The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/optioning-a-novel-and-the-golden-age-of-television).

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

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

**John:** And you are listening to Scriptnotes, Episode 25. This is a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m fine. I’m amazed. We’ve gotten to 25 of these things.

**John:** 25. That is a quarter of a century, or some sort of centennial celebration. A quarter of the way there.

**Craig:** It is, uh, some kind of anniversary. Gold, or diamond, or something, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What you get me?

**John:** I got you nothing.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I got you topics. I got you questions. I’ve got things we can discuss.

**Craig:** Oh, well that’s good.

**John:** We can put them off for a little while if you wanted to blather about something. I could find some other network promo that I could talk you through.

**Craig:** I don’t like your characterization of blather. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Let’s just get right to some questions, because I actually have some pretty good ones this week.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** Cody writes in to ask, “How does one obtain the rights to a novel, etc? I know I need to contact their agent/lawyer, but I guess what I am asking is how do I go about it without coming off like a complete novice or tool? Or, knowing me, most likely both?”

So, a kind of very basic question that is sort of procedural: How do you get the rights to a book. But, also, some psychology, so thinking about how you are going to approach a writer, an author, a novelist, and convince them that you are going to be the person who can adapt their book.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Have you optioned any books yourself?

**Craig:** It’s funny that this question comes up because I did it for the first time just a few months ago.

**John:** So tell us about it.

**Craig:** It was a book that I loved as a kid called The Hero from Otherwhere. And it is a sort of fantasy/fiction novel about two boys who end up in this fantasy world. I just always loved it, and for years I would sort of check… — First of all, I couldn’t remember what the name of it was.

And then with the Internet now there are forums. I think there is a forum literally called What’s that Book? And where you just say, “Okay, I remember three things, and there is something from the cover,” and then 100 people say it was this. So, I figured out what it was, and then I had…

So the first thing you do is you check and see are the rights available. And that is something where ideally you have an attorney, and they go to some sort of… — There must be some central database somewhere that keeps track.

**John:** I don’t think there is a central. I think they are actually just contacting people.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Yeah. So you just had your attorney do it?

**Craig:** Yeah. He figured out that the rights were not available, and so I just let it go for many years, but then it just kept popping up. And so finally, a few months ago, I asked him again, and he said, “Look at that? They are available.”

And he knew that the rights holder was the daughter of the author. He had died many years ago. And she was an older lady, and I said, “You know what? Have my agency, CAA, reach out to her, and see if she is interested in optioning the rights. And if she is, then I will call her.”

And it was actually a very interesting phone call, because I called — and I have never done this before — and a very nice lady answered the phone. And she knew that I was going to be calling. And I said, “Listen, it’s a book that meant a lot to me as a kid, and I would love to adapt it if at all possible.”

And she said, “Well, I have to tell you that two days ago my husband died.” [laughs]

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** And I was like, “This is going so badly. What’s wrong with my timing?” So, my heart sank, of course, like, oh my god. And I was just like, “I am so sorry.” I mean, because now I feel like a real vulgarian talking about options and books. Her poor husband died. And she said, “No, no. I knew that you were calling, and I said to my husband when he was in the hospital that somebody was calling about this. And this book meant a lot to my father, and to me, and to my husband. And he said to me, ‘Maybe this will be the one.’ So, I feel like an angel brought you to me.”

And, as you know, of course, I am…

**John:** Craig Mazin is all about angels. I mean, angels guide most of your decisions.

**Craig:** [laughs] My existence is proof that there is no God. So this was even more of a burden upon me. And I felt…you know…

But at the same time, it was just a very nice moment. I mean, and maybe if there is a lesson in general to be applied here it is that when you talk to people who own the rights to things like novels, presuming it is not a very popular thing — maybe it is a little thing — it means a lot to them. It is not just commerce. It is emotional to them, especially if it is a relative and the author has passed away. It is part of their family, so you have to be very respectful about it, and go about it the right way.

And it worked out.

**John:** That’s great. So after this conversation, what was the follow up?

**Craig:** So then I spoke to my lawyer, and I said, “Write up what is a very standard, fair agreement to option this novel. Don’t lowball. We don’t have to highball either. Just come in with what the sort of industry standard is for a property like this.”

And he sent her an option agreement, and she signed it.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Wonderful. So this will be a project that you will adapt here in the near future and hopefully turn it into a great movie.

**Craig:** That’s my hope. I have been talking about it with a few people, and it has its challenges, but there is a great story there. So, we will see if I can get it done. I would like to think I could.

**John:** Great. Over the course of my career there have been three books that I have been directly involved with getting the rights for. The first was Big Fish. So, Big Fish I got set as a manuscript, so it is not really the same situation in that my agency was representing the rights; they sent over a book as a manuscript, which is basically just a box full of pages. And you just flip through the pages and I said, “I know how to make this into a movie.”

I went into Sony. I pitched it to Sony. Sony got the rights for me. And so my name was never on the option agreement for that book. But a large part of adapting that book was my relationship with Daniel Wallace, and getting to know him, and getting to know sort of all the secrets of the book and figuring out what that was.

And the reason I have been active with Big Fish throughout all of these years is I have a great relationship with Daniel Wallace. And he has seen the project grow from this very nascent idea to now several different kinds of iterations.

Books I tried to get myself, or did get myself… — I remember going after this great book that I actually just found on the shelf this morning called Summer of the Monkeys. And I will find the actual author’s name and put up a link to it. Summer of the Monkeys was this great book that I remembered again from childhood, same situation as you. But, of course, it was a much easier title to remember because it is about a bunch of monkeys.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Summer of the Monkeys is this great story about this circus train that crashes, all of these monkeys get lost in these woods in the south, and this boy and his dog have to basically catch all of the monkeys. And he is getting paid money for each monkey he can bring back to the circus.

And it was a really great, charming story. Same guy that wrote Where the Red Fern Grows.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Rawls, I think, was his last name. I will find it.

So, I wanted to get the rights to this book, and at this point I don’t know if I even… — I guess I had an agent, but I was just doing this myself. And this was also pre-Internet age, so I had to flip to the front of the book, and you see who the publisher is. You call New York City information, because all of the publishing houses are in New York City.

This is actually, in the age of the Internet there is probably an online way to do this, but this was the old-fashioned way. You called New York information — (212) 555-1212. You ask for that publisher. You call that publisher. You ask for their sub-rights department. And this is what is called subsidiary rights. These are the people who represent the publishing rights on properties, or the non-publishing rights on properties. So, film rights, and everything else.

And they are the ones who will have the contact information for who owns the film rights on a book. So, I got this woman’s name, and this address, and I figured that this must be the wife of the author, the widow. So, I wrote a letter. I heard nothing for a couple weeks, wrote a follow up letter, and she finally wrote back and said that someone else had the rights, and she was really sorry.

And I eventually sort of forgot about it and got busy with other things. But they finally made a movie of that book, which I never saw.

**Craig:** Oh, somebody did make a movie of it?

**John:** Someone did. And it actually… — Dave Matthews is apparently in that movie.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Isn’t that so odd?

**Craig:** Yeah, that is. You know, the thing about rights is that they have become increasingly difficult because everybody who writes a book is seemingly already on the lookout to sell the film rights. And so a lot of them get snapped up. And sometimes it is particularly difficult when you are dealing with international titles.

Lindsay Doran, one of our favorite producers who we discussed in another podcast, brought me and Scott Frank a book that we wanted to adapt, a really cool book called Three Bags Full. And it was a German novel, and basically — it was a great idea — a shepherd in Ireland, in a little village in Ireland, is murdered. It’s a murder mystery. And his sheep take it upon themselves to solve the crime. [laughs]

And sheep, as it turns out, are particularly advantaged in certain ways, and incredibly disadvantaged in other ways, like their propensity to panic, and the fact that they can’t remember anything. And it was really great, and we really wanted to do it, but the rights were…

**John:** In your head was this going to be a live action movie or animated?

**Craig:** Yeah, it was going to be a Babe kind of deal.

**John:** Oh, perfect.

**Craig:** But, god, the rights were just so entangled with the German companies, and became very difficult. And the other day Lindsay and I were talking about it and we just thought it is never… we will never untangle that knot. It’s a shame, but you have to try at the very least.

**John:** A more recent example for me was Steve Hely wrote a great book called How I Became a Famous Novelist. And I read this little short book review blurb and said, “Well that sounds great.” So I tracked down… — I figured out that this one person who was doing a blog written in the author’s voice, the book is about a guy who writes a book.

And I was able to Google and find the writer of the book within the book, and that there was a blog that was sort of his self-important point of view. And I realized that Steve Hely himself is probably doing this blog. And so I just emailed at that address and said, “Hey, I’m John August. I have done these things. I really want to see your book. Can I see your book?” And they sent me an early copy.

I loved it. And because I sort of had been that first person to reach out, I was able to sit down with him and convince him that I was the person to adapt his book and to make it into a movie.

That ended up not being the case. And I ended up getting busy with a lot of other stuff that made it impossible to sort of do that movie, but reaching out directly to the author, when you can find a way to do that, is a great way to approach it.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I should say that you have to, like in all things, you have to gauge your value. If you are a new screenwriter, or you have no track record, then don’t think you are going to be getting the rights to a popular title. It ain’t going to happen.

**John:** But there may be a smaller book that no one is actually approaching the rights on, and if you are a person who can do it, and you can convince that writer that you are the person who can do it, maybe you will get it.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so you probably won’t get things that are still in galleys, or unpublished, or on their way out. But these little things like the books you remember that are now out of print, or have just been languishing somewhere — those little uncovered gems — those are real opportunities for you.

And it also gives you quite a bit of leverage when you do write a screenplay, if you write a spec screenplay based on a title that you have rights, it does give you a bit of leverage when it is time to sell that script.

**John:** Yeah. Have you read How I Became a Famous Novelist?

**Craig:** I haven’t. No.

**John:** Oh, okay, well I am sending it to you like right now because it is great. I will also put a link to it in the show notes. It is still one of the funniest books I have ever read and someone else has the rights to it now. And they are going to make a movie, and it is going to be great.

**Craig:** Can you say who it is?

**John:** Oh, I don’t remember who it is. I don’t remember who got it. But Steve Hely himself ended up getting hired onto 30 Rock, and now he is working on The Office.

**Craig:** Oh great.

**John:** He is doing just fine, so there is really no sad part to this story, other than the fact that the movie didn’t get made.

**Craig:** By the way, it was me. I got the rights.

**John:** I thought so. It was some sort of clever pseudonym.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So to summarize our guidance on getting the rights to a book, I would say — this is my advice — if you have a way to contact the writer directly, try to contact the writer directly. If you don’t, you go through sub-rights at the publisher to try to find who the contact person is. If you already have an agent or a lawyer, they can help you there.

Ultimately when it came time to option the rights to How I Became a Famous Novelist, that is the thing that my lawyer did. My lawyer talked to his lawyer, and it was all happy and good. And, try it. People might say yes.

**Craig:** And be nice. And just remember that they have something that you want, so be respectful and seductive.

**John:** Yeah. Good. Our next question: CeCe, this person named CeCe asks, “When can you say you wrote a script? Something like Big Fish or Go are obvious. Go was a spec, and you were the only writer. And on Big Fish, although it was adapted from source material, you were the only listed screenwriter. But for something like Charlie’s Angels, there are other writers who share that credit, same with other panelists listed. Can or do those writers also say they wrote it? I guess a more specific question is, is there some sort of unspoken rule in the industry among writers about who claims credit out in the world? Does the guy who did most of the work generally say he wrote it, but subsequent writers that did enough credit, but weren’t the first writer don’t? Does it even matter?”

That’s a really good question.

**Craig:** That is a really good question. I think the last question in the series of questions is probably the operative one. I mean, look, it is a little… — Most of the movies that I have my name on, I am a co-writer, not an “and” co-writer but an “&” co-writer. I wrote with, in conjunction with, other people like Todd Phillips and Scott Armstrong, or David Zucker, or whatever, Pat Proft.

It is a little unwieldy at times to say, you know, “When I co-wrote blankety blank,” or “When I was co-writing such-and-such;” it is just unwieldy. It is just simpler to say “writing,” because the truth is the credits are a matter of public record. It is not like you are pulling a fast one over on anybody.

If you, I suppose, if I… — I don’t have any credits that are just “Story by.” If I were just “Story by” on a movie, I probably wouldn’t say I wrote it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would say I have a “Story by” credit on it. But, I guess the big question is does it really matter? Not really. To me at least. You know, if you worked on it, and your name is on it, your name is on it.

**John:** Yeah. I think I am with you in terms of I wouldn’t say I wrote a movie if… — I wouldn’t say I wrote or produced a movie if I only got “Story by” credit. And so on the upcoming Dark Shadows, I ended up just getting “Story by” credit. And I certainly worked on that movie; I can absolutely claim that. But I would draw a distinction between “worked on” and “wrote.” And I worked on Dark Shadows, and I worked on a lot of movies.

And Aline Brosh McKenna actually emailed me after I posted on my “About” section, or some other blog post, about the movies that I have worked on. And she was like, “Well, isn’t that sort of claiming credit for it?” And I said, “That’s an interesting discussion, whether I am claiming credit for things by acknowledging that I worked on these movies that don’t have my name on them.”

So, like I worked on Jurassic Park III. I worked on Minority Report. And I am not sort of claiming that those were mine, but the litmus test, the threshold I sort of had for which movies I worked on, is did my pen go all the way through that script? So, did I not just like drop in for one quick little moment and then drop back out? Was that entire script, and the responsibility for that whole movie, within my word processor for a period of time? And those are the movies I felt like I could honestly say I worked on.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you could say you worked on those for sure, because that is accurate. For me, I’m a little different on it. I feel like the movies that I have done, that I have worked on but don’t have credit on, I don’t like talking about it because I feel like, hmm, how should I put it?

I just feel like it is probably a bummer for the people that do have credit. Because the truth is on a few of the them I don’t have a word in there. It was like you came in, and then suddenly the studio went, “Wait. Wait. We don’t want to do this kind of movie. We want to do this entirely different movie with different actors,” and all the rest of it. And I’m gone. My script doesn’t resemble what is up there. I don’t even ask for credit.

So, I just feel like it would be a bummer for them to go, “Oh, and then there is Craig Mazin out there saying that he worked on it.” Well, now, did he…

See, here is the thing that people have got to understand: Our writing credits’ rules state that you can, in certain circumstances like an original project, you can write nearly half of a movie and not get credit. So, if you say, “I worked on it,” that means you have done anywhere between zero and 50%. There is a certain vague…

So, my thing is I don’t talk about it. I just don’t. I don’t talk about it because I feel like, I don’t know. Because I don’t want people doing it to me. So don’t do that to me. You do it to everybody else. [laughs]

**John:** To me, I just feel that it is a little bit dishonest to talk about the career of screenwriting, and sort of like how I have actually made my living and not acknowledge the actual things I am working on. Because if you just look at the movies that I have made, that have my name on it, well that is great. But that is not really in some ways the bulk of what my career has been.

The bulk of my career has been a lot of things I sort of came in and carried along. I carried the football for a while on them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that is, I don’t know. To me, if you are being honest about what the actual day-to-day job of screenwriting and what the career of screenwriting is, sometimes it is that — being the person who carried this movie from this point to this point for awhile.

And in no way, whenever I talk about movies that I have worked on, and I don’t have my name on them, I try to make sure I am really clear about the fact that this isn’t my movie in any specific way. I don’t own this as my own, but this is the work I did on it, and this is why I did the work I did on it.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s fair. I mean, look, this used to be, I think, more of a controversy pre-Internet. If you get hired on something now, it is on the Internet because there are so many sites that rely on pumping out marginally interesting information about Hollywood.

So, you know, I get hired to do something and it is on some website. So it is part of the public record. But, it is a little…

Sometimes I think, you know, it is a bummer that the best work I have done probably — not the best work — some of the best work I have done will never be associated with my name. And some of the worst work I have done is associated with my name. And that, unfortunately, I don’t know; I chalk it up to part of the price of the job we do. So, we have two different answers to your question, CeCe.

**John:** Yeah. And in a general framework I should say we were talking about specific WGA screenwriting credit versus having worked on something. There is continually a discussion about should there be some kind of acknowledgement of participating writers in the end credits of movies, or something else. And the two sides of the debate are basically: no, there shouldn’t be, because it diminishes perceived value of the actual “Written by” credit; and then there is the other side of the argument that says, “Okay, what does this mean that you were acknowledging the catering truck driver, but you are not acknowledging the person who wrote a tremendous amount of this movie?”

**Craig:** Well one day we could fill an entire podcast I bet with that debate. Because that is a raging one. And I have, and I know this is going to surprise you, extraordinarily strong opinions about that. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It is going to be an Evergreen topic. That is never going to be solved, and it is never going to be solved to satisfaction.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s do our third and final question.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Ben asks, “What are your thoughts on what everyone else is calling the ‘Golden Age of TV.’ As a new writer trying to find a place, I am finding myself torn between the love of film, and also the lure of TV shows and networks such AMC, Showtime, HBO, and even new ventures on NetFlix. I was halfway through watching season one of Homeland and I started to get the bug to try to write a TV spec instead of a feature. Is it more realistic to become a working writer in TV nowadays than in film? What would you advise to a new writer? Pick TV or film?”

**Craig:** Hmm. Do you want to take a stab at that one first?

**John:** Yeah. You should write TV.

**Craig:** I think so. I mean, the only caveat is this: If you are a feature writer, you are a feature writer. Don’t force yourself into a square peg, sorry [laughs], into a square hole if you are a round peg. I don’t think my mind is structured in such way as to write television. I don’t think I would be very good at it. I tend to enjoy writing stories that are self-contained, that arc over 100 to 120 pages. That is just the way my mind works.

And, not surprisingly, I like going to movies more than I like watching TV. But in particular, if you like drama, specifically the kind of adult dramas that are flourishing right now on television, then television. Because they are not making those for movies anymore.

**John:** Not at all. I mean, there are whole genres that we have just conceded to TV, because TV is doing them better. And God bless it.

And if you look at, we talk about sort of auteur theory and filmmaker culture, and the way that people, these great movies of the 70s where you have these visionary people coming in and changing the way that cinema is. That is where we are at, I think, now with our TV. Our TV showrunners have come in with such a specific clear vision and a voice for what these shows are going to be. They are wielding these incredible writing staffs that are generating just amazing hours of television. And half hours of television, too. I think that is the unheralded thing now, too.

You look at the New Girl, which is a great half hour, that is specific and weird and amazing. I think the better writing is happening in TV. I think there are more jobs in TV.

**Craig:** No doubt.

**John:** Yeah. If you are a great writer who wants to work in TV, you should work in TV. And you will write some features, too, and it will all be happy and good. But that is where the excitement is. That is where the energy is. And it could swing back.

You know, I can see some of these TV showrunners are going to go back to film. And they may bring some of that awesomeness with them. J.J. Abrams is doing movies now. Joss Whedon is doing movies now. That is going to happen more and more. But, TV is still where the best stuff is happening.

**Craig:** Yeah. Again, for drama, for sure. It has as much to do, I think, with just the kind of audiences that these things address and the structure of the business. Adult audiences, I think, who are looking for drama are more likely to show up in business-satisfying ways for the companies for television than they are for film.

And so it makes sense that they would go ahead and then focus their firepower in television. Television is a little bit of a lower risk for them because, you know, you are not spending… — I mean a small studio movie, a small studio drama is $35 million. Big ones, you know, like for instance State of Play was a big bet. It was an adult drama. It was a big bet. I think it cost $100 million. TV shows don’t cost $100 million, at least not to start with.

So, it is a much lower risk bencher for them. There are more jobs. And there is a season to it. So there is a way; there is actually a protocol to follow to try and get hired. Movies, there is no protocol. It is kind of a crazy, like everybody is rushing into see The Who in Cincinnati, and hopefully you don’t get trampled.

There are much fewer movies being made, whereas television, reality kind of hit its peak and has pulled back a bit. And the other thing is television is unlimited by exhibition. You can keep making channels. The only thing that is stopping you from making more channels, I suppose, is the bandwidth of the delivery mechanism. But they keep squeezing that down in such a way that you can have 500, 600, 1,000 channels.

There are only so many movie theaters. There are only so many movie studios. So you are fighting over release dates. No one fights over a release date in television. There are so many reasons why television is a safer and more vibrant job market.

However, in addition to my caveat about if you are a movie guy write movies, if you are a comedy guy, I think movies are still a great place to be. Because television comedy is not yet back to where it was in its heyday, and I don’t know if it will ever get back there.

**John:** I think it will.

**Craig:** And if it does, that’s great. I mean, because a ton of guys really just suddenly found themselves outside in the cold going, “What happened?” And they are really funny people. I mean, it is funny — I was talking with, I won’t say who it was, but an excellent showrunner. Why not, I’m praising him? Steve Levitan. Great showrunner. Genius. And Modern Family is a terrific show. And he has been around forever.

And he was telling me how when they put their writing staff together for Modern Family it was like putting together an All Star team, because everybody was available. I mean, almost everybody, because sitcoms had been so decimated. So, hopefully those shows like New Girl and Modern Family help these networks see their way back to half hour sitcoms, because, man, I love sitcoms. I’ve always loved them.

**John:** Yeah. But I also think there is comedy that is happening at the edges, at sort of the edges of the dial. So the Portlandias, the weird little things that are right now off in sort of the cable universe where all of the great one-hour dramas sort of started. I think those half hours are starting off there.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Those shows are happening out in the cable universe. That sensibility will find its way back to the broadcast networks, and there will be more jobs. There will be more comedies like that.

**Craig:** I hope so. I mean, the good news is if you are a movie type of person and you writes comedy, there is still a strong desire on the part of studios to produce medium-budget comedies. And, frankly, all comedies are basically medium-budget. No one really spends a lot on them. You don’t need to.

But, yeah, the guy who wrote in and said that he is a Homeland fan, I think that tells us what kind of writer he is. And I would say, you don’t have to give up on movies, by the way, but yeah, television.

**John:** Television. You have two feature writers telling you to write in television.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** Maybe it is selfish. Maybe it is actually we just don’t want any competition, and that is why we are telling you to write television.

**Craig:** They are not competing with me. You are being selfish. I write silly movies. But, you know, look, they make dramas. I will say, if you want to be in the drama feature business, be a director-writer or writer-director. Guys like John Lee Hancock and James Mangold. These are guys who work in that area and they are able to generate material and direct. That is what the studios, I think, are looking for. Because if you are not writing action, like big action movies, it is tough.

**John:** It’s tough.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, we got depressing again, didn’t we?

**John:** So we are going to spin this back around. TV is great. It’s the Golden Age of TV. This is a great time to write TV. Hooray for TV!

**Craig:** Hooray for TV!

**John:** We are not going to go into that depressing mode again.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** It’s a happy podcast.

**Craig:** You know, I feel like an angel brought me to you.

**John:** Ah, thank you very much, Craig. This is terrific.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It is. It is all a dream.

**Craig:** So beautiful.

**John:** We have one last piece of business. Because so many of our listeners are presumably WGA members, the WGA asked if we could mention on the podcast about the survey which they sent out. If you are WGA member, you should be getting a survey in your email inbox which is about working conditions. So, it is specifically about features, I think, talking about who you have worked for, what the situation was like. It is all anonymous. You should really fill it out because it is how we can get report cards to studios and producers, and it is a very good idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if you are a WGA member, look for that in your mailbox. And if you don’t see it, you should email screensurvey@wga.org. And that is our piece of business there.

Craig, 25 podcasts!

**Craig:** 25 in the can, man. I mean, that is pretty great.

**John:** Yeah. It feels like quite an accomplishment. I remember when we were doing our first awkward podcast. It has gotten much, much easier.

**Craig:** I think so. And I wonder what we will be doing when it is like our 1,000th podcast, and we are both really old and irrelevant.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And by the way, and we are like still doing a podcast when the rest of the world is like, “Podcast?!”

**John:** I know. It will just be beamed directly into people’s brains.

**Craig:** Right. “Why aren’t they doing a Braincast? It is so lame.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, enjoy the phone calls from now, John.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, talk to you later.

**Craig:** All right, man. Bye-bye.

**John:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/how-credit-arbitration-works).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, and I’m Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is episode 20 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you Craig?

**Craig:** I’m good. Big 20 episode mark. This is where we don’t…we get renewed or go into syndication at this point?

**John:** Yeah, I guess we would have known by this point if we were going to be picked up for a second season. We would have already gotten our back 9 order theoretically.

**Craig:** Right. When can we renegotiate? [laughs] I’m tired of this salary that we get.

**John:** Yeah. It would really depend on our ratings. And I don’t really have a good way of gauging what our ratings are based on our competitors. Not that we really have competitors — it is a tough thing that we are doing right now.

**Craig:** I feel like, frankly, we have driven all of the competitors out. Why would anybody do a podcast like this when we are doing one? Stupid.

**John:** Well also how much should we be paid? It’s hard to say. Right now I feel like our salaries are probably commensurate with our audience.

**Craig:** That’s pretty rough dude. [laughs] That’s pretty rough. I want money. We should start doing what Zach does on Between Two Ferns. We should get a sponsor, like a weird sponsor, I think he does Mennen or something like that, Speed Stick. We should get something like Speed Stick.

**John:** Great. I listen to the 5by5 podcast and they have sponsors and every once in awhile Dan Benjamin breaks the conversation and talks about the sponsor and segues right back into the topics and is very good at it.

**Craig:** Given our tendency to always end on something about women’s reproductive health, maybe we can get some sort of sanitary product.

**John:** I think Vagisil.

**Craig:** Oh, good idea. Okay, well we will get — Stuart, get on that. [laughs]

**John:** So Craig, this week I went to CES for the first time.

**Craig:** Nerd!

**John:** Oh, so CES is the Consumer Electronics Show. It is in Las Vegas every year and I have always wanted to go. And so the Writers Guild wrote me last month and said, “Hey would you go and be on this panel that they are asking for a writer to be on,” and I said, “Sure, I’ve always wanted to go.” It’s a good excuse — they are going to fly me out there.

And it is not as much fun as I thought it was going to be.

**Craig:** Hmm. Tell me what went wrong.

**John:** Nothing actually went wrong. There weren’t great disasters. It is just when you see coverage of it you think like, “Oh my gosh, it is going to be a wonderland of new products. The future will be in front of me.” And instead it is a lot of the cruddy versions of the present in front of you, or the competitor’s version of this thing that you have already seen. At least that was my vibe — that is what I got out of it this year.

There were some things that were cool and new but most stuff was just…there was just a lot. There is just too much. It was like going to Lollapalooza but instead of great bands there were just a bunch of Chinese companies that made printers.

**Craig:** Right, so you are seeing miles of iPad knockoffs and printers.

**John:** Yeah. The thing that is actually really cool to see there are the TVs that will probably never come to the market, or won’t come to market for like five years, but they are ridiculously thin. They are as thin as your iPad, but they are like 50 inches wide. That’s amazing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I saw they had that OLED display from somebody that was super thin, but isn’t everybody sort of secretly waiting for this hypothetical Apple television thing to come out.

**John:** Yeah, if it comes out that would be great.

**Craig:** That would be great.

**John:** And some of the 3D stuff looked better than I have ever seen before. And a lot of it had glasses, but they also had little small things that didn’t have glasses, that you could hold your hand sort of like the way that the Nintendo 3D stuff works. Because it is so close to you it doesn’t have to require glasses. And that was okay.

But by about four hours into it my eyes hurt. And I don’t want to give that to the 3D. I think my eyes were just overwhelmed by so many things to look at and stare at and I don’t like crowds in general so it was tough for that thing.

I ended up sort of retreating into this one little room to eat lunch just to be away from people and to stare at a padded gray wall.

**Craig:** Well I also feel like sometimes, like for instance Comic-Con, any sort of gathering where you would expect a lot of nerds and geeks who are my brothers and sisters.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Sometimes those are the worst crowds because there is something about the nerd/geek DNA that doesn’t seem to mind crowds very much. So everybody really…I have a feeling if it is people that do mind crowds at a normal level of tolerance, they will, like diffusion, they will seek places of less crowdedness and it will even out, but not so much nerds and geeks. If they find something they really like they will just jam in.

**John:** I guess I was expecting more ordinary geeks and nerds. Most of the people that you see at CES are really people who are selling these kinds of products, so they are not necessarily nerds and geeks. They are not necessarily big on tech; they are just selling their product. And so there are a lot of people who are at booths who I suspect work at some office in Omaha, or were hired specifically to be a pretty model holding something at this show. And they are not there for the joy of technology.

**Craig:** Not so many fans in other words.

**John:** Not so many fans. It’s not like a car show where you feel like it is everyone crowding in to see the latest cars. It is a lot more like, “We are businessmen from various locations.” And the saddest thing that I didn’t really expect is that so much of the activity takes place in these three giant halls in Vegas, they are all next to Las Vegas Hilton. But a lot of stuff actually spills into the hotel rooms at the Las Vegas Hilton.

And so you would wander through the hallways and there would be little signs on the door for “This company, come in and let us demonstrate our thing for you.” And it just felt like maybe that was even worse than being in the massive show floor was to be stuck in a little hotel room for four days waiting for someone to wander in.

**Craig:** Come into your room and use your bathroom.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Weird. I didn’t realize that. Did you at least have some Vegas fun?

**John:** I don’t gamble, so I didn’t have that kind of Vegas fun.

**Craig:** What?!

**John:** Yeah. I know. But I got to have dinner with Gary Whitta who is a screenwriter colleague of both of ours and it was great to catch up with him.

**Craig:** Does he live in Vegas? Oh, no, he went for the nerd fest?

**John:** He went for the nerd fest.

**Craig:** Got it. I can’t believe you don’t gamble. I want to change that.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t derive joy from gambling. When I do gamble, the few times I have been gambling, I would just say, “Well this is the $100 that I will lose,” and that is the $100 I will lose. But I don’t get the pleasure out of it that I am supposed to get out of it.

**Craig:** Mm, you are doing it wrong.

**John:** I’m doing it wrong. I’m clearly doing it wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ll fix that.

**John:** Yeah. But so let’s offer practical advice on something that hopefully more of our audience will benefit from which is getting credited on a movie, or a TV show, but really a movie.

**Craig:** Now that’s gambling. [laughs] Now we are talking about gambling.

**John:** [laughs] There is a little bit gambling. So our topic today is arbitration, but really in a general sense it is figuring out who gets credit for a motion picture or for a TV show. As we have talked about before on the podcast there are different credits that you get for screenwriting. There is “written by” which is both story and screenplay, and then the story and screenplay credits can also be parceled out separately if that is more appropriate for what a specific writer did on a project.

If you are not the only person who wrote on a given project there is a very high likelihood that you will have to somehow figure out who deserves the writing credits. And you have several ways of doing that. You and the other writers can all mutually agree on what you think those credits should be. And in most cases that decision will be respected and that will be the final credit on the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. If in fact the writers, if there isn’t an automatic arbitration — we will talk about what triggers that — if the writers agree on what the credit is, that is the credit. There is a clause that allows writers to self-determine credits.

But, if there is an automatic arbitration, then there is no opportunity for that. And those cases arise when one or more of the participating writers is also what is known as a production executive which is a particularly bad, misleading legal term. What that really means is any writer that is also receiving credit as a producer or a director.

**John:** We launched into this and I didn’t sort of explain a big enough framework behind this. We are talking about movies that are written for Hollywood that are under the Writers Guild contract. The Writers Guild is ultimately the body that decides who gets credit for writing a movie or for a TV show.

And it hasn’t always been this way and there are problems with how credits are sometimes determined. But, given the choices you would probably rather have the Writers Guild figure out the credits on a movie than say a studio.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the idea was when this system was put in place way back shortly after WWII, so the company in the United States, these movies are exclusively, I think, works for hire. That means that the studios own the copyright. They are the legal authors of the movie. But who receives credit for authorship? Who is the author in fact of the movie?

And in order to determine that you have to look at all the people that contributed to it and make a decision. Prior to the Writers Guild making these determinations it was up to the studio. And the studio, frankly, can do whatever they want. They can give writing credit to the people who deserve it or writing credit to the people they like the most, or writing credit to their girlfriend. It doesn’t matter.

And to this day that, in fact, is the system that applies to feature animation. The studio has sole discretion over the determination of those credits. But for Writers Guild-coverage movies, live action movies, the Writers Guild determines it and what that comes down to ultimately, if there is a dispute among the participating writers, it comes down to an arbitration in which three of your peers get all of the scripts written by all of the participating writers, they read them — they don’t know who wrote what, they don’t know any names.

And then after reading all of them they make a determination about what the credit should be.

**John:** Exactly. So, let’s define some of these terms. So three of your peers, these are other screenwriters who are active members of the Writers Guild. I have been an arbiter. You have been an arbiter. They are recruited from the ranks of the Writers Guild. You don’t know who are the arbitrators on your project.

**Craig:** That’s correct. And there are some minor qualifications. You do need to be a member for a certain amount of time — I think it is five years — or have three credits. So, you can’t be a brand spanking new writer and expect to be an arbiter.

**John:** You don’t get paid to be an arbiter. It is actually quite a fair amount of work. So you do it out of a sense of responsibility, out of your writer’s citizenship. It is like voting: you feel like you need to do it because you want to make… you are going to do the best job you can as an arbiter with the belief that somewhere down the road you want those arbiters on your project being just as diligent.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is essentially jury duty for screenwriters and unfortunately, just as the case is with jury duty, it is very difficult frankly to get writers to participate as arbiters. It is work. Frankly, screenwriters hate reading screenplays, so the thought of having to read 12 drafts of a particular movie in order to make a determination is daunting.

And then on top of that you have to write a statement explaining your reasoning for the decision you make. It can be a little bit of a drag, but like you said, the system is only as good as the people who participate in it.

**John:** Let’s talk people through the process of how stuff goes into arbitration. You have written a movie. Let’s pick a name for this movie. Let’s say it is Batman vs. The Smurfs.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Alright. So, you were the first writer on Batman vs. The Smurfs and another writer was hired subsequently on Batman vs. The Smurfs.

Once the movie has finished production and there is no more writing happening on the movie the studio will send out what is called a Notice of Tentative Writing Credit. It is a very standardized form kind of memo that says, “We believe these are the writers who participated on this movie. We believe the proper WGA credit is ‘written by'” — or actually, it would have to be probably “screenplay by,” depending on sort what these underlying rights are.

It would say “written by Writer A and Writer B,” so the people’s actual names. And they send that out to everybody who worked on the movie, everybody who was a writer on that movie.

**Craig:** Yes. Everybody. That means even if they do a roundtable where they ask six or seven writers to sit in a room for eight hours just to do some punch-up on a comedy, for instance, which is fairly common. Even those writers will get the statement. Anybody that was employed under the auspices of this project gets this Notice of Tentative Writing Credits.

And all that is, is the studio’s suggestion. That is the beginning and end of the studio’s participation in the credit determination process.

**John:** Almost always. They may also get involved if there is a question of when material was submitted to the studio.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Over the course of arbitration the WGA may be asking the studio to provide certain drafts.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is the end, I suppose, of their opinion. [laughs] That is a better way of putting it.

**John:** So all of the writers who work on that movie, so this first writer, the second writer, and all of the people who were on that one comedy punch-up for Batman vs. The Smurfs, they all get this memo, this Notice of Tentative Writing Credits.

Usually it goes to your agent or your lawyer or both, but you get this notice. Actually one friend of mine who wrote on a movie somehow didn’t get the Notice of Tentative Writing Credit and it became a whole issue because she missed her window for when she could…

**Craig:** Protest.

**John:** …protest. And it became a challenge.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Ultimately she was able to get her protest in there because some other things had happened. But, anyway, your agent and your manager/lawyer should be given this notice. And you will read this and you will say, “Well I think that is the appropriate credit,” or, “I don’t think that is the appropriate credit.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now, that doesn’t automatically mean that it goes to arbitration. As long as Writer A and Writer B or any of the other writers involved were production executives you have the opportunity to determine among yourselves what you think the credit should be.

So Writer A could call Writer B and say, “Hey look, I read through the Notice of Tentative Writing Credit. I think I deserve sole story credit and then we should share screenplay credit.”

Writer B might say, “Yes, I think that is actually a really good solution. I agree with this. We will both write up a letter to this effect and submit it,” and that will be the final credit as long as the other writers who worked on the project aren’t appealing that. That can sometimes happen.

It happens, I would say, a fair amount of the time.

**Craig:** It happens. Yeah. The simplest outcome to these things is that all of the participating writers get this Notice of Tentative Writing Credit and nobody has a problem with it. Everybody actually agrees with the studio’s opinion in which case the window for protest lapses and those credits become final.

**John:** Exactly. So we should list that as the simplest case. You get the Notice of Tentative Writing Credits, you agree with it, everybody agrees with it, Those are the credits. Done.

**Craig:** Done.

**John:** Second simplest case. You get the Notice of Tentative Writing Credits, the participating writers confirm among themselves, agree what the credits should be. They both write letters to that effect. Everything is done.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I ran into a case on a project a while back that we couldn’t actually do that because of weird things that were in our contracts that I think I actually spoke with you about. Certain studio contracts, this boilerplate, that can have the studio…can prevent writers from just reaching that decision.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and in fact as far as I can tell it is every studio. Here’s the thing. I’m not sure this is enforced.

The deal is: writers get bonuses when they negotiate the terms of their employment. There is the money you get paid to write. And then there is a bonus that you get if you receive sole screenplay credit. It is never attached to story credit.

And there is a slightly diminished bonus you get if you share screenplay credit. And obviously the idea of the bonus is to reward you for authoring a movie that actually got made, which doesn’t…most of these movies don’t get made at all.

There is boilerplate language in just about every contract as far as I can tell that says if credits are determined by the writers agreeing amongst themselves to a credit that is different than the one the studio proposed they don’t have to pay you your bonus. And the reason why is because they don’t want writers to essentially collude to maximize the amount of bonus money the studios pay out.

On the other hand, it seems ridiculous because writers don’t care how much the studio pays out to other people. They just care about what they get. So, the truth is I don’t know if that is every enforced.

**John:** Yeah. The scenario in which I could see it happening is let’s say Writer A is a very low level writer and his bonus was $50,000 for the movie getting made. Let’s say Writer B was a huge writer and had a $1 million credit bonus. You can imagine a scenario in which Writer B would come to Writer A and say, “Hey look, if we just agree on this I will cut you a check for $200,000 so we can avoid all the arbitration and everything else.”

And I think that is the situation that that boilerplate language is trying to avoid. I don’t know that it really happens.

**Craig:** Maybe. Yeah.

**John:** But it did come up with one project that I wrote a while back where we realized that we couldn’t just simply come to an agreement.

**Craig:** Right. And that is a bummer.

**John:** That’s a bummer. So these are the two simple scenarios. First is Notice of Tentative Writing Credit. We agree. Everybody agrees. That is the final credit.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Second simplest solution is all of the participating writers decide their own credit, everyone agrees to that, and that becomes the final credit. If those two steps don’t work right then you file a Notice for Arbitration. So you are submitting a letter to the WGA. I think you can actually just call the WGA credits representative and say that you intend to seek arbitration on the credits for this move.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** That starts the whole process.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So that process involves a couple steps. First off you have to determine which drafts are going to be read, which drafts were written under the terms of the WGA contract. That can be contentious sometimes, especially in terms of what literary material really is literary material. Are you throwing in every outline? That can be complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there are rules governing this stuff and there is also a process called a pre-arbitration in which a separate group of writers will make a determination about whether or not something is, in fact, literary material and also what order things came in because chronology is very important. The arbitration process is based on a fundamental principle that all writers have access to all of the WGA-covered writing on the project that occurred before them.

It doesn’t matter if you read the script or not. It doesn’t matter if the studio gave you that first script or not. The truth is if it was assigned to you in your contract, and it always is, we have to assume you saw it. Therefore, if something occurs in a script that was written in June and something similar occurs in a script that was written in December, they will give the writer of the June draft credit for it.

So, a lot of times what happens is suddenly you think you are Writer B and then suddenly somebody waves their hands and says, “No, no, actually I turned something in before that. I’m Writer B. You are Writer C.” And then it becomes a whole thing about trying to figure out who came first.

**John:** Yeah. So, a pre-arbitration hearing may happen to figure out what order stuff happened in. I had a weird situation once where the pre-arbitration hearing was really to determine whether one of the participating writers was actually a writer at that point or was he a producer, like a studio executive on the movie at that point. Were those studio notes or was it really literary material?

So, there can sometimes be a pre-arbitration hearing. I wouldn’t say it is most of the time but it does happen.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Once you agree on which drafts are applicable, your name gets taken off of everything. And they start labeling things Writer A, Writer B, Writer C. If you are a writing team they will still call you Writer A. They don’t try to make it more complicated than it should be.

**Craig:** Yeah. You are treated as one writer by the rules.

**John:** And, of course, it can sometimes get complicated where you have a writing team and then they split up and one person wrote separately and then it just…yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have been in arbitrations where I have been part of a team that was called Writer B and on my own I was Writer C. And unfortunately your contributions as Writer C are viewed as separate from your contributions as Writer B as part of a team. It is just the way it goes.

**John:** Once you figure out which drafts and what you are going to label the different writers, the WGA has to figure out who are going to be the arbiters. Arbiters are assigned numbers rather than letters so you will have Arbiter 1, Arbiter 2, and Arbiter 3.

They will get a giant FedEx envelope or box with all the applicable scripts in it, any background material. They will also get a statement written by each of the participating writers. The participating writers don’t have to submit a statement but they generally do which outlines their case for why they believe they deserve the credit that they are seeking on the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now Craig has a really good post on his blog about how to write a good arbitration statement. And so I am going to link to that in the show notes, but we can sort of summarize them here. I think this is back from 2005, but nothing has changed.

**Craig:** No. And unfortunately this is one of those areas where the psychology of the participating writer is in direct competition with their own best interests. Because it is a difficult process to go through; it is a very emotional process. The thought that you will either not be credited for the work you have done or that somebody else will be credited for the work you have done is horrifying properly to anybody who writes for a living.

It is a very difficult thing to go through and it is fraught with anxiety. You add to that mix the fact that you are entering into what people often refer to as the Star Chamber, where you are being judged by three people you will not see, whose names you will not know, and who will not be accountable to you.

And the only communication you can have with these people is this statement. Suddenly the importance of this statement grows into this massive thing. This is your make or break statement. And, add to the fact that we are writers and that this make or break thing is based on writing, and you can imagine how people obsess over the statement.

Unfortunately, on the other side of this thing where the arbiters are, here is the truth: as arbiters, we are judging the scripts. We grant credit based on the writing that we read in the scripts. And that’s it. Or in the treatments. Whatever literary material has been supplied to us.

The statements are nice, but frankly every statement basically makes an incredibly biased argument about why that writer should get this or that. They often include irrelevant comments about how long it took them to write it or that they got the green light or that they never read the other stuff. All that stuff in the end doesn’t really matter.

And tragically there are writers out there paying people, so-called experts, up to $10,000 to write so-called expert participation statements that will get them their credit. And the worst thing you can get as an arbiter is one of these over-written, clinical, legal treatises on why a writer should get credit. All you care about are the scripts.

So, how do you write a good statement? Well… [laughs]

**John:** Here are the bullet points you gave. So let me read them to you.

Keep the statement short. Absolutely. I think the first time I did this it was like a 15-page thing. I don’t do those 15-page things anymore. They have gotten a lot shorter.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Do not bad-mouth the other participating writers.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Obviously. Nothing, I mean, remember: it is other screenwriters who are going to be reading this thing. You don’t want to seem like a dick.

**Craig:** Yeah. Don’t be a jerk.

**John:** Talk about what you contributed to the final screenplay and nothing else which is very key because they are going to read those early drafts which were great but the only thing that matters is that final script. You have to show what of your stuff is in that final script.

**Craig:** Correct. And it ultimately doesn’t really… It is not your job to tell the arbiters, “By the way, notice that all of this guy’s first act isn’t even in the script.” They will get it, trust me. They don’t need you to tell them that. And it just seems petty. Talk about what you did.

**John:** Yeah. Avoid the percentage trap. And probably at this point we need to explain why you are talking about percentages at all, or shouldn’t, but why you are thinking about percentages.

In order to be credited as the writer on a project there are different thresholds you have to hit. I’m going to let you talk because I’m going to mess it up and then we will have to edit this back. So, for story credit, story credit can be split between two writers?

**Craig:** That’s right. A maximum of two writers.

**John:** So, in order to… If you are Writer B on a project you have to be able to show that you have contributed 50% or more to the story.

**Craig:** Actually, no.

**John:** See, that is why I am going to let you talk.

**Craig:** Yeah. Story credit doesn’t have percentages.

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Story credit just says that you have to make a…I think it is significant or meaningful contribution to story. And they leave it up to arbiters to determine what that means.

The only limitation on story credit is you can’t give it to more than two writers, and again, teams count as one writer. So there is no threshold so to speak.

The thresholds come into play for screenplay credit. We have two thresholds essentially. The standard threshold is 33%. You have to show that you contributed at least one-third of the final elements that contribute to screenplay in order to receive screenplay credit if the project is a non-original screenplay. That includes adaptations and the like.

If it is an original project, typically something that began life as a spec or a pitch, then the first writer has to show that 33%. But all subsequent writers have to get a 50% threshold. They have to show that they have contributed in excess of half of the elements that contribute to screenplay.

Now, go ahead and ask me how an arbiter makes that mathematical calculation. [laughs] You can’t. It is nonsense. We typically refer to those percentages as guidelines. They are weird kind of — I don’t know how you… — metaphoric simulations of thresholds.

In my mind 50% is whatever half means. And 33% is a good amount. But no one, I dare anyone to tell me that they can figure out that somebody contributed 40% or 45% or 28%. It just doesn’t work that way.

But the upshot is that no more than three writers can share a screenplay credit. And that these percentages are guidelines. So, don’t talk about… That is the point, the reason you brought this up: the worst thing you can do, and I did it on a very early project because I was a dope, is to sit there and try and do math for the arbiters and say, “Look, I added it up and I got 59%.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Don’t try to invent your own math to it.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** It won’t help you.

**Craig:** No. It is just going to make you look like a dummy.

**John:** Your next bullet point: thank them for their service. Absolutely, because it is a hell of a lot of work. And I am always appreciative when I read a writer’s statement that thanks me for my service that doesn’t influence my choices. But I do get that small little endorphin burst that helps me then crack open the next script.

So, thank them, because you would want to be thanked. Golden rule.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Yeah. I have read some statements that were soaking in a strange sense of entitlement as if I had been employed by the writers to render this decision and it was… The statement was sort of a mix of griping, grousing, complaining about the process, suspicions that I wouldn’t understand, or complaints about how they had been burnt before by arbiters.

You know, I’m volunteering my time. And I don’t like it anymore than they do, so dispense with all the negatively. It’s just not going to help.

**John:** Yup. Next bullet point: cite the rules. This is really crucial because what the arbiter is ultimately going to do, he or she will read through all of the scripts, but the only way he can reach a decision is to go to the screenwriters credits manual and look at the rules and look at how to apply those rules.

So, if you are going to make a point, make your point using the same language as the rules that are going to be in the manual.

**Craig:** Yeah. If there is anything that approaches a trick, and it is not really a trick, but anything that approaches an effective way for your statement to have an impact on the arbiters it is this. The reason why is the arbiters have to write their own statement. When they are done with their decision they call the Guild and they say, “This is the decision I reached.” And then once the Guild has determined that there isn’t a deadlock among the jury members, then they ask each arbiter to write a statement explaining their reasoning.

And they do that because as participating writers we have the right to request those statements when the arbitration is concluded to review them and make sure that the arbiters didn’t violate any procedures, misapply rules, et cetera.

What you can’t do as an arbiter is write a statement like this: “I read all of the scripts and I just feel like Writer B just, they really wrote the script. I didn’t really get a sense from Writer A that they did much. But I do think Writer C should get story just because he worked a lot.”

**John:** “It seems fair.”

**Craig:** “It seems fair.” The staff will call you and say, “No.” You have to, please, use the language in the manual to clearly justify your remark that Writer B really wrote the script. Because we have to use the manual, it is helpful if the statements give us hints of how we could use the manual when it is time for us to make our decision.

I don’t think it is necessarily going to be determinative but it shows that you are serious and thinking about the problem the way the arbiter has to think about the problem. It can’t hurt. And it could help.

**John:** Yup. So the arbiter is given all of these scripts. He has received a big FedEx box with all the scripts in them and a timeline and really a deadline. This is how much time we have to figure out the credits. Sometimes there really is a ticking clock because there is a movie coming out, something big has happened. TV has more pressing deadlines a lot of times than features do.

Often I have had two weeks to read through the scripts and come up with answers. Sometimes it has been less than that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When you are finished — that deadline is clearly spelled out at the start — when you are finished you call into the WGA. You give them your decision.

If the decision is not unanimous they may ask you to do a teleconference. And, in fact, this last one I participated in they already had the teleconference time scheduled from the start, so they blocked out a period of time for when they would do a teleconference, if they needed a teleconference.

So this last one I went on we had a teleconference which was actually really cool. If there is not unanimity you call into a number, you identify yourself only as Arbiter 1, 2, or 3. You explain how you reached the decision. The other arbiters explain how they reached their decision. If that discussion causes a unanimous opinion to form, that’s great. If it doesn’t cause a unanimous opinion to form, that is still okay.

You don’t have to have unanimity but you would like unanimity if you can find it.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a rule change that our committee instituted a couple of years ago and it was kind of a revolutionary shift because the legal basis that the Guild has used to defend itself against many, many lawsuits over the years has been that this process is anonymous.

And they have always been very careful to preserve the wall of anonymity between both the arbiters and the participants and intra-arbiter as well so that I don’t know that you and I are both arbitrating on the same movie so I can’t call you up and say, “Hey John, shouldn’t it be this? Don’t you think it should be that? Should we give this guy credit?”

But we had another problem. The way that the rules work, if a decision is unanimous you are done. If a decision is two to one the majority prevails. Only in the case of three different decisions do you get deadlocked and then they have to impanel three new arbiters.

What we found was that —

**John:** Let me stop you for one sec.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** What you are saying is unanimity, great. Two to one, majority rules.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Two to one meaning you agree on the exact same breakdown of credits. Sometimes what will happen is one person will say, “I think Writer A should get sole credit.” Arbiter 2 says, “I think it should be split equal between the two.” And Writer C [*sic.*] says, “I think story goes to this guy and the other two share screenplay.”

So it is possible to reach three different decisions out of an arbitration.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Absolutely. And it happens frequently. But what we were finding statistically was that almost two-thirds of decisions were two to one. Only one-third of decisions on features roughly were unanimous. And the problem that we were having for our membership was if you lose an arbitration two to one you are sitting there going, “I shouldn’t have lost that arbitration. I mean, you give me another three people I might win that one two to one.”

It is a difference of one vote. If you lose unanimously, well, you lost. You may not like it, but three people all agreed that it should be this. And what we found often was that the differences between the two people and the one were fairly minor and they weren’t very substantive.

But the writers on the other end didn’t know that. So, what we required was in any case where it wasn’t unanimous from the start the arbiters had to get on this anonymous — this is a constant unanimous/anonymous shift — they had to get on this anonymous teleconference and defend their decision and talk about why they thought it should be a certain thing. And then see if maybe there was room for slight adjustments — if they didn’t feel very strongly, if they were on the fence about a minor aspect of it — maybe you could go to a unanimous decision.

The staff monitors the teleconference to make sure that no one writer is badgering, one arbiter is badgering another, or that no one arbiter is misunderstanding the rules when they make their argument. And two great things have come out of this.

One, we have far more unanimous decisions. And, two, the staff gets a chance to listen to the arbiters and learn who is actually on the ball and who is kind of a dope. And that is a big deal because, frankly, of all the problems that we have with arbitrations I maintain — this is my opinion — that the weak link is the arbiters, not the participating writers, not the staff, not the procedures, not even the guidelines, which are problematic, but the arbiters.

And if the arbiters are bringing bias or slip-shot methodology or just, frankly, a lack of mental acuity, we need to know and not have them arbitrate.

**John:** Yeah. So, this teleconference may or may not have happened, so coming out of arbitration this first step of arbitration, you may have reached an unanimous decision, you may have reached a majority decision. You may have reached a split decision, a deadlock, in which case you are doing the whole process again. But hopefully you have come out of this with a decision.

It is the Writers Guild’s responsibility then to call or email or contact the participating writers and let them know what the decision has been.

There is a possibility of appeal. The possibility of appeal can only be based on the application of the rules. It can’t be based on “I didn’t like that decision.” You have to be able to show that the rules were not applied.

**Craig:** Yeah. More specifically that the procedures weren’t followed correctly because it is… I will tell you that the staff is quite good at not letting out statements. Well, the Writers Guild West staff, not to beat up the East, but we are far more particular about this in the West — the Writers Guild West staff is excellent about not letting statements out that violate our rules.

You will not see a statement from a Writers Guild West arbiter saying, “This guy should get screenplay credit because he hit the 33% benchmark. And that writer really had to hit a 50% benchmark.” We don’t let that happen.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** You are not going to see anything like that. Where you can protest is if you feel the procedures weren’t followed correctly. For instance, you have evidence that one of the writers looked up your name and knew who you were. Or you believed that you didn’t have a proper amount of time to write your statement. Or, you can tell from one of the statements that the writer actually read the wrong draft, something like that.

So, when you get the judgment you have the opportunity to protest. And if you do protest you will receive the written statements of the arbiters which you can review. You will then be given an opportunity to go through with your protest or not. And if you do, you then go to what is called a Policy Review Board where three new writers hear your case with the proviso that they can’t read any of the literary material.

So they are not there to rejudge who wrote what. They are just there to monitor your experience with the procedures. And you can imagine that it is extraordinarily rare that one of these protests is effective.

**John:** Yeah. Basically in order for the protest to be effective you would have to be able to prove something that is very difficult to prove. Because the only things that the Policy Review Board is looking at are these three statements and do the writers get to make a separate statement to the Policy Review Board explaining their beef?

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Is it just in the statement or do they also call in?

**Craig:** They actually can show up in person. Because the Policy Review Board, you can see those people face-to-face because they are not reading your material. And you can give them your entire experience. And you can say, “Listen, I was misled by this person who told me this.” Or, “I heard during this process, somebody called me up and said, ‘Did you know that so-and-so is doing arbitration and that they told me that it was you?'” Stuff like that.

Then you can make your argument. But, again, the Policy Review Board is a… It is cold comfort for somebody who has lost an arbitration because their ability to overturn an arbitration is extraordinarily narrow.

And I get why, I mean, because honestly everybody would appeal everything and make everybody read the scripts over again.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Every time.

**John:** So the outcome of a Policy Review Board, if they find that something was not followed properly, it just gets thrown out and the whole thing starts again.

**Craig:** With new arbiters, correct.

**John:** Yeah. Another chance to roll the dice.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** One thing a Policy Review Board can do, I know from experience, is they can call arbiters. So if they have a question about an arbiter’s statement they can call him or her and ask specific questions about things if there are questions that are not answered just on the paper.

**Craig:** That’s right. I did an arbitration once and I was called by the Policy Review Board. And they asked me to explain. There was one statement that I wrote; it was a very complicated arbitration that involved a project where things had started as… Sometimes, unfortunately, the real world operates in a way that is inconsistent with the cleanliness of our rules.

So, sometimes someone sells a spec and then a studio turns it into a sequel. This happens all the time.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Well is it original, is it not original? It turns out it is not, usually; sometimes it is. It’s a mess. Anyway, it was a complicated arbitration; those are the types I usually get. And there was a sentence I wrote in my statement that was very specific and appropriate to the rules. And I guess one of the writers, the participating writers, had questioned whether it meant this or that.

And so the Policy Review Board called me, not in front of that writer, and asked me to clarify my statement and I did to their satisfaction and that was that.

**John:** Yeah. One thing that the process of being an arbiter has reminded me of is just the same way that you are writing your statement to arbiters knowing that those are other screenwriters, I have been very mindful of the statement I write as an arbiter being straight-forward and clear but also respectful and kind. Because you realize that in many cases the participating writers are going to read this and so you want it to be clear…

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** — but you don’t want it to cruel.

**Craig:** That’s right. There is no place for that. You should be…you are acting like a judge so you should talk like a judge and be dispassionate and impersonal and just be about the facts and also be aware that arbiters are not allowed… The statements that you write as a participating writer are considered private to you. It is private communication between you and the arbiters and the Guild.

What the Guild doesn’t want is for — if you and I are in an arbitration, I’m Writer A and you are Writer B, and I write in my statement, “Look, Writer B came in and worked for two weeks on this and then got fired and then they brought me back and it’s crazy,” I should be allowed to write that in my statement. It is not really relevant.

But I don’t want you reading that. So, arbiters are not allowed to quote or refer to anything that is in the participating writer statements because in the case of a protest you will get all of our statements and as Writer A I don’t want you reading in Arbiter 1’s statement how I said something about you.

It’s a very complicated business.

**John:** It is. Before we wrap this up, we have sort of jumped past a couple different times: production executive.

Production executive is a special term of art for determining screenwriting credits. And it doesn’t mean a person who works at Sony, although it can be a person who works at Sony. Production executive in terms of screenwriting credit is somebody who is employed on a movie in a non-writing capacity in addition to being a writer. Is that a fair description?

**Craig:** Uh, maybe, I don’t think that would work if you were both a writer and craft services. I think it comes down to —

**John:** It really means director or producer.

**Craig:** That’s right. It is a hyphenate. Writer-producer, writer-director. Because you can be a writer-actor and you are not a production executive.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because oftentimes actors are —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** — re-writing.

**Craig:** It is something that we have talked about.

**John:** Yeah. So, if you are a hyphenate like that, so let’s say Writer A creates a script, writes a spec script. A director comes on board and significantly rewrites it. That director may be considered Writer B.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And the fact that he is also a director triggers automatic arbitration.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, that movie will always go to arbitration. There is no way to not do that. They can’t even come to their own agreement, can they? They have to go to arbitration.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because the presumption is that a director or producer is in a position to pressure the non-hyphenate writer either with their status on the project going forward for press and premieres and so forth, or for future work. So, they take that out of the equation and it is going to be arbitrated no matter what.

**John:** Craig, is the system perfect?

**Craig:** No, no, no. Far from it. It is a deeply flawed system, frankly. The procedures, I think, are pretty good in terms of the way that they have built the firewalls around anonymity and so forth.

Of course, they do the best they can considering that we live in a world with IMDb. If an arbiter really wants to know who the participating writers are, they may not be able to match names to drafts, but they can always go on the internet and find out who wrote on this thing. And then using information from the writers’ statements they may be able to even piece together which writer wrote which draft.

But the procedures in that regard are about as good as they can be. Where we fall down is in the guidelines which we have been steadily improving but which are odd and occasionally impenetrable.

And in the pool of arbiters themselves who, I think, are not well trained and not well guided, not by the staff but just by the… — We just sort of get thrown into the pool and we have to swim. And it is unfortunate because the system is a legal procedure being adjudicated by non-legal people.

**John:** All the same, the people who are adjudicating it actually understand what they are reading better than anyone else would.

**Craig:** Sometimes.

**John:** They are the people who — well, a lawyer wouldn’t be able to read through a screenplay and know whether that change on page 56 was really significant to the rest of the movie or was it just an arbitrary change on page 56.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** That’s the advantage of having actual screenwriters doing this work.

**Craig:** Yes. Although I will say that there is a third option which is in, for instance, if you were to allege copyright infringement in the court — you write a novel and then somebody else writes a novel and there is a dispute. The courts rely on expert readers who are not only trained in terms of the dramaturgical and literary analysis of material but in the law itself to kind of combine those skills of legal analysis and literary and dramatic analysis.

We don’t have that training. And I think… Look, I have read — because I am one of the chairs of the Rules Committee, people will come to me when disaster strikes. And they will show me the arbiters’ statements. And I have read some unbelievably atrocious arbitration statements, that is to say, statements by the arbiters themselves. Statements that I thought revealed a very poor, un-analytical mind — a mind, perhaps, staring at the wrong things, thrown by bias, or just poorly argued and thought out.

And that is the part that concerns me the most. That is why I am always asking screenwriters that I know who are experienced and who are fairly left-brained to please, please call and volunteer and serve as an arbiter.

**John:** Great. Well let’s leave it at that as a final plea to our screenwriting brethren, the ones who actually are eligible — and I think a fair number of our colleagues are listening to the podcast now — to take the time out to actually do those arbitrations because lord knows you want smart people doing it when it is your time to submit for credit.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what, take a day and read the scripts and they usually send you M&Ms with it which is nice.

**John:** Yeah. A little calorie boost. This last time it was a Snickers bar. So you never know what you are going to get.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And, Craig, thank you very much for a very thorough discussion of arbitration.

**Craig:** Thank you. Hopefully everyone is sound asleep now. [laughs]. This is one of those podcasts that people will go scrambling back to four years from now when they are suddenly sweating in an arbitration, but, if you are riding in your car, it may be not the most applicable thing.

Next week let’s talk about sex.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, okay.

**John:** Thanks. All right. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/what-do-producers-do).

**John August:** Hello, my name is John August.

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

**John:** You’re listening to Episode 17 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, how are you doing today?

**Craig:** Pretty good. I’m getting ready for the holidays.

**John:** Ah, very nice. Are you staying in town this year? Are you traveling, getting on planes?

**Craig:** I am staying in town. Man, it feels good. This time last year I was in Bangkok which is the least Christmassy place in the world.

**John:** Yeah. Did they have a concept of Christmas there?

**Craig:** Yeah…

**John:** Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

**Craig:** I’m sorry. Say that again.

**John:** [Singsong] Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

**Craig:** [laughs] They’re aware. They know its Christmas time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t think they care.

**John:** Did you see inappropriately dressed Santas on the back of scooters or motorcycles?

**Craig:** No. It’s not a particularly Christian culture. It’s very traditional — very, I guess, Buddhist.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re just not into Christmas. It’s not their thing. It’s also super hot. Also, it wasn’t like I was doing Christmas shopping or anything. I was standing in hot streets with scooters going by.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is nice. I’m actually really appreciating the whole pre-Christmas pageantry.

**John:** Yeah. We’re actually having unseasonably cold weather in Los Angeles right now. It doesn’t usually feel this cold. It was nearing frost temperatures here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also, we had this crazy windstorm and Pasadena and La Canada, where I live, got the worst of it. Our power was out for three days. You know, it was kind of fun for a day. By the third day, man, just darkness is a bummer. [laughs] You really start to miss power.

**John:** Yeah. You start to revert to like earlier primal forms.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Never good. Our big damage around here was that our DirecTV satellite dish got knocked askew which is… Yes, okay, first world problems.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what I’ll do is I’ll send you a picture of what the street near our office looked like and you can put it up with this podcast. It was crazy. I mean, huge trees just lifted out of the ground and thrown down. I think they had clocked it at 97 miles an hour which, I looked it up, qualifies as hurricane gusts.

**John:** Well, good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. We shouldn’t say “good,” but it’s exciting when changes happen and when things that you don’t expect to have happen do happen. The earthquake is actually a really good memory of mine, of Los Angeles.

**Craig:** You’re so weird.

**John:** I’m so weird. I kind of like when things fall apart a little bit.

**Craig:** Yeah. What are you, Sauermon, you like watching trees die?

**John:** [laughs] I don’t want anyone to be hurt. I don’t want things to necessarily be broken. But I like the idea that things are not permanent or that the way stuff is put together right at this moment isn’t necessarily the only way it can fit together.

**Craig:** Well, life rewards people like you because, eventually, it strikes you down. [laughs] I think it’s the second law of thermodynamics.

**John:** Yeah. Everything changes. Everything goes towards chaos.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And heat…

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Heat death of the universe.

**Craig:** Heat death. We’re on our way.

**John:** Yep.

Speaking of heat death and the universe, that’s not a segue at all actually, today I thought we would talk about producers.

**Craig:** Heat death and producers.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s see, how can we tie in heat death and producers? Both thrive on chaos.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, they’re supposed to fight entropy, but many times they do contribute to it too.

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a better way of thinking about it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Today, let’s talk about what producers are. Craig, what is a producer?

**Craig:** Well, you ask a different producer you’ll get a different answer. And it’s different for television, it’s different for movies. Do you want to talk about movies first?

**John:** Yeah. I just want to talk about the general idea of what a producer is supposed to do though. I think we have an image in our head of sort of this rich fat cat who’s smoking a cigar, who’s giving orders and bossing people around. Or like the Robert Evans idea too. Thinking, “Well, that’s what a producer is.”

They used to be a little bit more like that. There’s a reason why some stereotypes are true. There used to be that “force of nature” producer who would storm in and do cocaine off of the table and make five movies before lunch.

**Craig:** Yes, off of the table. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. I always find cocaine stories fascinating because I have just almost no drug experience whatsoever. I remember going to visit a friend of mine who had become a producer and exec at one of the big studios. I’m making this as generic as possible so that no one will actually identify who I’m talking about.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He was so excited because he had gotten this new office. It had this built-in sort of cubby cabinet thing with the desk that folded down and there’s a mirror on the desk surface of it, which seems really weird. In the corners you could see the cocaine.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** This was like a special desk that was built to hold cocaine.

**Craig:** A cocaine desk.

**John:** Yeah. Which is such an ’80s thing. We got into the industry just a little too late.

**Craig:** Wow. I’ll confess something and it’s not a good confession. It’s like the opposite of an interesting confession.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m not a prude or anything. Not only have I never done cocaine, I’ve never seen it.

**John:** I don’t think I’ve ever seen it consumed in my presence.

Which is weird. It’s not what you would think of like Hollywood should be.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You think Hollywood should be like, “Oh, rampant drug use.”

**Craig:** There should be coke everywhere.

**John:** I think there is drug use in Hollywood but it’s really not visible.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like cocaine… Cokeheads are really private, I guess, or shy. [laughs]

**John:** I think it’s also the people who were doing cocaine are probably doing pharmaceuticals now. They’re doing other stuff.

**Craig:** Oh, like Oxycontin or whatever.

**John:** Yeah, or like less visible.

**Craig:** You know, I’m guessing cocaine is still around.

**John:** Yeah. I’m sure it’s still around.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just… Yeah. Well, most of the producers I know probably aren’t coked up. Some of them, frankly, could do with a little bit of cocaine every now and again. [laughs]

**John:** Some of them could use a good, firm kick in the butt.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In general, a producer’s job — and we’ll just talk like a theoretical of what a producer is supposed to be doing, — is the person who is responsible for a movie — let’s talk features for right now — is responsible for a movie from inception all the way through distribution, which is now, I would say, all the way through iTunes and down the road. They are the person who is most and primarily responsible for the movie. That’s the reason why they get the Academy Award. They are the person who… It’s their movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They are the person behind it all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Rarely does that actually hold true now. There are exceptions. Laura Ziskin, I think, was largely that kind of producer. She was my very first studio development teacher when I went through my producing program, called Peter Stark, at USC. She was that kind of producer. There were movies where she had the idea, she found the writer, she got the writer to do 15 drafts, she got the studio to green light the movie, she was there for every frame they shot, and she oversaw editing. She oversaw the whole thing. That’s what producers used to do.

Now, if you look at the opening titles of a movie, there will be 14 people’s names listed as some kind of producer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You really can’t know what each of those people did. We can talk through, in general, what those responsibilities are supposed to be, but I really want to also talk about the realities of what it’s like to be a writer working on movies and dealing with producers.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you think about, sort of, when you and I started in the business, and let’s take Disney for example. It had multiple divisions. It was making a lot of movies. Let’s say it makes 50 movies in a year. There’s only so many executives you have and, ultimately, the job of the studio is to decide whether or not they should make the movie and spend the money on the movie and then market the movie and release the movie. But they can’t be there on the set. They can’t be there in every casting session. It would be impossible.

The producer becomes kind of an interesting independent agent of the studio. They are, ideally, in the best possible world, I’ll describe the best kind of producer, somebody who helps protect and nurture the creative value of the movie while, at the same time, shepherding the business of the production to make sure it’s done in a way that is responsible and satisfying to the financier, typically a studio.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That doesn’t happen. [laughs] Sometimes that just doesn’t happen. Sometimes you get one and not the other. Usually it’s the business one and not the creative one.

**John:** What’s interesting is, if you were just looking at Video Village, Video Village being at the monitors in which people are sitting in chairs staring at the little screen while the cameras are rolling. If you were to look at the people sitting in those chairs it’s hard to tell, necessarily, who are the producers and who are people who work for the studio because they seem to be doing the same kind of job. To a large degree, their functions do overlap.

We had a guy who worked at Warner Brothers come in once to talk to our class. He said like, “Oh, my friends, at Christmas, will ask me, ‘Hey, I saw that movie you said you were working on but why didn’t I see your name on the movie?'” He’s like, “My name is that shield that plays at the front. The big Warner Brothers logo, that’s my name.”

The studio executive, his function is really the studio’s function so he doesn’t have his own separate title card on the movie. He is the logo of the company. The exception being, weirdly, like New Line Cinema which all those people got producer credits even though they were really a studio.

**Craig:** Yeah. It gets very confusing in that regard. You’re right. It is interesting, sometimes a very strong studio executive will have more to do with the inception and shepherding of a film than the producer. It’s a very difficult thing. The reason it’s so confusing about what producers do is there is no barrier to entry, anybody can get a blank producer credit. For instance, associate producer really means a sort of producer-in-training who’s working with the real producer, typically.

Co-Producer could be anybody. A lot of times these things are handed out as little cookies for people to feel good about themselves. Sometimes those people are actually doing more work than the person who is the producer.

Then there is executive producer, which sounds more important than producer but actually isn’t.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s hop through the ranks from the top to the bottom just so people get a sense of what it means in film. After we talk through in film we’ll talk it through in TV because it’s confusing because everything is reversed.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in film the most important producer, the person who would actually receive the Academy Award, is the producer. It just says “Producer.”

**Craig:** Right. “Produced by…”

**John:** “Producer” or “Produced by…” there’s no other qualifier in front of it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If there are several people with the title “Producer” on a film, the Academy has rules about who gets the award. There’s a Producers Guild which helps step in to specify who gets what kind of award for things. But producers should be the most important, significant person making the film.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Below Producer is Executive Producer. Executive Producer used to mean a person who brought money to a project. It still, often, does mean that. It’s a lesser function. It’s probably not a person who is involved day to day although, sometimes, that’s a credit that a Line Producer might be given or someone else who’s incredibly involved day to day but is not the overall overseer of everything about the movie.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Co-Producer, Associate Producer, are sometimes just handout producer credits. I got a Co-Producer credit on Go and I really did a lot of producing on Go, but that was just a stipulation in my contract.

**Craig:** Right. Or for instance, if there’s a big Producer, they may have somebody working for them that does an enormous amount of work on their behalf and that person might get a Co-Producer or Executive Producer credit.

**John:** Yep. Co-Producers, a lot of times you’ll see the person who’s responsible for the budgeting, the Line Producer being given that.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** I should specify: There’s two other titles that you won’t often see in credit blocks but are actual functions and that’s a Line Producer. The Line Producer is, I think of it, almost like the manager of a company. It’s the person who’s physically responsible for doing the budget, for making sure the trucks are showing up at the right place at the right time, all the sort of number responsibilities and production responsibilities.

**Craig:** Yeah. In the credits they’re called the Unit Production Manager. The Unit Production Manager is, essentially, the business master of the movie. It’s a very interesting position, actually, because the UPM typically is somebody that works more closely with the studio than with the productions. Studios are very particular about which UPMs they use because, ultimately, that’s the person they come to, to say, “You’re spending too much. These days are going on too long. Help us out here. Keep control over this thing.”

**John:** Yeah. So, the UPM is working with the producers on a general sense, working with the director on a general sense, in terms of some priorities. Or in terms of like how we’re spending our money, really overseeing the accountants and basically everyone who is staying back in those offices who are making sure that all the paperwork is actually done to pay for this thing and to make sure that insurance stuff is handled. All that sort of back office stuff is going to fall under the UPMs job. That person is working as much for the studio as it is for the production.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I just realized I have an Executive Producer credit on Prince of Persia, which is very classically the kind of credit I would be given in that situation. It’s a project that Jordan Mechner came to me with. He had the rights to Prince of Persia. We figured out the story, we put together a pitch, and we went around and pitched it to every place. I wasn’t going to write the movie but I was going to oversee the writing of the movie.

I developed Prince of Persia. Like — there wouldn’t be a movie if I hadn’t stepped in to do it, so Executive Producer is my credit for it. But I’m not the Producer. I didn’t oversee every frame of film shot or anything like that. I was a crucial function during one of the stages of production but I didn’t oversee the whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s one of the reasons the Producers Guild exists. It’s not really a guild, it’s not a union, because they don’t… they’re not employees like a union is. But it’s basically, kind of a self-imposed group that wants to try and make some meaning out of these credits.

Because a lot of times, what happens is people get kissed into these things. I was involved in this, I found the initial script, but then it fell apart here. I took it over here, nobody wants to work with this guy. Take an executive producer credit and get the hell out of here.

The producers, rightly, are saying, “Listen, you’re watering down these credits. Executive producer, for some people, means an enormous amount of work, and for others, it literally means nothing. At all.”

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes it means we let you take the rights from us, because we didn’t want to make the movie. It’s that crazy. And obviously, the Writers Guild spent a lot of time and effort and strikes and so forth, to make sure that we can protect what our credits mean. Producers don’t have that.

**John:** No. And it’s going to be very hard for them to ever organize to the degree that it’s going to be meaningful for them to try to step in and say that, because they have to convince the studios to agree to these credits, and that’s a challenge.

**Craig:** It is a challenge, because essentially, it’s an open market. And the studios love giving credits like that away instead of money, because it doesn’t cost anything. They don’t care.

That’s why you see these, sometimes, especially in independent films. You’ll see a thousand producers, because everybody’s been handed a credit in lieu of money. It’s not that great of a deal.

**John:** Yeah. Weirdly, I would say, coming from Broadway, where I’ve just been at these producer and investor things, that is very true in Broadway. Like, all those names you see above the title of a show on Broadway, those were people who were, like, investing money. They would be like the executive producers who are coming in with money on a feature, but they all get their names on there.

And I really don’t want our movies to get to that point. I hope it doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s quickly talk through the ranks in TV, because it’s different and really confusing. We’ll try to talk through it. I’ll also link to it. I found I had an old blog post from 2004, and it’s actually accurate. So, I’ll talk you through it now, but you may also want to look at the show notes.

The highest rank in TV, executive producer. Now, the executive producer, whoever is running the show, the show runner, is usually an executive producer — not 100 percent of the time, but usually that person is the executive producer.

There can be multiple executive producers. You could have three or four people listed as executive producer. But that’s the highest rank.

Below executive producer, co-EP, which is confusing, because, you’d think that co-EP means the same thing as executive producer. It doesn’t. It means co-EP, it’s just its own title.

Below that, supervising producer. Below that, producer. Below that, co-producer. Below that, story editor, below that, staff writer.

Now, in that TV ranking that I gave you right there, that’s sort of the writers’ version of it, because most of the producers you think about for TV are actual writers. They’re doing the writing on the show and they’re doing the creative supervision of the show.

There’ll be other people who get producer credits on a TV show who are doing those physical production functions. Kelly Manners is a famous line producer type person for TV who did Angel, who’s done a lot of the sci-fi action shows.

Those people have titles, too, and those could be associate producer, or an executive producer. They could have other titles like that, but because TV tends to be so writer-driven, most of what I’m talking about in TV is really the ranks that you ascend through as you become a more and more powerful writer.

**Craig:** And what are pods? Tell us about that.

**John:** PODs are producer overall deals. A POD deal is with, generally, a non-writing producer who oversees a show on behalf of a studio, usually a studio or a network. Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen had a POD at Warner Brothers. They would come in and develop ideas with writers and set them up at Warner€™s and oversee the show as producers who are non-writing producers.

Generally, if you are, and I should specify… I have not been doing this TV writing for a few years now, so some stuff changes. Some stuff’s out of date. I rely on my TV writing brethren to correct me on stuff.

But if you are a writer who has a TV deal, your agents will often send you in to meet with a producer, one of those producers who has a POD deal, before sending you into the studio, the network, because they’re going to want to stick somebody on that show anyway. It’s better that you get matched up with somebody you agree with creatively.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Independent of this hierarchy on TV writers is also consulting producers. Josh Friedman, for example, is a consulting producer right now this season on Finder. That is generally a high level writer who is not on any specific show at the given time.

They don’t have their own series on this season, so they’re assigned to a show. They go on and they help out that show, they write episodes, they help write stories. They do a lot of great work on a show, but it’s not their show. It’s a way to keep those people in the fold and keep those people writing and keep better TV being made by applying them to a show that’s already going to be on the air.

**Craig:** That makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. Regardless of the actual titles you get, I find that there’s three basic roles that producers play. You may have amendments to this. But I find, no matter what the nature of the production is, somebody in the production has to play these roles. Sometimes you get them found in one person, sometimes they’re split up between three people.

But there’s the peacekeeper/diplomat. There’s one producer whose job is to make everybody feel better. That is the person who’s always going to be on the phone talking to the studio or the network, talking to the agents, talking to the actors, getting everything to feel good.

When the actors have a problem, especially if the actors have a problem with the director, there’s got to be one producer that the actor can go to to discuss the problem. That’s a crucial role.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes, for sure, producers, good producers are very parental. Movies are made by emotional artists. I don’t care what the movie is. I don’t care if it’s Ernest Goes to Camp. Everybody’s an emotional artist.

In order to be creative, you know, when people always say, “Oh, look at the imagination of a child. When did we lose that imagination?” Well, people who write and make and act and direct, theoretically, didn’t lose their childlike imagination or any of a number of hosts of childlike things that go along with that.

Sometimes, you just need a mommy or a daddy to help everybody play better, feel better about themselves, get over whatever drama or nonsense is going on at the time.

**John:** Yeah. Classically, this producer’s responsibility is to get the actor to actually come out of his or her trailer.

**Craig:** Yeah, sometimes, a producer has to undo a hissy fit. But, similarly, I think producers are the ones that sit down with directors and say, “Here’s the thing. The studio does not like the dailies, and we have to really think long and hard about what we’re doing here.”

The producer’s the one that sits down with the writer and says, “We just got notes back from the huge A-list actor, they don’t want to say these lines. So, we have to figure out how to get the dramatic intent across a different way.” The producer is the person in the middle of those problems.

**John:** Yeah. The second role that a producer often plays, or somebody on the production has to play, is the general, people that just sticks to the physical production, the, “This is how much it’s going to cost us to do this, this is today’s work, this is how much time we have left today.”

Your 1st AD is going to be doing a lot of that, getting the day’s work done. But in terms of getting the whole show done, or figuring out, “Okay, our script is taking place in these five countries, this is how we’re going to fake this country for that country, this is how we’re going to make our schedule work.”

It’s not just the AD’s job, it’s not just the line person’s job, it’s a semi-creative job and an ability to see how you’re actually going to get the movie made. Somebody on the production does that.

Some of the movie’s I’ve worked on, Bruce Cohen serves that function. I think it’s because he, in a previous life, was an AD, so he has a very good sense of, “Okay, this is how we’re going to get it done. These are the problems that are coming up. I’m going to deal with this crazy insurance situation and we’ll get the stuff handled.”

**Craig:** Yeah, and I would say, conversely, very good producers also understand that the essence of what we do is not to make a budget or make a schedule, but to make a movie. Sometimes, you’ve just got to break the rules and spend a little extra or go above or risk getting slapped on the wrist to get better work.

Somebody said to me the other day, and I thought it was very astute, there are two kinds of producers. There are anxiety buffers, and there are anxiety conductors. Good anxiety buffering producers will sort of see the pressure squeezing down on the director, usually, to get better work out of less time and money, and somehow, protect them from it and help the movie.

Because, in the end, the producer is that one person who needs to be able to play both sides of the field, business and creative. Whereas, the director, frankly, should be entirely concerned with creative and hey, if you want to give me 10 extra days and another 30 million bucks, yeah, of course.

Then there are the anxiety conductors, who get squeezed by the studio, amplify it, and then squeeze everybody else around them. That does not do anybody any good.

**John:** Yeah. I would say, related to the anxiety people are sort of dual functions I’ll call the bulldozer and the bodyguard. Sometimes you’re doing one or you’re doing the other one.

Dick Zanuck, to me, is classically a bodyguard. Dick Zanuck is a producer with tremendous credits who I’ve worked with on many movies. But I feel like a lot of his job is to serve as a bodyguard.

To say, like, anything that’s coming in Tim Burton’s direction, he will throw himself in front of and catch the bullet, so that Tim can focus on the work he needs to do and that Dick will take the hit and will figure out, like, what to do with this studio note, or just to keep people away from Tim. That’s a crucial function.

Likewise, sometimes you need a bulldozer. The bulldozer’s that person who has no shame and has no off switch. You can say, “Hey look, Paul, Paul. You see this ball in my hand? I need you to get this ball.” You throw the ball as hard as you can and he will knock down every building in the way to get it.

You need that person who’s delighted to break rules and to piss people off, because that’s, a lot of times, what you need. It’s the person who will risk getting the whole production stopped by the police, or will make those really awkward phone calls, because he doesn’t have filtering mechanism to stop him from doing that.

In the era of drugs, the bulldozer function was probably a lot easier. Anyone can be a bulldozer with the right narcotics.

**Craig:** I mean, they were all slamming into each other. You know, Hollywood is full of the legends of angry yelling producers who are screaming on the phone and throwing ashtrays at assistant’s heads and many of those stories are true.

It is an enormously difficult thing to make a movie. Enormously difficult. It is a business that must be built from scratch, ground up, tuned up to perfection, create this thing that absolutely works, and then be dismantled.

It has to be done on the fly, while you’re going, while temperamental people all around you are asking for something that’s intangible, namely, quality, and also, disagreeing on what that quality is. Everybody knows what it means to create a thousand widgets a day. It’s a number. We don’t have that.

It’s an enormously difficult task for anybody. Yeah, naturally, the people that often succeed are very loud and very dramatic and obstinate, but there are also producers who are known for quietly, magically, getting their way.

Frankly, depending on what the movie, depending on the director, different producers are better in different situations. As writers, typically, we don’t get to pick. And that’s where we can sometimes end up in trouble.

**John:** Indeed. The other function which I’d never really considered, breaking off here but I think it’s absolutely a good fourth role, is that sort of creative chaperone That’s the function that I think Judd Apatow ends up playing on some of the movies he doesn’t direct, which is that he is the guy that says, like, “Oh, let’s try this, let’s try this, let’s try this.”

It’s the person who reminds you, “Oh, this is what the movie’s supposed to feel like.” That’s the person who is helping out while you’re shooting. It’s the person who is taking a big role in editorial to get to the story, working the way it should, hopefully, early on in the process, was really working with you on the script to get stuff to feel the right way.

That was the function I played at the start in Prince of Persia, it’s the function I played in Go. Now, obviously, I was there during all the shooting, but also, in the editing room, it’s finessing stuff to make it feel like the right thing and reminding people what movie it is you’re trying to make.

**Craig:** Yeah, I wrote a draft for an animated film production now called Turkeys, and that’s what I’m doing now. I’m serving in that producorial role to help keep things going. We have another writer who’s working. The director and I read his work and we take notes and suggest and all the rest of it.

Interestingly, for most writers, that is the bulk of our experience with producers. Producers, even if you’re selling your own original work, typically, when you go to each studio, you have a producer, quote unquote, “bring it in.” You’re picking a producer to already assign to this project,

If it gets bought, that person will help you develop the material. If it’s an assignment, there’s always a producer already attached. That producer will be the one that’s primarily working with you to develop the draft.

**John:** Yeah. Now something listeners may not be aware of is that sometimes a studio will develop a movie with producers who were involved with the project originally, but the studio does not feel that they can actually deliver the movie. The producer will go out and put another producer on a film. That happens because the studio has a track record working with a certain producer and believes that he or she can actually develop something.

Sometimes you’ll hear something like, “Oh, he got put on a movie.” That’s because this is a person they had a relationship with, and they really felt more comfortable making the movie knowing that this person was going to be on the film for them. That person is truly a producer. It’s not a studio executive, but it’s somebody who got brought in to help on something.

Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen were brought in on Milk, which was a movie that the studio wanted to make but they didn’t have people they felt could deliver the movie for Gus Van Sant. They came in to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, and this is where as a director I always felt like the best situation would be to have the bodyguard kind of producer because if you get the studio’s producer, you just have to be aware of where they land in the big game of things. This is the tricky part. Who do you work for? In the end, we all work for the people that sign our checks. But the writer and the director also work for this other thing called the movie, which we hope is good.

You want very much to make sure that your producer is working for the movie. Unfortunately, there are times when that’s not the case. I’ve been pretty lucky. I’m working with producers right now that I think are terrific and absolutely are in line with supporting the movie. When I work with Todd, he’s the producer along with Dan Goldberg. The filmmaker is the producer, and this is no problem at all.

**John:** A while back I had an interesting run-in. I was visiting a set, and I was talking with one of the producers in Video Village. I asked him, “Oh, hey, is Universal taking this movie all by themselves or are they splitting it with somebody else?” because this being a pretty expensive movie. He’s like, “Oh, I don’t know.” He asked somebody else. I was like, “You are a producer on this movie, are you not?” He had no idea.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not cool. [laughs]

**John:** No, I feel like if you’re going to get a producer credit, you should understand who’s releasing your movie, like those basic fundamental business things. I don’t care what role you play on the movie. If you have a producer title, you should know that.

**Craig:** Well, the job has changed. Here’s the basic evolution of the feature film producer: It used to be that they ruled the world. I mean every studio had multiple producer deals. These producers were very well compensated. Studios made a ton of movies, and they desperately relied on these producers to provide them with that material — to find it, grow it, and provide it to them. That’s changed.

Studios have become far more adversarial with these producers because they feel like a lot of their deals are far too rich for what they get. There are fewer producers because they make fewer movies. The recent strike, for instance, was a chance for them to force majeure out. A ton of their producing deals they just didn’t feel were worth their time or their money.

They tend to look at producers more and more like employees of the studios opposed to independent operators. They tend to look at producers more and more as agents of budget squeezing and schedule enforcement as opposed to creative partners with the filmmakers. Some studios just don’t seem to like producers at all. They think they’re the producers.

All of this adds up. Unfortunately, for writers it adds up to a very unstable environment. A lot of times you can’t quite tell who it is you’re working for. You can’t quite tell who’s in charge. Everybody’s competing internally. It becomes particularly difficult when the producer and the studio are not working together creatively because you just start getting pulled in two different directions.

For me, personally since I began, I’ve always had a simple rule. I don’t mind notes, but I like one set of notes. I don’t want producer notes, then studio notes, then producer notes, then studio notes. It’s a way to basically ruin your movie in three months.

**John:** Yeah. Really the problem comes even before it gets to the notes stage because if you’re going in for a job… Let’s say a producer bought a book at a studio. That producer is meeting with you to talk about, “Oh, how are you going to adapt this book?” You end up having meetings with this producer to say, “Okay, this is what we’re going to focus on, and we’re doing this.”

You end up spending a lot of time working with that producer to figure out how you’re going to do it. Hopefully, you’re the only writer who is going in to talk on that thing, but maybe there’s other writers, too. Then you’re going in to talk to the studio to pitch your take on this project. The studio may say yes or may say no. Or the studio may have completely different instincts than the producer did.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** Whose instincts are you supposed to follow? The producer ultimately just wants to get the movie made, so the producer is really looking for, “Well, what does the studio want? I’m going to somehow magically read their minds, or I’ll just call them on the phone and try to get them to say what they want.”

It’s just functioning as an extra step before you’re getting in to talk to the people who are actually going to make the decisions. The producer’s not making any decisions at all. The producer’s just basically saying, “I will bring in people, and hopefully you will like somebody.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s very important to understand the economics of producing movies to understand the decisions that are made. Writers are paid for the work that they do. It doesn’t matter if the movie gets made or not, to the great chagrin of the producers. “You want me to write a script? Pay me. I’m paid. I’ll write a script.” You decide if you’re going to make it or not or if you want me to do another draft or want another writer to do a draft.

Producers are paid almost nothing until the movie gets made. This is why producing is becoming incredibly difficult. They just don’t make that many movies anymore. The opportunity to get paid has shrunk down dramatically. The stress level therefore for producers, when they’re developing material, has skyrocketed. They are desperate to get these movies made so that they can support themselves and their families. I get that.

In that desperation bad producers tend to make bad decisions. Good producers frankly tend to make good decisions because they understand that the way to get a movie made is to stop caring about getting the movie made and start caring about making a good movie. [laughs] Those are two different things.

But if you have one of those producers that is just hell-bent on getting it through the system, just put it out there, just dump it out there so I can get paid, you end up in a bad place because sooner or later everybody starts to realize that this particular space shuttle is losing heat tiles. This thing was glued together. It wasn’t [laughs] really built right. Then you perish in a ball of fire.

**John:** Yeah. Along with desperate to get this one particular movie made and make whatever compromises have to be made to get this one movie made, the producer, seeing that there are fewer movies getting made, is incentivized to step up to the plate as many times as possible. The producer has many more irons in the fire and is trying to strike them all just to make one of them actually work.

The amount of time that he or she is able to spend on one given movie is lessened. The amount of time and energy that person has to devote to getting that next step of the movie happening can be diminished as well. My frustrations with movies that haven’t gotten made or have gotten made poorly, sometimes I can pin it on the studio. But a lot of times I really can pin it back on producers not doing their job. I feel like they need to be doing their job.

Producers theoretically should have the ability to take a project out of a studio, too. If a producer came into a studio with the rights to something, to a book or to a remake of something, the studio is optioning those rights for a time. The producer may own some things. The studio may own some things. But that project should be able to travel outside of that studio if it becomes clear that this studio is not going to make this movie.

Unfortunately, producers have fifteen deals on other projects with that studio. They’re loathe to anger the studio by trying to execute turnaround, which they should have — turnaround being the process by which they can reacquire something — to take that project and travel with it to someplace that may actually make that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s really difficult for them. I mean look. Put yourself in a producer’s shoes. Let’s say you’ve worked on developing a script for three years. The writer’s been paid. You haven’t. But finally the studio is willing to make the movie. It’s just that they won’t make it unless you do A, B, and C to the movie, and A, B, and C are terrible ideas. What do you do?

You just pack it up? You go home? Or do you compromise? Do you sell out? Do you try and broker some sort of better idea? It becomes a very difficult thing for producers and becomes a difficult thing for everybody involved.

Frankly, they don’t even have the security anymore that they used to have of just what they call the housekeeping deal. Many of them don’t even get their offices and assistants paid for. It is a high-wire act to be a producer. I’m not one of those writers that vilifies producers. Good producers are fantastic — fantastic, and absolutely necessary. The way the business is structured now, I just don’t know why anybody would want to become a producer.

**John:** I don’t either. I see feature writers who segue into producing. I don’t get it because the only movie I was a producer on that I didn’t write was Prince of Persia. I found the process maddening because here’s what it is: It’s like I’m sitting with Jordan, and we’re working through drafts, it was like, “Okay, here are the controls of the airplane. Now you’re not allowed to touch the controls, but you need to tell Jordan how to fly the plane.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** It’s like, “Oh, just give me the controls. Let me fly the plane.” Jordan was awesome. I love Jordan. I can’t even imagine what that process would be working with a writer who you didn’t respect and like going into it. It ends up being a tremendous amount of time. You end up using the same parts of your brain that you would use to do real writing. It’s just that you’re not allowed to actually touch the paper.

**Craig:** I totally agree. Writers fall into this trap all the time. Every single one of them always comes back and says, “This was a huge mistake.” We like the idea of being producers because producers have typically represented power to us. We think we’ll be a producer now. We’re that guy. We have the shingle and the sign and the people working for us in the hallway at a studio and look at us and hooray.

Then you realize this is not great. You’re exactly right. I got into the business to write screenplays, not to tell other people how to write their screenplays. In fact, I would argue that writers are terrible producers because we’re writing it in our heads. We don’t have what a good producer has. They can’t write. If they could write, they probably would write.

What they can do is be a really good reader and a really good shoulder to cry on and support us and help us get where we need to go. They’re not sitting there trying to get us to write the script in their head because that’s what I do. [laughs] I’m talking to other writers.

Producing for writers to me, it’s just my opinion, is a trap. I don’t think it’s even helping the writers. I think the best thing would be for studios to be more encouraging of good producers. But unfortunately it seems like the trend is going the other way.

**John:** Yup. Alas.

**Craig:** Alas.

**John:** Alas. Well, Craig, thank you for this discussion of producers.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I look forward to calling all my producers awkwardly after this podcast runs so they think like, “Oh, you weren’t talking about me.” I’m like, “No, no, no. That’s…”

**Craig:** [laughs] “No, no, no. You’re one of the good ones.”

**John:** “You’re one of the good ones, yeah.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** If I didn’t single you out by name, I lumped you with the good ones.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’ve actually been pretty lucky. I haven’t worked for…

**John:** I’ve worked for some terrible producers.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** I have enough credits and stuff that’s not made that I can just generically say that I’ve worked for some just terrible producers. Terrible producers. Some who were far too meticulous and, “Turn a page. Fifteen notes on this page. Turn a page.” “Oh, my God. Just make the movie.” Others who you can’t get them to lift up the phone and call somebody.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’ve been lucky, I have to say. Maybe it’s just that I steer clear when I smell trouble but…

**John:** But you’ve worked for some amazing executives.

**Craig:** Aha, well. [laughs]

**John:** Maybe that makes up the whole difference for it.

**Craig:** Yes, it does.

**John:** It does. All right. Thank you, Craig. Talk to you soon.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** All right. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.