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The original post for this episode can be found here.

Scriptnotes, episode 14: How residuals work

John August: Hello, my name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Crag Mazin.

John: And you’re listening to Episode 14 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, this is my second favorite time of year.

Craig: Hold on, did we discuss? Your first favorite time of year is when all the new fall shows are on.

John: Exactly. My second favorite time of year is, can you guess what?

Craig: Well, this is it, so it’s Thanksgiving.

John: No, it’s not the holidays at all. It’s the Academy Awards screeners.

Craig: Yes, of course. It’s screener time.

John: It’s screener time. For people who aren’t working in the film or television industry, this is the time of year when they show a lot of movies that hopefully will be getting awards come awards season. If you are a writer in the film or television industry, they will start sending you DVDs of the movies they want you to consider for award attention at the end of the year, or actually, after the end of the year.

Basically, the best movies of the year — or the movies that the studios want you to think are the best movies of the year — they will start sending you DVDs and hoping that you will play those DVDs and watch those movies and vote for those movies.

Craig: Right, which is kind of cool, because I don’t think anybody cares about the WGA Awards. When I say anybody, obviously we care about them, the people who make the movies care, and the studios, but the people at large, the audience, I don’t think are motivated to go to movies because something wins a WGA Award. I’m flattered that we get these things in the first place.

John: I think part of the reason why WGA membership is included is you want the overall buzz for your movie to increase. If a bunch of screenwriters are talking about your movie, that will hopefully convince other people who are voting for the more prestigious awards, like the Academy Awards, the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs.

[loud rustling from Craig’s side]

What are you doing to yourself there?

Craig: Thank you.

What I was doing to myself? That was the cleaning lady. The office cleaning lady came in, and I think we should keep this, because the thing is she’s really nice. The deal is that I’m sitting here at my desk, and I’ve got this microphone and headphones on, talking to a computer. All she hears is one side of the conversation.

I think she was already pretty convinced that I was insane, but now it’s like she’s literally going to go home and say, “There’s this one guy, I don’t know, he’s basically pretending he’s an astronaut or something, talking to his computer.” [laughter] You’ve got to keep this in, it’s great.

The thing is — this is such a digression — all she does is she comes in, I’ve got this office in this great old building in Pasadena. This woman comes in every day around this time to change the bag in my little trash can. I never have trash. I don’t make trash in my office, so she just comes in and changes an empty bag. There’s never anything in there, and yet often times she’ll come in, and she’ll hear me. Sometimes when I’m writing, I start doing the dialogue. She hears me talking to myself all the time. And now this.

John: Good stuff.

Craig: Yeah, it’s embarrassing.

Anyway, you were making an excellent point.

John: If we’re going to digress about offices, I’ll tell you my office story. Right now, I’m working at home, which is easy and great, so I can stumble into the kitchen any time I want. Before this, I had an office over in Koreatown. We were in this office building, and it was a perfectly fine office, and we also used it for pre-production and post-production on The Nines, so it was useful for that.

The building maintenance guy, the handyman who is sort of always around, was this guy named Oscar. It was a situation where there were shared bathrooms down the hall. I remember at one point going to the bathroom, and somebody must have been smoking in the bathroom — really smoking a lot in the bathroom.

It was uncomfortable to be in the bathroom. I found Oscar and I told him, “Somebody’s smoking in the bathroom, maybe you could figure that out. If you know who’s doing that, maybe you could stop them.” He really took it very seriously, “I’m going to figure out what happened.” Then two or three weeks later I walk into the bathroom, and he’s smoking in the bathroom. [laughter] It was Oscar. I just respect that he looked me right in the eye and he lied right to me that he was going to take care of the situation.

Craig: What did he do when he saw you looking at him? Did he just shrug and be like, “Yeah, that’s right?”

John: I didn’t see the cigarette lit in his hand. What it was, I walked into the bathroom at one point, and he was opening up this stall, and he had his pack of cigarettes and newspaper. Basically, he’d gone in there to do his morning business and have a smoke of a cigarette, and he had lied straight to my face.

Craig: I love it, I love it. I want people to also notice something if you wonder who the daddy of this podcast is. Wasn’t that you telling your story, and then saying, “What are you doing over there? You are making a noise while I am talking on my podcast!”

John: Yeah, there’s no way we’re going to be able to filter out all that stuff. I thought you were maybe changing into some sort of evening frock.

Craig: I am customarily. This is my changing time of day, where I do get into my evening wear, usually made of a Saran Wrap material.

I wish you could’ve seen the look on her face when she walked in.

John: And you have your personal valet who comes in to help dress you.

Craig: Yeah, totally.

John: Have we discussed Downtown Abby, by the way, talking about valets?

Craig: No.

John: Do you watch… You don’t watch any TV shows, so do you even know what Downtown Abby is?

Craig: No.

John: Downtown Abby’s so good.

Craig: What is it, is it a BBC show?

John: Of course it’s a BBC show. It’s the best BBC show you could ever dream of. It’s like Upstairs Downstairs, and it takes place at this manor house, and you have the first season takes place at the very start, leading into World War I. The second takes place during World War I. It’s Upstairs Downstairs: you have the rich people, you have the servants, and it’s all amazing. It’s such a good show that after watching it the first season — which aired on PBS here, but we actually pulled it off of NetFlix — we had to watch the second season, but it was only in Britain. It was airing live in Britain, and it’s not going to come to the US until January.

We had a friend who was going to London anyway, so we gave her some money, and said, “Will you buy us an iTunes gift card while you’re there?” And with a British iTunes gift card, you can actually download Downtown Abby from the UK iTunes. I feel like it’s basically legal. You’re paying money for it.

Craig: It’s legal, of course. It’s just you’re jumping through some annoying hoops. I remember doing that with — there’s this wonderful Irish sitcom called Father Ted. I don’t know if you ever heard of Father Ted. Spectacularly funny show, and it was only on I think for two seasons maybe, because tragically the creator and star of the show died, very young.

My wife and I visited a friend of hers in Ireland, and she introduced us to the show and I loved it. I bought the videotapes, but they don’t play here, and I spent God knows how much money to convert them from PAL to NTSC, because this was — it was 1998 or something like that. It’s a great show.

John: Someone tried to remake Father Ted, I remember seeing that as a…

Craig: You can’t, because the show, it’s really sick and hysterical, but you have to be a Catholic country to even give a damn about what half the humor is about. Really funny show. This podcast is so far flung from — what were we talking about?

John: We were talking about screeners. This time of year, the studios hold screenings of the movies that they want you to vote for, but they also send you DVDs, and they will also send you printed scripts if you ask them to. Unless you beg them not to send you a printed script, they’ll send you a printed script. DVDs have started coming, and so far this year, we’ve gotten 21 DVDs, which is a pretty good haul.

Craig: That’s a serious haul. We get all the movies that you think we would get, but then we get some movies that are kind of popular fare, where they’re fishing.

John: I will quickly read through the list of what we’ve gotten, just so people know what movies we are talking about. Beginners, Bridesmaids, of course, Cars 2, Contagion, The Deck, The Guard. — What is The Guard?

Craig: I don’t know.

John: I see it on my list here, I don’t know what it is.

Hannah — I liked Hannah, but Hannah, I barely remember that it was this year.

Craig: It’s not going to win anything, but cool.

John: I can’t really see it winning something. I liked her a lot.

Craig: It’s a good movie, I just don’t think it’s an award movie.

John: The Help, which is an obvious choice. Higher Ground, which I don’t recognize at all. Jane Eyre, which I liked a lot and sort of got overlooked. Midnight in Paris, sure, of course. Pariah, which is a Sundance movie that I worked on at the Sundance Labs, which is great. The script is great, I haven’t seen the final movie, but the movie doesn’t come out until Christmas Day, so they’re already sending it out. It’s one of those movies where they basically know that it has to get a lot of critical acclaim and attention or else no one’s going to go see it.

Craig: It’s kind of cool that you get to see it before it’s in theaters.

John: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

Craig: Good luck.

John: Yeah, maybe it’s a visual effects thing.

Craig: Yeah, that’s true. I don’t think screeners are going to help, if you haven’t seen it by now.

John: The Skin I Live in, the Pedro Almodovar movie. Take Shelter, no idea what that is. Tree of Life.

Craig: Tree of Life, I saw that.

John: Which I don’t really want to see on a small screen, but I didn’t see it when it was out on the big screen, so I’ll try to get to a screening of it. Warrior, which I know a lot of people liked. Winnie the Pooh, which we watched, which is really, really sweet, and really, really young. Just super young. I take it you have not seen this movie.

Craig: Yeah, I haven’t seen it.

John: Your kids are too old for the movie.

Craig: Yeah, they’re past Winnie the Pooh.

John: What’s so odd about it is the storybook itself is kind of illustrated, so the characters will walk across the printed words, or the letters will fall into a hole, and they’ll climb up the letters to climb out of a hole. It’s actually a very clever way of doing it. The movie’s like 50 minutes long — it is super short.

Gnomeo and Juliet. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, always a good choice, and J. Edgar was the most recent one to come.

Craig: I don’t know where The Hangover 2 screeners are. They must be lost in the mail, I guess.

John: There will be screeners, won’t there be screeners?

Craig: I don’t think so, I don’t think so. No one gives awards to sequels anyway.

John: Sent one out for Cars 2.

Craig: I don’t think they should have done that.

John: I’m not sure they should have done that either. We were talking about how there’s so many animated movies this year that are going to be up for contention. I wonder if this is going to be the year that Pixar’s not one of the movies in the animation category.

Craig: That’s actually a great question, because Cars 2 is their least well received film. There is a lot of other competition, the other studios seem to be raising their game.

John: Craig, when you get… I should explain again to listeners. The studios will send you a card saying, “Please verify your address, because we’re going to start sending you screeners.” You’re supposed to, for the Oscar screeners, they actually make you photocopy your Oscar card, and send that back in.

I don’t think they make you do that for WGA. They’ll ask you a lot of times as a tick mark, do you want DVD or Blu-Ray? A couple of years ago there was a big deal about each of the screeners was individually watermarked, and there was all this storm. Now they just send you stuff by FedEx, and they ask you to sign for it, and I guess they figure that’s good enough.

Craig: Yeah, I have a feeling that a lot of the security that surrounds these screeners has less to do with actual concerns about piracy than it does with maintaining a certain consistency in appearance about of being concerned about piracy.

John: Yeah, it’s security theater.

Craig: Yes, exactly. They really need to say, they are deeply, deeply panicked over piracy, and for good reason. By the time we get these screeners, the piracy has occurred. You’re right, it’s security theater.

John: The topic of DVDs coming to us is a good segue to our main topic for today, which is how residuals work. This is a good screenwriting or film industry 201 class. It’s not simple, but it’s not that difficult either, and I think it’s often very misunderstood.

I was at a WGA thing just last week, and another screenwriter said — we were talking about the Big Fish musical, and he’s like, “You’ll get royalties, just like we get residuals?”

I’m like, “Yes, and I understand why people want to think of residuals like royalties, but they’re really not the same thing.” They’re like royalties only in the sense that you’re getting paid down the road for work that you did earlier, but the actual way they work is vastly different than how royalties traditionally work.

Craig: They’re cousins, but they’re not the same.

Residuals exist because we don’t have copyright. When you do have copyright, one of the rights that you have is to be compensated for reuse of your work. You write a book, that book is republished, and when it is duplicated, you are compensated for all those duplications. When you write a play, and it is performed each time, that is a reuse of your work. In this regard, you are compensated fairly for the continual exploitation of your intellectual property.

As screenwriters, we don’t own intellectual property; we are employees. The studios own the copyright. How are we to be reimbursed for the reuse and continued exploitation of the work we create? Enter residuals, which were negotiated many years ago.

John: I actually looked this up, so do you want to hear the years?

Craig: Yeah. Sure.

John: I think the crucial framing for this is that residuals are only talking about the aftermarkets. They are never talking about the first use of something.

Craig: Correct.

John: So if you are writing a television show, that first time it airs on network television, or in some cases the first window in which it airs on network television, is considered the first use. You’re not paid residuals for that.

For a movie that you wrote for movie theaters, its first run in movie theaters or really any run in movie theaters is its first use. You are not getting residuals on that.

Craig: Correct.

John: Back in the old days, that is all there were. There weren’t residuals, because there weren’t aftermarkets. Basically movies showed in theaters, so they didn’t show anywhere else. TV was, once upon a time, just a live medium. It wasn’t rebroadcast later on.

Residuals first came up in TV, because you could rebroadcast something. So, 1953 was the first residuals for reuse of major television stuff.

Craig: Right.

John: That was limited to five payments. Only the first five times it re-aired were you paid something again. 1960 was the first residuals for reuse of theatrical motion pictures, what we call movies on free television. So, if you wrote that James Bond movie and it played on ABC, you were paid a residual. That was the first time that happened.

1971 was the first residuals for home video. Pay television and all of the other things that are like that, for both theatrical and for television. A lot of times, when we think about residuals, we really are thinking about DVDs and videotapes and things that people buy, even though showings on TV are often as lucrative, or even more important than the things that people buy at the store.

Craig: That’s right. Yeah. That’s all correct. The only interesting addition is that, for feature films, for whatever reason, exhibition on planes has always been considered part of the primary release of a movie. So we don’t get residuals for exhibitions on planes. I don’t know why.

John: Yeah. Maybe did they originally have projectors on planes and that was partly how they did it?

Craig: I don’t think so.

John: Or did it happen so close to the theatrical window that it was considered part of that?

Craig: It’s possible. I can’t imagine that planes were lugging around projector systems. But you never know. It’s interesting. I’ll ask one of our monks at the Guild why that came to be.

But certainly for motion pictures, the big residual base for us is pay and free TV. So, when they rerun our movies on network television or free cable television or pay cable television or home video, which used to be VHS. Then, when the VHS market gave way to DVD, it became DVD.

Now, as the DVD market gives way to online rentals and online purchases, that. That is all considered home video. Home video, since a very contentious negotiation in 1984, has been the battleground in residuals between our Union and the Company’s for going on 30 years now.

John: Yeah. So, before we get into the numbers, we should talk about who gets residuals. You get residuals if you are the credited writer on a movie that was written under a WGA contract.

Craig: Right.

John: Crucial to understanding this is that animation is not covered by the WGA. So Frankenweenie or Corpse Bride or Titan AE, the writer of those movies — me — I don’t get residuals on those. That would be awesome if I got residuals on those, because those end up selling a lot of DVDs.

Craig: That’s right. Not one Pixar movie has ever paid a dime to the writers in residuals, even though they have accrued many, many multiples of billions of dollars. It is unfair. I want to actually talk about why it is unfair for a second, because that ties into the whole point of residuals.

Residuals are not profit-sharing. They’re not designed to be something where the writer gets paid off in success the way that you hear about actors sometimes getting first dollar gross or back end deals or a percentage of the profit.

Residuals are designed to compensate us for, in part, the arrangement by which we don’t maintain copyright over the material we write. They are designed to compensate us for the reuse of our authorship. It doesn’t matter if the movie was a bomb at the box office.

If you keep printing DVDs, and people keep buying them, our authorship must be compensated for reuse. It’s not for the labor that we did. It’s not for the hard work. But for the reuse. That’s why it is, to me, a bedrock principle for any professional screenwriter to attempt to get payment for reuse. Unfortunately, in the world of animation, it doesn’t happen.

John: There are frontiers at which some people are getting WGA residuals for things that are kind of like animation, like motion capture for example. Some motion capture films have been written under WGA contracts and people really have got residuals.

I don’t know for a fact that Tin Tin is WGA. But I feel like it could be, because I know some of the Zemeckis movies have been.

Craig: Well, yeah. mo-cap is a battleground. That is something that we know that, in concert with the Screen Actors Guild, we are going to be fighting over, in the either the next negotiation or negotiations to come.

Obviously studios would love to see mo-cap be exempt and considered animation and thus the purview of IATSE, which does not procure residuals for its employees. We are going to see what happens.

John: This is a bit of a digression, but when we say residuals are something that writers get, we are not the only people that get residuals.

Craig: No.

John: Directors get residuals. Actors get residuals.

Isn’t it true that at least one of the other below the line unions, residuals kick into some part of their pension fund or something?

Craig: It in the Directors Guild, the director gets residuals. The way the Directors Guild works is that half the residuals that come to the Directors Guild for their members get apportioned off into the health fund. The rest are distributed amongst their members as opposed to the Writers Guild, where we get all of the residuals that come to the Guild.

In the Directors Guild, the Directors get the lion’s share of residuals. But a certain amount of residuals are also apportioned out to first ADs, second ADs and Unit Production Managers.

John: It does make it a little bit murkier, that sense that residuals are something to acknowledge copyright and authorship. It’s a use of that term for something that isn’t quite what we are talking about here.

Craig: Well, it’s not for the DGA. Look, that was their decision to make. But, for the Writers Guild I think it is very much a question of authorship, which is why you qualify for residuals if you get credit. Because our credits signify authorship.

John: Yeah. Yeah. So we should say that if you share credit on a movie, you end up sharing residuals. There is a formula for how that all works. So, if it is an even split between two writers on written by, they will share that 50-50.

Story credit is granted 25%. So, if you have got sole story, but shared screenplay, you get 25% plus half of the 75%. I’m not going to try that math here on the air. But it is a straight formula.

Craig: Yeah, that’s right. It’s also important to note that sometimes there isn’t a story credit, because it’s an adaptation. In those cases, the same amount of money still comes in. It’s just it all gets apportioned to the screenplay credits. Written by signifies a combination of story and screenplay.

John: Exactly. So, there are two kinds of residuals. We are mostly talking in the feature world. So one kind is moot. But, as I was looking up and doing some research for this, there are fixed residuals and there are revenue-based residuals.

Fixed residuals or something that kick in much more in television. So, as you write an episode of a television show, and then years later it rebroadcasts on Fox at five in the afternoon again and again and again, you get paid a flat fee for that. Am I saying that correctly?

Craig: Yes.

John: You get paid a flat fee based on that it was a show of this length. It aired on these markets and that’s how much you are getting paid.

Craig: Yeah. Those residual rates in television, the flat residual rates are actually based on the minimums scale. That’s why every three years, when we negotiate our contract, we always seem to be really vested in getting a 3% bump, or in this last one, a 2% bump I think, or 2 1/2%.

You think, “Well who cares if we are getting an increase in scale, because none of us get paid scale?” Well, it sets the residual rate for TV writers. That’s why it matters.

John: Yeah. It’s not an insignificant amount. If you got sole credit on a one-hour show that was rebroadcast later, your residual could be $20,000.

Craig: Yeah. Now, that is a little bit of a unicorn. It used to be, back in the day, when you and I would watch the networks unleash their fall campaign ads, there were a lot of network reruns. The network would run a show in prime time and then maybe a month later he would say that show pop up again.

Networks rarely do that now. They rarely rerun those shows. So even though the highest form of residual for television is I believe is a true network rerun, they just don’t happen.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s kind of a bummer.

John: Yeah. But we get more television. So that’s good.

Craig: There you go.

John: Yeah. For the users, it’s actually probably better.

Craig: Yeah, for the viewers it’s better.

John: Movies only have one fixed residual that I can think of or find. It’s relatively new and called the script publication fee.

Craig: [laughs] Yeah.

John: So if you write the feature film, the studio basically will pay you $5,000, which is theoretically so that they can include the script of the film, the screenplay of the movie, on a DVD. It’s sort of a gimme.

One weird thing and one separate right that we do hold onto is the screenwriter has the right to publish the screenplay. So they are basically pre-buying the right to publish that screenplay.

Craig: On the DVD, which they never do.

John: On the DVD.

Craig: What happens, and this comes down to the kabuki theater of labor management negotiations — I believe that came out of 2001; I may be wrong about that, I think it is 2001 — out of that negotiation, basically we were asking for a bump in in-home video for theatrical.

They were saying, “We are not touching this formula. We are not going to budge an inch.” So, we came up with this creative way to just tack on another $5,000 for everybody. It is such baloney. The language is baloney. The money is real.

John: It’s a check. It comes.

Craig: Yeah. It’s a check. It comes. Exactly.

John: Yeah. It’s actually one of the first checks you get for residuals, because they know what it is and they send it to you.

Craig: That’s right. That’s right.

John: So, we were talking. Those aren’t the only kinds of fixed residuals that you’re dealing with. So television has a lot of fixed residuals. Features only have that one fixed residual, the script publication fee.

Most of what feature writers are talking about are revenue base residuals. Basically you get a percentage of whatever the distributor’s gross is in those aftermarkets. So, it’s not the distributor’s gross of film rentals. We’re not talking about the money that is coming out of the box office at the theater.

We are talking about the money that they are making off of DVDs and iTunes sales and the sales they are doing through ABC and every place else.

Craig: And iTunes rentals as well. Yeah.

John: iTunes rentals, yeah. So those formulas are slightly different percentages. But 1.2% is the best way to think about it. 1.2% for…

Craig: Well, not really.

John: Talk to me Craig.

Craig: Well, it was 1.2%. That was sort of the number. Then, in 1984, the Writers Guild noticed that it wasn’t collecting 1.2% of the gross receipts that the companies were getting for VHS sales. They were getting 1/5 of that.

So they called up and said, “You have made an accounting error.” The company said, “No, we haven’t. See, we have this thing now, where we have decided that the 1.2% actually applies to what we call producers gross. Producers gross is 20% of the actual gross. So we are not giving you 1.2% of 100%. We are giving you 1.2% of 20%.”

In the rest of the world, that’s called getting screwed. You’re not getting 1.2%. You are getting .3%.

Did I do that math right? I think I did.

John: You did. Yeah.

Craig: So, long story short, we went on strike. We lost. We went on strike again in 1988. We lost. We have fought this battle over the decades. The formulas remain unchanged for DVD and VHS.

We essentially get .3%, roughly. It escalates at a certain point. But minorly. .3% of the gross. Now, that means if you go to Best Buy — and you’re that guy that is still buying DVDs at Best Buy, so you are my grandma — let’s say they sell them to you for $15.

Best Buy keeps a chunk of that money. Then the rest goes back to the studio. That is the gross that we get .3% of. Someone worked it out roughly to be a nickel a sale.

John: Yeah. So, technically my 1.2% is accurate, in terms of the terms of the contract? But it’s not accurate in terms of what studios are actually taking back?

Craig: Well, they enshrine that 20% language in the contract. Unfortunately, we got stuck. Now, an interesting thing happened in 2001.

In 2001, I don’t know if anybody remembers, but we almost went on strike. This was when John Wells was President. I think the first go around. There were a lot of big issues at the time, trying to get Fox to treat writers like they were an actual network instead of a fledgling network and all the rest of it.

But we got this little interesting thing out of there that I don’t think anybody realized was such a big deal at the time. We got the companies to agree to pay a full 1.2% — not .3%, but a full 1.2% — of Internet rentals.

Now, in 2001, when that deal was made, the iPod had yet to be introduced. There was no iTunes. Nobody rented movies on the Internet. So this was a remarkable bit of foresight by John Wells and our then Executive Director, John McLean, to extract that deal.

In the ensuing years, the companies realize that they blew it on that one. They refused to make a deal on sales. They said, “Okay, fine. You caught us with our pants down on this 1.2% for rentals. But for sales, we want to stick with that .3%. So, if you are going to buy something over the Internet, we just want to give you .3%.” That was essentially the biggest issue. That’s called electronic sell through. That is the biggest issue that led into our last strike.

John: Yeah, the Internet was always what the headline was for the strike. It was like, “Oh, how are we going to do it with the Internet,” and you always heard about web series, but it’s really sell through and rentals. It’s how people are going to be buying their movies in the next decade.

Craig: Yeah, and streaming for television shows. The television side is actually very complicated, because there are so many ways to deliver television shows, and it’s often difficult to calculate revenue. Is it ad supported or not ad supported? Does somebody buy a subscription to a site that then streams lots? It gets tough.

For movies, it’s actually very easy. You’re selling units or you’re renting units, how much per unit do we give? I remember sitting down with John Wells in 2005, this is two years before the strike. I said, “Look, they’re saying .2 or .3, rather, we’re saying 1.2 for sales. Where is this going to end up, in the middle?”

He thought that’s oftentimes where these things end up. In fact, after a very long strike, that’s where we ended up, pretty much in the middle. For electronic sales, it is .6 and change, and again with escalators for an electronic sale.

We do very well on rentals, iTunes rentals, we do great. iTunes sales, we do twice as good as we used to do on DVDs. DVDs, we still take it in the shorts.

John: Yeah, we do, but DVDs are going away.

Craig: Yeah, they’re going away. The scary thing for us as writers is unlike the last iteration of the extinction cycle, where DVDs eliminated VHS and then some, Internet hasn’t quite replaced DVD in terms of grosses. The studios are not making as much money per movie as the used to, at least not through downloads and rentals yet, over the Internet. They’re panicked because they see this enormous cash cow fading, and they don’t see the Internet quite booming the way they would have hoped. But it’s also new.

John: It’s new. Here’s the difference that I saw: VHS tapes, they were priced fairly high, and eventually they brought the price down. They were able to introduce DVDs at really, a pretty high price point, given how little they cost to make, an individual DVD. It cost them less to make a DVD than it was to make a VHS tape.

The form factor of DVDs, people liked collecting them, and people wanted to have big collections of DVDs. People would go out and buy all these things, and studios could go back and reissue old movies on DVD, or new box sets of things that were slightly remastered. They could keep churning their old library titles again and again and again on DVD. People loved it.

I don’t see that you’re going to be able to do the same kind of thing with digital downloads, especially because they want to sell ultraviolet or other ways that you have a film locker, you could hold on to things. I as a user don’t really want to hold on to things, I just want to be able to watch whatever movie I want to watch whenever I want to watch it, and it’s challenging to find a business model that makes sense for everybody across the board that makes that possible.

Craig: That’s kind of the secret, hidden, possibly good news here. You’re right, the age of possessing media is over. We have transitioned, some people dragging, kicking and screaming, but so be it. We have transitioned into an era where media is defined by our access to it, not by our possession of it. When it comes to movies and television shows, if we decide we want to watch something, we just want to be able to click a button and watch it. Since the technology is available, why shouldn’t we?

The good news is that’s a rental model. We do well on rentals. It’s also for the studios, the upside is there are literally no physical costs, beyond a bunch of servers. If they could get their acts together and create their own distribution for this, they don’t have to print materials, boxes, CDs, they don’t have to pay for shipping, and they don’t have to handle the returns, the destruction of the old copies or any of that stuff. The question is whether or not people will actually be trained to do this as opposed to whatever else, watching something else because they don’t want to.

John: Right now, looking at the on demand streaming through places like Hulu or Netflix. To me, what I see as the challenge when figuring out our residuals is Netflix or Hulu, they’re making block deals for a bunch of titles from a studio. There’s no guarantee that you as the writer are going to be nicely apportioned for that block of movies they ended up licensing.

Craig: Yeah, that’s the other thing. I don’t know how the studios handle that accounting. They have to in some way or another, because you’re right, if you write a big hit movie, you don’t want to split things evenly with movies that were duds.

That’s a challenge, and the other challenge is that we haven’t quite gotten to that place where the way the iPod essentially saved the music business and created that business model. We haven’t gotten there yet. We need the iPod of TV, we need whatever Steve Jobs is cooking up, or was cooking up, I should say, before he passed away.

The sort of Apple TV device that allows people to look at their big 60-inch screen in their home theater, and then through that screen, quickly buy a movie that plays right there and then and is stored right there and then, because that’s what we need.

Right now, I think it’s easy enough to go on iTunes and rent a movie. I actually don’t think people like watching movies on computers or on their iPads, frankly. I think they really want to watch them in their house, on their big TVs. Why not? They paid for them. If we get there, let’s see what happens.

John: While we’re getting there, let’s talk a little bit about the practicalities of residuals, and what that means to individual screenwriters. Residuals get paid out every quarter. If you write a movie for Sony, Sony will send you a check. They actually send a check to the WGA, and the WGA forwards the check to you for the amount of residuals that you’re owed.

If you have just one movie with a studio, it’s just the one check that comes. If you have a bunch of movies that are through a studio, like I had Charlie’s Angels and the second Charlie’s Angels and Big Fish, those all get lumped together. You can’t actually figure how much came from each movie until you go online and sort it all out.

Those checks come to your home or to your office, but it’s more fun if they come to your home. They come in a green envelope that’s a very unique color. Whenever you’re going through your mail, “Oh my God, I’ve got a green envelope.” Then the fun comes in trying to guess how much the check is for. You open up the envelope carefully so you can see which company it is, or which title it is, and then you guess based on your recent history how much you think that residual check will be for, and it can be for a lot more than you thought.

I picked Go because it was a movie that I’ve had residual checks for the longest, and I think was illustrative of why residuals matter. I can talk you through Go, and I’ll just give you the real numbers on Go.

Go was a movie I wrote in ’96, the movie came out in 1999. All in, I was paid about $70,000 for Go, that was them buying the rights to the script, and me rewriting the script and production and everything else, I was paid about $70,000. The movie was moderately successful, it made about $17 million in box office. The budget was $5.5 million, so nobody was really losing money, but with advertising, they had probably… they weren’t really making money theatrically on the movie.

My first residual check for Go came in November 1999, it was for $36,000. That’s a lot of money, that’s duties, sales, probably was on a run on HBO at that point. That was great, that’s DVDs sold. Checks keep coming. I remember Rawson Thurber, my old assistant. When he wrote Dodgeball, he called me after Dodgeball came out. He was like, “I just got a residual check for Dodgeball, it’s so great, I didn’t realize these things would come!” I was like, “Rawson, you know they’re going to keep coming. They come every quarter.” He had no idea, it was Christmas for him.

The checks keep coming on a movie, and so my most recent check for go was in August 2011. It was for $1,863. A lot less, but still money.

Craig: That’s the life cycle of these things.

John: Exactly, there’s a long tail, it tapers down. The lowest I got for a quarter, I just looked it up, was November 2007, I got a check for Go for $428, which is still money.

Craig: It’s money.

John: It’s money, it is actual money. I pulled up from the WGA site, and I totaled up all the Go of it all. It actually ends up being serious money. All together for go, $337,000.

Craig: That’s great. That’s a great example, because the movie wasn’t a juggernaut at the box office, it was a little film, but it had a life on video, it had a life on cable, and I assume it has a renewed life online. The point is you authored it, and you should get that money.

By the way, let’s also point something else out, because I like to reverse engineer these things. You made, what did you say, $370,000?

John: Yeah, $337,000.

Craig: Perfect, let’s just say $350. You made $350. Do the math, that is somewhere between .3 and one percent, depending on what the formulas were, and how it ran and all the rest of it. Let’s also point out how much the company has made for using that.

John: I came into this podcast having reversed the math at 1.2 percent, but that was really the wrong figure. My number for what they made is going to be too low. At 1.2 percent, they made $28 million.

Craig: They made more than that.

John: They made a lot more than that.

Craig: They made a lot more than that, and then you realize just how much money a movie can make, because a lot of movies can break even at the box office, then the rest of it. And what’s the expense, what is the overhead? This thing exists permanently and requires no maintenance. It doesn’t have to be cleaned, it doesn’t have to be fed. It just sits there and is duplicated as you need it.

John: The reason why wanted to put some real numbers on that is we end up talking about these esoteric things, like is it .3 percent or is it 1.2 percent, and it actually does genuinely matter. The reason why we go on strike, whether it was the right choice to go on strike or not, the reason why we fight for these things, $337,000 is a lot of money.

I’ve been lucky to be able to write other movies since that time, but if I hadn’t written, haven’t been successful in the time since then, that would be money that I would really, really need. It matters for everybody who actually gets a movie made.

Some questions that would come up, I think people were asking questions, so let’s get to them right now.

If you die, what happens to your residuals?

Craig: I believe that they are assigned to your survivor and your estate, as it were.

John: Exactly, they really are an ongoing asset. They do persist, it’s not one of those things like a health insurance thing. It’s not that kind of benefit that just goes away, it’s only while you’re alive. It does keep going on.

People ask, “Do you pay taxes on residuals?” Yes, you pay taxes on residuals, they’re income.

Craig: You also pay dues on your residuals.

John: You do, you pay your 1.5 percent. I think WGA already takes those out before they send it to you.

Craig: That’s right, when you get the little statement, they just ask you what your writing income is? Then you fill that out, you send it back to them, they send you back a bill with the calculation of that, plus they’re filing your residuals along since they’re collecting them.

John: Do you pay your agent or your manager commissions on residuals?

Craig: You do not.

John: You do not.

Craig: You do not, and for excellent reason, even though agents will bitch and moan about this incessantly. Very simple reason: they didn’t negotiate it, the Writers Guild did, so why should they get any percentage of it?

John: They shouldn’t get anything, they did nothing.

Craig: No, I deny them their money.

John: Anything more we need to wrap up about residuals?

Craig: I would just say to tie back to something you kind of hinted at there, in addition to the kind of intellectual justification for why we receive residuals, there is a sort of a moral one as well, residuals do help keep a lot of writers going in between these jobs that we do. This is not always a steady business.

When the companies attack our residual base, they are making it once again very hard for professional writing to be a sustainable career. If I could speak to them now, I would say, “Hey guys, keep in mind that you can’t starve your labor force to the point where they can’t actually bounce back and write another great script.”

You need people to stick with it, even if they have one or two years where they’re off, or they can’t find it, or they’re just not writing the stuff you want. Residuals are what keep people going, so it’s mission critical that we maintain those, fight for those, and seek to improve them every three years. There we go.

John: Great, thank you so much for this talk on residuals.

Craig: Thank you, and of course, thanks to our fine cleaning lady.

John: She does excellent work.

Craig: I’m sure right now she’s at home, staring at her husband, saying, “There’s the weirdest white guy. There’s no one there, he’s talking into a fake microphone.”

John: Yeah, it’s going to happen. All right, thank you, sir.

Craig: Talk to you next time.

The original post for this episode can now be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: Hey guys. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 485 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we make good on our promise to explain Hollywood’s guilds and unions. Then we’ll tackle the problem of good and evil, law and chaos, as it relates to character alignment and whether it’s helpful for writers to be thinking along these axes. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will talk about the screenwriting guru/QAnon connection which is as obvious and obnoxious as you’d think.

Craig: [laughs] Oh, I can’t wait. Can’t wait.

John: Yeah. But before we get into any of this, Craig, I know you are a person who loves puzzles.

Craig: I do.

John: I suspect you also love mysteries.

Craig: I love mysteries.

John: I could see you in another life becoming a detective.

Craig: Yes.

John: So, I have a mystery for you to help me solve. And there is an answer. I promise.

Craig: OK.

John: Since about Thanksgiving a thing I’ve noticed is when I wake up in the mornings my fingers smell sweet. Not like maple syrup, but kind of like an agave syrup. Just they smell genuinely sweet. And this was incredibly puzzling to me. I wondered what could be going on.

I found what the answer was. But I’m curious what your process might be towards figuring out what was going on.

Craig: OK. Well, I suppose the first thing I would do is to try and determine when the crime occurred. So, before I would go to bed I would very carefully smell and taste my own fingers to make sure that they weren’t already sweet.

John: And, yes, I smelled my fingers before going to bed and they did not smell sweet. It’s only when I woke up in the morning that they smelled sweet.

Craig: Interesting. So then the next thing I would do would be to figure out if there was something where maybe inside of my pillowcase or something that there was some sort of – maybe there was something in there that was rubbing off on my fingers. So I would check the bedding, for instance.

John: Yeah. And so I did check that. And I noticed nothing – like my pillowcases did not smell like it. My pillow didn’t smell like it. I couldn’t find that smell anywhere else. It was only on specifically my fingers.

Craig: Fingers. Next thing I would ask is are you wearing any sort of mouth appliance at night.

John: I am. I wear a mouth guard at night.

Craig: Ah-ha.

John: I could not imagine sleeping without a mouth guard.

Craig: OK. So now what I’m wondering is when you wake up in the morning and you’re smelling the sweetness on your fingers is it after you’ve removed your mouth guard or before?

John: It is both.

Craig: Oh.

John: So before I’ve taken it off I do smell it and I still smell it after I take it out.

Craig: OK, so it’s not for instance perhaps you’ve done a good job scrubbing and cleaning your mouth guard and gotten some residual toothpaste on it or something like that.

John: Yeah. That would be a natural thought, but no.

Craig: Right. And it’s not for instance that you’ve left any sort of toothpaste residue around.

John: No. Nothing. And I would say it’s not minty. I don’t want to – it smells more like kind of like a syrup. I don’t want to go typically maple syrup, but it’s that kind of sweet. Or sort of like baked goods sweet.

Craig: Hmm. Mm. OK. All right. I’m now engaging my literal gray cells. My little gray cells.

John: How about this. Why don’t we keep talking about the mystery as we go through this episode, so we can actually get to some of the screenwriting stuff? But we’ll come back to this mystery, because there will be answer by the end, I promise.

Craig: Great. Like in between–

John: You won’t have to flip to the back of the book.

Craig: Right. Like in between our topics. OK, great.

John: All right. So some follow up. In a previous episode we talked about, or I sort of brought up that I never see female characters grappling with ethical concerns. And some people wrote in with some suggestions. But one of the best ones I thought was Joshua who writes, “In Contact the character of Dr. Ellie Arroway, played by Jodie Foster, is ultimately forced to reconcile her atheism with a transcendent experience she cannot prove, culminating in a memorable congressional hearing where we see her struggling mightily to make sense of what she’s gone through and what it means for how she sees the world and herself.” Let’s listen to a clip.

Male Voice: Then why don’t you simply withdraw your testimony and concede that this journey to the center of the galaxy in fact never took place?

Jodie Foster: Because I can’t. I had an experience I can’t prove, I can’t even explain it. But everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real. I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever, a vision of the universe, that tells us undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are. A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves. That we are not – that none of us are alone. I wish I could share that. I wish that everyone, if even for one moment, could feel that awe and humility and that hope…but…that continues to be my wish.

John: So that’s not quite what I’m talking about in terms of an ethical concern. It’s a revelation that I don’t often see female characters have, but it’s not the ethical concern that I’m thinking about in terms of like 12 Angry Men.

Craig: Right. I love that movie, but that’s the part of the movie that I don’t particularly love because it seemed kind of forced in there. There was a slight sense of an engineered ethical conflict when in fact because we were sort of on the journey with her we kind of got it. There actually really isn’t – she’s not struggling mightily to make sense of what she’s gone through because there’s a pretty clear explanation. Aliens did stuff. [laughs] You know? How they did it and why they did it that way they kind of explain. So, there’s not really a question of did I see a ghost or was it something else. So, I agree with you, not quite what we’re getting at.

John: Yeah. But what I do like about that example is that is a character who is encountering a moment and her being male or female is not relevant to this. And that we more often see a male character in that spot. So I do want to give it some partial credit for that reason.

Craig: Partial credit.

John: Let’s also give partial credit to the eight sequence structure. So we talked about this in Episode 483 and we were very dismissive of this idea of an eight sequence structure. A colleague and classmate, Scott Murphy, he went through USC at the same time I did, we were in different programs. He was in the graduate screenwriting program and I was in the Stark producing program. But he said that at USC they actually taught that. And that’s how they taught that. And so he felt it was a little unfair that we were dismissing it based on kind of the first Google result I got, which I guess that is kind of true. I hadn’t done any deep research.

And he says that the first thing that I brought up was the most extreme version of sort of a labeling of what all those sequences would be. And that really the point in teaching eight sequence structure is to get people thinking about sequences rather than 30-page acts. And to really be thinking about sequences having a beginning, a middle, and an end, which sounds more like the kinds of things that you and I would say. There’s a notion of scenes, there’s a notion of sequences, and they build out to become bigger things.

So I want to give some partial credit to this idea of sequences rather than capital-S Structure.

Craig: I still don’t quite know what the value is in terms of teaching people how to create something, because while it is true that you can break these things down into sequences, I mean, you could also break it into sub-sequences and have a 16 sequence structure. But the real question is well what do I write in the sequence. So there’s supposed to be a sequence here but what am I supposed to do? And what if it doesn’t fit inside of this? And what if it’s just a simple moment? It feels pedantic.

John: And pedantic also in the sense of like I can understand why it is maybe a useful teaching way to get people to think about smaller blocks of story rather than 30 pages, you know, thinking about something that’s achievable, and beginning, middle, and end. But it’s also really clear to me how a way of teaching something can quickly morph into becoming a prescribed formula for how things have to work. And it feels like maybe that’s the mistake I was making at looking at this one sheet, but also what I worry about sort of over-generalizing this eight sequence structure is that this may be a useful way to teach people how to build up blocks that sort of become a bigger thing and understand what sequences are. But it’s not the magical formula.

Craig: Right.

John: And I think when you mistake the formula for the actual reality of the script that’s the problem.

Craig: I could definitely see myself teaching a class, something that would arrive at an eight sequence structure. But I would kind of want to begin with one sequence structure. Meaning let’s just talk about what your story is from beginning to end in a very big sort of bird’s eye view. So that we understand the rough movement of it. That’s one sequence.

Now let’s divide that into two sequences. So, halves of that big thing. Let’s talk about what happens in this first half. Now, great, we’ve done that. Now let’s divide each one of those again. And lo and behold, just like that, you’ve got yourself–

John: You’re getting there.

Craig: You’re getting there. You get yourself four and you do it again. And off you go.

John: Yeah. And we’ve often talked about there’s a fractal quality to storytelling is that like there should be movement within a scene. There needs to be movement within a sequence. Movement within whatever you want to call an act to get to this whole story. And so every scene is like its own little movie. Every sequence is like its own little movie. So I can understand, again, why it is helpful to be thinking that way as you’re teaching. I just worry then coming back and trying to impose that as capital-S Structure. And any time somebody brings up structure my [unintelligible] just immediately come up because I feel like that’s, you know, you’re giving us a formula and that’s not going to work.

Craig: Yes. It’s not going to help me make a thing.

John: So, one revelation of this past week is Megana has gotten in a bunch of emails about IP stuff and we now have an umbrella term for it. We’re going to call this Mockable IP.

Craig: OK.

John: So the things like the Slinky Movie, mockable IP. Josh who is pitching sort of a packing peanuts or plywood thing, he said the criteria for a mockable IP is the product should be something real that a company sells. It should be something that makes zero sense as a movie but you can still see someone from the company pitching it to a studio executive’s office. And, third, that it will never, ever be a movie no matter what. Those feel like useful criteria for us to be thinking about with these kinds of IP.

Craig: Well, that’s where I disagree with Josh. It was number three.

John: You think some of these things will happen?

Craig: I think in fact they must be possibly a movie. For us to consider it, because otherwise again we can come down to things like gravel. For us to consider it it has to be something that you know what they might make this. If we talk about, like Slinky, we would do that all the time, and they did it. And we were scooped and they did it. And, yeah. So it has to be something that can be a movie.

John: Maybe this number three is like they could make it, but it would immediately be mocked. The mockability, I guess that is begging the question literally. But that’s a crucial part of this.

Craig: Right. And good use of begging the question. Thank you.

John: Really, I was so excited when I realized I could use that term properly for once. But I also want to, as we talk about this mockable IP, call out a clip that was on the Stephen Colbert show, the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, by a listener who directed it, Ballard C. Boyd. It’s a great – got to combine two things we love in Scriptnotes which is Queen’s Gambit, the Scott Frank show, and Rubik’s Cube. So this was The Queen’s Gambit Rubik’s Cube limited series they were pitching. Let’s take a listen to a clip.

Female Voice: I wasn’t just handed my seat. I had to overcome so much. Sexism. A sprained wrist. Temporary color-blindness.

Male Voice: You may be the greatest natural talent I’ve ever seen. But you must master the opening move known only to distinguished players. It’s called “turn the left bottom middle forward to the front-facing part. It’s not like chess.” We don’t get to have cool names for things.

Female Voice: It may be just a block covered in little stickers to you, but to me it’s the entire world. Oh, also drugs. I do tons of drugs. You don’t know me.

John: So we’ll put a link in the show notes to the full trailer for that, but I thought it was a delightful way to combine two things we love in Scriptnotes.

Craig: That’s one way to do it. We got some other suggestions in here I see.

John: Go for it.

Craig: Erica suggests Scrub Daddy. Now, I got to say, that’s possible because it has a face. It’s the goofy sponge that has eyes and a mouth. And I think there’s like a Scrub Mommy and a Scrub Baby. So, I could see a scrub family.

John: Yeah, little Scrubbing Bubbles. I love them.

Craig: Yeah. Chuck says Fidget Spinner. No.

John: No. Because one company doesn’t own it.

Craig: Yeah. It’s not a thing. It’s a thing, but it’s not.

John: I guess there was the Emoji Movie which no one actually owns, but still I don’t think fidget spinner is going to happen.

Craig: Yeah. But emojis are literally everywhere, all over. The fidget spinner was a fad that’s already gone. I don’t think it’s a thing.

Let’s see, Philip from LA suggests Pogs. No.

John: I barely remember Pogs. They were sort of – I was in a gap between Pogs. It was elementary school but I think I’d outgrown them by the time they became a thing.

Craig: Pogs came back in the ‘90s. And, no, no. Nope.

Danny from St. Louis suggests Preparation H. Now, Danny, now you’re just being silly. This is real. You have to take this seriously. [laughs]

I like Sophie’s though. Sophie I’m pretty sure is touching on something that has been in development. Chia Pet. Surely that’s been, like scripts have been written right?

John: Yeah. There must be scripts written about Chia Pet. Or at least parody scripts for Chia Pet.

Craig: Or at least parody scripts. And then finally Matt, we do get this suggestion a lot, Pet Rock. For sure. But Pet Rock–

John: Dwayne Johnson is in it. It has a meta quality.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, it would have to be a period piece because pet rocks did exist happily in the ‘70s and never after.

John: Yeah. I had a pet rock for like a day and a half maybe. And then I realized that it was just a rock with some googly eyes attached to it. And I stopped paying attention.

Craig: I didn’t understand the joke. Because I was too young. I got a pet rock. I was like seven. And everyone was like there you go. And I’m like, OK. But, wait, why? And they’re like, “Well, it’s kind of making fun of the whole idea of toys.” What?

John: Why would you make fun of toys?

Craig: Right. What do you mean the idea of toys? Let’s just back up to that for a second. So this is my introduction to irony. Pet Rock.

John: I think all the things we’re talking about, they have to have eyes. That’s really what it comes down to. If you have to add eyes to it that’s a problem. So, there was an animated Rubik’s Cube cartoon at some point, but it was like Rubik’s Cube and then they added eyes to it. Well that’s disturbing. Versus like Pac-Man, he already had eyes.

Craig: Well, the Slinky doesn’t have eyes, but of course Slinky isn’t a character. It’s about the people that made the Slinky. What do you think about – you know what, that movie, the Seth Rogan animated movie that was basically all just food.

John: Food. Yeah. And so they added food to it, but I think they got away with it because it was just so–

Craig: Dirty.

John: It was such an absurd concept. And it was really dirty.

Craig: It was dirty.

John: It was really, really raunchy.

Craig: Yeah. It was dirty.

John: Like Towelie is one of my favorite characters in South Park and that’s just a towel with eyes.

Craig: A towel with googly eyes.

John: Who is really stoned.

Craig: Exactly.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Love it.

John: Really red googly stoner eyes.

Craig: I remember the paper clip guy from Microsoft that everybody hates. It’s a paper clip with eyes.

John: Oh yeah. Clippy. Yeah.

Craig: And eyebrows weirdly.

John: Yeah. Well it’s important because you can’t get full expression without that.

Craig: Right. Yes.

John: So, Craig, interstitial here, do you have any more questions here about my sweet, sweet fingers?

Craig: Yes. This may be violating HIPAA. Do you have diabetes?

John: I do not have diabetes. Happy to report I do not have diabetes.

Craig: OK. I have another question for you.

John: Please.

Craig: Does this happen every single morning, or some mornings?

John: Every single morning.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. One possibility was that it was related to a food you were eating.

John: That was a thought I had as well. I thought perhaps around Thanksgiving I was baking yeasty things that maybe there was something about the baking or the foods I was eating that were specific to the season. But it continued.

Craig: OK. I have another question for you. Even though you like I are in the brotherhood of the bald, do you put any sort of product in your hair or any sort of skincare product that might have an odor to it?

John: The answer to your first question is no. I don’t use Rogaine or any sort of topical hair product. So it’s not that. But, I do want to say that you are getting close to the solution there. Yeah.

Craig: Interesting. Wait, what about Mike?

John: No, it’s not Mike. So it is my own situation here.

Craig: Got it.

John: The second part of your question was a skincare product. And, yes, I put on a moisturizer. The moisturizer does not smell like that though.

Craig: I see. I see. I see. OK. All right. Well we should probably take another break.

John: We’ll continue on and we’ll talk about unions and guilds.

Craig: Great.

John: So this was something we promised we were going to do I think last week. And there’s actually two kind of news hooks for it this week because – we’ll put a link of the Deadline article of Hollywood Unions Celebrate the Inauguration of President Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris. The Most Pro-Union President and Partner in the White House. So all the unions and guilds were very excited and little tweets about that.

And also Biden fired the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. And then the replacement person for that. So there’s going to be a new person there. And I will say that doing guild stuff that the people who have been running NLRB has been a challenge for the WGA. You don’t want to go to them for help because they might side with the other side. So, those were two things in the news just this week that are related to Hollywood guilds and unions.

Craig: It’s a big deal. And John is right. You can’t really overestimate the impact that these things have on unions and the way they not only just conduct their week to week business but also how they go into negotiations. Because ultimately when you’re negotiating with companies as a union or when you’re trying to figure out how far to push things with management in between contracts your leverage is that maybe they’re violating the law. Or maybe there is an issue of law that is undecided that could be decided in your favor. Or, maybe there’s an issue in the contract that’s undecided that could be decided by mediators or arbitrators or eventually be heard by the National Labor Relations Board.

And if that government body is skewed to be anti-union you are automatically and reasonably way more gun shy about all sorts of things. The meddling that the government can do to hurt unions is not limited just to how they decide disputes. Sometimes it comes down to just aggravating paperwork.

John: Yeah.

Craig: When I was on the board way, way back when in the mid-2000s the Bush administration changed the rules. So every union must every year file a financial report that is publicly available. And basically under the Bush administration they changed the rules so you just had to report way more information. It was more burdensome to the unions to put it all together. And also it just was like you had to just open your kimono completely. Everybody should be able to see everything. And it was, you know, designed ultimately to kind of put their thumb in the union’s eye.

Over the decades since the big unionization movements in the early part of the 20th century the government has steadily chipped away. Steadily chipped away at organized labor and their power. And this is a much needed course correction on that part.

John: Yeah. So in this conversation we’re talking about unions and guilds as they exist in Hollywood and really only in the US. And so that’s necessarily going to be very limited to this because while there are international Writers Guilds they are more like professional societies because they’re not true unions where they’re representing employees. And we’ll get into some of sort of why the unique way we do it in the US allows for writers’ unions that wouldn’t exist or make sense other places.

And I started to put together a lot of links to the history of organized labor in Hollywood and I realized we are not a history podcast. We are going to mess up way more than we’re going to illuminate, but we’ll have some links in the show notes to that. Important things to understand in terms of background, the film industry is about 100 years old. It’s centered in Los Angeles. Radio and television was originally based out of New York. Even though more production moved to LA, there was still a lot of late night TV and news largely stayed in New York. That still exists. You still see the shadows of that in sort of how the unions are set up.

Interestingly, the first of the Hollywood unions IATSE, created all of this because they were the teamsters who were part of Broadway, sort of vaudeville, Broadway stuff. So it goes even back before there was film there were unions that were involved in the film production.

And, Craig, I remember when you were on Karina’s podcast did you play Louis B. Mayer? I’m trying to remember who you played.

Craig: That’s right. I was Louis B. Mayer.

John: So, this is a thing I did not know and I’ll put a link in the show notes to this, too, but I hadn’t realized the degree to which Mayer and the birth of the Oscars was really a response and an anticipation of organized labor.

Craig: Yup. So Louis B. Mayer, sensing that the artists under this control were starting to organize and come together and talk, and thus threaten his hegemony – and he really was the king of the council of kings – he very brilliantly created the Oscars because his theory was if you are possibly in danger of having to compete for resources with artists hold up a shiny trophy and they’ll forget about you and just fight each other for it. And that’s exactly what happened. [laughs] And continues to happen to this day.

So, the entire awards industry is in and of itself a massive distraction that not only gets artists competing with each other, but gets them competing with each other in a way that allows the entertainment industry to also make money off of their competing with each other. It’s spectacular.

John: It really is a remarkable achievement.

Craig: Remarkable achievement.

John: So a thing that’s important to understand is that when you talk about unions they only make sense really when you talk about the fact that there are employers and there’s somebody that you’re negotiating with and against. And so you can negotiate with the studios individually, with the streamers individually, but you tend to negotiate with them as a group. And that group that you’re negotiating with is the AMPTP, the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which is the Academy, which I got that confused when I first got out here because it seems like they’re two big organizations that run movies and stuff. But AMPTP is the collective body that we negotiate with as unions and guilds for our contract.

And you look at the different kinds of unions and guilds that there are, there’s a wide range. So you have actors, you have writers, you have directors, all of whom are sort of doing kind of intellectual labor, artistic labor. And then you have much more sort of physical crafts and trades peoples. You have grips and electricians and teamsters who are driving trucks. And you have all the other sort of unions that are involved in actual physical production.

And they seem so disparate and yet there are some commonalities, so I wanted to talk through some of the commonalities before we get into sort of why the different unions and guilds are positioned so differently.

Craig: Sure.

John: So what are some common threads, Craig?

Craig: Well, all of us are working gig work. So, typical union jobs you work at let’s say the Ford plant building trucks. That’s your job. Year in and year out, your job, welder on the line. That’s what you do. And you do it at one place for one employer. In Hollywood everyone is essentially freelancing for their entire careers.

So, you’re getting work from movie to movie, from script to script, from edit job to edit job. Everyone is constantly looking for the next thing because our businesses are organized around shows and movies, not around the steady production of a single product, like for instance a Rubik’s Cube.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So we’re not all together on the same floor, nor do we have longevity in a position or vis-à-vis each other or with one product. We’re constantly moving and swirling around.

John: Yeah. And we should say this idea of skilled labor, like welding is a skill and there’s training that goes into it. The same way that somebody who is working as an editor has a certain skillset. A welder has certain skillsets. But that welder is going to probably be working at the Ford plant for years and years and years and years and really has one employer. Versus this editor who is going to be hopping around from various jobs to various jobs. And it’s cobbling together enough money to make a living through many jobs rather than just one job.

There are exceptions, of course. There’s people who have been on TV shows for forever, but in general you’re hopping from place to place to place.

Craig: Yeah. Those are pretty rare. And similarly where somebody that is in a union as a nurse will have the potential ability to work at dozens of different hospitals, clinics, healthcare centers, etc., we’re more like professional athletes who can work for a single organization of teams. And our teams are Disney, Warner Bros., Sony, Universal, and Paramount, and their associated television networks and things like that.

John: Yeah. So there’s an oligopoly in the sense that there’s a very limited number of buyers. And so the big names, I don’t know if it’s 75% of employment, they represent a huge amount of the actual employment is to and for those people. So they have a lot of power because they are the buyers of note.

What is interesting about us as writers and which we should get into this is that we are doing work-for-hire. So intellectual property is commissioned from us. The people who are hiring us to do the thing, they ultimately own the copyright. And therefore as writers, as artists, we are an employee of the commissioner. So same with like an artist who is working at Disney animation, they’re drawing stuff but Disney owns everything that they’re drawing for Disney.

Craig: Yeah. And this works against us and it works for us. I mean, the only good part of this and we are unique in this regard here in the United States is that we can be a proper employer, therefore we can have a proper union. And as a result of our proper union we do have certain benefits that are better than some of the benefits that other similar artists receive elsewhere even as they retain copyright in their country. Because these large corporations here are exceptionally good at exploiting reuse. They’re really, really good at it.

Do we get enough of the share of that reuse? As sufficient amount as we should? No. Is the insufficient amount that we get typically more than what other people get in royalties elsewhere? Yeah, it is. So, it’s an interesting thing. We have a tiny piece of a very large pie which sometimes adds up to more than the entire piece of a very tiny, tiny pie. A little miniature molecular pie.

John: And so we talk about residuals and we talk about back-ends on things and that is an important part, especially for writers to maintain a career, but there’s other kind of fundamental union things which are also important. So things like worker safety and safety on a set. These are things that come about because of unions. Minimum hours/maximum hours. Just other sort of quality of life issues that are only possible because we have unions. So, it’s very easy to be myopic and only think about this in terms of how this works for a writer, but unions help everyone in all these different trades.

So let’s talk about the different unions.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, in Europe a lot of these other things that unions do like enforcing safety and things like that the government does.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Our government is less interested in mandating things and so you do find situations where in order to attract production and employment people will just sort of look the other way. I mean, very famously we have a massive problem in our industry with lack of sleep. We know that. There should be a statutory cap on how much you can work, how many hours in a row. And that’s it. No more. We don’t have it. I don’t know what the number is. I don’t know if there is a number.

I’ve worked 20 hour days. I’ve done it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: On set. It was terrible. Because you didn’t have a choice. So, that’s the kind of thing where our unions have to sort of step in where our government has failed.

John: Absolutely. So, things like – that kind of worker safety, but also it’s through unions that we have healthcare. In other countries the healthcare would be a national priority.

Craig: Right.

John: And we don’t have that here. Pensions are also through a union. So these are crucial things that were one sort of strike after strike over the course of time for the different unions.

So let’s talk about what the unions are. There’s SAG/AFTRA, which used to be two separate actor’s unions which then got combined together. They represent actors, but both in film and television and in radio. Other performers under AFTRA, I always get confused sort of what the boundaries were between this. I would say my general impression, and I think Craig alluded to this last episode, is that SAG/AFTRA is often fighting with itself more than it’s fighting the town.

Craig: Yeah. Well, SAG in particular has a long history of kind of the bitter internal feud between I guess you could call them the more militant folks and the more pragmatic folks. Pick your adjective. But they’ve been struggling with that for a long, long time. And that all came to a head when they merged with AFTRA which was something the pragmatists really wanted to do. AFTRA definitely covered things like voiceover work for radio. I could never quite tell exactly how the division worked. But they are combined now.

They are definitely a much larger union than the Writers Guild or the Directors Guild. That said, they don’t have the kind of employment requirements that we do. You don’t become a Writers Guild member for life. I mean, technically you do, but what happens is if you don’t work after a while you become post-current. So you’re still a member of the union but you don’t get any of the benefits. You’re not voting.

John: You’re not going to vote.

Craig: You’re not voting. That’s the big one. You don’t have a say on whether or not for instance a new contract gets approved. You need to have some employment skin in the game for that. Not so with SAG. I believe once you’re a member you’re a member.

John: And that really does change things a lot. SAG has not gone on strike, at least during the time that I’ve been working for here. If SAG were to go on strike it would shut down everything because we have not just actors in dramatic stuff, but all of our hosts in late night. Those are all going to be SAG people. And so it would be a big deal if it happened. It hasn’t happened. Could it happen? Sure. You never know.

Let’s talk about the DGA. So DGA represents directors the same way that the WGA represents writers, but the DGA also represents assistant directors, so the folks who are running – keeping the sets running properly. UPMs, that class of sort of folks who are making sets function is covered by the DGA, which is odd to me. It’s very different from what we’re used to in the WGA.

Craig: Yes. Well in particular because certainly the UPM job and the AD job are not primarily creative positions. They primarily are positions involved with the management of a production. Scheduling. Coordination. Budget. The employment of others. Management. This is going to come up again very quickly when we talk about the WGA and the reason we need to talk about it is because there’s a rule, it’s not a secret, it’s a rule – management is not allowed to be in a union. That’s just a rule. Which makes sense. You know, because if your boss could be in the union then you just get out-voted by a bunch of bosses and then what’s the point of the union?

So what is a manager roughly speaking the way the government defines it is somebody who is directly in charge of the hiring or firing of other employees, or the management of their time and how they do their job. That’s management. Well…

John: You definitely see that in the DGA. You see that in the WGA as we’re going to get to. But you also see it in this next, the biggest of the unions I think, we’re going to talk about which is IATSE. So IATSE is everything else you can imagine that is probably a Hollywood job follows under IATSE. And there are a tremendous number of smaller guilds within IATSE, locals, who specialize in one area of it. So there’s classically the Editors Guild, which is underneath IATSE, and over the last year has had real frustrations with sort of the lack of attention being paid to their specific specialty within there.

Within each of these places, though, you know, you’ll see that there are people who are responsible for hiring for other people. It’s just a thing that necessarily happens where you’re looking at, OK, I’m going to be in charge of this department so I need to fill my ranks. There’s a management function there. So it’s complicated.

Craig: Yeah. I think if you’re talking about sort of foreman type position, that’s acceptable. Some employees have a higher position of authority than others. So, I get that. You know, a pit boss that works for a casino is still an employee. And the dealer is an employee. And the pit boss is looking. But the pit boss is not hiring or firing the dealer.

And in IATSE there’s probably not a ton of situations where there’s specifically – I mean, technically it’s always the producer who is hiring or firing. Sometimes it’s the UPM in the DGA. IATSE is a great example of too much of a good thing. It is – you want a union to be sizable enough that you have collective strength. That’s the value of collective bargaining. If you have a union that represents six people at one Subway, it’s not that great. If you had a union that represents all Subway employees, I mean the sandwich, not the metro, then they can get something done.

IATSE, what they’ve done is conglomerate a lot of unions together because individually there may not be enough say onset painters to have collective strength. But then they create locals and they get bundled together. And then IATSE is the meta bundle of all the bundles. But the problem is that if you’re in one of these smaller locals, like for instance the Animation Guild. You’re just not going to be able to convince IATSE, all 100-and – I don’t know how many people are in it, 100,000? You’re not going to be able to convince all of them to go on strike so that your 30 members can get a slightly better deal. So you’re stuck. And that is not a great arrangement.

John: It is not a great arrangement. And something you’ve often brought up on the show, a somewhat analogous situation, is screenwriters, feature writers, within the WGA. And that folks who primarily write features in the WGA can feel like their issues are not getting as much attention as TV writers who are the bulk of the membership of the WGA. That’s changing now and there’s – obviously people do a lot more of both. You are now a TV writer. But it’s a genuine concern. And so you’re always having these conflicting instincts to broaden your base so that you can represent more kinds of people and sort of protect yourself. And to specialize so you can really focus on your core constituencies.

And there’s not going to be a great answer for that. You know, we often will talk about videogame writing is very much like screenwriting. There’s clear analogs between how those work. And maybe we should represent and protect videogame writing because that is clearly going to become something that is like animation. We want to make sure we don’t miss out on that.

But, are we going to do the best job representing those videogame writers? Is it pulling focus away? There’s a lot of writing that happens in reality shows. Not just where you aim the camera, but also all the narration. Shouldn’t all that writing be covered by the WGA? Sure. Maybe. But are we going to lose focus in trying to organize that work? So it’s always tough. It’s always going to be decisions and conflicts.

Craig: Yeah. And we’re hamstrung a bit by the law, again. For instance, we can’t necessarily compel union membership for people that are working in Canada. In fact, we can’t at all because they’re not here and jurisdiction sort of stops at the border. So, in videogames there are a lot of people, a lot of companies, that are foreign, international, and they’re not American. And there are a lot of writers that are working overseas. Also the entire videogame industry is vigilantly anti-union. So, one of the tricky things is to try and crack into those places is you’ve got a company where there are 400 people, all of whom would love to be in the union and they’ve all been told you can’t be. And they can’t. And then somebody else comes along and says, “We’re going to successfully unionize four of you.” That becomes hard to do.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And then there’s suddenly a ton of resentments and difficulties and problems. So, they just cracked down on all of it. They are brutally anti-union. And this, again, is why the more strength and pro-union impact you can have at the governmental level, and it has to be the federal level. They’re the only ones. This is all federal. If you get that federal level then some of these things start to tilt your way. If you don’t, running up hill in shoes made of ice.

John: The last sort of evergreen issue I want to make sure we talk about is that we usually think of unions representing the minimums. Basically trying to raise the minimums and protect the people at the bottom. Basically to set a floor on things. And that they’re not especially focused on what we’ll call above scale. So scale being the minimum you could pay somebody. Above scale being whatever beyond that. So much of the work that happens in the WGA is above scale. It’s beyond sort of scale payments. And Craig mentioned earlier in professional sports the player’s unions are sort of similar in position to us in that they are going to set minimums, but most of the members are working way above that and are going to have issues that are not the same as the lowest members. And there’s a natural conflict there. I mean, the degree to which you’re focusing on those bottom line issues for people making scale versus people above scale. And it’s challenging to balance those two demands.

Craig: It’s made more difficult by the fact that a number of the people in the Writers Guild who are making a lot of money are management. They just are. Showrunners who are hiring and firing other writers. They’re management. And so the Writers Guild is engaged in kind of an interesting dance. It comes more powerful vis-à-vis the companies by representing those powerful members of management, showrunners. And in theory that increased leverage helps them get more stuff for everyone. I don’t know if that’s true though. [laughs] So, it’s an interesting thing. And it does create kind of weird situations where you’ve got very wealthy people coming out there and saying things like, “Everybody needs to strike.” And you look at them and go, “That’s not a problem for you. You could strike for the rest of your life. You’re fine.”

There are tensions within our union because of the vast disparity of income which is even wider – well, I don’t know if it’s wider than the overall income disparity in our country, but it’s up there. I mean, we have writers that are scratching by and barely earning the right to have healthcare and making maybe $40,000 in a year gross. And then we have writers who are making $70 million in a year. So hard to hold that ship together perfectly, or even well.

John: Yeah. It’s an ongoing challenge. And it’s kind of always been this challenge. And it’s probably only accelerating. But let’s talk about the WGA because it’s also important to remind everybody that there’s actually two WGAs. So there’s the Writers Guild of America West and then there’s the Writers Guild of America East. They’re technically separate unions. They are sister unions. And luckily, thank god, we get along really, really well. We haven’t always gotten along really well.

I’ve been lucky to be on two negotiating committees within this last year and honestly Zoom makes it so much easier for everybody to be on the same conversation. Because traditionally what would happen is the WGA West handles all of the negotiations for the film and TV contracts. So we deal with the AMPTP and the WGA East basically takes that deal and their members vote yes on the deal.

Usually what would happen is that several representatives from the WGA East would come out and sit in on all these negotiation sessions and say, yes, great, and that would be it. Or raise their concerns about specific things that are of concerns to the East members. In these last negotiations we had a full contingent of East folks who were in all of those Zooms and were participating and that was great. So I think things are closer than they’ve ever been. But it’s important to understand they are different unions and they are kind of representing different priorities.

Theoretically any member of the West could also be a member of the East. But the East also represents. They’ve done a lot more organizing in online writing. So, organizing websites that have writers and they’re going through and representing those writers, which is great but also very different and I don’t know on the West side whether we’d want – it becomes an issue of how broad do you go. Would they be a good fit in the West? I don’t know.

Craig: I don’t understand this anymore. [laughs] It’s pointless. This exists literally because it exists. It’s just – it started–

John: It’s just because of history.

Craig: Yeah. Because of history. But it has long outlived its actual practical purpose. To the point where the Writers Guild West processes residuals for all Writers Guild West and East members, mails the checks to the Writers Guild East for them to just put in Writers Guild East envelopes and mail to their members. We are done to that amount of silliness. And the arcane nature of how the council and the board vote, it all is an unnecessary – what do you call it? Cruft? If that what it is in code? It’s organizational cruft. There shouldn’t be a West or an East. There should just be the WGA.

John: Yeah. So traditional arguments against it is that what I said in terms of East actually represents some kinds of writers that are not sort of classically West writers. And, yes, West represents some news folks too, but I don’t know that we do an especially good job of that. Traditionally it’s been like, well, how do you have national meetings? How do you actually have somebody – basically you can’t get everyone in a room together. In the age of Zoom it’s become much less important. And so the fact that none of these people have been in rooms for a long time, maybe it’s less important than it’s ever been before.

It’s hard to do that sort of on the ground work and have the meetings and do the stuff with membership when people are spread hither and yon. But it’s probably more possible – it is more possible now than it’s ever been before to conceive of some unification. But to me I would say having been on the board recently and been through this last bit of negotiations, it’s just not a giant priority for me. It’s I think a lower priority for me than it is for you.

Craig: It will remain a low priority until there’s a problem. And there have been problems and there will be problems again. And that’s when it will become – this has to be solved. We have writers all over the country. Basically if you’re west of the Mississippi you go to the West. If you’re east you go to the East. You’re right. You can switch. You can’t be in both at the same time. But you could switch. And it’s all just – we have two award ceremonies running simultaneously.

John: It’s goofy.

Craig: It’s just dumb. It’s dumb. And there’s duplication. We have two executive directors. Why? And sometimes it actually does cause problems when, for instance, in credit administration. If you are in a credit arbitration with a writer from the East there is a chance that the East may handle the arbitration instead of the West. Well what’s the difference? Well, there is I believe one lawyer on the staff of the Writers Guild East. There are about 12 lawyers just in the credits department of the Writers Guild West, all of whom are the ones that essentially take the lead on all of the negotiation, arbitration, and enforcement of credit rules with the companies. You want those guys running the arbitration because that’s what they do.

John: You want the cardiac surgeon who has done 100 of them rather than the first one.

Craig: And it just – let’s just fold it all together. You can have two. If you need an office over there, like people go to a physical office anymore. I mean, all that stuff is going away. So it would be ideal to solve this before it becomes a problem again. Because the actuality is when you look at the constitutions of the Writers Guild West and East, if the East wanted to cause a major problem it can. It has a way to do that. It hasn’t in a long time, happily. But it would be nice to get rid of it. Pointless.

John: Yeah. Last thing I probably should have stressed earlier in this conversation is that a frequent question I get is how do I join the Writers Guild. Or how do I join the Screen Actors Guild or anything.

Craig: Fill out this form.

John: It’s actually one of those amazing things where you don’t have to do anything.

Craig: They’ll find you.

John: They will find you. Once you’re hired to work on a project that is union-covered you will be required to join that union. A certain requirement has to be met. But you can’t join until you have to join and then you have to join and then you’re in. That’s really the simple explanation for it.

Craig: They will hunt you down. And one of the reasons they hunt you down is because when you become a member of the Writers Guild you are required to become a member of the Writers Guild. And therefore you’re required to send them quite a fat check for initiation. So, believe me, they get you. You’ll know. You’ll know. Congrats. Surprise.

John: Yup. All right. So that’s a quick overview. There’s obviously a lot more we could talk about with the guilds and the unions, but I want to make sure that we get some more time to resolve the mystery of the sticky fingers.

Craig: Mm, OK.

John: Not sticky, I should stress. Sweet, not sticky.

Craig: Sweet. Not sticky. Sweet. So, I was sort of getting close when I was talking about potentially some sort of hair product. So my theory is that you’re touching something that has that smell on it and it is transferring, but it’s happening while you’re sleeping. And I’ve already investigated the bedding, the begging material. It’s not that. It’s not your mouth guard. It’s not any sort of skincare product, as far as I can tell.

John: Going back, it is a skincare product. That’s the distinction. But none of the skincare products smell like that.

Craig: Oh, interesting. So perhaps there is a skincare product that when exposed to the air oxidizes and turns into a different smell.

John: That is essentially what has happened. That is the answer to the mystery. And so it is this facial moisturizer I put on. It’s like the last thing I put on at night. And it doesn’t have any smell at all. But somehow overnight it has like vitamin C in it or something. That changes – basically I don’t wash my hands afterwards because it’s just moisturizer. And the chemical reaction that happens is it smells sweet in the morning.

And so I was able to test this out by – that was my theory – and so what I tried is like, OK, I’m going to put this stuff on but I’m going to put it on with like a Q-Tip and not actually touch it. And so I tried that for two nights and then I went back to using my fingers. And that is exactly what is happening. It’s a chemical reaction to the moisturizer I’m putting on before bedtime.

Craig: Right. I have never done that.

John: Yeah.

Craig: No.

John: It’s important to moisturize.

Craig: Everyone says that. Everyone says it. I’m not going to do it. You know I’m not going to do it.

John: You’re not going to do it. You’re just not going to do it.

Craig: No.

John: No.

Craig: I come from a long line of men that just stupidly don’t care about the largest organ in their body. It’s the skin.

John: Craig, can I ask you a question about sleeping? Because we played D&D till pretty late last night. And then I know you had to take your puppy out to pee. And yet when I look on Twitter like you were up hours before I was. So I worry are you sleeping enough?

Craig: Sometimes I am. And sometimes I’m not. And it’s really weird. So I didn’t have to wake up that early. I had my alarm set for a bit later. And I just happened to wake up that early. Sometimes when I wake up earlier than I should I don’t feel tired. And I’m fine. Right now I don’t feel particularly tired. I’ll probably sleep longer tonight.

There are sometimes where I get like eight hours and the alarm wakes me up at eight hours and I feel like I could sleep another 20 hours and I’m miserable. It’s really weird. I can’t quite explain it. But, yeah, I only slept I would say four hours last night.

John: Yeah. That would not be enough for me.

Craig: It’s just natural. Yeah, it’s weird. Normally I would be a zombie, but I don’t know. Coasting on adrenaline.

John: One of the tweets that I saw recently from you was about D&D alignments as pertaining to crossword puzzles. And so what I saw in your tweet from January 17 was you can imagine like a Tic-Tac-Toe grid and in it was different layouts of crossword puzzles and they’re identified as being lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good. And so it was a meme that you were sharing.

And I want to talk quickly about D&D alignment charts and that idea of the nine kinds of alignments and whether they have any relevance to the work that you and I do as writers.

Craig: Sure. So the classic breakdown in Dungeons & Dragons is there are three general axes of goodness. There’s good, there’s neutral, and there’s evil. So that’s kind of your moral approach. You are a person that is – you believe in some sort of moral positivity, you just don’t care, or you’re just actually evil. And then those are divided into kind of ordering mechanisms. There’s lawful, neutral, and chaotic. So, lawful, you tend to follow some sort of rigid code. Neutral, you sort of make decisions on the fly as you need to. And chaotic, you don’t follow any rhyme or reason. You’re all over the place. And you can apply those to any of those. So there’s lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good. Lawful neutral, true neutral, which is neutral-neutral, and chaotic neutral. And then lawful evil, neutral evil, and chaotic evil.

John: And so classically you see that arranged as a Tic-Tac-Toe grid where true neutral is the center square.

Craig: Right.

John: And so my first exposure to I think morality or sort of the concept of regimented morality was in fifth grade playing D&D for the first time and seeing this alignment chart, which I don’t know that it pre-dated Gary Gygax and the original D&D or not, but it was my introduction to this idea of systemic kind of morality and approaches to these things. And we’ll put links in the show notes to a bunch of different memes about Arrested Development or Marvel, Harry Potter, or Star Wars, looking at that grid with classic characters from those mythologies and how they would fit into that grid. And it’s useful to some degree I guess. But I wanted to talk about sort of what’s good about it and sort of the pros and the cons of it.

I guess for me it’s useful to distinguish between approaches to a problem as a hero, so lawful good versus chaotic good. I can see the differences there. And imagining a lawful evil, like a really organized orderly evil versus a pure chaotic evil can be helpful. And so I think as I’m approaching my own writing to some degree I’m aware of that as an approach. I’m never – in no character breakdown have I ever written like somebody is lawful good for a screenplay. But it is somewhat useful as a framing device if you’re thinking of a character’s approach. What would you say?

Craig: I probably get – the only use I get out of it other than entertainment when somebody breaks down a show that I love into these characters. It’s the Game of Thrones alignment chart. Who’s in what? But I do think that it’s good if you find yourself feeling like you’re stuck between two easy, obvious polls and you can go, oh, this is just like a good guy or a bad guy. Well, it’s good to think in these terms and think about what would happen if – what does it mean to be chaotic neutral? And what would happen to my character if I took away their sense of morality? I didn’t make them evil. I didn’t make them good. I just made them not care. What would happen if my bad guy didn’t really follow a code, but also wasn’t a lunatic. And these things are interesting.

Look, the classic boring ones are lawful good, which is just like–

John: Dudley Do-Right.

Craig: Yeah. Superman. Lawful good. And then chaotic evil is just a monster like a wolf-man running around and biting people. It’s chaotic evil. But then you have these really interesting ones like chaotic good. And lawful evil. And true neutral, which is very rare. So it’s fun to kind of challenge yourself a little bit if you feel like you’re stuck. But, I mean, it’s a pretty blunt tool. I wouldn’t go too far.

John: It’s a pretty blunt tool. We’ve talked before about the Myers-Briggs personality assessment. And this is really kind of a version of that. Because like the Myers-Briggs you’re looking at two polls and sort of putting people on a spectrum between these two polls. And grouping them together in ways that sort of feel like, OK, if someone were lawful but they’re also good this is what the characters would be like. But you can really do that for any qualities that have two polls. Anywhere there’s a spectra of how they could come out. So you could look at this in terms of like how much is this person a planner versus an improviser? Are they serious or are they funny? Are they warm versus cold? Introverted versus extroverted?

You can really take any two opposites there and look at where a character is on that scale and as you combine the other things you kind of feel what they’re like. But I do just worry, even going back to eight sequence structure, it can just become a lot of busywork, a lot of ticking of boxes that’s not actually doing the work about what is making that character interesting, distinctive, and specific to this story.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, in the end if you can neatly fit a character perfectly into one of those boxes then they’re not a person. They’re a box.

John: Yeah. Yeah. I would say the last thing that’s been helpful for me thinking about alignment or these opposites is that it’s useful – once you’ve figured out who your hero is, who your protagonist is, thinking about who the polar opposite of that character is can be really helpful in terms of thinking about your villain, your antagonist. What is it about that antagonist that is uniquely challenging to that protagonist? And that can be a useful starting place for thinking about who is the person to put opposite your hero.

All right. We have time for a few short questions. Let’s invite Megana Rao, our producer, on to ask some questions that our listeners have sent in. Megana, what have you got for us this week?

Megana Rao: OK. So Adrianne from LA asks, “These days every company has its own streaming service that exclusively exhibits its content. Disney has Disney+. Apple has AppleTV+. And now Netflix creates originals not shown anywhere else. How is this not a modern day violation of the Paramount decrees? And how does this all factor in with the termination of the Paramount decrees? Please help me understand. I’m so confused.”

John: Yeah. So it’s a separate piece of that. The Paramount consent decrees are about studios owning movie theaters. Basically said that the studios were not allowed to own movie theaters. That’s going to go away and studios are going to buy the movie theaters. That’s kind of inevitable.

What you’re describing, Adrianne, is a little closer to Fin-Syn which was the change in the ‘80s I’m guessing that allowed for networks–

Craig: I think so.

John: ‘90s? When was it?

Craig: I think it was the late ‘80s or possibly early ‘90s. Yeah.

John: Regardless, there was a time in which NBC could not own its own programming. They basically had to buy from somebody else. That changed. And that’s kind of more like what we’re talking about here. A form of vertical integration. I think it’s not great. But it’s where we’re at.

Craig: Yeah. So Fin-Syn or financial syndication laws were why networks licensed their shows. So the way network television used to work is a studio like say Paramount would produce a show like Star Trek. And Star Trek cost a whole lot of money to make. And the network that showed Star Trek would pay Paramount a license fee per episode of some amount to run that show in Primetime, or syndication, or whatever.

And, if you could make enough of those then you could rerun them and that’s where you make all your money, and so on and so forth. And then for the network their whole game was pay out less in licensing than they take in in advertising. That was how that business worked. It has not worked that way in decades. John is absolutely right. Fin-Syn is what you’re thinking of here.

Paramount decrees really just referred to the brick and mortar buildings where they show movies and obviously that’s also gone. So, hopefully that helps you understand. Basically imagine all the possible barriers there could be and then get rid of them all. There you go. That’s what we got.

John: Yup. Megana, what have you got for us next?

Megana: So Tara asks, “My script made the Black List, got me agents, and several generals, and we’re finally getting a little heat. I’ve been writing in my free time for 20 years, but the business end of this is all new to me at 46 years old. My team is brilliant, but here’s my question for you and Craig. We’re trying to build a package. We may be close to getting the perfect lead attached. And the perfect director is tentatively interested. Hopefully I’ve got meetings with them in the next few weeks. What should I ask them and what can I expect them to ask me?”

John: Great. First off, Tara, congratulations. That’s awesome that you’re getting this together.

Craig: Good job.

John: And I’m guessing this is a feature that you’re putting together. I mean, it could be a limited series. It could be a TV pilot. But when we say a package, don’t worry or mistake the idea of a packaging fee, the kind of thing we’ve been fighting against for in the WGA. A package is a grouping of great bits of talent together to make this thing attractive to buyers. So it’s awesome this is happening for you.

Those questions when you’re talking to a big actor or director is sort of what attracts them to the project. What are they excited about? What are the questions they have for you? What is it about their previous work that you have questions about? Talk about the thing you’re hoping to make. Talk about the sort of – just get a sense of whether this is a shared vision for things. That’s the most crucial thing is to feel like what is it going to be like working with this person.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, I just want to point out that if I were on your team I would – this is a great sentence. My team is brilliant, and you can see them sort of sitting up straighter in their chairs. But here’s my question for you and Craig. And then they’d go, oh, dammit. You know, there is no special questions. There’s no secret handshake. I don’t know what they’re going to ask you. Because sometimes they ask great questions and sometimes they ask terrible questions.

I can’t tell if you’re talking about a feature or if you’re talking about a movie – it feels like you’re talking about a movie. So a lot of times with movies the directors barely want to even acknowledge that you are a human in the room, which is terrible, but true. And I hate that.

So, just have the conversation. And if you have the ability to decide in some way, to help decide who is getting this and who is doing it, then have the conversation and then just check your gut after. The only thing you need to make sure of is that the person that you’re going into business with, if you have any control over it, agrees with you about what this is, and what the tone is, and why it’s good. And if they don’t, then they’re not the perfect lead or director. That’s kind of what you’re about to find out.

John: Yeah. And that’s a longer conversation. Maybe we should put that on the list. What do you do when there’s a person who is circling your thing who you don’t really like? And I’ve been in Tara’s situation where there’s been a director and it’s like, ugh, how do you shake that person away without burning bridges? It can be challenging. So maybe we’ll ask Megana to put that on the list for follow up, because getting rid of somebody you don’t want is sometimes harder than attracting the person you do want.

Craig: True, true.

John: Megana, thank you for these questions. I see there’s a whole bunch more we have on the Workflowy, so thank you to all the listeners who sent in questions. Anything more you want to share, Megana?

Megana: No, I think that’s great. Thanks guys.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is type related. So, the New York Times has banner headlines occasionally for really big things. One of them was recently Trump Impeached and Trump Impeached Again. When you have letters that are next to each other you have to sometimes worry about how those letters are bumping into each other. In the case of impeached, when you have that uppercase, the E and the A next to each other looks kind of weird. There’s actually a lot of space. And so you’ll do some kerning to try to get those things a little bit closer. But then if they bump it feels weird.

So I’m going to link to an article that goes through the New York Times’ decision to build a special ligature, a special combination EA for headline situations where those capital letters are showing up next to each other so it forms one kind of letter glyph. And ligatures are pretty common in type overall. You’ll see them a lot with FL or FFL. There’s special combinations for those things because otherwise the letters would bump together in weird ways. I love ligatures and so I loved this little article explaining how and why they created a special EA for the word “impeached.”

Craig: Impeached. I also see they used it in Biden Beats Trump.

John: Yeah. Special.

Craig: Biden Beats Trump.

John: Feels nice.

Craig: I just like the sound of it. Thank you, John. My One Cool Thing this week is a website called Wordlisted from a gentleman named Adam Aaronson. There are a few resources on the Internet that allow you to – well, they give you a little bit of a helping hand if you are constructing a puzzle, and they can certainly give you a very big helping hand if you’re trying to solve a puzzle. And I probably cited some of them before like One Look for instance.

This one is quite the Swiss Army knife. First of all, it allows you to upload your own dictionary. And you’re like, what, I don’t have a dictionary. Well, a lot of puzzle folks create word lists. So, some terms that may have not made it into the dictionary or phrases, for instance, that they can sort of add on to the regular dictionary. And then you have all sorts of options doing simple pattern searches where question marks are missing letters and asterisks are missing strings of letters. There’s anagrams. Hidden anagrams where if you need to figure out, take the word MATE, how many words have an anagram of MATE inside of it. So, “steamed” for instance would be an example of that.

There’s letter banks where you put in eight letters and it tells you all the letters that come from just using those letters, with repeaters. There’s sandwich words. There’s replacements. Deletions. Prefixes. Suffixes. Consonancy. Consonancy is when two words have the same order of consonants but the vowels are different. Of course, there are palindromes.

And it’s all sortable by length or by alphabet. It’s a wonderful tool. And it’s free. So, thank you, Adam Aaronson. Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you. So you can find this. Wordlisted. We’ll throw a link in the show notes for you. But if you’re listening at home it’s Aaronson, that’s with two As. Aaronson.org/wordlisted.

John: Very nice. And right underneath that link we’ll also put a link to Rhyme Zone which is a thing I use as a writer all the time and I think it’s the best online rhyming dictionary. And so if you need to rhyme something, a very good tool for that.

As we wrap up, I need to give a special shout out to Megan McDonnell, our former Scriptnotes producer, who has her first produced credit this week. So episode three of Wandavision, the Marvel show that I think is just delightful, has a nice little credit that says Megan McDonnell, because she wrote it. So we’re very, very proud of Megan and–

Craig: Well, you know what? That’s your first credit. That’s a big deal.

John: Yeah. It’s awesome. First of many credits to come. So, congratulations to her.

Craig: No question.

John: Scriptnotes is currently produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week, and thank you so much for people sending in outros, this new one is by Malakai Bisel. It’s great. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for the weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re going to talk about right after this on QAnon.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

John: And we’re back. So James in New Zealand wrote in to say, “It’s been reported that one of the top QAnon influencers is a ‘failed Hollywood screenwriter.’ That started me pondering two things. One, what is a failed screenwriter? Most of us, present company included, have failed in some aspect of screenwriting. Two, do you think most screenwriters would be good at creating conspiracy theories? At its core it’s about writing a compelling story. I’m wondering if there’s a Save the Cat template for conspiracy theories.”

So, Craig, the confluence of things in our lives. So, many, many years ago there was a guy named Script Shadow who was a thorn in our collective sides, well before the podcast even started I think. But the QAnon guy is not the guy who is this guy, but there’s relations. Basically Script Shadow had reviewed one of these guys’ scripts and they sort of knew each other, the QAnon guy. And another listener wrote in with a longer explanation of sort of the history behind all this stuff.

I am not at all surprised that some of the QAnon folks are aspiring screenwriters.

Craig: Me neither. And this guy apparently was kind of haunting Franklin Leonard for a while on social media because he didn’t do well on the Black List. It’s not like Franklin sits there just digging into screenplays one by one and adjusting the scores and giggling. He doesn’t do that.

So, this was a grouchy guy that wasn’t getting the pat on the head that he thought he deserved, which is something that entitled people have in common. And so question number one. What is a failed screenwriter? I don’t know. I think if you abandon screenwriting, if you wanted to try and be a screenwriter and it didn’t work out and you didn’t get paid, or you got paid once and never again, and you leave it, then your attempts to have a kind of ongoing career as a screenwriter have failed. And that’s most screenwriters. I mean, honestly most people out there are failed screenwriters if they’ve written a script. Because very few screenwriters are able to kind of keep that going. It’s unfortunate. That’s the way it is.

Do you think most screenwriters would be good at creating conspiracy theories? No. Here’s the thing. I’m not surprised that a guy that was struggling to be a successful screenwriter was not struggling to be a successful conspiracy theorist because conspiracy theories are by definition overly complicated, pointlessly involved, illogical explanation of simple things. They are the opposite of elegant.

We are always trying to create elegant plotting that is simple, and compelling, and there’s not a lot of like weird rules stacked on top of each other of why this thing actually doesn’t work this way, but really this way. And that’s all these conspiracy theories. They’re terrible screenplays.

When you look at the QAnon screenplay for what’s going on you go, “Wait, what? That’s terrible. That’s just bad writing. That’s not how humans are. It’s not how organizations work. It’s not how anybody behaves. This is ridiculous. Ridiculous.”

Every single one of these conspiracy theories fails the “yeah, but why” test. Like, oh, didn’t you get it. There’s 17 flags behind him and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. But why? What does that actually achieve? Nothing. Nothing! Oh my god.

John: So, Craig, you’re saying that a screenwriter wouldn’t be great at creating conspiracy theories, but a screenwriting guru, or a wannabe aspiring screenwriter guru, that does feel like the sweet spot. And that’s apparently who this person really was.

So this is a person who was not successful as a screenwriter but then ended up setting up a website about how to make it in Hollywood. Basically giving all his tips. And that feels like such a great connection there.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Because you’ve discerned a pattern for success and you’ve broken the code of Hollywood and now you’re going to expose the real secrets within it.

Craig: Grift. Utter grift.

John: And that feels exactly – yeah, but grift and self-delusion are all part and parcel with a conspiracy theory.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: It’s an elaborate mythology that you’re building and that you have the actual secret for seeing past the illusion.

Craig: Well, the level of either self-delusion or just outright, just shamelessness required to, A, not succeed at something, and then, B, subsequently take people’s money to inform them how to succeed at the thing you could not succeed at is mind-blowing. Mind-blowing.

So I looked at a couple of the articles and I saw the nature of the way this guy would post things. And it was terrible. It was just a lot of “don’t you get it.” A lot of these aimless questions. Like, “You might have missed it. Don’t you get it? Think about this.” Just open-ended.

You know, like when people accuse a television series of not being accountable to its own stuff, like it starts to make up mysteries and rules and things and then it never actually pays them off. And that’s bad. That’s all this stuff is. It’s literally like you never got anywhere. I mean, there are people who have been, I hope, that a lot of the people who were caught up in this silly cult now understand, OK, that’s what it was. And I hope that they didn’t lose too much money. I hope that they didn’t lose too many people in their lives and family members. I hope that they didn’t hurt anybody. I hope that they can just gently return to sanity. They deserve the right to return to sanity.

But now that they’re hopefully able to see they can see that this was just a ridiculous game of Lucy pulling an imaginary football away from Charlie Brown day after day after day.

John: I think who I’m angriest at are the people who clearly didn’t believe any of it, but were using it to maximize – the Ted Cruzes. Who clearly doesn’t believe a single bit of it.

Craig: Of course not.

John: But is using it, the furor over it, to advance his own aims. That drives me crazy. I want to both be able to punish him and provide a ramp back to normal society for the folks who got caught up in it like it was Lost. And didn’t understand this is not actual reality. And I’m curious to figure out what are the best ways to get people re-involved in a normal functioning society and feeling like what they do matters because it actually does matter.

To me it feels like them volunteering at a soup kitchen a couple Sundays in a row might get them thinking about the world outside of them that’s beyond their screens. I don’t know.

Craig: Well, you know, people got stuck in their homes. And they were frustrated. And they were afraid. And they were being fed a fascinating story. Obviously they were inclined to want to believe it. I don’t think anybody who has been voting for the Democratic Party their whole lives was suddenly grabbed hold of by Q and went, “Oh, wait, hold on a second.” The willful manipulators, the crooked Bible-thumping fake preachers are always going to make us angrier, always, with their deceit and their nonsense which is so blatantly tuned to earn them money.

A lot of the leaders of this Q movement were selling Q merchandise. And their platforms were monetized on YouTube. And Facebook. And Google and Facebook should not only be ashamed, but they’re the ones who need to do the penance. They’re the ones who have screwed us.

But, yeah, this QAnon guy, that’s perfect, isn’t it? Freaking screen guru selling consultation fee sessions while he’s also just – he’s like, here, let me go ahead and grift you like this, and with my other hand I’m going to grift these people like this, because I’m bad.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Oh god.

John: Sorry. We can’t always be hopeful. But, yeah.

Craig: Ugh. Ugh.

John: Thank you, Craig.

Craig: Thanks, John.

Links:

• Ballard C Boyd for Stephen Colbert’s show Queen’s Gambit Rubik’s Cube
• Hollywood’s Unions Celebrate Inauguration Of President Joe Biden & VP Kamala Harris: “Most Pro-Union President” & “Partner In The White House” by David Robb
• Biden Gave Trump’s Union Busters a Taste of Their Own Medicine by Mark Joseph Stern
• Impeached Ligature EA
• Wordlisted by Adam Aaronson
• Rhyme Zone
• Wandavision check out episode 3, written by Megan McDonnell!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Malakai Bisel (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has one bit of swearing, so just a warning if you’re in the car with your kids.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 484 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re going to look at the many ways screenwriters compress, twist, and otherwise manipulate time in their scripts and strategies for doing it effectively. Then we’ll discuss dialogue, both in terms of subtext and continuity. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will discuss which moment in history or prehistory we’d most like to visit and why.

Craig: Exciting stuff.

John: It’s potentially a flashback episode.

Craig: Ooh.

John: We could even weave in a Stuart Special.

Craig: We’ve actually had a little bit of a pre-discussion about this time thing with our D&D group, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out in our bonus episode for everyone else.

John: Yes. Little bits of news. So this sort of snuck in under the wire. This was a December 31st announcement that the DGA sent a letter to WME telling it to get rid of its conflicts. Basically the head of the DGA sent this letter to the head of WME, Ari Greenberg, and said “we believe now is the right time to communicate our strong support for DGA’s efforts to remedy the affiliated production company issue.” So, Craig, I feel torn about this in ways that, I don’t know–

Craig: [laughs] I’m not.

John: We always reach for ways, you know, of German should have a word for it. But it’s not really German. I feel like the Swedish might have the right word for this feeling of like, yes, it’s the right thing, but it’s not kind of the way you want it to happen.

Craig: I’m going to quote this – I don’t know if you saw this amazing interview with this Capitol Hill police officer who had been attacked by the mob.

John: Oh, absolutely. And the last bit of it was amazing.

Craig: The last bit of it was amazing. And I will go ahead and I guess this will earn us a language warning. But he said some of the people in that mob, realizing that he was in danger of being killed, finally sort of surrounded him and tried to protect him from further harm. And to those people he said, “Thank you but also fuck you for being there.” [laughs] And that’s how I feel about this. I mean, what an enormous expenditure of political capital for the DGA to just show up in the final seconds of the war to announce that they’re in support of the losing side losing. I mean, this is pointless. I don’t quite even – the only thing I think they get out of this is maybe once again earning some sort of respect from the companies for restraint?

And when I say companies I mean the agencies at this point. I don’t know what the point of this is exactly.

John: Yeah. And I don’t know where this message actually came from, whether it was directors in the guild saying, hey, we also want this resolved, or where this came from. I want to be an optimist. And so in being an optimist I want to say that one of my great frustrations for two decades has been how little the three guilds have been willing to work together on issues of obvious multiple guild concern. And this was one of them. And the WGA did it all by itself. OK, fine.

But as we head forward into this next decade the role of the streamers and residuals and what that all looks like, we all care about that. It all has to be figured out as sort of one thing. So, maybe this is a small opening, a small glimmer of hope that we can actually coordinate some of our efforts in trying to address the challenges ahead here.

Craig: Over here in the pessimist’s corner I think that the DGA has always been more than happy to strategically allow the Writers Guild to be the crazy ones and the aggressive ones and the militant ones. And then pick up the spoils after the battle is over. That’s kind of how it works. They let us go into the coal mine. They don’t have to do stuff. They didn’t like some of this packaging stuff or affiliated production any more than we did, but they also didn’t have to spend anything. Not one of their members had to fire an agent. They just waited for us to take all the body blows, to go through two years or whatever long, a year and a half, or however long this was. Or continues to be. And now, you know, when it’s basically over now they can come in and try and earn some sort of, I don’t know, labor solidarity chit. That’s C-H-I-T.

I don’t see them abandoning that strategy any time soon. Honestly, you know, tip of the hat to them. It’s worked for them for decades. I don’t see them changing.

John: Yeah. So basically Craig Mazin maintains his WGA militancy as always. He’s always the one banging that gong, that WGA gong, over all sort of reason and order.

Craig: Well, I would say relative to the DGA I am militant. But, yeah, I’m doomed to be caught between the Writers Guild and the DGA. And then there’s SAG. By the way, I’m a member of all three of these unions, so I’m sure someone is going to be yelling at me soon.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But I don’t know, SAG doesn’t seem to – they just seem to be so inwardly focused. That’s no comment on actors in any way, shape, or form. [laughs] But it just seems so navel-gazey about things. And they have their own issues.

The Writers Guild and the Directors Guild should be allied. Just naturally they should be. The fact that they’re not is…[sighs]

John: Yeah. At some point we should probably schedule an episode where we really talk through that because it’s got to be so confusing to anybody who has not been immersed in this for two decades to understand why things are the way they are and how we got to this place.

Craig: Well, let’s schedule three episodes to explain why there’s a Writers Guild East and West.

John: That’s an easier one, but yes, that same episode or a different episode can talk about the East and the West and how luckily there’s not conflict there.

Craig: Anymore.

John: They’re doing different things.

Craig: Yeah.

John: All right. Some housekeeping, sort of follow up stuff. So many of you are members of the Premium program which is awesome. Thank you for being Premium subscribers. We just added a $49 price point, so you can either go monthly, but some people asked, hey, what if there was an annual price and it would be cheaper. So, sure. So you can get 12 months for the price of 10. If you go to Scripnotes.net you can sign up for that. But thank you for all the folks who do that.

Some people are also confused about the back episodes. So the back episodes are available through Scriptnotes.net. That’s through the new Premium service, so it’s not Libsyn where stuff used to be. It’s all this new thing. So we used to have Premium episodes through Libsyn. Now they’re all through this new service called Supporting Cast. We’ve been on it for a year. It’s gone really well. So thank you for everyone who has joined us over there.

But if you’re writing in with concerns about like, oh, I was looking for this thing on Libsyn, that’s why it’s not there anymore because it’s all moved over to this new service.

Craig: Thank god.

John: Yeah. And some follow up about bad IP, suggestions for – obviously we have the Rubik’s Cube Movie, the Slinky Movie. We’re always searching for a new thing. Dwayne from Edmonton, Canada wrote in to say, “Yes, I was listening in the shower, but the Showerhead Movie.” And then someone else had a suggestion for the Loofah Movie. I like Loofah Movie more than the Showerhead Movie because Showerhead actually has a function and a purpose. Loofah has some sense of like it’s tough but it’s soft. There’s a little texture to the Loofah.

Craig: I don’t love either one of them. Because they feel like–

John: I don’t love them either.

Craig: They have to live within the realm of possibility. That some thickheaded dingbat in the ancillary IP department of a large corporation might actually say, “You know what? We should make a movie out of this. It has to be something that is theoretically possible. Theoretically.

John: And really IP is intellectual property. And the thing about Lucky the Leprechaun is there is intellectual property there. There’s a copyright. There’s a protectable thing that no one else can make that movie. It’s a struggle we have, like you go in and talk to – I went in to talk to a studio a year ago and they’re like, “Oh, we really want to develop blank.” And it’s like, great, that is public IP. That’s not a protectable thing. So what is your plan for going in to do that?

Like Jack and the Beanstalk is public IP. And so anyone can make that, so would you make that? You don’t know.

Craig: Yeah. I think it has to be something that is possess-able and ownable and exploitable. That’s the crux of the whole awful affair is that something is being exploited in the most cynical manner. So there has to be an exploitable object.

John: Speaking of exploitable objects, Beau Willimon, who is head of the WGA East.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: This week signed on to do the Risk movie which is based on a Hasbro property.

Craig: There you go. Right.

John: And would classically be the kind of thing that we make fun of on the show, because Risk has no characters. It has kind of a general scenario of world domination and archaic names for countries and strategies which are obvious but also crucial to understand of, you know, as a child you might start with an Australia strategy, but any adult who has played the game knows that the South American strategy is better.

Craig: Of course, the Venezuelan gambit. Always. Just, yeah. It is strange how the Risk board does sort of undermine what we understand to be where military and strategic value actually is located. The thing about Risk, it’s similar I guess to what they were doing with Battleship, not that it will turn out the same way. They’re just taking a game that was already based on something real and kind of echoing back to the thing it was based on. So Risk was just a board game version of a large WWI style battle for global dominance.

So my guess is that’s what the movie will – I don’t know. Actually I have no idea what the movie will be.

John: We’ll talk to Beau about it at some point. There was a vague plan on Twitter for us to be playing an online game of Risk to talk through it. So, who knows? Maybe that will actually happen and we’ll find some good charitable cause to play Risk online so we can celebrate this exploitation of an IP and hopefully do some good in the world.

Craig: Exactly. Exactly.

John: Exactly. All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic. So explaining sort of how the sausage is made. We are looking at a shared outline document. I put stuff on as I’m sort of helping to organize this episode. Megana put stuff on and we sort of try to group it together and have it make some sense.

Generally the topic for the week comes out of something either I was working on during the week or something I saw this week. Or Craig will suggest a topic and we’ll sort of flesh it out. In this case it was something I was writing and something I was watching. One scene that I was working on this week it was just too long. And it was clear that it needed to be cut into two scenes. Basically I needed to cut the middle out of it. And cutting the middle out of it is really common craft work that screenwriters need to do. And we haven’t talked very much about that. But basically we need to do a time compression in the middle of it.

There was also a sequence I was working on that I had scenes that were back to back A-B-C, but there was going to be a really significant time jump. So, you know, I was sort of changing the rules of the movie part way through where it had been sort of like scenes were very naturally flowing, like were all within one day, and then suddenly we’re jumping forward weeks. And that’s a thing we haven’t talked about.

So that’s part of why I want to talk about this, but also the movies I watched this week all dealt with time in interesting ways. So Nomadland, which was great, people should see it, has a kind of weird cyclical time thing to it. It uses time really strangely. Tenet has this weird time version. The Lego Movie seemed to take place in this continuous present. It’s just like hyperactively present. The Crown has these giant jumps forward in time between episodes. And we also watched Edge of Tomorrow which is an even better movie than I remember it being.

Craig: I love that movie.

John: Which is all about sort of looping time. So, time is just a thing that screenwriters do and it’s probably the resource that screenwriters have to control kind of most carefully. So I thought we’d just spend our main topic here just talking about time as screenwriters use it.

Craig: We have this craft over here, just been thinking about this because I was talking with somebody who works in plays, so she’s a playwright, and all of her work is on stage. And on stage even though there may be cheats of how time functions, it is all unfolding kind of in real time in front of you because you are actually in the room with these people. You are present in their reality, so you’re all experiencing the tick-tick of time together.

But onscreen we don’t. And in fact the entire exercise of telling a story cinematically is one that involves the manipulation of time. The very notion going all the way back to simple concept of editorial montage. I look at this, and then the camera looks over here, and we understand that there may have been time that passed. It just happens in the blink of an eye like that.

So, it’s not even something that we can sometimes choose to do or dwell on. We are always doing it in every movie no matter what. And that’s separate and apart from the theme of time. Because obviously some movies are about time itself and how it functions. And you have Looper and Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow and things like that. But in any movie, in any movie, I mean, how many times have you sat there and gone, OK, they’re in a space and this scene has concluded, but they must still be in this space again to start a new movement of the scene, meaning time has gone by. But how and why? What do I do to show that there’s been this lapse of time?

John: Yeah. And you think like, oh, well here’s ten tricks for doing it. Like sure, maybe there are a list of like you zoom out and you start in a close up of this thing and as you pull back out some more time has passed. Or you’re focused on this thing. There’s tricks, but it’s all hard work.

And before we even get into the jumping forward in time, we should call there are movies that try to take away that grammar. And they stick out because they are so unusual. There’s things like 12 Angry Men which is based on a play which is basically a filmed play which has sort of continuous time because it’s a play. But things like – do you remember the movie Timecode, the Mike Figgis movie that it’s quadrants and they’re all in real time.

1917 has the illusion of real time buried. Clue. Phone Booth. Dog Day Afternoon. United 93. Russian Arc. Where you’re sort of generally moving continuously through a space, and the whole gimmick, the conceit is that you’re not cutting. But those are the exceptions. And most times in cinematic storytelling you are cutting, you are jumping forward in time. And just learn as an audience to accept that as a thing that’s going to happen.

Craig: Yeah. We know when we’re watching these things inherently that we’re going to get a compressed version of time because it’s dramatic. It’s exciting. If it weren’t we wouldn’t go. I mean, 12 Angry Men is a wonderful play and it’s a terrific film. And if it was actually presented in the way a jury deliberation would go it would be profoundly boring. Profoundly boring. With side discussions of irrelevance and people leaving to go to the bathroom and coming back. It just doesn’t work.

We are always twisting it and turning it. And so one of the things that you have to decide tonally is are you going to be naturalistic about it, meaning are you going to kind of hide the seams in between the time jumps, or are you going to have fun with it. Is it going to be something you wear on your sleeve? Like in Go, for instance, the way you move time around, you’re not hiding it, you’re making a virtue of it. But then that is a tone, right? So then the movie is sort of like an elevated heightened reality.

You have to make those decisions upfront about what you’re doing with this stuff. But what you can’t do is just ignore it. You need to be a craftswoman or man when it comes to presenting the disruptions of time to the audience.

John: Yeah. So what you’re saying is that you may not write down your plan for how time works in your movie. It’s very unlikely you are going to have a specific time plan. But you are establishing rules very early on in your script for how time works in your movie. Both how it works inside scenes and between scenes. And so let’s talk about some of those rules and assumptions that are going to be there and what you need to think through.

So, an obvious example is like is it continuous. Basically are we existing in real time or the illusion of real time? That you’re never jumping ahead. How big of jumps can you make? Can you jump to later that same day, or the next week? Or can you jump forward a few years. And that’s a very different kind of storytelling if you’re able to jump bigger jumps along the way.

How many clocks have you started ticking? And so I’m thinking back to your movie Identity Thief. And there is a timeline. You’re having characters say aloud that they need to get from here to there in a certain period of time. You’re setting expectations. Different kinds of movies are going to have different clocks ticking. But you’re generally going to set some kind of framework for what needs to happen by what point.

In Big Fish you don’t know when Edward Bloom is going to die, but you know he’s going to die. And so that is the ticking clock where you get the dramatic question of the movie answered before that alarm goes off.

Craig: Yeah. This is one of the reasons why I like outlining, to be honest with you. Because when you outline you are confronted by those disconnects of time. And you feel them and they literally help you outline. That’s how you suddenly go, OK, I think that this index card consists of these things that occur. And then it’s time for a new index card, or a new paragraph, or however you’re doing it. Because time is broken. There’s a snap. And I want to justify it. And I want to play around with it. And I also am aware that if I announce a certain kind of timeline that leads to a certain kind of pressure I need everything that follows to fall in line with it.

This is why Chernobyl is only five episodes and not six. Because as I was working on episode two it seemed that the timeline that the story had presented required a certain kind of speed. And even though the events that take place over the course of episode two went over the course of a week, into an hour, if they had gone into two hours of television it would have felt like two or three weeks, which would have felt wrong.

So you just have to have this weird internal fake chronometer that is aligned with what you think people’s experience of the time flow will be as they watch.

John: Yeah. Let’s drill into a little bit more on this, because we talked about Chernobyl in the sense of time to a limited degree. But each episode of Chernobyl changes its scale of time a little bit. So that first episode feels close to real time. You’re not slavishly real time. But it’s very, very present tense all the way through it.

The second episode, if everything took place in a matter of hours in the first episode, then you’re a matter of two days in the second episode, and then several weeks, and then months. It kaleidoscopes out. And that was a very deliberate choice really, I assume, from the conception?

Craig: Absolutely. And, you know, of note the first episode which does cover, I mean, the flow of events once you get out of the little prologue starts at 1:23 in the morning and it ends roughly at sunrise. That unfolds over about 50 minutes. It feels – so that’s the other thing – even though it feels like real time, it is absolutely not. And juggling some of that stuff and being really specific about it was important because I’m aware that there’s – it’s a funny thing. If you say to people, OK, this is happening at 1:30 in the morning, and then you show them something else happening at 4am, in their minds they’re like that’s really close together. It’s the middle of the night. Not a lot of stuff happening in the middle of the night, therefore it’s like those things are right after another.

If it’s in the middle of a day and it’s 10am and then it’s 2pm, that’s a different vibe. And suddenly you feel like a lot of time has passed. Things have happened. What went on in between those things? You just have to kind of have that weird sense of it.

John: Yeah. What you’re describing is time is relative. And not in any special relativity way, but in the sense of general relativity there’s an observer. And time flows according to what the observer sees, in this case what the audience sees. And it’s the audience that sees that two events that happened in the middle of the night are closer together than two events that happen in the middle of the day.

Craig: Right.

John: And often one of the things we encounter as screenwriters and as filmmakers is the big shift is like a day scene versus a night scene. A bunch happens between the two of those. And even if they’re back to back in the day scene and night scene that is a challenge.

A thing we often encounter with stories that are happening on multiple coasts is like it’s night in New York but it’s still maybe daytime in Los Angeles or in Australia. That’s confusing. That’s weird to see. And you try to avoid those situations because it just feels weird and wrong for the audience.

We know that they’re in different time zones, and yet if two characters are having a conversation they should both be in daylight or at nighttime they shouldn’t be split between the two of them.

Craig: Isn’t that funny? And there are times where people, it’s like spy movies and such where you have people in Washington, DC talking to an operative in Malaysia. Well, that’s about 12 hours apart. That’s like flip AM and PM. You will almost always see one of those people inside. Because you don’t want to see the light/dark thing. You don’t want to see somebody going night to – it is really confusing to us. Like the way our own circadian rhythms get biologically confused by jetlag. We just can’t handle it. It feels wrong and it takes us out of the moment, which is of course the thing we’re always trying to not do.

John: One of the other rules you’re establishing in whatever you’re creating is travel time. And so a show I loved deeply as I watched it is Alias. And as the series went along suddenly she could be kind of anywhere magically right away. They never showed her traveling someplace, so it’s like she’s in Los Angeles. She’s in Europe. She’s back. And somehow it’s still the same day. Travel time just sort of went away. And early seasons of Game of Thrones I felt like it just took forever to get from Winterfell down to King’s Landing. And then suddenly like, oh, you’re just there.

And, you know, in some ways that is just the collision of all the transitional scenes. Weeks could have been passing during that time. But it also just felt like they changed the rules in terms of how quickly you could move from place to place because they didn’t – it wasn’t serving them to show the travel time that would be involved.

Craig: Yeah. And I think that there is a boredom factor to repeating the kind of expanded time. So, it is interesting to watch a slow journey if it’s new to you. If it’s not, I’m all in favor of just like skip ahead, skip ahead. Fast forward. So I don’t have to watch the same boring journey again. No question, in the early seasons of Game of Thrones getting to The Wall took forever, which felt right. And traveling, it seemed impossible to get from Essos to Westeros. It was like a massive amount of land and ocean to cover. And as you got deeper in and closer to the end then things started going faster because you had experienced the journeys already.

And, yeah, was there some time things where you’re like on paper you have broken your own time travel rules? Yes. And you just kind of have to sometimes take those hits because when you are as deep into that world as those guys were after whatever it was, 80 episodes, it’s really hard to stay consistent and keep the story moving. It’s just hard to keep that timeline consistent.

John: Now so a lot of what we’ve been talking about so far has been scene-by-scene, or sequence-by-sequence, and sort of the stuff that you can look at in an outline form and figure out, OK, this is how we’re handling time. But let’s zoom in and talk about time within a scene. Because even as we’re talking to a playwright, a playwright is optimizing dialogue and moments within a scene so that things that would normally take place over four hours are happening in ten minutes. There’s an optimization that’s natural to any kind of dramatic writing where you’re sort of getting the tightest, best version of these things.

What I find to be so different as a screenwriter than other forms of writing is that we have this expectation of just how long a scene can be and how much has to be accomplished, and so often we have to be doing really delicate surgery to cut out half a page, to jump over some natural moments that might happens so we can get to that next thing. We’re always just trying to take out the stitches and see if we can just sew a little bit tighter. And that is part of it.

One of the things I’ve learned to do much better over the course of 20 years of doing this is recognizing when I can’t actually just make this – when I can’t tighten it and when I need to just actually get rid of this scene or approach it from a completely different way because there’s no short version of this scene that’s going to handle what I needed to do.

Craig: This is why the classes that aspiring screenwriters should be taking are not, in my opinion, screenwriting classes. Are we going to talk by the way about the crazy QAnon screen guy? Maybe next week. Because that was something else.

John: Oh yeah. When we have a little bit more about that we’ll do some of that.

Craig: We’ll get around to him next week. But I think the classes that screenwriters or aspiring screenwriters should be taking are editing classes. Because editing is where the time compression and expansion rubber meets the road. And you begin to see exactly how flexible or inflexible something is. There is a point where the material will snap. And it will not feel correct in terms of the manipulation of time. And that tensile strength, that flexibility, is different depending on tone and pace. But you’ll see it in there.

And the more you can get a rhythm of how that functions in an edit the more you will be able to anticipate that as you’re writing ahead of the edit. You will know that you can get away with certain things and you will also know you can’t get away with certain things.

I’ve spent so much time in editing rooms. So much time in editing rooms. If there’s one thing I can point to that has made me a better writer than I used to be over the years it’s the amount of time editing scenes of things I wrote.

John: Mm-hmm. And recognizing like, oh, I thought I needed that or basically you have to acknowledge that like it made sense why you did that on the page. And then when you actually see it with physical people in the blocking that they have, that moment just can’t last. We don’t have space for that in the movie we actually made. So therefore we need to come into that scene later or leave earlier.

So let’s talk about some of the classic techniques we do use for trimming time, which is also trimming pages. Because how we sort of measure our time is pages. Come in as late as you can. Leave as early as you can. So basically what is the latest moment you could start this scene. Can you start the scene with the person answering the question rather than the question being asked? Can you get out on a look rather than on that last line? What is the moment you can jump out of this thing? How can you not ask the question that a person would naturally ask? How can you get from A to B as cleanly as possible and still have an interesting scene?

Some of the challenges we face though is you can optimize a scene so much that it’s just not interesting. It’s quick. The story has made forward progress but there’s nothing interesting in that scene itself.

Craig: Yeah. And I think that, while the “get in as late as you can, leave as early as you can” advice is probably very good advice for early screenwriters who tend to overwrite, once you are getting better at things it’s dangerous. Because there are human moments in the beginnings and ends of things. Sometimes just the way somebody walks up to somebody else in and of itself is dramatic and sad or exciting. And it allows you to set a context for what comes next so that you don’t feel like you’re just kind of getting the choruses of the hit songs on the album, but that you’re getting something a little bit more rich.

Shoe leather is the term we use in production for people that are walking.

John: Yes.

Craig: Traveling pointlessly from one spot to another is considered the cardinal sin. There’s a moment in Chernobyl that we looked at a billion times where Jared Harris has, they’ve taken a break in the trial and he sees Shcherbina is sitting a bit a ways away on a bench and he walks over to him. And the question was how much walking do we need. I think initially in Johan’s first cut he just sort of materialized next to him and I was like, well, no. We can’t do that.

But, on the other hand, do we actually want to show him doing the full freaking walk? No. So can we show some of the walk that feels meaningful and weighty and just trust that the kind of, I don’t know, human aspect of his little travel there will be enough to kind of cover the manipulation of time? And it seemed like it was.

But there is definitely a screenwriting class version of that scene that begins with those two guys just sitting next to each other already. Like they went out there. They’re sitting next to each other. There’s a pause. And then one of them starts talking. But, you know, I like a little windup. What can I say? I’m a windup kind of guy.

John: Yeah. But you have to really make that decision. Does seeing one character sit down next to the next character change the dynamics of the scene?

Craig: Right.

John: If it does, then yes, you should write it and you should aim to shoot it that way. If it doesn’t really matter then maybe you do just have him sitting there because you don’t think about sort of the editorial work that the reader is doing. But just that sentence of like “walks over and sits down next to the person,” we’re filming that in our minds and it’s changing our perception of what is the urgency, what’s actually happening. Getting to that moment more quickly may be the right choice.

Definitely I think you and I are both urging writers to write like it’s the edit. And write the version of the movie that you’re actually seeing in your head. And you may make different decisions working with a director. You may decide to make some different decisions. But as close as you can come to this best version you can make inside your head and get that on paper the more likely you’re going to have a successful version of that scene and hopefully you’re whole movie.

Craig: Yup. It is one of those places where you get to show off a little bit of creative freedom. A little bit of chaos. Even shows that you might think of as very well organized temporally like say Breaking Bad is full of time tricks. Full of them. There’s that one season where multiple show openings were of a pool and a teddy bear floating in it. And you didn’t know why. And none of it made sense until the end when it was revealed to be a function of something that hadn’t even yet occurred at the first episode of that season. Because they had no problem messing with time and being creatively chaotic with it.

But it’s got to pay off. It’s got to be worth it in the end.

John: Yeah. You have to have confidence and you have to – that confidence has to be built out of trust in your audience and your audience trusting you. We always talk about the social contract between the writer and the reader. It’s like give me your attention and I will make it worth your while. And time and use of time well is one of those aspects of trust.

Craig: Yup.

John: All right. Let’s go to some listener questions because some of our questions actually do tie into this topic. Here is where we bring on our producer, Megana Rao, who asks the questions that our listeners write in with. Megana, what have you got for us this week?

Megana Rao: All right. So first up, Don writes, “I know you’ve talked about continuous dialogue before, but I wanted to take a crack at changing your minds.”

Craig: No. [laughs]

Megana: “Wouldn’t it just be easier for everyone to stop using continuous dialogue altogether? Does it really help that much? I can understand the argument that is useful at the start of a new page, but I can’t seem to find any usefulness outside of that. Even if the dialogue is broken up by action, I assume the average person doesn’t get totally lost without the use of CONT’D. Continued.”

Craig: I must admit, Don, I’m a little confused. Because you don’t have to change my mind at all. I don’t use CONT’D for dialogue, for continuous dialogue. I haven’t used it ten years.

John: Yeah. So CONT’D is a convention that I kind of feel is going away to a degree, but there’s two kinds of CONT’Ds to talk about. And it’s a thing that we encounter a lot with Highland because Highland does one kind and doesn’t do another kind. So let’s talk about what the difference is.

There’s CONT’D if a character is talking at the bottom of a page. Let’s say they have a long speech and it jumps to the next page. Software will automatically mark it CONT’D there to make it clear that it’s one block of dialogue that just got split between two different pages. That I have no problem with. I think Craig you don’t have a problem, too.

Craig: No.

John: Because it’s referring to like it’s just the software doing a thing to make it clear that this really is all one block of dialogue.

Craig: If you didn’t put it there you would not know that the next bit of dialogue was meant to be part of a continuous speech.

John: Yeah. So that – no one really has big issues with that.

Craig: That’s all good.

John: What we’re talking about though is Craig starts talking and then there’s a scene description line and then Craig keeps talking after that. And Highland does not automatically put that CONT’D in there. Final Draft does want to put that CONT’D in there. That was just a philosophical point from my side, because software wise we could do that. It’s just so often I’ve had to manually delete those back when I was using Final Draft because it really wasn’t the same idea, it wasn’t the same thought. I didn’t mean for it to be one continuous thing.

So, if I meant it to be one continuous thing I could type the CONT’D there to show that it really was one thought. But sometimes three different things happen between those two, so it really is not the same line, the same thought. It shouldn’t be continuous.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t matter. Basically, Don, what I’m saying is you’re right. I don’t see the value in it. It feels very format-y to me. Something that just was sort of vaguely secretarial in the creation of the classic Warner Bros screenplay format or whatever, the [unintelligible] format was. To me it’s literally changing the character’s name. I hate it. Just let them talk. They’re saying something, then a thing happens, and then they say something. And it isn’t continuous. If it were continuous I would make the choice to not break the dialogue up. There is some sort of natural pause, break, or change that has occurred in between those two things.

So, I don’t use CONT’D myself. And so you don’t have to fight me on it.

John: Nope. I will say there have been times, because I don’t use it, there have times in table readings where I’ve noticed that an actor doesn’t get their next line because they’re expecting like, oh, if there’s another line of dialogue it wouldn’t be my line of dialogue. But they can get over that. Or they can highlight their own script. It’s fine. It’s not a big deal.

Craig: They can figure it out.

John: Megana, what do we have next?

Megana: Danielle asks, “I would love any feedback on how much to include in therapy scenes. My protagonist seeks professional through a three-month rehab program in the third act which greatly moves them forward in their healing journey. I have plenty of dialogue that navigates what healed them, but not sure how much to include and when is too much.”

John: So this is, again, a question of time. How are you using your limited resources of pages to show this three months? And you’re going to make elisions and choices about sort of what we’re seeing. Are sessions individualized? Is dialogue being stretched out over the course of multiple sessions? Is the dialogue extending over other scenes that show passages of time? There’s a lot going on here. Craig, what tips would you offer for Danielle as she’s thinking about how to do this?

Craig: Well, I think first of all I would need to know what the nature is of the relationship between the patient and the therapist, or the rehab specialist. Because if it’s a very important relationship then I want to see more of it. There are movies where that relationship is central like Ordinary People or Good Will Hunting. Then there are situations where those relationships aren’t as important, but they are kind of backgrounded and they are used as these sort of subtle markers of progress. In Honey Boy, for instance, there are some therapy scenes. They’re very, very truncated and they’re really meant to just show where a character is in a given moment in his journey.

So, it depends on what you want us to focus on and listen to. The thing about therapy scenes is they’re always, of course, there are great examples, even better than a jury deliberating, which is usually very, very boring and then we just show the good parts, same with therapy. Therapy is circular. It can be boring. It can go backwards. It can be frustrating. And when a movie show – they show this kind of glamorized highlight reel of it all that often concludes with someone saying the one thing that makes everybody go, “Oh my god, I get it now. I’m healed.” Which is not what therapy actually is.

But there could be some key moments or some big reveals or things. So, I guess my only advice would be tailor the length to the significance of the relationship between the patient and the therapist. And try and avoid over-glamorize pitfalls if you can.

John: Yeah. It’s not technically therapy, but I go back to Marriage Story and the scene with Scarlett Johansson and Laura Dern which is a long scene and plays in continuous time. But the choice to have that be one scene rather than a bunch of little small scenes that add up to that scene was so smart and so well done because it allowed for a continuous emotional progression within a scene. It made it its own moment and would not have worked so successfully had it been broken into smaller bits.

And so I’m going to throw two contrasting bits of suggestions here. One is to look at sort of like if you sort of shatter it apart and just take the pieces and thread them through a period that covers time, where we can see progress of the character, where you’re not sort of in one scene for a lot of it, that’s a possibility. Or to do this Marriage Story approach where you really anchor it around one central scene that is really doing the work of this thing and not try to break it into three scenes of equal length which I suspect is going to be the least effective way to handle it.

Craig: Agreed.

John: What’s next, Megana?

Megana: Great. So Ash from London asks, “My writing and directing partner and I are 99% in synch. But recently we have both noticed that we might read the same dialogue in a totally different way, inferring different subtext, tone, or intended performance in ways that are quite drastic and effect the interpretation of the scene. It’s a bit like the relationship between reading the lyrics to a song which seem mundane and flat on the page and then listening to the final piece of music. I feel like I’ve suddenly become aware of a massive limitation of the medium and I find myself panicking about people reading the dialogue I write in the worst possible way. What’s happening here? Am I OK? Am I having some kind of existential crisis? Or am I struggling with something that everyone struggles with?”

Craig: No, Ash, you’re not OK. This is all you. Of course, what are you discovering, you’re discovering that this is what we are. This is part of our humanity is that we will interpret things in different ways. And it’s actually good news. It means that this stuff is more extensible than you think it is. It’s more rich than you might have thought it was. Yes, it is possible and it happens all the time that people read a line and go, “Why would you – this is so dumb.” And you’re befuddled by that reaction and you say what do you mean. And they say, “Because of this.” And you go, oh, no, no, no, you don’t understand. My apologies. It means this. This is the intention. And then then go, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, OK.”

That will happen to you a thousand times. So, in a weird way kind of almost enjoy it when it happens. Like my whole thing is I let people just keep talking. I swear to god. I do. It’s mean, but I just let them keep going until they finally exhaust themselves with their complaining. And then I say, well, it actually meant this. You were just stressing the wrong word. I would stress this word. And then they go, “Oh, oh, OK. Oh god.” And then I can see that they’re embarrassed. And I like that. Because I’m bad.

John: Ash, one thing that will help you is at some point you will be in casting for a project and you will see 30 actors read the same scene. And you’ll recognize, oh wow, there are so many different ways to read those exact same lines of dialogue. And you can tell which ones match your expectations and which ones don’t match your expectations and which ones are even better and cooler than your expectations. That’s great. That’s actually performance.

The writing is a plan. It’s a guideline for things that actors are actually going to say. And their performance does really matter. And their intention really does matter. So, there’s nothing wrong with what’s happening. It is super common.

Craig: Yeah. It’s good. I like it. When somebody something and it’s better than what you imagined, that’s a wonderful surprise. And it also jogs the material out of the expected. Because if it can surprise you, imagine what it’s going to do to the audience.

John: So I will tell you, my first experience with this was with Go. And we were having a very hard time casting the role of Gaines, the drug dealer, Todd Gaines the drug dealer. To the point where I was sitting through all these auditions like did I just write a bad scene? Is this a bad character? Can this not work? And then Timothy Olyphant came in and read it. It was like, oh, that’s what it’s supposed to be. That is actually – it does actually make sense as a character because this person in front of me was able to do this role and it does actually track and make sense.

So, don’t worry too much about it. That said, you and your writing partner who are theoretically writing the same thing disagree on sort of what these lines are supposed to be, there may be something that’s not happening right in your communication with each other, in how you’re establishing the voices of these characters to begin with. Because as you’re reading through a script if a character has an established voice it should be pretty unambiguous how a given line is going to sound or what the intention of a given line should be. So, watch for that. Maybe you’re not establishing voices especially clearly.

And then I’d say one technique to look at, and this is a thing I see a lot in J.J. Abrams scripts, is in the parenthetical there will be quotes with a line for what the line is meant to say. So if the line was, “You’re stupid,” but in the parenthetical it says, “I love you so much.” Just basically giving kind of like a line reading in the parenthetical. It’s a thing you see more in TV than you do in features, but it’s available as an option if there’s a specific line that is really not what it seems like it is just texturally on the page.

Craig: Word.

John: Word. Let’s do one more question, Megana.

Megana: All right. Great. So, Lawant from the Netherlands writes, “What makes a story more suitable to live action versus animation? I know the way the screenplay gets written is often a little dissimilar to the way a live action screenplay does. I also know that there are often logistics and economics at play. So do you feel that there are certain stories that inherently lend themselves better to one medium or the other?”

John: Yeah. So the obvious thing is if most of the characters in your story are human beings, live action is a really natural good choice. If most of them are not human beings, they are animals, they are other kinds of creatures, animation is a better choice.

Obviously we can do things in sort of hybrid ways that are between the two that are new, and exciting, and different. We can redo The Lion King in “live action.” But we all know what we’re talking about. If it can be filmed with human actors, then it should probably be live action.

But that said, the nature of certain kinds of stories that we tend to do more often in animation than in live action. So, mythic stories, simple fairy tale kind of things. Things that feel like they should have Disney songs in them are generally better off to be thought of as animation. But just this past year there was a project that we took out which was going to be live action, it was going to be sort of Mandalorian-y kind of shot, and ultimately the decision was, you know what, this is probably going to be animation instead just for the logistics of it all. And it was the kind of story where you could kind of go either way and we decided to go into animation.

So, I don’t have hard and fast rules, but the characters and the world are what’s going to dictate whether it’s live action or animation to me.

Craig: Yeah. The only other consideration may, Lawant, is that if your story is what I would call pure story, meaning it is so connected to a really sharply engineered super high concept plot, then it might be better suited for animation. Because in animation you can do anything. You can show anywhere and do anything. So if you have this pure story that really requires very specific plotting and structure, you might want to think about it as an animated tale because you’ll just have more latitude.

John: There are Pixar movies that you could do live action, but they really kind of wouldn’t work the same way. There’s certain formulas and there’s certain heroic journey stuff that it just feels better in animation than it feels in live action. And so really just be honest with yourself about the character goals and sort of what the story wants to be and you probably will feel if it’s animation or if it’s live action.

Craig: Yup.

John: Cool. Megana, thank you for these questions.

Megana: Great. Thank you guys so much.

Craig: Thanks Megana.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Before I get to my One Cool Thing I have to do follow up on Craig’s One Cool Thing from last week which was There is No Game which is a terrific – it’s a game, spoiler, it’s a game. But really, really well done. I haven’t finished it yet, but do check that out because Craig was actually right this time.

Craig: Actually.

John: I don’t play all of the games that he recommends, but this time I thought it really was terrific.

Craig: It’s a good one.

John: Two small things for me to recommend this week. First is Some Kind of Heaven, which is a new documentary that came out this past week. It’s about The Villages in Florida which is this retirement community. And it is a great documentary following several people who live at The Villages. Again, I don’t want to do spoilers. But we’ll put a link to the trailer. But if you went in cold I think it would honestly be the best exposure to it because it’s great. I want to have the filmmaker on at some point to talk through his use of characters and how you create detailed character moments and arcs when you only have these real people for limited periods of time. It’s just really well done. So, I’d urge you to check that out.

But my general One Cool Thing if you want to waste some time is Microsimulation of Traffic which is this German website. And it basically – it’s this animation where you have all these cars in this highway system and you can drag in little obstacles. You can sort of see how the traffic flow goes. I’ve always been really curious sort of how you optimize cars getting from point A to point B. And it’s just a really smartly done version of that. So it’s not Sim City. It’s very much more sort of mathematically-driven in terms of how you optimize traffic flow. And I wasted a good hour on it. And I think you will enjoy it.

Craig: There was an article years ago that someone did about traffic in Southern California and what causes traffic and what would alleviate traffic on the freeways. And one of the things that kind of blew my mind was he said one of the biggest impacts on traffic flow is sun.

John: Yup.

Craig: So you’re kind of going down a hill or something and there’s sunlight in your eyes. You will slow down. And everybody that slows down a little bit causes this ripple effect in the back. The other one is how many cars can you see ahead of you. If you can see a lot of cars ahead of you a lot of times it seems like there’s more traffic, so you slow down. And if you can’t, it doesn’t, and you speed up. It was just like we suck is basically – it was just another one of those your brains are bad stories.

John: Yeah. I will say a thing I’ve always read about and never sort of seen until I tried this on the traffic simulator is ghost crashes. Basically there will be an accident or something and then there’s a bump in the rug and there’s this traffic jam that persists for hours after an accident has been cleared. And this simulator makes it really clear why that’s there and why running traffic breaks, which is where the police cars turn their lights and very slowly do these S shapes to sort of slow down all the traffic clears the break.

And so it was fun to see that like, oh, it is actually just jams are sometimes just the echoes of things that happened a long time before.

Craig: Exactly. I like that. Ghost crashes. A couple of One Cool Things this week. This one is sort of a cool thing. They’re related. The first one is definitely cool. We announced, The Hollywood Reporter announced, that The Last of Us has its pilot director. Originally we were going to be doing this with Johan Renck who I did Chernobyl with. Johan, like so many people who is working on things, had a movie that got delayed by Covid and so suddenly the schedules couldn’t line up. So some big shoes to fill in terms of where to go and who to talk to.

And there is a film, this is, by the way, again not to be like – I don’t want to sound like a butt-kisser here, but HBO is pretty cool. Like we’re making this big show. It costs a lot of money. And we come to them and say, “You know who we want? We want a guy named Kantemir Balagov who had made a small film called Beanpole in Russian, in Russia.” And they were like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

It’s awesome. Beanpole is beautiful. I’m 99% certain that we are also going to be using the cinematographer that Kantemir partnered with. She is also remarkable. Her name is Kseniya Sereda. And it is stunning and heartbreaking and gorgeous. It showed up on a ton of Top 20 of 2020 lists. I’m not a huge list person as everybody knows, but the Top 20 of 2020 lists have been fascinating because so few movies came out that almost all of them are these really obscure and very cool little movies.

So, we’re very happy about that. Kantemir is a fantastic guy. Super talented guy. And he speaks English. But, he speaks Russian better than he speaks English. So, as we’ve been communicating I’ve been trying to find a translation solution, sort of an inline translation solution. I mean, ideally I would be writing an email and something would be mirroring in another window in Russian. That would be incredible. Not quite that simple. I mean, I can sort of go on Google and type it into that window and see what happens.

What I’m using now is something called Mate. M-A-T-E. Which is kind of like an integrated translation system. Its interface is a little funky at times. Sometimes the formatting goes away. And sometimes it comes back. So I’m just – it’s a pretty cool thing. It’s a pretty cool thing. But if somebody out there has an awesome translation solution, sort of a frictionless translation solution for me for English to Russian and Russian to English I’d love to hear about it.

John: Nice. Yeah. Send those suggestions in. And that’s our show for this week. So, as always, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Timothy Vajda. We could use some more outros. And so a reminder of what an outro is, because I was looking through the folder and there’s a bunch of pieces of music that are good that really have nothing to do with Scriptnotes at all. So, the only requirement we give is that they be cool and they somehow go Bum-bum-bum-bum-bump, or the minor version of that. But there’s pieces in there that like that’s a cool piece of music but it has nothing to do with Scriptnotes. It does not have our theme. So the only requirement is it has to use the theme in some way. And I want you to keep pursuing excellence and giving us great outros because we really appreciate it.

You can send us links to those outros at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. You can get them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

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Craig, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

John: OK, Craig, this is very much a dorm room stoner question.

Craig: Got it.

John: But if you could travel back to any point in history, or pre-history, and go there as a tourist, so we’ll start with the tourist rules where you go and you know you can come back to the present time. What are some places you’d like to visit in history and why?

Craig: Yeah. So we put this to our D&D, or you put it to our D&D group as well, and immediately because it’s a D&D group, which is just obsessed with the details and potential loop holes and possible ways to gain the system, there were certain questions in there, but they were reasonable. So let’s also presume that I’m not going to be suffering. There’s not going to be a bad case of bubonic plague or something like that. I’m not going to be immediately burned as a witch because of my clothing and so on and so forth.

So then the question is where do you go back in time. What are you most interested in seeing? And, you know, I don’t know how much of this reflects on who I am or what my interests are, but I suppose – and again let’s also presume you can understand every language.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Maybe because my dad was an American history teacher and that was the bulk of the history that I was taught, I think I would want to go back to those very hot days in July, late June and early July, where Americans were debating whether or not they should be declaring independency from Great Britain in Philadelphia. Because in that discussion there was not only the momentous occasion of our independence, but there was also the first real consequential debate over slavery. It had begun already. And it wasn’t going to get any better or any less complicated or any less morally repugnant. And would ultimately fester and explode into the Civil War and then into Jim Crow and then of course we still are struggling with its legacy today.

So all of that’s there plus Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. It’s pretty – I think I would like it. That’s where I would go.

John: Absolutely. So both around the Declaration of Independence, but also figuring out the Constitution are just, are just such seminal moments and we have many accounts of it, but we have no one who can sort of tell us what it’s like to be there and sort of look at it with modern eyes in ways that, you know, just to actually physically be there would be great.

And I guess we’re sort of playing – we’re not playing Terminator rules, so you can’t go back and change a thing. You can just sort of go back and witness it and really see what it was like.

Craig: Fly on the wall.

John: Fly on the wall. And so fly on the wall, two points in history and prehistory that I’m really curious to see. Everything happening around Jesus’s time. And sort of like what Jesus was like in his time. What the sense of this small little group was like and did it feel like it was the start of something bigger because I guess I just always wondered to what degree civilization was primed and ready to have this explosion of a religion that would take over everything, or it just was lucky.

And to what degree, who he was individually and how charismatic. And sort of what it felt like in that time would be fascinating. So, that’s one thing, but I would also really be curious to come to North American continent in a time before European settlers arrive and just see what it was like because I think I was definitely raised on this myth that North America was just sort of this empty continent, that there really wasn’t anybody here. And that clearly was not the case. It was actually a pretty busy and full place. And the myth of it being empty was sort of foisted upon us.

So while there weren’t permanently built cities in the way that we saw in Europe, there were actually a lot of people here. And I was just really curious what that was like. And we sort of lost all of that because there wasn’t written language just in that sense of what it felt like here before the Europeans came.

Craig: Cleaner.

John: Yeah. Probably cleaner.

Craig: Much, much cleaner.

John: Yeah. We made a mess of things.

Craig: Yes.

John: So, changing the rules a little bit, if you could go back to one moment in your life, so we’ve always gone back pre-us, but is there a moment in your life where you’d like to look at yourself?

Craig: Oh, oh god. I mean, no. I don’t want to see any of that.

John: I don’t know that I want to see any of that either. Because I think I would just – it would just be very wincey to sort of see the dumb choices you make. One of the reasons why I like the show Pen15 so much is that you have these really talented actors going back to play themselves at 15 years old and just how unbearably awkward you are those early ages. And so if I couldn’t change stuff, if I couldn’t encourage the younger version of me to do the things that are so obvious to do in retrospect, I guess I wouldn’t go back and want to watch any of it.

Craig: No. I’m embarrassed by all of it. Everything. Everything up to this moment. It’s a tragedy.

John: I will say having lost my mom last month there are definitely moments in my mom’s life and in my dad’s life that they’ve given me some reporting on, but I just don’t really have a very good sense of who they were at different moments. So the sort of Back to the Future fantasy of like getting to see your parents when they were teenagers or early 20-somethings would be neat. It’s not Jesus in his time neat. But it would be illuminating.

Craig: Yeah. I always feel like if you could get a good look at your parents when they were young it would be a little bit like getting a peek into the cockpit of a plane and seeing how drunk the pilot was. It would give you a bad feeling. Like there but for the grace of god. Like this person should not have been in charge of me at all. At all. Who put this guy behind the seat of an airplane or the wheel of an airplane or whatever you call it, the helm? Who put this guy behind the helm of an airplane? And who put this guy in charge of a child?

And if my kids could look back and see how absolutely clueless I was at so many points they would probably feel exactly the same.

John: So a thing I noticed this last year is that as I look back at photos of my daughter there’s continuities and there’s also discontinuities. And I don’t perceive sort of one continuous evolution of a kid from point A to where she is right now. There’s stages. And of course there were small shifts – there were shifts between those stages and there were transition points, but it’s almost like she’s a whole different species than who she was as a younger child.

Craig: Yes.

John: And sometimes I feel lost for – I look over these photos and I feel lost for who that kid was. And obviously she’s still right in front of you, but she’s not really right in front of me. That younger toddler who was so neat in her own specific way is gone.

Craig: Yeah. That is the tragedy of watching your kids grow up. There is a progression that you can see. And you can follow it with a line. And to tie back into our topic in the main show about time and how time can sometimes just break, there is an end of childhood and there’s the beginning of this other thing and there’s a break. And that break is traumatic for everybody. But what happens on the other side of it is a different person entirely emerges. Just a different human being. And it is a struggle sometimes for everyone to wrap their minds around the fact that your kid is gone.

I mean, memory and time claim all children. All of them. And what is left in their place you have to come to accept. And if you can, then there’s this whole other potentially wonderful relationship with them for the rest of your life. But sometimes you have this kid and everything is great and there’s the jump and then they come out on the other side a person and some children and parents don’t like each other anymore after that point and they go their separate ways. It happens.

John: And a huge source of tension between parents and kids is the parent not willing to acknowledge that it’s not their small child anymore.

Craig: That’s right. There’s been a change.

John: It’s reality. And tying this back to sense of time and screenwriters as being masters of time, if you haven’t seen Boyhood, the Richard Linklater movie, this is a great opportunity to see Boyhood because that is an experiment in which you follow a kid through this difficult time and you see both the continuities and discontinuities of a kid aging. And a great example of approaching a project with a plan, with an intention, and then having to adjust based on the actual realities of what happens.

So, I loved Boyhood. I thought it was just terrific.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah.

John: Cool. Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

Links:

• DGA tells WME to get rid of its conflicts
• Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium at Scriptnotes.net, with a new annual pass for $49!
• Some Kind of Heaven
• Microsimulation of Traffic Flow
• Beanpole film
• Mate translation app integration
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Timothy Vajda (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.