Search Results for: 3 page challenge

The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/screenwriting-in-color).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 494 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Movies are written in black and white but filmed in color, except for Mank which is about the writing of a screenplay for a black and white movie, so the general point still stands that screenwriters must think about color. And today on the show that is exactly what we’ll do.

We will also have a new round of the Three Page Challenge with a special focus on how opening scenes are setting up the reader for the movie that follows. And, of course, we’ll answer some listener questions. Then in our bonus segment for premium members Craig and I will discuss our Olympic ambitions.

**Craig:** Oh, we have those?

**John:** Or maybe you had those at one point.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** Like our sort of fantasy. If you could be good at one Olympic sport in winter and summer games which sport would it be and why?

**Craig:** Oh, OK. That’s fun.

**John:** We might also talk about sort of whether we should have the Olympics and sort of the international implications thereof.

**Craig:** I think that’s also a pretty good – that will get us in trouble. And I want trouble.

**John:** No troubles at all there. But Craig I don’t know if you heard. The WGA is on strike.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** As we record this the WGA is on strike against the ABC quiz show called The Chase.

**Craig:** Oh god. No. No!

**John:** Not your episode of The Chase. So The Chase is this quiz show that opponents in it are big Jeopardy! winners. Like Ken Jennings and folks. And so it is a show that is going into its second season of filming in theory and the WGA has not been able to reach a contract with this show. And we talk about on our podcast how the WGA covers things made for big screens and for small screens, including game shows. The WGA covers shows like Jeopardy! and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and The Weakest Link. This is a show that should be covered by that same kind of deal.

So, the writers on that show are currently on strike.

**Craig:** Hmm. See, I’m looking at the information here. It seems like ITV America, which is the company that produces The Chase, does have an agreement with the Writers Guild of America East, which is kind of the necessary substrate for a strike. You can’t have a strike if you don’t actually have a relationship I think with the company, or if you voted for a contract, or whatever. Anyway, the point being they have a deal with the WGA-E, and they’re apparently just not abiding by it.

**John:** Well, it sounds like there are things that are in that deal that are not up to the level of what a deal needs to be. And so those writers need pension and health benefits. They need residuals. They need the basic protections and they don’t have those yet. So that’s sort of what is at issue right now.

This is being handled by the East because East handles more sort of this kind of show, even though the show actually films out here. So, we hope this is resolved by the time you are listening to this podcast, but just to know that there was a WGA strike that very few people are participating in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And a lot of people may not understand that game shows require writers, particularly these kinds of trivia shows.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** The questions are writing. And people have to do the research and write them and put them in a script and stick them on a teleprompter.

**John:** I remember a campaign at some point called Somebody Wrote That.

**Craig:** The worst campaign the guild ever did.

**John:** Billboard, “Somebody Wrote That.”

**Craig:** I’m so glad you brought that up. It was my least favorite – the best thing about that, like we’re driving around LA and there’s this huge billboard and it has a quote from a movie and then a picture of a screenwriter and then it says, “Somebody Wrote That.” And I guess the point was like, see, actors don’t come up with these lines on their own, but my point was like who is that? Can you put their name on the billboard you idiots?

So, that was the worst campaign we ever did.

**John:** Yeah. But anyway so we will see what happens with this WGA strike action.

**Craig:** Well good luck to them.

**John:** In happier, more local news, so listeners likely know that my company makes Highland which is the screenwriting app for the Mac, which I use to write everything that I write. It is a free download on the Mac App Store and will remain a free download on the Mac App Store. It’s $49 to upgrade to the full version.

But for the past 18 months we’ve also done a student version which is the full pro version but just for people who are in university writing and film programs. And so we partnered up with individual schools to do that to make sure it all works right for them. And now we’re opening it up to everybody. So, if you are a student in a college level writing or film program and would like to get the full version of Highland free for a year there’s a whole new way to do that.

So you apply, you send in a photo of your student ID, and we send you the code to unlock it free for a year. So, if you’re a listener who would like this and you are in a university writing program or film program you go to Quote-Unquote Apps and click on For Students and we will get you set up.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s lovely of you. Well done.

**John:** Yeah, we do try.

Finally, we’ve been talking a lot about scheduling of movies. And this week a whole bunch of movies came sort of smashing around like little broken up iceberg pieces in the summer season. So Black Widow and Cruella are both in theaters and on streaming. It feels like everyone is just trying to figure out how big the summer box office is going to be and when things get back to normal.

**Craig:** Yeah, this one is another whack at the piñata of the theatrical movie business. Specifically because Cruella and Black Widow, they’re big movies, right? So they’re on par with what Warner Bros recently did. And they’re also doing this premier access thing. So you pay for Disney+ and then if you want to see Cruella or Black Widow when they come out that’s another $30.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And is that $30 for the year and then you kind of get everything in that premier access? Or is $30–?

**John:** No, it’s just for that title.

**Craig:** Holy cajole.

**John:** I say that with such confidence. I cannot promise you with that confidence. But I really do believe that it’s for that title.

**Craig:** That’s my move. OK, well, I’m interested to know. But either way that is pretty huge. Because on the one hand you think, well, geez, $30 to see one thing streaming when you’re already paying for Disney+ is a lot, but I think a lot of parents remember that not too long ago, like two years ago, if you wanted to take your two kids and one of their friends to a movie it was going to be way more than $30 because of all the food and everything. So, it’s still kind of a deal.

This is one more shot at the sustainability of the theatrical business. I have no idea where this is going to go. This is nuts.

**John:** It is nuts. So two things. First off, one of the things we need to remember about parents with young kids is you are just desperate to get out of the house. So, going out of the house to see a movie with your kids is a totally viable way to burn some hours on a weekend, as opposed to watching at home. Makes sense.

But I also say like I’m not vaccinated yet but I feel like when I am vaccinated this summer I am excited to see Black Widow and Cruella on the big screen. So I’m increasingly saying what about my own possible movie-going experience in the future here.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the things that is in play here is the secret, not so secret, but the silent economic killer of the theatrical business which has always been marketing costs.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And you and I both know that the marketing costs as they went up were also starting to, I’m going to use the word corrupt, I don’t care, corrupt the creative process of making films, because where it used to be that creative people would say here are the movies that we as a studio want to make, and then marketing people said, “OK, well, let’s figure out how to sell that.” Once you were spending more on marketing than on the movie naturally that flipped.

So the marketing people were telling the creative people what kinds of movies they should pay for. Now, with streaming you don’t have anywhere near the costs involved, because you’re not asking people to leave their house and go anywhere. In fact, every single show on Disney+ will serve as an advertisement for Black Widow or for Cruella.

Furthermore, social media has kind of taking over the job of advertising for you. People just talk about it with each other. So, if a movie like Cruella, I don’t know what Cruella cost, but it looks pretty expensive. A movie like Cruella before in the old days they probably would have spent $150 million marketing that thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, if they only spend $30 million marketing that is a massive difference in how the profitability line is on that kind of movie. It’s enormous. I cannot overstate how big of a deal that would be if the big marketing buy of theatrical movies went away. That more than anything will change everything. And I have to argue probably for the better. Probably for the better.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, the big marketing spends really anchor a movie in people’s heads. And so you don’t get sort of the giant change everything franchises unless you sort of have that marketing push behind them I would argue. But, yes, when Netflix makes a movie that costs $100 million it really kind of just costs $100 million because they’re not spending a fortune on marketing that movie because it’s just they’re pushing it through their own channels. They’re putting up some billboards in the city where the actor lives but that’s it. And they’re not sort of doing the big nationwide campaign for it otherwise. So it’s going to be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

I’m making a movie for Netflix now and it feels like the right thing to be making for that platform and that service, but it’s going to be weird not to see commercials for it and sort of a push for it.

**Craig:** I get that. I just think that if television has taught movies anything about the way streaming works it’s there is value in being unique and good. And that that is more important than kind of putting an advertisement for your movie on every carton of milk in the world because people will find it and talk about it with each other and watch it. And you do save a ton of money. And hopefully this leads to movies returning to a more adventurous mindset and not just a kind of franchise-obsessed, navel-gazing, big, big event movie for PG-13 audiences only.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** All right. Some follow up. Last week we talked about foreign levies and our own Stuart Friedel wrote in to say that foreign levies can be paid to your S-Corp but the WGA just needs a W-9 on file. So, if you are a loan-out corporation you can just register that with the WGA and they will pay it to your S-Corp rather than paying it to you as an individual person.

**Craig:** I did not know that.

**John:** Yeah, so things we learn ourselves. We have another foreign levies follow up here. Do you want to take that?

**Craig:** Sure. Bea asks, “Yesterday I got a WGA foreign levy for a project that was never made. It was a feature writer’s room, single day, major studio. Definitely hasn’t been made yet, if ever, but somehow the WGA is sending checks in its name. How’d that happen?”

**John:** So we won’t say what the name of this movie is, but Craig and I can both see it on the outline. I have absolutely no idea why you are getting this check for this movie that has not been made yet. Cash that check because the only reason the WGA got that check is because the studio wrote that check. And so it’s the studio’s fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not the WGA’s fault. Cash that check. I have no idea why you would be getting this check.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wonder if sometimes out of ease what happens is the countries will say like to Warner Bros, “Here’s a bunch of money that we have for your projects that are kind of…” Because remember they’re not collecting money off of the movies and shows that air. They’re collecting money off of the sale of blank tapes, disk drives, thumb drive, etc.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** So it may be that the studio kind of aggregates all of its expenses and says here’s how we will distribute that money, or here is how it should be distributed. They send a big list of information to the country. The country goes, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, let’s send out that money to the WGA for these things. That’s my guess.

**John:** That’s probably the best guess we can make for this. Basically they had a list of what writers did you employ during this year.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And Bea’s name was on that list and that’s what happened.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Well, cash that check. Whenever I got sort of like small checks for not a lot of money I always treated it as like Panda Express money. Ooh, I can get some eggrolls at Panda Express. That was a treat for me when I got those small checks.

**Craig:** Orange Chicken, man.

**John:** Oh, I love the Orange Chicken.

**Craig:** Everyone loves Orange Chicken. They figured something out. I remember when in the mall I noticed for the first time Panda Express had smartened up and did the double tray of the Orange Chicken. Because remember it used to be the same size tray as everything.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And then they were like, OK, fine, we give in, you people. You love sugar and fat. Here we go. Fine.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** Yup. It’s delicious.

**John:** Some follow up on Episode 491, the deal with deals. Danielle asks, “Following up on your conversation about writer deals, can you cover if-come deals? Specifically how they may or may not be hurting newer writers.”

Craig, have you ever had an if-come deal?

**Craig:** I was offered one many, many, many, many years ago and I said no. But I understood the general wisdom of it. I understood that.

**John:** So if-come deals are really common in TV. And so what will happen in TV is you are a writer with an idea for a series. And so you go and pitch to a studio or to a production company and they say this is fantastic, we really love that idea. We are going to make a deal with you that’s pending us getting a successful setup at a network. And so basically I’ve pitched to Sony and Sony says, yes, we love it, we’ll make you a deal. If it’s if-come on getting a network, so an ABC, or CBS, or somebody else to do it.

Super, super common in TV. And you can sort of get why they do it because that studio is going to be paying you but they’re only going to be paying you if they actually have a home for that project. And so it’s just sort of a given way of doing business in TV.

In features it’s weird and I don’t hear about it in features I think mostly because if you wrote a spec script and somebody wanted to buy it but not really buy it, or sort of have the option to buy it that’s just called an option purchase agreement where they’re paying you some money now and a promise for a lot more money down the road. That’s standard in features. What I’m guessing may be happening here in features would be let’s say, what did we decide it was, it was not the Slinky Movie, not the Uno Movie, what are we–?

**Craig:** Oh, what are we up to now? Oh, Mister Clean?

**John:** Mister Clean. So let’s say the Mister Clean Movie. So the Procter & Gamble or whoever owns Mister Clean says, OK, we love your take on the Mister Clean Movie and we want to be the producer of record on this, so we are going to make a deal for you, but it’s going to be if-come based on whether we can actually get a studio partner to actually release the thing.

I would not be excited about that deal.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because they are basically locking you up for a lot of time and they’re not paying you everything. There’s just no guaranteed money.

**Craig:** Well, even worse, what they’re doing is they’re purchasing insurance against an auction. And this is why I said no. And also I should say if-come was more common during the network dominance era, because now many streaming channels are their own studio, of course. But what they’re saying is like, OK, that’s a really cool idea. We can go and sell that to any one of 12 different places. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to lock you into what we’re going to pay you now and we’re only going to pay it to you once it lands at a place. That means is if there’s a huge competitive situation where everybody wants it the studio will benefit because the rights are going to go through the roof, the licensing fees will be massive. You won’t.

So, much better for you to be like, Nah. If I’m willing to bet on myself here I’d rather just see if a couple places want it and then they can fight over me and then I will also benefit from the competitive situation.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you know, one of those.

**John:** It’s also important to understand that even if you have an if-come deal if they can’t find the buyer at the level that they were expecting, or the kind of situation they were expecting, they might come back to you and say like, OK, we couldn’t actually get that deal so we need to figure out a new deal that’s actually makeable for the thing we’re trying to do.

And so I’ve encountered that in my career where I got like a pretty sweet ass deal, on paper, but then we went out to the market. The one place that wanted it wasn’t going to pay the amount that would actually pay out the other places. So they were going to renegotiate your deal anyway. That also happens.

Having that quote, a good quote, could be helpful for future deals. So there’s some valid, some reason why you might want to do it. But I would say if you’re a newer writer being offered an if-come deal especially for a feature or for a TV project that feels like it already is kind of set up at one place, that just doesn’t make sense to me.

Like an if-come waiting for an actor to be attached, that makes me really nervous.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ll also get if-comes a lot when you’re dealing with a producer that has an exclusivity issue. So you go to a particular company and they’re like well we have a deal with Netflix and we are exclusive to them. So we’re going to make you an if-come deal because there’s nowhere else to go. That’s it. We’re going to go there or we’re going nowhere. At that point maybe makes a little bit more sense.

**John:** Yeah. But it also may make more sense to actually just pitch to the one place that you can go and try to make a deal.

**Craig:** Well, correct. And so then you’re gambling, right? And the interesting things about those arrangements is they can be a little incestuous. So these people have a relationship already with the streamer and they can make a kind of deal where you get screwed and so do you want to lock something in earlier? It’s complicated. Your agent or lawyer will have the best advice. But Danielle that’s basically the long and short of it.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, what is your favorite color?

**Craig:** Red.

**John:** My favorite color is blue. How long has red been your favorite color?

**Craig:** Since the first time someone asked me what’s your favorite color. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it’s always been red. There’s never been a question. And it’s not like, oh, I’ve got to wear red or I’ve got to paint my house red. I don’t do that. That’s stupid. I just like it.

**John:** Yeah. I’m that way with blue. It was always the first answer and I just like blue. And when I say blue I have a very specific blue. It’s like a Crayola Blue. The basic blue crayon.

**Craig:** Standard blue.

**John:** Is the kind of blue that defines my favorite color. But of course like all things as you grow up you develop maturity and you horizons expand and you come to appreciate many other colors that are wonderful out there. And so you get past the sort of like very rainbow colors of your youth.

But I want to talk about color because I’m reading this book, The Secret Lives of Color, by Kassia St Clair. It’s a couple years old but I’m just now reading it. Which goes through the history of how humans sort of came to be able to make the colors that we see and use. Like how dyes and pigments and sort of all these things actually came to be. Because dyes were incredibly expensive, and so it was so hard to find the things that actually got you to that color. And worth more than gold, ounce for ounce, over the annals of history. And it’s only through modern science that we sort of have the ability to reproduce all the colors that are out there.

And I’m reading this book but I’m also thinking about the script I’m writing and I feel like partly because I’m reading this book I’m just very aware of the colors of the scenes that I’m writing and sort of what is what color in what space. And even though I’m not writing those colors necessarily into scenes they’re definitely informing my choices. So I thought we might talk first about sort of how color works on screen and some of the iconic moments that we sort of think about where you couldn’t pull color out them.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. All right.

**John:** So I think of movies with amazing color palettes. Amelie. The greens of Amelie. The pink in Grand Budapest Hotel. 2001 is mostly white. And then there’s some sequences that are all red. So in the movie Knives Out Chris Evans is wearing a sweater. Craig, what color is that sweater?

**Craig:** It was an off-white.

**John:** Yeah. It was on off-white.

**Craig:** It was a bone.

**John:** American Beauty has the red flowers and she’s in the red flowers. Midsommar has a really limited color palette and it’s just the explosive colors of the flower headdresses. So color is such a part of our movies and yet we don’t think about it that much on the page. So, let’s spend some moments thinking about it on the page.

**Craig:** Well it’s hard to do because it is purely visual. Sound I think occupies maybe – well, it depends on your mind. I think everybody’s brain functions differently. For me I find the ability to hear sound from a page much easier than to visualize color so much of what’s on page is dialogue. We’ve been trained since childhood to read books where people are talking to each other and so we are trained to hear words. And therefore we can hear sound effects. And sound effects are also very onomatopoeia-able.

So, well, I made a word. I can describe with words what a smash is. Describing colors turns basically into a simile fist. So it’s tricky to do. And it’s something that I think one of the first things that happens when a director reads a script is that can start to fill in more. The director who is going to be doing the first few episodes of The Last of Us, made this movie, Kantemir Balagov made this movie called Beanpole and color is an intense part of it and so much of our conversation already has been about color and specific color choices and what it means and why they pop up.

You’re actually putting your finger on something that I think is lacking probably in my toolbox. And I don’t think of enough. And maybe I should think of more.

**John:** Yeah. Something I’m trying to be more aware of as I’m writing, but you’re also right that a lot of times our color conversation becomes part of the conversation, becomes our discussion with the director and ultimately a production designer and an art director about how things are going to look beyond what’s just happening on the page.

And so when a filmmaker is thinking about how to shoot something there’s a discussion of color palette. And color palette not just like here’s all the colors, it’s like, no, no, we are being deliberate about what colors we’re using and what colors we’re not using. And really it’s that omission of colors that becomes even the stronger statement. So, in my movie The Nines it has three different segments. The first segment is really leaning towards reds and yellows. And so that informs the color of the light, but also just the wardrobe. We really go into yellows and reds. You will not see any blue or green anywhere in that section.

When we get to section three it’s all blues and greens. And we’re outdoors in the forest and it’s wet. And the light is whiter and bluer and colder. And you will not see any reds and yellows. That is a very common set of choices that filmmakers are going to make about how they’re going to shoot a thing just to make something feel deliberate and not random.

**Craig:** Correct. And I think you’re right that a lot of times it’s the subtractive aspect of it that strikes us. It’s a subconscious thing. We don’t really know that we’re not seeing something. Just like we don’t know we’re not hearing something. But it does create a subconscious, psychological impact which is something of course everybody wants. As opposed to just, oh wow, that’s a red movie.

So, removing things is a really interesting choice. The other aspect of color that I do think about when I’m writing, it’s not specifically a color choice, but overall is a question of saturation

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So saturation is just how – I guess it’s how vivid the colors are. So when you think about, like for instance you did Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Very vivid, right. Candy colors, which is no surprise.

**John:** Once we’re inside the factory. But outside the factory it’s very desaturated.

**Craig:** Exactly. So you make these choices and generally speaking we think of very saturated color as heightened reality and desaturated, particularly very desaturated as verité. So, the opening sequence in almost all of Saving Private Ryan is really desaturated to the point where you’re like, wait, is this black and white? It’s that desaturated. And it makes us feel like we are in something that’s super grounded. And there’s no right or wrong, obviously. It’s a question of tone.

So, with the stuff that I’m writing now I tend to want to write towards desaturation.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a scene I was working on this past week where I wanted that desaturated feel and I was thinking about well how am I going to get that. What is the natural way to do that? And I decided it’s two sides of a FaceTime call. And so I decided on the side I wanted desaturated. Oh, it’s going to be raining on that side and it’s going to be a guy outdoors standing under extra covering, but it’s raining. And that is sort of naturally god’s desaturation. It’s like you’re pulling the color out of things.

**Craig:** God’s desaturation.

**John:** And let’s talk about how color is created, because you can’t talk about color without talking about light. So, what color is the light? Basically what time of year is it? What time of day is it? Sort of where are you at geographically and sort of emotionally at that time?

I just watched Another Round, which I really loved, and it’s set in Denmark. And most of it takes place in sort of summery months, and so it never really fully gets dark. And so the colors are really strange. And it’s sort of always at most like a twilight. And that really affects sort of how you feel about the things you’re seeing and the choice to set those scenes at those times of day versus bright sunlight really does impact how those scenes play out.

**Craig:** Yeah. The impact of light on things, it’s a little scary for me to write it because when you start to get into how the light changes, the color of something as something moves through it, you do risk that kind of purple dialogue that we want to shy away from.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** A lot of new writers are talking about the golden hue as it turns–

**John:** The crimson sky.

**Craig:** And yada-yada-yada. And, of course, when cinematographers read that stuff they kind of roll their eyes and they’re like, OK kid, but this is not actually how light works. But there is a feeling, and I always feel that the goal is rather than to be technical – I like to just be honest, you know, the way the light hits you it makes you sad. Just say that. I think cinematographers vastly prefer that because they know how to achieve that. Just like actors are just like tell me I’m supposed to be sad. I know I can do that. So, I do think about light that way.

And then there are gags, which is our all-purpose moviemaking, television-making term for special things. So there’s a gag where a particular beam of light is coming down through a shaft and it’s combining with something else. Well that you can always call out and describe because that’s really specific.

**John:** Yeah. Well one thing you may choose to call out and describe is the colors that we’re seeing on screen, especially if they’re impacting characters. So characters are making choices about what clothes they put on, how they do their makeup, and that will have an impact. And so I’m definitely not arguing that you’re going to label the colors for every single thing a character is doing or wearing, but it’s important to highlight some things.

Like in the thing I’m working on right now it’s basically a two-hander and one of the characters has sort of a uniform that he wears every day. He just doesn’t want to think about the clothes he’s wearing. And so I’m able to describe what that is that he’s wearing. And the other character I describe as being unafraid of color and pattern. And that just tells you, like, it was a signal to the costume designer you can push this guy a little bit. This guy lives in a heightened space. And so I’m not really calling out color so much as sort of like the range of choices that should be open as we’re visualizing this character.

**Craig:** It’s such a good point. And it’s why I wish that movies would function more like television shows in the sense of how a writer interacts with key department heads, like costume. Because, you know, I’m writing a scene, or I wrote it, in an episode and there’s a crowd of people. Who they are is not important. I just want people to notice one particular woman because something is going to connect through to later. She’s not going to have a name. She doesn’t have dialogue or anything like that.

So, what I’ve done is given her a particular piece of clothing with a particular color. As I’m doing it I’m well aware that this feels very Schindler’s List. There’s the little girl in red where everyone else is in black and white. And so I don’t want to be that. But what I want to be able to say to the costume designer is this is what this means. This is what I’m just trying to achieve. Now tell me how you would go about doing it. Let’s take a look at some choices. I can always go back and revise that. But this was the intention. It is a relationship that should exist in movies and weirdly in features, for whatever reason, everyone feels the need to aggressively sequester the screenwriter from everyone else. And it just, I don’t know why other than directorial insecurity. I don’t know. It’s just bizarre.

**John:** I’m thinking back to go, my first movie, and Sarah Polley’s character, Ronna, where’s this iconic sort of red leather coat. And that’s not scripted in there, but the idea that she would have a sort of signature look, that makes total sense. What is scripted in as a color is that Adam and Zack are driving a yellow Miata. And a yellow Miata is actually just a very specific joke. And I knew it would also photograph well at night and so you could see it in these dark scenes. But them driving a yellow Miata actually does pay off. It’s a recognizable car. It also tells you something about them as characters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that becomes important. Again, we’re always arguing for specificity, but as a writer you have to be very deliberate about what things you’re putting in and what things you’re putting out. So we’re not saying to make everything a color but to be thinking about color and thinking about whether color could be helping you tell the story, especially what’s happening in the scene.

**Craig:** 100%. And if you find yourself in a specific moment wondering what you can do to get the awesomeness of your mind’s image across think about color. Because there may be a point in your script where you may want to hammer it and help people see. I think about that moment in The Last Jedi where the one spaceship goes light-speeding through another one and splitting it apart. And it’s so white. But it’s also starlight white. And I don’t know if Rian made that clear on the page, because he’s also directing and he doesn’t have to necessarily communicate it on the page the way we might have to with a different director.

But it was a moment where you go, ah, sound stops, this incredibly bright light shines, and I can see where a signature moment could really use a full attention to color on the page. So, it’s a good choice to make when you’re looking for something special as well.

**John:** And I haven’t gone back through Scott Frank’s scripts for Queen’s Gambit, but that is a series that uses color quite aggressively to establish time period. Because different time periods have different colors that are predominate. And so calling out mustard yellow appliances, that’s not just painting the walls, that’s actually anchoring you into, oh, this is what this kind of kitchen feels like because mustard yellow is a very specific time period.

And so just be aware of that. I think if you’re doing anything period it’s worth looking at sort of what the colors were that were dominant at that time because it may be worth calling those out.

**Craig:** Time and place.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Because there are places that have colors. The colors of 1980’s Soviet Union, well they’re colors. I mean, you know what they are. We certainly did our research and there’s certain ones that keep popping up and they’re glorious. I mean, they’re not colors we used. I guess on one level you’d go that’s objectively an ugly color, but on another level you go it’s weirdly kind of beautiful and hypnotizing. So think about that in terms of place as well because no question that color is reflected by culture in huge ways. There’s just certain cultures just have a different point of view on color than others.

**John:** So my advice for screenwriters going forward here, listening to this conversation, as you’re watching movies and TV shows be aware of color and be aware of when you think those choices of color were deliberate and sort of how early in the process those choices of color might have been made. Because I suspect you can retroactively write the scenes and decide, oh, they really called out that color quite early on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then as you’re going through the outside world just try to be more aware of the colors that you’re seeing. Because imagine yourself in a scene in a space. What would be the predominant color? And so if you’re hiking in the Grand Canyon you’re just going to be overwhelmed by that red color. And so that is going to influence any scene that is being shot there. If you’re in certain forests it’s just going to be overwhelmingly green unless you’re doing something to desaturate it. It’s going to be just super, super green.

So just be thinking about what the impact of color will be if you were to watch this on a screen.

**Craig:** Great advice.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get to our Three Page Challenge. So, this time we’re doing things a little bit differently. So let’s establish first what’s normal about the Three Page Challenge is we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their movie or their script and we read through them and offer our honest feedback. We’ve been doing this since very early on in the show.

But based on our conversation last week we said like you know what’s interesting about the Three Page Challenge is we’re just reading these pages in a vacuum and we don’t have any sense of what’s happening in the rest of the story, so we don’t know whether these opening scenes are actually setting up the movie that we think they are.

So what we asked our listeners to do is to send in their three pages but also give us a log line or a description of what happens in the rest of the script so we can see whether we were right and whether we set these up right. So let’s welcome on our producer, Megana Rao, to get us set up for this.

**Megana Rao:** Hey guys.

**John:** Hey. So we sent out an email to our premium subscribers on Sunday afternoon saying like, hey, we’re going to try this thing. Send in your script and send in your log line, too. And how many responses did we get?

**Megana:** And we got 190 responses. I read all of those.

**Craig:** Oh wow. Oh man.

**Megana:** By Tuesday night my brain was absolute mush. So I had to ask Bo to help me narrow it down from like the top 10 to 15.

**Craig:** Thank you, Bo. Thanks for helping, Bo. But so you read nearly 600 pages.

**Megana:** Yes. But if I found two typos like pretty early on I was like I’m not going to keep reading this.

**Craig:** Ooh. I like it.

**John:** That was a new thing I asked Megana to put in as a check because I get frustrated when we do a Three Page Challenge and you and I spend time talking about stupid typos on the page. And so going forward if Megana sees typos they go away. We’re not going to consider them anymore. Because you just don’t send in your stuff with typos. Have someone else read this first.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you want us to care about, at the very least you have to care about it.

**John:** Yeah. And also so this episode will have an element of surprise and mystery because Megana has seen the writers’ log lines for these things, the synopses, but you and I haven’t. So we’re going to speculate what we think the script is about and then she will tell us what the writer thinks the script is about.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** All right. Let’s get us started. Megana, can you talk us through Rinky Dink by Stephen Brower. And we’ll have a PDF in the show notes, but if you could give us a quick synopsis.

**Megana:** So Elias, 28, films a promo video for his aunt, Janet Witherbaum, a bronze-level figure skater in her 40s, at a skating rink in Minnesota. Janet is raising money for her trip to the National Championships of Adult Amateur Figure Skating. Elias tries to teach Janet a TikTok dance which she doesn’t get. Through talking head interviews we learn that Elias’s parents have died and that Janet taught him to skate but doesn’t allow him to skate at her gala events.

**John:** Craig Mazin, what was your first read and instinct on Rinky Dink?

**Craig:** Well, I was enjoying. The Minnesota kookiness, like wacky Minnesotans is a well-mined area, you know, from Fargo, and the Fargo show. But I’m a sucker for a good ice skating comedy and it definitely feels like a comedy. And I liked the way it started. Janet was an interesting character. I liked the say she was described and I liked the way she performed. I could see it. I could see the whole thing.

I ran into trouble on page two. So, I was cruising along. But on page two what happens is we go from this POV of an iPhone that is recording her and then there’s a wide shot of her nephew, Elias, shooting her through the iPhone. OK, cool, I get it. We went from an iPhone POV to that. And then it just says, “Elias Talking Head.” And he starts talking and I’m like where is he? I didn’t understand until quite a bit later that what’s happening is Stephen is putting Elias in one of those like Office-style testimonials somewhere else, but that needs to be spelled out really clearly. Because I was baffled for a bit about where the hell he was.

My other issue was I couldn’t quite get a read on Elias’s age. I mean, we are told that he’s 28. And we’re told that he’s kind of sweet and very easily steamrolled, which I liked. But he was interacting with her the way teenagers interact with old people. You know? Like “Come on let me show you the latest TikTok dance or let me say randos.” He didn’t seem like somebody on the edge of 30. So I was a little confused by the character there.

But I like the setup of things. It seemed like there was an interesting concept. Elias was still fun. And I thought there was a really good line when he says, “This year I worked up the courage to ask Janet if she would mind,” you know, to perform. “And she said, ‘yes,’ she would mind.” Which I liked.

This is cold open for presumably a series. It does not end with much of a punchline. I think we talked about last week how important punchlines are, whether they’re dramatic or comic. And this one just sort of ends. So that was an issue.

**John:** Craig, I literally wrote “not quite enough punchline.”

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** So, this feels like Modern Family. This feels like Modern Family, sort of Best in Show kind of space in that – whether or not there’s a documentary conceit like the way there is in The Office, or it’s just like for whatever reason they can talk directly to camera in these confessionals, it has that feel. And I mean that in a really good way. Like if I were to read this whole script and the whole script was to this level I’d be like, oh, this is a person who can write a Modern Family kind of show and shows real finesse with it and the ability to tell a joke and sort of get things going.

I have the same concerns you do about Elias though because I had forgotten that he was 28 so I just kept aging him down and down as I flipped through the pages.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Weirdly I know a lot about his parents dying and stuff like that. I know a lot of backstory, but I don’t get the great sense of who he is individually and specifically. And I’m asking a lot for the first three pages, and so I don’t want to sort of push it too far, but I don’t have a great sense of who he was at the end of these three pages in the way that in a Modern Family or in The Office I felt like I would have in the first three minutes. And so that’s a thing which I think can be worked on.

But let’s talk about some of the things that work really well here.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Page one, “Right now and always she means business.” Great. That scene description on the page it’s working really nicely for me here. Elias says, “Sorry, are you sure though? That’s what it’s called.” “No, I know.” “National Championships for Adult Amateur Skaters.” The just repeating it again to get the extra underline on the joke works really well and has a good sense of it.

On page two, here’s an opportunity to just trim a line but also I think works better as a parenthetical. So, Elias has his talking head. And so the “’whole social media thing, so’… He crosses his fingers. “’Her idea.’” I wouldn’t have broken out to the action line for that. I would have just kept in parentheticals crossing his fingers. It saves you a line and also keeps that thought together because it really should be one thought.

**Craig:** Right. I totally agree with that. I thought that one thing Stephen did pull through these three pages in terms of Elias is that he has got one of those indomitably happy spirits. So even when someone is kind of being insulting to him, or mean, he just keeps on smiling. You know, he’s like okie-dokie. So, he has a little bit of that weeble-wobble, you can tip him over but you can’t knock him down. And so I liked that. I liked him.

And so that’s why I kind of have a suspicion about where this is going, but you know, look, I’m not in possession of a log line.

**John:** What you’re saying about indomitably happy, like if he’d called that out on page one or page two, sort of like shortly after meeting him, that’s a fair thing to note because that colors what we’re seeing of the rest of his lines.

**Craig:** Right. It could contextualize that stuff for people a little bit better. I agree. But I thought that what was working here was that Janet feels like an interesting potential villain and Elias feels like an interesting potential hero. I like that the hero doesn’t quite get that the villain is the villain. And I think mostly other than the kind of simple clerical business like letting me know that we’re dealing with kind of Office testimonial, including where are they when they do it, you just need to kind of give us a good ending there. Because it just sort of petered out.

**John:** So this is the part of this special episode where we speculate about what the rest of this pilot is. And so I’m guessing that while they are central characters to this that there’s actually a pretty – there’s a bigger ensemble at work here. Because it feels like that kind of show. And so we’re going to see more of that family. Meemaw may still be alive there. And I think since Elias is our point of view character it’s going to be sort of centered around him. And so he will be sort of the straight man in – the “straight man” – amid all these sort of crazy, kooky people around him.

And so this first episode will go up through her event to raise money for her going off to this championship. And that things will go awry in trying to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Certainly we’ll have lots more characters. I can’t shake the feeling that this is going to turn into Elias versus Janet. And Elias is going to get a chance to skate in the Adult Amateur Figure National Championships. And either Janet is going to become his coach, or Janet will – so Janet has to leave the dream behind and help her nephew achieve his dream. Or, that they actually aggressively compete against each other, which would be fascinating.

But it does seem like ultimately this is going to turn into Elias hopefully in some final showdown a la Strictly Ballroom or something.

**John:** Megana Rao, can you come back and tell us what does Stephen Brower say happens in the rest of this script.

**Megana:** All right, so this is the log line we got from Stephen for Rinky Dink. “A charmingly delusional 40-something figure skater must prove her work among apathetic has-beens, cutthroat mothers, and snotty little children.”

**Craig:** Oh, so Elias is just sort of along for the ride.

**John:** Yeah, so she’s the central character.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** That can work, also.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** I mean, we’ve definitely built shows around sort of a delusional central figure before.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that makes total sense, right? So it’s maybe more of an ongoing thing. But, you know, this is the fun part. You kind of guess from these three pages. It’s no surprise that you might think that, OK, the thing that the three pages sort of highlights is what you would imagine everything to be about. But that’s interesting. I hope that Elias does get a chance to perform in that show. Because he’s sweet and he deserves it.

**John:** Nice. All right. Let’s look at Twilight Run by Andrew McDonald and Nick Sanford. Megana, start us off.

**Megana:** Twyla, 30s, wakes up in a 1980s Camaro next to a character titled Dipshit. Dipshit tells her she needs to take the edge off and offers Twyla a pack of cigarettes that she throws out the window. We cut to Twyla, Dipshit, some henchmen, and a French scientist in the pasture outside of the car. The French scientist claims that he has a world-changing technology and will only deal directly with Twist Jackson.

Twyla tells him he’s out of luck. Suddenly, a cowboy figure rides in on horseback. This is Twist Jackson. He exchanges briefcases with the French scientist who tries to warn Twist of the Twilight Run. Twist shrugs off the warning and later opens the box to reveal a swirling green gas.

**Craig:** You know. The usual.

**John:** The things that happen. This is a heightened world. And so one of the reasons why this made the finalist list is because we could talk about tone. We can sort of talk about what universe you’re setting up. And this is a clearly heightened universe. And I think the things that worked in this were about setting up what kind of heightened universe it is.

I don’t sort of really know what the rules of this universe are, but things are a little bit goofy in sort of a Buckaroo Banzai or a Rick and Morty kind of sense. And it’s good to see that by the end of page three. I got a sense that there’s some logic behind this even though I don’t quite understand what’s happening here.

My biggest issue was Twyla who is identified as our hero. I know nothing about her by the end of this. I really have no great insight into sort of who she is and why she’s special, or what her deal is. And instead Twist Jackson is the person who is sort of occupying things. So, by the end of these three pages I wanted a better sense of what makes Twyla interesting other than sort of being kind of grouchy and spacing out. I didn’t get a great sense of that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What were you seeing Craig?

**Craig:** Definitely Buckaroo Banzai. I mean, this just seems like an ode or an homage to Buckaroo Banzai. We could be totally wrong but that’s surely what it feels like at least through these three pages.

Couple of things. Tonally, there is a little bit of a mismatch because the first page feels tonally rather grounded actually. It’s just a couple of people in a car. They’re talking to each other. I was a little bit confused about, again, where we were. When I see somebody in a car in my mind they are – she’s behind the wheel. And then she looks over at – is she looking over to the right, to the passenger seat? Or is she looking out the window to a car next to her?

**John:** And I would say that the first two-thirds, “a woman’s face through a rearview mirror,” like I just didn’t really quite know what was happening there. And so even the second reading through I didn’t quite know what I was seeing, or why I was seeing it.

**Craig:** Correct. And I think that this underscores a larger issue that I want to talk to Andrew and Nick about. But the one thing I do know for sure is that the French scientist’s dialogue, “This discovery will change the world. I could have sold it to nations the world over. I made a deal with Twist Jackson. I want to deal with Twist Jackson,” even if the tone is heightened that’s just annoying. You have to kind of establish that a character lives in a world of bad dialogue to have him successfully deliver the bad dialogue. But we just met him. It’s literally the second – the first thing he says is, “Where is he?” which is, I don’t know anything, and then the second thing he says is this incredibly arch, villainy plot exposition thing.

So, again, you can get away with it if you know that that’s the world that guy lives in, but until you do harder to get away with.

Here’s the bigger issue, the biggest issue, and it ties directly to into what John is saying about how we don’t know anything about Twyla. There is no sense of perspective in these three pages. None. The perspective is I think a camera.

**John:** I felt like I was in a wide shot for the whole time.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. Because nothing is centered on somebody observing. Everything just happens and we’re observing, which is kind of no good. Especially when we’ve established a hero. The reason that we’re so confused about what the hell is going on is because you guys have this visual reveal that you just sort of toss out there. Like they’re in a flat open pasture. Well that is not where we expect a 1981 Z28 Camaro to be, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. So make a reveal out of it. Acknowledge that we’re not quite sure where we are, whatever it is.

And then this conversation, give me a sense that Twyla is having reactions. When Twist Jackson does show up, essentially completely contradicting what Twyla said, what does she think? We know what the French scientist thinks, but what does she think? When he shows up and grabs this thing what is she doing? She’s gone. She literally is gone. But somebody’s perspective has to be the perspective.

And it’s one scene. And in one scene, or one connected scene basically once we reveal where we are, one character has the perspective. One. So who?

I don’t mean POV. I just mean who are we kind of anchoring to?

**John:** Yeah. Like who is our entry point character? We’re sort of standing in their shoes as the scene is happening. And we don’t have that here yet.

**Craig:** We don’t.

**John:** Let’s talk a little bit about the words on the page. “Asleep, her head resting on a plain white pillow.” Well, there’s a color, just white. White pillow. Dipshit has prelap. It’s not really a prelap because it’s not like he’s going into really future stuff.

**Craig:** I circled that also. I was like it’s not prelap.

**John:** Yeah, so that’s just off-screen, or voice over. You can do either one of them. Both of them are acceptable here. But that’s not really prelap.

But that whole first sequence I just didn’t get the point of it. I really had a hard time understanding what that was. So, if you need that, if this really becomes important for your story that you need that, great, but I feel like just that precious time and you need – we talk about sort of the first line of dialogue in a movie, the first image in a movie is so crucial, so precious. Just to be wasting it on something that we can’t understand or really see, it’s not good. So I think starting someplace else will help you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also want lines to be motivated. We’re going to see this issue come up in our next three pages as well. So in the very beginning, “TWYLA, our hero. 30s, short hair, black bomber jacket. Don’t fuck with her, she won’t fuck with you. Lounging behind the wheel, she looks over at: SOME DIPSHIT…” This is what you’ve described. I’m looking at a woman. She is sitting there. And then she turns for no reason to a guy who then says something. Like he was waiting for her to look at him for him to say what he’s saying which makes no sense. Especially when he’s saying “you keep zoning out.” Why would he say that after she’s turning to look at him?

That’s not what zoning out means. If she’s zoned out and then she hears, “(OS) You keep zoning out,” and then she turns and looks. So you see what I’m saying? And again that helps drive perspective so we understand we’re with her. That’s kind of important.

**John:** Lastly, these three pages had more colons in it than I’ve sort of ever seen in a script. Basically Andrew and Nick have made a choice that colons are going to be there dashes. And it’s fine. I’m not complaining. It’s a way of doing things. And so in places where you or I might use dashes or some other piece of punctuation they’re using colons. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Works.

**John:** Go for it. There’s a whole range of styles of work and at least it’s consistent. There were no other real problems on these pages in terms of like formatting screenwriting stuff, so go for it. If that’s your style knock yourself out.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, you know, perspective guys. Big one.

**John:** All right. So Craig we’ve got to speculate. What happens in this script?

**Craig:** Oh boy. Well you’ve got this really weird thing going on in the very first shot that’s like some sort of dreamy thing. I think it’s Buckaroo Banzai and I think that Twist Jackson is maybe an idiot and I think maybe Twyla is going to have to save the world from Twist Jackson’s arrogance as he seeks to do something with the swirling green stuff that leads to the Twilight Run.

**John:** Yeah. I think the box with the swirling green gas is a MacGuffin and there are going to be a bunch of people after it. And what this deal was and sort of the bigger stakes of it all are going to be important. And that she will be forced to make a choice about which side she’s on. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** Now let’s find out how we did.

**John:** Megana, what’s the truth?

**Megana:** Wait, can I prolong the reveal and ask you guys a question?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Yes.

**Megana:** What do you think of the character description that’s “some dipshit who will get blown up by page nine?”

**Craig:** Great question. I personally have no problem with it. I think it’s a tone signifier.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So it’s the first indication that we might be dealing with a bit of a wacky heightened reality. I’m totally cool with that. That page unfortunately didn’t have anything that the movie viewer or TV viewer would detect that would indicate a heightened tone. It only had kind of a very mundane situation between two people. So it’s a little bit of a cheat. If the visuals matched that attitude I’d be totally cool.

**John:** Yeah. I agree. I mean, I should mention that I was never clear who the goons were working for. Sometimes it seemed like Twyla’s goons and sometimes it seemed like the French guy’s goons. So just be aware of that, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think there’s two sets of goons.

**John:** Too many goons.

**Megana:** So here is their log line. Five years after a deep undercover operation ended in failure a former ATF agent teams up with a smart but socially awkward tech specialist to infiltrate a deadly cult and stop an arms deal that if successful could alter the very fabric of reality itself.

**Craig:** That’s plot. We don’t quite get what the character stuff is there. It’s so funny, we only think about stuff with character. But again log lines are very plotty, aren’t they?

**John:** They are very plotty. Yeah, I guess I could buy her as a former ATF agent who then discovers this sort of heightened universe world. But I feel like Twist Jackson exists as a semi supernatural character, just sort of appears out of nowhere and rides a horse. So, yeah, it’s not quite what I would guess. But teaming up to stop a thing, sure, you’re setting that up right here on page three.

**Craig:** There’s no sense of tone in that log line which I think actually might be a mistake. I think it’s good to kind of indicate – the way that he’ll get blown up in nine pages. Indicate a little bit of a sense of that heightened-ness because otherwise people are going to read this and go like “What is this?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Embrace the Buckaroo.

**John:** That could be Mission: Impossible.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** That could be a whole bunch of different set ups.

**Craig:** It could be a billion things. And it seems like what these guys are going for is Buckaroo Banzai. I mean, the dude is named Twist Jackson for god’s sakes.

**John:** Cool. All right, it’s time for our third and final Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** By the way, we’re doing poorly. I just want to point out. O for 2.

**Megana:** Great. So South Carthay by Alex Rennie. In the middle of the desert 11-year-old Andy watches the 1988 film Hellraiser 2 with his brother Parker, 13, and their pit bull, Jules. Parker is blind and relies on Andy to narrate the movie to him. Their mother, Maggie, 35, speaks to her agent Karen on the phone in her home office. Karen tries to set up a meeting for Maggie’s new book in Santa Monica but between doctor’s appointments for her sons Maggie doesn’t have any availability. Karen urges Maggie to move from the desert to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Craig, do you want to start us off.

**Craig:** This, I’m going to talk about a couple things. My first question and I still don’t have an answer for it is what year is this.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Because they’re watching a movie from 1988, but I’m not sure if they’re just watching it as an old movie or if this is 1988. And it will become relevant in a little bit.

But there are two instances of a problem in here that I alluded to in the prior pages and that is – I don’t know what else to call it – the movie waiting. It’s like reality waits for something to happen. So here’s what happens at the very, very beginning. We get a description of a two-story house in the center of a barren desert. It’s very, very hot.

“The scene is suddenly interrupted by a demonic voice. Hellraiser, prelap,” once again not prelap, “you solved the puzzle box. You summoned us, we came.” And my question is how does that suddenly happen? The movie is on, right? Like it’s not like somebody suddenly starts up a remote for the movie.

What you can do, Alex, if you want to just not have rando dialogue and then that line have music that we go like what is this weird music. That’s weird music for this. And then the line would go, oh, that was score from a movie. But the point is the movie can’t wait. It can’t just suddenly come in.

Because we then go to a television screen and we realize that these two kids, Parker and Andy, have been watching it. Have been watching. Not just started, right?

I liked the reveal that Parker is blind. I thought that was really well done. Because first I was a little bit like I don’t understand why he’s asking these questions that he’s asking. And then I was like, oh, that’s why. And I love that feeling, right. There’s a joy as a moviegoer or television watcher to think that you got the writer and then you realize they got you. So I like that.

The problem of the world waiting for something to happen occurs again. These guys are watching TV and at the same time I assume their mom is on the phone with her agent. And that scene begins with the agent on the phone saying, “Mags, I sent them your book yesterday.” What were they talking about before? So the phone rings, I answer it, and then I just wait, wait, wait, oh the camera is here. “Mags, I sent them your book yesterday.” That is not how that works.

So you need to pick them up in mid-conversation, or have the phone ring and have her answer. Either way you can’t just suddenly have this line start in. Especially because it’s good news and it just makes no sense to have her waiting.

There’s a story problem here that you’re describing, or a character problem rather, that Maggie is being – she’s a book author and she’s being told she needs to have a meeting in Santa Monica at noon tomorrow and her problem is that Andy has a doctor’s appointment, so maybe they can do Sunday. This sort of like, ah-ha, single mom raising kids trouble. But the issue is this feels old because we’ve just spent a year not having to go to Santa Monica. Like you can Zoom. So that’s why I want to know what year is this.

**John:** Craig, I was also concerned about what year it was based on page two, “Maggie sits in front of a desktop word processor, a house phone pressed to her ear.” And I’m like, wait, what universe is this? First off, what is a desktop word processor?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** A desktop PC I guess? Her desktop word processor, are they talking about that post-typewriter but before it was a real computer thing?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s a landline because that’s just what it is? Because that’s conceivable but that’s a very specific time period. And I don’t think that was really what Alex was going for here. So, again, one word choice of saying word processor rather than computer threw me and made me question what year this was happening in.

**Craig:** Or maybe it is happening in 1988 or 1989 and Alex just wants us to suss it out. And I guess what I would say is you need to give us a clearer indication than that. There just needs to be a clear sense, especially because they’re watching a scene from the 1988 horror feature. So they’re watching it on television. It’s either on video tape. The point is they’re not going to see it in theaters, so it’s not 1988. So when is it?

OK, so you’ve got to figure that out. And then finally I would say that the last bit here where Maggie is arguing with Karen about where she lives feels a little soft.

**John:** I didn’t buy it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just don’t buy it. It just didn’t make any sense. Like it doesn’t matter that she got Road R as opposed to R Road. And she wouldn’t know that that’s where the airplane graveyard is. It doesn’t seem – and also this entire discussion feels very elementary. This is a real problem, but the way they’re discussing it and the way that Karen is responding just feels very elementary. Karen does not feel like a human. She feels like a plot machine.

**John:** So here’s where I liked about the characters, and the setup, and the world. And so I’m going to – and I guess this ties into where I think the story is actually going. I liked the brothers and one brother is blind. I liked the mom, the setup. I like them being out in the desert. I thought there was a promising space for a movie there. And I don’t think they’re actually going to stay out in the desert. I think they’re going to move to South Carthay, which is Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just my guess about why it’s titled that. So I like that in the setup. And so I dug these pages even though I thought a fair number of things weren’t working.

One thing I want to point out is just right at the top, “EXT. DESERT – DAY 1 A two-story house sits in the center of a barren desert landscape, dotted with patches of scrub brush.” You’re not giving me enough there. First off, there’s not just a desert. What desert? A California desert? Where are we? Anchor us. Because if you say desert I guess I’m thinking of the Sahara until you give me more stuff. So anchor us a little bit more.

And tell us what it feels like. You don’t have to describe every little thing, but is it just barely above a trailer park? Is it a two-story trailer home? Did it have that kind of feel to it? But I just don’t get a sense from this of what kind of space we’re living in.

When we get into her office we do get some more details about what her office is like and I liked that. I got a sense of character making choices that influenced the environment that they were in.

Craig had already pointed out the Hellraiser problems or the voice over that’s happening that becomes the Hellraiser dialogue. My way of handling this in general would be scratch that line “The scene is suddenly interrupted by a demonic voice.” You just hear character name Demonic Voice, “You solved the puzzle box. You summoned us. We came.” New action line. “A man’s voice screams in terror. Cut to…” And then you’re in. And that’s great. So we’re wondering what are we hearing rather than spoiling it by saying Hellraiser right at the start.

**Craig:** Right. I think that’s a great idea.

And I want to point out that Alex does do a really good job of creating perspective because in this first scene it’s not there’s an indication in the action that we’re meant to identify with Parker and understand the scene from his perspective, but we do. It’s just written in that way. We understand we’re with him and his inquisitiveness and his confusion. And that’s good. I mean, there’s good stuff there. But I’m nervous about some of the elementary nature of the drama that’s being created.

**John:** A few other small things to look at. In American screenplays parentheticals get their own line underneath the character’s name. So on page one, that “unsure” right now is tucked into that dialogue line. We don’t do that in American screenplays. On page two, two action lines. “Andy thinks, picking at a set of stitches above his right eye.” That’s great. That can work. Later on, “Andy’s sandwich collapses as he struggles to keep it together.” Those are two completely separate actions that are just too close together. I feel like you’re just throwing too much business at this one character. And it’s distracting from the scene. So either he’s working on the stitches or he’s trying to eat this sandwich like he was falling apart.

Pick one. There’s just too much there.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And if you imagined him picking at the stitches with the hand that was holding the sandwich because they’re itching and then it collapses, that’s fine. But you’ve got to let us know. But absolutely. You don’t want to have him pick-pick, and then line, and then a line, and then he’s doing an entirely other thing that implies some sort of sandwich disaster occurred. So it’s just like time management issues here in terms of continuity of reality.

Guesses, I guess it’s time to guess, huh?

**John:** It’s time to guess. So I was speculating that this family is going to move to the Carthay Circle part of Los Angeles which is close to where I live and that it’s going to be about them adjusting to their new life there. But I don’t have any sense of what the actual plot is of this story. These three characters are centered to it all, and perhaps there’s maybe stretching, reaching that it could be kind of a Lost Boys situation where it’s like the boys have their own adventure and the mother is sort of a secondary character. That’s my best guess at this point.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does feel like, and I don’t like this necessarily, but it does feel like mom is being setup to just be mom from E.T., like problem to be avoided.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And who is having a generic single mom problem like divorce, or balancing job and children, without more flavor to it. It does feel like this is going to be about Parker and Andy and some kind of horror thing, I hope. Because that would be fun. And, yes, moving to LA. But, you know, I have no clue from this which is not, I mean, again, 0 for 2. So let’s see how we did.

**Megana:** OK, so Alex wrote in, “When the MacLaine family inherits their dream home they quickly discover that their new neighborhood hides a sinister secret and must work together to find the truth.”

**Craig:** There we go. Well I like working together.

**John:** I like working together. I think we were closer than I would have guessed.

**Craig:** Oh definitely.

**John:** Yeah. It also has like a Fright Night quality where you move to a new house in this neighborhood. I like that.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, Lost Boys, right? You literally, I mean, that’s exactly what happened. They moved to a house. It harbors a big secret. But I’m really happy to hear that it’s all of them together so that mom isn’t just mom, but mom. Good.

**John:** Yay. Well that was fun. So, as always, we want to thank everyone who submitted their pages, especially Alex, Andrew, Nick, and Stephen for sending in your stuff. Thank you to Megana and to Bo for reading through all of these. You’re remarkable.

**Craig:** Thank you so much guys.

**John:** And again this is not a competition. This is just an exhibition where we all get to take a look at some writing and figure out what’s working well and what could be working better.

If you want to send in your own pages you go to johnaugust.com/threepage. And there’s a form you fill out, including a new field for where you can put in your log line for your script. This is not a log line competition. We don’t really care about log lines. We are just curious what the thing is about. And so just for the reasons we used on the podcast today.

So, Megana, thank you very much for all your hard work and all your reading in making this happen.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana. Great job.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** All right. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Emily VanDerWerff from this past week that was looking at the way professional critics and fans get drawn into what she calls The Loop of defending positions on a movie or TV show or piece of culture. So talking about the show Girls she writes, “I had tied my own personal opinion of the show to myself and from there it was far too easy to grow more and more defensive with every criticism the series endured because it was like the criticism was criticism of me.” And it just felt so true to a phenomenon I’ve experienced more and more and more over the last decade where I love a thing, someone hates that thing, that person is attacking me. And this weird way that we sort of claim ownership over things and form our identities based on what we like.

And just a really great article detailing her perspective as someone who gets paid doing this as a living and still gets stuck into that loop.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, I’ve gone off on critics a billion times on the show. I’m not going to bore everybody by doing it again. But I will say that I do personally like Emily. I did a nice interview with her for Chernobyl. It was one of the early interviews I did and I thought this was – I read this, too. And I thought it was very thoughtful. And I just wanted to say you think you grow defensive with criticism of a show you watch, imagine criticism of a show you’ve written.

And what it kind of comes down to is what I’ve always said. I do think that these feelings we have about movies or television shows are a function of the relationship we have with them. And that means it’s not just about the show or the movie. It’s about us, and the show and the movie. Some intersection of who we are and where we are and that. And therefore it makes no sense – it literally makes no sense to explain to people why it is good or bad for them.

You can talk about why it was good for you. And you could talk about why it was bad for you. I wish that critics would just be more subjective. Like literally just say here’s how this made me feel. I don’t know if you’re going to feel the same way. But this is my thing. Instead of just declaring that movies are good, bad, stupid, etc.

But I enjoyed – the introspection here I thought was very valuable.

**John:** And a thing I think has changed over the course of our lifetime in terms of criticism is that it’s one thing to be a critic looking at a movie because that movie is finished. And so while people will come to that movie with new perspectives over time that movie is done. But what Emily was doing with Girls and a lot of other TV series is you’re critiquing something that is still ongoing where it hasn’t been finished yet and your criticism will actually change the thing. And that just becomes an impossible feedback loop as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just everyone to be mindful of the fact that the creative process is influenced by the criticism of it in not always healthy ways. And that if you are criticizing a piece of art to differentiate criticizing that piece of art from the person who made it. Because they really are not the same thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just the way that things are completely redeemed or vilified over time. I mean, blech.

I have a much easier One Cool Thing than that.

**John:** All right. Pitch it.

**Craig:** Cake.

**John:** I like cake.

**Craig:** Everyone likes cake. So, we over at the Mazin house have been engaging in a kind of homemade food exchange with another family in our town as we’ve been navigating the pandemic. So occasionally they would make something and bring it over and leave it on our doorstep and then we would make something and bring it over and leave it on their doorstep.

And so we owed them one and I asked what they wanted and they have three girls. And all three girls said chocolate cake. That was what they wanted. Which seems like, oh, OK, well chocolate cake. Who can’t do that? There’s a billion chocolate cake recipes.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And I’m kind of a recipe nerd. I love the science of it. And so I went through and read all sorts of them and I landed on one, just faith, and it’s a recipe by a woman named Robin Stone. And it’s called The Best Chocolate Cake Recipe Ever. It might be. It’s really, really good. It’s really, really good.

And you might be saying well what’s the big secret in it? I don’t think there is a big secret other than she does have you adding a cup of boiling water into the batter at the very end before you put it into the oven. It makes it much–

**John:** I’ve seen that in other recipes recently.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting.

**John:** It’s a chocolate thing.

**Craig:** Exactly. But overall whatever the balance of ingredients were it just came out beautifully. Same with the frosting. She also has a recipe for chocolate butter cream frosting that goes with it and it came out also beautifully. So if you’re looking to make a chocolate cake.

**John:** I’m looking to make a chocolate cake. Craig, my question for you is this gives a choice between milk, buttermilk, almond milk, coconut milk. What did you use?

**Craig:** In that circumstance – and one of the things that made me a little nervous is that Robin is like whatever. And I’m like, all right, I’m a little more finicky than that. I went with straight up whole milk.

**John:** Whole milk. So super rich.

**Craig:** Well, it’s one cup of it. It’s not exactly half and half or anything. But, yeah, just one cup of regular old whole milk as opposed to any of the other stuff. But if you were lactose intolerant does that still work after you bake something?

**John:** Yeah, it does.

**Craig:** Then you might want to try the almond or the coconut milk. There’s not that much in it so I can’t imagine it would make a massive difference.

**John:** You’ve got a cup of boiling hot water in it to dilute it anyway.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** All right. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Damn straight.

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Always.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Ella Grace. 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. But for shorter questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com which is also where you’ll find the PDFs of for our Three Page Challenges. You’ll find transcripts there and be able to 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 the bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the Olympics. Craig and Megana, thank you both very, very much.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you guys. Thank you. And I just want to say a quick hello to listener Miranda, because I know she’s a big fan.

**John:** Oh, nice.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Well great. And that outro felt very Winter Olympics to me. I could imagine that being under a Winter Olympics Montage. Which is a good segue to a question from a listener, Adam in Los Angeles, who writes, “If you were an Olympic level athlete what sport/event would you like to compete in?” And so we’ll look at winter and summer. Craig, of the Summer Olympic events if you could be a medal-worthy athlete is there one sport that you’d go for?

**Craig:** Well, I suppose that one way to think about this is a little bit like how fun it is to fly in a dream. Because you’re never going to fly. So one possibility is pick a thing that you would never be able to do. Like in theory I could wrestle some people. I wouldn’t be any good at it, but I could wrestle for a bit at my weight class or something. I could throw a pole.

But the thing that I cannot do, ever, in any circumstance and have never been able to do, even as a child, is run for a long distance. I was not built to run for a long distance. So I would want to be a marathon runner. I just think that would be like flying. That would be so cool.

**John:** So I can run for a long distance. I ran a half marathon. And I assumed I could never run, but now I can run. But I don’t think I would actually want to be a long distance runner for Olympic stuff. I think I would actually prefer to be like a sprinter because that to me feels like you’re The Flash where you’re just so incredibly powerful out of the gate.

But what you were saying about flying made me think like, oh, maybe I should pick pole vaulting because that’s a thing in real life I would never, ever do, but it just seems so cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I don’t even understand how that happened. Why did – who figured that out? Why?

**John:** Yeah, we can pole vault. My guess is there’s a season of The Amazing Race where they were doing these – they were in these canal kind of places, flooded field canals, and you actually do use poles to get from one side to the other. So maybe that was sort of how pole vaulting became a thing. I don’t know. We could have looked it up by the time I–

**Craig:** Could have, but you know what? Nah. I’m tired of learning. I don’t want to learn anything else. I’m done. I’m done.

**John:** But I should clearly choose gymnast, because male gymnasts have the amazing skills, versatile skills. You feel like a real life Rogue. And great bodies.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was waiting. It’s about the body. The male gymnast body is stupid. It’s a stupid body. Yeah, like how? Oh my god. Could you imagine?

**John:** Now the Winter Olympics. Craig, what winter sports would you want to do?

**Craig:** Ooh, I do like the Winter Olympics. They’re fun. I mean, look, like the weirdo one like the biathlete where you ski and then shoot. That’s a silly one.

**John:** That was my top choice. Biathlete.

**Craig:** It’s a pretty silly one so I kind of like sneakily want that. But I think, so the guys who do the skeleton in the luge, and the women, are moving at insane speeds. And it’s terrifying. I think maybe if I could be one of those people. Just the idea of just firing down a shoot like a bullet for like a minute just seems like it would be pretty awesome.

**John:** I said that I was so excited to be a pole vaulter, but I don’t think I would be a ski jumper because that just–

**Craig:** Ooh, god.

**John:** No. That’s just too much terror for me. I’ve bungee jumped. Great. I’m not going to ski jump. That’s, no. That’s not good at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. The ski jump is kind of like you go down the ramp and you catch, just perfect, boom you launch off perfectly and you’re like I’m doing it. I’m going to go further than anybody. And then when you start to go down you’re like, oh, shit.

**John:** Well, Craig, you and I both grew up with ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Of course the agony of defeat. This big intro and then it goes “the agony of defeat” and they show this guy going off the edge of the ski jump and just falling. I still feel pain just thinking about that shot.

**Craig:** Why would anyone be an athlete after that? You’re just watching a human being tumbling down a mountain, breaking I assume everything. And, yeah.

**John:** In reference to our Three Page Challenges, I think figure skating is just remarkably great, and to be able to do that stuff. But I would just get such performance anxiety to actually have to masterfully do all these things, and be artistic, and hit all those jumps. That feels like too much.

**Craig:** Yeah. The artistic part – figure skating, I don’t love it. I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t love it. Not on the level of ventriloquism which is a ridiculous waste of everyone’s time. Actually, it’s the fact that figure skating is a remarkably demanding athletic pursuit, but they also have to wear these outfits.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, they don’t have to. I think they want to in a sense. But it just gets sillier and sillier. It’s like Vegas kind of. It just becomes so odd. You know what I mean?

**John:** As a young gay child I just loved my figure skating.

**Craig:** I get it. I get it. I do. And maybe it’s also like the performance aspect of it is so outrageously fake. Do you know what I mean? The smiles and the…

But I can also see where, you know – look, my wife loves figure skating. I mean, loves. So I watch it when it’s on. All right.

**John:** I never looked at the contents of my mom’s DVR after she died, but I guarantee you there were at least 16 hours’ worth recorded of figure skating on that. Just to watch at any point, which is great.

**Craig:** I love it. Who was your favorite?

**John:** Growing up it was Torvill and Dean. They were an ice dancing pair.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** They were remarkable. They were the Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh of their time, but on ice. And they were just remarkably talented. But then like through the Brian Boitanos, through the Kristi Yamaguchis. Katarina Witt, who I saw at a post office here in Los Angeles. Just remarkable talents.

**Craig:** Torvill and Dean, were they married?

**John:** They were married but I think they ultimately split up, yeah, which was controversial and terrible.

**Craig:** Oh, it was controversial?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Yeah. If I remember correctly. Chris Schleicher who is a writer who I only know through Twitter, but was a competitive figure skater before he became a writer. And I always find that so fascinating as a second act, you know, get out of figure skating and then become a writer.

**Craig:** Yeah. Interesting.

**John:** So, Craig, should we go to the Olympics in China? So that’s the 2022 Winter Olympics are going to be in China. And China has not done some good things.

**Craig:** You’re asking should you and I personally go?

**John:** [laughs] Oh yes.

**Craig:** Or should America go?

**John:** Should America send a delegation to the Olympics in 2022?

**Craig:** I got to tell you, and this is one of those hot button things. It’s practically designed for people to argue. But I remember as a kid feeling like boycotting the Moscow Olympics wasn’t great. The point of the Olympics was let’s get closer together.

I don’t think the Olympics, going to the Olympics, is any kind of tacit approval of what a government is doing. The United States went to the Olympics in Germany when Hitler was in power and Jesse Owens got to beat everyone in front of him, which is awesome. There’s a little chance to stick it to people at the Olympics also. And the way we kind of did to the Soviets in 1980 in Lake Placid.

But it kind of bummed me out. And then of course the Russians boycotted after. I feel like once you start it’s hard to stop. Because everybody has a reason to boycott everybody. There’s no reason that – if there’s ever an Olympics in Mumbai for instance, well, should the Pakistanis just immediately boycott? Do you know what I mean? You know, over Kashmir.

Everybody has got a problem. So, let’s preserve this one place where we just come together and we do it outside of the bubble of the bad things that we are or are not doing. And hopefully it brings us together and maybe solves a problem. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. I wonder if we hadn’t had the situation where we boycotted one Olympics and they boycotted us, I wonder when we decided that Olympic athletes a chip that we would use in international trade. Because we’re not talking about like, OK, we’re going to boycott Chinese products or we’re not going to do business with China at all, because clearly we’re doing a ton of business with China.

So, it does feel weird on that level. And yet at the same time you’re dealing with a government that is doing some really bad things. So, I’m sympathetic to both sides and I’m happy to be the one who doesn’t have to make the decision.

**Craig:** Right. Turns out weirdly that they have asked me to make this decision.

**John:** Craig, as your profile grows then so does your responsibility.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know how this ended up in my lap, so I’ve got to really think about this. [laughs] I’ve got to be honest with you. I’m in a whole boatload of trouble over here.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [WGA Strike](https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/the-chase-strike-writers-wga-itv-1234936943/) against ABC’s The Chase.
* For current university students and professors: Learn more about the [Highland 2 Student License](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/students.php)
* [The Secret Lives of Color](https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Lives-Color-Kassia-Clair/dp/0143131141) by Kassia St Clair
* [Rinky Dink](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F03%2FRinky-Dink-Three-Page-Challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=428197df8aa5744b9773ac3f65f597c5f8419e2fd6e60923f799f6b7e82795bf) by Stephen Brower
* [The Twilight Run](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F03%2FThe-Twilight-Run-Three-Page-Challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=f3e0780b9271811e28acf59ac67b2286357b3148ddf029bb4e12671a3fa558d9) by Andrew McDonald and Nick Sanford
* [South Carthay](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F03%2FSouth-Carthay-Pilot-3_21_21.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=ba275113a62a9a36a5dbf43a1c70442a3d5dd4ac8d303ec137268bbe73da2528) by Alex Rennie
* [The Loop by Emily VanDerWerff](https://emilyvdw.substack.com/p/the-loop)
* [The Best Chocolate Cake Recipe Ever](https://addapinch.com/the-best-chocolate-cake-recipe-ever/) by Robin Stone
* [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
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/494standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 492 of Scriptnotes. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Often on this program we talk about the difficult choices characters have to make. Today I want to explore the dilemmas that screenwriters encounter in the business with a mix of listener questions and things you and I are grappling with at this very moment.

We’ll also be looking at writer websites, international guilds, and hassles when joining the WGA.

**Craig:** Ooh, the only hassle I remember was that they suddenly made me pay money I didn’t have.

**John:** Yeah, there’s that. There’s also more stuff.

**Craig:** Oh, OK.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for premium members it’s time for an origin story. You and I will travel back to the moment we decided to become screenwriters.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. Fun.

**John:** And I had to think about what that moment or those moments were and you can share it with our premium members at the end of this episode.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. At the head of the program I said this is Episode 492. That means eight episodes away is Episode 500.

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** You and I have barely discussed what we should do for Episode 500 except that the idea of doing a big, live show with an audience seems a little premature.

**Craig:** I don’t know, John. Let’s kill them all.

**John:** [laughs] Let’s kill them all.

**Craig:** What a way to go out.

**John:** Absolutely. So, you have to have a proof of vaccination and then you come to our live – it’s too soon for that.

**Craig:** It’s too soon. Also, I mean, look, it’s 500. Seems like a good round number. We can just chuck it, right? We just wrap it up?

**John:** You know what? Maybe we should just wrap it up. And it has got me thinking about Episode 1. So let’s take a listen back to Episode 1 and see what Episode 1 sounded like. Because I don’t think you’ve probably heard any of this since–

**Craig:** Since Episode 1.

**John:** No.

Hello. Welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig:** And I’m Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is the inaugural edition of something we’re calling Scriptnotes, which is meant to be a podcast talking about things that screenwriters might be interested in.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What would those be?

**Craig:** Ah, you know, we can cover craft, the business, the union, psychology.

**John:** Work habits, too. Sort of like how you actually get stuff written.

**Craig:** Yeah. And topics for people who are working steadily, people who aren’t working steadily, people who want to work steadily.

**John:** Dig deeping. Dig deeping things?

**Craig:** You said dig deeping.

**John:** Dig deeping.

**Craig:** Please don’t edit that out. [laughs]

**John:** I will leave my misspoken terms right in there, unedited. But I wanted to start with a question because I figure, you know…

Oh, Craig, nothing has changed.

**Craig:** In a sense nothing has changed. You still do say things like “dip deeping” and I still have that stupid laugh. And other than that, good lord, we were children. First of all, it’s clear that I had no idea what a podcast was. You could hear it in my voice. You could hear it.

**John:** No sense.

**Craig:** But I still don’t know.

**John:** And still the brief we laid out in terms of the things we would be talking about on this program we’ve remained remarkably true to what our initial instinct was for what this podcast should be.

**Craig:** Let’s clarify. What your instinct was.

**John:** That’s true. And so while we didn’t have all the lingo down right in terms of like “things that are interesting to screenwriters,” that wasn’t quite right. We didn’t have our intro bloops yet. We were still using the CBS theme music as our intro stuff.

**Craig:** So good though. Makes me so happy when I hear that.

**John:** I can picture it. I feel like something exciting is happening at CBS right now.

**Craig:** I’m sitting in front of a large – and when I say large I mean small cube of a television. Remember when you would turn it on it would take a while for it to come on? It had to warm up.

**John:** Got to warm up the television. So nearly 500 episodes ago, but it’s also almost ten years. So I would propose that what we would really do is like we’ll go through Episode 500, fine. Episode 500 we’ll celebrate it in its own small way. But we’ll think about doing something for our 10th anniversary which would be August 30th of this year. It would be ten years of Scriptnotes. And I feel like August – something will be possible to do in August.

**Craig:** Well, I will be in another country. So, there is that.

**John:** That’s a challenge.

**Craig:** But, you know what? Maybe we’ll have a big Calgary show.

**John:** Yeah. A big Calgary show.

**Craig:** It’s not a big town, but if I can convince enough Calgarians to show up right off the bat.

**John:** Some sort of rodeo fair ground.

**Craig:** At the Stampede. They’re probably angry that I’ve called them Calgarians because I doubt that’s what they are. I’ve already blown it. They may run me out of town on a rail.

**John:** So let us lower people’s expectations for 500 episodes and raise them for the 10th anniversary to unrealistic heights for what we’re going to do. But, a thing you as listeners can do in the meantime is at Episode 300 we put out this listener guide saying like hey tell us what your favorite episodes are of the first 300. We are updating that now for the first 500. So, if you want to point to suggestions of like these are the best episodes if someone is new to Scriptnotes go to johnaugust.com/guide and let us know what are the best episodes, especially episodes between 300 and 500, which ones stand out for you.

**Craig:** Did I say Calgarians?

**John:** Yeah, you did.

**Craig:** Guess what? That’s right.

**John:** That’s right?

**Craig:** That’s right. I got it right.

**John:** Sometimes you guess correctly.

**Craig:** The thing is I don’t know why I was nervous because they’re very polite. People in Canada are worldwide renowned for their politeness. And I’m sure they would have just said, oh, you know, that’s not what we’re called but we accept you.

But I did call them – it’s Calgarians. Why would I have – how did I get there? Anyway, sorry. Here’s what’s happening as we approach Episode 500 I begin to ramble more and more.

**John:** Yeah. And Matthew has to keep cutting you back shorter and shorter. Those early episodes I was cutting everything myself. And so I think part of the reason why I became less of a terrible speaker is because I had to edit myself so much and I did not want to edit myself and so therefore I learned to just speak more clearly the first time through.

**Craig:** Right. Well you do an excellent job. I think the two of us have defined what excellence is for this show. We have self-defined it. We didn’t copy anyone.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Clearly.

**John:** We made it up as we were going along.

**Craig:** Correct. 500.

**John:** Another bit of housekeeping here. So people write in with questions or stories or things they want to share to the podcast and this last week Paige Feldman wrote into the ask account. And I read it and I said like, you know what, this would actually be a better blog post, so I asked her if we could post as a blog post and I did.

So she wrote about how screenwriting competitions are incredibly expensive. And so that instead of entering all these screenwriting competitions she normally would have entered she saved that money and then used it to fund an audio podcast version of her script. And that it was a much better use of her time and her money. So, I would point everyone to Paige’s example in terms of rather than spending the entry fee on a screenwriting competition there’s probably a better way to spend your money and your time.

**Craig:** I totally agree.

**John:** But what I liked about Paige is that she showed the initiative to just put her money and her time to better use. So whether you do what she does in terms of making an audio drama, just find something else to do with your time and your money other than a screenwriting competition.

**Craig:** I think there may be a chance that in Episode 1 of Scriptnotes, from which you just played an excerpt, I may have said something like screenwriting shouldn’t cost money. And here I am nearly 500 episodes later saying screenwriting should not cost money. I don’t think I spent a dime. And I don’t think anybody needs to.

You can. And there are certain ways to spend money I suppose smarter than others. But you don’t have to. And I love the way that she was entrepreneurial here. And I like the fact that she took a sober look at screenwriting contests. Because, John, I’ve got to say looking around how many of us, when I say us I mean screenwriters who are sort of safely ensconced in a career, how many of us got into this by winning a contest?

**John:** Almost none of us.

**Craig:** Ehren Kruger I think.

**John:** Yeah. You could probably point to some folks who won the Nicholl Fellowship, which I think we’ve said probably from Episode 1 is the only one that kind of–

**Craig:** Kind of super matters.

**John:** Clearly is worth winning. Yeah.

**Craig:** But even then it is not in and of itself – it’s a bit like the SAT. Congrats on your excellent SAT score. It’s not actually a predictor of success.

**John:** No. Not a bit. Well let’s keep talking about money. So last week on the podcast we talked about writer deals. Would you read what Lisa wrote in?

**Craig:** Sure. She’s wondering, “Can you speak to production bonuses and how those are calculated in deals? In 2019 I signed my first screenwriting contract with one of the major streamers. It’s a multi-step deal and I was ecstatic at the numbers because I’d never made such a large sum of money in my life before. However, after listening to the episode on deals and looking at the WGA’s screen deal guide I was shocked to discover I was earning $50,000 under the median for new screenwriters with multi-step deals.

“Then again my contract does include a production bonus which guarantees me another six figure check on the other side of production. If I take the production bonus into account does that mean I’m overall earning over the median? Or are production bonuses pretty standard in screenwriting contracts and I’m actually earning under the median?”

John, this is an excellent question.

**John:** It’s an excellent question. So Lisa first off congratulations on setting up that project at a streamer. Congratulations on having reps who fought for you to get a multi-step deal. That’s good. And you can compare on that chart like you made more money on a multi-step deal than you would have on a single one-step deal. So hooray for you.

That production bonus, that’s not included in these median figures. Because those median figures are about what you’re guaranteed to be paid. They cannot pay you any less than that. That production bonus is not a guarantee. It only happens if the project goes into production.

So, no, that money, production bonus, is important and so worthwhile, but you cannot count on getting it, so therefore you cannot really count it as income at this point.

**Craig:** That’s a great clarification. Lisa, it’s an interesting game, the production bonus game. We probably talked about this a number of times, but the way it basically works for those of you at home who don’t know is when you make a writing deal for a movie it’s blank against blank. I’m going to make $100,000 against $400,000. That means I’m guaranteed $100,000. If the movie is produced and I get sole screenwriting credit then they fill that money up to get to $400,000. So in other words they add another $300,000 on.

In the case of streamers I suspect they have a much higher rate of production than movie studios do. Movie studios used to have a terrible rate of production. They would develop ten scripts for every one they made. That number has come down quite a bit. But I still think streamers – because streamers are so voracious to produce and push out content I think there’s a fairly high rate of development to production. Doesn’t mean it’s a guarantee though. A guarantee is a guarantee. Made a guarantee, made a guarantee.

So, you can sort of think of it a little bit that way. If the number is super high than it’s a bit of a gamble. Again, this is also contingent on credit. So take a careful look at what your bonus is for shared screenplay credit. Because that typically is half of what the full credit bonus is. And you don’t know what the credit is going to be. You’re working on this now. But they may hire somebody to rewrite you. That person may rewrite you to the extent that you only get half screenplay credit. They may rewrite you so you get no screenplay credit.

And if that happens you don’t get any bonus. So, as much as you can get into guarantee the better. And I think it’s a great thing that you took a look at the screen deal guide. I think this is a conversation you should have with your agents, particularly now that you’ve made a big deal and you might want to convert that quickly into another one, which I think is generally a good idea. Talk about seeing about getting up to parity there. At a minimum. Remember, that’s the median.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Try and get more.

**John:** Also important to point out here so this report that we talked about was the WGA put this out but the WGA and the contract they formed with the studios is really about the minimums. And so all these things we’re talking about are things that are in your individual contract that are not in the overall contract. So when we say backend bonuses and that kind of stuff those are all things that your reps have negotiated for you individually. And so while we talked that there are sort of standard terms and things you kind of expect, they’re not codified in guild language.

And so that idea that you have a production bonus where it’s this amount if you get sole credit and that amount if you get shared credit, those are all negotiated points.

Also what’s negotiated in your contract is to what degree do the optional steps count against that bonus. And so every time they’re paying you for that optional rewrite, that optional polish, that may come out of your bonus. And so really what you should be looking at at that other figure is that is the most you can possibly earn in direct compensation off of writing this project.

And so, again, when you look at headlines where it’s like someone sold a project for a $4 million deal, really that’s probably the upper limit of how much they would be paid for something. It’s not what you are actually getting as the writer going into this project.

**Craig:** Yeah. The magic word there is applicable. So, in almost every circumstance all of the optional steps that are listed in your contract will be applicable against that bonus. That means, again, like John is saying whatever you earn they’re only obliged to just fill that up to get to the big number.

But, there is a term called fresh cash. It’s the best term. It’s the most magical term. That means that at some point they’re asking you to do something and you realize, look, you guys are making this movie. And I’m pretty much going to get sole screenplay credit. So if I do more work that’s applicable against the bonus it’s free. I would make the same amount if I did nothing. Therefore, you kind of need to make it “fresh cash.” That means cash that’s not applicable against the bonus.

**John:** Yeah. And so that’s if you have leverage in the project and that they want to keep you on and everybody else wants to keep you on, you may have the leverage to negotiate for that sort of point.

So I’ll point Lisa and everyone else to an episode we did where we really walked through writer deals and sort of how they work. And so you can look at the contract because it’s so important to understand that, yes, there are minimums set by the guild but everything else is in your own individual contract and knowing what that is makes a huge difference.

All right, some more follow up. Last week I talked about how I thought Disney was going to make its next trillion dollars on selling artwork and possibly through a mechanism like an NFT with the way digital art is being sold these days.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Philip wrote in to say, “If Disney earns trillions through NFTs wouldn’t it make sense for the WGA to already be aware of this and talk to writers being part of that NFT value chain with some percentage points of their work? So that if Disney makes trillions, writers make something at least, rather than be late to the party.”

And, yes. Yes, and, challenging. And so what I would say is that writers in America have classically been able to get some piece of the pie because of the intellectual property that we are creating and the sort of weird dance we do about copyright where we sort of pretend that these studios are the creators of the work. And that’s how we sort of claw back a little bit of that money.

It’s unclear to me whether an NFT fits in that copyright chain kind of at all. It’s its own weird sort of beast. And I think it’s absolutely a valid thing to be looking at. I don’t know that it’s going to be workable in the same way that merch and the guild have a weird relationship as well. So it’s challenging.

**Craig:** I think this probably would fall under merchandise. And we do have some access to merchandising money, but it is very restricted. So, first of all it’s relying on separate rights. Hopefully in our show notes we can give you a little link back to our episode where we went through all the separated rights. But let’s assume you have it. You’re writing something for Disney and you have a story credit or written by credit, which as we know is unlikely given the fact that all they seem to do is remake their animated movies. But regardless if you have that then you do actually get access to 5% of the money paid to the manufacturer for such merchandise.

So what does that mean? It means that your literary material – this is where they get you – must physically describe the object or thing being merchandised. And it has to do so in such a way that it includes specific physical attributes. And if the final product substantially follows that description than you may be entitled to money for the sales of the object.

So I know that for instance Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio kind of mixed it up with Disney over the fact that Disney was selling the Aztec coins from Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyworld. And they said, “Hey, we created the Aztec coin in our script and therefore…” And they were like, “Oh, mmm, actually we’re changing that now. It doesn’t look like the way you described it in the script. So now you get nothing.” And that’s kind of how it goes.

It’s very difficult. Getting merchandise money through the guild happens, but it’s a little bit of a Halley’s Comet. So, will the companies be more likely to want to share that with us now that that revenue stream might explode? Quite the opposite.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** They will become even more miserly about it I suspect.

**John:** I think you’re right. And I would also say in the case of Disney I think what they can commoditize through something like an NFT would be very equivalent to sort of like the pins you buy at the park. And so it’s like a character. It is an image. It is a thing. And it’s hard to say that it’s the work of the screenwriter that they’re putting out there as artwork. That’s the real challenge there.

**Craig:** If you successfully describe something in such a way that if they were to merchandise it you would get some merchandising money they would specifically not make it look like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They ain’t dub.

**John:** And, again, this is a thing where in theory this could be negotiated in your individual contract.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So Megana has provided us with a link. It was Episode 407 where we talked through understanding your contract. This is the kind of thing where you might want to do that. And I’ll say that there are properties that I’m considering doing that I actually own and control that I am thinking very seriously about like OK do I want to just pitch this as an original thing, or do I want to create some other piece of property first that can then sell? Partly it’s just so I can hold on to some of the merch a little bit more easily.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So that’s a thought. I had talked about a previous One Cool Thing was Beeple who was a digital artist who I said like, oh, you should follow him on Instagram because his art is really good. The day that we’re recording this that artist, Mike Winkelmann, who is known mostly for doing one big illustration a day, and so he’d been doing it for like 5,000 days. He’d been doing an illustration a day. The most any of his artwork had sold for was $100. Today an NFT was sold through Christie’s for $69 million. So, he’s made some money on this [digital gold rush].

**Craig:** That doesn’t seem good to me.

**John:** So let’s talk some pros and cons, because it’s actually a good segue into these moral gray areas here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Seems troubling.

**John:** It does seem troubling. The whole idea of how this artwork is sort of locked down is through these chains, these block chains, that involve a tremendous amount of energy. So this idea of sort of like it’s like you’re printing a baseball card on like ivory or something. You’re actually doing terrible things to the planet to build this thing.

**Craig:** That sounds awesome, by the way. [laughs] I would by that. A Mikey Mantle rookie card in ivory. Ooh.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** Wonderful.

**John:** But, also it speaks to the commoditization of everything. Just the sense that things only have value if they have some digital uniqueness to them. And at the same time I’m happy for this guy to be paid money. And I’m also happy for some artist to be able to actually see value off their work in ways that they could not otherwise see it.

But, man, pros and cons here.

**Craig:** I mean, when you have somebody go from something that the general marketplace value is at $100 to something the general marketplace value is at $70 million, and that happens within months, something has gone awry. And it’s certainly not – it’s not that Mike Winkelmann somehow managed to receive a message from god and put that into digital artwork.

What’s happening is a marketplace is getting distorted. And we know that the visual art marketplace, that economy is insane. It is tulips times a billion. And it’s entirely about perceived scarcity. And also prestige. And essentially it is fueled by a factor that does not – there’s no relevance for you or for me. It is the vanity of billionaires is what it is.

And what I see here is the vanity of billionaires at work. And it would be a shame if these things started to become distorted by that. It’s almost impossible to say to somebody like Mike Winkelmann, who by all accounts is a perfectly good guy who was doing something that was fun, to say, “Oh, by the way, if you take this $70 million for one thing you did it’s going to be ‘bad.’”

You know, he’s got a family. He has dreams and stuff. Maybe he has charitable desires and he wants to redistribute that. That’s awesome. But that seems bad. And if NFTs are already doing this? Eww.

**John:** Yeah. So, a good segue into talking about gray areas and decisions and choices and things that you and I face on a daily basis. And we’ll also then lead into some questions we get from listeners about this stuff. Because so often I think on this podcast people will write in and like we’ll have clear answers. Oh, you do this thing. You don’t do this thing. Or this sucks, but here’s how it goes.

But off mic you and I often have conversations about like, ugh, this situation. Like what do we do in this situation? And there’s sort of no good answer.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I went on a nice walk with Aline Brosh McKenna and we were talking through some of these issues yesterday as well. There’s just stuff that comes up. It’s like you sort of do the best you can. Yet you’re grappling with these things. And to the degree that we are characters in the stories of our own lives, I just want to talk about some of the things that you and I grapple with on a regular basis.

**Craig:** A great idea for a topic. It’s something that happens constantly I suspect in every job, in every industry, but there’s something about the loosey-goosey nature of this business, it comes up all the time.

**John:** Yeah. Because it’s a relationship business. It’s a question of we’re creating art that is so amorphous and so what is an idea. There’s a lot of stuff happening here. So, we’ll start with back in Episode 372 I talked about No Work Left Behind which was back when I was on the board. It was a thing I was pushing really hard. That idea of like when you go into a meeting and you don’t leave your pitch behind. You basically don’t leave written stuff after a pitch because that is problematic both for you as a writer individually but also for all writers. It sets an expectation that people should be able to get free work out of you and that your writing is essentially worthless.

And you obviously agree with this. We’ve talked about this a lot on the show. As a general principle you should not leave writing behind. Right Craig?

**Craig:** You should not leave writing behind as a general principle. Correct.

**John:** Yeah. And yet I find myself doing stuff that’s kind of like that in real life. And so here’s an example. There’s a property that I have set up. I’ve been pitching and have sort of set up. It’s not my own original IP. I control it but I didn’t create it. And getting this thing set up and trying to figure out how we’re going to do this I’ve sort of like paused the deal-making. I haven’t signed my deal because I’m not sure we can actually do it.

Technologically – it’s not the virtual sets of The Mandalorian, but it’s kind of like that. And it’s just like, god, I don’t know if we’re actually going to be able to make this thing happen. And so I wanted to see, basically just do a test and do sort of like a vertical slide to see is this actually going to be cool because I don’t want to waste my time if this is not going to be cool.

So, I ended up writing two sequences that we could actually put through a team and work on and see is this going to be cool. And it falls in this really murky area that’s somewhere between a pitch thing and actual work. And I felt weird doing it, and yet I don’t have a better solution for how do I decide if this is a thing worth my time to do.

**Craig:** Well, it’s entrepreneurial. You’ve generated it. So it’s a little different. If somebody comes to you and says, “Listen, we have an assignment and we want you to come up with some pitch,” and then leave that behind that’s different.

I do think in this case you probably have more leeway, but it’s leeway, right? I mean, the whole point of leeway is where does it stop and where does it end.

And you and I are always giving general advice. But when you talk about a specific situation general advice is only as good as general advice. General advice applied to a specific situation is typically not hugely useful. You have to take that general advice and adjust to taste. And in this situation I feel like that’s called for.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t feel guilty on a regular basis, and yet I could very easily see where my doing this could potentially lead to some other less powerful writer feeling like they are being required to send in some sort of proof of concept thing for something else that they may end up doing someplace else, or on IP that they don’t have any control over. So it’s frustrating to both be aware that I’m probably doing the right thing for me in this situation and it could also be not a good thing for the next writer down the road.

**Craig:** And this is why sometimes I struggle with the moral argument that we get a lot of times from the guild, because the moral arguments do start to fall apart in specifics. They are very good for general arguments. In specific cases they fall apart. And in fact doing the moral thing ends up just being a self-defeating pointless exercise.

And what it really comes down to is where is your heart. And it seems like your heart is in the right place here. And it is unlikely given the specificity of your situation that what you’re doing here is going to make life harder for other people. We kind of know what we’re talking about. It’s a little bit of the “I know it when I see it” rule.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But for all of these things we are going to be discussing the pain of uncertainty. It’s a very difficult thing for everybody. It’s really difficult for some people. And sitting in your uncertainty can be really uncomfortable. And yet it is required at times.

**John:** So here’s a conversation you and I texted back and forth about. A listener wrote in with her experience working with a very well-known showrunner and saying like, “Oh my god, this was terrible. Why isn’t anybody talking about this? Have you heard anything like this?” And you and I both said uh-huh. We have about that specific showrunner and other showrunners like that showrunner.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And my question for you was at what point do you think it will ever come to light and do we share any culpability by not speaking the name of this person?

**Craig:** I don’t know if that specific situation will come to light. I mean, over time you think probably the odds increase with every passing day. And do we share culpability? No. Because once you step into a river it’s not the same river.

The moment you say out loud this person is blankety-blank you have changed the state of everything. And it now becomes partly about you and why are you doing that. What are you trying to achieve, etc., etc. It literally changes the dynamic to the point where if your argument is if I don’t say something more people are going to get hurt, if I do say something more people are going to get hurt. And not the particular person that you’re saying this stuff about, but other people might get hurt, including the person who spoke to you.

And so there’s all this just sticky gray area stuff. It’s not as simple as like, you know, say the name. And also you and I don’t have personal work experience with that person. So, we’re kind of going – I mean, granted there sure is a lot of hearsay. But it’s hearsay to us.

**John:** Yeah. So I think about this also in context with #MeToo though. Is that you and I had heard discussion about certain people who we knew to be sort of personally abusive but didn’t know that they were actually sexual harassers and doing terrible things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I always think about that in terms of like two years, five years, ten years from now will it seem obvious that I should have spoken up about these things I was hearing or have tried to reach out to more people to see whether there was a consensus. And I think in this particular case on this particular person who we talked about before the answer is probably no. And yet I do wonder if that’s a rationalization for doing nothing. And the degree to which doing nothing is also a choice. And so I don’t want to sort of absolve myself of responsibility in too many situations.

**Craig:** You’re right to grill yourself and interrogate this. In the case of somebody like Harvey Weinstein I think one thing I discovered was the existence of the whisper network. So you and I are men. I don’t think we were part of the whisper network that said that Harvey Weinstein is a raper. I mean, I worked for Bob for many years and I did not know that Harvey was raping people. I knew that Bob was awful. And he was an abusive person, psychologically abusive. I received a lot of it.

But I didn’t know that that was going on. I think a lot of women were talking quietly with each other. To the extent that I can quietly talk to other people about what I know, I do. Because that feels like it’s not going to backfire into that person’s face or anyone’s face.

**John:** Well let’s talk about the talking quietly, because this is another thing that happened just this last week. There was a director who I was curious about and so I reached out to a writer who had worked with that director. And in the email to that writer I said, hey, so I’m thinking about this person, this director, what can you tell me about him. And here’s my phone number if you want to call me because you don’t want to email me.

And I find that you have to give the person that out because there’s a lot of times people will not want to have anything in print, but they will tell you honestly on a phone call. But, again, I could do that because I knew the other writer and I don’t know whether a stranger would be able to do that.

And there’s a power imbalance that is just naturally there. And so I’m trying to mindful of that while also getting through my daily working life.

**Craig:** I mean, I play this out in my head. Let’s say that I believe I know something. And I publically state this person I believe is this, this, and this. Inevitably within minutes somebody else is going to say, “No. That person is not that. I have more experience with that person than you do. You’re a liar. And I’ve heard the following about you.”

Now, what they say may or may not be true. It doesn’t help. And by the way let’s say I’m a shoplifter. This is not the worst thing in the world to be. It’s not great. Let’s say I just routinely like to lift Chap Stick and such. And I say I believe that John August is a domestic abuser. Sounds great. Because I’ve heard. Oh, I’ve heard.

**John:** Oh, you’ve heard the stories.

**Craig:** And I know him. He’s not. And also you’re a shoplifter. And I have proof. Well, my being a shoplifter doesn’t mean you’re not a domestic abuser. But now the conversation is muck. This is the problem with the world.

I will say if I had credible evidence or a strong reason to believe that somebody was behaving in an illegal way, breaking the law in a serious way, then I would do my best to try and get it out somehow in a way that would be also credible and believable. That is not what we’re talking. I mean, in terms of what you and I are talking about it’s really more of just unpleasant nasty behavior and not breaking the law.

**John:** Indeed.

All right. So going from situations out there to situations internally, a thing I often grapple with is when to bail on a project. When to say like, you know what, I just don’t think this is going to happen. And perhaps I enjoy the people involved and I would love to see this movie get made. I just don’t think it’s going to happen. And I’ve never been able to find a good rubric for figuring out, OK, for these reasons I should leave. And I think therefore I encounter the sunk cost fallacy where I’ve spent this much time on it I’m going to keep working on it, even though I probably shouldn’t.

**Craig:** It’s hard. And it’s hard because you are breaking up with something that you once loved. And maybe you still do love it, but you just don’t think you can love it that way anymore because you have something else that you need to attend to. Including things that you want to do. This does happen a lot.

It seems like Hollywood knows what you want and they want you to do the other thing. They know you want a job, so they won’t give it to you. They know you want to stop working on something, they will not let you. They just know. And this one always feels terrible to me. I do not like this feeling. I don’t like the feeling of disappointing people. I don’t like the feeling of letting people down. It’s a weird feeling.

Sometimes I feel like, OK, you’re a doctor in a MASH unit in a war and you could absolutely go over there and stop that guy from bleeding and probably save his leg, but this guy over here needs something else to save his heart. And so you work on that guy knowing full well that other guy, he’s going to lose a leg because of you. That sucks. But you know we can’t do everything. We can’t.

**John:** Yeah. Some advice that someone gave me which I’m sure I’ve shared on the podcast several times is that, and I forget which writer this was, but I think her advice was to write a letter to that project basically saying like thank you for teaching me these things. This feels very much The Art of Tidying Up kind of thing which is basically like acknowledging that that project as a thing and saying goodbye to it in a way that’s meaningful rather than just sort of keeping it on a tiny bit of life support there in your brain.

**Craig:** I don’t think I’ll ever do that.

**John:** Will never do that. That’s too rational of a thing to do.

**Craig:** I just would feel silly writing a letter to a concept. But that’s me.

**John:** Here is a thing that comes up quite a bit, and I’ve had some personal experience, but I also remember talking with a writer friend about this. Someone tells you something that they’re writing, or something that they’re working on, and it’s just a hell of a lot like something that you yourself are working on. That you’re clearly in the same space. Do you tell them that you’re working on the same thing right away? Does it matter how front burner it is versus back burner?

I find it awkward and yet it’s naturally going to happen because we’re all working in the same business. We have the same cultural impacts. It’s going to happen. What do you do in those situations, Craig?

**Craig:** I haven’t been in that situation too much because usually I’ve been working on things that were sort of, like a studio said we want to do this. So it wouldn’t matter whether or not somebody else wanted to do it. It was already there in existence and I’m working on it. But for things that were individual, if for instance while I’d been working on Chernobyl someone had said, “Oh, you know, I’m thinking about doing Fukushima as a big story.” I would have been like, OK, I should tell you that I’m working on this.

I’m not going to go into details or anything, but I am just so you know. And never because I want them to stop doing it, but rather more because I don’t want them to think that I walked away from that conversation going well I should work on Fukushima.

**John:** Yeah. A thing I’ve found myself doing, especially early on, is that I’ll be with a group of writers and someone will tell a tale or share something and if it’s close to something I want to do, or that actual incident is actually the thing we all sort of experience, and I will say like, “Hey, is anyone calling dibs on that? Because I actually could really use that thing.” Recognizing that other writers are going to find the same kind of material around you.

The same thing happens with just like people in your real life, like Mike my husband, and my daughter, things that could happen, conversations that could be had I need to be mindful of am I just strip-mining these things to use in stuff I’m writing. And I try not to, but if I am going to end up using some of it I will try to signal to them first that this is a thing that I’m going to be using a piece of, but don’t feel like I’m just taking your life.

**Craig:** I like the idea of you having a little light that you could turn on in the middle of a conversation. Just press a button casually and a green light goes on. And they just know, oh god, he’s recording it now. This is happening.

**John:** But back to the idea of competing projects, you and I have had a conversation a while back of like there was a time where we were working on projects that weren’t directly competing but were in a similar space. And it was interesting. And it was sort of fun, but it never became contentious because I think again it was clear that those properties existed independent of our involvement with them.

**Craig:** Yeah. And if I think I know which ones you’re talking about, there’s already been four billion things that had come out of that anyway.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And so essentially if there is a situation where you know both things can coexist even in the marketplace at the same time then it’s not an issue. It’s really more like when someone is like, “Oh my god, I have discovered this story that nobody knows about about this lady who did this thing in 1733.” And someone is like, “Oh, no, I’m also writing about that lady from 1733.”

**John:** Yeah. That’s the problem.

**Craig:** At that point two people are looking at each other and then slowly backing out of the room. It’s a duel. And all I can say in those situations is to just be charitable with each other. Because neither merit nor speed is going to determine which one or if either or both get made. There’s going to be some crazy series of luck and financial decisions and god knows what that makes those determinations. So don’t feel like once you hear that you’re doomed. You’re not.

**John:** You’re not. How to talk about movies and properties where you share credit, where it’s not entirely yours? And the degree to which you should claim credit for things – I’m not saying claim credit in a grabby way, but do you list those as your credits when you share a credit?

So an example for me would be Aladdin. And so Aladdin is a movie that I share screenwriting credit on. And so when people list my credits, like Aladdin, it’s like yes and it’s a shared credit. But I’m not going to go out and every time correct them to say like oh that’s a shared credit. Like to what degree is it OK to say from the screenwriter of Aladdin on something.

**Craig:** You kind of got to feel like where was I in the totem pole of things, you know? And if I feel like maybe I was the junior member of the writing crew then I’m not going to kind of want to say like – if someone is like, oh, Craig Mazin, he wrote The Hangover Part 2. Well, no I didn’t. I wrote it with Todd Phillips and Scott Armstrong. So, it would be strange – and literally ampersands. So in that case it’s super easy. I just don’t want that.

If someone says, OK, Craig Mazin wrote Identity Thief. Well, technically I have sole credit for the screenplay and I share credit with the story because another writer wrote a spec script. And that’s a guaranteed credit he has not matter what. In that case I’m OK with it because I kind of mostly did. Mostly. You know?

**John:** So, there’s going to be decisions though about when you’re going to bother correcting something and when you’re not going to. An example, our friend Rachel Bloom, whenever she’s listed as creator of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend she will tag Aline and say, “And don’t forget Aline Brosh McKenna, co-creator.” That’s a great, nice thing to do. Because co-created, that’s like a huge deal.

**Craig:** That’s an ampersand situation. It’s a team.

**John:** It’s a team. They did that together. But you and I also have colleagues who they share a story credit on something and they’ll be like, I’m not saying “I wrote this movie,” but they broadcast a credit that’s like it wasn’t really very much their credit.

**Craig:** If you talk about your own credits out of insecurity to make yourself seem like you did more than you did, or you are who you aren’t, everyone is going to know anyway. I mean, it’s not going to matter. It’s not going to fool anyone. Just be honest to what it is. Just be honest to what it is.

I mean, I have a lot of credits on a lot of movies. And then I have movies that I wrote a lot on that I don’t have credit on. And in the end no one gives a damn. If you do it long enough and you do it frequently enough you finally get to a place where you realize no one cares. When you get those first credits, oh my god do you care.

**John:** Yeah. Not only does it affect your career, it affects your income in a way we talked about last week. A credit does matter. So we get that.

**Craig:** Right. But if you have that shared story credit on a thing because you were rewritten essentially out of existence then you’re not going to get a huge bump in your career. You’re not going to get a huge bump in your salary. And you probably shouldn’t go off and say things like I wrote blankety-blank and forget the people that have like, for instance, all the rest of the screenplay credit or the rest of the story credit. It just doesn’t make sense.

**John:** Yeah. More ethical choices. Do you take a project where the money involved may come from places that are really problematic?

**Craig:** Ah, yes.

**John:** And so we’ve talked about this before in terms of Saudi money and things. And that can be a huge problem. But China. Also a real issue. And so there have been projects recently where it’s like, oh, you know, this would actually be an amazing movie to make with Chinese money. You can totally see that happening. And then you have all the challenges of China.

**Craig:** Correct. I try to keep things working directly for what I consider to be United States or UK companies that are funding themselves. There is no way to remove yourself from the global economic mesh. Everybody who walks down the street is ultimately one way or another doing business with other countries. If you don’t want to do business with China you do need to get rid of all of your laptops, all of your cell phones, all of everything. Because they manufacture everything.

Is there a difference between that and directly taking 100% funding from a particular company in another country? Yes. Of course there is. And so you have to sit in your uncertainty and make those choices. For me, I don’t really live in that world, so it’s not been a thing for me.

It would be really hard, I’m sure, as an artist if you knew like oh my god the thing that I was desperate to make that I really wanted to make, ah, but these people who are giving me the money I do not like them. And then you’ve got to look in the mirror and make a tough choice.

**John:** Yeah. A similar tough choice is getting involved with people who may have done terrible things. And so we can think of a list of people who have done shitty stuff who continue to work in the industry and are you willing to work with them? And sometimes it’s a case of like, oh, I can take this animation project to seven different places. Am I going to go to that place that has that guy who we’re concerned about? That’s a choice you’re going to make.

And it’s tough. Sometimes you have the luxury of being able to pick where places go. But if one person controls the rights on a thing and you want to do that thing that can be your only place to go to. And those things happen all the time. And if you rule out working for anybody who is problematic you’re going to basically not be able to work anywhere.

**Craig:** Well humans are problematic. Let’s just start with that. Everyone has done some really weird, screwy crap. Everybody. Nuns. Everyone has thought or done something bad. Because we’re human. And then the question is how bad, and how frequently, and did you change. I do believe in redemption. If I didn’t I don’t know how I would do the job that I do, because that’s what half of stories are about. And I do think it’s important to give people room to improve and change.

There are some people that do things where I don’t feel I need to forgive them. I’m just perfectly happy never working with them again. But for others, if they appear to be making a real effort, and they appear to have changed for the good, and are doing the work, then I think it’s important to not endlessly shun them. Because if you do you’re just kind of saying just keep being a criminal then basically. And when I say criminal I mean moral criminal. So just keep doing it, because you’re getting blamed for it anyway. So do it forever.

So, this is the sit with the uncertainty. Where is the line between unforgiveable and forgivable? Between I’m never going to do that again or this person deserves another chance? They have changed. Have they changed? I don’t know. Feel it out I guess.

**John:** Yeah. So the way you’re phrasing that at the end speaks back to sort of like the situations we’re often trying to find for our characters which is basically those are thematic questions. What is forgivable? Can a person be redeemed? You’re trying to create situations in which your protagonists are wrestling with these concerns. So don’t be afraid when you are the protagonist in the story and are wrestling with these concerns.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And it’s natural to feel tension and for it to feel really uncomfortable. And to want to retreat into the safest possible choice, but that’s often not the correct choice. Sometimes the traumatic choice is actually the correct choice. It’s going to be difficult, and it’s going to be painful, and you’re going to push through it and figure out the best way forward.

**Craig:** That’s why I love the movie Doubt as much as I do. Or I suppose the play which became the movie. It is a spectacular investigation of people whose job is to make moral determinations wrestling with doubt. Fundamental doubt. And uncertainty about a moral choice. And aside from being beautifully written, and beautifully acted, and beautifully directed, Amy Adams, Streep, it’s also a philosophically smart evaluation of our inability, fundamental inability to make certain moral choices.

There’s a place we cannot see, but we have to figure out how to navigate anyway. We have to move forward. We have to make a decision. But there are places we cannot see. And we make these decisions blindly all the time. We fool ourselves into thinking that we’re making these decisions with a clear head after careful thought and evaluation. But we’re not. We’re guessing. All the time.

**John:** We’re retroactively creating principles that theoretically guided our decision, but of course we actually just made the decision and then decided the principles after the fact.

**Craig:** And to tie into the craft of writing that’s one of the reasons I love that movie so much is because you’re going along feeling like the movie is zeroing in on moral certainty. And then there’s a scene between Meryl Streep and Viola Davis that just knocks the wind out of you and makes you think maybe not. And that’s where it gets really weird and uncomfortable, which I love.

**John:** All right. Let’s invite our producer, Megana Rao, on to ask some of our listener questions. We’ve got some good ones. And we’ll start with things that feel like this moral or ethical gray area.

**Craig:** OK.

**Megana Rao:** OK, great. So Cedric wrote in and he said, “I wrote a movie, my first, that got sidelined by Covid. They had decent name talent signed up. Funding was approved. Preproduction was already beginning, and literally a day or two before I was going into the lawyer’s office to sign the papers Covid struck and the whole thing got frozen.

“It’s an independent project, so I don’t know that it will ever happen now. Everyone insists that it’s going forward this year, but I give the whole thing a 10% chance or less. Two questions that came out of it for me that no one can seem to give me a straight answer on. One, at what point in the process does a writer’s contract get signed? They sent out the script to talent after we finished the director’s pass, but we hadn’t signed anything other than the deal memo at that point. No one asked my permission or anything. And when I brought it up to my lawyer and agents they seemed to think it was OK because I still own the material.

“And, two, in the process of doing the director’s pass there were a number of changes I didn’t like and argued against. I was constantly told, well, if you don’t do it the director will just fire you later down the road and do it himself. But I wasn’t proud of it anymore and I was marginally embarrassed about putting my name on some parts of it. Should I have just given the director co-writer credit so I could use that as an excuse for the parts I didn’t like? Or is it still better to keep sole writer credit regardless?”

**John:** Oh, so much good stuff to unpack here.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s chew on this.

**John:** And so some backstory on Cedric here is that he wrote in with a previous things like months ago about this situation before his movie got shut down. And so this is sort of the synopsis of where we’re at now.

But, Craig, we can start with the simple. At what point do writers’ contracts get signed?

**Craig:** Well, it’s different. It depends on the studio. It depends on the project. Sometimes – I will tell you this. I don’t have a signed contract for Chernobyl. HBO is just sort of like, you know, we had a deal in place and then sort of like, you know, this is what we’re doing. And it happened. But usually there will be a final singed contract.

In the case of Cedric weirdly the longer it takes for that contract to get signed the more leverage he has. Because if they’re going to make a movie and they haven’t purchased the copyright, they have not done the literary material sale, you can hijack them for almost anything.

So, I actually think your lawyer and agents are correct because you own this material and the longer that goes – I mean, the best scenario is they forget. They forget and it’s one day before everyone is going to start shooting and you’re like, oh, by the way you can’t. I can get an injunction. You can stop this crap tomorrow. You can’t make a derivative work of something I have copyright on without my permission and I don’t give permission. So they’re going to have to.

**John:** Yeah. We’re assuming this was a spec script where he wrote it himself and this company bought it and that this was happening. It wasn’t that they owned a book or something and hired him on to write it. But, yes, Craig is correct. At some point before production begins on an indie feature like this they are going to need you to sign that contract because in order to get their insurance and everything else they need for the bond and everything else they need to actually make this movie. They will to prove that they actually have control of the chain of title.

**Craig:** Now, the second thing is disturbing. And it’s why I suspect that if this did happen on the day before shooting your lawyer and agent should say, “Oh, by the way, you have to sign this bad deal because if you don’t then you’re dead in this business and you’ll be blacklisted.” Because you’re getting bad advice. In the process of doing the director’s pass there were a number of changes you didn’t like and argued against and you were constantly told if you don’t do it the director will just fire you later down the road and do it himself. I don’t know who is telling you that. Is it your producer? Is it your lawyer? Is it your agents?

Regardless. If you’re not proud of it and you’re marginally embarrassed and you don’t put your name on it, guess what, don’t do those. Then maybe you don’t want this movie made that way. While I understand the value of getting a movie made, there is also danger in getting a movie made if it’s bad and it is embarrassing. That word embarrass is a very upsetting word. Then maybe this isn’t the right director? And maybe you should say I don’t like this director and I don’t want to do this anymore. Because guess what? You own all the chips.

And if they want to make the movie they need you to do it. So, this is a conversation that I would have very frankly with your lawyer and agents and tell them I don’t like what’s happened here. I want this to be like this again. I don’t mind making changes but I think we should find a different director, because I don’t like this one.

**John:** All right. So here is where I disagree with Craig. I think it is in Cedric’s best interest for this movie to get made. And understand that the process of going from your vision of what this movie should be to the shared vision of what a director can actually do and accomplish and put on screen is an important part of the process. And I think he’s probably feeling some of this natural tension.

And the director may be terrible. The director may just be the wrong person. But the director could also in many situations be exactly the right person to direct this movie, just has a slightly different vision. And sometimes the writer has to accommodate the director’s vision because that director cannot direct a movie that he or she does not understand and doesn’t get and is not excited to shoot.

And so I think it’s natural to feel frustration at this script not being exactly what you set out to do. But you’ve got to kind of live with that. If this actually happens. But you think there’s only a 10% chance this movie even does happen, so the good news is Cedric you have the ability to sort of roll back to whatever version of the script, or a new version of the script that you think best reflects what you want this movie to be and that can be the movie that goes forward under a new situation, a new way of setting this up. Or as a writing sample to get you your next job.

So, I fully get Craig’s instinct to sort of say you have to be excited and proud about your work at every stage. But, it’s also important, I think you and I have both had this experience, sometimes you do have to bend to the situation because that’s what being a screenwriter is.

**Craig:** You’re right. So the question is where does the bending stop and the breaking begin? And in this case Cedric you’ve given us a perfect example of an area with uncertainty. Because I don’t think what I’m saying is wrong, and I don’t think what John is saying is wrong. I think it’s really a question of you have to ask where does this fall on that line. And there is uncertainty here. And you may not even ever know if you made the right decision. How about that?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

**John:** I look at so many of my screenwriting colleagues whose first credits are not good movies. And I think they would all prefer that those movies were better movies. But are they glad those movies exist? Yeah, because it did help. And so a not fantastic first movie I think is still in general better than not having a movie produced. And especially in terms of what you, Cedric, as a screenwriter will have learned in the process of going from this is what I had on paper and this is what showed up on screen.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you just got to kind of feel it out and see what you think. And talk about it with somebody you trust. And this is why it’s important that at least somebody among your lawyer/agent cadre, really it should be your agent, should be able to have that long term far view. And be able to then tell you, look, in the long run I think this is going to be better for you, or in the long run I do think we should make a change. That’s kind of what you’re hoping they’ll be able to do and not just think short term.

**John:** And you may need to make a change in your reps or your lawyer or somebody else if you feel like you’re getting bad advice.

**Craig:** Fire your agent. Fire your agent. I mean, we need to have those Morning Zoo buttons where I can just push a thing. Fire your agent!

**John:** Yup. All right, Megana, what else do you have for us?

**Megana:** So Max asks, “I just finished a feature that my agent and I are really excited to send out. The movie is a high concept farce with an ensemble cast and some action-y set pieces. Although its length is on par with similar scripts, it does have an objectively high page count. My agent and I are worried that the script won’t get looked at based on page count alone.

“A simple solution is to trim it down. But here’s the dilemma. Everyone who gave me feedback had a different favorite character, a different favorite scene, etc. And sometimes their least favorites were someone else’s favorites. I think this will be a strength of the movie, but it doesn’t give me a clear picture of what cuts to make. My question is should we send this out to producers and executives as is, and let them decide what they want to cut or emphasize? Or do I need to buckle down and make a decision so I don’t seem amateur and undisciplined?

“My biggest fear is sending it out and having doors close for me instead of open. Or, am I being an insane, insecure writer?”

**John:** Oh Max. You’re being every writer. Every writer has those insecurities.

**Craig:** How sad would it have been if we were like, no Max, there’s something seriously wrong with you.

**John:** There’s something seriously wrong.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Put down your pen and leave.

**Craig:** Check into a facility immediately.

**John:** Craig, my first instinct is that Max feels that something should get cut. That cuts probably will help. And he’s scared of what to cut. I think he has to make some decisions and actually just make the cuts that he thinks delivers the strongest script and not worry about the differing advice he’s hearing from different people. What’s your instinct?

**Craig:** You can’t please everybody. So if you make a movie and in particular what you’re talking about is a high concept farce. OK, well, if you make a high concept farce and you get 75 people to like it in a movie theater you’re doing a really good job. That means a quarter of the people aren’t going to even like it. So, you don’t have to opinion shop here. That is a way, ah, so let us introduce this fantastic phrase “reassurance seeking.”

When you are reassurance seeking you are hoping for people to help you get rid of the anxiety of uncertainty. You tell me and then there will be certainty and I won’t have to worry anymore. The problem with reassurance seeking is the reassurance isn’t actually necessarily real. People will differ in their opinions of what is reassuring. And in the end you will still be stuck with uncertainty. So, I think John is absolutely right. You look at it. You’re the writer. And you decide what I think is important, what I think maybe could go.

Also, because it’s a high concept farce – farce is the important thing I’m thinking – with an ensemble cast, I’m feeling like there’s probably a lot of scenes where there’s a lot of snappy dialogue and people yap-yap-yap-yap back and forth and door-slamming. And that can inflate page count in a deceiving way.

So, one thing you might want to also – look, if it’s 190 pages I don’t think there’s anything anybody can say that’s going to help it. But if it’s 130, you can say on a little opening page, “This is a farce. People talk fast. Don’t freak out about the page count. It’s going to read faster than most scripts that are 90 pages. Trust me.”

You can own it. Right up front. It’s called anchoring. Anchor people’s context and then they won’t be like what the…

There you go.

**John:** Yeah. Another trick you might want to try is because it’s a farce I’ll say it’s permissible is to do the Greta Gerwig thing where you dual dialogue some stuff that’s sort of at the very edge of dual dialogue. But it’s a way of capturing that people talking quickly feeling without it just stretching on for forever. So that may be another technique. But, yeah, again I think farce is the thing here, so it’s both high speed but also we don’t expect a farce to go on for two hours. And so that’s why you may want to be underneath that kind of 120-page thing. Because that feels right for a farce.

**Craig:** Do what you can. But don’t freak out about it. And I will say this. You will not – if people get this, they’re not going to go, “Wait a second. This is more than 120 pages. Not only am I not reading this, but put Max on our list. He’s dead to us.” That will not happen. If they read five or six pages and they’re laughing they’ll read another eight. And if they’re laughing they’ll read another 20. And if they’re laughing they’ll get to the end. They will. They just will.

**John:** They will. 100%. Megana, what else you got for us?

**Megana:** All right. So Andrew wrote in and he said your conversation about the agencies and union agreement over packaging got me curious about union agreements internationally. For instance, I’m from Canada and the local actors union, ACTRA, has an agreement with SAG/AFTRA about honoring each other’s agreements and advocating for their members when actors work in Canada and vice versa. Does the WGA have similar agreements with international unions like the Writers Guild of Canada? Does the agreement you reach with the agencies apply to international organizations whose members work in the US?”

**John:** So the answer is it is complicated. And the thing you always have to remember is that unlike writers’ unions around the world, or writers’ guilds around the world, we truly are a union in the US. And most other countries have nothing like us as a union.

So there’s the International Affiliation of Writers Guilds which meets annually. It comes together. And so it includes people from France, New Zealand, India, Israel, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Ireland, South Africa. So they’re all talking about issues of common concern to film and TV writers. But a lot of the concerns look so differently because we are actually a labor organization and places in Europe and Asia and Australia they can’t do the kinds of things that we can do because we are a union.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a slightly messy area because of jurisdictional issues. For instance, the Writers Guild POV – and this isn’t opinion, this is in our collective bargaining agreement – is that if you live in the United States, or if you are here in the United States geographically when you sell your material or if you are a resident of the US but happen to be temporarily abroad you are under the WGA.

Now, the Writers Guild of Canada basically says if you’re Canadian then we represent you. That’s how it works. Well, OK, now what? So you’re a Canadian. You come and hang out in LA and in about three or four months you come up with an idea and you sell it here. Now what? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I think it’s kind of a big old mess.

**John:** Yeah. And there’s things that come up and there’s waivers that happen. There’s lots of stuff that does sort itself out. I think the crucial thing to understand is it does sort itself out kind of over time. Whenever there’s talk of a big strike or something there’s always that threat that like oh the studios will just go hire British writers and it never happens.

**Craig:** The Canadians are coming!

**John:** There are so many British writers, but it just doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** No, because I think generally speaking writers are pretty cool and they understand. Nobody wants to be a scab, right? So just because you technically can, it’s like they always say, OK, there’s going to be a strike and then what’s going to happen is John August is going to move to London or France, as he often does, and then he can do whatever he wants because he’s in France.

But we don’t. We just don’t. If we wanted to cheat there’s an easier way to cheat than that. Do you know what I mean? So it’s like it doesn’t really happen. That doesn’t come up. Happily.

**John:** But, Megana, I see we have another question that’s very WGA related. So do you want to talk us through what Cleo wrote in about?

**Megana:** Yes. So Cleo wrote in and she said, “In Episode 485 you said the amazing thing about joining the WGA is that you don’t have to do anything. They will find you. I wanted to write in and share my experience joining, or trying to join, the WGA. Spoiler, it’s not as straightforward as you think.

“I was hired in December to write a feature for a WGA signatory company. I called the WGA’s membership department and emailed over a copy of my contract before the holidays. But I didn’t hear back. Oh well, I thought, they’ll flag my deal anyway and reach out soon enough. When I didn’t hear anything in the first couple of weeks of January I followed up by phone and by email and same deal. No response. Eventually in February someone got back to me to say they’d seen my email and in early March I finally received an application form.

“Now, you could blame this on the chaos of Covid, but the thing is a couple years ago I earned enough credits to become an associate member of the WGA. And no one from the guild reached out then to let me know. I didn’t even find out associate membership was a thing until much later. Whatever the reason, if I hadn’t been proactive and practically pestered the membership department for an application form I would not be on my way to becoming a member. The WGA should have some sort of checking system that flags contracts with non-members and triggers and application process.

“I’m sure I’m not the only new writer who has felt overlooked. And I sure could use the guild’s help getting my first payment, though I doubt that will happen because I’m still not a member yet. You see, I need that payment to make the $2,500 initiation fee.”

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Oh boy, lots of stuff here. So, first let’s talk about associate membership. Associate membership is a relatively new thing. It’s new within my time being in the guild. Where people who are doing screenwriting but they haven’t been hired by signatory companies to the degree they would be members can get some benefits for that. And it’s helpful and useful, but it’s a thing where you yourself have to sort of apply for it. So there’s a reason why the guild isn’t reaching out for that, because you call them versus them calling you.

My memory and my instinct about the guild is that they reached out pretty quickly when I was hired to write my first feature that was a guild feature, How to Eat Fried Worms. But it took a couple of months. And I don’t know that that’s unusual.

For folks who are writing television, it’s really clear when someone is hired in television because all that stuff happens really quickly. You’re getting paid really quickly. And the guild can see like, oh, this is a writer who is not in our system. This person now needs to join the guild and it’s easy to see. Features just take longer. And so that sense of like oh when the contract happened, well the guild wouldn’t have seen the contract until well done the road. And even in this age of agencies sharing contracts and deals they just sort of wouldn’t know for a while.

So it feels like Cleo did the right things in terms of being proactive. Are there things that the guild should probably do to improve tracking once a person has reached in? Yeah. Is it probably Covid? Yeah. But I’m not super surprised that she’s encountering this situation.

**Craig:** I’m not going to apologize for this. This was bad. I used to joke that the one thing the guild was really, really good at was finding out people who had earned enough employment credits to become a member of the guild and then chase them down and shake them down for that $2,500 initiation fee. Because that’s what happened to me in 1995 I think. I sold my first, it was a pitch that sold to write a screenplay with my writing partner. And I don’t know, within days or whatever I got a call from not just someone at the guild, but like the head of the membership department saying, “Hi, I found you.”

And I was like how did you even track – it was like getting served by–

**John:** How did they find you?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** Maybe was there something in Variety?

**Craig:** Maybe? I don’t know. All I know is that they were on it. And what I don’t like about this is that the – you want to talk – like the guild has this focus on organizing. The easiest organizing we can do is to organize the people that we already have the right to represent. So, yes, no question that when you’re hired in December Cleo the WGA signatory is supposed to alert the WGA. They may not have.

OK, so then you called the WGA membership department and emailed over a copy of your contract before the holidays. At that point that should have been done that day. I don’t understand.

**John:** They should have piggybacked like OK now you’ve got to fill out these forms.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** So here’s something we can do. We know the WGA folks. And so we’ll try to get an answer for Cleo about what is the normal process and sort of what didn’t happen properly here. I think our general guideline though is that Cleo couldn’t have gotten by for years without joining the WGA. They would have found her and she would have had to join.

**Craig:** But that’s not the point. The point is that – and this is the big point is her very last thing. I could use the guild’s help getting my first payment. Because she needs help. She’s already getting kicked around. And she needs her first payment to make the initiation fee. All of this would have been a lot easier if they had called her right then and there, right when they got back from the holidays on January 8 and said, got it, and she said, “Listen I can’t make that payment until you help me.” They would have helped her, hopefully.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But instead they sat on that email for over a month. And then, yeah, and then waited even longer. Yes, is Covid a thing? 100%. But also the WGA has managed to do a whole lot of stuff during Covid. So this seem fundamental like they should–

**John:** As we talked last week they were able to go through a thousand screenwriter contracts.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So her contract should have been in that.

**Craig:** 100%. And by the way this is a good thing that we can always hand off to a board member that we know to say dig into this.

**John:** Oh yeah. We will.

**Craig:** In fact, we’re doing it. We’re doing it.

**John:** Done. Send. All right. One last question, I’ll just actually read this one. This is from Graham who says he’s a screenwriter about to graduate from college and “I’m building a website for myself for the first time.” And he basically wanted some general advice.

So I just did a panel for the guild on press and publicity and advice for that. And one of the things I mentioned in there which I want to share with everybody else is I think it is very important for a screenwriter to control a Twitter account, an Instagram account, and a website, just so that you can be clear that I am this person. And so when something comes up you can point to like I am this person on the Internet. This is a source of truth for who I am.

And so register your own name if it’s possible. Your own name dot com or dot co, dot UK or whatever you want to register. Register something so that when I Google your name that will be the first thing that comes up is a simple clean website that says here’s who I am. This is the things I’ve worked on. And in the question Graham asks, “Should I include samples of my stuff?” Maybe. If you have stuff that’s actually really good of course you should. And if you have a portfolio of work or YouTube videos of things you shot that actually really good you totally should.

You don’t need to put on pitches and log lines and that kind of thing. But just let us know who you are so that when I Google you we can find you and I can say like, oh, that is this person and not the other person who has a similar name.

**Craig:** That’s a great idea. I think that all makes sense to me. I think people should feel free to put stuff – you know, artists put stuff up all the time. Directors put stuff up. Actors put stuff up. Writers are like, oh god, but what if they steal it? You know what the best evidence for them stealing it is? The fact that it was on your website three years earlier. That’s kind of like the best proof ever.

**John:** Yeah. So my only hesitation in putting stuff up is just like make sure it’s really showing your best work. But if you have a thing you own that you control that you’re proud of, absolutely put that up. Or put up the first ten pages and let people email you for the rest of it. That’s great.

And so I’m really talking about kind of a calling card website which is the minimum thing you can do. I’ll put a link in the show notes there’s a site I use called card.co.

**Craig:** Card.

**John:** Which is good for little one page things. And I use it for like if I refer to a URL in a project and I don’t really want to build a website I’ll get the URL and build a simple page for that. It’s absolutely fine for this kind of thing. So, to spend two hours making a website once is time worthwhile. You don’t have to have a blog and have everything else. Don’t feel like you have to do everything. Doing the minimum is perfect in this case.

**Craig:** I love doing the minimum.

**John:** You used to have a website yourself.

**Craig:** I did. I did. God, so long ago.

**John:** So long ago. I remember one of our first interactions was you asking how I got the little brad icon to float properly in CSS.

**Craig:** I thought it was like, oh, that’s probably not that hard to do. And you were like, no, it was a month of my life. It was like roto scoping a brad onto a thing.

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** That’s a whole world of stuff that’s just so mystifying to me. CSS. All the like Photoshop-y, layer-y. Oh my god. I can’t.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Craig:** I can’t.

**John:** It’s a lot. I can still read CSS, but I don’t have to do it all that often.

**Craig:** I love the idea of you reading CSS at night like a novel. [laughs]

**John:** I can still often figure out what CSS element is broken when something is not looking right, but I shouldn’t. It’s one of those things where like I shouldn’t try to fix it because that’ll just make it worse.

**Craig:** Yeah, and you know what? It’s not your job.

**John:** It’s not my job.

**Craig:** Not my job.

**John:** But Megana your job is to go through all these questions so thank you for helping sort through all the people who write in.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you for these answers.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Taylor Lorenz for the New York Times. She’s writing that For Creators, Everything is For Sale. So it goes on sort of the Beeple stuff, but really talking about – I love this phrase she uses – how people “monetize the drama.” And so think about like what do writers do? Well writers monetize the drama. That’s sort of what we’re doing.

But these are people whose real life. So celebrities or online celebrities and finding ways to take a picture of their feet and make money off of just like selling the rights to their feet. Or selling the right to decide what they’re going to wear for a day. It’s that weird Black Mirror episode that we’re living in.

**Craig:** I don’t want to live anymore. Get me off the planet. Get me off.

**John:** All right. Craig, you promised something great for your One Cool Thing so I’m really excited.

**Craig:** I don’t know if it’s going to be great. But this is a first for us after nearly 500 episodes. I’m going to do a live One Cool Thing. And the purpose of this is to find out if this is or is not a One Cool Thing. Have I talked about Upstep before? Was that a prior One Cool Thing?

**John:** It sounds familiar, but describe it.

**Craig:** So many years ago I used to wear orthotics because my feet are – when I say flat I mean flat. Like where–

**John:** Elephant.

**Craig:** You would say to foot doctors I have a flat foot. And they’re like, uh-huh, well show. And then they would go, “Oh my god!” So I have the flattest feet.

**John:** How are you alive?

**Craig:** Yeah. Like what the hell? What planet are you from? So I used to wear orthotics and then I got these sort of like wore out. And it was a huge pain in the ass. You’ve got to go to the foot doctor. You step on this thing and they charge you like hundreds of dollars and it takes like 19 years and then you get the thing back and you try it out and you go back to the doctor again.

So, it wore out. And then I got these new sneakers that kind of had slightly built-in arch support and they were fine. But not great. And then I read about this thing called Upstep. So they send you a cardboard box that sort of unfolds into two halves. And in each half is foam. Like the kind of real soft foam. And you step in it. And then you step in the other one. And then you send it back to them and they take the imprint of your foot and the foam. You say, oh, I’ve got flat feet and I want this. And they make you insert and send them back.

I have received them. And I’m going to try – I’ll just do the right foot. So I’m opening the box right now. Upstep tips. Give your orthotics time. Start with one to two hours a day. No problem.

Here they are. They look like orthotics. So that’s good. Here we go. I’m going to put the right one in. My model is on my feet all day which is [unintelligible]. I guess they’re like your feet are so flat we’re going to call you that. So stand by.

My shoe is off. They’re going on. Oh, I’ve got to take out the – so when you do these things you’ve got to take out the one that comes in your sneaker. That one comes out. This one goes in. Oh, no, it fits. OK, it fits. I was like oh boy it’s already not cool, but it fits and it fits nice and snug and good. OK, so here I go. I’m putting my foot in.

OK. I can feel it in there. That’s good. And it does take some getting used to. I’m going to tie my shoes, stand up. Stand by. Here we go.

Oh! OK. Huh?

Well, here’s my verdict. It feels like a support. It feels like the other ones felt. Is it going to be good or not over time? I don’t know. I’ll have to check it out. But I’m going to give these a shot.

**John:** Very exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I think this is provisionally my One Cool Thing. Upstep. Oh, and by the way much cheaper than going to the doctor about it.

**John:** I see these all the time in my Instagram feed. So, I’m sure I’ll keep seeing them more.

If you enjoy people trying on things they see online I’m going to also link you to my friends do All Consuming which is a podcast where they buy the things off of Instagram and then actually try them out on their podcast.

**Craig:** Oh that’s fun.

**John:** So you should try that as well.

**Craig:** That’s fun.

**John:** Great. Well I’m happy for your feet, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh, John, I have a question for you. Final question.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** That what you just said reminded me off. Have you ever drunk bought something?

**John:** Oh, yeah. I will Kindle buy some things when I’m a little bit drunk. How about you? What do you drunk buy?

**Craig:** Back in the days when I used to be on Facebook one night I had just one too many, which for me means three. I had one too many. And I was on Facebook and there was some ad that made so much sense. It was like this is the most comfortable, these shoes, these dress shoes that you could run in. They’re that comfortable. And I’m like really?

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** OK! And then the next day I had forgotten it had happened. And then like three weeks later these shoes show up and I’m like what the hell are these. And I never wore them. Drunk purchase.

**John:** And did you feel guilty about getting rid of them?

**Craig:** No. Not even slightly. No. I just felt like in the world of mistakes that people have made when they drank too much that was the mildest possible mistake.

**John:** Yeah. But talking about shoes, I do find you see advice about like you should replace your shoes after certain miles, especially for runners and such. But I realize like I’ll have shoes that are like ten years old and are basically just completely flat and I still wear them because they still work and I feel bad throwing them out. I have a hard time replacing my shoes.

**Craig:** You should. Well, it depends on what kind of shoe. But it’s just not good for your feet. It’s not good for anybody’s feet. So look at it this way. It will do no one any good.

Now, is there some place that maybe recycles that shoe? You could always look into that I suppose. But it’s not something you could donate because it’s going to be bad for somebody else’s feet. It’s just no good.

**John:** Yeah. It’s barely even a gray area.

**Craig:** Yeah. Barely.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** That’s right. Sure is.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Michael Karmon. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send the longer questions that we answer on the show. But for short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. You can ask me some questions there.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. If you go to johnaugust.com/guide that is the place where you can tell us which of the 500 episodes you think is most relevant for people to listen to and they should not miss if they are going to take a listen through the catalog.

You can find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter, Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll see those links in the show notes.

And you can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all those first 491 episodes and the bonus segments like the one we’re about to record detailing our origin stories. Craig and Megana thank you so much.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** So our bonus segment this week comes from a question by Isaiah Facta. Let’s listen to what Isaiah asks.

**Isaiah:** Hi John and Craig. I’m going to be graduating from high school in a few months and I know that I want to be a screenwriter. I realized this just after a girl that I liked told me that she didn’t want to be with anyone and then proceeded to get into a relationship two days after. Halfway through an episode of Parks and Rec I realized, hey, I’m not thinking about the girl right now. And I had my ah-ha moment of I want to be a screenwriter. I’m curious what moment made each of you decide that this was what you wanted to do with your life. Thank you both for helping me figure out where to even begin with writing as I don’t think I would be as far as I am if I hadn’t found Scriptnotes. Bye.

**John:** What I love about Isaiah’s story there is that experience of heartbreak plus comedy entertainment is what leads to screenwriting.

**Craig:** Basically. It sounds like he’s got the most important thing in place which is just pain.

I don’t know if there was a moment I realized I wanted to be a screenwriter per se, but there was a growing realization during my senior year of college that I wanted to entertain, somehow. And I didn’t know which way it was going to be, but it seemed like maybe trying to write some stuff, that there was opportunity there.

And so what I started trying to do was write sitcoms. I thought maybe I’d be a sitcom writer. And I was not. That never happened. And I became a sitcom actor before I became a sitcom writer, in fact.

But there was this desire to entertain. And I don’t know if there was a specific moment, it just started becoming clearer and clearer to me somewhere in my senior year of college.

**John:** Up to that point were you writing plays or sketches or any of that kind of stuff?

**Craig:** Nothing.

**John:** Nothing. Because I could totally picture you in an improv troupe. You didn’t do any of that?

**Craig:** No, because I was told over and over by my parents that that was frivolous nonsense. And it was drilled into me in a way that was – it’s hard to explain how – it’s just this thing. I think – I wonder, hey Megana, are you still there?

**Megana:** I am, yes.

**Craig:** Megana, I think John’s mom was probably way nicer than my mom. You don’t have to answer any of this if it’s too personal, but what did your parents think when you were like, you know what, I kind of want to go into entertainment?

**Megana:** They were like that’s such a fun hobby for you to do once you become a doctor.

**Craig:** Et voila. I didn’t even get that much. I got how dare you, you’re going to become a doctor. And so there wasn’t really space to do things like do improv or anything. It all felt guilty. It was all guilty pleasures. And so maybe that’s why the very first thing I did was work on this public affairs news show in college which seemed like the most serious version and therefore maybe potentially the most acceptable version of “entertainment” that I could find.

But I didn’t really allow myself to do anything until I came to LA.

**John:** Well, a common experience I think all three of us on this call would share is that while we were good at writing we were also good at other things, and so like Craig I know you were on your path to becoming a doctor and sort of did all that stuff of looking at cadavers and such. And you could have become a doctor and the same with Megana had her career at Google. There were other things you could have done that were just sort of normal and traditional and typical, and so therefore why would you not do those? And I guess of the three of us I was luckiest in the fact that my parents really did not push me in any particular direction at all.

So I always wrote and I was writing for my high school newspaper and ended up getting a journalism degree in college. But I tried to think back to what was the first moment that I realized that stuff was even written. And I’ve talked before on the show that I remember watching War of the Roses on videotape and rewinding it and starting to just transcribe everything I saw. And I realized like, oh, the dialogue is all written – someone must have written the dialogue down ahead of time.

Which sounds so naïve, because you read plays in high school, but I just didn’t have a sense that there were writers behind stuff.

I remember in fourth, so Spanish 4, so this is in high school, our professor Hugo Hartenstein asked like, “Oh, so what do you want to be when you grow up?” And I said, I was trying to find the words for oh I want to be a screenwriter. And Hugo Hartenstein is a native Spanish speaker, Cuban, and had no idea what the word was for screenwriter. So we eventually figured out it was guionista. So, a guion is a script and a guionista.

But that idea of like, oh, I want to write those scripts. And so then in college I realized like, oh, there really is a whole business and industry of people whose job it is to write these things. And Premiere Magazine. And that was sort of how I first got the notion that like, oh, screenwriting is job and a career I could shoot for and a way to write the stuff that I actually really want to write. The kinds of stories that I want to write.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. You had more of a moment there. I think, well it sounds like Isaiah is a bit freer than at least I was.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** He seems really free. There’s nobody kicking his butt about being a lawyer or a doctor or something. I feel like there’s a really cool – there’s a cool possibility, I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but there’s a possibility that Megana and I do just go to medical school. And we open up a practice. And we’re like screw it, it’s happening, we’re doing it. You know what? Find. We’re doing it. And then we become really good doctors. I could see that.

**John:** You know, I can’t think of any examples of someone who got their medical degree late in life. I’m sure there are examples.

**Megana:** Oh, you should talk to my dad. He has a ton.

**Craig:** Yeah. A friend of mine, his dad became a doctor fairly late in life. And, yeah, it does happen. Usually when it happens they don’t end up necessarily doing what you think of as like, oh, a general practitioner that builds a practice over time, because they don’t have that time. A lot of times they actually end up in administration, hospital administration, and things like that.

And a lot of them just are specialists. Yeah. They do it. I might still do it.

**John:** Get their masters of public health. Some advice for Isaiah as we leave here. He’s a high school student who has realized that he wants to become a screenwriter and TV writer may also be part of that as well. Opportunities he has is just to read a ton of scripts. And we live in a time where you can get access to all those things. And so he should be writing a lot, but he should also be reading a lot.

And I don’t want to steer him to a program that is exclusively film-based. I think he should – if he’s going to college go to a place where he can get a broad education about a bunch of other things that interest him. Because it’s those things that interest you that will be the material that you get to use as a writer.

If you just went someplace to study writing, especially screenwriting, I worry you’d become far too cloistered and wouldn’t have the kind of breadth of experience and breadth of curiosity that’s going to be so important for you.

**Craig:** Always. Try and live life as you’re going along. And try and find something that will put some money in your pocket. Because screenwriting will not for a long time.

**John:** It shall not. Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** See you next week.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Listener Guide Submissions](https://johnaugust.com/guide) send in your favorite episodes from 300-500!
* [Screenwriting Competitions Aren’t Worth the Money](https://johnaugust.com/2021/screenwriting-competitions-arent-worth-the-money) blogpost
* [$69 Million Beeple Auction for NFT](https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/beeple-auction-christies-nft-69-million-explained-why-why-why.html )
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 407: Understanding Your Feature Contract](https://johnaugust.com/2019/understanding-your-feature-contract)
* [Build a website on card.co](https://carrd.co/build)
* [For Creators, Everything Is for Sale](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/style/creators-selling-selves.html) by Taylor Lorenz for the NYT
* [Upstep](https://app.upstep.com) for insoles, and for more unboxing content, check out this podcast [All Consuming](https://allconsuming.show)
* [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
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael Karmon ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/492standard.mp3).

The original post of the episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/secrets-and-lies-2).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 490 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. It’s important to stretch because today on the show we’ll talk about secrets and lies, both how they inform characters, but also how they work in a story. We’ll also answer listener questions about realism, pre-laps, and the dreaded note “why now?”

**Craig:** Oh, why now?

**John:** Throughout this episode I will be challenging Craig to solve our first ever How Would This Be a Movie mystery. The case of the fatherless child.

**Craig:** Dum-dum.

**John:** Mysteries. And in our bonus segment for premium members we will discuss post-pandemic travel and generally the idea of post-pandemia.

**Craig:** Well, that sounds like a good idea, because I think the horizon is visible.

**John:** The horizon is visible there. We can tell that we are on a round globe because of the horizon and the way that living on a sphere gives you that kind of horizon.

**Craig:** There are people – I know everyone knows this –I’m stating it because sometimes I just need to say it out loud. There are people who are currently insisting the world is flat.

**John:** Yup. They are. Because of YouTube.

**Craig:** Because of YouTube. We’ve got to take YouTube off the Internet.

**John:** And I will also say the pandemic and disbelief in the pandemic and such is related to flat-eartherism and anti-vax people. It’s all that system of belief and it’s challenging to get people past that. We’re not going to solve it on this podcast.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Instead we’re going to talk about things that screenwriters can solve, like pre-laps.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** And the question of why now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why now?

**John:** One thing we were able to solve is we’ve added more scripts to Weekend Read thanks to our producer Megana Rao who has gone through and added Mank, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, First Cow, Malcolm and Me, White Tiger, The Personal History of David Copperfield. So a good list of 20 or more of the For Your Consideration scripts are now up there in Weekend Read.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** They’re free to read and download. And they are digital so they will take up no space on your kitchen counter, unlike screeners. So, Craig, I want to have a little conversation about screeners because for whatever reason this year it especially bugs me that I’m getting screeners for movies that were only released on digital platforms and I’m getting a physical copy of this thing that premiered on Apple TV Plus.

**Craig:** It’s enough already. And I understand the argument which is that there are a number of older – so all these screeners are for awards and there a number of voters who are older who may not be as comfortable with streaming as they are with physical DVDs. But I don’t even believe that anymore. Like, come on, it’s easier to stream something than to play a DVD. You don’t have to change the input on your TV or anything. I don’t understand it.

And it’s the plastic. It’s the delivery of them. They send them by FedEx. Sometimes I have to sign for these stupid things. Do you know how annoying that is?

**John:** I got a UPS sticky note saying I have to sign for this thing and I’m sure it’s a screener. I’m never going to sign it.

**Craig:** Well that’s the thing, right. So you get that notice. Hey UPS was here and we had something for you and you need to sign for it. And you’re like oh my god was it something great? No.

**John:** You know what? Send me a code. If it’s really important, send me a code and I will type in the code and I’ll watch the thing. But realistically they’re all on the apps and we just don’t need them.

**Craig:** It’s crazy.

**John:** Let’s stop.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s stop. I mean, what do we have to do? Listen, you’re a member of the Academy, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’m a member of the other academy. So between the two – although the other academy, I don’t think that there are – well, no, there are.

**John:** There are.

**Craig:** There are. They do do the TV things, yeah.

**John:** Sigh.

**Craig:** Enough of that.

**John:** Enough of that. All right, I’m eager to get you started on this mystery, and we’ll sort of revisit this mystery throughout the course of this, but this came in as a How Would This Be a Movie and I thought it could be a movie, but it could be more interesting as a thing to challenge Craig with and for us to discuss how real life articles can lead in different ways to movie adaptations.

So here is the set up. What I’m going to tell you is based on a true story. And we’ll have a link in the show notes to the actual articles. There are many articles that have been written about this thing that happened. I’m going to add some character names and details, mostly so it’s easier for us to talk about, but also so we can think about it as a potential movie.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** So this happens in Washington State, 2014. A couple, they are Roger and Annabeth Gleason. They’re both in their late 30s. They’ve been married for three years but it’s been a rocky relationship. They’ve been separated at times and Roger has been working out of state at times. They both apparently want to have a kid, though, but they’re having fertility issues on top of all of this.

With the help of IVF they have their first child, a son named Lucas. But there’s something odd. Lucas doesn’t share a blood type with either Roger or Annabeth. So, given this setup, Craig, what do you think is the next thing that happens?

**Craig:** I would imagine the next thing would be some sort of DNA test to see if the parents are the parents.

**John:** Yeah. And that is in fact what happens. Roger takes an at-home paternity test. And he learns that he is not the father.

**Craig:** Roger, you are not the father! Sorry, I had to Maury it. OK, so got it. But now the really interesting thing is, and I’m just sort of cheating because of the title of this thing, does mom take a maternity test?

**John:** Yes. So the question of sort of the paternity test and what the next step is is interesting. So I’ll set us up for our next segment by saying they end up writing into an online service called Ask a Geneticist, a blog. And he recommends that they need a more complete test. Because what’s going through their head right now is the question of like, wait, if this kid doesn’t match up, like we went through an IVF lab. Is it possible that the wrong sperm was used? That there’s something really wrong. Is there a lawsuit that we could possibly be filling?

**Craig:** And also the wrong egg.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. So this expert is going to recommend they take a more extensive paternity test, a more expensive and complete genetic test, and the results of that in our next segment.

**Craig:** The game is afoot.

**John:** All right. Let’s do some follow up on previous segments. We talked about text chains on screen. Do you want to see what Sam wrote to us?

**Craig:** Yeah, Sam says, “I couldn’t help but respond to your recent discussion about empty text chains on phones as I saw this executed well for the first time just a few days ago. In Ted Lasso we see a text chain between Keely and Roy that includes previous texts and also captures their personal characteristics. For example, in the pre-thread we can see Roy who curses often and vehemently has included a bitmoji of himself cursing. Really well done and thoughtful detail on a well done and thoughtful show.”

Well, OK, so it seems like at the very least Ted Lasso is getting it right.

**John:** Yeah. So I really enjoyed Ted Lasso and I think that attention to detail is really important in the way that character is reflected it’s sort of all little choices along the way. Speaks well to Ted Lasso there.

John from Stockholm, Sweden wrote in to say that this reminds him how characters onscreen get off phone conversations much more quickly than they do in real life. And his question is, “This got me thinking about where do you, specifically you, draw the line between something being unrealistic and just being economical from a writing and filmmaking place?”

**Craig:** Yes. So very often in movies characters will call somebody and not even announce themselves either. So you’ll hear somebody say, “Hello,” and they’ll say, “Listen, we’ve got a problem.” And the person goes, “OK, what are we doing?” But they don’t say, “Hey, it’s Craig, do you got a minute?” They don’t do anything, ever, ever. And when the conversation is done one of them nods as if the other one can see and then hangs up, which in fact on the other end of the phone would just seem like a dropped connection.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We do this because a lot of that filler does in fact take up space. It’s anti-dramatic. It tends to deflate tension. And generally speaking we just kind of go along with it. I think we’ve been trained by movies to just sort of go along with it.

**John:** I think a thing we do as writers very often is we will try to come into the scene after the phone has already been picked up, or leave the scene before the call is completed. Basically you don’t want to be in a scene where someone has to pick up the phone or hang up the phone if you possibly can avoid it. And yet if there’s really no way to avoid it you try to do the shortest reasonable thing that won’t stick out to a person. So I think my internal litmus test is when I notice that something is odd because they’re not doing it, or as an audience member we’ll just roll with it because it’s just sort of the convention. And that’s the test you’re always asking when you’re trying to optimize these things.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that there’s room now for you to actually do these little extra handles and bits and goodbyes and hellos as long as you do them in ways that are interesting. Then people might appreciate it. Do it quickly. I think this actually becomes a directorial thing of pace. You know, if your deal is that you’re calling somebody and going, “Hey, it’s me…,” you can just as easily go, “Hey, it’s Craig, listen…” Fine. “OK? All right. Bye. Bye.” That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with it.

**John:** Yeah. One of the nice things about the time we’re living in is people are tending to picking up their cellphones, so you can see who is calling you. So you can imagine like, OK, I see who is calling so I’m just going to start getting into it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you can sort of skip over that stuff. I think it’s always worth thinking about like what is the realistic way out of this conversation and what is the quickest version out of it? And do I take the quickest version or do I go even a little bit faster because of just movie logic.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know, I feel like there’s a fun in wallowing in some of the things that we’ve eliminated. Just in sort of a modern way to get hyper realistic about those things. It’s kind of fun to indulge in some of those things. Like shoe leather.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Because like, OK, so everybody understood, like nobody wants to watch people walking. If they’re going to go from this spot to that spot, the walking part is super boring. But if you wallow in it it could be kind of fun. So, I don’t know.

**John:** It’ll strike people as odd because you just don’t see it in on other things. Going through all of the nonsense chit chat.

**Craig:** Let’s reclaim it. Let’s reclaim shoe leather.

**John:** Evan wrote in this week writing, “You’ve been talking recently on the podcast about how you feel there’s a lack of female characters who make ethical decisions. I’ve also noticed there are no female characters with big redemption arcs, at least none that I can think of. Some of our most beloved characters are men who begin evil but are ultimately redeemed, like Darth Vader, the Hound, or Kylo Ren.

“And we have a fair number of female villains, like Cersei Lannister, or Amy Dunne from Gone Girl, but it seemed to me that evil women in fiction remain evil. I’d like to hear your thoughts on why there are no such stories or such few examples of female characters who are redeemed at the end.”

**Craig:** This is true. I was scratching my head on this one. And I don’t have great examples. I was thinking about Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max, Charlize Theron’s character, who she is a military general for the big bad villain. But she kind of makes a choice to be good really early. So I don’t think that’s a redemption story. The one that I actually thought was the closest was Helen from Bridesmaids. That’s the Rose Byrne character. Because she clearly is the villain. And then by the end she is good. She does the right thing. But not still then in the way that we think of these kind of mythological evil to good.

And I think partly it’s because a lot of male writers view women through this very binary – they used to call it the Madonna Whore complex where a woman is either a saint or a sinner. There’s no room in between, nor is there room for redemption because men are seen as morally striving and women are seen as just morally complete. They just come out good or bad. That’s it.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Whereas men are on some sort of path to goodness. And that’s just not true, but I think it’s just a function of the predominance of the male voice in our culture.

**John:** I was thinking through back to fairy tales and sort of other children’s lit where you do see broadly drawn villainous characters. And so you look at Maleficent, and so in the original Sleeping Beauty she is a just a thorough villain. She is a fairy queen/witch/villain. And then her redemption really comes in sort of a complete re-imagination of who that character is. Basically it’s not the character changes. You change the frame on who that character was in order to have her be not a villain throughout the whole story.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** The same with Wicked. In the Wicked Witch of the West in Wicked you see who she really is. It’s like, oh, this is all an act. She’s not inherently evil. It’s the world, it’s the system itself that is inherently evil. So, reinventions are not arcs. They’re just different characters. Different frameworks on a character behind it.

So, listeners write in. Give us some other good examples of female characters who have an arc from villain to hero or something more like a hero, because we’re having a hard time thinking of more of these. And I think it’s probably related, again, to sort of who was telling those stories and sort of what the biases they had in creating them.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it illuminates a big space to fill. Anytime you can’t really think of a lot of examples of something that is an opportunity to write your own. So, I would encourage people out there. Who are scratching their heads wondering what should I write to think about this as a good prompt.

**John:** For sure. All right. Let’s get back to our mystery, Craig.

**Craig:** Ooh, great.

**John:** Where we last left off there was a desire to have a more complete genetic test. So, that genetic test happened. The couple actually ended up going to 23andMe, which is not what you would think of, but was a much better test. And the results came back and they revealed that Roger is in fact not Lucas’s father, but Roger is his uncle.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** So, Craig, where is your storytelling brain going? Where is your detective brain going when I tell you that the man who thought he was this kid’s father is actually his uncle?

**Craig:** Well, I immediately wonder if Annabelle, I believe was her name, the wife.

**John:** Annabeth. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Annabeth. I wonder if Annabeth was having an affair with Roger’s brother.

**John:** That would be a very natural suspicion. Roger has no brother.

**Craig:** Well Roger thinks he has no brother. [laughs]

**John:** That’s really fascinating. So, you as the screenwriter, the person who gets the chance to invent things, what would you like to invent? Like if this was all the story that you had where would you want to take this thing and what’s your conception of who this brother that Roger doesn’t think he has – what’s the scenario there?

**Craig:** Well, it’s going to be fraternal twins separated at birth, one of whom finds out that through some reason or another he was denied the cushy life that Roger, his brother, got. And he comes back for revenge and seeks it with Roger’s wife.

**John:** I’m asking why – so why did you go to fraternal twin rather than just an older brother or younger brother? What is it about twins that is interesting to you?

**Craig:** Well, because it’s contemporary. It’s a little easier to imagine the separation not being something that Roger wouldn’t be aware of. Let’s say it’s an older kid, generally speaking if you have a child and then you have another child a few years later you don’t then boot the older one out. Although I suppose if he was a really bad seed you might want to.

Whereas twins, if they’re separated, it is conceivable that they wouldn’t know about each other. And obviously an older kid would know about a younger one. So there’s a certain plot convenience to twins.

**John:** Yeah. OK. That’s for sure. But in some ways I think it’s harder to imagine that twins got separated. I guess if Roger knew that he was always adopted. So, if Roger was adopted at the start it would make more sense. But it’s not like twins get separated and one stays with the family and one gets shipped off.

**Craig:** Generally speaking it is not an easy separation. That is correct.

**John:** I have friends who have families through adoption and it’s interesting that it’s like, oh congrats, you adopted this baby, that’s awesome. And then six months later it’s like, oh, now we have a four-year-old, too, because it turned out they had a sibling.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which is great and exciting and it’s lovely to have families together under one roof, but sometimes you anticipated having one kid and suddenly you have six because it turns out there’s a whole bunch of other related kids out there.

**Craig:** That is a risk you take with adoption and also biological procreation. Because sometimes the doctor comes to you and says, wow, four heartbeats. Didn’t happen to me, but it does happen. So, yeah, life is a crapshoot.

But, yeah, so I’m just doing the genetic math here. Roger is the child’s uncle. That means it has to be either, well, hold on. There’s another possibility.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** The other possibility is that Roger and Annabeth are brother and sister. But then he would still be the father?

**John:** Yeah, he would still be the father. There’d too much overlap.

**Craig:** That would be really confusing. So, it seems like Roger has a brother. There’s a brother in the mix.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And we’ve got to figure out how that brother snuck in there.

**John:** Great. That’ll be our next segment. We’ll get into what could possibly be happening here with the brother, because I’ll just whet your appetite by saying Annabeth has been faithful.

**Craig:** Wow. How?

**John:** All right, let’s get to our marquee topic which is secrets and lies. So, many episodes ago we were talking, it was like a random advice episode, and we were talking about blood donation. And you and I got into our little disagreement about whether if I had a rare blood type I should donate and it became this thing. And then in a bonus segment we talked through sort of my reasons for why lying about being gay to be allowed to donate blood I thought was problematic.

I mentioned this book by Sissela Bok that I read in college which I thought was terrific. It’s called Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life. I just finished rereading it. It’s still really, really good. It’s a book from 1975 that’s still surprisingly relevant to the things we’re facing today. But I wanted to in this topic talk about secrets and lies because I find them so interesting for writers, both in terms of plot and story, but also characters. And really be thinking about how secrets and lies relate to characters. And so I thought we could dig in a bit here and encourage our listeners to look at their own scripts from the aspect of what secrets are people keeping, what lies are they telling, and how that is driving story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like we’ve talked about lies before. I don’t know that we’ve talked about secrets per se. But I have a sense memory of talking about lies. And I believe that all humans are liars. That lying – we think of lying as a sin, like theft, or whatever is going on with Roger and Annabeth. Something happened somewhere. But that it is a crime. But the truth is it’s actually – while it can be a crime, it is also an inherent fundamental part of human behavior. And we innately understand that there’s a range of lies that cover a kind of spectrum of morality.

The fact that your character is a liar is essential to making your character seem real. Nothing is weirder than characters that apparently say what they think.

**John:** Yup. They feel broken. They feel like they don’t function within a real society. So, let’s define our terms a little bit so we make sure we’re talking about the right things. Let’s define a secret as something that is being hidden. And so that could be a truth that I don’t want you to know. My secret shame. My secret history. It could be a literal thing, a secret passage. It could be a secret message. I would say a secret takes some action to maintain. You have to sort of keep a secret up. And so generally at least one person has to know the secret. If not then it’s not really a secret anymore. It’s just like lost information. So there’s a truth that’s out there that is being kept from view.

**Craig:** Sounds about right to me.

**John:** And then a lie, let’s define that as a deliberate deception. So it’s not inaccurate information. It’s deliberately not giving out the truth. There’s a truth that could be told, that could be shared, and you’re not telling it. And weirdly a lie can kind of outlive the liar. That false story can persist long after that lie has been told and long after that liar has died.

**Craig:** Oh, I mean, most of human civilization is built on lies. Religion. [laughs] Basically they’re all lies. I mean, they’re stories, but if you tell people that they really happened that way then they’re lies. Most of our actual history is like what we think of as what really happened. A lot of it is just lies told by the victors.

**John:** A famous history book I think from the ‘80s, Lies My History Teacher Told Me.

**Craig:** Right. All of it.

**John:** So, when we say these can drive both plot and character, like Big Fish is about a secret that is misperceived as being a lie. That’s fundamentally what’s driving it. It’s the question of like is Edward Bloom’s past concealing a secret or is it all a lie, and sort of the relationship between those. Chernobyl, of course, is nothing but lies and secrets all the way down.

**Craig:** Yes. And very much about the corrosive quality of that stuff.

**John:** And they’re related phenomena. So every lie fundamentally conceals a secret because there’s a truth that’s being kept out of you. So every lie is a secret. And every secret has a lot of potential for lies. Because you’re going to start telling lies to maintain that secret. It’s almost impossible to keep a secret without lying. It’s challenging to. And I think a valid thematic question for a script could be can you maintain a secret without a lie? Are all secret-keepers fundamentally liars?

**Craig:** So, not always, but often. And there is a very enjoyable, in the way that horror movies can be enjoyable, like a stimulating, exciting aspect to watching somebody spin a web of lies and attempt to keep it working and going.

**John:** Oh yeah. The plate-spinning aspect of it is great.

**Craig:** The plate-spinning aspect. I mean, that was Dexter. The entire series essentially the joy of it I think was pretty much just watching Dexter keep the plates spinning. And the more you tell, the more you tell.

**John:** Yeah. The more I dig into it it’s hard to imagine a story that doesn’t have some aspect of a secret in it. And so there’s really obvious genre examples, like spy thrillers, anything with blackmail or infidelity. A mystery. There’s a secret generally within those. There’s some truth that you’re trying to uncover. There’s some detail that the protagonist is trying to unearth or themselves hide from view. And even in a love story, I mean every love story tends to have a moment where one character loves the other character but doesn’t want to confess to it. There’s some aspect of secret in kind of every story. So it’s always worth asking what secrets is the protagonist trying to discover. What secrets is the protagonist keeping from view? And that can inform both story but also specific behavior within scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it might be helpful to organize it a little bit in this way. Secrets are the things that get revealed at the end. Lies are grenades that are going to go off at some point and the explosion leads to the end.

So, in The Hangover the lie is calling back to Tracy and saying everything is fine, we’re just here in Vegas. No problem. When they know that’s not true. The secret is the secret/mystery of where is Doug. Well that lie is going to blow up before where is Doug is discovered, or at least almost does.

So, we know when we’re watching these things that eventually it’s going to go. Even in Dexter, where it was all the plates spinning, one by one they would bring people in that the lie would fail on. And then the truth would be shared. And you just feel that sense. The tension of a lie is like a bowstring being pulled back. Eventually the truth will out.

**John:** Yeah. And you as the storyteller have to decide what is the audience’s relationship with that secret. And so we as an audience in Dexter know what he’s actually been up to, because we can see all the things he’s been up to. We have his point of view on those situations. But you could make another choice where it’s a surprise until the end. Like that secret is revealed. That’s the twist at the end. That’s the M. Night Shyamalan reveal at the end. There’s a whole different level. The filmmaker was concealing a secret truth from you. And so that’s a relationship you have to have.

And in some ways it goes back to that notion of every secret is to some degree a lie because you are deceiving your audience into believing one set of realities when in fact a very different set of realities is happening.

**Craig:** And that’s kind of what a twist is. It’s a secret that you didn’t know was in the movie. And there’s a big difference between knowing there’s a secret and waiting to find out what it is. And having no clue that there’s a secret and then discovering that there was one all along.

**John:** Yeah. Because you entered into the movie with one set of assumptions, a kind of contract that you had assumed you had signed with the storyteller. And they had made different assumptions about what that would be. Or they had relied on your misassumption in order for this thing to work properly.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Magic tricks work the same way, too. Jokes work the same way. It’s that element of I have led you to believe a certain thing and I’m going to take you to a different place than you expected.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Yeah. But let’s talk about lies. Because as you said earlier for normal human interaction some degree of deception is absolutely required. Like just all the social niceties of how are you doing, doing just great. There’s a lie inherent to that because we’re not all doing just great. We’re all just struggling and getting by. It’s a lubrication that sort of gets us through this. This shared deception that things are a certain way.

**Craig:** Yeah. We don’t necessarily have a great grasp on our own truth either, which is why we lie a lot. And it’s why characters lie a lot. I mean, so a typical way we express the notion of a white lie is I think something that might be upsetting to somebody. I don’t want to upset them. So I give them a different version, a watered down version, or a polite version that’s acceptable to them. But even the thing that I’m thinking, maybe I’m just thinking that because I know they can’t hear it.

It’s like you can scream in your car because you know that no one can hear you, but maybe that’s why you’re screaming also. Because you know that no one can hear you. It’s like a feedback loop.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not necessarily true that the one thing is more true than the other. Sometimes I think that the white lie is the truth. It’s the extreme thing I’m thinking that isn’t the truth. Whoa.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Mind-blowing.

**John:** And there’s also lies we tell really for good intent. There’s the extreme versions where you lie to protect someone’s life. Basically there’s a killer at the door and they say, “Where’s Tommy?” And it’s like Tommy’s not here, when Tommy is hiding under the bed. That’s the kind of lie that even a strict moral philosopher might justify in some way. I think justification is really a fascinating word. The taking of something that you know is not right and making it seem right. That’s justification.

So there’s those extreme examples, but there’s kind of the patronizing lies, like this is for their own good. There’s a good purpose for this. It’s why we don’t tell kids the whole truth. This is why we let them believe in Santa Claus. The person is not ready for the lie so therefore it’s better for us to tell them that. And they may be agreeing to that, or they may not be agreeing to that. And those are the ethical/moral quandaries there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes I think things get retroactively turned into lies. I still don’t think that – when Obi-Wan Kenobi said to Luke Skywalker, “Darth Vader killed your father.” I think that was real. And then later it was like, you know what, that was a lie.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, how do you want to approach that? Do you want to approach that from like what the intention was when the line was written? Or retroactively we’re saying that was metaphorical?

**Craig:** I think, yeah, so I think retroactively saying it was metaphorical. And the reason I bring it up is not because, look, I don’t know, maybe George Lucas always knew that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father. Spoiler! But because it’s so flexible, lying or a rubber re-relationship to truth is so inherent to the way we think and speak that almost anything could be a lie. Even from people that seem saintly. You just give them a good, you know, reason for it and off you go.

**John:** Yeah. That’s why through these last four years when the New York Times would keep a list of lies that our former president said, yes it was helpful to label them as lies rather than–

**Craig:** Untruths.

**John:** Deliberate falsehoods. But there’s also fundamentally that question of like if a person doesn’t recognize that they’re lying do we hold that to the same standard? It’s tough and fraught. And I look at the Edward Bloom character in Big Fish and it’s like is he a liar or is he a bullshitter? Yeah, OK, it’s all a gradation here. And we have to make choices as writers what we’re letting our characters do and how the choices that they’re making are going to impact the characters around them.

**Craig:** And that’s the big one is what is the impact of these things. And building a good story around a single lie can be incredibly effective. Galaxy Quest is a story built around a single lie. So it’s a sin of omission. These aliens thought the show was real and the cast of the show does not disabuse them of this notion. And you know inevitably they’re going to find out. It’s inevitable. Just as in every romantic comedy where somebody is posing as something they’re not, you know inevitably they’re going to find out. And we like that.

We like watching people face the shame of lying and then recover by expressing truth, because it gives us all hope. Even if in reality typically when you’re discovered to be lying in that fashion you are rejected permanently because you hurt somebody in a way that is not – there’s just no coming back from it.

**John:** Craig, what I think you’re speaking to is we have an expectation in our movies that there will be a cause and effect. And so therefore if this is thing is setup then the event will happen. If that car goes over the bridge it will explode in ways. We sort of have this set of reasonable expectations that these causes will lead to these effects. And I think we have an expectation that lies will eventually be exposed and there will be consequences for those lies.

And it’s disturbing when the villain gets away with the lies. And when the villain gets away with whatever actions that they’re taking. So I think that gets to, again, it’s the audience’s and the other characters’ reaction to those lies in some ways are more important than the intention behind those lies.

**Craig:** Correct. Because at the end of the movie when somebody says, “I lied, but here’s why I lied, I was afraid…” And then so that’s what she says. And the guy is like, “I love you.” And then they kiss. But then like what happens a month later? We don’t see that part. When he’s like, wait a second, you’re a liar. Like I don’t know if I believe you.

**John:** You fundamentally deceived me on all this stuff. Yeah.

**Craig:** You lied to me with a straight face, like While You Were Sleeping. Wait, hold on a second, you’re a liar. And that is kind of funky. But we don’t see what happens after the movie so we’re OK with it.

**John:** Yeah. To wrap this up, getting back to the Sissela Bok book that I’m reading, one of the things she keeps coming back to is that notion of in any situation in which you are attempted to lie ask yourself would this also be a situation in which violence might be a reasonable choice as well? So like to protect someone’s life, well, you might avoid violence but you might use violence in order to protect someone’s life. You might lie in order to protect someone’s life.

In movies, just like the same way characters will lie to each other then like forget it all, these characters have gone through sometimes these incredibly violent things and have killed people in front of each other and it’s like, oh yeah, now everything is fine and we’ll never kill anybody again. Really? Is that how it’s going to happen? You’ve broken the seal on the mortal violence.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s get back to our mystery. Where we last left off we had just learned from a genetics test that Lucas is in fact the nephew of Roger. So Roger is the uncle to this kid who he assumed was his son.

**Craig:** And Annabeth, his wife, was not – she didn’t cheat on him. She was faithful. So she has not slept with anybody but Roger.

**John:** Absolutely. And as you recall this kid was conceived through IVF which may or may not be relevant. So I just want to make sure that that was still noted in there.

**Craig:** Noted. Was there any new information?

**John:** Yes. So there is some new information. We have done this genetic test. I think it was the blogger that they wrote into said like, you know what, there’s one other thing I want you to go check. And it turns out that this mystery which we believe began in 2014 actually began 30 years earlier. And the womb that we needed to look at was not the womb in which the son was born, but the womb in which the father was born.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** You had theorized – remind me your original theory of who the real father of this kid would be.

**Craig:** Oh, he ate his own twin in the womb.

**John:** He ate his own twin in the womb.

**Craig:** Wow. But the twin still had some sperm.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** Whoa. [laughs] That’s awesome. That’s so crazy.

**John:** So let’s put all this together.

**Craig:** Oh, I solved it.

**John:** You did solve this. And so you solved this, and then we’ll also talk about what the story implications are behind all this. But so, yes, 30 years ago in the womb Roger was a little embryo there and he had a fraternal twin in there as well. At some point Roger’s embryo absorbed the other twin, which apparently happens. They’re realizing a lot more often than people think it happens. And so Roger is technically a chimera. He has genetic information from two different individuals. When you do more extensive genetic testing on him you’ll see there’s two completely different individuals living inside this. And some of the genetic information that he absorbed was in fact what led to sperm cells. So his sperm is actually of his brother who never existed.

**Craig:** My god. So his brother gets the ultimate revenge. Like you don’t destroy me. I destroy you!

**John:** Indeed. You will never father children and I will father children.

**Craig:** My line will live forever. Oh, babies in the womb.

**John:** Babies. So, that is the actual truth behind this and so we’ll link to some articles about this. And so I made up the characters’ names, but everything else that I described is basically what happened. So, in reaching the resolution of this mystery what are the other interesting story points for you? Because I don’t think this is necessarily a movie, but tell me what things of this spark your narrative interest.

**Craig:** Well, right away I think of it as a test of trust. Because if two people trust each other and then someone comes along and then another person comes along, and then a third person comes along, and all of them provide rock solid evidence that trust should not be there. We have entered an interesting story of faith which is trust in the absence of any reason to trust. And that is interesting.

It’s romantic, to some extent. I can certainly see that. But it also can bring up other things. So, there’s an interesting kind of story where something happens and there’s a misunderstanding. I thought that you were not faithful with me, or something. It turns out you were. But the opening, that little opening discussion has led us to discover other things.

**John:** That seed of doubt.

**Craig:** Force Majeure is a good example of this. The movie where there is an avalanche and a man instead of sort of shielding his wife and children kind of runs away. [laughs] And that leads to a long, difficult kind of explosion of a marriage. And so that’s kind of where I would imagine it going.

**John:** So, I think it also speaks to the idea of objective truth versus subjective truth and the idea of like well science says this is not genetically your offspring, and yet by all normal standards this is your offspring. No other man was involved in the creation of this child. So it is you.

But also the notion of identity. Roger assumed he was just one thing. But he actually is kind of two things. And people who have chimera syndrome or whatever you want to say, they will tend to have other manifestations of like this other twin that’s inside you to some degree. So there could be discolorations of skin. There can be aspects of that other person inside you.

So, The Dark Half, the Stephen King story, is sort of the most extreme example of that where the twin starts growing inside the other person. But that is thematically interesting. I assumed I was just one thing, but now I realize I am two things. And it’s making me question who I am.

**Craig:** I would blame all that kid’s annoying stuff on my brother. I tried to kill him. I tried to kill him in the womb, but this is his kid. You know, my brother. It’s not my fault.

**John:** Yeah. It’s fun stuff. And, of course, we’re assuming that in a time in which IVF is more common and multiple embryos can be implanted at the same time, it can just be really complicated. It’s that idea of sort of the simple half from one and half from the other. Our assumptions about sort of like the fatherhood and parenthood of a child may be really just myths.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we don’t know what we don’t know. And that’s what makes a good story.

**John:** There’s interesting stuff there. I don’t think we have a – the conclusion of this mystery is not the conclusion of a movie based on it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It could be an M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end, but it would have to be for a kind of different story that got us there.

**Craig:** The problem is it’s super convenient. It feels a little bit like evil robot twin. And in the end when you find out the reaction from the audience I would assume would be, “Ooh, OK.” [laughs] But, fine, great. Well, I guess everything is fine now. But, you know, it feels like more of a thing that might pop up in a short mystery than in a movie.

**John:** Hey, let’s imagine that instead of being a normal parenthood situation this is some sort of murder mystery or some sort of serial killer thing. Roger in some ways like he could leave evidence at a crime scene that could never be traced to him. That’s interesting.

**Craig:** Well, but it will be. Because–

**John:** It’s sort of half-traced to him.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the thing. If his sperm is the sperm of his brother that he absorbed then any sperm sample would be traced to him. So you have to be able to be like, OK, if I nick a vein you get my brother, if you nick an artery you get me. Then that would be pretty cool.

**John:** It would be pretty cool. I mean, we’re in a time now where there are those databases where they are finding serial killers through relationships to cousins and things like that. So, it becomes fascinating. The idea that there’s people who never existed who are the villain.

**Craig:** The Dragnet is tightening around your neck, my friend. We’ll get you, John. We’re going to get you.

**John:** Eventually it will all come to pass.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. They’re zeroing in.

**John:** All right. Let’s go to some questions.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Megana Rao, our producer, if you could come on the line and talk us through some of the questions in the mailbag today.

**Megana Rao:** OK, Great. Julie Plec asks on Twitter, “What is the origin of the ‘why now?’ note? Why is it at the top of every exec checklist? What are you favorite shows and is there a why now in every single one of them? This note drives me bananas. Help me resolve this pet peeve of mine. Happy to be right or wrong. To clarify, the note in question is why is this story launching for this character now as opposed to why are we telling this story now.”

**Craig:** So, Julie Plec is the executive producer of Vampire Diaries.

**John:** And Roswell and other great shows. She’s been a guest on our podcast before. She’s a smart writer. So if Julie Plec, an incredibly successful showrunner, is getting hit by this note this note is endemic and can never be destroyed.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I don’t like it either, because I think there are plenty of stories that just happen because they happen to happen. And that’s fun. Life is a bit random in that regard. And sometimes understanding the why now makes everything feel a bit too neat. Why is it at the top of every exec checklist? Because there is peer pressure. I think people pick stuff up and then they spread it around. It’s memetic.

**John:** I also feel it’s one of those questions that they don’t have to kind of defend for themselves because you’re going to give them some answer and they’re going to be like, oh, OK. But it reveals none of their cards to ask why now. Because they could love the story and they could ask why now. They could hate the story and ask why now.

But let’s separate out the two why nows, because Julie is specifically talking about in this story that’s already established why is this particular storyline happening to this character now versus why is it time to tell – why is this the time to remake Grease, for example. And so that’s a whole separate beast and that timing stuff is complicated.

The why is this happening to this character right now, you can parse it as what is it about this storyline that is particularly interesting to this character now versus what are the existing plot mechanics that are going to generate the story now. And I think as the writer hearing this if you can hit the ball back and say like this is why this storyline right now for this character is going to be so exciting based on the other things that have happened, or this is so ripe, you’re more likely to succeed than just talking about the mechanics of the show overall.

**Craig:** I think that executives have tropes the way that writers have tropes. So, we’ve talked about clams. Writers can say, “Oh my god, it was the date from hell,” because it requires no thought. It’s just, bloop, there it is. Done. And I think sometimes there are notes like this where if you have to say something, well, you could probably get away with that one and just, bloop, there it is. Why now. And the real answer to why now is because I said so. That’s why now. Because.

**John:** Because Julie Plec is the showrunner, dammit.

**Craig:** Because you know what? I thought people would be interested. That’s why.

**John:** Now, I do know that we have quite a few development executives who listen to this show. We even did an episode where we talked to a bunch of them. So, if any of them want to write in and sort of tell us their motivations behind asking the why now question, or want to promise that they won’t ask the why now question again, we would love to hear it.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know if they’re going to be able to do that. But there is probably some kind of story where it feels so unmotivated that you can’t get into it, because it just seems like, you know, for instance – I understand this. A character works at a pet shop. And they are really bored. And when our story begins they go I’m so bored I’m going to rob the pet store. Well, OK, but why didn’t you rob the pet store yesterday or the day before, or month before? You’ve been there for seven years. Did something happen? I understand that one.

**John:** That’s a reasonable question.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s reasonable. But the why now as in like, OK, but why…what’s the why now of Big Lebowski? Why is this happening to Lebowski today? Because it just did. That’s the way it goes.

**John:** Why did he meet the beautiful woman on the bus today versus yesterday? It’s like that’s not a reasonable question.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Because it happened.

**Craig:** Because it happened. Bingo.

**John:** Megana, what else do you have for us?

**Megana:** All right. So Cassie in LA asks, “Before last November I rarely encountered a pre-lap in a script. Now the pre-laps are everywhere. I read a script the other day with a pre-lap scene every third scene. Am I crazy for thinking this is insane? Reading wise a pre-lap tends to take me out of the story. That’s why I don’t use them. But with all the pre-laps popping up I can’t help but wonder am I missing out? Are you guys team pre-lap or team let the editor figure that stuff out? And if you are pro pre-lap how many are too many?”

**John:** Applause for getting through as many times as you had to say pre-lap.

**Craig:** Pre-lap.

**John:** Pre-lap. Pre-lap. And you had to ask the question without even defining what the term was first, so let’s make sure that we all are talking about the same thing. A pre-lap in film or television scripts is when a character in a scene starts talking before we’ve actually made the cut. And so like if you hear my dialogue before you actually come to me in that next scene that is a pre-lap. So it’s bleeding the dialogue across into the next scene.

**Craig:** Or any sound. You know, like if it’s the sound of a lawnmower and then you cut to a guy mowing a lawn.

**John:** Exactly. And I am team pre-lap. I believe they are sometimes a useful way to convey the feeling of what it’s going to be like to be experiencing this on a screen while reading it on the page. So, I will use a pre-lap when it is useful. I think it can be overused like any technique in screenwriting. But Craig where are you on pre-lapping?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s one of the transitions. We had an episode where we walked through many, many ways to transition between scenes. Transitioning between scenes is one of the things that separates the accomplished craftsperson from the not accomplished craftsperson. And having the audio begin before we get there is one of the ways we do that.

I do it all the time. I just don’t use the word pre-lap. What I’ll say is, are you ready, “We hear, yada-yada.” And then I go, Interior, blah-blah-blah, and there it is. It’s happening. So, I use it all the time. And I would say to Cassie or to anybody, look, I understand – sometimes when people say such and such takes me out of the story and whatever the such and such isn’t story material but rather format material, I get a little squirmy in my seat. Meaning you can handle it. Just do it. You’re fine.

We’re not so precious as readers that we fall apart if we see pre-lap. If it’s a good story you can deal with it. Think of it this way. If someone handed you Raiders of the Lost Ark and it said pre-lap every third scene would you throw it out? No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No. You work through it. But for me, I don’t tend to use any what I would call formulistic old style mechanic instructions like pre-lap or things like that. I’ll just say, I’m more impressionistic. We hear the sound of a such-and-such rise as we find ourselves in, Interior, Bathroom.

**John:** Yeah, but if a character started speaking before the cut would you mark them as pre-lap in their parenthetical or in their character cue?

**Craig:** I must admit I almost never do that. All of my pre-laps are non-dialogue.

**John:** So as a member of team pre-lap I will use the term pre-lap I think only when the character is speaking before the cut. And I think Cassie has likely not only seen a ton of pre-laps, but has seen a ton of bad pre-laps which is why she’s noticing them. I think a pre-lap is useful if that character’s dialogue or the sound we’re hearing has an interesting contrast with the scene that is just wrapping up. And therefore starting it early actually gives us something. Gives us a little punchline to a joke. It helps do a thing to make that transition have extra weight and extra meaning.

If it’s just there as a stylistic flourish then it’s pointless and shouldn’t be there.

**Craig:** I feel like we should just record something that says, “If it’s done well it’s fine.” And we have Megana read a thousand questions in a row and we just keep hitting this button.

**John:** We press the little button.

**Craig:** Yup. If it’s done well it’s fine. If it’s done well it’s fine. Yeah.

**John:** Megana, what else you got?

**Megana:** So, JW writes, “I’ve been an appreciative listener of Scriptnotes for years. Thank you both for providing so much of your personal wisdom. That said, I have to take issue with the concept that reappears on this podcast every now and then. ‘You have it or you don’t.’ While I understand that there are well meaning reasons for repeating this phrase, I believe this line of thinking borders on elitist. I also fear that it is dangerous. Someone who has a grandiose personality but is it not self-aware enough to judge their potential lack of talent might never be dissuaded from pursuing a writing career, even if they’re told point blank that they ‘don’t have it.’

“Meanwhile many talented albeit sensitive writers could take the wrong lesson from this mantra. Such writers include myself. I quit writing for two years because I was convinced that I didn’t ‘have it’ after a vicious bout of imposter syndrome that was enhanced by the ‘you have it or you don’t’ mentality. Ultimately my inner voice told me I had to go back to writing. I’ve since sold a spec feature and went on to receive steady work in recent years.

“I love you both but I feel like I must alert you to a potentially problematic mantra that I repeatedly hear make its way back to this great podcast.”

**John:** Well, JW, thank you for writing in with that. And also congratulations on your sale. Craig, what’s your first reaction to hearing this?

**Craig:** My first reaction is that “that said” is my favorite phrase in the world. I love you, I respect you, I think you’re an amazing person. That said…oh boy.

I don’t understand. That’s my response. I don’t understand this. You do have it or you don’t. And you’re proof of it. And the fact that you were confused about it doesn’t make it true or not true. I think you’re arguing for us to just hide something that’s true because some people that don’t have it will think they do, and some people that do will think they don’t. But the phrase “you have it or you don’t” is not at the root of a lack of confidence in your own writing ability.

I have it. And I feel a lack of confidence all the time. I have it just means the potential. That’s what it means. It means you have the potential to be a successful writer. You have the materials. But now you’re going to have to do a whole lot of work. You’re going to have to pick the right thing. You’re going to have to apply yourself. You’re going to have to fix it. And you’re going to have to bust through all of the limitations of being a human being to get to something that’s good that people want to make.

I think you’re just putting way too much, I don’t know, influence. It’s a fact.

**John:** I’m trying to balance two competing instincts here. So let me sort of talk this out. On one hand we’ve discussed before that when it comes to being a professional basketball player there are objective metrics you can look at. OK, you have the skills to be a professional basketball player or you don’t. And if someone were to say like, “No, no, keep trying, keep trying. You can make it,” when it’s clear you can’t make it is doing no one any service.

And something like writing though there are not those same objective traits. And so while Craig or I or other folks could recognize like oh that person is a really good writer, we can’t necessarily recognize like oh that writing is not good yet but maybe they’ll get better over time.

And, yet, in our experience we’ve noticed common traits of writers who never make, who never flourish, and who struggle for many years and eventually decide oh you know what I’m happier not trying to be a screenwriter. And so in making that observation I think that comes to the expression of “you have it or you don’t,” or some essential skill to writing that not every person has. And I don’t know that JW would disagree with that. I don’t think that JW – my hunch is that JW doesn’t believe that pick a hundred people off the street and anyone of them could become a screenwriter if they just applied themselves enough.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Maybe JW does. But I don’t think that’s where we’re getting to.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, you have it or you don’t is a tautology. Right? It is absolutely logically from an Aristotelian point of view 100% true. It’s like something is either A or not A. That is always true. So, “you have it or you don’t” is a fact. The reason we repeat is because a lot of people promote something else, which is anyone can do this if they blankety-blank-blank-blank which are saying with the repetition of this tautology is not the case.

When you say that you believe this line of thinking borders on elitist I would push back and say it is not bordering on elitist. It is elitist. It is not elitist in the sense of snobbery, cultural snobbery. It’s elitist in the sense that there are a very small amount of people that seemingly have the ability and skill and toolkit to make it through and have a movie made, or a television show produced. It’s hard to do. Just like athletes.

I mean, we have no problem saying he’s an elite athlete. But we have a problem saying he’s an elite artist? Why?

**John:** Well, I think here’s one difference is that we talk about the skill, opportunity, and toolkit, but also is opportunity. And also is access. There’s things – there are obstacles in the way of someone becoming a successful screenwriter that have nothing to do with that person’s talent, but actually their circumstances. And I think we’ve acknowledged that repeatedly on the show and how important it is to increase access to opportunity and access to outcomes that are there.

So JW is not really talking about sort of those problems, those sort of systemic problems. JW is talking about how repeating this idea that “you have it or you don’t” dissuaded them from pursuing for a time. Yes. And I mean sometimes congratulations on having some imposter syndrome rather than this false bravado that you couldn’t do this thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m really happy that things worked out for you. I’m really happy that you got past this roadblock of self-doubt. I think a thing we’ve also tried to communicate a lot over the course of this show is that successful writers have a lot of self-doubt and that it’s not just a thing that aspiring writers suddenly get over. It’s not you become successful and you suddenly have no self-doubt anymore. That’s still a part of this career.

**Craig:** Yeah. When it comes to people who are struggling through limited access or struggling through a system that has an inherent bias it’s even more important to acknowledge that some people have it. Let’s just talk about the positive part. That’s why we need to open access to everybody and make sure that there aren’t artificial barriers because there are so few people that have it that you don’t want to lose the people who do through nonsense and bad behavior.

David Zucker when people would ask him how do you – what’s the secret for making it – he would always say, “Quit now. You’ll never make it.” And if you refuse to believe that you’re halfway there. That was his sort of Zen, Koan kind of paradox.

You obviously were able to push through, JW, meaning you are proof positive that us saying “you have it or you don’t” doesn’t stop you from being a successful screenwriter. And I’m never going to stop saying it. [laughs] Ever. In fact, I’m going to say it twice as often, just because I’m cranky.

**John:** And I would also encourage JW that whatever lessons you’ve learned, whatever helped you get through that, share that. Because other people might take inspiration from your example. But also remember that you are one example of the situation. And there’s a survivorship bias that is inherent to like, well, because I made it therefore anyone else can do what I just did. And that’s not reality. That’s just not how it goes. And so when we talk about sort of like the many hundreds of people we’ve encountered through our careers and the patterns we’ve recognized, that’s what we’re talking about.

**Craig:** Correct. That’s a great point. Great point.

**John:** All right, Megana, thank you for these questions.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you guys. Bye.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a game I actually texted to Craig because I thought he would enjoy it and I think he enjoyed it.

**Craig:** Loved it.

**John:** It’s called Kitty Letter and it’s by the Oatmeal, Matthew Inman, and the folks behind Exploding Kittens. It is a delightful little word puzzle where you’re trying to form as many words as possible while your opponent is trying to form words off the same tile set. It is just so specific to Matthew’s sense of humor and sort of how it all works.

I like that he coded it largely himself because it feels like a kind of thing I would do. I just really enjoyed it. It’s become a great little game to play when I have five minutes when I’m waiting for a call. So I really recommend Kitty Letter. It’s available for iOS and for Android.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was great. Matt did a terrific job. And it is so finger printed to him. No surprise it involved cats that explode. And also very odd-looking cartoon people with very dramatic expression and explosions of anger and joy. And it has a lovely – there’s a single-player adventure part that you can go through, like story mode, and it has a lovely ending. It was just great. I played it all straight through in like an hour. I loved it.

Well, my One Cool Thing is also a game, also for iOS, and possibly Google/Android, but I don’t care, called Inked. I don’t know if you’ve seen this. It’s pretty well-promoted.

**John:** The trailer is beautiful.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s really, so I mean I think the real value of this game is in fact the aesthetic of it. In and of itself it’s not something we haven’t seen before. It is a platform puzzler I guess you would call it where you are moving through a space and you need to manipulate certain objects in order to get through this space or move some objects where they have to go, so you have ramps and things like that.

And so the controls are very touch-based. You’re not running around or dodging or ducking or anything like that. But what makes it really run to play and look at is that the entire thing is done as ballpoint pen sketches. That kind of classic blue-lined look. And they just got it. I mean, they just nailed it. Maybe it’s fountain pen look. I don’t know. But it’s really beautiful to look at. And it is fun to play. So, check out Inked on iOS.

**John:** Fantastic. And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Daniel Green. Hey Dan.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send the longer questions like the ones we answered on the show today. For short questions on Twitter you can find me @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and 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 the weekly-ish newsletter we make called Inneresting which has 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 the bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on where we would dream about going to vacations in our post-pandemic wonderful life.

Craig, thank you for helping solve the mystery of the Case of the Fatherless Child.

**Craig:** Case of the Devoured Twin.

**John:** If I had said the devoured twin, if that was the title it really would have spoiled it, wouldn’t it?

**Craig:** It would have given it away.

**John:** It would have given it all away. Most of mystery is about finding the right title. That’s what I’ve learned today.

**Craig:** The butler did it.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. It is time for our bonus segment. This suggestion came from our premium listener Andrea, or maybe Andrea. She’s from the UK, London. So she may pronounce it Andrea. Who knows? She asks, “After this is all over, what countries, cities, or other types of locations would you most want to travel to that you’ve never traveled to before? And why?”

Craig, what’s on your list, your bucket list for travel in a post-pandemic world?

**Craig:** Well, I’m an interesting person to ask this question of because I don’t necessarily have a lot of wanderlust. I’m very much a homebody.

But the other day I was talking about the fact that I’ve never been to Tokyo.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** And I’ve never been to Seoul. And I thought I could do like a Japan/Korea combo trip.

**John:** And as you recall that’s where I was last January. So when we brought Covid back to the US – oh shoot, I wasn’t supposed to say that.

**Craig:** Yup. It was you.

**John:** We were in Korea for Big Fish and then we were in Northern Japan skiing with a bunch of Chinese skiers.

**Craig:** I think I would probably – that sounds like fun. Now, I say that and then cut to miserable jetlag and I’ll be cursing everything. But I think that that sounds like a good plan. And I do probably my very first trip regardless no matter what is going to be London because our whole Chernobyl was intending to have a bit of a reunion around the BAFTAs. But the BAFTAs were obviously not held in person and so we did not have that opportunity. And so I’m hoping that maybe by the time it’s like Christmas/New Year’s we might be able to have that London reunion. Because I miss those folks.

**John:** Our plans for last spring break were to go back to Paris to visit all our friends in Paris, because longtime listeners of the podcast know I used to live in Paris. And it would be our first time back to visit our friends there for quite a long time. So we had actually rented the same apartment we used to live in. And we were very excited to go back and just have our Paris life back for ten days. And then of course the pandemic shut down everything there.

So, Paris is definitely the first place I need to go once the world opens up again. That’s just a high priority and I can’t wait to get back there. But I would say there have been a lot of other places that were on the list that were like oh eventually we need to get to that place. And I feel an increased urgency just because the pandemic shut this down this one time. Who knows what’s going to stand in the way of future trips.

So I definitely want to go to New Zealand. We have Paris friends who live there now so I want to go and visit them. New Zealand just seems like a wonderland that doesn’t have Covid. Iceland, always high on the priority list. But then even places that are kind of always going to be there but I just feel a new urgency to get to is like Machu Picchu and other sort of great historic sites around the world. I want to get there before the next thing happens that keeps me from going there.

**Craig:** Yeah. I never thought about the next thing.

**John:** Yeah, but even if it’s not a thing that shuts down the world, we’re of an age where bad stuff can happen. And suddenly it becomes impossible for us to travel someplace.

**Craig:** Oh right. I get what you’re saying. Like suddenly just your knee.

**John:** Just your knee. Or mortality.

**Craig:** Dark.

**John:** So this week one of the things I needed to do was – so my mom passed away December 5, and it turned out her name was already engraved on the headstone and her birthday was there but I needed to add her date of death. And so I was calling the cemetery to do this and it cost $425 if people are curious about what that is.

But a site I found which was so remarkable and how I knew what still needed to be done is somebody had gone through and photographed all of the headstones in this cemetery where my father is buried, or where my mom is going to be buried. And so I could just look up and I could actually see a photo of my dad’s tombstone, which was just awesome. There’s a service that just does all of this. Or there’s a website that keeps them on. I think it was just a volunteer who takes all the photos.

And so I was looking there and I realized my father was only 60 when he died. And in my head he was like much older than that. And it really brought a sense of – the realization of the shortness of life at times. Because he died when I was pretty young. And so I always think of him as being old when he died, but he really wasn’t that old.

**Craig:** Well, he was. It’s just so are you.

**John:** He’s not that old, because I’m not that old. That’s what I’m saying, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, when my dad died last year I definitely felt older. I mean, I think I said as much on the show. The buffer between you and the great beyond has been removed. You’re next.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I’m the next Mazin man to die.

**John:** There’s no generation, yeah. If you were to die before your father that would be a great tragedy, but if you were to die after your father it’s like, oh, this is just what happens.

**Craig:** It’s about how it should work.

**John:** But happier topics, like imagining a post-pandemic life seems much more possible and plausible now than even a month ago. It’s surprising how quickly spring has come in a sense of this global disaster.

**Craig:** Yeah. I do feel like things – I mean, statistically the last couple of weeks have been remarkably good. It’s hard to say that when people are still dying, but relatively speaking the transmission rate and the hospitalization rate have plummeted, particularly here in LA County. Obviously plummeting from quite a steep rise that we experienced over the winter.

There is an acceleration of vaccinations. I think they said something like 50 or 60% of Americans over 65 have now been vaccinated or something. It’s like a really big number.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a crazy number.

**Craig:** And they have been saying that unfortunately because generally sucked at being good pandemic practitioners the infection rates were so high in the United States that we have started to also creep up on herd immunity just because of infections. So in LA County there is one estimate that half of all people in LA County were infected by Covid.

**John:** That seems too high to me and yet also it was just terrible here. So I could see both sides of that. I would say personally I am – and as a family – we are not sort of letting down our guard at all at this point. At some ways seeing that the end is near has strengthened our resolve to like–

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** –not get during this time.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s the short timer syndrome. The guys who were in war, they always say the most scared they are is right before their last three days. Because people do unfortunately catch it right there at the end. So, like you we are sticking to the plan and wearing the masks and social distancing and all that stuff. But, man, I cannot wait to get that jab in my arm.

**John:** I’m very excited for it.

**Craig:** I’m ready.

**John:** And it’ll be good when it happens.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** I would also say we’re starting to make some summer plans. Are they plans which we could cancel if we needed to cancel? Sure. But we are actually putting down deposits on some things just because that’s what you do. And you sort of recognize that you have to not just prepare for the worst but prepare for pretty good as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that makes total sense. We are, too. I think we’re presuming that Jessie is going to be able to go to a summer program of some sort or another. Obviously last summer all the camps and things were canceled. And, you know, look, I’m preparing to produce a television show.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Obviously there are ways to mitigate production. Testing everybody constantly. But, you know, we’re hopeful that not only will we be able to get through with good testing and practice, but also that no one will get sick. And that’s really the goal.

**John:** I would say one of my biggest surprises is that so much production was able to figure out a way to happen. You and I have friends who have been in production kind of this whole time. And one just wrapped a show and managed to get through without any infections or anything shutting down. Others have been on and off and on and off because of it, but they’re still shooting, which is a great testament to the hard work and skill of a bunch of people doing it. And in some cases luck.

**Craig:** In some cases luck. But I do think that they landed on good systems. And once tests were plentiful, I mean that really was the key. That’s where we just ate it as a country. Our lack of testing capacity killed us. Literally killed us.

**John:** Yeah. I’m also kind of hopeful that – will there be another pandemic in our lifetimes? Probably? It’s just probably going to happen. Will we be much better set up for it?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. We actually recognize that it’s a real genuine threat and we can shut stuff down quickly and surgically and just be much better ready to deal with it.

**Craig:** I was actually thinking about this the other day. That the next pandemic everyone will just put on a mask, including all the people that were belly-aching about the masks during Covid. Because at this point they’ve sunk that cost in. Like they’re the bellyacher. They just can’t admit it at this point. They can’t start wearing a mask now. It’s too late for them. They’ve said too much dumb crap on Facebook. But the next one? They’ll stick a mask on.

**John:** And so, yes, it turned out that wearing a mask was much more important than washing your hands, but the next time I’m going to wash my hands, I’m going to stay at home, I’m going to put on a mask. I’m going to do all the things until they tell me I don’t have to do some of the things. I’m going to do all of the things.

**Craig:** Yup. I’ll do all the things. Because, you know, I don’t want to suffer.

**John:** Yup. I want to live.

**Craig:** I want to live.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

Links:

* [Download Weekend Read to read the ‘Awards 2021’ scripts](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* [Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life](https://www.amazon.com/Lying-Moral-Choice-Public-Private/dp/0375705287) by Sissela Bok
* [Julie Plec on Twitter](https://twitter.com/julieplec/status/1362499010594963457?s=21)
* [Kitty Letter](https://theoatmeal.com/blog/free_game) Game
* [Inked](https://inkedgame.com) Game
* [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
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Daniel Green ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/490standard.mp3).