Search Results for: 3 page challenge

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/framing-the-story).

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

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

**John:** And this Episode 511 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’re looking not just at the story but the story around the story, how framing effects the perception of a movie, and the choices writers have to make. We’ll also look at vaccine mandates for production and answer listener questions about cheesy writing, zombies, and diversity fellowships. And in our bonus segment for premium members we’ll discuss the Black Widow lawsuit and what it means for backend bonuses.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Craig, it’s August. It’s finally my month. I’ve been waiting all year for this month and it’s my month. A month named after me.

**Craig:** A month named after you. A month that I think everybody generally agrees is sweltering and miserable.

**John:** It can be sweltering and miserable. It could also be delightful. It is a month full of stone fruit. And this trip on the east coast has made me remember how much I really do appreciate stone fruit, especially nectarines, which I think are overlooked because they’re just ready to eat. You don’t have to peel them. You don’t have to do anything. You just bit into them and then you throw away the pit. They are delicious.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, a peach is the ultimate. You don’t like peaches?

**John:** Peaches are great for – I like peaches, too. But peaches, like you can not peel them, but I just don’t like the fuzzy texture if you are eating a peach peel. Do you like the fuzziness?

**Craig:** Who peels peaches?

**John:** I know a lot of people who peel peaches.

**Craig:** Really? Megana?

**Megana Rao:** I’ve never heard of that. And I feel strange about it.

**Craig:** I think he made it up. John just made it up. Maybe people shave their peaches. I mean, I like the fuzzy part. I think it’s nice. It’s sort of a nice warm reminder.

**John:** It’s extra fiber.

**Craig:** It’s extra fiber. Do you know, John, there’s a wonderful puzzle word. Puzzle words are words that most people don’t know but they happen to be useful for crosswords and things like that. A puzzle word, it’s the botany word for stone fruit.

**John:** Oh what is that?

**Craig:** A drupe.

**John:** Droop?

**Craig:** Drupe. Drupe.

**John:** Ah. Drupe.

**Craig:** A drupe.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So cherries, nectarines, peaches, etc. Drupes.

**John:** Oh, yeah, I don’t think of cherries as being stone fruits, but of course they are stone fruit.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** All this season. So this is basically the summer of stone fruit. It’s a Hot Vax Summer and it’s stone fruit season.

**Craig:** The two of us talking about this, it’s a bit like the ladies on NPR, the Saturday Night Live sketch.

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. Schweddy Balls.

**Craig:** Shweddy Balls. Mm, good things. Mm, love stone fruit. Mm.

**John:** Craig, we have some follow up. I’m wondering if you could David from Iceland.

**Craig:** Sure. He writes, “The Icelandic sagas, which are often considered some of the earliest novels, are usually full of explicit foreshadowing in the form of dreams, dreams that women usually interpret correctly as terrible events that the men who are fated to live those events dismiss either blithely or in desperate denial of destiny. This literary device hangs a sense of dread over the proceedings from the outset while also giving these stories of damp farmers murdering each other a mythic, heightened quality. That is one sense in which ‘spoiling’ the broad strokes of a narrative at the beginning can enhance the story. It frames it, letting the story comment on itself as a story turning happenstance into destiny.”

**John:** I’m really glad that David wrote in with this reminder, because I really do like that kind of foreshadowing – that foretelling and sort of the sage foretelling of like doom is about to happen. And we see that in a lot of movies. We see that in any story that begins with like “let me tell you how I died.” It’s told by a narrator who is no longer living. Sunset Boulevard. American Beauty. Casino to some degree. I love that as a quality, basically when you know that the narration is not happening in the same time period as the movie itself. Therefore there’s an aspect of foreshadowing just by the fact that this narrator is talking to you.

**Craig:** Absolutely Correct. And I should add that somewhat happily we’ve got our second puzzle word here coming up, the Icelandic saga. The term for Icelandic saga, the Norse term is Edda, which we love to see in puzzles.

There’s another kind of foreshadowing of this sort that I really enjoy which is the I guess we call it ironic foreshadow, where somebody says this is how it’s going to end, and you think, OK. And it does end that way but in a way you didn’t expect. One of my favorite examples is an episode called X-Files called Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose. And the story involves – Peter Boyle plays a psychic of a sort. He only has one psychic ability and that is that when he meets somebody he sees how they are going to die. And leading aside all the other bits and parts of the story, and spoiler alert – it’s what, 20 years old now – Scully says, “Well have you seen your own death?” And he says, “Yes.”

And he’s lying in a bed and she’s sitting sort of on a chair near the bed. And he says, “Actually when I die we are going to be together in bed.” And she’s like, “Hmm, really? Really Peter Boyle?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I don’t mean any offense, but we’ll be in bed and you’re going to be holding my hand and you’re looking at my face and there are tears streaming down my face.” And she’s a bit skeptical because she’s a skeptic.

And later in the episode, or at the end of the episode, it is revealed that he has committed suicide. And he is in a bed and he’s got that plastic bag over his head, that method of going, with pills and such. And she sits down next to him and she holds his hand and they close in on the bag over his face and the moisture from his breath has turned to little rivulets of water that are kind of rolling down the inside of the plastic as if tears were streaming down his face.

So they told you how it would end, but you really did not know how it would end. And I thought it’s just one of those moments in television storytelling where I just thought that was just so smart.

**John:** Yeah. It’s really smart. And it’s a very classic technique. It’s a new show, but it’s a classic technique, that inescapable fate.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** No matter what you try to do you are cursed to live in this. And useful for storytelling because by setting out that sort of expectation or the characters pushing against those expectations you’re really establishing a through line for the audience. The audience is looking for ways it’s going to cue back to what that original statement was.

**Craig:** Yes. You know, there’s a whole other podcast that we could do just about these old stories. You know, like every culture has this epic tale that they go through. All of them. The Edda and Mahabharata and Gilgamesh and there’s so many and I don’t enough, but I think there’s a podcast where you just do the stories. You just read the stories and you kind of – Song of Roland is considered the first – Chanson de Roland – is the first “novel” in western literature. And it’s like Rocky. It’s like reading Rocky basically.

**John:** You know, Craig, I honestly think like maybe we could come up with a way in which all stories are essentially the same story and that really create a theory for like how all movie stories should work the same way. It could be stages of like heroes get a call to adventure. I know we could do this.

**Craig:** Can we make designs?

**John:** Designs or pivot off like Joseph Campbell. I really think we could sell books on it. I think we could do a lot here.

**Craig:** It doesn’t work if we don’t have a design. It needs to be not a triangle, they’ve already stolen the snail shape.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve got to have a shape.

**Craig:** 20-sided die. Of course.

**John:** Oh my gosh. Do like a [Hedron] theory of storytelling. It would have to have like 20 plot points and each plot point has to connect, but it has to be at opposite faces that add up to 21, right? Is that how 20-sided dies work?

**Craig:** It’s an Icosagon, by the way. Dodecahedron is a 12-sided die.

**John:** Oh, you’re absolutely right.

**Craig:** The barbarians’ best friend is the dodecahedron.

**John:** It is. I know. I’m so embarrassed.

**Craig:** You know, I think the icosagon, I think probably it is that they – well, except, yeah, they would have to add up to 21, right? So nine would be across from 12. 11 is across from 10. Yeah, that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. We solved storytelling and math in just one podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. Wow.

**John:** So good. So good.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Let’s get to our first topic today and this is coming off of two things that people have written in about. We’ll start with [Olafemme] who wrote in to say, “With Simone Biles’ withdrawal from her Olympic events the Twitterverse has been revisiting a moment from the 1996 Olympics which was Kerry Strug’s historic vault on an injured ankle. It earned the US the gold in the event. I’m old enough to remember the imagery of Strug successfully completing the vault, saluting the judges, then instantly collapsing to her knees in pain, having to be carried off the mat by her team. It was an unforgettable moment of Olympic history and an inspirational story of triumph in the face of adversity.”

Craig, you remember this moment?

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** This was a big photographic moment.

**Craig:** It was almost like it was scripted.

**John:** Yes. It was a very narrative moment. It felt like, oh, this is the end of the story. Well, it’s not quite the very end, because there would also be then a celebration after. But this was the final sort of moment of victory here.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then we’re going to get to see her hugging her coach and he’s proud of her. But Olafemme reminds us that “in recent years numerous pieces of information have come to light that have completely changed the context of this story. In particular the facts that her trainer had miscalculated and the US would have won the gold even without Strug performing the vault. And that the very people helping her off the mat, Bela Karolyi and Larry Nassar, were abusive psychologically, physically, and in the last case sexually.

“What seemed like a story about victory has been revealed in truth to be one about the toxic pursuit of victory. How it can be so toxic that we overlook and justify traumatic abuses. I don’t mean to make light of real world tragedy, but I’m fascinated by how a powerful story can be turned on its head this way.”

I like what Olafemme is reminding us that we could tell the story of Kerri Strug and it would be a certain story if we leave out certain facts. But now with the new framing it’s a very different moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. Our narrative maturity has accelerated, just as a culture. We used to have very, very simple narratives. Morality plays, Aesop’s fables, and the aforementioned Edda, and Mahabharata, and all of that other stuff. And what’s happened over time is – especially the last 30 years, there’s so much culture. So many stories are being told that we’ve gotten wise to all the tricks. Everyone has pretty good story horse sense.

My daughter, your daughter, have watched enough television at this point to probably be able to predict halfway through a typical average episode of ‘90s TV how it’s going to turn out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So over the last 30 years there’s been an acceleration of the subversion of narrative, or an interest in exploring hyper-reality. To insist that our narratives cover a lot of uncomfortable things. What we want, of course, is a very simple story on some level. We need Kerri Strug to make that vault in order to win the gold. She is deeply hurt but she makes one last vault, sacrificing herself, her body. And performs it brilliantly. And we win and she’s carried off by the men who inspired her to do so. And then now all these years later we’re a bit more grown up and what we want is the truth. And the truth does not diminish what Kerri Strug did. Nor by the way does the truth of what Kerri Strug did have anything to do with what Simone Biles did.

So, what I like about the way things are going now is that we are apparently grown up enough to face facts and in doing so we don’t lose heroes. Simone Biles remains a hero as does Kerri Strug. We just see the picture fully for what it is and we don’t sacrifice facts at the altar of simple narrative.

**John:** Now way back in the Austin Film Festival a couple of years ago we talked about the Zola Twitter thread. I’ve seen the movie. I don’t think you’ve seen the movie yet, Craig.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But one of the interesting choices that the filmmakers make is it’s largely framed around Zola’s tweets to the degree that which when a line of dialogue is actually from a tweet there’s a little Twitter sound to show that it’s from that tweet. But there’s a moment in the movie, and this is not a spoiler, where it reframes everything from the other girl’s point of view and you see like, oh, there’s a completely different context behind what could actually be happening in these moments which I think is interesting.

Now those are choices that the filmmakers are making. And so the same way we could have made a certain Kerri Strug movie in 1996 and a different Kerri Strug movie in 2021, I’m really more curious about how the outside events really change the perception of a given piece of art. And so let’s not talk about changing the story, but the world around the story changes it, even if it’s the same piece of art.

So not the piece of art, but the frame around it. So with visual arts it’s literally the gilded frame you’re putting around it changes how we see the work itself. Because that’s the thing we sort of have less control over as artists, and we as writers, but we have to sort of be aware of it. Because if we are making a Naked Gun movie that has OJ Simpson in it we have no control over the fact that OJ Simpson was going to be the person he became.

**Craig:** Right. We just have to keep up. I feel like that’s the important thing. We have to keep up. We can’t go back in time and change the things we’ve done, or made. We have to keep up with culture. We certainly can go back and reevaluate. Here’s a moment where I didn’t even realize that Larry Nassar was one of the people helping Kerri Strug off the mat. That’s just so upsetting. It’s important to go back and look at those things and acknowledge them.

However I think our primary task as artists is to keep up with culture as best we can while we are creating it. And learn. And adapt. It’s crucial.

**John:** Yeah. And I think part of that awareness is recognizing that generally we’re looking at things from a North American cultural point of view. And that framing might be vastly different in other parts of the world. We’ve talked about how some of our movies see big changes overseas, especially in China. Some of it is political pressure, but some of it is also just cultural understanding. Things that would work a certain way here just don’t come across the same way overseas.

**Craig:** Yeah. Every culture is at a different place in their narrative growing process, and I don’t even mean to imply that more complicated narrative is inherently better. The French, I think, have always felt that their narrative sense was better than ours, because it was more complicated, more subtle, more French cinema. I don’t that’s true. I don’t think it means it’s better. But if you like that sort of thing then it’s wonderful. The important thing is that the French were making films for the French for their taste. French comedies, on the other hand, are so – generally speaking – I’m going to generalize here are really broad.

So, famously the French loved Jerry Lewis. So even within narratives there’s certain kinds where there’s what we’ll call a grown up, or very mature, complicated point of view on narrative. And then in other genres there’s a bit of a younger point of view. In other parts of the world there’s an appreciation for some of our simpler movies that we make because people are still kind of catching up to all the movies that there are. Not everybody has access to all of the stuff that we’ve had access to. So it is different all across the world and it is different because people are seeing things through their own filters.

One thing though that I try and keep in mind as an active participant in Hollywood is that despite all of the differences that exist across the globe in terms of culture and the way people create and process narrative Hollywood still does kind of change things. People literally learn to speak English from the things we make and do. They are watching very, very carefully. So, it is important for us, particularly for us, to keep up.

**John:** I think I’ve mentioned on the podcast before one of my favorite movies of all time is the Talented Mr. Ripley. I think it is just phenomenal.

**Craig:** Amazing. Love it.

**John:** But on this trip it was the first time I saw Purple Noon, which is the French adaptation, the much earlier French adaptation of the same source material.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Vastly different. And absolutely worth watching for just all the places where one movie goes right and one movie goes left. But one of the things that you can make this movie, when Minghella is making Talented Mr. Ripley in – I’m looking up the year – in 1999 versus the original film is that the subtext of sort of why Ripley is doing the things he’s doing and his attraction to Dickie Greenleaf can be more overt. So it’s not just he wants Dickie Greenleaf’s life, but he wants Dickie Greenleaf. And the sexuality is possible just because of the years that had passed between it. And it’s interesting how filmmakers have to be aware of the context in which they make their pieces. Minghella could just make a different movie than he could have made 30 years earlier in France.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I love those strange evolutions. I think it’s great. There’s a movie out right now, The Green Knight, which is – I haven’t seen it, I’ve just been reading discussion of it so far, but I’d like to catch it in a theater here in Canada. And it is a retelling of an incredibly old and super simple story of Gawain and the Green Knight and, you know, he comes – it’s like Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable with a bit of magic in it. It’s a fable.

And by all accounts the story that is being told in this new version is quite mature. And somewhat profound. So I love that sort of thing. I think it’s great.

**John:** Now the other prompt for this framing discussion was Stillwater. So Tom McCarthy’s new movie, Stillwater, it tells the story of Bill Baker who is an Oklahoma oil rigger played by Matt Damon, also from Talented Mr. Ripley, and this character travels to Marseilles to visit his daughter Allison. She is a one-time exchange student who is now serving a nine-year prison sentence for killing her lover. If that last part sounds familiar that’s because it’s reminiscent of the situation of Amanda Knox who found herself arrested and later acquitted of a murder in Italy in 2007.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the challenge here is in interviews McCarthy says the story is completely fictionalized because “there’s no similarity in our stories beyond an American student in jail.” And on Twitter and on Medium Amanda Knox herself, who is now a journalist, says kind of, well, “Bullshit.” And it raises the issue that we’ve been discussing a lot on the show recently is sort of who owns a story. And to what degree do we take things from real life in sort of How Would This Be a Movie segments and fictionalize them. And there’s legal implications. There’s moral and ethical implications. And real narrative implications.

And so even if McCarthy and team feel that they are fictionalizing the story every article written about it says Amanda Knox “is perceived as being the Amanda Knox story.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** How are you feeling about this situation?

**Craig:** Let’s talk about just the easy part first, which is the legal part. The deal here is it doesn’t sound like anything illegal is occurring. Even if you were to tell the Amanda Knox story specifically in your own way, if you were basing it on existing news articles and reporting and interviews, public interviews that Amanda Knox herself did, you can do that. And you can even cast an actor and make her look like Amanda Knox. You can put a bunch of makeup on and such. That’s entirely legal.

What you can’t do is defame people, at least in the US you can’t defame living people. So, what you can’t do is imply, for instance, that Amanda Knox is in fact a murderer. Because by all accounts and from everything I’ve read it seems quite clear she was not. And certainly at the very least she was acquitted. That is different than the moral standing question.

So, I think this kind of working out the way it should. I believe that if you’re going to make a movie that is inspired by someone’s life, and in particular inspired by a very traumatic thing they went through, then it’s sensible to talk to them. And it is sensible to listen and to communicate in some way. It doesn’t always work out. Sometimes you talk to people, you communicate with them, and then they stop. Sometimes they stop communicating back. Sometimes they claim you never communicated with them at all. It’s an interesting that can occur. But you do your best to try.

You have to know that the balance is that that person has the exact same pulpit you do. And they can go and say I don’t like this and here’s why. And in this case that’s what Amanda Knox has done. And it sort of works out the way it does and some people get upset, some people don’t, but everybody gets their day in public court, especially now because everybody has a pulpit.

I do think it’s important for us to at least try if we’re really going to be kind of expanding and going in a different direction in particular than what somebody actually lived, in this case sounds like they did, it just seems like maybe you should talk to that person or make enough changes that there isn’t really a concern about it.

**John:** Yeah. The issue of like they have access to the same pulpit, yes I think Twitter makes some of these things more possible, but the power differential between a giant movie starring Matt Damon and Amanda Knox is significant. In her own essay she cites for so long we were calling it the Monica Lewinsky affair when we really we should call it the Clinton affair. Basically the power differential between who Monica Lewinsky was and the forces against her was so vast that we needed to really think about how we were framing that.

Also Amanda Knox, she is a journalist who can speak up and defend herself, not everyone could do that. And so I’m trying to think of some guidelines we could offer filmmakers to think about when you’re using a person who exists in real life, someone who is going to be perceived as being the character in your story, how do we treat that person the respect? It’s also – you missed out on this conversation, but when we were talking about Cat Person a few weeks back, which was that short story that was–

**Craig:** Yes, I remember.

**John:** And then there was a discourse because it really came out that like, OK, it wasn’t about the own writer’s life, but it’s about this other woman’s life and she could speak up and say like, “Hey, this was actually my life, and it feels really strange.” Ownership of that becomes complicated.

**Craig:** Well, I am going to stick up for the writers of the world here in the sense that we do need to be free to create art. Sometimes art is inspired by life. There are hard rules in place to protect people from being damaged legally. When we say damaged legally it’s not like there’s some number that you hit on a meter and suddenly the legal thing goes up. Those laws are there to reflect our moral stances and our moral points of view. We can always, of course, adjust those laws through legislature and so forth. But I do think that artists need to be free to work.

If we are going to say that people who might be unintended victims or collateral damage of artworks, if that is the rule that we use to not write the work of art we have just eliminated most great works of art, at least when it comes to novels in particular. It’s a really sticky area.

**John:** It is. But Craig I think you laid out some of the remedies earlier which is that you might look for like what are the things that are absolutely to identify those people and what are the things you could change so that it’s not so clearly one person. So that was the issue with Cat Person is that the original writer could have changed some small details that would have made it more clear, it would have helped distinguish this fictionalized relationship from the real relationship that happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. But maybe it wouldn’t have been as good.

**John:** Maybe? Maybe.

**Craig:** You know, the thing is I was not aware that that story was based on a real person. If the real person hadn’t said this was based on a real person then would I have even known that it was based on a real person? I don’t know.

You know, I’m a little bit more – certainly you’re intention is never to hurt anybody. But if a woman is in an abusive relationship with a man, he abuses her, and he torments her, and then she writes a roman a clef, right, she writes a novel that’s basically inspired by the things that she experienced with that person, she’s supposed to respect him too? Does she have to change things so that we don’t know it’s him? I think there’s the legal line and that’s the line. And the rest you have to kind of just feel. I understand why Amanda Knox is upset. The people I think she should be most upset with are all of the lazy journalists who just keep going, “Look, it’s Amanda Knox,” because that is kind of easy.

But I’m not sure there’s a remedy here beyond just saying hey everybody just to be clear if you think that that movie that is sort of like my life is actually like my life it is not at all like my life, at all. But I don’t think there’s any stricter kind of remedy than that.

**John:** So we talk a lot about our How Would This Be a Movie and to what degree we would need to get life rights from a person or just use publically available facts to do something. Obviously one of the reasons why you sometimes want life rights is because it’s going to be very difficult to do this work without access to information they have. Or to protect yourself from defamation lawsuits, libel lawsuits that could come up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there’s reasons why you may want to protect yourself. Even if you think you are in the clear you may still want those life rights because it’s better not to have that lawsuit and have something hanging over you. And to have that person be publically on the side of the film rather than against the film. Those can be very useful things independent of kind of the moral and ethical issues.

**Craig:** Almost no one is going to go get life rights for a fictionalized version of something. They will get life rights if they are telling the so-and-so story. They’re using your actual name. But if we’re into the roman a clef world where we are drawing from reality but changing some names and doing a parallel fictionalized version of it it would probably not be advisable to go get the life rights. You are essentially opening yourself up to even more trouble I think. Because at that point you’re saying, “Oh yeah, this is definitely you.”

Whereas right now Tom McCarthy and the studio can say, “No, I mean, it’s not her. We’re not telling the Amanda Knox story.”

**John:** Yeah. So Craig on Saturday I got to go see Mike Birbiglia’s new comedy show.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** It was delightful. So Mike Birbiglia, a frequent guest on the show, friend of the podcast. And it was my first time having to show proof of vaccination to get into a venue to see his show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I was just absolutely delighted to show my vaccination card and to be in a space full of vaccinated people. I still wore my mask and I was one of the few people wearing my mask. I kind of felt like more people should have been wearing their masks. Still, I was delighted to be using my vaccination card and be in a space to see Mike do his new show, which is going to be obviously a stage adaptation and is going to be just terrific.

But I wanted to talk about required vaccinations because it’s not just comedy venues like this. It’s actually a big thing in the industry as of the last two weeks. More and more places are requiring crews to be vaccinated. So Netflix led the way. They were the first major Hollywood studio to do it. It’s basically everyone in Zone A has to have proof of vaccination for their productions. Craig, can you talk to me about what Zone A means?

**Craig:** Zone A, which is my zone on my show, is the zone where you are working with actors. You were working in general proximity to actors. And the reason that is its own zone is because the actors are required at various points throughout the day to have their masks off. They have to act without masks. So all of the people around them need to be masked and tested and evaluated regularly. I myself am tested three times a week. And so far I’ve aced every test.

**John:** Yes. So you are vaccinated but you are also tested.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Because even though the vaccination will protect you from serious disease you could theoretically get a breakthrough infection and I know folks who have gotten breakthrough infections.

**Craig:** Yes, absolutely. Happily what we’re seeing with breakthrough infections is for the most part it is a mild illness, almost no hospitalizations, and almost no death, thank god. There’s a little bit concern about some of the long haul Covid symptoms showing up in some of those folks, so vaccinations are not a magic shield against being ill. But we’ve always been ill. I mean, we’ve been sick our whole lives with flus and colds. I mean, every year we would get a cold until the last two years, rather nice.

So we’re used to being sick. We’re just not used to having to go into the hospital, get intubated, and die.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s what the vaccines have accomplished. I’m thrilled that they are starting to require these vaccinations for people working in Zone A. Along with those new rules, the unions also agreed to loosen some things up. For union productions if you are fully vaccinated you don’t necessarily have to wear the mask all the time, I think, or when you’re outside I believe you don’t have to wear the mask.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they’re starting to loosen things up. Unfortunately up here in Canada we don’t get the full benefit of those easing of restrictions because quite a few people here in Canada are vaccinated with Astra-Zeneca which the US has not approved. So it’s sort of like it doesn’t count for those rules which is annoying. Because I just read, by the way, I mean the whole thing about Astra-Zeneca was the danger of blood clots, and they’ve just come out with a study no more danger of blood clots with Astra-Zeneca than with nothing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we’ll see what happens next.

**John:** So as we’re recording this Disney was requiring all salaried and non-union hourly employees in the US to be vaccinated, which is great. And so you have to do it within 60 days. And all new folks have to be vaccinated it looks like before they even start.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I’m sure other studios will have the same thing. Google and other places are laying that in. As you said the unions are saying yes it’s OK to mandate vaccines. They have stipulations about who can have access to the vaccine information, but great, that’s good.

For writers we’re in sort of a unique place because you as a writer, and many showrunners, need to be in Zone A because they have to be on set around the actors, but if you’re a writer in a writer’s room, eh, do we need writer’s rooms to be in person right now? WGA came out and said if you are going to have an in-person writing room basically your employer is responsible for protecting your safety. They strongly recommend everyone be vaccinated and that you still need to give the option/accommodation for writers who don’t want to be in-person for services in a writer’s room. And that just makes sense because we are lucky that we don’t have to be in-person to do a lot of our jobs unless it’s something involving the set.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t use a writer’s room, but if I did I would imagine I would love to have it back in person just because there is a certain interpersonal magic that occurs and the ease and speed of communication that Zoom can disrupt. But if it were my room I would say you’re not getting in this room if you’re not fully vaccinated and also you have to wear a mask.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If everybody is fully vaccinated and wearing a mask then I’m more than happy to sit in a room with all those folks. That would be no problem for me.

**John:** So for personally and for sort of my own small business we are back in person sometimes. We’re outside as much as we can be. We’re all vaccinated. We’re trying to be safe and smart. On this trip Mike and I have been the two guys with masks in places where a lot of other people weren’t wearing masks, but it just felt like I don’t want to be indoors places without a mask if I don’t need to be indoors without a mask, especially because we’ve had other friends on this trip who have gotten breakthrough Covid-19 infections. That’s just the reality that we’re living in.

Coming back to the city after being on Fire Island we went and got PCR tests, which you can get at any Walgreens. So the drive-through PCR test. But we also got the cheap do-it-yourself kits, the BinaxNOW kits, which are actually surprisingly easy to use and are useful in the sense of something that was promised kind of very early in the pandemic, the test that is not perfectly accurate but shows are you infectious right now, and they’re really good for that, so I would recommend those for folks. And they’re behind the counter at the pharmacy. And they’re cheap.

**Craig:** Yeah. So just a couple years after anyone who wants a test can get them and they’re beautiful tests.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So one of the things I’ve read about the Delta variant, which makes it interesting, and I think is part of what’s happening here is that the Delta variant seems to work primarily through the nose as opposed to the lungs. It really wants to get inside your nose. That’s where it does its business. And the nose is in a fully vaccinated person the least vaccinated part of you. There’s just not a lot of blood flow in there, which is weird for anyone who has ever gotten a nosebleed, but it just doesn’t have the same kind of constant flow around.

So when you do get fully vaccinated all those wonderful immune cells are living in the rest of your body, but not so much in the nose, and that’s where Delta is going in and doing a number. Now, eventually what happens is it crawls down your throat and into your lungs at which point the vaccine says, ah-ha, I’ve got this, and then it wins. Which is why you can get sick with Delta but not fatally so, which is good news. But that’s what’s going on.

**John:** I’ve just decided I’m treating myself as my own Zone A. I’m going to be careful about myself and I’m going to protect myself, because I am my own actor. I’ve got to protect the production and the production is me.

**Craig:** Yeah. I worry about this all the time. You know, we have hundreds of people working on this show, maybe a thousand, more.

**John:** And you and I both know so many shows that have had to start up and shut down and start up and shut down. And you don’t want that.

**Craig:** No. Yeah, we have not had to shut down, which is wonderful, and I’m hoping we don’t. We have a lot of people. So, of course, I think about it all the time. I worry about it all the time. But what I am pretty happy about is that we’re vaccinated. I think basically everybody – I believe everybody in Zone A is vaccinated. And so if something should happen, shutting down is never the thing that should freak you out the most. What should freak you out the most is people getting really sick.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And to that extent I’m way less nervous about life than I was a year ago, that’s for sure. So thank you science.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I will say that before we started our trip was the first time I got a Covid exposure notification and it’s basically we went to go see a movie in a theater in Koreatown and the next day got a notification that someone had tested positive for Covid-19. It’s like, OK, well we’re all vaccinated. 100% of the people in the theater were wearing masks. And we were spaced out widely. I’m not worried and nobody got sick.

But the advice for what you’re supposed to do next reminded me of the signs you see in restaurants about Covid safety but they’re like six months out of date. I hate the ones that are all about it’s really important to wash your hands and that stuff. I’m like, yeah, washing your hands is important, but by far the most important thing is to be vaccinated and to wear a mask. And the instructions I got from this exposure notification were sort of the same. They were kind of vague about isolation, but didn’t sort of say the actual things we know you really should do. So, frustrating. Like getting tested.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. Well, our government is struggling.

**John:** It does struggle at times. But we never struggle with listener questions because we get the best ones.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** And so Megana Rao, if you could come on and share some questions from our listeners with us.

**Megana Rao:** All right. Dan from Baltimore asks, “I found myself watching a clip from a movie about a particular turtleneck-wearing technology figure and someone in the comments said, ‘This part is so cheesy.’ While I agreed with them it was hard for me to put my finger on exactly what made it cheesy. Was it the acting? The writing? Or was it that the moment itself was unearned? I’ve searched the podcast and maybe I’m using the wrong term, but have you guys ever talked about cheese and how to avoid it?”

**John:** You know, I don’t know if we’ve really used the word cheese much on this podcast.

**Craig:** I don’t think we have.

**John:** But I mean I get it. I know what Dan is describing. And those moments that set up this wincing feeling like, oh, that is so cheesy. And it sort of feels like fake earnest. It feels forced. And so let’s talk about some of the reasons why those things feel forced. And sometimes it is the writing. But sometimes I think it really is the acting and the staging that is what’s making a moment that doesn’t have to feel cheesy feel cheesy. So Craig what’s your instinct on where cheese comes from?

**Craig:** I think cheesiness happens when the people who are performing or the scene, whatever, any of the things that you’re witnessing feel unaware of the complexities of life. So, you see this a lot on sitcoms for children, although you used to see it a lot on sitcoms for adults, where you’re like, OK, well in real life nothing like that happens like that. That’s insane. It’s like somebody walks into a wall and goes, “D’oh, my head,” and someone else is like, “Oh man, you’re so clumsy.” And they’re like, “I know.” That’s so divorced from the reality of what’s true.

It’s a little bit like what we were talking about earlier, the complexity of narrative, and the maturity of narrative. Cheesiness is the least mature narrative. It’s narrative that is just unaware. A little bit like a hyper formalized and hyper imagined human behavior.

**John:** Yeah. You’re describing something that feels unnatural. And so it can feel unnatural because it’s just written unnatural, like characters are doing things that they just wouldn’t do, but sometimes the [unnaturality] feels like the motion-smoothing that’s being left on a hotel room TV, which I encountered way too much on this trip. It just feels weird and gross and sometimes it’s because of the staging, because it’s just forced camera movements that don’t make sense, or eye lines that don’t match. It just feels like, oh, this is just not good. We’re staying way too wide for no good reason.

We have a sense of what it is and I think there’s a vicious circle where the kinds of camera work and staging that we see in children’s sitcoms, which is cheesy material, whenever we see that kind of staging in things that aren’t written cheesy it feel cheesy because we’re associated the cheese with it. So you sort of have that sprinkling of parmesan over anything if it’s used in that same kind of blocking and staging and shot selection. It’s strange.

Also, the difference between camp and cheesy.

**Craig:** Oh sure.

**John:** Because camp kind of knows that it’s cheesy and it’s leaning into the cheese and sort of celebrating the cheesiness of it, which can be great and delightful.

**Craig:** Something about cheesiness is connected to indicating. The cheesy material is always over-explaining what it’s about and how somebody feels. Somebody puts their hand out and gestures to a thing and says, “What is this?” It’s so weird.

My sister and I loved Brady Bunch but we knew how cheesy it was. So part of our enjoyment of The Brady Bunch was giggling about how those parents just seemed like they were on drugs because if we had done any of the things those kids did, you know, we would have been screamed at. Any of that stuff.

**John:** I guess you really are describing the awareness or unawareness of cheesiness is camp versus cheese. And that’s why The Brady Bunch movies are terrific because they are fully aware. They’re doing the same tropes but they’re fully aware that they’re doing the tropes and that’s what makes them work.

**Craig:** Yes, the movie is aware. And the characters who are the Bradys are not, which is wonderful. I love those movies. The second one is really good. Both of those movies are great. I love them.

**John:** Love them to death. Megana, what else you got for us?

**Megana:** OK, Lydia asks, “I’m writing a script right now that has an extensive discussion about zombies and the plan for surviving the apocalypse when it comes, because, well, it is. My characters are discussing the different types of zombies in the existing film universe and how each are better or worse in relation to their ability to survive. I want to call them out specifically. I was going to say Cillian Murphy/Brad Pitt zombies or Romero Slow Pokes. That’s OK right? How far can I go in referencing or quoting without infringement?”

**John:** My instinct is that I’m nervous for your scene. I’m nervous for your scene because I feel like characters discussing things in other movies is not generally going to work out great, but there’s exceptions. I think Kevin Smith’s Clerks does a really good job of that. But, Craig, I have no issues with referencing Romero zombies versus 28 Days Later zombies. I think that’s all fine. You’re not infringing on somebody to say – you can talk about those things without using those things in a copyright sense.

**Craig:** You can talk about anything you want. People in movies are allowed to have seen movies. Somebody can sit down in a movie and explain the entire plot of Ghostbusters 2 if they want. That’s perfectly fine. So, there’s no problem here with that. If that’s what you want to do you can do it.

**John:** Craig, I want to see the movie where someone just explains the plot of Ghostbusters, because that could be phenomenal.

**Craig:** It would be really funny.

**John:** I can imagine a version of that that’s absolutely great. And at some point you would cross some line where it’s like, wait, are you actually just – is there enough of a narrative adaptation to it? But it’s still great.

**Craig:** Are you just reading the script for Ghostbusters?

**John:** The same way that that Gone with the Wind parody was considered not to be enough of a parody to be its own, to not be copyright infringement.

**Craig:** Ah, yes.

**John:** There’s some line you’re going to cross, but if it’s characters in a scene doing it you’re not going to cross that line.

**Craig:** You can reference every zombie that’s ever been made. You can reference the people who were in it. You can reference the people who created it. No problem.

**John:** Craig, I think we’re at a fascinating moment right now with also the superhero genre and basically we have the DC Universe, we have the Marvel Universe, but then we have both Amazon’s The Boys and Invincible which are really closely quoting sort of those characters. There’s sort of one-for-one parity between the characters in the DC universe and the characters in these other universes. And it’s just gotten to be sort of weird.

I mean, I don’t think there’s going to be any lawsuits, but it’s strange that we have these ideas of like well what if Superman was evil in both of these shows.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s too much. I feel like this is – we’ve gone through these. We’ve talked about this before. There was a time when everything that was on a screen was a western. And there was a time when everything that was on a screen was a car chase movie, or an action movie. And let’s see where this all goes. But Marvel in particular is experiencing so much success that everybody else now – I think people tried to chase them and then most people said, “Well, this is all based on characters, other than Warner Bros. and DC none of us have characters that people know, so yeah, let’s just start inventing characters and commenting.”

And to that extent if they’re good shows, great, fantastic. All for it. But, yeah, we’re getting into levels now.

**John:** Levels over levels.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Megana, let’s try one last question.

**Megana:** Great. Kevin asks, “My partner applied for a diversity fellowship and admitted to me that he submitted a script we co-wrote together as one of his two samples, but with just his name on it since I don’t meet the qualifications for diversity that the fellowship asks for. That’s wrong, right? I’m not sure what my next step should be or if I should just let it go.”

**John:** Oh Kevin. Kevin.

**Craig:** Now, wait, is Kevin’s partner a life partner or writing partner? Probably writing partner is what we’re thinking here.

**John:** I’m assuming just writing partner.

**Craig:** OK, it’s just writing partner.

**Megana:** It’s writing partner.

**Craig:** Man, if it had been actual cohabitation romance partner.

**John:** My wife. Yeah.

**Craig:** Ooh, damn. That would have been rough. But it’s still rough.

**John:** To stipulate it’s wrong to change the title page to take your cowriter off. That’s just wrong. That’s absolutely wrong. That’s actually–

**Craig:** It’s wrong and–

**John:** Legally…yeah. There’s liability. I don’t want to say – it’s not like criminal, but…

**Craig:** No. But you have considered – what you have done is committed a tort as the law [unintelligible]. That is a civil wrong. You have violated another person’s right in their own shared copyright of that material. You cannot do that. It is wrong. And, yeah, you’re absolutely legally liable. And even worse if Kevin wants to he can just drop the dime on you to the diversity program and they’re going to be like, “Oh yeah, no, you’re out,” because it’s dishonest. And it’s also not fair to everybody else applying for that diversity fellowship.

Everyone is supposed to be applying representing their own work. So, Kevin, your partner has done a very wrong thing and they should undo it.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s imagine that the question came not from Kevin but from Kevin’s writing partner saying like I did this thing, what should I do. I think the choice is to own up to it, to say, “Hey, I sent this in, my name on it, but it’s actually me and my partner. I need to resubmit the script.” You need to apologize the hell out to Kevin.

There are going to be situations where you’ve co-written a script and one of you is eligible for a thing and the other one isn’t. Ask. There’s going to be some frequently asked questions about like how you submit this, because there’s going to be a way to do this. Most likely the best choice for this, and this happens also with representation, is you need to have something that you wrote by yourself and something you wrote with a partner. That’s representative of your work. But just taking the other person’s name off of it is not cool or kosher. And that just cannot be done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Generally when you use the phrase “he admitted to me” then you know that he did something wrong. Like John says if he had asked that’s entirely different. You’re allowed to ask permission. And if you grant that permission, fine, that’s up to you. And it’s entirely your prerogative. But, no, what he did was wrong. And as far as what your next step should be, I’d get a different writing partner. I mean, I don’t trust this dude at all.

**John:** Uh-uh.

**Craig:** And I’ve got to be honest with you. Kevin, there’s so many untrustworthy people in this business. So many liars that the thought of self-inflicting one of them upon your person and your soul is no good.

**John:** You need to trust your writing partner. You just do.

**Craig:** You have to.

**John:** Not only are you sharing a mind space with them, but you are making business decisions together.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Your lives are going to be entangled. Don’t do this.

**Craig:** What does Oprah say? When somebody shows you who they are believe them. Is that Oprah?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I choose to believe it’s Oprah.

**John:** I’m sure she said it, even if she didn’t say it originally.

**Craig:** In Oprah we trust.

**Megana:** Can I ask you a question? Because Craig said something like if you ask their permission and they give it to you. Can you give your permission to have your credit revoked?

**Craig:** Absolutely. So this is not a Writers Guild awarded credited. This is your work. And you have control over how your work is reproduced, assigned. And so, yes, they would have to ask permission. There would have to be something written. You would have to sign it. And it basically says in this limited circumstance you are allowed to present this work without my name. But you’d have to really limit that and make sure it’s defined carefully. But that’s one of the rights of copyright is that you can waive it or reassign it, which is what happens when you sell a script to a studio. You reassign it.

**John:** That’s true. I think there could still be a moral/ethical issue between you and the contest, or the fellowship you’re trying to enter into.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** I think there’s an issue there for misrepresenting that this is your own work.

**Craig:** I think that in the case of Kevin and his untrustworthy writing partner if the writing partner had said, “Can I do this,” and Kevin said, “Mm, OK, fine, let’s have a lawyer draw up a little thing, we sign it.” And then the partner does it. The partner is still committing the crime. The partner is misrepresenting something to this program. Kevin has merely created a condition that allows the partner to do the wrong thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is Judge Mazin. Slam.

**John:** Chun-chun.

**Craig:** Tunk-tunk.

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a place I’ve visited today which is Little Island in NYC. It is a new floating park. I guess it’s not actually floating. It is built on piers. It is on the west side. I just thought it was delightful.

**Craig:** Oh, look at this thing.

**John:** I’d read stories about it and it was sort of controversial as it was being planned and people were opposed to it. And Barry Diller provided a lot of money for it, which I don’t really love billionaires, but if you’re going to be a billionaire and you want to build something build a public park that people can go and enjoy and is free for the world. And I really dug it. It’s super pretty and it’s just like this little space you could wander around. They have an amphitheater for concerts and outdoor shows. And I just like when there’s – it reminds me of the High Line.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s just an outdoor place of joy. And so I would recommend anybody who is visiting NYC or living here to check it out when you get a chance. It’s limited entry, or it’s like timed entry during the weeks. It’s going to keep changing. But if you get there early you can just wander in and it’s just really nicely done.

**Craig:** It looks beautiful and I’m all in favor of this. We stopped building stuff at some point. All we decided we were going to ever build again were shopping malls and square office park buildings. So New York, all these wonderful buildings there, the whole skyline with the exception – one notable exception as the result of terrorism – it’s essentially kind of unchanged. Like all the great buildings are still there. But where’s the new Chrysler Building? Where’s the new World Trade Center? Where are all these wonderful things?

And so the High Line was an example of something new in New York that felt wonderful and so is this. If they’re going to build things then build these. This is cool. Yeah, I mean, look, Barry Diller is probably not a great guy. [laughs] I mean, based on what I’ve read. But that Little Island looks beautiful.

**John:** It does. And the photos that you’ll see in the New York Times piece that we’ll link to is with it empty. But it’s actually when it’s full of people, and it’s not crowded, but when it’s full of people, people just love it. And it feels imagineered in the sense that like all the slopes are designed so that an older person could get up them. You can sort of explore. There’s little bell things that kids can play with. So everyone who was there was just really digging it. And so just well done everybody for building this thing.

**Craig:** I’m sure folks from the wide open spaces in the US like Wyoming are looking at this going, “What?” [laughs] “You spent a quarter of a billion dollars for what? 2.4 acres?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s New York for you. I love it. Love it.

**John:** What have you got?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing, you know I love an escape room, John.

**John:** Oh you do.

**Craig:** The escape rooms are open here in Calgary. And I had the pleasure of visiting twice doing two rooms at Escape Ops here in Calgary. And what I love about Escape Ops, they have four rooms. I’ve done two of them so far. There are two remaining. It is run by Dan and Emily who I don’t know if they’re husband and wife but they’re partners. And they’re also partners. And they love what they do. And they make some terrific escape rooms there. And it just occurred to me that in so many circumstances you need passion and skill. If you find people with passion and skill it is the greatest thing.

If you’ve got passion without skill it’s just sort of noise. And if you have skill without passion it’s boring. But when you have passion and skill like they do you come up with really great things because you care. Because you want them to be wonderful.

So, if you do like escape rooms and you live in here in the Greater Calgary Area go visit Escape Ops and tell them Craig sent you.

**John:** I love that we’re providing highly localized opportunities of places to visit only if you are in the places that you are.

**Craig:** Correct. Well, I mean, about the same amount of people live in New York City and Calgary I think. It’s roughly the same. [laughs]

**John:** They really are. They’re really two capitols of the world.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Caden Brown. If you have outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. Go to Cotton Bureau. You’ll find them, including the new 10th Anniversary t-shirt.

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 Black Widow. Craig, it’s nice to have you back.

**Craig:** Great to be back, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** And we’re back. So, Craig, this past week Scarlett Johansson or I don’t think she actually sued them this week but basically news broke that Scarlett Johansson is suing Disney over Black Widow saying that the decision to release it through streaming and theatrically cost her millions of dollars that she would have been paid in box office bonuses. This is the first of these lawsuits that I’ve seen publically, but a lot of actors and directors were complaining when Warners was doing similar things. How are you feeling about this and the situation we find ourselves in?

**Craig:** Well, we can talk about the prospects of this case and we can also just talk about the politics of it which may be more interesting. Legally the prospects seem super questionable to me. As always, I am not a lawyer. What do I know? Except that they did release it theatrically. Unless there was something in the contract that said we have to release it theatrically on this many screens and we cannot release it day-and-date in any other way, I’m not sure what she can do other than say this sucks and you guys are jerks for doing it to me.

Or, you guys suck because you haven’t compensated me the way that for instance Warner Bros. eventually compensated their major talent when they decided to put everything out on HBO Max.

So, is she going to win? At this point, like if Disney showed up and murdered your family I’m not sure you’d win either. I would not want to go up against that crew of lawyers. But this is possibly the beginning of the end of something and the first shot of a war that is about to start.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s what makes it most interesting to me. It doesn’t honestly matter that much to me whether she wins or loses. I mean, I don’t think this lawsuit will be especially important, but I think it does signal a split between these two things. Because we have this time before which was like, oh crap, there’s a pandemic, we have to release stuff on streaming. OK, we’re going to compensate these big movie stars to do this.

In this case they didn’t compensate her for doing this, which was a choice. They could have just chosen to give her some extra money or sort of make good on that. It seems like they didn’t do that. I sort of wonder why they didn’t do that.

**Craig:** Well, they might have.

**John:** They might have.

**Craig:** They might have. It may have just not been what she wanted. Right? So then it becomes a negotiation. We don’t know. I don’t know the details behind the scenes here.

**John:** But so we should back up and say it’s not just big actors and big directors, you and I have box office bonuses built into our contracts. And so for movies that are in production right now, but also moves we’ve had before. If Aladdin had gone to streaming rather than gone to theatrical I would have lost, you know–

**Craig:** A lot.

**John:** A lot of money. Major, major money. And I would have been pissed, understandably. And I think in some ways even a little bit more pissed in – if it was just the pandemic and there really wasn’t a choice and they had to release it on streaming I sort of get it. But here they had a choice that they could have just gone full theatrical and there might have been more money to have made. We won’t know.

**Craig:** That’s the part I disagree with. I don’t think Disney is ever going to do anything that they know is going to cost them money. I think they–

**John:** But their calculation is different. Because they make money if people see it in the theater, but they also make money if people sign up for Disney+ and keep their Disney+ subscription.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And they’re trying to serve two masters there. And we as folks who get box office bonuses are only getting money if it’s successful at the box office.

**Craig:** 100%. I just think that if Disney thought that they would make more money ultimately for themselves, regardless of what they were going to dole out, by a longer and exclusive theatrical window they would have done it. It is possible that they are also pricing in the long term plan to put everything on Disney+ and just stop putting movies in theaters. I don’t know.

What I do know is that we are living in the echo time. And when Covid happened it impacted a whole ton of contracts that had no concept of what Covid was and didn’t care. So, now we all know. And contracts will look different. That’s for sure.

**John:** Oh, for sure. I mean, I guess we’re probably living in a force majeure world for a bit, where they can sort of say this is an act of god, we can’t do normal things. And now that this is more normal, we’re not as pandemic, but it’s also not – nothing is unprecedented at this point. We sort of know how to do stuff and we have a sense of what the shape of the universe is like. Yes, our contracts will be different. And I think they will be different in ways that will tend to favor the studios.

**Craig:** Yeah. Of course. [laughs]

**John:** Let me make a more obvious point. [laughs] I’m not nervous for Disney succeeding here.

**Craig:** No. They’re going to be just fine. This is really fascinating because I’m still confused. So much of this subscription based stuff is really hard to tie the income to individual works. They have their baloney theories of how they can figure that out. But Netflix won’t even tell us how many people really watch something. And when they do tell us how they define who watched something, you know, you want to shoot milk out of your nose. It’s the biggest joke in the world.

So if somebody watches something for 20 seconds they watched it? That’s crazy. So, everything is wonky. Nothing is connected to anything real. I have no – it’s just a black box. Nobody knows what’s happening inside of there. And if there were ever a time when the three guilds needed to come together and figure something out here and unify on an issue it was this. That said, they won’t. 100% they will not.

**John:** [laughs] Oh my gosh. I love how definitive you are on that.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** I will, god, I don’t know. Are we betting on this? I think – so here’s where I think we agree. I think you and I both agree that if the guilds don’t figure this out it is an existential threat to the nature of residuals and sort of meaningful backend compensation. And not only do the guilds understand this, but I also think the agencies understand this as well. So I think there are a lot of people who have clear vision of how important this is. And what we’re really debating is whether that clear vision will get them to actually take an action that will benefit all of them.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t count on the agencies. The agencies make all their money from probably 10% of their clients.

**John:** Like a Scarlett Johansson.

**Craig:** Correct. But in the case of Scarlett Johansson my guess is that if they were negotiating a new deal for Scarlett Johansson they would know to not build it around box office bonuses. Meaning that there’s a lot of ways to skin the cat when it’s an individual negotiation with a studio. The issue for guilds is they’re there to protect everybody, so there’s this baseline thing.

And in a way the studios love that because they don’t want individuals negotiating too much of this backend stuff. They want to be able to say, well, when it comes to residuals that’s what it is for everybody. What I think will happen is probably there will be some labor action and then the DGA will make a deal. [laughs] That’s just sort of how it goes around here.

**John:** Well so here’s the point of commonality between all these different parties is the desire to break that black box and actually have some insight into what’s actually happening there. And some of that insight is already happening because Nielsen actually kind of does know who is watching what. So I think the desire to keep all that data secret, it’s just not going to be secret for forever.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s what we really need is some sort of robust third party verification of who is watching what and how long they’re watching it for. And it’s tricky because they’ve got to figure out what watching something means. It used to be very simple. The TV was on for that thing and you watched it. And then it was gone.

**John:** Or you sold that DVD and that DVD was sold and that became residuals. And it is tougher in this age, I get it, with streaming. But we can figure this out because we figured stuff out before.

**Craig:** I mean, there’ve been things where I’ve started it watching it and stopped and then like seven months later I’m like, oh, look at that, and I finished it.

**John:** Does that count as one view or not?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I don’t know.

**John:** But we have computers who can count that stuff. And they’re really good at counting stuff.

**Craig:** The computers will save us, said the computer.

**John:** Ha-ha. So I think our summary of Scarlett Johansson lawsuit is I don’t think it will probably amount to anything, but I think it is an important step along the way of this discussion about how we move from how we were counting things to how we will count things in the future.

**Craig:** I agree. I think it will be settled, as these things almost always are, and that settlement will be yet another black box by design. But we are going to have to figure this out and one thing I think we have to be really careful about at this point is no longer fighting blood wars over dying models. We have to figure out – knowing what to fight for is just as important as a willingness to fight. And right now that’s the trick of it. I don’t envy anybody planning strategy for these next negotiations.

**John:** Agreed. Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Kerri Strug Shouldn’t Have Been Forced to Do That Vault](https://slate.com/culture/2021/07/kerri-strug-simone-biles-vault-atlanta-legacy-injuries.html)
* Amanda Knox’s [twitter thread](https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status/1420871392266911746?s=21) and [Medium article](https://amandamarieknox.medium.com/who-owns-my-name-93561f83e502)
* [Mandatory Vaccinations On Productions An Option Under Return-To-Work Protocols](https://deadline.com/2021/07/mandatory-covid-19-vaccinations-now-an-option-on-film-tv-productions-1234796313/)
* [Disney to Mandate COVID-19 Vaccinations for All U.S. Staffers](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/disney-requiring-all-employees-be-vaccinated-1234990995/)
* [Netflix To Require Covid Vaccinations For Actors & Other “Zone A” Personnel On Its U.S. Productions](https://deadline.com/2021/07/netflix-to-require-covid-vaccinations-for-all-actors-on-us-productions-1234801577/)
* [Little Island](https://littleisland.org/visit-us/) by [Barry Diller](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/arts/little-island-barry-diller.html)
* [Scarlett Johansson’s ‘Black Widow’ Lawsuit Is Game-Changing, But May Be Legally Weak](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/scarlett-johanssons-black-widow-lawsuit-1234990644/) by Eriq Gardner
* [Scarlett Johansson Sues Disney Over ‘Black Widow’ Streaming Release](https://www.wsj.com/articles/scarlett-johansson-sues-disney-over-black-widow-streaming-release-11627579278?mod=e2tw) on WSJ
* [Escape Ops on Calgary](https://escapeops.ca/)
* [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/)
* [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 Caden Brown ([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/511standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/preproduction).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 507 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show what is preproduction? Or what the hell is Craig doing right now?

**Craig:** That’s a great question.

**John:** Then it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie where we take a look at stories we found in the news or just online somewhere and discuss how they could be filmed entertainment for the world to enjoy. We’ll also look at a related question: why do certain movies get made? What is it about some projects that make them more or less likely to actually go into production?

And then in our bonus segment for premium members, if you were a time traveler Craig what would you want on your cheat sheet? If you had like a one-page back and front of stuff you wanted to carry with you back into the past what stuff would you want to put on that sheet?

**Craig:** OK, well mostly prescription medications. But let’s get into it.

**John:** Let’s do it. All right. Let’s start with preproduction. So, Craig, you were gone last week because you were in the throes of preproduction. We described you as being buried under an avalanche of preproduction.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Talk to us about – I don’t think we’ve really talked about what preproduction is.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think so.

**John:** So let’s really go through it both for a writer’s perspective but also a showrunner’s perspective which is different. So talk to us about the kinds of things that are involved in preproduction and really what are the boundaries of preproduction versus production and when does preproduction really start for you?

**Craig:** Well, the easiest question to answer is what the boundary is. The boundary is once the cameras start rolling you’re in production. Every day prior to that you’re in preproduction. On a television show where there are multiple episodes individual episodes will have prep going on while you’re producing other episodes.

The time you spend in advance of shooting in prep varies from project to project. The rule of thumb for feature films, for an average feature film, let’s say we’re talking about a $40 million movie, typically you’re looking at three or four months of prep. For a show like the one we’re doing we have been prepping for many, many, many months. And we will continue to prep throughout as new episodes come up. The basic gist of it is if you think about all the things that have to be in place when you’re shooting, all of those have to be planned. And that’s what’s happening in preproduction.

So every department is planning the locations you’re going to be shooting, the sets you’re going to be building, the clothing that the actors are going to be wearing, the casting of the actors, the stunt work that’s going to be required, the picture cars, meaning the cars that show up on the screen when you’re driving, what’s all that look like. What cameras do we need? How many cameras do we need? Do we need cranes? Do we need other special arms for the cameras? Who is going to be handling the video playback? Who is going to be recording the sound? Makeup. Hair. Visual effects.

Every single tiny little thing has to be figured out, including a bunch of things that I don’t necessarily concentrate on, but also have to be figured out like who is doing the catering and what are the trailers going to be. And, oh, props. All the fabrication of things. You know, everything actually happens in prep. And if it doesn’t, well, that’s going to be a sad day of shooting.

**John:** Well perhaps our listeners have watched a heist film. And so you’ve seen the preparation that goes into a heist. It really is kind of analogous because you are trying to plan for this event which is the start of production and you have to think about what are all the things we need and what are the things that could go wrong and how are we going to be ready for this. So you’re assembling a team. You’re getting the resources together. You’re figuring out how you’re going to do these things.

And what’s different about prep for a movie or prep for a pilot is that in this case of the series you have to be thinking about not just how you’re going to make this first episode, but what are the decisions you’re making right now that are going to carry through the whole show and especially this first season? You’re planning not just for one hour of entertainment. It’s multiple hours and a huge schedule to go through. So the decisions you’re making with this first director are going to ripple through to all of the other directors on future episodes. And these are fundamental decisions you’re making right now.

**Craig:** They are. And it’s really dangerous. You have the ability to mess things up before you even start and to mess them up permanently. So you have to be really careful and you have to think twice. There is a tendency, I think a natural human tendency, to want to just arrive to yes. Get to certainty as quickly as you can. But I find that it’s really important to listen to the nagging little voice at the back of your head going, “Well, wait a second though.” Maybe this is a problem for people who have stronger egos than I do because I think sometimes I hear stories about showrunners just like, “I’ve decided this,” and everyone is like, “But we’re the experts in this little area and we’re saying this.” “No, I’m saying…”

Anytime anyone, I don’t care who it is, it could be the guy delivering lunch, if that guy is like, “Hmm, that looks a little too red, don’t you think?” I’d be like, what, oh I mean, hold on. Does it? Let me consider that carefully because it might. Because if you don’t measure a thousand times to cut once you’re in trouble.

Example, hair. Very simple thing you’d think, hair. It’s not simple. That’s going to be the hair. So, we’re going to be shooting for quite some time. Once we figure out what Pedro Pascal’s hair looks like that’s the hair. Every day. Every day. If you blow it then every day you’re going to walk in in the morning, you’re going to look at him, he’s going to look at you, and you’re both going to go, “Great.” And he and I will both think the same thing, “Craig is an idiot.”

So, got to get it right.

**John:** Yeah. Now, let’s talk about what the start of prep really is because there’s this sort of murky period that I’ve found when a project is like we’re going to do this thing but it’s not quite clear when we’re going to actually shoot it, so the initial onramp into prep is really strange. And so talk to us about for something like this or for something like Chernobyl what were those first hires and when do you get sort of permission to actually make those first hires who are going to help you to put the rest of the team together?

**Craig:** Well, so sometimes we’ll call it pre-prep, which is kind of an amusing idea, but I mean, pre-pre-prep. So, the first thing that happens typically is in order to get a green light for your movie or your television show there needs to be a budget. And the only way to have any reasonably useful budget is to do some work. Typically that means figuring out roughly where you’re going to shoot and looking at some key locations and determining what you might need to build and not build.

To do that you have to start with this first key component and that is a producer. The producer in movies that I’m talking about is typically a unit production manager, sometimes they are elevated to executive producer or something like that. And in television they might be called producer or also executive producer. So for us, Rose Lam is our executive producer along with myself and Carolyn and Neil. And she was the first real key hire because she was the person who was going to start to work on schedule, like let me look at the scripts, let me look at this bible, let me use my experience to break it down, get a sense of how long this thing is going to be, come up with some basic numbers and some plans for where we should shoot.

And to do that you get a little bit of a float. They call it a float. You get floated some money from the studio. Not too much, but enough to get that done and done accurately. At which point then there’s a decision made about budget and all the rest. And then you begin hiring people. You need your casting director very early, because you’ve got to cast way ahead of time. You need to hire your production designer very early because what their vision is is going to impact how you are going to be spending your money. And you certainly need to make sure you have a director in place as well.

**John:** Yeah. And what can be confusing is based on different kinds of projects and media when you go from like, OK, we can put together a budget versus OK we are giving you a green light to start shooting can be a very different experience. For something like your show, maybe they said like OK we’re going to make this thing based on this budget, this script, and this director and other key talent involved. But other projects I’ve been through you’re going through quite a lot of preproduction and they have stop points sort of along the way. Like you can spend up to this point but they could decide like, no, we’re actually stopping this right now. We’re not moving forward. We’re not giving you the green light. And that can be one of those tricky things, too.

It’s not like full speed ahead, we’re making this thing, we’re starting this day. You’re continuing to like sort of hopefully build momentum, but you’re still waiting for key decisions from the powers that be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And for television that’s sort of what a pilot is. There’s a built in break point where everybody can agree to produce to one hour of television and no more. And then decide what to do from there. For us we were ordered to series, so that’s not an issue. We’re doing it.

Look, it’s risk and reward. Bet hedging versus commitment. They each have plusses and minuses. Pretty obvious what the plusses are of hedging your bet. The minuses are that when you don’t have a full commitment it can sometimes be harder to access and lock down great talent, not just in terms of actors, but in terms of directors, cinematographers, production designers, and all the craftspeople that create the product with you, create the show, the movie, the series.

And if you don’t actually have a full commitment there a lot of them are like or I could just go over here where there is a commitment and now I have a job. And I don’t have to worry about not having a job. So there are costs to that.

**John:** Yeah. A thing you find in sort of traditional television is you shoot a pilot and then all of your actors are placed on holds so that the studio can decide, OK, yes, we are going to make this into a series and therefore we can pull all of those actors and keep them on the show. And obviously there’s the choice to replace any of those actors you want to and reshoot that stuff which does happen.

It’s tough. And I think as more and more stuff has been written as mini rooms and we’re sort of shooting the whole thing at once that can be great, but it also puts a lot more showrunners in situations like you are where you have to plan for like – you may only get one crack at it. If you were shooting a pilot you could make some changes between the two things. Just like Game of Thrones made changes after that pilot that didn’t work.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** You’re not going to have that opportunity.

**Craig:** No. And we didn’t have it on Chernobyl either. And so part of that is making sure that you feel really, really confident in your team and in the scripts. But I think there are probably also on the other side of the pilot process some negatives to consider as well.

So positives are you can stop and you can retool and move ahead successfully like they did with Game of Thrones. The potential negative is everybody gets a chance to just sort of pick at it and water it down and smooth off the edges and make it stink. Nothing survives too much scrutiny. Nothing. From people who can comment without accountability.

So when I’m making something and I’m commenting on it in the editing room I have accountability for it. All of my comments are leading towards me coming out to the rest of the world and saying I stand by this. Other people it’s sort of like, well, if it’s one of the shows that a network puts out in the year, or Netflix, one of the 15 shows they put out every ten seconds, they’re not really accountable to it. So, it’s like they’re not getting blamed for it specifically. And so everybody can sort of focus too much and pick at it and then walk away. And it can just, you know, the soufflé can collapse.

So, plusses and minuses in all circumstances to these things. When there were only three networks and there was one season it made sense. Everybody had a pilot. Nobody could avoid the pilot situation because there was nowhere else to go, because those were the three networks, this is how they do it. We all do it at the same time. Not so anymore.

**John:** Yeah. But also the musical chairs problem of it was really tough because essentially there’s only a certain number of actors. There’s only a certain number of cinematographers, directors. You’re all fighting for very limited resources here.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I got my third choice of an actor and I got this–

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s bad.

**John:** It’s bad. And so this is probably a better way to make things, but it is still really difficult.

**Craig:** It’s difficult. Yeah.

**John:** So, a question for you. As you were buried under work last week, how much of your daily firefighting problem-solving is really about money and budgets?

**Craig:** Very little. We certainly have budget challenges. There’s no such thing as a show without a budget challenge. It doesn’t matter what your budget is. My feeling is that by and large no matter what you do as an artist you will always have at best 90% of the money you need. That’s just the way it goes. Because, you know, your imagination always exceeds your grasp to some extent. And they have to draw the line somewhere. We do have a very healthy budget and we have a budget to make an excellent show, and so we shall do our best to do.

But, no, most of the issues that I deal with really are just the issues of 400 things need to be determined and here’s what someone just sent over as a possibility. And it’s not quite right, but it’s making us reconsider this or that. Someone says I need to sit with you for ten minutes and just ask you three questions. And that ten minutes turns into two hours because the questions are actually complicated. And then all of the other things that were supposed to happen after that have just been pushed down the line and then things spill over into the weekend.

And as you get closer to shooting this is very common.

**John:** Yeah. Now, how much more complicated is it shooting something that’s distant and remote? Like Calgary is not the end of the world but it’s not in a production hub. And obviously Chernobyl was not shot in a production hub. It does strike me as a very different experience because when I make a movie here in Los Angeles, we’re making Charlie’s Angels, we have all the resources of Los Angeles here. And we can pretty easily swap people in or out if we need to.

You are more isolated up there and is that a thing you have to think through in production right now?

**Craig:** No. It’s something that we consider early on. But one of the selling points of shooting here in Alberta is that there’s a pretty good layer of crew here in Alberta. And when we need to fill in we pull people in from Vancouver or Toronto where those are production hubs. Vancouver is more of a production hub at this point than Los Angeles is. So there’s actually quite a good depth and folks don’t mind relocating from Vancouver to Alberta for a while, or Calgary for a while, the way that our friend Derek lives in Chicago for a big chunk of the year because they do Chicago Fire there. So, that hasn’t been too bad.

And of course Calgary is a city of a million-plus people. So this experience has been much easier than the prep experience in Lithuania. There’s no language barrier. And there’s just more people to pull from. However, this production is way larger. So everything kind of scales together.

You get 90% of what you want all the time. That’s the way it goes. At best.

**John:** Let’s talk about you as a writer in this prep preproduction situation. Also it’s weird, as I was working on the outline here. We say prep and preproduction and prep is sort of a shortened version of preproduction, but it’s also preparation. It’s weird that they are describing the same things and they’re similar words but they’re not quite the same word.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** As a writer what are you doing right now on that first script that’s shooting? How much are you still tweaking things? Is there a script coordinator who is helping get stuff put together? What is the writing that happens for you during this period?

**Craig:** The writing for the first three episodes and to some extent the first four episodes is kind of done. There are little tweaks. I kind of blew it. I forgot that we had changed, like literally a word from one thing to another, and I was like oh, D’oh. And that actually matters because the people doing some prosthetic stuff need to know where it’s going to go. So we issued – the green pages were literally I think one word changed.

We do have a script coordinator and so I work with her closely. I’m very good about maintaining revision levels and scene numbers and things like that. But with any production at this point you do need a script coordinator to be the central distribution point. And that all goes through Synchronize. Synchronize is the software that everybody uses. God, I hope it’s better than – it’s not owned by Final Draft is it? Because that would bum me out.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t think it is.

**John:** It’s probably Entertainment Partners or something else.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anyway, so it’s basically the software that does all the distribution of schedules, calendars, scripts, all those things to cast.

**John:** And are you distributing physical scripts? Or is it all online now? Basically are people seeing printed pages or are they only scenes on tablets?

**Craig:** I believe that they are able to print them. They arrive as watermarked PDFs so they print them for themselves for reference if they need to. But, no, this is not like the old days where when it was time to release new pages 12 Xerox machines begin cranking up to 800 kelvin as pages got shot out. We just don’t do that anymore. It’s wasteful and it’s slow and expensive and unnecessary.

But it is a weird situation because I am writing the other episodes. So, you know, there are episodes that are going to be shooting many, many months from now that I’m writing now while we’re prepping and then while we’re shooting. And that’s, you know, that’s a tingly feeling of anxiety.

**John:** And something we should make clear is that the preproduction phase stops at a certain thing. Once you start production like preproduction stops. But there’s still prep on each individual episode.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that is the director. And are you marrying a director and DP together? Who travels together on an episode?

**Craig:** Yes. So each one of our episodes. Without getting into it, because I don’t think they’ve all been announced. But we have five directors across ten episodes. So we have the pairings all figured out in terms of DPs and such.

**John:** And does each director have his own first?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So one AD is running the whole?

**Craig:** Well, no, I believe there’s going to be a second first AD that comes in. So, they alternate because what’s going to happen, of course, is the first AD does need to start prepping episodes with the director. So once it’s time for that our first AD who is working with our first director to kind of step back and start planning ahead then the new one comes in. So, yeah, we do have this kind of side-by-side first AD thing going on.

**John:** And so that episode prep is also crucial because you made general decisions about the look of the show, how stuff is basically going to work, overall camera styles, but this director with this DP and this AD is figuring out like, OK, we’re going to need a crane on this day. This is how many extras we need for this thing. So it’s really taking what you’ve written in the script and figuring out like, OK, let’s really break it down in how we’re going to do this and what is our plan for getting this episode shot in the number of days that we have. What is our schedule going to be? When do we go to nights? How do our weeks work? Those are crucial things.

**Craig:** We’re going to nights real fast.

**John:** Oh, Craig, you wrote a shot that probably mostly takes place at night.

**Craig:** No it doesn’t. Thank god it doesn’t mostly take place at night. But there’s a bunch of night stuff early on and, of course, we don’t shoot in order, so I’m not giving anything away about what happens when. But I’ve been pretty smart about not plunging us into too much night. But there’s night early on. And you know what? Better to do it early.

**John:** Yeah. Rip the Band-Aid off.

**Craig:** Rather than when you’re week – sorry, week – month seven and you’re like oh my god.

**John:** But you are in Calgary facing a unique challenge. There’s limited daylight.

**Craig:** Ah-ha.

**John:** As you get into the winter.

**Craig:** And this is an interesting challenge. Very limited night right now. So, a couple of weeks or so, or however, I haven’t looked at the schedule exactly to see exactly how many days, but the number of days we have that we’re shooting nights we have to be really careful about. They are very well orchestrated, prepared, and choreographed because right now in Calgary you get about 4.5 hours of proper dark.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** That’s what you get. So in production when you shoot a little bit of a day and a little bit of night it’s called a split. We will likely be kind of in a semi-split situation where we shoot a little bit of stuff that’s sort of day-ish and then we start prepping and we use that kind of twilight, that 19-hour long twilight that they have here to set up. And then once the sun is gone-gone, boom, pedal to the metal.

**John:** Yeah. I remember on Go, of course it has a lot of night shooting, and it mostly takes place over the course of one long night, and there would be times where you’re just trying to get this one last shot and the sun is coming up and you’re trying to hold up flags to make it a little bit darker. And you just curse the rising of the sun. And then to have to drive home after a full night of shooting with the sun coming up is just the worst experience.

**Craig:** Particularly if you’re driving east. It’s just blaring in your eyes.

**John:** Oh yeah. That was me. Me coming from Santa Monica Airport back to my house in Hollywood.

**Craig:** It’s depressing. The shooting schedules can definitely screw your head up. They certainly screw my head up. There is this awful feeling of chasing the light or chasing the dark, which is why I think some of the older, more well established directors from the ‘70s and ‘80s starting promoting this whole we’re going to shoot everything on a green screen stage and I’ll be MoCap because you don’t have to go outside, it’s always air-conditioned. There’s no light. There’s no dark. You’re wherever you want.

**John:** Yeah. Season two of your show is going to be like The Mandalorian. It’s going to be all virtual sets. Pedro will be back in his environment.

**Craig:** It will not. Look, I do – I’m not impressed – The Mandalorian, the volume. I love that they call it the volume. It’s a remarkable technology. It seems very well suited for something that does take place in a kind of fantastic other world. We’re a very naturalistic philosophy over here.

**John:** You’re a naturalistic zombie show.

**Craig:** Yeah. Not zombies. Not zombies.

**John:** Sorry, fungal creatures.

**Craig:** Thank you. Humans, just fungal-infected humans.

**John:** Yeah. Infected humans. All right. Let’s think about movies that are not in preproduction. They’re not even in development. They are just potential movies. It’s our segment How Would This Be a Movie. And as set up I’m seeing Zola this afternoon. I’m very excited. Because it’s the first of the movies that we’ve pitched, way back at the Austin Film Festival. I remember our great discussion about the Zola tweets, so I’m excited to see that movie. People love it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just this past week I got approached to adapt – to do one of my first How Would This Be a Movie. One of the properties we talked about on the show, producers came to me and offered me–

**Craig:** Did they know when they were offering it to you that–?

**John:** They did not. Because if they had known they would have seen like why I did not think it was a good idea for a movie.

**Craig:** They would have seen the big no flag being waved real early. You can’t say which one it is I assume?

**John:** Unfair for me to say which one it was. Because someone will get that job, and that will be great, because I love when writers get hired to adapt things. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for a movie. All right. We have three or four projects here to look at. We’re going to start with the big one which I think probably actually is a movie. We’re going to link to the New York Times story on this, but there’s actually a lot of other sources for it.

This was about these criminals who were using these secured devices, these encrypted devices, for phones and texting that they thought were legit, but of course the FBI was actually behind it. And so they bought these cell phones on the black market. They believed that they were super securely encrypted. It was like cell phones just for criminals.

**Craig:** Right. [laughs]

**John:** And of course the FBI was involved in this. And they were able to sort of really round up a whole network. On one day they had arrested 800 people in more than a dozen countries. They intercepted 20 million messages in 45 languages.

**Craig:** They seized tons of drugs. 250 firearms. 55 luxury vehicles. And $48 million in several currencies and crypto currencies.

**John:** And interestingly none of the people arrested were in the US. Because you actually can’t use basically what they were doing, like you can’t use in the US. But it was like Australia, and Asia, and all sorts of other places.

**Craig:** Yes. Europol was sort of a big part of it. So something like this has happened before. There was I think it was either the FBI, CIA maybe, had figured out – there was a company that was hosting servers for the dark web. I’m not sure what aspect of it. But they got them. They came to those people and were like we got you. We got you on X, Y, or Z, whatever they had done wrong. And the deal is we’re going to go easy on you if you just let us run this. And they were like you got it.

And so for months all these people who were using this secure server specifically to avoid the prying eyes of the government were literally sending stuff through a government server. And all of it was just being logged as mountains of evidence.

**John:** Yeah. And it was a very similar case here. So this is Operation Trojan Shield. Ugh.

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

**John:** That was the name of the operation.

**Craig:** Condom brand.

**John:** There was a service called Anom. And basically they busted the guy who was making these secure cell phones. And said like could you just keep making these secure cell phones but let us see everything that’s happening there. And he was like OK.

And so they sold these really expensive cell phones. I think it’s also so smart that they kept these phones really crazy expensive and sort of underpowered.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And so everyone felt like, oh, it’s got to be legit. It’s got to be real.

**Craig:** Genius.

**John:** And it’s a classic honeypot. You make somebody sort of feel like oh I’m getting something for free, or I’m getting something that no one else could have. And that’s how it works.

**Craig:** And they got them. So the question is how do you make this a movie beyond the simple mechanism of the kind of man in the middle hacking trick that they pulled here, because in and of itself once you get the point of that, well, then that’s that. So what do you do to kind of jazz this thing up to be a movie?

**John:** Well, I think there’s a couple good choices here. So I kept thinking back to the 2006 film The Lives of Others, the German film where–

**Craig:** Great movie.

**John:** Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, I just love saying his name.

**Craig:** I know. It’s great.

**John:** Which is about eavesdropping in East Germany and a guy who is listening in on a family and sort of like becomes involved in their lives. So that’s a clear way in. But I also think we always talk about sort of ethical choices and characters being forced to make tough things. You’re going to hear about so many crimes and you have to make decisions of like when are you going to intercede or not intercede and sort of what is worth sort of blowing the whole thing up for or not.

And I think those tensions can be great. I’m assuming that the movie is more from the law enforcement side than from the other side, but maybe we’re splitting it sort of back and forth the way Sicario does. I think there’s lots of ways. What’s tough about the story as it is right now with the situation is like there’s so many characters you could pick, there’s so many ways in, and it’s a completely different movie based on where you start.

**Craig:** Well, and that’s why in the end when these companies purchase these stories, so whoever wrote this article, in this case I’m looking at the New York Times article. It was by Yan Zhuang, Elian Peltier, and Alan Feurer. So let’s say that Yan, Elian, and Alan sell the rights to this story as they’ve written it to Warner Bros. At that point Warner Bros what they have is a big question mark. And then they start talking to writers. And this is how it gets figured out.

Somebody is going to come in and throw one of those darts in the right path. For me, when I think of this, I do think of The Lives of Others, and I also think of Donnie Brasco. And the idea that you can create a relationship with somebody while this is happening. That part of your job is now you are monitoring the communications between two criminals and it’s quite clear to you at some point that one of them is just simply being used by the other.

Because you can see everybody’s communication. So what you’re watching is the normal flow of social activity where someone is being bullied or ostracized or lied to or manipulated. And you begin to feel for them. And I think that’s really interesting. So there’s all sorts of possibilities here.

But it would have to be whipped up quite a bit beyond just the concept. The concept alone isn’t going to get you more than 15 or 20 interesting minutes I think.

**John:** I agree. So, you and I are both thinking about this as a drama, but let’s think about this as a comedy or some other genre of film. Because there’s something kind of funny about this. The central conceit can be funny where these people think they’re being secure and they’re not being secure. And that’s relatable. We’ve all sort of messed up and done something that we thought was private and was actually public and it sort of got out. So there’s an opportunity to tell the same kinds of stories or the set the same kind of characters but play it in a funny way. And I think that’s another very interesting take to this is to approach it as a comedy, or even a romantic comedy.

Because what is it like if you can see inside what a person is really doing? Or you can see that this guy’s girlfriend is absolutely just a nightmare and you want to sort of intercede there. There’s something fun about having that information feels like a comedic premise.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in the ‘90s, I mean, this is how I got my career started. You would imagine a drama and then you would say, OK, do the drama except the person that would be the hero what if they’re just an idiot. Now go. Literally, don’t change anything else except that they’re stupid. And let’s have fun.

**John:** Steven Soderbergh, Matt Damon movie. I think it was The Informant! with an exclamation point feels – that’s a similar kind of premise there.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** You talked about sort of buying the New York Times article. I don’t think you buy this article. I don’t think there’s an enough there.

**Craig:** I don’t think anybody should buy any article. I don’t understand that whole business to be honest.

**John:** But I can imagine that there’s a longer article that really goes into the characters and gets some firsthand reporting that is unique and different that could be an article worth buying.

**Craig:** Then it’s just facts. They’re reported. Everything in the article as it is published is available for everyone to use. The reason you would buy the article is to have access to the iceberg under the water line amount of notes that perhaps the reporters had aggregated. And that can be interesting stuff.

**John:** That could be interesting, too. In this case you’re unlikely to get firsthand – none of the people involved in this story are going to talk to you. None of those people are going to be real characters that you can – real life people that you can buy life rights to. That’s not a thing here. So it’s not important.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Cool. All right, next How Would This Be a Movie is Wanted: A Household Manager/Cook/Nanny. This is a thousand-word job listing that requests applications from somebody with a good degree, great executive functioning, very good Excel skills, and also river swimming. So I remember when this – so this was a viral post that went out. Basically this woman, a single mom, who was a CEO was trying to hire on someone to be a nanny, but the requirements for this person were just absurd. Basically crazy. And then I remember also reading Ruth Graham and Slate did a follow up where she actually talked to the woman who did the post. And it was much more reasonable and also interesting.

Because basically this woman kind of needed a wife. This woman needed to do sort of the other stuff and it became sort of an interesting question of feminism and gender roles. I thought there was an interesting thing underneath that as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. I read through that, too. Although I wonder sometimes if we look at these things and the first filter we’re going to consider is gender and the way sexism functions in a patriarchal society. And then the second filter we might want to consider is tech people versus not tech people, because it’s like they’re their own species of human.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** When I listen to the tech people talking, I mean, so I was really interested in the woman sort of explaining through things, because I thought like OK this is where I’m going to actually see the truth under this and go I get it lady. But here’s the first thing. OK, so Ruth Graham asks this question: how did you set about writing this ad? And the woman said, “I had a great nanny for 5.5 years with our family. When the kids started school I placed her with a Google family that had baby boy twins. She’s now been with them for 5.5 years and they love her deeply. This is important because,” and now here’s why we go into Techville. “This is important because I’m one of the most loving, kind people around. And I build wonderful long-term relationships.” Who talks like that?

**John:** No one.

**Craig:** No one.

**John:** A tech person talks like that. Yeah.

**Craig:** A tech person is like and now here’s–

**John:** And now value.

**Craig:** Yes. Let me give you the PowerPoint of why you should invest into my human status. That was like whoa. And, look, also some of the stuff, I understand like your desire – it would be great if she was really good at mountain driving. I guess. But also she’s like my kids and I love to swim in rivers. We’re really into river swimming. You know, it’s OK if you found a wonderful person, a nurturing, caring person who could do all this other stuff, including mountain driving, but when she’s like these people aren’t physically fit enough I’m like well kind of also how dare you. So an amazing, wonderful, loving, caring person who your children would love and who would teach them things and take care of them and drive them places, do all these other things, you’re not going to include because she can’t river swim? How about just leave her there on the shore and then swim on back?

Anyway, I started getting annoyed when I was reading. Because just like, ugh, tech people. It’s tech people. Tech people.

**John:** And I think what she really wants is Maria von Trapp from the Sound of Music.

**Craig:** Maria von Trapp couldn’t swim the–

**John:** No, but those kids did river swim. Like we saw them swim in the river.

**Craig:** Yeah. And they also climbed a mountain, literally.

**John:** They did.

**Craig:** Every mountain.

**John:** Uh-huh. They did some mountain driving as they were getting out of there. So, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s true. That’s true.

**John:** So who are the characters in whatever story this is? I think it’s a comedy, but I think it’s a relationship comedy probably between these two women and what happens here and sort of what that dynamic is which I think is potentially really fascinating.

**Craig:** OK. I have an idea for a movie for this that I actually think is pretty good.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So don’t steal it everybody, but here’s my idea. My idea is you’ve got this kind of back-breaking tech humanoid. It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman. Literally doesn’t matter. Who is a single parent and puts this crazy viral job listing out there that is essentially demanding a super human. There is a mess. Somebody is a mess, manny, nanny, doesn’t matter. And they’re like I need money. So they basically lie to get this job, but then are required by dint of the job, and also by starting to really care for those kids, to become the nanny that they were supposed to be. And the better they get at stuff the more it becomes apparent to everybody else around in the tech world that is meeting this manny/nanny that the manny/nanny is a super human because they have risen to this task. And that person becomes CEO.

Because if you can do all the things that this person is asking you don’t need to be a nanny. Guess what? You are a mega human. So anyway that was my idea for a movie.

**John:** I really do like that idea and I like the sense of – what you’re pitching is sort of a School of Rock to some degree. The person who takes the job just to kind of take the job because I happened to answer the phone and I sort of passed myself off as this thing I’m really not, and then I actually learned how to do it and I actually had skills that were above and beyond because I was actually myself.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Sort of underneath this.

**Craig:** And the same thing happens in the third act. By having that success, because you did this you then are in a position where you’re going to leave those kids and then the kids are like why and then you’re like, oh, I love you. And it’s nice. I mean, look, it’s formula and everything but I do think that you’ve got to lampoon the tech culture here. They are nuts. And by the way they’re nuts and they’re also running everything.

**John:** They are. Well, the other thing you’re pitching is essentially Mrs. Doubtfire.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is a person coming in under false pretenses to do this. So to the degree that I think you could go in tomorrow and say like it’s Mrs. Doubtfire for the 2020s. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s like Mrs. Doubtfire becomes the perfect human being who becomes both an allergist and a river swimmer and a stunt car driver. And one of the things she was like “determine how to purchase travel via points or miles and comparisons.” And I’m like, oh, so they’re also a travel agent. They’re a booking agent.

**John:** But that is a spouse to a large degree, too. That’s what’s fascinating about this is that they really – she wants someone to watch her kids but also to help run her life. And that’s–

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t know how it goes over there with you and Mike, but for me and Melissa there are a whole lot of things on this list neither one of us does, including let me just start with river swimming. And mountain driving. Mountain driving?

**John:** Yeah, you’ve got to mountain drive.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t, yeah.

**John:** Chauffeur.

**Craig:** Megana, when you read this, just out of curiosity, what did you think about this?

**Megana Rao:** I felt so bad about myself.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s terrible.

**John:** Now, Megana, you come from a tech background, so you worked at Google. So for all you know you know the Google family that took the previous nanny here.

**Megana:** Yeah, the Google baby boys. I mean, that part of it wasn’t surprising for me and I had a real visceral reaction to reading this. And I was like a lot of the things she’s talking about is adulting and the worst parts of being an adult.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Megana:** And I was just thinking about like I think the reason that people have such a reaction to this is because the emotional labor required for these things is so taxing and tiresome. And thinking about doing a job of just looking at kids’ summer camps is so hard to like fathom. Because it’s horrible, but then it also made me think of all the work that you guys and all parents are doing but we just prefer to look at because we don’t pay for it.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is quite a bit of that. I believe that people need help and I believe if you can afford help then it can be a win-win for everybody. Some people are getting employment and people are getting help.

**John:** And she’s paying $35 to $40 an hour which is not bad.

**Craig:** No, no, it’s quite a lot. That said, the job that she’s describing is intense and there is a whiff of, well, when the revolution comes they’ll be the first against the wall, you know? It’s starting to get a little weird when you’re like having people pit themselves against each other to get your job to do this list of impossible things that honestly you will be OK if you don’t have somebody swimming in the river with your children. That’s not necessary.

**Megana:** Well, the weirdest thing to me also is when she talks about – she’s, you know, the most loving, wonderful person around.

**Craig:** Oh my god. What the fudge?

**Megana:** And how she loves her employees. It was just this weird thing of like outsourcing family and community but having – I don’t know. It was just so blurry around the boundaries and that made me feel really weird.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She did I think at some point describe her friends as – what was it?

**Megana:** Building alliances with other parents.

**Craig:** Building alliances. How dare you? Also, the nanny needed to be able to do sit-ups, lunges, squats, and pushups.

**John:** Yeah, physically fit.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Yeah. I mean, like you do. Megana knows this. It’s part of the office culture here.

**Megana:** Yeah. Every day when I walk in.

**Craig:** John is like–

**John:** I blow the little whistle and then we do our lunges and our squats.

**Craig:** Megana, it’s Thursday and that’s squat day, so here we go. I, wow, experienced snow-driving.

**John:** Next How Would This Be a Movie. So this is a couple who breaks up after being handcuffed together for 122 days. This is Ukrainian lovers, Alexandr Kudlay and Viktoria–

**Craig:** Pustovitova.

**John:** Pustovitova. Have taken off their shackles and are moving on from one another. So this is a couple who agreed to be handcuffed together because they were having relationship troubles and they decided that the way to solve these would be to be the most cliché version of a ‘70s odd couple who have to sort of live together by being handcuffed together. So they could have divided their house in half and put a tape line down the middle, but instead they chose to be handcuffed to each other.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And as I looked through the photos related to this article I see them wearing different clothes including clothes with sleeves. And I don’t understand how they’re putting on these clothes with sleeves while they are handcuffed together.

**Craig:** This is so much bullshit. This is Instagram nonsense bullshit.

**John:** That’s why I kept it on this thing. This is just annoying Instagram couple decides to be annoying Instagram couple.

**Craig:** Screw you guys. Where they lost me completely was when it said that Pustovitova ultimately had to quit her job as a beautician because clients weren’t comfortable with her husband standing over them as she manicured their eyelashes. So, first of all, you can’t manicure an eyelash. You manicure fingers, not eyes. But you cannot do that job while handcuffed anyway. Geez Louise.

**John:** So Craig there is not a movie to be made about this particular handcuffed couple?

**Craig:** No. It’s nonsense and I would like to never hear of them again.

**John:** All right. Our final How Would This Be a Movie contender, this comes from a Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax. It is her column. And here is the issue. Megana, would you read this question for us?

**Megana:** My husband’s sister “Beth” fancies herself a psychic of sorts who can communicate with the beyond. A few months ago, we were eating dinner when she began talking about a spirit with me. I honestly had no idea who she was talking about and told her that, because I had no deceased relatives or friends who fit her description. Beth became very upset, claiming that she was overwhelmed with what the spirit was trying to tell her. She was so upset she ran from the room to lie in a dark room and compose herself.

My in-laws asked me to be gentler with her, since this “gift” is a major part of her identity.

I see two paths. I can either lie to Beth and feed her belief that she has this “gift.” Or I can tell her she is dead wrong. Which makes me feel like I’m kicking a puppy. My husband and I would ideally like to handle Beth’s “gift” in a thoughtful way, but it’s hard to see what middle ground we have, especially when she puts you on the spot. How can I thoughtfully respond to Beth in a way that preserves her self-worth but also doesn’t give in to a delusion?

**John:** Now, Craig I think has a strong opinion on sort of the reality of Beth and what the sister should tell Beth. But I would urge him to think about as a movie or as characters in a movie is this a situation that can be fun and fraught? And how might you develop this as a movie?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a fun odd couple situation when you are marrying somebody and their sibling – you inherit these other people. And if you are very much a skeptic about things and that’s part of who you are, that’s part of your identity, no one ever seems to acknowledge that being a skeptic should be a major part of anyone else’s identity. And then you get stuck with somebody who believes this nonsense. It’s really frustrating.

It’s particularly frustrating if they keep being right and you start to feel like you’re being gas lit and what’s going on. Look, I refuse to be a part of any movie that actually says – other than Ghostbusters – that suggests that there is any of this stuff. But that seems like that’s what it would be, ish.

**John:** To me Beth feels like a minor supporting character, like you’re marrying into a wacky family.

**Craig:** She’s one of them.

**John:** It’s Meet the Parents, but she’s one of them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the natural choice for it. But if you want to elevate her up from a supporting character to the other sort of co-lead, that is potentially interesting. I mean, obviously Ghost is a great example of this situation where like this person has a “gift” that seems impossible. Whoopi Goldberg’s character has a gift that is impossible. Seems impossible. And yet it is important for the plot to move on. And there can be some good comedy there.

But I think it’s important to marry the skeptic with the true believer. That’s comedy.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think you’re right. But I also feel like I’ve seen this character before a little bit. You know, like the wacky and then no one has to take them seriously. Everybody agrees that they’re nuts. So it’s not really, I don’t…

**John:** But I think what’s potentially more fun is that everyone says like oh no but she’s right. Like if you come into a family where everybody is like, oh no, Beth has the gift and she sees these things. How are you supposed to deal with that? As the rational person. And so we’re coming in as the audience as the rational person. We’re relating to that character as our way in and then we have to see like, oh my god, and the frustration.

**Craig:** Every family I ever talk to I think I’m the weirdo. Because somebody there believes in god. And that to me is right up there with contacting the dead. I just don’t understand it.

**John:** Let’s do a recap of our four things we talked about today. So the first off is the criminals and their cell phones that were actually done by – there was a whole FBI sting behind that. Is that a movie? Is it a limited series? What do you think that is?

**Craig:** I don’t think it’s a limited series. That would be a very boring limited series. I think it’s a movie maybe if you really make it about relationships.

**John:** Yup. Nanny plus.

**Craig:** Yeah, it could absolutely be an interesting comedy that lampoons tech culture.

**John:** The handcuffed couple is not a movie. We’re striking it out. And I wanted to leave it on this list because I felt like these are people who perceive themselves as characters in a movie and they’re not. They have main character syndrome and it’s annoying and they need to just stop.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Defiant Ones is a great movie about two people handcuffed together or chained together. And it was all about the relationship between white people and black people during the Jim Crow era. That’s not this. This is just dumb. [laughs] This is just stupid.

**John:** The original Charlie’s Angels “Angels in Chains” episode is a classic and you’re not going to top that. So, just stop.

**Craig:** Can’t top it.

**John:** Can’t. And psychic sister-in-law is a maybe and I would say it’s possibly a movie but also I think that’s an interesting character in an ongoing TV comedy because it’s not a problem you’re going to solve. You’re not going to resolve this problem.

**Craig:** No. It feels like a wacky neighbor.

**John:** Yup. Let’s segue to something that Aline actually brought up. She texted to say why don’t you guys talk about why certain movies get made, so not just how would this get made but why certain movies get made. And my first instinct is that movies get put into development by development executives who are one type of person. And so they’re seeing story from a specific way. And they are interested in like oh the story, the characters, this writer is really great. And movies go into production because of marketing executives. Basically the decision of like what movie do we think we can actually make money on is often a very different team.

And so when I get approached with a hey would you want to adapt this thing for us, when I got approached with this hey do you want to take this How Would This Be a Movie one of my fundamental decisions was like I don’t think you’re actually going to make that movie. And so much of my job as a screenwriter is to really stock pick or thinking like what movies do I think you’re actually going to make versus you’re just going to hire me to write a script.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does seem to me that some movies just cannot be stopped.

**John:** Inevitability is I think a thing.

**Craig:** Inevitability. Generally speaking if there is some underlying property that some PowerPoint presentation proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that it can’t miss, they’re making it. Obviously it can miss. In fact, those probably miss more frequently and then the hit, it doesn’t matter. Everybody agrees together, holding hands in a boardroom this is correct. So this is how you do get pitched things where you go you can’t be serious.

And there’s nothing you can do about it. They’re making it. If there is a combination of a very hot star and a very hot director, they’re making it. Even when they shouldn’t. And that doesn’t have to be a very commercially obvious movie. That could be like a completely commercially not-obvious movie. And yet still but we got them. And then it’s like, OK, I guess you’re doing it then. You shouldn’t. But all right.

**John:** But you always have to think in terms of like what is the slot for this. And does the studio see this as their awards contender? Or do they see this as a big blockbuster movie that’s going to actually generate real movie? Because those are the two things that studios tend to make now.

With the rise of streamers there’s latitude to make other kinds of movies that are appealing to specific audiences which is great. But classically people were approaching this as like can I win awards with this or can I make a gazillion dollars off of this. And those are the things. And some of the movies we talked about today it’s not quite clear how that would work out. I mean, the nanny-plus, Aline could write that movie. It reminds me of sort of like I Don’t Know How She Does It or those books – there was an era of books that were adapted that were centering on women and women’s issues. Maybe you make those for streamers now, but you’re not making them very often for theatrical release.

**Craig:** No, I don’t think any of the movies that we contemplated existing today would be for a major studio. They just don’t do them.

**John:** Unless it was Smokehouse, the George Clooney company, doing it for Warners as a big awards kind of thing. That’s possible. Like Argo is an example of that kind of movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is still that niche, but a lot of times I think with those things they have arranged for other co-financiers that limit – when you talk about like, OK, we’re spending a bunch of money, what they’re spending a bunch of money on is, I don’t know, whatever Paw Patrol, live action Paw Patrol.

**John:** That’s what we want. Did you see the trailer for Clifford the Big Red Dog?

**Craig:** I did.

**John:** The trailer for Clifford the Big Red Dog was better than I expected and I think it will actually succeed in its target audience. And I want to wish them well.

**Craig:** I have no idea because I don’t know what it costs. If it costs a whole lot, I don’t know.

**John:** If it costs $100 million then I think that’s money not well spent. But I don’t think it costs $100 million.

**Craig:** That would be unfortunate. And somewhere someone is listening to this going it literally cost $99.5 million, you mother-f-ers.

Yes, listen, I root for all movies.

**John:** I root for all movies as well.

**Craig:** All movies.

**John:** All right. Let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, you forgot.

**Craig:** I didn’t forget. You know, what episode is this? 507? There aren’t even 507 cool things in the world total.

**John:** There are so many cool things in the world.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. I think we’re into like moderately interesting things at this point.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is genuinely cool and I think our audience will like it.

**Craig:** I’ll be the judge of this.

**John:** Do you want to hear it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So my One Cool Thing is an episode of Decoder Ring. It’s a podcast I listen to. I think it’s been a One Cool Thing several times before. Willa Paskin hosts it. It is terrific. It’s on Slate.

This episode was on the Tootsie shot. And the Tootsie shot – you know in Tootsie when she’s walking towards the camera, it’s a very long lens in a crowded New York street?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** You recognize that shot as an iconic image from Tootsie, but from a zillion other movies.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** It’s about the history of that shot, or that kind of shot, and how that shot became possible because of technological changes, but also sort of cultural changes. And the changes in cities overall. It’s just a really great analysis of both urban structure but also moviemaking and cinematography and what that shot means in terms of like we’re focusing on this one person among a sea of other people. That it’s generally a first act shot that you see.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And establishing who this person is in a crowd of others. I just thought it was great. And it ties into 9 to 5 and lots of other things, too. So I would highly recommend people check out the Tootsie shot episode of Decoder Ring.

**Craig:** Pretty cool.

**John:** That’s pretty good.

**Craig:** Pretty cool.

**John:** And that’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Michael Karman. 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 I’m @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re lovely. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can also find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you find transcripts and sign up for the weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting where we talk about things that are interesting to writers.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where get all the back episodes and bonus segments including the one we’re about to record on your cheat sheet for time travel. Craig, thank you for coming back and for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. So Craig this is the conceit here I want to get to. So let’s say you are traveling back through time and you may get stuck someplace. If you had one sheet of paper back and forth what kind of information would you want to have that you could share with the people of that time, that era, so that you could jumpstart them but also sort of like prove that you actually know things? What would you have on there that would make you seem so, so smart?

**Craig:** OK. And I don’t know what time I’m going to?

**John:** You don’t. You don’t know what it’s going to be.

**Craig:** Because what a bummer you jump in that thing and you end up just yesterday. You’re like, ugh.

**John:** I’ve got the Pythagorean Theorem for nothing.

**Craig:** God. Yeah.

**John:** And I want to stipulate that there’s prior art here. So Ryan Norse has a great book on how to invent everything. A previous One Cool Thing of mine was The Information by Lewis Dartnell. There’s The Thrifty Time Traveler’s Guide by Jonathan Stokes. So people have thought about this. But the sense of one sheet of paper is sort of my conceit for this.

**Craig:** I would probably emphasize medicine and in particular germ theory.

**John:** Yeah. Oh god.

**Craig:** And some simple antibiotic methods. But most importantly just basic germ theory. If I could back into certain periods and just prove to people that they should just wash their hands, and like specifically the doctor.

You know, when Lincoln was shot, so this is not that long ago. What was it, 1865?

**John:** Sounds right.

**Craig:** So not that long ago. That wasn’t thousands of years ago. The doctors who they took him across the street and they brought doctors in. He was clearly in grave straits and on his way to dying. There’s a bullet hole in his head and they just put their fingers in it to try and feel if they could find the bullet. That’s what they did.

They didn’t wash. There was no reason to wash because there’s nothing on your hand that could possibly cause more problems than a bullet. If I could do one thing it would be germ theory.

So notes on germ theory. Plans for how to heal infections. How to prevent viral transmission and bacterial transmission.

**John:** Those all sound great. I think there’s some basic formulas that would be important there. Because this idea of a cheat sheet, I don’t know if you ever had any classes where a physics test you were allowed to sort of like have one sheet of paper that can have–

**Craig:** They never let me have that.

**John:** Oh, I think it’s a godsend. Because it’s stupid not to because you could always look it up.

**Craig:** I know. But they were mean.

**John:** Yeah. So the basic formulas, so Pythagorean Theorem, Quadratic Formula, getting everybody on a base ten system is just so important and so crucial. The knowledge that the world is round, because experiments you could do even in ancient Egypt that show like oh the world is round, you can actually calculate the size of the earth. The sense that the earth is not the center of the universe. That the sun is the center of our solar system. That there are other planets. I think that’s important to understand. It’s not going to have as big of an impact necessarily as washing your hands will be, but I think will move things forward.

Getting people past – you know, if you look at Aristotle and sort of the classic philosophers they were trying to do this theory of mind, but also the physical universe, and they just did not have the tools to actually understand. So they kept inventing things and they systematize this logic but it was based on nothing. So bringing them the scientific method and sense of like this is the hypothesis, this is what I’m testing. This is the results. That feels crucial to me.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Capitalism and just the sense of how money works and how we’re going to exchange stuff, how we’re going to exchange goods and services.

**Craig:** A lot of Bernie fans screaming at their iPods right now. How dare you!

**John:** If you understand capitalism then you can get to other sort of systems as well.

**Craig:** That’s how you get yourself off the hook, huh? All right.

**John:** That’s what it is. But who explained capitalism better than Marx? No one.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not really sure anybody did prior to that. It was just sort of this is our system. It’s a natural bartering system is what we do.

**John:** There was Adam Smith.

**Craig:** From the Invisible Hand.

**John:** Invisible Hand and all that stuff. Those feel like the crucial things to sort of get across. I mean, you don’t need to teach them atomic theory. There’s things that are just not going to be realistic because they have to build so much stuff along the way, but I want to get people started as quickly as we can. And hopefully head off some of the worst things like slavery and thinking about sort of like what does it fundamentally mean for each person to have inalienable rights that are possessed within.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, what do you think? Based on everything we know about science fiction when you go back and you help people then you hurl yourself back to the future, it’s going to be a nightmare scape. Because that’s just we can never help.

**John:** Time travel inevitably involves sort of like sleeping with your mother and it’s bad.

**Craig:** Oh, why would you? Why?

**John:** Back to the Future.

**Craig:** Got to drink heavily now at 11:47 in the morning. Oh man. I’m going to go back in time to a moment before you said that. That’s all I want to do.

**John:** Now if you can go back in time you could actually think of a One Cool Thing that you could have shared here.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** No, not going to do it.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** Craig, thank you very much for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** And listeners if you have suggestions for what you should put on that sheet do write to us because I think you’re going to probably have some really good ideas of what that sheet should be.

**Craig:** Better ones. Oh, you know what I would love? I would roll the dice and hope that I would go back to the time of Jesus. And show him the bible. And have him go, “You can’t be serious?” And I’m going to be like, no dude, this is real. And he’d be like, “You can’t? You cannot be serious.” And I’m like, no, no, no, this is seriously real.

**John:** Listeners if you tweet at me with your one page back-and-forth sheet cheat I will retweet that because I think that’s a great idea. Do it. Craig, good luck with your continued preproduction and when do you start shooting? Or is that public knowledge?

**Craig:** That is not public knowledge, but real, real soon.

**John:** Cool. Enjoy.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Zola Movie](https://a24films.com/films/zola) discussed in our HWTBAM segment on [Episode 222](https://johnaugust.com/2015/live-from-austin-2015).
* [The Criminals Thought the Devices Were Secure. But the Seller Was the F.B.I.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/world/australia/operation-trojan-horse-anom.html?referringSource=articleShare)
* [1,000-Word Job Listing for a “Household Manager/Cook/Nanny](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jan/24/nanny-viral-ad-california-ceo) and follow up [An Interview With the Woman Who Wrote the Viral 1,000-Word Job Listing for a “Household Manager/Cook/Nanny](https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/01/meet-the-silicon-valley-ceo-and-mom-who-wrote-the-viral-extremely-detailed-job-listing-for-a-household-manager-cook-nanny.html) from Ruth Graham on Slate.
* [Couple breaks up after being handcuffed together for 123 days](https://nypost.com/2021/06/18/couple-breaks-up-after-being-handcuffed-together-for-123-days/)
* [Must I really indulge my ‘psychic’ sister-in-law?](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/carolyn-hax-must-i-really-indulge-my-psychic-sister-in-law/2016/08/05/ff5f2f10-5830-11e6-9767-f6c947fd0cb8_story.html)
* [Decoder Ring: The Tootsie Shot](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2021/06/tootsie-shot)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Liz Hannah](https://twitter.com/itslizhannah) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael Karman ([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/507standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/creating-a-tv-comedy).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today on the show we have some clips with some bad words in them, so if you don’t want your kids to hear those words maybe listen to this one on headphones.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 508 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig and I could not get our schedules to sync up this week, but lucky for all of us we have a remarkable replacement in the form of Jen Statsky. She’s a writer-producer whose credits include Broad City, Parks and Rec, The Good Place, and my previous One Cool Thing Hacks, a series which she co-created. Welcome Jen.

**Jen Statsky:** Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

**John:** I’m so excited to have you here. So we’ve not really met in person I don’t think, maybe at a WGA thing?

**Jen:** Maybe at a WGA thing. But I think this might be our first in-person meeting.

**John:** It very well could be. So on Twitter I congratulated you on your show, but I think we probably retweeted the same things in the past, but that’s about as much as we’ve done together.

**Jen:** Yes.

**John:** Well today on the show I want to talk about how you got started and particularly how you got started in comedy because that’s a thing I know nothing about. And then I really want to dig into the form of single camera comedy, because Hacks is just great and Hacks and Broad City are both single camera comedies, but they’re very different. And I want to talk about writing those, writing towards act breaks, writing without act breaks.

**Jen:** Sure.

**John:** And we have the pages in front of us, so we have some scenes. So I really want to get very specific if we can.

**Jen:** I love it. Let’s get into it.

**John:** And you know who else has questions? Our listeners. I put out a call to the premium subscribers and they sent in 130 questions about comedy that Megana has sorted through. So, we will not 130.

**Jen:** Let’s do them. Let’s hit them all.

**John:** All of them. We’re going to knock them all out.

**Jen:** 130 questions.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for premium members I want to talk through the cat person discourse, so cat person which is that short story that everyone is talking about years ago, well now there’s an update to that, so I want to get your take on that.

**Jen:** It’s so funny that we are once again reliving cat person on Twitter. It’s all come full circle from 2017.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like there’s people who were in a coma all this time and they wake up and we’re still talking about cat person.

**Jen:** On one end of a global pandemic there’s cat person discourse, and on the other end of the global pandemic there’s cat person discourse.

**John:** It gets into those questions about like who owns a story. And we’re all sort of drawing from real life, especially writers. And I’ve run into situations where an event will happen and it’s like, oh, do I get that event, or do you get that event?

**Jen:** Exactly. I know. It’s a super nuanced conversation about art and who owns certain life things that have happened to people. So it is a really interesting conversation.

**John:** Cool. Two little bits of news and follow up to start with. First off, the WGA put out this pilot deal guide, which was kind of cool. So coming out of the agency agreement we now get all the contracts, and so we can see everybody’s contract and we can see how much people are getting paid for their deals, not just as writers but also as producers, and how much they’re getting paid to write pilots. And so they have all this information. The guild looked through 700 pilot deals from 2020 and 2021 to see what the averages were.

Jen, were there any surprises in here for you?

**Jen:** No, no real surprises. I mean, I think it’s so helpful to have this information out there. I’m just so delighted that the guild did this because you know so much of what happens is people get kept in the dark about what other people are getting paid. And in doing that it allows studios and networks to have all the power, because we’re not talking. We don’t know what our counterparts are making. And so just to have this information out there is I think wonderful.

I remember when the guild was asking for people’s contracts I had a couple of friends reach out and be like, hey, is it OK to send them this. And it’s like yeah it’s to help us, it’s not for nefarious purposes that the Writers Guild wants to look at your contracts. It’s all in the name of the information being out there and just being super helpful and give writers a stronger place to be in for negotiations.

**John:** Yeah. So if you have an agent or manager or lawyer getting your deal, great, they should have some of this information. They should have a sense of what this is. But this is a chance for a writer to say like, OK, this is above the median, this is below the median. If it’s below the median, why is it below the median? There could be a good reason. I mean, half of writers are going to get paid more. So, there could be a reason why you’re below median. But it’s helpful to understand. And if there’s a reason that you can solve about this, great.

**Jen:** Totally. Were there any surprises to you in looking at it?

**John:** I was happy to see that there were changes from 2019. So that a pilot script went up $17,500. That’s great.

**Jen:** That’s great.

**John:** And so that’s progress people are making. And the split between one hours and half hours is also good. So you deal for Hacks, was it a streamer at that point? Was it clear that it was always going to be something that was made without commercials and made for not a cable?

**Jen:** Yeah. It was always – the idea was always to go to the cable streaming places. Like we didn’t really ever entertain pitching this to networks. I and Mike Schur under overall deals at Universal Television, so it started out – we pitched to Universal and then kind of going from there we plotted out where we were going to take the show. But, yeah, in the very early iterations as Paul – my co-creators Paul Downs and Lucia Aniello and I were talking about this idea. We just always knew it had to be for streaming or cable. It’s just baked into the idea.

**John:** Great. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to this, but it talks through sort of what broadcast network and streamer deals are like and you can see where things are at right now. And the good news is that it’ll keep going forward. So each year they’ll be able to put up an update to see what progress is being made, or if stuff is retrenching at all.

A bit of follow up here. Two episodes ago we talked about getting fired. Phil in LA wrote in. Megana could you tell us what Phil said?

**Megana Rao:** Yeah. So Phil wrote in and said, “I listened to Episode 506 where you discussed how to handle being fired. While bad communication isn’t limited to screenwriting, it doesn’t need to be the practice. In Episode 399, Notes on Notes, instead of accepting the status quo on notes you and Craig created a program to help producers learn to give better notes and fix communication issues. The same could be done on this issue as well. And industry build on relationships and communication needs a bedrock of respect. And important moments like firing need to have established norms.”

**John:** Yeah. My daughter just applied for her first job. She’s a high schooler. And so she applied for her first job and she keeps asking like when do you think they’re going to tell me if I got the job or didn’t get the job. And I’m like they’re never going to tell you.

**Jen:** Oh, you’ll never know. I’m still waiting to find out if I got a job at Jimmy Kimmel from a packet I submitted in 2008. So, you just never know.

**John:** Well you’re in a position now to hire people, or to fire people if you need to. So, what are some things that you’re thinking about in terms of communication outward with people that are either under your employ or want to be under your employ?

**Jen:** It’s a good question. I mean, I think when it comes to hiring, and especially firing, there are just difficult conversations that you have to have. And with the privilege of getting to be a showrunner, getting to be a show creator, getting to be the boss you are also taking on the responsibility of having difficult conversations. And so I think you can’t shy away from that. I think you have to say, OK, if this person is being let go we’re not just going to do it in an unethical way where we don’t treat them like a human being. We’re going to have a conversation.

And so it’s about being a human being and just treating that person like a human being and saying, OK, this is going to be a difficult conversation and it’s probably not what I want to do with my day to day, but I at least owe this to someone to talk to them about it.

**John:** Well from a writer perspective the golden rule really applies. You know what it would feel like to be ghosted or to be fired in a bad way. We can understand what that’s like. And so even though we may not be trained as managers, which is a whole separate issue, we do have a sense of what it feels like to be the writer who is not getting the full information. And so just being honest with the person and just being thoughtful and human with the person seems to be great progress.

**Jen:** I listened to you guys talk about it and as someone who works primarily in TV, not in features, I knew this as a fact but it is so fascinating that in features it does seem like you have to get so much more used to being fired than in television. Like in television, you know, maybe you work on a show for a season and they don’t ask you back, but even that doesn’t totally feel like firing. It feels like in features it’s a much more common occurrence that people have not figured out how to handle well still.

**John:** Talk to me about not being asked back. Because that is a different thing than being fired. And it doesn’t have the same negative connotation as being dropped off of something.

**Jen:** No, not at all. You know, I have friends who have run rooms and they’ve not asked people back the next season and it’s never necessarily because, oh, that person was bad and didn’t work. Sometimes you’re just like oh you know what going forward we found that the tone of the show is way more dramatic than we thought and so we’re going to try to hire some people with more experience in drama for example. And so that really just becomes looking at every single, the makeup of your writer’s room, who do you need, what are you feeling you need more of, what direction is the story headed, and who can help you serve that?

So a lot of times I think if someone doesn’t get asked back, like yeah sure there are situations where it was just a bad fit and that person didn’t gel with the room, but it doesn’t – like you said, it doesn’t have the same stigma. It’s not quite the same as being fired and told like, OK, you’re not doing this job again on Monday basically.

**John:** It also strikes me that with so many shows being done in mini rooms are being entirely written before anything is being shot, there’s not that same expectation that you’re going to be coming back season after season on a show. Because those people will not be available necessarily. So you’re just kind of assembling a team for one heist.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** And then you go off again.

**Jen:** Exactly. Like there’s so many shows now, so many opportunities. So you can’t really expect – like we have some wonderful writers who wrote on season one of Hacks, but they might get their own. They’re doing their own stuff. They might get a pilot. They might not be available for that reason. Yeah, it’s very much so one heist at a time, one season at a time.

**John:** Let’s talk about the staffing up on a show. So, this is a good transition between your role as a showrunner now versus when you were first starting up. You mentioned that you had submitted a packet to Jimmy Kimmel. What were your first jobs in the industry? What were your first attempts at writing in the industry? Because you were an intern also, correct?

**Jen:** Yeah. So long before I worked I was a kid who just was like obsessed with television. Reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore Show on Nick at Nite was like that’s what raised me. Because my parents kind of kicked the can down the road on that one. And so I was obsessed with television from a very young age. I didn’t really know that it was a job someone could do until maybe towards the end of high school. And then I realized like, OK, it seems like NYU has a very good film and TV program. I’m going to apply there. And I got in. And I studied film and TV there.

I went through the film and TV program which is actually more for directors, but pretty quickly learned that I did not like directing and only wanted to be a writer. And so at NYU the thing that was an incredible privilege of being at NYU was that you’re in the city during the school year so you can apply for these internships that people at other colleges can really only do during their summer breaks. So my senior year I interned at Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Saturday Night Live. Kind of found myself in this insane situation where I was going to 30 Rock six out of seven days a week as a 21-year-old because I was able to do, yeah, three days at Conan, three days at SNL, which was an incredible learning experience.

It was actually 2007, so it was an incredible learning experience which was then cut short because of the writers’ strike. So I got to also see how all of that stuff was going down.

**John:** Tell me like it was an incredible learning experience because they had set it up to be, or because you were doing something that you actually – were you being entrepreneurial about your learning there?

**Jen:** Kind of a combination. They definitely were very kind people who I think wanted interns to learn from being there. But I lucked into a very specific role at Saturday Night Live which was I was a photography intern, which made no sense because I have absolutely no photography skills whatsoever. But that’s just the department I ended up in. And in being a photography intern you are tasked with going down – at least this was how it was in 2007, I don’t know if it still is now – but we were tasked with going down on the floor and taking photographs of the dress rehearsal, like on the Friday, the day before the show on Saturday. And so I had like this firsthand front row view of the sketches being worked out, the actors running through them, the writers whose sketches it were being on the floor, figuring stuff out, what works, what didn’t.

And that was just so incredibly fascinating. So it was kind of a combo. Any time you’re in an environment like that hopefully your eyes are wide open. You’re listening and you’re just trying to take in as much as you can to learn. And then I also kind of lucked out with the position I got.

**John:** That’s great. So you were there to see the tension of sort of like these are the sketches we think are going to work. These are the tweaks we’re making. Just all of the stuff that gets cut.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** And you’re seeing the writers trying to save their things along the way.

**Jen:** Exactly. And just seeing firsthand what a high pressure environment it is. I mean, it’s been well documented, but that show it’s like really crazy that you are under that kind of time limit. And there’s a gun to your head and it’s like, OK, the show happens Saturday, figure it out. You’ve got to write 12 sketches or whatever it is. And they need to be done by Saturday by 11:30 and it’s Tuesday or whatever. And so that was also just kind of a good intro into realizing like, oh yeah, a lot of these TV writing jobs are super high pressure and can be really intense.

**John:** Were those writers on the show talking with you? I mean, I guess you were the photography intern at SNL, so you weren’t probably interfacing so directly with them. But something like Conan O’Brien did you have a role of actually working with them?

**Jen:** Yeah. SNL was like you said I was more in the photo department for that. But I remember at Conan there’s a long term Conan writer, I think he might be at Colbert now, this guy Brian Stack who is just the funniest, loveliest man and he would always come into the bullpen where the interns were and talk to us and say like how are you guys doing, and any questions we had we were able to ask. So like, yeah, you did mingle with the writers there a lot, which was amazing, because you’re getting to see the people doing what you hopefully – what you want to be doing. And so that was a great experience, too.

**John:** So you come out of these internships and NYU with a degree, but also hopefully some writing samples? What were you trying to do next after this experience?

**Jen:** I knew that I wanted to work in comedy. But I wasn’t quite sure what lane I wanted to pursue. And by that I mean I was taking classes at UCB. I was taking improv classes. I was taking sketch writing classes. I had some half-hour samples that I had written at NYU. But I was also doing standup. And that’s kind of an interesting thing about comedy is that there’s so many – if you are like I want to write movies, you’re like I’m writing movies. But if you’re more broadly like I know I’m interested in comedy and I want to work in comedy there are a bunch of different kind of paths you can dabble with.

And so I was doing a bunch of that and pretty quickly like the things that I was having no fun doing I realized like, OK, that’s not for me. I’m not meant to be a standup. That’s not going to happen. And so the way it happened that I got my first actual job in the industry is that when the writers’ strike happened and so SNL and Conan kind of shut down and didn’t really need interns for a bit there was a satirical newspaper called The Onion which I’m sure people are super familiar with.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Jen:** Which was like a huge touchpoint for me comedically. Like one of my first big comedic influence was The Onion. I just loved it. And I spent my last semester at NYU interning there because they at the time were doing web videos based on Onion headlines and articles. And so I worked there at The Onion and then as I graduated I just got a job in a coffee shop because had rent to pay and wasn’t sure the exact path I was going to take to make it in comedy.

But my two bosses there at the time, Will Graham and Julie Smith, they were tasked with running shows – The Onion did a show for Comedy Central and then they did a show for IFC. And these shows were happening at the exact same time, which was pretty crazy. And so they offered me a job of being their assistant and I took it. And so that was my first kind of real TV production experience.

**John:** These internships were clearly so important for you because you met the people who both inspired you but also gave you a job. So what advice do you have in sort of pursuing one of those internships and how do you land one and how do you make the most of it if you’re in one of those spots?

**Jen:** I think that’s a great question. You really just can’t underestimate what it means to be a kind, good person who seems happy to be there, which sounds like the most simple advice in the world, but I think sometimes people forget it. I think like treat those opportunities like they’re really great opportunities and work hard. And I think you will reap the benefits of it. It’s also a tricky thing because even in the ten or so, 13 years since I was doing that we’re having more conversations about what is free labor, are these internships totally ethical? So I also understand that you might find yourself in a situation where you’re like am I being taken advantage of.

But hopefully in a situation like mine was where I was being compensated in the form of school credit and I was treated with respect. I was able to I think work really hard and be available and engaged with the people I was working for and serve their needs and learn from them. And I think it led them to be like, OK, maybe she’s someone we should bring on in a more fulltime capacity.

**John:** What was the first thing you were hired to write, that you were paid to write for film or TV?

**Jen:** So the first thing I was paid to write freelance was actually Onion headlines. While being an assistant there I wanted to also be writing and so I asked if I could submit headline. And Megan Ganz actually who is a very talented writer who co-created Mythic Quest on Apple, she was an editor at The Onion at the time. And so I submitted to her and she gave me such helpful notes on why this headline works, why that one didn’t, and all this. And she kind of guided me through that.

**John:** Talk to me about an Onion headline. Because I have a sense of what it is, but it’s hard to break down specifically what it is. But is it really the order of words?

**Jen:** That can be one part of it, right? Like, oh, this needs to be more succinct. There’s too many words here. You can cut these ones out. Other times it would be like just the general premise of the idea. It’s like I kind of get the observation you’re going for here but it’s not clicking for me. Things like that. And then I eventually got hired as a freelance Onion headline writer. And so that was every week you submit Onion headlines and they send back, OK, here’s the 40 we picked and your initial would be next to yours if yours made it in. And then you don’t even know if they’re going to use them, but those are at least these the ones they’ve culled down they’ve picked that they’ve liked.

And then if they did eventually use them I think you got a $25 check in the mail. So that was my first freelance job, which again I loved because I just loved The Onion so much and I felt so grateful to be getting to write for it.

And then my first fulltime staff job was writing monologue jokes at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

**John:** So that was a job you probably went through a packet process?

**Jen:** Yes. That was a packet process. I was lucky enough to get a manager through a UCB class I took. The teacher very nicely said, “Oh I think my friend who is a manager would like your stuff, can I pass it along to her?” And he did. And to this day she’s still my manager. So through that I started submitting packets to late night shows. And, yeah, did a bunch of those that I am pretty sure I didn’t get the job for because I never worked at those shows.

**John:** In all those cases you’re submitting – you or your manager are putting this in and you just never hear back? For all you know they’re just going into a void?

**Jen:** Oh, you never, ever hear. Basically like, OK, SNL is looking for sketch packets. Conan is looking for monologue joke packets. And so you just do it and you send it out into the world and, yeah, you typically don’t hear.

I remember the monologue one for Fallon, it was like a weeklong, almost challenge or something. You would every night get sent premises and then you would have to send in your jokes either later that night or by the next morning. And you did that for like four days.

**John:** And you’re not getting paid for that.

**Jen:** No, you’re getting absolutely no money for that.

**John:** That’s why the WGA sort of stepped in there and said like, OK, you have to limit that.

**Jen:** Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it’s a good question. I’ve been out of the late night game for so long now. What is the situation with packets now?

**John:** So, here’s what happened. Both on the east, but also some on the west, we were getting these complaints about, OK, this has just become abusive. They’re asking for just tremendous amounts of just free labor to do these things. And even if that stuff is not making it into show, it’s just abusive.

**Jen:** It’s not cool.

**John:** It’s not cool at all. And so there are limits to sort of how much they can ask. And trying to get some standardization of like what packets really mean, so that you can theoretically submit a packet to more than one place, so it’s not all specific work to this. And if there’s real research involved at some point they have to pay you for like those later rounds, because some of these shows were having round after round after round you have to go through.

**Jen:** So crazy. Yeah. So unnecessary to make people jump through those hoops.

**John:** And it was clear when you talked to some of the people who were hiring it’s like they were just doing it because they were doing it. And it wasn’t actually helpful in their process.

**Jen:** Yes. That’s one of those things. And I do feel like in the late night world this happens even more than in half hour of like ways of doing things just get calcified and people go, “But it’s just because it’s the way it’s done. That’s how we do it.” Even on SNL they still stay up all night writing when I don’t know that that necessarily needs to be the process. It’s so good that the guild got involved to challenge these ideas of like, yeah, just because it’s the way it’s always been done doesn’t mean it’s actually cool to be doing to people.

**John:** Yeah. So it sounds like you knew in the general sense you wanted to write comedy, but you decided I’m going to try all the things and then decide from those things which things are not my things. So standup was not your thing.

**Jen:** Standup was not my thing. I am really not a performer. It is not where I shine.

**John:** So UCB was learning sketch writing.

**Jen:** Yes, UCB was sketch writing, which I liked OK, but I still wasn’t great at. And so what happened actually was around this time, I guess this was probably now 2010, before Twitter became a hell scape it was a place where people were just writing stupid jokes. And in a really cool way it kind of democratized comedy writing a little bit because anyone could just write a funny joke. And if it was funny enough a ton of people would see it and get retweeted. And a lot of people made their careers by doing that, which was cool.

And so I joined Twitter in like 2010 and started just kind of writing little one-liner jokes, which like I said there were things I wasn’t great at. I wasn’t great at standup. I wasn’t great at sketch. But I found that one-liner jokes I had a lot of fun writing those. And so I always tell people when they’re starting out in comedy like kind of follow the fun. The thing you’re having the most fun doing is probably the thing you’re best at.

So I just was doing that on Twitter and what’s funny is I had submitted – like I said I had submitted to Fallon many times. I had done that week-long challenge of sending jokes in every night, not getting any sleep, and never hearing back. But what happened was is A.D. Miles, the head writer at that time, learned of me through Twitter and then just sent me a direct message being like, “Hey, do you want to submit a packet for Fallon?” Which I was like, yes, of course, even though what I could have said is, “Yeah, I’ve done it hundreds of times. Just hire me off one of those.”

But they were actually looking for sketch writers at the time, so I had to a sketch packet. Got hired off of that. And then though quickly again since sketch is not really my strong suit I started also – even though it’s divided into up into sketch and monologue writers at that show, or at least it was when I was there, anyone is allowed to submit monologue jokes. You can just send them in.

So I started doing that and getting a decent amount on. And then it kind of became apparent, oh, this is more your skill set. We’re going to move you over to here. And then I became a permanent monologue joke writer for the rest of my time there.

**John:** What I hear you saying is that you didn’t go in saying this is exactly the kind of writer I am. You actually sort of discovered and you just tried a bunch of things. And then winnowed out the things that didn’t work. And so if people are listening to this at home who say, oh, I want to write comedy, maybe take a broad approach to what kind of comedy you’re writing and see where your natural strengths are.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** Rather than assuming I’m the person who is going to write this exact show.

**Jen:** Exactly. I think that when I started, you know, growing up, even though I loved – like Mary Tyler Moore was, again, a huge influence, I also loved SNL. And I think a big part of me was like oh I’m going to be a sketch writer for Saturday Night Live. That’s what I want to do. And I think if I had just tried to like force myself into that it would have been a much tougher path because, again, I don’t think my natural skill set, I don’t think sketch writing is something that I’m great at. And so by trying a bunch of different things and allowing myself to go, right, I’m having the most fun doing this thing, let me follow that, I think that’s the thing I’m best at, it allowed me to find what my path was.

And so, yeah, I think anyone starting out, especially in comedy when there are so many different ways to approach it, I think give yourself the freedom to try a bunch of stuff, and be bad at some of it. And just because you’re bad at one part of comedy writing doesn’t mean you’re bad at the other parts. You know?

**John:** Now, what’s the segue from Fallon to writing for shows, writing for Broad City, writing for Parks and Rec? What was the step in there?

**Jen:** So I was at Fallon for about 2.5 years, which I always say felt like 20.5. Not because of the people there. They’re lovely. But because monologue joke writing is so grueling. You basically – I think every morning by 11:30 in the morning I would have to have like five pages of monologue jokes written, something like that. And let me be clear. Most of them bad. They’re not good. It’s not a good five pages. But still you’re expected to produce this volume of stuff. And it’s all based on the news. And it really – I think the people who can do it forever, like I truly tip my cap to them, because it’s really challenging and it’s really hard. And especially as the world seems to be getting darker and darker it’s hard to write topical jokes based on the news. That really, really weighed on me after a while and I was gone in 2013.

So I really appreciated the job there because – I say it was comedy writing boot camp because I just had to produce so much material every single day. But pretty like towards the end of my time there, like the last year, I realized I think I want to tell longer stories. I want to explore writing for characters and characters that have arcs and just get into that. So I knew that half hour was the place I wanted to be.

And so I made the decision to just leave. I didn’t have my next job lined up, which I remember at the time people were like why are you doing this. But sometimes I think you just have to force yourself to make the move. So I left Fallon. My then boyfriend at the time, now husband, we moved across the country. Came to LA. I wrote a spec of, wow, this is going to date me. I wrote a spec Happy Endings. Do you remember that how?

**John:** It’s a good show.

**Jen:** Yeah, I loved Happy Endings. Very funny show. So I wrote a spec for that and that was my sample, because I think even back then half hour people were looking more for specs than original pilots. And, yeah, I got hired. My first half hour job was actually the show Hello Ladies, on HBO, which was co-created by Stephen Merchant and Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky. So that was my first half hour experience.

But that was a pretty short – it was like an eight-episode HBO show. One of those shows where you kind of are going to write everything in preproduction and then they’re going to go off and make it. And so towards the end of my time in that writer’s room I also came to know Mike Schur via Twitter. And he I guess, yeah, liked jokes I had written there. And then I think he read my spec, but I honestly think he also hired me based off of Twitter and just meeting me and being like, all right, she’s not a total crazy person.

**John:** So that was for Parks and Rec?

**Jen:** That was for Parks and Rec.

**John:** And again these are very joke dense shows. These are things where there’s expectation that there’s going to be a joke every 10, 15 seconds.

**Jen:** Yes. Totally. Yes.

**John:** So from there then back to New York for Broad City?

**Jen:** Yes. I did my first season of Broad City in between the last two seasons of Parks and Rec. It kind of worked out beautifully where I think the day we ended season six of Parks I got on a plane and went to New York and started the Broad City season two writer’s room. And I did that for a couple months. And then came back.

And then going forward Parks and Rec ended. I went on to a show, Lady Dynamite on Netflix. I did that in the interim. And then once The Good Place started I was always kind of – I was never again fulltime in the room in Broad City. I was always just writing a script from LA while they were in New York and giving notes on episodes and punch ups and stuff like that.

So I was very lucky in that I was able to be on The Good Place fulltime, but also be working on Broad City as well.

**John:** Great. So you’ve mentioned all the people who seemed to be involved with Hacks. So talk to me about where did the idea for Hacks come about and how did the three of you, but also Mike Schur and everyone else come together on this property?

**Jen:** So Paul W. Downs, and Lucia Aniello, and I, we met doing comedy in New York. Lucia and I were the only two women in this sketch group that was kind of like an offshoot. It was all people who had met at UCB. And then slowly but surely the sketch group stopped emailing us to come to the meetings and we both realized, OK, I think we’ve been let go from this sketch group. Cool.

But, we instantly connected and shared a sense of humor. And I loved her and I was desperate to make her my friend. And then she was dating Paul and was also comedic partners doing sketches with Paul. And same thing. We hit it off. And I was lucky to just kind of be in their orbit for a while. If they had sketches and stuff I would pitch jokes and they went and they made their movie Rough Night. And I was on set as a punch up writer for that.

And so we just always loved writing together and knew that we wanted to make something together one day. So what happened was Paul was doing a Netflix Characters special, which I don’t know if you guys have seen, but it was basically just a bunch of sketches he was shooting. I came along just to pitch jokes for them. And we went to Maine. We were going to a monster truck rally. So the idea for Hacks was born out of a monster truck rally.

Paul has a character called Jasper Cooch, whose catchphrase is Big Trucks. And he was being allowed to just host the monster truck rally in Portland, Maine. They gave him the mic even though – like he could have absolutely said there’s a bomb in here and caused and incredible panic. But they trusted him. And so on this road trip we met up in Boston and then we drove to Portland, Maine for this monster truck rally.

And I don’t know how we got on the topic, but we started talking about comedians, particularly female comedians, and women in the arts in general and how maybe they hadn’t gotten their due the way their male counterparts had. And how it’s just such a harder path for women, like how they had to keep their heads down and pound the pavement and put up with so much bullshit frankly while, yeah, for other comedians who were maybe straight white men, they didn’t have as hard of a path.

And so we just kind of started talking about characters like that. And wanting to tell a woman like that story. And that was sort of the birthplace of Hacks.

**John:** All right. So for listeners who haven’t seen the show yet, let me give you the briefest logline so you get some sense of what we’re going to be talking about today. Hacks is a limited series, well now it’s going into its second season, so it’s a series about a legendary Vegas comedienne who hires on a disgraced, young Hollywood writer to freshen up her act. And their relationship is alternately contentious, very contentious, and maternal. And it feels like it’s mostly a two-hander.

**Jen:** Yes.

**John:** And yet other characters have some storytelling power. So Paul W. Downs plays an agent who can drive scenes by himself. Marcus who is her COO can also drive scenes by himself. How early in the process did you know who the characters were and sort of what the shape of the show was going to be?

**Jen:** Well, I think you’re right that it is a two-hander. That’s very much so like in the DNA of the show. That’s kind of what it was born out of. It was this idea of, OK, what if it’s this woman who has been through so much and has so much trauma from what she’s done, but also amassed this empire, making so much money doing it. And then what if there was a younger woman who didn’t fully appreciate what this woman has been through and has also maybe like so many women like this, the younger writer has the story about her wrong. Because so often we get women like this, we get their story wrong. And something gets pushed in the media and people just blindly go along with it. And only in the last few years when we look at when like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton have we started to reevaluate these stories we’ve believed about women in the public eye.

And so that was kind of the genesis of, OK, they’ll be forced to work together and they will butt heads, but actually they both really need each other. And at the heart of it it’ll be a love story. It’ll be about these two women falling in love with each other through their friendship, through their working relationship, and how does that change them and what new places does it bring them to.

But then you also are correct to bring up Marcus and Paul’s character and Kaitlin Olson who plays Jean Smart’s daughter so wonderfully. We knew we wanted to fill out Deborah’s ecosystem, right? We’re very interested in the idea of people like Deborah who are empires. Like I said they have a very carefully curated ecosystem around them. They have enough money and enough power that they get to choose all the people in their world, and there’s a lot of people in their world whose job it is to only fulfill their needs and think about them. And so someone like Marcus, played by the wonderful Carl Clemons-Hopkins, we wanted to explore the idea of well what does it mean that Marcus has devoted his entire adult life to working for Deborah and building something up for her. And also taking from her this kind of workaholic attitude and how does he reckon with but is that fulfilling him, is that fulfilling his soul.

**John:** And it’s not into late in the series that we learn that he’s actually a fan. That he got the job because he was a super fan.

**Jen:** Exactly. And we just I think never wanted any one character to feel purely like an accessory, which is a challenge to do that because even though it’s streaming you only have so much time. You only can afford to shoot so many pages in a day. So it’s definitely a balancing act of trying to give – when it’s a two-hander but also kind of also an ensemble, giving the other players in the ensemble rich storylines that feel and grounded and interesting.

So, I hope that we achieved that because that definitely was our goal going into it.

**John:** Let’s take a listen to a scene. This is a scene from the pilot in which Deborah Vance is meeting with the owner of the casino who is trying to tell her that basically she’s going to lose her theater and this job that she has is going to be ending. Let’s take a listen to it, then I want to get to what’s actually on the page.

[Clip plays]

**Marty:** You know how I’m redoing the casino’s east tower?

**Deborah:** Oh yeah.

**Marty:** So the contractor double orders everything. And what the hell am I supposed to do with two tons of fertilizer?

**Deborah:** Dumb it on Steve Wynn’s doorstep.

**Marty:** Bingo.

**Deborah:** Marty, you set me up.

**Marty:** Deb, 2,500 shows. Now, I think it’s a Vegas record.

**Deborah:** It is.

**Marty:** Well cheers.

**Deborah:** Cheers.

**Marty:** And they’re naming a street after you.

**Deborah:** I know. Deborah Vance Drive. It’ll probably be a dead end with an abortion clinic on it.

**Marty:** [laughs] Now that the big show is all planned, maybe it’s a good time to talk about the future. You know you’ll always be a part of the Palmetto’s history. But maybe it would be good if you did a few less shows a year.

**Deborah:** Good for who?

**Marty:** Yeah. I need some marquee dates for new acts. Like Pentatonix.

**Deborah:** What the hell is that?

**Marty:** They’re a beatbox forward acapella group. They do medleys. They won the Sing Off.

**Deborah:** Who gives a shit?

**Marty:** I have two buckets to fill. Families and idiots in their 20s. The families want to see singing and dancing and the college kids want to spend a grand to watch a guy in a helmet hit play on an iPod.

**Deborah:** You’re forgetting about your third bucket. People from Florida. They love me. And my numbers are strong.

**Marty:** You’ll still be doing shows, just not Friday and Saturday.

**Deborah:** Oh, just the most important nights. Un-fucking-believable.

**Marty:** Deb. Why do you even want to do 100+ shows a year? It’s not like you’re having fun. I mean, you’re on cruise control up there.

**Deborah:** I fucking wish – wish I was on cruise control. I’ve been defense my entire career thanks to assholes like you.

**Marty:** Deborah, calm down. Please.

**Deborah:** Oh, what do you care, you own the place. The service sucks. Where’s my fucking doggie bag? I’ll take his, too. And the fork! There was a cockroach in my salad.

**Marty:** Shit. Comp everybody.

**Waiter:** OK.

[Clip ends]

**John:** Great. Let’s take a look at the words that are actually on the page. So this is starting on page 5. This is scene 114 of the script. There’s a lot of changes at the head of the scene. So the script starts with another conversation about being wealthy. It’s about a yacht and an infrared sauna. At what point did that change?

**Jen:** So what you see here on the page we did shoot. We came into it writing the scene like first thinking OK we need to set up what is the dynamic between Marty and Deborah. And the idea being, OK, well one they connect over rich people shit. So they’re talking about their yacht and infrared sauna and that. And then also as – spoiler – but I don’t think we have to worry about that, as the series progresses you see that they have romantic history these two characters. And so there’s also a line here where Deborah says, “Oh yeah.” He says, “Remember my first 70-footer,” talking about his yacht, “Remember that one?” She says, “Oh yeah, we had some fun on that.” And it’s kind of a coy moment where they’re alluding to their sexual history.

But as we got into the edit room it just felt like this is such a lesson in storytelling you learn time and time and time again. Get to the action, get to the crisis. Also, I think once we saw obviously Jean Smart phenomenal. Chris McDonald is incredible, too. Their characters feel so lived in from the moment they appear on screen. We realized like, oh, we overwrote. We didn’t need to write stuff to establish their dynamic.

**John:** You gave them a big onramp that they did not need.

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly. Trust your actors. Capable actors can communicate that even without words. It’s how they’re interacting with each other. It’s how they’re laughing at each other. It’s how they’re truly sitting across the table from each other. So what happened was is that in the edit we just realized oh their dynamic is clear. This is overwritten probably. Let’s just get right to the heart of the scene which is Deborah finding out your dates are getting taken away from you.

**John:** Great. So the lines we hear in the show, are those just looped lines that you threw in? Did you shoot alternates on the day?

**Jen:** We shot alts on the day. Because it comes in about the Steve Wynn stuff. One of the benefits to having Paul, Lucia, and I are always on set. I mean, Lucia and Paul direct, so they’re of course there. But the three of us are able to pretty easily rewrite on the fly. If we feel something isn’t working there’s three brains. We can huddle up, come up with something. And so that Steve Wynn kind of leading into it that just came from us at village being like all right let’s try this. And credit to Jean and Chris, too, because they’re so nimble and quick that they can have something thrown at them like that and knock it out of the park.

**John:** Great. On page 7 I want to call out some things you do here. So there’s a great moment early on page 7. So she tells a joke, Deborah Vance Drive, and then she writes it down in her notebook, which is just such a great little detail. Is that something you’ve actually seen in real life, or just something you created for this character?

**Jen:** Yeah. It’s something that I think comes from all of our lives. Like I have on my phone Notes app of just like if a joke or if I see something going into it and writing it. And I know on Broad City they had – I think it was a doc of convos we could have. Things we could just talk about. Things that would be funny to see Abby and Ilana talk about and we’d just go into the Google Doc. So that’s something that feels very true to – I mean, I don’t know if it’s all writers. Maybe it’s more specific to comedians, but just constantly observing things and not wanting to forget them so you write them down in your notebook or on your phone.

**John:** So this lunch is set up on the pretense of just like oh let’s get together, but of course he actually has news to deliver and it’s going to lead up to this argument here. A thing you do on page 7 which works really well is Marty’s dialogue is interrupted by a scene description line that is just actually Deborah’s action here. So Mary says, “Now that the big show is all planned maybe it’s a good time to talk about the future.” Deborah puts down on her drink. “What’s this?” in quotes. He presses on.

And so the “what’s this?” is a reaction that she can give. It’s a line that she can say just with her face.

**Jen:** Yes.

**John:** It’s such a great use of breaking up the dialogue here so that we can actually see what the shift is that happened here.

**Jen:** Yeah. It’s a great way I think to show that Deborah is incredibly perceptive and very smart when it comes to business. And so when someone is gently trying to guide the conversation and maybe sneak something by her it’s like, no, no, no, you’re not getting anything by Deborah Vance. Just come out with it, man. And I think Chris does a great job then of like shifting uncomfortably in the seat because he’s a little bit scared of Deborah Vance. So yeah.

**John:** Without that line in there the delivery of his whole thing wouldn’t work. You’re going to need to have some kind of break in there so to call it out in the text is great. You also on page 7 have “Beat” just as its own line as a sentence. And listening back to it she doesn’t actually take that beat, but it’s a nice – Beat is just used as a placeholder like there’s a shift, there’s a moment, there’s a little air here.

**Jen:** A little air to show that Deborah – and again it’s not really in the version that ended up in the final cut, but yeah to show that Deborah is trying to process this tornado that’s been thrown at her of like what are you talking about, I’m losing these dates. These are the most important thing in the world to me.

**John:** Moving on to the next page, here’s an example of I bet you shot all this and people don’t realize that in the edit you have magic scissors and you can cut anything out. So what was actually probably shot was she says, “My numbers are solid and presales from the holiday are on par with last year.” That shows that she’s savvy and that she’s on it. But you probably recognized you did not need the line, so you just cut back to him and her line disappears.

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly. It was really like – and I had been in the edit a lot on Parks and Rec and The Good Place, always for our episodes. Mike was super like, yeah, get in the edit and do stuff. But this was, running my own show, I was the most in the edit I’d ever been before. And I was just like oh yeah you can truly do anything in the edit room. So, yeah, we shot those lines and then, again, at this point the conversation is getting heated and they’re kind of speaking on top of each other. And so we just wanted to amp up the pace and the frantic energy of it, so it just made sense to lose those lines.

**John:** Now, the decision of when she actually loses her cool, and even when she loses her cool it’s kind of a performative losing her cool. She recognizes she’s doing this in front of a crowd and that she has power because she’s doing this in the crowd. You’re going, “This hits Deborah, then she explodes.” That’s done as scene description but then there’s a parenthetical, hitting the table, getting loud, really emphasizing that this is going to color her vocal performance in this next piece.

**Jen:** Yeah. We knew that this was the moment where we wanted her to lose it because someone like Deborah Vance being told you’re on cruise control, even though it is somewhat maybe true with regard to the quality of her material or how much she’s updated it, she is a woman who like we talked about has had to fight and claw for her position. And so the idea of someone telling her, especially a man telling her, you’re on cruise control is so opposite to what she believes about herself to be true, which is that she is a shark. She just keeps moving. She’s never on cruise control. She’s always fighting, and fighting, and fighting. And so hearing this makes her really lose her top. And yeah.

**John:** So this is a dramatic moment but you’re still in a comedy, and so that’s why you have the runner of the doggie bag coming back. And so can you talk about the shape of this scene and sort of how much did this change in the writing from its initial conception. Was this the scene you kind of always envisioned it to be, or how much did it change as you approached it?

**Jen:** This one I would say of all the scenes in the pilot this one changed quite a bit. We definitely reworked this one more than we reworked some others because it’s such a pivotal scene. It’s the inciting incident for this change Deborah is going through.

**John:** The series would not happen if this scene didn’t happen.

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, it was a lot of rewriting in terms of like we talked about at the beginning, OK, how much of their dynamic do you need to set up, do you understand who Marty is. I think we got a note at one point that like someone didn’t understand his role, that he owned the casino. So I think that’s where some of the Steve Wynn stuff came in from.

So we rewrote it a decent amount. And I think the beat where she grabs the fork and stabs his steak and throws it, like that came later. She always was going to freak out, but I don’t remember that – that was a later pitch. And, again, you’re also rewriting on the day. And I got to give a shout out to Jean Smart. That “I found a cockroach in my salad” line, that was improvised. She just yelled that as she walked out and we thought it was hilarious and we kept it in.

So this scene went through a lot of rewriting. It was always, OK, he’s telling her he’s cutting back her dates. That was always what was happening. So that never changed. But a lot of the pieces around that inciting incident did change.

**John:** Now the pilot is working on basically parallel tracks. So we’re seeing what’s happening in Deborah’s life, and what’s happening in Ava’s life. And as she’s going to Las Vegas to meet with Deborah about potentially writing for her. They finally meet at the end of the show at it does not go well. It’s a long scene, so we’re going to play just a smaller clip from it, but let’s take a listen to the actual interaction between Ava and Deborah.

[Clip plays]

**Deborah:** So why are you here?

**Ava:** Oh, well, obviously it would be a huge honor to work with someone like you, who has been working so successfully for so long. I mean, you’re a legend.

**Deborah:** Wow. A legend. So you’re a fan?

**Ava:** I mean, of course. Would I be here if I wasn’t?

**Deborah:** What’s your favorite joke of mine?

**Ava:** Man. You know. That’s so hard.

**Deborah:** Well it shouldn’t be. I’ve written over 30,000. Just pick one.

**Ava:** Uh…you know what? I would have to say that your TV show is my personal favorite thing that you’ve ever done.

**Deborah:** You mean my sitcom from 1973? You’ve seen it?

**Ava:** Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, I’ve seen clips.

**Deborah:** Clips? Wonderful.

**Ava:** Um, yeah. Well, you know, a lot of the actors on the show that I most recently worked on were standups.

**Deborah:** You know, I’m going to stop you right there. I don’t work with writers.

**Ava:** You don’t?

**Deborah:** No. Jimmy sent you against my wishes.

**Ava:** I’m going to kill him.

**Deborah:** No, I’m going to kill him.

**Ava:** Great. Well, this sucks.

**Deborah:** Yeah. Sucks. Well at least you didn’t waste too much time researching me.

**Ava:** I’m sorry. Did I do something to offend you?

**Deborah:** Other than walk those chimney sweep boots on my silk rug? Um, no.

**Ava:** Sorry, I didn’t realize it was a shoes off situation.

**Deborah:** Well it’s shoe-dependent. Thank you for your time.

[Clip ends]

**John:** Great. So they’re finally meeting. In the actual episode they start to meet and then of course DJ the daughter interrupts and so you see all of that drama happen and then they finally get to their discussion. This scene was clearly always going to be part of this first episode, because we have to get these two women together in the room. How early on did you know who Ava was in the show? Like who her character was?

**Jen:** I think pretty early on we knew, too. But that one was certainly more – we learned it more and more as we cast. You know, we had this incredible thing where Jean signed on to do the show and you’re like holy shit we’ve got Jean Smart, and then you’re like holy shit we’ve got Jean Smart. Who is going to be play opposite her that’s like 25 and can go toe-to-toe? Oh no.

So the casting process for Ava was really, really long and intense. We saw I think maybe over 400 women for it. Watched that many tapes. And it was always this thing of what Jean has, what Jean is so incredible at is she can in equal parts do comedy and drama. She’s so skilled in both. And so we knew we were looking for someone who also could do that. Someone who could tell jokes and realistically seem like a comedy writer, so someone who is in their bones funny and you believe that, but also can play the more dramatic parts of this show. And so they had to have some real acting ability.

**John:** So what were you looking at for this? Did you write up sample scenes? Or were they scenes from this pilot?

**Jen:** They were scenes from the pilot. So everyone auditioned with the initial Ava and Jimmy scene in his office where he’s telling her he can’t help her get her job and she’s kind of laying out her situation. So they auditioned with that and then they also auditioned with the Deborah/Ava meeting scene.

**John:** OK. So a version of what we just heard?

**Jen:** A version of what we just heard, yeah.

**John:** And that didn’t burn a hole in your brains? Because I’ve always been reluctant to do that because I don’t want to hear that same scene a thousand times and then actually have to deal with it on the day.

**Jen:** Totally. Mike Schur is a big fan of doing fake audition sides because that’s I think part of it. He does not want to hear the same scene over and over and over. And it definitely at a certain point did burn a hole in our brains. I remember just being like I can’t hear this Ava/Jimmy scene one more time. It’s not working.

So, but what was interesting is that there were a lot of really wonderful, talented women who read the part, but for whatever reason a lot of the times we heard the scene Ava just came off as pretty whiny and it was not what we wanted it to be. And then when Hannah Einbinder, who plays Ava, auditioned it just felt different with her reading it. She was like projecting the strength and confidence of a 25-year-old who thinks they know everything, but also there was some very obvious vulnerability right below the surface that felt like she was also accessing, which made Ava not feel whiny and made her just feel like a very interesting character to us.

And so I think what was helpful was even though we had to hear these scenes over and over and over and go through the process of like oh no this isn’t working, junk all the thing in our darkest moments, once we heard it with Hannah and certainly when we heard it in the screen test with Jean and Hannah reading it it was like oh this works. This absolutely works. Which I don’t think I would have felt that if they were dummy sides that weren’t actually from the pilot.

**John:** We had that experience on Go. As we were seeing a zillion actors for Go, and I started to question like did I even write something that is even castable. And then suddenly you get the actors like, oh, that’s Sarah Polley. I get it. It all works.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** And I wasn’t imagining that there was a person who could fill that.

**Jen:** There’s a certain chemistry that happens between the writing and the actor. And when it’s the right actor you’re going to feel it in your gut in ways that you’re not if it’s maybe not the right person reading it.

**John:** So Hannah Einbinder has the vocal fry of a 25-year-old. Did you hear that voice as you were writing this? And also her tendency to kind of stop in the middle of thought. You write with a lot of ellipses in her dialogue. Was that always part of the voice for it?

**Jen:** Yeah, I think we knew that Ava felt more like kind of a drier sensibility, so that was very baked into the character. I think there are a lot of ellipses, but then I also think that Hannah’s natural – she’s also a very talented standup and if you see her perform she has a very interesting, unique cadence, which is much slower than probably your average 25-year-old up on stage. And so it kind of like naturally lined up that way. But, yeah, that was always kind of – she was written on the page the way we imagined it.

**John:** Looking at the words on the page, on page 29 there’s some cuts here and I’m just curious when the cuts came or if they all came in the editing room. So Jimmy actually sent you against my wishes/I’m going to kill him/no, I’m going to kill him, but feel free to kick the corpse. It’s a joke. Did you try it and it didn’t stick?

**Jen:** So this scene, it’s I think a 7.5 page scene or something. It’s incredibly long. And so we always knew – we knew two things. We knew, well, this show lives or dies by the chemistry between these two characters. So, hopefully the chemistry you’re interested in watching them for 7.5 pages. And if you’re not we’re in trouble anyway. But then we also knew when we get in the edit we’re going to need to trim this down, but let’s just shoot it as is and then see where we’re at.

And so, yeah, that was this “I’m going to kill him but feel free to kick the corpse” line, it totally worked. Jean delivered it perfectly. It just felt like the scene was running a little long.

**John:** It’s a little bit of a detour also. It’s pulling attention to somebody–

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** Off the focus here. What happens in the rest of the scene is like we finally get to see Ava kind of monologue and actually have her voice and express her power which is ultimately what impresses Deborah. It’s so fun to actually see somebody sort of cut loose eventually, because we’ve seen Deborah be able to go off, but to actually see – it’s a strange place for an audience to be kind of rooting for both sides of the equation. Because it’s really a true two-hander we’re sort of seeing both sides of the story. And to see them go after each other was just sort of delicious. Just a nice job here at the end of this.

**Jen:** Oh, thank you. Yeah, I mean that was always by design that that was how the scene was going to end. That Ava would let loose and in letting loose and kind of they would start roasting each other the way comedians do and that is their love language. Jokes are their love language. And Deborah would be impressed by Ava’s ability that way. And, yeah, I think it’s written that way and then Jean and Hannah just perform it so wonderfully together. They have such amazing chemistry that we were very happy with how it turned out.

**John:** We have a ton of listener questions, so maybe we can do some speed rounding through some listener questions.

**Jen:** Love it.

**John:** Megana Rao, if you could get us started.

**Megana:** Awesome. Joel asks, “Standup comics seem to get far more freedom to go more controversial while TV writers have to be far more careful with jokes and topics. First, do you think that perception is accurate? And if so how do you find that balance?”

**Jen:** Interesting.

**John:** So standup versus sitcom writers.

**Jen:** I think that, sure, there’s probably a little more leeway given to standups because you are just one person getting on stage one night. You might say something controversial but on the flip side when it’s in a TV show it has to go through so many layers of approval before it actually makes it to air. So I think in the case of jokes that are seen as offensive sometimes I certainly think this when I see it, I’m like how did the – so the initial writer, then the showrunner, then the entire writer’s room, then the studio, then the network, like no one gave a note on this? There are lots of rounds that that could have happened.

I think if it is true that standups are allowed more leeway that way it’s probably because it’s just one person getting up on stage saying something one random night and it’s not going through so many levels of approval. But I have to say as a TV writer it’s not something I think about. I never think like, oh, I wish I could say this controversial thing but I got to get up at the Improv to do it. I don’t really think about, oh, can I get away with saying this or not.

**John:** The incentives are also different for the standup comic. And one of the episodes sort of goes into her trying new material and the standup guy who she confronts. And the incentives are trying to get the laugh, to keep the audience laughing is so different than in a sitcom situation. When it’s just you up on that stage you’re going to say whatever you can do. You just keep saying–

**Jen:** That’s a good point. It’s almost like it’s survival. You just need them to laugh, so you’re probably – who knows what you might say to get that to happen. Whereas, yeah, TV you’re crafting characters and you need to make sure that if someone is saying something controversial it better not be punching down or something that makes this person seem like a horrible person if that’s not the intention.

**John:** Because you don’t have to go home with that standup at the end of the night, but with a sitcom character you want to come back the next week and see that character again.

**Jen:** Exactly. Totally.

**Megana:** Awesome. Nora asks, “So many of my favorite comedies get better the longer they go on. And audiences tend to say stick with it, it gets really good. Why do you think many comedies are growers and not showers?”

**Jen:** I think that is really true. I think it’s – well I think it’s for two reasons. One is, and Mike Schur, again, my mentor and the man I credit with teaching me how to make television, is fond of saying I wish I could just throw out the first episodes of a show when you make it. Because the first eight episodes is kind of this sludge pile of figuring out–

**John:** Parks and Rec, those first episodes are rough.

**Jen:** Yeah. And I think Mike – he would be happy to admit that they were figuring it out. Especially in an ensemble comedy. You are figuring out how are all these characters funny. How are they funny with each other? How does that actor mesh with that actor? And so you are really figuring it out. And so I think when comedies start out maybe not as strong as they get as they progress, it is because the writers, the actors, the crew, everyone is figuring it out a little bit. Comedy, I think there’s chemistry to it. It’s intangible. And you’re trying to capture lightning in a bottle in a lot of ways. And so it takes a little bit of trial and error until you really get there.

And then I think the other reason that comedies feel they get better as they go on is like great jokes come from character. You know, yes, there are some lines on sitcoms where if you just saw them written on someone’s Instagram page you’d be like that’s a funny one-liner. But for the most part jokes are funny because they’re specific to character. Like a Ron Swanson joke can’t be put in the mouth of Leslie Knope or Andy Dwyer because they all have very different character games and world views. And it’s why you love them, because they’re specifically drawn characters.

And so I think when you watch a pilot you don’t know these characters. You don’t know their game. You’re learning them. And it’s the writer’s job to introduce you to them and that takes some time. And so I think as a show goes on you learn these characters, you love these characters, you know their games, so you say like, oh yeah, of course Monica has 11 categories for towels. That’s so her. But you don’t know these characters as well when you’re first watching a show. So I think the longer you spend with them the more you understand them and the more the things they say and do are funny to you.

**John:** You just used a term which I don’t use at all in features. Character game. So what is game?

**Jen:** So character game in comedy is basically like – and this is something that I don’t know in the streaming world if it’s as relevant, but character game is like what is their specific trait that they exhibit over and over again in behavior that is how they are funny. So for example Leslie Knope’s game, and you could say she has multiple games, but one game is she is type A crazy optimistic to a fault. She is like the craziest, hardest worker you’ve ever met in your life. And she does everything in her life 150%. And that is both endearing but also sometimes exhausting to her friends and coworkers. And so that’s the character game.

In the most simplest of terms, like sometimes the character’s game is they’re the dumb one. And that is what gets hit over and over again in their jokes and dialogue and what they do. And so it’s a term that gets used a lot in comedy and I think maybe as comedies become a little more – or at least some of them become a little more grounded, a little more real, maybe we say that less and less because the characters – at least when we were making Hacks like we want the characters to feel like real people, real grounded people.

We don’t all have character games in life. Some of us do. But it’s something that maybe we talk about a little bit less. But certainly in a more traditional comedy network sense you do talk about character game a lot.

**John:** So on the Scriptnotes podcast Craig’s umbrage is his character game?

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** He goes off and my desire to keep things moving along to segue, like this next question.

**Megana:** Leah asks, “In a previous episode Jac Schaeffer mentioned that she received good advice about staffing people in the room. Pick writers who offer something different from what she already had. Is there a type of comedy that is your strongest? And if so, what types of writers do you look for? For example, physical humor? Adept one lines? Etc.”

**Jen:** That’s a good question. That is really good advice for staffing a room. I think to look for people who fill in the gaps for you, who are stronger in things that you are maybe weaker in. Listen, I’m really good at formatting a script. I’m really good on the keyboard. That’s definitely number one maybe. I guess, let’s see, comedy wise probably I feel stronger in terms of jokes and one liners, like just sort of naturally where I come from from the monologue writing world. I think that maybe in jokes more than I think in story.

Story is something that, you know, I think the longer you work in narrative TV you get better at it, but that certainly wasn’t my strong suit when I started out. And so for example I think I’m always, like when staffing Hacks, looking for people who are really great with story. Really great with coming up with story. Coming up with twists and stuff like that. So, yeah, that certainly is good advice. That if you are staffing you want to find people who do things that you don’t maybe do as well.

**John:** This is an obvious point, but something just occurring to me now. A difference with Hacks is you have two central characters, two women who are telling jokes and are aware that they’re telling jokes because it is their business to tell jokes all the time. So there’s two characters who are aware that they’re funny, which is really unusual actually.

**Jen:** Yeah. Exactly. Most times in comedy people are funny but they don’t know they’re making jokes. And in this show, yeah, they know they’re funny. Making jokes is their business. It’s also been an interesting thing because I think when you write about comedians or comedy writers the bar gets set pretty high I think about how funny they need to be in their every interaction. And it’s funny because as a comedy writer, like I personally – the comedy writers who are constantly making jokes in every day conversation are the worst ones to be around. They’re pretty rough.

I, you know, I’m like – I am a comedy writer, but I’ve had so many people, like my hairdresser one time who shares some clients, some friends with me, and he said, “You know, everyone says Jen is so funny, but I don’t see that side of you.” And I was like, OK, cool. I think comedy writers, you think oh this person is playing a comedy writer they better be cracking wise every line. And that’s just truthfully not – it doesn’t feel like a realistic portrayal of a comedy writer to me anyway.

**John:** Yeah. Our next question was from Jay who asks…?

**Megana:** “What’s the correlation between being funny in person and being funny on the page? How does one get better at one or the other?”

**Jen:** Well, I mean, my hairdresser would like me more if I could learn.

**John:** It’s been my experience, too, is that like there’s people who are really, really funny, but they cannot write it down. They don’t have the ability to write in anyone else’s voice. Actually just something falls apart when they actually try to put it down on paper.

**Jen:** it’s really two different skills. And I think there are some people who are so wildly funny in person and also incredibly funny writers. That certainly exists. Someone like my co-creator Paul Downs is an incredible performer, so he’s so funny in that way, but then also a very talented writer. So it’s not like it doesn’t exist. But I think it’s hard. I think there’s no way to learn to be funny. You know, you either have it or you don’t.

So, what was the second part of the question?

**John:** How does one get better at one or the other? So like obviously people can – you went through UCB and so you learned how sketches works and you also learned some performance stuff, but it wasn’t your natural thing. And there’s going to be an upper ceiling to how good you are going to be as a performer, right?

**Jen:** Yeah. I think so. I think I could have taken a million more classes and they happily would have cashed my checks to do it, but I don’t think I ever – it is not in my wheelhouse to be a dynamic, incredible performer. It just isn’t. And that’s OK.

**John:** And we all know some really tremendous comedic actors who could not be any funnier, but they just cannot write. It’s just not natural to them.

**Jen:** Exactly. It is two very different skill sets. And sometimes you’ll find someone who has both, but it doesn’t always line up. And comedy writing is an interesting, especially TV comedy writing, is an interesting hybrid. Because when you are writing on a TV comedy you’re spending all your time in the writer’s room. And the writer’s room is just sitting around a table, breaking story together, pitching ideas, and then going through a script and pitching jokes for that script. I was shocked to find out my first narrative half hour job how little time you spend in front of a computer. When it’s your draft, you’re out on script, you’re writing the episode, but that’s pretty much it.

And so writer’s rooms are a very social place. You have to be comfortable sitting with five, six, seven, eight – back in Parks I think we had like 16 writers. A room of 15 other people and you have to get comfortable pitching your jokes out loud in front of all of them. And that was a real – again, for someone who isn’t a natural performer, and I’m not like an extrovert, that was a real challenge is to get comfortable learning like, OK, I need to just kind of be performing to pitch this joke for this character. So it is two different skill sets. But when you do work in TV comedy in writer’s rooms both come into play.

**John:** Yeah. On the feature side, if you’re pitching a comedy there’s not an expectation that you yourself are going to be hilariously funny in that pitch, but they need to believe that you actually know what funny is. And so if you’re a humorless person going into that you’re not going to get the job. That’s just how it works.

**Jen:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s tough. What else we got?

**Megana:** OK, a different Jay asks, “How many story arcs ahead do you and the staff have a feel for from the start?”

**Jen:** 1,012. No. There’s no set number to be honest. I think basically from the start what you’re more looking at is kind of, especially in a serialized streaming comedy, you’re looking at your tent poles for the season. You’re saying, OK, tent pole one, they meet, they clash. Then mid-season she’s going to quit, but she’s going to go on this bonding trip and learn more about her, which opens her eyes to new experiences and brings them closer. OK, another tent pole, her old LA life calls her back and she gets an opportunity that way.

You’re laying out the very big story points that you want to hit over the course of the season. And then you’re kind of filling in in between that all the little stories. And that is how it works like on our show, Hacks, which is a little more serialized. On more network TV shows, or even Broad City, those shows they were able to withstand a little more one-off episodes I think. So, I remember Parks and Rec like the beginning of every season we would have a writer’s retreat and part of your assignment for your writer’s retreat was to come up with ten episodes and you would just go to the retreat and then you pitch your ten episode ideas to Mike and we would write them all down on index cards and by the end of this retreat we would have this huge board of all the index cards of just crazy one-off episode ideas. Because a 22-episode network sitcom you have a little more leeway.

One that I pitched I remember was like Donna sends a tweet that she thinks is from her personal account but is actually the Parks Department account and it spirals. And that was just a one-off episode that we did that wasn’t tied to a larger arc. But because there are 22 episodes you had the time and space to do that.

And same on Broad City. Broad City we had much more ability to do kind of like one-off episodes that weren’t tied to a larger arc, even though we did on both Parks and Broad City you’re still telling longer arcs, but for something now like Hacks which is only 10 episodes, there’s less of a need to go, OK, we need to generate 500 episode ideas. It’s much more about these tent poles like I said of knowing where you want your character’s story to start, what’s happening in the middle, what’s happening in the end. And then filling in in between.

**John:** Well in the case Hacks in this first season you established stakes for both of the characters right at the very start. And so we know as an audience that by the end of this series we should have an answer to these fundamental questions about what’s going to happen to these two women.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** Which would not really make sense for something like Parks and Rec. That really wouldn’t make sense because the idea of characters leaving, it just wouldn’t track.

**Jen:** Yeah. And we did some stuff, like Leslie is getting recalled at the beginning of the season, what’s going to happen with that? So we certainly did that. But it was less central to the way the show was built.

**John:** Let’s try one more question from a listener.

**Megana:** Jerry asks, “I’ve heard Breaking Bad and Succession both described as comedies. Atlanta has had at least two horror episodes. And Insecure has had episodes that have brought me to the edge of tears. What are the biggest changes you’ve noticed in the form as of late and what do you see coming over the horizon?”

**Jen:** That’s a great question. And I agree with all those assessments of those shows. Those shows have made me laugh and cry similarly, too. I think it’s really honestly exciting to me. It feels like there’s no longer these strict parameters of like it’s a comedy so it needs to sound and look like this, and it needs to be this one way, and the tone always has to be comedic.

Something with Hacks we talked about all the time is like we wanted it to feel really grounded and we wanted it to feel like real life. And real life is equal parts drama and comedy and you’re switching in between the two tones in a matter of instance sometimes. And so what I think is so exciting about all those shows, you know, the question mentioned is like those shows all play with tone in such a cool way. They can be like, yeah, Insecure can be so funny, but then it also has these real grounded heartfelt moments that do make you cry.

And to me that’s so exciting. Like I want my art that I consume to reflect the real world I live in. And it feels like these half hour shows, or all these shows, not just half hour, are getting closer to reflecting the way the real world is in that it plays with tone and it isn’t just one thing.

So I love that shows are now able to do all these different things and it doesn’t feel like there’s hard and fast rules about what they can do. And as far as what’s on the horizon, I hope that trend just continues because I think it’s really exciting. And I think what’s in, I mean, maybe I don’t know if this is on the horizon, because I don’t know what the future of network comedy is, but maybe because these shows are so successful and people love them like maybe network comedies will also get to be a little more fluid with tone and a network comedy doesn’t have to like you know be just one thing. I think that was something Mike did with The Good Place in such a great way. That is not your typical network sitcom and he was given the chance to make it. And I think people were really excited by that.

So hopefully just kind of playing with tone and the rules and letting things be more fluid is something that will spread to not just streaming or cable but also network.

**John:** A thing I noticed about Hacks and Succession both is that they’re not very classically comedies, and yet the dialogue and how the characters are sort of presented are presented with a sort of comedic voice to them. Comedic things can happen in their universe and it makes sense for them do it. And characters talk in a way that I don’t want to say they feel like they’re written by comedy writers, but it feels like they’re writing at a pitch that can feel funny.

As opposed to something that’s done as a straight drama which just would never happen. And so you can basically take the same outline for a Succession episode and write it as just a true drama and write it as this. And the same things could happen in the scenes but it’s really just how characters are expressing themselves mostly that makes it feel like kind of a comedy.

**Jen:** Which is what I love about that show so much. It’s not just a straight drama. I love the comedic moments. And the specific character, again character games, that they kind of play with. I think that’s what makes that show so rich and run to watch.

**John:** All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. I have two short One Cool Things there this week. First is an essay by Zachary Zane that ran in the New York Times a couple weeks ago called You Are Bi Enough. And it’s just a nice way of looking, as we head out of Pride month, bisexuals always kind of feel like should I even be at this party. There’s that sense of like do I even belong here. Am I sort of stealing someone else’s valor for being in the room for this conversation?

And he does a really good job sort of laying out what to do if you’re a bi person who is in a mixed gender relationship and stuff like that. It’s just a really smart essay on approaching that.

Second is much more important for me personally which is that one of the things that has been hardest about the pandemic is it’s been impossible for me to get Caffeine Free Coke Zero, which is my go-to drink.

**Jen:** That is a tough one to find. I’m a Coke Zero drinker too and I never see Caffeine Free Coke Zero.

**John:** It’s really tough. So all the canned beverages took a real hit during the pandemic because there was not enough aluminum to sort of make all of our favorite sodas. But the niche drinks, like the Caffeine Free Coke Zero just became impossible to fill. So my two placeholders have been the Caffeine Free Diet Coke, which is OK. If you can find it, that’s great. And so Megana was able to find it this week. God bless you, Megana. But the other go-to for me has been I have a SodaStream and we always just use it for fizzy water. But they actually sell the syrups to put into it.

And so I was able to track down Caffeine Free Diet Cola syrup for the SodaStream. And if you use just under one ounce in a bottle it is a pretty good approximation of what Coke Zero should be like, what Caffeine Free Coke Zero should be like. So if you’re really jonesing for it – it’s not even really economically advantageous, because I worked it out and it’s $1.50 per liter which is not great.

**Jen:** Not great, no.

**John:** It’s not great. But I mean when you absolutely need it it’s there.

**Jen:** I love that you’re over here doing chemistry, too. You’re in your lab mixing.

**John:** One after another, I’m tweaking the formula to get it just right. And so I would say just under one ounce is what you need to make a perfect caffeine free diet cola.

Jen, what do you have for a One Cool Thing?

**Jen:** My One Cool Thing is my favorite show that I watched over the pandemic, and honestly one of my favorite shows I’ve watched, which is a British show called I Hate Suzie. I don’t know if you guys have seen it.

**John:** I have not. Megana is nodding that she has.

**Megana:** Yeah, I love it.

**Jen:** It is co-created by Billie Piper who stars in it as well. And Lucy Prebble who is a phenomenal writer/playwright. She also writes on Succession actually. But this show is just so, so good. Billie Piper plays this actress who is like somewhat famous. She was like a pop star and now is on a zombie sci-fi show which is like seen OK. And then she’s up for this big career opportunity which is Disney is maybe going to hire her to play an “aging princess.” And so she’s very excited about that.

And right as this opportunity is about to happen her phone gets hacked and compromising photos of her leak. Her with someone who is not her husband. And it is just an eight-episode series. They’re all available on HBO Max. And it’s kind of this exploration of what it means to be a woman in the public eye. What it means to be – just modern womanhood in general. And the performances are just so wonderful. Billie Piper is amazing. It’s one of my favorite performances in a comedy of all time I think.

The woman who plays her manager and best friend, Leila Farzad, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, she’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful show that I feel like not enough people I’ve seen talking about. So, I’m doing the work.

**John:** We’ll start talking about it more.

**Jen:** I love it. Great.

**John:** Great. We’ll do it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Peter Hoopes. 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 I am @johnaugust. You’re on Twitter?

**Jen:** Yes, I am on Twitter. I’m @jenstatsky.

**John:** And we have t-shirts. They are great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

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 Cat Person and the discourse around Cat Person.

Jen Statsky, this was amazing. Thank you so much for coming in.

**Jen:** Thank you so much for having me. This was a real career highlight as a longtime listener.

**John:** Aw, thanks.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Jen Statsky. What was your experience with Cat Person before this? So you were aware of the original short story?

**Jen:** Yes, I was aware. I remember reading it back in 2017 and I remember being very struck by it because it came out during the #MeToo movement when I certainly as a woman and I think a lot of women I knew and globally were like reevaluating their relationships with men and interactions with men and just what kind of it meant to be a woman out in the world. And certainly a woman with a sexual life. And so I was very – I thought the story was – I remember reading it and liking it. And then was also was so – I was like, wow, this is like the first viral short story. I couldn’t believe how much Twitter was discussing it and talking about it. So, yes, I was very aware of Cat Person.

**John:** I remember when it broke as well. It was a New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian and it just spread everywhere. I think because it was a short story it wasn’t a huge commitment. It wasn’t like a book where you had to read the whole thing. You could sit down and read the thing and like, oh, that was really good. And what struck me as I first read it and it was a lot of part of the discourse originally was it felt like it maybe kind of wasn’t fiction. It felt like it was actually just an essay. It felt like it was a first person thing that she was writing about her own experience. And she said like, no, I’m not, it’s fiction.

The term auto-fiction came up there. The sense of like it felt like autobiography but it was actually fully fiction.

**Jen:** Yeah. And I mean I think partly is because it’s so well-written, or so confidently written that people found it hard to believe it wasn’t someone’s actual experience.

**John:** Yes. And that’s where we get to this week. So, this past week Alexis Nowicki, another author, wrote in Slate saying like, OK, well this is actually based on my own experience, even though she’d never actually met Kristen, the original author. And so we’ll put a link to both things in the show notes. This summary of what Alexis is writing is that she read this short story and everyone was texting her saying like, “This is about you, right? This is about you and that guy?”

And she’s like, yeah, but I never met this woman. I don’t understand how this could be the situation. And she eventually reached out to Kristen Roupenian who said like, yes, I knew that same guy. And while I’m not the person, you sort of are the person who is the other character in the story.

**Jen:** Yes. That must have been such a crazy – I found the essay by, it’s Alexis–

**John:** Nowicki.

**Jen:** Nowicki. I loved the essay. I thought it was really, really well-written and interesting. And she describes coming out of a movie and having like dozens of texts being like, “Is this about you?” People sending her the story. And that must have been such a bizarre, strange experience for a person to go through. And yet it goes into a really nuanced, interesting conversation about art and who owns the details of one’s life. Is it ever OK to just point blank take facts from someone else’s life and use them as fiction? It’s really interesting.

**John:** Well so often on the podcast we do a segment for How Would This Be a Movie and Craig is always arguing you don’t need people’s life rights because facts are facts. And the facts that Roupenian was using here are kind of facts. It was basically she didn’t know this person. She looked up and she had heard about this earlier relationship this guy had had and sort of imagined what this woman was like. And Googled and found real information about where she went to school and where she used to work and was just imagining what this life was. And imagined pretty correctly sort of how a lot of this stuff worked.

But it’s the issue of like nothing was illegal here, but where the ethical boundary is between sort of pulling that stuff in.

**Jen:** Yeah. I mean, I guess what was interesting to me and this Kristen when she did, if you read the essay, you’ll see she apologizes for this eventually. She says I’m sorry I should have taken some of the details and changed them so that it wouldn’t be so directly linked to you, which I do – as a writer myself I can’t picture, yes, it’s of course you don’t need someone’s life rights necessarily. You’re always pulling from different people’s lives and experiences. But I can’t really picture writing something and using such specific details that could easily be traced to a person and not just taking the extra step of changing them slightly so that person wouldn’t think it’s about them.

**John:** Yeah. People were pointing out that it’s always dangerous to be around writers because you never know if you’re going to be sucked into this, but in this case it’s dangerous to be around people who could be around writers.

**Jen:** Yeah. Right. There’s always a writer within a few degrees of connection to you and that’s really dangerous.

**John:** So a thing that I’ve always been aware of as I’ve been around writers is like events will happen, or somebody will say something or things come up. You were saying this before about Deborah writing a joke down in her book. Like as a funny thing happens, who owns that funny thing that happens? Who owns that moment?

**Jen:** I have friends who are standups who talk about this specific issue because they’ll go on tour together. And then when you’re on tour you’re living together. You’re going out to eat. You’re on the bus. And something crazy will happen and then it’s a race to who can craft the joke about it first. Who gets to tell it on stage first? It is a really interesting thing when creative people are together. Who has ownership over it? There’s not really a hard and fast rule about it.

**John:** I also – Dana Schwartz makes this point on Twitter that whenever there’s two people it always feels like you have to declare two sides. And it’s this or it’s that. And you can’t actually say that’s an interesting conversation about this thing. She was in the right, she was in the wrong. She’s trying to claim credit for something that she didn’t actually write. And it makes it more complicated than that. I’m not on either team here. I don’t think they should have teams. I don’t think we’re playing a game.

**Jen:** Right. Twitter always rushes to be judge, jury, and executioner, right? So someone always, yes, exactly, like Dana is saying has to be in the right and someone has to be in the wrong. And what I thought was so interesting about Alexis’s essay is that she wasn’t casting herself as the victim and Kristen as the villain primarily. I thought the essay was so well done because it’s a really nuanced, holistic look of like this very strange thing happened to me. I feel angry about it in this way, but I also see that this person has a particular experience of their own.

So I found it interesting that people didn’t take the hint from the essay which is like I’m not trying to cast, oh, this action was evil and this person should be condemned. I’m just working my way through this specific personal experience that happened and kind of exploring this conversation about art and the ethics of art.

So, yeah, that was interesting. Twitter is not great for nuance.

**John:** What’s also strange about this situation is that the third person in this relationship, so Charles who is the basis of the character, is apparently dead, which is dismissed in a single line and not explained.

**Jen:** I know. My jaw dropped when I got to that part of the essay. And then I don’t know if you saw this, but a lot of people – and again we have no idea – but a lot of people on Twitter took the extra step to say, oh, he killed himself. He must have killed himself because of the negative portrayal in this work of “fiction.”

**John:** I don’t think we know that.

**Jen:** We don’t know that at all. That’s just complete conjecture from people on Twitter, which again like rushing to try to put everyone into the category of villain and good person. It’s just so fascinating. But we have no idea how this man passed away. It’s very sad. It’s a very sad part of the essay and that both of these woman are left I think grieving this person is just like a sad bookend to it.

**John:** And there is theoretically a movie version of this, so the tie in to this is so Nicholas Braun of Succession is apparently supposed to be playing this character.

**Jen:** Right.

**John:** And so it just becomes complicated as reality and fiction and meta fiction overlap.

**Jen:** I don’t know what stage – do you know if they’re–

**John:** I don’t know where they are.

**Jen:** I wonder if the current writer is scrambling now to include this newest twist into the Cat Person saga.

**John:** The next Zola saga.

**Jen:** Yeah.

**John:** Thanks Jen.

**Jen:** Thanks.

Links:

* [WGA Pilot Guide](https://www.wga.org/members/employment-resources/writers-deal-hub/pilot-deal-guide)
* [Hacks on HBO](https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GYIBToQrPdotpNQEAAAEa) check out the pilot script [here](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Hacks-Script-It-Starts-On-The-Page.pdf).
* [Jen Statsky](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4278387/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/jenstatsky?lang=en)
* [You Are Bi Enough](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/opinion/bisexuals-coming-out-anna-paquin.html?referringSource=articleShare) by Zachary Zane for NYT
* [Caffeine Free Diet Cola syrup by SodaStream](https://sodastream.com/products/diet-caffeine-free-cola-4-pack)
* [I Hate Suzie](https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GX6MziQh41pYSwwEAAAK4) on HBO Max
* [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/)
* [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 Peter Hoopes ([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/508standard.mp3).