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

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

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**Male Voice:** [Unintelligible].

**Male Voice:** I’m [Robert Grolich].

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

**Phoebe Judge:** I’m Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.

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

**Roman Mars:** I’m Roman Mars.

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**Karina Longworth:** I’m your host. Karina Longworth.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 303 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program, we will be answering listener questions about writer agreements, page-one rewrites, and resuscitating dead projects.

**Craig:** We’re not going to talk about what just happened though? [laughs]

**John:** What just happened?

**Craig:** The weirdest intro that we have ever had.

**John:** It’s a pretty great intro. So that intro came from Jonas Madden-Connor. Jonas, thank you for cutting that. Again, we have the best listeners in the entire world.

**Craig:** We really, really do. I don’t know, there’s been a number of these that people have done, but that one was the most interesting and therefore also the most disturbing.

**John:** Yeah. It was wonderful. I had an interesting disturbing day and I want to talk to you about it, because it was strange and I want your feedback on it. So, today I got an MRI. I got a brain scan.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Which I’d never had before. So, to cut to the end, I’m absolutely fine. There’s nothing wrong whatsoever. And it was a scan that my French doctor wanted me to have and my American doctor says that’s ridiculous, you don’t need that. But I ended up deciding, you know what, I’m curious what a brain scan is actually like, what the experience is. And so I’m going to cross this off my bucket list. I will have a brain scan. The answer is it’s not especially pleasant, but was fascinating in a way that I’m glad I did it. So, I did it here in Paris. And I’ve had scans, like of my chest before, but this was the first time where like they lock your head into a cage and you can’t move.

And have you ever had that done, Craig?

**Craig:** No. But I’m actually going to in the summer because some researchers at Princeton – I may have even mentioned this on the show – are doing a study about writers and neurological function and I guess the idea of visualization in the brain. And they’re using screenwriters specifically. And so they reached out to me and I said yeah. That’s like everything I love all in one. So, I don’t know what the – the test is sort of a challenge test, I think, where they’re scanning your brain and then they’re also asking you to perform mental tasks.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** And then they are looking at how it works inside your head. But, yeah, I’ll have it done then. And generally speaking, I mean, it isn’t really – there’s no real good reason, you really shouldn’t do it. But–

**John:** It’s not dangerous to do it. Here’s what I’ll say. I’m not a claustrophobic person, and I’m generally not claustrophobic in small spaces. I wasn’t freaked out about doing this whatsoever. But there becomes a moment about ten minutes into this where I did start to panic a little bit. And the fact that you cannot move your head at all is really jarring. The other thing which was strange is the way that the little cage is set up, there’s a mirror where I can sort of see my eyes, and I can sort of see forward, but I couldn’t quite figure out what I was seeing. There was sort of this landscape ahead of me that felt very sort of science fiction. And like I was moving through a tunnel in a Kubrick movie.

And it was only after a few minutes of staring at it that I realize like, oh wait, I’m actually looking at over my shirt and my pants at my shoes. But my brain couldn’t process what I was actually seeing. It was really strange – it was cool.

So, I guess on the whole I would recommend it to people, but it wasn’t a pleasant thing. Like I was happy to have it be finished at the end.

**Craig:** It doesn’t hurt.

**John:** It doesn’t hurt whatsoever. It was good for the experience. It was also good to prove that I do have – I now have a scan to show I have a brain and a heart, so I’m really not a robot.

**Craig:** You have what we would call a vestigial brain and heart. I think that you have those organs, but they’re essentially redundant because your CPU and I think you have some kind of pump. Like a motorized pump that moves the nutrient fluids and the lubricants, the coolants, through the ductwork.

**John:** It must be contained somewhere down in my lower extremities, because so far in the head and the heart the magnets haven’t been set off by that–

**Craig:** No, no, there’s no reason to mimic the inefficient design of the human anatomy. It’s probably all packed in somewhere around where your kidneys are, or would have been.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That actually makes a lot more sense. I feel much better knowing that now.

**Craig:** I mean, that’s where your food port is, isn’t it?

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. That’s where I inject my food port. I go through all the efforts of looking like I’m eating normal food at restaurants, but no, it’s all for show.

**Craig:** You do this incredibly rhythmic chewing that actually freaks people out more, but you don’t know.

**John:** Oh, it’s good stuff.

We have some follow up here. Why don’t you start us off here?

**Craig:** Oh, Kevin Walsh. Kevin is a guy that you and I play Dungeons & Dragons with. I think we’ve mentioned him on the show before. We definitely mentioned him when we did the D&D podcast with the Wizards of the Coast folks. And Kevin is the ultimate D&D rules lawyer. And apparently also chess lawyer. So, he wrote in to say, “Just heard you guys discussing errors in specialized details. And the example of the impossible chess scenario in The Office jumped out at me. I’m a poor player, but I know enough to realize—“

He’s already lying, by the way. I’m sure he’s great. “The setup of two bishops on white squares, while highly improbable, is not impossible due to the promotion element of the game. When a pawn reaches the eighth rank, it’s almost always promoted to a queen. But you actually have the option to promote it to any non-pawn piece, so you could conceivably promote a pawn on a white square to bishop in addition to a bishop already on the board.”

Yes, that is technically true. Who the hell would do that? I mean, there’s no reason to do that, at all. Ever. I can’t imagine anyone has ever done that.

**John:** So, invariably when we do the podcast we talk about articles and blog posts we’ve read and we summarize because it’s in audio format, but if I recall correctly in the longer blog post that we were drawing from the author, who I believe was a woman, did single out that, yes, there is a possibility in which he could have gotten two bishops on white squares, but the way the game was actually set up, or at least how you saw the game being played, it wouldn’t have been possible.

**Craig:** It just doesn’t make any sense, because the queen moves in all directions as many squares as she wants. So, she’s already – she can be essentially every piece on the board. Well, she can’t move like a rook. I’m sorry. Like a knight. But she can move diagonally like a bishop. And she can also move one square over and then start moving diagonally, so who the hell would promote a pawn to a bishop? I don’t know, now a bunch of chess people are going to write in and call me–

**John:** They’re absolutely going to write in and you should write those things with Header Craig.

**Craig:** John, why would you say such things? [laughs]

**John:** In Episode 301 we talked about writing a pilot based on a property you don’t own as a writing sample. Charles writes, “I’ve written several episodes of a television series based on an existing property, specifically the Fallout game series.”

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Craig loves Fallout.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** “The game developer, knowing nothing about my script or plans for the series as a whole, won’t answer or return any of my calls regarding obtaining the rights for said property.”

**Craig:** [laughs] You don’t say?

**John:** “I’m sure an agent would be able to make some headway in this department, but as you’ve probably already guessed, I don’t have one of those. I’ve thought about contacting agents who have developed similar properties, but articles I’ve found on the subject suggest that contacting an agent without already possessing the rights would present a substantial hurdle. Any advice you could offer would be greatly appreciated.”

**Craig:** OK. Charles, here’s your advice. There’s nothing wrong with what you’ve done, per se. You’re into this and you’re writing episodes. What you’re writing is only valuable to the extent that someone might read it and say, “I like the way you write, Charles. I’d like to hire you to write something else. Or I’d like to see if you have something original that you’d like to write.” Under no circumstances will Bethesda, the massive corporation that makes the Fallout game series, and Elder Scrolls, be willing to discuss with you the notion of licensing derivative works. They maintain very careful control of those rights and they will only license them to the largest of entities for the most possible amount of money.

To date, I don’t think they have. I think they’ve actually – they don’t even want to license this stuff to Warner Bros, much less Charles. Do you know what I mean?

So, stop calling them. They’re never going to – and they will also very intentionally tell you that they’re not reading anything you’ve written because the last thing they want to do is deal with you then coming down later and saying you stole some of my stuff for Fallout 7, or your Fallout movie. So, they’re never going to read it. They’re never going to contact you. They may never acknowledge that you have even done what you’ve done.

Technically speaking, I mean, what you’ve done isn’t a violation of their rights unless you try and make money off of it. Then it is. So, you should stop pursuing this like it can happen. You should only think of this as either a writing exercise for yourself, great practice, a way to learn, or as a sample for other people to read who might be looking to hire a writer to adapt their video game which is perhaps a smaller property that isn’t quite as a massive as Fallout.

**John:** 100% correct. And I think this is a case of sort of over-applying something we said in Episode 301. So in Episode 301 we talked about this guy who wanted to do an episode of Dallas or a pilot based on Dallas that was turned into a comedy. We said, yes, go for it with the giant caveat that like that is a great writing sample. A writing sample is wonderful, but it is not a thing you’re going out to try to make. So, stop pursuing Bethesda. Stop pursuing an agent with the goal of making this into a thing. Try to make people read it because hopefully it’s really good writing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m going to put a link in the show notes to a short film about Portal, made by Dan Trachtenberg, who is a guy we should absolutely have on the podcast at some point.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. He’s great.

**John:** He’s great. And so he’s gone on to become a director of note. But the first thing I was aware that he did was this short film inspired by Portal. And I don’t recall the full backstory on this. I don’t think he had any rights or blessings from the Valve folks. It’s a film that’s sort of set in the Valve universe, but it is not – to my understanding – was not sanctioned by Valve before he made it. But it was very useful.

So I think the same way that Charles’ Fallout script could be useful to him as a calling card, this was useful to Dan Trachtenberg as a calling card. But he was not setting out to make a Portal movie to make money.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, basically you’re writing fan fiction, Charles. And there’s nothing wrong with it. But you could – certainly you could put it on the web and just have people, if they want to read it, for free. Can’t charge them for it. That’s for sure.

**John:** Yep. Last bit of sort of meta follow up, in previous episodes we’ve done How Would This Be a Movie. We did a How Would This Be a Movie last week. A lot of those How Would This Be a Movie are becoming a movie. And so I wanted a place for sort of consistent follow up on like all those things we talked about, which ones of those are actually becoming movies. So, Godwin, our producer, is going through and tracking all those projects now. So, there will be a link in the show notes for sort of the tracking board of the previous projects to see what’s going on. So we’ll be updating that periodically as we have news on which of those movies are actually going down the roads into production.

**Craig:** Smart. Is he going to keep a little report card of how we’re doing on our predictions?

**John:** That’s a really good idea, too. We’re figuring out what the good forum for it will be. I think it will be just a single page on johnaugust.com. But it will be some sort of table. There will be, you know, a good little indicator of like what’s where.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Great idea. And you know what? Keeps Godwin busy.

**John:** It does. You got to keep him busy, because you know what? Our listeners are paying Godwin’s salary. Well, technically I’m paying his salary. But our listeners are helping to pay Godwin’s salary.

**Craig:** And, uh, idle hands are the devil’s playground.

**John:** They certainly are. You know who else works for me who has idle hands sometimes is Nima Yousefi. And he asked a question which I figured we would discuss here. So it is our first of many questions this evening. Is there a name for the kind of movie that is just stuffed with stars, like the Garry Marshall films, such as Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day, or Love Actually? Craig, can you think of a title for that kind of movie, that genre?

**Craig:** I don’t think there’s a specific one. Sometimes you might refer to those as star ensembles. But, you know, on television, when they used to make television movies, sometimes they would do this and they would call it an All-Star Cast. We don’t really do that in movies. That sounds ridiculous. I just call them Star Ensembles.

**John:** I guess a Star Ensemble would make sense. You know, it feels it could be weird to write that kind of movie if you weren’t anticipating it being stuffed with stars in a strange way. You know, it’s hard to envision Love Actually if you didn’t anticipate like, OK, there’s all these different characters who are sort of running around. If they weren’t kind of notable actors independently would you really try to make that move? I don’t know. I also think of like the Cannonball Run movies are just full of actors in ways that we don’t commonly make those anymore.

**Craig:** That’s right. I don’t know if Love Actually specifically – it’s not quite the same Star Ensemble sort of thing that maybe some of the Garry Marshall films are. Those really are like, look, over here, and over here, and over here. It’s not my favorite genre. I will admit.

**John:** I’d agree.

**Craig:** I’m not one of those people that loves or hates Love Actually. It’s such a polarizing film in a weird way. I like it. You know, like I’ve never felt passionate about it. But the holiday movies, they’re not really – mostly what happens is they get very sentimental in certain kind of way. And I like certain kinds of sentiment, and then other kinds of sentiment is just not for me. It’s just, you know, it’s a personal taste thing. So, I’m not big on those.

And I never really liked the Cannonball Run movies. I didn’t. Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World? No. Not really. No.

**John:** Not so much. You know, I think of the Judd Apatow movies and also the Seth Rogan/Evan Goldberg movies, they tend to have big casts, but it doesn’t sort of feel like I’m cramming this one actor in for just this one scene. They very much tend to stay on plot. I mean, Apatow will sort of like – sometimes you will sense that somebody was there just because they were funny and they sort of got three scenes because he wanted them in the movie. But it’s not the same sense of like, oh look, it’s that famous person who is just being that famous person and improvising.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are some filmmakers that have a little bit of like a Mercury Theater group of actors they always use. And those people keep showing up. And how some of those people get into that clique. It’s really more of a clique, because when you see a movie like the Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day movies, you don’t get the sense at all those actors hang out all the time. But Jon Hamm seems to hang out with these people. Like he hangs out with Kristen Wiig. I don’t know how that happened. It just did. And now he shows up in those movies. So, that’s more of a – yeah, I would call that a Clique Movie.

**John:** It’s a Clique Flick.

**Craig:** Oh! How did I miss that?

**John:** See? I knew if we talked about it enough we would get it out.

**Craig:** It’s a Clique Flick. Dude, seriously, that’s great. That’s exactly what it is. So Apatow makes Clique Flicks.

**John:** So good. I think we should stop the podcast right here.

**Craig:** I think we should stop everything. I may just stop. That may be it. I may walk out into traffic now. I’m not sure how it gets better than this.

**John:** It’s all downhill from here.

Cord writes, “I was wondering, what percentage of the rewrite gigs that you take on are page-one rewrites? And would you say that percentage represents other writer’s workloads, too? Or are some writers more apt to say no to page-one rewrites and other writers yes?”

So, Craig, that’s an interesting question because I guess we have to define what is a page-one rewrite and does the notion of a page-one rewrite change how likely you or I are to approach a project.

**Craig:** OK. Well, we’ll start with the term. So page-one rewrite is an assignment where there is an existing script. Sometimes there are bunch of existing scripts. And either because the studio feels this way or they are going along with a writer, a new writer, who feels this way, we’re essentially starting over. We’re not throwing out the basic idea, but we’re saying, you know, we’re not taking the document of this script and then going into it and making adjustments throughout. We’re going to begin again. We’re going to break a new general plot. There could be wild shifts in character or tone. Certainly in story. And then we’re going to write – all this is new. We’re basically starting over.

I find that most of the time the rewrite work I do falls into two piles. One pile is you’re going to be on this for a week to three weeks. And then the other pile is page-one rewrite. It’s not that they come and say that. But inevitably if I’m not doing a short-term assignment, which means usually the film is in preproduction, it’s been green-lit. There’s a lot of pressure to color within the lines. A lot of times – you probably get this all the time, right?

So you get a call from your agent. They’re like, “Yeah, they’re calling about blah-blah-blah.” And you’ll say, OK, well what are they saying in terms of work? What do they think it is? “You know, they’re saying like three weeks.” In my mind I go, that’s a page-one rewrite. [laughs]

**John:** Usually I hear it, it’s like, “It’s a couple of weeks.” I’m like, oh yeah, it’s a couple of weeks.

**Craig:** Couple of weeks is trouble. Three weeks is right out. Because they underestimate everything essentially.

**John:** Here’s the interesting thing about a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks means that like, OK, they’re going to want to meet you and they’re going to have to have discussions and basically you’re going to have to pitch them what you’re going to do. And then they’re going to decide and then they’re going to hire you. So, a couple of weeks, it could be a couple weeks before you would even get the green light to sort of get to writing. And so then you’ve just burned a tremendous amount of time. At that point you could have just rewritten the whole script more like.

A page-one rewrite to me is – generally it’s an adaptation or there was something preexisting and whoever took the first crack at it didn’t deliver what they wanted to do. I don’t get a lot of the “this was a spec script we bought and now it’s a page-one rewrite.” That just doesn’t happen to me very much, just because not a lot of spec scripts tend to get sold. But this is like, you know, we’re kind of starting over here. Or we need to have a whole new framework. So even though you might take the same characters, you’re changing a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I tend to say no to those, honestly because I would rather be the first writer on something or I would rather be working on my own stuff, because a page-one rewrite is really just a brand new movie.

**Craig:** That’s right. It is. I will do them probably more frequently than you will because I don’t mind so much that I’m not necessarily the first person in if the topic is exciting to me and I feel like I can see a way through. That’s what happened on Identity Thief. It was a page-one rewrite. But what I do find is that it’s actually rare that the studio will say, “This is a page-one rewrite.” They’re always weirdly hopeful that there’s a fast, easy magic bullet to fire at this thing. I mean, in their dreams they imagine a screenwriter walking in and saying, “Oh, you guys, give me four days. Pay me only for four days and I will fix everything. You guys didn’t see it. It’s just this, and I got it.” And they go, “Oh my god.”

That’s their dream scenario. That’s not realistic, of course. Normally what happens if there is something that’s troubled, you got to start over. And then, yes, it is a lot of time. I do prefer if I’m going to do all that to just be the first person in. But when there’s a really interesting project or a really interesting director, then I’ll come in and do a bunch of work. What I try and avoid is the middle. And I don’t always avoid it.

I’ll give you – perfect example from my career is the Huntsman sequel. That was the middle. So they had a screenplay. And they were happy with the basic shape of the story, the premise, the way the characters were moving in and out. They just wanted work done on tone and dialogue and some new scenes. And this and that and all the rest. And that became – that was essentially about seven weeks. And it was one of those middles. It wasn’t a page-one rewrite. It wasn’t a short rewrite. It was heavy rewrite. And then the movie got green lit and then I had to come back and do another two weeks for production stuff. But at that point a lot of things had gone wrong, including the director getting fired and a new director coming on, like a week before shooting.

And I never felt like, OK, I mean, the credits on that are absolutely fair. Even Spiliotopoulous and I really wrote that movie. He wrote it and I wrote it. Not together, but separately. That’s one I try to actually avoid. I’d rather just say I was never here. Nobody knew I was here. I do my two or three weeks. Or, I wrote it. You know? But, well, you live and learn.

**John:** Yeah. For sure. You know, the page-one rewrite generally comes up when it’s a project that the studio says, “We really do want to make this movie. This is just not the script to make this movie out of.” So it’s a big adaptation of some piece of property that they really want, or it’s a sequel. Those tend to be prime candidates for rewrites.

So, there’s a lot of Bruckheimer movies where they just page-one rewrite it a zillion times. And that’s a thing that happens and I try to avoid those. There are projects I can think of over the last few years where it was a page-one rewrite but it was basically like I had a completely different concept for how to take this existing property. And that was intriguing to me, so to me it felt like a new movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Certainly to the previous writers, it felt like a page-one rewrite. And both can be true at the same time.

I tend to only really look at the rewrites where it’s a movie that I would want to make anyway. So then, sure, I’ll go in and do it. Or, sometimes I’ll read something and like I really do have the pretty simple solutions to things. I can tell you exactly what’s not working here. I can tell you how to do it. And I’m so excited because this script is really good and I can fix these things that I think we all agree are the problems. Those are the times where you get to feel like, OK, I’m actually helping something.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A lot of times with these page-one rewrites I just don’t feel like I’m necessarily getting that much closer to them making a movie.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I won’t take one of those unless I do feel like there’s a real chance. You know, that I have an excitement like it’s something new. And you’re right. It’s a bit like being handed a book. I mean, you don’t write the book but you’re asked to adapt the novel and you feel like you are the writer. Well, sometimes there is a book and also five scripts, which they’ve pushed aside. And they’re saying just go back to the book and start again. And then it feels sort of the same.

But I never want to take – I mean, Ted Elliott I remember once somebody asked him, we were on like a panel or something. And somebody said to him, “When people are offering you opportunities and movies that you can write or rewrite, what sort of movies are the ones that you want to write?” And he said, “Oh that’s easy. I want to write movies that they want to make.”

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And that’s kind of true. And sometimes you think I can make you want to make this. But that’s a harder circumstance than the normal one which is, “Oh, they want to make this. They really want to make this, so let’s see if I can be the last guy who gets the seat before the musical chairs song stops.” It’s risky.

**John:** I will tell you that as I do a mental survey of our screenwriting friends, the ones who are consistently employed but often the least happy are the ones who are doing a lot of those middles.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s the ones who are – they’re the fifth writer in on this project that has broken many other people before and will it break them? Probably. But they’ll pick themselves up and they’ll go on to the next thing. It’s a lucrative thing to be in that middle spot, but it’s not actually particularly enjoyable.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, at this moment I’m happy not to be doing a lot of those.

**Craig:** I agree with you. The one thing – let’s put money aside. Let’s say money is not the object. You don’t need a job at any particular moment. You’re lucky. And you have some choices. The one thing you want to avoid I think as a screenwriter is that gig where they’re clearly flailing around in the dark. And they’re hoping that somebody will give them something that excites them. They’re not already excited. Maybe you’ve got – they’re in a situation – there’s politics involved. There’s a property. A producer who controls something they need, a franchise, is also obsessed with developing this other thing. And so they’re letting the producer do it and they’re paying for development. They don’t necessarily really want it.

Or, there’s an actor who is attached to something. It’s a passion project. And they’re using that as bait to get the actor to do their franchise again. Those are scary. Because they will pay and you will work. And it will never satisfy. Because they don’t really want it.

**John:** What I will say is that as a young writer, some of those jobs were incredibly important to me, because they were a paycheck. And they were experience. They were a chance to sort of work in the system and figure it all out. So I don’t want to scare people away from those jobs early on. But you can’t only do those jobs because then you will never get a movie made.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so that’s part of the calculation you’re doing. I always say my favorite genre of movie is the movie that gets made. So very similar to Ted Elliott’s. And I’m always doing a check on things saying like do I really think they’re going to make this movie. And based on where I think that is, I will make a calculation like this is the right project for me to hop on or not hop on. And that’s shifted over the course of my career.

Early on, I needed to grab on to any movie that was going to pay me, any script that was going to pay me because that was incredibly important, to get both the experience and to keep the lights on.

**Craig:** Without question. Yeah, when you’re starting out, my god, take the job. Always take the job. Because let’s say somebody comes to you. The screenwriting fairy comes to you at night and says, “They’re never going to make it.” That’s OK. You’re going to learn something from the project. You’re going to be a better writer. You’re going to go through the experience of dealing with notes and producers and studio executives, politics, whatever it is. It will make you stronger. The experience will make you stronger. Even if it is an entirely negative experience, then you have learned something to avoid. Either way, there is no I don’t think, short of being abused, which unfortunately can happen quite a bit – there is no cost to taking a job when you don’t have another job to do. And you don’t have something of your own that you are burning to write. And you need to keep paying your bills. And you need to keep yourself as a viable option. They have lists. And you’re on one. And there’s upward and downward mobility on the list. Far more than you would imagine.

So, working is good. If you’re lucky enough to get to a place where you can be picky, well, look, I think probably you and I are in the same boat in this regard. We can kind of steer our ships between the three happiest islands which is: production rewrites, which are short, weeklies; page ones, where we can feel like we own something and make it; or our own stuff.

**John:** Yeah. And I’ve been happy to be able to do my own stuff these past couple of years. But I also enjoy working on other people’s movies. And so when those opportunities come up that make sense, I will do those as well.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Let’s go on to Lucas’s question. Lucas from Melbourne, Australia writes, “As we all know, scripts can change during production.”

**Craig:** What?!

**John:** “So if the film itself does not include specific dialogue that was in the original script, how much can we as authors hold on to legally? I know ideas cannot be owned, but I’m wondering if dialogue can be.”

**Craig:** Uh…maybe Lucas you’re asking this question because you live in Australia which doesn’t have work-for-hire the way we do in the United States. But here in the United States, we don’t own any of it anyway. We’ve signed over all of the copyright on our work to the studios. They own every word that’s in the film. Whether we wrote it or an actor ad-libbed it. We actually aren’t the technical authors of our screenplays. The studios are.

So, it’s not applicable to us.

**John:** No, I think he’s saying morally. I think he’s really asking the question of like I wrote this brilliant speech in this movie and then the script was shot and then for various reasons it never filmed. So basically in the third draft of the 19 drafts I did on this movie, there was this character who had this speech, or had this moment, or had this line of dialogue. Can I take that line of dialogue that never shot, that was never used–?

**Craig:** Oh, and reuse it?

**John:** To use that somewhere else? Can I use something from a previous thing?

**Craig:** Well, I was just – he said how much can we as authors hold on to that legally. So, I was taking him at his word. But I think you might be right. That really what he means is sort of morally legally. And the answer is you’re fine, I think.

**John:** I think you’re fine, too.

**Craig:** If it never got used, and the line itself is sort of multi-purpose, I don’t see a problem with that. I can’t imagine anybody calling you up and saying, hey, that line was in script three of 12 of a movie. They won’t remember. And even if they do, they don’t care. They chose not to use it. It doesn’t really have any value. I can’t imagine.

You know, the way that these work from a legal point of view is you’re always asking, well, who is the damaged party and how were they damaged. And in this case I don’t see how they were damaged at all, really.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a really hard case to be made for like, oh no, Paramount was planning on using that line of dialogue from that script in some other movie two years from now. That’s a very hard thing to accept. So, I think you’re OK.

And, the other way to think about it is let’s say that your movie did get made and that line of dialogue was in there. If it was a line of dialogue, it wouldn’t be illegal for another film to use that line of dialogue. It would be kind of crappy. It would be like lame for them to use it, but it wouldn’t be illegal for them to use that same line of dialogue.

So, you’re fine.

**Craig:** Well, it depends. It depends on how much.

**John:** A line of dialogue is not going to do it.

**Craig:** Probably not.

**John:** A whole speech could be a problem. But a line of dialogue, you’re fine.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s one of those kind of know it when you see it things. But it would be a bizarre case to bring. I have never heard of it happening in all of my years. It’s not – by the way, it’s not particularly common anyway. There are some writers who will say, “Oh my god, I saved this line. I’m definitely using this and definitely using that.” And I always think like, yeah, or make a new one. You know. I mean, you can make new ones.

**John:** Yeah. It’s very easy to imagine that these are sort of Lego pieces that you can sort of put together and reassemble, but I would say that in my life I rarely had the chance over, you know, I don’t know, god, 70 scripts I’ve written to use anything from one thing in another thing. There have been times where I’ve had ideas for like an action sequence or like some way that an exchange can happen that move from like one movie to another movie. But that’s really, really rare.

**Craig:** Yeah. For me it is rare to the point of it has never happened. I don’t recognize that being a thing that I’ve done. But in any case I think, Lucas, you should be fine. I don’t really think there’s going to be an issue there.

**John:** I agree. All right. This last one is a question that came in and the question was so long that I decided that it would actually make a much better blog post. And so if you go to johnaugust.com or follow the link in the show notes you will see an article I wrote and it starts with a little preamble, but then it goes through this question by a writer named KB who is talking about this project that a mutual friend had pitched to her and her writing partner.

So, essentially this guy Patrick had come to this writing team with an idea, a premise for a TV show. And said like, “Hey, why don’t you guys go off and write that.” And so KB and her writing partner did that. They went through like six months of work. They brought it back to this guy Patrick but Patrick said, “No, I don’t really like it.” And it just sort of fizzled there.

But someone else did like the project and so it was starting to get some traction, starting to get some heat. And this Patrick guy said like, “Oh, OK, well no, I really do like it and I want 75% of whatever you make off of it,” which is just nuts. And it became a huge fight. There was no contract ever signed between Patrick and this writing team.

13 years later, this writing team still likes this project and wants to redevelop it and do it as an indie pilot and they wrote in asking for our advice. I gave them my advice. And, Craig, you read my advice, but I’d like to sort of talk through what you think about – first off, Patrick. Second off, best practices for dealing with writing teams/collaboration. This sort of early nascent situation.

And then maybe we can segue into talking about when do you dust off an old project and sort of try to bring it back to life.

**Craig:** Well, I would urge everyone to think of it like this. Hollywood has a very long history of negotiating these things between various interested parties. And over time there have been some best practices that have evolved. So, people that have ideas that then bring it to a writer generally are considered producers. Producers make their own deal, however they are attached to the project. The writers make a separate deal for the script, but they’re all associated through a chain of title.

This has all been kind of litigated over time. And even so, after all these decades, there are disputes. Now, you’re out there, you’re not in Hollywood, and some guy comes to you and you’re having a conversation at a coffee shop and you’re like, hey, we should do something together. You don’t have any history behind you. You have no best practices. You have no tradition, agents, lawyers, any of that. The odds of it going smoothly are essentially zero. You’re flying blind in a very, very dangerous situation. Collaboration is dangerous because ideas and expressions of ideas, it’s not like they’re physical objects you can carve up. There are no shares in the company.

And since no one has decided whose role is what and how much is you and how much is me. The potential for disaster is extraordinary. And we hear things like this. You and I hear these stories constantly. And it’s frustrating for us, but it’s also understandable. Because there’s a certain social contract when people start having a conversation and saying, “Oh, you know, I have this idea.” And someone is like, “Oh my god, I love that. What if blah-blah-blah. Ooh, that’s great.” And everybody is feeling good. They’re having a conversation.

It would be bizarre for somebody to say, “Hold on. Stop talking. Everyone stop talking. We need to get lawyers.” That would seem aggressive and weird.

It is, however, exactly what you have to do. otherwise, you end up in this spot where a guy like Patrick has wildly overestimated, at least based on this account, what his fair share and fair due is. And yet because there is no prior agreement, it’s all subject to disruption. And it is challenging in the best of circumstances to sell material to buyers. It is nearly impossible to do it when there is any kind of distressed attachment, challenge, legal problem.

**John:** So, let’s talk about when you introduce this idea of a contract or some sort of agreement. So, in the blog post I put a link into a surprisingly straightforward and standard collaboration agreement the WGA has available to download. So we’ll put that in the show notes as well. You can see what that looks like. And it’s the kind of collaboration agreement you might do with your writing partner if you are going to be co-writing something. And it feels like this Patrick guy, he was more than a producer, so maybe you fold him into this collaboration agreement as well.

But importantly it sort of spells out the terms of like who is doing what and what the splits are going to be. I think it also puts people on notice that like we’re taking this seriously. We really are going to discuss this, so Patrick can’t come back six months from now saying like, “Oh no, I should get 75%.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This is no longer just a bunch like sitting around a table at a bar talking. This is like we’re going to actually try to write something. And so I think the time to introduce this kind of contract of this discussion is before anything gets written. Before anybody sits down to actually start saying like, “OK, let’s outline this. Let’s figure out what this all is.” That’s when you need to start doing this because you’re going to have a real problem before then. And so the minute it goes from just an oral conversation to words on paper, really break this out and start to look at it.

**Craig:** If you’re sitting there with your buddy and Patrick walks over and starts talking about this idea he has for a clothing store and you guys are like, oh my god, we’re designing clothing. And he’s like, “We should figure this out and we can open a clothing store and it will be a great clothing store.” You wouldn’t go, “Great. Let’s all start.”

No. No, no, no. That’s a business. Everybody would go, OK, let’s draw up a business plan. Let’s talk about how this is going to work. Terms of ownership and shares and collaboration. But when it comes to writing things, because the capital costs are essentially nothing, and there’s no barrier to starting, people leap. They leap before they look. All day long.

And you have to make a concerted effort to not be swayed by that zero entry, no barrier, no capital costs problem. And take that to mean, “So let’s just start.” You have to treat it like you are being asked to invest money, because in this case your time and effort is the equivalent.

**John:** I would 100% agree. And so I’m going to point you to this collaboration agreement. I can’t vouch that it’s the best collaboration agreement in the whole world. I will tell you that if I were in KB’s situation, I probably would not have hired a lawyer. I would have looked at something like this and probably have been pretty happy with this. And I think it probably would have dealt with most of KB’s situations. Again, I’m not a lawyer, but this is my best advice – this would have at least been a very good start into fixing the situation.

But what I found so fascinating about KB’s question is that this is 13 years later and now she’s looking at revisiting this. So, when I answered this on the blog I said, OK, there’s a chain of title problem here, because this guy came to you with some drawings and such. There is a chain of title issue here. He does own something. Clearly.

So if you try to make this without consulting him and you try to go to a festival, you try to sell this to somebody else, he’s going to come back in some way and it’s going to be terrible. So I said you’re going to have to bite the bullet, track him down on Facebook and say, “Let’s talk about what this is and sort of go through and find and an agreement that makes sense.” And if it doesn’t make sense, walk away, because it’s not worth trying to do this without him or do this with him too involved.

Your time is better spent doing other things. Do you agree with me on all that?

**Craig:** I do. You know, after all this time, you can always go to somebody and say, “Listen, we’re going to work on this, and we’ve been advised by attorneys that we’re free and clear to do so. That you have no copyright ownership of anything. However, we want to make sure that you’re attached as a producer. So here’s an agreement. You would be attached as a producer and you would be allowed to negotiate a fee should we set this up somewhere. But you have essentially quit claim on anything else.”

And then, you know, that guy has an opportunity to decide does he want a piece of something or 75% of nothing, because that’s the alternative. I mean, there are ways to do that sort of thing, but yes, you certainly don’t want to proceed and pretend that, oh, he won’t care. He will. He will.

**John:** He will care. He will find out and he will care. But let’s talk about the 13 years later of the whole thing, because my suspicion when I sort of looked into KB and why this project was coming back up is this seemed to be the only thing that was really getting attention out of all the stuff that she and her writing partner had done. And that might be why it was sort of coming back. And I want to dig into the psychology of trying to go back and pull up those old projects and make them happen versus writing something new.

And on the blog post I described it as being like a fashion thing. Like if you were a fashion designer and you made this amazing cape and people liked this cape, but it never sort of took off, it never really became a thing. 13 years later, if you look at that cape you designed, is this the time for that to break out into the world? Probably not. Fashions change. It’s unlikely that that cape is going to be the thing. You need to be designing for whatever fashion is right now. And my hunch is that whatever this thing was, it struck some zeitgeist moment right then 13 years ago. The odds that it’s going to strike the zeitgeist moment right now are small.

But I can understand why she might be attracted to going back to it because at least it had something. There was some heat. And there’s the nostalgia for like you remember what that felt like when we were younger and there was an excitement about what we were doing? I’d like to get that again. And I completely understand that, but I don’t think you’re going to get there by dusting off this old project.

**Craig:** We should do Scriptnotes capes.

**John:** Again, you thought there would be no other great ideas in this episode. You thought we should stop way back then, but Scriptnotes capes. Come on. It’s a writer’s cape.

**Craig:** Because, you know, when you sit down to write, what do you need? Well, you need a pads and pens, or you need your laptop. You need your cape. And a cup of coffee, really, I think.

**John:** Yeah. So next live show, any screenwriter, any guest who shows up with a cape I think gets some special reward. That person definitely gets a photo with me and Craig. There’s no question.

**Craig:** Oh, you’ll have to remind me. Because here is what’s going to happen. Somebody is going to walk up to us with a cape and go, “Check me out.” And I’m going to go, um, why are you wearing a cape? [laughs] And then you’re going to say, “Craig, do you remember…?” And then I’ll say, nope, but OK, let’s take the picture with the cape.

Yes, you are correct about this. There is a sense memory of the what-if. And the thrill of the anything is possible. The most exciting script in the world is the one you’re about to write. The least exciting script is the one you’re on page 80 of. And so it’s only natural to still carry this torch, the way that we can look back on our lives and think of a boy or think of a girl and say, “Oh, you know, there was a chance there and I went this way and they went that way. What if, what if, what if?”

Well, what if is, you know, maybe you would have had one or two terrific weeks and then, oh god. And then you would have never thought about them again. So, you have to put it in its proper psychological perspective. That said, if you’re in a meeting and a lot of times what a producer or studio executive will say to you is, “We really like what you’ve done here, and we like what you’ve done there. Do you have anything in your drawer?” They love to say that.

Again, they’re grasping for straws. They’re hoping for a magic bullet so that you go, yes, I have this Matrix trilogy in my drawer. Would you be interested in this? I forgot it was there.

Yeah, it doesn’t really happen. But it is fair for you to say, “You know, there was this thing, and we’re going to tell you what it is, but we’re also going to tell you right up front there’s this guy out there who feels like he owns a piece of it. But we’ll tell you what this is, and if you love it, well then you can deal with that guy.”

So now it’s all open, you know, in the air. And if they really do love it, and they want it, they’ll go find him. They’ll go make him go away. They’ll make him go away with money. Or they’ll make him go away legally. Whatever it is, it’s now their problem. And they’re so much better at it than we are.

So, that’s always a possibility. And at the very least then you’re not writing it in a vacuum. Someone is saying, yes, I want that. That would be nice.

**John:** That would be wonderful. Every once and a while I will hear a story of a screenwriter whose long lost project got made. So something that he wrote ten years ago. Actually, I was thinking, Damien Chazelle who did Whiplash, but then he did La La Land, I guess he had written La La Land many years before and then, of course, he got the chance to make it and it was terrific. So, you will hear that story of like, oh, that great thing that they wrote back then which they now got a chance to make and it’s fantastic. And everyone was a fool for passing on it back then.

I love those stories, but I also worry that the prevalence of those stories creates a false expectation about how common that really is. Because if I look through the things I wrote in my earlier days, or even ten years ago that haven’t gotten made, there’s generally a reason why those didn’t get made. And there’s very few of those that I really want to dust off and say like, OK, I’m going to spend all my time and energy trying to get this thing back up the hill to try to make it a movie. There generally was a problem or it just didn’t come together right. And I’ve usually felt that my time is better spent looking forward and writing the next great thing than the last great thing.

That’s not to say like, you know, on a phone call with an agent, like every couple months, I will check in with them about those sort of zombie projects. And I bet you have some of those, too, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Where it exists someplace. And a director could go on. Something could happen. And it’s still technically in development at the studio, but I just don’t know what’s going on with that. There’s no forward movement. And I could try to push that thing forward, but my history has shown that I’m not especially good at pushing that thing forward. So there are just some zombie projects out there that I kind of can’t do anything with.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have one of those for sure. And I just don’t think about it. I just don’t think. Maybe one day something will. Maybe something won’t. It’s just no sense in thinking about it. If they hired somebody else to work on it, then I would think, oh, OK, now I’m going to think about it.

But they haven’t, so it’s just there. There’s no point. And you’re absolutely right that we only tell stories of exceptions. We’re only interested in the notable. But by definition that means it’s rare. So it is notable and exciting and rare to hear about somebody’s ten-year-old script suddenly being reborn. And it is notable and rare because it is notable and rare. You certainly don’t want to rely on that. Almost always, it doesn’t happen. And we don’t tell those stories because they’re boring.

**John:** There’s a lot of silent evidence of all those projects that did not get reborn that are still sitting on shelves. And that’s most of what’s out there. It’s the dark matter of screenwriting.

**Craig:** I want to say that, because I’m a little hung up on Patrick. And I hear this a lot. These people have these crazy ideas about what they deserve. So here’s a little rule of thumb for you guys, when you’re sitting at the coffee shop with somebody. It’s real simple. If somebody brings you an idea – art work, a poem – anything that isn’t written, non-words on a page, but rather spoken or graphics, that’s great and that’s good. They’re a producer now. Either they are going to be writing or not. Writing is what the writers do. So the rights to the screenplay, the story and the screenplay, belong to the people writing them.

Now, that person then is attached as a producer because they have given you something of value and they deserve something of value in return. And that’s fine. But, when someone says, “OK, and then I get 75% of everything.” No. When it comes to the money that’s given to the people that wrote the script – or let’s forget that. The money that’s given for the script specifically, you get zero percent of that. Because you didn’t do it. It’s that simple.

So, you can say to somebody, OK, if you want to write the story with us, all three of us are going to work on the story together, then that means you’re writing it with us. We write a document that is a prose story of what a screenplay is going to be. Then we’ll go write the screenplay and the screenplay will say Story by the three of us, Screenplay by da-da-da. And then that money is divided in a very simple way, per the basic residual formula of the Writers Guild. That whatever money is given for that script, 75% of it goes to the people that wrote the screenplay, and 25% of it goes to the people that wrote the story, divided amongst each other equally.

Then if you want to get money, you deserve money for being a producer because they have to pay you as a producer, you negotiate that. And you know what we get of that? Zero. That’s how it works. That’s the way you should do it. Anybody that’s like I want 75% of stuff is, A, an idiot, and B, greedy.

**John:** I would also say that in Los Angeles, a special note for you will meet many, many actors in Los Angeles. And some of those actors are incredibly talented and you might say like, “Oh you know what? I want to write something for that actor.” Or that actor might come to you and say like, “Hey, write me something. It will be really fun.”

Maybe that’s a good idea. Maybe that person really is talented and really has a great shot. But, do what Craig says. If that person is going to write the story with you, then write up the story document with that person. And then in your deal make it clear that you are writing the screenplay and it will be Story by Actor and you, Screenplay by you. That’s all great and good. But just like the person who is showing up with a bunch of drawings for a premise, the actor is showing up with a premise. “It’s me, but in a comedy.” Don’t give them all your power, because you are the person who is actually writing the thing.

**Craig:** Seriously. And this is why Patrick drives me crazy, because first of all maybe he can make an argument he’s supplying story material. He’s flipped the percentages, so instead of 25/75, he’s decided it’s 75/25. He’s also asking for all of that. It’s parasitical and it’s insulting to what is required to write something. It’s ridiculous. It’s as dumb as a screenwriter saying, “Also, I want 75% of what the director makes, because I gave them the script.” What? No. They’re doing a different job.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Ugh, Patrick. You know what, Patrick, it’s not his real name, is it?

**John:** I don’t think it’s his real name.

**Craig:** I wonder what his real name is. It’s probably Steve.

**John:** It probably is Steve. Damn Steve.

**Craig:** Steve. What a jerk.

**John:** Yeah. Jerk. Steve does not get a cape.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a great essay that I was turned onto by Tess Morris. Tess Morris, friend of the show. Oh, I’m so excited to be back in Los Angeles soon to see Tess Morris.

**Craig:** Ray of sunshine.

**John:** She is wonderful. It is this great essay by Rebecca Solnit called The Loneliness of Donald Trump on the Corrosive Privilege of the Most Mocked Man in the World. You know what? People have written so much about Trump that it feels ridiculous to sort of write anything new about him, but man, Rebecca Solnit just does it. It’s a really great character study of what it must feel like to be him and to have had this kind of privilege and to have everyone kissing your ass sort of your entire life, and just be completely rudderless.

There’s a metaphor she uses where it’s as if all the compasses point north in whatever direction you tell it to point north. Basically you have just no way of knowing how the world functions. And there’s essentially an isolation, a loneliness that happens behind that. So, it was great writing. I took some solace in the reassurance that our president is probably miserable. And I just encourage everyone to read it.

Even if you love Donald Trump, I think you will find it a fascinating character study, because it makes you feel like, oh, there really is a great character there. I just wish he were not running our country.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was. I also read it. It was also just very well-written.

**John:** She’s a terrific writer.

**Craig:** She did a great job. So excellent choice there. My One Cool Thing is a fun game. I want to say it’s on the iPad and iPhone, but I play it on the iPad, of course.

And it’s called Faraway Puzzle Escape, which is a terrible generic name. There’s like a billion puzzle escape/escape room games. They’re mostly horrendous. This one is terrific. It’s beautiful. Faraway is one word, which makes me itch, but fine. It’s very Myst like in its vibe, but much simpler. And it is executive summary I think there are 18 levels. And you are proceeding from the start point to an end point. And each one works the same way. I have to get from here to this gate. I have to stick a thing into the gate. There’s a portal, I move onto the next level.

But the way in which you manage to get that piece and get through the thing involves puzzles that play on all sorts of interesting, very abstract things. And then there’s this bizarre meta game that you can also play once you finish the whole thing by collecting all these notes you found along the way.

It’s very good. It’s really well done. And I found it remarkably diverting. So, I strongly recommend Faraway Puzzle Escape. It is premium, I think the deal is like a bunch of levels are free and then you have to pay, plus there are a bunch of ads running. Or pay the $4. There’s no ads. And you can play all the levels and be cool.

**John:** Pay the $4.

**Craig:** Pay the $4.

**John:** All right. That is our show for this week. As always, our show is produced Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short ones on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We are on Facebook. Just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes there. While you’re there, leave us a review. That is terrific.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, thank you very much for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next week.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Midnight Blue T-Shirt](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-midnight-blue)
* [Portal: No Escape (Live Action Short Film by Dan Trachtenberg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4drucg1A6Xk)
* [This is why you want a writer’s agreement](http://johnaugust.com/2017/this-is-why-you-want-a-writers-agreement)
* [WGA Collaboration Agreement](http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/contracts/collaboration.pdf)
* [Rebecca Solnit: The Loneliness Of
Donald Trump](http://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-the-loneliness-of-donald-trump/)
* [Faraway Puzzle Escape](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/faraway-puzzle-escape/id1202839666?mt=8)
* [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 Rajesh Naroth ([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_303.mp3).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hi, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 302 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we try to figure out how to adapt three stories in the news. Only this time we don’t want to just make a movie. We want to make our parents proud and enemies jealous by bringing home a shiny gold Oscar.

So, we’ll be aiming high with these adaptations.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Plus we’ll be answering–

**Craig:** I mean, I’m always looking for that Oscar. You know, I’ve come so close so many times.

**John:** Time and time again. So, this will be the one that finally does it for Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** After that we’ll be answering a listener question about why the hell the AMPTP can do what it does.

**Craig:** Well. Got a good answer for that. At least we have an answer.

**John:** There’s an answer. One of those rare things where’s actually just an answer.

**Craig:** Concrete answer.

**John:** We have some news and some follow up. So, the WGA deal was ratified by the membership. 99.2% of members approved the deal. That’s a good figure. Very close to 100%.

**Craig:** I want to meet, something like 18 people voted no, I think. I would love to meet them. Just kind of curious.

**John:** Yeah. So, we had promised that there will be an episode with Craig Keyser where we’ll talk through the deal and sort of everything in the landscape of the deal. And so we are still trying to schedule a time for that. So, there’s people traveling, but at some point we will him on to talk through what’s in that deal, what’s not in that deal, and sort of where things are in the process of us and the studios and film and television.

**Craig:** Yeah. And he is coming on. We’re just trying to figure this out between everyone’s vacation and all that.

**John:** Cool. Last month we actually crossed a milestone, but I didn’t notice it because I don’t often check the stats. But Scriptnotes crossed its 10 millionth download.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** In its lifetime, which is just such a huge number.

**Craig:** That’s kind of insane. So, you’re saying that the show has been downloaded ten million times?

**John:** Yes. And that’s only since we moved over to Libsyn. So the earliest 50 or so episodes or even more than that weren’t on Libsyn. So since the point where we’ve had good statistics, it’s been 10 million, which is great. So–

**Craig:** God. I’m losing so much money.

**John:** Well, and things that used to cost us money, like each download used to cost us a lot of money, which is part of why we moved over to Libsyn, and now we don’t have to pay for that. So, that’s great.

**Craig:** Oh, so wait, so if we don’t have to pay for that, then am I finally making money again?

**John:** I think you’re making as much money as anyone is making on this.

**Craig:** D’oh. That’s still zero.

**John:** Sorry. But thank you to all of the people who are our premium subscribers, because you guys are fantastic and you help pay for things like Matthew who edits the show, and Godwin who produces the show, and all the other stuff around it. So, thank you for that. And our transcripts, which are one of our biggest expenses.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is awesome. We do appreciate that very much. So, John, let me ask you this question then. Because I know downloads are a bit like hits in that they’re slightly misleading. How many people – is there a way to know how many people listen to this show?

**John:** That’s actually one of the interesting challenges of podcasting, because it’s kind of a black box. So, podcasting works under a system called RSS. Basically syndicated – it’s an XML file that gets passed around. But basically you’re tracking downloads, but you don’t know a lot more information about that other than just like the file was downloaded and sort of the general things you figure out, like where it was downloaded. But you can’t tell when it was played.

And so right now there’s a movement amongst some of the providers to be able to provide much more granular data so they can sell ads against it. Basically they just want to know where stuff is.

So like Spotify has some premium things where they can tell you exactly who listened and who skipped the commercials and that kind of stuff. Midroll bought Stitcher, or Stitcher bought Midroll. They combined. So there’s changes happening in the podcasting world. And including Apple itself. So we’re not supposed to call it the iTunes Store. You’re supposed to call it Apple Podcasts. So, we ask for people to leave a review on Apple Podcasts now. And there’s talk that there will be some new stuff happening probably around WWDC with how podcasts work for Apple as well.

**Craig:** Well, as long as I continue to get ripped off, I don’t care. I just like to know the tune to which I’m being ripped off.

**John:** You know what else you won’t be making money from is Cotton Bureau sent an email saying that they’re going to print more of our t-shirts. So they’re going to print more of the blue t-shirts. If you are a Scriptnotes listener who does not have one of the softest t-shirts ever made–

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re soft.

**John:** They’re so soft. The blue Scriptnotes t-shirts are back up for sale at Cotton Bureau. So just go to Cotton Bureau and get yourself one of those. They’ll be up until June 8. And that will be the last day you can order one of those.

**Craig:** Those are good shirts. You should get one.

**John:** They’re good shirts.

Some news from WGA. So I got this email and I emailed her to ask if it’s okay to share with other people and she said sure. So, they’re doing a first-time staff writer boot camp for all people who are new staff writers on TV shows. It’s a one-day boot camp, which sounds like a really good idea, sort of talking you through the crash course and how to be a staff writer. What it’s like being in the writers’ room. Best practices. It’s a good idea. So, Saturday June 17, at the WGA. If you are first-time staff writer on a TV show, you can write into tvdigital@wga.org with BOOT CAMP in the subject line. You need to include in the message what the show is and who your showrunner is. Because they really will be confirming that it’s a WGA show and that you are staffed on that show.

**Craig:** Great. That’s an excellent thing. And anyone who is starting out should be grasping for any bit of driftwood in the water that they find. This a particularly good bit of driftwood to cling onto. I suspect that the people that are going to be teaching it will have been there before.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Always a good service. I love that sort of educational effort from the WGA.

**John:** In the spirit of education and correction and making things correct in our podcast, last week I said the seed vault had flooded. It turns out the seed vault has not flooded and the seed vault is actually in much better shape than had previously been reported.

So, there’s been sort of a seepage, but the seeds themselves are fine.

**Craig:** Well it seems like if the seed vault is okay, we ought to get back to the busy work of destroying seeds left and right.

**John:** Absolutely. Because we got it back up there.

**Craig:** There’s nothing to worry about anymore. Let’s go burn some seeds.

**John:** [laughs] Or put them on delicious buns, because you never know what seeds – like poppy seeds are delicious. Let’s try all the seeds and see what you can make out of them. Or like a tahini. Grind up some seeds.

**Craig:** I don’t like tahini.

**John:** I love tahini. The little tahini made into a hummus? Come on, it’s the best.

**Craig:** See, hummus to me is hummus. That’s chickpeas. I’m down. I’m all over that.

**John:** But you can’t make hummus without tahini. Tahini is a crucial ingredient in hummus.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. But it’s like a little bit of it. It’s not all of it.

**John:** Yeah. I get it. Finally, last bit of follow up. It’s also a good segue. Another one of our How Would This Be a Movie is being made into a movie, or at least being optioned as a property. So Universal bought the rights to the New York Times column You May Want to Marry My Husband, written by the late author Amy Krouse Rosenthal. So it was a bidding war between Paramount, Sony, Netflix, Studio 8, and Universal. And so it was Mark Platt, a very seasoned producer at Universal, whose credits include Legally Blonde, and La La Land, and Craig has worked with him. So he is going to be a person shepherding this project into the world. So no writers announced yet, but it looks like there will be a movie version of that story at some point.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? I’m really interested to see how this all works out. You and I both saw the opportunities in that piece, but I think we also recognized that there were real challenges to it. I’m currently developing a movie with Mark. It’s a musical, so it’s totally off the beaten path of this. But he’s a very prolific producer and if anyone can get this one made, I think it would be him for sure.

What is remarkable is how many people went after it. Sometimes I think that there are ideas that are harder to turn into a movie than people realize. But they have a certain immediate grabbiness that makes everybody want them.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And then there’s that flip side movie where there’s nothing shiny or loud about something, but somebody just finds it in a pile and goes, “Oh my god, this is gold.” It’s interesting. I think this is one of those pieces that is going to be much harder to do than you might think. But that’s not to say that it cannot be done. It’s just going to require quite a bit of skill.

**John:** I agree with you. Let’s take a look at three new stories in the news and figure out which ones of those could become a movie. One of these I think has that shiny quality which everyone will chase. The other two maybe not so much, but I think there’s interesting movies to be made out of here.

The three articles we picked this week, the first one is written by Alec MacGillis, who is writing for ProPublica. Was also published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, so everybody read it. This is The Beleaguered Tenants of Kushnerville. So I’ll give you a little bit of a synopsis of this. The story follows these housing developments where there’s 20,000 people living in them in sort of the Baltimore area, but there’s other developments across mostly the eastern seaboard. They were generally owned and managed by different firms. But the firms fell on hard times and this one company started buying them up and started managing them.

And people who lived in these units would often get out of their lease. They’d go on and do different things. The reporter follows some of these people who were then sued by the people who bought out these different apartment complexes. And were sued sometimes for really small amounts of money, but they were just really dogged in sort of going after them.

The apartment complexes themselves, there’s in some cases black mold. There’s bad maintenance. There’s a lot of things you could consider being the bad landlord kind of story. The fascinating twist on this is that the bad landlord, the person behind JK2 trust is…

**Craig:** Jared Kushner. The presidential son-in-law and I believe current architect of a lasting peace in the Middle East.

**John:** Yes. So, a busy person. But this was sort of a fascinating escalation of sort of what could be a very normal sort of situation of class and race and real estate. But this sort of bumps it up a notch. So, Craig, what are you thinking of this as a movie and how would we even get into this as a movie? What kind of movie would you see making out of this story?

**Craig:** Well, we have some real opportunities. We have a wide variety of people, because these apartment complexes are enormous. And inevitably there are going to be some people who move out, do nothing wrong. I mean, there’s a number of instances cited here where people followed the rules but either the paperwork was lost, or a mistake was made when money was moved from one account to another. And then Jared Kushner’s company pursues these people doggedly and tenaciously and ultimately cruelly and unfairly to extract money from them, even going so far as to garnish their wages, which means that essentially a court gets between you and your paycheck, takes that amount of money out that you owe somebody, and then gives you the rest.

So you have lots of different kinds of tenants. That’s exciting. You have single moms. You have black tenants. You have white tenants. You have some tenants who are Trump supporters who then find out that it’s Jared Kushner that’s doing this to them. So good opportunity there.

But it seems to me that the only efficient way in is a way that gives you an efficient way out. That requires some kind of funneling through a character. And if ever a movie were asking for the Erin Brockovich treatment, or the A Civil Action treatment, it’s this one. Somebody has to get a case and then go about that case, even if they’re not a lawyer or a private detective. They’re just somebody who is going to help do one little thing and they start pulling on a thread that begins to unravel this thing and go all the way up to somebody in the White House.

However, because it’s somebody in the White House, we have to kind of either wait for a news resolution to this story, or fictionalize who is actually in charge.

**John:** Yeah. So I agree that there needs to be a center point of focus. With something like Erin Brockovich, it’s an outsider who comes in, because Erin Brockovich is not directly involved with the water stuff until she becomes involved with general case work. I think it’s more fascinating if it’s one of these – if you could sort of take one of the characters who is living at that complex. We have a lot of names of people and they’re all great, but I think it may be a new person that you’re creating who is living there, basically has all the paperwork. They just picked the wrong person and she’s the one who said like, “This is not fair. This is not right. I actually have the paperwork. You cannot do this to me.” And she just keeps challenging them and ultimately uncovers, oh, you know who actually owns this, it is the president’s son-in-law. That feels like the natural way up through that.

And it would be great to have somebody who is inside it so that it doesn’t just feel like this weird way of the outsider comes in and saves everybody. That, to me, feels like the frustrating thing.

The other movie that struck me as being a good way into look at this is The Big Short. Because The Big Short was able to take a bunch of different characters looking at the same situation and see it from their different points of view. And so there’s complicated finance things to explain which some complicated finance people could explain to us, but there’s also all the dealings on the ground and then there’s the dealings in the White House or sort of the bigger legislative issues happening.

**Craig:** It’s a little tough to apply that to this because it doesn’t – this story doesn’t quite have the global impact or the cliffhanger nature of that event. It doesn’t have a major market crash. It doesn’t have mad geniuses pushing their crazy theories against conventional wisdom to be proven wrong and then to be proven right. But, I like your idea of maybe having our savior come from within.

I do always think about relationships. What is the relationship we will care about in a movie like this? And there is something really interesting – the bit that sort of jumped at me was this one guy is a Trump voter and he’s complaining about the state of affairs in this apartment building and how he’s been screwed over and his apartment is neglected. And the company treats him unfairly and everybody unfairly. And he’s told that the landlord is Jared Kushner and he goes, “Oh. Really? Like they don’t have enough money?”

And it’s a fascinating moment. Fascinating in part because these buildings, specifically where these – the Baltimore buildings are in this interesting transitional Exurb – it’s not quite suburb, you know – where you have poor black people and poor white people. A lot of people getting Section 8, which is federal support for housing. And I can see a situation where one tenant starts a crusade and tries to find help among her fellow tenants to essentially fight back.

And she encounters this guy. And they are completely different on paper and yet also if you take away race and politics exactly the same on paper. They have the same class and they have the same place and they have the same power status. And there is a relationship between the two of them. It doesn’t have to be romantic, although why not. But a relationship where the two of them change and become something together.

There is something exciting about watching people without power not only fight the power, but stop fighting each other. I think that sometimes is the most uplifting part of this. So, I think I would probably come at it from there. All that said, probably this is not going to be turned into a movie.

**John:** I would never say never, because there’s certainly a smart way to do it and the right filmmaker could find a way to do it. There’s also potentially – there’s The Wire. There’s the series version of this which could be really fascinating, too. Where you basically are examining this community from different sides. And you’re sort of looking at it from different perspectives. But going back to what is that fundamental relationship is you’re hitting on a key thing, because whether there’s romantic conflict or just straight on conflict, you don’t just want your protagonist going up against this sort of faceless entity or Jared Kushner, who is not going to be a person you’re going to be able to see directly.

You need to have somebody who is right there in his or her life who most of the conversations are going to be going with. So, think of Taraji P. Henson in Hidden Figures. And so she’s clearly your central protagonist character, but she’s surrounded by people who are interesting who are challenging her in interesting ways. So they’re her friends, but there’s also Kevin Costner’s character. There’s the Sheldon character. There’s other people around her who can be foils for her for her next step. And that may be the kind of thing you need to be trying to build out early on in the story figuring out who is it that she’s not going to just talk to, but who is going to challenge her to make it to that next step.

Because it can’t just be like the next judge, the next thing. That’s not going to be interesting.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Erin Brockovich, you have her boss. And even though they’re on the same side, they have to be able to butt heads.

**Craig:** They have to be. And I think that this is a mistake that I encounter constantly in screenplays from new writers. They miss this big part where we really do experience narrative through the lens of relationships. It’s how we’re programmed as humans and it’s certainly how we’re programmed as movie goers and television watchers. We need it.

We don’t really feel – this is something that Lindsay Doran has talked about a number of times, including at Ted. The ends of movies are – what we feel at the end of a movie is not elation at something having had happened. We feel elation with a relationship experiencing joy in something having happened. And so it’s easy to just forget that part and write about somebody fighting the court. And that’s about justice. And that’s about what’s right and what’s wrong. These are moral things. You’d think they’d be enough. They are not. Even remotely enough.

**John:** It’s not emotionally satisfying. That’s why Star Wars doesn’t end with blowing up the Death Star. It ends with everyone being together and getting their medals. Which seems like, oh, you could just cut that scene. But, no, you can’t cut that scene because then it’s not Star Wars. You haven’t paid off the emotional arc of what those characters have gone through. And that’s the kind of thing you’d be finding for this movie is like what have the characters been able to achieve together and what does that look between those central characters at the end of this story? And that’s what you’re trying to build to.

**Craig:** Yeah. You get to this exciting courtroom conclusion and if it’s just legal fireworks, then it’s contextless. It doesn’t matter to us. It’s not within the confines of a relationship. Whereas when Luke blows up the Death Star, he’s doing it because he’s talking to his key relationship and he’s finally getting the lesson. When Tom Cruise lights up Jack Nicholson on the stand in A Few Good Men, we understand that that is the culmination of a character choice to finally stop playing it safe and be more like the man his dad was, which in turn is a response to the challenge he’s received from Demi Moore’s character. It’s all about the relationships. It’s not about the legal stuff. Otherwise, well, okay, yep, you got him there. You know? It’s just not as interesting.

**John:** That’s why this is a fascinating article because of the things it provokes, but you’re basically adding all new characters and all new character dynamics to tell this story. So someone comes to you with this, you can say like, okay, that’s a fascinating backdrop, but almost everything you’re going to be inventing wholesale to find a way to get at these things.

One of the most fascinating questions that the article asks and never really finds a great answer for is why is this firm so doggedly pursuing things that cannot really be profitable for them to pursue. They’ll go after these $5,000 bills and their legal fees are clearly much higher than that to go after them. And so one of the theories is that they do it just basically to intimidate everybody else who is currently in the building from trying to leave or from trying to raise any kind of a fuss because it will just get around that, no, no, they will sue you and they will never stop suing you.

I just finished rereading 1984 and there’s a long section at the end where Winston, your protagonist, is wondering like why are you doing this to me. You’ve already won. Why is it important to you that I completely surrender, because you could just kill me? And that’s actually the point of the end of 1984 is it has to sort of break you of that. And it seems like such a strange drive from the other side. And a movie could hopefully find a meaningful answer for that in the course of the story.

**Craig:** And this is where the story boils my blood, because it’s true. And because essentially this corporation is being punitive and bullying and somewhat sadistically so. And Jared Kushner should be held responsible. And I can only imagine, and this is where journalism can really work wonders, that these poor people – not figuratively poor, literally poor people – who cannot afford lawyers are about to get some. I can’t imagine there aren’t at least a few large firms who are looking at this going pro bono, let’s do this class action.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s just outrageous. And maybe then that could – that might give you the ending you want. But we have like kind of an interesting opposite sort of situation with this next story. And I assume that this is the one you were saying is flashy/blingy for studios. I can only imagine – I mean, this is My Family’s Slave, written by the late Alex Tizon, who is writing for The Atlantic. If this hasn’t been optioned already I would be shocked. Shall I give a little summary?

**John:** Absolutely. And if you’ve listened to any other cultural podcast for the last two weeks, you’ve heard this discussed, because it’s been the focus of a lot of conversation.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a fascinating one. So, Alex Tizon was a Filipino-American and when his parents come from the Philippines they brought along a woman names Lola who Alex’s grandfather had essentially given to his mother as a slave. It’s interesting how long it takes him in his life to realize that she’s a slave. She is always with them. She is their domestic. She is their cook and their nanny and their maid. She doesn’t get paid. She has a little space, but sometimes she just falls asleep in the corner with the laundry. Both of Alex’s parents are fairly abusive to her. The mother, in particular, has a very complicated relationship with her, in which she’s not only abusive but seemingly also jealous of the relationship that Lola has with the children, including Alex.

And eventually after Alex’s parents die, he takes Lola to come live with him, but of course not as a slave, just to give her a place to live and give her freedom and take care of her. And even so, she is not really able to do so and keeps sort of working because that’s the life she knows. And yet there’s this profound sadness with her. She never knows love. She never has sex. She never learns to drive. She never really lives independently whatsoever. And is permanently estranged from her family back home. And eventually she passes away and in a quite beautiful moment Alex brings her ashes back to her village where she is from and gives her back to her family.

But this story does not take place in the 1700s or 1800s. Quite obviously, it takes place in the ‘70s, and ‘80s, and ‘90s.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a fascinating story and unlike the first story which is all abstract, sort of like big picture things, this is nothing but characters. It’s all characters here. And so I think the reason why this is such catnip is because it’s a way of exploring our relationships with the people who work with us, work for us, and the sense of what is slavery. What does it mean to have somebody be working for you but not being paid? It’s all so relevant and the characters are so interesting and compelling.

The most fundamental question though is when do you start. When do you start telling this story? Because do you start telling the story when Lola is essentially given to the mother, so she’s 12 years old. Do you start the story then, back in the Philippines, and you sort of meet the crazy grandfather who is abusive, who beats Lola for something that the mother does? Or do you start it later on? Do you start it in the US with this kid who has this nanny he loves and eventually starts to realize, oh wait, she actually is not getting paid – this is sort of the family secret.

It’s a fundamentally different movie based on when you start it. Do you start it with Alex being in the story, or do you start it back in the Philippines and come to the US?

**Craig:** It’s a real challenge. This is the perfect example of a very shiny property that will pose an enormous amount of problems as you try and turn it into a movie. And, again, my question – it’s always my first question – what’s the relationship that we care about?

It seems here that the greatest potential of a lasting relationship that we can care about and find joy in is the relationship between Lola and Alex. She is his slave, too, even though he’s a child. And then later an adult. But she loves him clearly. And he loves her, clearly. And, in fact, a lot of the dissatisfaction and conflict he has with his own mother is because she mistreats Lola and because frankly he loves Lola more than he loves his own mother. There’s stuff there.

Now, this is a minefield because we have seen this movie before. We have seen the kind of movie where someone finally realizes that they have been taking advantage of and oppressing another person whom they love. And so they set them free, thus becoming the hero of the story when really they’re not. They’re just kind of correcting something that’s horribly wrong. And we’re meant to experience their kind of enlightenment as a positive, but ultimately for the slave there is really no happy ending.

So we’ve seen that. It’s a challenge to avoid that narrative here because there is no great change for Lola. There is really only the sadness of an unfulfilled broken life.

**John:** Yeah. One of the real challenges here, in the bad version of the story Lola is nothing but an object. She’s just something who is looked at but never sort of explored internally. And I think that is the real danger here is that you’re not getting inside what her drives are. Because they’re actually complicated. And Tizon does single out some moments where she kind of can’t leave, she doesn’t want to leave. She loves the kids. But she also wants to go back. She realizes that she has not ability to sort of function here and she’s scared what’s going to happen if she rocks the boat at all.

I wonder if the fundamental relationship is essentially a love triangle. It’s a love triangle between Alex, his mom, and Lola. And the very complicated thing between the three of them, because Alex loves his mom and he loves Lola, but it’s very hard to fit all that together. Like the mother is horrible to Lola and yet also needs Lola. And Lola needs to be needed. It’s messed up in really fascinating ways. To me, that feels like the crux of all this is the pull between these three people.

I mean, usually as an audience, we would probably sit with Alex because it’s the most comfortable place to come into the story. But I wouldn’t want to limit the POV to only Alex’s point of view because then I think we’re not going to really understand what the mother is going through and what Lola is going through.

Because if you look at the story from the mother’s point of view, she’s like look how hard I had it here. I came to the US. We had nothing. I worked three jobs. If I didn’t have this nanny, how would I do this? How would I provide for my family? She’s panicked at every moment. She wants the best for her kids. And Lola’s health and happiness can’t be anywhere on her priorities. I think it’s a fascinating story to look at where you have some sympathy for where the mother is.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then you don’t, because–

**John:** Then you don’t, yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, ultimately she didn’t have to be cruel. And the problem with the relationships there is that ultimately the stakes of those relationships which come down to “am I loved, who do I love, is it wrong to love you, is it wrong to not love you” all pare in comparison to the stakes of “I’m a slave.” It’s hard for me to–

**John:** Okay, and here’s the thing. You don’t want to slide into moral relativism or to – we could also post links to some good threads on people’s criticisms of the piece and support of the piece talking about sort of you don’t want to justify it based on like, oh, this is actually common in Filipino culture or like you’re misunderstanding what some of these things are. But I think there’s a universal aspect to this which I definitely felt where a person in Los Angeles who has a Latina nanny, like that is a complicated relationship. That person is being paid. But is that person living their best life? Are they living the dream that they had hoped to live? Well, they’re certainly in a better position than Lola, but it’s still complicated.

**Craig:** It is. Yes.

**John:** Here’s another complication. Imagine Lola was a relative. Imagine Lola was a niece or a spinster aunt who was basically in the same situation. Well, is that slavery? Well, technically I guess it sort of is. But that’s actually much more commonly accepted. Like a relative you are not paying. That’s sort of natural. It’s almost in a weird way that she was shanghaied into being part of this family with no choice of escaping.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there is a genre where people explore the nanny relationship. It goes way back. Mary Poppins was a nanny. And then in The Help you had a nanny. And in the modern phenomenon of the Latina nanny in Los Angeles and the Jamaican nanny in New York. But they’re paid. That is a job. And you can talk about the nuances of class and love and race, but at the very least there is a basic dignity that they are paid and they are free to leave.

This girl is not even sold. She’s just given. She’s just taken and given and separated from her family. Not allowed to go back. She’s never taught to read. They deprive her of an education. It is hard to look past the fact that she is essentially imprisoned and indentured and is owned. And has no free will. And that, to me, trumps all of the other possible concerns. And it’s very heartbreaking. The saddest thing in the world is an animal that is so used to being in a cage that when you open the cage door it doesn’t even understand that it can walk out.

And when you see that in a human being, and you see that, people have spent a long time in prison. Notoriously have really hard times when they leave because the freedom is overwhelming to them. Well, she’s never even – she can’t even have the freedom when she gets the freedom, because she has been essentially – she’s been broken. And it’s hard for me to look past any of that. It overwhelms everything.

This will require a very, very deft touch. And, I do think whoever writes this should be familiar with this culture, because I think nuance is going to be really important here. And this is a very interesting take on slavery. We have a lot of experience with culture investigating slavery in the United States. But we had a very specific slavery of African people. This is a different kind of slavery. And it’s a different kind of culture. It would take a deft hand and a very knowledgeable hand.

**John:** Agreed. I think one of the crucial choices to make sort of going back to, you know, when do you start the story. If you came into the story not knowing that she was essentially indentured at 12 years old things change a lot. If you believe that she actually came into this at 18 or at 20, that it was a choice, and like that things didn’t go well, it definitely shifts how you perceive this story. So, if you start the story when she’s 12, I’m going to have a very hard time ever becoming sympathetic to the mother.

Unless, and this is again very tricky, but the mother is a child as well. And if the mother as a child just cannot fundamentally understand that this girl is being forced here against her will, then maybe you’ve got something. But it’s really tough.

**Craig:** I mean, there is a version of this with a slightly amended ending where you don’t talk about the fact that this woman is a slave at the front. She is the beloved nanny. The son is older now. The mother dies. And the nanny doesn’t know what to do. And the son realizes that she’s not really leaving him. And he’s not sure what the deal is there. And he starts to try and give her some life that she didn’t have before because of the mother. And he decides, you know what, you’re pretty old. Let’s take you back to the Philippines. Why didn’t you ever go back?

And she makes excuses. They go back. And they have a journey to this very remote village where she’s from. And along the way the ultimate discovery is you weren’t my nanny. You were a slave. The truth emerges. And then in the end she does die.

There is a version there which is a version of discovery.

**John:** Honestly, from the article’s point of view, I found the trip back to the Philippines to be the least interesting part. When I reread it, I ended up just skimming them because that wasn’t–

**Craig:** She wasn’t there. That’s what I’m saying. If she were with him.

**John:** She was just a box of ashes.

**Craig:** Yeah. If she were with him, I think that could actually be sort of interesting because here’s somebody who is uncovering what he thinks is a trip where he’s going to uncover his “past” because he’s going back to the place where his people are from. But really the past he’s uncovering is his recent past. That’s interesting.

**John:** To me, the most fascinating and sort of cinematic moments for me though are when Alex is I think 12 or 14 and a friend is coming over. And the friend starts asking questions about who is this woman. And he gets caught in the lie where like, oh, she’s a relative. No, you said she was your grandmother. And basically like it’s almost like The Americans where you’re caught up in these lies and you can’t risk it being exposed because if it did get exposed, because Lola doesn’t have documentation, like the whole family could get shipped back to the Philippines. So that pressure on a 14-year-old kid who both loves his mother and loves Lola, that’s a really fascinating moment.

And in a certain way if you didn’t move forward in time but just let it be about that, that’s a really fascinating meaty bit of drama right there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is. I don’t know. It’s a tough one because we know. So we’re watching this and we feel bad. And then those people leave and we still feel bad. I’m looking for that engine to figure out how to make this story work. I mean, that’s why I’m going, “Is it a road trip?” I’m looking for something that is an engine here, because the other way to go is to go completely unconventional and do a magical realism take on this where we’re with Lola and she’s a slave and this is her life. But then she has this other life she leads in her head, which is the what-if. It’s really about what is the point you’re trying to make here and what is the thing you want to unlock for people. And the feeling you want to leave them with.

And you sort of make your decision there and work backwards, I guess.

**John:** Another choice you’re going to have to make early on is at what point are people going to start speaking English, because you feel like they’re not speaking English inside the house, but then that’s a lot of subtitles to read. So, figuring out how you’re going to make that split is really fascinating, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would think that you would stay pretty much in English. It’s accented English. I mean, you have a little help there in that the kids are American. So, even though they probably speak Tagalog, the parents and Lola will speak them in English, but then you can certainly hear – it would be interesting to hear the two of them fighting in Tagalog and not have subtitles and you just know it’s not good.

**John:** Yeah. All right, our last story is nothing like the other stuff, so it’s a completely different kind of story. This is The Mystery of the Wasting House-Cats. So this is a story in the New York Times by Emily Anthes and it tracks the outbreak of a really rare feline condition that they started noticing in the ‘70s which is hyperthyroidism. And basically cats don’t get hyperthyroidism where your – well, you should explain what it is because you’re the medical person. But essentially a gland in your brain pumps out way too much, is it insulin? What does it do?

**Craig:** Well, the thyroid pumps out growth hormone in part.

**John:** And so in humans when humans have hyperthyroidism they lose weight, they become incredibly hungry. It’s a thing you don’t see in cats. But then they started seeing it in the 1970s in cats. And so it starts to look at like, well, why would that happen. And scientists looked back at the previous autopsies of cats. It didn’t happen before then. So something new is happening, so they need to investigate why. And so it becomes a medical investigation story of like why are these cats getting it. What has changed? And the leading culprit is a flame-retardant which has been put into cushions for upholstery and other things. It’s meant to be there to protect us, but it’s getting into the cats and the cats are doing poorly for it.

And the real question is at what point does this become a human problem as well? Are these things we’re putting out there going to hurt us as well. So, it’s a detective story. It’s a little bit of an investigation. There’s a lot of cats, so you got to kind of like cats to like this movie.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But to me this struck me as it could be Erin Brockovich again where you’re going after the bad chemical makers. There’s something really interesting about this. It’s not Outbreak. It’s not one of those sort of disease movies. But there’s something fascinating about this. Craig, did you like anything of this?

**Craig:** No. By the way, I want to clarify it’s not really growth hormone. The answer is thyroids put out thyroid hormone, but I was like that’s not a really good answer. They’re mostly about controlling the metabolic rate. Which is why people who are hyperthyroidic, you know, get skinny and sometimes their eyes get a little buggy.

Yeah, the problem here is that the cats aren’t dying. So, when we see an epidemic where a lot of animals are suddenly dying like the collapse of the bee colonies, we’re like, “Oh no.” They’re not dying. There’s actually a pretty reasonable way to treat this. And it does seem like the cause here, the environmental cause, has been determined – PBDEs. And it’s not like the movie can really come up with a better solution than what we’ve already come up with which is to stop using those, because we have. So, those – I mean, they’re out there still because they’re sort of grandfathered into a lot of materials, but we don’t make them anymore.

And, first of all, cats will chew on things that humans don’t. So, we’re not necessarily chewing on our sofa cushions. It does not appear that there is a spike in hyperthyroidism among adults, or hypothyroidism for that matter among adults. So, it doesn’t really seem like there’s a problem for us, so mostly just seems like if you’re a super cat person, but no one is going to go to a theater and watch this. I can’t imagine.

**John:** There’s anecdotes in here that I really liked. In the 1950s in Minamata, Japan, all the cats seemed to go mad at once. And this seems kind of amazing. So they began to stagger, stumble, and convulse, limbs flailing in every direction. They hurled themselves at stone walls and drowned themselves in the sea. That’s cinematic. That’s crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Cool.

**John:** And so that’s terrifying. And then it started happening to the children. And, oh, that’s horrible. Now you’ve got a movie. At first you’ve got sort of like an “oh, that’s curious,” and once the kids start dying then you’ve got a real problem.

So it turned out to be that one of the local chemical plants was dumping stuff into the sea. The fish were eating the chemicals. The people were eating the fish. The cats were eating the fish. And that’s what happened. So, classically that’s a canary in the coal mine. That’s why often environmental impacts will be seen first in animals, and therefore you’re watching those to extrapolate out from there to other places.

And so in a movie where you saw cats or some other animals like suddenly perish, there will be that instinct of like, oh, isn’t that so interesting that that’s happening. But as an omen for things that are going to happen next, that can be a great way into the bigger problem that’s about to happen.

So, again, I’d love to pitch what the Oscar version of this is. And I’m now sort of regretting putting it on the outline, because I can’t see what that Oscar version is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But in terms of the horror movie start, that’s the great horror movie start. The cats acting insane is a great horror movie start because then the people start acting insane and you get a good foreshadowing of what’s to come. That’s always delightful.

**Craig:** Always delightful. Yeah. And we do see in movies like Contagion and the Hot Zone, and what was it, not Contact, but–

**John:** Outbreak.

**Craig:** Outbreak. There is almost always a scene where an animal goes bananas. And in the case of the one cited in this article is methyl, not ethyl, methyl mercury into the bay. Because the anti-vaccine people love to think that methyl mercury and ethyl mercury are the same thing. They’re not, dopes.

So, yeah, that’s super bad. And there are definitely things, I mean, we have at times realized that we are in trouble because of the way animals were acting. But, of course, animals aren’t people and they will do things that people don’t do, like eat feces. That’s one of the big ones. We generally don’t. [laughs]

**John:** But if you saw people doing that in a movie, you would know something is wrong.

**Craig:** Or something was right, like in Pink Flamingos, the great Divine rest in peace. So, yeah, I mean, maybe there’s a crazy black comedy to be done like this.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** There was a movie out of New Zealand I think where the sheep went nuts.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Like a horror movie. Which is kind of fun. You know. And so the idea of cats going crazy is kind of fun. So it’s a black comedy or sort of like a horror-comedy. But there’s no Oscar potential here for the cats. They’re just going to get better after some mild treatment. [laughs]

**John:** There will be a Pixar version of it where the cats notice the humans are going crazy, and the cats have to band together to save the humans. The humans are the canaries in the coal mine and the cats realize there’s a problem coming.

**Craig:** Right. Like the cats suddenly realize that Donald Trump is the President of the United States.

**John:** No, no, we’ve got to stop him.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not good. Something has gone terribly wrong here.

**John:** The new Cat Constitution. We could stop trying to save it. I regret putting it in here.

**Craig:** No, you should never regret. Never regret. Ever.

**John:** No regrets. That’s the thing I’ve learned about 2017 is no regrets ever.

**Craig:** No regrets.

**John:** Predictions. Will any of these things become movies?

**Craig:** Yes. I think My Family’s Slave is going to become something. It may be a Netflix kind of television-only piece. But if you attract the right filmmaker, the right actor, and you really kind of nail a specific and enlightening angle on a story to kind of honor what’s unique about it and not jam it into the same old story that we’ve seen where the slave owner is finally enlightened by the slave, then yeah, I think that one. Certainly someone is going to buy it, if they haven’t already. That’s unquestionable.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s a slam dunk. And I think Kushnerville, something like that could happen. I don’t know if it’s necessarily based around this article, but I think the idea of doing something about those housing projects is fascinating, but the hook of having Kushner be the guy behind it is also just great. So, I don’t know that it’s a big screen feature thing, but I could see a premium cable movie coming out of this. There’s something that it’s political, and targeted, and smart.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I could see something happening with that, but I don’t think there’s going to be a cat movie. At least not a cat movie based on this article.

**Craig:** [laughs] No, there is not going to be a cat movie. I think that there is a good story to be told. Someone should start working on this. Or, hey, just hire me. There’s a good story to be told about two people falling in love and one of them is – and it doesn’t matter which gender is which. It doesn’t even matter if they’re homosexual or heterosexual. All that matters is that one party is lower class and black, and one party is lower class and white. And you’re watching the two sides of that coin and the interesting thing that has happened in this country where they have been seemingly pitted against each other, coming together and actually falling in love I think would be spectacular. Because that’s the crazy thing.

I mean, I think we discussed that sketch on Saturday Night Live this year where Tom Hanks was on Black Jeopardy.

**John:** Oh yeah. Absolutely. That’s a great sketch.

**Craig:** And it kind of cuts right to it. Which is the experiences of our life are actually so much closer together than the experiences of say people like Jared Kushner, who don’t want to talk to either one of us, and don’t live like either one of us, and don’t respect either one of us. There’s something there. There’s a really good story to be told there. And this is an interesting – it’s certainly a way in. I don’t know if it’s the way in.

**John:** I agree.

All right, let’s get to our big feature question of the episode. This is from Nick in Los Angeles. And we have audio. So let’s take a listen.

Nick: This is a question that occurred to me during the last round of WGA negotiations with the AMPTP. And that is basically why is the AMPTP allowed to exist? Why are all the studios and networks allowed to get together and decide collectively what they’re willing to pay writers and directors and actors, even though they’re all separately owned companies, when that is not allowed to happen in other industries? Like, for example, Ford and GM and Chrysler can’t put all their CEOs in a room and say, “Okay, this is what we’re going to pay United Auto Workers Union next time there’s a negotiation. And if they want more than that, too bad. We’re all united on this.”

That’s an illegal trust and it can’t happen. So, I wonder why it’s allowed to happen in the case of the studios, even though it seems like it’s the same situation. They’re separately owned companies in the same industry that are basically colluding on what they’re going to offer their employees. So there must be a legal distinction there, but I don’t know what it is and I would like to understand. Thanks.

**Craig:** Well the AMPTP is considered a trade organization. And so this is a – it’s not just a phrase. It’s a term of law when it comes to collective bargaining. Specifically they are a multi-employer bargaining unit. And federal labor law, as has been interpreted by case law over time, because every part of the national labor relations act has been litigated up and down the line. The companies are allowed to form a multi-employer bargaining unit to negotiate with a common pool of employees. And it doesn’t always make sense, but a lot of times it does. For instance, in sports it makes complete sense.

So, if you’re Aaron Judge, you play for the Yankees. You are an employee of the Yankees. You’re not an employee of Major League Baseball. You’re an employee of the Yankees. But you are part of a bargaining unit, the Major League Baseball Player Association, that does not bargain with the Yankees. It bargains with the Major League baseball team’ multi-employer bargaining unit.

Similarly in Hollywood, we do the same thing. Nick says the CEOs of Ford, GM, and Chrysler can’t negotiate with the UAW as a group. I think they could, actually. They choose not to, and it makes sense in part because while the auto industry was once very, very centralized, it is no longer so. Hollywood is unique in this sense. It’s pretty centralized. There is this very specific walled-off pool of talent, just as there is in professional sports, which is the only real analogy I think to – or cognate to what we have.

Frankly, it probably wasn’t smart for the auto companies to not form a multi-employer bargaining unit way back at the height of the UAW’s power. But, yeah, long story short, they’re allowed to do it and they can do it. And for our situation here, it is not going to change any time soon.

**John:** It’s worth noting that I think nothing precludes – this is doing the 2007/2008 strike, there were discussion where the WGA was going to start negotiating with some of the members separately to do deals. And that’s a thing that could still happen. But I would like to remind Nick and other writers that it’s actually useful for the WGA to negotiate with all of the people at once, because if we had to make a separate deal with Paramount and a separate deal with Disney and a separate deal with Fox, it would be a mess. Because your terms would change based on who was employing you and that would be really bad really quickly.

Unlike the auto worker who is working for Ford and is working for Ford for 30 years, we are working for different people all the time. And it’s very useful to have common terms across all these different things. And so this is the fantasy of like, oh, we could pit them against each other. In real life, it would probably not work out very well for us.

**Craig:** Yeah. They don’t seem interested in being pitted against each other. They have chosen to band together in this multi-employer bargaining unit. And, look, it’s not just the big companies. The big companies are the ones that run the negotiations on behalf of the AMPTP. Well, I mean, the staff of the AMPTP runs the negotiations, but the big companies are the ones in the room with Carol Lombardini who is their chief negotiator.

But, the AMPTP is negotiating that deal on behalf of hundreds of companies. Every small company that wants to hire WGA writers has to become signatory to the contract. They essentially become members of the AMPTP. And it makes complete sense because why wouldn’t they? If they just agree to sign on board with the AMPTP, they get to have that contract. People who say, well why don’t we negotiate those people separately and get a better contract, the answer is because they don’t have to. Because they’ll just take that one. They can with the stroke of a pen. And so it goes.

**John:** There’s always going to be a discussion of like, oh, should we make a separate deal with Amazon or Netflix or some other brand new player who actually has a lot of money and is doing something different. That will always come up. I don’t know that it’s ever going to happen. But that does come up.

And the WGA does have different deals in certain cases because it’s a very different kind of company. So the WGA also negotiates on behalf of some TV news writers. It’s a completely different kind of thing. And those are done in a different way.

**Craig:** Yeah. And really specific, because for instance the WGA West represents news writers employed by KCBS. That’s it, as far as I know. Oh, and also 1010 WINS News Radio, I believe. So, they don’t even represent the whole business there, so that is an employer-specific negotiation.

Netflix and Amazon have agreed to just basically tack themselves onto the AMPTP. Smart business. I think they’re well aware that the only possible thing that could end up happening if they negotiate with us separately is them having to pay us more. Because we’re never going to take less than what the AMPTP gives us, so what’s the point? It just sort of resolves itself. That is kind of the deal and, yeah, it’s going to stay the deal.

**John:** It will stay the deal. It’s time for One Cool Things. Craig, what do you got?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a bit of a sad thing, but also a very lovely thing. My grandmother-in-law, my children’s great grandmother-in-law, my wife’s grandmother, Millie Hendrick, passed away this past weekend. She was 98 years old. She was a spectacular lady. It was fun to know her for as long as I did. She was born in 1918.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** You know, just imagine all the things you saw. Yeah, first six years, you don’t remember any of that. So let’s spot her at 1925 to make it a nice even number of when she starts realizing what’s going on. She’s there when the stock market crashes. She’s there during the depression. She’s there during WWII. She’s there during the Eisenhower era. She’s there during Korea. She’s there during Vietnam. She sees all of it. And then the computer comes.

Just think of the way the telephones changed. She was there when TV showed up. And there she was at the end just being her cool self. Fantastic lady. Lived a great life. Really active in the Peace Corps. And she loved bird-watching. My wife loves bird-watching. Bird-watching is one of those things where it’s like–

**John:** I just can’t.

**Craig:** What is that? [laughs] What possible joy are people – and yet they, oh my god, do bird watchers love bird watching.

**John:** I have to say, Craig, the way you feel about bird-watching is how I feel about most sports. I could totally understand some people find joy in this, but I just can’t find joy in this.

**Craig:** I mean, you can at least acknowledge that in sports there is an outcome. Right?

**John:** That’s true. There’s a mystery. Yes.

**Craig:** In bird-watching, they’re just watching birds. Anyway, she loved bird-watching. She was a terrific person and it was an honor to know her. And, you know, when someone dies at the age of 98, you can’t really be sad. I mean, you can be mournful.

**John:** Celebrate that they lived 98 years. That’s great.

**Craig:** What a run. What a run. So my One Cool Thing this week, Millie Hendrick.

**John:** Very nice. My One Cool Thing is a song and video called Dear Mr. Darcy. It is done Esther Longhurst and Jessica Messenger. It’s an open letter addressed to Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. It is just terrific. I just loved it. It reminded me of my favorite things about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Another Period, Hamilton. It was sort of like Empire with empire waist lines. It was delightfully perfectly done little short thing. So it’s just a little delicious treat to enjoy if you like Jane Austen things, which I suspect many people on this podcast do like.

So, I will use this as the outro for tonight’s episode so that people can enjoy a little bit of this song. And that’s our show for this week. So our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions like Nick’s today.

People ask us do you have a voicemail line for when people leave those messages like Nick’s. No, just attach you asking your question to the email and then we might use it. So, that’s a way to do it. You can just record it on your phone or however you want to do it.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts as Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a review, because that helps people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode, including links to all these articles we talked about, including additional things about My Family’s Slave, at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts in about four days.

And all the back episodes of the show are found at Scriptnotes.net. We have 300 episodes back there, plus bonus episodes with cool other people. So thanks.

**Craig:** Thanks John. See you next time.

**John:** Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Midnight Blue T-Shirt](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-midnight-blue)
* [The Seed Vault is Fine](http://www.popsci.com/seed-vault-flooding?src=SOC&dom=tw)
* [You May Want to Marry My Husband](http://variety.com/2017/film/news/universal-you-may-want-to-marry-my-husband-movie-1202429914/)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 293: [Underground Railroad of Love](http://johnaugust.com/2017/underground-railroad-of-love)
* [The Beleaguered Tenants of ‘Kushnerville’](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-beleaguered-tenants-of-kushnerville)
* [My Family’s Slave](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490/)
* [The Mystery of the Wasting House-Cats](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/magazine/the-mystery-of-the-wasting-house-cats.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&_r=0)
* [Dear Mr Darcy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekVdhO7P4Nw)
* [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 Esther Longhurst and Jessica Messenger ([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_302.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 301 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’re looking at The Addams Family, not just the 1991 film and its sequel, but the property itself, to see what lessons we can learn when adapting for the big screen. I think this is the first episode that’s based on a previous One Cool Thing. Because your One Cool Thing a couple weeks ago was The Addams Family pinball game. And look at us now. We’re talking about the entire franchise.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, you know, here I am, I’m playing the Addams Family pinball game, and it has all these wonderful recorded lines from the movie and then some new ones that they recorded for the game. And it just made me, well, nostalgic for The Addams Family. You know, sometimes you go back and you watch these movies that you loved and you’re a different person now and you just don’t love them anymore. Well, I am a different person than I was when the Addams Family movie, the first one came out, in 1991. I mean, that’s, my god, 26 years ago.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I love it even more now. I think as a screenwriter I have so much more appreciation for how good of a job they did at a task that has ruined many, many a filmmaker, namely adapting a television show that a studio is probably saying do because people know the title. And turning it into something of quality. And that’s what happened there. It’s just a terrific film. So, it’s going to be fun to talk about that and the sequel as well today.

**John:** Absolutely. So, a bit of follow up before we get into that. A couple episodes ago, god, maybe 10 episodes ago we talked about the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide, or as Craig wanted to call it the ScriptDecks.

**Craig:** ScriptDecks.

**John:** Which was a catalog of all the back episodes where we asked our listeners to go through and single out the episodes that they thought people should definitely catch. Because we get new listeners every week and they are joining us at episode 301. And they’re like, well, which of the 300 previous episodes should I actually listen to, because it would be an entire life if you wanted to dedicate yourself to all the previous episodes, which some people have done.

So, people have been filing in these reviews of previous episodes and talking about why they were so important to them. And so that is now ready almost for consumption. So, Dustin Box has done a heroic job in putting it together. It’s about a 100-page booklet.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Of the episodes that people singled out with their reviews and what’s in there and the summaries. So, we talked about printing it. It’s not going to make sense to print it. But we’re going to release it as a PDF for folks. And so it’s in pretty good shape. The thing is the most recent episodes have no reviews at all because they’re so new. So if you are a person who has listened to the last 20 or so Scriptnotes and you want to single out any of those, I really need some more reviews of those because it just sort of stops at 280 right now.

So, if you can go to johnaugust.com/guide, and if there’s any episodes in that last batch that you want to single out for why people should listen to them, please do. And I think we’re only a couple weeks away from being able to share it with the world.

**Craig:** And what will it cost, John?

**John:** The plan is for it to be free.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Look at you.

**John:** So the theory is like it’s free, but if you want to listen to all those back episodes they’re of course available at Scriptnotes.net, which is $2 a month, and so you can go through and listen to all those back episodes. And we will be making more of the USB drives. They are actually extra cool USB drives. We think we’re going to be able to make the ones that I want. They will survive any catastrophe that happens in the world, I think. So, they are definitely a time capsule of the first 300 episodes.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, we want to make sure that after the apocalypse those episodes are still available. It’s a bit like the seed bank. Do you know about the seed bank?

**John:** I know about the seed bank. But you also know that the seed bank flooded because of the permafrost melting?

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** That happened like just today.

**Craig:** It happened today? We lost our seed bank?

**John:** We haven’t lost it, but it has been damaged by the flooding permafrost, because they deliberately built it in an arctic location that was safe and cold. It is no longer safe and cold.

**Craig:** I like that the thing that we were using to hedge against the apocalypse was damaged by the encroaching apocalypse.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We could do better. I mean, the seed bank should be a little more protected than that.

**John:** So, I mean, I don’t want to go too deep into the Alanis Morissette discussion, but is that ironic? Is it ironic that–?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, so it’s tragic. But how could that seed bank thing be ironic in the classic definition of irony?

**Craig:** Um, it would be ironic if – here’s how. The world ends because seeds become incredibly aggressive and literally tear apart buildings and everything. So, the end of the world that the seed bank was preparing for was brought about by an overabundance of seeds.

**John:** OK. But couldn’t you say that deliberately placing it in – picking the location that was safe and arctic ended up becoming its undoing, that’s ironic. Is it not?

**Craig:** Just feels like bad planning.

**John:** Yeah, perhaps.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like it’s not ironic to say that I put my – you know what happened, I put my documents for my fire insurance in the fireplace. That’s not ironic. That’s just dumb. And then the fire destroyed them. You know, that’s just dumb.

**John:** I was listening to a podcast today. I was listening to Trumpcast. And the interviewer used Begs the Question completely appropriately.

**Craig:** Oh yay.

**John:** It was just such a delight. I got this little tingle of joy.

**Craig:** It’s like when Haley’s Comet swings around every seven or eight decades. It’s nice to hear it when it happens. You sit up. You applaud. There’s still hope, John. There’s still hope.

**John:** There is still hope.

Let’s get to some questions. So Doug in LA wrote in with a question. “What does it mean when you say a scene is working? Is a ‘working’ scene the minimum viable shootable version of a scene? Is a script full of ‘working’ scenes in a great script? Or is the working scene like pornography – difficult to define, but easy to identify?”

**Craig:** Oh, well that’s an interesting question. I mean, the truth of the matter is when we talk about these terms of art, it probably means different things to different people. For me, it’s definitely not – I can at least rule out one of these. It is not the minimum viable shootable version of a scene.

When I say a scene is working, what I mean to say is that whatever the intention of that scene was, it is coming across clearly. It is interesting to me. And the craft of the scene unfolds in such a way that everything feels harmonious and dramatic and interesting or funny. Whatever the ultimate entertainment intent of that scene was, it is happening in a very satisfying way.

**John:** I completely agree. I would also add to it that there’s a time-based element to this. So, you could say a scene is working when it’s on the page. You could say a scene is working or not working when it is in front of the camera and the actors are trying to do it. You see that it’s just not working. And you have to figure out what’s happening there or not happening there properly.

You also ask is this scene working when you’re in the edit room. And you’re looking at there like this scene is not working. And so sometimes the writing really was the issue. But sometimes something else is the issue. And so you’re going through and trying to figure out how do we get this scene to work because it is simply not doing the job it is supposed to be doing in this moment. It is not living up to the narrative potential or to the tone potential of what that scene is supposed to be doing.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And it is probably the case that we use this term most frequently when we are in the editing room, because that is the ultimate test of the scene. There is a scene on paper that ideally when you arrive you feel like this is a good basis of a working scene. Now let us go make a scene. But when you are in the editing room, it is very common to look at something and go, “It’s just not working. I’m feeling a little bored. I’m feeling a little confused. Maybe it’s too long. Maybe it’s too short. Maybe there’s one of those intangible things. I know I’m supposed to feel something at this moment, but I don’t.”

So, it’s not working.

**John:** The moment of panic is when a scene is not working and you’re on the set. So, you may have gone through blocking with the actors and they’re trying to do it and they’re like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. This isn’t working for me. I don’t understand what’s going on.” And that can be a moment where as a writer you’re like the scene works, I know it fundamentally works, and yet you’re not able to make the scene work. And so therefore I’m going to have to have this conversation to try to figure out what it is that is not working for you and the director, of course, and try to find a way to make sure it works for everybody. Because if an actor has no idea what the scene is supposed to be doing, or cannot find his or her way into the scene, it’s unlikely – not impossible – that you’re going to be able to find that later on.

So, those are the moments I dread is when you maybe shot one, or you’re about to start shooting, and like they just don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. And those are the moments where the floor just falls out of your heart.

**Craig:** Yeah. That happens. Similarly, you will find yourself in situations where everybody seems to understand what they’re doing. And it’s all going according to plan. And you’re watching it and thinking, “It’s not working. There’s just something amiss here.”

And in those moments, I think this is where experience really comes into play. They talk about this in sports all the time. I mean, you have two teams that make it to a championship game. A Super Bowl. The World Series. And so therefore they’re all not only professional athletes, but they’re at the top of their game. They are the best of the athletes in that league. But one team has been to the big show before. They’ve played in the World Series before. They’ve played in a Super Bowl before. And very typically people will say they have an edge because they have a certain experience.

And you think, well, it’s a game. The rules aren’t any different. There is this comfort that you get from having been there before. The longer you do this job, and the more times you arrive at a place where something isn’t working, first of all the impulse to deny that it’s not working, it’s not there. Because you’ve already felt the sting and the consequence of that denial in the past. So, there’s no struggle against that. You immediately accept that it is true. But you also remember that you were able to fix things. And if you take a breath, take a moment, think about what it was that this scene was supposed to do, and look with dispassionate scrutiny upon what the scene is currently doing, a lot of times with just 30 minutes or 40 minutes you can cook up something new.

And production is used to this. You will get to a place where you’re not quite sure – it’s clearly not right. I remember Todd Phillips and I, we were – it was I think the third Hangover movie. There was a scene where the guys were in a car. And Todd was really adamant about not shooting car scenes the way most car scenes are shot today, which is on a soundstage against green screen. He really liked the old school style of processed cars where you’re towing a car and shooting it for real.

And so it’s a very involved bit of production work, because you can only go so far in that car. You have to turn around, go back. So, takes take a long time. And the scene just wasn’t working. So, we sort of hit the red button, stopped. Said, “Let’s just shoot something else today.” And then we took a day to figure out what it was and come up with something else. And we did. And then we did that and it worked great.

That is something that I think experience teaches you about non-working scenes, because I think a lot of people, particularly early directors, first-time directors, and early screenwriters are hearing people say, “We’re here and we spent all this money. We got to make this work.” And so you just go, OK, I’ll do my best. It’s not working though.

**John:** You and I don’t have experience working on traditional sitcoms where they have a process where over the course of the week they’re writing and then they have a table read and they have blocking. And so they’re working on the script as they go through it. And in that process, at the table read, or while they’re first trying to stage things, they could say like, OK, that’s not working. They can see it in front of their eyes. Like, OK, that’s not working. And it’s built into their process. Like, the things that aren’t working, we’re going to fix them. And by the time we’re doing the real taping, we will get it worked out.

And so it’s a luxury we don’t often have in features, because generally a scene is in front of the cameras, that’s the only time you’re going to shoot that scene unless something crazy happens or unless you are in a movie where you have the luxury of being able to shoot things multiple times. I would just say like if something is not working it’s not a sign that everything is doom and gloom. It may just be part of the process. And it can be a really terrifying part of the process in a feature. And it’s probably less terrifying in the television medium where it’s expected that you’re going to keep working on things.

**Craig:** There’s no question. This is why movies, to me, are the tight rope act of our business, because you’re asking people to sit in a theater and experience this one time. That’s it. There are no commercial breaks, nor can they hit pause. Television always has more leeway because there’s a certain casualness to the manner in which it is consumed. Not so with movies where you’re asking people to go somewhere and park and sit and watch it with total attention, captive audience, and then go home.

And, also of course, in television, even serialized television single-camera dramatic stuff, there are so many locations and sets that are reused over and over and over. Obviously in sitcoms, well, let’s talk about the traditional three-camera sitcom, the sets are the same literally every week. So, the variables are reduced down to almost nothing. The only real variable is what are these people doing and saying and thinking. But you’re not in a new location. You’re not stuck there all day with a scene that doesn’t work. You know what I man?

So, always much more pressure, I think, in movies. Very scary business. But I will say that when Doug asks is a script full of working scenes a great script, I probably would say no because that’s not how we judge a great script. We judge a great script as a whole. So, yes, all the scenes should be working, but also they should be working together. That’s kind of one of the big factors.

**John:** Absolutely. In the show notes I want to put a link into an episode of this podcast that goes into the backstory of The Americans. So The Americans is a fantastic show and for the last few seasons Slate has done a podcast series where after every episode they do a spoiler special where they talk about the episode, but they also interview the showrunners and somebody else involved with the production.

And this past week, they talked with the producing director whose job it is to direct the first two episodes of the season and the last episode. And to work with the directors who are doing the course of the season. And he was talking about being the guy, in shooting the last episode, he’s also the guy who shoots all the clean up on previous episodes. Because there will always be some things that don’t work or things that they missed because of weather or an actor changes or something. And so he shoots all those cleanup things. And that’s sort of a unique thing as TV shows, at least how we’re doing them right now, they have that opportunity to go back and like fix things in a way which is just amazing.

**Craig:** Indeed. Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. Tim in Ohio writes, “Can a writer take a previously produced show, write a few episodes for it, then submit it as a writing sample? My idea is to take the former number one show Dallas and spin it into a sitcom.”

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. Generally speaking, what used to be common is now looked down upon, which is to advertise yourself as a writer by writing an episode of an existing show. So, when you and I came into the business and if you wanted to get into television, you would write a spec episode of Seinfeld, or a spec episode of Frasier.

People don’t really do that anymore. Now the folks who are hiring writers for television shows are looking for original pilot material to say, OK, how are you as a writer on your own creating characters and situations that are unique to you. But, in a situation like this, of course, you could certainly take a show like Dallas and turn it into a sitcom. That sounds very inventive. It could be really fun and funny to read.

A couple of warnings. One, obviously that’s never going to get made, because you don’t have the rights. So that really is just a calling card kind of piece of work. Two, it requires that the reader be familiar with the substrate. So, if Dallas was on the air when you and I were children, that’s a show from the ‘80s, it may very well be that some people who are reading this material and judging you as a writer are not that familiar with it. So, it might not work for them. It might not be that funny. But those concerns aside, I don’t see any problem with it.

**John:** No, I think it’s the right kind of idea. So, I don’t know if Dallas as a sitcom is the right idea, but the right kind of idea to sort of take something that people are familiar with and do a very different twist on it. That’s great. And it kind of busts the clutter a little bit, because these people are reading a zillion samples for things, they’ll remember this one if it’s a clever take on something that was familiar to them.

So, yes, I think it’s absolutely fine and fair. Are you violating somebody’s copyright? Well, not in a way that is meaningful, because you’re not trying to sell this. You are not trying to do anything other than prove your writing talent. So, it is a common practice to do spec episodes. This is essentially the same kind of idea.

**Craig:** Correctamundo.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our big feature topic which is The Addams Family. When you and I first talked about this on email, we were going to focus on one movie and sort of do one of those deep dives like we did on Little Mermaid or Indiana Jones. And then as we started sort of talking through it and you were watching one movie and I was watching another movie, we decided let’s just talk about The Addams Family in general. So, you were going to focus on the first movie. I was going to take the second movie. But then I think it’s also interesting just to look at how would you approach The Addams Family overall. Because it’s the kind of property that if we were doing it right now in 2017, you would probably put together a room. You would put together a room of writers and they’d spend four weeks on it and figure out what the movie was going to be and what the spinoff HBO show was going to be.

It’s that kind of big property that you do things with. And it’s so interesting that we have already a TV show and movies to look at. So, The Addams Family.

**Craig:** Yeah. This could have gone so, so wrong. And it went so, so right. I mean, let’s remember that The Addams Family started as a cartoon in The New Yorker. Charles Addams did these one-panel cartoons. And I see here in the show notes, thank you for supplying this information, John, began in the ‘30s. So this goes way, way back. And it eventually was adapted into a television show in the ‘60s, which you and I, I mean, I certainly was watching that when I was a kid. They were in black and white. Was that one of the shows that then transitioned to color at some point?

**John:** I honestly don’t remember. And actually my memory of The Addams Family versus The Munsters is kind of blurry. The general, like there was a house, and there was kooky people living in it, but it wasn’t a clear distinct memory for me. Like I can remember, I can keep my Bewitched and my I Dream of Jeannie separate. But these kind of got conflated to me as TV shows.

**Craig:** There was a time, because there were only three networks, where you could get away with this. You could have a hit show and then another network can go, “Let’s make a that show. Make that exact show, just change a few names. It will basically be the same show.” And that’s what they did when The Addams Family came on. It was a hit. And then The Munsters came along to be the same show. It was kind of remarkable.

The show was very typical for television in the ’60s. It was a sitcom. It had a laugh track. It was pretty cheesy. And most importantly because it was meant for families, it pulled punches. The cartoons that Charles Addams drew were – they were a bit like Gorey’s cartoons. They were dark, macabre. They didn’t pull punches. And then the show sort of did.

And then you come along to 1991 and in a very typical Hollywood move they say, “We can get the rights to this thing. Everybody knows the name The Addams Family. Most people know the big characters. They love that song. So let’s make a movie out of it.” And what’s so amazing about the film is that it didn’t pull punches. And so the opening shot tells you everything about what this movie is going to be and it is essentially a filmed version of one of Charles Addams’ most famous one-panel cartoons, which shows a group of carolers merrily singing outside of a door. And then you go all the way up to the top of this gothic mansion and there’s this ghoulish family with a vat of bubbling oil and they’re going to pour it on these people. And the key, really the key to everything that makes The Addams Family work as a movie and as a cartoon is that they are so gleeful about it.

They are not – they don’t look vicious. They look happy as a family. It’s this wonderful – in fact, this is to them what caroling is to not them. This happy, warm feeling. And that general tone sets the path for the entire film.

**John:** Agreed. So the first film is 1991. The second film, Addams Family Values, is 1993. On the previous podcast I said, oh yeah, the second film, Addams Family Vacation, which is not really a film.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But totally could be a film.

**Craig:** It could be.

**John:** So we’ll get into why that could be film.

**Craig:** It’s Addams Family Values, right?

**John:** Values is the second movie. There was a third film written that never shot. Raul Julia, who played Gomez, died. And they never shot the third film. But I think it would be interesting to figure out sort of what that would be.

There have been direct to video sequels since then. In 2010 it was announced that Tim Burton would do a stop motion version for Illumination, but that apparently never happened. But, wow, Tim Burton feels like a perfect match for The Addams Family.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In 2013, it was announced that MGM had hired Pamela Pettler, who did Corpse Bride with me, to do the script for the new animated version. I don’t know any more details about that, but it feels like she should be making something. And finally there’s a Broadway musical that our friend Andrew Lippa wrote, which has obviously played on Broadway but it is now in the UK and traveling around the world. So, we can also get into that for a little bit.

So, we can talk about sort of the common elements of all that, but also what is unique to sort of each version of The Addams Family.

**Craig:** Right. Well, so the 1991 film is written Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson. I don’t know if Paul Rudnick also worked on it. I can only guess. It seems like maybe he did. He is, I think, the only credited screenwriter on the sequel. And there’s a certain Rudnickian humor.

I mean, it’s funny, you can go through particularly the second film and the comedy is very one-liner based. And you can literally go through and divide the jokes into two categories. Jewish or Gay. It’s incredible. There’s like a whole academic study to be on what gay humor is and what Jewish humor is and how The Addams Family just is the king of both of those schools.

But Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson write the script for Addams Family, the first film. It’s directed by Barry Sonnenfeld who I think at this point – had he already done Men in Black? I don’t know.

**John:** But watching the film, it was so striking, because I recently watched Men in Black, and like his style is his style. It very much feels like Men in Black in sort of how it’s visually presented on the screen.

**Craig:** Correct. I mean, Barry Sonnenfeld started as a cinematographer. His style is very – is for the camera to be very present, very bold, big moves. But, here’s what kind of emerges from a screenwriting point of view, why I love The Addams Family. You have this enormous challenge ahead of you, and I always put myself in the shoes of Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson. What do you do?

And so they make this brilliant choice right off the bat. I’m going to take this cartoon and in it is all the DNA you need for a movie. Specifically, family bonded together by the opposite of what most families are bonded together by. And in there also is this strand of the celebration of non-conformity. We all get a little squeamish by those perfect families. Think of Ned Flanders on The Simpsons, right? They’re perfect, we just then want to hurt them because of it, right?

So The Addams Family celebrates the perfect opposite of that. And in that they love each other. And so what is the movie? From a plot point of view, I think they actually make this brilliant choice by picking the dumbest plot ever. In comedy film, there is no more hoary plot than – HOARY plot – not WHOREY plot – than the grandma is going to lose her house essentially.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they live in this mansion. They have all this money. And the plot of the movie is that their financial manager is scheming with somebody that he owes money to to take all of it away from them. And they’re going to do that by having this man pose as the long lost Uncle Fester, even though he is not, because Uncle Fester is the rightful owner of all of that. And once that happens, he can take it all, and kick the Addams Family out, and they get all the money for themselves. That is a terrible plot and it’s perfect for this because the joy of The Addams Family is not plot-based at all. It is entirely about how this family loves each other in the strangest way. This incredible romance between the parents, between Morticia and Gomez. And then ultimately what it means to actually be loved by a family in any way, shape or form.

And all of that requires comedy and set pieces to the point where you feel like you’re almost watching a standup show. And the choice of plot here is brilliant because really the movie is at its best when it doesn’t give a damn about any of that.

**John:** Yeah. Going back to your earlier comment about like it’s the intersection of Jewish comedy and gay comedy, there’s something really fundamentally queer about The Addams Family. And actually I searched “Addams Family Queer” to see who had done their Master’s thesis on it, and there really weren’t a lot of them online. But it is a family that is defined by its otherness to the world around it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And in portraying itself as the alternative to everything out there, it is strangely normalizing. It’s all about this family that loves each other so much, even though they’re not like anything else around them. And all their individual, sort of the natural things you see in a family are magnified to these extreme degrees. So, Gomez and Morticia don’t just love each other. They love each other in a passionate way that is really bizarre. Like it’s almost uncomfortable, but also delightful.

**Craig:** Right. That’s exactly right.

**John:** And so Gomez is sort of feminine in sort of his fawning over his wife, but that’s kind of great. They seem to have a bondage/S&M kind of relationship. But that’s kind of great, also.

Then you look at the two kids, Wednesday and Pugsley, they have sort of the normal sibling rivalry, but taken to such an extreme degree that she’s always trying to kill him, like literally kill him. And you sense that she never really will because it’s the rules of the movie, yet she’s always trying to kill him.

And then the kooky Uncle Fester. And Grandmama, they are the most extreme versions of the wacky Jewish uncle or the Bubbe.

**Craig:** The Bubbe.

**John:** She’s the extreme version of the Bubbe. So, it’s all those things taken to sort of their nth degree, and yet in the nth degree they become very normal. It’s revealing how normal a family they are in relation to all the cold outsiders.

**Craig:** No question. I think that’s exactly why the movie works. And that is the – the interesting subversion that’s in it, there is something – we’ll talk about, OK, the Jewish side of the humor is this – it’s not a suspicion of the perfect WASPY family. It’s more like, ugh, who wants to be perfect like that? You know, we’re not perfect like that. We’re loud, or we’re weird looking. Those perfect people are kind of boring and stuffy. So this is the sort of Jewish humor that you saw with for instance Harold Ramis when you look at movies like Caddyshack for instance. That’s a very Jewish kind of expression. Rodney Dangerfield’s character in Caddyshack. He could have just as easily been in The Addams Family. You get a sense that if he had walked into the Addams Family mansion, he would have made some comments, but otherwise been perfectly fine.

And definitely when you think about the queerness of it, that there’s this straight world out there that doesn’t understand the true fascination of being yourself completely. Because in the straight world, you’re born straight, and nobody gives you a problem with it, so you’re just yourself. There’s no effort to it. And here they’re making a conscious decision. They do love S&M. They talk about it without ever going too far, but, you know, she says – I mean, Gomez is very upset because he is starting to think that maybe Uncle Fester is an imposter and it’s not really his brother. And she says, “Gomez, why torture yourself? That’s my job.” And it’s all – and when they’re literally torturing her, she loves it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She says, “You’ve done this before.” So, it’s very much about a total free acceptance of our non-conforming selves. And all of that is necessary. But I will argue that the reason – they lynchpin to this movie is Wednesday Addams and her portrayal by a very young Christina Ricci who did a sort of impossibly brilliant job. It’s one of the best jobs any child has ever done in any part.

**John:** I completely agree. So, we’ll skip ahead and give a taste of Addams Family Values, because my daughter watched this with me this week. And my daughter is 12 and has not seen any of it. She had no idea what The Addams Family was. And so she hadn’t seen the first movie and we just started watching Addams Family Values. And within the first five minutes she’s in love with Wednesday Addams. Because Wednesday Addams speaks her mind in an adult way but also in a kind of couldn’t care less way. She completely takes agency in every scene in a way that’s just remarkable.

And she says things that like no one should ever say, and yet she’s much freer for that. And so my daughter just completely fell for Wednesday because it’s just such a revelatory character. And Christina Ricci’s performance is superb.

**Craig:** It’s not surprising to me that she fell in love with her because the character of Wednesday Addams is almost a super hero. Everybody else is operating in this world where they are concerned about their love for each other, or money, or whether this brother is real or not. Wednesday Addams is operating on this plain above everyone where, A, she’s the first person to figure out that Fester isn’t really Fester. He’s an imposter. Although, spoiler alert, it turns out he really is Fester. She just knows that, inherently. She’s brilliant. She has this remarkable deadpan, which I think great deadpan characters – like I think of Martin Starr on Silicon Valley.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** What they convey in their perfect deadpan is that they’ve seen it all. It’s almost like you get the sense that that character on Silicon Valley or Wednesday Addams has literally already seen the movie, or the show. They know how it ends. It’s a confidence there. It’s a remarkable confidence. Unflappable. And violent but violent because of a passion to be in control of the world. It’s actually a very kind of traditionally masculine trait to want to dominate the world, right?

Wednesday effortlessly seems like she wants to dominate everything. You got the sense that if Wednesday just decided to end this movie early, she could. And that’s a wonderful choice. And Christina Ricci does these things when she reacts to things that are too cloying, too sweet, too nice, whatever they are. Her eyes go big and her eyes are just, I mean, they should – I wish we could copy them and put them in a museum to show people like this is what eyes can do.

How old was she when this movie was made? It’s just unbelievable that she could do those things.

**John:** Yeah. She was 12.

**Craig:** 12! My daughter is 12. Your daughter is 12. There’s just this preternatural confidence and ability that she had that was just so brilliant.

All right. So, I want to talk about a scene in Addams Family. To me, it’s the pivotal scene. It’s where the movie turns and you start to see why you fall in love with everyone.

So Christopher Lloyd plays this imposter. He’s pretending to be Fester. There’s all this hullabaloo going on. It’s not going very well. Wednesday doesn’t necessarily think – you know, she’s on to him. And he’s a bad guy. I mean, he’s a murderous thug who is basically being sent in there to be a criminal. And because of that, he’s finding a certain commonality. And the strongest connection he has weirdly is with these two kids because he likes them. He likes the things that they do. And at one point, when even Gomez is saying this man is not my brother. He’s an imposter. Imposter. You know, nice and big.

Fester sees Wednesday Addams and, oh, what’s the brother’s name again?

**John:** Pugsley.

**Craig:** Pugsley. Wednesday and Pugsley are pretending to sword fight and it’s nicely grim, you know. Pretending to kill each other. And he watches this. And so it was that old sword under the arm and Wednesday goes, “Oooh,” and pretends to die. And he’s, “No. No, no, no, no, no, no.” And he runs downstairs and teaches them the proper way to kill each other. And it’s in this moment that you understand that there is this connection between freaks that is deeper than the connection we suppose between people who are normal and therefore don’t need that depth of connection. And it pays off in this incredible scene where there’s a school play and it is the perfect example of the outsider behavior you were talking about and the insider behavior, because all of the perfect kids are like, la-la-la, school play.

And then up come Wednesday and Pugsley, who it appears have been well-instructed by Fester, who shows up to watch, proud of them, because now it is a family. And they engage in the sword fight and start lopping off limbs. They’ve rigged fake limbs. And fake blood is spraying everywhere. It’s spraying. And this is where I stand up and applaud. Spraying blood into the faces of audience members, like into their mouths, and this is a family movie and it totally works. It’s awesome. And it’s the best example of how this movie just refused to pull its punches. And you so loved it for that. And at the end of it, you cut to this great shot of this shocked into silence, blood-covered audience, and then the Addams Family standing up and applauding. Ah, brilliant.

**John:** So, the reason why that kind of sequence can work is because as the audience, our sympathies are with the Addams Family at all moments. And so even though we’ll meet other characters who are like normal, we will never go home with them. We’ll never follow them.

And so our experience of the movie is only through their eyes. And because we relate with them, that scene isn’t gory. That scene is hilarious. And so you can imagine the other version of that. Like the bad version of this where we have fallen in love with or tracked people who are outside looking at the Addams Family, they seem disturbed. And you would have natural concerned about the Addams Family, and then this bloody school play would read very differently. So it has to be the triumphant final act of these characters we’ve fallen in love with over the course of the story in order to see it. And you’re setting it up from the very first shot where we see the family trying to pour hot oil on the carolers.

**Craig:** Right. And that’s exactly right. So in that concept of DNA. You and I, we never say to people the Three Page Challenge has to be the first three pages. But, the first three pages should pack in an enormous amount of genetic information. That is the tension and the joy of The Addams Family is that they are on a superficial level horrible people who do horrible things and it’s even implied that they’ve murdered people, you know? But they love each other so purely and the movie is kind of a middle finger to the hypocrisy of family values, which was a big buzz word at the time, and obviously then became the title of the second movie. Because it was essentially saying everybody out there pretending to be all nicety nice, they’re great on a superficial level and rotten on an internal level. And we’re going to flip that. We’re going to make these people rotten on a superficial level and beautiful on an internal level, which is also a very gay/Jewish kind of mélange.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so to wrap up the discussion of the first movie, you have these moments that continue to reinforce the notion that Uncle Fester is drawn specifically to that authenticity. And in fact starts to sense that it is the very thing that will reward him, even though he is a freak. The fact that it turns out that he really is the long lost Uncle Fester is sort of a cherry on top of the sundae. And, in fact, an interesting fact that I read, initially that wasn’t the case. Initially he was not really Fester, but he becomes adopted as Fester. And apparently the cast had a real problem with that. And this is from the documentary, The Making of The Addams Family, Sonnenfeld stated that he meant it to be unclear ultimately in the end whether Fester was really an imposter or not. But all the other actors rebelled and chose, guess who, Christina Ricci, to speak on their behalf who gave this very impassioned plea that Fester shouldn’t be an imposter.

And so, in fact, they ended up changing that plot point to make the actors happy and says Sonnenfeld, “They were right. It was the better way to go.” And of course it was, because – see the thing is it’s not saying, oh, it only worked because of a genetic connection. It works before the genetic connection is ever discovered. That really is your reward essentially. Like, oh, and you really are a part of this. But only after they’ve accepted you as part of it.

So, it was a lovely thing. And it set up a second movie quite brilliantly.

**John:** I agree. So, let’s talk through the plot of Addams Family Values. So this is written by Paul Rudnick. Same director. Same producer. In the opening, Morticia gives birth to a new baby. This is Pubert, who is actually part of mythology. I assumed it was made up for this movie, but it’s actually part of mythology.

Wednesday and Pugsley are jealous, so they try to kill the baby. And so there’s a lot of sequences of how they’re trying to kill the baby. The family hires a nanny named Debbie, who is played by Joan Cusack, who is just spectacular.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** She’s actually the Black Widow Killer, and so she plans to marry and murder Uncle Fester.

**Craig:** Which, let me just interrupt. Again, the dumbest plot ever. Perfect. Perfect. Thank god.

**John:** Wonderful. Debbie sends the kids off to summer camp and from there we’re cutting back and forth between the main A Plot storyline which is at the house and it is Gomez and Morticia and Debbie and Fester, and the other plot line is at Camp Chippewa where we’re following Wednesday and Pugsley there.

Ultimately Debbie marries Fester, but finds him impossible to kill. And she’s ultimately electrocuted by the baby at the very end. She’s basically kidnapped the entire family. She’s going to kill them. But the baby ends up killing her. So, that is his real crowning as an Addams is killing their killer.

**Craig:** So the plot of the baby is set up in I think the very last shot of the first film, where she announces that she’s pregnant and she announces this by showing this little onesie she’s knitting that has too many limbs. And, of course, Gomez immediately recognizes the meaning of it and is thrilled. And then they have this baby in the beginning and, of course, Morticia enjoys labor pains. And, by the way, just another brilliant thing that you got to give Sonnenfeld an enormous amount of credit for. They make a choice in the first film that they carry through the second film. In every scene, no matter what is happening, there is a key light going across Morticia’s eyes. And so Anjelica Huston has this wonderful face.

Now, a key light for those of you who don’t know, it’s a special light and it’s usually very well defined in terms of border. And very typically is hit across someone’s eyes to give a kind of dramatic pop. It’s like the Tabasco sauce of lighting. You use it very carefully in places. And they’re just like, nope. [laughs]

**John:** It’s not careful here. It’s just a giant spotlight.

**Craig:** It’s crazy.

**John:** There are moments, clearly she had very little, like once they did her blocking, she was not allowed to change whatsoever.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Because there’s one inch of like that her face can be in.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So that she’s perfectly in the light. And so watching it this past week, there are a few times where she steps into the light, but essentially she’s frozen throughout most of the movie because of that light.

**Craig:** Which actually weirdly works, because she has this kind of insanely contained character. So even when she’s lying in the stretcher, being wheeled into the delivery room, there’s a key light across her eyes. [laughs] It’s just amazing.

So you have this Black Widow plot. And once again, by the way, Wednesday, she knows. Always knows. And you go back and forth between these things and the truth is that it is kind of a rehash of the plot of the first movie, which I don’t mind. Someone else is trying to steal their money in their house. And it certainly cuts to the family themes. But the movie sings and is at its best, and I think is beloved for all of the scenes at Camp Chippewa because those again cut right to the heart of that let’s just call it the queer Addams Family academic theory of outsiders versus insiders. And it does it in a way that is now even bigger and more obvious.

And it is outstanding. Just once scene after another. Christine Baranski and Peter MacNicol both being like the perfect foils. Every scene there is just gold.

**John:** Well, it’s also worth noting that the summer camp mythos is also a largely Jewish culture thing, too. So like the East Coast summer camp vibe is a real thing. I was trying to figure out whether this came first or Camp Crusty. And they’re almost the same time. The Camp Crusty, the phenomenal Simpsons episode where Bart and Lisa go off to Crusty’s summer camp.

But both of them are presaged by Meatballs, which is an amazing sort of distillation of what the summer camp experience is. So, all the Camp Chippewa stuff is just delightful. I found that my memory of the movie was that, oh, it’s mostly Camp Chippewa.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s actually not that much. It’s just the stuff that’s there is like really, really good and funny. And you sort of remember the parts of the movie that Wednesday is in, and that’s the part of the movie that Wednesday is in.

Some things honestly don’t work phenomenally in this movie. And it’s worth noting what doesn’t quite work, because watching it this past week I had this suspicion that some scenes got dropped, or something got changed along the way. Quite early on Wednesday Addams starts to figure out like oh I think Debbie is not who she says she is. Debbie is going through these papers. But for whatever reason, Wednesday doesn’t say anything and Wednesday gets shipped off the camp. But Wednesday comes back from camp for the wedding, Uncle Fester’s wedding, and yet doesn’t say anything there either.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then goes back to camp. There’s a weird stutter step there. And I would love to talk with somebody involved with the movie to figure out what happened there. Because there’s something that got dropped or changed there, because it was really weird to have Wednesday in some scenes where she could have been taking some agency and she wasn’t taking any agency.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree. There’s an interesting – you could tell that they obviously had made this choice. They want them to go to camp. It’s going to be great. This is how they can have all their fun. But how do you get them there? So, once Debbie, the Black Widow, realizes that Wednesday is on to her, she makes this impassioned plea to Gomez and Morticia to send the kids to camp. And she says, “And they’re going to tell you they don’t want to go, but they really, really do.” And of course Gomez and Morticia are shocked, because that’s just – fresh air and sunshine is so horrible.

But they go along with the plan. They’re fooled, which is fine, but Wednesday doesn’t really protest, which doesn’t make sense. So, that was – it seems like a cheat. It is a cheat.

**John:** It is a cheat. And here’s the thing. I feel like you could get that cheat if it was because it is setting up the fundamental premise, like they’re off at summer camp. So I bought it that moment. It was the stutter step where they come back to the house and then have to go leave again. That was a bridge too far for me. And while it makes sense that they should be there at their uncle’s wedding, if they had revised it in a way that the wedding had to happen suddenly and they couldn’t be there, that would have made maybe even more sense.

And I do wonder if the choice – if what happened in editing or in some sort of reshoot was like, oh, we want to have Wednesday come to this thing, or they want one more scene with Wednesday and the family, so they stuck her into a sequence that she wasn’t naturally in.

**Craig:** It’s quite possible.

**John:** Just a guess.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s quite possible.

**John:** There’s another scene that doesn’t work towards the end or a little sequence that doesn’t work especially well towards the end. It’s that like Gomez and Morticia are phenomenal, but they sort of lose their agency once Fester and Debbie go off. And you sort of lose them as a centerpiece of the movie. So they go to sort of confront Debbie, and then they skulk away. And they go to the police station. There’s a scene with Nathan Lane which doesn’t need to be in the movie at all.

Curiously, Nathan Lane ends up playing Gomez in the Broadway musical, which is a small world kind of thing. But I was watching that scene wondering why that scene was in the movie.

**Craig:** Well, it’s interesting. It is a mirror of a sequence in the first movie, and I suspect that’s why it’s there. Because they felt that it was successful in the first movie, although I would argue that – so in the first movie, towards the – by the end of the second act, beginning of the third act, there’s about ten minutes, which is by the way a lot for a movie that I think is about a 90-minute running time without credits. There’s ten minutes where the Addams Family has been kicked out of their house and they have to go live in this motel. And it is really a sequence of gags. And they’re fun gags. And they even set up this girl who ends up showing up as the girl in the summer camp who is like the perfect little girl.

But it’s just too much. And you start to feel once the Addams Family is – well, OK, now we’re doing a fish out of water movie with the Addams Family? But that’s really not the movie that we were doing. That sequence goes on a bit long in the first movie, and here in the second one it seemed like they were trying to grab at that again. And I agree with you, it didn’t really need to be there. It was more frustrating than entertaining.

**John:** Yeah. But it’s worth talking about the dynamics they were trying to establish with Debbie and Fester and Morticia and Gomez, which is that Morticia and Gomez’s perfect love is intimidating. Like it sets an impossibly high standard for love. And so Christopher Lloyd, who we’re not talking enough about because he’s just phenomenal in both movies–

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** He’s great. And like imbues this bizarre character with a lot of heart. And at every moment is making fascinating choices. The sequences with him and Debbie and with him and Debbie and Morticia, they are really terrific, yet there’s a sameness to them. There’s not a progress. And if I could hope for anything it would be a little bit more engine behind them so that we’re not coming back to the same vibe again and again.

**Craig:** I agree. And it’s worth noting that Christopher Lloyd carries the burden of the protagonist in both movies and does it beautifully well. And it’s a very similar protagonism in each movie. In the first movie he is someone who is struggling with a desire to be loved. He has this unhealthy relationship with this woman who has adopted him who is not his mother, but he has clearly this crazy mamma’s boy thing going on. And bordering on oedipal, because he so desires to be loved and accepted. And then he finds that love an acceptance from his actual family, the Addams Family.

In the second movie, you’re exactly right. They make a brilliant point of setting up a new need in him that is not simply there because. It’s there in response to Gomez and Morticia’s perfect romance. He wants what they have. And they have all these wonderful jokes where he just talks all the time about how he watches them through a keyhole while they have sex and they don’t really seem to care, which is spectacular. I mean, also in the movie you have multiple scenes where Wednesday and Pugsley are not just kind of pretending to kill their infant brother. They are legitimately trying to kill him. And every single time either the baby foils it or the parents foil it and they’re like, “Oh, you kids. I know it’s hard.” Which is brilliant.

But you’re absolutely right. The part of the laboring of the second movie is that Fester’s desire to have a romance and therefore his attraction to Debbie kind of flat lines. When he understands she’s manipulating him, she keeps trying to kill him and it never really works because he’s Fester and it’s really hard to kill an Addams. We know this. It does sort of flat line for a while. And you start to get a little frustrated that Fester isn’t getting it.

In the first movie, Gomez figures out pretty quickly that this guy doesn’t seem like. We aren’t ahead of him. He’s with us. In this movie, we’re so ahead of Fester that it does start to get a little plodding.

**John:** Yeah. My daughter was rooting for Debbie at times. And–

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god. She’s sick. I love it.

**John:** You’re not supposed to, and yet, I mean, Debbie is a kind of very Addams character in a way. You know, to a certain degree she is a Wednesday Addams grown up in the sense that she’s completely empowered in what it is and what she does. And so she’s an outsider, too, she’s just homicidal in a not appropriate way.

And one of the strengths of the movie is like Morticia has a sequence where she confronts her and she’s like, “You do these terrible things, and I like that about you.” Basically sort of like you’re horrible and you’ve killed these men and I applaud that. And, yet, trying to explain that she could still have love for her I guess brother-in-law, it’s not really how everyone is related.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s her brother-in-law.

**John:** But in previous Addams incarnations it’s actually her uncle. It’s all crazy. But there’s a specificity to sort of why she’s doing what she’s trying to do, which is really nice. I just wanted more of that.

**Craig:** I’m with you. I’m with you. There’s this – I mean, you want to talk about like the best jokes in the movie, and it’s so – when I think about Paul Rudnick and his sense of humor, it’s so brilliant. And a great example of like, OK, we’ll put that one in the gay column. When Morticia does confront Debbie she does so at this new mansion that Debbie has purchased with all the money she’s stolen from them. And it’s just the opposite of the Addams Family mansion. It’s all pinks and blues.

And Morticia says to Debbie, “You have gone too far. You have married Fester. You have destroyed his spirit. You have taken him from us. All that I could forgive. But, Debbie, pastels?” It’s just so great. It’s like that’s the thing?

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** Your bad design taste, you know, which is so not Goth. That’s the problem here. That, to me, is the brilliant consistency of the tone that they created in these movies that is just cherishable.

**John:** Let’s take a step back, because we brought up the idea that Fester is essentially the protagonist in both of these movies. Like he is the character who has to change over the course of these movies, and everybody else is just sort of swirling around, and like the family as a unit. And it strikes me that in most of these kind of stories there’s like two ways you could go. Either classically a story is a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. And both of these movies are essentially a stranger comes to town.

So, everything is perfect in Addams Family life, and then an outsider comes in and because he’s an outsider everything is questioned and there’s tumult. And ultimately order is restored. The normalcy is restored after the outsider is either tossed out or accepted into the family.

But I think the reason why I think you could make an Addams Family Vacation is there is a possibility of potentially a Little Miss Sunshine with the Addams Family, where you could take them out of that house and have them grow over the course of a journey. There’s a version of that you could make. It’s just we haven’t seen it yet.

**Craig:** Well, right. And that could descend a bit much into fish out of water, which is a certain kind of joke. I find that the Addams Family is so much more interesting when the fish that are out of water are the people visiting them.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** As opposed to them going to visit other people. But, I would pay many, many hundreds of dollars to see a new Addams Family movie where Christina Ricci is the new matriarch, because she’s so incredible. And we have to talk about, again, her acting ability in the Camp Chippewa sequences. But interesting that her storyline goes completely against the notion of a character arc. Wednesday Addams has no character arc. She is always the boss. And the entire Camp Chippewa story is really like – it’s just watching a superior person win.

**John:** I would say Christina Ricci’s character Wednesday, she has a tiny bit of growth where she gets a little bit closer to the David Krumholtz character.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Who is the asthmatic Jewish kid who is at the camp as well. And, again, it’s a tremendous stereotype and he is fantastic in that role. But her best acting is not a line she was given, but an expression she has to play.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s incredible. Incredible.

**John:** So you talked about her eyes. So, there’s a moment where she is forced to smile. And so the camera just holds her in a close up and you see her trying to evoke this smile and it’s one of the best sort of ten seconds of film you’re going to see. It’s just delightful. And that she could, I guess she was probably 12 or 13 at this point, pull that off is just remarkable.

**Craig:** There’s like a bookend. There’s two moments that I think of and that’s definitely one of them. Because in that moment she’s forcing a smile because she has a plan. And she needs to sucker everybody into thinking that she is now one of them. So she forces this horrible smile. And, of course, they’re horrified by it. But it’s incredible acting.

The other moment is a smaller, simpler thing, but it’s brilliant. They catch Wednesday, Pugsley, and the David Krumholtz character trying to escape. And they catch them at like a fence. And they start to sing Kumbaya. And Wednesday’s eyes get enormously big because it’s like she’s looking into the pits of hell. And she slowly backs up against the fence. It’s incredible. I just don’t know how – that’s the kind of thing where you go, listen, we’re writers, we feel great about what we do, but when you can find a human being that can do something like that, you just have to take off your hat and go, “Well done, actor. Thank god you people exist.” Because my goodness, that was incredible.

**John:** Yep. So, I want to wrap up by talking about a thing that fewer people have seen but is also really worth discussing because it has different challenges and different opportunities. So, there’s a Broadway musical version of The Addams Family. It was written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice did the book. Andrew Lippa, our friend, did music and lyrics. And it is fascinating because of what works differently on a stage.

So, the basic plot for people who probably haven’t seen it, so Wednesday is a little bit older in this. She’s late high school, maybe college. She brings her Midwestern boyfriend, Lucas, and his family from the Midwest also to come visit them at their house. And so this is, again, a stranger comes to town and this is that family and sort of what having that family there sort of unleashes within the household. There’s delightful songs. But I wanted to actually play one little thing, because I know it’s a song you like as well. This is – Uncle Fester sings a song in the second act called The Moon and Me.

So, this is part of Addams Family mythology is that Uncle Fester loves the moon. But in the song he literally loves the moon. Like he’s in love with the moon. The moon is a character. So, let’s listen to a clip.

[Song plays]

What I love about that song is that it reveals a part of Uncle Fester that would be very, very hard to do in a non-singing movie. It’s hard to get that character’s introspection without a song. And it sort of perfectly illuminates what’s going on inside his soul.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s what musicals do best. And what movies tend to do worst. When you’re asking somebody to share this feeling inside of them, and it’s usually a romantic feeling. It’s usually a sentimental feeling. Movies are terrible at that. Just listening to people talk about how much they love somebody is a bit gloppy, you know? But when you sing it, it’s beautiful. And, of course, you have the delicious perversion of the fact that he’s singing it to the moon. And yet then again the answer to that which is, no, no, see, that’s your judgment. It’s actually beautiful and wonderful. And Kevin Chamberlin, who is a fantastic singer and great performer and Broadway legend hits that note at the end. It’s a high C. My god. What a – ugh.

**John:** Do that eight shows a week. Yeah.

**Craig:** Exactly. And do that eight shows a week. It’s just nuts.

**John:** Yeah. But again it’s revealing, we talk about sort of the queerness of it. Like it’s really queer to love the moon. And yet he loves the moon and he loves the moon so honestly that it’s delightful. And so if a character said he loved the moon, well that’s a crazy person. But when you have a song to go with it you’re like, oh, I get it. I get sort of what your deal is and you’re not a bad person. You’re a person who is in love. And that’s – it’s a remarkable little moment that is much easier to illuminate with a song than it would be just a character in a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think Andrew’s key lyric in here and the really important one to speak to that is “though I’m told it’s wrong,” you know? And everything else is very sweet and it’s very much a straight kind of love song to somebody that you love. But he knows that other people think it’s wrong and he doesn’t care because the moon makes him feel great. And this is a real love. And you’re right. It’s definitely that kind of queer take on romance and acceptance and a kind of “I got to be me.”

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s wrap this up by talking about what we can learn from the Addams Family in terms of adapting a property. So, somebody comes to you with a preexisting thing. So, be it Scooby Doo. Be it some other Hanna-Barbera thing, be it something else that has characters in it, where do you start and how might you start differently looking at The Addams Family and the success they’ve had?

**Craig:** Well, the great hope is that there is some kernel of something that is going to light your way. And in The Addams Family, it’s quite clear from that great cartoon that they drew inspiration from, the kernel was this familial love and that inversion between superficial and internal and what looks bad and what is beautiful and good. And then if you can latch onto that, and in doing so you know you have a sentimental, positive payload for an audience that will deliver the joy of relationships to them, then pull no punches on the other side.

And so you’re looking for something that gives you these opportunities. So, when you talk about Scooby Doo, they’ve tried many times. They made some Scooby Doo movies. They were mildly successful. But the problem with something like Scooby Doo is that it doesn’t really have that payload. They’re friends, but they don’t love each other. You would have to start to invent these things. That’s where it starts to feel a little artificial and forced.

So, in a sense you’re looking for a property that maybe gives you a spark that you can then take forward. And the worst situation is when that spark is there and you deny it. And they did not do that here, which is why it’s successful.

**John:** Absolutely. I’m thinking back to Charlie’s Angels. And when I came to Charlie’s Angels, my first pitches, my first meetings on Charlie’s Angels, they weren’t about the plot or even specific set pieces. They were about the feeling of it and sort of what my feeling was towards Charlie’s Angels and having grown up loving it is that I was weirdly proud of the girls. I loved them and I loved their relationship between them. And they struck me as being like the three princesses who work for their father who is the king. And that it felt like a fairy tale in that way. And that the characters could be incredibly proficient when they were on the job and yet in the sense of this being a comedy they could be giant dorks when they were off the job.

And the tone that we sort of described in those initial meetings became the movie. Became what we ended up working on. It was like what it was going to feel like was much more important than what was going to happen at the start. I think the same would be true with The Addams Family. It’s like what does it feel like? And they found a good answer for that and were able to make that work for these two movies and other properties along the way.

**Craig:** No question. No question.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s get to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing this week is the first episode of the second season of Master of None. So we had Alan Yang on the show for our live show quite a while back. But this second season started and the first episode I thought was just remarkable. Alan Yang and Aziz Ansari wrote it. Aziz Ansari is the only one of the recurring characters who is in this first episode. It all take place in Italy. It is all black and white. It is just delightful.

And one of the things I like about it is that if you’ve never watched the show, you could still completely enjoy this episode. It is just a remarkable good half-hour of really great comedy. And just it’s specific and it’s warm. Aziz Ansari directed it. It’s great. So, I strongly recommend you check out this first episode of the new season.

**Craig:** People are talking. People are talking. My One Cool Thing this week comes to me through Boing Boing. And I feel bad, because I’m not sure how to pronounce Xeni Jardin, but am I doing it right, do you think? Xeni Jardin?

**John:** That sounds about right. Xeni Jardin. That, too.

**Craig:** She’s fantastic. And so she put a link up to this and we’ll have the direct link in the show notes. It is – so some folks who are working with neural networks where those are the kind of learning computers, they attempted to see if the neural network could learn how to name colors. So, what they did is they fed it a list of 7,700 Sherwin Williams paint colors, along with their RGB values. Those are the numbers that ultimately define what the pigment will look like.

So, they give it to this and then they just start having it learn. And where it ended up was amazing. So I’m going to read you some names of some paints. Clardic Fug. Snowbonk. Light of Blast. Burble Simp. And my favorite, Turdly.

**John:** Turdly is good. But Sindis Poop is also quite strong.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. We’re thinking about repainting our living room in Stargoon. [laughs] Here’s the thing, that sounds ridiculous, but actual paint names are absurd. At one point, when it was kind of like in the middle, so like – and it’s fascinating to watch how it’s learning. So like initially it’s coming up with things like Rererte Green or Gorlpateehecd. Then, it starts to kind of get in a little closer with Golder Craam and Burf Pink. Then it’s actually locking into words, like Ice Gray. That’s – I mean, it didn’t match Ice Gray to a color that looks like ice gray. But then Gray Pubic is probably not a color that you’re going to see in a store.

**John:** There is one color here. It’s 216 200 185. Stummy Beige.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it actually genuinely looks like, oh, that’s what Stummy Beige would look like.

**Craig:** Yeah. That does look like Stummy Beige. I mean, Grade Bat doesn’t look like Grade Bat to me. And it’s not different enough from Grass Bat. But still, I mean, it’s pretty freaking amazing that it comes up with these like remarkable words that are sort of good, but wrong. It’s the uncanny valley of names. Spectacular stuff. So, I just loved it.

**John:** Great. We’ve talked in previous episodes about scripts written by AI and they’re not quite there yet, but eventually if they can name paint colors, then eventually they can do more and more of our job. At least the naming of our characters. I’ve seen a couple of like online character name things that are designed for like fantasy stuff. And they are kind of clever in the way they’ll put things together. Even these examples. Like, they’re all basically pronounceable. And like making something pronounceable is not simple.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** God bless them.

**Craig:** Listen, we’re laughing now. We won’t laugh when we’re in their labor camps as the neural networks have us creating huge batches of Sturbil Blue or whatever it is. But, still, for now it’s funny.

**John:** For now it’s funny. It’s funny until we die.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Our show this week is produced by Godwin Jabangwe, as always. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast.

You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes. And leave a review there while you’re on iTunes. That’s always delightful.

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Transcripts go up about four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. We should have 300-episode USB drives eventually, but it could be a couple weeks. So, if you’re hankering for one of those, hold tight.

And, Craig, thank you for another fun show with the Addams Family.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Cool. Bye.

Links:

* [Addams Family TV Show Opening](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL4CV5tlstM)
* [The Addams Family Official Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyyJYyIexq8)
* [Addams Family Values Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmhQzhUbdvo)
* [The Moon And Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYvPeSTS5zY)
* [Master of None – Season 2 | Official Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGE-Mw-Yjsk)
* [New Paint Colors Invented by Neural Network](http://lewisandquark.tumblr.com/post/160776374467/new-paint-colors-invented-by-neural-network)
* [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 Rajesh Naroth ([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_301.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2017/from-writer-to-writer-director).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 300 of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. 300 Craig. That’s just amazing.

**Craig:** I mean, we sort of blew it because we had that big live show that ended up being 299, but in a way that’s us, isn’t it? We’re not numerologists.

**John:** We’re not. I actually had some big plans for the 300th episode, which I talked you through, and it was going to be so much work that it did not end up happening because other life things interfered. But 300 is still good. And this is a really good 300th episode. Today on the show, we have Chris McQuarrie here to talk about the transition from being an A-list screenwriter to being an A-list writer-director. So, it’s an incredibly relatable episode. I mean, it’s really for all of the A-list screenwriters out there who are thinking about what is my path to being an A-list writer-director. Chris McQuarrie can talk you through that.

**Craig:** Yeah, our 300th episode is speaking to fewer than 300 people. [laughs] That’s how I look at it. It’s for like about three people.

**John:** Yean, three, four.

**Craig:** Four, tops.

**John:** Depends on the day. But it was actually a great conversation. So, when we get into it you’ll see that it ends up being mostly me and Chris because of just time zone problems. But he gets into some really fascinating stuff about just, you know, he had some peaks and some valleys even after his career sort of got going. And we talk about that. And I think there’s actually a lot of really relatable stuff there about being the person when stuff falls apart. And putting stuff back together. And that’s a valuable lesson.

**Craig:** Chris is – I was sorry to miss a good chunk of that. Chris is a very good friend of mine and one of the most infuriatingly smart people I know. I feel like I serve a similar role for him in that we make each other crazy, but we’re the sort of people that like making each other crazy, and so hours will go by where we debate absolute nonsense and everybody around us just gets very tired and bored and leaves. And we like that. I just have the greatest respect for his abilities. And he is an excellent articulator of the interior life of the writer. So, I’m looking forward to this discussion as much as perhaps the three or four people to whom this applies are listening, looking forward to it at home.

But he’s terrific. It’s hard to believe that it took us this long. You know what? We’ll have him back on for Episode 600. How about that?

**John:** That’s a very good idea. So, a lot has actually happened since you and I were on the Skype together. You did a live show which was fantastic. I actually got to listen to that live show as I was on my bus on the way over to meet with Chris. And it was just great. So, thank you again for a great show. Thank you to Dana Fox for filling in for me. But Rian Johnson and Rob McElhenney were terrific. And people asked smart questions, or at least the questions that made it into the edit I heard were smart. So, thank you to everybody and thank you to Hollywood Heart for hosting us there.

**Craig:** Yes. And by all accounts we did in fact achieve the goal, which was to raise a pretty good amount of money for Hollywood Heart. So we felt really good about that. They were very happy. Dana was wonderful. Just did a great job. I’m going to go ahead and just say if I croak, she gets my gig.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Sounds good. So if there’s Russians out there planning to do things, know that we have a backup in Dana Fox.

**Craig:** There are Russians out there planning to do things. I just don’t think this one is high up on their list.

**John:** No, they got a long, long list.

**Craig:** They got a long list.

**John:** But listening to that show, it was fascinating because you were recording it on Monday night and while you were recording it at the other side of the hill they were still negotiating the WGA contract. And we did know when that episode was being recorded whether or not we would be on strike or if a deal would be reached. And the deal was reached and huzzah. So, it went past the midnight deadline, but they kept talking, and there is now a deal that is up for vote by the membership.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s up for vote by the membership, which means it’s going to be our deal. We’re not going to turn it down. And by all accounts it seems like a pretty good deal. We are actually going to have Chris Keyser, the former president of the Writers Guild and one of the co-chairs of the negotiating committee come on the show. I believe he’s going to come and record with us next week. And he’s going to walk us through it. And he’ll walk us through as much as he can. I mean, ideally he’s going to explain the deal itself to us and how that works. And hopefully he can also give us a little insight in how the actual machinery of the negotiation worked, up to a point. Because of course there are certain things they can’t really talk about, you know, because leverage is a delicate manner. You don’t want to necessarily give away all of your secrets. But I was thrilled with the outcome, certainly.

**John:** I was thrilled with the outcome, too. And one of the things which hopefully Chris will be able to explain to me, because I have a hard time understanding it as a person who writes mostly for film rather than for TV is there’s a change in the definition of how many weeks of work can be ascribed to an episode. And he will talk us through that, because that has a lot to do with the changing way we’re making television and he’s making one of those shows that is in a changed model. So he’ll hopefully be able to talk us through that as well.

**Craig:** That’s the most important change, I think. And it has ramifications not only for the way writers are compensated and how much money they make, but also our pension and healthcare. It’s one of those ripple effect changes. So, yeah, we’ll definitely get into that with Chris.

**John:** Another bit of follow up. Two episodes ago I asked listeners for their advice – what advice would they give to a time traveler whose time machine broke down? You remember this Craig.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** Like you had some basic ideas of stumbling up to a person and asking, hey, what year it is. And seeming like a crazy person. Our listeners, once again, prove themselves to be the best, smartest people in the universe. So, already they started pointed me towards like, you know, OK, here’s how the stars change, so therefore you can figure out based on the shape of the Big Dipper. But they had some more specific things. So I wanted to get into a few of those.

Logan Rap wrote in to say, “If you have your iPhone with you, you can have an offline version of Wikipedia that’s only text but then you have a pretty good sense of history. And that would probably help you out. And, of course, your iPhone would also have a compass. It would help you sort of figure out geography around you.” He also suggested a Wild Edibles app to help you find the 200 edible plants in your area to help you figure out sort of how you could survive. So, if your time machine is broken but you still have a phone, that’s potentially helpful.

**Craig:** OK. Yeah. I mean, I can see that. Personally, I would mostly be using that offline Wikipedia to find out the most painless way to kill myself. As we already pointed out, my strategy is curl up right away.

**John:** Yeah. Perhaps they have like a Poisonous Plants app you can download, so you can figure out what is the quickest, most efficient poison plant you can find that would do it for you.

**Craig:** But that doesn’t – I don’t want any cramping.

**John:** That’s true. Because poison we’ve learned can be incredibly painful.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You want something quick. Honestly, use the compass to find a cliff and jump off of it.

**Craig:** But then I got to deal with the whole falling. I don’t think you quite understand how cowardly I am. I don’t think you’ve gotten it through your head yet. I need a beautiful, quiet, lovely sleep that just, yeah. My time travel nap.

**John:** I get that.

**Craig:** Oh, you do? You’re like, no, no, I understand exactly how pathetic you are.

**John:** I think we all want a nice gentle death. But if a nice gentle death doesn’t come, I just feel like the bungee-less bungee jumping would be a pretty good way out. Because I’ve bungee jumped. And bungee is tremendously fun, especially when you don’t die. But if you’re ghost smack at the end. Eh.

**Craig:** I don’t know. No one really to ask about it is there?

**John:** No, there really isn’t. Renee wrote in to point out that since the earth is 70% water and it’s only had a breathable atmosphere for a small portion of its existence, the chance of my broken time machine landing me someplace where I would survive even minutes are incredible small. So, that was despairing.

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** But she also had a good suggestion. That if I ended up around humans and I couldn’t figure out who these humans were, a portable DNA testing kit could be really helpful. And so once again if I had something kind of like a medical tricorder, I could probably do some DNA testing to figure out what group of humans I was around. That would help sort of narrow it down.

**Craig:** It’s stretching the definition of useful, I got to say. I got to say.

**John:** Yeah. Finally, I want to single out some things that Rich wrote. And so he wanted to point out that for all we know we are surrounded by lost and confused time travelers. So think about how many beggars you’ve seen in your life. How many of them are time travelers? How often have you stopped to give them time travel advice? If not, why not? What could hurt? You could approach that guy and say, hey buddy, today is Friday April 28, 2017. And you’re currently located on the corner of Alameda and Prime in Los Angeles, California, United States of America. I hope that helps you, in case you’re lost. Have a nice day.

**Craig:** I don’t think Rich has actually seen any beggars in his life.

**John:** You don’t think that Rich is guessing correctly about sort of how – you don’t think that the US homeless situation is mostly a result of failed time travel.

**Craig:** It’s the result of failed something. But not – you know, generally speaking homeless people aren’t shy about asking you for things. So, like what year is it – I don’t think they’d have a problem with that.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s fair. You know, I think it’s probably a very small subset of the people you see–

**Craig:** [laughs] Probably.

**John:** The people you see who seem confused in life are just time travelers. There could also just be shy time travelers who aren’t in the right place, but they just don’t kind of know how to ask. And so I would say even sometimes here in Paris there have been times where like I kind of needed to ask a question, but I have just no vocabulary for how to actually ask that question. So I just let the question go unasked and therefore unanswered.

**Craig:** Was the question on the order of where am I and what year is this? Or was it more like, where can I find a place that sells Diet Coke? Sorry Coca Light.

**John:** Oh yeah, Coca Zero is my go-to.

**Craig:** Coca Zero.

**John:** Everywhere sells that. But more on the order of, like for instance, I had to call in to make a doctor’s appointment. And that is one of the worst, most frustrating things. It wasn’t actually even a doctor’s appointment. I needed to call to get the doctor on the phone to ask her a question about something. And they didn’t speak English. And it was just beyond my vocabulary level to actually get through that. And a phone call makes it tough, too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s challenging. So, in some ways aren’t we all shy time travelers at times?

**Craig:** No. In no ways. [laughs]

**John:** That was a reach, even for me. But time travel actually played an important role in this next bit.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** With Chris McQuarrie. Because we went through a lot of different times to try to find a way that we could meet up together to all have a conversation. So, me and Chris in person, because Chris is here in Paris shooting Mission: Impossible 6. And you were going to Skype in. And it kept getting moved because their schedule kept changing and they’re shooting French hours. And so a new time was set and you were not there at that time because of this time and math and stuff got changed and you didn’t get the email.

So, Chris and I spoke for most of this time by ourselves, but then you were there for the last part of it. And so people are going to listen to this conversation with me and Chris, but then Craig gets to join in about three-quarters of the way through. And stays with us through our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** And I emerge in the most Craig way possible.

**John:** Yeah. You’re just suddenly there.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** And to make it extra jarring, we only have the backup audio for the last few minutes. So, I honestly don’t know how we’re going to edit it. So, Matthew, have fun. But we’re going to enjoy this conversation with Chris McQuarrie. It was really great and fun to talk about what he was doing and literally he was coming straight from the set of Mission: Impossible 6, so it was fun to see literally what he was doing that day be reflected in the conversation that we had. So, enjoy this.

Chris McQuarrie is a screenwriter whose credits include The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, Jack Reacher, and Edge of Tomorrow. He’s also written and directed The Way of the Gun, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and the upcoming sixth installment of Mission: Impossible, currently filming in Paris.

**Chris McQuarrie:** That’s a very good introduction.

**John:** So, welcome to Paris. How far are you into shooting in Paris right now?

**Chris:** We are I believe four weeks in.

**John:** That’s a long time to be shooting in Paris. I’m guessing this is a globe-trotting movie that doesn’t all take place in Paris?

**Chris:** No, it does not. But I was determined, unlike the last movie, to spend more time in one location. I went back and I looked at the first movie, which started in Prague, and realized that they’re in Prague for the first half of the movie. So, I sort of pulled back a little bit on the globe-trotting. I think in Rogue Nation I think we might have been in six countries in the first ten minutes of the movie.

**John:** And if you hold to this production schedule, how many countries will you have reached before you’re done shooting this movie?

**Chris:** We’ll only be in three countries.

**John:** That’s great. There’s economy there.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** You’re saving the studio money.

**Chris:** Sorry, no, that’s not true. We will also be – we’ll be in four countries. There’s a little piece in Germany.

**John:** So I think I remember speaking to you after your first directing gig. You did Way of the Gun, and I remember a very specific story you told me in a van on the way up to Sundance where you were talking about dealing with a prop guy about the bags of money and how much would those bags of money weigh. Like the reality of that much money.

**Chris:** Yeah. That was a Benicio del Toro question. Benicio asked me how much does $15 million weigh. Which I had just arbitrarily picked that number. And Benicio was always asking a lot of questions like that. And it was in the middle of a very busy day and I thought, “Who cares?” And he said, “I care. I’m going to have to carry it. So how much does it weigh?” And in the script it was a bag. It was like a suitcase with $15 million in it. So I went to the prop guy, Ian, and I asked him how much does $15 million weigh? He said, “Oh goodness. OK, I’ll come back to you.”

So he came back and he said, “As you have it in the script, $15 million in tens, twenties, and fifties. I’m assuming that it’s even amounts of those three denominations. It would fill 27 printer paper boxes and weigh something like – it was like 1,200 pounds or 1,500 pounds.” It was huge. It was a van full of money. And I said, oh god, we can’t do that. So, how about thousand dollar bills? And he said, “I knew you’d ask me that. They don’t make thousand dollar bills anymore.”

**John:** They don’t.

**Chris:** There was a time when they made them. And, in fact, they’re so rare, they’re worth more than a thousand dollars. And I said, OK, how about hundreds. And he picked up this huge duffel bag, like something you would go skiing with and said, “Each one of these contains $5 million in hundreds. And I suggest you reduce the amount to $5 million and we just make it the one big bag.” And I said, no, I got a better idea, let’s make it – let’s keep it $15 million and then let Ryan and Benicio figure out how to carry it. And that revolutionized the sequence at the end of the movie when obviously the sequence became all about two guys, three bags of money, and every time you get shot in the arm it costs you $5 million because you can’t carry the money.

**John:** That’s why I wanted you on the podcast today. Because it’s that difference between what you wrote as the screenwriter and what you actually encountered as a director. You had one thing in your head as you were writing that scene and you wrote a number in there, the $15 million was a fascinating number. But it wasn’t important to you as you were writing that like what does that actually look like, because that’s a director’s problem.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** And then once you became the director, you had to really dig in on what that was going to be like. And you found an interesting answer because of that problem the screenwriter had given you.

**Chris:** Yes. And I still do that quite a lot. I still run into things where you just sort of cavalierly throw something out there and then the rubber hits the road and you realize, oh, that doesn’t work at all. Or even things that we very carefully plan. Right now, this chase scene that we’re shooting in this movie. We went and picked all these fabulous locations. And planned this whole chase scene. You previs everything out. And then you put Tom Cruise in the location in a car and he drives through so fast, the location is gone in like ten seconds. And so we’ve learned over the course of shooting this sequence when we get to a location we say, “Well the plan is not going to work, because if we do what we plan we’re just going to blow through here. So we have to kind of think of ways to…” But instead of slowing Tom down, we figure out more creative ways to shoot it.

**John:** So this is in your – coming back to a Mission: Impossible film. So you actually had a sense of what it was going to be like the first time. As you came back to write this movie, did your writing change because you had gone through the process of directing one of these beforehand?

**Chris:** Absolutely. Well, my process changed over the course of three of them. Because I did a rewrite on Ghost Protocol. But my rewrite was an onset rewrite. I came in about ten weeks into a 17-week show. And they had a lot of the action, but the story – it was things like that. Things that had been presented and now suddenly reality was hitting that stuff and it just wasn’t gelling. So when I came to the second – the second time I came in, when I came in on Rogue Nation, I said let’s take all the lessons we learned from that movie, let’s have somebody else write a screenplay and I’ll come in and fix it. And Mission: Impossible kind of has a mind of its own.

That script just blew up as soon as we started making small changes to it. It completely fell apart and we had to then write a whole new script. On this movie, I swore I wouldn’t start a movie without a finished screenplay. And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. But, one of the things I learned from that movie, I developed a much more acute sense of what you were going to cut out of the movie. You start to feel a sense of this – I like this scene, but I can easily cut it out of the movie, so I probably should because I definitely will.

And Rebecca Ferguson’s character is back in this movie and her introduction in the movie was originally this page of dialogue when Ethan runs into her at this event. I also am working with a new cinematographer. And we kept talking about shooting things in longer takes, oners, less editing. And I realized that the scene that I had written for the two of them forced me to cut back and forth. And I was very frustrated in the last movie that every time people started talking, it eventually – the movie just stopped and turned into–

**John:** Coverage.

**Chris:** Shot of – just coverage. Just coverage, coverage, coverage. And I thought how do I get out of that. I want the camera to feel lighter. I just want the scenes to feel lighter. So, I realized this scene between Tom and Rebecca was going to just drag me down into coverage. So I started taking away the lines of the scene that weren’t necessary. And one by one I cut away every line until there was nothing left in the scene. And what happens now is Rebecca just bumps into Tom. Tom sees Rebecca. Rebecca sees Tom. And they have this whole moment. There’s a whole story between the two of them and there’s another person standing there. And she can’t say what she wants to say. He can’t say – and they just behave the scene.

And it was really liberating. So we’ve gone in and done a lot of that. We’ve just sort of chipped away.

**John:** That type of change that you’re talking about, is that a change that happens to Chris McQuarrie screenwriter who is there sort of watching the scene in rehearsals? Or at what point? Or was it still the conversation with your cinematographer that you realized I’m just not – as you’re talking through the scenes, like wow, I can’t actually shoot this scene I want to do. So, I’m going to send this back to the screenwriter and get a revision? Where in the process did that kind of change happen?

**Chris:** That happened from the conversation I had with Rob Hardy, I said I want to do a very different Mission: Impossible. The franchise relies on a different director every time. That’s what it’s sort of become known for. And so I want to maintain that, even though I’m coming back. And to that end, I’m going to defer to you on certain things. And Rob said, OK. I said, so how do you like to shoot? He said, “Well, I tend to shoot pretty much on a 35 and a 50mm lens. Everything.” Which terrified me, because I tend to start at 75mm. And so 30 and 50 I reserve for very specific things. He shoots everything. He covers scenes in it.

What was really interesting was on our second day we were shooting this car chase and we were into the hood mounts on the car chase. And Rob pulled out the 100mm lens. And the 135. And he was sort of shocked to find himself compelled to do it.

**John:** Because we don’t have people who necessarily are going to know the differences between these – the long focal length and the short thing. So, the shorter the lens, that feeling of being very close in their space, in a way, but it’s also the longer lens flattens things, makes people look better. There’s reasons for both type of lens.

**Chris:** If you look at a Tony Scott or a Michael Bay film, they’re all shot on long lens. If you look at a Sidney Lumet film, it’s all shot on wide lens. A wide lens, like a 50mm, is sort of like the human eye. And a 135 is a very long, very sexy lens that really blurs out the background and makes you very, very present. And, of course, you have to get very far back from somebody just to shoot them in a close up. It’s a very intimate lens.

**John:** It’s the real version of the iPhone 7 Portrait Mode, where it’s blurring out the background for you.

**Chris:** That’s exactly right. Well, actually, Portrait Mode in the iPhone 7 is like a 75mm lens. That’s kind of the effect that it gives you. What Rob and I have been doing is – he’s pushing me into wider lenses and the movie is pushing him into longer lenses. And both of our styles, we were determined to come to this with a specific style. And the movie and the action have just said, no, you’re going to do this. But it makes you more aware when you’re writing a scene. If I get into coverage, I’m going to have to start using the 75, because it just makes a nice close up. But if I don’t include a lot of dialogue in that scene, if there’s just behavior, then you actually want a wider lens. And suddenly your movie looks different from the last movie you shot.

So that’s what we’ve been kind of doing is I’ve been taking away the writing, the explicit writing in my storytelling. Again, I was determined to have – in Rogue Nation, in the middle of the movie, there’s a huge data dump. You know, they’ve had all these misadventures and now in the middle of the movie you have to explain why everything that has happened up to now is happening. I was determined not to do that this time. There’s no getting away from it. It’s right on page 60, characters start explaining why were you there and why did you do this and who are you loyal to. But we found ways to do them more elegantly, shorter scenes, to have a little more fun with it.

**John:** Now, if you were just the director or just the screenwriter, there’d be a conversation between the two of you, but there’s just you. So who else do you have these conversations with as you’re trying to figure out the narrative lenses through which you’re going to make these choices? I mean, who are the other people?

**Chris:** Well, obviously Rob Hardy, cinematographer, and first and foremost Tom. And Tom has a very distinct sense of what Mission is. He has a very distinct sense of what Mission isn’t. And Tom communicates in emotional terms. He’s not a guy who comes in and says, no, you have to do this in a Mission: Impossible movie. In fact, the only thing you have to do in a Mission: Impossible movie is Tom has to get a mission somewhere in the beginning of the movie. That trope is kind of the thing that differentiates Mission: Impossible. That’s really his only rule.

**John:** That’s sort of the contract with the audience you’ve made is that there’s going to be a mission assigned at some point.

**Chris:** Yes. And we have a really fun one at the beginning of this one which we’re very excited about. And it takes you in a direction that it hasn’t quite gone before. We’re quite excited about that. But then also getting back to your question, the other actors. The way the movie tends to come together, there’s a pretty good idea what the story is and what the screenplay is. And we hire actors with an idea of where their character is going. But what Tom and I like to do is work with the actor and on the set start to say, “Well, I’m feeling more of this from you.” For example, Vanessa Kirby’s character in the story started as one thing, and during our conversations, not even rehearsals, but costume fittings and props and things like that we started to play with is your character this – is this a good character or is this a bad character? Is it a character we like to see being bad, or is it a character we want to see get her comeuppance? And we played with all these different shades of the character until we found just who she was. And then on the first day we shot with her, that all proved to be wrong.

And Vanessa just found this beautiful tone that she played with Tom. And now I know how to write the rest of the movie.

We’re also very fortunate in that as long as we’re in Paris – we’re here for almost seven weeks, I only have three dialogue scenes in Paris. Everything else is action. All of the – the interior action in Paris will be shot in London. And what that allows me to do is play with the characters on a very, very, very minute scale and start to find what the movie looks like and know that, oh, I don’t have to explain what happens in this scene until the end of the summer when I’m in London. So it allowed us to sort of prioritize what did I really need to know in Paris before I left and what does that tie me into. And what we’re always trying to do is leave ourselves as many outs as possible.

**John:** So while you’re shooting this stuff, you are also cutting. There’s somebody who is getting all this information and cutting. So you have an editor who is working on this and–

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** He or she is giving you some sense of what this movie is looking like and feeling like. Are you going in to watch those cuts of sequences along the way?

**Chris:** Not at this stage. Eddie Hamilton, who cut the last movie, and who cut both Kingsman movies, really brilliant editor, is in London, because he was finishing up Kingsman as this movie started. He’ll join us in New Zealand and then I’ll be back in London. But he calls me – if there’s something particular that is missing from a scene and he knows we’re still at that location, he’ll call me and say get a close up of this, or this thing was out of focus. But for the most part Eddie just calls and says keep shooting.

**John:** Great. Go back ten years ago and did you think you’d be directing big blockbuster movies?

**Chris:** No.

**John:** You were a writer of big movies and I thought you were at the apex of writing those big blockbuster movies. And I sort of assumed you’d keep doing that. So I was surprised that you ended up wanting to do – wanting to direct them. What was the change?

**Chris:** Somebody asked me. I think really it was – well, I directed The Way of the Gun in ’99 in the hopes that The Way of the Gun would be a stepping stone that would – I tried to do what Rian Johnson did with his career. I was going to direct the little movie, and then a slightly bigger movie, and a slightly bigger movie until I got to direct the big movie I wanted to direct. And that first movie was not successful. You could even go so far as to call it a tremendous bomb.

I guess it’s not a tremendous bomb only in that it wasn’t a big enough movie to be considered a tremendous bomb. [laughs]

**John:** Absolutely. I have one of those, too.

**Chris:** Yeah. But people really reacted quite angrily to it. No matter what I did over the next seven years to get another movie off the ground, I couldn’t. And I was working on two fronts. I was working as a rewrite guy and I was writing my own stuff, trying to get it made as a director, and was getting nowhere.

And it wasn’t until Valkyrie when I let go of something that was mine to direct and opted to be the producer on that movie. And as a producer, I learned so much more about both writing and directing then I ever did writing and directing my own movie.

**John:** Talk about the difference. Because when you’re doing Way of the Gun, you had the responsibilities for everything. So we talked about the bag of money. You’re dealing with all the department heads. You’re making those thousand choices a day, which always sort of terrified me about directing. But what was it about producing a big movie like Valkyrie, because it is just a fundamentally different beast for making a smaller movie like Way of the Gun? What was the change in Valkyrie?

**Chris:** Well, yes, the size and scope of the movie and also dealing with Tom Cruise, who at the time I did not know, and couldn’t safely assume anything about him. And so my intention was to take a producing credit for having put the movie together. But not actually go make the movie. I really didn’t want to do it. And Paula Wagner, who was still with Tom at the time, was running United Artists, which was the studio making the movie. Paula took me out to lunch to tell me they were making the movie and said, “Now, I understand you’re producing the film.” My intention was to say, “Well, yes…”

**John:** But you’re really going to do that.

**Chris:** Yeah. But no, I’m not… – And I sensed immediately how I answered that question would have a profound effect on my career. And instead of saying no, I said, “I am now.” And she said, “Good, because I’ve been on set with Tom for the last 25 years. This is the first time I won’t be able to be on set with him. So I want you to be there as Tom’s guy. I need somebody to be there day to day with Tom.”

And so I found myself very suddenly thrust into this position, which I had never anticipated. And Tom quite graciously took me under his wing. And he understood that my relationship with Bryan Singer was such that I could communicate with Bryan more effectively and probably with more force than Tom could. It allowed Tom to have a very comfortable relationship with Bryan. He never had to push Bryan. All he had to do was create with Bryan. And then he would come to me and say, “Hey, here’s what I think we should be doing.” So Tom and I worked together very well on that movie. And that sort of translated into the next thing, and the next thing.

The next job was we worked on a draft of The Tourist together, which is how I ended up on that movie. He dropped out of The Tourist and then called me up to Ghost Protocol. And he called me up to Ghost Protocol after reading Jack Reacher, which was not something to which he was originally attached.

**John:** And Jack Reacher was a project you adapted from the book originally?

**Chris:** Yeah. Don Granger, who was also at UA, and who had been at Cruise-Wagner before that, he’s at Skydance now. Don Granger saw the writing on the wall. Saw that UA was not going to be a going concern. And he said I’ve got this series of books at Cruise-Wagner and I think this is the best prospect at getting a franchise made. So, he offered me the movie and I said I’ll do it on the condition that the studio offers me the movie to direct. I’m not going to ask for permission to direct movies anymore. I’ve been doing it for ten years and getting nowhere. And they did. So I handed Tom that script to read as the producer. And he called me the next day and said, “Script is great. I need you to get on a plane and come up to Vancouver right now. We’re working on Mission: Impossible and I need your help.”

So now I was thrust into a very big movie, bigger than Valkyrie, and it was a movie that more than halfway through the show was in a critical state of confusion as to what the story was. And having worked on Valkyrie and having had that crash course in moviemaking, I now understood, OK, here are the resources I have. Here are the scenes that have been shot. Here are the scenes that haven’t been shot. Here’s the sets they haven’t built. Here’s the sets they haven’t struck. Here are the roles that they haven’t cast yet.

And so I had to make a puzzle out of things you had and things you didn’t have yet. And I could only reshoot what I still had sets for. Like sets they hadn’t torn down. And it gave me this sort of creative puzzle to solve. My first six days of my one week on the movie – I was originally only supposed to go for a week – my first six days were just meeting with department heads and saying, OK, well these are the sets you still have. Can I get rid of this set? Can I move these resources somewhere else if I have this idea? Is there something you can build? And so that really gave me, without ever having to stop and think about how daunting the task was, it gave me this fundamental grassroots understanding of how those big movies functioned. So that when it came my time to do it, I had a slightly better – I had a better understanding of the allocation of resources. And it’s very interesting that that career trajectory is the exception and not the rule. For me to have made an $8.5 million movie, didn’t make another movie for 12 years. That was a $60 million movie. With Valkyrie in the middle, which was like $70 million. But I wasn’t directing. And that the budgets continued to get bigger over time, now what you have is a guy directs a $5 million. The studio says, “Hey, that movie cost $5 million, made $60 million. Let’s give him $100 million and he’ll make a billion.”

That’s a very, very, very hard turn for a lot of filmmakers to make. And now I have another career, which is coming on to those movies and supporting that director and saying, OK, so now you’re making your big movie, here’s what’s important. Because what happens with a lot of those guys is they haven’t gone through the trial by fire where they realize there’s only so much reinventing the wheel can take. They’re still coming at it like an indie filmmaker, but somebody has given them $200 million and a giant franchise. They don’t really want to believe that they’re making mass entertainment and they struggle against that. And I’ve seen two kinds of filmmakers in that. There are the filmmakers who very quickly listen to reason and adapt and survive. And then there are the ones who just their movies get taken away from them.

**John:** Yeah. We can think of the ones whose movies got taken away, or the really bad scenarios there.

**Chris:** Yeah.

**John:** So, if you are coming in to be a director whisperer on a project, at what point is there a realization that there’s going to be a problem? Like are they bringing you in right when that person is hired on to say like this person is going to be a consigliere to you? Or it’s like something has gone horribly awry and now let’s get Chris McQuarrie there to help?

**Chris:** There’s a sweet spot I call 4-in and 4-out. If you’re four weeks out from shooting, or four weeks into shooting, you’re in this zone where you’re so freaked out you’ll do anything the doctor says. If you’re any deeper into production, you kind of get entrenched and you get blinders on and you’re afraid to change anything. And if you’re too far out, you’re afraid to change anything because you think, oh, it’s too daunting a task. And there was one movie in particular that’s coming out. I’m very interested to see it. I won’t say its name. I begged the director not to go in the direction he was going. Because I really did believe in the material and I thought it was wonderful. And there was one specific plot element that completely degraded the main character of the film. And I said if you just take this thing away, your movie will become really powerful.

But there was a visual idea. Either it was clearly an obsession with this particular idea, and there was a refusal to recognize that this very idea that gives you one visual aspect of the movie is going to tear the movie down. And he said, “Well, it’s just too much work.” And I said, “You’ve got nine months. You don’t realize how many times you can reinvent this movie.” And more importantly, because of the movies I’d worked on, I come into a movie like that and say, “I’m not going to change anything about your movie. I’m not going to change the sets. I’m not going to introduce new characters. I’m going to take the resources you have and kind of reconfigure your movie to give it a more emotional journey.” Because that’s really all I care about.

It took me a long time to learn that. I was an information guy. And it was what I was telling the audience. I was a writer who was all about dialogue. And I’ve since learned about emotional drag. That’s my catchphrase.

**John:** That 4 weeks in/4 weeks out thing is really interesting because you look at these filmmakers who are coming from – like you and I on our first movies, like those were four weeks, you’re almost done with your movie on a $5 movie.

**Chris:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it’s a very different thing. But you know we’ve both also been involved with these movies that just shoot for forever. And you and I both have helped out on those movies where you come in where the train is already running, but generally if we’re coming in as a screenwriter we’re just there to fix sort of the visible screenwriting problems. And so we’re not doing the thing of what you’re talking about with Mission: Impossible where you actually had to sort of talk to all the department heads and really get their buy-in.

A couple times we’ve had guests on the show, Drew Goddard, or Damon Lindelof recently, who talked about the big opportunity, the thing that changed everything was coming into a project that was in crisis. It was, you know, the TV show that was going down, that didn’t have any more scripts. In this case it was a movie that was sort of swirling around. And that’s also been true in my career. It’s the editing rooms where they couldn’t find the movie that I could come back in and actually really help.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** And those are the moments. And if you haven’t had both the courage to step up when those things happen, but also the education to sort of know what are the right questions to ask, you know, how to push for the best thing. It can be really daunting. And if I were that filmmaker that you’re coming in to help, I would be scared to ask for help. Because that’s an admission of failure. That’s an admission that someone made a mistake in hiring me to do this job.

**Chris:** Yes. It’s the moment in Terminator when he says, “Come with me if you want to live.” You walk in and you say to that director, “Here’s what’s happening on your movie and here’s what’s going to happen.”

There was one director in particular, his movie is in trouble, he was four weeks in. There was going to be a big change. The script was going to be gutted. There was a lot of panic. And I said, “Can I just go in and talk to him for half an hour before you guys all come in so that he doesn’t feel like I’m the studio hatchet man?” And I have had that happen, too. I have had studios try to sort of manipulate that. They try to position me as being the hatchet man and I won’t do it. I’ll go to bat for the director every time.

So I walked in and I told him here’s what’s going to happen. They’re going to come in and they’re going to say these are the things we want in the movie. And a lot of them are ideas that I have suggested for how to fix your movie. I’m going to strongly urge you to say, “I’ve heard everything that Chris has suggested. I don’t like any of it. I don’t think any of it works. But if you think that’s what the movie needs, I look forward to seeing how it turns out.” I said, what you will then do is you will put the responsibility that has been placed on you onto the producers. And the producers will feel that you are working to make their movie. The studio will feel that you’re working to serve what they ultimately need served. And he didn’t do it.

And we had another meeting and half an hour before I went in and said, “Now remember, just say this, and the pressure will come off of you.” And he didn’t do it again. And eventually everything he was afraid would manifest itself manifested itself. And I don’t even think by the time he was through the process he even recognized that his movie had sort of been taken over. His worst nightmare sort of happened. That was the other thing. When you’re talking about working on those movies on those – those movies that are falling apart, you have an emotional detachment that you wouldn’t have if it was your own story.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Chris:** You’re able to come into it and say, “Well, there’s a clarity that I have on everybody else’s movies that I will never have on my own movie.” I’m dying right now in the middle of Mission: Impossible, trying to figure out the turn on page 70. I know what happens in Act Three. I just can’t – know what’s supposed to happen, but I can’t quite figure out how to get there. If it wasn’t my movie, I would parachute in and just be like, oh, you just have to do this, and you know, and it’s just so much easier when it’s not your baby.

**John:** Can I ask you, a thing that’s happened to me over only the past few years where I will get on something that I will get stuck and I just can’t get past it. And I would never ask for help, but I have started asking for help. And so like just this last week with this book I’m doing, there was this one thing that I couldn’t get to work. And I was like you know who would actually know the answer to this thing, my friend Lisa. She will know the answer to this. And so I just called Lisa and I described the situation. And she absolutely had the answer. Do you call anybody? Do you bring anybody else onto–?

**Chris:** I call everybody. I’m going to call you right after this. [laughs] I have specific people that I call all the time. And we all kind of get stumped together. Because the problem with something like Mission, the action is dictating the narrative. And I was determined to change that on this movie. And I started with that. I started with more of an emotional story for this character and more of a character arc within it. It’s definitely more of an emotional journey for Ethan Hunt in that movie. But then the action comes in. And the ambitions of that action, so there’s a sequence at the end of the movie which is fabulous. It’s never been done. It’s all photo real. It’s going to be incredible. You then have to create the contrivances for that sequence to happen. And then there’s only a few locations in the world where you can shoot that sequence. So suddenly you find yourself going, well, I have this resource and that resource, and I have to put them in my movie. Why are they in my movie? And now I’ve got to explain that.

So suddenly you find yourself writing. And you know how it is. Especially when you’re writing for studios, you get to a place where you go, god, it would be – I know what I should write. If I didn’t have to turn right here and I could turn left, I’d know where this movie would go. And that is kind of the – that’s the thing you’re always struggling.

**John:** You’re trying to find a way to finesse it so it feels like it’s a natural turn, that it’s not just – and now we cut to a new sequence, because we all know the directors who would just like, OK, this is my big – on the wall here I have all the different sort of sequences and like find a way to connect them all together. Go. And those are the jobs I despise and ultimately get out of because I don’t want to just be the person who is stringing those things together.

**Chris:** Oh, it’s soul-sucking work. It really is.

**John:** It pays well, but it kills you. And you’re always just…

**Chris:** Yeah.

**John:** You’re responsible for just creating a trailer for the moments that are happening in front of you. It’s maddening.

**Chris:** Yes. Well, it’s funny you say that, because that’s another thing that we think about now. That since just before Rogue Nation, the lesson I learned, having had fights with the studio about the marketing of Jack Reacher, my first meeting on Rogue Nation I just went to marketing and said, “Tell me what to do, tell me what you need so that I’m not fighting with you.” And that has evolved for me. So that in this movie, Tom and I have a rule, you give marketing one shot a day. Every day you get a trailer shot. It’s like doesn’t matter–

**John:** That’s great.

**Chris:** And you look at it and go, yep, that could be in a trailer. OK, send it away. And then they’re happy. They’re invested in your movie as opposed to you’re fighting them. But we also know that movies like this need lines like, “You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond.” You know, you just – I don’t know what that means in the context of the rest of the movie. I don’t ever particularly feel that he is a kite in a hurricane in that movie. But the sexiness of that line in a trailer is really effective. And so you develop a sense for where those lines might go in a movie. And we have little placeholders.

There’s a scene between Tom Cruise and Sean Harris in this movie and we have a blank space there were it’s like that’s where we know the villain is going to say something that is going to communicate the story of the movie in that one sound bite. I never really thought that way until this franchise.

**John:** Well, if you think about people who run TV shows, they have to think about this episode of television that they’re making, but they have to be thinking of the whole series. They have to be thinking of like how am I going to keep this thing on the air. And it sort of sounds like part of what you’re doing is that realization that you’re responsible not only for this two hours of entertainment, but you’re responsible for this giant ship that is going to be sailing through its berth and the success of that. And so it’s not just these two hours of film, it’s everything around it. It’s this universe of marketing around it that you also have to be aware of. And from an early time. You can’t just like make your movie then get involved with the marketing.

**Chris:** Yes. And what is Mission. It’s the life of whatever this thing is, so that your movie leaves it so that another chapter in the franchise can exist. And I guess that’s where jumping the shark comes in. You know, you worry all the time. Am I taking this in a way that it can’t go? And we had a big conversation about tone. Because Brad Bird really changed the tone of the franchise and Rogue Nation embraced that tone completely. At the beginning of this I said to Tom, “I don’t think we can do that three in a row. I think now it’s going to become cute. I think we need to take it another direction still.” And we did.

But now we find ourselves going, you know, are we going where Bond went where Bond became–

**John:** Dark and serious.

**Chris:** Serious. It’s another kind of tone. Which, by the way, has not hurt their bottom line at all. They’ve really found their place. But we can’t go there. We were sort of laughing because we were looking at Rogue Nation and saying, “Well thanks, Bond, for not doing that anymore, so we’ll do it.” Now we’re looking at it and going, “But we can’t keep doing that.” We suddenly hit that same wall and understood why Bond went the way they did. And we’re at this kind of emotional crossroads with the franchise saying well how dramatic can you take Mission? It’s not going to a dark place. It’s going to a more emotionally dramatic place.

**John:** When we were making Charlie’s Angels, when we started making the second one, I talked to the team and I described it as like I really want to approach this as we made an amazing pilot and now we’re going to make that first episode of the TV show that actually – of the series that really is the series. Where we sort of learned everything from the pilot and now we’re going to make the most amazing one. And we didn’t. Spoiler. It was as much of a trouble and more so than the first one.

But that was sort of the fantasy. You want to be able to make the sort of movie series. Marvel is able to do it remarkably well. DC, yet to see whether they’re going to be able to make a franchise-y series out of the things they’re trying to do. But it’s laudable. You understand why people want to do it.

**Chris:** Well, DC has a tough road to hoe because they’ve got to do something different than Marvel. Marvel has staked a claim so strongly in a very specific tone. And Marvel has Kevin Feige, who is not a traditional studio head. He’s not a traditional producer. He is a producer of the old school. That’s what producers used to be like in Hollywood. They were the guys who came in and said this is the movie. I guess the closest analogue in something other than comic book movies is somebody like a Scott Rudin who really he owns the material and he is a filmmaker in his own right and has specific control.

Warner Bros has to do something to differentiate itself from that. And what is that? There’s Christopher Nolan’s Batman, but that’s not a universe. That’s one character. Whereas Iron Man and the Marvel universe sort of set the tone for all those other movies. I mean, if you had told me even a year before it came out that Captain America would work as a movie, or that Thor would work as a movie, that I’d find those characters appealing, that I’d actually find Captain America one of the more appealing characters in the Marvel universe. I just would have laughed at you. And we had grown up seeing so many bad attempts inn these really cheesy TV movie ways.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen some of those Captain Marvel movies or–

**John:** They’re amazing.

**Chris:** Oh my god. Oh my god. So, it will be very interesting to see how DC defines themselves.

**John:** So, switching just for our last topic here, we just finished the negotiations for the WGA and so there’s not going to be a strike.

**Chris:** Thank god.

**John:** What would have happened if a strike had occurred while you were making this movie? Like what do you do?

**Chris:** Well, we had an emergency plan in place, assuming that if there was going to be a strike. On the day that the contract ran out, we were hedging our bets and saying there will probably be a ten-day extension. There wasn’t the feeling that it was acrimonious and that a strike was just going to happen that moment. So, I had a friend who is a writer friend of mine who I have worked with on other movies and he was on deck. And if there was an extension, he was ready to get on a plane, fly out, and during that ten days we were going to generate as many pages as we possibly could. And then we figured the lights were going to go out.

**John:** So you get past your page 70 thing. You just have something you can shoot at page 70.

**Chris:** You had to have something you could shoot.

**John:** Our friend Aline Brosh McKenna calls that the Rocky Shoals. It’s that point where the movie is transitioning from sort of one thing before it becomes that third act.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** And it’s often a challenge in scripts, but it’s often a challenge in cuts. So I sympathize.

**Chris:** Yeah. It’s funny, on the last one, that wasn’t the problem. On the last one it was how does this movie end. I know the ending of the movie quite vividly. I don’t know – there’s this weird middle bit that’s happening in London. And I know what the last five pages of it are. I know there’s a confrontation that Ethan has at the end of that, which is this scene that I really love. And what happened was when we sensed that the strike was coming, I had all of these action scenes that had been storyboarded and worked out and in many cases prevised, but no one had ever written a page of those sequences.

There was something like 30 pages of material that existed in concept. We were building sets and rigs and all sorts of things. I just didn’t have them in script form. So I had this friend – the storyboard artist called him and said here’s everything we’re doing. And he took that 30 pages off of my docket. He wasn’t creating anything, but he was writing it in script form so that I could more quickly rewrite it. And he wrote this one scene, but not in any way, shape, or form the way I would have shot it, but inspired this idea where I was like, oh my god, I’ve got this really fun idea. So we know what that sequence is now. Or at least we know how that sequence ends. I just don’t know how it begins.

**John:** One of the things that was a big topic of the WGA negotiations was the move to shorter seasons and sort of how writers were being held for a very long time on these shorter seasons. And their writing fees was being applied against producing fees. But we see also a change happening in features where there are these mini rooms where they are bringing together a bunch of screenwriters, some really high levels, some newbies, and they’re working through a giant property. So they’ll take–

**Chris:** Transformers.

**John:** Transformers was an early example of that, where they’ll say, OK, we’re going to spend four weeks and figure out Transformers and generate, you know, a TV series and three movies and we’re going to figure out what this all is. Where do you see yourself fitting into that universe?

**Chris:** I believe you can create all of the Transformers stuff you want. You can build out the whole universe. You can finish all the screenplays. It goes back to the very beginning of the conversation we were having. When the rubber hits the road, that’s all going to change. They’re going to call you. They’re going to call me. They’re going to call Drew. They’re going to call somebody in at some point and go, “None of this works. It was all great in theory, but we just suddenly…”

An actor drops out. Or the budget changes. And things happen. What I try to impress upon writers going into it now, I believe the future belongs to the writer-producer. That is not to say you have to be named a producer on the movie. But that you need to be able to function on a level where you are – you need to understand editing. You need to understand elements of physical production. The more you understand that, the more valuable you will be to those people. The more you’re selling yourself and not your writing.

Writers right now – and I did it for a long, long time – tend to believe I’m going to write this script and the script is the commodity. It’s not. It’s your ability to write a script that is the commodity. The truth of the matter is, if everybody could write they’d do it. They wouldn’t call us. The fact that the strike was going to happen and had people nervous, if we went on strike, movies just – nobody would write it. It’s a lonely, miserable, very difficult particular skill.

And everybody thinks they can do it. I think the same way everybody feels like playing guitar looks like it would be easy.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. Yeah, just pick it up. Just strumming.

**Chris:** Well, yeah, you teach me the basics. You teach me a couple of chords and I’m like, oh, this is very easy. Then show me Van Halen and say do that. And, by the way, do it with two weeks before you’re going on stage. In those writer’s rooms and things like that, this thing with the television seasons that they’re dealing with now. The nature of television is changing and it created a really prickly situation in this atmosphere with the strike.

I can see the studios looking at it and saying, “Well, yeah, now there are only ten episodes. There used to be 22 and now there’s ten. Why should we pay you more if there’s only ten?” And we’re saying, “But wait, you’re taking us off the market for this much time.”

The studio’s argument is going to be, “Go and create your own show.” It’s going to thin the herd out. It’s going to define who those writer-producers are. And I think what it’s going to do is it’s going to shape writer’s opinions of themselves. Writers have been trained to believe that they are simultaneously necessary and totally dependent. That you can’t make a movie without a screenplay, but I can’t get my screenplay made unless you buy it and validate me. And now you’re at a place where you can be more a part of the process.

Here’s the dirty little secret, and it’s something you know better than anybody. A lot of directors don’t know how to direct. They simply don’t know how to do it. They have some specific skill or some specific vision, or a team around them that helped them, but of great many of them don’t really understand the fundamentals of storytelling as much as they understand some specific visual style.

As a writer who understands editing, you will be invaluable to that director. You may not get the glory. You may not get the credit, but if those things aren’t important to you, if being valuable is what’s important to you, you will always work. And that was really the big change for me in my career. I wanted very much to be in control of my own destiny. And by letting go of that control, my destiny has become that much more in my control.

You were asking me at the beginning, you know, how did you – did you ever expect that you would be directing these blockbusters. I very distinctly remember when I was trying to get Valkyrie made, and I thought Valkyrie was going to be a little movie, no one would read it. It didn’t matter who I was or where I came from. They’d hear it’s about the German generals who, and they were done. They didn’t care.

When Bryan Singer attached himself, people were then offering to make it without having to read it. And I had a very painful realization which was I’ll never be at the level to direct the things that I really want to do. Booth and Valkyrie and The Last Mission and things like that. All my history stuff. Because I’m never going to direct X-Men. And X-Men gets you to a level where you can step down to do a Valkyrie. I’m just never going to get there. So I let go of that dream. And in doing that I became a producer on Valkyrie, which led to rewriting Mission: Impossible, which led to Jack Reacher, Edge of Tomorrow. And on Edge of Tomorrow, Tom said, “You should direct the next Mission.”

So I never aimed for that target. I just showed up at work saying how can I help you make your film. How can I help you make your movie better? And not worrying about where the path was taking me. And at the beginning of this process, there was a thing in the press the movie fell apart. The movie was shut down for a while. It was shut down over contract stuff. And when it did, I felt this very strange relief. First, I was freaked out, for a minute. But I remember hanging up the phone. I got the call and I was in New Hampshire at a friend’s house, where we visit them in the summer, and I was in the same room that I had been in ten years to the week when Bryan Singer called and said he wanted to make Valkyrie. And my career took off again.

And I thought to myself, wow, that was – I’ve been working with Tom for ten years. We’ve made nine movies in ten years in some capacity. I’ve worked on nine movies with him. That’s a pretty good run. You can’t take that for granted. That part of your life is over now. Because Tom is going to go off and do something and I’m going to go off and do something else. And who knows when our stars will align again.

And for those two weeks, I was looking at a completely different life for myself. So that when Tom called me back up two weeks later and said, “Hey, we’re back on,” I went, I don’t know. I don’t really know about it. I’m not sure that’s what my future is. I had gone back to London to pack up my apartment. Because I had moved my family back to LA. My girls were in school. Two weeks into school I get the call that we’re back. And he goes, “Let’s go for a walk and we’ll talk about it.” We go walk around Hyde Park. It’s one of the reasons Tom loves London. He can just go out and walk places and everybody is very respectful.

And we talked all about it. And my apprehension and sort of the catharsis I’d been through. And he said, he goes, “Look, you’ll do whatever you want to do. You want to make this movie, make this movie. You don’t want to make it, don’t make it.” He goes, “I’ll always work with you. We’ll work on something else together. This is a go movie. That’s all I’m going to say. I don’t know what else you got going on, but this movie is going.” And that’s a really hard thing to achieve. And he was right. The other stuff that I wanted to do wasn’t immediately happening. Still isn’t happening. So, I got back on the train.

And now when I go to work in the morning, there’s days you get up and you don’t want to go. Don’t want to go to set. You’re not ready to face the material. And that the lesson I’ve learned is the days that I don’t want to go turn out to be the best days. Those are the days where you’re just like, “I don’t know what to shoot, and I don’t know how to do it.” And you find yourself creating this shot. And it builds, and builds, and builds. And you end up just starting with a problem and you walk away from it, just shot by shot, having created one neat little moment in your movie. That’s just a great feeling.

And the fact that these movies afford you the opportunity to do that on such a grand scale is really, really fun.

**John:** Comparing that to your life as a screenwriter, there are definitely days where you or I, we don’t want to sit down and write that thing. It’s almost always torture to actually get me at the computer.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** But at least with the director, you have a call time on the sheet. Like someone is going to pick you up and take you there. And then you’re going to be responsible for those decisions. And that’s terrifying and there are definitely days I don’t want to get in the van, but once you’re there, there’s a whole bunch of people there who are there to help you. And there’s at least some plan for what you are supposed to do. There was some assignment you were given. Like this is the thing that is theoretically on the call sheet. So, we got this location, we got these people, it should be something like this. And you can figure it out.

And, you know, some of my favorite days in directing were things had gone horribly wrong, or there’s a rainstorm and it won’t match cut into anything else, but we have to shoot this. It’s the only day on this location. And you just make it work. It’s going back to remembering like, OK, what is this actually supposed to be about. What is here that we can use to do this and how can we sort of make this problem seem like a solution?

**Chris:** Screenwriting is pushing a rock up a hill. And directing is running downhill with the rock behind you. [laughs] That’s really what it is. It’s going, and it’s going to crush you if you don’t run. But, also, the other night we were – I think this was in our first or second week of shooting. We were at the Grand Palais. We had this big sequence at the Grand Palais. We had all these extras. And extras in France get paid quite a bit of money. So, you had to pick and choose what nights you had a lot of extras. And finally we were shooting outside the Grand Palais. There’s a scene where Tom and Vanessa Kirby and another character come – and Henry Cavill all come running out of the Grand Palais.

And there’s a big event inside. And that night there’s 150 extras. And we put the camera in front of the building and Tom and Vanessa and Henry come walking out and they’re just like three people and 150 extras barely – it’s just deserted. And you came from this big event inside to suddenly – it’s so big. There was nothing you can do.

And the cinematographer loved the building. And he said, “But this is great. This is a great shot of the Grand Palais.” And I said, “But it’s deserted. How do we make 150 people look like a thousand people?” And instead of shooting the outside of the building looking in, we went inside the building and put a long lens on the camera and created a narrow funnel of people. And had the actors rushing through the door with all the extras coming towards you. And it turned into this – the fun of it was we were shooting Mission: Impossible, but we were making an independent film. Where like I only have 150 people. What do I do to make this shot big?

And we had the best time that night. That was like really one of the more fun attacks we had. It was great.

**John:** So, at the end of our podcast we often do a One Cool Thing where we recommend one thing that people should check out. My One Cool Thing this week is a new tool from Google called AutoDraw, which is actually just madness and wonderful. So, it’s just a sketching program, but you can just freehand draw with the cursor and draw something that looks like a terrible horse and it will provide good line images of a horse, or it will guess basically what you’re trying to draw and give you a much better version of it.

**Chris:** That sounds crazy.

**John:** It’s just our modern computers doing smart things. And so it’s just Autodraw.com.

**Craig:** I’m going to stump AutoDraw. I guarantee you. I’m that bad. I have the drawing skills of a stroke victim. There’s no way. I’m going to try it. I’m going to try it. I’m going to try and draw a horse and I guarantee you it’s going to send back, “We’re you thinking of a transaxle? We’re you thinking of a pill?”

**John:** It pulls up along the top a bunch of images that sort of could be like what you’re trying to draw, so at least you get a sense of like what it thought you might be trying to draw. Like earlier today I was trying to draw a skeleton, but it kept giving me like lobster people. And it’s like, you know, I could see why they thought I was trying to draw a lobster.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, lobster people are certainly more frequently drawn than skeletons. So that makes sense. I think I’m going to try this and Google is just going to direct me to a site, You May Be Having a Stroke. And that’s useful.

My One Cool Thing this week is a game, a little tiny game. The best games for your phone are the little tiny stupid ones that do one thing. They don’t try and do a whole lot of things. Remember Dots, remember that one? Where you’d make the square with the dots? Did you ever play that?

**John:** Two Dots, yeah.

**Craig:** Two Dots. There you go. Two Dots. That was fun because it was incredibly simple. Well, so these folks have come up with a game called Zip Zap. I hate that name. I hate it. But, the game is so brilliant. It’s the simplest thing. You have basically – they’ll show you a couple of little girders. They look like little Lego type girders. And one of them if you tap on the screen – no swiping. Swiping does nothing. If you tap on the screen, you can make one of them contract in a certain way. And the whole point of this is to just move this thing around towards a goal.

It’s so simple. And at first you’re like, this is great, because I’m good at it. And then very quickly you’re like, oh, god, oh no. But it’s all brilliant. The level designs are all brilliant. And it’s the kind of game where you can just – it’s very level-based. I’m on like 3-16 right now. Great time waster. And it’s free.

**John:** Yay. We like that. I actually made it to the third screen of Zip Zap and gave up because it got to be really maddening. There’s a lot of times where like you’re trying to flip it in a certain way and then you’re going to – it’s like my daughter flipping the water bottle stuff. It just drove me crazy after a while.

**Craig:** Is your daughter doing the spinner thing? The Fidget Spinner?

**John:** The Fidget Spinner has not made it to France yet. And thank goodness.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s here, buddy.

**Chris:** The thing I was going to tell you about is the Fidget Cube.

**John:** Oh, he’s got the Fidget Cube.

**Craig:** Oh, Fidget Cube. Yeah.

**Chris:** Somebody had just given me this as a gift. Here is the Fidget Cube.

**John:** Can I get a picture of you holding the Fidget Cube to prove we were here?

**Chris:** You can take a picture of me holding the Fidget Cube. Somebody gave this to me on set and I had read about it as–

**John:** It was a Kickstarter, yeah.

**Chris:** And like most things on Kickstarter, I go that looks cool. That’ll never get made. And sure enough, it did. Somebody gave this to me on set and it has been with me every day since. And when I’m nervous, which you quite often are on the set, you’re just – time is getting more and more horrible and you’re just getting agitated, I am constantly playing with this thing. And it’s actually quite satisfying. Have you seen one of these?

**John:** I haven’t seen it in person. But I’ll play it.

**Craig:** The Fidget Cube, I think wasn’t the initial application for people with ADHD?

**John:** Yeah. But we all sort of have something.

**Chris:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No, no, no, McQuarrie has it. There’s no sort of.

**Chris:** I don’t know what you would describe what I have as.

**Craig:** It’s advanced. It’s AADHD.

**Chris:** But my problem isn’t the hyper activity part. I don’t think you can call me hyper active. I’m actually hyper lazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what you have? You have Attention Deficit Hypo Active Disorder. So you don’t move around, but you also don’t have an attention span. It’s perfect. Actually that’s a perfect director thing because you sit in your chair, but then you’re like show me something new.

**Chris:** Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

**John:** I meant to ask you, are you shooting French hours while you’re in Paris?

**Chris:** We are. Yes. The ten-hour days, you mean?

**John:** Yeah. Is it as amazing as everyone says?

**Craig:** Love those.

**Chris:** Well, we’ve always done it. We did it on the last Mission: Impossible as well. We were in London, but shooting French hours. It’s great. You don’t lose that momentum that you do with breaking for lunch. And an hour is really two hours. You don’t think about it in those terms. The difference is that when the day is done, most days I get in the car and I have real energy all through the day. I get in the car to drive home and I am unconscious before I get back to the hotel. You just feel like you’ve been in combat. You’re just drained.

But then when you wake up again, then it’s very hard to get to sleep. It’s really – it’s quite unusual.

**John:** But you came from the set right to recording a podcast, so thank you very much for doing that.

**Chris:** Yeah. But this thing is engaging. Sitting down and talking about ideas and talking about movies and stuff like that, I could stay here till four o’clock in the morning. It’s when I walk out this door, halfway up the steps I’m going to pass out.

**John:** All right. That’s our show for this week. As always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you an outro, you can send a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send longer questions. For short questions, I am on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Are you on Twitter?

**Chris:** I’m on Twitter.

**John:** What is your Twitter handle?

**Chris:** I am @ChrisMcQuarrie on Twitter. And Christopher McQuarrie on Instagram.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Chris:** Although I’m not kind of doing all that much on Twitter anymore, because it’s become – I put pictures on there, but Twitter has become a very angry, militant place.

**John:** Yes.

**Chris:** Everyone is an activist.

**John:** Craig goes to war every day.

**Chris:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Every day. Every day.

**Chris:** When you make a comment, you make a joke about the global marketplace and are accused of being a racist, it was time to [unintelligible]. So now I just put pictures on Twitter. And I find that Instagram is a much more–

**John:** Nice and calm.

**Chris:** Welcoming place. And I think because it’s not words, it’s images, that’s much more. Anyway.

**John:** Anyway. We are also on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. But don’t look us up individually because I don’t friend anybody on Facebook.

You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. And that’s also where you find the transcripts. They go up about four days after the episode airs.

You can find all those back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

Chris McQuarrie, thank you so much for being on the show this week. This was amazing.

**Chris:** Thank you. And how cool that we’re doing this in Paris?

**John:** It’s in Paris. I live here.

**Chris:** Because you live here. Paris is fantastic. You’re an ex-pat.

**John:** I am an ex-pat for two more months.

**Chris:** Awesome.

Links:

* [Chris McQuarrie](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0003160/)
* [Valkyrie Official Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YppIQUiE9Y)
* [Mission Impossible 5 – Rogue Nation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onq_miYqUXU)
* [AutoDraw](https://www.autodraw.com/)
* [Zip Zap](http://www.kamibox.de/zipzap)
* [Fidget Cube](https://thefidgetcube.co/?gclid=CjwKEAjwxurIBRDnt7P7rODiq0USJADwjt5Da6-oLQ0gMOen21lE4tKuCYRXxEeJL4lTGVx1pKASohoCcF3w_wcB)
* [Chris McQuarrie](https://twitter.com/chrismcquarrie) on Twitter
* [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 Rajesh Naroth ([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_300.mp3).