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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-premise).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 610 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what is it even about? We are discussing the premise, the very foundation of story, upon which we construct our takes. We also have a ton of follow-up on AI and language, listener questions, and more. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, it’s back to school season. We’ll reminisce about pencils and notebooks and what we do and don’t miss about being in school.

**Craig:** Oh my god, that’s like, we’ll reminisce about penny candy.

**John:** Ah, indeed. I love it.

**Craig:** Pencils and notebooks, what?

**John:** A preview for our listeners, I have such distinct olfactory memories, actually, of back to school season, like the smell of glue and paste and when you open up a new thing of Mead paper and the notebooks. I love it all.

**Craig:** Listen, it’s going to be a Gen X fest.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** We’re gonna talk you through all the pink erasers and-

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** … the little plasticky zip-loc pencil holders that would go on your three-ring binder. Oh, we got it all, my friends.

**John:** Yeah, plus the new jeans that are really too stiff when you’re first trying to break them in.

**Craig:** New jeans. Hey, guess what? Jeans used to be made out of the same stuff they use to cover old boats.

**John:** Now they use them to make the new WGA T-shirts.

**Craig:** That’s right, exactly. They use that now to punish us, in our hair shirts. Yes, all true, all true.

**John:** It’ll be fun. We’ll start with some actual news. In the headlines this week, there was a ruling saying that AI-created art is not copyrightable. This was a bid. Stephen Thaler is an artist, a person who made something or had his machine make something. He wanted to register it for copyright. The copyright office said, “Nope.” The judge in the case said, “Yeah, the copyright did the wrong thing. That is a no from me, dog. You cannot say that is a thing that you created that is going to be subject to copyright.”

It is interesting. There’s been a lot of little moments that have come along this way. I’ve testified on the WGA’s behalf in terms of our perspective on copyright and AI. It’s going to be an interesting area to follow over the next couple years about whether things that are made by AIs can be copyrighted and in what circumstances.

**Craig:** I think Stephen Thaler, I believe he owns some sort of AI business. I don’t think he’s an artist in and of himself. I could be wrong. Maybe he considers himself one. To me, this was a slam dunk. There is no reason to imagine that AI would have copyright production, any more than there’s a reason to think that AI would have freedom of speech protection. AI is not a person.

If there’s one thing we know, that I think we can all agree on when it comes to the Constitution – and copyright is enshrined in the United States Constitution – it is that the people who wrote it were writing it about people and did not imagine, predict that there would be artificial intelligence. There wasn’t even a cognate for it.

Sometimes people point out that the Second Amendment was written at a time when guns needed to be loaded slowly with a rod and powder and that the founding fathers did not foresee assault weapons. True, but there were guns. At least we know, okay, so there was a gun. Guns have gotten crazy. All right, we can discuss. There were no computers, no calculators. There wasn’t even an adding machine. There was nothing. Copyright is for people.

I did read the decision. Sometimes you read these things, and you can just tell that the judge is like, “Oh, come on. Really? No.” It was very much a no. I foresee that that will continue. I cannot imagine that this would survive in challenges. I don’t care who’s on the Supreme Court. I really don’t. Unless the Supreme Court is entirely made up of people that own AI businesses, I just don’t see how anybody could ever argue that AI-created stuff qualifies for copyright.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to the pdf of the decision, which is great. People should read through it. The article I’ll also link to talks about some of the other challenges to copyright that have come up over the years. Of course, you and I, Craig, we both work for corporations, and corporations are retaining the copyright on the things we do, because we are doing work for hire. I think that was part of Stephen Thaler’s argument here is that the machine was essentially work for hire and the same kind of principle should apply here.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** What I argued in front of the U.S. Copyright Office is that copyright was initially intended to protect… There was always a human author. It was always about the authorship. While the final copyright might transfer to somebody else or transfer to a corporation, it was originally intended to protect that author and that author’s expression and to foster more expression from authors. That is not a thing that a machine knows or wants to do.

**Craig:** No. Work for hire was about commissioning work. You could commission it from people. Again, there was no understanding or conception or ability to foresee that you could commission work from something that wasn’t alive.

For instance, nobody would’ve argued that if somebody had, I don’t know, a loom that could operate itself, that that would be creating works of art. Player pianos, interestingly, created all sorts of issues around copyright. That led to a whole understanding of mechanical copies and things like that and how mechanical copying was in and of itself a derivative of copyright.

We do not commission work. I think work for hire and the commissioning actually started in, I don’t know, prerevolutionary time with silversmiths, people like Paul Revere, I suppose.

**John:** It’s all Paul Revere’s fault.

**Craig:** They would come up with a design and say, “Listen, you work in my factory. I do all the silver stuff. Come up with a design of something. I’ll make a bunch of buckles. I’m going to own the buckle copyright if you want to work here.” That became the way that functioned.

You cannot commission something that is not alive, because you can’t pay it. It’s not a thing. So work for hire requires payment. It requires employment. You cannot employ something that isn’t alive. That’s not what employment is. Employment is paying a human for a thing.

**John:** The use of technology has also come up in copyright over the years. As photography came to be, they had to decide, a photograph taken by a camera, is that copyrightable, and is it to the person who took the photo, and if it’s to the person who took the photo, does it apply to the monkey who takes a photo. There famously was a monkey who took a selfie. Who owns the copyright to that selfie?

**Craig:** What courts have found is that humans causing something to be created is an essential part of copyright. If a camera falls off the back of a truck and the take a picture button gets hit, and it takes a picture, welcome to public domain. No one caused it to be created.

Animals cannot cause something to be created in an intentional sense, or at least in the sense that we say is necessary for copyright. No, selfies by animals, pictures by animals, paintings by elephants, none of it can be considered copyrightable, nor can a human say, “I am causing an animal to create something. Therefore, I should have the copyright on this.”

**John:** Where I think the decisions will ultimately come down, and it’s trying to draw that line of, when a human being uses AI programs to create a work of art, or to create anything that would normally be subject to copyright, where is that line, where it’s like, okay, that human gets the copyright claim. Caselaw will figure that out.

**Craig:** That’s a real thing. That’s happening now, and to the extent that there are elements in there that you can say are unique. This is the key. People need to look at some of the language underpinning all of this, but the most important word is “unique.” Unique work expressed in fixed form. Unique is key.

If people are using AI to make something, but the AI elements that they’re employing are not unique, it’s gonna be very hard for them to qualify for things, because other people can… It’s just basically, you’re remixing chunks of stuff that somebody else has created.

**John:** While all culture is remixing, how you’re doing it and the things you’re using to do it with does matter.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. You can remix to the extent that, okay, I’m gonna write a song that’s gonna hint at a little phrase that was in this piece of music and maybe do a variation of something else, and it’s unique.

What you can’t do on your own, just because, is do Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys, and then not have to deal with the fact that you’re using copyrighted works that you are remixing. That is gonna be a mess, because AI itself can’t really exist without the input of stuff that somebody made.

**John:** Craig, on this listening session, I gave my little testimony, but then I also got to listen in as other people gave theirs. This was an interesting thought experiment, which is gonna not even be a thought experiment soon. This will come up, and it’ll become an issue.

Let’s take a game like Red Dead Redemption. You would agree that the company that makes Red Dead Redemption can copyright the material that’s in Red Dead Redemption. Someone wrote all the stuff that’s in there. There’s an ability to protect that material, correct?

**Craig:** Yes. Rockstar commissioned a lot of people on a work-for-hire basis. Rockstar owns the copyright to Red Dead Redemption. Correct.

**John:** Imagine a future version of Red Dead Redemption where the dialogue and situations that occur within Red Dead Redemption are not the product of people writing things, but instead of AI generating, in real time, within the game itself, those scenarios, the dialogue, what’s happening, creating characterizations. Would that material be copyrightable by Rockstar Games?

**Craig:** It would, because Rockstar is creating a derivative work of their own copyrighted material.

**John:** Okay. Defensible, but also challenging to protect in certain ways. If it wasn’t IP that was clearly already owned, then you can imagine scenarios in which there is, inside a computer game, new material being created, and a real question, a live question, of whether that material created by AI is protectable.

**Craig:** They would have to be able to show that their AI… Let’s just call it a black box. You put stuff into the black box. Stuff comes out of the black box. They would have to show that they only exclusively fed the black box stuff that they had 100% intellectual property control over. At that point, I don’t see how you can argue that the black box somehow undoes that.

Now, if they say, we’re gonna put in all of our stuff, plus we’re also gonna feed the black box 30 Westerns, now you got a problem. Then I think they can’t. That’s where it gets interesting. I think it’s actually, weirdly, not that complicated, as long as you understand how copyright works and what you can and can’t do and what it means to own something. Either you do or you don’t. If you don’t, you can’t half-own it. You own it or you don’t.

**John:** Other news this last week, Disney is releasing on Blu-ray Disc… Blu-ray Discs still exist, apparently.

**Craig:** Yes, they do.

**John:** Mandalorian, Loki, WandaVision, and some other titles. Just notable because you don’t hear about Blu-ray or DVD releases that often. There’s always that concern of shows will disappear off their services, and then no one will ever be able to find it. This is a counterexample, where these things are so popular that Disney recognizes, people will pay us money for these things that have special features on them, and they believe they can make a buck on it. What’s your reaction to some stuff coming out on disc?

**Craig:** Just last week I received my 4K and Blu-ray copies of The Last of Us on DVD.

**John:** Fantastic. Talk to us about that and also what is the sales pitch for a consumer. Why would a person want that, versus watching it on HBO Max?

**Craig:** Quality. It just simply comes down to playback quality. It doesn’t matter how fast your internet connection is. Let’s say it’s maximum speed. It still doesn’t matter, because in order to put the signal out in an efficient way across the world, every streaming service has to compress the image, and the sound to some extent, much less. Really, the image has to be compressed in such a way that it’s deliverable.

When you are getting 4K in particular, but also Blu-rays, it’s just higher resolution than what you’re getting over a streaming service. 4K would be the maximum resolution. In fact, technically, we didn’t even shoot the season in 4K. We were going to shoot the next season in true 4K. Then we went through an HDR process, and it gets up-ressed, and magically, I don’t know, something happens.

**John:** Probably AI.

**Craig:** It’s probably AI.

**John:** It genuinely is probably AI. It’s pattern matching to figure out what the missing pixels would be.

**Craig:** I have no idea. It’s probably more algorithmic than AI. The bottom line is, there’s no reason to buy any of these things unless you really want to see it at its best, which of course, as a cinephile, I do, for certain things.

Also, as our screens get bigger at home, the flaws of streaming will become more and more evident. You would think that as time goes on, speeds would get faster and faster, and therefore the ability to send something through at full resolution would be closer and closer. But the problem is because everything is now going through the same pipe. They have to feed that pipe across the world to billions of people. It’s gonna be a while, I think, before we have that kind of infrastructure. Owning these things on DVD at full resolution is as close as you can get to permanency, as long as they keep manufacturing the equipment to play them back.

**John:** That’s gonna be the question. We do have a Blu-ray player, but we got it specifically because Stuart Friedel, formerly Scriptnotes podcast producer, has purchased, for my daughter, a Blu-ray copy of Freaks and Geeks, because she’d never seen Freaks and Geeks. He got her a Blu-ray copy, and we realized we don’t have a Blu-ray player. We got a Blu-ray player so she could watch Freaks and Geeks. I think she watched an episode.

**Craig:** Stuart got you a gift that ended up costing you a lot of money.

**John:** It did. It did. It cost us a lot. This news that these titles are coming out on disc, I’m excited for those creators and showrunners and everyone who worked on them, because they know there’s some permanent copy of this, which years from now you can look back at, which is fantastic. Reflecting on my own experience, it’s been two or three years since I’ve played anything off of a disc. It’s just the reality. I don’t know what your experience has been.

**Craig:** Similar. I think that where home video on DVD, VHS, used to be this enormous market, at this point, it’s more akin to the way laser discs used to be, something that people who really care about image quality purchase. It’s more of a niche marketplace. It is a little bit of a prestigious kind of, “Look, you can even own it for yourself at full la da da da.” That’s terrific, but as you note, this is not something that they do for everything.

Luckily, I’ve had it for Chernobyl and for The Last of Us, because when I was writing movies, there’s DVDs for all of those things, because there was DVDs for everything then. So far, I haven’t written anything that could theoretically be disappeared off the planet, or as the kids would say, yeeted, or you know what? I don’t even think they say that anymore. I bet yeeted is 10 years old now.

**John:** Yeah, it’s moved on. It’s a historical term.

**Craig:** Yeeted got yeeted.

**John:** If you’re listening to this podcast 10 years from now, and we say yeeted, and you don’t know what we’re talking about, or you do know it, and Craig was wrong, and it did come back, please write-

**Craig:** It’s going to come back.

**John:** … to future producer, Adam Middlemarch, and tell Adam what happened.

**Craig:** Now we have to comb the hospital records for an Adam Middlemarch being born.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Find him and just be like, “You have been chosen. It is your fate.”

**John:** “You have been chosen.”

**Craig:** “You will fulfill your destiny.”

**John:** We have some follow-up. Drew, talk us through. This first one, I’ll tell, his name is Adam Lisagor, because it’s hard to guess how you would pronounce that name. He’s a very smart writer, actor, producer, director person and a friend of mine. He wrote back about our conversation on large language models in 607.

**Drew Marquardt:** Adam Lisagor writes, “To Craig’s question of why we don’t like hearing our names over and over again, prefer using pronoun variables for comfort, my best guess is it’s a mix of two things. First, it’s a conservation of energy. Naming something with specificity requires effort, and naming something with generality requires less effort. We’d prefer to just not have to think so hard.

“Second, conservation of cortisol and our limbic system’s threat detection, because usually, hearing your name is a signal that something needs your attention immediately, can induce panic, like a new email alert tone. When there’s context, your name can be a really nice sound. When there’s less context, it causes stress. That’s my best guess.

“But I’ve been thinking a lot about why we would choose to use so many permutations of words to convey an idea instead of always trying to stick to the same words as the path of least resistance and best communication. I guess the best answer is that’s what makes us human. We derive so much joy from infinitely combining and recombining the elements to new and surprising outcomes, even at the expense of efficiency, even when it causes miscommunication. I guess that’s why writers write. When you find exactly the right new permutation of words, the link you can create with the receiver is that much more powerful. I’m not high right now.”

**John:** Two basic points here. The first is his pronouns argument, is that we use pronouns not just for simplicity, but also because it’s just more comfortable, because you’re not calling the person out every time by name. You don’t ring the bell as hard when you use the pronoun. Is that striking you as all accurate?

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t buy the conservation of energy theory. When we talk about where we live, we don’t say, “I live in town,” although I suppose I say, “I live in the city.” There’s things that we refer to specifically all the time.

I do think that there’s something to the notion that your name is an attention grabber. Attention, what we know, if you keep ringing a bell over and over and over, it just starts to disappear. Our brains can’t handle repetitive alerts like that. Yes, that makes sense. It takes a little bit of the edge off of that. I agree. I don’t think he’s high right now. He might be high right now.

**John:** As he wrote this email, he probably wasn’t high. His second point is about basically, our language could be simpler. We could choose to speak in simpler words. We’ve definitely seen examples of cases where you’re limited now to 115 words you have to communicate. You can get it done.

There’s a game we played in the office a few weeks ago called Poetry for Neanderthals, where you can only use single-syllable words. It’s difficult, but it’s very doable to get your point across. The ability to mix things up and really surprise yourself and everyone else around you by how you’re stringing words together is what makes language delightful.

**Craig:** Agreed. I like your observation there, not-high-at-the-time Adam Lisagor.

**John:** We have some more follow-up on Esperanto.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** I love Esperanto.

**Craig:** We can’t kill this topic any more than we can kill the fake language Esperanto. It just keeps coming back.

**Drew:** You’re going to get a couple knocks on this one, Craig.

**Craig:** Of course I will.

**Drew:** Mark F writes, “One point that pricked up my ears was Craig’s reference to Esperanto being an aspiration of recent vintage. I just happened to be reading about Esperanto in the wonderful book, Humanly Possible, a historical overview of humanism by Sarah Bakewell. She includes a chapter on Ludwik Zamenhof, who originated Esperanto in the 1870s, with the ambition of making a universal language that would break down barriers and help promote a more humanistic civilization across cultures.

“An incredible part of the story is that Zamenhof developed the language as a teenager, but before he was able to work on introducing it to society, his father locked away all his language notebooks, to force the young man to focus his energies on studying to become a doctor. He was sent to Russia to study medicine, but when he returned, he discovered his father had actually burned the notebooks, at which point he started over and rebuilt the language from memory. Amazing.”

**Craig:** I’m really on board with his dad. I think Ludwik Zamenhof’s dad was spot-on.

**John:** Craig, this is the first time I knew that Zamenhof had worked on this as a teenager. That teenager idealism does still ring through in the language, in Esperanto. I’ve of course picked it up a couple times. It’s on my Duolingo little things I can study. It is clever in many ways. It’s so ambitiously unambitious in a way. It’s almost an example of how few words do you need, because it has a limited vocabulary by default, but it’s logical in ways that are all really appealing. No one is ever going to speak it in a meaningful way, because it’s just-

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** There’s not gonna be any native speakers of it, and so therefore, it’s never going to catch on. I still find it delightful.

**Craig:** Regardless of when Esperanto was originally conceived and then burnt and then reconceived, culturally it did seem like it had a moment in the ’50s and ’60s and then rapidly went away. I’m sure there were lots of moments along the way, between 1870 and when it finally… Although again, it will never end. Esperanto is the Ayn Rand of languages. It’s just one of these things where it’s like, guys, it doesn’t work. Let it go. They won’t go.

**John:** Like communism. There’s never been a true communist country.

**Craig:** Exactly, nor will there be. There’s a reason for that. Now all the Marxists are gonna write in. Guys, it’s not gonna happen. Let it go.

**John:** But maybe like Marxism, you can say, what is it that’s fascinating about this idea, and how can you apply it to actual, real places where real people are living? Here’s my generous take on it. Looking at Esperanto and while it did work, it probably got a lot of people curious about how languages actually really do work.

That probably could’ve started a whole generation of folks who were more curious to learn about the actual languages that people out there in the world are speaking, and the quest for what is the universal grammar that’s underneath all these languages, like what is it about our brains that is causing us to create the same patterns again and again and again, and why languages broadly work in very similar ways, when we can imagine that they could work, that they just don’t work.

**Craig:** That is remarkably generous.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** I don’t think Esperanto did a goddamn thing.

**John:** People with the little green stars, Esperanto speakers.

**Craig:** Esperanto speakers, yes, they can all talk to each other at the world’s most boring conference.

**John:** We will have universal translators very soon. Arguably, we have them right now in that-

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s called English.

**John:** Also, what’s on our phones right now, those translate features are really good.

**Craig:** They’re really good. They are really good.

**John:** It’ll become less important. Our last bit of follow-up here is about lingua franca, and it really pertains to this.

**Drew:** Chris writes, “As a fellow language nerd, I enjoyed Episode 607, but I have to correct Craig’s assertion that the term lingua franca derives from the fact that French was once the common language for international communication. In fact, lingua franca was spoken throughout the Mediterranean, where Europeans came into contact with people from the Middle East and Africa, for whom Franks was a general term for Europeans. Lingua franca was the language of the Franks.

“Scholars argue quite a bit about whether lingua franca really qualified as its own language or was more of a pidgin dialect, but in any case, the languages to which it was the closest were Italian dialects, not French. Some version of lingua franca was still spoken in North Africa into the 19th century, but a Frenchman would not have understood it.”

**Craig:** That is fascinating. I did not know that. Lingua franca is a combination of Italian and French and other stuff, but yeah, I guess more akin to Italian than… It’s its own language. It was the Esperanto of its time, except that it emerged, I presume naturally, as, Chris says, a pidgin dialect as opposed to-

**John:** Yeah, which is when you have people who can’t speak the same language have to figure out how to get along, you get a pidgin. Then if their kids speak that as a creole, which is a more formalized version, a new language is formed.

I want to defend you here, Craig, because you were talking about lingua franca in the way that we typically use it, rather than the historical terms, because we now talk about lingua franca as being the actual default or the bridge language in a place. English is a lingua franca for a lot of places, where it’s just like, the British language is the common language that people speak. If we throw in that Wikipedia link there.

**Craig:** Again, you’re being very kind. I think I just screwed up, because I’m pretty sure that, it sounds like, I can’t remember exactly, but I probably said something like, “Lingua franca, which comes from French, because that was the language of diplomacy,” which it was. I’m sure I referenced the Olympics and the fact that they constantly would repeat everything in French in the Olympics for some reason. It made sense in my brain, but I was wrong.

This is the kind of thing that… I have to say, some people don’t like people like Chris at parties. “Well, actually… ” But I do. By the way, I also appreciate that Chris did not use the word “actually,” even though I’m sure Chris really wanted to. Thank you, Chris.

**John:** He said “in fact,” which is the gentleman’s “actually.”

**Craig:** Could be a she

**John:** Absolutely. 100% true. I don’t know why I jumped to that conclusion.

**Craig:** Because you are a-

**John:** I’m a monster.

**Craig:** You’re a monster. You’re a cancelable monster. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate the correction. You are completely correct. I was entirely wrong. Now I know something that I can bother other people about.

**John:** I love it. Hey, Craig, let’s talk about the premise. Our marquee topic here in the weekly Inneresting newsletter, which is sort of the print version of Scriptnotes, Chris Csont had picked an old blog post I did back in 2016, where I was responding to something that Michael Tabb had written for Script Magazine.

In that, Tabb was talking about how a premise is the core belief system of a script and the lifeblood of a story. I was arguing, “What you’re talking about seems great. I really wouldn’t call that the premise. Greek scholars might call that the premise, but I would really say that is the thesis, that is the dramatic question.”

I wanted to talk with you, Craig, about what we mean by the premise, what we mean by a thesis, and really what we mean when someone says, “What is your movie about? What is your story about?” Because that about is really two very different things. It can be about what is the TV Guide’s synopsis, it can be talking about that log line, or it could be like, what is it emotionally about for the characters within, what is it about for the writer, what is the purpose behind the work. Sometimes when we have challenges talking with people about their work, I think sometimes we’re really not understanding what we mean by “about” when we ask, “What is this about?”

**Craig:** This is a great question. I tend to answer as follows when people say, “What’s your show about? What’s your movie about?” I’ll say, “What it’s about is blah blah blah, but what it’s really about is blah blah blah.”

What it’s really about, that’s the theme, that’s the central dramatic question, whatever vocabulary you want for that. What is it about to me is the plot premise, what’s happening, literally what’s the basic, simple thing of what’s happening in your show. What it’s about, it’s about the nuclear disaster that happened. It’s about a guy that has to take a girl who might have the cure for worldwide plague from point A to point B. It is the hardware premise, because that is the very first thing that will hit people’s eyes and ears when you put a trailer out, for instance, or a teaser.

**John:** That sort of log line description, for The Martian, is an astronaut stranded on Mars has to find a way home. That is a good example of, it’s explaining what the problem is and what the quest of the movie is. It feels like, oh, how would you do that? That’s intriguing. It feels like there’s a question mark to that.

Sometimes we’re talking about the story area. What is your movie about? It’s about Hawaiian indigenous rights. Great. Or it’s about fatherhood, which is a broad, general theme, but fatherhood is not a central dramatic question. It’s not a thing you’re necessarily grappling with.

**Craig:** I try and avoid topics as a premise, because a topic just is a topic. Okay, it’s about indigenous rights in Polynesia. Okay, that’s a topic. That can be a term paper. It could be a nonfiction book. But what is the premise of the movie or show?

**John:** If it’s about a tribal leader leading a revolution against some other people for indigenous rights in this one Polynesian island, that is specific.

**Craig:** A premise has occurred. We need to know what some big, huge thing is happening. Typically, it’s the big, huge thing that happens very early on that is the thing. Most people, by the way, out there in the world, the vast majority of the audience, will never get past that “what’s it about” when they’re telling other people what it’s about.

When we’re talking about this with potential people, to buy it, act in it, direct it, write it, whatever it is that we’re trying to get somebody to do when we’re communicating this within our industry, it’s very important to know the both what it’s about, because if it’s super high-concept, people may get very excited, like, “Whoa, these three guys get together to fight an outbreak of ghosts in Manhattan? Very high concept. I can see how that movie… It’s a comedy. Okay, got it.”

Then what’s it about-about? Then maybe in a circumstance like this, there’s very, very little. It’s about somebody going from being cynical to a believer. That’s cool. But there are other situations where, what’s it about, it’s about one baseball game of no importance, that happened in 1976, between two teams that weren’t even in contention, for a pennant. But what it’s really about is da da da da. Then you’re like, “Oh, this is fascinating.” We need to know both. It’s very important.

**John:** Not only do you need to be able to communicate both, you need to really deeply understand both. I was on a phone call yesterday with a young writer, talking about her project. Her two abouts didn’t really match up, because she could tell me both abouts. I just didn’t think they were fundamentally compatible. That’s really the heart of our conversation.

She was doing a period musical about a young woman trying to get over a breakup and move on. Okay, I see that as a plot premise, I guess, and her inner emotion. But what it’s really about is this writer’s own feelings of exile after being forced to leave the country.

I said, “Okay, I get those two things separately. I don’t see how you’re drawing the connections there. Okay, that feeling of exile and loneliness, sure, but I don’t see how those two things are going to tie together with everything else you’re describing here. I think maybe you’re going to have to honestly change one of your abouts, to get something that’s actually going to be writeable. I think the reason why you’re struggling is you’re trying to write two different incompatible movies. I think that’s why you’re finding it so difficult to have scenes that actually resonate and have a story that feels that it gets you to a meaningful conclusion.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s so important. There’s only one reason for the plot premise to exist, and that is to ultimately convey, in some form or shape, the “what it’s really about” premise. But there’s only one reason for the “what it’s really about” premise to exist, and that is to live inside of the “what happens” premise. They are connected, inherently.

Typically, we will think of a plot premise first. But the very next job should be, “Okay, but what would that serve? What could I learn or note or be fascinated by, even if it’s incredibly simple? What sort of thing would make this interesting once I have absorbed the reality of what it is?”

The opposite is also true. If we’re like, “You know what? I really… ” A lot of people start things with their own experiences. “I had an experience where I’ve lost somebody, and I experienced grief, and I want to write a story about grief.” Okay. “But also, one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was skeet shooting. I want to write about grief, set against the world of skeet shooting.”

Your common love of things is not enough. They are not purposefully reflecting each other. They are simply living side by side. One has to purposely reflect the other. They must serve each other. It must make sense. Otherwise, like you said, you’re just going to have one thing floating on top of another, and nobody wants that.

**John:** If you have that inner premise and no external premise, the inner premise could be a great poem. You can just have free-floating feelings and analysis of questions. It could be an essay. But it’s not going to have characters and a story that can actually get you to a place, because that’s the social contract you’re making with an audience is that, if you’ve given your attention, I will tell a story that will be meaningful, and it will take you on a journey.

There’s not gonna be a journey if it’s just, “This is what I think about a thing.” If you just have a central dramatic question or this feeling you want to explore, that’s not gonna be a movie. That’s not gonna be a story. That’s just a thing. Maybe it’s a song. But that’s all you got.

**Craig:** Yeah, precisely. We sometimes get a little reductive about this stuff. That’s why I don’t like the whole pitch contest thing, even though I’ve judged them. It boils things down to only thinking about these premises like polishing these premises to sharp edges and points when they don’t need to be. They don’t even need to be interesting. The premise can be utterly boring if the “what it’s really about” is fascinating, and vice versa.

God knows how many times I’ve said it. We talked about it at length in the How to Write a Movie episode of our podcast. The “what it’s really about” of Finding Nemo is so banal and so dumb fortune cookie, it’s almost giggleable. But it’s what’s perfect about it, is that you sometimes want to take something that’s so simple and obvious and then explain it through the most remarkable premise, plot premise, so that you finally get it.

It’s weird. Sometimes the simplest things just fly right over our heads, because they’re so cliché, they don’t even sink into our skin. We need to be reminded through fascinating plots and vice versa. Sometimes the simplest plot is what you need to absorb something that’s very complicated.

**John:** Absolutely. I can think of many films I love, including many great indie films, where you look at the description, you’re like, “That’s not enough for a movie.” You Can Count On Me, it’s a woman’s sort of shiftless brother moves home. It’s like, is that it? There’s not a lot of plot, story to it. It’s terrific, because it’s actually exploring the rarely asked questions about how adult siblings get along and what the nature of that relationship can and should be. Both are good things. I’m saying, don’t freak out if they’re not equal weight for you. But they have to serve each other, no matter what.

There’s a project I’m hoping, whenever the Strike is resolved, to take out. I am genuinely very, very excited about the movie poster premise of it all and what you’re gonna see in the trailer, but even more excited about the “what it’s actually really about” of it all. Those two things I think are gonna marry really well together. I’d say I’m excited by the flashy, what’s in the trailer of it all, but I’m really excited to write the deeply what it’s about, if I get a chance to do so.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** We’ll hope.

**Craig:** That’s true. We have to hope. I don’t want to just go presume that it’s gonna be fantastic. I agree with you. First of all, we have to… You said, “Whenever the Strike ends.” If the Strike. Let’s just say if.

**John:** Oh, come now.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** Craig, no.

**Craig:** Craig, no. Craig. Craig.

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** Craig. No, I believe it’ll end.

**John:** It’ll end.

**Craig:** Everything ends, John.

**John:** Everything ends.

**Craig:** Everything ends.

**John:** The heat death of the universe.

**Craig:** That’s right, John. One day the Sun will devour us.

**John:** Memento mori. Remember that you will die.

**Craig:** Craig.

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** Craig, no!

**John:** Memento mori!

**Craig:** Craig, no! We should do some listener questions. We’ve probably built up quite a few.

**John:** We have. Drew, start us off.

**Drew:** Our first one comes from Johan on Twitter. He writes, “Hey, John and Craig. Is the whole starting a script with FADE IN actually just a myth? I think I see it in like 5% of the American scripts I’ve read through the years. Seems like a huge waste of space. Cheers.”

**Craig:** “A huge waste of space.”

**John:** Craig, do you write FADE IN?

**Craig:** No, but does it really seem like “a huge waste of space?” It’s one line. Who cares?

**John:** It is one line, but also, it’s the first line. If your first line is a useless line, I’d say get rid of it.

**Craig:** Look, I don’t use it. I think it is superfluous. Also, not every film fades in.

**John:** No, it doesn’t.

**Craig:** Often, you just start with a boop, where you just pop in. You don’t need to start a script with anything there than INTERIOR, EXTERIOR, blah-dah-dee blah, or even not.

**John:** Or not that.

**Craig:** You could start with just we hear a bunch of sounds or whatever.

**John:** Or just an image, because it’s not even clear where you are.

**Craig:** Exactly. That said, it is not “a huge waste of space.” It is precisely line. You can absorb it.

**John:** Absolutely. Now we’re gonna get all the people who are so angry at us. It’s like the CUT TOs and the we hears and the we sees.

**Craig:** I like that. Do it.

**John:** Do it. Write in.

**Craig:** Let them fight.

**John:** Waste our time. Waste Drew’s time, because he won’t put it in the outline for us.

**Craig:** It seems like a huge waste of time. What’s next?

**Drew:** Patrick writes, “Apart from supplying the budget, what services do the studios actually provide during the production of a movie? If you got the money elsewhere, as per your billionaire episode, would you still need to work with the studios? Equipment, studio space, crews, cast, post facilities, marketing companies, etc, are all available elsewhere, right? Are studios just glorified banks? Is it all about the distribution?”

**John:** Aha.

**Craig:** Cutting right to it.

**John:** He’s challenging the fundamental premise of the studios.

**Craig:** I think he’s confirming the fundamental premise of the studios.

**John:** Craig, you can talk us through. Also, Drew just graduated from the Stark Program, so he’ll have a perspective on what studios do. Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** I think Patrick’s put his finger on exactly why we do use them. Studios are, in fact, a combination of a distribution facility, a bank, and an advertising agency. That is what they are. The rest is what we do. But what they do is they pay for it, they advertise it, and then they put it out. That’s it. That’s what they do.

**John:** It’s easy to confuse the fact that they have physical lots where you can shoot films, and they obviously have some equipment there, and they have facilities there for doing post. But of course, Craig and I will both tell you that so often, a show that is for CBS will actually shoot on, like, Universal stages, because that’s what was available. It’s not like they’re always shooting their own things on their own lots. They do that wherever they could do it.

There are, of course, lots of movies that were made completely outside of the system. There are independent films and other things that are sold after they are produced, to a company that distributes them. But it’s that distribution function and marketing function that’s really, I think, the heart of why there still is a modern American studio system.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are stages everywhere.

**John:** Everywhere.

**Craig:** There are post facilities everywhere. Sometimes when things are independently financed, you take away the bank aspect of the studio, but you’re still maintaining the marketing, the advertising aspect, and the distribution aspect, which is why independent films are constantly looking to get distribution from studios. That’s sort of how it goes.

**John:** We talked about Legendary Pictures. Legendary, it’s kind of a studio. They definitely have money. They do their own development of stuff. They can put stuff in production. They have money to put stuff in production, but they’re not a distribution company. I’m sure they have a lot of sway in the marketing, but they don’t have unilateral control over the marketing of things.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** They partner up with other companies for distribution. Drew, any insights that you have from having just completed the Stark Program and knowing… You’ve had a studio management course recently.

**Drew:** You guys have nailed it. I think marketing and distribution is obviously so key. I think it seems so easy for indie producers or indie filmmakers or people outside the studio system, that we would be able to jump in, and the idea of, oh, you can get some money together and make a movie. But without that distribution… Marketing costs, I think it’s a million dollars per 100 screens, just to try and get you to the place where you’re gonna break even on that money.

Then I think for people, for writers and for artists, it becomes an institutional check too. You can try and make a career outside of it, but I’m not sure. I think you need to have that to have a certain longevity.

**John:** Maybe so. One point I want to make about distribution is you need an ongoing distribution program. Basically, you can’t just spin up in a distribution company once, to distribute one movie, and then wind it all back down.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** You need to have ongoing people who do that, not just so you have the expertise to do it, but also, to collect the money that you made in those theaters, you have to have another movie coming out, so you can say, “Hey, deadbeat exhibitor, before we give you this next movie, you gotta pay us what you owe us.” That historically has been an incredibly important part of why studios who have spun up and done one or two or three years of movies have failed, because they couldn’t get the money back in, because they didn’t have the ongoing pipeline of product.

**Craig:** Money goes out instantly, comes back slowly. You also need a library to keep you afloat. You need to have the ability to absorb that slow return. Also, when it comes to distribution, there is a leverage when you’re dealing with…

Let’s just deal with theaters, which are having a nice little bounce-back. Hooray. There’s a limited amount of theaters. Do you want Batman? Yeah, you do want Batman if you’re a theater owner. I need you to also take this thing. You get to where, as if you just have this thing, and they’re like, “We don’t want to show that.” I don’t have a Batman to make you show it.

You’re absolutely right. There is a reason why the only new studios that are appearing are from companies that are already enormous. Really, Netflix was kind of the only one to emerge without having been a legacy studio or a preexisting massive entity, like Apple or Amazon. But even then, Netflix has absorbed an insane amount of venture capital. It is a massive endeavor to start one of these things from scratch. The war field is littered with the bodies of companies that tried and failed.

**John:** We’re phrasing everything in terms of movies, but the same thing happens in TV. If a studio has a TV show that they’ve made, that they want to then sell around the world, they need to have a team that sells that show around the world and collects the money from around the world.

If they have Designing Women, and they want to sell it to Portugal, and some Portuguese company wants to air it, they have to make that contract, enforce that contract, collect the money. That’s just a lot of overhead. You can’t expect one individual to do that. It just takes a lot of people and bodies to do it.

**Craig:** It takes a lot of people, which is why you can’t really create one of these things as a single-use entity, because the amount of people required, lawyers, financiers, to keep the pipeline functioning, it just is not warranted by a single-use entity.

The HBO is an interesting case, because they have certain, unlike Netflix or Amazon or Apple, which is just one worldwide, or Disney Plus, for instance. Everybody just logs on to the one thing. HBO still has linear. They have Max. They have Max LatAm. They have Max Nordic. There’s some local versions of it around the world.

Then for most places internationally, they’re making good old-fashioned distribution deals. For instance, in the United Kingdom, HBO material, through a deal that the studio made with Sky, is shown on Sky in the UK. In Canada, it’s shown on an outlet called Crave. Every single one of those deals has to be negotiated and forced, managed, renewed, evaluated. John, the amount of PowerPoints, we can’t imagine. We can’t imagine.

**John:** Obviously, Craig doesn’t have to worry about each of those individual deals. Craig might be asked to go to travel to some place to hype up the show as it’s being released in Canada, but he’s not responsible for negotiating the Canadian deal.

**Craig:** I don’t have to do any of that.

**John:** He doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to.

**Craig:** Thank god, because I would be like, “I’d love for Canadians to see it, but guys, how about just free? It’s free.”

**John:** It’s free. It’s free. I remember Rachel Bloom came to Paris while I was living in Paris, because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend had just started airing on its new network, and they wanted her to go there and promote it. She’s like, “I’ll go there and promote it.” We hung out. We drank some wine. It was nice.

I don’t want to get off this topic though without saying that just because it’s hard to build up an entire studio distribution marketing arm doesn’t mean that it’s hard for any given billionaire to make the production part of it. The production part of it’s actually the easier part. You make a thing, and you sell it to a distributor who does all the rest of that. We would love more people to do that, to do what Legendary does, to do what other companies have done to create that, because that’s awesome.

**Craig:** There is a lot of money in the world. There are only a few studios that are capable of marketing and distributing a film. Yes, lots of money. Now, traditionally, investing in movies and television has been a great way to lose a billion dollars.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like opening a vineyard. It’s like, oh, it’s a great way to make a little money off of a lot of money.

**Craig:** You know how to make a million dollars in the wine business? Start with a billion dollars. It’s definitely a thing. But it has always been, I think for a certain segment of independent financiers, a labor of love. Patron of the arts is a thing. Nobody who supports the production of Broadway shows, for instance, nobody goes into that thinking, “I’m gonna make a gazillion dollars.”

**John:** “I’m gonna be rich.”

**Craig:** No. You are doing it because you love it. Now, you may still be a hard-charging guy who’s probably corrupt, because Broadway accounting makes Hollywood accounting look absolutely spotless. Nonetheless, the point is, you can make a whole lot more money just handing it to a hedge fund and just sitting back.

There is still a value to the Medici-style patron of the arts. Those people exist. Those entities exist. Every now and then, a very wealthy scion will go into that business. The Ellisons, for instance, both Ellison siblings have done so.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And have led to the creation of some fantastic stuff.

**John:** Absolutely. You look at the success of A24, and as horribly toxic as they were, The Weinstein Company at its peak recognized the ability to make and market a certain kind of movie and distribute a certain kind of movie that did really well for them and did well for the industry, at least in terms of the quality of material they were able to put out there and some of the artists they were able to introduce. I don’t want to say it’s impossible to do it, but it’s not possible to compete on the big studio level with just a billion dollars.

**Craig:** No, it is very difficult. It may be the case that the lesson of the Weinsteins is that it’s only possible to be successful in going to war against those big studios if you are an absolute shameless son of a bitch. But who knows?

**John:** Who knows?

**Craig:** Look. A24, there are companies that do quite well.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I don’t mean to take things away. A24 really is the new Miramax. They really are. They seem to be doing it quite well.

**John:** Fantastic. Let’s try one more quick question here.

**Craig:** CR asks, “I want to ask if having log lines or summaries of some of my original unsold scripts posted to a personal website with a prompt saying, ‘If you’d like to read this, please contact me at whatever email for the full script,’ is remotely a good idea. I’m friends with several amateur artists trying to break into their respective industries. One does a web comic posted to her personal website. She was telling me to start finding ways to give myself an internet footprint, so if someone wants to find me, there’s something to find. She recommended a website.

“The only problem is, what do I put on this website if I have nothing sold? I can’t just put up random pieces of writing like an artist might post sketches. I thought about putting final versions of original scripts I have up, but I’m not sure if I’m comfortable just having my unsold scripts there for the taking.”

**John:** My first instinct is, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. I just don’t think that’s actually gonna be successful for you. I’m curious what our listeners think, because we obviously have 10 years of aspiring screenwriters who have listened to this podcast. I’m curious whether any of them have done anything like this and found it to be successful in terms of getting people to read it.

My other instinct is, let people read your writing, but maybe just put up the first 10 pages so they can see, and if they want to read more, they can read more. Craig, what’s your instinct?

**Craig:** I don’t understand why you can’t put up random pieces of writing, like an artist might post sketches. Throw a couple of scenes on. Throw one scene on. Throw one scene on with a storyboard. Maybe your friend who does a web comic can… Throw her a couple of bucks and have her do a little… Why not? I don’t understand why. Nobody wants to read a whole script anyway. Everyone hates reading scripts.

Also, you say, “I’m not sure if I’m comfortable just having my unsold scripts there for the taking.” What are you afraid of? You have the copyright on them. They’re there. You’ve published them on the web. Register them with the United States Copyright Office for whatever it is, 100 bucks, and then put them there. Why worry? Dude, no one’s stealing your script, man.

**John:** No one’s stealing your script.

**Craig:** No one’s stealing it.

**John:** If it’s on the web, an AI will scrape it. They’ve already scraped it. But you know what? They’re gonna scrape everything anyway. We can’t stop it.

**Craig:** You should be so lucky, because then you can point back and say, “This was copyrighted.” Now the people that scraped it and folded it into whatever have to pay you a lot. No, I think there is no problem whatsoever. Think about this. Photographers do it all the time.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Photographers take a picture. It is their copyright. They put it on the internet. Anyone can take it, copy it, and stick it somewhere. People don’t stick it in anything that’s actually legit and moneymaking, because they’re gonna get sued, and it’s gonna cost them money. They’ll throw it all over a bunch of crap that isn’t gonna make money, but also, they’re not pretending that they took the picture. I just don’t think this is a problem.

I think, I have always said this, the paranoia that people are gonna steal your unsold script is not warranted. You should be far more concerned about the odds, the minuscule chance that somebody who can make a difference in your life is also gonna find it and also gonna read it and also gonna like it. That tiny, little lottery victory is worth the chance that some dingdong somewhere is gonna take your pages and put them into his unsold script. It’s not a problem.

**John:** It doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** It doesn’t happen. Even if it did, you would have recourse. I just wouldn’t worry about it.

**John:** Agreed. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a holdover from our live show. We were gonna do One Cool Things. We ran long, and it was messy and chaotic.

**Craig:** Just say Natasha Lyonne. My belovedly messy and chaotic Natasha Lyonne.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is an article by Danielle Campoamor in Marie Claire. Headline is, We Need to See More Parents Having Abortions in Film and Television. The point is that if you look at, in film and TV, whenever you do see a character having an abortion, it is a young, unmarried white girl. That’s not actually the majority of abortions in America. It’s actually people who already have children are the ones who are getting the most abortions in the US. So rarely do we see that portrayed on screen. Literally, in 2020, of characters who had abortions on film, 73% were white, and one third were teenagers, and not a single one of them was a parent.

It’s just arguing for, we need to have representation of what reality is, because people see themselves in that and see the choices they need to make reflected in those characters. That gets people thinking about abortion in a different way, because I think our image of what it is is just that unmarried teen mom, and that’s just not the reality. It’s actually people who already have multiple kids and are deciding whether to have another child.

**Craig:** I completely sympathize with this. I think it’s important to get that message out. I’m not sure drama is necessarily the best way to do it. The problem is a little bit like showing… I bet you if we cataloged the portrayals of leukemia on film, you would also see a predominance of children and teenagers, maybe kids, or rather, young adults in their 20s. What you wouldn’t see are a lot of people in their 70s or 80s or something like that, because nobody cares, because it’s not dramatic.

The problem is the reality of abortion is it’s not dramatic. This is just the stark reality. It’s not dramatic. People who are in committed relationships, with three kids, and a woman gets pregnant, and they decide rationally, oh yeah, no, actually, this was not a pregnancy we wanted. She goes to a clinic. She goes to a gynecologist. There is an abortion. It’s done. Move on. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it’s fun. But it’s not dramatic.

That’s specifically the point I think that Danielle’s making is that what we tend to concentrate on is the overdramatic abortion scenario, a 13-year-old white girl, because white girls. Oh, god, white girl. That’s what we concentrate on. Therein lies the problem, is that we are dramatists.

We’ve talked about medical shows and legal shows. They’re soaking in this problem. They’re just not building medical shows around the mundane medical needs of people, nor are they building legal shows around the vast predominance of legal cases, which are boring and result in settlements between people in quiet rooms.

I understand. I think it’s a fair critique. I think the critique needs to be acknowledged. I think it is important. For instance, what I would argue is that at the end of an episode or a movie about or that contains such an abortion storyline, it would be important to actually put this information up on screen. That’s more, I think, actionable than just forcing non-dramatic situations into a product that is supposed to be entertaining and dramatic. It’s a tricky thing to do, but that’s where I would go with it myself. I’m sure no one will have any thoughts or comments about this.

But as somebody that actively and aggressively supports reproductive rights and access to reproductive rights in this country, I just want to make sure that we don’t end up getting stuck on too much of a hook as dramatists, to portray situations that are inherently not dramatic.

**John:** The article itself actually points out Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as an exception to the rule, because on that show, Rachel and Aline had a character who was a mom of two kids, who had an abortion. It wasn’t a big deal. I think it was such a smart choice to have the character who was facing this decision not be Rachel Bloom’s character, but her friend, who is a central character, but is not the unwed young mother. I think there are definitely ways to do it.

I guess, Craig, I would just challenge that it’s not necessarily that we need to wedge this into more things. I’ve not even seen a movie that it happens in, or it even be the central thing in a movie. I’ve never seen it come up as an issue in this stuff. It feels like it could. There’s gonna be interesting ways to do it, and unexpected ways. We have such a stereotype of who a character is who has an abortion. It’s great to always challenge those stereotypes.

**Craig:** I completely agree with that. Listen, I guess in a way, I’m almost being more aggressive about it, by saying that we should just put facts on screen, white letters on black, and just say, “What you’ve just seen is a dramatization, or is drama. Understand, however, this is the reality,” da da da da da da da da da, to aggressively deromanticize and dedramatize the truth of how abortions occur, not only in our country but around the world, and have always done.

But I agree with you. I’m not suggesting that it’s not possible to do. Of course it is. Nor is there a way to do it in a way where there is no burden of drama on it. Really, what I’m saying is I don’t want to unfairly judge works of art that do portray-

**John:** I get that.

**Craig:** … the most dramatic form of abortion, particularly because I suspect in most of those dramatizations, the characters do end up either having an abortion or relaying a positive perspective of that essential reproductive right. Could be wrong about that.

**John:** I think what we’re both saying is we don’t need fewer portrayals of abortion. We want more portrayals of abortion, and among those, maybe a broader range of experiences.

**Craig:** With an acknowledgement of the truth, because I think what Danielle’s writing about is incredibly important. People don’t understand how this actually functions. We are typically, in this country, always afraid of the wrong thing.

My One Cool Thing is just as much of a hot topic. It is not. We gotta take a break from some of the serious stuff and talk about things that are even more serious, like Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, boys.

**John:** It’s Dungeons and Dragons adjacent. You don’t actually have to play D and D to play this game.

**Craig:** You don’t. This is sort of exciting. Again, not for everybody, but for boys and girls who are dorks like us, and who do like role-playing games. There is a new board game out. This is not a typical role-playing game of the sort you might see on Critical Role or the kind that John and I play on a weekly basis, sometimes on a biweekly basis. This is a board game version of Dungeons and Dragons that is playable in one shot, I think they estimate over the course of two hours, which is not wildly nuts. It’s like a nice, long Monopoly game. It’s called Dungeons and Dragons: Trials of Tempus.

This is an officially licensed product, so it gets to use all of the characters, classes, spells, and so forths from Dungeons and Dragons. It was created by two friends of mine, along with a fellow I don’t know, Adam Carasso, and then my friends, Thor Knai and Kyle Newman. It’s excellent if you enjoy nerdery like we do.

What’s really interesting about it is you get to do something that we generally don’t get to do when we’re playing D and D, which is fight against each other. You get divided into two parties. The two parties are rivals in an heroic adventure. Normally, when I’m DMing, technically I suppose it’s like the DM versus the players, but I think that makes you a bad DM. I think it’s the DM with the players. The point is we’re all gonna get through this and have a great time and go through highs and lows and all the rest. This is more of a traditional “our team wins.”

It’s got all sorts of D and D-ish things about it. I know the overlap between D and D players and board game players is almost 100%, so I think you might like it. Check it out, Dungeons and Dragons: Trials of Tempus, freshly out, available online and all sorts of places, including Schmamazon.

**John:** I checked this out when I was at your house this last time. It is beautifully put together. It’s in a very heavy box. It’s full of figurines and cards and things and all the accoutrement that you love in a board game. I’m excited to play it with you.

**Craig:** (Speaks French.)

**John:** (Speaks French.) That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Craig, we gotta talk merch.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** We have T-shirts, and they’re great. They’re at Cotton Bureau, including the new Scriptnotes University T-shirt and sweatshirt.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Craig, have you even seen this?

**Craig:** No, but I want a Scriptnotes University… Is there a hoodie?

**John:** Of course there’s a hoodie, but also just a normal sweatshirt, a collared sweatshirt.

**Craig:** I never wear those.

**John:** I’m gonna paste a link in the Workflowy here so you can see it.

**Craig:** What I need is a hoodie.

**John:** There’s hoodies.

**Craig:** I’m getting one.

**John:** Our hoodies are good.

**Craig:** You know Cotton Bureau, by the way, used to make the blank T-shirt in the Stuart tri-blend?

**John:** They don’t do it anymore?

**Craig:** They don’t do it anymore. They stopped.

**John:** Oh, wow.

**Craig:** It’s such a shame. I’m checking out… I love the look of it. Oh, but this doesn’t show me… Oh, it doesn’t have a hoodie. Oh yeah, it does.

**John:** It does have a hoodie, yes.

**Craig:** But it’s not a zip hoodie.

**John:** Oh, you want a zip hoodie.

**Craig:** Yeah, I want a zip-

**John:** We’ll figure it out.

**Craig:** John.

**John:** We’ll figure it out.

**Craig:** John.

**John:** The problem is the zipper would go through the logo itself. That’s the problem with a zip hoodie.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true. Ugh.

**John:** It has a pullover crew neck. The pullover crew neck is what you would think about for a sweatshirt.

**Craig:** What about doing a zip one where you take the Scriptnotes University and just make it a bit smaller and put it on one side? I don’t want to screw up our merchandise methods. I’m just saying. A tank top? Wow. Who’s walking around in the Scriptnotes University tank top? That’s cool. Aw, there’s a onesie. Aw.

**John:** There’s a onesie. See?

**Craig:** Aw, so cute.

**John:** Make them for everybody. This was inspired by a Scriptnotes listener who wrote in. She wants to remain anonymous. She said, “I really feel like I learned more from Scriptnotes University than I did from actual film school. I really want a Scriptnotes University T-shirt, sweatshirt.” We’re now making this for her and for everybody else. If you zoom in, you’ll see that the little logo at the center has a typewriter. It’s surrounded by brads. It says “scriptum notas” and “ira and ratio,” which is umbrage and reason.

**Craig:** I love it. I love it.

**John:** Established 2011.

**Craig:** Established 2011, Scriptnotes University is objectively superior to every film school in the world and costs far less. I’m just saying it. I don’t care. I’m saying it now constantly. It’s just a fact. I know you guys went to Stark and everything. I’m just saying it. It’s a fact. We’re just better.

**John:** Speaking of college, any listeners who are college students, reminder that you can get Highland 2 for free for the student license. You just write in. There’s a link in the show notes. Also, just go to Quote-Unquote Apps. If you have a student ID, if you have a student dot-edu address, you get it for free. Why would you not want to do that?

We also have the new XL version of Writer Emergency Pack in the store at writeremergency.com. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one Craig and I are about to record about going back to school.

**Craig:** Back to school.

**John:** Craig and Drew, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Drew:** Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Oh, Craig. Megana was back from her trip, and she texted you and me, saying, “Oh, I was at Target, and I saw that it’s now spooky season, because they have Halloween stuff out.”

**Craig:** Freaking August.

**John:** Megana, it’s not spooky season yet-

**Craig:** it’s not.

**John:** … because it’s still back to school season. Back-to-school season is the best time of year. I loved back-to-school season. I didn’t like necessarily going back to school, but I loved school supplies. I loved stocking up for the new year.

**Craig:** Always fun, yes. Fresh, new stuff. Crisp, new stuff. I was the sort of kid that would just ruin his notebook or binder over the course of the first two months. To have a fresh, new binder, a new notebook, with that weird marble cover that makes no sense, all of that stuff was wonderful, and getting my new pencils, and pens, which we weren’t really allowed to use, until we were in, what, 7th grade or something?

**John:** For a while, we were allowed to use the erasable pens, which-

**Craig:** Those stank.

**John:** I’m sure they still exist, but no one uses erasable pens anymore.

**Craig:** What was it called, Paper Mate?

**John:** Paper Mate.

**Craig:** Paper Mate. Those stank. Poor lefties were just erasing their little-

**John:** That smear.

**Craig:** It was just so sad. Those stank. Protractor.

**John:** Oh yeah, compass.

**Craig:** Compass, all that great stuff. That weird eraser, that big, chunky, pink, trapezoidal, or parallelogrammatic.

**John:** I want to know, how did that form come to be, because where it’s slanted, it’s-

**Craig:** It’s a parallelogram.

**John:** It’s a parallelogram. That’s what it is.

**Craig:** It’s a parallelogram.

**John:** On the side. It’s a parallelogram extended as a solid.

**Craig:** What was it? Was it a Pearl? Was that what it’s called, Pearl Eraser?

**John:** Yeah, Pearl Eraser. Yeah, Pearl Eraser. A very distinct smell.

**Craig:** So distinct.

**John:** You’re not rubbing through the paper, but you can smell that burning rubber to it.

**Craig:** You know what? It’s by the Paper Mate company, and it’s called the Pink Pearl Eraser. It is one of those products still available, of course, that seemingly will never change. The script on it that says Pink Pearl and all that, it just will never change.

**John:** Why would you change it? It’s already perfect.

**Craig:** It’s kind of perfect. It does have that weird smell. Occasionally, it would crack.

**John:** Yeah, because it would dry out over the course of the year too. It was much better when it’s fresh out of the package.

**Craig:** Everything is.

**John:** A few months in, it’s pretty bad.

**Craig:** Everything is better. Also, we did have new clothes, which in my case meant going to Sears and buying-

**John:** Sears or JC Penney’s.

**Craig:** Yeah. On Staten Island, you would go to Sears, and you would have to buy all of your winter clothes, because that’s when they were available, because for some reason, they would only have winter clothes in the summer and summer clothes in the winter, which made me crazy. We were all in the same lower middle class economic stratum. We would get to school, and everybody’s wearing the exact same coat, this weird polyester thing with fake fur and a bright orange inside. Did you have that one?

**John:** I didn’t have that one, but I know exactly what you’re talking about. I also had this maroon color coat that was my coat for a couple years.

**Craig:** There was that. There were your jeans, your new sneakers. Everything was fresh, fresh, fresh.

**John:** You did not have hand-me-downs, because you were the oldest.

**Craig:** I was the oldest, yes.

**John:** I got a lot of hand-me-downs.

**Craig:** My younger sibling was a girl, my sister. She wasn’t really getting my stuff. That’s probably why our stuff was so shitty, because you could only use it once. It was all really cheap. I had a lot of Wrangler shirts. You know those Western style button-downs?

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** You’d get a haircut. Your hair’s all combed. You had to look super clean and neat on day one. This ended on day one. Day two, you could be an absolute rolling, lice-filled wreck. But day one, spotless.

**John:** Now, did you have school photos on day one, or was it in that first week? When were your school photos taken?

**Craig:** That’s a really interesting question. I can’t remember. Maybe it was in the first couple of weeks.

**John:** I think it was the first school week. I do remember, because there was another day where you had to actually look pretty good and bring a comb, or they’d give you one of the incredibly sharp, painful, disposable combs to run through your hair. Every year, I would have to get my photos retaken, because I just could not smile properly.

**Craig:** Was there some… Emotionally damaged or-

**John:** I would make the wrong choice in that last millisecond before the shutter went off.

**Craig:** Was it the kind of thing where you would smile and everybody would be terrified, like look evil?

**John:** No. I would just be looking away or something. I would get nervous by the eye contact.

**Craig:** I do remember, it was always like every year, you would just be in the same arrangement. I was generally taller, and so I would be in the back, next to my tall friend. Man, every now and then, somebody will send me something like, “Oh my god, look. Your former classmate, who’s on Facebook, put this thing up from 3rd grade.” They’ll copy and send me the photo, because I’m not on Facebook. I’m just like, “What am I wearing? What is this weird, horrible, nylon disco outfit that my parents have put me in?” It was just nightmarish.

**John:** I think it’s more fun to look at what the teachers were wearing, because the teachers were actually indicative of what adults were wearing at the time. Like, oh my god, how was that comfortable? That looks like polyester death.

**Craig:** Everyone was wearing some sort of plastic clothing.

**John:** Not a tri-blend. No. It was actually just all plastic.

**Craig:** A uni-blend of some sort of cancer fiber that we were all breathing in. You know what? It was also a lovely time, because I’m sure it was like this for you, for us in New York, the weather was getting cooler. Finally, summer was ending. Fall was sweeping in. Fall in New York is lovely. There’s also all the fun fall stuff. It’s not spooky season. I just want to be clear. It was just more like apple cider and whatever. I don’t know. Leaves.

**John:** I remember we would get the Ditto machined copy of like, this is what you need to bring for your school supplies. I just loved that, checking off the things. You had to bring a box of Kleenex, because somebody, mostly me, I would go through all the Kleenex is the classroom, because my nose was always runny.

**Craig:** You were the snot kid.

**John:** I was snot kid, because I had terrible allergies in a time before people understood what allergies were, apparently.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Now, I take medicines for them, but at that time I didn’t have them.

**Craig:** There was always a kid with snot. I guess it was you.

**John:** It was me.

**Craig:** Then we would also have to bring a shoebox, which all the girls or resourceful boys or non-resourceful boys’ mothers would cover in wallpaper or newspaper or something to make it look pretty. That was our school supply box. We would have our Elmer’s glue and our safety scissor and whatever else was on that Ditto sheet, which I’m sure, Drew, you are absolutely falling asleep here, but let me just wake you up for a second and explain.

We did not get emails listing what we required. No. A teacher hand-wrote a list of things on this toxic piece of disgusting purple paper, that was then stuck to a large roller, coated in even more disgusting purple fluid. Then they would roll it with their hands. As they would roll it, it would stick onto another piece of paper, send that piece of paper off, pull in another piece of paper, and thus, like a small Gutenberg printing press, made of purple death. Each one of those things stank, and yet we all loved the smell of it.

**John:** You did, because you’d get a fresh Ditto machine, you’d just stick it up to your-

**Craig:** Everyone.

**John:** Stick the paper up and inhale it, yeah.

**Craig:** Everyone was snorting whatever was in that. I don’t even want to know what was in it. We were absolutely huffing paint, in the classroom, by the way. The teacher would be like, “Go ahead, kids. Snort it up.” Then we would go to work. That’s what we would get. What a time. What a time to be alive.

**John:** My olfactory memories of that age are so distinct, because I also remember when you have heads down for Thumbs Up, Seven Up on a rainy day, I remember what the desk would smell like. It would smell like this weird cleaner, whatever they used to clean the desks. I have that memory firmly in my head.

**Craig:** Same. It’s funny, you went to school halfway across the country from me, and our desks smelled exactly the same.

**John:** Absolutely. It was not quite urine, but it’s almost that. It was an ammonia-ish kind of thing to it.

**Craig:** It was ammonia. It was this weird, rank ammonia smell. It’s a disgusting smell. The desktop was some horrible, again, plasticky, lacquery thing.

**John:** It looked like wood, but it was not wood.

**Craig:** It also had a little bit of a sour milk smell to it. It just was disgusting.

**John:** Craig, did you have a number line taped to the top of your desk?

**Craig:** Of course we did. Of course. We all had a number line when we were learning addition and subtraction. Also, lining up in size order. Drew, did you ever have to line up in size order?

**Drew:** Yeah. I was always at the front because I was tiny.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw, little Drew.

**Craig:** Aw, little Drew. Oh my god, he was in the front.

**John:** We were almost always in alphabetical order, especially if we were going to lunch, because we had to go through the lunch line. If you were buying lunch, they would check your name off on the little logbook.

**Craig:** I see. That actually makes sense. Lining up in size order seems unnecessarily cruel to everyone on either extreme of the line. Even if you weren’t on the extreme of the line, if you put two boys, if they happen to be next to each other in the size-order line, there would almost certainly be a shoving fight over who was taller. Just pointless. Why? What is this size order thing? Who came up with that? What does it even matter what the order is? What does it matter?

**John:** They want to make sure Drew gets his milk first.

**Craig:** Because he needed it. They’re like, “There’s only one thing that’s gonna make this kid grow: warm, under-refrigerated milk.”

**John:** In a cardboard container.

**Craig:** That has the picture of a lost child on it.

**John:** Indeed. Drew, what are we forgetting about back-to-school?

**Drew:** Oh, my god.

**Craig:** He’s like, “You guys are from a different time.”

**Drew:** No, the smell is real, but I can never delineate where the smell is cleaning product and what is just the smell of children.

**John:** That’s true.

**Drew:** Maybe that sounds strange, but-

**Craig:** It really does sound strange.

**Drew:** It does.

**Craig:** That’s really upsetting.

**Drew:** Should probably walk that back, but yeah.

**Craig:** I just like the idea of a small Drew just walking around, just sniffing.

**John:** Sniffing.

**Craig:** Everyone’s like, “Oh my god, what is with that kid? Oh, leave him alone. He’s small.” They didn’t know what the Ditto fluid was. Ditto fluid.

**Drew:** I wonder when they retired the Ditto machines, because I definitely went to a school that did not have up-to-date equipment by any stretch of the imagination, and we didn’t have one, which makes me feel like they must’ve-

**John:** At your point, it was all photocopies, right?

**Drew:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here’s a website that says mimeographs, that was the technical name, “The classroom chore that smelled so good.” I’m just looking to see if they actually identify what was in there. The duplicator fluid was methanol and isopropanol, so basically-

**John:** Alcohols.

**Craig:** … alcohol, but non-drinkable alcohol, the kind of alcohol that makes you blind. That’s what we were snorting. Hooray.

**Drew:** In my generation, we had the markers that ended up, I think had to be the same stuff that kids would just stick straight in their nostril.

**John:** Craig, you and I didn’t really have markers as much, because even Sharpies were late in my career. We had some marker things, but it wasn’t a default thing. I didn’t go to school with Crayola markers at the start. Did you?

**Craig:** They were much later on. We typically went to school with a box of Crayola crayons. The classic was the 64… I have one. I bought one of them just off of eBay for two bucks. I loved it. It was a proper 1970s era 64 Crayola crayons with the crayon sharpener in the back, which didn’t-

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** … sharpen shit.

**John:** No, but you didn’t really need to. Of course, the pink color was labeled Flesh, because that was the default white.

**Craig:** Yes, Flesh was that, yes, was a slightly whitey peach-ish. I don’t even think Flesh was my color of flesh. It was really for John and Melissa.

**John:** Basically, yeah. It’s a difference between my very tanned legs and my very pale ankles. It’s the pale ankle color.

**Craig:** It’s the pale ankle color, yeah. Flesh, it was like, oh, you’re very light. That is back when things weren’t quite the way they are. There was also Indian Red. That was a color, Indian Red. They’re not red, and they’re also not Indians, but okay, Crayola. That’s how we grew up. We had the Crayola thing and, oh yeah, man, the tape. Magic Tape was a huge deal.

**John:** Oh, Magic Tape, a huge innovation.

**Craig:** Yes. Before Magic Tape, Drew, regular Scotch Tape was shiny as hell.

**John:** Yeah, it was shiny and gross.

**Craig:** You’d put it on something, and it would just reflect like a mirror. Then somebody over there came up with this matte finish, called it Magic Tape. It was invisible. Everybody lost their crap.

**John:** Those 3M scientists, we don’t talk enough about the innovations they had. Magic Tape. Then they had the Post-It notes.

**Craig:** Oh my god, absolutely. They’re geniuses over there, absolute wizards.

**John:** Oh, question for both of you. Were you required to… You got your textbooks, or your math book or your science book.

**Craig:** Cover it?

**John:** Did you have to put a cover on them?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Was it like part of your task is, okay, now you have to put on this cover?

**Craig:** Book covers, yes.

**John:** Loved them.

**Craig:** Which I bet you made your own book covers.

**John:** Yeah, out of paper bags, for sure.

**Craig:** I knew you would. I knew it. Now, you’ve seen me attempt to do crafts, so you know that I could not. My mom would have to do it. Then eventually, I got my sister to start doing it. If it ripped in class, you would get in trouble. I don’t know why. I would ask one of the kids sitting next to me. I’m like, “Can you fix my da da?” Then they would, because everybody just understood I was helpless.

**John:** They would rip off a piece of their shiny tape and fix your book cover.

**Craig:** Yes, just so shiny. So shiny. Inside the textbook, sometimes it would be like “this book is the property of” and then there’d be one kid after another, and it’s stamped. What was that about? Who needs to know?

**John:** I loved that.

**Craig:** Yeah, like, “Oh my god.”

**John:** They had the history. “Did you know that some of these kids are dead by now, and they owned this book.”

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** They got sent off to war.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Some of these people who were reading this book had been sent off to Vietnam, and I’m reading this book.

**Craig:** I’m reading this book on vocabulary, and the last kid who had it died in Inchon. It’s all very grim. I gotta say, man, every generation has its ups and downs and things, but you know what? Generation X, we’re pretty great.

**John:** We’re pretty great.

**Craig:** Does anyone hate us? I don’t think anyone hates us.

**John:** No, because we’re a small generation too.

**Craig:** We’re small. We’re kind of like, “Whatever, man.” We were still there when computers came around. We reminisce, but not like, “And our way was better.” We’re usually reminiscing in a way of like, “God, that sucked.” We like everybody except the Boomers. Nobody likes the Boomers. Let’s face it.

**John:** We grew up mostly with a fear of nuclear war.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re terrified. We’re all right.

**John:** We’re all right.

**Craig:** Last question for you, Drew, on back-to-school week. Are there people that don’t like Generation X, or is there a generation that you think is opposed-

**Drew:** To Gen X?

**Craig:** … naturally to Generation X?

**Drew:** I don’t think so. I think you guys are truly safe, because my generation looked up to you. I’m firmly Millennial. We looked up to you. You were creating all the content when we were growing up. I think Gen Z likes you much more than us, because we’re very cringey to Gen Z, because we’re very cringey in general.

**Craig:** Yeah, you guys are special. You know what? It’s not your fault. Your echo Boomers. You’re the children of Boomers. You are trying to outrun a legacy in your blood, and you’re doing all right.

**Drew:** We can’t escape it though.

**Craig:** It’s tough. It’s a tough one. That was amazing. I wish it were back-to-school week every week.

**John:** I love it. Drew and Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Drew:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, Judge Says in Ruling That Could Give Hollywood Studios Pause](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-works-not-copyrightable-studios-1235570316/) by Winston Cho for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Thaler v. Perlmutter](https://www.scribd.com/document/665871482/Thaler-v-Perlmutter#)
* [The Mandalorian, Loki, And WandaVision Are Getting Limited Edition 4K And Blu-Ray Releases](https://www.slashfilm.com/1371265/mandalorian-loki-wandavision-getting-limited-edition-4k-blu-ray-releases/) by Ryan Scott for Slash Film
* [Lingua franca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca)
* [Where Story Begins – Premise](https://scriptmag.com/features/script-notes-where-story-begins-premise) by Michael Tabb for Script Magazine
* [The premise, or what’s the point?](https://johnaugust.com/2016/the-premise-or-whats-the-point) by John August
* [We Need to See More Parents Having Abortions in Film and Television](https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a35802152/parents-having-abortions-on-tv-films/) by Danielle Campoamor for Marie Claire
* [Dungeons & Dragons: Trials of Tempus](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/385546/dungeons-dragons-trials-tempus)
* [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/)
* [Writer Emergency Pack XL](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/writer-emergency-pack-xl)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Pineless ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and is edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/610standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/billion-dollar-advice).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** This is Episode 603 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, you and I both know that it’s never been easy to be extraordinarily wealthy in America. You monopolize the railroads, you’re called a robber baron. You perform a few hostile takeovers on public companies, bankrupt them after laying off thousands of workers, and somehow you’re the bad guy.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. Isn’t that a shame?

**John:** It is. Today’s billionaires I think maybe have it even worse, because they get dragged on Twitter for buying Twitter and ruining Twitter. Orcas have finally learned how to capsize their yachts. Today, I thought maybe we could offer some guidance for the billionaires and other folks who are looking for a safe and tranquil place to put their money, which is the film and television industry. This episode is for the dreamers, the builders, the doers, the absurdly rich. It’s also a history lesson in the way things used to work and could maybe work again, with independent studios making things for distributors. To help us look into all of this, we have a very, very special guest, Craig, Akela Cooper.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Hi, Akela.

**Akela Cooper:** Hello. Hi!

**Craig:** Hey!

**John:** Hey! Akela Cooper, you are a writer for film and TV. Credits include Malignant, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Luke Cage, and the breakout hit M3GAN.

**Craig:** That’s pronounced me and three-gan.

**Akela:** M-three-gan.

**John:** Me and three-gan.

**Akela:** M-three-gan.

**Craig:** M-three-gan. That is M-three-gan.

**John:** M-three-gan.

**Craig:** If I know one thing in this world, it’s that that movie would have done even better had it been pronounced M-three-gan. I think in some countries it may have been pronounced M-three-gan. Go on.

**Akela:** I was going to say, that’s one of those writer things, where it’s just like, no, you guys, it’s really Megan. At a certain point, I’m like, oh no, I have lost the narrative on this. It is M-three-gan.

**Craig:** It’s M-three-gan. It’s M-three-gan. There’s going to be M-four-gan. It’ll be M-three-ga-four-n. M-three-ga-four-n is what’s going to happen.

**John:** M-three-ga-four-n.

**Craig:** M-three-ga-four-n.

**John:** Akela Cooper, you are also a WGA captain, who I first met on the picket line in front of CBS. I was so excited to meet you. I think I gasped audibly, because I loved your movie. Your name I’d seen for a long time. I got to see you in person and shake your hand. Akela Cooper, welcome-

**Akela:** Thank you.

**John:** … to Scriptnotes.

**Akela:** I love that the picket line is just bringing people together. Even at the rally today, everyone was like, oh my god, I turned left, and I seen someone I haven’t seen in 10 years. I turned right and I seen someone I haven’t seen in five years. It’s like a writers reunion.

**Craig:** That’s what you think good news is. For me, I see somebody I haven’t seen in 10 years, I’m like, “Oh, no. I gotta go hide behind a very slender tree. I’m going to turn sideways and pray.”

**John:** Akela, we barely know each other. I mostly know you through your work. I was looking through IMDb, and I thought we might actually start with getting an origin story. I might guess your origin story just based on this really expensive credits list I see here of the things you’ve worked on. It feels like you worked your way up in a way that a bunch of our listeners are really aspiring to, because I look back over your 10-year arc. You’re starting off on, first credit I see a credit for is Tron: Uprising. Presumably, you were a staff writer. Was that really your first job?

**Akela:** That wasn’t my first first job. It was my first credit, which was animated. Shout-out to Christopher Mack at the Warner Bros Writers’ Workshop, may that rest in peace. Oh, wait, no, I had gotten staffed on V, the reboot of the ‘80s miniseries on ABC that went a season, and then actually, in between seasons I needed work. Chris Mack was like, “Hey, I know Disney is doing a Tron animated series. You want me to put you up for it?” “Yes.” I ended up getting a freelance actually.

That’s where I first met our lot coordinator, Bill Wolkoff, who was my boss on that. It was just the three of us in a room. There was another executive story editor who was on there. We broke this episode, and then I went off and I wrote it. Then years later, it aired. My staff writing job was on V. Unfortunately, I never got a credited episode on that, just because a whole lot of fuckery happened on that show.

**Craig:** I love that song. That’s my favorite Led Zeppelin song.

**John:** Akela, you bring up a really good point, because I misassumed that Tron: Uprising was your first job because a staff writer isn’t guaranteed a credit in IMDb or anywhere else for being a staff writer on a show. It’s only if you actually get an episode that you get a credit on that you’re necessarily going to show up there. You had a whole extra year or work before you show up in a public record for this.

From that point forward, I look through your credits here, you’re climbing that ladder. There’s a ladder. You’re climbing up it, because you go on to Grimm, Witches of East End, The 100, American Horror Story, Luke Cage, Avengers Assemble. Each of these steps, you are… I see you getting a story editor credit, which is the next rung up from staff writer. I see you getting a co-producer. I see you just rising up the ranks, supervising producer to co-AP. That’s sort of the dream process, right?

**Akela:** Yes.

**John:** You kept working up show after show. They’re all in a genre. They’re all very specific sci-fi, fantasy spaces. Was this by plan? Talk to us about how you’re moving from show to show.

**Akela:** It was by plan in that I wanted to hit that next level. As an elder millennial, I feel like I’m… Sadly, we all know this is what we’re fighting for now. I’m part of a last generation that was able to work my way up the ladder and learn each step of making a TV show as I went along. I certainly hope we win on those fronts, because I think we’re doing the next generation of writers a disservice by cutting them out of the process, as streaming has.

I was part of the CBS Writers’ Workshop and the Warner Bros Writers’ Workshop, and that’s what they told us. It’s assistant, and then hopefully you make it to the table and you become a staff writer.

Then traditionally in network you would have to do 22 episodes before the studio would bump you. On V, I had done 13. When I went to the next show, which I believe was Grimm, NBC was the one that was like, “You didn’t do 22, so we’re going to make you be staff writer all over again.” I had to do staff writer again. Then I did 22 episodes of Grimm. Then I got the story editor bump.

Just from there, I kept hitting those 22 episodes on the network side, and so that helped when I transitioned to streaming, like on Luke Cage, where at this point now I think it’s co-producer. I have the experience. You gotta give me that title.

As it was explained to me, you get the episodes, and then either the series is renewed and then you get a bump automatically in your contract, or if you go on to another show, it’s like, I’ve got all this experience behind me, you give me my bump.

There were some bumps along the way, because I do remember specifically for The 100, it was a difference of do you want the title or do you want the pay. I’m like, “You’re going to give me that fucking title, because I’ve earned it.” I actually ended up taking less pay just so I could get the title, because I knew I was going to need that title going forward, especially as a Black female writer in this business. I took the title over the money. Again, going from The 100 to Luke Cage, it helped.

**Craig:** That’s a good lesson right there in delayed gratification. Any time somebody offers you money or blank, take the or blank. There’s a reason they’re offering you money. It’s a trap. Just think it’s a trap every time, because you’re right, if you can hang on… I almost think they’re counting on people being desperate and taking the money instead, because yeah, once you get the higher title, yeah, you’re going to get more money starting next time, and then building off of that, more and more and more. Well chosen. Good on you.

**John:** The other choice I see that’s really smart here is you were not only doing television. You were also writing features this whole time through. Were you consciously working in long-form scripted, and were you always trying to make features in addition to this stuff, or were they opportunities that came up along the way? Because even before Malignant, you have Hell Fest, you have other stuff you were working on. What was your split there? You were doing TV, but you were also trying to do features?

**Akela:** I focused on TV. I ended up going to USC in the grad program, which at the time was feature-focused. Then I fell into TV. I loved TV, but I had no idea how it worked. Then I found out at USC. It’s like, this is how it works. I’m like, this is amazing. While I was focused on working my way up, I wasn’t really writing features. I was writing spec episodes. I was writing pilots. At a certain point I was also writing short stories, just to have something else in my quiver when they needed to send out samples.

It wasn’t until I got on Luke Cage that it’s like, okay, I think Luke Cage, I made co-producer of Season 1. It’s like, woo, I’ve made mid-level, which is huge. It’s a huge thing to get your foot in the door as staff writer. Then getting that bump is also huge. Then when you make it to mid-level, that’s when I was like, yeah, break out the Prosecco. At that point, I felt comfortable in that I had a body of produced work, so I didn’t have to write as many specs anymore. At that point, I was like, I’m not writing specs anymore. You can see that I’ve had episodes produced.

**John:** You weren’t writing spec television episodes, but then you could actually focus back on doing features, because everyone can always read a feature and say, oh, look at how good her writing is.

**Akela:** Yeah. It had been an itch that had been growing. It’s like, now that I have this time, and now that I am at this level in my TV career, let me go back and take some time to write features. While I was on Luke Cage, I had had two horror movie ideas that had been knocking around in my brain. I’m like, let me get these down on paper. I had a system where if the Luke Cage writers’ room started at 10 a.m., I would show up at 9 and then work for an hour before the room started, just on the outline and then eventually the script. I wrote two spec scripts that way while also working on Luke Cage. I would work at home after work as well, and sometimes on the weekends.

I went to my TV agent, ICM at the time. May that rest in peace. It got absorbed by CAA. I went to my TV agent and was like, “Hey, I’ve written some features, and I’d like to write movies also.” He introduced me to a wonderful agent on the feature side. Then he sent out those spec features. That led to a meeting at Atomic Monster. That worked out very well for me.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** I love the fact that you were there… Anytime anyone, but particularly generations younger than John’s generation and my generation, anytime anybody is showing up early, working early, working on weekends, betting on themselves, I sing. I sing. It’s just wonderful. It’s wonderful to see, because it does pay off. It does, honestly. It’s just very exciting to hear somebody betting on themselves like that and then the way it pays off. Well done.

**Akela:** I actually knew the editor of Get Out. We’d met somewhere. I forget now. He had reached out, and it’s like, “Oh, she’s writing features now? I’m being brought on to direct this movie. Would she mind coming on board and doing a rewrite?” That’s how I got on Hell Fest.

**John:** I once had your work ethic, where I actually could get up early and do a thing. I don’t have it anymore. How did you keep energy in the tank to do this writing before your actual writing job? That to me is so tough.

**Craig:** She’s young, John. She hasn’t died inside like we have. Look at her. She’s vital.

**Akela:** Why thank you.

**John:** You’re not a teenager. You still have that young 20s energy, even a ways into your career.

**Akela:** I think I was mid-30s 2015. I am not good at math, but I think I was, because I’m 41 now. Elder millennial, as they say, or whatever the fuck they’ve designated us. They can never seem to land on anything.

**Craig:** Maybe we’ll take you. Maybe Gen X will just pick you up. You’re worth picking up.

**Akela:** At one point, I was part. It was the tail-end of Gen X. Then it’s like, no, we’re going to call you the Pepsi Generation. Then that didn’t stick. Then they forgot about us. Then millennial and Gen Z became a thing. It’s like, hey, what do we call the people between ’78 and ’83? Who the fuck knows?

**Craig:** That’s a pretty specific range there.

**Akela:** That also shifts. There are so many people who will be like, “No, it’s ’79 to ’84.” Wherever it is, I’m smack in the middle at ’81.

**Craig:** Wait a second. I have a question for you, Akela. Do you have children?

**Akela:** No.

**Craig:** There it is. There it is. There it is.

**John:** There it is.

**Craig:** That’s why she’s not dead inside.

**Akela:** As you can see behind me, Craig, I have a cat. I actually have two cats.

**Craig:** I was just guessing, based on the cat and the coolness behind you and the lack of just crap everywhere that belongs to children that put it there, even though this is mommy’s office and you told them not to go in there and they did anyway. John and I, as parents we are the worst about promoting parenthood, because all we ever do is talk about how kids are why we’re so tired. They just haul you out.

**Akela:** That is also where I get time.

**Craig:** Man, you just made one great decision after another, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** I do look at what I see in your background of the Zoom here. Everything there is breakable by a child. That Predator statue-

**Craig:** Oh, gone.

**John:** Gone.

**Craig:** Gone.

**John:** Gone.

**Akela:** That’s Pumpkinhead.

**John:** Oh, it’s Pumpkinhead. Thank you. I couldn’t see it clearly.

**Craig:** It does look like Predator from here.

**Akela:** I have one of those too, but he is in storage right now. In the before times, when we had in-person offices in writers’ rooms, I have a box of all of my collectibles that are specifically for my office. My Predator is one of them.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** You’re a nerd?

**Akela:** Yes.

**Craig:** Love it.

**Akela:** Born and raised.

**Craig:** John and I are playing Dungeons and Dragons tonight, so you’re with your people.

**Akela:** I have played Dungeons and Dragons exactly once. I did have fun. It’s just like, hey, we’re going to do this campaign, and it’s going to be Sunday evening for four hours. It’s like, I wish I could, but no.

**Craig:** You just need to commit to that.

**Akela:** I’ve got a couple of people being like, “We’re going to do a one-shot at some point.”

**Craig:** Do one-shots. Exactly, do one-shots.

**John:** One-shots are perfect. That’ll be great. I want to talk to you about M3GAN, because I saw M3GAN in the theater with an audience who loved it to death. It’s just a fantastic movie and a fantastic ride. My question for you is, from its initial incarnation, did you know that tone was going to be there, that tone where it’s aware of its own absurdity and embracing it and also it’s going to have the jolts that you’re hoping for in a horror movie. When did the tone of it become clear?

**Akela:** The tone of it was Gerard. I wrote a straight horror movie.

**Craig:** Gerard Johnstone, the director?

**Akela:** Yes. The jolts and the scares, yes, those were intended. I’m happy a lot of them landed. The hilarious tone, that is Gerard’s New Zealand sense of humor. I was really, really happy when he was brought on, because it was a case of, I had seen Housebound when it was released on DVD, and I loved it. When the guys at Atomic Monster were like, “Hey, we found a director. It’s Gerard Johnstone,” I was like, “I know that guy. I saw his movie, and I liked it. Cool.” It’s one of those things where I didn’t have to go on IMDb and be like, who the fuck did they hire? He brought that sensibility. I was like, oh, wow, I love it. I love how we played together in that area, because he took what I wrote and then enhanced it in that way. It was so fun to see.

**John:** It’s always great when a writer has a happy director story, Craig.

**Craig:** It doesn’t happen frequently. Then again, so few films get made now, that one would hope that they’re all somehow happy. Can you talk us through the dance? It’s hard to write dancing. The M3GAN dance is astonishing. I feel like we’re buried in culture right now. There’s so much of it. It’s all noise, no signal. Then every now and then, something just pokes through in such a way that everyone goes, “Everybody, shut up and look at this!” In the trailer for M3GAN, when she starts dancing, there was just something about it. I’m curious how that kind of thing gets built in, even from the page, or whether it was on the page or now, and how that storytelling happens.

**Akela:** It was not. I love it. I love that it’s in there. It’s one of those things that writers are going to have to learn. You guys have dealt with production. On the feature side, when I was writing it, after I turned in the first draft, and I got notes from Atomic Monster and Blumhouse, the mandate was, “We cannot have M3GAN moving that much.” They didn’t know how they were going to build the doll and whether or not it was going to be practical or if it was going to be CG or what. It was like, no matter what, if I’m writing her moving, people are going to see dollar signs. I had to go back into the script and cut out “she runs” or she does this and she does that. It’s a lot of head movements. M3GAN will glance this way, and M3GAN will do that. I knew I could get away with that and-

**Craig:** Eyes.

**Akela:** Yeah, and her talking. As far as arms and limbs and doing all this, even the bully sequence, I wrote it like how Steven Spielberg had to visualize Jaws after Bruce the shark, which I took that name and gave it to Gemma’s first robot in honor of that. I wrote it that you would see her in quick flashes from the bully’s perspective. She would be behind a tree and then this and that.

When we cast an actress to actually physically be there, that just opened up a whole other world. I think it was a situation where, when they were doing location scouting, they really liked that office building, but then you get to that moment, and there’s this long hallway between M3GAN and David, and the question during production was like, how is she going to close that gap? It was like, what if she throws them off some way, somehow? It was like, okay, how is she going to do that? I believe Gerard said the idea of her dancing came to him at 3 a.m. in a dream.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Sometimes that works that way. Man, I wish we could show everyone that enjoys movies and television how often some of the things we love come out of the most mundane problem solving, not even problem solving of the romanticized version of how do we make this character interesting? It’s more like, we got to get the doll from here to there really quickly, in a way that makes logical sense, so that the guy down there doesn’t just go, “Bye.” What are we going to do? Then out of these things sometimes comes this fascinating magic.

**Akela:** I remember when I got to see a rough cut. It was a rough cut. They didn’t even have the ending on there. I was like, “What the hell?” Then I just started laughing with everybody else. I was like, “This is odd, but I think it works. Am I crazy? I think it works?”

**Craig:** Whoever the choreographer was, hats off, because I would watch it, and I don’t think my body could do that. There was something about the [indiscernible 00:20:25] that was just so bizarre. It’s interesting that you say that so much of the tone comes from the director. The movie to me only works insofar as I take it seriously. The fun parts are fun, and the campy parts are campy, but if there isn’t something real holding it all together, then it’s just not there. It’s just there’s nothing there. It’s a very ’80s movie in that regard. There were a lot of movies in the ’80s that were horror movies but funny, but horror movies. It was nice. It was such a great throwback to that era.

**Akela:** It was the same thing with Malignant. Obviously, when you’re writing, you’re going to put fun moments in there, because you don’t want it to be super dour. I had jokey moments and stuff like that, but the tone of M3GAN, yeah, that was Gerard looking, because he even hired his friend, who is an actor, is the cop who’s talking to Gemma and is like, “Yeah, that boy’s ear was ripped off and tossed far.” Then he starts laughing. It’s like, “I shouldn’t have done that.” That was an improv on the day. That was Gerard being like, “That was awesome. Let’s keep that.”

As far as Malignant goes, I didn’t sit down at the keyboard like I’m going to write a Giallo horror movie. It was just like, I’m just going to write a straight horror movie. Which characters can I use for humor? The cops. The cops. They wanted more humor, because I think in my original draft, her sister was a psychologist. Again, serious and straight. Then she became an actress towards production. It’s just for more of that humor that James wanted in that, because he very specifically I think wanted to make a Giallo horror film. I did not know that when I was writing it though.

**Craig:** It worked.

**John:** It worked. Congratulations on these films exist. Let’s segue to talking about how we can make movies and TV in a better and different way. Way back, Craig, in 2013, you and I did what was called A Young Billionaire’s Guide to Hollywood. Craig, you said, “This is not a good way to spend a billion dollars if your goal is to have $10 billion.”

**Craig:** I stand by that statement. That is correct.

**John:** A hundred percent. I would say that neither is building a rocket ship or investing in an F1 racing team. You do it because you want to do it. I think if you are a person with a ton of money who wants to throw a ton of money at something, throwing it at Hollywood is not the worst idea.

**Craig:** You’re right, although it does seem lately that large corporations have been investing in Hollywood to try and make 10 times their return, which has been part of the problem.

**John:** It has been a large part of the problem.

**Craig:** Because you’re absolutely right, it used to be, and this will tie into my One Cool Thing when we get to the end of the show, that very wealthy people would buy sports teams because they were very wealthy and they loved sports. If you could break even or make a little bit of money, fantastic, because the point is, I own a sports team. Mark Cuban’s like, “I’m going to buy Mavericks. I don’t care. I love basketball, and that’s how it’s going to go.” What you wouldn’t get so much is the AT&T buys the Yankees because they believe they can leverage it to synergies and blah blah blah. It does seem like some of the money that’s been moving around in our business hasn’t gotten the message that maybe this isn’t just about pure profit.

**John:** You’re talking about corporations, giant corporations swallowing each other to do a thing. I’m talking about, and this is actually something that really comes out of the genre area, is that once upon a time, we used to have independent studios who were making things. We still have some of those in the film side. We have Legendary, which I guess is now not as independent. We have A24, which has done really well for itself, Annapurna. We have Alcon.

**Craig:** There was Annapurna.

**John:** There was Annapurna. Annapurna was a thing. We have Alcon. We have Bold. We have these companies. A lot of times, those film companies are making their mark by producing less expensive genre pictures that do really, really well. In the case of M3GAN, it was a universal release. It could’ve been at A24. A lot of other places could’ve made that movie. It was not an expensive movie to make.

**Craig:** Blumhouse.

**John:** There’s Blumhouse.

**Akela:** Blumhouse, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s what Blumhouse is.

**John:** I think there’s a model for that. Also, I want to reach back to, once upon a time there used to be TV that was done that same way too. We used to have Carsey-Werner. We used to have Stephen Cannell. They weren’t bankrolled by the studios. They brought in their own money. They were able to make things and sell them off to companies.

**Craig:** Sort of, because those, you could make so much money back then. There are few people still making that kind of money now, like the Shonda type money. She makes her company. The studios that made television, Paramount and so on and so forth, would back your show. It would become this massive hit. Stephen Cannell had so many of those, or Aaron Spelling. Then those people would end up with a billion dollars and be like, “I don’t need Paramount now. I’m just going to do it myself.” They had been funded by the studios paying them a lot.

**John:** Things started in a place. Here’s where I think there may be an opportunity now. Just today, as we’re recording this, news came out that Warner’s is negotiating to sell some of the HBO content to Netflix. It tells you that this model of, we’re only going to make things for ourselves and we’re going to keep them inside our little walled garden, may be changing. People may be starting to make stuff for other people, which is really good news, I think, down the road. Akela?

**Akela:** Or it’s like we’ve come back around to what worked before, because back in that area, Fox eventually had Fox Network, but Fox Studio would still sell shows to CBS or ABC and vice versa. Then the goal was, hey, we’re going to get 100 episodes. Then it became 88. Then we’re going to sell it in a syndication, so that you can watch it when you’re at the gym on a fucking treadmill. Supernatural would run in perpetuity on TBS.

It was a system that worked. People made a living. You had your Stephen Cannells and Dick Wolfs. Also, as a middle-class writer, you could make a living, because guess what? You were getting residuals when they sold it into syndication.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. The headline, with the Captain Obvious Statement of the year, said, “According to sources, this,” meaning Warner Bros selling some HBO content to Netflix, “is a financial move.” What? Really?

**Akela:** I’m shocked. I’m shocked.

**Craig:** It’s not friendship is magic? This is fascinating to me. It’s really interesting that it’s happening with HBO, because HBO never was engaged in syndication. HBO was always walled off because it was funded entirely by subscriptions through paid television, and those subscriptions were beefed up through the arrangements with carriers, cable companies and satellite companies.

The ritual suicide that our business has engaged in over the last five years, to eliminate all those structures and make sure that everybody can lose as much money as Netflix does, has created a system where that doesn’t even happen anymore. It does make sense. Look, I don’t know if my shows are going to end up there. It doesn’t matter to me, as long as people watch what I do. I don’t see a problem with this. I guess the first thing they’re going to be throwing out there is Insecure. They’re going to put Insecure on Netflix. So many more people are going to watch Insecure on Netflix than ever watched it on HBO. I have no doubt about this. None.

**John:** It’s not just though that the streamers are saying, the stuff we made for our service will actually license to other places. If you’re Sony, this is really good news, because Sony is one of the few places that’s left that does not have its own streamer. If people are more willing to pick up a show that is owned outside of a service, that’s great news. The opportunities to take things that were made just for one place and actually get them monetized other places, it’s going to help everybody out.

**Craig:** Let’s remember that this was how it was even working five years ago, because Netflix was running Friends. Warner Bros had no problem licensing Friends to Netflix and making a gazillion dollars off of it. Then everybody was like, wait, why are we giving all of this stuff to Netflix and building Netflix up, when we could be doing this ourselves? Missing the fact that Netflix was paying them money for something that no longer cost them money to have. We spent all the money required to make Friends. It’s over. Our Friends costs for this year will be zero, and our income will be all of the money that Netflix sends us for Friends. This does make sense.

We will slowly but surely reinvent the wheel. They will call it something new. Eventually, they’re going to figure out how to take all these channels and conglomerate them into networks. We’ll get back to three networks. Nothing new under the sun.

**John:** Absolutely. There will be true streaming services like Netflix, like we’re used to, where there aren’t commercials. Then there’ll be the commercial version of Netflix. Then there will also be Crackle and Pluto and all the other services that are AVOD and selling ads. It’s okay. It’s okay for people to watch things where they watch them and where they end up. That’s fine.

Here’s my pitch though. I think this is an opportunity for the same people who are now trying to make the next deal with Shonda or Greg Berlanti or Ryan Murphy. If you’re a person with a ton of money, why don’t you go to Shonda and say, “Hey, rather than making that deal at that streamer, why don’t we just make a company? We’ll make all the stuff ourselves and license them out to these places.”

**Craig:** You already lost Ryan, because he went to-

**Akela:** He’s back at Disney.

**John:** He’s back at Disney apparently.

**Akela:** He’s back at Fox by way of Disney.

**Craig:** Disney-Fox.

**John:** Disney-Fox.

**Craig:** Fisney.

**John:** Akela, someone comes up to you with this offer. Do you do it? You have experience in film and TV. Would you?

**Akela:** Yes. If someone is going to be like, “Hey, I’m going to give you x billions of dollars.” Am I making my own network, or am I just making shows?

**John:** You’re Carsey-Werner.

**Craig:** Production company.

**John:** You’re making shows. You’re a production company. You’d do that?

**Akela:** Yes, in a heartbeat. We all have friends who have cool fucking ideas that do not get on air because of the bullshit way this industry works now. It’s so frustrating. It’s so frustrating. I’ve had this happen. I had this happen before the Strike, where it was like, streaming service not to be named was like, “Oh my god, we love your original idea.” I’m like, “Great, I’ve got heat on me. This is going to happen.” Then they took a week, and they came back, and it’s like, “We don’t know if it’s a sure thing, so can you go get a director and an actor attached to this?” It’s like, no.

**Craig:** Do the work of a production company, but you’re not going to be a production company. You’re not going to own anything, but do all the things that owners do. By the way, even if you don’t have any friends at all, which I’m working my way towards that-

**Akela:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** Even if you have one show that you make that is a big hit, if you own it, you are going to make vastly more money than if you don’t. The trick of it is, in the old days there was deficit financing of shows. Shows cost more than the license fees that they received from the networks to air them.

Paramount produces a show, and every episode costs, I don’t know, let’s just say a million dollars. It wasn’t that, but let’s just say a million. CBS says, “We’ll give you 500 grand for the rights to air that.” They’re losing a half a million dollars per episode until it hits that magic amount quantity, 100 back then, where you could sell them to syndication, and then boom, all profit all day long, and in perpetuity. If you’re a show like Seinfeld, it never ends. Deficit financing things is tricky for individuals to do, but yeah, in today’s day and age, where a lot of these shows are not producing 22 episodes…

**Akela:** If someone came to me, I would be like, obviously, I’m going to make my show, because now I don’t have to listen to nopes I don’t want to listen to. Again, my friends who have cool ideas that I would love to see as shows, that are different, that bring in different perspectives. It’s like, fuck it, let’s just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. That’s what everyone else is doing, even though they try to pretend that by going into the past and figuring out what worked before and just repeating that until that horse has been beyond beaten to death, I would be different in that it’s like, I’m going to take a risk, and I know it’s a risk. I’m not going to fire myself if it doesn’t work.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true.

**John:** Akela, part of what you’re describing might also be, you might want to do a process where rather than shooting an entire season, you might want to actually shoot an episode and see if it works.

**Akela:** What?

**John:** You might actually want to test that. Maybe we could figure out how to do that too.

**Akela:** What would we even call-

**John:** The flyer.

**Akela:** … that thing?

**John:** What would we call the one episode that’s-

**Akela:** If you’re getting in a plane and you’re guiding it, it’s like piloting something?

**John:** Like a pilot? Oh, a pilot?

**Craig:** No, no, no, I hate that. Let’s call it something better. Let’s call it a winger, because you’re winging it. It’s a winger.

**John:** It’s a winger.

**Craig:** The winger wasn’t great, so we’re not picking it up. This is where late-stage capitalism goes. We’ll make everything a pilot. Everything’s now a pilot. The whole season’s a pilot.

Listen. I don’t want to over-romanticize. The old system made an enormous amount of crap. Television was just awful for a long time. It was really a lot of crap. A lot of corny crap. They would make all these pilots. The pilot system, by all accounts, was pretty demeaning. It was this horrible rat race where everyone’s chewing at each other to be the last show that’s picked up from the pilot stuff. The fact that a lot of people were employed doesn’t negate the fact that the people that were in charge of picking pilots and then putting those shows together were kind of crappy shows, were subject to horrible amounts of testing. Networks are still doing people turning dials up and down. “I don’t like her. Her jawbone’s too pointy.” She’s gone. Next. Boom. It wasn’t all sugar and rainbows.

**John:** Craig, there’s a difference between a pilot and pilot season. Pilot season was terrible, because it was [inaudible 00:35:15]. It was artificial scarcity of actors and directors and talent and locations. The idea of being able to see what the thing is before you had to make the full thing is a huge benefit. We had the Game of Thrones guys on to talk about their pilot process and how much they learned shooting a pilot of that show, which was a godsend for them. We could take the best things about the previous system and the best things about the new system and marry them together, I hope, to make something better.

**Craig:** That sounds like a brilliant idea. Let’s do that.

**Akela:** Again, it was also a time where people would just try things. Occasionally, you would get something like The X-Files. That worked. I don’t think at the time that the studio was like, “Oh my god, this is amazing.” It was like, “It works. Slap it on Fridays and see what happens.”

**Craig:** Absolutely. Seinfeld and Cheers come to mind as two shows that were abject failures at the start, just full-on fucking failures, and then they weren’t. Once they caught on, and that’s a lot of television to make, sweating bullets, hoping that people finally catch on. Then they do. There were risks that occurred, and there were rewards that occurred. There was a lot of middle-of-the-roadism also, for sure. There was just some common sense that had been picked up over the years. Pilot season only existed because of cars.

**Akela:** They were sold in the fall.

**Craig:** They were sold in the fall, so that’s when the new show started.

**Akela:** Cars were sold year-round, but the new models would come out.

**Craig:** The new models would come out in September, and the car companies needed new shows to run the ads on. That’s why we ended up with what we ended up with. All that’s gone out the door. It will never go back to what it was, but you can feel…

It was almost like everyone looked around and said, “Nothing about what Netflix is doing makes sense, but obviously, it must make sense, so let’s do what they’re doing, because it couldn’t be that none of that makes sense.” Then they all started doing it. Then they were like, “Oh, no, it doesn’t make sense. It actually doesn’t make sense. We should stop and start going back to stuff that makes sense,” which they are now painfully doing. It seems like there is a painful course correction going on here. The pain is entirely self-inflicted by this industry.

**Akela:** It is. Everyone got enthralled by the idea of subscribers. I am of average intelligence. I will admit that. Sometimes things just do not make sense to me, like NFTs. What the fuck?

**Craig:** NFTs are stupid, and people started to realize that.

**Akela:** Has no one considered that if everyone has a streaming platform, there’s only so many subscribers to go around? What do they think is going to happen? Now we know. It’s imploding.

**Craig:** Now we know. If the only way you can keep your business afloat is by constantly growing your subscriber base, you’re going to run out.

**John:** You’re going to run into a hard cap there.

**Craig:** You’re going to run out. It just doesn’t work. Also, do you remember how expensive cable used to be if you threw HBO and Showtime on there? Oh my god. The bill was 250 bucks a month or something. Now it’s like, if I spend 15 and 15 and 15 and 15 and 15, I can get what I used to get for $300? Yeah, I’ll do that. They devalued their own stuff. They busted all the partnerships they have that created structure.

Again, not sugarcoating the way the past was, but at least from a financial point of view, none of this stuff makes sense to me. I’ve never understood it. I’ve always felt like, I don’t have to. It’s a little bit like I do what I do. Billionaires do what billionaires do. I don’t want a billion dollars. Let them go do that. It does feel like some obvious NFT style what is catching up to us all.

**John:** I see two listener questions here, which I think might be fantastic for our guest here today. Drew, can you help us out?

**Drew Marquardt:** Adam in London writes, “I’m wondering if you have any advice for what I call freeze-frame details in screenplays? These are the kind of details that viewers will only see on a second watch of the film. They might even have to slow down the film or freeze-frame it to see it properly. I’m thinking of the kind of little clues in movies like Hereditary or the subliminal flashes of Tyler Durden in Fight Club. These moments shouldn’t really register for viewers the first time around, so is it odd to signpost them to the reader in the script? Any advice on how you’d word such a moment?”

**Akela:** I usually do signpost them for the reader, just because again, having gone through this process, I’m not going to say executives have gotten lazier, but a lot of people don’t really read scripts, they skim them. Hopefully, your director is going to read it, but you run the risk of things being cut if they’re like, “Oh, we need to get the page count down,” or, “We need to get to this event faster.” I will underline or bold some things in the script, because it forces the reader, the executive, to look at that. This is necessary. If I need to, I can’t remember what script I did this on, but I will be like, hey, this is important.

There was a script recently, pre-Strike, pens down, but yeah, I had a moment where I’m like, “I’m going to highlight this. It will be important later.” Then later on it’s like, “Hey, remember that time I said this was going to be important? Here’s why.” I just want to make sure that the reader, before I’m even given those notes, knows that that moment is important. It’s more of an executive thing than a director thing, because again, I you’ve got a good director, they’re going to read the whole thing. I do highlight those moments however I can in my voice. I think the listener should highlight them in their voice.

**John:** Adam’s also asking about Easter eggs, so things that you might not notice that very first time you’re watching the movie. On a second viewing of Malignant, you might spot some little thing that you didn’t see the first time. That’s maybe not crucial to the initial plot, but it’s rewarding. Akela, can you think of any examples of that where it’s a piece of logic or a piece of something that you’ve put in a script that is maybe not essential for the first viewing of the film, but you need to make sure it’s there for the story to track and make sense?

**Akela:** Again, that would be in the script that I’m currently writing.

**John:** You’re doing it then.

**Akela:** Yes. I don’t say it’s an Easter egg, but in a TV episode, and again, I can’t remember, it was like, on second viewing, the audience should notice this. I have written that in TV scripts, I know.

**John:** I’ve written exactly that, that wording too. Craig, for what you’ve been working on, have there been any examples of things where you’re writing something which you know the viewer’s not going to really catch this the first time through, but will it be meaningful the second time, or that only in a later episode we realize that this line of dialogue is important.

**Craig:** If it’s important, it’s important. That’s how I think about it. If I needed to be in there, either for super fans or people who are obsessive, then it’s going in. Like both of you, I will call it out, so that it’s understood that it’s not just a random detail that should have the same weight as everything else. It is important, even though it seems maybe like it’s not.

Now, there are things that emerge almost always through production, because you capture something, and you’re not quite sure what to do with it, or you get an idea, and you’re like, “Hey, you, go over there, shoot this thing. I don’t know if I’m going to use it or not, but I might.” Then you do, because it’s good. It’s interesting.

One example from Chernobyl, this moment in the episode where it concentrates on the liquidators, the soldiers who went to go clean up Chernobyl, there’s a moment where one of the soldiers sings this traditional Russian song, which lo and behold, is sad. I think it’s called Black Crow. It’s beautiful. It wasn’t anything that we knew about. I didn’t know about it. Johan didn’t know about it. One of the actors was Russian and was just singing it one day, because he said this whole place where we were shooting reminded him of that. I was like, “Here we go.” Sometimes, those things happen.

Because that was a moment where someone was singing something in Russian, we had no expectation that anyone was going to think it was anything other than just some sort of, there’s Russian singing happening now, but not, oh, the lyrics are incredibly poignant and relevant. We just decided screw it, if people are interested, they’ll research it up, and they did. It’s a combination of happy accidents or things that you just, they’re important to you, and that’s enough.

**John:** Yeah. Drew, another question for us?

**Drew:** IMS in Toronto says, “I’m an outlier who doesn’t particularly care about character names. As an audience member, I always seem to forget them or confuse them, and as a writer, I try to avoid them as much as I can. I’m currently writing a story set in the near future, and I refer to all my characters by their profession, you know, reporter, doctor, professor, etc. Since the characters in the story don’t really know each other, there’s no good reason for them to refer to each other by name either. I believe most viewers wouldn’t even realize none of them have proper names. However, a reader told me I should definitely conventionally name the characters for the sake of producers. He says that being an unknown writer, I should avoid straying too much from established standards. He also says that should the script ever get produced, actors might be turned off by the fact that they be playing engineer versus a cool character name. I think that not having a proper character name plays well into a heightened futuristic vibe and vision for the show, but what’s your instinct on this?”

**Akela:** If you believe that in your future world, names are not important, that needs to become a part of the world. That is why they are just called engineer or doctor. Play that up so that the reader understands, oh, this is a world where no one has a proper name. Then you’re not getting notes from executives or actors, because my first thought was like, man, so many actors are going to be like, “What the hell? No,” if only for those IMDb credits, because even now, we’re told, even if it’s just someone who has one line, don’t just put bartender or lady coming out of the bathroom. Give that person a name so that it’s a human being on the IMDb credit.

**John:** I always love that IMDb credit which is like “guy pissing at urinal.”

**Craig:** It’s a great credit.

**John:** The best.

**Craig:** That credit is evocative.

**Akela:** I am someone who’s obsessed with character names. I literally a couple of days ago called my mom, because I’m writing personally, pencils down, something for myself, and it’s set in my hometown. I needed names from the ’90s. I was like, “Hey, can you go get my brother’s yearbook and just start taking photos of his classmates?” I build names off of that.

It is intriguing. That could also be his Wes Anderson thing. We all know a Wes Anderson movie when we fucking see one. If his thing is I don’t want character names, these characters are their professions, that’s a thing. That’s his thing. Again, just make it part of his specific aesthetic in that world, and I think you’ll be fine.

**Craig:** I agree. I actually love this idea. Let me tell you what I don’t love. What I don’t love is anyone who says any version of, “Because you’re an unknown writer, you should not do following.” Fuck that. You’re saying I shouldn’t do a thing that known writers do? If you’re successful and you do this thing, I, being not successful, shouldn’t emulate what successful people do. The thing that successful people do very successfully is not give a fuck about stuff like that. It’s an interesting choice.

It worries me that it’s a show as opposed to a movie, just because 20 episodes in, I do want to get to know people a little bit more intimately, but my guess is you would. At some point, you would. If we’re just talking about a script… Even for the actors, I think when the actor realizes, oh yeah, by the way, Pacino signed on to be Doctor, so it’s okay that we’re coming to you for Lawyer. I think it’s a really interesting thing.

I don’t know who the reader is. I don’t care about crap like that. I’m not interested in readers giving that kind of input. Story input, character input, flow of narrative, all that stuff. It’s when readers put on the “if I ran a studio” hat. You don’t. In fact, your name in my movie would be Reader, so yeah, do that part.

**Akela:** It is interesting. Sorry, I didn’t realize this was a show. I thought it was a movie.

**Craig:** He said show at some point, or she.

**Akela:** They.

**Craig:** They.

**Akela:** It was a show. That would be an interesting thing. Also, what happens when you have two doctors?

**Craig:** You have Tall Doctor and Short Doctor.

**Akela:** Yes, you have to start getting into descriptors. I’m fascinated with the person who asked the question was like, “The characters don’t know each other, so they don’t really address each other by name,” which okay, but if you have Doctor and Engineer talking about Architect, what are they saying?

**Craig:** That’s where I’m not quite sure, since it’s set in the future, even though near future, if this is just a convention that’s occurred societally or if it’s something that’s specific about this other planet or if it’s just that thing where this person says the characters in the story don’t really know each other. There’s no good reason for them to refer to each other by name either. I should say as an aside, one of my pet peeves is when people are constantly using each other’s names with them.

**John:** Their names when they wouldn’t be, yeah.

**Craig:** We just don’t do that. Sometimes I realize, oh my god, I’ve made it to the end of the script, and no one ever said this person’s name out loud, because they didn’t have to. At some point, we do need to know what it is. It would be one thing if IMS said, “They’re going to be called Reporter, Doctor, Professor, and they will never have a name beyond that.” That’s a super hard choice to make.

**John:** It’s a choice.

**Craig:** It’s a choice. If the theory is at some point we’ll learn their names, and actually that’s kind of a big deal, that’s fascinating. Then learning their name becomes really interesting, because when we find out someone’s name that we’ve been talking to or having a connection with, it’s a moment. It’s an interesting moment.

**John:** Absolutely. I agree with everything that’s been said. I think what we need to remember about a name though is it’s not just a thing, handy little handle for our reader, it’s also how people in the world can refer to each other. I think IMS is going to run into problems where they need to talk about that person to a third party, and you just have no way to do that.

Watching a Game of Thrones, most of the time I could not remember any of those characters’ names. We have shorthand in the house, but the tall guy, or the guy who’s traveling with her. You figure out that kind of stuff. You have ways to talk about people. You end up inventing names for people, even if the show itself does not give the person a name. They’re going to be finding ways to identify those people. Let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, I see you’ve added a One Cool Thing, so I don’t want to take it away from you here.

**Craig:** You wouldn’t, but I don’t always have a One Cool Thing. I like that now it’s special. It takes me forever to watch things. I have been just getting the quiet, passive-aggressive stink eye from Rob McElhenney for months now, because I hadn’t watched his documentary show on Hulu called Welcome to Wrexham.

Welcome to Wrexham is the documentary story of the English football team, the footy club, that he and Ryan Reynolds purchased in Wrexham, Wales, and the story of this team that’s buried in a fairly low-level tier of English football, struggling to make it to get promoted to the next level up.

Finally, I couldn’t handle it anymore, and so I did it. I was going to do it anyway. You watch something for a friend. When you start, it’s a little bit homeworky. I was so in on this thing, within, I don’t know, seven minutes. I was so in on it. It is so well done. It is so charming. It is so sweet. It is not at all what you think it’s going to be. Yes, there is some fun bits of football, but I don’t care about soccer. I’ve never cared about soccer, and furthermore, I never will. What I am obsessed with, stories of economically depressed towns in the United Kingdom. Boy, do I-

**John:** Billy Elliot, yeah, right there.

**Craig:** Oh, Billy Elliot, how you claim my heart, or In the Name of the Father, or any movie that deals with the economically… The Full Monty. There’s so many. What a genre. I love that genre. This is true. This is real people. It focuses on a certain kind of segment of English society that we just generally don’t see. We see lords and ladies, and we see the royalty, and this is something else.

First of all, Rob and Ryan are both, not only on television, but in person, just lovely human beings. They’re just quality humans. What you see is what you get. They’re authentic, and you can tell. What they’ve done for this town and what has happened to this town is pretty remarkable. It is a delight. It is funny at times. It is exhilarating at times and very, very sweet always.

As a kicker for those of you who are Scriptnotes fans, they sent over a gentleman named Humphrey Ker to be their emissary. Humphrey is an Englishman. For those of you who are Scriptnotes fans, he is Megan Ganz’s husband, so Megan Ganz, who’s been on our show and who’s a wonderful person. I met Humphrey when we were all in those early, heady days of Mythic Quest, figuring out what that show was. Humphrey was on staff there as well and also played a part on the show. Big recommendation for Welcome to Wrexham. It is on Hulu. There are a lot of episodes.

**John:** There are a lot of episodes. There are a lot of episodes.

**Craig:** There are a lot of episodes, but they’re 25, 30 minutes long. They go down easy, quick, and you do not need to like either soccer or Britain.

**John:** Or human beings.

**Craig:** Really, or humans. If you like Rob and Ryan, I think you’ll be okay. In fact, if you like Rob or Ryan, you’ll be fine.

**John:** One of the two. A difference between you and me, Craig, so Rob is your friend, Ryan is my friend. I watched it the day it came out and then texted him.

**Craig:** Yeah, because you’re literally a fucking Eagle Scout. You are literally an Eagle Scout. Do you know how many badges I earned as a Boy Scout? Guess.

**John:** Two?

**Craig:** Zero, because I was never a Boy Scout, nor would I ever be. How dare you.

**John:** You should’ve been. My One Cool Thing is shorter and simpler. An article by Clare Watson in Nature called Evolution Keeps Making Crabs, And Nobody Knows Why.

**Craig:** What kind of crabs are we talking about here?

**John:** You know evolution. Evolution, things adapted to their environment. They change. You have trees of things that grow out. You see, oh, these would be all the crabs. For some reason, crabs have independently developed many, many times. They are not related in ways that they should be related. They will develop claws and pincers in ways that they work. There’s true crabs and not true crabs. There’s something about the biomechanical form of crabs that is-

**Craig:** I’m literally laughing every single sentence that you say the word crabs.

**John:** I say crabs. It’s great.

**Craig:** Every single one is funny. Keep going.

**John:** There’s something about crabs, Craig.

**Craig:** Yes, there is.

**John:** They just get under your skin. They’re an irritant.

**Craig:** You keep scratching at this, you’re going to get to something important.

**John:** You keep scratching, I’m going to get to something good here. How they work in multiple environments has given them some sort of evolutionary advantage. We keep coming back to crabs for some reason. I think at some point, we’ll be visited by an alien species, and they will probably be crab-like, because it just seems to be a very effective form.

**Craig:** Have you seen the South Park episode where they go underground and meet the crab people?

**John:** I do not remember a crab people episode of that.

**Craig:** Spectacular.

**John:** I’m sure. I’m sure it’s spectacular.

**Craig:** Crab people. Crab people. The headline here, we’ve discussed many times that people who write articles do not write the headlines that go on the articles. I can’t give Clare Watson credit for this. Clare Watson wrote the article that you’re referring to here. Somebody at sciencealert.com wrote this headline, Evolution Keeps Making Crabs, And Nobody Knows Why. That’s awesome. Nobody?

**John:** Nobody.

**Craig:** What? Where are all these crabs coming from, evolution? This is also delightful.

**John:** It is delightful. You look through the tree here, and you see, oh, why did it happen this way? We don’t know.

**Craig:** Nobody knows.

**John:** Crabs.

**Craig:** Crabs. People.

**John:** Akela, what do you have for us?

**Akela:** I guess overall it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger.

**Craig:** That works.

**Akela:** I’m a fan of documentaries, and I recently watched the Arnold doc on Netflix. Also just being an ’80s baby, Arnold Schwarzenegger was huge in my household. My dad is a huge Conan the Barbarian fan, so he watched it all the time. I love Terminator, Commando, Predator. We’ve talked about Predator.

**Craig:** Commando.

**Akela:** I’m just fascinated by that era. I’m also in the process of reading this book called The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage, which is basically about that period in the ’80s between Schwarzenegger, Stallone-

**Craig:** Stallone.

**Akela:** … Van Dam, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan. It is fascinating to just see behind the curtain of that and how much Stallone and Schwarzenegger actually hated each other. It was basically like evolutionary warfare. They were each other’s inspiration. I think after Stallone did Rambo, Schwarzenegger was like, “I need a movie like that.” Commando came out.

**Craig:** Commando happened. Did they talk about how Stallone ended up in, I think it was Stop or My Mom Will Shoot?

**Akela:** No, I haven’t gotten to that part yet. I am on-

**Craig:** It’s incredible.

**Akela:** He has just directed Staying Alive.

**Craig:** All I’ll say is, Schwarzenegger is an evil genius. That’s all I’m going to say. Let’s see if they get to it. It’s spectacular.

**Akela:** Oh my god, you watch the documentaries. I am on TikTok, and so sometimes there will be clips from old movies. There’s this interview with Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura, which I think is part of the behind the scenes on Predator. Jesse Ventura was like, “I went into wardrobe and I found out that my bicep was one inch bigger than Schwarzenegger’s. I was bragging about it.” Then Schwarzenegger was like, “Good, because I went in before him and I told the wardrobe lady to measure him and lie and say his bicep was bigger than mine, so that then I could go and bet him a bottle of champagne that it wasn’t true.” He is a mastermind. It’s so weird how cunning and charming Arnold Schwarzenegger is. He has done awful things. In the documentary, he actually owns up to all of that. That man’s mind is like a steep trap. It’s since he was a child too.

**Craig:** I will say that the bicep trick, it’s almost exactly what he does to Stallone, except on a scale that is so terrifying, and that led to an entire movie being made that should’ve never been made. It’s astonishing.

**John:** I love it.

**Akela:** I look forward to that. That’s what my Cool Thing right now is. Again, I just love ’80s action movies, ’80s horror movies.

**Craig:** Have you ever seen the little best of moments from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s DVD commentary on Conan the Barbarian?

**Akela:** A long time ago.

**Craig:** John, have you ever seen it?

**John:** You’ve talked me through them. It sounds amazing. I think over D and D we’ve talked about it. It’s great.

**Craig:** It’s so special. “Look at [indiscernible 01:00:27]. Look at him. Now he’s turning into a snake.” He’s just saying what you’re looking at. “Now he’s drinking the liquid.”

**John:** It’s descriptions for the visually impaired and blind. I love it.

**Craig:** It’s incredible. He’s so drunk when he’s doing it. He’s so clearly shit-faced.

**Akela:** One of the great things years ago was the musicals on YouTube of his movies, like Commando the musical. Oh my god.

**Craig:** I gotta check that out.

**Akela:** You have to watch this. It’s hilarious.

**Craig:** Love Commando.

**John:** We’ll add it to the list.

**Craig:** “Hey Bennett, why don’t you let off a little steam?”

**Akela:** It really is them singing. It’s like, “Bennett, John, I’m here again.”

**Craig:** What is his name? It’s John. What is it again? It’s a name that a man with a strong Austrian accent would not have.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** He plays John Matrix. That’s his name, John Matrix, you know, a very popular name in [crosstalk 01:01:25], John Matrix.

**John:** Matrix.

**Craig:** “I’m John Matrix.”

**Akela:** It’s just at some point, he was so successful. People were just like, “We don’t care how he got the accent.”

**Craig:** It doesn’t matter.

**Akela:** It makes no sense how he has any of the jobs he does.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Just the armory bunker that he has in Commando alone, which I loved. I loved that. I was like, “He’s got a special secret room full of all the weapons in the world.” Anyway, that’s our show.

**John:** That’s our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Wahoo!

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Woo-woo!

**John:** Our outro is by Nora Beyer. 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. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. Craig, I forgot to send you, I think I did text you the new Scriptnotes T-shirt. Did I send it to you?

**Craig:** I don’t think you did.

**John:** You can picture the CBS Special Presentation, right?

**Craig:** (sings)

**John:** Imagine that with the word Scriptnotes coming in and that color pattern.

**Craig:** All I want to wear. Just get me an entire wardrobe of that.

**John:** They’re absolutely gorgeous. You will love them.

**Craig:** That was before your time, Akela, I’m guessing, the CBS Special Presentation intro music? (sings)

**Akela:** I think so, yeah.

**Craig:** That was such dopamine for ’70s kids.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** That meant something fucking incredible was about to go down.

**John:** Was about to happen.

**Craig:** Whether it was like, it’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi or it’s whatever, it’s some animated awesomeness or some just incredible thing.

**John:** Not a Bond movie, because CBS didn’t have the Bond movies, but something great like that was going to be on. So good.

**Craig:** Something awesome. It would spin. Crack. Crack for ‘70s kids.

**John:** So good. So good. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we should record, although we’re running out of time. Akela, are we willing to talk about the writers’ programs you went through before you started your staff writing career? Because I’m really curious how those went for you and what you think about the changes there.

**Akela:** Yes.

**John:** Akela Cooper, thank you so much for coming on Scriptnotes. It was an absolute delight to get to talk to you about Schwarzenegger and genre and how to change the film and television industry.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** You’re an absolute hero [indiscernible 01:03:52].

**Akela:** Thank you. This was fun.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Akela, so you, before you started as a staff writer on V, you had gone through film school. You’d also done two different writing programs. Can you tell us about what you learned in those different programs and how they helped or did not help you get started as a television writer?

**Akela:** They both helped tremendously. As somebody who’s a little bit socially awkward, I did the CBS writers’ program first, and it was really helpful in helping to set expectations for staff writers when we are on the show. For lack of a better phrase, a lot of times, staff writers don’t know how to act in the writers’ room. That can often be to their detriment, which will lead to them not being asked back. We had people who would come in. Showrunners would come in and talk to us about expectations and answer our questions, like, is this okay, is that not okay.

It was just a great experience in how to navigate potential scenarios and also just building a network of people that we could reach out to, whether it was like… I’m actually still friends with Carole Kirschner, who runs the CBS writers’ program. I had a great mentor in Leigh Redman, who was at CBS at the time. If ever I felt lost, I would be like, “Hey, can you guys help me out here? I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” or on that level.

We also did mock writers’ rooms. It was like, hey, we’re going to break an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. John Worth came in to talk us through that, show us the ropes of what a writers’ room does and how it operates before we actually got into one. It set us up for success.

Warner Bros operates in pretty much the same way. It was just another bite at the apple. It’s like, okay, this is what you do for this situation, and this is what you do for this situation. Warner Bros was also very helpful in getting most of us representation. I got my manager through the Warner Bros Writers’ Workshop, which I still have today. I think he and I are going on 14 years together.

**John:** A question for you, Akela. You are a huge success. You came out of these programs and are a huge success. Of your cohorts who are in those programs, how many of them are workings as writers today, top of your head? A bunch?

**Akela:** A bunch. In CBS, I can say Aaron Rahsaan Thomas was a showrunner for SWAT on CBS. From CBS, he ended up getting on Friday Night Lights. Janet Lynn did a bunch. She did Bones, I think after CBS, meaning that’s the job that she got coming out of the program. She’s been working her way up. Those are the two off the top of my head. I think there’s another one who ended up in animation, who was with us in our program. He was doing well in animation. Warner Bros, Lilla and Nora Zuckerman, who were the showrunners recently on Poker Face. Now I need to look up all of our class. Most of us are working.

**John:** That’s a pretty good hit rate. It feels like it was a good investment for these programs to have spent the time and money on you guys to make sure that you had this training, because now you’re able to make shows for these networks, which is amazing. Now, talk to us about what you learned in those programs versus learned at USC and film school? You went through a graduate screenwriting program?

**Akela:** Yes. Love USC, as someone who had no connections to the industry here. It was helpful for me. I know a lot of people don’t need grad school. You don’t have to spend that money. Again, I went to USC for feature writing, not knowing there was… At the time, there was a nascent TV program. I got into that, because we would have to take one class. I ended up discovering this whole new world that I did not know existed beforehand.

USC is what got me into television. It opened my eyes in that way. I had a lot of good professors who were very supportive, because a lot of people think that USC, especially at the time, was like, “This is where you go to make several blockbusters. They don’t care about art or anything like that. That’s what you go to NYU for.” Our professors were like, “No, write what you want to write. Write what you are passionate about.” They were very nurturing and encouraging in that aspect and just teaching us.

As far as features goes, I did need to learn structure, because I had written scripts in high school and college. They’re trash. It was very helpful. There’s a structure, first act, second act, third act. You can break it up into five acts if you fucking feel like it. There’s a structure to movies.

Also, even with USC, it’s like, nothing else matters if no one cares about the characters. That was the big thing at USC. It’s like, you gotta get your audience invested in your characters no matter what you are writing. It was a really good experience in setting me up to learn the basics before you start going off and breaking the rules.

**John:** Akela, can I guess that USC was really good in theory and how to get words on the page, but these programs were how to actually be a working writer in the business? Is that a fair difference?

**Akela:** USC was like, you had deadlines and you had to turn in pages, but CBS and Warner Bros is like, you got two weeks usually. It doesn’t matter, when you’re on a show, what you are going through. You gotta turn in your scripts. It’s a machine. Of course, this was network television that they were focusing on at the time. It’s like, once that production train is moving, they’re not going to stop for you as a staff writer, so you have to learn how to hit your deadlines and make your showrunner’s life easier.

**John:** Craig, you have never been a big fan of organized education over screenwriting or television writing. Hearing this description of the writers’ programs at these studios, what’s your instinct? What do you feel?

**Craig:** They’re proper vocational programs. It makes absolute sense. In most, we’ll call them crafts, trades, there is a job training that is run either by an employer, which in this case is what this is, or they’re also apprenticeship programs that are run through unions. What you don’t do is spend $80,000 a year to have somebody lecture to you about arc welding. You instead are employed and trained as an arc welder. You learn how to arc weld from folks in the arc welders local whatever. Then you start arc welding.

I am fully in favor of all vocational programs like this, but particularly these programs that are run by the companies, because they’re certainly not going to be leading you down a primrose path. They’re going to be teaching you how to work for them. That’s what they’re there for. Big thumb’s up to any vocational program. Not so much of a thumb’s up to expensive graduate programs.

**John:** Akela, what is the status of these programs right now? Some were canceled. Some were reinstated. Do we know where these programs are at right now?

**Akela:** I believe CBS is still going, but Warner Bros has been dismantled due to-

**Craig:** I thought they brought it back. I thought there was an outcry.

**Akela:** There was. From what I understand, I don’t think it’s going to be the same thing. I could be wrong. The program, as far as I knew it, is no longer there.

**John:** Of course, one of the issues also is how our industry works, is that these programs can train a bunch of writers inside their programs, but those people are going to be working for all the other networks. I can see someone looking at this as a cost on a balance sheet and saying, oh, why should we be paying to train writers for Netflix or for other people. It’s short-term thinking, but also that’s the frustration.

**Akela:** I think CBS joined, because when I did CBS, they didn’t pay for you as a staff writer, which is a point of contention, but Warner Bros. The idea was that Warner Bros didn’t want their own farm system. We were like Triple-A baseball. They were going to invest money in us.

On V, because I got V through Warner Bros, they paid for me. My salary did not come out of the show’s budget. That’s what that means. I think they would do that for two years, because they do want to start you off as a staff writer, and hopefully you get on a hit show and you work your way up and then they’ve got a showrunner down the line. The original idea of the Warner Bros Writers’ Workshop was that, yes, they’re going to do what you say, John, they’re going to invest money in us, and then years later they’re going to have a trained showrunner within their camp.

**Craig:** I think Universal’s feature development program works similarly, where they’re like, look, we’re going to put you through this program. You’re going to learn these things. We’re basically giving you a blind script deal for something. We can also put something on you. We can assign you something. The point is, you’re going to write something here. You’re going to write it for… There are definitely ways to make it function.

The expense of these programs is couch change. It’s not an actual number that is relevant to the operation of these companies. No offense to Mr. Zaslav, but every time he sneezes more money comes out than the amount that any of those programs cost. If they want to say that, they can say it, but that ain’t why. It’s usually because it’s a hassle to make a program, find people to run the program, deal with people having issues with the program, and then figuring out who should be in the program. It’s annoying. Doing things is hard. It’s so much easier to not do things than to do things, so they don’t want to do things. This is worth doing. It would be hard for anybody to defend not doing it with any excuse other than, “I don’t want to.” That’s the only actual legitimate excuse I can imagine.

**John:** Akela Cooper, thank you so much.

**Akela:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you, Akela.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Akela Cooper on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4868455/) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/akelacooper/)
* [Paramount Writers Mentoring Program](https://www.paramount.com/writers-mentoring-program)(formerly CBS Writers Mentoring Program)
* [Warner Bros. Television Workshop](https://televisionworkshop.warnerbros.com/)
* [M3GAN Dance Scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c7XccFwJrQ)
* [Episode 122: “Young Billionaires Guide to Hollywood”](https://johnaugust.com/2013/young-billionaires-guide-to-hollywood)
* [Ben Affleck And Matt Damon Launch Production Company With RedBird Capital’s Gerry Cardinale](https://deadline.com/2022/11/ben-affleck-matt-damon-launch-production-company-with-redbird-capital-1235178013/) by Bruce Haring for Variety
* [Warner Bros. Discovery In Talks To License HBO Original Series To Netflix](https://deadline.com/2023/06/warner-bros-discovery-in-talks-to-license-hbo-original-series-to-netflix-1235421444/) by Peter White for Deadline
* [The Carsey-Werner Company](https://www.carseywerner.com/) on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carsey-Werner_Company)
* [Чёрный Ворон (Black Raven) – Chernobyl OST](https://youtu.be/-q23tuds2ZU)
* [Evolution Keeps Making Crabs, And Nobody Knows Why](https://www.sciencealert.com/evolution-keeps-making-crabs-and-nobody-knows-why) by Clare Watson for Science Alert
* [Welcome to Wrexham](https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/welcome-to-wrexham) on FX and Hulu
* [Arnold](https://www.netflix.com/title/81317673) on Netflix
* [The Last Action Heroes](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/668268/the-last-action-heroes-by-nick-de-semlyen/) by Nick de Semlyen
* [Commando: The Musical](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FFQ_g8OoQM)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/) on Instagram
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nora Beyer ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli). Our intern is Halley Lamberson.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/603standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-ref-with-richard-lagravenese).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi, folks. This upcoming episode does feature some naughty language, so if you are in the car with children, put the earmuffs on or wait to play this when you’re at home.

Hello, my name is Craig Mazin, and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This is 593rd episode of Scriptnotes, which is upsetting.

John is not with me today, also upsetting, but to counteract that, today on the show we have one of the best screenwriters simply of all time, and also one of the nicest people in Hollywood, which I agree is a low bar if that’s what you were thinking, but he would be a nice guy pretty much anywhere. We welcome Richard, AKA Richie as I call, Richard LaGravenese. Welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Richard LaGravenese:** Thank you, Craig. This is great. Good to see you.

**Craig:** It’s good to see you too. We are looking at each other over Zoom. Richie and I have known each other for many, many years. I have been a fan of his for many more years than I’ve known him. I’m going to run down a short list of some of the movies that he’s written, so that you can go ahead and drop your jaw like I do when I look at it all together like this.

The Fisher King, The Bridges of Madison County, The Mirror Has Two Faces, The Horse Whisperer, Beloved, Behind the Candelabra. These are all remarkable, highly acclaimed films, and yet we’re not going to be talking about any of those today, nor are we going to be talking about the seven other movies that Richie has directed.

What we are going to be talking about today is one of my favorite movies of all time. It is the 1994 film The Ref. The Ref was a criminally under-seen film. That’s why I want to dig into it, because I think from a screenwriting point of view, it’s remarkable.

Then in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, we’ll be talking about men without friends, how and why men should make friends, and how friendless men emotionally burden the women in their lives. That ought to be fun.

Normally, this is where John would do news and follow-up, but I simply have none. Instead, we’re just going to get right into The Ref. The Ref was released in 1994. It was, I believe, a Touchstone movie. Touchstone was one of the, I was about to say adult film arms of Disney, but that doesn’t sound right. Non-family movie wing of Disney. It was a Christmas movie, and that’s why of course they released it in March. Why would they have done that, Richie? Do you know?

**Richard:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** It certainly impacted the movie’s prospects. When it came out at the time, it was a bit of a box office bum. I think looking at how much money it made, if it came out today and made that amount of money, everybody would be dancing in the streets, but the business was different back then. The expectations were a little higher for theatrical releases. The fact that it didn’t necessarily make money right away didn’t mean that it wasn’t going to catch on as a cult hit and maybe even more than a cult hit.

The story is by Marie Weiss, screenplay by Richie LaGravenese and Marie Weiss, and directed by the late, great Ted Demme. I’ll do the quick summary, and then we’ll dive into the origin story of The Ref.

Quick summary. It’s Christmas Eve. Caroline and Lloyd, a middle-aged couple living in an affluent and very white and uptight Old Bay Bridge, Connecticut… Is that right, Old Bay Bridge? Is that the town?

**Richard:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Are having a marriage crisis. As they debate the past, present, and future of their relationship, they’re taken hostage by Gus, a thief on the run, but who has captured whom? Gus is forced to listen to their ceaseless bickering, as well as pretend to be a marriage counselor when Lloyd’s extended family arrives for the holiday, but his intervention, ultimately at the point of a gun, is what finally leads Lloyd and Caroline to be honest and open with each other.

This always struck me as a modern Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf take on Ransom of Red Chief, the old O. Henry story.

**Richard:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Is that where it began for you?

**Richard:** Absolutely. It started as a take on The Ransom of Red Chief. It was an idea by my then-sister-in-law, Marie Weiss, who was coming out of advertising and wanted to work in the movies, and her then-husband, Jeff Weiss, who is one of the producers on it.

I had a deal at Disney, because originally, Disney had bought Fisher King but didn’t make it but then put me under contract for three movies. You give them an idea. They give you an idea. They never take your ideas and usually do things off the shelf. That’s where Little Princess happened. The first thing was Widows, which just recently got made by McQueen. That was originally there.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Richard:** That was the longest development thing. That’s when Touchstone and Disney used to give you literally 16 pages of notes in development. At the time, we were making it a comedy for Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn, so it didn’t turn out that way. I was on that for months, like a year. It was terrible.

Anyway, the last deal was we brought to them this idea of The Ref. That’s how it began. She had this idea of a Ransom of Red Chief idea with an arguing couple and a family and stuff. With me guaranteeing it, she got to do a first draft, and then I came in.

**Craig:** Then you came in and you started doing what you do. The movie, I suspect, given the fact that it was 1994, which was thick in the middle of every movie makes money because it’s going to be out on VHS and DVD. I suspect that all it really needed was a star. Then along comes Denis Leary. Now, Denis Leary was a bit of a phenomenon at the time.

**Richard:** He and Teddy, they had a partnership, kind of.

**Craig:** I see. Denis Leary was, I think at that point, primarily a stand-up comic. Then he was doing some stuff for MTV.

**Richard:** Yes. Interstitials they call them.

**Craig:** Yeah, interstitials.

**Richard:** Teddy directed them. They were all Cindy Crawford-centric and really funny. When I hired Teddy, when we met on the movie, he brought in Denis.

**Craig:** One question to start with is, Denis Leary has a very specific comic persona. That comic persona is brought through here. As a character, he’s a quasi-chain-smoking, fast-talking, angry guy. That was his thing was he’s angry, he’s very verbal, he doesn’t have time. Every frustrates him. It is a perfect match, really.

The first question is, did he just pick that script up and go, “Oh yeah, if I just be me and say these lines, everything will be fine,” or did you say, “Ah, okay, now that it’s Denis Leary, I need to adjust the character of Gus to fit Denis Leary.”

**Richard:** I remember I always loved those fast-talking comedies of the ‘30s and ‘40s. He’s perfect for that, because he’s rapid fire. I now remember there were a few drafts that were going through, again, Disney development, Disney development. Then once we had a producer on it, it still wasn’t really clicking.

I remember it was me, Denis, Judy Davis, Kevin Spacey, and Bruckheimer. I rewrote the script in 4 days, bringing in 30 pages and 60 pages and reading with the actors the next day, the next day, the next day, and built it like that.

One of the greatest feelings you can ever have as a writer, it happened with Robin Williams too, is when you make someone like Denis laugh from reading the script. He was reading it cold, and he would start laughing.

Then we found the voice of it. In those four days, I think we really found the rhythm and the voice of it a lot. It’s easy to write for Denis, because he has a kind of 1940s delivery. You know what I mean?

**Craig:** “Here’s the thing. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that. Hey, ho.”

**Richard:** Breathy and fast and just quick. I know there was a couple of bits he improved, like biting the baby Jesus cooking and things like that. We stuck to the script pretty much. It was a free form on the script. On the floor, we needed to come up with something funnier. That was it. It was finding the rhythm and then his ear.

I had known Denis also earlier. We went to Emerson together. We were in different groups, because I was in the theater thing and he was in the comedy thing. He started the Comedy Workshop there. I remember his shows with his little troupe. They were always really, really funny.

**Craig:** I’m fascinated by the fact that so much came out of those four days. There is this interesting intensity that can happen when you almost have a theater setting. It’s crazy. You have to deliver.

You’re working with Judy Davis, Kevin Spacey, who we will discuss purely as an actor in this podcast and not deal with all the other stuff. Those two alone, what’s interesting about them is how verbal they are as actors and how they’ve maybe never been more verbal than this. I want to give a little example here.

Right in the beginning, there’s two things that happen. The first thing is you establish the town. As the credits are coming on screen, the camera moves to this town, and we learn that it is a picture-perfect place, although there’s maybe the undercurrent of an issue, like the fact that the baby Jesus is missing from the [inaudible 00:09:44] in town square.

We eventually get to a marriage counselor, played by BD Wong. He is dealing with the angriest couple in the world. As they go back and forth, I always feel like the first five minutes of a movie teaches you how to watch the movie, and it teaches you a few things here. One of them is, tonally, these people are so hyper-verbal and hyper-literate in the way they talk to each other. I’m going to give an example here, because I’m fascinated by the way dialog works like this.

**Caroline Chasseur:** You took out a loan. I mean, it was your decision, not mine. You took out a loan from Satan Mom.

**Lloyd Chasseur:** She blames my mother for everything that’s gone wrong in her life. In the meantime, she never finishes anything she starts. Photography courses, existential philosophy courses, Scandinavian cooking classes.

**Caroline:** At least I go after my dreams.

**Lloyd:** To be what, somebody who takes photographs of lutefisk to prove the nothingness of being? No wonder our son’s so confused.

**Craig:** That’s gorgeous, right? He listed three classes, and then without a pause to think or put it together, he can come up with this imaginary idiot who’s used all the knowledge of those three classes. It really teaches you how this movie’s going to function and how these characters work. They both speak like this.

Talk a little bit about dancing on the edge of… One of the classic notes is, “This line feels written.” When you have actors like this, they can do it. There’s something almost play-like about it. Talk to me a little about how you addressed the manner in which they would speak and how literate and how many words and how writerly it would be.

**Richard:** I keep thinking of those first 15 minutes of His Girl Friday, when it’s Cary Grant and Ros Russell in the room. I’ve watched that scene about a million times. The rapidity and how they cram things into their references and you know exactly what they’re saying, and they’re insulting each other, they’re undermining and they’re funny, that rhythm was in my head as much as possible.

I’ve always over-written. I like literate movies. I like movies that are a little theatrical, that are not all exactly like real life. They’re just a little heightened. I think for comedy, it works.

Comedy, like music, goes through different grooves and different rhythms and stuff like that. It doesn’t always work, but I really think the classics do still work today, because there’s an intelligence behind them.

The rhythm was always in my head. I wanted to maintain it as much as possible. I had these two great theater actors, Judy and Kevin, who knew exactly how to find those rhythms. It’s funny when there are certain actors who just don’t know how to do that, today’s actors who don’t know how to talk fast. I was lucky. I was lucky with that and Christine Baranski, of course, later on.

**Craig:** We’ll get to her. You’re bringing up an interesting thing, which is that over time… It is a little distressing to me how much time has gone by, because this movie is almost 30 years old now, which is, I know, horrifying. Over time, actors have notoriously become mumblers, kind of introverts. I think acting quality has been too associated with that kind of navel-gazing and muttering. Here is this, where it’s a little bit like… There are certain bands where the singer is… Freddie Mercury is a great example. You understood every word he’s saying.

**Richard:** Articulation.

**Craig:** Articulation. There’s something so articulated about everybody here. The articulation of everyone is remarkable. I love that.

There’s another thing that happens here. First, we briefly meet Gus as a burglar who goes a little too far in trying to empty out a safe completely, but not before he’s sprayed by cat piss, as a very strange booby trap.

When we get back to the therapy session, one of the things that you do brilliant here is, inside of this one scene, in what John and I often refer to as this precious real estate of the first 5 or 10 minutes of a movie, you deliver so much exposition through therapy and through argument.

When that one scene is over, without us really noticing that anything has happened other than terrific entertainment and quite a few laughs, I know that Caroline has had an affair, that they haven’t had sex in a really long time, that they are in debt to Lloyd’s mother, whom Caroline hates and Lloyd defends, instinctively. Their son Jesse is a budding criminal delinquent.

Shortly after, in a connected scene where they’re driving home, I also understand that Caroline wants a divorce, and Lloyd isn’t going to agree to it. That choice is really interesting to me, because after a lot of this interesting exposition, all of which we will see echoed back at us, I’m not going to lead the witness. Why was it important that Caroline wanted a divorce and Lloyd wouldn’t agree to that?

**Richard:** Because I wanted there to be somewhere to go, because him agreeing to the divorce ultimately would be like an act of love, really. Right now, it’s about who’s got power and who’s going to get their way. That kept it open, so that there was conflict, like an engine going forward. If they both agree to the divorce, they’ve been decided, nothing is moving forward on that. I guess it could’ve worked, but it was more interesting to me leaving it open.

**Craig:** I think you made the right choice. Yes, it could’ve worked. They could’ve both agreed that they were going to get a divorce, and then at the end of it, they decide to call it off.

What I loved about the choice was that it felt… She says, “We’re miserable.” It felt like, okay, they are suspended in misery. These two people are stuck in this permanent misery where one wants to leave, one won’t let her leave. They can’t stand each other, but they can’t go anywhere. If nothing happens to them, this is going to be the way they are for the rest of their lives. That’s what I felt, because that is exactly when Gus enters. He is confronted now. It’s immediate. You guys don’t hide the premise. It’s right away, boom, “What did I do?”

There’s this wonderful scene where he gets in the car with them. We have a little bit of plot logic. I want to talk a little bit about the plot logic, actually, because it’s the most annoying part of writing these kinds of movies, but it’s essential. Gus has stolen jewels from, I think he’s the amusement park king.

**Richard:** I don’t remember.

**Craig:** It’s an old Willard. I think his name’s Willard. He’s out of town. There’s something about Willard, I guess his connections or whatever, that basically the theft of his stuff leads to this state police manhunt for the guy who’s done it. Why the manhunt? Why escalating it to the state police? Talk me through that storyline.

**Richard:** I can barely remember. Obviously, these are the least interesting parts of these movies for me to write. I’d rather just have people in a car or in a room talking for two hours and Virginia Woolf-ing it the whole time.

Making up this had to do with the McGuffin of the whole thing, because what happens at the end? If people aren’t searching for him, and it isn’t that big a thing, then there’s no tension of him having to hide in the house and pretend to be a therapist until he can figure out how to escape. We had to create this outside pressure cooker for him to stay inside the house. That really was all it was.

Again, it probably could’ve been better. It could’ve been a lot more logical or I just didn’t care. That’s the problem with me. I don’t outline. I get bored with that stuff. I just, “All right, that’s fine.” [inaudible 00:18:06].

**Craig:** In its own way, it works beautifully, because it’s simple. I can’t say that I understood necessarily why the one theft here led the whole state police manhunt to happen, but also, I kind of didn’t care, because when logic is in place to help me have a good time, I don’t interrogate it too much.

**Richard:** I think if you want to take the ride, you take the ride and you accept those things-

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Richard:** … because they’re not that important.

**Craig:** The way you set up the rules, it’s really simple. I don’t have to think much about it, because you don’t want me thinking about it. He can’t leave. He’s waiting for Murray, his getaway car guy, to call back and say he’s gotten a boat for them to escape. That’s it. He’s stuck in the house until-

**Richard:** Which is Richard Bright from The Godfather.

**Craig:** It is?

**Richard:** Yeah, he was in The Godfather.

**Craig:** He was in The Godfather?

**Richard:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who was he in The Godfather?

**Richard:** He’s one of the younger… You’ll see him.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**Richard:** He’s one of the assassins. He was a great guy. It was Richard Bright, wasn’t it? Yeah, it was Richard Bright. He was Murray.

**Craig:** Was he the one that was in the police uniform and shoots Barzini on the steps?

**Richard:** Yes.

**Craig:** Wow. I had no idea.

**Richard:** He’s in it throughout if you see. He’s in it throughout.

**Craig:** I had no idea. Oh my god.

**Richard:** Yeah, that’s Richard. He’s in a lot of movies.

**Craig:** That’s a connection I didn’t realize. Here’s another interesting fact for those of you following along at home. This movie I think was JK Simmons’s debut on screen.

**Richard:** It might’ve been.

**Craig:** I think it was. He plays Siskel. He’s a teacher at this military academy where Jesse, the son, is. We’ll talk about him in a bit.

We’ve set up everything we need to set up. You’ve done this beautifully. In the first, I don’t know, whatever it is, 10 minutes, I know everything about this town, I know everything about their relationship, I know everything about the rules that Gus has to deal with. Now we begin this triangle of characters for a while.

I’m also fascinated by this structure, because what you do is, once he meets them, once he takes them hostage, the movie splits into two halves. The first half is the three of them, that triangle. Then the second half is the larger family coming over. Talk a little bit about why and how you did that and focused in on the three of them first for quite an extended bit before bringing the family in.

**Richard:** They’re the heart. They’re the core of it. Then it was about showing the shark that’s coming towards the house to create some suspense and anticipation for what that collision is going to look like.

It was like a three-character play almost up until… I had ideas about turning this into a play, because it’s a one-set thing. You could have the whole thing in the house, in the living room for the entire evening.

**Craig:** Would you please do that?

**Richard:** I thought of doing that. It’d be really fun to do that. It was also for cutaways, because we had to skip time for them to prepare for the house. Denis had come up with the idea, had the idea of being the therapist. The fun of seeing this family coming towards them, I thought the audience was like, “Oh god, this is going to make complications in a farce kind of way, even better.”

**Craig:** It was incredible escalation. I appreciated, in a way, the quiet time, even though it was anything but quiet, between the three of them, because there’s a really interesting thing that happens almost immediately. First, as they’re driving to Caroline and Lloyd’s house, Lloyd blows right through a stop sign, which he says he didn’t see. There is no stop sign. Then when Gus gets them into the house and he’s got them tied up, he wants a cigarette. Lloyd says, “I don’t smoke, and Caroline quit.” As a smoker… Were you a smoker?

**Richard:** Yeah. Not like Denis, but yeah, I was.

**Craig:** I was as well, and so there was something absolutely delicious about a smoker seeing right into another smoker’s brain and going, “Where are they?” He knows she has has them. He knows instantly that there’s a hidden pack of cigarettes somewhere, and sure enough-

**Richard:** There are.

**Craig:** Because he has a gun, she has to reveal if they’re there. He says something to both of them that I think is kind of magical. In the film, he’s pushed them both over. They were in their chairs tied up.

**Richard:** [Crosstalk 00:22:28].

**Craig:** He’s pushed them backwards because they were bickering and they wouldn’t shut up. He comes over them. They’re accusing each other of being a liar. Gus says to Caroline, “You said you quit, didn’t you?” because she was like, “I never said I quit.” “You said you quit.” She admits it. Then he says to Lloyd, “You saw the stop sign, didn’t you?” Lloyd admits it.

In a way, what I love about this is the brilliance of starting the two of them in a marital counseling session with a completely ineffective counselor who cannot control them, and now here a guy with a gun is starting to make it happen. Talk a little bit, if you could, about the idea, even before Gus has to pretend to be a marriage counselor, the actual marriage counseling that he’s doing right here.

**Richard:** The joy of this for me, the most fun to me, was getting inside a marriage, and having been there myself. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but we used to do this a lot, where you get so into bickering with each other, doesn’t matter if you’re in public, doesn’t matter who’s there, everything goes away, and it’s just about who’s winning and who’s going to win. It’s like a match. It’s the information you use and the information you hold back and what you admit to and what you don’t admit to. This is how this marriage works. I was in the midst of that myself, and it was driving me crazy.

Having a character who just puts a gun to your head and says, “Tell me. Say what it was,” it’s like ah, then you finally get the truth. That’s how the marriage can heal, because they’re not really telling the truth to each other. It’s a power thing going on. They’re trying to each save their own skin. You lose the sight of the relationship, of the marriage. I think we do that a lot inside relationships when we bicker.

That idea was so real to me, of getting so lost in the bickering that you don’t care who is there, who’s around, you just have to get your point across kind of a thing. That was the fun of writing all that stuff, and then having him just cut right through it.

**Craig:** Cutting right through it is fantastic. There’s another thing that you set up so smartly. I would say to everybody, one of the things to do here is read this screenplay. Watch the movie. Read the screenplay. What Richie does in that first scene with BD Wong, who’s the failing marital counselor, is set up a situation where the marriage counselor says, “I’m not here to take sides. Basically, I’m not a referee. I don’t blow the whistle and say who created the foul.”

**Richard:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Here’s a guy who’s absolutely doing that, whether he realizes it or not. He is a referee. He’s saying, “This is what’s true, and this is what’s true.” In doing so, you start to see what they need, which I thought was a fascinating thing.

You described the incoming family as a shark. Talk to me about this. We meet the incoming family. They’re at dinner at a restaurant. They’re eating there because they know that Caroline is going to serve them something horrible and inedible, so they’re getting food first. Talk a little bit about this family now, these other ones.

**Richard:** Again, pulling from personal experience, the idea of a rich, controlling in-law that was a matriarch that was crippling the marriage, I liked. It wasn’t exactly my situation, but it was close, in a way, about how money can infantilize adult people around them. I wanted to get back at my in-laws for doing that, so I put all of the venom that I… You know when you have to be quiet at family gatherings and you want to say [inaudible 00:26:17]. I would just put it in the movie, like nailing yourself to a cross kind of a thing.

Out of that came her never approving of Judy Davis’s character, of her over her son and being too maternal love for the son and controlling and crippling him. I saw adult people crippled by their parents because their parents had money. My parents never had money. They always had problems. My dad was a cab driver. They never had that power over me. It was the first time I had witnessed it in that family. I played with that idea.

Her other son also being a soft doughboy. No one could stand up to her. He’s married to Christine Baranski, who’s just full of resentment and is trying to get along, is trying to make it through, but then when she sees what happens with Judy and Kevin, it gives her the liberation to finally tell the truth as well. It was really just a revenge thing for me to just get back at people who were too controlling.

**Craig:** I have to ask, since so much of this has been pulled from your own marriage, your own family, your in-laws, when the movie came out, did you get any difficult phone calls or no?

**Richard:** Went right over their head. No.

**Craig:** Isn’t that amazing?

**Richard:** Yep.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. People just can’t see themselves.

**Richard:** It’s I guess a good thing.

**Craig:** Were you worried about it?

**Richard:** No.

**Craig:** You knew that it would go like that. Wow. That’s amazing. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie, because we’ve been with this very literate, bickering, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf trio, and then we go to this other group that is not that. They seem regular in one sense.

I think this was my first exposure to Christine Baranski. She is brilliant, because she’s so frustrated and angry about this entire situation and constantly takes it out on her kids. I think she says something like, “Be happy. It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas!” I do that all the time. Every time Christmas rolls around, I say it just like her, so angry.

We also, I think, meet the antagonist here in the purist dramatic sense, Glynis Johns, who is absolutely brilliant in this movie as Mother Rose. Appears to be the antagonist. Myself, when I’m writing, I don’t necessarily think about who’s the protagonist, who’s the antagonist.

**Richard:** I don’t either.

**Craig:** I’m wondering if in retrospect you would agree that she is the villain if there is a villain.

**Richard:** Yes.

**Craig:** That comes through pretty clearly. There’s something that happens prior to the family arriving, and that is a connection between Caroline and Gus that struck me as really interesting. They have a conversation as she’s leading him upstairs to find some band-aids for his dog bite that he got when he was escaping the crime. She tells him things. She tells him that she and Lloyd weren’t always like this and that they, in fact, had a restaurant, she worked, and they had a dream, and it fell apart.

I’m curious what you were thinking, because this feels so natural to me. What drew her to him? Why does she open up to him so easily? Why does she want to take care of him like that?

**Richard:** I don’t know that she’s taking care of him. I think she respects him. He’s about the truth. There’s no lying with him. I think that’s in the line too where he turns to her and says, “What are we, girl friends?” That was when Denis laughed at the script when he read that for the first time.

**Craig:** It’s so funny. “What are we, girl friends?”

**Richard:** She starts to warm up. She needs someone to talk to, and she doesn’t have anyone. He is this symbol of… He’s all about the truth. He’s all about no bullshit. It’s life or death. I think she feels the need.

I wanted to humanize. I had to start planting what was good about what they had and how do I bring that out, so that you understand there was something there. Otherwise, they’re just bickering. What are they fighting for? I had to bring up the past any way I could figure it out. Then later on, when it all explodes and then they start saying what happened in the past, then you understand. I had to give little seeds of that, so that there was something, a dream there.

I got too sentimental with it, so he undercuts it. He doesn’t want to hear it. I think she wants to open up and figure it out and thinks he can help.

**Craig:** There’s an interesting theme that’s going through, that exists separate from… I think the main takeaway of the movie really is, in a very simple way, that communication and honesty is really the only way to salvation when you’re dealing with a relationship that is not working.

There’s this other theme going on, which is the haves versus the have-nots. It’s throughout the whole thing. It comes out here when they’re walking up the stairs, specifically because he notes that they have a shagol [ph], an actual shagol. She’s like, “If you want it, you can have it.” She doesn’t care, be presumably, it’s something that Mother Rose paid for or bought. He finds that so offensive and points out that, “You people, you probably never even worked a day.” It did strike me that she wanted his approval as well, when she says that’s not true.

**Richard:** She wants his respect. She wants him on her side, which also happens in bickering couples, no matter who’s around. Whatever witnesses are there to the bickering, you want them on your side, so I think so. I think he’s pointing to the fact that, “You don’t even know what you have. You don’t value what you have.” She’s like, “No, you don’t understand. That’s not the point. It’s the cost. Is it worth it?”

**Craig:** That is an interesting idea that I hadn’t considered, that she’s buttering up the ref. She’s getting him on her side.

**Richard:** As a friend almost, yeah, like an odd liaison.

**Craig:** That leads to this big second movement of this story, and that is when the family arrives. There is something that happens here that I think is really educational for anybody that’s writing farce, because it definitely becomes farcical, at least for a while, in a fun way.

What you do here, and again, there’s just an elegance to it, is rules. The rules are simple. Jesse, the son, has come home. They’ve tied him up and put him upstairs. No one can go upstairs. Rule number one, no one can go upstairs. Rule number two, the three of us always have to be together. That is enough. That’s enough.

**Richard:** That’s hard enough.

**Craig:** That’s hard enough. The family arrives. A question about the family. You are Italian. You come from, I assume, a Catholic background, Catholic upbringing?

**Richard:** Yep.

**Craig:** I’m Jewish. I come from a Jewish upbringing. You’re a New York Catholic. I’m a New York Jew. It’s essentially the same thing. It’s basically the same, but this family is not. My wife is Episcopalian from New England. This reminds me more of that world. Talk a little bit about how you were able to present that kind of WASPiness so accurately and beautifully?

**Richard:** I remember, I think Marie came up with, which I thought was just funny, that they were Huguenots.

**Craig:** French Huguenots. We’re French Huguenots.

**Richard:** That cracked me up when she told me that.

**Craig:** Mid-18th century French Huguenot.

**Richard:** Yeah, which I thought was really funny at the time. I’m speaking at the time, because my situation is very different now. At the time, the in-laws were Scarsdale Jewish.

**Craig:** Got it. Let me translate for everybody else, Scarsdale Jewish. It’s in Westchester. It’s fancier, richer, but still Jewish. You’ve got one foot in the old ways, and you’ve got one foot in the golf club and all that, but you’re not old money rich.

**Richard:** There still were a lot of, I want to say there were affectations, but the way things are done, how things are done, the kind of dinner parties and what you say. The contrast was, when the shit hit the fan, all that went right out the window, and they were just like Italians, emotional and brutal and all that stuff, but all the upper crust stuff. Part of it was from that. I think it was just osmosis of watching a lot of films and reading things about how those families work and the Philip Barry world of Philadelphia Story and Holiday and those kind of things.

**Craig:** It’s interesting.

**Richard:** It’s a New York sensibility too, to a certain extent, an Upper East Side sensibility.

**Craig:** I think outsiders often do those things the best, because we have been watching them. Like you say, you’ve been watching those things.

**Richard:** You absorb it.

**Craig:** It’s funny. I was at a party a couple of weeks ago, and Maureen McCormick was there, Maureen McCormick who played Marcia on The Brady Bunch. I told her how my sister and I used to watch her and that show and yearn for that kind of… We thought of that as the best kind of life, this WASPy… Nobody yelled. Nobody was screaming. Nobody got hit.

**Richard:** Nobody got hit.

**Craig:** It was so wonderful.

**Richard:** No plates were thrown.

**Craig:** No plates were thrown. Your mother and father weren’t screaming at each other constantly. I love the notion of the outsider creating this but then also going, “There are worms in the dirt underneath this.”

**Richard:** Something underneath there. Absolutely. Absolutely.

**Craig:** There’s a fantastic moment in this dinner where as things devolve, and they devolve rather quickly, Mother Rose mentions, quite casually, Caroline’s infidelity, the fact that Caroline cheated on her precious son, whom she’s awful to anyway. The fact that-

**Richard:** That he told his mother.

**Craig:** That he told his mother, that fact just sends her into a rage.

**Richard:** As it would.

**Craig:** As it would. She storms off, which means that Gus and Lloyd both have to follow her. They go into the kitchen, and there’s the following exchange.

**Richard:** I love this scene.

**Craig:** This is one of my favorites. She says, “You won’t talk about it in therapy, but you’ll discuss it behind my back, with that bitch.” Lloyd says, “Hey, she’s my mother.” Gus says, “She’s a fucking bitch, Lloyd.”

**Richard:** He’s telling the truth.

**Craig:** That is the best referee moment in the entire movie, because somebody has to say it.

**Richard:** Somebody has to say it. Exactly.

**Craig:** Somebody has to say, “No, I just showed up here. I have no vested interest in this fight, but I’m telling you, she’s a fucking bitch, Lloyd,” which my wife and I have been saying just as a general phrase about anybody we think is a bitch. We’ll just say, whether it’s a man or a woman, “He’s a fucking bitch, Lloyd.” We always just put Lloyd at the end.

**Richard:** That means so much. I love that. That’s fantastic. That makes me really happy.

**Craig:** A fucking bitch, Lloyd. It’s the ultimate referee moment. It goes by very quickly. It’s not this big, dramatic… Nor does the conversation stop. It keeps rolling. That is almost like the match that lights the fuse that eventually inevitably leads to everybody saying everything they think.

Talk about how to do that scene, where you’ve brilliantly jammed all this gunpowder into a barrel. How do you blow these things up? How do you create a sequence in one room, where no one’s really moving around that much, and yet everything explodes?

**Richard:** The event is the act of opening presents at Christmas. That’s what you hang it on, like a tree. Then the heartbeat of it was the relationship between Kevin and Judy and them speaking again as if no one’s in the room and then getting everything out. Then you have all these people now who have somewhat of an interest invested in it, which is different than what we’ve had before, so they get to throw in their stuff and bring up their own stuff. The motor is the couple. Then all these other pieces come around when the timing and the moment feels right. Example is they’re talking the gifts, and Christine Baranski shouts, “Isotoners.”

**Craig:** Slipper socks.

**Richard:** The slipper socks. I think one version was Isotoner. “Slipper socks, medium.” All the resentments start to come out. The focus was on the relationship. That was the steady. That was the through line. Then everything else could jump off of it when it felt right.

**Craig:** There is this amazing moment where after watching an entire movie of these two tearing into each other and then watching this entire dinner with them tearing into each other and then this sequence here where they’re really tearing into each other, it finally comes out that Caroline wants a divorce, and they are. He’s fine. “We’re going to get divorced.” Gary, the stupid brother, says, “Why?”

**Richard:** He was so sweet.

**Craig:** It is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s so wonderfully innocent.

**Richard:** He’s very sweet.

**Craig:** So sweet. Oh my god, the look in his eyes where he looks like he was stunned by this thing. Everybody else is like, “What?” In this discussion, they finally get to the truth. What’s interesting is the ref, Denis Leary, in this sequence, says, “I don’t think anything.” He just-

**Richard:** Stands back.

**Craig:** Yes. You understood that the scam that he’s playing here, just for the purposes of the rest of the family, is that he’s posing as the marriage counselor. That’s to excuse his presence. He, as it turns out, is kind of the perfect marriage counselor. He knows exactly when to say, “You’re a liar. No, you’re a liar. She is a fucking bitch, Lloyd.” Here, it’s as if he actually gets invested. It feels like he’s invested.

**Richard:** This is the moment when it’s not about him hiding and it’s not about the robbery and it’s not about anything. He actually has been with these people all night, and he’s seeing what’s happening and is like, “No, this has to happen.” He just steps back.

He could’ve stopped it. He could’ve rerouted it, but he doesn’t, because he has heard her side of it, and he kind of is understanding Kevin’s side a little bit more. He knows this thing has to happen, and so he steps back and he just watches it. It’s an act of grace that he gives it. It’s not about him in that moment at all.

**Craig:** It’s a really interesting decision. It goes again to, I think there are a lot of movies when people are thinking about them or talking about them or when they try and write them and they’re wondering who the main character is, they will sometimes confuse main character and protagonist as the same thing.

What’s interesting is Gus maybe is the main… Denis Leary I suppose is the main character in a sense, but he’s certainly not the protagonist here. To the extent that it’s about people changing, it does feel like it’s about both Lloyd and Caroline, although I would argue ultimately, as is the case with almost every story, it comes down to one person making one choice that finally changes things.

I think for me, that moment is when in the middle of their arguing, Mother Rose says, “What does it even matter? They’re getting divorced,” and Lloyd turns to her and says, “Mother, is it possible for you to shut the fuck up for 10 seconds?” That to me is the moment where the protagonist there, I think-

**Richard:** Is Lloyd.

**Craig:** … is Lloyd.

**Richard:** That’s what the marriage needed all along.

**Craig:** All along.

**Richard:** To stand up to his mother.

**Craig:** There is this wonderful tradition in movies about psychological issues, relationship problems, and therapy, where it often comes down to one thing. I assume you go to therapy. You’re like me.

**Richard:** Been there 24 years now.

**Craig:** It would be great if therapy worked like this. In real life, it doesn’t, but in the movies, it often does come down to these little moments, like, “It’s not your fault,” or, “Mother, shut the fuck up. It’s almost like the walls come tumbling down.

**Richard:** One-word truths and then all the walls come tumbling down.

**Craig:** Everybody starts saying the truth. It is a wonderful conclusion of things. Before the family can be healed, there’s also the story of the son. What’s interesting about him, we’ve given him short shrift here, is that he is a criminal delinquent. It seems to be a reflection of the fact that his family home is broken. That’s what it feels like. He wants to go with Gus.

This is where there is this pathos to Gus’s sadness and a weight to him, even though he’s a funny character and he’s a burglar and he has the gun. We like him quite a bit, because he didn’t shoot anybody. He actually made things better. He expresses a sadness here. I just wanted you to talk a little bit about what is the story of Gus. Does it matter? Is he like one of the Greek gods that shows up in The Odyssey and then leaves?

**Richard:** It’s close to that, I guess. When I think about it, I don’t know that there was a lot of backstory. I think he had a lot of empathy for the kid. I have to be honest. This was the one part of the movie that I had… I wasn’t crazy about the casting. I like that kid, but I didn’t think he was right for the part. There wasn’t enough edge to him for me.

When I think about this storyline, I have to say, when Teddy and I hired Simpson and Bruckheimer to be our producers, because we had to pick from the Disney stable-

**Craig:** Got it.

**Richard:** We wouldn’t pick anyone that wouldn’t drink with us. Each one of the candidates we met at a bar. Teddy would lean [inaudible 00:46:08] go, “No, he’s a spy. We can’t hire him. No, he works for the studio.”

Simpson and Bruckheimer were a little bit insane. They had already had Top Gun and all this stuff. Then they made a deal. They saw this as, “Oh, Denis Leary, MTV. This is going to be a comedy for teenagers,” which was a big mistake. Don Simpson, who was a character in his own right, he detoured the script by making me do a rewrite that was all about the kid, because that was his thing. He wanted it to be about the kid.

We had the reading with the actors. The script had changed so much that Judy Davis got up and went, “This isn’t the part,” all of a sudden. I said, “I know. I agree with you. Please. I’m fast.” That’s when the four days happened, after that.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting.

**Richard:** The kid, that storyline was always, for me, a little… All I remember is we wanted to Gus to have this sort of humanity, hinting at a past, that he understood this kid in a way that his parents didn’t. I don’t know that we had any big past for him. We didn’t want to get too sentimental or too bogged down in that. He was going to help the kid in some way as well by his presence being there. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it was more like a Greek god that comes in and out.

**Craig:** Yeah, or like The Rainmaker. I always think of The Rainmaker, because I love that movie and just the idea of someone who shows up with bad intentions, a con artist, a thief, and yet is exactly what is required to un-suspend the misery, basically.

**Richard:** And get the truth out.

**Craig:** And get the truth out, exactly. Finally, at the end, the family is healed. Gus escapes. There is one of the greatest lines ever in history. Lloyd and Caroline are about to kiss, finally, when they are interrupted by Lloyd’s nephew, who says, “Sorry, but Grandma’s eating through her gag.” “Sorry, but Grandma’s eating through her gag.” It’s one of the greatest lines in history.

**Richard:** I love the way Denis did it. There’s an earlier line where he’s so upset with her, he wants to punch her. He goes, “Your husband isn’t dead. He’s hiding.”

**Craig:** “He’s hiding.” It’s so great.

**Richard:** Denis was great in that. The whole time he loses his shit.

**Craig:** [Crosstalk 00:48:34].

**Richard:** He’s like, “[inaudible 00:48:35]. Let me at her.”

**Craig:** They get it. They’re like, “We get it, but you can’t.”

**Richard:** They were holding him back.

**Craig:** They were holding him back.

**Richard:** I love that. Denis was so good in that.

**Craig:** “Mothers are supposed to be nice and sweet and patient and forgiving.” She really is horrible. With that wonderful mid-Atlantic accent, that not American, not British, kind of moneyed way of talking is absolutely wonderful.

Now, I read somewhere that the end here, which is a very happy ending, because Gus does escape with Murray on a boat, that that end was not originally the end.

**Richard:** It was re-shot.

**Craig:** Re-shot.

**Richard:** I believe we re-shot it, yeah. The original ending was Gus sacrifices himself for them in some way and gives himself up. Disney, they wanted it to be-

**Craig:** Happy.

**Richard:** Yeah. We had to re-shoot the ending.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting, because I remember those days.

**Richard:** They’re still here.

**Craig:** Studios still give notes and stuff, but there was something about the 90s. Maybe it was cocaine. I don’t know. There were so many notes. So many notes.

**Richard:** They’re still here. They’re still here. Streaming services are like that.

**Craig:** They’re still doing it. Through the crisis of writing drafts that you didn’t want to write, featuring storylines you didn’t want to feature, having Disney tell you to change the ending, all of that stuff, and then ultimately, all of it goes away in the crucible of those four days where you could just do the work.

**Richard:** Exactly, with the people that you’re doing it with, and not the executives, who are five steps removed and don’t really know how things work and don’t really know how things are made.

**Craig:** And also don’t know to release Christmas movies at Christmas. It’s the weirdest. Actually, March is the worst possible month, because Christmas happened, but it’s not a funny, ironic thing that it’s in the summer. It’s fucking March.

**Richard:** I also think we opened on the same day as Four Weddings and a Funeral, which was huge.

**Craig:** Oof.

**Richard:** Huge. I think it was the same weekend.

**Craig:** Lots of reasons why the movie initially didn’t do well, but it is something that I think adds character.

**Richard:** It was more, like I said, for a teenage MTV audience instead of an adult audience. I think that was part of the problem.

**Craig:** They must’ve been incredibly confused by that first scene, which I still think, if you understand what the movie is and who it’s meant for, is absolutely wonderful. Richie, we’re going to do a little segment now we call Drew Has A Question.

**Drew Marquardt:** I have a quick question on The Ref, because in the presents scene, I realized as I was watching it that we’re watching Lloyd do a monologue in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t feel that way. You’re hanging on every word. Very often, monologues aren’t done very well in movies. I was wondering if you could speak to how you set us up for that. Were you building to that the whole way through, or is that about following the logic of the moment?

**Richard:** I think it’s a few things. Like you said, it was building up all the way through. You want the audience to feel the way Judy Davis and Denis feel. They want this guy to blow up. They want this guy to tell the truth finally, especially when the mother enters the scene. You’re anticipating that, and you’re going, “Oh, here it comes. Now here it is.” You’re ready for it.

Another testament is that it’s just Kevin Spacey is a great actor, and he knew how to time it and he knew how to deliver it. The way Teddy directed it, with all the different characters there and their reactions and how to make it keep moving forward, keep moving forward. A lot of the energy of that is because of Kevin’s performance and everything that we set up along the way.

Finally, he’s blowing his top. In the first scene with the therapist, he’s snide, he’s sarcastic. They’re playing the game with each other of how they communicate, which isn’t the truth. It’s one-upmanship. This is finally taking the mask off. Okay, this is it.

It was revealing to me, and this happens in relationships, where everybody has their story, everybody has their side, but it’s not the whole story. Everything she said was true, but she forgot this. She forgot she wasn’t happy in that little apartment. She forgot this part of it. She didn’t understand the pressure he was under. To me, that was very honest.

It happens in all relationships, where you just get into the bickering, and you’re not really getting to how different people see things and their experiences and go, “Oh, I never thought of that. I never thought you were feeling that. I didn’t understand that. I thought it was power or something, and it wasn’t.” It was honest, and it was a lot of Kevin’s performance.

**Craig:** It’s also really interesting that you pull a little trick in that monologue, which is you don’t let him finish it. Everyone basically interrupts him, as if they’re too busy with their own crap. He has to pick up a fireplace poker and whack the Christmas tree over and over.

**Richard:** To get a symbol of why they’re there.

**Craig:** Exactly. “Shut up. I’m not done.” Then he gets-

**Richard:** The corpse has the floor.

**Craig:** The corpse has the floor. That reminds me so much of something that my dad used to say, which I won’t say on the air. It was the idea of feeling like you weren’t alive, the notion that you were being treated like a corpse that had been stuffed and stood up against the wall, not to be listened to and not to be considered.

**Richard:** Your father said that?

**Craig:** He would say something like that.

**Richard:** Wow.

**Craig:** I’ll save that for one of our confessional episodes. Richie, that was a fantastic discussion.

**Richard:** Thank you. This was great.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. I hope people do watch The Ref. I know for a fact it’s available to watch on Amazon Prime Video.

**Richard:** Is it on Disney Plus? I don’t know if they have it. Do they have it?

**Craig:** That’s a great question. I don’t know.

**Drew:** I don’t think it’s on Disney Plus, but we’ll put a link to it in the show.

**Craig:** Classic Disney.

**Richard:** [Crosstalk 00:54:43].

**Craig:** They’re still screwing this movie over. Guys, come on, put The Ref on. It’s so good. It is a fantastic Christmas, holiday tradition. We like to watch it every Christmas.

**Richard:** That makes me happy. Thank you.

**Craig:** We love it so much. Thank you for it. Now at the end of our regular show, we like to do something called One Cool Thing.

**Richard:** What’s yours?

**Craig:** I’ll tell you. I like to solve puzzles. I’m a big puzzle guy. For those of you out there who do enjoy, as I do, solving lots of puzzles, you will find oftentimes that you need to refer to the letters as number, so A as 1, B is 2, and so forth. Braille, binary, there’s something called a pigpen cipher, Morse code. You have to go around looking for all these things.

There’s an organization called Puzzled Pint. I think they’ve been my One Cool Thing before. They have, in one easy pdf, basically not all of, but a lot of the codes you would need to use, like NATO alphabet and semaphore and all the other ones I’ve mentioned, including binary, ternary, and hex. It’s incredibly useful, all in one sheet of puzzle solving, if you are, like me, a puzzle solver. We’ll include that link.

**Richard:** I love puzzles.

**Craig:** Oh, then listen.

**Richard:** I do the crossword on the subway every day.

**Craig:** Fantastic. You may find this interesting, especially if you expand into some of the stranger puzzles out there, which have begun to occupy me daily.

**Richard:** Did you Wordle?

**Craig:** Of course I do Wordle. Yes, I do Wordle.

**Richard:** I do Wordle.

**Craig:** We had Josh. What’s Josh Wordle’s actual name? Is it Wordle? It’s not Wordle. What’s his name?

**Drew:** It’s Josh Wardle.

**Craig:** Wardle. Wardle.

**Richard:** Wardle? Really?

**Drew:** Yeah.

**Richard:** Wow.

**Craig:** We had Josh Wardle on the show, who invented Wordle.

**Richard:** Wow.

**Craig:** Big Wordle fan, and also the Spelling Bee and the regular crossword as well. Do you have One Cool Thing for us, Richie?

**Richard:** Oh, man. I thought about this, and all I could think about was food.

**Craig:** Oh, we love food. Last week, my One Cool Thing was food. What’s yours?

**Richard:** There’s a place in New York, a couple of them, called Levain Bakery. Levain Bakery comes up with these cookies that are gigantic. One of them is a chocolate peanut butter. Literally, it’s a meal. You can only take little bites of it every day, because you eat the whole thing, you’re dead.

**Craig:** You’re dead.

**Richard:** It’s that big. They have a sour cream coffee cake. My mother and I always had this thing where we had to have cake, because she used to say it helps just to make the coffee go down. This is what she used to say. I had this thing in my head that I need cake to drink coffee or I can’t drink coffee.

**Craig:** It won’t go down.

**Richard:** It won’t go down. They have this sour cream coffee cake. I literally go to be at night thinking, “When I wake up, I can have the sour cream coffee cake.” I get so excited by it. It’s really good. It’s dense. It’s got all this sugar and maple stuff in the middle of it, and sour cream.

**Craig:** Oh, wow.

**Richard:** It’s a really great coffee cake. The other thing I can recommend is I discovered the benefits of celery juice. I buy this big bottle of Suji, I think it’s S-U-J-I or something, celery juice. It actually helps, because I have a terrible, terrible, acidic, nervous, ulceric kind of stomach, and it really helped. That kind of juice helps. There’s a couple things.

**Craig:** Those are both excellent recommendations. It’s Levain? Is that what it is, Levain Bakery?

**Richard:** L-E-V-A-I-N.

**Craig:** Levain.

**Richard:** Bakery. Great cookies. They deliver.

**Craig:** Do they ship?

**Richard:** Yeah, I think so. I use Try Caviar. They’re on that. I think they could ship to you. Their cookies are amazing. They have an oatmeal. All their cookies are gigantic.

**Craig:** Just like manhole covers.

**Richard:** They’re really good. They’re dense.

**Craig:** I love it. I’m going to unfortunately have to go and buy some of that stuff now. Thank you for that.

**Richard:** Thank you for this. This was really wonderful, because I don’t think anybody remembers the movie or thinks about it. Thank you. This meant a lot to me. Thank you very much.

**Craig:** I hope that we bring a whole new generation in.

**Richard:** And to Teddy.

**Craig:** Yes, and to Teddy, wherever he is, watching or listening.

**Richard:** And Denis too.

**Craig:** He’s wonderful.

**Richard:** That’s right.

**Craig:** That’s right. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro today is by Matt Davis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That is also where you will find transcripts and the signup for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts, and they’re great. Cotton Bureau. So soft. Highly recommend them, Richie. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we are about to record now. Richie, Drew, thank you so much for a terrific episode.

**Richard:** Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Drew.

**Drew:** Thank you, Richie.

[Bonus Segment]

**Craig:** Premium members, welcome back. Little, short treat for you here. Little bonus. I want to talk with Richie about… Because we’re both middle-aged guys. Apparently, middle-aged men have problems making and keeping friends.

There’s been some really interesting articles about this. There was one in the New York Times. This one was back in November of ’22, an article by Catherine Pearson titled Why is it So Hard for Men to Make Close Friends? “American men are stuck in a friendship recession. Here’s how to climb out.”

There’s also a slightly different view here back in May of 2019. This was in Harper’s Bazaar, written by Melanie Hamlett, Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden. “Toxic masculinity and the persistent idea that feelings are a female thing has left a generation of straight men stranded on emotionally stunted islands, unable to forge intimate relationships with other men. It’s women who are paying the price.”

First of all, I guess one question I have is, friends-wise… I have a lot of friends. Have you encountered the middle-age man not having friends issue?

**Richard:** First of all, I’m not a straight man. That’s one.

**Craig:** Boom.

**Richard:** That’s been a change since we saw each other last.

**Craig:** You were.

**Richard:** Not really.

**Craig:** I know.

**Richard:** I pretty much assumed everyone knew so I didn’t have to say anything. No, not really. My wife knew before we were married. It was a second coming out. Sorry, I came out-

**Craig:** Second coming is a much more [crosstalk 01:01:43].

**Richard:** I came out when I was 18, but only halfway, not with my family. I don’t know that it’s about toxic masculinity or anything like that. I do have friends. They’re mostly writers, like you, that I know. I used to have friends through the marriage. I don’t have them as much anymore.

It is hard to meet people. I also don’t like a lot of people now. The world is so fucked up. I really can’t stand people. I’m becoming a hermit. It’s hard to meet people when you’re a hermit. You meet them through work. I just directed this movie and made lovely new friends there. Again, it’s through work. I think something that women don’t understand, maybe not, this is probably wrong, but we’re defined by what we do.

**Craig:** Men, you mean?

**Richard:** Yeah. When we’re not doing what we do, we are invisible. We disappear. There’s a lot of pressure about that. I think we find friends through what we do. I don’t really have sport hobbies or stuff like that. I have a trainer, a gym guy that I love, that I talk to a lot and I’m with a lot. I don’t know. How about you? Are most of your friends in the business, or do you have outside friends?

**Craig:** Most of my friends are in the business. Most of my friends are writers. We do get an interesting built-in fraternity, I think, in a sense, because there are a lot of people that do what we do, and we’re all complainers. I find that complaining about things really can bring people together.

**Richard:** Absolutely. Absolutely. Also, writing is a solitary activity. Years and years ago, because we’re in New York and not LA, where you guys know each other and see each other more, Robert Kamen used to live here and he started this dinner thing. It was me, Robert Kamen, Tony Gilroy, and at the time Stephen Schiff, but now Scott Frank is here. We would have monthly dinners just to check in. That was really nice. We went out of our way and had a beautiful dinner, complained, drank. It was really a great thing that we did every month almost. Now that’s dissipated as well. I think especially for writers, male writers, it’s a good thing to do, to reach out and create those groups.

**Craig:** I talked about my father briefly before in the episode. It did strike me that in his later years, I never really thought about my dad and friends. It wasn’t like my dad had a group of guy friends.

**Richard:** No, my dad either. He was alone. It was all for my mother, all for my mom.

**Craig:** Exactly. It was that way until my dad died. His relationships came down to his wife, and that was it, and then family if you had to have those family holidays and things. It does strike me as sad. It is an interesting concept that men who can’t keep a friend group of men start to overburden their wife or their partner, because that’s the only person they deal with. That’s the only person who hears their problems.

**Richard:** Their only outlet.

**Craig:** There is no way to process.

**Richard:** I think that’s true.

**Craig:** Part of what they discuss here is how hard it is, like you said, for men to meet each other. You’re looking for a friend version of Grinder, basically. I don’t know what we would call it. Women do seem to just meet each other and become friends so easily.

**Richard:** Open up to each other more easily.

**Craig:** Exactly. I guess we don’t have the solution here. How old are you, Drew?

**Drew:** I’m 33. I’m getting married this fall. I’m doing the list for the bachelor party. There’s my brother.

**Richard:** Who do you want to spend time with? Who do you want to hang out with?

**Craig:** It’s happened to you.

**Drew:** It’s happening slowly, in little bits. It’s strange. I think honestly, I’m closer with women than I am with men, for the most part. It’s also interesting talking about burdening your wives too. I found a little book called Point Omega where one of the characters has a thing. He’s fresh off a divorce and doesn’t know why it fell apart. One of the characters says, “It’s because you told her everything, not because you told her anything.” I always think about that. If you burden your wife or anything with that oversharing and feeling like they have to be responsible for all your feelings-

**Richard:** That’s too much. No one person should be responsible for everything. That’s why friends are really good to have, to share other things with. We got to fix this. I don’t know how we do this.

**Craig:** I don’t know either, but I urge men to make an effort. I think part of it is just making an effort and not being afraid to say, “Hey look, I’m actually fucking lonely.” You have to show a little bit of vulnerability, because if you’re just like, “Hey, you want to get lunch?” guys are like, “No, not really.” If I hear a guy say, “Hey, listen, I’m actually having some problems and I need advice. Do you want to have lunch?” absolutely.

**Richard:** I’d be right there for them, yeah.

**Craig:** Then you start to create… You also get perspective. Richie, you were married for I don’t know how long, a long time.

**Richard:** 35, yeah.

**Craig:** 35 years. I’m getting close. I’m at 27, I think. When you can talk to other people who are in marriages that are that long, the complaining feels very good, because you realize this is normal.

**Richard:** You’re not alone. You’re not alone in it. That’s a really important thing. That’s really important.

**Craig:** Otherwise, it just feels like you’re stuck in something. You don’t realize that other people are like, “Oh, it’s fine. I feel that. It’s okay. It’s totally normal.” I don’t think we solved the problem necessarily, but at least we can urge you out there, if you are a man, particularly if you are heading into your middle ages, make an effort. It’s worth it to have some buds. Richie, thanks again.

**Richard:** Thank you very much. You’re a bud.

Links:

* The Ref on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKthobV2JU4), [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B006RXQ1EI/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r) and [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110955/)
* [Richard LaGravenese](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0481418/) on IMDb
* [The Ransom of Red Chief](https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Henry_Red_Chief.pdf) by O. Henry
* The Ref’s [Opening Scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAa3zP1ysqo)
* [Puzzled Pint’s Code Sheet](http://puzzledpint.com/files/2415/7835/9513/CodeSheet-201912.pdf)
* [Levain Bakery](https://levainbakery.com/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
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* [Craig Mazin](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/) on Instagram
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matt Davis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.instagram.com/marquardtam/) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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