The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/back-in-the-fyc).
**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:** And this is Episode 625 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Craig, it’s finally here. It’s awards season. We’re so excited. What does awards season mean for you, Craig?
**Craig:** It means losing to Succession a lot.
**John:** Yeah, that’s probably going to happen.
**Craig:** It’s going to be quite the blitzkrieg, and well deserved. It would be tougher probably if I didn’t love Succession and I also didn’t know Jesse Armstrong and know him to be a fantastic person and an amazing writer and leader of his whole staff. It’s their final season. I think we’re all getting swept under the tide. I’ll cry onto the lapels of Mike White, or perhaps he’ll cry on mine, or maybe a shocker.
**John:** Yeah, it could.
**Craig:** But I doubt it. We’re going to be at the Golden Globes. Because of the strikes, everything got squished into… We’re going to be at the Golden Globes and then a week later, AFI, which is nice, because it’s not a competition. Then Critics Choice, and then the Emmys. It will be one crushing loss after another.
**John:** Smear of awards.
**Craig:** I’ve been trying to practice my face when they announce that I lose multiple times. What do I do with my face? Because I’m worried that somehow-
**John:** You’ll have to have a reaction.
**Craig:** … my sadness will leak through, although I’m not sad. But I also don’t want to be a goof about it. You have to practice a very neutral…
**John:** That makes sense.
**Craig:** “Well done, Jesse.” That’s going to be my face. “Well done, Jesse.”
**John:** Absolutely. For folks at home who cannot, of course, see this, because this is an audio medium, there’s a little nod there. It’s a good acknowledgement. “That makes sense.”
**Craig:** Yeah, like, “That’s about right. Yeah, that’s about right.”
**John:** Now, for 99% of people who listen to this podcast, they don’t have to worry about their faces during awards season. They get to enjoy the movies and the TV shows and read the scripts or take a look at the scripts that were behind all these amazing achievements.
**Craig:** Via your app, I believe.
**John:** Yeah, so all these things are available in Weekend Read, but I also will put links in the show notes to the original pdfs. I think it’s sometimes good for us on this podcast to look at the pdfs, to look at what they were like on the page, literally the layout on the page, because we talk about this a lot in the Three Page Challenge.
**Craig:** Everybody’s different. It’s always interesting to see how people do things.
**John:** We’ll be taking a look at a lot of the For Your Consideration scripts to see what lessons and trends we can learn from the movies that got made this past year. We’ll also answer some listener questions about writing routines, shared credits, and more things like that. And in our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, how do we feel about lab-grown meat, and would we eat human flesh if it were created in a lab? Craig is laughing, but we’ll get the real answers only in the bonus segment for premium members.
**Craig:** I’m laughing and suddenly hungry.
**John:** Strange, that.
**Craig:** Mm, humans.
**John:** We recorded this before the calendar has flipped to January, but some of the last news coming out of December was the possibility that Paramount is up for sale or that Shari Redstone had considered selling Paramount. Warner’s has apparently had a conversation about it. I don’t feel good about Warnamount.
**Craig:** Very good portmanteau.
**John:** I didn’t create that, but I hear it being said.
**Craig:** Para Bros.
**John:** Para Bros. Para Bros.
**Craig:** Para Bros.
**John:** I don’t want Warner’s to buy Paramount. I don’t want another Disney-Fox situation. I don’t know how that avoids happening.
**Craig:** I’m not sure Warner Bros shareholders want this either.
**John:** The stock prices were down after, yeah.
**Craig:** It’s a bit confusing, because so much of what’s been going on post any of these mergers is that the company that acquires the other company then has to manage all the debt, because these are all leveraged. Apple, I suppose, could do it. Everybody else needs to borrow money to buy these companies, with the understanding that it’ll pay off in the end. But in the short term, you do get saddled with a lot of debt. Discovery bought Warner Bros and then was saddled with a lot of debt. It seems counter-intuitive that they would want to buy someone else. The upside, I suppose, of buying Paramount is you also get CBS.
**John:** Yeah. That’s one of the unique situations is that basically you’re not allowed to own two broadcast networks, but Warner’s doesn’t own a broadcast network.
**Craig:** Exactly.
**John:** They’re one of the few existing studios that could legally conceivably buy Paramount/CBS.
**Craig:** They could buy it. There are a lot of great Paramount… Star Trek alone-
**John:** It’s great. It’s a good franchise.
**Craig:** … has been kicking off a trillion dollars over the last decades. Look, I don’t understand, because I don’t buy companies or sell them. But Paramount seemingly has been on the block forever. The thing that I wonder about, and it’s the same thing I wondered about with Disney and Fox, is the lot itself. What happens? Fox is a smallish lot.
**John:** But it’s incredibly prime real estate.
**Craig:** Prime real estate, but it’s smallish. You could argue, let’s keep it, and let’s use the sound stages and all the people that have offices there. Paramount is massive.
**John:** Warner’s is massive.
**Craig:** So is Paramount.
**John:** You were saying what was a small lot?
**Craig:** Fox.
**John:** I think Fox is a huge lot.
**Craig:** Really?
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** I think of it as a small lot.
**John:** I think of it as a much bigger lot than Paramount, actually.
**Craig:** Really?
**John:** I do.
**Craig:** Can you quickly scan this up and let’s see?
**John:** Let’s take a look. We’re going to look at Google Maps here.
**Craig:** In my brain, Paramount just goes on and on and on.
**John:** But having picketed at Paramount a ton, you really can walk around. You can’t walk around the north perimeter of it, because it backs up against the cemetery.
**Craig:** I’m looking up sizes here. Paramount Studio, their lot is 65 acres.
**John:** 65 acres.
**Craig:** 65 acres. Now, let’s talk about Fox lot by size. The Fox lot is 50-plus acres, so Paramount is bigger.
**John:** It’s bigger.
**Craig:** It’s bigger. Now, 65 acres, by the way, or 50 acres, in the middle of either Hollywood, like Paramount, or Culver City-
**John:** The west side, yeah.
**Craig:** … or I guess West LA, like Fox, that’s worth a gazillion dollars. There is another argument, which is you’re buying real estate, incredibly valuable real estate. That’s terrifying, because it’s our history. It would be so sad to see one of the great studio lots torn down and parceled out into condos.
**John:** Yeah. Getting back to beyond the real estate, I was concerned about Disney buying Fox. It felt like there’s just one less place to sell a movie-
**Craig:** Of course.
**John:** … one less place to sell a TV series, and that it should never have been able to go through. I didn’t see Fox really struggling that much. They still had franchises. They were still able to do stuff. I also see Paramount doing stuff. I’m frustrated that it feels like we’re setting these impossible standards for what a studio is supposed to be able to kick off and generate, and ignoring the fact that there’s cycles and ups and downs, and there’s hits and misses, and Paramount could be on the uptick.
**Craig:** It’s possible, although as a movie studio, it has felt a bit more abundant over the last 10 years even. When you and I started, Paramount was a full buyer like anyone else. Over the last 10 years, it just felt like their output dwindled down to Transformers, occasional Star Trek, not a ton else, Indiana Jones.
**John:** But now Indiana Jones is Disney.
**Craig:** Now it’s Disney, yeah. It did feel like it was shrinking. I agree with you that any time there’s one fewer buyer, that’s bad news. On the other hand, it is counter-balanced by the fact that there are all these other buyers that didn’t exist before, so Apple, Amazon, Netflix.
**John:** A24.
**Craig:** A24.
**John:** The other thing I would say is CBS as a brand is really good. It’s still an incredibly powerful broadcast networks. The shows I actually watched are broadcast shows: Survivor, Amazing Race, Big Brother. Those are all CBS shows. They tend to skew older.
**Craig:** Also sports.
**John:** Sports. It’s got huge sports.
**Craig:** The sports alone is a pretty big deal. If your argument is, hey, if you’re a big studio, you should have a television network, yeah, I guess that makes sense, but I don’t understand. The one thing that people have suggested is maybe the government would thwart it. Doesn’t seem like they ever thwart it.
**John:** This FTC I don’t think would’ve allowed Disney and Fox to go.
**Craig:** I don’t know. They’ll probably push on it and challenge it and delay it, but it seems like they never stop anything.
**John:** They actually just stopped Adobe from buying Figma.
**Craig:** I don’t know what that is.
**John:** Adobe was trying to buy-
**Craig:** What’s Figma?
**John:** They are one of the big design software places.
**Craig:** Then okay, something there.
**John:** The push for the FTC is always whether consolidation is bad because it hurts prices or does it hurt competition overall within the industry. I think that consolidation could hurt worker power.
**Craig:** It’s a little tricky, because hurting worker power is probably not enough, although that’s certainly our interest. There are still a lot of competitors in Hollywood, whereas Adobe buying Figma maybe reduced the pool of… If it increases their market share to 80%, now you’ve got a problem. But nobody has 80% market share. The only company in Hollywood that would even be whiffing at some kind of monopolistic market share would be Netflix.
**John:** Yeah, agree. If Netflix were to try to buy something, I think there would be-
**Craig:** Netflix would not be able to buy something. I can’t imagine that would go through.
**John:** Some follow-up. A couple of sessions ago, we talked about that I was going to start learning the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. It’s actually really interesting. I’m working with a tutor but also going through some books and learning some stuff. There’s just things you never think about. The “huh” sound, we have “huh,” but we also have “wh,” and so the different between “who” and “hue” is really strange. I’m actually really enjoying learning all that stuff. In particular, there’s a chart you can see, which shows all the sounds that are in all the languages, basically where they fit into the mouth. There are sounds that humans can make that for whatever reason don’t show up in any languages, which I think is really interesting.
**Craig:** Maybe they just weren’t considered valuable for some reason or another. Obviously, some languages have clicks and things like that, but no one really has [odd, indescribable mouth sound]. Nobody does that, which is probably for the best. There are certain sounds in other languages that we can copy, even though we don’t use them without too much difficulty, like [clicks tongue], like that one. Then there are certain sounds, for instance in Icelandic, where you’re like, “I don’t know how to do that. That’s a hard sound to make if you haven’t been raised natively.”
**John:** They can be hard sounds to make and also hard sounds to hear. Classically, if you’re not raised in a tonal language, it’s very hard to hear the tones and stuff if you’re trying to learn Mandarin as an adult.
**Craig:** You can hear them, but you can’t hear the shades in between them. It’s hard to discriminate. It’s that thing where someone’s like, “No, no, no, I said this, and you said this.” You’re like, “You just said the same thing twice.” “No, I didn’t.” I can understand. There’s also these funny things that happen, particularly with British English compared to American English, where a lot of British people will drop the Hs, famously, so, “‘Ow are you doing?” But then they will add Hs or aspirations where we don’t. Instead of “HBO,” a lot of people in Britain say “haych-BO”. “Haych-BO” is kind of incredible.
**John:** Or classically, also adding the aspirated H before a W, so “h-where.”
**Craig:** “H-where.”
**John:** “H-where.”
**Craig:** “H-where are you going? H-what?”
**John:** “H-what?” We’re making up accents. There’s clearly patterns of things that go together. The thing I’m also, was a little bit brain melting – I think I’ve mostly gotten the way through it – is the two TH sounds in English.
**Craig:** “Th” /ð/ and “th” /θ/.
**John:** Yeah, which you think you understand fully, and then you realize almost the same word can have a different thing. As you’re writing stuff out in phonetic things, are you using the theta, or are you using the other one to show it.
**Craig:** “With” or “this.”
**John:** “Withdrawn” doesn’t have the voiced.
**Craig:** “Withdrawn.”
**John:** You could say “withdrawn.”
**Craig:** You’d be wrong. “The” is the simplest one. It’s not “the.” If someone said “the,” it would actually be kind of incredible.
**John:** Imagine you’re a speaker who doesn’t speak a language with those sounds.
**Craig:** It’s bizarre.
**John:** How do you tell those apart?
**Craig:** That’s the con of learning English. On the plus side, the easiest conjugations ever.
**John:** Love it. So good.
**Craig:** Yay.
**John:** If you learn the sounds of English, you can get through a lot of other languages pretty easy.
**Craig:** Also, if you’re not a native English speaker, and you say, “I would like the bagel,” no one’s going to be like, “H-what?” They’ll say, “Got it. Here’s the bagel.” It’s not that far off.
**John:** I’m also just always impressed by deaf people who learn spoken English and just how challenging that must be to figure out what all the sounds are without being able to have the feedback mechanism.
**Craig:** It is fascinating to see where the difficulties are, because there are certain things that we apparently need aural, A-U-R-A-L, feedback for to get. Typically, when deaf people are first learning to speak out loud, it’s very nasal, and certain sounds are just clipped or not there, because there’s not a feedback loop. Nasality is a really interesting thing that you just, I don’t know, I guess hearing, you auto-correct. Strange.
**John:** Strange stuff. That was one of my goals for 2024 was learning that. But Mike and I made a joint list of goals for things, like 24 things we’re going to do in ’24.
**Craig:** You guys are so organized.
**John:** We’re so organized. I would just encourage people to think about that. It’s good to set couple goals stuff and things like we’re going to do bar trivia at least four times in 2024. I love bar trivia.
**Craig:** It’s the best.
**John:** We’re going to see at least two shows at the Hollywood Bowl. Make a list of not homework stuff, but things like, “Oh yeah, let’s actually make it a plan to do those things.”
**Craig:** That sounds great. Did you ever read the story of that couple that was like, “For this year we’re going to have sex every day.”
**John:** Oh yeah.
**Craig:** I can’t do that. That just seems like too much, because sometimes I think couples are like, “We should do it. We should do the sex every day.” I feel like I would probably make it eight days and be like-
**John:** We did it for a month.
**Craig:** You did it for a month?
**John:** For a month, and it was a lot.
**Craig:** Around Day 22, was it like, “Time to make the donuts.”
**John:** I think it was actually a useful thing for us to do, just as a reminder, a prioritization of that.
**Craig:** That’s a pretty interesting notion.
**John:** It’s sort of like those folks who do Whole30, where they don’t eat any refined sugars or any of that stuff for 30 days. You do actually come to appreciate other things because of it.
**Craig:** I guess you can do anything for… You know what I’ve stopped doing?
**John:** What’s this?
**Craig:** I stopped biting my nails.
**John:** Good. That’s terrific.
**Craig:** I have a friend who has a habit that she’s trying to break. It’s a similar sort of habit. Just to be an ally, I was like, “I’ll do it with you.” I had been biting my nails my whole life. Every now and then when I find my nails resting on my tooth, and I’m like, “Nope,” and I take it out. But I’m having to learn how to use nail clippers. I thought maybe it would just get it all in one shot, but it doesn’t. You have to go around.
**John:** Yeah, like the rest of us.
**Craig:** I’m like a little child learning to walk, with my nail clipper.
**John:** You’ve stopped the auto-cannibalism of biting your fingernails.
**Craig:** We will discuss that in the bonus segment.
**John:** In the bonus segment. Let’s take a look at some of these scripts that are now available For Your Consideration. I remember when Big Fish was out for awards stuff, it was just at the early days where they were starting to really send out the scripts and have people read the scripts. They would mail printed copies of the script or the bound things. I had a pdf on my website for stuff, but pdfs weren’t as big of a thing to be shipping around. Luckily, now, in 2023, 2024, basically any script that’s award-eligible is going to have the script out there, which is great resource for people.
These are all theoretically the final shooting scripts. But let’s talk about that for a second, because they sometimes are, and they often aren’t. If you were on set, shooting the last day of that production, versus the script that we’re reading, it’s probably not the same thing. It probably doesn’t have those color change pages or the partial pages. Stuff will have changed.
**Craig:** Sure, and probably more will change then in the editorial process. One of the things that we have to do when we’re putting our stuff together is say, “Okay, do we leave this scene that we deleted? Do we leave it in? Do we leave this longer version of the scene in?” Generally, I do. The stuff that I will amend to conform it to the final edit usually has to do with things that involve meaning, or if there were things that I was just like, “It actually wasn’t that good. I’m glad I took it out. It doesn’t need to be in the script.”
**John:** Or if you reshot something, and it really does not resemble the final version of that. In Go!, there were reshoots and whole sequences that are no longer.
**Craig:** Exactly. For a movie it’s much easier, because there’s just less of it. You can spend the time conforming it. You can make it almost a transcript version of the final cut. For television shows, it’s a little more annoying. My general thing is go with the shooting script, do a version where you unlock the pages. Maybe I take off the scene numbers. They’re not particularly useful for people. Remove the asterisks and the production headers. Then here or there, make your choices about whether or not you want to conform it.
**John:** A friend of ours worked at a studio. One of his jobs every awards season was to go through and put together that final script that would actually go out there, because sometimes there were little changes or things that were in the final movie that weren’t in this. He had to conform those things. That’s a tough job. You’re literally going through scene by scene, watching it and then making sure the script matches it.
**Craig:** That’s right. If there is a line that happens on the day, because the director and… Let’s hope the writer is there, although usually not. But let’s say it’s the writer-director. Let’s say Rian Johnson says, “Oh, I have an idea. Instead of saying what I wrote, say this instead,” and they do. That has to now be written into the script or else it just doesn’t have that great line. “Here’s Johnny” in The Shining was not in the script that day for him to do, but you’d want to have that in the script.
**John:** You would want to have that in the script. The only time it’s come up in my arbitration experience, there was one project I worked on where the script had gone through a lot of drafts, and other writers had touched it, and I saw a cut of the film, and then I got the final shooting script for the arbitration process. I had to go back to the Guild and say, “This is not the movie. This is not the movie I actually saw. There’s a ton of scenes that are in this script that are not in the movie at all.” They went to the studio, and the studio agreed, and so they created a new script, which was much more a transcript of what the film itself was.
**Craig:** A reflection of what it was. There’s this thing that when you arbitrate for credit, what the arbiters are asked to do is credit the final shooting script. That’s what the credit is for. Sometimes there isn’t one, because people just started doing stuff or figuring things out on the day and not writing it down, or I do this all the time when I’m editing, where I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to add a line and just put it on this person’s back, and we’ll loop it.” What about all that? Yeah, you do need a conforming process, especially for credit.
**John:** The scripts we’re looking at, some of them may be closer to what was actually shot on the day. Some of them are combined, optimized versions of what the plans were. But I think they’re all really useful. They do reflect the writers’ original intentions behind these things.
I broke these down into a couple categories. I wanted to start with scripts that just do a great job of establishing the setting. When we do the Three Page Challenges, we’re always looking at, do I know what kind of movie this is, do I know what the world is like.
I thought we might start with The Holdovers by David Hemingson. If you take a look at this first three pages here, “Day – December 18, 1970.” Credits on the top. Then we’re going through a sequence of scenes that are establishing this boys’ school on the East Coast. The Choirmaster is leading the kids through Oh Little Town of Bethlehem. I just thought it did a brilliant job of establishing the world of a 1970s boys’ prep school and what the feeling and the time and the season was.
**Craig:** Yes. As you go through, I really appreciate the fact that there is specific music that is called out. The music itself gives you a signal that as you move through these moments, you’re not moving through against dead nothing. It’s amazing how even in our minds, if I just took that line out, even if I just said, “The Choirmaster gives each boy his note, and they sing,” and I didn’t say Oh Little Town of Bethlehem, the rest of this would be very just eh. But now I can hear it, and I’m moving around, and I’m seeing everything that he wants me to see, and I understand the tone of it, which is that it’s set against this choral music. Very well done.
**John:** It’s a great start here. By the end of our three pages here, we’ve met our main hero, our main antagonist. We’ve met Crandall, who’s the main kid we’re going to be following. We’ve met the teacher, Paul, who’s Paul Giamatti’s character. We have a sense of what this world is like. There are some surprises they don’t want us to spoil in the film. But we get a really good sense of the world this film is going to be taking place in.
**Craig:** You know my obsession with wardrobe, hair, and makeup to describe characters. I’m just going to read the description of Miss Crane. “Miss Crane, a bright-eyed, middle-aged secretary, holding a plate with a napkin over it.” Now, I don’t know much other than age and bright eyes. But then, “She smiles, lipstick on her teeth.” Yes, yes, I can see her now. The thing is, we don’t have to describe everything. We just have to describe the stuff that we think will matter to the reader to get the essence of who a person is. There is something about a bright-eyed, middle-aged secretary with lipstick on her teeth where I go, “There’s about a thousand different people who could play you, but I see all of you.”
**John:** Having seen the film, I don’t remember that lipstick being on her teeth, and it doesn’t matter.
**Craig:** It doesn’t matter.
**John:** It gives us a sense of who she is as the reader, who doesn’t get the visual otherwise.
**Craig:** It helps you with casting. We’re going through quite a bit of casting right now. When we look at auditions and things, we’re not looking for the scene. We’re looking for the intangible stuff, the little moments that go, “They’ve captured the essence of something.” Now, once we cast somebody, it’s new, and now we change things. There may be somebody that didn’t need the lipstick on the teeth.
**John:** Next up, we’re taking a look at All of Us Strangers by Andrew Haigh. This did, again, I thought a really good job of establishing a place, a time, a setting. It’s modern day. It’s London, but we’re outside of London. We’re looking back at London. This script goes a very long time before a character speaks, and so we’re just watching Adam going through his day, trying to write, not really writing. We’re establishing the world inside of his apartment, this bubble that he’s sealed himself in. “His flat is comfortable and well-looked after. Furniture is all carefully selected and the shelves are lined with books, DVDs and records. Adam lies still for a while, more than a while, watching the light fade from the room. He sits up, switches on a lamp. His stomach grumbles.” We’re just getting a sense of place, time, space in these initial pages.
**Craig:** Then hallelujah, some sound. The final paragraph of this second scene is, “He looks down at his hands resting on his belly and rubs his thumb gently against his finger. The room is quiet enough to hear the sound of skin stroking skin, such a strange, sensual sound.” Thank you. Then the transition is, “Adam opens the fridge door, the ‘buzz’ of the appliance loud in the silence.” This makes me so happy. Anybody out there who’s still doing the whole, “Don’t direct on the… ” Yes, yes, direct. Direct, and use sound as much as you can.
**John:** The first dialogue occurs between our two main characters, Harry and Adam, on Page 3 here, which is this initial very important meeting. Very awkward dialogue. But Haigh does this thing where he does explain what’s happening inside of Adam’s head, which is always a debate, how much do you offer up here. Page 4 here, “Harry lifts up the bottle. He really does seem fucked. Adam wants him gone.” “Adam wants him gone,” that’s a playable thing. It’s totally appropriate to have it there. I know there’s screenwriter teachers who would say, “That’s not a thing. You’re inside of his head.”
**Craig:** Why shouldn’t you be in his head? I’m in my characters’ heads all the time. The important thing is whatever you say either should inform them about what they’re feeling and thinking or give them a motivation. But it’s perfectly fine to give them something that they don’t… It’s not a want or an action. It’s just context, because then it maybe helps. Instead of putting in parentheses, “Lying but trying not to be caught,” have a little bit of space in there, like, “This is a lie, and no one is going to realize it’s a lie until blah blah blah.” Whatever you want to do, as long as it helps them get context and removes questions. Otherwise, there’s a lot of questions. When there’s a lot of questions, there’s the danger that somebody that doesn’t know will answer them incorrectly.
**John:** It’s also important to look at, this initial conversation, the scene description is breaking up the conversation a lot, which is giving you a sense of what the pace of this is. This is not a rat-a-tat-tat, we’re zooming through here. There’s a lot of pausing and reconsidering on both sides.
**Craig:** Yes, and these pages also look good. If you have all this dialogue without any commentary in between, it feels amateurish, and it feels like there are missing opportunities. It just feels like talking at that point.
**John:** Next up, let’s take a look at May December. Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik have the story credits. Samy Burch has the screenplay credit. I like these pages a lot. A lot is established and set up very, very quickly. We are meeting our central characters, the two woman who we’re going to be following throughout the story. We don’t know context behind who Elizabeth is talking to in these initial scenes, but we get a sense of what Savannah, Georgia is going to feel like. “Shady oaks drooping with Spanish moss frame historic blocks of Georgian and Victorian townhouses. American flags hang from exteriors. A high school marching band assembles near a park block.” We’ve established this butterfly imagery that’s going to be happening throughout here.
**Craig:** Theme.
**John:** Theme, theme.
**Craig:** Theme.
**John:** Once we actually get to Gracie Atherton-Yoo’s house, there’s a party being set up here. We get some sense of what Gracie’s like. One of her first bits of dialogue I really love is that, so her husband, “Joe takes a beer from the fridge and heads out,” and Gracie calls out, “That’s two.” You know something about the relationship from that very first little exchange. Once he’s out barbecuing, “Joe mans the grill. There are so, so many hot dogs.” Great. Love it. I really enjoyed setting stuff up for these initial pages.
**Craig:** What can we say? Good writing is good writing. Part of what good writers do is manage to use every ounce of every page without filling it with text. Every page looks balanced. It is not blanketed in words, and yet so much information is being imparted in such clever and interesting ways. It’s incredibly visual. You can kind of smell it. You can kind of hear the chirr of the insects outside. You are drawn in, because it is providing you with the… Like a puzzle that’s at the exact right level of difficulty, even though you may not know what’s going on, you know the movie knows you don’t know what’s going on, and it’s okay, so you feel like, “Ah, yes, take me along on this journey. You will reward me.” It’s just good writing.
**John:** The experience of watching the film is very much like the experience of watching the script. You are a little bit confused, and you’re also confused how much do characters really know about each other, like what do they know versus what I do. That’s thematically what the story is about, so it’s completely appropriate.
**Craig:** It’s funny how often people do get hung up a little bit on, “I don’t know what’s going on.” It’s changed over time. If you watch movies that are from, let’s go back to the ’80s, you’re almost never confused about anything. Everything is really explicit. You go back earlier, it’s absurdly explicit. It’s just, “I am now going to the store. That is my so-and-so.” We’ve gotten way more sophisticated with that stuff, and people are keeping up just fine.
**John:** That’s absolutely true. In the spirit of keeping up, Saltburn, Emerald Fennell, really jams through a lot in its first couple pages here. Just stark imagery. Cigarette cases. Match striking. A man’s mouth. “I wasn’t in love with him,” is the first line spoken, which becomes a repeating theme. We are zipping through a bunch of flashback scenes establishing Oliver and Felix, the object of his affection, getting a sense of what this world is like, the college quad, just how stunning Felix is, and what a magnetic focus he is. We’re zooming through a lot, and then by the end of Page 3, we’re going back to the question, “But was I,” quote unquote, “‘in love’ with him?” And then making it clear that this must be some retrospective, something bad has happened, that we are narrating the story.
**Craig:** We’ve got a little prologue. The prologue is letting us know who the problem is, the object of desire. It is also these kinds of voiceover prologues I often think of as Holden Caulfield prologues, where the narrator is trying to tell you something, and already you kind of suspect he’s just lying, he’s not telling the truth, or he’s spinning it to himself and you at the same time. You don’t trust him already, which is great. Even though people say, “She was also directing it,” lots of direction on the page. Tons of direction on the page, as well there should be.
**John:** We have a whole category for the “we ares” and “we sees.” This is a “we are” and “we see” script.
**Craig:** Side note, Oliver Quick is the best Charles Dickens name that Charles Dickens never wrote. It’s up there with Oliver Twist. I want there to be an Oliver Quick and Oliver Twist movie.
**John:** I would also say Oliver Quick is the name you can get away with if you’re setting up in that first couple pages, but if halfway through a movie you’ve made a character named Oliver Quick, you’re like, “Wait, what is this?”
**Craig:** “Hold on a second. I’m sorry. Did you say Oliver Quick?”
**John:** You would stop if you met somebody like, “My name’s Oliver Quick.” Like, “No, it’s not.”
**Craig:** Yeah, “Let’s bring it down a notch there, Quick.” But it’s tonal. You do get it right up front, even if no one’s saying it out loud. You get it. You the reader get it. It’s a delicious name.
**John:** I set up that we’re talking about “we hears” and “we sees.” Let’s go to Eric Roth, a well-known, established writer, and a Martin Scorsese. Never heard of that.
**Craig:** I don’t know either one of these guys. Who?
**John:** Killers of the Flower Moon is their film. As we look at the shooting script here, Page 1, we’re establishing two-column dialogue, which is a choice you can make when you have things that are going to be subtitled, and it’s important that you have things in both languages. Everything, Everywhere, All At Once did the same kind of thing with its Chinese dialogue. Here, we’re establishing these places and the initial setup for our story here. First line of scene description, “We see eyes through cracks and openings of the bark.”
**Craig:** Wait, what?
**John:** “We see slices of faces peering in.”
**Craig:** Wait, no!
**John:** “We hear-”
**Craig:** No! You can’t. Reddit says you… Oh, wait. For the 4 millionth time, if you hear someone, if we hear someone say you can’t see “we see,” “we hear,” “we” anything in a screenplay, print the script out. Don’t hit them on the head, but threaten to. We don’t want you to cause violence. But nothing wrong with instigating a little bit of fear. If anyone’s like, “It’s okay. They’re established,” here’s the bigger point. It’s not that Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese are established. God knows they are the definition of established. It’s that no one cares. No one cares. There is no more attention paid to “we see,” than there is, I don’t know, the word “exterior.” It’s just not relevant to any of us. Stop talking about it. Who do we talk to?
**John:** We don’t even talk to anybody. I think we talk to ourselves-
**Craig:** We talk to ourselves.
**John:** … on a weekly basis, and eventually, people will learn about this.
**Craig:** We talk to ourselves. I’m also really interested in this numbering system.
**John:** Our numbers are here, P1, P2, P3.
**Craig:** Is that prologue?
**John:** Maybe this is prologue, because it does get back to 1 eventually.
**Craig:** That’s what it is.
**John:** This prologue does look different.
**Craig:** You know what I suspect happened?
**John:** This was added on?
**Craig:** Yep, because if you start a script and you number it, then you lock the numbers. Oh my god, if you change a scene number-
**John:** Oh god, no.
**Craig:** … the entire system falls apart. Now someone’s like, “I have an idea.” I’m going to try and be Martin Scorsese. “I have an idea. I have a great idea. We should do a prologue.” We have a prologue that’s going to have a ton of little scenes. Normally, if you put a scene in front of one, you don’t call it Scene 0, you call it A1. Then the next one would be B1, C1, D1. Too many damn 1s at that point. I actually feel like using this method makes total sense. I’ve never seen it before. But I suspect that’s what happened.
**John:** I suspect that’s the case, because also these are formatted differently than the rest of the script, because these have, instead of scene headers, it’s, “Cut to Osage Princess Contest.” Wow, this is a really strange screenplay format. Then once we get to Page 5, it’s much more conventional.
**Craig:** This looks a little bit like a first AD went into maybe what was considered three scenes, because what happens is P1 is an interior, P3 is an exterior, P2 and all the other Ps are non-scene headers typically. They’re more “cut to, cut to, cut to.” But a first AD knows, “I got to treat each one of these as a scene, because they’re in different places with different people, so I’m just going to go through and number these myself.”
**John:** Scrolling ahead, there are cases where things that we would normally do an interior/exterior scene header are just big uppercase sections. I’m looking at Page 13, where Scene 12 is listed as, “Mollie emerges from Beaty’s office. Ernest goes to her.”
**Craig:** Right. There are other indications that maybe this is the combination of different people doing it. For instance, on Page 10, Scene 6, the scene header is underlined; Scene 7, not. You have Eric Roth, great writer who has his druthers. You have Martin Scorsese, who has his way of doing things. And then I really do think there was a third person working here to help transcribe ideas. This is an example where format is not relevant at all, because guess what? This thing’s been nominated for 4 billion awards.
**John:** What I don’t want listeners to do is to over-learn lessons from this thing, where it’s like, “Oh, I can switch up my scene headers all the time, chaotically.” No one set out to do this.
**Craig:** There’s no advantage to it. But on the other hand, no one’s going, “Sorry, I got to Page 3, and one of the scene headers was underlined, so we’re passing on Killers.” No, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think you are.
**John:** I was very excited to finally see the script for Barbie, which is Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. We’ve had them both on the show before. They are absolutely terrific. I love the opening to Barbie and how it set up why Barbie matters and what an iconic change she was on the landscape. We see how they write up the 2001 sort of homage to this. Again, “we hears,” “we sees,” and it’s very much captioning the experience what it would feel like to see the movie. It’s not afraid to show things that are not in evidence, because they help us understand how things feel.
**Craig:** I will say again, the whole thing, the reason we harp on the whole “we see,” “we hear” is not because people use it and other people say don’t use it and it’s just annoying to us. There’s value to it. This, “We go,” “We see,” “We see,” “Finally, we see,” “We float-”
**John:** “We float above the Barbies.”
**Craig:** I understand what’s happening. The point is, the camera is a point of view. A lot of directing is figuring out where do you put the camera. And a lot of figuring out where to put the camera is whose perspective is this from? Who matters here? Do I want to imply isolation? Do I imply etherealness? Do I want the audience to feel voyeuristic? Do I want it to be somebody’s clocking of things? “We” is the indicator that it is us.
**John:** It’s the audience getting to see things through the camera, through where we are.
**Craig:** The camera is moving in a way that is for us, like we’re ghosts that are moving through and around, being steered by an invisible hand, to show us things. That’s valuable.
**John:** “Barbie takes her slide down to the pool. Because she can!” Exclamation point. “Barbie’s Dreamhouse. Kitchen. Day. She eats a nothing breakfast, drinks a big glass of nothing. Barbie Margot stands at the top floor of her house, waves to her friends and then improbably sails through the air and lands in the driver’s seat of her car.” It’s just giving you a sense of what this is going to feel like and what the tone is. Conveying tone in a script is absolutely crucial. It’s the relationship of the filmmaker to the audience and the writer to the reader. They have to mirror each other.
**Craig:** It’s a very clever way of imparting the rules of this world without explaining the rules of this world. I’m not a big fan of scenes that explain the rules. Sometimes you have to. In The Matrix, it was so nuts, somebody had to say, “Here’s a rule. If you die in the fake world, your body dies in the real world, because the mind can’t live without the body.”
**John:** You have to say that, because otherwise-
**Craig:** But it doesn’t even really make sense, but it doesn’t matter. They needed stakes, and it works, and I love the movie. But you had to say it. Here, once Margot Robbie steps out of the heels and reveals her feet, we’re like, “Okay, I get it,” because there’s so many different ways of saying a doll is going to be represented by a person. What I learned from this is she is a person, she is flesh and blood, but also, she follows general rules of actual Barbieness, which is, I can teleport if a kid teleports me, and my feet are fixed, and I don’t really eat or drink, and that’s part of the fun.
**John:** For sure. I want to take a look at two scripts that are just really complicated setups and seeing how they’re conveying a ton of information on the page. Across the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Dave Callaham. We take a look at these pages here, they are establishing in a sequel, basically characters we’ve already met before, but there’s a whole bunch of stuff happening here. This initial sequence is Gwen Stacy on the drums, establishing what’s happened with Miles Morales is the time before this, “Miles watching his uncle Aaron die… Miles’s dad Jeff unwittingly pulling a gun on his own son.” There’s so much happening that’s really complicated, and yet it’s making clear this drum sequence is going to get us through all that backstory and getting us up to speed with where we’re at in Gwen’s world and Gwen’s dimension of Earth-65.
**Craig:** While already creating mystery with the repetition of, “He’s not the only one.” We understand there’s more coming here, especially when somebody says, “You think you know the rest. You don’t. I thought I knew the rest, but I didn’t.” That’s a really good way of warning the audience to expect the unexpected. It’s also a very clever way of saying, “Hey, we have to undo finality.” Sequels are hard, because a good ending feels final, unless it’s really meant as like Chapter 1 of the continuing episodes. Dune sort of ends like that, because we understand there’s more book to tell. It doesn’t have to conclude. But the Spider-Man multiverse movies, Across the Universe [sic] concludes. So now you have to unwind it without making the audience feel like they got baited and switched. What they’re doing is saying, “Hey, empathize with her. She got baited and switched. Let’s find out how and why.”
**John:** On Page 2, there’s a choice to… Em Jay has, “Gwen! Gwen! Yo! Def Leppard!” The first “Gwen” is tiny font. Then it gets a little bit bigger, little bit bigger. Sure.
**Craig:** Do it all the time. I do it all the time. Love it.
**John:** Then we’ll get to Oppenheimer. We had Christopher Nolan on the show. He was delightful to talk through his process and his writing process on this. We talked a bit about, he had to find ways to describe these impossible-to-visualize things of quantum mechanics. There are sequences in the script that really reflect a jumble of images that get you to what that point is. A thing we didn’t get into too much on the episode was that he doesn’t like to reveal anything that the audience wouldn’t directly know. If you look at the script, they’re very spare. There’s not a lot of description of settings, of wardrobe, hair, costumes. There’s not a lot of that. It’s very, very spare and efficient. Even places that we’re going to come back to a lot, like these two interview rooms, we’re not seeing a lot of details here. It works for this movie.
**Craig:** It works for him particularly because he’s in complete control of the process from beginning to end. Now, what it means is that Christopher Nolan is going to have to have some very long meetings with his department heads to explain what he sees. There are probably a lot of conversations with the actors.” But that must be part of his process. There is value in saying, “Look, actually, this information that I need you to know, I’d prefer to impart one-on-one, individually with you guys.” The other thing is, it saves space. This is a 195-page script. Now, right off the bat, what I notice is between scene headers there is not-
**John:** A second line.
**Craig:** … a second line. You can feel him trying to fit this into 200, because he is like, “Look.” He knows this is going to ultimately be a very long movie. If I make a choice to fully describe things, it will be 500 pages.
**John:** He was sitting in your chair. He said, “Listen.” He looks at a screenplay as a way to get his thoughts on paper and make it clear what it is he’s trying to do, but it’s also a sales document that he has to give to somebody and then see, “Okay, I understand what you’re trying to do here, and I’ll give you the money to make this movie.” If it had been a 250-page script versus cut off the A and B pages and it’s only 180 pages, but still, it’s long-
**Craig:** It’s a Scott Frank sized script, and that’s fine. Look, the movie is a long movie, but if it holds people’s attention, that’s great. Part of it is like, “Hey, you’re going to be here for a while reading. I’m not going to bog you down. You just won’t make it, so I’m going to save a lot of this.” It’s a very efficient way of doing it, which I think probably was necessary.
**John:** Something you probably don’t realize yet is that instead of third-person or second-person plural, it’s written first-person. Oppenheimer in the “I” in this. It’s strange when you first encounter it. Then you eventually understand, “Oh, I get why he’s doing that,” because he’s always the POV character in these things. In the scenes that he’s in, it saves him from typing Oppenheimer 5,000 times in the script.
**Craig:** Very long name. It also adds this kind of Doctor Manhattan style wistfulness, because he’s not narrating; he’s living it. But yet you feel like he is watching his own life and he is just describing what he does to us all in this slightly numb way. “I drop a beaker. It shatters.” That’s very Doctor Manhattan.
**John:** Yeah, it is. Last one I want to talk through is Cord Jefferson’s script for American Fiction. These are great-looking pages. They’re very much I think what we are talking about when we describe what looks great and classic and normal in a Three Page Challenge is that the pages are inviting, they’re very clean to read. We get right into the story too, from that very initial scene, when you’re like, “Oh, this is going to be about a Black professor confronting race,” and we know what the central theme and question of the movie is going to be.
**Craig:** Sometimes I see things. I’m like, “Oh, do I want to steal that or not?” Stylistically, Cord does an interesting thing. He capitalizes not only names as he’s introducing people, but of course, like we often do, capitalizes things. What we does in the capitalization of these things – typically they are for people – is he bolds that. I’m kind of interested in that.
**John:** It makes it easier to find where a character first appears.
**Craig:** It is interesting. Sometimes I look at stuff like that. Now, he also bolds and underlines his scene headers. I just bold mine.
**John:** It depends on the script. I’ve done it both ways. There’s something nice about the bold and underlined, because it just makes it really clear, like, here’s the next thing. It can look good on the page. He doesn’t need to do it.
**Craig:** You’re right. The pages lay out exactly as I would expect. It’s just well-written. You could tell.
**John:** You never flip to a page and like, “Oh Jesus, that’s a lot of text for me to tackle.” Some of these scripts do have just a lot of words on the page, and it’s a lot. In Cord’s script, you never get to a page that’s like, “Oh my god, I don’t have the strength to get through that page.”
**Craig:** Right. Also, American Fiction is a comedy. It’s not a raucous physical comedy, but it is a comedy, so you want a certain lightness in speed and pace. One of the things I like is this first scene is one and a quarter pages.
**John:** Yeah, not long.
**Craig:** It’s not long at all. It tells us so much about who Monk is.
**John:** And what the mood is in 2022, 2023 when this is happening.
**Craig:** And it’s funny. It’s really funny. It just cuts right to the heart of things. It’s just tight. It doesn’t need to dwell.
**John:** Let’s compare this to the first script we looked at, which was The Holdovers. It needed to establish this is what 1970s New England prep school feels like. Here, we don’t need to establish what the campus is like. We don’t need to see-
**Craig:** We just need to know he’s in the situation that we know about. You just get it right away. Also, the subsequent scene where he’s called on the carpet by his bosses and colleagues, again, funny and zippy. While this is happening, and Cord’s teaching us, okay, we’re actually in our world, this is incredibly topical and current, also, this is who Monk is, and it’s not like, oh, he’s just a victim of circumstance. He does have a problem.
**John:** He is creating his problem.
**Craig:** What I really thought was interesting about this second scene, you can see it across Page 2 through 4, is you don’t necessarily root for him. You want to root for him at first. Then you’re like, “I don’t know if I… ” There’s this great exchange where he says, “You’re under the impression that time spent with my family will take the edge off. I’m fine.” “You’re not fine. I saw you crying in your car last week,” which is really great and sort of makes us wonder if maybe Monk is actually problematic. He is, but not politically problematic, not philosophically problematic. He’s emotionally constipated. It is interesting to see how that unfolds.
**John:** We talk about how important it is to figure out where to come into a scene and when to exit a scene. On Page 2 here, we’re coming into this conference room scene quite late into it, which is great, but we automatically catch up to where we’re at. The first line is, “Well, it made some of your students uncomfortable, Monk.” The other 20 minutes that happened before this were not important.
**Craig:** There’s also a really smart choice. Sometimes you get to a point in a scene where you’re like, “Uh-oh, someone just started trouble,” and then you have to write the trouble. Now, what happens here, and Cord’s very clever about this, so Monk is a professor. He’s written a Flannery O’Connor title on the board that includes the N-word, but spelled out. A white student has a real problem with that, even though Monk is Black. Here’s what she says. “Well, I just find that word really offensive.” He says, “With all due respect, Brittany,” I wish I could talk like Jeffrey Wright, “With all due respect Brittany, I got over it. I’m pretty sure you can too.” She says, “Well, I don’t see why.” “Monk, who has been affable up until now, casts an icy stare at Brittany.”
Now, what Cord chooses to do is then cut to her storming out crying, and him shouting out, “Does anyone else have thoughts on the reading?” We know something went down in there. It’s better that we didn’t hear it. If we heard it, we might actually really start to not like Monk more than we don’t want to not like him. We might get confused about whose side we’re on. But right now, what’s important is, in our minds we go, “Okay, this guy’s got a problem. He’s a little hard on the students. But also, Brittany is kind of ridiculous.” It worked. It was a great elision.
**John:** Yeah. It also establishes our trust in the storytelling. This person knows what they’re doing. They’re going to lead us through a story. We’re in good hands. Hopefully, these were useful lessons for people. You don’t need to ape any one person’s style. You can see there actually is a range of really good scripts out there to read. It’s just important to read them and process them and see what actually fits for your own personal style.
**Craig:** Completely. Of note is probably that all these individual styles are expressions of something internal going on in each one of these writers’ brains that is unique, specific to them. That’s why some people want to do it this way and some people want to do it that way. It’s just how it fits with the way their mind works.
**John:** Absolutely. Let’s tackle maybe two listener questions.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** We have a question from Tim L., who asks, “When do you write? Do you have a set routine or just when the mood hits you?” Craig, you’re in the middle of a lot of writing right now. What is your writing routine these days?
**Craig:** These days I’m being very productive, because we’re on a little holiday hiatus, so I’m back here in LA. I don’t have 500 meetings every day to go to for prep, so suddenly I’m like, “Wee!” I’m getting a lot done. We’re pulling into the station with just about everything for the whole season being done writing-wise. But typically, my process is to wait until I know what the scene is and what I’m supposed to write and what the beginning and the end is and what the turns are. I really wait until I know what it is. Then I wait until I’m so ashamed that I have to write. I am not a set time of day person. It’s incredibly unlikely that I will wake up and just start writing. That’s not how it works for me.
**John:** My writing routine, right now I’m mostly just doing the Scriptnotes book edits. It’s different writing than usual, but still, it’s getting the work done. It’s getting through that. I tend to have two or three writing sessions in a day. If I can write for an hour, I’ll write for an hour, go away, come back, write for an hour, go away. Doing the Arlo Finch books was the most routine I actually really had to establish, because if I didn’t hit 1,000 words a day, those books would never get finished.
**Craig:** You weren’t going to get there.
**John:** Yeah. That’s where I mostly learned, okay, this is just how I get the work done. When it’s stuff on my own for whatever, there’ll be moments where I know how to do this thing now, and I will stop everything and get that written down. In my 20s, that was a lot more possible to stay up all night and just follow the inspiration. I can’t do that now. It doesn’t work the family, but also doesn’t work for me. I’m ruined for a couple days if I don’t get a good night’s sleep.
**Craig:** I need to sleep. If I don’t, I’m a mess. I think we’re all a bit of delicate flowers. People that just go, “It’s 9:00 a.m.,” (imitates typing sounds) and then, “It’s 4:30. Kaching, I’m done,” suspicious. Deeply suspicious.
**John:** But we both have friends who can do that, and God bless them.
**Craig:** It’s terrifying, but I salute them.
**John:** Second question, Single Card writes, “I’m a UK writer with a question about shared writing credits. I’m the third and, fingers crossed, final writer on a film that is due to shoot in spring. The initial agreement was for me to share a written by card with the other two writers, but the work I’ve done on the script since that agreement is substantial enough that the producer has agreed to renegotiate on that point. He has offered a separate written by card for me, which would follow a shared written by card for the other two. In this instance, is it preferable to go first or second? Is there anything else I could be asking for regarding the credits to make it clear that I am the writer who made, by far, the biggest contribution to the script? This would be my first major credit, and I’m eager for this to be as reflective as possible of the work I have done on the script.”
**Craig:** Single Card, you are definitely a UK writer, as this is not something that happens here. The WGA litigates all credits and comes up with a single writing credit that may include multiple names, but it would always be on one card. In this case, it would be written by you and, A-N-D, so-and-so, ampersand, so-and-so, if they were a team, or three A-N-Ds. That is the maximum credits allowed for a screenplay would be three names. There would never be two different cards. Also, it would never be up to the producer. This is a very foreign concept to us.
**John:** The theories we can apply here from our experience is that in general, the writer’s name that’s listed first is considered the person who contributed the most. If we’re going through an arbitration, and we have to determine the order of, is it Writer C, then Writer B, then Writer A, whatever the first name that appears is, in the belief of the arbiter, is the person who contributed the most to the finished screenplay.
**Craig:** Correct. Nobody in the world notices or cares. It doesn’t really matter. I suppose if you were concerned about the ordering and where the prestige is, typically the closer you get to the final credit, the more prestigious it is. The Writers Guild, for instance, negotiated many years ago to get into the second-to-last position. It used to be writers, then producers, then directors. Now it’s producers, writers, directors, so we’re the second to last. Director is always the final credit.
But I got to tell you, Single Card, I’m not judging you here, but it is clear that this is your first major credit, because you’re dwelling on all of this. Don’t. It doesn’t matter. Here’s the way it works. Nobody cares what the order is. Nobody cares that it’s on a separate card. This will get hashed into an IMDb thing. That’s what people will see. Also, unless there is some sort of awards or things like that, in and of itself, it’s only going to matter to the business. Most people aren’t really paying attention. The business pays attention. You can certainly get more opportunities. But the ordering, separation of cards, you’re focusing on the wrong thing right now.
**John:** Yeah. Now, Craig, on the podcast, we’ve established why the US is an exception, that we are actually a true labor union for the writers of America. I guess what I’m confused about is whether any other international groups have come together to figure out writing credits for themselves, because there’s nothing that would stop a volunteer organization to come together to do this, the way the PGA credit is. Producers Guild is not an actual union, but they actually come together to determine the PGA producing credits on things.
**Craig:** Yes, but they only are able to do so because the companies allow them to. The companies and the academies basically said, “We’re going to outsource this dispute to you guys. We are allowing you to decide.” I’m not aware of any other organization around the world that adjudicates credits in a way that is legally binding per a contract with the companies. There are droit moral and first writer rights and things like that that exist as a function of law. I don’t know if anybody else does it like us. Our system is infuriating, but preferable to going hat in hand to a producer, because in this case, Single Card, I’m just going to take her or him at their word that they did do the vast majority of the work. But let’s say they didn’t, because writers say that all the time. We know as arbiters, we read those statements, and someone’s like, “I clearly did everything,” and then I read the scripts, I’m like, “You didn’t do anything.” Sometimes we get delusional about our contributions. If you’re buddies with the producer, if that’s your pal, does that mean you’re more likely to get credit, somebody else gets screwed over? It’s not good.
**John:** Not good at all. If you are a listener who actually does have information about how other international bodies may be determining credits, I’m just curious what’s out there.
**Craig:** It would be good to know, even if it’s an arrangement like the kind the PGA has, where it’s just a studio, or maybe like the BBC goes, “Yeah, we’ll let you guys figure it out.”
**John:** I could totally imagine something like BBC might have its own credit determination process.
**Craig:** It may very well, as it is a government.
**John:** Our animated projects that are not WGA-covered, they do have their own process, which is not always great.
**Craig:** Their own process is the producers decide.
**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things.
**Craig:** Yay.
**John:** Craig, what is your One Cool Thing?
**Craig:** My One Cool Thing, I guess it’s a little late, because this is coming out in the new year, right?
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** It would’ve been good for you guys to know about this during the holiday season. But you know what? The holiday season keeps going. It’s a fun game that you can play with kids, families, large groups of parties, even eight, nine people. It’s a website called Gartic Phone, G-A-R-T-I-C phone dot-com. It’s just a twist on the good ole game of Telephone. The idea is, instead of somebody whispering something into someone’s ear, and then they pass it along, you draw a picture. Everybody draws a picture. Then the game figures out, okay, I’m going to send each one of you one of the other person’s pictures. You are going to write a caption that you think is what this picture meant to say. Then I’m going to send that caption to another person, who’s going to draw what they think that caption should be. It keeps going. Then at the end, it shows you the evolution of these things. It’s hysterical. It’s fun. It’s the kind of thing that is so absurd and silly and yet a delight. It’s totally free. You can do it on your phones, iPads, laptops. Fun for all ages. Gartic Phone.
**John:** Gartic Phone. The physical version of that that I play is called Telestrations. There’s these little whiteboard notebooks. The same idea, where on one page, you get a card with a prompt. You have to draw that thing, and you pass it to the next person.
**Craig:** Exactly.
**John:** Always a good game to play. Mine is also a game. It is Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Craig Mazin, for the last three years, coming on four years-
**Craig:** God.
**John:** … has been hosting a session, often weekly, playing D&D, of Dungeon of the Mad Mage, which is an established campaign setting world. It takes place underneath Waterdeep, in Halaster’s tomb of madness.
**Craig:** Domain.
**John:** Domain of madness. We started on April 7, 2020. I looked back through.
**Craig:** Wow.
**John:** I have an Apple note that just goes through session by session what happened in a session.
**Craig:** We literally started like, “It’s the pandemic. Let’s do this.”
**John:** Craig, I want to thank you, because you were the person who made this all possible. Pandemic happens. We’re like, “Oh crap, are we still going to be able to play something?” Craig figured us out Roll20, which is the system which we are all looking at the same map. We’re all on Zoom. We started playing this game. It was an absolute lifesaver. That group stayed together. We added a few members over the while. I can’t believe we are finally finishing it. By the time this episode comes out, we will have finished the Dungeon of the Mad Mage.
**Craig:** The final battle is upon you. What are we, 100 and some odd sessions?
**John:** 113 sessions.
**Craig:** 113 sessions. That’s a whole lot of DMing.
**John:** That is.
**Craig:** I’m looking forward to it. My hope is that we keep going, that we find another game. I would love to play. As much as I enjoy DMing, it would be nice to play as well.
**John:** We’ve obviously done this podcast for 625 episodes, so we have a sense of doing things every week for a very long period of time is natural to us. Did you have any anticipation that it was going to take this long to get through this?
**Craig:** No, because I played it as part of a group, and that group was just faster. I think every group is different. You guys were way more deliberate and liked to look everywhere. That group would be like, “Oh, we found the way down. Let’s just go. We don’t care. Next.” You guys, which is great for me as DM, you love looking in every corner. There were very few things where I thought, “Aw, they missed this cool part.” You guys kind of did everything, which was great. Obviously, I homebrewed a bunch of it. There were some things that I knew were boring that I got rid of or made exciting. But by and large, it was an incredible dungeon crawl. You guys milked it for all it was worth. There’s this other thing. Middle-aged men are notorious for not having friends, and then they die. Having friends-
**John:** Yeah, it’s nice.
**Craig:** … is important. Having this ongoing group is important. It is a stellar group. We have some pretty famous people in it.
**John:** We have some heavy hitters in there.
**Craig:** Everybody is distinguished in one way or another, and while we were doing it, became more distinguished. Kevin Walsh became a five-time Jeopardy champion while we were doing this. There’s all these things that are just happening. It’s been great, and I’m looking forward to the final fight.
**John:** I just wanted to acknowledge the years of work and also the fact that obviously you created and are showrunning this massively expensive TV project, but for the eight of us who get your world-building week after week, I want to thank you again.
**Craig:** Thank you. It was a joy. It was a great thing to do. There were times where I was running sessions out of my trailer while we were shooting, at night. This was as much fun for me, and I’m glad it was… Advice for DMs out there: make the game fun for your players.
**John:** Crucial.
**Craig:** Crucial. You can’t baby them. They got to be a little scared. It’s okay that they get frustrated. But ultimately, if they don’t want to come back, you must be doing something wrong.
**John:** I think I’ve told you this before, but our neighbors moved in during the pandemic, and so we only met them a year after they moved in. They asked, “Why is that one light on in the second story of your guesthouse only on Thursdays, but until midnight?” It’s like, “It’s because I’m playing D&D.”
**Craig:** “Because I’m awesome.”
**John:** Because I’m awesome.
**Craig:** That’s why.
**John:** That is the reason. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
**Craig:** You know it.
**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Craig:** Indeed.
**John:** Our outro this week is by Zach Lo. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on lab-grown meat.
**Craig:** Lab-grown meat. What a great name for a band.
**John:** I would be shocked if it’s not already.
**Craig:** It’s got to be.
**John:** It’s got to be there.
**Craig:** Got to be there.
**John:** Thanks, Craig.
**Craig:** Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Craig, so a thing I’ve noticed over really the last year but maybe a little bit longer is I see you eating more fake meat.
**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not necessarily an ethical choice, although I think it probably is more ethical. But I like it. I don’t need it to be like, “Oh my god, it tastes just like regular meat.” Sometimes I want a burger, and sometimes I think I’ll go for the Impossible Burger, which is quite [indiscernible 01:04:31]. Also, I love Morningstar chicken nuggets, like a child. They’re good. They taste good.
**John:** They taste good. All the things we’re describing so far are just synthetic versions of things, like pea protein.
**Craig:** Tofu, pea protein, seitan, etc.
**John:** Rearranged into things. But have you had any of the stuff that’s actually animal cells but put together in a lab?
**Craig:** I don’t believe I have.
**John:** I don’t think I have either.
**Craig:** Is it out there?
**John:** No, I don’t think there’s any commercial applications. It’d be at some special restaurant that might have it or something.
**Craig:** But they’re working on it?
**John:** They’re working on it.
**Craig:** They’re working on growing meat in labs.
**John:** I’ve not eaten beef or pork or lamb, any mammals for 30 years.
**Craig:** For ethical reasons?
**John:** I became a full vegetarian in college. It was just for economic reasons. We were just broke, and so we would just eat lentils all the time. I wasn’t eating meat, and so I just stopped eating meat. Eventually, I started eating fish again, and I started eating chicken. Then I just stopped there. It’s been 30 years since I’ve had any red meat. I need to think about, would I eat fake cow grown in a lab. Maybe, I guess. I have no great ethical issue with it.
**Craig:** You can afford it, and it’s not hurting anything, so probably worth a shot. You might go, “Oh my god.”
**John:** “Oh my god.”
**Craig:** At some point, what’s the difference? If they can make it exactly the same, why not?
**John:** Right, which raises the question of, if they take human cells and put them together in that way, is it cannibalism?
**Craig:** I would argue it is not cannibalism any more than shooting someone in a video game is murder. But the thing is, would I want to? Supposedly, just based on the composition of humans, it’s not supposed to taste good. We don’t have a good distribution of fat and muscle and stuff. The fat sits on top of the muscle. I don’t think we’re going to be good. Pigs are the most delicious animal, I have to tell you.
**John:** I wouldn’t know.
**Craig:** Listen. As a Jew, I can tell you, we got that one wrong.
**John:** I guess what is cannibalism comes down to, is the prohibition because you’re doing harm to a human being and eating them? Doing the harm would be the murder. Doing the other thing… Or is it like not eating pork, like it’s wrong to do it?
**Craig:** It doesn’t feel like there should be anything in between. There’s no consciousness there. They’re just making meat. If they were cloning people to be eaten, no, that would be terrible. But I think growing it, it’s just protein and stuff, and no one suffered. No one was deprived of anything. No opportunities were lost. No life was removed.
**John:** In our stories, we often look at cannibalism like alive, or there’s a plane crash and there’s dead bodies, do you eat the dead body, or post-apocalyptic.
**Craig:** The old religions would occupy themselves with this question. In the Jewish faith, I can’t remember what the term is in Hebrew, but it basically means you have a duty to keep yourself alive and healthy as long as it doesn’t hurt other people. For instance, you are supposed to fast on Yom Kippur to atone for your sins. However, if you are physically frail and fasting would damage you, you’re not allowed to. It’s not just so you don’t have to. You’re not allowed to. I would imagine that they would be like, “Look.” I’m sure it doesn’t say this, but-
**John:** You really need to.
**Craig:** The Bible is very flexible. Among the various rules of how to purchase and sell slaves, I’m sure there is some sort of… Oh, the Bible.
**John:** Oh, the Bible.
**Craig:** Oh, Bible.
**John:** Save it for another bonus topic.
**Craig:** Yeah, that one will go over great.
**John:** Thanks, Craig.
**Craig:** Thank you, John.
**John:** Bye.
Links:
* [The Vultures Are Circling: Who Will Walk Away With Paramount?](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/paramount-sale-shari-redstone-suitors-1235778461/) by Alex Weprin for The Hollywood Reporter
* [The Holdovers by David Hemingson](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/The-Holdovers-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [All of Us Strangers by Andrew Haigh](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2dtdybqjrehxv9cwx9t4c/All-of-Us-Strangers.pdf?rlkey=g30scn7qf9nlspf49en2g7tub&dl=0)
* [May December by Samy Burch](https://film.netflixawards.com/assets/cms/films/May-December/Script/MAY-DECEMBER-Final-Script.pdf), story by Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik
* [Saltburn by Emerald Fennell](https://amazonmgmstudiosguilds.com/app/uploads/2023/11/Saltburn_Script.pdf)
* [Killers of the Flower Moon by Eric Roth & Martin Scorsese](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Killers-Of-The-Flower-Moon-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Barbie by Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/cd2bym23kd0kwsrysdpvi/barbie_final_shooting_script.pdf?rlkey=g3zc8e6vep6vf351p01zul6xt&dl=0)
* [Across the Spider-Verse by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller & Dave Callaham](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Spider-Man-Across-The-Spider-Verse-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/b7a0udq0942rrbllaf0av/Oppenheimer.pdf?rlkey=frfag98w0o361drdhg36vhlo9&dl=0)
* [American Fiction by Cord Jefferson](https://amazonmgmstudiosguilds.com/app/uploads/2023/09/AmericanFiction.pdf)
* [Weekend Read 2](https://apps.apple.com/in/app/weekend-read-2/id1534798355)
* [Gartic Phone](https://garticphone.com/)
* [Dungeons & Dragons – Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage](https://dnd.wizards.com/products/waterdeep-dungeon-of-the-mad-mage)
* [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 Zach Lo ([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/625standard.mp3).