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

**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:** You’re listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, if one were to eavesdrop on the conversations happening at Los Angeles restaurants or the chatter occurring on Zoom meetings before everyone gets there, you might assume things are pretty rough in Hollywood these days. Today on the show, we’ll look at what’s going on in the industry, its historical analogs, and some suggestions for what might fix it.

**Craig:** I’m sure that they’ll listen to that, right? We’ll suggest what to do.

**John:** We’ll suggest the things.

**Craig:** And then they’ll do it.

**John:** The industry bigwigs will do it.

**Craig:** They’ll do it.

**John:** It’s not even just the industry bigwigs. It’s really the structural fundamental changes that will happen, or maybe we don’t need to do anything. It’ll all sort itself out.

We’ll also answer listener questions. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what happens after we die. No, Craig, we’re not talking about the afterlife.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** What specifically happens to all of our accounts and passwords and other aspects of our digital lives and what preparations should we make, should Craig or I or Drew, for that matter, suddenly keel over and all our stuff is there.

**Craig:** Sweet release. Yes.

**John:** Sweet relief for us, but not for our heirs, not for everybody else.

**Craig:** No, everybody else is gonna have a mess to clean up. But we will be free, released-

**John:** Free.

**Craig:** … back into the simulation.

**John:** Clear.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Drew Marquardt:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** First we have some follow-up. To start us off with, Javier in Peru apparently has some corrections about our Star Wars beer ads.

**Drew:** The Star Wars beer commercials were real, but not in Peru. They happened in Chile.

**Craig:** Ah, all right. Then apologies to Isabela Merced, who is Peruvian, and ha ha Pedro Pascal, who is from Chile.

**John:** Love it all. But apparently, that was not the only mistake Craig made in Episode 641.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**Drew:** Daniel wrote, “Craig referred to the birthday paradox and got it wrong in the same way that Johnny Carson famously did. The paradox is not that if you have 23 people, there’s more than 50 percent chance that at least one will have your birthday. In fact, that’s very unlikely. The paradox is that in a group of 23 people, there’s a more than 50 percent chance that at least two of them share the same birthday. This is actually a simple calculation, as it’s one minus probability that they all have different birthdays.”

**Craig:** You know what, Daniel? Absolutely correct. This isn’t me being defensive. I knew that. I think I just said it wrong. I misspoke. But yes, I did in fact know that that was what it was, so you do get the gold star for the correction. I have no problem saying oh, darn it, I blew it, but in this case, I just misspoke. I did know the nature of that.

**John:** Now, apparently, Craig was not the only person who made a small mistake or a small issue of disagreement in 641. James wrote in and actually send audio. I think because of the nature of this, we’re gonna play James’s audio, which is fantastic. Let’s take a listen to James.

**James:** In addition to the email, John, I thought you ought to hear from a native New Yorker. I was born in Brookdale Hospital. My father was born in Brookdale Hospital. We are still here. Our accents are still here. I’m a Black dude, so you gotta throw in the AAVN, whatever. My parents are from the South, so I got New York, I got down South. But I always tell people either go from y’all or yous, depending on who I’m talking to. You know what I’m saying?

I understand what you saying, but Brooklyn has more people than Philly. We gotta stop seeing four or five gentrifiers in Bushwick, Greenpoint, and they represent Brooklyn. No, they don’t. They will be in another city in five years. My mother is buried in Brooklyn. I’m just saying that to say that we still here. You gotta move around.

I don’t know where to send people these days to find a real New York accent. But it’s not the vegan dude with the mustache and his stupid lumberjack, whatever that is, that nonsense. He wasn’t wearing that in high school. Come to Brooklyn, he gonna change all of a sudden. Whatever, dude.

But like I said, the Brooklyn accent is still in effect, no question about it. I’m writing characters. All my stories are set in New York City with real New York natives. I gotta hear that accent, because like I said, people only associate the accent with white people, to be honest with you. But like I said, we out here. It’s funny, because whenever rappers from New York go anywhere, the first thing they talk about – these are Black rappers, of course – is our accent, because they know where we from: New York.

**Craig:** Oh, man.

**John:** Oh, man.

**Craig:** I love James so much. I just want to hug him. That is the sound of my youth. James, Brooklyn-born Craig over here. Absolutely. There’s a generational thing. There are different kinds of accents inside of Brooklyn. What we think of as that classic Brooklyn accent, I would say it’s an accent that was predominant in the mid-20th century and mostly among white people. Very specific things. For instance, my grandfather wouldn’t say “toilet.” He would say “TUR-lit”. The TUR-lit. That is a specific thing. But Black Brooklyn accent is also a specific thing. That was awesome. That was a great example of it.

There are all those different accents. What he’s referring to as, I guess we would call them the hipster Brooklyn people, I agree. My mom grew up in Bensonhurst, and she still has that accent. The mid-20th century Brooklyn accent’s very strong.

**John:** It’s fantastic to hear James’s voice. On 641 I talked about how the fact that when casting breakdowns say they want Brooklyn accents, what are you actually talking about? They probably honestly really want James. But if you actually look at who’s living in Brooklyn right now, you can’t guarantee that a person that you pluck off the street in Brooklyn is gonna have that accent. I was just in Brooklyn actually this whole last week. I was there for the Brooklyn half-marathon, which was really fun. I got to run through all the neighborhoods of Brooklyn. It was fantastic, and I loved it. James also makes the very good point that Brooklyn is huge. Brooklyn would be the fourth biggest city in America if it was its own city.

**Craig:** It’s massive.

**John:** It’s nuts how huge Brooklyn is. In that giant not-quite-city. You’re going to find all sorts of different accents, but this is the one that I think people are really talking about. We just need to actually denote specifically what you want when you want to hear James, because we want to hear James.

**Craig:** I’m gonna go ahead and put an R rating on the episode here. Hannibal Buress has one of the funniest things. He’s talking about these people in Brooklyn that James is referring to with their lumberjack shirts. I’m paraphrasing, but he’s like, “I don’t mind if you want to wear a lumberjack shirt and have a waxed curly mustache, but don’t talk to me like you aren’t standing there looking like a carnival face motherfucker.” Carnival face is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** Carnival face. We are so far past the whole hipster thing. We’re probably 12 generations of pop culture cycle hipsterism now. God only knows what it’s up to now. I sure do like James for just being as real and true Brooklyn as possible. God, I hope he’s a Yankees fan. I don’t know what to say. If he’s a Mets fan, it’s gonna break my heart. James, can you just let us know, Mets or Yankees.

**John:** I want James making movies too. I’m glad he’s listening to the show. I’m glad he’s writing. I want to see what he makes.

Also in Episode 641, we talked about gendered words. We’ve talked about blonde with an E versus blond without an E. Ian wrote in to point out that there actually is a male equivalent. The male word for brunette is brunet. Really, it’s without the extra T and the E on the end. I’ve never seen that used in English. Have you?

**Craig:** I have not, but it’s certainly consistent with the way French works. Brunette is not a word that I ever use anyway.

**John:** Yeah, it’s weird.

**Craig:** What’s wrong with just brown? Brown hair?

**John:** What is wrong with brown? It got me thinking as we had this discussion. Why don’t we just use the Anglo-Saxon word for blond? Because there were Anglo-Saxon blonds. Why don’t we use that? I looked it up, and the Anglo-Saxon word for blond is whitlock.

**Craig:** Great. Let’s use it.

**John:** Which means wheat-haired. Whit is wheat, and lock is that… I had a friend, Paige Whitlock, who I went to college with, who had blonde hair.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Her name was Paige Blonde.

**Craig:** That’s on theme. Also, there’s towheaded, which we usually use for children. My oldest kid was a towhead. I guess that’s a slightly different meaning. Yellow isn’t really a great descriptor of what blond hair is, because blond hair is more of that kind of lightish brown. To me, truly yellow is you’ve dyed your hair.

**John:** There are people who are almost just platinum blond, but it tends to be really young people, who have strikingly blond hair.

**Craig:** Towheads.

**John:** Towheads.

**Craig:** Towheads.

**John:** Also in 641, we asked people who had to deal with putting in the act breaks and streaming shows if they had firsthand experience to write in. Somebody did.

**Drew:** JG writes, “I have a few features running on services like Prime, Tubi, and Roku. The service that distributes those movies to those sites, Filmhub, requires that you provide metadata with commercial breaks for each movie. Their rule is you have to offer a break every 12 minutes or less, but not more. As a producer submitting the movies, it’s my job to go in and fill in the time codes for where each commercial breaks will take place. My goal was always to find the best or least intrusive spot for the breaks. But I suspected if a producer didn’t provide the metadata, the system would randomly insert the commercials within that 12-minute framework. It was a frustrating and time-consuming process, because as we know, movies aren’t designed for ad breaks. I know I opted for more breaks than I might’ve needed in order to put breaks at what felt like the most opportune moments.”

**John:** This feels like delivery requirements. We probably have talked about this on one of our 642 episodes before this. If you make a feature and you are delivering a feature to the buyer, they will have a whole long list of delivery requirements, which is not just, “Here’s the finished film,” but, “Here’s all the audio. Here’s all the paperwork that shows that we actually control all the music in this.” Delivery requirements will also be apparently now this metadata for where the commercial breaks should go. Not surprising that they’re asking for it, but JG had to do this him or herself.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s actually a good point. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about delivery requirements. We’re so focused on how do you write a screenplay, how do you get something made into a television show or a movie, but there is a kind of industrial aspect of all this, where what you provide needs to meet legal requirements. It is a product to some people.

We think of it as art, but there are people who must make sure that there is some sort of quality control and product uniformity. That means there is a minimum run time that it must hit. There are long lists of requirements for credits. How large are the credits? Where do the credits go? How big are the credits? Is that per individual deals? Is that per union bargaining agreements? There are certain delivery requirements in terms of sound levels. There are delivery requirements in terms of the fidelity of the image. Do you have to submit in a certain resolution or more or less? Do you have to supply it with sound that is capable to be both stereo only or surround? Is it full surround? Is it 5.1? Is it 7.1? Blah blah blah blah blah. All that technical stuff, there are just entire departments working on that, to make sure that when you and I get our job done, that wherever it ends up, it’s theoretically hitting some minimum level of quality.

**John:** Where our listeners are gonna probably run into this is that if you go off and make an independent film, you’re like, “Great. I spent the money. I made this independent film. I maxed out my credit cards. I’m selling it to this company.” They say, “Great. Here are the delivery requirements.” Suddenly, you have tens of thousands of dollars more expenses you have to incur in order to deliver the thing that they are buying. That could be a real drain. On my movie The Nines, we had to deliver in this format and that format and the other format. We had to deliver a cut negative. There were things I required.

**Craig:** Negative cutting, there’s something that no one worries about anymore. Hey, kids. Listen up. You would film on film, and then by the time you and I were working in the business, the images would be transferred to video using something called a Telecine. Then that video would be digitized into your digital editor, your Avid probably. You would edit on that. That would create an EDL, an edit decision list. Every single shot has a frame. Then when all that was done and the picture was locked, they would send those just reams of paper with all of the ins and outs of every single shot. Then negative cutters would take the negative of the film and a splicer and a chopper, and they would begin to assemble it painstakingly over the course of I don’t know how many days, creating one long Frankenstein negative that was the edited film. That was then run through and reprinted onto a single negative. Then that was the thing that they made. I believe that’s how that worked. Then we ended up with a DI, digital interpositive, and all that other stuff.

Now the workflow, unless you’re dealing with Christopher Nolan or a filmmaker that’s really committed to physical film, all that’s gone. There is no more negative cutting.

**John:** Yeah. Not only would you need to deliver a print or something else that could be distributed, as Craig was saying, the sound has to be in this format versus that format. You had to deliver a print that has the sound printed on it. There were all these requirements. Some of those have gone away. As JG is saying, now there are new requirements.

I didn’t have to, at that point, supply where the commercial breaks are. With my movie The Nines, one of the things I was required to do was to deliver a broadcast-ready version of the movie, basically a sanitized version of the movie that could be aired on, realistically, cable. I remember talking with the company who was doing that, and here were their suggestions for how we were going to get that done. It was crazy. As far as I know, it hasn’t ever aired on basic cable, but there is a cut someplace that could do it.

**Craig:** Somewhere. We went through this on Season 1 of The Last of Us. We had to go through a delivery process that held two weeks to convert the image into HDR, high dynamic range, which some televisions can make use of. That two weeks was brutal actually, because we were right up against it to try and get things done. A lot of movies and television shows are right up against it because of the proliferation of visual effects, how many visual effects there are, getting those visual effects delivered in time and then shoving it through the rest of the sausage factory, including things like HDR and all that other fun stuff. Yay the people that do the delivery stuff, because god knows I would butcher it.

**John:** Oh, yeah, also because it’s a job that you are doing once. You are doing maybe once or twice a year if you’re just doing a lot of stuff. You would need a person whose job it is to do that every day, who actually understands what these things actually mean on paper and what they actually take in time. That’s why you have post-production supervisors and-

**Craig:** Sure do.

**John:** … contractual obligation people who oversee stuff, people who are figuring out what the credits are, what that run is. It’s a lot.

**Craig:** There’s a reason that there are all those names in the credits.

**John:** Now, before we get on to our main topic, a few episodes back we had Ken White come on, and he did a great job of talking through the realities of the law we see on TV and the lawyer-client relationship we see on TV versus realities. I was thinking we should do that for some other professions, because there’s professions we see all the time in film and television, and we don’t know what the actual realities are behind that. This is a thing where our listeners may be able to help us out.

Some things we would love to be able to talk with people about. A private investigator. If you know or are a private investigator who does the kinds of things we see on TV but the reality version of that, we’d love to talk with you. A military specialist. We see all these military actions in film and television. We don’t know what the realities are behind that. Public school teachers, especially in high school. There’s a whole genre of teacher movies. We could talk a little bit more about teachers. Police officers, of course. We see cop stuff all the time. Be curious to see what the realities are there. Then we have a few more long reaches. We have an astronaut on deck. We could talk about that.

If you have suggestions for this is a person who actually does this job who could be a great guest on Scriptnotes, write in to ask@johnaugust.com, because in the weeks ahead, we’d love to do more of those kind of episodes.

Let’s get on to our main topic here, which is, man, things are just terrible, or they feel kind of terrible. Literally, at dinner last night, I was sitting with a group of other writers and filmmakers. It’s really tough to set up a project now, to sell a project right now. Craig, you may be a little bit insulated from this, because you’re up in Vancouver, you’re doing your TV show. Your head’s down, doing your work. But for the rest of us who are down here in Los Angeles, it is really weird and tough in a way that is just different than previous years.

**Craig:** Insulated though I may be, because I have a television show that’s on and running, I hear about it all the time. There’s no part of me that’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know what everyone’s cranking on about.” No. There has been a significant – I hesitate to use the word correction, because that implies that things were wrong prior. There has been a significant change in both the quantity of shows that are being made, the way they’re being made, the amount of episodes that are being made, the costs of those series. Everything has changed in such a way that there’s a squeeze now.

I think that a lot of the issues that we’re dealing with were anticipated by and partially addressed by the strike. The things that the Writers Guild were looking for dovetailed entirely with the problems that we see now. What’s important to always keep in mind is the Writers Guild negotiates a collective bargaining agreement for people who are hired. The Writers Guild, even with the minimum guaranteed room size, that’s not going to be something that keeps 9,000 people at work if there aren’t 9,000 jobs. It’s just not how it goes. There is no way to insulate the workforce from a contraction like the one we’re seeing right now.

**John:** Yeah, for sure. We’ll put links in the show notes to two different articles. The one that had the most people talking about it the last couple weeks was one by Daniel Bessner, he was writing for Harpers, called The Life and Death of Hollywood. It’s really recapping what’s been happening over the last few decades and how we got to this moment. For a lot of people, it’s gonna be very familiar territory. But there were a couple of quotes and interviews in there that stuck out.

The first one I want to talk about is Alena Smith. She wrote and created the series Dickinson for Apple TV. She says, “It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multi-billion dollar grant from the tech world, but we mistook that and were, frankly, actively gaslit into thinking that was because they cared about art.”

What’s she’s saying here is that we did, with a rise to streaming, just get suddenly a whole bunch of new opportunities to make weird, cool shit, but we shouldn’t ever confuse ourselves that they wanted to make the weird, cool shit because they wanted us to be artistically satisfied. They were chasing audience. They were chasing just esoteric, strange audience. Their whole goal was to get as many people as possible to subscribe to these shows. They really weren’t that obsessed with how successful any individual show was. Now, the correction is that they really want those shows to be hits, and that is likely largely driving some of this contraction and this retreat to safety that we’re seeing in the things they’re actually choosing to make.

**Craig:** I think the phrase “too good to be true” comes to mind. You said they were chasing an audience. I’m not even sure they were chasing an audience. I don’t even know what they were doing. In terms of the amount of content that was being created, it seemed like they were trying to build overwhelming libraries of stuff. Instead of saying, “Hey, come to our new store, because if you like pants, we have pants,” they were saying, “Hey, we built a new Walmart. We have literally everything you could possibly ever want. Go wander the aisles.” It’s Costco of stuff. What they weren’t doing, and I couldn’t understand it, was having any concern whatsoever with who, if anyone, was watching some of these shows.

When the Warner Bros-Discovery merger happened, there was this immediate convulsion, because under the direction of the CEO, they took off a bunch of things from the streaming service. In the articles, there were these little mentions that some of the things that they had taken off were being watched by tens of people, so in a statistical sense, unwatched. There was so much stuff. Because everything is expensive when you are creating demand, high labor demand, the cost of things, not necessarily of the writers, but the cost of production and key actors start to go up. Everything inflates. What we ended up with was a bubble.

The only thing that I would say to Alena is that the studios and networks have been actively gaslighting writers forever. This is not new. They are constantly lying to us any time they say, “Hey, we love you. We love your mind, and we love what you do.” They’re lying. What they’re saying is, “We hope to god that whatever it is that you do, which we may not even understand, people become obsessed with and pay us to watch.” That’s all they’re ever saying. That’s all they’ve ever said. That’s all they ever will say. But they dress it up in all sorts of alluring phrases.

What changed during the bubble time was they actually didn’t seem to care about anything. They just wanted stuff to get made. It was almost like in the late ’80s and early ’90s when home video made it so everything was profitable. In this case, profit didn’t matter. Therefore, they made everything.

**John:** I’m really glad you brought up the difference between audience and just doing stuff to do stuff, because it reminds me of criticism I see of web traffic. For a long time, these websites were generating huge numbers of eyeballs. People were seeing stories on these sites. Everything was about chasing views. But there’s a difference between views and audience. An audience actually likes the thing you’re doing and wants to come back and see it again. They actually really engage with the content you’re making, versus someone who drops by your site and then immediately bounces back off and leaves. Many websites are having to retool and really think about who do we actually want to attract to what we’re providing, and how do we keep them engaged and involved.

That does feel like the same kind of distinction we’re seeing here is that they were trying to build these megamalls and recognizing that most of these stores that they were opening up, no one wanted to walk into.

Also in this article, they were talking about the short-termism that happens is because once you actually start just looking, like, quarter by quarter, how much are we growing these things, when you have investors really wanting to see, “We have to have a return on investment immediately,” that’s not a very good way to make movies and TV shows. You need to be able to think a little bit longer than just the next quarter for how you guys are doing and then to try to correct out of the situation, you end up making these gargantuan cuts that are so brutal.

**Craig:** We are getting pretty violent pendulum swing/whiplash syndrome here. A healthy industry does make money, because if they don’t, then they fall apart and they stop hiring us. We have a vested interest in a healthy industry. If the industry decides, “We actually don’t care about profit anymore. We’re just gonna borrow crazy amounts of money and spend crazy amounts of money with no goal in sight,” then it is inevitable that they are going to then pendulum swing back to keep themselves alive. The pendulum swing will be too much of a squeeze, too much of a minimization, because they are now trying to pay back their own bad decisions.

But ideally, this whiplash pendulum effect settles down and we find ourselves back in some kind of healthy balance, where the studios are making money, don’t feel like their backs are against the wall, are no longer in a wild cocaine spree of spending, and then hopefully are able to go back to the way it used to be. “Here’s some safe stuff. Here’s some slightly risky stuff. Here’s a little bit of this. Here’s a little bit of that. But overall, we have a balanced slate.”

**John:** There’s a quote here from Jason Grote, who is talking about prestige TV. He’s really talking about the HBO model of prestige TV, so like The Sopranos, and when you suddenly got like, “Oh my god, we have this really good TV.” He’s pointing out that it wasn’t about a bunch of new people coming into Hollywood. It was a bunch of people who actually really knew how to make TV shows, who were suddenly given the opportunity to make the TV shows they really wanted to make. That feels like a crucial distinction. It’s not just about newcomers making brand new stuff. It was actually like, “Oh, let’s actually take some chances on some people who actually know what they’re doing.”

**Craig:** Yes, and I’m a beneficiary of this. No question. There are a lot of people who worked for a long time, making the things that they were told to make, the way they were told to make them. They had to fit in a certain box. There had to be ratings. There had to be this. There had to be that. It had to be for a particular budget, repeatable for 22 or 26 episodes a season. All of those restraints suddenly disappeared. You did get remarkable stuff. Now, there are some things that are excellent that also get huge audiences. There are things that are excellent that don’t.

I think a lot of those things in part suffered more from where they were and how they were, or often, not even, marketed, because in the crazy gush of content, it was almost like nobody making the stuff had time to even tell you about it. They threw it in your face as you were walking by. Maybe you took it, and maybe you didn’t, and then you just kept going.

But that’s absolutely true. Vince Gilligan is such a good example. He was making great network television. It was standard network television. But when you said to him, “Hey, do what you want.” Same thing with David Chase. Charlie Kaufman worked on – was it Alf? I think it was Alf. When you let certain writers go free… But no question; it wasn’t like prestige TV helped, for instance, under-represented writers. It didn’t.

**John:** Wrapping up on Bessner’s article here, I think his last suggestion is frustrating, because he undercuts it immediately after he says it. But he’s talking about, oh, the one change which would actually make a big difference is if we let these writers control the copyright on the things that they make. As we’ve talked about since probably Episode 1 of this show, there’s a reason why that doesn’t happen in the U.S. It’s because that’s what lets us have the powerful union that we have. The other good counterexample is, in lots of other places in the world, writers can control the copyright. It’s not like it’s awesome for them there.

**Craig:** No. When you see somebody suggesting that the answer to a screenwriter’s ills is retaining copyright, you know you’re dealing with a tyro or somebody who is simply from the outside and doesn’t get it. It is a nonstarter and it’s a bad idea. You’re absolutely right.

We can simply point to the rest of the world and say, “Show me in the rest of the world where writers for television or film are being compensated the way American writers are. Show me in the rest of the world where writers for television and film get a pension the way American writers do, get residuals the way American writers do, get credit protections the way American writers do.” You can’t. You can’t. The copyright suggestion just falls apart anyway, because we don’t publish screenplays to be read by people. It is a part of a composite work. That’s kind of a huge red flag that maybe somebody didn’t do the research they needed to do.

**John:** The second article we’ll put a link in the show notes to is One Weird Trick for Fixing Hollywood by Max Read.

**Craig:** I like this.

**John:** He starts out by talking about how among his screenwriter friends, it is just really tough. It’s the same conversation you and I have about our screenwriter friends. The only things that are getting made, in his case he’s hearing about ultra premium limiteds, which are a six-episode miniseries that has an A-list star. I would say even that is very hard to shop and get made right now. No one wants to buy those things. I’ve been out with things like that, and it’s still really tough.

The number of projects that have, “That’s a great writer,” the script’s already written, there’s a director on board, there’s an actor on board, the number of those that have not sold in the last six months is just mind-boggling. There’s no guarantees about what’s going to happen.

What I did like about Max’s article is that he points out the bigger issue that the industry as a whole is facing is that we have a lot of new competition for the amount of time that people would normally spend watching TV or going to a movie, and that’s because we have phones, we have other things that are going to keep our eyes entertained during the day. That’s time that we’re just not gonna be watching TV. The amount of hours viewed of the television that’s being made or the movies that are out there is gonna suffer.

**Craig:** This is an odd argument to me, I have to admit. Billions of people are watching things that are on Netflix and Amazon and Max and network television, which still earns millions of viewers a week. The old stuff, Suits and Friends, these things get recycled again and are watched by millions and millions of people and then discussed on TikTok. TikTok, in fact, is where a lot of these shows get their popularity in the first place.

You and I talked about how our kids got caught up in this crazy TikTok phenomenon of watching Criminal Minds, a show that was never intended for 16-year-old girls to watch, and yet there was this massive wave of girls one summer – mostly girls as far as I could tell – watching Criminal Minds and discussing it together on TikTok.

I don’t understand, A, the argument that the problem with television is that people aren’t watching it. They are. We have fragmented the audience across 4 billion shows. At peak TV, the John Landgraf phrase, I think there were over 600 television shows made in a single year. The audience probably grew, but it was spread out over 600 shows. This is a division problem. It’s not an addition problem.

Second, I don’t understand how to solve Hollywood by going off and supporting or helping YouTube and that. That’s not Hollywood. That’s a different thing. We need to protect this business as it functions here, because what people do on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Twitch and Twitter is not Hollywood. It’s its own thing, which is massive and incredibly profitable and valid, but it’s different.

**John:** It is different. I’m gonna make his argument that I don’t fully endorse, but just so it’s actually made. His metaphor would be, let’s say you are a home builder who’s building apartment buildings, and then a few blocks away you see there are these hobbyists who are building things that are basically like buildings, that are competing for the housing of people around you, but they’re doing it much cheaper and without any of your protections. You would be thinking about that. You would be looking, like, “Shit. How am I going to be competing against them if they are doing it cheaper?”

**Craig:** If I bought into the premise that we’ll call the paramedia is limiting the audience or ruining the audience for what Hollywood does, yes. There’s an argument to be made that the theatrical experience has been permanently damaged by both the pandemic and the paramedia, but not the streaming business. The streaming business was damaged by the fact that the business plan made no fucking sense. The streaming business was damaged by the fact that they were spending more than they could ever hope to make back, with no end in sight. All of them decided they should try and outspend each other.

But the viewership is enormous. Enormous. We’re talking about tens and tens of millions of people in the United States alone, much less the rest of the world. Netflix has an audience that has, I don’t think, ever existed before in terms of size. I include them, of course, as part of Hollywood. I don’t buy that the audience is being taken away.

My concern about the way things have been going is that none of it made any sense. It all felt a little bit like MoviePass to me, where you and I would look at it and go, “You spend $80 billion try and get $5 billion? Why?”

**John:** The answer is because there was a time when tech companies could do that, and sometimes it had great outcomes because of that. Google was an example, or Amazon was an example of companies that burned money until they became incredibly profitable. I think there was a thought that these legacy studios could burn money and then suddenly become profitable. Netflix was able to do that. In order to compete against Netflix, we need to become Netflix. It didn’t quite work out that way.

**Craig:** It didn’t work great. I think that there’s been a settling in. We do have some more convulsions on the way, because Paramount is clearly up for sale. As we’re talking, maybe it’s already been sold. I know Sony has put in a bid. Disney bought Fox. Let’s say Sony buys Paramount. We’re now squishing ourselves down, but in a way also getting back to the number of things that we used to have, because if you include Amazon and Netflix and Apple, those are three big studios. We’ve lost Fox. We’re about to use Paramount. We’re getting back almost to the same number of studios that have always kind of existed. It will be interesting to see in the years to come if we can achieve some kind of stability again in our business.

**John:** In talking with agents and managers and other folks who are on the sale side of stuff, they will agree that this is a really tough time. But there are some, I won’t say brighter spots, but there are some areas that are less affected. There’s still money to make indie features. That pool of money is still out there, and there’s still a market for that. There’s ways to do that, especially things that come to a certain price.

I was talking to a documentary filmmaker who said that he’s been working on this thing that he was originally gonna pitch as a three-episode documentary series. You can’t do that now. People aren’t gonna buy that now. But he can make it as a documentary feature, so, “Great. I’m gonna pivot. Same story. I’ll do it in 90 minutes versus I guess 90 minutes in three episodes.” It all works out. The same thing happens for narrative features as well.

I also think we just need to be mindful that, the classic truism, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. People can be so gun-shy to actually try to do something that they’re looking past simpler things they could try to do. If these $200 million movies are not working out for you and you’re losing money on them, maybe take a look at the Anyone But Yous, smaller movies that are successful, and just try some of those, because there may be some different ways and different kinds of movies and series you can make that are gonna be cheaper, that can actually give you the outcome you want.

**Craig:** This has been going on for quite some time. The squish of the small movie preexists all the Netflix stuff. It preexists the pandemic. The chasing of massive things really accelerated with the Avengers. You can draw a line where the Avengers came out, did what it did, and everybody said, “Okay, I guess this is our business now, because the amount of movies we have to make and the amount of swings we have to take to match one of those.” One of those gets you four more of those. That keeps your business afloat for years. Years.

**John:** We are making some big, expensive movies that pay off. Dune 2 was incredibly expensive. It paid off. It’s not going to generate a bunch of more Dune movies, most likely, but it was great that it happened. We of course had Barbenheimer, was a great success for both of those films. Those films were very profitable and big successes. I think what we’re urging this industry to do is to take a look at what were the things about those films that were successful. They were made by great, visionary filmmakers who were swinging for the fences and doing interesting things. It wasn’t a retreat to safety that made those things giant hits.

**Craig:** I’ll point to a movie that is one of my favorite examples. I think the budget was something like $60 million. This movie was from 2019. In 1990 or 2000s, that would be the classic $35, $40 million movie. Joker. Joker was a hard R. It was kind of an art film. It borrowed a little bit of comic book shine, but barely any. There were superpowers. There were really no action scenes. It was an art film. The box office for Joker is $1 billion. Joker: Folie à Deux is coming out. That is the kind of bet that I think is well worth taking and is terrifying.

**John:** Let’s also talk about Joker is that not everybody liked it. In fact, a lot of people hated Joker and to this day hate Joker. You know what? That’s okay, because it doesn’t have to appeal to everyone in order to be a giant success.

**Craig:** People talk about the four-quadrant movie. There are movies you can make that everybody likes. There are very few movies you can make that everybody loves. But what you can do are make films that some people love so much that they will evangelize them, they will market them for you, they will see them multiple times, they will buy them again when they come on the streaming service. Joker is a great example of that and the definition of a risky pitch. By the way, the sequel looks just as risky to me.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Good for them. It’s a big budget.

**John:** Here was the bet. The bet was that there wasn’t an audience for it. It wasn’t the bet that everybody in America will want to see this movie. It was that it was talking about there’s gonna be an audience, and that by definition of audience, people who will genuinely love this movie.

**Craig:** Yes. That kind of artistic risk taking, which I think you could also see with Barbie… There’s so many ways to make Barbie bad. There are about a million ways to make a bad Barbie.

**John:** Oh my god. Almost every way is to make a bad Barbie.

**Craig:** There’s pretty much one way to make a great one. Trusting somebody like Greta Gerwig, that’s risky. It is. They used to just have a bland filmmaker deliver a bland script for these things, to hit the thick middle and hedge their bet, and they didn’t do that with that one.

Oppenheimer only gets made because Christopher Nolan is the kind of filmmaker who gets to do stuff. That’s it. Again, nobody’s sitting there thinking, “Oppenheimer’s gonna make a hell of a lot of money.” How much did Oppenheimer make? $965 million globally.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** That’s insane. That’s insane. That’s a biopic of the guy that ran the nuclear program. We’ve made movies about the nuclear bomb before. We’ve made movies about the father of the nuclear bomb before. Universal said, “We will take this huge bet. We will spend $100 million on this.” An algorithm most likely would say, “Oh, that’ll get you $30 or $40 million.” But instead, they made almost a billion dollars, because it’s a quality film. What’s the bet there by Universal? Good movie, people will come and see it. That’s old-school thinking. Really old-school thinking. You know what else we see out there that’s old-school thinking? Ads on television shows.

**John:** It’s craziness.

**Craig:** We may be hurdling ourselves backwards to 1988. Let’s find out.

**John:** Craig, a term I heard this last week, I saw it in a blog post by Hannah Ritchie, who writes about environmental issues, was the Moloch trap. Have you ever heard this term, the Moloch, M-O-L-O-C-H?

**Craig:** I only know that from the Bible and Watchmen. What is the Moloch trap?

**John:** The Moloch trap, it’s these forces that coerce and cause competing individuals to take actions which although are the best for them individually, ultimately lead to situations where everyone is worse off. It’s almost impossible to break out of that cycle. Tragedy of the commons is kind of an example of that.

But there’s a lot of things in environmental science that are Moloch traps, because, okay, I recognize that burning coal is bad for everybody and it’s bad for this, but if I stop burning coal, then other people are gonna burn coal. It’s very hard for any one individual to make a change or any individual nation to make a change, because the forces force you to do that.

I do feel like there’s a Moloch trap happening with the streaming wars, because it was like everyone was trying to do this thing. I think everyone recognized this thing we’re doing is unsustainable, but if I don’t do it, then I’m worse off.

**Craig:** Right. Basically either we’re all sinking together or one or two of us need to sink. I don’t want to be one of the one or two that sinks.

**John:** It’s hard to break out of the Moloch trap, but you do it by basically changing your motivations, by embracing innovation. The case of environmental science, it’s now cheaper to make power without burning things, which is great. Now it’s like we’re out of this cycle because we just don’t do those things, because it’s actually cheaper to build solar panels or turbines or other things. We’re not competing on these limited resources anymore, because we can just do stuff, and we actually think about abundance rather than limitations.

I do wonder whether there’s some way we can be thinking about changing our motivations and our goals here to break out of the cycle. Instead of always thinking about subscriber numbers or this or that, really thinking about what are the markers of success that we want for this. Profitability, sure, but with ads or with other stuff. Is there other ways we can think about how we’re judging whether this project was worth making, that are not purely based on the impossible metrics?

**Craig:** Hollywood is not a great place to try and metric yourself to success. The reason is, unlike basically every other industry, there’s something going on here that is incredibly unpredictable and also incredibly attractive. Our business creates culture, which is exciting and alluring, and predictable, sort of, a little bit, sometimes, but mostly not. Betting is really on human beings saying to you, “The thing I love and like, a lot of people will love and like.” You don’t know if that’s true or not. Your gut may not be particularly good or it may be okay. Your job basically rests in their hands.

Hollywood will always frustrate the modelers and the quants. It’s why I think people that just want to make money don’t bother with Hollywood. But if you want to make money and be part of something exciting and meaningful, yeah, Hollywood.

**John:** That’s why people make Broadway theater. That’s why people invest in independent films. The last point I’ll make here is that I think we’ve talked about the quants. They are doing these calculations that are incredibly esoteric, and it’s really hard to know what is the purpose behind, that they’re basically the navigators in Dune who are adjusting this device to get them from one place to another place. But this is not Dune.

I think there was something really good about the simplicity of Nielsen ratings and box office weekend grosses that lets you know was this a successful thing or was this not a successful thing. During probably five years of streaming, no one knew. We never knew, was this successful, was this not successful. I don’t know what actually worked. I think that by making it so opaque, we were really hurting ourselves.

**Craig:** It’s a really tricky thing. Have we talked about the new subscriber data thing on the show?

**John:** The WGA one?

**Craig:** I don’t think it was a WGA thing. It’s more a method of measuring, because one of the questions is, if you put all this stuff out there on your streaming service and it says, “We have a whole bunch of subscribers. Lots of them watch this,” did that show keep them subscribing? Hard to say. In fact, impossible to say. But one of the things they look at is, when we put a new show on, are there new subscribers? Are the new subscribers clearly coming in for that show? Now, it’s impossible to draw a perfect line, but you can kind of see these waves.

They are trying to find ways to figure out which of these shows is actually contributing to the subscriber money and which are not. It’s hard to say, because let’s say you make a show and you put it on your streaming service and not a ton of people watch it, but those people are subscribing to your service only for that show. That’s valuable. Then you could have a show that a lot of people watch, but nobody’s gonna cancel it if the show gets canceled. Then what is that worth? These are very tricky things to figure out.

**John:** They are tricky. I can see why an individual service might want to look at those numbers, but I don’t think it does the industry as a whole, or certainly the filmmakers they’re working with, all that much good to just trot out these weird, esoteric numbers. Tell me, is this show a hit? How many Americans or people worldwide are watching the show? Because that’s what really matters culturally is knowing this a very popular thing. There’s a reason why – what is the new Netflix series, Baby Reindeer?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** It broke out. We know it broke out because people are talking about it. They can also tell us that the numbers are really big. It’s great to see. That’s also again an example of a weird show that shouldn’t work and does and a risk that somebody took and it paid off.

**Craig:** We used to have a line we could draw between watching and money. Like you said, people bought tickets. Every person that came to see the movie put money in your pocket. When there were ads, every single person that watched the show put money in your pocket. When you take away the ads and you take away the tickets and you just have a store that people can wander through and it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet, how do you know that people are paying for the buffet for the shrimp or the salad? You don’t. You just don’t know. Even in success, I think a lot of times these people might be going, “Okay, but is this success meaningful?”

Let’s go back to the quote we got from Alena Smith, who said we were actively gaslit, because they don’t care about making an impression on culture, actually, I don’t think. I don’t think they care. I think what they care about is money. I think they are deeply confused about what is actually putting money in their pockets and what isn’t. They’re looking for something to hold onto, but it’s a lot of sand. It’s not that I’m gonna go so far as to say that I sympathize with the people sitting in the rooms trying to figure the math out. But from a problem-solving point of view, it’s a tricky one.

**John:** The only point I’ll slightly push back against is you said they only cared about money. I think one of the issues was they weren’t caring about money for a number of years.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** They were just caring about growth, and then they realized. “Oh, and money will come at some point.” It’s like, but will it? That’s not sustainable.

**Craig:** No. That’s a classic Silicon Valley think. Hollywood of old, those people were like, “I’m not making a picture unless I know it’s gonna make money, and that’s it!” I like talking like Tony Shalhoub from Barton Fink. That was the way it goes. Then suddenly, there were these other people like, “We got a better idea.” Silicon Valley is remarkable. They do these things that sometimes turn into these world-changing, axis-shifting, gabillion-dollar businesses.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Sometimes they just set massive piles of money on fire and dance around it. It’s so bizarre. I don’t know what’s going on up there.

**John:** We got our Quibis.

**Craig:** We got our Quibis. We got our FTXs. We have our things that just were like, what in the hell is it? But hey, man, you know what? We just write them.

**John:** We just write them.

**Craig:** We just write them.

**John:** Let’s answer some listener questions. The first one here is from Ellie.

**Drew:** Ellie writes, “I’ve been receiving some incredible feedback on the first draft of my screenplay. However, I’m finding that I’m now super scared to move forward with any rewrites or editing things that I know that I have left to revisit on the second draft. It’s like the excellent feedback has made me feel scared and completely frozen. I literally feel tense. It’s quite a timely story, so I really feel I want to get this out in the world ASAP. Perhaps I’m also afraid of the unknown of what I’ll do with a second draft. Ach, help. How do I unfreeze myself?”

**John:** I hear you, Ellie. That’s a familiar state, because here’s the thing. Your first draft, it wasn’t perfect, but it was complete and full and you loved it. It was an expression of what your original intentions were. You get this feedback, and they’re describing something that’s maybe even better, but you don’t know that you can actually do it. That’s probably a fear, a perfectionism. There’s all sorts of things that are holding you back. Man, you just gotta go for it. You gotta jump in and I would say pick some random moment in that thing and get going.

**Craig:** I too have had this, Ellie. You’ve described it so well that it’s making me feel tense, because I’ve been here so many times. I’m gonna say something that is maybe a little bit scary, but there’s some sunlight at the end of it. The second draft is usually worse than the first.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** It’s just part of the process. This is one of the reasons why. Your first draft was knitted together, and now you’re starting to pull stuff. You know that you have to change things, and you know that there are some things you want to change. But now when you pull stuff, you’re gonna make wounds, you’re gonna diminish some things. You might step on something that it turns out was incredibly important.

Allow yourself to write the second draft that is worse than the first draft, as long as you can say to the people you’re working with, “I’m gonna go for some stuff on the second draft. This one will be a little messy.” The third draft is where it’s all gonna happen, because that’s the one where you get it back and then some.

**John:** Ellie, a technique that might work for you, and this sounds counter-intuitive, but actually start with a blank page. You might want to just open up a new document, and in this new document, type bullet points of, like, “These are the new scenes. This is the new stuff that’s happening.” Start to write those new scenes. Then from your old script, copy through the scenes of the moments that are actually gonna come through unchanged, where you’re not doing anything, because that may actually help you avoid the problem of just like, “Oh, I don’t want to damage this perfect thing that I built,” because you realize you’re damaging it. Think of the second draft as a new thing that gets to pull from your first draft. You approach a new thing differently than a rewrite. By letting it be a new thing, it may be actually a little less scary for you.

**Craig:** Yep, that may work. Basically, try anything you want and give yourself permission to suck. It might suck. That’s okay. Third draft is around the corner.

**John:** We have a question on a different kind of paralysis. Here’s Richard. Let’s take a listen.

**Richard:** Hello, guys. Richard here from the UK. I wanted to ask you something that seems to just steal so much time for me. I’ll set the scene if I can. You’ve made a really promising contact, and they’ve asked for some work, and you’re readying an email, a one-pager, and maybe even, say, a script. You reread your breezy yet professional email about 17 times, and then you worry that maybe the one-pager has got a typo, so you go through that a few times, and then the script, scanning for mistakes that may have eluded the 27 rewrites that you’ve already done. Then obviously, you better reread your email with fresh eyes, or maybe, oh, we should change that word. Then you think, oh, if I’ve spotted a mistake in the email, then maybe there’s one in the one-pager. Before you know it, four or five hours have just passed and it’s time to pick up the kids and start their dinner.

Both of you have obviously had to send some super important emails to some super important people. Can you give me any advice on how to cut out this excruciating ordeal. Thanks, guys. You’re the best.

**Craig:** We are the best. Thanks, Richard. I wonder how long Richard worked on this.

**John:** Absolutely. How many times did Richard rerecord his question to us?

**Craig:** Here’s some good news, Richard. Yes, we have certainly written our fair share of emails and documents and things. The fact is if you look at the emails you get back from these people, you will find all sorts of mistakes in their emails. You are dealing with an illusion that our minds create whereby all of our decisions are important. Emails are glanced through, scanned, sometimes barely. The documents that you send will have moments in them that make people sit forward and go, “I want to make this.” You can have an entire sentence missing. If it’s working for them, that’s okay. If you are riddled with spelling errors and typos and you’re actively putting forth the attitude of carelessness, that will call things into question. But ultimately, the quality of things is what matters. If you find yourself in a loop, just stop the loop and send the email.

**John:** You’re in an anxiety trap. You’re anxious because you’re anxious. It feeds upon itself. It’s real. It’s natural. You gotta get out of it. What might help you out would be to literally set a timer for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, and take a reasonable amount of time to reread the email, take one last look at the document you’re attaching. When the timer goes off, press send and walk away from your computer, because you’re not doing anybody any favors by obsessing over things that are not important and not worth obsessing over.

**Craig:** There’s a feeling sometimes when you send these things. You’re about to hit send, and you think, “I’m sending you me.” You’re not. That’s the scary part is I’m sending you a document. I’m sending you an email. This is me to you. If there’s a flaw in it, there’s a flaw in me, and I will be rejected. None of that is true. It’s a way for us to imagine a control we do not have over people’s impressions of us. You could be given a year to perfect an email and a document in terms of editing, the surface editing you’re describing, and it would not change their opinion of you or the work in any significant way.

**John:** For our Premium Members, we sometimes send out emails about live shows or other things coming up or Three Page Challenges. In Mailchimp, the service we use, there used to be this thing right before you sent the email. There’d be this animation of a big monkey finger, a sweaty monkey finger above this red button for pressing send. It’s very effective and really anxiety-producing, like, “Oh, shit. Is it really ready? Is there anything left to fix?” They got rid of that image, because I think they probably did some surveys and realized that’s actually making it worse for people. It’s too true to the experience. It no longer says that. Now you can send it out more willy-nilly and it doesn’t do that, freak you out.

**Craig:** Do you really want to send this email?

**John:** Really want to?

**Craig:** I mean, I’m a monkey, but I’ve read it. Do you really want to send it? I mean, if you want to, but I wouldn’t.

Richard, you’re gonna be all right.

**John:** He’s gonna be fine. Let’s do our One Cool Things, Craig. My One Cool Thing is this artist named Lola Dupre. I have no knowledge of who she is. I just know her artwork is just so effing cool. I’ll put a link in the show notes to her archive, her gallery. She makes these portraits of animals and people that are collages, and so they’re distorted. It’s an image of a thing that’s just been distorted and pulled into different directions. They’re all really, really cool. Craig, you’re looking at this now too. Help me describe what you’re seeing.

**Craig:** There are images of let’s say cats, and it’s somewhat caricatured, but most salient, the cats have 20 eyes or there are painted images of people and the length of the face is really distorted. One of these is wonderful. I might just get that. It’s an old-school Mac with a keyboard, but the keyboard has like a thousand buttons on it. This is amazing. I love that one.

**John:** It’s all great. They’re done through collage. Basically, she’s starting with one original image, and then just by overlapping and overlapping, she’s distorting the dimensions of it in ways that are just really, really cool. It just made me happy to look at and just things I would love to have on my wall. Lola Dupre, an artist. We’ll put a link in the show notes to her shop and her gallery.

**Craig:** Very cool. Looks like most of her stuff has been sold. You’re doing great, Lola. I have two One Cool Things, because sometimes I have none, so I’m trying to make up for it. First is Codenames Duet. We’ve talked about Codenames.

**John:** Which I’ve played. It’s so much fun.

**Craig:** It’s so much fun. Codenames Duet, I played with Melissa. If you just have two people, you can’t play against each other, of course. The idea is you both have the same board of words. You each have different words on that board you’re trying to clue to each other. You need to work cooperatively to get all the words uncovered by a certain number of turns. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a very clever way for two people to play Codenames, and it’s just as interesting. There’s something nice about the cooperative experience. As opposed to the, “I beat you,” it’s more like, “We beat it.”

**John:** Now, Craig, we haven’t talked about the new Scrabble, and so all the controversy over, in Europe they came out with an alternate version of Scrabble, which is a cooperative game rather than a competitive game. There was all this Sturm und Drang about like, “Oh my god, they’ve ruined Scrabble.” But it actually reminds me of these cooperative games like Codenames Duet, where basically you’re trying to work together to get a thing done.

**Craig:** I don’t know why people would be annoyed that there’s a version of Scrabble that people can play cooperatively. Who cares? Just play your regular Scrabble. It’s still there. It’s not a problem. I think sometimes people are just looking for stuff to get angry about. Scrabble is made by, what is it, Mattel? They’re a company. They’re trying to make money. Who cares? Do you know how many versions of Clue have been made?

**John:** One or two.

**Craig:** Yeah, like 400,000. My other One Cool Thing, I landed on this because I was talking with somebody about the Bible and weird Bible verses. I thought, “Oh, I bet you the internet has a great collection of weirdest Bible verses,” and they did. They had lots of them, but there was one that I loved so much that I need to read it. This is my new favorite Bible verse. This is from 2 Kings Chapter 2, Verse 23.

“From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ they said. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ He turned around, looked at them, and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of the boys.” There’s so much going on here-

**John:** There’s so much.

**Craig:** … that I love. First of all, at first I was like, you can’t kill kids because they called you baldy, although I was not aware that people were yelling “baldy” back in, whatever, 300 BC, but fine. But then I was like, wait a second, 2 bears mauled 42 of the boys. That means there’s more than 42 boys. Now, that’s a riot. That’s 70 boys now following you screaming, “Get out of here, baldy!” I’m afraid.

**John:** I don’t understand the bears’ agenda. It’s [crosstalk 01:04:16].

**Craig:** The bears don’t have an agenda. The bears have been sent by the Lord. But this is the next mind-blowing part. He only sent two bears. Two bears mauled 42 boys. That’s 21 boys per bear. Let’s say these bears are real quick. It takes maybe five seconds to fully maul a child. You got 21 of them. That’s almost a minute. After 30 seconds of watching your friends being torn apart by bears, how are you not running?

**John:** Run away.

**Craig:** Just run. Why only send two bears? Also, I like that there happen to be woods nearby, and also that the Lord was like, “Oh my god, no. You can’t call my guy baldy. Oh, bears, that’ll work.” Bears.

**John:** Bears.

**Craig:** It’s just such a great verse. “Get out of here, baldy!”

**John:** I’m looking it up on Biblia, which is showing me the different translations of that same section, because I was wondering was baldy just one esoteric choice that one translator chose to make. But no, baldy is common in most of this.

This is from the New International Readers version. It’s slightly different. “Elisha left Jericho, went up to Bethel. He was walking along the road. Some young fellows came out of the town. They made fun of him. ‘Go on up. You don’t even have hair on your head,’ they said. ‘Go on up. You don’t even have any hair on your head.’ He turned around and looked at them and he called down a curse on them. He did it in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods. They attacked 42 of the young fellows.” It’s not just a weird translation.

**Craig:** That’s what happened. That’s the story.

**John:** That’s what happens.

**Craig:** That is the full story of what happens when you start saying “baldy.” Is it possible that the two bears were just large, hairy gay men? Because now this is getting good.

**John:** Now it makes more sense.

**Craig:** Now this is getting good.

**John:** Could they really maul these? Maybe they were carrying a maul. They were carrying a giant hammer.

**Craig:** We know they’re big. We know they’re big guys.

**John:** They’re big. They’re big guys.

**Craig:** I just love this verse. I think it’s “baldy.” Ultimately, it’s just-

**John:** “Baldy” is pretty great.

**Craig:** That is a word that you’re not imagining people in the time before Christ or even shortly thereafter saying “baldy.” It’s so mean. As a bald person, I’m in love with this.

**John:** I’m thinking of our D&D Zoom group and just how many bald heads there are. We would all be subject to these taunting youths.

**Craig:** “Go away!” Why do they care? Why are they so mean? Anyway, they got what was coming to them.

**John:** They do. That’s a lesson learned. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-

**Craig:** Baldy.

**John:** … and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Baldy.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Ben Singer. 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. We love when you send little audio clips, so keep doing that. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our 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 those back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to do about all of our digital stuff and what to do with it after we die. Craig and Drew, thanks so much for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Drew:** Bye, baldies.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, so as we’ve established well on the show, you believe we’re living in a simulation, so therefore your death has no impact on you, because you’ll just return to the cloud. But your loved ones will still be around. Melissa will have to deal with, oh my god, all of Craig’s computers and stuff like that. Have you done anything to help her out in this situation, or, god forbid, you don’t die, but you’re in a coma, and she has to deal with that stuff, what are you doing to make her life better and easier?

**Craig:** I have thought through all of this, and I think everybody should. Of course, Melissa and I have done some estate planning, which you do not need an estate to do. You just need something. You own a spoon, you can do estate planning. We have provisions should either one of us die or become incapacitated medically. Because I use 1Password, she has access to my 1Password, which means she has access to all of my passwords. If I drop dead, she can use that to basically get into any account that I’ve created and cancel them, or perhaps cause mayhem.

**John:** Absolute mayhem.

**Craig:** What about you?

**John:** I had to deal with some of this when my mom died, because she was the last of that stuff. We had a bunch of her accounts and things like that. To her credit, she made good lists of where her physical bank accounts were and that kind of stuff, and I had to deal with all the closing off of her estate. For the digital stuff, because my mom was not technically all that sophisticated, I just had a list of all her passwords anyway, so I could get into her Gmail and all that stuff and deal with those situations that came up.

With Mike and I, we have similar situations where that stuff is in 1Password and most stuff will be pretty easy to do. I was reading a blog post this last week that was talking about, it’s one thing to have all the accounts, but that doesn’t tell you what a person actually needs to do. This blog post is recommending a document that’s like, here’s how to be me, basically just talking through, like, this is all the stuff that I’m actually doing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that’s keeping stuff going, because Mike is paying a bunch of our bills that I don’t really know about. Here’s where this thing is. This is the phone number for the tree guy, because I don’t know who that person is. That kind of stuff we haven’t done a great job of sharing, and we probably just need some sort of shared document for that. God forbid something happens to both me and Mike, because Amy has no idea where any of this stuff is kept.

**Craig:** Yeah, that probably would be good to have somebody be able to provide her that. We have a trust set up. If the two of us go down, then there is an executor of the trust who has to operate with the fiduciary responsibility to the people who are assigned stuff, like our children. They would help them. That would be their gig. Part of the trust is making sure that those people are compensated fairly, so they’re not working for free.

But yes, there are ways to make sure that your kids are helped. I never had this issue, because my mother is still alive, but my parents didn’t have really much in the way of assets for me to worry about. Same for my grandparents. I didn’t have to think about it, but certainly my children will.

**John:** Drew is reminding us here in the Workflowy we did talk about some stuff on this area back in 594. Drew, remind us, what did we actually get into?

**Drew:** We were talking more about what happens to the things you’ve written after you’ve died. We had a little bit of estate planning. That’s always good.

**John:** In terms of the stuff we’ve written, I guess there’s all the things that I’m halfway through on. I have just a big Dropbox full of the finished projects and the stuff that was started that never got finished. I have a Notion database of my 36 projects that are in some form of active development in my brain. But that’s not gonna be so crucial. It’s worth something, but it’s not gonna be worth a lot. The Big Fish musical that I did with Andrew Lippa is an asset that I do control copyright on, and that will be a thing that my heirs will have to be thinking about and thinking about future productions and what changes they will allow to make to that down the road. But that’s not gonna be a, “Oh crap, in the next 24 hours, what stuff do I need to get done?”

**Craig:** It is gonna become an issue going forward. There’s an entire generation of old people that are on Facebook, and no one knows their passwords for anything. They barely know their passwords for stuff. When they die, there are just gonna be all these just floating accounts of dead people just hanging out.

**John:** Closing those accounts is an important thing too, or arguably, it’s an important thing. I think zombie stuff out there is gonna be bad. You don’t want people to be getting emails from dead people about stuff. There was a service – we’ll try to find a link to it – that basically checks in that you’re alive on a regular basis and then has a plan for if you don’t respond in a certain period of time, it starts closing things down, which could make sense.

**Craig:** I think Facebook has a, “Hey, here’s a thing to fill out for when you die.” They’re aware of it. Probably costs them money. All these dead people hanging around on our Facebook. I’m sorry. Meta.

**John:** Meta.

**Craig:** Meta.

**John:** But then I feel like in the not too distant future, we’re also gonna have to worry about, what about the AI versions of ourselves? Do we want to continue after we die versus not continue after we die? I think it was Laurie Anderson, the performance artist, was talking about, I don’t know if it was her husband or some other person, that she has basically an AI representation of their work as a chatbot. She finds it therapeutic to chat with this representation of a friend or husband or somebody. Yes, and also, should I have the ability to say no, you can’t do that? It’s weird.

**Craig:** If they make an AI chatbot of me, it’s mostly just gonna be saying the following to people: Get out of here, baldy!

**John:** With that, another Scriptnotes is resolved. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [The Life and Death of Hollywood](https://harpers.org/archive/2024/05/the-life-and-death-of-hollywood-daniel-bessner/) by Daniel Bessner for Harpers
* [One weird trick for fixing Hollywood](https://maxread.substack.com/p/one-weird-trick-for-fixing-hollywood-6f0) by Max Read
* [Moloch Trap](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/moloch)
* [Lola Dupre](https://loladupre.com/archive)
* [Codenames Duet](https://codenames.game)
* [2 Kings 2:23-24](https://www.bible.com/bible/116/2KI.2.23-24.NLT)
* [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 Ben Singer ([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/642standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** You are listening to Episode 641 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what do your characters know, and how do we know if they know it? We’ll stare in the epistemological looking glass and offer some guidance on building characters who feel appropriately informed. We’ll also look at TV ad breaks and what they’ve become in the age of streaming shows that may or may not have predetermined act breaks. We’ll also answer some listener questions, and in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what should you do when meeting a famous person, and what should you not do? Craig?

**Craig:** I did not get the memo that we’re being British.

**John:** We’re being very British on the podcast today for no good reason.

**Craig:** I’ll do it for the entire time. Just curious why.

**John:** Some mornings I wake up and I’m just channeling the spirit of Claire Foy. Claire Foy is still alive, and yet Claire Foy’s voice as the Queen in The Crown just seeps into my body, and I just want to channel that Claire Foy energy.

**Craig:** We’re doing Received Pronunciation. That would be very, very appropriate.

**John:** Extreme Received Pronunciation.

**Craig:** Oh, so RP. We’re so RP, darling.

**John:** So RP. It’s just fantastic. We’re not required to keep doing it, but it’s just fun sometimes to just be in that space-

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** … be in that voice. I remember when I got to college, this young woman said, “What is your accent? I like it, but what is your accent?” I’d really had no idea, but later I realized it’s just closeted gay kid. That was my accent.

**Craig:** Yes, there is a gay accent.

**John:** Striving gay kid.

**Craig:** Oh my god, that’s so specific. What a specific dialect. Striving gay kid. I like that. Did we talk about that documentary about gay voice?

**John:** I think we did.

**Craig:** It is interesting. It’s a thing.

**John:** I think that documentary was Do I Sound Gay?

**Craig:** Do I Sound Gay?, yeah, I think that’s what it was. But then there’s the RP version. Do I Sound Gay? Do I?

**John:** Yeah, is it gay or British? It’s hard for people to distinguish at times.

**Craig:** There are so many reasons that our British listeners are angry at us right now. I work with a lot of British people, like British actors who are doing American accents, like Bella Ramsey. We also have British directors. We’ll do our versions. “Here’s my London. Here’s my East London. Here’s my Northern England. Here’s my this.” There are people who are amazing at accents, there are people who are decent, and then there are people who are horrible. I was talking with Mark Mylod, incredible, multi-award-winning director. He said, “I can’t do the American accent. I can’t do it at all.” I’m like, “Oh, sure you can.” Have you heard when British people do a bad American accent?

**John:** Oh, it’s so bad.

**Craig:** It sort of sounds like this. This is how they do. I was like, “Oh, do it. It’ll probably be that.” He said something like, “I’m going to… ” It was like a monster.

**John:** It’s because he’s trying to go rhotic. He’s trying to put his R’s back in, and that’s a way to do it.

**Craig:** There’s an attitude, like (monstrous noises). I was weeping laughing, because it’s incredible.

**John:** Amazing.

**Craig:** It was incredible. Loved it.

**John:** Loved it so much. I was talking to a dialect coach yesterday. He often works with actors who get the audition requests for, “Okay, you’re going in on this accent,” and they’re like, “Crap, I need to quickly get up to speed on that.” One of his frustrations, which I can totally understand, is that the breakdown will say New Jersey or Brooklyn or this thing, and that’s not actually a real thing. Basically, the New Jersey accent is an Italian American accent, so it’s not specific to New Jersey. It’s really specific to a cultural group. But they don’t want to say the cultural group, so they’ll put it on a region. People in Brooklyn don’t actually speak with that Brooklyn accent anymore.

**Craig:** Not anymore. My parents did, and my mom still does. They’re not Italian. It’s a different vibe than the Sopranos style. There’s just a different kind of thing going on there. New Jersey has about 12 accents. The weirdest one, although probably the most common one, is the Bruce Springsteen, Central/Southern Jersey. It’s sort of Philly. It’s sort of country. It’s a weird one. It’s a really weird one.

**John:** It’s a really weird one.

**Craig:** We’re going down to get a hoagie. Anyway, that’s our show.

**John:** That’s our show. It’s I think really good. As always, our show was produced by Drew Marquardt and-

**Craig:** Drew Marquardt.

**John:** Drew Marquardt and-

**Craig:** Marquardt.

**John:** … edited by Matthew Chilelli. Before we get to the wrap-up, we have some follow-up. In Episode 637, we talked about AI transcription and specifically we wondered whether our own transcriptions for our show, which we’ve done since the very beginning, were currently being done by a human or if they were just humanized versions of AI transcriptions. We have an answer. Drew, help us out.

**Drew Marquardt:** Our very own transcriptionist, Dima Cass, wrote in, says, “Hey, y’all. I’m Dima, a real human, and I’ve been happily transcribing Scriptnotes for over two years, since Episode 536. I actually just hit 100 episodes. I transcribe everything from scratch as opposed to using any AI. I have, quote unquote, ‘humanized’ AI transcripts for other jobs, but I personally find it time-consuming and tedious. I imagine there would be a lot of editing involved if Scriptnotes used AI transcription, because John speaks rather quickly-”

**John:** I do.

**Drew:** “… almost blending words together sometimes, while Craig tends to make sound effects and use different accents.”

**Craig:** Look who’s using different accents today, Dima.

**Drew:** “You also often discuss pronunciation, which is sometimes a difficult thing to capture in written words.”

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**Drew:** Which I’ll say Dima does a great job doing. “I’ve been doing transcription for a decade now, and AI has actually taken some of my jobs over the past year. The current trend is that entities will hire transcribers for half the price and have them touch up AI transcripts. It’s similar to what’s happening with script coverage work.

“I know most people don’t enjoy transcribing, but I’m one of the strange few who does. I learn a lot and it fits my lifestyle as an introverted, neurodivergent queer person living in the Bible Belt. Thankfully there are still some fields of transcription in which humans are still preferred over AI, for instance in legal proceedings where every detail is very important.”

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Then Dima sent a photo of themself “squinting in a huge field of tulips as further proof I am a human.” Yeah, Dima’s a human being. There’s a real Dima, unless AI… That does sound like an AI prompt, doesn’t it?

**John:** I will say, this is Dima posing in this field of perfectly lit-up flowers. It could be an AI backdrop. Tell me that doesn’t look like it could be an AI backdrop.

**Craig:** I just think, “Dall-E, create neurodivergent queer person in Bible Belt squinting, huge field of tulips.” I love the cardinal shirt. He’s got a shirt with a cardinal on it. Dima, thank you for doing this. It’s really nice to meet you. I’m very glad that you’re a human being. Look, let’s face it. Everybody knows that John makes the decisions around here, but to the extent that I get a vote, I vote that we never use AI and we always use a person to do this.

**John:** Yeah, I think it’s great. There’s subtleties that a human being is gonna understand about what’s important and what’s not important. Dima does the transcripts. Drew reads through the transcripts to make sure they fit what we want, gets them posted up there. We started doing the transcripts early on just for accessibility, because we have folks who are deaf or hard of hearing and need to be able to read it. It’s better for them. But then other people who don’t have those conditions also benefit from the transcripts. And it also means we can Google search and find if we ever talked about the thing we’re thinking about talking about, because we probably did. So transcripts are good.

**Craig:** I love the fact that we have transcripts. I myself would vastly prefer to read through a transcript than listen to a pod… Oh, god, look what I just did to Dima. “Listen to a pod,” and then I cut off the word “podcast.” I’m now thinking about Dima all the time. Also, I get to say Dima is wonderful. And now Dima gets to transcribe “Dima is wonderful.” Thank you, Dima.

**John:** Good stuff. In Episode 637 we talked about gendered words in English. We had some feedback on that.

**Drew:** Adam Pineless wrote in, “Another interesting gendered word like fiancé or divorcé is blond, because blond for men is spelled without an E.”

**John:** That one I’m kind of willing to let go a bit, because it’s only when you’re using it as a noun that you do it that way. I get why it’s confusing for people to use it in English. It’s strange for us.

**Craig:** “Blonde” to me is actually in the same category as fiancé and divorcé, and that is French words that are gendered. “Blonde” is a French word. I was actually talking about this with Melissa the other day. People have basically stopped using “fiancé” with the single E to describe a male betrothed. Everyone just uses the two E’s now.

**John:** I see the opposite more often.

**Craig:** Oh, sorry. You’re right, you’re right. It’s the other way around. It’s that there’s only one E, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No one uses two E’s. Sorry. That’s exactly right. No one uses the two E’s. There was an interesting case where I thought about the word “née.” N-E-E we will see as born as.

**John:** Born as.

**Craig:** Typically, it was used for a woman who had taken her husband’s last name. Melissa is Melissa Mazin née Frye, and it’s N-E-E with the accent on the first E. But you never see “ne,” N-E. But now you can, now that we have marriage between men. Mike August could be Mike August ne, N-E, and then whatever his last name was. But I have a feeling that we’re never gonna see N-E.

**John:** I also haven’t heard people pronounce that aloud. But I bet there’s a whole generation of people who have seen that word but never pronounced it, and they’re gonna say née [nee], because we don’t know what to do with that thing.

**Craig:** Now we have a new thing that we need to… Look, maybe we lost the battle of begging the question, but we will not lose the battle over ne.

**John:** Of ne.

**Craig:** Never. Nay!

**John:** Never!

**Craig:** Nay, I say.

**John:** Craig, here’s a question for you. “She had blond hair.” Spell blond.

**Craig:** In that case, I would use not an E. I would go blond without an E.

**John:** I think that’s right. I think that most style guides will say that.

**Craig:** “She is a blonde,” I would use an E.

**John:** But should you even say “she is a blonde”?

**Craig:** Why not? “She is a redhead. She is a blonde. She is a brunette.” I have no problem with that. There’s a word for this. Synecdoche, is that it, where you take a part of what someone is and use it to describe the whole?

**John:** Charlie Kaufman could tell us that.

**Craig:** Synecdoche, I’m looking it up now. “A figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole.” I guess, yes, a blonde. Or a metonymy.

**John:** Fun. In Episode 635, you were talking about dialog and character voice, and we have feedback on that as well.

**Drew:** Matt Yang King writes, “I loved your discussion on character voice, but I noticed you guys were missing a huge resource. One of the major websites I use when wearing my acting hat is the International Dialects of English Archive. It’s an incredible asset for anyone who wants to know the flow and cadence of various different languages and how they’re spoken in English. Also, it’s hugely helpful in building a real, grounded character. Every person who speaks into the archives speaks from a common script, so that you learn how they pronounce similar vowels and consonants, and then they give a little talk on who they are.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** You’re absolutely right. This is by Paul Meier. If you’re gonna do any accent work, you’re probably gonna do any accent work, you’re probably gonna pick up his book, Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen, which I was working through this last year when I was studying dialect and accents. Independently, I also learned how to write stuff in the IPA, which you’re gonna see in this book as well. Really, really useful.

You wouldn’t want to stop at this website. You should go beyond that and look at YouTube and other places. But it is really handy that they are all speaking through the same script. You could get a sense of, like, oh, what does this person from Glasgow, what does it sound like when they’re speaking versus this person from Northern Ireland. It really is useful on that level.

**Craig:** This site is really cool. Just looking through it, I picked Africa, and then I picked Cameroon. There are three different audio examples of people from Cameroon at different times – they even list the year – speaking English, so that you can zero in on accents that granularly, which I think is fantastic.

**John:** Let’s take a listen to the first of these examples here. This is Cameroon 1. It’s a 32-year-old man from Kumba, Cameroon.

**Man From Cameroon:** Well, here’s a story for you. Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who had been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory, so she was very happy to start a new job at a superb private practice in North Square near the Duke Street Tower.

**John:** Great. They’re gonna be reading through the same script. You heard him rolling his R’s. He had a trill on his R’s, which is really interesting.

**Craig:** There is a specific thing going on there that is a little bit surprising to me. We do hear this kind of generic African English dialect, which that doesn’t sound far off from it, but there are very specific things going on. I thought it would be a little bit more French, more French-ish, because it’s Cameroon. But the point is, this is a great website. You can go and listen to all these things and avoid either just being wrong or being generic.

**John:** The other thing I would recommend people take a listen to is Accent Tag, which is a series of YouTube videos. Basically, just follow the hashtag #accenttag, and it’s people who do read through a similar script, and then they talk about their lives a little bit. They’re reading through also how they pronounce certain words, which can be really funny just to hear how vastly different it is and sometimes how unaware they are about the choices that they’re making, because people say, “I don’t trill my R’s at all,” and of course they’re trilling every one of them.

**Craig:** I’m gonna start trilling my-

**John:** Trilling.

**Craig:** Tapping the R’s.

**John:** Little tap there. Great stuff. I encourage people to take a look at that. That is dialectsarchive.com.

**Craig:** Very cool.

**John:** Our main topic here, this was prompted by a couple different things that happened this past week. Before we hopped on the Zoom for D&D this week, we were talking with Kevin, our friend who was on Jeopardy. I wanted to know specifically, when he was ringing the buzzer, did he always know the answer to the question. Craig, what do you think? Did Kevin always know the answer as he buzzed in?

**Craig:** I’m gonna say no. I’m gonna say yes and no. I’m gonna say that there was a part of his brain that knew that he knew the answer before the answer appeared, and that was the part of the brain that was buzzing in. And then there was a second for the answer to actually make its way from one section of the brain to the other. How close am I?

**John:** I think that’s pretty close. He said he mostly knew the answer. But really, I think what was so fascinating about the conversation, it really came down to what does it even mean to know a thing. Are you buzzing because you know it or because you think you will know it in time? Kevin described situations where they record Jeopardy, and six months later it shows up on TV. He’s watching the episodes that he was in. A question would come up, and he wouldn’t know the answer, but then the Kevin who was on screen got the answer right.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** What does it even mean to know the answer to something? It’s very situational sometimes. You’re in the moment and you know it in the moment, but you don’t know it beyond that. I liked that as one aspect of knowing a thing.

But then also, during the D&D game, a thing happened which often happens in D&D, which is last week you encountered a new creature that none of you ever had seen before. It’s a Kruthik, and none of you had any idea what the hell this thing was. You asked, “Can I do a nature check to see if I know what this thing is?” And you rolled and you failed. You had no idea what it was. But then this past week, you encountered a troll. And you all know what a troll is, but would your characters know what a troll was? Again, we’re rolling dice to see do your characters know what this thing is and what its unique disadvantages are or abilities are.

**Craig:** One of the things that DMs deal with – you’re DM-ing now, so you have to deal with it – is metagaming. We all know lots of stuff. You play lots of campaigns. You meet things. Since we’re not in a game right now, and I know a lot about D&D, when we encounter a troll, I, Craig, know that trolls regenerate health, unless they take acid or fire damage, in which case they don’t. But it’s really important then for fair play and for fun play to deny your character that knowledge. There’s no reason for a character that doesn’t know about trolls to think, “You know what I should do? I should throw fire at it.” But if you deal with a troll and you learn that, then yeah. We have to do the same thing when we’re writing.

**John:** Yeah, that’s the point.

**Craig:** We know everything. But what do our characters know, and what should they not know, and how did they learn it? And also, what’s the knowledge gap between what the audience knows about a character and what they know about themselves?

**John:** Yeah, it’s tough, and it’s really like, what is the theory of knowledge that is informing the author, the piece, and the characters inside the piece, and the audience? There’s all these different things you’re trying to balance. You have no choice but to acknowledge the meta-game behind it all, because the audience is aware of things, because they’re aware of the genre, they have a sense of this, and they also have a theory of mind about what the characters inside this story should know or should not know.

An example will be, I’ve seen things happen in movies where I as the audience know something, and suddenly this character knows this thing, but I know that they could not know that. There was no opportunity for them to have learned this fact. We’re willing to forgive that or it seems natural if some time has progressed. But there was never that moment. They never got that call from the other character telling them that thing, so how do they know that this thing is possible? Those are things that screenwriters are always, back of your mind, thinking about, wondering about. What do the characters know about what’s going on? Do they have a sense of what genre of movie that they’re in? These are all challenges.

**Craig:** The converse is also a problem. I see this frequently, where you think, “Why are you willfully not knowing something?” It’s helpful, of course, to put obstacles in front of your characters, but if they are willfully not aware of something that they should be aware of because of what you’ve been watching, it’s incredibly frustrating. Similarly, it’s frustrating when characters withhold knowledge from each other for no reason whatsoever, other than that it will deny a scene from happening. If characters should be sharing information with each other, then they should share the information.

I have a particular sore spot with characters saying the following cliched line: “I want to show you something.” “What?” “Just trust me.” And then they show them a thing that they could’ve just described or mentioned. They could’ve said, “By the way, you need to know that the dog next door has two heads.” “What?” “Yeah. Come on, follow me.” It’s a frustrating thing. As we often say, anything that makes the audience stop and notice that they’re in a movie is harming the illusion we are intending to create.

**John:** The other vector we have to consider is, is this character specifically well informed about a subject or in general, because if so, we need to signal that pretty early on, or else it’s gonna be really frustrating when they suddenly have information, like, “How did they know this? I didn’t know that they were a doctor. I didn’t know that they were this kind of thing.” Or if they’re specifically uninformed, I think you need to clue that in to the audience quickly.

A thing that occurred to me in the office yesterday is a character who doesn’t seem to know anything about dogs at all would be surprising. You say, “How old is your dog? How old do you think he is?” “I don’t know, 30.” That’s absurd. Any reasonable person should know that dogs do not live to be 30, but that could be a really good character moment, as long as we’ve established that it’s plausible this character is that dumb.

**Craig:** If a character does say something like that, everyone should stop and say, “What?” and then grill that person on their stupidity, their weird knowledge gap. But you get one of those. You don’t get multiples, unless the point of the character is that they are absolutely idiotic.

**John:** Drew brought up in the office yesterday a good corollary example, which is, in Top Gun: Maverick, Maverick is a Navy pilot, but he doesn’t know anything about boats, and so he’s on the sailboat and has no idea how to sail at all. That’s good. That’s funny. I get that. It’s surprising, and yet it made sense for the character, and it was a good moment in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Navy pilots fly, and they land on boats, but they don’t sail, so that’s reasonable. That is a reasonable thing. It’s also a kind of thing that maybe some people wouldn’t necessarily be aware of, because they think of the Navy as boats, boats, boats. But yeah, I’d buy that completely.

**John:** We’re coming up with characters who are gonna be in our story. We have to be thinking, okay, what do they know, what are their subject areas, and then within the story, how much information do they have that the audience also is right there with them and knows, versus they’re ahead of the audience or the audience is a little bit ahead of them. Finding that balance is really tough.

There’s movies where characters know a lot more than the audience. Gone Girl comes to mind, where there’s a whole con being played on the audience, which is very important. But also Civil War, which I just saw this last week and really, really liked a lot, the characters in that movie know a lot more than the movie will ever tell us about what’s actually going on in the world. For me, it worked, because they’re not gonna talk about that stuff, because everybody around them knows it, so there’s no reason for them to discuss it. That was something that worked for me about that movie is they know really what happened that brought us to the Civil War, even though we as the audience never will.

**Craig:** One of the worst phrases you type in a screenplay is “as you know.”

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** If you know it, why are you saying it? There is an unspoken contract that there are things that we both know. Now, how we get that to the audience can be difficult. Let’s acknowledge that for a second. The reason that “as you know” came into being is because sometimes two characters who both know a thing need to impart that to the audience somehow.

**John:** Now, Craig, I just want to point out, you just “as you know”-ed me to do that.

**Craig:** As you know.

**John:** As you know, as a screenwriter, but now we have to share it with the audience.

**Craig:** We have to share it with the podcast audience, yes, as you know. Now, as we know… I like that. That’s fun. We meta “as we know”-ed.

How do we do it? How do we get that information across? There are some good old-fashioned tips and tricks. The easiest and most obvious is bring a third party in who doesn’t know. There’s also a version where someone is saying, “Look, I went through the normal thing. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It didn’t work,” so that part of the way they’re imparting that information to their friend is, “It’s obvious to both of us, but the reason I’m running it down is because the outcome isn’t what we expected.” You have to come up with ways that feel naturalistic to share that information.

**John:** Some cases, you will be able to just show it directly to the audience, just actually show the thing and cut away from the characters doing the thing and actually put that information out there so the audience directly knows the thing that the characters inside the world would know. That’s great when it works, but it may not be the right choice for your movie. Some movies cling very closely to their characters. The camera feels like it’s right over their shoulder the whole time, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to cut away to something else to give that piece of information. But other ones are jumping all over the place. If you’re doing The Big Short, you could jump all over the place, because that’s the style of the movie, and you can talk about a thing. You can talk directly to the audience about a thing if you want to, because that’s the rules you’ve established for your world.

**Craig:** Yes. And even inside The Big Short, before they would get to the fourth wall breaking, where people would explain what a derivative was, you had Steve Carell’s character sitting with somebody, and he’s saying, “Okay, explain this to me, because I’m a finance guy, but this is a very specialized thing. You’re saying that blah blah blah blah blah?” And the guy’s like, “Yeah, and in fact, we then take these things and we repackage them into derivatives of derivatives.” And he’s like, “Wait, what?” And then you cut to somebody explaining. But you do have a character that we’re invested in who is asking questions and revealing that there are gaps in his knowledge, which makes sense, given what that story was, that people were literally finding out as this was happening, that these, I think, going to call them weapons of mass financial destruction had been created.

**John:** We’re gonna go back to our probably most cliché phrase on this podcast: specificity. But I think you also look for what is the specific conversation that these characters would be having that would reveal to the audience the thing we need them to know but would actually be necessary for the conversation for them to be having to move forward to do the next thing. That’s actually moving the scene forward, but in the context of moving the scene forward, will also provide this explanation and give the audience the knowledge they need to have to go forward.

**Craig:** That’s right. We have to think about how we do this on a day-to-day basis. There are times where you might say to somebody, “I arrested this guy. I brought him in. What do you think happened next?” And then the other character says A, B, C, D, and E. And the first guy says, A, B, C, D, and then not E, weirdly, H, because he’s setting this person up to make the story interesting, and in doing so, there’s our package of information. But it’s natural. We just have to make sure we don’t do that lazy thing of people just dumping information at us. And similarly, we can’t do the lazy thing where people are missing information. We’ve talked about the cellphone problem. If they had the information, now what?

**John:** What should also be clear is that there’s times where you don’t need to see all the connections being done, because you feel like enough time has passed that it’s naturally going to happen. I think through Succession. In a given episode of Succession, sometimes they’re really tight and it’s almost real time, but sometimes we’re covering a period of a couple weeks, and then, yeah, those communications were had, but I didn’t see them. But I believe that Logan knows that this thing is happening. All those pieces were put together behind the scenes. If you trust in the storytelling enough, you’re not gonna worry about how did this person find out this thing, because they spoke it. It’s gonna get through.

**Craig:** I have a personal thing. I don’t know. It’s part of my style, maybe. I don’t know. Part of my voice. But my thing is that there are times when people need to explain things to other people, and the best way to go about it is to just do it, to embrace the active explanation. We do explain things to each other all the time, so it’s okay, as long as the characters are acknowledging that that’s what’s happening.

Part of the problem with an elegant exposition is that people try to make it elegant. But here’s the deal. It’s either don’t be elegant and just say, “I am now gonna explain something,” or be elegant and don’t enough notice that the explanation happened. But anywhere in the middle, lame. It just comes out lame.

I personally have no problem embracing explanations. If you look at Chernobyl or if you look at The Last of Us, you’ll see scenes all the time where people are just saying, “Can you explain what happened?” and someone says, “Yes, here’s my… ” Now, explaining things is its own art. You have to be interesting when you explain things. The people who are explaining things have to be good at telling a story. That’s important.

**John:** But Craig, the examples you’re making, like Chernobyl in particular, those explanations are germane, because those characters really would be explaining those things to the other people around them. They were actually necessary to do, so it doesn’t feel forced on. Where our concern is is when characters are explaining things that don’t need to be explained within context of the world, that they’re just there for the audience so that the audience can be up to speed. That’s the real challenge. That’s where you need to search for elegant ways to get that information out there.

**Craig:** You need to be elegant. You can’t always have somebody explaining something. But when you have information that is actually interesting, then just do it, just explain it.

**John:** Another thing I think is crucial about these explanation scenes, when it is a straightforward explanation, is it doesn’t mean that all conflict stops. There needs to be something else that’s happening and that’s not just we’re on all the same page together. There has to be some urgency that’s getting you through the scene. Otherwise, we’ll be informed but we’ll be bored.

**Craig:** Correct. The scene must have a beginning and an end. And the beginning is not as important as the ending. The ending of these scenes cannot simply be, “All right. Now I know.” The ending of the scene needs to be personal. It needs to have some sense of a relationship. And it needs to explain why the information we received is relevant not only from a plot point of view but from a personal point of view. It must come back to the human being. Otherwise, it just floats there as info.

**John:** Yeah. A show I liked a lot on Netflix this last year was The Diplomat. One of the things I enjoyed about it was that there were moments where you just had to explain things, but all the explanations came kind of in conflict, because there were competing ideas. You’re jostling for supremacy within them, and also a lot of interpersonal conflicts that were happening at the same time the explanations were coming out. And that made for good scene work. And it was a delight to see when that show was working so well.

**Craig:** I love it. Personally, I love when information is relayed, and I’m excited and interested. I love The Big Short. I don’t understand money. I still don’t understand money. But I loved learning. Even if I have forgotten, I don’t think I could explain it as well as I could have, say, an hour after I saw the movie the first time. But while I was watching it, I was fascinated by it.

When I watch shows of any genre where the information is revealed in fascinating ways and it seems like there’s craft and art to characters learning, explaining, and also when there’s a lovely and satisfying gap between what I know and what the character knows, whether it’s that I know more than the character knows about themselves, like, say, the movie In and Out, where we all know he’s gay from the start, but he just doesn’t get it yet, or when somebody knows way more than I do, like for instance, My Cousin Vinny. Marisa Tomei is on the stand, and she suddenly has this epiphany about the tire marks. And she’s like, “No. The defense’s argument is wrong.” Okay. She knows everything now. And Joe Pesci knows what she knows. And he’s like, “Really? Why do you think that?” And I’m like, “Okay, now they both know something.” And the gap between what they know and me not knowing is curiosity, and I’m leaning all the way forward knowing that I’m gonna be satisfied, which is wonderful.

**John:** Let’s circle back to the troll problem, where the audience is ahead of the characters, where the audience knows how trolls work and the characters inside the story don’t. There can be frustration from the audience, like, “You dummy. This is the rules. You don’t have this. You don’t understand how vampires work,” or whatever. There’s a fundamental sort of disconnect there. To me, the crucial thing here is you need to establish your characters well in the world well enough that the audience is on board with understanding what the characters could know and could not know and that they’re on board the ride and they’re willing to turn off that part of their brain that is aware of the genre and the rules around the genre.

**Craig:** It’s frustrating for us when we watch. It’s not necessary. There is a way to do it correctly. There are some television shows, I think because, specifically procedurals, they just don’t have the time sometimes. We’ve gotten more time as storytellers in television where you don’t have ad breaks. But good old-fashioned ad break television, like the kind you and I grew up with on the networks, they just didn’t have the time. They have to just dump the information out. It’s tricky. It’s also why you see procedurals that work in specified job areas are incredibly popular, because it allows them to say information that is specific, that we wouldn’t otherwise know. I don’t know necessarily why doctors are constantly explaining medicine to each other, but the fact that we don’t know any of it helps.

**John:** Yeah, it does help a lot. You just mentioned ad breaks, which segues naturally to our next topic, which is that we’ve talked on the show before about shows that were written without act breaks, like Chernobyl, but now they have ads inserted into them, and those ads were inserted kind of randomly. There’s no plan for it, because you didn’t plan for a moment where this ad would go, which was so different than how we used to do television and still do television on a broadcast model, which is that you have acts that build up to rising tension, and at this moment of great tension, fade to black, a commercial goes in, you come back out of the act break, pick things up again and move on. That was a way we wrote television for 50 years, and now we don’t tend to do that very often. We’ve talked to writers who were doing spec pilots, like, “Are you putting act breaks in? Are you not putting act breaks in?” That’s a choice you make.

This last week, I think it was Chris in our office, was talking about he was watching an old episode of The X-Files, which is a show that had act breaks in it. He was watching it on Prime. But they didn’t use the actual defined act breaks. They just inserted their ads kind of wherever, and it was really frustrating.

**Craig:** Yes. I know that some of the stuff that I do for HBO does get chopped up and ad-breaked in other countries or in other services. I try to just not think about it. Then again, as film writers, you and I have dealing with this our whole lives, because traditionally, movies would eventually sell to broadcast or cable, where they would be chopped up and ads would be shoved in.

**John:** Almost all the Bond movies I watched were on ABC, the Sunday before school started in the fall. I absolutely loved them, but they were full of random ad breaks.

**Craig:** Full of random ad breaks. Now, my One Cool Thing this week, I won’t give it away, because I don’t want to give the audience too much information, but it is a show that has been made for a premium streamer, and that streamer now has options. You can either watch ad-free or not ad-free. Even though I’m watching ad-free, there are moments where the shows just cuts to black, and then, boop, we’re into the next scene, and it’s very clear that the way they built it was like, “We are picking the ad breaks.” You won’t have to watch ads when you watch it ad-free. But you’re gonna see the moments where the ads would go. You just don’t have to sit there for 15 or 30 seconds.

**John:** But here is the question. Will those ads really go in those spots? Because that’s the issue. Are they keeping track of the metadata for where those things go? Because clearly, in X-Files, they were not. Oour own Drew Marquardt spent the afternoon yesterday looking through a bunch of shows to see which ones were actually inserting where the natural ad break would be and which ones were not looking for the act breaks at all. Drew, what did you find as you were scanning through stuff?

**Drew:** It was a very scientific process. Prime it seemed like would have an act break at 19 minutes no matter what and 32 and a half minutes no matter what. But things like FreeV, which is also an Amazon service, would put act breaks where they were supposed to go, for both shows that they didn’t produce or ones that they did, and Peacock seemed to be pretty good about it too.

**Craig:** I think that what’s going on is some sort of dictate that says ads must happen at a certain point or wherever, and we don’t care where the ads used to go. But when they are making their own shows, that dictate is certainly built in. There’s no chance that they’re making their own material with ad breaks that they’re gonna ignore. Those ad breaks are obviously designed by whatever algorithm runs the kingdom.

**John:** I hope we’ll have some listeners who write in who actually have first-hand experience with how this works on the other side and will break whatever NDAs they’re gonna be breaking. My guess is that for a show like The X-Files, produced by Fox, for Fox, I think, Amazon licenses it, they get the video file. I wonder if they are not getting special metadata about where the actual act breaks are, that they could slot those things in, and they’re just putting it wherever, or they’re getting that metadata and saying, “Screw it. We don’t care. Our own internal metrics show that it’s most effective for us to put these commercials here and here and here, regardless of what the original plan was for the show.”

**Craig:** I suspect it’s the latter. I remember my first internship in Hollywood was at Fox Network. When we would review the shows before they air, it was just clear. On the tape, every quarter inch, it would go to black, and then there was a second, and then it would come back. It’s pretty clear. I think that Amazon basically is like, “We can’t put as many ads in as network put in for whatever this medium tier is, and yes, our data says that people will deal with two ad breaks in this point and this point, and we’ll just shove them in there.”

**John:** Obviously, YouTube works that way. If you don’t pay for YouTube Premium, it’s just shoving in wherever they want to put it in. I didn’t watch Mad Men on its original run, but my recollection of people talking about it was Matthew Weiner didn’t write act breaks at all, and the commercials would just show up where they showed up.

**Craig:** It was on AMC. I didn’t watch it as it was airing either. I watched it after. So I don’t know the answer to that.

**John:** I don’t know what the right answer, the right choice is here. Clearly, we’re in this transitional, frustrating moment where you don’t know as a show creator how much you should be planning for where those act breaks are gonna be, where the ads are gonna go, or just ignore it, and the algorithm’s gonna figure it out. And even if you got an answer from your executive, is that gonna really hold true when people are watching two years from now.

**Craig:** I know that Max does have an ad-supported tier. No one has asked me. I know that much. Maybe they haven’t asked me because they know that I would be like, “Rah rah rah-”

**John:** “Rah rah rah.”

**Craig:** … and just be like, “Shove it anywhere. It doesn’t matter. You’re ruining it, so just ruin it however you want.” That is basically what I would say, so my guess is they just haven’t bothered asking.

**John:** I think maybe you could just start putting digital logos on characters’ clothes, and it’s like NASCAR.

**Craig:** I don’t know if this is real or not, but it was making the rounds on social media. It was an old broadcast of Star Wars. It was in, I think, Peru perhaps. They didn’t want to stop the show to do ads. So instead, when Obi-Wan reaches into his little footlocker to get Darth Vader’s lightsaber to give to Luke Skywalker, they just stop and cut to a cooler being opened with a bunch of beer in it, and they do a little beer ad. And then they go right back to him handing him the lightsaber, which is kind of incredible and horrible.

**John:** Apparently, it was real.

**Craig:** Oh my goodness. Really?

**John:** We’ll find a link to the story about it.

**Craig:** Incredible. It’s terrible, but also hysterical.

**John:** Yeah, it’s good stuff. Let’s try to answer some listener questions. Drew, what do you have for us?

**Drew:** Eerie Resemblance writes, “So a film recently came out featuring the same job as the industry I’m in and, arguably, what I do within that industry. The main character was also a woman in my industry, which is a big deal because we are still under-represented. Someone from the film reached out and invited some women from our field to watch a private screening about two months before the release. Turns out the main character and I share a lot of commonalities, including a very similar name, we work from the same company, and we are even from the same state. Also, I focus on the same issues as this main character was.

“I was able to give feedback to the people contracted to show us the film. They said they would pass it on. But I’ve listened to y’all’s podcast long enough to know that two months before release is zero time to change anything or really take notes. I’m wondering if filmmakers actually take any of these notes when they do stuff like this, or was this just checking the box because we are three women who are in the same industry as the main character? And secondly, as I mentioned, the main character’s coincidences with me were eerie. But I’m giving the writer of the benefit of the doubt that it was just three crazy coincidences, and I found it kind of funny.

“But my question is, do y’all think about the consequences of creating a character, especially in a story that’s highly traumatic, who’s very close to a real person? Obviously, you can’t worry about that all the time, but are there ethical considerations to think about when it comes to your research and how that character may psychologically affect that person or a small group of people that they’re based off of in real life. I’m actually really glad that I’ve been listening to this podcast before seeing this film, because I think if I hadn’t been, the movie would’ve messed with me a lot more.”

**John:** So many good questions in here and issues that are brought up. I want to start first with what was the purpose of that screening, Craig. Why do you think she and the other people who do what her job is were invited to see that early screening?

**Craig:** This feels like manipulative PR move. Eerie Resemblance, your gut is correct. If the movie is about to come out in two months, this is box checking. They’re not gonna be changing anything, unless there’s some very simple thing an ADR line would address. Otherwise, no, they’re looking basically for cover, to say, oh, we screened it for all these people, and they really enjoyed it. This feels like CYA stuff to me.

**John:** I think their logic was probably – let’s say there’s 10 people who might have an opinion about this specific thing. If the movie comes out and they react really negatively to it, we’re gonna have to deal with that. But if we can sort of preempt that by showing it to them and getting them on our side to some degree, that’s gonna help them out. And so that’s probably why they were bringing you in.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think it’s preemptive. Now, the other question is an interesting one. The fact is that, just as the birthday paradox, if you have, I think, 23 people, there’s more than a 50 percent chance that one of those people will have your exact same birthday. This is gonna happen.

Eerie, the name was sort of close to your name. They were from the same state. They work for the same company. Once you’re working for the same company, the odds are you might be from a state like the one that the company’s in. Lots of names are similar. It was probably not intentional. In fact, it’s actually quite annoying how fussy lawyers can be when they say, “Oh, this is actually too close to this person.” Screenwriters and filmmakers are smart enough to know to not just try and duplicate another human into their script. They’re aware that there’s a legal problem on the other side.

**John:** We can be more specific about that. At some point in the development process, the screenwriter’s gonna have to sign something that says, “These are not based on real people.” There’s gonna be some kind of contractor sign that’s making that clear. Or if they are, you’re gonna have to go through a lot more scrutiny on that. You’ve dealt with that in some of the stuff you worked on.

In terms of names, that becomes a thing. One of the clearance reports they’re going through is they’re gonna look for the names of the characters in your story and the people who actually do that job in the real world. And this could’ve been flagged. This could’ve been a thing that was a concern. It’s not your exact name. We know a little more of the details. And it didn’t set off their alarm bells. But there have been times where I’ve had to change characters’ names because it was too similar to an actual real person who existed in the world.

**Craig:** The thing about names is, if you name somebody Cassie, that is possibly close to Cathy, Catie, Cara, Carrie, Cass, Cat. Names don’t really mean much. If it’s not your name, it’s not your name. Even if it’s your first name and not your last name – and it wouldn’t be your first and last name – it just doesn’t really matter.

The issue is, do we think about the consequences of creating a character who’s very close to a real person? I gotta be honest with you. No, because we’re trying not. The fact is, we’re not trying to be close to a real person, or we’re saying we are doing a dramatization of a real person. If we’re dramatizing a real person, then they’re out there, and they can complain, or maybe not. Maybe we bought the life rights. Maybe we haven’t. We’ll be accountable to that.

But if we’re creating a fictional character that does a job in a certain way for a certain company, no, we’re not thinking, “Oh, what if there happens to be somebody that has a similar name that does this and works for that same company? What will the psychological impact be on that person?” No, I don’t think we do. Because what can we do, other than confining ourselves, out of hyper concern, because somebody at some point is gonna say, “Oh, that reminds me of me.” We’re writing people that are supposed to remind you of real human beings, just not specific ones.

**John:** I would say I mostly agree with you. I think there are situations where even if you’re not thinking about the specific individual, you’re thinking about the people who are in that position and how the existence of your movie or TV show might negatively impact their ability to do the work they’re doing. Let’s say your show involved some NGO workers in Malawi and South Africa and portrayed them in a very negative light. That could be true, and it could be absolutely accurate within the course of your movie, but it could also make it very difficult for the people who are really doing that work to not be kind of painted by that brush, not in a legally difficult way, but in a… I don’t know. I think there’s some moral and ethical considerations you’d have there about are you making their ability to do their humanitarian work more difficult by your portrayal.

**Craig:** If you’re portraying an organization that is clearly meant to be like another organization, and you are suggesting that that organization, even if it’s fictional in your movie, is corrupt or whatever, then yes, you can impact an organization. You have ethical obligations, I think, as a screenwriter.

One of the things that I was worried about when I did Chernobyl was not coming off as an anti-nuclear-power show. That was not the purpose. In fact, it was important for me that the main character explained very clearly the difference between all of the nuclear reactors in the West and the one that they were using in Chernobyl, which was just wildly different and didn’t have a containment building around it, etc., because the fact is I support nuclear power. I don’t think the lesson there is no nuclear power. I think nuclear power is kind of essential if we’re gonna avoid continuing climate crisis. But I’ve said so. I made that as open of an opinion as I could. I still got a whole lot of crap from paid nuclear industry lobbyists who were super cranky. I don’t care about them. That’s their job. They’re paid to be cranky. But I felt like I fulfilled my obligation as a creator to at least not be wildly misunderstood. Yes, we do have to think about that. But an individual’s name, no. Somebody somewhere is gonna say, “Oh, that reminds me of me,” and there’s nothing we can do about that.

**John:** Yeah, sounds good. Let’s try one more question.

**Drew:** John in LA writes, “About four months ago, I met a producer who has worked in development at several big companies. Last month, she sent me a young adult novel that I really responded to. We’ve emailed and called several times about adaptation ideas. At the end of our last call, I asked her if she’d hire me to adapt the novel in full. She said yes and told me to, quote, start thinking about my contract. I’m not in the WGA. She has a new production company that is not yet a Guild signatory. Her intention is to become a signatory. Is it appropriate for me to ask if she’ll do the Guild paperwork so I can get a fair deal? I feel awkward making that ask.”

**John:** You should not feel awkward.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** This producer has worked in Hollywood, has worked in this industry. Since their production company that’s not yet a signatory but is intended to become a signatory, guess what? They can become a signatory with your project. You can break that seal. Hurrah.

**Craig:** I’m a little nervous here, John in LA, who’s writing about this, because the producer says her intention is to become a signatory. That’s a little nerve-wracking. Let’s make this easy for you. You shouldn’t have to ask anything, nor should you be thinking about your contract. Not only are you not in the WGA; you’re not a lawyer. What you need is a lawyer, and the lawyer can do all of this. Here’s the thing you need to be aware of, John in LA. It’s not as simple as saying, “I’m hiring a WGA writer, and I’m hiring them under a WGA deal because I’m a signatory.”

To be a signatory to the Writers Guild, you need to prove a certain amount of financial security, such that you demonstrate that you are able to meet your obligations as a signatory, specifically paying out residuals. You can’t just say, “I’m a producer, and I’m gonna hire a WGA writer. Just give me some boilerplate WGA stuff and I’ll sign the thing and I’ll be a signatory.” It’s not that simple. It’s not that simple, because people have done that in the past and then just not paid.

**John:** Yeah, reneged on it.

**Craig:** Right, not fulfilled their obligations. You need a lawyer. The good news is she’s saying she wants to hire you. She’s saying she wants to be a signatory. The lawyer will get paid therefore. So you should find one that’s willing to paper this for you, and they can have that discussion with them. It’s as simple as that. If her intention is to become a signatory, she should begin doing so. That’s on her.

**John:** It’s not an onerous process to become a signatory. I had to do it for my movie. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Exactly. They ask you a bunch of questions. You show them some evidence. You sign a piece of paper. Voila.

**John:** Exactly, because ultimately, when it comes to residuals and paying out stuff down the road, you’re basically having to guarantee that any future contracts that the thing is sold to will take care of the residual. It’s doable, and so this person can do it. It’s fine.

**Craig:** It is fine and is doable. They just need to do it. If that’s her intention, she should convert her intention into reality, and your lawyer should be thinking about your contract, not you. You don’t do that.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things this week. First off, it’s a Patreon but also a website called tacticalmap.com. For the DM-ing I’m doing right now for our group, we’re using Roll20, which we’ve talked about, which is basically a virtual tabletop that we’re all looking at the same thing. You need maps for that. Some really good maps I found that are inexpensive online are at tacticalmap.com. It’s a guy who just develops some really beautiful top-down maps of different scenarios. We have a cliffhanger going on right now where there’s a troll attack. There’s this great fort in the mountains. It was perfect. I got this map, threw it in there, put some trolls in there. We’ve got a party. I like tacticalmap.com. You can find these maps.

Then my other one is a game that I wish we had played with you, Craig, while you were in town, because you would absolutely love this. It’s called Letter Jam. The concept behind this is, it’s a cooperative word game where you have a bunch of players around the table. Each of them has a letter on a stand in front of them, but they can’t see their own letter. They’re trying to work together to get through all of the words that are in front of them. They could say, “I can make a four-letter word using four player letters and this wildcard.” Then you’re going around the table. It’s who can make the biggest word and what that is, but without ever revealing that word. Then you are taking those clues on your little clue sheet, trying to figure out, like, what the hell is the letter in front of me. Its really smartly done.

**Craig:** I see, I see. People are saying, “I can make this word.” You’re like, “Okay, that person said they can make this word. This person said they can make this word.” I’m learning who maybe has what letter-

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** … and who maybe doesn’t have what letter. That’s interesting.

**John:** That person never says what that word is, but instead, they’re putting little tokens in front of different people’s spaces to show, this is letter 1, 2, 3. You can see the other stuff. You can never see what yours is. It’s really smartly done.

**Craig:** Sort of like Cluedo but with letters. I like it. That sounds like a fun time.

**John:** Letter Jam is a Czech game, but you can find it on Amazon and other places. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** Fantastic. The Czechs make excellent games, like Codenames.

**John:** Like Codenames. The same company that makes Codenames.

**Craig:** Oh, there you go. They’re great. My One Cool Thing this week is the television show Fallout. Now you have the information. Fallout on Amazon.

**John:** On Prime.

**Craig:** On Prime. I loved it. I loved it from start to finish. It was so well done, I thought. A lot of the reviews for it would talk about The Last of Us and video game adaptations, and I wish they wouldn’t, because to me, it’s taking away, first of all, from what those folks did at Fallout, and saying, “Oh, this one’s also a video game.” It’s like, “Okay, and these two movies were both adapted from books. Let’s compare those.” There’s no point. It doesn’t matter. It’s a wildly different show, different tone.

I played Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4, and I’m just a fan, a Fallout fan. I thought that they did a terrific job of adapting that in the way it should’ve been adapted. It was just a fun watch. It was well acted. Walt Goggins is terrific in it. It might not be for everyone. It’s an overtly kind of gory, kind of like that comedy gore, which is true to the game. I thought it was great. I just loved it from start to finish. They’ve been renewed for Season 2. Not at all surprised to see that. I look forward to that, I assume, in… It’s a massive show. I know what it takes to make a show this size. I think they probably are bigger, budget-wise, I think. I hope so, based on what I saw. It was like, oh my god, this is insane.

**John:** But I saw they got their California tax incentive for Season 2, so they’ll be here, so that’ll be great.

**Craig:** Maybe I’ll come visit the set if they invite me. I’m a fan. I really enjoyed the show a lot.

**John:** That’s great to hear. It feels like the kind of show that my husband will not want to watch, so I think while he’s gone this weekend, I will burn through it myself.

**Craig:** Now, I will say-

**John:** You still would want to-

**Craig:** You know what I’m gonna say.

**John:** Yeah, you want it to be a weekly show.

**Craig:** Not only do I want it to be a weekly show. This, of all shows-

**John:** Of all shows should’ve been.

**Craig:** … should’ve been a weekly show. Hey, Jeff Bezos, I know you listen to our show. He does not. That’s just stupid. I don’t know how else to put it. I wish there were a different way.

**John:** He doesn’t even run Amazon Prime Video, but still, yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know who does. The most polite way I can say it is, it’s just fully stupid, because that show-

**John:** The footprint is smaller than it should be.

**Craig:** It’s so much smaller than it should be, and that show is such a “oh my god, I can’t wait to see what happens next” show, which is why you should make them wait. Make them wait a week. Then with, I think it’s eight episodes, you’d have a cultural conversation over two months.

I’ll just keep pointing over to Shogun, which has one more episode to go. Tuesday, when this episode airs, that night will be the finale, the finale, the finale of Shogun. People have been talking about it for months, because it goes one a week via Hulu.

There’s no reason for Fallout to be all at once. It just felt wasteful, like, I’m gonna cook you a week’s worth of food, and then you just throw it after, because you consumed it all too much. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to maximize the discussion around something as good as Fallout that is so watchable and addictible – addictive.

**John:** Addictive.

**Craig:** Addictive. I said “addictible.” That’s not a word.

**John:** Addictible, yeah. It could be.

**Craig:** It shouldn’t be.

**John:** The kids will make it a word.

**Craig:** Damn kids.

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

**Craig:** Is it?

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Oh, dear.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Nica Brooke. 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’ll 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 fantastic. 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 what you should do when you meet a famous person.

**Craig:** Oh, I thought you were gonna say what you should do when you get lots of emails from English people complaining.

**John:** You can send those emails to ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Ask.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Ask@johnaugust.com.

**John:** Ask@johnaugust.com. Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you, Drew.

**Drew:** Thanks, guys.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, let’s talk through what a person should do when they meet a famous person. And by what you should do meeting a famous person, I don’t mean you or me, who actually have different contexts, but you’re an ordinary person. You meet a famous person. Let’s talk through the different contexts in which this might happen. First off, you were called into a meeting with a famous person, a famous actor, a famous director, producer, who cares. How do you acknowledge or not acknowledge the fame differential between you and that famous person?

**Craig:** In the context of a professional meeting, you want to acknowledge it as little as possible, because you don’t want to seem like you don’t belong in the room. The tried and true method is to simply say, “I’m such a fan. It’s so lovely to meet you.” I do that with actors that I cast in the show that are famous and have done lots of things. It’s 99 percent of the time exactly true. And beyond that, you don’t want to go too much further, because at that point, you’re putting yourself in fan box as opposed to collaborator box.

**John:** 100 percent. I had a meeting with Henry Cavill. He’s so charming and just so incredibly handsome, but if I were to acknowledge too much, like, oh, this famous person is two feet away from me, that’s not gonna be useful for the meeting. That’s just noise and buzz and it’s not on topic. Address it just the way Craig said. “Such a fan. It’s really good to meet you. I really liked this thing.” You can talk about other stuff. But don’t talk about, like, “What’s it like being famous?”

**Craig:** They don’t necessarily want to listen to that. Hopefully, if it’s a professional context, they’re also familiar with you and some of the things you’ve done. There may be a polite exchange of, “I really love this. I really like this.” The other thing that you don’t want to do in a professional context is try.

This is pretty common. For any human being, when you meet somebody famous, there’s gonna be a natural instinct to try. You’re gonna want to impress them. You’re gonna want to make them laugh. You’re gonna want to make them like you. You’re gonna want them to be your friend, because they’re famous and they have this distortion field around them that’s so fascinating. Don’t do that, because what will end up happening is either faceplanting or just inauthenticity. It’s a bit sweaty. The hardest advice and the most common advice is to just be yourself. Unfortunately, in this situation, you must just be yourself.

**John:** I would say don’t try to match their energy, their accent, because again, they have a gravitational pull sometimes, and it can be really natural to do that. No, you’re there to be yourself and to do your thing. Don’t try to get there.

I had an actor camp coming in. I was gonna come in to do a rewrite on a project, and he was just bouncing off the walls. I didn’t react to how hyper he was. I was just back to focus on, like, “This is what I want to do. This is how we can do this. I hear why that’s important to you, and here’s a way we can achieve that.” You can validate all you want, but don’t try to match them at their energy, because that’s not your job.

**Craig:** It’s not. Also, don’t give away your authority. You’re in the room for a reason. You know something. You do a job they don’t do. You have value. Don’t give it away. You don’t have to be a pompous jerk about it. You don’t have to be arrogant. But it’s all right for you to have opinions. It’s all right for you to say, “Yes. However, one of the things I’ve learned is blah.” You are allowed to be valuable. You’re not there simply to go, “Oh my god, that’s so great. Oh my god, you’re so awesome. Oh my god, everything you say is right.” It’s not. It’s not. They’re just people. They’re just people, especially in that context. You must people-ify these individuals that prior to that meeting were godlike to you because they were on screen.

**John:** Back in the time when you and me both used to do more emergency work or coming in to help out on troubled things, I really felt like a lot of times the reason I got hired is I could survive in those rooms, that I could actually do my job in the presence of just a lot of chaotic energy and big egos and things. I could navigate my way through that. You get better at that by just meeting more famous, powerful people and not being swept away by them.

**Craig:** Correct. There’s another skill involved in those situations where you need to make your way through a meeting with that person, giving them some kind of comfort, and then separately talking with the adults and saying, “Okay. Now, what do we need, and how much of that do you want?” Navigating that is a very difficult thing to do. But it is important, because ultimately, a lot of these famous people need to be happy. If it’s fixit stuff, it’s fair to say no one’s happy. Everyone is feeling wanting. How do you satisfy everybody somehow?

Look, you can piss off the head of a studio. They can stop talking to you for three weeks. But if you piss off – I don’t know, I’m just gonna pick somebody. You’ve come in to fix a Thor movie and you’ve pissed off Chris Hemsworth, you’re fired, because he’s the one who’s showing up on screen. You can’t lose that piece. That’s the additional political power that these folks have just by dint of the job they do.

**John:** Let’s talk a different context. It’s not a meeting, but you just saw their show, you saw their movie, or you’re backstage at their theater performance. How do you interact with that person in those moments?

**Craig:** Keep it short. Keep it simple. And keep your expectations to zero. Your expectations should simply be shake their hand, tell them how great they did, say one quick thing. If you want a photo, they’re so used to that. And always ask, “Is it okay if I take a picture with you?” They’ll be happy to take a picture with you, because most of the time, backstage is when that’s supposed to happen. That’s sort of the deal. And also, it means this interaction is about to end.

You and I have had these. We’re not famous-famous, but people know us from the things we do and from this podcast. When there is, either it’s at a live show or let’s say you’re just at a restaurant and somebody notices you and they are a big fan of you, when they say, “Can I get a photo?” in my mind I’m like, A, yes, and B, we have concluded this interaction and I can go back to whatever I’m doing. That’s a good thing. If you go too long, I don’t know, more than 15, 20 seconds, it becomes an imposition.

**John:** I would differentiate the backstage of the show versus out at a restaurant. If you can find a moment in a public space where you feel like you can grab the person without breaking their world, that’s great, but I’d say don’t – I don’t know, I don’t want to blanket recommendation to never come up to the table, but kind of never come up to the table.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t say come up to the table. If they’re having dinner, leave them be. But when they’re leaving-

**John:** Waiting for the valet, waiting for [crosstalk 01:05:57].

**Craig:** … waiting for the valet, those are perfectly fine moments, because the other thing is, if you just imagine yourself in their shoes, if you’re in the middle of dinner, you’re in the middle. That means somebody comes up, talks to you, goes back and sits down, and now they’re over there, and now you’re aware that they’re there. Other people might take this as an opportunity for them to come up. Leave famous people alone when they’re clearly in the middle of conversations, dinner, etc., working. But when it is a little breather moment, like leaving, then sure. Just always be polite if you can.

**John:** This last week after seeing Civil War, I was walking back to the car, and a listener of the podcast stopped me to say, “Oh hey, I really liked the show.” That was great. It was lovely. It was a brief conversation. Completely 100 percent appropriate.

**Craig:** Oh, of course. Look, there are actors who are infamous for being super grouchy about this. I don’t begrudge them their grouchiness. It’s just like, hey, did no one tell you that being famous would mean you’d be famous? Most famous people I know are perfectly fine and gracious with those interactions. There are ways that they mitigate some of these things.

Every now and then, I’ll go catch a Dodger game with Jason Bateman. When it’s time to leave the game, nobody walks faster and with more purpose than Jason Bateman leaving Dodger Stadium. It’s because there are sometimes upwards of 50,000 people there. At least, I don’t know, 30 percent of them are like, “That’s Jason Bateman.” If you’re walking real fast, people will go like, “Oh, Jason.” He’s like, “Hey,” and then he keeps walking, and so there’s no chance to get stopped and mobbed. That’s reasonable. But if somebody were to walk over to him when he’s sitting there and say, “Hey, my son’s a big fan. Would you sign this?” yeah, of course.

**John:** Dodgers Stadium, the equivalent for us is Austin during the film festival, where I do need to walk pretty quickly and with laser-focused eyes, because otherwise I just won’t ever make it to my destination.

**Craig:** There was one year, I think it was the last time I was in Austin, I got off the plane. I landed in Austin, got off the plane, emerged from the jetway into the airport, and within three seconds, I heard someone say my name to another person. I was like, “Ah, shit.” The thing is, listen, of course, it’s a nice thing when people know you and like you. But if you feel like, uh-oh, it’s gonna be a lot of this, it does become a little bit like… I’m not built for it necessarily. I’m always nice. I’m never a jerk, ever, ever, ever. But if somebody could say, “Hey, here’s a potion you could drink when you’re at the Austin Film Festival and you’ll be invisible for the next three hours,” oh my god, I would pay a lot.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** I’d pay money.

**John:** Another context, a social event. Actually, there’s two different levels of this. There’s a social event which is the bigger social event, where there’s a lot of people mingling around, it’s a cocktail-y party kind of thing, or an after-screening kind of thing, where there’s a famous person there and you’re kind of introduced. Do you acknowledge how famous the other person is? A lot of it, you can do the – it’s like a meeting thing, where it’s just like, “I love doing this thing.” But other times, it can be weird. You’re folded into a conversation with somebody who’s much more famous. Do I acknowledge, like, “Oh my god, you’re Amy Poehler.”

**Craig:** This is an example of a moment like that that I had. Normally, when I walk away from moments like that, I think to myself, I screwed it up. In this one, I thought, “Nailed it,” because it was so honest. I was at the Golden Globes. It was before the show started. I was talking to Kevin Huvane, one of the guys that runs CAA, and we were by the bathrooms. And he said, “Oh, I’m waiting here for Meryl Streep.” I was like, “Oh my god.” He’s like, “You want to meet her?” I’m like, “Meryl Streep? I would love to meet her.” She came out. He’s like, “Oh, Meryl, this is Craig Mazin.” I shook her hand. This is what I did. I went, “You know.” And she said, “I know.” I was like, okay, well, there you go, because she’s heard it a billion times. I didn’t want to say it all to her, but also, I wanted her to know, like, “I love you and I love everything you’re in and you’re amazing. You’re the greatest actor of your generation. Here’s the whole thing.” I think I could boil it down to just, you are aware of what’s happening in my brain. She was so nice and gracious about it.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** It was the perfect length. It was a good old-fashioned 15-second chitchat, and that was the end of that.

**John:** What’s great about that example is Kevin Huvane could be the hinge that introduced the two of you, and that makes things much more natural. If she was 10 feet away, would you have gone up to say anything?

**Craig:** Oh my gosh. Now I’ll tell you when I blew it. This is so long ago. This was like 1992. I was with a friend. Is Johnny Rockets still there on La Cienega?

**John:** No, it’s not, alas.

**Craig:** It was an old burger joint across from the Beverly Center. We were there. It was, I don’t know, 8:00 p.m. or something sort of late. My friend – and we were sitting outside – he goes, “Look who’s over there. It’s Seinfeld.” It was Jerry Seinfeld. He was talking to someone else. They were having dinner. I was like, “Oh my god, oh my god, Jerry Seinfeld.” When we were done, we’re walking by, and I was like, “I’m not gonna do it. I’m not gonna say anything.” I had already passed him by two steps when I just was like, “No, I must.” I turned around and then went back towards him. I’m sure he thought, like, “Oh shit, I’m getting assassinated.” I was just like, “Oh, hi. Just a big fan.” He was like, “Oh, great.” Then I walked away. My friend was like, “That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. He must’ve shit his pants, because you looked like you were coming back to throw a punch at him.” But I was so nervous and awkward about it.

That said, sometimes – and you’ve probably felt this, John, maybe at Austin, where people come up to you and you can see how nervous they are to talk to you. It’s adorable, actually. It’s kind of sweet.

**John:** You immediately do the thing to put them at ease and make you feel okay about the whole thing.

**Craig:** Exactly. Everybody has these moments with famous people where they just fall apart, forget themselves, regress to childhood, feel like an idiot. That’s also fine and normal. If you can see that they’re like eh, just thank them for meeting them and leave. Don’t push it. I’m sorry, Jerry Seinfeld. I’ve never met him since. I’ve never met him. We’ve talked to Julia Louis-Dreyfus on our show, and I know Jason Alexander. These are lovely people. I’m at a different time in my life. I’m very comfortable around these people. But I still feel like if I were to meet Jerry Seinfeld today, I would have to say, “I need to take you back to 1992 and apologize.”

**John:** Example just from this last week. We were at the WGA Awards. Craig, congratulations on your WGA Award-

**Craig:** Oh, thank you.

**John:** … for Best New Series, which is terrific. At the after-party thing, Quinta Brunson was like three feet away from me, talking with other people. And I was talking with other people. But I didn’t know whether to say hi to Quinta, because she came on the podcast, but it was just a one-time thing. I don’t know that she really remembers who I am out of this context. Of course, there’s a disparity, because she’s just much more famous. I know her because she’s a very successful creator and star of a thing. I did not end up saying hi, and I had an opportunity, because a friend of mine was talking with her, and I could’ve worked my way back in, but you don’t always have to take advantage of those opportunities.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nothing good would’ve happened.

**Craig:** If you have nothing to say… I had met Quinta before, through Natasha Lyonne. Then we had her on the show. Now we sort of know each other. Melissa and I were both just wiped out, so we just went home. But if I had gone to that party and I had seen Quinta there, my guess is I probably would’ve just waved and then just kept going, because I don’t have anything specifically to say other than, “Hey, we know each other.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Yes, and?

**John:** Yeah. There’s that. Craig, as a famous person I get to do a podcast with every week, always a pleasure.

**Craig:** Famous, quote unquote.

**John:** Quote unquote, famous.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

Links:

* [Do I Sound Gay? Documentary](https://www.doisoundgay.com/)
* [International Dialects of English Archive](https://www.dialectsarchive.com/)
* [Accent Tag on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=accent+tag)
* [Chilean beer ads in Star Wars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSgMWAi9YPA)
* [Letter Jam](https://czechgames.com/for-press/lj.html)
* [TacticalMap](https://tactical-map.com/)
* [Fallout](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0CN4HV16N/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r) on Prime Video
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* [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 Nica Brooke ([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/641standard.mp3).