Search Results for: Save the cat

The original post for this episode can be found here.

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin and this is Episode 403 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

On today’s show, something we have never done before. It’s just me. No guest. No John. He’s off visiting family I believe in Colorado. So it’s just me today. And we’re going to do something that I’ve been looking forward to doing for a long time. I’m going to be talking to you today about structure and character. I’m kind of giving you my whole theory on how to write a movie.

I know it sounds like a lot. And it is a little bit of a lot. It’s a talk that I’ve done at the Austin Screenwriting Film Festival a number of times. I haven’t done it in a while. And I feel like their exclusive right to it has ended, so now I’m giving it to you. This is sort of my how-to write a movie.

But before we get into that we do have a little bit of business to go through. And it’s about our live show. Our next live show, we’ve talked about this before. It’s going to be on the evening of Thursday, June 13 here in Los Angeles at the Ace Hotel which is a beautiful venue. And it is benefiting Hollywood Heart. We do this every year. It’s a great charity.

We have probably the best guest lineup we’ve ever had. We have Alec Berg, the showrunner of Silicon Valley and Barry. We have Rob McElhenney, showrunner of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. We have Kourtney Kang, writer of Fresh Off the Boat. And we have Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. And by the way that’s – Melissa McCarthy and Ben – I’m not talking about other Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcones that you don’t know. I mean the ones you know. Those.

It is just about the most comedy firepower I think we can ever assemble on one stage for this show. You’re not going to want to miss it. Tickets I believe are still available but we’re getting close to running out, so take a look at the link in the show notes and get your tickets.

All right. Let’s get into it. So when we talk about writing a script a lot of times we’re talking about structure. There are, I don’t know, four million books about structure. I went online and I looked for just images based on screenplay structure and what I saw was kind of mind-blowing. There are these long narrow lines with little ticks on them and then there’s a pie chart. And then there’s a swirly thing that kind of looks like a snail shell. There’s a triangle. There’s a diamond. I think there’s a parallelogram. And if there’s not a trapezoid maybe one of you can get on that.

All of this is designed to help you learn how to structure a screenplay. Here’s the problem. All of it is done from the wrong end. All of it. It’s all done from the point of view of analysis. They look at things, they take them apart, and then they say, look, all these pieces fit into this swirly shape, or this diamond. The issue is that’s not going to help you actually write anything because when you write you’re starting from scratch. You’re not breaking something apart. You’re building something out of nothing. And when you’re building something out of nothing you need a different set of instructions.

I can think of a doctor who takes bodies apart. That’s a medical examiner or a coroner. That’s not the doctor you want to go to to make a baby for instance. It’s just a very different thing, right? So we’re going to come at it from the point of view of making babies and your baby is your script. Don’t worry, we’re going to keep this safe for work.

So, structure. Structure, structure, structure. Screenplay is structure. You need to know how to do your structure. Structure I’m here to tell you is a total trap. Yes, screenplay is structure, but structure isn’t what you think it is. Structure doesn’t say this happens on this page, this happens on that page. Here’s a pinch point. Here’s a stretchy point. Here’s a midpoint. Structure doesn’t tell you what to do. If you follow strict structural guidelines in all likelihood you will write a very well structured bad script.

Structure isn’t the dog. It’s the tail. Structure is a symptom. It’s a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic argument. Take a moment. Think about that for a second. I’ll repeat it. Structure is a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic argument. Structure isn’t something you write well. It’s something that happens because you wrote well. Structure is not a tool, it is a symptom.

When we think of rigid structural forms I have to tell you there’s nothing honest about them. There’s nothing true about them. They’re synthetic. There’s never been one single great writer who created one single great screenplay following a structural template. Not one.

What real writers follow are their characters. And what great writers follow are their characters as they evolve around a central dramatic argument that is actually meaningful to other human beings. Let me stop for a second and tell you that we are going to get into real practicals but for a bit now we’re just going to talk a little bit of philosophy. First, let’s consider what we call basic structure. There’s a Syd Field point of view. You have your three acts, your inciting incident, act break escalation, magical midpoint character shift, third act low point, and kick off to climactic action.

We also have the Chris Vogler Hero’s Journey, ordinary world, call to action, refusal of call, acceptance of call, and blah, blah, blah. Save the Cat is a lot of stuff.

There’s a lot of what to do but where’s the why? Who came up with this stuff in the first place? Why is it there? Why are there three acts at all? Why is there a low point? Why do we like it when there’s an inciting incident? Why do we like it when there’s a low point? If we don’t know why those things are there how are we supposed to know how to write them? Because we process the world through our consciousness and our consciousness is sort of a natural storyteller, all of us are actually walking around doing this right all the time. We just don’t know it. We’re narrativizing our own lives better than most who try and do it on purpose on Fade In or WriterDuet, or Highland2. I don’t know any other software.

Right now you’re sitting there, you’re riding along in your car, you’re being passive. You are accepting this structure talk, wondering when I’m going to get to the practicals. And I will. But later if someone asks you about this experience you’re having you will naturally, without thinking, create a story. You won’t have to consult a graph or a chart or a swirly thing. You’ll just tell the story.

Here’s a story. I listened to a podcast. It was on the following topics. Reasonable people could agree or disagree. Anyway, I’m the same. That’s not a very good story, is it?

Here’s another story. I was listening to a podcast and it was OK, it was sort of a little boring, but then the person said this one thing and it reminded me of something else I’d heard once and that tied back to this moment in my life where something really interesting happened. And now I’m wondering maybe if I was wrong about that thing and I should be doing it this way instead. Huh. There you go. And that story has character, meaning you. That story is about you and maybe it’s about me. It’s about a relationship that we’re having right now through this podcast, for better or worse.

And if you were to relay this story, this experience, you might share some parts of this that you thought were interesting or some parts that you thought were stupid, but you will naturally contextualize it as such. This moment in time did or did not help you in your desire to change. We live our lives this way, but when we sit down to write we somehow forget. You know who never forgets? Actors. They have to get it because they are the characters and we are experiencing them as the characters.

So there’s that old cliché line: what’s my motivation? Well it’s not a joke. Believe it or not that is the key to structure. What is the purpose of all this storytelling that we engage in, all this narration? Well, narration helps us move through a changing world. And story is about a change of state. There are three basic ways your story changes. And this applies I think to every possible story.

The first way is internal. This is what is going on inside the character’s mind. This is the things they’re thinking, they’re feeling, their emotions. And this axis goes all over the place. It zigzags up and down. Then there’s interpersonal. That’s the main relationship of your story. It has a start, it has an end. It usually begins in a kind of neutral way. Then depending on how your story unfolds it can dip and then rise and then plummet and then spike. And finally you have the external axis. That’s the narrative, the plot, the things that are going on around you. And that generally is just a straight line. Start to end.

All of this is made up of scenes. And within scenes we’re doing something that follows the Hegelian dialectic. Calm down. You don’t need to look it up. I’ll help you out. The Hegelian Dialectic basically is a way of thinking about how we formulate ideas and thoughts and arguments. You take a thesis. That’s a statement. Something is true. And then you apply to that an antithesis. No, that’s not true and here’s why. Those things collide and in theory what results from that is a new thesis called the synthesis. And that starts the whole process over again. That synthesis becomes a thesis. There’s an antithesis. A new synthesis. That becomes a thesis. Constant changing. Every scene begins with a truth, something happens inside of that scene. There is a new truth at the end and you begin, and you begin, and you begin.

And who is the person firing these antitheses at these theses? You.

So, as we go through this talk never forget this one simple fact. At any given moment as you begin a scene you have a situation that is involving those three axes and you are going to fire something at at least one of them to make something new. That is all story is. But what is the glue that holds all those changes together? What’s the glue that you the creator can use to come up with your antitheses and get your new syntheses and do it over and over again?

And that brings us to theme. Theme is otherwise known as unity. Unity is a term that was first used by Aristotle in Poetics and this is one you actually should read. I know you’re like, Aristotle? Hegel? Hegelian guy. Calm down. It’s fine. In fact, Aristotle was really a contemporary writer in his own way. Poetics is an easy read. It will take you about 30 minutes. It’s a pretty good bathroom book. And in it you’ll find a lot of things that we hear today, like for instance the worst kind of plot is an episodic plot. Well, that’s pretty much true.

What did he think of unity or theme? Well basically theme is your central dramatic argument. Some of those arguments are interesting. Some of them are a little cliché. And the quality of the argument itself isn’t necessarily related to the quality of the script. For instance, you can have a really good screenplay built around you can’t judge a book by its cover. That’s OK. The theme itself doesn’t have to be mind-altering or, I don’t know, revolutionary. It’s your execution around it that’s going to be interesting.

But the important thing is that the argument has to be an argument. I think sometimes people misunderstand the use of theme in this context and they think a theme for a screenplay could be brotherhood. Well, no. Because there’s nothing to argue about there. There’s no way to answer that question one way or the other. It’s just a vague concept.

But, man and women can’t just be friends, well, that’s an argument. Better to be dead than a slave. Life is beautiful, even in the midst of horrors. If you believe you are great, you will be great. If you love someone set them free. Those are arguments.

Screenplays without arguments feel empty and pointless. You will probably get some version of the following note. What is this about? I mean, I know what it’s about, but what is it about? Why should this movie exist? What is the point of all this?

Now, it’s really important to note you probably don’t want to start with an argument. That’s a weird way to begin a script. Usually we think of an idea. And that’s fine. But when you think of the idea the very next question you should ask is what central dramatic argument would fit really well with this? And ideally you’re going to think ironically. For instance, let’s talk about this idea. A fish has to find another fish who is somewhere in the ocean. Got it. The animators will love it. Water. Fish. Cool.

OK, let’s think of a central dramatic argument. How about if you try hard enough you can do anything, even find a fish? That’s a bit boring, isn’t it? How about sometimes the things we’re searching for are the things that we need to be free from? Well, OK. That’s an interesting argument. I’m not sure how it necessarily is served or is being served by this idea of a fish in the ocean. How about you can’t find happiness out there, you have to find it within yourself? That could work. That’s sort of Wizard of Oz-ish.

But let’s go really ironically. How about this one? No matter how much you want to hold onto the person you love, sometimes you have to set them free. Well, that is pretty cliché but it is a great central dramatic argument to pair with a fish needs to find another fish. Because when you’re looking for somebody out there in the deep, deep ocean you the writer know that what you’re promising is they’re going to find them and then have to let them go anyway. And that is starting to get good.

All right. Let’s get into some practicals, shall we? Because this is thematic structure. This is going to help you write your script. In thematic structure the purpose of the story – and listen carefully now – the purpose of the story is to take a character from ignorance of the truth of the theme to embodiment of the theme through action. I shall repeat. The purpose of the story is to take your main character, your protagonist, from a place of ignorance of the truth or the true side of the argument you’re making and take them all the way to the point where they become the very embodiment of that argument and they do it through action.

So, let’s talk about how we introduce. We begin in the beginning with the introduction of a protagonist in an ordinary world. You’ve probably heard this a thousand times. But why? Sometimes movies don’t start ordinarily. You probably saw Mad Max: Fury Road. If you didn’t, do so. Well, there’s no ordinary beginning there. I mean, it’s crazy from the jump. Ordinary doesn’t mean mundane. Although sometimes it can.

What ordinary means here is that the protagonist’s life essentially exemplifies their ignorance of the theme, of the argument that you want them to believe eventually. In fact, they believe the opposite of that argument. That’s how they begin. Typically in the beginning of a story your main character believes in the opposite of the theme and they have also achieved some kind of stasis. There’s a balance in their life. In fact, their ignorance of that theme has probably gotten them to this nice place of stasis and balance. It doesn’t mean they’re happy. What it means is that without the divine nudge of the writer-god their life could go on like this forever. It’s not a perfect life. It’s not the best life they could live but it’s the life they’ve settled for. Their stasis is acceptable imperfection.

If we’re going to circle back around to my favorite fish movie, Marlin can live with a resentful son as long as he knows his son is safe. That’s acceptable imperfection. I get it. Nemo resents me. He’s angry at me. He feels stifled by me. That’s OK. He’s alive. I can keep going this way.

And then along comes you, the writer. Your job is to disrupt that stasis. So you invent some sort of incident. Ah-ha. Now we know the point of the inciting incident. The point of the inciting incident is not to go, “Oh god, a meteor!” The point of the inciting incident is to specifically disrupt a character’s stasis. It makes the continuation of balance and stasis and acceptable imperfection impossible. It destroys it. And it forces a choice on the character.

OK, but why? I’m just going to keep asking that question. But why? But why? But why? Why do you have to do this to this poor character? Because you are the parent and you have a lesson to teach this person, or animal, or fish. Your motivation is part of your relationship to your character. You don’t write an inciting incident. You don’t write push character out of safety. That gives you no real guidance to let something blossom. What you write is an ironic disruption of stasis. Ironic as in a situation that includes contradictions or sharp contrasts that is, and hear me out, genetically engineered to break your character’s soul.

You’re going to destroy them. You are god. And you are designing a moment that will begin a transformation for this specific character so you have to make it intentional. It can be an explosion, or it can be the tiniest little change. But it’s not something that would disrupt everyone’s life the way it’s disrupting this person’s life. You have tailored it perfectly and terribly for them.

So, what’s the first thing your character wants to do when this happens to them? Well, it they’re like you or me they’re going to immediately try and just get back to what they had. They have to leave their stasis behind because you’ve destroyed it, but everything they’re going to do following that is done in service of just trying to get it back. Shrek doesn’t have his swamp, so he has to go on a journey so he can get his swamp back. The point here is that the hero has absolutely no idea that there is a central dramatic argument. They’ve made up their mind about something and their mind has not changed.

Your heroes should be on some level cowards. I don’t mean coward like shaking in your boots. I mean coward like I don’t want to change. I’m happy with the way things are. Please just let me be. And underlining that is fear. And fear, especially in your character, is the heart of empathy. I feel for characters when I fear with them. It is vulnerability. It’s what makes me connect. Every protagonist fears something.

Imagine a man who fears no other man. He doesn’t fear death. He doesn’t fear pain. But, ah-ha, fill in that blank. But the point is it has to be filled in. You can feel it, right? Like he’s going to have to fear something. Because fear is our connection to a character. And a fearful hero should have lived their lives to avoid the thing they’re afraid of.

You, are taking their safety blanket away. So I want you to write your fearful hero honestly. What do they want? They want to return to what they had. They want to go backwards. And believe it or not that is the gift that is going to drive you through the second act. The second act.

Oh, the thing that’s so scary. No. No, you should be excited about it. Let me take a break for a second and say that everything I’m talking about here is mostly to serve the writing of what I would call a traditional Hollywood movie. That doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean cliché. It doesn’t even mean formulaic. It just means it’s a traditional narrative. So, I don’t know, if you’re looking to be a little more Lars von Trier about things, well, I don’t know how interesting or helpful this is going to be. But I’m presuming that most of you just want to write a general kind of movie that conforms to a general kind of movie shape.

So this is how we’re going to help you do it. And the second act is the part that I think freaks people out the most. They get scared. But I think you should be excited about pages 30 to 90 roughly. Please do not quote me on those numbers. But first, are you getting it? Have you stopped thinking about plot? Have you stopped thinking about plot as something to jam characters into? Because when you do that that’s why you run out of road in your second act. You ran out of plot because it wasn’t being generated by anything except you.

Ah-ha. But when you start thinking of your plot as not something that happens to your characters but what you are doing to your characters that’s when you can lead them from anti-theme to theme. How do we do it?

First, we reinforce the anti-theme. That might sound a little counterintuitive but hear me out. You’ve knocked your hero out of their acceptable stasis. They are now on the way to do whatever they need to do to get back to it. The hero is going to experience new things. And I want you to think about making those new things reinforce her belief in an anti-theme. Because this is going to make them want to get back to the beginning even more. Oh, it’s delicious. We’re creating a torture chamber basically. Keep thinking that way.

Imagine your hero is moving backwards against you and you push them forward and they push back. Ah-ha. Good. Design moments to do this. You’re going to keep forcing them forward, but you’re also going to put things in their path that make them want to go backwards. That’s tension. That’s exciting. And more importantly when they do get past those things it will be meaningful. You want to write your world to oppose your character’s desires.

So, you’re going to reinforce their need to get back. Ah-ha. So, let’s see, Marlin wanders out into the ocean. His theory is the ocean is really, really dangerous. What should the first thing be? Maybe let’s have him meet some sharks. And actually, oh, you know what, they’re not scary at all. Oh god, yes they are. The ocean is in fact way worse than he even imagined. That’s what you need to do. He needs to get his son back really, really soon so he can return to stasis. And then when you’ve done that you’re going to introduce an element of doubt.

Something or someone lives in a different way. Someone or something in your story is an example of the life of theme rather than the life of anti-theme. So remember, your hero believes in one side of the central dramatic argument. It’s the wrong side. You want them to believe the other one. OK, but they believe the wrong one. They need to run into someone or something that believes in the right side of it. This element of doubt creates a natural conflict for the protagonist because of course I believe this, you believe that. But it’s also attractive to them on some level because – and again, really important. Your hero is rational. This is a critical component of a good hero. You are dealing with somebody that probably lives irrationally, fine, but they have to have the capacity to see that maybe there is a better way.

You’re living things maybe the wrong way but you need the capacity to see things going the right way. It is fear that separates the irrational hero from their rational potential. And because they’re rational when they get a glimpse of this other way of being they’re going to realize there’s value to it through circumstance or accident or necessity or another character’s actions. These are all things you’re inventing, but here’s why – the hero is going to experience a moment of acting in harmony with the right side of the central dramatic argument.

This could involve their own action or it could be something that they watch someone else do or something they experience passively. But this is why the magical midpoint change occurs. See, now you know why. You’re not just doing it because a book said. These things generally happen in the middle of the movie because our hero’s belief system has been challenged. There is an element of doubt. There is not a willingness to go all the way and believe the other side of the argument yet. They may not even understand the other side of the argument.

There’s only a question that maybe for the first time they have to wonder if their side of the argument that they started with, the anti-theme, maybe it doesn’t explain or solve everything. Have I been living a lie? That’s what’s happening in the middle of a movie.

So, remember in Finding Nemo there’s a moment where because Marlin has to rescue Dory from this field of jellyfish he invents a game. She forces him to do something that he normally wouldn’t do. Play. He’s doing it for the old Marlin reasons of neurosis, but it’s working. She’s following him. And as he’s doing it he gets a glimpse of what it’s like to live without fear. He gets a glimpse of what it’s like to be carefree. To not worry so much. To be, well, a little less conservative with your own life. And he loves it.

And then what happens? She gets stung. Oh, glorious. And that gets us to this reversal of theme. The very moment your hero takes the bait that you put there to think about maybe switching sides – maybe switching sides of the argument – you need to hammer them back the other direction. The story has to make them shrink back to the old way. Dory almost dies in the jellyfish. And why? It happened because Marlin decided in a moment out of necessity to have fun and then forgot himself, forgot his fear. And what’s the price of forgetting fear and not being vigilant? Pain and tragedy. The tragedy of the beginning is reinforced and the hero retreats once again.

Ah. It’s good stuff. And it means you have to be kind of mean. Sadistic really. But it turns out that these are the kinds of things we want out of our narrative. It’s the essence of what we call dramatic reversal.

I’m going to put aside the examples from Pixar for a second and I’m going to talk about somebody real. There’s a guy named Jose Fernandez. This is a true story. Jose Fernandez is born in Cuba and at the age of 15 he escapes Cuba with his mother and his sister and many others, all packed in a very small boat. And during the difficult village he is awakened to the sound of someone yelling. That someone has fallen overboard.

And Jose, 15 years old, doesn’t hesitate. He dives into the choppy water to save whoever it is. And it’s only when he drags this person back onto the boat does he realize he has saved his own mother. Wow.

Jose Fernandez grows up, he’s a hell of an athlete. He goes on to pitch. Major League baseball pitcher. And he’s really good. In fact, he is the National League Rookie of the Year. And he’s an All Star. His future isn’t just bright, it is glorious. Jose Fernandez is living the American dream and I don’t know how much you know about baseball but ace pitchers they get paid hundreds of millions of dollars.

But at the age of 24 Jose Fernandez dies. He doesn’t die from illness. He doesn’t die from violence. He dies in an accident. But not a car accident. He dies in a boating accident. A boating accident. Now, do you feel that? Do you feel more than you would if I had said he died of a blood clot? Well, why? I mean, death is death. Why does this detail of the boating accident make you feel more?

Because it’s terribly ironic. Because this is a guy who saved his own mother from water and then he dies in water. It implies that there’s a strange kind of order to the universe even when that order hurts. And this is where we start to pull irony out of drama. This is essential to your choices when you decide how you’re going to push back against your hero. How you’re going to hammer them back. How you’re going to punish them.

Think about that Pixar Short, Lava. And I talk about Pixar all the time because it’s just pure storytelling and they’re really, really good at it. So he thinks he’s alone. He’s a volcano in the ocean. He thinks he’s alone. And then he discovers he’s not alone. But when he discovers that he also discovers that she’s facing the wrong way and she can’t see him. And he doesn’t know how to sing anymore. So she doesn’t even know he’s there. Oh, that’s terrible. It’s unexpected. It’s contradictory. And it’s ironic. And that’s exactly what you want to do.

So, consider the irony that’s involved with Marlin. Marlin is worried that he has lost his son. Every parent who loses a child, even for an instant in a mall, is scared. But that’s not enough. Let’s talk about what the people at Pixar understood they needed to do to this character from the very start to punish him so that his journey would be that much more impressive. It’s not enough to say, look, you love your kid, your kid is lost, you’ve got to go find your kid. Everybody loves their kid, right?

OK. But they go a step further. They say, you know what, there’s no mom in the picture. Mom died. It’s just you. You’re a single dad. You’re the only parent. You’ve got to find your kid. No, that’s not enough. How about this? How about your wife and all of your other children were eaten in front of you because you couldn’t protect them? And the only kid you had left out of all of that, the only memory you have of your wife and your happy life before is one tiny egg. One kid.

And that is still not enough. And this is why Pixar is so amazing. Because they knew that the further they went the more we would feel at the end. It’s not enough that he only has one kid. When he looks at that little egg he can see that the one kid that’s left is disabled. He has a bad fin. Now it’s enough. Now you have created the perfect circumstance for that individual, you cruel, cruel god of story.

Now I know why he’s so panicked that that kid is somewhere out there in the ocean. When you’re designing your obstacles and your lessons and the glimpses of the other way and the rewards and the punishments and the beating back and the pushing forward, keep thinking ironically. Keep thinking about surprises that twist the knife. Don’t just stab your characters. Twist the knife in them. If someone has to face a fear make it overwhelming to them. Don’t disappoint them. Punish them.

Make your characters lower their defenses by convincing them that everything is going to be OK and then punch them right in the face, metaphorically.

So, sorry to tell you that as a writer you are not the New Testament god who turns water into wine. You are the Old Testament god who tortures Job because, I don’t know, it seems like fun. And when you’re wondering where to go in your story and what to do with your character ask this question: where is my hero on her quest between theme and anti-theme? Or I guess I should say between an anti-theme and theme. And what would be the meanest thing I could do to her right now? What would be the worst way to do the meanest thing right now? Then do it. And do it. And do it again until the hero is left without a belief at all.

So as the demands of the narrative begin to overwhelm the hero, the hero begins to realize that her limitations aren’t physical but thematic. Think about Marlin. I promised that I would never let anything happen to him. But then I suppose nothing ever would happen to him. That’s what Dory says. And Marlin knows she’s right. He knows that if all he does is basically lock his kid up to prevent anything bad from happening to his kid nothing good will happen to his kid. The kid won’t have a real life.

So, now what? Well, the answer is obvious, right? If you love someone let them go. And I’m sure that at that point in the movie if you ask Marlin that he would say, “I suppose that’s the thing that I’m supposed to believe.” But they can’t do it. Not yet. In fact, you’re going to want to have a situation where they have a chance to do it. And they fail at it in some important way because they don’t really accept the central dramatic argument you want for them. They just lost the belief in their original point of view. They’re trapped between rejection of the old and acceptance of the new. They are lost. Their old ways don’t work anymore. The new way seems impossible or insane.

Shrek doesn’t want his swamp back anymore. He wants love, but he is also not willing to do what is required to try and get it. He’s trapped. And this is why they call it the low point. It’s not random. It’s not the low point because the books say page 90 is the low point. It’s the low point because your character is lost and in a whole lot of trouble.

Their goal in the beginning, which was to go backwards to the beginning to achieve stasis, to re-achieve stasis, that goal is in shambles. Their anti-thematic belief, whatever it was that they clung to in the beginning of this story, it’s been exposed as a sham. And the enormity of the real goal that now faces them is impossibly daunting. They can’t yet accept the theme because it’s too scary. When your core values are gone and when you aren’t ready to replace them with new values, well, you might as well be dead. And this is why people go to movies.

So, granted, we love the lasers, we love the explosions, we love the ka-boom, and we love the sex, and we love the tears, but what we need from drama – and when I say drama I mean the drama of comedy and the drama of drama – what we need are these moments where we connect to another person’s sense of being lost. Because we have all been lost.

And that’s why the ending is going to work. Because without this there can be no catharsis. Catharsis comes from the Greek word for vomiting I’m pretty sure. So just think of a lot of your plot as shoving really bad food down the throat of your hero because that’s how you’re going to get to this catharsis.

Now, I want to say that these approaches don’t help you map out a second act. What these approaches do is help you develop your character as they move through a narrative. And that narrative is going to impact their relationship to theme. And when you finish that movement of this character interacting with story so that their relationship to the theme is changing from I don’t believe that to, OK, I don’t believe what I used to believe but I can’t believe that yet, suddenly you’ll be somewhere around the end of the second act.

And here is the big secret. John and I have said this many, many times. There are no acts. So you can’t really be scared of the second act. It doesn’t exist. It’s not some sort of weird wasteland you have to get through. It’s just part of one big piece. There’s one act. It’s called your story. And now we get to the third act, sorry, end of your one act. And this is the defining moment. Your character needs to face a defining moment. And this defining moment is their worst fear. It is their greatest challenge. This is the moment that will not only resolve the story that you’re telling but it will resolve the life of your character. This moment will bring them to a new stasis and balance. Remember synthesis, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Here we are again.

But what are you going to do? You have to come up with this thing. This is the difference between what I’m saying to you now and what a lot of books say. Books will say, “Defining moment goes here.” And I’m saying, yeah, but how? What makes it so defining? You’re going to design a moment that is going to test your protagonist’s faith in the theme. They need to go through something where they have to prove that they believe this new theme. They have to prove it. It’s not enough to say, OK, I get it. What I used to think is wrong. There’s a new way that’s right. That’s not enough.

They have to prove it. And they have to prove it in a way where they literally embody the point of that idea with everything they have. But before you do that don’t you want to torture them one more time? Of course you do.

The relapse. A nice ironic relapse. You want to tempt them right before this big decision moment. Right before the defining moment. You want to hold that safety blanket up and say, “Go ahead. Go back to the beginning. You get it. The thing you wanted on page 15, I’m giving it to you. Don’t go forward. Don’t change. Go back.”

And what do they have to do? They have to reject that temptation. You design a machinery where they have to reject that temptation and then do something extraordinary – extraordinary – to embody the truth of the theme. And now you get acceptance through action. The hero acts in accordance with the theme. Specifically by doing so they prevail. They have to act.

So let’s go back to Marlin. It’s not enough for Marlin to say, “I get it now. I’ve heard the wise turtles. I’ve seen the way Dory is. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve got to let you live.” That’s not enough. What Pixar does is create a perfect mechanism to tempt and then force action. Dory is captured. And Nemo says to Marlin, “I’m the only one who can go in there and save her.” And this is a great temptation. This is where Marlin has to reject the old way. We’re saying go ahead, you’ve got your kid, we’re giving him back to you. It’s all you wanted. On page 15 you just wanted your kid. Here he is. Get out.

But he has to act in accordance with the theme. So he rejects that and he says, “No. Go ahead, son. And try and save her.” And that simple decision is how he acts in accordance with theme. And it is terrifying. And now you get one last chance to punish him. Briefly. Go ahead. Let’s see Nemo coming out of that net and let’s think that he’s dead. And let Marlin hold him. And let Marlin remember what he was like when he was in that little egg. And let Marlin kind of be OK with it. Because that’s what it means to live in accordance with theme.

If you say, look, sometimes if you love someone you have to let them go, that’s one thing. Actually having to let them go is another thing. Letting them go and seeing them get hurt is yet another. That is the ultimate acceptance of that idea, isn’t it? And that’s what he sees.

But then, of course, faith in the theme rewards. And Nemo is alive.

So then you get this denouement. What is the denouement? Why is it there? It’s not there because we need to be slowly let down and back out in the movie theater lobby. It’s there because we need to see the new synthesis. You have successfully fired a billion antitheses against a billion theses and come up with one big, grand, lovely new synthesis. Please show it to me. So we now see that the after story life is in harmony with theme.

And here’s the deal with the first scene and the last scene of a movie. If you remove everything from the story except the introduction of your hero and the last scene of your hero there should really be only one fundamental difference. And here it is. The hero in the beginning acts in accordance with the anti-theme and the hero at the end acts in accordance with the theme.

Now, this should all help you create your character. When you’re creating character I want you to think of theme. I want you to imagine a character who embodies the anti-theme. You can be subtle about this. You probably should be. It generally works better if you are. And I want you to think of your story as a journey that guides this character from belief in the anti-theme to belief in theme. Remember you’re god – angry, angry god. You have created this test. That’s what your story is. In order to guide your character to a better way of living, but they have to make the choices.

Oh, if you’ve heard, “The worst character is a passive character,” that’s why. They have to make the choices or you’re making it for them. And then, well, it just doesn’t count, does it?

If you can write the story of your character as they grow from thinking this to the opposite of this, and guess what, you will never ask well what should happen next ever again. You’ll only ask how can I make the thing that I want to happen next better. That’s a whole other talk. Maybe I’ll do that one in like five years or something.

I hope that you found this interesting. It was kind of fun to do. I mean, I’m not going to do it frequently because it’s scary. I mean, John really does run this show. But I’m all here all alone. But I kind of liked a chance to at least talk to you directly about all this stuff and I hope that you got something out of it. If you did, great. And you can let us know.

And here comes the boilerplate. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by, well, I don’t know. But it’s a surprise and we’ll let you know who it was the week following.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter I am @clmazin and John is @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you will find transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs.

Some folks have also started doing recaps and discussion on the screenwriting sub-Reddit. If that continues, terrific. You can check there.

And you can also find the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

And I get none of the money.

You may want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide at johnaugust.com/guide to find out which episodes our listeners recommend most.

And with that, I bid you all good luck. Go torture your heroes.

Links:

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You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/splitting-the-party).

**John August:** Head’s up, this episode will absolutely have some bad language. Not apologizing, just stating the facts.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 383 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be talking about the trope of never split the party, and why in fact as a writer you often want to and need to divide the party up. We’ll talk about how to do that and what you gain, plus we’ll be answering listener questions on sequences, working with an author, screenwriter websites, and we have some umbrage fodder to kick off the new year.

Craig, Happy New Year.

**Craig:** Happy New Year, John. We did it again, by the way. We made it through another loop around the sun.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I feel super good about it.

**John:** The longest loop around the sun in my memory.

**Craig:** It was in many ways the most challenging and yet also rewarding year of my life. It was quite a thing. But there is something nice about arriving at the end because the flat disk that is the earth has managed to kind of do this circle around what I presume is also a flat disk of the sun. And it just gives you a nice feeling of accomplishment even if you specifically haven’t really done anything except stand still on the flat disk that is the earth.

**John:** Yeah. You made a TV show. That was fantastic. Hurrah.

**Craig:** I made a TV show. Feels great. We’re trucking along there, getting close to showing it to people which will be fun. Although you know it’s funny, I was talking to – I won’t say who, but a famous filmmaker friend of ours – and we were saying how the dream, the real dream, is to make a television show or a movie and when it’s finally done and it is perfect and you’ve got everything the way you want it, you show it to no one. You just put it away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it’s like, ugh, it’s the showing of it.

**John:** I’ll tell you, with The Nines, that movie I made with Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy, I kind of feel like I did that, because I’m really happy with the movie and no one saw it. So, it wasn’t a deliberate choice to have no one see the movie, it just sort of worked out that way.

**Craig:** Well that can happy, too. I suppose it’s sort of involuntary lock-away-ness.

**John:** I’ll tell you that the project I’m thinking about directing next, I originally had envisioned it as sort of an indie feature, sort of more on the Destroyer model, and now I’m just like, you know what, maybe I’ll just make it for Netflix, because Netflix at least it’s out there in the world all at once. Everyone can see it and then you’re done. And that will be Chernobyl. Everyone will see it all at once. Well, they’ll see episode by episode, but the whole world can see it.

**Craig:** Yeah. The whole world within some reasonable limitation, yeah, can see it. But at least, I don’t know, there’s something about television I suppose that’s, I don’t know why, that’s a little more acceptable to me in this regard. Because it’s like opening weekend. There’s a thing in movies, it’s like you feel like there’s a blade that’s swinging towards your neck.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s all make or break. And then in television it’s like, you know, Cheers and Seinfeld, I think, were both like the lowest rated television shows of their debut season. And then, you know, then you kind of come around. But in movie terms, it just feels like you’re always under the gun. So I like this new kind of relaxed TV deal. It’s nice.

**John:** Yeah. So there will be ratings for your program, and so if people want to support you in 2019 they can support you by watching your show. That would be fantastic. So it’s not like you get extra dollars if people watch your show, but people notice when shows have high ratings, which is great. If people want to support me in 2019 they can pre-order the second Arlo Finch. That’s actually the single biggest thing you could do for me this year would be to pre-order the second Arlo Finch because if all the people who bought Arlo Finch the first go around by pre-ordering the second book it would be on the top of the charts. It would do fantastically well.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** Yeah. So that would be great. If people wanted to do that–

**Craig:** I’m going to do that because my daughter is a big fan. She loved the first book.

**John:** That’s right. And I didn’t give you the second book. I’ll get you the second book. She’ll like the second book.

**Craig:** Well, you just cost yourself a sale.

**John:** No, no, no, you should still buy the book.

**Craig:** Well, eh, I mean, you know, you’re giving it to me. I don’t know. I don’t get this.

**John:** How’s this – I will give you a copy of the audio edition which she can listen to, because the same guy did the audio edition, James Patrick Cronin.

**Craig:** Hey.

**John:** I just approved the artwork minutes before we started recording.

**Craig:** Ooh, exciting. I always love it when things like that are happening behind the scenes.

**John:** Behind the scenes. Some news, so people know about our Princess Bride screening that’s taking place on January 27 at 5pm at the WGA Theater. Some details on how you get into the screening. So this is apparently how it’s going to work. The doors open at 4:30pm. WGA members get in first. They get first choice of seats. And then at 4:45pm it’s open seating for everyone else who wants to come in and see The Princess Bride and then stay for our discussion of the terrific movie that we are going to be looking at that night and celebrating.

**Craig:** And, John, correct me if I’m wrong but the idea is that we’re going to record our discussion as one of our deep dive podcasts essentially?

**John:** That is exactly it. And so if this goes well I’d like to do this several times more even this year.

**Craig:** Great. That’s fun. It’s a way to get me to see movies.

**John:** Yeah. But also sometimes like some classic movies, too, would a great thing for us to see. I think that’s another goal I would like for us to do this is like we do the Three Page Challenge but we never really look at whole screenplays, and so maybe we’ll pick a screenplay, sort of like a book club thing where you and I will both read the screenplay and we’ll assume that our listeners have read the screenplay, maybe even for a movie that hasn’t been shot. So we can actually look at what it looks like on the page, from a really good screenplay.

**Craig:** All right. I’m down with that.

**John:** Cool. We also have another live show to announce. This is breaking news. So, we’ve been trying to do a Seattle show for about as long as the podcast has existed. We are finally doing a live show in Seattle, February 6. Details will be coming soon, but assume that it will be in the evening. We are going to do it someplace at a venue that will be appropriately sized for the people who come in Seattle. We don’t know how many that’s going to be. But I’m doing my Arlo Finch book tour. Craig, you’re flying up just for this. So it should be a fun time.

**Craig:** Yeah, come on Seattle. Don’t make us look stupid, you know, because I love you. I love Seattle.

**John:** I love Seattle, too.

**Craig:** We have family in Seattle.

**John:** Yeah. So that’s great. I have friends there.

**Craig:** So come on. I’m just saying to Seattle like, hey, guys, you have a reputation for being super cool, but you don’t want that to tilt over into we don’t care ism, right? You still want to care, like you want to show up. So my goal is 40,000 people.

**John:** Yep. And while we’re doing our tour of the United States, back when we were at the Austin Film Festival I recorded a special episode of Studio 360, which is a Slate Podcast, and that episode aired this last week and it’s actually pretty nice. It’s sort of a recap of how I got into being a screenwriter. So if you don’t know that history there’s a link in the show notes to an episode of Studio 360 I recorded about my history as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Let’s get into some 2019 with something that can really get us going. You’ve been gone for a while.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** So let’s get into this. We got a letter from a listener named Mark, and so I’ll read Mark’s letter and then we can discuss what Mark brings up.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Mark writes, “I’m baffled as to why you are not railing against the Golden Globe awards. Did you not hear Lady Gaga whining about how hard it is to be a female musician while fondling her $5 million necklace? Did you miss the entire article that the writer may make $218 for a song that makes the artist $34 million? By your silence you are supporting a platform that denigrates writers while promoting the self-indulgent delusions of those who believe they are entitled by the measure of their gender, race, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs.

“I really thought your podcast was about earning your way and working to get the skill set necessary to make it happen. Wow. You really had me fooled.”

Craig, I mean–

**Craig:** It appears we had him fooled.

**John:** Yeah, Craig, you fooled Mark. I mean, so let’s get into Mark and let’s really take a look at ourselves about–

**Craig:** What an idiot? I mean, it’s so stupid that I can’t even feel umbrage. I’m almost happy. It’s almost made me happy because I’d forgotten that there can be people this stupid. And, yeah, I’m OK calling Mark stupid. Mark, you’re probably not a stupid person but this is a stupid thing you’ve done. It’s a stupid thing you’ve written.

And the reason I guess primarily that I would say so is because you’ve made this insane logical leap that because you didn’t hear us talking about the Golden Globe awards we therefore support it. By the way, I have no opinion about the Golden Globe awards. I didn’t watch them. But why would anyone presume that if you don’t say something about a topic that, I mean, it’s not like either one of us were at the Golden Globe awards. Neither one of us are a member of the Foreign Hollywood Press Association.

I also didn’t mention something about Yazidi Christians being slaughtered yesterday. That doesn’t mean I support that. That is the dumbest premise for any stupid letter I’ve ever encountered. That’s crazy. Why would anyone think that?

**John:** Yeah, what I liked about it is it sort of reinvigorated a spirit that I’m trying to sort of feel for 2019 which is that in 2019 I’m sort of done being outraged. I’m not going to let myself get provoked or baited into sort of arguments. That includes Twitter, but also in the real world. I think I kind of felt sort of your calm. I also sort of felt nothing other than sort of a vague like sort of frustration. But I’m just not going to take Mark’s bullshit. I’m not going to be outraged enough to be outraged by it.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**John:** And I think this also extends to politics overall. Because I was having lunch with Tess Morris today, who is obviously fantastic and a big friend of the show, and we were talking about politics and upcoming democratic stuff. And I said that I’m not going to sort of sit around and listen to like, “Oh that person is too progressive, or that person is too liberal, or that person is too whatever.” No, no, you can have your own opinion but you don’t get to tell me what my opinion is anymore. And you don’t get to tell me when I should be outraged or should not be outraged.

**Craig:** Yeah. I haven’t seen something quite this stupid since like 15 minutes ago on Twitter. This is a very kind of Twittery way of talking.

**John:** Yeah. He did long Twitter. He did long Twitter.

**Craig:** He did long Twitter. And listen, everybody knows the difference right? The funny thing is it used to be that a guy like Mark would write something like this, you would go oh my god, like I have to combat this point by point. And there are so many Marks out there who do this that you realize like you know what actually I couldn’t possibly rebut all their stupidity, so nah, go ahead. You know what? Mute.

The Twitter mute function has been such a joy for me.

**John:** Oh, isn’t it so nice.

**Craig:** Yes. So like in my mind I read this and I’m just like mute.

**John:** Yep. So you and I both used to have comments on our blogs and I remember when I turned comments off people were like how can you possibly silence the conversation. It was like because I just don’t care anymore. I literally don’t care what your response is to this. This was my opinion and you can have your opinion. But you don’t get to come into my living room and sort of tell me your opinion. And so getting back to the Golden Globes of it all, it’s like I think – oh, I didn’t watch the Golden Globes because I was at your house playing D&D.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We didn’t discuss the Golden Globes once. At the very end of the night we said like, oh my god, Phil Lord won for Spider Verse.

**Craig:** Spider Man. Yeah, Spider Verse.

**John:** Fantastic. You know what? I did not email him to congratulate him because I had already congratulated him on making a great movie and that’s all that mattered. I am a voting member of the Academy. I don’t give a shit about the Academy Awards. I genuinely don’t. I don’t care who hosts them. I don’t care who wins the awards. I’ve gone to the Academy Awards because it’s nice to get dressed up and go to a big fancy party. And that’s what I wish awards really were is like a big fancy party to celebrate the cool movies over the course of 2018. And then we’d sort of like put down our drinks and go back and make movies for 2019.

But this whole long season of award stuff is just such bullshit. And I’ve been through it before and I’m just not having it this year.

**Craig:** Good for you. I mean, obviously my position on awards is a fairly consistent position all this time. The notion of awards for art has always been troubling to me. And, of course, look, Mark isn’t making points that haven’t been made before. These aren’t fresh points. Yes, shocker of all shocks, a lot of actors will talk about poor people while they themselves are making a lot of money and wearing expensive things. And also people that sometimes make a lot of money and wear expensive things donate more to charity than Mark could ever imagine donating in his lifetime.

There is always an easy kind of – you could just sort of easily go look at this hypocrisy of the whole thing and I get that. it is easy and it’s sort of fun to punch up I guess at incredibly beautiful rich people who are going on about their beautiful art and so on and so forth. But it’s also a bit boring now I think. Everybody gets it. Like we all understand. If Lady Gaga weren’t also kind of a nice – she seems like a very nice person. I’ve never heard her say or do anything where I felt like, ugh, yuck. She’s not R. Kelly for god’s sake. Shut up Mark, you idiot. [laughs]

Oh, and you know, please stop listening to the podcast. This is also this new thing of like people who have a complaint about the podcast and I’m like well let me get your address so I can send you your refund. You jerk.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Fun. Fun. I couldn’t even get umbrage over that. I feel robbed.

**John:** No you couldn’t. I felt a little more umbrage than you did on this. But it’s my own special thing. I need to figure out what that word is, but it’s just that little snap of something. It’s like, you know what, I’m not dealing with that. I’m not having it.

**Craig:** I ain’t having it.

**John:** I’m feeling the clap emoji kind of. I’m underlining my words with claps.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m trying to hit mental mute as much as I can these days. Just mental mute. That’s the thing. They don’t even know you muted them. That’s the best part.

**John:** Oh, so good.

**Craig:** God, I love it. All right, moving on.

**John:** Moving on, our feature topic today is splitting up the party, dividing the party. It’s that trope that you often see in – well originally in sort of Scooby Doo things. Let’s split up so we can cover more ground and so therefore everyone gets into trouble because they split the party. But it also happens a lot in D&D where it’s that idea of you don’t want to divide up the party because if you divide up the party you’re weaker separately than you are together. And it’s also just really annoying for players because then you’re not – you’re just sort of waiting around for it to be your turn again.

But as I thought about it like dividing the party is actually a crucial thing that we end up having to do in movies and especially now in the second Arlo Finch just so that we can actually tell the story the best way possible. So I want to talk about situations where it’s good to keep characters together, more importantly situations where you really want to keep the characters separated, apart, and why you might want to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a really smart idea for a topic because it’s incredibly relevant to how we present challenges to our characters. And the reason that they always say – and it’s maybe the only real rule, meaning only real unwritten rule of roleplaying games – is don’t split up the party. Don’t split the party is really in response to just a phalanx of idiots who have split the party in the past and inevitably it doesn’t work because as you point out you are putting yourselves in more danger that way. But that is precisely what we want to do to the characters in our fixed concluding narratives because it is the very nature of that jeopardy that is going to test them and challenge them the most. And therefore their success will feel the most meaningful to us.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s talk about some of the problems with big groups. And so one of the things you start to realize if you have eight characters in a scene is it’s very hard to keep them alive. And by alive I mean do they actually have a function in that scene? Have they said a line? What are they doing there? And if characters don’t talk every once and a while they really do tend to disappear. I mean, radio dramas is the most extreme example where if a character doesn’t speak they are not actually in the scene. But if a character is just in the background of a scene and just nodding or saying uh-huh that’s not going to be very rewarding for that actor. It’s going to pull focus from what you probably actually want to be doing.

**Craig:** Whenever I see it it kills me, because I notice it immediately. And it’s so fascinating to me when it happens and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this great video. Patton Oswalt was a character on King of Queens. He was – I didn’t really watch the show, but I think he was a neighbor or something, or a coworker, so smaller part.

So there were many times I think where he was included in the scene in their living room, which was their main set for the sitcom, but other than his one thing to say at the beginning or the end he had nothing to do. And he apparently did this thing where through this very long scene he held himself perfectly still like a statue on purpose in the background. And you can see it on YouTube. It’s great. He’s amusing himself because the show has absolutely no use for him in that scene other than the beginning or the end.

**John:** That’s amazing. A situation we ran into with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is in Roald Dahl’s book Charlie Bucket gets the Golden Ticket and you’re allowed to bring two parents with you. And so Charlie only brings his uncle, but all the other characters, all the other little spoiled kids bring both parents. And that would be a disaster onscreen because you would have 15 people at the start of the factory tour. And trying to keep 15 people in a frame is really a challenge of cinema and television. There’s no good way to keep them all physically in a frame.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that is a real problem. So what we did is basically everyone could bring one parent and it turned out the original Gene Wilder movie did the same thing. We made different choices about which parent. But then even when you get into like the big chocolate river room I’m splitting up those people and so they’re not all together as a pack because you just can’t keep them alive. You can’t get a group of more than four or five people together and actually have that moment be about something. And so they’re immediately splitting apart and going in different directions just so that you can have individual moments.

**Craig:** Even inside a group of characters where you haven’t technically split the party in terms of physical location, as a writer you begin to carve out a weird party split anyway because someone is inevitably going to lean in and have a quieter exchange with somebody else, or whisper to somebody else, or take somebody aside, even though they’re all still in the same room, because ultimately it is impossible to feel any kind of intimacy when you do have 15 co-equals all yammering at each other. Or, god forbid, three people yammering at each other and then 12 other people just standing there watching. That’s creepy.

**John:** Yep. The last thing I’ll say, the problem in big groups, is that there are conversations, there’s conflicts that you can really only see between two characters, maybe three characters, that just would not exist as part of a larger group. You’re not going to have an argument with your wife in a certain public place, but you would if it’s just the two of you. And so by breaking off those other people you allow for there to be moments that just couldn’t exist in a public setting.

And so that’s another reason why big groups just have a dampening effect often on what the natural conflicts you really want to see are in a story.

**Craig:** Even beyond the nature of certain conversations, there are certain aspects of basic character itself that change based on the context of who you’re around. Sometimes we don’t really get to know somebody properly until they’re alone with someone else. And then they say or do something that kind of surprises us because they are the sort of person that just blends in or shies away when there’s a lot going on. And they only kind of come out or blossom in intimacy.

Quiet characters are wonderful characters to kind of split off with because suddenly they can say something that matters. And you get to know who they really are. By the way, I think people work this way, too. We are brought up to think of ourselves as one person, right, that you’re John. But there’s many Johns. We are all many of us and we change based on how big of a group we’re in and who is in the group. So don’t be afraid to do that with your characters.

**John:** Yeah. So that ability to be specific to who that character is with that certain crowd and sort of the specificity of the conflicts that’s something you get in the smaller groups. But one of the other sort of hidden advantages you start to realize when you split the party up is that enables you to cut between the two groups. And that is amazingly useful for time compression. So basically getting through a bunch of stuff more quickly and sort of like if you were sticking with the same group you would have to just keep jumping forward in time. But by being able to ping pong back and forth between different groups and see where they’re at you can compress a lot of time down together. You can sort of short hand through some stuff. Giving yourself something to cut to is often the thing you’re looking for most as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** It is incredibly helpful for the movie once you get into the editing room of course, because you do have the certain flexibility there. You’re not trapped. There is a joy in the contrast, I think. If you’re going back and forth between let’s call them contemporaneous scenes. So they’re occurring at the same time, but they’re in different places, they can kind of comment on each other. It doesn’t have to be overt or meta, but there’s an interesting game of contrasts that you can play between two people who are enjoying a delicious meal in a beautiful restaurant and then a third person who is slogging her way through a rainy mud field. That’s a pretty broad example. It can be the tiniest of things.

But it gives you a chance to contrast which movie and film does really well and reality does poorly, because we are always stuck in one linear timeline in our lives. We never get that gift of I guess I’ll call it simultaneous perspective.

**John:** Yeah. So I mean a thing you come to appreciate as a screenwriter is how much energy you get out of a cut. And so you can find ways to get out of a scene and into the next scene that provide you with even more energy. But literally any time you’re cutting from one thing to another thing you get a little bit of momentum from that. And so being able to close a moment off and sort of tell the audience, OK, that thing is done and now we’re here is very useful and provides a pull through the story where if you had to stay with those characters as they were moving through things that could be a challenge.

But let’s talk about some of the downsides because there’s also splitting up the party that’s done poorly or doesn’t actually help.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So if you have a strong central protagonist, like it’s really all on this one character’s back, if you’re dividing up then suddenly you’re losing that POV. You’re losing that focus of seeing the story just from their perspective. And so the Harry Potter movies, the books and the movies, are all from Harry’s perspective. He is central to everything. And so if they were to cut off and just have whole subplots with Ron and Hermione where they’re doing stuff by themselves it would be different. There’s a way it could totally work, but it would be different. You know, if you’re making Gravity you really do want to stay with Sandra Bullock the whole time through. If you cut away to like on the ground with the NASA folks that would completely change your experience of that movie. So, there are definitely times where it does make sense to hold a group together so that you can stay with that central character because it’s really about his or her central journey.

**Craig:** Yeah. In those cases sometimes it’s helpful to think about the perspective character as a free agent. And so you still get to split the party by leaving a party to go to another party. And going back and forth. So Harry Potter has the Ron and Hermione party, and he has the Dumbledore party. And he has the snake party. And so he can move in between those and thus give us kind of different perspectives on things which is really helpful.

I mean, I personally feel like any time you’re writing about a group of people, basically you always are even if it’s a really small group, you should already be thinking about how you’re going to break them apart. Because it’s so valuable. It also helps you reinforce what they get out of the group in the first place. Because a very simple fundamental question every screenwriter should ask about their group of friends in their show or the movie is why are they friends.

We are friends with people who do something for us. Not overtly, but they are giving us something that we like. So, what is that? What are they doing for each other? And once you know that then you know why you have to break up the party. And then if they get back together what it means after that has been shattered.

**John:** Yep. I think as you’re watching something, if you were to watch an episode of Friends with the sound turned off most of the episode is not going to have the six of them together. They’re going to go off and do their separate things. But generally there’s going to be a moment at which they’re all back together in the course of the thing and that is a natural feeling you want. You want the party to break apart and then come back together. You want that sort of homecoming thing. That sense of completion is to have the group brought back together. That is the journey of your story. And so you’ll see that even in like Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another example of like let’s split up, let’s do different things. But you are expecting to see Xander and Buffy and Willow are all going to come back together at the end because that’s sort of the contract you’ve made with your audience.

**Craig:** Exactly. And that is something that’s very different about recurring episodic television as opposed to closed end features or closed end limited series. You can’t really break up the party in any kind of permanent way. Whereas in film and limited series television sometimes, and a lot of times, you must. You must split up the party permanently. I mean, there’s a great – if you’re making any kind of family drama it’s really helpful to think about this, the splitting of the party concept. I’m thinking of Ordinary People. Ordinary People ultimately is a movie about what happens, you know, the party and whether or not the party is going to stay together. And, spoiler alert, it breaks up. The party splits up permanently and you understand that is the way it must be.

**John:** You know, Broadcast News. And so if you want to take that central triangle of those three characters, they could stay all working together as a group, but that would not be dramatically interesting. You have to break them apart and see what they’re like in their separate spaces so you can understand the full journey of the story.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** So let’s talk about how you split up a party. The simplest and probably hoariest way to do it is just the urgency thing. So the Scooby Doo like we can cover more ground if we split up, or there’s a deadline basically. We won’t get this done unless we split up. There’s too much to do and so therefore we’re going to divide. You do this and then we do that. The Guardians of the Galaxy does that. The Avengers movies tend to do that a lot where they just going off in separate directions and eventually the idea is that they’ll come back together to get that stuff done.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** That works for certain kinds of movies. It doesn’t work for a lot of movies. But it’s a way to get it done. But I think if you can find the natural rhythms that make it clear why the characters are apart, that’s probably going to be a better solution for most movies. You know, friends aren’t always together. Friends do different stuff. And friends have other friends and so they’re apart from each other.

People work. And so that sense of like you have a work family and a home family. That’s a way of separating things. And there’s people also grouped by common interest, so you can have your hero who is a marathon runner who goes off doing marathon-y stuff, marathon people, marathon-y stuff, who goes running with people which breaks him off from the normal – the group that we’re seeing the rest of the time. You can find ways to let themselves be the person pulling themselves away from the group.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s also all sorts of simple easy ways where the world breaks the party apart, walls and doors drop down between people. Somebody is arrested and put in prison. Somebody is pulled away. Someone dies. Dying, by the way, great way to break up a party. That’s a terrific party split. Yeah. There’s all sorts of – somebody falls down, gets hurt, and you have to take them to the hospital. There’s a hundred different things.

And I suppose what I would advise writers is to think about using a split method that will allow you, the writer, to get the most juice out of this new circumstance of this person and this person together, which is different than what we’ve seen before. So where would that be and how would it work and why would it feel a certain way as opposed to a different way.

And you can absolutely do this, even if you have three people. I mean, you mention Broadcast News so let’s talk about James Brooks and As Good as it Gets. Once you start this road trip it’s three characters and the party splits multiple times in different ways.

**John:** Yeah. The reason I think I was thinking about this this week is I’m writing the third Arlo Finch. And the first Arlo Finch is a boy who comes to this mountain town. He joins the patrol and there are six people in his patrol. His two best friends are sort of the central little triad there. But there’s a big action sequence that has six characters. And supporting six characters in that sequence killed me. It was a lot to do.

In writing the second book, which is off in a summer camp, you got that patrol and that is the main family, but I was deliberately looking for ways to split them apart so that characters could have to make choices by themselves and so that Arlo Finch could have to step up and do stuff without the support of his patrol. But also allow for natural conflicts that would divide the patrol against themselves and surprises that take sort of key members out of patrol.

And that was the central sort of dramatic question of the story is like will this family sort of come back together at the end.

And then the third book is a chance to sort of match people up differently. So you get to go on trips with people who are not the normal people you would bring on a certain trip. And that’s fun to see, too. So, you can go to places that would otherwise be familiar but you’re going into these places with people who would not be the natural people to go in this part of the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. You get to mix and match and strange bedfellows and all that. That’s part of the fun of this stuff. We probably get a little wrapped up in the individual when we’re talking about character, but I always think about that question that Lindsay Doran is lobbing out to everybody. What is the central relationship of your story? And thereby you immediately stop thinking about individual characters. OK, this character is like this and this character – that’s why maybe more than anything I hate that thing in scripts where people say, you know, “Jim, he’s blah-blah-blah, and he used to be this, and now he’s this.” I don’t care.

I only am interested in Jim and his relationship to another human being. At least one other and hopefully more. So, I try and think about the party and the relationships and the connections between people as the stuff that matters. Because in the end mostly that’s what you’re writing.

**John:** Absolutely true. All right, should we get onto some follow up?

**Craig:** Why not?

**John:** All right, do you want to take Daniel in Nashville?

**Craig:** I do. Daniel writes, “Guys, I know screenwriting scams are all over the place, but I would appreciate some public shaming,” oh, here we go, “directed at this particular one that just popped up here in Nashville. It’s especially disgusting because it’s hosted by something calling itself The Nashville Filmmakers Guild. Breakthrough screenplay competition where the winning screenplay becomes a major motion picture.” Well that’s a promising slogan. Let’s see where this goes.

“They take your money, have a robot read your screenplay,” oh, John, there’s a job in this for you, “real life producers evaluate the algorithm and make the winning screenplay into a ‘real movie.’ There are zero details for how the movie gets made. Worst of all, they will send you a Save the Cat book. Please help me make this go away.”

Oh my god, it’s like someone invented the thing that would make me the most nauseated.

**John:** So let’s try to do some backstory here. We’ve not done extensive research. We don’t know who is really behind all this. There’s some names on the website. I don’t know how much they’re really involved in it. Craig, you and I have both been to the Nashville Screenwriters–

**Craig:** Conference.

**John:** It was a zillion years ago. I think that organization is not around anymore.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I had a good time at that Nashville Screenwriters Conference. But this is not that. I think Nashville is great, but my blanket recommendation of don’t enter screenwriting competitions, don’t enter these things that like “we’re going to make your movie” because they don’t. There’s just not a track record of any of these things happening.

And the things that feel more legitimate would be because they’ve been around for a long time or they are with producers who have made real movies. And I’m not saying that the folks involved in this haven’t made movies, but I don’t understand why they would be involved in this project.

**Craig:** Looking at their website, this is absolutely horse shit in my opinion because of specifically, oh my god, first of all they say, “The hype, the false promises, the gate keepers. The Breakthrough Screenplay Competition is the only competition where you have a chance to turn your script into a fully funded motion picture.” Shut up.

You want to talk about hype and false promises, they love talking about gate keepers. This is what they do. They say “those people are keeping your genius out because they’re stupid or bad or mean or just Hollywood-y, we’re the way in.” No they’re not. No they’re not.

And here’s what happens. When you send your script in, he’s right, it’s a robot. “The American Film Lab Software scores and ranks 78 script elements with an algorithm that analyzes over 3,500 points of data to reach an overall script score.”

**John:** Mm.

**Craig:** You die in a fireplace, you go to hell. You go to hell and you die. It’s outrageous. It’s outrageous. Dumb. The regular deadline fee is $99. That is $99 too much. And, yeah, they’re not in a guild. This isn’t a union. What a dope. God, it makes me puke.

**John:** So American Film Lab if you click through their website it’s the same, really beautiful design, but the same folks are behind it. So, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, this is all – it has the look, appearance, and whiff of horse shit.

**John:** Yeah. Nicely designed horse shit.

**Craig:** Yeah. The website is really quite good.

**John:** It’s really nice. I don’t want to slack on the website because the website is really well done.

**Craig:** The website itself is fine, but yeah, I mean, what does this mean? The executive director, so this is the guy in charge, is a guy named Bobby Marko. And please don’t write to these people or tweet at them. Don’t be a jerk. It says, “As a producer, director and cinematographer, Bobby has been fortunate to work on many types of productions with many in the film community.” I think he means with many people in the film community. But, I’ve never heard of Bobby Marko. Have you?

**John:** I have not. I looked up Derek Purvis. He has some credits, but certainly not things I’ve heard of. So.

**Craig:** Bobby Marko. I’m looking up Bobby Marko right now. Let’s just do a live look up on Bobby Marko.

**John:** Because really quality podcasting is about Googling things while you’re recording.

**Craig:** It’s not good. And listen, I’m not judging people on their credits. My credits are a whole big fascinating pastiche. But it’s not about quality it’s really about access and size. If I’m sending something to a film competition and paying money then I want to know that the people running it are able to provide the access that they promise. Based on the credits that I’m looking at here, we’re looking at essentially shorts that I’ve never heard of.

**John:** They’re shorts.

**Craig:** They’re shorts. And so, no. No. It doesn’t cut it. And, listen, I don’t mean to insult. Everybody should be doing what they’re doing. And it may be that the people that are running this thing next week will sell something, write something, create something that is the biggest thing of all time. And I would salute them. But until they do they shouldn’t be taking other people’s money as if they can do stuff for them.

**John:** Also, I feel like when they do make that thing that is absolutely amazing they won’t want to be taking other people’s money to be doing stuff because they’ll have a career making the thing.

**Craig:** [laughs] They’ll be a little busy. So, yeah, once again my recommendation is do not spend your money on this.

**John:** Great. Dave from Los Cruces, New Mexico writes, “Thanks for bringing us the interview with the double ampersand team of Walsh and Jackson and Boyens.” So that was my interview with them after Mortal Engines. “Such an impressive collection of talent. Do you have any comments about the incredibly negative critical response to the film? My wife and I enjoyed it and were surprised by the roasting it got and sad to see it’s a commercial failure. John saw the film prior to the interview and I was wondering if he had any feeling from the audience’s response that it was going to be poorly received.”

So, we ran this over the break as sort of a little extra episode. I think it was Christmas Day this came out. And so I had agreed to do Q&A with them after the WGA screening of it. And so I had not seen it until the WGA screening of it and I kind of didn’t know very much about it other than it was about cities that moved around and ate other cities. And so I watched it and I was like, oh, I don’t really full – I could never fully get onboard with the premise. But, I could also sort of say, OK, you know what, but let’s say I did buy the premise, is this a good version of that movie? And I think the answer is yeah. It’s a pretty good version of that premise of a movie.

And it’s the kind of thing that felt like it was adapted from a YA novel which it was. And it had sort of big epic themes. But as I was watching it and as I sat down with them to ask questions about their process and the thing I had a sense that it was going to get the reception that it got, which was not a big glowing reception.

If you listen to that interview I talk with them about why they got started on it and the long process it took to get it to the screen. And there’s an interesting moment where I ask Peter Jackson about why a big screen versus doing it for streaming. And he’s like, and I think they were all saying like there’s just a thing you can do in a big theater with the sound and sort of the size and spectacle of it all which is amazing, yet Peter Jackson also said like, “But the things I love most right now are streaming, or they’re Game of Thrones kinds of things on HBO.”

And I do genuinely in my heart of hearts believe that this product would have been much better served as a made for Netflix, made for HBO, that kind of big epic scale thing than as it was done as a movie.

But, they made the movie. And I think it’s worth seeing because it actually has some really cool pieces. And I think it’s also worth noting the story challenges they set for themselves. Talk about like a big cast of characters. They’re having to split the party a lot just to get storytelling done. And I hope people will go to it now that it shows up on Netflix and other places and appreciate some of the things that they were able to do, because some of it was really cool.

**Craig:** I always feel like when you’re talking about people that are incredibly talented, and I’m a huge Peter Jackson fan, and thus by extension a Walsh and Boyens fan as well, that there is a certain inherent – it’s like a fingerprint, right? And it will express itself very frequently in ways that you appreciate, but it is inevitably going to express itself in a way that you don’t.

I can’t think of anybody where I go, “Oh, I’ve liked everything they’ve done.” Because it’s just not going to work that way. So, sometimes I think people get hung up on this stuff and they go, well, oh my god, how could they make something that everyone thinks stinks? Well, A, they obviously don’t think it stinks, and B, it’s the way things work. You know? It’s just part and parcel. You don’t get all of these things if you don’t get that.

**John:** Yep. You know, I always applaud sort of like the big wild swings of things. And it felt like a big wild swing. And it didn’t connect with audiences and I don’t think it was quite what the project ultimately wanted to be when it was released in 2018. But, I love them and I actually really loved talking with them because they are literally the only double ampersand team I can think of that has stayed together through so many different projects. I know I think at least Philippa listens to the show, so hi. And I thought it deserved better because there’s some really good stuff there.

**Craig:** I just, you know, you know my whole critics thing. Here’s the thing, Dave from Las Cruces. The real thing is what does it matter? I understand why you’re asking. You’re asking John do you have comments about the incredibly negative critical response to the film. But I kind of want to get underneath your question and sort of explore why you’re asking it in the first place. Because I think sometimes there’s this car crash on the highway thing that goes on where people want to rubberneck at bad reviews, except that they are not car crashes. No one has been hurt or died. It’s just a bunch of critics that didn’t like a thing and it in and of itself doesn’t mean anything.

And even now when you say, well, the movie did not work commercially, it didn’t work commercially yet. It may never work commercially. But then again there have been movies that didn’t work commercially initially and then they just kept making money.

**John:** Yeah. Kept chugging along. Austin Powers.

**Craig:** Austin Powers is a great example. Just, you know, it was a video hit. It was a hit after it was not a hit and then it became a hit. So, I just feel like it’s just not a question that’s worth asking in a weird way.

**John:** Well, I want to get back to he does say that like my wife and I saw it and enjoyed it and were surprised by the roasting it got. And so I know what that’s like, too, because there’s definitely been movies that I saw and then it’s like, oh, I really liked that. Like I’ll see it on a plane and then when I can turn on my phone and I pull up Rotten Tomatoes I’ll see it got like an 18%. I’m like, wait, was I wrong to think that? And so the message I want to give Dave in 2019 is that you are not wrong to love something, or like something, or think it’s better than what everyone else says.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Don’t let other people’s opinions sway your opinions on what is good.

**Craig:** Yeah. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s not like you’re looking at an X-ray of a tooth and thinking it looks OK and then a whole bunch of dentists are say no that is not a good tooth. You are no more or less valid than anybody else watching a movie or a television show regardless of whether or not they have some column on a website.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** All right, let’s answer some questions. Do you want to take Kevin?

**Craig:** Yeah. Kevin writes, “I saw a copy of John’s Big Fish sequence outline. And I wanted to know two things. One, how do you determine how many sequences to put into a script and how do you know how many pages they would take to write? Is this learned over time or do you have an intuition of how much page space they would take? And, two, what is the significance of the rectangular border around certain sequences?”

**John:** I can answer these questions. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to this, but it’s also just at johnaugust.com/library. You can see most of my old scripts and supporting documents. So this Big Fish sequence outline was something I did early on in the process for Big Fish. Like after I sort of set up the book at Columbia but before I started writing it, because there was like what is this movie going to be because the book is really slender. And I had to sort of describe what things were going to be.

So, in terms of the number of sequences, I don’t know how many sequences there are in a movie. I don’t know how many scenes there are in a movie. A hundred? A hundred scenes maybe? But I will say that you just get a kind of sense of like is this enough story, is this enough things that are going to happen. And so you might guess at sort of how many pages it’s going to be, but what’s more important is like these are the moments I need to tell this story.

So for this Big Fish outline you’ll see that certain sequences have a box around them. Those are for like the fantastical things. So I was just trying to give the people reading this document a sense of like, OK, this is the real world, this is the big fantasy world, so people could see what the mix was between the fantasy world and the real world. So that was that kind of document.

I don’t always do those. I would say it’s actually pretty rare. This project I just did that’s not announced yet I did something kind of like that but that’s because there were very specific sequences that were going to involve a lot of other people, and so I needed to warn people ahead of time that these are some big things we’re going to have to do in addition to the script.

**Craig:** Finally I think after Chernobyl airs I’ll be able to put all the scripts and outline material and bible stuff up on your website.

**John:** That would be great. That would be fantastic.

**Craig:** It’s funny, I was thinking to myself like why is that something that I can easily handover as opposed to all the other stuff and I realized it’s because it was mine. So, I was able to control that process and outlining and scripting the entire way through. I am the only person that was writing it. And in everything else there was always something else. I was rewriting somebody, or production changes and all that crap. So, it just became this like very messy archive of 12 different movies.

So, it’s in a neat package. I’ll drop it off on your doorstep digitally when it’s time. When it’s time.

**John:** Susannah writes, “I am a writer/producer and I have been approached by the author of two fascinating books to develop and produce into a TV series. I’m going to write the bible and pilot and I’m looking for a writer with TV credits interested in joining me as I have no experience in television, although I have experience in film. The author would fund the development. The question is how should we split the ownership of the IP and what are the rights credits for each one? Should we sign a collaboration agreement or a coproduction agreement? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thank you so much.”

Craig, where should Susannah even start? So she has this project that exists as books. She’s going to come in and do a bible. I feel some sort of agreement between her and the author is going to be very important to do right now. Because if the author is funding development, so it’s not like Susannah is optioning it from the author. They’re going to have to have some sort of working agreement on how this is all going to go.

**Craig:** Where she should start is in a lawyer’s office because this is a complicated arrangement. I mean, the author is funding the development, so Susannah is the author commissioning the script as a work-for-hire? In other words will the author control the copyright of the screenplay? Or are you writing a screenplay based on the author’s IP and they have granted you permission to do so and are also paying you to do so, to do so so that you have the copyright on it until such time as you sell it to a studio?

As far as the other writer, it sounds like what you’re talking about is a partnership in which case you would be both have 50/50 ownership of the screenplay, unless you don’t own any of the screenplay at all because the author does. And then I don’t know what to say. This is a complicated one because you’re not doing it the way anybody does things, which should be a red flag in and of itself. So, I definitely recommend that you talk to an entertainment lawyer about this. It will save you a lot of – it’ll cost a little bit of money now and save you a lot of money later.

**John:** Yeah. And so I would say if this author is successful enough that she can fund development on stuff then it’s entirely possible that she has a lawyer who is going to be preparing these kind of contracts now. It does sort of sound like she’s hiring you to do this and therefore it is a work-for-hire. There’s going to be some control over the rights of something, but you’ve got to figure that out. So, good luck.

**Craig:** Good luck!

**John:** Good luck.

**Craig:** Good luck, Susannah. That’s the way we should end all questions. Shia – Shia? Shia?

**John:** I’d say Shia.

**Craig:** Shia, because of Shia LaBeouf. But I feel like it could be Shia. I’m going to go with Shia. Shia writes, “As an experienced but not yet professional screenwriter of eight feature scripts, a dozen short scripts, one feature rewrite, and one produced short, I was told by an accomplished friend that my greatest challenge is that people don’t know I’m here. As I contemplate ways to up my networking game I am strongly considering a website. In the day age of Twitter, Facebook, and IMDb listings do you think they’re helpful?” What do you say?

**John:** Yeah, so as a person who has a website, I don’t think they’re super helpful. I do think you need – I think some sort of landing page that can have your stuff is probably a good idea, just so that you’re Googleable and if there are things you wanted to show, you have your short. You can have that on there, like the YouTube or the Vimeo clip of that. You can have samples. So some sort of landing page with your name on it is fantastic. As far as a real full on website, I don’t know that it’s going to serve you.

What Craig and I will both tell you is that actually running a website, like a blog where you’re writing regular things and posting, is a tremendous amount of work and time. And so if you’re going to do that just know that it’s a tremendous amount of work and time that you’re not going to be doing other stuff.

Tomi Adeyemi who is the author of Children of Blood and Bone, she had a great website that built a big following before her book came out, and so I think it did help sort of her exposure and as that book became – I mean that book became a giant blockbuster. But it did sort of help her get notice and get traction early on. So, there is some history of that, but not so much for screenwriters I would say. I think it’s more of a book kind of thing.

Craig, what do you think? Beyond a simple website does she need anything?

**Craig:** Well, you’ve got an accomplished friend telling you about your greatest challenges. Maybe your accomplished friend could, I don’t know, hook you up with somebody here or there. I mean, the truth is that I’m a little nervous because, yes, there are times when you are limited by your inability to get out there I guess you’d say or talk to people or know people, but you’ve written a lot. And the writing should be the thing that opens the doors. And if the writing is not opening the doors I just don’t want you to fall into the trap of thinking that your limitation is networking.

You’ve written a lot. So, at this point you should feel free to question how to network and how to self-promote, but you should also be questioning whether or not you need to refresh some of the material. Write perhaps in a slightly different way. Take a look at what’s kind of inspiring you right now and keep it fresh. So, just don’t forget about the writing part because I actually feel like that’s the part that matters the most.

**John:** Yeah. There certainly is a moment that happens where if you’re a funny writer Twitter is a great place for being funny and getting noticed for being funny and Megan Amram obviously did that. I don’t think Facebook matches writing especially well. I don’t think Instagram matches writing especially well. IMDb listings, if they’re just showing your shorts, OK, I mean, if they’ve actually been produced. Remember, IMDb is for produced things that people could theoretically see somewhere out there in the world.

So, I don’t know that just digital online networking is going to be your next thing. I think it’s trying to make sure that people who actually are in position to do something with your script get your script and that may be sort of more old fashioned leg work. Or if you’re in a position to be in Los Angeles working in the trenches and meeting folks, you know, handing them the script.

**Craig:** Yeah. Completely agree.

**John:** So, one last question. A Gal in LA writes, “I was at a holiday party the other night and met a nice lady who wants to introduce me to a friend who makes made-for-TV movies. They’re looking for female writers to do horror, which is me. The thing is their movies are awful, but I need cash. Do I: 1, pursue the job and hope that people will understand that sometimes we do bad things for money? 2, write under a pseudonym and never speak of it again? Or 3, just say no to Hallmark Horror.” Which is probably not the real brand but I get what she’s talking about.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Craig, should someone take a job working for people who make schlock?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And here’s the deal. First of all, the list of great filmmakers who started in schlock is long and remarkable. Roger Corman has given quite a few filmmakers their start. James Cameron’s first film was Piranha 3 I think, or Piranha 2. And a lot of great–

**John:** Ron Howard.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of great writers started doing that stuff. So, the point is no one really – look, I’ve worked on a bunch of junkie things and nobody looks at me and says, “You’re a bad person. You’ve done something immoral.” You know what’s immoral? Being able to make money and be a productive member of the economy, generate some tax for the community, and just not doing it because you think you’re above it all.

Until you’re above it all you’re not above it all. And furthermore I would say any time you work with a company and you get paid you learn something. You learn a little bit about how the meatloaf is made. You get a little bit of experience with politics. A little experience with notes. And also, Gal in LA, if you’re good, well, your movie might not be so awful, right? I mean, the writing is kind of important.

**John:** It is important.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, did I ever tell you about my experience writing for porn?

**Craig:** Uh, no. Hold on. We’re at Episode 383 and…?

**John:** I don’t talk about it a lot.

**Craig:** You’ve just now decided that you’re going to tell me you wrote for porn. Hold on. Let me get my popcorn and proceed.

**John:** So, this is early on, so I’m guessing this is probably ‘96/’97. So I had not been hired to write for anything. I probably had done the novelization of Natural Born Killers, which was the thing that got me free of my assistant job.

I had an agent. And the agent was sending me on normal meetings, but he also sent me to this meeting with this company that was doing porn essentially. It was like CD-ROM porn. And so they would have preexisting scenes from other porn things, but it would be sort of a choose your own adventure thing which you would navigate yourself through a maze. You could make different choices that would you lead you to different porn scenes.

**Craig:** Was it called Bandersnatch?

**John:** It was not Bandersnatch, but that would be a great title for it.

**Craig:** Would be.

**John:** That Bandersnatch was great, by the way. So we’re going to try to have Charlie Brooker on the show to talk about it, because it’s–

**Craig:** Yeah, but don’t get derailed from the porn story. So…so you’re writing porn?

**John:** So, anyway, so I go in and I talk with them and I’m just like – I needed a job. I was looking for things. So they sent me home with a bunch of these CD-ROMs to look at and this wasn’t my kind of porn at all. So I’m watching these things and thinking like, OK, so basically they needed someone to write the scenarios for how you get from place to place. And there would be some filmed bits between the things, sort of green screen stuff to get you through things. And I had one follow up phone conversation with them, but then it ultimately went nowhere.

But I bring up the writing for porn because I did meet with porn producers to write porn segues because I wasn’t above that. That was a thing. And so that would be like writing for videogames or writing for E! True Hollywood Story. Whatever. If someone was going to pay me to write I was not above that. And so A Gal in LA, don’t be above writing for schlocky horror place if you are a person who wants to do great horror because you’ve got to start somewhere.

**Craig:** You got to start somewhere, man. I mean, I was young, I needed the work. It’s a great phrase. You say, “I need cash,” well shit, do it. You say write under a pseudonym and never speak of it again. Ugh, good luck. It doesn’t matter. The truth is it doesn’t matter. If you’re destined to be a really, really good writer then what’s going to happen is people are going to go on your IMDb page one day and go, “Wait, did you realize that her first movie was Blood Sausage. Nobody even saw it. It was made by some weird company.” No one will even see it, so it doesn’t matter.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s the other thing. Think about that as like, you know, you get an interesting starting place in your career life. Oh, the journey becomes more clear. Because if you just come out of the gate with a brilliant thing no one knows anything about you. But if you have credits like, oh that.

Sandra Bullock has really questionable early credits. Look at her now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Exactly what I’m saying.

**John:** Hollywood loves that. Hollywood loves an underdog. So, write that great horror movie for the schlocky place and you’re golden.

**Craig:** I mean, I do think that Blood Sausage is a pretty decent title.

**John:** I think it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** Yeah, as far as titles go. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

**John:** For sure. All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a little video that Entertainment Weekly posted. Sarah Silverman doing her recording for Slaughter Race from the amazing Ralph Breaks the Internet. I love this movie. I love this song. Craig, I put a link there. Actually, there’s a link in your folder. Why don’t you take a listen to it? We’ll listen to it together. We’ll play a little under here.

So this is a song, music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Phil Johnston and Tom MacDougall.

[Clip plays]

So I find that just delightful. And I love seeing Sarah Silverman actually do the voice, because it sounds kind of like her, but then when you actually see her singing in character it is just a tremendous joy. So I loved the movie but you should also check out this video of how they recorded it.

**Craig:** That’s great. I’m going to look at that movie. God, she’s good.

**John:** She’s so good.

**Craig:** She’s just good. Good people are good at stuff.

**John:** Good people are good. And obviously a very well-written movie. We have Pam Ribon on to talk about it. But I loved the movie, but her performance is just spectacular.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** And I’m sure Pamela Ribon actually probably played that character in all the rehearsals. So a little Pamela Ribon in that moment as well.

**Craig:** Yes. Well I always said Sarah Silverman is the perfected Pamela Ribon. Yes, always.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have Two Cool Things, because you know what, I’ve been gone for a while.

**John:** Absolutely. Save them up.

**Craig:** And the people have been clamoring for my Cool Things. So I have two. The first one is sort of an educational thing only. It’s called This is Your Brain on Pot. This is a website. It is something that the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, put out. It’s not about pro-marijuana or anti-marijuana. It’s purely scientific. It is the first and only really good thorough explanation I’ve ever seen about what neurologically happens when you get high and how THC actually works in the brain. It’s fascinating.

And they did a gorgeous job showing how it works. Take a moment, whether you smoke pot or not, it’s just interesting I think to see how these things work. It’s like you get to step away from the whole oh-ah of drugs and just look at how medicine of a sort works. Fascinating.

**John:** So, I would say I think it’s also totally worth checking out. I would say that it makes it feel like it’s the definitive answer on what’s actually happening and the actual research on how marijuana affects you is not great because there haven’t been enough studies. So I think it’s a good conjecture about what they think is happening in terms of uptake and receptors, but I don’t think it’s the full picture. And obviously it doesn’t account for CBD and the other compounds that are in there which are probably doing their own thing.

**Craig:** That is true. It is not definitive by any stretch. But it’s certainly more information than I’ve ever seen. So I was pretty impressed.

The second thing, this is pretty cool. It’s called TripIt. TripIt.com. TripIt. And there is an app called TripIt. And here’s what they do. You sign up, it’s free. There’s a subscription possibility. Personally I haven’t seen much of a value in it, so I’m happy to use the free version.

And what you do is you register your email address and you could register two or three of your email addresses with them. So now they know if you send them an email who you are. When you book a trip somewhere, for instance John I’m going to Seattle. So I booked a flight I believe on Alaska Airlines and I booked a room at the same hotel you are in. When you book things online like an airfare, what happens next? You get something in your email box, right? You get those little confirmation reservation blah-blah-blah. And then I never know what to do with it.

Well, dig it. Just forward it from one of your email addresses to I think it’s plan or something like that at TripIt.com. That’s it. Just forward. You don’t have to do anything else. Just forward the stupid email that you get. They get it. They see it’s from you. They know it’s your trip. They suck the information out of it and then pipe it in nice beautiful itinerary form into the app on your phone, including reservation numbers, that stupid six letter thing that airlines use.

**John:** Confirmation code, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s great. It works like magic.

**John:** It’s great. So my husband Mike has been using it for six or seven years I want to say.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Because he’s ahead of all things travel.

**Craig:** Are you serious?

**John:** I’m serious.

**Craig:** Seven years?

**John:** It’s been around for a very long time.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** And so I will say that you don’t have to use the app on your phone for all that information. It will also generate a calendar feed so it’ll just show up in your normal calendar as well. And so we have a feed called TripIt which is basically anything that is a travel thing just automatically shows up there.

**Craig:** I’m not coming back to this show.

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Craig:** I don’t know, I’m not doing anymore cool things.

**John:** No, no, it’s good. I never used it as a cool thing before, so it wasn’t like one of those games where like a year later you’re like, “Oh, this is a great game.” It’s like, yeah, I played that game.

**Craig:** You know what? Maybe what I’ve done is I’ve rekindled a certain spark in your marriage.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** You appreciate something now that he was doing that you realize now is cool.

**John:** Now it’s cool. It’s quite cool. Going back to the marijuana thing, I’m just going to put in a tiny little rant here. So people who don’t live in Los Angeles or a place with legalized marijuana may not be aware of this, but in Los Angeles all the billboards in Los Angeles that are not for Netflix programs are marijuana/legalize pot billboards. And it’s really annoying.

And so I just want someone, State of California, somebody to sort of say whatever the restrictions are for tobacco have to be the same restrictions for pot because it’s ridiculous how many pot billboards there are right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, technically cigarettes are – they kill you. You know, marijuana doesn’t appear to kill you. By the way, I sound like a big pot head. I don’t smoke pot. I don’t smoke pot. I’m just sort of like–

**John:** But here’s what I’ll say. While I would say that marijuana is not a dangerous substance to the degree that other things can be, we have restrictions on alcohol and on tobacco. I think similar restrictions are – obviously there are restrictions on who you can sell it to. So, you shouldn’t be able to – here’s what I’ll say. I don’t think you should be able to buy a giant billboard for this product if a kid who is walking by it couldn’t buy it. It just feels dumb and stupid to me. And it feels like a weird mismatch of rules and laws.

**Craig:** Do you think it’s dumber and stupider than that letter that Mark wrote us about the Golden Globe awards?

**John:** I don’t know. It’s a whole different category of bad.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. I don’t think so. No. No chance.

**John:** Anyway, that is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell, it is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. People, you have been sending us amazing outros. We’ve got just some great ones. And Craig you’ve listened to a couple of those.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. There’s some really good ones coming up.

**John:** There’s some good ones coming up. But we always need more, so send those in. Ask@johnaugust.com is also the address for when you’re sending these longer questions or follow up things like we addressed today. But on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re happy to answer your questions.

I feel bad about the guy I kind of put on shout about sort of the pre-roll language warning thing. That wasn’t my intention. It’s just sometimes I will do the quote-reply to things just so that everyone sees the answer, so I can answer the question once rather than a bunch. But I do kind of apologize. Eh, I kind of apologize for that.

**Craig:** Kind of.

**John:** Kind of.

**Craig:** If you call that an apology.

**John:** I apologize for putting him on blast when that was not my intention. I was just trying to answer the question once.

**Craig:** I hear you. I hear you.

**John:** You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you’re listening to this right now. If you’re there, leave us a review. It’ll be a new thing for 2019 is to leave us a little review. Tell people how much you like the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll see in that links to preordering my book. Our Seattle show when we have details about that. The live show for The Princess Bride. You’ll see all that stuff there.

You’ll also see transcripts. They go up about four days after the episode airs. And you can find all of the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net, or you can buy seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, we’re back.

**Craig:** We’re back. Yes!

**John:** It’s good to be back in our zone.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yeah. So we had great temporary hosts, but Craig you are the only Craig.

**Craig:** I mean, you know what I mean? You feel me?

**John:** You’re Craig.

**Craig:** I’m Craig. See you next week John. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Join us for the WGA’s [Princess Bride screening](https://www.wga.org/news-events/events/guild-screenings) on January 27th.
* You can catch John on [Studio 360](https://slate.com/culture/2019/01/john-august-the-host-of-scriptnotes-explains-his-approach-to-screenwriting.html).
* [“Let’s Split Up the Gang”](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LetsSplitUpGang) and [“Never Split the Party”](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeverSplitTheParty) are topical TV tropes.
* Watch Patton Oswalt when he’s not being utilized in a [big scene](https://www.mediaite.com/tv/hilarious-patton-oswalt-reveals-strange-prank-he-pulled-in-old-king-of-queens-episode/).
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 381: Double Ampersand](http://johnaugust.com/2018/double-ampersand) with Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens
* [Big Fish sequence outline](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/bf-outline.pdf)
* [Sarah Silverman recording Slaughter Race](https://ew.com/movies/2019/01/07/slaughter-race-ralph-breaks-the-internet-sarah-silverman-song/), music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Phil Johnston and Tom MacDougall
* [TripIt](https://www.tripit.com)
* [This Is Your Brain On Pot](https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/thc/)
* You can now [preorder the next Arlo Finch](http://www.amazon.com/dp/162672816X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_383.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/the-one-with-mindy-kaling).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So, today’s episode has some explicit words. It has some F-bombs. So if you’re in the car with your kids, this is the warning.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 362 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is all the way off in Europe someplace. I’m not even sure what country he’s in right now. But luckily we have someone more than qualified to take over his spot.

**Mindy Kaling:** Craig knew that I was coming and was like, “I’m fucking out of here. I’m not doing this.” Which hurt my feelings actually. But what can you do?

**John:** Yeah, it’s fine. Mindy Kaling is a writer and sometimes director whose credits include The Office, The Mindy Project, and Champions. As an actress, she’s appeared in all those shows plus Ocean’s 8, A Wrinkle in Time, Inside Out. Plus she has two great books. She makes me feel incredibly lazy. Mindy Kaling, welcome to the show.

**Mindy:** Thank you. I think that’s why I do it, to make other people feel like they’re not doing enough.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. Well done. You’ve done it very well. It also turns out we’re neighbors. I sort of knew you lived generally in the vicinity because we talked about the same frozen yogurt place, so I knew you must be somewhere around here, but we’re close by.

**Mindy:** Yeah. We both go to the same farmer’s market I bet.

**John:** Yeah. That’s the crucial thing about Los Angeles is frozen yogurt, farmer’s market, good little walks around the neighborhood.

**Mindy:** Do you know if our farmer’s market has organic fruit or does it just sell fruit? Because I go there thinking that it’s all organic and everything there is organic, but I have no idea.

**John:** I think it’s largely organic. You’re talking about the large farmer’s market?

**Mindy:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah, well, yes. So I think a lot of it is. And sometimes there are probably peaches that have been sung to by like special people who go out into the fields and sing to their peaches. I think it’s all good.

**Mindy:** I never ask because I think it’s insulting to ask people if it’s organic. If it is organic they’ll be like, “Are you kidding me? Why else am I doing this?” But I also feel like, oh, they could just be repurposing stuff from Von’s and I have no idea. Whatever.

**John:** The history of farmer’s markets is actually fascinating because they really do make more money by selling the fruit and vegetables to you directly because they’re not selling it wholesome to some place that’s selling it to the grocery store. So that’s why they exist. And to make us feel guilty about not eating only farmer’s market food. I don’t know.

Today I don’t want to talk about farmer’s markets, I want to talk about writing. I want to talk about writing, especially half-hour, which I just don’t know anything about and you know so much about it because you’ve written a bunch of them. But I also want to get into sort of how you got started because so many of the people who listen to the show are aspiring writers and so they’re thinking about like “Well how do I go from this person who is writing this one script in my house to actually writing on a show?” And so I want to talk about that journey for you if that’s OK.

**Mindy:** Yeah, absolutely.

**John:** Cool. So looking through your backstory, you grew up in the east coast, right?

**Mindy:** Yes.

**John:** At what point did you start to think like, oh hey, I want to write? And did you start to think I want to write for screen versus writing for a book? How early did writing come into the field?

**Mindy:** I had very strict, very loving but strict parents who didn’t let me do a lot of activities. My parents both immigrated to the states in the ‘70s and were very suspicious of American culture and its effect on its children. And so I spent a lot of time alone. My mother was a doctor, so I spent a lot of time sitting alone in the phlebotomy room of her – she was an OB-GYN – in the phlebotomy room of her office, which is where they take bloods. Drawn. They draw bloods there. So basically what I would do was sit in a little desk and I could bring a book with me, or I could do nothing. But those were my choices. And this is obviously well before cell phones. It was early ‘80s.

And then every 20 or so minutes I’d have to scuttle out while they took bloods and I’d stand in the hallway, while a patient was getting her blood drawn. So, I started writing because I loved reading. I absolutely loved reading. I read so quickly. And I wasn’t reading like brainy books. I was just read The Babysitter’s Club, whatever. And I started writing because there was a typewriter in there. And I just thought it was cool. I thought the sound it made sounded cool and official and grown up. And I just started writing on it.

And then the first thing I wrote was plays because plays, writing dialogue seemed easier than writing anything else. So, I thought that was significant that the first thing I would write was just how you say and speak things. Although now it feels like it’s probably very natural for children to write dialogue rather than writing fiction or nonfiction.

**John:** You’re just typing on this typewriter and you’re writing things that you and your friends would perform? Or were they just kind of for you?

**Mindy:** Oh, I had no friends. So it was just me. It was just me and I would show it to my mom and dad. So I was really raised with this idea of like how do I please mom and dad, how do I please mom and dad. So I would write things that I thought they would think was funny. So the first thing I remember writing, and I think my dad still has this somewhere, was a comedy play about a haunted house. And I remember when people ask, because for whatever reason I’ve done so many interviews, that people always ask “What was your first joke that you wrote?” And I think the first joke I wrote was in this play where a mummy said – a mummy who was living in the haunted house – a witch, a mummy, and a vampire lived in the haunted house. And the mummy turned to the vampire and was like, “I don’t know what the taxes are for this haunted house.”

I don’t even think I really understood what taxes were, but it seemed like a grown up term, so that was probably the first joke I wrote.

**John:** But you had a sense of the structure of a joke. It was a comment on a thing that these two people were talking about. Something that doesn’t seem related to a haunted house. Like taxes and haunted houses are a weird thing to join together, so you already had that sense of a joke.

**Mindy:** One thing doesn’t belong. And I see adults griping about things that they seem to think is funny, you know, and relatable, or just that my parents would gripe about that. So that was the first thing.

And I just, more than writing though, I just read. I think that you’ll find that most writers now, like I have a six-month-old baby so I don’t read as much now, but almost everyone I know who is a screenwriter or TV writer read so much as a child. And it wasn’t like classy books. They’d read through all the Hardy Boys, all the Babysitter’s Club, pamphlets, magazines. Anything that would come – because I wasn’t really allowed to do anything else and I wasn’t good at sports, so.

**John:** I was an obsessive reader, too. So if I was in the bathroom I would have to have something to read. So I would read the back of shampoo bottles. Or every time we were in the car I was always reading. And so when I finally got my driver’s license I had no idea where anything was because I had never really looked out the windows of the car. I was just reading a book, again and again.

**Mindy:** I actually get worried because I think that the desire to read would be so replaced so easily with looking at a phone, so with my daughter I have to get her – and I’m so out of it that I don’t even know, do kids read books anymore or do they just read on their iPads? I have no idea?

**John:** Yeah, so they do still read books. Kids, there was this whole movement towards Kindles and stuff like that. But my daughter still prefers physical books. She’s 13. So they still will read, but it’s really true that they are drawn to their phone. And that boredom time where you would have picked up a book, they’ll definitely pick up their phone. And so that’s the challenge you’re going to face is how to convince them it’s worth the extra effort to grab the book rather than grabbing their phone.

**Mindy:** Oh no.

**John:** But the kinds of jokes you’re talking about, you must have been watching TV. You must have been watching some movies to get a sense of people talking and sort of that rhythm. Or was it all just observing?

**Mindy:** Yeah. I was a late bloomer on TV. You know, a lot of comedy guys — I’ll read like Paul Feig or Judd Apatow, what they did when they were children. Their parents let them watch TV. And I wasn’t allowed to watch TV until I think it was probably junior high when I had kind of established that I wasn’t a kid that was going to do drugs or be a bad kid. We never had cable. All through high school we never had cable. So if I wanted to watch cable I would have to go to someone else’s house.

But what became a big tradition in my house was 7th and 8th grade my parents really liked Seinfeld. So I could watch Seinfeld on Thursday nights. I don’t even know, Seinfeld, Cheers, I don’t even know if I was really allowed to watch Friends. Friends was really something that I kind of caught up on when I was in my 20s. So that’s it. And that was a big deal. And my parents really loved comedy and they saw like, “OK, this is sort of – this is really funny. We love George. This isn’t going to be something that is going to corrupt our kids or is going to make us feel uncomfortable when we’re watching it.”

And then I think that they also just saw that I really loved it. So Must See TV was massive for me. Thursday nights is when I could watch TV. It also felt, I think, weird or perverted to my parents that I would come home on a Monday evening and just like turn on TV. Like I think they thought it’s a work day.

**John:** Absolutely. You have to work to do.

**Mindy:** You have work to do and homework to do. And it’s good because I have this very addictive personality that I would have been that kid. Like I never watched – I think the symbol for the thing that they were the most scared of was Married with Children. They felt like if you watched Married with Children, you were like really braindead. You were going down a bad path. And to a lesser degree The Simpsons.

**John:** Wow.

**Mindy:** Like I had to make my parents sit down and watch The Simpsons and be like, “No, this is funny and actually smart and satirical.” But, yeah, Married with Children was just like – in fact, the entire Fox Network I think was something that my parents were suspicious of. Because it had that kind of irreverent, Garbage Pail Kid, like we don’t care what you think thing. So I was really sheltered from a lot of that stuff growing up.

**John:** I would have guessed that the Mary Tyler Moore Show or those would be the templates, because I look at some of the work you’ve done and they’re workplace comedies, they are a woman trying to find her place in this world. I would have guessed that you are person who was watching all the reruns of those growing up.

**Mindy:** No, I love Mary Tyler Moore. My parents did let me watch Nick at Nite. So I would watch Rhoda, Mary Tyler Moore. If it was black and white they were like, “OK, there’s nothing–“

**John:** Very classy.

**Mindy:** “Very classy. Nothing.” And a lot of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. So I did get to watch. But again we didn’t have Nick at Nite because it was on cable so it would be like once a week we’d go to my aunt’s house to have dinner and they had cable so we would watch. I would watch all of Nick at Nite. But it wasn’t really until later that Mary Tyler Moore I really got into it. But it’s such an amazing show.

**John:** Now, when did you decide to study writing and make that be your primary focus? Was that your undergrad degree?

**Mindy:** Yes. I majored in playwriting and the classics. So I did Latin. Equally unhelpful majors. No chances. Which actually was great because I feel that a lot of women, particularly young Indian women, ask like how did you persuade your parents to let you do writing and acting. And the truth is I didn’t have, while they were very strict and like worried about me having bad influences as a kid, they were very open to me being a writer and an actor as long as I was achieving some success at it. You know, but I’m sorry, your question was did I have a degree in writing.

Yeah, but I’ll tell you this. I went to Dartmouth and I took playwriting, but I felt that I pretty much learned nothing from playwriting in college. I think the classes I took in terms of writing didn’t help me. It’s not that the classes were bad. It’s just that wasn’t the experiences that helped me. It was writing short plays for my friends to perform, because that’s when I got to see, “OK, what do actors like to say. How do actors do well?” Because otherwise when you’re just taking a class you have no idea. You can write a one-act play, try to write a full-length play. And we had great professors. But none of that was really helpful. And frankly none of that was really fun.

It was all my extracurriculars in college that kind of taught me what I wanted to do. Because I took improv and I would do these short one-act plays that I’d put up at our black box theater at Dartmouth. And that’s what was like, “OK, well this is really what I want to do.”

**John:** So doing these extracurricular things, did you find a tribe of really great, smart, fun people you could sort of write for? How did you get into that stuff? Because what you’re describing seems very consistent with a lot of people. Whatever the degree they got, great, but it was everything else that was not part of the college curriculum that was really what they learned during those years.

**Mindy:** Yeah. Well, you know, it really helped me because I really wanted to make friends and I was nervous about making friends. So what helped was I was like, “OK, I’m this loser who came to college. I have no friends. I really like dynamic, funny, actor type personalities,” because I didn’t know what a comedy writer was or anything back then.

And so I met them through doing improv and because I was like funny enough to get on the improv team, though not like the funniest person on the team by any measure, those were the people that I started hanging out with. And then I was like, “Oh, it would be fun to write for them.”

And what I found was often I would write myself parts in things simply because there was just, at least in Dartmouth in the early 2000s there was not a ton of young women that were like, “Oh, I want to really put myself out there as a comedian.” So I kind of did it because I was like, oh, well there’s female roles. And I loved the attention but I was more scared of it.

**John:** Now, coming out of college what was your plan and what were the actual first kind of months and years like coming out of college? What were the next steps you did?

**Mindy:** Yeah. That was a really exciting period, but if I look back in my life and think about the time when I felt the most uneasy and depressed, even though I’m not a depressed person, but the time that I felt, oh, what’s going to happen. Post-college was really fucking hard. And I graduated when I was 21 and I started working on The Office at 24, so we’re talking three years. But it’s that time when a single week feels like it lasts a year. When you’re so ambitious and no one knows who you are and no one is giving you an outlet. And it was really hard because at the time, by the time I ended my time at Dartmouth I was like a big – I was a big star in the drama/comedy/performing world. Like it was great that I went there because that would not have been the case if I had gone to an actual artsy school, like Yale or NYU or something. I would never have continued on to be a writer.

But because nobody really wanted to do what I wanted to do there. This is like well past – Phil and Chris had already graduated. I didn’t overlap with them at all. I felt like such a big shot on that campus. And then went to New York and it was just that thing that I didn’t think would happen to me which was that nobody cared. I was a babysitter. I couldn’t get – I wanted to just go straight to SNL. But we didn’t have like a Harvard Lampoon. We had a comedy newspaper that I used to write for, but it didn’t have that kind of pre-professional edge to it.

**John:** And there wasn’t like an alumni network that could sort of get you in places in New York?

**Mindy:** No.

**John:** None of that?

**Mindy:** No. It was Dr. Seuss was the only other person. Because truly, no, because Shonda wasn’t Shonda yet. Phil and Chris hadn’t done stuff yet. So there wasn’t that network out there.

**John:** Phil and Chris are Lord and Miller?

**Mindy:** Yes. Yes. And Shonda is Shonda Rhimes.

**John:** Shonda lives in the neighborhood, too.

**Mindy:** Yeah, she does. I keep thinking I know what her house is and I slow down in front of it, not realizing how creepy that must be. Because someone at Shonda’s level I think probably has security.

**John:** Yes.

**Mindy:** And so they’re probably photographing me and showing her photos and she’s like, “Ugh, Mindy Kaling.”

**John:** Again.

**Mindy:** “Sitting in front of my house again.”

**John:** She follows you to Dartmouth. She follows you to Los Angeles. It’s terrible.

**Mindy:** I know. What a creep that girl is, she must be saying. And I email her a lot, too, about – not weirdly about writing stuff, because the drama world and comedy world are so different, but about baby things. She’s very helpful.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Mindy:** Sorry, so I was telling my sad tale of me being in NYC without a job.

**John:** It’s a very classic story of like you move from college to NYC. You’re sort of in your ramen days. You’re just trying to–

**Mindy:** Yeah. 9/11 happened a month after we moved there. You can’t go in the subway.

**John:** Good timing.

**Mindy:** Yeah. And so my parents were really antsy about me being there, too. I was babysitting. And that was the time where, when people ask why I’m successful I think it comes from this one feeling I remember happening there was like my panic is very useful to me. And my panic is something that is so deeply uncomfortable – keeping me up at night, can’t sleep – that until I can do something with the panic like I really can’t function.

So my panic when I was 21 when I didn’t immediately go write on SNL, I didn’t even get a job as a page at NBC. Like I was rejected from that even. My friend and I who was kind of my – she’s more of an actress, but my friend Brenda from college, we would – she was a substitute teacher and I was a babysitter. So we had opposite hours. But there was always one or two hours in the middle of the day that we overlapped. And during that time we would always hang out and either watch TV or go for a walk in Prospect Park. And so we started just kind of improvising characters and being like what do we really want to write and what’s fun to play?

And so we had always had a kind of theatrical friendship where we would be doing bits with each other and we kind of started improvising in these really absurd improvising world where she was Matt Damon and I was Ben Affleck. And we found that we could walk around Prospect Park for like three miles and improvise in character.

And as we were doing it it wasn’t even a thing where I’d be like, “OK, well what if we did this?” because we were in character the whole time and these whole backstories that we just invented for these two guys came up. And this is back in 2001. So, you know, they were like – I mean, they’re extremely famous now. But this was like a different – I don’t know if you remember. It was a different kind of fame. Because there’s like the fame of youth and who they were dating really mattered and all that. And you were just bludgeoned with it in magazines.

**John:** And Premiere Magazine, sort of like people to watch, on the rise, that kind of–

**Mindy:** Yeah. It was a couple of years after they had won I think an Oscar for Good Will Hunting. So they were both like the biggest young A-list celebrities. And I think they’re both like about ten years older than us, or seven or eight years older than us. So they loomed really large for us, in pop culture anyway. So we just started doing that. And we didn’t know what we would do with it. It just amused us.

And then we were like well what if we just like wrote down some of the stuff they were doing and we wrote this play called Matt and Ben that we ended up performing at the Fringe Festival. And then it won the Fringe Festival which was really where we – where I at least, because Brenda stayed in New York to do acting and I wanted to write. So I moved to LA off of the success of that.

**John:** So let’s connect some dots here. To get into the Fringe, so you write this play and then do you submit the play in its written form into the Fringe Festival or how do you get into the Fringe Festival?

**Mindy:** Yeah, OK, so this is the nitty gritty stuff that I feel like I always gloss over because it feels so logistical, but yes, I know that this is interesting for young people who are trying to make it. So, at that point – this is like not pre-Internet, but like barely Internet, you couldn’t submit even something online. You would go to the Fringe Festival. That was the big, in our big group of friends of theater – off-off-Broadway theater people. They’re like, well, the one thing where you can be seen if you’re not cast is the International Fringe Festival, which wasn’t even that old. It was barely a thing. It’s definitely not like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

But it was the only way that you could just kind of be seen by anybody. And you knew that if you could make it there’s like 500 things that go up in the Fringe Festival. They have a huge acceptance rate, or at least it’s like 50%. And if you can make it to the top 50 of the 500 then people will kind of review it in Time Out New York and everything like that.

And I was like, OK, I’ve beat these odds before. I got into Dartmouth. I was like a big star at Dartmouth. Like maybe we could do this together.

So we downloaded the application. We wrote up what we thought the play would be. We sent in $50 which was a lot of money. And you just waited. And we didn’t get an email saying that you were accepted. You get like a letter. I’m really dating myself now. I sound like I’m a thousand years old.

And they accepted it. But it wasn’t even this delicious thing of, “Oh, we’ve been accepted,” because at that time they took so many people. And then it’s a kind of cool thing the Fringe Festival. I don’t know if they do it now where there’s all these tiny little venues in Downtown New York that you wouldn’t even know about that were open for these – the Fringe Festival is like two or three weeks. So we did our play in the Fringe Festival at a – it was East Broadway was the subway stop you’d have to get off. It was like a Chinese cultural center’s auditorium is where we did our play.

And so you’d walk into the lobby and there’s all this Chinese cultural posters and things, actually pretty interesting. Great festivals every year. And then they had this beautiful auditorium that was for, I don’t know, telling senior citizens where your Chinese resources were in the neighborhood. So they were like, yeah sure, we’ll do that. And so really the Fringe Festival is all based on all these tiny little auditoriums agreeing to have these people.

So, long story short, we did I think it was only three nights. The Fringe Festival is just three nights. And what we did was we went out of pocket. We borrowed money from – I think we figured out that, somehow the number was like $2,500 that if we could borrow $2,500 to promote the show ourselves then we would make that back in ticket sales and we could pay back everyone. So we made up little postcards with Matt and Ben, with like a little picture of them with their eyes covered and with all the dates of our three shows on them. And then we just would go around New York City. I would go to Barnes and Nobles and I would stick them in all the different cool magazines.

**John:** Amazing.

**Mindy:** That I thought people would buy. Which is completely illegal. So I would just go and look like I was reading through a magazine and stick one in there. So, I’d hit like six Barnes and Nobles and stick the little flyer thing in all of those. And then all through Park Slope, and the East Village, and the West Village we would just put up signs for Matt and Ben. And I think because of the subject material, which we didn’t know at the time was – because of the subject material people were like even more interested in seeing it.

And so we did three performances. And then we were like voted. We didn’t even know there was like a thing at the end where they like Sundance or whatever, they say like, “Oh, here’s the awards,” because we didn’t know. How could you possibly see everything?

But we won Best Production at that festival.

**John:** And the production is just the two of you, correct?

**Mindy:** It’s just the two of us. There’s like a sofa. Actually, it’s very much like a sitcom set. It’s just a sofa and just a living room. I think we kind of subconsciously just thought like, “OK, this should just look like a sitcom.” But it was very easy to move that play around. And we just needed the two of us. And we couldn’t have paid any other actors to do it which is why I acted in it.

And that was very lucky, because if I hadn’t done that I don’t think I would have been a performer on The Office. So yeah.

**John:** Now at this point are you Mindy Kaling or are you using your longer name? Where were you at in your transition?

**Mindy:** I think, because I was so – even though I didn’t have an agent or anything, I had done standup before that and I remember this so distinctly that I had spent weeks and weeks trying to get in this one standup show that was at this little hotel in like the East 20s. And weeks and weeks. And I had like this – I worked so hard to do a tight ten. And you had to ask a friend who had already performed in it, who was barely a friend, if they could ask someone to do it. And this wasn’t the time when anyone was like, yeah, let’s try to make room for people who look different. It’s like, hey, it’s fine if it’s all white men and one guy’s girlfriend. That’s fine. We can do a whole night.

And I finally did it and I remember the emcee butchered my last name when he was introducing me and made a joke about it. And I don’t even–

**John:** How do you pronounce your last name?

**Mindy:** Chokalingam. And so he was so – I don’t even think he meant to – I don’t think he’s like a racist guy, but because he messed it up he did like a little Indian accent to cover for it. And then when I was there I was so shaken, because I didn’t know – I wasn’t like good at standup so I didn’t know how to roll with it and deal with a white standup comedian who doesn’t know who to pronounce a long Indian name that I think the set went terribly. I had invited all my friends to come see it. And I remember on the subway going home – one of my best friends is half Asian – and I was sitting there and I was like I have to not have that feeling anymore where people feel – not even people who are racist – that they feel uneasy about saying my name because they don’t know how to pronounce. I was like, you know what, I know why Bob Dylan did it. I know why Woody Allen did it. Like if they did it and their names are even more easy to pronounce Jewish names, I got to just do this.

And it was weird because I was like I wonder what my parents are going to think if I suggest this. And it was interesting because my mom had taken my dad’s name. But she was a doctor. And she was like, you know what, we totally get this. If I look back at my career it might have been easier. And I asked my dad because it’s his last name. And he’s like, “Oh my god, do it.”

So, they were the only real obstacles. I was thinking of like, OK, well how is this going to make them feel. But I was so happy I did it.

**John:** Yeah. So I changed my last name, too.

**Mindy:** Did you really?

**John:** Yeah. My last name was German. It was Meise. It’s pronounced Mize-y. But no one ever could pronounce that name. So you’d see this hesitation and they’d go Meyes? Mise? And so the first ten seconds of meeting anybody was just correcting how they mispronounced–

**Mindy:** Correcting them.

**John:** How they mispronounced my name. And it’s a terrible way to start any new conversation. And so between graduating from school in Iowa and moving out to Los Angeles I took my dad’s middle name, which is August, as my last name and it just–

**Mindy:** That’s so funny. I didn’t know that.

**John:** Yeah. It makes life so much easier.

**Mindy:** Isn’t it? So it’s just a making life easier thing. Isn’t it so interesting?

**John:** But I mean I do also worry that this temptation to make things simpler for everybody also just makes things kind of whiter and smoother. I do worry that it takes some of the–

**Mindy:** No, for sure.

**John:** The texture out of the world.

**Mindy:** No, it’s true. And then also it’s just like are the only people who can be successful just have these incredibly easy to pronounce names? You know, it’s funny, I once saw this tweet that Kumail Nanjiani tweeted which is like “People have trouble saying my name. It’s just what it looks like.” And if I had a name that was just what it looked like, that’s how you pronounce it, I would have no issue. But I think you’re right.

But, you know, when you’re young you don’t think about the sort of sociopolitical ramifications of what you’re doing. You’re just like I got to make it. This is another obstacle getting in my way.

**John:** I think changing my name, you know, maybe is 5% of sort of making me more successful. But just that same thing where people don’t stumble across your name just helps.

**Mindy:** Or they’re inwardly wincing, you know, about trying to recommend me to something or bring me up in conversation, even when you’re not–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Mindy:** Like half of my life I’m like I love Chimamanda Ngozi. I don’t even know if I’m pronouncing her name right. Because she’s such an amazing writer. But half the time I want to reference her I’m like, ah, I’m going to mess up her name and then I’m going to seem like I’m–

**John:** Yeah, or you say the poet who wrote the Beyoncé stuff. That’s the same person you’re talking about. So you might not directly use her name, but refer to her as the thing, or the other person’s name you can pronounce.

**Mindy:** Yes.

**John:** And that’s a challenge.

**Mindy:** I know. Which is a different way of making yourself be invisible. I don’t have an opinion about recommending it to other people or not. But you made your decision when you were very young. I did it when I was 21.

**John:** I was 21, too.

**Mindy:** Yeah. And it’s like to the point where like it’s funny, you make those kinds of decisions when you’re just so ambitious and just so didn’t want there to be an obstacle. Because I’m like there’s already a million obstacles in my way. Why would I not move that? I don’t know if I would make that decision if I was older, but I did it.

**John:** I do have friends who have considered what last name to use and end up using their Latino last name deliberately so that they are on lists for staffing, so people can actually see that they are a Latino writer. Because if they have a generic white-sounding name they may not know that you’re a Latino writer. It’s a weird time.

**Mindy:** Yeah.

**John:** So, you have written Matt and Ben. It’s gone great. And did you also do it in Los Angeles? How did more people discover it?

**Mindy:** Yeah, so then what happened with the play was it had enough people – off the success of the Fringe then like little producers in New York who they can do Off-Broadway plays, they put up money for that, put it up at PS122.

**John:** Great.

**Mindy:** Which is a great venue in Downtown New York. And we got more and more people. And that was when – when it was PS122 that’s when like Steve Martin came to see it and Nicole Kidman came to see it. We got our photos taken with them afterwards. And it became like a hot ticket. And we would do it six or seven times a week. And then from that they’re like, you know what, this would probably do well in LA.

And so I was so excited to go to LA because I knew that my future as a comedy writer – at that point I knew I wanted to write for TV. I felt that it was in Los Angeles, not in New York. And so I was really excited to go out there. And we went out there – this is how – I’m actually amazed at myself sometimes, because I already had an Arrested Development spec I had written.

**John:** Amazing. So you watched the show and you just guessed on sort of what a script of that would look like? Or had you read a script?

**Mindy:** So I had gone to the 67th Street Upper West Side Barnes and Noble and they have books on how to break into TV writing. So I bought like two books and they all said you need a spec script of a show. And then because this is like pre scripts being available online, I actually went in SoHo there’s this guy who sells TV scripts, printed out copies of TV scripts, on like a foldout table on Broome Street.

**John:** I’ve seen that guy. So you actually–

**Mindy:** Yeah. It was like Broome and Spring. He would set up his little – in a full circle moment I now like own an apartment in SoHo and I still see that same guy there selling his sitcoms and he has an episode of The Office that I wrote.

**John:** Amazing.

**Mindy:** I know. And I was like should I tell this guy? He’ll be like, “Fuck off, it’s not interesting to me. Who cares?” But I was like my full circle moment! You’re part of it, sir.

Yeah, so I got a copy of Arrested Development. And so I literally I was just like I don’t know about act breaks. I don’t know how long the script should be. I have a sense of it just from watching it on DVDs. So while we were doing Matt and Ben at night in New York, because I knew we were going to go to LA at that point. We had like two months before we were going to go. So I was like, OK, I have a couple of ideas for this. So I got an Arrested Development script ready to go.

So, I had that when we went to LA.

**John:** None of what you described so far sounds like luck. All of it sort of sounds like hard work.

**Mindy:** Thank you. You know, I’ve often – like you know, I think that hard work is two different things. Because like hard work is like, in America at least, it’s like good to be hard-working. But often it’s cool, particularly from some of my WASP-ier friends who maybe worked on the Lampoon where like you’re not supposed to show how ambitious you are. It’s just there’s such a bad look. And I’m like, well, if that’s true then I’m like living a perpetual bad look because I am like nothing without my panic fear, hard work like cycle that I go through.

But, yeah, thank you. I don’t think I had any luck either.

**John:** No.

**Mindy:** I mean, I definitely had supportive parents. And I went to a great school. So it’s not that – I had luck being born into a nice family who had enough money to send me to an Ivy League school for sure. But–

**John:** But to describe back a few things, you were talking about the panic and rather than just dwelling on the panic you actually started talking through stuff with a friend. You walked around. You recognized that this thing that you’re actually describing could actually be a good thing. You did the work to actually write that thing. And then the work to actually figure out a way that people could see this thing. And see that it was good. And while you’re having success, you didn’t take that, OK I’m going to stop here. You’re like I’m going to work extra hard to write the thing that will get me to the next place.

And so many people I think along the way they get to this thing and they’re like, “OK, when will lightning strike more? When are people going to notice me more?” And they’re not doing the thing to actually get them to the next place.

**Mindy:** Well it’s exhausting, right? Because that’s how you – just to keep going, it’s like you can never just sort of sit and be content for too long. It’s like constantly churning, especially as a writer, and particularly if you’re creating your own work it’s just a constant thing. But luckily I have enough panic for many lifetimes. So I think I’ll be OK.

**John:** So you come out to Los Angeles and you’re doing the play and you’re also meeting folks?

**Mindy:** So I’m doing the play. The play is going like spectacularly badly.

**John:** Was it at the Hudson? Where were you doing it?

**Mindy:** It was going so badly. It was at the Acme Theater on La Brea, which I think is still there. It’s going so spectacularly badly. Horrible. It’s like this is so not a theater town.

**John:** I remember reading a review of it in Variety which I think was a good review.

**Mindy:** Oh really?

**John:** But I remember actually seeing the physical, because I had the printed Variety at that point, and I remember seeing–

**Mindy:** Oh really?

**John:** The first time seeing a review of it.

**Mindy:** Oh my god. It was horrible. It was horrible, horrible, horrible. And there’s just something, in New York, because I like the play and I think it’s a funny play, and I think the performances are great. Not my performance. My friend. I just thought it was a good play. It was worthy of – I believed in it. Anyway.

And I think that in New York there’s just much more of a feeling of these little rinky-dink plays with something special in them. They have little venues. It’s like you can go on a date. Or you could do whatever. And it felt like here if you brought someone to go see a play in LA you were like “This is the worst date of my life. What are you, poor? Why can’t you take me to something nice?”

And so it just had a very different feeling about it here. So it went terribly and I, again, I was really panicked about that. But because of my spec script our agent, who started representing us when we went Off-Broadway, for writing was – I was taking meetings to staff on things. And actually that was going really badly, too.

**John:** And why badly? Because they would have already read you before you’d gone in. So, did you–?

**Mindy:** I can’t even, I just want to say, I can’t emphasize how much there was not this feeling of wouldn’t it be great to have writers in a writer’s room that don’t look like everybody else. It truly was like that wasn’t a thing at all back then. And I felt that it was – I had done this play. I had an Arrested Development spec. I really wanted to get into – I thought Will and Grace is such a great show. Couldn’t get a meeting on Will and Grace. Couldn’t get a meeting on – at that time it was Father of the Pride, was that animated show that was going to be after the Olympics. Couldn’t get into that room.

Couldn’t get a meeting with any of those people. But now if I think about it like an Indian-American girl who had like written a play that won the Fringe Festival who would come out to LA who had written a spec, like I’d be like of course I would take a meeting with that person. But things have just changed now, or maybe because I am Indian, where every showrunner would be like well of course you’d meet that person. It seems like what a great person to put on your show. But it wasn’t that.

Or maybe my material just wasn’t good enough. But the doors were just completely slammed shut except for Greg Daniels who had seen my play with his wife Susanne and they–

**John:** Susanne Daniels at that point was running the WB Network.

**Mindy:** WB. Yeah. Or, you know, I think she just left the WB and was now an independent producer. But so Greg and she had seen the show and Greg wanted to – Greg and I met for The Office, which wasn’t a thing yet, and when I had my meeting with him I hadn’t even seen the original Office. I hadn’t even heard of it.

And so met with me. We had a really long meeting, which I thought went terribly. And then after he hired me as a staff writer for six episodes first season. NBC so did not believe in this show at that time. But I didn’t – it was not a job that anyone who wanted to be a comedy writer would have signed up for. Because who would sign for six episodes when you could do a 22-episode fifth season of an existing show?

**John:** So a general rule, I think long meetings are good. Has that been your experience since that time? Are most long meetings good meetings?

**Mindy:** Yeah, you know, at the time I had no idea. It was maybe my second or third meeting that I’d had. Yeah, I think long meetings are good. You’re totally right. Long meetings are good.

Greg, if you have ever met him, is someone who is completely comfortable with like long pauses and silences. He’s a very reflective person who can be thinking about something and you’re just sitting there nervous. It wasn’t like a chatty fun, “Oh I know that person, too,” like one of those kinds of meetings. He is just a – he will not just be like chattering away if he doesn’t think it’s worth saying, whereas I’m the opposite. I’m as my mom calls me a talkie-talkie, say-nothing.

So I’m like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he was not. But I remember leaving thinking like oh my god if I could work for that guy. He’s so fucking smart. And I was at the King of the Hill offices because he was I think working on The Office while he was doing King of the Hill. So, it was very intimidating.

**John:** And when you were hired on did you know that you were going to be a performer as well? Or were you just hired on to write?

**Mindy:** I didn’t – I just thought I was going to be a writer. I didn’t know that there was a clause in there which is as a performer there was a pre-negotiated thing. And I think my agent so thought that was not a possibility that we didn’t even talk about it.

And it didn’t occur to me that being on a sitcom that was only picked up for six episodes was something to worry about. Or that there was something better than that. I think that looking back it was of all my professional success being hired on The Office was probably the most exhilarating.

**John:** Yeah. Because suddenly you really are being paid to do the thing that you want to be doing.

**Mindy:** Really getting paid.

**John:** Drew Goddard was on the show and we were talking about some of those early jobs, some of the best early jobs are sort of the underdog jobs or sort of the long shots, or shows that are kind of in trouble, or no one is really paying attention, because then as the new person in you sort of can just do new stuff. And The Office was really, even though it was based on an existing format, was really breaking sort of new weird spaces.

**Mindy:** That’s such a good point. That’s such a good point. I think that Drew was correct. Drew Goddard is smart for a reason. He’s successful for a reason.

**John:** He’s a very smart person.

**Mindy:** Yeah.

**John:** Because he was talking about sort of early on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and when things were just in chaos that’s a really great time to come onboard because they’re open to sort of new ideas. And you’re there while they’re figuring stuff out.

**Mindy:** Did you see the documentary about the Dana Carvey show?

**John:** No. I haven’t.

**Mindy:** OK. So it’s a great, great documentary about how could this go wrong, because the writing staff I’m sure you know was like Colbert, Carell, Charlie Kaufman, Robert Carlock. It was just like, Dana. So it has huge – and of course Dana Carvey was the star at the height of his powers. And it had this hugely talented staff, of all white men, but it did terribly and it got canceled I think in its first season or only lasted one season.

And it was so fascinating because here’s like how did that not go well? And I think maybe because there was so much scrutiny on it. Where everyone was like we can’t wait to see – they’re rubbing their hands together – we can’t wait to see what Dana Carvey does. And it was, probably because there was just so much scrutiny.

The Office was the opposite of that, which was I think that – I don’t want to speak out of turn here, because Greg knows better than me. I was like a staff writer so I truly didn’t know what was going on that much. But my sense of it was that The Office was like, “OK, six episodes, like let’s just let this run its course.” And frankly our first season we did terribly. I still love those first season episodes. I think they’re so funny, but I also think I was particularly attached to them because it was my first experience writing in TV. It was just completely intoxicating and it was such a small room. And I was like, “Oh, Mike Schur is so cool and mean. And B.J. Novak is so cool and mean. And everyone is so cool and mean. I hope they become my friends.” And it felt like we were just doing like such – by the way, now they’re going to be like, “Why’d you say I was cool and mean on the podcast?”

I was going to say they’re both very nice, which is also not true, but they’re both perfectly nice and have since become my good friends. But I just remember being like I’d never been around this level of concentrated comedy, of people who just like knew what they were doing. And I was just trying to keep up.

**John:** So talk to me about know what you’re doing, because I’ve never written half-hour and I don’t really have a good sense of what the process is like in the room and I’m sure it’s different for certain shows than other shows. But as you guys are breaking an episode, so you have a general sense of the ideas of the episode or the big things that are happening. How many days are you there figuring out, OK, this is the episode before someone goes off and writes it? The Office or your later shows.

**Mindy:** The Office or later shows. Well, I just took the way that we had done things at The Office and brought that onto The Mindy Project. And I did it at Champions. And then now at Four Weddings and a Funeral. We just do things the same way.

And the way that we did it – the way that Greg did it – was that we would kind of blue sky or talk about the entire series for several weeks, maybe two weeks. And sort of like we would take a couple days and talk about each character and what made them funny. What was their wound? How would they react in different situations? Their backstory. And that’s when, those first couple weeks is when you figure out like, OK, Dwight Schrute has a beet farm. That kind of thing. Michael Scott, you know, he talks about his mother and his step-father but we never really know about his dad. I don’t know how far we got with it.

But we just – and then we just went through all the main characters on the show and did that.

**John:** And at this point had a pilot script been written? Or this was before the pilot script was written? Because it was kind of a special case on The Office right?

**Mindy:** Yeah, well no, Greg adapted the pilot. They had already shot the pilot, when I came onboard. So then when they’re hiring a staff that’s when like Mike, me, Paul Lieberstein, that we came onboard. And B.J. was in the pilot, but he was in the writer’s room as well.

So we had this small room. And so then after the second week of talking kind of blue sky about the characters then it was like, OK, we have these six episodes, let’s like go – one of them is already written, so we have five episodes. What would be great or funny things? And that was all like well above my pay grade. That was kind of Greg deciding what he wanted to do. And then us pitching jokes on how that could be funny, or twists and turns in the story.

**John:** So what’s happening in the room, are you pitching jokes like actual dialogue jokes? Or are you pitching conflicts or little bits of like this scene would work like this? How much to dialogue are you getting into in the room?

**Mindy:** In the room?

**John:** Before someone goes off and writes the script?

**Mindy:** I think at The Office the first season it would be, like if Greg or Paul Lieberstein who were like the co-EPs and EPs on the show, if they had like a turn of phrase or a piece of dialogue that they thought Michael could say, or Dwight would say, then that would go into the script. I mean, I don’t really know how many even usable bits of dialogue or jokes I even contributed. But not that much. In later shows, like what we did at The Mindy Project, which has a completely different rhythm. Because what happened at Mindy was – it was a couple Office writers, but not that many because they were all still working on The Office. Because my first season of Mindy was the last season of The Office. So those guys were still employed.

Actually, I don’t know if I had any Office writers my first season. I don’t think I did. I had a couple 30 Rock writers. A couple Simpsons writers. And then the other writers – I’m sorry, one Simpsons writer, and then everyone else was from late night TV, from like Jimmy Fallon and Colbert.

So, the style of that show was very different from The Office for a lot of reasons. It wasn’t a mockumentary. But the joke rhythm became a little bit more – The Office has tons of jokes, but it was more of a hybrid. It had a real like more 30 Rock/Simpsons joke dense type of show. And that became a show where there was a lot of dialogue in the outline, because I was in the room, and I was the lead. So it felt like, OK, if I said something and it made people laugh, or I liked it, it would just stay in the final script.

**John:** So, Rachel Bloom, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she has a similar situation like you have on Mindy Project where she’s in the room for breaking the stories and sort of figuring stuff out, but then she’s ultimately the star of the show and has to go off and be the star of the show. Something like Mindy Project, how did you split your time between “I am the showrunner” and “I’m also the star of the show?” How were you switching back and forth between those roles?

**Mindy:** It was incredibly time-consumptive, particularly when we were at Fox. It was just a real seven day a week job. So I would go to work, my call time would be like 5 or 5:30. We’d do that first season thing where on a show you do like 13 hour days.

**John:** And why the first season? What’s different?

**Mindy:** Because on the first season scripts are longer because you’re not sure what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. So you need to just shoot longer things. And you don’t know yet. The characters, you don’t know who they are yet. So things are a little bit overwritten. And by the end of Mindy we were doing I think 11 hour days, which was great. But at the beginning it was like 13 or 14 hour days. And then I would come and then once if there was a lighting setup at Universal our writer’s room was really just like across the way, so really close. There’s a lighting setup for 45 minutes, I would go to the writer’s room and check in, see what they were working on. And then I would go back over and just do that.

And then when I wrapped at night, 6 or 7, I would edit to about 10, then go home.

**John:** Brutal.

**Mindy:** So it was tough. And then on the weekends I would just go over my lines for the next week, but then also on Saturday probably go into post. So the thing that gets really kind of held back is post. Because they can’t cut an episode without me. The director will do a director’s cut, but they can’t really do that final pass without me there. So on Saturdays I’d be there for like four or five hours doing that.

But, it was a lot of time, but it was also like I wasn’t married and didn’t have kids. It was my only goal in life was to have my own TV show. So, for me, it was like, eh, this is fun.

**John:** Your life is being inside the show.

**Mindy:** Yeah. My life is being on the show, so it was fine.

**John:** The one TV show that I did show run, I did find myself, like I would go through life and everything was just being sorted into two bins. Is that part of the show? Is that not part of the show? A song will play on the radio. Could that in the show? I felt like I was just constantly grabbing at things out in the real world and trying to put them in my little basket.

**Mindy:** It’s fun though isn’t it?

**John:** It is sort of fun. Anything that can happen out there you’re like, oh, this could be a thing. But I found myself, there was like a little red light that would come one. If we’re having this conversation it’s like, oh this kind of conversation could be in the show, which is – I’m not sure it was actually emotionally very healthy to do that.

**Mindy:** Oh interesting. You know, my character was so out there and it was all dating stories and I wasn’t dating at all, so I didn’t get a lot of that. But I would see would be like, “Oh, my assistant loves Workaholics.” I’m like, “Oh, that guy Anders Holm, they love him.” And like, “Oh, he should be a boyfriend on the show” and then he would be.

Or I would see Seth Rogan at an event and be like, “Oh, Seth should be on the show.” That’s fun to just find actors. And for a serial dating show it’s really fun to be like, oh, this guy is big on a Broadway play. And when you have a show, a TV show for theater people is actually like kind of fun and glamorous for them to come be on a TV show. Or Mark and Jay Duplass, I met them–

**John:** Oh my god, they’re great.

**Mindy:** They’re great. And they set a meeting with me because they wanted me to like either be in or – it was for me to be in a movie that they were going to produce. And nothing happened with the movie, but after meeting both of them I was like, oh, I want them to be on the show. And then they became the midwife brothers on the show. I only did this because Jay Duplass has said this many, many times that he credits me with kicking off his acting career, because he had never acted before then. And so that always fills me with pride.

**John:** They have such a weird Penn and Teller vibe as those characters. It was so disturbing.

**Mindy:** Penn and Teller vibe. That’s so funny. Yeah, that was – I always loved when those guys could come be on the show. They were so funny.

**John:** So, as you’re learning your lines over the weekend though, if there’s something you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t really working for me right,” could you just rewrite your lines?

**Mindy:** I could rewrite it. So in some ways it’s easy. It’s easier when the star of the show is also the showrunner, because it’s not one of these things where you’re like I hope, you cross your fingers and hope at the table read that the lead likes it/gets the joke. It made rewrites easier because for the most part I like knew what was going to happen. And so when we would rewrite things, we’d have to rewrite me a little bit, but it was mostly the other characters.

What became hard was that, at least when we were at Fox, it was like the notes we would get would be just – like that would keep us there for overnight Sundays/Saturdays. Because we would hear something and be like, “Oh, they don’t like this one character.” And you’re like, “OK, so we’ll write them off in a fun, believable way.” And they’re like, “No, they can’t be in the next episode.” So, you would say like you want us to get rid of that character without a sendoff? They’re like, yeah, they just – I don’t want to say the person I’m talking about, but they just don’t want to see them again.

And so we would get knocked a lot because there was a lot of characters that we were kind of – the edict was to just not see them again. And who would believe that the head of a network or development execs at a network would just say, “Yeah, they just can’t be in the next one. Our boss is going to freak out.” That that would actually be the case. So it just looks like, oh, Mindy didn’t like that person and wanted them off the show. And most of the time you’re like I hired this person. I would never want them to just to be off the show in this kind of way. It makes no sense.

**John:** So again, and we won’t talk about specific actors, but having watched I think almost every episode of your show, there were best friend characters or other friends. And so Mindy would have friends sometimes and not friends other times. And there was probably a focus question of like is this a work show or is this a Mindy’s home life show? Is that the kind of stuff that would come up?

**Mindy:** Well, you know, it was interesting. It was two things. If you look at 30 Rock or Parks and Rec, like Liz Lemon and Leslie Knope have no girlfriends accept for the people that they work with. And at the beginning of my show I was like, oh, it would be great if she had – I mean, I love Sex and the City. I would love for her to have girlfriends. But what ended up happening is we were at work so much, so you would end up having this thing of like how do we get the best friend at work.

For the record, I really loved having that – I liked that challenge. And we’ve always had great actors who would play my friends on the show. And then what would happen was that the network would say, “That stuff isn’t working. Cut it. We don’t want to see them.” But what it always felt like, and you have these fights where you’re like I don’t think people necessarily understand this when they watch a show. You have these fights of like I don’t want to do that. I want to write them a sendoff or I want to keep doing that. And it’s just like, “Do you want your show to continue on the air? No.” You have to like – and so you learn like, oh, things don’t work the way where you know it’s going to be better creatively.

And so I don’t know that other streaming platforms or cable networks don’t do that the same way, but I think there’s a reason why the comedies that most people are really enjoying are not on networks. Because I think that there’s these panicky edicts to get rid of things or change things up that make sometimes shows not work at the beginning.

So we were so lucky we came back after there was – I liked so much of the first season, but it was so rocky. Like some inconsistency, particularly the first 13 episodes where it was like this feels a little bit out of control. That kind of evened out in later seasons.

**John:** I don’t think this is true of your show, but there have been definitely shows I’ve seen the first season where it was clear they aired them out of order, or they just rejiggered the plan. Because a character is introduced in episode five but they actually showed up in episode three. It’s always so weird as the viewer to see–

**Mindy:** Well, they fall in love with an episode and they’re like, “Ooh, we want to air this now.” And I’m like a character has a broken arm in this episode that doesn’t have a broken arm in the previous one or something. It just doesn’t make any sense. And sometimes it’s coming from a good place. And it’s always a development exec who is just like, “We want to save the show. So we want to put the very best one next.” And you’re like “But it doesn’t make any sense.”

So, often it’s really coming from people who are, because there were so many big champions of our show at Fox. And a lot of times they’re like, “But we think this will help keep the show on the air and isn’t that the whole point?” So then you would do something, because yeah, I don’t want to have a six-episode show of a show that I really believed in that I didn’t make any compromises at all. And ultimately it was worth it that first – it was even just the first 13 episodes. Because at the end when we were in like Season 6 at Hulu they were like, hey, do you want to come back and do another season? And at that point I hadn’t realized like, oh, that’s such a rare thing, because I had gone from The Office to then Hulu, which was like you want to keep doing it?

And Craig Erwich is such a feeling of supporting it. It was like, yeah, you can do it as long as you wanted. And I was like, no. I was like, no, I want to go be in like A Wrinkle in Time and Ocean’s 8 and go do movies for a while. Being like, oh yeah, that will be done in like a year. But it is nice to see what other kind of characters I can play.

**John:** Can we talk about Champions, because I tweeted at you because I loved Champions so much.

**Mindy:** Oh, thank you. I loved it, too.

**John:** I was really impressed by the pilot because I’ve never written a half-hour pilot, but sort of the density of what a half-hour pilot has to do in terms of establishing the premise, the characters, the unique voices for the characters. I felt like every line in that pilot had to do like five jobs in terms of establishing these guys are brothers, they own this gym, their father died. He had a kid by this woman he hasn’t seen all this time. Now she’s dropping—

It was such a–

**Mindy:** It was so dense with plot and things.

**John:** It was like a full two-hour movie that had to be crammed into this little 30-minute thing, but it felt – everything was just nipped and tucked just so delightfully.

**Mindy:** Oh, thank you. That’s so nice.

**John:** So it was you and Charlie–

**Mindy:** Charlie Grandy.

**John:** And so what was the genesis of that pilot?

**Mindy:** I think with Charlie and I, because we had worked together for so long on so many different shows, I wanted to do – because I came to him with the idea. I think we both – we wanted to do something different than Mindy, but I wanted to do a young gay character. And I wanted to write for a guy. Because I’d been writing for Mindy for so long.

It’s crazy, because J.J. Totah who played the lead in that show–

**John:** He’s just remarkable.

**Mindy:** He’s so remarkable. But we didn’t know he existed before we wrote that part. So we wrote this really specific part of a half-Indian like very theatrical confident but with some vulnerabilities, this character, which is so specific. And then we found this young kid who played the part completely, but it was one of those things when we were auditioning we were like what the hell did we do? It’s not just a young teenage kid that’s a great actor, and singer, and dancer, which is already so hard to find. We’re like he has to be half-Indian, or look half-Indian. So that was incredible.

And writing for that voice was really fun because I love characters who want to come to New York and be strivers and are chatty and enter a room and they kind of like download their entire deal. And so he was like Mindy in some ways, but he had this vulnerability because he didn’t have a dad. So it was a really, really fun show to work on.

**John:** The other character I thought you had a great original voice for was the Andy Favreau character whose name I don’t remember. Dim-witted, but in a very different kind of dim-witted than I usually see in these shows. He was so good-natured and Canadian in sort of an odd way. And that brotherly dynamic is a thing we don’t–

**Mindy:** That’s funny. Matthew. Andy is so funny. And Matthew was just like, yeah, in some ways he could have seen just kind of stock, but he was smart about certain things and he was super moral. And also like really ambitious about the gym. And I remember he would always talk about like we thought it was really fun that he thought the most important familial relationship was between uncle and nephew. He’s like that’s the most valuable relationship. He didn’t really come alive until he discovered he had a nephew. That really fulfilled him. He was just a really sweet, funny character. And I mean Andy was so funny playing that part.

**John:** So writing with Charlie on this pilot, what is the process and what’s the give and take of figuring out like who wants what and sort of who is responsible for what?

**Mindy:** I love writing with another person. That was kind of the first time since I’d written Matt and Ben that I’d written with a writing partner. And what was great about writing with Charlie was I was shooting Ocean’s 8 at the time in New York and he was in LA. So we spent two or three months meeting, because Mindy was still happening. So we would meet on the weekend and then before work.

So we broke the story and carded it onto a board. And then what we did was – I think this is what we did. I took the blue cards and he took the red cards. And we just outlined it. We wrote what each scene would kind of be. I moved to New York. We’re in the middle of our outline. We had our respective assistants. Mine was in New York and his was in LA. Like Frankenstein them together, the cards. And then we had this kind of rough document that didn’t – it made sense, but it was tonally all totally different and all over the place. And you got to see like, oh, he really like sparked to this aspect of this guy’s character and I sparked to this. And you learn a lot. And it’s so much fun.

And then what we did was we massaged the document tonally into one thing. He would do a pass on it, and then I would do a pass on his pass. And so we had this outline which we then submitted–

**John:** How many pages long was this kind of outline?

**Mindy:** So, towards the end of Mindy we started doing really long outlines that were really detailed because it took the edge off of that horrible feeling you have of a blank page when you’re writing a script. So our outlines were often like 27 pages long.

**John:** Oh wow.

**Mindy:** And a script is like 32 pages.

**John:** So suggesting the dialogue but not really having blocked out?

**Mindy:** Sometimes we would write the dialogue to begin with. But it was like a Microsoft Word document. And then what’s great is then we would just when you put the Microsoft Word outline that has dialogue but just like in block form and you put that into a Final Draft document you’re like, “This script is like written.” It’s like 31 pages already.

And then that to me always makes me feel better. And the great thing about breaking everything together to that level of detail is that when you’re looking over it with your writing partner you’re like, “Oh, I kind of think that they shouldn’t make this decision and this beat should be two beats later.” So that when you’re actually writing the script it’s kind of really fun. Because you’re fleshing out the thing that’s already been really, really established. You can’t mess up. You can just make it better.

That’s something that we kind of figured out at The Mindy Project which is why when we were at Hulu it just made everything so efficient and no writer came in with a draft that was like bad because we had done so much room work on the actual outline.

**John:** Cool. Now, you’re in the room right now. What are you working on?

**Mindy:** I’m working on a miniseries, a ten-episode miniseries that’s an adaptation of the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.

**John:** Holy cow. That feels exactly in your wheelhouse.

**Mindy:** Yeah. Well, you know, Richard Curtis is such a genius and has such a distinct voice. And it wasn’t until I was adapting someone else’s distinct voice that I was like, “Oh, I think I have a distinct voice and it’s not the same as this person’s voice.” So it’s been interesting being like, well, people are really – if they wanted to watch Four Weddings and a Funeral as an adaptation into a miniseries what would that look like? And what did they want knowing that I’m doing it?

So I’m trying to fulfill the promise of people who want to see that while also being like, OK, this is through the eyes of Mindy Kaling. And the biggest change that we made is the lead is an African American girl. And the male lead is a British Pakistani man. And so already I’m like, OK, I feel like I can get onboard with these two leads.

**John:** And so right now are you just blue-skying, or you’re breaking episodes? What happens in this part of the room?

**Mindy:** We just finished blue-skying which is the most fun period of preproduction and now we’re going into breaking the first episode. I mean, the first episode is actually written, so we’re doing episode two, which is a little bit harder. Less fun.

**John:** So a listener wrote in with a question which I thought would be a perfect question for you. So we’ll try to answer this question. Iris in Philadelphia writes, “I’ve been developing my first feature film and I’m putting a lot of thought into point of view. The film is an unconventional romance. The majority of the film is through the point of view of the protagonist. How do I shift the POV at one key point in the film? Do you find that certain genres lend themselves to using POV in different ways?”

So POV is a crucial thing for the things you’ve written. The Office of course has that documentary conceit. Four Weddings and a Funeral, at what point are you approaching POV in figuring out your stories? And who can drive a scene by themselves?

**Mindy:** Wow. I can talk about it more from TV than features because I’ve only written like two features. But I will say that in TV it’s kind of trial and error. You see like, OK, we know – at least in The Mindy Project we’re like we know Danny can do a POV story. We know Mindy can. Adam Pally seems to be able to be and that character.

And then sometimes you’ll do a character on the show and it’s somehow not working. And it’s often because as a POV character we didn’t take the time at the beginning. You have to establish who are the leads and who are the secondary characters. And it’s a real thing. And when you have a secondary character they only reveal themselves as a secondary character when they try to have a story. And it just is not as interesting.

And I think that we did that on The Office, too. It’s like there were five characters who could hold a story. And if you tried to do that with someone else–

**John:** A Phyllis story wouldn’t make a lot of sense in The Office.

**Mindy:** It wouldn’t. And she would have things, like Phyllis’s wedding was the name of a story. She would often be like the cover story of an episode, but it really revealed itself. And that’s something you do at the very beginning. You have to decide, particularly in a comedy, that you’re not burn your characters off for jokes and make it so that you wouldn’t be able – that they’re not a fully three-dimensional POV character. It’s actually something that on Four Weddings we really want there to be – it’s an hour-long, so more than ever you really need these strong POV characters. You can’t have funny secondary characters where you make up some crazy backstory for them for a joke and you sacrifice something that’s their character just to do a comedy bit.

And so on Four Weddings we’ve been like, OK, this is an hour-long, so more than two characters have to be able to have story. So, it’s like eight characters have to be fully three-dimensional characters. And I think film is great that way. There’s a believability thing that movies have to have that sitcoms don’t have to have, I think, where it’s like, no, we demand all the characters be fully three-dimensionalized characters with active internal lives that you don’t necessarily have to have on a sitcom.

**John:** Well, the other difference between a TV series and a feature is that a feature generally you’re following a character on a journey they would only take once. And like that character is going to change over the course of this movie. But on a TV series you have to be able to come back to these characters again and again. So what you’re saying about not burning off a character for a joke, because you’re going to need them for like the next ten episodes, or even in a short-run like this you’re going to need them for later on. And you’ve got to make sure that it actually tracks and feels real.

**Mindy:** Well, it’s interesting because if you have like the character I played on The Office, Kelly, you only need her for like a joke or two an episode. So it’s OK that she has like insane backstory or big dramatic characteristics/personality traits and things, but you couldn’t do that for almost anyone else otherwise it would just be like only Steve Carell being able to do anything and you actually care.

So, that’s something I feel like I learned on The Mindy Project where I was like, oh, things are going to get really fucking exhausting for me if we don’t flesh out some of these other characters and so you really care about them and their journeys.

I don’t think this answered her question. Sorry Iris.

**John:** I think it did. This was good. We did a whole episode on POV and this was sort of a follow up question on that. But I think we couldn’t talk about it in TV the way that you could talk about it in TV, so thank you for that.

**Mindy:** Of course.

**John:** At the end of our shows we do a One Cool Thing. I think I emailed you to warn you about this.

**Mindy:** Yes. Yeah.

**John:** So do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Mindy:** Oh yeah. My One Cool Thing is a show on Netflix that I just started watching called The End of the Fucking World.

**John:** I heard it’s great. I want to watch it.

**Mindy:** It’s so good. Well, what it does is that it’s incredibly stylish. It’s very dark. And it does something at the very beginning – this isn’t a spoiler – where the lead character kills a cat because he’s a psychopath. And you’re like, whoa, according to books that I’ve read about screenwriting and writing you’re supposed to save the cat. So, I thought that was really bold and it’s just incredibly stylish. It’s really well directed, which I never used to care about how things were directed or think about it.

And then the other thing I’ve watched which I love is the miniseries Godless, which I really want women to watch because I think they see western – I don’t know, did you see Godless?

**John:** I did. Scott Frank was a guest on the show and it’s remarkable.

**Mindy:** It’s so great. And I think when you see western I think a lot of women are like, eh, that’s not something I’m all that interested in watching. But two of the great characters in it are women in roles that I think are just awesome that I have never seen in any movie. So I just loved that miniseries. And it don’t think there’s going to be a season two. It doesn’t seem like it’s that kind of thing. Did he tell you?

**John:** I haven’t heard about a season two.

**Mindy:** But I just loved it. Merritt Weaver’s role is so great. And Michelle Dockery is fantastic in it. So those are my two. What’s your thing?

**John:** My One Cool Thing is we went down to the Broad this last week, so the museum in Downtown Los Angeles. And it’s all remarkable. But this room we went in at the very end, and I typically don’t go into those video installation rooms because I didn’t come to a museum to see video, but it’s this amazing thing done called The Visitors. And it’s this installation by Ragnar Kjartansson – I’m butchering his name – but it is a bunch of Icelandic folks who went to this house in Upstate New York and they hung out at this old decrepit farmhouse. And they start singing this song. And the song goes on for like an hour. But they’re all in different rooms. They all have headphones on and their singing in their microphones. And the song just sort of keeps repeating.

But you’re seeing it on all these different screens around the room, so as you wander around you get close to somebody. You can hear them sing their song or play whatever instrument they’re singing. And eventually they all kind of come together and leave. And it was just beautiful. It was like kind of being inside the space of once in a way. It was just really remarkable.

So, if you’re downtown for any reason I would recommend go to the Broad, but also check out this really remarkable film installation thing called The Visitors. I think it’s there through January.

**Mindy:** That’s so great. Because when you said The Visitors I was like, ah, this is some slasher thing. I always go to horror movies. So that’s the opposite of a horror movie. That sounds great.

**John:** But I have this aspiration of just like hanging out with a group of sort of like grungy people and like singing songs in a farmhouse. And then you get to sort of be with that group of people and it’s remarkable. So, check it out.

**Mindy:** Cool.

**John:** And that’s our show. So our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Timothy Vajda. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the one we answered today.

For short questions, Twitter is great. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Mindy, what are you on Twitter?

**Mindy:** I’m @mindykaling.

**John:** You’re also @mindykaling on Instagram? Correct?

**Mindy:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** You can find us on Apple Podcasts and starting today on Spotify. So, just search for Scriptnotes and while you’re there leave us a review. That helps people find the show.

Transcripts for the show go up about four days after the episode airs. You can find them at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the show notes for things we talked about on the show.

But most importantly I want to thank Mindy Kaling. It was so great to finally meet you and talk with you about writing stuff.

**Mindy:** Yeah. It was so good to be here. It’s funny, when you talk about your childhood or like your teen hood and how you became a writer, I was like I don’t want to revisit that. But I was glad I did.

**John:** Yeah, it’s fun. So, Mindy, thanks so much.

**Mindy:** Thanks.

Links:

* Thanks to [Mindy Kaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindy_Kaling) for joining us!
* [Champions](https://www.nbc.com/champions) is available to watch on NBC.com.
* You can watch a recording of her play, [Matt and Ben](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBbMv3gO0lo), written and performed by Mindy and Brenda Withers. It premiered at the [Fringe Festival](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_International_Fringe_Festival) in New York.
* Keep an eye out for [Four Weddings and a Funeral](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/mindy-kalings-four-weddings-a-funeral-anthology-a-go-at-hulu-1106794).
* [The End of the Fucking World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_F***ing_World) and [Godless](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godless_(TV_series)) on Netflix
* [The Visitors](https://www.thebroad.org/art/ragnar-kjartansson/the-visitors) by Ragnar Kjartansson at The Broad
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Mindy Kaling](https://twitter.com/mindykaling) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Timothy Vajda ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_362.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/bad-behavior).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi folks. Today’s episode may feature some strong language. So if you’re listening with your kids you may want to stop that. Or put some headphones on.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 353 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be discussing the hot new trend of firing assholes off television shows and speculate about what happens next. Then we’ll be answering listener questions on feature comedies, biopics, and shopping agreements.

**Craig:** That’s great. You know what’s funny, John, is that those folks who are listening to this heard me just warn them that there might be some strong language. And then you immediately say asshole, which I like. You know, let’s just get right to it. We’re going to say asshole a lot today.

**John:** Yeah, we are. Because people have always been assholes and I think we’re calling them on it more now and we will discuss that trend of calling people assholes.

**Craig:** Wonderful.

**John:** But first some follow up. So back in Episode 348 we discussed the Elif Batuman story for the New Yorker about Japan’s rent-a-relative business. And we wondered How Would This Be a Movie. And the answer is someone will hopefully find out because they’re going to try to develop it as a series it looks like for Anonymous Content, Paramount TV, and Conde Nast.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t get it, personally. I mean, I do, but I don’t. I mean, the part that I get is the part where they think, “OK, this is sort of a good inspiration for a show.” The part that always puzzles me is why people feel the need to go get the rights to things. So I’m of two minds about this. One mind is that there are some things about these individual stories that people find really attractive and so just to close the loop on things and be safe and smart they go ahead and they get the rights. But another part of me, frankly the majority part of me, thinks it’s just general media company laziness. They feel like it’s not real unless they’ve purchased a thing to make it real. I just don’t see what the point of buying some of these things is.

**John:** I understand your concern there. I will say that by these companies coming together to say like, “OK, this is a real thing that we’re going to develop” — it gives them ownership – at least some sort of intellectual ownership, not even real legal ownership, of that idea space. And sort of scare somebody else off from trying to do something that’s like that in that space, because they are first out of the gate with the announcement saying we’re going to try to make this as a show.

I think also the idea of trying to do it as a show is a good one. I don’t remember whether we talked about that as whether it’s a movie or a TV series, but the more I think about it I think it is a TV series idea because it’s the ongoing relationships you form with these families, sort of like The Americans, you see people dropping in and playing different roles in different scenarios. That could be very cool.

**Craig:** It absolutely could be. And I think you’re right. That sometimes there is a certain claim-staking value to purchasing some of this material. But there is a flip side to that coin and that is that sometimes companies will do some stake-claiming with – I won’t say it’s like this where there was an article that was published, but rather there’s a book. So someone says, “OK, so-and-so is writing a book about blankety-blank.” And it’s a lot of times with big authors and big books they will pre-sell the film rights. So the book is going to be published in a year but we have the rights to it and we’re going to start developing something.

But meanwhile the writer is still working on the book. Well, actually that happened with Chernobyl. A little bit after I set Chernobyl up, which was just based on my own research. There’s no individual book that I said, “OK, we’re going to purchase this book and make a show of this book.” Another company and another producer, fairly well-known, very reputable producer did this kind of thing where he bought the rights to an unpublished book and then they sort of waited. They had to wait. I guess for the book to be done.

Meanwhile, you know, our show is shooting. So there is a little bit of a danger to that. Sometimes I think – and the only reason I bring it up is because it cuts against us, meaning you and me as writers, and anybody else out there as writers, this thing where companies are constantly buying material, sometimes when they don’t need to, diminishes our individual rights as writers.

So, I don’t know, I guess I’m just saying wouldn’t it be nice if these companies saved a little money and maybe afforded the actual writers of these things a little more credit.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about that credit, because I think what you’re alluding to is that because this is going to be based on preexisting material there are scenarios in which whichever writer comes in to actually do this may not have the degree of rights to the property that they would otherwise have, such as separated rights. They might not have the ability to control spinoff sort of materials. Even if they were to hold onto some of those things, they just have less hand in the project overall because it’s not their thing, it’s the studio’s thing. And that is a power imbalance that will affect the whole project going forward.

**Craig:** It will. And I am constantly struck by the arbitrary nature of the birth of things in this business. And simply by a quirk of, “Oh, I happened to mention it to someone, well now they’re the producer of it.” Or they happened to read this article that no one needs to buy, because we’re not talking about using any actual elements from the article other than the things that are public record. Now they somehow will make more money than the writer who actually does the work.

There’s all these strange things that happen at the beginning of the inception of projects. And I do think that as writers going into the next decade where the, I think – I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say that the demand for content will continue to increase – we have a lot of power that we give away simply by not paying attention in the very beginning. That’s all I’m going to put out there.

**John:** Yeah. But I don’t want to undercut a thing we’ve said often on the show which is that the idea is not the thing. The execution is the thing. Well, this is a situation where the idea kind of is the thing and like they’ve chosen to put a lot of value in this idea or this notion of like, OK, it’s a rental family thing, and these people have bought this idea but not the execution. So it is just a really dangerous precedent that we’re sort of starting to set.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, look, the interesting thing is that these folks bought this idea, but you and I could write this idea ourselves.

**John:** 100%. Yeah.

**Craig:** So like what are they buying? That’s the weird part, you know.

**John:** They’re buying air.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re buying air.

**John:** It’s tulip fever. On previous episodes we’ve talked about outlines and whether we outline and sort of what applications we use to outline. Folks have written in with their suggestions for things that they use for outlining and so I thought we’d talk through some of them. So, we’ll start with Workflowy. That’s what Craig and I are looking at right now. It’s how we do the outlines for the show. I use it sometimes for outlining for creative projects. I don’t use it a ton. What I like about Workflowy, it is a shared thing, so Craig and I are looking at the same document. We can update it in real time. That is genuinely useful. And it’s pretty minimalist. Like it just works the way I sort of expect it to work. So, I do like it for that.

But listeners wrote in with some other suggestions, so I thought I’d read through them. And we’ll have links in the show notes if anything is interesting to you.

The next one down here is called Gingko. So I tried that this afternoon. It’s weird. So it’s a web app. You create things on the left hand column. They can branch out into things on the right column, and then the third column to the right. And things can nest together. I never really got it. It could be a thing where you spent some good time with it and it becomes feeling very natural. But it did seem like a lot to learn right off the bat. And sort of a strange way of doing things.

**Craig:** So many of these things are – what’s the word–

**John:** Skeuomorphic?

**Craig:** That’s what I’m thinking of. Skeuomorphic, right? Where we’re doing digital versions of real life things, like index cards. And so this one looks very much like, here, we’ll give you index cards without index cards. But you know what I also have? Index cards.

**John:** You have actual physical index cards.

**Craig:** Which are wonderful.

**John:** So the next thing we have on our list is Cloud Outliner Pro. This is a Mac app. There’s other versions of it, too. This one looks a lot like Workflowy, except it’s actually genuinely a Mac app. It seemed fine. The controls for it weren’t as intuitive as what I’m used to in Workflowy, but I’m sure you get used to it. It seems fine. If you want an application that just does the outlining stuff.

**Craig:** I got to be honest with you. “It seems fine” is not enough of a recommendation for me.

**John:** It’s not a glowing recommendation from me.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So if you want a really powerful one, an app I’ve used a couple times and I keep trying to love and I just have never fully fallen in love with is OmniOutliner Pro. It’s from Omni. And they’re a great Mac developer. This one is like our Workflowy. It’s like a normal outline, but it actually has columns. And so you can do complicated things with columns across. So you could have like this is the scene, these are the characters who are in that scene. I’ve tried to use it for that purpose before and it’s always felt like too much application for when I want to try to do this.

Someone recommended just using Pages and just using the bullets on Pages. When you’ve done outlines have you done them in Word before? How have you done that kind of stuff?

**Craig:** I do them in Word. And Word has kind of an automatic numbering system which you can format as you like. So, you can – sometimes if I’m doing a true-true bare bones outline I will do a kind of Roman numeral – I guess you’d call it a legal outlining system where you start with a number, then you go to a letter, a Roman numeral, a small letter, and whatever. So I can do that. But typically I’ll just do one, two three. A list, essentially. And it automatically formats that for you. It’s pretty simple to do.

And I do like that because if I go back and stick something between two and three it knows to make three and everything after a bump up one. You know, easy.

**John:** Yeah. And so Highland has a similar feature. So Highland automatically does lists for you, so if you add something between it will renumber the list and sort of make that all work. It’s totally doable and you can use the header formats to sort of break out stuff if you wanted to. But it’s probably not what people are talking about with outlines where you can just drag stuff around simply. That’s a thing that we can do in Workflowy which is really helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah. Workflowy is great, it’s just a little too minimalistic for me. For whatever reason I do like numbering things. I don’t know why. When I’m doing things on index cards, I mean, my proper outlining is to actually – I have a little template that I made for myself in Word that is an index card template. And I have a font that’s like Sharpie font, which is very comforting. So I just type them. I just type them and print them. It’s old school.

**John:** Are you laying those out on a table? Are you sticking them up on a wall? How are you doing those?

**Craig:** Ah, OK, so, folks at home prepare to envy me, if you don’t already envy me. Years and years ago, now we’re talking 15 years ago, when I first met David Zucker, we were in his office in Santa Monica working on Scary Movie 3. And he had this wonderful thing on his wall. It was this corkboard, but then it had two hinged wings that could close in. And the front and back of those wings were corkboard. So you essentially had six corkboard surfaces that could fold in and open up. And this, in fact, was the same corkboard that they were using for Naked Gun.

So he and Jerry and Jim had been using this – they had it built. And years later when David moved out of that office and just was working out of his home, this thing ended up in storage. And I was like I want it. And we got it out of storage. It was like in some lockup in Compton somewhere. And so we got it out of storage and they just gave it to me. And I have it and it’s in my office. So I have the Naked Gun bulletin board and I use it constantly. It’s the best thing. I don’t know what to do – if it should ever fall apart, I think I’ll just retire.

**John:** Oh, that’s charming and sad. So you have your big special corkboard. You know, when I’ve needed to use the actual physical thing I’ve not found index cards to be especially helpful. I’ve done sometimes just like on a big table. You can just lay them out there and that can be helpful. They don’t stay put that way, which is sort of the advantage I guess of a corkboard. But like a TV room I will just use a whiteboard. And just whiteboard and markers. And that’s honestly how most TV is put together is just on a big whiteboard and that’s another good way of doing it.

**Craig:** By the way, do you go horizontal or vertical?

**John:** I go vertical.

**Craig:** So do I. And guess what? We’re the weird ones?

**John:** Oh really?

**Craig:** Because everything I see, early on there were some skeuomorphic – I’m not saying it right, but I don’t care – apps where you could – it was like little index card/corkboard apps. And they would–

**John:** Final Draft still has that.

**Craig:** OK. They would default to horizontal. And for instance when Tom Schnauz, sometimes Tom will publish on Twitter a picture of what the index cards for a particular episode of Better Call Saul looks like. All their progression is horizontal.

**John:** So it goes left to right, then left to right, then left to right?

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’m a big top to bottom kind of guy.

**John:** Yeah. That feels weird to me. But everyone has their own way.

**Craig:** I know. But our way is right.

**John:** Our way is right. The last thing I will point people to, and Craig click the link on this because I’m curious what you think of it, it’s an app called Causality that someone had recommended. It looks just like a lot of app. And so if you thought OmniOutliner was too much, this is a thing that’s trying to actually build your screenplay in a way and there’s a timeline view.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** It’s a lot of app.

**Craig:** Oh my god. This is like they’ve basically tried to Avid a screenplay. So like a stripped timeline with bricks. I hate this sort of thing. I apologize. I’m sure it is a wonderful app for a lot of people. I just look at these things and I think I’m further away from my story than ever. Now I’m into something else, this graphical representation of it. I’m adding layers between myself and the thing I feel. I don’t like it.

**John:** Yeah. You’re a long ways away from the writing in something like this.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And so for all my criticism of Final Draft, at least you are looking at the screenplay.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This you’re looking at some just bizarro representation of what this thing would be. But you will know that there are templates you can download for it that build in Save the Cat, so that’s useful.

**Craig:** Is it? [laughs] I mean, this just seems like an amazing thing for bad screenwriting professors, which is nearly a redundancy, to use in a class to enforce some sort of rigid thing. It’s very pedantic looking. None of this is at all necessary when what you really need – and this is the most unsexy thing, and you can’t monetize this – is inspiration, talent, and either a pen and a pad or just–

**John:** The most basic way of just getting text onto a surface.

**Craig:** Right. And even if you want to just say, look, I think formatting is important to me ultimately. Then you’ve made the app for everyone. Highland 2. Here’s the cheapest solution that totally works. You can write in normal text. It turns it into a properly formatted screenplay. What you need is some kind of inspiration/understanding of how to tell a story. None of this stuff – I guess my point is I feel like if you need this, it’s probably not your business.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe so.

**Craig:** Probably not for you. But, look, I am notoriously a dick. So, there you go.

**John:** I’ll leave this segment on, outlining apps. Definitely use the thing that works for you, I just feel like in general minimalism is going to be your friend and a thing that gets you thinking about the sequences of your story and not about the technology behind it is going to be helpful.

What’s useful about some of these apps is that they’re freeform enough you can just drag stuff around and drop them the same way you could with index cards or something else. You can sort of see what the layout of your stuff is. But if it’s anything that to me is skeuomorphically trying to create Craig’s index cards is probably going to be worse for the process. Because you’re spending your time figuring out how to use the app and not figuring out how to structure your story.

**Craig:** I agree. The one thing you definitely don’t want your goal to be is a pretty outline.

**John:** Oh, a beautiful outline. Yeah.

**Craig:** Worthless. Absolutely worthless.

**John:** Color-coded. Good tags.

**Craig:** Feh.

**John:** Feh. All right, let’s get to our feature topic. I’m excited to get into this.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** So over the past few months something kind of weird and unprecedented happened in TV at least. Is that two, actually three networks now have decided to let loose the stars of their popular series and fire them not because of sort of money or contract demands, which is the classic things, but because of their behavior. So first I guess we had Jeffrey Tambor who was booted from Transparent. We had Clayne Crawford who was knocked off of Lethal Weapon. So Fox agreed to pick it up but with a different star attached. And then this last week Roseanne booted from her show, or the show was canceled at Craig’s request, because of her racist tweet.

**Craig:** I think I did it. [laughs]

**John:** You did it. So, I want to talk about a couple things. First off, am I right in thinking this is actually something new?

I mean, that is in previous seasons the networks would have just hunkered down and made their way through it because the show was successful and they were just going to pretend they didn’t see it. And if it is new, then what’s changed? What are the reasons why we’re seeing this now in 2018 where we didn’t see it in 2017?

**Craig:** Well, it’s sort of new. I think that there have been incidents in the past. Is it Isaiah Washington? Is that his name?

**John:** Yeah, yeah. And I was thinking of him and I was also thinking of Charlie Sheen.

**Craig:** And Charlie Sheen. There have been incidents in the past where networks or producers have terminated stars of hit shows because of their bad behavior. I think what has changed beyond the culture around us, I mean, certainly since the – we are living in a Weinstein era. I guess we’ll call it a post-Weinstein era. That is an enormous difference.

I think the fact that we have a president who is also a many time accused sexual assaulter and also notorious and factually-proven liar has created a lot of sensitivity about these things. And thirdly there’s Twitter. And we now have a situation where you can’t get away with saying things the way you used to before simply because they weren’t noticed. I mean, Roseanne has been saying crap like this for years. Years. Which they knew. And people generally just sort of didn’t know. Or if it happened it happened and disappeared. That doesn’t occur anymore. I don’t think that’s a thing you can do now.

**John:** So the three stars I mentioned, they all had sort of different trajectories. And it’s worth maybe looking at what the commonalties are and what the differences are. So Jeffrey Tambor, there were specifics, sexual harassment allegations against him, but also increasingly just being a dick kind of problems that were surfaced about him, when he was let loose from Transparent. Clayne Crawford, it wasn’t a sexual harassment thing I heard about so much but just that he was the problem on set, or he was a significant problem on set and was an obstacle to actually making the show that they needed to make.

And Roseanne, the final firing line was over a tweet she did. And I think if you were to dial back five, 10, 15 years, these same people could have been in those positions but I think you’re right. There wasn’t Twitter to either let themselves – they couldn’t hoist themselves up by their own petards. They’d have to go through some other media platform to get it out there. So, they say something to a reporter and that gets reported, or they’re caught on TMZ doing something. But there were buffers between this. And Twitter has sort of taken away the buffers.

And in some cases, you know, it’s probably the case of Jeffrey Tambor, people are more willing to speak out because of sort of a Twitter culture that says I’m going to share my story about what actually really happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there was a time, too, I think in our culture where people were simply more naïve about how this stuff worked. And networks and studios took advantage of that. They would get rid of people for being huge problems. But they would do it under the guise of their character dies and it’s a bit of drama and then that person says, “Oh yes, I wanted to pursue other projects.” They would lie. So they were just lies.

A bit like, you know, in the ‘50s when a young woman had an unwanted pregnancy and needed an abortion then she would take a holiday or something. Go overseas to visit someone. And then would come back later. There was this weird Kabuki theater that people would do because there was a shame around these things. And everybody bought it. Or maybe they didn’t, I don’t know. But we don’t do that anymore. We don’t need to. We don’t have shame about those things. And similarly for people on television – I don’t think anybody would those excuses anymore. We’re too savvy. I think the culture is too savvy. I mean, remember when you and I were growing up nobody ever talked about box office. Now everybody looks to see what a movie has made by Friday at noon. Because we’re just movie and TV savvy now.

**John:** Yeah we are. So, let’s think about whether it’s useful to draw a distinction between a person who is a difficult and a person who is an asshole. Because you and I have both worked with difficult people, and sometimes it’s worth it to deal with difficult people because they are genuinely talented and they’re not actually mean or bad people, just they are a lot to handle.

And so there’s been people I’ve worked with and people will call me to ask like, “Should I work with this person in the future?” And I will tell them these are the problems you’re going to run into and here’s why you need to decide whether that’s worth it to you. But if someone is asking me is this person an asshole, that’s a different conversation. That’s like this is a bad person who will make your life miserable and will hurt people around you.

I’ve always felt pretty free to speak up about that, but I feel like overall we’re more empowered as a town to be talking about that just in the last year or two. I feel like those conversations are coming much more to the fore.

**Craig:** No question. And it is an important distinction to make. Because it is inevitable that you will work with people that are “difficult.” Everybody’s difficult is different. Sometimes people are difficult simply because the relationship with another person is just not a good fit. So one person may say, “Oh yeah, so-and-so is difficult to work with,” and another person may say, “Oh, no, they were a dream.” That can happen.

Also, “difficult” sometimes is a function of just a person’s way of doing their job, but they’re not trying to be malicious. They just are puzzling. Actors in particular can be difficult in that I find some incredibly gifted, wonderful actors may behave in ways that are illogical. They may behave in ways that are seemingly hypocritical and yet they don’t recognize it. They may say and do things that seem counterproductive or self-destructive. A lot of it is connected to fear and feelings.

And yet if you get through it and survive that process what you get is wonderful work and you understand that that person is being difficult because they don’t know how else to get where they need to go to give you a good performance. And that’s their job.

But then on the other side of that line is abusive behavior and mean behavior which is –- whether it’s part of their process or not — I don’t think is going to be tolerated anymore. And this is sort of the discussion that was going on around Arrested Development the last week or so.

**John:** Absolutely. So I didn’t dive too deeply into any of the articles but it was the question of if you’re doing a group interview and this topic of Tambor comes up, how do you respond in a group interview to the reality of what’s in front of you? And his behavior in relation to everybody else who is in that same room. That’s tough. And it doesn’t sound like people nailed that conversation.

**Craig:** Well, I listened to it and I actually was really impressed by everybody. I know people gave Jason Bateman a really hard time and he went out and said, “OK, I might have flubbed that one,” or he said, “I did flub it.” But I actually thought that there was a very grownup conversation going on about performance and acting and the different temperaments involved in acting. And the fact that the work product of acting is ideally a true emotional expression. Requires actors sometimes to go to strange places inside of themselves psychologically. It is naïve to expect that that will not have some sort of bleed through for some people when you’re not in between action and cut.

But I also thought that it was a very reasonable response to say, “Yes, until you are hurting other human beings,” and at that point we have to protect humans. It’s not fair. There is ultimately, I don’t think, an even balance between treating humans decently and getting a good performance. I’d rather that people just be treated decently. There is no single actor in their genius ability that to me justifies them being cruel to other people.

So, I thought it was a really interesting discussion. Note, this was not about the accusations of sexual harassment against Jeffrey Tambor. This was about Jeffrey Tambor’s behavior, essentially being verbally abusive and being a dick during the shooting of Arrested Development in some prior seasons.

And lastly I will say that it is my experience that a lot of times when we hear that someone is a bad guy, or a bad woman, and then I meet them in person I am sort of stunned by the fact that that is not the case, at least for me. And there are other actors, men and women, who are held up as paragons of virtue, good guys and good ladies–

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And then I meet them and I go, “Oh god, no, you’re awful.” There is one person in particular I’m thinking of who is sort of lauded for being wonderful and my personal experience is that this person is a monster.

**John:** Yep. And that’s why you have some of those conversations before you cast somebody in a role. Ideally just know like, “OK, you’ve worked with this person before. Is there anything you want me to know about them?” And that’s why you talk honestly about sort of what’s going on there.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also I would just add that the person that I encountered and went, oh god, this person is a monster, you know, then I asked other people, “By the way, do you know—“ And everyone is like, “Oh yeah, no, of course. This ironically incredibly famous person is also ironically a terrible human being but we all just quietly move about our day.” And that part is shocking.

**John:** Again, I wonder if it’s worthwhile to distinguish between one blow up and a pattern of behavior. So, I was thinking back to Christian Bale’s notorious blow up on the set of Terminator Resurrection and all the brouhaha over that, versus if Roseanne had tweeted this one time and had never tweeted anything else like this I don’t think she would have been fired. If that had been one tweet, and that was the one tweet, I don’t think this show would have been canceled.

I think there’s a difference between a long pattern of behavior and sort of like this one-time blow up that people do look at very differently. And the decision to get rid of her was like, “OK, we’ve crossed that line and we’re never going to go back to a place of normal sanity. We’ve got to cut our losses and run.”

Do you see a difference between the one-time and the pattern?

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, we are human. Every single person on this planet has had a bad hair day, you know. Everybody has lost their temper at some point. Everybody has done something that they regretted. Everybody has said something that they wish they hadn’t said. We’ve all had moments where later we feel ashamed of how we acted and then we make amends. We apologize. First of all, Christian Bale’s thing, I was on his side. Because I’m still angry about the fact that a DP goes behind an actor while the camera is on the other actor. So Christian Bale is trying to do a scene looking at another human being, and meanwhile behind that human being is a guy moving the lights around while they’re shooting. That’s crazy. So I actually understand that blow up. I mean, yes, any individual blow up when you start to listen to it it becomes unhinged and a little scary because that’s what blow ups are. That’s what anger does. And Christian Bale I believe apologized later, because that’s how it goes.

That’s different. The people that I have found scary aren’t the ones that have had moments and then come back to you and say, “I’m sorry about that.” The people that I find scary are the people that have no idea that they’re being cruel and in fact cruelty is sort of their method. They live in a weird space where they show up angry, they continue angry, and then they leave angry. And while they’re there they’re just mean. And mean in ways that make no sense. Those are the people that I just find terrible.

**John:** Yeah. That’s where you start to look at the, like, this person may be a psychopath test.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** These are the people who cover their walls in pictures of predatory animals. They can fake human emotions but not actually demonstrate them. That is a real thing and you will see some of those behaviors.

But I want to talk about though these three examples we gave were all TV examples and there’s a difference I think with what we put up with in features versus what we put up with in TV. I think because TV you’re coming back for another season, you’re going to have to keep working with this person. Versus in features at least to this point we’re like “OK it’s only a month. It’s three months. We can get through this.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “And so we just suffer through with this person and hope to never work with that person again until the movie is a huge hit and then we’re making the sequel.” That is an interesting thing and I’d be curious to see the first movie that fires a lead actor and just says like, “OK, no, you’re horrible, you’re gone.” I mean, Kevin Spacey is sort of an example of that because when they reshot all that stuff, but I’m curious what the first like while a movie is happening we’re just like “OK, no, we’re done, go away.”

**Craig:** Well, it doesn’t have to necessarily be an actor. For instance Bryan Singer was recently fired from the Queen biopic because of terrible behavior. Now, of note, Bryan Singer has been accused of terrible behavior practically for every single movie he’s directed in the last ten years, or more. So, again, it does seem like things are changing. The tolerance for this sort of thing is starting to drop to zero.

In the case of Roseanne, yes, if this had been the only time she had ever tweeted something like that then I suppose there would have been interventions, tears, apologies, the Ambien excuse may have possibly held a little bit of water. But the nature of it was so outrageous and so disgusting that I just don’t think it would have ever been able to continue even if it had been a one-time thing because there is a difference between a blow up where you are so dedicated to your work that you become enraged at inefficiencies or things that keep you from doing your job and incidences where you express thoughts or opinions or feelings that are just repugnant and completely out of line with the experience you want people to have when they watch your show.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s worth pointing out was that Roseanne’s issue wasn’t about her being a bully on the set. It was about things she was saying off the set that were just abhorrent. And that was one of the first times we’ve seen that. So it wasn’t about what she was doing on the set. It was something unrelated that was causing her to be nixed from it.

So the last thing to sort of talk about, we talked about actors, we talked about directors, but some writers are notoriously assholes. And there’s been writers who have been famously fired or had big scandals that happened because of how they were running their writer’s rooms. Not so much on the feature side, because we’re not sort of in control very much, but there’s writers who are in control who are out of control.

One of the things I find so fascinating and frustrating is that we are one of the only places in the world where someone with no management experience is suddenly expected to manage a staff and be able to do all these things with no training and sometimes very little support around them. So I think it’s not a wonder that some people’s worst instincts come out in those situations.

**Craig:** Yeah. And to complicate matters further, what I said about actors is also true for writers. We’re emotional people, like all humans, but on top of it we’re doing something that is specifically emotional by design. We write and create these things. We do it with emotion. We do it to create emotion. And then we are, in television at least, placed in charge of the process to bring this about. And when things are different or don’t work right or are frustrating it is natural then to have strong emotional feelings about it.

And I think ultimately the best advice for all of us in these situations is when you have those responses, those strong emotional reactions, go have them quietly somewhere else. Have them to your heart’s content alone so as to not dump that on other humans. And then when you have calmed down and are able to be a little more dispassionate, come back and address the cause. Because you can fix things quite easily if you’re not enraged or frightened, you know.

It’s the anger and the fear in the moment that never – you might get what you want right then and there just by screaming or shouting or throwing a tantrum or being angry or afraid, but in the long run you’re damaging yourself, you’re damaging human beings around you, and you’re damaging the show.

**John:** Yeah. When you Hulk out you just destroy things. That’s what you do.

**Craig:** Hulk Smash.

**John:** Hulk Smash. All right, let’s smash our way through some questions. We will start with Mark. Mark writes, “What happened to feature comedy? It’s one of the genres I specialize in. Even though I’ve gotten positive feedback on my script from a variety of sources, people keep turning me down when I go in to pitch. In general the explanation is since comedy is no longer doing well in theaters they are only looking for small budget indie style comedies or ‘high concept’ bigger budget films with star talent attached. And, unfortunately, I fall somewhere in the middle of the scale.

“After doing research it does seems to be true that only dramedies like Bick Sick or Lady Bird or star vehicle comedies seem to be opening in theaters lately. And even then the numbers seem to be declining. Meanwhile, mid-budget comedies in the vein of Superbad, American Pie, and even something like Zombieland seem nowhere to be found as far as I can see. Is this reasoning just an excuse for executives to turn my scripts down, or is it true the feature comedy landscape is actually changing or declining?”

Craig, you write in this space. Tell me about it.

**Craig:** I don’t agree with this argument. Yes, it is true that there used to be more comedies because there used to be more movies. And it is also true that of the reduced amount of movies that now exist, we’re talking about theatrical films, a greater percentage of them are franchise movies which tend to be action films, super hero films, etc. The smaller movies a lot of times are mini-budget horror movies.

So I’m just looking at 2017 and so right off the bat I see Girls Trip. So when we talk about what he says, “Original mid-budget comedies in the vein of Superbad, American Pie, and Zombieland seem nowhere to be found as far as I can see,” it’s staring right at you right there. Girls Trip worked. And there was The House and there was Jumanji which I thought, I mean, it’s a larger thing but it was definitely a comedy. The made Chips which, OK, maybe didn’t work, but again in that same zone. There was Snatched.

Anyway, point is they do make comedies. Kevin Hart makes one a year as far as I can tell. So, they absolutely make these. Melissa McCarthy makes one to two a year as far as I can tell. It has always been the case that comedies are driven by comic stars. When one of them kind of comes out of nowhere then that person becomes a comic star and they keep making movies with that person.

I don’t think anything has changed other than the fact that they make fewer movies in general. If you get turned down when you go to pitch, you’re pitching to the wrong people. I mean, I don’t understand this. You go to pitch a screenplay for a comedy and the person says, “Oh, comedy is no longer doing well. We only want small budget indie style comedies or high concept bigger budget films,” who is sending you into these rooms?

**John:** That does feel weird.

**Craig:** Either you’re in the wrong rooms or they’re kind of just lying to you and really what they’re saying is, “We just don’t want to buy that.”

**John:** Yeah. I can see that. Another comedy that I really loved quite a bit was Game Night of this last year.

**Craig:** Yeah, Game Night, there you go.

**John:** Which was delightful. And, again, mid budget. Stars Jason Bateman. It’s the right kind of thing for what we’re describing.

I think they do still exist. I think Craig is correct that it’s mostly because we’re just making fewer movies overall, so in making fewer movies we’re making fewer of these comedies. I also do wonder is the kinds of comedies we’re talking about, even Game Night, even Girls Trip, as a script you could also make that as that lower budget thing, too. So I’m not sure you’re necessarily – unless it’s Jumanji where it literally is that expensive of a movie to make, or some of the other Kevin Hart things like Central Intelligence that requires a certain budget and scale, a lot of those scripts are going to look the same whether they’re kind of low budge or medium budget. So, write those scripts and if people want to make them they will make them.

And the reason they become mid budget is because they add on some stars and enough of a production value that it just costs that much and they shoot it in Atlanta. But otherwise it’s not that different of a thing. So, keep writing those scripts. And also I’d say writing those scripts is also probably a good way to get staffed on the many, many comedies that are shooting these days for TV.

**Craig:** Yeah. And they’re also making comedy films for TV, you know, Netflix for instance does this sort of thing. But, yeah, I think that there’s still plenty of life in the let’s call it $30 million comedy. Plenty of life there.

Christina from Malibu writes, “What is your opinion on postscripts at the end of a biopic? Are they necessary? Appreciated? Expected? Can they take away from the story you just told?” John?

**John:** They largely drive me crazy. Basically like we’re going to tell a story up to a certain point, and then we’ll roll some cards and tell you the rest of it. I tend to find them very frustrating. Sometimes they work when they’re done well.

What does drive me crazy on biopics is when they show the real people. It’s like, you know those actors you just saw, well these are the real people and this is what they really look like and isn’t that great? That drives me crazy. I can’t explain why it drives me so crazy, but I don’t want the illusion broken by showing me the real person at the end. It makes me nuts.

**Craig:** Well, do not watch the very, very end of Chernobyl, which is going to have a very long postscript only because there’s just so much to say.

**John:** Oh, of course.

**Craig:** But are they necessary? Are they appreciated? Are they expected? I don’t know. I mean, in a movie where you just spent 90 minutes or two hours and you’re a trapped audience member and you can’t go, there’s a limited amount of time there at the end. Basically people are incredibly patient for the first 20 minutes of the movie and I think they’re generally incredibly impatient in the last 20 minutes of a movie. And reasonably so.

So, whatever you say at the end should be quick, I think, if you are talking about people in a theater. For television at home, I mean, I think everybody can – it seems to me like it’s sort of information on demand, you know? The more you want to know, well, it’s there. And if you don’t want to know it, you just hit pause and go to sleep. You’re done. So that’s kind of my feeling about it. It’s sort of up to you. And the good news is it’s something that you can decide very, very late. I mean, you do need to know what it is you want to show at the end if you’re going to be putting up cards. You need to plan for that visually if you need to shoot stuff. But the actual decision of how much you want to put there and why, you know, that’s late – that’s a late sort of thing to worry about. And there’s chances to do it or not.

**John:** The one thing I would urge Christina to think about is that the card should not be the end of your movie. So basically the central dramatic question of your movie shouldn’t be answered by the card at the end.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Your movie has to answer the question at the end. If there is an extra beat that is meaningful or poignant or is very helpful for the audience to know after that, basically sort of how much longer this couple lived at the end, great. I can see the argument for that. But you have to really end the story as the movie and not as the card at the end.

**Craig:** No question. The cards really do have to have a little bit of irony to them or they have to be extra credit. Essentially if you love this story, and you love all this stuff, here’s some more that would be cool for you to know. But beyond that, yeah.

**John:** Cool. Tony writes, “I was wondering what your thoughts are about shopping agreements. I’ve adapted a novel I co-wrote and a small production company here in Australia is offering a shopping agreement, giving them the rights to represent the screenplay for 18 months. From what I can see on the intertubes, the agreement I’ve received is pretty standard to others out there, but I’m curious how effective these agreements are.”

**Craig:** I mean, pretty standard sort of thing. How effective are the agreements? I’m not quite sure how to answer that. I mean, what you’re really asking I think is how often do people that sign shopping agreements end up actually selling something, and the answer is I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter. Let’s say I gave you the average. Let’s say I told you that 0.5% of the time it works. What are you going to do? Cancel it? Of course not. You want to be the 0.5%.

So, I wouldn’t worry about any of that. Generally speaking if you want to work in this business and you’re starting out you need to make friends with uncertainty because that’s what you got.

**John:** Yeah. So to define terms here, a shopping agreement would be Tony making a deal with this production company saying that for this period of time you can be essentially the producer, the creative financial partner behind this thing as they go out and try to find more money to raise to actually make this project. They’re kind of standard. If you’ve looked up other ones online that would be good.

I would say that your trust and faith in this production company is worth as much as the actual contract is. And so hopefully you’ve done your research to figure out what else have they actually made. What is the reputation they have for things? You’ve talked with them about what their actual goals and intentions are with the thing.

I haven’t done a lot of these shopping agreements. The closest we came was a project that Jordan Mechner and I did together, which was to be shot in Asia, and we ended up partnering up with this small Asian production company which was trying to find the larger financing. It was fine. But, you know, it’s not a thing that Craig and I are doing on a regular basis. It’s a thing that happens more in indie finance things or things that are using a lot of international financing.

**Craig:** Correct. Nate writes, “Recently your colleague Josh Friedman was fired as showrunner on his TNT series Snowpiercer and was replaced by Orphan Black creator Graeme Manson. Friedman was hurt when Graeme failed to reach out to him and he said so on Twitter. What is your opinion on proper etiquette? Was Josh justified in making this public?”

All right, John, what do you think?

**John:** So Josh is a friend. I don’t know Graeme at all. I’ve known Josh for a good long time. And I knew Josh as he was headed off to make Snowpiercer and I know that he had a vision for the show and was not at all happy to be replaced on the show. And I think what I respect about Josh is he actually sort of openly communicated his feelings about how it all happened. Because there’s a tendency we have is to buckle down and pretend that everything is OK and that it’s all just fine and good and that’s just the way it goes. And it’s not always well and fine and just the way it goes.

And so Josh has been – back even from his blogging days has been just very up front and honest about sort of how it feels to be doing this job. And so I get that.

I would say overall protocols for when I come on to a project to replace somebody, when I am replaced by somebody, that reaching out, that conversation is good and helpful and just lets the person know where all the bones are buried. Just that little bit of a blessing to go forward. But it’s not always easy.

I can very much see it from Graeme’s side as well. I don’t know what the real situation was. I don’t know how bad things got or sort of who was saying what. I know it’s hard to sort of come in and make that first phone call to the person who just got let go. But I think I am mostly with Josh in the sense that it sucks. And I think it’s good sometimes to acknowledge that it sucks publicly because otherwise it seems like it’s all happiness and success in this town. And if you don’t talk about the failures people get even more distorted views of how the industry works.

**Craig:** I agree with that completely. And that part is very admirable. We should talk about our failures more than we do because it is a huge part of our lives. For many writers, probably most writers, it’s the majority of their careers is failure. Because this is a tough business and the odds are brutal. It’s why, for instance, when the critics ripped me open for Identity Thief that’s why we did that show, because I wanted to talk about that specific kind of fail. I mean, the movie was a success happily, but critically it was a failure. So I wanted to talk about that.

Look, that to me is – protocol wise I feel like our failures are ours. We own them and we are free to talk about them and I encourage that. And I think it’s wonderful – anything that avoids shame about that is wonderful.

However, I don’t take swings at other writers in public just as a matter of course because, again, I feel like even if another writer flubs it or blows it – and I certainly support always reaching out to writers. That’s something I’ve always done.

I just don’t like making other writers the villains. I feel like this business is brutal and a lot of times we just don’t know what’s going on. There are times when people are hired and someone says, “Listen, if we can’t keep this show going the following 150 people lose their jobs. We need you to keep it going. And for the following reasons we are asking that you do not have contact with the person we just fired.” Well, that’s a tough spot. And then it becomes tougher when you can’t respond and someone is taking swings at you in public.

Now I don’t know if that’s what happened. It may be as simple as that in fact it was just kind of poor etiquette. I don’t know. But because I don’t know – and because I generally think that taking swings at writers and taking swings at their work is not good for us as a community, that’s something that on that front I think it’s better etiquette to refrain from that sort of thing. But I certainly feel for Josh completely. And so as much as we can show empathy for each other I’m in full support.

**John:** So I don’t want to go back through the whole Twitter timeline right now to see who said what exactly, but my recollection is that Josh was talking about his situation and how he felt about not getting a call from the person who is replacing him. Is that taking a swing at the guy who replaced him? Kind of, but like there’s sort of no way to even talk about it without acknowledging that he hasn’t had any conversation with the guy who is taking over the show.

One thing I should say is that Josh and I actually developed a show together. So we did a show at Fox that didn’t make it past the pilot. And it was heartbreaking, but I’ll tell you that it is so much nicer to have a script not go to pilot than to go to pilot and not get picked up, or go to series and last a few episodes. The more you’ve done on a project, the more fully emotionally committed you are to something and it’s just devastating when it doesn’t go forward.

TV is just this crazy thing we make where we’ll shoot 30 shows and four will make it to the air. And there’s just so much buried labor in making TV.

**Craig:** It is an awful situation. And these things do happen – they don’t happen often, but they do happen. And they can be very upsetting. They should be very upsetting. I mean, to be asked to leave something that you love and care about is hard. And it’s happened to all of us. And it is very, very hard.

I’ll tell you what I do with writer etiquette and it’s just my way of etiquette. It’s not the right way, it’s just my way. I love to give positive examples. So I like to talk about how I feel when a writer calls me, or how writers react when I call them. Because I think that’s helpful. And then I also will from time to time I will send a private message to somebody who I think is doing it wrong. And certainly not in this case. Not Josh. I don’t think he did anything. I’m talking about other writers occasionally do things on Twitter and I go, “Oh no, no, no, nope, nope, nope. No.” And then I send them a little note. I’m like an old guy now, so I can say “I just don’t think that’s good for us as a group.” And I’m polite about it. And it has nothing to do with me, so I’m just an independent observer. I’m just saying this isn’t good for us. And every single time I’ve had that conversation it’s gone well actually.

I think a lot of times it’s just that we don’t see it. We miss it. And we’re human, right? We make mistakes. But we must protect each other and take care of each other. And when we fail to do so it’s weirdly even more important to figure out how to take care of each other while we correct each other. I think that’s just generally my feeling about these things.

**John:** Yeah. I’m sure I’ve said it on the show before, but I’ve become good friends with screenwriters who I only met because either I was replacing them or they were replacing me. And we had that phone call to talk through stuff. And it was fantastic. So, it’s just a way to do that. And especially in the age of Twitter now it’s much easier to reach out to somebody, even if you don’t have the mutual contact, to just chat about things and wish them well and let them know that you are there to listen if they have things they want to tell you about the baby that you were raising for those past months.

**Craig:** I mean, how often do you read something, have a reaction to it like, “Oh my god, this person has reported a story, they have been wronged, this other person is a jerk.” And then maybe you meet that person, or you meet somebody that knows that person and you hear a different story and you go, “Oh, OK, that’s not what I –“ that’s pretty common. And all the more reason I feel like there’s rarely any practical good that comes from this sort of thing in public. Far more practical good comes from it in private.

However, the big difference is the stuff we were talking about earlier. The abusive stuff. So now we’re not talking about etiquette. We’re talking about people that are bad people. They’re abusive. They’re hurting other human beings. Then I think actually we do ourselves a disservice by not talking about it in public.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s where it gets dangerous.

**John:** It’s tough. And I think for far too long we’ve just assumed that saying nothing is the best approach and maybe a thing that’s happened over the course of the last 18 months is we’re starting to realize if we say nothing things will just continue.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s true.

**John:** All right. Let’s go to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a card game called No Thanks! I’m not even sure who first recommended this card game to me, but it’s really good. It’s by this guy Thorsten Gimmler. And the idea behind it is you are sort of bidding to not take cards. And in the bidding you are putting these chips on the card that shows up. And eventually you’ll decide like, oh you know what, I’m just going to take this card and get all these little chips. It’s a very clever mechanic and I’ve never seen it in any other game before.

It’s good for like three to five, maybe six players. But we really liked it, so it’s become a new Friday afternoon game here around the office. So it’s No Thanks! It’s by Thorsten Gimmler.

**Craig:** Excellent. I also have a little game this week. It’s the third chapter of a series that I enjoy called Faraway. This is an app on iOS and maybe it’s for Google, but as we all know I don’t care. And Faraway is sort of a puzzle solving game. John, did you play The Witness by the way, or I guess it’s just Witness?

**John:** I never played it. I know what it is though. It’s by the same guy who did Braid.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Jonathan Blow. Excellent game. The style of puzzles in Witness are I guess more complicated versions of what you see on Faraway, but it’s a very fun game. It goes through pretty easily, but inside each level there are three little hidden pieces, notes essentially, and finding two of the notes is usually very, very simple. Finding the third note is very, very hard.

I tend to like games that add little collectible hunts. It’s just an interesting little mechanic that makes me happy. So anyway, Faraway 3. Pretty cheap little game in terms of cost. But fun.

**John:** Nice. Cool. Well that is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by the great Jon Spurney.

**Craig:** The great Jon Spurney?

**John:** It’s a pretty great outro, so he gets the great for this one.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place to send questions like the ones we answered today. On Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. That’s a great place for little short questions we can answer.

You can find us on any place where you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there you can leave us a comment or a review. Those help.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. For all the back episodes you can go to Scriptnotes.net. For $2 a month you can get all the back episodes. There’s also an iOS app that will let you listen to them easily.

We still have a few more of the 300-episode drives. Let us know if you want us to make more of those because we were encountering situations, especially overseas buyers will say like it’s cool to get the drive but the import taxes on the drives are incredibly expensive so is there another way to do it. So we’re thinking through that. Let us know on Twitter what you’d like us to do about the drives, or the situation for that, because we might just go to a purely digital version of that. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, I mean, because somebody can go and buy themselves a little thumb drive for $20 and then download just our archive right?

**John:** Yeah. So we’re thinking about maybe we could break them up into either 50-episode or 100-episode chunks that are like still manageable for downloads. We’ll see.

**Craig:** What will be the most profitable for me?

**John:** The most profitable for you would be anything. Really nothing would make any difference for you.

**Craig:** Right. Right. OK. Interesting. Interesting. Great.

**John:** Now, Craig, if you want to negotiate a split on this we can? Tell me what more you’d like to do on the show to ensure its profitability.

**Craig:** I feel like I do so much, you know, just in terms of personality labor.

**John:** Oh yeah. For sure.

**Craig:** Just like my glowing personality has a value.

**John:** So going back to Kevin Hart, so I went to the Survivor Finale which was great, because Jeff Probst who is a Scriptnotes listener invited me to come to the finale. And it was fantastic. But Kevin Hart shows up at it to promote his new show. And I really wonder about the business model of Kevin Hart’s new show, because it’s this competition show where it’s this silly thing where you’re racing across these obstacles and the other team is trying to knock you off these obstacles. Sort of like American Gladiators but with like–

**Craig:** Regular people?

**John:** Regular people doing American Gladiators. And he’s a charming host, he’s wonderful, but how much are you getting paid? What is the split that gets Kevin Hart to do that show?

**Craig:** So much money.

**John:** So much money. So like you, Kevin Hart has that sort of personality plus is what he gives.

**Craig:** So true.

**John:** He is the intellectual property. He’s the emotional property. That’s what it is.

**Craig:** Kevin and I go back. We go all the way back to 2008.

**John:** Was he in Superhero Movie?

**Craig:** He was in Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4 and Superhero Movie.

**John:** So you directed Kevin Hart.

**Craig:** Yeah, I did. I don’t know if Scary Movie was his first movie, but it was close to his first movie. We hired Kevin because he came in – remember, he came in for like a fill in for a table read.

**John:** That’s so great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s great. And he was small back then. But he’s grown so much.

**Craig:** Well, he’s still physically small.

**John:** But now as a force of personality.

**Craig:** I have loved watching the rise of Kevin Hart so much because just to close the circle, let’s come full circle on our theme. Kevin is such a good guy. He’s always been such a good guy. He’s always been a gamer, up for anything, hard-working dude. Doesn’t get any like ego in the way. And he’s good at what he does, obviously. He’s just a delight. Kevin, every time he would walk on set, every single time he would go, “OK, it’s magic time.” That was what he would say every time. I loved that. He’s the best. I love Kev.

**John:** And the minute we stop recording we’re going to talk about all the actors who are not good people. Bye Scriptnotes!

**Craig:** By the way, I know, exactly. I made a mistake. I said 2008. I meant 2003. Sorry, Scary Movie 3 was in 2003.

**John:** Wow. We’re old.

**Craig:** So Kevin Hart’s first role was in a movie called Paper Soldiers in 2002. I don’t know what that movie is. But his second role was in Scary Movie 3. So that’s how far back me and Kev go.

**John:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. All right, that was a good show.

**John:** Good show. Thanks.

Links:

* A [series](http://deadline.com/2018/05/series-japan-rent-a-relative-business-in-works-anonymous-content-paramount-tv-conde-nast-entertainment-1202397497/) is in development based on Elif Batuman’s New Yorker [article](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/japans-rent-a-family-industry) about rental families.
* Some listener-recommended outliners include [Workflowy](https://workflowy.com/), [Gingko](https://gingkoapp.com), [Cloud Outliner](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cloud-outliner-pro/id1024917449?mt=12), [OmniOutliner](https://www.omnigroup.com/omnioutliner) from Omni Group, [Pages](https://www.apple.com/pages/), [Causality](https://www.hollywoodcamerawork.com/causality-videos.html), and good old index cards.
* Some recently fired examples include [Roseanne Barr](https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/roseanne-canceled-abc-1202824211/), [Jeffrey Tambor](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/jeffrey-tambor-officially-fired-transparent-wake-harassment-claims-1085236), [Clayne Crawford](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-lethal-weapon-clayne-crawford-fired-20180514-htmlstory.html), and [Bryan Singer](https://variety.com/2017/film/news/bryan-singer-fired-bohemian-rhapsody-1202630247/).
* A [question of etiquette](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/fired-snowpiercer-showrunner-calls-replacement-an-idiot-not-reaching-1112964) regarding replacing another writer
* [No Thanks!](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013FAC4FK/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), a game by Thorsten Gimmler
* [Faraway 3](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/faraway-3/id1336928392?mt=8), a puzzle game for iOS
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jon Spurney ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_353.mp3).