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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: And this is Episode 397 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to fulfill a promise that we made last week on the podcast where we said that we would talk about sound and how it’s used on the page, on the stage, and in the mixing room. After nearly 400 episodes I cannot believe it has taken this long to talk about sound. To help us out we’re joined by a guest from 250 episodes back.

Craig: Wow.

John: Andrea Berloff is a writer whose credits include World Trade Center, Straight Outta Compton. She wrote and directed this summer’s 1970s gangster movie The Kitchen. She just came back yesterday from New York where she finished her sound mix. Andrea Berloff, welcome home.

Andrea Berloff: Thank you. It’s so good to be home. And really if I’m going to return to Los Angeles is there any better place than to have my first stop be here?

Craig: No.

Andrea: With the two of you.

Craig: We are the definition of Los Angeles.

Andrea: My family doesn’t need to see me. Nobody.

Craig: No.

John: No, no.

Andrea: No.

Craig: Why would they?

Andrea: They’re fine without me.

Craig: They know you and they’re bored of you.

Andrea: That’s absolutely true.

Craig: We still appreciate everything you say and do.

Andrea: I don’t know about that. But we’ll see. [laughs]

Craig: You’re fresh to us.

John: Andrea Berloff brought Matzo for Passover which is fantastic.

Andrea: I did. I brought Matzo for Passover, but also just because I knew it would be a great opening conversation with Craig.

Craig: We got to talk about the Matzo for a second. And just come along with us gentiles. You need to hear this story. So a little quick refresher course on Passover. Passover is the reason that the most of you have your Easter, because The Last Supper was a Passover Seder. Interesting trivia: Jesus was Jewish.

Andrea: Ooh. Really?

Craig: I still feel like a lot of people miss that one. So Passover is the story from the Bible and one of the deals is that the Jews are running away. They’re leaving, they’re fleeing. It’s an exodus of sort from Egypt after all their travails. And they don’t have time to leaven the bread. Right? They have to make bread. It doesn’t have time to rise. So instead they just leave that out and end up with this terrible bad bread. The point is the bread has been damaged. OK? It’s damaged, because they’re fleeing.

And I’m sure everybody when they first saw Matzo come out of the oven said, “Oh no, what happened? There’s been a terrible mistake.” And the bread-maker said, “It’s not a mistake. It’s just that we didn’t have time to do it right. So this is wrong bread. It’s bad. But it’s all we have.” Right?

Andrea: Right. I’m with you. Go on.

Craig: So in a very Jewish way Jews are like let us now impose this terrible, broken food upon every generation of Jews to follow. And so during Passover Jews are not supposed to eat any leaven bread, or any leavened anything, but only things that are no bread-like at all. Or this horrible, broken, misshapen food that is in defiance of all that is good.

Andrea: Now here’s what I have to say about that. I will grant you that perhaps Jews have extrapolated out a little far. That perhaps just because the Matzo screwed up why take that against pasta?

Craig: Right.

Andrea: What did pasta factor into this? Nothing. Pasta is fine. Had nothing to do with this story. So I will say to you that I’m with you in there. But I will take issue with the idea that Matzo is inherently a terrible thing. Because the Matzo for example that I brought you today–

John: Was delicious.

Andrea: Thank you, John. Covered in caramel and chocolate, a little bit of sea salt. Delicious.

Craig: Sure. That’s how they tell you that crickets are good. They’re like, look, we took this bug and we covered it in chocolate and sea salt and caramel.

Andrea: I feel like that’s your cultural bias. Some people do find it delicious, crickets.

Craig: No. Everybody finds chocolate, caramel, and sea salt delicious. And then it is literally masking – when you purchase Matzo, John…

John: Yes, tell me.

Craig: Have you ever bought a box of Matzo?

John: Never once in my life. I never had the occasion to.

Craig: How strange.

Andrea: Well the real conspiracy at this point is that you can no longer buy a box of Matzo. If you go to the grocery store they only sell them in six-packs. And nobody wants six boxes of Matzo.

Craig: No, exactly.

Andrea: But that’s the only way they sell them now.

Craig: The reason they have to do that is because Matzo actually probably costs less – because it’s such a terrible product it costs less the more you sell. It defies physics and nature as I pointed out. Also, true fact, Matzo is packaged in Matzo. I don’t know if you knew this. Yeah, you can eat right through the – there is no box.

Andrea: Oh, I didn’t know.

Craig: The box tastes slightly better than the contents.

Andrea: With a little butter and salt.

John: Well because the ink, the printing on the box.

Craig: The ink adds a little zest.

Andrea: Sure.

Craig: So my birthday is in early April.

Andrea: Happy Birthday.

Craig: Thank you. And the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, like the Muslim calendar. And because it is a lunar calendar that’s why for instance Christians have you ever wondered why Easter keeps shifting around on you all the time? This is why. Because it’s based on Passover.

Andrea: It’s funny that they never settled that down on the Christian calendar. Because you know what they settled down Christmas. They settled down other things. I wonder why they didn’t do that.

Craig: They shifted the Sabbath one day. Why not? They could do anything.

Andrea: I don’t know. Just declare April 15 Easter.

Craig: They should.

Andrea: Right. I don’t know.

Craig: Anywho, a lot of times my birthday would fall during Passover.

Andrea: That’s the worst. My dad’s, too.

John: Oh, so what would your birthday cake be?

Craig: That’s a great question.

Andrea: The worst. The worst.

Craig: So what they would do is they would take something called Matzo Meal.

Andrea: Ugh.

Craig: What is Matzo Meal? So Matzo is horrible. But if you take it and smash it up and grind it into a quasi-ersatz powder flour type substance it gets even worse. Then, you add eggs and you whip it up and it turns into a kind of a thick dense cement. Then…

Andrea: Like papier-mâché. What you would make papier-mâché out of.

Craig: Yes. It’s a glue. It’s essentially a glue. A mucilage if you will. And then you add a little bit of sugar. Not too much, because we don’t want anyone to enjoy this. Then we put it in the oven and we bake it until all pathogens are dead, so I think we’ll put it in the oven at 7,000 degrees for 100 days. Then when it comes out you cover it in – OK, and this is another, this Passover chocolate always has the same disgusting taste to it. Why can’t chocolate be right? Is there leavening in chocolate?

Andrea: It’s the corn syrup, isn’t it? I don’t know. I’m saying that like I know what I’m talking about.

Craig: You can’t use corn syrup? It’s so horrible. It’s like sickly-sweet. At that point it’s like a diabetes prune juice that they pour all over the whole thing. Then they put it in front of you, they stick a candle in it, and they sing Happy Birthday. But even as they sing Happy Birthday to you, John, there’s a slight sneer. A little bit of a sneer.

Andrea: We know it’s not that happy.

Craig: No, this is bad.

Andrea: See, I really think that the moral of this is that it’s not really your issue with Matzo and Passover. It’s because it screwed with your birthday.

Craig: Correct.

Andrea: [laughs] And you’re still really angry about this and about all the trauma.

Craig: Yeah, that’s actually the headline. There’s no secret there. The absolute headline is that I was traumatized repeatedly.

Andrea: Matzo is not the issue.

Craig: No. That said, I have taken this with me very far.

Andrea: I see.

Craig: Somebody posted a picture on Twitter of a Matzo cake covered in that glistening, brown, weird, shimmery fake chocolate.

Andrea: Awful.

Craig: And I got the shivers. I got the spinal shivers.

Andrea: I’m sorry. What else happened to you as a child?

Craig: That was actually the worst of it. Weirdly–

John: It was the root of all Craig’s anger was the Matzo cake.

Andrea: Clearly.

Craig: Just a brutal insult year after year.

Andrea: Terrible.

Craig: Yeah. So anyway, Happy Passover.

Andrea: Do you want to hear the worst? My birthday is on Christmas Day. As a Jew. Think about that.

Craig: Yeah. I have another friend who has that, too. I mean, I guess as a Jew it’s not super bad because you weren’t going to get Christmas anyway.

John: But you couldn’t have like a normal birthday party with friends.

Craig: That’s the problem.

Andrea: I got a cake, but there was no party.

Craig: Oh yeah you got a cake.

John: My husband’s birthday is on Halloween.

Andrea: Oh, that’s fun.

John: Well, it’s kind of fun, but also–

Craig: That’s a rough one, too.

John: Everyone wants to trick or treat rather than, you know.

Andrea: Yeah, than celebrate him.

Craig: And the theme of his birthday is blood. Bleh. All right, well anyway, that’s my – so don’t eat Matzo. That’s my basic—

Andrea: Well then I’m sorry I brought you my delicious treat. John liked it.

John: It is delicious. It is genuinely delicious.

Craig: We can keep continuing to argue about that.

John: Andrea Berloff is not only a Matzo expert. She is also a WGA board member. So we’ll start today by talking about some WGA stuff because that’s what we basically do. Stuff happens and we recap it. But we recap it sort of on a Saturday and then everything changes by the time the episode comes out.

Craig: Let’s see how completely obsolete our information will be.

John: Let’s see what happened this week. So on Wednesday the WGA filed a lawsuit seeking to establish that talent agency packaging fees are illegal under both California and federal law. So the defendants in the lawsuit are WME, CAA, UTA, ICM, the big four talent agencies which represent 80% of the packaging fees paid by Hollywood studios and networks. The plaintiffs in the suit in the WGA East and West include Patty Carr, Ashley Gable, Barbara Hall, Deric Hughes, Chip Johannessen, Deirdre Mangan, David Simon and Meredith Stiehm.

Andrea, we know a lot of those folks.

Andrea: I think we need to take a moment to really honor that group of incredibly brave people because they – it’s not even so much that they specifically, you know, I don’t want to speak to individuals, but we needed plaintiffs who just simply have been on shows that were packaged for whom we could fight on all of our behalves. And the fact that that group stepped up and put their names on the lawsuit is really brave. And people don’t typically stick their necks out like that for others. So I really want to commend them and thank them.

John: Yeah. I got to see three of them yesterday and just pulled them aside and thanked them so much for what they’re doing because it is just putting yourself in the spotlight in that way.

Craig: David Simon kind of prior to the lawsuit had already extended his neck, torso, limbs, and yeah, he’s been pretty outspoken.

Andrea He’s been vocal.

John: So Meredith Stiehm is from the show Cold Case. And she spoke about sort of how the agency was making $0.94 on the dollar of everything she made in the backend. And Deirdre Mangan I didn’t know before, but she did Madame Secretary which is another big hit show. And so these are great plaintiffs. And as we sort of said in the speeches and the lead up to all this stuff, this lawsuit we always said we were going to file it, we also said it was going to take a really long time. And you sort of don’t know what the ups and the downs are, but the lawsuit is now filed. And we’ll check in with it.

Andrea: And it will take years. We can be checking in on this conversation for years and years and years. My mother just had a lawsuit settled this week that took 10 years. 10 years. So it will take some time.

Craig: Well, I thought that I had a pretty good case against her and I was willing to fight. And I was. I was ready to take it the whole way.

Andrea: You know.

Craig: If you guys weren’t on the board, if other people were on the board and we were hearing about this information then I would say a certain kind of thing. And so I think I should just keep saying that certain kind of thing. And you don’t have to react to any of this. But my general analysis in a situation like this is that the lawsuit is part of a strategy to try and get a deal. I believe – my theory is that in fact this lawsuit will not last years. It will not go to court. It won’t do any of that.

My great hope, I’ll just keep saying this, my great hope is that we resolve this quickly. I know that there’s been a suggestion from some people – some people have come back from meetings and things and said that people at the guild were saying, “Look, this is going to take a really long time and we really think maybe we should be looking at forgetting about the big four and looking at midsize and smaller agencies.” And my feeling is that that’s never going to happen, ever. That’s just my personal opinion. And that we do have to make a deal with the big four agencies. And so I’m very, very hopeful that that happens.

This is a nerve-wracking time because – it’s an interesting time because unlike our labor actions with studios, which must come to end. I mean, you can’t strike forever. They can’t lock you out forever. Nor can a deal last forever, right. So these things are constantly churning and then resolving. This could last forever. And that’s frightening because I do think that there’s great value in the way we work with these people. And also we’re talking about these relationships that have gone on for a very, very long time.

You know, I’ve been talking to people on both sides and it’s fascinating how there’s a lot of similar feelings on both sides of hurt and confusion. But there’s also I think a weird wistfulness like on both sides what you hear people saying is that this personally is really distressing and upsetting because we have relationships. You know, the businesses that are the umbrella of a place like WME for instance or CAA, that’s that. And like the Writers Guild is an institution and that’s that. These are the umbrellas under which people exist.

Then you have individual people who are just like this feels terrible. And I’m hopeful – hopeful, hopeful, hopeful – that all of this stuff, saber-rattling and fire and all that, leads to some sort of resolution. The resolution has to be better for writers than the status quo. And I think that there is a resolution to be had.

So I just continue to urge – I urge you guys, I urge them to get into a room that both sides recognize as productive and then produce and get a deal so that we can just sort of get back to our lives. Because I like the life that I had.

Andrea: I like the life I had, too. But I will say this. I picked up on a word that you just said which was this wistfulness. And I think nobody when they’re a kid wants to – everybody wants to grow up and go to Hollywood and make movies. And you have an agent and you think that sounds so cool. And all of that kind of no longer exists in a sense. Nobody dreams of growing up and creating content for a multinational conglomerate that is then going to be streamed and you’ll never see it again and you don’t know how many people watch it. Like that is not your childhood dream.

Your childhood dream is not working for an agent that is no longer an agent. I mean, our individual agents may function as that, but the agencies no longer function in the way that we perceived it as being. So I think part of this is also a wistfulness for the way things used to be. And the way things are evolving is frightening to everybody. And I don’t think it’s just endemic to our relationship with our agents and the conversation we’re having regarding that. I think it’s also regarding what will be writer’s place in the future of this world, because I think that is very much in flux and I think that this fight is a symptom of the larger thing going on right now.

John: I had a conversation with a reporter this week. We were talking about – he’s not a person who covers Hollywood at all. He covers labor. And so he’s asking these questions about how is this reflected in the division of labor versus capital, or labor versus management. And it was a really fascinating lens to look at it through because obviously we only see this as Hollywood, our own little unique thing. But as writers we are labor and agents are sort of the people representing our labor. But it feels in a strange way that this influx of money has made us like we are assets and the split of labor and capital is – it’s just a different mix.

If I were not in this business at all I’d be looking at this and be really fascinated to see sort of the questions that it brings up in terms of what does it mean to be an employer versus an agent, a manager. So it’s a fascinating thing even if you weren’t part of this mess and trying to figure out the way through it.

Craig: And we are weird labor. I mean, we’re labor, but we also – there was a New York Times article that misunderstood the relationship and said agents play a massive role in matching writers to the room. And I’m like, no, no, no, writers do that. And then you realize very quickly we’re employers. That’s the weird part is that we’re labor but we’re not labor. We’re also employers. When the agents are – people say, look the packaging fees has disrupted what I call the you make more when I make more relationship, which is crucial, when we say packaging fees has disrupted that and thus pushed down the salaries of lower level writers towards our minimums it’s also important to remember that there’s a writer in charge of that who is signing off on that.

Andrea: That’s right.

Craig: And whose budget is being improved because of that. There is an inter-relationship here. It is not as clean and clear as the big guy versus the little guy. This is a strange relationship that has gotten twisted but can be untwisted I believe.

And, of course, for those of us who mostly have done feature work our agents have operated in a traditional sense. I mean, until I did Chernobyl I had never had any relationship with an agency other than you get 10% of what I make. So there’s still I think a lot of room for this to be fixed and worked out.

You know, and I do think that when I think about life where there’s a kind of forced separation I immediately start thinking about unintended consequences. And essentially what I start to ask is who now will benefit from our not being there with those people? And some individuals and institutions come to mind. So, you know, I’ll just keep urging a peaceful resolution. But that doesn’t capitulation and it doesn’t – for either side. Neither side wants to just go like, oh OK, whatever you want.

Andrea: Never mind.

Craig: Yeah. If there’s any way to fix this. That would be great if you guys could do that.

Andrea: We’re trying. We’re working on it.

John: You know, and that was only Wednesday.

Andrea: There’s more.

John: And so on Thursday night a bunch of members led by screenwriter Daniel Zucker put together a big mixer with the #WGAmix. And I’ve never been sort of prouder of a party that I wasn’t at. It was this huge event, two stories of a bunch of people together in a room.

So it reminded me Craig that during the strike we would have events. This is sort of pre-social media, but you had your blog and I had my blog. And Jane Espenson had her blog. And so we’d put on our blogs like everybody meet at Warner Bros and we’ll all picket together. And it reminded me of how important it was during times of unrest to sort of gather people together. And so I just love that these members self-organized and did this thing.

Andrea: I will agree with you. I would say to you that some of my most significant relationships with writers were formed during the strike. People who are still genuine friends today were people who I met during the strike.

John: 100%.

Andrea: Because we’re screenwriters and we sit alone all day long. I didn’t know anybody.

Craig: Can’t we have parties without–

Andrea: You’re welcome to invite me any time.

Craig: Throwing grenades around. I mean, strikes are very expensive ways to meet people.

Andrea: They are. They are.

Craig: I mean, I think it’s great, obviously. And, look, a large part of this is a sense of solidarity, but I will also, as always, because I am disagreeable and I am that guy, I want to also say to people in the guild don’t be so quick to scream and yell and be abusive at people that disagree or dissent. Because I think that makes us weaker.

Andrea: I agree.

Craig: Look, I did not like the essay editorial that – what’s the writer’s name?

Andrea: Jon Robin Baitz.

Craig: Jon Robin Baitz.

Andrea: Yeah. I thought that was a big mistake.

Craig: Right. So he wrote this long piece about why he wasn’t going to leave his agent and how much he loved his agent and how agents were great and how this made no sense and all the rest of it. And I just thought, well, this is a massive miscalculation. What do you think? People are going to read this and because of your grandiloquence everyone is going to go oh my god he’s right and the scales will fall from our eyes. That’s not how it works.

Also, I just didn’t think it was a very well argued piece. And it was super long. That aside, I’m sure he’s listening to this going, oh thank you very much Scary Movie 4 guy. Regardless, people went crazy and they started yelling at him and making fun of him and mocking him. And say what you will, the guy is a very well-regarded writer. But that aside, even if he weren’t when do that it makes us look weak. It’s implying that we are one defection away from collapse and we’re not. Ever.

Andrea: No. I couldn’t agree more. And I think one of our big flaws, not just with this action but with almost every action we take, is that we do not create enough safe space for dissent. Dissent is not particularly welcomed. And I don’t think that we can ever–

John: Dissent is democratic. And we are a democratic organization so we have to make sure that we are listening to those things. And a lot of my job this last week was listening to people who were freaked out and unhappy. And Monday was a really tough day because I was hearing a bunch of that stuff. And then Tuesday was a much better day because I was hearing better things.

Craig: I think in part the attitude of fearing dissent is engendered by the natural guild position that the more of you that support this the stronger we are. Which implies the fewer of you who support it the weaker we are. Which implies if you don’t support this you are weakening us. Which makes you a kind of enemy for disagreeing. And if there’s anything I wish I could kill in the guild body politic it’s this whole you have to vote yes or else you’re weakening us. So your yes isn’t really a yes. It’s sort of a yes, but it’s mostly kind of a – you know what I mean? It’s an act of patriotism to vote yes. We have to stop doing that.

And I know it’s hard to stop doing that because it’s helpful. It is. I get it. It’s useful. But the more we keep saying you have to vote yes to be patriotic and effective the more we’re essentially defining people who dissent as internal termites gnawing at the foundation of our union.

Andrea: Or just anti-guild. People are out to, I mean, same way you just said, out to destroy us. And loving something also means sometimes seeing its flaws and being able to speak to that as well. Doesn’t mean that you’re trying to tear it down.

John: 100%.

Craig: That’s the song I have sung for so many years.

Andrea: Yes. I know.

John: That was Thursday. Then on Friday—

Andrea: What happened on Friday, John?

John: On Friday there was small happy news. So the guild announced the Weekly Feature Memo.

Andrea: I think that’s great.

John: And it’s sort of inspired by the CAA Book Memo. It’s a newsletter that goes out every Friday to producers, to studios, listing available specs and pitches. It’s available to current, post-current, associate members. You can make up to two submissions a month. And you get those in by Wednesday. We’ll put the link in the show notes. But essentially it’s just a simple straightforward newsletter that goes out of like these are the things that are out there. All the agencies always sort of had their own version of this. This is just a system-wide thing that people can (crosstalk).

Andrea: I think that’s really great. And I hope that this continues after this action is settled. Because to give writers who may not have number one agent or something like that the ability to have a list out there. I guarantee you every assistant in town is going to read that list. And just say that’s a really cool idea. Yeah, I’ve never heard that kind of idea before. I would take a look at that script.

I really think that this could be tremendously helpful for screenwriters.

Craig: Isn’t there at one of the theaters they will do a little live creation of an unproduced pilot?

John: Yeah.

Craig: There’s an interesting idea of this bin of forgotten toys. And inside of them are these gems. And people won’t read them because they’re old. There’s this sense of like, oh, that’s been around. It’s old. That doesn’t mean a damn thing. It could have been around for 30 years. Who cares?

If you love it, and you see the potential, and you know how to do it, and then you find somebody else that really loves it, well then that’s a thing. It counts. So it makes total sense to have some mechanism by which we can kind of reintroduce things that have fallen by the wayside. I’m not even thinking about writers at this point. I’m actually thinking about audiences at this point because there are a lot of – you know, somebody said that literally if all you did – oh, you know what it was? So escape room. I did an escape room and it was – you know, escape rooms are always located in like weird parts of town and stuff because they just need cheap real estate. And one of them apparently was either in the same building or near the building where the Writers Guild keeps all of its printed scripts from their screenplay registration service.

John: Yeah. That’s a whole thing.

Craig: And we were talking about kind of a storage wars where you buy a pallet and go through and try and find a script that’s great.

Andrea: Think about the gold that’s in there.

Craig: But someone said, you know what, if I could what I would do is just go through all the scripts written by women. Because they were all ignored for decades. So go in there. There’s probably like a hundred amazing scripts that just got ignored.

Think about like that alone. Right? So I think it’s a great idea.

Andrea: Someday we’ll have an archivist. Right? How about that? We pay for an archivist for a year to do that.

Craig: Just go through and sort. Great idea.

John: Craig, it occurs to me that with this weekly feature memo people will be looking at loglines and you and I are always so dismissive of loglines.

Craig: Correct.

John: And now people are going to have to write loglines.

Craig: Well they’re the worst and my logline would just be like “Seriously, just…”

Andrea: “Just read the script.”

Craig: “Just read the script.” Just read five pages and if you don’t like them throw it out. There’s the logline. There is no logline. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Read five pages.

Andrea: But it does. It does matter. People say what is your movie about.

Craig: I know. They should stop it.

Andrea: Well.

Craig: And you should just keep saying to them read five pages. If you don’t like them it’s not going to be for you. And if you do you’ll keep reading. And eventually you might get to a point where you go oh here’s where I realize I don’t like this. But the logline will never – because I can tell you, I can give you terrible…

Here’s a logline. The son of a mobster struggles with the legacy of his family and the direction of his own life. Well that’s The Godfather. That’s terrible.

Andrea: I know.

Craig: Yeah, so anyway, read five pages.

Andrea: OK. I’ll tell them.

John: Now we finally get to the marquee topic.

Andrea: Let’s do it.

John: Which is sound. I’m so excited to talk about sound.

Andrea: Me too.

John: So we’re going to start with talking about sound on the page. So as a screenwriter you are responsible for everything that an audience sees and hears in a movie. But really if you look at a script you’re really mostly describing what people see. There’s dialogue which of course you hear, but I’ve been thinking back sort of like how often I reference the sound in a script and it’s probably not even every page.

So I want to talk about sort of when you make the decisions to call out the sound and when you don’t. I remember looking at my first – as I was first starting to read screenplays, like the old screenplays, like every sound effect was capitalized. It was like an old radio play. So that the person with the coconuts could make the horse galloping. And now I think there’s an expectation that unless you’re saying something is weird we assume that everything that we see onscreen is going to make the sound we expect it to make, unless we’re calling it out differently.

But, Andrea, as you’re writing how often are you calling out on the page special sound things?

Andrea: I tend to do a lot, and probably too much. I probably write too many stage directions as is. I’m very verbose on the page. I feel like when you’re writing a screenplay you are trying to entertain people enough that they want more. They want to see what actor would you put in. They want to make that movie. And so I tend to overwrite a bit in the screenplay. I always say – I mean, not me just saying this, everybody says this – there’s a reading draft and a shooting draft. And my reading drafts tend to be pretty heavy on all of that stuff. I love sound. I love music. And I put a lot of it in.

So I will often say, you know, the sounds of the city, the screech of the tires, the clap of lightning. I do it a lot.

John: You’re trying to create that feel of what it would be like if you were in that theater experiencing this. Craig what’s your sound take on the page?

Craig: I’m probably not as heavy as it sounds like you are in terms of visual description. I will describe visuals in a very kind of reportorial war correspondence style. But sound I’m obsessed with. Because I realize, especially now having just gone through all these sound mixes, how much more in tune with sound I am than with the granular aspects of stuff.

Visual information is important to me, but sound texture and I think all the emotion comes from sound. So a lot of times when I’m writing a scene and I want you to feel scared, or I want you to feel confused I’ll think in terms of sound. Things will go whistling by, or falling or going kerplunk. But really the sounds are lying because then you realize it’s something else. But I love to bring the reader into a space with sound because I don’t know, for me at least that’s where all of the emotion lives in the environment.

That said, when you actually arrive at the moment of production sounds have to reorient and change to what you see. But then you get to write again. Because sound is yours to control and it’s the best part of production to me because, look, what you shot is what you shot. Yeah, VFX can help and all that, but sound you can do anything.

Andrea: Right.

Craig: Oh joy.

Andrea: It’s fun.

John: Let’s talk about, this is very esoteric, but on the page what you capitalize in sound and what you don’t capitalize in sound. Because sometimes do you capitalize that Whistling By or do you capitalize the thing that’s whistling by? Or are you capitalizing any of that stuff? What are the things–?

Andrea: Well, it’s funny. I think it’s really individual and I think, you know, I think there are some writers who just love the all caps. And I’ve looked at some screenplays and it’s almost impossible to read because apparently every single page is so exciting that we scream about every word. I tend to not do that and really reserve my all caps for when it’s worth it.

John: Holy cow – pay attention to this.

Andrea: Holy cow. Like probably not more than 10 to 15 a script. Because there shouldn’t be many, in my opinion, many more than 10 or 15 like holy cow sound moments. On the page that is. So, most of them you just – it’s in there for feeling, for texture. And when it’s a big moment that you’ve got to really make a statement with it then I hit the all caps.

Craig: I’m with on that one. I’ll all caps things that are sort of introductory weird items that aren’t meant to be like oh my god but just more like, you know, he lifts up a mechanical BLINKING DEVICE. That’s an important thing. So I’ll just say prop guy, blinking device. But for sounds, unless it’s an explosion mostly I’m not capping them. Sometimes I will, if it’s meant to be kind of evocative or emotional I’ll put all of that line into a kind of italicized position.

As I get older I find myself stylizing things more like Stephen King does, you know. We’ve all read these Stephen King books where suddenly there would be a paragraph in italics that was sort of an internal process. And I find myself doing this more and more now where I just start – in my action descriptions I spend less time describing what the room looks like and more time describing the inner dialogue that we will never hear, but I find it actually helps, you know.

John: If it’s shootable.

Andrea: If it’s shootable. Well, you know, even if it’s not shootable. In my mind it creates that emotional moment when again the screenplay is getting somebody to make your project.

Craig: It’s inform-able. Right.

Andrea: It creates that emotional buy-in that if it’s just dialogue and just description you don’t get. Like you need to understand the core of why this character cares about what they’re doing. Why they’re in a panic about what they’re doing. And it does inform the actor’s performance ultimately. You know, it sort of makes the actor realize like the three sentences you have to say here might be that interesting, but let me explain why they’re interesting.

Craig: That’s exactly right. And see that’s how actually we get to direct on the page. Because I’m not a big fan of like “we meet Jane, smarter than everybody realizes, and hiding her brutal past.” I don’t know any of that and I can’t see it. And also that’s just a writer reading off of a card to me. But we meet Jane. She’s standing there. She sees a car dive by. And then in italics: I don’t know why I do this every time.

Oh, I’m in a character’s mind. I’m feeling something. That’s actually really exciting. And I’ll do that a lot around sound because I think the experience of sound is something again that just feels more emotional and less intellectual. It’s more of an I Feel than an I Think.

John: Great. And before we move on let’s define the categories of sound we’re talking about. So obviously almost literally the tracks you’re going to see on your nonlinear editor. You have your dialogue, so everything the characters are saying. You have your ambience, which is the sound within a space. It’s the diegetic – it’s what the space itself sounds like. You have your music, obviously. And then you have your sound effects, like those big pops. Those things that are classically the things that would get uppercased on a page. Those are the things we’re talking about with sound.

And so all those things show up in the script, but then when you actually get to production, let’s transition to production, that changes. And when you’re in production a lot of what you’re recording is the dialogue and it’s weird – I remember the first time I showed up on a set and you’re watching the scene happening and they hand out these things called Comtek which are so you can hear the microphones and you can hear what’s being recorded. And you realize like, oh, it sounds so thin because all you’re hearing is the actor’s dialogue.

You’re not hearing the space around them because it doesn’t sound right. Because you’re only recording for that dialogue.

Andrea: When done properly. And that’s kind of all you want is to hear the dialogue.

John: Yes. Completely clean.

Andrea: And the worst case scenario is if you’re not, if you’re hearing anything else. I had an incredible sound recorder on set, Danny Michael, and we were in our tech scout. And there was a location that I really liked because I thought it looked cool. And Danny said, “Yeah this looks really great. Are you interested in hearing the scene?” That sort of thing. Because he was absolutely right. We were standing on top of subway tracks basically. There was a subway underneath it. So we were never going to get through the scene. So we had to move our location.

The worst is when you finish production and you get back to the stage and you realize I can’t use this dialogue because it’s too messy. You want the cleanest dialogue you can get.

Craig: And that’s actually something you can protect against slightly as a writer. I mean, most of the time it’s bad choices being made by a director that puts somebody in a place where like I need to be in this place therefore we’ll just go ahead and loop or do an automatic dialogue replacement later. That’s when actors go into a studio and just lip-sync to their lines so you get this – but it’s never – and we’ll get to ADR, because it can be both life-saving and it can also be the devil. So it’s one of those things, like all tools.

But if you are writing a scene and you are hell bent on putting it somewhere that you know is inexorably loud and noisy, just be aware if it’s a heavy dialogue scene you’ve probably screwed up. That you need to reduce the dialogue as much as possible because on set not only is the job of the sound recordist to get the cleanest possible dialogue, usually in combination of a little lavalier mic, which is right on them, and also a boom microphone. If you can get both at the same time it’s great. But also even in terms of what they call overlapping – you know, if I can only see one character I can’t hear another character step on the character’s line that I see because then I can’t edit that dialogue cleanly. So they’re really obsessed with–

John: But as a writing choice you might choose to set it in a loud place, but if you’re choosing to set it in a loud place you’re going to make different choices about what the characters are going to say because they’re going to have shout over that noise and it’s going to completely change the nature of the scene.

Craig: And they have to be together in the shot because you can’t edit it because the background sound will get all chopped up.

John: But there may be good choices to do that but it’s different content of that scene and different context—

Andrea: You have to be creative about how to achieve that. If you want to have it in a big club, that’s great, but everybody has to be dancing silently. And then you can get their lines out.

Craig: That’s the best.

Andrea: Which is the best. Which I might have done.

Craig: Everybody does it. Everybody does that.

Andrea: But it’s very awkward.

Craig: It’s the weirdest thing to see shot. Like if you’re in a big – like that scene, like The Social Network when they’re in that club and they’re like yelling over the – there’s no music playing on the day and people are just shuffling like zombies, so it’s this quiet thing. And then two people are just yelling pointlessly in a silent room where people are shifting around to lights and no sound. It’s creepy.

John: So classically what you do is the music plays, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then it stops, and then everyone has to keep dancing, like basically it’s still there.

Craig: It’s so weird.

John: We have no videos to show.

Andrea: I will say this, because I feel like this is (unintelligible) statement on sound overall, you know, I shot a dance scene and I was adamant that we had to play a song that people could dance to, because music affects people in a very different way than a click track would affect people. And really feeling that sound and that music in your bones really changes the performance.

Craig: Yeah. You get your moment where you actually play it for people so they can dance and have a great time. And then when you need them in the background of the shot of two people talking, like in singles, then you are going to have to get some stuff where they’re just shuffling–

Andrea: Shut up back there.

Craig: Like weird zombies. So creepy.

Andrea: Right.

John: What other lessons did you learn shooting your film about sound?

Andrea: In production?

John: In production. Let’s talk about whose responsibility it is to do sound in production. So obviously you have your sound recordist. The sound recordist, did that person go out on location scouts with you?

Andrea: Yes. Absolutely. It’s imperative because he had to go into each set, like I gave that previous example, but also even things like, OK, you’re going to shoot in this diner, except that industrial refrigerator is humming the entire time. So we have to make arrangements with the establishment, the owners of this diner, to unplug that refrigerator. And if that’s a deal-breaker then we can’t use this location. That sort of thing.

So, there’s a fan whizzing overhead that nobody else can hear. He has hearing like a dog. Thank god. So, yes, he’s there every step of the way to make sure that you’re–

John: And in production can we talk about “Hold for Sound.” So sometimes you’re about to shoot something, or cameras are rolling, and then the plane goes overhead or this thing, you know, a motorcycle passes by. It can throw off performances. It can throw off your rhythm.

Andrea: I had some incredibly skilled actors in my movie and they kind of knew it the second we all knew. Everybody knows at the same time. There’s a bus going by. And so the actor would be in the moment and be like, “I’m holding,” and then we would continue.

Craig: They can find their light and they can pause for passing noises. They’re very good that way. Yeah, I mean, your sound crew is actually quite small on a movie which is always surprising to me. A movie with even enormous crews and enormous things, your sound team really boils down to the sound mixer, who is the person sitting at the cart with the mixer, driving the various inputs which is just lav mics and boom mics.

John: And also looks a lot like what we have here for this recording setup.

Craig: It’s not that different actually.

Andrea: A little cart.

Craig: Yeah, it’s a cart. And then you have your sound, I guess your sound assistant, or the second sound–

Andrea: I’m sure we’re bungling that title. Another guy runs around.

John: We’re going to butcher terms.

Craig: There’s a person whose job is to basically mic up all the actors and handle all the Comteks, the wireless things, and make sure that all the mics are in place and every actor has them on when they need them. And then there’s a boom, sometimes two boom people, but usually just one boom man or woman whose job is to put themselves in what I think is the most horrifying spinal position you can imagine.

John: Arms way over their head.

Andrea: Their shoulders are incredible.

John: The very long boom. And just out of frame and they magically know how to stay out of frame.

Craig: And I will say to like the sound mixer, “Isn’t that bad for them?” And he’s French, he goes, “No, the pole is very light.”

Andrea: It’s not light enough.

Craig: “Like a feather. It’s like a feather.” And I’m like even if it weighed nothing, just having my hands up like the Y in the YMCA for more than five minutes hurts so much.

Andrea: All day long. 14 hours a day.

Craig: All day long.

Andrea: God love them.

Craig: Amazing.

Andrea: It’s amazing.

John: So if you’re a writer on set, one of the things that I had to learn is sort of when to freak out about sound and when to not freak out about sound, especially in terms of dialogue. So if both characters are in the shot and you see them talking to each other you know you can’t cut around a mistake. But if you’re on a single, if you’re looking at one actor and not the other actor, the other actor is off camera and kind of off mic and they mess up a line, it reminded myself that, oh, that doesn’t matter. The sound that matters most is the sound that you’re seeing that is reflected in that shot. And not the other sound. And training yourself to be like, OK, did I get all of what I need of both sides of that and will I be able to – imagining yourself later on in the editing room like do I have all the pieces I need to make that scene work?

Andrea: Well there’s that part of it. And now we’re sort of dipping a toe into ADR as well, but there’s also the idea that you can also say please hold, just give me that one line again please, actor.

John: Yes.

Andrea: And let them repeat that specific line in a different way. And then also just making sure you have enough takes that you have options so that if you’re off of an actor you can get them saying it 15 different ways and you don’t know that they’re saying it 15 different ways. You might have one take that you see on screen, but you could have 15 takes that are the dialogue that’s informing that scene.

Craig: Yeah. You need to know how to edit. I mean, that’s the – writing doesn’t necessarily prepare you for how to manage that aspect of production. But editing does. So, the more you can get a little bit of editing experience before you go into a situation like that, the better off you’ll be because you can actually – and here’s the thing. If you don’t quite know how that functions what will happen is you’ll start asking for things and people start looking at each other like, oh, director is stupid. They don’t know how this works. Because they all know.

Andrea: Yes. Oh they do.

Craig: They know.

Andrea: Much more than you do.

John: And let’s transition to the edit, because a thing I also didn’t realize until I was actually in the middle of editing my first movie is how often the dialogue that we hear is not actually the dialogue that matches that take. The editors are masters at making things fit and work, and so that you can cut together a scene where they’re not quite saying what was matched with that video. And it doesn’t matter.

And so they’re remarkable. Things that I assumed like, oh, we’re going to have to ADR that and we’re going to have to fix that, like oh-no-no they’ve got that.

Andrea: They’ve got it. Right.

John: What was your experience with them?

Andrea: Well what’s amazing about this and still as a writer-director you know the emotional truth of that scene better than anybody around. So the sound editor might try something that you never thought of and you think that’s a great idea because that’s exactly, you know, that is getting at a different emotional truth than the flat performance we might have gotten in the take that we got. But if we can grab that sound take from a previous time, or get the actor back into a booth and get them to record it with a different emotional truth it really can enhance a scene.

John: And as we’re talking about this part of it, traditionally this is your main editor. So this person who is cutting picture is also cutting that first sound and there may be assistants there to help out. And that first cut is largely about performance. It’s about the storytelling.

Andrea: Picture.

John: Yeah. It’s picture. And so I’m always reminding myself that like, oh, I shouldn’t expect this to sound right. I shouldn’t expect the world to sound right. Everything is temp. We’re just trying to get the storytelling to work.

Andrea: What story are we telling here?

Craig: And that sometimes will also get lost by editors and sound people. Because we know, and this is why I love the way that things function when you’re making a feature and it’s a writer-director, or you’re making television and the writer is ultimately supervising postproduction, sometimes what will happen is I’ll watch something back and I’ll go I know there was a better version. There was a better reading.

Andrea: Where is that?

Craig: And they’re like, “Oh this one, yeah. Somebody dropped a thing and it made a noise back there.” I don’t care. Fine. Then you know what? Someone made a noise back there. This makes me feel something. Who cares? So sometimes they’ll get a little over-pristine because they don’t quite see what you see. Which is fascinating to me. But that initial process of editing, it’s interesting.

It used to be that your first pass was really raw and it was really about story, dialogue, that. As nonlinear and computerized editing has advanced and become faster and easier, the first pass you kind of now also expect a certain kind of beginning of creation of environment, atmosphere. You’re starting to zero in on an aesthetic of sound effect. So for instance when we were doing Chernobyl there were a lot of moments where we thought like, OK, what would this room – we have a lot of choices. We’re in the pump room of a nuclear reactor. And if you give that to 20 different editors and ask them to do 20 different atmospheres you’ll get 20 different atmospheres. So the question is what is our aesthetic? What are we going for?

OK, well we’re going for hyper-realistic. What does that mean? That means let’s have somebody record one. And if it sounds boring, then that’s boring. That’s fine. Then it’s a boring atmosphere in that room. We’re not there to make it like whoop-whoop-whoop.

Now, if there’s nothing there and the reality is so jarring that it makes us feel like we made a choice to not be realistic then we have to slightly fudge reality to make it seem like reality. But all those choices start to get made early on and they will all ultimately inform the people that then make the real choices in the mix.

Andrea: Right. Well, figuring out what rooms sound like and what environments sound like has been an incredibly fascinating learning process for me. And the idea of how it informs character has been fascinating. You know, I have three main characters in my movie and they’re all at slightly different economic levels. And so what would one person’s apartment sound like versus another person’s apartment? Would a wealthier person’s – and nobody is really wealthy in the movie – but would a slightly wealthier person’s apartment be quieter than somebody who is poor? And so really playing around with OK this person’s apartment has this tone, and this person’s apartment has that tone. And then when they step outside those apartments and they’re all in the city together what are basically those three tones together sound like, all three of them mixing up, and how do those inform the characters? And how does the city become–?

Craig: It’s writing.

Andrea: It’s writing.

John: That is writing. Now, we’re talking about tone in the sense of like the ambiance you’re going to build later on in the process. I think we skipped over while you’re recording there on the set or on the stage you’re also recording room tone, which is one of the most annoying moments of the day. But it’s that moment either in the middle of shooting or generally at the end of shooting where everyone has to stand still and they record 30 seconds, 60 seconds of what’s called room tone.

And the reason why you do that is because as you’re cutting dialogue you need just the base level of that so that you don’t hear the backgrounds of dialogue coming in and coming out.

Andrea: Dropping in and out. Right.

Craig: Well, also if you – I mean, the way I’ve almost only used, exclusively used room tone is if you need to expand a moment that isn’t there, like in other words you’re just like adding stuff, then where like, OK, I’m going to say something and then I’m going to cut to Andrea and she immediately starts – she hears me saying it and then she starts following it. Well I want her to absorb it first. So I want her to just sit there and then start. Which means I have to take my voice out of her side. Well, if I take it out there’s nothing. And nothing is different than nothing.

So you have to put room tone in there to make it seem like she was in that space.

Andrea: Right. Otherwise it drops to dead silence and it’s very awkward.

John: It’s incredibly jarring.

Craig: Again, our wonderful sound recordist on Chernobyl was – like sometimes I would think like, OK, I’m shooting in Europe, these are European crews. We had this pan-European crew. They do things somewhat differently there. They have different words for things. But it’s all basically the same.

The first time that we were on stage and he called to do room tone he recorded it for I think upwards of four minutes.

Andrea: Oh my god.

John: Was everybody going insane?

Craig: I mean, I personally was like what’s – is this what they always do? Maybe this is European. So at some point, like after a full minute of this I look across the room at our French first AD and he looks at me like I have no idea what he’s going to do. But it was just–

Andrea: It’s just this guy.

Craig: Our guy, Vincent, who is the best. He just really liked to get a full breadth and variety of room tone. And the work that we did get was outstanding. And the room tone was helpful. The one thing we never had to worry about was not having enough room tone.

Andrea: Right. There was plenty of it. Room tone for days. We did very little of that. I think we only did it a couple of times.

Craig: Really?

Andrea: Yeah. We really did very, very little room tone. Because it’s all so heightened and pulpy and fictionalized, the whole movie, that we were just creating environments anyway. We weren’t going for ultra-realistic.

Craig: You can always steal room tone if you have to.

Andrea: Maybe he was stealing behind my back. It was happening and I wasn’t aware. That’s possible, too.

Craig: And even in editorial you’re like, OK, we need some room tone here, well find a shot where people shut up for two seconds.

Andrea: Some other movie.

Craig: Take that and just paste it over here.

John: Let’s talk about the mix. So we’ve written the scenes, we’ve shot the scenes, we’ve edited this thing. And so once you’ve picture locked, usually, but then it’s time to actually do a mix. And so this is where you’re going from the folks who have just been editing picture and doing dialogue and stuff to a generally a whole new team—

Andrea: That’s right.

John: That does not involve your original sound recordist.

Andrea: At a new location. New facility.

John: Yeah, new facility. And they’re seeing what you’ve done and then they’re building out whole new tracks and giving you a lot of new choices about what you’re doing. So what is your first conversation with them, Andrea, with the people who are going to be doing your real post-production sound?

Andrea: First of all you sit down and you watch the whole movie together and you all think oh my god there’s so much work to do.

John: And you’re watching it on a big screen?

Andrea: A big screen. The nice thing is when you get into a sound – I mean, at least my experience in New York – you pretty much edit the movie almost on a laptop. I’m exaggerating, but you are not editing the movie on a big screen.

Craig: You usually put a little monitor to the side.

Andrea: But it’s not the same experience as seeing a movie. And then you get into the sound stage and at least they have a big screen set up. And the most killer speakers in the entire world with the most pristine setup as if we’re all going to have an incredible theater in our homes. But that gives you the full scope of what do we have once you hear it that way. And the answer is not much usually. Turns out we’ve got very little.

And so you watch it through that first time with the team and you all realize, OK, we’ve got a lot of sound effects work to do and we can talk about sound effects later. We’ve got a lot of dialogue work to do, because as pristine as you may record it what you suddenly realize is this is the writing part that I absolutely love is I wish that she had not said that. I really wish that we could use this moment to have her say something else. And that is the best part about it is to go back and get something else entirely that can really change the entire course of your movie.

And so you all sit together and think we’ve got to get that, we’ve got to get that, and then you also look at what lines like for whatever reason somebody dropped something on and you really do need to get them to record it again because it’s crucial and we just don’t have it clear enough. The audience can’t understand what they’re saying. And then like I said creating the soundscape overall. So where is this movie set? What does it feel like? What is the era? How does it sound differently in that era or that world versus this world?

And then finally, you know, you go into that first mix definitely with a lot of ideas about music, but you do not have your score recorded. You do not have all your songs locked down. And you have to then figure out what are we trying to say with music. What are we trying to say with every other sound?

Craig: You go through a sound-spotting process where you go through and sort of say, OK, scene by scene generally speaking what’s our theory on the sound effects we’re going to need here? What’s important? What can we keep from our sync track? That’s what we start to refer to the recorded sound from the day. What can we use from our sync track? What do we have to create? Are we doing a score here? Are we doing a track, like a cue from a song? Are we doing no music? Do we need – so let’s talk about looping for a second.

So looping or ADR, everybody has experienced this even from an audience point of view when suddenly appears that the character’s voice seems a little bit different because it’s been recorded. The idea of ADR is you go into a recording room and they play back a scene and the actor has a bunch of takes to kind of sync their own voice up to their own mouth to improve it. Or, if it’s an off-camera line they just record it.

The interesting thing about ADR is a lot of times it comes down to the actor’s voice. Literally the quality of their voice. I think some actors – Emily Watson I think could probably ADR an entire movie and you’d never know because my experience of her doing an ADR line is just her voice has this beautiful consistency and it just drops in. You’re like I didn’t actually – just watching you record it I didn’t realize you were saying it. You know, like I’m watching you fake it and I don’t see.

But then other actors their voices have so much variation that it just sticks out. That day they sounded like this and this day they sound like this.

Andrea: Did they get a good night’s sleep? Did they have tea for breakfast? Like all of that.

Craig: All of it. And those sometimes can take you out of moments. And that’s always tricky. So you have to kind of gauge how all that looping works. But it can be a remarkable opportunity. And for instance are you guys Game of Thrones watchers?

John: We are. Of course.

Andrea: Listen, I’ve had a busy week. I did not watch so don’t say anything about the first episode please. But yes.

Craig: OK. So I’ll use code. So annoying.

Andrea: I’m sorry.

Craig: So John, towards the end of the first episode someone makes a remark about waiting for an old friend. And you see how that turns into an interesting thing. That was not scripted and that was not shot on the day. Dan and Dave watched the episode and thought you know what would be good if he says this here and it was looped.

John: Nice.

Andrea: Wow.

Craig: So that’s the kind of thing that happens.

John: So they were able to put it over another character’s–?

Craig: They were able to put it over another character’s face. So there’s a conversation between two people, I just have that person – sometimes you can also slide things around. So it’s not ADR. It’s from production. Like I’m going to use the visual of you on take three but I’m going to use your line reading from take two and put it in your mouth.

John: Oh yeah. All the time.

Craig: And it can be a little rubbery for a second or two. But it’s OK if it sounds great and we glide by.

Andrea: You can usually get away with it.

Craig: You can usually get away with it.

John: All right. So we have now done our spotting. We have a whole new team that is building all these tracks for your movie. So you may have done little small mixes for test screenings and stuff, but this is the real final thing. This is what you just flew back from New York for.

Andrea: Yes.

John: And so how many days is that process for you and what–?

Andrea: It’s hard to pin down because the good people on the team were – you do that spotting session much earlier on. Months ago we did it. So they had been working, and working, and working, and building, and building it before I get in to the actual stage. My process on the stage is I was there about three weeks working it through with them. But it went on far longer than that for those people.

John: A thing I always fight both in mixing and in color-timing is just fatigue. Where like I can’t tell the difference between two things anymore. For me the worst moments in sound mixing are like how should this doorknob sound? Should it sound like this? Or like this? Or like this? And I can’t tell the difference.

Andrea: Well, my motto this week became “let’s move on and let’s come back to it.” Because, yes, you get absolutely fatigued. I have one shot in particular that is a bear for color – now we’re talking about color-timing. But I have a shot that has been a bear because there is VFX in a real environment and it has been so hard and I’m hoping that nobody notices. We can talk about this after August. Everybody sees it and see if they can pick up the shot.

But it was 1am Wednesday morning this week and we have nine people sitting there being like, “Bluer. Grayer.” And you know what? We’re going in circles. And so we just all to say like let’s move on.

Craig: Yeah.

Andrea: And we’ll come back to it. Because you do get fatigued. Your eyes and ears get fatigued and you’re tired.

John: But in the mix your team is helping you decide. They’re asking you for decisions about like so how big should the music be here versus how much do you want to hear your environment.

Andrea: And this is where it’s storytelling. This is where the writer, the director knows what they’re trying to create. Even this week there’s a scene where a deadbolt gets turned in a door. And I kept saying like I’m not into that deadbolt. You’ve got to get me – it’s got like a thud. I don’t care if it becomes unrealistic. It’s got to feel like it’s saying something. It’s not just about locking the door. It’s about saying something. What is the emotional moment with that deadbolt?

Craig: Yeah. And the great thing about being in the executive producer position in television is the director has to do all this really hard-hard work. And then I get to come in for review, which is wonderful.

Andrea: Right.

Craig: Because my job then is to sit there. I listen to a full playback. And while you’re watching there’s timecode running and you just write down the number and your note. Number/note. Number/note. And then you go through and you go through every single thing and what it is that you think should change and why. And for me what I find so fascinating about this process is that there are all of these specific choices that I consider writing. What should that sound like? What should the deadbolt sound like? And what line should I be hearing? And what is the score?

But then the magic is in also the relational choices you make. Who should I be hearing louder? When does the rest of the world fade away? Is this music too loud? Is it now telling me to feel something? If I pull it back will I feel more because I don’t realize? All of those mixing – those are true mixing choices – I find to be where actually the most remarkable writing can occur because what you’re doing is you’re focusing people on what has emotional value. I love that.

Andrea: I love it, too.

John: We are going to take a listen to a clip from Mad Max: Fury Road.

Andrea: Oh wow.

John: Which is an example of there’s a bunch of stuff happening simultaneously. So we’ll listen to this. There’s a moment where it gets really silent and then it gets sort of big again. But after we listen to it I want to talk about the relationship between music and sound effects. And sometimes in the mix you’re not quite sure who is driving it and sort of which of those tracks is driving it. So let’s take a listen.

[Mad Max: Fury Road clip plays]

John: I mean, that was so complicated. Just imagine how much time it took just to build that one minute of sound?

Andrea: That was a sound mixer’s dream come true.

Craig: Exactly. But there’s like 40 tracks running in there. And so one category that we should probably break out from sound effects is sound design. So sound effects are really like, OK, somebody put a glass down on a table. Somebody revved a motorcycle engine. Somebody threw a grenade. People have recorded that. Here’s what that is. Here’s 20 different versions of that.

Sound design is more of a kind of creative computerized process where you’re starting to mess around with sound. So like, OK, it’s a grenade but it’s doing this really funky thing. So we’ve taken a grenade noise and we totally warped it out and ran a comb filter on it. And then a high-pass blah-blah-blah. So that becomes a little bit more of the sound equivalent of visual effects. But in this case what I loved about what they’re doing there is they are obviously playing to emotion. So when you drop out you feel like you’re falling through the air. Or you’re in shell-shock.

And then when you come back they are very smartly making you feel a little sick and scared from all this rumbly base. And then there’s this high, gravely, tinkle-y stuff going on that makes you feel like needles are going into your eyeballs. And it’s all feeling. And it’s so smart. And I love that.

Andrea: I think there’s a very low music track in there.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: Definitely. Percussive.

Andrea: But at the beginning of that track, sort of the music was louder and the vocals were underneath it. And then by the end the music was incredibly low and I don’t know if it was Russian or whatever was on top of it. It was very interesting.

John: And so some of the music is diegetic because they’re playing these big drums on the back of their cars. All that decision about sound was made in the writing stage because they’re playing these crazy guitars.

Now, I want to contrast that with a scene from Can You Ever Forgive Me? which is not as loud.

Craig: Really? Because I’ve seen Can You Ever Forgive Me? and I recall that there was a huge chase with 40 trucks and 90 motorcycles.

John: I just want to point out that one of the requirements for all of our guests is they have to have made a movie with Melissa McCarthy which you just did.

Andrea: That’s right. How funny is that?

Craig: Isn’t she the greatest?

Andrea: Yes.

Craig: So this is what we keep saying now over and over to all of our guests. Isn’t she the greatest?

[Can You Ever Forgive Me? clip plays]

John: So this is – we were just listening to this, so where was that space? As you guys listened to this where was this happening?

Craig: So it’s a bar. We also forgot to mention Foley.

Andrea: How could we forget Foley?

John: Crucial.

Craig: How could we forget? So Foley is when you hear the footsteps for instance going across this creaky wooden floor of an old bar. And that is an old bar in Manhattan. Probably almost certainly that is Foley because our microphones generally aren’t picking up feet very well. So people will walk and record themselves on things like wooden planks and – anytime you hear soldiers marching through gravel that’s Foley and all that. They’re enhancing certain things like the glass, the tinkling of ice. These things are not pickup-able on the day.

But what I thought was really interesting was the way that Mari contrasted – she included the other conversations in the bar. So those would have been faked. We’re not hearing those on the day. Those are recorded later and then seeded in. She wanted you to feel like this was not some fake bar but there were things happening.

And also there’s quite a bit of reverb on these. Which either is a function of the day, but I doubt. I think it was a choice. When you add reverb, a little bit of echo to these conversations, it makes the space feel a little lonelier. A little emptier. So it’s like there’s empty people over there, and you’re two people over here, and you’re talking in this old, creaky, verby bar. And you almost feel like it’s like ghosts are having conversations over cocktails. It’s very evocative and I like that a lot.

Andrea: It really puts the characters front and center I think because really what you’re hearing the most is the dialogue as you should be hearing in that kind of environment. And everything else is in service to the dialogue and in service to those characters.

As compared to the first track we watched which is in service to this giant action scene. It’s not necessarily about character development.

John: Absolutely. So those people talking in the background, sometimes you’re pulling clips from stuff, but more likely it was a Walla group. So it’s actors who were brought in—

Andrea: Group ADR.

Craig: Loop group.

John: Loop group.

Andrea: I have to say that was one of the most fascinating days I had.

Craig: It’s wild, right?

Andrea: Because my movie takes place in Manhattan, 1978, and I really wanted that feel. One of the cool things about New York is when you’re walking down the street you can hear conversations in every language imaginable. And I really wanted that feeling of that assault of the city. You know, as you’re walking through New York you hear somebody screaming their head off for no reason over here. And somebody speaking Spanish over here. And just that kind of – that assault that is so intense.

And so we got most of that through our group ADR. And we had this one guy in group ADR who speaks 15 languages. He speaks Yiddish. Who speaks Yiddish? Nobody speaks Yiddish.

Craig: Nobody. Zero Mostel.

Andrea: He speaks Yiddish. And I was like, you know, we have a scene set in the jewelry district and he gave me a little Yiddish to stick in.

Craig: That’s where it would be.

Andrea: Right. That’s where it would be.

Craig: Borough Park, or you know.

Andrea: That’s right. And so the group ADR session I’m sure as Craig pointed out that that little conversation in the background was two incredibly talented group ADR actors having a conversation that they recorded some months after they finished shooting and Mari was able to use that in her bar scene.

Craig: Every now and then you will have to write that. Usually you don’t. Usually because it’s meant to be barely heard your loop group will just kind of come up with some cocktail chatter or bar chatter of various kinds. And then it gets seeded into the background. But every now and then, for instance I knew like, OK, we’ve got a scene with all of these firefighters. A bunch of them are going to be saying things. We could have them come up with their own things to say but do you want some specific things, and I did.

And even if you barely hear them I wanted them to be accurate and correct and relative to what was going on. So I wrote those. You will write maybe some of those things, but usually it’s just kind of improvised.

Andrea: It is. But I did quite a bit of writing, too, because it was a period piece. And so what I didn’t want was people talking about–

Craig: Cellphones.

Andrea: Current stuff. And so we pulled a bunch of articles and what was going on in city politics in 1978 and what might people of New York been talking about on that day. And I ended up just writing a bunch of sentences. Like let’s complain about the trash. And let’s complain about taxes. And let’s complain about unemployment. You know, that’s what it’s like.

Craig: ConEd. A lot of chatter about ConEd.

Andrea: ConEd. I know.

John: So when do we get to see and hear your movie, Andrea?

Andrea: August 9, theaters everywhere.

John: Very nice.

Craig: That’s coming so fast.

Andrea: It’s coming up. The trailer will be out mid-May.

John: I’m so excited to see your trailer. So I was looking for a trailer so we could hype it up.

Andrea: It’s not out yet.

John: Remind us who is in your film.

Andrea: It is starring Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elizabeth Moss.

Craig: Wow.

Andrea: And I got more. I got Domhnall Gleeson. Brian d’Arcy James. Bill Camp.

Craig: Brian d’Arcy James is fantastic.

Andrea: He’s fantastic.

Craig: Did he sing for you?

Andrea: James Badge Dale. He did not. Because I felt shy about asking.

Craig: Really? I would have asked him to.

Andrea: You know, we shot in New York and we had three big musical theater actors. We have Brian d’Arcy James, Will Swenson, and Brandon Uranowitz. And all I wanted was them to do Kitchen: The Musical. Like I was just like guys get together.

Craig: I think I would have gotten Brian d’Arcy James to sing for me only because I wouldn’t have said, oh, sing some Hamilton or whatever. He was the original king in Hamilton. But probably I would have asked for some Shrek. I’m obsessed with Shrek: The Musical.

Andrea: I was too shy. Brian right now is starring in The Ferryman on Broadway and he gives an incredible performance. And if you haven’t seen it you should go see him.

Craig: Yeah. It has been touted as such.

Andrea: He’s great.

Craig: That’s a fantastic cast.

Andrea: It is. I got very lucky.

Craig: Boy, if it’s not a good movie—

Andrea: It’s my fault.

Craig: I’m laying it firmly at your feet. And if it is a good movie I feel like the cast elevated it.

Andrea: It’s not my doing.

John: I’m giving all the credit to the sound team.

Andrea: That’s perfect. As we should. Because it really does sound amazing.

John: All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things, where we talk about the things we wish people would know more about. My One Cool Thing is this article, speaking of musicals, Seth Abramovitch wrote for the Hollywood Reporter about the musical Nerds, which I was not aware of. So it’s a musical about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. And how this musical kept crashing down and sort of half made it to Broadway and went through all these workshops.

It’s just a long history of what happened there. And it gave me such triggering flashbacks to Big Fish: The Musical and how hard it is to get something up to the stage. And so I recommend you look at it. Maybe this musical will actually happen at some point. But the weird way that musicals are financed to put together it was just a great look at sort of how that all works.

Craig: Terrifying.

John: Terrifying. Andrea, what’s your One Cool Thing?

Andrea: So 14 months in New York working on this project, tried to come home for 36 hours every weekend to see my kids. Which meant that I was jet-lagged always. There was never a time where I was like on east coast or on west coast. And I have been having a very hard time sleeping. So somebody turned me on to there’s an app called Headspace. A lot of people know about Headspace.

John: Love Headspace.

Andrea: Within Headspace there’s a subcategory called Sleepscapes which is this bananas thing. It’s like a bedtime story. And you plug it in and a very soothing voice will start telling you a bedtime story. But after you listen to it for about five minutes it becomes nonsense. So it becomes, “The cats love rainbows. The cats are up on rainbows. The clouds…” So you’re listening and you’re like, wait, where are the cats? I’ve lost the cats.

John: That’s what falling asleep is like?

Andrea: And then eventually you’re like, oh never mind, and you go to sleep. And this has worked better for me than almost – I have tried Ambien. I have tried all of these things. There is something about this that triggers the perfect thing in my brain that it worked like a genius. And I had been addicted to it for the last six weeks.

Craig: Wow. Very cool. I’m going to try that. That sounds cool.

John: Craig, what’s your One Cool Thing?

Craig: My One Cool Thing are these wonderful little creatures that we call yeast, because they leaven bread. They give us alcohol.

John: They do.

Craig: But most importantly they leaven bread. Because without yeast all delicious bread would be horrifying and disgusting Matzo.

Andrea: Have you ever had too much yeast though in bread?

John: Not good.

Craig: Oh, like a yeasty bread?

Andrea: Super yeasty.

Craig: Where it tasted sort of like weird beer?

Andrea: Yeast can go awry. Calm down, yeast. Get in your lane.

Craig: Calm down. Don’t go crazy. Be happy doing all the wonderful things you do. But you’re really meant to be in the shadows.

John: You’re a supporting player.

Andrea: It’s not your moment.

Craig: Yeah. We don’t want to taste you. We want to taste bread.

John: You’re the ambience, you’re not the featured sound.

Craig: Correct.

Andrea: Exactly. You need a mixer.

John: That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by the Arbitrary Jukebox Experience. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Are you on Twitter?

Andrea: I got off. I canceled the account.

John: Congratulations, Andrea Berloff.

Craig: But you may want to hop back on just to pimp out your movie.

Andrea: Instagram. Find me on Instagram. How about that?

Craig: People say like, oh, I can’t deal with Twitter, instead I’m on Instagram, the thing that gives everybody an eating disorder.

Andrea: Nope, not me.

Craig: It’s better?

Andrea: Not me. In fact, it shows me what to eat.

John: Here’s your food.

Craig: That’s great.

Andrea: I’m all about obsessing over people’s food.

Craig: OK, great. Good. Good. You’re using it in a healthy way.

Andrea: Yes.

John: You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a comment. It helps people find the show. The show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up in the first week after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net or seasons of 50 episodes at store.johnaugust.com.

Andrea Berloff, welcome back.

Andrea: So good to be home.

John: And thank you for talking to us about sound.

Andrea: Thank you for having me.

Craig: Thanks Andrea.

Andrea: Thanks guys. Bye.

Links:

• WGA Lawsuit
• #WGAMix led by screenwriter Daniel Zucker
• Mad Max Fury Road Clip
• Can You Ever Forgive Me? Clip
• The story of the “Nerds” musical article by Seth Abramovitch
• Headspace’s Meditation for Sleep
• Accepting recommendations for updating the Listener’s Guide
• Submit to the Pitch Session here
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Outro by Thomas Johnstone (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, it’s John. So today’s episode was recorded on Friday when it looked very likely that writers would be leaving their agents this week. But then a twist. Just hours before the agreement was set to expire the deadline was pushed back to this Friday and negotiations are continuing. So, now you’re all caught up, and on with the show.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 395 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to be discussing a different kind of movie template where you don’t have one hero, you have a group of heroes, and the movie needs to follow multiple points of view which can be exciting and challenging.

Then we’ll be answering listener questions on a bunch of topics including things Craig tweets.

Craig: Well, I don’t know what could possibly be interesting about that. What do I tweet? Recipes? Recipes mostly.

John: Yeah. It’s mostly recipes. Mostly things you saw in the world that you enjoyed.

Craig: And definitely not at all things that made me upset.

John: Yeah. Craig’s Twitter feed is basically just Instagram but with words.

Craig: It’s Insta-Rage.

John: It is Insta-Rage. It’s often Insta-Ragey. We are recording this on Friday afternoon. Unless something surprising happened during the weekend Craig and I now share a characteristic with many aspiring screenwriters out there. We don’t have agents representing us at the moment.

Craig: What do we do? How do I get an agent? [laughs]

John: We’ll have to answer that question. Back at Episode 1, Episode 5, early on in the show we answered the question how do I get an agent.

Craig: Should probably go listen to that now.

John: Yeah. As we are recording this there are a few agencies we could sign with. My plan is not to sign with any of those agencies at the moment. Craig, next week are you spending your time hunting down an agent?

Craig: No. Next week I’m spending my time mixing the final episode of Chernobyl and doing my job. And I will not be looking for agents. You know what? I’m going to tell you my outlook. I have a generally optimistic outlook that something will work out and we’ll all go back to the way it was. Or, that’s it for agents and writers. And which point I’m just like, OK, you know, let me calculate what 10% was of what I made. I think an answering service would cost less. So it won’t be as good, but at the very least somebody will have somewhere to call. Beyond that, I’m not really sure what else to do.

John: No. I mean, before we started recording we were talking about a thing where you were going to reach out to some folks, and you know what, you can just reach out to them directly. It’s one of those weird things where you realize like, oh, I could actually do this myself.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, look, there is a great utility to agents.

John: 100%

Craig: I mean, I have enjoyed my relationship with my agents and they’ve done great things for me and they’ve put me in positions where I was able to succeed that I don’t think I would have had an opportunity to be in without them. So I don’t want this to end this way. I want to continue on the way things have been continuing on. But, if they can’t, life will go on.

John: Yeah. It will go on. And we will be covering the life as it goes on, on this podcast and we’ll see where we’re at.

Craig: Forever.

John: Forever. An ongoing study of how life goes on. If you want to go back to those very back episodes I am here to point out that we have a Listener’s Guide, a Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide, and that was designed when we hit Episode 300 because people would come into the show late and say like, oh my gosh, there’s 300 episodes. Which ones do I listen to first? And so we crowd-sourced for our listeners from our listeners which episodes people liked the most. And so that is available for the first 300 episodes.

But now we’re on Episode 395, so pretty soon we’re going to have to do the 400-episode Listener Guide.

Craig: Oh my god, 400.

John: So people, be thinking about which of the episodes between Episode 300 and 400 are the really notable ones. I thought last week’s with Mari Heller was phenomenal.

Craig: That was great.

John: So that would be a recent vote. But you know what, I have that recency bias. So, please reach back over the past two years and tell us which of those episodes need to be on that list.

Craig: So, John, I feel like when we hit 500 there should be some sort of Diamond Jubilee banquet.

John: Yep. There has to be something. So, a little over two years away.

Craig: Banquet.

John: Banquet.

Craig: You know what? We should ask our agents to plan this.

John: [laughs] Indeed. So, they have to negotiate an agreement that deals with conflicts of interest and plan for our 500th episode.

Craig: Diamond Jubilee.

John: So good. Is 500 the Diamond Jubilee? Is that normally how it works?

Craig: I don’t think 500 is a thing.

John: Nothing goes to 500.

Craig: No, nothing goes to 500. So, I’m just going to say it’s our Diamond Jubilee. I feel that that’s fair. And you know what? I want there to be a Deyas. I want there to be a DJ. I want it to be like a Bar Mitzvah kind of.

John: That would be so good. So this last week was my daughter’s 5,000th day of life. And so my husband got her–

Craig: It’s her Diamond Jubilee.

John: It is her Diamond Jubilee, or like Double Diamond Jubilee. There’s some sort of gem stone that is appropriate for it. But got her a little special card and we turned off the explicit music restrictions on her iTunes account.

Craig: Yes. I had that discussion with my daughter the other day as well. They had already been off. And then I guess I got her a new thing and I turned them on the new thing and she came to me and said, “Why did you put this restriction on?” And I said, I don’t know, I mean, do you need to have the explicit lyrics? And she looked at me like I had stabbed her in the heart. I mean, it was a look of just shock and betrayal. Like yes I do. The look was so powerful, she didn’t even have to say anything. I just said, oh, all right, just give me the phone. Fine, here you go.

John: So people without kids may be asking well why would you turn on those restrictions at all. And here is the secret at least from my perspective is not that you don’t want them hearing those words, it’s that you don’t want them saying those words. You don’t want them singing aloud to the songs and saying those words. That is the reason why we have kept the explicit lyrics off for so long, just so they don’t inadvertently become sung aloud.

Craig: But then the thing is of course they are.

John: Yeah.

Craig: They’re doing it. They’re doing it wherever they go. My daughter sang me something the other day where I was just like you can’t – I can’t hear that out of your face. And we were just laughing. We were laughing at how outrageous it was that she said it in front of me.

John: And was she playing the ukulele while she sang it?

Craig: No, no. No. No. This is not a ukulele song.

John: With my daughter I get a ukulele accompanied by those words.

Craig: Oh, that’s nice. You know, Jessie plays the ukulele as well.

John: Oh my god, a concert. Concert series.

Craig: I feel it coming on.

John: For the 500th episode a concert jubilee.

Craig: Oh, for sure.

John: Nice. My last bit of news is that on my Arlo Finch book tour this coming week I will be signing books at The Briar Patch in Bangor, Maine. There will also be a little event there. The Briar Patch, for people who listened to the Launch podcast, is this little bookstore in Bangor, Maine where they’ve sold more Arlo Finches than any place else on earth. And so I’m going there to greet the people who have read Arlo Finch and made it the talk in Bangor, Maine.

Craig: Now, what do you think is going on there?

John: It’s really one bookseller named Gibran who is a huge fan of the books and just basically puts it in everyone’s hands who comes in. He does a very good sales pitch for it.

Craig: That’s spectacular. Great.

John: So Thursday, April 11 at 5pm is that event if you want to come see me in Bangor, Maine. And, you know what? I bet we have some listeners in Bangor, Maine, because we have listeners all over the world.

Craig: It seems like it.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: So our main topic this week came up because yesterday I did a roundtable on a project and this project we were working on had not one hero but a big group of heroes. Or, not a big group, but four people who were sort of the central heroes of the story. And that wasn’t a mistake. That really was how the movie needed to work.

And it got me thinking that we so often talk about movies being a journey that happens to one character only once, and we always talk about sort of that hero and that hero protagonates over the course of the story and sort of those things. Even though we are not big fans of those classic templates and sort of everything has to match the three-act structure that tends to be the experience of movies is that you’re following a character on a journey. But there are a lot of movies that have these groups of heroes in them and I thought we’d spend some time talking about movies that have groups and the unique challenges of movies that have groups as their central heroes.

Craig: Smart topic because I think it’s quickly becoming the norm actually as everybody in the studio world tries to universe-ize everything. You end up, even if you start with movies with the traditional independent protagonist, sooner or later you’re going to be smooshing everybody together in some sort of team up. So it’s inevitable.

John: We’ve talked before about two-handers where you have two main characters who are doing most of the work in the movie. And sometimes it’s a classic protagonist/antagonist situation. So movies like Big Fish, Mr. And Mrs. Smith, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Romancing the Stone, Chicago, while there are other characters there’s two central characters you’re following and you could say either one of them is the main character of the story.

But what you’re describing in terms of there’s a big group of characters is more on the order of Charlie’s Angels, The Breakfast Club, X-Men, Avengers, Scooby Doo, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Lord of the Rings, Goonies, Go, all The Fast and Furious movies. These are movies where characters need to have journeys and make progress over the course of the story but they’re a part of a much larger team. And we really haven’t done a lot of talking about how those teams of characters work in movies.

Craig: Yeah. I actually wasn’t really a team movie writer until I guess The Hangovers, because those three guys kind of operated as a team. And then when you throw Mr. Chow in there it’s a team of four. It’s a crew. Now you’ve got a crew.

John: You’ve got a crew.

Craig: You got a crew.

John: We’re putting together a crew.

Craig: And you got to figure out how that crew works, because it is very different than just – even like a typical two-hander like Identity Thief. I mean, there are other characters but it’s just the two of them on a road trip. That’s pretty traditional stuff.

John: The movie is about their relationship. And so I’m sure people can argue that one is the protagonist and one is the antagonist. And, great, but really it’s about the two of them and how they are changing each other. Wicked is a two-hander.

Craig: Right. When you say, OK, now it’s really about three, or four, or five, or in Fast and Furious there’s like 12 of them at this point now, you kind of have to present them as this team. It’s a team sport now. So writing for a team requires a very different kind of thinking I think than writing for a traditional protagonist and let’s call them a sub-protagonist or something like that.

John: Yeah. So if you think about them as a group, if you think about them as one entity this should still be a one-time transformational event for this group of characters, for this team of characters, for whatever this party is that is going through this journey that has to be transformational to them as a group.

But within that bigger story there’s probably individual stories. And in those individual stories those characters are probably the protagonist of that subplot or at least that sub-story. So they’re all going to have relationships with each other, with the greater question, the greater theme, the greater plot of the movie, and it’s making sure that each of those characters feels adequately served by what the needs are. Bigger characters are going to have more screen time and probably take bigger arcs. Minor characters are at least going to enter into a place and exit a place that they hopefully have contributed to the overall success or failure of not just the plot that the characters are wrestling with but the thematic issues that the movie is trying to bring up and tackle.

Craig: Yeah. There’s a kind of a Robert Altman-y trick where you take an event and he would do this a lot in very good Robert Altman movies, but we see it in all sorts of movies, where there’s an event. And the event is so big it encompasses everyone. And so we kind of – we play a little bit of the soap opera game. So soap operas traditionally would have about three or four plots going at once. You would see a little bit of one, then it would switch over to the next one. And you’d have to wait to get back to the one you liked. At least that was my experience when I was home sick with grandma.

So in say a movie like Independence Day there are multiple stories. There is a president. There is his wife. There’s an adviser to the president who has an ex-wife. There’s his dad. There’s Will Smith. There’s a bunch of stories going on. And each one of them gets a little slice of the story pie, but ultimately it’s all viewed through the prism of this event. And in the end everybody kind of comes together in some sort of unifying act which in Magnolia was a frog rain.

John: Yes. Yes.

Craig: And we see that in fact as different as all these stories were everyone was connected and kind of working as a team. So individuals are the heroes of their mini-stories. And that’s in fact how those movies tell the story of the big story through mini-stories.

John: Yeah. Now, in some of these stories the characters enter in as some kind of family. They have a pre-existing relationship. In other movies they are thrown together by circumstances and therefore have to sort of figure out what the relationships are between them. In either situation you want those relationships to have changed by the end of the story. So just like as in a two-hander, their relationship needs to have changed by the end. In a team story the relationships need to have changed by the end and you need to see the impact they’ve had on each other over the course of this. So independent of a villain, independent of outside plot, the choices that they individually made impacted the people around them.

Craig: And that’s the matrix of relevance. So in a traditional movie it is about me. I have a problem. And I go through a course of action and at the end of the movie my problem is solved. In this kind of story the group has a problem. And what we’re rooting for is the group to survive. And in that sense very much it is a family. And we know that about the Fast and Furious, because they’re always telling us.

John: [laughs] It’s family.

Craig: They always tell us. This is a family. But it is. And so the hero of those movies is the joined relationship of them all in the family. And what the problem is in the beginning of the story is not a problem with one individual. It is a problem of family dynamic. And that is what needs to be figured out by the end of the movie.

John: Yeah. So let’s talk about the real pitfalls and challenges of doing a story with a team protagonist or with a big group at its center. The first and most obvious one is that sometimes certain characters just end up being purely functional. You see what their role is within this group and what their role is within this plot, but their character isn’t actually interesting in and of itself at all. And sometimes if it’s a minor character, OK, but if it’s a character who we’re putting some emotional weight in that we actually want to see their journey at all, they have to be more than purely functional.

The challenge is the more you – in a normal movie you can say like, oh OK, well I need to build in some back story for this character. I need to see them interact with other people and get a better sense of who this person is and what they’re trying to do, but you can’t do that for every character because the movie would just keep starting again and again. It would never get anywhere. So, finding ways that one character’s progress is impacting another character, which is sending the next thing forward. The jigsaw puzzle aspect of getting all those characters’ changes to happen over the course of the story can be really difficult.

Craig: It can be. Because, you know, the movie starts to turn into a stop-and-start. Action, quiet talk, backstory, my inner feelings. Action, quiet talk, backstory, your inner feelings. And it’s one of the reasons by the way these movies are so long. They are so long because everybody needs a story. It’s hard to justify why you have seven characters when only three really have lives and inner worlds and the other four are standing around doing stuff.

John: Yep.

Craig: So everybody has to have it. And they can get really long. You know, it wouldn’t kill these people to maybe, you know, kill one of them. If it’s not going well we’ll just kill them. No big deal.

John: I’m going to argue without a lot of supporting evidence that Alien is essentially one of these kind of group movies, and a lot of horror movies are those kind of group movie, and they winnow down the characters so that one person is left standing. But you couldn’t necessarily say that that person was the protagonist at the very start of the story.

Aliens is not really kind of what we’re talking about with the team movie. Even though there’s a team of great people in it, it is Ripley’s movie and it is her journey. You can clearly see her protagonist arc over the course of it. So, that’s a distinction. Even within the same franchise those are two different kind of setups. I would say – I’m arguing that the first Alien movie is kind of what we’re describing in this episode whereas Aliens is much more a classic, here is one character on a one-time journey.

Craig: Yeah. Don’t be afraid, if you need to write fodder characters you write fodder characters.

John: Oh, go for it.

Craig: I mean, people need to die. Somebody has to be the red shirt. But when you think about – Star Trek is a pretty good example I think of a kind of team story. All their movies feel like team stories to me. And in part it’s because, I mean, take away the science fiction aspect, they’re just sailors on a boat. And so we’re rooting for the boat to survive. That means everybody on the boat is important. However, if something blows up, a few people on the boat can die and we won’t miss them. It’s the people that we have invested in emotionally. Those need to be justifiable to us. They all need to be important. They’re all doing jobs that are really important. I don’t care about the janitor on USS Enterprise. They do have an important job. Really important. But not during your crisis.

John: Absolutely. And we should distinguish between, in television shows by their nature tend to have big casts with a lot of people doing stuff, so Star Trek as a TV show you say, oh well of course, there’s a big cast, there’s a team. But the Star Trek movies which I also love, that is what we’re talking about here because it’s a family. It is a group of characters, the five or six key people. They are the ones that we care about. And we don’t care about the red shirts. We want to see them come through this and survive and change and interact with each other. That’s why we’re buying our ticket for these movies.

Craig: You know what? I just had an idea.

John: Yes?

Craig: You know, so occasionally we do a deep dive into a movie. And I do like the idea of surprising people. I don’t think we’ve necessarily been particularly surprising in our choices. They’ve all been kind of classics. But you know what’s a really, really, really well-written movie?

John: Wrath of Khan?

Craig: It is. But that’s not the one I’m thinking of.

John: Tell me.

Craig: Star Trek: First Contact.

John: Oh great.

Craig: First Contact is a brilliantly written script. It is a gorgeous story where everything clicks and works together in the most lovely way.

John: Nice.

Craig: I would deep dive that. I’d deep dive the hell out of it.

John: It’s on the list. Nice.

Craig: Put it on the list. Put it on the list.

John: Put it on the list. Getting back to this idea that there’s sort of a jigsaw puzzle, there’s a lot of things happening at once, you and I have both worked on Charlie’s Angels films. I found that to be some of the most difficult writing I ever had to do because you have three protagonists, three angels, who each need their own storylines. They need to be interacting with each other a lot. They have to have a pretty complicated A-plot generally. So every scene ends up having to do work on more than just one of those aspects. If it’s just talking plot then you’re missing opportunity to do Angel B-story stuff, but you can’t do two or three Angel B-story scenes back to back because then you’ve lost the A-plot. They’re challenging movies for those reasons. And more challenging than you might guess from an outsider’s perspective.

Craig: Well, you’re spinning plates, right?

John: Yeah.

Craig: You watch them when they’re actually spinning plates. They spin the plate and then they move over and they keep this plate. This plate is slowing down, spin that one faster. The one you were just spinning, it’s in middle. That one over there is slowing down, get to that one. It’s the same thing. You kind of service these things in waves. When you feel like you’ve had a good satisfying amount of this person, leave them and move onto another side story or another aspect of this group. That person can hang for a while.

If you have left somebody for a while when you come back to them it’s got to be really good.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You’ve got to go, oh, you know what, it wasn’t like we were away from that person because there was nothing for them to do. We were away from them because they have a bomb to drop on us. And so that works, too. But just think of it as just servicing plates. Spinning plates and looking for the ones that have kind of been a little bit neglected for a little too long. Because you can’t do them all at once. It’s not possible.

John: Yeah. And so this, we talk about art and craft a lot. Some of that is just craft. It’s recognizing having built a bunch of cabinets you recognize like, OK, this is what I need to do to make these cabinet doors work properly. And I can’t, if I don’t measure this carefully those cabinet doors are going to bump into each other and you’re not going to be able to open them. It’s a design aspect that’s kind of hard to learn how to do until you’ve just done it a bunch. And recognizing the ins and outs of scenes and how long it’s been since we’ve seen this careful. What are we expecting to happen next?

And while doing all of that remembering like, OK, what is it thematically these storylines are all about. What is the bigger picture that these can all – how are we going to get everybody to the same place not just physically but emotionally for this moment.

Craig: Yeah. You find as you do these things that you can get away with almost nothing. I think early on you think, well, it’s been a little while and this person hasn’t said anything, but whatever, it’s fine. These scenes are good. And then you give it to people and they go, “So why is this dead weight hanging around here? That was weird.” And you go, well, you can’t actually get away with anything.

John: Yeah. We talked before about how a character who doesn’t talk in a scene can be a challenge, especially if they haven’t talked – if they’re just hanging in the background of a scene for a long time and haven’t said anything that becomes a problem. But if a character has been offstage for too long and then they come back it has to be meaningful when they come back and you have to remember who they are. There’s not a clear formula or math, but sometimes you will actually just do a list of scenes and recognize like, wow, I have not seen this character for so long that I won’t remember who they are. And so I’m going to have to remind people who they are when they come back. It’s challenging. And you’re trying to do this all at script stage, but then of course you shoot a movie and then you’re seeing it and you’re like, oh man, we dropped that scene and now this doesn’t make sense. That’s the jigsaw puzzle of it all.

Craig: Yeah. It’s why writers should be in charge of movies.

John: Yeah. I think so.

Craig: Just telling it like it is.

John: Well, we go back to the sort of writer-plus that you’re always pitching which is that aspect of writers sort of functioning as showrunners for films is especially important for these really complicated narratives where there’s just a lot of plate-spinning to be done.

Craig: Yeah. I think television has proven this. Really it’s empirical at this point. The other thing I wanted to mention, one last pitfall, when you’re dealing with a group dynamic and you’re writing for a family you have to make sure that no one person – no one person’s personal stakes outweigh the group stakes. We want to be rooting for this whole team to survive. And they’re working together. But if you tell me also that one of their little mini-stories is that they’ve discovered the cure for cancer now I just mostly care about that person. That person has to get out of the burning building. Everybody else should just light themselves on fire so that person can get out.

So you just want to make sure that no one person’s stakes overshadow or obliterate the other ones in the group. And really the biggest stake of all which is us staying together.

John: Yep. 100%. So some takeaways. I would say if you’re approaching a story that you think is going to be a team story I would stop and ask yourself is it really a team story or is it more Aliens where it’s one character’s story and there’s a bunch of other characters as well? Because if it is one character’s story that’s most movies and that is actually a good thing. So always ask yourself is there really one central character and everyone else is supporting that one central character? If that’s not the case and you really do genuinely have a family, a group, a series of characters who are addressing the same thing you’ve made your life more difficult but god bless you. That could be a great script. But recognize the challenges you’re going to have ahead for yourself and be thinking about how do you make this group feel like the protagonist so you feel like there has been a transformation of this group by the end of the movie.

Craig: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And I do believe that after this episode people should be able to do this. All of them.

John: Oh, all of them. Easy-peasy. Nothing hard to do there.

Craig: I mean, what else do you people want? We’ve almost done 400 of these.

John: Wow.

Craig: They should all be at the top of their game. There should be 400 Oscars a year for screenplay as far as I’m concerned.

John: Let’s see if there’s any questions. Craig, do you want to open up the mailbag?

Craig: Sure. Ben in Los Angeles asks, “I keep getting the note that my protagonist is ‘plot-transactional.’ The way I am interpreting this is that she is reactionary as opposed to making choices throughout my feature script. Do you guys have ways to avoid this? How do well-drawn characters drive the story from scene-to-scene? I feel like I don’t know how to approach a rewrite because I think she makes a lot of choices.”

John, what do you think this is about, “plot-transactional?”

John: I’ve never actually seen that exact phrasing of plot-transactional, but I think I get what these readers are talking about is that it feels like she is there to service the plot rather than drive the plot. That is she is a way for this plot to happen rather than the person who is in charge of this plot happening. And so, Ben, it’s good that you feel like your character is making choices. It may come down to dialogue and sort of what’s actually happening in the scenes. That it feels like she’s driving those scenes, that she’s asking the questions that lead her to the next thing. That she’s not just following a set of steps that a screenwriter has laid out for her.

Craig: Yeah. I think sometimes we get a little too wrapped up in plot. We think that our unique plot is the thing through which we should thread a character. I think that’s ultimately backwards. I don’t think the plot matters at all. I don’t think the plot is as important as what the characters need. And then when you think about it, Ben, this person that you’ve created she needs something. She needs to go through something. Your job is to create this perfect miserable torture for her so that the plot is directly relevant to her character. It is a challenge to who she is at her core rather than just a thing to go through.

That’s why when I watch Ocean’s 11 it’s a wonderful heist movie, and it’s brilliantly plotted, but the plotting is there to challenge a character who needs to do something. It’s not really just there because we like the mechanics of a heist.

John: Yeah. So I want to underline something Craig said there because it’s easy to mistake it. Saying you’re setting up these obstacles, you’re setting up these difficulties for the character, it’s to make sure it doesn’t feel like you have set up these difficulties and obstacles for the character, because that could be a situation where it feels like the plot is driving her or forcing her to make certain choices.

Craig: Yeah. That would be bad.

John: Again, you want to give the illusion that the character really has control over what she’s doing at every moment. And that she’s making the choices that have led to this outcome. And that’s hard to do with some plots, with some storylines, but that’s the struggle you’re facing as a screenwriter.

Craig: It’s essentially what writing is man. Sorry. That’s kind of the nitty-gritty of it. You have to just kind of figure this part out. And write in a way where the plot is only meaningful within the context of character. People only care about a character. They only care. They will tell you they care about other stuff. They only care about a character.

John: Yep. Oh, also we should say, you’ve said often people care about relationships.

Craig: Yes.

John: So that can be an aspect, too. So look at–is there a relationship? Does that character have a relationship that’s meaningful? If that character does not that may be your problem.

Craig: Agreed.

John: Darcy from Toronto asks, “I’m approaching the 50-page mark in my screenplay and the story is approaching the end of the runway. I’ve listed out all the scenes I have left to write and I can maybe stretch it out 20 more pages. I know this isn’t a pilot for a web series. It has to be a movie. So, what do you do? How can I make an appropriate length piece of entertainment at this stage?

Yeah, you’ve got a problem. You don’t have enough story. That happens, man. You need to stop right now and you need to look at what you’ve done and then reassess like, OK, well what is the movie version because I didn’t write the movie version. I wrote a pilot.

Craig: Yeah. Unfortunately Darcy there’s no Hamburger Helper here, you know. Somebody asked you to build a limousine and you have completed the construction of a two-door coupe. That’s it. It’s the wrong thing. And you can’t just go, well, I’m just going to make the trunk of it bigger. It doesn’t work that way. It’s the wrong thing. You have to start over unfortunately. There’s no way to easily do this. You listed out all the scenes that you have to write now, but I’m suspecting that you didn’t do that ahead of time. If you sort of tear it back and you think about why it needs to be a movie, and you say it has to be a movie. I know this has to be a movie. Then you need to think about that movie, watch that movie in your head, and let it feel the rhythm of the feature version of this.

Because there’s something about the way you’re writing it that is not either feeling that rhythm or is missing things that would be fascinating, enlightening, and fun to watch. If none of that works, then maybe it isn’t a movie.

John: Yeah. So what is a movie? As we say often, a movie is a one-time journey that a character, or in the case of teams, characters can take. So if that’s why you truly believe it is a movie, great, it’s a movie, but you need to step way back and do Craig’s work there. What I will say, if this is at all comforting, is that this part gets easier with experience. Because after you’ve done a few of these you have a kind of innate sense of like, OK, that’s enough story for a movie, or uh-uh-uh that’s way too much story for a movie. You get a really good sense of how much fabric you need to cover the couch and that comes with experience.

Craig: It’s actually astonishing how consistent I am. Just after all this time when I plan out a story it inevitably ends up around 115 pages. It’s like down to the page. It’s the weirdest thing.

John: And I don’t have that experience in books and that’s why I have no idea how long my books are or how long they’re going to take. I had a sense of this is how much story I have, especially for book two it’s like oh wow I have a lot more story and that’s why book two is significantly longer. I don’t have that same way of sort of pacing myself because I don’t have the experience. I bet if I wrote ten more books I would have a very good sense of exactly how much story I have and how many pages it would take.

Craig: Well, you know, J.K. Rowling’s books got longer and longer as she did her series.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I mean, your first Arlo Finch book was 14 pages which I thought was not long enough.

John: Yeah. It was barely a pamphlet but then the second one is, you know, 400. So.

Craig: 400 pages. Good lord. Nicole asks, “I had a general meeting at one of the big animation studios and they ended up loving one of my ideas and they went so far as to say that it was exactly the kind of thing they are currently looking for. They asked,” here we go, “that I write out a treatment. It’s an idea that I love, too. It would have been my script anyway, but since the meeting went so well I’ve been working on the treatment instead of jumping into my normal writing process. When I finish I really want to show them, but I’m weary of leaving my work behind.” I think she means wary. “Is there something I can do to keep their interest without just handing it over? Do I request a second meeting to talk through it in person and then leave with it? My fear is that if I don’t hand it in the conversation will be over with them. What would you do in my position?”

You are the perfect person to ask this question. John August, go.

John: Yeah. So, we have this campaign in the WGA, No Work Left Behind, reminding writers that when they go into pitch on a pitch on a project, when they go in for those meetings they might have notes for themselves. Don’t leave those notes behind. It hurts you. It hurts every other writer.

But Nicole’s situation is not quite that situation. So let’s talk through the distinction. Nicole has an original idea. She ended up sort of half-pitching this original idea at this animation company. And now she’s wondering, oh, I’m going to write up this whole treatment. Nicole, you own that treatment. You own everything. You own 100% of this concept. So if you feel like writing this up as a treatment or a full script, you can, you may. You own every little piece of it.

Now, is the best choice for you to show them that treatment or to go in and pitch it to them in person? I don’t know. Animation does have a lot of stuff that ends up being written out. And that’s fine and good so maybe that is. But, I want to just distinguish in a general sense you own this fully and that is not the kind of problem we’re trying to solve. The problem we’re trying to solve with No Work Left Behind is when they’ve called you in for a project that they own and they’re asking you to write up some stuff and leave it behind. That’s the real danger here.

Craig, what do you think?

Craig: Well, another thing to point out, one of the big animation studios equals not WGA. It is either going to be an Animation Guild shop or it’s going to be a non-union shop. So, the Writers Guild can’t help you here. I think that the problem I’m having, Nicole, is that they asked you to do this. That to me feels like kind of a weird one. They love your idea, so they say, and they have asked you to write a treatment. You have written a treatment. John is correct. You own that treatment meaning you own the unique expression in fixed form there. You don’t own the idea, because people can’t own an idea. So you may very well, if you consider your idea to be unique, you may find that they’re developing something with the same idea a year from now. These things happen.

But I am also wary of you leaving this work behind for sure. Because you haven’t been paid for it and you should be paid as a writer to write. I think pitching it might be the way to go. I think you could give them a tease. You can say, look, I can show you a little bit and then there’s much more. But let’s formalize it and let me come work here and write this script.

It costs them nothing to ask you to do this. And it costs you time and energy and talent to do it. So just keep that in mind. Their request has cost them nothing. They have no skin in the game.

John: This is where I jump in to remind everybody that just because most animation is not covered by WGA does not mean that all animation is not covered by WGA. So, increasingly there are shops, there are places where you can get WGA deals. So just don’t take it as a default assumption that you will get a non-WGA deal at a place. If Nicole has not worked any place and doesn’t know it’s more likely than not it’s a non-WGA shop, but don’t assume that it has to be a non-WGA situation.

Either way, I think what we’re coming down to is this is your idea. You own copyright on it independent of anything else. If you feel like sharing it you can share it, you know, that’s totally your choice. Maybe they’ll look at that as a writing assignment they want to hire you in to work on some stuff for them. OK. But I’m also with Craig in the sense that they’re asking you kind of to do something for free even though you own it fully, so just always be aware of that.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Cool. Ashley asks, “I recently inadvertently discovered that a spec I’ve been writing on and off for over eight years bears a very striking resemblance to a feature that is about to go into production this spring in a neighboring country.”

Craig: Of course it does.

John: “They share the exact same title and they seem to share a similar world, characters, and themes, but this film is set in the ‘90s and mine is contemporary. My question is what does the existence of the forthcoming film mean for my own spec? Should I change the title or consider dramatic alterations? Will industry bogs consider this spec an attempted rip off? Given its relatively small nature should I not worry about this other project?”

Craig, what should Ashley do?

Craig: Change the title. I think that’s reasonable just because this movie is about to go into production. And then that’s it. Just change the title.

John: Yep.

Craig: Listen, this is constant. This is never not the case. And I will say that everything always seems much more similar to us when we’re writing something than the rest of the world, even when, you know, you end up with two volcano movies at the same time or two talking ant movies at the same time. We can all look at it and go, yeah, but they’re different. And the people writing them are like, no, my god, I thought I was the only one.

So don’t panic. Don’t worry about it. Change the title. It will probably serve you well. And otherwise just rock on with your bad self.

John: The first script I ever completed was a romantic tragedy called Now and Then. And a year later there was a Demi Moore movie called Now and Then, so I changed the title to Here and Now. And people read it as a sample. It was great. But I think it was the right choice to change the title just so it wasn’t confused with the movie that had just come out. So, that was a studio movie so more people had heard of it. This other one maybe no one will have heard of it, but still good to have a title that’s not going to confuse people.

Craig: Agreed. Jake from Texas writes, “I wrote an original pilot that uses celebrities as characters, specifically country music stars as over-the-top action heroes in a parody. I want to enter it into the Austin Film Festival Competition as an example of my writing. Am I facing any liability in this situation? Clear parody. I’ve been conscious of not trying to negatively portray anyone. Should I just enter something else?”

John: Jake from Texas you should enter in your parody with country music stars. You’re fine. Just do it. If it’s good and it’s funny that’s all that matters. You’re not trying to make anything. You’re showing your writing. If the South Park guys stopped themselves at this stage they would not be the South Park guys. Do it.

Craig: Yeah. And they can’t stop you anyway. Parody is part of fair use. It’s literally specified as part of fair use. And frankly you don’t even have to worry about negatively portraying anyone either. Larry Flynt, god bless him, went to the Supreme Court to preserve your right to negatively portray people who are public figures in parody. So, just yeah, go on buddy. You’re fine.

John: Do it. Steve asks, “I also want to applaud the guild for taking the first step in breaking down the barriers that prohibit writers like myself who have always operated on the fringes from getting material in front of showrunners with the implementation of the Staffing Submission System. I’m curious as to what happens once I submit material to a show as many of your other listeners are I’m sure. Can you walk us through the process for showrunners? Is it up to them to log in to see if any writers have submitted? I just want to make sure I’m not wasting my time on something showrunners don’t intend to use.”

So, we talked about this last week. Craig mentioned wouldn’t it be great and I said it actually exists. So people seem to like it. Here’s what I hear from showrunners who are using it is that there’s one login per show. And so the showrunner has a login but so do their assistants. The assistants who would be gathering in scripts anyway go on the system. They see who has submitted. And it is useful to them as another way of getting some new scripts in.

So, I would say it is worthwhile to submit yourself for shows that you feel that you are appropriate for. That’s why we limited it to three. Pick the shows where you feel like you are the best fit. And it does seem like people are using it right now.

Craig: Also, Steve, I’m not quite sure what you mean by I just want to make sure I’m not wasting my time. Uh, click, right? Isn’t that it? Just a click? How much time does it take? [laughs]

John: I think you put a little statement there to explain sort of why you’re applying for the show and you’re updating your profile. But yeah.

Craig: That’s five minutes? Ten minutes?

John: Do it.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t really see a time-waster there.

John: Nope.

Craig: Michael in LA asks, oh, here we go, here we go. So this is in response to a tweet I made about straight white men. And the context was that I was having a conversation with Monica Beletsky, a fantastic writer, about this thing where straight white men in Hollywood are starting to complain that they cannot get hired. That no one will hire them. No one is allowed to hire them. No one will read them. No one is allowed to read them. All their agents are telling them you cannot work in this town. It is simply – it is off limits for straight white men. So, this is what Michael writes.

John: Do you want me to be Michael just because I feel like it might be better if I play Michael and you can play Craig Mazin?

Craig: Yeah. I think that’s a great idea. You be Michael. I don’t want to be Michael. You be Michael.

John: “I’m a working writer and have two indie movies produced and been staffed on two cable shows. Like many people in this industry I’m a straight white dude and as a young straight white dude I couldn’t have picked a worst time to break into the biz. You and Craig are in the privileged position of breaking into the industry when you did and it is exactly because the upper ranks are filled with people like you and Craig that young white writers and I are having such a hard time right now.

“For Craig to completely dismiss how difficult it is to be a young white man right now simply because it wasn’t his experience when he was coming up is disrespectful and hurtful. I’m a good writer. I would say that I’m a great writer. But I can’t even get read for staff or story editor positions.

“In the past we had to hear things like, ‘You won’t even get read because you’re white,’ mainly from our reps, but now thanks to the WGA’s new staffing system we can see it written right there in the notes. Almost all the shows that are staffing say that they are ‘looking primarily for diversity and women.’ It’s one thing to hear this from an agent. It’s another to hear it from a showrunner and have it directed at all prospective writers looking to staff. What is a young white male writer supposed to do when all the showrunners are telling you that essentially you can’t even apply to write for their show?

“I understand there’s a correction going on to a broken system, but the dismissal being levied at young white males right now by people like Craig who were lucky enough to have gotten their foot in the door when they did is insulting. I’d love to see how he would have fared if he graduated from college in 2012 rather than 1992.”

Craig Mazin, take it away.

Craig: Well, I’ll tell you how I would have fared. I’d be crushing it. Sorry Michael. Here’s the thing man. Look, there’s luck involved in how this all starts. No question. Now, when John and I started we were in the middle of a recession. That wasn’t any fun. And the spec marketplace was essentially crumbling around everybody. That wasn’t any fun. But no question that the current situation in Hollywood which continues to favor straight white males really favored straight white males back then. I was a straight white male. John was a white male. And, yeah, so we had certain semblances of luck there.

Luck doesn’t keep you in this business. I can assure you of that. And it may take a little bit longer, just like it probably took a little bit longer for writers of color. But then they get there, right? And so that’s what we’re trying to fix.

Yes, I’m sure that it is discouraging to you to hear this all the time. The people that are saying this to you are essentially lying. They’re lying. Now, yes, you will see things like “looking primarily for diversity and women.” The reason that you see that is because people are having a hard time finding diversity and women. They are looking for writers who represent different kinds of people and different perspectives. And our system has done such a poor job of nurturing those writers that there isn’t the rich farm system there should be.

I’d like to think that there will be now going forward. But, yes, everybody is looking for that because people are putting a priority on it. Looking primarily for diversity and women doesn’t mean we’re looking for a room that is primarily diversity and women. It means we are primarily and looking for diversity and women, probably because most of what we keep getting are white guys. And you would be one of them.

And so I don’t think that that means don’t apply. OK. I don’t think that when agents say, “Oh don’t bother. You can’t because you’re a straight white guy.” My response would be why are you my agent? Why are you my manager? Do you have other white male clients? Why? Are you stupid?

So I want to read you something, Michael. This is a statistic. Because when I read your question I thought of the Black List. Not the service the Black List but the annual voted on Black List. And so this is features, not television, but it’s the features that all the assistants and development people in Hollywood vote as the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood. And I asked Franklin Leonard to do a quick tally of the percentage of the writers that were named to the Black List who were white males. And the answer was 67%.

Now, Michael, do you know – you’re not here. You can’t answer. I’ll answer for you. The percentage of Americans that are white males is 31%. So, that’s more than double representation. I know it feels weird to have anyone say I would prefer to hire fewer white men, but please put it in the context it needs to be in which is that there are way more white men than there should be.

I am not dismissive of your position. I am dismissive of people that say that stuff to you. I would ask you to really think about it and maybe investigate why people that choose to represent you are telling you that you are unrepresentable in the marketplace. And then I would just council patience. Patience. Because where I go and the rooms I’m going into and the people I’m seeing there are a lot of white faces and there are a lot of male faces. There are more than 31%. And maybe what you’re experiencing now is just the way it ought to have always been. And that means if you’re great it might take just a little longer.

John: Yeah. So let’s wind the clock back to ’92 when you and I were getting started. And it was even whiter then. And so as white people going into it did we have even more advantages back then? Maybe? Just because, I mean, the competition was different. It was a different universe and a different world. But the fact that he is facing less advantages that he did before doesn’t mean that he’s really disadvantaged.

I mean, it’s hard math to do. When you are used to having things have the dice roll in your favor and they start rolling more fairly it feels like something has gone wrong. But I don’t think that’s an actual accurate portrayal. I don’t think you are disadvantaged below other writers honestly.

Craig: Yeah. And I would really caution you, Michael, to not use – everyone wants to wrap themselves in the cloak of whatever woke language will give them the most moral authority in their argument. I would caution you to not do this. Because it’s easy and it’s a little cheap. There’s really no reason to suggest that John and I are in a privileged position when your thesis here is that you are a straight white man. Let’s dispense with that. We don’t need to get into the privilege wars.

We’re all white guys in America. So let’s just go with that. OK? We’re all white guys in America. One of us is gay. One of us is a Jew. We’ve all got our things. Well, maybe you don’t. I don’t know. But there’s no reason to look at it that way. I think the way you should look at it is there are white people, there are white men being staffed right now. There are. And they’re new. And they’re coming up. They’re being hired as writing assistants and then they’re getting jobs as writers. They are selling scripts. They are being employed. They’re everywhere.

So, if you’re not in the seat, work harder, try more, be patient. You may have to wait a little bit longer than John and I did, but if you are a great writer, and you claim to be, it’s inevitable Michael. It’s inevitable.

John: All right. It has come time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a great tweet by Rachel Wenitsky. It’s in the tradition of Natalie Walker’s great tweets where she does a character and she sort of explodes a stereotype of who this character is in film and entertainment. In this case Rachel Wenitsky is doing “The Hot Character Who Everyone Thinks Had It Easy But Finally Reveals Their Painful Backstory.” It is just a terrific monologue that I encourage everyone to watch because you will see it and you’ll realize, oh yeah, that. I can’t ever do that again.

And so it’s such a third act kind of monologue where that character explains how rough she had it and that people are misjudging her. So, I just highly recommend it and I want people to keep doing these trope-busting monologues.

Craig: Love it.

John: Let’s take a listen.

Rachel Wenitsky: You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me. You think I don’t know what I look like? What I represent? But you have no idea what I come from. I was born on top of a moving bus. When I was eight my dad evaporated right in front of me. My mom was never the same. She started collecting bones that she found in the woods and building a bone house. And then she made us all live inside the bone house. I had to go to school at a 7-11 because we couldn’t afford light-up sneakers. And when all the other kids were out becoming chefs I was home, giving our dog a deep tissue massage. Didn’t go to college. I went to a school of rock. So don’t you dare tell me that I don’t belong here because I have worked my ass off to be here and now I may not have an ass but I am lawyer. I am a goddamn good lawyer. And I object to you.

Craig: Ha! That is hysterical. Rachel Wenitsky, you’re funny. God, that was really good. You know, people are getting really good at writing bad dialogue. It’s like becoming its own cottage industry which I kind of appreciate.

Well, my One Cool Thing is somewhat similar actually. Also a parody of a sort. Very different sort. I don’t know if you saw this, John. This was a review in the LA Times, it wasn’t really a review, it was one of those lifestyle pieces. And the title – it’s by Lucas Kwan Peterson – and he’s a food columnist. And the title is “For Cramped New York, An Expanding Dining Scene.” Have you seen this?

John: I did because Julie Turner tweeted it and you retweeted it. And I thought it was amazing.

Craig: So basically what Lucas has done is written a think piece about New York in the same condescending, ignorant style that the New York Times uses constantly to talk about Los Angeles. And it is amazing. I mean, just a brief quote here. “My first culinary encounter was with pizza, a mysterious kind of baked tlayuda, covered in macerated tomatoes and milk coagulation, and occasionally smothered with a type of thinly sliced lap cheong called pepperoni. The odd dish, sometimes referred to as a pie, washed ashore from Naples some years ago. While the taste takes some getting used to, pizza can be enchanting when done properly.” [laughs]

It’s so great.

John: Yeah. It was just pitch perfect. Loved it.

Craig: It’s so good.

“The Jewish-style delicatessen I am well familiar with — Los Angeles has the strongest deli scene in the country, after all — but I’d somehow never had a bagel before, a dense version of a baozi that’s boiled, then baked. With a vaguely alkali exterior and a chewy but pliant center, the bagel was puzzling but nevertheless a treat. And that hole in the middle? Apparently, it’s supposed to be there.”

Yeah. You know, as a New Yorker who loves Los Angeles this couldn’t have been better pitched and more deserving. I mean, it’s just, yeah. I mean, New York, clueless when it comes to Los Angeles. Truly amazing.

John: It’s great. That is our show for this week. As always our show is produced Megana Rao, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by David John Banks. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today.

On Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We love to answer little short questions there.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a review or a comment. Those help.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up usually the week after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. Or at store.johnaugust.com where we sell blocks of 50-episode seasons.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John. Almost there. Almost to 400.

John: Almost to 400. Cool.

Links:

• Accepting recommendations for updating the Listener’s Guide
• Arlo Finch Book Tour – Meet and Greet at The Briar Patch in Bangor, Maine on Thursday, April 11 at 5pm
• Rachel Wenitsky’s “The Hot Character Who Everyone Thinks Had It Easy Finally Reveals Their Painful Backstory”
• For cramped New York, an expanding dining scene in the LA Times
• Submit to the Pitch Session here
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Outro by David Jon Banks (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.