Search Results for: Scriptnotes residuals

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/how-residuals-work).

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 be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 701 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you leverage connections to get work and help others get work? We’ll discuss the sometimes uncomfortable aspects of getting writing jobs and really almost any kind of job. We’ll also talk about the surprisingly good news for future writers in the recently released WJ numbers.

Then we’ll answer more listener questions we didn’t get to in last week’s live show. In our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, let’s continue our discussion of connections with literal connections, this being Lego. Here, we are looking at some Lego flowers. We’ve talked about Lego in a general sense over the 700 episodes of the podcast. I want to have a deep dive discussion on Lego and our philosophies regarding Lego because there’s the Lego we grew up with, and then there’s the Lego now, and how you’re treating these bricks we’re assembling.

Craig: I’m always here to discuss Lego, the plural of which is apparently Lego.

John: Which I love. Some news. The Scriptnotes book is now up on Goodreads. If you’re a person who uses Goodreads to review your books, you can mark that as a want to read and just helps people remember that, “Oh, this is a book that people want to read.” We look forward to hopefully some very positive Goodreads reviews once the book is out there in the world.

For now, a thing you can do is mark it as want to read. You can also preorder the book and send Drew the receipt. Right before we got on microphones, we were talking through a special thing we’re doing for all those people who sent us their receipts.

Drew Marquardt: We don’t have enough.

John: No, we do. We have a lot. It’s been a chore for Drew to sort them, but it’s a chore you love, right?

Drew: I love it.

Craig: Oh, yes. I can tell he loves it.

Drew: You see the twinkle in my eyes?

Craig: It’s always fun when you’re like, “But you love it, right?”

John: Don’t you just love it?

Drew: So good.

Craig: I said you love it.

Drew: I’m very excited.

Craig: Keep loving it.

John: We have a bit of follow-up here because last week was our 700th episode. It was a live show. It was so much fun to do. It was on YouTube, so thank you for everybody who participated in that. We forgot one thing from last week, which was that we actually had a thing we were supposed to do. It was something that had been set up a year in advance. Drew forgot the thing.

Craig: Oh, well, that’s all right. You’re only human.

Drew: Thank you.

Craig: You’re welcome.

John: People decided to see Drew on the livestream because everyone thought Drew was a child.

Craig: Why would they think he’s a child?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: First of all, that violates labor law.

John: Absolutely.

Drew: That feels like you guys, though.

Craig: Oh, that we would do that?

Drew: Yes.

Craig: It feels like we might. It feels like the kind of really good hypocrisy. Oh, we’re talking about the union and getting assistance paid. Now we make our seven-year-olds put this all together. We keep them in a room the way the musical Oliver! begins.

John: Yes, absolutely. It is a hard-knock life.

Craig: No, that’s Annie.

John: Oh, that’s right. I’ve confused my musicals. Well, they’re both about ragamuffin food.

Craig: Food. Glorious food.

John: I don’t know all of that.

Craig: Oh my God. We have to have an entire Oliver! podcast.

John: Right. Before we do that, we need to talk through this bit of follow-up here. Way back episode 645?

Craig: 645.

John: 645. Meredith Scardino was a guest along with Jen Statsky. We opened up an envelope that I had sent to Jen Statsky with my prediction for what was going to happen on the upcoming season of Hacks. I had written the prediction and sealed it and mailed it to her. She opened it live on recording. Meredith Scardino was like, “Well, I want to do that.” She made a prediction for what was going to happen on the 700th episode of Script Notes. Drew, will you open this and read what Meredith Scardino– this is a sealed envelope that Drew is opening.

Craig: I can confirm this. 700th show prediction, Meredith Scardino, June 1st, 2024. Over a year ago.

John: We were living in a different universe.

Craig: I hope it says something like, you both died.

Drew: “700th show prediction. One, compilation of best advice from guests,” which we kind of did.

Craig: Did we?

John: No. We brought people in for some advice.

Drew: “Two, then you go into an interview with special guest, one but not both Coen brothers.”

Craig: Wow.

John: No, we’ve not gotten the Coen brothers on this.

Craig: Oh my God, that would have been amazing. I’m not saying it would have been better than what we did, but we really should get one if not both. Did you say one but not both?

John: Yes, one but not both Coen brothers. She still think we can do it? She think we can bring the brothers back together for our podcast episode.

Craig: We’d like at least to get a Coen brother in here at some point. Oh, we could do a deep dive on a Coen brother movie.

John: Totally.

Craig: That might be fun.

John: They have one or two good movies.

Craig: They just have a few. Just a few, literally all of them. Miller’s Crossing, by the way, is one of my favorites.

John: I like Miller’s Crossing. I love some Fargo. I love–

Craig: Fargo, of course, Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men. It goes on. You know Barton Fink is the one I really want to do. We’ve been talking about Barton Fink for a long time.

John: It’s a screenwriter movie.

Craig: It has that Barton Fink feeling.

John: Funny that a Barton Fink movie has Barton Fink.

Craig: Where would I find another writer? Kidding. Go to the commissary. Throw a rock, you’ll hit one. And Fink? When you throw it, throw it hard.

John: Meredith Scardino, thank you for this card. Also, your handwriting is fantastic. It almost feels like architect handwriting. It’s tidy and neat. It’s printed. It’s all uppercase.

Craig: You know what I like? It’s not gendered handwriting. I wouldn’t know if this was a man or a woman. There could theoretically be a slight serial killer aspect to this handwriting. If you look at it, the kerning is really chaotic. It’s very ordered and yet it’s also saying, I might murder.

John: The I is very close to the P.

Craig: You see what I’m saying?

John: There’s some weird spacing there.

Craig: There’s signals there. If you are close with Meredith, just keep an eye open, is really all we’re saying. Just keep one eye open.

John: She makes the both and the brothers, they’re very different Bs too. It’s like she’s just choosing–

Craig: Like there’s a lot of different people up in there.

John: She’s cutting and pasting things out from a magazine.

Craig: There’s a little bit of a ransom note.

John: I love it. Thank you very much for sending it.

Craig: Also, she has great– her cardstock here is a great imprint on it. It says–

John: It says, from the drywall experts of Scardino & Sons, established 1859s. Awesome. So fantastic. We have some more follow-up on streaming services and creator pay.

Drew: Jeffrey writes, “A couple under-the-radar platforms worth mentioning. Vimeo On Demand. Not a subscription streaming service and very few consumers know about it or use it, which is a shame because the revenue split is extremely favorable for filmmakers.

Another one is Kanopy, which is the library and university-based streaming platform. When your film is on Kanopy, the residuals are decent compared to other streaming services. Best of all, you need is a library card to use it.”

John: It’s Kanopy with a K because, of course, it’s Kanopy with a K. Vimeo On Demand I have used for things. Not for things I’ve made, but to watch other people’s things. It’s good. I’m glad Vimeo has persisted in the world of YouTube.

Craig: I go there when it’s a result. I never think about going to places. I just go where–

John: Another reason I end up on Vimeo is when people have a trailer that’s not released yet, they want me to see it. A password-protected thing.

Craig: I will see some things there. Sometimes when I’m looking at, they’ll send me, “Oh, hey, here’s a director if you want to hire them for your show.” Then they’ll send a movie that they did or another episode. They’ll put it on Vimeo.

John: Exactly.

Craig: It’s password-protected.

John: It’s good stuff. Last bit of follow-up here from Dan who’s asking, “In regards to renting a movie on Apple TV or Prime, does one service provide higher residual payments or are they both the same?” They’re essentially the same. I think because it’s based on the actual price they’re charging, I think it does not matter.

Craig: The price that they charge is relevant, but the formula that we use is applied across all of the companies because it is a collective bargaining agreement term.

John: If you choose to pay $4.99 versus $3.99, that’s technically a little bit more. Also, just thank you for actually doing that and not pirating it.

Craig: That’s the most important thing. Don’t feel like you need to shop around for the highest price.

John: No. Not at all. Please don’t. Continuing the discussion of writers and money, last week, the Writers Guild sent out the Screen Compensation Guide, which was synthesizing data from 800 screen deals, feature deals, for high-budget features, which is high-budget features or anything with a budget of $5 billion or more, that was made during the term of the 2023 MBA.

We negotiated this new contract, and there were 800 screen deals made since that time. They looked through all the deals, and this is how you get a bird’s-eye view of what writers are actually being paid for the work that they’re doing. Craig, can you remind us of some of the terms we’re going to hear here? Talk to us about scale and what does scale mean for feature writers? How important is scale for feature writers?

Craig: Scale is the minimum amount that a WGA writer can be paid under a WGA agreement. Typically, we don’t see a ton of it in features. Scale is the rule of the day in television because so much of television compensation is moved over into producing numbers and things like that. For feature writing, you’re paid entirely as a writer, typically.

The lowest you’ll usually see is scale plus 10, so the company agrees to add 10% on so that you’re not losing money to your agent and going below that. Scale for original scripts is probably something like $130,000 now or something like that.
John: It’s over $100,000, so it depends on whether there’s an attribute or outline involved.

Craig: Generally speaking, if you’re going to be hired to do something as a screenwriter, you’re probably looking at six figures. Low six figures, at least to start, but not below scale.

John: As you and I, and this predates Script Notes, as we were going around meeting with studio bosses saying, “You need to really look at how you’re paying feature writers to make sure that you’re paying them better,” one of the things we were talking about is, it’s not just that you’re being paid a certain amount for this draft, but if you’re only being paid for one step, that is a crisis.

That was a real problem that we were seeing was that writers are being paid X dollars for one draft and there was no guarantee of a second draft. Therefore, they were being held hostage to these situations. As we talk about one-step deals, we would often describe that it’s an issue if they’re paying you or me for a one-step deal as higher-paid writers, but it’s really debilitating to younger, newer, lower-income writers.

Craig: The part of the problem was that studio executives were used to paying big writers, A-list writers, a lot of money, and not worrying about steps. If you hire somebody to fix a movie, “It’s a rewrite, fix this.” “Okay, well, it’s going to cost you $1 million.” You’re going to get a draft and be like, “Hey, well, blah, blah, blah. Okay, let me fix that,” or, “First, I could use some work. Okay, let me fix that. You paid me $1 million.”

They get used to that. They get used to not worrying about the paperwork of like, “Oh, sorry, the amount of yogurt you put in your cup went over the medium size. Now you have to pay the large.” Nobody likes to deal with it. The problem is, when you’re paying people a little bit, if you make them do more than one step, they are effectively getting shoved under scale.

All the way back in 2004, the last time that they were silly enough to put my dumb ass on a negotiating committee, what I asked was that, if a writer was being paid less than twice scale, they should be guaranteed two steps. In this way, the writer gets a chance to get the studio notes, get paid to write something else officially. The producer doesn’t have quite as much anxiety about that first draft and quite as much meddling to do. That request went nowhere until 2023.

John: In the 2023 MBA negotiations, that’s the thing we actually won. Future writers earning less than 200% of scale, you’re guaranteed a second step. That was designed so that it’s helping the writers who are most hurt by one-step deals.

Craig: It protects, in a way, the studio. This is why I never understood why the studios, why it took them 20 years and a strike to agree to this, it doesn’t cost them anymore. Okay, I pay you $200,000 for one step, or I pay you $200,000 for two steps. You see what I mean? Anyway, I hope that that has made life a little bit better and has retrained the studios a bit to see that two steps are helpful.

John: Anecdotally, based on what you were experiencing in these 10 years leading up to this, how many writers did you feel were encountering one-step deals in the future land? What percentage?

Craig: I would have guessed it would have been over 50. I would have said 60%.

John: That’s my guess too. At least over half, maybe two thirds. The good news is one-step deals now account for only 3 in 10.

Craig: That is definitely a reduction. It has to be.

John: It has to be. The better news is, when they actually break it down by the amount that the writers are earning, the median pay for one-step deals went from $250,000 to $450,000 over the course of this term.

Craig: What that tells us is they’re still reserving the one-steps for the people who are being paid a lot. They’re being paid enough that, really, doing two steps or even three isn’t going to push them below scale. In short, we protected scale. That was what this was always about. Sounds like it’s working great.

John: Looking through the numbers, at least one screenwriter got $2.25 million for a one-step deal. Good for them.

Craig: I get that. That’s fine.

John: The other factors in here, the other–

Craig: I wanted 2.7, but they only gave me 2.25.

John: 2.25.

Craig: 2.25. It’s a nice number. I like 2.25. You could tell that that’s a negotiated number. Nobody wants to be there.

John: No. It was between 2 and 2.25.

Craig: They were like, “Fine.”

John: Members with two-plus credits got the biggest bump of $100,000 for the last three years. Even new members with no credits were receiving $25,000 more than they were in 2021. It’s progress in future pay across. That matches anecdotally with what I’ve been hearing from people.

Craig: This was always a quality-of-life thing. The question that I am interested in is, again, it would be anecdotally, survey-style, do writers feel like they are doing more or less “free work”? I would hope that it would be a little bit yes. I mean, a little bit, yes, I’m doing less free work because, in my mind, this term was never going to increase the earnings that much. It was really quality of life.

John: That’s the hope, too. One way, if you are a future writer who is encountering these things and want to help figure out what it looks like on the ground, is that they’ve started sending out the survey leading into the negotiation cycle. It’s a good chance to fill out that form and let us know really where you’re at and what the biggest issues are for you. If there’s a thing that we’re not catching here, this is the time to speak up.

All right. Let’s get to our main topic here, which is connections, which is not just a fantastic New York Times game. Do you still play Connections?

Craig: Of course, played it this morning.

Drew: It’s great.

John: I’m trying to remember, today’s Connections involved– what was the purple category of this one? It was–

Craig: Well, there was Blank Land.

John: Blank Land, yes.

Craig: There were things with the antennae.

John: Like in Teletubbies.

Craig: There were Blank Doodle.

John: Yes, Blank Doodle, I think, was the-

Craig: It was Blank Doodle was the thing.

John: -the purple.

Craig: Oh, yes, and the other things were Blenders.

John: Dipsy Doodle. I didn’t know what Dipsy Doodle was.

Craig: Oh, you didn’t know about Dipsy Doodle?

John: What’s Dipsy Doodle?

Craig: The first thing I thought when I saw Dipsy Doodle, I knew that she was trying to fool us into heading towards the Teletubbies. Nice try, Wyna.

John: Wouldn’t happen.

Craig: Nope, not today.

John: I love Wyna Liu.

Craig: What’s that?

John: Wyna Liu.

Craig: Wyna Liu. By the way, I don’t even know what Wyna Liu looks like. I’m looking up Wyna Liu right now.

John: There’s an interview with her, and she’s a woman in her 30s, maybe early 40s. She seems to love what she’s doing.

Craig: She’s got a great name. Wyna is a– oh, look how happy she is.

John: Doesn’t she look happy?

Craig: Oh my God, she looks thrilled. She looks thrilled.

John: I also love the discussion around Connections. People will have whole TikToks on, let’s break down the most insane connections of them all, and they’ll talk to you.

Craig: Somebody said to me early on, I won’t say who it was. They were like, “It’s good, but there’s no way Wyna Liu can keep this up day after day.” I was like, “I have faith,” and she has.

John: It’s justified. That’s Connections the game, which is fantastic and we all love, but let’s talk about connections in real life. Connections between people, and especially people who need a thing from each other, and how we handle those connections in our town, and how we use connections, but even just saying use connections feels gross.

Craig: It’s a better word than exploit. How do you exploit your connections?

John: The good use of connections implies a reciprocity, a generosity, a good-for-everyone quality to it.

Craig: I think sometimes we feel like we are begging or that we’re charity cases. In fact, if the connection works, it’s not because the person that you begged took pity upon you. It’s because they thought that your thing is good and it will reflect well upon them. That’s really what that is. Otherwise, sometimes your connections, “Oh, my mom is best friends with your mom.” That’s going to get you a 20-minute chit-chat. Is it going to change your life or career? No.

John: No. Craig, you spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, I can tell.

Craig: Love LinkedIn.

John: How many connections do you have on LinkedIn?

Craig: I have zero connections on LinkedIn, John.

John: As do I. We’re not talking about LinkedIn connections or any of that performative networking. I think we’re talking about the casual stuff that does happen all the time, and this is the thing I’m sure happens with you, is that a friend asks you to put in a good word on a show that they’re trying to step on. That’s a valid, accepted part of the practice.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Let’s talk about the specific kinds of connections, when it’s okay to reach out, when you should step back a little bit. You were talking about our moms, our friends kind of thing. Weak connections are things like acquaintances, your dad’s friend’s friend, the guy you went to high school with but you don’t keep up with. If you’re reaching out to them specifically for this thing but you wouldn’t talk to them otherwise, that’s a weak connection.

Craig: It’s important to be mindful if you are the one that is being connected to, that the person that is asking you to talk or consult or advice, you’re their thing. You are probably the sum total, in many cases, of their connection to Hollywood. There’s an importance that they’re putting on this that you’re not. At least be mindful of it. I try and be as respectful as I can and I try to remember what it was like when I was grasping for crumbs, little hints of threads of things. Everything is high stakes, everything.

John: Let’s talk about strong connections. Close friends, collaborators, your writing partners, all that kind of stuff. Employers, supervisors, classmates in a program is good. Drew and I both went through the Stark program. The real advantage of going through a film school is you have 25 connections who actually you can get information from, they can help you out and stuff, and that is super invaluable. Those are the people who you should feel like you can count on and they can count on you. Again, it’s that reciprocity thing feels so crucial.

I think another aspect of reaching out to somebody is intent. Are you trying to exchange information? Are you trying to extract something from them? Are you asking someone that will take five minutes of their time or is it a lot more than that? If you’re asking someone to read something, that’s a lot to do. If you’re asking for advice on a specific situation, that’s a thing I’m more happy to take some time to do. Tell me about being a screenwriter in Hollywood, it’s like, “I got a podcast. Listen to this.” Now there’ll be a book.

Craig: We have a book. Advice for people reaching out, the more specific you can be about what you want, the more likely it is that the connection will at least happen initially. The hardest ones are the, “Can I just pick your brain podcast.” You can go pick my brain for 701 hours, but when they say, “I have three questions I need to get answered somehow,” or, “I have one situation that I’m wondering if you can help me with,” then it’s practical, it’s targeted, it feels a little bit like a mission.

It’s not an open-ended quest. When it’s an open-ended quest of just like, “Hey, I just want to talk with you about–“ then we’re just going to talk. It’s not great.

Craig: An example of the former, which is the specific thing, a friend reached out to say like, “Hey, there’s a thing they’re trying to put in my contract for this deal. Can I talk to you about it?” “Yes.”

John: Oh my God, yes.

Craig: 100%. To me, that’s not even connections at that point. That’s like, okay, we’re colleagues. We’re in the same business. That’s different.

John: It’s in the category of generosity, but a thing I do, which some friends do and other colleagues do, but I don’t see people do enough and I think that people should do more is, if I see a friend written up a deadline, like they sold a show or they did a thing, I’m always right there with an email saying, congratulations. I’m making it clear that I’m rooting for that person.

Craig: You’ve never sent me that email, not once.

John: Then I’ve said something like that to you.

Craig: I don’t think you have.

John: You probably have.

Craig: I’m different, I know. You know why? Because you just take me for granted. That’s why. I’m just the guy that’s there. I get it. I know how Mike feel.

John: Actually, you had a show that you were producing that was announced in Deadline, I didn’t email you [unintelligible 00:21:54].

Craig: You didn’t. Exactly.

John: How many other people– did other people email you about it?

Craig: Yes. They texts, mostly texts.

John: Texts, yes.

Craig: I don’t expect it. I don’t expect it, and also, I never do it because I don’t read Deadline.

John: That’s good for your sanity.

Craig: I think it might be.

John: Here’s what I’ll say about the dropping the email or the text. The email is good in the sense that there’s less of a pressure to respond to a thing sometimes, or like an Instagram congratulations to somebody. It’s just reestablishing. It’s making it clear that I’m rooting for you and some good things have happened in my life because that.

Like, “Oh, this is a good chance for me to catch up with this person,” or there’s actually a project I ended up doing when I sent through the congratulatory email. The guy said right back, like, “Oh, you should do this other thing.” I’m like, “Oh, yes, I should do this other thing,” and I ended up selling a project. Do those. It takes a minute to do and do it at the time.

Craig: Generally speaking, when it’s people in our business, if you’re already inside the business, I feel like you have a very specific need, want, that another person can help you with. Some friend that you and I both know called me the other day with this exact situation. “I have a problem. I think you’ve had this problem before. Let’s talk.” Those things are great. Then, of course, great job and so forth. I’m very texty about that sort of thing because I’m a teenage girl. I don’t know. Text is better.

John: Text is better for a friend or somebody if you regularly keep in touch with, or semi-regularly. For example, writer friends who I haven’t seen in six years but then I see that they sold a show.

Craig: Really?

John: I want to drop them a note.

Craig: I go text.

John: I think it was maybe I’ve actually never texted these people.

Craig: You may not even have their number. You may only have their email. That’s a different situation. Even then, I try and do the thing with text where it’s like, “Oh, can I text you via your email?” If it turns blue, just like that.

John: That works.

Craig: I always say, “This is Craig.” Never text somebody that you are not in an active conversation with.

John: If there’s not a thread back and forth.

Craig: There are a few, I have to say, that I occasionally get. It’ll happen once every two years. I’m like, “Thank you,” and I don’t know who it is because it’s a number. I’m saying this quietly like no one’s going to hear me. I can look back over six years of these. It’s too late now.

John: It’s not too late.

Craig: Can your phone do this?

John: Sorry, your name isn’t showing up.

Craig: They’re like, “Has it ever been showing up? Have you ever known who I was?” That’s what I would say. I wouldn’t. I am so against making people embarrassed for not knowing something about me. We need to have a whole podcast about how to handle the, I don’t know who you are. That’s like a whole situation. It’s a real life situation.

John: It’s in real life, for sure, too.

Craig: It’s a massive situation. It wasn’t when we started. The older you get, the more people you know.

John: There’s just more people.

Craig: It just becomes a real issue.

John: A situation that happened, we were at a restaurant way out on the west side, a place I never would have been. We’re sitting at this big table and having a good conversation. There’s a guy who’s in my eyesight who waves to me. It’s like, crap, I know I must know who that person is, but I don’t.

It was the challenge of I’m more recognizable than he is. He’s seeing me repeated in deadline stories and other things. I have no idea who he was. Fortunately, at the end, he did come over and reintroduce himself. Of course, an agent I had 15 years ago who I hadn’t seen in person in so long.

Craig: They all look the same. They wear the same clothes.

John: He did a very gracious thing. I think that’s the right approach.

Craig: He said, “Hey, it’s so and so.” There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s so much right with that. This is why it’s hard to go somewhere when your spouse, this is the case for both of us, is not in the business because they’re not going to know who the person is. When that person goes over, you are now supposed to go, “Oh, hey, Melissa, this is blah-di-di-blah.”

When I know who somebody is, I’m so proud. I’m like, trumpets, red carpet, this is so and so. Here’s what he’s done. Here’s what he did. Here’s where he came from. I’m like a Wikipedia article all of a sudden. Then the other people, I’m like, “Oh my God.”

John: Obviously, this is advice. If you’re the plus one going into one of these situations, get in there.

Craig: Get in there fast.

John: 100%. Let’s talk about other connection outreaches. Make sure to give people an out so that you’re not boxing them in. If you’re too busy, no sweat at all. Recognize when someone might be stretched thin. The last thing I’ll say is close the loop. Thank them for doing it. If there’s an update, give them the update because so often, I’ll give someone advice, I have no idea what happened. Just a follow-up email, “I just wanted to let you know this is what happened. It was great, and thank you for this.”

Craig: I can think of a couple of people that have emailed me years after I spoke with them, and did it perfectly. Reminded me of who they were. Acknowledged that I might not even remember it because it was just 30 minutes two years ago. Give me some context that might help me remember. Tell me why they’re updating me because this good thing happened. A lovely sentiment of thanks or gratitude.

John: My day is better because of it.

Craig: Then, thank you, goodbye. Perfect.

John: Perfectly done.

Craig: Perfect.

John: Wrap this up with an example of a connection that ends up paying off for everybody involved. Years ago, we were hiring a designer for the company, and I met with a bunch of people. One guy was great, but he wasn’t quite the right fit. He asked, “Hey, can I stay in touch?” I’m like, “For sure. You’re great.”

He was really good about dropping an email once a year to keeping up with where things were at. He ended up getting a job at Amazon and working on a very specific top-secret project. It was a once-a-year email and sometimes a short Zoom to catch up on stuff. We ran into a problem with our emergency pack, which is sold on Amazon, where we suddenly weren’t able to sell it because Germany was requiring this authorization. Basically, our whole account was shut down until we verified with Germany, but there were no appointments to actually do this video.

Craig: I immediately feel a pang of fear when you tell me that Germany, because of new regulations, is shutting something down. I start to panic.

John: For two months, it was this bureaucracy nightmare. Finally, I’m like, Jared works at Amazon. I don’t think he works anywhere in that department. It’s like, “Can you help?” He’s like, “Yes, I think I can help.” He was able, because he just knew people, was able to connect the things and thoughts.

I still had to do the stupid German interview, but I got it bumped up so I could, at 3:00 in the morning, talk to some German person. He made the thing happen. That’s because he was a smart person who was like, “Oh, I’m rooting for you.” He could help me out down the road.

Craig: You could make an interesting graph of how much you’re going to be helped by connections in your life. The graph will start with a line that is very low to the X-axis, and then it will not rise linearly. It will rise exponentially.

John: There’s a compounding effect to that.

Craig: The more you achieve, the closer the proximity to other people who are achieving, which means the more likely it is that you can help each other, and that grows and expands. It is very easy, I think, and reasonable to be close to the X-axis and look upwards at the people who are high on the Y-axis and go, “Well, this is unfair.” It is, but it is also just a function of reality.

I’ve thought about that a lot, actually. There’s really no way to create equity there. It’s just something that’s going to happen. At least, if you are high on the Y-axis, try to not just shut down the X-axis people completely.

John: 100%. I think I found myself doing during the WGA negotiations is we have all these big member meetings. We have them with strike captains and with members and all these forums. I wasn’t answering a lot of questions, but I was up there on the stage or I was in the audience. When people come up to the microphone, they say their name and they ask their question.

In my little notebook, I wrote down people’s names and I wrote down their question and put a star by them. That is a smart person. Sometimes afterwards, I would come up to them and thank them for asking a smart question. Just to establish a radar for, these are good people who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow, it’s always easy to remember the jerks and the idiots. When somebody is like, “Oh, that is a smart person who is asking a good question,” it’s helping you understand through the invisible mesh of trust and smartness that’s out there.

Craig: I try with the connection thing to also look for institutions. These are mentorships that aren’t already dealing with people that have other legs up. It’s not that I don’t talk to people who email me from Princeton because they get my name from the Princeton Alumni Guide. It’s just that I’m not as motivated. They’re Princeton. You got a lot going on. I’ve done my charitable work there.

It’s more interesting when other groups come and you have a chance to talk to people who don’t have– okay, well, that one didn’t pan out, but here’s 40 other people in the alumni handbag. I don’t know. I’d rather talk to other people. Sorry, my Princeton [unintelligible 00:31:51].

John: You’re setting some boundaries, too, which is a helpful way to–

Craig: Prioritizing.

John: Prioritizing. I think the final bit of advice we would probably both agree on is paying it forward. The degree to which you are benefiting from connections, make sure you’re creating connections with other people that can help lift them up.

Craig: Everybody who achieves a certain status in our business is going to get hit up by people. That’s inevitable. It’s not like you’re going to have any shortage of opportunity. Don’t never do it. Do it. You can’t do it all the time. You have to gatekeep somehow. You just have to because you have a job and you have a life.

The other thing is, sometimes, I remember thinking when I was starting out, this person just needs to give me 10 minutes of their life. I know that they’re wasting 10 minutes all the time. That is true. I am constantly wasting time. Also, I’m sorry, I can’t. If I just talk to people, then that’d be a rough life.

John: That’s one of the things. It’s like, I can’t have this conversation with each individual person, but I can have a conversation in aggregate among all these people.

Craig: Just listen to the 701–

John: Or buy the book.

Craig: Or buy the book. I keep forgetting we wrote a book. I wonder how I could forget that.

John: Let’s answer some new listener questions. Can we start here at the bottom of the list with Michael Neal?

Drew: Michael writes, “I had my first kid at the beginning of the year.”

John: Congratulations.

Drew: “Well, my wife had the kid. I was the cheerleader.”

Craig: Well done.

Drew: “When I watch film and TV now, I find myself having much stronger reactions to scenes, even ones I’d seen before. They don’t even have to involve kids. When I talked to my mom, she said she had to stop watching horror movies for years after I was born, and I was her second kid. After you both had your kids, was there anything that changed about your viewing habits or how you reacted to film and TV? Was there something specific that surprised you?”

John: I’m trying to think whether my viewing habits changed greatly. Obviously, at a certain point when she started watching TV shows, I was watching a bunch of inane TV shows with her. I think we talked about it on the show. I used to swear a fair amount, and it just stopped completely suddenly. It really is awkward for me to swear now.

Craig: Whoa. I started swearing more.

John: You did?

Craig: Yes, because of those effing babies. I don’t think there was anything that changed in terms of taste. My threshold for, yes, I want to see that, went way higher because I had a kid. That is a question of, would you like to not be with your baby and see this movie that, whatever? Just because people are like, “Oh, it might be–“ It just changed. It changed.

I used to see movies all the time. I would watch a lot of different shows and things, and then it just changed after that. It does change you. This is why critics are unreliable. Think about what he’s saying. It changes. As your life changes, you change, your taste changes, your ability to appreciate or not appreciate something changes. The rhetoric of, I have deemed this good or bad, just doesn’t make sense. It’s an odd thing.

John: My sensitivity towards onscreen when children are in danger probably shifted a little bit. It’s not like I was like, “Oh, I want that kid in peril.”

Craig: You used to love it.

John: I think there’s always the aspect of watching something is that you’re imagining yourself in that situation. When you have a kid, that kid is an extension of you and you’re imagining that kid being hurt. It feels like it’s a part of you.

Craig: I think maybe I probably did also empathize more with parental characters whose children were in danger. It is a different feeling. It’s a bit intellectual prior to that, and it becomes incredibly middle brain when you’ve had a kid and your limbic system is getting triggered by Liam Neeson getting a phone call and taken.

John: My eyes are on Mike. Watching the end of Toy Story 3 when the kid is going off to college, just broke him. He couldn’t even think about it without sobbing.

Craig: Interesting.

John: That was directly a factor of having a kid and not being able to imagine our daughter going to college. Then the teenage years make you really ready to leave.

Craig: Get out. It’s almost like it’s all planned. They make it so that you finally are like– although my youngest is living with us right now, which is great. She could get her own place, but you know why she’s living with us? She’s like, “It’s better here.”

John: Honestly, it’s better.

Craig: Yes, it is. It’s cool. We’re good. You’re all right. Just stop making a mess.

John: Let’s answer a question that actually ties back into our initial connections question. We have a question here from Tara Garwood, which is related to connections.

Drew: “I’m almost finished with my first screenplay, a horror comedy, which I wrote under the mentorship of two well-known Hollywood horror screenwriters. As someone living outside LA, how can I best proceed with my first screenplay and mentors who are presumably willing to help me out?”

John: Great. Tara, congrats on this project. We don’t know how you got it to these horror screenwriters, but if they’re actually working in the business, they’re great connections for you here. The real issue is, how do you let them help you in a way that they’re going to be able to help you and not be too much of a hassle to them? They can connect you to other people, including a rep, a manager, somebody else. They can just get your script in front of people, and that’s going to be the most helpful thing to you going forward.

Craig: Sounds like you know what to do. You’ve got two people. They’re your mentors. You’ve written something. Depending on how close that mentorship is, you might want to say, “Hey, I’ve written the script. I’m not going to make you read the whole thing. Unless you really want to, just read the first 10 pages. Just read the first 10. You don’t even have to respond. If you do, I’ll send the rest.”

John: Assuming they like it– I went into this question assuming that they had read the whole thing, which would be great, but if they haven’t, that’s also fine. If they can help you find other people to talk to so it’s not just them all the time, will be good. That’s why I was trying to look for a manager or just like, who else do you think I should talk to? Who else could be a good connection here because that feels useful and important?

You’re outside of LA, which is great and it’s fine, but I think you need to find some other writers, people in this space who you can talk to so it’s not just on the backs of these two mentor people because they will burn out if they’re getting an email from you every two weeks.

Craig: Yes, eventually they will burn out, no question.

John: Cool. Let’s do a question here from Reid.

Drew: “John and Craig compared being hired on a weekly project as making a corpse presentable enough for an open casket funeral.”

John: That was Craig’s.

Craig: That’s me. It’s not always like that. Sometimes it’s like that, yes.

Drew: “Well, when you’re in a situation like this or in the throes of rewriting a scene for the fifth or sixth time, how can you tell if you’re actually improving it or are you just making it different?”

John: Sometimes you’re just making it different for the sake of freshness and just dealing with people’s egos and needs and situation. You have to be honest with yourself when it’s like, this is not a better version of the scene, it’s just a different version of the scene that starts in a different place, it goes to a different place, it has different words, but hopefully it’s serving the same function.

When you’re actually trying to improve a thing, I think you need to step back and look at, what is the function this is trying to serve? Is it consistent with the tone and the voice and the spirit of the movie, and especially the section of the movie or the section of the storytelling? Is it fresher? Is it more exciting for an audience to encounter? That’s hard. We’ve talked a lot about it in comedy. Sometimes you forget that things are funny because you’re just exposed to them so many times.

Craig: I remember reading about Mozart when I was a kid and how he was able to learn some classical piece when he was seven, and then just sort of extemporaneously create seven versions of it. I just thought, “Well, what are those versions?” Well, turns out if you are a writer, you could do seven versions of something. You understand, then, what versioning is. When you’re in a situation where you’re on one of these deals, you’re usually trying to make one person happy. Sometimes that one person is happy because you’ve made somebody else happy. You’re trying to make the head of the studio happy.

They say, “What would make me happy is if this star agrees to get on the plane and fly there to do the movie. Right now, this is what he or she wants.” Great. How would this do? “Almost, but they want this or they don’t want that.” Got it. What about this version? Really, you’re not writing anything that is expressive of you. You are versioning until someone goes that because you actually don’t know. Nobody knows. You’re just trying to get people to say, “Oh, yes. Okay, that. That’s what I think this should all be.” Then it is useful because then everybody can go, “Oh, we were making Meatloaf, but you wanted Baked Alaska. Okay. Let’s realign.

John: That is the frustration is often they’ll focus on the script because that script is the thing they can control, but the issue isn’t the script at all. The issue is the actor, the director, the location-

Craig: Always.

John: -the budget, it’s all this other stuff. The problem never was the words on the page, but the words on the page are the only thing that can change. That’s what they’re focusing on. You’re getting paid, hopefully well to do impossible things and do the least damage possible while you’re doing it.

Craig: There are, I think, a lot of situations where studios like an idea that is inherent to a script, and they find an actor that means something and a director that means something who also really like the idea of that script. Everybody agrees the script could “use work,” meaning the execution of that idea isn’t thrilling to them. There be dragons because what happens then is a parade of highly paid, extremely competent writers all versioning to figure it well, is it this? Is it this?

John: The truth is there’s no one decision maker. It gets off like a consensus situation. There’s not a king to please.

Craig: There is no king to please. Everybody’s fighting with everybody over it. Everybody wants it to be something, and none of them have the ability to write two words together, not two, and there’s the problem. You go in, as we’ve talked about this before, in those situations, you are a surgeon, you are a mortician. You are also a therapist, you are a diplomat, you are a priest, confessor, you are so many things to so many different people.

It is one of the great ironies of the feature side of our business that those are some of the highest-paid people in Hollywood who are still treated like crap in their own way. It’s like, “Well, we’re not treating you like crap, we’re giving you all this money.” Also, change everything because somebody that shouldn’t have any power whatsoever doesn’t like the word blue.

John: Oh, yes. Their notes are like, “I don’t like seeing people eat on screen.” Sure. I recognize that you’re number seven on the power structure here, but also if I don’t yield on this, you’re going to dig in your heels to the other side. I’m going to need you to fight on my side for something else.

Craig: Also, I’m not going to be here in two weeks. I’m gone, right? One actor, his issue was he just didn’t like dialogue when he was standing. He wanted to be moving. Well, I’ve got a director and a producer who are like, “This is a scene where there’s nowhere to go.” I don’t know. What if? Now, this is the problem I’m trying to solve. This is not a writing problem.

John: No.

Craig: It’s really not. Now it’s just this weird puzzle of like, oh, well, I still want this lovely scene where Vito Corleone is talking to Michael Corleone in the garden and explaining to him the innermost truths of running a mafia family. Let’s say Al Pacino was like, “But I don’t want to sit. I want to be walking.” Marlon Brando was like, “Well, I don’t want to be walking. I want to sit.” Now I’m not doing art at all.

John: No.

Craig: Now it’s Lego.

John: It is Lego. How does it assemble properly? All right. Let’s draw one cool thing. Mine is an article by Cate Hall in her newsletter, Useful Fictions, called 50 Things I Know. There’s an industry out of this newsletter like lists of stuff I’ve learned over the course of the years. They’re skimmable, but I thought hers were really good. I’m just going to hit the first three here, Craig, and see how you respond.

She says, “You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you. In fact, uncovering your capacity to love people who will never fully reciprocate it is the definition of grace.”

Craig: Yes, that’s a beautiful thought.

John: It’s also a good theme for a screenplay. That’s a good dramatic question.

Craig: Yes, it is. The idea of unrequited love implies an unfairness and a wound. Here’s something that changes when you’re a parent. It’s unrequited love. Their love for you is not like your love for them, nor will it ever be.

John: It’s never going to be perfectly reciprocal.

Craig: Never. You don’t really, nor should you really require it to. That’s an example where you just go, “I’m going to care about you.” There’s no quid pro quo. This is how it goes. Yes, there are people that you can do that with.

John: Second point, if you’re unsure how to have better opinions, try just having fewer of them for a start.

Craig: Well, first of all, what is a better opinion? [laughs] I’m not sure what that means.

John: What is a better opinion? I guess you pull that apart. To me, it’s–

Craig: Maybe justified.

John: Justified opinion, yes.

Craig: Instead of just saying stuff because.

John: I feel like sometimes you have this instinct of like, “Well, I have to have an opinion on something.”

Craig: No, you don’t.

John: I don’t have an opinion. No.

Craig: I don’t know, and I’m not sure are wonderful phrases.

John: “The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging opinions of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good. Lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign. If you’re hearing a lot of diverging reports about a person, that’s a red flag, and that feels true to me.”

Craig: Yes, I can understand her point that people that you would want to treat well are saying, “Oh, this person’s wonderful.” Well, yes, because they’re probably wonderful to you. Then, ‘Oh, these are people for which there is no reward if you treat them well, and all of those people are saying this person’s a monster.” The agent that a big star loves but all the assistants loathe, yes, that’s going to be a person who’s probably not great.

John: Going back to connections, I got a call from a writer who was asking about an actor who I’d worked with, and I could tell him that obviously this should be on a phone call. Don’t text this. Don’t email this. I can say, I had a really good experience with them, and I know that other people have not had good experiences with them. I personally did not encounter that at all. I would say keep asking and check on people, but I also wonder if there’s just a bad mix of personalities and types.

Craig: Yes, qualifying, things like that, all the time. Absolutely. I’m very nervous about saying, “Oh, this person is “bad.” It’s best to talk about your experience with somebody. I try to lead with, I’m just one person. I do think that there are people about whom I’ve been warned who turned out to be great. Then my question is, “What’s the deal with you? You warned me about this person.” There are people who warn you, and they warn you in a careful way.

They go, look, here’s the context. The truth is all of us can be warned about. We all have something that isn’t going to work with someone else. We’re not compatible with everyone. The warning should be not something abusive, horrible, racist, whatever. It’s just these are the ins and outs of this person. If you don’t mind a person like this, great.

John: Those are 3 of the 50 recommendations on Cate Hall’s Useful Fictions. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. Craig, what do you have for us?

Craig: Well, it’s fun. We were talking about connections today. My one cool thing is a new game, Pips. Love it. Have you been playing it?

John: I tried the demo and did not click for me. Tell me what’s working for you about Pips in your brain.

Craig: First, let me admire the puzzle that I did this morning. Pips, it’s pretty simple. It’s a dominoes-style game. Unlike dominoes, where every square of a domino has to match up to another one, what they do is they give you a little grid, a little snaky grid, in which to place the collection of dominoes they’ve given you for that puzzle. They’ve created regions inside of the grid that have constrictions. For instance, in today’s, there was an area where the numbers in this one region had to equal 10. There’s another area where a plus sign region had to all have the same number.

I played it on hard because I got to be honest with you, it’s a pretty easy game. It’s a lovely little easy logic puzzle. When it clicks, there’s a very odd satisfaction to it. What I also like is, as much as I love words, there’s a lot of word-letter-based stuff here, connections, spelling bee, Wordle. I do the Sudoku occasionally. Sudoku is just Sudoku. It’s so number, crunchy, simple in its own way. It’s just straight dead logic. This at least requires me to move shapes around, which is not my strong suit. I like the spatial aspect. It’s fun and it’s quick.

John: Their games are quick. It’s interesting because The New York Times games were originally just digital versions of things that could be done on paper and pencil. This is an example of the thing that couldn’t happen on paper and pencil. Wordle couldn’t happen on paper and pencil.

Craig: No. Wordle could not happen on paper and pencil. Now, this is my chance to decry the removal of the acrostics. I don’t understand. I will never understand why The New York Times just– Mike, how much could it have cost to pay Henry Cox and Emily Rathvon every two weeks to bring acrostic? Come on. It was perfect for digital. If ever they were a puzzle made for digital, it was that. I don’t care if 12 people did it. I was one of them. Boo.

John: Boo.

Craig: Boo.

John: It wasn’t bad enough to make you cancel your account, which is why they didn’t do it.

Craig: I know, but I’m still–

John: There’s still time.

Craig: I’m still out here being– you know what? They’ve never encountered a cranky, rigid customer in the top of [crosstalk]. Listen to me, I’m still the most flexible customer I have.

John: That is our show for this week. It’s produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today on the show.

You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We are also scriptnotespodcast on Instagram. We’re posting stuff about the show and the book, and new vertical videos on there too.

We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today, and the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to those premium subscribers who make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Lego.

Craig, thanks for a good connections episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. We are looking at a vase full of– vase or vase? Are you a vase or vase person?

Craig: I’m a vase person.

John: I’m vase as well.

Craig: That’s a very New York way of doing it.

John: Yes. Full of Lego flowers. Can you describe it for the listeners at home?

Craig: Yes. It’s actually quite beautiful. I’ve made Lego flowers of a more chunky, tulipy kind. These are more delicate. It’s like a lovely bouquet with a couple of orange blossoms, some pink ones, some rose-looking ones. Then they even got that baby’s breath vibe going on and some nice stem work.

John: Yes. My daughter assembled these before she headed off to college this semester. It’s Lego. Things snap together, but there’s no blocks to this. There’s no three-by-two, the classic Lego block, to this all.

Craig: I will be honest, if you asked me, is this a Lego brand thing, I’d have to look close. I know that these little nubs, for instance, are very Lego-y, but this could be another brand of assembled plastic pieces.

John: I want to talk about that a little bit because I love Lego. I’ve loved Lego as a kid. I’ve built some things. I was looking around the office here. I have my Lego R2-D2. I have my Lego typewriter. I love them. Yet, at a certain point, the kits became so specific. The pieces are so bespoke. The flower here is the most recent example of these are not things you could apply to anything else. Basically, the kits are just to resemble this one specific thing. If you were to try to pull this apart and use them in other ways, they wouldn’t be useful. The joy of Lego growing up was just there’s a trash bag full of blocks, and we would just build houses out of them.

Craig: The Titanic does mostly have useful items.

John: Yes. You said on the show that you built a Lego Titanic.

Craig: I built the Lego Titanic.

John: The Lego Death Star, Millennium Falcon?

Craig: I built the Lego Death Star, the Lego Millennium Falcon, the big ones. Those I ended up just breaking down and giving them to my kids to play with.

John: [unintelligible 00:54:47].

Craig: Yes, because they were young and they wanted to. I’m not going to be that guy who’s like, “No, this is my Millennium Falcon.” I’m an adult here. The Titanic is in my office. This is awesome. It’s the biggest Legos out there. It’s huge. Then I built a lot of– this is what I do in prep usually when I go home. I did the Pac-Man arcade one and the Mario on TV, the Nintendo one. There’s a lot of fun things like that. I agree with you when they get too bespoke. For instance, I did Rivendell, the Lord of the Rings setting.

John: Yes, I saw that. It was on your table, yes.

Craig: That one’s a D&D one. The Rivendell one, I ended up breaking down. Like you said, it was too– by the way, it’s why I haven’t finished the D&D one. I just left it on the table because it’s sort of too far into not Lego.

John: There’s the spectrum of– there’s the model kits that you assemble, which are like, growing up, you glue together the thing, and it perfectly forms this one thing, which is exactly the replica of this thing. There was a classic Lego, which is just a bunch of blocks you can assemble any way you want to do. I just feel like we’ve gone so far over towards the assemble this perfectly to this thing.

It is a skill to follow those instructions and be able to do the engineering feats of what these new things can do, like what this typewriter can do, are remarkable. I’m sure it’s good for our visual intelligence, but also I worry that it robs us of some of our– it’s not a new thought. This is in the Lego movie, too, but it robs us of some of our individual agency to build things ourselves. Which is why our friend Phil, who’s just building this giant ship out of just a block seat himself, I’m inspired by.

Craig: If I weren’t imaginative as part of my job, but this is actually a weird refuge from that where I don’t have to create anything. I don’t have to worry about variations. I don’t have puzzles to solve about architecture. My job is to zen out and do something that I can do perfectly.

John: That’s what I miss about standardized tests where actually like there’s a correct answer to things because everything we do in our writing lives, there’s just like, is that the right way to do it? Sure.

Craig: There’s no [unintelligible 00:57:07]. It’s even worse. Sometimes there is a right way to do something, and everyone is like, “Yes, but do it differently,” which is the worst feeling. You want me to do the test wrong.

John: Yes, absolutely. I gave you the right version of the scene. Now you want me to start from the heart. It’s frustrating.

Craig: It’s frustrating. Yes, I still do love following instructions. It’s such a nice, simple–

John: Well, I think it appeals to your puzzle brain, too. There’s an answer, there’s a conclusion, it can be done.

Craig: Yes. Puzzles, the fun part is I have the pieces. I just need to understand how they fit together, whether it’s words, or numbers, or anything. With Lego, I actually am not thinking at all. It’s a way to stop thinking. I’m just obeying in a safe way.

John: This is actually interesting because you hate jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles, it’s ambiguous for a long time, that things click together. While there is that state of completion, there’s no instruction manual. It’s like this piece could be one of a thousand things in it.

Craig: Yes. A jigsaw “puzzle” is a bit like if I said, here is a Lego typewriter, here are all the pieces, here’s the instruction guide, but I’ve jumbled the pages and I haven’t numbered them. Well, let’s look through these pages. Do you think this maybe is where it starts? This is busy work. For what? A picture of a hamburger or a cat jumping over a thing?

John: I will say, building the Lego R2-D2, there were some ambiguous sections. I think the assembly books are really good, but there were some ambiguous situations where I don’t know if I did this right, and it’s going to take 20 steps before I realize if I did it right.

Craig: That is part of the process, is the, uh-oh, flip back and go, “Oh my God, I was supposed to put the dark gray piece and not the black piece. Okay, let’s undo, undo, undo because it must be right.” It drives me crazy. The one thing that I wish Lego would do– so they’re very good in a way now about supplying you with extra bits of little tiny things. The problem is they don’t tell you what the extra bits are. They should say at the end of a chapter, “By the way, we were hoping that you would have these extra bits, so if you do, don’t panic.”

John: So you didn’t make the mistakes.

Craig: If you have two extra bits of something, you probably screwed up. One thing that I know is true is the piece that you need to make it is there. You might think it’s not there. You might be panicking. It’s there. Either you’re not seeing it, or you don’t understand what the shape is, or it’s on the floor, or it’s in the box. It’s there.

John: It’s Scott Frank’s advice. Don’t move until you see it. It’s there.

Craig: That’s Steve Zaillian.

John: Oh, Steve Zaillian. You’re right.

Craig: Yes. Don’t move until you see it.

John: All right. Lego flowers, I guess we’re going to keep them. The weird thing about this bouquet is it’s really pretty from a distance, and it’s actually pretty up close. There’s a middle range where it’s just like, ugh.

Craig: I think I’m in that middle range, and I’m still appreciating it because– you know what? It’s arranged very nicely because I don’t imagine the arrangement was dictated quite that.

John: It’s going to be a different vase for each.

Craig: Right. Your daughter put that together. She has an eye for arranging flowers, so she’ll never be hungry.

John: Absolutely, because there’s always going to be a market.

Craig: People love flowers.

John: People love flowers. I used to buy flowers, and then I realized, this is dumb. I don’t really enjoy having them.

Craig: Or horrible. You know who loves flowers?

John: Elsa. Yes, sorry. I can appreciate watching a Martha Stewart where halfway the flowers are like, “Oh, that’s beautiful, but I don’t want it there.”

Craig: There’s a bunch of vegetables, and then they’re dead within minutes. It doesn’t matter what you do, they’re dead, and they smell. They smell while they die, and then the bugs come.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: What is this– and it’s, “Ooh, look at the sad flowers, they’re all dead.” Yes, that’s why I don’t like clowns either.

John: Oh, flowers die.

Craig: Like, oh, happy? No, no, scary.

John: Which reminds me, I think my daughter has a bouquet of flowers up in her room, which is she’s probably-

Craig: Oh dear God.

John: -going to get rid of because she’s just gone.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: I’ll smell it, so yes.

Craig: That needs to go.

John: Quickly.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: Right. Thanks, Craig.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Thanks, Drew.

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John August: Hey, this is John, a standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids. There’s some swearing in this episode.

Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to episode 694 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome back the writers of a new movie in a genre that has almost disappeared to talk about why and how they wrote a new movie in this world. That genre is spoof.

The movie is the new Naked Gun, and the writers are Dan Gregor and Doug Mand. Welcome back, fellas.

Dan Gregor: Hi, guys. Hello.

Doug Mand: Thanks for having us.

Dan: Hi, Drew.

John: I want to talk about the spoof genre, but also other genres that used to be common that have basically now disappeared. We’ll also answer a list of questions on publicists, and complications, and overcomplications. And in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about movies that Gen Z hasn’t seen, because the spoof genre is a thing that they are just not familiar with, and that has to be a factor as we think about what movies we’re doing going forward. First, Drew, we have some follow-up.

Drew: We do. Back in episode 690, we talked about the new Dogma 25 manifesto. I’m not sure if you guys remember that.

Dan: Listened to that.

Drew: Andrew in Boston wrote in. He said, “A hilarious aspect of the Dogma 95 movement that people might not remember is that the majority of the movies broke the manifesto rules in one way or another. For example, The Idiots and Julien Donkey-Boy both used background music.”

John: Oh, my God. The scrilidge of background music. That’s not authentic to it? No.

Dan: What am I even watching?

Doug: That changes everything I think about Julien Donkey-Boy.

John: It’s moving out of my top 10 list in New York Times.

Doug: Fully mainstream sell-outs. [laughter]

John: Complete sell-outs. Anybody who breaks any of these rules, just banish them.

Dan: Sell-out.

[laughter]

Drew: Justin in Eagle Rock, formerly of Altadena, writes, “I was listening to your segment about Dogma 25 with my seven-year-old in the car. He started asking lots of questions.

John: About The Idiots and Julien Donkey-Boy.

Drew: He’s a big fan of The Celebration. ”I said, ‘Elijah, I will explain this in a minute, but can I please listen to this because I’m very interested in the content.’ When we arrived at our destination, he said, ‘Mama, I changed my mind. You can just enjoy that. I don’t want the explanation.’”

Dan: [chuckles] That’s about how I felt after the entire segment was done. I was like, “What is this again?”

Doug: It’s what I wanted Craig to say at the end of it. I think this kid’s really onto something.

John: Absolutely.

Doug: Very mature take. I don’t even want to talk about it.

John: Yes. It’s a good advice for a lot of things. It’s like you’re curious in the moment, but then ask yourself when it’s over, did you really care?

Dan: No.

Doug: No.

John: There’s this whole, like, cultural moments that have just passed me by. Trisha Paytas passed me by.

Dan: Oh, yes. Trisha Paytas. All right.

Doug: It’s okay to not know.

John: It’s okay to not know things. It’s okay to not actually dig in deep to really fully investigate.

Dan: Will anyone know what the Dogma 25 is in five years, or will it be a weird reference that you’re like–

John: It’s a great question. We have a memory of Dogma 95, but there are films made of it, and it was a thing.

Dan: What are the odds that this is something that people actually adopt, and it creates a movement, and I’m doubtful?

Doug: I guess it depends on the quality of the films that come out of it. If something pops a little bit, maybe, which seems unlikely, but not impossible.

John: Yes. I think that the genesis behind this, or at least one of the motivations, was just the rise of artificiality, and artificial intelligence, and AI, and just a sense like none of this is real underneath this. I think there’s going to be some movement that’s going to happen, but is it going to be called Dogma 25?

Dan: It’s also a callback to a very Gen X thing that mostly is going to be forgotten by most of the filmmakers who are employing whatever this Dogma 25 is.

Doug: I respect the idea of the punk rock, like what is going to be birthed out of this anti-artificial intelligence movement of these big-budget movies, what’s going to come out, and what cool artists are going to emerge. It’s so dogmatic. Obviously, it’s just AI. Listen to that list.

John: Literally dogmatic, yes.

Doug: That list was just like, okay.

Dan: It’s always just about a vibe. If something feels like a low budget, deeply authentic, organic, shot in the right place, all those things are– you feel it. Nobody needs a stamp.

Doug: As we learned, Julien Donkey-Boy used background music.

John: Yes. Betrayed the entire spirit of The Husk. Now, there’s one thing, we’re talking about genres that may not exist, or may never have existed. There’s one thing I know about you guys, is that you think that dead genres should stay dead forever. Never go back. [laughter] Never go back.

Dan: I’ve heard a hundred genres, and no, I put a stake in its heart.

Doug: Absolutely.

John: Just kill it dead. Let’s see if you can do that August 1st with Naked Gun.

Dan: Oh my gosh.

John: You have the new version of Naked Gun. Congratulations, boys. The trailer’s really funny.

Dan: Thank you.

John: I have not seen the full movie, so we’re recording this early. We’re going to have a conversation about this in an abstract sense.

Dan: It’s a theory more than anything right now, and I like the theory of spoof comedy.

Doug: Yes.

Dan: It’s a little college course I’m hoping to teach.

Doug: In this moment, we are infallible, which is amazing.

John: Which is so great. You’re the experts, having done it most recently.

Doug: People will see it and be like, Oh, I wish they could edit some of this up.

Dan: The idiots, they missed the boat.

Doug: They really screwed the pooch on this one.

John: Entirely. Let’s talk about that class. You’re going to teach Dan Gregor on it.

Dan: Please.

John: What are the defining characteristics of a spoof movie to you?

Dan: Yes. I think a spoof movie is something that takes a pre-existing genre, something regarded that everyone recognizes, and then does a, I guess I want to say, deeply silly send-up of that genre. I think that’s how I would most centrally define it. There’s leeway on various sides of it for how sincere your send-up is, how doctrinaire you are about the rules of that. You have your Mel Brookses, you have your Austin Powers, and those guys are also doing spoofs.

There’s a little more character, there’s a little more stand-alone heart to some of those characters, but they’re still fundamentally spoofs of a pre-existing genre that everyone recognizes as its own intellectual space.

John: Yes. When you say send-up, you can only send it up by actually understanding it and deeply appreciating what’s there. You have to recognize what the tropes are, what the cliches are, so you can pull them out, study them, exaggerate them. You have to go way beyond things. That’s probably true for all spoof movies, but I feel like the thing I recognize about The Naked Gun thread of these is an absolute deadpan lack of acknowledgment of the world melting down around you, which seems very crucial.

Dan: Yes. There’s straight manning, where there are people in the world who register that Frank Drebin is dumb, but the world continues to functionally operate regardless that he is still the top cop in the game. The way that any genre movie, Ethan Hunt is the top spy in the world. There’s really nothing he can do that will get anyone else to stop treating him like the best super spy that’s ever existed. That’s almost the spine of these movies, that it’s real. It’s all real. It’s all really happening. The stakes are real. It’s not silly unto itself.

John: Yes. A distinction here, so like Frank Drebin’s character is absurd. The world is played mostly straight, but without acknowledging that he is absurd within the world and the world is heightened to some degree, and then finding that right balance. There are visual puns and gags, and there are things that couldn’t happen in a normal world, but you just let them slide, and that’s got to be an ongoing discussion.

Doug: Everyone lets them slide, and it is an ongoing discussion because it’s a sliding scale where you’re like, “Is this–“

Dan: They’re oddly like really precisely important moments when the actor does straight man, and maybe he’ll look at Drebin like, “Did he just say that stupid thing?” Or sometimes he’ll look at camera and they’ll be like, “What the fuck is happening here?” It’s not that every single moment has to completely play it straight. It’s that the world continues to hurtle forward. Because the truth is, if you are writing the smart version of this movie, the villain would be like, “I’m pretty sure this guy is dumb and we don’t have to worry about him.” Then the movie would be over.

Doug: They have to say yes. The characters have to say yes while still walking the line of being like, “You’re an idiot,” and it’s a balance. Even when we were on set, we would look at Danny Houston and the way he would respond to some of Liam’s takes or Frank’s takes, and we’d be like, “Do we need to get maybe a take where he’s giving us a little bit more like, that’s insane. Do we need to move faster? Do we need to run through the bees on this one?” This is maybe not the moment where we stop and acknowledge it, and we just keep moving because the world needs to keep going.

Everyone has an agreement almost, that this is happening. Honestly, that really starts with Liam and what started with Leslie, which is just like getting actors to play it straight, and they are not in a comedy. Those lines, those actions can pop even more. They’re not in on the joke. They are fully serious, fully committed. That’s, we were so lucky to have Liam for that. Leslie was obviously incredible, but it was the idea of getting actors who are known as dramatic actors. That’s why some people didn’t know about Naked Gun and really didn’t understand what we thought made Naked Gun so great would be like, “Oh, but Liam isn’t funny,” and be like, “He is. Also, that’s why he’s there.”

John: It’s a specific thing.

Dan: There are other attempts over the years to cast comedians in this movie. That was always, I think, doomed to fail because it would fundamentally misunderstand, like it has to be straight. It has to be like the concept that you expect is you’re seeing and it’s all happening the way it’s supposed to happen. It’s just the edges are stupid, as opposed to the person in the middle himself is not Inspector Clouseau.

John: Yes. Those are clear antecedents. It exists within a spectrum, and we’ll talk about sort of the ZAZ versus the Mel Brooks versus the Wayans and those things. We want to talk about this genre really did disappear. Looking up on Box Office Mojo, if you look for like the spoof keyword,-

Dan: Ooh, I love this.

John: -there were only 10 spoof titles released worldwide between 2013 and 2024.

Dan: Oh my God.

John: Versus 34 in the previous decade.

Dan: Even before that, and probably by, you said 2013, even by then, the genre had burnt itself out.

John: Younger listeners will all know this, but there was a whole, like a yearly series of movies that were like Epic Movie in these things, which resembled this genre, but were incredibly pastiche and just–

Dan: If I’m being honest, I do think that this was this really beloved genre for 30 years. It’s so silly. It’s so funny, but I do think that some of those movies stopped respecting the genre itself and burned it off. It created a generation of kids who were like, “This is stupid. I don’t need it.”

Doug: I think Scary Movie 4 was around 2003 or 2006. I looked at the same thing over the last year of writing, and be like, “When was the last time?” To me, that was like the end of that era. It feels almost 20 years to me. I don’t know.

John: I want us to go back to this idea, Doug, you’re talking about how at some point, you have to figure out like, how are people responding to this idiot who’s doing these stupid things?

A real change that’s happened is we’ve had The Office. We’ve had shows where Jim looked to the camera and that reaction, and he’s acknowledging, like, “This is a crazy thing that Michael Scott is doing,” or, “This is a moment that’s happening here.” That’s the kind of thing that you’re looking for in a spoof movie, or you need to cut out of a spoof movie. It’s finding exactly what the right flavor is.

Doug: Yes, it’s a great observation.

Dan: We move the culture of comedy so much towards like the Apatow and the Mike Schur, which there’s a real naturalism to that. Those people are– Jim Halpert is a funny person. He knows he’s funny. He’s sometimes trying to be funny. He’s regularly trying to be funny, and you’re laughing with him. He’s in on a lot of these jokes. Same thing for the entirety of the Apatow-averse. Of just like everyone in those movies is a funny person, and they’re humorous unto themselves.

It creates a world where the comedy is the space that you’re hanging out in. There’s a sitcom-ness to all of that, actually, that I think is a very different take on the comedy.

Doug: I also find that the– and I love The Office, I love the character of Jim. It almost became a like, “I’m cooler than this.”

John: Yes, like existing outside of the space of it. Schwimmer on Friends also would tend to do that thing, too. You’re not quite in the same universe as all the other characters.

Doug: I’d hope that what we pulled off is that when we do even actually quite literally look to camera, it’s not that. There’s part of the trailer is Frank going, “The new one, Frank driving the new one. I think that take is him being like, “I’m the baddest mother fucker out here. This is not a joke. There’s nothing funny about this.” I think that that’s maybe the difference.

Dan: We had several jokes where we debated, is this too meta?

Doug: Yes, is this too meta?

Dan: We honestly cut all of them except for that one that is like that last trailer moment, because we felt like that one fits in its own bit of genre.

John: We’re talking about the trailer moment where a character who’s supposed to be O.J. Simpson’s son looks to camera, and you have to acknowledge that.

Doug: This is the one on the bank, but that’s also a meta joke as well. It’s in the bank, and it’s after a big bank heist scene, which is in the trailer as well. One of the hostages says, “Who are you?” He says, “I’m Frank Drebin, the new one.” Then takes “the new one” to camera and puts his leg up. He has like heart underwear on under his skirt.

Dan: Right, we had like one version where he was like, “I’m Liam Neeson– fuck. That’s not it.”

[laughter]

Doug: Yes, “I immediately biffed it.”

John: I want to talk about this because one of the challenges you face here is that you have what you need for the movie, but you also have what you need for the trailer. The trailer has to be an instruction manual for how to watch this genre.

Doug: Yes, especially to a whole generation who has no idea how stupid this really is, and what’s the language and what are the rules of this kind of comedy.

Dan: Our test screenings have been really interesting because there are many people under a certain age who have literally never seen this genre before. We’d see that those people for the first five minutes were like, “What the fuck is happening? This is psycho. There’s like, he’s the size of a little girl, and then suddenly he’s a 6’4” Irishman.” They needed their own little mini education of ramping into what a world this even feels like. That yes, something ridiculous and crazy happens, and it bears no repercussions to the reality.

It just snaps right back. We’re still moving forward. Nobody’s acknowledging it. It’s not like this is a magic power that we’re calling back.

Doug: It’ll be interesting to see, too, because those screenings happened really before, like the trailers were coming out. Hopefully the trailers will serve as a little bit of a key and an answer guide to like, “Oh, okay.” Hopefully, there won’t be as much of a learning curve for a certain generation. That’s the hope, but it still might be.

Dan: There’s a silliness that is really doesn’t exist in cinema now, and it’s–

John: Non-animation cinema.

Dan: Yes, non-animation.

John: Last time you were on, you were talking about Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, which ended up turning out great. Because it was animation and sort of half animation, and the world was broken in a way that I think people are used to with animation, and it’s not what we’re used to in a live-action film. We’re used to like, we have heightened things in something like an Edgar Wright movie or in like Dicks or– can’t remember the name of the other, A24 comedy with Ayo Edebiri.

Drew: Bottoms.

John: Bottoms.

Dan: Oh, yes. Bottoms is an amazing movie, but even Bottoms, like those are great ones to talk about because Bottoms is a movie that is light with its reality. It goes away from, like, a strict reality, but it does regularly come back to a take on the genre of high school, like coming-of-age movie. I think Bottoms is so cool because of that.

Doug: I think it’s a cool movie.

Dan: Then what was the other one you just said?

John: Oh, Dicks.

Doug: Oh, Dicks. Oh, yes.

John: Yes, it’s so absurd. You have Nathan Lane spitting lunch meat into his sewer baby’s mouths. It’s like, we’re willing to accept things as being incredibly pushed when it’s just so indie and so strange that sure, but in a big mainstream comedy, we’re just not used to seeing that anymore.

Dan: I think that’s exactly right, that there’s like cartoons keep the silliness alive. It’s in the trailer too. There’s the one shot where Liam is interrogating a bartender and he won’t give him an answer, and he smashes his face against the table, and he pops back up, and his nose has been completely pancaked. Which is just a cartoon joke, fully a Looney Tunes joke. Even just being able to like, “Yes, we’re doing Looney Tunes jokes, but in the real world,” I think people can clue into it soon enough, but it is new.

John: We had Ryan Reynolds on to talk about a third Deadpool, the Deadpool Wolverine movie and the real challenge of finding where the right space is for like within superhero reality, what makes sense and to what degree are you identifying with this person as a real human being underneath that suit or everything is fungible, to what degree is it all just Play-Doh and an ongoing struggle?

Dan: That was a cool movie because there were absolutely elements of spoof in that. There were multiple moments where he is just breaking reality, and nobody else is really allowed to acknowledge that he’s breaking reality. Then we snap back, and it’s just the movie again. It’s just the genre, it’s just the plot. He gets to exist on both sides of in the movie and outside the movie.

John: Yes, but in a broader sense, that’s an example of a mainstream comedy, even though it was inserted in the superhero genre, but we used to do this all the time. We used to have Jim Carrey movies. We used to have big, silly movies.

Doug: Big, over-the-top comedy.

John: They weren’t spoofs, but like, The Cable Guy or Liar Liar, they were all really big and broad.

Doug: Physical and broad and bring people in to laugh out loud and throw their popcorn around. It’s been a long time.

Dan: I know.

Doug: I think that it was great that ushering in of the Apatow comedies, which were great, were so like, you weren’t laughing out loud. You were like, “Oh, that is funny.” Oh, yes. You’re acknowledging that life can be funny, can’t it? It was enjoyable. I loved it.

Dan: There’s an authenticity, and it was a heartfeltness.

John: There were funny people being funny. Even though they weren’t laughing at each other’s jokes, you could tell that they knew that the things that they were saying were funny. Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan’s show, one of the things I really respected about that is they would laugh at the jokes when they were funny.

Dan: They were funny people who would make each other laugh.

Doug: Which is also really hard to do, though.

John: It is hard.

Doug: It’s hard to write characters who are funny and are being cheeky and cute and brilliant.

Dan: Fleabag did it, too, where she was like aware that she was really clever.

Doug: Fleabag broke the fourth wall immediately by looking at camera in the first episode. They pulled it off. There’s something about the British take that leaves you a little bit–

Dan: Also, it takes a next level of balls to not just write a joke, but write a joke that you are telling the audience is funny in this reality. It’s like when you say, “Our band wrote the best song of all time,” You better write a fucking great song now.

Doug: It’s really the, like in Hacks, when she’s a standup comic. She’s supposed to be funny. And the jokes are good. What a swing that is to be like, “Yes, Deborah Vance is a great comedian.”

Dan: Because if those jokes are no good, then the whole reality falls apart. It’s all based on that.

John: It’s good you brought Hacks, because I think that is one of the real challenges facing you trying to do a mainstream comedy is that comedy on television is so good right now, and streaming comedies are so good. You have the shows like Hacks, you have the Successions, which aren’t technically comedies but are written-

Dan: Oh, it’s hilarious.

John: -with comedy genes. I think audiences are used to now, we watch comedy on our screens here and we don’t get to see comedy on big screens.

Doug: I think one of the things that we’re hoping for and banking on, and Paramount is, it’s not our money, is that people want to go back to theaters and laugh in a community and have that experience.

John: The first M3GAN certainly was that experience. It should never have gotten so big but it was so fun to see crazy things.

Dan: Horror to me proves the point which is there are certain emotions that are better experienced in a group because it’s this collective gasp, it’s this collective release of a laugh, and it’s just funnier together. I also think that’s hopefully the point of diving into the action comedy or the action spoof, because we really did work to make this feel like an action movie. Liam Neeson’s real stunt coordinator doing real Liam Neeson stunts, and his whole team had the best time, basically doing the things they would be doing on any Liam Neeson movie.

Doug: Sending up the things that they’ve been doing for the last 10 years for Liam. They were so excited to do it.

Dan: There’s a scope to it that feels cinematic, hopefully, and I think that’s what we’re hoping for. I think we’re hopeful that this is going to be a movie that people are excited to see on a big screen because it feels like a big-screen movie.

John: Back when we were doing Charlie’s Angels talking about action comedy, that was a very successful and very difficult tone to hit which is that we are in an action comedy space and we’re going to be doing the things we’re used to seeing but we’re going to be approaching it with a very different attitude, a very different style. Yes, there are going to be jokes, and yes, it’s going to be silly at times, but not silly that it completely undercuts the stakes of what the movie is and what the heist is that they’re trying to pull off.

Dan: We write a lot of action comedy, just like normal action comedy, and that’s always the thing that you’re really up against, which is like we have to write a real action set piece. We have to write something that is exciting and gripping, but it can’t just be dry action for five pages, right? Then it’s boring also, but they can’t be so out of it that there’s no stakes again, that suddenly the reality is broken. In this one, you get to have the carte blanche to never really have to worry about that. The bank set piece.

John: Let’s talk about that because we can talk about something that we’ve seen in the trailer. Talk us through the bank heist because we’ve seen a bunch of bank heists in movies before.

Dan: It certainly comes straight from The Dark Knight and just that crazy opening of, okay, we’re in the most intense instantly this bank job, and we watch a bunch of different bank job heist action set pieces. Once you get into these, we probably ended up filming five or six more actual fight sequences than we ended up using, because we were like, they’re all pretty modular jokes. The reality is we don’t really need to care about much of the mechanics of like, “How does he get from here to the other side of the bank and how do they stop this guy from entering,” and all the actual mechanics you might have to care about in a real set piece.

We’re just like, “All right, let’s identify the 10 most common tropes within these movies and how do we undercut that?” One of the ones that’s in there is there’s the circular firing squad when you convince two bad guys to accidentally shoot each other because you’re dodging that. We just undercut that with having them take a very obvious dummy, not a human body, by any means, and just like toss it like a rag doll into the middle of 10 bad guys who all are just like, “Okay, I guess we’re shooting at this now,” and they all kill each other.

You’re like, “Okay, great. That was a great way to just functionally get rid of 10 people.”

John: Yes. Treating those moments as comedic moments and believable and plausible within the universe that you’ve created, but they don’t have to pay into higher stakes. We’re not worried about like that bystander over there.

Dan: We just kept watching these sequences where it was like, “Oh, the way that these guys disassemble guns is so ludicrous. It’s so easy.” Then you’re just like, “It’s like they’re treating it like papier mâché,” and then you’re like, “Okay, that’s the joke right there. What’s our run of ways that you can just take apart a gun in the most psychotic way?” We ended up eventually getting it to like, “Is it cake?” [laughter] It suggests to him, they literally made– Yes, that’s in it. He bites the gun, and so they literally made one of the guns out of cake, and he just like ate a bunch of guns on set.

Doug: He ate a ton of chocolate cakes and a ton of chocolate guns. He just ate a lot of them. I think also the important, and Akiva did this so well and stressed this, and we know this is–

John: It was Akiva Schaffer who directed this.

Doug: We wrote with him as well. It was the three of us writing this, and he directed Rescue Rangers, but is setting the world in a very real way too. The beginning of that bank sequence is shot, it should look and feel like Heat and Place Beyond the Pines. It should feel like a tense bank ice until you break the reality. Everyone settles into like, “Oh, I know these tropes.”

John: Yes. Okay, exactly.

Dan: That was really fun for us to also, whenever people see the real movie, like we were like, “How long can we not make a joke?”

Doug: How long can you hold?

Dan: It was just like, okay, we’re in this bank scene, and everyone gets the genre. It’s really intense, and that music is just like piercing your ears and it’s like, how long can we just keep building this tension before we have to pull the plug on it and like reveal that this is a little girl and is actually Frank Drebin in a dress. That’s great.

John: That’s great. The other bank heist that was reminding me– which is another example of like a big comedy that did work was Free Guy. Free Guy also goes back to a heist, but in that heist, you’ve already established that you’re in a video game world. Everything is heightened to some degree. We’re already looking at this bank vault with the expectation, like this is a heightened space that we’re not expecting Heat.

Dan: Right. Again, it’s like rules of the world. That movie is so amazing for rule-building and world-building. It’s, you educate yourself very quickly on like, “Okay, this is a, this is a totally different set of reality.”

Doug: Video game rules. I love Free Guy. I think that the time you get to the bank scene, you’ve been in it for at least 10 or 15 minutes. I think so.

John: He’s woken up in this space. He knows where the reality of this place.

Doug: They can go right into that raw red meat a little faster.

John: Before we leave Naked Gun, I want to talk about Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which I think is a terrific show and is a heightened police show, but doesn’t work on that same scale anymore. It’s like, it’s a comedy without being a spoof and it has to have a groundedness in like, do you believe the characters, like if that physics applies, that the characters cannot Looney Tunes.

Dan: Right. It’s funny. We wrote this movie from the Lonely Island offices. It shares an office with Dan Goor, the creator of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. He would regularly come in and be like, “Oh, what’s that? You guys need any jokes? You got any jokes?”
Drew: Again, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a great–

Doug: Procedural comedy in all the best ways. It’s silly. It pushes the silliness as much as they can.

John: It harkens back to, like a Barney Miller. We have an expectation. It’s the next version of what a police sitcom would be.

Dan: It’s still real cops in the real world, basically.

Doug: It is not Police Squad.

John: No.

Dan: No, it’s not.

John: Great. Let’s move from here and talk about, this is spoof genres, but I want to talk about other genres that used to be valid genres that we just don’t see anymore. We touched a bit on this on episode 400, but it’s been a minute. The reason I’m bringing it up is I feel like sometimes the audience forgets, like with spoof, that it’s even a thing and they forget how to watch them and they forget, they don’t seek them out. In the cases where we’ve been able to make them, I think we don’t even put them in the context of everything that came before them.

What would be like a melodrama? We used to make like Now Voyager or big Douglas Sirk things. They used to be giant programmers.

Dan: Got our Baldoni and Blake Lively.

John: That’s what I’m saying. A counter example is like It Ends With Us was a melodrama in a way that was incredibly successful. Yet no one who saw that movie put it in the context of those movies that came before it.

Dan: No, the vertical stories–

John: I think those are the melodramas now.

Dan: Yes, exactly. I think there’s a truth to a lot of these genres that are undeniable. They went away for whatever market reasons, but people are drawn to this swath of genres forever. I think that people are interested in types of stories. If something hasn’t been around for a while, there’s a good reason to believe that it absolutely is still relevant.

John: I know, it feels like, “Oh, it’s a brand new thing,” but like, it really isn’t. It’s just pulling off of that tradition.

Other examples of melodramas would be Marriage Story, but was it more of a comedy? It still feels like fundamentally a comedy. Spencer, the Diana movie, it plays as a melodrama. Tar, kind of, but it’s just such a bizarre, weird, extravagant thing.

Dan: I don’t know. I wouldn’t put Tar into–

Doug: I don’t know. It feels like such an arthouse, auteur-driven. I don’t know. It’s definitely big in a way that you don’t see a lot–

Dan: I guess to start the conversation the way we started the spoof conversation, like, what does melodrama even mean? How is it different than drama?

John: I think it’s heightened emotions around a domestic issue, around a domestic relationship. I think that’s where it comes down to. It’s a family, it’s a man and a woman, and it’s a soap opera, but a soap opera told in a smaller space.

Dan: We have to go to sex melodramas, the sexy movies.

John: I want to talk about sexual thrillers.

Doug: There was like sexual thrillers, sexual noir, Florida sexual noir.

Dan: Florida sexual noir is its own genre.

Doug: Florida noir is a whole genre.

John: We had Body Heat, we had Jagged Edge, we had Fatal Attraction.

Dan: No, there’s a whole podcast about this.

Doug: Yes. Great.

John: We talked about this and I think when Rachel was on. We also talked about sort of like, we just don’t put sex in movies anymore.

Dan: Did you listen to the You Must Remember This season about this?

John: Oh, that’s right. Karina had a whole–

Dan: It’s spectacular. She analyzes the whole 25-year rise and fall of this whole genre.

John: We’re going to send everyone to Karina Longworth’s podcast about this because I totally forgot about that.

Dan: Amazing. Because again, she talks about how it starts as this very artistic endeavor, where it’s really experimental and there’s simultaneously a whole generation of experimental filmmakers who are like, “When and how will we actually merge pornography with art?”

John: I watched Altered States recently. I was like surprised how much sex and nudity there is. It’s not even a sexy thriller. It’s just like there’s just sex.

Doug: Yes, it’s just what happened, and now it doesn’t. Now we’ll see all kinds of grotesque violence.

Dan: I know.

Doug: Then if you see one sex scene, you’re like, “Did they have to do that?”

John: I think Challengers feel so shocking because, like, oh, they have sex.

Doug: That was– Yes.

John: Yes. It’s PG-13 by comparison.

Doug: I just watched Dead Ringers the other night, which is a totally different thing. Also, it’s like that would be rated X at this point if you put out Dead Ringers for sure.

John: Traditional Westerns. High Noons and Shanes, things that were historically Westerns. Now if we make Westerns, they–

Dan: They’re Star Wars.

John: They’re Star Wars or they’re revisionist Westerns. They’re really Western, but it’s not really Western. It’s the other way around. Power of the Dog is, it’s a Western. It’s set in the West, but it’s not doing Western things.

Dan: Western to me is one of those questions where, like, what is it other than an aesthetic? Is there some more elemental part of what makes that a universal story or an evergreen story that people were so obsessed with it for so long that is still a story that we’d be telling today?

Doug: Look, I’m obsessed with the Westerns. I’ve only been reading Westerns this year. I’m about to finish Lonesome Dove and I’m just like in love with it. I feel like there’s a lone character aspect of like just writing alone and more morally ambiguous that I’m always excited about when I get to see in movies now. It’s far less–

John: A man alone on the frontier. There’s a bunch of things that–

Doug: I think it’s a reason. Besides, Quentin Tarantino is very similar, but he’s making his version of Sergio Leone films. They’re so exciting for those reasons.

John: Sword-and-sandal epics. We used to make them all the time. We know it’s Ben-Hur and Spartacus, but we used to do that. There’s hundreds of them.

Dan: I love the last Gladiator. I had a great time watching that. I thought that was great. I absolutely would watch dozens of those. You know what’s very popular is Jesus stuff.

John: Oh, yes. It’s doing great.

Dan: The Jesus guy, this guy, Jesus, he’s got a real–

Doug: [crosstalk] Jesus show on like Fox International. Some channel that I’ve never heard of is like, “Martin Scorsese presents Jesus, the early years.”

Dan: More people are watching that than anybody is watching anything on HBO.

Doug: For sure. There was the architect movie, the Adrian Brody movie.

John: Oh, yes. Sure.

Doug: That did feel big to me in a way that was amazing that they did it for that amount. It was sprawling in a way that–

John: The sword and sandals turn like the– and the Cleopatra’s. We used to do that kind of thing a lot. Maybe like, some of our superhero movies are doing.

Dan: Would you call Aladdin a sword-and-sandal movie?

John: It’s the sword-and-sandal movie. Yes. A little bit of that. The residuals would say [crosstalk]

Doug: I think about epics like-

John: It’s big scale.

Doug: -big large-scale movies that [crosstalk] that cover large periods of time in a way that just feel big.

John: Big adult drama. English Patient, Out of Africa. Even though it’s going to be a much cheaper, it did feel like part of that universe.

Dan: Man, those are the those are the best.

John: They were great. I loved them.

Dan: That’s, to me, the version of public domain IP that is so valuable of just like these are these are the most recognizable people in history. How are they not interesting?

John: Going back to melodramas or sort of adult dramas, I guess like Celine Song’s, both of her movies feel like that, too. Past Lives or Materialists.

Dan: That’s interesting. Where does it now blend into rom-com or–

John: Yes, exactly. Melodrama is like rom-com, but not like emphasizing the jokes.

Dan: I guess so. Then now we’re back to the indie comedy of it all, which is like it’s a comedy because I said it’s a comedy, but I didn’t laugh once in an hour and a half.

John: On this podcast for the last 12 years, we’ve talked about, oh, the rom-com. The success of Anyone But You broke ground for more big-screen stuff. My hope being is that you can break that ground for spoofs.

Dan: We’re bringing it back, baby.

John: Mid-budget adventure films. We used to make Romancing the Stone, a thing that didn’t have to be like epic titanically.

Dan: This is a depressing podcast, John. [laughter]

Doug: Or IP-driven. Something.

John: The exception of like The Lost City was delightful and funny and did well, but it didn’t open up space for those movies.

Dan: I remember a moment where people were like, people want more movies like that, but it didn’t…

Doug: How much of it is about the finances and how the system being broken, that the bar is so high for what you have to pass to make it worth putting in theater or something, to give a big theatrical release. It feels like so many things just don’t pass the bar. A movie making $110 million that is not IP-based, but they put $100 million into it. That’s not a huge hit anymore. How much does that cost?

John: Everyone’s like, “Oh, we can’t make a musical,” and then like Wicked makes a gazillion dollars. Meanwhile, I was doing the Grease prequel, which felt like obvious, and no one would gamble on the prequel to Grease.

Dan: Yes, it seems like that’s IP.

John: It was the assumption like, we cannot release a studio musical because West Side Story didn’t work, because In the Heights didn’t work.

Dan: I thought then, those were good movies, too.

Doug: They were good movies, too, but they didn’t. [crosstalk] The tags were too high on them, I guess.

John: Yes, and so that becomes the challenge.

Dan: Yes, this is all a budget problem. Movies have gotten so expensive to make and to promote.

Doug: Everyone has this vertical integration of just like, we can put it on our streamer, and it’s cheaper, and it will keep the dollars rolling in. What is the point of doubling our budget and promoting this thing? It’s just–

John: I do wonder whether, like, oh, we could put it on our streamer. There’s some lessons to be learned in terms of like Lilo and Stitch. The live-action Lilo and Stitch was made for the streamer and then made a gazillion dollars in theaters, which is great.

Doug: Will still destroy on Disney+.

John: Yes, 100%.

Doug: Didn’t take away from it all. If anything, it boosts Disney+.

John: Moana 2 was also made for streaming.

Dan: They’re just like, why would we waste it on streaming when we could make a billion dollars?

Doug: It was supposed to be a TV show, too, first of all.

John: That’s what it was, yes. I was looking at my Aladdin participation statement recently, and so–

Dan: Let’s talk about numbers.

Doug: I would love to open up that WGA. Look at those.

John: The residuals are good. I post the residuals for that frequently because it’s a really good comparison between that and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, because they’re both big four-quadrant family movies that made about the same amount in the Box Office. The residuals on Aladdin are lower, but they’re not dramatically lower. The categories in which it makes the money are a lot different because it’s not about DVD sales. It’s about streaming and other things.

The gains that the Guild has made over the last couple of negotiations in terms of new media residuals, they’re making up the difference in a very comparable movie, which is great. The participation statement I get for Aladdin is different because they have net points that will never actually pay off. You look at the theatrical money that Aladdin’s brought in, those are what’s considered film rentals. This is a little bit wonky, but basically, when you see Box Office, that is the money that’s going into the theaters.

Rentals is what actually comes back to the studio. Rentals for domestic theatrical distribution and international theatrical distribution are still a huge number on a movie like that. While you talk about, oh, all the ancillary money is great, the hundreds of millions of dollars you bring in that initial launch is great.

Dan: Oh my God. It’s enormous.

John: To give that up for streaming is so–

Dan: No writers are arguing with you.

Doug: Maverick was so huge for that reason, too. I think it proved that people will come to Paramount Plus, who could be more coming to it. No, we’re with you. I’m still shocked to this day. We’re still here. Until Naked Gun is in the theater on August 1st and I see it there, I still won’t believe it’s going to be in the theaters. I was like, they can pull it at any time. They can just decide that they’re going to be like–

Dan: Today was the day that CBS settled with Donald Trump.

John: As we’re recording this.

Doug: How did we not lead with that? Come on, the news.

John: The news.

Doug: One of the greatest screenwriters of all time, Donald Trump.

Dan: Yes, he was a Broadway producer briefly. [crosstalk]

Doug: [laughs] The Producers is about him.

Dan: I know. Anyway, there were multiple moments where we were just horrified that somehow Donald Trump was going to destroy the movie.

John: Just stop the release of this thing.

Dan: We were afraid–

Doug: Or just the regular wheels in motion of Hollywood being like, “You know that? We’re not going to put that much money into–“

Dan: Again, if Donald Trump stopped the merger, then suddenly Paramount’s entire business model falls apart, and there’s no guarantees anymore. You just don’t know. It’s such a scary world to live in.

John: I want to acknowledge how dumb it is that we’re in a world where the president decided to do something could have an impact not just on the quality of the planet, but also just really mundane, anodyne business that we’re working in. It’s so dumb.

Doug: Could affect whether or not I can send my daughter to college if it goes into theater.

Dan: Yes, she’s not going to college if this movie doesn’t open.

Doug: If this just goes right to Paramount+ she’s staying home.

John: Obviously, all in context are like many bigger problems in the world. It’s just it’s absurd that such small petty things are happening.

All right, let’s get to some listener questions. We have one here from Frank.

Drew: I have a movie coming out this fall in theaters, hooray. Not a huge release, but 4 to 500 screens, and it’s my first produced work. Congratulations, Frank.

Doug: Ooh, congrats.

Drew: Should I hire a publicist? What could or should I expect from that publicist? Part of me feels like the publicist is just for my ego, and I’m basically paying to go on a few podcasts, but is there more to that I’m not aware of? Obviously, I want to be a smart caretaker of my career, so maybe there’s no reason not to hire one. You never know what could come of it, that sort of thing.

Dan: John, I’m going to let you start. We’re more in the listener’s category than–

Doug: This is our second studio release.

John: You have a movie coming out in two months. Do you have a publicist? Did you hire a publicist?

Dan: Yes, we did.

John: Your own publicist.

Dan: Daryl Borquez, Apex Talent. Perhaps the listener would like to get in touch.

John: Talk to us about the decision to do this on this movie.

Doug: Yes.

John: What is this publicist doing for you individually?

Doug: We had multiple conversations with our reps about this, with other writers, with writers’ directors, with actors. I think what we found, and you can correct me, Dan, if I’m wrong, but as a writer of a film, we felt and we’ve seen that writers can be pushed to the side a bit when it comes to releases. Actors first, actors and actresses, stars, directors right up there, and then–

Dan: The caterer-

Doug: Yes.

Dan: -and the grip.

Doug: The writers get the dregs. Our fear was we wouldn’t even get the dregs of the runoff if we didn’t have a publicist reaching out to Paramount or Disney and saying, “Hey, Dan and Doug would like to have some interviews and be on the red carpet and answer questions.” That it’s very easy to be forgotten as a writer, especially if you’re not one of the few really famous writers. Even then, that might have been your experience. Our idea was that it’s like, this is our moment. I think he’s right to say that you do get out there. I think it does matter and it is helpful to be in articles, be on Deadline or be in Variety.

It makes the town know your name a little bit more. It does feel good. It’s definitely an ego thing. My fear would be without it is that we would be just hustling ourselves to try to get all these things.

Dan: John, you’re nice enough to put us on your podcast regardless.

Doug: It would probably stop at John-

Dan: Yes.

Doug: -and coming on and the day of the release. We did it for Rescue Rangers and we had a full press day.

Dan: This was such a deep in COVID movie that was pretty great because we were like, we really were not going to go anywhere per se.

Doug: We just did a Zoom day of 10 to 15 interviews and that stuff is out there and it felt like it got our names out there. That felt like money well spent.

John: Let’s talk about the money. My assumption is this is based on, I haven’t brought on a publicist for a couple of years, but it’s a couple thousand a month and you do it for the month.

Doug: We’re doing it for two months.

Dan: We’re doing it two months.

John: Two months is what it is.

Dan: Yes, the two month lead up and then once the movie comes out, then a little bit more depending.

Doug: You’ve got to go feel it out.

John: It’s different if you’re in like the awards season contention and like, I love you guys, but you don’t need to worry about that.

Doug: How dare you?

John: For things where I did need to do that, like for Big Fish, it was incredibly valuable having a person on my team who’s just helping to navigate all this stuff. Honestly, the studio publicists weren’t upset that Bibi was around. They’re like, “Oh my God, there’s a person who can coordinate and wrangle all that stuff it’s really good.”

Doug: One less thing for them to do.

John: Absolutely, so it’s good.

Dan: I think, again, it’s an expense for sure. I just don’t think it’s an expense you’ll regret. Don’t hold onto them forever because then you’ll feel crazy.

Doug: I also think get someone who, and this was something that our agent said, and they’re right, and it’s why we like Darryl, is that Darryl was actually excited about Rescue Rangers and excited about Naked Gun. I think it goes with like any other relationship. Do they want to be in the relationship or are they just like, they’re going to do this, they’re collecting a check, it is a business, but are they excited about the project? Do they believe that they can do things? Ask before you sign. What do you anticipate being able to get me on this? What’s realistic for a first-time writer, director?

It was just a writer, I believe, he didn’t direct. Yes, what is realistic for me? Then you can like say, “Is that worth it?” They’ll say, “Maybe we’ll get you like four or five podcasts and I think I can get you a Variety article.” You can be like, “I think that’s worth it.”

John: Yes, your agent and your manager will have recommendations for this situation. There are people who are a little bit more cued into big studio releases versus Sundance, which is its own specific beast. It’d be great if you’re going to a festival, it’s good if you have somebody who does that, but also they can’t be repping 10 different clients there or else it’s just not going to work. You have to recognize.

Dan: I would say that festival space is probably even more valuable, to be totally honest, because that’s more of a wild west and what you get out of it is really an unknown.

John: You don’t know how to do it and you need somebody who knows how.

Doug: You can get really swallowed up in a festival if you don’t have the right person guiding you, leading the way.

Dan: Yes, the studio system is this giant behemoth that you’re just trying to ride the coattails on.

Doug: Festivals are really star-driven. If you’re there and you’re the writer, no one is trying to get you into the gifting suite.

John: Yes. Next question from Nicole.

Drew: “Having struggled through many scripts, I found my biggest problem is creating a plot that’s way too complicated and then not knowing how to cut through the Gordian Knot I created in a rewrite. I find myself bogged down in logic questions whose answers only add more complications and any fix that makes substantial changes to the script makes me worried I’m veering too far from what the actual story is. I’d love any tips for writers like me.”

John: Yes, we’ve all been there. It’s often a second draft problem. Second drafts are generally worse than the first drafts because they fix the problems of the first draft but add a whole bunch of new complications and garbage too. My general advice, Nicole, is you have to look at taking away the questions, taking away the things that are gunking stuff up and so rather than try to answer questions that come up, just make sure that the audience and the reader is never asking the question. That it’s streamlined in a way that people aren’t getting hung up on a thing because it was just never there.

Dan: I find that this question is, the best way that I answer this question is thinking about the edit. Every time you’re in the edit, you’re consistently looking to cut, to slim, to move faster.

John: When you’re looking at the edit of the actual finished film, yes.

Dan: Of the actual finished film. Yes.

Doug: Trying to picture it in your mind’s eye though.

Dan: Try to picture sitting in that edit, editing the movie and being able to ask yourself, is this a thing that I’m going to want to sit in?

You regularly start realizing, this is repetitive. Man, the amount of times that you have repeated things that the audience knows or basically knows and if you just let them figure out the last 10%, 20% of their information, they’d be fine. That you don’t need to handle them at every turn. You don’t need to repeat the information, reiterate it as many times.

I find that the exercise of imagining being in the edit is the thing how I always get through that problem of what’s not really necessary. What am I going to feel burdened by when I’m sitting there? I’m like, “Oh, I can’t believe we have to like get through this scene so that we can get to the things that are actually fun.”

Doug: Yes, I think that’s great. I think also the over-explanation usually does happen in the second draft when you’re getting notes from studios and stuff because they really want to hear it so sometimes you have to put it in there just to take it out later.

Dan: I always feel like I want the script and then I want the explainer side thing that’s for the reader who wants to be really handheld where it’s like, this is what the movie’s going to be. If you’re wondering what they’re thinking when they have that concerned look, it’s this two pages of backstory.

John: Yes, little footnotes, yes.

Doug: I would also just try to go back to the emotional arc too, which being like, that’s what we care about in movies. We care about the human stories, I think. What are we following there? Then what parts of the plot are you, like Dan said, going to be, I don’t really need to know this.

A lot of times I think always helps to just go back and watch the movies you love and see how in so many ways, some of the best movies are just very clean and bare bones and you’re just feeling emotions. I’ve been going on Script Slug a lot now too and reading scripts of movies that I love after seeing them, and I find that to be incredibly helpful to just to see ways people are just, how thin certain things are in really great ways and being like, this is one sentence.

I’m reading The Departed right now. 15, 20 pages every day, I’m just like looking at it and it’s wonderful. It’s wonderful, but there’s very little handholding in it and I’m shocked by it. It’s such a joy to read because I’m like, “Yes, I know what’s happening here. I understand.” I think giving your reader some benefit of the doubt, it can be helpful.

Dan: I always find that projects confidence in the writing-

Doug: Agreed.

Dan: -that is more enticing anyway and the writer is writing in a way that is making me lean in a little more and
ask questions, think about it, as opposed to, there’s nothing less enjoyable on the page than long blocks of contemporary text.

Doug: Blocks of scene direction. You want to fly, and it doesn’t mean people don’t like reading, it just, but you want to feel, there’s something that actually that Akiva talked a lot about too when we were writing. It’s like, when you start reading this film, and we did it for Rescue Rangers and for this, and it might not be for everything. He’s like, “When is the moment where you feel like, I’m in good hands, and I’m watching a movie, I’m in a movie?” It’s amazing once he pointed that out there, because we would then read a draft and be like, “Yes, it’s not until page 13 where I feel like I’m in the movie.” What are we doing wrong?

John: How to reset it?

Doug: Where are the roadblocks, what are the things, where are the traffic jams that are getting in the way of this feeling like, I’m in. I’m in this movie.

John: Over the weekend, I was talking to a friend who’s in the edit room on a movie, and he’s saying, “Oh, but the producers want to cut this scene,” and he was describing what happens in the scene. He’s like, “I guess if we cut it, the audience can figure out that this and this, and they wouldn’t know about this until later on, but does it matter?” Like, you have to cut that scene. I’m just like, “I’m sorry to agree with your producers, but —

Dan: I’m literally in my bed right now, and I’m curled up in a ball.

John: Yes, because it’s just like, if that scene could be cut, you have to cut that scene.

Doug: If it can’t be cut, and it’s not important, you got to go cut it. Just, and also, and it’s what’s really hard, is just trust that those words and those ideas will come back.

John: Yes.

Doug: I think that’s also something that people get caught in, is being like, “But I love this scene, but I love this one detail of the scene.” The thing I noticed about writing over the years is that things never die. The scene that you’re cutting in this movie that just is not working for whatever reason that you love will find its way into another screenplay, television show, a pitch. They’re there, they’re not dead. They’re very much alive.

John: All right, let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is, a preview of something that’s hopefully coming, but it’s also a good cautionary tale of why headlines can be misleading. BBC Science Foundation had this headline this week, Breakthrough Cholesterol Treatment Can Cut Cholesterol Levels by 69% After One dose. That seems great, because I take statins for high cholesterol, my whole family does. In this article, it says, high levels of LDL cholesterol increase the risk of this buildup, which is why millions of people, over 40 million in the US, take daily medications like statins to keep their cholesterol levels under control.

They’re like, “Well, that’s going to be great. That’ll be a huge breakthrough.” I’m excited for that. Then I found a different article about the same thing, and it’s actually, this drug is targeting something very specific that only certain people are having. Lipoprotein A is a type of cholesterol that lurks in the body, undetected by routine tests, and undeterred by existing drugs, diet, or exercise. There are people who have familial conditions where it’s really bad. This could be a great thing for them, but it’s not necessarily going to affect.

Dan: Not a medical revolution.

John: Yes, the three of us around the table here, it may not actually be the thing that does this. It’s both good news, but it’s also like, oh, it’s just a bad headline.

Dan: This is more of a one cautionary thing.

John: Yes, a one cautionary thing. It’s still cool that this thing exists, but it may not actually–

Doug: Consult your doctor and find out, what elaborate testing do you need to do to find out if you’re a candidate for this?

John: I think we’re going to quickly reach the edge of my knowledge and then people are going to write in. Basically, when we get our normal cholesterol tests, they’re testing for LDL, HDL, total cholesterol, but there’s actually a different thing, ApoA and ApoB, that they probably should be testing for, which are the actual things that tend to cause the clumping and the problems of why bad cholesterol is bad. This targets one of them in a very specific way.

Dan: I hope that you live a long and healthy life.

John: I hope we all live long and healthy lives, yes. I feel like, it seems like most people I know are on statins because–

Dan: Are you on a statin, Doug?

Doug: I’m on a statin and I give myself a shot every two weeks of something called Repatha, which is because heart disease runs in my family and it’s my biggest fear. It’s having a heart attack. Yes. There’s a lot of especially health, real health fanatics who are against statins and have–

John: And there are side effects of some people have muscle loss and things like that but–

Dan: Doug’s fucking strong.

Doug: Wait till you hear my one.

John: I’ve actually had twice the scans where they pump in the radioactive stuff so they can just see where the plaques are. It’s like, there are plaques, but they haven’t actually grown very much in 15 years, which is great news.

Doug: I think statins are saving lives in that way. I don’t think that’s undeniable. Maybe there’s some side effects. You’re, can I-

John: No, yes, Doug, I’ll cue you up.

Doug: -because I was worried about bringing this one in anyway, because it feels so lowbrow and silly. Now it feels even, it is on the opposite spectrum.

John: Ooh, I can’t wait.

Doug: I am very fearful of heart attacks and I’m also very vain. This last year I’ve been going to the gym consistently and trying to eat right and change my relationship with food. It’s started to happen slowly and I’ve approached it differently and I’ve never been this consistent. I would never promote Instagram and social media in a way because I do think it’s terrible. However, the algorithm knows that I’m doing this and I’ve been fed a lot of protein, what I call protein bros. Who are just like, “You got to eat like this. You can have a burger, but have my burger.”

John: You’re supposed to be eating a gram of protein per–

Doug: Per pound, they said.

John: Which is just so much–

Doug: I started tracking my macros, but I will say this. I found people on Instagram who are showing me recipes that I am making. I’m not just scrolling and I love it.

John: That’s great.

Doug: I found someone named Calvin Kang. He’s one of them. He’s a Korean American who has amazing high protein, lower fat Korean dishes. He has all kinds of dishes, but he has Korean chicken and he has kimchi, pancakes, and all this stuff that is delicious. I would just say, if you’re getting served all these things, you don’t have to go to Calvin’s page, but you’re looking at this all night, might as well get something out of it. This is the one positive thing that’s come out of Instagram for me, that and kids drumming videos. I love it. I’m starting to eat food that I’m like, “This tastes good.” It’s scratching the itch of eating crap. That’s what I’m doing.

John: That’s awesome. The Instagram algorithm has started feeding me just this week, a guy who– multiple people, but one guy in particular who will go through men’s Tinder and Hinge profiles like, “This is why you’re not matching.” Basically, just go out and talk to their photos like, “This one, you look like a psycho killer. This one, this one, this is your mom’s bathroom.”

Dan: I love this.

John: It’s just, it’s so savage, but it’s so necessary.

Dan: Oh, I love that. There’s a feature on your Instagram that lets you reset your algorithms back to zero. I was like, oh, my thing is just, I don’t even know what it is. I got to reset. I got to go back to square one. The problem is that the first thing you click on, Instagram is like, you fucking love this thing. I made the terrible mistake to click on a pimple popping video. Truly within two weeks, I was getting Third World, like abscess videos. I was getting a lot of cleft palate stuff. It just keeps jamming that thing deeper and deeper.

Doug: Now you’re wishing you had that old algorithm.

Dan: I know. I was like,

DougI miss the days of those burgers getting served to you-

Dan: I know. I know.

Doug: -and dogs that are friends with bears. That’s really.

John: Mine is rescue dogs in shirtless men. That’s what I–

Dan: That’s pretty much you. I love it.

Doug: Having a non-toxic like algorithm is wonderful. My algorithm next to my wife’s, she’s looking at awful things that make her upset. I’m watching protein bros, kids drumming.

John: Yes.

Doug: Maybe like nice, like golf courses maybe sometimes and it’s wonderful.

John: That’s great. Dan, what you got?

Dan: This is my one cool thing. I’m such a curmudgeon. I’m always like looking to really yuck people’s yum. Obviously, a couple of years ago, there was this big report about aliens came out from the government. I’m a real skeptic son of a bitch. The government was basically saying aliens are maybe real. Everyone was like, “What are we doing? Let’s talk about aliens.”

Basically, the Wall Street Journal just did a long deep dive into that report and what was actually going on beneath it, which is that most of these UFO stories are actual disinformation from the military itself who are trying to actively get our enemies to think it’s aliens and not our own weaponry.

My favorite detail within this story though, which is absolutely something that could be on one of How’s This a Movie segment for your show, is that for 50 years, there has been a hazing prank that they have done to new recruits in the CIA where they will bring someone into a secret room and they will give them pictures of UFOs, doctored fake pictures of UFOs, and basically say, “If you tell anyone about this, we’ll make you–“

John: Incredible.

Dan: There’s this generation of military and CIA operatives that have basically been hazed to think that this is real. There’s an immeasurable amount of veterans who have actively been tricked to not talk about it, but of course, some have talked about it. When you see these people, unfortunately on documentaries or all this stuff, they’ve been gas lit into these things.

Doug: It’s very real to them.

Dan: Yes. Anyway, aliens are still not real. I’m sorry.

John: Oh, I’m sorry.

Dan: Yes, I’m sorry to everyone.

Doug: I like you more when you were watching Pimple Popper movies.

John: We were talking about, you’re reading a bunch of scripts. Doug, Drew, what do you have in Weekend Read? Because you’ve been putting up a new collection.

Drew: Yes, we do. I’m sure you guys use Weekend Read all the time.

Dan: I do, and I have complaint.

John: All right. Tell us your complaint.

Doug: Here’s the curmudgeon.

Dan: There you go. I love the app. Use it all the time. Doesn’t work in my car. Can’t get it to work.

Drew: Sorry. I’m so sorry. This week, we’re doing sports comedies. We have A League of Their Own, Bull Durham, Caddyshack, Cool Runnings, Dodgeball, Glow, I, Tonya, Talladega Nights, The Sandlot, Tim Cup, and The Bad News Bears.

Dan: Yes. I love this. Doug and I wrote the reboot of Rookie of the Year that’s currently collecting dust in between the cracks of the Disney and Fox merger.

John: I was going to say, there aren’t a lot of recent ones in that list, and it’s a genre we’re not doing much.

Dan: Yes. There’s some boxing movies coming out now.

Drew: Oh, yes.

Doug: That’s comedy?

Dan: No, comedy–

Doug: I feel like Jay Baruchel made a hockey movie called Goon that people really liked. It just sticks out to me because I was like, “Oh, it’s a sports comedy.” That could be five years at this point.

Drew: I think it’s 10 years at this point.

Doug: Oh, my gosh.

Drew: Yes.

Doug: What is time?

John: What is time?

Dan: Sports movies, sports comedies are the genre that I most, I like sports movies more than I like sports. I think they’re the fucking best.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ryan Gerberding. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You will find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes. Have you looked at the videos on our YouTube now? That is something you actually will enjoy.

Doug: Oh, are we being recorded right now?

John: You’ll find t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about. In the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You also get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Gen Z and how they haven’t seen these movies. People who are premium subscribers can go back and listen to your previous episode.

Dan: Great. Please do.

John: Several episodes where your wife, Rachel Bloom, has joined us here.

Dan: Of course, my fake godmother, Aline Brosh McKenna.

John: Yes. Aline Brosh McKenna, an icon of the very start of Scriptnotes. Doug and Dan, thank you so much for joining us.

Doug: Thank you for having us.

Dan: Thank you.

John: Take care.

[Bonus Segment]

John: I was Googling this and I came across a series of articles that were talking about a study, but I can’t find the actual study. It was a press release that a bunch of British newspapers ran. Basically saying that Gen Z hasn’t seen these movies and maybe that’s a crisis. The first one on this list was Airplane, which I want to talk to you about. It’s an iconic spoof movie. I remember showing it to our daughter and she’s like, it was so funny. It’s also just so weird for a kid who has never experienced anything like it.

Dan: It’s funny because I feel like I’ve watched some TikTok channels now that probably unintentionally take this aesthetic of weird, just sort of weird, nonsensical, non sequitur comedy that is very much of a piece with the deep silliness of those old Zucker Brothers movies. It’s really talking about the cartoons that they all grew up on that, I think about Adventure Time and all the Adult Swim stuff are so weird. I do think that they are more primed for this than we give them credit for.

John: Yes. Again, they haven’t seen it in live action. There’s things that are new to them. The top 10 things that were listed on this study, Airplane, Vertigo, Night of the Hunter. Good but also, I don’t think it’s iconic. If you haven’t seen it, it’s hard to understand things. Casino is a really good movie.

Doug: Oh my gosh. Gen Z hasn’t seen?

John: Gen Z hasn’t seen Casino, Citizen Kane, Casablanca.

Dan: Wait.

John: A lot of people haven’t seen Casablanca.

Doug: I’m sorry, but this is more than The Godfather or more than–

Dan: There are other greats that they have seen?

John To whatever degree we can trust in this study, they’d be more familiar with The Godfather, but they wouldn’t have seen Casino. They wouldn’t have seen Moulin Rouge, which feels like an important– You certainly need to understand that aesthetic.

Dan: That’s very Y2K. I feel like that’s something that would be really in vogue right now, actually.

John: Blues Brothers, also on the list. I haven’t come back to watch Blues Brothers.

Dan: I have. I’ll be honest. That whole era of the ‘70s, ‘80s, coke-fueled, Belushi, Chase, Aykroyd.

Doug: It’s not my favorite either.

Dan: It doesn’t hold up honestly, a lot of it. Some of those are really great moments, but there’s a lot of stuff that feels very masturbatory.

John: Gone with the Wind. Sure. Do you need it?

Dan: I also think that’s a movie that probably lost a lot of its ability to break through because it’s just so fucking racist.

Doug: Yes.

Dan: You get a lot of credit on being on AFI 100, and it’s one of the greats. It is an impressive piece of cinema.

Doug: How do you find, do you need to watch this or not? It’s also–

John: Craig and I, in bonus segment from last week, Craig and I were also talking about this but in terms of the New York Times 100.

Doug: Yes, seen that everywhere.

John: That one is like, well, I feel like if you’re working in this industry, most of those movies you should probably see because they’re in the conversation all the time in ways that–

Dan: Gone with the Wind is not.

John: Gone with the Wind is not, Blues Brothers is not.

Dan: No, it’s not. It’s, again, interesting how would you define what that genre even is and how is it replicable today?

Doug: Why is it important? Again, if you’re in the industry, that’s a different conversation. To me, Casino, which is one of my favorite movies, if these Gen Z has seen Goodfellas, then they’ve seen the Scorsese aesthetic, they’ve seen the Stones, they’ve seen the scene where the Stones are playing and De Niro and Pesci are doing– before they became characters themselves, then it’s okay. You don’t have to see Casino.

John: That’s my argument for Airplane or one of the other great spoof movies. I think it’s important to see it just so you actually have a sense of what that is as a thing. If you didn’t see all of them–

Doug: Or Naked Gun, I think.

John: Or Naked Gun. Yes. Top Secret, I also love.

Dan: I love Top Secret. We watch that a lot.

Doug: Top Secret is really cool. Not as accessible to people, I feel.

Dan: No, because also they’re a little more-

Doug: It’s a little experimental.

Dan: It’s more experimental, which is really cool, but it’s also more blanketing different genres. It is less-

Doug: Focused on-

Dan: -fidelity to a genre. They hop around genres more in that. It breaks some of the rules that I think we are all talking about.

Dan: What are the other movies? Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off.

John: The Shining.

Doug: Ooh, yes.

John: I feel like The Shining is a really important one. It seems like really high elevated horror. I don’t think you really get the origin of Ari Aster or some of the other really high end horror directors unless you’ve seen The Shining and what that can do.

Dan: The point of this is that we don’t like Gen Z.

John: We don’t like Gen Z. Here’s the thing–

Doug: They’re just big dum dums.

John: Yes.

Dan: The whole era of people.

John: Going back to what we talked about in terms of spoof, it’s like if you’re not aware of this genre of movies, if you have no exposure to it at all, it’s very hard for you to get to your first one. It’s like, yes. If they’re not seeing it and they’re the people making the next batch of movies, those whole genres could go away or the number gets reincorporated into the culture.

Doug: Yes.

John: ET. It’s like-

Dan: Really?

John: Yes.

Dan: That’s shocking to me.

John: My daughter never saw ET. Has your kid seen ET yet?

Dan: No. It’s too scary for her. She’s only five.

John: All right. She’s little. Has she seen The Sixth Sense?

Dan: Yes. Of course.

John: That’s an important one. Everyone has to see The Sixth Sense.

Doug: Yes. Totally. You want Hayley Joel Osment’s career, kid. Yes.

Dan: She did not see The Twist coming. She’s a dum-dum too.

Doug: A big old dum-dum.

John: I don’t know. I think there’s, to me, there’s a good argument to be made for making the list of here are iconic things in each of these little genres, and just so you have a sense of what that actually is. Even if you’re not sort of going into film and television, a sense of what the broad culture is, the same way that you have as you’re reading books and going through the genres of reading stuff in school, you just need a sense of what is out there, because otherwise there’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s cut off to you. If you really respond to Airplane, and then you’re just like, “I love this” or “Here are all the things that are like this,” but until you have that one that lets that it exists.

Doug: I think that’s the biggest thing, is that if you love movies, then it just makes movies richer. This will be the second time I brought this up, but I love Tarantino. I had never seen any Sergio Leone. Once I started watching it, I was like, “Oh, this is wonderful.” I was like, “Oh, that shot is just straight up from Django.” That’s what he took from Django, and he’s made that. It makes me enjoy his movies more, and it opened up my world to Westerns in a way that it hadn’t been.

It was just a great discovery, and a language in films that I didn’t know before. I just think it’s like, I’m not going to tell a bunch of kids to watch these things, it’s just important, but if you love movies, it’s going to make you love them even more, and be like, “Oh, that’s where that came from.” Also, it’s really cool to discover, “Oh, that’s what makes Jack–“ I think about The Shining, I’m like, if you haven’t seen that, what do you know Jack Nicklaus from, and if it’s just The Departed-

John: From golfing.

Doug: Yes, Jack Nicklaus, what a performer on the 18th green, no, but Jack Nicholson, I’m sorry, then what do you know him from, and then you’re like, “Oh, I get it.” I remember seeing Deer Hunter for the first time, and being like, that’s Christopher Walken? This is not the Christopher Walken I know now with the SNL sketches and his voice, and this is before the parody.

John: Yes, I definitely want to come to the point where it’s not just like, “Oh, as a Gen X-er, these are things I loved as a kid, so therefore you should love them.” That’s useless for everybody. There’s some way to be, not prescriptive, but to invite people into these different phases.

Doug: Oh, you like that, you might like this. It’s the same thing about music, too, you don’t want to be like, “Oh, you got to go listen to this music, because you’re a dum-dum if you don’t listen to it.” It’s like, “Oh, you like this? You should listen to this.”

Dan: Yes, if you like Haim, you’re going to like Fleetwood Mac.

Doug: Yes, exactly. You should listen to James Brown, because you’re listening to Bruno Mars right now, or whatever, check it out.

John: My husband will point out that, when I’ve referenced something that I liked, a band I liked in the ‘80s or ‘90s to my daughter, that’s like me, if my parents were recommending somebody that they liked in the ‘30s or ‘40s. Yes, it’s crazy how much time has actually happened.

Dan: It’s horrifying. It’s very scary.

John: We have this expectation like, “Oh, you should understand the history of rock music.” It’s just an extra 50 years between, and that means the stuff that–

Dan: I’m sure you feel this all the time, there’s stuff when you’re like, “Well, this is pretty new.” You’re like, “No, it’s not.”

Doug: It’s really not new at all.

John: No.

Doug: Very old. It’s so old.

John: I know. Everything is so old, and so are we.

Doug: Immediately, yes, that’s just what it is.

Dan: I’m dying.

John: Congrats again on the movie, boys.

Dan: Thank you.

Doug: Thank you for coming back on the podcast.

Dan: Yes, thanks for having us. This is the best.

Links:

• The Naked Gun in theaters August 1st!
• Dan Gregor and Doug Mand
• Doug and Dan’s last time on the show, Episode 548: Made for Streamers
• Bottoms and Dicks: The Musical
• Melodramas: Now, Voyager, It Ends with Us, Spencer
• Sexual thrillers: Body Heat, Jagged Edge, (Bonus: Altered States, Dead Ringers)
• You Must Remember Thins: Erotic 80s
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
• Adult Romantic Dramas: The English Patient, Out of Africa, Past Lives, Materialists
• Mid-Budget Adventure Films: Romancing the Stone, The Lost City
• John’s Aladdin residuals
• Breakthrough cholesterol treatment can cut levels by 69% after one dose by Hatty Willmoth for BBC Science Focus
• One dose of experimental drug nearly wipes out stealthy cholesterol in ‘remarkable’ trial by Erika Edwards for NBC News
• The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology by Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha for WSJ
• Calvin Kang on Ingstagram
• Weekend Read 2
• Top movies that Gen Z have never watched revealed – including Oscar-winning classics from The Sun UK
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Ryan Gerberding (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt 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: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: [singing] My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 693 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you introduce an idea to the audience? We’ll discuss setups that don’t feel like setups and, most importantly, make your audience feel smart. First, we have a lot of follow-up from listeners, some actual news, and some listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, I want to discuss The New York Times feature on the top 100 movies of the century so far.

Craig: Oh good, a list. Yay.

John: A list, but also there’s the meta around the list. I think it’s, actually, probably more interesting than the list itself.

Craig: Okay, I’m up for that.

John: You get to see different filmmakers and actors give their top 10 list, which is a performative, revealing kind of thing.

Craig: [laughs]

John: I want to discuss that. We’ll keep that as a special feature for our bonus, people who get to hear our unfiltered takes on these lists.

Craig: Where did Scary Movie 3 land?

John: It tops out on so many lists. It’s crazy.

Craig: It should be in there. Should be top seven.

John: Yes. Spoiler, I have no movies in the official big 100 list.

Craig: Well, I’m going to go ahead and presume I don’t either. [chuckles]

John: You don’t, you don’t. Perhaps we can make some more movies with all the new California tax credit money coming.

News this week that California legislators have voted to more than double the state’s film and television tax credit program and raising the cap to $750 million from $330 million. Basically, a proposed 35% tax credit, which is up from 25%. Most importantly, there’s more money available there to be spending on productions that are shot and posted here in California.

Craig: Yes. Let’s look at this as good news, bad news. Good news, more.

John: More.

Craig: Certainly, double sounds like a lot. Bad news, it is not a lot. It is still not what I would call a competitive program with basically anywhere else where Hollywood goes. Comparing it to the tax credit programs in Canada or Georgia, New Mexico, Louisiana, even New York, UK, it’s just not competitive with those, but it is less non-competitive than it used to be, right? It’s a good trend.

The hope is that the government can watch this work and go, “Hey, we’re not losing money on this. This isn’t a disaster. In fact, we could afford to be more aggressive later.” If this begins a trend, that’s great. The other interesting factor for this legislation, I believe, is that it limits the tax credit to a certain budget. A show can’t come in that costs $300 million and gobble up $300 million at this thing.

John: How these tax credits are structured is there are certain categories and budget levels of which the funds are tiered towards. Smaller movies and very small movies can get smaller amounts, but you’re right that one thing can’t take up all the money.

Craig: Right, which sounds good, but here’s the bad news part. The bad news part is that large productions tend to push way more into the economy, and they provide much more stability. For instance, if you have a show like, let’s say, Fallout, Fallout’s a big show. They spend a lot of money. They also take a lot of time to shoot. There will be more stability, more employees for a longer amount of time.

Those shows tend to also have multiple seasons, which means there is some ability for crew to say, “Hey, I now have a life where I work on this show, which will work steadily for the next X amount of years.” If the tax credit is chopped up among a lot of one shot things, you lose that sense of stability, because the point of this all is, “Hey, how do we provide a living to people, an actual manageable living?”

John: Well, it’s important to note that these tax credits are about jobs. They’re specifically about reimbursing money spent on people’s employment, people’s salaries for the work that they’re doing. That’s what you’re trying to base it on. Your point is well-taken that you’re spending a lot more of those on these big productions. That goes on longer. That has a bigger effect. I just say, the counterpoint is that by spreading around to smaller productions, too, you’re enabling a wider number of people to get these things. You may be able to incentivize production in places that don’t otherwise get it that aren’t big production hubs. There’s reasons also to be providing tax credits for smaller things.

Craig: Absolutely. Everything’s a choice. When you are dealing with scarcity, you have to make a choice. These other places that I mentioned don’t really have much in the way of scarcity. They don’t really have effective caps like this. If you want to make a small movie in Alberta or if you want to make a large television show in Alberta, you’re both getting it. You’re both getting the benefit of this.

For California, the calculus is we’d like to hire more individual people as opposed to hiring fewer individual people more consistently. That’s the trade-off you have when you aren’t going for large– Large television productions will pump the most money into a system in the most reliable and lengthy way. We don’t have that yet, but I think this is a good sign that something is happening.

If we can hopefully prove that this isn’t some sort of problem and people can get over the fact that the tax credits go right back to these massive corporations, then perhaps California will start to edge its way towards competitive because California has an inherent edge, which is this is where people live. There are costs associated with shooting elsewhere. A promising thing, this is not ideal, but we don’t need ideal right now. We just needed something.

John: Absolutely. The other factor is that with this kind of tax credit, actors and directors and producers and other folks involved in the movie can say, “No, no, I want to shoot in California,” and there’s math that can actually make it more sense to shoot in California. It ultimately come down to more individual decision-makers about the choice to shoot in California than just it is impossible budgetarily to shoot here.

Craig: Yes. People have been working on this lottery system where, if you’re lucky enough, you get what that limited tax credit program was. Our friend, Derek, who makes the new show Countdown on Amazon Prime, they won the lottery. They were able to shoot here in California. I went to go see the first episode at their premiere. You get up there in front of people and you say, “Oh, I would like to thank blah-blah-blah,” and everyone applauds, “Yay.” Derek said, “I’m very proud of the fact that we’re able to shoot this show entirely here in Los Angeles.”

The cheer from that crowd, it was like a cheer of like, “Finally.” It made me sad in a way that that was so special. It shouldn’t be special. It should be the norm. Let’s see how we do.

John: Yes. While we’re talking about numbers, we can talk about the WGA annual report. Each year, the Writers Guild of America West publishes an annual report, which is basically all their financials, but also reports on how the membership is doing and basically what number of writers reported earnings, what the total earnings were, differences between screen, which is basically television and streaming, versus theatrical. We’ve talked about these over the entire course of the Scriptnotes podcast. Craig, what are you seeing here as you’re looking through these numbers? We’ll put a link in the show notes to the PDF.

Craig: Well, these reports have a lot of stuff going on, but we tend to look at two things when we do this, you and I. One is, how many people are working? The other is, how much money are we making for the writing we do and for the residuals that we are all collectively receiving? Let’s talk about the number of writers working. It’s not great. It’s bad.

John: 5,228 writers reported earnings in 2024. Those numbers will go up a little bit just with late reporting, but it’s down 9.4% for the previous year. It’s really down from the high, which is 6,910, which was back in 2022.

Craig: Yes, the thing that’s really frightening to me is that it’s down. You’re absolutely right that these numbers from the prior year will always be a bit compressed because they don’t have all the data in yet, but it should be way, way up at this point, even so, from prior year, because the prior year was impacted obviously by the strike. If you just look at 2019, 6,833 writers reported earnings. In 2024, we’re looking at 5,228. That’s bad. That’s more than 1,000.

John: It’s a big drop. Yet, Craig, if we were to roll back even earlier before, we’re at the top 2015, 2016. I don’t have those numbers in front of me, but you and I both know that the membership used to be smaller. The number of writers in the guild grew with the rise of streaming. With the rise of streaming series, there were more jobs than there ever have been before. I think what we’re really looking here is a retrenchment in the number of series shot. That’s really what it comes down to is there’s less development. There’s less things being shot. There’s fewer writers being hired because there are fewer shows. There was a huge growth with the growth of streaming that appears to be pulling back.

Craig: Yes, we know for sure that there was retraction in the amount of shows. What we don’t quite yet know is how we’re doing in terms of the average number of people employed per show. Obviously, that was something that was important during the strike to the Writers Guild to create minimum room sizes, which they did. Minimum room sizes are minimums. Those minimum room sizes were smaller than, say, what I think the Writers Guild would hope would be an ideal room size.

John: What was a classically-sized room.

Craig: Right.

John: There are rooms like The Simpsons, which seem to have 30 writers in them. The overall size of rooms has gone down noticeably.

Craig: Yes, I guess the point is, regardless of why, if people are walking around out there going, “It is tough out here,” the answer is yes. Factually, numerically, there are fewer jobs.

John: The corollary to this is the actual amount of earnings has gone up. The earnings were up 12.7% from last year. There are fewer writers working, but those writers who are working appear to be bringing in more money. That is not entirely unexpected. If the people who are not working are the people who were earning the least, and people who are working now are earning significantly above scale, that would be one reason to expect that this number did increase.

Craig: Yes, it does look like the percentage over the prior year, of course, is up because, again, strike. Let’s just say again, going back to 2019, there are about 1,600 fewer writers. The total earnings, only $300 million less. I can’t do the per-writer number here quickly, but it looks like it’s higher, yes.

John: I think the changes you would see here is during the real boom time of streaming, there were a lot more writers working in streaming who are working probably at scale in those lower-level positions. With fewer shows happening, with fewer writers being hired at those levels, the actual amount per writer has gone up. That would make sense.

Craig: Yes. It doesn’t surprise me a ton because so much of our earnings is pegged to scale because so much in television–

John: Especially in television.

Craig: Yes. If you have more and more people who are working as writer/producers in television, which has become far more common as the rooms have shrunk down, so much of the writer income will be pegged to just minimums because it’s the producer income that’s flexible. That will go up by roughly 3% across every three years. I think it is something like that. That’s not super surprising to me. I think we probably are in a place that’s right now in terms of the amount of writers working that is similar to what it was in the earlier parts of the 2010s.

That’s my gut. Let’s also break it out for a moment in terms of screen and television because our poor screenwriters is always, “Let’s start with feature writing,” which has been hammered over time. It’s not terrible news. We look like we’re starting to recover here. 2024, about 1,900 writers working in features compared to 2019, 2,350. Again, that 1,900 is a little low. I would imagine it’ll end up in the low 2000s, which means it’s not that far off actually.

John: We show as being down 3%, but that 3% could become 0% when, actually, the late reporting comes in. The dollars are up already 14.2% versus the previous year.

Craig: Yes, but, again, okay, here’s the problem with the previous year. Previous year is a strike year, right? Everything looks great compared to 2023.

John: Very good, so we have to compare it to–

Craig: Yes.

John: If you jump back several years, it’s just lower than it was.

Craig: Yes, it’s not great. I think the per-writer amount is down. It looks like it’s down to me significantly, which-

John: -which honestly matches my anecdotal experience just talking to people, talking to reps. It’s harder to make the big deals. It’s harder to bump people’s quotes.

Craig: Yes, and this is an area where you will see the market reflected in total earnings as opposed to television because, in television, the market does put a lot of flexible money in producing fees. In screen, it doesn’t. Screen is generally an overscaled thing. The market is reflected in these numbers, and it doesn’t look great. It does look down, but it’s not horrifying.

It’s not what it was five years ago. Just not as good. In television, yes, it’s weird. It’s like the money actually per writer is doing fine. It’s just the amount of writers has plummeted. That’s where the real plummeting has occurred. In 2019, 5,581 writers in television. In 2024, 4,117. Let’s call it even 4,500 by the time the year ends. That’s a thousand fewer. That’s a lot.

John: Let’s quickly touch on residuals. Residuals are, of course, all the monies that writers get paid for their work when it’s reused off of not its original airing of things or not its original screening, but down the road. It used to be DVD money and other things like that. Those numbers have increased. The five-year change is 19.3% up total residuals. We can put in the chart that shows TV residuals versus theatrical residuals.

They’re both up. In any individual category like DVD or network stuff, those things have fallen off a cliff over the last 10 years. What we now call new media, which is streaming, which is everything else, which is all the things that the guild had to fight for over these years to increase those rates, those have made up the difference. Those are the bulk of what the residuals are that writers are getting paid.

Craig: Yes, so there are some good news in here. They have all these categories, and they’ll show you the percent changes for all of them. Again, skip the 2023 to 2024. Just go 2019 to 2024. All these numbers look either horrible or great, but they’re irrelevant in terms of percent. It’s really the percentage of what. What we see, the most important two are new media reuse for SVOD and new media reuse for non-SVOD, meaning, okay, streaming video on demand, and I guess ad-supported or whatever. I don’t know what else.

John: It’s also direct buys through iTunes, through Prime Video, and such.

Craig: Those things are up dramatically. That’s where the bulk of our residual income comes from, by far. Those numbers are good. The trend there is great.

John: Last year, writers brought in $562 million in residuals. That’s great. That’s money going to individual writers. It’s important to understand that in the Writers Guild, those residuals go directly to the writer. It doesn’t go into any big slush fund for the guild itself. Those monies are paid out to individual writers. Writers pay percentage fees back to the guild, but the overall pool goes to those writers. Those are crucial quarterly checks that help smooth out the ups and downs of the business.

Craig: Right. The fear that those would be eliminated, I think the guild, through its efforts and through the efforts of the membership, particularly this last strike, is going to help because of the way it did lock in some success-based residuals for streaming. It looks like we’re going to be okay on that front. Theatrical residuals. For screenwriters, it’s doing quite well, I would say, overall. Just flat-out numbers look much better. These are spread over, not the writers that we just described as working. These are spread over all writers who got anything ever.

John: Got a credit on a teleplay, on a screenplay, yes.

Craig: In 1998. It’s for everything. The residual picture looks pretty healthy. I think the big challenge for the Writers Guild is going to be employment. That’s what it’s going to be because, ultimately, it’s the employment now that drives residuals later.

John: It’s also crucial to understand that the Writers Guild represents the writers who are working, but it does not get writers jobs. The actual frustrating experience of not being able to land a job because there’s not a show to be made is not a thing that the guild directly controls, or we will lose members who will time out of their eligibility to be active members of the guild because they won’t have worked for a while. That’s a thing that’s just going to happen.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. There’s a number in here that is such a fascinating one. Then I think we probably covered the financial thing. They do a little review of the legal department. What they do is they break out the various kinds of cases that the legal department brings against the companies. Cases for initial compensation or for pension and health, or they screwed up the credits, whatever it may be. They list the amount of monies that they’ve collected.

I think the trend is that the legal department is seemingly getting a bit more aggressive because the compensation they’re collecting is more, but there’s one number that I would love to find out what the deal is. Let’s just look at residuals. In 2018, they collected $6.5 million in penalties for residuals that the companies didn’t pay. Next year was $2.3 million. Next year was $946,000. The next year was $12 million. 2023, it was $2 million. 2024 is $9 million.

It’s always between nothing and $10 million. In 2022, they collected $70 million in residuals penalties. I want to know what that is. Was that one massive case against Netflix or something?

John: If I’m remembering correctly, it could have been the Netflix case, or, basically, the case of made-for-streaming movies, and what happens with a made-for-streaming movie and what basis they have to be paid out on. I suspect that is what you’re looking at. It’s really a judgment.

Craig: It’s massive.

John: Yes.

Craig: Anyway, it looks like the legal department is being pretty aggressive, which is great.

John: It’s what you want.

Craig: Yes, they have a ton of open cases, which sometimes means they’re just not mulching through cases. In this, based on what I’m looking at here, it looks like there’s a ton of open cases because they keep opening more cases.

John: Yes, that’s what you want.

Craig: Which is good.

John: Money well spent is getting writers paid.

Craig: Yes.

John: All right, let us talk about some follow-up here. First off, we have a correction. Drew, help us out. On Episode 689, we were talking about postmodernism, and it’s not a surprise that we may have said something wrong.

Drew Marquardt: Marion writes, “I want to write to say that the Disney corporate headquarters was designed by Michael Graves, not Robert Venturi, and the product line for Target was also designed by Graves. I’m going to intentionally avoid discussing whether or not the building’s terrible, but I must confess that I’m an architect, and I own several of the Michael Graves pieces from Target.”

Craig: Okay, so we thought it was Robert Venturi. Michael Graves is a very famous architect. The Disney corporate headquarters is a bad building.

John: Yes.

[laughter]

John: Both things can be true, yes.

Craig: I will confess that when you look at the–

John: I love looking at it.

Craig: It’s incredible. From the outside, that building is a masterpiece. If you have to actually work in it or even just go to a meeting in it, horrible.

John: The building causes physical pain upon entering.

Craig: It is the most startling misuse of space, but outside, it looks great.

John: Yes, and so another reminder that Craig and I can make mistakes even without ChatGPT. We can just make mistakes out of our own brain.

Craig: Isn’t that amazing?

John: It really is. We have some follow-up about AI video and VFX because we’ve talked in Episode 689, how visual effects is going to be greatly impacted by AI, just because obviously. We have feedback from Lee in Montreal.

Craig: Okay.

Drew: “I’m speaking as someone who has worked in VFX for 30 years at Weta, MPC, Rhythm & Hues, Sony Imageworks, Cinesite, and DNEG. What has been killing VFX in the past couple of years has been a lack of greenlit projects, not generative AI. We’ve lost thousands of jobs. Many of whom are already leaving the industry before AI will have a real impact. Generative AI, as we see on social media, isn’t yet good enough to meet the exacting standards of Hollywood clients. My question for you as showrunners and directors is, as generative AI gets more powerful, would you want to hire a couple of people directly as part of your production team to sit in a corner and try to generate all of your project’s VFX content using generative AI, or would you still hire a VFX supervisor and proven vendors to execute your brief?”

Craig: All right.

John: Craig, so you’re hiring people more directly than I am, but I think it’s a real question of like, how much stuff do you feel like you might take internally to the team versus your classic way of working with vendors? What are you thinking?

Craig: Well, first of all, Lee, my heart goes out to you because you’ve worked at two companies that have imploded. MPC and Rhythm & Hues. Because of The Last of Us, we do a ton of work with Weta and DNEG. Yes, there has been an interesting shift in the business where there was– I would say in 2020, 2021, the world was actually terrified that there weren’t enough VFX artists out there for the amount of work that had been greenlit, and then there was this massive retraction.

The VFX industry hires people in waves. It’s almost like large corporate farming interests that bring people in for harvests and then lay them off. There’s a lot of like, “You’re hired,” “You’re laid off.” There’s not a lot of good, consistent work there, and it is a mess. That said, generative AI to me is the answer to nothing. I rely heavily on my VFX supervisor, Alex Wang, and our proven vendors, including Weta and DNEG. The only thing that we do in-house is a small amount of work that is still regular VFX work.

We’ll have an in-house group that handles traditional VFX work, not through AI, but that is of very simple nature. Doing split screens or some very simple comp work or beauty fixes where there’s a blemish that you want to just get rid of, or things like that that aren’t a bloater running through the snow, it makes sense to actually have an in-house team that handles some of that stuff. The idea that we would have anybody sitting there using generative AI to make creative choices or even begin creative thinking is not something I have on my show, and it will not be.

John: Yes, I think this point you’re making about, there’s stuff that used to be visual effects, but it got pulled back into editorial, that it’s things you’re doing much closer to the source, because you can. That makes sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the tools that come out of generative AI, we talked before about sound fixes, there’ll be things like beauty fixes.

There’ll be some things, which I suspect over the course of the next few years, will get pulled closer to the editorial flow rather than the visual effects flow. That makes sense. I do wonder if there are going to be some movies and some shows for which the visual effects and the pre-visualization, all of that process gets to be much blurrier. Almost in the way that animation goes from storyboarding to things much more quickly.

I suspect that we’ll see some new workflows and some models for this kind of stuff. I agree with Craig, and what we’ve always stressed with these tools, is that you want to make sure that the person who’s using these technologies is the person whose job it is actually to do, to create the final thing. Whatever these technologies in generative AI can create, you want the person who is the visual effects supervisor, the visual effects artist, to be using them because that’s a creative artistic thing they’re doing. It’s not just done by some random person sitting over there at a desk.

Craig: [chuckles] Yes, there is no doubt, AI that is being used inside of tasks. A very simple visual effect thing to do is a comp. I have a guy. He’s standing in front of a green screen. The wind is moving, so his hair is blowing around. Now, we have a comp that goes behind him. Somebody has to deal with all the hair in front of the green screen, and that may be stuff that, internally, they’re using AI to do.

It is not creative work. It is just rote work. Highlight and roto every single piece of hair. If AI can do that more quickly than somebody with a tablet, yes, of course, that’s going to happen just like– I don’t necessarily think of the filters in Photoshop as AI, even though, in a sense, they are. They’re algorithms, really, very fancy algorithms. The artistry, no. You’re right. There is a lot of connection now.

Our editors work right next to the visual effects team while we’re shooting up in Canada in a way that the visual effects department now works very closely with the art department. Production design and visual effects are now– I think of them as one big group because there’s such a blending that has occurred. We also integrate VFX with the makeup department. It’s touching everything.

It’s funny, Lee. We do the opposite of what you’re wondering about. Rather than having generative AI kicking out some concepts or things, we use illustrators like actual artists, like illustrative artists, to start, the most human possible way to start, because I find that where you start will tend to be where you start. If you start with generative AI, the path to the end begins with crap. I wish you the best, Lee. I hope you’re doing okay out there. It sounds like, based on the description, that you are indeed still doing okay. Hang in there. We treasure the work that you do.

John: All right. Also in Episode 689, we talked about verticals, which are those stories for your phone, its video, lots of little chapters.

Craig: Oh yes.

John: I was sure that we’d have somebody in our listenership who’s written for these. Risky Business wrote in because he has written for verticals.

Drew: Risky Business writes, “I spent six months writing for ReelShorts. As a writer, it was terrible.”

Craig: What?

Drew: “The first 10 chapters were poured over with repeated rewrites until all the joy was taken out of them. Pretty much, they didn’t care. The rest of the story had little oversight as they didn’t expect people to watch. The CEO repeatedly criticized the writers in company-wide messages while giving 100% of the credit for success to the editors, all while paying $22 an hour with no work orders between feedback cycles and a constant, ‘Your contract can be canceled at any time,’ hanging over your head, and expectation that you’d be immediately available the second they had feedback, which sometimes took over a week to receive.”

“It ended up being less than minimum wage to basically hold all the blame for a possible failure poured on you from the entire company. Creative decisions were made entirely by algorithms based on what was selling, the whole prediction model that Hollywood is always trying to master contracted by the short production schedule. I’ve not had the pleasure of joining any union, but the success of ReelShorts definitely scares me. If the model succeeds, AI will definitely be writing the scripts, and the CEO can have his dreams of never having to rely on a writer’s creativity again.”

John: Yes, so what Risky is describing really feels like the fears you have when you talk to folks who’ve written at Netflix. The softer Netflix version is they’ll tell you like, “Our data shows that people don’t like to see cats in the first three minutes of a show,” or they’ll have some specific things like, “Okay, we can’t do that.” Fine, whatever, but the feedback mechanism is so much longer there.

With something like ReelShorts, all they’re trying to get you to do is to watch through enough episodes that you’ll hit the buy button and then watch the rest of it. The rest of it doesn’t have to be good because they don’t really care. As long as you hit that buy button, you’ve stayed on board. That is just toxic to storytelling. It’s the opposite of anything you would want to do, and yet writers are being paid to do it.

Craig: Based on this and based on what you just said, my prediction is that this thing implodes because it feels like the sort of thing that will be carried briefly by some TikTok wave or sense of novelty, and then everybody will catch on. Once you pay your subscription, it’s crap, and it doesn’t matter. They’ll get bored, and they’ll move on. Regardless, right now, they exist. They sound like a sweatshop.

Let’s just say that this sounds horrible. I don’t really see what the point is of working there because you’re not writing. Just to be clear, sometimes people will bait hooks with the worm of at least you’re writing. This is not writing. It seems like writing, but it’s not. If it is paying, as Risky Business says here, $22 an hour and eventually less than minimum wage because of the overtime that gets baked in there, go work somewhere else.

Work at Starbucks and write something you care about and love. There’s nothing here. There’s neither a ladder for promotion. There is not the ability to get better as a writer. There’s not the ability to make relationships that are going to serve you throughout your career. There’s no value here to you as a writer, none. I would say that I would not advise anyone to work there.

John: If people think we’re being a little unfair to this one company, I will say, we’ll put a link in the show notes to a Time magazine interview with Joey Jia, who is the CEO there. One of the questions they ask is, “Who writes the content on ReelShort? There are reports that some of the content sounds like they’ve been written by AI.” The answer is, “If AI could write the content and make money right away, I would do everything with AI.” Great. Well, he’s not hiding the ball there.

Craig: Yes, no, but then he says, “No, it’s our in-house editors.” This is backing up our friend who’s writing in where the editors get all the credit. We have an in-house editor, also an in-house screenwriting team. People say, “Oh, your content is really like AI. I disagree.” Well, it doesn’t really matter, as far as I’m concerned, what people think the content is. All that I care about is the health, security, and quality of life for professional writers in our business. I don’t see any reason to work at this place. If they were paying $50 an hour, we’d have to have a discussion.

John: Try to?

Craig: No, just go work at Starbucks.

John: Yes, agreed. All right, let’s transition from that dystopian view to– This last week, I got to have the utopian version of that, which is I was an advisor for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

Craig: Great.

John: For 25 years, I’ve now worked at the Screenwriters Lab, which is crazy. For folks who don’t know what that is, they bring in filmmakers who are working on their next feature. In the summer labs, they will have already shot two of the scenes from their things, just up on a mountain with random actors, just to test stuff out. Then there’s a screenwriting lab that’s just one week afterwards, which we talk through about what they’ve learned, where they’re at with their script. We give them specific feedback.

I describe it as being like, “We are your friend with a pickup truck who shows up to help you move from where you were to your new place. We’re not going to tell you how to do stuff, but we’re there to help you carry your couch.” One of the best things about this process is that you get to talk to other really smart screenwriters who are talking about the projects that they’re working on with their advisees. Some quotes I wrote down. Robin Swicord says, “Act 1 is the suitcase you pack for the journey,” which just feels so smart and right.

Craig: That’s true.

John: I love that. Stephen Gaghan was talking about how he likes to do a transition pass. After finishing a draft, he’ll set it aside for a second and go back and just look at all the transitions, like transitions from scene to scene, but really from idea to idea, even within scenes, and just really focus on how you’re moving from this place to that place. It’s such a smart idea. I’ve never thought to actually just spend one pass through just looking at the transitions.

Craig: Well, I love that because we talk about transitions all the time. That’s the thing that separates scripts that turn into things that feel like not smooth unities, and then the ones that do. So far, Robin and Stephen are A+.

John: Absolutely. Liz Hannah, who’s been on the show several times out of joy, one of the things she likes to do is to actually literally retype the script. She’ll have it open in one window, have a clean document, and actually retype the whole thing. She gets it back in her fingers. Obviously, you’re changing things along the way. That is a kind of thing I would not do, but I really appreciate the instinct behind that. That feels, I don’t know, just a way to get it back into your bones.

Craig: That’s one of those classic bits of advice that is either going to be 100% useful or 0% useful, depending on the person, because if it works for you, oh, my God, it’s probably a revelation.

John: Yes.

Craig: If it doesn’t, well, then you tried it once, and you don’t have to do it again. [chuckles]

John: Absolutely. The thing I also really enjoy about the labs is, as an advisor, I’m looking at three different projects. These were three very different projects. In two of the projects, I noticed a thing that we needed to do. It never really occurred to me before. In both projects, we got to a place where we needed the characters to confront specific dramatic questions in the third act, concepts, but there was no real good way to introduce them there at that moment.

We needed to set them up earlier, but it could feel really forced. It was really the conversation about, how do we introduce ideas so that they’re available to the audience when we get there later on so that we put them into the world of the movie? It’s not exposition exactly. It’s not where we’re saying like, “Oh, to launch the missile, you have to turn these two keys.”

It’s more abstract. It’s how you introduce an idea rather than a fact, an idea like, what does it even mean to own land, or can you ever trust someone who’s betrayed you? You’re priming the audience for those questions. I just want to spend a few minutes, Craig, talking about this need. It’s a thing I’ve found myself doing all the time but never really being aware that I was doing it.

Craig: Sure, and this is one of the craftier bits of our jobs. It is calculated. This is palming something as a magician.

John: It’s magic trick.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. We could go on and on about why it’s more satisfying, but it doesn’t matter. We just know it is more satisfying if something emerges in the third act that feels like, “Oh, it has been there the whole time. We just missed it as characters.” Now, we see it as opposed to just realizing it then late.

John: One of the projects, I’m talking in very vague terms here, but it’s set present day, but hinges on something that happened in that region during World War II. If that were to come up just out of the blue in the third act, it’s going to feel weird and forced. If we bring it up randomly in Act 1, it’s going to feel like a setup. You’re going to feel the setup-ness on it. You’re looking for ways. You can introduce the notion of World War II, the notion of the history here without feeling like, “Okay, this has the objective of doing this thing.”

The answers for that is you’re always looking at, what is the present-tense problem? What is the present-tense need of the scene that brings up this idea so it feels natural to the moment that you’re in and, of course, seeds us for later on, that it feels like, “Oh, of course, the characters are having this discussion. Of course, this thing is being shown here,” or the scene that you’re currently in, and the audience has no idea that’s going to pay off later on?

Craig: Yes, there are two ways of going about this, and I strongly prefer one of them. One way is to introduce the idea in a manner that is not objectionable. An objectionable way is somebody goes, “By the way, you know what it is interesting that right here, which was the site of a World War II battle 30 years ago, happens to be the place where–” and then you go, “Okay.” Well, that is objectionable. A non-objectionable way would be like, they walk by and they see a sign like, “This place was a World War I site. This was a thing. This is World War II.” That’s interesting, and it’s not objectionable because it–

John: Like, “What happened to that church?” “Oh, it was this battle in World War II.”

Craig: Not objectionable. That’s one method, not objectionable. I strongly prefer the other method, which is essential, that when you are introducing this, it is the point of a moment, such that you believe it’s over. There is information here that I need you to know for a point right now that matters, that has nothing to do with why it’s going to be relevant later, because then you don’t feel at all like it’s superfluous. The ultimate trick to me is to make people believe that you are not palming a coin. You are actually holding a coin in your hand for a reason. Then later, it’s revealed, oh, also this.

John: Some examples from movies that might be helpful here. In Finding Nemo, Dory has a joke early on about, “Oh, I speak whale.” It just feels like that’s the thing that Dory would say. It’s a funny joke in the moment, but then later on, she actually does speak whale to a whale. It’s like, “Oh, I did not think that was a setup.” It’s just so much more rewarding because they got it in there without it feeling like a setup at the time. Or in A Quiet Place, the daughter’s cochlear implant is malfunctioning. It feels like you know why they’re doing that. It’s like, “Oh, that’s going to become a problem for this character.” You don’t feel like, oh, that’s actually going to be a solution to the things down the road.

Craig: That feels essential to me. I need you to understand that this person goes through a problem. It is a problem right now we have to solve. You will, in your human story eating mind, go, “Oh, this was important for me to understand a character, what their challenges are, what they want and need, how they relate to their parents, what they need from their parents.” There is meat there. It mattered. That’s better than what I would call the non-objectionable.

John: Absolutely. There was a bottle thought here. It’s like, “Oh, why are you telling me this?” Some of what we’re talking about has obvious overlap with what we’ve talked about before in terms of exposition. I know this specifically because I was looking through the exposition chapter in Scriptnotes book. In terms of sometimes you’re direct, sometimes you’re indirect. I want to make sure we’re also thinking about, sometimes I just need to prime the audience for a concept, or just the notion of a thing that could happen within the course of this movie.

Sometimes it’s bringing up an analogous situation. In one of my scripts, it ultimately hinges on trust. I have one of my characters listening to a call-in radio show. They’re talking about this husband’s betrayed her, and I can’t ever forgive that. Just setting up the idea of trust as being a thematic element is natural to do in a way that is going to pay off later on, but it doesn’t feel like it’s hitting you over the head in the moment.

Craig: It’s got to have its own reason to live there. If it has its own reason to live, no one will think, “Oh, that’s weird that they mentioned that. I wonder if it’ll come up later.” We’re all very good at picking that thing out. If it has its own reason to exist, you’ve solved the problem. Sometimes I think people are so worried about hiding it that they contort themselves into pretzels to make something blend in so casually that it’s almost not a thing at all. Unnecessary and usually sweatier than just confronting it head-on and making it be a thing that matters right now.

John: Absolutely. All right. Let’s get to a couple of listener questions. Drew, start us off.

Drew: Sarah writes, “I’m a screenwriter from the Netherlands whose secret side ambition is to someday direct music videos. After watching the excellent new music video for Sabrina Carpenter’s Manchild, however, I’m at a loss. How would you even start communicating the idea for a project like that? As a screenwriter, I just cannot imagine how this would look on the page. At the same time, it seems impossible to pull this off without a script. I know directing music videos is an incredibly specific skill on its own, but I’m very curious what your thoughts would be. Also, what are some of your favorite music videos?”

John: All right. Drew, it’s so interesting that the listener wrote in with this question because you would actually put this music video on the slack, because you’re like, “Wait, is this AI?” I was like, “I don’t think it’s AI. I think it’s just a lot of hard work.” Then we looked back through the behind-the-scenes of these directors working on stuff. It’s like, “Oh, no, they just work really hard.” There’s just a lot of setups and a lot of visual effects. It is a very good video.

Sarah, I’m going to challenge your question. Most of these music videos do not have a script the way that Craig and I are doing scripts. They tend to have documents that lay out the overall vision for something. It might be a one-page brief of what this is, what the concept is, but then they’re going to have a lot of storyboards, setups, a listing of things for these are the moments that we’re shooting that become the production plan for everybody else, the equivalent of the script that they would use for breakdown, for scheduling, for wardrobe. I would be shocked if there’s anything that looks like a script for this music video.

Craig: Definitely. I think, Sarah, this is one of those deals where it’s a very what I call, directorish thing. No one comes in with a screenplay. In fact, I imagine that there never was anything like that here. This feels so much like somebody comes in with the mood board and crazy pictures of wacky cars on the road. What if you cut one in half and it’s so surreal and da, da, da, and the palettes will be this and this and we’ll do these colors.

Then you start to tell this little story that you imagine that you could just describe, like basically she’s hitchhiking, going from one crazy place to another, and blah, blah, blah.

Then you start storyboarding. I don’t see why you would need a screenplay for this. It feels very storyboardy. The way they shoot these things, I would imagine, is to get lots and lots of little mini movies that they then cut together to make 12 movies that seem like they’re going on all at the same time, and then edit it all together. The thing about a music video like this is there is no real coherent structure to it. The structure is the song. The song provides the structure.

John: Absolutely. The music can exist in this liminal dream state. It doesn’t have to make narrative sense. That’s one of the joys of it. You also asked our favorite music videos. We had Daniels on, so I would say Turn Down for What is an incredible music video.

Craig: So good.

John: I would say David Fincher’s Express Yourself by Madonna is incredible in terms of it actually does have a narrative storytelling drive. It’s inspired by First Land’s Metropolis. It is just really well done and does tell a story. It does all the music video things it needs to do so well. That’s a highlight for me. Craig, any other ones that jump out for you?

Craig: There have been so many great ones. Some of them do decide, “Hey, what we’re going to do is we’re going to tell a story that isn’t really reflected in the lyrics of the song, but we’re going to pick something else.” Take On Me is one of the great videos of all time by A-ha. They really told a story based on the movie Altered States. That’s what they did. They said, “What if we did an Altered States?” The idea was it was a man that lives in comics who’s trying to become real, all the way to him slamming back and forth against the walls, just like William Hurt. Great.

A lot of music videos are about showing awesome visuals that have nothing to do with the lyrics whatsoever. If I looked at the lyrics for Manchild, I don’t know if I’m going to see anything there– I’m actually looking at them right now, that would indicate this is what you would do. There’s nothing in here that implies we should be on the road going through a series of hitchhiking moments with crazy visual effects. They’re just letting the structure of the song give you structure, knowing full well, the entire thing is going to be over in, what, three minutes or so. Just delight me with visuals that maybe progressively get crazier, a little bit of an ironic ending, and you’re done.

John: The one other one which I’ll put in the show notes is Riz Ahmed’s The Long Goodbye, which I’m looking up now, it’s directed by Aneil Karia. When it starts, it’s so slice of life. It’s just a short film, basically, that eventually the song starts, and it gets into a thing. It’s a situation where I can imagine there probably was some scripting there because there’s a lot of characters. The verisimilitude of just the space that they’re in and the conversations feels like it could be scripted before it gets to the actual big events.

I don’t want to say much more. It’s 11 minutes. It’s worth watching it. I think it got a–

Craig: It won an Oscar.

John: Did it win the Oscar in 2022?

Craig: I think it did.

John: It’s remarkable. I’d point that out as another example of the music video that probably had something resembling a script at some point, but that’s more the exception rather than the rule.

Craig: You can do basically anything you want. That was a short film. It was 11 minutes long. You could do a Phil Collins music video for Billy, Don’t You Lose My Number I think it was called, where the whole music video was music video directors pitching him ideas for the music video for that song, and then them doing parodies of other music videos. You can do whatever you want. [chuckles] Everything from story to not.

John: I celebrate what has been made possible by the music video because yes, we had commercials before that, but I think just we’ve had a lot of great directors come out of music videos, but also just a lot of cool art and a lot of cool just ways of thinking about visual storytelling that have come out of music videos.

Craig: Absolutely. Music videos and commercials are both interesting places where new things are invented, or things that are subcultural get pulled up into culture. Madonna very famously pulled Vogue up out of the subculture.

Drew: Let’s do one last question here, one from anonymous. “I’ve been working in the legal field for over 10 years, and a couple years ago put my undergrad English degree to use and started screenwriting. My two features have had great feedback, including from a friend who’s a professional screenwriter with several credits. That friend is encouraging me to set up meetings in LA with agents and managers and has made recommendations on who to reach out to.

Here’s the problem. In this world, with this president, at this time, should I, as a transgender person, be open about my identity? I know that being trans has at times limited opportunity as a lawyer, but that hasn’t stopped me. Just altered my trajectory a little. One script I wrote features a trans protagonist, and my other screenplays have strong queer themes. Now I’m wondering if an agency or studio would view a trans writer as a liability they would be unwilling to take on during this administration. Happy Pride, and I hope that those in the generation behind me won’t have to worry like this.”

John: Happy Pride, anonymous. Obviously, I’ve been out my entire career. Easier for a gay man to be out. Being out as a cisgendered gay person is a different lived experience than being a trans person. Everything just means a different thing for me and for your experience. I think the fact that you are writing material with trans characters is going to naturally raise the question of whether you have the lived experience to be writing these things and be reflecting the things on the page. My instinct is you’re probably going to want to be open about your identity from the start. That’s just my first blush instinct, correct? Craig, what are you feeling?

Craig: I come at this just from a purely analytical point of view. I think about the business and the way people function here, so I’ll be very cold and calculating. In my cold and calculating way, I think you’re absolutely right, John, that it is a plus if people are considering a feature script that is about a trans person, if the trans person is centered in that story. Or, as you point out anonymous, you have screenplays with other strong queer themes. The first question they’re going to ask is “Who are you?”

That’s not to say that they might go, “Oh, you’re not trans? Then screw you. You can’t do this.” It’ll be considered a strong plus. I think the challenge you have is not whether or not being out as a trans person is going to impact you. I don’t believe it will. If it impacts you, it’ll impact you positively, I think, given your scripts. The challenge you’re going to have is that the interest in that kind of story right now has been reduced dramatically because these wonderful corporations, no matter how progressive they pretend to be, are always with their finger in the air, checking the wind direction.

Right now, I don’t think there’s a big push in Hollywood to be telling trans stories or queer stories. I think that there’s still some, but I think it’s been reduced. I think that there’s a natural reactivity to what they detect is some sort of backlash trend. That would be a bit of a challenge. Remember, the wheel of things turns slowly. You, as a producer, may say, “With the script I have right now, probably not a great time to walk over there into the chairman’s office and say, ‘Can I have $20 million to make this movie about a trans person?” In five years, they may be cool with it again, and it takes time for stuff.

Your job, anonymous, now that you’re starting to be a screenwriter, is to just get hired to do something. Whether they buy your script, or they love your writing, and then want you to work on something else, get yourself into the world of being a writer. My feeling is that I am not transgender, but I have people in my family very close to me who are. I think about these things all the time. The choice of whether or not you want to be out is more important than just how it impacts your career. I would say that question needs to be resolved by you for so many reasons in so many ways. That ultimately is your choice, but I do not think it would hurt you.

John: I think we’re in agreement here. If we have listeners who have more opinions on this, more specifically informed opinions, we’ll always be happy to hear them. All right. Craig, it’s time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is this feature written up by Alvin Chang in The Pudding. I love The Pudding. It’s a website that does great deep dives and moving infographics on different topics. This one is called 30 Minutes with a Stranger, and it comes from this project called the Candor Corpus, which recorded 1,700 conversations between strangers.

How they would have these conversations is it was through a– It’s not a mechanical trick, but one of those sites where you get paid by the hour to do stuff. They would set up these people to have a 30-minute conversation that was recorded. They would ask these people before the conversation, right at the start of the conversation, middle conversation, and after the conversation, how they were feeling. Basically, what their emotional state was.

They would do this for all these conversations. The people who were in the study didn’t realize is that they were being set up with people who were like them. Age, demographics, ethnic background, political affiliation, and also people who were diametrically opposed to them. They could really see what is it like to have a conversation with somebody whose politics you fundamentally disagree with, who’s much older than you, much younger than you?

Craig, how do people feel about conversations with someone they generally matched up with versus someone who’s very different than them? What do you think the outcome of the conversations generally was? Did people feel better or worse after the conversations?

Craig: The optimist in me says that there was no difference.

John: The optimist is correct. People felt better after the conversations across the board. It really didn’t matter whether they were matched in those demographic terms or not. Even political affiliation, people generally felt better after conversations, which is what, again, you hope but worry that it’s not going to be true. It’s basically the experience of people just need to talk to people, and people like to talk to people. We are wired to talk to people. It doesn’t matter who you talk to. The experience of talking to people is positive for your emotional health.

Craig: Thank God there isn’t an entire industry designed on getting us to hate each other so that we click on stuff more and see more ads. This is the misery, the misery of social media, that it has taken something that is one of the few positives that we have. That when you just can talk to somebody, you can connect with them on a human basis, that is about things that are far more important and far more relevant than the superficial. It has turned it into shouting. Just basically thrown everybody into a shouting arena and have them scream at each other. This is a wonderful thing. I’m glad he did this. This is great.

John: I think the other crucial distinction here is social media allows you to take anonymous drive-by potshots at people.

Craig: Exactly.

John: It’s not conversation.

Craig: That’s right.

John: There’s a difference of actual conversation. Where there’s a back and forth where you actually have to listen, is a fundamentally different thing. We are wired to do it, and we just don’t create structures to do it as much as we need to.

Craig: I think that social media basically creates the conditions in which sociopaths are always living. Normal people look at each other, there is a human connection, they have a conversation. If you remove the human connection and you can just yell at somebody’s @ blankety blank, you are now living in the sociopath space. You do not detect their humanity at all, and now you can just do what you want. Horrible.

John: I’ve greatly scaled back my social media. Not to your extent, but to a large extent. There’s been times where someone has come at me weirdly aggressively, and it’s hard to do it. If I can just do the judo move of just honestly and emotionally responding to them, it does throw off the thing. It’s like, “Wait, people are just expecting to punch back.” When you don’t punch back, it throws them off. I don’t know. People say so many things they would never say to your face.

Craig: Of course.

John: I wish there was an option to like, “Great, let’s get on right now. Here’s my phone number. Call me and we’ll talk about this.”

Craig: I used to do things like that, and then I realized I could do this all day. It doesn’t matter. [crosstalk] There’s 12,000 other people.

John: There’s no winning.

Craig: This guy might be screwing with me anyway. He might be DMing his friend, going, “Oh my God. I got this guy talking to me now. LOL. What should I do?” It’s not real. It’s just not real social interaction. It doesn’t deserve our mind.

John: Just don’t talk to people.

Craig: I’ll tell you what deserves our mind, John. D&D and Chris Perkins. My one cool thing this week is Chris Perkins. Who is Chris Perkins? If you know, you know. Chris Perkins was the senior producer for Dungeons & Dragons and was a story genius for D&D and the general D&D world for so long. He just retired from Wizards of the Coast recently. He’s actually joined the whole crew over there at Critical Role, which is with Jeremy Crawford. John, you’ve heard me probably say Jeremy Crawford a few times at the table.

John: Jeremy Crawford is known as being the rules guru of D&D.
Craig Mazin: Jeremy was rules guru, and Chris was story guru. That’s very, very reductive, and I apologize to both of them. [chuckles] They had lots to do with each other and their work that they all did together. Both of them went, “You know what? Our time at Wizards is done. We’re going to move on and just join Critical Role, have some fun over there.”

Together, those guys really did help create the most successful edition of Dungeons & Dragons ever, 5th edition, which was released in 2014. Chris did do some work on the recent version that came out, the 2024. Those of us who play owe him a lot. For instance, Chris was the lead story designer for Curse of Strahd, which was the thing that brought Ravenloft, which has been around forever, into 5th edition. Anyway, I got a chance to meet Chris and actually play D&D with him. I’m playing, someone’s running Lost Mines of Phandelver.

John: Ah, the classic.

Craig: The classic. The intro story from 5th edition, which I’ve now played, DM’d, played, and played, he is playing with us, and he designed a lot of this.

John: So fun.

Craig: It is fun when the DM’s, someone goes, “Is the water coming out in a trickle, or is it a lot?” The DM’s like, “I’m looking. I think it’s a trickle.” Then right next to me, Chris goes, “No, it’s a lot.” [laughs] He’s fantastic. Really, Chris, I guess, and Jeremy. I should lump Jeremy Crawford in there as well. Both those guys are my one cool thing for helping with so many other people. I want to be clear, revitalizing Dungeons & Dragons and making it as super popular as it is today.

John: I got a chance to talk to Christopher Perkins, coming on three years ago, about wizard stuff, and so super smart, and that whole team. Not a surprise that he is just as great around a table as he is at writing these incredible rule books. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, our author this week is by Spencer Lackey.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You will find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have a new crafty episode. It was me and Christina Hudson talking action.

Craig, it’s one of the situations where video really is better than just the audio version of it because we can show you the screenplay as the scene is happening and see what’s on the page. Take a look at that one. You’ll find t-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware all at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in an email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the best movies of the 21st century. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Thank you, Drew.

Drew: Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Great. Craig, this past week, the New York Times has launched a feature which is looking at the top 100 movies of the 25 years of this century that we’ve been through so far. You can see their full list. Their full list has many of the movies you’d expect to see there. Craig, have you gone through and actually done the feature? Have you clicked through to see which of those movies you’ve seen so far?

Craig: Yes, I’m scrolling.

John: You’re scrolling. I’ve seen 80 of the 100, which is better than I expected.

Craig: Yes, that’s pretty good.

John: Because there aren’t a lot of esoteric, strange ones on there. There’s just things I just didn’t happen to see. They tended to be foreign films. They’ve always been on the list. I’ve never gotten to see them. It was crazy to me that Anora wasn’t on the list. I think that’s just recency problem is so that people aren’t thinking about stuff like I think Norrish would be on my top 10 list. I really thought the most interesting part about this, and Max Reid, who has been on our show before, pointed this out, is that there’s a separate list that the New York Times pushed of the people’s top 10 lists. That was partly how they made this whole big list.

It’s so fascinating to click through and see what are people’s top 10 lists like Mark Birbiglia. I’ll link in the show notes for that. Mark Birbiglia’s top 10, Children of Men, Frances Ha, Hot Fuzz, Idiocracy, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Sideways-

Craig: Great.

John: -Spotlight, Superbad, Squid and the Whale, and Up.

Craig: Wow. I love how comedy-heavy that is, of course.

John: Yes, which should totally make sense for Mark Birbiglia. Five of those movies are already on the top 100 list, five of them are not. It’s easy to see why you’re making the case for any one of those movies. Sometimes movies speak to you individually. They may not speak to everybody. Any list is going to be evening out the odd choices of an individual person. It’s just fun to see what people put there. Also the fact that it’s– I don’t want to say it’s performative, but you know this is going to become public. You might make choices there that reflect an intention on what you’re trying to communicate about, who you are based on what the top 10 things are that you’re recommending to people.

Craig: Can I ask a question?

John: Please.

Craig: I understand this is very much like religion. I know most people are religious, and I know most people believe in God and angels. I don’t. I never have. More to the point, it is not an active choice to disbelieve. I just don’t. Why do people make lists? What is this?

John: A couple of things I can think about. Why do people individually make lists? I don’t have a letterbox, but many people have a letterbox, and they have a public setting on a letterbox so everyone can see how they’re rating different movies. I think there’s a sense of how you want to put yourself out there in the world, how you want to have people perceive you, what you want to show as being your taste. Producer Drew Marquardt, have you gone through this? Have you marked which of these movies you’ve seen?

Drew: I did. Not to brag, I’ve seen 93.

John: 93? It’s incredible. Did you make your own individual top 10 list?

Drew: I did, but it’s impossible to do because 10 is too much to reduce to. Yes, I could show it to you, but it feels embarrassing in some way.

John: That’s the thing, too. I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing my top 10 list. If I think about movies of all time, it’s easier for me to reach for these are iconic things, where Clueless and Aliens will always be in that top 10. Those would be super high here.

As I was going through this process with the top 100 movies, I was thinking about which of these would be on my top 10 list. Some of them I remember liking, but I haven’t gone back and rewatched them. I don’t know if I actually think they’re the best things ever, or maybe I’m just forgetting. A spoiler, Mulholland Drive is either number one or very high up there. I remember liking Mulholland Drive, but I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about it. I would never put it in my top 10 list because I just don’t remember it well enough. I feel like anything you put in your top 10 list, you should have to be able to speak for five minutes about why it’s so good.

Craig: Why is anything anything?? Honestly, this is my issue with this stuff is there’s an instinct, I think, among critics to rank stuff because that’s what they do. They’re pretending to have some analytical ability to quantify and qualify art, which is a ridiculous concept on its face. When you really look at it, it’s just absurd. When you dig underneath the hood of what it means to even describe something as having quality and how individual that is between you and the thing that you’re analyzing, all of it is absurd. Then the ranking of it feels vaguely masturbatory to me, designed to, I don’t know, create some authoritative hierarchy that is impossible to do and also pointless to do.

I think it’s actually demeaning to everything. If I’m Bong Joon Ho and I look on this and I go–

John: Parasite’s number one, that’s right.

Craig: Parasite’s number one. I don’t feel good. I’m like, “Wait.” Then Paul Thomas Anderson’s supposed to be looking at me going, “I didn’t do as well as you did with There Will Be Blood.” If anybody were to say to me, “Hey, I need you to do me a favor. Tell me which one is better, There Will Be Blood or Parasite?” I would say, “You’re an idiot.” That’s an idiot question that an idiot would pose because there is no ability to– first of all, why compare them at all? Second of all, why not just enjoy them both? Do you know what I mean?

John: I agree with you that comparing one to the other is crazy. Any of the films that are in this top 100 list are going to be, by default, really good movies. Here’s the argument I’ll make for why it’s useful for people to share their top 10 lists, or at least “Here’s a movie that you should absolutely check out.” I cannot remember which filmmaker it was, but some filmmaker recently was talking about how important Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona was to them. I’m like, “I have no idea what this movie is, but sure.” I put it on my list and I looked it up, and Mike was out of town one night, so I was like, “I’ll watch Persona.” I dug it. It was really weird.

It’s never going to be on my top 10 list, but it was so specific and strange, and I would never have thought to watch it if this filmmaker– I can’t remember which filmmaker it was, hadn’t talked about how important it was for their work. I think that is potentially the good and the joy of this is it’s exposing me to things that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. In the case of the 20 movies that I haven’t seen, I was reminded, “Oh, you know what? I should probably check these out because there’s a reason why so many people like these movies that made it into the top 100.”

Craig: Sure. This is why I have no problem when people say, “Here are 20 movies from the 2000s I loved,” and list them in alphabetical order, because otherwise, what is the point of this? This numbering is so dumb. It is so anti-art. There isn’t a single director or screenwriter represented on this list, I believe. I swear to you. Not one who would go, “You know what? Yes, I’m glad that I was–“ I don’t think Denis Villeneuve is going, “Oh good, Arrival 29. That’s right. Just not quite as good as Dark Knight, but definitely a little bit better than Lost in Translation.” What?

John: I will say, there are many people who Big Fish is one of their favorite films, but it didn’t end up in the top 100, and it could have ended up in the top 100. I did look for it [unintelligible 01:10:15], it was not there. I do feel a little bit of that, but anywhere in that top 100, I would have celebrated. It wouldn’t have mattered where it ranked in this thing. It would have been nice to see that there. Yes, I get you. I agree.

I think this list is so much more helpful, though, for a person working in this industry now than the AFI top 100 movies of all time. Because when I look at those things like, [crosstalk] Citizen Kane or Meet Me in St. Louis, yes, those are classic films. That is not telling me at all about what it is to work in industry now. I think if you are coming into this industry today, you should have watched a lot of these movies because the people who made these movies are the people who are still running this industry.

Craig: Yes, this is a collection of fantastic movies, don’t get me wrong. There’s not one of these where I went, “Oh, I hate that.” There are a few where I’m like, “I’ve never heard of that, but that’s okay. That’s fine. Maybe I’ll check it out.” That’s fine, but this is why I love the AFI event at the end of the year, where they say, “Here are the 10 movies that we really loved this year. Here are the 10 TV shows we really loved.” No ranking, no award, no best, no competition.

This ranking thing, everyone has become a little film critic where they have to rank things, and then they argue over your number one is number your three. It’s really just them attacking each other’s taste, and it is performative. To me, this is a sell, this is an ad. [crosstalk] This is just the New York Times going, “Hey, click.”

John: [unintelligible 01:11:53] creating a little event for itself. Yes, I get it.

Craig: I swear to you, I feel like it is cheapening to– all of these really, there isn’t one thing here where I’m going, “Oh, that’s not–“ They’re all beautiful art, and they should all be celebrated, and putting them in a ranking, I hear David Lynch. I hear his voice. Did you ever see that interview where it’s early on in the days of the iPhone, where they’re talking about, “What do you think about people that might watch some of your movies on a phone?”

He’s like, “Why would you watch a movie on a phone? On a fucking phone?” This is a fucking list. I just can’t think of something David Lynch would be less interested in than a fucking list. Now, I could be wrong. The late, great David Lynch might actually have loved a list, I don’t know. In my mind, he hated them. Sorry about the f-bombs.

John: No, that’s all right.

Craig: Cool.

John: Thanks, Craig. Thanks Drew.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Links:

• The Best Movies of the 21st Century by NY Times
• California lawmakers approve expanded $750-million film tax credit program by Samantha Masunaga for LA Times
• WGA Annual Report – employment and earnings, residuals
• Michael Graves
• How ReelShort CEO Joey Jia Used a Chinese Trend to Disrupt the U.S. Entertainment Industry by Chad De Guzman for Time Magazine
• Sundance Labs
• Sabrina Carpenter – Manchild
• DJ Snake, Lil Jon – Turn Down for What
• Madonna – Vogue
• a-ha – Take On Me
• Riz Ahmed – The Long Goodbye
• Phil Collins – Don’t Lose My Number
• 30 minutes with a stranger by Alvin Chang for The Pudding
• Chris Perkins
• Mike Birbiglia’s top ten movies of the 21st century
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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