The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/good-energy).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 547 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting screenwriters.
Today on the show, we live on a planet experiencing climate change, yet the stories we tell tend to ignore this uncomfortable fact. We’ll look at ways writers can address that with two of the folks behind a new campaign to put some good energy out there. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll talk about how you ask for money, be that for making a movie or for launching a campaign to save the planet.
First, producer Megana Rao is here, and we have some follow-up to get through. Megana, what stuff has come in through the mailbox that we need to address on this podcast?
**Megana Rao:** Tony wrote in regarding Episode 545, the nuclear episode. He recommended this great film about Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved the World. I’ll include a link in the show notes.
**John:** This had come up as like, oh, someone should make a movie about Stanislav Petrov, who’s the Russian who did not start a nuclear war. I said on the thing, “We don’t do movies about people who didn’t do things.”
**Megana:** Exactly.
**John:** Who stood in the way of things. I looked through the trailer of it, because it says, oh, all these famous people are in this. Wow. How did I never hear about this? It’s a documentary that has reenactment footage in it. It’s a hybrid in between, but it’s not a full-on normal feature.
**Megana:** Scripted, exactly.
**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. What else have we got?
**Megana:** In Episode 530, Jack Thorne introduced us to the 1in4 Coalition, which is an organization that focuses on accommodations for disabilities in the UK entertainment industry.
**John:** That’s right. He was talking to us about simple things like bathrooms that are accessible for everybody and making sure that there’s a person on set whose responsibility it is to really focus on making sure that people can do their jobs and that there’s nothing holding them back because of accessibility issues. They’ve made some good progress in the UK based on his speeches and other people doing work on the ground.
**Megana:** Absolutely. Then the Inevitable Foundation, which is the American equivalent of that 1in4 Coalition, just released an accommodations report this week. They created a calculator to look at the cost of what it would actually cost production to have X percentage of disabled people on their sets or in their writers room. One of their missions is that they want to close the disability gap between real life and film and television, because disabled people make up over 20% of the population, but represent less than 1% of writers behind the screen. They mostly focus on mid-level screenwriters. In this project they looked at two budgets. One was for a 24-week writers room. They looked at the cost if there were 25% disabled writers versus 100% disabled writers. Then they looked at a 20-week budget for a 10-episode show and then did the same thing and calculated the cost there.
**John:** Great. We’ll put a link in the show notes and to the report, and also to this Hollywood Reporter article which does a good job of walking through it. This is Richie Siegel and Marisa, who you and I had actually spoken with before, because I did a little thing with them for the Inevitable Foundation.
One of the things that’s interesting is they’re putting some real numbers on what those costs would be, because I think sometimes you’re scared to walk into those conversations. It’s like, “Oh my god, it’s going to be so expensive.” What I like about the report is they’re focusing on some of the really small things. It could just be adjustable chairs for different height people. That is a simple thing. Some things are more expensive like ASL interpreters for a thing. Also, it scales differently with how many people need that thing on your set. If you need an ASL interpreter for one person, that can scale up to more than that one person. It helps the whole production when you have that stuff figured out in advance. Some of the costs really weren’t that big. I think the percentage cost for those writer rooms, it was sometimes 1% to 12%, but it wasn’t a crazy, crazy number. Compared to the things we spend money on in Hollywood, it was not a huge number.
**Megana:** Totally. They break down all of the costs in this really easy-to-read way that feels so obvious, like some of the things that they’re asking for are $4. It also brings up that I think when you are someone who is lower level on a production or it’s your first day at work, you’re like, “Who do I ask for these things?” It can be so uncomfortable to ask for really small things that might make going to the bathroom easier.
**John:** That’s what I think Jack Thorne was really emphasizing, I think, in their report. They were talking about having trained disability coordinator people, so that you know there’s a person you can go to to ask for that thing, so you’re not the person who has to go ask the producer for the thing. You can go to the specific person, just the same way we have a COVID testing coordinator and we have intimacy coordinators. There’s a person whose job it is to really think about that for the production, and so it doesn’t fall on the line producer or some other job.
**Megana:** In the report they survey 35 artists, writers, directors, showrunners, actors, and the combined projects that those people have worked on are 600 productions. Something that I was so struck by is that productions are spending money on accommodations to make things more accessible, but it seems like the people that they’re trying to help are being left out of those conversations. In one example, the production had hired an ASL interpreter, but this person actually didn’t-
**John:** They learned ASL on YouTube. They were not actually qualified to be doing the job that they were trying to do.
**Megana:** Someone had Celiac’s disease and someone gave them a gluten-filled doughnut and lied to them about it. I was so surprised by, and I guess it makes sense, that it seems like the discomfort around dealing with people who are differently abled is preventing any sort of communication from happening, whereas it’s very normal for us to now ask, “Do you have any dietary restrictions?” I think it’s just a new way of framing how we approach people and set expectations before going into things.
**John:** That’s actually a good segue to framing expectations about how we are going to be working on sets and telling our stories as we transition to talking about climate. Maybe we’ll introduce our guests for this week. First, I’m going to introduce Anna Jane Joyner. She has been working for over 15 years in climate communication strategy and campaigning. Her work has been featured in Rolling Stone, Glamor, MTV, the Associated Press, New York Times, and more. Most recently, Anna Jane is the founder and director of Good Energy, which has released a playbook for how film and TV can welcome feature storylines on climate issues. Welcome, Anna Jane.
**Anna Jane Joyner:** Thank you so much for having me.
**John:** An absolute pleasure to be here. I saw you first at a presentation that happened this last week where you’re rolling out this big playbook, which is a big, giant event at the Academy Theater. I want to get into how this all came to be and where you’re at. Where are you at at this very moment? Just this past week, are you on a high? Are you trying to get your energy back? How are you feeling?
**Anna Jane:** Yeah, a combination. We’ve been working on the overall project for about three years, but on the playbook itself for a year. It was a whirlwind year. It felt very surreal to see it actually come to life and be out there in the world and have this great reception, both at the event at the Academy Museum, but also a lot of press around it and just general excitement, so definitely on a cloud.
**John:** We’re going to be putting a link so people can read it, but I really want to talk through some of the workable ideas from it on this podcast. To help us out with that, Quinn Emmett is a screenwriter, investor, father of three small humans. He also created Important, Not Important: Science for People Who Give A Shit, which is both a podcast and a newsletter. It covers science news, from climate to COVID, heat to hunger, agriculture to AI ethics. Quinn Emmett, I can’t believe you’re finally on the show. Welcome.
**Quinn Emmett:** I know. I was wondering how many times my wife would make the cut before I did. Then every time I think about that, I think you should just keep having my wife on the show probably.
**John:** Quinn’s wife is Dana Fox Emmett, who is one of my favorite humans in the world. I got to see her married off to you at a great celebration in Virginia many years ago.
**Quinn:** So long ago. So long ago. Thank you for having me. You are a mentor to me. I’m delighted to be here and to help Anna Jane any way I can.
**John:** The hook for this episode really is that this thing has just come out. Can you tell us what the playbook is, Anna Jane?
**Anna Jane:** It’s a playbook for screenwriting in the age of climate change, which is really just an array of both inspiration and information. It has all the classic things you would think of, information on impacts, the science, solutions, but all of it ties back to story itself, in screenwriting in particular. Then it has a lot of fun sections on characters and a cheat sheet, a lot on climate psychology, because obviously that’s very related to character development. It’s really just an array of both great information and tips, but also a lot of just inspiration and ideas that we hope people steal.
**John:** Now when Quinn first described it to me, I was expecting it to be a book or a pdf, some sort of physical printed document. While there is a small version of that, it’s mostly a website. If you go to goodenergystories.com, you’ll see all the stuff that you have built out. It’s a very elaborate array of… I think it’s designed so you can just fall into it and spend hours inside it, looking through stuff. Quinn, you’ve been writing about climate issues for all these years for Important, Not Important. How’d you get involved with it, and what was the hook for you?
**Quinn:** Time is a flat circle, and I don’t remember much. I don’t remember how I got roped into this/inserted myself, but I have been aware and so impressed by Anna Jane’s journey over the past decade and all the contributions she’s made to the movement, from her personal story to her greater effect in climate communications. I got into this because I was screenwriting, and mostly sci-fi and tech and things like that. I devised this fire hose of, hey, what’s the latest in science and tech and medicine and things like that. I realized a lot of my friends weren’t seeing that same news, folks who were interested in it. They were getting their news from Facebook, which turns out, not so great for everyone. That’s just what it’s been. It’s been this journey of, hey, how do I help people keep up with these things, but do something about it?
What Anna Jane was working on was such a bizarre intersection of my two jobs, which was it’s very difficult to keep up with what’s happening with this stuff to truly try and understand it, to decipher disinformation from what really matters, and if at all possible, to guess where we’re going, but more importantly, to really identify with the folks who were already being affected, whether by choice or not, and the folks that are working, as I like to say, on the front lines of the future, to do something about this, whether through mitigation or adaptation. There’s a million different ways. That’s people and stories and characters and struggles. Anna Jane said, “We need to build something so that the folks in Hollywood who have a hard enough time making movies and TV and all that can find ways to build the most important story of our time into the most prolific storytelling mediums of our time. I feel like what you built is just an incredible version of that.
**John:** Quinn, you’re trying to distinguish between news, which is information and facts, it’s a kind of storytelling, but it’s not the kind of storytelling that involves characters. Anna Jane, we often do a segment on this show called How Would This Be A Movie. Imagining you as a protagonist who’s building this organization, what is your character origin story? What gets you into doing this kind of work for 15 years?
**Anna Jane:** It’s a journey. I grew up in a conservative, evangelical community. My dad is a megachurch pastor, so definitely not who most people think of becoming a climate activist and communications guru. I went to UNC Chapel Hill, and I took environmental science, because it was supposed to be the easy science class, and learned about climate change. For me, the actual entry point was mountaintop removal coal mining, which is this kind of coal mining where they blow the tops off of mountains in Appalachia. I grew up in western North Carolina in the mountains, and then on the summers on the gulf coast of Alabama. That hit me in a very visceral, emotional, personal way just imagining the mountains near me being blown up and those communities being impacted. That’s what really got me into working on coal and environmental activism and climate.
A few years later, when I was the campaign director for a regional nonprofit in North Carolina, I was approached by Years of Living Dangerously, which is a Showtime documentary series on climate. They wanted to follow me trying to convince my dad that climate change is real for a year. We had a celebrity cohost, Ian Somerhalder. We spent a year trying to convince my dad, by introducing him to faith leaders who are climate leaders, but also some of the best climate scientists in the world. I intellectually understood the climate crisis and how severe it was, but when I did that, I was like, “Okay, I really need to read up on all of this and really immerse myself in the latest climate news.”
I was just listening to a TED Talk by David Roberts, who’s an amazing journalist. He just went through it in such a simple way, the climate crisis and the impacts. It just hit me. I just had this moment, I remember, where I was driving, where I really emotionally understood what we were up against, and from that moment on, knew that there was never anything else I could do. Also, working on Years of Living Dangerously introduced me to just the power of cinematic storytelling and the fact that we don’t have enough of it. That is what really turned me more. I was also passionate about climate stories. Growing up in religion is a masterclass in storytelling, so I knew the power of it. That’s what really got me into TV and film and thinking about how to portray it on screen.
**John:** Thinking about you as a protagonist, we always talk about a protagonist has to leave home and go on a journey and be transformed in this. Was it that speech that was the transforming moment or was it the first class that transformed you? What are the moments along the way that made you feel like, oh, this is what I meant to do, this is what scares me, maybe this is the cave I fear to enter that I must enter? What were those moments?
**Anna Jane:** That was definitely a big one, David Roberts. It showed you, if we’re at two degrees, this is the world, and six degrees, and just in this powerful, simple way, and that just showed how terrifying it was, frankly. It was a bet that somebody on Twitter had waged at him that he couldn’t talk about climate change in 11 minutes or explain it in 11 minutes. At the end he just said, “Your job, anyone who knows this, is to make the impossible possible. That is what we are up against. That’s all of our roles.” I really took that to heart. There’s that car moment listening to a TED Talk.
Then I would say the other piece is, so about six years ago I was working in New York for a company that was a B corporation, had a nonprofit climate arm, and we had a creative agency in-house. I got to do a bunch of my own documentaries and short films and work with a really amazing creative team. I decided to move back to the Gulf Coast of Alabama, which is where my mom’s family’s from. I had this romantic idea of, I’m going to move back to this place that my family’s been for five generations, that’s very sacred to me, that’s beautiful. It’s right on the water and is also on the front lines of climate change. My little town of 500 people is a peninsula, and it’s been called one of the most vulnerable places in the country to climate.
When I got down there, I was not anticipating the real trauma and stress of living on the front lines of climate changes. It’s now six months a year of hurricane season. It’s just every couple weeks, one of these starts forming, and you just have to stop everything you’re doing and prepare. It’s traumatic. It’s also morally complex, because you’re praying that it doesn’t hit you, but that means that it hits somebody else. Being down on the Gulf Coast has certainly brought climate home to me in a very, very personal way. I already had a lot of emotions and feelings about it, but it certainly upped that experience of just really profound grief and anxiety about how this is already impacting us.
**John:** Let’s talk about the emotions, because you said grief and anxiety, but also it sounds like this initial TED Talk was fear. Basically, they’re showing there’s a monster there and we have to fight this monster, yet the storytelling can’t only be about fear and grief and anxiety. There has to be positive things to talk about there as well, and hope and optimism and courage. As you’re trying to develop this playbook for people to be telling the stories in the space, how do you find those other emotions? I feel like the movies we’ve seen have always been about just doom. How do you key into those other things?
**Anna Jane:** I think you’re right. The tropes that we do see are the apocalypse and doom, or they’re a character who’s shaming another character about their plastic straws or SUV or what you, or they’re ecoterrorists. There’s a lot of those too. We would love to see some more versions of climate stories, which is really the purpose of the playbook is to expand that, and then you have possibilities. I have two feelings about it.
Dr. Britt Wray, who’s an expert on climate psychology and mental health, has this great line of thinking or quote that grief and anxiety isn’t inherently bad and hope isn’t inherently good. Grief and anxiety are pointing you toward something. She says this: climate, it’s not a pathology to feel anxiety about it. There’s a reason we feel anxiety about it. If you can really process that and turn towards doing something that this anxiety is pointing you towards doing, that is a really amazing transformation. Seeing characters go through that and really reckon with their difficult emotions around climate can very much not only help the writer process their own difficult emotions, but the audience as well. I really love those stories where the emotions show up and it’s hard and you see how people work through them and reckon with them. That’s a form of finding courage. A lot of great stories are that dark night and then you come out of it and then you find courage to go up against the impossible odds. I think that that’s huge.
Dr. Kate Marvel, who’s a climate scientist and was one of our advisors and wrote the climate science section. She’s also a beautiful essayist and storyteller. She has this great quote that we need courage, not hope to fight climate change. Re-framing it that way for me was just so powerful, because there are moments where it’s hard to find hope. It is a really big challenge. Even just what we’re already seeing with Hurricane Ida when it hit New Orleans last years, I just cried for two days. The Gulf Coast is going to change. There’s nothing we can do. For me, it’s more about finding courage, like how do we face this thing, which is such a lot of what stories are about. Everything from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings to the Jesus story is about going up against really big odds. I do think you can find hope. There’s definitely still hope. We can still avoid the apocalypse outcome for our children. No matter what direction we’re going toward scientifically, we can build a society that can actually take care of each other, so that as we’re going through these impacts and transformations of our physical world, we can still take care of each other.
**John:** Now, obviously, the actual changes need to happen. There are some individual changes, but there’s more societal changes, political changes. Those are the wheels that need to turn. You’re focusing on what Hollywood’s role is and what the storytelling can be. I want to take a moment to think back about what impact has Hollywood actually had over the years in social issues, and to what degree is it just reflecting things or to what degree is it actually moving the needle. At our meeting we were talking through trying to brainstorm what are examples of situations where Hollywood and film and TV actually did have an impact. One of the things I was thinking about was smoking. People used to smoke on screen. You just don’t see smoking on screen. Smoking numbers have gone down. I think that is related. I think there’s less smoking and it’s not perceived as being cool anymore. That’s an example.
A negative example, we see the CSI effect. Because everyone watches CSI shows, in which there’s perfect crime forensics, the expectation for juries is that there should be perfect crime forensics. It should be fast and easy, and there should be DNA tests for everything. It should be easy and infallible. There’s definitely an impact that Hollywood can have in terms of what Americans think is normal. I think you’re trying to move the needle in terms of what Americans are thinking about in terms of climate.
**Anna Jane:** Absolutely.
**John:** Quinn, help me think through some of these other examples of bigger issues. Designated drivers, that’s a thing that I think I see in movies a lot now and in TV shows. It’s not okay to be driving drunk. That’s one. Other examples that you can think of?
**Quinn:** You guys have covered… I don’t remember, it was sometime in the last 100 episodes. You talked about the portrayal of dark government and those sort of things and realizing, hey, it might not be okay to keep showing these sort of things with how little we trust institutions these days, for better or worse.
Also, the goal of this isn’t to put the onus completely on Hollywood. I think one of the things Anna Jane and I talked about a lot is it was really important, in the language and the tone and the vernacular, to not say, “You’re not doing a good enough job.” It was important for us to say, “We need you. You’re the best in the world at this. If there’s anything you can get out of this, if one line prompts you to include one line in your movie or TV or you have an entire show, entire movie, entire series you want to bring out of this, that’s great too,” because as Anna Jane was alluding to, 30,000 feet to come on down.
In the past 15 years or so, as we’ve scaled up solar and wind and batteries and things like that, we’ve actually gotten rid of a lot of the worst-case scenarios with these eight degrees of warming, seven, six, five, four. Just this week there’s a big article in Nature saying if every government fulfilled just their current pledges, which to be clear, aren’t that great, we can keep it under two degrees. Of course, that’s a big ask. That’s actually enormous. Every tenth of a degree really does matter. When you ask the question, okay, what is it going to require for those governments to do that, it’s going to require the kitchen sink, just like defeating smoking wasn’t just not showing people smoking on TV and movies anymore. It was the warning labels we put onto the packages. It was all the lawsuits. It was all those things. It was banning it in restaurants and all these different places.
The answer, and where I work a lot, is people saying, okay, this is all great, but what can I do? The best answer to that, usually, whether it’s COVID or climate or whatever it might be, is what can you do, John? What is the intersection of your interests and your skills, and then I’ll give you 70 different ways that are very measurable where you can have an impact. What Hollywood screenwriters, or if you live in the UK, wherever it might be, Bollywood, wherever it might be, what you do is so impactful and has such reach and can have such exponential impact. Any publicity is good publicity. Look what happened with Don’t Look Up. That matters so much.
Again, the onus isn’t you’re not doing well enough. It’s we need you because you do this one thing so well, while people like Kate Marvel, who’s again an incredible essayist but also one of our most impactful atmospheric scientists, all of these people are going to make a difference, and the impact that screenwriters can have, and showrunners and story editors and people who work below the line to build these worlds that writers imagine. Everyone can have such a substantial impact. If we can provide a tool for people to answer that question of what can I do, then that’s the least we can do. It just will help move the needle so much. The answer is we’ve made a lot of progress, and we can make so much more, but we need everybody on board.
**John:** Let’s focus on some of the smaller things and bigger things in terms of what screenwriters and TV writers can do to show impact of climate change and solutions to climate change on screen. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the page we’re talking through. This is Climate Solutions On-Screen. Anna Jane, can you talk us through just some of the simple things? Then we can also get into the bigger things. I know Norman Lear is involved in this organization as well. I think what he did with The Jeffersons, which was portraying a successful Black family on screen, and putting it in everyone’s living rooms, did have an impact. There could be as big a thing about a climate-centered series like Scott Burns is doing, or we also had Gloria Calderon Kellett on the show to talk about One Day At A Time and how she did little small things on the show, like if they’re on the roof, they’re going to show some solar panels. There’s bigger things and smaller things. Can you give us a sense, from this playbook of these smaller things that we could be looking at for our characters in existing shows or movies?
**Anna Jane:** Definitely. Lynn and Norman Lear have been great champions of seeing more climate on screen. You’re exactly right. We talk about it as a spectrum. On the smaller things are almost more the set dressing. If you’re showing a roof, show solar panels on it. If you have a kitchen scene, show an electric stove, not a gas stove. If you have a car scene, have an EV. When on set, don’t have single-use plastic in your scenes. Have a water bottle. Those are just the really easy things that almost any production could do.
**John:** Those are things you’re not even really acknowledging in the course of the scene. It’s just normal to see that there.
**Anna Jane:** We know that that works, because it’s worked with smoking and it’s worked with other issues and it normalizes these behaviors and makes them sexy, depending on the context. Of course, that’s what we want. We want to make these things really desirable and sexy. Then I think from there it’s talking about it just in passing. You’re seeing that show up more, just in shows where it’s an ongoing story that isn’t about climate, but the character brings it up in passing conversation. We know that that is powerful, because again, it normalizes talking about it.
There’s this really strange dynamic that’s happening in the country where now according to Yale’s most recent research, 75% of American adults are concerned about climate change, everything from cautious to deeply alarmed. The deeply alarmed is now the biggest American audience of all the audiences they study. It’s a really small percentage of people who ever talk about it in their normal, day-to-day lives. It’s creating this sensation of feeling very isolated and also like you’re being gaslit by the world, which how the characters in Don’t Look Up felt, like there’s a meteor headed towards us and nobody seems to care. We also consistently, according to research, underestimate how much those around us care about it. We think that we care more than the other people around us, but that’s not true.
Just having it come up in passing conversation for a character that you’re already attached to and a story that you’re already attached to is really, really powerful. Then I think we see the more in-depth engagements with shows like Years and Years, where it’s not focused on climate, but it’s a consistent theme that impacts the family and the story because it’s set in the future.
**John:** Let’s go back and take a look at that middle ground thing where it’s not just set dressing, but it’s coming up in conversation, because I think the classic example you go back to in terms of one character makes a comment and that changes the whole industry is Merlot. In the movie Sideways, Paul Giamatti has his tirade against Merlot, and it actually has a demonstrable impact on Merlot sales for decades afterwards. It literally changed what grapes are planted in California based on the result of that movie and people not buying Merlot. If you have characters you care about, who you believe would be saying this thing, but are voicing a concern about this thing or that thing or a preference of this over that, that could have a real impact if it’s the right show, the right message, the right timing of it. It’s being judicious when you’re doing that.
**Anna Jane:** It’s huge. Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, another amazing climate scientist, says that the number one thing that anyone can do about it is talk about it, is really being honest about the fact that this is impacting our lives and our psychology and our mental health and our physical environment. Having your characters do that I think also is just an honest portrayal of the world we’re living in now. If these characters were out there in the real world, it would be impacting their lives, and they would be thinking about it. Also, just for the impact on the audience, it really does a lot to normalize people’s own concerns and courage and thinking about it and saying it’s okay to be worried. These characters are also worried.
**John:** Choices in transportation feel like a really natural way to do that, because the choice of whether to get that bigger car, to get the smaller car, or to not get a car and use public transportation, those are things that are moments we can see on screen where characters are making choices. We can think about like, oh, what choice would I make if I were in that situation. You might make a different choice. Just because you see a bunch of big trucks around you, you might be the person who doesn’t get the big truck because of something that you saw on screen or a choice that someone else made that was different, because of a show you saw or a movie you saw.
**Quinn:** Going from the ground level back up, there’s some fascinating research that says the single most influential lever for why someone might get solar panels is whether their neighbor has them. That’s been measured a thousand times. We know that the biggest levers to pull, no question, are elections, legislation, and candidates who might be able to win races, that will vote for that sort of legislation that pulls a lever. We also know that that really doesn’t usually happen until it’s swelled from the ground up, until social norms have been changed, so when there’s been a paradigm shift.
If TV is like the friends that are in your living room every week or you’re binging them or whatever it might be or these big impactful movies, if we’re able to show those things more and more, whether it’s solar panels or a smaller car or it’s water issues or whatever it might be, that’s going to help build that. That’s going to help build it up to the point where it’s really tough for the folks who are in charge, who are able to have the biggest impact to ignore. Again, there’s a million different roles that people can play. When you ask, what can I do, it’s the same thing.
I reread Anne Lamott’s book Bird By Bird recently, which I love and I’ve dogeared a thousand times. It’s just these wonderful character questions like what do they dream about and what are they scared of and all this. It’s the same thing, just looking at your characters and going, “What can they do? How can they get involved in some way, whether it’s subtle or not?” The more you see that, the more you go, “That’s a job I didn’t know existed.”
**Anna Jane:** I think the way that we talk about it in the playbook is a climate lens, which is also just another generative, creative opportunity, thinking through how would this be impacting my story world, and my characters can open up all these new possibilities around plot and character development. I think that that’s exactly right. It’s just thinking through, if this character was alive in our world today, what would they be dreaming about, and how might they be engaging or thinking about this. Then I think Gloria Calderon Kellett at the event did such a good job of showing what that looks like in her show, where it’s a sitcom. It’s not about climate change, but one of the characters is really passionate about social justice issues. It was very natural to have that character dress up as Greta Thunberg for Halloween. There were some great jokes. It was funny. It totally worked for their characters and their story.
Then also talked to Scott Z. Burns, who just created an Apple Plus show that will come out I think next year, that’s heavily focused on climate. His co-showrunner and writer Dorothy Fortenberry has this great line that if climate isn’t in your story, then it’s science fiction. I think that that’s going to continue to be the case. In 10 years, if your characters aren’t acknowledging climate, it’s going to feel so outdated, because that is just going to increasingly impact our real lives and our real world.
**Quinn:** Now when I watch any show that is about an oncoming pandemic or something, or I see medical situations where people aren’t wearing masks, I’m like, “Put on your mask!” It feels really crazy. I love love love the show Station Eleven, but it started to be filmed before our pandemic. We see all these medical situations, and there’s a pandemic coming. I’m like, “Where are your masks?” It does feel like some sort of weird alt timeline universe that people are not acknowledging what we all know to be true.
**Anna Jane:** That was one of my favorite shows recently, because obviously it’s not a climate show but it does show how do these characters find beauty and joy in the midst of pretty harrowing circumstances. I think we need a lot more stories about that, around climate. That stuff can’t go away, as things continue to get more intense. We’re humans. We need stories. We need art. We need joy and beauty. Also, on the flip side, I was like, “This is set 15 years in the future. There’s a lot of climate change happening. They just don’t talk about it.” It would be so easy to just have thrown a little bit in there to acknowledge that their world is very changed.
**John:** We’d be focusing on the little things we can do or how the characters talk about it. Let’s zoom back out. There’s a page in your playbook called the Cheat sheet, which is bigger, broader things to be thinking about. One of the big frameworks you have for it is the climate crisis is here now. I think so often we talk about it as the day after tomorrow. We’re always jumping ahead 10 years like, “Oh, this is how bad it’s going to be,” and not acknowledging what you’re experiencing on the Gulf Coast, which is that it’s happening to you every day. There’s constant problems. The wolf’s not at the door. The wolf’s in the house. We have to deal with the wolf that’s in front of us.
Let’s talk through some of the other things in this cheat sheet, because there are things you might skip past but I think are important for us to be looking at. One of them is your idea of no shame, because I think so often it’s easy to think about, oh, they’re saying that, but then they’re also flying someplace, so they’re hypocrites. You have a quote there from Bill McKibben that says, “Everyone’s a climate hypocrite. The hypocrisy is the price of admission in this battle.” You to be doing this, you had to fly here to Los Angeles to do this presentation. You have an impact as well. That doesn’t negate the good that you’re doing.
**Anna Jane:** Yeah, it’s really huge. I think it’s actually an intentional narrative that’s been seeded by the fossil fuel industry, who very much understands the power of storytelling. They commissioned a movie glorifying oil in the 1950s. It’s intentional. BP actually coined the term carbon footprint, and it was very much to put the onus of guilt and shame on the individual instead of the systemic problems, the fossil fuel industry, the governments that are allowing this to happen.
I think that when we do shame each other over flying, plastic straws, what have you… In the Deep South some people need trucks. EV trucks haven’t become affordable. Shame is a very good emotion for shutting you down. It doesn’t provide a psychological mindset for moving into a place of agency and action. That’s a very intentional thing that was done by the fossil fuel industry. I encourage people not to play into that. It’s easy to fall into. It also tends to set up the character who does care as the nag, like a lot of the annoying neighbor bitching at you about your recycling. We want to show characters who care who you like, or you don’t like, but they’re somebody who’s fascinating and not just bitching at you, ideally.
**John:** I think one of the other tropes and expectations we get to is that character, that nag, is a white person who is going after you. One of the things that I see you doing in this is that you’re trying to really center Black and indigenous people in this conversation. You had Reverend Lennox Yearwood Jr., and one of the lines he said that I thought was so smartly crafted was, “From the front line to the fence line,” and really focusing on communities that are impacted by these things and centering them in the solution to it, and not just the victim of the problem.
**Anna Jane:** It’s huge. I think it’s very in line with a lot of representation and diversity conversations already happening in Hollywood. When it comes to climate, historically marginalized communities, largely BIPOC, are the ones who are near the fossil fuel industries that are poisoning air and water, Cancer Alley in Louisiana, largely Black communities. They’re also in the front lines. We see Standing Rock and all kinds of pipeline fights and fights against different fossil fuel infrastructure led by Black and indigenous leaders. It’s really important when we’re telling climate stories, those people are leading on the stories that they’re in.
**John:** There’s not a white savior who comes in-
**Anna Jane:** Exactly.
**John:** …just to solve the problem for them.
**Anna Jane:** They’re a part of the actual storytelling process, because they are largely the ones who are experiencing it first and worst.
**John:** Let’s try to wrap this up with some action steps, because this feels very much like a Quinn newsletter thing, like here’s what you can do. Obviously, any of our listeners can go to the climate playbook right now. It’s goodenergystories.com, and take a look at those things. What are some steps that you’d like people to take this week, this month, in terms of if you were a showrunner working on a show, what are some practical things they could do to start having these conversations in the room? What would you like them to do?
**Anna Jane:** Certainly reading it, but also sharing it with your writers and making sure that other people have access to it and are aware of it. We’re definitely trying to distribute it far and wide. The more that folks can do that, the better. We’re also offering workshops, and we’re happy to come into writers rooms and bring it to life off the page. Happy to do that. Definitely reach out to me if you’re interested in that. It’s like climate change, just talking about it, sharing it.
**John:** Great. How will you know if what you’re doing is successful. How will you know whether this good energy playbook has had the impact that you want to have? I know you have people involved who are data folks. Will you have a sense of whether this has worked?
**Anna Jane:** Yeah. We worked with USC’s Media Impact Project to study how often climate and any adjacent conversation is showing up in TV and film. It’s 2.8% between 2016 and 2020 showed up in scripted entertainment. We are going to continue measuring that to see how it’s going up. That was before Don’t Look Up. I’m curious how much that impacted audiences. Just looking, definitely going to study how does this change over time, and not only just the frequency, but how are the stories showing up. What are the narratives that are showing up?
**John:** Small sidebar. You don’t have to weigh in on this. I fully respect Don’t Look Up, and I’m so happy Don’t Look Up happened, but I do worry that it’s going to feel like that’s how you make a climate change movie. I don’t know that you’re going to have the impact you’re going to have, because I do worry that those people involved telling that story has just made it feel like it’s a Hollywood movie about this thing that’s really… It’s a metaphor. The meteor’s a metaphor for something else. I don’t know that it’s going to connect the dots in the ways that it all could. I’m happy that movie exists, but I think we could do so much more granular work to actually get some stuff happening.
**Anna Jane:** On Don’t Look Up, I do think that it opened a lot of doors by having a successful movie that was a metaphor, also for climate explicitly. They were very clear about that. Definitely want to see climate show up more in non-analogies, in real ways. One of the movies that I just loved that did that was First Reformed. I just re-watched it, because we do a bunch of case studies in the playbook. It’s just so beautifully written. I just feel like anyone who says that you can’t write climate without being preachy or didactic or boring or too technical, that movie just to me completely debunks that, because it’s just gorgeously written. That’s a lot of faith and climate intersections too, which I always find fascinating. I really love that one. It’s dark, but it ends on this moment of possibility and expansiveness. I really love those stories, where it’s helping you to befriend uncertainty but also letting you imagine something that happens.
**Quinn:** I always try to take the perspective of we’ll take whatever we can get here. One of the things I tried to emphasize as Anna and her team constructed this incredible tool, is we always have to remember how difficult it is for anyone at any stage in their career in Hollywood to get anything made. I watch my wife, who is the most hardworking, incredible human, and about as successful as it gets, struggle to get things made. One of our goals was literally anything you can get out of this, great, we’ll take it, because that 3% number can only go up. If you skim one page and you grab one thing, that’s something else, and that starts to change that social norm. We’ll take whatever we can get. Don’t Look Up felt the same way, whether it’s something more fantastical like Beasts of the Southern Wild about the Gulf Coast or it’s First Reformed or whatever it might be, the movie about the big forest fire last year.
**John:** Angelina Jolie?
**Quinn:** Yes. The point is, if you think there’s a limited number of stories to tell, you are just incredibly off base, because the folks that are already being affected by this have such a wide, beautiful variety of lived experiences who have stories to tell, who are already contributing, because their answer to what can I do is, it’s what I have to do. I have to make sure that my frontline community is getting the money or is electrifying buildings or whatever it might be. We’ll take any of these stories, because all of them make a difference.
**John:** They do. The other thing I would just stress is that you don’t necessarily have to announce your intentions. You don’t have to say, “Oh, we’re going to put a climate change story into this episode.” No, just do those little, small things. The network, or the studio, they’re not even necessarily going to notice that you did it. You’re making choices for your story that are the right choices, but also help tell the message.
**Quinn:** This’ll date me. It doesn’t need to say, “A very special episode of Parks and Rec.” We don’t need that. Just make it part of the world, and people will identify with it so much more.
**Anna Jane:** I really love it when it shows up very authentically. I think that’s really powerful. I do think people love the drama of my story, like the climate activist goes up against climate denier megachurch pastor father. All of us have fascinating stories. All of us are experiencing this in unique ways. There are literally billions of climate stories, because every single person in this world is affected, and every person to come will be affected.
**John:** Cool. It has come time for our One Cool Things, where we share something with our audience. I’ll start off. I’m going to start with Redactle, which is a new daily game, in the tradition of Wordle, because now there has to be a daily everything, a place you go to. Redactle is really tough. What it does is it takes an article on Wikipedia, one of the top 10,000 articles, so not something super obscure, but then it redacts almost all the worlds. Then you plug in words to uncover what it is. You have to figure out what is this actual article about. It’s really hard, but really challenging. If you’re a puzzley kind of person, you’re just trying to figure out what this could possibly be. I spent about a half an hour yesterday trying to figure out what an inclined plane article was, also known as a ramp. It’s rewarding. You do feel that sense of accomplishment when you actually have uncovered the thing. Redactle will be my One Cool Thing for this week. Quinn, why don’t you go next. What do you have for yours?
**Quinn:** I’m going to cheat. My One Cool Thing is my wife.
**John:** Aw.
**Quinn:** Besides just being an incredible human on her own, I was privileged enough to choose to do this work. She has been supportive in 10,000 different ways, including there’s really no way to get into this work without having some dark moments, even if you’re as privileged as I am. I deal with air pollution a lot less, now that I left California. I don’t want for clean water and food and things like that. The scope of it and what’s here and what’s coming can be very difficult. She’s found me under a blanket on the couch some nights, going, “Oh boy.” She’s the most incredible human alive. On the other hand, if you want to laugh with everything that’s going on, her new movie is fantastic. It’s a blast. It’s a throwback. It’s a delight.
**John:** That would be The Lost City. You have to actually name the movie.
**Quinn:** Yeah, The Lost City.
**John:** The Lost City.
**Quinn:** Yeah, that’s helpful. Sorry. It’s been so long. We’re so in it. Lost City, Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum. He takes off his pants. I don’t know what else to tell you.
**John:** Good stuff. Anna Jane, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?
**Anna Jane:** I’m going to go with Russian Doll Season 2.
**John:** I’m excited to watch it. Are you enjoying it?
**Anna Jane:** I loved it. I binged it. It was my treat after launch. We launched on Tuesday. I was bringing on Wednesday. I’m like, “The universe gave me Russian Doll Season 2 as a gift.” The first season was really profoundly moving to me.
**John:** I watched it twice.
**Anna Jane:** I think I watched if four times. Just personally, I was going through stuff that it really helped with. On a global scale, working on climate can feel like you’re in this crazy death loop and like you’re going a little crazy, especially the first 10 years. Now everybody else is waking up too, which is great. This season goes back into her story. She is working through trauma from her family and history. I have a lot to do with that as well. I hear rumors that if they get a next season they might jump into the future. If you want to talk about climate, reach out to me. That show has just been profoundly life-changing for me.
**John:** Fantastic. Great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Jade Carta. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Anna Jane, are you on Twitter? Are you a Twitter person?
**Anna Jane:** I am. I’m @annajanejoyner.
**John:** Fantastic. We can also follow, is it @goodenergy?
**Anna Jane:** It’s @goodenergystory.
**John:** @goodenergystory. You can follow their Twitter account as well. Quinn Emmett, you are on Twitter? I don’t remember now.
**Quinn:** I am, yeah. Yes, when I’m not dealing with my children. It’s @quinnemmett.
**John:** Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. While you’re signing up for newsletters, you should also sign up for Quinn’s newsletter and podcast. Quinn, plug away.
**Quinn:** You can find that newsletter at newsletter.importantnotimportant.com. You can find the podcast there as well. It’s weekly. It’s free. I don’t know. A lot of folks find some value in it.
**John:** Of course, goodenergystories.com is the place where you can get the playbook and find all that information there. If you would like a T-shirt, we have T-shirts. They are great. They’re available at Cotton Bureau. We have hoodies like the one I’m wearing. They’re very comfortable. Are you wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt at this moment, Quinn?
**Quinn:** No, I should’ve. That was a real mistake, because I have a closet full of them.
**John:** Yes, we all have our closets full. 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 asking people for money. Anna Jane and Quinn, thank you so much for coming on the show.
**Quinn:** Thanks, John.
**Anna Jane:** It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Anna Jane, to do this work, you had a vision, you had a goal, but again, we talk about you as a protagonist. At some point you, to enact this vision, had to get people to give you money to do this thing. Can you talk to me about how you approach people and say, “Hey, would you give me money to do this thing, this vision that I have for this organization?”
**Anna Jane:** I would say I’m still learning the art form, but I have been pretty successful with this particular project. I basically had the idea after consulting on Madam Secretary, on a storyline that was loosely based off of my story, but was like, why aren’t we seeing this show up more, and just started a personal… It really came from a very personal passion. I love TV and film. I’ve been a book nerd since I was little. It was very much like you follow your personal passion, and that opens up doors. I just started talking to as many writers as possible to figure out how we could help, what was going on.
From there, I went to the Sierra Club, who was my first climate home. I’ve worked with them off and on over the years a lot. I was like, “I think this is an opportunity that nobody seems to be looking at.” I think just the uniqueness and the fact that it intersected with what felt like we were craving more and more, that certainly opened up doors. The art of going out and dancing in front of billionaires to get money for work that you care about, I just… I think stories are powerful. We worked with a story scientist as an advisor, and just learning with him about the psychological reasons that stories impact you so much more than facts or data and can lead to action as a result of that. Not only was it just a vision for something that was missing, we really did the deep work of making the case from a just practical, psychological space that was really needed.
**John:** Vision is great, but at some point you are probably writing things. You can talk to us about writing podcasts. Talk to us about what you were writing and meeting with and slides. What was the work from, “Okay, we have this vague vision.” You went to the Sierra Club. With Sierra Club, did you go in and have a meeting? Did you have a pitch deck? Did you have a written document? What were you going into them with? When did you have the name Good Energy? How does all that stuff come together?
**Anna Jane:** That was in the spring of 2019. They were fairly easy, just because I already had a relationship with them. They could pretty quickly see the vision. Certainly in working with Bloomberg Philanthropies, who was our next big partner that came on, we had to be really intentional about piloting. That’s what we did with the Sierra Club was we talked to so many writers. We did two events. We really made the case that there was an opening for this and there was an appetite for it, but also practical things. Our creative director is a magician. All of our materials, including our pitch deck-
**John:** Your materials look great.
**Anna Jane:** It’s beautiful. I think we just created… It wasn’t just a vision. It was how we packaged it. We’ve tried, and some things didn’t work, and we learned from it and we tried again. Definitely when you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before, there’s a lot of trial and error. Certainly, I think not only leaning into the vision and getting evidence, scientific evidence and also just qualitative evidence based on interests, but also really packaging it in a super beautiful way.
**John:** Sierra Club is seed money to get you started and do some little small events that are test of concept, proof of concept for a thing. Then you’re going to Bloomberg. Also I see you have Annenberg. You had that USC connection, because they could do some researchy stuff for you. It feels like there’s places out there that want to do things, that they want someone to come to them saying, “This is how we do the thing.” Is that what your function is?
**Anna Jane:** Yeah, I definitely think people, including foundations, have this esoteric, like storytelling matters, but doing research on other organizations who do this… Define American was a huge inspiration for us.
**John:** I don’t know what that is.
**Anna Jane:** Sorry. It’s very similar. They do story consulting for immigration storylines. They’ve done research on the impact. It’s very significant. Looking at other organizations who do similar things, adopting it for climate, and showing that there’s this very practical model really helped. We took this esoteric vision and we brought it down to what does this actually look like.
**John:** Talk to us about going into a Bloomberg, going into a big foundation. How do you get the first meeting? What’s the process for going in there to ask for money? Do you know what dollars you’re asking for when you go into those things where you’re just saying, “Hey, please be a partner.” What’s that like?
**Anna Jane:** I want to acknowledge that there’s a lot of privilege inherent in this. I had been working in the climate space for a long time and I had a reputable name. I’d done work that had done well before. I just knew a lot of people. I met the woman at Bloomberg, Lindsay Firestone, who’s been just pivotal not only for getting us money, but also just helping us really think through the model and grow it. Bloomberg is very data-driven. That is their thing. We really had to show that we could measure this, we could measure the impact, in addition to presenting the vision and really the practical steps for what this could look like. That continues. We’re getting better and better at it. We’re getting more evidence. We’re getting more data that shows that this is possible to do. It’s like Hollywood. A lot of it is relationships. That has to be combined with something, a really solid idea, and that’s packaged very well.
**John:** Now, as I went to this event, I noticed that there were a bunch of other organizations that were part of it. Bloomberg is obviously writing big checks, but you clearly partnered with a bunch of other organizations who are doing related things. Are they advisors? When did those people come on board with the process?
**Anna Jane:** Absolutely. Our other big funder is Walton Family Foundation and Doc Society. Then we have a bunch of great funders at smaller levels. Our network of partners is so critical for just bringing diversity of voices and a lot of stories. A lot of these organizations work with people on the ground. A lot of them work with BIPOC communities, so access to character inspirations and stories. Hip Hop Caucus is one of our partners who does incredible work not only on climate justice, but also on racial justice. They’ve worked with a lot of musicians in the hip-hop community. They really get the impact of culture work. Now they’re doing more and more storytelling work as well.
Then Center for Cultural Power is our anchor partner. They’ve done a lot of amazing work at the intersection of art and story and climate, but also gender justice and racial justice. They’ve just been pivotal. They were editors on the playbook, advisors. Then the Sierra Club. CA Foundation, the Writers Guild East has really helped us. Both of those organizations really helped us think through the audience. What really helped too is that my two co-writers on the playbook were TV writers, or are TV writers. That’s Carmiel Banasky and Rae Binstock. We not only were connecting with advisors who were writers the entire process, we actually brought in writers to help us craft it. That was hugely important. Writers Guild East also just really helped us think through.
**John:** Just going back to the writing again, so when we say writing, are you guys writing in Microsoft Word? Are these Google Docs? How are you putting together this very complicated site? How are you gathering all of this material and making sure it all feels like it has a consistent editorial voice?
**Anna Jane:** It was a herculean effort. It was a huge Google Doc that we were inputting into. We had a ton of guest writers. We also brought in Kate Marvel. One of my favorite sections is we worked with a consultant to Marvel’s world-building empire, and then also climate scientist Dr. Pete Kalmus. They really took the science and worked to project what these two worlds that we’re heading towards, one or the other or somewhere in between, would look like. We follow a character who’s born today and grows up in the best-case scenario, which is honest. It’s still harrowing. It does get worse. There’s nothing we can do to avoid that. It’s a lot better than the scenario we’re headed towards right now, which is more three degrees. You get to see what do these two different worlds look like at 2050 and then towards the end of the century. We brought in just a lot of amazing guest writers and also worked with TV… It was really intentional and important to us that the tone was… Fun is a weird word when it’s coming to climate, but there are moments of humor in there.
**John:** It’s inviting and it’s engaging. You’re not screaming as you’re going through it.
**Anna Jane:** Not too technical. We wanted it to be very accessible to storytellers and writers. It was important to us that the writing was really good, because our audience was writers. We also worked with a really amazing copywriter. We were intentional the entire time about making sure the writing was really solid.
**John:** Quinn, you got cut out of that whole segment. Anything you want to say?
**Quinn:** That’s the way it should be. Are you kidding me? I’m just a paperweight here.
**Anna Jane:** Quinn was an amazing advisor throughout the entire process.
**Quinn:** Anna’s amazing. Every time I read something new, it was just like, oh man. It’s incredible. My whole goal was just trying to always come back to the measurable outcome, which was is this section designed so that a screenwriter can easily and understandably get something practical out of it. It wasn’t, hey, let’s write 100 pages on all the climate science. That’s not going to be as helpful. It was always with that goal in mind. What’s out there is just so helpful. Again, it’s one of those things that seems so obvious once you have it. It’s because of course, this is a tool for these people to use. It just didn’t exist.
**John:** When you see it at the final product, of course that’s how it was going to be, and then you don’t see all the process that got you to that point. At what point did you know it was a website and not a printed thing?
**Anna Jane:** I have to shout out the Walton Family Foundation who made that possible, as well as the research. Originally, we only had funding for a pdf version. When we got maybe a third of the way in, we were just like, “This has to be a website.” Also, we talked to over 100 TV and film writers to inform the playbook and just realized through those conversations that it would be way more accessible on a website, so we shifted maybe four months in and were like, “We’ve got to figure this out.” We raised more money so that we can make it a website.
**John:** Great. Again, thank you very much for coming on the show and talking through this whole plan, and especially that’s how we raise money to make these things happen.
**Quinn:** Absolutely.
**Anna Jane:** It’s an art form. Still learning.
**Quinn:** Thanks for having us, John.
**John:** Cool. Thanks.
**Anna Jane:** Thank you so much.
Links:
* [Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved the World](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2277106/) Documentary
* [Download The Cost of Accommodations Report](https://inevitable.foundation/cost-of-accommodations/download) from the Inevitable Foundation and read more on [The Hollywood Reporter](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/the-inevitable-foundation-disability-accommodations-cost-study-movies-tv-1235131680/?_hsenc=p2ANqtz–L2n-kjr_qiSGqFieZri6yrMikpnCpb_V7he_SrT2rQcnerEPKQAfUJHYpZkE3lJxquHEz)
* [Good Energy Stories Playbook](https://www.goodenergystories.com/playbook)
* [David Robert Ted Talk on Climate Change](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ktYbVwr90)
* [Years of Living Dangerously Clip with Anna and her Dad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0d09DIv8vY)
* [Subscribe to Important, Not Important](https://www.importantnotimportant.com/)
* [Dana Fox](https://twitter.com/inthehenhouse) on Twitter and checkout [The Lost City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfKO9rYDmE8) Movie
* [Russian Doll Season 2](https://www.netflix.com/title/80211627?source=35)
* [Redactle Game](https://www.redactle.com/#)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Anna Jane Joyner](https://twitter.com/annajanejoyner) on Twitter
* [Quinn Emmett](https://twitter.com/quinnemmett) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jade Carda ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/547standard.mp3).