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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: This is Episode 591 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do we establish what happened in the world before the movie began? We’ll look at collective narratives and ways to get the audience up to speed. We’ll also discuss getting staffed and joining the WGA. To help us do all that, we welcome back our beloved Scriptnotes producer, Megana Rao. Welcome back.

Craig: Yay!

John: Woohoo!

Megana Rao: Hello.

Craig: Aw. Hi.

Megana: I’m feeling very shy.

John: Suddenly she’s shy.

Craig: Nothing’s changed. You’ve done this so many times. You’re good. You’re doing great.

John: She’s like the kid running around all over the living room before the guests come over, and the guests come into the living room and they hide back behind their parents.

Megana: Yeah, exactly.

Craig: You’re doing great.

John: Megana, we lost you because you went off to work on a television show, a Netflix comedy.

Megana: Yes.

John: On a scale of 1 to 14, how has it been working on this Netflix show so far?

Megana: It has been so fun. It absolutely rocks. I’m not saying that in a way… I don’t want anyone’s feelings to be hurt, but I’m having a great time.

Craig: Our feelings are certainly not hurt, although what were the odds that Megana was going to describe her current job as a 1 out of 14?

John: Exactly, like, “Oh, it’s absolutely torture, and all the people in the room who listen to this podcast, they need to know that it’s absolutely the worst.”

Megana: No, it’s the greatest. My head hurts from laughing so much every day.

Craig: Oh, wow.

John: It’s gotta be a huge adjustment though too, because generally, it’s been you and me or you and me and Nima, who comes in the office, and now you’re suddenly around a bunch of people all day. Has that been a huge adjustment for you?

Megana: Definitely. It went from quiet time with just you and me sitting next to each other in the office to around a dozen people just doing jokes and bits all day, talking nonstop.

John: Wow. Megana, in our Bonus Segment, because you’re coming back, I wanted to give you carte blanche to whatever you would like to do for a Bonus Segment. Do you have any thoughts about what you want to do for a Bonus Segment for this one?

Megana: Yes. I recently downloaded TikTok and have gotten sucked into get ready with me videos, which I believe you’re also familiar with, hashtag #grwm. I wanted to talk about those.

John: Fantastic. We are so unprepared to talk about getting ready with me, but you can get us ready for it by talking us through what we need to know about-

Craig: No idea what’s going on.

John: … getting ready with me.

Megana: Wait, really? You guys aren’t watching these?

Craig: Weirdly, no.

John: I have a sense of what I think they are. You’ll tell us. Our Premium members can listen in as we get up to speed with where Megana is already at in terms of getting ready with me videos.

Megana: Great.

John: Awesome. Some news, folks. The WGA Awards happened. It’s this past weekend as we recorded. It’s two weekends ago. No surprise that Everything Everywhere All At Once and Women Talking, two of the features that we had the filmmakers on to talk about, won first place, because that’s what we do. We pick the winners.

Craig: I really wish you hadn’t said that, because now we’re going to get more emails from more PR people.

John: You know whose problem that is? It’s Drew’s problem.

Drew Marquardt: It’s my problem.

John: It’s no longer Megana’s problem.

Craig: It’s Drew’s problem now. That’s wonderful, as long as it’s not our problem, although it is. We get them.

John: We get them too.

Craig: We do. Congratulations to Sarah and the Daniels. Very exciting. Listen, I don’t want to handicap anything. I’m not an Oscars expert or a pro or anything like that, but it sure looks good for Everything Everywhere All At Once going into the final weekend here, because the Oscars are coming up this weekend.

John: They will already have happened by the time people are listening to this. You’ll know whether Craig was wrong or was right. I think he’s probably right.

Craig: I feel like I am, but no one’s going to be watching the Oscars, because it’s the finale of The Last of Us, so oh well.

John: Good timing there. Good planning.

Craig: Sorry, Oscars. Sorry.

John: Megana, do you have any advice for Drew as he deals with the onslaught of publicists who are going to be asking for a prime spot on Scriptnotes?

Megana: Unfortunately, we don’t take solicitations for guests. It’s tough that we have this policy, because there’s a lot of cool guests that are being pitched out there. You two actually end up bringing on most of the guests that you’re interested in talking to.

John: In general, if there’s somebody who we’re really fascinated by, we’ll just reach out to them, and they’ll say yes. Occasionally, we have to go through a publicist. Back in the day, we used to go to Twitter, but now I guess it’ll have to be Instagram. I’ll reach out on Instagram and find these folks or Craig will meet them somewhere.

Craig: I don’t want people to feel bad, like if we haven’t had you on the show, it means we don’t think you’re fascinating. That’s not true. The other thing that I do say to people all the time, because it is true, is that we’re not really that show. We’re not a guest chat show. We’re a John and Craig talk about things that are interesting to screenwriters show, and occasionally, we’ll bring someone else into our marriage to spice it up a touch. Mostly, we’re monogamous. That’s kind of how we are.

John: If you’re a publicist who has terrific clients, there are so many great venues for you to be bringing those clients. Scriptnotes won’t be one of them, but that’s okay, because there’s lots of other great podcasts out there who will be happy to have them. Megana, we have you here only for a short time, so I want to make sure we get the most value out of your time here with us.

We have talked to previous guests about getting staffed. We talked to Ryan Knighton. We talked to Jack Schaefer about running a room. We talked to Megan McDonald, your predecessor, when she got staffed.

I want to talk about that transition period, because there was a time when you were taking a lot of meetings. You were just taking a lot of meetings and going out and meeting with people. What was that like? What was the process? You get the call saying, “There’s this show. They’re interested in you.” Then you’d have to get up to speed. How did you get the call? What prep did you do? It was a couple of months of work on some of these, and some of them happened really quickly.

Megana: I don’t think it was a couple of months on any of them. I feel like with lower-level positions, it happens really quickly. It’s week off. This one happened to be less than 24 hours notice before I went in for the interview.

Craig: Wow.

John: Let’s talk through going in for the interview before you get there. What is the call or the email from your rep saying, “Hey, there’s this show.” What are they telling you about it? What are you reading? What are you watching?

Megana: Somehow, for this show, my sample got passed to this showrunner, but my agent didn’t formally submit me for this role. In tracing back how it all came together, I’m actually not quite sure.

Craig: Wouldn’t it be great if this is where Megana found out that we did it?

John: Behind the scenes.

Craig: We just quietly paid them off.

John: It was us.

Craig: We’re like, “Listen. Megana-“

Megana: “We have had enough.”

Craig: “She needs to go. She’ll sit in the room. She’s not going to write anything. Don’t worry about it. She’ll just laugh. She’s great.”

Megana: “She’ll just giggle.”

Craig: “She’ll just giggle. Then just send her home. For God’s sake, she’s gotta go.”

Megana: Did you guys actually do that?

Craig: Yeah, we did that.

John: No, that’s not true at all.

Craig: No, it’s what happened.

John: There was a friend of ours in college who our ongoing bit with her was that her parents were paying us to be her friend.

Craig: Aw.

John: Whenever she’s like, “You’re being mean to me,” it’s like, “Your parents’ check didn’t clear.”

Craig: Wait, we have to explain to them what checks are.

John: Here’s a good tie-in to that. Megana, literally the day before you got staffed on the show, you were in the office and we were talking about what a check was. You had a revelation about something you had never realized before about checks. Is that correct?

Megana: Yes, but I’ve already forgotten what it was. There’s a form on the back of checks, and you’re supposed to do something with it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Good lord. You endorse it.

John: You endorse it. You sign it for a deposit or for deposit only. That was a new thing for checks for you.

Megana: What happens if you don’t do it? Because I’ve never done that for the three checks I’ve written.

John: I think it actually doesn’t matter anymore, because now you’re just putting the thing on the ATM, and so it doesn’t matter.

Megana: Got it.

John: Technically, you should be doing that.

Craig: There was a while where I never did it. Then with the advent of digital deposits, where you take a picture of your check, the algorithm needs you to sign the back of it or it kicks it back at you, so we’re back to it.

Megana: The other thing I didn’t realize is that checks were numbered. That was the big surprise.

John: That was a big one. I wanted you to say it rather than me say it.

Craig: What?

John: The checks are numbered sequentially.

Craig: What? You didn’t notice that there was a number on each check that got bigger with each check that you went through?

Megana: Craig, there are a lot of numbers on checks, and I don’t go through checks.

Craig: First of all, how dare you? You have to come at this with some humility, because that’s crazy.

Megana: I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a check before, but there’s-

Craig: There are a lot of numbers on it. I’m like, “Oh yeah, you’re making a great point.” Wait, no, you’re not, because all the numbers on the bottom of a check are in that weird check font, but then there’s a normal font in the top right, or that’s usually where it is, which is just a four-digit number. John, are we-

John: Old? Yeah.

Craig: God.

John: She grew up in a time when checks were just no longer a thing. They’re not a thing now. There was never a period where she needed to worry about a checkbook and the sense of, “Oh, did I grab the right checkbook?” It doesn’t matter, because she never had to deal with it.

Craig: Did you have the same experience that I did, John, in high school, where we took half a semester in some class that was like home ec? I don’t know what else you would call it. It was learning how to write checks and keep track of them in the white parts of the checkbook that no one ever uses except old, old, old people.

Megana: Aw.

Craig: I know. Aw, we’re cute.

John: I think it was part of our math unit. I think it was just built into basically that.

Craig: That’s awesome.

John: I think we were explained what a mortgage was.

Craig: You get to pause on math and then they just make you do checks?

John: Probably math.

Craig: That’s crazy.

John: Also, they shoved logic into the geometry section. They’d have to find a place to do it.

Craig: Technically, geometry does require proofs and theorems.

John: It’s logic.

Craig: A lot of logic. I don’t really think they shoved it in there. I’m going to challenge you on that.

John: We’ll see.

Craig: I’m fighting today. I’m fighting everyone.

John: How would we find the answer to this? Where is the source of truth people go back to? What was the curriculum in Fairview High School in 1987? Who can find that out? If you’re a listener who could tell me when I learned about checks, that would be fantastic.

More crucially for screenwriter issues, I want to get back to, in general, Megana, as you were hearing about a show, your reps were trying to set up a showrunner meeting with you on the show, what are they sending you? What kind of prep can you do for that?

Megana: Typically, I would get at least a pilot script, maybe a couple of other scripts, and a little blurb that my agent would send with a log line and a little synopsis of where the season was going. Oftentimes, that’s been it.

John: Do they give you some sense of why they’re meeting with you? Is there a specific role they might be looking for you for, like, “We need a funny person.” Because talking with showrunners, it seems like sometimes they’re casting rooms to make sure, like, “We need somebody who’s really good at mysteries. We need somebody who’s good at structuring a one-hour show, someone with this kind of experience.” Do they give you a sense of why they’re meeting with you, or just you’re on their list?

Megana: I’ve never really had that information beforehand. I’ve tried to come up with a pitch based off of those materials, but typically, I don’t think so.

John: You’ve had a little bit of time to prep. You’re going in and meeting. Are you actually going in meeting somebody, or is it all just Zooms at this point?

Megana: My interview was in person, and the room’s in person, which I am so thrilled about.

John: That’s great. Has that been typical for all the showrunner meetings you’ve been taking over the last couple months?

Megana: No, I think this is the first one. In the past few months, it’s been like, “Hopefully, we would do something in person or hybrid if possible,” but this is the first one that’s been like, “Nope, we’re definitely physically here.”

Craig: Do you feel the love being in person? I certainly prefer it, but I know that that’s been the way it’s always been with me, that people I’ve worked with have been in the room, and then there was this brief interruption. For you, since you haven’t had the experience of a writing room really until now, does it feel good knowing that you’re there in person or is it a 50/50?

Megana: I’m so happy that we’re in person. Everyone in this room has had prior relationships with each other. I can’t imagine coming into this room over Zoom and not having the ability to make small talk on the way up the stairs or in the coffee room. I just think it’s been hugely important. Also, the energy of being there together is not something that you can easily replicate.

John: Especially for a comedy. It’s a sense of was that funny in the moment, was it funny in the room, did it actually land. I feel like that’s much more important for something like this. If you’re doing a very structured procedural, it may not be as important that you all physically be in the same space, because it’s not going to have the same vie.

Megana: Totally. I think I didn’t appreciate how much of the job is just reading body language. You just can’t do that over Zoom in the same way.

John: A thing we’ve heard from a bunch of showrunners and also previous staff writers on the podcast is that it’s hard when you’re first in a room to know when to speak up, when to stay quiet, what the first thing is you should actually say, the first pitch you should give. Is that the experience you’ve found? What was it like based on your prior expectations based on Scriptnotes versus being there in person?

Megana: I don’t know. I guess I’m still figuring it out. Luckily, my showrunner is very into mentoring, so I have felt very supported through this process. I think it’s certainly something I’m still navigating.

John: A question we often get is, if you are a staff writer in this room, on a daily basis what are you actually writing? Are you taking notes? Are you doing anything, or is it just entirely your brain, and you’re talking in the room? Is there anything that you are actually physically writing at this point?

Megana: It’s mostly talking, but we’ve recently started working on outlines.

John: That’s exciting. You said there were maybe a dozen people in a room. Does that include support staff? Because we obviously talked a lot about support staff on this podcast. Who’s in the room on a supporting level, who’s not a writer?

Megana: There’s a script coordinator and a writing assistant.

John: Are they just there to physically write stuff down and move stuff around, or are they contributing as well? Are they speaking up, or are they mostly there to make sure everyone else is facilitated?

Megana: Both. They’re definitely speaking and contributing. The room is just so many whiteboards.

Craig: You don’t want to give anything identifying here in terms of size, but is there ever any frustration, asks the guy who works alone, with either some people talking too much, some people never talking, having something to say but waiting and then it’s too late and then we’ve moved on? How do you deal with the frustration of a large group of people talking about something?

Megana: I don’t think I really have to deal with the frustration of it, but a lot of these people are very seasoned writers, and there’s a certain pace and momentum that they just understand. The showrunner is so great, because he’s really responsive to what everyone says, but he’s also very clear on the direction that he’s looking for, the types of things that he’s looking for.

John: It also helps that you’re not coming in from scratch. There’s already a sense of what this show is or at least what the show is supposed to be. You didn’t come in on day one of this. That also helps a little bit too, that there’s some sort of structure, a sense of what this is that you’re trying to make.

Megana: Totally.

John: Megana, when I took you out to celebrate getting staffed on a show, one of the things [inaudible 00:15:19] you can potentially be joining the WGA based on this show, based on staffing on this show, which would be so exciting, because we’d get another WGA member in our fold. I realized that we’ve never actually talked on the podcast, or at least not recently, in 591 episodes, about the actual point system it takes to join the WGA, because it’s not just a club that you sign up for you. You actually have to qualify to join.

Megana: I had no idea how any of this worked.

Craig: Few do. Few do. This is arcane knowledge that only the oldest of wizards and witches know about. You know when Gandalf goes to research the ring and he goes into that super old library and finds some scroll and he’s reading and goes, “Oh,” and then he’s running back? That’s me.

John: You are the old scroll.

Craig: There’s somebody on Twitter who was doing the thing that people do on Twitter, professing his great knowledge about the screenwriting world, as often. One of the things he said was, “A lot of people don’t know that just because you sell your spec script, that doesn’t mean that you automatically become a WGA member.” Yeah, it does. Then I was like, “Okay, I don’t know where the misconception is,” but let’s talk through how it actually works, because it’s weird.

The way it works is there’s units. To become a full-fledged, current, active member of the Writers Guild of America West, you need to get 24 units at a minimum. You have 3 years to accrue those 24 units, or the ones that start to expire, basically. You need to figure out how to get your 24 units in within 3 years, at which point, hooray, you’re a member. The thing about selling a screenplay, if you sell a screenplay for a feature length theatrical motion picture, boom, 24 units, you’re done. Welcome to the Guild.

John: Craig, I want to raise one potential hand here. In theory, someone who’s not a WGA member, could sell a spec screenplay to a company through their nonsignatory arm and not join through that. There’s ways I’m sure this had happened in the past, where someone has sold a thing and it’s not happened for them.

Craig: If you sell a screenplay to a nonsignatory, you get zero units, and may God have mercy on your soul. What he specifically said was you have to sell your script, and then you have to do another pass on it. That is not the case, although you weren’t guaranteed another pass on it. It’s part of our deal. The tiniest amount of units is two.

I think this is the way a lot of people get into the Guild. Each complete week of employment within the Guild’s jurisdiction on a week-to-week basis gets you two units. If you’re hired as a staffer on a show, and you are in the room, covered by your employment deal for 12 weeks, boom, Writers Guild. You’re in. That’s 24 units.

John: That’s the way it helps for Megana.

Craig: Indeed.

John: She’s accruing two units per week.

Craig: Two units per week. There’s lots of things in between writing a story only, writing a short film, writing a radio play less than 30 minutes, shall be prorated in 5-minute increments. These rules have been around for a long… Like I said, Gandalf in the library.

John: You can tell these are old.

Craig: The story for a TV program of less than 30 minutes, again, prorated in increments of 10 minutes or less. I think it should be 10 minutes or fewer. In any case, there are lots of subdivisions, but the point is, the way most people get into the Guild is either through selling a screenplay for a feature film or working week to week as a staffer and getting those 12 weeks under their belt, at which point the Guild calls you and says, “You owe us money.”

John: That’s one of the exciting calls you love to get. Craig, I got into the Guild because I was hired to write a feature screenplay, which is 24 units of credit, for How to Eat Fried Worms. It was for [inaudible 00:19:22] Pictures, which is a Guild signatory. I got the message from the WGA saying, “Hey, congratulations. You are now eligible and must join the Guild and the pay $3,500.” It was some pretty significant fee to join. Then you are in the Writers Guild, and you’re there for good until you could go post-current at some point. You were then in the Writers Guild and you are fully a member thereof. Craig, what was your thing that got you in?

Craig: I was the same. With a writing partner of mine, we sold an original screenplay idea to Disney, and we were hired to write the screenplay. Of note, both of us immediately accrued 24 units. It wasn’t like they spread the units, 12 and 12.

I have never had a faster call in my life from a union. I don’t know how they found me. It was like seconds went by, and then suddenly the phone rang, and then they were like, “Hey, kid.” There was a woman who used to run that department. I can’t quite remember her name. She was a very nice lady, but older. It was like they sent the tough lady after you, like, “Listen, kid, you owe us money.” I was like, “Okay, great.”

What was funny at the time, of course, was LOL, I hadn’t gotten paid anything, and neither had my writing partner. We both owed each the full initiation fee. I was like, “I’m out of money now. I don’t have any money. I just gave it all to the Writers Guild. This is going great so far.”

Obviously, all said and done, a fine thing to get into the union. You just have to be ready and prepared, particularly if you’re endeavoring to get into the Writers Guild. If you want to be optimistic, and I think you should, sock the initiation fee away. What is it, $2,500?

Megana: Mm-hmm.

John: I think so.

Craig: Sock that away. You’ll need it.

Megana: The one funny thing in the communication is that it was like, this assumes that you live West of the Mississippi River. I was like, “I’ve never thought about where I live in those terms.”

Craig: Unfortunately, we have two Writers Guilds. Ask me why, Megana. Ask me why.

Megana: I can tell you’re in a fighting mood-

Craig: Do it. Do it.

Megana: … which is why we don’t record evenings.

Craig: Ask me. Ask me.

Megana: Craig, why do we have two unions on opposite sides of the Mississippi?

Craig: Because we’re dumb. We are dumb. We weren’t dumb. Back in the old days, the business was divided between New York and Los Angeles. New York handled a lot of television, and Los Angeles handled a lot of other stuff. New York in particular handled all the news and stuff like this. Then shortly thereafter, everything just ended up in LA, but we still kept this weird, archaic structure, where we have the Writers Guild East and the Writers Guild West.

We negotiate together. We have the same minimum basic agreement. There’s no reason to have two unions. It’s all so stupid. For the love of God, they were able to put Berlin back together. The dividing line between the East and the West per chain-smoking, bourbon lunch drinking from 1943 was the Mississippi River. I’m sure it was a difficult compromise to make. It’s so silly.

By the way, anybody in the Writers Guild West can, by choice, join the Writers Guild East, and vice versa. It’s just so stupid. I’m glad you asked, Megana. I’m glad you asked.

Megana: I’m not.

Craig: You asked.

John: Just to close out the topic, let’s say you were hired to do a rewrite, not to do a full first draft. That would count for one half that number of credits. A polish is one quarter. An option can do a thing, which I’ve never heard of somebody getting into the Guild through options, but theoretically it’s possible. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the full explanation of things. Megana, I’m curious, because you said that you got this email. Did you get an email from the Guild saying, “Hey, this is your path to joining the Guild.”

Megana: Yes. They were like, “So-and-so has told us that they’ve employed you,” and then this big email with lots of attachments.

Craig: We got our eye on you, kid.

John: In the case of Megana, she’s working on a Netflix show. There is a thing called a work list. Every week, the employers have to report who is writing for them. Craig, they could’ve found you through a work list, but they also could’ve just found you through Variety. There’s some article that you sold a thing.

Craig: I don’t know. They were on it fast.

John: Love it. I love that kind of efficiency. I want to get to our marquee topic here. I am writing something right now that is set in 1962. I say 1962, you think, oh, it’s the ‘60s, but really 1962 is not the ‘60s. It’s sort of more the ‘50s.

We have this desire to decade-ize time, and things don’t fit nicely. Yet it’s so helpful that we can talk about the ‘40s, the ‘50s, the ‘60s, the ‘70s, and have an image of what it is we’re talking about. There’s a shared collective understanding of like, we don’t have to agree on exactly what happened in that decade, but we can at least agree on what everyone thinks about that decade. If I say it feels like the ‘70s, we get a sense of what that is.

I’ll put a link in the show notes to this article by Noah Smith, who’s talking about conceiving the 2000s. Weirdly, the 2000s and the 2010s, I don’t feel like we do have a good sense of what those are like. We haven’t decided on a collective narrative for what those feel like. There’s moments in there that we can point to. Even when we were living in the ‘90s, I think we could point to the ‘80s and say, “Oh, that feels very ‘80s.” It’s hard for me to say, “Oh, that feels very 2000s,” or it feels very 2010s. We haven’t found a good collective narrative about what those decades are like.

I thought we might talk about why collective narratives like that are useful for screenwriters in framing things in real world things, but also important for establishing collective narratives for the characters inside your world, if you’re creating a world from scratch, because we look at fictional worlds, like what happened with the Snap at MCU or how the robots came out sentient in the Terminator universe. The characters in that world know that stuff, but we have to tell the audience all the stuff that normal characters in that world might know. I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about both why it’s important and how we establish those things in the fiction worlds they’re creating.

Craig: You’ve got to start, I guess, with culture. It seems weirdly as we are creating culture, we are studying culture, and the snake eats its own tail, as the uroboros [uh-RAH-boo-ruhs] does. That’s right, I said uroboros [uh-RAH-boo-ruhs].

John: I would say ouroboros [or-uh-BOR-ohs]. You say uroboros [uh-RAH-boo-ruhs]?

Craig: I think it’s uroboros [uh-RAH-boo-ruhs]. I don’t it’s ouroboros [OR-oh-BOR-uhs], because that would be… It might be.

John: I think I’ve heard it said ouroboros [or-uh-BOR-ohs] though.

Craig: Here we go.

John: I’m not sure.

Craig: Hey Siri, how do you pronounce uroboros [uh-RAH-boo-ruhs]? It said, “How to pronounce Robert Henry Rose.” I guess I should realize that that was going to happen, because if I’m mispronouncing it, then it won’t know. If I’m pronouncing it correctly, I didn’t need to ask. I’m going to the dictionary.

Drew: Google says uroboros [yur-oh-BOR-uhs].

John: I was close though.

Drew: You were close.

Craig: That’s really close.

John: Uroboros [yur-oh-BOR-uhs].

Craig: I’m going to give that to you. I think that you’re right, because you said ouroboros [or-ruh-BOR-ohs], but the adding of the Y, that’s insignificant compared to my uroboros [uh-RAH-boo-ruhs], which is just wrong. Uroboros [yur-oh-BOR-uhs].

John: Uroboros [yur-oh-BOR-uhs].

Craig: The nature of the uroboros, we obsess over pop culture and/or just regular culture, high culture, low, it doesn’t matter, as signposts for the world around us. Clothing is maybe the most immediate thing that we think of. Then music is a hot second right behind clothing.

John: Definitely.

Craig: Hair is right there in third place. Then in fourth place you will often see fads, the things that captivated culture at a time. In the 2000s, for instance… Were Tamagotchi big in the early 2000s?

Megana: That feels like ‘90s.

Craig: Late ‘90s.

Drew: It’s the late ‘90s.

Craig: That feels like ‘90s. Something that just comes along where people are like, “Oh my god,” obsess over something from 2003. That sort of thing paints this broad sense of where we are.

More than anything else, I suppose the other thing we do draw from are these main historical events. It seems like in half of the movies about the ‘60s, somebody will run into a room and go, “Did you hear about John F. Kennedy’s been shot?” He gets shot constantly in those movies. That’s understandable. Makes sense.

Megana: It’s interesting in the examples that Craig brought up, I would associate most of those things with teen culture, but teens, I don’t know, they’re not typically creating culture. They’re responding to it.

John: I think teens are often creating culture. I think stuff does bubble up there, because Craig’s examples were fashion, music, and hair, but if you think about the decades that we can actually distinctly remember, it’s when those three things intersected. ‘90s, you have grunge. ‘80s, you have hair metal. You also have ‘80s fashion. ‘70s, we have a look. ‘60s, ‘70s, we have the hippies. Again, music, fashion. ‘50s, the Beatles. We have all these things that are gathered together. It’s that perfect storm. It’s really teens who are creating that culture.

Beyond just the culture, what this space feels like, there’s a sense of a shared story about how we got to this place. We have a collective narrative about the fall of Roman Empire. We don’t need to know the details. It’s just like, oh, the Roman Empire got really big, and then it collapsed.

Craig: Too big.

John: Too big.

Craig: Too big.

John: Too big. Got too big, got too spread out, the fall, fiddling while it all burned. We have a sense of a collective story about how the first peoples arrived in North America. That’s the crossing of the land bridge. We don’t need to know the dates of it. We just know that essentially the land was pretty empty and then a bunch of peoples crossed over the land bridge from Alaska, spread out over the whole North and South America and Central America, and that’s how people got here.

Those are helpful things that we can assume that anybody watching our stories would understand. We wouldn’t have to explain those to people. Yet if we were doing a fictional world… Need to explain the Empire or the Federation in Star Wars or Star Trek. You gotta be doing some work there to get up to speed, where any character within that world would already know that stuff.

Craig: Knowing things and figuring out what your audience knows is actually trickier than you think, especially the older you get. One of the things that happens as we get older is we start to take for granted that people know stuff that we know that they don’t, and similarly-

John: That the checks have numbers on them.

Craig: Correct. Conversely, there’s a whole bunch of stuff we don’t know, and we don’t know that we don’t know it. That’s how you become out of touch. That’s how your references get dated. That’s also how you make missteps and incorrect assumptions. What we assume about what the audience knows is essential. Otherwise, we are either wasting time telling them stuff they already do or we are presuming they know things that they don’t, and they just won’t understand what’s going on.

Megana: As you were talking, I was thinking about, Chernobyl is obviously so rooted in time and place, but actually, so is The Last of Us, because it’s 2003.

Craig: There is a genre of frozen in time, where the world stops and everything stops at a kind of time period. It is interesting, 2003. We were a little short on fads and things like that. In terms of the technology…

I guess technology is also now a huge one, not so much before, but now, because it changes so rapidly, what kind of phone were people using, and what did the cars look like and what did the radios in the cars look like, and even the fact that there is a radio. All those things were frozen in time and do help mark where you are as you’re going through. Then of course everything decays and turns into its own vibe.

Megana: I also remember, John, once, I think very early on when I was working with you, you were working on a project that was set in the ‘50s, and you and I made a timeline of when different things happen and trying to map out what the social cultural attitudes towards these things were, and that was shocking.

John: I think that’s important to do, because you need to understand what the baseline of it was and the characters in that time period, what they thought, and also always remembering what people now think about that time period. I think when there’s a mismatch there, you can actually create some good cultural moments.

I think the movie Hidden Figures is a great example. We have a sense of what the role of Black women was in that time period, we have a sense of what getting a man on the moon was like, but we didn’t have a sense that those two things were related. We didn’t have a sense that there were Black women who were involved in NASA’s work there at that time. That’s exciting when you can find those moments that both use people’s cultural narratives, a collective narrative we have about that time period, and can push beyond it, show an attitude that was different.

I think Chernobyl did a great job of that also, because we have a sense of what Chernobyl was, this moment that happened, but Craig was able to fill in details that people would’ve never known about what was going on there. Talk about uroboros. Craig’s show not only exposes things, but really changed people’s cultural expectation of what Chernobyl was, because it became the narrative of what Chernobyl was. For better or worse, just like we were going to think that the Titanic sank the same way that James Cameron showed us, because that’s the biggest cultural marker we have for that event.

Craig: If you can find some undermined cultural territory for collective narratives, that’s always exciting, not only showing the flip side of things that we know, but even just general… I think Mad Men was so interesting, because they were like, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to do the early ‘60s, which actually no one thinks about,” because as you put, when you would say, “What were the ‘60s like?” “Hippies. Boom, it’s hippies. Let’s go.” Actually-

John: That’s late.

Craig: That’s late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The early ‘60s, they’re not the ‘50s. It’s not poodle skirts. It’s not Grease. It’s this other weird thing. Mad Men just went, “Oh, there’s this fun little hinge point between regressive and progressive society and major change versus stagnation. We’re going to just sit right in the middle there and find this other little special spot.” That was exciting, because honestly, a lot of people, myself included, I’d never really considered that time as a thing, but it is a thing.

John: Once we have Mad Men, then we can use that as a jumping off point for other things that are around that same time. X-Men: First Class would’ve had a harder time explaining itself if we didn’t have Mad Men, I think, as a reference back to us. Also, this thing I’m working on right now in 1962, Mad Men is a useful reference for it. Not that Mad Men has to stand in for everything, but at least we can visually see that’s the feel we’re going for.

Let’s talk about when we have to establish the collective narrative of a place in time that is not just strictly our decades. I’m thinking about fictional universes or we’ve made a big change in the universe.

A couple different techniques you might want to use. The first is brute force. We’ve seen things that start with “once upon a time.” They’re just going to lay it out for you, like, “This is what you need to know about our world for this all to make sense.”

The Star Wars opening crawl is basically a once upon a time. It’s just like, “You gotta get up to speed here. Go with us here. Trust us as you’re reading this thing for two minutes, and then it’ll be worth your while to go through it.”

Buffy the Vampire Slayer opening credits, “In every generation, a slayer is born,” establishing this is the premise, that there’s a history to this moment that was here from before.

Megana: I think one other different category off of that is something like The Watchmen or For All Mankind, where they’re using collective narratives to introduce us to a world that’s slightly different. Would you call it science fiction, alternative?

Craig: Yeah, alternative history. That’s a whole category where they’ll reference President Robert Redford, be like, “It’s our world, but it’s not our world. It’s an alternate version of history,” and helping people figure out, okay, so there was a Vietnam War, but in this world, America won, and how would that go? That’s a good way of orienting people into your new collective narrative, your ultimate historical collective narrative.

John: It seems important that you would have to introduce some of those elements quite early on, so the audience knows that it’s not just our universe, because you could probably do it at the end of the first episode or something like that, or a ways in, but at a certain point it’s going to feel like a betrayal if you didn’t reveal it was a different universe pretty early on.

Craig: Do they not know that Robert Redford wasn’t the president? Maybe they don’t know. They don’t know. I’m going to write a stern letter.

John: Those numbers in the corner of checks, what are those for?

Craig: Yeah, what are those?

John: Another way, if you’re creating a fictional universe or having to really change the collective narrative of something is to explain to an outsider or to a newcomer. You see this in a lot of things. Indiana Jones, he is explaining to somebody who is not an archeologist the important things to understand about this culture, this thing, these rules of this universe.

The Matrix works that same way too, where Neo is an outsider being introduced to the truth behind The Matrix. He’s a convenient place to exposition dump upon. We’ve talked about The Matrix a lot. It’s a good example of a movie that starts in a mostly real world and then has to bring the character through the looking glass into the other side.

Lastly, I would say that sometimes you’re doing multiple things at once. Star Trek: The Original Series, those opening credits every time told you what the mission was of the Enterprise, but each time, they were also meeting a new civilization, and through that way they could introduce concepts like the Federation or we’ve moved beyond money, all the ideals of what their show is like and how stuff is structured and set up.

There’s a big science fiction project I’m talking about doing that the explanation of what has happened to the world is so lengthy that even at the conceptual stage we have to think about how much are we info dumping to audience right at the start versus exposing people piece by piece as things come up.

Craig: I do love an info dump. I love a creative info dump. It’s one of my favorite things to do.

John: Some of that has attention in the moment, but it’s also getting you through that, getting over that bump. Megana, because we have you, we actually have some listener questions that came in that were specifically exactly for you. I’m wondering if Drew might want to read you some of them.

Drew: Wait a second. This is (singing) We Have a Question for Megana.

John: Yes.

Drew: Cool. Fred writes, “Congratulations to Megana!”

Craig: Woo.

Megana: Woo.

John: Yay.

Drew: “I’d be interested in hearing about Megana’s journey, leaving the corporate world and becoming a screenwriter. Can she share her story and offer any tips to aspiring writers?”

Craig: Megana, you have 40 seconds. Go.

Megana: Oh my god. This question is tough, because it’s so hard for me to emotionally relate to what I was doing at that point, because I feel like I made a lot of bad decisions. If I were to give advice to somebody else, I’d be like, “Have a plan. Line up another job.”

I worked at Google for five years, and then I quit my job, and I had no plan. I moved out to Los Angeles. I had money saved up. I had a family friend, who was my mom’s best friend from when I was six years old. I knew that she had an extra bedroom in her place in Long Beach that I could stay at rent-free for a while. That was my path to coming out to LA. Then once I was here, I just tried everything and threw myself and tried to talk to as many people as I could and luckily started working for John within that year.

Then in terms of offering any tips to aspiring writers, I think looking back, there are so many things I might’ve done differently, like writing more or doing some more of the planning when I have the security of a full-time job, but also things worked out because I had made room for changes in my life, if that makes sense.

It’s something that I think about a lot is that if you want change in your life, you do have to make room or space for it. I think that if you are writing for five minutes or 30 minutes a day, you’re going to see progress or change, but it’s going to be proportionate to the amount of time you’re giving that activity.

Craig: It just strikes me that what you’re maybe… It’s not that you’re dancing around it, but I think what you’re struggling with is something I’ve struggled with so many times when I’ve been asked this question, which is, yeah, I can share my story, and I suppose I could offer you tips, but really what I’m what saying is here’s the unique thing that happened to me, and here are the tips that I learned along the way that are applicable to me but may not be at all applicable to you.

The way I got here isn’t how you’re going to get here, so I don’t know. Is this a great question or not? That’s the thing. Everyone asks it of everybody, but at some point, you do start to wonder, does it matter?

Megana: It’s also so hard because it’s really hard and heartbreaking in ways that I could never have predicted, and so it’s hard to encourage anyone or offer tips looking back on things retrospectively, because I don’t know, it feels like it was just luck.

John: It was luck, but it was also you put yourself in a situation where you could get lucky. You put yourself in a situation where you stopped working for Google and you moved out to stay at your aunt’s house in Long Beach, where you could be lucky when Megan got staffed on Wandavision, and suddenly there was an opening and you could interview for her job and be like, “Oh, of course, Megana should take over.” You put yourself in a position to be lucky.

I think that’s the common thing I’ve seen among everyone who’s been in your job and gone on and done great things is that you were working really hard, but you were also open to situations that could happen. When those opportunities presented themselves, you had writing samples to show. You had a work ethic that you could demonstrate. You had people who could recommend you. You were ready for when luck was ready to strike.

Craig: Chance favors the prepared.

John: Last thing I’ll say, sometimes when you think back like, oh, you spent your five years working at Google, does one regret that? Tell me what you think. I’m not sure that regret is really useful, because you don’t know whether starting your writing career five years earlier would’ve helped or not helped. You can’t say.

Megana: I think that those experiences really informed me. When I talk to a college student, I think just take any job. Working and having experience showed me what I didn’t want to do, what was important to me. I wouldn’t have been able to come to those conclusions if I didn’t try something.

I think it was really useful to be working there, because it was a really awesome company to work for. The perks were incredible. I met such smart people. I still had this thing in me that wanted to pursue screenwriting. No matter how great the company was, I realized that that thing wasn’t going to go away.

John: Also, keep in mind, you were heavily involved with all of the Pay Up Hollywood stuff and speaking up for supporting staff pay and conditions. Had you not spent five years working that actually had a structure and had some sort of standards, would you have had the experience to say, “Oh, no, that’s not right. This is not how a reputable company should be working.” I don’t know that what we were able to do helping supporting staff would’ve been the safe if it hadn’t been for you and your experience.

Megana: I did have a very different context in standard, reading those emails. I also think your first few years of working, and this is something you talk about all the time, is just learning to be a professional. I think Hollywood is such, I don’t know, Wild West of an industry that it can be hard for people who only come up through the entertainment industry to know how to navigate that.

John: Another part of your story which I will say is useful and a good reminder is that you moved out here and you’ve kept your expenses low, which Craig and I often talk about. By staying at your aunt’s house, you didn’t have to take the very first thing that was offered. You could really figure out what it is that you were trying to do. You didn’t have to be so desperate, which I think was a great choice that you were able to make. Craig, I don’t know if you even know that. The first couple weeks that Megana was working here, she would drive to and from Long Beach to the office here.

Megana: It was the first three months.

John: First three months.

Megana: It was rough. It was really rough.

Craig: John was paying careful attention to your pain.

Megana: John would be like, “I can’t even think about it. It’s going to stress me out too much.” I’d be like, “Okay. It’ll be two hours until I get home. Bye.”

Craig: These are the things we do. I will say when you are in your 20s, there is a certain amount of stamina there and an ability to bear the kind of stuff that you deal with when you’re an up-and-comer. There are also things that as time has gone on have made things a bit easier.

For instance, when I started out, let’s say I knew, okay, I have to go to a meeting at Fox. Uh-oh, I live in North Hollywood in my small apartment. It’s going to take a while to get to Fox. How long? I don’t know, because there’s no internet to tell me. In fact, there’s no computerized maps. There’s the Thomas Guide, which is a large book that shows me things, but basically, I’ve figured out how to get to Fox. That’s how I’m going. There is no Waze or Google to say, “Oh, by the way, don’t go that way today.”

You’re just going, “I could go one of two ways. I can go down and to the left or I can go left and down. I’ll go down and to the left today.” Oh, wrong. Looks like it’s going to be an hour and 45 minutes and you’re going to miss your meeting. You can’t even call them to tell them-

John: I’ve done it.

Craig: … because you’re in a car without a phone. This is how it used to be. We’ve all carried the burdens. Driving a long way, a long commute, is something that so many Americans deal with. So many Americans shoulder that burden. There is a privilege in living near your workplace if you work in a city. It just gets more and more expensive the closer and closer you get to work. This is part of life. God, I did a lot of commuting back in those days, a lot. You do it.

John: We’ve got one more question here from Ben.

Drew: Ben asks, “Megana, with access to John and Craig and guests as knowledge resources, what advice have you learned from working there that you have found most useful on your writing journey?”

Megana: Wow, another really big question.

Craig: These feel unfair.

Megana: It does relate to the thing that you were saying earlier. I would say a big thing that I’ve learned from having access to so many guests and the both of you is your creative processes are so different from mine, and so is everyone’s. It’s unique.

I think one thing that I have learned is finding models that work for me, finding validation that some people work in the same way that I do, but also maybe permission that my process is going to look different, because I think one thing that all of the guests and you guys have in common is that the creative process is ugly and difficult and surprising and can be heartbreaking. I think just setting those sorts of expectations is really helpful.

Also, I feel like I’ve learned that just because things feel awkward or strange or difficult during your journey or your writing doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re wrong. I don’t know, sometimes things do feel really great, and you should actually chase that feeling and maybe not keep… This is more to myself to not keep writing the thing that you can’t figure out.

Craig: Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s correct.

Megana: It works both ways.

Craig: There’s no doubt. It does. It works both ways. You’re absolutely correct that John and I have different processes from each other. One of the things that I think is most admirable is when people in our business, when asked how ought one do something, respond with the way that works best for you. What I loathe is when people say, “Allow me to tell you how to do stuff,” and, “Real screenwriters do it like this, and failures do it like this.” Oh, shut up.

Megana: The episode with the Daniels was so cool, because in watching Everything Everywhere All At Once, it’s like, “Oh, this is so well done. They must have had this plan or this guide or whatever.” To hear their process, it’s like, “Oh wow, that’s kind of like how I feel when I’m stuck in the weeds.” The fact that they were able to produce this beautiful thing is just inspiring. I think that it’s been so helpful to hear these stories week after week and from the both of you, then just encourage that process and just the practice of continuing to do things that feel difficult.

Craig: That’s the way.

John: One last question for you on behalf of Drew. What advice do you have for Drew stepping into your role producing a Scriptnotes podcast? Any things you think Drew needs to know?

Megana: I have trained Drew on a lot of the things I think he needs to know. I think he’s doing a pretty great job so far.

Drew: Can I ask you a question?

Megana: Yes.

Drew: How do I get Craig to stop texting me? It’s just constant.

Megana: I am so jealous. Just tell him that your phone number is mine, because I would love to be texting with Craig more.

Drew: I’m going to do that.

Craig: I have literally never texted him once.

Drew: You text me all the time, Craig.

Craig: Why am I texting you? What am I texting you about? Tell me.

Drew: It’s just compliments.

Craig: Compliments, yeah. Just like, “Who does your hair?”

Drew: Yeah, exactly.

Craig: Sometimes I’ll text you in the middle of the night. I’m just like, “You up?” Yeah, I do. Then an hour will go by. Even though it’s the middle of the night, an hour will go by, and then I’ll be like, “Why aren’t you talking to me? Are we fighting?” I’ll do it all night. Then when he wakes up in the morning, he’s like, “Oh my god, what do I do about this?”

Drew: Look, it’s a back and forth. It’s okay. I was just hoping Megana might be able to [crosstalk 00:51:12].

Megana: I know this is a joke, but I’m still incredibly jealous and fuming.

Craig: She’s jealous of me stalking you. I’m going to do it. Megana, I swear to god, I’m going to set an alarm. I’m going to wake up at 2:30 in the morning. I’m just going to text you, “You up?”

Megana: Please do.

Craig: “You up?” is the funniest… Oh my god, I just love that. “You up?” Hysterical.

John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. Megana, you get to start us off, because I’m curious what you think is cool.

Megana: That’s so sweet. I have three One Cool Things, but I am going to choose just two, so that you guys invite me again.

Craig: I have none, so go ahead, cook.

Megana: I’m going to choose the two that have to do with collective narratives. The first is this book called Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy. It’s by James B. Stewart and our Scriptnotes friend, Rachel Abrams from the New York Times, who we worked with on Pay Up Hollywood stuff.

John: Great.

Megana: It is about Sumner Redstone and the family. It is such a fun read and so informative of I would say the early aughts, like what we were talking about earlier.

John: Cool. We’ll definitely take a look at that. Does it feel Succession-y?

Megana: Yes.

John: I think obviously there’s a lot of Redstone stuff happening in Succession.

Megana: In reading it, I’m constantly like, “Oh, is this where they got that Succession storyline from?” It’s really fun and fun to read in advance of the fourth season coming out.

John: Awesome.

Megana: Then my other One Cool Thing is The Romantics on Netflix. It is this docuseries by Smriti Mundhra, who is this really cool director. She did Indian Matchmaking for Netflix as well. It’s about Yash Chopra Films. Yash Chopra is a very influential filmmaker in Bollywood. I think whether you’ve watched Bollywood or not, it is so delightful. She does such an incredible job of tying how films and media were in conversation with Indian politics at the time. Would definitely recommend.

John: Is The Romantics a documentary?

Megana: It’s four episodes. It’s one of those docuseries things.

Craig: A docuseries.

Megana: I guess it’s not a thing.

John: Love it.

Megana: It’s a docuseries.

Craig: Like Tiger King, but without tigers or the Tiger King and with Yash Chopra and Bollywood.

Megana: Exactly.

Craig: Nailed it.

John: Nailed it. My One Cool Thing is incredibly basic. It is a vertical mouse by Logitech. It’s called The Lift. I’ve used a vertical mouse for many, many years. If you are having a hard time visualizing it, imagine you’re shaking somebody’s hand. That’s the position you want to keep your hand in.

Craig: What is going on with you? You’ve verticalized every interface.

John: I originally got my vertical mouse because Dana Fox, who you love, and has been on this show many times, she introduced me to the vertical mouse. It is so much better for your wrist, because you’re not turning your wrist down. You’re keeping your wrist up.

I’ve been using one for many, many years. It crapped out on me. I got this one from Logitech. It’s maybe a tiny bit small for my hands. I kind of have small hands. It works seamlessly. It has really good resolution and tracking. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it. If you’re loving for a vertical mouse, especially for a Mac, I highly recommend it. It works great for me.

Craig: I like pain!

John: I love it. He wants brutal pain.

Craig: Meh!

John: Craig, you’re passing on your One Cool Thing? You’re just taking one of Megana’s?

Craig: Absolutely taking one of Meganas. Mine is also The Romantics on Netflix.

John: Love it. That’s our show for this week, guys. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: You know it.

John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Lex Kornelis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send questions.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. They’re from Cotton Bureau. Just go to Cotton Bureau. You’ll find them there.

You can sign up to become Premium member on scriptnotes.net, where you’ll get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on getting ready with me.

Megana: Hashtag GRWM.

John: Only for Scriptnotes Premium members. Megana, it was so great to have you back.

Megana: Thanks, guys.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Megana Rao, talk us through get ready with me. I barely know what this is.

Megana: Get ready with me is a, it’s now new, but it has been increasing in popularity, trend on TikTok where different influencers will look into the camera and do their makeup for whatever event as they are chatting to you about what’s on their mind, about things that they are experiencing. Drew, please jump in if you’ve been watching any of these.

Drew: I haven’t been watching any of these.

Megana: Okay, cool.

Drew: I really wish I knew.

Craig: Drew, you’re gonna be fine.

John: I may have a reference for this though, because Drew Barrymore, who is a friend, she will have her camera up in the bathroom as she’s doing her makeup and she’s watching her face and doing all that stuff. She’s talking to the camera while she’s doing all that. Is that get ready with me?

Megana: Yes, exactly. It’s like, “Get ready with me as I go to New Year’s party,” or, “Get ready with me for a day of work,” or something like that.

John: Is it a similar thing to, there’s this young blonde influencer woman, she’s a stay-at-home girlfriend, who’s like, “Now I make a smoothie for my boyfriend and I take it to the gym and he really likes it.”

Craig: Which just sounds scary.

John: It’s [crosstalk 00:57:03].

Megana: Is that the voice or are you doing the computer automated voice that they put on top of their videos a long time?

John: I wasn’t doing a TikTok voice, but she has that voice herself, dead inside.

Megana: It’s really strange, and it’s so boring. It’s people cleaning their apartments or making smoothies for their boyfriends, but I spend hours watching these things.

Craig: Wow. If I made a get ready with me video, it would just be like, okay, shower, clothes, go, done. I don’t use products. There is no getting ready. Every morning of my life is just me launching myself out of a cannon and doom scrolling and then flinging myself into the car. There’s just no getting ready.

Megana: It is this gendered thing. It’s part beauty tutorial, part makeup tutorial, I mean.

Craig: Fashion.

Megana: It’s just so interesting to me, because getting ready, it’s an intimate thing. It’s your bridge between your private and public life. I don’t know, it’s just so weird to me that I now have access to all of these people’s process for how they transition from their home to the public world.

John: One of the things you put in the Workflowy here is this Alix Earle, A-L-I-X, Earle. One of the videos in her Instagram or her TikTok was her and her little sister, and they’re doing their makeup together. It was an ad actually for something. It was for some concealer. They were side by side.

It feels like that’s what you’re describing. It’s the kind of experience you normally would have with a big sister, watching her do her thing and being side by side while she’s doing her thing, but because maybe we’re all only children, we’re all by ourselves all the time, it just feels like there’s somebody there. It’s nice to just be next to somebody while they’re doing their thing. Is that the feel?

Megana: Yes, exactly, because I have this experience where this 13-year-old’s get ready with me came across my TikTok, and she’s getting ready for this bar mitzvah. Then I don’t know, however many videos later, I’m so invested in her life. I’ve seen all of her different bar mitzvah outfits. I’m like, “I shouldn’t have access to this.”

Also, when I was 13, so much of the fun of getting ready for an event like this is being around your friends who are also getting ready and learning in the same physical space. Yet me as a 30-year-old woman just watching this 13-year-old get ready for her bar mitzvah is so dark.

Craig: Ew, strange. Obviously, the easy cliché question is are you really seeing them getting ready or are you seeing them doing a version of getting ready that is being seen, so it’s a different thing? Let’s say it’s all honest. This is really them getting ready. It does also promote this notion of perfectionism, I think. All of this, I find it disconcerting.

Megana: It’s interesting that it’s an anti-perfectionism, because they are letting you behind the mask. They’re letting you see their blemished skin and all of those things.

Craig: Let me push back. They’re letting you see their blemished skin, and then they’re showing you how when they’re done, it’s not blemished anymore and how they have perfected it before they walk out the door. It’s like when very beautiful people are like, “Look, here’s a picture of me without makeup.” I’m like, “You’re still hot. You’re still beautiful. You know you’re beautiful. That’s why you’re doing it.”

To show them all the layers and stuff, and then they’re go off to something cool or whatever, I don’t know. It feels aspirational in a dangerous way, the way that all advertising has always been. That’s not even a gendered thing. Maybe the nature of it is gendered. “You want to look beautiful, don’t you? Here’s how you do it. You want to have an awesome car. Here’s how you do it.” I don’t know. It’s just when I hear about a 13-year-old girl commoditizing her life, it’s scary to me. It’s scary.

Megana: It’s so frightening. In the article that John linked for collective narratives, that Substack article, he talks about how teen happiness in the early 2000s was at an all-time high, and he had this theory that it was because it was early internet, where kids are just sharing memes online, but they’re still in physical spaces together. I was so struck by that compared to… When I was younger, we used to watch makeup tutorials on YouTube, but the women were much older than us. The idea of being a 13-year-old and creating content in this way is so wild and terrifying to me.

Craig: Terrifying, yes. Let the kids be kids. I understand that every sentence that comes out of my mouth will be something that an old man says. I don’t know. As a parent, I worry about it. I worry about the fact that your life becomes memorialized permanently and belongs to everyone, that there is a sense that you’re curating your own moments.

One of my kids was talking about BeReal the other day and saying how it’s literally become the opposite of BeReal. Literally. It’s like, “Oh my god, BeReal. Here I am riding a unicorn and drinking champagne while my hair’s on fire, and there’s my new boyfriend. Oh my god, you caught us at just the right time.” Did we?

John: An option I would see with get ready with me videos, because now I’m realizing there’s other things that are actually part of that trend. I just didn’t recognize it. There’s a guy who’s blind who, basically just like that, basically like, “This is how I figure out my closet and what I’m going to wear in the mornings. This is how I make breakfast.” It’s his boyfriend filming the whole thing. That’s a perspective I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a blind person getting your morning routine together, or I don’t know what it’s like to be getting your morning together if you’re using a wheelchair. In the sense of giving you a window into other people’s spaces and daily lives, that could be really useful.

I think that’s one of the good things about the internet that we didn’t have before is that it could give you some perspective in what a life is like that is not yours. That’s good, but I do share most of our other horrors about especially teenagers feeling like, “I have to perform being myself.” That I don’t think is healthy.

Craig: What you’re saying about seeing a window into other people’s lives, that makes sense. To the extent that these things can be empathy building and instructive and help us understand other people is great. To the extent that they are about a calculated lack of calculation and about physical perfectionism and lookism and sizism and all the other isms… Remember, these things are, I assume, heavily featured people who have very typical Western standards of beauty and the typical body size that the media says we’re supposed to have. I don’t know.

I don’t know how I would feel about watching even a guy my age. Like, okay, you’re 50 years old. Here’s a 50-year-old guy who’s like, “Get ready with me.” Then I’m like, “Aw, man, he’s in awesome shape, and he’s really handsome, and he’s got a full head of hair. He’s gonna put on his… Oh, that’s an interesting shaving lotion. Okay, I can see how that might help with razor bumps. Oh, okay, those are possibly cool shoes to wear with those pants, but really, it doesn’t matter what the hell he wears.”

Drew: Do you find any comfort in a ritual though? I feel like I do find comfort in watching a ritual.

Craig: I will tell you this very strange thing I’ve noticed about myself. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it on this show. It occurred to me one day that when I wash my hair, or my head I guess at this point I should say, my hands do the exact same thing in the exact same way for the exact same amount of time every single time. I have completely ritualized the movements of my fingers and hands over my head. It’s remarkable. I don’t know how it happened. There’s no variation whatsoever. I’ve created some strange rituals for myself. I don’t think that they’re signs of OCD as much as just humans ritualize things.

I don’t have any great interest in that stuff. I don’t. If people were like, “Oh, why don’t you walk us through getting to ready to write,” I would be like, “Eff on off out of my office, friend. You don’t want to see that, and I don’t want to show it to you.”

Megana: I guess it just feels like, and I feel old saying this too, the amount of time that your camera is recording is just longer and longer. The one-way intimacy of it is confusing to me for young people growing up. I don’t know. I guess I’m in the situation where I’m very invested in this person’s life. I know what their rituals are. I know what they’re doing. They’ve shared a lot with me. It’s so weird to have that intimacy flattened and unreciprocated.

Craig: You taught us all about parasocial relationships. I get it completely. I would argue that for people who listen to us on this show and have listened for a long, long time, they actually know us pretty well, because this is us. I know John. It’s not like when the mic goes off, I’m like, “Okay, now the real John pops out.”

John: [inaudible 01:07:08].

Craig: We are this, so they actually do know us. The intimacy is a product of time and exposure. There is no calculation. That’s one of the best things I think about audio only is that it removes a certain kind of vanity or insecurity from the equation, which I have seen my face on television way too much.

This weird thing that’s happened is because… Sometimes in LA, I would get recognized because people just knew that I was on Scriptnotes, and it’d be like, “Oh, you’re a Scriptnotes fan.” What’s happened now is, because I do those little segments at the end of The Last of Us-

Megana: They’re so cute.

Craig: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Megana: I’m always like, “Aw.”

Craig: “Aw.” That’s what I go for, unthreatening. That actually means that now people are recognizing me. I swear to god, I’m confused every time. I gotta figure out how to get around this. I know I’m not Brad Pitt. What I feel almost every single time is a certain twinge of insecurity.

John: Megana, I’m curious, because we’ve talked about this off mic, but you are recognized some just because of your role on Scriptnotes. To what degree are you finding it helpful? To what degree is that annoying? How are you feeling about your semi-fame off of here?

Megana: I would say our listeners are very niche and specialized. They are people who are interested in screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. It’s cool, because they’re also people in my industry. I’m not recognized that often, so it’s not something that I have to deal with like Craig. It’s fun because it means that the person listens to Scriptnotes, and then I have something to talk about with them.

Craig: You have a famous name, I think, because you are the only Megana I’ve ever met in my life.

Megana: Keep it that way.

Craig: Oh, I will. Trust me. If I meet another one, I’m just gonna turn around and walk away. It’s just a very specific name that there’s not a lot of them. I think when people probably see it on a piece of paper or something, they’re like, “Oh, I know who you are.”

Megana: You guys did do a very nice thing when Drew started, which I also appreciated, because I didn’t know how to say your last name, where you had a whole bit about pronunciation and who he was. I would say that people still think that I am Megan McDonald who just got married.

Craig: Married to a guy named Arao. It really does flow. I gotta say, 999 people out of a thousand, or perhaps all thousand, if you said, “Can you write out the name Megana Rao for me?” would say Megan, and then they would be like, “How do you spell Arao?” Is it a common name in India?

Megana: Yes, it is. It means “of the clouds,” because mega means cloud in Sanskrit.

Craig: Of the clouds.

Megana: I’m not resentful at all of the portion that you guys gave Drew to explain his name.

Craig: We finally got around to it.

John: We learned. We’ve learned our lesson. I will say-

Craig: You’re so ethereal. You’re of the clouds.

John: A friend of ours was hiring a new assistant. One of the assistants who was under consideration was also Meghna, which is the other spelling of Meghna, so just-

Craig: Oh, Meghna.

John: M-E-G-H-N-A, which is the same name, correct?

Megana: Correct, yeah.

Craig: By the way, Megana, it feels a little weird as a white guy to be like, “Okay, now your name is Megana. What does that mean?” It’s a little weird.

Megana: Fair enough.

John: This would’ve been a great way to first introduce you on the podcast if we’d said, “Your name is Megana. It’s the same pronunciation as Pamela.” It’s not hard for people to do, because my frustration was people saying, “Oh, is Megana [meh-GAH-nuh] gonna be setting that up?”

Craig: Megana [meh-GAH-nuh].

John: You hear it all the time.

Megana: Yeah, and Megna [MAYG-nuh], Megana [MEH-guh-nuh], all of those are fine. Megana [meh-GAH-nuh] though is what people reach for first though, in a way that’s confusing.

Craig: Megana [meh-GAH-nuh]. I’ve been getting Craig Mazin [MA-zn] my whole life. My whole life.

John: That’s why I changed my name.

Craig: Exactly. Listen. You changed it to a month.

John: Megana, thank you for coming back on the show. You’re welcome back any time, of course.

Megana: Thank you guys.

Craig: Thanks, Megana.

John: Open invitation.

Drew: I’m so glad you’re here.

Megana: Bye.

Craig: See you guys.

Drew: Bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• How to Become a Member of the WGA
• Conceiving the 2000s by Noah Smith
• Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams
• The Romantics on Netflix
• Logitech Lift Vertical Mouse
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Lex Kornelis (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.