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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/toughlove).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll discuss when you need to be tough on yourself and when you need to back off. Plus, we’ll have lots of follow up discussion on Austin, television, assistant pay.

Craig, it’s so nice to be back with you. You were in Austin all by yourself last weekend. But that’s not really true because you were there with a huge panel of people for the live Scriptnotes show. I listened to it. I thought it was great.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you. I’m so glad. You know, I’m very nervous when I’m without you. I’m nervous that I’m going to do a poor job and then I’m nervous that I’m going to do what I think is a good job, then you’ll get angry. [laughs] So, this is how I view you as a parental figure. So, I’m glad you liked the show. We had a great time. The audience was probably the most ruckus I’ve ever experienced in all of our many years doing a show there. So good on them for being ruckus. And we had a terrific panel. I thought it was a fantastic mix of people.

**John:** Agreed. And it was very interesting for me to listen to you running it by yourself because you definitely seemed like you wanted to keep the trains running on time. And when there are that many people on stage sometimes it is awkward when both of us are there because it’s hard for two people to cohost that many people. And so it was great – I think it was honestly probably better that it was just you up there trying to wrangle those people into talking about things.

My frustration though as a listener I don’t get to chime in. And so I was listening to your discussion on television seasons and the model where you drop all the episodes at once versus week to week. And people made really good points, but the point I kept waiting for someone to make and no one was making is the benefit creatively for dropped in all at once and the downside in a marketing sense for dropping them all at once.

So two anecdotes I would have shared had I been there on stage. Susannah Grant has a new show out called Unbelievable on Netflix. It got rave reviews. But one of the things she pointed out on another interview was that Toni Collette who is one of the biggest stars in the show doesn’t appear until the second episode. And what Susannah was saying was that it was very helpful for all those episodes to drop at once because people might not, you know, actually know that she’s on the show if you had to wait till the second week for her to show up.

So, them all coming out at once was really helpful. She felt like she would have gotten noted early on that like, oh no, that actor has to appear in the pilot episode had it been a traditional drop of series.

**Craig:** Well, that’s an interesting point. I mean, the fact is I had that precise issue with Chernobyl. While we had Jared Harris briefly in the first episode, but Stellan Skarsgård and Emily Watson did not appear until the second episode.

**John:** It worked out OK for you.

**Craig:** Well, HBO never gave me any flack about it. And basically what we all did was just make sure that the marketing materials put everybody front and center so people understood that those people were coming. And I don’t know necessarily where Toni Collette sits on the spectrum of actors that demand people’s attention but it seems like she’s kind of in the same zone as an Emily Watson or Stellan Skarsgård.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** So it didn’t seem to hurt on our end. But I understand the nervousness. Certainly when it’s time for, you know, the ongoing awards season, the never-ending awards season with 4,000 awards, you will occasionally have to submit and say I want you to read or watch one episode. For the Emmys I could send in all of the episodes, I think. But when we have to choose one episode, typically we’ll send episode two because it is more of a traditional episode with our actors and all the rest of it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I kind of understand it. But, I don’t know, I don’t think it hurt us.

**John:** It didn’t hurt you. It worked out OK for you.

**Craig:** Yeah. Worked out OK.

**John:** The other thing I would say that is a benefit towards the more traditional weekly release schedule which I think we talked about before, I think did help Chernobyl because the conversation kept building, is I would argue is almost like a disease model of television which is that you are trying to infect as many people in the world with watching your show. And if you are only releasing it all at one time you have a very limited window. And you could infect everybody with your show, but they will have less opportunity to spread the virus to other people. And by releasing week after week you’re continuously re-infecting those people and getting them talking to others. Getting them to go online to talk to others.

So I do feel like it is a great way for a show to build and snowball in ways it’s very hard when you release the entire thing at once.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, look, pretty clear where my interest lies. I like that model. It worked really well for us. You’re right. You do get to infect people slowly and people can spread. And what happens is when somebody catches up to you and infects you by saying, “You have to watch this show,” what you don’t have is that feeling of, oh god, I have to watch all of a show. No. Maybe you’re going to get there and you’re like, OK, I just need to catch up. I’ve got three episodes or two episodes and I’m caught up and now I’m on the wheel.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Of whatever that show is. So I think that that makes total sense. I agree.

**John:** A show that people could catch up on for three episodes is Watchmen, the Damon Lindelof show. And, Craig, you are now hosting a podcast about Watchmen. Tell us about this.

**Craig:** I’m hosting a podcast. I’m hosting the official Watchmen Podcast. Because, you know, the Chernobyl Podcast was this – if Chernobyl the actual television series surprised HBO with its performance, I think the podcast really surprised them. Because they had no interest in podcasts whatsoever before that moment and they were kind of legitimately taken aback. 10 million people listened to the Chernobyl podcast, which is nuts.

So they were talking about, you know, we need to do more of these. And I said, you know, I would do one with Damon for Watchmen. And they were like, “Really?” I said, yeah, I would do that, why not? And then he said, “Really?” And I said, yeah, why not? And we did it.

So, it’s a little different than the Chernobyl Podcast for a couple of reasons. One, it’s not a nonfiction show so there’s a little bit less science and history going on there. And we also only do one episode for every three episodes of the show. So we have stuff built up to talk about. But our first episode airs this Sunday right after episode three of Watchmen. And I think it’s really good. Damon really is a great articulator of his own process and intention.

And I find the show fascinating. I mean, I love that show. And I’m a fan of the graphic novel as well. So we got into everything. We talked about everything. And I think if people like Watchmen they’re definitely going to like that podcast.

**John:** Fantastic. Now, another thing that happened in Austin that I was not there for was that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had a panel where they talked through Game of Thrones. People in the room seemed to love it a lot. People on Twitter did not seem to love it as much. We have two people writing in, at least two people wrote in with comments about it.

So, Jason Kabala from Austin wrote, “I was hoping you could address the backlash that Dave and Dan have been getting in the days following their panel at the Austin Film Festival. I was fortunate enough to be in the room and hear them speak and I just don’t understand how the media and Game of Thrones fans across the Internet could further vilify these two talented individuals based on some paraphrased snippets on one person’s Twitter feed.

“It is incredibly disappointing and disheartening to see this kind of lunacy unfold in real time, especially when I feel it contradicts what I heard with my own open ears.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Brief summary from what I could tell, because I was not at their panel but I read the comments. They were saying things that they’ve said many times that are a reflection frankly of their humility. They are generally humble guys. They don’t go on a panel and explain to you how brilliant they are and why their show got 50 million to people watch it year after year after year. And why it became a phenomenon and the biggest TV show in history basically. They don’t do that.

Instead they tend to lean more towards self-deprecation and humility and that somehow has become a problem. So, as far as I can tell the argument that sort of came out on Twitter, and it was one person writing it and then everybody kind of glomming on to that one person’s account, it seemed to rest on a lot of bad math or strange math to me. It goes like this. They’re saying that they kind of didn’t know what they were doing. Therefore they didn’t know what they were doing. Women and people of color, writers of color, never have an opportunity to get a job where they don’t know what they’re doing, therefore Dan and Dave are incompetent and bad.

And I read that I thought, well, OK, rebuttal. A, everybody watched the show. It was a huge success. That should be the end of that discussion. Literally. We should just end at A. The show was great. It doesn’t matter if they’re being self-deprecating or humble. The show was great. And people can argue about the last season or the last episode and I understand that. But for whatever, if you didn’t like Season 8, and hey, you didn’t like Season 7, fine. There were six seasons of essentially undeniably brilliant television.

They were complaining also that Dan and Dave said we mostly wrote everything ourselves and we didn’t have a writing room. Amazing. That’s mind-blowing to me. It’s incredible that they were able to do that. And that’s probably why for so long the series was so consistent and consistently brilliant because it was part of one unified authorial voice.

So, that’s A. B, let us stipulate that female writers, writers of color, would maybe not get the chances that those guys had after their first pilot, which was not good, or they wouldn’t have been allowed to learn on the job. OK. Let’s stipulate this as true, and honestly I think it probably is true. What does that have to do with them? I mean, that’s not their fault. Now we’re talking about corporations that hire people and give people chances. Why are we angry at them for that? I mean, if anything what they’ve proven if you believe their self-deprecation and humility is that second chances turn out great sometimes. And they do.

And so really all we’re saying I guess then is that second chances are good. But what’s underlying all this I think is anger at very, very successful people. And I think this is connected in part to anger at the last season. Literally. I think what’s happened is a lot of really hardcore fans who are hardcore fans of the show because of the work that Dan and Dave did were upset with the last season and now hate them. And that’s just sad.

**John:** I think it’s a symptom of our time, though. That sense of turning on the thing that you once loved. Yes. We get it. We sort of know how that happens.

One small element here that we should acknowledge is that in some of the discussion I saw on Twitter about it, it made it sound like Dan and Dave just stumbled off the street and pitched it to HBO and said like, “Hey, will you do this thing.” And they’re negating sort of like the tremendous track record they had before this, especially David Benioff who as a feature writer at the time was as hot as you could possibly get.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So for HBO to land him to do a series for them was a big get. And so I think people don’t actually acknowledge what careers these gentlemen had before this all started. And that’s worth remembering.

**Craig:** It is. And listen, David Benioff, and full disclosure, Dan and Dave are my friends. I presented them with their award, absurdly at the same festival where one of the people in the audience was complaining about them, they were also in a different event receiving the 2019 Outstanding Television Writing Award from the Austin Film Festival. And I presented that award to them. And if it makes people feel better, my speech was 90% making fun of them, and 10% praising them because they deserve that. But partly I can do that with them because, yes, David Benioff is really tall, and good-looking, and he was born rich. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons, sure, to say, yeah, I’m going to throw a tomato at this guy.

But, he works so hard. They uprooted their lives and their families for nearly a decade back and forth from Los Angeles to Ireland to Iceland and Dubrovnik. And they did this tirelessly and they got so much right and we loved their show collectively as a culture. And I’m talking about the world. This was a global phenomenon. And, you know, it does inspire strong emotions. And I understand that people get upset if they don’t like that final season or if they feel that characters were betrayed. And so they’re going to latch onto things these guys say as evidence of some disease that was always there. But, no, they’re incredibly decent people, hard-working people who did a brilliant job. And for the life of me I don’t understand how people can love something so much that they forget they loved it. That’s the part of this that’s so strange. They forget.

And people are going to yell at me for this because this is emotional to them now. They are invested in the notion that these guys are villains and they’re not. They’re writers who wrote a terrific show that we loved. It really doesn’t go much deeper than that. Is there a reason to say that our business doesn’t give non-white male writers more chances and deserved chances? Yes, that’s right. And hopefully our business gets better at that and fixes it. But I have no idea what that has to do with the fact that the business did get this one right. This is not like they gave two mediocre idiots a second chance to make a mediocre show and then kept pushing it in our faces even though we didn’t want it. We loved it. It was huge. What else can I say?

**John:** Well let’s leave it with Nate who wrote in to say, “What’s most frustrating about this for me is that it seems to further reinforce incorrect notions that creative pursuits spring fully formed from the instant the creator gets the spark of their idea, like a muse gifting an artist with a story. Instead of the actual truth which sees artists having to fail countless times in figuring out the best way to bring their stories out into the world.

“In other words, if you’re lucky enough to be labeled a genius it only comes through never-ending process of trial and error.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you know because you did Big Fish on Broadway so you know that process, which is designed ultimately to seem like one day you went, “Oh, I know,” and then out comes this perfect crystal of a show. That’s not how it works.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** I mean, it is a constant reimagining and reconfiguring and rethinking and re-staging and recasting. And that’s the way movies go. And that’s the way TV shows go. And we’re partly to blame as artists because we are peddling the illusion of intentionality. We always meant it to be this way. But, you know, it’s not. And I just, again, don’t understand why anyone is angry about the fact that they fixed it. I mean, that’s what happened. I saw that pilot. It was bad. I told them it was bad. They agreed it was bad. Everyone agreed it was bad. They redid it completely. I saw that. And it was awesome.

**John:** That’s what you want for every writer to have the ability to go back and fix these things.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Exactly. I want that for everyone.

**John:** That’s what we’re saying.

In hiding the work, we’re only seeing the end result, which is great for most audiences. The audiences don’t need to see all the work. But, that work was there and to not acknowledge all the work was there is a disservice to the artist and the final product.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, listen, when writers go out there and say things like, “We didn’t know what we were doing,” they’re being humble and they’re being self-deprecating. I assure you they knew what they were doing more than most people. Because most people can’t do that. Almost no one can do that. It’s really hard to be the people that come up with the biggest TV show of all time. I’m pretty sure it was just them that did it. And from their point of view, of course, they must feel stupid and like they don’t know what they’re doing, just like I felt stupid and felt like I didn’t know what I was doing when I was making Chernobyl, or everything I do, because that’s kind of my anxiety. I mean, have these people never heard of–

**John:** Imposter syndrome?

**Craig:** Imposter syndrome. I mean, all of us have that. So you have these two guys being very human and vulnerable up there and sharing their imposter syndrome and I guess the answer is, “And therefore they’re imposters.” Well who made the show that you loved? I’m so confused by the math.

But, meh.

**John:** All right. Here’s a simpler thing we can resolve. So, in a recent blog post I had to spell out the word writers room. So television is written in a writers room. We all agree to that. What I said is completely accurate and clear until you actually have to spell the word writers and decide whether it has an apostrophe or not an apostrophe. So I asked a poll on Twitter about apostrophe/no apostrophe. But, Craig, I want to know what your opinion is. Writers room – apostrophe or no apostrophe? And where does the apostrophe go?

**Craig:** I struggle with this myself. Probably technically I think I want there to be no apostrophe and just it is the room with writers in it.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** However, the problem is when I look at that it looks wrong. So then I do want it to be possessive. I want it to say that this is the room that belongs to the writers. But then that’s plural. And that’s a bit goofy looking. So, the most pleasant looking is the least right one, which is that it is a room that belongs to just one writer, which I just don’t think applies. So my suggestion, and I’m excited to hear where you’ve landed on this, but my suggestion is we just dump the term entirely and call it the writing room. And then problem solved.

**John:** Yeah. So the room of requirement. Yes. So I did it with no apostrophe with the logic that it is the room full of writers rather than the room owned by writers because in a possessive sense technically the apostrophe goes after the S because it’s a plural. I agree that also looks weird. It looks like you’re leaving something out. Apostrophes in English are just a kludge and, you know, it’s weird we have the apostrophes. We pretend we have the rules for them. We really don’t have good rules for them. So I’m doing it without the apostrophe.

The poll results were 55% with S’, 45% with no apostrophe. I didn’t give the ‘S as an option. That split tells me that both are really common and therefore we should not rend our garments over which spelling we use. They’re both good. They’re both acceptable. They both make sense. And we should focus on what is happening in that writers room and not how we’re going to punctuate writers room.

**Craig:** I’m going to still push writing room and we’ll see how far I get. We know I’m not getting far at all, but I’m stubborn, you know. I’m stubborn.

**John:** Yeah. You are stubborn. We like that.

All right. Let’s talk about the people inside that writing room. We have a lot of discussions about assistant pay over the past few weeks. Brad wrote in to say, “I’m a principal consultant to a large corporation in a major US city. My blood pressure was running high by the middle of episode 422. Similar to how we set professional expectations in the wake of #MeToo, no dinner, no drink meetings, no hotel meetings, is it time to reset the role and responsibilities of an assistant?” Would that it would be so simple as to do that. Basically there’s a clear concise way to say that an assistant does exactly this and nothing more. Brad, I get the instinct. It’s not going to be just a simple job description listing I think that’s going to fix this problem for me.

**Craig:** Agreed. Would that it were so simple. We all use assistants in different ways and also the word assistant is covering many, many different kinds of assistants. So for instance John just referred to the sort of assistant that’s in the writing room. Ha, I did it.

**John:** Keep trying. The more you say it.

**Craig:** Selling it. But of course there are personal assistants that don’t work in a writing room. They are there to work for an executive or somebody and they’re really just there to do personal things. Then there are assistants that are more like executive assistants. They’re there to work for someone at a desk, at a studio, or an agency. There are all sorts of different kinds. We’re going to struggle to codify what that word means. And I don’t necessarily think we need to as long as the people doing the hiring are disclosing fully what the nature of the job is before people accent it.

What we do need to do is set a floor for how much people are paid.

**John:** Agreed. I think part of the challenge, this term assistant which means one thing in all other industries, it means kind of a different thing in Hollywood, is that the assistant position is kind of an apprenticeship. Ideally it’s kind of an apprenticeship. It’s where you get to learn how the industry works. And that’s why we had people write in talking about working as an assistant at an agency even though they had no intention of working at an agency ultimately for their career because it was a great place to learn the business.

And so that apprenticeship is broken. It is busted right now for issues that are beyond just how pay is working. But it is a fundamental nature of how this all happens. It’s why most people who are working in the industry did have a job as an assistant at some point in their careers which is different than a lot of other industries. So it is a natural place for people to get started in this business. We just need to make sure that it’s paid properly.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And in future episodes we’re going to talk more about what assistants should be doing. Because some of the email that has been coming in has been talking about sort of, “My boss has me write scenes and stuff, is that OK?” It’s like–

**Craig:** No!

**John:** Complicated. Yes. Partly that is a thing that you aspire to do, so in some ways it’s great that that person is involving you in the creative process.

**Craig:** Paying you as a writer would be great.

**John:** It would be.

**Craig:** I think that you’re right. It is a broken apprenticeship. Although I suspect it’s always been broken. I mean, I assume that throughout history here in Hollywood the percentage of assistants that have gone on to become the things that they wanted to be is rather small. Because the percentage of everybody becoming the thing they want to be in Hollywood is very small. But if we are going to have this brutal system where 10 million people are competing for three jobs, three dream jobs, then while they’re here competing and working on desks and picking up lunches and dry cleaning and answering phones they should be treated like human beings, meaning not abused, and paid a reasonable wage that allows them to live in Los Angeles while they do this job.

**John:** Agreed. So this week on Assistantdom I thought we would talk about showrunners and the holidays. So, this past week I put up a blog post that went through some of the letters we’d gotten in about how showrunners were stepping up for their assistants, especially writing room assistants, to make sure they were getting paid enough. So, I’ll point to that blog post. We’ll have a link to that.

But there were also some additional letters that came in and I thought we’d have Megana read through them. She’s our voice of the assistants. So producer Megana Rao can read a little bit more from what some people had to say about their bosses stepping up.

And I really want to focus on some of the strategies that these showrunner bosses used. This first one really speaks to understanding and sort of selling the value of that assistant. Let’s take a listen.

**Megana Rao:** Bianca writes, “Before going to the studio about a number the showrunner discussed it with me first, making sure I was OK with that rate. We shot a pilot in Croatia this past spring and the showrunner advocated for me to go with him and be bumped to script coordinator with a higher rate. When the script coordinator job finished as our pilot wrapped the showrunner asked the studio to keep me at that higher rate as a raise. There have also been several times when I was supposed to wrap but he asked the studio to extend me by telling them how important I am to his writing process.”

**John:** Great. So I think this is a really strong example of the studio is more willing to pay for somebody that is deemed vital to the production. And if the showrunner is saying, no, no, this person is vital to my creative process, they’re going to listen more carefully. They’re not going to argue like this is a disposable cog, that anyone could do this job, if you’re telling them, “No, no, most people couldn’t do this job. This person is special,” you’re more likely to get them the salary they deserve.

**Craig:** Yeah. In a very broad way I think that the studio is probably waiting for the showrunner to say something. If the showrunner isn’t necessarily advocating for something then the studio doesn’t have to worry about it. I mean, they’re the ones who are paying this. They don’t want to pay more than they have to. But if a showrunner says, “I need this person. That’s that,” generally speaking, assuming that the show is going well, that’s going to be honored. They don’t want to cause a problem there. And I think in this case there’s a pretty interesting thing going on here. Whether or not the showrunner was coming up with these ideas or whether Bianca was coming up with these ideas, I suspect Bianca had a plan.

So if you’re an assistant and – let me take that back – if you’re an employer and you’re concerned that your assistant isn’t getting paid well enough, ask them what their plan would be. I bet they have one. They’ve just either been hesitant to share it with you or they didn’t think it could ever come to pass. But they’ve probably thought this through and know more about their situation than you do.

**John:** So next strategy is for the showrunner to have business affairs deal with them, the showrunner, rather than dealing directly with the assistant. So it’s a case where you sort of intercede early in the process to make it clear like, “No, no, this is how much I want this person to be paid,” rather than having to come back in later on to negotiate it. Let’s take a listen to that.

**Megana:** Kaitlin writes, “For season one of the show I currently work for my boss actually negotiated my pay on my behalf. I never needed to negotiate for myself in person with the studio. I believe this was an outlier experience because she was a first time showrunner who had the time and the drive to go bat for us before the show actually got rolling. The way this worked was I gave her the number I planned to ask/negotiate for with Netflix, asking if she’d be willing to back me up when I did. And she said she would.

“The she reached out to me telling me that she herself had asked Netflix to pay me that amount and they came in a teeny tiny bit under. Would that be OK with me? It certainly was because I had asked for higher than I planned to receive. She totally had my back.”

**John:** Great. So this was a first time showrunner, so this was not a person who had experience doing this negotiation, but had the time and had the energy and sort of the pluck to step up and say this is what I want this person to be paid. Didn’t quite get all the way there, but got much further than this assistant would have been able to by him or herself. So that feels like progress.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And maybe it’s because that this person was a first time showrunner they were kind of fresh and new and had a healthy attitude about how this should all work. I could see how after your 30th year running TV shows you didn’t want to also add on this extra aspect of being an HR person for what is now the 4,000th assistant that has come that has kind of gone through the system. But hopefully if we can kind of get things better then individual showrunners won’t have to.

The more you do it as an individual showrunner the less likely it is you’ll have to do it next time because there will be a reasonable base pay for assistants and you won’t have to personally advocate. It will just be there waiting for them.

**John:** Yeah. Business affairs will see you on the phone. OK, this showrunner is calling to get this person bumped up. It’s a thing that happens every time. It’ll be OK. So maybe they won’t even have to make the phone call because it will just default to a higher level.

**Craig:** Correct. That’s the plan.

**John:** So the next strategy for showrunners is to keep hammering. Let’s take a listen.

**Megana:** Andy wrote in, “My boss had to lobby for me to superiors on four separate occasions. I’m fully aware that not everyone is willing to do that for their employee and can put him in an uncomfortable position with his superiors. I’m very grateful to my boss and feel very lucky. I will say my mental health has benefited the most. Constantly being stressed out about money is such a burden. It affects your relationships, your mood, and you feel like you are carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. I feel so much better and can see a future for myself in this industry which wasn’t always the case.

“It’s kind of crazy what a huge difference something like that can make. But keep in mind this was all for just a $5 an hour raise.”

**John:** Yeah. So a $5 an hour raise is not a big deal probably in the course of the show, but it’s a huge deal for someone like Andy who is in that situation. And so for the showrunner who has a thousand other things to juggle, to keep coming back to, OK, and I’ve got to get Andy an extra $5 an hour is a lot. But it is really important to Andy. So that not sort of giving up at the first no is crucial. And believe me, that showrunner wasn’t taking no on a lot of other levels as well.

So, to keep hammering, to keep pushing for what Andy needed was crucial.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I had to do quite a bit of that when I was making a deal and I wanted to make sure that my employees had health insurance. I had to fight. What I am sort of shocked by, but I guess I shouldn’t be, is how weirdly pennywise and pound foolish business affairs and studios can be. They will fight you tooth and nail on these things, like a $5 an hour raise, which they can afford, and isn’t a huge deal. Maybe because they’re just terrified that they’re going to end up having to do what you and I want them to do, which is give everyone a pay raise across the board who does that job. That seems to be the big fear. That’s what they’re scared of the most.

So they are acting like McDonald’s, which will lobby against increases in minimum wage everywhere they are because that’s what they pay and they have to multiply it times every single employee they have. Well, tough. We’re just going to keep doing this because that’s what needs to happen.

**John:** So the last strategy a showrunner might consider is really focus on the total dollars. So, not focus on how much they’re getting paid per hour or how many guaranteed hours, but how many they’re bringing home on a weekly basis. Let’s take a listen to that.

**Megana:** Margie wrote in about kit rentals. She says, “I was a director’s assistant during post on a Netflix movie in 2016 to 2017. Part of Netflix’s policy for kit rentals for laptops is that they’ll pay up to $500 for however long you’re on the project. It was a great extra $50 a week on my paycheck for a couple of months. Then, when I hit the $500 max and I stopped getting paid to bring my laptop in, well, $50 extra a week is a huge deal for me. Losing $200 a month in salary would hurt a lot of people.

“I asked the accountant if I could renew the kit rental or if they would provide me a work laptop. And I got a curt email from Netflix production restating that $500 was their max policy and said I should have asked them for a work laptop from the start. So, they wouldn’t budge. The post supervisor knew all about this and wouldn’t do anything to fight for me. He was afraid of and loathed the producer. I got so fed up I approached the director and asked if he would talk to the producer about increasing my weekly rate to compensate for the loss of my kit rental.

“He did. And the producer upped my rate for the remainder of the project, which was nearly ten months.”

**John:** Great. So what I like about this is it’s not being hung up on the principal of like, no, no, her rate needs to be this versus that. It’s how much is she bringing home. And so she was getting this extra $50 a week as a kit rental. Once that ran out, how do we get her an extra $50 a week? Bump it someplace else. If they had to make up an excuse for it, or they’re going to rent something else of hers, great. But really for Margie what made this job survivable was that $50 a week. And so how do we get her to that number rather than figuring out exactly what this hourly rate needed to be?

**Craig:** Right. And as we go forward in this discussion I’m going to keep coming back to the notion of the bottom line, because we know now after listening very carefully to so many people over so many weeks now that the employers can play a ton of games about how they pay you. They can change your hours. They can change the amount of overtime hours. They can change how much they pay for overtime. So when you get a number, a blankety-blank per hour that actually isn’t the bottom line. They can make that rather elastic actually.

What really matters is what is the bottom line. How much money do you get per week? That’s what matters. So that’s what we’re going to concentrate on whether it is a question of improving an hourly rate or improving guaranteed hours, or improving kit rentals. Whatever it is. The bottom line is we need to find a reasonable amount per week.

**John:** Agreed. So in the weeks ahead I think we need to have a discussion about what is the amount per week that is livable and survivable on in Los Angeles and see if we can get something approaching consensus on what that is and then figure out how to get people that money.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So that’s our goal. A small goal for the New Year.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** But before we get to the New Year we’ve just crossed through Halloween, which means that it’s now the holidays. It’s now the official holiday season. We can now play All I Want for Christmas for the next two months solid. But, a thing that’s come up quite a bit in the letters that have come in to the mailbox is that the holidays are actually a really tough time for assistants because many assistants are not paid during those holiday weeks. And so in some cases it’s two weeks off, or a week at Thanksgiving. There’s real problems for assistants in a period where they should be excited to have vacation it’s actually much worse for them because they are not bringing in the money they would normally bring in.

So, Michael Greene, a showrunner, has a Twitter thread from a couple years ago that we’ll link to that talks through his recommendations for how a writing room can figure out how much to give as a holiday bonus to the assistants who are working for that show. And it’s very clear simple math based on what position you are how much you kick in in order to get people paid so they can make it through those holiday seasons well.

So, that is a first step I would point people towards.

**Craig:** Yeah. Nothing says Christmas spirit like telling people this is a time of year where you have to buy extra stuff. Also we’re not going to pay you. I mean, how about this just as a simple bottom line. Pay people. Every week. If you have an assistant they should be paid every week. They should get a couple of weeks of vacation time and they should get holidays off. And you should also pay them for those.

On top of that – on top of that – you should be giving some sort of Christmas bonus or gift, presuming that the employee is somebody that you’re not, you know, in the process of getting rid of, because that’s what freaking Dickens tells us. I mean, honestly how many versions of A Christmas Carol has this town made? 400?

**John:** We’re doing some more, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. And they keep coming. And yet – and yet – it’s just Scrooge all the way down. And it’s not fair. It’s wrong. It’s kind of anti-progressive. It flies in the face of everything we say we care about. It’s just wrong. Boo.

**John:** Boo.

**Craig:** Boo to Scrooge, you know? Like people should be paid. So you shouldn’t be looking at Christmas as a time of tension because you’re going to have to drive an Uber for two weeks. I mean, this is wrong.

**John:** Yeah. It is wrong. Also, the holidays are a time where you theoretically should be able to travel back to visit your family.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so that’s what this holiday spirt is about. Have movies taught us nothing? That the holidays are for getting back with your family and coming to appreciate your family as an adult. And we are not allowing these assistants to go travel back to their families and appreciate them as adults and have awkward conversations about their Hollywood careers. That’s why we need to give them holiday bonuses.

**Craig:** Let’s not get crazy. I mean, let’s not necessarily that we have to go back to see our families at Christmas, right. I mean, can’t a few of us get waivers on that one? I need a waiver.

**John:** Some sort of waivers will be allowed.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Let’s end this segment on some good news. Matt wrote in. He was a key set PA on season two of Fresh Off the Boat. I won’t read the whole story, but essentially because of how their schedule was working they were going to be off a week at Thanksgiving and then more time at Christmas. And it became really tough to figure out like how are we going to survive with only three out of four weeks’ pay. It was stressful. So they went to their ADs. The firsts. The seconds. The seconds-seconds. They voiced their concerns. They went to the UPM and the producer. And successfully got them to carry them through Thanksgiving and one week at the holidays.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** And so–

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** That’s an example of a show stepping up and recognizing we are putting an undue burden on the people who have really stepped forward to bear it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we shouldn’t necessarily be giving the Fresh Off the Boat people too much credit for doing what I think should just be the base right thing. But, you know, tip of the hat because a lot of people are not even doing that. So, everybody – everybody – should be paying their employees for that stuff. I mean, come on. Come on. When you were a kid did you think that my dream is to grow up and deprive my employees of pay during Christmas? Who wants that? That’s just wrong.

**John:** Your college roommate wanted that.

**Craig:** Oh god, did he ever – oh, what a disgusting person. Ugh. Did you see him at the – well, you don’t watch sports.

**John:** But I saw a photo of him wearing the Astros outfit at the game.

**Craig:** He’s the reason they lost. I’m telling you.

**John:** He’s a curse.

**Craig:** He puts on any team’s uniform and that’s it. It’s just that all the wheels come off. Ugh. What a repugnant person. Anyway.

**John:** Anyway. Let’s do a last bit of follow up. This is from a stuntman named Kevin who writes, “I just did my 20-year anniversary working as a stuntman in LA. I emailed you guys once before and said Craig is right, stunt people don’t punch each other in the face.” That was in relation to a Three Page Challenge we were looking through.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, yes, yes.

**John:** He says, “I also loved the Seth Rogan episode. His perspective on stunt people and how they process pain got me thinking. It reminded me of a conversation I once had in a [trans-mo] van from set to base when someone in the van asked me and another stunt guy doesn’t it hurt. And the delivery had the tone of why on earth would you do this. Right then I had a moment of clarity. Explained it in a way that still encapsulates how I feel about what I do. I said, ‘It hurts more not to pay the mortgage.’”

**Craig:** Well, Kevin, I don’t believe you. Because here’s the thing. There are a lot of ways to pay the mortgage. But you’re a stunt guy. And you’re a breed of people. I mean, listen, I always describe all of us collectively as show folk. I mean, we’re show folk. We’re carnie people, right? We’re in the business of putting on things. And so we’re special. And stunt people are a special brand of show folk. And they – you have to like it. You have to. You can’t – there’s no way you go to work and you’re like, “Oh my god, I approach falling down the stairs with the same trepidation as everyone.” You do not.

So, I’m going to push back a little bit and actually say, Kevin, no. There’s more to it than that. Every stunt person I’ve ever met on set and talked to has a certain kind of thing. And it’s awesome. And I don’t have it at all. But I’m glad that they do.

**John:** Cool. All right. Time for our marquee topic which is tough love versus self-care. So this is inspired by a Chuck Wendig blog post over this past week where he talks through the dueling notions of sort of do you buckle down and sit in that chair and get all those words written when you’re hurting, or do you take a step back and practice some self-care. And he’s really looking at the trap you can fall into where you’re just self-caring all the time and you’re not actually doing the hard work. And as we head into NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which is where I started Arlo Finch, I thought it was a good time to look at the dueling instincts to you’ve got tough it out versus relax and be easy on yourself.

**Craig:** Yeah. I loved this. I thought it was really smart. And the reason I really appreciated it is because there are two positive ways of thinking about things and one positive way is I need to take care of myself and be gentle with myself and not beat myself up because that’s going to be counterproductive. And there’s another positive thing that says I need to apply myself and motivate myself and push through difficult things and be resilient in order to get things done.

The problem with both of those things is that bad sentiments can easily masquerade as those things. That’s kind of the part that I thought he really put his finger on brilliantly is that the two things I just said are correct and good, but here’s something that can masquerade as tough love: a kind of brutal self-loathing and self-denial. And here’s something that can masquerade as self-care: just fear and withdrawal and a sense that engaging isn’t worth it. So, I thought it was really important that especially now because we do concentrate so heavily on self-care that somebody said, “Just watch out. There are these two imposters that will wear the clothing of these two things and neither one is going to help you.”

**John:** Yeah. Let’s go back to that tough love, because you know someone who is advocating tough love will say, “Yeah, so what? Writing is often hard. You’re not digging a ditch.” And to some degree writing is exercise and it’s just like working out. You get stronger sometimes by pushing through the pain. And you’ve got to rip those muscles a little bit so that they can get stronger. I don’t know if actually physical science would hold that up to be true.

**Craig:** That is – you did it.

**John:** All right. So, and I get that. And writing for all of us, actually sitting down in the button chair and getting to that thousand words or those three pages can be really tough sometimes. It’s hard to string the words together. We’ve talked about this a lot on the show. But, what Craig describes as that imposter is a real thing where sometimes it’s your romantic notion that art must be suffering. That writing must be hard and so therefore if writing is hard then I’m doing the right thing because that’s what writing is supposed to be like. That it’s supposed to hurt and it’s supposed to be torture every time you do it. That’s probably not true. And that’s not a healthy way to be approaching the craft that you’ve chosen for yourself.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you can easily get into a trap where you think of yourself as stupid or lazy because it just didn’t happen that day. You can try and try and try. There are days where it’s not going to happen. And the healthy thing is to say that is normal. I am not perfect. Not every day is going to be optimum. But that imposter dressed in the clothing of tough love will say, “You suck. You’re weak and lazy and dumb and a real writer would have gotten it done. You’ve just failed.” Well that’s not helpful at all.

**John:** Let’s look at self-care because you and I are both dealing with shoulder pain and part of the recommendation for that is, well, take it easy on your shoulder. Don’t do things that are going to hurt your shoulder. And that really is a form of self-care. And so if you are encountering a lot of mental anguish and other things in your life that makes it hard for you to write, possibly pushing through and forcing yourself to write is going to make that mental anguish worse. And so to be mindful that there could be a good reason why you should step off the accelerator and give yourself a little bit of a break and not be pushing yourself so hard.

Chuck was writing from the perspective of he’s a guy in a shack who is writing books. I’m reading his book right now. His book is really good. He wrote a big giant tome called Wanderers. It’s sort of like The Stand. It’s as long as The Stand. It’s a big tome that drops down. But Chuck is a guy writing by himself out in the woods. He is not in a writing room. I’m going to keep using that word as much as I can.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**John:** He’s not in a writing room in a social environment with other people. And so therefore he only has himself to turn to. And so some of his advice can be a little bit different about self-care when you are surrounded by a group who can be pushing you, or also be supporting you.

**Craig:** Yeah. The self-care thing is interesting because we didn’t really have it until a few years ago. Of course it existed and people would come up with different names, but the notion of self-care and the popularity of it is a relatively modern phenomenon. And I think it is important for somebody to kind of, you know what happens is there’s this backlash where people say, “Problem is all these snowflakes with their self-care, ergo self-care is stupid.” By the way, the people that say that never use the term ego. But whatever.

That’s not correct. Self-care is actually crucial. What is correct is that self-care can be used as a name for something that isn’t self-care at all, but a different kind of self-abuse, which is hiding. And we can when we are afraid sometimes put on the clothing of somebody that is trying to take care of themselves, when really we’re just scared. And people might think, well, how exactly is writing scary. Well, when you don’t know what to say it’s terrifying. It really is. It’s as scary as a dream where you have to go on stage and give a speech but you haven’t prepared one. That’s what it kind of feels like.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a natural anxiety that happens. Like am I going to be able to do it? If I can’t do it then it’s going to suck and I’m going to be embarrassed. Even if I’m the only person who is going to see that I can’t do it it’s going to be embarrassing. So, yes, there’s a whole cycle that can stat about should I sit down and actually start writing today.

**Craig:** Correct. And you can wear the clothing of modern parlance and say, no, today is a self-care day. It is worth taking a real clear moment when you say today is a self-care day to say, “Or is it?” It doesn’t mean you’re lying to yourself. It just means let’s really ask and evaluate first. Then if everything checks out, then yes, it’s a self-care day.

**John:** So I put together a list of five questions that I thought would be a starting place for looking at is this a time for self-care or is this a time for some tough love with myself. So, let me read through here. Craig, I suspect you’ll have other things to add to this checklist.

So first I would say is check the facts. And basically that’s a chance to sort of step outside yourself and just look at the situation you’re in. Is this a situation where you’re dealing with some big stuff that anyone in your situation would say like, OK, given what you’re going through, like the loss of a family member, a big breakup, you’re moving, there are some real reasons why you are not equipped at this moment to be doing this stuff. So just check the facts. Like independent of your emotions, what are the actual facts about this situation?

I would ask are you taking care of the basics. I would ask are you taking care of the basics. Are you actually eating properly? Are you sleeping enough? Is there some basic survival function that you’re not doing a good enough job at and is that the thing you really need to fix rather than worrying about how much you’re writing on a day.

I would ask can you take smaller bites. And by that I mean rather than committing to three hours of sitting writing can you just write for 20 minutes, or an hour. Can you do a little sprint to get you through some stuff? Can you write 100 words rather than forcing yourself to write 1,000 words at a sitting?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Can you lower the stakes? And this is where I come back to Aline Brosh McKenna’s method of getting in the ocean. I don’t know if you remember her describing this at some point. But this is how Aline describes starting to swim in the ocean. Is that you sort of step on the sand and you get your toes wet, and then you get your ankles wet. Then you splash a little water up on your shins, and then your knees. And eventually you’re in the ocean and you’re swimming and you don’t even realize that you started swimming. And I always loved Aline’s visual for how she gets into the ocean, because it’s sort of true. It’s scary to jump into the ocean, but if you sort of just wander in there like, oh hey, I’m in the ocean, I’m swimming.

**Craig:** It’s literally how every Jewish woman I’ve ever seen gets into a pool. It’s like every Jewish woman slowly like wets the arms, wets the legs. It’s so careful. Maybe it’s just my family. Maybe it’s just the women in my family. I don’t know. But it’s such a weird stereotypical thing.

And I guess as far as stereotypes go fairly harmless. Because it is a smart way of acclimating to a new environment. And I think lowering the stakes is a brilliant point of view on this. Because there are times where you may say, “Listen, I think today is a self-care day. You know what? Today is a self-care day. That said, what if I did some writing on a self-care day? It doesn’t even count. It’s like free calories. Because it’s a self-care day. So if it happens it happens. And if it doesn’t it doesn’t. I’ll just try it now with like zero stakes attached because it’s a self-care day. I don’t have to sit there grinding my teeth because it’s not happening.”

I think that’s really smart.

**John:** Katie Silberman when she was on the show recently she talked about how when she starts a project she’ll write scenes and scenes and scenes that aren’t going to be in the movie that are just the characters talking. Perfect. Those are kind of throwaway scenes. It doesn’t matter. You’re just getting a sense of the voices. There’s no demand that those actually have to be the real scenes in the movie. So try writing those. You’ll be surprised. Some of those will end up in the movie. But it’s lowering the stakes. The world isn’t going to come crashing down if those scenes are not perfect.

**Craig:** There you go. Yeah.

**John:** Last I would say can you define what you’ll need to be able to do in order to get back to work as normal. And so if you say like this is a self-care day, I can’t do it. Great. What are the criteria you need to meet for you to be able to get back to work? And if you can be just a little bit more concrete about that. OK, I need to be able to sit for ten minutes without bursting into tears. Great. So that’s a thing. If you can do that then you’re on your way to being able to do the next thing.

I need to be able to focus on one thing for 20 minutes. Give yourself some real criteria, benchmarks that you need to hit, so that you can actually say, OK, I’m in this state or I’m not in this state. There’s a sense that there’s an end date to it. That it’s not going to be a permanent condition for you.

**Craig:** Those are five great questions to ask yourself. I really only have one other one to suggest. And it is simply is the biggest problem on this particular day your writing. Because if the biggest problem, the thing that is taking the most wind out of your sails, the thing that is making you the sickest in your gut is the work itself, it may not be a self-care day. It may be a day where you just have to kind of re-approach your writing and think about what’s not working.

Because otherwise you could hide forever from that.

**John:** Yeah. When I was writing the Arlo Finch books, so the third book is in and done, so I’m essentially done with them, it was a lot more regular writing than I’d ever had to do. So it’s been four years of like really regular writing to get those books done. And the word counts were just so much higher and the workload was so much higher than before. And so I did have to be little tougher on myself in terms of like, yeah, I don’t necessarily really want to do it today but I kind of need to do it today and I’m going to do it today. And I would schedule like even family vacations I would say, OK, I need an hour this morning to write. And I’m not being selfish. It’s what needs to happen. And so I would plan for, OK, I’m writing during this time.

And then once I got that writing down I was just free in a way that was great. It wasn’t looming over me because I knew I’d gotten that work done.

So I bring this up because sometimes writing actually is what you need to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Sometimes writing is a really important way to get healthy again because it lets you step outside of yourself, outside of your own internal narrative into a different narrative. And really focus on that for a time. So, it can get you out of your head with the right project.

**Craig:** That’s such a great point. And I’ve got to tell you, that’s me. There are times where I needed a day off or even a week off because of extant circumstances. Things that are going on in my family. My son has surgery. Do you know what I mean? Like you got to deal with life as it comes and there are days where you just can’t do your work. But in all honesty 90% of the time when I am feeling miserable it’s because something is wrong with what I’m writing. And the only way to fix that is to solve that problem. So it doesn’t mean I have to write the solution. Sometimes I just have to take a long walk or a long shower. Sometimes I just don’t know the answer and I have to sit in that discomfort. But that is still a work day to me.

My fingers may not be moving on the keys, but I am thinking. I’m trying. And I know exactly what you said is correct. When I do solve it and when I write that solution the pain that I’m feeling will go away. Therefore I can’t self-care that. That can’t be self-cared away. That has to just be worked away. And it’s a really smart distinction that you’ve made there.

**John:** Cool. So we will link to Chuck Wendig’s original blog post which we thought was terrific. Chuck Wendig also writes a lot about writing and the writing process, so if you’ve not read any of his books on writing you should do that as well because he’s a very smart, clever guy and talks really honestly about the frustration of writing but also what’s cool about writing. And has a very good voice. So I would encourage you to check out his books as well. We’ll put links to those in the show notes.

Also, it is time now Craig for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Neato.

**John:** And I see you have one.

**Craig:** I do. What a shock. This one came from my old friend Craig Perry who is part of an exclusive club of people: Craigs. And it was right down my alley. This is an article in The Atlantic written by Olga Khazan and it is entitled The Therapeutic Potential of Stanning. And it’s about superhero therapy, which I did not know existed, but I think it’s amazing.

And basically, I mean, people can read it for themselves, but the basic idea here is that there are psychologists who are engaging with their clients and having their clients kind of imagining themselves as superheroes in their own lives. And processing their issues and their problems as superheroes encountering obstacles. Using people’s natural desire to interact with the world through narrative to help them unwind their own personal narrative. And obviously it’s not delusional. Everybody understands they’re not really a superhero. But it’s this kind of interesting geek therapy. And it seems to be working.

And I’m not at all shocked. Therapy has always been about kind of looking at your life as a story. What caused you to get this way? What was your beginning? What was your middle? How would you like your end to be? So this doesn’t surprise me at all. I just thought it was really fascinating that it was happening in kind of a codified way. So check that article out. The Therapeutic Potential of Stanning.

**John:** Yeah. I really liked this article a lot. And the idea behind this therapy. When I give my Arlo Finch talks to grade school kids part of my discussion is about what we mean by hero. And hero is the one who grows and changes. The hero is the one the story is about. The hero is the one you’re rooting for. And I flip it at the end saying like in real life you are the character who the story is about and in real life you are the person who has needs, hopes, dreams, and wants. You are the character that you’re rooting for. And if you look at yourself as the hero in your story that can be really helpful. It gives you a different way of looking at the obstacles in front of you. It gives you a different way of looking at who are your allies because very few heroes don’t have allies, someone who is on their side.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Everyone in these stories is an ally to somebody else. So gets you thinking outside of yourself. So to put it in a superhero context makes a lot of sense, especially in this Marvel moment that we’re living in. Smart.

**Craig:** Every superhero seems to have an origin story that is built around some kind of trauma. Well, a lot of them do. So, it’s just a natural thing to connect to. What about you’re One Cool Thing this week, John?

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a thing you’ll enjoy very much as well. It is called One Page Dungeon. It’s by Oleg [Dolya] who goes as watabou on the internets. It is a machine generated D&D dungeon, sort of like a one-page map for a dungeon that sort of is algorithmically generated. So each time you click it it’s building up a new little map of this place. It’s really great-looking little dungeons that you could imagine in any sort of published module. And sometimes the encounters are built in there. But I just really loved that it could procedurally generate these great little D&D maps that look so much better than anything I could ever draw on graph paper. So, I just loved it. It inspired me to just generate one and then build a one-off one-night encounter for some of my friends.

**Craig:** This is really cool. I also like the – they do – they look beautiful. And I like the titles that get generated as well randomly, one presumes, like this particular page. Let’s see, I’ve got Monastery of the Silent Dragon. And Secret Maze of the Dread Master. That’s pretty great.

**John:** I’m looking at Subterranean Monastery of the Red Titan. And I’ve got some rooms with some pillars in them. I’ve got different encounters. It looks great. So I just thought it was a cool way to use, you know, machines to generate some really paper and pencil kind of results.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** Fun. And that’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions and feedback on things like assistants and other such.

But for short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

We have exciting news coming out very soon about the future of the premium show. But you can find all the back episodes for now at Scriptnotes.net. You can also download 50-episode seasons of the show at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/austin-film-festival-2019).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode of Scriptnotes was recorded live at the Austin Film Festival. I wasn’t there, but I’m told the language gets a bit salty, so keep that in mind before you listen. Enjoy.

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin and this is Scriptnotes. A podcast about screenwriting and things—

**Crowd:** That are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Pitch perfect. And we are live in Austin once again at the Austin Writers Conference in a packed room.

[Audience cheers]

**Craig:** I wish all of you at home could see the enthusiasm in this room right now. I am so excited to be here. John isn’t with us this year, but I’m in control now. So, strap in everyone. This is going to be interesting. And I assure you as I always do that there’s going to be a lot of time for Q&A because I do believe that, you know, honestly that’s why you’re here. We have incredible guests. And so I want to introduce them one by one.

Today joining us on the stage we have Ayanna Floyd who – Ayanna has written at a very high level on Hannibal and The Chi and the upcoming Cotton Club series which I believe you’re the showrunner of the upcoming Cotton Club series. Is that right?

**Ayanna Floyd:** It’s Dead-ish.

**Craig:** Ish. I like it. That’s good enough for me. Next to them we have two up and coming writers named David Benioff and Dan Weiss. And you may know them from Gamay of Thrones. [laughs] We have the great Liz Hannah with us tonight. Liz Hannah has written The Post, and she is also on Mindhunter. Come on.

Never one to sit around and wait, Nichelle Tramble has shown up just in time – by the way, you look beautiful tonight. Did you put like, OK, something is going on there. This is great. Nichelle Tramble, I’ve got a thing with Nichelle. And her husband is right next to her. It’s weird. What room are you in? [laughs] Nichelle Tramble has written on Justified, The Good Wife, and she is the showrunner and creator of the upcoming Truth Be Told on Apple. Nichelle Tramble.

And next to her, Malcolm Spellman, who isn’t my oldest but is my dearest friend in the world, and has written on Empire and is the showrunner of the upcoming Falcon and the Winter Soldier from Marvel. Malcolm Spellman.

And then just to mix it up a total failure. David Mandel unfortunately has only written on Saturday Night Live, Conan O’Brien, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Veep. I’m so sorry.

Well, we’ve got quite a show in store for you all. I’ve got some normal questions that I’m going to throw out to you guys. Please all feel free to chip in, even if I don’t necessarily address them to you. And we’re going to have a little bit of a fun game we’re going to play later. And then we’re going to turn it over to the audience for Q&A. And it’s going to be a great old time. And then when it’s over, more drinking. So, hooray, welcome to Austin.

So I want to start with David Benioff and Liz and Malcolm. We all have something in common. We were in movies. We started in features and now we find ourselves in TV. And I’m just kind of curious for you guys is there any interest in going back or is this kind of a permanent exodus? Are people just leaving features and going to TV and not returning?

**David Benioff:** Liz?

**Liz Hannah:** Malcolm?

**Malcolm Spellman:** Um, it’s funny. I did this little panel at the WGA for black writers. And the statistic was like if African-Americans made up 1.5% of feature writers, it went down in its diversity push to 1%. So–

**Craig:** Oh, so the diversity is working.

**Malcolm:** It’s – my point being I think the feature business is so hostile and closed, it’s a worthless cause. I don’t think we should bother with it. They can have that shit. We’re doing good stuff. We’re making a difference with TV.

**Craig:** To be clear, they is white people.

**Malcolm:** So what was the woman’s name from Crazy Rich Asians? The writer?

**Craig:** Adele Lim.

**Malcolm:** Who needs that shit? You know what I’m saying? They can have it. They can just fail on their own.

**Craig:** Let me put a little context there. She was very successful, but she had difficulty getting paid what she thought was a fair amount to return for the sequel. I didn’t want you to misunderstand Malcolm there. So, continue. I’m just thinking of Twitter and how it is.

**Malcolm:** So, fuck no.

**Craig:** I’m protecting you as best I can.

**Malcolm:** Like what I’m presenting to you all is, no, the truth is, you know, an occasional thing might come around where it’s worth it just because I know the experience is going to be great, but I have no intention of giving them my energy or creativity in a meaningful way ever again. Fuck ‘em.

**Craig:** Well, that was a bit of a mushy answer. David Benioff, you and Dan Weiss, you’ve made a new deal to make programming for Netflix, but Netflix of course is kind of it could be features, it could be television. Does it even matter? Or is it just sort of mushed together for you guys now?

You can’t throw this one to Liz.

**Dan Weiss:** Dave?

**David Benioff:** Malcolm took my answer.

**Craig:** In case you wondering what it meant to be a professional, there it is. You’re not that funny. Don’t even try. Guys?

**Dan:** What was the question?

**Craig:** The question is—

**David Mandel:** Craig, is this the vamping part or did we start yet?

**Liz:** It’s so nice you’re still holding onto your questions so tightly because those should just be thrown away.

**Craig:** No, oh no, no. John would be very upset. I have to try at my best. So the question for you guys is, you know, you did a lot of feature work. You guys had enormous success in television. Is there any road back to features like traditional features, or no?

**David Benioff:** I think the thing that would be hard to go back to is on every feature I worked on I never once sat in on a casting session. I never once sat in in the edit bay. Never once sat in hiring department heads, any of that stuff. Because that’s just the way it is for screenwriters on a feature. And so to have the experience that Dan and I had on Thrones where we got to do that stuff, and that was so much fun, and that’s so crucial to telling a story, to give that up and go back I think would be really hard.

**Dan:** I mean, that said, Netflix is fluid in that way. So if the opportunity arises to tell – I mean, some stories need 75 hours, some stories need 87 minutes. And if we have stories to tell that need 87 minutes and we can find a way to do them there that lets us tell stories the way we’ve been telling stories for the past 10 years then, yeah, that would be great.

Obviously all of us here grew up on movies. Everybody in this room grew up on movies. We haven’t kicked to the curb the things that built us.

**Craig:** Malcolm has.

**Dan:** Malcolm. He has, but like–

**Craig:** Definitively. I believe his words were “Fuck ‘em.”

**David Mandel:** And I was just going to say possibly by association we’ve all been ruined tonight. It’s very possible just sitting here with him on this stage.

**Craig:** Liz Hannah, what do you think?

**Liz:**But also like, yeah, I mean, Malcolm is right. Why shouldn’t he feel that way? And why shouldn’t he not want to work in movies because of that? I don’t think it’s dismissive as like, yeah, fuck it. I don’t think it’s a joke. I think it’s real. Like I think it’s like, yeah, fuck ‘em. If they’re not going to look at you and respect you then don’t do it.

And your question of going back to features and working in TV is, look, we’re writers. Writers are not respected as much in features as they are in television. It’s a fact.

**Craig:** It is. I have felt it myself. Well—

David Mandel: I was just going to – a serious point just wherever this fits in, and I know obviously Chernobyl most recently, but you were a comedy writer as once and a while I was. I mean, what little movies they make, none of them are comedies. The movies that I guess what little I used to sell, they don’t even make those anymore.

**Craig:** That’s right.

David Mandel: I mean, literally don’t make them. They don’t exist. Like the notion of the – you know, the first thing I did with Schaffer and Berg was – the goal was, hey, we’re going to sort of spec sell and make a $15 million little movie that’s funny. Just nonexistent. And that’s crazy.

**Liz:**I’m going to also counter. The two movies that I have made, one was a political film about two people in their 50s in 1971 and nobody fucks. And then the second one was a romantic comedy in 2019 when everybody said romantic comedies were dead. And not a lot of people saw the romantic comedy, to be fair. But people liked it. And people had a conversation about what romantic comedy was in the new era. And so I will say like what it taught me in that experience of working in features and working in television is like nothing we think is expected is expected. Or like nothing we think matters matters. Like let’s just do the things we want to do.

Like I wanted to write the American president in 2019. I wanted to write a movie about falling in love with my husband in 2019. And I thought nobody would want to see it. And not a lot of people did.

**Craig:** So you were right. Nobody wanted to see it.

**Liz:**But people did—

**Craig:** Some people wanted to see it.

**Liz:**Some people wanted to. But what I’m saying is like I think if we’re going to make movies now it has to be about us investing enough into it. Like it can’t just be about projects that we’re being assigned. And it can’t just be about things that we’re doing because they want us to do them. It has to be because you’re committing to do it. It has to be the way we’re doing TV now which is you’re committing ten years of your life. To do a movie now should be like I’m putting my soul into it.

**Craig:** Well that’s a great dream. I mean, I think mostly what’s available now for features is kind of what they want you to do, sort of the inventory that they have. And obviously a great night for those of you who want to be in features, so. So welcome to the show. And good luck.

**Dan:** Watch Craig go back to features.

**Craig:** Probably. Since you all abandoned it all of that money is mine.

**Dan:** Nobody is there. Nobody is there.

**Craig:** Ayanna and Nichelle, two of you. I want to talk to the two of you because now we’re going to switch over to the television world and the way it’s changing. And I think of the two of you as great examples of people that come in in kind of a traditional route. You come in, you’re working as writers. You impress – we were talking about this at dinner – and you go up and up and up. There’s a ladder. And you climb the ladder and you get to the top of the ladder and you make your own show. You run your own show.

But I have this weird feeling that these days that ladder is getting short-circuited. That suddenly people are just showing up and suddenly they’re making a show. And maybe they’re not necessarily ready. And I wanted to ask the two of you what your experience is of that and if you think that the ladder is being disrupted. The normal progress.

**Ayanna:**Yes, the normal progress is being disrupted. And on one hand it’s a good thing, because it’s allowed for people who look like me to kind of kick the door in.

**Craig:** Beautiful.

**Ayanna:** That. And black. [laughs]

**Craig:** Oh, I want to assure you I totally see color.

**Ayanna:** So it’s allowed many of us to come in, because the traditional route that I went through, that Nichelle went through, there is absolute value in it. Also, it took me twice as long to climb that ladder and it wasn’t always fun. And it was sometimes harder than it needed to be. So I can appreciate people just coming in and kicking the door down. Right?

On the other side, I won’t say which show, but I have noticed that a lot of younger writers are just not equipped. I mean, they’re just not equipped.

**Craig:** They’re not ready.

**Ayanna:** They’re not ready. And in they’re in rooms and they’re getting opportunities that they are absolutely not ready for. And what’s going to happen is and what often happens is they get minimized very quickly. And I also worry – we talk about this all the time – when the industry starts to shrink, because it will, because there’s so much television, so much content, where will those people go? And what will happen? And that’s why my thing is always you have to focus on the craft. You have to work hard. And you, you know, writing is a process. It’s not a destination. I still have insecurities as a writer. I just called Nichelle a couple of weeks ago and I was like, hey, I’ve got a pitch coming up. Can I talk to you about it? Like those types of things matter.

And I do feel like it has gotten a little lost.

**Craig:** Professionalism. It seems like what you’re talking about is professionalism.

**Ayanna:**Basically. I’m trying to be nice. [laughs]

**Craig:** No, no. I think that there’s a real concern that as the door gets kicked open and things get short-circuited that some people are going to come in, they’re not ready. They have an initial failure and they just leave. Right? They don’t go through. Nichelle, what’s your perspective on this?

**Nichelle Tramble:** Well, the way that I saw that when I was staffing for Truth Be Told, I would get submissions from agents for writers for staff. And they were, you know, at a producer level or supervising producer level. And then when I looked at their actual credits they were on shows that had four episodes, six episodes, ten episodes. And so they were getting that bump after every year, but the experience wasn’t there.

And that didn’t make any sense to me. I felt like I know if you finish a season but seasons have shrunk. On The Good Wife we did 22 episodes. So after four years on The Good Wife you’ve done a lot of TV. Yeah, so that’s a huge difference. So if you come to me and you’ve gotten a bump up the ladder but you only have 12 episodes total it didn’t make any sense. And it didn’t make any sense in the room or on the page because there were just a lot of basic things that weren’t learned and weren’t there, from basic writing an outline or a story document or something like that, to simple room etiquette. And that’s a big deal.

**Craig:** Room etiquette.

**Nichelle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And Malcolm, you’re running a room. How do you kind of bring the new kids along to kind of get them educated about what the room etiquette is? And if they’re struggling do you lift them up or do you let them sink?

**Malcolm:** It’s getting to the point now where we are – me and Nichelle personally – trying to cultivate a farm league. Because the people coming in now there’s a culture clash that’s going on with I’m not–

**Craig:** Don’t worry about it. Just go ahead and blow it up.

**David Mandel:** Just say it. Just say Fuck ‘em.

**Craig:** Fuck ‘em.

**David Mandel:** Fuck ‘em. Come on, no, no, fuck ‘em.

**Malcolm:** It’s funny, can I side bar real quick? When I first started doing round tables with you and getting around guys like this, you’re at home and you’re thinking you’re super funny and you’re a genius. And then you get around the big leagues and you’re like they can do that shit all fucking day, 18 hours.

**Craig:** Mandel has still got some heat on his fast ball.

**Malcolm:** Yeah. That’s what Wilmore told me. I was in the–

**Craig:** One of the Scary Movies?

**Malcolm:** Super hero one.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, yeah.

**Malcolm:** And Wilmore was killing me. And he knew it. And I was walking out and he said, “You like that heat I was throwing in there?” [laughs]

**Craig:** You’ve still got it.

**Malcolm:** But, no, I do think it’s become difficult because you’re dealing with like Ayanna and Nichelle said a lack of experience that really is – you can’t miss it. You’re dealing with people who are coming there as a sense of entitlement. TV has exploded in a way, I don’t know if any industry has exploded the same way. It is more than double than what it was seven years ago.

**Craig:** No question.

**Malcolm:** Right? Which means if that many new jobs are occurring the vetting system must be different. And expectation for writers coming in it’s obviously going to be a little bit less – what’s the word – like the fight isn’t the same because the fucking industry just blew up. And so these people walk into your room not having suffered the way pretty much all of us on this stage have. And the way they carry themselves is not appropriate.

**Craig:** They haven’t been broken down completely yet.

**Malcolm:** They’ve got no sense of regard for what you’ve done. And so now I think the backlash that’s coming – I don’t think we’re the only ones – is people are starting to say, “Fuck that. Let me groom my own youngsters and bring in people who I think are solid.” Cause these other people coming in from the outside are not built right.

**Craig:** They don’t get it.

**Malcolm:** They’re not built right, yeah.

**Craig:** And there’s not the respect that’s required.

**David Mandel:** We had it both ways on Veep. One I guess success story and one I guess not. Which was my first season, taking over the show sort of midway, I mostly went with veterans. I wanted people I felt – because I felt like we weren’t going to get a lot of wiggle room. That people had expectations. And so there wasn’t a lot of room, but I did hire a staff writer and I realize I’m going to keep it somewhat vague, although obviously you can look it up.

And it didn’t work out.

**Craig:** Right now if you want to, by the way.

**David Mandel:** But I’ll leave it at that. It did not work out. It was just not a good year. And I blame myself partially. The job was overwhelming. I did not have the opportunity to mentor this person the way I hoped I would. And a couple of the other senior writers tried to step in. And, I don’t know. It didn’t work.

However, we had a writer’s PA who is a stand up in her own world and in one of the stages of Veep, I guess for lack of a better word I just “gather-alls.” Like when we’re doing a scene, I just get them and I get them anonymously. I mean, they’re just handed to me by writer’s assistants. And I just go through them and I’m mixing and matching and adding my own stuff. And I don’t know whose is what. Best joke wins. That’s all I care about.

And at some point like a year into it someone said, “Amelia is getting a lot on. I mean, just jokes and stuff.” And it was just sort of like fantastic. And when we came back we made her a staff writer. And I think for her it did help that she had been around the room. Someone mentioned room etiquette, whatever. I think that she had learned—

**Craig:** The culture.

**David Mandel:** Not just rooms in general, but she had learned our room to our extent. And she’s off on her career and I couldn’t be more happy. So it does work both ways. But it’s hard. You bump into people that have the exec-producer credit and you just cannot believe that they have it. I don’t know what else to say.

**Craig:** Right. I know it’s something that you used to have to – that was the height. You know, you finally climbed to the top of the mountain. And now they’re just sort of—

**Dan:** Are you talking about us? Is he talking about us?

**Craig:** Pretty much. Yeah. We’ll get to you in a minute. But first I want to talk a little bit more with Dave Mandel down there. Because Dave when it comes to television you’ve had a remarkable run. It’s rare to just keep winning. It’s actually frustrating to me.

**David Mandel:** Let the record show my movie credits are just shit.

**Craig:** I was going to go through those. But, first, it seems to me that at some point there’s more than just talent going on. What do you think is the secret to making what I think is the hardest genre – comedy – to make it work time and time again almost without fail? What is going on there?

**David Mandel:** I guess from my perspective and I was really – I was very lucky at Saturday Night Live to work under some just incredible people. At Saturday Night Live Al Franken was kind of my mentor and then a man named Jim Downy, which if you know Saturday Night live maybe people know the legend of—

**Craig:** The great Jim Downy. You guys know him as the guy who says, “What you just said may be the stupidest thing.” That guy.

**David Mandel:** And he was also the change bank guy. But he literally might be the funniest human being on earth. And most of anything you kind of ever liked on Saturday Night Live from Strategery to Fred Garvin Male Prostitute was Jim Downy. And I learned, I mean I was there for three years. And to this day I write a joke and I think to myself that’s a Jim joke, that’s an Al joke, you know, those pieces of it.

And then when I got to Seinfeld, Larry really taught me to write a show, an outline. And he had learned basically because he had never worked on a traditional sitcom. So he was not taught in a room by that – just to be clear, comedy rooms are very different than your guys’ rooms. Comedy rooms are atrocious. Comedy rooms are group thought and group write. And I do all the work but it’s your turn to write it so you write it, even though I did all the work. You know, what seems funny at 2am where you’re watching a show going, “What?”

And so that stuff, that structure, those lessons that those of us that were there getting those lessons, I think that’s what we sort of went out and did. And, I don’t know, that’s what has carried me through I feel like.

**Craig:** Well, it has certainly worked. Now, you two, since you were so insistent, Dan. You guys I think better than pretty much anybody that I’ve ever experienced as a television watcher made me enjoy and dread anticipation. I mean, my heart legitimately would race at the beginning of a new season of Game of Thrones. I don’t know if – I’m not that jaded. I mean, I would get so excited. And I would get so excited to see how the season would end.

And that anticipation it feels like is kind of maybe going away. It’s something that obviously networks still do. They show something once a week. HBO still does it. They show something once a week. But even for stuff like HBO/networks, there’s also the option to just wait and binge it. And then for Netflix there is not option. It’s just there it all is. Do you think that the binge model or the unenforced anticipation is something that is going to change the way you actually approach things creatively as you go forward?

**Dan:** Speaking for me, I don’t think so. I mean, I think you want to tell a story. Your episode you want to be the best episode it can be. Your season you want to be the best season it can be. I don’t think it would really – you’re trying to game the system to try to hook people into – you’re doing that anyway by the nature of the medium. Like yeah, you do an episode of television, you want someone to watch the next episode of television. But I don’t think – I’m speaking for me, slightly speaking for us, not speaking for the companies that we work for because they may have different agendas – but will it change the way that TV is experienced by us, like the big us? Will it change the way that these stories affect us as a whole? Without question.

I mean, what you’re talking about is a group phenomenon. It’s a societal phenomenon. Something shows up and you watch it, or you don’t, and then you discuss it with the people you care about the next day. And we’ve all felt that changing.

**Craig:** It’s kind of replacing the water cooler. So the water cooler was, “Did you see blankety-blank last night?” And now the water cooler is, “Have you watched this series yet?”

**Dan:** And this is an HBO show I’m referencing now, not even a binge show. But like Succession.

**Craig:** Yeah. That feels like a water cooler show.

**Dan:** Which is a water cooler show. And yet even that, which is a water cooler show that is released week by week. We were at dinner tonight talking about it and he’s like, “I’m on this episode. I’m on that episode.” Half of the table is plugging their ears when somebody else talks about the thing they haven’t seen.

**Liz:**It was you. You were plugging your ears.

**Dan:** I was plugging my ears. I was talking to myself.

**Craig:** You’re not half the table. You’re just one man.

**Liz:**Earmuffs.

**Dan:** In my mind I was half the table.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Dan:** And that experience extrapolated out to what does it mean when everybody watches things at their own pace, that’s going to change the group experience. No question.

**Craig:** Do you feel any difference in terms of – or even any kind of sense of loss of that model? Because it seems like it’s going to just go away completely.

**David Benioff:** Well, I don’t know. We’ve argued about that, right? I mean, Malcolm thinks it’ll come back.

**Malcolm:** [Unintelligible].

**Craig:** Well, go ahead Malcolm.

**Dan:** You think it’s coming back.

**Craig:** Is there another “fuck ‘em” in our future?

**Malcolm:** No, but it’s not going away. And you could always binge HBO shows. It’s just Netflix doing that shit. And no one else – the people who are about to possibly eat their lunch–

**Craig:** Disney+.

**Malcolm:** As we’re talking about, they’ll release a couple in a row. But they have all separately decided that week-to-week is more bang for your buck. Marketing. It extends the conversation.

**Nichelle:** Apple will release three episodes and then go week to week.

**Craig:** Really?

**Nichelle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that news? Did you just break some news? Because I haven’t heard that. Well, that should send the stock moving up or down. I don’t know which one. But that’s a fascinating model. It’s the crack model. Let’s face it, it’s crack.

Apple is a crack dealer. We know that. That’s brilliant.

**Malcolm:** I was just saying that’s all of Hulu, Disney+, Apple, all using pretty much the exact same model.

**David Benioff:** With three?

**Malcolm:** Two or three.

**Craig:** So two or three, and then they go week to week. So obviously they see something inherently valuable in that kind of dribs and drabs.

**Malcolm:** We’re all fighting about this by the way.

**Craig:** It is amazing. The fights that go on. It’s gorgeous. Liz, please go ahead.

**Liz:**I also want to say it has to do with what the point of what you’re releasing is. Because if you’re releasing something and it’s episodic based and you are breaking it episodically and you are telling the story that way in a very strictly – I’m using quotes – as we know television format, then yes, that works.

If you’re breaking something that you’re using 10 hours of television to be released that way then that doesn’t necessarily work. That is why Netflix exists. That is why you’re saying whatever the three and six or full drop on Hulu or whatever it is works. Like I think there is a benefit to this fluctuating system we have as storytellers to say like Mindhunter is maybe the slowest burn ever. And so – for me personally, in a positive way. And I don’t think it would ever be built to be as a weekly drop. And would ever be built as a three and then multiple drop. And that’s intentional. And that’s from the top down.

And so I think you have to look at it creatively from the beginning of like what is the story you’re telling. How do you want this to be told? And how do you want to tell it? And then say where are we going to release it from there.

**Dan:** Malcolm, I think that’s a really good answer.

**Craig:** Malcolm just smiled. That’s a terrible smile. I’ve seen it before. It’s horrible. Only terrible things come after it. Dave, I think you were going to say something.

**David Mandel:** Oh, I had a shitty HBO Max joke that I was going to try.

**Craig:** No better time to workshop it than now.

**David Mandel:** It was going to be – they’ve got a different plan. It’s going to be $50 a month and it’s only going to be on DIRECTV. And it’s going to be really something special. HBO Max. See me if you want to sign up afterwards. It’s not bad. Not great. But yeah.

**Craig:** It’s on the way, man. I feel like that’s on the way. If you had a choice, Ayanna, if you had a choice, just like Liz is saying. Some shows want to be one thing, some shows want to be another. But Netflix is like this is how we do it. And HBO goes this is how we do it. If you had a choice, what’s your druthers? You want it all out there, or do you want to kind of go the week by week? Because I can see positives in either direction.

**Ayanna:** I just watched this show on Netflix called Rhythm and Flow. It was great. It was a rap competition. Did you guys see it?

**Craig:** Yeah, it was cool.

**Ayanna:** I liked the way they released it. They did three episodes every week. So they did—

**Craig:** OK, so they’re coming up with new plans now.

**Ayanna:** Six, nine. Yeah. I think I like that. I think week to week, I don’t know, I have a touch of ADD.

**Craig:** Just a touch.

**Ayanna:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** [speaks in French].

**Ayanna:** I don’t like the idea that – I want to be in the conversation. I don’t like the conversation to be ahead of the conversation or behind the conversation. But I think somewhere like in the middle.

**Craig:** You know, I think these compromise solutions are really interesting because the only thing that I’ve ever thought about this releasing stuff, just because television up until I guess five years ago was released exactly one way. Week by week by week. And there is – so it’s interesting to look at what this means. And the only thing that I think is that if you release it all at once there is a sort of implied devaluation of the material. And so I really like this kind of hybrid model, where they’re sort of acknowledging, look, you’re all too impatient to wait.

**Ayanna:** But I will say that something like Chernobyl, like what was it six episodes?

**Craig:** Five.

**Ayanna:** Five. OK.

**Liz:** Who wrote Chernobyl?

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I did that. I did that.

**Dan:** That wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny.

**Liz:** Was that the half-hour sitcom on Fox?

**Craig:** We brought in Mandel and he just killed it. I mean, just all the funny. Yeah.

**Ayanna:** But something like that, I say week to week.

**Craig:** It seemed to help us, week to week.

**Ayanna:** I say week to week. Five episodes or a shorter order.

**Craig:** Well that was kind of heavy, wasn’t it? I mean, it’s like who wants to watch all that at once?

**David Benioff:** I would say there’s also an argument that it doesn’t matter that much. You know? I came to Breaking Bad really late because we were in the middle of making Thrones. And I didn’t get to it until I think the final season was split into two. And between the first half of the final season and the second was when I started watching it. And then I just became an addict and was watching an episode on the way to set on the iPad, in the back seat, and then on the way back from set. And just blew threw it in a couple weeks. And then had to wait for the final half of the season where I watched them in real time with everybody. And watching it both ways was incredible. And at the end of the day it’s because Breaking Bad was fucking great.

And so, you know, the argument is interesting and it’s professionally very interesting to us, but I don’t know if there’s necessarily an answer. Or it’s just if the show is good enough–

**Craig:** Then it doesn’t really matter.

**Dan:** I think this matters more to the people who aren’t us. Or should matter more to the people who aren’t in this room and the people who aren’t us. I’m not saying we spend no time thinking about it. We spend–

**Craig:** Not a lot of time.

**Dan:** Tiny bit of time thinking about it. But honestly like I don’t give a shit.

**Craig:** It’s not in the forefront of your mind. I mean, I’ll tell you, Dave, I actually watched Breaking Bad almost exactly the same way you did. And I take your point. I think maybe I suppose you could say the fact that it was released week by week helped it become what it was. So it helped people–

**David Benioff:** Also Netflix helped it become what it was.

**Craig:** Well, exactly.

**Malcolm:** We have [unintelligible], let’s be clear about that.

**Dan:** That’s how we all – a lot of us that’s how we all experienced it.

**Craig:** That’s how my 14-year-old daughter has watched every episode of Friends, a show that was made well before she was born. So it is transforming things.

**David Benioff:** But Vince Gilligan—

**Liz:**But I guess I don’t understand why we’re having the argument or having—

**Craig:** We’re not having an argument.

**Liz:**Not an argument.

**Dan:** Because we have an hour to kill.

**Liz:**Settle down right now. It’s just like why don’t we look at it as there is a plethora of options. And let’s make content we want to make and let’s find the place to make it. And find the place that will let us make it the way we want to make it.

**Craig:** Well, the good news is there’s more of those places than ever.

**David Mandel:** Sorry, just to make an actual real point. I truly meant the shit I have been saying, not what you were saying. But I was going to say, not a joke, I do think the week to week model allows you to grow into a show. And there are shows where I think if they were just dumped out there and you were only given the binge option and there was either – and I’m not talking about a situation where you’re binging late and other people are saying to you, “No, no, no, stick with it. Get at least to episode four,” that there are certain shows that develop, sort of figure themselves out a little slower and there is something – I guess I am a fan of the traditional version.

**Craig:** I think Succession is like that. It kind of found itself.

**David Mandel:** Yeah, Succession, I definitely said to people give it a couple to get there and I guess I would worry about the, oh no, because again in that short attention span just turning it off.

**Craig:** Well that was a great not-argument that we had, Liz. I thought.

**Liz:** To make a real point, I think Dave is right.

**Craig:** Yep. Can’t go wrong with that.

**David Mandel:** Look, let’s just agree to fuck it, OK? Fuck it.

**Liz:** Fuck it.

**Craig:** Fuck it. We’re going to play a couple of quick games and then we’re going to turn it over to the audience for some questions. This game is a real easy one. It’s just run by me and I judge it. It’s called How Do You Follow That Up?

**David Mandel:** What’s it called?

**Craig:** How Do You Follow That Up? Dave Mandel, Veep is over. How do you follow that up?

**David Mandel:** No, this is exciting. I’m doing one of the Game of Thrones spinoffs.

**Craig:** Works. Malcolm, you were on Empire. It’s a show that nobody expected to be a massive hit. Massive hit. You’re on a Marvel show, you’re following it up.

**Malcolm:** I followed up.

**Craig:** You followed up. You’re already following up. You have no problems whatsoever. Nichelle, I saw the trailer. You’re following up. Have you guys seen the trailer for Truth Be Told? Yeah, she’s following it up. I’m going to go over to you, Ayanna. Cotton Club.

**Ayanna:** I told you, it’s Dead-ish.

**Craig:** Ish. Ish. Is there any chance? Because I think it’s a movie that would be perfect to serialize in television.

**Ayanna:** I love Cotton Club. It’s a great script, if I may say so myself. But it’s having some challenges in the marketplace right now. I am following it up with something else, but I can’t talk about it.

**Craig:** OK, so you’re following it up though is the point.

**Ayanna:** Yes I am. Yes.

**Craig:** I’ll get to the two of you in a second. Liz, The Post. Boom. Mindhunter. Boom. How are you going to follow that up?

**Liz:** I’m going to work for these guys.

**Craig:** All right, all right. So let’s get to these guys. You guys did Game of Thrones. The biggest television show of all time. No show could possibly be bigger or better than it. It is impossible to do anything better than you’ve already done. How are you going to follow that up? How are you going to follow it up? Please speak directly to Netflix executives. [laughs] How are you going to follow this up?

**Ayanna:** He said, “Fuck it.”

**Craig:** That’s a great answer. Malcolm has given us our best answer. Now we have – this is a cute little game.

**David Benioff:** What about you? Craig Mazin, Craig Mazin, you wrote and show-run Chernobyl, the greatest limited series according to IMDb. The highest first television foray ever.

**Craig:** Yes, I made one television show.

**David Benioff:** Best writing Emmy and best producing Emmy.

**Dan:** Saw him double fisting it.

**Liz:**Best beard. Best beard.

**Dan:** They call him Double-fisting Mazin.

**David Benioff:** A lot of people say the greatest limited series in history.

**Craig:** Yeah. Thank you. So.

**David Benioff:** How are you going to follow that up, Craig?

**Craig:** Fukushima. [laughs] Obviously. Guys, it’s a simple search and replace.

**Liz:** John is so mad right now.

**Craig:** So easy. OK, we’ve been drinking. So, before we get to you guys, this is a real game. So – that wasn’t a real game. My friend David Kwong who is a magician and puzzle genius and I put together a little puzzle competition for people and this is one of the puzzles that we played. But this is a movie – it’s going to be fine. This is movie quotes. You guys should be able to nail this. If you know it, don’t say it until they all fail.

**Liz:**Is this like Jeopardy? Do we ring in?

**Craig:** Just raise your hand.

**Liz:**We’re very competitive, so I just need to know.

**Craig:** I think just you are. So we’re going to raise our hand. I’m going to give you a movie quote that I’ve just changed all the words but the meaning is still there.

**David Benioff:** Ayanna is looking. She’s looking.

**Craig:** Ayanna is falling asleep.

**Ayanna:** No, I’m getting gum.

**Craig:** Oh, you’re getting gum. OK, here we go. We’ll start you off with an easy one. “My intention is to suggest an undeniable proposition.”

**David Benioff:** An Offered Proposal?

**Liz:** Indecent Proposal?

**David Mandel:** Godfather? An offer he can’t refuse.

**Craig:** Yes, I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse. Godfather. See, this is easy. Don’t get too thrilled about it.

“I am completely superior to the famous and large primate of mythology.”

**Malcolm:** King Kong ain’t got nothing on me.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Yes.

**Liz:** Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

**Dan:** Are you changing words?

**Craig:** Are you shitting me?

**David Benioff:** I thought he was changing words.

**Craig:** Dude, you made Game of Thrones. Did you just ask that question?

**Liz:** I’m curious about the quote.

**Craig:** It’s much worse than that.

**Liz:** I just want to know what the real quote is that you’re rearranging.

**Craig:** The real quote, it’s actually King Kong ain’t got shit on me.

**Liz:** Right, so what did you just say?

**Craig:** I am completely superior to the famous and large primate of mythology.

**Liz:** Right, so that’s not the same words.

**Craig:** Wow. All right, let’s just talk about what it means to play a game. Let’s just go back to that. It’s a game.

**Liz:** I didn’t know that these were the rules. I thought I was rearranging words. And now—

**Craig:** If I just said, “King Kong ain’t got shit on me,” and someone said, “I know it. It’s King Kong ain’t got shit on me.” This would be the worst game ever.

**Liz:** I didn’t know the rules. And now I feel prepared. Thank you.

**Craig:** So here we go. Number three.

**Liz:** A lot of stakes.

**Craig:** “My choice is now identical to hers.” Nothing? Nothing? Nothing? To the audience?

**Audience:** I’ll have what she’s having.

**Craig:** So much smarter than you guys.

**Liz:** What was it?

**Craig:** I’ll have what she’s having. Harry Met Sally. OK, super easy one. “Greet my diminutive companion.”

**Male Voice:** Say hello to my little friends.

**Craig:** Say hello to my little friends. Perfect. This is my favorite one. No, the last one is my favorite one.

**David Mandel:** Wait a second. You’re changing the words?

**Liz:** Thank you! Thank you!

**Craig:** Professional timing. You see how professional he is? He just waited there.

**Liz:** Well Dave was just weighing in with a real opinion. So.

**Craig:** He was like in the towner, like Barry Pepper waiting to shoot me in the head.

**Liz:** Is that Saving Private Ryan?

**Craig:** Yes. Different game.

**Liz:** You’re welcome. Do I get a point for that one?

**Craig:** No. “This metaphorical infant shall not be positioned at the junction of two walls by any person.”

**David Benioff:** No one puts baby in a corner.

**Craig:** Yes! Dirty Dancing.

**David Mandel:** What was it?

**Craig:** No one puts baby in a corner. Dirty Dancing.

**Liz:**If you have to ask the entire audience, Craig.

**David Benioff:** Are you going to name this game?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s named Awesomeness. No, I’m not naming it.

**David Benioff:** OK, all right. “Add protective coating, remove protective coating.”

**Liz:** Wax on, wax off. Wax on, wax off.

**Craig:** Yeah! I got your number, Liz. You’re the kind of person who is like, “This game sucks. This game sucks. I’m winning! I love it.”

**Liz:** Fuck you all. I got one.

**Craig:** Last one, and then we go to audience. “Farewell, woman whose name is the feminine version of Felix.” Audience?

**Audience:** Bye Felicia.

**Craig:** Bye Felicia. Jealous.

**Liz:** Is that a movie quote?

**Craig:** Oh my god. Friday. OK. We’ll do some Q&A and you can ask any one of these brilliant people any question you want and I will compel them to answer. Begin. Yes ma’am.

**Female Audience Member:** Hi, my name is Kiana.

**Craig:** Hi Kiana.

**Female Audience Member:** And my question was for the TV writers and with the media landscape changing how do you translate experience in other arenas into experience for a room and conversely how do you take that writers’ room experience you guys are talking about in areas that aren’t like an actual writers’ room? How do you translate – do that in the real world, the world outside of writers’ rooms?

**Craig:** So you’re learning lessons in the writers’ room, you’re learning lessons in life, how do these kind of feed into each other? You’re all professional writers, so feel free to–?

**Malcolm:** The first half I think I got. It takes practice to start to understand that each person usually has lived – very few people have not lived a worthwhile life. The gap when you walk into a writers’ room, you have to get into the habit of paying attention to where the story is going and naturally knowing that maybe a story about the way your mom cooked a meal, or the way your church did something different from other churches applies to that story. So I guess what I’m saying is everyone has that reservoir and if you are a storyteller there is still one more learned skillset which is – here’s what the answer is. You pay attention to how the more senior people are mining their personal lives and then you very quickly start to understand, oh shit, well, I remember my brother and me used to go fishing at this thing and dot-dot-dot and you’ll start to see how that ritual of pulling your own life and applying it to other people’s stories comes.

**David Mandel:** I was just going to say, when we used to hire people on Seinfeld literally the hiring process was just give us a list of ideas by characters. Kramer ideas. Elaine ideas. George ideas. And you’d go through the list and they’d all be terrible and you’d get to one, and I don’t know, it would be like, “A fight with an Uber driver.” Whatever it is. And you’d go this one is really funny. This really happened, right? The rest, you were a writer sitting at home trying to think of what was funny, but this was something real that you’re now extrapolating on. And they’d be like, “How do you know?” And it’s like, well, it’s the only funny one.

And Seinfeld and Curb and to this day on my iPhone, even though I haven’t worked a Curb in a couple of years, I have just my Curb list of things that happen that I write down and then I’ll either give them to Larry or I’ll figure out a way to use them for something else. But that reality – and obviously taking it somewhere. That’s obviously also the hard part. But to start to identify these things that could be something.

Very quickly, you also have to learn what a story is. And there’s no other way of saying that. And, again, to talk about people in LA, like a story is not a location. A story is not just something that happened or something that someone said. A story is a story. And you do have to figure that out. But you can mine your life. And that’s where I think a lot of that certainly from a comedy standpoint that comedy reality comes from, for me.

**Craig:** Ayanna, you were going to jump in there.

**Ayanna:** Oh, no, I was just looking at Malcolm when he was talking because we worked on Empire together. And remember “move the table?” That’s a great way to mine. I’m not saying that because it was my idea. But, and it never made it in the show.

**Craig:** Tell us about this. What’s “move the table?”

**Malcolm:** It’s a perfect example actually because it was specific to Ayanna’s experience and that specificity made everything great. So Lucious and Andre I think were about to fight. And the room was hemming and hawing about how to make this scene and interesting and how the characters would react. And Ayanna brought up an anecdote from her life and applied it – and the way it basically manifested, because I’m going to ruin the story or whatever, was that it was like what would Cookie who was the star of the show do. And Ayanna was like, oh yeah, she tells a story where basically it’s like, oh well, if y’all about to fight up in here move that table out of the way and don’t fuck up my furniture. And the entire room, it was like what you were saying about comedy, the entire room knew that was the pitch.

**Craig:** Because it was real.

**Malcolm:** Because it was specific and it felt real. Yeah, it brought it all together.

**Ayanna:** And scene.

**Craig:** Best answer possible.

**Ayanna:** It never made it.

**Craig:** And it never made it in. But now all these people know. Yes, ma’am right there.

**Female Audience Member:** Hi, my name is Annie and Ayanna I really appreciated how you had mentioned reaching out to Nichelle to talk about a pitch. Because as a writer and creator of color I’ve noticed that there’s this idea that there can only be one of us when it comes to like marginalized communities and breaking in. So I wanted to know if you or any of the non-white men on the panel can talk a little bit—

**Craig:** I’m Jewish. Doesn’t count. Yeah, the racists have told me. I’m good. Sorry, go on.

**Female Audience Member:** I wanted to know if you could speak a little bit about how we can be collaborative and build community and not see each other as competitors but more as allies.

**Craig:** Great question. What do you think?

**David Mandel:** I find the best collaboration—

**Craig:** Oh my god!

**David Mandel:** I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Why do you have to be so professionally funny? You’re so lucky John is not here. Because John would have been like, “No, no, you didn’t hear. She said…she was very clear who she wanted to hear from.”

To the non-white writers up here, any answer to the excellent question?

**Nichelle:** Well, it’s a little bit about building a community. You know, and you can be a good writer, but you can also be a good friend. And when you meet people that you admire and appreciate, when there’s an opportunity to work with them you take it. And when I was on Good Wife, which was a great room, and I think my second year there another woman joined the staff, Erica Shelton Kodish, and that was the first time I’d ever been in a room with another black woman. And that was my fourth show. And it wasn’t because they weren’t there, it was just this weird twist of fate that they left the year I got there. And so it was weirdly like I met some of them afterwards and we kind of joke like, oh, I replaced you.

But I don’t think it’s that sinister, frankly. And one of the things about it is when I was staffing Truth Be Told my first instinct was to only hire my friends. Because there’s first time showrunner, first time network, it was a little bit terrifying. And so I wanted people around me that I could trust. That meant those were people that I worked with before. My husband. Or writers that I knew in different ways. And so I had to tell myself do not fill this entire room with your friends. Someone gave you an opportunity 10 years ago, so you have to leave seats open at the table.

So you just have to be committed to it. And it was a little bit scary, because I didn’t know, oh my god, this person is going to come in and join the room and they’re not going to be able to take my jokes. Malcolm’s “fuck it” attitude. Whatever it is. And you just have to trust and be open. And if it doesn’t work you just cut bait.

**Ayanna:** Yeah. My first show was in 2000. It was a show called Gideon’s Crossing with Andre Braugher. Paul Attanasio created the show. Eric Overmyer was the showrunner. And I was a staff writer. And there was an upper level black female biracial woman, Samantha Corbin Miller, who actually looked out for me. So, one, I come from a family of black women and so camaraderie among black women comes natural to me, but also during my professional career like she shielded me. She would talk to the showrunner or talk to the creator and say, “Hey, she’s got a good pitch. Listen to her in the room.” So she would have those conversations so that I could speak. Because back in those days you really didn’t speak. You were just there to learn, right?

And so that spirit, you know, I’ve carried on every show, even when I’m the only one. So, I think it’s either in your to do that or it’s not. I don’t think it’s something, I mean, I guess you could teach it, but I don’t know.

**Craig:** Well, it seems like there’s a paying it forward thing kind of going here. Somebody does it for you and you feel obligated to do it for them. Liz, do you feel that way in any way, shape, or form in that regard?

**Liz:** I had a really interesting experience. I mean, I met a lot of – in television I met a lot of female showrunners because I did this sort of random female showrunner panel a year ago. And all of them really kept in touch with me. And I just feel like it’s also that I call them. So, that is the advice I would give. I ask them what I should do and what they think of the people that I’m going to work with. Or what they think of the people that I could work with or what I should do. And they coach me.

And so the group of people that you choose to surround yourself with regardless of gender, but in my case has been a group of women, is something that I will appreciate forever.

**Craig:** Great. All right. We’ve got some more questions here. Yes, you’re right here. You’re literally right here. It’s too easy. Go for it.

**Male Audience Member:** My name is Phillip. We’ve noticed in the movies that it’s more and more especially with the big movies they’re looking – producers and studios are looking at existing IPs to adapt. It feels like that trend is starting to creep into television. Obviously Falcon and Winter Soldier and Game of Thrones and now its spinoffs. Is that something that is tangible to you? I mean, do you see that growing?

**Malcolm:** This is something we talk about a lot. I think every – IPs are awesome. They help. But I also got – I got into the movie business just as it was just becoming obsessive. The idea that there used to be a spec market in features meant there was a market for fresh, original ideas. And that died. So they literally didn’t want them. It is definitely coming into TV. I unfortunately don’t think there’s any stopping it. If you look at – if you ask people their favorite shows, right, they’re going to say The Wire, Sopranos, Breaking Bad. All original ideas. I’m hoping.

And I think that’s quickly starting to be constricted. And with event television coming in, you know what I’m saying, it’s just going to accelerate. It doesn’t mean every show has to be an event show, but the idea that event television will be IP-driven will create a narrative that exacerbates it. So I think it’s a real concern. It’s unstoppable. And it will eventually have the same negative on TV that we’re all doing.

**Liz:** Is that a “fuck it?”

**Craig:** Yeah, so another lukewarm opinion from Malcolm Spellman. No, no, I mean, look, I kind of – the only thing I would disagree with is the volume at least right now, the volume of television is so remarkable that you can put things on the air that are just, I mean, the idea that Russian Doll. That’s a show that doesn’t exist in any other reality except this one right now. Where there’s room for something like that. That is so original.

**Liz:** It arguably exists in multiple realities.

**Craig:** Well, yes. Actually, that was the first possible example I could have used for a show that doesn’t exist in multiple – yes. But there is a lot of really original television that’s happening right now because there’s an enormous amount of room. Where I do agree with you is if that room should contract—

**Malcolm:** Which it—

**Craig:** OK, you and I have an agreement on this.

**David Benioff:** Yeah. But we’re in the Death Star trash compactor. And right now we’re at peak TV. We’ve got, what is it, 500 and something show being made in 2019.

**Craig:** Good lord. Wow.

**David Benioff:** But the walls are going to start closing in.

**Craig:** They will.

**David Benioff:** Because no one is making – a few people are making money, but not everyone is going to be making money off of 500 shows. Most of those shows are not going to be profitable. So someone is going to win, but a lot of people are going to lose. And 10 years from now what’s, you know, what’s it going to be? 200 shows? I don’t know. But it won’t be 500.

**Craig:** No. And I think when that happens the general tendency is to get safer. We know that. And so enjoy it while it’s lasting. It’s pretty cool right now.

**David Benioff:** And especially this goes back to Phillip’s original question is things are getting much more expensive. Television has gotten so expensive. And—

**Craig:** Was there one show that you think drove the price up? Just wondering. How about that, Mandel? Fuck you. I’ve still got it. [laughs] He’s fantastic. I’m amazed that Mandel is still awake, by the way. Usually he’s out like a light halfway through this thing.

**David Benioff:** But if you’re going to pitch something to a feature executive and it’s going to be a $300 million movie, it’s really hard now to do an original as you’re saying. It’s almost impossible. And it’s getting more like that with television, with the big budget television. Because if they’re going to invest this much money they want to believe there’s something out there, there’s some fan base out there, whether it’s a comic book, or a novel, or whatever it is. Which is exactly what it’s been for features for a long time.

**Dan:** Going back to that model, so I’m just trying to not romanticize the past. The movies that built us, or that built us, like Star Wars an original and Jaws was an adaptation. And The Godfather was IP. And The Wizard of Oz is IP. And Taxi Driver is an original. It’s a mixed bag down the line. I’m just not sure – and I understand that there’s a certain amount of self-interest in this response, because we’re here because of something that George Martin made. Like if he had not written those books we wouldn’t be sitting here on this panel with you.

But I just – on some level there is room for everything and the pendulum is going to swing one way or another. But I just think about the things that meant the most to me and lots of them came from other things.

**Craig:** That’s a good point.

**David Mandel:** I worry less about IP because it’s such a broad term. And I guess I’m less bothered by books than I am I guess videogames or something like that. So I guess to me not all IP is created equal.

**Craig:** Wow.

**David Mandel:** Yeah, I know.

**Dan:** But there’s never been a great videogame movie.

**Liz:**Well, The Last of Us is excellent. Let’s calm down right now. In the defense of videogames, there is one great videogame that does exist.

**David Mandel:** There’s one great videogame, The Post. And it was really good. But, no, I was going to say—

**Liz:**It was so dope when Ben Bradley argued with Nixon.

**Craig:** Level 7 of The Post is impossible.

**Liz:**And you role played with him for so long.

**David Mandel:** But I do worry about, and I guess IP is a part of it, but I do worry as these brands, the streamers kind of retreat to their own stuff, which I know I’m not explaining it well. That’s my bigger I think fear.

**Craig:** You mean like Disney is just—

**David Mandel:** They’re so on brand that there’s not room for anything else. And then the other ones in response to that starting to feel a little bit like they’re also doing the same. Where you start to kind of hear the plans for things like the NBC/Universal one and it’s very I guess for lack of a better word NBC/Universal-ish.

**Craig:** On brand.

**David Mandel:** And part of that is the IP they own. But I do worry that that’s the conservativeness.

**Dan:** That’s what the studio system in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s was.

**David Mandel:** It was. There were five. Gangster studio. Exactly. Romance studio. R-studio.

**Dan:** Where the Warners were tough. And MGM was family.

**Liz:**Well that’s what we’re going to now. I mean, and but like why – I guess I feel like repeating myself, but why are we still talking about this idea of something existing that—

**David Mandel:** You seem to think this conversation is dumb.

**Liz:**I do. I do. I do. I don’t think it’s dumb.

**Craig:** You said “I do” three times.

**David Benioff:** I do. I do. I don’t.

**Craig:** I do. I do. I do. I do.

**Liz:**But, no, I think it is dumb to predict or try to predict or try to anticipate what this industry is going to do. We have endured – or not even endured. Endured feels like something you put on your shoulders. But just witnessed a lot of changes in this industry in just five years. That’s five years of change.

**Craig:** So in five years from now, who the hell knows?

**Liz:**So in five years who knows what’s going to happen? So why?

**David Mandel:** I agree with that, but I will say the following. You’re right. I think sitting here worrying about it is crazy. I think sitting at home and worrying about it is crazy. And certainly you’ve got to make what you believe in. So I’m with you on every part of that. But I will also say that when Seinfeld ended, which would have been ’98, and the writers from Seinfeld we all kind of went out into development world to create television just as the networks all lobbied and changed the rules in Washington so that the networks could own their own programming. And television got really shitty for a couple of years. Comedy especially. Because why would I put on your show when I can put on your terrible show that I own 100% of.

And I think writers stood there smiling, not worrying about it to the point of basically self-flagellation. Where we have a tendency as creative types – and again I don’t know what to do it about it. And I’m not saying we should spend all our time on it. I do worry about these things because I think writers have a tendency to ignore some of these sometimes very big picture ideas that have created these monumental changes. I mean, you would go out and you would pitch and if you were at a place – like I had friends that were at DreamWorks that had no official affiliation at the time. You’d pitch and they’d go, “What do you like? Do you like this idea? We really like this idea. Who do you think should be in this? Michael J. Fox.” And they would literally go, “Well when you guys get Michael J. Fox, you call us.” Because no one was interested in anything they didn’t own unless it was extenuating circumstances.

And writers just sort of took it, just took those body blows. Anyway.

**Craig:** We’re going to squeeze in one more question. Is that OK? But obviously your question was shitty because nobody cared about it and we didn’t talk about it. Yeah, you’re right here so let’s go for it. Let’s finish it off with you.

**David Mandel:** Get up.

**Male Audience Member:** Avery like the ranch, white like the house. I wanted to know what your thoughts on when I have to vote for SAG Awards. So they send you these – speaking of binge watching. Yeah, the screeners that are like, man, you only have this amount of time. But the screeners, you know what I mean? So it’s like you can get stuck on one series and you’re technically like eliminating someone else without even really giving them the same amount of time.

**Craig:** Is your question how to vote for an award?

**Male Audience Member:** No, well, how do they feel about that window that we’re given, which is small.

**Craig:** So the larger question here if I may expand it to everybody that isn’t voting for SAG Awards.

**Male Audience Member:** Do it.

**Craig:** Thank you. Is – and I feel this all the time. I don’t know about you guys. But in this era now there is almost an anxiety. I cannot see everything I need to see, I want to see, I should see. Do we just have to deal with the fact that we can’t be completionists, I guess?

**Ayanna:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes. That was a yes or no question. Yeah. I think Ayanna answered that. It’s yes.

**Liz:** I didn’t watch—

**Craig:** Chernobyl.

**Liz:** I mean, I watched Succession. I didn’t watch Chernobyl. No, obviously not.

**David Mandel:** Depressing.

**Liz:** It’s really sad. God.

**Craig:** It blew up. What are you going to do?

**Liz:** No, I didn’t watch Succession until the beginning of Season 2. And then I binge-watched it to spite my husband, because he was watching it. And then I finished it and was like, holy shit, all of a sudden I realized what everybody was talking about. They don’t know and you don’t know what I’m talking about, but it’s fine.

And then the thing that I actually felt the most – there was a cultural shift that happens and Succession, Game of Thrones is that. Succession was that. The biggest cultural shift I felt personally with my friend group was Fleabag. And—

**Craig:** Say that again.

**Liz:** Fleabag.

**Craig:** Fleabag, yeah. Of course.

**Liz:** I didn’t watch Fleabag Season 1 at the time it released. Fleabag Season 2 was coming out. Everybody was talking about it. And I was like, OK, I’ll watch Season 1. In all honesty I liked Season 1. I thought it was really good. I thought it was so well-written. Fleabag Season 2 is one of the most well-written things I’ve ever seen on television. Regardless of television, on screen, in all of it. And it was the thing I felt was culturally different in terms of being – at least for me, a woman – of what it was like to be around other women. Where every woman I was around was talking about Fleabag. And talking about what it was like to be in a relationship with a man like that. Or talking about what it was like to be in a relationship like that, regardless of gender.

So that was for me the most recent – I don’t remember the question. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Well that was a good answer. Although “yes” was also a really good answer. I’ve got to say.

I think with that we’re all done. So, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Yes. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by a person to be determined. If you have an outro out there you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions.

For shorter questions on Twitter, I’m @clmazin, and John August is @johnaugust. Are you on Twitter? What is your Twitter thing?

**Ayanna:** Wait, my husband did it.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**Ayanna:** It’s @qu33nofdrama but the two Es are two 3s.

**Craig:** What the fuck?

**Ayanna:** He’s a scientist.

**Craig:** OK. That doesn’t explain that actually. You’re not on Twitter?

**David Benioff:** Fuck no.

**Craig:** Well, good. You’re not on Twitter. Smart. Twitter?

**Liz:** @itslizhannah.

**Craig:** @itslizhannah. Nichelle? Malcolm? No. Mandel?

**David Mandel:** @davidhmandel but all the Ds are Zs.

**Craig:** Professional comedian. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. We try and get them up about four days after the episode airs. You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. And you need to sign up there in order to use the Scriptnotes app for iOS or Android.

You can also download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com. And I get none of the money.

Austin, thank you so much for coming. I want to thank Ayanna Floyd. David Benioff. Dan Weiss. Liz Hannah. Nichelle Tramble. Malcolm Spellman. And David Mandel. And all the folks here at Austin. Thank you so much for coming and goodnight.

Links:

* [Ayanna Floyd](https://twitter.com/qu33nofdrama) on Twitter and [IMDB](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0283234/)
* [Liz Hannah](https://twitter.com/itslizhannah) on Twitter and [IMDB](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2176283/)
* [Nichelle Tramble Spellman](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2838492/) on IMDB
* [Malcolm Spellman](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1173259/) on IMDB
* [David Mandel](https://twitter.com/DavidHMandel) on Twitter and [IMDB](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0541635/)
* [David Benioff](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1125275/) on IMDB
* [D.B. Weiss](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1888967/) on IMDB
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_424_aff.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/idea-management).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 417 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to take a look at the issue of idea management. What do you do with all of those half-formed ideas for various things to write? We’ll also discuss screenwriter’s quotes and answer some listener questions. To help us out on all of this, welcome back Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Craig:** Yay.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** Woo! What!

**Craig:** I almost want to do like when Kermit waggles his hands around and goes, “Nah!” I don’t know why. It seems appropriate.

**John:** Yeah, Kermit’s hands are sort of like the inflatable car lot things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They wave by their own magic.

**Aline:** Do you guys remember in that original Batman show that sometimes Catwoman would be on?

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Oh, I love Catwoman.

**Aline:** But you would watch in the credits to see if she was on that week.

**John:** I never watched the credits to see if she would be on.

**Craig:** I would not.

**Aline:** They changed the credits. If she was going to be in that episode it would be like, “And…” and then they would show a picture of her. And I would be very excited because I knew that it was going to be a Batman episode with Catgirl. Catgirl or Batgirl?

**Craig:** No, no, Batgirl or Catwoman. Catwoman was Eartha Kitt.

**Aline:** Catwoman.

**Craig:** Catwoman was Eartha Kitt. But I don’t remember who Batgirl was. Did they have a Batgirl on that original Adam West show?

**John:** I bet they did because the commissioner’s daughter was Batgirl. Here’s maybe what you’re suggesting though is we need to change the introductory bloops if it’s going to be an Aline episode so everyone knows, oh my gosh, this is an Aline episode.

**Aline:** Yes. And I can sing something and just mock something up.

**John:** Before we get started to our big topics we have some follow up listener questions and I thought maybe Aline would read the question because you’ve never gotten to read a question for us.

**Aline:** Great. Oh, it’s this question that I tried to shove back at you? OK, I’m going to read a question.

**Craig:** Great.

**Aline:** Lochiel writes, “I grew up with D&D basic, then advanced, and played up through Gen 2. I love or loved D&D, but Dungeon World is in my opinion so much better. The game is much less crunchy and can be learned in an hour. The best part of the game is that the players and the DM share narrative control in a much more collaborative way. It would be beyond awesome to witness some people as creative as you guys playing Dungeon World.

**Craig:** Yeah, it would.

**John:** Well, Craig, yeah, that’s good. So, maybe we can discuss some Dungeon World here.

**Aline:** This is obviously a question for me.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yes. 100%.

**Aline:** And my answer to this would be that I would think that Dungeon World would be a store where you could buy stuff for your dungeon.

**Craig:** Like a sex dungeon?

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** That’s what I would think. Where you would be kitting up for your BDSM dungeon. Is that not correct?

**Craig:** Right. It’s your BDSM superstore.

**Aline:** That’s what I would think it was.

**Craig:** Yeah, come on down to Dungeon World. [laughs]

**John:** So this is follow up on our episode from last week with Alison Luhrs from Wizards of the Coast. Wizards of the Coast makes Dungeons & Dragons, the official Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeon World is a separate gaming system that is very free-form, very loose, and Craig you and I actually did play a campaign in Dungeon World. I DM’d one. And I liked it more than you liked it. It is very free-form and loose. And I think we found it a little bit too free-form and loose. Is that accurate?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think so. I mean, the story part of playing Dungeons & Dragons is definitely a huge part of it. And, look, Lochiel, it’s really just a question of preference, right? I mean, you’re sort of arguing that vanilla tastes better than chocolate and some people will agree and some people won’t. I prefer Dungeons & Dragons or say like Pathfinder which is a similar, because I enjoy some of the rules minutia. I enjoy the constraints of combat. I think that’s fun. I think it’s just the leveling up and all that stuff. I just, I like it. I like it more. It gives me more of what I want.

But I also understand where some people would be like actually that’s the worst part of it all. I just like pretending and talking and such. The one thing I will say about Dungeon World is it feels a bit arbitrary. In other words success and failure feel a bit kind of at the DM’s whim as opposed to kind of influenced by statistical calculation.

**John:** So I remember Michael Gilvarry being frustrated like when is it my turn to swing a sword. The lack of initiative and the lack of sort of structure within combat was frustrating to him.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I do enjoy reading other games’ sort of inherent mechanics and seeing sort of how they do stuff. Like I think the new Paranoia has a really cool system for how it works. There’s a role-playing game called Kids on Bikes which is very much a Stranger Things. And how that all works in success and failure is clever. But you know what? I like Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. I’m old school.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you. And Aline obviously we know that you strongly prefer Pathfinder.

**Aline:** Do you have a question on fall fashion?

**John:** We do. We have so many.

**Craig:** We do.

**Aline:** Something about belted tweed jackets?

**Craig:** Let me ask you a question, in all seriousness Aline.

**Aline:** High-waisted leather pants?

**Craig:** Am I a spring, a fall, a winter? What am I?

**Aline:** Oh, no, that whole thing is a scam.

**Craig:** That’s garbage?

**John:** That color theory?

**Aline:** I’m saying in terms of your look–

**Craig:** Oh yeah, yeah, my look.

**Aline:** Yeah. You’re in the hoodie and J-Crew shirt area. But, you know, Craig, if I took you to a mall I could work with the existing aesthetic but I could tone it up.

**Craig:** You could plus it. Come on down to Dungeon World. We’ve got– [laughs]

**Aline:** We could do that. But you might want to do that with Melissa.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** Let’s transition to a topic that we all sort of know more about. So, a story that was in the news this last week was about the controversy over sequels to Crazy Rich Asians and who was getting paid what for it. Without diving too deep into that situation, I thought it was useful for us to have a conversation about how are screenwriter quotes even figured out or even what quotes are. How does a screenwriter know how much they’re worth and how much they’re being paid for a project? Because over the course of 20 years I’ve seen the amount I’m being paid per project go up and go down for reasons that probably wouldn’t be apparent to somebody outside the system.

So we haven’t really talked about money as a screenwriter for a while, so let’s talk about how much a screenwriter is worth.

**Aline:** So one of the things that changed and I think it’s about four or five years ago was no quotes. A no-quote thing was issued.

**John:** Tell me how you perceive that.

**Aline:** To me it was perceived a little bit like there’s no quotes, tell me your quotes. Because it is a world where you’re sort of making things up. You know, Hollywood is an interesting system in that your pay rises based on certain intangibles. And they are not just how the things you’ve written have performed in the public sphere. They can also be determined by oh you wrote a script that got a director. You wrote a script that attracted actors. You wrote a script that people like. You wrote a script that got a bidding war. Even if those things didn’t get made. And that’s why I think that system seems really byzantine irrational to people because it is based on intangibles. And it’s a marketplace where things are worth what someone will pay for them.

**John:** Craig, could you start us out, the conversation. Talk to us about the floor of how much somebody gets paid. Because I think we need to talk about scale before we talk about above scale.

**Craig:** Yeah. And maybe also just quickly before we talk about no-quote system is, we should probably talk about what the yes-quote system is, too. A lot of people see this phrase “quote system” and they don’t know. So, first thing, the floor of what a writer gets paid in Hollywood when you’re working on a Writers Guild project, that’s going to be pretty much everything other than most feature animation. It’s determined by the Writers Guild. It’s determined by our collective bargaining agreement. So every three years the Writers Guild negotiates a new deal with the AMPTP. That’s the organization that essentially represents the companies in those negotiations. And that is the minimum we can be paid.

So, you start from there. And then because our business is an over-scale business, which makes us different. Typically a union will negotiate salary floors for everybody working in the plant. So if you’re a welder you make this much money per hour. And if you’re a welder for this many years you make this much money per hour. In our business, no. It’s all over the place. Most people are making more than scale and how much more than scale is up to you and your representatives and the marketplace, which is where the quote system comes in to play.

And all the quote system means is that you’ve been paid some amount of money by someone that someone else agrees is legitimate. Meaning I go to Sony, they say, OK, we want to hire you for something. And then my representatives say, “Well his quote for that service is blotty-blah because Disney paid him that.” That’s it. That’s the sum total of the quote system.

Now, doing better than your quote or when they say no-quote, that’s a whole other ball of wax.

**Aline:** Right. They can’t do that, though. They can’t do that anymore. They can’t ask for your quotes and they can’t–

**John:** Let’s talk about the change. So, traditionally over the last 15 years, ten years ago, that was the starting point of any discussion. So the very initial projects I was hired to write I got paid scale. Probably most of us got paid scale, which is the minimum they could possibly pay us. It’s like getting minimum wage. And then after you’d had a couple projects, things get made, you start creeping above that. And so if I got $200,000 on a project, you know, the next time I was going to make a deal for some place my quote was $200,000. And so we were trying improve upon that.

But as Aline is saying they’re not supposed to be asking for quotes anymore.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** Right. So then it becomes a supply and demand question ostensibly. But one of the things that if it sounds like a somewhat amorphous system, it is. And so obviously it leads to and can lead to unfairness because a lot of these things are perceptual. And you can’t control perceptual things. You can’t, you know, when your agent comes back and says, “Well, they perceive that this happened as opposed to this happening on this project and that’s why you’re going to get this and not that.” There’s not a lot you can say back.

And I have a friend who has been trying really hard to make it so that everybody publicizes what they get paid because, you know, especially if you’re in a group setting like a television show and you want to know, OK, what are other supervising producers with six years of staff experience, what are they getting, you’re only getting that anecdotally or through your representatives. So some people are an advocate of everyone should just publish what they’re getting paid so then you can compare. But you are in this world of what in your resume earns what dollars.

And I will say that because the atmosphere has changed a little bit more in terms of like we do discuss bias more, I have now numerous times been told, “Hey, I think if you were, I mean, a man you would get paid differently. And the demand for your services would command a different price.” You can’t obviously prove that and you can’t “accuse” people of that. But, again, whenever you’re in the realm of perceptual things with humans it’s something we’ve talked about before, like people’s idea of what a director looks like is a 30 to 60-year-old man with some facial hair, you know, and cargo shorts or pants, or some kind of a vest. And that’s what they picture. So when they look at a 90-year-old – sorry, 90-year-old.

**Craig:** No, do it. I like that.

**Aline:** Yeah, a 90-year-old works. Or a hundred pound fashionably dressed 26-year-old female, just for example, it’s a perceptual thing. And so I have numerous times seen not just in my own career but in other people’s careers where what seems to me that people are doing equally well and then come to find out that the men are being paid more. And that’s not just true with screenwriters, obviously. I think that’s across the board in Hollywood. And I don’t know how you standardize that system without doing kind of what Craig suggests which is publishing people’s salaries so that you can say, “Hey, you know, my movies have earned this much, or my TV shows have gotten this rating, or whatever, and so I see what this person gets paid and I would like to be paid concomitantly with that.

**John:** Nice use of concomitantly. I’ve never tried that word in real life.

**Aline:** But, you know, it is a vague – when you get, you guys know, when you get on the phone with your lawyer so often the first thing they offer you is crazy shocking because in the no-quote environment instead of before where it felt like it was building on the pay you’d gotten sometimes they come back and they’ve made a number that sets you back seven years and the question is why. And it’s based in these things which are, you know, size of the budget, scale of the movie. But again these perceptual things. So, it’s an interesting system because it has, you know, it’s a little bit of the court of the Louis XIV. It’s like Tulip Fever. It’s a little bit things command the price that they command and you can’t really get behind.

But I will say that, you know, some of those things are steeped in assumptions that people make about certain – and it also translates into genres. So certain genres the people make extremely more money than in other genres irrespective of the box office performance. If they think well you can write this super hero movie in success that movie is going to make a lot more money than this movie about three girls on a road trip which, you know.

Anyway, it’s why it’s an imperfect system at the best.

**John:** Well let’s talk about the no quotes in two different ways that it comes up. I think it was California law that changed where you’re not supposed to be asking for quotes on previous things, and so that was a change. The other thing that happened over the last five, seven years is that increasingly projects at studios they really kind of didn’t care what your quote was. They said like we are paying X dollars for this project, are you interested or not interested. And so things that are like this a $500,000, it’s not more than that, and that’s a thing that changed, too. And that was a supply and demand thing as well because there were fewer projects.

**Aline:** Absolutely.

**John:** And so some of us had to take a haircut to take some of those projects on. So there’s an objective reality which is the dollars you’re being paid, but the subjective quality is how much are you worth. And value is not an easily calculable thing. It is a matter of opinion and that is a reality.

**Aline:** And what you’re saying, the landscape of the business is changing and another really interesting factor in this is television and film are fusing and melding and, you know, what does years of experience in television, what does that translate into feature wise? When I started they would disregard your television quotes in features and they would disregard your feature quotes in television as if you had been fixing airplanes an then you show up to paint a Renaissance master.

**Craig:** They still do that.

**Aline:** Guys, these things are related. So they are still doing this. And I think Craig you experienced this.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Aline:** But that’s going to change as more people are doing both, freely doing both, moving back and forth. And they are going to expect their high quotes in some areas to translate into quotes in other areas because what is the big difference. What is this artificial gulf that we’ve created?

**Craig:** Well, when we talk about all of this stuff, I mean, the amusing part is the law may say you can’t ask what their quote is, and yet they’ll know because they talk to each other. This is something that maybe people don’t know. The division within each studio that negotiates how much a writer gets paid is called Business Affairs. So it’s different than people who are hiring you. This is another interesting thing. Usually, well I guess it’s sort of like in a big corporation human resources is there to determine salaries, right. So you get hired by somebody and then they send you over to HR and a negotiation occurs. In Hollywood it’s business affairs. And the business affairs executives pick up the phone and call each other. They know exactly what you’ve paid.

And, more to the point, when it’s time for you to make a deal if you like the amount of money you just got paid you’re telling them. So, we can say it’s a no-quote time but it’s not. What you just got paid is known by both sides. Or, it is confirmable by both sides. So that’s the first thing.

And the second thing is when we talk about what you’re worth we’re talking about what the market decides they’re going to pay you at that moment. The hard part is it has absolutely nothing to do with your actual worth as a writer. What you’re being paid now is actually what you were worth. It’s never what you are worth. It’s what you were worth before this moment.

So when you’re a new writer you are worth nothing. [laughs] You were, right? That’s all you have to show is nothing so they pay you like that. When you just had a hit movie they pay you like what you were worth on the hit movie. They’re always behind. They’re always lagging.

**Aline:** When you as a creative person become part of a negotiation I’ve always found it really challenging because there’s things that I just want to do them. And so I don’t want to get immersed too much in the pay because I’m desperate to do it. And your representatives in a way are there to buffer that enthusiasm so that you have, you have a stronger hand. Because if you’re saying to your lawyer I’ll just take, just take it, just take it, you’re really cutting them off at the knees. But if it’s something you’re dying to do, you know, we’re not usually driven by money. We’re driven by the love of the material. And so it’s very challenging just to empower your reps to say, “Well, if it’s shitty walk away from it,” when it’s something you want to do. And you have to have some sense of like, no, this one is worth it. Maybe I’ll take a little pay cut on this one because I believe in this and I think in success this will really work for me.

But I have always found that transition from you’re talking to the creative executives and you’re all on the same page and it feels great and you’re going to go do this thing and then the first offer comes in and your lawyer is like, “This is atrocious.” And it’s hard not to take it personally. And sometimes it is personal in the sense that they are lowballing you because they think they can for whatever reason and it hurts.

**Craig:** They do it every time. They literally do it every time.

**Aline:** Your lawyer is trained to say, “Hey, don’t feel differently about this project because of this,” but it’s almost impossible not to feel that way. And because business affairs is a different department and you’re dealing with people who only deal with money and only deal with deals, but then they have to translate these intangibles of like we really, you know, the creative person has their heart set on John August. When they first read the book that was the only person they could picture so they desperately want John August. But the business affairs person has to pretend like they don’t care if it’s John August. And sometimes they do.

**John:** Well let’s talk about leverage because that is the way that a screenwriter ultimately increases the amount they’re paid for that project. And leverage can come from a couple ways. But the biggest one is the freedom to walk away, to say like, “You know what, I’m not taking this deal. So if this is where we’re stopping then I’m stopping and I’m moving on to the next thing.”

Leverage can also come from kind of being perceived as being irreplaceable by other creative elements. So that director desperately wants you. That star desperately wants you. We have a friend who is sort of the only person who can get along with a certain actor and so she’s worth a lot on those projects because she’s the only one who can sort of handle that person. So those are reasons why a person can get paid more.

I would say classically coming off of a hit movie, like you got that bump on your next movie and your next movie after it, I see that happening a little bit less now than five years ago just because the business has changed. Again, the supply and demand of how many projects there are out there is different.

Another way that you can increase your quote or the amount that you’re being paid on this project is by working for one of the new places. And the new places will tend to overpay because they’re desperate to get in business with certain people.

**Aline:** In certain moments. I mean, you know, if it’s your passion project you’ve got to be prepared to take a haircut. But I think one of the things that’s interesting, you know, the three of us have been in this business a long time and it was kind of the same for a long time. It was a very calcified, for better or for worse, it was understandable. And some of the things of like, Aline, you’re not going to get paid as much as the other people, I mean, those were codified, too.

Technology and the rise of all these other means of distributing have effected everything. And it’s exactly what you said, you know, movie quotes are not what they were, TV quotes are not what they were. You’re in a sort of a more freeform environment and there’s wonderful things about that but there’s also, you know, in some ways they have us over a barrel and they are trying to redefine backend. Redefine all the ways in which screenwriters are being paid. And it’s one of the reasons there’s sort of a lot of tumult and discussion among writers because I’ve never seen a more rapid period of change.

**Craig:** We’re also in the middle of a rapidly increasing income disparity which echoes what’s going on in the economy at large and the world at large. What used to be a kind of gentle bell curve has been accelerating even more and more, so now the question really isn’t, well, what’s my quote and how much am I being paid and can I get a bump – that’s what they say is a raise is a bump. Can I get a bump? What’s happening is that the writing business is starting to separate between employees, just standard old employees who are more and more just being pushed towards scale, and mega deals.

In my career the thought of a writer earning nine figures – that would be over $100,000,000 – for a deal that went on for two or three years was kind of astonishing. It’s happening all the time now. And so we are moving out of what we’re all familiar with. And the mega deals seemingly don’t care about, well, I guess you get what you get. And what’s concerning to me is that the opportunities for new writers coming in are going to be defined by this new system which is essentially, oh yeah, we don’t really do live over-scale. Do you know what I mean? That’s the fear is that over-scale essentially just goes away and everything is just sort of scale. It’s like, well–

**Aline:** I also just, I mean, we’ve talked about this before, but I don’t know how I would have broken into the feature business given what I write. I would absolutely now be going in through the TV door.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**Aline:** Where minimums are different. But, you know, just to be writing sort of character-based comedies often, most often with female leads, they’re making so few that – there used to be a pipeline and all of that is going now into these television–so the other thing is that the feature business is much more steeped in–

**John:** In giant IP. Yeah. Absolutely.

**Aline:** And so it is a different – if you are person who can take one of those pieces of IP and make it make sense, there’s wild rewards in that. And those people’s careers have skyrocketed. And also it’s kind of sucked up a lot of our A-list talent. You know, I always think of like people who would have been doing Three Days of the Condor or All the President’s Men or all those, you know, Sydney Pollack, Alan Pakula, you know, a lot of those movies. They’re doing big genre franchise movies. And I wish that they could do both at the same time because I do mourn a little bit the original character-based movies that we all grew up on. And because a lot of the people grew up loving these genre pieces they’re making these IP movies. And I do mourn a little bit the movies they might have made if we were still making those personal pieces.

**Craig:** They’re gone.

**Aline:** They’re on TV.

**John:** They’re on TV.

**Craig:** They’re on TV. And when it comes to movies you’re absolutely right. They would not – if you were starting out and you were writing romantic comedies or character studies or smaller let’s say call it a $25 million budget with a female lead, no question. They’re just not making them. And nor are they making the movies that I was writing when I started out. If you want to make sort of a family PG-13 live action or PG live action comedy–

**John:** That’s me.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s television. You know, you’re going to Netflix now. They’re just not doing it.

**Aline:** But unless you have Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

**John:** Or Aladdin.

**Aline:** Or Aladdin.

**Craig:** Exactly. But even then, I have to say even now I got to argue that in 2019 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a harder bet. Because we talk about these big movies and IP and stuff but we’re not saying the word “superhero” which we need to. Because the superhero thing has essentially transformed Hollywood. The theatrical movie business is the superhero movie business. Period. The end.

**Aline:** And we’re way deep in the bin there. People are like, oh, are you pitching on Oatmeal Boy, and you’re like, what? There was one issue about that character in 1964. We’re deep, deep in the well there. And there are so many kind of big classic pieces of novels that have yet to be adapted. It’s so funny because somebody once said to me they never made a Mata Hari movie. And it’s just something that I think about. But if you had done a Mata Hari comic in 1972, you know, and people collected it and whatever you could shove that through.

But it is funny. We just have gotten – I run into people and they’re working on superhero stuff that – I mean, obviously I’m not an expert. But we’ve gone deep, deep in the well there.

**Craig:** Well, they don’t even have to go that deep in the well. They just remake.

**Aline:** Keep making the ones, yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, I think everybody kind of giggled when the fourth version of Spider Man had come out. But now it’s sort of like, oh, what’s this year’s Spider Man? That’s it. Just every year there will be a new Spider Man. And every year there will be a new Batman.

**Aline:** That’s like those old Tom Mix westerns, you know, from early Hollywood. You would just go that character, they would just do latest adventures or comic books.

**Craig:** The only thing is like in the old days they would crank out programmers, like Wallace Beery wrestling pictures, or [Odors] as those of us who do crossword puzzles love to say. But they were low budget. They were cheap stuff to flood the theaters.

**John:** They’re filler.

**Craig:** Nobody does that anymore because it’s the opposite now. Everything has to be a massive event. So either you’re doing superhero movies or you’re doing Star Wars movies. And then there’s animation. Or, in the case of Disney, live action animation. But there is no space really for other stuff. There’s the tiniest space which I find myself now when I’m working in movies that’s where I live. In this tiny space. Which is why I’m quite happy to be embarking on a television journey because, you know, I–

**Aline:** I’m just imagining you trying to pitch Chernobyl as a feature. Like having ten meetings in a week where you go in and pitch Chernobyl and executives sort of come in expecting you – what does Craig have? Like expecting some fun comedy with big comedy stars. And here’s [laughs] Craig saying–

**Craig:** That’s why I didn’t do it.

**Aline:** So he’s vomiting. He’s bleeding out from his face. And, you know–

**John:** There’s male nudity but it’s not funny male nudity.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** But there was a world where you would have conceivably pitched and made that movie and that’s why I think there is a giant hole in the marketplace for somebody to start a company which makes a lot of the stuff that’s now going to Netflix. Other kinds of stories, character-based stories, but female leads, non-white leads. To sort of have a woke, for lack of a better term, studio that opens its doors to everybody who wants to be doing stuff like that because if you make them for a price they can work huge. And the upside can be huge. And you can make Girls Trip and you can make Mamma Mia and you can make Get Out. And for someone to really open the doors on a big company like that that is run by executives who are not all named Matt. That would be incredible and I think we would all run to that person.

And I understand that financially now the amount of money that you need to be that person is almost too astronomical to exist. But I am waiting desperately for someone to make the superstore, the big box version of Fox 2000 with big funding that we can all run to for those projects. Because people have an enormous hunger to still make them and to see them on a big screen.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Question for you. Didn’t you just describe Megan Ellison and Annapurna? And didn’t they just go bankrupt?

**John:** Or A24. Fox Searchlight.

**Aline:** But are they taking the Girls Trip swings? Are they taking the Mamma Mia swings? Or are they taking more of the art – which again, and love those more arthouse type movies, obviously a thing I love. But I’m talking about more the sort of commercial in-the-box comedy character-based, you know, Bad Moms, Get Out is a good example of, you know–

**Craig:** Well Jason Blum obviously has a very successful business making genre films.

**Aline:** But I’m just talking about non-IP driven original content that is run by and includes a wider swath of the community who are desperate to tell those stories. I am sure every writer, we all have something in our drawer that we would love to do that way. And frankly right now people are going to streamers to do that.

**Craig:** I would. I mean, I’m just being honest with you. I would. I mean, unless I had something – I mean, look, Mamma Mia would be – that’s different because that is IP and all the rest of it. If I had something that was akin to, well, if I had something that I thought was an interesting $25 or $30 million movie I would be going to a streamer without question. Without question.

**Aline:** So maybe that’s a hole in the theatrical feature environment then. Maybe not.

**Craig:** They just don’t do it. I mean, the problem is you’re right. There is this massive hole there. But you can’t get a movie in theaters without distribution. And these major studios control it.

**Aline:** And giant marketing costs.

**Craig:** Well, exactly.

**John:** So there’s a project I’m doing which may end up at Netflix. And part of the discussion was it was hard to envision what the Friday night of this movie would be. It’s just like could you get enough butts in seats on Friday night to make this smaller comedy work. But if it were on a streamer that pressure is just not there. And so I think people would find it in their own time and it wouldn’t be that sense of like it has to be this giant weekend.

**Aline:** Interestingly though, when those movies drop on Netflix they do get humungous, crazy-huge eyeball numbers on the first weekend.

**Craig:** So they claim. [laughs] So they claim.

**Aline:** No, well I do believe that. Because–

**John:** Always Be My Maybe is a good example.

**Aline:** You guys know you turn on your streamer box and that’s the first thing there. And they have this marketing which is insane. You pay to subscribe to this service and it’s pushing something on you. And you’re not sure what you want to watch and everybody looks at each other and says great. And it’s new and it’s being promoted to you. So, you know, there’s nothing – so I don’t know, maybe this new studio that we’re creating is a subscription service.

**John:** So let’s bring this around and talk about where we’re at and sort of what we can do to sort of make this better.

**Aline:** The quotes?

**John:** The quotes. I do think in a world where quotes become less important the transparency in terms of what you’re getting paid is helpful. And I see more of that happening in TV. And in TV there are clear rungs that you’re going up through. So if people publicize like I’m a story editor on this show, this is what I’m getting, that is truly helpful for people figuring out am I getting paid more or less than sort of the average for this role.

A thing I’m going to probably do and I’ll just commit to actually doing it now is on Aladdin it’s going to be one of the probably last movies that’s going to have traditional residuals. And so I’ll just publicize, as I get each green envelope on Aladdin I will put up on the site how much I’m getting from those envelopes because it’s going to be huge. That’s a big movie and this is classically how writers were able to make a living is the constant residuals that come through.

And those are going to go away, too. And that’s another future topic, but figuring out how we sustain a career without the good residuals we’ve traditionally had is going to be a challenge.

**Aline:** Data would help the representatives. Because if you had data about what everyone was getting paid your agent could say, you know, this person and this person have a similar track record, or this person has made a special contribution in this way. And here’s another instance where someone did something similar and this is how they were recompensed. So, secrecy always benefits certain groups.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, having representatives would also help representatives. Because when I listen to this—

**Aline:** Well, the lawyers generally do the, right?

**Craig:** Well lawyers do the negotiating of the hard numbers. Or a lot of the internal numbers. But one thing that agencies can do, particularly the big ones, is say I can tell you exactly what this person got or this person got. They’re really good when you can talk about participation, backend. They know how those things work. Because we’re not the only deals that impact us. Again, because we’re over-scale there are other people like actors and directors and agents who are making certain kinds of deals that we can also make, depending on what the kind of movie is.

So having more information like that is great.

**Aline:** And also these are intangibles, agents have long relationships with these folks and bring them numerous people. And so they can be saying, “Hey, F-you. Step up. You know what’s right.”

**John:** And at the same time they can also be saying, you hope that they’re always advocating on your own behalf. But they could also be advocating on other people’s behalves or trying to get this other thing to happen.

**Aline:** Or trying to protect a relationship.

**John:** Exactly. So it does work both ways.

**Craig:** It does. I mean, we’ve all paid 10% to agents our entire careers I guess because we assumed that it was working in our favor.

**John:** All right. Let’s move on to the marquee topic for today which is idea management. So this came up to me because there’s a couple projects that I’m sort of noodling on, so I’ve not really started writing them yet but they are things that are in my head. They’re like the shiny jewels that I pick up and hold in my virtual hand and stare at them and do a little work on and then set them back down. And we haven’t really talked about this on the show which is that sort of early stage of holding onto and sorting through your ideas before you start writing and some best practices on that.

Because what really occurred to me this past week is I had some insomnia and I realized I was doing that rather than actually letting myself fall asleep. I was like so worried about holding onto this idea and focusing on it that I couldn’t set it down and actually go to sleep. So, Craig let’s say you have a good idea, it’s midnight, you’re headed to bed. You have a good idea. Do you get out of bed and write it down? What do you do with that idea that occurs to you?

**Craig:** If there’s something that happens right there while I’m in bed, my iPad is on my nightstand so I’ll just send myself a quick email. I have in the past said to myself you’ll remember this and then I don’t. I just remember not remembering it and being very angry. But that’s not really where most of my thinking happens. By the time I’m going to bed I’m just tired and I want to go to bed. Most of my thinking happens, well, most of my freeform thinking happens in the shower. That’s where I like to just think.

**Aline:** We’ve established this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** We’ve had a lot of mind images of Craig in the shower over the years if you’re a Scriptnotes fan.

**John:** Aline, you have that late night idea, what do you do with that idea?

**Aline:** So I do a lot of my thinking in the bathtub.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the same thing.

**Aline:** It is the same thing. A bathtub. But also when I go to sleep I try and think about something that I’m noodling on or have to solve. And I don’t think I wake up instantly with the answer but I do try and noodle on it because I know that that’s a fertile period. I will say like Rachel and I frequently had this conversation – I don’t write things down very often because I feel like if it’s a good idea it will persist and it will return to me. And I know a lot of people who think I’m insane who are real note-takers. And for them they need to see it concretized. If I start writing on an idea too soon I’ll kill it. It’s like I’ve over-watered the plant.

So I have to kind of keep it in a back-burnery place where only my subconscious is working on it until it’s kind of formed before I start putting voice to it, because there’s something about rendering it that sort of makes it less magical and interesting for me. So if I’m going to email myself something it’s a line of dialogue. Sometimes I think of lines of dialogue in the bathroom or in the bed. And then sometimes it’s plot stuff that I cannot fix. So, I would say the bathtub especially is a place where I go, oh, you know what, that’s where I go. And then I will put notes – I usually use the notes app. And kind of get it down.

But again I try and get it down in a skeletal way because somehow if I fully express an idea in print it doesn’t engage me in the same way.

**John:** I totally get that. You just did an over-watering metaphor which I really do like because it does kind of feel like it’s a garden that you have to tend every once and a while because if you don’t actually pay attention to the thing it can just wither and die on its own. And sometimes it’s best that it wither and die. Like it really did not want to be anything that you pursued. But also things can overgrow and just become too crazy.

And like I’ll try not to put something down in print and fix it in one form because I know it’s growing in different things and it could be combining with a different idea. You know, these really inchoate ideas they’re sort of competing for attention in your mind. They’re trying to get brain cycle. Like, no, no, think about me, think about me. And that’s the only way that they can actually become real projects.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t, you know me, my whole thing is I don’t write the script until I know exactly what the hell it is that I’m writing anyway. So in a weird way what we’re talking about here is this kind of idea gathering process. That is the process for me. I’m gathering ideas and writing things down on notecards and putting snippets of dialogue in little clustery files. But I don’t start writing anything until I see it. It’s like, oh, I always think of this wonderful scene from Searching for Bobby Fischer. Do you love Searching for Bobby Fischer the way I love it?

**John:** I do not recall it well, so obviously I don’t.

**Craig:** My god. Aline? Big Searching for–?

**Aline:** I haven’t seen it recently.

**Craig:** Oh, Steven Zaillian wrote and directed, brilliant. And there’s a moment where Ben Kinsley as the grandmaster is teaching this little kid. And he’s looking at the board and Ben Kingsley says, “You can get to checkmate in five. Don’t move until you see it.” And the kid is looking at it and he goes, “I don’t see it.” And Ben Kingsley says, “Don’t move until you see it.” And the kid says, “I don’t see it.” And Ben Kingsley says, “Here, I’ll help you. And he takes his arm and he wipes all the pieces off the board and they all clatter to the floor. It’s gorgeous. And he says, “There.” So now the kid can look at the blank board and then imagine the pieces and then he sees it.

And a lot of times for me I’m like don’t write it until you see it. That’s the way I kind of think about it. Don’t write it until you see it.

**Aline:** There’s also a thing that can happen where if you iterate something before you’re ready it creates a box or a fence in your brain and you can never get over it to where the good idea was. And so I fear that a little bit. Like you don’t want to start putting in those 2x4s and beams until you really know what you’re doing because you can get trapped in your edifice and then you can’t ever – because I was talking to another writer yesterday about sometimes you see something on the page and it’s so not what you want that you’re like I don’t remember writing, I don’t remember being a writer, I don’t remember what stories are. Have I ever seen a movie? It can block you.

So, I’ve written – a lot of the stuff I’ve done have been originals, 27 Dresses, Morning Glory, Crazy Ex, were all ideas that I had for a very long time. And what I tend to do is I store them up and I think about them until I meet the person.

**John:** Now did you have a list of those ideas?

**Aline:** No.

**John:** So just floating in your head somewhere? It’s like I want to do a movie about that.

**Aline:** They’re floating in my head. And then 27 Dresses I was like, you know what, this is a good idea. I should do this. Because my best friend Kate had been in 12 weddings at that point and it was insane. And I could see that the wedding industry was getting to this point where she was asked to do stuff that was bonkers.

And I pitched it to a lot of people. I think I pitched that to 11 people and the person that I didn’t know who latched on to it right away was John Glickman. So when I find often a collaborator or person I know this is the right person who can help, you know, water this with me and then I’m in a process. And with Morning Glory that was JJ. I pitched it to JJ I think the first time I met him. And then Crazy Ex was an idea, the title and the character – because I think there’s – I really relish and am giggly about all the moments in my life when I’ve been a crazy ex, even if it’s just like I want that sweater and there’s only one left in the small, you know, and I stalked it. And I always loved that idea.

And when I met Rachel I went, boom, that’s how to do it. So, I think it’s nice to carry around a little suitcase of notions in your brain and then when you think, oh, you know what? Now’s the moment to do it. This wedding stuff is getting so over the top that a movie about a perpetual bridesmaid, this is a good time to do it. So either the circumstances or you meet a person or you think of the genre. You know, you have an idea and you think, oh, the way to do this is, you know, this is a movie about terrible in-laws, but it’s Meet the Parents, or it’s Get Out. It takes a certain form.

And to me if the thing isn’t good I’ll forget about it.

**John:** Craig, do you have an idea suitcase?

**Craig:** No. I’m not a big idea person like that. In other words I’m not a big “here’s an idea for a movie.” I was like that early in my career because early in my career you were rewarded for that. Over time it seems to me that my skill isn’t so much in coming up with a wonderful idea for a movie. My skill it seems is figuring out how to write a movie. So, and that kind of meshed nicely with the way the business evolved because suddenly—

**Aline:** Well I would argue that that’s not true of Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Well, Chernobyl isn’t an idea. In other words, Chernobyl – it’s a topic.

**Aline:** The way you did it. Well, it’s a topic, but the way you did it and the way you chronicled it.

**John:** That’s execution rather than idea.

**Craig:** Correct. I think of that as actually the best example of the fact that I can execute things. But I don’t think of it as like, in other words what you do there – I used to do it. I don’t. I don’t know if I was ever really good at it to be honest with you. I mean—

**Aline:** So just to bring this back around, one of the reasons I’ve always done that is because that’s how I got hired. And there was not a lot else out for me. I was not being offered the big IP. Even back in the day I wasn’t getting Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I wasn’t well-known enough in those days. And that’s, you know, that’s why I chased Devil Wears Prada. Talk about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I chased that. Every single time they replaced the writer I said to my agent, “Get me in, get me in, get me in.” Because there’s so few things like that.

So I wasn’t getting – because there weren’t – there were so few pieces like that. Annie is one. Weirdly Cinderella was a thing that I came up with and pitched, strangely. That’s how long ago that was. That was before they were doing that. Annie is an example of like that’s a big piece that got given to me, but one of the reasons I did that is because for whatever reason I just have not been gifted with things that already had momentum. Annie was one, but not often.

**Craig:** At least in the beginning I certainly wasn’t either. So I was coming up with ideas and things. Some of them were really bad, but then they made them. Right? So they made some movies, some of them did OK. Most of them didn’t do well. What happened was I got stuck on sequels. And I guess at that point I was able to demonstrate some sort of executional ability.

But, yeah, when you start out you do kind of need to go here is my suitcase, here are my samples. Would you like to buy? And I do remember, you know, I mean, look, there’s a movie that I co-wrote with my partner back then called Senseless. It’s just a bad idea for a movie. It’s really just terrible. It’s a terrible idea for a movie.

The reason it got made I think is because it was in the middle of the video era when they would make anything. And, you know what? Penelope Spheeris did her best to direct and Marlon Wayans was really funny. And Matthew Lillard was really funny. But the idea was just dumb. It was just a bad idea for a movie.

**Aline:** Some ideas don’t work.

**Craig:** I mean, but that one honestly mystified me – I remember my writing partner and I were taking a walk and we had just pitched this thing. Because we were, again, we were like we need to get the suitcase out. No one is giving us anything. We have to make our own opportunities. And he said, “Do you think they’ll make that?” And I said not a chance. Not a chance. And then they did.

**Aline:** So one thing I would say for aspiring writers, when you are breaking in and you start to get those round of general meetings they’re going to say to you, “What do you want to write? Is there an article? Is there an idea? What do you have?” Wait a second. Get to know this person. Have a nice general meeting. Just chat in general about their movies. Hope you bump into them. Don’t give your babies, because in the beginning, you know, anybody who wanted to meet with me I’m a more reticent person so I would meet someone and five minutes into it they would say, “What is something you’ve dreamed of writing your whole life?” And I would think I just met you. I don’t know if I want to entrust you with that.

But I’ve seen young writers often, they’re just so excited to be in a meeting with someone that they take one of their idea babies out of their suitcase – not a good place to keep babies.

**Craig:** Put holes in it.

**Aline:** And they give it to someone and then that’s where it loses its momentum. So if you have something that’s near and dear to you in the beginning you might want to write it, or wait until you find someone who is truly a champion. Because the other thing I was naïve about is people take these general meetings with you. They actually haven’t read your work.

And one of the funniest – I don’t know if I’ve told this story on this podcast before – but I was in a meeting, my very first round of general meetings. And while I was sitting there an assistant walked in and said to the executive, “I have that coverage on Jersey Angel you wanted.”

**John:** Your script.

**Aline:** And I was so dumb that I didn’t know that that was – she hadn’t read it. And was taking the meeting as a favor to my agent. And so that was a person saying, “Gee, what are your hopes and dreams. And give me those things that reside in your soul,” who hadn’t actually read my script.

So, just, you know–

**John:** So I’m taking a lot of generals right now because there’s just a bunch of folks who over the years I’ve never met, or all the executives moved from one company to another so I’m just taking those generals now. And I’ve found that, granted I’m not at the beginning of my career, but I will generally go into those meetings with some sense of like, OK, these are the kinds of things they might be looking for. And so I may not pitch a specific story, but I’ll pitch like this is a story area that I’m really interested in. Like I just read an article about this thing and I think there’s probably a great movie to be made that’s looking at the reality of this but also pushes it into this fantasy aspect. And so those are helpful things to have as you go into those things.

Just give them a sense of like what your taste is and what’s interesting to you. And a lot of times I really am pulling some stuff out of the old idea suitcase. Like I’ve always wanted to do something with this place. Or like this old idea, I realize now in 2020 is actually more about this and that is a point of discussion. So, a deal I’m making now was out of one of those general meetings where I had an old thing but I realized like, oh, actually the way you make this story now in 2020 has a whole different [valence].

**Aline:** You said something so brilliant once and I think about it a lot, so I’m going to make you repeat it. Somebody said I have two ideas and I don’t know which one to write. And you said pick the one with the better ending.

**John:** That was Episode 100.

**Aline:** Ah, I love that piece of advice. And to go with that is I would say pick an idea that suggests a structure. Because sometimes I’ve had ideas – that’s why I had not done Crazy Ex because I didn’t know what the structure of that could be. And it wasn’t until Rachel and I started talking about it and I realized it was a TV show so you could kind of examine the prism. I was worried that a movie would be too reductive and broad.

Pick an idea that suggests a structure to you. Because if it just seems like a good idea for a movie, and I will tell you something quite counterintuitive. Things that are set on the backdrop of a wedding, rom-coms, a lot of people their first movie is like, “Oh, it’s the destination wedding. Or it’s the wedding where you find out your divorced parents fall back in love or whatever.” Weddings are brutal structurally because they are not escalating. So, your rehearsal dinner to your ceremony to the football game on the lawn, they don’t have a natural escalation in stakes. Actually it seems like that’s a structure. It’s not. And I’ve wandered down that garden path more than once because I’ve written a bunch of things that have weddings in them. They’re actually very difficult.

If you’re starting out and you have an idea, the one that suggests I have to be there by Tuesday to get a thing is probably the easiest the one, the simpler one to write. Something that suggests a journey. Suggests a story.

**John:** Like your Crazy Ex-Girlfriend example, Arlo Finch I had in my head for a very long time and I just didn’t know what it was. It’s not really a movie. It’s not really a TV show. And then I had a conversation with a middle grade novelist and I realized like, oh, this is a middle grade novel series. That’s what it is. I started writing that night and that became the thing. So, you do hold on to those things not knowing quite what form they want to take, but you know that there’s a thing there that’s interesting and appealing.

**Aline:** But I still think I would still argue Craig that the idea of doing Chernobyl in the way that you did it is a great idea because, you know, you could make a lot of Chernobyl movies but they would have been the more typical accident of the week kind of thing. So it’s just – it’s a cool idea just to examine that because it’s not something that people know enough about. But also the way in which it was done is a cool idea. I think.

**Craig:** Well thank you.

**John:** Take the compliment, Craig. She’s complimenting you.

**Craig:** I mean, you know, I’m not good – I’m really bad at compliments. Mostly when somebody gives me a compliment my mind immediately starts creating a very good rebuttal.

**Aline:** Or you think, “What an idiot? What a dummy?”

**John:** They couldn’t recognize the real me, because if they knew the real me they’d be disappointed.

**Craig:** I don’t think you understand. See, I’m not really very good. That’s kind of, yeah. Well, you know, Chernobyl couldn’t have been a movie anyway. That’s true.

**Aline:** Part of your idea was we’re going to really look at this in a very granular beat-by-beat and the millions and millions of bad decisions that go into something like this. And that’s what makes it a great cautionary tale because all these disasters are a collision of a million mistakes, human and technical. And you need time. You needed episodes for that to unfurl. And a movie might have constrained you. Also because movies are going to follow a more traditional escalation crescendo structure which sometimes things don’t want to be. And those make you be phony.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** Sometimes the form is a terrific idea. I haven’t seen it, but doing Emily Dickinson’s life as sort of like an emo-teen-pop thing which they’re doing on Apple, I have no idea what that’s like. But it’s taking the biopic and making it, from what I’ve seen it looks like a cool Ariana Grande video. That’s a cool idea.

**Craig:** Have you guys ever heard someone pronounce biopic “bi-opic?”

**Aline:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. Every time it happens I get so excited.

**Aline:** I have to stop correcting. We have a thing in our house but with fewer and less. And two of us are quite strict on it and one of us is really annoyed.

**Craig:** That would be Will, your husband, I’m assuming.

**Aline:** No, he’s a bit of a stickler in a way. One of my children finds it very annoying to be policed.

**John:** And your dogs are like I don’t know what you’re talking about.

**Aline:** Yeah, we’re idiots.

**Craig:** We don’t speak at all.

**John:** Let’s answers some questions here. First question is an audio question from Nathan Morris.

Nathan Morris: Hello, my name is Nathan. I’ll give you a dollar each if you can guess where I’m from by my accident. I’m currently living in New York. I have a question about working with actors. I’m a writer-director. I’m working on a little passion project right now to prove to the world what I can do. It’s all improvised. I wrote large backstory for each of my characters. During casting and workshopping with them was really fun and some ideas come up that the actors thought of about the characters I created.

I used a couple of these in the edit I’m putting together now and I’m wondering should they be credited as writers because they did create the joke? I don’t want to annoy anyone, piss anyone off, or just be a dick. Yeah, so I’d love to know what you guys think about that. I’m especially interested after hearing your Veep episode. Armando Iannucci is one of my heroes.

**Craig:** I’ve got to tell you all I did was listen to his accent for the first half of that question. I have no idea what the question was.

**John:** So here was his question. He made a short that involved a lot of actors who were doing improv.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, yes, yes.

**John:** He is wondering whether he should credit them as writers for the improv.

**Craig:** No. So, the, well, listen, it’s entirely up to you, Nathan, how you go about these things if you are not working within our Writers Guild world. In the Writers Guild world writing credit is for literary material. That means specifically material that has been written down on paper. So ad-libs, things that come up on the day that actors are putting out there are not considered literary material so it’s not creditable as writing.

If you are creating something that is highly improvisational you can consider it. But I would point out that even in shows like—

**Aline:** Curb.

**Craig:** Curb Your Enthusiasm, right, which there is a very strict outline that’s been written but inside of those scenes the dialogue can be often very improvised, those actors are not getting writing credit either. It’s just sort of understood this is how it works. Also I think he’s from South Africa.

**John:** All right. Aline, what is your impression both of what Nathan should do with his actors and where he’s from?

**Aline:** He’s from Australia.

**Craig:** It’s one or the other.

**John:** I’m pretty sure Australia.

**Craig:** Those two are always in my mind competing.

**Aline:** Interesting. Yeah, there’s a lot of the Christopher Guest movies and Curb are examples of the story is preset. They’re given material and then the dialogue is – what I wouldn’t do is spring it on anyone. Just make sure going into it that they know what examples you’re following and that this is how you’re going to be doing it.

It’s different if they’re sitting in a room with you and you’re typing it together.

**John:** Yeah. I think our consensus is that these actors sort of knew going into it that this was an improv situation. They probably don’t have an expectation that you are going to be giving them writing credit for this. But, of course, what we really care about is where you’re from and Nathan has an answer. So I actually heard the answer so I know. But I wasn’t convinced – I was thinking South Africa originally, but I was also thinking it could be a British accent, like a specific one that I was just missing. But let’s hear Nathan give us his answer.

**Craig:** Oh good.

Nathan: My accent is from…New Zealand.

**Craig:** Ah!

**Aline:** Ugh.

Nathan: Aotearoa. That’s the Maori name for my country. And we also have tall poppies [in germ]. Some would say greater than the Australians. Maybe that’s tall poppy syndrome right there. OK, I will stop wasting your time.

**Aline:** I feel bad about that because my sister-in-law is from New Zealand.

**Craig:** It’s really close. I mean, honestly, I mean Australia certainly is closer to New Zealand than South Africa. But I make that mistake, I mush those two together all the time. All the time. Mush those three together I guess all the time. Shame on me.

**John:** Shame on us. Monica asks, “Hi John, what was your budget on God and how did you go about funding it?” So God was a short film I made with Melissa McCarthy in 1998. We shot on 35mm film. We shot on short ends. We got the film pretty cheap but processing is expensive. So the full budget on that was $30,000. You can now make that same movie for $3,000.

**Aline:** John, where can people see The Nines?

**John:** The Nines, anywhere. It’s actually streaming kind of in all the places. It’s on iTunes but it’s also everywhere else.

**Aline:** It’s so good.

**John:** Thank you very much. So Melissa McCarthy’s character in God shows up again in The Nines. And as we all know Melissa McCarthy is a treat and a gem and a wonder of our age.

**Aline:** And Ryan Reynolds in it. It’s really good.

**John:** Thank you. Paul asks, “I watch a lot of movies and notice that it usually starts raining at the beginning of the third act or the end of the second act when things get bad in the story. Is this a tradition that should be used? Is it a crutch? Is there a way to stop using rain as a crutch? Should it be written in the script or left to a cinematography decision? I don’t hate it when I see it but I don’t love it either. It’s in many of my most beloved movies of all time. Help.”

**Aline:** I mean, it’s a huge rom-com trope.

**John:** It is a trope.

**Aline:** We made fun of it on the show. It’s a huge rom-com trope. You know, using the environment to reflect the inner feelings of a character, so as things are darkening the weather is reflecting that. That’s why you can call it out in a comedic sense because climaxes of romances in romantic comedies are people speaking to each other in the rain which is a thing I’ve never done. Dude, it’s raining. Let’s have this fight under an awning. People will stand there getting drenched with rain drenching them. Women with like their shirts drenched having a romantic conversation with someone. So, externalizing people’s emotions in the weather can sometimes reinforce the atmosphere, but sometimes can just make it seem like hilariously people’s emotions are being externalized.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a trope. I mean, is it a crutch? I don’t know if it’s a crutch. Although I do agree that there are times when you want to see your characters at a low moment and you decide it’s not enough to just know that they’re feeling terrible. You have to also rain directly on them, like those cartoons where a little cloud follows someone around.

**Aline:** But have you guys ever just stood there while it was raining?

**Craig:** Yeah, no.

**John:** No!

**Aline:** And spoken to someone?

**Craig:** No. I mean, unless I was so depressed because I was at the end of my second act. I mean, that’s the point. It’s silly but there’s a lot of silly stuff in movies. Like the fact that usually people don’t have rear view mirrors in their cars. So, I would say, look—

**Aline:** And they talk to people who are sitting in the middle of the back seat.

**Craig:** And they don’t say goodbye when they hang up a phone.

**Aline:** All these things we love.

**Craig:** All these things we love.

**Aline:** I think it can be cartoony. I mean, I love a sunlit noir. I love a movie where someone is going through some horrible noir. After Dark, My Sweet is the one I think of. Where it’s a noir but it’s Jason Patric being sort of bathed in horrible, horrible California sunshine instead of dark.

**Craig:** Yeah. Glaring hangover light.

**John:** So a thing that people who don’t make movies probably don’t realize is that whenever you write rain in the script, when you actually show up on set it is miserable generally because like the rain towers and the whole process of getting people wet and getting people dry and shooting in the rain is a huge hassle. You’re trying to protect everything. So I learned this firsthand on Go which does have rain in the third act. And it’s a hassle. It’s fully appropriate in Go. It actually serves a character purpose. It’s part of the reason they hit Ronna. But good lord, rain is a brutal thing.

**Craig:** Rain is hard to do. One thing, Paul, you would not do is leave it up to the cinematographer. The cinematographer does not make that decision. The cinematographer has to figure out how to shoot it. But, yes, it is absolutely within your domain to write that into a script. And then, you know, people can discuss after if they want to do it or not. But, yeah, it’s definitely something you should be deciding.

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. Now, Craig you and David Kwong just finished a massive puzzling expedition. It was like five days of work I believe?

**Craig:** Six.

**John:** Six days. So I’m going to break precedent and I’m actually going to recommend a puzzle thing. This is called Reg Ex Crossword. And so it’s the perfect Venn diagram intersection of what’s interesting to me and what’s interesting to you. So Reg Ex or regular expressions are the computer code that helps do pattern matching. So it’s how you find text within text. It is really esoteric and strange. This is a crossword puzzle situation where the clues are actually just regular expressions so you have to figure out what letters could possibly match up with those things. It’s very ingeniously done.

Craig, I hope you will clear out your afternoon schedule so you can try some of this.

**Craig:** I shouldn’t, but I will.

**John:** So, weirdly a cross between what we love about crossword puzzles and also what we love about Sudoku and only certain things can fit in certain boxes.

**Craig:** It actually sounds like a cross between what I love about crosswords and what I love about you.

**John:** Aw, Craig.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Aline:** Aw.

**John:** Aline knows that I’m blushing right now.

**Aline:** He’s blushing. Do you guys know what Sooth is?

**John:** Sooth is the relaxation app.

**Aline:** Sooth is a massage app.

**John:** Oh yes. Yes.

**Aline:** Sooth is an on-demand massage app. And I’ve got to say I’ve used it for a bunch of years now. It’s great.

**John:** We’ve used it.

**Aline:** And I’ve had many, many massage therapists. You can request the same one. But the beauty of Sooth is that you’re like, you know what in about an hour I’m in the mood for a massage and I have time. And they’ll come to your house and they bring the table. And I’ve had many, many Sooth massages and they’ve been different people and they’ve all been pretty great.

You know how sometimes you go to a spa and someone starts and you’re like this is – what am I doing?

**John:** There’s going to be 45 more minutes of this.

**Aline:** There’s going to be 45 minutes of nothingness. These are really good, strong massage therapists. I’ve only had women because I’ve had too many creepy male massages in my life. So I can only speak for the female massage therapists on Sooth. But they’re really good. They come to your house. And what’s nice about that is when you’re done, you know, and after they go you just get in your shower. You’re not in a spa. That’s a whole – I don’t like things that are a whole thing. Going to get a massage can be a whole thing.

But Sooth makes it into a really easy, pleasurable way to get a massage in your home.

**John:** Nice. That sounds like an ad for Sooth but it’s actually just a One Cool Thing. Craig, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Well I don’t know if I’ve mentioned Assassin’s Creed Odyssey yet.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I’ve been playing it. So, hat’s off to Ubisoft. Every Assassin’s Creed game is kind of the same thing. I mean, it’s amazing. And yet it’s sort of like, well, you know, the Big Mac works for a reason. People like it. And in this game you’re running around Ancient Greece which is cool because you get to talk to Socrates. But what my One Cool Thing specifically about the game is sex. There is sex in Assassin’s Creed and it’s hysterical.

You know the old cliché of two people start kissing and then they just sort of pan over to a fireplace? So that’s what it is every single time. But the best part is you can play the game as a man or a woman. It’s kind of ingenious actually. There’s a beginning where there’s a brother and a sister and something terrible happens and they’re split apart. And then they have to kind of find each other over the course of time and they’re rivals. And so if you choose to play as a woman, well, you’re the sister. If you choose to play as a man you’re the brother. And then they just flop the other things. But what doesn’t change are all the people that are interested in having sex with you. And your choice is to have sex with them.

I have had sex with everyone. So I played this character, because you have an option. You can turn down people. I turn down no one.

**Aline:** Just the pulled quote from this episode is Craig Mazin for Deadline Hollywood. It’s going to be Craig Mazin, “I’ve had sex with everyone.”

**John:** Everyone.

**Craig:** My favorite thing happened the other night. For whatever reason I had sex with this woman that I used to have sex with that I hadn’t seen in a while. Then I go rescue this guy and he’s so into me right from the start, right? I’m playing as a guy. So he’s into me from the start. And then he has a brother. And he and the brother are very different. I’m like, OK, I kind of see what’s going on here. This brother is into guys, or if I’m playing as a woman he’ll be into women. It doesn’t matter. The point is he’s into me and the other one is not really. A sad story.

No. They both are. I have sex with brothers, not at the same time, but separately. And then they both find out.

**Aline:** Next quote. New article. New piece. “I had sex with brothers.”

**Craig:** I had sex with brothers. And then I dumped both of them. It was great.

**Aline:** Have you guys seen the Black Mirror with Anthony Mackey in it?

**John:** I have seen that one.

**Craig:** No.

**Aline:** You have?

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** Yeah!

**John:** It’s sort of that situation.

**Aline:** Yeah. Craig have you seen that one?

**Craig:** I’m living it, man. I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. I’m having sex with everyone.

**Aline:** Well, it can get tricky.

**Craig:** One of the quests in the game is you have to go get somebody’s like armor from a special blacksmith. And you go to the blacksmith and he’s like, well, and he’s like a big burly dude. He’s like, “I would, but you know, I don’t know. Maybe if you make it worth my while.” I mean, he’s literally saying, “You know, if you have sex with me I’ll do it.” And I’m like, done. In. And he’s like, “The only problem is I need special herbs to actually have an erection.” So I have to go and like kill some mountain lions or something so I can collect herbs to give it to a blacksmith to have sex with him in exchange for armor.

I mean, that’s a day. That’s a freaking day.

**Aline:** What’s going to happen when we find out this is not actually happening?

**Craig:** Yeah. There is no game called Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. [laughs]

**John:** Craig is just sitting there staring at a black screen. [laughs]

**Craig:** Or I’m doing it. First of all, I have to find a blacksmith. A real blacksmith.

**Aline:** Brothers.

**Craig:** Brothers. I have to find brothers. I have to find an old flame. I want to be clear. Every single, and I urge people when they’re playing Assassin’s Creed, whether you’re playing as a man or a woman, have sex with everyone. Because you end up kissing everyone and then like the camera just drifts away. And the best part is the next thing that happens is like time has passed and you’re alone. They’re gone. So you have sex with people and they just leave. It’s perfect. It’s a perfect world.

**Aline:** It’s perfect for our Tinder age.

**Craig:** It really is.

**Aline:** Tinder.

**Craig:** It’s like, hey, yeah, I’ll have sex with you for armor. And you’re gone.

**John:** That should be the title of the episode. [laughs]

**Aline:** I’ll have sex with you for armor and then you’re gone.

**Craig:** And then you’re gone. It’s fantastic.

**John:** Oh, that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Victor Krause. 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. But for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Aline, do you want to be Twitter mentioned now?

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. You are @?

**Aline:** I’m @alinebmckenna.

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

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. And you need to sign up there if you want to use the app to listen to back episodes. So some people were having a hard time listening to back episodes on the app. It’s because you have to go to Scriptnotes.net to log in there. The app exists for iOS and Android.

You can also download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com. Aline, you use the Scriptnotes app?

**Aline:** Oh yeah. I do. I do. I’m not a completist, but I’m pretty close to it. I’ve been an early fan and I was an early fan partly because when you’re a screenwriter you’re so lonely and the fact that there was a show where I could listen to two of my friends talking was so nice.

**Craig:** It was like you weren’t alone.

**Aline:** Yes. And it was like my buddies are over and we’re talking about screenwriting. But as you know I’m a legit fan and I recommend the show all the time. And so I did recently when I was writing a script I went back and I did kind of a deep dive into the early episodes.

**John:** Well, Aline, thank you for being a super fan and also for coming back again on the show.

**Craig:** Thank you, Aline.

**John:** To be our buddy and talk through these issues with us.

**Aline:** I just looked it up and Batgirl and Catwoman, they were both on Adam West, but I can’t remember – and fans will tell us which one used to appear in the credits.

**Craig:** And Eartha Kitt was Catwoman right?

**Aline:** Julie Newmar did the first two years, and then Eartha Kitt.

**Craig:** See, I’m an Eartha Kitt fan because she would [purrs]. She was great. She really leaned into the purr.

**Aline:** She was the greatest.

**John:** Yeah. And she would have sex for armor.

**Craig:** I mean, honestly I think you would, too.

**Aline:** I’m getting Craig a t-shirt that says Will Have Sex for Armor.

**Craig:** Yeah. Don’t say it like it’s bad. It’s good.

**John:** Craig, thanks so much. Have a great week.

**Craig:** Thanks guys, bye.

**Aline:** Bye.