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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/mystery-and-suspense).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 632 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is about mystery and suspense. It’s also a best of episode. To explain why we’re airing material from the vaults, I need to tell you a little story. So sit back, get comfortable.

Now, longtime listeners will recognize that in no fewer than three episodes of Scriptnotes, we have urged our listeners to get their flu shots. In fact, in the opening moments of Episode 5, back in 2011, Craig and I talked about it. Drew, let’s play a clip from that episode, right from the very start, because this is before we even had bloops as a (sings). Back then, I used to pick different theme music from the shows. Let’s play that now.

[Episode 5 clip]

**John:** Hello and welcome to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters. My name is John August.

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

**John:** Hello, Craig. How are you doing today?

**Craig:** Doing great, John. How about yourself?

**John:** I am doing pretty well. It’s been a day of many small errands and things to take care of. I got my flu shot today, for example.

**Craig:** You know I’m a huge pro-vaccination guy, but I always feel like the flu shot is the one vaccine that’s kind of a waste of time, just because of the whole thing where there are so many different strains, and they’re kind of guessing.

**John:** They are guessing. They have to figure out which flu they think is going to be the biggest strain to hit American shores at the time. My gambler’s aspect of it is that having the flu completely sucks.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so, if I can spend $20 and take 20 minutes to have a very good chance of avoiding a terrible flu, I’ll gladly spend that money and take that time.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And that’s why I’ll get a flu shot, also. And I always get my kids flu shots. I just always feel a little silly about it as opposed to proper vaccinations, which, of course, are life savers.

The other thing about the flu is, I feel like people misuse the word “flu,” because flu is a very specific virus. And usually, when people say they have the flu, what they mean is they have the common cold.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You really have to be pretty sick for it to be the flu.

**John:** If you’re knocked on your back and really, really hating life, that could very well be the flu.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’ve got, like, a serious fever, muscle pains, that’s… Flu’s bad stuff.

[End of clip]

**Drew Marquardt:** Oh my gosh, you sound like babies.

**John:** We were so young, so naïve.

**Drew:** The 10 years of cigars hadn’t lowered your voice or anything like that.

**John:** The Trump administration, the bourbon, everything else that has happened. Here we have our first clue about what may be going on here. Craig and I were talking about the flu, so either one of the two of us or someone in our orb must have gotten the flu. And in fact, that has already happened on the show.

So back in Episode 434, January 2020, Craig talks about how he got the flu. He describes going to Urgent Care. And Craig asks me, “John, do you know how they test for the flu? They put a swab up your nose and swirl it around,” which is wild. That used to be a new thing. This is January 2020 he’s telling me this. We were just about to have COVID. We were just about to all have our noses swabbed endlessly for the rest of our lives, but this was a new thing for Craig.

**Drew:** No idea what was coming.

**John:** Nope, no idea, which brings us to 2024. Last week, it’s a Saturday evening. I am feeling a little bit achy, but I was just at the gym that morning. It’s nothing too big, nothing too pressing. We’re having friends over to play board games, so as a responsible host, I take a COVID test. I swab my nose, just as Craig had done back in 434. COVID test turns out negative, so hooray. Friends come over. We play Spyfall. We play Poetry for Neanderthals. We play Celebrity. A great time is had by all.

The guests leave, and suddenly I just feel awful. Everything comes crashing down. I’m guessing that what I was experiencing during that game night was essentially stage health, where you can feel good when you’re actually out on stage, when you’re actually performing, and then it all comes crashing down. Drew, you were an actor. You may have seen something like that in your orbit.

**Drew:** I’ve absolutely had that happen several times. Usually, the times when I was the lead, I would have full-blown laryngitis backstage and then get on and be able to project out and not know how I did it.

**John:** We were doing Big Fish in London. There was this cold that went through the entire cast. These people, they were basically invalids. They were so sick. Then you just shove them up on stage, and they could somehow do it. They’re belting, and then they can’t talk off stage. I think it was some bit of that. I just did not feel how bad I felt while people were there. But I am now so cold, I am shaking. I have a fever of 101. I take some Advil. I go to bed. I don’t sleep too well. I get too hot, too cold. I start sweating. I feel gross. I take my temperature throughout the night, and it gets up to 105.5.

**Drew:** Oh my god.

**John:** At that point, I genuinely don’t know what to do, because if I Google now, I see that over 105, you’re supposed to go to the emergency room, but it’s not like it was staying over 105. I don’t have any of the other emergency symptoms like that. I’m not convulsing. I’m not confused or delirious.

Anyway, first thing in the morning, Mike takes me to Urgent Care. I say, “I think I have the flu.” They swab my nose. They say, “You have the flu.” They send me home with Tamiflu. The doctor says, “Listen, you’re going to have three bad days, and then you’ll be okay.” The doctor was accurate, but I don’t know, he didn’t fully describe the experience. It was just horrible. I have friends who’ve had much more serious illnesses. I don’t want to downplay that. But for whatever reason and good fortune, I’ve never been this sick as an adult. I don’t want to just downplay how awful the flu was for me. It was just bad. Have you had the flu as a grown-up?

**Drew:** I don’t think I’ve had it as an adult. I’m sure I’ve had it as a kid, because kids get everything.

**John:** I’m sure I had it as a kid too. I remember things that felt like this as a kid. But your kid body is just so different. I felt like everything was just down and broken. I had fever, body aches, chills, diarrhea, but that’s it. I had none of the respiratory things. But what I had was enough. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t really sleep. I just laid there in this fugue state envisioning boxes being assembled. I couldn’t think any organized thoughts, other than just repetitive, simple thoughts. I felt like a video game that had crashed, and the screen was half pixelated, sort of broken. It was bad.

I eventually came back online. I’d have these moments where I’d say, “Oh, this is the best I’ve felt so far,” and I still felt terrible, but it was better than I’d felt two hours before. Then a few hours later, I’d say, “Oh, this is the best I’ve felt so far.” That was the gradual coming out of it. Now, we’re on the fifth day. Flu-wise, I feel like I’m basically through it. The last couple days I’ve been able to do some phone calls. For reasons we’ll get into, I’ve had so many phone calls. The flu sucks. That’s my takeaway from the flu.

To answer the mystery and suspense question I posed at the very start of this, the reason why this is a best of episode is because we had a bigger episode planned. We were going to have a guest host on. We had a menu of things we were going to go through. That’s going to be pushed back a week. But we have a lot of other things to talk through. This is a hybrid of old stuff and new stuff in one episode.

Takeaways, I guess, flu shot. Get your flu shot. It didn’t protect me this time. It’s protected me many other years, I’m sure. Tamiflu, sure, great. It’s not the magic bullet I hoped it would be. You see people who get the COVID drug, and they’re like, “Oh my god, I suddenly feel great.” It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t just like, oh, suddenly, the lights came on. It is crazy that we don’t have an at-home test in the U.S. for flu. They exist in Europe. They exist in Asia.

**Drew:** Really?

**John:** Yeah, they have these tests where you can swab. It’s one test that swabs for flu, RSV, and COVID. If I’d had a test like that, I would’ve swabbed my nose, and I would’ve tested positive for flu. I would’ve not had friends come over. I probably could’ve gotten Tamiflu 12 hours earlier. It’s really frustrating we don’t have those here.

**Drew:** That feels so obvious that we would have them. Now I’m very frustrated.

**John:** Apparently, the reason why we don’t have them is it was proposed years ago, and they said, “Americans aren’t ready to handle at-home testing of things,” but we are now. So just get over it. We can do it. Of my board game party group, no one is sick yet, which is great. Some of them took Tamiflu, which is smart and great. Hopefully, they’ll all stay healthy.

**Drew:** Terrible for you, but it sounds like it worked out okay.

**John:** Drew, tell us about the mystery and suspense portions you have picked out for us this episode.

**Drew:** This is an episode about mystery and suspense, but it’s not just detectives and thrillers. This is how to use mystery and suspense techniques in every story, including comedies, so really helpful. We’re going to start with Episode 269. That’s Mystery Versus Confusion. It’s about using mystery to capture an audience’s curiosity, but making sure that doesn’t tip over into confusion or frustration or just making sure it’s all very deliberate. Then we’ll go to Episode 332, which is called Wait For It. It’s about suspense and the different types of suspense and how to craft it on the page.

**John:** Great. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, you and I are going to talk about the Apple Vision Pro, which we had in the office and got a chance to test out and play around with. But before we get into any of that, we have some news. We actually had a busy news week. First, we need to start with all the agent stuff that happened this week. Agencies are always going through changes. Agents move from one firm to another. Sometimes they take their clients with them. Sometimes they shutter, and that happened this past week with one of the smaller agencies.

**Drew:** That’s right. The first one was A3, which used to be Abrams Artists Agency. An email went out on Friday, February 9th, that the agency was shutting down on Monday. It sounds like the decision to pull the trigger was made completely by the chairman, Adam Bold. Bold has that power to make that unilateral move because of an operating agreement they signed last year, which the CEO Robert Attermann and President Brian Cho have been suing Bold over. It sounds like there’s quite a lot of drama here. They did that reportedly in attempt to block Bold from selling off A3’s digital and unscripted departments to Gersh, which happened in January. And now that agency’s completely dissolved.

**John:** My recollection is that A3 represented both… I know they represented some writers, because back in the WGA agency campaign, I remember them being one of the agencies that we had to negotiate with. But they also represented other talent as well.

It’s frustrating when your agency melts away, because then you don’t know, as a piece of talent, what are you supposed to do, where are you supposed to go. I also feel bad, of course, for the agents who are suddenly without a job. Those changes do happen. That is an agency shutting down. What’s more common to happen in Hollywood is that an agent will leave an agency either taking his or her clients to a different firm or setting up a new agency. That’s what happened this past week.

So the big news in my friend group this past week has been about Verve. On Tuesday, it was announced that Bill Weinstein, who’s one of the founders, partners, and the CEO of Verve Talent, had left the firm. And as longtime listeners will know, I actually moved to Verve during the WGA agency campaign, and Bill was my primary agent. The trades are reporting that three other agents are joining him on this new venture. There could be more.

We’re recording this on Thursday, so by the time this episode comes out on Tuesday, a lot more may have developed. But Drew, it’s fair to say that a ton of phone calls have happened in the office here over the last two or three days.

**Drew:** Yes, I would absolutely say that.

**John:** It’s weird. The phone doesn’t ring nearly as much as it used to, because everything is now emails or text messages. But when you need real-time information, you just pick up the phone and call a person, especially when they want to talk about advice. The reason why people were calling me were mostly friends of mine who were at Verve, and just to think about, “Do I stay at Verve? Do I go to this new place? Do I go to a third place?”

One of the things I tried to talk everybody through is not to fall into the false dichotomy of only two options. There’s a sense of you either have to choose A or B. You can choose A or B or neither of those and go to a different situation, different solution.

For some people, if they have a primary relationship with an agent who is staying at Verve, it probably makes sense to stay at Verse. If they have a primary relationship with an agent who’s moving to this new firm, it may make sense to move to the new firm. But in other cases, it may make sense to look around and see where is the right place to end up. That could be at a different agency. It could be with a manager.

For me personally, as we’re recording this, I don’t know where I’m going to go. I don’t know if I’m staying at Verve or going to the new agency or going someplace else. It will be a busy couple weeks as this all sorts itself out.

**Drew:** It’s mystery and suspense.

**John:** It is mystery and suspense, Drew.

**Drew:** It is.

**John:** The second bit of business we have not covered yet on the program is OpenAI announced Sora. Sora is this new video generation tool. We’ve seen tools before that do what Dall-E did for images that created videos, but they were terrible. They were just awful. You would not believe them to be real at all. Drew, you saw these demos. What’d you think?

**Drew:** I was blown away. The physics of it is amazing. Seeing things underwater videos are incredible. There’s one I was telling you about. It’s a drone shot from 1850s California or something like that. It’s both incredible and awe-inspiring and a little bit terrifying.

**John:** The first text message I got from a friend was, quote, “How petrified should I be?” I told them, don’t be petrified. It’s a long way from these little demo clips to typing a prompt in for, “Make me a biopic about Janis Joplin in the style of Baz Luhrmann. There’s a reason why writers and other film professionals are involved to get you from that notion to an actual film that people see.

All of that said, there are important things to consider with these technologies and the impact they could have on our business. First off, the demos they showed were largely about someone typing something into a box and it coming up with a little clip. But it can also take video’s input.

So you can feed it video of a film and say, “Replace Kevin Spacey,” because Kevin Spacey’s a problematic person right now, and it could probably do a very good job of replacing Kevin Spacey in a film. And so suddenly, you don’t have to re-shoot or do anything else. If you are the copyright holder on this film, and you want to make money off this, you might replace Kevin Spacey in a film, and it can do it pretty simply.

Likewise, if you are the holder of copyright on something in your vault, and you want to refresh it and make it more palatable to modern audiences, you could do certain things like up-ressing it or you could change the aspect ratio of it. If it’s shot more square and you want it to be more widescreen, you could fill in the edges there much better with AI. You can really figure out… It’s like the Photoshop’s generative fill. It’ll have a good sense of what should actually be in the spaces that are missing. That is really useful for that.

Is it transformative enough that it is covered by copyright? That’s an open question, and that’s a thing that’s going to be wrestled with. But it raises the question of, what is a refresh of an existing film versus what is a remake, because writers and directors and other folks, we get paid for when our material is remade. If someone wants to remake Go, I get paid for that, because that’s my original thing. But if you’re just constantly rejuvenating an existing property, that gets to be a little bit murkier.

I guess, what do we call the stuff that comes out of these engines? Because some of it can look like animation; some of it can look like live action, but it’s not really either of the above. There were no actors being filmed, so it’s not live action as we think of, but it’s also not animation and the animation process. It’s just a thing that’s being generated.

As WGA writers, we want to make sure that material that comes out of a process like this isn’t defaulted into animation, because the WGA does represent animation, but not exclusively. It could be a way for studios to run around protections that we have put in place for writers. We want to make sure that there’s no loophole here where using this technology gets them out of hiring WGA writers.

Finally, you talked about the physics of the stuff that you saw. The knock-on effect that these things have had is that they have become these reality engines. They’ve ingested so much material, so much video, that they create these pretty compelling drone shots. They have a sense of how things move in space. If a character was in front of another character and it clues it, there’s persistence of vision.

**Drew:** It has object permanence almost.

**John:** Object permanence, yeah, like a baby learns object permanence. It’s just much more sophisticated than things we’re used to coming out of this. Because of it, it can actually do things like, by watching a bunch of Minecraft videos, it gets Minecraft, and it can simulate Minecraft so well that it becomes basically just Minecraft. If you can do that with Minecraft, to what degree are you going to be able to simulate off of real-world video what reality is? That has troubling implications for – not troubling, but fascinating implications for the nature of reality and how it understands the world around it.

I think it’s just really interesting to watch this space. Obviously, we’re concerned about it, because it looks like it could replace the jobs of Hollywood workers, but it could actually have broader implications even beyond that. I think it’s nothing to panic about right now, but it’s something we should be mindful of, because as of this moment in 2024, it’s just interesting. It could be much more than interesting in a few years.

**Drew:** Do you feel like there’s a next step from it almost? Do you anticipate any of that or is it all just an unknown?

**John:** Right now, they’re showing the demos, but they’re not releasing the tool for people to use. That’s because there are obvious applications of this for disinformation, for deep fakes. All of that’s really troubling. Figuring out how you would even put this in the public’s hands is a big concern.

Some people pushed back against my blog post on it – we’ll put a link in the show notes to the blog post I put up about it – saying, like, “John, you ignored the fact that AI material can’t be copyrighted.” I think that’s naïve. It is a fact that right now, existing U.S. law suggests that material generated by AI by itself cannot be copyrighted, but there’s really no clear gradations there.

My example of using AI to do some film enhancements… The Zone of Interest, there are these really cool sequences which I originally thought were animation, but they turn out they were shot with this night vision camera that looked really surreal. Those cameras are not high enough resolution to create a good image on screen, but they could take that and then use AI to fix the issues in it. That’s still going to be copyrightable. You still were starting with something.

I think the degree to which you can use AI to do stuff in your film does not make it un-copyrightable. That’s all going to need to be figured out. We don’t know what the line is right now. I think, as people who are working in guilds, we need to be thinking about how do we make sure that we help draw the line, and it’s not just the studios who are drawing the line.

**Drew:** Cool.

**John:** Before we get to the new stuff, Drew, some things we need from our listeners. First off, we’re trying to do an episode that includes some counterfactual Hollywood history. I’ve been reading this great book on counterfactual military history, so like, what happens if this battle back in ancient times had gone differently and the other side had won? Would we be speaking Roman right now? Sometimes in history, small changes can lead to giant differences of outcome.

We’d love to do that for Hollywood, if we could, for a future episode. If you have suggestions for, if this one event had gone differently, what would the impact be. For example, if the movie Titanic had tanked and was a disaster, what would be the knock-on impacts of that? Or if Iron Man had failed, would we have the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

We’d love your questions about that. It doesn’t just have to be about movies. It could be about television. It could be about some other impact of technology or if another country had gotten to a certain thing first. But what we’d love is not too sci-fi-ish. It’s not about what if aliens had invaded at this point. It’s about flip of a coin, a thing that could’ve gone either way, could’ve gone the other way. It’s always fun to think about that. If you have suggestions for counterfactual Hollywood history, we’d love to hear those.

**Drew:** Email those to ask@johnaugust.com, and I’ll look at them all.

**John:** Fantastic. Drew, let’s get started with our mystery and suspense. Which episode are we hearing first, and which one’s number two?

**Drew:** It’s Episode 269 first, and then Episode 332.

**John:** Great. We will be back here after that with some One Cool Things and to wrap stuff up.

[Episode 269 clip]

**John:** Craig, get it started. Why should we care about mystery?

**Craig Mazin:** Well, we should care about it because we care about confusion. You and I talk about this all the time. We get confused so easily. But part of the reason that we can get confused easily is because, clearly, as writers, we’re trying to do something, and if we do too much of it, it ends up confusing. But why not be completely non-confusing? Well, that seems like a stupid question, but it’s worth asking. You know, why not just be obvious about everything? Well, because, oh, the audience doesn’t want that. Well then what is it that they want? What they want is mystery. They want mystery in all things.

And we get maybe a little distracted by the word “mystery,” because it implies a genre like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie. But in fact, mystery is a dramatic concept that is in just about every good story you ever hear or see. Mystery essentially creates curiosity, and curiosity is what draws the audience in. It weaves them into the narrative.

The idea is even though you’re not telling a detective story, you’re telling a story in such a way that the audience now becomes a detective of your story, because the desire to know is essentially the strongest non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It actually is, I think, the only non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It’s the only intellectual thing that you can inspire in them, but it’s very, very powerful when you do.

**John:** So as you’re talking about curiosity, it’s that sense of asking a question and having a hope and an expectation that that question can be answered. And so, obviously, as we’re watching a story, we’re wondering, “Well, what happens next?”

Mystery comes when we’re asking questions like, “Wait, who is that character and why don’t I know more information about that character?” or “Why did she say that?” or, “What’s inside that box?” And those are compelling things that get us to lean into the screen a little bit more, because we want to see what’s happening. And so often, they can be effective if we are at the same general place as our lead hero in trying to get the answers to these questions. If we see that hero attempting to answer these questions, we’ll be right there with him or her.

**Craig:** Yeah, and even if we create small moments where perhaps the hero does know more than we do, what we’re tweaking is this thing that is very human. It’s built into our DNA. When we walk into a situation, we are naturally curious. We insist upon knowing certain things.

If you walk down the street, and you see suddenly 50 people lined up in front of a small storefront that has blacked out windows and a man in the front just patiently keeping people from entering, there’s no decision to want to know. What’s in there? Why are those people standing there? Who is that man? You begin to do this, right?

So as screenwriters, let us constantly exploit this. But exploit it in a way that doesn’t get us into trouble, because if we’re going to go ahead and tap them on their knee to make that little reflex happen, we have to reward them.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And we also have to figure out when to reward them. And this is where the craft comes in.

**John:** Let’s go back to your example of the crowd outside the store and its blacked-out windows. If our characters walked past that and didn’t comment on it, didn’t acknowledge it, if we saw it as an audience but nothing was ever done with it, that would be frustrating. We would have ascribed a weight to whatever that mystery was, and we’d be waiting for the answer. And we might honestly miss other crucial things about your story because we keep waiting for an answer to that thing, which is part of the reason why I think it’s an overall cognitive load that you can expect an audience to keep. And if you have too many open loops, too many things that are not answered or don’t feel like they can be answered, the audience grows impatient and sort of frustrated and can’t focus on new things. They’re trying to juggle too much.

That’s a thing you have to be very aware of especially as you’re going through your story, as you’re putting all those balls in the air in the first act. Sometimes you’re going to have to take some of them out before you get into the meat of your story. Otherwise, the audience just can’t follow along with you.

**Craig:** That’s right. I always think of mystery as the intellectual version of nudity in films. Nudity is distracting, right? So in comedies, when there’s nudity, you can rest assured that the jokes will be somewhat diminished, in general, because people are too busy staring at boobs, and it’s hitting a different part of their brain than the haha, funny part. So you can do a little bit of boobs, but you can’t do too much boobs, because then it’s like, “I’m confused. I’m distracted.”

So when you engage in this very powerful technique of mini mysteries all the time about things, you are creating a contract with the audience. And you’re saying in exchange for this distraction – and I know you’re distracted – I promise that an answer will be given. I also hopefully promise that it’s probably something you could have figured out maybe if you’d really thought it true. It’s not just going to be totally random. Otherwise, it’s not a mystery; it’s just random. I promise you that the answer will be relevant, it will be logical, and it will add value to the story and value to your experience of the story. And I also promise that someone in the movie knows the answer. Someone, not no one, right? Because then it’s not really mystery; then it’s just an absurdity that everyone’s finding out together. Somebody knows.

This is all contrasted with what I think sometimes happens – and we see this when we do our Three Page Challenges – with confusion. Confusion, generally, this is how I experience it. I’m kind of interested how you do. I experience confusion in the following ways.

I feel like I’m supposed to know something but I don’t. So did I miss it? Was I eating popcorn when someone said something? Because I don’t know who that is and I don’t know why they’re talking.

I feel a mounting sense of confusion when things that are relying on the thing I’m supposed to know keep happening, and I don’t know why they’re happening, so now I’m getting really worried and distracted.

And generally speaking, I am confused when I sense that I’m not supposed to be confused. If I’m watching a David Lynch film and suddenly there’s a dwarf talking backwards in a dream, I understand I’m supposed to be… This is abstract. Okay, go ahead. Confuse me. But I only get confused when I think, “I’m not supposed to be confused right now, and I am so confused.”

**John:** Yeah, so if you were in a Melissa McCarthy comedy and suddenly there was a dwarf talking backwards, that would be unsettling. You would start to question the rules of the world in that movie and your own trust in the filmmakers, because that’s not the contract you signed when you sat down to start watching that movie. That can be a real thing. That can be a real burden. I agree with you on these points of confusion.

And my frustration honestly is that sometimes in the effort to eliminate confusion, we end up sort of scraping too hard and getting rid of important mysteries that are actually keeping the audience involved.

And so I remember when I was doing my first test screenings for my movie The Nines, I asked in my little survey form, What moments were you confused in a bad way?” Because what I didn’t want to do is to get rid of all the confusions, because you were supposed to be confused for parts of the movie. But when were you confused in a way that pulled you out of the movie? And those were important things for me to be able to understand for, like, “This wasn’t intriguing; this was annoying that I didn’t know what was actually happening here.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. There is confusion in a good way and confusion in a bad way. And when we are confused in a good way, we have an expectation that the pain will go away and that answers will be revealed, and that’s exciting. That makes us want to keep watching. That’s the most important part of mystery. It makes you want to turn the page of the movie. That’s why mysteries sell more copies than any other kind of book, because you want to know. It’s inescapable. Every Harry Potter book is a mystery. Every single one.

**John:** Well, it also stimulates that basic puzzle-solving nature. It’s like you feel like, “Okay, I have all these facts. They’re going to have to add up to something useful.” And what you said before about you feel like, “If I could think about this logically and really figure this out, I would come to the right conclusion.”

And also in the case of Harry Potter, you see characters talking about the central mystery and trying to solve the central mystery. And after you’ve seen one of these movies, you recognize, in the third act, they will confront the mystery, and there’ll be little tiny mysteries, but it will get resolved. There’s an implicit deal you’re making when you sign in for one of those books or one of those movies that the third act will be about resolving what’s going on in the course of this thing. And not all of the bigger issues of Voldemort and everything, but what’s been set up in this movie will get resolved by the end of this movie.

The same thing happens in a one-hour procedural, is that by the end of the hour, you’re going to know who the killer is, and the killer will be brought to justice, or the person who set the fire will be caught. Where the frustration comes in sometimes the big, epic, long arc stories of an Alias or a Lost, where sometimes those mysteries were so big and so spiraling that you had a sense of, like, “Are we ever to get the answer to these mysteries, or are there even answers to these mysteries? Are they meant to be just philosophical questions?”

**Craig:** And we just aren’t as curious about philosophical questions. We don’t need to know the answers to philosophical questions. And it’s important, I think, to say that even though it’s easy to talk about mysteries in the context of actual mystery movies, that non-mystery movies feature little mini mysteries all the time. Sometimes a scene is just who’s that and why are they doing that? And then we get the answer.

**John:** So let’s talk about the different types of mysteries we encounter.

**Craig:** Sure. Now, we’re talking about little specific crafty things of how we can create or impart mystery in any genre, any scene, any moment, and so very broad, writerly ways of approaching mystery. First, very, very simple mystery: pronoun. So two characters are talking and one of them says, “Well, what are we going to do about her?” And the other one says, “I don’t know.” And we go, “Okay, who’s her? Who’s her? Why are they worried about her? What is her going to do” Very simple, very easy, and then your choice is when to reveal who she is. Similarly, you can, “It.” “Did you do it?” “I did it.” “And?” “It was hard.” What’s it? Oh, I have to know. What is it? What is it?

**John:** Yeah, so essentially you’re omitting one piece of a crucial information by putting in a generic pronoun, and we are desperate to fill in that blank and find out what is that X that he’s talking about.

**Craig:** And it is absolutely the simplest form of magic trick that we do. And yet it is so powerful. It is our “pick a card, any card.” People are still talking to this day about what is in the briefcase. What is the “it” in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction? You know what it is? Nothing. It’s a flashbulb. It’s a light bulb, right? And the point is that he literally is saying, when the movie’s over and you don’t find out, the point is that’s it. It was just a mystery that I will never solve for you.

Just like what does Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost In Translation? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because you will never know, and yet we will talk about that because of our insatiable need to resolve this simplest kind of mystery.

**John:** So one caveat here is sometimes you can accidentally introduce this kind of mystery that you completely didn’t mean to. And the situations where I see it is, you enter into two characters having a conversation, and sometimes it’s just in how it’s cut or how the actors actually changed some words, but it makes it seem like… They’ll drop out a pronoun, or they’ll drop out the name of somebody, and so they’ll talk about her or she but not actually say who that person is. And then we’re like, “Wait. Are we supposed to be confused? Is that a mystery? Should we be looking for what that is?”

So you have to be mindful as a writer and as a person who’s watching cuts of films that you’re not accidentally introducing this kind of mystery that’s actually just going to be confusion because it’s not there intentionally.

**Craig:** Correct. And so there’s the treacherous navigation between confusion and mystery. But if you can figure out how to put these little ambiguities in that are intentional, that’s great. If you can figure out how to put in a secret between two people… When you see two people looking at you and whispering, you don’t have to decide to be curious. Right? You are now involved. And that’s exactly what we want our audience need to be. We want them to be involved.

There’s an interesting subtle way of creating a mystery that, personally, I love this version when I see it. And every now and then, I’ll pull it myself. And it’s what I call the obvious lie. We know what the facts are at this point in the movie. We have a bunch of facts at our disposal. And then someone asks a character something, and the character lies. And we know they’re lying, because we’ve seen the truth, but we don’t know why. Why are they lying?

Or we don’t know the facts, somebody says something, we believe it’s true, and then we find out that they were lying. And now we want to know why did they lie and what is the truth? Those tweak us immediately. We begin to light up when these things happen.

**John:** Because we want to understand the whys behind a character’s actions, and so to see a lie or to have somebody reveal his lie, it’s like, “Wait, do I not understand that character well enough? Is there something else happening here? I’m curious what that is.”

Now, on the page, sometimes I think you have to be really careful doing this, because the first time you’re reading a script, you’re reading it really carefully. You’re getting it all. It’s experiencing just like the movie. The 19th time you read through a script, sometimes you just look at the lines and you’re like, “Oh, wait, he says this on this page but this and the other page.” If you don’t somehow single out that this is a lie on a time where you’re putting the lie, that can be kind of a trap.

I’ve actually encountered this in places where actors or directors will forget, like, “Oh, no, she’s not telling the truth there. That’s a lie there.” And it sounds so obvious for me to say it, but like they’re just looking at the individual pages or like looking at like the sides, and they’re about to shoot something. And they’re not remembering like, “Oh, that’s right. This is not actually the truth.”

So this is a case where the slyly worded parenthetical or the little action line that sort of underscores that she’s a terrific liar, something in there to indicate to the reader and the filmmakers that, “Remember, this is not actually the truth here.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. I mean, early on, that’s not necessary. It’s later on when you want to think, “Okay, maybe somebody has forgotten.” Or you don’t have to worry about it so much if the lie and the reveal that it’s a lie are really close together.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So if someone says, “Anyway, I got to go. I got a meeting. I got to jump in my car. I got a meeting in like five minutes.” And someone goes, “Great.” And then they walk outside and they don’t have a car.

**John:** Yeah, perfect.

**Craig:** And they just sit down on the bench and wait. Then you go, “Okay, you’re a liar. Why? I need to know.” Right? So this is a good little mini mystery. Similarly, you can have mysteries that don’t involve people talking at all. Sometimes it’s just an object, like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Or you got a camera looking. Here’s a little mystery.

At the end of Inglourious Basterds, it’s not much of mystery, because you can pretty much see it coming, but he sets it up as little mini mystery. You’re looking up at Brad Pitt and I think it’s B.J. Novak, actually. I think it’s a friend of the podcast, B.J. Novak. Looking up at them looking down at what they’ve done to Hans Landa, and they’re talking about it. And we are the perspective, so we don’t know what it is, but they’re talking about it, and then we reveal the answer to the mystery. Listen. It may seem inevitable to you, because that’s how you saw the movie. It was not. It didn’t have to be done that way at all. It was a good choice.

There’s also another kind of simple mystery to do, and it’s what I’ll call no-so-innocuous-information. So in this idea, someone asks someone a question, and they get an answer, and it’s very meaningful to them. It’s just not meaningful to us. And that disparity between what the character thinks of it and what we think of it creates a mystery. So someone says, “Hey, did George come in today?” And the person goes, “Yeah.” And the person asking the question says, “Thank you,” walks outside, and starts crying. Why? Why are they crying that George came in? Nobody else seems to care that George came in. Who’s George? Mystery.

**John:** Mystery, again, we’re trying to figure out a character’s motivations, and they’re not matching up with their expectations, so therefore we’re leaning in and we are curious. And so as long as you’re going to be able to pay that off at some point, that could be a terrific thing. It’s when we don’t see that payoff that things get really strange.

Again, on the page, if that reaction is happening in the moment, like it’s just a subtle reaction in the moment, like a concerned stare or like a look of sudden panic, you’re going to have to script that, because the lines of dialogue are not matching our expectations. So you got to script in what that reaction is. And sometimes people feel like, “Oh, you’re directing the page.” No. You’re saying what is actually happening in the movie. You’re giving the experience of watching the movie on the page.

**Craig:** This whole directing on the page thing doesn’t even exist. My new thing now is forget not not doing it. It isn’t a thing. There is no such thing as directing on the page. I don’t even know what that means. We’re creating a movie with text. So we will do, we should do and must do everything we can to create that movie. And if that means that we are directing on the page, in fact, that’s the only job we have. We should only be directing on the page.

I think people think that, you know, directing on the page means camera moves this way, camera pushes in, switch to this lens, do the angle, angle, angle, angle. No. Directing on the page means you are creating a movie in someone’s mind. Use every tool you can.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, is there an elephant outside your window?

**Craig:** It’s a bus.

**John:** It’s a very loud bus.

**Craig:** With an elephant on it.

**John:** Fantastic. All right, let’s talk about some resolutions, because there are different scales at which a mystery can happen. So the short-term mystery. So there’s those little things that happen within a scene that keeps us wondering about like, “Oh, what are they talking about?” and then the camera finally reveals like, “Oh, he’s married the whole time.” Or “Why do they have that object in their hand?” Those are great ways to just provide a little tension and conflict within a scene. They provide just a little extra spark of energy and get us to pay attention to the things we may not otherwise pay attention to.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a great way, for instance, to pull people through exposition. So you can have a character explaining a bunch of information to another person, which is okay, or have the character explaining that same information to another person, but while they’re explaining it, they are, for some reason, slowly pouring gasoline around the room that they’re in. Well, okay. Why are they doing that? And obviously, they’re going to light it up. But why are they going to light it on fire? And what does that have to do with what he’s saying? I am now interested in the exposition. Short-term mysteries are a great way to make something out of nothing.

Then we have our kind of mid-length mysteries. So mid-length mysteries, I kind of think of those as middle-of-the-movie reveals. You have people that you’re meeting early on, and there are some characters with relationships, who seem to know something about the circumstances of the movie that you don’t. They know secret motivations. They know secret pasts of each other. Someone isn’t telling us something. It’s clearly important to them. We will need it.

This is the kind of thing we’ll need by the middle of the movie, to appreciate it and then understand how that impacts the character moving forward. It’s not so much fun when two people have a little secret in the beginning of the movie and then at the very end of the movie we’re like, “Oh and by the way that secret is this,” because the movie has resolved itself by then. So these are good little middle-of-the-movie things.

The bad versions of these are, “I lost my brother in an ice skating accident.” But typically they are slightly more interesting than that, and they help people engage with the character on an emotional level separate and apart from the details of the plot.

**John:** Yeah. These are the things where Jane Espenson uses the term “hang a lantern on things” and I’ve seen other people use it as well. It’s like it’s an important enough detail that when you first introduce it, you want to sort of call it out and make sure that the audience is really going to notice, I’m doing something here, so yes, you’re right to be noticing it. I am doing something here, and I’m going to be doing something with it later on. You are marking this for follow-up. And so it’s going to show up not at the end of the movie but at some key point during the movie, at an important time. And you’ll be rewarded for having remembered it from before.

So sometimes it’s that character who got introduced who you never really knew his name. But then he shows up and he’s actually a hit man midway through the movie. Great. You’ve done the right job there, because you have established somebody and then you’re using them in the course of the story for an important reason. That feels useful, and that’s a great way of… The mystery of who that person is is paying off within the scope of the movie, right at the time we want these things to pay off.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Or your main character has a scar, and someone says, “Where did you get that?” And he says, “Mm.” And then maybe somebody else asks, “Where did you get that?” If I’m going to answer the scar question, it’s going to have to happen by the middle of the movie. I will not give a damn by the end of the movie how he got his scar. It won’t matter anymore. If the scar is important to who he is, then I need to know who he is by the middle. Because here’s the thing. If I have a character, she’s gone through half a movie with some big secret that is relevant to who she is, I must know it by the middle. This is a protagonist now. I must know it in order to appreciate how she changes from that point forward.

So these are mysteries that actually can’t survive, you know, much more than half a movie. But there are mysteries that must survive the entire movie. But these, I think, usually come down to what is the big central mystery of the story. It’s harder to pull off the character-based mystery that lasts the whole time.

**John:** So, you’re saying that these long-term mysteries are really like the mystery genre? They are the classically sort of like Agatha Christie, like, we’re going to wait until the very end for all the reveals. That’s what you’re talking about?

**Craig:** Kind of, because if you have a long-term mystery that isn’t about a plot mystery, and you only get the answer at the end or right before the end, it’s a little bit of a cheat. It’s like, “Well, I’ll solve a mystery right in time to save the day.” That just feels a little meh.

**John:** So this last week I saw a movie that actually I think does have that long-term mystery, and it worked really well for having that long-term mystery. It’s Hell or High Water, which in France is Comancheria. So it’s a Chris Pine, Ben Foster movie with Jeff Daniels. And I really quite liked it, but there’s a long-term mystery in it, which I’m not spoiling anything to tell you that you’re watching Chris Pine and his brother rob these banks, and you’re really not quite sure why they’re doing it. Yes, they’re doing it to get money but there’s clearly a specific reason and there’s a plan, but you’re not quite sure what the plan is. And they withhold that information from the audience for a really long time, much longer than you think would be possible.

And I think it works in that movie because the movie is otherwise really simple. It’s a very straightforward Texas pickup truck western kind of genre movie. And because it’s so simple, holding off all the reveal on what their actual plan is is very rewarding. And so it felt like it was finally revealed at just the right moment.

So it’s definitely possible, but I agree with you that it’s really rare to see movies that hold off all that stuff for so long throughout the course of a story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s tricky to do. Very tricky to do, unless, you know, it’s your mystery-mystery. So anyway, hopefully this is helpful to people. Just examples, practical examples of how to tweak this and exploit this natural instinct in the audience. This is the thing that makes them want to lean in. So if you can make them want to lean in, why not?

[Episode 332 clip]

**John:** All right, let’s get to our feature marquee topic of this first episode of 2018, which is suspense.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Ooh, wait for it.

**Craig:** Wait for it.

**John:** So, suspense, actually, the word itself is fascinating. So, it’s from a French word “suspendre,” which is “pendre,” which is to hang, and “sus,” above. So, to hang above. What a great image that is. It’s like something is dangling above you and you’re waiting for it to fall. That is suspense. And that’s mostly what we’re talking about when we talk about suspense as a narrative device. It is that sense of there is something that is going to happen. You see it’s going to happen. And you are waiting for it. And attention builds because of that.

I would define it in a very general sense, suspense is any technique that involves prolonged anticipation. There is a thing that is going to happen. You see it. And you are waiting for it to happen.

**Craig:** The waiting.

**John:** Waiting for it. You usually think about suspense in a bad way, like there’s a bomb ticking under the table. But suspense can also be a good thing. If you are waiting for a surprise party, there’s a good suspense, too. So it’s not just thrillers. It’s not just sort of the big action movies that have suspense. It’s a technique that we can use in all of our scripts. And so I thought we’d dig in on that today.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a great idea. I believe this topic was proposed by somebody on Twitter, so thank you for that. And it’s a very crafty thing, and I like talking about these. You know, a lot of times when we discuss writing, and I think a lot of times when we go through Three Page Challenges, we’re looking for truth. We’re looking for verisimilitude. We’re talking about how as writers we can create these moments, these people, their words and their actions that ring true to us. This is not that.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** In general, life does not have suspense at all. This is a very artificial thing. It’s as artificial in my mind as a montage, which simply does not exist in life. And yet we find it incredibly gratifying when we experience it. And because it is this technique, a craft, it’s good for us to talk I think about how the nuts and bolts of it actually work, because it’s one of the few times as writers we get to be mathematicians. And I like that.

**John:** I think it’s also important to focus on this as a writing technique, because so often you see Hitchcock is a master of suspense, and you think about it as being a director’s tool. And it’s absolutely true that the way a director is choosing to frame shots, to edit a sequence, to build out the world of the film or the TV show, there’s a lot of craft and technique that is a director’s focus in building suspense. But none of it would be there unless the writer had planned for that sequence to be suspenseful and really laid out the structure that’s going to create a sequence that is suspenseful.

And suspense, I should point out, really is generally a sequence kind of technique. Within a scene maybe there will be some suspense, but generally it’s a course of a couple of scenes together that build a rising sense of suspense. And so that’s going to happen on the page. So, let’s dig into how you might do it.

**Craig:** Great. Well, I guess to start with, I divide suspense roughly into two categories. Suspense of the unknown and suspense of the known. Because they’re very different kinds of suspense. When I think about suspense of the unknown, I think about information that is being withheld either from the audience or from a character. Do you know what I mean by those distinctions?

**John:** I think I do. So, the unknown is like we are curious. We’re leaning in to see what is going to happen. Or in some cases, we have more information than the character who we’re watching has. So, we know there’s something dangerous in that room, and so we’re yelling at the screen like, “Don’t go in that room.”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** But the other broad category you’re leaving out there is suspense of the known. Because of the nature of the genre, because of the nature of the kind of story that you’re setting up, we kind of know where it’s going to go. We just don’t know how we’re going to get there. We don’t know what the actual mechanics are. And that is what has us leaning in, has us curious. It’s a question we want answered. And I think almost all cases of suspense, there is that question that we want to see answered.

**Craig:** Exactly. And I think suspense of the known is far more common, and it’s also applicable across every genre, comedy, romance, everything. When we hear suspense, at least initially, we think of that Hitchcockian mode, which is more of the suspense of the unknown. Or it’s a kind of a whodunit suspense. The key for me when you look inside, for instance, there is information that you, the writer…

And by the way, let me just take a step back for a second. You’re so right in saying that this is something that is important for writers to understand. We think suspense, like we think all technical aspects of cinema, like for instance, montage, is from the director. And I argue, as I often do, that that is not true. It’s not that it’s not from them. It’s that it’s from us.

The writer must lay out the montage so that it has a purpose, that it has a beginning and an end, that it makes sense for the characters. It’s there for a reason. You don’t just haphazardly decide one day on set, “I think, you know what, let’s have a montage.” It doesn’t work that way. It is intentional. And it is from the script.

Similarly, we must plan our suspense. Otherwise, there’s no opportunity for it. How the director creates it visually, we can even put some clues ourselves into the script. But, yes, certainly directors have an enormous role to play in that. So let’s talk a little bit about that situation where there is information that you, the writer, have, the director has, but the audience doesn’t have, and also the characters don’t have.

**John:** Absolutely. So, the most classic example of this is the whodunit, where the character is trying to figure out who killed the person, who is the villain in this situation. There’s a fundamental thing which you as the writer know and the audience and the lead character does not know.

So, in order to build that suspense, you’re probably laying out some clues that will help that person get closer. You will have some misdirects. You’ll have some sort of near misses. You are trying to lead the character and the audience on a path that will take them towards it, but a really fascinating path that will take them towards the answer, with a lot of frustrations and delays that are ultimately gratifying.

I mean, the best kind of suspenses are kind of like beautiful agony. It’s that moment of delayed gratificatio,n and so when you finally get there, aha, it’s there. Other cases, you know, the suspense might be you’re trying to get away from that thing, and will you get away from that villain. In those situations, you as the audience might have more information about how close the other person is than the character does.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s also another classic kind of suspense of the unknown, what I’ll call, for lack of a better phrase, mystery of circumstance. For instance, Lost. Or I don’t know if you ever saw that old show from the ‘60s, The Prisoner.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Which Lost is basically riffing on.

**John:** Yeah. What is the nature of this world? What the hell is going on? And you’re waiting for that.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so now everyone is confused and you’re confused, and you’re confused with them. But they’re making discoveries. And episodic television has this wonderful tool of suspense, which is, “Show’s over. What will happen next week?” That’s the cliffhanger. I mean, when you talk about cliffhangers, that is literal suspense. I am suspended over a chasm.

But figuratively, these sorts of moments of suspense are happening all the time, and all of it is creating this ache to understand, because what suspense is playing on is a human fact. And the human fact is that we naturally seek to make sense of and order the world around us. So suspense is playing with that natural desire that every human… Babies have it. So, this is something that’s going right to this primal need that the audience has.

Then on the other hand, we have the other kind of suspense, which I think is more common and very useful, even if it’s not always thought of as suspense, which is suspense of the known.

**John:** So these are situations where because of the nature of the genre, because of the kind of story that you’re telling, we have a sense of where things are going. We just don’t know how. We don’t know what the path is that is going to lead them there. And we are looking for clues that will get us to that conclusion.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Call Me By Your Name yet. But you start watching Call Me By Your Name and you have a good sense of some of the things that are going to happen, but you just have no idea how you’re going to get those things to connect. And that is the thrill of the movie is watching those things happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a bit of a paradox, isn’t it? I mean, you’d think that the point of suspense is not knowing. And yet when we sit down and someone says, “Oh, here’s a movie from 1998. It stars Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Lopez. And they bump into each other on the street. And he’s getting married and she’s the wedding planner for the marriage.” And you’re like, “Well, I know how that ends.” And you do. You know exactly how it ends. In fact, you know roughly how the whole movie is going to go, don’t you? Yes. And yet if you sit down and watch it, you will begin to feel great suspense.

And this kind of suspense to me is really anticipation more than suspense. It’s a slightly different feeling. It’s the feeling from the old ketchup commercials. Well, the ketchup is going to come out of the bottle. Don’t know when. Don’t know how. Is it going to come out in a big blob? Right? So, this is like watching somebody continually pulling a slingshot back. You know they’re going to let it go, but when? When? And you start to need it. You start to need it.

So, even though we know inside of these movies, like for instance, friend of the podcast Tess Morris’s Man Up. Is she going to get him in time? Is he going to get to her in time? Is she going to believe him? Is he going to believe her? Of course. Of course. But how? And will they? And is it going to go the way that we think?

This all creates this enormous suspense. And all of it really – I think you hit upon it earlier in a beautiful way – is kind of sweetly torturing the audience. That’s the point.

**John:** Yes. And so I will say that even the examples of the rom-coms where we as the audience know they’re going to eventually connect at the end – we can see what the template basically is that’s going to take us to that place – within those beats there will be moments in which we as the audience have more information than the characters do. And that is part of the joy. Within sequences, we might know something about the other guy that she doesn’t know yet, and that is important. Or we know that there’s a secret that’s going to come out and we’re wondering when will that secret come out.

So it’s not just one kind of suspense. There’s going to be little moments of suspense during the whole time. And even in action sequences, you know, will he get past that part of the cliff before the boulder falls? There’s always going to be little small moments of suspense within the bigger moments of suspense.

**Craig:** Correct. And this kind of suspense fuels genres that we don’t necessarily think of as suspenseful, but definitely are, and in fact require suspense. For instance, comedies of error. A comedy of errors is entirely based on suspense. Someone overhears something, misinterprets it, and then what ensues is a comedy that really is about us going, “Oh my god, would you just ask him the right question? Would you just say what you want to say and then it will… Oh, do it, do it, do it.” And then they finally do it. Every episode of Three’s Company was a suspenseful episode in its own way.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s take a look at some of the techniques a writer uses in order to build suspense, both on a scene or a sequence level, but also on a more macro level for the entire course of the story.

The thing I think we’re talking about sort of fundamentally is delay. And in most of these cases, the ball could drop immediately. The bomb under the table could just go off. But suspense is the ticking. Suspense is delaying the bomb going off, or having some other obstacle get in the way that is keeping the thing from happening, which you know is going to have to happen next. So those two characters finally meeting. The explosion finally happening. The asteroid blowing up. There’s going to be something that has to happen, and you’re delaying that. And you’re finding good reasons to delay that, that are reasonable for the course of the story that you’re telling, but also provide a jolt of energy for the narrative and for the audience.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in order to create delay, we have to do things purposefully. We have to use our story and find circumstances to frustrate the characters. And we have to use our craft to obstruct. And there are different ways of doing this.

The most common way and perhaps the easiest way, but oftentimes the least satisfying way, is coincidence. Coincidence is used all the time to frustrate and obstruct people. Instead of walking into the room and seeing somebody do something, they do it, walk out just as you’re walking in, and you just miss seeing them do it. And the audience goes, “Oh!” Well, that’s coincidence.

There’s a classic axiom. You’re allowed to use coincidence to get your characters into trouble or make things harder for them. You’re not allowed to use it to make things easier for them. And that’s true. But when we’re creating suspense and we’re trying to delay things, the less you can use coincidence, the better. Because no matter how you employ coincidence, the audience will always subconsciously understand you moved pieces on the chessboard in order to achieve an effect. It didn’t happen sort of naturally or for reasons that were human or understandable. And therefore, we’re just a little less excited by the outcome.

**John:** Absolutely. If we’re talking about two events, if it’s A and then B, if A causes B, we’re generally going to be happier. If we can see that there is a causal relationship between those two things, we’re going to be happier. But coincidence, I agree, can be really, really helpful. And the coincidences that get in the way of your character achieving the thing he wants, that’s great.

And it’s always nice when the bad guy catches a lucky break, because that’s just great. And so we’re used to having our hero suddenly have this big stroke of luck. So having the hero not get that stroke, or having the villain who you despise just really be lucky, or start to tumble but then save himself, that’s great. It’s surprising. And so it’s not what we expect. It’s going to be a helpful kind of way to keep that suspense going, to keep the sequence running along.

**Craig:** Yeah. And if you can subvert your coincidences, all the better. For instance, there’s a famous and wonderful moment in Die Hard where our hero coincidentally catches the bad guy. He just catches him. He doesn’t know he’s the bad guy, but he catches him. And we’re like, “Oh my god, the coincidence of that just made life so much easier for our hero.” And then the bad guy pretends, in a way that is very surprising and shocking to us, to not be the bad guy at all, but to be a hostage. And our hero believes him. And now a terrible suspense is created because now we don’t know what will happen. We know the bad guy is going to use this to his benefit. And we know that our hero is now in terrible danger. We know it. The hero doesn’t know it.

Oh, suspense of the unknown. Wonderful. So in that case, you’re actually taking coincidence and using it in your favor in a way that isn’t even coincidental. So I love that sort of thing.

**John:** Over the course of Die Hard, which is a suspenseful movie from the core, you have this moment of intense micro suspense. Because we know at some point the gig is going to be up and Bruce Willis is going to recognize what’s really going on. But will it be in time? There can even be moments with Ian, just really small, second-by-second suspense, like, does he still have a bullet left in his gun? That is a question that you don’t know, he doesn’t know. What is the choice going to be? And as long as you can sort of juggle all of those things, you are going to make a much tighter, stronger sequence.

**Craig:** As a writer, you are looking for opportunities. You are looking for targets in which to create suspense. All the time, in every genre, again, every single genre, don’t think of suspense only as when will the bomb go off or who shot Mrs. McGillicuddy. And when you find those opportunities, it’s really important for you to use them. Exploit them, because they’re little gifts.

When you have a moment of suspense – for instance, the hero doesn’t know that he’s even caught the villain, he thinks the villain is a victim – wonderful. Use it. And inside of that, now you have free rein to just torture the audience. Do not be afraid to torture the audience. Be afraid of not torturing them. This is where you want to tease them. You want to tantalize them. You want to almost have the hero figure it out and then take it away from the hero. You want to drive them crazy.

This is sort of the closest thing writers have to sexual interaction with an audience. Sorry, Sexy Craig. I’m going to be unsexy about this. But it is a bizarre, flirtatious, sweet kind of torture, all of which is designed to delay release. It is a bit like saying, “I’m going to give you an itch and I am not going to scratch it. I almost scratched it. Almost did. Oh, you thought I scratched it, but I didn’t,” until you finally do it. And in this way, something that is as expected an outcome as “itch is scratched” becomes remarkably satisfying. It is a release. And in that sense, it is a catharsis.

**John:** It is a catharsis. And so I think it’s also important to keep in mind – we talk about the victory lap, and we talk about sort of the success at the end of that – when you finally do let that person have their success, make sure you give them enough of a scene to celebrate that success. Because there’s nothing more frustrating to me when I see a movie where the character finally does it and then it immediately cuts away to the next thing. Let them actually enjoy it for a moment, because we as the audience need that moment of release as well. We need that moment of celebration, like okay, we finally got to that thing.

You know, throughout this whole sequence, maybe we’ve seen that door in the distance, or we’re running into it and we get there and it just shuts. And the thing we’ve been going to that whole time is no longer an option. Aliens is a movie of tremendous success, where there’s always a plan, and the plan is always getting frustrated. And it finally gives us those moments at the very, very end where like, okay, we’re safe, everything is down, and we can sort of go off, quote unquote, “safely into the distance.”

So, make sure that in those teases and all the misdirects, the red herrings, everything you’re doing to set that up, make sure that by the time you get them through that sequence, you do get that moment of release.

**Craig:** And to guide you on this journey, dear writer, is your best tool: your empathy with the audience. Suspense really needs to be a function of your empathy with an audience. You already know the movie. You’ve seen it. You know everything. Now put yourself in their shoes. Do it over and over and over. Weirdly, they’re the most important character in your movie, even though they’re not in the movie. You’re thinking about them all the time. And it is especially important to think about the audience when we are talking about these, let’s call them artifices, because that’s what these kinds of craft works are.

If you do, then you’ll know, okay, in the moment where you finally do the reveal and you release the tension and the ketchup comes out of the bottle, well, again, put yourself in their shoes and ask, “What do I want here?” And, of course, what you want to do is just wallow in the joy of it. Just let them wallow.

**John:** So let’s wrap this up by talking about what does this actually look like on the page. Because we say like, okay, obviously film and TV directors are responsible for a lot of the visuals we’re seeing on screen, but the choice of what we’re overall going to be seeing there is the writer’s choice. And so let’s look at what those techniques look like on the page, because so much of successful suspense really is the scene description. Those are the words that are going to give you the feeling of what it’s going to feel like when you see it visually.

And so it’s cross-cutting. We’re with this character, and then we cross-cut to the other person who is getting close. It’s finding honestly the adverbs and the short, clipped sentences that gives us a sense of like how close they are to each other. Or like, he’s almost at the door. But then, no, it slams shut.

These are the cases where you may want to break out that sort of heavy artillery of the underlines, the boldfaced words, the exclamation points. Maybe even double exclamation points when it really is a stopper. So that we as the reader get a real sense of what it’s going to feel like to be the audience in the seat watching that up on the screen.

And that’s also why I’m so conservative with using those big guns when I don’t need them in action and writing. Because when you really do need them, they need to be fresh. You got to have some dry powder for when you really need to sell those big moments. Like, hey, pay attention to this thing because this is what it’s going to feel like.

**Craig:** 100%. And I also think the great weapon in our arsenal when we are creating suspense on the page – and you’re absolutely right; it has to be done with action – well, if suspense is delay, and suspense is waiting, delay and waiting for us in terms of text and page is white space.

When I want people to feel as if it’s an agonizing wait, I use a lot of white space. Burn it up, because that’s what it tells you. Sometimes I’ll do three, four, five things in a row. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Boom. It’s amazing how cinematic that can be when 99% of the script is just line, line, line, line, line, you know, double space, line, line, line, line.

So white space becomes essentially your timeline. It’s your way of expanding that moment to agony. And it’s not something that you can get away with more than I think once in a script. And you may not need to do it at all. But if you do have that moment where it’s the big reveal, burn up some space and let people feel it on the page.

[End of clips]

**John:** All right. That was nice to travel back in time for a moment. We’re here in 2024 with some recommendations. Earlier, I was talking about Sora, the new OpenAI thing and potential negative implications of that. My One Cool Thing is GOODY-2, which will not do anything bad for the world. Drew, I know you like GOODY-2 as well.

**Drew:** I love GOODY-2.

**John:** It is the world’s most responsible chat bot. If you haven’t played with it, it’s really fun. It looks like ChatGPT or any of the other ones. You can ask it a question. It understands what you’re asking. It will not help you out at all. It will find a way to avoid answering it. It’ll give you detailed reasons for why it’s not answering it. I think what impresses me is you could think that it would have a canned list of responses, but no. It’s clearly doing a lot of AI work to really parse what the meaning of the question is and why it’s not going to answer you. I just thought it was really, really smart.

**Drew:** I’m dying to know how they built that model, because it’s really adaptive to anything you can throw it at. That’s really fun.

**John:** My guess is that they did not have to train a whole new thing. I think they just were able to find the right parameters, so peeling under the hood here a little bit, because we’ve had to do some of this work in our own experiments. When you send in a query to OpenAI or any of the open-source models, you get the string that the user types, but you can of course change that string to be whatever you want to get the model to say back. It may be wrapping whatever you’re saying in a bunch of stuff around it that says, “But make sure that you’re not giving them anything useful or dangerous, and pad it in a lot of really protective language.” They may have found a way to do that without having to actually train their own model. It’s just really smart like that.

We’ll put a link in the show notes to a wider article about the chat bot and the reason why they made it, because they’re trying to point out the importance of safeties on chat bots, but also how difficult it is to do this and how you think locking this down would be the way to solve it. If you over-lock these things down, they become parodies of themselves, which is what this is.

**Drew:** There’s also something lovely about, at least feels like a different type of large language model. The way you’re interacting with it, it feels like it expands the possibilities of what these could be.

**John:** You were saying that you and Heather were playing around with it, trying to get it to do something.

**Drew:** Heather’s like, “What’s five steps towards world peace?” It won’t get you any of that. It’ll tell you why you’re in the wrong for even trying, basically.

**John:** Good stuff. What do you have for a One Cool Thing?

**Drew:** I have a much more old-school One Cool Thing. I have books. I have an author that I love. Her name is Claire Keegan. In the last probably six to eight months, I have just devoured everything she’s ever written. She writes mostly novellas, really quick books. They’re small. You can read them in an afternoon. She’s got Foster and Small Things Like These are both incredible. She’s got lots of short stories. I just love her. She’s an Irish author. A lot of it has to do with rural Ireland. It sounds like it could be a little too quaint or a little too maudlin, but they’re not. They’re perfect. Claire Keegan is my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Excellent. Wonderful. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Drew:** Woo.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. Drew looks through all those questions, so please send them through. Send through your counterfactual Hollywood history scenarios. We’d love both your, what if this happened, and some things you think might be the outcomes of that.

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 sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on the Apple Vision Pro. Drew, thank you so much for chatting through this with me.

**Drew:** Absolutely. John, I hope you feel better.

**John:** Thank you very much. Matthew Chilelli, god bless you for cutting this down to make me sound somewhat coherent.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The Apple Vision Pro. As everybody on Earth knows, I’m sure, Apple came out with this new mixed-reality headset. It’s complete goggles that cover your face, but it still looks like you’re looking through, because it has cameras that let the video pass through. It’s super expensive. It’s indulgent. My company makes software that runs on it, so we bought one. We have it here at the house. Drew, I would love your honest first opinion of using it, not whether anyone should buy it, but what is the experience of using it like?

**Drew:** The eye tracking is pretty amazing. The way it works out is it has its primary user, which it perfectly calibrates to, and then it has a guest mode. I was in the guest mode. Even that, its eye tracking is outstanding. A lot of it feels intuitive. The clicking your fingers to click the buttons feels intuitive. I had trouble moving some stuff or figuring out placing windows and that kind of thing. But it just feels like a new language in a lot of ways.

I don’t know. It’s hard not to be optimistic when you put one of the headsets on. When you’re outside of people wearing those headsets, it looks ridiculous. But when you’re inside and you’re playing with it, I’m wrestling with whether it’s going to be useful immediately. But it’s hard not to be excited. I don’t know.

**John:** I’m excited and also temper my expectations, just because I think it’s going to be a ramp up, and we just don’t know how steep the ramp up is to get to widespread use of these kind of things or if it’ll even ever be widespread use. In terms of the UI and how they do stuff, it reminded me a lot of the first Macintoshes, because the metaphors were just so different. You had to learn how to use the mouse and the abstraction of doing this. Putting on the Vision Pro and then using your hand to do stuff, they really walk you through that quickly. I was surprised how quickly I got up to speed on doing a lot of things.

I think one of the challenges comparing it to early computers is that computers were clearly just so useful for doing things we had to do other ways before. If you needed to write a paper, man, it was so much better to write a paper on a computer than it was to write it by hand or write it on a typewriter. It was just a complete game changer. It’s not a game changer for doing a lot of the productivity stuff that we do right now on our computers or on our phones or iPads. It doesn’t change that. Some of the immersive stuff it does is really just incredible and has no parallel. It’s like being there, but it’s also like being there in a way you couldn’t possibly be there.

If you have a chance to go into an Apple Store, if they’re still doing demos, you can sign up for a half-hour demo, even if you have no intention of buying it, it’s worth seeing it, I think just because you get a sense, like, oh, this is where the puck is headed. We can do this stuff now. You have to think about what impacts does that have for you. How does it change the ways we write things?

Some of the immersive demos they have, Drew, you did the dinosaurs one, where it’s like Jurassic Park, but you’re inside Jurassic Park, and dinosaurs are coming over, butterflies are landing on your finger. It was really impressive, right?

**Drew:** It’s incredibly impressive. I think you can do that because it’s 3D models, because it’s CG, basically. They can place those around you so you’re interacting with it in a really immersive way. I guess that’s really the only word for it. I’m really curious to know what human beings and storytelling is going to be like with that on. I’m not sure what that’s going to be or how that would work, other than it just being a presentation.

**John:** I’ve gone through some of the other demos. They have Alicia Keys in the rehearsal room. They also have one where you’re at this rhino sanctuary. They’re both incredibly impressive, because there are cameras that are there, and it’s like having a wide angle lens, but you’re right up in there, and so these rhinos are eating out of your hands. You’re just much closer than you probably ever would even be as a human being to one of these things.

In the case of Alicia Keys, it’s really easy to envision a play where you’re watching it in this space, because it’s not just in 3D; it’s like it’s around you. It’s like being in a theater in the round. Amazing, but also it changes how you would write and stage something like that, because you can’t perform the same way to a camera when there’s multiple cameras, when the viewer can actually move inside the space with you.

It’s really fascinating. I think there will be incredible things built for this. We just don’t know what they’re going to look like. It may be the wrong assumption to think we’re going to adapt existing media to fit this. It may be a different kind of thing that only makes sense in these spaces.

**Drew:** That’s fair. I also think it’s got to be really hard to light for a 360 video. How do you hide that?

**John:** You put the lights up high. That’s what they clearly did for the Alicia Keys thing. Also, the cameras, they are in these white towers that feel kind of 2001. They look like maybe they’re humidifiers, and you ultimately figure out those were the cameras, because they’re in the space too, and you can see where the cameras are. For sporting events, it’s going to be incredible, because you could literally put the camera in places where you could never otherwise see, which feels great and real. That’s going to be fascinating.

All the entertainment parts of it are compelling. I’ve watched some television. I’ve watched parts of movies in there. It really is great when you want to just shut the whole world out and just focus on a thing. That’s really nice, because it’s increasingly difficult to do that in these times. I was watching an episode of television, and I wasn’t also looking at my phone or also doing something else. I was just focused on the episode. That can be really nice.

**Drew:** One thing I do really like about it, that it doesn’t have those hiccups, those visual hiccups that the other VR/AR headsets have, because I remember using the Quest for the first time and then taking that off, and even in my dreams, I was starting to have that visual latency. It was really strange. But this doesn’t do that at all, which really helps.

**John:** Also, I get super motion sick, and I’ve had no issues with that at all with this. Now, the essential reason why we bought this was because we make Highland and Weekend Read and other apps that can work on the Vision Pro.

We already have Weekend Read for the Vision Pro. It’s absurd but actually kind of cool on that. I can open up the script for Anatomy of a Fall, and it can be bigger than I am. I could scale that one to be bigger. You’re scrolling through, and the fonts scale perfectly. That letter G is as big as my hand, which doesn’t seem useful, but in a weird way, you can study a text closely, because you can literally come up closer to the text.

The version of Weekend Read we have for Apple Vision Pro is the iPad version, and so all the iPad stuff basically works in there. You can highlight stuff. You can have characters read stuff aloud. It’s amazing that it just works. Is it optimized for it? No, not at all. You can envision a better way to do it. But it’s fine for what it is.

What I’ll be curious to see is whether apps like Highland, whether it really makes sense to build special versions for Apple Vision Pro, because there could be something very nice about the sense of just, you have these on, just like you’re watching a movie. You can put all the distractions away, and it’s just you and the words. You’re in your writing space. You’re in your little writers’ room, and you’re writing the script. There’s something compelling about that, because it can use an external keyboard, so you’re not typing with the little weird, floaty keyboard. You can actually type real, full-speed stuff inside it.

**Drew:** We had a listener write in who shared an article about someone who has a whole setup in the Yosemite Valley setting of the Vision Pro and writes essentially in a little snowy cabin, but they’re in their chair at home.

**John:** That makes sense. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That’s David Sparks, who does a Mac podcast I think I was on many, many years ago. It’s true, I can envision you build your own space, and that just becomes your writers’ room. When I was writing the first Arlo Finch, I needed to finish that first book while we were living in France. We moved to Paris during a heatwave. We had no air conditioning. I’m writing all these snowy scenes. I have to ponder this wintery valley. I would find these videos on YouTube that are just 12 hours of snowstorms and just the sound of snowstorms.

**Drew:** I love those.

**John:** Put those on my headphones, and that would be my space. Even though it was 100 degrees in the apartment, I would channel myself there. If I’d had the Apple Vision Pro at this point, it would’ve been really nice to just, again, pull up that snowy Yosemite Valley and write the scene in that place. There’s something nice about conjuring that. It could be really great.

Anyway, I’m not recommending listeners go out and buy one of these things, but if you have a chance to try it, it’s really worth trying it, because they really are some fascinating directions in which it can move us, thinking about the future. We’re definitely going to put some more stuff on it. People who do have it, we’ll announce when we’re putting out stuff that could be useful for it. I don’t know. It’s fun to see something new that’s really well designed and yet you also sense is going to change completely.

One of the things it reminded me about too was the Apple Watch was introduced. It looks like the Apple Watch of today. But if you actually go back and look at the features that were in it and what they thought was important, it was completely different. It was all about sending your heartbeat to your friend or staying in touch with your closest buddies. It was completely different. They didn’t realize this is mostly a fitness tracker that also keeps notifications. That’s what the Apple Watch is now. I think we’ll figure out in the next couple years what the Apple Vision Pro really is for and what the use cases are, and a lot of what we talk about now will seem a little bit silly.

**Drew:** I wonder if that has been the barrier for most of the VR/AR stuff is just that people don’t have the headsets. I think like you were saying, having computers in your home let people experiment with computers and figure out what that is.

**John:** Also, I will say there are much cheaper headsets out there. For a certain thing, I’m sure they’re great and probably better than the Apple Vision Pro. The rock stability of the illusion that you’re actually in that space is so good that that’s why I’m saying even if you’ve tried other headsets and been under-impressed, it’s worth it to go into guest mode on somebody else’s and just see what the world is like.

**Drew:** Yeah, definitely.

**John:** Drew, thanks so much.

**Drew:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes 269 – Mystery vs. Confusion](https://johnaugust.com/2016/mystery-vs-confusion)
* [Scriptnotes 332 – Wait for It](https://johnaugust.com/2018/wait-for-it-2)
* [A3 Artists Agency Shuts Down](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/a3-artists-agency-shuts-down-1235821430/) by Aaron Couch and Rebecca Sun for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Verve CEO and Co-Founder Bill Weinstein Leaves Agency After 14 Years](https://variety.com/2024/biz/news/bill-weinstein-verve-talent-agency-out-1235916578/) by Cynthia Littleton for Variety
* [A few thoughts on Sora](https://johnaugust.com/2024/a-few-thoughts-on-sora) by John August
* [GOODY-2](https://www.goody2.ai/)
* [Meet the Pranksters Behind Goody-2, the World’s ‘Most Responsible’ AI Chatbot](https://www.wired.com/story/goody-2-worlds-most-responsible-ai-chatbot/) by Will Knight for Wired
* [Claire Keegan](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/274817.Claire_Keegan)
* [Contextual computing with Vision Pro: My Writing Cabin](https://www.macsparky.com/blog/2024/02/contextual-computing-with-vision-pro-my-writing-cabin/) by David Sparks
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Segments originally produced by Godwin Jabangwe and Megan McDonnell. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/632standardV2.mp3).

The transcript for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/adapting-for-television).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has a few F-bombs, just in the One Cool Thing section. So if you’re listening with your kids in the car, you can skip just that section.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 631 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, there’s a long history of bringing TV shows to the big screen. For example, my own Charlie’s Angels movies. But today on the show, what happens when you go the other way and bring a big screen property to television.

We’ll talk with the co-creator and showrunner of the new Mr. and Mrs. Smith movies about that process and the differences between telling a story over eight hours rather than two. We’ll also answer some listener questions on samples, casting, and more. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, we’ll talk about film school and fellowships. But first, Drew, we have some follow-up.

**Drew Marquardt:** We do. In Episode 629 we had someone write in who is in a writing team, and they were wondering if they could pass their original samples on to their reps or if one person on the team could do that.

Paul wrote in to say, “I was in a similar situation in 2018. My writing partner and I had been writing separately for years until we teamed up for one project. That landed us a manager in LA, and we sold our pilot to NBC. But we knew going into the partnership that we both wanted careers in Hollywood, and that meant getting a manager. Our partnership just happened to be fruitful and lead to that goal, so it was never an issue with us when we each presented separate works to our new manager. We were happy and rooting for each other, because we respected each other’s goals. We are each other’s cheerleaders. We both now have separate writing careers with the same manager, while maintaining our friendship, which began before writing anything together.”

**John:** Great. It sounds like they went into this process of getting a manager with the expectation, we will ultimately separate and do some different things, which feels right. Having that conversation up front seems good. Looking at the Brian follow-up here too, it also feels like communication was key for them.

**Drew:** Brian wrote, “My writing partner and I had had the conversation very early on about how we would deal with situations like this, and it’s worked out well. First, we were okay with developing stories together, and only one of us actually wrote the script. If that’s the case, it’s only the person who wrote the script who claims it as a sample. Second, him and I have different skills. I have an MFA in playwriting. He’s a stand-up comedian. We know we will eventually want to work on different stuff. Our partner writing is never to get in the way of our individual expressions. Third, if we get represented together, we know all work with that agent until such a time that we both have established careers, we’ll be writing together. And fourth, we delineate our stuff, my stuff, and your stuff before we ever start writing. It’s a shocker, I know, but open and consistent communication was key in making it work.”

**John:** That last point seems really important, because we’ve talked with other writing teams who have come on the podcast, and they will talk about, “This is an idea I have. Is this an idea for us together? Is this an idea for me separately?” I think that’s important to early on establish what those are. We talk about first-time writing partners and the importance of having this conversation but also getting some stuff on paper about what’s going to happen here, because when you don’t do that, it becomes really uncomfortable for everybody involved.

**Drew:** Seth Rogen talked about that.

**John:** That’s right. More follow-up on phonetic alphabets.

**Drew:** Jonathan wrote, “I’m enjoying your adventures in phonetics this year, and I thought you might like to know that the Earth Species Project in Berkeley, which is using AI to decode animal communication, has now introduced the first inter-species phonetic alphabet to transcribe animal sounds.”

**John:** I’ve seen a little bit of that on TikTok or Reels, which is how old people get TikToks. It is actually really cool, because there are consistent sounds that birds are making, that different things are making. It feels like an important first step to identify these things. Honestly, machine learning and AI is going to probably have some real insights here, because they can just listen to tens of thousands of hours of things and see what are the consistent patterns that we can’t notice that they can notice in there. Watch this space, because I feel like this time next year we’re going to hear some real breakthroughs about not just whale sounds, but bird sounds and other stuff happening there.

**Drew:** That’s so cool.

**John:** It’s cool. It’s cool. All right. That’s enough follow-up. Let us get to the meat of this episode. Francesca Sloane is a writer and producer known for Fargo, Atlanta, and the new series Mr. and Mrs. Smith, on which she is the co-creator and showrunner. Welcome, Francesca.

**Francesca Sloane:** Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.

**John:** It’s great to have you here. I want to talk about the show, obviously. But before that, I want to get into your career path, because if I look at IMDb, I see you starting in 2017, and it feels like a rocket ship, really fast. I bet that allies a lot of other stuff that happened before then. Can you talk to us about how you got started in the industry as a writer? What was your genesis here?

**Francesca:** Absolutely. I never had the chutzpah, I guess you could say, to think I could be a professional writer. I always was a writer in terms of just being somebody that liked to tell stories and focused on that in school and things like that. But in terms of thinking I could make a career out of it, that was never actually part of the agenda, I guess you could say. I had gone to art school, because my parents were big on education. It was something that I enjoyed, making films and writing stories. They were not thrilled that a non-trust fund kid decided to pack their things, move to LA, and go to art school.

**John:** What school were you going to?

**Francesca:** I went to California Institute of the Arts, which was actually a very anti-narrative, experimental school.

**John:** I think of CalArts as animation and just really experimental films. It kind of feels New Yorky for being in Los Angeles.

**Francesca:** Definitely. I would agree with that. That was what drew me in, which also takes me even further away from a typical screenwriting career, writing narrative things. But even within that structure, there was a teacher there named Nicole Panter, who was really cool. She used to manage the punk band The Germs. She worked on Peewee Herman. She was very cool. She led a very loose-based screenwriting course. That was my favorite class of CalArts. But even with that said, I got into making these experimental video art type work.

I just took any job I could, because at that point, I just liked Los Angeles. I worked at Yum Yum Donuts. I cleaned toilets. I nannied for celebrity children – well, celebrities who had children.

**John:** I think celebrity children would be awesome.

**Francesca:** Celebrity children. I was Haley Joel Osment’s nanny, even though we’re the same age. No. It was just constantly just doing whatever I could to pay the bills and still make art. But I would still go home and write these screenplays for no reason. I wasn’t even sure why I was doing that. I eventually decided to go to UCLA for a masters program, mostly because I figured I could get a teaching job at some point. If I was able to be in a creative writing community and be around writers in that respect, I felt, what a beautiful way to be around imaginative people for the rest of my life, again, still not considering that I could actually do that by going down the direction of trying to write TV for myself. I ended up writing a script that won a competition there.

**John:** Tell me about that. What was the competition like? What was the script?

**Francesca:** UCLA has this screenwriting competition. I submitted this script called Headbangers, which is about this punk kid in the ’90s who moves to North Philly, which is very close to where I grew up, and is immersed in a world that makes him fall in love with rap music.

**John:** Great.

**Francesca:** I wrote it very much about the kids that I grew up around. It felt very authentic to my experience at the time. That landed me with a few meetings with managers, because if you win the competition, that’s the prize is you get an opportunity to meet with people from the industry.

**John:** I’m going to have you pause right there. It sounds like the script you wrote was a script that you had unique experience in. Someone could read the script and meet you and say, “Oh, she’s the one who wrote the script,” and it feels like there’s a good fit there. You feel like, “Oh, I get that she is the person who wrote this script.”

**Francesca:** I think that that’s very true. I actually remember there was one manager who said this very bizarre, backhanded thing, where he said, “I’m so surprised when I saw that your name was Francesca. I really thought a man wrote this script, because it just felt like such a masculine energy.” I found that so strange, because to me, I just wrote something that felt very honest. But I guess maybe he was leaning toward the fact that the protagonist happened to be this teenage boy. But I remember that striking me as something really, I don’t know, interesting, but also kind of a problem. I thought, “I’m definitely not going to work with you, sir.” But it was an interesting way to dip your toe in.

That eventually led me to the path of meeting my manager, who is this man named David Katzman. Every single person said to me, “Just make sure that you weigh your options. Don’t hire anybody in the room.” I hired David in the room immediately.

**John:** I hired my lawyer in the room too. Sometimes it just clicks.

**Francesca:** Exactly. You get a feeling. In fact, every single thing that I’ve done so far, I have not listened to that advice and have always gone with my gut in that way. So far, knock on wood, it has not led me astray.

**John:** At this point, you’ve signed with a manager, and you have a script that has caught some interest. Do you have other stuff to show? What’s happening next?

**Francesca:** I had nothing else to show, actually. In fact, he had said to me, “How would you feel about trying to be in a writers’ room?” I said, “I’m quite shy. I always imagined I would write, if anything, if I was going to go down this path, features, because I spend so much time by myself.” He said, “Why don’t we just give it a try and see what happens.”

There was this Sony Crackle show that was looking for somebody, and I think specifically a Latina woman for one character on the show named Izzy, who happened to be that as well. In order to be a part of that room – they were worried that maybe Headbangers was a fluke – they said, “Does she have any other samples?” I had nothing. Over the weekend, I wrote a slew of short stories and a few short scripts. I just said, “Here. Just give them this. We’ll see how it goes.” That ended up doing the thing.

**John:** That’s great. For international listeners, Crackle, I guess it maybe still exists. I don’t know to what degree it exists.

**Francesca:** I don’t know either, honestly.

**John:** It was an online video platform, that point where everyone thought web video’s going to be the next thing. Was it WGA? Was it not WGA?

**Francesca:** Actually, it was not, and I was not WGA, obviously. I had started that room very briefly. But at the exact same time, before that room even started, I ended up meeting with Veena Sud for her show, Seven Seconds, that was to be on Netflix. But that wasn’t anywhere ready to go. We said that if somehow I land that gig, which was a big question mark, I would be able to leave the startup Crackle room early and leapfrog into Veena’s room. All of this, again, big question marks. Nothing was certain. That ended up ultimately happening. Veena did end up hiring me for Seven Seconds. So I jumped from the Sony Crackle room to Veena Sud’s room.

**John:** You were worried about being in a room, because you felt like you were a shy person who wanted to write alone. What was the process of adaptation of learning how to be in a room? Because rooms are very different. There’s different cultures. What worked for you?

**Francesca:** Oh my gosh. It was like just meeting my people. It was the first time where I felt like I truly fit in. That sounds very idealistic and romantic. But it was just sitting around with a bunch of nerds, talking about characters and story and world building. For me, that was just so exciting. In fact, when I write on my own now, I get a little lonely, because it is so incredible to be able to bounce ideas off of people in that way and laugh and give personal anecdotes. It just all clicked. I just didn’t realize that that was what it was going to be. It felt right. It felt like home.

**John:** Seven Seconds was a Netflix show. It was a bigger show. Veena Sud’s an experienced showrunner. Were you taking notes? Were you trying to figure out, “This is how I do that job,” or were you just heads down, like, “I got to deliver as,” you were a staff writer, I’m guessing?

**Francesca:** Yes, I was a staff writer. I was so naïve, which I actually think worked in my favor. I didn’t understand the hierarchy that you’re supposed to know when going into that. I wouldn’t necessarily give this advice. I think it’s good to do your research and become well learned before you enter any kind of environment. But I did not do that. I did just go with human interactions and feelings. I started to figure out very quickly that if I was speaking too much, certain people had certain energies about it. I learned my place just by picking up on cues. But I didn’t totally understand that. I just was this dog with a bone that would get so excited.

If we couldn’t crack something in the room, I’d go home and spend the night trying to figure it out, to come in with something the next day, just because I was excited, not because I was kissing ass or anything. I had never had a job that inspired me that much before. Looking back now, I feel like I would be so annoyed with me if I were the upper-level writers in that room.

**John:** We have a lot of listeners who are going to be in that same situation. What advice can you give them when they’re feeling like the energy is just a little strange here? How did you navigate? How would you recommend it now that you’ve had to be the person in charge? What advice do you give?

**Francesca:** I think being excited is a wonderful thing. I think being a hard worker is obviously something that can only be helpful in that dynamic, because ultimately, that’s what you’re there to do is to break story, figure out the problems, solve them. But I do think it’s really important that you’re not taking up too much space, just like anywhere. It’s like really making sure that other people have opportunities, because most of the time, when you do that, your ideas can only become better, or they might actually see something that you’re not seeing yet. The collaborative process of a writers’ room is the beauty of it in the first place.

I will say though, Veena is absolutely incredible. But that was a very straightforward, conventional way of running a room. It was very much about plotting and breaking things and character development. The way that I like to work, ever since working on Atlanta, and the way that I run my room is more parlor style, talking more about your own life and anecdotes and what you saw that might’ve been interesting online or things like that first, before you go into the rest of it.

**John:** When you say first, first bit of business in the day is all that talking stuff before you get to, “This is the episode that’s on the board. This is what we’re trying to focus on.”

**Francesca:** Maybe not even just the day. I think even just the first few weeks, it’s just becoming about the alchemy in the room.

**John:** You said be careful that you’re not taking up too much space. A thing we hear a lot of writers of color talking about when they’re going into these rooms, it’s that feeling like, “How do I show up with my full self? How do I feel present in this place and not always asking permission to speak?” Any guidance on that?

**Francesca:** This is not anything unique, what I’m saying right now. But I really think that people react well to being your authentic self. I think don’t think about that as much. I think I’m saying that less about being a person of color myself, which I can totally relate to that sentiment. I think I’m saying that more in terms of making sure that you’re also listening and that you’re not so hungry to get your own idea out, just because I think it makes your idea better. But I would advise to not think about that as a person of color, and go in and just be completely unabashedly you.

**John:** They hired you for a reason. That’s always a thing to remember. You were picked out of a lot of choices, and so recognize that they want you in that space. They had many choices, and they chose you.

**Francesca:** Exactly. I totally agree with that. I think the less that you think about that, the more that your brain can process than other things. It’s a liberating thing to actually be like, “What would this character do?” as opposed to, “Oh god, what am I doing here? What should I say?” There’s a freedom in that.

**John:** You’re in a room. You’re seeing how television is written. But did you get a chance to see how television is made in that first process? How close was the writing room to the actual production?

**Francesca:** Veena was such a G in that respect. She created the room so that even, no matter what level you were as a writer, you would basically go in as her stand-in. You would advocate for whatever you would think Veena would want, and you would show-run. I got very lucky with that, because here I am, I don’t know, this term is not the greatest, but this baby writer. I’m on set and being able to do the job that a showrunner would do. We would touch base with her every single day. She was still very much part of the process.

**John:** That was a show that was shooting here in Los Angeles?

**Francesca:** They shot that in New York. That was also very exciting is to be able to be on location in that way and do all of those things and make a lot of mistakes, which I definitely did, and learn from them. She was good about that.

**John:** Some examples? What mistakes did you make being on set?

**Francesca:** There’s a part of you that wants to make sure that you’re doing right by Veena. Because Veena was such a good leader, it wasn’t even just because you want to do right by your boss. Specifically, we wanted to do right by Veena Sud, because she was just this incredible person, and she worked so hard, and she really had a vision for her show. I would sometimes get anxious, because I would think, “Oh, Veena wouldn’t want this that way.” Then it really is a matter of how do you communicate those things. You also have to respect your director. My director was Ernest Dickerson, who is a big-

**John:** A legend.

**Francesca:** Yeah, a legend. Here I am. In his eyes, I look like a 13-year-old little twerp coming up and trying to give him notes constantly. I would have to gauge how to give notes, because I didn’t want to feel like a gnat that he had to shoo away. I think a few times he probably did feel like that, but I understand why he did. Those kind of things, like navigating how to give those notes, making sure that certain things are actually happening, when he might have a vision that might be different than what I would assume Veena’s would be.

**John:** The challenge as the writer, you know how the whole thing has to fit back together, and sometimes on that set, the director might be fantastic but may not remember these pieces have to get together this way. You were in that room as a showrunner was approving this script and what the purpose of that scene was, what the purpose of this segment was.

**Francesca:** Exactly.

**John:** Sometimes you’re the only person on that set with that memory.

**Francesca:** Exactly, exactly.

**John:** Coming off of that show, how was it moving to the next show, to the next show? Was it a steady progression? Did you have ups and downs?

**Francesca:** I wish I could say I had ups and downs, because it just makes the story more interesting. But I was one of those very lucky people where it just kept on going, one room to the next to the next to the next.

**John:** What are some differences you’ve noticed in different rooms? You’re coming off of a really good experience there. Hopefully, they were all good experiences. But every room is going to have its different culture, its different vibe. What were some differences you noticed between the rooms?

**Francesca:** Every single room was an entirely different job in terms of how different they could be. I don’t think I could point at any room and say, oh, this one was similar to this one. They were all completely different beasts. After that room, I jumped right into, and I actually came in a little bit later, to Beau Willimon’s show The First. That had its own intimidating factor, just because there was already that alchemy that I had described earlier, and here I am as the new kid stepping in. One person can truly change an entire thing in terms of a room. Jeff Melvoin once said to me that a writers’ room is like choosing who you want to be trapped on a submarine with for hours and hours at a time.

I was a little bit intimidated by the fact that I was jumping into that room a little bit later. We were there to support Beau’s ideas. It was a lot of us kind of helping him constructivist thing, which felt different than how collaborative Veena’s room was, where she really wanted to pull from us. I used to describe it as – and I mean this with complete respect – but it was like if you play a pinball machine, you know the two little things that bat the ball around?

**John:** Yeah.

**Francesca:** I felt like that was our job.

**John:** You’re the flippers.

**Francesca:** Exactly. We were the flippers, which was totally fine and understandable. It was a great room with really talented people. But that was very different than what I had experienced right before that. It was also a smaller room, significantly smaller.

**John:** That was a first season show. It was a whole group of people together. Going into Fargo: Season Four, that’s an anthology show, so there’s not ongoing mythology, but I suspect there are people who are coming back year after year on that show. What is it like fitting into the fourth season of a show with established people?

**Francesca:** Interestingly enough, yes, it was an anthology show, but we were all brand new to Noah, which was new for him too.

**John:** Great.

**Francesca:** Noah was the consistency there, but we actually all were this new crowd trying to replicate this really strong voice that other seasons had already expressed. What was interesting about that season as well though is it was tackling race. Part of what is interesting about Fargo in terms of the comedy is that it’s actually not necessarily pointing at something as heavy as that. It Trojan horses in heavy material by not speaking on those things. I think it was a big challenge in terms of the tone of the Fargo universe to try to bring that into the fold. I think we did our best. I think Noah did a fantastic job. He’s a genius. But I think it was an interesting place to play because of that obstacle.

**John:** You were talking about how in your rooms you like to have a parlor feeling where there’s a lot of blue sky and a lot of potentially weeks of chatting about stuff to get the speed up and running. Was that more, “We have this many episodes. Let’s get started and cracking.”

**Francesca:** Definitely. Noah lives in Austin, and he was also directing Lucy at the time. There were times when it was just the room in that sense. When it was just the room without our leader, so to speak, there was a lot more of small talk and personal anecdotes. We actually all got very, very close. It was an incredible room. It’s Enzo Mileti, Scott Wilson, Stefani Robinson, who I ended up meeting, which was my link to Atlanta, this guy Lee. It was just incredible, so we really bonded as friends. But when Noah would come back to the fold, it was go time. It was work. I used to explain it like we would mine ideas, and Noah would come back to the room, and he would take our ideas that felt like fuel or coal, and then in real time turn them into diamonds. It was an exceptional thing to witness. But that was that process.

**John:** Great. You teed this up. Then you moved into Atlanta, which is an established show. You’re coming into the third season of it?

**Francesca:** Yes.

**John:** What is it like? I assume there were writers who’d been through that whole process. There’s the ongoing storylines, those things. How do you catch up to speed with it? How do you get running when something is already going like that?

**Francesca:** Atlanta was the biggest gift of my career. I think it will always be, actually. It was my favorite show. I remember meeting with my agents years before. They said, “If you could pie in the sky, what would it be?” I said, “Somehow write on Atlanta,” which seemed really unusual and unlikely, because part of what makes that show so incredible is that it’s specifically a Black point of view in a lot of ways. It was just a silly thing to even say. Then ultimately, it just happened.

Stefani Robinson hit me up and said, “Hey, Donald’s looking to expand the room. He especially would love strong female voices. Do you have anything?” Again, I wrote a sample that wasn’t a thing yet. I wrote this silly look script called Tuesdays that was about four different Tuesdays in a row between this family. That felt like my tone actually, but part of why I liked Atlanta so much is I felt like my tone could lend itself more naturally to a show like Atlanta. That got me a meeting with Donald Grover and Stephen Glover.

**John:** Stephen Glover is his brother and producing partner, right?

**Francesca:** Yeah, he’s the funniest person on the planet. Literally the funniest person on the planet. No one can make me laugh more. I feel like a baby when Steve’s in the room, because I’m just laughing at him constantly.

That was the most intimidating room. I keep using the word intimidating, but that was the most intimidating, because this is a collection of friends. These guys were all friends before they were writers together. Two of them are even related to each other. They have created this hit show for so many seasons, then took this hiatus and have a big thing to prove by coming back so late. I actually jumped into that room late as well, because I had been doing a development project that didn’t go through.

Not only was I coming in as a new writer to this group of friends, I was coming in late. I was also the only writer that was Salvadorian and Jewish. They have this whole other sort of shorthand. It was terrifying, but it ended up being the room that I was most comfortable in at the end of the day. I’ve never felt more aligned with a group of people in my entire life than I did with the Atlanta writers’ room.

**John:** I want to wind back, because you said, “Oh, I’d written a new thing which was right for this Atlanta sample.” Listeners might be confused, because it seemed like you’ve wrote things for these other shows. You could point to these produced scripts. Can you explain why those things you did for other shows are not useful samples for you trying to be staffed at your next thing?

**Francesca:** Absolutely. I think with every show, you’re writing to that specific voice and that specific showrunner typically or creator. None of the shows that I had previously written on felt like Atlanta even a little bit. Not only that, I even feel like my previous script that got me in the door in the first place, Headbangers, was so self-serious and actually so-

**John:** You’d grown.

**Francesca:** Yes, exactly. I was ready to be a little bit sillier, be a little bit less dramatic, and just write things that just felt a little bit more about the everyday, without trying to say something with every single line on the page. I wrote this thing in two days, because it felt so easy to me. It felt really natural. Thank god that resonated with the show Atlanta.

**John:** The other reason why you don’t tend to use things you wrote for another show as samples is because it’s really hard to show what was your work versus somebody else’s work. That was obviously broken as a room, so it was a bunch of different people’s inputs. You don’t know who touched every line. Even though it has your name on it, it’s not really fully yours the way that your sample is going to be yours.

**Francesca:** Absolutely, especially in a show like Fargo, because on a show like Fargo, Noah is such an exceptional writer, but really does go in there and play a lot with the scripts, as he should, because it’s also replicating the Cohen Brothers, and it’s such a specific tone of voice. On that note, I was already really surprised at how that would work, and then I was already really flattered and amazed at how much of my stuff would actually end up on television, that was actually my… I’m like, “Whoa. I actually really did write that. Holy crap.

**John:** Megana Rao, who’s our previous producer, and Megan McDonnell, also a Scriptnotes producer, they now have TV writing careers, and they still do marvel at, “Oh, that actually is my thing. That’s my scene.” It’s so nice to see when that actually happens. It gets all the way through to production.

**Francesca:** Yeah, it feels magical.

**John:** This explains your connection to Donald Glover. Does this get us to Mr. and Mrs. Smith and this new series?

**Francesca:** It does, yeah. Donald and I connected immediately. I will say that in the Atlanta room though, I did make sure, because at that point, all of those lessons that we talked about earlier had been learned. I did a lot of sitting back before I would jump in. I actually only spoke when I really felt like I had something pretty solid to contribute, because I just felt their bond. I didn’t want to be the thing that came in and interrupted something that was so beautiful and worked so well. It took a little bit longer for me to feel fully comfortable to show my real self. Then when I did, it was wonderful.

But I will say from the very, very start, I remember Donald had this Memorial Day pool party at his house before we even started the room. I went and I remember sitting down by the pool and got flanked by both Stephen and Donald. They both sat down next to me. Donald’s son was swimming in the pool. He was probably around five at the time. There was this moment he’s swimming and he’s swimming and he swallows some water, and he gets really panicked. At the exact same time, all three of us laughed as soon as we saw he was okay and said, “Do you remember that feeling of death at that age?” We all laughed at that, because it’s this fleeting thing. I thought, “Oh my gosh, the three of us see the world really similarly.”

It was this throwaway thing, but it was very comforting and very cool. From there, it was off to the races where references that Donald and I would pull were the same. I just started to realize we were very similar children. That made it really easy for us to connect creatively.

**John:** Great. What was the brief on Mr. and Mrs. Smith? I don’t know quite what the genesis was. Obviously, this is based on the Simon Kinberg movie – Simon’s a friend; he’s terrific – which was Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie. It was high stylish Doug Liman, who directed Go, directed that. A huge success.

**Francesca:** I love Go.

**John:** Thank you. It was the start of Brangelina. All sorts of things stemmed out of it. Where was the genesis of, “Okay, we’re going to do this as a series.” How did the Donald of it all come together? Talk to us about that.

**Francesca:** Donald and I knew we wanted to do something together. We didn’t know what it was. Donald called me one day. He is good friends and works with Michael Schaefer, who at the time worked at New Regency.

**John:** New Regency produced Mr. and Mrs. Smith for Fox, I think.

**Francesca:** Exactly, yes. He said, “Hey, what if we do Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the TV series?” I started laughing. I thought he was totally joking around with me. He’s like, “No, I’m actually completely serious.” I said, “Why would we do that?” Not as a diss on the movie. Just our specific voices do not lend itself to that at all.

As we kept talking about it, he said, “We could really focus on the marriage of it all.” I had just gotten married, so it was heavy on the mind. I never thought I would get married. Donald never thought he would get married. Now we’re both married. We started talking about that. We started talking about how we could focus more on in-between moments. As far as an action show was concerned, that felt really intriguing to me.

Then Donald said, “Yeah, okay. Do you want to pitch this at some point?” I said, “Maybe down the line.” At the time, I was developing something for Jordan Peele, and I was developing this erotica comedy series. He’s like, “Yeah, cool, cool. I’ll come back to you.” Then he called me and said, “Can we pitch this next week?” That’s very Donald, by the way. He waited all summer and then all of a sudden it’s like, “How about next week?” That’s very typical. I said, “Yeah, why the hell not? Let’s get together, crack this thing, and pitch it.” We were off to the races from there.

**John:** The original film is about a husband and wife who, they’ve been married for a time and they’ve discovered that they’re actually spies for rival organizations. It’s the secrets you keep inside of a marriage. From that initial pitch, had you decided to basically flip it that these are complete strangers who are put together as a marriage and then have to learn about each other? That was your initial pitch?

**Francesca:** No. Actually, our initial pitch was that this was a marriage that was on the rocks, and things had gotten stale. We actually did pitch something closer to the film.

**John:** Closer to the premise.

**Francesca:** It wasn’t until we were really workshopping it that we felt like two strangers was the correct angle for a variety of reasons, one being the why. We really wanted it to be about loneliness. That just felt like the better angle in terms of bringing that to light.

**John:** You say workshopping. What does workshopping it mean?

**Francesca:** Tossing around ideas, banging our heads against the wall, saying, “Let’s go down this path. Here’s why this is great.” Then we felt like within the eight episodes and the eight hours that we had, showing milestones of a relationship from start to finish felt like the freshest take, and especially in terms of having missions of the week.

**John:** Absolutely. The meet-cute is that they’re essentially assigned to each other, and it then has to evolve from that. Had you solid it with the vague, initial pitch of being more like the movie, and then in actually developing it internally, you decided, “We’re going to change the premise.”

**Francesca:** Yes. We pitched it exactly as you just said. Also, it definitely helped that at the time, Phoebe was on board.

**John:** Phoebe Waller-Bridge, another previous Scriptnotes guest and incredibly talented writer and actor. Was the goal for them to write it together? What was the initial vision for this?

**Francesca:** The origin, everyone’s very curious about this piece, which I totally understand. No one is more of a legend to the writing community than a Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She’s incredible. Donald and I knew that we wanted her to play Jane, because in my mind and in Donald’s mind, it just made sense that it had to be this meta couple and that they had to be truly well matched. For what Donald did for Atlanta and a community in one way, Phoebe felt like she did that. Fleabag. They’re also friends. They’re also funny in very different ways, but still very, very funny.

**John:** They’re in the same Star Wars universe.

**Francesca:** They’re in the same Star Wars universe, exactly. It just felt right. I actually wrote this little synopsis with all of these places that episodes could potentially go. He sent them to her, and she read them. I waited with bated breath to see how she would feel about it. She loved it, which floored me. I couldn’t believe it. She came on board initially to act and then ended up asking us, “How would you feel if I wrote it with you guys?” That turned us into a three-headed monster of creators together, which was a dream to me.

When we pitched it to Amazon, it was just Donald and myself, but we did say, “Our Jane could be Phoebe Waller-Bridge,” which Amazon’s mouths hit the floor. They were very happy about that idea, especially they both had deals there. There are so many reasons why it was amazing.

**John:** You’re developing this. You and Donald are figuring out your take. She would come on board also as a writer at some point. It sounds like ultimately the visions did not align perfectly. That also happens. It’s so frustrating when you see reports like, “Oh, there’s bad blood,” or anything. Sometimes things just don’t work right. Is that a fair summary of what happened there?

**Francesca:** It’s a really fair summary. Donald let me cast the room with this incredible group of people. The room ended up actually being all women, all women of color, completely based on merit and the strength on the page. It actually wasn’t based on anything outside of that.

**John:** What were you looking for? This is your first time assembling a room, right?

**Francesca:** Yes, it’s my first time assembling a room. I was looking for people that could get along. It was really important to me that we all felt like we would be friends, that we weren’t just there for work. It was important to me that people were generous about their own stories and vulnerabilities and being able to laugh at themselves, because so much of this had to be pulled from personal lives about relationships.

Most importantly, I wanted the writing to be strong. I wanted the writing to be able to speak to personal dynamics, but still also have a sense of humor. I was really excited to have all women, because I really felt like the strength of this show would be more Jane’s story, even though it is about two people. I wanted different perspectives of different kinds of really strong woman come into the room and get their voice to that.

**John:** I want to make sure I’m getting the order of events here right. You’re putting together this room. Had you already written the pilot?

**Francesca:** No, we had not.

**John:** That’s interesting. You had a vision for what the show was going to be, but there was not a pilot yet.

**Francesca:** No pilot.

**John:** You’re putting together this room. That room has to figure out whether the whole show is including the pilot.

**Francesca:** Exactly. At that point, I had done that first, before necessarily knowing if Phoebe really was going to come on or not, with this big hope. “Let’s hope that she does. If she doesn’t, we still have a great room.” Then she said yes, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, we cannot be beat. We’ve got everything. We’ve got the great women in the room. We’ve got Phoebe. We’ve got Donald. We have Stephen Glover. We’re unstoppable.”

To your point earlier, with different time zones and Zooms and a pandemic and all these different kinds of voices, ultimately Phoebe gave so much. Phoebe and I would a lot of times end up just on the phone for hours and hours, just the two of us, really trying to figure this whole thing out. But ultimately, Donald and I had such a distinct vision for the show. It evolved over time, and it changed, but the crux of it is still the same. Eventually, the visions just weren’t aligning. She was very gracious about stepping away and letting us do our thing.

**John:** You have this room. You have this vision. You’re talking. But what point is there actually a script? At what point is there something on paper to say, “This is the show we’re trying to make.”

**Francesca:** At one point, I had done a pass of the pilot. I then passed my pass to Donald. Donald did a pass on my pass. That pass went to Phoebe. Phoebe did a pass. There was one moment where we all blew up each other’s scripts. Then finally, we all band together one more time from the first pass that I had sent there. We went back to it. That ended up being the pilot that, once Phoebe ended up leaving, I rewrote one more time. But ultimately, that was what ended up being on television.

**John:** This script exists. The room still exists. Now, the room can read this thing. “This is the show we’re trying to make.” I always feel like the script helps anchor our expectations in a way that it’s all nebulous until there’s something on paper.

**Francesca:** Yes, 100 percent. That is exactly right. I will even say that the most important thing that we figured out in the room was the milestones of the relationship and making that the anchor of the series, and also then figuring out how we could take these missions that could otherwise be so silly and make us get away with the unbelievable and pausing disbelief because it was able to speak then so directly to the relationship milestones. That was the freshness of it. That’s how we got away with some of the silliness. That was the best and most useful part of what we did collectively as a team in the room. The scripts had to change so many times, especially once Phoebe left and once we found Maya. Maya of it all happened when the room mostly disbanded at that point.

**John:** Let’s talk about Maya, because she’s another creator, brilliant writer, performer. Were you specifically looking for that energy or someone who could do that, or she was just the right person and available at the time?

**Francesca:** It’s a great question. It’s a combination. I think going back to earlier, the gut reaction thing, I think it started off as a gut reaction.

**John:** The gut reaction is true, just the same way Phoebe’s interesting opposite him. She brings a very interesting energy opposite him.

**Francesca:** I agree. I remember being on a text thread with Carmen Cuba, our casting director, and then Michael Schaefer and Donald and Hiro. We’re like, “Who? Who? Who?”

**John:** Hiro Murai, who’s the director.

**Francesca:** Hiro Murai, who is, yes, the director, one of my really close friends and probably one of my favorite people on the planet. We were texting each other. Carmen said Maya. As soon as she said Maya, I was typing Maya. I was like, “That’s just too strangely aligned.” Then Hiro said Maya. We all felt her, but none of us unpacked why. I think in retrospect, it is the fact that she is also this visionary. She’s also a creator. There is that meta quality that I was looking for with Phoebe in a different way with Maya and Donald. Also, there’s something interesting about them playing these rejects. It feels like a good pairing.

**John:** She plays lonely really well.

**Francesca:** She does.

**John:** We know that from Pen15. She’s not afraid also to let you deep inside of her.

**Francesca:** She is the queen of allowing herself to embarrass herself so deeply that it turns beautiful. She does that better than anybody, in my opinion.

**John:** You have a pilot. Now, you have all the scripts. The room is largely disbanded. We have a new actor on, so you’re having to rewrite some stuff to tailor it better to her experience. Now, you’re also responsible for production. This is the first time that this is all on your shoulders. What was that process like getting up to speed with that?

**Francesca:** Just a little anecdote or background on that too is that we started talking about the show in 2020, we started writing the show in 2021.

**John:** There’s a pandemic happening, yeah.

**Francesca:** I got pregnant, and then I had just had my baby at the top of 2022. Then we were off to production. I was juggling being brand new first-time mom, brand new first-time showrunner. I joke around sometimes that I had twins, because it really did feel like that in a lot of ways. We had an amazing line producer, Anthony Katagas, who’s this old-school cinema head, really knows New York. When we decided it was going to take place in New York, he was the guy. Anthony’s the kind of producer that never tells you no. He just says, “How can we do this? How can we figure it out?” which is really fun for a bunch of scrappy kids with a big budget for the very first time. It was incredible that we were able to do it.

**John:** What lessons did you learn early on as a showrunner? What were the things that were complete surprises? Background is, I produced a show very early on and had a complete nervous breakdown. It was a disaster.

**Francesca:** It’s so hard.

**John:** It’s so hard. I think you had more TV experience than I did going into it. Just the amount of just staying on top of everything is so tough.

**Francesca:** Oh my gosh. It doesn’t matter how much experience you have. I even feel like if I ever have the opportunity to show-run again, which I hope I do, it’s still going to be a shit show. It’s part of the experience. I didn’t realize how much of it was people managing. I didn’t realize how much of it is also being a psychiatrist and then needing a psychiatrist for yourself. Also, so much of making sure that you’re managing the budget and being wise. Here’s a little stupid example, but I feel like it says a lot. When I wrote initially, I would write these scenes with the cat, so many scenes with Max. Maya’s allergic to cats.

**John:** Oh, god.

**Francesca:** The cat one day ran and got lost under the stage and cost us hours, which cost of us money. All of a sudden, Max is in maybe no scenes anymore. Maybe we can have sometimes Max sit on the couch. That’s an example of learning and thinking on your feet in a small way, but there are way bigger versions of that. As you’re making this thing, it takes so much time and energy. People were losing their parents. I lost my dad. You’re having to push through these personal matters, close out the noise, and still give everything you can to this moving show. Also, the tone, I think I learned a lot that you have this idea when you write something on paper, and then in the reality of it, it’s this ever-moving, evolving thing. It tells you what it should be, versus the other way around, and you have to pivot. I hadn’t known that until this experience how much pivoting you end up actually doing to service the show.

**John:** How much rewriting were you doing while shooting a lot?

**Francesca:** Gosh. A lot. That I won’t do as much this next time around, because that was bananas. But yeah, quite a bit.

**John:** We have some listener questions I thought might be good for us to talk through.

**Drew:** The first one comes from Chat McG. Says, “I recently read Christopher Nolan’s screenplay for Tenet. While I enjoyed it very much, I don’t think an unknown writer would’ve gotten very far with it as a writing sample. This got me thinking, what makes a good calling card screenplay for an unknown? If you had to start from scratch, what kind of thing would you write? Would you steer clear of certain genres? Would you try to reinvent the wheel to get noticed or write something solid in a popular genre to assure the reader that you know what you’re doing? How would you write to impress the agent’s assistant’s assistant to pass it on and get noticed?”

**John:** You read a ton of samples for this. What was a good sample for you? What did you like to see on the page? Were you finishing all the scripts? How did you get scripts? Talk us through that process of picking writers for your room.

**Francesca:** There are a lot of not-great scripts. I hate to say that. I was so surprised by that. Again, in terms of answering a question or giving advice, I always feel silly about it, but I just want to come from a sincere place, and I hope this isn’t too sincere. But I think if you’re trying so hard to write a script to get in the door, you’re doing it wrong. I think you have to first write a script that you feel connected to. It has to start with you. If you’re not feeling anything by it, and you’re just thinking about the agenda as a whole, people can read that straight away.

I think we live in a really hard and cynical world, but I think the thing that transcends is being authentic. I think it’s contagious. I think people can sense it. As long as you’re writing something that feels really true to you and makes sense to you and makes you feel something, then that’s going to hopefully make someone else do that. But I don’t think you should think about where it can take you.

**John:** This question about should you write in a popular genre or that kind of stuff, it’s like, no, because really, it’s meant to represent you. It’s not meant to be made necessarily. It’s just what is the script that someone can point to, it’s like, “Oh, you should read this, because it’s really good, and I want to meet this person who wrote this script.”

**Francesca:** Exactly. Tuesdays was about Tuesdays, and it got me to eventually make Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

**John:** Another question.

**Drew:** Joshua writes, “I recently received notes from someone at a major studio. He told me that in pilots, you should follow major character introductions with a, ‘Think Mindy Kaling,’ or a, ‘Think Joel McHale,’ to give them a sense of what kind of person could be cast in this role. I hadn’t received this note before, but he implied this is standard practice now. Did I miss an industry-wide memo or could this just be for their particular studio?”

**Francesca:** I think that’s a particular studio thing. I think as long as the rest of it works, if that feels like that little wink goes with the tone of how you’re writing everything else and that feels natural for the rest of it, sure. But if you’re writing this hard-hitting, cinematic experience where you’re getting lost in the vision of it, and that’s how you write, and you’re like, “Think Mindy Kaling,” that will not work.

**John:** I bristle at this, because I also think if you say, “Think Joel McHale,” immediately that’s a white guy. Also, it limits your choices down. Listen. If that studio really wants it that way, you got to listen to that. But I don’t think that’s good advice in general.

**Francesca:** I agree.

**John:** I wouldn’t do that.

**Francesca:** Don’t box you in.

**John:** It feels lazy too. Then we’re only going to read their dialog with that cadence in our heads.

**Francesca:** Yeah, it’s really limiting. Definitely. I agree with you.

**Drew:** Rashani in Sydney writes, “I read lots of scripts and usually find them with ease. I’m working on a story about art and decided to read the Mona Lisa Smile script, but I couldn’t find it for free, so I paid $20 for it on a website I wasn’t even sure was legitimate. The story has a happy ending, since I did receive my pdf copy the next morning. But I’m curious, why are some scripts in the public domain and others not? It might be a silly question, but I never questioned this before, since every script I ever read, I found on the internet for free.”

**John:** First off, scripts aren’t in the public domain. There’s still copyright to the person who wrote them or the studio who released them. But most of them are available. You just download them on the internet. That’s good. It’s a good thing that’s happened over the last 20 years is that they’re available and people can read them. It’s so helpful for all people who want to learn more about scripts. Way back when I started here, there were stores where you could pay your 20 bucks to get a printed script of a thing. That’s not good. Scripts want to be free.

**Francesca:** I agree. I remember one of the most educational experiences for me way more than screenwriting school was just reading Buck Henry and seeing how much came from his mind. It blew me away. I thought, oh my goodness, what a beautiful medium to tell a story, and never thought about this until this exact moment. But I don’t know if I would be doing what I was doing in terms of writing scripts, so I hadn’t read that script.

**John:** Exactly. Listen, Rashani. I think it’s great you got the script that you wanted to read, but also maybe you could share the wealth and just put that up someplace so people can read that script and no one else has to pay $20 to get it.

**Francesca:** Yeah, I’m with that too.

**John:** Whoever wrote Mona Lisa Smile, they’re not getting any of that $20.

**Francesca:** Exactly.

**John:** It’s not a legitimate thing that you’re paying somebody.

**Francesca:** Exactly. I couldn’t agree more.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Do you have something, Francesca, you want to recommend to our listeners?

**Francesca:** Yeah. If I deeply care about somebody, I always get them this book. It’s called Bluets by Maggie Nelson. It’s technically a poetry book. I feel like it’s more of a philosophy book. It meditates on the color blue. It’s really, really specifically from a woman’s point of view and unrelenting in sorrow and sadness and love and loss. I really feel like if anybody wants to get into the depths of how deep my sadness can go and how that’s actually then sort of liberating, I always get them Bluets to get some kind of a glimmer of what that feels like.

**John:** That sounds great. That’s great. Mine is a blog post I read this past week called A Unified Theory of Fucks by Mandy Brown. I’ll read the premise of it. She says, “You are born with so many fucks to give. However many you’ve got is all there is. They’re like eggs in that way. Some of us are born with quite a lot, some with less, but none of us knows how many we have. When we’re young, we go around giving a fuck about all kinds of things, blissfully unaware of our ever-dwindling supply, until one day we give the last fuck we’ve got. The invisible bag of fucks we’ve been carrying around all these years is irredeemably empty. We have no more fucks left to give.”

**Francesca:** That’s so great.

**John:** It’s a really good metaphor. She continues on to say that you can’t buy more fucks, but you can get fucks. People can give a fuck about you, and so you can collect fucks. It’s the importance of giving a fuck but also being willing to receive them when people are trying to give a fuck about you.

**Francesca:** I’m very into that.

**John:** It’s just a really smart philosophy and a smart way of framing that thing. Just give a fuck about things.

**Francesca:** I do. I give a fuck about things.

**John:** You clearly do. Absolute pleasure talking with you.

**Francesca:** You too. Thank you so much. I was so nervous, but this was actually really nice.

**John:** Yay. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. Reminder that our outros have some version of (sings). We’ve been getting some outros recently which are charming, but they’re not a Scriptnotes outro.

**Drew:** They’re full songs.

**John:** They’re full songs. We don’t need those. We want 30 seconds that feels like a clever variation on Scriptnotes.

**Drew:** Perfect.

**John:** Ask@johnaugust.com is also a place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today, or send some follow-up. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on film schools and fellowships. Francesca, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is on Amazon Prime Video everywhere worldwide?

**Francesca:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** All episodes are out now, right?

**Francesca:** Yes, all episodes are out.

**John:** Should watch them and rejoice in the thing that you made.

**Francesca:** I would love that if they did.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Francesca:** Thank you so much.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** For a bonus segment, I would love to talk about film schools and fellowships and all the stuff you do before you get started in this career, because you went through CalArts. I think you’re the first person on our show who’s gone through CalArts. What did you take from that? What recommendations do you have for someone who’s considering film school, or should they do something else? You must be asked this question. What advice do you give people?

**Francesca:** CalArts I think was an incredible experience for me, but in ways that have nothing to do with what I do now for a living. I think CalArts was an amazing experience for me, because I think I met people who changed the way that I think.

For instance, James Benning is a professor there. James Benning makes these gorgeous long-form films. For instance, he made, for one example, this film called 20 Cigarettes, where he does these portrait pieces. I happen to be in one, but I fast forward during my part. It’s just a person starting a cigarette, from start to finish. It’s gorgeous. It says so much without giving anything away.

That affected my writing. But it was very costly. I don’t actually think it did anything in terms of moving me ahead in this career. Same with UCLA. I think what I got out of UCLA masters program was time to write scripts. This is no shade on either school. I think that they’re incredible. I think that they help other people. But I don’t actually think it impacted where I ended up if I had not had either one of those educations.

**John:** CalArts I think about as being just really an art school. Did you have other normal university classes? Did you have English and all of the other stuff, or it was just art the whole time?

**Francesca:** For instance, there was a math class that was called Math as Art. I remember we would have to come in. A friend of mine Patrick’s math problem was him saying in front of the room, “And on, and on, and on, and on.” He got a high pass. That sums up the answer to that question.

**John:** That’s incredible. I’m guessing you came from a pretty good educational background, so you didn’t necessarily need that full college experience. But for somebody who might benefit from that or benefit from the challenging medieval lit class, you weren’t going to get that at CalArts.

**Francesca:** No, you weren’t going to get that at CalArts. Actually, I went to Philadelphia Public Schools. I’m not sure how great my education was. I just was somebody who was a lover of books and knowledge and history on my own right. I think a lot of that just came from me. But I do think my biggest career education was watching films and watching television and watching my heroes, like you even, for instance. I think if you want to tell stories in this way, that’s the greatest way to learn and learn film history and things like that.

**John:** Going to UCLA for a specific graduate program, two years, three years? How long was that?

**Francesca:** Oh my gosh. My brain from the past years is scrambled.

**John:** You were a young child, so that explains it.

**Francesca:** Exactly, exactly. Technically, I believe it’s a two-year program.

**John:** Going into that, did you have samples to get into that? How do you get admitted to that program? What was your expectation going into it?

**Francesca:** You do have samples, and you have to apply, and you have to get letters of recommendation and go through all of that process. My expectation of that was, people think about it in terms of networking, I’m sure, which makes a lot of sense. You do meet people that way. I personally wanted to go to get a masters and hopefully get to write at least one script that was good enough to allow me to then teach. That was my angle was higher education.

**John:** As a fallback, you could always teach it while you were still writing.

**Francesca:** Exactly.

**John:** I have misgivings about sometimes graduate film school programs, but I think the least you were going to do is you were going to come out of there with some work finished. You had to come out of there with some samples. You’ll have to write a half hour. You’ll have to write a feature. You’ll have to get an experience writing different kinds of things.

**Francesca:** More than anything, you’re paying for the time and the discipline to get that done. I was fortunate enough that within my first year, I ended up getting cast into my first writers’ room. Then it was really about juggling writers’ rooms and finishing my masters at the same time.

**John:** And all the jealousy of your classmates.

**Francesca:** Yeah, and sometimes professors too, honestly. It happens. But it was important to my parents that I finish that, that I finished the education and got the paper, got the masters.

**John:** Any fellowships, any other programs along the way that you participated in? Were any of them useful?

**Francesca:** I did a Sundance Lab, which was really incredible, just because the community was really smart. I got to meet a lot of other really talented individuals. It changed my perspective on how to make things, just a little bit. Not entirely. I think any experience that makes you reflect on your own process and how to create something is worth your time.

**John:** I’ve worked with Sundance Labs a lot. This was a TV lab? A feature lab? What was it?

**Francesca:** This was a feature lab.

**John:** Were you up on the mountain doing all that?

**Francesca:** No, this was the one that was local. This was for actually that script Headbangers that I had workshopped there and I had written so many years before. It was interesting, because I almost felt like I had evolved from that, and I was still going back to it, which is really interesting. I did have one mentor. I won’t say who it is. But she had said something really funny to me. She said, “If you don’t change your script,” because I was saying I wanted to make it even more experimental and this and that. She said, “If you don’t change your script, I’m afraid that white people are really not going to like your movies.” I said to her, “That might be one of the coolest things anyone’s ever said to me.”

**John:** The Sundance model is really interesting. Basically, they’ll take filmmakers or TV writers and their scripts, and you’ll meet with a succession of established writers who are just talking through what it is you’re trying to do and how to help you do it. I always describe it as being, when I’m in that role as an advisor, I am just your friend with a pickup truck. I’m helping you move from where you were to where you want to go.

**Francesca:** That’s cool.

**John:** I’m not going to tell you how to set up your apartment.

**Francesca:** I like that.

**John:** I’m just going to help you get the couch through the door. That can be really, really useful.

**Francesca:** Definitely.

**John:** If a person has the opportunity to do Sundance Labs, I always say recommend them. But it doesn’t mean you take every note and just do every note. That’s just not how it’s going to work.

**Francesca:** I think that’s right. I do think out of all of the communities that this industry has, that one that is really supportive. I really do like Sundance.

**John:** They’re generally rooting for you. They have no other agenda…

**Francesca:** Absolutely.

**John:** … other than make the best thing you possibly can make.

**Francesca:** Completely.

**John:** Cool. Francesca, thanks again for this conversation.

**Francesca:** Thank you so much. Thank you.

Links:

* [Francesca Sloane](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4300986/) on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/f__sloane/)
* [Mr. & Mrs. Smith](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLRQGR5G?ref=DVM_US_DL_SL_GO_AOS_MAMS_mkw_sfphkCC9t-dc&mrntrk=pcrid_689516632965_slid__pgrid_156782128925_pgeo_9030930_x__adext__ptid_kwd-2265602445555) on Amazon Prime Video
* [ISPA: Inter-Species Phonetic Alphabet for Transcribing Animal Sounds](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03269) by Masato Hagiwara, Marius Miron and Jen-Yu Liu
* [Bluets by Maggie Nelson](https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/bluets)
* [A Unified Theory of F-cks by Mandy Brown](https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/unified-theory-of——)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/631standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/a-very-special-christmas-episode).

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

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

**John:** This is a very special Christmas episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, when I say a Christmas episode, what comes to mind? What are the themes or the plots in a Christmas episode?

**Craig:** There’s somebody who’s coming home to see their family. I’m just going to Hallmark this. She’s been putting her career in front of her personal life. Then there’s that guy that she remembers from high school who’s back, and he’s raising a kid on his own, because his wife died, at 23. She’s just woken up to the possibilities that maybe she doesn’t want to be in the big city anymore, and she’s going to live here in the small town and get together and become a stepmom but still work. She doesn’t give up anything. Actually, she gets everything.

**John:** That’s a Christmas movie. That’s a onetime story that happens. I’m thinking about more a Christmas episode of an existing series.

**Craig:** Oh, a Christmas episode. Everybody does a little Secret Santa. They each give each other gifts. Those gifts prompt memories, which then go [imitates magical sound effect] and you get clips.

**John:** Remember back, like a clip show.

**Craig:** Clip show.

**John:** It’s also the opportunity for actors to sing.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** They reveal that one of them actually can sing really, really well.

**Craig:** Because they hate that.

**John:** They hate that. Never let an actor sing.

**Craig:** They’re like, “Oh, no, don’t make me. Okay.”

**John:** The other thing that’s often a hallmark, I want to say, of these Christmas episodes is A Christmas Carol. There’s some version of a Christmas Carol where they are visited by ghosts of past and present, which is actually the case for us here today, because we are visited by the ghost of producers past in the form of Megana Rao is here.

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

**Craig:** Yay! I know we have producers present.

**John:** Drew Marquardt is here.

**Drew Marquardt:** Hello.

**Craig:** Is a producer’s future going to show up and do that weird, creepy bone hand point to my grave thing?

**John:** We don’t have a producer future yet, but for all we know, one of the listeners is the future Scriptnotes producer.

**Craig:** That’s pretty deep.

**John:** That’s pretty deep.

**Craig:** Everyone, it could be you.

**John:** We’re going to learn some valuable lessons today-

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** … hopefully on this podcast. We are also going to do a bake-off. We’re going to talk about bake-offs, and we’re going to eat delicious cookies, and we’re going to discuss these delicious cookies in front of us.

**Megana:** I cannot wait. I won’t be able to focus on anything else.

**Craig:** It’s a little bit like Lambert, your dog. He just keeps cheating, looking over like, “You’ll pet me now, right?” Megana’s like, “I’m talking, but really-”

**John:** The cookies are right in front of Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Can we give any preview?

**John:** Please describe these cookies for us.

**Craig:** There are three cookies. One appears to be a standard good old-fashioned chocolate chip. The other one might be oatmeal raisin. Hard to tell. It’s a darker brown. Then the third, it’s a brown-black kind of color. It looks like white chocolate chips in there. Maybe macadamia. Who knows? That’s the one that’s tweaking me right now. That’s where my eyeballs keep going.

**Megana:** It looks decadent, like it’s got a good mouth feel.

**Craig:** My understanding is these are from different places.

**John:** These are different bakeries across Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Drew and Megana consulted about the best cookies we could get.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** We will be discussing this bake-off as we talk about writing bake-offs and the scourge of Hollywood.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Are we going to do this wine tasting style where we take a bite, chew, spit it in a bucket.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. You see the bucket in front of you. That bucket is for spitting.

**Craig:** That’s what that’s for?

**John:** Yeah. You wouldn’t actually eat a cookie.

**Craig:** No. God. Yuck.

**Megana:** Over my dead body. You will have to scrape it out of my teeth.

**Craig:** Megana’s going to eat the plate.

**John:** We’re also going to talk about Netflix, who released a bunch of viewership data.

**Craig:** You said that like the Berlin Wall didn’t just come crumbling down. This is insane.

**John:** It is insane. We will get into that. We’re going to answer some listener questions. In our bonus segment of premium members, let’s talk about gifts and the best gifts we remembered getting as a child or afterward. Let’s talk about gifts, because that’s the season.

Now, before we even get started here, Megana is here because we really wanted her to come. I texted her to say, “Hey, Megana, we had to postpone the live show, but would you want to come over on Sunday to record an episode with me and Craig?” Megana texted back, she wrote…

**Megana:** I said, “Oh, I would love to, but I think I’m going to prepone my flight. Any chance Saturday works?”

**Craig:** I’m sorry, did you say prepone?

**Megana:** I did say prepone.

**John:** That was exactly my response.

**Craig:** Now we have a problem.

**John:** I asked her, “Did you just create a brand new word?” Because you know what it means.

**Craig:** Of course. I’m using logic. Actually, in theory, it should work, although it’s a bit like gruntled, like, “Oh, I’m so gruntled to be here.” No one says that. We only have the negative. There’s only the post and not the pre version of poning something. Did you create this?

**John:** She wondered if she created it. But I turned to Drew, who was right there, and so Drew did some research.

**Drew:** Megana did not create it. It is standard in Indian English and South Asian English, but it goes all the way back to Latin.

**Craig:** Things are starting to make sense.

**John:** What is your theory now on prepone?

**Megana:** When I said it and you questioned it, it felt so natural to me. I was like, “This feels like this word has always been a part of me.” It is, because my mom uses the term a lot, as does everyone in my family. I was telling John, it makes sense to me that prepone would be a South Asian English term, because we are so fluid with time and logistics and all of those things that-

**Craig:** Interesting. It almost implies though that there’s more specificity to time. You’re pulling something forward, as opposed to pushing it later? Is that what prepone means?

**Megana:** It is what it means. But people in my family are always like, “Just prepone your flight, or prepone this, and then do that.”

**Craig:** Which means do it earlier?

**Megana:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s actually great. Just like in production, we have a push, which means you’re not going to come in tomorrow at 8:00, you’re going to come in at 9:00. We also have a pull. We’re going to pull your call. But we don’t have that really for standard English or American English. We only have postpone. Prepone makes total sense.

**Megana:** It’s more efficient.

**Craig:** I’m fascinated why it emerged in Southeast Asia as an English word that I don’t think the British use either.

**John:** It traces back to the 16th century, so it was used in British English, but not very commonly. It goes back to Latin praeponere, which means to place in front of.

**Craig:** Prepare.

**John:** Yeah, prepare, or ponere would be to place something someplace.

**Craig:** Pre-place. This is fascinating.

**John:** If a character said that in a script, we would be like, “What is that?” It would jump out.

**Craig:** Word to the wise, Megana. Although I feel like we probably did it right now.

**John:** We did it.

**Megana:** We’re normalizing it.

**Craig:** We’ve normalized prepone.

**John:** Prepone.

**Craig:** I have a feeling I’m going to get a call from my agent a year from now going, “Hey, can we prepone this call?” I’m going to be like, “Oh my god. Oh my god. It’s a buzzword now.”

**Megana:** It’s so funny that it rankles you or you immediately recognize it as strange, because it couldn’t feel more natural to me.

**John:** I’ve never heard it.

**Craig:** I have never heard it before.

**Megana:** Wow.

**Craig:** I just went da-doing. It’s not one of those words that’s offensive. I’m actually annoyed I haven’t had it. I feel deprived.

**John:** Should’ve been there. Something we also should’ve had this entire time was viewership data for the streaming services. This was a huge point of contention in the WGA strike. Of course, the SAG-AFTRA took the same basic formula. But now, this last week, Netflix released just a ton of viewership data on all this stuff. It is the hours viewed for every title original and licensed, watched over 50,000 hours. The premiere date for any Netflix TV series or film was listed on this chart, whether it was available globally. In total, this report, which they released, covers more than 18,000 titles, 99 percent of all viewing on Netflix, and nearly 100 billion hours viewed.

**Craig:** This is an insane thing. I guess question number one is do we believe this?

**John:** That’s fair. We don’t have any sort of independent way of verifying that these are the real numbers. I guess my volley back would be, what would be the reason for fudging the numbers on any given title or multiple titles?

**Craig:** Two potential reasons. One, fudge upwards to look better for Wall Street. Two, fudge downwards on shows where fudging upwards would cost them a lot, because now that the WGA made their deal and got success-based residuals of some sort, and SAG… Is their success-based slightly different than ours?

**John:** It’s exactly the same.

**Craig:** Exactly the same.

**John:** But they get paid more than we do [crosstalk 08:21].

**Craig:** That makes sense, because they have to split it across a cast. That’s my question. The number one title on this list is The Night Agent: Season 1.

**John:** Craig, you’ve seen every episode of The Night Agent. You know exactly what it is. Tell me about The Night Agent. Tell me what you love about it so much.

**Craig:** As you guys know, I love agency-based stuff, agency-based narratives, whether it’s a travel agent, a secret agent. When I have a choice of viewing, and I know, okay, this whole thing takes place during the day, as opposed to this happening at night, I always go to the night. It just looks cooler. That’s what drew me to The Night Agent: Season 1.

**John:** I think you’re getting confused though, because it’s not about an agent that works at night. It’s actually about an agent who helps you find the right night for you. It’s like a real estate agent. What is the right night for me?

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** It’s that fulfillment kind of show.

**Craig:** Buying and selling knights.

**John:** No, it’s not that at all. It’s a Shawn Ryan show. Shawn Ryan, who’s a [crosstalk 09:17] guy. It is his show for Netflix. It is by far the top title.

**Craig:** He’s destroying. Is this a crime kind of thing or a spy thing?

**John:** It’s not. Let me give you the description of it.

**Craig:** It’s like I don’t work in this biz. Literally, so oblivious.

**John:** Here’s a summary that’s on IMDb. Low-level FBI agent Peter Sutherland works in the basement of the White House manning a phone that never rings – until the night it does, propelling him into a conspiracy that leads all the way to the Oval Office.

**Craig:** As they often do.

**John:** As they often do. It has no stars to speak of. The two people I recognized in the cast are Hong Chau and DB Woodside.

**Craig:** They’re both very good.

**John:** Both very good, but there’s no marquee star. That’s not either of those people. It’s based on a book by Matthew Quirk. Seven writers in the room. It seems like a very conventional show that is a giant hit.

**Craig:** It’s a giant hit. That’s my question. You mentioned no huge stars. I don’t think the star thing necessarily would connect to these hours viewed, although individual actors may make deals with Netflix that say, hey, if you hit this number, you got to pay me extra. Doesn’t sound like maybe they have, like you said, a big marquee A-lister, Bradley Cooper kind of guy. When I look at this, I just wonder. I want to believe all of this. I don’t know what to do with 812 million hours viewed exactly. I don’t know what it means.

**John:** One of the challenges with hours viewed is it’s hard for a feature to hit hours viewed, because a feature’s just two hours of film. It’s not 10 hours the way that a limited series would be.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I assume they keep track of people rewatching things, although I’m not sure how you even convert rewatchability into money when there is no advertising. If you rewatch something on a network, you get new ads. That’s money.

**John:** Ultimately, Netflix will have ads, and so that will be useful for them down the road, the rewatching.

**Craig:** What is interesting is what we don’t see on here. There’s a lot of stuff on Netflix, and a lot of hoopla around all sorts of things. Every time a new show comes out, as I like to say, Netflix announces it as the most watched show in the history of mankind. Wednesday is not surprising to see here in the top five.

**John:** We had the creators of that show on here to talk about it.

**Craig:** You, very popular, people talk about all the time. But then there are these… FUBAR: Season 1?

**John:** Don’t know it.

**Craig:** What is FUBAR?

**Drew:** It’s an Arnold Schwarzenegger show.

**Craig:** That actually makes sense. That’s kind of cool.

**John:** Ginny and Georgia I’ve heard about only in the sense that it’s a giant hit on Netflix that I’ve never heard of.

**Craig:** Same. Giant hit on Netflix, and I don’t know what it is. BEEF: Season 1, very good, I would say for that. There are shows that, now that we’re in the thick of an incredibly compressed award season because of the strikes, everything is happening in January and February, basically. The discussion is, okay, there are these shows that are not necessarily widely watched by audiences around the world, but they’re very hot in our circles. Of course, inside Hollywood, that’s where all the voters come from. Then you think, okay, BEEF, everyone talks about BEEF, everyone’s seen BEEF here, but is it a hit anywhere else? Answer: yes.

**John:** Yes, it is.

**Craig:** Yes, it is.

**John:** It’s important to note that almost all these titles, they’re showing the global hours viewed. Some of these shows may not be huge hits in the US, but they are big hits overseas. The third title listed on here is The Glory, which is a Korean show. There’s actually quite a few Asian shows that show up pretty high. There’s Spanish shows that show up pretty high.

**Craig:** La Reina del Sur. Physical: 100: Season 1, that looks Korean as well. Physical: 100: Season 1 has two colons in it, Physical, colon, 100, colon, Season 1. I’m into that.

**John:** What will be the actual impact of Netflix deciding to release this? Will it pressure the other companies to do similarly?

**Craig:** Not necessarily. Probably, if I had to guess, I would say the opposite, that Netflix is the most widely watched streaming service. If I’m Apple, I would probably destroy small countries before I would agree to put out hours viewed, because every indication is they’re not viewed anywhere near this level. Other companies may not have this hours viewed data the way that Netflix does. For instance, Max, or HBO, is still linear and streaming. Do you get the hours viewed like they do? Because that data doesn’t come in. When grandma watches it over her satellite dish, it doesn’t collect the data the way it does on a streaming service. Disney Plus I think might, if they felt they could compete with these numbers. I think Netflix is kind of smart, because they’re like, “You guys want to see numbers? We’ll show you numbers. Now you. Now you do it.” I don’t know if we’re going to see any of these anytime soon from anyone.

**John:** I guess the counter-argument to that is you can always divide the hours viewed by the actual number of subscribers you have. That’s the reason why Paramount Plus, it’s not going to have 812 million hours viewed, but based on the number of subscribers, they could show what are the hits for it.

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s the subscribers that matter. That’s the problem. Paramount’s like, “Our subscribers watch more per subscriber than Netflix subscribers do.” It doesn’t matter, because if you have one subscriber, you’re dead, no matter how much that guy watches. I like the idea of one crazy Paramount Plus subscriber who’s just 24/7.

**Megana:** It’s me.

**Craig:** It’s you?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It you.

**John:** Megana, some insights. Are there shows on here that you’re aware of that we’re not aware of?

**Megana:** Some of these shows like The Night Agent and FUBAR my parents were all over, so I was aware of the popularity of those shows. Something I was surprised about though looking at this is very few comedies.

**Craig:** Comedies are not global. That’s the problem. That’s why comedies in motion pictures were always questionable investments and always got squeezed on budgets, because it was just hard to make back anything anywhere else, because some comedy just doesn’t travel. But is there anything on here that you’re surprised to see how low it is?

**Megana:** We only have two sheets of this, and scrolling through this whole report, it’s just endless.

**John:** It is endless. This is also January through July 2023. Stuff that’s more recent we wouldn’t actually show here. I’m always happy to see things like Never Have I Ever: Season 4 showing up. It’s on the second page, but it’s still pretty high up there. It’s a comedy in its final season. You think about like, the nice thing about multiple-season shows is, was that last season worth it for us to make, and this seems like yes, it was worth it to make that last season.

**Megana:** A huge win for Aline with Your Place Or Mine right below that.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. In what’s called the national competition, the Olympics level competition, Korea with the gold. There is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 Korean series listed here. That’s impressive.

**Megana:** I also listened to the media call that they did with this. One point that they made was that Korean series have 40 to 50 episodes. If you are watching and you’re engaged, that’s-

**Craig:** I see.

**Megana:** … a lot more hours then.

**Craig:** It’s going to rack up. Korea, it’s not a massively populated country. It’s nothing like India, for instance. Where’s India on this list? That’s what I want to know.

**Megana:** I’m not seeing a ton of-

**Craig:** I’m confused.

**Megana:** … localized Indian things.

**Craig:** There’s Netflix India. It’s not like they break it out into a different service.

**Megana:** There definitely is, and they have really great localized content for India. I don’t know. I feel like most people’s viewing patterns in India, the types of shows that they’re watching, I don’t know that everybody’s watching Netflix stuff.

**Craig:** It’s not necessarily the biggest thing there.

**Megana:** I feel like culturally, they are still going to the movies a lot.

**Craig:** Thank you, India. Somebody has to go to the movies.

**John:** We’ll see in the future what happens here. I should say that the WGA formula, which became the SAG-AFTRA formula, is that if at least 20% of the streaming platform’s US users consume a new original film or TV series within its first 90 days, that kicks off the payment, and then the bell rings again in future 90-day installments. If a scripted series shows up here in this first page or two, I think it’s a very likely chance that it’s going to kick off one of these residual payments.

**Craig:** Do we happen to know what the domestic viewership base for Netflix is?

**John:** I don’t.

**Craig:** How do we know that we’ve hit 20%?

**John:** We know how many subscribers there are.

**Craig:** That’s what I meant.

**John:** We do. I don’t know it off the top of my head.

**Craig:** You just don’t know, I see.

**John:** We do know it.

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** That’s a public figure they-

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** … are proud to boast about. Cool. We’ve got some follow-up, Drew.

**Drew:** In Episode 621, John said that one of his goals for the year was learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, which led to a whole discussion about words like present versus present, which Craig called homonyms. Andrew wrote in with a follow-up, wrote, “Homonyms are the intersection of words that sound the same and words that look the same. The term refers to both homophones and homographs, but in combination. Examples would be ring/ring or tire/tire. What you described as a homonym is, in fact, a better example of a homograph. That’s two words that are spelled or graphed the same but have different pronunciations and different meanings. Present/present is a great example of a homograph, so words that look the same on the page but sound different when spoken aloud.”

**Craig:** The difference between a homograph and a homonym, if I understand what he’s saying, is that homonyms sound exactly the same when spoken, they just mean different things?

**Drew:** Yes.

**Craig:** Whereas homographs look the same, spelled the same, but pronounced differently?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Thank you. You know what? I don’t recall learning about homographs. I got to be honest with you. That was not something we were taught.

**John:** No, I think we were just told homonyms.

**Craig:** Homonyms.

**John:** Which is only supposed to be the combination of the two.

**Craig:** They’ve carved off a chunk of what we were taught were homonyms and reassigned them to homographs, which is a much better word. I agree with that.

**John:** Homophone are things that just sound the same but would be spelled very differently, so eight and ate, or bear like the animal and bare like without clothes. If you have bear with me, that’s an example of a word. Bear can be a homonym in that sense too, where bear the animal and bear with me are the same.

**Craig:** Right, but a homograph would be like resume and resume.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Got it. I also have some additional follow-up I should mention-

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** … that Melissa wanted to add.

**John:** I was not surprised that we have additional follow-up to the last follow-up from Melissa.

**Craig:** This was not about cooking. Now it’s about biopic. She said, accusingly, “You said that,” there was another word I use with bio, that we don’t say bai-AH. She said, “But you do say biography. If you say biography, it’s reasonable that somebody might think you would say biopic [bai-AH-pik].” I think that’s fair. That’s a fair point. I still think if you say bai-AH-pik, you’re stupid. I want to be on record with that. It’s not as annoying as the past participle of cast being casted instead of cast. When people say casted, I don’t know what to do. I’m on a crusade. We’re going to get rid of it.

**John:** Casted.

**Craig:** We have to stop people saying casted. We have to. Why do they do this?

**John:** Because they do. You’ll never win that.

**Craig:** I’m not going to win.

**John:** You’re not going to win.

**Craig:** I’m punching against the ocean, aren’t I?

**John:** You are. You absolutely are. English I think is generally drifting towards just standardized E-D endings for everything. I think ESL learners will always put the E-D on because the instinct is there to do it.

**Craig:** ESL people are going to learn the proper way because they’re being taught. It’s the non-ESL people, it’s the native speakers of English, who just don’t care. They’re ruining our precious language.

**John:** During Ramadan, we fasted. During the storm, we lasted through the night.

**Craig:** Of course, of course.

**John:** The oil lasted through 40 days and 40 nights.

**Craig:** It turns out, unfortunately, cast doesn’t work that way. I don’t know. It’s sort of like “I putted this here.” No, you did not. You put it there.

**Megana:** But “putted this here” is so cute. I’m going to start saying that.

**Craig:** I putted this here.

**John:** It’s a very common child error.

**Craig:** Mommy, did I putted it in the right place? It is cute, isn’t it? Casted is not cute. Casted is repulsing.

**John:** Putteded, they’ll recognize that something is wrong, and so they’ll put an extra E-D on it again.

**Craig:** Putteded.

**John:** I putteded.

**Craig:** Putteded. Oh, is putted wrong? Oh, I puttededededed it. Lambert is scratching the couch in protest against casted. Correct.

**John:** We have more follow-up on coverage.

**Drew:** We talked about AI script coverage. R wrote in. R says, “I interned this past summer at an independent production company that has several movies on a major streamer. My main job was script coverage, but they would have me and other interns do random tasks during my time with them. One was training ChatGPT to provide script coverage. I asked to switch assignments after a day, because it felt like I was actively helping AI to replace me. To make matters worse, I wasn’t getting paid for it. The internship was for school credit. I do want to acknowledge that maybe they weren’t trying to replace script readers, but still, script coverage is a great way for people like me, fresh out of school, to gain experience and meet new people, and I’d hate to see that go away. Not that you guys necessarily need confirmation that companies are doing this, but hopefully this anecdote provides further insight into how other companies are using AI.”

**John:** I have some follow-up on this. I was emailing back and forth with a woman who works in script coverage. She’s a union script reader. She was talking about how in the upcoming IATSE negotiations, script coverage is paneled under IATSE, that is going to be a thing they want to talk about is-

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** … making sure that professional script analysts are in charge of the process of doing script coverage. If these tools are used, they need to have the ability to be the people using those tools. I used to do coverage. A lot of us have done coverage. Writing a synopsis is horrible. It’s the worst part of that job. If you could use a tool that would help you get through that, and you could verify that it was correct, great. It’s the analysis that I’m actually most concerned about. That’s the part that we need to make sure stays in the hands of actual human beings with taste.

**Megana:** Also, when you’re doing script coverage, a huge part of it is you being able to tell your boss, “This was good.” That just can’t be replaced.

**Craig:** That’s what they don’t know, because if you think about it, let’s say the boss is being paid a lot of money to decide what should be made, meaning what should we spend tens of millions of dollars on. They are turning to somebody who is either an intern or being paid $60,000 to tell them what they should think. The system already doesn’t make sense in that regard, so you can see how, where it’s at least exploitive, those people would be like, “I already am cheating. I’m already asking somebody else to tell me what I’m being paid to know. Maybe I’ll just have the computer tell me what I should know.” I could see dumbasses doing that.

**John:** Craig, I think what you’re describing is it’s almost like they’ve outsourced the job of reading stuff to a low-paid person. If it’s a free person, it’s not that different, so it’s like a black box of it all.

**Craig:** I remember when I came to Hollywood, I was shocked, honestly. I thought that the whole point of being an executive was you were being paid for your taste and your analysis, and then I found out, no, you’re not.

**John:** You’re being paid for your ability to communicate to the other creatives and communicate up effectively and to manage your superiors.

**Craig:** Sure, but then it’s almost like show business is show business. None of it’s real. I’m still struggling with that to this day.

**John:** Some more follow-up from Ward here.

**Drew:** Ward writes, “I wanted to thank Craig for emphasizing that even though we all know California will go for Biden, he’s still planning to vote. What people sometimes forget is that local elections can be very, very tight, sometimes on the order of tens of votes or fewer. Even in states like California, those down-ballot choices don’t always go the way that you might expect. That one vote could really end up making a difference. Your vote really does matter.”

**Craig:** That is a fact. Facts.

**John:** Facts and evidence.

**Craig:** Facts.

**John:** We’ve actually had episodes where we had… Beth Schacter was on. We had Ashley Nicole Black on to just talk through voting, elections, and local issues, just to make sure we actually understood about them. We agree. Fully agree.

On to a marquee segment here. This last week, I got a call from my agents about a project that was out looking for a writer, looking for a showrunner. It’s a TV thing. It’s based on this giant IP that everyone’s heard of, and now they want to make it into a series.

**Craig:** Is it the toilet?

**John:** No, it’s based on a very famous book series that has become a movie series that everyone knows and loves.

**Craig:** I see. We used to use the slinky.

**John:** Slinky, yeah.

**Craig:** Now I’m just down to the toilet.

**John:** The toilet.

**Megana:** That’s actually already in development.

**Craig:** It is?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is the awareness. Toilet awareness is through the roof.

**John:** Almost everybody on earth knows about toilets.

**Craig:** Knows about toilet. But this is not toilet.

**John:** This is not toilet.

**Craig:** This is quite a bit better.

**John:** This is already a hugely popular, successful franchise that they now want to make into a series.

**Craig:** Based on books, made movies.

**John:** Made into a film series.

**Craig:** Now making a TV series.

**John:** [Indiscernible 00:26:24].

**Craig:** I think we know what it is.

**John:** Although there’s a couple of choices that could-

**Craig:** I think we know what it is.

**John:** It wasn’t The Hunger Games.

**Craig:** And it’s not toilet, so what’s left?

**John:** I passed on this immediately, because I did not want to be a part of it. I asked them, what is the process, how are they going to pick the person to be the showrunner. This was the game plan. They’re not going out to any writer exclusively. They’re going out to a few select writers, but no one’s exclusive. There will be a series of meetings going up the ladder, pitching a vision, so about five meetings going up the ladder.

**Craig:** Five?

**John:** Five meetings.

**Craig:** The ladder’s not that… I know where this is, and there’s not that many rungs on the ladder, so I’m very confused. Do you start with the receptionist?

**John:** Then they’ll get down to four or five writers who they’ll have write pilots. Then they’ll pick the favorite of those pilots.

**Craig:** They’ll pay them.

**John:** Yes, they will pay them. They will pay them to write pilots. They’ll pick their favorite of these pilot scripts. They see this as a 10-year commitment.

**Craig:** I would agree with them that it’s a 10-year commitment. That makes sense.

**John:** Let’s talk about the pros and cons of this. I think this is a doomed process, because no person who actually knows how to run a show will agree to go through that process in my perspective. I don’t think they’re going to be agreeing to compete with other experienced showrunners who would go through this.

**Craig:** Counterpoint.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Ego. One of the things that a lot of writers have is a belief – and I kind of feel like I fall into this category – that I know what to do, I know the answer to this. They will see that my way is correct. I think there is a little bit of hubris involved here, necessary hubris. How else could you even think to say, “Hey, I’ve thought a bunch of things and written them down. Spend a lot of money to make people see it.” Look. The best showrunners in the business I think generally are probably already running shows. The timing of having somebody roll off something that’s brilliant and then rolling onto something like this is tricky. You’re not going to get people like Vince Gilligan, the best showrunner in the business, because he only does Vince Gilligan stuff, right? There is some trickiness there. I think they will get some good people, but the thing I’m really catching on is, getting people to write pilots like that, only to be… Although isn’t that what development is? You write a pilot, and then they decide if you’re going to do it or not.

**John:** Yeah, but it feels so different to know that in the classic broadcast model, your pilots can be against all the other pilots at that network.

**Craig:** But not pilots for the same show.

**John:** Also, that feeling like, is this thing that I’m writing in my script going to end up in that other person’s script, because we’re all writing the same thing based on this. That’s what’s so tough here.

**Craig:** In support of your concern, there is something that gets a little bit weird in the water when you know you’re not competing against yourself when you’re writing, when you’re being paid to write, that there’s somebody else writing something. It almost starts to maybe corrupt your own process. You start to worry, like, “I think what would make them choose mine over that one would be if I did this or that or avoided this or that. You could start to get a lot of, as Lindsay Doran says, unsharpened pencils, just blunted, fear-based, appeal to the down the middle committee kind of vibe. Hard to say. Because of the size of it, I understand, and because of the 10-year commitment, I understand. But I don’t know. That’s a new one on me.

**Megana:** The precedent feels pretty scary.

**John:** It does.

**Megana:** To be competing and auditioning like that, because I imagine the people they’re going out to, if you had a conversation about this, are very tenured, very experienced showrunners. To continue to have to audition like that feels…

**Craig:** Maybe that’s what going to happen is that they’re going to find out just how many fish they catch with this particular trawling net, because if they’re not getting the quantity and quality of writers they want to participate in this particular winnowing Hunger Games process – it’s not Hunger Games.

**John:** It’s not Hunger Games.

**Craig:** Then they’re going to have to revise it.

**John:** We’ll see what happens here. I’m going to keep an eye on what happens with that project.

**Craig:** Ten years to work on toilet.

**John:** That’s a long time on toilet. During the strike, I went to this big event at Universal where members were bringing baked goods and competing to see whose baked goods were the best. I was one of the judges for that. It was fun. It was really crowded. Andrea Ciannavei, who came up with the idea, she gave this great speech during the time about what bake-offs are like, why they’re a scourge on Hollywood. I asked her if I could get her speech and we could draft off of that for a little bit while we do our own bake-off competition. We have three delicious cookies in front of us that Drew has brought in. I thought we would start with one of them.

**Craig:** Megana, you already ate them. There’s nothing left.

**John:** You have crumbs on-

**Megana:** Drew, where did you put the cookies?

**John:** Drew, why don’t you pick the first cookie that we’re going to taste? We’ll describe it and give it an assessment.

**Drew:** The first cookie we’re going to taste is the OG cookie. It’s the OG chocolate chip cookie on the far left there.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** This is the original chocolate chip cookie. I’m looking at this. It’s a classic chocolate chip cookie. It’s a lot of chocolate in here. It looks like chocolate chunks. It’s not greasy. It’s got an amazing smell. Craig, what’s your first instinct here?

**Craig:** It’s a little bit intimidating how much of a cookie sommelier you are. It’s flat, and there’s too much chocolate in it. I’m just looking at it. For me, there’s too much chocolate. What I do like is that there’s salt on the top. That makes everything better. It’s a chewy cookie. I can tell by squeezing it. I’m just concerned about the quantity of chocolate in this thing. Shall we?

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Craig:** Oh, Megana, do you have any thoughts?

**Megana:** No. I’m excited by the salt, and it has a nice crunchy layer on top of the chewiness.

**Craig:** That’s pretty much what I thought.

**John:** It’s nice and crispy on the outside, and it is chewy on the inside. It’s a solid chocolate chip cookie. I agree with Craig that it’s basically a chocolate delivery mechanism.

**Drew:** Yeah, it’s chocolate dominant.

**Craig:** It’s almost like a thin cookie-crust-covered brownie. Now, I recognize that they’ve pulled a trick here. They smashed a bunch of chips down, then put another little bit of cookie dough, then put the cookie. I don’t know if I’m the only one that has that.

**John:** I wonder if they’re maybe not chips but actually some sort of chunky chunks kind of situation.

**Craig:** Yeah, like a ganache almost. Confession. People get upset with me when I say this and so many things. I don’t love chocolate. Look at Megana. Megana, literally, I wish I could’ve taken a picture, and we could’ve put it in the show notes. The look of disgust on her, just utter contempt. I’ve never actually seen her look like that.

**Megana:** You know what it was? It was a moment where I was like, I thought that we were very close.

**Craig:** You’re shooketh, because it’s like, I don’t even know who you are anymore.

**Megana:** Exactly. It was a look of betrayal.

**Craig:** I am sorry. I want to assure you that I am who you know. But this is how we keep things spicy, by just occasionally going, “Oh, by the way, I have a kink.” My kink is not loving chocolate. I don’t hate it. I just don’t love it.

**John:** Drew, what’s your first read on this cookie?

**Drew:** A lot of chocolate. My gut is that it would be better if it was warm, but I also feel like we’re doing ourselves a disservice by not having them warm, because all cookies are good when they’re warm.

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**John:** Let’s talk about some bake-offs here, because I described-

**Craig:** By the way, you just assumed Megana loved it.

**John:** Am I wrong?

**Megana:** He knows me so well. I did love it. As a vehicle for chocolate, I loved it. The salt did a lot of work for it.

**John:** Yeah, it did.

**Megana:** I will say that.

**Craig:** Always good with cookies. I agree.

**John:** Bake-offs in general. I described that one TV project as a bake-off, but that’s really the exception where you’re going after these giant, established showrunners. Most bake-offs are really targeting writers who are newer to the industry. Producers are asking you to come in and pitch your take on the piece of IP that they own, or open writing assignment, and they sit back and pick the one that they like best. You’re doing this tremendous amount of work for free for them. It is both really tempting and kind of natural to approach, because it’s good practice for how to find a take on something, but you become free research and development for these projects. Oftentimes, they pick none of the above. It’s like, “Oh, there’s nothing here to make.”

**Craig:** Sometimes the winner is no one. It’s a function in part of anxiety. It’s also a function in part of just lack of trust. But having been on the other side of not writing bake-offs, but employment bake-offs, basically interviews, so we have to interview a lot of people to come and work on our show. Sometimes I’ll talk to three or four or five different, say, cinematographers. They will bring different levels. Sometimes they just talk, and sometimes they put together mood boards. Everybody has a different thing.

For me at least, I wish I could say that that process led to certainty. It doesn’t. You’re guessing before they show up, and then you’re guessing after they show up, because you realize what you’re getting is not necessarily the work that will be done. They’re not shooting something for you right now, in the case of cinematographers. Also, you’re getting their interview self. You’re just hoping, and you’re going on your gut. It’s a process designed to create certainty where certainty cannot exist and doesn’t exist, which is why bake-offs, a little bit like pretty privilege, I think bake-offs lead to room privilege. People that are good in rooms, fun, easygoing, seem like they’d be a great hang, those people have privilege in bake-offs.

**John:** In theory, you are developing the idea, and you’re coming in there, and people are responding to your idea. But they’re really responding to your charisma, your ability to sell yourself as the person. They can have confidence that you are the person who can deliver this thing. When we talk about bake-offs, we really should think about actors auditioning are really in a very similar situation too. There is that scourge where actors will go in and audition and come back in and get callbacks, but there are some rules about how many times you can call an actor back without paying them.

**Craig:** There are also now rules about how many pages they can be. We’ve been dealing with that now as we go through our audition process for certain roles. Coming out of the SAG strike, we now have a limitation on the amount of pages we can send for reads. You can’t just dump 12 pages on them, not that we were. But I think it’s five maybe total, I think, something like that, which is fair.

**John:** Which is fair.

**Craig:** By the way, same deal with actor auditions. Actor auditions, at least there’s time where somebody, you just go, “There it is. That’s it. That’s our person. Done.” I saw Bella Ramsey’s audition. I was like, “We’re done. It’s over.” You’re hoping for that. You will never get that certainty from writing bake-offs. It’s not possible.

**John:** When Bella Ramsey came in to do that thing, you saw, “Oh, that’s it.” She created that moment. It happened. A writer coming in in that bake-off situation, that’s never going to happen.

**Craig:** No, it’s not possible, given what we do, and it’s not really possible for, I think, any other job except for acting.

**Megana:** Because such a huge part of it is the revision process. That’s not something that every writer is capable of or that you would be able to know from the first pitch that they have about that project.

**John:** Craig was able to see Bella doing a version of a scene that would actually be in a thing. But if I’m going in to pitch a thing, I’m pitching a vision, but that’s not the script. They’re going to hire me, and then three months later, I’m going to deliver this script, and who knows?

**Craig:** You’re not able to show them anything like the final product, nor are you able to show them, like Megana says, how you would participate in the process of developing that. All you can show them is, hey, does this person make my skin crawl? Do they seem defensive? Are they imaginative? Do we ping-pong? Do we converse? Is there a dialogue, or is this a monologue? The bake-off process, to me, that’s the problem with it. There are some incredible writers who, I think if they were coming up now, wouldn’t even get a shot, because they don’t have, what would you call it, charisma privilege.

**John:** Let’s try our second cookie here. Drew, describe this cookie for us.

**Drew:** This is an oatmeal raisin cookie.

**Craig:** Now we’re talking.

**Drew:** It’s a brown exterior with raisins pretty solidly throughout, it looks like.

**John:** I would say softer on the outside. It’s definitely soft on the inside. Very cinnamony.

**Craig:** It smells good.

**John:** It does seem good. A lot of people just despise cinnamon raisin cookies for not being chocolate chip cookies.

**Craig:** Yeah, but that’s why I love them. This is the kind of thing I love. Megana’s so upset. She’s like, “There’s no chocolate in it.”

**Megana:** I keep looking. No, I’m enjoying it. Texturally, it’s good and interesting, because I feel like oatmeal raisin sometimes have too much texture, too much oatmeal. This is nice and gooey.

**John:** I’m not getting much oat here at all in terms of actual… I’m not a fan of this cookie. It feels a little gummy and under-baked to me.

**Drew:** It’s a little wet.

**Craig:** I love it. I’ll tell you why. Because this is my flavor profile. I love, I’m going to say, the fall spice kind of vibe. I love raisins in cookies. Everybody else is like, “What’s wrong with you?” I made a joke about it in the first season of The Last of Us. Still, I love it anyway. I also like how much you can take a molasses, brown-sugar-forward kind of vibe in this, which makes me so much happier. I ate my whole piece.

**Megana:** It was enjoyable. I just don’t think you should call it a cookie.

**John:** What would you call this then?

**Craig:** What would you call it? An abomination?

**Megana:** It was just like a breakfast item, like a breakfast pastry.

**Craig:** A flat, disc-like coffee cake?

**John:** If you take one of those Quaker Oat bars and just soften it, microwave it, it could be-

**Craig:** That sounds great. I’d eat that. This is really turning into a real Jets versus Sharks situation. I feel like we’re star-crossed lovers.

**John:** Drew, texture-wise?

**Drew:** Texture-wise, wet. But I think Craig hit the nail on the head with that molasses, and I like that gingerbread kind of flavor to it.

**John:** Let’s talk about you’re approached as a writer in a bake-off situation. Generally, your agent, your manager, somebody’s coming to you for the situation. Have you been hit by these yet, Megana?

**Megana:** Thankfully, I have not. I have not.

**John:** You’ve had to go in and meet on rooms. You’re just coming off your second room. But you haven’t had to go out and pitch on a job. Back when you were still a producer, there were projects you were going out to meet on, but were you the only person they were going out to?

**Megana:** I was going out to meet mostly on projects that I was pitching and developing, so luckily, I have not had this.

**Craig:** You haven’t had the bake-off experience.

**Megana:** Exactly.

**John:** Here’s the information you want to know from your reps before you would consider taking off for one of these things. How many writers are in the mix? You ask the question, and they need to tell you the answer. That’s in the contract, because they have to do that. You need to figure out how invested is the studio in this. Is it a priority for the bosses, or do they even know that it exists? How many people need to say yes before you get the job? One of the things I did like about this thing that the agency came to me with is they could talk through the process. They’ve asked the questions. They knew what the process was going to be.

How long has this been assignment been around, because if things have been around, floating for a long time, that’s a really bad sign, that they’ve never been able to crack it. Do they actually have the rights. I’ve heard so many horror stories where, “Oh, we’re trying to do this thing. Oh, we haven’t gotten the rights yet, but don’t worry, we’ll get the rights to this eventually.”

**Craig:** “If you tell us how to make it something good, then we’ll tell the people.” Then I’m like, “What do I need you for? I’ll go talk to them then.” Now they’re just laundering your work into IP that they would control. It doesn’t make any sense. But there are some people in Hollywood that just are not scrupulous.

**John:** Funny that way.

**Craig:** Shocker.

**John:** Shocker. The last red flag that Andrea has here, which I think is such a good point, is that if you hear something like, “The director has a preferred writer, but we’re exploring our options.”

**Craig:** You’re dead.

**John:** Run away.

**Craig:** Dead. You’re dead.

**John:** Even if you get the job, you won’t want to have that job, because you’re not the person the director wanted to work with.

**Megana:** I’ve also heard experiences from friends who have gone on open writing assignment pitches and things. It feels like an open book test, but some people have had after-hour sessions with the teachers or something, where some friends will know exactly what that executive wants, and they just want you to repeat that back to them from a different body. It’s like, okay, so not every writer has this information.

**Craig:** It’s not a healthy or sane or principled process. It just doesn’t really make sense to me. In the case of a massive project, where a studio has invested a billion dollars and wants to make 10 billion dollars, I understand to an extent. But the process is very formalized. They come to you, and they say, “There’s going to be five steps,” and da da, bah, bah, bah. When you get what we’ll call the standard bake-off, I just feel like that is the first indication that nobody cares and that this is kind of junky, because why are they doing it like this? It means they don’t really know what they want, and they probably don’t have money for bigger writers. It’s all sketch at that point.

**John:** The alternative would be just go to a writer who has experience making movies and you know can deliver a script for you.

**Craig:** Exactly. If you’re like, “Okay, I bought this neo-noir book. I now have some IP,” why wouldn’t I call Scott Frank first? Of course I would, unless I can’t afford it. Now that means I don’t have the vote of confidence from the studio, and I’m just begging and looking. Then I need to seat seven people, because I don’t know. Problematic.

**John:** Let’s take a look at our final cookie here. Drew, talk us through this.

**Drew:** This final cookie is a dark chocolate peppermint chip.

**Megana:** Are you kidding? You don’t like mint in your…

**Craig:** I really thought it was going to be white chocolate, which I love, because I don’t like chocolate. I’m basically the anti-cookie person. It’s mint chocolate chip?

**Drew:** I don’t know. It’s peppermint.

**Craig:** Peppermint.

**John:** Those look like peppermint pieces, I think. It’s a smashed-up candy cane.

**Craig:** A smashed-up candy cane in a cookie. Let’s just say also, this thing is massive.

**John:** It looks more like a rounded brownie than a cookie.

**Craig:** It’s a mound.

**John:** You can smell the mint in it.

**Craig:** It also just looks so chocolatey to me. That’s foul. This is terrible. It’s toothpaste. I’m eating toothpaste. Megana’s like, “I’ll take yours.”

**John:** It really is a brownie to me.

**Craig:** It’s gritty.

**John:** If it weren’t for the rounded shape, I would say this is a brownie. Megana?

**Megana:** If I was closing my eyes, I would think that this was a brownie.

**John:** I’m not a fan of candy cane kind of things, but Drew, what are you thinking?

**Drew:** I’m not either a big fan of the candy cane. It has a similar amount of chocolate as the first cookie, as the chocolate chip, where it’s everywhere.

**John:** Everywhere!

**Craig:** I actually like mint chocolate chip ice cream. It’s when they put mint and chocolate together, like those Andes after-dinner, I’m like, “Gross,” because I don’t like chocolate that much. Now, it just tastes like disgusting toothpaste. I hated it. Apologize to the bakery. Literally, I’m choking.

**Megana:** Is this a new thing? I don’t remember you not liking chocolate.

**Craig:** No. Even as a kid, I was always confused why let’s say after baseball practice, the team goes to get ice cream, and everyone’s like, “I want chocolate!” Everyone was in pure agreement, chocolate ice cream. I’m like, “I would like vanilla, please.” I love vanilla. It’s amazing. It’s just never been my thing. It’s not for me, dog.

**John:** Now we’ve tasted the three cookies. Should we vote first, or should we reveal where these cookies are from?

**Craig:** Good question.

**Drew:** Let’s vote first.

**John:** Let’s vote first. I would say cookie number 1 was my choice of the three cookies.

**Megana:** I would also say number 1.

**John:** Yeah, which is a very classic chocolate chip.

**Craig:** Number 2.

**John:** Number 2, of course.

**Drew:** I would also vote number 2.

**Megana:** Drew!

**John:** Oh my god, tie.

**Craig:** Whoa. I did not see-

**John:** I did not see that-

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Didn’t see it coming.

**Craig:** Wow. That is gasps from the audience. Okay, so now-

**John:** Final two contestants here. I guess it gets kicked up to the boss, the studio head, to decide between these last two contenders.

**Craig:** Right, and you know they have just a D20 that they’re rolling.

**John:** But I think you actually can pull this back to what we’re talking about with bake-offs, is that tasty is subjective.

**Craig:** Sure is.

**John:** You may have delivered the pitch that wins over that executive, but their boss may not have the same taste, and you’re screwed.

**Craig:** Also, I remember seeing on a producer’s table, when very young… I was starting out. I was coming in and pitching on something. The system brought me into the meeting room, the office. But he was on the phone. He would be right in. Right there on this desk was a list of names. Obviously, I was one of them. Next to each thing, it said a credit, and then there were dollar signs, like Yelp.

**John:** So exciting.

**Craig:** It was like one, two, three, four, because part of it is how much do you like this person, because they’re way more expensive than this one. If cookie number 1 costs half as much as cookie number 2, cookie number 1 will probably get the job.

**John:** Drew, it’s now time to reveal the cookies that were…

**Drew:** In third place-

**John:** In third place.

**Drew:** The dark chocolate peppermint cookie is from Levain Bakery.

**Craig:** World famous.

**John:** Right up the street, yeah, world famous.

**Craig:** They do have some lovely things there. I can’t hang this on them. They probably have an amazing oatmeal raisin cookie that I would love to try.

**John:** I would say all the cookies I’ve gotten from Levain have that quality of it feels like a giant ice cream scoop was used, and it never quite all the way baked down. That’s their way of doing cookies.

**Craig:** They are kind of doorstops.

**Drew:** Is that too much baking powder? I feel like there’s got to be something that’s [crosstalk 48:36].

**John:** No, it’s not risen. It’s just dense.

**Craig:** It’s just quantity. It’s quantity of dough.

**Drew:** Tied for first, but the oatmeal raisin is from DeLuscious Bakery, which was a Megana recommendation.

**Megana:** Oh my god, I betrayed the love of my life.

**Craig:** Megana!

**John:** Tell us about DeLuscious Bakery. Why was that your choice for a place to pick?

**Megana:** It was a place that I discovered when somebody sent you a gift three or four years ago. Their cookies are just divine.

**Craig:** I agree.

**Megana:** Oh, gosh. I’m betraying my team. They’re delicious. Their chocolate chip cookies are so good. They also have vegan and gluten-free cookies, which I am not, but they’re still delicious.

**Craig:** Levain also, I know for a fact, has a vegan cookie and possibly a gluten-free as well.

**John:** Excellent. My top choice, the chocolate chip cookie, is from where?

**Drew:** It is from The Very Best Cookie In The Whole Wide World bakery, which is LA Times number one cookie in LA.

**Craig:** I’m going to challenge their name, but okay.

**Megana:** Wait, that was the name?

**Drew:** That’s the full name. I feel like a lot of cookie places have names that make me a little-

**Megana:** I thought you were just vamping.

**Drew:** No.

**John:** I thought maybe it’s for search optimization.

**Craig:** The best cookie.

**John:** Dentists will have a place called Dentist Near Me. Their actual practice name will be Dentist Near Me.

**Craig:** A lot of plumbers that are AAAA Plumber. It’s got a The Country’s Best Yogurt vibe for their name. It was, I’m sure, fine. I don’t know how to evaluate a cookie like that. It’s just not my jam.

**John:** My favorite cookie in Los Angeles is at La Provence bakery over in Beverly Hills in a strip mall. Their vegan gluten-free chocolate chip cookie is incredible. It’s better than any of these cookies here, I believe.

**Drew:** I love vegan desserts. The best brownie I ever had was a vegan brownie.

**John:** They can be really good.

**Craig:** I don’t know where you are in this, Megana, but to me, as somebody that likes to make desserts, cook, bake, etc, I support vegans, I love them, I disagree with what those two people just said. Eggs are essential.

**John:** They’re really [crosstalk 50:44].

**Craig:** Often, cream is essential, but eggs and butter. Eggs and butter, that is what a dessert is.

**Drew:** They do coconut usually in the vegan stuff.

**Craig:** I can’t stand that.

**John:** Let’s answer a listener question.

**Craig:** No, no, no, I need to get support.

**Megana:** When I have a vegan dessert that I really like, I’ll say it’s a surprise rather than an expectation.

**Craig:** Girl, boom.

**John:** Got a fist bump there.

**Craig:** Owns.

**John:** Let’s answer a question or two. I see one from Carlos that seems good.

**Drew:** Carlos writes, “What do you consider a draft? I’m sorry if the question seems a little bit obvious, but I’m new to this sort of thing. I understand that a first draft is what comes out from beginning to end with the story laid out, characters and all. Next, you take out a scene or add up some more story. If it’s just a new paragraph, is that considered a draft or a pass? How many changes are considered to make it a new draft, and what do these many color labels mean in various drafts and revisions?”

**John:** Craig, this week I was working on the chapter of the Scriptnotes books which was about script revisions and colored revisions and all that stuff, so the idea of a draft comes up here. My instinct is that a draft is any time you have a script that you’re handing to a different person that you’re saying is different. That’s a change that’s going out there. It’s not just you’ve made a change on one page. It’s just like, “This is actually a new thing I want you to read.” That’s a draft.

**Craig:** I think of draft as a pre-production term. This is my first draft. Okay, here are some notes. Beginning, the end. Here are some notes. Here are some thoughts. Okay, I’m going to go off now and do a rewrite. This is my second draft. I’m going to do a polish. This is a polished draft. It just means these are new versions of the thing from beginning to end. Once you get into production, those now aren’t drafts anymore.

**John:** They’re revisions now.

**Craig:** We will sometimes say blue draft. But really, I like to say blue revision. It doesn’t matter. Ultimately, in production, if you change one word on one page, and it’s really important, and it has to go out today-

**John:** That page goes out.

**Craig:** … it’s technically a draft. It’s a page. Pink page is out.

**Megana:** It’s so fun, because I’ve been getting the updates from the Unstable: Season 2, what is it called, the distribution?

**Craig:** Yes, synchronized?

**Megana:** Yes, exactly. I’ll be like, “Oh, cool. What did they change here?” It’s like, “We have changed the hat to a visor.”

**Craig:** There’s definitely a lot of that, and sometimes one small word, like, “They walk outside. It’s raining.” Pink page, “They walk outside. It’s sunny.” That’s a very big change. I should give a little shout-out to Ali Chang, who is my intrepid assistant, but also our script coordinator on Season 2 of The Last of Us. She’s doing an outstanding job.

**John:** In this chapter, we talk through revisions mostly from the future perspective, where you and I have to be the script coordinator, because we’re the person responsible for making sure the script doesn’t get messed up. But on an actual TV show, there’s a whole person whose job it is to make sure that those revisions go out in a way so that they are sensible for everybody.

**Craig:** We have a shared folder. I say, “Okay, I believe Episode 203 blue is ready to go.” She proofreads, adds in, if need be, the production days. We do D1, 2, 3, 4, N1, 2, 3, 4, and all that, and make sure the headers and the title page, and then sends it through Scenechronize, which I think it’s owned by Entertainment Partners, that also owns Final Draft. For something that is even remotely associated with Final Draft, it works quite well. It is not Final Draft-esque in its [crosstalk 54:13].

**John:** Craig, a question for you. In the chapter that I put through, we talk about pages in that sense. I don’t bring up Scenechronize at all, because I want to make sure the book doesn’t feel like it’s too tied into one thing. But I do mention the fact that often it’s now software. On your set, how often are people looking at physically printed pages?

**Craig:** Our initial feeling for Season 2 is that we would have no printed pages, until the morning when certain people would have sides, director, showrunner, actors. Little bit of a revolt by the heads of departments. We loosened it up and allowed HODs to have printed things, because they just need them to do their work. But beyond that, we really are trying to keep it digital. Security is a thing. Once you have a show that people are really paying attention to, you do have to be careful. I know Game of Thrones went through all sorts of… There used to be this thing where they would print scripts on these red pages, because they couldn’t be xeroxed. No one xeroxes anything anymore. What’s nice about Scenechronize – so it’s synchronize but it’s Scene-chronize – is that it distributes PDFs, but they are only viewable online and watermarked and dated. If you try and take a screen cap, it’s going to have exactly your name and the time and all that stuff, your IP, blah da da blah. It’s actually quite solid for security purposes.

**John:** On the day, certain people are going to have sides, just because you have to look, like, what is this thing?

**Craig:** Of course. One of the things, I always ask for my sides to be on full-size pages, because I don’t like the little tiny pages. I don’t understand why they have to be little tiny pages. I can’t see them. There is somebody who, at the end of each day, studiously gathers those things up and runs them through the shredder.

**John:** Great. Let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a game that we played yesterday called Clue Conspiracy. It is the game Clue, but built out in taking cues from Avalon and other sort of social deception, teamwork. It’s cooperative, but there’s traitors in your midst.

**Craig:** Pandemic kind of vibe?

**John:** Yeah. It’s really a smartly done thing. It took a bit to figure it out, but it does come with a video explainer. Drew, you liked it.

**Drew:** I had a great time. Avalon’s a good comp. It’s like Clue but White Lotus.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** You’re trying to prevent a murder, but you probably won’t prevent the murder. Then you have to figure out-

**Craig:** I bet. Avalon, they’re classic.

**John:** They’re good. We played with four, which was okay, but I think five to seven to nine would probably be the right number there.

**Craig:** More of a party game.

**John:** It’s more of a party game, but nicely done.

**Craig:** Does anyone actually die?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In real life?

**John:** Oh, no, not in real life, no. That’d be nice if it did. Megana, what have you got for a One Cool Thing?

**Megana:** I’m going to say on the baking theme, last weekend, my friend brought this spiced persimmon cake from Claire Saffitz’s Dessert Person book.

**John:** Such a great book.

**Megana:** Such a great book. So delicious.

**Craig:** Persimmons.

**John:** I can’t summon the taste of a persimmon. What is persimmon like?

**Megana:** I don’t totally enjoy them, but the profile that they brought to the cake was just a little fruity, really moist, and it was just perfect.

**Craig:** It’s a milder citrus flavor, to me at least. I think they’re delicious. But a little goes a long way with persimmon. We don’t generally put oranges in cakes. You put fake orange in cake, probably. But it’s very strong, whereas lemon and lime somehow work better. Persimmon is really interesting. Spice I think is the key. You know I love my spice. I thought for a second you were going to be like, “My One Cool Thing is oatmeal raisin cookie.” That would’ve been awesome.

**Megana:** I’m also pitching this because I’m hoping that one of the two of you will… Drew, do you bake?

**Drew:** No.

**Megana:** You guys are my bakers.

**Craig:** You want me to make one for you?

**Megana:** Yes, please.

**John:** I have her book.

**Craig:** Send me the recipe. I will do it.

**Megana:** The hack that my friend did was she used butter instead of oil. I’m still thinking about it.

**Craig:** I am not a big believer in recipe hacks. I feel like you should always try it once the way the author intended, maybe because I’m a writer. What happens, I’ll look on, for instance, the New York Times, and they have some really nice recipes there, and then there’s all the comments. I like the comments, because people can say what they thought. If everybody agrees really you should probably not leave it in the oven as long as they say, okay. But inevitably, there’s five people like, “It was incredible. I loved it. I just replaced the eggplant with tuna, and instead of cheese, I used graham crackers.” People are like, “Why are you here?”

**Megana:** Have you seen the Reddit thread that’s people who have made substitutions in recipes and then get really mad that they don’t work?

**John:** That’s a perfect subreddit.

**Craig:** That is a dream. I got to go look that up, because I’m like, “Guys, how is it their fault?”

**Megana:** There’s literally one that’s like, “I substituted mayo for marshmallow fluff, and it did not work well.” It’s like, who asked you to do that?

**Craig:** Oh my god. Because they are the same color?

**John:** They’re both white, in a jar.

**Craig:** I used an old T-shirt instead of butter, and it didn’t work very well, but they’re the same color. If you send me the recipe, what I will do is… By the way, since you’ve had it, I’ll do the OG version, and let’s see what you think. Look, in general, butter is butter, but every now and then-

**John:** If Claire didn’t use butter, she’s-

**Craig:** Every now and then, there’s a reason. There really is. Sometimes I’ve even come across recipes where they do use strange substitutes for things. Some people are just like, “Look, if you’re going to do this, you’re using Crisco. Sorry. I know it’s kind of trashy, but that’s what works.” You make a pie crust, use Crisco. It’s bad for you.

**Megana:** But so is pie.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Craig, what have you got?

**Craig:** Have I talked about steaming yet?

**John:** No.

**Drew:** No.

**Craig:** You guys, I’ve become obsessed with this.

**John:** Steaming for clothes or steaming for vegetables?

**Craig:** Steaming for clothes.

**John:** It’s better.

**Craig:** It’s so much better. I get frustrated with wrinkly clothes, but I don’t want to have to constantly take it across the street to people to press it. That just seems stupid. Ironing is hard. It takes so long. I’m terrified I’m going to burn something. It’s just so long.

**John:** Setting up the ironing board and all that stuff.

**Craig:** Setting up the ironing board. There’s always one corner of a shirt that is topologically un-ironable. Then somebody, and I can’t remember who, said, “Just get a steamer.” I’m like, “What?” I watch this video of this guy doing it. I’m like, “There’s no way it’s going to work that well.” Oh my god.

**Megana:** It’s magic.

**Craig:** It’s magic! You just do it. You can watch wrinkles. Some shirts are easier than others, but even the hard ones, it’s okay, because you’re just running this thing up and down it. It just goes, not wrinkled anymore. I do it on pants. I do it on shirts. I do it on sport coats. I love it.

**John:** We went to Drew’s wedding, so we were staying in Boston. We had our suits. Things get wrinkly. The hotel room didn’t have an iron, but it had a little steamer in a little bag. You plugged it in, put the water in it.

**Craig:** Off you go.

**John:** After that point, I immediately bought the same steamer.

**Craig:** Oh, so you don’t have a standing steamer?

**John:** Oh, no. It looks just like a hair dryer, but with water in it.

**Craig:** John, if I may.

**John:** The standing steamer?

**Craig:** Step your game up, dude.

**John:** No more closet space, nothing like that.

**Craig:** You can shove it in a corner. It’s not that big. The whole thing is the size of a football, and then there’s a pole-

**John:** A pole.

**Craig:** … and a hose, and it goes in the corner.

**John:** I’m so happy with what we have.

**Craig:** I’m just saying.

**Drew:** Do you put the water in the bottom?

**Craig:** Yeah, you do.

**Drew:** How do you get it in the bottom?

**Craig:** There’s a little tank. You lift it up. Always use distilled water.

**John:** This one doesn’t require distilled water. This requires any water you got.

**Craig:** I’m super suspicious about this janky ass steamer you got.

**John:** Works delightfully well.

**Craig:** I’m just saying. I’m in. I’m in. Megana, do you have a steamer?

**Megana:** I do have a steamer. I wasn’t using distilled water, and so I got the LA water buildup. My clothes have flecks of calcium deposits on them.

**Craig:** This is what I’m saying. Distilled water, good steamer. I used to have this panic. I came home yesterday from Vancouver for our holiday hiatus, packed all my stuff into this big bag. I’m going to go to a holiday party this evening at someone’s house. I would normally be like, “I’m screwed. I’m going to take this out of the suitcase. It’s going to be wrinkly. I’m just going to look like an idiot.” I have no fear. Know what I’m doing after this? I’m going home and I’m steaming. I so enjoy it. It’s so Zen. Love it.

**John:** Drew, what do you got for us?

**Drew:** I get a One Cool Thing?

**John:** Yeah, you get a One Cool Thing, of course.

**Craig:** Yeah, you do.

**John:** It’s a Christmas episode, a very special Christmas episode.

**Craig:** Is it also steaming?

**Drew:** I should be. My embarrassing joy this year has been, I got a new-ish car, and you get a few free months of SiriusXM when you get a new car. There is a Kelly Clarkson radio station on SiriusXM that is anarchy. It’s basically like someone hacked into Kelly Clarkson’s iTunes and hit shuffle, and you don’t know what you’re going to get. It’ll go from ’40s country to ’90s RnB. It is crazy, but it’s incredibly joyful and insane. I love it. I’m going to be really sad when my free trial ends.

**Craig:** Did you just Tinder match with Kelly Clarkson in front of us?

**Drew:** I might’ve. I think she’s fantastic now.

**Craig:** That’s incredible.

**Drew:** I wasn’t a huge fan, and now suddenly, I’m all Kelly Clarkson.

**Megana:** So sorry. I have some follow-up questions. The Kelly Clarkson bit of it, it’s not just her music?

**Drew:** It’s her music sometimes, plus whatever Kelly’s influences are or she feels like playing [crosstalk 01:04:14].

**John:** But how often [crosstalk 01:04:15]?

**Drew:** Occasionally.

**Craig:** Just enough to keep you going.

**Drew:** Just enough to have that Kelly Clarkson… She’s never taking over. I’m learning all about SiriusXM. Lisa Loeb hosts the 90s on 9. Lisa Loeb has guests. She’s not that involved. She’ll just do bumpers. It’s just her feelings and her vibes. It’s super modern stuff. It’s old stuff. You’re like, “Yeah, you know what? I guess that is what influenced Kelly Clarkson.”

**Craig:** Are you into Broadway at all?

**Drew:** A little bit. I don’t keep up with Broadway.

**John:** SiriusXM on Broadway.

**Craig:** SiriusXM on Broadway with Seth Rudetsky, that’s my jam.

**Drew:** I’ll check it out.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**John:** Drew, you very naively say as long as you have your subscription, you get it free for a while. Good luck getting rid of your Sirius subscription. They will try to hold onto for whatever.

**Craig:** You haven’t given them a credit card or anything?

**Drew:** Not yet, because I looked, and I was like, “What would this take to keep?” It’s 25 bucks a month, which-

**Megana:** Wow.

**Drew:** Insane. I’m sure they’ll try and get me offers and stuff. I’ve already got some [crosstalk 01:05:13].

**Craig:** Yes, they will. As long as they can get your credit card in some way or another, you will be unsubscribed maybe 40 years after your death. Wow, they’re good at what they do.

**John:** They are good at what they do.

**Drew:** Don’t subscribe to SiriusXM for this channel, but if you have it, check it out.

**Craig:** I think Seth is worth it myself.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Woot woot!

**Megana:** Woo!

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Our outro is a Christmas throwback by Matthew. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where we can send some questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We were on the Cotton Bureau’s Christmas list [crosstalk 01:06:00].

**Drew:** We were front page.

**John:** Yeah, it was nice. We were front page of them.

**Craig:** You mean the front page of the Bureau?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Damn.

**John:** You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on gifts. The three of you are my gift, so thank you so much.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Drew:** Aw.

**Megana:** Aw.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The best gifts we ever received at Christmastime. Two things come to mind for me. Maybe I’ve mentioned them on the show before. I remember getting Lester, the ventriloquist dummy.

**Craig:** Oh my god, terrifying.

**John:** Terrifying. So great, so wonderful. I had my little Lester doll, which was great, and also a safe, a little child’s safe to store all my valuables in. I had a little safe.

**Drew:** I don’t know anything about Lester. Was that a mass produced-

**Craig:** Yes. Sorry, I’m just hung up on John hoarding stuff in his safe, this little kid. What were you putting in there?

**John:** Exactly. What valuable things did I have? I had a silver dollar. I had that cool rock I found.

**Craig:** A gold crayon. No one can get at it. I love that.

**Megana:** Was it a children’s safe, or did your parents give you a safe and call it a children’s safe?

**John:** It was a children’s safe. Both of these were definitely out of the gift book or the wish book. We used to get these big catalogs from department stores that had a bunch of stuff to buy. Those were the things that [crosstalk 01:07:39].

**Craig:** My first safe.

**John:** Yes, my first safe.

**Craig:** For paranoid children.

**John:** I became obsessed with safe-cracking and pretending like I had a great idea.

**Megana:** That’s so cute.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Two little dials there.

**Craig:** That’s so great.

**John:** Those were gifts I remember loving [crosstalk 01:07:51].

**Megana:** How old were you when you got this ventriloquist dummy?

**John:** Second or third grade.

**Craig:** So creepy. This Lester thing was a nightmare.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to Lester. It’s an African American, looks like a small adult, kind of.

**Craig:** Yes, like all dummies, it is both a child and man.

**Megana:** Is this where your thing against ventriloquism came from?

**Craig:** No. Ventriloquist dummies are horrifying and famously have been featured in horror movies. Yeah, there’s Lester. My issue, look at the mouth. The problem is the mouth.

**John:** It’s just up and down.

**Craig:** It’s just terrifying.

**Megana:** This is what they’re making fun of in Arrested Development.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. My issue with ventriloquism as a craft is that it’s just stupid.

**Megana:** Got it.

**Craig:** It’s just dumb. You’re just not moving your mouth. Who cares?

**John:** Megana, gifts you received and loved that were life-changing, or at least in the moment were really significant?

**Megana:** I remember I was obsessed with these baby dolls that would pee.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Megana:** You would put the bottle in the mouth, and then they would pee. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that longing since. It was like, “If I have this plastic child, my life will be-”

**Craig:** Your biological clock ended with that little baby that peed, and you’re like, “I’m satisfied.”

**Megana:** I was just like, “I got to have it. I want to change its diaper,” or whatever.

**Craig:** You were teasing your mom at that point. She was like, “Yes! I’m going to have grandchildren.”

**Megana:** Yes. I was four or five years old.

**John:** She should not allow you to prepone your childbirth with a doll.

**Megana:** I got that and then pretty immediately I was like, “This is a mess. I don’t want this.”

**Craig:** It’s basically just a doll with a hole in it, that just comes out. It’s a tube. I’m pouring water in. Then water comes out.

**John:** We’re all tubes.

**Craig:** Correct, so what do we need a doll [crosstalk 01:09:49]?

**Megana:** I don’t need a plastic one to hold around.

**Craig:** I remember my sister was super into that too. She was like, “I want the doll that pees.” It was a huge thing. Nobody thought that was weird, by the way. Nobody. Nobody was like-

**John:** Natural.

**Craig:** Just all these kids want dolls that pee.

**Megana:** Literal four-year-olds.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was totally fine.

**Megana:** I have that. Then I remember I got this fuzzy diary, a blue fuzzy, it looks like a shag carpet almost.

**Craig:** Yep, that you could write all your secret thoughts in?

**Megana:** Yeah. I was just like, I’m a glamorous woman with-

**Craig:** My fuzzy blue-

**Megana:** … an interior life and-

**Craig:** A lock.

**Megana:** … a key-

**John:** Of course.

**Megana:** … for my locked diary.

**Craig:** An unbreakable lock. You’d need literally something as rare as a paper clip.

**John:** How often did you use your diary? I feel like one of those things where you maybe wrote in three pages of the diary.

**Megana:** I found it recently. I remember being like, “I don’t have the key for this. I can’t open it.”

**Craig:** Jesus. God, Megana.

**Megana:** My friend just ripped it open.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Megana:** I actually wrote in it a lot. All of the entries were about a boy named Taylor in my class and whether or not he was in school that day, because I am so cool.

**Craig:** I thought you were just a budding truant officer.

**Megana:** No. It’s like, “Today was a bad day. Taylor was sick.”

**Craig:** Taylor was sick. What ever happened to Taylor?

**Megana:** I do not know.

**Craig:** Prison.

**John:** It was Taylor Lautner. He [inaudible 01:11:19] career, but now he’s in a weird in-between place, where he’s kind of famous, but he’s not actually being cast in things.

**Megana:** Exactly.

**John:** Or casted.

**Craig:** Go get him, girl.

**John:** Taylor Lautner married a Taylor, who’s took his last name, so Taylor Lautner is now married to Taylor Lautner.

**Megana:** He used to date a different Taylor.

**Craig:** Wait, really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that true?

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s weird.

**John:** It happens.

**Craig:** I guess it does.

**Megana:** Yeah, that you would marry-

**Craig:** If you have a name that’s unisex, it doesn’t matter whether you’re gay or straight, you have a chance of running into somebody that is going to have… Then if they take your last name, it’s done. Now you’ve just married yourself. We’d love to invite you to the wedding of Taylor Lautner and Taylor Lautner.

**Megana:** It’s a homograph.

**John:** It is a homograph.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s actually a true homonym.

**Craig:** It’s a homonym.

**Megana:** A true homonym.

**Craig:** It’s a homonym.

**John:** It’s both written and-

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s not pronounced differently. If one of them was Taylor Lautner [laht-NUR], then we would be in homograph territory, I believe.

**John:** Exciting. Craig, gifts, what gifts are you thinking back to that were meaningful?

**Craig:** 1977.

**John:** Now, your family celebrated Hanukkah, obviously, but did you also do Christmas evenings too?

**Craig:** No. It’s hard to describe. If you grew up in a Jewish household in New York in the ’70s, it was like a war was going on. The war was between your parents and the obviously best holiday. It was like, “We will not have a Christmas tree. There will be no decorations that are Christmassy. We will actively not do any of it, because then we are destroying our faith and traditions. Therefore, we’re going to pour all of our effort into this fake holiday.” Apologies to those who celebrate Hanukkah. On the list of Jewish holidays, I think there’s 4 million, it’s probably in the 3,900,000s of importance. It just happened to line up with Christmas, and voila. For me and my sister, Hanukkah was really just a time of resentment, because everybody else would just look like they were having the best time. We couldn’t put lights up. We couldn’t put lights up, because that was Christian.

**John:** Sorry.

**Craig:** Did you have that in your family?

**Megana:** No. We fully bought into Christmas as a-

**Craig:** Well done.

**Megana:** … purely capitalist holiday.

**Craig:** As an American holiday. It wasn’t a grievance. Anyway, so yeah, we celebrated fake Christmas, basically.

**John:** Your memories of best presents, was it a birthday present? Was it also just a Hanukkah present? What was it?

**Craig:** I don’t know when I got this, but it was definitely a gift. 1977. There was a line of toys. I remember there were three of them called Shogun Warriors. They were large. I’m going to show you a picture in a second. They were very big. This is the part I didn’t expect, because usually action figures, dolls for boys, were small. They were maybe a couple inches, or maybe if it was-

**John:** A GI Joe is a large, almost like a foot.

**Craig:** GI Joe, yeah, it was like a foot, or the Bionic Man. This thing was two and a half feet tall. It was really tall.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It looked like this.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** What I did not realize until much, much later on was that this thing had a name, because I think the package may have just had Japanese on it. What was cool about him was, he’s this big robot warrior, kind of like-

**John:** It almost looks like a nutcracker to me, honestly.

**Craig:** Yeah, looks a little nutcrackery, but also you could tell that they’ve cheated a little bit from Darth Vader on the mask, clearly. This thing in his belt fired out, and his fist had missiles. There was all these little spring-loaded things. I loved this thing. I can remember the smell of the plastic, this toxic wafting fume of, I assume it was plastic. It could’ve been made of body parts. I don’t know. Loved it. Years later, I went to look it up. I was like, “Maybe I’ll buy one of these.” They are selling them. It was made by Mattel. It is currently I think on eBay for $800.

**John:** Wow.

**Megana:** Wow.

**Craig:** At the time, I assume it cost $6. They were eventually banned because of the choking problems.

**John:** I was going to say anything that shoots off-

**Craig:** Yeah. You can see these little missiles here. Those are little missiles, perfectly designed to catch in a child’s throat. The name of this Shogun is Mazinga, which is just Mazin and a G-A.

**John:** Wow. Made for you.

**Craig:** It was like it was made for me. Mazinga. Shogun Warrior, 1977, Mazinga. If you had one of these things as a kid, please write in and let us know. There were two other ones. I don’t remember their names. I did not have those, but I wanted them.

**John:** Love it. Drew, how about you? Gifts that are meaningful?

**Drew:** Christmas ’98, because I would go out with my mom every weekend, and she’d go shopping. At Pier One they had these papasan chairs, which are the circle ones.

**Craig:** Of course, the classic dorm room chair.

**Drew:** Yeah, dorm room chair. I was like, “I want one so bad.” Christmas morning, there was a papasan chair. That was the big gift. That was like, “I am an adult now. I’m eight years old. My room is like the house in Friends.”

**Craig:** You were eight?

**Drew:** I was eight.

**Craig:** You wanted a papasan chair?

**John:** Was it a full-size one?

**Drew:** It was a full-size one.

**John:** You could nap in that thing.

**Drew:** Yeah, I would just curl up basically in that, because I was a weird kid.

**Craig:** What a weird little boy.

**Drew:** I was very strange.

**Craig:** Everyone else is like, “I want Nintendo [inaudible 01:16:48].” You’re like, “I would like this poorly put together rattan chair.”

**Drew:** Corduroy.

**Craig:** “With corduroy cushions, please. I will sit in it like the king.”

**John:** I also remember gifts I didn’t get that I really, really wanted. In the first case, I was too afraid to ever ask for this gift. But whenever I was flipping through the wish book, this is the gift I really wanted. It’s Barbie, but it’s Barbie’s head.

**Craig:** My sister had one.

**John:** Makeup Barbie, where you could get that stuff. I desperately wanted that, but even then, I knew, oh, no, that’s-

**Craig:** That’s probably not going to fly?

**John:** That’s not going to fly in the household. I couldn’t ask for it. Internalized homophobia wouldn’t let me do that. I also really wanted – and Craig, you will remember this one – Big Trak. Do you remember Big Trak?

**Craig:** Oh, absolutely, I remember Big Trak. Look how ’70s that is.

**John:** It is amazingly ’70s. To describe this-

**Craig:** Incredible.

**John:** It feels like if you took an Atari and put tractor wheels on it, tank wheels on it. The idea behind this is that you punch in little buttons and set a course for it, and then it’ll go and run. It’ll drive itself around on that course, which was just revolutionary at the time.

**Craig:** Magic. Absolutely magic. With that membrane style pushing the button.

**John:** My Atari 400 computer had that.

**Craig:** The membrane keyboard, yeah.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** My sister and I had loads of board games. We would play everything. My closet was jammed full of those things. We liked Battleship, but I was obsessed with the idea of getting electronic Battleship. Obsessed. The ads made it look so incredible. I asked over and over, and every single time, my dad was like, “Why? It’s just Battleship. You already have Battleship.” I’m like, “You don’t understand. It’s like you’re in the middle of a naval battle. There’s explosions and lights.” Never flew. Never flew. Never got it. Never got it. Still don’t have it. Will never even give it to myself, because you need to have something missing, or else… The day I get electronic battleship, I’m probably just going to keel over and die.

**Drew:** Now we know.

**Craig:** Now we know. Now you know how to kill me.

**John:** Drew, you and I were talking about adults who collect toys, adults who go shopping for toys, because you were working at a company that they would actually just go out and buy toys.

**Drew:** I worked at a stop motion… I worked at the studio that did Robot Chicken. They would just be toys all the time. They would go out and get stuff. Even the people that I worked with would go. There’s so many collector places around LA. It’s a whole subculture. It’s cool for a bit, but I don’t know. People go really far.

**Craig:** There’s a weirdness to it. It gets weird to turn something so lovely and innocent into something rather serious and tense.

**Drew:** The collector aspect too sort of bothers me. My dad, when Star Wars toys came back in ’95, bought all of them, and they are still pristine in our basement in boxes. I got some toys, but he has all of them. That always drove me nuts. I can’t wait for, someday I want to just give those to a kid.

**Craig:** Until you see what they’re worth, and then you’re like, “Yeah, I won’t give these to-”

**Drew:** I don’t think they’re worth… I think everyone had that same idea.

**Craig:** I think everybody did have the same… I don’t understand collecting at all anyway.

**John:** I’m not a collector. I collect some typewriters, but I don’t know anything about the typewriters. I just collect them because they’re cool. I like them. Megana, any gifts you never got that you are still resentful about?

**Megana:** Papasan chair is actually on there.

**Craig:** What is going on?

**Megana:** I don’t know what it was, what choke hold Pier One Imports had me in, but I would beg my mom to stop by Pier One on our way home from the mall. The first time I failed my driver’s test, my dad took me to Pier One to make me feel better about it.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Megana:** But he still didn’t get me the papasan chair.

**John:** Instead, he bought some wrapping paper and some Chilean wine.

**Craig:** I know. Exactly. Baubles. Here’s some baubles.

**John:** Absolutely. Here’s a wind vane.

**Craig:** I like that when you failed, your dad tried to make you feel better instead of what I had, which was just anger on top of shame. Your dad was cool. That’s nice.

**John:** Cool dads, that’s the best gift of all.

**Craig:** Cool dads are the best gift of all. You hear that, my kids?

**John:** Thanks, everyone.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Megana:** Thanks.

**Drew:** Thanks.

**Craig:** Merry Christmas!

Links:

* [Netflix Viewership Data](https://about.netflix.com/en/news/what-we-watched-a-netflix-engagement-report)
* [The absolutely legitimate, incredibly useful Indian English word you’re not using](https://qz.com/india/380388/the-absolutely-legitimate-incredibly-useful-indian-english-word-youre-not-using) by Diksha Madhok
* [Homographs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph)
* [The Very Best Cookie In The Whole Wide World](https://www.theverybestcookieinthewholewideworld.com/)
* [DeLuscious Cookies](https://www.delusciouscookies.com/)
* [Levain Bakery](https://levainbakery.com/)
* [Clue Conspiracy](https://hasbropulse.com/products/clue-conspiracy)
* [Dessert Person](https://www.dessertperson.com/dessert-person-cookbook) by Claire Saffitz
* [Upright Steamer](https://pureenrichment.com/products/puresteam-pro-upright-garment-steamer-with-4-steam-levels)
* [The Kelly Clarkson Connection](https://www.siriusxm.com/channels/the-kelly-clarkson-connection)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/623standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/entering-the-post-strike-era).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 613 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s time for a five-year checkup. We’ll open an email time capsule about the state of the industry and maybe just perhaps spend a lot of the episode talking about the WGA deal. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, dreams.

**Craig:** Dreams.

**John:** Not the aspirational kind, but those pictures in your mind while you sleep. We’ll talk about those. Hooray! But this is an episode with actual news, because-

**Craig:** What? Did something happen?

**John:** Something happened, Craig.

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** I don’t know if you’ve been aware. I don’t know if you’ve checked the headlines.

**Craig:** No. What happened?

**John:** After 146 days on strike-

**Craig:** We were on strike? Oh, no.

**John:** Did you forget?

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** I am in so much trouble.

**John:** Oh, man. So much explaining to do.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** WGA reached a tentative agreement with the studios.

**Craig:** Woohoo!

**John:** The strike is over. We are back to work. We discussed this almost entirely over on the sidecast episodes, so this is our first main feed mention post-strike. For future historians, five years from now, this was the first episode that was recorded in the post-strike era. Now, Craig, because it’s usually just Drew and Megana and I talking over in sidecasts, and because I was on the Negotiating Committee, you and I really have not talked about much of this stuff at all. This is my first chance to ask you, what do you think? What’s your impressions?

**Craig:** I am thrilled. Look, I’m thrilled that the strike is over. Of course, when strikes end, obviously, a lot of pain ends for a lot of people, so that’s important. But there are a couple of ways strikes end. Either end in achievement or end in not so much achievement. This was a whole lot of achievement. You saw something that I wrote 10 weeks ago on Threads, the poorly attended Threads.

**John:** Oh, remember Threads?

**Craig:** What I wrote was, “The AMPTP,” this is 10 weeks ago, “has lost already. They’re in denial, and they’re paranoid about giving in, but none of that changes the facts.” What I said was, basically, they were going to lose, because they had already lost, and it would behoove them and save them quite a bit of money and save everybody a lot of pain if they just could just lose quickly, as opposed to slowly, because the outcome could not be anything other than, with the exception of adjustments of quantity, the WGA had to secure everything in principle that it was asking for. It was the only possible outcome, and that is exactly what happened, although that is not to diminish how hard it was for you guys, for the leadership, and for the membership to stick to it.

I don’t think I had a single conversation with anybody where it felt like people felt we had a choice. Everybody just kind of felt, “This is it. Either we get it or what’s the point of any of this?” We got it. Jeez, I wish they had just… It’s funny. I look at this deal, and right after I’m, “Yay,” I go, what is it about any of this that was hard to give? It’s just mind-blowing to me. Would love to just run through-

**John:** Let’s run through it, because you and I have never really done this. You can take the lead here. I can jump in when I have clarifications or some color to put on stuff.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** I’m mostly curious to hear your take on this.

**Craig:** First up, the standard minimum bumps, those are more than they typically are, but those were negotiated by the DGA. This is where pattern bargaining is just a rigid fact of life. Those were always going to be what those were always going to be, and it will forever be so. But just as important to note that when we were done negotiating and striking, we got a lot of stuff that was just simply different. Not different from what they had, but different as in they don’t have it at all and we got it. Those minimum bumps, not surprising to me at all, and unquestionable, essentially. Anybody that says that you guys should’ve gotten more just doesn’t understand how the world works.

**John:** Something people should understand is that those top line minimum bumps is basically anything in the contract that doesn’t say it changes by a different percentage all increases by that percentage. If it doesn’t say otherwise, everything rose by 5% in that first year.

Now, there’s a lot of stuff that’s new in the contract that has its own bumps. It’s important to note those things, because there’s a whole new Writer-Producer tier, which is 9% above what the Story Editor rate was. That’s a big change. Things increased overall more than just the minimums, but those minimums are the top thing you see.

**Craig:** One other thing that I think it’s important for people to understand about those minimums is that they’re cumulative. If you have a 4% raise in year two – I can’t remember the exact details – and then year three it’s maybe 5%, that 5% applies to the already 4% bumped-up number. So it is cumulative. It compounds. There are quite a few people who, I remember when the DGA deal came out, were like, “That doesn’t even match inflation.” It does, I think.

But there were many other places where we needed to improve things, and we did, so let’s get into those. We made made-for-streaming movies move much closer to the theatrical residual model than ever before. That’s a great improvement.

**John:** Absolutely. There aren’t a lot of these movies, honestly. Most of the stuff that’s being made for streamers is done under theatrical terms anyway. We wanted to make sure that there wasn’t any incentive to start making them under streaming contracts rather than under theatrical contracts.

**Craig:** A good loophole to be closed and a good bump for people that were operating under that, let’s call it a loophole. Oh my god, a second step for writers in theatrical who are earning double or less than double scale. Anything above double scale, no. But if you are earning under twice scale, you get a guaranteed second step. This is a thing that I proposed on the Negotiating Committee in 2004. It took 19 years. You guys got it done. Can’t thank you enough. That is a huge, huge win for theatrical writers.

You may say, is it really going to put that much more money in their pockets? In the short term, probably not. But what it does is reintroduces the business to the value of the second step. We’ve talked about it on the podcast quite a bit. It’s just a revision to a broken system, and it gives theatrical writers a chance to learn how to do their jobs without feeling like they’re always one draft away from being fired.

**John:** It’s also a way to push back against the scourge of free work. If you know that you have that second step coming, you can say to the producers and executives and everyone else pressing you for, oh, if you could just fix this thing and this thing and this thing, “You know what, guys? I have that whole extra rewrite guaranteed. Let me do it then.”

**Craig:** Correct. It also removes the fear factor from producers who feel like they only get one chance to submit this thing to the studio. Now they have two. It helps. It helps everybody. It’s particularly helpful for the studios, because they don’t have to worry about producers just going crazy for seven months. Weekly pay in theatrical, a nudge in a positive direction, although I do think the two steps will be more impactful overall. But good to see. Good to see.

**John:** Where we got to in this was, rather than weekly pay, we have accelerated pay for those same writers who are 200% of scale or less. After nine weeks, they invoice, they get paid initial 25%. After nine weeks, they’ve been paid out 75%. Does it solve the problem? No. But it puts more money in their pockets sooner. Talking to writers in this situation, cashflow is really a huge problem. They were running out of money. This gets them more money quicker.

**Craig:** I misspoke when I said weekly pay. The typical method was, “We’re going to divide your amount of money in half. You get half up front. You get half when you turn a thing in.” The problem is the turn the thing in. Producers were delaying that endlessly. This not only gets you half of the half that you would normally get at the end sooner. It also alerts the studios to the fact that a bunch of time has gone by and they haven’t gotten a script, so they might start asking for it, which is good. We want that.

**John:** Craig, this is something I’ve wanted to say on the podcast for a while, so this is a little sidebar here. I do think it’s best practices for when you are starting a theatrical project. When you get that first commencement check, email the whole team and say, “Hey folks, I just got commenced on this. I’m so excited. Today I’m starting a 12-week contract per my deal. I anticipate handing in the script on this date.” Just making sure everyone actually understands what the timelines are here and just putting them on notice that this is a 12-week deal, this is not meant to be the next eight months of my life, can just be helpful, just be good framing here. After nine weeks, for writers who qualify for this, it’s a reminder for yourself, oh, that’s right, I actually have to stupidly invoice at nine weeks to get paid that 25%.

**Craig:** Certainly, our lawyers are all aware of this now. I think if you do say something like what you just suggested, John, you have to brace yourself for a very angry phone call from the producer, who knows exactly what you’re up to. There is that, just to be aware of.

But certainly, it’s enormously helpful to note that the trigger payment that comes earlier, it’s an internal alarm that can go off at the studio, like, “Why have nine weeks gone by, and we haven’t seen a thing?” or, “How are you doing? Where are you at?”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** We do have escalated minimums for higher-level Writer-Producer tiers. That’s what you just described earlier. It’s important because it basically rebuilds the ladder in television. Basically, there used to be a ladder. You would start as a staff writer. You get this minimum. Then as you went up, you got more. At least from the writing point of view, it all flattened out to minimums for everybody, and there was no more ladder. It was just a floor. The ladder has been restored.

Some people may say, “How does this help me if I am a new writer?” There’s a ladder. You can climb it now. It means there’s a chance for you to earn more as you progress in your career. Yes, in the short term, it benefits the people above you. In the long term, assuming that things go well for you, it benefits you. That’s important.

**John:** It also ties into the fact that now you’re required to have a certain number of those writer-producers at the higher pay tier, are required for staffing. It pulls people up that system. When everyone was being paid the same, it didn’t matter who you were hiring. You saw people just stuck and stagnating.

**Craig:** Exactly. Let’s talk about mini rooms, which I think quite rightly took it in the shorts, as they should. I like the phrase that the Guild’s been using, which is development rooms or pre-greenlights rooms. It helps, because mini room is actually a terrible word for what they are.

What’s happened? We as a Guild have secured more pay for a longer guaranteed time if writers are working in these pre-greenlight development rooms. In short, these rooms have gotten more expensive and less attractive to the companies, which is good, because from a creative point of view and from a quality of life point of view and from a career point of view, I can detect nothing positive about them at all.

**John:** Mini rooms, or development rooms, came to be as an alternative to pilots. Once upon a time we made pilots, and then we shot the pilots, and we saw what the show was. Increasingly, streamers decided, oh, no, we are just going to get a bunch of scripts and they’ll make a decision based on that. They didn’t have to pay any premium to make those things. Now they do, and so it may cause them to reevaluate how they are choosing to develop their shows and whether they might shoot more pilots or how they are going to proceed.

**Craig:** Correct. The Guild got script fees for staff writers, or any writer in television, on top of the weekly amount they’re paid. That is excellent. To borrow a D and D term, it stacks nicely with the new streaming residual formula, because there are a lot of things that are tied directly to credit, like residuals. It’s good to see that if you write a script, that is an additional amount of money on top of the amount that you were already getting paid. It means that you don’t essentially write a script for free, I guess, if they had to pay you anyway. It was good to see.

**John:** It was great to see. That has been an issue, like a guaranteed second step for feature writers, that’s always been there. It’s always been like, “It’s absurd that we can’t get this.” This time we got it.

**Craig:** We got it. Let’s talk about minimum staffing, which was something of a controversial thing. For starters, there is a carve-out for writers who like to go it alone. Hooray. Now, I have been that writer. I am not currently that writer on The Last of Us, because I do work with Neil Druckmann, and for Season 2, also Halley Gross. I was actually quite thrilled to see that. Let’s talk about the value here. Minimum staff of, to start with, three Writer-Producer tier people. Now, I have a question for you. What level does that include?

**John:** Co-producer and above.

**Craig:** Okay, so it is the new, higher-paid level.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Basically, the first three people that you have to make sure you have, if you are not writing everything by yourself, are three writers, including the showrunner, if they so choose, at that higher level. Beyond that, depending on how many episodes you are writing, you may then also need to hire additional writers who can be at that higher level or not.

**John:** Yeah, and would likely be not at that level, just in terms of how budgets and things work out.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s of course important to stress that these are minimums. One of the goals in any contract is to make sure that you’re not incentivizing the minimums to become the maximums. We are very mindful of that in how we’re putting these together. Staff writers and story editors are less expensive now than writer-producer level writers, and so this is a good budgetary reason to make sure you’re including them in your show.

**Craig:** This was going to happen. I think any time you look at what a guild asks for, or at least in this circumstance, if there was a quantity, we of course weren’t going to ask for our bottom line quantity, so there’s room to give there. But the existence of this was going to happen. I got asked about this all the time. I know Mike White got asked about it all the time. Part of me wishes that we could’ve just incorporated the carve-out from the start. I think it would’ve eliminated a lot of internal strife and a lot of carping about certain writers, as if, for instance, Mike White was doing something wrong and not just writing two great seasons of a TV show in the way that he likes to write.

Given that part of the argument about this was, “99% of shows use rooms anyway, so we really have to address their needs,” okay, then, so why obsess over rooms for that last 1% of shows? In all negotiations, you have to have things to give away. I don’t know, and I don’t need to know, if this was part of the calculation that maybe, okay, we’ll toss that back into the pile to get what we need.

But also, I can say, people ask me, “What do you think about it?” What I think about it is I’m one member of a union with over 10,000 members, and one thing became incredibly clear from the jump. This was an extremely popular demand. Our union on the whole wanted this. They had thought about it. They had considered. They weren’t bamboozled. They looked at it. They examined it. They said, “We want this.” Like any union member, I think it’s important to say, “Hey, you know what? I benefit from the union in all sorts of ways. I’m not going to necessarily benefit from every way.” My answer to the question, “What do you think about it?” is I’m glad the union got what the membership wanted, because to me, it seemed like any notion that we weren’t was insane. We were going to get this. And we got it.

**John:** One of my great frustrations in the discourse around minimum staffing, it’s like, “No other union tells people how many union members they have to hire.” I’m like, no, every union does that. That’s what unions do. You don’t get to choose whether you want assistant directors on your show. There are ADs. That just is a thing that happens. It was not this revolutionary seizing of the means of production that some people were portraying it as.

**Craig:** No. It was a response to the fact that there had been a system where 99% of shows had rooms. Those rooms were full of the amount of writers the showrunner felt they needed. Then the companies started to screw around. This is what happens. This is the eff around and find out moment.

**John:** I was going to say. Lindsay Dougherty.

**Craig:** They found out. Weekly minimums in post, we didn’t get it. I do not consider this a failure, because I don’t understand how we can get that, because I don’t think we’ve solved the wording problem yet. Obviously, I was not in the room with you guys, and I did not dig into all this. I understand the problem. The problem is, we want to ensure that writers, other than the showrunner, are going to be included, for instance, in editing, so that we can train them and they can prepare and they can learn, so that we have showrunners down the line.

But there is a wording problem, because no matter how many time the Guild says editing is writing, it’s not. We have a contract. The contract defines what writing is. There is a jurisdiction. I understand that we’re reserving legal rights. I don’t think that’s going to pan out. I think we need to figure out another way to solve it. The good news is, okay, no harm in trying. No harm, no foul. It helps define the path that doesn’t work. We’re going to have to figure out a path that does, because I think it’s important.

**John:** Just speaking up for some of the writers on the Negotiating Committee, some of other showrunners on the Negotiating Committee, who felt strongly that they were not being paid as writers during post. They were being forced down below Guild minimums for that time in post. You could say that’s a failure on their reps for not negotiating a proper payment for that time they were spending in post. Also, they literally had Final Draft open and were writing new scenes and new moments and new dialogue in those times, and that’s clearly writing. There is writing that happens during the post-production process, and that’s what they’re arguing. That’s why there’s ongoing arbitration over this. It will continue to be figured out.

**Craig:** Little dangerous. Yes, we do occasionally have to write things in post, and that is writing. If we argue that that’s the basis for this, I’m sure the companies will respond with, “Great. Let us know if you’re writing, and we will work up a weekly deal for you. That will be a minimum writing deal, and only for the time you’re writing. Let’s see what you write.” It’s tricky. This is one of the downsides of having writers who are also management. This is a tricky area. It’s not going to be an easy solve.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** But at the very least, we understand there is a problem. Now we’ve just got to figure out a different way to get there. I have faith.

**John:** I have faith.

**Craig:** Foreign streaming residuals. Question for you, John, was that reflective of the DGA deal? Either way, it was positive. I just didn’t know if this was something that was unique to us or we were inheriting from the DGA.

**John:** This was inherited from the DGA. Like everything, our asks were larger, and this is where we ended up.

**Craig:** That makes sense. Viewership-based streaming. This one was the holy grail here. It I’m sure at times felt somewhat insurmountable, because it was wrapped up in this other problem. The problem wasn’t that they were greedy and cheap, although they often are. The problem was they were greedy, cheap, and did not want to share the data required to actually be able to calculate this stuff.

**John:** Our residuals classically are based on reuse, where you can just see that reuse, like, oh, it aired on TBS, and therefore you’re getting residual payment, or based on units, and we had ways of auditing the number of DVDs or videotapes sold. Those are physical things we can track. Reuse that’s based on this is an incredibly popular show on your streaming service is a new metric for us, is a new thing we’ve never been able to study before.

**Craig:** Correct. What we were asking for was, since just basic reuse seems very difficult to define here, the moral argument was, guys, if a show is watched by a billion people, how is the writer of that show getting 12 cents in residuals? It doesn’t make sense. It’s not correct. We have to fix it. So where you guys landed I think is a decent start. It’s going to be fascinating to see how it goes.

There are bonuses now tied to viewership. They kick in when a show hits viewership that is equivalent to 20% of the domestic subscriber base. If there are 10 million people in the United States who subscribe to a platform, then we’re talking about 2 million. You have to get 2 million views within the first 90 days cumulative to then trigger the bonus scheme. This goes along hand in hand with a very obviously necessary data-sharing plan. The data itself will stay somewhat confidential with the Guild. The Guild will be able to present an aggregate of that to the membership, not necessarily a, “This many people watch Apple. This many people watch Amazon.”

The big question over the next three years is how many shows qualify. If a lot qualify, then we’re in good shape. If seven qualify, we’re going to need to bargain that threshold down. That’s how it’s going to be. That is a negotiation topic. What happened here was the invention of an entirely new payment plan.

This is something that is as close to being conjured out of thin air as you can get in a negotiation like this. Certainly, the DGA didn’t get this at all. To me, this was the most important and probably the most hard-fought victory that you guys had to get to. It’s a great beginning.

**John:** Thank you. I agree with you. It’s a first step, because we won’t know… We were told in the room, some staff, what roughly percentage of shows on their services should hit that. The way I like to think about it is that if the service is bragging, like, “This is the top show on our service in America,” it should probably be kicking off a payment here. If something is genuinely a hit on that show, and they’re bragging that it’s a hit, there probably needs to be a payment associated with that. I think we will get there. I think this will be that first step, this next two years and seven months before we’re back negotiating contract again. We’ll get some actual dollars out of this, but it’s that data transparency, our ability to actually look and see what other shows are doing that will tell us where we need to go next.

**Craig:** Correct. The battlefront will be on the threshold. That’s where we’ll live. We’ll see how we do. You can’t have that battle if it doesn’t exist, and it now exists, so that’s huge.

Residuals for ad-supported streaming. Not only is that great to see, that one was one of those things where I’m like, why are they not just giving… Just unreal that they didn’t just give that, and they had to fight about it. Anyway.

**John:** AVOD services, FAST services, I think we all recognize it’s a future growth area. There will some shows that are made specifically for those services. They’re not there yet, but we want to make sure that we have protections and residuals for those shows as they start to come up.

**Craig:** Health care bumps. Fairly typical when we need these things, usually, we get punished. You say, hey, look, we need you to add a little bit more into the amount you contribute per writer and per this much of earnings into health care. “Okay, we’ll do that, but instead of giving you the 3% minimum bump across the board, it’s going to be 2.5%.” We got all of it. We got the bigger bumps, and we got an increase in the health care bump, and wonderful to see also, an extension of one quarter of eligibility, one quarter of a year, to reflect the time that was lost to the strike. That’s a big deal. That is an example of a lesson learned from the last strike, where our staff honestly just miffed it. They thought that was just how it would work, and told the membership as much in leading up to the strike vote, and then later went, “Oh, actually, no.” Everybody was well aware that this was an issue going in.

This is one of those areas where I got to actually tip my hat to the AMPTP. I’m not saying that they were not jerks to not offer it immediately. But it does strike me that when it comes to these issues, they at least are less Scroogey perhaps than in some of these other areas. It was good to see that.

Huge, huge win here for writing teams. For as long as I’ve been in this union, for as long as you’ve been in this union, teams have been penalized, essentially. They had a different deal for how much money they could receive health care contributions for, and now, finally, at long last, we have won what is only fair, which is that even if you write with somebody else as a team, you are treated individually for the purposes of qualifying for pension and health care. It’s unreal that we have been living with this for so long, but it has been fixed. Thank god.

**John:** The way to think about it is these are two human beings who are writing as a team, but they’re also two human beings, and each of them needs pension, each of them needs health care. You and I both know so many partners who have struggled with this. In some cases, especially if they’re married partners, they would do tricks to put all the pension contributions under one person’s name so they could do spouse minimums. It was insane.

**Craig:** It was crazy.

**John:** To finally close this is such a welcome relief.

**Craig:** Yeah, really brutal and a huge relief. AI obviously, media-friendly topic. It was solved I think exactly as it should’ve been, to the extent that anybody can say that AI has been solved. The nightmare is still emerging. Basically, AI-generated stuff is not literary material. Writers cannot be required to write AI. Writers cannot be required to incorporate AI. They don’t have to adapt to AI. AI is not eligible for credit.

The one area that we’ve punted to the courts – it makes sense that we’ve punted it to the courts – is basically scraping. The companies are reserving the right to feed all the scripts that they own, that we wrote, into an AI to see if they can help make that AI better. It’s going to be a tough case for us to win in a court, because we’re basically arguing that they can’t scrape their own copyrighted material, because they own the copyright. The fact is, we don’t know where any of this is going. It was going to be nearly impossible to get them to not do that. I think getting all these other concessions was really important. It is a markedly stronger set of language than the language the DGA secured.

**John:** I was obviously very involved in the AI frontier. I say there’s really two buckets of gains you can be thinking about here. First off is the writer’s daily working life. Those are issues like, AI-generated material is not literary material, source material, or sonic material. That makes it so it’s not your problem, that you cannot be forced to use AI tools, that if something is being generated by AI and then handed to you, they have to tell you that. They have to disclose that to you. Those are all protections for you and me today.

The other thing we’re wrestling with is what happens to the huge trove of material that we have written for the studios, that they control copyright on, that they could use to train their models? It’s true, they do control copyright, but we also hold back certain rights. As you know, Craig, we have separated rights on material that govern reuse and remakes and other things, so that the mutual agreement, neither side is giving up their ability to assert that they have controls over this. We’ll see where it goes and whether it’s something that happens in the courts in the next couple years. We’ll see.

One thing I think it’s important for everyone to remember is that the companies that are actually really doing AI, Microsoft, Facebook, Open AI, they are not parties to this contract at all. Whatever we did in this MBA does not affect them directly. In many cases, writers and the studios are aligned in our ability to say you cannot do these things, you other companies. It’s going to be a really live and active issues. In some cases, we’ll be allied with the studios. In some cases, we’ll be fighting the studios. But this contract does not give up any of our rights to do so.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think you hit on it, that the area where this can get worked out is in separated rights. Those are negotiated. We’ll have more success there than we will in a court, but we’ll see how it goes. The important thing was not only did we get about the strongest language I think we could’ve expected to get, but we also then set up SAG for their negotiation. Because I’m not on a negotiating committee, I’m just going to go ahead and presume that the major terms we got on things that are applicable to them, for instance, streaming success residuals, will carry through to them. They’re not going to do better. They do have specific needs regarding AI that we didn’t have, for instance, likeness, voice. They need to do more work on that. But we have given them a very good start, a very good basis. It was really important just for our sister union to see that we got much further than the DGA did with their language.

**John:** Speaking of SAG-AFTRA, of course they’re on strike right now, but in the times since these deals have come out, I’ve actually been talking to a lot of other labor organizations. I think there’s two principles that were tried to enshrine in this that are applicable to workers everywhere else is that AI cannot be used to replace the human worker and that you can’t use AI to drive down the wages or working conditions of the human worker. It’s going to be different in every industry, and it’s hard to make absolutes, but those are the kinds of guiding principles that you’re going to see other people try to enact to meet their specific needs in their industry.

**Craig:** Yes. This was the time it needed to happen.

**John:** We were uniquely positioned to handle it. It was just fate that the time came up at the right moment that we could do this.

**Craig:** Yes, things sort of lined up. We were unlucky in one regard that it fell in your lap. On the other sense though, we were very lucky that it fell in your lap when you guys were ready to start negotiating. That was good.

Lastly, I just want to talk about the overall value of the contract, because oftentimes – you’ve spent a lot of time in these Negotiating Committee rooms, I’ve spent some time in there – this becomes a bit of a shorthand of, how much money are we actually asking for? It gets calculated in various ways. But it was interesting to see, the amount that we were asking for and then the amount they initially offered, where we landed was a little bit under halfway.

You might think we should’ve gotten more or we should’ve been exactly halfway. But here’s the deal. What we were asking for was enormously more than we had ever asked for before. The Guild’s analysis is that where we landed is, the value of this contract is $233 million per year for three years. That is more per year than we got for the entirety of the 2023 year contract. I hope that puts it into perspective for people.

**John:** It’s also worth noting that 2020 was our biggest contract year to date.

**Craig:** That’s right. We didn’t do better. This was a paradigm shift, quantum leap. Pick your trope. This number is simply a different category of number. This contract is a different category of contract than any contract that the Guild has ever gotten in my career or yours.

Couple things to conclude, and then we’ll move on with the rest of our show. First, thank you, John. Thank you to you, the Negotiating Committee, the leadership, Chris Keyser, and Ellen. Ellen Stutzman deserves a medal. There’s something about the right person at the right time. I just think it was really important, the role she played and the way she played it. I was so impressed. I hope she continues to do that for us and for the companies, since we’re all working together again.

My parting advice for the companies in the aftermath of all this is to manage to do something that is very uncharacteristic for them from here on out, and that is avoid grinding labor down until our backs are against the wall, because the deal is, with this strike it was so evident that, as a labor force, our backs were against the wall. If you’re against the wall, you strike until you’re not. That’s it. You’ll strike forever. You’ll strike for a thousand years. It doesn’t matter, because there is no alternative that is success. Only success is success.

If they continue to follow that plan of theirs, to just chip away, chip away, chip away, they’re going to find themselves right back in the spot they were in in 2023, which was having perfectly, flawlessly, thoroughly motivated an entire union to walk the picket line for as long as it takes to get the biggest contract in union history. Try and avoid that, companies, because if it happens, we’ll strike again, and we will win again.

**John:** I’d second all of that. I would also say that it’s so easy to focus on the leaders of this organization and where we got to because of their hard work, but of course, it was the 10,000, 11,000 members who actually stood together through five very difficult months that made this all possible. It was really hard for basically everyone to do this.

Sometimes when you come out of a war, it’s hard to think about, what do I do next? I would encourage everyone to remember that you are in this Guild because you are the best writers of film and television in the world. That’s how you got to be here. It’s now your job to make the best film and television in the world, and to remind everybody that not only are you worth this $233 million, you’re still underpaid, you still should be paid more, that you are just absolutely unique in your abilities to do this.

All of the energy and brilliant and creativity we saw during these five months, everything that happened on the picket line, everything that happened online to support this, channel that energy, channel that brilliance into writing brilliant things. I would love for future historians to ask, “What happened in ’24 and ’25? Why did everything suddenly flourish and become so much better?” Maybe it’s because all the energy that was diverted into striking came back to where it really, truly belonged, which is on the page, and then we wrote just groundbreaking, incredible things.

**Craig:** I sure would love to see that. I have a question for you, John.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Were you writing at 12:01 a.m.?

**John:** No, I was not writing at 12:01 a.m., although shortly after it was called, I did send out those first emails to all the producers and all the people who I had not talked to in five months, saying, “Hello. Checking in. What’s happening?” It’s busy again, and it’s exciting. For the folks who it’s not busy for quite yet, just remember, the same drive and determination you showed over these last five months, show for yourself, and stand up for yourself, and stand up for your fellow writers.

**Craig:** I’m going to say I was playing D and D, in the game I play, not DM, on Tuesday. I think it was 11:30 p.m. when we finished. Everyone went home. I had a Diet Coke, watched the clock, and then it felt so good.

**John:** It did feel good.

**Craig:** One of the things that I think people don’t understand – certainly the companies don’t understand it – is that as much as we deserve to be treated correctly and compensated correctly, almost no one is driven to do this because of a love of money. We do this because we’re compelled to create things. It’s what we do. It’s how we define ourselves. One of the costs of a strike is disconnecting yourself from your thing, from the thing you’re supposed to be doing. It hurts. I hope everybody is enjoying reconnecting to the thing they’re supposed to be doing and having fun with it.

**John:** Fantastic. Drew, now, this is your part of the podcast, because you got a very interesting email this past week.

**Drew Marquardt:** I’m so excited to follow that up, by the way. I got an email this last week from Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell, sent September 24, 2018, which is five years ago-

**John:** Very exciting.

**Drew:** … asking me to follow up about Scriptnotes Episode 369 and the things you were talking about then, because you made five-year predictions then, and we can see if they came true. I went back and listened to Episode 369, and it also had a five-year follow-up, because producer Stuart Friedel had also sent an email five years into the future, because of course he did – that’s Stuart – to see if your predictions in Episode 108 about iPads making the way into movie theaters had come true. Of course, that did happen.

**John:** We all know that everyone brings their iPads into theaters all the time now.

**Drew:** Exactly.

**John:** That’s become so common. We were talking about it way back in, what was it, 2013 or whatever.

**Craig:** That was as close as you’re going to get to a meal-in-a-pill moment, John.

**Drew:** This is a chain going back 10 years in Scriptnotes history. It’s kind of like a wormhole. I figured listening to your predictions from Episode 369, they felt pretty timely and relevant to everything we’ve just been talking about, so I’m excited to hear you guys reflect on them.

**John:** Let’s listen to our predictions from Episode 369.

[Episode 369 Clip]

**John:** Let’s make some predictions for Megan to send five years in the future. Five years in the future, what’s going to become of award season, and what’s going to become of movies?

**Craig:** I’ll take the lead on this. Nothing will change. In five years, movies will pretty much be as movies are. There will be more original movies running on our screens at home through the Disney service and Netflix and so on. But there will still be huge theatrical releases coming out every single week. There will be a big summer box office battle issue of Entertainment Weekly and so on and so forth. When it comes to awards, nothing is going to change at all.

**John:** But will anything have changed in terms of getting writers and other people fairly compensated for movies that are not released theatrically?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Will we figure any of that stuff out?

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** We will have essentially the same conversation five years from now you predict?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Franklin, what’s your thinking, five years in the future?

**Franklin Leonard:** It’s really hard for me to argue against that, honestly. Look, the theatrical business will still exist in five years. I think people will be going to see movies of all sorts. There will continue to be a giant summer blockbuster season and probably a six-month award season. As far as how people are compensated, I certainly hope there’s a change, but you guys have much deeper knowledge on the realities of that than I do, so I happily defer to your judgment.

**John:** A thing we found out as we surveyed screenwriters for the WGA is that 80% of screenwriters are also TV writers. Either they’re currently working in TV or they’re planning to work in TV. As these things get more and more combined, we’re going to have to figure out ways to do what Craig describes. Basically, after a certain window, every new time it’s watched, a nickel goes into the jar, because it shouldn’t really matter ultimately whether it was a 90-minute thing or a 30-minute thing. Just you pay that person.

**Franklin:** I totally agree.

**John:** There will be more things like Chernobyl, like Craig’s.

**Franklin:** Exactly, and more limited series specifically authored by Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** There will be at least one more. There will be at least one more of those.

**Franklin:** That’s my big call for 2023.

**Craig:** I do agree. I think that that is a format that is expanding, and expanding rapidly. It’s a tricky one, because I feel like a lot of these… Here’s another award season bunch of baloney. The whole limited series, not really limited. The Crown was a limited series its first season. No, it wasn’t. A lot of these limited series become these sort of backdoor seasons into a multi-season show. But I do think that that is going to… What’s happening is the television business seems to be shifting away from just pure ratings and into more of a kind of targeted depth. They’re like, “Look, we don’t need to be the Super Bowl. We don’t care if 80 million people watch. What we want is these five million people to all watch, if we can get those five million. And the only way to get those five million people is to show them this.” It doesn’t matter that most people don’t see it. These five million did, and that’s going to keep them paying for all the stuff, because they’re not going to watch any of the rest of this junk. They’re just going to watch this.

You start to get into the… There’s a great article by Malcolm Gladwell many, many years ago about how Prego figured out for the first time that if you sold five different kinds of Prego, you would make so much more money than if you just sold one kind of Prego. It’s the Prego-ization of television. That’s what’s happening. I think that is going to drive actually a lot of wonderful new content. I think there’s going to be a lot of limited series. There’s going to be more documentaries. There’s going to be all sorts of smart stuff. But for movies and for award stuff, I just think, as the guy says in Fallout, “War. War never changes.”

[end of clip]

**John:** Craig, how did we do five years ago? Which of these predictions do you think we landed on pretty well? Which ones were whiffs and misses for us?

**Craig:** I got to be honest. I think we did great. The one thing we missed was, what was going to happen just three months later, basically, which was COVID. Obviously, COVID was a massive monkey wrench into everything. But when it comes to theatrical, even in spite of COVID, it’s still here. There have been huge theatrical releases coming out. Are there huge ones every single week? No. Will we get back to that? Probably, yeah.

**John:** I would notice that during the strike, and of course we had the Barbenheimer phenomenon, and everyone was so desperate, like, “Oh my god, we need to make more movies, and of course we can’t make more movies right now.” You felt the industry having a frustration that they couldn’t do the thing which was so obvious they should be doing, because of the strike.

**Craig:** COVID and the strike certainly challenged our prediction, but I think that’s kind of why our prediction’s good, because if it hadn’t been good, between COVID and the strike, movies would be dead, theaters would be shuttered. That did not happen. I think we did really well there. I think we were right to suggest that the awards season, it’s the cockroach of seasons. Doesn’t matter what’s going on, there must be awards, and so the awards continue to happen, and the discussion and advertising around awards never, never, never seems to change.

**John:** That didn’t change over the course of the five years. This year is still an open question, because until a SAG-AFTRA deal is reached, they can’t do the normal award season stuff. I was talking with a friend who is an indie film publicist. There are these films that are going to festivals right now that have those SAG-AFTRA waivers, and so their actors can do the press. But the ones who came out in big studios can’t do that. It’s a really messy situation. Everyone is hoping and assuming that by the time it really becomes important, there will be a SAG-AFTRA deal, and normal things can resume. Of course, those same actors who were supposed to doing press, publicity for movies, are supposed to be also filming other movies, and their schedules are completely messed up. It gets sorted out.

**Craig:** Take it from me, as a guy that’s finally now looking at schedules. It’s just scrambled eggs out there, man. We’re all trying to figure this out. We’re talking about hiring a director, and she’s like, “But they have this other thing.” We’re like, “What are their dates?” She’s like, “I don’t know.” Nobody knows anything. Everybody’s just going to work together and figure that stuff out.

I agree with you. I think that SAG-AFTRA will hopefully conclude with a great deal for that union sooner rather than later. The award season will, I think, begin primarily in earnest in January, when you have the delayed Emmys, and then there’s Oscars and Golden Globes and all the rest of that. Fun, fun stuff.

**John:** Fun, fun stuff. There’s a prediction about more limited series, and that came true. There were a lot more limited series, especially for streaming, and so many of them that I couldn’t keep track of them. They just disappeared.

**Craig:** Yep, a gazillion of them. I think we’re probably set up for a contraction, not because of the strike, but because where else could you go? At some point, the balloon was going to pop. There are still a ton of those. Also, if the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that, with the rare exception of those remarkable shows that continue to do it the old way – Abbott Elementary – most television shows, even when they’re not limited series, are operating like limited series, 8 episodes, 10 episodes, 12 episodes, that sort of thing, and not coming out every fall. That format seems to be the format. It’s taken over.

**John:** I’ll disagree with you. I’ll put that on the record for our five-year follow-up. I think you’re going to see a lot more longer-run shows. The reason Daredevil is a 20-episode season, I think. I think these streamers and, of course, broadcast networks are finding, oh, it actually is more valuable to keep people watching a show over 20 weeks rather than the 8 weeks, and it’s more profitable for us. I think we’re going to see a return to some of those, also because once you’ve put a show out there, and it starts getting some traction, you don’t have to keep spending all the money marketing, because it can roll on its own. When there’s only 6, 8, 10 episodes of a show, it can be hard to keep it going, and it can be expensive to keep it going. Not every show is The Last of Us. Some shows, you try to launch them, and they don’t really launch, and that really kills you.

**Craig:** It does. I think you’re right from an economic point of view. It makes total sense. The challenge will be that the toothpaste is a little bit out of the tube in terms of quality, because when you have these shorter seasons or larger budgets, the audience gets used to a size of things. It’s hard for a standard 20-plus-episode rolling show to match that, although comedy is particularly well-tuned to match it. I got to be honest. I could see both. I’m not sure which way it’s going to go. I think what’s for sure is the limited series thing isn’t going away at all. It’s just will there be a clawing back from the traditional 22-episode season. That would be interesting to see.

**John:** Let me make my least controversial prediction, is that there will be a contraction, because there already was a contraction before the strike, a contraction back down towards a more normal, typical number of series and number of people employed on those series, just because there was a huge over-building phase during the early part of the streaming wars, and that’s going to stop. There will be a contraction. It’ll be wrongly blamed on the strikes, which were not actually a huge factor in it. It’s really about bottom lines and making shows for the right price.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s almost weird to suggest it’s a contraction when it’s just an inevitability. Because of how over-productive the business was, there’s just too many things being made. Everybody knows it. Nobody can keep track of all of it. Nobody’s quite sure why. Even if there is a reduction in the amount of shows that are made, it will still be more shows than were ever made before. I think that’s likely, although, god, what happens if five years from now — I’m going to give her a name, Annalise — the new producer, says, “I got this five-year email from Drew, and apparently, you guys thought there wouldn’t be 14,000 shows each day.” And boy, will we look stupid.

**John:** We will look so, so dumb.

**Craig:** Dumb.

**John:** What are predictions for AI? Five years now, what things-

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** … are we going to be expecting to see?

**Craig:** That’s a fool’s errand, honestly.

**John:** It truly is. Even as we were doing these AI proposals, I’d try to remind myself and everybody else, we cannot know beyond a certain horizon what this is going to look like, because some AI company we’ve never heard of could make a thing that is so compelling that it replaces our interest in film and television. Things could happen. We just don’t know.

**Craig:** We don’t know.

**John:** Something like TikTok.

**Craig:** We don’t know. It’s almost like an instant disqualifier if you see somebody babbling on about where AI is going to head. Who the hell knows? I have no clue. It would be interesting to ask AI where they think it’s going. I’m sure they also have no clue. I don’t know why I’m calling them they.

**John:** But also remember that the generative AI we’re talking about today, as we’re recording this in 2023, is just a prediction machine. It can say a thing, but it actually has no decision-making capability. It’s not sentient in any meaningful way. Yes, we get closer every day to things that kind of feel like Scarlett Johansson’s character in Her, but there’s not a consciousness happening there, and we need to make sure that we don’t mistake that, at least as we’re recording this in September of 2023.

**Craig:** What we call AI today, people later will call something else, because we’ll have something else. I refuse to predict.

**John:** Streaming. How many streaming services will there be? Of the existing streaming services, which ones get merged, combined? Do new ones come online? What do you think is happening five years from now, Craig?

**Craig:** Anybody that’s going to try and launch a new streaming service right now is insane. That feels almost suicidal. I think Apple’s not going anywhere, because they can afford to do this until the end of time. I don’t think Amazon’s going anywhere, for the same reason. Same reason with HBO/Max. The interesting thing is, Disney has Hulu and FX, so it’s three streaming services smushed together into one of them. Similarly, there’s Paramount Plus, smushed in with Showtime.

**John:** It’s also CBS.

**Craig:** Then that’s also CBS. What’s that? It does seem like I could see some squishing down there. I do not predict that there will be another swallowing of a major company the way Disney swallowed Fox.

**John:** I agree with you there. I think there’s going to be just too much heightened attention. Unless we get an entirely Republican administration that wants everything to be mega-merged, I don’t think the FTC or other people in regulatory functions would allow that to happen.

**Craig:** I think maybe people have seen enough now to go, “I don’t know if buying these companies makes sense,” because it seems like everybody’s tried to buy Warner Bros at this point. Maybe Target.

**John:** Target.

**Craig:** Warner Bros Target.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** That’s not bad.

**John:** It’s not bad.

**Craig:** That’s my prediction, Warner Bros Target.

**John:** While I don’t think there’ll be a new streaming service, I think some of the AVOD or FAST services, the equivalent of what’s now Pluto TV or other things, I think more people will watch those. I think it’s actually a good market for shows that are no longer valuable to a streamer but still have value out there in the world. Yes, it feels like old broadcast or cable, and that’s fine. It’s fine.

**Craig:** It’s essential, because what’s happened is, as these companies have chased Netflix –which is stuck in its one moat, because it has no other moat it can do — they’ve sat there going, “But wait. We used to make money off of Friends, because we would license Friends. But now we don’t, because we just show it to people ourselves. Why did we do that?” It’s interesting. HBO is strange in this regard. They license their shows to Amazon. Some people watch my show via Amazon, and they pay for it a la carte, which is great. That means that’s kind of a syndication. I think we will see more of that. I think we will see more shows being licensed to ad-supported streaming. It’s inevitable. It’s smart business. There are a lot of people who have no problem watching stuff with commercials as long as they don’t have to pay for it. That’s what television used to be.

**John:** It was, one day. Hey, Drew, is there anything else we didn’t make predictions about that you want to hear our prognostications?

**Drew:** I have heard rumors around indie TV coming. Do you think that might happen at all?

**John:** Can you describe indie TV? I want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing.

**Drew:** Indie TV is stuff that’s made independently and then licensed to a network, which sort of is the same where you have a typical studio that then licenses it to a network, and it has international distribution, but doing it more on a show-by-show basis.

**John:** Craig and I both, pretty recently we advocated for, “Oh, that model actually was good for a lot of people.” I don’t know that we’d be able to get there without some government regulation. We don’t have to get all the way back to [indiscernible 53:36], but without some motivation, on a governmental level, I think it would be tough. Craig, what are you thinking?

**Craig:** You do see this sort of thing still with variety and talk. Independent companies create a talk show, because it’s so cheap to make.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Then they license it to exhibitors to run. That’s how we ended up with 500 Oprah clones in the ’90s.

**John:** The Ricki Lake Show, for example. You take a celebrity, you build a show around them, you license it to stations.

**Craig:** Sally Jessy Raphael. There were so many of them. There are still a lot of these things. But traditional narrative shows are expensive. They are so expensive that typically in the old days, when one company would produce them, and another company would air them, the company that produced them would deficit finance them, meaning they lost money. They would continue to lose money, because the licensing fee did not cover anywhere near what it cost to produce the show, until the show went into syndication, at which point it was all profit. It is an incredibly difficult thing to finance television shows without having some sort of massive financial safety net under you. I would be surprised.

**John:** I would be surprised too for scripted, but you never know. For all we know, there could be much cheaper versions of shows or much cheaper ways to make shows that we’re not thinking about right now, that become successful. Just the same way TikTok videos don’t cost money to make. There may be something like that that becomes a different means of production. Hard to say.

**Craig:** Yeah. If it doesn’t cost that much to make, what do you need those places for anyway? You just put it on TikTok.

**John:** Yeah. Drew, bundle this up, please. Send it five years into the future. What did we say, Annalise is her next name?

**Craig:** Annalise.

**John:** Annalise. She will open it up and be surprised by it, but hopefully also charmed and delighted like we are whenever we think of Megan McDonnell and Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Drew:** Good luck, Annalise.

**John:** Also, the bottom of the email is like, “John and Craig are monsters. Run.”

**Craig:** “Dear Annalise, you are not yet born, but I write to you now to warn you.”

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this very cool, interactive visualization done by Alvin Chang for Pudding, called 24 Hours in an Invisible Epidemic. It’s about loneliness. It’s taken from this American Time Use Survey that looks at what Americans are doing hour by hour over the course of their day. It’s tracking, oh, they are grocery shopping, they are cleaning their house, they are at work.

Some of the things you discover in this is that people spend so much of their time alone, or at least not with friends and family members. One of the things that was shocking to see is this one chart that shows, among people 34 and younger, the time spent with friends has just plummeted. It’s just down so much. Some of that is the pandemic, but some of it’s also just sort of other structural changes in society.

Why that matters, there’s also this concept called Cantril’s ladder. They say, “Imagine a ladder. At the top of your ladder is your best possible life. The bottom is your worst possible life. Which step of the ladder do you personally stand on at the present time?” They ask people this question, and the people who are not around friends and family, they rank themselves very, very low.

It’s just a really nice way of visualizing and talking about something that’s hard to see, which is that people are not just alone, but lonely, and this is not good. We need to be thinking about how to get people around family and friends and feeling better about life.

**Craig:** Given everyone so many other things to do, that are so easy to do, and so here we are. We’re part of the problem, aren’t we? Because I’m looking at this chart, and there’s a whole lot of watching TV. Sorry.

**John:** We’ve always had TV though.

**Craig:** But there’s so much more of it.

**John:** There is more.

**Craig:** There’s so much more. Also, everybody had to watch the same show at the same time, kind of. If you missed it, you missed it. Then you had to gather around the TV. There was a great book that was written about the culture of television in America, called The Cool Fire, the idea being that it was the new fireplace. Now everybody can just go to their corners, they have their own screens, and watch their own things. They can watch whatever they want, whenever they want, and there’s way too much. There’s more than they could ever watch. Sorry, America.

**John:** Some of these are not new concepts. I’m looking at the famous book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, which was talking about the scourge of loneliness and people losing a sense of community. But I do think the pandemic, remote work, you’ve taken away the places in which people would not only be around people, but also make new friendships. We need to I think just be much more proactive about finding places to meet people. I have a friend who went to a board game meetup, specifically just like, “I just need to be around some new people.” That’s great. That’s taking good initiative. I also have friends who were talking about, “Oh, I realize I have a best friend who lives in another city. I don’t really care. It doesn’t really matter where I live. I’m just going to move to that city where my best friend lives.” I think that’s a great choice.

**Craig:** Unless that best friend’s like, “I’m not your best friend. Please leave me alone.” Happily, you and I have D and D.

**John:** Which solves everything.

**Craig:** Solves everything.

**John:** It does. But I would say during the pandemic, our Zoom D and D games were some of the only consistent social interactions I had with people outside of my family.

**Craig:** Exactly right, the D and D games. Then I was involved in a bunch of Zoom Mafia games that were incredibly elaborate and fun. That was it. It was like, what else can you do? You can’t go anywhere. You can’t do anything. Very cool. I like that it’s also for Pudding. I like just the thought, Alvin Chang did this for Pudding, like he was paid in pudding. But apparently, it’s a place called Pudding.

**John:** It’s a site called Pudding. It mostly does interactive visualizations of stuff.

**Craig:** Do you think Alvin Chang sat there and realized that some people were going to spend a bunch of time alone looking at Pudding?

**John:** Maybe he did. I will say actually, it has a tip jar on it. It was the best set up tip jar I’ve ever seen, so I tipped Alvin Chang really for all the incredible hard work he clearly did to make this.

**Craig:** Pudding. I have, uncharacteristically, two One Cool Things, because sometimes I have none. First one, easy, Rusty Lake, Underground Blossom. Everybody who listens to the podcast knows how much I love the Rusty Lake games. They have a new one out. It’s called Underground Blossom, the story of Laura, who’s a tragic figure, like literally every other character in Rusty Lake. Terrific puzzles. The theme is you are on a subway car, moving through various subway stations, but each station is a different place in time. The classic Rusty Lake vibe, good puzzles, weird, creepy, disgusting, funny, the usual. Well worth the purchase there.

My second One Cool Thing is a woman named Melissa Smith. I’ve probably mentioned before, John, that I took an acting class in college. That acting class was probably the best instruction I ever received on writing, because I learned what had to happen between the page and performance. We write for actors. Melissa Smith was the head of the acting program at Princeton. She was wonderful. She’s a wonderful teacher, very good actor. Very good actor. I just learned so much from her.

All these years go by, and I did a Zoom seminar with one of the screenwriting classes at Princeton. The instructor had said, “Hey, do a One Cool Thing.” I was like, “You know what? I think my One Cool Thing will be Melissa Smith.” I went to look her up, to see where she was, because it’s rare that people stay the entire time in one place. Indeed, she did move on from Princeton at some point and became the Conservatory Director at the American Conservatory Theater and also continued to act and played Frances McDormand’s sister in Nomadland, in fact-

**John:** Oh, nice. I didn’t know.

**Craig:** … and died two years ago.

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** And that’s where I went… Here’s the thing. We get older, and we forget everybody else is getting older, especially when they were already older to begin with. We just think that we’re the only ones getting older. There are people in your life who were, back then, the age you are now. You will let 30 years go by. Actually, she was much younger than I am now. She was 64 years old. You will let all this time go by. Then you think, “Oh, you know what? I can drop them an email and tell them what they mean to me.” No, not always.

If you have that instinct, do it, because I never had a chance to tell Melissa Smith exactly how important I thought her instruction was and how formative it was for me as a writer. I didn’t even know that that was her in Nomadland, because all that time had gone by. She was just a terrific person and a brilliant actor and a really, really good teacher, just really good. More than anything, she taught me how important brutal honesty was in what we do. Honesty, which hurts all the time. Thank you to Melissa Smith. You are my One Cool Thing this week. I’m sorry I didn’t get to tell you.

**John:** Excellent. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Holland Gallagher. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. You can send us an outro. If you want to send me a three-minute version, that’s lovely, but honestly, a 30-second version is much more useful, because that’s about as much as we’re going to use. I would say don’t kill yourself to do the extra 2 minutes 30 seconds. Give us the 30-second one.

ask@johnaugust.com is also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on dreams. Craig, Drew, thank you so much for a good episode.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig?

**Craig:** Yes?

**John:** Are you a dreamer?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes?

**Craig:** Yes, of course.

**John:** How important are dreams in your life? Do they just disappear, or do they stick with you at all?

**Craig:** Sometimes they’ll stick with me a little bit because they were particularly bizarre, but I give them no import. I seek within them no reason. I do not dwell upon them. I don’t think they’re significant in any way, shape, or form. But I definitely dream. I definitely dream.

**John:** I’m a big dreamer myself. I will say that it feels like I spend at least as much time asleep as awake. I feel like I spend a tremendous amount of time in my dream space. I know that’s all really an illusion, because your dreams are just your brain kind of going through its washing cycle. It’s your brain cleaning up all the goop and getting yourself ready for what’s next, and yet I love my dreams. I genuinely enjoy them most of the time. I’m lucky I very rarely have nightmares, and most of my dreams are cool. I sort of like being in them. Drew, are you a dreamer?

**Drew:** I am a dreamer. It comes in and out. I was also wondering too, do you guys feel that you have a few days of certain tone of dreams? Maybe it’s just me. But three days in a row, the dreams will be sort of similar in tone.

**John:** I definitely notice the tone and nature of my dreams can change based on what’s happening in my life. At times when I’m stressed out in my life, the dreams can reflect that, or at least the fact that my life circumstances are different will be affected in my dreams. When I’m sick, my dreams are different. If I’m super jet-lagged, if I’m in a strange place, if I’m going to bed at a weird time, that will affect my dreams. Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah, the dreams that I fear the most are not nightmares. Honestly, if I do have a real nightmare, I’m actually quite thrilled, because it’s intense, and I might be able to steal something from it. But it’s the dreams where I am stuck doing a task or trying to solve a problem that is unsolvable and unending. All you need to do is just move this box to this corner and this box over to here. Oh, but it moved again. You just spend seemingly hours exhausting yourself in your own dream because your brain is stuck in a solve loop. I hate those. They do happen every now and again.

**John:** Do either of you have moments of lucid dreaming, where you’re aware that you’re dreaming, and you can affect what you’re seeing and what you’re experiencing? I’ve had it rarely, but it’s not a thing I’ve sought or tried to control.

**Drew:** I had it this week, where I thought I was having a full conversation with my fiancée as she was getting ready to leave early one day, and then I realized that I was still in bed and that I was sort of having a completely different conversation. But I knew that I was dreaming. I wasn’t controlling it necessarily, but I was aware of the two.

**Craig:** I’m aware sometimes, I guess, “Oh, this is a dream.” Somebody was saying that they wanted to train themselves to be able to do whatever they wanted in their dream. That’s a little scary to me. I think if we gave you the power to do whatever you wanted in the world, you would do it, you would seize that power. I’m a fairly humble dreamer, I guess. Here’s what obsesses me about dreams. What obsesses me about dreams is they’re all from my brain, but things are constantly happening in dreams that surprise. People are constantly saying things in dreams that I did not know they were going to say. I don’t understand how that works.

**John:** I would say the current best guesses and understanding of what’s happening with dreams is that, as I said, it’s your brain going through its maintenance cycle and clearing off the stuff. But you have to remember that of course our brains are taking in all this external stimulation normally and creating meaning out of it, because what our eyes are seeing and what our ears are hearing isn’t really what we’re experiencing. That’s our brain forcing meaning onto it, which is why we have optical illusions and auditory illusions.

In this case, some part of your conscious brain or some part of your brain is experiencing all this crap that’s being thrown up by this cleaning process and trying to create a narrative meaning out of it or trying to make sense of it. That’s why it seems to have some dream logic to it. There’s no one in charge of the narrative there. It’s pattern matching. It’s actually not that different than when the eye is hallucinating. It’s stringing together the next thing. It doesn’t know whether it really makes sense.

**Craig:** It doesn’t even need to make sense. Really, the thing that puzzles me is that I don’t know what’s about to happen. How can I surprise myself? How can somebody in my head say something that makes sense in conversation, that I didn’t predict they were going to say?

**John:** It comes down to the assumption there is a Craig Mazin, there is a myself.

**Craig:** This is the thing.

**John:** The homunculus problem.

**Craig:** The problem is, it seems to me not a problem, just a fact, that our consciousness can absolutely split. In a weird way, that’s what we’re doing when we’re writing, consciously, I think.

**John:** I think so.

**Craig:** We’re just being other people. It is amazing to me that in our dream state, we still reserve some kind of weird consciousness. We understand there’s a concept of I. I went into a room, and I picked up a thing. Then something leapt out at me and freaked me out. Whatever is creating the leapt out and freaked me out bit, that section of the brain somehow can function entirely independently of the eye portion of the brain. That is fascinating to me.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** I don’t think anybody knows how that works.

**John:** No. I would say that my POV inside dreams is not first-person shooter. It can vary a lot. Sometimes that can be a person inside the dream, not often, but sometimes. Sometimes I am watching a movie to some degree. It’s always strange. At times I’ll see extreme angles in my dreams. It’s like, why is this top-down shot from the ceiling? That doesn’t make sense. I as a person could never be there. But I guess it’s the person who’s watched movies in me or the part of my brain that’s watched movies has made that choice. It’s a strange thing. But I think we assume that there’s an intended viewer for this dream, and it’s probably not accurate.

**Craig:** I’m an FPS dreamer.

**John:** You think you’re always looking through the virtual eyes of yourself in your dreams?

**Craig:** I don’t recall ever waking up going, “I was just watching myself do something.” In fact, I’m positive I’ve never had that experience. I’m a first-person dreamer. We have a lot of theories about all of it. The other thing that they always say is, everybody dreams. It’s just that a lot of times you don’t remember it.

**John:** Exactly. It’s probably good that you don’t remember it too vividly, because it would mess you up.

**Craig:** Because it’s a nightmare.

**John:** It’s a nightmare. You said that maybe you’ll have a nightmare, and that nightmare will inspire you to write some sort of scene. Have you written anything that has been directly or indirectly prompted by a dream? You woke up, like, “Oh, yeah, that’s the thing.”

**Craig:** Not per se. It’s really more of a weird vibe. It’s like, okay, I remember feeling deeply disturbed by this little thing. I’m just going to channel that disturbed feeling. Sometimes all I’m trying to do is reaction match. I know what it feels like to be particularly creeped out. Is this giving me that feeling? Is this giving me that feeling? Happily, most of us will never experience something that is on par with whatever happens in a horror movie, but we can imagine it. Dreams are a chance to have that. A dream or a nightmare version of creeping you out always seems more intense than a movie version, always, than things you see that other people come up with.

**John:** I can’t think of the exact example, but there was one time where I woke up and realized, oh, that actually just was the scene of whatever I was writing. Like, oh, that was the scene. I just wrote down the dialogue that was in the scene. That literally became the scene. But that’s really rare. I’ve never even really tried to be the person who, “Okay, now, I’m going to think before I go to bed about the scene I’m trying to write or the story problem I’m trying to solve, and let my dreams do it.” That’s never been a [crosstalk 1:12:58] for me.

**Craig:** Dream dialogue generally is total garbage.

**Drew:** Do you ever have the dreams where you hear the greatest song you’ve ever heard, and you wake up and you try and explain it and it’s garbage, it’s just gobbledygook?

**Craig:** I’m glad you mentioned that. Never, ever tell somebody your dream. Never do it. Never tell it. It’s boring. It’s boring for everyone, unless there’s crazy sex involved, and then you have to be careful who you’re telling it to. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever tell people your dream, because you think it’s so interesting, and everyone’s bored, always, 100% of the time.

**John:** I think the only time you’re interested is the question of like, why would you tell me this dream? What is it you’re trying to reveal about yourself in this dream? But that’s not very often.

**Craig:** No, it’s usually like, “Oh my god, the craziest thing happened, and then, and then, and then… ” Shut up.

**John:** Also, the fact that it is “and then, and then, and then” is part of the reason why there’s not narrative logic there. As we’ve talked about on the show countless times, if your recap of a story is “and then, and then, and then,” there’s a problem, because there’s not a forward drive.

**Craig:** Completely.

**John:** We want better dreams. Better dreams in 2024.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** That’s my motto. Cool.

**Craig:** Are you running for president?

**John:** That’s what it is. By the way, I’m running for president.

**Craig:** Awesome. Thanks, guys.

**John:** See you.

**Craig:** Bye.

**Drew:** Bye.

Links:

* [WGA Tentative Agreement Summary](https://www.wgacontract2023.org/WGAContract/files/WGA-Negotiations-Tentative-Agreement.pdf)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 369 – What is a Movie, Anyway?](https://johnaugust.com/2018/what-is-a-movie-anyway) from 2018
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 108 – Are two screens better than one?](https://johnaugust.com/2013/are-two-screens-better-than-one) from 2013
* [24 Hours in an Invisible Epidemic](https://pudding.cool/2023/09/invisible-epidemic/) by Alvin Chang
* [Melissa Smith, longtime head of ACT’s MFA program, dies at 64](https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/theater/melissa-smith-longtime-head-of-acts-mfa-program-dies-at-64/amp) by Sam Hurwitt
* [Rusty Lake Underground Blossom](https://www.rustylake.com/adventure-games/underground-blossom.html)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Holland Gallagher ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and is edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/613standard.mp3).