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

**John August:** Today’s episode of Scriptnotes has some strong language, so if you’re in the car with your kids this is your warning.

Hey, so this is John. Today’s episode of Scriptnotes was originally going to be a Best Of episode because Craig is traveling back from Europe and we could not find a time to record a new episode. But also this past week I sat down with Aline Brosh McKenna, Rachel Bloom, and John Gatins to talk about the third season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. This was an event that I had promoted on the show earlier. People wrote lyrics to win tickets to come to see this. And I met those guys. They were fantastic. But more importantly I had a great discussion with Aline and Rachel and John about making a TV show. Making a third season of a TV show and figuring out what you want to do going into it and what changes along the way.

So, we showed some clips. We took some audience questions. What you’re hearing is a little bit condensed because it doesn’t really make sense to play full clips because you’re not seeing stuff. This is all recorded at UTA, so thank you for letting us use the audio from the event. I think you’ll really dig it. It’s a really good discussion between some really smart folks.

If you want to see another smart discussion between smart folks – Segue Man – you can come to our live show, May 22 at the ArcLight, 8pm. We’re sitting down with Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan from Westworld and also Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely from The Avengers movie and Captain America. It should be great.

So, as I’m recording this I know all the VIP tickets are sold out, but I think there are still some general tickets left. So, if you want to come, you should come. It’s going to be great.

There will be another normal Scriptnotes that same day. So Craig will be back and we’ll record a normal episode. But today it’s a special live one. Next week is normal. And the week after that we’ll have some audio from the special live show. So a whole mix up of things.

But today enjoy. This is Aline Brosh McKenna, Rachel Bloom, and John Gatins.

We’re here to talk about the third season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. And so I remember about this time last year, I follow you on Instagram, and you had taped over the windows because you were getting started to figure out this season. So my question now is what were you guys talking about in that room with the papered-over windows? What was the plan?

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** What were the things that really stuck through?

**Rachel Bloom:** The thinking was how quickly do we get to the full revenge episode. We knew very quickly we wanted to do – in the pitch five years ago at this point it was always inherent that she was – we were going to play the promise of the premise somehow. She was going to become full fatal attraction crazy ex-girlfriend. The question was how long did that last and how long did we take before we got to that point. And I think that was the thing that we were talking about.

**Aline:** That was the main. And then balancing – you know, the thing about revenge, and I don’t know if you guys have ever tried to write a revenge movie, or if anyone has tried to write, revenge makes no sense. It just doesn’t make any sense. And then what?

**John Gatins:** It felt so good though.

**Aline:** But then it’s like Wah-Wah. So we were building towards that but we knew that there needed to be something else going on in the season beyond that. And also we knew we had owed for a long time figuring out what was really her issue and the diagnosis. So that was something that we were also talking about then and starting to do research. And our writer’s assistant at the time, who is now going to be a writer on the show, Alana is here, she was with us – and there’s usually a few songs that are like born in that first breaking room and there’s some that change a lot from there. But there’s usually a few things that are like “Oh that’s done. We’re going to do that.”

But I would say every year we’ve had like a midseason thing where some of the things were set and then some of the things needed to be re-broken. And we usually do a little bit of re-break, like a little bit of a retreat halfway through to kind of calibrate, recalibrate.

**Rachel:** Yeah, and the big thing, and usually there’s a point in every season, midseason, where Aline and I will go to her house and get naked and get in her hot tub together. This is 100% true. And we’re usually drunk or—

**Aline:** Something.

**Rachel:** On something. And we’ll come up with like, “Oh no, this is the kind of shot in the arm the season needed.” And so in season two that was she and Josh full on – spoiler alert – I may not, if you’re here, sorry, but the shot in the arm was, “OK, Josh is going to leave her at the altar.” Because there was a world in which – the way we always pitched season two—

**Aline:** Was that Josh was about to marry Valencia.

**Rachel:** And she was going to then – oh god, was this two or three? The original pitch was that he was about to marry Valencia. She didn’t stop him from proposing and then she was going to do some big grand gesture, like Say Anything gesture to win him back, but it was going to backfire and it was going to hurt – at the time we didn’t know his girlfriend’s name was Valencia. It was just his girlfriend and she’d break her uterus. That was in the pitch. It was like season three Rebecca breaks Josh’s girlfriend’s uterus.

**John G:** I’m trying to picture that in the hot tub naked.

**Rachel:** So we re-broke it. And then last season I remember being in the hot tub with you, naked—

**John G:** We’ve got to do this.

**John A:** Our writing process has been wrong this whole time.

**Rachel:** It’s great. Our bodies are so different, so we’re also both very fascinated.

**Aline:** I need parts that I waited for and never got.

**Rachel:** Oh yeah, but what I was going to say – sorry, I was thinking about Aline’s nakedness – the thing that we re-broke in your hot tub after – usually it’s hot tub after pasta, so we’re really not judging each other. It was last year was – we knew something was going to happen with – we had to get her – she was going to get in trouble with—

**Aline:** She was going to get in trouble and get in prison. She was going to be obsessed with Josh and Josh’s new girlfriend and that somehow was going to lead to her being in prison. But then in the middle of the season once the Josh thing had sort of burned brightly it seemed like it was over and we switched to Nathaniel. And then this idea of Trent as her id coming back and that that was the thing that really symbolized that she had, you know, burned through her revenge scheme, she was on her road to redemption, and then her mistakes come back to haunt her even though she’s actually doing the right thing. And there was an irony in that.

And one of the things that you guys as feature writers will relate to is we pitched it in four parts, the series. The first season really is act one. The second season really is the first half of the second half. And last year as you guys know, we’ve talked about this on Scriptnotes, the second half of the second act is the rocky shoals. It is the hardest thing to right. It’s the cumulative thing to write. It has the most plot in it. So that gives you a sense of what season three is going to be, or season four is going to be which is the third act. So we have a lot of plot in last year, like more than we ever had.

And there were times where Rachel came into the room and looked at the board and was like, “What’s happening?”

**Rachel:** Well because there’s always a point—

**John G:** The lowest point.

**Aline:** Yes. Bringing your character to its lowest point.

**Rachel:** But it wasn’t in those as much, I mean, that’s also a separate issue with me, the work schedule, which is I am in the writer’s room for the first two months and then we start filming and Aline is still running the writer’s room. And so then I’m reading outlines but also it’s on me to – I’m one of the three songwriters and it’s one me to – I’m the main person who supervises the edit of the music videos. I script out the music videos. So, around episodes let’s say six through 10 are when stuff is changing in the room rapidly. And so I’ll walk in and be like, “Whoa, Josh is a DJ? Oh, cool. Good for him. That sounds really cool.”

**Aline:** And it was hard because there was so much plot stuff that was happening as you said to bring her to her lowest point and how do you construct that. But there’s a very hectic part in the middle of the season around seven, eight, nine where we’re really tired and confused. And then it starts to – as the last few scripts are written we start to come up for air a little bit and there’s a song in the very last episode that Rachel and I wrote very calmly that first draft of, I mean, when I say wrote she wrote and I said half sentences, that ended up being one of the last songs in the last episode.

So, that was a very long answer.

**John A:** So really broad strokes, and these are sort of like the fat marker on the whiteboard, the overall map. Now, you knew you were going to get to a revenge plot and eventually she was going to go full Glenn Close in it. But her first instinct after the wedding gets broken off she’s at a very low place, then she decides like, “Oh, I’m going to use my super power. I’m going to sue him.” And so there’s this idea at the start of the season like, “Oh, there’s going to be a lawsuit.”

**Rachel:** That was the hardest thing actually. I remember, I mean, I think what’s interesting in looking back at what we were doing exactly a year ago was the lawsuit was a great idea that we knew we were going to do that you had early on but the question was right after the wedding what is she doing.

**Aline:** Right.

**Rachel:** And can we share what originally happened?

**Aline:** They went to a diner?

**Rachel:** No, but then.

**Aline:** Oh yeah.

**Rachel:** So originally she goes to this diner with her friends and she’s like mad and they’re like, “Oh my god, what is she thinking?” And she’s like, “Will you just excuse me for one second?” And then she knocks on Nathaniel’s door and they fuck. Like literally the first second of the season. And then that’s part of the reason he’s been on the hook is like she came and fucked him and then left. And then there was this whole runner of like she got really freaky and she comes back to his apartment. She’s like “Take a shower. I need a clean work space.” And it was really dirty.

**Aline:** So that was in there for a long time and that was behind that newspaper. And I got to say the writers really hated that because they felt like it cut off all the opportunity for like the first time they slept together building to that. And there was a lot of resistance to that in the writer’s room. And I clung to it for a while. But there were so many other things going on in the beginning of that episode that we let go of that.

She does a lot of awful things in the first third of the season. And then when they start to come out, she also has this giant dip so that the characters later will forgive her for that.

**John G:** So you guys create a show called Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. When do you have this idea to explore BPD as a thing that’s going to arc itself out? And what was that conversation like?

**Rachel:** BPD didn’t come – BPD started to come kind of organically. I remember we started talking about it really in the second season. I definitely – I remember thinking it a lot in it was the third episode of the second season where she thinks she’s pregnant for a scene and goes in between these extremes. And BPD is very difficult to diagnose and it’s a very interesting disorder. And so we kind of knew that that’s where it was going. I mean, a lot of the things that we had the character do were kind of emotionally heightened versions of things that both Aline and I had gone through in our lives but very, very, very heightened and just kind of yes-anded.

And the interesting thing about BPD is that’s what it is. It’s emotions that we all feel, it’s thoughts that we all have, just multiplied by a million. I mean, they say that if you have BPD it feels like you have emotional third degree burns all over your body. You literally have no emotional skin because your sense of self is not present, so you rely on the outside world to define who you are which is inherent in the premise of the show of someone who imagines themselves in different musical numbers to define who she is.

**Aline:** So what’s interesting though is we didn’t know that that’s what she had. We wrote it by feel. And the same thing happened with figuring out that Greg was an alcoholic. We just were writing that character, it was a thing that we had a pattern that seemed like it adhered to that character. And then we realized, oh, when we go back and do the checklist for alcoholic, Greg’s him. And when we went to do the BPD checklist it was stunning how much we had done that, but we hadn’t done that intentionally.

And I didn’t know anything about BPD until – Rachel knew stuff about it and had been talking to me about it sort of lightly for a while, but we didn’t really—

**Rachel:** I know people who have it.

**Aline:** And then we kind of delved into it and that’s what we had written. And I actually think it’s interesting because I think if we had written it knowing that that’s what we were going to do it might have been more forced and programmatic. But BPD people are the people who like – you know the friend that you have that does “crazy shit” and you call your other friends and you’re like, “You are not going to believe what this person has done.”

If you – the people that you know who tend to be – people call them crazy because they’re always stirring up stuff and they end up in weird – that’s her thing. She ends up in very weird situations because she’s lying and she’s freaking out and she’s over-dramatizing things, but not realizing these are all connected to one place.

**John G:** Was it scary or kind of exciting to be able to kind of push the tone really hard? You know, because it’s a show that like when you see the first season it’s so funny and so full of life and the music is amazing, the performances. It’s like you’re constantly laughing. And then as she devolves into this spiral it’s intense. Some of those–

**Aline:** Season three is—

**Rachel:** The show was always really dark to us, though. I mean, and I have spent a little bit of time rewatching some episodes of the first season, which is very weird to rewatch a show that you worked on but it seems like a new show because it’s been a couple years since I’ve seen it. And she’s quite ill. I mean, in that first season, in ways that I think at the time I didn’t even realize, but she’s really, really, really sick. And then the fact that Greg wants to fuck her and that’s like the only thing he can think about is like fucking this sick person. It’s really dark and disturbing.

And so I never thought of – the darkness of the show has always been inherent for both of us.

**Aline:** Yeah. I mean, I think because it’s a deconstruction of romantic comedies and you look at how people behave in romantic comedies, it’s psychotic. No, that’s a thing that we connected on which is the guy is outside in your yard and he’s got the boom box on. Like this is not OK. Stop fucking running to the airport. If you love somebody, you know, don’t lie about – and I had written obviously a lot of stuff where people are lying and scheming and it’s supposed to all be OK if you end up kissing. And in our very, very first conversations about the show that’s what we talked about which is like – and for me it’s rom-coms and for Rachel it’s also Disney princess stuff where what we sell to girls and women as appropriate behavior if it ends up with Prince Charming or in a kiss is like we excuse very crazy behavior.

So what’s interesting is because the first season is the first act it’s that rom-com cute stuff. And we always – you know how you guys when you write something they’re always like, “Make her likeable.” We always had it be someone else’s fault. And basically what happened over the course of the three seasons it’s like, “No, no, it’s her. She’s driving it.”

And I will say when we wrote episode four of this year which is the full-on revenge episode we laughed and laughed. It was such a release.

**Rachel:** Ah.

**Aline:** It was such a relief. We wrote that.

**Rachel:** It was the episode we wanted to write.

**Aline:** Yeah. We wrote that over the weekend at my house and it was such a release to actually have her be stalking him and really go for it, because we had sort of been putting kid gloves on it, you know. And there is something – but a lot of the stuff people do, you know, if you go to people’s weddings now and you hear the toasts of how they met it’s like, “Well that’s not OK. He slept outside her house for – I think that might not be legal.“

**Rachel:** If you didn’t think he was hot you would have called the police. Because you were attracted you’re like, “That’s fine. That’s cute.”

**John A:** Talking about premise of the show, so it’s a woman who wants something so desperately she’s willing to uproot her life and move across the country. And the first two seasons we see her pursuing her wants. What’s so interesting about this season is she’s kind of stopped wanting and she just goes on defense. She’s so terrified, and so what we just saw with Paula is she’s lashing out at Paula and she’s using her special skills kind of for evil and for vengeance.

**Rachel:** She’s very smart. Yeah.

**Aline:** But she’s bouncing off the mound. It is late act two stuff. She’s grabbing at vines.

**Rachel:** Even in moments of being a villain she doesn’t know how to be a villain. She’s just trying to get her pain out. And I think that that’s been something very interesting to write for all these characters that even at their worst Aline and I we come at it from a place of empathy and compassion. And so it’s the reason people calling the show My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend really bothers us because it other-izes her. And unlike in Fatal Attraction where you know “the bitch must be killed,” that’s an example of someone with borderline, you know, the original ending of Fatal Attraction was her killing herself. And the audience felt unfulfilled because it made you feel sorry for her and you want the world to be black and white. But when people are acting villainous they’re terrified. They’re insecure and they’re upset.

**John A:** So reaching all the way back to, I think it was season one, I’m the villain of my own story, which was sort of the fairy tale version. And she imagines herself as that sort of dark villain. So she has some insight. She’s able at times to realize that this is a thing that I’m doing that is the wrong thing. How much does that factor into your decisions on a scene like this, her to understand what’s really happening in the world and this is her own feelings?

**Aline:** You know, I think it’s the special pain of her character, but it’s also the thing that makes you like her is that she knows she’s messing up. She always knows. No one is harder on herself that she is. And so when she’s doing awful things she is aware always. And if you know anyone who has a disorder, not even just BPD or something like this, when they are aware that they’re acting out and they can’t help it there’s just a special pain and empathy that you feel for that character because she does know that she – and that’s why I think in some ways one of the signature songs of the whole series is You Stupid Bitch, where she sings this very lacerating song about herself because she knows what she’s capable of.

**John G:** How many episodes? 44.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John G:** And how many writers from the beginning?

**Aline:** All from the beginning. We’ve had the same writers since day one. We promoted two people. We have a very cohesive group. And one of the things that’s amazing about it is we have such institutional memory on our show. It’s incredible. It’s like this is a room that remembers every – they know and remember things that I don’t, that we don’t. They just know it so well. And when you have shows where people come and go you can’t create that as coherent a story. And they’ve just been steeped in it from day one. And everyone there will bring in bits and pieces of stuff or point out, “Hey, we can’t do that because we’ve done this already.”

And we work alone. You know, screenwriters work alone. We’re hermits. And John and I are friends because we hated being hermits and we created our own little writer’s room on the telephone when people used to talk on the telephone. We still do. But having that community of writers that understands this show and is helping us to guide us and give us feedback and say that’s crazy. And this suicide episode that Jack wrote, I mean, Jack brought such tremendous humanity and depth to the draft that he wrote. And we wept in the room, many of us, very frequently. You know, for me – Rachel is like a daughter to me, but Rebecca is, too. And the thing that always gets me about her is that she has hope. She’s a very hopeful character. It’s like, you know, she has a spirit of wanting to live and wanting to survive that like really, really moves me. So we wept a lot in the writer’s room.

**John G:** I’ve been to see you both in your room a few times. And I’m only now remembering that, yeah, it was exactly the same people every time I went. And I’m just thinking like that’s a really long season. No, it’s been many seasons. I just keep thinking like, “Oh, it’s Wednesday,” but you’re on another season. It’s this continuous thing. And the feeling in the room was very open. Like I didn’t know who was the boss. I didn’t know anything.

**Aline:** Well, it’s funny, I didn’t know. I think because I never ran a room before, so there are things that I learn. Like I don’t care who has the idea. And I didn’t obey any hierarchy. I didn’t think like, “Oh, if you had this title you should speak more or less.” That doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would you – so there were a lot of things about the way shows are run I didn’t know because I’ve never been on staff. And the staff taught us how – Rachel actually had more experience than I did. And the staff taught us really how to run the room. And some of the senior writers really helped inform that. But it’s just a glorious lucky thing to have a group of people that is so – you know, just to be in a room with ten intelligent, hilarious people while you’re creating something is – it’s so hard to go back to writing solo. It’s crazy.

**John G:** But I think it’s really unique that you have this writer’s room, as a guy who has been there, and you guys are there, and then you’re shooting the show on the other side of a wall. And you’re the star of the show. You’re in the writer’s room. You’re there. The writers go there. You’ve directed three episodes, right? It’s a pretty rare–

**Aline:** Also we really give the writers custody of their episode, like during the breaking and the writing of the draft obviously, the rewrite, the going onset, it always goes back to them. It’s their episode. And they guide it and they’re responsible for really keeping track of it. I mean, I’m thinking of the writers that are in the room, like Alana did episode six for us. It was her first episode. She was our writer’s assistant. The one right after this which deals with her diagnosis. And, I mean, she is like a Ph.D. level expert in Borderline because she read absolutely everything.

And so when a writer is entrusted with an episode we take that very seriously. That is their episode to curate and they’re there for every second of it.

**John A:** You know, I think that merlot joke was so crucial because it’s a reminder that like the rest of the universe is still functioning, even though she’s pulled herself out of it the rest of the universe is still functioning. And in the next episode or the episode after we sort of see what the office is like without her there and how they’re all sort of desperate to reinsert her. But they’re just being crazy madcap the way they always would be and the universe is cycling on, which is also a factor for someone considering suicide is like either they want the universe to stop because they’re not going to be there or “No one is going to miss me if I’m gone.” And you’re able to sort of answer that question by seeing what the office is like without her there.

**Rachel:** Yeah, and I have to say in talking about the writing of this I – there are certain things that if I – if we’re talking about a certain idea and I don’t know about it, Aline will get a conviction in her eye and I know that her gut is right on a certain thing. And I have to say like it was her idea, the idea of that help sign turning into hope, and I couldn’t – on its face I was like I hope this isn’t schmaltzy. And then she was fucking right. It’s what you needed in that moment. And so things like that, things like tone, yeah, you can talk about them intellectually but I feel like the tone of the show in many ways is an emotional thing for us and is an instinctual thing for us.

And we wrote the pilot, we set the tone. The way we wrote that was basically kind of just line by line together in a room. I mean, we had an outline and we had songs. And so I think that it’s the reason we try to maintain the idea of humanely going beneath stereotypes is because this show is, yes, it’s intellectual but it’s very emotional. Sometimes it comes from our gut. And I want to point out a moment where Aline’s gut was just spot on and it really was a wonderful tonal thing for that episode.

**Aline:** And one thing I would say if you’re going to write with somebody, it’s great to have somebody who has – we have a lot of overlap in many things, but the skills we bring to the table are different. You know, I’ve been doing long form storytelling of a certain type for a very long time and Rachel’s background is different. The funny things is we both have – like I have an allergy to expected things on a story level because that’s what I’ve been practicing for a long time. And Rachel has an allergy to expected things because she’s a comedian and a sketch comedian and a songwriter and comes from animation. And she doesn’t like any stale or expected thing. And I would say if there’s one thing that we overlap on that is our most shared thing is the zigging.

You know, we really try to – and sometimes it’s hard to either get other people onboard or even to get each other onboard, but we both have a very strong – and in here the zig I felt strongly about taking was towards some celestial feeling of like this can be OK and that’s why we have the clouds and that’s why we have the blurry hope. But, you know, being partners and having a writer’s room is like listening to the conviction and sort of hearing like well that’s important but we’re going to continue to zig there.

**Rachel:** I also think it’s a testament to what technique is and what understanding – you have to understand structure and tropes and technique before you can break them. I mean, Aline comes from oftentimes writing these romantic comedies and she knows the structure so well. I come from musical theater knowing all of those tropes. And sketch comedy, when you learn sketch comedy, the way I learned it it was almost mathematical where it’s like, OK, well then there’s this beat and there’s this beat. There’s a weird – [cell phone rings] you should get that. I’m joking but I’m not. There’s a weird like rigidness sometimes, especially when you first start to learn sketch comedy. And so I think that knowing those structures and what’s expected and what’s trite and what you’ve seen and what’s stock has given us a real allergy to anything that feels like stock.

But even then that’s a – because that’s why I thought maybe the help turning into hope might have been and it 100% wasn’t. And so it’s always this back and forth and this debate.

**John A:** So coming out of this suicide attempt she’s trying to sort of reconstruct her life and she’s trying to figure out who she is and deal with stuff and she’s running away from the work for a while but she’s trying to get stuff back together. Can you talk about the Nathaniel relationship because that’s going to be the next stuff we see? What was the charting on Nathaniel through the season? What was in your head as you were going into the season and what you wanted to see from him?

**Aline:** It kind of connects to what Rachel was saying which is a lot of what we do is sort of take tropes and try to take the piss out of them, but also to try and understand why someone is that way. So like Paula is the sidekicky Rosie O’Donnell best friend. But that’s a person. That’s not just a plot function, that’s a person. And Greg was this trope of the friend-zoney loser who can’t get his life together but thinks he’s entitled to the pretty girl because he’s better than the handsome guy. And then Nathaniel was really the rich preppy asshole. And we show him as broken right from the beginning — that he’s got huge daddy issues and he is enormously fun to write because he’s very Darwinian and kind of disconnected.

And it’s interesting. There’s certain people in the writer’s room who will really connect with him in certain moments. We’ve always said like he’s really screwed up. So it’s like that Less Than Zero. And you have to be able to boil it down actually to something kind of reductive to make it work in a way. You know, in story terms there is an element of taking that trope and kind of doing it and not doing it. So he gives us that. And it really works very well with her character because she’s very good at seeing what’s wrong with that guy.

**Rachel:** His background was somewhat inspired by some of the people in the industry we know and especially some of the agents we know. And that office is very high powered agency and sometimes I’ll walk in and Scott will fuck with me and be like, “Bloom, we’ve got some great projects coming down the pike for you,” and I have to leave. I have to leave the room. I don’t like this at all. I don’t like this bit. It’s too fucking real. “Oh, we’ve got some great – we got a call.” They’re also both very narcissistic, so I think that they see – I mean, it’s been very interesting to write who brings what out in Rebecca because which part of her – because each of the three guys, the main love interests, Josh, Greg, Nathaniel, they bring out a slightly different part of her because there’s a part of her that’s very – she loves the part of them that is a different part of her.

So with Josh they’re very kind of childlike. They’re like kids playing in the sand. And with Nathaniel it’s this kind of very – it’s very raw and judgmental but also then the flip side very sweet. It’s almost very schizophrenic. And then Greg is like the sarcastic kind of above all of this.

**Aline:** It’s also something that I was familiar with which is sort of the Jew melting the heart of the stony goy.

**John G:** Oh, that old trope.

**Aline:** Talking about emotions and being free about her emotions and sort of like frank about who she is and sort of not afraid to – there’s a scene where she rubs her boobs on a glass in anger. She’s just very free with her emotions and he’s not able to do that. And so that’s another—

**Rachel:** We had a line that we had taken out where he – in an earlier episode he confronts his parents about something because she’s opening him up. And we had written like his dad I think saying like, “What are you doing airing your true feelings like some sort of Jew.”

**Aline:** So many jokes about being a Jew.

**Rachel:** We were like that’s a lot. It’s a lot. But that’s the subtext of everything his father says all the time.

Sometimes, I mean, I think for a lot of comedians going into comedy was also my way of – you know, I’m laughing at myself before you can laugh at me. I’m being ridiculous and knowing that I’m ridiculous. So when you call me ridiculous I can, “Ha-ha, I meant to be ridiculous.” And so the moments like that or the song, A Diagnosis, earlier in the season which were emotionally raw, those are scary when you come from doing musical comedy songs because you can in some ways excuse the emotion under a structure or under a genre. And when you don’t have the pastiche or the satire to rely upon. You’re like this is just me. It’s very scary. And they end up being some of our favorite moments of the show but it still feels kind of like stepping off a cliff a little bit.

**John A:** Absolutely. Most of the songs you end up seeing are sort of projecting out your inner feeling. And you’re actually singing to yourself, which A Diagnosis is another situation where you’re trying to sing the song to encourage yourself to really get yourself to push forward. And it’s a very different feel from the other kinds of songs they did.

**Aline:** Yeah. And obviously season three has more dramatic moments and it has more earnest moments. And we all had to like hold hands and jump into that pool because that was the last pool for us to get into was like, you know, Diagnosis is really not a joke song. It’s a sincere song that could be in a musical comedy. And that felt a little like new territory.

But I think we had to go there. And as we were saying second half of the second act, like you have to delve in and get under there. And, again, is it harder to watch someone try to deal with their shit or is it harder to watch season one where you’re going, “Oh wow, you’re a mess?” You know? But what’s interesting is there is this protagonist bias where you forgive people a lot in the first act. You know, you forgive Tootsie a lot in the first act. And then the accumulation of this is wrong and you’re hurting people, we had to go there.

So that’s why it’s interesting that the series really is structured with a big overarching story because that was the thing we wanted to do most at the beginning was to really have it have progression, which is something that obviously TV is doing now but it didn’t always.

I mean, I love The Love Boat but–

**John A:** Yeah.

**Aline:** It doesn’t really go anywhere.

**John G:** Who doesn’t love The Love Boat?

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John A:** So coming through towards the end, you know, Nathaniel shows up with one last like we can get out of this. The song I love is Nothing is Ever Anyone’s Fault. Like a rip cord.

**Rachel:** Well, and just to say, so the inspiration, every love interest on the show is picking at a different trope of a rom-com and then poking a hole in it, right? So there’s the best friend who you should settle for. Well, he’s actually a fuck up. And there’s the guy who is perfect, well he’s actually a fuck up. You see the running pattern.

And then Nathaniel is the trope of the reformed asshole, because you have this asshole and then eventually he says love has reformed me. And what we loved when we were writing the final episode and getting into the lyrics for Nothing is Ever Anyone’s Fault is that he almost learns a lesson. It’s almost the reformed asshole going love has set me free. But love has actually only kind of reinforced his Darwinian nature. He’s just used love as another excuse for being a piece of shit. So it’s kind of everything we had wanted to do with the character of Nathaniel.

**Aline:** Right. One of the hot tub notions was the idea that he would actually say to her “You are crazy. A doctor has said you’re crazy. Use crazy as your get out of jail card.” And it was like he could actually ask her to plead insanity and for her to actually be confronted with am I crazy, what does it mean to be crazy. All her life people have said that about her. How is she going to own that? But she has a diagnosis. It’s not a medically significant word, but insanity is a legally applicable concept. So it all kind of dovetailed into that. And somebody who is saying “catch the nearest way,” which is what he is, versus somebody who is trying to wake up to taking responsibility in the world. And that’s what the second half of the season is.

That’s a terrible decision. She’s not legally responsible for what happened.

**John A:** Yeah, I want to ask about that.

**Aline:** She’s not legally responsible for what happened. And on some level she knows that, but she’s trying to take responsibility. She’s reaching for whatever she can. That’s the bill that came due. And that’s the one she’s going to try to pay. And, you know, also it’s funny because sometimes people will point out that she and Paula do – or all the characters on the show do things that are irrational, don’t make any sense, or dysfunctional, whatever. Like welcome to humans, you know. They’re not avatars of anything. And they make mistakes and they do the wrong thing. And Paula’s looking at her saying I love that you take responsibility and we’ll move on from here. And I love that you did that.

But I think it’s wonderful that she takes responsibility for the wrong thing because that’s the kind of thing that she does. And so I – and I love that we know that Paula is going to try and get her out of that mess, but that Paula has seen her for the first time try to own up.

**John A:** So, a similar crowd there, we forgot to mention the jump forward in time, which came as such as shock. So for people who don’t remember like literally we’re just following a character as she walks behind a wall, when she comes back she’s now fully pregnant. And so we jumped ahead eight months at least. When did that come into play?

**Aline:** Well, when we were doing the pregnancy, obviously that was one of the reasons we wanted to fast forward, but also we wanted to sort of really – to go back to the hot tub – that idea came from the idea that she and Nathaniel are having an affair basically.

**Rachel:** Yeah. We had to kind of reverse engineer the math, because the math of it was like, “OK, so she’s going to try to do the healthy thing.”

**Aline:** Right.

**Rachel:** But – and so he’ll get another girlfriend. But that’s like shock bait. Everyone knows – there is no amount of putting him with another person that’s going to convince the viewer that they shouldn’t be together. We know what story we’re telling. You’re going to see it coming, and so how can you acknowledge that, but still make it not the right decision? Oh, he’s just cheating on a girl with her for eight months.

**Aline:** And one of the things we thought was funny is I’m a – Rachel and I have seen a lot of marriages implode with affairs, etC. And how people can have – that affair goes on – it’s not a week. It’s not a month. It’s just months. So she makes the mistake and eight months later they’re still sleeping together. Not a thing you’ve seen a lot in these stories, but like that’s what happens. So the idea was, the joke of that jump ahead is that everyone has moved forward over those eight months. Everyone has had huge things happen to them. Valencia has started a new relationship, you know, while Josh has been to Mexico. And everybody has had huge things happen to them. And she’s just still like racing off to the closet.

Because I do think there’s something about infidelity that feels to people like something is happening. Like they’re in some great drama. I think that’s part of the huge appeal of it. So we loved that idea that she was in stasis there.

**Rachel:** Well, and for both of them really what it is is two people having their cake and eating it, too. Is that he would – if she said I want to be with you and I love he would at any second drop that girl. Even though he also knows that she’s the sensible, healthy choice. And likewise Rebecca is too scared. She equates love with death at this point. We say it as part of the episode.

**Aline:** Well I remember when Rachel came in, we were breaking the sort of like why this. We were talking about why this would be such a good refuge for her infidelity. And I remember where Rachel was sitting. She came into the writer’s room and sat down and we were talking about it. And she said if she loves somebody she could die. Like love for her is her – like I had a friend who was, my neighbor who lived downstairs was an alcoholic. And he said if I take a drink on Friday I’ll be dead by Monday. And that was one of the things that made me understand the pull of an addiction. And for her it’s like she’s afraid that if she falls in love with somebody that that will lead her to spiral down a drain.

**Rachel:** It’s PTSD also by association. That now she associates kind of – and I’ve had not thoughts exactly like this, but she associates the trauma of being in the place of wanting to kill herself with obsessive love. And so when she thinks about obsessive love again it’s not a happy thing anymore. It’s this feeling of I cannot be in that place.

**Aline:** Right. And she can’t separate love from obsessive love. She can’t eat one cupcake. She’s going to eat, you know, she doesn’t trust herself not to eat 20 cupcakes.

**Rachel:** Well, and Aline and I talk about this all the time. I mean, we both for a long time have known about this term “limerence,” which is a term coined by not scientists but–

**Aline:** Social scientists.

**Rachel:** Social scientists. Which is the term for obsessive love. And it’s different than other types of love. And limerence is that really when you’re so in love it’s painful.

**Aline:** You’re sick.

**Rachel:** You’re sick. And they’ve done brain scans on people who are in the state of limerence and it’s akin to being on cocaine or having obsessive compulsive disorder. Basically your dopamine, which is that pleasure chemical, spikes, but your serotonin which is what regulates your overall emotional well-being dips. And so you need those dopamine spikes in order to compensate for the fact that you’re actually at a lower point emotionally. And for some–

**Aline:** Watch Helen Fisher’s Ted Talk.

**Rachel:** Yeah. It’s very good.

**Aline:** And she has a book. And there’s a book about limerence. And you know obsessive romantic love is an incredible drug that forces you to take your genitals, which in the caveman days were not in great shape, and mush them together.

**Rachel:** Sex is a gross, horrible thing. No matter who you’re doing it with. It’s gross and terrible.

**Aline:** Love gets you to do that.

**Rachel:** There’s a reason why our dog leaves the room. She’s like this is terrible what’s happening. And only the strong emotions of love will get you over someone else’s stanky ass junk.

**John G:** What if you have limerence and you do cocaine?

**Aline:** It keeps you in that state.

**John G:** But speaking of genitals, and before we make my genitals famous.

**Rachel:** What?

**John G:** We have a clip.

**John A:** A clip about genitals.

**John G:** Hi Rachel.

**Aline:** Do we have one more clip?

**John G:** We have one more clip. I kind of want to give my 20-second creation myth of – no, not this, of you guys. Because I feel like you and I, we’re screenwriters, and you were killing it. Devil Wears Prada. 27 Dresses. All these. And you called me one day and said, “I’ve found this incredible young woman on the Internet. You’ve got to see.” I’m like, yeah, that’s amazing. Crazy. “I’m going to meet with her.” OK. “I’m going to do a TV show with her.” I was like OK. “We’re going to do it on Showtime.” I was like OK.

And then you made this thing and I was like, OK. And then they didn’t make it again. That was it. You’re like, “We’re going to go sell it to this other place.” I was like, oh, OK. That always works out.

**Aline:** I think I called you and I said this poor young woman thinks we’re going to sell it somewhere else and she doesn’t know how Hollywood works. How am I going to let her down? This is awful.

**John G:** Oh my god. Does she not know that never works? And then you did. And then it’s this. And the incredible thing about what you guys have done is that television – I mean, a lot of television I should say, is, look, it’s a tool of business. It’s this thing that gets smashed together. It’s the network creation kind of thing. This is so not that. This is like an undeniable talent and brainchild of the two of you smashing into each other and being like I’m this person and I’m that person and together we’re going to – I didn’t know there was a hot tub, but now I know this. There’s a hot tub. You’re in a hot bowl of soup. And then you do this. It’s like you can’t do that.

It’s like think about it this way–

**Aline:** It’s funny because it’s so much work. It’s so much more work than being a screenwriter. And something that Gatins says all the time, which makes me laugh, is he’ll call me and be like, “Oh, I’m thinking about doing this project, but I don’t know man, it’s a lot of phone calls. Sounds like a lot of phone calls.” And it’s basically like is this worth the phone calls? And this is so many phone calls to make this show.

**John G:** It’s amazing.

**Aline:** And it’s worth it.

**John G:** It’s incredible. Because think about this. Imagine if this was a network kind of creation thing and you had to cast that. Can you imagine trying to find that? You can’t find that. There’s nobody that can do that.

**Rachel:** Also, I mean, there was a world in which because we originally we’re going to develop it for network that I would have had to audition for this part. You can’t, no.

**John G:** That’s what I’m saying. Can you imagine trying to hold auditions and be like, “OK, this woman has to come in – she has to be able to act, sing like that though, sing like that.”

**Aline:** Be world class funny.

**John G:** Be world class funny. And write. And help create and write the show.

**Aline:** And write 100 and some songs with two other people. It doesn’t make sense.

**John A:** I want to talk a moment about the song and getting into the reality of it’s the first penis she’s ever seen and the rubbing across the pants. It’s so specific and you’ve got to be – like were you noted a lot of this? There’s no bad words in it, but–

**Aline:** I just saw that Patty is right there.

**Rachel:** Oh my god. Please, for those of you who read articles about our show or heard interviews with me you’ve heard me talk about the great Patricia Dennis from CW Standards and practices.

**Aline:** We sent her a video of the dance, which was really way more suggestive–

**Rachel:** Which we got to do on tour. Because I was one of those backup dancers when we just did our live tour and it was basically, you know, giving him a hand job..

**Aline:** Patricia gave us very specific guidelines and we sent her back videos. And she reads all the lyrics and clears it. But Rachel and I and Jack have become the masters of the double entendre.

**John A:** We should answer two questions from the audience. Questions for our writers and our guests. We’d love to hear them, if anyone has a question.

**Rachel:** A lot of whom are writers.

**Female Audience Member:** I have a question. First of all, love both of you. Love, love, love the show. So songs and Nathaniel, I guess maybe I am one of those people that does like to look at him. And his hair never moves. That’s one thing that I have noticed.

OK, so two of my favorite songs are Thin Hot Guys Have Problems, Too, which was amazing. And I Go To the Zoo. Like I love I Go To the Zoo. And I would love to hear how you guys got on that one, because that was great.

**Rachel:** Well that idea actually was – the original idea for that was thought of when we were in that paper room. And it’s like we need a hip hop song. What does Nathaniel do when he’s feeling bad? Something that’s unexpected. And Aline–

**Aline:** And I said I go to the zoo. And it’s the only time, because I mean I contribute lyrics to the songs occasionally, but it’s the only time I actually said [sings] I Go To the Zoo. That’s the extent of my contribution.

**Rachel:** And it stuck. And then I sat with Adam and Jack and I have a video of us writing the song. And for me I would say hip hop lyrics are not my strength. So if I’m kind of pitching hip hop jokes it’s just like, “Tomorrow night I’m in a car with a girl.” And I remember Jack was like, no, “I got this bitch up in my ‘rari.” Jack really gets to a very deep place. Same thing with [unintelligible] with Nipsey Russell rap lyrics. It was originally like – it was my impression of what how a rapper looks at women. And it was just like, “Girl, you know I like it when you wear that dress.”

And Jack was like, “Hey, I have some thoughts.” And then Jack just busted out, “Hop on my dick…” and it was great. It was so funny. But I Go To the Zoo, aside from the hip hop lyrics, the bent of that song is just about his – a lot of the problem I have with a lot of musical theater comedy is it’s rhymes and it’s clever but you know what’s coming and you know what the specifics are and so you don’t laugh. And especially with a song like that you want to have consistent jokes. And the only way to have consistent laugh-out-loud jokes is to surprise the audience. And so like, you know, when – I mean, I remember the moment when one of us went like, “I go to the San Diego Zoo.” And it was just like, “Oh, what a great way to like keep the chorus but surprise the audience.” And so that song, a lot of the funniest songs on the show are Jack, Adam, and I just try to make each other laugh. And when we do that we know we’ve hit on a good specific for a turn in the song that will then surprise the audience and make them laugh.

And I love – yeah, yeah, so that song has a tiny bridge. “When’s it gonna stop? When’s it gonna end?” And unlike a lot of songs we write that’s actually kind of a dramatic song – that’s a dramatic bridge because it sets up I Go To the Aquarium. But a lot of times the bridges in songs we write are the funniest parts because you can – the sky is the limit with the bridge because the bridge in a song is a departure, not a departure from the premise, but you can go to another lens, like another angle of the premise you haven’t explored.

And so coming up with ways to surprise each other when we’re thinking of those bridges is also really, really fun.

**Aline:** I mean, one of the great, great joys of the show is we’re in the writer’s room and hacking away at something and the door bursts open and Rachel, Adam, and Jack, some combination of the three, one, two or three of them comes in and sings us a song, it’s amazing. And also like I just am such a controlling writer. I’ve never in my life copied and pasted anything that anyone has ever sent me and just put in the script. On the pilot Rachel wrote Sexy Getting Ready and West Covina and I read them and I was like select all, copy, paste. And that’s it. And she scripts them all.

But just the joy of them bursting into the room and singing a song to us is just indescribable. Jack wrote a song called The Buzzing from the Bathroom. And, I mean, they all work on all the songs, but that one was mainly Jack. And I laughed so hard, like physically my stomach hurt. I understand what that is now because I laughed so hard my stomach hurt.

**John A:** All right, time for one more question. Right here.

**Male Audience Member:** I feel like there’s such an infinite amount of inspiration that you guys can pull from for songs and for each episode. Is there a process that you guys go through eliminating inspiration? Or do you just…

**Rachel:** Nailing the song premise and genre and hook line, whether or not it’s the chorus, the tag line is the hardest part. Like once we have that it’s a downhill slope. Am I right Jack?

**Jack:** Yeah. I mean, hi everyone.

**John A:** Hi Jack.

**Rachel:** That’s the hardest part. I mean, I think that it’s whatever genre we haven’t done and then whatever genre in a way is juxtaposed best with the idea, because especially when we’re writing songs that have – we’re coming at it from a comedic standpoint. You want those contrasts.

**Aline:** And then in terms of writing the show, we have an embarrassment of riches now because we have so many characters that we love and we only have 13 episodes. And so we have limited amounts of real estate. So it is actually there’s stuff that ends up, storylines we wanted to do or things we wanted to explore. And the door is closing because we only have 13 left. So there’s stuff that will never see the light of day that we thought we were going to do.

There’s never a shortage of ideas, but finding the right idea is always a challenge.

**John A:** So bringing this back around to the taped up window, so you’ve been in your taped up window process already. How much of what’s going to come in this fourth and final season is figuring out how much is going to be figured out as the game is played?

**Rachel:** We’ve done like three days of work, plus a hot tub session. And we have – look, everything is open to changing, but we have almost every episode we have what the episode is going to be about on the board right now.

**Aline:** Yeah. And it’s actually just for, you know, the first season was very thematic. Every episode was like I’m a good person. It was very thematic. And then it got increasingly plotty. And by last season those are more plot-driven, especially towards the end. And this season moves back to towards being more thematic. More thematic pieces. Because it is that–

**John G:** It is the rise.

**Aline:** It is the rise. It is the rise. It is the third act rise. So it’s more thoughtful stuff. And we’ve really had a great time. I mean, it’s like, as you said, it’s so weird. We have a lot of weird metaphysical moments that we just can’t believe that we’re here. You know, when I met Rachel she was 26 and I really look forward to her – I feel like 30 and 50 is better than 26 and 46. I feel like we seem like we’re closer in age now. You know?

But, you know, it’s just been incredible.

**Rachel:** We also know each other better.

**Aline:** Yeah. We know each other better and we know our habits better. And it’s funny, when I was watching that Paula and Rebecca thing I’m thinking they’re both right and they’re both wrong. That scene in the courtroom. You know, they’re both right about what she’s doing and they’re both wrong. And often in their interactions they’re both right and they’re both wrong. And that’s a lesson that we learn and relearn all the time is how to listen to each other and how to work together and how to get the best out of each other.

I had really gotten to a point in my movie career where it felt stuck and it felt like the stories that were being told were just not the stories that I had grown up on or wanted to hear. And this young lady came along and gave me an opportunity to do this and that’s why sometimes when someone says, “Oh, you discovered Rachel,” I feel like it’s the line in Pretty Woman. She discovered me right back.

**John A:** Aw.

**Rachel:** And I will say that as of now we are working out the season, it is still looking like it’s going to end the way that we always pitched it five years ago. I’m going to leave that vague, but we’ve stuck to the broad plan in a really, really cool way.

**Aline:** Although I will say Rachel came up with a – it’s generally the same, but Rachel came up with a joke on the end that was, I thought, sublime. And so I hope it ends up working out.

**Rachel:** And Aline is being very vague. You came up with a story the other day that was a great example, I’m really excited to talk about when they see it, of zagging. And we have another thing coming up for another character that I’m so excited about.

**Aline:** Don’t ask for – she might tell you.

**Rachel:** There are like five main things right now that I’m itching to tell people and I can’t.

**Aline:** Well, before we – I want to thank John and John for this.

**Rachel:** Yes, thanks Johns.

**Aline:** And I want to thank the assistants who helped put this together, especially Alden and Alana. There was a lot of work that went into this so thank you guys.

**Rachel:** Thank you.

**John A:** Aline and Rachel, thank you very much for a very fun season. Good luck on season four. I’m so excited to see it.

**Aline:** Thank you.

Links:

* Our next live Scriptnotes with Jonah Nolan & Lisa Joy (Westworld) and Stephen McFeely & Christopher Markus (Avengers: Infinity War) will be Tuesday, May 22nd at the ArcLight in Hollywood. [Tickets are on sale now](https://scriptnotes.brownpapertickets.com) — proceeds benefit [Hollywood HEART](http://www.hollywoodheart.org), which runs special programs and summer camps for at-risk youth.
* Some Crazy Ex-Girlfriend context may be helpful for this episode. You can watch it [here](http://www.cwtv.com/shows/crazy-ex-girlfriend/)! Otherwise, here’s the [Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Ex-Girlfriend_(TV_series)).
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/conflict-of-interest).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 347 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be discussing conflict of interest, both as a legal theory and as a reality in the world of film and television. Then we’ll be answering listener questions on TV comedy, establishing time periods, and not writing.

But Craig I’m so excited because you are all the way on the other side of the world. It’s the first time where we’re doing one of these long distance podcasts where you are in Europe and I am in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yeah. Not just in Europe but Eastern Europe, so I’m a bit far flungerer than you were last time when you were in Paris. I am in Vilnius, the capital city of the great country of Lithuania. I am 10 hours ahead of you. This is very exciting. We just finished our second week of shooting on Chernobyl and all is going well.

**John:** I’m so excited for you, Craig. I was actually with Craig Mazin as the first shot of his show went off. We were playing D&D and he got the text message with the first still image from the first scene being shot. And this has been a very long journey so I’m so, so happy that you are making your show.

**Craig:** Well, thank you very much. And all, I think, all television and film production should begin with the writer-producer playing Dungeons & Dragons while the first shot goes off. I think that’s fair.

**John:** That is only fair. It’s the way things should be. In a perfect world it would all be Dungeons & Dragons and television programs.

**Craig:** I’ve got here in my hotel room, it’s Rise of Tiamat, the module that I’ll be preparing so that when I return I will be DMing that for you and the boys. So D&D never too far away from me. But we’re making it work, you and I, as we do no matter what time zone we’re in.

**John:** All right. Let’s start our episode. First off I have some news. So, along with John Gatins, a friend of the show, I’m going to be hosting a special Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Q&A with Aline Brosh McKenna and Rachel Bloom on Wednesday May 9, 2018, 7pm, at UTA. So, this is actually at an industry thing, so it’s not like a thing that I can sell tickets for. I can’t send you to a website to come to this screening. But what I can do is Aline says we can put two people on the list to come to this. And I feel like we have a big bunch of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fans among our audience. But I’m trying to think of the best way to give out these two tickets. And, Craig, this is the first you’re hearing of this. What I think we might want to do is the first listener who can send in an email to ask@johnaugust.com with the lyrics to a song, like just write the lyrics to a song, that expresses why they want to be at this event. That might be the thing.

But, Craig, if you could offer some sort of theme for the song, or maybe even a title for the song that would convey what it should be.

**Craig:** Yeah. The theme is I want to be on the inside at an exclusive event because I’m on the outside normally and I want to be on the inside where not anyone can just go, because you said it’s a special industry fancy people event. And so I think let’s call the title of the song “The Other Side of the Velvet Rope.”

**John:** Ooh, I like that very, very much. So, if you are a person who wants to come to this, we are going to give away two tickets – well, they’re not tickets. We’ll put two names on the list and we’ll put those two names based on the person who writes the lyrics to that song. So, write those lyrics about The Other Side of the Velvet Rope. Send them through to ask@johnaugust.com and we will put those two names on the list.

To be clear here, I think whoever writes that and their plus one will be our guests for this special little thing.

**Craig:** Great. I think that’s a great idea. And it’s not a lyric contest. It’s really just like who can put the effort in, you know?

**John:** Exactly. We want you to jump over a bar. And that bar is write some lyrics.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But we have an actual real Scriptnotes show to hype as well. So on May 22 we are going to be doing a show at the ArcLight. Tickets are not yet available but I want you to clear your calendars on May 22. There will be a live show in Los Angeles. We are going to have very cool guests. It’s going to be a good, fun time. So, if you have anything scheduled for May 22, now is the time to cancel it because there’s going to be a Scriptnotes live show there. And this is the equivalent live show as when we had Rian Johnson on and Dana Fox and Rob McElhenney. It’s the equivalent of that show. And we’re excited to announce our guests pretty soon. You can’t come if you’ve – don’t schedule surgery for that day.

**Craig:** No, no. Well, listen, don’t schedule surgery if you don’t have to, obviously. We’re not big fans of the elective stuff. But also, folks, this is the event that we do to support Hollywood Heart, which is a wonderful charity that our friend John Gatins supports. And the past two times we’ve done this have been, well, we like to save some of the heavy firepower for those shows. So, the first time we did it we had Dan Weiss and Dave Benioff from Game of Thrones and we had Jason Bateman from Jason Bateman. And then, yeah, last year we had Rian Johnson on the eve of The Last Jedi coming out. We had Larry Kasdan, I believe. Oh no, Larry wasn’t on – he had his own show. He had his own live show.

But we had Rian Johnson and we had Dana Fox. I mean, we’ve had great guests for these. I don’t want to say yet who we’re getting, but we’re going to be getting some great people. So, no elective surgery on that night.

**John:** No. No. All right, so enough hype of future events. Let’s go to the past. Let’s do some follow up. So, a regular feature on the show is How Would This Be a Movie. One of those recent stories was the Worst Roommate Ever, the story by William Brennan. And that story was acquired by our friend Chris Morgan and Blumhouse. They are going to be trying to develop this for both TV and for features.

**Craig:** Yeah. So where did we land on that one? I can’t quite remember.

**John:** I think we landed that it was a very interesting premise and character. I think we may have differed on whether we needed to actually acquire the rights to this specific story or that as a general story space, like the idea of the roommate from hell genre might be a thing worth pursuing. But they decided, you know what, the actual rights to this story were worth it and they locked down those rights.

**Craig:** Well, I think if you are an individual writer and you get inspired by something like this it’s perfectly fine to write your own story as long as you feel you’re basically drawing on public facts as listed in this article. But when you’re a big company, and Chris Morgan has a big company, then you almost always just go and get the rights because you have a certain amount of money to spend and it generally plants a little bit of a flag in the space. You’re saying to other people, “Hey, we’re doing this, so maybe you don’t want to waste money doing it.” It’s a bit of business gamesmanship I should say.

**John:** I would say so. So I’ll be curious to see what project or projects come out of this idea. Almost all of us have had roommates at times. Most of them have not been deranged. But almost everyone has had a bad roommate experience.

**Craig:** I’ve had–

**John:** Actually, some of us have had deranged roommates. I guess you trump most of these other stories.

**Craig:** Yeah. I kind of have a problem with anything called Worst Roommate Ever, because I’m pretty sure I had the worst roommate ever.

**John:** Oh, always good. More recent news. We got an email from Nate. Craig, would you read what Nate wrote to us?

**Craig:** Sure. Nate writes, “I was listening to Episode 345 today and hearing about how Isaac and Elizabeth moved to LA right after college and that hit me harder than it should have. After I graduated I had plans to move to LA from Philadelphia with one of my best friends from college, but I was fortunate enough to be pitching a couple of shows here that picked up some momentum and decided to ride them until they were shelved.

“Once they plateaued I made plans again to move out. Just before putting down a deposit on an apartment I was hospitalized with Lyme disease.” Oh, that’s not good. “At that point my focus was health and put everything on hold again. And that urge was suppressed until today. I currently have a great job at 27 as a post-production supervisor at a large e-commerce company, a comfortable position that a lot of people would kill for in the area. A girlfriend of more than two years who has always supported me and my crazy ambitions but doesn’t want to move to LA and it has come to the point where it physically hurts to not be in LA.

“I guess I have more of an ask of you and Craig than a question. I would appreciate it if you and Craig could just tell me to quit being a coward and tell my girlfriend what I just told you.” Huh.

**John:** All right, well Nate, I can’t speak directly to your girlfriend but I can only tell you what I would tell her which is that if you are 27 and you want to be working in the film and television industry that is centered in Los Angeles, you don’t want to be in Philadelphia anymore, this is the time to do it. And you’re going to want to move here. And hopefully there’s a way you can move here and that she comes along with you. But I will say it’s not unprecedented for a person to leave a two-year relationship at 27 and move to the city they want to be living in. So, I think it’s time. Craig, do you have any more advice for Nate?

**Craig:** Well, look, it’s the girlfriend part that’s kind of stopping me. Because, yeah, all of the details seem about right. I mean, you’re 27. You’re still fairly young. You’re a post-production supervisor. That’s a gig that actually could get you a fairly decent day job working in a similar capacity in LA. So, theoretically there’d be a fairly nice glide path in for you.

I’m a little concerned when you say it’s come to the point where it physically hurts to not be in LA. Obviously it’s a slight amount of hyperbole there, but you seem to have put a lot of hopes and dreams on the location of Los Angeles. You haven’t exactly said why. I mean, you said you were pitching a couple of shows, but you know nothing was stopping you from writing shows while you were in Philadelphia and you weren’t. So, a couple of concerns. A couple of things to think about, Nate.

First, why is it super-duper important that you be in LA, and, if you have an answer to that, can you answer why you haven’t been at least working towards those goals while you’ve been in Philadelphia? And secondly, and more importantly, this girlfriend of yours of 2.5 years, you say she’s always supported you and your crazy ambitions. Well, that’s real. That’s a thing. And if you love her and she loves you, I don’t know, like it just seems – sometimes there’s things that are more important than living in Los Angeles, which is just a place, Nate. It’s a place.

So, I just want you to think really carefully here. I just want to make sure that you aren’t imagining that it is location that’s going to make and break you and location is going to solve your problems and make all of your dreams come true. Because generally speaking while it’s easier in LA, it’s not the be-all, end-all. And I don’t know, breaking up with your girlfriend, I hate to advise anyone to do that, especially because it sounds like you and she have a good thing going.

**John:** Yeah. This last week I spoke at USC. I was part of their Talent Week in which they bring in alums to talk to other alums and current students. And the thing I ended up talking about was the nature of sort of how characters express their wants and how to think of yourself as a character in the story of your life. And so I would urge Nate to think of himself as the protagonist in the story of his life. And if he sees himself that way he’d recognize that heroes of stories have triumphs and setbacks. They go on journeys. They come back from places. He perceives himself as the person who meant to leave Philadelphia but like weird stuff got in the way and he was never able to leave. And the nature of his true quest, where he really should be, is to be in Los Angeles.

He’s never going to be sort of the same person he was at 21. But I also don’t want him to think that like, “Oh well, now his movie is over.” That the thing he wanted is unrealistic or impossible at this point. I think the reason why I’m pushing him to maybe go to Los Angeles or really have the hard conversation with his girlfriend and figure out whether this is a thing that can work or not work is because he maybe really unhappy five years, ten years, 15 years from now if he hasn’t done this thing he always meant to do.

I don’t want him to be with the same woman, married with kids, and still be frustrated that he never tried in Los Angeles. So, that’s where I’m pushing Nate this direction.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, those are the two competing movies, right? So you have the movie of the person who never quite follows their dream and suffers in silence and then finally gets a chance and goes for it and wins. Then there’s this other movie, it’s more of the romance. A person who doesn’t realize what they have, leaves to go get something better, and eventually comes back home realizing, “Oh, you know, it was right here in front of me the whole time.”

There’s these two movies. I don’t know which one is Nate’s movie. I do know that when he says, “I would appreciate it if you and Craig could just tell me to quit being a coward and tell my girlfriend what I just told you,” um, you know, I would say to you that’s, generally speaking, good advice always. You should be able to tell your girlfriend everything you’re thinking and feeling in that regard.

I don’t think you’re being a coward, Nate. I think you’re trying to have your cake and eat it too here. And you need to decide what you want and what matters more and make your choice. Real simple. We can’t do it for you, buddy.

**John:** Yeah. Nate, a year from now please write us back and let us know what you have done or decided to do and how it all went, OK?

**Craig:** Good idea.

**John:** Last bit of news is way back follow up. In Episode 32 of this podcast we discussed Amazon Studios, in particular discussed their plans for inviting anyone in the world to send in their movie ideas, their pitches, their treatments and things, and there was a whole service. There was a whole website you could go to to put in your stuff and we both thought it was a terrible idea. And there was news on that front this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. So apparently Amazon finally admitted that it was, in fact, a terrible idea. I think they knew it was a terrible idea almost immediately. And they just sort of kept it lingering there because it didn’t really cost them anything per se. Just sort of hard drive space on servers which is kind of their bread and butter. They’ve got more of that than anyone. They’ve shut it down. They finally said no mas. This thing is over.

And, John, I’m pretty sure that they should have just listened to us.

**John:** Yeah. It would have probably saved some time and some effort. I don’t know to what degree they were actively doing any of this script outreach stuff. I don’t know whether this was a factor for years, honestly. And I didn’t hear anybody talking about it. But I will say if you look at what Amazon Studios is doing right now, they are investing heavily in high-priced IP and expensive talent to try to make big things like a Game of Thrones. That’s why they’re spending a gazillion dollars on the Tolkien rights. They’re making big, big swings because that’s how you make big hits in general.

So, it’s 180 degrees from this sort of crowd-sourcing thing that they started with.

**Craig:** Yeah. And look, I remember when we talked about this, some people got their feathers a little ruffled. You and I occasionally will get hit with the whole, “You guys are elitist, and you’re just trying to keep the little guy out. And that there are all these men and women out there who, if only they could get past the gatekeepers, would be successful. And that crowd-sourcing is the future. And you’re old. And you’re done.” And I believe our thesis at the time was, no, this is not something you crowd source. This is about personal creative vision and intelligence. And, no, we’re not trying to keep anyone out. We’re just being realistic. People generally are fussy about what they watch and it’s really expensive to produce things. So, this isn’t going to go well.

And we were 100% right on this one. And there was no doubt. Sometimes you and I make guesses about things. I don’t think either one of us were guessing back then. We knew. It’s not enough that Amazon does this whole thing – by the way, I also remember that they pushed a very bad contract out initially and then they fixed it. But it’s not enough that they put this out there and then just face plant, but they are now, as you said, all the way in the opposite direction. They’re now chasing all the A-list “elitist” writers because as it turns out writing is hard. Writing for screen and television is hard. It is not a common talent. It takes time to cultivate and to perfect, or at least to progress in. And so, yeah, there’s actually something called a professional screenwriter. Sorry. I don’t know what to say.

The entire exercise I thought was kind of a weirdly cynical bit of false egalitarianism that was never going to work.

**John:** Yeah. It’s interesting. There’s the choices of going wide versus going deep. And so wide is the sort of crowd-sourced model where you get a bunch of different brains working on things, and it’s really good for some stuff. It’s really good when there’s things that could be kind of figured out algorithmically.

But screenwriting, at least screenwriting so far, is not a good candidate for that sort of algorithmic wisdom-of-the-crowd kind of thing. It’s such a specific thing that requires one person’s intense focus for long periods of time. And that’s why both writing a movie or showrunning a TV show requires just this person’s brain to be so intensely focused and have a vision for what things are. And crowds are really good for like vision in a lot of different directions, but when you need an intense, focused vision that ends up being one person or a very small group of people.

And I think this is another example of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Silicon Valley at times gets a little too up its own butt about these notions of things like, for instance, crowd sourcing and the wisdom of the crowd. But even in the case of groups of people writing in Hollywood, for instance television shows, there’s a hierarchy. And there is a person in charge. And things are decided on that level. The notion that there’d be some kind of group pushing something towards brilliance is so bizarre because, you know, what’s everybody’s complaint? I mean, the most watered down Hollywood stuff is movies by committee. And here Amazon attempted to expand the committee to the world. It was dead in the water from the start. It was never, ever, ever, ever going to work. And honestly I do think people should listen to us.

When you and I 100% agree on something it’s not possible that we’re wrong. If we both agree to 100%, everyone just needs to just trust us.

**John:** Absolutely. So, having said that, please don’t go back through the archives and figure out all the cases where we were completely wrong, because I’m sure there are some of those.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, but not when we’re 100%–

**John:** 100%, yeah. That will be the thing. No, no, we were only 99% sure.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I will say even like recent things like MoviePass, we’re like well that can never work. And right now it seems to be quite successful. But we’ll see sort of how it all goes.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we were a little wishy. I wasn’t at 100.

**John:** We were a little wishy. We were like confused.

**Craig:** Yeah. Whereas I remember with this–

**John:** We were never confused about Amazon Studios.

**Craig:** No. I lost my freaking mind over this one. This was early umbrage. This may have been the first umbrage. I don’t know.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our feature topic of today. This is conflict of interest. And so I put this on the outline because this came up a couple times the last few weeks and I want to talk about it as a concept. So first thing that sort of came up was the discussions about the agency deal and the deal with writers and the WGA, particularly in terms of packaging and producing. I heard the terms conflict of interest used a lot around that.

And also more recently we have Sean Hannity who is talking about Michael Cohen, but he’s in fact a client of Michael Cohen. And as a journalist or whatever you want to call him, that is troubling. And so the word conflict of interest was also coming up there.

So, I want to dig into conflict of interest.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a tricky little area. I mean, I have often discussed this fact with lawyers. This is one of those areas where sometimes the things that we think of as conflict of interest aren’t necessarily conflict of interest. It seems rather situational. And certain professions are more susceptible to it than others.

So, yeah, let’s talk about how this applies to our lives as writers.

**John:** Absolutely. So we’ll try to define terms a little bit as we start. I think the crucial thing to understand is that conflict of interest is not a crime in itself. It’s not even necessarily a big wrongdoing in and of itself. It’s just a situation. It’s a set of circumstances. It’s wherever you have a person/organization that has multiple competing interests. They can be financial. They can be other kinds of interest. But in trying to service one of those they may end up acting in the detriment to one of the other interests. So each of these interests thinks that they are the primary interest and they can’t be. And so it’s those conflicting things that become a conflict of interest.

So, any situation where your loyalties are divided, that’s the way of thinking about a conflict of interest. And so it can go beyond the strict legal definition to just these murky places we find ourselves where even if there isn’t an actual wrongdoing, there’s a perception that something could be unfair towards the parties involved because you have these multiple competing interests.

Classic examples, if you are buying a house and the real estate agent is representing both the buyer and the seller, that is a conflict of interest. That happens sometimes, but it has to be publicly acknowledged that there is a conflict of interest here because the seller is trying to get the highest price. The buyer is trying to get the lowest price. The agent is also kind of trying to get a higher price because they get a percentage. So, that’s a thing that has to be discussed.

If you are given a bonus based on how many life insurance policies you sell to the clients of this organization, that can be a real conflict of interest because those people you are selling these to, they may not need life insurance policies. But if your salary is based on how many of those you sell, that can be a conflict of interest.

So, it happens in lots of situations. But, particularly for our podcast I want to talk about the situations where it happens for writers.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, to me conflict of interest typically revolves around questions of trust. There is a sense of a violation of trust. If you believe that somebody is working on your collective behalf. That is to say on behalf of them and you. Or, if that person is working for you. You’ve paid them and they are advancing your interests. And very specifically what they’re doing is providing you a service in which you can trust. For instance, a doctor. I trust my doctor. My doctor says, “You know what? I’ve done a blood exam and I really think you need this medicine Flamydol.” OK, great.

Now, if he doesn’t tell me that he’s a shareholder in the company that makes Flamydol, that is a conflict of interest and he’s violated my trust. This is something that’s very clear in certain areas like, for instance, doctors, lawyers. Journalists are constantly having to disclose things. They seemingly are the most fastidious about it. So, very typically you’ll read a news article and somebody will be talking about a product or a movie. And then they will say, “By the way, that movie or product is manufactured by such-and-such, the parent company of this paper.” So at the very least by disclosing it you don’t have to worry that we’re trying to put a fast one by you. You can judge that for yourself, but we have not violated your trust.

**John:** Or an organization like a newspaper might have firewalls between the advertising department and the editorial department so that the people who are selling the ads to those companies are not influencing the editorial decisions of stories written about that company. And that’s a reasonable way of trying to avoid conflicts of interest because even if there wasn’t impropriety, the perception of impropriety is sometimes just as damaging.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in our business I think that’s – well, look, there are some areas where there is clearly a question of financial conflict of interest. But maybe more than half of the time what we’re talking about is the appearance of a conflict. The appearance or sense that trust has been violated because what happens is one party or the other discovers something that someone didn’t disclose to them and that’s where we can get ourselves into trouble or people can get into trouble with us.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s talk through some examples that writers are going to face. First off is just with their agencies, with their agents, because agents represent you but they don’t only represent you. They represent multiple clients. And so if you are going in for a job pitching on the Slinky movie, well your agency – your agent – might have other writers who are pitching on that same job. And that is going to happen in your life. And sometimes you’ll know about that. Sometimes you won’t know about that. You should know about that. And so we’re going to talk through strategies for like how you have those difficult conversations.

But it’s not just writers. They also represent directors. So, you know, that director who signed on to that movie who wants to fire you, that is a weird conflict of interest that happens all the time where they are trying to keep their director client happy, but also their writer client happy. Same thing happens with actors. They may really want to have their actor from their agency in your TV show. Are they doing what’s best for the show, what’s best for you as the writer? Or are they doing what’s best for them as the agency because they have this big high profile actor client that they want to get into a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, there is a certain aspect of this where it’s a bit caveat-scriptor. The agency is absolutely going to represent other people. You know they represent other people. You know that a bunch of them either do the same thing you do, going up for the same jobs you go up for. Or are people that could theoretically fire your, or employ you. Or people who make more money than you do, therefore it would enrich the agency more. They also represent producers.

So, you kind of have to just assume, I think, as a writer no matter where you are represented that unless you, the client, are literally the highest paid client at that agency that at some point or another your agents will be in a position where they have to choose between your interests and the interests of a client that earns more money for themselves and therefore earns more money for the agency. It’s just priced into the situation. It’s kind of hard to, I don’t know, pretend that you didn’t know. It’s sort of out there, isn’t it?

**John:** It is. And so a thing that’s come up recently in discussions about sort of the agency deal is we all know sort of the challenge of the multiple clients situation, but when the agency has their own financial interest in a project that changes the equation. So if an agency has a packaging fee on a TV show, they no longer have the interest in trying to make sure that you’re getting paid – your being paid more salary isn’t helping them because they are not commissioning that salary. They are not taking their 10% on that salary. So they no longer have an interest in trying to make sure your price goes up.

In fact, they may have an interest in making sure the show is sustainable. They want that show just to keep running because they’re getting a fee for every episode produced. If the show is incredibly successful and syndicates they are getting a percentage of the overall profits of the show. So, their interest is in the success of the show and not necessarily interest of the client. And that is, very classically, a conflict of interest.

Similar kinds of things are happening on the feature side where some agencies and other companies are really truly acting as producers. They’re financing projects. And therefore they have an interest in the final product that is not the same as their interest in the client who put the project together. That’s a challenging situation and the kind of thing we’re trying to figure out a way to address.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, look, technically speaking there is a law that governs talent agents, at least in the state of California which is where all the talent agents we’re describing live and work, and it basically says you get to procure employment on behalf of artists and in exchange for that exclusive right no one else can do it without a license you are not allowed to charge more than 10% commission. And you are not allowed to have a financial stake in the employers or the companies that are employing your clients. That’s simple straight up non, you know, conflict of interest avoidance let’s call it.

And what the agencies have done is put a little end run on that. They have created essentially side companies. So there’s the illusion I think of a separate company because they do these things.

So, OK, the talent agency is actually a Talent Agency Incorporated. But the production company is Productions Limited. Well, the finances are comingled and the shareholders are the same. But they’re two different companies therefore this one is not violating the talent agency act and this one is – it’s bull sugar.

And, also, this packaging thing I hate. I hate it. And here’s the – so packaging basically as far as I can tell, the scam is that the agencies have basically performed a shakedown maneuver on studios. They say, look, a number of our clients are in this show. You have to pay us money per episode or we’re going to, I guess, tell all of our clients to not be in the show. Or we’re going to not have our clients show up for your next show. It’s a little bit of a, “Oh, it’s a shame if anything should happen to your network.” And they get this money. There’s no value added, at all, whatsoever. This money is theoretically money that could be spent instead on the show itself. Or, god forbid, on the clients.

Yes, the clients don’t have to pay commission on that. But as you point out the whole point of commission is I want to pay it because that means you’re motivated to get me more money. The problem as far as I see it in that case is a flat-out conflict of interest as far as I’m concerned. The issue is I don’t know if there’s anything we can do about that one, because it seems like the big agencies – UTA, William Morris Endeavor, CAA, ICM – all package. And we are mostly represented by them. And so it’s not like you can leave and go to the other one. It’s going to happen to you again. And it is apparently not illegal.

**John:** Yeah. So these are things that are going to be figured out over the course of the next year. And so if you’ve been to some of the WGA meetings you’ve heard some of the plans on that front. We won’t sort of rehash them here.

I think it’s important to talk about them because it is an inherent conflict of interest and there always are going to be conflicts of interest. Because I’ve heard people talking about like, “Oh, this WGA is to eliminate all the conflicts of interest.” And I want to stress that that’s impossible. That will never happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because conflicts of interest are inherent in any situation where people are representing multiple parties. That’s going to happen. I think what you want to do is get to a place where one of the parties they’re representing isn’t themselves. And that’s not the biggest party that they’re representing. And we’ll see if we can make progress on that front.

But I also don’t want to leave it all on the agency’s doorstep here because studios have conflicts of interest as well. Look at pilot season. Pilot season is conflict of interest season. It’s basically “We are going to create a bunch of TV pilots and some of them we’re going to pick up to series and some of them we aren’t. But we don’t know which ones yet and so we’re going to pretend that each one of them is the most important thing and that we’re going to stick the best actors in each one of them. But really we know we’re not going to actually make it all – they’re not all going to work. And we’re going to be pulling people out of things. And we know it’s going to be a train wreck. But we’re going into it just thinking like, OK, this is our process. This is how we’re going to do it.”

There are inherent conflicts of interest in there. And if you go through like casting in the pilot season process, it’s all conflicts. It’s all people trying to negotiate these things and you don’t know all the information. It’s really crazy. But that’s just the way it is. And no magic wand will ever be waved that can make that all go away.

So as a writer you’re going to be entering into a system where that’s just part of the game.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, there’s conflict always. And then there are these times when you have – a very common situation that we encounter where the studio is engaging in conflict of interest. A studio head is fired. A new studio head is brought in or a new network head. They have an inherent conflict of interest when they’re evaluating the shows that are there. They may quietly think this show that this former head was developing is brilliant. But that just makes me look terrible. If I go ahead and greenlight that show and it becomes a big hit everyone is going to say, “Oh, look, see, they fired the wrong person. They hired him. They should have just kept her.” So, I think I’ll just kill that thing.

That’s just a classic conflict of interest. And also internally what a lot of people don’t know is that the – let’s call them the sub-level of executives. You’ve got the boss, and then you’ve got the two underbosses. And then you’ve got the layer of the five under-under bosses. Each one of those executives has shows for which they are responsible and accountable. They are being evaluated by the success of those. It is in their personal interest to see those shows get on the air. And it is in their personal interest to see their colleague’s shows not get on the air because there is an endless churn of competition and survival of the fittest in the ranks of these executives. That, of course, is also conflict of interest if we define the ultimate interest as good show, which John it often is not.

**John:** It is not. I want to quickly go through some of the other flavors of conflict of interest you’re going to find. So, self-dealing. Self-dealing is when you are basically buying something at a reduced price because you’re essentially selling it to yourself. And so that happens in television where a studio will sell its TV show into syndication to the network it itself owns. So that’s become a subject of several lawsuits where they’ve negotiated a lower price than it’s believed they could have gotten on the open market.

That can hurt show creators who are counting on that price to be what’s affecting their profits on the show.

Another situation we all face is outside employment which is basically you’re working on two things at once. A lot of writers are going to be working on two things at once. You kind of on the phone call sort of pretend it’s the only thing that you’re working on. But realistically you are going to be working on multiple projects at once. The buyer thinks that you are only working on their thing when in fact you’re working on multiple things. Usually that doesn’t become a problem. And usually it’s just understood that this is a thing that happens. But it is a conflict of interest.

Am I giving all of my best thoughts and words towards project A or towards project B. Sometimes you are making choices like that.

**Craig:** I think writers do face these situations of potential conflict of interest all the time and it’s fair, if we’re going to whack agents and studio executives for it, we also have to give ourselves a pretty good spanking because it comes up a lot. Writers are constantly playing this game of managing multiple children. Each one of those children is a project of theirs that they love or care about. Someone comes along and says, “Oh, would you be interested in helping us fix this movie?” And you know that you just worked on that movie’s competition at another studio. It would be proper to disclose that. But if you do not, you are engaging in blatant conflict of interest.

If either one of those parties find out that you worked on this movie and its direct competition, you’re violating everyone’s trust. You’re taking money and violating trust. And it would be fair for both of them to question whether or not you did your best on either one and even worse if you did then that meant you took money to hurt the other one. That’s a real thing that comes up all the time, especially because there’s – as we’ve often said – rarely a movie that doesn’t have some kind of direct concept competition at another studio.

**John:** So the most direct competition thing I can think of that’s happened in my career is I signed on to write an Alice in Wonderland movie and Sam Mendes was going to direct it and it was produced by Dick Zanuck. Separately, Tim Burton signed on to do Alice in Wonderland at Disney and Dick Zanuck was his producer so Dick Zanuck joined him in that. So, Dick Zanuck was attempting to produce two competing Alice in Wonderland movies at the same time.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Dick Zanuck was amazing. And I am so sad he has passed away, because he was remarkable. And he was one of the best producers I ever met in terms of just really being honest with me. So, I remember sitting at lunch. It’s like, “Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s crazy that this is the situation. I’m going to do my best to support both things at the same time. I don’t know what’s going to happen. And at some point I’ll have to choose.”

Ultimately the universe chose and the Disney movie went and the Sam Mendes one went away. And I never ended up writing the Sam Mendes one. But those things do happen. And Dick Zanuck himself was – the role of a producer like that is always conflict of interest because he’s trying to protect the movie, and his relationships with everyone involved with the movie. You know, it’s complicated. So, I have nothing but sympathy for the kinds of situations we find ourselves in as we’re trying to make these nebulous, impossible things come to life.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would advise writers, I mean, because in a situation like that – the good news for Dick Zanuck was everybody knew. Right? So, the second studio that says–

**John:** Exactly. He was transparent.

**Craig:** Yeah. So they say, “OK, listen, we know you’re doing this. It’s crazy. We’re pricing it in. Everybody knows everything. We still choose this. Fine.” Conflict of interest has been avoided. Voila.

For writers who are working – professional writers – if something like this should come up, I think in general it is good to err on the side of disclosure. More disclosure than less.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** About most things. Because I believe – and I could be just Pollyannaish about this – but in the long run people appreciate honesty, particularly in our business where it is in short supply. And you will be probably rewarded. You will probably end up if you were to say lose a potential job because of disclosed conflict of interest, the karma would come back around to boost you up later. I just sort of believe that.

I try my best to not get into a situation where if somebody were to find out that I were doing something they would feel betrayed. I think that’s the most important thing. I never want to walk around worrying that if somebody should know something that I’m doing that is true they would feel betrayed.

**John:** Absolutely. I think it’s always good advice to imagine the phone call you’d get if that person found out. And, all right, that phone call would be horrible. I should tell this in advance.

There was a situation where I was working on a movie for Spielberg and I was also working on the first Charlie’s Angels. And both things had to happen at the same time. I had days where I was going between those two meetings back to back. And so I told Steven I’m doing this thing for Drew. He knew Drew because of E.T. And it was all fine and it was all good.

But, if he had found out separately that I was still actively working on Charlie’s Angels, or if Charlie’s Angels had found out I was doing this other thing that could have been a real conflict. And so being upfront about it, just being transparent, is helpful. And just phrase it in a positive way. I want you to know that this is what I’m doing. It’s going to be these three days and then I’m back on yours fulltime. That it will all work out.

That’s much better than the betrayed call that you get from that person. Because it poisons things after that moment. Even when you give them that great draft they’re going into thinking that they’re upset with you. That you are a bad person who didn’t do their very best work because of this other reason. So, disclose.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, it’s not like they necessarily always follow these rules. You will find yourself in situations where you are doing the right thing for someone and then they turn around and do the wrong thing to you. And you may feel that you have firmly discovered the whole nice guys finish last rule. And that you’re a sucker. And you’re a doormat. And you should check your morals at the door. It’s the only way to get ahead. And all I can say to you is no. It is not worth it.

Yes, there are unscrupulous, bad, evil people that work in our business. I think it’s become more evident than ever. And they do succeed. And it is nauseating. The levels of injustice at times can be nauseating. However, that doesn’t mean you have to be a bad person. Nor does it mean you have to embrace any kind of betrayal. You can absolutely succeed by being a decent person.

I’m not suggesting you have to be a saint. This is a tough business. Sometimes you sugar coat. Sometimes you have to kind of bend the truth a bit just to avoid – you know, it’s the whole white lie syndrome. Right? These are things that have to happen.

But, you can be a decent person and succeed in this business. Will you end up with $500 million? Probably not. Do you want that? Eh, you’re in the wrong business anyway.

**John:** Yeah, I think so. So let’s talk about what can be done, or at least what steps an industry can take and individual people can take. So I’d say industry-wide what works for lawyers, what works for doctors, what works for newspapers when they’re run properly are standards. Codes of conduct. Basically public statements about this is what our policies are. And so when you have standards and practices, if you have a fiduciary standard where a client’s needs have to be the primary thing you’re working for, that helps.

So even like the NBA players, they have a code of conduct with their agents which sort of dictates these are the things that are allowed and that are not allowed. And so the degree to which you can figure out ways to codify what the expectations are, that helps. Because it’s when there are no clear cut expectations that these conflicts of interest become so pervasive.

Individually I would say that as a writer you have to acknowledge that those conflicts are going to be there. And that some of them are completely unavoidable. Like your agent represents multiple people. That’s just the nature of it. And so unless you are the only client, that’s going to happen.

And in a weird way the bigger your agency, the more of those conflicts are going to be a factor. That’s just the nature of it. You may have more access to some things at a bigger agency. But you also are going to have more conflicts just because there’s more people and more relationships there.

Some of the things that I think are useful to ask on the phone call is “What’s been your experience with this person?” Just get them talking about like who this person is, who this executive is, who this producer is to see if they have some preexisting thing. I’ve always been surprised where studio execs when they are renegotiating their contracts at the studio, it’s the agents who do that negotiation for them. So, agents have ongoing relationships with these people at studios that go much beyond just their clients working with them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, ask about that stuff.

It’s fair to ask, “Hey, do you have anybody else going up for this job?” I think that’s a fair question. If your agent won’t answer that question, they’re not really your agent.

**Craig:** And also the answer is, “Yeah.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think that Hollywood and DC are very similar in this regard. The lobbyists and the politicians and the people who run businesses that the laws govern are all way too involved with each other’s lives and there’s simply not enough separation there. That said, like John said, be aware of the stuff that’s obviously there. Just as, by the way, the studios are aware that every time they talk to us about an idea there’s a decent chance that we either have been working on a similar idea on our own, or could love that idea but want to do it on our own and not tell them. Everybody’s kind of dealing with that sort of thing.

So, by and large you can only essentially govern your own honesty and your own sense of decorum and good behavior. And you can only really govern your own representatives in as much as you have a sort of choice. But that sort of choice isn’t great. I got to be honest when it comes to these issues I don’t know of any particular agency where I would look at it and go, “Oh well, they are more, I don’t know, above the board and clean-handed than any of the other ones.”

**John:** Yeah. I would say you can find out reputations of people who are – you can avoid some shady people by asking questions. And that’s why when other writer friends ask us about agents or that they’re moving around we will tell them quite candidly what we think and sort of what’s happened. But in terms of the inherent systemic conflicts that are going to be there, they’re going to be there regardless. Even the best agents are going to have those conflicts. And I would say the agents I would choose to work with are the ones who are going to be most transparent and are going to put my interests as far forward as they can. That’s all you can sort of ask for.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree.

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

Jay writes in, “In regards to sitcoms, what factors are used in deciding if it should be a single camera or a multicam? Should the teleplay’s formatting differ based on the camera setup?”

**Craig:** Well, generally speaking multicam shows are fixed in a couple, two or three, key locations. So you’re thinking about your Seinfelds and your Cheers and a number of the Disney and Nickelodeon sitcoms where you’ve got the living room, the bedroom, and the office. You’ve got the movie theater, the kitchen, and the schoolroom. It’s that kind of thing. Or in the case of Seinfeld, it’s Jerry’s apartment and it’s the diner, right?

So, the reason why is if you’re camping down with the multi-camera setup you kind of are living in a space. You don’t want to yank all of your multi-cameras around. The whole point of multi-camera is we’re on a stage. We have a base. So we can set up our cameras and go from there. We’re probably going to have an audience. There’s a fair chance of that as well.

Single camera you have quite a bit more freedom. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have certain sets or locations that you use over and over. In terms of formatting, I don’t know necessarily if the formatting is hugely different as much as the style of the writing itself is necessarily going to be different. You can have lots of shorter scenes when you’re single cam. And obviously you can go outside and you’re going to want to find some different locations to move around and justify your single cameraness.

If you’re a multi-camera format and you’re in the living room, you’re probably not going to do the three or four line scene. You’re going to camp down for a while. You can kind of get this just from watching these shows. It’s sort of intuitive I think.

**John:** So, right now a couple of listeners are screaming at their podcast player right now because multicam is formatted differently. So, if it’s a multicam show it looks really different on the page. It’s double-spaced.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s crazy.

**John:** It does. It’s double spaced.

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** Scene headers are underlined. I’m going to send you a link. It will drive you mad. I don’t know the actual origin of the multicam format, but it is a very different looking thing. So, it’s double-spaced. Action lines are all uppercase. So you’ve got to really look at the shows that are multicam and study that format because if you were to sort of halfway do multicam people would be – they would throw the script across the room. It’s a really different look.

**Craig:** Are the multicam shows all exactly the same? Or are some different than others?

**John:** You know, there are going to be some house styles. But part of the reason why I know what multicam looks like is the new Highland has multicam as a template. It looks so different. Here, I’m sending you a link to what this looks like. I’m going to send you the link in screenwriting.io, a website that our own producer Megan McDonnell updates, to show some of the big differences here. I’m going to throw it in Skype for you.

**Craig:** What the F? This is stupid. I hate it. All action and description is in all caps. Well, I guess they hate – you know what? I sort of understand. How much action and description can you have when you’re in the same damn set every time? You know what I mean? So maybe that’s why they do it that way. That’s so weird. All right.

**John:** And so I also put in an image there.

**Craig:** What the – that’s ugly as F. Oh, and they put the characters underneath. It’s almost like a cross between a play and a – yuck.

**John:** My guess is that the multicam format evolved sort of with the birth of television and it was a little bit more like a play. And if you really think about it, television and film came from kind of different worlds. And so film was done out here in Los Angeles. It was a thing that sort of grew up 100 years ago. TV had its own origins. It sort of came out of radio and plays and multiple cameras doing stuff. And they’ve co-mingled, I mean we think about them in the same way, but multicam shows are written in this different way. And it’s jarring when you first see it.

So you still see INT. You still see DAY. But character names are listed in there. There’s much more underlining, all uppercase. It’s a really different looking thing on the page.

So, getting back to I think Craig’s more important point is that the writing is also different. There’s an expectation in multicam shows that we are getting to jokes and that the jokes are presented and are landing and they are acknowledged by generally a laugh track and an audience. And there’s just a timing and a spacing. We’ll put a link into the show notes for this great YouTube clip of Big Bang Theory without laughs.

**Craig:** It’s so great. It’s eerie.

**John:** It’s so disturbing. But it’s this moment that like plays totally natural with laughs, but if you take the laughs out feels just bizarre. So, you will know whether your show is meant to be a multicam or a single cam. It’s also weird we still use the term single cam because all of the “single cam” shows they use multiple cameras. It’s just they are shot more like a drama or a TV show in that they have – yes, they have coverage. They’re shooting A and B camera. They’re doing more complicated things.

So, the shows, half-hour comedies that are single camera include things like Modern Family, Blackish, The Office. A lot of these shows have that sort of half-conceit of there is a documentary crew there. But the other ones that are just truly fully dramas that happen to be half an hour long.

You will know whether your show is which one. But they are actually very different. I’ve never written multicam. But some people love it.

Roseanne is a modern example of a multicam that is hugely successful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I obviously have never written in it because I didn’t know that it was a different format. And I’m kind of hoping that there’s somebody out there that’s working on a multicam show that’s striking some sort of blow against the tyranny of this very silly format.

**John:** Absolutely. Another format which is related to both of these but different still is the graphic novel format. Graphic novel format is not as standardized as either screenplays or this multicam format is. But it’s a way of sort of reflecting the script of a book and sort of where the panel layouts are and what is dialogue. It’s not just screenplays, you learn.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** Charles writes, “When writing a period piece, how would you establish a time period? I suppose putting something like The 1920s in description would suffice, but it feels a little too simplistic and the opposite of artistic.” Craig, how would you specify the time period for something like Chernobyl? What details do you put in there to let us know – to anchor us in a time and place?

**Craig:** Well, you have some choices. I mean, the first thing you can decide is exactly how you want your reader to discover the time period and by extension the audience. Obviously the audience does not see scene headers, right? So I don’t like to put in the establishment of a time period in a scene header. I feel like that’s the least interesting way because, again, the audience won’t have it.

So what you start with are some key things. We know that there are certain things that stick out. Appliances. Streets. Clothes. Technology in general. And even language. There’s all these little bits and bobs that kind of make indications. Smoking in a weird way has become a signifier of a time period.

So, little things like finding a cool reference to a brand that no longer exists. Little subtle ways so that people can figure out the mystery on their own. And then, if you desire, if it’s important for your story, you can indicate exactly when this is. It depends on the time period. People may think, well, this is 30, 40 years ago. If it’s important for them to know which then you throw the subtitle up on screen.

But first I like to kind of let people figure it out on their own. So we’re talking about our environment. Hair. Makeup. Props. Location. Language choices. All the things that make a period as vibrant as it is.

**John:** So situations where you may want to put the year in there is if it has to – like there’s multiple time periods in your script and you need to make it clear which time period you’re in for this thing. That’s a great time to put some time period in your scene header.

Or if you’re anchoring two specific real world events, then that’s a situation where you might honestly just put it on screen because it’s clear that this is a very specific moment in time and you want the audience to be crystal clear on exactly when you are in time and space, because this is going to be a hugely important part of your story.

But what Craig describes is right. I think your job – remember always – in the screenplay is to be the movie in paper form. So if there’s specific things we’re going to see and hear in the film that are going to clue us into what time period we’re in, those should be in your script.

**Craig:** Yep. Even sounds. You may have somebody walking along a street at night. And it might not be necessarily evident from the way that they’re dressed what the time period is. But you hear a car going by in the background and a horn. And there’s a certain kind of old car horn. That alone just puts you in a space. So use all of the things that exist. And I can tell you now that I’m here and we’re shooting a show that is period, every single thing has to be thought about. Everything. And the question that is often asked is “Did they have this?” That would be the worst thing of all. Like, “Oh, we put a thing in that just didn’t exist during that time.” That would be a nightmare.

But every single thing there is an attempt to source it to period so that it is accurate and the world feels true.

**John:** Absolutely. All right, so it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing could not be more related to what you just talked about. So in terms of anchoring you into a place and time this is a re-endorsement actually. Dana Stevens on Slate Culture Gabfest mentioned this. It’s from 1911. And so the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern took a trip to NYC and they filmed it on the motion picture cameras of the time. And so we’ve all seen that kind of footage. It’s all herky-jerky and odd because the frame rates are different. But this person named Guy Jones on YouTube has taken that footage and adjusted the frame rate so it’s smooth to modern eyes. And he added sound effects. He added ambience and full sound effects. And it’s really amazing because it’s like, “Oh, that’s what it actually looks like.” So we’ll put a link into the show notes, but you see horses and cars both simultaneously moving around NYC. You see the Flatiron Building which looks just like the Flatiron Building.

Everybody wears hats. We’re in Chinatown. You see this little Chinese kid and he’s doing what kids now would do is like, “Oh, it’s a camera. I’m going to try to get in front of the camera.” And that’s just a great sort of instinct. It’s just really cool to see the real version of this, because I’ve seen movie versions of the same time period a lot, but we can never actually build something this big. I mean, you see all of these people on these giant sets and it really is incredible. So I encourage people to take a look at this thing. And also just to – the sound design on this is really good. It’s very convincing and it’s more believable and more interesting because it feels like you’re really there in the time. Because this was a silent film, but they built a really good ambient track for it that feels like the period.

So, that’s my One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Well, my One Cool Thing is somewhat similar, but I’m not looking at the way things really were in 1911. I’m looking at the way things really were in Cleopatra era Egypt.

**John:** Ooh.

**Craig:** And Greece. Yeah. Because I’m playing Assassin’s Creed Origins. Of course. And I believe it is accurate in all ways. So naturally at the time I would have been this wonderful man named Bayek who goes around – only in pursuit of justice – just shedding massive quantities of blood. But it’s a really good game.

I like the Assassin’s Creed series. Have you ever played an Assassin’s Creed, John?

**John:** I never have.

**Craig:** There’s this underpinning concept to it that is so stupid I don’t even – it embarrasses me to say it. But you’re not really – the idea of the game is you’re not actually an assassin running around in ancient Egypt or in 1800s London or in Renaissance Florence or all the things that they’ve done. You’re actually a person in the modern era accessing genetic memories of somebody. It’s absolute nonsense. I hate that part of it.

**John:** I saw that in a trailer for the movie. So I saw Michael Fassbender in this big rig. And so that’s what you’re describing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like if it had been me – no one asked me to write Assassin’s Creed – but had they asked me I would have said just slice away this ridiculous thing and no doubt they would have said to me, “Um, Ubisoft, the company that’s licensed us the rights, they’re not going to let you do that.” Then I would have just fired myself.

Regardless, the actual gameplay though of Assassin’s Creed is really good. They’ve made a lot of them. They seem to make one a month. So, I had kind of gotten off the Assassin’s Creed wheel. But the aforementioned Chris Morgan said, “Oh no, this one is really, really good.” And it is. It’s really fun playing as somebody in a completely different culture. The Assassin’s Creed games have generally been white, white, white, white, white. So, it’s fun to be an ancient Egyptian. Well, I wouldn’t say ancient. I mean, you’re talking a little bit before the Common Era as they say.

But it’s just a cool time period. You’re riding a camel. You’re lopping people’s heads off. It’s great. So, you know, I’m a big fan. I say yes Assassin’s Creed Origins.

**John:** Yes Assassin’s Creed. The common thing said about Cleopatra is that she lived closer to our time than to when the pyramids were built. I don’t know if that’s actually true. But it’s a thing I hear repeated a lot.

**Craig:** It is true. And, in fact, it is mentioned in a splash screen at one point while the game is loading up.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** Yes, so that is true. Cleopatra was fairly modern. I mean, we’re talking just – we’re starting to edge towards the 0 Common Era. But you do – there’s one point where you’re running around. You’re doing stuff. And you just happen to turn to the left and there in the distance are pyramids. And it’s quite breathtaking. So big fan.

**John:** Very nice. That is our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Tim Garcia. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send the lyrics to the song you’ve now written about being on the other side of a velvet rope so you can join us for the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend special Q&A thing.

If you have longer questions like the ones we answered, those are great at ask@johnaugust.com. But short ones are easy on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you would like to leave us a review, that’s lovely. It helps other people find the show.

Here’s my reminder that we have a game that is out there in the world that is called AlphaBirds. It is a fun game for people who like words and like Scrabble or Boggle. Craig played it along with Melissa, god, like two or three years ago at Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yeah, in Austin, right? Yeah.

**John:** It’s a fun game.

**Craig:** It was fun.

**John:** Back then it was called Sparrow. It’s now called AlphaBirds and it’s available for purchase. So that’s at store.johnaugust.com. Or alphabirdsgame.com.

You’ll find show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. The transcripts go up about four days to seven days after the episode airs. All the back episodes are available at Scriptnotes.net. It’s a subscription. It’s $1.99 a month.

We also have a few more of the USB drives that have the first 350 episodes of the show on them. Craig, delightful talking with you across the world.

**Craig:** Indeed. Thanks, John. I’ll see you next week. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* To win an invite to the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend event on Wednesday May 9th, send your lyrics to “The Other Side of the Velvet Rope” to ask@johnaugust.com
* Amazon Studios is no longer accepting [unsolicited submissions](http://variety.com/2018/digital/news/amazon-studios-shuts-down-open-script-submissions-1202753480/)
* The Deadline [article](http://deadline.com/2018/04/talent-agency-business-writers-guild-deal-proposal-shakeup-packaging-deals-1202373395/) that outlines the WGA’s proposal to renegotiate the Artists’ manager Basic Agreement
* [Dick Zanuck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Zanuck) and his [credits](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005573/)
* Multicams are [formatted differently](https://screenwriting.io/how-are-multicamera-tv-scripts-formatted/). This clip of the [Big Bang Theory with the laugh track removed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASZ8Hks4gko) shows how different the rhythm of a Multicam can be.
* Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern’s [footage of New York City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aohXOpKtns0) as adjusted by Guy Jones
* [Assassin’s Creed Origins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed_Origins)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [AlphaBirds](http://alphabirdsgame.com) is our fun new word game!
* [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 Tim Garcia ([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_347.mp3).