Search Results for: Save the cat

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 708 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we look at three stories in the news. Two of them from the Hollywood trades, and ask, how would this be a movie? We also follow up on audio dramas, last looks, and absolute rage bait in an article about ChatGPT 5.

Craig: Oh, that’s fantastic because there’s already rage bait in two of the How Would This Be movies. You’re setting me up. This is a setup because what? I haven’t been cranky enough lately?

John: Yes, we have a blood pressure monitor on Craig, and we will just watch the line rise as we go through–

Craig: My blood pressure goes down the angrier I get.

John: Oh, that’s nice.

Craig: That’s my secret cap.

John: Absolutely. Lie detectors never work on Craig because–

Craig: Yes. It just–

John: Lie detectors would be useful for several of the stories we’re talking about today.

Craig: Yes, for sure.

John: Plus, we’ll have a new listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, we often need to watch TV while we’re traveling away from home, overseas, or domestically. We’ll share our experiences and hopes for the future about best ways to watch things when you’re not in your home audio and video setup.

Craig: Oh, that sounds like a good idea. How to hack the hotel television and so forth?

John: Yes. I’ve reached behind so many hotel TVs.

Craig: Sometimes it’s very complicated. They really don’t want you to–

John: Clearly, you are just breaking everything.

Craig: Please don’t. Which I take seriously.

[laughter]

Craig: I’m a rules follower.

John: Before we get started, we have some local news and follow-up and explanation. Recently, Scriptnotes sent out 81 emails over the course of 20 minutes.

Craig: Oh, yes. That was fun.

John: That was fun.

Craig: Oh, I loved it.

John: I was in Australia for two weeks, and so I knew nothing about this. Craig, you actually knew about it before I knew about it, which is–

Craig: Can you believe it? It’s so unusual for Scriptnotes.

John: I can’t, no.

Craig: I got quite a few texts that morning saying, “Hey, has the Scriptnotes email server lost its mind?” I was like, what? Then I looked up my– I’m one of those people that I go through my emails. I don’t have the 15,000 unread emails that sometimes you see. My badge is usually good for three or four.

John: That’s impressive.

Craig: There are a bunch of read messages that are still sitting in my inbox. I try and read. That morning, it was 89. I’m like, oh. I actually saw that before I read any texts, and I honestly thought, have I been fired or something? That’s the sort of thing that happens if you get fired or a video came out of me beating my wife, which happily, I don’t think there is video of it, at least.

John: In ping pong.

Craig: Right.

John: Drew, you as producer can answer the question, were we hacked?

Drew Marquardt: We were not hacked.

John: What happened?

Craig: We just stink.

Drew: We just stink. For our premium members, we put out seasons with back episodes. I had put together– we had just crossed 700, so I did the 601 to 700 season and put that out. Our wonderful hosting service said, “Hey, do you want us to send out an email to members letting them know that there’s a new season?” I said, that would be great.

Then I went to bed and then I woke up to [onomatopoeia] because the system had, instead of sending one email, recognized each episode as a new episode, so it was sending out 101. We very quickly were just pulling plugs digitally trying to get it to stop. It stopped at 81.

Craig: Oh, so it could’ve been worse.

Drew: It could have been worse.

John: It actually could have been worse, yes.

Craig: Well, thank you for that. I apologize.

John: I apologize to our listeners. Now–

Craig: Nobody wants that. There was no easy way– I had to delete, delete, delete. It’s email, right? Tap and delete.

John: Yes, you can select a bunch, but yes.

Craig: I didn’t even know how to do that. I was on my iPad.

John: On your iPad, yes. It’s on the bottom one, top one, but yes, on the iPad, it’s yes. Again, we do apologize. We thank all of our premium members for supporting Scriptnotes. Let’s talk about why we do seasons is because when there’s 800 episodes, you want to not have to scroll through the whole list. We break it up into 100-episode chunks.

Craig: We were trying to make it easy for everyone, and we thought– What I loved about it was like, hey, Scriptnotes premium member, listen, we have news for you. What’s that? You didn’t listen? We’ll say it again. We won’t stop saying this until you send us another $5.

[laughter]

Craig: Tragic.

John: Anyway, it shouldn’t happen again. What’s tough about this error is it’s a very hard thing to troubleshoot or test for because you don’t know it’s happening until suddenly, it’s happening a million times.

Craig: You’d think that whoever runs the servers would have some sort of internal control that says, don’t send out–

Drew: Well, now they do. Because of this, they’ve built a thing–

Craig: They’ve innovated.

Drew: They’ve innovated. Now there’s a block that after two emails within quick succession, it just cuts off, so it’ll never happen again.

Craig: Well, happily, if anybody was worried that their billing info had been leaked or anything.

Drew: That was the concern of a few people.

Craig: We’re not the ones leaking your billing info. Your billing info is being leaked by literally everyone else. I got a letter in the mail, the M-mail from WestJet. They’re a commercial airline that’s affiliated with Delta. I think Delta may just own them. They’re regional. They’re the jet I would fly to Calgary back in season one.

They sent me a lovely letter explaining that they’ve been hacked. Don’t worry. Your credit card numbers weren’t compromised. Just your name and possibly your address and maybe date of birth and possibly some security number and maybe. Here, we’ve bought you two free years in this– Who gives a damn service that monitors? Oh, please.

John: I also don’t trust those services. They’re the cruel services.

Craig: No, I don’t either. They’re going to get hacked.

John: Yes.

Craig: When I signed up for that service, they’re like, “What’s your birth date?” I’m like, I think you know. I think everybody knows now. Thanks, WestJet.

John: Other bits to follow up. The scripting on this book is coming out December 2nd around the world. The hardcover copy in Australia, we’ve just learned it’s going to be January 4th instead.

Craig: Because they’re on the bottom of the planet.

John: Yes. They have to ship it all the way down there.

Craig: They have to defeat gravity to get there.

John: The e-book and audiobook will release the 4th of December in Australia, but the hardcover book will be a month later.

Craig: Well, we apologize, Australia, but you know what? Absence makes the heart grow fonder. There’s a little bit of time to work up an appetite for what I believe will be the best book in anyone’s bookshelf that has a completely orange cover.

John: Yes. It’s going to be really great.

Craig: We are the best option.

John: You recognize on the spine, on the center shelf.

Craig: You don’t have to go hunting for it.

John: It’s there.

Craig: If your car breaks down at night, you wave your Scriptnotes book around, it’s like a flare.

John: It absolutely is.

Craig: No one’s hitting you.

John: It works really well. A reminder that you can pre-order the book now wherever you are. It’s scriptnotesbook.com is where you can do the pre-order. We’ve had a ton of pre-orders, which has been great. Thank you for everyone who’s pre-ordered.

Craig: Is this book going to be a success, do you think?

John: I think it’s going to be a success. I think we’re going to do well. We had one little live event for the pre-order folks. If you do pre-order the book, send your receipt to Drew and Drew will add you to the list for other little events that we’re going to do before the book comes out. We also have signed copies of the book that are going to be available through a special site. There will be a link in the show notes for if you really desperately want a signed copy of the book. Craig and I did 500 of those.

Craig: It just seemed like we signed our names forever.

John: Forever. With a combination of the WestJet-leaked information and Craig’s signature in the book, you get to take over his life.

Craig: I basically should be able to at least pay my mortgage off for me. It’d be nice. It’d just be nice.

John: Let’s just follow up on audio dramas. Back in episode 706, listener Dan wrote in asking if he should turn his screenplay into an audio drama. We had a lot of listeners who wrote in to say they had personal experience with that.

Drew: Sounding Off writes, “I just finished a series for Audible, adapting an iteration of my work. In my experience, this was handled like most other productions. They put our scripts through several rounds of notes, hired name actors through their agencies, hired a director via the same, set up recording studio sessions, and they handle all the post-production sound along with multiple rounds of dialogue edits.

Perhaps Dan has a different way in, but having worked on this project for several years, I’d caution him against doing all the work on his own with the expectation of then selling to Audible. I suppose it could happen that way, but if you look at many of their dramatic or fictionalized podcasts, these are professionally-run projects on the Audible side from start to finish. There’s a learning curve for writing just to audio. It’s challenging and fun, but you do have to expand your skillset.”

John: That would be my expectation, too. You look at the professional productions, there’s an expectation that goes into what they’re looking for. It feels like it’d be hard. I’m thinking about the screening process. If they’re picking up stuff that’s already produced, they’re going to put on their headphones and listen to 20 minutes of it and decide, is this a thing I want to do? They’re also looking for what is the overall package? What is it going to feel like?

Craig: Yes, I can see the wisdom of what Sounding Off is saying here. I love the punny name, by the way. I like that people do that for call-in– There’s something about radio/podcast where you need to come up with Sleepless in Seattle. It’s just their thing. Sounding Off, I think, makes a great point because if you are Audible and you listen to an already produced story, you might think, okay, I like this, except this part, I wish were longer, or this part, I just don’t love that line.

I want access to, well, we didn’t do that bit, or we didn’t do this bit, or sorry, that sound effect is married to that of dialogue. Suddenly, you have to go back in the studio anyway. Since they all have– They get very fussy about standards, post-production people are very fussy about standards. It makes sense that they would probably want to control that production process.

John: I could imagine basically shooting a pilot, recording a pilot for what I’m seeing as a proof of concept. That might be the thing. To go through and do all the work ahead of time with the expectation that you’re going to sell it to Audible versus releasing it yourself feels like a reach. More listeners wrote in.

Drew: Jonathan writes, “I very much agree with what was said about not doing something unless you really want to be making it. Audio dramas may not have the industry prestige that a film does, but they do have a dedicated loyal audience who may not otherwise discover your work. I know many people who don’t watch films, but they do listen to fiction podcasts.

As a producer, you can attract a higher level of talent than on an indie film as the time commitment is less and they have the opportunity to play a role outside their on-screen type. I find it a very satisfying medium to work in.”

Craig: That’s fantastic to hear. Yes.

John: We also have some follow-up on last looks. We were talking a few episodes back about the last things you do with a script before you turn it in. We had a suggestion from Liz.

Drew: “Regarding finding the objectivity you need for that last edit on your draft, I’ve got a very dumb and very effective hack for you. A few years ago, I started to convert my script to a PDF and send it to myself with a title page. Something about the look of a PDF and the fact that I can’t fiddle with it as I’m reading tricks me into objectivity. I find I can read it and note myself as though I’m looking at someone else’s work. So dumb, and yet I swear by it.”

Craig: Two things. One, I’m not sure why we’ve decided to replace the word tip with hack. Hack is some interesting shortcut, a workaround. This is just a tip, it’s not a hack. Sorry, Liz G. What she’s suggesting here is the slightly newer version of what you and I always did, which is print it out. Something about printing it out and going through the pages one by one made it seem like somebody else had written it and you can be more objective because you’re out of the composition environment.

John: I think getting away from the scroll is really important. That’s how you’re seeing it differently and really feeling, and the page flips matter. It’s useful to do it that way. Whether it’s printing it or doing it as a PDF that you’re reading on your iPad, it’s going to help.

Craig: Printing is something that we all did. We all had printers in our little crappy apartments. I have a feeling most people don’t have a printer in their crappy apartment now. Then if you do want to actually physically print it, which I think is superior to the PDF “hack/tip”, I guess you’d have to go to work, print it out there on their printer, I guess. I mean, printers aren’t that expensive, but it’s–

Drew: $30.

Craig: Wait, what?

John: Printers are incredibly cheap right now.

Craig: Did you say $30?

Drew: Yes. You can get a basic printer at Best Buy for $30?

John: The replacement toner cartridge is $100.

Craig: Sure. You just throw the printer out and get another printer. Wait, $30?

Drew: I could be wrong, but that’s what I remember paying for the last one, I think.

Craig: That can’t be possibly right. Hold on. We’re going to do a little live– We’re doing a live price check. This is a new segment called Drew, I Don’t Believe You. Best Buy printers. Okay, we’re all looking this up. Printers for home use. It’s not looking good for you right now, buddy. I got to tell you.

Drew: I Googled printer and the first one is $49.99 at Best Buy.

John: I see a basic [unintelligible 00:13:34] printer for 130.

Craig: Okay, the lowest selling printer that I– Oh, let me take off brand. Okay, so the lowest selling printer is an HP that’s $50. That is their rock bottom, absolute crappiest. That thing is like, yikes.

Drew: Office Depot has a Canon PIXMA for $37.99.

John: Oh, damn. They’re selling that for $65 over it.

Craig: Still haven’t hit $30, by the way. Listen, you said– If it’s an exaggeration, then–

Drew: It was a maybe $7 exaggeration, but I remember it being $30. I feel like there was a deal. I feel like it was a holiday sale.

Craig: $7 off of $30, that’s a lot. That’s like 20-something percent.

Drew: I’m going to hold steady on this one. I think–

John: I think Drew was making a category statement of in a $30 range. $37–

Craig: If you had said $50, I still would’ve been like, what? Then this would’ve been a slam dunk for you. You know what? There’s a lesson here. [laughs]

Drew: It’s my hyperbole.

Craig: It does turn out that printers are stupidly cheap to the point where I would say yes. If all you used it for was just this, it’s better to me, at least, than the- PDF method.

John: All right, let’s get to our marquee topic here, which is how would this be a movie? This is where we take articles that are in the news or that people send to us and talk about the ways in which they could be converted to fictionalized entertainment for our enjoyment. It could be a movie, it could be a TV series.

What’s interesting about these three stories is two of them come from the Hollywood trades, which is not where you actually think about these stories coming from. You think that the trades are going to be reporting on these things rather than the actual stories themselves. The third is just a fun story. They all involve ambition, chicanery, in cases, misrepresentation.

Craig: Yes, con artistry. It does seem like swindling, horn-swoggling. We could do this all day.

John: Let’s start with The Many Faces of Sir Marco Robinson. This is an article by Jake Cantor writing for Deadline.

Craig: By the way, good job, Jake Cantor. Again, you’re at Deadline, we’re used to reading–

John: It’s like barely-written press releases.

Craig: Yes. The eighth banana on a procedural has changed agents, and you’re like, I don’t– Nobody cares.

John: I was so surprised when I see this because it’s a long-form investigative piece.

Craig: Sort of like an Atlantic kind of style or Vanity Fair-ish kind of investigation. I thought it was quite well done.

John: Yes. Drew, could you give us the quick summary here?

Drew: Sir Marco Robinson is a self-styled Instagram business guru. He claims to be the number two Netflix producer, a bestselling author. To have been knighted in Malaysia, a global real estate empire, he promotes movie-making master classes based on his claim to have produced the Netflix spy movie Legacy of Lies. A budding screenwriter signed up for master classes after being contacted by Robinson on Instagram, spending up to £10,000 to access his so-called expertise in script development.

Craig: You and I are idiots by the way. Do you know how much money we could be making?

John: We make really good money not doing this. That’s the reality.

Craig: Think about it. If we did, I’m just saying. If we did, oh my God, this podcast could be worth trillions. Go on.

Drew: He also pledged to produce their projects through his company. It will surprise no listener to hear what happened next. He was sued by several writers for fraudulent misrepresentation, and he lost. The real producers of Legacy of Lies have sent him a cease and desist. We should note here that Robinson denies all the claims and continues to pursue all of his business ventures.

Craig: We should just continually cite that the way that at the end of Say Nothing, they kept saying, Jerry Adams denies all involvement in the IRA. Yes, Robinson denies all the claims. Let’s talk about these claims. I’ve never heard of this guy. I’ve also never heard of Legacy of Lies.

John: Legacy of Lies, it made it up to the number two slot on Netflix once.

Craig: For a day.

John: Yes. It’s being like an Amazon number one bestseller in each category.

Craig: It turns out he wasn’t a producer of that movie. He initially was. He was an investor. He failed to deliver the money he promised, and so they took away his credit. He’s not even a producer. He does have a cameo as Johnny who says a line. That’s in and of itself insane. The knighting thing is incredible. He’s British. As the alleged con artist that he is, seems like he thought, “Oh, I’ll get quite a bit of legitimacy if I put the word sir in front of my name.” Reverse engineered a vague sir from a British protectorate that turns out didn’t give it to him anyway.

John: In Malaysia.

Craig: Nor would it have mattered because the United Kingdom does not recognize titles that are given by other countries or protectorates. If you want to be sir in England, and this is going to be surprising you, they’re rather specific.

John: It’s like champagne in France.

Craig: Yes. They’re like, “Sorry, you can’t call that champagne. It’s not from– It’s sparkling wine.” He’s the sparkling wine of number two producers in Netflix. What is fascinating is the breadth of his alleged scams. It cuts across 20 different things.

John: Before we get into the meat of how this would be a movie, let’s also bring in the Scriptnotes connection because looking through the archives, Drew found that his team had actually reached out to us in 2023.

Craig: You’re kidding me.

John: Here’s the email.

Drew: I was wondering if we had anyone who was like, “Hey, I’ve been scammed by this guy.”

Craig: Turns out we have him.

Drew: We got a guest request from May 1st, 2023. “Dear Scriptnotes, we hope that got your attention.”

Craig: It’s gotten my attention. [laughs]

Drew: “We love your podcast and we also believe you should feature Sir Marco Robinson as your guest really soon. Here’s why. One, yes, he has slept with a Russian spy that was sent to kill him and survived. Two, the above is part of the true story of the making of his first feature film, Legacy of Lies, which debuted at number two on Netflix USA.

Three, he is making a musical called Legacy of Spies. Are you prepared to die to live your dream? His own life story. If that wasn’t enough, Sir Marco remains the only human to give three houses away to three homeless families on Channel 4 Primetime in the UK with his own show, Get a House for Free.”

Craig: That is so specific. On Channel 4. Other people have given away many more houses on other channels. Now, can you read the sentence again about the spy, the first thing?

Drew: Yes, “he has slept with a Russian spy that was sent to kill him and survived.”

John: The spy survived.

Craig: Thank you. What is that sentence construction? The spy was sent to kill him and survived. [laughs] She’s okay, is what I’m hearing?

John: She’s good. We could interview her. That sounds fascinating.

Craig: How are you writing those? You’re surely dead. That’s horrible. I think, this I can say factually, I find that to be idiotic. That’s a fact. I do.

John: Let’s talk about this. How would this be a movie? How would he be a character in whatever we want to do? We hear it where I need to divorce myself from like, okay, this is a person who at least three screenwriters have said has been scamming and done a lot of behaviors which we’ve condemned on this podcast for a long time, which is taking advantage of aspiring screenwriters with promises that are not being fulfilled.

Setting that aside for a moment, the idea of a charismatic, ambitious hustler producer who’s faking it until he makes it, there can be something charming about that. It’s a classic story. It’s also a reality we see all the time in this business, especially with international productions where it’s like, do you really have anything? You just have a poster with Ben Kingsley’s face on it. Is there actually a movie?

Craig: Does Ben Kingsley know about this poster, which in this article, it turns out, no. It’s tough to come at this directly because Catch Me If You Can exists. That’s sort of the top of the heap of what you could do. Also, that character of Joseph Bagnoli, I think was his name, Joseph Bagnoli, was fascinating.

This guy, at least in terms of how he’s been portrayed by this article, is just boring. He’s a boring scam artist. The only thing that’s surprising, and I suppose this isn’t really surprising, is how anybody fell for it. Even if you buy everything that he says at face value, the people that are more interesting to me are the people that– There’s a woman that sued him and won.

There’s this little thing in the article where I went, oh, that’s the thing that I hooked on. He has a master class in screenwriting. The bait on the hook is number two Netflix producer of Legacy of Lies. That’s not enough. No, but this woman, like many, bought it. Now, here’s the part that amazed me. She sued him. She won. She got her money back, and now she has started her own website called Victim to Victor, which is like an advocacy– It’s like a master class for how to get your money back. What’s happening is this is the world we live in now where everyone self-promotes.

John: It’s the idea of, it’s not even being influencers, but it’s basically getting people’s attention and being able to hold people’s attention as a way of monetizing that. I think we’ve always had this legacy of fabricators and people who would sell you stuff, like snake oil salesmen and stuff like that.

In the online world, in the Instagram world, the ability to portray yourself as something fancier, more powerful, more influential than you really are is just more directly commoditizable and because you don’t have to be there physically, in person, in front of somebody you can just get away with a lot more. Calling himself Sir Marco Robinson is more helpful than Mark Lawrence Robinson, which is his actual real name.

Craig: I’m not sure if this is a movie.

John: No, I think it’s a space.

Craig: I could see a comedy where friends are laughing at one of their friends who has spent money on this and they’re just making fun of him and reading the description of the guy and going, “This is who you gave your money to?” Because Sir Marco Robinson, look at that email he sent us. That’s not great. No, it’s not written well.

John: Listen, I think the fact that we’re discussing how this would be a movie at all, he’s won to some degree because the email he wanted, he wanted to be discussed on the show.

Craig: He did get on the show.

John: He got on the show.

Craig: He got on the show. I don’t like him.

John: Positive attention, negative attention, it’s still attention. That is actually, I think if you were to do a movie or a TV series adaptation of this space, you wouldn’t do it about him specifically. It is that sense of people who just need to be in the conversation. They don’t care why you’re talking about them.

Craig: They are the ultimate enemy. You cannot defeat them because if you agree with them, you’ve lost. If you disagree with them, you’ve lost because you’re talking about them at all. My only hope is that anybody– because he’s still out there. He’s still–

John: I suspect we’ll get an email from him.

Craig: Cool. I hope it’s written better than that last one. I hope that gets his attention. [laughs] All right. Probably not a movie, but we’ll sum up later. Maybe we’ll have better luck with this next one.

John: Absolutely. Next up, we have the sisters battling to become the Billboard Queen of Los Angeles. This was sent to me by my friend Shad. I think it’s a great story. Again, it’s in The Hollywood Reporter, which you don’t think of it– It feels like a good Vanity Fair article.

Craig: It does. Mickey Rapkin wrote this for The Hollywood Reporter. You know, by the way, that it’s one company that owns all of these things. It’s the same. They’re all in the same building. I don’t understand this. Deadline, Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and I think The Wrap are all owned by one company.
It’s hysterical, but they actually do try and scoop each other. In a way, they’re like sisters battling to become the Billboard Queen. Mickey Rapkin did a terrific job here. I really enjoyed reading this.

John: I loved just how local it was because people outside of this market are like, what is this? We see these billboards all the time. Drew, give us the summary.

Drew: Adriana Gallardo is the founder of Adriana’s Insurance, which is recognized across Los Angeles for her iconic billboards featuring her and a red convertible. She’s a formerly undocumented Mexican immigrant and a self-made millionaire. Adriana also has a younger sister, Veronica, who owns Veronica’s Insurance and also has iconic billboards across LA featuring her next to a large German shepherd.

These two sisters are bitter rivals. The article chronicles the sisters’ rise to prominence, catering to the large but underserved Hispanic community. Veronica initially worked for Adriana, building her insurance empire, but after feeling undervalued by her older sister, she strikes out on her own. Since then, the two have been fierce competitors and undermine each other however they can.

John: They undermine each other, but they also have territories and they don’t encroach on each other’s territories to some degree.

Craig: Yes, it was interesting. There was something that Adriana says in the interview that I thought was really wise. She said Hollywood always wants, I think it was sisters, women to fight. Even though they do compete, and it’s clear that there is some resentment there, Adriana paints Veronica as the little princess, the younger sister who just didn’t want to work that hard and get everything handed to her and won’t complain anyway.

Obviously, Veronica is a hard worker because her business is doing well, but then they go out of their way to make the point that they go to each other’s children’s weddings, they still talk, we’re still sisters. It’s not like Falcon Crest.

Drew: No, it’s not the cat fight.

Craig: It’s not Joan Collins and Linda Evans.

Drew: Linda Evans, yes.

Craig: You don’t know what we’re talking about.

Drew: No.

Craig: Okay, so that was Falcon Crest. Falcon Crest was a prime-time soap opera.

John: It was Dynasty.

Craig: Was that Dynasty? Okay, Dynasty. A lot of people just started screaming out there. A lot of gay men just started screaming out there. I couldn’t hear them. I’m so sorry. Dynasty was a prime-time soap opera, and at the center of it, Joan Collins, this grand, dumb English actor, and Linda Evans, who was this very dignified American actor. I think she was American.

John: Yes, I think so.

Craig: They hated each other, and they got into some massive physical cat fights, wig pulling, throwing down stairs.

John: They’re always ending up in the pool.

Craig: Yes, it’s very mommy dearest, like two mommy dearests. It was insane, and people loved it. In any case, that’s like what it could be, like the telenovela version of that, but it’s not.

John: They’re rivals, but they are fundamentally still sisters, and they’re civil about things, but it’s clear that they’re choosing their words carefully. I loved so much of this and I think there’s a movie version to make, there’s a series version to make, but one of my fundamental questions is, where do you start? Because the origin story of it is actually really fascinating. They’re coming into the United States on a tourist visa, and they’re just staying, and so they’re undocumented.

Craig: She describes herself as illegal. That’s how she categorizes herself.

John: It’s their mother who sees how long the lines are for the insurance offices, because everyone has car insurance through that changeover.

Craig: Yes, and the law change that basically said, if you get pulled over for a traffic violation, if you don’t produce insurance, they’ll take your license away. A lot of Latinos in LA were like, “Well, we don’t have any.” Which I remember being a problem when we first moved here. I don’t know if you remember, people were like, “By the way, no one has insurance. If you get into a car accident, you’re screwed. No one has insurance.” It turns out a lot of people didn’t.

John: Now they had to. It’s the mother who pushes Adriana to get a job at this insurance office. Adriana learns the trade, and basically can do it better. She strikes out on her own. Veronica ends up following her sister’s footsteps. That rags to riches story, as you often see here, mythologized, seems really true.
They were going from nothing to relatively good success. Then also the decision to put themselves on billboards and bus shelters, and stuff like that leads to a kind of fame that is unique and special. To agree with Final Destination, the most recent one, had a tie-in with Adriana.

Craig: And apparently, was incredibly effective because in that horribly dry way, the over-index with the Latino population– over-index is a terrifying phrase. By the way, side note, when I first came to LA, I needed car insurance. I got insurance from Freeway Insurance. Do you remember this? I think they’re still out there.

Freeway Insurance, they would advertise on the radio. Their slogan was, Freeway Insurance, it’s that thing you’re speeding on. I was like, you know me. I love this, too. First of all, it’s a very LA story. Los Angeles has a strange tradition of women mostly, but a few men, a few accident lawyers as well. Sweet James, he’s out there.

Accidentes is out there, who buy billboards, and because we’re all driving all the time, the people who manufacture culture through television and movies get to know the people on the billboards even if those people are not movie stars. Angeline is the most famous. She was a woman who just got dressed up like a human Barbie and put herself on billboards and no one even knew why. It just said Angeline and just showed her with her pink corvette or whatever it was. She became famous for being on a billboard.

John: Then you would see her on a talk show. She wouldn’t actually even be interviewed. Just physically–

Craig: Sometimes you would see her around town also and you’re like, oh, yes, you do not look like that billboard. You’re dressed like the billboard, but you’re like that billboard, but a thousand years older. When you saw Angeline, and I don’t even know if she’s still alive, but when you saw her in real life, it was a bit sad actually because you’re like, this is an older woman who’s– something’s going on here. This doesn’t seem well. Who’s paying for these billboards? I remember reading an article about that, too. In this case, I think if I had to make money off of this in the grand tradition of Adriana and Veronica, I’d want to do it as a reality show.

John: Apparently, there has been a reality show before. There was a– I don’t know if it was Bravo or whoever it was, but there was a behind-the-scenes.

Craig: It feels–

John: Yes. I get that, but I also just feel like we have amazing actresses who could play these parts. I think we haven’t quite seen that.

Craig: Yes, but what I don’t see in the story is an arc, per se. I see actually a fairly straight arrow. Adriana is one of those– the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. She’s the busy ant who just works. Her whole thing is, I worked really hard. I did any job. I knocked on any door. I did what needed to be done. I made all this money, and I believe anybody can do this. Very much land of opportunity, only in America kind of story. That’s sort of it. There isn’t a murder. No one stole anyone’s husband. No one’s died. It’s missing that.

John: I get that. If you were to take characters who are like these and put them in a Knives Out movie, you could see them in the backdrop of that. Characters in that rather than just their individual story. I do just think that a smart writer could find a way to succession this, essentially. Use this as the same way that the Murdock family is succession, but it’s all fictionalized and turned around. There’s ways to do that we just haven’t seen on screen before.

Craig: It could work. Succession, the stakes are built in because they’re running the media empire. They’re literally figuring out who the next President should be.

John: This isn’t quite that. Mad Men is another example. It’s a period– you could move this back into periods. It could be ’90s, 2000s, and rising up with this and these two sisters who are partners and then rivals. There’s a way to do that too. I don’t want to give out lines.

Craig: It could be. I think series, for sure. A movie, I just don’t see the movie here. Series, yes. In a world where there are– because Adriana and Veronica are both glamorous people. That’s what they’re selling. They’re selling glamour through their looks, their hair, their car, even the dog is somewhat glamorous.

They’re glamorous. They’re doing a job that’s not glamorous. They’re actually glamorous and in heels, but walking around and answering phones and dealing with invoices. It’s giving Selling Sunset, as the kids would say where real estate is the most, but I’m not going to watch a reality show about real estate. Yes, you will if it’s this. I’ll watch a few episodes of that.

The fact that they’re sisters, each one of them seems to be developing a show. One show. It’s about the two of them where you go back and forth, and then they can build up the rivalry. That would be successful. To me, that’s a slam dunk.

John: All right. Our final story is from Josh Levin writing for Slate. This is about a congratulations, you’ve got accepted to Oxford. Oh, wait, there’s something you should know.

Craig: Yes, it’s hysterical.

Drew: In 1995, a group of high-performing American students believed they’d been accepted into Oxford University through a college called Warnborough. The brochures and acceptance letters all tied the school’s identity to Oxford University’s reputation, convincing the students to pay thousands of dollars and cross the Atlantic.

When they arrived, they discovered that Warnborough was not an Oxford college at all, but an independent and unaccredited institution set up in a countryside estate way outside of the city. After hunting down answers, half of the Americans left and demanded refunds. The other half stayed and tried to make the best of the situation.

Still, Warnborough was unaccredited, so they could not grant valid degrees, and the credits were untransferable. Media coverage soon turned the episode into an international scandal. Warnborough was sued for its materials being misleading, and the fallout took a significant financial toll on the students. Its President, Brendan Tempest Mogg, still denies any wrongdoing. Warnborough collapsed soon after the suits, but later reemerged as an online university.

Craig: Brendan Tempest Mogg.

John: That’s a great name. Incredible.

Craig: That’s insane.

John: This is 1995, and that’s important context because I feel it was easier to pull this scam, at least get people to show up at a place in 1995 before the internet made it. It’s easier to search things. It’s also a uniquely weird thing that Oxford and these universities have so many different colleges that are all part of the same thing, but are not from the same thing.

Craig: They’re in the system.

John: I can understand why these students were duped to some degree, but as you read through the article, some of the students had some heebie-jeebies, even as they were headed there. I love them showing up and like, “Oh, no.”

Craig: It’s a great moment where they’re driven through Oxford campus and they’re like, “We’re here. It’s amazing.” Then the car just keeps going, and then suddenly it’s out in farmland, and they’re like, “Wait, what?” That’s an amazing moment.

John: I feel like this is a comedy. It needs to be an American Fish Out of Water comedy, and you’re struggling to figure out what it is that we’re going to do next. Is there shame involved? Do you want to report home to your parents what’s happened?

Craig: It feels like it’s potentially a basis for a high concept college comedy. We haven’t had a good college comedy in forever.

John: It’s a missing genre.

Craig: Yes, mostly because no one’s funny anymore. College campus is very serious business. The problem with this as a comedy concept is it’s unique, which sounds weird. Wouldn’t that be what you want? The problem with its unique nature is I don’t see this ever happening anywhere else ever. It can happen once.

Therefore, it’s almost like you’ve rigged your plot to create comedy instead of not rigging it. Do you know what I mean? There’s something so– It’s not science fiction or anything. You can do that. You can do a liar-liar where somebody blows out a candle, science fiction occurs, and now you can’t stop telling the truth. That’s not what this is?

John: No. To me, this feels like a British indie comedy that happens to have a much American center in it, but it’s the fish out of water of these Americans who are trying to figure out what to do. The characters have to be funny and distinct and have clear leadership roles as to what all brings them together.

It’s a Breakfast Club situation and see what happens. How do you make college out of this weird situation? The TV show Community is actually almost the same premise in a weird way. It’s this terrible, “learning institution” that we’re all just surviving inside of.

Craig: Community had that, hey, we know we’re not a four-year college material. There is this unearned, unfair stink that’s on community colleges that should not be there. It’s a little bit like, okay, we know we’re in the loser club. We’re losers and we’re here at loser club. Now let’s deal with that. In this, you get there, you’re– These kids got into Harvard and Princeton and stuff and now they’re here.

Of course, half of them, immediately, are like, “Bye.” Get on a plane and go home. A few of them try and stick it out and eventually go, bye. One poor kid, his grandmother dies, he flies back, doesn’t have the money to fly back again. They all lose their money to Brenden Tempest‑Mogg, or at least that is what he’s been accused of. He’s still out there, by the way.

John: It’s not clear from the article whether he was the person who was administering all this during the time or if he’s the new person brought in for the online university.

Craig: No, he was there. He blamed it on the guy that they had hired for US student recruitment. That guy was like, “No, that guy runs this place.” What happened to them was, as from the article, it seems like they got sanctioned by the government in the UK for being unaccredited, for representing themselves as an institution of higher learning to British people, and they got slapped. As a result of that, maybe it was just that it was an article, perhaps it was just really bad publicity, the upshot of it was their enrollment plummeted in a desperate attempt to save this place.

This is like Fawlty Towers now, where John Cleese has an idea. Well, if someone goes, “You don’t understand. We can’t run this college anymore because there’s no one in Britain who doesn’t know about how bad this is.” He goes, “No one in Britain, you say? What about America?” Then they just go on this campaign to get dumb Americans to believe it’s Oxford. I could see that. I want to now be actually–

John: On the other side.

Craig: It’s funnier. It’s funnier to be this sweaty con artist who’s constantly trying to keep the Americans from leaving and convincing them that this really is Oxford, even though there’s goats moving through the classroom. That’s funny. I would watch that.

John: There are two very different comedies out there, but I think there’s something fun to do there. Both of these are small. I think both of these are Gold Circle movies at the highest end.

Craig: Yes, which is a perfectly good movie to be, if it’s a movie. I would probably rather watch the sitcom version, the good old six-episode British sitcom version. My gut is, I want to be with Basil Fawlty on this. I want to be with Brenden Tempest‑Mogg as he desperately– or Father Ted, it’s such a great standard of sitcom work. The guy in the middle of it is a con artist who’s constantly getting hoisted to buy his own petard. That’s such a evergreen comic engine.

John: Yes, I do love that. All right, let’s recap our movies and our predictions here. Sir Marco Robinson, I don’t think we think there’s a movie to be made specifically about him as a general class of this kind of person as a character, evergreen, the fabulous. Adriana and Veronica, we think there’s multiple ways into telling this as a series. Probably not a movie.

It’s also really a question of where do you start and what is the nature of their relationship as they’re battling and finding what’s fascinating about that. We think there’s a couple movies to be made about fake Oxford. It doesn’t have to be about this one specific place, or just inspired by that general idea. Great. There’s comedy to be found there.

Craig: A comedy.

John: Cool. Let’s answer some listener questions, starting with a rage-baity one. Josh wrote in.

Drew: “Do you guys see this article in The Ankler called Run It Through a GPT-5? The phrase changing Hollywood overnight. Feels vastly overstated regarding the adoption of AI in writers’ rooms and studios, but worth discussing and guaranteed to incur some final draft-level umbrage from Craig.”

John: A little from me as well. I had a reaction to this. A couple of friends sent me this article right as it was published because it mentions AI and WGA, and so they’re always sending me stuff. I had one really visceral reaction, and then I had to modulate it a bit based on, well, what is The Ankler? We’ve been talking about it the trades. There’s Deadline and there’s Hollywood Reporter and these things.

Craig: What is The Ankler?

John: The Ankler, it’s on Substack but it’s not a one-person thing. It’s a bunch of different writers writing under it. It feels like a publication. It feels like journalism, but I’m not sure it really is journalism in the classic sense. I looked up the guy who wrote this, Eric Barmak, and he’s really a producer, not a journalist. Other things he’s written for this, it’s been about, “How I’m using GPT-5 to do these things.” When I look at it from this perspective, it’s not like fan fiction, but it’s more just talking off the top of his head.

Craig: This is an advertisement. That’s what this is because when you look at it, it’s got a headline that’s rage-baity. Then it suggests that something is true without citing anyone. Then it transitions very quickly to, “Here’s what I’ll tell paid subscribers.” Then a nine-point or eight-point bullet point list of all the pro-tip hack benefits that you’d get from reading this. The implication being, this is how you’re going to beat the robots.

John: What’s frustrating is there’s a lead to it. It’s basically, you get a paragraph for free and a bunch of bullet points, and then you click through the full thing to see it. Fortunately, a friend had a subscription and sent through the whole thing, so we have a PDF to look at. One of the bullet points is, “Why did the WGA’s ‘AI protections’ from the 2023 strike are already outflanked, and what the guild can’t actually stop this time.” Nothing in the article gets to that point at all.

Craig: Oh, you mean you’ve read the paid subscriber?

John: I’ve read the paid subscriber.

Craig: Oh, did you pay him?

John: No, people sent me the PDF of the whole thing.

Craig: Oh, we stole it.

John: No, we didn’t steal it.

[laughter]

John: An actual subscriber who was concerned about stuff sent it through to me for my PDF.

Craig: We should ask ChatGPT to summarize it for us.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Of course, because this is just like all the things that you see at the bottom of a local newspaper. There’s all these suggested articles that are clearly from an ad mill, and they’re all full of things like this. How many times have you seen this stupid doctor that’s warning you not to eat blueberries for breakfast? Do you see this?

John: All the time.

Drew: I don’t get that one.

Craig: Okay, because you’re not old. We must have let them know that we’re in our 50s because there’s something about this doctor.

John: They know.

Craig: They know. This doctor is like, “I have a warning for Americans over 50. Do not eat this for breakfast.” It always shows a bowl of blueberries. I’m like, “A, okay. B, what?” It’s this. That’s all this is. It’s crap.

John: What I don’t understand about the whole process is, did Barmack write the meat of the article, and then someone else writes the leads for things? They don’t seem to match very well together.

Craig: It’s almost like maybe a person didn’t write all of it at all.

John: I don’t want to go into that level of speculation, rather than focus on the article itself, which I don’t think– it’s all filler. What I do want to say is that there’s a class of article that is just designed to be like a grenade you throw into a room and rage bait. We just have to recognize this and not overreact to it.

Craig: This is so poorly done as rage bait. I feel nothing. This didn’t even get the tiniest bit of red mist in me.

John: Here’s where I think it’s dangerous is that a person reads this and says, “Well, God, if all the writers’ rooms are just using ChatGPT to do everything,” and if, “Oh, do a GPT-5 pass on things,” because it’s a standard thing, no, it’s not.

Craig: No, it’s not.

John: No one is saying that at all.

Craig: Never. Nobody says that.

John: As we have conversations with the actual people who are creating film and television every day, this is just not a thing that is actually happening.

Craig: It’s not.

John: I think it’s distracting from the real concerns we should have about AI and how it’s going to impact writing and every other part of the industry to just hand away and assume this stuff is already happening, and it’s not actually happening. That’s my great frustration.

Craig: I love this bullet point. The quiet gold rush in studio marketing and post teams. By the way, I’m going to get back to– this is rage baiting to me, is how bad it is actually. The quiet gold rush in studio marketing and post teams, where a GPT-5 can cut 20 trailers before lunch and nobody’s sure whose job that is anymore. Okay, the second part of that sentence undermines the first part. If GPT-5 can do that, how is there a gold rush?

Second of all, everyone’s sure whose job that is. It’s the guys who edit the trailers. It’s still their job. This is so poorly done. In any case, I’m not falling for it. More importantly to me to answer, I guess, Josh, who wrote this in. He was saying, did you guys see this? He said, “Feels vastly overstated, but well worth discussing.” Josh, I think you’re exactly correct. This is vastly overstated. Nobody talks like this. Are there writers’ assistants who use ChatGPT to summarize? Perhaps, but that’s not what I’m looking for in a writer’s assistant.

John: Yes. As an industry, there are a lot of conversations happening about how as an industry are we going to address what these technologies do and how it’s going to change things because it’s going to change things. It’s important for the industry to be smart and proactive about making the choices now about what we use these things for and what do we not use them for. This just stirs up anger.

Craig: Also, there are not that many people reading this. That’s the other thing.

John: My concern is that it’s because people who are tangentially in the industry, they see this kind of thing and they assume that this must be true because it’s in print.

Craig: 98% of what is written about our business is nonsense. This fits right in with everything going all the way back to the 20s. It’s just baloney. I love saying baloney. It’s baloney.

John: Let’s get to a happier letter from one of our listeners. This is Paneque, who writes in about some producers.

Drew: All right. “I’ve been out here about 10 years. I’ve worked my way from assistant to writer during that time, but I’ve never really had something hit or get hot. That changed this past week. My new script went out and got an immediate response. I was bombarded with meetings, all of which my reps handled beautifully while trying to build a competitive situation for me. I feel incredibly blessed. However, one of my most enthusiastic meetings has now really turned up the pressure.

It was a company I’d met previously and to whom I’d sent the script directly, and it’s a place I think really loves and understands my intentions. I’ve met with other folks who have similar enthusiasm. Now, this company’s executives have started to contact me directly, reaching out to tell me how much they want to work with me and how they’d be heartbroken if they don’t. While I’d be lucky to work with them, I also feel awkward since I do want to continue with my reps’ plan to keep everything competitive and keep momentum going, and give this thing its best shot at being made.

At the same time, I also want to remain cognizant and grateful that I have smart people passionate about a project so dear to me. How do I navigate this? If the project does land elsewhere, how do I salvage that relationship with people I really do respect?”

Craig: This one’s easy because this happened to me. I’m sure it happened to you. I remember talking about this with my agents way back when. I said, “I don’t know what to do because they’re not calling me, and I feel bad.” They were like, “Oh, we’re going to call them and yell at them. We’re going to call them and say, ‘Hey, our client is incredibly nice. He loves you. He’s so worried about upsetting you. Because you’re contacting him directly, he feels you. Our job is to tell you you can’t do that. We’re his agents. That’s our job. Our job is to do this. You have to go through us. If you don’t go through us, we have a problem.'”

It’s just as simple as that. The agents become the heavies. By the way, everybody knows. What they’re doing is they’re just trying to get what they want. They’re just end-running the system. The agents who are the system are like, “Stop end-running the system,” because they can all speak to each other in the fully cynical language of people who know what we’re doing, as opposed to us who are like, “Oh my God, they care so much.” No, they don’t. Hard for us to be cynical. Probably shouldn’t be. Let the agents do it.

John: What can happen here is that the people who sent this thing to you directly, it may make sense to give it to them to take to one place or to places where they have relationships, but other producers will take it other places too. I agree with Craig. Your reps need to call them and say, “Hey, our client loves you, but also you need to back off because there’s lots of people he needs to be talking with.”

Craig: Also, you can’t. It’s as simple as that. You can’t do it anymore. It’s not because he’s asking you or she’s asking you to stop. We’re telling you, we don’t want you doing it. You have to go through us. It will hurt you to go around us because guess what? We’re this kid’s agents, not you. We have our thumb on the scale.

John: Here’s the balance is that as a writer working, you’re going to have personal relationships and direct relationships with some producers and some stuff that is only moderated through your reps. The ones who you do have specific personal relationships with, they need to also be in contact with your reps so that it’s not all on you.

It doesn’t mean you have to blow off these producers. It’s great that they love you because it seems like they’re good legitimate producers, but you need to communicate with your reps and then communicate after the reps have communicated through them. Make sure that you have a positive relationship going forward, but it’s not all just directed straight to you.

Craig: Perfectly fine to reply back and say, “This means so much to me. I think the world of you guys.”

John: “We’re so excited to see what happens with this, and we cannot wait to work with you on things.”

Craig: “I’ve let my agents know how passionate you guys are. I’m sure they’ll be reaching out.” Then your agents, when they read that, they’re like, “Oh, we’re about to get the call.” Then they’re going to get the call. They’re like, “I know.” That’s how they’re going to answer the phone. “I know.” The agents will be like, “Can you stop?” “Yes.” “Look, I love this script. I just don’t want to lose this script with so-and-so.”

John: Which is great.

Craig: Exactly. No one’s going to be like, “Wow, your client really hurt my feelings.”

John: They don’t have feelings. All right, let’s get to our one cool thing. I am just back from two weeks in Australia. My one cool thing is, the whole continent is fantastic, but my one cool thing for this week is Sydney. The city of Sydney is terrific. It’s always reductionist to compare one city to another city and do this. Sydney was great in a lot of ways. I find Vancouver to be great in that it’s just the right size city.

Craig: Not too big, not too small.

John: Sydney has fantastic public transportation. If you need to take an Uber someplace, they show up really quick. So many restaurants. I have no idea how–

Craig: So many.

John: So many.

Craig: So many restaurants.

John: I have no idea how the city can support as many restaurants as it does, but fantastic. Great.

Craig: Australians love eating.

John: I was lucky to be there for great weather. You can hike anywhere. There’s a zillion beach walks.

Craig: What about the spiders?

John: I saw no spiders.

Craig: You saw no spiders?

John: Well, there were no poisonous snakes.

Craig: They were there-

John: No animals came after me.

Craig: -stalking you.

John: A lot of cockatoos.

Craig: Oh, well, those are nice.

John: They’re nice. They’re gorgeous.

Craig: They’re not poisonous.

John: No.

Craig: It’s the only non-poisonous animal in Australia.

John: There are bats. The Sydney Opera House. We saw Rent at the Sydney Opera House.

Craig: Rent?

John: Rent.

Craig: You saw a Rent?

John: Rent. Sydney Opera House is great. We did the bridge climb again. We did all the touristy things.

Craig: Lovely.

John: I loved it.

Craig: I was so bummed out, too. I was supposed to go on the promotional tour for our second season, but I had to finish the show because our post-production people were like, “You can’t leave.”

John: Can’t leave.

Craig: “You can’t leave,” and so I couldn’t go. I was bummed out.

John: You’ve never been to Sydney?

Craig: No, that was my chance.

John: When you get there, it’ll be great. Everyone will try to marry visiting Australia and New Zealand at the same time. I get it.

Craig: It’s not a short little trip there. Quite a bit of ocean between them.

John: No, I will just say enjoy Australia for itself.

Craig: I honestly want to go see New Zealand because I want to be in Middle-earth. Straight up. I’m not going to lie to the people of Christchurch I’m not that interested in the town center. I want to go to Hobbiton. Straight up. I will. One day, I will. Maybe go visit my friends at Wētā. Well, I’m glad you had a great trip. Fantastic. The moment you left, there were 5,000 emails sent to people. Just be mindful.

John: I picked my time.

Craig: Just be mindful. Well, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time on an island in the Pacific as well, playing Ghost of Yōtei-

John: I know nothing about it.

Craig: -which is the sequel to Ghost of Tsushima, which I’m sure was my one cool thing back when Ghost of Tsushima came out. Now, I will say Ghost of Yōtei, which is a PlayStation Exclusive, has all the things that I really enjoyed about the first game and all the things that I were annoyed by in the first game. The combat is wonderful. It’s fluid combat, lots of fun options. In the first game, you had different stances you would use depending on the foes and the weapons.

John: Is this set in medieval Japan?

Craig: In medieval Japan. Exactly. In feudal Japan. This, you have different weapons, lots of stealth and parkour, minor parkour. It’s the characters and the dialogue. It’s just–

John: It’s wooden. No, I’m sorry.

Craig: It was wooden the first time. It’s made of the same wood this time. When you wander around a world and you meet people, like we play D&D, we meet NPCs all the time. One thing that’s really important is that NPCs, some of them can be boring, some of them can be earnest, serious, speak in platitudes and homilies and deep thoughts, but you want a bunch of them to be a little nuts or really funny or lusty or just really angry.

There’s only a couple. You meet so many people. There’s one character I’ve met so far who’s funny slightly, and nobody knows what to do with him. Everyone’s like, “Ugh, this guy. I can’t believe they let somebody with a sense of humor into feudal Japan.” They’re going to make another one. There’s going to be a Ghost of– pick another area of Japan. When they do, I would just urge them, give these characters a little more zip. A little more edge. Boy, is it fun running around killing. I got to tell you. I got my katana. I got my kusarigama. Oh, so much fun.

John: Love it. We talked before about how great Baldur’s Gate was on Baldur’s Gate 3 on so many levels.

Craig: So many.

John: The writing was terrific. Every character you ran into was so specific.

Craig: So many. They were funny. They were pathetic. They were funny to laugh at. They weren’t funny themselves, but you could laugh at them and how ridiculous they were. A lot of them, like the character of Auntie Ethel, spoiler alert for a while, she’s a hag. When you meet her, she just is this kindly old Irish lady trying to sell you potions. Then you find out she’s a hag who’s trying to basically devour a child to turn into a new hag. She’s hysterical. She’s so funny.

John: Even when you run into a bunch of goblins who are guarding a bridge, each of the goblins is specific.

Craig: They got their own thing. They fell into the thing of, all right, goblins are Cockney. I was like, “Bad monsters always have Cockney accents.” “Oh, can we have a little meet?”

John: Ghost of Yotai.

Craig: Ghost of Yōtei.

John: Yotei.

Craig: Ghost of Yōtei. Lots of fun if you like feudal Japan. I will say, having played Assassin’s Creed Shadows– honestly, see, I can’t even remember the subtitles. Is that the last Assassin’s Creed, which was also set in feudal Japan? I think this is better. Also, visually, there are times where you’re like, “Whoa, it’s so beautiful.” Thumbs up for me. Room for improvement, Ghost Squad, but the gameplay aspects are fantastic.

John: A friend of mine, a writer friend, is working on a big AAA game that’s not announced yet, and so he’s under so many NDAs. Just hearing the description of how hard the work is on that, it’s just incredible.

Craig: It’s so many people work so long and so hard, and sometimes the games don’t work. This one, I assume it’s selling well.

John: I hope so. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week comes from Jeff Ross. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. I don’t think it’s that Jeff Ross. It’s a different Jeff Ross. Is that on a roast?

Craig: It’s not roastmaster Jeff Ross?

John: Could be. If you have an outro, you can send a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting. There’s lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You will find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast.

We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find all this at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. You’ll just get the one email.

Craig: Just one.

John: Not 80, just one.

Craig: Just the one.

John: Thank you again to our premium subscribers for your kind attention. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on watching things when you’re away from home. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, we were traveling for two weeks in Australia. There are things we wanted to watch that were on streaming services. There are things that we wanted to watch which were on broadcast. It’s always the question of how best to do this. Our classic technique for traveling is we just pack an Apple TV with us. We put in a little box with HDMI cable, its power cord. 55% of the time, we can make it work.

It’s a hassle in that getting that box connected to the hotel’s WiFi is challenging. It’s improved over time, but it’s still challenging. There’s ways it pairs with your phone to do it. Getting an HDMI port that actually works can be a challenge. Getting a plug that’s close enough to the Apple TV, so you’re not reaching across the whole room, can be a challenge. It’s just a frustrating experience.

This last time, we did take the Apple TV, but did not end up plugging it in. Instead, we used Google Cast, which was on all the hotel TVs, to do it. It was rolling dice to see, oh, is it going to work this time? Is it not going to work this time? Why did it stop working suddenly midway through watching Survivor?

Craig: Hotels have this legacy problem of wanting to charge you to watch stuff on their television. I guess you could buy movies. They have their in-hotel rental system. You can buy a movie and show it to your kids to shut them up while you go have dinner in the bad hotel restaurant. They seem to think that’s still a thing, and maybe it is still a thing.

John: At certain price points, it probably is.

Craig: Possibly, but I do feel like we’re past it. A reasonable hotel chain at this point should just go, “Hey, here’s how you can watch whatever you want.” There are some security issues. What they don’t want is for somebody to log into their account on a TV, check out, have it still be there, and the next person starts buying stuff on your account. There’s concerns that I’m sure they have. They also don’t want people uploading crap into their system through the television somehow, I suppose. That could be a thing.

First thing I do when I walk into a hotel room, if it’s one of those hotels that has the TV on when you walk in, which drives me crazy because they’ve set it to the hotel welcome channel, first thing you do is turn it off.

John: It’s so bright, also.

Craig: It’s so bright and it’s so annoying, and it’s always playing bad music. Then I just watch stuff on my iPad. I don’t even bother with the TV.

John: When it’s just you, it’s great, but sharing, me and Mike together–

Craig: I don’t share.

John: A couple of times, we just end up watching off my computer. It was close enough, and it was easy enough. A couple of hotels I’ve been at in Norway, there’s an HDMI port you could just plug in. I was like, “Oh, that’s-”

Craig: Lovely

John: “-lovely and nice.” I feel like Google Cast is attempting to be that same basic technology, where basically, on the menu, you go to Google Cast and just like, here’s the QR code, scan this thing and do it. If it all worked consistently, fantastic, but it’s buried in other stuff.

Craig: Hotel internet is horrible. It’s firewalled up the wazoo, and it’s slow. It’s also incredibly fragmented. Your speeds are-

John: They’re shifty, yes

Craig: -relative to whatever anybody else is doing. If five people on the floor are all Google Casting, you’re screwed.

John: There are times where we end up tethering to our phones because-

Craig: Oh, geez.

John: -our data plan was so big for Australia that we were never going to be able to burn through all of it.

Craig: Can we talk about data plans for a second? Do you know what drives me crazy?

John: Please.

Craig: I had to do this for my older kid. She needed a new phone. I had to go on where Verizon meets Verizon. I had to go on to put the new device on the old phone line. I never go there. They’re like, “Oh, by the way, here’s the tab, review your plans.” The crazy thing is, every other business is constantly upselling you. These people, I don’t know if this is true for AT&T or other service providers., they quietly are like, “Oh, your plan is you pay $40 a month for X. Well, we have a new plan where you pay 10 cents a month for 1,000X.” You’re like, “Why didn’t you tell me? This whole time I could have had this?”

John: Our broadband at our house was the same situation where we were actually like, “Wait, no, the new plans are so much more for so much less.”

Craig: Quietly, they’re like, “Okay, we roll these new plans out to get the new people, but let’s not tell the old people. Let’s just have them keep spending money.” Somebody out there is still spending money on a pager. Anyway, that’s a side gripe.

John: We were getting back to the story of the internet at these hotels can be really challenging too. Also, if I’m trying to watch stuff off my American YouTube TV, I use my VPN, ExpressVPN. Mostly works.

Craig: Mostly works. There are so many VPNs.

Drew: Do you guys not watch linear TV in the hotel rooms?

Craig: No?

John: Occasionally. We were in Egypt earlier this year, and it was fun to actually just watch linear TV in Egypt because you’re just like, “Oh, this is actually a very charming, Ted Lasso-y kind of show that it’s all in Cairo.” That’s great. No, mostly I’m not doing that.

Craig: I have never. I don’t watch linear TV here. Why am I going to watch it there?

Drew: For me, that’s the joy of it. It’s being part of the culture in that way by just watching whatever–

Craig: I have to say, I have watched television overseas. Let me just annoy an entire continent.

John: Please.

Craig: I find European television to be obnoxious. Our television is ridiculous. I find their ads are obnoxious. I want Europe to be more dignified. They’re the old country. I want them to have a little bit more restraint. Instead, less when it comes to advertising, it’s all quite garish and loud. Anyway, right in Europe. Let’s go on, or I’m going to get a summons from The Hague.

John: Finally, this week, Apple TV+ is now just Apple TV.

Craig: Oh, thank God. Now I know what to do.

John: Now you can watch Apple TV-

Craig: On your Apple TV.

John: -on Apple TV through Apple TV.

Craig: Which is where your iMovies is and iTunes.

John: Which is the best thing. I do hope that we’ll get an Apple TV stick because, honestly, the box does not need to be this big. This is my new phone. All of the phone is this tiny little bump at the very top of the phone.

Craig: I am confused by the size of the Apple TVs myself.

John: They have storage. Storage for what exactly?

Craig: That’s the thing. They were designed to store a lot. You don’t really need to store that much anymore.

John: It just needs to connect.

Craig: Yes. Also, I was about to say, they’re annoying because sometimes you just have to restart them because they just crash. Then again, they’re running all the time. If they crash once every six months–

John: They’re really solid. They’re really good. Once they finally figured out how to make a non-terrible remote– I like the remote now.

Craig: I have the universal remote. I can’t deal with that. Then people are like, “Use your phone.” No, I will not. Yes, Apple TV’s pretty solid. Yes, Apple TV+, Hulu, gone. Plus, gone. HBO Max. Max, gone. HBO Max, back. Netflix sits there like, “We’re still Netflix, by the way.” FYI, they’re so cool. They’re just smoking a cigarette, like, “That’s nice.” Oh, you don’t have a Plus anymore?

John: No. Listening back to this bonus segment in 5 years or 10 years, what things will be like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe they were still talking about this as a thing.”

Craig: Oh, Apple TV’s been around for a long time now. Wasn’t it Chromecast? Now it’s Google Cast. Wasn’t it Chromecast?

John: Yes, it’s now called Google Cast.

Craig: Then what was Slingbox?

John: Slingbox was a separate service, Slingbox.tv, which was basically, I think, a unit that you had on your own personal TV, and then you could basically log into it from any computer anywhere in the world. YouTube TV has taken the place of that for us.

Craig: YouTube TV-

John: That’s how you’re getting your local channels in the US.

Craig: -is how I get my local channels, yes. I think the cable companies have given up on that one, mostly. They’re like, “We know. Just take the internet. How about that? If you check on the new plan, we pay you $80.”

[laughter]

John: It’s how it works.

Craig: “You have 14 trillion gigabytes instead of your current plan, $100 for one megabyte.” Why do they do that? Well, I know why they do that. I know the answer to my question. It’s as obnoxious as a European ad. I’m going to get so many ad complaints. Well, I’ve spent time in America, and I think your ads are obnoxious. Fine.

John: Fine. Craig, Drew, thanks.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Thanks.

Links:

• Preorder a signed copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• The Many Faces Of “Sir” Marco Robinson, The Man Who Grifted Aspiring Filmmakers With Claims About Being A “#2 Netflix” Producer by Jake Kanter for Deadline
• Trailer for Marco Robinson’s TV show Get a House for Free
• Meet the Sisters Battling to Become L.A.’s New Billboard Queen by Mickey Rapkin for The Hollywood Reporter
• Dynasty (1981)
• Rica Famosa Latina on YouTube
• Fake Oxford by Josh Levin for Slate
• Fawlty Towers and Father Ted
• ‘Run It Through GPT-5’: The Phrase Changing Hollywood Overnight by Erik Barmack for The Ankler
• Sydney, Australia
• Ghost of Yōtei
• Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Jeff Ross (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/lets-catch-up).

**Craig Mazin:** Standards and Practices has informed us that we have violated a certain number of rules, including use of bad language that may be inappropriate, in fact is inappropriate for your children, so earmuffs, guys, or just listen to it when they’re not around.

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name’s John August.

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

**John:** This is Episode 556 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Craig is back, literally back, not edited together from episodes dating back 10 years.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** We have so much to talk about, from movies to gun to created by credits. We’ll also answer listener questions that have been stacking up for months.

**Craig:** Yes, please. I apologize, I’m a bit raspy. Hopefully, this comes across as maybe perhaps-

**John:** No, it doesn’t at all.

**Craig:** … compatible with Sexy Craig.

**John:** Mildly ill, yeah.

**Craig:** John, you’re not ill. There’s nothing wrong with this. Don’t kink-shame my voice.

**John:** Oh yeah, so that’s how you’re going to spin it around.

**Craig:** I’m going to spin it around. Sexy Craig loves to spin it around. Sexy Craig had to come back because my voice is a little shot. We’ve gone through whatever was nearly a year of production. I’m back home. I am whatever beyond exhausted is, whatever that state of mind is, but ready to reengage my number one pursuit, podcast making-

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** … because I love podcasts.

**John:** We’re going to get through all those topics. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’re going to discuss penmanship apparently, because this topic was chosen by our producer, Megana Rao, who I suspect just-

**Craig:** Has excellent penmanship.

**John:** I’m also making fun of you.

**Craig:** She can make fun of both of us, my friend.

**John:** At times I can write very neatly, but it just doesn’t stick.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nope. Craig, while you’ve been gone, actually an update, the Scriptnotes book is actually going really well.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We’ve actually done a lot of work on it these past couple weeks. We’ve done a deep dive, which we sent out to all those folks who subscribed to get the updates on things. We did a deep dive on Frozen, which was an episode that Aline and I had done.

**Craig:** Oh yes, I remember it, with Jennifer Lee.

**John:** It turned out great. It was our first time testing what a deep dive chapter would feel like.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** A bunch of the interview ones done. Megana, you’re working on a chapter right now for group dynamics?

**Megana Rao:** Yes, on relationships in team movies and two-handers.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** That was actually based on… Two weeks ago our episode was a clip show that we put together. It ended up being a really good clip show with the two of us. That’s basically a chapter right there.

**Craig:** Honestly, we could probably put together 400 clip shows from the 500 shows we’ve done.

**John:** We’ve done a few while you’ve been gone.

**Craig:** You know what? Mix and match. There’s nothing wrong with that. When we were young, television would occasionally just-

**John:** Happens all the time.

**Craig:** You know what? It’s not new tonight. It’s a show that literally aired three months ago. Everyone was excited.

**John:** Also had the literal clip shows where it was like, remember that time we went and did this thing? That was a great time.

**Craig:** Yep, you get stuck in an elevator, you start remembering stuff.

**John:** You remember just a little bit. The Clerks animated TV show did not last for very long, but the first episode was a clip show, which I did respect.

**Craig:** Cute.

**John:** It was a good, fun idea. Updates on the book. I had said originally 2022. That’s not going to happen. We have a proposal that’s out now to our agent. We’re going to try to find a good publisher for the book.

**Craig:** What would you say the price is? Are we going to charge $300, $400 for this thing?

**John:** I think so, based on all of the work going into it. Each one is hand sewn. It’s going to be-

**Craig:** Big margins.

**John:** Big margins. Big margins for this book.

**Craig:** We’ve arrived.

**John:** It’s going to be good. Craig, not only are you back, movies are back.

**Craig:** Movies are back.

**John:** Movies are back.

**Craig:** They are back.

**John:** Big box office this past couple weeks.

**Craig:** It’s interesting. They’re back-ish. When Top Gun: Maverick comes out, it’s like the old days. It’s smashing Memorial Day weekend records. There have been big movies that have been coming out, but they are a very specific kind of movie, and there are not a lot of them. It used to be that on Memorial Day there would be two or three of these mega airliners smashing into each other and competing for this crazy week. It would go on for a few weeks. Now it’s like, oh my god, a movie. Then everybody goes, “Remember that?” I guess Jurassic Park, sort of.

**John:** Jurassic Park was probably the best example of… Top Gun was still able to hold on, while Jurassic Park did huge numbers as well. We’ll see whether we’re getting back into that groove. It’s also been nice to see Everything Everywhere All at Once doing great and just keeps trucking along.

**Craig:** That movie.

**John:** Delightful.

**Craig:** I can’t wait.

**John:** We’ve tried to get Daniels on to join us, and it’s just been a scheduling-

**Craig:** We’re going to get at least a Daniel. I don’t care. It has to happen.

**John:** Either one.

**Craig:** I love that movie so much.

**John:** So, so good. Craig, let’s talk about guns in Hollywood. This past week, a bunch of Hollywood creators signed a petition. I saw Shonda Rhimes. I saw Judd Apatow. Some of their statement with this open letter says, “As American storytellers, our goal is primarily to entertain. We also acknowledge that stories have a power to affect change. Cultural attitudes towards smoking, drunk driving, seat belts, and marriage equality have all evolved due in large part to movies’ and TV’s influence. It’s time to take on gun safety. We’re not asking anyone to stop showing guns on screen. We’re asking writers, directors, producers to be mindful of on-screen gun violence and model gun safety best practices. Let’s use our collective power for good.” An open letter. Craig, what’s your first instinct on this?

**Craig:** They solved it. We’re saved.

**John:** I have mixed feelings. I will say that going back to the episode we did about the Sideways effect and cigarette smoking, I do think stopping showing cigarette smoking on screen did have some impact in what people are doing to smoke cigarettes. The counter-example I have with guns though is that American movies are seen all over the world, and no one has the same gun violence problem that we do. It’s not the movies. It’s the guns.

**Craig:** In fact, I think it’s a very dangerous thing to suggest that it’s the movies. The issue with smoking is millions of Americans smoke. Millions of Americans do not murder each other with guns, although sometimes it feels like it. It’s a very rare and random thing that happens from time to time. When it does, the presence of a gun exacerbates someone’s terrible state of mind, and we have this awful violence. This is a uniquely American phenomenon, because for instance, certain states let 18-year-olds have assault rifles, which is insane.

We can’t impact millions of Americans with this, because millions of Americans happily are not murdering each other in the street with guns. Gun violence is not a function of movies. Nobody who shoots up a school or shoots up a supermarket or shoots up a post office is doing so because they watched a movie and got excited. No one. The premise is actually quite dangerous, I think. I think it feeds into this terrible narrative that we’ve always struggled to grasp at. You know what used to cause gun violence and things like that? Heavy metal. Then it was video games. Now it’s movies. It’s none of that.

You’re absolutely right to point out… In the UK for instance, there was a terrible school shooting in the ’80s in Scotland. The United Kingdom’s response, so, so sane, was to ban guns. There has not been such a school shooting since. They have all the same movies that we have. There’s plenty of gun violence there. I think that drama is always going to show extreme things. We’re allowed to murder people. Apparently, we can cut their throats. We can stab them in the head. We can have Jason walk around and hatchet teenagers.

This is a bit like… In reaction to the emergence of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, the porn industry was like, “Maybe everyone wear condoms.” Everyone was like, “We don’t want to watch that so much,” and then they didn’t, because movies are not reality. We actually understand that. We didn’t start wearing seat belts because of movies. We started wearing seat belts because there was a law, and we’d get a pretty sizeable ticket. Plus, it also made sense.

**John:** I want to make sure we’re not straw manning them here, because they’re not saying as a factor of gun violence. It’s a cultural attitude towards guns. I do think that there is a possibility that the way we portray guns in movies and television has an influence in how Americans perceive guns and the problems of guns and the utility of guns to solve problems.

I’ll give you an example. On the first Charlie’s Angels movie, one of the things Drew and I discussed from the very start is the Angels don’t use guns. There just are no guns. There are no guns in our movie. An Angel will never touch a gun. That was an important distinction at the start. Therefore, we’re going to have to find other ways to do the things you would otherwise do with a gun. That was helpful for that movie. Is it going to work for all movies? No, but I think sometimes asking that question from the start, of does a gun need to be in this scene or in this moment could lead to some good, better solutions.

**Craig:** It’s always a creative question. Putting the gun debate aside, it’s a very important creative question. What sort of violence does this character commit? Very famously, Batman doesn’t use guns. What Batman does do is severely beat his victims, to the point where they are probably likely going to be permanently brain damaged, whereas perhaps just shooting them in the shin would’ve helped, made their life a little bit better afterwards. That’s a Batman thing, doesn’t use guns. Superman doesn’t need to use guns because he can throw a meteorite at your face. Other characters do.

I don’t think that the discussion should be within the context of actual gun violence in the street, because if I think about a movie that glorifies gun use, John Wick comes to mind. John Wick is fun, and it’s insane. It’s crazy, posits a world where there is a hotel for hit men, where they have hit men tailors and whatever they do in there. Nobody’s John Wicking around. I can’t think of something that glorifies gun use more. There’s all sorts of things that are… You know what’s glorious on film? Drinking. We show people drinking all the time on film. Drinking is a poison that kills a lot of people. More people die every year from drinking than from gun violence, but we love it because it’s fun and because it’s the movies. It’s fake. It’s fiction.

**John:** Again, I want to make sure that we’re not escaping what they’re actually trying to do here, because they’re also talking about gun safety culture, like showing characters who do have guns actually locking them up or doing them safely. There are small things I think that could help.

**Craig:** I don’t see how that helps. I don’t see watching a movie where a guy puts a gun in a safe and closes it is going to make anybody else in the world think, “Oh, I should get a safe for this.” We all know. It’s like with smoking. Prior to smoking being removed from a lot of movies, there were warnings on every single pack of cigarettes for as long as you and I have been alive that said, “Don’t do this. It’s going to kill you.” We all know it’s going to kill us. Any reasonable person understands that you should keep guns out of the hands of children or people who should not have guns in their hands. Every reasonable person knows that they should be locked up. What I do think is good is to show people… For instance, when you show people using guns in shows or movies, and they are somebody that has picked up a gun before, they should hold it correctly. Keep your finger off the trigger. Keep the barrel down. Don’t do stupid things like pointing it sideways. Then again, some characters are knuckleheads and that’s what they do. That’s part of the stupidity of it. Have you seen Barry?

**John:** I’ve seen Barry, yeah.

**Craig:** This year, there was a moment-

**John:** There was a moment where two characters who decided they were going to use a gun to do violence should never have been sold a gun.

**Craig:** Correct. That was an interesting commentary on gun violence, because they are having a discussion about taking revenge and murdering somebody, and then it is revealed they are having that discussion right in front of a gun salesman, who says, “So are you taking it?” They say, “Yes.” He’s like, “Great.” He gives them the gun. Somewhat predictably, they end up injuring themselves, because they’re bad at gun use. That is an interesting commentary on guns. That’s within a show where a guy is constantly killing people with guns and never locks it up. I think it felt to me like its heart was in the right place. We all want to do something. I think Hollywood tends to believe that it is more culturally powerful than it is when it comes to certain things. We are more of a mirror than a projector.

**John:** Here’s as far as I’ll meet you is that I do worry that sometimes making the statement or saying we’re going to do this thing on our side is taking the pressure off of the actual people who need to affect the changes, which are lawmakers, because it was not just cigarettes not being shown in movies that affected the change. It was you can’t smoke in restaurants. We made it much harder to smoke.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** If we make it much harder to-

**Craig:** Get guns.

**John:** …own a gun, get a gun, use it improperly, yes.

**Craig:** From the beginning, one of the most popular Hollywood genres was the Western. In the Western, people shot each other constantly. That was the thing. There was rifles and handguns. They would swing the guns around. They would bring them in places and shoot each other in the streets. There were not mass shooting incidences in the ’50s and ’60s. One notorious one in Texas, and we still talk about it. If that happened today, it would be news for about an hour. The presence of the gun in our culture has always been there. The availability of guns for anyone, including the mentally ill or the angry or the young and brain not completed, therein is clearly, without question, the 99.9% contributing factor to our situation today.

**John:** We will not solve the problem of gun violence in America, but I think you and I may actually be able to achieve some closures or some real consensus on this next thing, which is a piece of follow-up. We talked about what is that page after the cover page before the script starts. It’s an interstitial page. Interstitial may be a good word for it. We asked our listeners for submissions about what they think that page should be called. I am going to read these aloud. I want your honest feeling about each of them. We may ultimately do a poll or something, but I want to hear you react first. Prescript.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Page 0.

**Craig:** Terrible.

**John:** Declaration page.

**Craig:** Outrageous.

**John:** Ancillary page.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Preface page.

**Craig:** Uck.

**John:** Epigraph page.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Dedication page.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Notes page.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Dramatis personae.

**Craig:** Get out of here.

**John:** Front matter.

**Craig:** Front matter just sounds disgusting.

**John:** This is from Icelandic. Sourbla [ph].

**Craig:** Perhaps in Iceland.

**John:** Elias sent that through for us. You liked epigraph most. I like preface most. Talk to me about why epigraph.

**Craig:** That’s what it is. That was the word-

**John:** In a book, it was.

**Craig:** That’s what I was trying to remember and I couldn’t. It was somewhere way back in my head. Epigraph is exactly the description that we have for that is the graph on top of epi. That is a perfect description of that page. Preface, it’s true. The problem is preface has its own meaning, which is a full chapter that is an introductory forward or something like that.

**John:** I get that. I feel like most people don’t know what an epigraph is.

**Craig:** Let’s teach them.

**John:** Otherwise, everyone gets the sense a preface comes before the thing starts.

**Craig:** Sure. I think we have the power, as we just know. That’s what I want to do. Let’s just put out our own competing thing, get as many of our friends to sign it, saying this thing really should be called the epigraph. Let’s stop calling it that weird page between the cover and the next thing. Let’s see if we can change the world.

**John:** After this episode comes out, we will officially poll the world and see if we can get people to come on board with one of these things. I feel like it’s going to be probably preface or epigraph. I also kind of like Page 0, but it also makes it feel like you’re going to number that Page 0.

**Craig:** Page 0 sounds pretty intense. That sounds like it could be a title of a movie. Look, I’ll accept any of them except front matter. That just sounds dirty.

**John:** Yeah, or it sounds like a brain thing. It’s like, oh, he has damage to his front matter.

**Craig:** Right, or it just implies that there’s back matter. I don’t want it.

**John:** A notes page feels like it comes at the end of a script to me.

**Craig:** Yes, or put notes on it. These aren’t notes.

**John:** No, they’re not notes. We have a question from Mark about Obi-Wan Kenobi’s created by credit. Megana, can you help us out with that?

**Megana:** Mark writes, “In Episode 552, you talked about the writing credits on Elvis and everything that went into the decisions to credit it the way that they did. In a similar vein, I wanted to ask why there’s no created by credit on the Disney Plus series Obi-Wan Kenobi. It’s my understanding that the writer of the first episode is usually considered the creator, but both of the first two episodes have story by and teleplay by credits in addition to the based on Star Wars by George Lucas credit, which has become standard since Disney bought Lucasfilm, and no creator credit. Is this more common than I think it is or is there some kind of weird possible IP-based reason why there isn’t a creator credit?”

**Craig:** There may very well be. My understanding is that when you’re talking about an adaptation, created by is in play if the adaptation is sufficiently different from the source material, if you’re directly adapting a preexisting storyline. I haven’t seen the Obi-Wan Kenobi show.

**John:** It’s based on things that exist, but there’s a whole new storyline. It’s not a remake of a thing.

**Craig:** It’s not from, for instance, a comic or a novelization or something like that. If you’re adapting something in a very close manner to what was there before, then there may be a rule about created by not being in play. My personal opinion is that the Writers Guild shouldn’t be in the business of taking created by away from anybody. I think it should be always available. It should always be there. I don’t really see what’s the point of limiting it, particularly if there’s not an argument about it. I ran into a weird thing with that on Chernobyl. Originally, HBO submitted the credits and said created by Craig Mazin, and the Writers Guild initially came back and said you can’t have created by because you’re only five episodes.

**John:** That’s right, you told me that.

**Craig:** Created by requires you to have six episodes. I was like, “Guys, it’s just me.”

**John:** No one else.

**Craig:** There’s no other writer that has been hired on this show. One writer is employed: me. You’re just taking away from me. It was going to be six episodes. We just collapsed it during production into five. They were like, “No, sorry, that’s the rule.” I was like, “Now I have to try and get a waiver.” I think at that point they were like, “Just give it to him.”

**John:** I just looked it up. Obi-Wan Kenobi has six credits, so that, it wasn’t the issue. I do wonder if there’s a thing about… There were multiple writers on it. I think there may have been multiple writers doing different things at different times. It may have been an arbitration credit to get to where we even were for the pilot credits. That makes it harder to get a created by credit.

**Craig:** I readily admit that when we get questions about feature credits, I have 100% confidence that I know what I’m talking about. Television credits, weird, but again, I don’t have a writers’ room, so it doesn’t come up, but I have 70% confidence in my answer.

**John:** The related credit you’ll often see in television is developed by, which is when it’s coming off of a piece of IP, but you don’t get a created by credit. We’re going to be comfortable in our not knowing the full answer here. You are doing more TV. I’m going to be doing more TV. We’re going to learn this. Check in in 10 years and we’ll be experts on these credits.

**Craig:** Or even a month.

**John:** Even a month. Let’s get to some listener questions. Megana, I hope you have your voice rested, because there’s a lot of questions to get through.

**Megana:** I do. We have Nile from Hong Kong, who asks, “How do you handle repetitive actions such as a military character enters and stands to attention? My current screenplay has quite a few ‘stands to attentions.’ I’ve tried variations, starting the scene later, adding a distraction, and even hanging a lantern on it, but I still have three more ‘stands to attentions’ than I want.”

**John:** I suspect you don’t actually need to have those “stands to attentions,” because at a certain point, we just get when a character comes into the scene, they’re going to have to do that. You don’t need to call it out every time. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** I’m a little concerned that you have that many soldiers entering and standing to attention period.

**John:** That’s a lot of walking in rooms.

**Craig:** It may be a sign that there’s just a lot of times where somebody walks into a room and goes wah. Are they saluting? Are they just bah? You can also get away sometimes with assuming that they’re standing to attention for the same person, like let’s say General Smith. You could say, “So-and-so enters the room, stands to attention in front of General Smith, as everyone always does,” and then you know this generally is going to happen.

**John:** Yeah, just because if you have people doing the kinds of stuff that they’re going to be doing in the world of your movie, you just don’t have to call it out all the time. In Top Gun, they’re not talking about how they’re doing stuff on the plane each time. Probably the first time in the script it’s mentioned, you’re seeing it, but then you’re not acknowledging it every other time.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can establish your routine as a routine, let us know that it is a routine, and then move along.

**Megana:** I think this is an interesting followup. Jonathan asks, “In your recent episode on entrances and exits, you mention that we don’t need to see people enter and exit places, yet in the show Severance it shows the subjects walking from place to place throughout a large portion of the show. Why do you think this works?”

**John:** I think it works really well in Severance. My guess is why it works so well in Severance is this is a show about characters being trapped in a place they cannot get out of. They’re in a very small environment. It works for them to always be walking from one point to another point. They’re always under surveillance. It feels right in the continuity of that show. My guess is that you see a lot more entrances and exits in an office world than you do outside, is that you’re seeing characters enter into spaces more down there than outside. I think there’s probably a good contrast there.

**Craig:** All we were saying is you don’t need to. We weren’t saying you shouldn’t or that it’s bad. It’s just that you don’t feel that you are obligated to show people enter or exit spaces. If there’s a purpose, whether it’s thematic or because the space is really interesting, do it. I write entrances and exits all the time.

**John:** I would say that show also has a lot of things that are happening in doorways, because you’re always in between two different spaces. It feels really natural that you’re just going to show somebody coming in and going out of that space. I would say definitely not trying to have a blanket prohibition on entrances and exits, but always look at a scene and say, wait, do I actually need to have this character walk in here, because I think so often, especially new screenwriters are treating it like a play, where everyone has to enter into the scene, do the work of the scene, and then leave the scene. The magic of movies is you don’t.

**Craig:** Exactly. We’re just saying ask the question.

**John:** Cool.

**Megana:** Alex from Manchester asks, “I’m in the middle of planning a short screenplay set in early 19th century Wales. While I’m happy with the overall premise, I can’t help but feel I’m damaging the integrity of the story by writing the film in English, as during this time, little to no one would’ve spoken English. Should this be a genuine worry or shall I plow on, incorporating the Welsh language where possible and in small doses to help hold up its overall integrity?”

**John:** I don’t know what I would do.

**Craig:** I know what I did.

**John:** Absolutely. People, they spoke, quote unquote, Russian.

**Craig:** Yes. People spoke English. They spoke English just like Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in not Danish but English. Alex is perfectly free to write this story not in Welsh, a beautiful but notoriously difficult language to speak, and very few people understand it. You’d right away be limiting your actor pool quite significantly. Again, it’s for an audience. The language to me is not where all of the beautiful detail is. If you get the clothing and the hair and the places and the props right, if you get the attitude, if you get the philosophy and the history correct, the language is just part of the regular artifice of recreating life through art. I don’t see any reason why you should feel obligated to try and write this in a language that I doubt you speak. Don’t make them sound like they’re from Manchester, because that would be hysterical but wrong.

**John:** A thing Alex may run into is that if everyone is, they’re speaking English, but we know they’re actually really supposed to be speaking Welsh, and he has to have a scene where some English speaker comes into that situation, that can be complicated. That’s the Hunt for Red October problem.

**Craig:** Exactly. England and the English language gives you such a great gift here. There is a Welsh accent in English. Lots of ells. It’s lovely. It would be good if the actors spoke English with a Welsh accent. Similarly, when the king is discussing how to put down the rebellion in Wales, he should be rather posh and kingly in his speech, RP and all that. There are wonderful regional accents that they can always pull from, especially if you’re making a film in the UK about a section of the UK. Try and get that accent right. Then again, they made Braveheart.

**John:** I was going to say Braveheart, that’s in English.

**Craig:** Everyone’s all over the place. Half of them are Irish. One of them’s American, so you know.

**John:** You know. I would say also, Alex, watch House of Gucci.

**Craig:** Don’t do that.

**John:** Watch House of Gucci, because those characters, they are Italian, but they’re speaking English. Sometimes they speak Italian. Sometimes they’ll say things like… In English they’ll say, “What’s the word for… ” It’s like, you’re speaking Italian right now.

**Craig:** Plus, they also vaguely sounded like vampires. It did not help that story. I agree with you. I really struggle when they just try too hard with the language. I do feel like well-trained actors from the United Kingdom will be able to do a Welsh accent with some training. There are wonderful dialect coaches that work with folks in the UK all the time.

**John:** Cool.

**Megana:** This is a quick question for Craig. Cuber Dad asks, “Do you like Rubik’s cubes? Where do they rank on your puzzle solving scale? I got one for my son and finally learned how to solve it in my 40s. Am I wrong to think that cubing and writing share some similarities? Trying to crack an algorithm on a cube feels like working through a difficult part of a script, turning a scene one way, then sideways, then back on itself, or perhaps I’m straining this metaphor.”

**Craig:** You are straining this metaphor.

**John:** You are definitely.

**Craig:** Writing is like a Rubik’s cube with so many pieces that no one can learn the algorithm, and it’s constantly changing anyway, because what you consider to be success with the Rubik’s cube, which is finite, is not success with writing. Nobody knows what success is with writing until you get there. No, they are not related. I do not know how to solve a Rubik’s cube. My script supervisor, Chris Roofs [ph], excellent Rubik’s cube solver. Bella Ramsey, excellent Rubik’s cube solver. The two of them would solve it, and then I would come and mix it up. That was my job. Could I learn? Yes. There is a method. You can learn it. That is the very reason I don’t want to, because once you learn it, you can pick up any Rubik’s cube that has been scrambled to any extent and within a few minutes, solve it, because you are essentially being a robot. That said, I do like watching them solve it.

**John:** It’s fun to watch. My daughter learned how to solve a Rubik’s cube while we were in Paris. For two or three years, she was solving it. Now it sits on a shelf. She’s never going to solve it again. It was useful in its time. There is a good Rubik’s cube movie. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

**Craig:** A documentary.

**John:** A documentary.

**Craig:** It’s lovely.

**John:** Great, but it’s not really about Rubik’s cubes. It’s about this relationship between these solvers and this one kid.

**Craig:** It’s about the autism spectrum more than anything. I think it’s gorgeous. Beautiful movie. I will say that level of solving is astonishing to me, where it’s not about solving your Rubik’s cube, it’s about seeing just how fast can the brain go, not only to know what should be done, but also to make the fingers do it. For these kids to blindfold themselves and solve a Rubik’s cube in 30 seconds is just astonishing to watch.

**Megana:** Ray in the Midwest asks, “I’m the main writer on a genre indie film coming out later this year with an Academy Award actor as one of the leads. On top of that, my representation is currently shopping three to four different genre scripts of mine that are getting interest. I parlayed this writing momentum into finally getting permission to adapt one of my dream projects after pursuing it for more than a decade. It’s a comic book property. I took it to my representation, thinking it could be a game-changer, which it was for a bit. Suddenly, they now have a major studio screenwriter who’s shown interest in the property and pitching it as a major studio tent pole, which means that I would not be the screenwriter on my dream project. However, I would still be on board as a producer, which my reps told me would be far more valuable than me writing my dream project at the indie level. I’ve dreamt about writing this movie for over 12 years, and I’m wrestling with what is the best approach here. I’m obviously in no position to get this made as a major studio tent pole like the other writer, but the project is incredibly important to me. I always want to be a team player, because this industry’s all about collaboration. My question is, is it more valuable to my career moving forward to write and maintain creative involvement even if the movie is at the indie level like 2 million or below, or to be a producer with very little input on the potential $50 million or more?”

**Craig:** There’s a girl you’ve been chasing for years. You finally get that chance, and then your best friend says, “You know what would be even better than sleeping with her? That guy sleeping with her.”

**John:** I feel really bad for Ray. I have had similar conversations with friends who have been in situations like this, where they had the take, they had the thing, and they were about to get the job, and then some big screenwriter, not me… There have been conversations where I’ve been the person who’s come in to be that big screenwriter. I feel bad for the Rays who I didn’t even know about who were involved in things. My hunch is that so far you have an indie coming out, which is great. You have this other thing you want to adapt. You want to do it as an indie. If it really wants to be a bigger property and you’re not going to be able to swing it, take the producer credit, learn how a big movie gets made. Learn how all the gears go together and grind things down into frustrating pulps. Then focus on doing other stuff, because you have other projects, other irons in the fire, as you said in the first paragraph, different genre scripts. Use those to be your indie calling cards. Use this to be a lesson about how to make a big movie.

**Craig:** You’re implying that you have a choice. I’m not quite sure how that is. If you do have a choice, then my feeling is write it. You know how to do it at a certain level. You believe you do. You should do it. If there is no choice, I’m not really sure what the question is anyway. This is happening.

**John:** Yeah, because he doesn’t control the IP it doesn’t look like.

**Craig:** What I would say is make your peace with it. John’s absolutely right. It’s a great chance to see something big get put together. It’s a wonderful opportunity to see something destroyed that you love, which everybody should experience in Hollywood at least-

**John:** I’ve had a few of those.

**Craig:** … 7 or 18 times. One thing I just want to be clear about, your reps are absolutely full of shit. This is not good. That producing credit will mean zero. There is in movies one producing credit that means something, and it is produced by. The rest aren’t going to mean anything. They’re going to give you co-producer or, God forbid, associate producer. Do not settle for that. Even if it’s executive producer, it doesn’t matter, because everybody will know who produced the movie, and everybody will know who wrote the movie. We all know. Don’t get swayed by that. It will accrue to a zero benefit for you.

**John:** Last week on the show we had Michael Waldron on. He was talking about he went to Pepperdine for film school. I was trying to drill him. I tried to be Craig here and say, “What did you really get out of it? Was it worth your time? Was it worth your money?” It was clear that he treated it as like, “I’m going to treat every day like it’s my job. I’m going to absolutely kill everything that comes my way. I’m just going to really approach it like that.” If this could be Ray’s film school, where it’s like, “Listen, I know that my producer credit’s not going to mean anything, just like my screenwriting degree is not going to mean anything, but I am going to learn the shit out of things every day on this process and I’m going to stay involved on those conversations,” that’s going to be really helpful for you.

**Craig:** You’ll have to fight your way into it.

**John:** You will.

**Craig:** You may think that, “Oh, I’m a producer on this.” They’re like, “No, you’re not.”

**John:** Craig and I have been producers on things we’ve barely touched.

**Craig:** Enjoy your two tickets to the premier, sitting way, way in the back.

**John:** Ray, congratulations that you have a movie coming out with good people. It sounds like things are going pretty well here. Just don’t take the negative of this one thing not going quite the way you hoped as a sign that everything is doom.

**Craig:** Lay in wait, because that big screenwriter may fall on his or her face. Happens all the time. Then you can step up and be like, “I know what to do.”

**Megana:** Nathan in Nashville asks, “I’ve been stumped for a few weeks on a new spec I’m writing. I have the gist of the story worked out in a broad outline. I know all the major set pieces, including the ending. However, something feels off with the logic. I feel like I’m trying to force a puzzle piece into a hole that’s a 95% match. It might even seem to fit to the untrained eye, but doesn’t lock perfectly into place. For context, it’s a sci-fi script, but if Michel Gondry and the Muppets had total creative control. In other words, the rigorous logic needed for audience buy-in is much closer to the Swedish chef cooking with singing food than it is to Anthony Rapp navigating a star ship through a multidimensional network of interstellar fungi. Even still, I feel stuck. Do you have any tips for working yourself out of this predicament? I keep trying to write around the problem and solve it in a second draft, but the fact that the story logic isn’t perfect keeps niggling around in my brain and stopping that progress. I just can’t find that perfect fit.”

**Craig:** You got to pay attention to that.

**John:** Something’s wrong.

**Craig:** There is no piece fitting 95%.

**John:** I can tell you as a person who solves jigsaw puzzles, there’s no such thing as a 95% piece.

**Craig:** Not a puzzle.

**John:** I am the person who’s qualified to answer this thing talking about puzzle pieces. I’m going to say if it’s a near fit, it is a misfit. It’s not actually going to work. You’re going to bend the edges of that puzzle piece. Only pain is going to follow.

**Craig:** You will not be able to reassemble your broken picture. I will say that you need to solve this problem. You cannot write your way around it. You can’t cover it with words. You can’t pour structure over it, all that stuff. You think that the untrained eye might not notice it. Everyone will notice it. It will be glaring the whole time. Think of how many times you walked out of a movie complaining that something didn’t make sense. You have to solve it. This is very hard. This is a hard, hard thing to do.

I always think of this line, I’m sure I said this before, from Searching for Bobby Fischer, where this little kid is sitting there, eight-year-old chess prodigy, but he’s learning from a grandmaster played by Ben Kingsley. He’s laid out this arrangement of pieces for the kid. He says, “You can get to checkmate in 10 moves. How?” The kid’s just staring. He goes, “I don’t see it.” He says, “Don’t move until you see it.” “I don’t see it.” “Don’t move until you see it.” “I don’t see it.” Then he whacks all the pieces away, and the chessboard is empty. Then the kid looks at it. Then he has it in his mind. Then he sees it. Then it’s glorious.

I would say to you, in terms of writing, don’t move until you see it. Solve the problem in your head. It’s often way more elegant than you think. You will go through all these, and I do this all the time, these torturous machinations, because you think you’re hunting for this elusive, complicated formula. You’re not. You’re looking for E equals MC squared. You’re looking for something so fundamentally simple that when you see it, you’ll know.

**John:** My hunch is that you’re going to find the solution is not by adding something, but by taking some things away, and probably by taking away some things earlier on, because you’re trying to stack things up to fit a certain way. If you just take that piece out, oh, that was the thing that was causing the wrinkle in the carpet. It’s that thing that you can’t solve. Once you take that thing out, you’re there. It may also be a piece of just logic you’re giving us early on or emotional logic that you’re giving us early on makes us feel like this is how it’s going to work. These are the rules of the world that I’m setting up. Within the rules of the world I’m setting up, this makes perfect sense. Maybe don’t move until you see it. Also, the other choice is to take a step back and don’t try to solve this problem right in front of you. Look at the whole thing, and see, if I take some other things away, does that problem disappear.

**Craig:** Look at what you have, and ask yourself if maybe the answer’s just sitting there, because just what happens if everybody relaxes? What happens if all the characters that are currently tormenting themselves into your plot, what if it just relaxes? What if it simplifies?

**John:** The language you’re using, you’re trying to force something. You’re trying to jam something. Nope, actually just got to ease back and just let it flow and let it go to the next thing. It can feel lazy. It can feel like, I’m not doing work to jam this thing. No. Actually, it’s much more natural. If you’re doing a great job of writing this, it’s going to feel both natural and surprising to the audience, I think, because one of the things I loved so much about the third act of Top Gun movie is that a bunch of stuff happens, that I’m not surprised that all happens, but it actually feels natural to how the movie is set up.

**Craig:** Great.

**Megana:** DJ from Palmdale asks, “I’m writing a script in which the main characters are introduced in the opening scene, but as younger versions of themselves. Later the story jumps forward to the time period where the rest of the movie takes place when they’re older. My question is should I do my in-depth character introductions in that opening scene when they’re younger versions of themselves or should I wait until a few scenes later when the main characters are reintroduced as their older versions? The characters haven’t changed much fundamentally since the time period in the opening scene and act pretty much the same, but their older versions are what the audience sees for most of the film.”

**John:** Interesting. I don’t think we’ve actually addressed this before. When you have younger and older versions of characters, if you’re saying here that they’re actually not fundamentally vastly different, personality-wise. They’re still going to look different. They’re still going to feel different in their space. Make sure you’re giving us a visual and a way to identify those characters, keep them straight, when we first see them, with the older version or the younger version. You get a sense of who they are. When we see the older or the younger version of them, you can use some similar language to remind us of the personality things or other defining characteristics so we completely connect them in our heads, because it’s one thing in a movie when we’re watching that we can see these characters, be like, “Oh, that looks like the young version of Bill Hader.” On the page, we don’t have that. All we have is these names, and hopefully, we’re going to match to be the same person. We can get lost in terms of what’s changed and what’s the same.

**Craig:** You’re asking should I do this or that. My answer is yes, because you want to introduce the characters as they’re young, the way you should introduce any character. I want to know what they look like, what their hair is like, their clothes, wardrobe, hair, and makeup. If there’s anything specific, are they missing teeth, are they skinny, are they heavy, are they goofy, are they handsome, whatever it is, tell us. If you’re telling me that when they’re older they’re basically the same, I’m telling you, you haven’t done it right, because age is the thing that changes us the most, and not just because there’s physical changes, but there are mental changes and emotional changes. If you’re telling me a story where I see them as children and then I see them as an adult, for the love of god, something must’ve happened when they were children to earn my way into now jumping ahead and seeing them as adults. It’s really important that you do it again. If all you do is say 15 years older but more worried, 15 years older, still boyish, but somehow has lost their charm, or the goofy one is now more possessed, whatever it is, you got to give me something. Otherwise, why are you jumping ahead in time? Something must’ve happened.

**John:** The other thing I’d ask you to really look at, DJ, is how important is the younger and the older version of these characters. It says here that you were mostly with the older versions of these characters. Really ask yourself what happens if we don’t have these younger versions. It may be absolutely essential to your story that we see these younger versions, but maybe it’s not. Maybe you’re trying to do a thing that won’t actually be benefiting you in the movie. Maybe the question you’re asking is really should you be doing this at all. Maybe you should. Just ask yourself could you get by without this.

**Megana:** Justin asks, “My name’s Justin, and I’m in Canada, and I’m dyslexic. I’m currently writing my first screenplay roughly 20 years after being told by a high school English teacher that I should give up writing. That moment shattered my confidence, but as spell check and grammar checkers became more and more reliable, I slowly began to write again. I will always have to take a final ultra-slow pass reading through my script, but I will still miss mistakes that may seem fundamental to other screenwriters. Generally, the mistakes are not so severe that it would ruin the reading experience. I’m really confident in my storytelling skills. Should I be informing people before they read my script that I’m dyslexic and that there may be a few grammar errors? I worry that they may not want to read it at all if I do this. If I don’t, I worry they may wonder how I could make some fundamental mistakes.”

**Craig:** Good question. For starters, you can ask somebody to proofread it for you. There are people who will read scripts, and they will check for both spelling and grammar issues. My guess is that there are probably some pretty good resources for you in Canada, Canada, my home away from home last year and some, a socialist country with a lot of resources. I would imagine that there’s probably some decent resources for people with dyslexia there. There may be something. I don’t know if you live in a major city or not, but perhaps at a university library or at the university setting, there may be somebody willing to just do that to help you out. If not, then I think it’s fair to let people know that you’re dyslexic. The way I would put it is, “If you see any errors that would make you think, why would a person like this make that error, now you know why.” I wouldn’t get into grammar or spelling per se. I would just say, “If you see an error that seems funky, just flag it for me. I’m dyslexic. This will happen from time to time.”

**John:** I think before you need to do that, you’re going to be able to find resources for getting that last set of eyes on them, because you talk about needing to read through slowly and carefully, so you do have a sense of the kinds of things you’re struggling with. It may be a public resource, but it may also just be the person you’re paying 50 bucks to do that last pass on a script before you send it in. I think we’ve talked about this on previous episodes where there are people who will just read your script and there are people who can help you out on that. Finding the college student who can do that may be one of the best resources there for that.

I would also say that I think one of the good things that’s happened in the 20 years that you weren’t writing is that we’ve recognized that dyslexia is a set of challenges for people to read and to write, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the ability to express themselves or tell stories and do all these things. I’m just really happy that you’ve realized that you have the ability to do all these things, and just like a person who… Ryan Knighton is blind and can write a hell of a script. It’s a small obstacle on the way that you can deal with and address.

**Craig:** 100%. With that in mind, if you do find somebody that you’re going to pay $50 to, $50 Canadian-

**John:** Which is less than it would be in the US. It’s a bargain in Canada.

**Craig:** John doesn’t understand money. Anyway, the point is make sure that they know why they’re reading it. Everybody that you give a script to is going to be like, “I did have some things. I wasn’t sure if this… When she said that, would she really say that?” Just be real clear up front, “I don’t want any creative notes from you whatsoever. I just want spelling, grammar.”

**John:** I will say there’s a writer director I know, who I think she’s talked about her dyslexia, but I don’t want to say her name in case she hasn’t talked about it. She is dyslexic, and she has a very successful writing directing career. She just has people help her with those issues. Is it a thing you’re going to have to address? For sure. Can you still be perfectly successful? Yes, because she is.

**Craig:** There you.

**John:** Craig, it’s come time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us? We’ve missed you for so long, so I bet you’ll have a cool thing.

**Craig:** I do have a cool thing. It’s free, which I can’t believe. Like most shows that shoot on digital, which is most shows, we used an ARRI. One of the primary tools that have been around for directors and cinematographers for many, many years when we were shooting films was a viewfinder. The idea when you’re shooting on the ARRI or a film camera is you’re constantly switching lenses. The lenses are fixed focal lengths, so 50 millimeters, 35, 32, 27. When you’re trying to frame up the scene, when you’re blocking it out and you want to know what lens should we be using, we used to just get the lens on a stick. It was a viewfinder on a stick. You’d look through it, and you could turn a dial. That was a variable lens, so you could roughly see what it would look like. We don’t have to do that anymore.

**John:** You’ve got your phone out, so I bet it involves your phone.

**Craig:** It is. There’s an app called the Magic ARRI Viewfinder. It is free. There are a few extra doodads you can unlock on it if you buy… I don’t know, it’s like $4 for the little upgrade. It’s wonderful. Basically, you hold it out, and you just dial in with your finger what focal length. It’ll take any focal length, including lenses that don’t exist. Nobody uses a 68. If you want to look at it in 68, you can. When I was directing, I found it incredibly useful to be able to just take my phone, especially when I was scouting, to look around, just see, okay, I’m just going to roughly go in my mind. I know what a wide is. I know what a medium is. I know what a long is. Let me just take some pictures using the bright lens. Very helpful. Super free and/or cheap. If you are ever contemplating using a viewfinder for anything, that thing did pretty well.

**John:** I’ve seen viewfinder things on the iPhone for a long time, but it sounds like this one is deliberately an ARRI thing that is going to give you exactly what you’d expect from this camera, which is great.

**Craig:** Especially with this iPhone, it’s saying, look, this is what-

**John:** This is what you’re going to get.

**Craig:** This is what you’re going to get with a general lens, because the ARRI is not lenses. The ARRI is just-

**John:** It’s a box.

**Craig:** It’s a box. The lenses are the lenses. It’s saying if you were to stand here and look through a real lens on a 35, this is what you would see.

**John:** Craig, when you’re out scouting at location and you’re pulling out this app doing this stuff, are you just setting location manager, AD, stand there, stand there, to see relative framing?

**Craig:** I will occasionally do that. The last time I used it, I asked my production designer to stand here. I was like, “No, move to your left. Take one step forward. Stop.” Then you can tap on your area of focus. If I want to see the back of his head sharp but in the distance things blown out-

**John:** That’ll give you a sense of like, okay, if I was on this long of a lens, how quickly would I lose that, could I keep both of them in focus, if you wanted to.

**Craig:** Right, or if I want the background to be out of focus, how much out of focus will it be with this lens. Then I find the one, like, okay, this is basically what I’m thinking, take a picture. Then I can share that with my DP. I always say, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. This is just for a vague sense of my… You will make it look great. Maybe this lens is wrong and all that. This was just kind of a thought.”

**John:** Whenever I’m Slacking something through to Dustin, our designer, and I’ve just done something up in PhotoShop really quick, generally I’ll say, “A thousand apologies, this is terrible, because I’m stepping into your domain. This is what’s in my head.”

**Craig:** You know what I did? There was a note. I was talking to Franny Orsi, who runs HBO Drama. She was saying there was just something in a scene she wanted. She described it in the kind of way that executives do. I knew I had 50% of what she was asking for, but not 100%. I said, “Okay, Frannie, write dialog for me. Don’t worry. It doesn’t have to be good. It’s going to feel weird. I’m not going to use it word for word or even any of it. I just need to know what’s in your head. It will help me write something that will probably look completely different but maybe get to.” She did it, and she was so sweet about it. She’s like, “This is a first for me.” She’s like, “This was hard and weird and uncomfortable, but here it is.” It was incredibly helpful. It helped me. Like I said, I didn’t use that, but I did this, and it achieved hopefully the thing that she was asking for.

**John:** That’s great. My One Cool Thing actually comes from Megana. This is a tweet by Alex Hirsch, who was going through some of the emails he got from Disney’s Standards and Practices on his show Gravity Falls. Did you see this today?

**Craig:** I was just talking about this with our editor, Tim Goode, an hour ago. It’s really funny.

**John:** Let me play a little clip here from it.

**Alex Hirsch:** Page 492. It has come to our attention that hoo ha is a slang term for vagina. Please revise.

It is a proper word meaning excitement or hullabaloo, and that is clearly its meaning here. The context is an owl-themed restaurant called Hoo Ha’s Jamboree. Not changing it.

Page 14. Please revise chub pup on T-shirt. Chub has a sexual connotation.

This is silly. It’s an image of a fat dog. On the context, there’s no reason to think chub means anything other than that.

We have ran this phrase up the line, and unfortunately the concern surrounding it still remains. If you’d like to send me some alternate phrases, I can run those and let you know what becomes of it.

Alternate phrases: chubby pup, tub pup, chubbity pup pup. I can’t believe I have to do this.

**John:** Standards and Practices, for people who aren’t familiar with it, international listeners, particularly on the broadcast networks but also on some of the cable networks-

**Craig:** Censors.

**John:** Censors. They are censors. They’re going through and saying this is appropriate or not appropriate for our audience, for our network, not in a legal sense, but basically so that people won’t come after us and say that we are corrupting the youth of America, things that we are being asked to change.

**Craig:** Standards and Practices is notorious for being… It’s like they found the most fuddy-duddy people on the planet and then gave them an audience and said, “Suck the life out of things,” because we generally are smart enough to know where the line is that’s hard. If you’re writing for network, you’re not dropping F-bombs on that show. That’s not allowed by the FCC. You can’t do it. Then there are those weird things that are in the middle. You know, okay, look, I was dancing around… You might say, “Oh, did you get a handy?” Now, handy in that context clearly means hand job. You’re going to get flagged by S and P. You got to take the L on that one. Okay, fine. If, look, it’s called chub pug because it’s a fat pug, and we heard that you could also say I got a chub meaning an erection, no. No, I’m going to fight that all day long. That’s crazy. Who is going to misinterpret that? Certainly not the nine-year-old kids watching it.

**John:** The frustration with all of it is that it’s anticipating an adult responding in a way that a kid would never actually do it and taking offense on behalf of an imaginary child.

**Craig:** I love those videos when some outraged mom somewhere is like, “I got this animal, stuffed animal, and if you pull the string, it says words. Listen to what it says. It’s saying go fuck Santa.” Then they play it for you, and it’s like, no, it’s not. It’s saying, “Oh, I forgive you.” It didn’t say fuck Santa at all.

**John:** It says, “I’m fun Santa.”

**Craig:** You’re like, lady, you’re crazy. Then they get attention. Then a hundred articles are written. Anyway, now we have to put a language warning on this.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Lachlan Marks. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. The Dropbox folder that has all of our listener outros is getting a little bit bare.

**Craig:** Uh-oh.

**John:** Maybe send those in now. If you’ve been holding onto one, we need it. Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today, but for short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @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. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You could sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on penmanship.

**Craig:** Penmanship.

**John:** Craig, it’s nice to have you back.

**Craig:** It’s so good to be back.

**John:** Craig, what is your handwriting like? I don’t think I’ve actually seen your handwriting ever.

**Craig:** I’m happy to do it for you right now.

**John:** Let’s find a pen here. I would like you to write instructions for heating up dinner.

**Megana:** I’m pulling up an article that says what does your handwriting say about you.

**John:** We’re going to trade.

**Craig:** Trading.

**John:** Mine has things I legitimately just wrote for myself and one thing I just wrote now for this. Craig wrote, “First, put the food on a plate. Second, place the plate in a microwave. Third, hit start three times.” It’s clearly readable. I can see what you’re going for here.

**Craig:** It’s not going so well over here, John. I’m taking a look at what you wrote. This says, “Magical pollution.”

**John:** Magical pollution.

**Craig:** “At end of… ” I think you meant to say pilot, but it is spelled pidut. “L?”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** “Her?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Hope?”

**John:** Hope, yeah.

**Craig:** “L her hope?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “He, um, loody, huh, owl, M,” music note, “didn’t,” two marks that mean nothing, and then another M. Then on the back it says, “This is my normal… ” You meant to say handwriting, but what this is is… I got hand, and then it just went bad.

**John:** It’s the difference between… I tend to just write for myself, because I can read everything that’s on this. I can get it all back. Then I won’t think about, oh, I’m actually writing this for somebody else who has to read my handwriting, and it becomes really bad. The exception is I used to do my first drafts all by hand, and so I would send them through to Dana. I would fax them through to Dana.

**Craig:** Fax.

**John:** Because I would be bunkered down someplace, I would hand-write the pages, send them through. I would be very deliberate about my handwriting when I send them through to Dana. This is my scribble.

**Craig:** That’s very bad. That’s way worse than I thought it would be, because I think of you as a precision machine, but not-

**John:** No, I’m full chaos.

**Craig:** You know what? Every machine has some weakness. This is yours.

**John:** I would say on this [inaudible 00:55:07] this is my normal handwriting. I will tend to focus on the first bits of a word that actually are important, and then I’ll just… I’ll get the rest of-

**Craig:** It’s gone.

**John:** I’ll remember what the rest of the word must be.

**Craig:** My handwriting, it’s good to see that it’s legible. That’s great.

**John:** I’m holding this up so Megana can see it on Zoom.

**Craig:** Let’s see what Megana thinks.

**Megana:** Yeah, that is legible. You both have very creative handwriting.

**Craig:** It’s bad. Don’t get me wrong. It’s bad. Your handwriting is probably outstanding.

**Megana:** Yeah, it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** This is an experience I think almost every boy has had, being in 5th grade and you’re writing your little thing, and then you look in the seat next to you, there is a girl who is calligraphying it as far as… Or her hand is a font maker, every letter, the kerning, the fact that the lines are straight, the precision of it all. You’re like duh, duh, der. You just feel so bad.

**John:** Megana, I’m trying to think what your normal handwriting is. Are you printing or are you writing cursive for your normal, just daily writing?

**Megana:** I do a combination. It’s like Spanglish between cursive and print.

**John:** Does your handwriting vary based on whether it’s something just for you? I don’t know if you do morning pages, but if you’re writing just for yourself, is it any different than what people are writing for other people?

**Megana:** I’m looking at my morning pages.

**Craig:** What are morning pages?

**John:** It’s a whole thing that, Craig, you missed out on, because it’s this idea of… Megana, you do it, so describe them.

**Craig:** What is it?

**Megana:** I don’t really do it. I just journal but call it that facetiously. It is from this popular book called The Artist’s Way. The idea is that you wake up every morning and you write three pages without thinking. It’s supposed to clear you for the day.

**Craig:** I’d rather light myself on fire.

**John:** I tried it for two weeks. It was weird, because it’s just stream of consciousness going to your pen.

**Craig:** Oh god, no. No, because I know it. Every morning, I don’t want to do this, which makes me bad. I never want to do things that are good for me. I’m a bad person. I’m no good. I’m hungry. I eat too much. I eat too much. I want to eat something that’s bad for me. I should stop. You know what? I’m going to have a breakfast salad. No, I’m not, lol, you fat bastard. Then I would do another two pages like that. Then I would weep. Then I would go ahead and have myself one of those nice eggwiches.

**John:** Eggwiches are delicious.

**Craig:** Love an eggwich.

**John:** Egg sandwich, so good.

**Craig:** Anyway, I’m not doing that, Megana. I don’t care.

**Megana:** I’m not telling you to.

**John:** Can you hold it up to the camera? We want to see what your handwriting looks like.

**Megana:** Let me find something that-

**John:** That’s not your private journal?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s like, please hold up your private journal to Zoom.

**Craig:** She’s like, “I hate John so much.”

**Megana:** You know what? This is actually Craig level. These are old notes from a couple of years ago that my writers’ group gave me.

**John:** I would describe these… It’s mostly printed, but some letters do connect together. I would say it’s written fairly big. There’s a lot of open space within letters. It’s really easy to read that.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s also evident that a woman wrote it. That is female handwriting.

**Megana:** I feel like boys are socialized to play, and I spent so much time just writing boys’ names in doodly hearts.

**Craig:** Boys don’t think that way.

**John:** Megana, how many different boys’ last names did you practice with on your Trapper Keeper growing up?

**Megana:** Oh my god, so many. I don’t understand on the Trapper Keeper, because then the boy would see it. It’s on loose-leaf at home.

**John:** Perfect. Which was the best last name you aspired to?

**Megana:** Gosh, this is so embarrassing. I think Barton and then using a lot of changing the vowels to be hearts.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** What is the deal with that A? It’s pretty common. I guess writing is vaguely gendered. It can be. My A is like a very normal A. The lowercase A is just a circle with then a little leg coming off the right. Then there’s what I think of as the girl A, which is this curlicue and then a little… It’s like a pregnant backwards R. Exactly. Where did that come from?

**John:** What it comes from, in print, in actual typeset print, that is an A.

**Craig:** We’re doing it wrong.

**John:** No, but what I think is it came from typeset print and some people just started doing it in actual normal writing. I don’t think it was a handwritten thing at first.

**Craig:** I think it’s just a cultural thing where girls will copy each other doing it.

**Megana:** I do remember seeing it and being like, “That’s beautiful,” and then a little voice in my head-

**Craig:** See, there you go.

**Megana:** … being like, “You can do that too.”

**Craig:** Or bubble writing.

**Megana:** There we go.

**Craig:** Oh, the bubble writing. I think that Megana Mazin is the best last name you could’ve played with, because think about it, you sound like Megan Amazin’.

**John:** Amazin’.

**Megana:** Megana Mazin.

**Craig:** It’s so good.

**Megana:** That is true.

**John:** Amazin’.

**Craig:** Megana Mazin.

**Megana:** The nice thing about Mazin is there’s an I, which gives you the opportunity for a heart above the I.

**Craig:** The heart dot.

**Megana:** Or a flower.

**Craig:** The heart dot or a flower. The flower is the friendship version. It’s the blue heart of red hearts.

**John:** Megana, when you were in school, did they still teach cursive?

**Megana:** They did teach cursive.

**John:** In Ohio?

**Megana:** Yes. I feel like I might’ve been one of the last people to learn cursive.

**John:** They’ve basically given up on it.

**Craig:** I don’t even know why they should be teaching handwriting at all. It’s gone. It’s over.

**John:** [inaudible 01:00:38].

**Megana:** Wait, when you guys were in school, did you learn how to make a cool S?

**John:** Yeah, you’re talking the super bad ass, looks like a rock star kind of thing?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** The interconnected, the geometric-

**Craig:** Yes, the up, back, down, back, back, up.

**John:** That clearly is going to be the next Scriptnotes shirt.

**Craig:** It’s the Kiss S.

**John:** Yeah. The next Scriptnotes shirt will have to be-

**Craig:** Scriptnotes should have that. It should feel like that.

**John:** I learned cursive. For a while, my signature was the cursive J, which is that weird loop on top of a loop.

**Craig:** I like that J.

**John:** Then my friend Jason started doing this J that was just, “That’s cool. I’m going to steal that.”

**Craig:** Stealing it.

**John:** That’s now my signature.

**Craig:** My signature is cursive, but it’s evolved. If I do my name in proper cursive, so that’s my proper cursive name, which hopefully looks like-

**John:** Yeah, that looks like a Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Now here’s the actual signature. It’s like every hard bit has been removed. All that’s left is C, G, and Z. You know what?

**John:** It works.

**Craig:** When we go to the Austin screenwriting thing and then they’re like, “Sign 400 of these.”

**John:** Wah wah wah, wah wah wah.

**Craig:** I watch somebody doing their very beautiful signature. I’m like, “You got to let that go.”

**John:** I have two different signatures. The top one here, which is the stolen J, is how I sign checks. It’s my legal signature. The other one looks Disney-like. It’s printy.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, look at that.

**John:** That’s what I sign for Arlo Finch books and everything else.

**Craig:** I’ll do my first name. When you do John and I’ll do Craig, it’s sort of print.

**John:** When we send out-

**Craig:** Like that.

**John:** … emails from the Scriptnotes account, which Craig never reads, we’ll send them out-

**Craig:** I didn’t even know that we did that.

**John:** We’ll send out to our Premium Members to say… Premium Members are the folks listening to this segment. We’ll say, “Hey, we’re doing a Three Page Challenge. Do you want to send stuff in?” It’s signed John and Craig. You wrote that eight years ago.

**Craig:** That’s like the version of when you listen to a TV show and you hear a laugh track and all those people are dead.

**John:** Exactly, that’s what it is. I think we originally did that for the USB drives. We used to have the episodes on the USB drives way back in the day.

**Craig:** You can probably sign checks using that with me. I think you’re allowed, just Craig.

**John:** Craig. Craig.

**Craig:** Who’s this from? Craig.

**Megana:** I do have to say I had a really nice experience recently. I got notes from John back, and he had made the notes on a pdf on your iPad. Is that right, John?

**John:** Yeah.

**Megana:** As I was scrolling through, I was like, “What is this circle that he’s made on the paper, or is this parentheses? Do I need parentheses in this place?” Then I realized it was a little heart.

**John:** I wrote little hearts in there.

**Megana:** It was so sweet.

**Craig:** Your hearts look like circles.

**John:** I think if I did it quickly it could look like a-

**Megana:** Some quick hearts.

**John:** Sloppy.

**Megana:** Then I had to go back, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s hearts all over the place.”

**Craig:** There’s hearts all over the place.

**John:** There were hearts all over. It was a very good draft. There were things in there I really loved.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**Megana:** My heart exploded. I was so happy.

**Craig:** That’s great. Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** I had a similar experience. You were there, Megana, when we talked through Bo’s script, which I really liked. What I do is I will just highlight using… I’ll do it in Notability. I’ll just use my highlighter and just make them green. It’s maybe not as emotional as a heart, but if there’s a lot of green, that’s good.

**John:** Good stuff. Good topic.

**Craig:** Great topic.

**John:** That pulled it out.

**Craig:** Fun.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** Thanks, all.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Sign up for [updates on the Scriptnotes Book](https://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Box Office Balancing Test: How Many Tentpoles Can Share a Weekend?](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/box-office-balancing-test-how-many-tentpoles-can-share-a-weekend-1235166404/)
* [Judd Apatow, Shonda Rhimes and other Hollywood creators sign gun petition](https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/judd-apatow-shonda-rhimes-hollywood-creators-sign-gun-petition-rcna33509)
* [Magic ARRI ViewFinder](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magic-arri-viewfinder/id1347132361) on the App store!
* [Alex Hirsch’s Gravity Falls Tweet](https://twitter.com/_AlexHirsch/status/1537314312926003201)
* [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/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Lachlan Marks ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/556standard.mp3).