The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: [singing] My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to Episode 693 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, how do you introduce an idea to the audience? We’ll discuss setups that don’t feel like setups and, most importantly, make your audience feel smart. First, we have a lot of follow-up from listeners, some actual news, and some listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, I want to discuss The New York Times feature on the top 100 movies of the century so far.
Craig: Oh good, a list. Yay.
John: A list, but also there’s the meta around the list. I think it’s, actually, probably more interesting than the list itself.
Craig: Okay, I’m up for that.
John: You get to see different filmmakers and actors give their top 10 list, which is a performative, revealing kind of thing.
Craig: [laughs]
John: I want to discuss that. We’ll keep that as a special feature for our bonus, people who get to hear our unfiltered takes on these lists.
Craig: Where did Scary Movie 3 land?
John: It tops out on so many lists. It’s crazy.
Craig: It should be in there. Should be top seven.
John: Yes. Spoiler, I have no movies in the official big 100 list.
Craig: Well, I’m going to go ahead and presume I don’t either. [chuckles]
John: You don’t, you don’t. Perhaps we can make some more movies with all the new California tax credit money coming.
News this week that California legislators have voted to more than double the state’s film and television tax credit program and raising the cap to $750 million from $330 million. Basically, a proposed 35% tax credit, which is up from 25%. Most importantly, there’s more money available there to be spending on productions that are shot and posted here in California.
Craig: Yes. Let’s look at this as good news, bad news. Good news, more.
John: More.
Craig: Certainly, double sounds like a lot. Bad news, it is not a lot. It is still not what I would call a competitive program with basically anywhere else where Hollywood goes. Comparing it to the tax credit programs in Canada or Georgia, New Mexico, Louisiana, even New York, UK, it’s just not competitive with those, but it is less non-competitive than it used to be, right? It’s a good trend.
The hope is that the government can watch this work and go, “Hey, we’re not losing money on this. This isn’t a disaster. In fact, we could afford to be more aggressive later.” If this begins a trend, that’s great. The other interesting factor for this legislation, I believe, is that it limits the tax credit to a certain budget. A show can’t come in that costs $300 million and gobble up $300 million at this thing.
John: How these tax credits are structured is there are certain categories and budget levels of which the funds are tiered towards. Smaller movies and very small movies can get smaller amounts, but you’re right that one thing can’t take up all the money.
Craig: Right, which sounds good, but here’s the bad news part. The bad news part is that large productions tend to push way more into the economy, and they provide much more stability. For instance, if you have a show like, let’s say, Fallout, Fallout’s a big show. They spend a lot of money. They also take a lot of time to shoot. There will be more stability, more employees for a longer amount of time.
Those shows tend to also have multiple seasons, which means there is some ability for crew to say, “Hey, I now have a life where I work on this show, which will work steadily for the next X amount of years.” If the tax credit is chopped up among a lot of one shot things, you lose that sense of stability, because the point of this all is, “Hey, how do we provide a living to people, an actual manageable living?”
John: Well, it’s important to note that these tax credits are about jobs. They’re specifically about reimbursing money spent on people’s employment, people’s salaries for the work that they’re doing. That’s what you’re trying to base it on. Your point is well-taken that you’re spending a lot more of those on these big productions. That goes on longer. That has a bigger effect. I just say, the counterpoint is that by spreading around to smaller productions, too, you’re enabling a wider number of people to get these things. You may be able to incentivize production in places that don’t otherwise get it that aren’t big production hubs. There’s reasons also to be providing tax credits for smaller things.
Craig: Absolutely. Everything’s a choice. When you are dealing with scarcity, you have to make a choice. These other places that I mentioned don’t really have much in the way of scarcity. They don’t really have effective caps like this. If you want to make a small movie in Alberta or if you want to make a large television show in Alberta, you’re both getting it. You’re both getting the benefit of this.
For California, the calculus is we’d like to hire more individual people as opposed to hiring fewer individual people more consistently. That’s the trade-off you have when you aren’t going for large– Large television productions will pump the most money into a system in the most reliable and lengthy way. We don’t have that yet, but I think this is a good sign that something is happening.
If we can hopefully prove that this isn’t some sort of problem and people can get over the fact that the tax credits go right back to these massive corporations, then perhaps California will start to edge its way towards competitive because California has an inherent edge, which is this is where people live. There are costs associated with shooting elsewhere. A promising thing, this is not ideal, but we don’t need ideal right now. We just needed something.
John: Absolutely. The other factor is that with this kind of tax credit, actors and directors and producers and other folks involved in the movie can say, “No, no, I want to shoot in California,” and there’s math that can actually make it more sense to shoot in California. It ultimately come down to more individual decision-makers about the choice to shoot in California than just it is impossible budgetarily to shoot here.
Craig: Yes. People have been working on this lottery system where, if you’re lucky enough, you get what that limited tax credit program was. Our friend, Derek, who makes the new show Countdown on Amazon Prime, they won the lottery. They were able to shoot here in California. I went to go see the first episode at their premiere. You get up there in front of people and you say, “Oh, I would like to thank blah-blah-blah,” and everyone applauds, “Yay.” Derek said, “I’m very proud of the fact that we’re able to shoot this show entirely here in Los Angeles.”
The cheer from that crowd, it was like a cheer of like, “Finally.” It made me sad in a way that that was so special. It shouldn’t be special. It should be the norm. Let’s see how we do.
John: Yes. While we’re talking about numbers, we can talk about the WGA annual report. Each year, the Writers Guild of America West publishes an annual report, which is basically all their financials, but also reports on how the membership is doing and basically what number of writers reported earnings, what the total earnings were, differences between screen, which is basically television and streaming, versus theatrical. We’ve talked about these over the entire course of the Scriptnotes podcast. Craig, what are you seeing here as you’re looking through these numbers? We’ll put a link in the show notes to the PDF.
Craig: Well, these reports have a lot of stuff going on, but we tend to look at two things when we do this, you and I. One is, how many people are working? The other is, how much money are we making for the writing we do and for the residuals that we are all collectively receiving? Let’s talk about the number of writers working. It’s not great. It’s bad.
John: 5,228 writers reported earnings in 2024. Those numbers will go up a little bit just with late reporting, but it’s down 9.4% for the previous year. It’s really down from the high, which is 6,910, which was back in 2022.
Craig: Yes, the thing that’s really frightening to me is that it’s down. You’re absolutely right that these numbers from the prior year will always be a bit compressed because they don’t have all the data in yet, but it should be way, way up at this point, even so, from prior year, because the prior year was impacted obviously by the strike. If you just look at 2019, 6,833 writers reported earnings. In 2024, we’re looking at 5,228. That’s bad. That’s more than 1,000.
John: It’s a big drop. Yet, Craig, if we were to roll back even earlier before, we’re at the top 2015, 2016. I don’t have those numbers in front of me, but you and I both know that the membership used to be smaller. The number of writers in the guild grew with the rise of streaming. With the rise of streaming series, there were more jobs than there ever have been before. I think what we’re really looking here is a retrenchment in the number of series shot. That’s really what it comes down to is there’s less development. There’s less things being shot. There’s fewer writers being hired because there are fewer shows. There was a huge growth with the growth of streaming that appears to be pulling back.
Craig: Yes, we know for sure that there was retraction in the amount of shows. What we don’t quite yet know is how we’re doing in terms of the average number of people employed per show. Obviously, that was something that was important during the strike to the Writers Guild to create minimum room sizes, which they did. Minimum room sizes are minimums. Those minimum room sizes were smaller than, say, what I think the Writers Guild would hope would be an ideal room size.
John: What was a classically-sized room.
Craig: Right.
John: There are rooms like The Simpsons, which seem to have 30 writers in them. The overall size of rooms has gone down noticeably.
Craig: Yes, I guess the point is, regardless of why, if people are walking around out there going, “It is tough out here,” the answer is yes. Factually, numerically, there are fewer jobs.
John: The corollary to this is the actual amount of earnings has gone up. The earnings were up 12.7% from last year. There are fewer writers working, but those writers who are working appear to be bringing in more money. That is not entirely unexpected. If the people who are not working are the people who were earning the least, and people who are working now are earning significantly above scale, that would be one reason to expect that this number did increase.
Craig: Yes, it does look like the percentage over the prior year, of course, is up because, again, strike. Let’s just say again, going back to 2019, there are about 1,600 fewer writers. The total earnings, only $300 million less. I can’t do the per-writer number here quickly, but it looks like it’s higher, yes.
John: I think the changes you would see here is during the real boom time of streaming, there were a lot more writers working in streaming who are working probably at scale in those lower-level positions. With fewer shows happening, with fewer writers being hired at those levels, the actual amount per writer has gone up. That would make sense.
Craig: Yes. It doesn’t surprise me a ton because so much of our earnings is pegged to scale because so much in television–
John: Especially in television.
Craig: Yes. If you have more and more people who are working as writer/producers in television, which has become far more common as the rooms have shrunk down, so much of the writer income will be pegged to just minimums because it’s the producer income that’s flexible. That will go up by roughly 3% across every three years. I think it is something like that. That’s not super surprising to me. I think we probably are in a place that’s right now in terms of the amount of writers working that is similar to what it was in the earlier parts of the 2010s.
That’s my gut. Let’s also break it out for a moment in terms of screen and television because our poor screenwriters is always, “Let’s start with feature writing,” which has been hammered over time. It’s not terrible news. We look like we’re starting to recover here. 2024, about 1,900 writers working in features compared to 2019, 2,350. Again, that 1,900 is a little low. I would imagine it’ll end up in the low 2000s, which means it’s not that far off actually.
John: We show as being down 3%, but that 3% could become 0% when, actually, the late reporting comes in. The dollars are up already 14.2% versus the previous year.
Craig: Yes, but, again, okay, here’s the problem with the previous year. Previous year is a strike year, right? Everything looks great compared to 2023.
John: Very good, so we have to compare it to–
Craig: Yes.
John: If you jump back several years, it’s just lower than it was.
Craig: Yes, it’s not great. I think the per-writer amount is down. It looks like it’s down to me significantly, which-
John: -which honestly matches my anecdotal experience just talking to people, talking to reps. It’s harder to make the big deals. It’s harder to bump people’s quotes.
Craig: Yes, and this is an area where you will see the market reflected in total earnings as opposed to television because, in television, the market does put a lot of flexible money in producing fees. In screen, it doesn’t. Screen is generally an overscaled thing. The market is reflected in these numbers, and it doesn’t look great. It does look down, but it’s not horrifying.
It’s not what it was five years ago. Just not as good. In television, yes, it’s weird. It’s like the money actually per writer is doing fine. It’s just the amount of writers has plummeted. That’s where the real plummeting has occurred. In 2019, 5,581 writers in television. In 2024, 4,117. Let’s call it even 4,500 by the time the year ends. That’s a thousand fewer. That’s a lot.
John: Let’s quickly touch on residuals. Residuals are, of course, all the monies that writers get paid for their work when it’s reused off of not its original airing of things or not its original screening, but down the road. It used to be DVD money and other things like that. Those numbers have increased. The five-year change is 19.3% up total residuals. We can put in the chart that shows TV residuals versus theatrical residuals.
They’re both up. In any individual category like DVD or network stuff, those things have fallen off a cliff over the last 10 years. What we now call new media, which is streaming, which is everything else, which is all the things that the guild had to fight for over these years to increase those rates, those have made up the difference. Those are the bulk of what the residuals are that writers are getting paid.
Craig: Yes, so there are some good news in here. They have all these categories, and they’ll show you the percent changes for all of them. Again, skip the 2023 to 2024. Just go 2019 to 2024. All these numbers look either horrible or great, but they’re irrelevant in terms of percent. It’s really the percentage of what. What we see, the most important two are new media reuse for SVOD and new media reuse for non-SVOD, meaning, okay, streaming video on demand, and I guess ad-supported or whatever. I don’t know what else.
John: It’s also direct buys through iTunes, through Prime Video, and such.
Craig: Those things are up dramatically. That’s where the bulk of our residual income comes from, by far. Those numbers are good. The trend there is great.
John: Last year, writers brought in $562 million in residuals. That’s great. That’s money going to individual writers. It’s important to understand that in the Writers Guild, those residuals go directly to the writer. It doesn’t go into any big slush fund for the guild itself. Those monies are paid out to individual writers. Writers pay percentage fees back to the guild, but the overall pool goes to those writers. Those are crucial quarterly checks that help smooth out the ups and downs of the business.
Craig: Right. The fear that those would be eliminated, I think the guild, through its efforts and through the efforts of the membership, particularly this last strike, is going to help because of the way it did lock in some success-based residuals for streaming. It looks like we’re going to be okay on that front. Theatrical residuals. For screenwriters, it’s doing quite well, I would say, overall. Just flat-out numbers look much better. These are spread over, not the writers that we just described as working. These are spread over all writers who got anything ever.
John: Got a credit on a teleplay, on a screenplay, yes.
Craig: In 1998. It’s for everything. The residual picture looks pretty healthy. I think the big challenge for the Writers Guild is going to be employment. That’s what it’s going to be because, ultimately, it’s the employment now that drives residuals later.
John: It’s also crucial to understand that the Writers Guild represents the writers who are working, but it does not get writers jobs. The actual frustrating experience of not being able to land a job because there’s not a show to be made is not a thing that the guild directly controls, or we will lose members who will time out of their eligibility to be active members of the guild because they won’t have worked for a while. That’s a thing that’s just going to happen.
Craig: Yes, absolutely. There’s a number in here that is such a fascinating one. Then I think we probably covered the financial thing. They do a little review of the legal department. What they do is they break out the various kinds of cases that the legal department brings against the companies. Cases for initial compensation or for pension and health, or they screwed up the credits, whatever it may be. They list the amount of monies that they’ve collected.
I think the trend is that the legal department is seemingly getting a bit more aggressive because the compensation they’re collecting is more, but there’s one number that I would love to find out what the deal is. Let’s just look at residuals. In 2018, they collected $6.5 million in penalties for residuals that the companies didn’t pay. Next year was $2.3 million. Next year was $946,000. The next year was $12 million. 2023, it was $2 million. 2024 is $9 million.
It’s always between nothing and $10 million. In 2022, they collected $70 million in residuals penalties. I want to know what that is. Was that one massive case against Netflix or something?
John: If I’m remembering correctly, it could have been the Netflix case, or, basically, the case of made-for-streaming movies, and what happens with a made-for-streaming movie and what basis they have to be paid out on. I suspect that is what you’re looking at. It’s really a judgment.
Craig: It’s massive.
John: Yes.
Craig: Anyway, it looks like the legal department is being pretty aggressive, which is great.
John: It’s what you want.
Craig: Yes, they have a ton of open cases, which sometimes means they’re just not mulching through cases. In this, based on what I’m looking at here, it looks like there’s a ton of open cases because they keep opening more cases.
John: Yes, that’s what you want.
Craig: Which is good.
John: Money well spent is getting writers paid.
Craig: Yes.
John: All right, let us talk about some follow-up here. First off, we have a correction. Drew, help us out. On Episode 689, we were talking about postmodernism, and it’s not a surprise that we may have said something wrong.
Drew Marquardt: Marion writes, “I want to write to say that the Disney corporate headquarters was designed by Michael Graves, not Robert Venturi, and the product line for Target was also designed by Graves. I’m going to intentionally avoid discussing whether or not the building’s terrible, but I must confess that I’m an architect, and I own several of the Michael Graves pieces from Target.”
Craig: Okay, so we thought it was Robert Venturi. Michael Graves is a very famous architect. The Disney corporate headquarters is a bad building.
John: Yes.
[laughter]
John: Both things can be true, yes.
Craig: I will confess that when you look at the–
John: I love looking at it.
Craig: It’s incredible. From the outside, that building is a masterpiece. If you have to actually work in it or even just go to a meeting in it, horrible.
John: The building causes physical pain upon entering.
Craig: It is the most startling misuse of space, but outside, it looks great.
John: Yes, and so another reminder that Craig and I can make mistakes even without ChatGPT. We can just make mistakes out of our own brain.
Craig: Isn’t that amazing?
John: It really is. We have some follow-up about AI video and VFX because we’ve talked in Episode 689, how visual effects is going to be greatly impacted by AI, just because obviously. We have feedback from Lee in Montreal.
Craig: Okay.
Drew: “I’m speaking as someone who has worked in VFX for 30 years at Weta, MPC, Rhythm & Hues, Sony Imageworks, Cinesite, and DNEG. What has been killing VFX in the past couple of years has been a lack of greenlit projects, not generative AI. We’ve lost thousands of jobs. Many of whom are already leaving the industry before AI will have a real impact. Generative AI, as we see on social media, isn’t yet good enough to meet the exacting standards of Hollywood clients. My question for you as showrunners and directors is, as generative AI gets more powerful, would you want to hire a couple of people directly as part of your production team to sit in a corner and try to generate all of your project’s VFX content using generative AI, or would you still hire a VFX supervisor and proven vendors to execute your brief?”
Craig: All right.
John: Craig, so you’re hiring people more directly than I am, but I think it’s a real question of like, how much stuff do you feel like you might take internally to the team versus your classic way of working with vendors? What are you thinking?
Craig: Well, first of all, Lee, my heart goes out to you because you’ve worked at two companies that have imploded. MPC and Rhythm & Hues. Because of The Last of Us, we do a ton of work with Weta and DNEG. Yes, there has been an interesting shift in the business where there was– I would say in 2020, 2021, the world was actually terrified that there weren’t enough VFX artists out there for the amount of work that had been greenlit, and then there was this massive retraction.
The VFX industry hires people in waves. It’s almost like large corporate farming interests that bring people in for harvests and then lay them off. There’s a lot of like, “You’re hired,” “You’re laid off.” There’s not a lot of good, consistent work there, and it is a mess. That said, generative AI to me is the answer to nothing. I rely heavily on my VFX supervisor, Alex Wang, and our proven vendors, including Weta and DNEG. The only thing that we do in-house is a small amount of work that is still regular VFX work.
We’ll have an in-house group that handles traditional VFX work, not through AI, but that is of very simple nature. Doing split screens or some very simple comp work or beauty fixes where there’s a blemish that you want to just get rid of, or things like that that aren’t a bloater running through the snow, it makes sense to actually have an in-house team that handles some of that stuff. The idea that we would have anybody sitting there using generative AI to make creative choices or even begin creative thinking is not something I have on my show, and it will not be.
John: Yes, I think this point you’re making about, there’s stuff that used to be visual effects, but it got pulled back into editorial, that it’s things you’re doing much closer to the source, because you can. That makes sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the tools that come out of generative AI, we talked before about sound fixes, there’ll be things like beauty fixes.
There’ll be some things, which I suspect over the course of the next few years, will get pulled closer to the editorial flow rather than the visual effects flow. That makes sense. I do wonder if there are going to be some movies and some shows for which the visual effects and the pre-visualization, all of that process gets to be much blurrier. Almost in the way that animation goes from storyboarding to things much more quickly.
I suspect that we’ll see some new workflows and some models for this kind of stuff. I agree with Craig, and what we’ve always stressed with these tools, is that you want to make sure that the person who’s using these technologies is the person whose job it is actually to do, to create the final thing. Whatever these technologies in generative AI can create, you want the person who is the visual effects supervisor, the visual effects artist, to be using them because that’s a creative artistic thing they’re doing. It’s not just done by some random person sitting over there at a desk.
Craig: [chuckles] Yes, there is no doubt, AI that is being used inside of tasks. A very simple visual effect thing to do is a comp. I have a guy. He’s standing in front of a green screen. The wind is moving, so his hair is blowing around. Now, we have a comp that goes behind him. Somebody has to deal with all the hair in front of the green screen, and that may be stuff that, internally, they’re using AI to do.
It is not creative work. It is just rote work. Highlight and roto every single piece of hair. If AI can do that more quickly than somebody with a tablet, yes, of course, that’s going to happen just like– I don’t necessarily think of the filters in Photoshop as AI, even though, in a sense, they are. They’re algorithms, really, very fancy algorithms. The artistry, no. You’re right. There is a lot of connection now.
Our editors work right next to the visual effects team while we’re shooting up in Canada in a way that the visual effects department now works very closely with the art department. Production design and visual effects are now– I think of them as one big group because there’s such a blending that has occurred. We also integrate VFX with the makeup department. It’s touching everything.
It’s funny, Lee. We do the opposite of what you’re wondering about. Rather than having generative AI kicking out some concepts or things, we use illustrators like actual artists, like illustrative artists, to start, the most human possible way to start, because I find that where you start will tend to be where you start. If you start with generative AI, the path to the end begins with crap. I wish you the best, Lee. I hope you’re doing okay out there. It sounds like, based on the description, that you are indeed still doing okay. Hang in there. We treasure the work that you do.
John: All right. Also in Episode 689, we talked about verticals, which are those stories for your phone, its video, lots of little chapters.
Craig: Oh yes.
John: I was sure that we’d have somebody in our listenership who’s written for these. Risky Business wrote in because he has written for verticals.
Drew: Risky Business writes, “I spent six months writing for ReelShorts. As a writer, it was terrible.”
Craig: What?
Drew: “The first 10 chapters were poured over with repeated rewrites until all the joy was taken out of them. Pretty much, they didn’t care. The rest of the story had little oversight as they didn’t expect people to watch. The CEO repeatedly criticized the writers in company-wide messages while giving 100% of the credit for success to the editors, all while paying $22 an hour with no work orders between feedback cycles and a constant, ‘Your contract can be canceled at any time,’ hanging over your head, and expectation that you’d be immediately available the second they had feedback, which sometimes took over a week to receive.”
“It ended up being less than minimum wage to basically hold all the blame for a possible failure poured on you from the entire company. Creative decisions were made entirely by algorithms based on what was selling, the whole prediction model that Hollywood is always trying to master contracted by the short production schedule. I’ve not had the pleasure of joining any union, but the success of ReelShorts definitely scares me. If the model succeeds, AI will definitely be writing the scripts, and the CEO can have his dreams of never having to rely on a writer’s creativity again.”
John: Yes, so what Risky is describing really feels like the fears you have when you talk to folks who’ve written at Netflix. The softer Netflix version is they’ll tell you like, “Our data shows that people don’t like to see cats in the first three minutes of a show,” or they’ll have some specific things like, “Okay, we can’t do that.” Fine, whatever, but the feedback mechanism is so much longer there.
With something like ReelShorts, all they’re trying to get you to do is to watch through enough episodes that you’ll hit the buy button and then watch the rest of it. The rest of it doesn’t have to be good because they don’t really care. As long as you hit that buy button, you’ve stayed on board. That is just toxic to storytelling. It’s the opposite of anything you would want to do, and yet writers are being paid to do it.
Craig: Based on this and based on what you just said, my prediction is that this thing implodes because it feels like the sort of thing that will be carried briefly by some TikTok wave or sense of novelty, and then everybody will catch on. Once you pay your subscription, it’s crap, and it doesn’t matter. They’ll get bored, and they’ll move on. Regardless, right now, they exist. They sound like a sweatshop.
Let’s just say that this sounds horrible. I don’t really see what the point is of working there because you’re not writing. Just to be clear, sometimes people will bait hooks with the worm of at least you’re writing. This is not writing. It seems like writing, but it’s not. If it is paying, as Risky Business says here, $22 an hour and eventually less than minimum wage because of the overtime that gets baked in there, go work somewhere else.
Work at Starbucks and write something you care about and love. There’s nothing here. There’s neither a ladder for promotion. There is not the ability to get better as a writer. There’s not the ability to make relationships that are going to serve you throughout your career. There’s no value here to you as a writer, none. I would say that I would not advise anyone to work there.
John: If people think we’re being a little unfair to this one company, I will say, we’ll put a link in the show notes to a Time magazine interview with Joey Jia, who is the CEO there. One of the questions they ask is, “Who writes the content on ReelShort? There are reports that some of the content sounds like they’ve been written by AI.” The answer is, “If AI could write the content and make money right away, I would do everything with AI.” Great. Well, he’s not hiding the ball there.
Craig: Yes, no, but then he says, “No, it’s our in-house editors.” This is backing up our friend who’s writing in where the editors get all the credit. We have an in-house editor, also an in-house screenwriting team. People say, “Oh, your content is really like AI. I disagree.” Well, it doesn’t really matter, as far as I’m concerned, what people think the content is. All that I care about is the health, security, and quality of life for professional writers in our business. I don’t see any reason to work at this place. If they were paying $50 an hour, we’d have to have a discussion.
John: Try to?
Craig: No, just go work at Starbucks.
John: Yes, agreed. All right, let’s transition from that dystopian view to– This last week, I got to have the utopian version of that, which is I was an advisor for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.
Craig: Great.
John: For 25 years, I’ve now worked at the Screenwriters Lab, which is crazy. For folks who don’t know what that is, they bring in filmmakers who are working on their next feature. In the summer labs, they will have already shot two of the scenes from their things, just up on a mountain with random actors, just to test stuff out. Then there’s a screenwriting lab that’s just one week afterwards, which we talk through about what they’ve learned, where they’re at with their script. We give them specific feedback.
I describe it as being like, “We are your friend with a pickup truck who shows up to help you move from where you were to your new place. We’re not going to tell you how to do stuff, but we’re there to help you carry your couch.” One of the best things about this process is that you get to talk to other really smart screenwriters who are talking about the projects that they’re working on with their advisees. Some quotes I wrote down. Robin Swicord says, “Act 1 is the suitcase you pack for the journey,” which just feels so smart and right.
Craig: That’s true.
John: I love that. Stephen Gaghan was talking about how he likes to do a transition pass. After finishing a draft, he’ll set it aside for a second and go back and just look at all the transitions, like transitions from scene to scene, but really from idea to idea, even within scenes, and just really focus on how you’re moving from this place to that place. It’s such a smart idea. I’ve never thought to actually just spend one pass through just looking at the transitions.
Craig: Well, I love that because we talk about transitions all the time. That’s the thing that separates scripts that turn into things that feel like not smooth unities, and then the ones that do. So far, Robin and Stephen are A+.
John: Absolutely. Liz Hannah, who’s been on the show several times out of joy, one of the things she likes to do is to actually literally retype the script. She’ll have it open in one window, have a clean document, and actually retype the whole thing. She gets it back in her fingers. Obviously, you’re changing things along the way. That is a kind of thing I would not do, but I really appreciate the instinct behind that. That feels, I don’t know, just a way to get it back into your bones.
Craig: That’s one of those classic bits of advice that is either going to be 100% useful or 0% useful, depending on the person, because if it works for you, oh, my God, it’s probably a revelation.
John: Yes.
Craig: If it doesn’t, well, then you tried it once, and you don’t have to do it again. [chuckles]
John: Absolutely. The thing I also really enjoy about the labs is, as an advisor, I’m looking at three different projects. These were three very different projects. In two of the projects, I noticed a thing that we needed to do. It never really occurred to me before. In both projects, we got to a place where we needed the characters to confront specific dramatic questions in the third act, concepts, but there was no real good way to introduce them there at that moment.
We needed to set them up earlier, but it could feel really forced. It was really the conversation about, how do we introduce ideas so that they’re available to the audience when we get there later on so that we put them into the world of the movie? It’s not exposition exactly. It’s not where we’re saying like, “Oh, to launch the missile, you have to turn these two keys.”
It’s more abstract. It’s how you introduce an idea rather than a fact, an idea like, what does it even mean to own land, or can you ever trust someone who’s betrayed you? You’re priming the audience for those questions. I just want to spend a few minutes, Craig, talking about this need. It’s a thing I’ve found myself doing all the time but never really being aware that I was doing it.
Craig: Sure, and this is one of the craftier bits of our jobs. It is calculated. This is palming something as a magician.
John: It’s magic trick.
Craig: Yes, absolutely. We could go on and on about why it’s more satisfying, but it doesn’t matter. We just know it is more satisfying if something emerges in the third act that feels like, “Oh, it has been there the whole time. We just missed it as characters.” Now, we see it as opposed to just realizing it then late.
John: One of the projects, I’m talking in very vague terms here, but it’s set present day, but hinges on something that happened in that region during World War II. If that were to come up just out of the blue in the third act, it’s going to feel weird and forced. If we bring it up randomly in Act 1, it’s going to feel like a setup. You’re going to feel the setup-ness on it. You’re looking for ways. You can introduce the notion of World War II, the notion of the history here without feeling like, “Okay, this has the objective of doing this thing.”
The answers for that is you’re always looking at, what is the present-tense problem? What is the present-tense need of the scene that brings up this idea so it feels natural to the moment that you’re in and, of course, seeds us for later on, that it feels like, “Oh, of course, the characters are having this discussion. Of course, this thing is being shown here,” or the scene that you’re currently in, and the audience has no idea that’s going to pay off later on?
Craig: Yes, there are two ways of going about this, and I strongly prefer one of them. One way is to introduce the idea in a manner that is not objectionable. An objectionable way is somebody goes, “By the way, you know what it is interesting that right here, which was the site of a World War II battle 30 years ago, happens to be the place where–” and then you go, “Okay.” Well, that is objectionable. A non-objectionable way would be like, they walk by and they see a sign like, “This place was a World War I site. This was a thing. This is World War II.” That’s interesting, and it’s not objectionable because it–
John: Like, “What happened to that church?” “Oh, it was this battle in World War II.”
Craig: Not objectionable. That’s one method, not objectionable. I strongly prefer the other method, which is essential, that when you are introducing this, it is the point of a moment, such that you believe it’s over. There is information here that I need you to know for a point right now that matters, that has nothing to do with why it’s going to be relevant later, because then you don’t feel at all like it’s superfluous. The ultimate trick to me is to make people believe that you are not palming a coin. You are actually holding a coin in your hand for a reason. Then later, it’s revealed, oh, also this.
John: Some examples from movies that might be helpful here. In Finding Nemo, Dory has a joke early on about, “Oh, I speak whale.” It just feels like that’s the thing that Dory would say. It’s a funny joke in the moment, but then later on, she actually does speak whale to a whale. It’s like, “Oh, I did not think that was a setup.” It’s just so much more rewarding because they got it in there without it feeling like a setup at the time. Or in A Quiet Place, the daughter’s cochlear implant is malfunctioning. It feels like you know why they’re doing that. It’s like, “Oh, that’s going to become a problem for this character.” You don’t feel like, oh, that’s actually going to be a solution to the things down the road.
Craig: That feels essential to me. I need you to understand that this person goes through a problem. It is a problem right now we have to solve. You will, in your human story eating mind, go, “Oh, this was important for me to understand a character, what their challenges are, what they want and need, how they relate to their parents, what they need from their parents.” There is meat there. It mattered. That’s better than what I would call the non-objectionable.
John: Absolutely. There was a bottle thought here. It’s like, “Oh, why are you telling me this?” Some of what we’re talking about has obvious overlap with what we’ve talked about before in terms of exposition. I know this specifically because I was looking through the exposition chapter in Scriptnotes book. In terms of sometimes you’re direct, sometimes you’re indirect. I want to make sure we’re also thinking about, sometimes I just need to prime the audience for a concept, or just the notion of a thing that could happen within the course of this movie.
Sometimes it’s bringing up an analogous situation. In one of my scripts, it ultimately hinges on trust. I have one of my characters listening to a call-in radio show. They’re talking about this husband’s betrayed her, and I can’t ever forgive that. Just setting up the idea of trust as being a thematic element is natural to do in a way that is going to pay off later on, but it doesn’t feel like it’s hitting you over the head in the moment.
Craig: It’s got to have its own reason to live there. If it has its own reason to live, no one will think, “Oh, that’s weird that they mentioned that. I wonder if it’ll come up later.” We’re all very good at picking that thing out. If it has its own reason to exist, you’ve solved the problem. Sometimes I think people are so worried about hiding it that they contort themselves into pretzels to make something blend in so casually that it’s almost not a thing at all. Unnecessary and usually sweatier than just confronting it head-on and making it be a thing that matters right now.
John: Absolutely. All right. Let’s get to a couple of listener questions. Drew, start us off.
Drew: Sarah writes, “I’m a screenwriter from the Netherlands whose secret side ambition is to someday direct music videos. After watching the excellent new music video for Sabrina Carpenter’s Manchild, however, I’m at a loss. How would you even start communicating the idea for a project like that? As a screenwriter, I just cannot imagine how this would look on the page. At the same time, it seems impossible to pull this off without a script. I know directing music videos is an incredibly specific skill on its own, but I’m very curious what your thoughts would be. Also, what are some of your favorite music videos?”
John: All right. Drew, it’s so interesting that the listener wrote in with this question because you would actually put this music video on the slack, because you’re like, “Wait, is this AI?” I was like, “I don’t think it’s AI. I think it’s just a lot of hard work.” Then we looked back through the behind-the-scenes of these directors working on stuff. It’s like, “Oh, no, they just work really hard.” There’s just a lot of setups and a lot of visual effects. It is a very good video.
Sarah, I’m going to challenge your question. Most of these music videos do not have a script the way that Craig and I are doing scripts. They tend to have documents that lay out the overall vision for something. It might be a one-page brief of what this is, what the concept is, but then they’re going to have a lot of storyboards, setups, a listing of things for these are the moments that we’re shooting that become the production plan for everybody else, the equivalent of the script that they would use for breakdown, for scheduling, for wardrobe. I would be shocked if there’s anything that looks like a script for this music video.
Craig: Definitely. I think, Sarah, this is one of those deals where it’s a very what I call, directorish thing. No one comes in with a screenplay. In fact, I imagine that there never was anything like that here. This feels so much like somebody comes in with the mood board and crazy pictures of wacky cars on the road. What if you cut one in half and it’s so surreal and da, da, da, and the palettes will be this and this and we’ll do these colors.
Then you start to tell this little story that you imagine that you could just describe, like basically she’s hitchhiking, going from one crazy place to another, and blah, blah, blah.
Then you start storyboarding. I don’t see why you would need a screenplay for this. It feels very storyboardy. The way they shoot these things, I would imagine, is to get lots and lots of little mini movies that they then cut together to make 12 movies that seem like they’re going on all at the same time, and then edit it all together. The thing about a music video like this is there is no real coherent structure to it. The structure is the song. The song provides the structure.
John: Absolutely. The music can exist in this liminal dream state. It doesn’t have to make narrative sense. That’s one of the joys of it. You also asked our favorite music videos. We had Daniels on, so I would say Turn Down for What is an incredible music video.
Craig: So good.
John: I would say David Fincher’s Express Yourself by Madonna is incredible in terms of it actually does have a narrative storytelling drive. It’s inspired by First Land’s Metropolis. It is just really well done and does tell a story. It does all the music video things it needs to do so well. That’s a highlight for me. Craig, any other ones that jump out for you?
Craig: There have been so many great ones. Some of them do decide, “Hey, what we’re going to do is we’re going to tell a story that isn’t really reflected in the lyrics of the song, but we’re going to pick something else.” Take On Me is one of the great videos of all time by A-ha. They really told a story based on the movie Altered States. That’s what they did. They said, “What if we did an Altered States?” The idea was it was a man that lives in comics who’s trying to become real, all the way to him slamming back and forth against the walls, just like William Hurt. Great.
A lot of music videos are about showing awesome visuals that have nothing to do with the lyrics whatsoever. If I looked at the lyrics for Manchild, I don’t know if I’m going to see anything there– I’m actually looking at them right now, that would indicate this is what you would do. There’s nothing in here that implies we should be on the road going through a series of hitchhiking moments with crazy visual effects. They’re just letting the structure of the song give you structure, knowing full well, the entire thing is going to be over in, what, three minutes or so. Just delight me with visuals that maybe progressively get crazier, a little bit of an ironic ending, and you’re done.
John: The one other one which I’ll put in the show notes is Riz Ahmed’s The Long Goodbye, which I’m looking up now, it’s directed by Aneil Karia. When it starts, it’s so slice of life. It’s just a short film, basically, that eventually the song starts, and it gets into a thing. It’s a situation where I can imagine there probably was some scripting there because there’s a lot of characters. The verisimilitude of just the space that they’re in and the conversations feels like it could be scripted before it gets to the actual big events.
I don’t want to say much more. It’s 11 minutes. It’s worth watching it. I think it got a–
Craig: It won an Oscar.
John: Did it win the Oscar in 2022?
Craig: I think it did.
John: It’s remarkable. I’d point that out as another example of the music video that probably had something resembling a script at some point, but that’s more the exception rather than the rule.
Craig: You can do basically anything you want. That was a short film. It was 11 minutes long. You could do a Phil Collins music video for Billy, Don’t You Lose My Number I think it was called, where the whole music video was music video directors pitching him ideas for the music video for that song, and then them doing parodies of other music videos. You can do whatever you want. [chuckles] Everything from story to not.
John: I celebrate what has been made possible by the music video because yes, we had commercials before that, but I think just we’ve had a lot of great directors come out of music videos, but also just a lot of cool art and a lot of cool just ways of thinking about visual storytelling that have come out of music videos.
Craig: Absolutely. Music videos and commercials are both interesting places where new things are invented, or things that are subcultural get pulled up into culture. Madonna very famously pulled Vogue up out of the subculture.
Drew: Let’s do one last question here, one from anonymous. “I’ve been working in the legal field for over 10 years, and a couple years ago put my undergrad English degree to use and started screenwriting. My two features have had great feedback, including from a friend who’s a professional screenwriter with several credits. That friend is encouraging me to set up meetings in LA with agents and managers and has made recommendations on who to reach out to.
Here’s the problem. In this world, with this president, at this time, should I, as a transgender person, be open about my identity? I know that being trans has at times limited opportunity as a lawyer, but that hasn’t stopped me. Just altered my trajectory a little. One script I wrote features a trans protagonist, and my other screenplays have strong queer themes. Now I’m wondering if an agency or studio would view a trans writer as a liability they would be unwilling to take on during this administration. Happy Pride, and I hope that those in the generation behind me won’t have to worry like this.”
John: Happy Pride, anonymous. Obviously, I’ve been out my entire career. Easier for a gay man to be out. Being out as a cisgendered gay person is a different lived experience than being a trans person. Everything just means a different thing for me and for your experience. I think the fact that you are writing material with trans characters is going to naturally raise the question of whether you have the lived experience to be writing these things and be reflecting the things on the page. My instinct is you’re probably going to want to be open about your identity from the start. That’s just my first blush instinct, correct? Craig, what are you feeling?
Craig: I come at this just from a purely analytical point of view. I think about the business and the way people function here, so I’ll be very cold and calculating. In my cold and calculating way, I think you’re absolutely right, John, that it is a plus if people are considering a feature script that is about a trans person, if the trans person is centered in that story. Or, as you point out anonymous, you have screenplays with other strong queer themes. The first question they’re going to ask is “Who are you?”
That’s not to say that they might go, “Oh, you’re not trans? Then screw you. You can’t do this.” It’ll be considered a strong plus. I think the challenge you have is not whether or not being out as a trans person is going to impact you. I don’t believe it will. If it impacts you, it’ll impact you positively, I think, given your scripts. The challenge you’re going to have is that the interest in that kind of story right now has been reduced dramatically because these wonderful corporations, no matter how progressive they pretend to be, are always with their finger in the air, checking the wind direction.
Right now, I don’t think there’s a big push in Hollywood to be telling trans stories or queer stories. I think that there’s still some, but I think it’s been reduced. I think that there’s a natural reactivity to what they detect is some sort of backlash trend. That would be a bit of a challenge. Remember, the wheel of things turns slowly. You, as a producer, may say, “With the script I have right now, probably not a great time to walk over there into the chairman’s office and say, ‘Can I have $20 million to make this movie about a trans person?” In five years, they may be cool with it again, and it takes time for stuff.
Your job, anonymous, now that you’re starting to be a screenwriter, is to just get hired to do something. Whether they buy your script, or they love your writing, and then want you to work on something else, get yourself into the world of being a writer. My feeling is that I am not transgender, but I have people in my family very close to me who are. I think about these things all the time. The choice of whether or not you want to be out is more important than just how it impacts your career. I would say that question needs to be resolved by you for so many reasons in so many ways. That ultimately is your choice, but I do not think it would hurt you.
John: I think we’re in agreement here. If we have listeners who have more opinions on this, more specifically informed opinions, we’ll always be happy to hear them. All right. Craig, it’s time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is this feature written up by Alvin Chang in The Pudding. I love The Pudding. It’s a website that does great deep dives and moving infographics on different topics. This one is called 30 Minutes with a Stranger, and it comes from this project called the Candor Corpus, which recorded 1,700 conversations between strangers.
How they would have these conversations is it was through a– It’s not a mechanical trick, but one of those sites where you get paid by the hour to do stuff. They would set up these people to have a 30-minute conversation that was recorded. They would ask these people before the conversation, right at the start of the conversation, middle conversation, and after the conversation, how they were feeling. Basically, what their emotional state was.
They would do this for all these conversations. The people who were in the study didn’t realize is that they were being set up with people who were like them. Age, demographics, ethnic background, political affiliation, and also people who were diametrically opposed to them. They could really see what is it like to have a conversation with somebody whose politics you fundamentally disagree with, who’s much older than you, much younger than you?
Craig, how do people feel about conversations with someone they generally matched up with versus someone who’s very different than them? What do you think the outcome of the conversations generally was? Did people feel better or worse after the conversations?
Craig: The optimist in me says that there was no difference.
John: The optimist is correct. People felt better after the conversations across the board. It really didn’t matter whether they were matched in those demographic terms or not. Even political affiliation, people generally felt better after conversations, which is what, again, you hope but worry that it’s not going to be true. It’s basically the experience of people just need to talk to people, and people like to talk to people. We are wired to talk to people. It doesn’t matter who you talk to. The experience of talking to people is positive for your emotional health.
Craig: Thank God there isn’t an entire industry designed on getting us to hate each other so that we click on stuff more and see more ads. This is the misery, the misery of social media, that it has taken something that is one of the few positives that we have. That when you just can talk to somebody, you can connect with them on a human basis, that is about things that are far more important and far more relevant than the superficial. It has turned it into shouting. Just basically thrown everybody into a shouting arena and have them scream at each other. This is a wonderful thing. I’m glad he did this. This is great.
John: I think the other crucial distinction here is social media allows you to take anonymous drive-by potshots at people.
Craig: Exactly.
John: It’s not conversation.
Craig: That’s right.
John: There’s a difference of actual conversation. Where there’s a back and forth where you actually have to listen, is a fundamentally different thing. We are wired to do it, and we just don’t create structures to do it as much as we need to.
Craig: I think that social media basically creates the conditions in which sociopaths are always living. Normal people look at each other, there is a human connection, they have a conversation. If you remove the human connection and you can just yell at somebody’s @ blankety blank, you are now living in the sociopath space. You do not detect their humanity at all, and now you can just do what you want. Horrible.
John: I’ve greatly scaled back my social media. Not to your extent, but to a large extent. There’s been times where someone has come at me weirdly aggressively, and it’s hard to do it. If I can just do the judo move of just honestly and emotionally responding to them, it does throw off the thing. It’s like, “Wait, people are just expecting to punch back.” When you don’t punch back, it throws them off. I don’t know. People say so many things they would never say to your face.
Craig: Of course.
John: I wish there was an option to like, “Great, let’s get on right now. Here’s my phone number. Call me and we’ll talk about this.”
Craig: I used to do things like that, and then I realized I could do this all day. It doesn’t matter. [crosstalk] There’s 12,000 other people.
John: There’s no winning.
Craig: This guy might be screwing with me anyway. He might be DMing his friend, going, “Oh my God. I got this guy talking to me now. LOL. What should I do?” It’s not real. It’s just not real social interaction. It doesn’t deserve our mind.
John: Just don’t talk to people.
Craig: I’ll tell you what deserves our mind, John. D&D and Chris Perkins. My one cool thing this week is Chris Perkins. Who is Chris Perkins? If you know, you know. Chris Perkins was the senior producer for Dungeons & Dragons and was a story genius for D&D and the general D&D world for so long. He just retired from Wizards of the Coast recently. He’s actually joined the whole crew over there at Critical Role, which is with Jeremy Crawford. John, you’ve heard me probably say Jeremy Crawford a few times at the table.
John: Jeremy Crawford is known as being the rules guru of D&D.
Craig Mazin: Jeremy was rules guru, and Chris was story guru. That’s very, very reductive, and I apologize to both of them. [chuckles] They had lots to do with each other and their work that they all did together. Both of them went, “You know what? Our time at Wizards is done. We’re going to move on and just join Critical Role, have some fun over there.”
Together, those guys really did help create the most successful edition of Dungeons & Dragons ever, 5th edition, which was released in 2014. Chris did do some work on the recent version that came out, the 2024. Those of us who play owe him a lot. For instance, Chris was the lead story designer for Curse of Strahd, which was the thing that brought Ravenloft, which has been around forever, into 5th edition. Anyway, I got a chance to meet Chris and actually play D&D with him. I’m playing, someone’s running Lost Mines of Phandelver.
John: Ah, the classic.
Craig: The classic. The intro story from 5th edition, which I’ve now played, DM’d, played, and played, he is playing with us, and he designed a lot of this.
John: So fun.
Craig: It is fun when the DM’s, someone goes, “Is the water coming out in a trickle, or is it a lot?” The DM’s like, “I’m looking. I think it’s a trickle.” Then right next to me, Chris goes, “No, it’s a lot.” [laughs] He’s fantastic. Really, Chris, I guess, and Jeremy. I should lump Jeremy Crawford in there as well. Both those guys are my one cool thing for helping with so many other people. I want to be clear, revitalizing Dungeons & Dragons and making it as super popular as it is today.
John: I got a chance to talk to Christopher Perkins, coming on three years ago, about wizard stuff, and so super smart, and that whole team. Not a surprise that he is just as great around a table as he is at writing these incredible rule books. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, our author this week is by Spencer Lackey.
If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You will find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have a new crafty episode. It was me and Christina Hudson talking action.
Craig, it’s one of the situations where video really is better than just the audio version of it because we can show you the screenplay as the scene is happening and see what’s on the page. Take a look at that one. You’ll find t-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware all at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in an email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the best movies of the 21st century. Craig, thanks for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you, John.
John: Thank you, Drew.
Drew: Thanks.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Great. Craig, this past week, the New York Times has launched a feature which is looking at the top 100 movies of the 25 years of this century that we’ve been through so far. You can see their full list. Their full list has many of the movies you’d expect to see there. Craig, have you gone through and actually done the feature? Have you clicked through to see which of those movies you’ve seen so far?
Craig: Yes, I’m scrolling.
John: You’re scrolling. I’ve seen 80 of the 100, which is better than I expected.
Craig: Yes, that’s pretty good.
John: Because there aren’t a lot of esoteric, strange ones on there. There’s just things I just didn’t happen to see. They tended to be foreign films. They’ve always been on the list. I’ve never gotten to see them. It was crazy to me that Anora wasn’t on the list. I think that’s just recency problem is so that people aren’t thinking about stuff like I think Norrish would be on my top 10 list. I really thought the most interesting part about this, and Max Reid, who has been on our show before, pointed this out, is that there’s a separate list that the New York Times pushed of the people’s top 10 lists. That was partly how they made this whole big list.
It’s so fascinating to click through and see what are people’s top 10 lists like Mark Birbiglia. I’ll link in the show notes for that. Mark Birbiglia’s top 10, Children of Men, Frances Ha, Hot Fuzz, Idiocracy, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Sideways-
Craig: Great.
John: -Spotlight, Superbad, Squid and the Whale, and Up.
Craig: Wow. I love how comedy-heavy that is, of course.
John: Yes, which should totally make sense for Mark Birbiglia. Five of those movies are already on the top 100 list, five of them are not. It’s easy to see why you’re making the case for any one of those movies. Sometimes movies speak to you individually. They may not speak to everybody. Any list is going to be evening out the odd choices of an individual person. It’s just fun to see what people put there. Also the fact that it’s– I don’t want to say it’s performative, but you know this is going to become public. You might make choices there that reflect an intention on what you’re trying to communicate about, who you are based on what the top 10 things are that you’re recommending to people.
Craig: Can I ask a question?
John: Please.
Craig: I understand this is very much like religion. I know most people are religious, and I know most people believe in God and angels. I don’t. I never have. More to the point, it is not an active choice to disbelieve. I just don’t. Why do people make lists? What is this?
John: A couple of things I can think about. Why do people individually make lists? I don’t have a letterbox, but many people have a letterbox, and they have a public setting on a letterbox so everyone can see how they’re rating different movies. I think there’s a sense of how you want to put yourself out there in the world, how you want to have people perceive you, what you want to show as being your taste. Producer Drew Marquardt, have you gone through this? Have you marked which of these movies you’ve seen?
Drew: I did. Not to brag, I’ve seen 93.
John: 93? It’s incredible. Did you make your own individual top 10 list?
Drew: I did, but it’s impossible to do because 10 is too much to reduce to. Yes, I could show it to you, but it feels embarrassing in some way.
John: That’s the thing, too. I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing my top 10 list. If I think about movies of all time, it’s easier for me to reach for these are iconic things, where Clueless and Aliens will always be in that top 10. Those would be super high here.
As I was going through this process with the top 100 movies, I was thinking about which of these would be on my top 10 list. Some of them I remember liking, but I haven’t gone back and rewatched them. I don’t know if I actually think they’re the best things ever, or maybe I’m just forgetting. A spoiler, Mulholland Drive is either number one or very high up there. I remember liking Mulholland Drive, but I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about it. I would never put it in my top 10 list because I just don’t remember it well enough. I feel like anything you put in your top 10 list, you should have to be able to speak for five minutes about why it’s so good.
Craig: Why is anything anything?? Honestly, this is my issue with this stuff is there’s an instinct, I think, among critics to rank stuff because that’s what they do. They’re pretending to have some analytical ability to quantify and qualify art, which is a ridiculous concept on its face. When you really look at it, it’s just absurd. When you dig underneath the hood of what it means to even describe something as having quality and how individual that is between you and the thing that you’re analyzing, all of it is absurd. Then the ranking of it feels vaguely masturbatory to me, designed to, I don’t know, create some authoritative hierarchy that is impossible to do and also pointless to do.
I think it’s actually demeaning to everything. If I’m Bong Joon Ho and I look on this and I go–
John: Parasite’s number one, that’s right.
Craig: Parasite’s number one. I don’t feel good. I’m like, “Wait.” Then Paul Thomas Anderson’s supposed to be looking at me going, “I didn’t do as well as you did with There Will Be Blood.” If anybody were to say to me, “Hey, I need you to do me a favor. Tell me which one is better, There Will Be Blood or Parasite?” I would say, “You’re an idiot.” That’s an idiot question that an idiot would pose because there is no ability to– first of all, why compare them at all? Second of all, why not just enjoy them both? Do you know what I mean?
John: I agree with you that comparing one to the other is crazy. Any of the films that are in this top 100 list are going to be, by default, really good movies. Here’s the argument I’ll make for why it’s useful for people to share their top 10 lists, or at least “Here’s a movie that you should absolutely check out.” I cannot remember which filmmaker it was, but some filmmaker recently was talking about how important Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona was to them. I’m like, “I have no idea what this movie is, but sure.” I put it on my list and I looked it up, and Mike was out of town one night, so I was like, “I’ll watch Persona.” I dug it. It was really weird.
It’s never going to be on my top 10 list, but it was so specific and strange, and I would never have thought to watch it if this filmmaker– I can’t remember which filmmaker it was, hadn’t talked about how important it was for their work. I think that is potentially the good and the joy of this is it’s exposing me to things that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. In the case of the 20 movies that I haven’t seen, I was reminded, “Oh, you know what? I should probably check these out because there’s a reason why so many people like these movies that made it into the top 100.”
Craig: Sure. This is why I have no problem when people say, “Here are 20 movies from the 2000s I loved,” and list them in alphabetical order, because otherwise, what is the point of this? This numbering is so dumb. It is so anti-art. There isn’t a single director or screenwriter represented on this list, I believe. I swear to you. Not one who would go, “You know what? Yes, I’m glad that I was–“ I don’t think Denis Villeneuve is going, “Oh good, Arrival 29. That’s right. Just not quite as good as Dark Knight, but definitely a little bit better than Lost in Translation.” What?
John: I will say, there are many people who Big Fish is one of their favorite films, but it didn’t end up in the top 100, and it could have ended up in the top 100. I did look for it [unintelligible 01:10:15], it was not there. I do feel a little bit of that, but anywhere in that top 100, I would have celebrated. It wouldn’t have mattered where it ranked in this thing. It would have been nice to see that there. Yes, I get you. I agree.
I think this list is so much more helpful, though, for a person working in this industry now than the AFI top 100 movies of all time. Because when I look at those things like, [crosstalk] Citizen Kane or Meet Me in St. Louis, yes, those are classic films. That is not telling me at all about what it is to work in industry now. I think if you are coming into this industry today, you should have watched a lot of these movies because the people who made these movies are the people who are still running this industry.
Craig: Yes, this is a collection of fantastic movies, don’t get me wrong. There’s not one of these where I went, “Oh, I hate that.” There are a few where I’m like, “I’ve never heard of that, but that’s okay. That’s fine. Maybe I’ll check it out.” That’s fine, but this is why I love the AFI event at the end of the year, where they say, “Here are the 10 movies that we really loved this year. Here are the 10 TV shows we really loved.” No ranking, no award, no best, no competition.
This ranking thing, everyone has become a little film critic where they have to rank things, and then they argue over your number one is number your three. It’s really just them attacking each other’s taste, and it is performative. To me, this is a sell, this is an ad. [crosstalk] This is just the New York Times going, “Hey, click.”
John: [unintelligible 01:11:53] creating a little event for itself. Yes, I get it.
Craig: I swear to you, I feel like it is cheapening to– all of these really, there isn’t one thing here where I’m going, “Oh, that’s not–“ They’re all beautiful art, and they should all be celebrated, and putting them in a ranking, I hear David Lynch. I hear his voice. Did you ever see that interview where it’s early on in the days of the iPhone, where they’re talking about, “What do you think about people that might watch some of your movies on a phone?”
He’s like, “Why would you watch a movie on a phone? On a fucking phone?” This is a fucking list. I just can’t think of something David Lynch would be less interested in than a fucking list. Now, I could be wrong. The late, great David Lynch might actually have loved a list, I don’t know. In my mind, he hated them. Sorry about the f-bombs.
John: No, that’s all right.
Craig: Cool.
John: Thanks, Craig. Thanks Drew.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Links:
- The Best Movies of the 21st Century by NY Times
- California lawmakers approve expanded $750-million film tax credit program by Samantha Masunaga for LA Times
- WGA Annual Report – employment and earnings, residuals
- Michael Graves
- How ReelShort CEO Joey Jia Used a Chinese Trend to Disrupt the U.S. Entertainment Industry by Chad De Guzman for Time Magazine
- Sundance Labs
- Sabrina Carpenter – Manchild
- DJ Snake, Lil Jon – Turn Down for What
- Madonna – Vogue
- a-ha – Take On Me
- Riz Ahmed – The Long Goodbye
- Phil Collins – Don’t Lose My Number
- 30 minutes with a stranger by Alvin Chang for The Pudding
- Chris Perkins
- Mike Birbiglia’s top ten movies of the 21st century
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.