Search Results for: 3 page challenge

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

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** This is Episode 646 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

There are many software products aimed at the film and television industry, and more in development. But why do the bad ones persist, and why is it so hard for the better ones to succeed? Today on the show, we’ll look at the challenges and opportunities around making things that don’t suck. Then it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at pages submitted by our listeners and give our honest feedback. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, magic, who needs it?

**Craig:** Are we talking the card game or prestidigitation?

**John:** We’re talking about our D&D campaign at the moment. We’re 10 installments into a campaign without magic. Let’s discuss what’s worked and what’s not worked so well, what’s been surprising about that campaign.

**Craig:** Fairly niche topic, but honestly-

**John:** It is a niche topic, but that’s why it’s a Bonus Segment.

**Craig:** It’s a Bonus Segment, and really our Premium Members should be playing D&D. They’re premium, for god’s sake. They should pursue quality in their life.

**John:** I think in a more general sense though, it’s like, what happens when you don’t uphold some genre premises. Take anything. If you took a horror movie and dropped out some of the aspects of what we expect out of that genre. We just saw the movie Bodies Bodies Bodies, which is an example of that, because it looks like a one-at-a-time killer thriller thing, and yet it’s not really that.

**Craig:** I like that idea. If we had an action movie, like a cop action movie, but no one ever fired a gun. It’s an interesting exercise in self-limitation to inspire some creativity and change.

**John:** We often talk about that on the show, how constraints are the writer’s best friends and that when you have constraints, it forces you to work within that. A project that I was approached by the last couple weeks, one of the problems was that it was just a world. There was no other kind of constraints to it. The first thing I had to do is like, “What constraints am I putting on myself?” because otherwise this is just an amorphous blob.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember talking to Scott Frank when he took the job to do the Wolverine movie. He said his condition was Wolverine has to be able to die, because otherwise, who gives a crap? Everyone was like, “But Wolverine doesn’t… ” He’s like, “Mm-hmm. So anyway, Wolverine has to die.”

**John:** In a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll talk about constraints and death, because death is a bigger factor when there’s no magic.

**Craig:** Massively so. That’s an exciting one. What do we have going on with news? Probably nothing.

**John:** There actually is some news here today, because-

**Craig:** What?

**John:** You and I are headed out of town.

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**John:** We are going to go to the Austin Film Festival, which we are often doing. We’re going this year. It’s October 24th through 31st. We are scheduled to attend. We’re gonna plan a live Scriptnotes show. We’ll probably do a Three Page Challenge. There’s talk of doing a 25th anniversary screening of Go.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s nice.

**John:** It should be fun. If you are inclined to go to Austin and are thinking about travel there, now might be a time to think about that.

**Craig:** We haven’t been there in a couple years. Is that right? Did we miss last time?

**John:** Yeah, probably two years.

**Craig:** Two, yeah.

**John:** Because I remember you didn’t go last year, and the year before that was the year you got really sick.

**Craig:** Oh my god. I got so sick. I think I got a stomach bug is what happened. No, let me revise that. I got a stomach bug. It happened. It was that 24-hour stay in bed clutching your stomach in pain after you’ve barfed your world out and then just try and drink a little Gatorade. It was miserable.

**John:** It was bad.

**Craig:** Yeah, so no one breathe on me.

**John:** A stomach bug is probably something you ate though, right?

**Craig:** Look, it may have been something I ate, but it felt like just that nasty gastritis.

**John:** We are so selling the Austin Film Festival. Come for the illness. It should be a good time. It’ll be Drew’s first time going.

**Craig:** Wow. Look, as long as your room has a toilet.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s like those cruises where everyone gets norovirus. No, it’s not like that, I swear. I’ve been there many, many times. The only time I got sick. It’s actually quite fun. It’s raucous. Drew, you will be somewhat of a rockstar there.

**Drew Marquardt:** Weird.

**Craig:** It is a little weird. I gotta be honest with you. That part gets weird. People will be like, “Oh my god, it’s Drew. You sound just like… I imagined you looking different from your voice.” You get a lot of that.

**John:** Megana was a rockstar when she was there, but Megana’s always a rockstar.

**Drew:** Megana’s a rockstar though.

**Craig:** I’m not saying that you’re necessarily gonna captivate people the way Megana did.

**Drew:** I don’t have that charisma.

**Craig:** You know what? You got enough rizz. You got enough rizz.

**Drew:** I’ll take it.

**Craig:** Listen. People are gonna be talking.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to it, but Google Austin Film Festival and that’s all the information you need. Let’s do some follow-up.

Back in Episode 644, we talked about new federal reporting requirements for loan-out companies like Craig and I have and like what Scriptnotes is. That is for sure happening. But since that time, there was also a bit of a freak-out about, it looked like the California Employment Development Department was going to crack down on loan-outs in a bigger, more general sense. Cast and Crew, which is this big payroll company in Hollywood, sent out this alert right before Memorial Day, saying red alert, there could be huge changes coming here. It looks like that’s been backpedaled, but I thought we might spend a few moments talking about loan-outs, why they’re important, why a change to this would be a big, disrupting deal.

**Craig:** It’s hard to tell if Cast and Crew freaked out unnecessarily or if they freaked out necessarily. The fact is that loan-out corporations function essentially to protect Hollywood workers, duly artists, from being overtaxed, essentially. Some people could argue that loan-out corporations exist to keep artists below the line of fair taxation. There’s a fair debate to be had about it.

That said, literally every single writer, actor, director, producer that is, let’s just say, succeeding is working with a loan-out corporation. It is par for the course. California already has quite a high tax rate. We are taxed twice. You do actually get taxed as a corporation. Then you get taxed as an individual. It really exists because there are a lot of deductions that you can take as a corporation that you can’t take as an individual.

I have no doubt that once this letter went out, the unions and people that donate a lot of money to California politicians called those chips in and said no, don’t do that, and somebody then yelled at the EDD, who was probably some guy there who was like, “What is this all about? [Indiscernible 00:06:59].” Then he got like 15 texts in 12 minutes, like, “You’re gonna die.” It looks like the fight is over.

**John:** The fight is over. At least it’s been stalled or it’ll change a different way of approaching it. Listen. Loan-out corporations are a weird thing. It is strange to set up a system where you have companies that basically have one employee, or sometimes two with an assistant or something. It’s a weird way to do it, and yet the way that we work is just sort of weird.

I can both understand why regulatory agencies might say, “No, listen, these are employees. You should just treat them like employees,” and it’s also strange that above a certain earning threshold it makes more sense to go through a loan company rather than me being paid directly. It is kind of weird, and yet trying to change the system now would be so, I think, disastrous. You’d have to have a real, clear plan for how you were gonna do this.

**Craig:** Yeah, it would cost so much money that you might end up losing some people to neighboring states. It would be that crazy. The name “loan-out,” you might as well say it’s a fake corporation. You might as well use the word “fake.” Yes, it’s a weird bit of paperwork dancing, but it is, what, forever, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How long have these things been going on? Long before we showed up. That’s for sure.

**John:** Oh, yeah. It’s easier for big companies to hire other big companies. For this job I’m just finishing up now, it was on a rewrite for something. It was complicated. But they chose to pay me through their payroll company rather than through just the normal way. It was a mess to do it that way. There’s reasons we do things the way we do things. It’s not just because we’re trying to save dollars. It’s because there’s a structure behind it. There’s a reason why you pay a company rather than paying an individual in some cases.

**Craig:** The system, as far as I can tell, will not be changing any time soon.

**John:** But some potentially good news for you, Craig, because we got some follow-up about your Space Cadet movie.

**Craig:** Oh, fantastic.

**John:** Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Yeah, because you mentioned on Episode 644 that the Space Cadet title, Lucas was sitting on it for a long time. Jose Luis in Puerto Rico says that there is a Space Cadet movie coming out this year, July 4th, 2024. It’s written and directed by Liz Garcia and will be released on Amazon Prime.

**Craig:** I guess Lucas finally got off the title there. My thing was in 1997. That’s a year that Drew doesn’t even understand as a year. I think it’s fair to say that nearly, what is it, 27 years later, that yeah, Lucas probably let it go.

**John:** Which is fair and reasonable.

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**John:** Let’s get to our marquee topic this week. Over the past couple months, I’ve had some conversations with two different startup companies who are trying to make software for film and TV productions. Here’s the problem that both of these companies were trying to solve. On a film or TV production, you have all these different departments who need to work together and need to communicate with each other. You have the ADs, you have wardrobe, props, locations, transpo, VFX, everybody working on the same project, and they need information from each other. How do they get that information to each other? What is the central source of truth?

The sources of truth would be the script, obviously, and also the schedule, the breakdown, like, this is the schedule for how to plan to shoot this thing. But there’s no obvious established way to do that, so instead, a bunch of homespun solutions have come up. Some of them work for some places, don’t work for other places. But it’s not hard to imagine that there could be a better way of doing this.

If in the script we know that Scene 15 is taking place at a roller rink, how does each department weigh in on what they’re going to do? Craig, I ask you, on The Last of Us, what is that process? What is the process by which all departments can see what each other is doing?

**Craig:** You really touched on a sore spot here.

**John:** I’m not surprised. There is a problem here. That’s why.

**Craig:** There is a problem. Basically, the way is done is through, I’m now gonna editorialize, endless, repetitive meetings. Endless, repetitive meetings. I found myself in a meeting just the other day. I love my crew. The department heads work so hard. Our show is a massive aircraft carrier. It takes so much time and effort to do everything, and everything is happening all at once, all the time. But I was in a meeting, an endless, repetitive meeting, just last week that brought up a topic that had been already met upon multiple times in prep, which is a half year ago. I started to feel like I was getting punked, like how is this possible? The fact is that there is a certain amount of human, face-to-face interaction and questioning that needs to happen, and I don’t know if there even is a software solution for that.

Beyond that, we do what every production does. The script gets broken down into a schedule by ADs using whatever Movie Magic scheduler or whatever the hell they use.

**John:** Probably that.

**Craig:** Probably that.

**John:** Probably that very old program, yeah.

**Craig:** Which is annoying, because it puts on the schedule thing in a list, the things we shoot, and then at the bottom of that it’ll say what day it was. That’s stupid. It should be at the top of it. Then everything in terms of distribution goes through Scenechronize, which I believe is owned by aforementioned Entertainment Partners, which I believe also owns my least favorite writing software, Final Draft. You start to see a little bit of a monopolization problem here.

**John:** Remind us again, what do you use Scenechronize for?

**Craig:** Scenechronize is a platform that distributes documents to the crew-

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** … electronically. Scripts can only be viewed in super watermarked ways and cannot be downloaded unless you have certain privileges. If you’re a department head, they let you download it. It also releases all communications like call sheets, schedules, preliminaries, memos, everything like that.

**John:** Most of your crew is looking at the stuff that would’ve been printed paper. Instead, they’re getting it through Scenechronize. They’re seeing it on their laptops, on their phones, on their iPads, right?

**Craig:** That is correct. We don’t have any printed stuff, except in the morning we distributed printed sides for very few people, just the ADs, the actors, producers, directors.

**John:** The decision not to use paper for very much stuff, is that because it’s more efficient or because you’re worried about stuff leaking out?

**Craig:** Both. This is Canada, where when you go to throw your garbage out, there are 400 bins. They’re very green. They’re like, before you throw your garbage out, is it soft or hard plastic? Is it a pen? Is it colored blue? There’s so many. I think probably also it’s just about not burning through… Productions used to burn through forests of paper.

**John:** Paper like crazy.

**Craig:** Insane. There is that aspect. It’s certainly cheaper. There are security measures that we can use with that stuff. It’s a little frustrating, I think, for people, because they can’t really have a script and mark it up and all the rest, but it’s just a necessary evil.

**John:** We talked about scheduling. We talked about Scenechronize. What are the other pieces of software that you or members of your team are using regularly to get the show done, both during production and then in post?

**Craig:** I write on Fade In. Then once Allie, who is both my assistant and also our script coordinator, goes through and puts it through the Scenechronize machinery to distribute, she also converts it to a Final Draft file. Why is it converted to a Final Draft file? Because Chris Roufs, our script supervisor, uses a very specific program for his job that only imports in Final Draft, of course. You start to see the problem with the closed system and the proprietary formats. It just begets just this legacy system of misery.

**John:** We have that, and then for while you guys are shooting, what is the software you guys are looking at cuts on? I know you also have the ability to look at things if you’re on another set while one set is shooting. What’s that kind of stuff?

**Craig:** There are two platforms for that. For the distribution of dailies and cuts, we use PIX, which I also do not like.

**John:** Oh my god, I’ve had to do nothing but PIX the last five weeks. I think PIX’s main job is to sign you out as frequently as possible. I’ve been on Zooms where I’m just tapping the screen and wiggling 10 seconds back just so it won’t sign me out.

**Craig:** PIX will log you out if you blink. PIX will force you to change your password if you go to the bathroom. PIX also is poorly organized and difficult to use.

**John:** Oh god, their bins are really tough.

**Craig:** Horrible.

**John:** The equivalent of folders.

**Craig:** I do not like PIX. I don’t. In fact, when I say to the editor, “Okay, everything’s great here, I just need you to change this, this, and this. Can you just send me that little section?” I make them not send it to me on PIX, even though that violates everything. I apologize to Time Warner, Discovery, HBO, AOL. The other platform we use constantly is Box. Box is our digital file management system.

**John:** It’s very much like Dropbox, but it tends to be used in the industry more for various reasons.

**Craig:** There are a few of those. We used I think Frame.io in one season. Maybe for Chernobyl we used Frame, and for this we use Box. We have somebody whose job is to oversee and manage that entire system. We use that to distribute tests, images, proposals, illustrations, previses, all that. Then you can comment, and you can also annotate, draw on it and comment to that. It’s a better system.

But I will say it only functions for me because I don’t actually get any notifications from Box. They all go through a separate account that Allie manages. Then she can compile all the things that I need. Three times a day, I get an email from her with 12 Box links, describing what they are and what I need to respond to, because if you don’t have that, basically you’re getting an email every 12 seconds saying somebody commented, somebody thought, somebody did this.

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** A nightmare. That’s what happened to me in Season 1. I didn’t stop looking at it. It was a real problem.

**John:** Let’s talk about email. You are still using email to communicate with certain people, or do you believe in Signal threads? Are you using Slack? What is the way you communicate with department heads?

**Craig:** With department heads, typically I’m speaking to them directly or commenting through Box. If I really, really, really need to get them ASAP, I text. We don’t have Slack. I think that’s probably a good thing. It’s a good thing for me.

Part of this discussion is who are you and what are you doing on the production. If you are in the middle of things, you need as much communication as possible. If you’re the showrunner, you need the most curated discussion as possible, because you will drown in questions and details with three minutes, and you’re trying to do other things and stay in big picture and work on shooting and all the rest of it.

We don’t have Slack, or at least I’m not aware of one. It’s just texts if I need to, or I call somebody. But more often than not, I just say to an AD, can you have somebody come over, and I’ll talk to them.

**John:** Then you also have the ability to look at what’s happening on set. If you have to step away, but you still need to see what is that shot that’s going up or the setup. What’s that that you’re using?

**Craig:** We use QTAKE, which again I believe is the industry standard. QTAKE works quite well. QTAKE is incredibly important. There’s the whole system that Amanda Trimble, our video playback operator, uses. I don’t know what she actually has loaded on her cart there, but it is some special system. There’s a special system that the DIT uses. That’s the guy that manages the information flow from the cameras, because of course it’s all digital. I also use Evercast to edit remotely with our editors.

**John:** A lot of specialized software that’s just for the industry, but also some things like Box, which are just off-the-shelf things that you guys are using because they’re there and they work.

We’ve talked a little bit about the screenwriting side of it, which most of our listeners are involved with screenwriting software. Obviously, Final Draft, or at least the FDX format, tends to be a thing that you go back to. I guess I can understand the FDX of it all, because it is at least an organized format. It is an XML format, so there’s some logic behind using that as a basis of things.

The challenge though is, if you’re passing around files for things, will the files get out of date? It would make much more sense if there was one continuously updated file that everyone was looking at the same file. That’s very hard to do.

There’s a service called Scripto, which Stephen Colbert’s company developed, which a lot of the late-night shows use, because they are all banging together to work on one script. It’s more like a Google doc, where everyone is working on one thing simultaneously, which makes sense for those kinds of shows. You would hope that in the future at some point there could be a centrally updated script that is the source that you don’t have to then redistribute scripts out to people.

**Craig:** We don’t have anything like that. We still operate under the old system of blue revision, pink revision, goldenrod revision, but it’s all done digitally.

**John:** Then there’s the programs that you and I are actually writing in. I’m writing in Highland. You’re writing in Fade In. Those are great single-computer systems. There are some things to try to do the onliney version of that. WriterDuet did that. Celtx did that. Arc Studio does that. There’s ways to do it. It can be overkill for the single writer, but it can be useful for team situations. It’s tough to say what the right solution is. Still, the script and the schedule are at the heart of what productions need. It’s not surprising that people are trying to figure out how do we organize all these things so all these different ways we do stuff can be centralized and make life happier for showrunners, for department heads, for ADs, for everybody else.

In most of these cases, I’ve been talking to folks who are ADs who naturally have this instinct to… They want information to go to places without being repeated and for people to be able to see what the plan is. They look so good on paper. I look at the slideshows and the little mock-ups. I’m like, “Yeah, that seems great.” But what you’re actually talking about doing is you actually have to build Slack, you have to build PIX, you have to build all these things that exist that are really difficult to do.

The problem is there’s not a big enough market for it. You’re not gonna be able to get somebody to pay enough to make it actually worth developing, and much worse, worth supporting, because the expectation of your users is that this has to have basically 100 percent uptime, because if PIX goes down or if QTAKE goes down, that is a crisis. You have to have this crazy expectation for your uptime.

**Craig:** Anything that is served like that has to be bulletproof. You’re absolutely right. It’s why the hammer costs $800 instead of $5, because there’s only 12 people buying the hammer. It is incredibly specialized. A lot of these things I imagine are quite expensive. I don’t know. Things that like Fade In or Highland, that’s marketable to millions of people who want to write things. But Scenechronize, it’s just the people making stuff that use Scenechronize. I don’t know what it costs, but probably a lot.

**John:** I think as we talk about both the problems and solutions, you’re gonna need to find some way to make recurring revenue from your existing customers, because you can’t just find the next customer and the next customer after that, because there’s a hard limit on the number of customers who could potentially use your software. You need to find ways to monetize each time. That means either you are charging per user, per production, per month. There has to be some way that you’re making that sustainable, because otherwise your company’s gonna go bankrupt.

That’s also the reason why it’s very hard to attract the initial kind of money it takes to build the product in the first place, because any investor will say, “I don’t think this is a survivable business. I don’t think you can actually make enough money here, so why would I invest in it?”

**Craig:** You could see a world where let’s say Disney, as large as they are, says, “We’re gonna create our own system.”

**John:** They are.

**Craig:** They are?

**John:** They are. Disney and Netflix both apparently have their own systems they’re developing. That makes sense because they’re doing so much production and they can top-down force people to use it.

**Craig:** You can force people to use it anyway. But what you are always dealing with is the fact that, A, you are at the mercy of those companies, who charge, I can only imagine, exorbitant yearly subscription fees that scale in terms of the size of your company, and B, you’re at the mercy of their features. The way they do it is how you have to do it. But the method of organizing things per production to customize it, there is no customization really like that.

The upside for a company like Disney, which is so big and makes so much stuff, is, yeah, we can completely control it, we can manage it, and we can make sure it is bulletproof and not be held hostage. The downside is people that come into your system now have to use that, which means they have to learn it, which means they have to deal with it. They’re used to using the other thing, and everybody gets very, very cranky. Either there will be a revolt or it will work and it will spread, meaning if Disney and Netflix, in their combined might, create a system like this, everyone’s gonna use it. It’s just gonna happen.

**John:** Agreed, agreed. Everyone’s gonna use it who can afford to use it. Indie films will develop alternate systems. Maybe that’s appropriate. Maybe they can do some different stuff and it would make sense for them on that smaller level. Here’s the subtlety on that. If Disney or Netflix says you have to use this, people will use it, but I also suspect department heads will still go back to their own native ways of doing things and then just have to duplicate the effort to use the other system. They’ll still find off-channel ways to do stuff. I was talking to a British AD who says for their productions, they have WhatsApp channels for each scene or something, which is just-

**Craig:** Oh my god. Oh my god.

**John:** … ongoing discussions about how stuff works.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** It’s like, oh god, that seems so-

**Craig:** That’s horrible.

**John:** Yeah, it’s awful.

**Craig:** That’s just awful.

**John:** This is a person who made a giant Amazon show, and that’s how they did it.

**Craig:** “That’s how I do it,” in quotes, you’ll hear a lot. Obviously, there’s very powerful calendaring software and scheduling software. But also, when I walk into certain offices, in our production offices, I’ll see people who have calendared their wall with post-its, because that’s how they do it, and it helps them. I’m like everybody else. I have a way of doing things that I’m comfortable with. You get set in your ways. By the way, side question for you, John.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** This is a “set in your ways” question. In the old days when we would print scripts, people would have a script, and then you would make revisions. The revisions would change the way the page count would be, so instead of changing the page count, you would just make A and B pages so that the following pages didn’t change. People just had to open their huge binder, pull out pages 38 and 39, and replace them with 38A, 38B, 38C, and then a new 39. But we don’t print anything anymore, and we have scene numbers. My question is, why do we still do this with pdf?

**John:** Craig, we should absolutely not be doing this.

**Craig:** We shouldn’t be doing it.

**John:** It is ridiculous that we’re doing it. I’m sure one of the showrunners who’s listened to the show says, “No, we stopped doing that.” Let’s all do this, because it’s dumb. It’s ridiculous.

**Craig:** It’s stupid. It’s stupid, because what happens is, on the day, you get there to rehearse the scene and there’s a page with one effing line on it.

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** It’s just dumb. It’s too late for me now. I’m in too deep on this season, but next season I’m not doing it. I’m not locking pages. It doesn’t make sense. People refer to everything by scene number anyway. I am infamous for not knowing what scene numbers mean. Somebody from prosthetics will walk over to me and say, “Question about 533.” I’ll say, “I do not know what that is. You have to give me some context.” But they all have scene numbers that never change, ever. So why? Why?

**John:** Hey, Craig, instead of scene numbers, should we as the writers come up with the three-word name for that scene or that sequence that we all are gonna refer to that thing as?

**Craig:** If you think about it, the scene number really is the ultimate version of that. They really do all think in terms of scene numbers. I have the program make scene numbers and I never think about them again. But what happens is they’ll say, “Oh, it’s Jane and Vanessa are arguing in the library.” “Oh, okay, that’s what Scene 533 is. Got it, got it, got it. Okay, continue with the question.” It’s easy enough to do. But the page thing, honestly, it just occurred to me how stupid it is that we still do it.

**John:** It’s ridiculous that we’re still doing it. We shouldn’t be doing it. Hey, if you’re on a show that has given up locked pages, let us know. By the way, late-night has never had locked pages. I bet there’s other things that have never locked pages. I don’t know if – did multi-cam sitcoms lock pages? [Indiscernible 00:29:02] on that too. It feels like they should’ve.

**Craig:** I don’t know. All I know is that for movies we always had them and it made sense and I understood why, because you printed things. But now, it just doesn’t… Why?

**John:** Let’s wrap this up with some takeaways here. I think one of the real problems we’ve talked about is inertia. There is that first mover advantage. People are used to Final Draft. They’re used to Movie Magic scheduling. So when a better system comes along, like Highland or like – there’s a competing scheduling software out of Germany called Fuzzlecheck, which is a terrible name, but apparently, European productions use it and it’s a lot better and it’s all online.

**Craig:** You’re saying Germans made a great scheduling software?

**John:** That is a shocker. This apparently is great. It’s all online, which makes so much more sense that you’d have multiple users touch things rather than have one person on one computer doing the thing. But I think it’s struggling to break through into the U.S. because everyone is used to the standards. It’s hard to get people to adjust from what they’re used to doing, unless you’re forcing them to or show them this is 10 times better and then they’ll switch, which is the frustration.

**Craig:** It won’t happen from the bottom up. I think your Disney revelation here – it was a revelation to me – is how it happens. It happens from the top down when a bunch of people in a room say, “Attention, all. This is what we’re doing now.” Everyone’s gonna, “What?! No!”

**John:** If you think about it from Netflix’s point of view, Netflix is essentially a software company, and so it would make sense that they would have ways to do these things.

**Craig:** Absolutely. People will complain, gripe, moan, and then they will adjust. But it will never come from the bottom up, because making television shows and movies is chaos. It’s utter chaos. Anywhere you can find some kind of comforting repetition and security, you grab it and you hold onto it forever. You will have to pull it out of their hands and give them something new. They will freak out, but then they will adjust.

**John:** Last thing I’ll say, you have to be thinking about what is a sustainable business model for this app you’re thinking about making. The problem is not that you cannot imagine a better tool or even design a better tool. It’s that you cannot afford to make it and sustain it and to actually keep it up and running. When people get frustrated about per-month fees or per-user fees or all that stuff, it’s like, that’s because that’s how this company can stay in business.

**Craig:** You’re saying that they’re not in business to go out of business?

**John:** They’re not in business to go out of business. That’s the problem with the Final Draft. Because they sell it to you once, they’re like, “Crap, we ran out of screenwriters. Okay, we need to make a new version of Final Draft that adds a useless feature that no one needs, just so we can keep the lights on.”

**Craig:** That’s not great.

**John:** Not great. Not great. That’s how you end up with Final Draft.

**Craig:** That is how you end up with the tragedy of Final Draft.

**John:** Let’s go to something we can maybe help and fix. Let’s talk about some Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** For listeners who are new to the show, every once in a while we do a Three Page Challenge, where we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their pilot, of their feature. We look through them. We give our honest feedback. These are people who asked for our feedback. We are not picking random people off the street. We are trying to give constructive feedback on what they have sent through.

**Craig:** That would be so cruel.

**John:** What happens is we put out a call for submissions to the Three Page Challenge. People go to johnaugust.com/threepage. They read the little form. They submit their pages. Drew and our intern have to go through 100? How many generally come through?

**Drew:** A little over 100 this week.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Go through a bunch of these to find three or four that seem like they’re good for our show. The criteria are they have to have no obvious spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes. We don’t want to be talking about those. We want to talk about what’s working on the page, what’s not working on the page, what can our listeners benefit from. They’re not picking necessarily the best entries, but the most interesting ones, the things we’ll have stuff to talk about.

We have three really good ones here to discuss. For our listeners who have their phones or their iPads handy, there are links in the show notes that you can read through these pages. Pause this, read through the pages, and join us as we discuss them. Drew, for folks who are not reading along with us, can you talk us through what happens in Planet B by Christopher James?

**Drew:** Sure. It’s 2055. In the White House Situation Room, President Keiko Pearl is briefed by her advisors on the discovery of a new Goldilocks planet able to sustain life. The head of the EPA cautions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but he’s laughed at. We then cut to a creature smashing through terrain, only to reveal that the creature is in fact a human toddler.

**John:** Craig Mazin, talk us through your initial reactions to Planet B.

**Craig:** We have what hat appears to be possibly a comedy. I think it’s a comedy.

**John:** I think it’s a comedy.

**Craig:** Science fiction comedy where Earth is in trouble, almost certainly because of climate change, and they have managed to find a mirror Earth that they can go settle.

This is a pretty common way to start these things. There are multiple problems that are inherent to this method of starting things. The way Christopher goes about it is he’s using a situation room in the White House to introduce people and concept and character. We have, I think, a bit of an over-stuffed three pages here, because it’s trying to do so much at once that it doesn’t feel like an actual scene with human beings. It feels more like a machined thing to teach us stuff about people.

We meet Sarita Arya, and we also meet Keiko Pearl, and we also meet Anne Reiss, and we also meet Brian Dale. Everyone, by the way, has some sort of race and wardrobe, hair, makeup, except for Anne Reiss, who is none of those. Does that mean she’s white? That’s a weird-

**John:** The default white problem, yeah.

**Craig:** Default white problem there. We also meet Bear “Grizz” Norris, and we meet Ryan Arya and Nowell Arya. In three pages, that’s too many people to meet. That’s too many. Everybody is a person. Everybody is a thing. Everybody has a thing, a vibe, whatever. We’re learning all of these things.

Here’s what I learned. I’m just gonna list the things that I’ve learned here. It’s Earth. It’s 2055 and Earth is in trouble. I learned that in the White House, Sarita Arya has a “steady demeanor and short, spiky hair.” I’ve also learned that Keiko Pearl, who’s Japanese American with “shoulder-length hair and youthful skin-”

**John:** She’s the President.

**Craig:** She’s the President. I’ve learned that Anne Reiss is a science advisor and is “always on defense.” I have learned that General Brian Dale is bald and from the Army and he is a stroke survivor and he uses a cane. I have also learned that Bear “Grizz” Norris is White. Oh, so he’s White. Okay, so Anne, she’s whatever. He is “shaggy haired and bearded.” I have also learned that Nowell Arya is biracial Indian/White and his father, Ryan, is Indian American and athletic. That’s all separate and apart from the plot stuff that I’m learning. It’s too much.

**John:** It’s a lot. I would say I think Christopher is doing almost the best job you could with this kind of shotgun intro problem. One of the reasons why I like this as an example is it shows how hard it is actually to do this.

I can envision a scene. Let’s say this is actually shot and there are recognizable actors maybe in some of these roles that help you distinguish who people are and remember them. But you’re trying to do so much. There’s so much table setting to do about that there is a second planet that has breathable air, who these people are, that it’s 2055, that it doesn’t feel real or legit in a way that even in a heightened comedy setting, which this is, is not going to work especially well.

I want to talk about just on the page. It’s in Courier Prime, which looks lovely. I think the breakups of scene description and dialogue, it all reads well. I’m not terrified to look through these pages. It’s pretty easy to get yourself through them. The use of underlines and single-word sentences, also really good. All these things work nicely.

I don’t mind the character descriptions. I think a lot of times I could visualize these characters better than in many samples because you’re giving me some details that I can actually click in my head. The problem is there was just too many of these things introduced back to back to back to back. Then I got confused and a little frustrated.

**Craig:** Everything has the same importance. Everyone has the same importance, because there are so many. Then there’s the tone itself. First of all, we go from the exterior of space, where we see Earth, and then we’re interior the Situation Room in the White House. The Situation Room in the White House is just a room. You might need to see the White House itself just so we know where we are. Then Sarita, who I assume is President Pearl’s chief of staff-

**John:** Chief of staff.

**Craig:** Yeah, it says chief of staff. Sorry, that was the other bit of information. See, it’s lost in the clutter. Everyone’s talking, and she whistles to make everyone stop talking. I didn’t believe that. I don’t think that’s how it works. They show this other planet, and then President Pearl immediately gets into an argument. “Why didn’t we know about this sooner? What took so long to find it?” I guess she’s just dumb. Is she dumb?

**John:** It feels like a question that is being asked for the audience rather than for herself.

**Craig:** Exactly. Then everybody else has a very… Anne Reiss, the scientist, is very sciencey. General Brian Dale, he’s very military-y. Then Buzz [sic] “Grizz” Norris is very EPA administrator-y. They are their jobs. That’s the roughest part of this.

**John:** I would like to propose a line that is banned from future scripts, which is, “In English, please.” General Dale says it. That feels just the tropey-est, clammiest line.

**Craig:** That’s a clam, especially because what Anne Reiss, 64, nothing else to know, says, “The atmosphere is 19.5 percent O-2.” General Dale, “In English, please.” He’s a general. He knows what oxygen is.

**John:** The actual question is, is that good, because I don’t know if 19.5 is good. I don’t know if that’s appropriate. Then her answer makes sense. It’s, “It means humans can breathe.”

**Craig:** If someone said, “So too much or not enough?” “It’s about right.” That’s fine. Christopher, I’m gonna pitch you a different way of doing this.

**John:** Tell us.

**Craig:** Christopher, what if the entirety of this scene – and you could go to interior, you don’t even need to know it’s the White House yet – is Sarita and President Pearl, and we don’t even know who they are. We don’t even know that President Keiko Pearl, “42, Japanese American, shoulder-length hair and youthful skin,” is the President. We just have two people talking over lunch, and one of them is explaining to the other one, “This is what’s happening.” What that scene is about is not about the information, but rather, their relationship.

There is some relationship here that is the central relationship of the movie. If that’s not the central relationship of the movie, find one and make that the beginning. But if it’s just two people talking and then President Pearl goes, “Okay, got it,” walks out of the room, walks into another room and finds this scrum all arguing, tells them all to shh, then they’re like, “Oh, the President’s here,” and she’s like, “This is it. This is what we’re doing,” I’ll go, “Oh, that was the President, and this is important.” But we have to focus this scene and put it within the context of a relationship, or we just won’t care.

**John:** I think our expectation of the first scene of the movie is that we’re gonna meet characters who are the fundamental most important people. Sometimes that can be defeated, where a bomb can go off and all these people could die. That could be a choice too. My expectation is that Keiko Pearl is probably the most important character. She’s the one we’re gonna follow. We don’t really quite know at the end of the scene whose point of view this scene is from. That is the frustration, if one of these characters is going to be the central character of the story.

I want to talk about, just as we wrap up here, the scene on Page 3 which is basically this monster is smashing things and it’s revealed to be a toddler. That will never work, because we’re seeing something. You’re not gonna be able to hold that premise, that joke for very long. You could have the bom-bom-bom music of something stomping around, but the minute we see his-

**Craig:** Legs.

**John:** … cute little shoes, his legs or something, it’s not gonna really work. You can describe it metaphorically, like, he’s like a monster smashing things, but only on the page could you get away with the, “Oh, there’s a terrible monster smashing things. Oh, surprise, it’s a child.” That’s not gonna be a surprise to people with eyeballs.

**Craig:** That is correct.

**John:** I love that we now have log lines for things. Drew, tell us the log line of what the actual full movie is.

**Drew:** “In 2055, climate change is irreversible and humans live on borrowed time. When Americans discover a nearby inhabitable planet, they must consider what’s worth giving up for a future as refugees in an alien society.”

**Craig:** Just about what I thought. It doesn’t mention what the tone is, but it does feel comedic.

**John:** I think so too. I’m guessing this is a feature and not a pilot. I think something would’ve said pilot on the title page.

**Craig:** Feels featurey.

**John:** Feels featurey. Cool. Let’s go on to The Long Haul. Again, if you’re gonna read along with us, why don’t you pause and read this. But if you’re not reading along, Drew, give us a summary.

**Drew:** The Long Haul by Becca Hurd. Emmy Baxter, 24, is irritated when an Australian stranger named Angus hijacks her karaoke performance at a Chicago pub. But despite her initial annoyance, their banter turns to flirtation.

**John:** I want to start with the title page here. This is The Long Haul. The O in “Long” is a heart. Below this is an image of the country of Australia and the country of U.S. with a line between them and a heart. It’s cute, sure. I kind of get what it’s about. It feels like a lot on this cover page. I would go with either the heart or the image there.

At the bottom it says, “Sydney, Australia, February 2024,” and it has her email address. The “February 2024” generally is over on the right-hand side where she put it, but things like her email address tend to be on the left-hand side. I don’t know why Sydney, Australia is there, other than maybe to tell us she’s Australian. But I don’t know that’s useful information for a title page.

**Craig:** I’ve never actually seen the location of where the script was written on the page there. I think you’re probably right. But I enjoy the graphic quite a bit. I agree with you, the issue with putting the heart in “Long” is that you have two hearts on the page.

There’s a very clever thing. “The Long Haul, Written by Becca Hurd.” The line between Australia and the United States is the old style, when you fly, a little dotted line happens, and the dotted line does a curlicue to become a heart in between. That actually is a beautiful summary of what this is gonna be about. It’s gonna be about a long-distance relationship between somebody who lives in the U.S. and somebody who lives in Australia and flying back and forth, I suppose. But that heart is diminished by the fact that there’s another heart in the word “Long.” Make that heart special, I think, by making the O just an O in “Long.”

**John:** Agreed. Once we get into Page 1 here, it starts with a discussion between Beth and Emmy. Emmy is our central character. Beth is her friend. They are awaiting their time to do karaoke. There’s some chitchat here, which is not great. There are some lines I would love to scratch out here.

Beth says, “Thought you were off the clock.” Emmy says, “Thought you were a vegetarian. But your mouth is full of Meat Loaf?” referring to this guy she’s making out with. Meat Loaf is not a great contemporary reference. I don’t think people are gonna get the joke that you’re referring to the singer Meat Loaf here.

There’s a better joke in the next line, which is, “Where’d you find him, an episode of Stranger Things?” Great, I get that as a joke. That is the better one. If you’re going to start with these two talking, I think that is your better way in.

More trimming here. “Somehow he’s not your worst. You’re too good for these guys, Beth.” If Emmy says, “He’s not your worst,” that tells us more and it’s more efficient.

**Craig:** But they’re sisters. Why are they talking to each other like they don’t know each other? If your sister is constantly making out/dating with guys that she’s better than, you’ve had this conversation before. It feels like we’re having it for the first time.

**John:** Agreed. For a sister, it feels like a stretch. There’s a semi-friend that you could actually have these things with. Craig, I want to talk to you about Emmy’s line near the bottom of the page, “When are they gonna play my song??” question mark question mark. I kind of like the question mark question mark. I kind of hear the delivery in the line with a double question mark. What’s your take on a double question mark?

**Craig:** I’ve never used it myself. But it feels like if a drunk person is asking a question. Then two question marks does definitely indicate drunken questioning.

**John:** That’s an overall note I had on Page 2 is how drunk are these people, because once we actually get to the standoff over the karaoke song, it feels like I need a clear sense of how drunk each of these people are to believe it or get a sense of a reality check on this moment that’s happening.

**Craig:** Let’s roll back to, for a moment, where even are we? The script tells us we’re interior Chicago pub. How do I know this is Chicago? It’s important, because apparently, this is gonna be a movie about an American and an Australian. I need to know where we are. Even if you just, again, give me nice exterior of Chicago-

**John:** That helps.

**Craig:** … it would help. The beginning, Emmy “is speedily typing on her phone.” Then her sister is gonna say, “Thought you were off the clock.” I’ve now got her character down to a post-it note. Works too hard. I don’t like that. Why is Emmy there? Why is she there? If she’s there to just speedily type on her phone, why is she at the karaoke club? Beth says, “Sometimes it’s okay to just have fun and not control every little detail. Wild concept for you, I know.” Post-it note character description. Why is Emmy there?

**John:** Craig, she’s there because she wants to sing karaoke, which is established in the very next line, “When are they gonna call me?”

**Craig:** But I don’t believe that, because she’s-

**John:** I don’t believe it either.

**Craig:** … “speedily typing on her phone.” If she comes to sing karaoke, she’s gonna have a drink or whatever and have fun. But I love the idea of somebody being impatient that her song isn’t coming. That tells me more about their character-

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** … than this other stuff. Also, John, we just talked about the toddler. This is another toddler moment. This is good advice here, Becca. When you’re writing, I want you to see it actually happen in your brain. Here’s what happens. Emmy is “typing on her phone while her younger sister, Beth, sucks face with an ’80s-musician-looking-dickass. Beth takes a breath and glares at Emmy.” No, she doesn’t. She’s making out with a guy. What’s happening is she’s making out with a guy, then stops making out with him to stare at her sister and then criticize her sister.

**John:** Has never happened.

**Craig:** I don’t know about you, but when I’m making out with somebody, I’m making out with them. I’m not looking around to make comments. Emmy should interrupt Beth. That I’d believe.

**John:** Yeah, or the kiss breaks off and he goes off to hit the restroom or whatever, and then she can land her sniper comment there.

**Craig:** Yes, but there’s no reason for her to stop. She can’t do both things at once. Also, just a little bit of advice here, Becca. If you do want Emmy to make comments about Beth, she’s sitting there waiting for her song. The bartender or somebody is sitting next to her. The two of them are like, “What the fuck with those two?” “Yeah,” blah blah blah. Then we find out it’s her sister. There’s ways to also just reveal these relationships and who they are, because right now I don’t know that they’re sisters. There’s no way to know, other than that the script told me.

**John:** These are all real challenges. I do think if you’re gonna start with Beth making out with the rocker guy, we know the experiences of when you’re sitting there and someone’s making out right in front of you or right beside you. That is a playable moment. It’s like, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, this terrible person. Please,” willing this person to go away. That’s a thing that can also happen.

But I agree, we’re gonna need to quickly establish they’re sisters or something else there, because it’s gonna be weird if we’re a couple scenes into the movie and we don’t know that they’re sisters.

**Craig:** It is weird. It’s also a little dangerous to introduce a character who is anachronistic right off the bat, because people will just think this is in the ’80s or they won’t know what time it is, because we don’t know what year it is either. It’s in a karaoke bar. People are singing old songs from the ’90s. I think Torn is from the ’90s. We’re gonna be like, “What year is this?”

But then we get to the meat of it. Now, this is a meet-cute. It’s a good idea for a meet-cute, except there’s a logic problem. A meet-cute has to just be solid. We have to buy it. We don’t want to stop and go, “I can feel the screenwriter.”

**John:** “We requested the same song.”

**Craig:** “We requested the same song.” Then Emmy says – great point here – “He literally just said Emmy. Is your name Emmy?” Angus’s reasoning for going up there and taking the mic is, “She’s Australian.” I guess I’m Australian, which means I have the right to just sing the song? That doesn’t make any sense at all.

If his last name was Emory and then, “We have Emmy with Torn,” and he’s like, “No, he said Emory. My last name’s Emory,” and she’s like, “No, he said Emmy. That’s my first name. And we both requested the same song,” then I would be fine. I would be fine. But that’s not what happens here. I wasn’t buying this meet-cute premise.

**John:** There’s a way you can maybe set this up where the thing comes up for the next song and it shows the Natalie Imbruglia, Torn, and the emcee is fumbling a bit to find who it was, and they both go up there. Then you finally get the emcee, like, “Whose song is this?” It’s like, “Oh, it’s Emmy.” Then he refuses to stand down, because, “No, I should be singing this song. I am the Australian. This is part of my culture.” There’s a way you could do that. But I didn’t believe the setup. I agree with you.

**Craig:** I didn’t believe it, and I also really did not like this guy. When you have a meet-cute where two people are arguing, you want to be able to see both of their sides. At that point, you’re like, “Oh, they both pulled into the parking spot at the same time, and now they’re arguing because it was a tie.” But this is not a tie. He’s just a jerk-

**John:** It’s not a tie.

**Craig:** … for doing this.

**John:** He’s a jerk. Page 3, we get after their song. I thought the actual intercut of them trying to do the verses can work. I can picture that on the page. I got the sense of what was actually happening there. On Page 3 they’re talking afterwards. They have electric chemistry. I don’t understand, “I’m a 3 wing 2, because I-” “A what?” “A 3, which is an Achiever.” Do you know what that’s about?

**Craig:** I have zero idea what any of this is about.

**John:** Drew, do you know what that’s about?

**Drew:** I have no idea.

**John:** It’s okay for people to talk about things we don’t know, but we need to have a context of what kind of thing they are talking about. I didn’t get it. At a certain point you feel dumb and you start to resent that you don’t know what’s going on there.

**Craig:** Also don’t care. It’s wasted time, because I’m not learning anything. Emmy said, “You would say that. Because you’re a 4.” What? What does that mean? Anytime somebody makes fun of “neur,” that always… I do love “neur.” Neur neur neur.

**John:** Neur neur neur neur.

**Craig:** Neur neur neur.

**John:** I think we enjoyed the potential of the premise and this as a meet-cute, because as we have discussed on the show from nearly Episode 1, we enjoy rom-coms. We want that genre to thrive. It’s nice to see when movies can succeed in doing this. We want Becca to have the best chance possible to make a rom-com. Drew, tell us the log line that Becca submitted.

**Drew:** “Determined to win back her ex, an audacious American woman sneaks into Australia by telling the government that she is in a continuing and loving relationship with the man who just dumped her.”

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** I assume it’s Angus.

**Craig:** Are those two different people?

**John:** We don’t know. We don’t know from this log line.

**Craig:** Say that log line again.

**Drew:** Sure. “Determined to win back her ex-”

**Craig:** Her ex.

**Drew:** “… an audacious American woman sneaks into Australia by telling the government that she is in a continuing and loving relationship with the man who just dumped her.”

**Craig:** Who would also be the ex.

**John:** I guess so.

**Craig:** How do you sneak into Australia?

**John:** I think the idea of sneaking into Australia for love feels kind of fun.

**Craig:** If you’re talking to the officials of Australia, you’re not sneaking into Australia. In order to stay in Australia… But you can go to Australia for six months.

**John:** I don’t think so, Craig. I think Australia is a locked-down place. No, Australia is basically North Korea, Craig. You have to go through checkpoints. It’s incredibly dangerous.

**Craig:** I don’t understand.

**John:** This is a girl who’d do anything for love, like the song.

**Craig:** Like Meat Loaf. Like Meat Loaf, which Meat Loaf, referenced twice in three pages. I don’t understand. I don’t understand the log line. But there’s something very charming about the idea of this meet-cute. I’ve not seen this meet-cute before, where two people believe they each have the karaoke song, they start to sing to each other, and some little bit of magic happens. That’s a very nice way of doing things. I can see that moment. That’s encouraging.

I would say at a minimum, Becca, we’re gonna want to clean that log line up so it’s nice and sharp and doesn’t raise questions. Log lines should only raise the question you want to raise, not the questions you don’t.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s wrap it up with The Right to Party by Lucas McCutchen.

**Drew:** Captain Albert, a British officer, raises a British flag over colonial Boston. On his way home, he steps purposefully on an American child’s doll that’s fallen in a puddle. At home, his 17-year-old son, Edmund, struggles with chores, due to an injured hand, while trying to appease his stern father. Their tense interaction culminates in Captain Albert shooting at Edmund’s breakfast, inadvertently killing a passerby. Edmund and his brash friend Henry leave for school, where they discuss the dead bystander and girls they have crushes on.

**John:** This is a big swing. What I got by the end of three pages, this is a teen boy comedy but just set in this Revolutionary time, which is actually, I think, an interesting premise. A lot of stuff got in the way of the interesting premise, but I’m eager to talk about it, because I did think it was a clever idea to, again, just smash up tropes and genres and do a teen Apatow-y kind of movie but in this time period. Unfortunately, on Page 1, I have no idea what time period I’m in.

Let me read the first couple lines here. “Exterior Boston Town Square – Dawn. Sleepy merchants and townsfolk slowly begin their morning routines. Stores display their pitiful wares. Flies buzz in circles above the fruit in their baskets.” Finally, on the fourth sentence, “A prisoner locked in stocks stirs.” Until that sentence, I didn’t know that we were in the past. Boston Town Square exists now. I thought we were just in modern-day Boston. This is a problem, because I didn’t know where we were, when we were.

**Craig:** Never before has something so desperately needed “Boston, 1775.” It absolutely needs that. This is a broad comedy. Broad comedy is very, very hard to do. Take it from me. Struggled and succeeded and failed multiple times in my career.

**John:** Craig, you’re a drama writer. What would you know about broad comedy?

**Craig:** I’m a drama writer because I gave up finally. One of the most important aspects of writing broad comedy is logic. It is more of a science than an art. It’s science. Everything is about logic. Everything.

We have this very broad Monty Python-esque moment where Captain Albert, who’s this incredibly over-the-top British dickhead, fires a gun at his own breakfast, not because he’s angry at the breakfast, but rather to check if the sights are good on the pistol. They’re not good on the pistol, and a woman dies, and no one cares about the woman. The kernel of that, great. Logic problems. One, why is he firing the pistol at his breakfast? If the pistol is aligned correctly, he will ruin his breakfast. That makes no sense.

**John:** He should shoot at something in the room.

**Craig:** He could shoot at something in the room. Secondly, if you’re aiming at your breakfast on a table, I don’t care how misaligned the sights are. The most misaligned they could be is you’re off by about eight inches. You cannot be off by seven feet and then go through a window and kill a woman passing by, which by the way, is very difficult to actually film, because you have to shoot in such a way that you can see both the woman outside through the window and the man as he shoots. If this were happening outside, no problem.

**John:** I can envision a scenario in which he’s shooting at a thing on the wall and then it goes out the window and kills the woman. Do you necessarily need to see the woman in that first shot, or could you hear the scream and then that’s funny?

**Craig:** What you want to do is not see the woman at all. You want him to shoot at something on the wall, it goes through a window, and then there’s a pause, and then you hear a man go, “My wife.”

**John:** “Millicent!”

**Craig:** Yeah, “Millicent, no!” That’s what you want, and then people to start crying. Then when you go outside, there’s the guy, and he’s like, “Oh, Millicent.”

**John:** There’s the payoff.

**Craig:** Millicent, as it turns out, was actually a pig. Whatever it is. There’s all sorts of ways to do this. But the concept of being so broad that a guy is gonna kill somebody and they don’t care about somebody being killed is funny. It’s just logic.

Now, the other issue is, in broad comedy we need somebody that we can identify with, especially when you have an uber-jerk like Captain Albert. He has two sons. The problem here is both sons seem just as callous as their father. Who do I like?

**John:** I think you’re supposed to like Edmund, but he’s trying to make his father happy. That’s the journey that the character needs to get past. I think that’s the goal is to have-

**Craig:** The problem is, when they walk by the small crowd around the dead woman and Henry goes, “Jeez… a bit dramatic.” Then he goes, “Your hand alright?” Edmund’s like, “Yeah, I’ll talk about my hand now. I’m not gonna have any comment about that lady whatsoever.” He doesn’t care that a woman died.

Then we’ve got a little bit of an anachronistic vibe, where there’s a cart driver who says, “Don’t hit my effing cart.” Edmund says, “Sorry. Have a nice day,” which does feel like Edmund is a bit of a nice kid. But are they afraid of the British? Are they not afraid of the British? Why is this guy yelling at them like that? Logic, logic, logic.

**John:** Logic, logic, logic.

**Craig:** That’s the key.

**John:** That’s a lot. The other thing I will say is that I was missing some uppercases that would’ve been really helpful. Generally in scripts, the first time you’re meeting a character, you’re uppercasing their name, or even if it’s just a person who’s gonna come back. I wanted those “dirty townsfolk” capitalized. I wanted “child” capitalized. We’re used to those things being uppercase the first time we’re seeing them, just to acknowledge that these are people who are gonna do something specific.

**Craig:** Yes, especially when you are creating very large bricks of action. There’s a seven-line paragraph and an eight-line paragraph. My whole thing is once I get past three lines, I start getting itchy. Seven is a lot.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Craig:** Eight, people are just skimming.

**John:** Yeah, they are.

**Craig:** That paragraph is the gag paragraph, where he shoots. Oh, I see. He picks the plate up and “sets it on the window sill nearby.” He did do that. I totally missed that.

**John:** You didn’t read that because you skimmed.

**Craig:** Yeah, because I skimmed, because it was an eight-line brick. Then it said, “Edmund cocks his head.” You don’t want to use that. You don’t want to say “cocks his head” when there’s a pistol that can also be cocked.

He picks the food up, places it “on the window sill nearby.” Okay, so now that does make sense, except it doesn’t, because why is he using his plate to shoot at? It’s his breakfast. It’s very odd. It says, “Edmund is in shock as Albert returns and sets the gun in front of him.” Now I’m feeling like if he’s in shock, this has never happened before. But he doesn’t be in shock. He should be more like-

**John:** His father is this guy.

**Craig:** This happens all the time. If this is the first time, then I think Edmund would be vomiting. This happens all the time. Edmund should walk over to the window, look out, and just wince. There’s ways to do this.

By the way, I will say, Lucas, don’t feel bad right now. I’m serious. This is the hardest tone to get right. It is so difficult. If you Google, David Zucker has this lovely bunch of rules that he’s set forth for this kind of work, which are really compelling and useful. Just take a look at those. It’s so difficult to get right. If you don’t, then people just turn their heads. It’s incredible how technical and precise it must be. It looks like you actually did have that logic right, except that you didn’t, and also it was in too long of a paragraph.

**John:** Drew, tell us the log line.

**Drew:** “Two teenage best friends, an American colonist and the son of a British officer, set out to have the night of their lives before they’re drafted to opposite sides of the American Revolution.”

**Craig:** Such a great premise.

**John:** It’s a really good premise.

**Craig:** It’s a great premise. I don’t think these pages are setting that premise up.

**John:** I think we can do better, but I think it was a really good premise.

**Craig:** It’s a terrific premise.

**John:** Two episodes ago we had that service where you send off a sentence to describe what your script is about. If that was a sentence you sent in, they’d say, yeah, that’s a good premise. Love that.

**Craig:** That’s fun. That’s a fun premise. I really like that.

**John:** Let’s thank everybody who submitted their Three Page Challenges for us to discuss, especially these three entries. If you want to send in your pages for the next time, it is johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. We’ll occasionally look through that pile and pick some new ones. Thank you, everyone who did that. It’s very nice of you to do so. It really does help others learn.

Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things. What is your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a director that I’m currently working with named Stephen Williams. He’s not the One Cool Thing. It’s actually an episode of Watchmen that he directed. I’m sure Watchmen was my One Cool Thing when it was on the air back in-

**John:** It’s a good show.

**Craig:** Was it 2020? I guess something like that.

**John:** 2019, because I remember the Wash-men, which was initially during the pandemic when you had to wash your hands.

**Craig:** Stephen is a terrific director. He directed an episode of Watchmen that’s still… It’s stuck with me to this very day. Written by Damon Lindelof, Cord Jefferson, and Dave Gibbons. Damon Lindelof obviously needs no introduction. Multi-Emmy award-winning Damon Lindelof. Cord Jefferson, Oscar award winner.

**John:** Oscar, right.

**Craig:** He’s an Academy Award winner now for American Fiction. We’ve got some pretty big names there working on this, and then directed by Stephen. It is origin story of a superhero in the world of Watchmen. It uses a character that was indicated in the original graphic novel, Hooded Justice, and turns it on its ear and tells a pretty profound story of the Black American experience in, I believe it’s the ’30s or ’40s. Just an outstanding episode of television, beautifully done, moving and subtle, and directed gorgeously.

If you haven’t seen Watchmen, can you just pop that one in and watch it? No, you cannot. You have to watch up to it. I think it might be the sixth episode. Yes, it is the sixth episode of the season. You’ll have to do some watching for that. But honestly, it’s worth it. It’s such a great season of TV. It stands alone. It is the only one that exists. It’s got some so-so actors in it, like Regina King and Jean Smart and Don Johnson. It’s so stacked.

**John:** Despite that, it triumphs.

**Craig:** It’s so stacked. What a stacked lineup, as the kids say. I had watched it again, just because I’m having such a lovely time working with Stephen. He’s just such a great guy.

**John:** Great. My One Cool Thing is a show that people can also watch. Ripley on Netflix. This is the Steve Zaillian adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Talented Mr. Ripley, the movie, is one of my favorite movies, one of my top 10 movies. I absolutely love it. I was a little bit nervous watching this adaptation, because I didn’t want it to spoil my love for the original or be compared. I really like this adaptation. It’s just so different. Everywhere the movie went left, this goes right. I love that the main adversary in the series is stairs, basically. Poor Ripley is always confronted by stairs.

It’s also, I think, a really great lesson in what you can do with time, and when you have the time of a series, how you can expand these moments that in the movie would be 30 seconds. You can now spend 15 minutes on, like, how do you deal with this dead body. The comedy that Zaillian’s able to find out of that is just terrific. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, and yet it’s still funny, just because it points out the absurdity of human bodies also, which is great.

It’s black and white. It’s gorgeous. Everyone talks about that. It’s all shot in Italy. Looks terrific. Great performances. Really strange casting that works. Just check out Ripley on Netflix if you get a chance.

**Craig:** I wish you’d get Steve Zaillian on the show.

**John:** We’ll get him on the show. I’m sure we can get him on the show.

**Craig:** He’s a lovely man. He is just a towering figure in our business of what we do. There aren’t many people who have demonstrated his kind of consistent excellence for so, so long. He was excellent out of the gate and stayed excellent. Just an incredible writer and one of the best of all time.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** … with help this week by Jonathan Wigdortz.

**Craig:** Uh-uh.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** I don’t think so.

**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. 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 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 magic and the lack thereof in our D&D campaign. Craig, it’s always magic talking with you and Drew.

**Craig:** It is not.

**John:** See you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Craig, so the brief for the new D&D campaign we’re playing. We should explain to listeners that for the last four years we were playing a campaign that you were DM’ing. We finally finished that. I was gonna take over the next campaign for our group. I pitched to the crew that, what if we did a Robin Hoody kind of thing where it was a little bit more stripped down. We ultimately said let’s do the really stripped down. We’re only gonna have Humans and Halflings and maybe some Elves, but none of the other fantastical races. We would have a campaign with no magic, where it’s really grounded and you can’t cast spells, or not magic items. Everyone stepped up, and that’s what we’ve been playing.

**Craig:** It’s been kind of a delight. In Dungeons and Dragons, there are these different classes. Some classes are almost, by definition, un-magical. Wizards of the Coast-

**John:** They’re the company who runs D&D, who owns D&D.

**Craig:** They’re pretty clever in that they even will allow variants of basically every class to have some magic. Very difficult with barbarians. But you can have a Rogue, or Arcane Trickster, I think it is, and learn some spells, because spells are very powerful. There’s a spell for every circumstance. People love magic. It’s Dungeons and Dragons. But one thing that is true is that at some point, spells become so powerful and pervasive that they can make the game a little unfun for focus characters who don’t cast spells. They just at some point feel like, okay, you guys will do all this awesome stuff.

**John:** I will hit it with my sword.

**Craig:** I’m gonna hit you with a club, and then everybody else gets to do something extraordinary. Then I’m gonna run in there and, I guess, hit someone else with a club. It’s easy to play, but you can start to feel, as the characters increase in level, sort of like, I guess, the way – what’s the archer in Avengers? What’s his name again?

**John:** Oh, Hawkeye, yeah. One trick, yeah.

**Craig:** You start to feel like Hawkeye. Like, “Okay, so you’re literally a god and you can shoot lasers out of hands, and I have a bow and arrow.” “And what are you gonna do?” “Shoot my bow and arrow again.” It’s nice that we are all basically in that boat, not only us, but also the bad guys.

**John:** Talking about classes, you and I had an interesting discussion where we were talking through what is actually gonna make sense. There are Fighters. There are Barbarians. There are Rogues. There are Monks, but only certain kinds of Monks, because some of the Monks get really, really magical, and so variants that don’t have magic. And Rangers, but Rangers without the magic stuff, because Rangers have a lot of spells they would otherwise cast. But it’s a world without Wizards or Sorcerers, Clerics and Druids. You think about in a Robin Hoody kind of situation, a Bard makes a lot of sense, except the Bards in 5th Edition D&D really are Spellcasters and it doesn’t make sense to do that. Even Paladins, who you think, oh, it’s a brave knight-

**Craig:** Spells.

**John:** Yeah, but with a lot of magic there.

**Craig:** A lot of necessary magic. The thing that makes a Paladin good is that they have their various smites to add damage to their hits. We don’t have any of that, and it’s kind of a joy. When you face a bunch of bad guys, there’s no crowd control spells. There’s a lot of spells in D&D where it’s like, “I’m gonna just put you all in darkness. I’m gonna put you all in something. I’m gonna fireball you.” That’s the thing. You run up against seven guys, one person in your party can kill all of them with one spell. It’s nice to – you have to think more. There’s more strategizing. There’s more planning. The combat feels a little… I don’t know, it’s a nice gritty D&D.

Typically, everyone’s drinking a potion, or you have a Cleric or a Druid or somebody else that has healing spells that can restore all of your aches and pains – rather, alleviate your aches and pains. Here, my character took a feat which I don’t even know why anyone would take in a campaign with magic, that allows you to use an underutilized mechanic of healing kits to heal people, like a doctor would. If you’re not playing a magic-free campaign, why would anyone take the Healer feat, ever?

**John:** I don’t think they would.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** It’s been interesting to see the ripple of changes that happen through this. I think combat speed has been a lot faster, because inevitably what happens is, like, “Oh, it’s my turn. Am I gonna cast a spell? What spell am I gonna cast? Let me look up what that’s gonna do.” Here it’s like, “No, I’m going to shoot somebody. I’m going to slash somebody.” Yes, people may use their special martial abilities to some degree, but it’s just been a lot faster to get through stuff. It can take more rounds to knock down an opponent, but that’s been nice.

I would say on the DM side I’ve been struck by just how much damage you guys can do, because you have these Rogues who can, through various mechanics, get sneak attack, get advantage on things, and they can take down a creature really quickly. I’ve had to adjust the number of monsters I’m throwing at you, just because you guys can do so much damage and take them out so quickly.

**Craig:** One of my DM tricks is – there are a few DM tricks. Now I’m telling you how to hurt us more, which is fun. One is, if there’s a big bad in the party, give him more HP. If the party is just crushing, just give him more HP. Make him last another round or two.

The other one, and this is the most useful one when you really want to mess with your party and you feel like they’re cakewalking, is to give one of the main boss guys legendary actions, because now that is essentially like increasing the number of bad guys without throwing a bunch of weak-asses on the field, who often can’t do that much damage on their own and get mowed down anyway, because our party’s capable of killing a couple of guys, three guys a turn if they’re just scrubs.

**John:** A thing I hadn’t considered until we got into this section of the campaign is that you guys are now underground, and light is a real factor. Often in these campaigns you’ll have more characters who have dark vision because they are Elves or have the ability to see in darkness, but you guys don’t. People would generally have a light spell cast on something, so they have a coin or something is shedding light. Here you guys have torches, and you have to deal with the torches. You as an Archer can’t hold a torch and shoot an arrow. It’s been really interesting to see from that perspective how a lack of magic is impacting you guys.

**Craig:** Light management is fun. I like that. It’s a little scary. You can’t be as stealthy as you want to be. That was one of the things about a traditional campaign that you have to deal with as a DM is that probably everybody’s gonna be able to see in the dark and light no longer becomes a thing. The only time it becomes a thing is, okay, so typical dark vision, you can see 60 feet ahead of you. Sometimes you run into, like, Drow. They can see 120. Now you got a situation. That’s interesting. But making us deal with simple things like not being able to see, especially when we’ve now encountered some creatures that can see in the dark, very interesting.

**John:** So fun. As we said in the setup, it is interesting to apply constraints to things, because we’re all very experienced D&D players. To make something feel fresh, you need to put on some new rules, new challenges to people. Rather than adding stuff, sometimes subtracting stuff is a way to make something more interesting. Do I want to play only this no-magic way forever? Absolutely not. But I think it’s been interesting for this round to try that and see how it all works.

It’s also been challenging to – on the DM level, I’m enforcing that you guys don’t have spells or magic stuff. As I’m picking adversaries, a lot of times what’s baked into these scenarios, they are Spellcasters too. I have to find, okay, what is the equivalent of that spellcasting ability for those characters. In some cases I’ve given them grenades that can duplicate an effect, but in other cases I’ve given them things taken from the Battle Master feats or Battle Master-

**Craig:** Maneuvers?

**John:** … maneuvers, yes, or monk-y kind of things.

**Craig:** You mean monkish?

**John:** Yeah, or monk abilities, because that would be the equivalent in this world for the third level spell they would otherwise be able to cast.

**Craig:** You’re dealing with people who have been playing for a long, long time. We all know what we’re doing. We all know the rules pretty well. Some of us know the rules pretty well, and then others do not, but that’s fine. The point is we’ve been playing for a long time.

I was in one brief campaign that another guy was running with some of the Joe Manganiello crew. The restraint on that one was every character had to be a Wizard. It was the opposite of this. It was an all-Wizard party, which meant that at least when we were starting out, it was like sending children out into the world. We were like, “I can make a light come on. Also, if you touch me, I die.” But by the time you get to Level 3-

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s pretty serious, but if anybody gets close to you-

**John:** You’re still fragile.

**Craig:** You’re pretty fragile. Now, that party, you get an all-Wizard party at Level 18, now everyone’s dead.

**John:** Good lord.

**Craig:** We win. You lose.

**John:** The rules of time and space have changed now.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** We’ll continue with our campaign and with the podcast in the next couple weeks.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Craig, good to chat with you as always.

**Craig:** Thanks, John. Thanks, Drew.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**Drew:** Bye.

Links:

* Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: [PLANET B](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Planet-B-Three-Pages-Christopher-James.pdf) by Christopher James, [THE LONG HAUL](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/The-Long-Haul-by-Becca-Hurd-Three-Pages.pdf) by Becca Hurd, and [THE RIGHT TO PARTY](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/The-Right-To-Party-3-Pages.pdf) by Lucas McCutchen
* [Submit your script for our Three Page Challenge!](https://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [David Zucker’s 15 Rules of Comedy](https://creativecreativity.com/2017/07/30/david-zuckers-15-rules-of-comedy/)
* [Space Cadet (2024)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21469794/)
* [Movie Magic Scheduling](https://www.ep.com/movie-magic-scheduling/)
* [Scenechronize](https://www.ep.com/scenechronize/)
* [PIX](https://pix.online/)
* [Qtake](https://qtakehd.com/)
* [BOX](https://www.box.com/home)
* [Frame.io](https://frame.io/)
* [Evercast](https://www.evercast.us/)
* [Scripto](https://www.scripto.live/)
* [Fuzzlecheck](https://www.fuzzlecheck.de/)
* [Ripley](https://www.netflix.com/title/81678765) on Netflix
* [Watchmen – “This Extraordinary Being”](https://www.hbo.com/watchmen/season-1/6-this-extraordinary-being)
* [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](https://www.drewmarquardt.com/) with help from [Jonathan Wigdortz](https://www.wiggy.rocks/). It 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/646standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 645 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. For showrunners, the first season of a television show is often a trial by fire as they figure out what show they’re actually making and how to do it. The second season can be both easier and more difficult, as showrunners have the benefit of experience but also the burden of expectation.

Today on the show, we have two showrunners who have just delivered the third seasons of their respective shows, which was an absolute cakewalk. Am I correct? There were no issues on either of your sides?

Jen Statsky: Not anything, yeah.

Meredith Scardino: Zero.

Jen: Really simple.

John: Great. Episode’s over. It’s done. Nothing to talk about.

Jen: Not much to talk about it.

Meredith: Credits.

John: Credits roll. Thank you for joining us on the show. Let me introduce you. Meredith Scardino is a writer and producer whose impressive listener credits include Saturday Night Live, The Colbert Report, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. She has four Emmys and a Peabody. She is now the creator and showrunner of (sings) Girls5eva. Bing!

Meredith: That was beautiful.

John: Thank you. I love myself a musical sting, a little introduction moment. It’s one of those few credits that you just don’t skip past, because you’ve got to embrace it while it’s there.

Meredith: It’s Jeff Richmond. He makes a good theme song.

John: After Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, we desperately needed another musical comedy to watch in the house, so we went back and re-watched Seasons 1 and 2 to get ready for Season 3. Man, I need songs. Even if they’re diegetic like they are in your show, I want characters to sing.

Meredith: It’s fun, and the cast is great at singing.

John: Yeah, which is nice. Sarah Bareilles, she’s a ringer. She’s actually genuine.

Meredith: She’s done this before.

John: Once or twice.

Meredith: A little bit.

John: But who knew she was funny? You knew she was funny.

Meredith: She’s hilarious. She’s absolutely hilarious, and so is Renee Elise Goldsberry from Hamilton fame, who no one quite knew she was absolutely hilarious, as she is, although I watched her in Co-op on Documentary Network.

John: Oh my god, so incredible.

Meredith: She was so committed to the bit.

John: Love it.

Meredith: You’re like, “Oh, that lady, committed.”

John: Alex Brightman is also in Co-op, and they’re just so fantastic in that.

Meredith: So fantastic. Then you got Paula Pell and Busy Philipps, who we knew were hilarious already, but you didn’t know they could sing.

John: All things you figured out. Jen Statsky is a writer and producer who has written for shows including Parks and Recreation, Broad City, and The Good Place. She’s the co-creator and showrunner of Hacks, for which she has won an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a Peabody Award. Welcome back, Jen.

Jen: Hi, thanks for having me. I’m sad you didn’t sing Hacks though. I was hoping.

John: Here’s the problem. It’s a really good show.

Jen: Not a musical show though.

John: No notes except you could add some songs. Would it hurt you to have a catchy song?

Jen: I do think that catchy songs would be helpful. I guess it’s not too late. Maybe next season it can be full musical.

John: That is a prediction that I might be willing to make. We’ll get to that in a second here.

Jen: Meredith, can you lend me your entire writing staff?

Meredith: Yeah, sure. Let’s do it.

John: A lot of the times on the show we have guests who have just finished their first season and they talk about what they’ve learned, and that’s great, but I really want to talk about what’s easier and what’s more difficult about being an established show and going into things where you know stuff.

But I also want to talk about this moment we’re in as an industry, especially for series, because both of your shows debuted at a different time, when there was this era of streaming abundance. I want to talk about what’s gained and what’s lost when streamers are cutting back so much right now.

We’ll also tackle questions from listeners about nonbinary characters, mentorship using the past tense, and finally, two years ago, I made a prediction about what would happen in the third season of Hacks, and I mailed it in a sealed envelope to Jen. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we will open that letter and see how right or wrong I was. She’s holding it up to the Zoom right now. I’m looking at it. I’m looking at my weird penmanship.

Jen: I’m so proud of myself that I didn’t open it. When did you send this?

John: Two years ago.

Jen: Two years ago.

John: There’s a postmark on it. Is there a date? Is it listed?

Jen: Oh yeah, June 2022. Wow. I was so terrified that if I opened it before everything was done for Season 3, you’d have a much better idea than we did, and then I would be like, “What do I do?”

John: There’s a Season 4 still, so if you’re searching for something, maybe it’s in there.

Jen: We’ll see.

John: I’m not actually 100 percent sure what I wrote, so it’ll be a surprise for both of us.

Jen: Great.

John: Only for Premium Members in the Bonus Segment.

You guys are on your third seasons, but to set the stage, can we go back in time and think about the shows you actually pitched originally when you were talking about doing these shows and figure out what that was, compared to what the show ended up becoming. Meredith, can we start with you? What was the pitch for Girls5eva?

Meredith: The pitch was a reunited girl group, one-hit wonder from the late ’90s, Y2K era reunites in the present after they get sampled by an up-and-coming rapper named Lil Stinker and tried to give it a go again. It follows four of the surviving members of Girls5eva. One sadly had swam off the edge of an infinity pool in the mid-aughts.

It follows being a woman in your 40s. There’s a lot of stuff about that. But it’s also a very big underdog story. It’s got a ton of comedy. It’s very hard jokes, fast-paced. We also look back at the past and do lots of flashbacks to their old, regrettable music, the way they got chewed up and spit out by that pop music machine that didn’t really value any of their voices. We just see the fun, ragtag comeback story of hilarious, very different women, who all internalized the pain of that big loss of the one-hit wonder going away in different ways. It’s a really fun show.

John: That very much describes the show that we end up seeing right now, but do you think that was actually all there in your original pitch? Was it a pitch, or had you written a script?

Meredith: It was both. I had written the pilot. Basically, I would go in to network streamers. I had a fake CD that I made, because I had an art background. I made a fake CD that was basically like, “This is what their… ” I made discount stickers, like it had been in the Sam Goody discount bin. I had the cover, and then on the back I had their track list, so it gave you an idea of what kind of group this was.

John: That’s incredible.

Meredith: I even sealed it with one of those plastic industrial sealer things on top, because I didn’t want anyone to open it, because I didn’t have a real CD in there and I didn’t have any music written. Again, just for weight, I put in DVDs from the Jack Lemmon collection that I had.

The pitch was very much similar to what the show became, and I think because I had the pilot. Basically, I’d do the whole pitch. I’d do the song and dance, 20-minute, like, “Here’s what it is. Here’s all the characters. Here’s where they go.” Then I’d leave behind the script. It was nice, because when you pitch something, it’s not always a complete descriptor of what you might end up writing. My producers and I made the decision to be like, the best way is just to be like, “Oh, do you like this thing that you’re reading?” That’s the best indicator of what the show is.

John: We can clarify, this is a situation where a leave-behind is completely appropriate, because you own and control everything here. You weren’t doing free work for them leaving this behind. This was, “I pitched you this. This is the evidence that I really can pull off this thing I just described to you.”

Meredith: Yeah, exactly.

John: Now, Jen, the initial pitches for Hacks, I think we talked about this when you were on the show before, but remind us, what was the process of pitching Hacks and getting it set up originally?

Jen: In 2015, my co-creators Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello and I had been talking about women of a certain generation of comedians and how they had never really gotten their due, especially in comparison to their male counterparts. And so we had this idea for a show that would be about the redemption of a comedian like that through the lens of her relationship with a younger comedy writer who had benefited from the ways in which this woman fought.

It was a long process to the pitch, because in 2015, Paul and Lucia were full time on Broad City and they were making a movie and I was full time on Good Place. It took us a while before we were ready to go out with the pitch. But that was to our advantage, I think, in many ways, because we kept working on it through those years. And by the time we got to go around town and pitch it, we had a very thorough, probably too thorough pitch, where we went through to the end of the series, to how it would end, which is still to this day what we plan on doing for the end of it. I did not have any cool leave-behinds. Maybe we would’ve gotten more yeses had I.

John: But you didn’t have a finished pilot? Did you have a script?

Jen: No, we actually hadn’t written a script. It was a pretty thorough 30, 35-minute pitch, but that was it. We didn’t have a script.

John: Wow.

Jen: We didn’t have talent attached. It was really just the idea and all the work we had done to build up the idea.

John: You said you had multiple seasons figured out for what the general arc was of the show. Now that you’re in Season 3 of it, how close are you to that plan?

Jen: We’re still very close. We’re still very close to the plan. Now, of course, obviously, there’s things within the season that happen, and your writers come in and they pitch things and you say, “Oh, that’s an amazing idea.” For example, we knew at the end of Season 1, it was in the pitch, this massive fight and that Deborah would slap her and what it would be. That was all thought out. But for example, Ava sending an email with dirt about Deborah that would then be this huge rift between them, that came in the writing of the show. There’s smaller story moves that of course have come up over the course of the years writing this show. But the major tent poles for what each season is and Deborah’s arc and Ava’s arc have remained from what we pitched.

John: Meredith, did you have multiple seasons figured out at the start?

Meredith: Yeah. I had basically eras of what I thought they would be doing, like chapters. Each season has adhered to that, where Season 1, it’s so much of the adrenaline of the reunion, trying to do everything the old way they used to, and then realizing, like, oh no, god, no, there’s a better way, and trying to just get it going again. Then Season 2 is very much about, okay, now they have an album they can make. What will they say once they have that moment to be in the studio as a group and they’re the actual songwriters? Then Season 3 felt like, okay, you gotta go promote that album and get on the road.

In their future, I would like to see them – they’ve been underdogs clawing for relevance for three seasons, and I would like to see what it looks like for them to have a little bit of success and how they navigate that.

John: Both of your shows are about women in entertainment who are grappling with their legacy, who were big stars and then they see their stars teetering, and so they’re trying to remain relevant or rebuild their careers without seeming desperate. They’re both shows about ambition, but they’re also insider shows. They’re shows about the entertainment business that look behind the curtain and inside. Classically, it’s a thing we do, but it’s also a thing we’re told, like, don’t pitch those shows, because no one wants to watch those shows, no one wants to make those shows. Did you find resistance to the fact that there were shows about the industry?

Meredith: I feel like people say that, but then there are so many shows that people – 30 Rock, even Entourage. There’s like a million shows about… I don’t know why people say that.

Jen: You do always hear that. You hear, “Don’t pitch an industry show. Don’t pitch inside baseball. No one wants it.” Then you turn on your TV and there are so many of them. So many of them have been acclaimed and awarded. I don’t know what it is. I guess no one wants to admit that they do make them.

But I will say, I don’t know how you feel, Meredith, but we pitched the show in 2019, which was during still the boom of streaming. When we pitched the show to Max, it wasn’t even Max at the time. It wasn’t even HBO Max. It was the Warner Media streamer that didn’t even have a name. They just knew that Warner Media was gonna do a streamer.

I think we very much benefited from pitching during a time when it was a seller’s market, and a good idea was a good idea. Credit to Suzanna Makkos, because she heard the pitch and she got it immediately and she made it happen. I don’t know that today, as we speak to you in 2024, I don’t know that Hacks gets bought or I don’t know that it gets made. Part of it I think would be reluctance to do a show about the industry. But I don’t think we faced it at the time. I don’t know. Did you, Meredith?

Meredith: No, I didn’t feel that coming off of anyone that we pitched to. But I also just think that in some ways the show is about the music business in some ways, of course. You get to make all those pop culture references that can be really fun to write, and all of those observations. But at its core, it’s about four women in their 40s trying to do something at the time when you’re normally retreating into the habits and ho-hum of life and you wonder if your greatest days are behind you. It’s about so much universal… I feel like Hacks is the same way. It’s not just about comedy.

Jen: No, it’s not just about… Yeah, you’re exactly right. The shows will work if they’re about universal, relatable things that any viewer, whether they’re in the industry or not, can connect with. Like you’re saying, women in their 40s and their friendship with each other, or in the case of Hacks, a very specific friendship and collaboration between two people and, honestly, just an older women in her 70s. We talk about it a lot. It’s about her quest for dignity. I think that is incredibly relatable to anyone watching of that age.

I think you’re right that what it is when they say don’t pitch an industry show, it’s kind of like don’t pitch an industry show that is about nothing else, that doesn’t have anything underneath it. As long as there’s something underneath it and you’re speaking to relatable universal themes that humans connect with, I think you can set a show anywhere.

John: Both of your shows are comedies, but they’re very different kinds of comedies. I want to talk about their relationships to jokes. Meredith, your show is in the tradition of 30 Rock or Kimmy Schmidt, where it’s a very joke-dense show, where there’s an expectation there’s a certain number of jokes per minute. People are being funny and they’re also not acknowledging that they’re being funny. It’s very much in that habit. Three seasons in, or more seasons when you think about Kimmy Schmidt too, is that just a natural form for you? Do you feel that in your bones?

Meredith: It is. First of all, I was attracted to it like a moth to a flame. But also, I think coming from late night, The Colbert Report, where you’re just taking in input from the news and churning out jokes and satire and character, like boom, boom, boom, boom, that muscle is the one muscle in my body that’s not atrophied. I’m very jacked in that capacity. Then going and working with Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, whose style I absolutely love from 30 Rock, and they came from SNL. I think there’s something a little bit coming from sketch and late night that imbues into the episodic execution.

At Kimmy Schmidt, we had that similar rhythm. It’s joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, but you also get to say all the things. I feel like there’s no shortage of the points we’re making about women feeling irrelevant or whatever we were trying to say. You can still say them even while the breakneck joke pace is breakneck.

John: Hacks is obviously about jokes also, because literally it’s two characters who are wrestling with coming up with material. There’s a comedy writer and a comedy legend. But what’s different about the jokes in Hacks is often they will say a joke and they will acknowledge that that was funny. Both parties that were around them will acknowledge that was funny. But they’re competing basically in comedy with each other. How early in the process of actually writing this did you figure out what that was gonna feel like and where the level was? Did you even know as you started filming how you were going to play that?

Jen: Yeah, I think from the get-go, we knew that we wanted this very specific tone that was a mix of comedy and drama. I’ve said this before, but for us, casting Jean Smart was – she embodies exactly that. She can do hard, funny comedy, but she can also be incredibly grounded and dramatic and heart-wrenching in that way. Once we got her, we said, “That’s our North Star. That is the tone of the show.” That’s what we were always going for.

You’re right that we have this cheat code of we want characters to be able to say jokes and be very funny, but it’s all within the grounded realm of you’re watching a show where characters are supposed to be funny and they know they’re funny and they know they’re making a joke. That was just the particular tone that we wanted to go for with this show.

John: Question for both of you. As you’re thinking about the outline stage or figuring out what is happening in the episode, you’re figuring out what the scenes are, how much does that need to be driven by, “Okay, this is the dramatic story points I need to get across,” or can this scene actually be funny?

Maybe start with you, Meredith. I’m thinking about, they’re on tour. You need to figure out what it is that’s happening in the show. Is it mostly about the emotional stakes that are progressing, or are you thinking, “Okay, these are gonna be good arenas that will allow me to make jokes.”

Meredith: What you want is to find the match where the emotional arc that you’re trying to sell for your character and their evolution over the course of the series is then told through a story that’s funny. That’s what I’m always looking for. Sometimes you’ll have an idea that’s just funny, but you’re like, “I don’t know where it lives.” Or this is popping into my head, but Wickie on the road getting tempted to cheat on her very stable, very nice boyfriend that she has back home, who’s a lunch lord, which is the masculine version of a lunch lady. You’re like, “Okay. What would be fun about… ” You’re trying to just find the match.

We ended up coming up with this idea of her having her idea of female arousal. She was talking about having a Home Alone doorknob for this guy Torque that she meets on the road. Then we wrote a song called Home Alone Doorknob. It is all coming from the fact that she’s being tempted on the road. It’s a real story about is she going to cheat, is she going to fall prey to her old ways of thinking about herself first and not thinking about another person. You’re telling that story in an absurd way, but it has a grounded core underneath it and some emotion. Renee Elise Goldsberry is incredible at walking that line, at making you feel for a character that’s talking about a Home Alone doorknob, being tempted to cheat. Yeah, but always looking for the match.

Jen: Yeah, it is very true. When I look back at scenes in Hacks, that always has to have an emotional reason to exist. For example, I can think of a scene from a Christmas episode we did this past season. I think this was my fault. I’ll take responsibility for this.

Hannah Einbinder’s character, Ava, grew up in a suburb of Boston, which is also where I grew up. And Irish step dancing is a huge phenomenon among Boston girls growing up. I went to many an Irish step competition, in the audience, not participating, which was actually weird. Why was I there? But at some point, I was like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Ava had Irish step danced? She should do that performance at the end of Deborah’s Christmas party.” We shot it. Hannah took days and days of Irish step lessons. She’s really good at it, because Hannah comes from a cheerleading, gymnastics background, so she’s very physically skilled. But also, it was really funny. But there was no emotional reason for it to exist in the episode. It didn’t come from, oh, and she needs the warm reception that the performance will get after a tough night or whatever. It wasn’t connected to anything. It was just purely me going, “That would be funny.”

We ultimately ended up cutting it. I think it’s a really good lesson exactly what Meredith is saying. The emotion and the story reason has to come first, or else you’re writing something different, which is like sketch comedy or something, which is great, but it’s not really the shows that either of us are making.

Meredith: You can always feel it too when you do a table read. When you have good story energy, you can just feel you’re locked in.

Jen: Yes, totally.

Meredith: You don’t feel any of the awkward tension that you might feel if you’re on a first date or if you’re talking to a new person or whatever that awkward thing is.

Jen: It just flows in a different way.

Meredith: It flows. Then when you do stop down for something that is comedy nerdery indulgence, that I love too – we all do it. We all pitch things that you want to just see on screen. But then they do stick out, and then you suddenly feel awkward. It’s not working. You’re like, “Oh, that just has to go. It’s just gotta go.”

Jen: Totally.

Meredith: Even though it’s funny. If you had the reason behind it, it might-

Jen: It might live.

Meredith: … be the greatest moment of the show.

John: This is three seasons in that you’re still encountering these situations. It feels like the first season you make the discoveries, things that work, things that don’t work, things that can fit inside one actor’s mouth. You learn things in that first season. But three seasons in, you’re still learning things about your show and what works. Going into this third season, what was the process of figuring out the shape of the season? What was the blue sky whiteboarding? How did you figure out the basic shape of what the episodes would be?

Meredith: At the end of Season 2, we bit off that Girls5eva, they pile into a van and they’re gonna go on tour. And they don’t have any idea of where they’re gonna go, except that they have a hit song in Fort Worth, Texas, because they wrote a pandering song about the city, because it was the biggest city in America that didn’t have a hit song about it.

Going into Season 3, there’s so many things to figure out, where you’re like, “Okay, we need to sell the road, but we also shoot in and around New York City, and we’re not gonna go on the road.” It was like, production-wise, how do you pull off the road without hitting it? We come up with ideas of what’s a home base they could go to. Hotel rooms. A hotel chain looks pretty much the same in every town you’re in. Does someone have reward points? Gloria did. That’s how we came up with the Marriott Divorced Dad Suitelets where they stay throughout the tour. You swap the art out. You swap the drop and whatever. That was good problem solving.

But then you’re also blue skying, like, “What would happen on the road? Dawn’s pregnant. What does it look like if she tries to get a prenatal checkup in the Ozarks? What does that look like?” You’re coming up with, what are some things that would happen that would challenge our characters, push our characters out of their comfort zone?

You’re also thinking, what is the end goal? We went into the season. I had done a lot of pre-work headed in and had the hotel and some rough ideas about, oh, maybe Wickie and Summer have never actually been alone together and they realize that in Season 3. Just a million different ideas. But then early in the blue sky, in the room, we figured out maybe Wickie bit off something massive to make this tour being a Taylor Swift-level tour, and so she books them at Radio City Music Hall, and they’re not that kind of act, and she books them on Thanksgiving. That gave us the engine, like, okay, how do you get to Radio City?

We had six episodes, so it was a short four hours of content to get them from Fort Worth to New York in six months and get a baby out. There was a little bit of math, but also just the fun of pulling off the plot of that, plus all the character development.

John: But also, in planning this to be a tour, you were blowing up your sets. Classically, in comedy, you always get to go back to your sets. Those things are established. You have to establish characters you go back to. You blew up all those things for this season, because you didn’t have those things. Her apartment is gone. A lot of the places we were expecting to see are gone.

Meredith: We did bring it back in Episode 6, because they return to New York. There was a return to some of those comfort sets that we had seen. But yeah, in some ways, the four of them together always feels like it’s somewhere. That always feels like the show to me. Whenever we get them together, no matter where they are, it feels familiar, whether it’s the Macaroni Rascals chain or the van or the hotel room or wherever it is.

John: Now, Jen, your tour was Season 2. We are leaving your sets behind and then hitting the road and going into a bus.

Jen: Same dumb problem of making the show really expensive.

John: Yeah, and the aesthetics are just different. You had to actually go places. We expect to see outdoor locations much more in your show.

Jen: Yeah, there’s a certain, I guess, tone and look that has been established with the show. Yeah, it was a lot of on-location shooting for Season 2, which was really, really challenging from a budget perspective. Also, just credit to Jean Smart. She’s 72 years old. It’s different driving to Universal to shoot on our stages than it is going to Tarzana at 5:00 in the morning.

Season 2, we knew going in it was gonna be on the road, and so those were our benchmarks. Much like Meredith is saying, the strength of a show when you have characters that are so good together, is as long as they’re together, you still feel like it’s the show. That’s how I feel about Hacks is that as long as Deborah and Ava are together, it is Hacks.

Then going into our third season, we had ended Season 2 on a pretty big cliffhanger, which was that Deborah and Ava had gone their separate ways. Deborah had fired her, benevolently, so that Ava could go pursue her own career. We had this huge question of how do we get them back together. That was really the first thing that we tackled when we came back to break Season 3.

Now, we knew that the arc of Season 3 and the thrust of it would be Deborah finding out that there was this late night position opening, and Deborah would say, “Okay, I want that chair. I’m going for it.” We always knew that that would be the thrust of the season. We specifically had to figure out how do Ava and Deborah get back together. But it ultimately felt very correct and satisfying to us that it would be only as Deborah goes after this biggest thing in her life, this biggest goal that’s she trying to achieve, she would need Ava’s help.

John: Now, can you talk about production in both of these situations? I’m trying to remember. Season 2 of Hacks, that was pre-COVID? I’m just trying to remember timelines of things.

Jen: Season 1 of Hacks was COVID, pre-vaccine. We were shooting, but I would get calls, the studio being like, “All the hospitals are full. Do you want to shoot today?” I was like, “This is up to me?” Then Season 2 was still COVID, but people were vaccinated, felt a little bit lower key. Season 3 I believe was the first time we got to shoot without masks, so kind of crazy to actually see people’s faces after three years of working with them.

John: But Season 3 also had dealt with the strikes probably. Were you able to shoot before or after the strikes or both?

Jen: We are so lucky that this show has been received the way it has been. But every season we’ve had some pretty significant production challenges. Season 3 was no different, in that a little less than halfway through shooting, we needed to shut down, because Jean Smart had a health issue and she needed to go have a procedure. We shut down for a few months so that Jean could go and take care of herself and get healthy, which of course was of the utmost importance. Then we came back for four shooting days, and then the strike was called. When I look at the calendar, we started shooting Season 3 in November 2022, and we wrapped in January 2024.

John: Wow.

Jen: Someone said to me recently, “It’s like you’re making Boyhood, the TV show.” It was taking so goddamn long. Yeah, very challenging, long Season 3 production.

John: Do you shoot episode by episode? Do you block shoot? What’s the plan?

Jen: We block shoot as much as we can. We try to get as many scripts done before we start the season as we can, so that we can be nimble and be efficient budget-wise, because if we tried to do it just episode by episode, it would be prohibitively expensive. We do block shoot. The first episode of Season 3 that was locked was Episode 8 of 9. The first shot of the season, this drone shot that comes into Caesars Palace in Vegas, that was the very last thing we shot.

John: Wow.

Jen: It’s very much boarded like a movie, in that you’re bouncing around.

John: Meredith, I noticed on Season 3, I believe it’s one director for the entire run?

Meredith: Yes, Kimmy Gatewood.

John: Has that always been the plan, or why was that choice made?

Meredith: The block shooting of the whole season was a budgetary decision. Kimmy was just also a perfect choice person who could bite that off. Obviously, it was confusing, with one scene that’s in Episode 1, you’re shooting one scene that’s in the finale, all on day one. We had done things like that in the past.

I remember being on set of the Kimmy Schmidt interactive special that had a million potential permutations and universes that you could end up going into and timelines and talking to the actors, like, “Okay, so this time you’re in the blue sweatshirt and the zombies came,” or whatever it is. That was fine.

The one benefit of block shooting is that you have to get all the scripts done ahead of time, which meant that I was free to be on set the whole time. I didn’t have to do that thing where you’re sprinting between trying to check out rehearsal and then you run upstairs and then you’re finishing a script and then you’re looking at an edit and then you’re working on an outline and then you’re pitching another thing. That was not part of this season. The scripts had to be done by this pre-production time. We did it. We prepped, and then we had a very dedicated strike of a shoot. We did the whole thing in six weeks.

John: Wow. Jen, you had a background in more traditional comedy. I’m thinking of The Good Place, or sorry, Parks and Recreation or Good Place, more episode by episode. Can you talk through pros and cons of traditional schedules versus block shooting?

Jen: I think what’s nice about the network formula, the way that Parks and Rec and Good Place were run, was that it honestly just allows you to do more episodes, because it’s this machine you have going. Parks and Rec was 22 episodes. There’s no way we could make 22 episodes of Hacks the way we do it, which is that Paul, Lucia, and I are in every step of the process. We are writing, and then we are on set every single day, and then we are editing. We all do every step of that process. That is just the way we want to do it, because we want to have all of our eyes on every single part of the process. Now, we’re allowed to do that and able to do that, because we do 8 to 10 episodes, but when you do 22, there’s just no way. There’s too much. There’s not enough months in the year to do it that way.

I think from my time on Parks and Rec and Good Place, it worked like a very well oiled machine, that Mike Schur would be in the writers’ room most of the time. Writers would be on set managing their episode and overseeing it. I think what was really nice about that model – and we’ve talked about this – is that it allows for more of a training ground. The writers are empowered. I certainly learned how to run a show by working on Mike’s shows and seeing how he did it, but also being given the power to be on set and having to take on that responsibility.

This has been well covered, but as we divorce the writing from the production from the editing, writers are given less of a chance to do that. There are certainly tremendous advantages to the older model that was tied to longer season orders in that it just makes better writers. Better writers come out of that process, because you become a producer and you become a showrunner that way.

John: Now, Meredith, Jen had a trio of people who were there to oversee stuff. On your shoots, were you the only writer around? Was there anybody else you can go to to help you out on that stuff?

Meredith: Yeah, this season we built into everyone’s contracts that they would come back for the week of their episode and be paid to be on set.

John: That’s great.

Meredith: That was important, for the exact reason that Jen’s talking about. You really learn by doing and being on the job and being empowered to make the decisions about a prop that’s not working or quickly doing a rewrite of a line that’s not working for an actor or whatever it is. You need that experience. That was very important to us.

Season 1 and 2, just because of the nature of the way the things worked, I was alone a lot on set and tired. But also, directors were very helpful. I had producers that would pop by if they were available, Robert or Tina. Jeff Richmond would be around too. Very incredibly helpful. Some writers would come by as well if they were available. By that point, our room was wrapped, so that was more like just to stop by and hang out, really. Not really on the clock. Also, during COVID, we weren’t allowed to have any visitors really.

Jen: That was for the majority of Hacks shooting it’s been COVID.

Meredith: That’s right.

Jen: Writers couldn’t come to set.

Meredith: That’s a good point. Maybe they didn’t come really Season 1 and 2, but yeah, Season 3. The new Writers Guild agreement, it has that thing in that where you have to have at least two people stay the entire course of shooting, I believe, right? Which I think is a great thing.

John: That was one of the things we heard from most going into the negotiation was it wasn’t just lower-level writers feeling like they weren’t getting experience. It was other showrunners who just felt completely abandoned and lost. They were having to carry the entire thing on their backs. It was incredibly difficult.

Jen: I give you so much credit, Meredith, because having three showrunners is incredibly helpful, and even then it’s really helpful. I’m like, “Oh, maybe we need a fourth showrunner,” sometimes. I give you so much credit, because doing it one person is really challenging.

Meredith: I lost a lot of stress weight.

Jen: That’s good.

Meredith: I was just trying to suck protein shakes. How many calories can you put in a shake?

Jen: Oh my god.

Meredith: So I can drink in as much as I can. It was still more exciting than not.

John: Season 3 is now behind you. Looking forward to a potential Season 4. When does the process start? As you’re working through Season 3, are you also thinking about, “These are the hooks we’re gonna establish for Season 4,” or are you mostly just focused on, “We gotta get Season 3 put to bed.”

Meredith: I think obviously the priority is getting Season 3 out. Then as we have in Seasons 1 and 2, we have a little bit of a tease of something to come. At the end of Season 3, you see the big time calling Wickie. It’s her old song from the early 2000s when she went solo, Yesternights.

John: Yesternights is such a great word.

Jen: So good.

Meredith: It is featured in the show The Crown, the finale of The Crown, so obviously, she’s gonna blow up and Kate Bush. That promises what could come. My phone is always just – if something occurs to me, I’ll just throw it in my notes app and revisit it later if there’s something real. But I try to always have rough designs, but not anything too prescriptive or rigid, because I feel like there’s always so many exciting surprises that come that you don’t want to be too locked into anything.

I remember in Season 2, we knew they were gonna do an album for a label. We made the label the Property Brothers label, because everybody’s branching out into so many passion projects that they have. They were on Property Records. We wrote that not knowing if we’d ever book the Property Brothers. I thought worst case, we could just get two brown-haired guys with beards. Maybe we’d get Vince Mulaney and Adam Scott to play them or something.

John: But of course they stepped up.

Meredith: But then we found out they stepped up, and they said they’d be happy to be in it. Then my favorite thing in the world happened. Drew Property, which I’m gonna say is his last name – it’s not, it’s Drew Scott – he sent us some assets to show off, “Hey, we can do all these different things.” One was a reel of voices that he did, animated voices. One was some music, because they’re very musical. Then one was this incredible reel of him doing stage combat in a backyard with guns and just attacking a stuntman and doing all this Jack Ryan stuff.

We saw that, and the writers and I were just like, “This is the greatest thing I have ever seen. How can we license this and put it on the show and use it in some way?” Then that’s what led to the big fight between Gloria and one of the Property Brothers that was I think a couple minutes, three minutes or something. We did not cut much of that out. We wanted it to be incredibly long.

Going into that season, could I have ever imagined that we would do something like that? No. I try to be loose with some of the things that we want to do, knowing that it could change.

John: Jen, we’ve established that you went into your pitch knowing all these seasons. As you’re looking at a fourth season, where are you at in your process? How do you get started?

Jen: Similar to Meredith, you set up these things at the end of Season 3 that you know you’re gonna follow through on. We knew at the end of 3, Deborah’s gonna get this show. That would be a major thing we’d be dealing with in Season 4 is Deborah having this show and getting that off the ground and how does that go, especially when she and Ava have a new dynamic to their relationship.

But it’s also very true what Meredith said. You do have to remember that the process is very much so alive, and so that even though we have figured out a lot of things and we have these benchmarks and tent poles for the entire structure of the series, there are surprises along the way, and there are things that are like, “That’s a better idea. That changes the path, but that’s a better idea.” You have to, I think, be really open to those.

I think that’s one of the reasons that I love being on set and why I can’t just go, “I wrote the script. Go execute it. I’ll do editing or whatever,” is because the process is so alive that you have to be paying attention to every part of it, because things come up while you’re shooting, while you’re witnessing the way the actors are delivering the lines, that you need to be on top of and change and be willing to change and be willing to adjust. We have these big story points that we are moving towards for Season 4, but of course, there’s always gonna be things that we adjust if it’s a better idea.

John: We have a few listener questions here. I’d love you guys’ opinions on what our listeners should do in these situations. Drew, help us out.

Drew Marquardt: Noah writes, “How should I describe nonbinary characters in action lines so as not to confuse my readers? For instance, how should I use they/them, or should I just use a character’s name instead of a pronoun?”

John: For context here, so thinking about inside a script, so it’s not how the characters around them are acknowledging, but what you’re reading on the page. What’s your instinct for that?

Jen: I guess my instinct would be, if it’s a scene that is solo with the character, you can use pronouns they/them. But yeah, if there’s maybe multiple people in a scene, I don’t use pronouns a lot in the action. Sometimes I’m trying to get the page count down, and I do. I’m almost always using their names, like, “Deborah moves to the other side of the room.” I’m just always using the character’s name anyway.

Meredith: So am I. I remember on Kimmy Schmidt, we were like, “Why did we name Jane Krakowski Jacqueline? It takes up so many characters whenever we’re describing her in an action line.”

Jen: I gotta say I love the name Ava. Ava, it has worked out.

Meredith: Ed would be great. I get why they made that show.

Jen: [Unintelligible 00:42:39] for the scripts.

John: My instinct would be, I understand the question. You’re trying to make sure the script feels inclusive. But if it’s important the character be nonbinary, great, call it out on the page if it’s gonna be acknowledged in the scene as well. But not to worry too much about it. You’re right to always be thinking about how do we not confuse the reader. Your answer in terms of just use the character’s name a lot is probably the better choice. On screen, we’re gonna be seeing that person’s face. The person’s name stands in for their face on the page. Drew, another question. How about this one from Tara?

Drew: Tara writes, “I recently won a competition for a yearlong mentorship from two major Hollywood screenwriters. I’d love some advice on how to make the most of it. For context, I’m on the East Coast and almost 48 years old and plan to do this for the rest of my life. I’m a no thanks to retirement, like Craig. I’ve written, produced, and directed three short films, and this is my first feature screenplay.”

Meredith: I think it’s great if you have a feature that you’re working on. What an amazing opportunity to have this amount of time to bounce things off of and get feedback from these mentors. The tangible stuff is always great. I think for me, when you’re mentoring someone, sometimes a lot of the questions are like, “How do get an agent?” Some of the things that have nothing to do with writing.

I think that the things that have the most to do with getting your screenplay in the best possible shape by the end of this mentorship and also, how do I navigate the business, asking questions like, “What would you do if you were me?” Those kind of things are always helpful. But I think, wow, what a great gift to have a project and two great people to be looking at it whenever you want them to.

Jen: I think that’s great advice, because of course you want to use these mentors to ask questions about the business if it feels important and relevant to you. But the business changes at breakneck speed, especially in today’s moment. But good story elements don’t change. I think like Meredith is saying, getting really specific of the script, like, “Oh, was this Act 2 break surprising to you? Did you see that?” Just really honing in on making that story and that script the best it can possibly be will be the most beneficial thing to you.

Meredith: Tina Fey always is a real big advocate of a table read, even if you don’t have production coming up. In this year, it might be worth putting together a little table read of your script when you feel like it’s in good shape and inviting these mentors or at least filming it so they can watch later. It’ll help you realize where your screenplay really needs work.

John: I’ve had a couple mentees over the years. Often, the best questions they can ask are “how” questions. We agree that this is a thing that needs to change. It’s a moment that’s not working right. But how do I get it there? How are the ways to make the scene work the way I want to do? Show some different examples.

When they come to me with questions about, “My manager wants to send it to this person,” when they come to me with a specific question about, “What should I do with this next situation?” that’s always much more helpful than, “How do I get an agent?” It’s specific advice for specific moments, or like, “This producer is taking too long to respond. Do I send this email?” Those are the quick answers I can give them. That may be something that Tara is able to use with these mentors. Last question here is from Stephen.

Drew: Stephen writes, “What’s your take about using adverbs in the past tense to convey emotion when writing action? For example, the slug line is, ‘Exterior restaurant parking lot, moments later.’ The action line is, ‘Exiting with Dre in tow, Sean checks his order. They screwed it up again.’ I want to make it known that this has happened before. I want to hammer home his frustration, but should I just find a better way to write it? Should it just be, ‘They screwed up his order,’ or am I over-thinking it?”

Meredith: Oh my god. I am so confused. Can you read it one more time so I can see what’s wrong with it?

John: It’s confusing. Here’s what it is. In the action lines, Sean is not saying they screwed up again, but there’s an uppercase line here, like, “They screwed it up again.” We’re reading this reaction that they screwed it up again.

Jen: It’s giving us the emotional feeling of, “Oh, god,” I see, I see, versus speaking to format of, why is it all of a sudden switching tense. I see.

Meredith: I think it’s fine.

Jen: I think it’s totally fine.

Meredith: It’s totally fine.

Jen: I sometimes put a smiley face in the action line. I’m really going wild and not sticking to format when I’m writing the script.

Meredith: Also, so many people don’t read the action lines. So many people read the dialog and skim them. I would always advocate just generally to keep those short. This is not the question, but don’t try to be too cute, put jokes in your action line, because that’s never gonna be on the page, something a little winky or whatever. Keep them real simple. If it makes sense as you’re reading it, even if grammatically it doesn’t agree with the tense you used earlier in the clause, I think that’s what you go with.

Jen: I think as long as the story keeps moving and it’s enjoyable to read, that’s all that matters, never a grammar shift or anything like that. As long as it’s keeping me engaged, that’s all I care about.

John: 100 percent. It is time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our listeners. Meredith, do you have something to recommend?

Meredith: I have a person to recommend.

John: I love that.

Meredith: It’s a person that Jen Statsky knows very well.

Jen: Oh, wow.

Meredith: Chris Fleming.

Jen: Yes. Oh my gosh.

Meredith: I love Chris Fleming. He’s a stand-up. So funny. Has a special. Also, I just saw him live in March at Town Hall. It was the happiest hour and a half ever. I love him. He’s so funny. I love how unpredictable he is. I’ve been in comedy a while, and you can start to get where a premise is going, even if the comedian’s incredible and has a cool execution. But I’m like, “I feel like I know where this is going.” But with Chris Fleming, you do not know where it’s going. It’s very surprising. He’s firing on all cylinders. If you see him come through your town, get a ticket.

John: Here’s a question for you, Meredith. Someone like Chris Fleming you see, like, man, this is a great comedic voice, do you think, “I want to just watch them,” or, “I want to hire them on as a writer for something.” Does that kick in?

Meredith: I want to know him. I want to go to coffee with him every morning. I want him to be in my life. I want him to be my domestic life partner. I would love to work with him. He’s great. But yes, I’m just also enjoying it. But yeah, of course.

Jen: I will say, Meredith, I’m so happy you brought up Chris. Same exact thing. You work in comedy a really long time, not to sound jaded, but it’s very rare that someone so organically surprises you and it feels like you’re seeing something new and fresh for the first time.

A friend of mine showed me Chris’s videos. I was like, “Oh my god, this is the funniest person I’ve seen in so long.” I told my manager, I said, “I will do anything to work with this person. He is so deeply funny.” Then I ended up producing his special for Peacock, which you can watch now. It’s on Peacock. I’m so happy that you shouted him out, because Chris Fleming is so deeply funny and talented and special.

John: Love it. Jen, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

Jen: I do have a One Cool Thing. We’re going on a stand-up comedy theme for this one. This one may sound like it’s connected to Hacks, and it is, but I gain nothing from promoting this. I have no financial stake in this. But Hannah Einbinder, who plays Ava, has her very first one-hour special coming out on Max on June 13. I have seen it. She is so phenomenal. If you’ve seen Hacks, great. If you haven’t, guess what? You can still watch this special and you will love it.

Hannah is – the same way with Chris – such a unique, special voice in comedy, doing something that I’ve truly never seen anyone do before on stage. Her tone and delivery is so specific to her. It’s unlike anyone else. She’s such a gifted also physical comedian. We do a little bit of that in Hacks, but the way she moves on stage and her physicality and her act-outs and voices, it is just so phenomenal.

Again, I financially do not benefit from this special. It’s actually bad for me if more people see her, because she’ll be unavailable to shoot the show Hacks. That’s how much I like this special and think Hannah needs to be seen as an incredible stand-up comedian. It’s called Everything Must Go. It’s Hannah Einbinder’s first special, on Max, June 13.

John: Excellent. I’m gonna break the pattern. I’m sorry. I don’t have a comedian recommendation. My recommendation is – the camera in your computer monitor is terrible. They are terrible. They’re not good. They’re not optimized for that. But the camera in your iPhone is fantastic. It would be so nice if you could just use your camera on your iPhone as your computer camera, which you can now. This thing called Continuity. If you’re on a Mac, it automatically already works. You can choose your iPhone. The problem is you need a place to actually put your iPhone. They have this thing now which is a little mount to the back of your monitor, where it just connects by MagSafe.

I’m right now using my iPhone camera. I’m gonna show the difference to you guys so you can see what the difference is. This is the built-in camera for my monitor.

Meredith: Oh, god! Hideous!

John: It’s hideous.

Meredith: It’s like a Bigfoot.

John: This is the iPhone version. It’s a better thing. We’re still stuck on Zoom for a lot of pitches and things, so if you are lamenting the terrible camera in your computer monitor, there’s a solution here. The one I have is from Belkin, but they don’t seem to make it anymore. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a thing that seems almost exactly the same. It just connects on the back. It’s lovely. It just makes things look better.

Meredith: That’s a hot tip.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Roger Corser. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions.

You will 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 weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hats and drinkware now. They’re all great. You can 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 opening up this envelope I sent more than two years ago about the future of Hacks. Meredith, Jen, an absolute pleasure talking with both of you. Congratulations on three seasons of incredible entertainment.

Jen: Thank you.

Meredith: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Jen: Thanks for having us.

[Bonus Segment]

John: The time has come, Jen Statsky.

Jen: Hold on.

John: I emailed you after you were on the show last time. I’d just watched and loved Season 2, and I had a prediction about what was gonna happen in Season 3. You said, “Write it down.”

Jen: I think I made a joke, because I was like, “Wow, wonder if it’s better than what I have planned. Write it down and send it to me, please.” Then you, in a great move, said, “I absolutely will. I’ll send it. I’ll write it down. I’ll send it and put it in a sealed envelope.” I have in my hand that very envelope, postmarked from June 2022. It has been burning a hole in my desk for almost two years. Let’s open it.

John: Let’s open it up.

Jen: Let’s see what you had to say.

Meredith: Should we do a little ASMR of the opening?

Jen: John, before I read this, do you remember what you wrote?

John: I have a general sense of what it was. I think that it was about the power dynamic shifting between the two of them, where eventually Ava would be the boss. I think Ava created a TV show is where I think it is.

Meredith: Good idea.

John: Let’s see what I actually wrote down.

Jen: We’re opening it now. Here’s what it says. “John August prediction for Hacks Season 3. Ava sells a TV comedy and Deborah is ultimately one of the leads. It puts them in an uncomfortable boss-employee relationship, since Deborah isn’t used to being subordinate and Ava is constantly being undermined and second-guessed.” Then there’s a heart, which is very cute. It says, parentheses, “The show within a show barely survives.” Very good pitch. Meredith, I don’t think you’ve seen the Hacks Season 3 finale. How could you?

Meredith: I have not seen the finale.

Jen: But there is a dynamic shift very close to what you’re guessing there, John, in the Hacks season finale. While Ava doesn’t sell a TV show the way you’re predicting, you are, in a good way, I think, getting at this dynamic shift in their interpersonal relationship.

John: What I was envisioning was that it was a scripted series. It was a scripted series more like a Hacks series gonna be reflecting their dynamic. But of course, Hannah would have created it, would actually be the showrunner behind it. The talk show thing is really interesting, because that star is still the star, in a way.

Jen: Is still the star, yes. It is Deborah’s white whale.

John: It [crosstalk 00:56:34].

Jen: It always felt like that would be the thing that Deborah would be going for, to get.

John: I’m glad I wasn’t completely wrong.

Meredith: I think you did a great job.

Jen: I think you did an amazing job, because even though the plot details are slightly off, the emotional details were right on, of a dynamic shift and the power flipping. I think don’t quit your day job.

Meredith: Jen, great job not losing the letter.

Jen: Not losing it. I know.

Meredith: Where did you keep it?

Jen: I kept it in my office, my desktop drawer, and I didn’t touch it.

Meredith: That’s great.

John: That’s nice. Meredith, on your show, the shifting power dynamics are present through the whole thing. I’m thinking about Wickie clearly is the biggest star and she’s not the songwriter and those ongoing dynamics. It sounds like your next season, God willing, is a lot about how they hold together in what’s gonna come next.

Meredith: It is always interesting to see. It’s interesting, I think, to see people change and go through an evolution. Sara Bareilles’s character, seeing her find her alpha side would be interesting, I think, to explore. Every episode, somebody’s more in charge than the other and telling somebody how to live.

John: In doing the Charlie’s Angels movies, I often use this metaphor of fighting the monster. For both the original and for the second Charlie’s Angels, every day on Charlie’s Angels was fighting the monster. You weren’t quite sure who the monster was going to be. Some days you were the monster. But every day everyone had to band together and fight the monster. That’s how we made those movies and why they were so incredibly painful and difficult and bruising to make. Those challenging dynamics.

Even doing the first movie, I already recognized that, oh no, I’m the problem here, and yet I’m just gonna own – I’m not gonna change. I’m gonna just let myself be the problem of the day, and then someone else will be the monster tomorrow that has to be fought. It’s tough.

An absolute pleasure talking with both of you. I will not write down a prediction for Season 4, but I predict it’ll be great.

Jen: Do you have anything you want Meredith and I to send you a prediction for?

Meredith: Do you want us to predict anything?

John: We’re on Episode 645. We just recorded Episode 645. Episode 700 will be our next big milestone. That’s more than a year away.

Meredith: We could pick the topic.

John: Pick the topic of Episode 700.

Jen: A retrospective on the career of Jen Statsky.

John: Absolutely.

Jen: Just kidding.

John: Absolutely. What happened?

Jen: If you want the show to end on 701.

Meredith: If you want it to be done at 700.

Jen: You want subscriptions to plummet.

John: Good stuff. Thank you both so, so much.

Jen: Thanks, John. Thanks, Meredith.

Meredith: Thank you so much.

Links:

• Meredith Scardino on Instagram
• Jen Statsky on Instagram
• Girls5eva on Netflix
• Hacks on Max
• Chris Fleming
• Chris Fleming: HELL on Peacock
• Hannah Einbinder: Everything Must Go on Max
• Stouchi iPhone Camera Mount
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Rodger Corser (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/the-power-of-the-cold-open).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 644 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we will sing the praises of the cold open. Those scenes that occur at the beginning of an episode, often before the opening titles. We’ll discuss how they work and how to make them work for you. We will also check out new requirements for loan-out corporations and answer listener questions on exposition, motivation, and agents. Finally, Craig and I have both discussed our love for the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her. Love that movie. It’s so good.

**Craig:** Love that movie.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, let’s talk about how OpenAI’s new chat capabilities might have us talking to human-like AIs and how we feel about that.

**Craig:** Okay. I don’t want to fall in love is all I’m saying.

**John:** It’s gonna be up to you whether you fall in love. First rule is never fall in love.

**Craig:** Oh, I see what’s coming next, and boy do I like what I’m looking at.

**John:** I’ll let you do the honors here. Tell us what we now have for our listeners.

**Craig:** We now have official Scriptnotes hats. These are baseball style hats. They’ve got the name Scriptnotes written across the front. But why I love it so is because the S that begins and the S that ends the name Scriptnotes is the legendary cool S.

**John:** The cool S. It’s the very cool PT folder kind of Scriptnotes S. We’ve had T-shirts of this logo for a while, but Dustin Box, our designer, said, “Hey, how about hats?” And I said, “Absolutely.”

**Craig:** I gotta get a hat.

**John:** You gotta get a hat. You and I are both gentlemen with not a lot of hair on top of our heads. Hats are very important for us. Gotta protect our bald pates.

**Craig:** Hats are not fashion for us. Hats are self-care. I gotta get one of these. I’m ordering one of these. Can I order one now? How do I do it?

**John:** You can order one now.

**Craig:** How do I get a hat?

**John:** The same place you get our shirts. They are available on Cotton Bureau.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Just let them know they are embroidered rather than being printed. I think they should be great.

**Craig:** John, you could also get glassware.

**John:** Yeah, we have drinkware there.

**Craig:** Scriptnotes themed glassware. I gotta tell you, I love this, because what is my cocktail of choice?

**John:** An old-fashioned.

**Craig:** And where does an old-fashioned belong?

**John:** In an old-fashioned tumbler, so a short, squat, cylindrical glass.

**Craig:** It is a rocks glass. I’m gonna get one. I love it. I’m gonna do some shopping today. I’m losing money.

**John:** Absolutely. Always been a money-losing podcast, and now Craig is personally losing some funds to the Scriptnotes branding.

**Craig:** It’s like you’re watching Scarface snorting his own coke right now.

**John:** I’m excited for these hats. I’ve not gotten my first Scriptnotes hat, but I’m excited to wear one, although I do recognize that sometimes I’ll be out in the wild, I’ll be wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt, and people will come up to me like, “Hey, John.” It’s like, “How did you recognize me?” Oh, because you think that’s probably John August and he’s actually wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. But you know what? Let’s face it. We’re not that famous. Every now and again, somebody goes… I could hardly say, “Oh god, I can’t even walk outside.” I can totally walk outside.

**John:** We can totally walk outside. We are not at the level of an actual actor. We’re not at Glen Powell level of celebrity.

**Craig:** I like that. Good choice.

**John:** Good choice. I will say I was wearing my Scriptnotes T-shirt this past week when I jumped out of an airplane for the first time.

**Craig:** Oh my god, you did what?

**John:** I went skydiving with my daughter. We went to a place in Oceanside. It’s a jump by the ocean kind of place. I was wearing my Scriptnotes shirt. I realized, oh, this is being filmed on the GoPro. Can I write this off? Basically, this is promotion for the Scriptnotes podcast. I decided no, I don’t think that’s ethically correct for me to do. But I did, I jumped out of a plane. It was actually fine and good. For me, it wasn’t personally terrifying. Aline was terrified on my behalf, but I was not terrified.

**Craig:** I am terrified. I will share with you Melissa Mazin’s philosophy, if I have not already on the program. It goes like this. If you do something like jump out of an airplane, go deep-sea diving, and you die, you deserve it. You deserve it. Now, I’m sure a lot of people listening who are avid skydivers are gonna feel very upset by that. I just want to remind them that’s what my wife says. That’s not me.

**John:** Blame it on Melissa there. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the video of me jumping out of a plane if people are curious to see me jumping out of a plane and want to see a Scriptnotes T-shirt in action.

I’ve done things like this. I’ve bungee jumped, which was much more terrifying, because – we can talk about agency here – bungee jumping, you actually have a lot of agency, because you are responsible for stepping off all by yourself. That is a hard thing to convince your body, which does not want to fall and die, that no, you have to go do this. That’s a tough thing to do. In the case of skydiving, I am strapped to the instructor, so I really have no agency. I’m gonna be out of this plane no matter what. I was like, “Might as well just go for it.”

**Craig:** That’s a huge distinction, because I did go rappelling once. Once. The moment where you sit back over air is basically like you just have to tell yourself to commit suicide. It’s the same feeling. It’s insane.

**John:** Craig, my palms are literally sweating just picturing that.

**Craig:** It’s horrible. Once you’ve done that, now you’re just going down the hill and it’s fine. But the moment where you just have to trust that this rope is going to hold you as you let yourself die… I could do that or I could do what I did yesterday, which is to solve the latest issue of Panda Magazine Puzzle Hunt with my friend Dave Shukan, in my seat, without falling off a hill.

**John:** They’re both thrilling. Only one will kill you potentially.

**Craig:** One is thrilling, and the other one is just sweaty and scary.

**John:** There’s a thing I’ve done which is similar to the skydiving. When we were living in France, we were in Chamonix, and we went paragliding, which is where you’re at the top of the mountain, and again, you are strapped to a person. The parachute is laid out on the snow behind you. You just start running forward and the parachute goes up. I guess it’s really a sail goes up. Then you jump off a cliff. But then you are literally just flying in the air. It’s 30 minutes. It’s incredibly relaxing and peaceful. You don’t have that sense of falling at any point.

I would say skydiving, the moments where you’re free-falling is incredibly loud in ways I hadn’t anticipated, and unpleasant. But then once the chute opens, it was just like paragliding again. I got to control the going to the left, going to the right. I was pulling on the ropes. I got to go through a hole in the clouds. That felt really cool.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** The answer is no from Craig.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I don’t think I’ll do it again. Just the hassle of getting down there and setting up… If I lived by an airstrip where I could just go on a random afternoon and just do it, I might. But it wasn’t that life-changing.

**Craig:** You didn’t get the bug for this?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** I’m not an adrenaline junkie, for sure. I was wearing my Scriptnotes T-shirt. I could’ve potentially taken a tax write-off, but that would’ve been a not necessarily kosher thing to do, because corporations are under a lot of scrutiny these days. This is our bit of news here.

You and I both have loan-out corporations – and we’ve talked about this before on the show – which is when somebody wants to hire us to do some writing work, they are not hiring us directly. They are hiring a corporation that we control, and that corporation then hires us to do the work. It’s an abstraction that is very, very common in the film and television industry.

**Craig:** I don’t know if this is referring to… John, have you done the annual report to the Secretary of State of California? Is that what this is referring to?

**John:** Yeah. It’s a new requirement. Traditionally, when you set up a loan-out corporation, your attorney fills out this paperwork and creates this corporation. Then once per year, you have to cement this on-paper annual meeting that describes what happened to the corporation. It’s just very perfunctory. What has changed is that starting in January 2024, most entities like corporations or LLCs, partnerships, have these new US federal disclosures-

**Craig:** Federal.

**John:** … because of the Corporate Transparency Act. It’s actually a big deal, because if you do not file these reports properly, there’s civil and even criminal penalties. It’s all in an effort to combat money laundering.

You and I and our individual corporations but also the Scriptnotes LLC now have to file this new paperwork. Our law firms who generally set up these things have said, “We’re not doing that anymore. This is beyond the scope of things that we are able to do for you.” Most folks listening to this podcast who have loan-out corporations are going to have to do something different this year, which probably means bringing on an outside firm and paying them 100 bucks, 200 bucks to file this new paperwork that has to be filed every year.

**Craig:** I will not be filing the paperwork personally. Here’s the order of business. Buy Scriptnotes old-fashioned rocks glass. Buy Scriptnotes hat. Talk to business managers and lawyers about who is gonna fill out my new report. Then I’ll have lunch.

**John:** That’s what it is. For most of us, it is an email. It’s a little annoying thing. But if you are a listener who ignores this, I would say maybe don’t ignore this, because it’s this year that you have to start doing it, and everyone’s gonna be scrambling to do it.

The kinds of things that have to go in this new report are principal place of business, if you’ve hired full-time US employees, and if you’re a beneficial owner of the company, which you and I would both be that for Scriptnotes, legal name. We have to file your primary residential address or if you got a new passport or driver’s license. Basically things that could look shady in the sense of money laundering, all that stuff has to be disclosed.

**Craig:** I can imagine you running through all these things as you were free-falling through the sky.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Thinking, “Should I write this? Probably not.” You know what? That means that this law is doing its job. It’s making very small business owners think twice, while massive corporations will simply assign a division of A-holes to get around all of this.

**John:** What’s actually interesting is these new regulations apply to companies with 20 or fewer employees. I think because that’s who tends to have the money laundering kind of problems.

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**John:** That is gonna affect almost all of us, because unless you’re Shonda or Greg Berlanti, you’re gonna have 20 or fewer employees as a loan-out corporation.

**Craig:** I can’t even imagine that Shonda or Greg have more than 20 employees, because most of the employees are being hired and employed by the studio or network, for writers, etc. It would come down to producing partners, assistants. Then I don’t hire, for instance, our landscape folks. The only people that are hired through my company really are me and my producing partner, and that’s it.

**John:** But how about your chauffeur and your assistant butler? Those are things that should go through your loan-out, because they’re helping you get your writing done.

**Craig:** My chauffeur and my assistant butler I got from overseas.

**John:** That’s nice. Like an au pair service.

**Craig:** It’s an au pair/indentured servitude.

**John:** It’s good, because you’re giving them an opportunity. You’re letting them move to the United States. You have a little space in the back of the guesthouse. It’s a cabinet basically they can sleep underneath.

**Craig:** It’s under the stairs. I call it a Harry Potter suite. It’s lovely.

**John:** It’s themed. I really like that. It makes it really feel [crosstalk 00:11:56].

**Craig:** I love they made Harry Potter sleep under the stairs. That’s fantastic.

**John:** In our house, there is actually a little room underneath our stairs. Is it the same in your place? Can you get into that space underneath your stairs?

**Craig:** I cannot.

**John:** You don’t know what’s hidden there, basically. It could be anything underneath there.

**Craig:** I think the stairs are solid.

**John:** That’s not true.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** The stairs going up to your second story, they’re not solid.

**Craig:** Of course they’re not solid. I don’t know exactly what is under there.

**John:** I think Kevin Williamson hid something there for you. Somewhere down the road, it’s gonna come out.

**Craig:** We do have a screening room in the basement, which is under the stairs. That goes down itself. Maybe there is a person still under the stairs that I’m not aware of. I gotta talk to Kevin.

**John:** If things go mysteriously missing, yeah.

**Craig:** Wait, if you buy-

**John:** They have to disclose that. It’s in the standard residential buying of a property.

**Craig:** But I purchased my home from one of the most famous horror writers to ever live. Surely he left behind some kind of nightmare. I gotta check in with him.

**John:** Actually, I am thinking about the geography of when you go down the steps into the basement where the screening room is, there is that little nook where the popcorn machine was originally at some point. That’s kind of underneath the stairs. That could be that space.

**Craig:** I think that is. What is currently there is the Chernobyl Mickey Mouse.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** By the way, we had the Chernobyl Mickey Mouse made in Europe. Folks made it there. I asked if I could have it at the end of the show, and everybody said sure. Shipping it to the United States was such a nightmare, because you had to declare it as a artwork. You had to pay customs. It had to have an assigned value. There needed to be so much paperwork filled out, I think in part because it also needed to be really carefully inspected, because it looked like the kind of thing you would fill with bags of cocaine.

**John:** It’s paper mâché, yeah.

**Craig:** It was so suspicious. I just kept going, “It’s from a show. I like it.” They were like, “Fill more papers out, please.”

**John:** Fortunately, there’s somebody on your payroll who just does that. It’s not the assistant butler. Who was it? Was it your vice accountant?

**Craig:** That was just my assistant Bo, who did a great job navigating the US customs people.

**John:** The thing about being an assistant is you never know what kind of weird stuff you have to figure out suddenly. Here’s a onetime only situation. Handle it.

**Craig:** Keeps you on your toes.

**John:** We have some follow-up. First off, Craig, you’ll be relieved to know there is a MoviePass movie now for you to watch.

**Craig:** There is a documentary on HBO that I will absolutely watch. It’s coming out a couple of weeks from now. It is a documentary about the rise and fall of MoviePass. But I think it should be subtitled “the thing that John and Craig predicted over and over and over.”

**John:** I’m a little upset that they did not interview you for this documentary, because come on. Who would be a better talking head than Craig Mazin on this?

**Craig:** I was really clear about it from the start.

**John:** You work for HBO, and you were available.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was. I don’t know. They seemed to concentrate, for some reason, on people that were actually involved. But I will say that the actual collapse of MoviePass, it was a moment that reminded me that the world still makes sense.

**John:** That there is gravity, yes.

**Craig:** Yes, because so many times, things happen, I’m like, “What the… ” That one at least, we were like, “Finally. Yes, there’s gravity. Exactly. Something that doesn’t make sense actually doesn’t make sense.” I’m gonna definitely give that one a watch. Of course, MoviePass, still out there. Zombie MoviePass trying to come back to life in some, I don’t know, new altered state. But the old MoviePass, oof.

**John:** Oof.

**Craig:** I watched the trailer for the documentary. It looks like not only did their business plan make absolutely no sense, but then they were also spending money like drunken sailors.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to this trailer. I want to say this trailer’s also the most HBO documentary trailer. It hits all the beats of an HBO documentary trailer. It feels exactly like what it should be.

**Craig:** They’re pretty good at what they do.

**John:** They know what they’re doing. We have talked about streaming ad breaks, so the idea that you write something and you produce a thing and it goes out there, and it might have act breaks already in there. But because of streaming, they make different choices about where those act breaks go. We asked for our listeners who had firsthand experience, who do this for a living, what the realities are on the ground. We had two folks write in. Drew, can you start us off with Lachlan?

**Drew Marquardt:** Lachlan in the UK writes, “I’ve been an editor for 12 years, and for much of that time I was working with one of the biggest broadcasters in the UK. Even if shows were delivered with specific ad break moments, often we would have to re-edit them to change where these ad breaks would happen. This is because we have a different amount of ad breaks in the UK than in other places like the US or Australia. Here, for a 30-minute slot we have one ad break, for a 60-minute slot we have two ad breaks, and so on. So often we would be joining up ad breaks, usually the old dip to black, and then the compliance team would dictate where the new ad breaks would happen.

“Unfortunately, these days, I believe they don’t use editors as much for this job, and the compliance team creates the ad breaks themselves. This means that even if you watch a show on VOD, it still has a title card that pops up every time the linear version would be going to a break, which gets very frustrating when trying to watch any HBO show in the UK. Sorry, Craig, this is the same with Chernobyl and The Last of Us.”

**John:** Again, what Lachlan is telling us is editing is a skill, and even editing like putting in the act breaks, getting out those fades to black is actually a skill. If you try to not use an actual editor to do it and it’s just some functionary who doesn’t have any experience with this, it’s gonna be unartful. It sounds like it’s unartful.

**Craig:** It is frustrating to hear that about the stuff that I’ve done. There are ways, of course, to find a spot and make a reasonable ad break in a show. But if the compliance team, which doesn’t care about any of that and is simply looking for, “Okay, at this point, at this point, at this point,” yeah, that is frustrating.

This is one of the bummers about working for a network that isn’t streaming only. That is that I have no control over how most people watch the shows I make for HBO, because most people are not watching it on HBO. Most people are watching it on the local service that HBO sells it to. For instance, in the UK, I believe that’s Sky. Sky just I guess just shoves stuff in. That’s a bummer.

You know what? I’m not gonna cry. People are watching it, and they can do the math. Listen. You know what a bigger problem is? The fact that people have motion smoothing on their TVs. That’s where I’m gonna cry. I can’t cry over this.

**John:** No. Zack wrote in with more information about streaming breaks. This is his experience doing a series where he had to put in the breaks. Let’s listen to Zack.

**Drew:** Zack writes, “Last year I edited a three-part series for Peacock. For every cut, we were asked to break up roughly 50-minute episodes into six acts, all with loose targets for duration. The execs noted that Act 1 should be longer than the subsequent acts, but overall there was a fair amount of flexibility. I found that mandatory act breaks impose some fun structural challenges on the team. We might send a viewer into a break with a question that we’d answer at the top of the next act or leave a loose end that we’d pay off in two acts down the road.

“We were forced to build well-defined phrases with sharp edges ending each act. Do writers think in terms of sharp edges the way that editors do? A sharp edge often means a clean break between scenes that shifts point of view, shifts a story from an A story to a B story, cleanses the palette, or maybe does all three. Too many sharp edges can leave you feeling a bit disjointed, while too few can make for a soupy edit. Often, the best sharp edges mark the end of the phrase or a movement. If you have a flowy, prelapsey series of scenes all following a single character, story, or theme, that sharp edge will be all the more noticeable when it shows up.”

**John:** What Zack is describing, I think he might’ve been cutting a reality show or a documentary show, because it sounds like it wasn’t something that was written for act breaks. There wasn’t a writer involved in determining where those things go in. They might be looking at, “Okay, given the footage we’ve got, what’s an interesting question to leave at the end of an act break? How do we get people to come back after the act break?” which is really the job that writers have traditionally done in traditional television, which is we think of act breaks as moments that have rising action, that end on a question mark, so that there’s a real intriguing moment to come back. That was very much the art of TV writing for 30, 40 years.

**Craig:** This is the way it should be done, because there are things that are not written with ad breaks in mind. I think that if you are writing a piece that is meant to be viewed all in one, you shouldn’t be worried about this other part. This other part is not your problem. But then if there are artful editors, like Zack, who can at least make it decent and reasonable when it is chopped up, fantastic. But we need those people. They can’t just be arbitrary.

**John:** I think AIs or just human eyes can actually figure out, “Okay, this is the end of one scene. This is the start of another scene. But is that the right place for an act break?”

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** It’s not necessarily the right choice. If you were to delay that 30 more seconds, it might be a more narratively useful place to put that break.

**Craig:** Also, it’s more valuable for the people advertising, because if it breaks at a dumb spot, that’s where people might just go, “Meh. Actually, meh.”

**John:** “I’m done.”

**Craig:** “I’m done. I’m not coming back.” Soap operas, that’s all they ever did was somebody would go, “You didn’t know? She’s alive.” Cut. Soap, soap, soap, soap, and then back.

**John:** We’ll talk about this more in the cold open section, but I’ve been working on this project that is a bunch of episodes. These are designed without traditional act breaks. But I also know that ultimately there will be act breaks going into this thing. While it’s not the top of my mind, I am thinking about, where would you slot in these ad breaks down the road? I feel pretty good about these episodes since there are natural places where you can put this thing in and it won’t disrupt the flow, and in some cases will give you that sense like, “Oh, I’m curious what’s going to happen next.”

Sometimes it’s just basic good writing. Scenes should end on a moment that has an energy going into that cut so you want to come and see what the next scene is. Most episodes of TV that are written without intentional act breaks should have that kind of momentum that you can get through it if there is an ad inserted there.

**Craig:** I agree. If, for instance, HBO said, “Hey, everybody is gonna watch your show on HBO in some streaming method. Some people, however, are paying less money and it will be an ad-supported experience. Where would you like to put these breaks?” I would take the hour or two with my editors to come up with those moments. The problem for me is that’s not what’s happening.

**John:** They don’t do that.

**Craig:** That’s what they did with Fallout. Even as I’m watching without ads-

**John:** It fades out.

**Craig:** … it fades out and then it comes back. But for me, it doesn’t matter. I could send it that way, and whatever the company is that shows it to people in, I don’t know, India, they have their own needs, and it won’t have anything to do with those things I put in, and so it’ll be even worse. I’m just gonna not think about it.

**John:** What I admire about Fallout, because they clearly anticipated people are gonna encounter these ad breaks and we’re gonna plan for them, it’s not just about fading to black. It’s also thinking about what is the music doing here, because that is what’s so awkward. If it’s just wedged in, music goes up to a moment and then it doesn’t pay off, or then you’re coming back from an ad break and suddenly we’re at this very high level, like, “Why is the music up here?”

**Craig:** Exactly. Because you will only watch Fallout on Amazon, no matter where you live, they have the luxury of dictating that. I thought that was smart.

**John:** Let’s move on to Andrew who wrote in about email anxiety. We had a previous listener who was so terrified and so nervous to send out an email because they wanted everything to be perfect and they got hung up on it. Andrew has a suggestion.

**Drew:** Andrew writes, “I was listening to your podcast where your listener Richard had anxiety about sending an email, and I had a suggestion. Recently, I was listening to Brian Grazer on someone’s podcast, and he had a strategy for getting the most positive response from emails. Apparently, what Grazer does is he watches the stock market and looks for when the studio he wants to work with has their stock go up. It’s on the day that their stock goes up that he sends emails to people he wants to finance his projects. Maybe this method would make Richard a little less anxious.”

**John:** First off, Andrew, I don’t think we said it was okay for you to listen to any other podcasts. You shouldn’t have been even listening to anything that Brian Grazer said, because you shouldn’t have been listening to any other podcasts. Scriptnotes will tell you everything you need to know about the film and television industry. That’s what we’re here for, not other people’s podcasts.

That stipulated, Craig, this is your strategy, I know, because you are tracking the stock market every day, and you’re only making the calls based on how well a certain company’s stock is doing.

**Craig:** No disrespect to Mr. Brian Grazer, but I don’t think this is gonna ever work. First of all, most of the people that we writers are sending emails to are not the owners of the company or people looking to exercise massive amounts of stock options. But even if they were, whatever the stock market happens to be doing that day can’t possibly be that meaningful to these people. Hopefully, the people that are at that level understand that any day’s movement, other than some insane delta, is not relevant to anything. This feels like a way to make yourself feel better about something. That feels like an attempt to calculate your way to success, which in this business is easier said than done.

**John:** I want to give full benefit of the doubt to Brian Grazer. Let’s imagine he’s talking to Bob Iger. If the Disney stock is just bouncing around its normal amount, I can’t imagine it’s gonna make any difference, because Bob Iger is smart enough to know the stocks can bounce around. Now, if the stock was suddenly down like 25 percent-

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** … then yes, it’s not the moment to try to sell your expensive thing there. I completely get that. But small normal things, no way.

**Craig:** Also, none of us are selling anything to Bob Iger. He’s 12 levels removed from that. It does not make sense. It’s adorable. It’s adorable.

**John:** Last bit of follow-up here. We’ve talked in the past about AI being used for coverage and that AI is really good at summarizing things, but we’re very suspicious about AI providing any kind of critical analysis of what material actually is or its worth or its merit. Greg in Illinois gave us his experience with The Film Fund.

**Drew:** Greg in Illinois writes, “I recently stumbled upon an interesting example of AI being used for feedback and coverage. The Film Fund is an organization that provides resources to filmmakers to produce short films. Their flagship program is a competition in which the filmmaker pays $35 to submit a one-sentence description of their film’s premise and how they would use the funds if they win. Winning films receive up to 10 grand. For an additional fee of $14, winners can opt for feedback on their one-sentence pitch.

“In a Reddit thread from last year, a couple of contestants complained that the feedback they received was worthless. The founder of The Film Fund replied, assuring them the situation would be much better in future contests, because they’re gonna use AI to generate feedback. These are his exact words. ‘Going forward, we’re implementing a different approach with our feedback service to ensure a consistent and high level of quality. We’ve trained a custom AI model explicitly on what our judges look for in entries and what makes a good pitch in the eyes of the judges. We’ve tested the output by this AI model thoroughly, and it greatly exceeds the feedback responses we were sending previously.’

“To his credit, he appears to be responsive and reasonably transparent. I don’t get the impression he’s trying to scam anyone. But it’s a bit surprising that he doesn’t perceive how this might undermine whatever credibility the contest has.”

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Here’s what I’m saying. Transparent doesn’t mean good. If someone says, “I am going to rob you,” that’s transparent. Doesn’t mean it’s good. This feels dumb. You’ve spent $49 on a thing that you shouldn’t have probably spent $49 on. This AI coverage, I will not believe that The Film Fund’s special training on what they’re looking for is worth $14 that you couldn’t get from a normal, free ChatGPT or whatever, which you shouldn’t be using anyway for feedback on your writing project.

**Craig:** I’ve never heard of The Film Fund, but I’m looking at their website. What I don’t see is that they are registered as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization, meaning they’re a business. I see no mention of being a charity of any kind. I could be wrong, but I don’t see any of it. I don’t know if they’re a for-profit company or not. But I will say if you have to pay money to submit a one-sentence description of your film’s premise, that’s ridiculous.

You’re paying $35 for somebody to read a sentence? And then for an additional fee of $14, which is a very odd number – it’s an even number, but it’s a curious number – they now will give you an AI feedback based on the input. The AI’s trained on what the judges did. The judges’ feedback is the very thing that they are also admitting was useless. This is ridiculous!

**John:** It is ridiculous.

**Craig:** It is ridiculous. It is absolutely ridiculous. Winning films receive up to $10,000. I don’t know how many they’ve made.

**John:** I’m looking at the examples and winners. They show how much prize money these different people get. They show the example pitch sentences here.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** We’ll look at their thing.

**Craig:** Look at this. Look at this. First of all, on their examples, no one has received $10,000. The most anyone has received to make a film is $6,000. Now, if I have, I don’t know, 15,000 people sending me 35 bucks and I hand out $6,000, okay. But then there are some people who, quote unquote, won a prize of $400.

**John:** Or a three-month subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.

**Craig:** What is this? What is this?

**John:** What is this?

**Craig:** What is this?

**John:** I think it was created just to annoy Craig.

**Craig:** It almost seems like it was. It literally seems like it was.

**John:** AI is being used to just create sites to annoy Craig. That would be a good use of AI is just to build websites that are specifically there to frustrate Craig.

**Craig:** This is really frustrating. I don’t know if it’s the deals that they make money from all the $35 and then they give some out. I guess I would have to look more about them to see. I love this. I hate these people so much. In their frequently asked questions, here’s a frequently asked question. “Do I need to give credit to The Film Fund?” The answer is, “Yes, and we’ll be honored.” How can you be honored by a credit that you are making mandatory? How is that an honor?

**John:** I initially thought this was something European or British, because there are, like The Irish Film Fund, these film funds that are actually national funds, where it’s a whole system by which they help support their local film communities. That’s a valid thing. But by calling yourself The Film Fund, it seems like it’s not even a competition; it’s just a thing.

**Craig:** It’s just a thing. They say, “Where does the money come from? It comes from filmmakers like you who have also submitted their sentence to The Film Fund.” They’re just making people pay to ask a question.

**John:** I do like on the fact, “Why are you doing this?” the answer is, “We know there’s a simpler way to fund films.” That’s a real answer.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** “Who are the judges? You can check them out here.” Let’s take a look through here.

**Craig:** Let’s see. No offense to any of these people. One of the judges is the founder and CEO of The Film Fund.

**John:** I’ll take a screenshot, just because this of course could change. But I do want to point out that at least on my thing, there’s an ad being served underneath one of these people’s photos that says, “Notice this site contains real police records, background reports.” An ad is breaking up this thing, making it look like this person is actually a felon, which is not accurate.

**Craig:** The folks here do not appear to be what you would imagine would be judging what films should be financed. I’m sure they’re all excellent people and valid in their own rights. But there’s a certain expectation of a kind of level of accomplishment for judges. What we see over and over in these kinds of things is that’s not what you get. This is a do not recommend for me.

**John:** I will say four of these people I’ve noticed are all from Lehigh University, which I don’t know of.

**Craig:** Oh, Lehigh University, it’s in Pennsylvania.

**John:** Which is the center of all film production.

**Craig:** That is very strange. We have college friends who sat around, and I’m not suggesting they were high or drinking, but they were sitting around going, “How do we make money?” This is operating like the lottery.

**John:** Here’s what I kind of respect. Over the years on Scriptnotes, we’ve criticized so many of these things that are like, “Send us your scripts and we will judge them.” Here they say, “How do we improve on this process? We don’t have to even read the script. We just have to read one sentence.”

**Craig:** “We read one sentence. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna charge people $35.” Usually, it’s $35 to send your finished film into our festival or send your finished script in. No, $35 to send your log line, and then an extra, if you want a little bonus action for our premium service, we’ll have ChatGPT barf some crap out about it, for free for us but $14 for you. Thumbs down. Do not like. This seems very silly. I’m sure they’re gonna yell at us now.

**John:** Yeah, which is fine, but Drew is ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** When they start these things, I’m sure everybody’s like, “At some point, John and Craig are just gonna swing a bat at us, because they don’t like these things.” It doesn’t mean we’re right. It’s just our opinion, man.

**John:** That’s all we can give. Hey, while we’re having a little bit of rants, I have a rant that I’ve just wanted to talk about for a while, and I think this is the moment to talk about it. Can we please stop sending Word documents around on emails? So often, I will get something that is a Word document that should’ve been a pdf. The problem if you send a Word document is like, okay, am I supposed to edit this? What do you want me to do? No, this is actually a press release, but you’re putting it in a Word document so that it looks terrible when I open it in QuickLook or Pages, because I don’t actually have Word installed on my computer. There’s no reason to send a Word document. Send a pdf or a link to a webpage. Do not send me a Word document. It’s so frustrating for me.

**Craig:** It is a rare thing for me to send a Word document. I only do it when I am essentially saying to somebody, “I’m sending this to you, and I’m specifically sending it as a Word document because I want you to have the ability to edit it if you’d like.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That is the only reason.

**John:** If it’s something you want me to be able to copy and paste out of it, you can do that from a pdf.

**Craig:** Absolutely. It’s literally only like, “Hey, I’ve written this. I’m thinking you’re gonna want to change a few sentences here and there. Do that, send it back to me.” For that, great. But otherwise-

**John:** But I’ll say a Google Doc could be better than that, because that way you can just send the link and they can edit that link.

**Craig:** You’re right. You’re right.

**John:** For WGA stuff, whenever we have to figure out what’s the press release we’re sending out, what’s the thing, we did it as Google docs, because that way we could actually all edit it and look at it. A little more sympathy for sometimes sending the Excel spreadsheet, because sometimes there is stuff they need to tweak and move around there. But also Google Sheets is available, and maybe try that instead.

**Craig:** Those of us who solve puzzles for a not-living use Google Sheets all the time. Incredibly useful.

**John:** So good. So useful. Let’s get to our marquee topic. This is the cold open. We’ve talked about the cold open several times on the program before. I know it’s a little bit of a repeat. But I was reminded of how important and how useful the cold open is because of this project I’ve been working on, because I’m getting the chance to write a bunch of cold opens, which is so wonderful and exciting.

I thought we might start by talking about what we’re talking about, because obviously, every episode of television is going to open with something. Sometimes that’s a teaser for what’s going to happen. Sometimes it’s continually the action from what happened in the previous episode. If it was a cliffhanger, it might go right back to this moment. But you also have the option in television to open with characters you’ve never seen before and just establish a brand new thread of something. It’s a great way to introduce a new character who’s going to be important to the series or at least important to that episode.

I just love a cold open. It’s just one of the most powerful things we have in episodic television. Sometimes people are not using the full power of the cold open. I want to just sing the praises of and talk through how it works, when to use it, why we love it so much.

**Craig:** You have a choice every single time. There is no such thing as an episode that can’t have one. The first decision you have to make is do I want to put one here or not.

They are enormously fun. They are fun for the audience. They work like appetizers. They are wonderfully free of rules. They are not bound into the normal narrative timeline, nor are they bound by the normal rules of who’s that and where am I and what’s going on. They can be mysteries. They can feature people that you never see again.

They’re often great ways to reveal information. You can have an episode where 20 minutes in, one character starts explaining something to another and you’re like, “Okay.” You could also just start the scene with one character explaining something to another and you don’t even know who they are or where they are. You’re leaning forward, and then you get to the end of it, and it’s a little short story that has a twist or something that makes you go, “Whoa.”

Then the show starts, and now you’re fully appetized and ready to go into the main storyline. The main storyline feels like an entrée has been served. Psychologically, I find it very comforting. I don’t do a cold open in every episode myself, but quite a few. Quite a few have them.

**John:** I think the quintessential cold open, the one we’ll put a link to in the show notes, is the introduction to Desmond’s character in Lost. Lost, I think it’s in Season 2, opens with this person we’ve never met before. We’re not even seeing his face. He’s waking up. He’s going through his daily routine. He’s inside someplace, but we’re not sure what it is. We would assume naturally as an audience that it is going to be one of the flashbacks that the show is known for, where you’re establishing who people were off the island. Ultimately, we’re gonna reveal that, oh, no, he’s actually down in this hatch that we’ve been working to figure out what’s inside there. It is a tremendous sequence, and it’s done so, so well and sets up this character that we’re now intrigued by and just really broadens the geography of what Lost could be about.

That’s I think what I love so much about a cold open is that you are creating these scenes that you could not put anywhere else in the episode. Almost by definition, if you’re starting in some brand new place, it would be very hard to slide this anywhere else in an episode. It basically has to start, and in many cases should start before the opening titles. You need all of the viewer’s attention. You need it to not be in the chain of events of the normal episode. Once you’ve started the normal sequence, it’s very hard to stop that and go to some place that’s completely different to establish a new person, a new place, a new way that the show’s going to work.

**Craig:** As you described that, something occurred to me that I don’t think has occurred to me before. That is that a cold open reveals a mystery to the audience with nobody in between. In the normal method of plotting in the main body of your story, when there are mysteries, they are discovered by and solved by and revealed to characters, but not in a cold open. In a cold open, it’s just you. That is a very exciting thing for the very reasons you said. It can’t really happen in the middle.

Once we are in the perspective of our main characters, we must stay there. We can certainly see some things they don’t see, but we can’t have scenes that are speaking directly to us. But you can absolutely have that at the beginning, before you begin the main storyline. That’s a great example where instead of somebody finding a tunnel, going through something, or opening the hatch itself and discovering this man, the show says now, this is just for you, directly for you only.

**John:** The point of view is the audience’s point of view rather than any of the one character’s points of view, which is great, so powerful. Honestly, some shows are built around this kind of idea. Law and Order almost always starts with the discovery of a crime by people we’ve not seen before.

**Craig:** Thunk thunk.

**John:** Thunk thunk. Poker Face, one of the things I love so much about that show is, generally we’re starting with a crime itself. It’s a question of when the hell is Natasha Lyonne gonna show up. You don’t know. She’s gonna come up sometime. Generally, we’re not starting with her.

**Craig:** She’s gonna be there when she gets there, and that’s no big deal.

**John:** She might be in the background of something or we see her arrive and we don’t know how are these two things gonna connect. That’s the joy of this. I love cold opens. Also, the sense that you cannot slide it anywhere else in time, this project we’re working on, has really made me appreciate, god, day and night is so tough, because there’s so many times where you would love to move this scene after that scene, and day and night is killing you, where this scene can’t happen before, because then you’re creating an extra day that is impossible. I’m sure you’ve encountered that in your writing as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s been more of an issue for me when I was writing movies than television, because you have a little bit more of a timeline flexibility there. But the day and night situation, especially as we enter this next storytelling phase of The Last of Us, is important, and so you do have to stay within the bounds of it. But that’s another reason why a cold open is so valuable.

**John:** Yeah. You’re not tethered to the timeline at all, which is so nice.

**Craig:** At all. Doesn’t even matter what year it is. You could be wherever. You could be in the future. You could be in the past. You could do whatever you want. That is freeing, and also, I think the audience appreciates it. They appreciate that they get spoken to directly without any rules whatsoever, before they settle into the traditional experience of the show.

**John:** Yeah, this cold open I just wrote covers a 14-year time span for a character we’ve never met before. It’s delightful to have the opportunity. We’re going from the past into a time beyond when the events of the series are happening. It’s delightful to give you a sense of like, oh, this is bigger than just this one moment in front of you. We’ll see if that makes it through the end, but that was the intention behind it.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Let’s answer some listener questions. I see the first one here is from Matt. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Matt writes, “As an Asian American actor, I’ve gone from being basically Johnny exposition guy in every television show and movie I was in, to now seeing true parts with complex, interesting characters being offered to me. One of the reasons I decided to start writing was because I was tired of being the furniture and wanted to be the interior designer. Since I keenly feel the plight of being the guy asked to give massive exposition dumps, what are some ways that writers can give the necessary exposition without relying on a single character for the purpose or at least make it interesting?”

**John:** What I love so much about Matt’s entry point here is that as an Asian American actor, he feels like he’s Johnny exposition guy. It never really occurred to me, but yeah, I could totally see that. I could completely imagine that the size that he’s getting for an episodic role, he’s just the guy who explains the thing and actually has no character beyond that. Hopefully, that’s changing. It sounds like it’s changing for Matt here in his experience.

We’ve talked on exposition a ton before. But Matt’s instinct here is that, like, god, it’s the worst when one character has to do all the heavy lifting. It’s so true.

**Craig:** Yes. For writers, we’ll do a very, very short sum-up. It is just as important to characterize the person receiving the information and to understand why they want the information and why they need the information and also how they feel about the information as the information is delivered. Relationship.

The scene where somebody is – we say an exposition dump. If it’s an exposition dump and that’s how you’re describing it, you’re doing it wrong. It is a conversation between two people who have a knowledge gap. The knowledge that is being imparted needs to impact the other person. The way it’s imparted needs to be crafted. It needs to feel like a little story. It needs to be interesting enough that people lean in, because when we say exposition dump, what we’re really saying is boring. But people can explain things in a way that is fascinating. You just have to write it well. So write well.

**John:** A recent conversation we had on this podcast, I think you were the one who was talking about how an explanation does happen in real life. People do explain things to each other in real life.

**Craig:** All the time.

**John:** Look for ways in which this would happen in real life, and that’s a way to hopefully keep that scene grounded and unapologetic about its need to get the information out there, because it’s being given from one character to another and not just to the audience.

**Craig:** Think of it as teaching. It’s not exposition. It’s teaching. You’re teaching somebody something. Teaching means that one character takes into account the other character’s education level, information level, what they deserve to know, what they ought to know, and then lays it out in a structured way so that they get it. That is as much fun to write as anything as far as I’m concerned.

But when we think of it as an exposition dump, what we’re really saying is, Character B needs to know and the audience needs to know a bunch of crap. Just have some guy say it. That’s not artful. That is not looking at it as an opportunity. That’s looking at it as a chore.

**John:** I would also say look for moments within those conversations where information is coming out, to have it not just be about that information, but there actually be some character not necessarily in conflict, but some challenge, some revelation that there’s something more there. A scene in which a character says, “Yeah, I knew that, because I’ve actually been following your career over these years.” That’s interesting. That makes us lean in and doesn’t just feel like, okay, now we’re being told this thing. Look for moments where there’s actually some interesting character moment happening there that’s not just about the text.

**Craig:** Yeah, agreed.

**John:** Another question here. It looks like Dean wants to ask us about titles.

**Drew:** Dean writes, “What makes a good title? Does it have to be unique more than it has to be relevant to the theme of the movie? Does a good title help get a script made, or is it just a good script that gets scripts made? Do writers even get the final say on titles, or is that all up to Brian in marketing? What are the best titles you’ve come across, and have you noticed any trends in titles?”

**Craig:** That’s a whole discussion.

**John:** That’s a whole episode. Titles are crucially important and yet the writer who has spent so much time thinking about the right title for their movie does not have the final say. The second Charlie’s Angels was Charlie’s Angels: Forever, it was Charlie’s Angels: Halo, and Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle came because the marketing person always wanted to do something called Full Throttle, and that became Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.

**Craig:** Full Throttle.

**John:** Full Throttle.

**Craig:** Full Throttle.

**John:** But yes, titles are important, because it is the first idea a person has about your script, about your movie is gonna be that title. So yeah, it does matter.

**Craig:** There was a trend – I don’t know if it’s still continued – where scripts that were going out, original screenplays, needed to have bizarro titles, long, bizarre, weird titles, because that was what was jumping out, because people were tired of the short, punchy title. But by the time things make it to a movie theater, they generally do have the short, punchy title. Yes, it is up to Brian in marketing.

A screenplay with a boring title I think is at a disadvantage. But if it’s what we’d call a good old-fashioned punchy title or a weirdo title or a title that is somewhat provocative, just to get them to get to Page 1, that’s really all it is, just literally to Page 1, and then off you go. Try to not have a title that feels like a rip-off of something else, just a blatant rip-off. By the time you get to the movie theater, the title itself is not up to you.

Famously, the movie I’m thinking of is title-cursed is Shawshank Redemption. It’s a wonderful film. It was released into theaters, and nobody went to it, because nobody knew what the word “Shawshank” or “redemption” meant, and certainly not the two words together. It just said nope, don’t come here. Then eventually, people found the movie and it is beloved. But it was a flop in the theaters, likely because of the title. But putting Shawshank Redemption on the cover of a screenplay that you’re trying to sell, no problem at all. None. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

**John:** Unforgiven was The Cut-Whore Killings.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** We’ve talked before on the podcast, I think, about there are rules about titles. The MPAA I believe is the one who has a title registry. If you have a movie that’s coming out with a title that is too much like another title, there can be a challenge. There can be a whole issue. Basically, so we don’t have two movies with the exact same title coming out at the same time.

My movie The Nines was coming out the same year as there was a movie Nine, and the Nine and a Half movie. We had registered our title first, and so we had to give permission for the other people to have their titles. It all worked out. But there is a reason why you don’t see too much of a log jam with the people with the same titles coming out the same year.

**Craig:** Yes. First movie I ever had out in theaters, the script was Space Cadet. Turned out Lucas had squatted on that one with the MPAA. I still haven’t seen his Space Cadet film, but we had to change our title. Did I ever tell you my crazy [bleeps] story about this?

**John:** I want to hear the [bleeps] story.

**Craig:** I’m telling everybody the [bleeps] story. I’m in a room with [bleeps]. Already interesting. He says, “Hey, I have registered a lot of titles with the MPAA. I tell my assistants, if you see some interesting words, I go and I register it, because it doesn’t cost that much.”

**John:** It’s domain squatting.

**Craig:** Literally. Then he goes, “Other people happen to need the title, they pay me.” He was literally domain squatting. He goes, “But some of these would be great movies, so I’m gonna give you some names.” He goes, “Oh, this is my favorite. This has to be a movie, so tell me if you want to write this.” By the way, by “this,” he means title, Body Bag. I’m like, A, in my brain, I don’t think that is a very good title, and B, no. But I was fascinated by the thought process of seeing the phrase “body bag,” picking up the phone, spending the whatever it cost, $5,000 or something, to register that title with the MPAA, even though you have nothing, and then asking writers to write a script for a title.

**John:** It’s not even IP. It’s awesome. I love it.

**Craig:** It’s nothing.

**John:** It actually reminds me of this past week. I was approached to do this movie. There’s a director who wants to do this movie. He basically has a story space. He has a cool deck of cool images. This is a filmmaker who could make something really cool. But there was actually no narrative to this. It was exciting, but also it made me really recognize how much we need constraints.

The fact there was basically no constraints other than it looks like this, it was tough to think about what is the story. What are constraints that are interesting to me? What are the things that I want to avoid about the kind of movie that would have this as a pitch deck? Once I got that narrowed down, then it could go like, oh, okay, this is probably what the movie actually wants to be or what’s interesting to me. But the lack of constraints, where it’s just, here’s an image or here is a title called Body Bag, it’s just too open.

**Craig:** There’s nothing there.

**John:** It’s harder because there’s nothing to push against. There’s no walls to it.

**Craig:** There’s nothing there.

**John:** Let’s get to a question from Spencer here. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Spencer writes, “My writing partner Parker and I just finished a new draft of a project that draws on our extremely unusual relationship. You see, I’m a wheelchair user, due to a form of muscular dystrophy. For years before we started writing together, Parker was my friend, roommate, and live-in caregiver. Our script is a crime genre buddy comedy that follows two people in a similar situation as they try to figure out the limits of their obligation to one another.

“Though one of the things I’m most proud of is the level of specificity we were able to bring to the story, I worry that readers and producers will find it too specific. We’ve felt this concern since the very beginning and have leaned heavily into genre conventions and broad-ish comedy, hoping to ease audiences into the often alien way of life that a disability entails. Do you have any strategies or recommendations for taking out a script that deals with such a particular context? And given the reports of the belt tightening across the industry, the representation boom seems over. Are we too late?”

**Craig:** Spencer, you’re asking a question that I think presumes more than exists, meaning I don’t think anybody is actually reading things through the lens of how specific is this or how authentic is this. I think they’re just reading through things to say, will an audience be entertained, moved, feel something, appreciate what we’re doing here? It sounds like you’ve tried to deliver entertainment, because you’re talking about leaning into genre conventions and delivering broad comedy.

I think the things that are unique to your voice and your writing partner’s voice are the things that are valuable in the script. Otherwise, anyone could do it. I don’t think there’s a specific strategy or recommendation here, other than to say when you submit the script, it’s important for people to know that you are in a wheelchair, because the concern will not be, uh-oh, somebody in a wheelchair wrote a story about somebody in a wheelchair. The concern will be, uh-oh, somebody not in a wheelchair wrote a story about somebody in a wheelchair.

The representation boom, I can’t speak to that, but the representation concern still certainly exists. I think people are looking for authentic voices when we’re talking about things like, for instance, living with disabilities.

**John:** I completely agree with Craig. Really what matters is what is the person’s reaction to this. Are they enjoying the script that they’re reading and can imagine a movie that an audience will enjoy reading? That’s all great. The specificity that you bring hopefully is just making the script better for its own sake.

I would consider including maybe not a preface page, but maybe a page at the end to say, “Oh, so you know, I actually am a wheelchair user. I’m not some sort of person pretending this experience.” That could be useful just for a person who reads the script without knowing who you actually are.

Obviously, we want your movie to get made. That’d be fantastic. But also, this thing will serve as a calling card for you. The fact that it reflects your own experience, when you come in to have that meeting or get on Zoom to have that meeting, it’s gonna be great that they actually have something to connect you with, like, “Oh, these guys wrote this funny script about the situation, and these are the guys.” That is useful to you when you have those general meetings and you start talking about writing stuff for other people. I think you made the right choices. I hope your script is good.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Let’s wrap it up there. We have a couple more questions we’ll save for a future episode. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Craig, I see you have a One Cool Thing listed here.

**Craig:** I do. John, are you a nail biter or a nail clipper?

**John:** I’m a nail clipper. I’ve never bit my nails.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. I have been biting my nails for so long, but I decided to stop. I stopped for I guess 2024. It was, by the way, not difficult. Not difficult. One of the things that has made it not difficult, one of the best gifts I ever got, from my intrepid assistant, Allie Chang, she gave me a pair of Suwada nail clippers. That’s Suwada, S-U-W-A-D-A. Do you have these, John?

**John:** I don’t believe I do, but now I’m looking them up to see what they are.

**Craig:** Oh, baby.

**John:** Oh, look at them. They look so different. They look more like pliers. Wow.

**Craig:** Exactly. They look like pliers or wire cutters. They’re made by a Japanese company called Suwada. They are so superior to the standard nail-clipping device that we can pick up anywhere, because they have so much better leverage, and the curved nature of the clipping edge itself just is so lovely and fits so right. They work like a dream. A standard nail clipper thing is, what, $8? This thing is $85. But if you’re gonna use it for the rest of your life, couldn’t recommend it more highly.

**John:** It also feels like a nice gift for a person who obviously does need a gift.

**Craig:** Yes, you can’t go wrong with this one. For somebody that was never a nail clipper, now I look forward to it. If I’m rubbing my thumb against my index finger and I feel a little like there’s too much nail there, I’m like, “Oh, I get home, I’m getting my Suwada nail clippers out. Kaching. Kaching.”

**John:** How much did you say nail clippers cost? I almost felt like there was a “how much could a banana cost” moment there, because I think cheap nail clippers are even cheaper than you think.

**Craig:** I was saying $8.

**John:** I think they’re like two bucks. They’re like two bucks.

**Craig:** Two bucks. You’re getting what you pay for with the two buck nail clipper. The handles are kind of this lovely texturized rubber or something like that. Also, it’s a particularly good gift, I think, for a dad, because just standard dads love tools. This is a tool. This isn’t a grooming device. It’s a tool.

**John:** It’s a meaningful tool.

**Craig:** It’s a butch-coded nail clipper.

**John:** That’s what we like. Absolutely. It also feels like for people who have their premium knives that they want to treasure and own, it’s the same kind of thing. Get the best tool for the job.

**Craig:** It’s a good tool.

**John:** I have two little One Cool Things. The first is an episode of Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a podcast that many people have probably heard of where they take an existing song, generally a pop song, and they interview the people who made it and go through the stems and figure out how the song came to be, and just interview things. It’s a short episode, like 15 minutes. It’s great. I’ve enjoyed listening to that podcast.

But one episode I want to point people to is Madonna’s episode on Hung Up, which is a great song. It’s the interview with Madonna, over 40 years we’ve known Madonna, the most direct and just work-focused I’ve ever heard. She’s so focused and smart on it. She’s not defensive. She’s not just doing any of the normal Madonna things you’d expect. Talking about how she and the producer came up with Hung Up and the different iterations they went through, what worked, what didn’t work, trying to get the sample from Abba and hand-writing a letter and going to meet with Abba individually. It just made me really, I don’t know, respect her as a songwriter and producer more than I ever had before. Song Exploder’s Hung Up on Madonna.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** My second One Cool Thing is The Ladder, which is a great new experience from the folks who made Lab Rat, the escape room that we love so much.

**Craig:** Hatch Escapes.

**John:** Hatch Escapes. Craig and I were both Kickstarter backers of this thing. We went and played it with a group of 8 people, 10 people last week. It was just terrifically well done. It is different than an escape room. It’s more of an experience. It’s 90 minutes long. It’s all the things you would expect in that escape room in terms of puzzles, but the goal is not to escape, but to do something different. It is replayable in ways that are really clever. I just think it’s a really great evolution of the form.

I want to commend Tommy Wallach and everybody else who put together The Ladder. If you’re in Los Angeles and you love escape rooms, you should book a time for The Ladder at Hatch Escapes. It’s just really, really well done.

**Craig:** I’m waiting to return to LA from production here. Once I do, The Ladder is high up on my list of things to get to.

**John:** It’s gonna be great.

**Craig:** I’m very excited for that.

**John:** Craig, you will see that you are actually a part of the experience itself. I don’t want to spoil any more than that. But you will see Craig Mazin as part of the experience if you go take your time through The Ladder.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Oh, boy.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Don’t know him.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson, in an homage to Severance, which actually feels very much like The Ladder. It all fits together nicely. 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.

You will 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 hats and hoodies. They’re all great. Oh, and drinkware now too. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau, so get your stuff there.

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 new [indiscernible 01:03:16] chatty voice features of OpenAI and what it means and how we feel about it. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Before we start, a little context. Craig and I recorded this segment about OpenAI before Scarlett Johansson called shenanigans on the voice that was being used. If you’re wondering why we’re not talking about that, it’s because it hadn’t come out yet.

Craig, recently, OpenAI had a demo for their new features in ChatGPT-4o, which is their omni-media thing, which does a lot of normal ChatGPT stuff but also could handle images and audio and speech all natively. It’s just much, much faster and can interact with you in a chat fashion more quickly and in ways that just feel novel and new.

I’m going to play one little clip. This is a guy named Rocky who is talking to ChatGPT on his phone. Over the course of it, he’s gonna put on a stupid hat. That’s the only thing you should know if you’re not watching this video.

**Rocky:** In a few minutes I’m gonna be interviewing at OpenAI. Have you heard of them?

**ChatGPT:** OpenAI? Huh? Sounds vaguely familiar. Kidding, of course. That’s incredible, Rocky. What kind of interview?

**Rocky:** It’s for a software engineering role, but I just need to know, do I look presentable, professional?

**ChatGPT:** Rocky, you definitely have the “I’ve been coding all night” look down, which could actually work in your favor. Maybe just run a hand through your hair or lean into the mad genius vibe. Your enthusiasm is what’s really gonna shine through.

**Rocky:** I don’t have a lot of time, so I’m just gonna throw this on. What do you think?

**ChatGPT:** Oh, Rocky, that’s quite a statement piece. I mean, you’ll definitely stand out. Though maybe not in the way you’re hoping for an interview.

**Rocky:** Okay. I got it, I got it.

**John:** Craig, what is your reaction to Rocky’s discussion with OpenAI?

**Craig:** The OpenAI personality I find toxically positive.

**John:** People describe it as like a kindergarten teacher.

**Craig:** Yes, like a bizarrely positive and a little bit condescending, slightly patronizing, like, “Oh, Rocky, you silly billy.” I didn’t believe any of it. I’m impressed. Certainly, it’s cool that an AI can look at an image, parse out what it’s seeing, have a general sense of category, and then make some sort of comment.

It’s sort of like, what do I care about a generic comment about my appearance? What possible valuable information can I get there? Generally speaking, we want information from people that we really care about or people that we believe have specific expertise, not from some vague amalgamation, because that’s what JCrew has on their rack. That’s what the amalgamation is. We don’t need that. I’m mostly just unnerved by the toxic positivity.

**John:** There’s a lot of things to unpack here. First off, of course, we’re playing a snippet of a demo, so this is an optimized version of what this is. From the longer live demo, you can clearly tune the personality of the chat bot. This was probably tuned to be incredibly positive and giggly and all that stuff and flirty in ways. You could turn that down. You can dial that pretty easily, apparently.

What is interesting is this is not a sentient system. This thing is not alive. This thing is not conscious. It’s not her. And yet the illusion of it is so clear to see, because it feels like that because it has the ability to have back and forth and actually really enter into a dialog, it crosses that uncanny valley and makes it feel like there’s really a person there, that there’s an intelligence there that is not actually there.

**Craig:** It certainly prompts the question of whether or not – not begs the question, but prompts the question.

**John:** Prompts the question. Invites the question.

**Craig:** Invites the question of whether or not the Turing test is the proper test. I think in Alan Turing’s day, it made absolute sense. But what we’re seeing now is that this person is a real person, is the illusion of being a real person, is not in and of itself indicative of intelligence, and in fact, creating the illusion of a real person talking to you is easier than we might’ve thought.

So much of it just comes down to how synthetic the voice is. Yeah, sure, she sounds real, and I think would pass the Turing test in the most rigid sort of way. But it’s unnerving. I find it unnerving.

**John:** We know that this is a demo of an AI speaking back to us, but I can just imagine a year from now, two years from now, there’d be a lot of situations where we just don’t know if we are talking to a real person or not talking to a real person. That feels like, I don’t know, a social boundary that we’re not really prepared for.

If I’m talking to customer service right now, I get a sense of when it’s a real person, when it’s not a real person. I won’t a year from now, two years from now. That is different. I will know that if I’m talking to an executive on Zoom, that’s a real person. But we may soon not really know if that’s an actual real person we’re speaking with. I don’t know, something makes me feel uncomfortable as a human not knowing that.

In situations where I do know that I’m talking to an AI, I think there could be useful things coming out of that. Siri is so frustrating and useless most of the time. Same with Alexa. But this seems like you could actually get meaningful information out of it. If I was in a situation where I needed to know something, I might just ask the question out loud rather than googling it, and that feels great.

**Craig:** It’s an extension of Siri, which nobody thinks of as being alive. It’s interesting, one of the things that AI seems to struggle with is the concept of being interrupted. Interruption is hard, and yet it is fundamental to the way humans talk to each other. We somehow managed to interrupt each other without destroying each other’s train of thought. We don’t keep talking. There’s an interesting back-and-forth rhythm that I think they have to figure out. Do you know the comedian Ron Funches?

**John:** I recognize that name, but I couldn’t think of what he’s known for.

**Craig:** He’s so funny. He’s so, so, so funny. He has this bit about filling out CAPTCHA things. What he says is, “Why do I always have to prove to a robot that I’m not a robot?” He’s like, “The thing is what the robot is asking me to do, to enter a random series of letters and numbers, is pretty much the kind of thing a robot should be able to be good at. It’s not even a good test. It’s really proving that I am a robot.” I just love that. I love that concept of what the robots think is indicative of humanity and then how they give it back to us.

Look. The AI thing at this point I’m just starting of think of as a meteor that might miss the planet or smash into it, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing.

**John:** There’s things we can do to mitigate certain harms, but there’s overall bigger things that are way outside of our pay scale and what we can control.

I want to go back to interruptability, because I think one of the things that made this demo impressive was there was better interruptability. It wasn’t perfect, but you could just talk over the AI, and it would still hear you when you’re talking over it. You didn’t have to wait for it to be done before you can say the next thing, which is useful and good.

But it’s also a great reminder of, when movie dialog feels artificial, it’s because you feel like people are not allowed to talk over each other, they’re not allowed to interrupt each other, they’re not allowed to interject before a sentence is finished, and in real life we’re doing that all the time.

**Craig:** Yes. Maybe what they’ll get better at is the idea of not stopping when somebody interrupts you, but continuing and then going, “Oh, exactly.” Hearing and talking at the same time is tricky. I feel like right now, AI either listens or talks. Certainly, Siri is horrible at that. Do you find yourself getting angry when you’re like, “Hey, lady, play me the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof,” and then there’s a long pause, and then she’s like, “Playing Hamilton, the 1983 free version.”

**John:** So incredibly frustrating.

**Craig:** I’m like, “What?”

**John:** Here is our daily struggle. While we’re making breakfast, we have Alexa Flash News. Flash News should play NPR’s brief little three-minute “here are the headlines” kind of thing. Maybe 70 percent of the time, that’s what happens, but another 30 percent of the time, anything else could happen. It could play Fox News. It could play on a different speaker in a different room. It’s so frustrating. It feels like I’m in some sort of experiment, where it’s like how much can we torment John before he’s had coffee.

**Craig:** Then you find yourself having this increasingly stern, escalating argument. “I said the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof.” “Now playing Annie.” I’m like, “I said… ” I’ll say, “No.” Now I realize it’s like I’m talking to my dog at this point. “No, Bonnie. No.”

**John:** Maybe what we need is we need the AI’s kindergarten teacher, like, “You did a good job. Oh, Rocky, I think that’s great that you were able to play that.”

**Craig:** I feel like this version would be like, “Sounds like you’re a little frustrated. I get it completely. Doing my best. Tell me one more time.”

**John:** That’s what we’re gonna hear.

**Craig:** Ah! Ugh! Eck!

**John:** Ah!

**Craig:** Ugh!

**John:** Ee! Also, now, imagine being a kid. You’re a two-year-old, a three-year-old who’s growing up in this world now. It’s just gonna be very different. The expectation that there’s a disembodied voice who should always be able to tell you things, to tell you a story, to do whatever, it’s just a very different experience.

**Craig:** Then our children will look at that generation like, “Oh my god. The worst.”

**John:** “So coddled.”

**Craig:** “The worst.” Instead of iPad kids, now they’re AI kids. Just sit the kid in front of the AI and let them talk to their imaginary friend. God. You know what? Generation X, John. We were the last ones out.

**John:** The last true generation.

**Craig:** Last true generation before all this crap. We’re the best. (sings) We’re the best around. Nothing’s ever gonna bring me down. I think I can get that out before the copyright kicks in.

**John:** Love it. Craig, thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes hats](https://cottonbureau.com/p/UMVJ36/hat/jon-bon-jovi-of-podcasts#/20330764/hat-unisex-dad-hat-dark-grey-100percent-cotton-adjustable) and [drinkware!](https://cottonbureau.com/p/JBYJB4/drinkware/scriptnotes-gold-standard#/20331064/tumbler-everyday-tumbler-black-powder-coat-20-oz.)
* [John jumps out of a plane](https://www.instagram.com/reel/C66u0u6pbBG/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==) on Instagram
* [Corporate Transparency Act: An Overview of Impending Reporting Obligations](https://www.faegredrinker.com/en/insights/publications/2023/10/corporate-transparency-act-an-overview-of-impending-reporting-obligations)
* [MoviePass, MovieCrash | Official Trailer](https://youtu.be/3G75RASEmUI?si=b5W5zEmpV4r8UzCT) from HBO
* [The Film Fund](https://www.thefilmfund.co/) and [the Reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/Filmmakers/comments/16ftex6/is_the_film_fund_a_reliable_website/)
* [LOST – Desmond in the Hatch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgsNjTyGsRk)
* [Suwada Nail Clippers](https://www.suwada.co.jp/en/products_en/nailnippers)
* [Song Exploder – Madonna’s “Hung Up”](https://songexploder.net/madonna)
* [The Ladder](https://www.hatchescapes.com/the-ladder) by Hatch Escapes
* [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/644standard.mp3).