Search Results for: 3 page challenge

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/writing-animated-movies).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 356 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

This week Craig and I have switched places. He is in Europe while I am back in Los Angeles. Luckily I am not alone. Across from me I have Linda Woolverton, a screenwriter whose credits include The Lion King, Homeward Bound, Alice in Wonderland, Maleficent, and of course 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. She also wrote the book for the stage musical Beauty and the Beast for which she received a Tony nomination. Linda Woolverton, welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Linda Woolverton:** Well thank you.

**John:** I could have gone on for about another five minutes with your credits because they are so vast. And like these are just some of your feature credits, but you also had TV credits from before then and after then. You’ve done a lot of stuff.

**Linda:** Well, I’ve been writing professionally since over 20 years.

**John:** Yeah. Well, I’ve been writing for more than 20 years, but I don’t have anywhere near the credits that you do. It’s just remarkable.

**Linda:** Well, thank you. You know, it’s hard work.

**John:** I sort of want to start with that last credit because Beauty and the Beast, the 1991 movie, I looked it up on Box Office Mojo and I looked up the adjusted gross, all-time adjusted gross income for it. It ranks number 133 of all films adjusted gross income. And that is higher than Iron Man. It’s higher than Toy Story. It’s higher than five of the eight Harry Potters. And then, of course, that also spawned the live action movie from 2017 which made $1.2 billion. So I guess this may be an insensitive question, but Linda Woolverton you must have gotten so much money off of Beauty and the Beast. Can you just give a sense of how much money you’re really talking?

**Linda:** That is a really appropriate question given where we are right now in terms of the business and feature animation and feature animated films being made into live action films.

**John:** Of course.

**Linda:** So, the important thing to note here, we’re going to talk about financial gain, is that feature animation is not covered by the Writers Guild of America. Which means that there are no residuals. There’s only up front. And I was paid I’m going to guess $35,000 to write the script. Took me four years, as animation does. There was nothing else. Oh, there was a bonus when the movie was made that Jeffery Katzenberg gave us checks. Howard Ashman was there. Alan Menken was there. And the directors, Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. He handed us a check for $100,000 each. I was blown away. I had never seen that in a check before.

So, I was like, “No!”

**John:** So many zeroes.

**Linda:** Really. Howard Ashman tore it up and threw it him.

**John:** Because that was a pittance. Even back then.

**Linda:** For him.

**John:** Yeah. At that time to be paid $100,000 as a bonus. So I want to make sure everyone’s clear. You were paid $35,000 up front for these four years of work on Beauty and the Beast. And your backend was zero. Well, $100,000, it was that $100,000 check.

**Linda:** Gift.

**John:** Gift. That was what you’ve received from writing one of the biggest movies of all time.

**Linda:** Yes, now, luckily I wrote the theatrical version of Beauty and the Beast, which is a whole different ballgame.

**John:** Having done a musical adaptation, it’s a very different thing.

**Linda:** Completely different thing.

**John:** You control copyright in these stage play versions of what you’ve done. And that is probably a much more lucrative thing. I can guess you’ve made more than $35,000 off of that.

**Linda:** A little. Because the show ran 13 years on Broadway. Traveled around the world twice. And it just opened in China. So that’s very lucrative. Just a little note here, when we did the deal for the theatrical version, Disney – it was really interesting – they had ownership of the movie. Right? Because they owned the movie. So I had to proportion out my royalty as per all the new stuff I wrote. So my royalty, which if it had been a full royalty it would have been a wonderful thing. But it’s only partial royalty.

**John:** I am in the same situation with Big Fish. So I wrote the stage play version of Big Fish, having written the screenplay of Big Fish, but Columbia is considered the author of that. And so they could have brought somebody else in to have written the stage version of Big Fish and I would have had no participation in it whatsoever.

**Linda:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** It’s not a great situation. But, in your case and in my case we got to stay on those projects and that’s fantastic. But I think what’s so interesting is not only did you not get residuals on the animated version of Beauty and the Beast that you wrote, but while your name is listed in the credits for the live action Beauty and the Beast you don’t have a piece of that either because that is – animation is not covered by separated rights. Had the original movie been live action and covered by the WGA, you would have gotten a piece of the live action remake as well.

**Linda:** Probably. Because if there had been an arbitration, because I did not work on the live action. If there had been an arbitration I’m 99% sure I would have gotten at least shared credit, which means I would have had a participation. So, it’s unfair with a capital U. But it is what it is.

**John:** So let’s get into that. Why animation is not covered. Because Craig and I have talked about this before, back in Episode 317 a listener wrote in with a question basically saying “How could animation not be covered by the Writers Guild of America?” And the long answer is long, but the short answer is that back in the days when animation was new the WGA didn’t think it was necessary to cover that. And so the Animation Guild began covering the writing of animated features. The Animation Guild is part of a larger guild, IATSE. They represent animation writing at the major studios. And the WGA can’t just go in and take it back because it’s another union thing. So, US labor law is preventing us from trying to go in and get that.

So it is a real frustration. And I think also a real cautionary tale for people writing in other genres that don’t seem like important things at the moment, but will become very important things.

**Linda:** Right.

**John:** I look to videogame writing. And I look to people doing things that don’t yet feel like they are on the level of film and TV writing but could be one day.

**Linda:** Yes. Yes. It is definitely a cautionary tale. And I didn’t know. Someone from the guild Board of Directors asked me, you know, well you signed the paper. True. I signed the paper. But I didn’t even know that there was a WGA at the time. I was this Saturday morning writer. I wasn’t in a guild at that point. And I went over and wrote a feature film.

So, you don’t know what you don’t know.

**John:** So let’s go back into some of that history because you were a Saturday morning writer, but what were your first writing credits? What got you started? And what made the leap into being able to write a feature animation?

**Linda:** It all began when I wrote two young adult novels. I had just left my job at CBS. I was on a desk and I wanted to be a writer. So I wrote a spec Muppet Babies.

**John:** I remember Muppet Babies. It was a great show.

**Linda:** I wrote a spec. And I didn’t sell the spec but I got work off of it. I started writing Berenstain Bears for Saturday morning. And then my career just never stopped. I was writing Saturday morning for like four years.

**John:** That was here in Los Angeles?

**Linda:** Yes. Here. Really fun. Really fun. Great group of people. You know, it’s just a little group.

**John:** So, in that era of TV animation were you writing as a room or were you just going and pitching a show and being sent to write it? What was the process of writing a half-hour like a Berenstain Bears, or they aren’t even half-hours. You’re writing little smaller segments.

**Linda:** They’re like 15 minutes.

**John:** So Muppet Babies. Was that written as a room or was that written – each individual writer just went off and wrote it himself.

**Linda:** I have never written in a room. Ever. Don’t know how to do it. No, you know, Berenstain Bears, it was very funny. It was my first job, so they gave me an outline. And they said here’s the outline. We want you to write the script. If it’s no good we won’t pay you. And there you go.

**John:** That’s a non-WGA sort of situation.

**Linda:** Exactly.

**John:** Here, work on this for spec, and then if we like it we’ll choose to pay you.

**Linda:** Yes, we’ll choose to pay you.

**John:** But if not it’s a useless thing that you’ve spent weeks writing.

**Linda:** Yes, exactly. So, that worked out. And the process was here’s an idea. Pitch the idea. Just like anything else. Here’s the idea, pitch the idea, pitch a take, and then they hire you and you go write it and then you get paid. So, that went on for – I had a really fun time. And then I just couldn’t think of anything more for silly creatures to do. And I had just seen a Disney animated feature that I didn’t think was very good.

**John:** Are you going to say the name? This pre-Little Mermaid. Little Mermaid is the moment where–

**Linda:** Little Mermaid is the revolution, whatever it is, of animation.

**John:** It was a ground-breaker. And that’s a whole special episode of Scriptnotes. We had a whole episode just talking about The Little Mermaid as a breakout moment.

**Linda:** Oh really?

**John:** Yeah. So, it was a pre-Little Mermaid feature you saw which wasn’t especially good, and that inspired you to say, “I can do better than that.”

**Linda:** Yes. So I went to my agent. I did have an agent. And I said I would like to go try to work at Disney. And she said, “No. They don’t read animation Saturday morning writers, because it’s not real writing in an interview.”

**John:** That whole thing about it’s not real writing is an ongoing thing in animation, isn’t it?

**Linda:** Yeah. It’s an ongoing thing. Yeah. What real writing is? Real writing? So I said, but I have these books, you know, I am a real writer. Here’s a hard cover book published by Houghton Mifflin with my name on it. Does that prove anything? So I drove my book over to the lot and it there was no dwarf building. This is way–

**John:** Pre-dwarf era.

**Linda:** Pre-dwarf. And there was no guard. So I just walked in and put it on the desk and said maybe somebody here wants to read this. And I left.

**John:** Wow. I can’t believe that worked. But it worked apparently.

**Linda:** It worked. My phone rang on Sunday and it was Charlie Fink had picked it up. He was probably hanging out with the receptionist. Picked it up. Read it over the weekend and called me and said you have to come work for us.

**John:** Well that’s great. So they say come work for us. Was it a specific project already at that point, or was it just a general come in and pitch things? What was the idea?

**Linda:** I did have an idea. Several ideas and pitched them. I came up with an idea that they didn’t do. But they offered me a live action Winnie the Pooh.

**John:** Sure.

**Linda:** I mean an animated Winnie the Pooh feature.

**John:** Feature.

**Linda:** I wrote that. They didn’t make it. But it opened the door to Beauty and the Beast.

**John:** I think a lot of writers we talk with, they get hired to do something that doesn’t actually go, but they can demonstrate that they are a good writer who can work with people and that’s what gets them the next job. And one of those things becomes the assignment that actually happens.

**Linda:** Right. Exactly. So that’s OK. You know, you’re getting paid. You’re honing your skills. You’re proving what you can do. And you’re bringing what you bring, which is really important I think.

**John:** So at the time that you’re writing the animated Winnie the Pooh, or eventually you’re brought in to write Beauty and the Beast, are they bringing you in as a special like they’re assigning you this project and you’re writing this, or are you working on a weekly basis? What was the nature of your relationship with Disney at that time?

**Linda:** It wasn’t weekly. It was a contract.

**John:** So just like writing any other feature.

**Linda:** Any other feature. Yeah. Only I didn’t know how animation worked.

**John:** Let’s talk about how animation works, because this is so different. I’ve done three animated movies. And so much of the process of writing an animated film, like the script looks almost exactly the same, but the actual process of making it is so different from live action, not just in terms of the development of it, but then with the live action feature you are writing it, and then you’re shooting it, and then you’re editing it. And those stages are pretty distinct. In animation you’re sort of doing all those processes at the same time. You’re writing a script and you’re hopefully going off and you’re able to get at least one chance to write a script when it’s just a script. But from that point forward it goes through this process of being broken down into shots and storyboards and then into animatics. And it becomes this living thing.

And your script, while still important, isn’t as central as this animated thing that’s in this sort of raw form in front of them. And you have the ability to keep changing story things quite a lot later in the process than you do in live action. It’s a very different situation. It’s not like the editing room. It’s like the clay is still moldable a lot longer.

**Linda:** It’s moldable for years and years.

**John:** Yes.

**Linda:** And what’s interesting about the process, you know, it’s sort of a given that the project will take on a different form from the written word to a different medium, which is usual. Then it will go from that to the next step. But it’s sort of a given that at some point in time the whole thing will get thrown out and you start again.

**John:** Yeah.

**Linda:** If you’re lucky. So, that’s just how that process works. And there’s a lot of, you know, I would say it’s difficult to be a writer in feature animation because they really – you sort of like aren’t on the same par as people who are artists. It’s an artists’ medium. It is not a word medium, even though it’s a story medium.

**John:** It is very much a story medium. But that story is being translated through artists’ hands who are doing some of the functions where in live action the actor would be doing it. The artists are the actors who are making this thing come to life.

**Linda:** Exactly.

**John:** And stuff changes through that process.

**Linda:** It does. It absolutely does. But, again, story is the most significant thing. And the story as a writer as the story-maker, you know, I still believe that we are as significant in feature animation as in a live action feature film.

**John:** Absolutely. And especially the movies that have done well have had their writers as an integral part of the process the entire time through because those are the people who just the keepers of story. The people who can see past that beautiful artistic moment that you created to this is the journey the character is on and this is how we have to get through this.

**Linda:** Because it’s so fragmented. And one person is in charge of this sequence and one person is in charge of this sequence. Which was so confusing to me when I first did Beauty. It’s like well how do you have a singular voice? How do you keep that singular voice? Because every sequence had a different tone as per the person who was boarding it.

So, you know, I fought. I had to fight. I had to fight for Belle. Because Belle was losing her way. She was going backwards, back to being the victim princess, and I had to kick and scream to make her not.

**John:** Also she’s in many situations the only human character on the frame. And everyone else is big and broad and special. And so that’s a thing that happens, especially in animation, but also in live action where the hero becomes the least interesting character on the screen because everybody else can be wild and crazy and be driven by their Id. And the hero has to be this sort of moral compass moving board. And I can totally imagine how Belle could be reduced to just princess of the castle.

**Linda:** Yes. So we couldn’t let that happen.

**John:** No. And you didn’t. Am I correct that Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture?

**Linda:** Yes.

**John:** And that was a crucial ceiling to break through, because to be able to think of these movies as not just like a good movie for children, but an actual good movie for adults and for everybody else.

**Linda:** That was a huge breakthrough. It was like on a par with all the other live action movies that year. Silence of the Lambs won.

**John:** Yeah. But Silence of the Lambs is a great movie.

**Linda:** It is.

**John:** Nothing to take away from that. But I think just to be on the same list as Silence of the Lambs–

**Linda:** Yes.

**John:** Or these other sort of movies for adults is a crucial thing. And I don’t know if we’ve gotten to a place where Pixar movies could be Pixar movies if we hadn’t gotten an Academy Award nomination for Beauty and the Beast. I do think it was a ground change of sort of how seriously we’re going to take animated films.

**Linda:** Well that’s about the money, isn’t it? Isn’t it about the box office?

**John:** Well, yes. So, I think the box office is a crucial thing to be talking about though because we’re recording this as the Incredibles 2 has just opened and sort of set all sorts of records. Like everybody wants to be that movie. It’s a well-liked movie that is making a tremendous amount of money, so everyone wants to be able to do those things. And very few people can do those things. Disney can do it. Pixar can do it. They’re the same company now. Every once and a while Fox Animation or Warners will have something else that breaks through. But it’s really tough. And it takes a tremendous amount of investment and years of commitment to make an animated movie. Much more so than to make a live action movie.

**Linda:** Yes.

**John:** Anybody could just write a check for $100 million and make a big live action movie. You can’t just write a big check and make an animated movie. Essentially the research and development on making it is just so much greater.

**Linda:** It is. It’s much greater. Yeah. And I’m writing one right now for a company called Skydance.

**John:** So Skydance’s logo used to be often in front of like Paramount Features. They’re a big pool of money that invests in movies and they’re starting animation now.

**Linda:** Yes. They’re starting a live animated feature division, but I guess they produce television now as well. And big budget live action features under the Paramount umbrella I guess. So, there’s three in the pipeline at this moment in time. My one was first, but we got put back because it’s a hard subject. Again, it was one of those like let’s throw it all out and start again. So, you just sort of like I had forgotten all this.

**John:** Well, you choose to forget that. It’s like having a newborn.

**Linda:** Oh, yeah right.

**John:** You forget the darkness of those first months. And then it’s like, “Oh no, but they were so cute. You look at the photos, like oh it was delightful.” And then you’re like, “Oh that’s right, this is what it’s like.”

**Linda:** That’s right. This is what it’s like. I forgot.

**John:** Here’s one of the differences is that making a normal live action movie you’ll go through those places where everything falls apart, but it will fall apart in sort of script land and then you’ll start shooting and then you’ll have troubles during shooting and there will be challenges and there will be a terrible first cut and you’ll get through it. But at no point will you be sort of like a ways into it and then just like, “OK, we don’t know what this is. We’re going to change who the lead character is of the story.” And that happens almost every time in animation. It’s just so regular to know that you’re going to have the complete upset.

**Linda:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s still surprising. I will say the stop motion movies I’ve made with Tim Burton have been somewhat of an alternative to that because you can’t go back and rejigger things very easily. Because once you’ve shot a frame it’s just sort of shot. And so the most that could happen to us with is we could reboard and reschedule some things for sequences we’re not quite sure of yet, so like if there’s things where like we’re not quite sure how it’s going to work out we’ll put those towards the end of the schedule and so we can sort of see what we’ve got and then write towards those sequences which were not set on, but we can’t do that thing which they can do on Frozen and other movies and just like let’s change that entire sequence and let’s make Elsa a very different thing.

We can’t do that in stop motion the way that you can in traditional or sort of CG animation.

**Linda:** I had the best time of my life working with Tim Burton.

**John:** So tell me about your experience. What was good about that for you?

**Linda:** Working with Tim?

**John:** Yeah. I have my memories of Tim, but I’m curious what it was like from your side.

**Linda:** From my side it was, first of all I was intimidated by him. But he agreed to direct Alice in Wonderland. And I went to London to meet with him and I was intimidated. You know, it’s Tim Burton. But when we started talking, you know, he doesn’t make complete sentences because he finishes it in his head.

**John:** Absolutely true.

**Linda:** So he’ll say something and he won’t finish it, and then he’ll say, “But you know what I mean?” And I realized first of all I did know what he meant and I knew who he was.

**John:** Yeah.

**Linda:** Because he came from here. And it came from animation. So, I got it. And then I was able to kind of connect. And I found him to be so open and many directors I’ve found they want to put their stamp on it immediately. They want to just stomp on what was there and sort of show it around and make it theirs. And I didn’t find that with Tim at all. I found suggestions and he’d say, “Well try this,” and they were great suggestions. And he was very, very supportive. And, you know, we had to throw a bunch of stuff out for budget-wise, and I would say how about we throw this out. “No, no, no, we’ve got to keep that.” So I found him to be fantastic.

**John:** Yeah. What I love about Tim is that he treats a writer like a department head. You are the department head in charge of the script and the story. And he treats you with the respect that he would treat a costume designer, you know, a Colleen Atwood, or a great DP, or a production designer, and like lets them run with this thing. And will give them guidance, but like he sort of trusts that you know what you’re doing. And so often directors don’t trust that you know what you’re doing. And that makes a huge difference.

**Linda:** Huge difference.

**John:** Do you know the backstory? I had the competing Alice in Wonderland project. You know that there was a whole thing here right?

**Linda:** I don’t really know the whole thing.

**John:** Well, let’s go through it. So here’s what happened is at the same time that Disney approached Tim about your Alice in Wonderland, because you had written it first for Disney, right?

**Linda:** Yes.

**John:** I was approached to do an Alice in Wonderland project for Sam Mendes. And Dick Zanuck was the producer of both movies.

**Linda:** Right.

**John:** Which is just an impossible situation for Dick to be in, but being the uber-producer he was and the wonderful gentleman he was he was making it work as best he could. But it became this crazy situation where like I was trying to write this movie for Sam and Sam was going off and doing another movie. Tim was going to do his movie. Mine was for Warners. Yours was for Disney. And it became a place where it’s just like “Well this is just silly. This is just not going to happen.” And so ours went away and yours went into production. And so the choice was made for Dick. He didn’t have to sort of choose between which of his directors he was going to work for. But it was nuts that there were going to be two live action Alice in Wonderland movies in the same space.

**Linda:** I find that when that happens, when you hear that there’s two competing versions of a project, one of them ultimately goes away.

**John:** But sometimes they don’t and it’s always crazy. So Deep Impact and Armageddon is an example of where both things happened. There is the other Jungle Book movie which is coming out. That’s crazy. Mowgli.

**Linda:** That’s right.

**John:** So it does sometimes happen that both movies exist, but you don’t want to be the second movie most times.

**Linda:** No. No you don’t.

**John:** And we were going to be the second movie. So I wrote a movie called Monster Apocalypse for Tim. And we were getting close. And Pacific Rim went into production and we looked – someone read both scripts and is like that’s too close. We’re going to be the second giant robot movie and we don’t want to be the second giant robot movie.

**Linda:** Right. So whoever gets there first.

**John:** Yep. First to cross the starting line is the thing. It’s tough. But, anyway, I’m glad your movie exists and you got it made and you got to make a sequel and that’s fun. I visited Tim on the set while he was doing your movie and it was in Burbank and they had – actually, no, it was down in Culver City. And they had this giant green screen stage and I’d never been in a space that was that much green. It was really painful to be in that set. And Tim had these special weird tinted glasses so he wouldn’t get headaches from it. But it was just so strange being in a space where I just had no idea what anything was.

**Linda:** What was up, what was down.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, the costumes were beautiful, but there was no set.

**Linda:** He kept having to leave and just get his perspective and reality in the blue sky and all that during that whole process. So, yeah.

**John:** But let’s talk about – that movie was a live action movie and there was a tremendous amount of CG and animation. But there’s other kinds of movies like Justin Marks and his Jungle Book that Jon Favreau directed which are essentially animated movies with like one live action element. And now you wrote the original Lion King, but now they’re going to do The Lion King as an all CG thing with real actors voicing those parts. We’re at a place right now where it’s really difficult to say whether that movie is an animated movie or a live action movie.

My understanding is its being shot as a live action movie technically under WGA, but we’re going to run into situations where is that animation or is that live action and we have to fight to keep them.

**Linda:** Who is going to make that determination though? Studios aren’t because it doesn’t behoove them to because they will have to give up something. So, who’s going to decide? What percentage of real people are in it? So, if it’s all CG, does that make it animation?

**John:** That’s the question. I mean, the original Lego Movie is a WGA movie because there’s a live action element to it. The second movie does not have that and it is not a WGA movie. And the difference for what a writer gets off of writing One versus Two is tremendous. And so my hunch is that there will be some movie that will come up, it will be a big enough fight to say this should actually count as a live action movie that WGA and SAG and DGA will all step in to say like this really needs to count as a live action movie. And whether that becomes a lawsuit or there’s some way that you intervene to say like “You have to be acknowledging this as that kind of movie.”

Zemeckis with his stop motion things, those have been WGA movies to date. And so hopefully that’s a good precedent.

**Linda:** That would be wonderful. So that’s it? So the last Jungle Book was WGA.

**John:** Yes.

**Linda:** The Jungle Book. Is there a definitive–?

**John:** No, there’s not. It’ll be figured out at some point. Well, most people go by if there’s one live action person in it, if there’s a real identifiable human being in there that is filmed then it’s not an animated movie. But there’s going to be weird test cases where you’re just not quite sure what it is.

And what happens if the original Lego Movie, if they’d taken out the live action element would it still be a WGA movie? If something starts as a WGA project can it go into animation and come back out? These are difficult situations and you and I both know writers who are in those situations.

**Linda:** Yes.

**John:** Folks who are being hired on to write projects where it’s not quite clear whether it’s going to be animated or live action or a combination of it. And they’re getting hired generally by the worst possible terms.

**Linda:** You know when you’re being hired to write a story, to me it’s like the furthest thing on my mind in the beginning anyway, when I was young and naïve, is how much I’m going to get paid, or how, or what it’s going to land as. I’m concerned about telling the tale. And I’m thrilled to be able to tell the tale. And much less for a big company like Disney that it’s going to be seen around the world. That’s huge.

**John:** Yes.

**Linda:** So the last thing on my mind is like, “Well, do I get residuals for this?” Didn’t cross my mind. So, I think it’s really important for writers who are making a leap from live action to animation to be very conscious, especially the new marketplaces.

**John:** Absolutely. So we were talking about, so Skydance is a new marketplace. But there’s Netflix. There’s Apple. There’s Amazon. There’s new people who are making movies. And if those people make movies under a WGA contract that is so much better for writers like you and me who are trying to make a good movie and actually get paid for it.

**Linda:** Right.

**John:** Than if they were to do it under an Animation Guild contract or no contract like Pixar is done under.

**Linda:** Right. So, when I went to Skydance, you know, I understood intimately the unfairness of it. So, I said, “Well, if you want me to do this then you have to give me a contract that’s as if it’s a WGA deal.” And I actually foolishly didn’t sort of press them to join the WGA, because I actually didn’t know that I could do that, or had that sort of clout in any way. But they agreed. So my contract is as if a WGA contract.

**John:** Which is better. And so I think what we’re going to be looking for in the next ten years for feature animation writers is places where we can get an actual WGA deal, best case scenario. That’s fantastic. That’s great. But in places where we can’t, how do we get coverage there on individual projects, for individual writers, that give them some of the benefits of a WGA contract. That gives them some protection, some backend, hopefully some credit protection.

I looked at some of your credits and you’re listed as additional material by, which is not a WGA credit.

**Linda:** No.

**John:** It’s madness that you could have worked on a movie and clearly would have gotten credit under WGA, but wouldn’t get credit because the studio decides.

**Linda:** The studio decides. Yes. So even in the Skydance project, it won’t be WGA arbitrated. If there are other writers, they’ll decide.

**John:** So ideally you want to get some coverage for that. The other situation which many writers find themselves in is that maybe you’re going back and forth, you’re writing some animation, you’re writing some live action, and getting your pension and health covered between those two things can be really difficult. And so a writer you and I both know said like “Well thank goodness I’m on my wife’s health insurance because otherwise I wouldn’t have health insurance because I don’t work enough in WGA projects. I don’t work enough in Animation Guild projects to get it covered.” And that’s foolish.

**Linda:** And that’s a really scary thing. Like I don’t get WGA coverage on this project and I’ve been on it for two years already. So, thank god I have points, the points system is still working for me.

**John:** So, we’ll explain to listeners that when you work on WGA projects you accumulate points which sort of count against times where you’re not working. So, because Linda and I could be on a project for two years without sort of new income coming in there to sort of pay your things, you have points that sort of carry you over those stretches where you’re not on a new project.

**Linda:** It’s like credits.

**John:** It’s like credits essentially.

**Linda:** Yeah. Then you use them up.

**John:** You use them up. Yeah. And so then you’re looking for the next WGA job because otherwise you’re going to be out of health coverage.

**Linda:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** Scary things. Well, let’s talk about other changes that are out there because just this last week it was announced that Jennifer Lee is taking over as Chief Creative Officer at Walt Disney Animation. Jennifer Lee was on here to talk about Frozen. She is fantastic. She’s a real writer, so it’s great that she’s taking that over.

Pete Docter is taking over that slot at Pixar. Again, a real screenwriter. I would hope that’s somewhat good news for writers overall. They’re both places that really value story. So, maybe there could be some progress made at those two places, at least in terms of we can’t get WGA deals, but at least we can get some better consideration of what it’s like to be a screenwriter working on these projects. A little bit more parity with what we’re getting for writing live action and what we’re getting for animation. I would hope.

**Linda:** Right. I would hope, too. I don’t know if he’s going to change the nature of Pixar, because they’re a non-union joint. So, who knows?

**John:** Who knows?

**Linda:** I hope though that can change a little. And I don’t know Jennifer Lee.

**John:** She’s great.

**Linda:** Well, that’s fantastic. It would not be anything I’d want to take on because, you know, being a screenwriter is one thing and being in charge of all the everything of animation is a whole different ballgame. So, I wish her luck.

**John:** I mean, yeah, it’s more like producing. Or, it’s running a studio really.

**Linda:** Yeah, it’s running a studio.

**John:** It’s all the management aspects of that, but also the creative choices. And so I have a hunch she’ll do a fantastic job of it, but it’s tough.

Like you, she’s also – she went through and adapted her own thing for the Broadway stage, so she’s got that experience too. So, we’ll see.

Do you have any regrets not having gone back and tried to sort of run the show? You haven’t directed any features. You haven’t produced other things. If you were to do it again would you have made different choices in terms of the kinds of things you – the kinds of other roles you would want to take on?

**Linda:** I produced. I guess I have a credit producing a few. You know, people ask me a lot if I want to direct. And I have a skillset. I have big imagination. I have a skillset. I’m a storyteller. I’m a world-builder. And just because I can do that doesn’t necessarily mean I can do something else.

**John:** Yeah.

**Linda:** And maybe I don’t have a director’s eye. Maybe I don’t know where to put the camera. And that’s OK. You know, I create the world, I put the people in it, and when I write I write really specifically, very specifically on the thing. I overwrite, which annoys directors. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m going to be a good director. So I have never taken that on. Because I think I know myself. I also know, I mean, here’s what the really horrible truth is: I get bored.

**John:** Yeah.

**Linda:** Right?

**John:** Totally. And to be stuck on something for three years on the same thing is so tough. At least as a writer you can dip in and dip out. A director, you’re there every day.

**Linda:** Yeah. I can dip in. I like to dip out. [laughs] And do something else, you know. So, if I were to go back and do it again I’d probably just write novels like you have.

**John:** Yeah, writing novels is – that sense of control you have writing a novel is great. So, after your YA novels you haven’t gone back to do prose?

**Linda:** I never have.

**John:** It’s so many words. Man, just so many words.

**Linda:** It’s a lot of words.

**John:** It’s a lot of words.

**Linda:** You have to fill up the white on the page. Right?

**John:** Yeah, you can’t just sort of sketch it in there.

**Linda:** No.

**John:** That is a tough thing. But I’ve enjoyed it. But it’s much more work than I sort of anticipated going into it.

**Linda:** Really. Yeah. I might still try my hand at it.

**John:** You should. It’s fun. I had two listener questions that I thought would be great for you. So I’m going to start with Ben in LA who writes, “I was just wondering if there is such a thing as a bad character want. A character should always want something, but is there an example of something a character shouldn’t want?”

And I’ll sort of put parenthesis around this to say that we talk about want a lot on the show in terms of that driving force behind that character, and really I think animated musicals are a great example of character wants because so often that second song in a Disney movie is the I Want song. It’s basically them singing their wants.

As you’re working on one of these movies how early in the process are you articulating what that character wants? Is it from the very first pitch you’re describing that want?

**Linda:** The I Want issue holds true in musicals, but again I think that if you lean on one thing too heavily it becomes formulaic. And I live in fear of that happening. You know, so my protagonist wants something. And to make them proactive as opposed to reactive they have to proceed through the world with a desire. And however that’s not how everybody lives. So every single protagonist isn’t going to be like the person with I Want who has like I’m never going to stop until I get this thing. That’s not every character in the world.

You know, some characters – isn’t it interesting to have like a normal person who has something remarkable happen to them and then their want becomes to get it back to the way it was.

**John:** Absolutely. Return to normalcy. Yeah.

**Linda:** Return to normalcy, or to find happiness in another way. So, I fear the I Want and it’s also kind of like so getable and kind of easy. Land this I Want on this person and then like whatever obstacle comes at them. They still have this I Want. And then to me it seems like then all the characters become the same. It’s like this relentless pursuit of their desire. And the world is a big place filled with remarkable people who have different experiences and not all of them are the I Want. That’s my rant about the I Want.

**John:** I like that rant. I would say that sometimes I notice that if things aren’t working it’s that the character wants something that I don’t really want for the character. Or the character wants something that I feel like I don’t think the story is set up to give them that want. You know, an example of like it’s a medieval dragon story but the character really wants to sing, or really wants a moment in the spotlight. And it’s like, yeah, but it’s not really a good match for that. It doesn’t seem like you created your universe and your character to fit quite right together. What you’re saying in terms of like there’s characters who like they’re so want driven that it’s the only thing you can see, I get that. And it can be–

**Linda:** It makes it really one-dimensional, or two-dimensional, but it just becomes that. So, then story becomes really simplistic in my view. You just have this drive to get what you want no matter what and then the interesting sub characters come in and out. And then the villain stands in your way. And then you get rid of them to get what you want.

**John:** Yep. You know, some of the fascinating movies, it’s not that the protagonist is opaque, but they’re self-defeating in interesting ways. Like, you may be able to see sort of what they’re going after, but they’re making choices that interfere with their ability to get that. And that draws you in closer because you recognize that weakness in yourself.

**Linda:** Right.

**John:** I think also part of the reason why we’re so attracted to longer form great dramatic television is because it doesn’t have that pattern of like this is the one-time story that you’re going to see this character go on this one-time journey that’s going to epically change everything. It just doesn’t happen that way.

**Linda:** No.

**John:** So they have a bundle of conflicting wants and you see them juggling those different things. And movies tend to be focused for better and for worse on that one road. You started here, you got there, and that is the path of this movie.

**Linda:** Yes.

**John:** Second question comes from Tommy in Toronto. He writes, “At what point during the process do you break down story days? Is this something you tackle in outlining? I’m nearing the completion of a new draft and it’s occurred to me that certain story days seem extremely packed in terms of events while other story days are quite light.”

So, what Tommy is describing is like let’s say you’re watching a movie that takes place, it seems to take place over the course of a week. And if you really look at sort of like day by day by day you could figure out like this would be the Wednesday of the week. I personally don’t find myself thinking about that too much. Do you find yourself thinking about like what day of story this is in your projects?

**Linda:** No. I don’t. I can only think of that where it happened if the time clock was part of the plot, then you would think, OK, well like in 24, whatever it was, this is hour 23. We better get it together. I’m just really old school. I think in the three act structure. And I just do. Beginning, middle, and end. You know, Billy Wilder’s quote, “Get your guy up a three, throw rocks at your guy, get your guy out of the tree.” I think it’s pretty good.

I’ve also never read a screenwriting book, so I don’t know anything.

**John:** Then you’re Craig’s hero, because Craig hates screenwriting books. He rants about them endlessly.

**Linda:** Screenwriting books?

**John:** Yeah. Just like, again, it’s that frustration of formula in the sense that everything has to fit this one model for how things work.

**Linda:** I guess because you’re always looking, you know, if you want to start something you’re always looking for like, because there is no path. There’s no path to being a screenwriter. There’s nothing like if you do this, and you do this, then you’re going to be a screenwriter.

So you grab onto what you can that’s going to guide you through that process. And sometimes screenwriting books are a help, I think, to a lot of people. I steer clear because I don’t want to be on a formula. I don’t want to put – I don’t want to shove my stories or my ideas into this formulaic how to do it.

**John:** Yeah. Getting back to Tommy’s question, I feel like sometimes it is good, like after you finish a draft to just take a step back and look at like realistically could all these things happen over the course of this amount of time. And does it feel like this is happening over the course of a week or a year? And sort of where you’d fall.

A thing that happened in the first Arlo Finch as I got notes back from I guess it was the proofreader or the first production editor was pointing out like the week logic, the week’s logic didn’t really make sense. Like if this was September and this was January, we skipped over Christmas, and so we should at least acknowledge that we skipped over Christmas. There were some interesting things where she was pointing out like, “OK, time does still happen in a normal fashion.” So, trying to figure out sort of when roughly some things could have happened was really good.

And the same thing will happen in movies. At a certain point, you know, they’ll break down and go into boards, but I think even before that process you need to look at did characters wake up twice in a row. I mean, there can be situations where like, OK, that’s actually not possible. Where it went day to night to day again but it’s still sort of the same day. So you got to be looking at that.

**Linda:** I do look at that. It’s like are we at night now? And, again, the time of day, the weather, all plays into it.

**John:** Totally.

**Linda:** Plays into whatever is going on anyway. So, I do step back at a certain point. I don’t realize I do, but I do I guess.

**John:** At a certain point in every project I have kind of a color scheme in mind for the movie or for the book in the case of Arlo Finch, and I sort of see myself moving from like, OK, I’m in here, and then into this new color, and then into this new color. And it’s a helpful way of me thinking about what’s changed along the way. I’m in the green section now. And so if I’m in this section it literally looks more green to me. It’s just the basis of how it is. But some of those logic things aren’t going to be such a thing because I’ve moved forward to a place where I’m in this section now and I know I’m in new days. I know I’m in new places. And even if I’m not like mentally changing the clothes on characters I know that they’ve woken up and gone to sleep again a few times. Things have changed in their life.

**Linda:** I know that actors do that. They’ll color code their script as per what emotions or whatever it is that they’re going through at the time. But that’s interesting. You’re in the green.

**John:** I’m in the green section now. Some interview I was listening to years ago was talking about My So-Called Life. And Winnie Holzman was talking about one of the crucial things she and ultimately the directors had decided is that they wanted her, the lead character’s wardrobe, to repeat. Basically like for her not to have new outfits every time, but to see that she would wear the same things again, because realistically characters do wear the same things again. And they never do on TV, but in this case they wanted to make sure that she was actually a middle class girl who has a limited number of outfits, which I thought was a genius choice.

**Linda:** That was good. Yes it was.

**John:** I’m thinking back to some of your movies and in so many of them characters don’t get a lot of wardrobe changes because they are theoretically just on one quest the whole time through. Like Belle–

**Linda:** Belle gets her yellow dress.

**John:** She gets her yellow dress. That’s crucial and iconic.

**Linda:** She wears her blue dress and then she gets her yellow dress. And then she gets her yellow dress. Or she goes home, and then she comes back and she has her yellow dress.

**John:** I guess with few costume changes each costume change is really meaningful and it really does, you know, it lands bigger.

**Linda:** Yeah. I think you’re right actually. And the yellow dress became such a big thing it needs its own agent. The yellow dress. That’s interesting. Alice shrunk, so she had to get a little mini wardrobe. What else have I written? In Lion King nobody wears clothes.

**John:** Naked people running around the whole time. Rafiki has some like beady kind of stuff, but that’s about it.

**Linda:** And let’s see, Homeward Bound, same thing.

**John:** Not a big wardrobe movie.

**Linda:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** You know that Linda Woolverton, lovely. Won’t dress her characters at all.

**Linda:** Yeah, sorry, no clothes. You don’t get the clothes.

**John:** All nudists. We do a little thing on Scriptnotes called One Cool Things. Did I warn you about this? Do you have a recommendation?

**Linda:** You did. I was trying to think of – well, I guess, it is a recommendation?

**John:** A recommendation or something you like. If people want to check it out.

**Linda:** OK. Go to Shanghai.

**John:** OK, Shanghai.

**Linda:** Go to Shanghai, China. Go to Disneyland. Disney Shanghai, or Shanghai Disney, and go to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

**John:** So why should they check out at that ride?

**Linda:** It’s so awesome.

**John:** Tell me.

**Linda:** If you know Disneyland and the Disney ride, they’ve completely re-envisioned it for like the new version of Pirates, the Johnny Depp version of Pirates, but the whole thing is three domes. And you’re in your little boat. And you go under the sea–

**John:** Of course.

**Linda:** In this little boat. And you’re still on the floaty boat. It’s real water. But these domes are sort of like above you and they’re moving the boat around in circles. And there’s like creatures and there’s a big fight between battleships, you know, the ships. It’s really so imaginative and so impressive. So get on that plane and go to Shanghai.

**John:** My One Cool Thing was almost a Disney Imagineering thing also. So, I’ll put a little bonus. I read a great article, I think it was called Adventure House, and so they were going to do sort of a sequel to the Haunted Mansion. So they have the Haunted Mansion ride or attraction at Disneyland. They were going to build a second one called Adventure House. And so they have all the Imagineering plans for it and what was going to be there and there was like a sleeping bear in a bed and it sounded kind of great. And so I sort of wish they had built that.

But my actual One Cool Thing is an article I read this last week about Climate Central. And I’ll put a link to the NBC News article and also the real website. But what this organization does is a non-profit and they provide information about climate change to local weather stations. So if you’re watching the local news they always have the weather man who is mostly talking about the seven-day forecast. What this group does is they provide charts and graphics and little video packages for local news stations to talk about how climate change is affecting local places.

And so like how pollen counts are going up. And the effect of climate change on pollen counts or on hops brewing and how it will change beer taste because of climate change. It was just a very smart way of getting local news stations to talk about climate change.

**Linda:** Wow.

**John:** In ways they might not.

**Linda:** Interesting.

**John:** This was a really bleak news week and so this was like one of the few little moments of like, “Wow, there’s some really smart people doing some very clever placement of good information.” So, Climate Central, you’re a One Cool Thing.

That is our show. So, as always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is also by Matthew. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For shorter questions on Twitter I’m @johnaugust and Craig is @clmazin. Linda, are you on Twitter?

**Linda:** No.

**John:** Good. Safe. Stay away.

**Linda:** I know. Those knee-jerk reactions, not good. Yeah, no.

**John:** You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a comment. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We’ll also have transcripts up within the week.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. It is $2 a month. And you can get all the first 355 episodes of the show.

Linda, thank you so much for being here. It was so great to chat with you.

**Linda:** I know. So much fun. Thank you so much for having me. Bye.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Linda Woolverton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Woolverton)!
* Adjusted for inflation, Beauty and the Beast ranks [#133 in domestic grosses](http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm), above Toy Story, Iron Man, and other huge films.
* In [Episode 317: First Day on the Job](http://johnaugust.com/2017/scriptnotes-ep-317-first-day-on-the-job-transcript), we talked about the history of why animation writers are not represented by the WGA.
* In [Episode 92: The Little Mermaid](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-ep-92-the-little-mermaid-transcript), we did a deep dive on the animated film that changed the game.
* [Shanghai Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean](https://www.shanghaidisneyresort.com/en/attractions/pirates-of-caribbean/) ride is amazing. This [POV video of the ride](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vIchXwRw7U) is definitely a spoiler.
* [Climate Central](http://www.climatecentral.org) is an independent organization of leading scientists and journalists researching and reporting the facts about our changing climate and its impact on the public. It helps [localize reports](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/global-warming-now-brought-you-your-local-tv-weathercaster-n884831) of the effects of climate change.
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_356.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hola y bienvenido. Soy John August.

Craig Mazin: Soy Craig Mazin.

John: Y esto es Scriptnotes, un podcast sobre la escritura de guiones y cosas que son interesantes para los guionistas.

Today we have the grab-baggiest of episodes with topics ranging from screenwriting competitions to toxic fandom to the new Apple deal, plus we’ll be answering questions about capitalizing on heat after a sale, Bad Robot, and NDAs.

Craig: Ohh. But can I do the entire episode in my telenovela voice? Soy.

John: Oh please.

Craig: Craig Mazin.

John: You absolutely should. So, I should say that I’m doing the Spanish because I am here in Spain. I’m in Barcelona at the moment, and it is great. Craig, you’ve been to Barcelona, right?

Craig: I have not.

John: Oh, put it higher on your list of places to go.

Craig: It’s pretty high up there. Just in the midst of all the work travel we sort of put other travel vacations on hold just, because I’m starting to hate planes and time zones. But, yeah, it’s definitely high up there. My daughter is quite demanding about it.

John: It is fantastic. I recommend everything that everybody always recommends about Barcelona. I was here in high school and did not like it, because it was sort of the first big city I’d been to and it was overwhelming. But it’s a really good, approachable big city. I was a little bit nervous about the Catalan of it all, but everyone here speaks Spanish and English. And it’s fun to watch what language they default to you in.

So, if they kind of recognize that you probably are a native, then they’ll speak Catalan. Otherwise they’ll speak Spanish. Unless you’re Asian, and then they’ll speak English.

Craig: Well, what’s going to happen with Melissa is they’re probably going to speak English to her because she looks so not Spanish. And then she will speak Spanish back to them. And then they’ll be surprised, which is one of the most fun things to watch for me.

John: Yes.

Craig: Watching native Spanish speakers listening to Melissa speak Spanish for the first time, they all make the same face. And the first face they make is what’s going on here? What is this? Is this one of those hidden camera shows? What is this?

And they start getting very curious because they want to know where she’s from. Because they’re quite sure she’s not American. Because her accent is too good. But it’s not their accent, so they start thinking are you like one of those German people that ended up in Chile? Or what are you? And thus–

John: She could have escaped–

Craig: The Nazis.

John: Who hid off in Argentina, yes.

Craig: Yeah, no, she looks like the great-granddaughter of some sort of Nazi escapee. Yeah.

John: But she’s a lovely woman and a great wife I take it.

Craig: Yeah. She’s none of those things.

John: She’s none of those things. Let’s get into this because there’s so much stuff on the agenda for today. So, we’ll start with what was going to be our feature marquee topic. We thought it was going to be a whole special episode and it is not a whole special episode. But to sort of give a little recap, this started on Twitter. Someone tweeted at you and me saying like, “Hey guys. You should be aware that there’s a giant scam going on. It’s about Coverfly.” I didn’t know what Coverfly was.

Craig: Me neither.

John: There’s a long blog post. You and I read the blog post. And it looked like, wow, there’s actually a lot here. And then it has all sort of dissipated.

Craig, can you talk us through what you’ve discovered so far, at least what this was?

Craig: I mean, vaguely. I mean, this is the same – so somebody was complaining about this group Coverfly. Coverfly apparently is a service that provides coverage for payment, I guess. And then also offers as part of its conglomeration with 12 other business names offers paid consulting – you know, the sort of thing that you and I don’t like very much.

However, Coverfly also provides a service to other screenwriting contests. They have their own contest, I guess. And then there are other screenwriting contests that become overwhelmed with submissions and need readers to evaluate these scripts. And so they essentially – I guess they outsource that to Coverfly.

Coverfly in turn has its own sort of like script hosting service I guess you’d call it. Right? It’s sort of like a Dropbox for screenplays. And I guess what happened was they started signing people up or migrating accounts to their service without people knowing and then people thought that essentially, “Look, I’ve entered the Austin Screenwriting Festival Competition for instance and suddenly I’m getting an email from these Coverfly people telling me that I can create an account for free if I want, which I didn’t want. And who are they? And why are they sending me ads?” And all the rest of that.

And so it seemed a little stinky and smelly. And interestingly enough it was the same guy that we had our last and final Scriptnotes Investigates episode on which was that former service where the whole thing went kablooey and people lost some scripts.

Anyway, it turns out it’s sort of not really any of that. It’s just kind of actually very mundane, boring, reality of the way businesses work. And it didn’t seem like there was anything particularly unethical going on any more than there usually is in this area of the world.

So, I don’t know, what did you think?

John: I felt we ended up in a place where there were sort of counter-balancing unethical things that were happening. So the initial blog post that we were tipped off to was taken down afterwards, but the Coverfly people had responded to it. I actually tweeted at the Coverfly guys saying like I know you’re going to do a blog post response to this, so I’ll just wait until you do the blog post response to this.

It was not clear who this anonymous person was who was putting up this thing. Whether it was a rival? Whether it was a former client? So the person we were talking to before was John Rhodes. This was back in Episode 191. And the service was called Scripped.com. They’d bought it out, some people lost their material that was on that. It was a special Saturday episode that we put out. Like I think it’s the only time we’ve put out a Saturday episode.

And so we talked with him about that way back when. This seemed like a situation where both sides were doing a lot of Googling of each other to figure out who the other person was and all these Coverfly businesses were related. But also the same guy had taken screenshots from a certain thing. It all got very forensic and kind of dull and boring.

Where I came out of this, and a question I asked on Twitter as it all sort of blew up, was I asked to Twitter at large, “Hey, can anyone tell me whether winning a screenwriting competition actually had a meaningful impact on your career. Like did it actually start your career?” And I said specifically I’m curious who out there has produced credits that they believe only came to be because they won a screenwriting competition.

And if so, which competition? And I think not surprisingly at all Nicholls Fellowship is meaningful. If you win the Nicholls Fellowship, great. That’s fantastic. It’s run by the Academy. Everyone knows what that is.

Some success out of Austin Film Festival. Very little success out of anything else.

Craig: Of course.

John: And that’s what we’ve always kind of said.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, it’s not surprising at all. And one thing that did come out of this which was a bit surprising to me is, look, the guy that made all these charges seemed like an Internet crank honestly to me. One of those people that just goes way, way deep in a Zapruder film-like examination of something. But they did make one point that I thought was kind of remarkable that this company – so the parent company that owns Coverfly and a bunch of other things is called Red Ampersand. And Red Ampersand owns ScreenCraft. ScreenCraft operates at least 15 different screenplay contests. OK?

So, the Coverfly Company is involved with 15 different screenplay contests that are run by itself, meaning its parent company. Also, they are supplying coverage for other people’s competitions. Meaning you’re kind of ultimately paying twice to submit to the same people. Now, what they say is, “Oh, we have different juries and judges for those different kinds of things. And so it doesn’t work like that.”

But here’s the truth. None of this is worth a damn thing and nobody should be using it. Apologies to everybody involved, because some of these people are nice people, but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. I don’t know how else we can say it and how many times we can say it. It doesn’t work.

There are so many people out there charging you money to enter contests, charging you money for notes, charging you money for consulting. It doesn’t work. And more to the point, not doing it has worked. In fact, not doing it has worked for literally everyone you and I know who works as a professional screenwriters. So at some point I think we’re asking people to take a leap of faith here and stop doing this. We know that the Nicholls Fellowship matters. It doesn’t always work, but it can work. We know that Austin to a lesser extent can work. Beyond that, stop.

John: Yeah. I do feel like screenwriting competitions are the astrology of our business.

Craig: It’s the homeopathy, right?

John: It is. It is. Just maybe entering one more competition is really what’s going to do it for you. It’s not.

Craig: It’s not. It’s not. And people are losing money and I have to also just point out that there is something at some point when you do look at the fact that the parent company owns 15 different companies, they each run – there’s 15 different screenplay competitions. It’s all promotional so that you’ll end up spending money. They are businesses to make a profit. And it starts to get byzantine and more to the point literally they’re charging you money for a lottery ticket and the thing that you can win is not money or prize but rather a brief moment of pride.

And perhaps even a brief moment of not feeling bad. Maybe that’s the best it can be, right? That’s all they’re selling you is false comfort. That is what that industry is. And I don’t begrudge people a right to make money doing a legal thing, but it is our, I think, obligation to tell all of you at home the truth, which is that they don’t matter and they don’t work.

John: So, when I talked with writers who did succeed off of Nicholls or Austin, like Stephen Falk of You’re the Worst was a person who wrote in saying like, yes, winning at Austin was incredibly helpful. And I asked him why and he said, “It helped me get my managers,” and that was important to him. Basically it provided some legitimacy so as he went in to talk with managers he could get over that next little step. That I could totally see and that’s why the prestige of Austin and the prestige of Nicholls Fellowship helps people start careers.

But these things you’ve never heard of, well, Craig and I have never heard of them. Managers have never heard of them. Winning it is not going to do anything for you and that’s what it comes down to.

Craig: Everybody at some point is going to say I was a semifinalist/finalist/winner of some blank fill-in competition named here. Nobody cares. No one cares. No one knows what those competitions are. You know what else they don’t care about in Hollywood? They don’t care about your college degree. They don’t care about your work experience. They don’t care about how many languages you speak. They don’t care about your skills, your volunteerism. You know what they care about? The document they just got handed. That’s it. Period. The end.

They read the script. They don’t care about anything else. So, stop.

John: Yep. Another group of people we’d like to stop are some fans of the Star Wars franchise who seem intent on destroying it, in a way. So, this has been sort of bubbling up for a while, but this is the most recent example was the stuff that happened to Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose in Rian Johnson’s film, The Last Jedi. She left Instagram. We’re recording this about a week before the episode comes out, so who knows what will happen in the meantime.

But I wanted to just take a moment to talk about fandom and sort of this most recent wave of destructive fandom that you see out there. And see if we have any recommendations for creators dealing with it, or an industry dealing with it, because it just sucks. And it’s just so dispiriting to see every day.

Craig: I cannot explain this beyond the obvious explanation. It’s so bizarre to me. You and I – I look at a lot of these people out there that are complaining about Star Wars because they don’t like, I don’t know, the cast or something, or what happened to a character. These people certainly must be younger than you and I.

You and I grew up in the age of Star Wars. We were each about six or seven when the first movie came out, right? And then the second movie came out nine/ten. So, we are prime Star Wars generation. We are the Star Wars Generation. And nobody ever, ever, ever when we were young talked about these movies this way ever. Ever. Never. In any way, shape, or form. And part of the reason was we felt no ownership of it whatsoever. None. It was a gift that we went to go see.

We all saw them. And, yeah, you know what? I remember thinking the Ewoks were stupid. I didn’t care. Whatever. You know what? So then the Ewoks were stupid. What am I going to get angry? That’s not how it works.

I have no ownership over these movies. They’re movies. My ticket back then cost the same price to go see Max Dugan Returns. A pretty good movie, by the way. It didn’t matter what the movie is. You paid your ticket, you went down, you saw it. And now what has happened is, and I can’t put all of the blame on the fans. I put part of the blame on the companies. The companies have managed to monetize and exploit this fandom, this experience. I mean, you can’t say convention without con. It’s all a con to take your money. They are religiousifying their products in such a way that people begin to feel religious about it. What a shock.

And then they are surprised when it sort of bites them in the butt. I blame the butt-biters for it. However, I do think that the fact that we have kind of built these mythological and engaging worlds around these movies has engendered a certain problem with what I’ll call a problematic segment of our society, specifically young men, young white men, I’ll say between the ages of 15 and 30.

It’s interesting from an anthropological point of view, or a sociological point of view, they didn’t seem to have a problem with a black man in Star Wars. Well, they did, but they didn’t lose their minds. But when you start putting women in Star Wars then they start getting crazy. And my god, you put an Asian woman in Star Wars and they lose their S.

John: Yeah. There wasn’t backlash against older Leia because Leia was already established. She was cannon. People love Leia. She’s seen as a princess. Everyone sort of got that. It was the other women being added to the franchise that hurt it.

I think you’re picking at two very interesting aspects of this, which is that you have the religious fervor quality and whenever people become true believers in things that belief in things can be transformative and it can become dangerous. It can become sort of fanaticism. It can become this kind of zeal that is destructive. You see that happening again.

And also this sort of that 15 to 30-year-old white male culture, which is really the heart of the sort of troll culture. It’s the people who have grown up in the system of like always snapping back against the things they don’t like and feeling that they need to exert control over things because they feel out of control over things.

Craig: Yeah.

John: A related thing which I listened to this last week was a great piece on the shippers of Sherlock. So basically the people who watch the BBC Sherlock and believe that they are absolutely, 100% a couple and that the creators of the show are lying to them when they claim that they are not a couple. I’ll put a link in the show notes to a really great podcast that sort of explores, called Decoder, that explores how that fandom sort of came to be and how it became a giant schism within the community of the fan fiction writers for Sherlock and their fervent beliefs in the nature of that relationship and the degree to which the creators of the show are lying when they say that they are not a couple.

Craig: Yeah. Including the gay co-creator, Mark Gatiss. It just, ugh, I don’t get it. First of all, I have trouble with just anyone talking about shipping or ship instead of relationship, because it makes me itch. Just like I have a huge problem with people using the word stan for fandom, because it feels so blech.

John: And some of it is generational. Sometimes it’s us old men shaking our canes at things.

Craig: Some of it. Some it also is just like I think you guys are just making up words to make yourselves feel like you’re part of a secret group of people with inside knowledge or coolness. It’s not cool. It’s inherently not cool to explain to creators of a show why they’re lying to you about what their two characters should be doing. That’s it. That’s what they showed you is it. That’s it.

John: So do we have any theories about why some properties seem to be a little bit better protected from that sort of toxic backlash than others? Because when you look at the Marvel universe, it seems to have done actually pretty well at sort of keeping the main through line of the movies moving ahead fine. And all the shipping can happen over at the margins, but it’s not affecting the main product and you don’t see a backlash against the main product from the fans.

Same with Harry Potter I’d say. Like there’s always been a lot of shipping happening in Harry Potter. There’s always people who believe that Harry and Hermione belong together, but it never seems to come back to J.K. Rowling that she has done something wrong.

And I wonder what it is. I wonder what is the difference between those kinds of properties. Is it that Star Wars is perceived as being more adult and therefore adults are sort of more engaged with it? There’s something different happening there. If you could figure what that is it would be so useful for us as people creating these giant properties that go out into the world.

Craig: I have a theory. It’s going to be disheartening, but that’s what I do. I think that had Harry Potter begun to come out say two years ago it would be a nightmare for J.K. Rowling. Every single new book would be a nightmare of how could you do this, why would you do this, what happened to so-and-so, why aren’t they together, how could you lie. When she finally reveals seven years from now that actually Hermione and Ron get together, people go bananas. It’s just going to be – and every single who is or is not white, black, Asian, why are there no transgender characters? Why are there no openly gay characters? It would just be an endless thing. And it would be a very different experience. And the reason I would say it would be horrible for her is because every decision she would make would be terribly questioned.

As opposed to what used to happen where a creator would do something and that person’s creations would be considered “cannon.” In other words you would receive them. You wouldn’t question them or feel entitled to have a conversation with them. You would receive them the way we received Lord of the Rings or the way we received George R. R. Martin’s books, or the way we received the original Star Wars.

Now as things on go, it is no longer considered a receiving. It is considered a conversation. So when something new comes along, like the new Star Wars, it’s considered a conversation. Marvel movies are all based on old characters that have thousands of comics behind them. They don’t give us new ones. They just keep giving us old ones. And so they stay within the cannon that exists. These new movies are tellings of stories that have been around for a long time. Infinity War, that whole storyline has been around for a while.

So they’re weirdly not breaking new ground. The only times that they get in trouble is when they try and cast away from what the comics were, which created a huge problem with Doctor Strange.

In the case of what we’re seeing I think with Sherlock, again, they sort of remade a thing. They made it new. So it’s modern day London Sherlock and therefore people were entitled to have a conversation with it. And I think more than anything it is about the time you start something. And unfortunately if you start something now, that’s the world you live in.

John: Probably so. On the sixth or seventh episode of Launch, I guess it’s the seventh episode, we had Tomi Adeyemi on. And her new book, Children of Blood and Bone, is a bestseller. And so it’s the first of a three-book series. And I am fascinated to follow up with her to see now that the book has done so well and the second book comes out what the nature of her fan relationship becomes. Because right now people love the books. They love her. She’s fantastic. She’s exactly the right vessel for this book, but what’s going to happen when she makes tough choices in book two and things don’t go the way that people had expected. What happens in book three? What is the pressure as a movie comes out? It’s going to be fascinating to see what it’s like because your proposition that essentially any piece of popular culture you make right now that has a fan base behind it is going to face these pressures, she’s ground zero for that.

Craig: Yeah. And it’s terrifying because you cannot actually function as an artist if you are responding to the conversation. It’s just not possible. Well, you can, but you won’t do a very good job. The people out there will destroy that which they love. If you ignore the conversation entirely you just have to be ready to know that you’re going to get beaten around the head and face for a bit from now time to time.

A good example is Dan and Dave who do Game of Thrones got an enormous amount of grief in season, I guess we’ve just seen season seven, so season six I think – maybe season five – somewhere in there Sansa ends up getting married to, what was that guy’s name? He’s so bad.

John: Yeah.

Craig: We’re practically – it’s so terrible that I can’t remember his name. Anyway, that guy. She’s married to that awful, awful guy. And then they had a scene where it was just this very hard to watch, drawn out, difficult rape scene. And the show had already dallied in rape scenes a number of times. This one really sent people into a very bad place because it wasn’t in the books. This was something that they had invented. They didn’t take it from George R. R. Martin. And everyone felt it was just gratuitous and brutal to do to this character that they loved.

And then by extension Dan and Dave were misogynists. They were sick. They were A-holes. They didn’t understand – they were part of rape culture. Etc.

The next season they get the revenge and Sansa watches as Ramsay is ripped apart by his own dogs and everybody loved it, including I think all the people that had complained. And one of the reasons they loved it so much is because his brutal death had been earned by his brutal acts.

Sometimes we just have to be patient. Sometimes characters must suffer. Sometimes in really challenging art they suffer and do not survive. And people seem to not be accepting of this when they are engaged in conversation with the author.

John: Yeah. So to wrap this up, let’s go back and imagine The Empire Strikes Back, and let’s imagine that the Empire Strikes Back comes out now, so there already was a Star Wars. Now Empire Strikes Back comes out. It’s the same movie. Same incredibly great quality movie. But you end that movie with Han Solo frozen in carbonite. What is the fan reaction? How dare you take away my Han Solo? How dare you imprison him? Basically that sense of you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re getting rid of the best character of it all. You’ve made this fundamental change in the nature of Luke and Leia’s relationship. And you’re going to make us wait years to find out what happens next.

Craig: I think that people probably would have approached that the way that many people are approaching the end of the current Avengers movie which is to say, “Not really dead,” and in both instances I suspect, certainly in one different correct, and the other one almost certainly correct. But I think they would have had a huge problem with Luke being weak. They would have had a problem with Yoda. I’m sorry, a Jedi master is a stupid puppet, so now for kids we’re just doing dumb hand puppets. That would have been a meme within four seconds. They would have just absolutely trashed Yoda today.

John: Well, also he has Grover’s voice.

Craig: Exactly. So it’s Grover or it’s Miss Piggy. So, I’m sorry, the most powerful Jedi in the world is Miss Piggy? They would have made fun of that. They would have gone after that. And I think, let’s see what else, Lando, who is this guy? Social justice warriors obviously are demanding that the Colt 45 guy being in Empire Strikes – there just would have been racist stuff. It’s all the things that are just predictable. It’s the same thing every time.

And then for the third movie on the far left people would have been accusing it of being imperialist because it’s talking about white saviors and exploiting the native people of a jungle climate for themselves. You know. It would have been the thing. And we can all write that script. And it’s dispiriting because that’s how you know we can’t go on like this because it can all just be written ahead of time. Nothing will survive the crucible of these extremes on either side. Nothing. There is not art that can survive it except bland art.

John: We don’t want bland art.

Craig: No.

John: No, we want great, vital art.

Craig: Yeah. And you know what? I don’t mind mistakes. I also don’t mind bad movies. Just do them honestly. And so with the case of Rian’s Star Wars movie, I really like that movie a lot and it’s just so bizarre that it is a discussion involving politics. It’s Star Wars for god’s sakes. It takes place in a galaxy far, far away a long, long time ago. What the hell?

John: Frustrating. OK, last bit of new news. This past week the WGA announced a new deal with Apple. So Apple is moving into creating original programs. They have not announced the name of this service or sort of how the service is going to work, but they’ve started making shows and so they need to make a deal with the WGA to cover the writers on those shows. Some shows that Apple is doing are through a studio, like a Paramount, or a Disney, or some other place. Some of the shows they are doing are directly for Apple. And the so the WGA made a deal for those shows which Apple is doing directly. And the deal is better than it could have been.

There’s basically two ways these kind of deals work these days. There’s the deal we have with places like Netflix which are subscription based. And there’s places like Crackle, was the example, things that are free to people to watch those shows, and those deals tend to be terrible.

So, the good news is that the deal with Apple if Apple ends up making a free service, free to consumer service, it will be better than that deal which is a good sign because there will be things like minimums for writers to be paid, residuals, other good stuff along the way.

Craig: Credit protections I presume?

John: Credit protections, yes. So it’s a decent WGA deal by most measures.

Craig: And I think that in time these will become the deals. It seems all inevitable. I don’t know what the specific numbers are on these deals. But I don’t know if any of us have any clue what our contracts or our compensation would be on our initial self-negotiated compensation will be in, I don’t know, ten years. I don’t think we have any clue whatsoever. I mean, ten years ago it was 2008 and the iPhone came out in–

John: 2006 I believe. We’re past the tenth anniversary.

Craig: We’re just past it, right? So that’s how much has changed in ten years. So ten years from now, good lord, right? I mean, it’s going to be unrecognizable.

So, yeah, first generation iPhone was 2007. So, we have to keep doing what we’re doing here I think which is just sort of piecemeal-ing these things and going along. But there will be a reckoning.

John: For sure.

Craig: The reckoning will come. And here’s what’s interesting: when that reckoning does come, it will not come against our usual foes. You know, to strike a company that does nothing but exploit the work that we do is an interesting probability. It’s self-destructive but also other-destructive. To strike Apple, uh, OK.

John: Nope.

Craig: Good luck.

John: It is a challenging thing. So, I mean, the programming that Apple makes will be a very small percentage of the income for Apple overall, or maybe actually it will make no income for Apple, but they’ll be used – if it’s a free service – perhaps they will use the programming they make to sell Apple TVs, or iPads, and other things. So, you know, if we say, no, we’re not going to write your stuff, it’s like, well, it doesn’t sort of matter so much for them.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t think they’re actually running any of these shows in a sense to get people excited about a show. I honestly think they’re doing this just to hurt each other at this point. I don’t even know if Apple knows why they’re doing this beyond, “Well, why let Netflix be the only people that does a thing. That just sounds dangerous to us. And we literally have $80 billion sitting around. So let’s spend a little bit of it just to make it competitive. We’re not even sure why.”

Well, that’s a tough employer to negotiate with.

John: Yeah, but right now if they’re going to spend that money on us, as writers, that’s fantastic.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And what we should stipulate is that it’s not like people who are writing these shows these people weren’t getting paid or individually they might be able to get some good things in their contracts. The challenge is that that showrunner might get a really good contract, but it’s very hard to get a good contract for that staff writer on that show because there are no minimums. And so a union has to negotiate the minimums that any writer is going to get paid. And without that it’s just all the way to the bottom. And that’s what happened with Crackle.

Craig: Is there pension and health involved?

John: I believe there’s pension and health. I have not seen the final deal. I just know that there was a push to get good coverage on the whole shebang.

Craig: I mean, that’s really important.

John: Oh my god, pension and health is so crucial.

Craig: That’s kind of the reason we’re here.

John: If you talk to folks who work in animation, who write for animation, pension and health can be a huge deal, because there’s coverage sometimes through the animation guild, but if you’re working on some WGA projects, some non-WGA projects, it will be hard to keep your health together. So, it’s tough.

Craig: Yep.

John: All right, let’s get to some questions.

Craig: All right.

John: We’ll start with Evan in Philadelphia who writes, “I’m a former comic book author and in comics we call the space between the panels the gutters. The gutters are almost as important as what you see in the panels because your brain is actively filling in all those blanks as you move from panel to panel. Scott McCloud has a book called Understanding Comics for an excellent explanation. Do you ever think about the time that passes in between scenes of a script and what your characters are learning, changing, what’s happening to them, etc., in these interstitial spaces and cuts?” Craig?

Craig: Evan, that’s a fantastic question and a great observation. It’s a really interesting analogy. Absolutely. It’s not just something that I – do I ever think about it – I always think about it. The design of scenes from one scene to another, we talk about a lot of times when we’re reading scripts we want to feel compelled through. We want it to seem seamless. And so much of that is about designing the end of a scene and the beginning of another to acknowledge something is happening. And that’s how you can figure out what you don’t need to show.

A lot of times you’ll hear very broad-based advice like “Start your scene later than you thought you needed to, and end it sooner than you thought you needed to.” Well, that’s really referring to this interstitial phenomenon where we can fill things in. But you have to know what those things are. That’s the most important thing. And therefore you have to be thinking about what they are. And then rather than sort of saying, oh you know, hmm, I wonder what could go in this space, figure out what should be there first before you start thinking about what comes after. So I’m constantly thinking about all this. And for actors, one of the classic bits of acting instruction is the moment before. A scene begins, but what were you doing before it? Otherwise it just seems like you’re one of the hosts in Westworld that gets switched on, you know?

John: Yeah. Exactly. So that common advice, like starting a scene as late as possible, ending a scene, I always think about it as a scene ends and it needs to have a little bit of forward momentum. That’s why it’s sort of slanting into the next scene. You’re tipping that energy across the cut into the next scene.

But you’re also always mindful of what had to happen beforehand. And it’s really not you as the author who is filling in those details. It is the audience. So you have to think about expectation. What is the audience expecting to happen next? Or when they see that first shot of the new scene, what are they doing to expect happened that go them there? And if you can do that math in your head you can very often skip over a lot of things that people will just see what it is that they’re doing next.

When it comes time for direction, really literally like moving left to right across the frame versus right to left across the frame, our brains do stuff to fill in the things that we missed based on the way the camera is moving, the way the characters are moving through the scene. You do that work to figure out sort of what must have happened right before this moment and what’s going to happen next.

So, yes. And I think gutters is actually a really interesting way of thinking about those missing scenes, those missing connection pieces that we use all the time in screenwriting.

Craig: Yeah. That’s a great question. I love that. And we talked about this sort of from a different angle when we discussed transitions. We talk about it a lot when we do our Three Page Challenges because sometimes those things feel like they’re not there.

You know, it occurs to me that when people ask what do you need to become a professional screenwriter and work steadily we always say, look, talent, hard work. But talent in what? Vocabulary? Sentence structure? We’ll talk a lot about dialogue, so an ear for dialogue. Things like that. But I suspect that one of the most important talents that we don’t really talk about is what psychologists call mind reading. There’s this aspect of social communication that’s essentially mind reading where we’re trying to figure out what the other person is thinking. And then we shape our comments or thoughts to achieve a change in their thinking state.

The game of charades is just mind reading in that sense writ large, because you’re trying to figure out what someone is thinking. And when we’re writing we’re always trying to think about what our characters are thinking, how they can change what the other person is thinking. How much they’ve picked up on what the other person is thinking. And then in a meta sense, we are in a relationship with the audience where we’re trying to figure out what the audience will be thinking. So that’s predictive mind reading.

These things if you were bad at are going to limit you as a screenwriter. And possibly disqualify you as a screenwriter. It’s a talent that I don’t think anybody really talks about in film school, but it’s a huge part of this.

John: Yeah. And so when you’re getting feedback from somebody and they say like I was confused by this moment, I didn’t understand what this character was trying to do, really you’re discussing a breakdown in that mind-reading. You had not read their mind properly and they couldn’t figure out what was happening next, or where you were trying to lead them. When they talk about like “I kind of lost faith in it, I lost faith in where the story was going,” that’s again a breakdown of this mind-reading about what you’re trying to do and what those characters are trying to do next.

We can’t see inside their heads. We just don’t know what we’re watching.

Craig: Yeah. And none of us are 100% at it. Of course. We all make mistakes. But generally speaking you want to be more right than wrong with that sort of thing.

All right, well we’ve got another question for Miranda in LA. And she asks, “I have a question that NDAs, that’s non-disclosure agreements, and parting ways with an employer with whom you are working on an idea.” And I really like that you said with whom. “Here’s my scenario. For a while I worked as a writer’s assistant to an established screenwriter.” John, I’m already telling you my butt is clenching. OK. My butt is clenching.

“I had developed a concept for a show that needed a plot. Through the course of my work my employer said something that gave me an idea for the story and I ended up with a cool pitch for a show. I wrote up an outline, we talked about it once, and then I was let go a couple of weeks later.

“I’d like to pursue the project, but not with my former employer. I signed an NDA that grants ownership to everything I came up with to my former employer.” That’s not what an NDA does. “Does that mean I can’t work on this project without them or their permission? Or can I use my original concept and take out anything that relates to my former employer’s idea”

Oh. Good. Lord.

John: Oh. Good. Lord. So, first off, we will say that an NDA does not strictly mean that there’s ownership of ideas, but you could have signed something that including NDA language and included that all things discussed as part of work belong to your employer. Without seeing your contract I don’t know. So we cannot give you great legal advice here. And we’re not lawyers anyway, so we wouldn’t be able to give you great legal advice.

What I will say is as a person who has had a number of assistants who have gone on to have great careers, I’ve always had those kind of discussions about the things they were writing and I’ve offered them advice and they’ve gone off and they’ve done stuff. That kind of discussion should be encouraged and is part of the process. So, I hope your boss is not listening to this podcast saying like, “Oh, I know exactly who Miranda is and I’m going to get that idea back because that is a terrible person.” That is not what a screenwriter should be doing.

Craig: Yeah. We would destroy that person.

John: We would absolutely destroy this person. So that sense of like I have this story world, I’m working on this plot, I had those same conversations with assistants over games of pool and, you know, watching Martha Stewart, and all sorts of other discussions I have now with Megan all the time. And so this is not a thing that is unusual.

I would say it’s a little bit unusual that you signed this contract going in. I don’t know many writers who are having their assistants do that. But my instinct is you should feel free to pursue your idea that is your idea. But I would say just look through that thing you singed to make sure it doesn’t say that anything you ever brought up in the office is theirs.

Craig: Yeah. Certainly have somebody review that and have the discussion with them and just say, look, I’d love to do this and is it OK if I just go off and do that please?

Just a little tip. If you do review your agreement and it is – so non-disclosure agreement basically says you can’t talk about any of the stuff that we do here with other people. Right? So it’s pretty normal. If John and I are working on a screenplay that’s something that’s confidential in almost every case. So, we don’t want our assistant tweeting about it, right? Standard NDA sort of thing.

But then there’s this other agreement where you’re essentially saying anything that you think or say belongs to me. It’s my property. It’s considered a work-for-hire. Therefore the copyright is mine. If anyone asks you to sign something like that it has to be basically a company. And I don’t mean like just some random company. I mean like a studio-type company.

So, if say I wanted to talk to some scientist for Chernobyl, just interview him and get some information, he said, “You know what, I’ll write down some things for you and send them,” and I go, oh, if you’re going to write anything down and send it to me you need to sign this thing that basically says HBO now owns what you just said in this piece of paper because we’re not saying, “Oh, we’re looking for people to write a scene or anything. That’s not what we do. We’re just looking for some research or advice.” And as long as then they’re OK with that that’s the document they would sign with a company like HBO or a studio like Paramount, or Warner Bros., or anything. That’s pretty normal.

But if some person asks you to sign that, that’s an alarm bell. It’s a massive alarm bell. So, I think Miranda what you need to do is find yourself an attorney. Talk to them. And then assuming that that person gives you the thumbs up, reach out to your former employer and say I’d like to do this. Would that be OK with you?

John: Yeah. And hopefully it should be OK. And if the guy says no–

Craig: We’ll destroy him.

John: That was a bad guy. Yes, tell us what his name was and we’ll go after him.

The last thing I want to say is I think there’s understandable concern about NDAs overall and NDAs that are used to protect people from being called out on bad behavior.

Craig: Crime.

John: Crime. And creepiness. And so NDAs cannot and should not be used to protect people from doing terrible – certainly criminal things but also just bad things. And so I want us to always shine a spotlight on NDA abuse.

Craig: I agree. And so eventually there will be some sort of legislation with a different congress that will attempt to address this. And I think it could also be a state-by-state thing.

John: Yeah. California could totally do this.

Craig: California could do this. There is a weird thing that also happens where NDAs start to protect what I would call reluctant whistle-blowers. So people will say I have a whistle I could blow but I can’t because of my NDA. Well, I think you can. I think you can. I think you don’t want to. So, it’s a weird – it’s a whole weird thing. Anyway.

John: It’s a whole weird thing. All right, Dan has a question. He asks, “How do big production companies like Bad Robot work? They get a deal from a studio and that funds the company and the development of shows and movies? What’s the corporate structure like? When JJ is paid does it go to the production company and he just takes a salary? Speaking as a company owner, why would JJ want to deal with the business-running stuff? Wouldn’t he just work as a freelancer? What happens to the company if he’s off directing for six months? It would seem that the revenue that people like JJ would make as a company is insanely profitable. So, anyway, I don’t mean to pick on JJ, but I was just thinking of him as an example.”

So, Bad Robot is a company that makes Mission: Impossible movies, they make Westworld, they make other JJ Abrams movies. Like they make Star Trek. And so I’ve gone into meeting with them. I’ve never written anything for them. But they have really nice offices out in Santa Monica. They have a lot of people who work there and they’re really smart, great people. So they are busy doing stuff. Their deal is with Paramount, but they’re always doing other things. They just started a videogame company as well.

So, Craig, why do you not have a Bad Robot?

Craig: Well, no one has asked me to have a Bad Robot. I think that the prerequisite for these things is television. So, people think of JJ as a movie guy. He’s actually a TV guy. He came out of TV. And when you come out of TV and you’re making a few hit shows then there’s a massive revenue stream.

So earlier this week, Dan, there was a news story about Greg Berlanti who is an incredibly prolific television producer with Warner Bros. And they just made him I think it’s a 10-year deal for $400 million. That’s guaranteed $400 million. And then it goes up from there. And the reason why is he has 14 shows on the air apparently, which is insane. And so this is really a television empire business. And this has always been around.

There have always been these little mini studios that were mini studios making television. So, Chuck Lorre has a little mini studio. Back in the day Stephen J. Cannell who would make a lot of the action programs that John and I grew up watching, he had a little mini studio.

John: You had MTM.

Craig: MTM. And John Wells had a mini studio. So these have always been around. And now we have this crossover where they’re making television and also big movie franchises. So how does it work? Basically, yes, the studio will make a large deal with that business. They will guarantee them a certain amount of money. That money is used to cover overhead and employees. There’s almost always somebody other than the principal creative, which in this case is JJ, who is helping to run the business, like a principal business runner.

And then sub-business runners underneath. JJ and the company are paid as producers. JJ is then also paid individually as a writer. JJ is also paid individually as a director. So he has three different streams of income. And typically the production company is making a fee off of everything it produces and then that fee is either applied against, or in really great cases not applied against a backend percentage of profits or gross, depending on how good your deal is.

So the question is why would JJ want to deal with all the business-running stuff? Well, he’s not sitting there signing certificates for office insurance and handling human resources. There are people that do that for him. But he’s of the mindset of that. That’s what he likes to do. Same with Simon Kinberg. They like this kind of I make things but I also overlord things.

Our friend Chris Morgan has a – I mean, it’s smaller than JJ’s thing, but it is a similar kind of thing. I don’t have an interest in it. I like doing what I do. I mean, I suppose maybe one day, but I don’t want a building with a lot of people in it. I don’t want human resources. I don’t want development people. I don’t want it. I like my office. It’s me and then it’s Jacqueline Lesco who is my associate, who is sort of my editor, and it’s the two of us. And it’s wonderfully quiet. And I love it. So, I think maybe it’s a question of ambition. It’s basically is there a desire for you to do this and do you have the ambition to do it.

John: Yep. That’s really what it is. A talent, and a vision, and an ambition to do all those things. And I would hope that I have talent and that I have vision, but I do not have the ambition to have this massive company. And the overhead, the emotional overhead, of having all of those employees.

So I’ve got four. And four is plenty. Four is a lot for me. And so I’ve got Megan. I’ve got Nima. And I’ve got Dustin. And we make stuff. And that’s great, but really mostly my software company. Megan helps me out with my writing stuff — I am working as a freelance writer. I’m not working as some big production company entity.

I don’t want to have to go to some other office every day. I don’t want all that feeling. And so even though JJ Abrams would have really smart people to do all that stuff, and even though he gets to participate in lots of other projects because his company is making 30 things, that’s exciting. But he also has to participate in some of those projects. And I’m sure it is challenging when he goes off and directs a Star Wars movie in London for all the other stuff to get done. And that’s going to be the same challenge with Greg Berlanti running 14 shows, or Chris Morgan with Fast and the Furious, plus other franchises. But that’s a choice they’ve chosen to make and that’s great. But it’s just not a choice that I would want to make.

Craig: No. Not at all. And Spielberg has been doing this sort of thing forever. So he has his own at Amblin and then DreamWorks and then back to Amblin again. But then he does his own movies. And so, yeah, it’s really just a question of desire and scope.

Yeah, and by the way, even for Greg Berlanti. So he does most of the television shows, but then he does Love, Simon. Right?

John: Yeah.

Craig: I think that’s part of it also is that you like doing different things and you don’t mind never being at home. That must be a part of it. It seems like a very busy life.

Let’s get this last one in here. Alex in LA. Who knows, maybe we’ll get more than one more in. Alex in LA – I get all the LA people. He writes, “Recently,” or it could be she, writes, “Recently after years of struggle I finally made my first big spec sale.” Yay.

“While the sale is great, what I really want is to have a long and sustained career and not just be a one-hit-wonder. So my question is what can I expect to happen next and how can I maximize my opportunities when I’m in that rare moment where I actually have a nice Deadline write up and a little career heat? What are the traps to look out for?

“For context, I’ve had some minor successes before and I’ve even been on the bottle water tour when a previous script of mine got a lot of attention, but sadly no sale. So I’m not a complete newbie at this, but I’d like to know what happens when you move past the level of general meetings at random production companies and into higher levels of the industry.”

All right, John, we’ve got a new kid. What do you tell ‘em?

John: All right, so first Alex congratulations. I would say here are some priorities for you. Priority number one: let’s get that script made. So having sold a script is fantastic. Having a script actually produced and a movie is out is much, much better. So if there’s anything you can do to get this movie made, I say do those things to get that movie made.

So that is taking the notes, trying to make those notes actually work. Always asking about the next step. Always asking how are we going to get a director. What are the things that are happening next? Try to make that thing actually become a movie and not just one thing that you sold. So, great that you sold it, let’s make that a movie would be my first thing.

Second priority I would say let’s get you another job. Let’s get you writing something else. So, that could be a pitch that you’ve gone out with, that you’ve set up, that you’re going to be writing. It could be an assignment for something to write, a preexisting piece of material. It probably won’t be a rewrite if it’s so early in your career, but it could be a rewrite. But getting you as a person who gets hired and not just a person who has sold something is great.

Third I would say maybe you need to staff on a TV show. That’s not advice I would have given ten years ago, but I think most writers are working in television right now. And so if there’s a TV show that you could be staffed on I would look at staffing on that TV show, especially if your script is a perfect example of something out there. Maybe try to staff on a show, even like a short-run show for Apple. An eight-episode Apple show would be great experience for you and get you more scripts under your belt.

Craig: All fantastic. I’m not sure what I could possibly add to that other than you should continue to be concerned that this will end tomorrow, because that’s kind of the way it works. The trend is to get rid of you. You are a new infection in the body of Hollywood. It will try and get rid of you. The good news is eventually it will stop trying to get rid of you and then you will start to try and get rid of it and you won’t be able to. But that’s a long way to go.

So, get the next job. Get. The. Next. Job. Go out there swinging at as many things as you can to get that next job, to keep working. Nothing is sexier than a writer who is unavailable. And it’s a shame, because it has nothing to do with our abilities, but being unavailable is the thing that makes people excited about you because that means somebody else likes you, which means you’re likeable. That’s the mess of it all.

So, yeah, stay ambitious man.

John: Alex, you’re going to be very busy because you’re going to be rewriting your script that you sold. You’re going to be going out and pitching on a bunch of things which means you’re really going to be doing the internal writing of all these different projects. You’re going to be figuring out how you’re going to tackle these projects.

Plus, you’re going to be writing new stuff for yourself because where I do see writers who have sold that one thing who never sell another thing it’s because they never really wrote another thing. They just went out and tried to get that first movie made or try to get a deal and they never wrote something else new.

So, you’ve got to do all three things, which seems crazy because you worked so hard to get to this point, but you’re now going to be probably working a lot harder.

Craig: Yeah. And you’re going to have to assume that there are going to be some swings and misses along the way.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: You may also work on something that doesn’t work out and you get fired off of it and then, you know, OK, well you’re going to have to deal with that fallout or whatever. But it won’t be your problem because you’ve already got the next thing lined up. So actually now is when you have to work harder than you’ve ever worked before. And you should enjoy and be proud of the moment, but I think honestly Alex your questions are implying the right mindset.

John: 100% agree. All right, let’s save that last question for next week and instead go to our One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing is an article by Avi Selk for the Washington Post called The Worst Sex in the World is Anglerfish Sex, and Now There’s Finally Video.

So, anglerfish are those things you’ve seen in cartoons. They’re these monstrous sort of Precambrian Jurassic fish that have the little lantern dangling over their heads. They live deep, deep in the water. They’ve never seen sunlight. But there’s video now of this anglerfish and it’s a female anglerfish you find out because female anglerfish are the giant ones and male anglerfish are tiny, tiny little fish. And when males mate they bite into the female fish. Their teeth hold on basically forever and they basically become subsumed into the bigger fish.

The video is fantastic and disturbing. It looks alien. So I just encourage you to see it. I’ll actually put two different video links in there. One which simulates what it would look like if humans did this, which is so disturbing.

Craig: It’s the best. I’ve seen this, too. It’s awesome.

John: Yeah. So I love that we live in a world that has such incredibly freaky creatures out there. And while it seems like, “Oh, that poor male fish is dying to procreate,” it’s also very kind of smart mechanism. Because literally all of his DNA gets in there because he becomes part of the other fish. So he’s both a parasite and he’s eaten by it. It’s all interesting and it feels alien in a wonderful way.

Craig: Yeah. I got to say once you get past the mammal situation and you get into insects and reptiles and fish, women – I think they generally win the whole battle of the sexes. They seem to be winning. And violently in all sorts of fun ways, like biting the heads off their mate. You know, I always love those things. But, you know, I’m a praying mantis fan.

John: Well, if you think about it there’s a reason why women should win because essentially if the goal of reproduction is to pass along your genes, ultimately the women are going to be the ones who are going to give birth and raise the children in many cases. So there’s a reason why you’d want them to be stronger and survive.

Craig: Yeah. It really comes down to math from what I understand. It’s a question of how many eggs, you know, so mammals are basically we’re pregnant with one offspring at a time. And then when you’re in reptiles, fish, and insects they’re pregnant with a million offspring at times. So, like the math has a huge impact on whose head gets chopped off basically. It’s a real mess out there. Biology is brutal and doesn’t care about our feelings. Isn’t that terrible?

Well, I got all geeked out yesterday and watched two of the E3 press conferences. The one was the X-Box press conference and then the other one was the Bethesda press conference. And really I was just watching the Bethesda press conference to see if they would finally just say, OK, yes, there will be an Elder Scrolls 6. And they did. There’s going to be an Elder Scrolls 6. But not for like four years probably.

And one of the reasons why is because it’s going to be the game they work on after the next game they’re working on. And the next game that they’re working on is their first original franchise in 20 years or something. Because Fallout was actually based on something they had purchased from another company. And then they made it what it is.

But in any case Bethesda, my favorite game studio, has a new game that they are going to be putting out I think probably for the next generation platform, so my guess is 2020. And it’s called Starfield. And what we know about it is it’s in space. That’s it.

But I have a feeling if it is remotely like what we have all come to love from Bethesda games then even if it’s just Fallout in space, I’ll be thrilled.

John: That will be great.

Craig: So, anyway, Starfield is hopefully heading towards us in 2020. And then I’m thinking Elder Scrolls 6 in 2022? Then at that point if I get hit by the bus I’m OK.

John: Yeah. Hopefully there will still be a planet in 2022.

Craig: Well–

John: No guarantees in this world.

Craig: There’ll be something.

John: There’ll be something. Will there be humans? Yeah. There will still be a planet.

Craig: I’m optimistic.

John: All right, good. I like the optimism.

Craig: I don’t why. Because I’m stupid.

John: You’re not stupid, Craig. You’re smart and you’re wise and you have umbrage for only the right things.

Craig: Thank you.

John: That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Jeff Mooney. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. But Craig and I are always delighted to answer your questions on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a comment. That helps people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes, plus links and such at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find transcripts. They go up the week after the episode goes out.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. Last episode I proposed that we may end up doing a digital version of the USB drives down the road. We’re thinking through that. We still have a few of the existing USB drives if you’d like one of those. But they may be the last of their kind. So, we may end up going to a fully digital version. And let people download them in chunks or maybe batches of 100 so they can live on with–

Craig: I think that’s smart.

John: Yeah. It’s really the international users are really facing – sometimes the import fees on the USB drive which is hard to value.

Craig: Yeah, you know what, and then they have to pay those taxes that end up coming back to us as foreign levy fees.

John: Yep. Crazy.

Craig: That part’s nice. I finally get–

John: Actually that’s true. Craig is referring to writers get paid these foreign levy fees that are not residuals. They’re kind of like residuals but they’re not residuals. The WGA handles it which is controversial. But it’s nice extra free found money because of Europe and other countries.

Craig: Thank you Europe and other countries.

John: It’s nice. Craig, thank you for this discussion which happened in Europe for me, Los Angeles for you. Lord knows where you’ll be next time we try to talk, but–

Craig: I know where I’ll be next time. In Europe. When you’ll be in the United States.

John: That’s what it is. We’re always – someone is always safe and out of the country when we’re doing this.

Craig: Yep.

John: Cool. Craig, thanks so much. Bye.

Craig: Thanks John. See you next time.

Links:

• Coverfly’s response to accusations in a now-deleted blog post. Here’s a conversation on the Screenwriting Reddit page about it.
• In 2015’s Episode 191 The Deal with Scripped.com, we invited John Rhodes from ScreenCraft and Guy Goldstein from WriterDuet to investigate a data management crisis with Scripped.com.
• Toxic Fandom Is Killing ‘Star Wars’ by Marc Bernardin for the Hollywood Reporter
• Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast covers the Johnlock Conspiracy.
• Apple has made a deal with the WGA
• Evan in Philadephia recommends Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art for a great explanation of “gutters.”
• JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot is an example of a big production company led by a creative.
• The worst sex in the world is anglerfish sex, and now there’s finally video by Avi Selk for the Washington Post. This video’s upsetting animation shows what the process would look like for humans.
• Bethesda’s Starfield has been announced
• The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!
• The USB drives!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Outro by Jeff Mooney (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/full-circle).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 351 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we’re going to be talking about the way that movies tend to bring their stories full circle and what that means for writers trying to figure out their story beats. We’ll also be answering questions about YouTube, arbitration, and skipping credits on Netflix.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is going to be pretty great for our second 350 episodes. This is kind of how I think in 700s.

**John:** Absolutely. You’re a Septcentennial.

**Craig:** That’s right. I work in base 700.

**John:** Absolutely. I wonder if there’s any civilization that was a base seven civilization. Because obviously we have the Babylonians who were base six and 12. You know, we’re in a decimal system. But obviously some system somewhere there are going to be creatures with seven fingers and they’re going to be working on a base seven.

**Craig:** I think it comes down to fingers, right?

**John:** Fingers and toes, whatever. Although, I mean, the Babylonians like they didn’t have six or 12, so?

**Craig:** And we still have base 12 for clocks.

**John:** Absolutely. Those Babylonians they helped us out a lot there. Because I think circle math just works better in six and 12. That’s why.

**Craig:** Circle math works better. 360. But again, you could divide a circle into anything. The truth is you could have divided it into 500 segments. And then you’d be back to base 10.

**John:** I’m so happy we’re staying on theme, our circle theme, for this episode.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** First we’ll start with a little bit of news. So this is a thing that happened this past week. There was a small theater in Pittsburgh that was going to do Big Fish. They decided to cancel Big Fish because some background actors were established as being a same sex married couple during one number. It was silly and crazy and frustrating. So, on previous episodes we talked about what writers should do when there’s drama, when there’s drama out there in the world, and the degree to which you should participate in the drama or comment on the drama.

In this case Andrew Lippa and I, the authors of Big Fish, did jump in to say like, “Hey, that’s not cool. It’s absolutely fine to stage the sequence with a same sex married couple walking in the background.” And it was interesting to see it play out sort of on Facebook and then become a bigger thing.

So if you want to see the actual statement that Andrew and I wrote it is up on the site at johnaugust.com. But it was just an interesting little moment that happened that I wouldn’t have anticipated because Big Fish has been staged hundreds of times across the country and this is the first time that we had to get involved in any way.

**Craig:** Yeah. I read your and Andrew’s statement and I thought it was really well done. No surprise there. I think that you guys probably have more cover to write something like this because you’re not just writers but you are creators of IP, right? So there’s a certain producorial or entrepreneurial aspect of your co-ownership of that show.

The thing that confused me was why – if you have a problem with same sex marriage why are you licensing a show written by two openly gay men? What’s your theory there? How does your mind work? I don’t get it.

**John:** Yeah, so this theater, and in our statement we were trying to be careful to not kind of just slam the theater entirely because the basis of why we get staged so much across the country is we are a very family-friendly wholesome show, with no swearing or violence. And in some cases we’ll even let theaters ask us to change a certain word because they don’t want to say the word penis or whatever. We’ll let that happen because we sort of want the show seen by as many people who want to be able to see it and stage it. I mean, I think the actual experience of staging a musical is so crucial and that’s why in many ways our audience is not just the folks who are sitting down to buy a ticket but the folks who are spending weeks to put the show on.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So we want to make sure that we keep it out there for the folks who want to make it. But I don’t think there was really anti-gay animus behind any of these decisions. And I don’t want to sort of assume that there was. I think there’s often just a fear of controversy. A fear of making somebody feel uncomfortable. And that’s a thing that we need to get rid of kind of overall, especially on the topic of just like there are gay people in the world. It’s a thing we see on network television all the time. There’s that sense of like can we just soften this a little bit. Can we make sure that we’re not going to ruffle any feathers?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, Blackish had it with an episode this season which they pulled completely because they were worried about angering communities especially I think around the NFL. So it’s a thing that people face all the time. And so you wouldn’t say that this theater is anti-gay or that ABC is anti-Blackish, but so often they’re so afraid of upsetting anyone that they’re going to upset the people they need to be supporting the most.

**Craig:** I understand that. I side with your argument against that sort of thing. And curiously I should note that when we talk about being a family show, the people that have the least problem seeing same sex couples being represented on screen or on stage are children. Their generation doesn’t give a damn. Well, at least as far as I can tell. And granted we live here in California. Maybe a little bit different in Pittsburgh, but I’m kind of guessing maybe not. Because culture has changed. And it’s a legal institution in our country. And my feeling is “Get over it.” And if you’re uncomfortable with that then don’t come back.

But we have, I think, a responsibility to be consistent in our positions on these things. If you’re uncomfortable with same sex marriage or you’re worried about people being uncomfortable with same sex marriage then, you know, maybe don’t try and profit off of the work of people that are in same sex marriages. That’s my thought.

**John:** All right. I would say the last thing that’s interesting about this scenario is that as screenwriters, as TV showrunners at times, we have control of our product to a certain point but we’re not getting involved with individual productions down the road. Like if a certain TV station is trying to show our show and we don’t like that TV station we’re not going to get involved with that.

But usually the authors of a play, if they do get involved in a production it’s because that production is trying to change something that is against the text of the show. And so you’re trying to not stage it the way it’s actually written on the page. So it was weird for us to come on board and say like “Listen, no, there’s no characters who identify as LGBT in the show, but there’s also no characters who are not – who identify the other way.”

It was weird for us as writers to be jumping to the defense of the director of a show saying like it’s absolutely fine for this person to choose to stage it this way because that is a valid interpretation of this. And so often as people working in Hollywood we are very frustrated by directors and sort of directors changing things. But here this was an opportunity to say like, oh no, it is the director’s job to provide perspective on this and to bring it to new life.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, I’m fascinated by that job of stage director because you get this pretty remarkable contrast of things. You can see a show and then you can see the same show by a different director, so all the words are the same, the songs are the same, the story is the same, but it’s all different somehow. That’s really interesting. It pulls out for an audience exactly what a director brings.

**John:** And we never get to see that in Hollywood because a thing is made just once. And so therefore that is that vision, so we never see two visions of the same story.

**Craig:** Except The Exorcist. What was it called, The Exorcist Dominion? So there were two Exorcist sequels. It was Exorcist 4 essentially. Paul Schrader wrote and directed an Exorcist sequel. And then when he was done the studio or the financiers, I think maybe Morgan Creek said “We don’t like this, it’s not scary enough. Let’s redo it. Let’s redo it with Renny Harlin. Let’s rewrite it. Let’s bring out Renny Harlin. We’ll keep a few scenes but we’ll redo it. And most of the same cast, so it’s sort of the same story, but it’s sort of not.” And I’ve seen both of them. It’s fascinating.

And Stellan Skarsgård is the star of both of those. I said I got to talk to you about this because I’m fascinated by what happened there and I got a really interesting perspective on it from him. But that’s the one thing I can think of in movie history are two movies of the same thing sort of by two different directors. Very strange.

**John:** Yeah. In film schools you’ll often get an exercise where three different crews will be given the same material and they’ll shoot it and you’ll see how vastly different their approach is to shoot the same material. But agree, in the real world in sort of actually made big things it’s a unique opportunity.

**Craig:** Exceedingly rare.

**John:** All right. More follow up. So, two episodes ago we talked about Highland 2. You and I discussed Highland 2. It’s now out in the world. It worked. It did really well. So I was so terrified as we were launching because it had been beta for three years. I was worried that it would not actually be able to be downloaded and the in-app purchase would work. So, we actually released it in Japan for six hours, so Matthew Chilelli, our editor who lives in Japan, could download it on the Japanese Mac App Store and make sure it worked. And he screen recorded the whole thing. So Matthew who is editing this, thank you very much for doing that. It worked for Matthew and it worked for a bunch of people.

In just the first ten days we’ve almost reached the number of people who had installed Highland 1. Six years it was out there.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** So that’s a remarkable launch. So thank you to everyone. Thank you for people who left reviews. If you haven’t left a review for it, it’s great and it helps because it helps other people find the app and let us know what you’re thinking. Because we’re really happy with this version but there’s a roadmap we’ll put a link to about what’s coming in future versions and you can help us figure out what we should be working on next.

**Craig:** So you guys are going to make some money on this?

**John:** We are making some money. So we’ve made $29,000 so far on it.

**Craig:** Nice!

**John:** Which is good. Which is really good for an app like this. And a couple times we outranked Final Draft in the total grosses, so that’s nice to see too.

**Craig:** God, I love that so much.

**John:** That’s really Craig’s goal behind all this is just to see them suffer a little bit.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s sexy. Oh, you know who loves that?

**John:** Yeah, is he back?

**Craig:** Oh yeah, he’s so back. Tell me about Highland 2. Highland 2.

**John:** Yeah, so he’s really – he’s become a monetary focus person. He’s really about sort of like value and cash flow.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig likes imagining Highland 2 spanking Final Draft. Spank.

**John:** This is not going to go well. In Episode 346 Christina Hodson came on and we talked about race and gender and inclusion and all sorts of things pertaining to Hollywood. It was a really good episode. Following after that the New York Times did a story on her and that and me and there’s a photo of the two of us together. I do not like the photo whatsoever. It looks like I’m giving her instructions on how to fix things. I’m not happy about the photo, but it was a nice story.

**Craig:** Oh my god, you’re right. It looks like you’ve shown up to say, “Hey stupid. Look at what I wrote.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh that’s terrible. Why did they do that? Why did they do that?

**John:** Because we weren’t thinking and Christina and I were both really uncomfortable being photographed. The photographer was super nice, but he had this set us and like, “OK, we’ll try this.” And that was the photo they ran. And I wasn’t crazy about it.

**Craig:** She’s awesome by the way.

**John:** She’s so cool. So I’ve gotten to hang out with her. We like Christina Hodson. We’ll have her back on the show at some point. But you can read the New York Times story about that. And sort of the ongoing discussion over whether these tools can be helpful for people figuring out what they should be thinking about in their own scripts.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** JT in Philadelphia wrote in. Craig, do you want to take him?

**Craig:** Sure. He says, “Your discussion of the controversy surrounding the pronunciation of Los Angeles reminded me of George R. Stewart’s 1975 book Names on the Globe, a wonderful exploration of the origins of place names. Sadly it’s long out of print but used copies are readily available. Anyway, he spends nearly two pages delving into the controversy and the many variations of the pronunciation that were used by one group or another.

“What I found most interesting, however, was the way politicians and others who wished to sidestep the controversy tended to settle on the abbreviation LA, which is why Los Angeles is practically the only city that is universally known by its abbreviation.” I’m smiling as I read this because that never occurred to me before.

**John:** It hadn’t occurred to me either, but it’s so true.

**Craig:** Holy – I mean, people will occasionally say NYC, but only because it’s a little bit of a cutesy thing and there’s a song from Annie. But nobody in New York goes “Oh yeah, I live in NY or NYC.” No one says that. LA is the only one. No one says STL for St. Louis. Wow.

**John:** And I think part of it is because LA captures the idea of bigger than just Los Angeles. In a weird way Los Angeles feels like the city where LA feels like the city and the surrounding region and sort of the idea of LA. So if you say like where do you live, “Oh, I live in LA,” if you live in Santa Monica you can say like “I live in LA.” It’s a general sense of that. But you wouldn’t say to, if you were visiting somebody in New York like, “Oh, I live in Los Angeles.” You more likely say that you live in LA because it’s a wider sweep that sort of counts as LA. It’s a strange thing. But I had never really considered that we speak of the abbreviation as much or more than Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, look, there are places like people who live in Mendocino, they don’t say, “Oh, I love in SF.” They say, “I live in Mendocino. It’s outside of San Francisco. Or I live near San Francisco.” Nobody says SF. I mean, there’s Nola, but nobody really says Nola.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Right. For New Orleans, Louisiana. Nobody says that. We’re the only one. It’s fascinating. Thank you, JT. Great reference to a very cool book.

**John:** All right. Larry writes in saying, “I thought you might like this story from the Washington Post. One space between each sentence they said. Science just proved them wrong. Obviously there needs to be a standard, but do we really want to leave it to science?”

So this is a story about whether two spaces or one space are the better choice for readability in text. This article seems to argue that two spaces is better, at least for certain fonts. Craig, you and I are both now one-spacers. What do you take from this?

**Craig:** I didn’t read it. I didn’t read it because you know what I don’t care. Here’s the thing: I was a two-spacer. Then I became a one-spacer. I have no problem reading anything with one space. Frankly, I have a problem reading things with two spaces. I can understand that there’s a point to say that it might be easier this way or that. It’s too late for me and this is the deal. I’ve just decided I get to be cranky and old about things now. And I think I’m going to be cranky and old about that one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m absolutely fine having switched to one space. I don’t find it easier or harder to read with multiple spaces. That sense that like oh the extra space helps you keep sentences apart, I don’t really buy that. That’s why you have capital letters.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s going to be fine. So I will maintain my one space policy because I can.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because you can. And you will.

**John:** And I will. Craig, you proposed the topic for this week’s episode which is Full Circle. We kind of left it at that, but what I took that to mean was that the way in which our stories, especially movie stories, have an expectation or a natural pattern where characters end up coming full circle at the end of stories. Is that your intention behind the idea?

**Craig:** It is. Exactly right. There is this strange feeling we have about this sense of a return, and generally speaking I think it helps writing. I think it helps us as we go about writing something to think of the ending as the beginning and the beginning as the ending. That they are overlap-able essentially. And that there is a strange echo in the end of the beginning. And you see it very, very clearly as is often the case with structural things in animation, because animation is just pure storytelling.

So when we think about Finding Nemo, and the beginning of Marlin finding this one little egg and then at the end he’s holding his son and he imagines the one little egg we cry. And we cry in part because there is a connection to the beginning. And I’m fascinated by the way the return to a thing is inherently emotional to us.

**John:** Yeah. So as we talked about movie stories and what makes movie stories unique from television stories, a movie story tends to be about a character taking a journey that will be the one time they take this journey in their life. It’s this unique set of circumstances that are occurring to and because of this character. They’re generally leaving their place of safety and comfort and going off into the world. And that we want to see them making forward progress and have obstacles but ultimately getting to a place.

Yet often that place that they physically end up is the same place where they started. So Wizard of Oz, she leaves Kansas, she comes back to Kansas at the end. But they come back to that place changed and that is the crucial narrative the journey the character has been on is that they are not the same person they were at the very start of the story. Other stories, they’re not going to literally come back to the same place, but they will be assembling a new home, a new normal that has echoes of the original normal at this place they’ve gotten to. So that is the full circle. There is a thing that they’ve wanted that has been driving them. They achieved that thing. And in achieving that thing they’ve come back to a place of normalcy that they have created which is echoing the original place.

**Craig:** That’s all absolutely correct. And there is I think layered in there this other magical little thing which is an implication that existence is meaningful. I could make a pretty good argument that it’s not actually meaningful, but one of the things that is wonderful and seductive about good storytelling is that it implies quite the opposite. That there is meaning in life. And that these moments in our lives may indeed be important. And so when we come back around to things and stories we get this little hiccup in our hearts because it means that there’s a sense to all to it. That we’re not just randomly going through moments.

The first person that like really used the word circle with me was Jeanine Tesori who is a Broadway composer and I worked with her on a musical movie. And we were talking about the idea of circle and I want to just point out there’s – you’ve seen Fun Home haven’t you?

**John:** I’ve never seen Fun Home.

**Craig:** Oh, you’ve never seen Fun Home?

**John:** No. It’s a masterpiece by all accounts.

**Craig:** It’s wonderful. So there’s this thing – Fun Home begins with this little girl and she’s demanding that her daddy play with her and she plays this game. She says “I want to play airplane.” This is all in song. “I want to play airplane.” And he sort of does this thing that I used to do with my kids where he gets on his back and he puts his feet up and she sort of gets on his feet and balances and pretends that she’s an airplane.

And then the progression of the show is about how this girl grows up and starts to realize that she’s gay and also starts to realize that her father is gay. And she can handle it and he can’t. And he eventually commits suicide. At the very end of the show you’re kind of broken up, as you might imagine by all of this. He’s committed suicide. She’s in shock. And then they go back to her being a little girl again. And she’s pretending to fly on him again. And the last line of the show is as kind of a grownup version of herself she says, “Every so often there is a rare moment of perfect balance when I soared above him.” And you go, oh my god.

So I thought this show began with a nice moment between a father and a daughter and showing that they were close and that they used to have together. And then all this other stuff happened to kind of pull them apart. And then he died. But really that moment at the end is this much deeper more tragic story of someone who cannot admit to themselves who they are, but because of their love for their daughter she can. And she can go places he never could. That’s profound. And then you cry.

And it wouldn’t work if it wasn’t the repetition of that beginning moment. There is a promise in that repetition that things make sense.

**John:** Yeah. The technique you’re describing is called bookending. So you’re opening with a scene and coming back to the scene. Either the exact same scene or a close echo, a close rhyme of that scene to make it feel like, “OK, there’s intention. That there is a meaning behind things. That these things were put there for a specific reason. That there is a nice clean beginning and end. Weird that we’re talking about circles and we’re talking about beginnings and ends, too, but like that there really is a reason behind all these things being placed out there before us.”

So a bookending is a very classic technique and useful for a lot of situations. But even if you don’t literally have the same scene, you do have I think a natural movie expectation that we are going to come back to a place because movies as we talked about tend to be structured around a central dramatic question. There’s a fundamental question that the movie is trying to – the movie is asking at the start and trying to answer over the course of it and hopefully you’ve gotten that answer by the end. And so when you get that answer that naturally brings you back to the question. Like you’re asking the question again and providing a new answer. That’s what you’re describing in Fun Home and it’s what we see hopefully in movies that are working really well is the thing you’ve set up at the start as the issue you’re going to be tackling, you’ve tackled it and you actually have come to a conclusion about it. And that conclusion by its necessity is referring back to the beginning.

**Craig:** Right. And this helps guide us as we’re putting these things together because first we need to know what’s our actual point. What are we trying to say? And then I think you have an opportunity before you ever worry about anything else like inciting incidents and the middle and the whatever. Pinch points and all the other nonsense they throw at us. You have an opportunity to create a wonderful, terrible, funny, or tragic irony. That the beginning and end have an ironic connection to each other. And it could be an uplifting irony. It could be a touching irony. But irony in juxtaposition like that is giving the audience a thorough satisfaction. That’s almost like dessert, you know. You feel satisfied because the ending is the beginning. You feel as if that is that proper ending.

And when the ending is disconnected from the beginning I think this is sometimes when we will get the note, “There’s a problem with the ending. I’m just not feeling enough at the end.” And if you are getting that note take a careful look and see if there is a – if you have closed the circuit essentially.

**John:** Absolutely. So my first movie Go, that final scene is incredibly important. And it feels like, “Oh, you could lose that little thing.” Like basically all the storylines are wrapped up. But without that final scene where like they’re all back at the car together and Manny asks, “So what are we doing for New Years?” Like, oh, OK, a normalcy has returned. All the questions about like will Ronna have enough money for went. That’s getting paid off there. And then Manny is alive. We didn’t know if we was still alive. And he’s asking what are we doing for New Years. Like, OK, they’re all all right and we’re going to return to a normal space after this wild night and all the stuff that has happened over the course of it.

Without that scene you don’t leave the movie nearly as satisfied, even with all the funny bits along the way, often that final scene is really where you’re sticking the landing and making it feel like, “OK, this was worth your whole time getting through there.”

If you’ve ever been to see a movie and like it breaks halfway through or like there’s a big interruption, you don’t get to see the last bit, even if you enjoyed the movie up to that point it’s not going to be your favorite movie because you just don’t know how all the pieces come together.

**Craig:** And there is the communication of intelligence when you get to the end and you see that the end is an echo of the beginning. Floating above the characters and the things they’re saying, there’s a feeling of comfort. That the storyteller was in control. That everything was carefully done and said to you. I’m a big Guns N’ Roses fan. And one of the things I love about Guns N’ Roses is that every now and again, but not infrequently, they would write a song that was a pretty good song. And then they would just tack on another awesome song as part of it. They didn’t have. They just did.

It was like, you know, November Rain is a pretty fine ballad. That’s a cool ballad. Now here’s an awesome guitar song at the end of it that has nothing to do with the rest of it but it’s amazing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or like Rocket Queen. Well, it’s a pretty decent song. And then at the end let’s just do a different song which is awesome. They would do that all the time and what you would feel was this sense of we’re so good at this we can just do it just cause. We can give you extra. That’s how good we are. We have bonus talent.

And I think sometimes when you’re telling a good story and there’s that, well, unexpected return – because see a good completed circle, the beginning does not imply an ending. You know, I show up and I show up to Fun Home and it’s a story about a woman who – I’m going to watch her grow from a 10-year-old girl into a 35-year-old woman. And I’m going to hear about how she grows up and the story of her life. And how her relationship with her father changes and what happens to him.

So, when I watch in the beginning that she’s a little girl and she’s playing I think, “OK, I have no idea that this is going to mean so much more and yet it’s the same thing at the end.” And so when I get it it’s bonus art. And that’s when we feel loved by the storyteller. We feel taken care of. And I love that feeling.

**John:** So mostly we’re talking here a Broadway musical or a movie, it’s a one-time experience. It’s about two hours going through it. But a lot of the same logic applies to television as well. Only there you’re talking about the course of a season, the course of multiple seasons, the course of a whole series. And so recent conversations – obviously I sat down with Aline and Rachel for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and they talked about how they had mapped out the four seasons. They really knew what the arc of the whole show was going to be. And they were hoping to get the four seasons so they could really complete it out.

And then earlier in the year I sat down with Stephen Schiff to talk through The Americans. He was describing the third season, not spoiling stuff in it, but I have loved this third season and you realize like oh my gosh they have – we talked about Chekhov’s Gun on the wall. Like when you see a gun on the wall that gun has to fire at some point. And you realize like, “Oh man, this is like Chekhov’s 12 Gun Salute.” Like there are just Chekhov’s guns going off all the time because there are so many things they have carefully stacked up along the way. And they’re all just firing and it’s so exciting to see.

Like the things you knew, OK, that’s going to have to happen at some time. Oh no, there’s only three episodes left. All of these things are happening. It’s so exciting to see everything coming. And I have a very strong suspicion that when we get to that last episode it will come full circle. It will answer that question of can you be Russian spies living as Americans here and what does that mean to be sort of a false family within this country? They’ll be able to answer that question because they just so clearly thought through what they’d done and what they could do to answer that question over the course of the season.

**Craig:** Have you ever read The Sandman comics?

**John:** I never read Gaiman’s Sandman. No.

**Craig:** OK. Well, treat yourself. And they have – I think it’s a set of I want to say three or four volumes that have all of them. Neil Gaiman is an absolute master of this. And in Sandman he does this so beautifully and so frequently, circles within circles, that it seems impossible. Like it seems like he must have had some massive spreadsheet because the amount of stories he tells and the nature of them and the way that they roam between sort of regular people to gods of various mythologies, whether it’s European mythologies or African mythologies or Asian mythologies, and then into strange science fiction and then back around. It is mindboggling.

But every time he comes back around, sometimes he would come back around to something that was from like four years earlier. How did you know? This is insane. He’s brilliant at it.

Definitely if you haven’t read Sandman, my god, I’m saying this to everybody not just you. It is such a joy. It’s so literate and smart.

**John:** I will look forward to reading it. So let’s end this segment talking through some advice for how writers can think about this circle as they’re breaking their stories.

You can go to the Dan Harmon sort of – he literally has a circle chart that he goes through as he thinks through his stories which works for Community and for Rick and Morty. And that is his way of doing it. I have never been enamored by that specific approach, but I think the general idea of thinking about like where am I starting, where am I getting to, and to what degree is that ending reflective of where I started? Like does it feel like, OK, it’s answering the dramatic question. Is it getting me either physically back to that first place or emotionally back to that place that that character sought? That is a thing I’m always thinking about right from the beginning.

There’s a project I’m hoping to write next where the nature of it I knew exactly a moment that had to happen and that it was probably the last moment of the story. And so then I had to think like, OK, knowing that it has to be the last moment, what is the first moment that’s going to make it feel like getting there is going to be as rewarding as possible?

**Craig:** Right. And to me that’s the – it’s tough to give practical advice about this beyond “think about it,” but the general guideline is to find something that is in its own way beautiful, and beautiful meaning harmonious and satisfying and delicious, to say you know what the beginning – if I want this remarkable ending, what would be this ironic way to have it as a beginning? And sometimes you don’t know that you’re going to need an ending and so you look back.

I mean, when I was doing the last Hangover movie with Todd Phillips, you know, we could have ended it all sorts of ways, but it just seemed like we should end it where it began, all the way back in that room where Justin Bartha’s character was going to get married and they were having a chat and Alan was trying on a tuxedo. And now Alan is about to get married. And it just felt like that’s – you know, draw your circle.

Now, nobody was planning on that, so that’s not a particularly delicious one. It just felt appropriate. But when you are planning your version of it, think about what would feel so good. Because you know your ending is complicated and insightful and definitive. Your ending is a period at the end of a sentence. So what’s the question version of that to begin with?

**John:** Absolutely. Really establish the question and therefore the answer will have meaning. The other thing I would remind people is that you can’t come to a place unless you left. And so your characters have to leave that place they start, which I think is one of the biggest challenges often screenwriters have is they don’t let their characters move. They don’t sort of force their characters to move and actually take some action.

So, if people are just sitting around not doing anything, there’s no coming back to a place because they never left. You’ve got to get them moving. Most of the time that’s literally leaving their place of safety and comfort, but it can also be, you know, a journey of what they want, what they’re going after, what is normal for them and pushing them into a place that’s not normal.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So you got to leave before you come back.

**Craig:** Hell yeah. Get out.

**John:** Hell yeah. All right, let’s answer some listener questions. Marco writes, “I have been making a low budget pilot for an animated series for the last few years. It will be finished by the end of this month. My question is whether or not to put it on YouTube for all to see, or keep it a secret and only show it to professionals who could be interested in producing it.” Craig, what are your first thoughts for Marco?

**Craig:** Well, if you have professionals who might be interested in producing it then it seems reasonable to begin by putting it say on Vimeo and putting a password on it. A lot of people do things like that. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that maybe you don’t. And if you don’t, then just let people see it, because maybe it gets passed around and you get attention for it.

I don’t see why you wouldn’t.

**John:** In general I am a fan of sharing stuff and letting people discover it and trying to let what’s naturally going to happen happen. But I will, a counter example here, so Megan McDonnell, our producer, she directed this really good short earlier this year and I asked like, “Oh, so you’re going to do the festival circuit with it and get some awards for it?” She was like, “Oh no, we’re actually going to put it online.” And that’s totally her choice and people saw it and she got meetings off of it. But I think there’s also a scenario in which they went out, they won some awards, and got some attention that way where people are looking at it on a big screen with professional attention. Like oh holy cow, here’s a good short with some stars I recognize. And some awards behind it could have been helpful.

So, there’s no one perfect way to do that. But if Marco your concern is like someone is going to steal my idea and do their own version of it, don’t. Because showing your work is good, so show your work.

**Craig:** Show your work, Marco. Lex in LA writes, “Is the WGA going to fight Netflix skipping credits? One of my biggest pet peeves with Netflix and other streaming platforms is that they cut away from the end credits and jump into a trailer for something else or another movie, episode of a TV show, etc. A lot of the time I finish the film and think ‘I wonder who the DP was,’ and I’m constantly let down when Netflix cuts away before it gets to the below-the-line credits. Hell, the ABC app on my Apple TV cuts away during the last scene before the closing credits.

“Is there anything the unions can do to combat this? Shouldn’t it be a given that the credits are allowed to roll in their entirety?”

**John:** All right. This is not an official WGA answer. I will say that the WGA is not a great vehicle for addressing this, because WGA deals with the folks who make things, not necessarily the folks who exhibit things. So it would be a challenging thing for the WGA to implement. Where I think you could see some movement on this would just be a lot of public shaming. So I think if you had a big group of high profile filmmakers and TV makers saying, “Hey, Netflix, cut this out. Hey ABC, cut this out. Show the credits,” then I think you could sort of publicly shame them a bit into doing that.

But I don’t think unions are going to be able to do that. Craig, what’s your take?

**Craig:** Well, I think there is some bearing that the union has on the exhibition of credits and I don’t know exactly how the legal mechanism works, whether it’s that if you’re a signatory you have to require any exhibitor to obey the following rules for credits. In other words we’re obliging you to pass the rules along. I do know for instance that CBS cannot air a show, show you who the director is, and not show you who the writer is. And that they have to follow the order of credits.

So the thing with these credits is that the rules are negotiated by the unions. The two most powerful unions when it comes to credits are the DGA and the WGA. The director and the writer credit are married together essentially. Even on posters if you show the director’s name you have to show the writer’s name in any way, shape, or form. That’s just the rule.

Then the below-the-line credits, those are the purview of various IATSE unions that don’t really have the kind of credit protections that the DGA or the WGA have, nor do they have seemingly the interest to promote those things.

I feel like it’s a little bit honestly of a shrug, because the way we consume that information now is so different than what used to be. You just go online and you have the answer. It’s all there. And I generally don’t stick around for the credits. If I want to know who did it I take a look. To me credits are fine, but I don’t make movies so that people can see the credits. You know what I mean? I just want them to see the show.

**John:** Because of the Marvel movies and their after-credit sequences which I’ve railed against before, there is a tradition of sitting around for certain movie’s credits and not other movie’s credits. On Netflix, yes, I notice that as things go by sometimes I have been frustrated and wanted to see those things and have to sort of deliberately hunt them out. But it’s not that hard to hunt them out. I think Craig makes a good point that like you’ve got IMDb at any point and so you can always look up who the person was behind that.

I will say that growing up, sitting through credits did give me a sense of just how many people are involved in making a movie. And that is a lovely thing to see like “Oh my god it took thousands of people for this movie to exist” Was a good education. But I don’t know that the unions are going to be able to make this happen.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think public pressure on Netflix is by far the most likely way of getting that to happen, or some setting that Netflix allows you to do to like never skip credits.

**Craig:** There will be no public pressure on Netflix to flood your television screen with endless credits. It’s just not going to happen.

**John:** DT in Los Angeles writes, “I’ve been consulting with a distribution company who has recently started doing their own productions. One of their productions currently in preproduction is a historical drama based on real people. In Episode 325, Craig mentioned how he and his researcher had to create an annotated version of teleplays for Chernobyl. Irene Turner also mentioned having to do this in Episode 293 with her screenplay for The Most Hated Woman in America.

“The attorneys for the production company had never heard of an annotated screenplay until I explained it to them based on my listening to the podcast. Could you give me a bit more detail about how an annotated screenplay is formatted? Are they footnotes or endnotes like a college research paper? Or are notes just inserted into the action line? Also, how specific are the sources? I’d imagine if you are citing a newspaper article you have to list the publication, the author, and the date of the publication?”

**Craig:** OK. Well, first of all, DT, the deal is that there are certain things that are our obligations and responsibilities and then there are certain things that are their obligations and responsibilities. Typically what happens is when the company hires you to write your project one of their obligations to us is to indemnify us. Essentially if someone comes along and sues they cover it. And they cover the legal action in our defense. In exchange we promise that we didn’t do anything wrong, that we haven’t ripped anybody off. Obviously if we have then all bets are off.

But one of the ways that they feel that they’re on solid footing with that indemnification is that we provide them with an annotated screenplay. If they didn’t ask you for one, and they are also indemnifying you, you probably don’t want to bring it up because you’re getting something for free there.

That said, the actual physical document, the annotated screenplay, I didn’t even see. We just had our researcher do it and send it in. So, I will get a hold of it. And I can’t publish it for you guys yet, just because I don’t want to give anything away regarding the show. But I can at least describe it. So, I will get a copy of that and in our next show as part of follow up we’ll talk through what that looks like.

**John:** Absolutely. A thing I would also single to DT is that in the case of Chernobyl, especially in the case of Most Hated Woman in America, there were concerns about libel. Are you saying things about people that could create lawsuit situations? If your historical thing is something that happened in the 1600s that’s not going to be a problem for you.

So, the reason why I imagine you might do an annotated screenplay in that situation is if there are certain facts that are not well known and it’s not clear sort of where you’re drawing these facts. There you might want to have some evidence-based, like “This is where I got this thing from” to make it clear that you’re not drawing on one specific source of material. But I think it’s more for recent history that you’re going to be finding annotated screenplays an important thing.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, essentially whatever the time is that covers the possibly defamation that might occur. That’s what you’re dealing with. And, by the way, it depends country to country. In the United States I believe the deal is are they are alive or not. If they’re alive you can defame them, if they’re not you can’t. That is not the case in other countries, for instance Russia. So, depending on–

**John:** Can you defame the dead in Russia?

**Craig:** That is what I’ve been led to understand.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Craig:** That you can and then the family could take action against you. And, you know, we don’t do that in our show. We’re careful to not do that. There’s certainly historical figures that we describe what they did, which is not good, but in a couple places it was a thing that we had to kind of work through. Then the question is where is this airing and who is making it and all the rest. There’s a lot of complicated factors.

Because Chernobyl is a joint production between HBO and SKY, it’s a very European-based production, so there’s multiple country laws that are covering this. So, I think that got a little complicated.

**John:** Cool. Do you want to take our last question?

**Craig:** Yeah, Writer A…ooh, I like the mystery. Writer A in LA writes, “I recently…” OK, this is just really rough, Writer A because of what’s about to happen. Writer A in LA writes, “I was recently Writer A,” were you now, “in an arbitration that involved three other writers. And I encountered a dilemma that I haven’t ever heard discussed.

“In addition to Story by credit, I believe I deserved shared Teleplay by credit with whichever of the subsequent writers contributed the most to the shooting script. But when I attempted to suggest Teleplay by Writer A and Writer Whichever I was told by my attorney that I had to determine which of those writers deserve the shared credit. That is to say Teleplay by Writer A and Writer D. That required me to read all the other writer’s drafts and make a judgement which I felt was best left to the arbiters and was ultimately a decision which I think has no impact on me, or am I mistaken in that presumption? Is my lawyer correct?

“As the original writer why do I have to do anything other than defend my original contribution?”

Ooh, John.

**John:** So this is a valid thing and I’ve encountered this in arbitrations before. So the quick arbitration refresher is because we have a Writers Guild, thank god, we have the ability to determine the credits for our movies. And it’s the Writers Guild that determines that. It is a panel of arbiters who are picked per project. They are anonymous. We do not know the names of the writers involved in the project. They are assigned Writer A, Writer B, Writer C.

In this case the person writing in was Writer A. And so what Writer A is really asking is am I allowed to say “The credits should be me and somebody else.” That you basically don’t care who you’re sharing credit with, but you recognize it’s going to be somebody else. And this lawyer said, no, no, you’re not allowed to say that.

But let’s think about in what circumstance is Writer A saying this at all. It’s in the letter that the writer is submitting along with the arbitration, which is generally a short letter that says like I’m Writer A, these were my contributions to the script. Generally it ends with I believe the proper credit is Writer A and whatever you believe the proper credit is. That is really what the writer is talking about. Am I required to list which of the other writers is the appropriate one. The lawyer says yes. I say kind of basically no. I think it’s generally good practice to sort of say what that is, but it’s also fine to say in the letter like this is a tough case. I don’t know who to say is the proper other writer, but I believe it’s going to be either one of these two.

I think you do yourself a disservice if you’re not actually looking at the other scripts. But you’re not actually required to look at the other scripts as a writer in an arbitration. What do you think?

**Craig:** In the case of Writer A’s lawyer versus John August, I rule in favor of…John August.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** You are correct. The lawyer is absolutely wrong. Writer A, your lawyer couldn’t be more wrong. I wish I could see your lawyer right now to look them in the eye and say, “Dear Lawyer, I know you meant well, but you’re wrong.”

Here’s why: when you write this statement you are essentially saying, “Look, I believe I deserve teleplay credit because I believe I have met the threshold for credit.” That’s how credits work. You hit a certain threshold, you earn a credit. In film we use percentages, which is kind of a game, but essentially what we say is, “OK, if it’s an original project if you’re the first writer your threshold is 33% of the final shooting script. If you’re a subsequent writer it’s 50%.” For other movies that are adaptations everybody’s threshold is the same. If you can show that you have written a minimum of 33% of this movie then you have earned credit. At that point you have a choice. You can say I’ve earned all of the credit, because I wrote 90% of this script.

You can say, you know what, I believe I deserve credit and just because I’m a fair-minded person I also think Writer B should get credit, but I leave that up to you. Or you can simply say I’m not here to tell you anything other than this. My contributions meet the test for teleplay credit.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** I’m not saying they meet the test for sole teleplay credit. You guys can determine how the rest of that is apportioned. That’s up to you. All I’m saying, and the only argument I’m making is I’ve hit the threshold. That is absolutely fine.

So, your lawyer was super wrong.

**John:** Your lawyer was wrong.

**Craig:** And I got to say, people at home, don’t ask your lawyers these questions. They’re not dumb. Believe me, they’re not dumb. And a lot of lawyers are pretty good with our credit stuff, but why would you ever ask your personal attorney whose job is not say to be a lawyer administrating the credit system of the Writers Guild, which is its own subset of jurisprudence, when you can just call up your union for free, the people you pay dues to, and say “I have a question.” And they will give you the definitive answer, which in this case I assure you would be you’re fine.

So, there you go.

**John:** What people may not understand is that Craig isn’t just talking like he sort of knows this stuff. Craig has actually been involved with sort of the instructions that are going out to arbiters and all of this stuff for years, including new stuff that’s coming out to make this process more clear and transparent for people going through an arbitration. So do trust Craig, don’t trust your lawyer.

I will say Writer A one reason why you may want to read through those other scripts is if there really were like four writers after you. In order for someone else to receive credit that writer would need to hit at least a 33% threshold in the final shooting script. And if in reading those things no other writer actually hits 33%, even if you individually your contribution wasn’t more than 50% or whatever, there could be scenarios in which you end up with sole credit even though you only did a little bit more than a third of it because none of those other people actually hit that thing.

So, it may be worth it for you to see what that is. Or it may be fine for you to say like I believe I deserve credit and I leave it for you fair arbiters to figure out who if anyone else deserves credit.

**Craig:** No question. So you can say “I want to figure out if I deserve sole credit or not.” And by the way the 33% probably doesn’t apply here because this is television, this is a different deal. But regardless I want to read everybody’s stuff to figure out am I asking for shared credit, sole credit. Am I sort of being agnostic about it and saying you guys tell me. All I’m saying is I deserve some credit.

Or, Writer A I think it’s reasonable to say, “You know what? I read the final shooting script. I know I deserve credit. The rest is up to you.” That’s the only argument I’m making is I deserve credit. Should I share it? Should I share it with this person or this person? Should I not share it? That’s on you guys. You decide. You tell me. I don’t care. I’m good either way.

As an arbiter, I will tell you, as the person that’s actually making judgements, I am always happy to see writers arguing for their credit. And I am generally less happy seeing writers arguing against somebody else getting credit. Now, sometimes you have to. But, yeah, there’s nothing requiring you – for instance, Writer A says when I attempted to suggest Teleplay by Writer A and Writer Question Mark I was told by my attorney no. Well, yeah, you can absolutely say I think the credits should be Teleplay by Writer A and whichever other writer you think qualifies. No problem with that whatsoever. You can read all of them. You cannot read all of them. Ultimately it’s up to you.

I generally would advise you to read everything, but you know, it’s up to you.

**John:** And now it is time for our One Cool Things. To bring this full circle is 21 Things to Know Before Losing Your Gay Virginity.

**Craig:** Oh, thank god. I got to cram on this.

**John:** This is by Alexander Cheves. It’s written for The Advocate. And what I liked about this article is that it literally just very clearly sort of lays out here’s what’s really happening here because one of my great frustrations in seeing gay sex portrayed in movies is that the first time is portrayed in a completely unrealistic way about sort of how it all works. And I think they basically just took what you would assume from straight virginity and tried to apply it to this and it just isn’t the same. And it’s different and you got to acknowledge that.

And so this is I think a very practical guide. If it’s something you’re going through or if you have a person in your life who you know is going through this I would steer them in this direction because I feel it is a helpful overview of some of the things that you’re going to be thinking through as you’re–

**Craig:** As you’re losing your gay virginity.

**John:** I think it would be helpful for straight people to know some of this information, but it’s certainly helpful for any person who is going to be encountering this themselves to know this going in.

**Craig:** Wow. Yeah. I think that may be the most John August thing of all time. As you’re losing your virginity to go “Let me now consider. Hold on. I’m just running through the 21 things. I’m at thing 14. Slow down.”

I’m going to read it. I want to know. Fascinating. I know – things to know before losing your straight virginity…that’s a pretty short article. It’s going to be weird. That’s pretty much–

**John:** And certainly there’s a huge overlap between the two.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s going to be weird for sort of everyone and of course porn has distorted our expectation of what those situations should be.

**Craig:** It has.

**John:** But there’s specific stuff, and like most kids are not going to encounter in popular culture the way they will encounter all the straight stuff in popular culture.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I think that’s the reason why you have to shine a spotlight on some of these things so that people know it’s actually out there and that it’s not what they would assume.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I’ll take a look at that. I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but I’ll be prepared at a minimum. So my One Cool Thing this week is sort of new to me, so I’m just starting it, but I like the concept of it. It’s an app called Moodnotes and essentially you log your mood. And it’s got a lovely interface. This is the part that I love the most. You know that little pain chart in the doctor’s office?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I love that pain chart because number one is super happy and number ten is just freaking out, but it’s just all smiley faces and you rarely see a smiley face just freaking out and dying. So it begins when you log your mood, and you can do it each day if you like. It’s just a simple screen that says how are you and then it shows you a face, just a very stylized face. And then by swiping up or down you create smiley or sad. And you can do it to various degrees. And when you’re done you can add a little detail and then you can save it. And essentially the idea is by monitoring your mood you can see over time patterns. First of all, you become more mindful of your moods. And you can start to see patterns.

And the reason I think this is potentially very useful is I remember years and years and years ago when I had a lot of – I was having a huge migraine problem and I went to a neurologist and he gave me just a chart and he said every day you have a headache write down, put a little check mark here, and just put the severity with a number. And I did it and then I brought it back to him after a month and he goes, “Oh my god, look at this.” I had a headache almost every day. And it was important to see that because essentially what happens to us on a day to day basis is we forget. We forget what happened yesterday and the day before. And I think you can start to not notice that you’re depressed until you’re really depressed.

And I also think you may be missing certain patterns like I tend to get really moody on weekends or I get – maybe for women I get really moody right before my cycle or something like that. So, it’s really useful I think to just monitor your mood. If nothing else it keeps you mindful. But it may also have some predictive or diagnostic value. And I think it’s $4 or something, which my new jam is like I don’t want free apps. I want to pay for them and be done with it. I don’t want the apps that are constantly like a subscription, blah. So I like it.

Give it a shot. It’s called Moodnotes.

**John:** Fantastic. All right. That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Olufemi Sowemimo. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com.

That is a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Short questions are great on Twitter. We’re happy to answer your questions there as well.

We are on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Just search for Scriptnotes. Leave us a review if you’d like. That helps other people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. So it’s links to the things we talked about and other stuff you might want to download or investigate.

We have a few more of the 300-episode USB drives left, but we also have the whole back catalog available at Scriptnotes.net. Every week we check to see how many subscribers we have to the premium feed through Scriptnotes.net and it keeps growing, so it’s very nice that more of you are subscribing to that to hear all those back episodes and bonus episodes. So if you would like to go back and catch up on the early days of Scriptnotes you can at Scriptnotes.net.

And that’s it. Craig, it’s nice to talk with you. I’m going to talk to you next, I guess the day this episode comes out, at our live show.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m excited for that.

**John:** I’m excited for it, too. All right, thanks all.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Our next live Scriptnotes with Jonah Nolan & Lisa Joy (Westworld) and Stephen McFeely & Christopher Markus (Avengers: Infinity War) is TONIGHT, Tuesday, May 22nd at the ArcLight in Hollywood. Proceeds benefit [Hollywood HEART](http://www.hollywoodheart.org), which runs special programs and summer camps for at-risk youth.
* [John’s statement](http://johnaugust.com/2018/on-big-fish-family-inclusion-family) on one theater’s choice to cancel their performance of Big Fish over the inclusion of same-sex parents.
* [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/) is officially out! [This](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/movies/is-your-script-gender-balanced-try-this-test.html) is the New York Times article about our Gender Analysis feature.
* [Names on the Globe](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0195018958/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by George R. Stewart discusses the pronunciation of L.A.
* [One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/04/one-space-between-each-sentence-they-said-science-just-proved-them-wrong-2/?utm_term=.40216d38feb5) is a Washington Post article by Avi Selk about whether to put one space or two after a period.
* According to Craig, [Fun Home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fun_Home_(musical)) is a good example of a moving bookending.
* [The Sandman comics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(Vertigo)) by Neil Gaiman
* Dan Harmon’s [Story Circle](http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit)
* [21 Things to Know Before Losing Your Gay Virginity](https://www.advocate.com/sexy-beast/2018/5/17/21-things-know-losing-your-gay-virginity#media-gallery-media-13) by Alexander Cheves
* [Moodnotes](http://moodnotes.thriveport.com/) is an app that tracks your mood
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Olufemi Sowemimo ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_351.mp3).