The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 620 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, what is it about this moment at the end of 2023 that feels so uncertain, so unsettled? We’ll discuss how we’re feeling about the industry and beyond. We also have follow-up on advice we gave listeners in previous episodes, and new questions on composite characters, anecdotes, and sustaining a D&D group. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we are going to freestyle an introduction to the Scriptnotes book, the first draft of which, Craig, is due in January.
Craig: Oh, no. I haven’t done anything.
John: It’s a nightmare where you wake up and you realize the exam is happening.
Craig: I haven’t studied.
John: You forgot to drop the class.
Craig: My essay isn’t finished.
John: The book is in good shape, but we don’t have an introduction. Most of the book is really just based on our transcripts. We will have a freestyle discussion, and that’ll become the introduction to the book.
Craig: Great.
John: People can hear it here first. First, Drew, we have some follow-up on previous people who wrote in with questions.
Drew Marquardt: We heard back from Ghosted, who is no longer ghosted. They wrote, “I just wanted to write in with an encouraging follow-up. After having been ghosted by the studio for six months when a film I wrote disappeared off a streaming site, the director emailed today to tell me that it is now available to rent and buy on Apple and Amazon. Thank you for encouraging me to go directly to the director and to contact the WGA about my concerns over not having a copy of my work. I did both, and I’m not sure if it led to this outcome, but at least it helped me feel less helpless.”
Craig: That’s quite good.
John: That’s good.
Craig: I think people, especially in Hollywood, we’re trained early on to, “Don’t overdo it. Don’t write in too much.” That can sometimes turn into utter passivity. Don’t be scared.
John: Just in my own life this past week, I had heard back about this project. I got news through my agent about, “Oh, it’s sort of unsettled here. We’re not really quite sure.” It’s like, “I’m just going to text the producer and ask.”
Craig: Yeah, “What’s going on?”
John: It nudged things forward. Don’t feel like you’re going to be a dick to ask about what’s going on.
Craig: There’s a difference between shy and weak. You’re allowed to be shy while you’re asking people questions. It’s perfectly fine. You can be a little nervous, especially if you’re new, because we’ve all heard the stories of the person that emailed every day, three times a day, because they had gone to persistence school or whatever. Nobody likes them. But you’re not that person, shy lady or guy. You’re just a little reluctant.
John: Good. Our next bit of follow-up is a similar vein here. This is from Ben.
Drew: Ben writes, “I was the person whose boss’s boss’s boss forwarded my script to a creative executive at the studio I work at as an office coordinator. The creative executive loved my script, and I had a general meeting with him. Here’s what happened in the past year. I took John and Craig’s advice and emailed my new creative executive friend and asked him if he could send my script, along with his general good feelings and approval, to an agent he would feel to be best suited for me. The creative executive never emailed me back. That’s fine.”
Craig: Nailed it.
Drew: “He’s super busy, and he probably just didn’t have an answer for me, so I just continued to write. I decided to write a middle-grade novel as my grad school thesis. I’m happy to report that not only did I graduate with my MFA, I also currently have interest from seven publishing agents.
“However, after the strike ended, I reached out to my creative executive friend. He seemed excited to hear from me. We got on Zoom to talk. When he asked me what I was working on, I said I had a comedy pilot. He said he’d love to read it. I sent it to him, but it’s been two months, and I haven’t heard back. Not sure what to do about that, but my instinct tells me to simply wait it out and keep writing. My dad always says it’ll work out for you, just not in the way you think it will, and I’m going to go with that.”
Craig: Your dad’s very Zen.
John: Your dad is very Zen. Dad may be a little bit too Zen, for two months.
Craig: I agree. Dad’s moving towards just flat-lining there.
John: I would say it’s worth following up with the creative executive, say, “Hey, checking in to see if you’ve had a chance to read that pilot I sent through to you. Also, some good news on this front that this book I wrote seems to be attracting some interest.”
Craig: There’s another possibility, which is that he’s just not that into you. There is always that situation where maybe there’s an initial spark of interest, and then it dies down. You have to accept that that’s a possibility. In our business, people get very excited very quickly about things, a little bit like overdramatic people in their love lives, just fall in love within seconds, and then two weeks later, they’re like, “Who?” You may have just caught a spike, and the spike is gone. That’s okay. Really, the advice here is don’t just rely on this one connection. Start looking for another one.
John: You need to date around some, Ben.
Craig: This well may have run dry.
John: Yeah, which is fine and fair. That absolutely does happen. That is not a crisis for you. I like that, Ben, you went back and just kept writing, which is crucial.
Craig: That’s the key.
John: You did a new thing, which is important. That will get you far in life, we’ll hope. It’s time for my thesis for this episode. Craig, I’m going to lay this out. We haven’t talked about this at all ahead of time. I’m curious what you think.
My belief is that, as people, we go through life with this expectation that next month, next year, all of the tomorrows will be largely as they are today, and while there will be change, we can generally anticipate what those changes are going to be and incorporate them into our vision of the future, because we are nothing more than a predictive species. We think, “What’s going to happen tomorrow? What’s going to happen next season?”
For example, every year, we can anticipate there’s going to be a new iPhone. It will be faster. The camera will be better. But it’s not going to fundamentally transform society. It’s not going to change our personal lives. We’re not going to put off next year’s vacation because, “Oh, I don’t know what the next iPhone is going to be like.” That would be absurd.
But then there are changes that do transform society. Sometimes those are slow enough that we don’t really notice that they’re happening. You and I were both around for the start of the internet. The internet did change everything, and yet it was a very slow roll-out. It didn’t feel like day after day-
Craig: That’s right.
John: … we had to anticipate things are going to be vastly different in our lives. Even when Amazon came or when Napster came, yeah, it was new stuff, but it didn’t fundamentally transform how we thought about the future.
But then there have been some moments that were really abrupt shocks, where things feel like, “Oh, I just don’t know what’s going to happen next.” 9/11 was one of those. We talked about the 2016 election. We did that special episode after that, because it was hard to envision how things were going to fit. The pandemic was another thing. It totally knocked us off track. We just didn’t know what life would be like after that, how would we get back to a normal space.
What I’m feeling right now, as we’re recording this at the end of November 2023, is a different but kind of related sensation. It’s that we’re not in one moment of particular crisis – this is not a pandemic, this is not a 9/11 – but I feel like personally, as an industry, I’m having a harder time envisioning the future than I normally would. Some of that is obviously just coming out of the strikes and knowing how stuff is going to start up again. Some of it is the upcoming election. A fair amount of it is AI stuff. But I feel like we’re in this moment of unprecedented uncertainty.
I’m out pitching a movie right now. In a best-case scenario, we might start shooting in 2025, may come out in 2026. I’m having a harder time envisioning 2025 and 2026 than I should be, what two or three years from now is going to look like. That’s just the vibes I’m feeling, this unspecified anxiety. I thought we’d talk through this on a couple different axes. I’m curious whether you’re feeling anything similar, Craig.
Craig: To an extent. I have a little bit more certainty in my career, because I basically am parked at a place, making a thing. Unless there’s a dramatic upheaval where nobody wants to watch any television at all, my future’s stuck in a place for a few years. However, it’s very easy for me to go, let’s just play the game. Let’s say you’re not making the show, and I’m not parked at a place. I would absolutely be feeling this uncertainly.
First of all, there’s been a lot of movement in terms of who runs places. Things have changed across the board in that regard. Also, I think you could just feel in the air that Netflix is experiencing things. I don’t know how you would describe their experience of things. There was an article that came out. I don’t know if you read this article about Carl Rinsch.
John: No.
Craig: It’s incredible. It’s Ringe or Rinsch. Carl Rinsch, he directed that movie 47 Ronin.
John: Now I know what you’re talking about. The recap of this, I believe, is that he directed a movie called 47 Ronin, a Keanu Reeves movie that was a bomb. Then Netflix said, “Sure, we’ll make this series with you.”
Craig: They won a bidding war with Amazon. He went out with this idea for a series, and they gave him, ultimately, $55 million, and they did not get a series. Apparently, at one point, he asked for an injection of cash to help him keep going. It was $11 million, which by the way, I didn’t know you could do that. Did you know you could call a studio and just say, “I need $11 million.” They gave it to him.
John: To him.
Craig: To his production company, and then he used it to bet on crypto.
John: And actually made money on bets on crypto.
Craig: Made money and then bought Rolls Royces and just went insane.
John: We should specify, we are not saying he went insane. Insane things happened, based on this. We read an article.
Craig: I’m following the article. I’m not a psychologist. When I say he went insane, I mean he definitely did things in an unorthodox fashion. Netflix, it seems like that’s the way they used to operate, so that was how it went. That is not at all how it goes now. All of these places seem to have finally realized that the Netflix business plan was not a very good plan. Everybody is contracting and trying to figure out what they’re going to do with streaming. No one really knows. All they know is that they have taught everyone to watch everything that way.
Because I work for HBO, I know that there are still linear viewers, people that get HBO on a satellite dish or through cable, and programs come on at an hour on a certain night. It’s a larger amount than you would think, but if you watch the graph, it’s going down as people die. There’s usually one year of paying for DIRECTV after someone dies before they realize they’ve got to cut it off.
I have no idea what’s going on. Disney bought Hulu. Disney bought Fox. Marvel, which used to be the most blue chip brand in Hollywood, seems to be a little tarnished right now in terms of performance.
John: [Crosstalk 10:51] what’s going to happen with their next set of movies.
Craig: Yeah. The latest one just did not do very well. Star Wars has been stumbling around for a while. Also, weirdly, Pixar. I’m not picking on Disney here. It’s just they happen to own everything. Pixar, which used to be the most reliable brand, feels like it’s swallowing its own tail at this point. People don’t really seem to care the way they used to. Then we have these black swan events, like Barbie, because Barbie, people were like, “Well, of course.” No.
John: That was not a given at all.
Craig: No. Every movie that’s made from a toy generally stinks. Barbie was Lego Movie-ish in its surprise-ness, and so was Oppenheimer, a movie that theoretically would only appeal to older men that watch the History Channel. Nobody knows anything has become even more powerful. I should say nobody KNOWS anything.
John: You gotta emphasize the right word.
Craig: Nobody KNOWS anything. I’m with you. I don’t feel comfortable predicting, by the way. If we do our, “Hey, let’s predict-”
John: No, no, no. I think that’s actually my point is that, in general, you could make some predictions and feel relatively good about, it’s going to fall within this range. I don’t have a good sense of what the range of acceptable predictions would be for the next couple of years.
We were talking about Marvel films underperforming. Someone brought up in a podcast recently that Marvels was an expensive movie, but Killers of the Flower Moon was just as expensive of a movie, and we don’t talk about that as being a disappointment, because it was made for Apple. We just have the entry of these huge companies who have no… It doesn’t actually really matter to them whether a movie makes money. That’s a huge difference from the last 20 years that you and I have been in the industry.
Craig: Normally, when people come into Hollywood, they are absolutely trying to make money. Apple, with Killers of the Flower Moon, definitely felt like they were making a prestige play and an Oscar play. A lot of it is about, these companies want to be taken seriously. They understand that, in a weird way, awards and things like that do confer a legitimacy. If Apple can win Best Picture, that’s a big deal. It means other filmmakers are going to want to go there and do that.
Killers of the Flower Moon was not intended to be a blockbuster, whereas every Marvel film is intended to be a blockbuster. In a year, there may be 20 more superhero movies that do great, but it does feel like the curve on superhero movies, that we are on the way down. We haven’t started to crest. We crested, it feels like to me. It finally happened: the glut of Westerns killed the Western. Hollywood just loves to overeat.
John: I feel like, Craig, on any of our prior 10 years of doing this show, we could’ve talked about the trends in genres and things like that, like, oh, superhero movies are rising or falling. What’s different about this one is that a year ago, there wasn’t AI. There wasn’t AI in the sense that there is now.
It was exactly a year ago that ChatGPT came out. We had Rian Johnson on the show. We did that experiment where we talked about, “Oh, let’s imagine what the next thing would be.” What I can say to you listeners now is that there are parts we cut out of that episode, because afterwards, we were like, “That was really uncomfortable,” thinking about how this would mirror or not mirror a future movie that Rian would want to make.
Since that time, I haven’t used ChatGPT for anything, but we did have Nima, who works for us, train a model on the Scriptnotes transcripts, to figure out how well could it mimic what we would say about screenwriting.
Craig: How’d it do?
John: It was a mixed bag. Drew, you’d say it was not that impressive.
Drew: It would start, and the first two sentences would be sort of right, and then it would just devolve.
John: That will get better.
Craig: Good, because then you can replace me, seamlessly.
John: Craigbot.
Craig: Yeah, Craigbot.
John: The thing we found is that it was fluent but generic. Ultimately, it wasn’t very specific to what our experience would be. It wasn’t useful for doing the book. We thought it would be a good research tool for the book, like, go through this and see what we talked about in terms of character conflict. It really wasn’t bad. It wasn’t better than this, which is why Drew and Chris have had to kill themselves over the last six months to pull these chapters together.
AI overall is probably the root of a lot of the uncertainty I’m feeling about the future. Every other podcast for the last week has talked about Sam Altman’s ouster at OpenAI, which was a big episode of Succession.
Craig: His un-ouster.
John: His un-ouster there, which was really interesting. The conflict behind the scenes there really seemed to be about these two different movements, of the effect of altruism trying to slow down or stop progress on AI stuff, and the effect of accelerationism, which is basically, “No, no, let’s take off all the brakes and go wild.” It feels like it’s a philosophical question, wrestling about Terminator and to what degree we’re going to do that. That always felt like a science fiction premise. Now that it doesn’t feel like a science fiction premise is partly why I’m feeling really unclear about what the next couple years look like.
Craig: Asimov famously came up with his three laws of robotics. Even though our federal government is staffed primarily by dotards and morons and do-nothings, at some point the government is going to need to regulate this. It’s just inevitable, or we face our doom. It’s inevitable, of course. If it’s unchecked, it’s inevitable.
I wonder if the progress of AI is going to be hindered a little bit or go a little more slowly than we think, because… This is something you were saying about training the AI to do the transcripts. I wonder if quality – that is that feeling that this is human and intelligent – comes down to the last .1% of similarity, that there is just that one little, tiny, tiny thing that is really hard to get to. Obviously, if it’s unchecked, it’s unchecked, and it will get there. That’s inevitable.
John: We’re also in this moment right now where SAG is deciding whether to ratify their contract. That’s a bit here. We should say, for folks who haven’t been paying attention, the source of contention within SAG-AFTRA at this moment is really over the AI provisions and whether those are enough protections for performers.
Craig: I’m going to just make some statements here that I believe are true, based on my understanding of how labor law works. What isn’t really happening in the discussion over ratification is, “What happens if you say no?” because it’s a disaster if you say no. Basically, the way it works is the negotiators come back, and they say, “This is the deal we recommend.” Then the board says, “We agree. We are recommending that the membership vote yes, and we are also ending the strike.” All of that happened. As a SAG member, I would urge people to make their voices heard and to prepare for the next negotiation. I think that the vote will ratify.
John: I think it will ratify as well. I do think the discussion around this has been good and interesting, just because brand new terms were invented in this contract that make us really think about how we’re going to be dealing with non-human representations on screen. The two basic things – we talked through this stuff before on the sidecast – a digital replica is a representation of an actual performer who is there, and a synthetic performer is a made-up thing, a human-like character that has no basis in an actual person.
Craig: That’s right. On our show, for instance, I know that for certain large crowd scenes, we do use digital replicas to fill things in.
John: Probably digital replicas where you’re scanning an actual person.
Craig: We’re scanning an actual person.
John: An actual person.
Craig: In fact, creating a digital replica that is not based on the scan of an actual person is incredibly hard to do. It’s expensive and time-consuming. You want to scan actual actors. That makes your life so much easier, because once they’re scanned, you then have something that you can…
The other thing we do a lot of times is just shoot real people on green screen doing actions, running, jumping, turning, and then we can comp then in digitally and adjust, paint in something on their head or something like that.
Generally speaking, we’ve already been doing this. The horrible outcome that you want to avoid is, there was a movie where some kids were in a bleachers in a gym, and clearly Disney had just AI’ed in four people that were just nightmare, the kind of people you see in previs. It was horrifying. Yes, in schlock, I suppose that might be a problem, but generally speaking, for credible productions, we’re scanning real people.
John: Craig, forgive my ignorance, because you are shooting your show in Canada, and so obviously, your Americans actors are under a SAG contract, but for your background performers, is that a Canadian contract?
Craig: Yes. There’s a Canadian Actors Union. Most of the actors that we employ are Canadian. The Americans or the Brits we bring in for obviously certain… The thing is, it’s not like we’re like, “Oh, only Americans can get the good parts.” An example is Lamar Johnson, who played Henry in our show, is from Toronto. He’s Emmy-nominated for his performance. We’ll look in Canada. We’ll look in America. Most people on the show ultimately by number are Canadian, under Canadian acting contracts. We also have directors in the DGA. I’m a DGA director, so I direct under a DGA contract. Other directors that we had who were from overseas would direct under a Canadian Directors Guild contract.
John: A new aspect of the AI stuff, I want to talk about coverage. We have friends who write coverage. I started off writing coverage for, first, this little [indiscernible 21:01] Pictures. Then I was a paid reader for TriStar Pictures. Every day I would go into TriStar, pick up two scripts. I’d be paid $60 a script to write coverage on those.
Craig: Pretty sweet.
John: Pretty sweet job.
Craig: Not bad.
John: I’d drop those off the next day.
Craig: Not bad.
John: Coverage, of course, consists of a synopsis of the material, so generally a one-page typed-up synopsis, and then an analysis, half a page, three quarters of a page, talking through whether you recommended this, basically, what’s working in the script, what’s not working in the script. It’s a way for the executive who didn’t read the script, or read the script a week ago and doesn’t remember it, can have something to say about this thing. Also, it becomes something that is filed away, to say, “We did read this script. This is a person we’re [indiscernible 00:21:41] as a writer.”
Since ChatGPT came out, I thought, okay, that’s going to be a vulnerable job, because the kinds of writing you’re doing, and the synopsizing is something that ChatGPT seems really good at. You can just feed into it a script right now, and ChatGPT would write a reasonably good synopsis.
Craig: I agree.
John: Last week, a listener wrote in saying that he had experience with this AI coverage thing. He was a screenwriter but got approached to beta test this screenwriting coverage tool. He said, “I thought it would suck, but I agreed to beta test it. I’m writing to you because it didn’t suck. I have the coverage it generated on one of my old specs that I can share with you if you want. It was generated in five minutes. While it had some generic beats, it felt like a huge step in how Hollywood might use AI, and it’s coming much sooner than expected.”
Craig, that is the pages you have in front of you right now. It has a log line. It shows genre, keywords, time period, occasion, setting, and then the script score, which I feel very nervous about, about character development, plot construction, dialog, originality, social engagement, theme, and message – those would be a grid that you would normally see on a top sheet of coverage – a synopsis, a short one, a long one, then it goes into premise and notes, some things about things you should be thinking about in terms of the characters and their archetypes. It has suggestions for main character casting, with name actors for these different roles, and comp movies to be thinking about in comparison. The writer who wrote in said this was all accurate. He felt like there was some generic stuff in here, but this clearly was really talking about the script that it had read.
Craig: I think that this is probably a good example of how stuff that’s not in that .1% is manageable. Most scripts are not great. Most scripts that get covered, probably 99.9% of them don’t get bought or produced. A lot of what coverage is is people presuming that a script is going to be bad, because it’s a safe bet, having somebody write something down, so that when they talk to the person who wrote it, they can sound like they knew that they read it, even though they didn’t, and look at some key things, or just simply not have to worry about passing it along or processing it. The question I have about this is, what does it do with Jerry Maguire.
John: I would say that experience as a reader at TriStar… I have my little database of all the coverage I wrote. I wrote like 100 pieces of coverage for them. I recommended two things, and I got called to the mat for both of those two things that I recommended. My job was to say no. My job was to say, “This is a pass because of X, Y, and Z.” Most of them were very easy passes, like, this was not a movie we were going to make. There was nothing so exciting about this writing that you say, “Okay, you should at least read this writer.” That is also my concern is that this is probably really good at saying no to stuff, and it’s going to miss things that would otherwise be exceptional.
Craig: I wonder also – because everything of course is machined, there is some sort of algorithm going on here – is it designed to basically always deliver you a balance? “Here’s what I like. Here’s what I didn’t like. Here are some numbers.” But you can’t get that passion thing. You can’t get the thing of like, “No, no, no. It’s completely messed up. There are 12 things that are really, really wrong with this. But the stuff that’s right is so blindingly, gorgeously right.” Does ChatGPT understand yet the difference between this needs work that will be really hard to do, or this needs some simple work to be incredible? That’s where I think it’s going to need some time. Pump the brakes, Sam. Apparently, all those people walked off the job because they, like Sam, were like, “Don’t pump the brakes.”
John: They also believed that they would follow Sam to another company, to do the work that they’re doing. In the case of OpenAI, it was that they believe that they were doing good things and that they were doing it in a safe manner.
Craig: That sounds culty to me.
John: People like us too. It’s always a cult with other people.
Craig: No, no, we have a cult.
John: We have a cult.
Craig: We’re cult leaders, for sure. We’re just very kind, benevolent cult leaders.
John: That’s right.
Craig: We demand nothing from our-
John: Maybe $5 a month.
Craig: We don’t even demand it. We gently suggest it.
John: If you want the Bonus Segment at the end of the episode.
Craig: Many of our cult followers say no.
John: Yeah, of course. Great. We should say that this coverage program is not ChatGPT, apparently. It’s based on a different thing. If this guy could do it, other people could do it. This is obviously coming. It’s here. Difficult to predict, but let’s talk about some of the repercussions of this existing. My job, which I was paid $60 a script for, would be on the line, because mostly what they’re paying me for is that synopsis and that critique. There’s no reason to do that. You should feed this thing in. What this is kicking out is as good as the stuff I was doing.
Craig: I think that if your job is to figure out how to mulch through a ton of scripts that you suspect are going to be bad, because you’re dealing with just general submissions, then yes, you’re going to want a machine to do it. You’re going to miss stuff, but then again, you knew you were missing stuff anyway, because you were paying people $60 an hour, most of whom were not John August.
John: It was $60 a script, not an hour.
Craig: Sorry, $60 a script, even better for the people paying. Most readers aren’t you. Hollywood is full of stories of people paying $60 to get coverage that says, “This stinks,” and it turned out to be Pulp Fiction. Those people will just continue their imperfect process without paying the $60 a script, but by paying, I don’t know, some licensing fee to whatever.
Where I think we are still going to need people are like people like our friend Kevin, who don’t just do coverage; they do story analysis. They are really there to essentially give the studio executives the notes that they give the writers. That is thoughtful. That is dramaturgical. That is also about understanding the breadth of cinema, reacting in real time to the audience and what their tastes are and how they feel. All of those things, that’s science. That’s much more connected to what we do, which is creating things.
I think it’s going to be a little time before this thing actually can spit out a reliable predicting number, because the other thing that’s going to happen, of course, is ChatGPT or its cousins will all agree that a script is a 3 out of 10, somebody nuts will make it, and it will be a blockbuster.
John: Everything Everywhere All At Once was a script that I feel like probably would not thrive in this environment. I love those guys to death, but it was a challenging script to read. That’s going to be an aspect of all of these situations.
I want to think about, if you are a producer, a director, anyone who’s getting sent stuff, if you are a showrunner who’s being sent stuff, it’s going to be hard not to say, first, pass this through here, and let that be the first filtering process. If that is going to be the first filtering process, every writer with a spec script is going to go to these things and say, “What is this system going to say about my thing?” That’s the different thing, because it would be one thing to go to a person who reads for a studio, does coverage, and say, “Hey, would you read this for me and tell me whether this would make it through?” Here, you’re going to pay your 5 bucks or whatever, submit it, and get this report back.
Craig: That’s a great point, that basically, if Hollywood switched over to this, it would be like they just pay $60 a script to one person to cover everything. If people can figure out who that guy is or who that girl is, then they’re just going to game it, because they know that person has a certain kind of taste.
John: You could just iterate, iterate, iterate, just get the script up to the point where it gets the highest score possible off of this. Is that good for you, or for cinema? I don’t think so.
Craig: The thing is, it’s inevitable that some script is going to get a 10 across the board, and people are going to make it, but while people are making it, the other humans are like, “This stinks. This is the emperor and his new clothes. This is not a 10 out of 10.” It’s just something the computer liked.
John: It’s also important to remember that all programs are based on large language models or things that are churning images too. Often, they’re based on some sort of seed. There’s a random number that is being created. That becomes the underlying pattern for how it’s going to be doing some stuff. If you were to feed the same script through three times, you might get three different answers, just like you might get three different answers from readers. I think we’re going to be chasing this dangerous thing.
Craig: Look. Coverage has always been imperfect. If they have mechanized an imperfect thing to make it a faster and cheaper imperfect thing, then yes, I agree, people that make their living from coverage should be concerned.
Drew: Can I add one more thing to that?
Craig: Yes, please.
Drew: I also feel like a lot of young execs are trained on writing coverage, and that’s how a lot of their tastes are developed. That feeling of, “Oh, I love this script,” is helpful, and even if you hate it, you have to articulate yourself. I feel like that’s going to hurt writers too, because you’re going to have execs who are not able to articulate why.
Craig: So execs are going to get worse.
John: That’s what we need. The only optimistic case I’ll make for this is that some of writing coverage, yes, it is a learning process, but it’s also absolute drudgery. To get rid of the drudgery… Writing synopses was always the worst part of coverage. It’s like, “How do I try to synopsize down this script and make it make sense in these paragraphs?” It’s not a useful skill, and so I’m really delighted to send that off to a system to do that. It’s the analysis and how to talk about what’s not working, what is working, and how to talk to the writer or talk to everybody else about that-
Craig: That’s a great point.
John: … is a crucial skill.
Craig: The robots are ruining everything.
John: A friend of mine works and does coding for a very specific kind of machine that uses a language that is esoteric to its one thing. He said that for what he’s doing, ChatGPT is not useful. It can’t write that language, because there’s just not enough examples online of how that language works.
Craig: Interesting.
John: He also has to do JavaScript as bridges on stuff. He’s not that good at JavaScript, so he uses ChatGPT every day to write all the JavaScript for all the stuff he’s-
Craig: Whoa.
John: … doing for this, and it’s crucial.
Craig: ChatGPT will code for you?
John: ChatGPT is really good at coding.
Craig: Really?
John: It’s very good at coding.
Craig: I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. This code is good at itself.
John: You can use it to write an iOS app that does this kind of thing.
Craig: Wow.
John: It can iterate through it and does a really good job.
Craig: Wow. That’s cool.
John: Most coders these days are not on Macs, basically, because Mac, it’s not so set up for it. But there’s a thing called Copilot for Microsoft, which is writing code with you the whole time. It’s becoming a crucial part of coding stuff. My friend was talking about this esoteric language he’s using. He says it’s just a matter of time before it can do it, and that he feels he has maybe three to five years left in the industry, and then anybody could do his job. His special training’s not going to be useful.
Craig: That is a very good thing for him to say. I think a lot of people just deny and do not want to imagine a world where their skill has been reduced to useless, because it’s terrifying, and it’s challenging to your core identity. It’s actually quite brave of him to say that. It’s really smart, because I assume he’s looking to do something else while he’s got his three to five years left. I assume he’s retirement age or-
John: Oh, no. He’s 30.
Craig: Then he I assume is thinking about, “What else can I do?” because that’s a real thing.
John: These machines he writes code for are still going to exist. Somebody’s going to have to essentially tell the ChatGPT what code needs to be written, but there’s fewer and fewer jobs for doing that.
Craig: The skill required for that is reduced.
John: You could outsource it. You could do whatever.
Craig: It used to be one of the safest jobs in the world was guy who understands the one thing to engineer this thing that everyone has. That’s the safest job in the world. I think it’s important for people to keep their eyes open on this stuff. Again, it’s an interesting debate.
We can’t necessarily just go, “You know what? A lot of people make their living driving horse buggies, so we can’t have these cars.” We can. We will. It’s happening. Horse buggy guys need to find a different gig.
John: Many fewer horses in America than there used to be.
Craig: Correct. We try and figure out things. The government does come in and prop businesses up. Based on the way our system works, there’s really no reason for us to be mining coal anymore, other than the fact that there are two senators from West Virginia. We will, however, progress. It’s just inevitable. Very smart of him and very brave.
John: Last thing, I wanted to give you this demo, where I was going to play two clips for you, one which I have recorded my voice reading a thing, and one which I trained a model to read it for you.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: Unfortunately, I couldn’t do it, because actually, it was too complicated to do. It was this whole Google collab. I looked at the video. I was trying to do the thing. I couldn’t translate it out of Japanese. This is a situation where literally weeks from now, it’ll be simpler to do. I just didn’t want to take my voice sample and give it to some sort of outside service. I was doing it all on my own machine.
Craig: I see, I see. I’m excited for that.
John: It’s incredibly straightforward to do. If I was willing to pay 20 bucks, it would’ve been really easy to do.
Craig: I would’ve given you the 20 bucks.
John: I just didn’t want my voice out there already training a model.
Craig: Oh, I see. I see.
John: I was trying to do it myself. I was thinking about our podcast is us talking through this stuff. I feel like for many of our listeners, we are our voices. It’s so easy to synthesize these now.
Craig: At some point, we do enter this area where verifiability will actually become its own resource. Diamonds look like cubic zirconias, and vice versa. Zirconiums? Zirconias? Zirconias. I think it’s zirconias. Cubic zirconias. I can’t tell the goddamn… Nobody can tell the difference just staring at it, except for diamond experts. Then they get their little loop out, and they stare at it, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, this is fake, and this is real.” If you can’t tell the difference just walking around, who cares? Gold-plated versus solid gold, who can tell the difference, if you don’t pick it up? But it matters to us. It matters. This is an original Chagall. This is a Chagall print. Can you tell the difference? No. Does it matter? Enormously.
It’s funny how the NFT thing was all about verifiability without any product. All they were selling was an empty verifiability. Verifiability of actual things will become important to people, and that will become a job. You should tell your friend. The discernment between the fake and the real. People care. It matters to them that it’s real. It really, really matters.
John: Two points of verifiability that I want to bring up. First off, during the pandemic, you and I noticed that we always used to have to sign contracts, and suddenly, no, no, you can just DocuSign it.
Craig: I love that.
John: You’re just clicking, and it’s filling in a little thing.
Craig: Click, click, click, click, click.
John: Somehow, we decided that was okay, and it stayed. Bless it. Love it.
Craig: Thank god.
John: Also, when I need to do a wire transfer, I need to move stuff from one account to another account, they call me, and I have to go through a voice verification of this thing, “I approve this transfer,” and stuff like that. It’s ridiculous, because I can record this now once and just play it, and it’ll be there.
Craig: Anybody can record it or synthesize your voice and play it back. We just sold our house in La Cañada. When you do the first big document, where you say I’m selling my house and for this price, there are like 8,000 signatures. I remember having to do it by hand, like, are you kidding? There’s just a pile. Now it’s just like tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
John: Oh, good. I haven’t bought a house in 20 years.
Craig: Oh my god, just tap, tap, tap, yes, yes, yes. I’m signing it before the page loads, just because it doesn’t matter anyway.
John: There was a whole person whose job that was to show up and walk you through all those forms. That person doesn’t have that job anymore.
Craig: That person doesn’t have that job anymore.
John: It was a terrible job.
Craig: It was a bad job. 80 pages of just California state boilerplate disclosure, blah, blah, blah, what happens if grass exists, asbestos. You’re just like, “I’m not reading any of this,” just sign, sign, sign. So yeah, sign, sign, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, it’s wonderful.
John: I will say a point for verifiability is our own Stuart Friedel is now a notary public. Stuart Friedel notarized some forms for us recently. It was an absolute delightful process. If you need a notary in Los Angeles, Stuart Friedel’s your man.
Craig: Stuart Friedel is your man. I will say that Stuart does have that notary thing going on, which is just this inherent trustability. You’re like, “Yeah, you’re a good egg. I trust you. That’s why the County has authorized you with your stamp.” I love notary stuff. It’s actually fun.
John: With you and your family, have you developed any passwords for things, so if someone calls asking for-
Craig: Oh, hostage?
John: Hostage situation. Have you developed that with your family?
Craig: No, because my answer is no.
John: “I’m not paying anything.”
Craig: Yeah, exactly.
John: You are Mel Gibson in Kidnapped.
Craig: Basically. “What’s that? You’ve got them all? Good.” No, we don’t have that. It never occurred to me that… If my family calls asking for money, I’m going to be like, “What? What do you mean?” I think after a few questions, I’ll be able to-
John: Suss it out.
Craig: … sense that something’s up. We do have 1Password, which is very helpful, I will say, in terms of…
John: 1Password, the system for making sure you have different passwords for all your different things, but there’s one central repository?
Craig: Yeah. 1Password, the app has a family plan, and so you can create vaults. We have a shared vault. What’s really helpful is like, “Dad, I ran out of medicine at college.” I’m like, “Okay. Probably getting emails, but fine. I can access your stuff, because I have your password, so I can log into your thing,” and that’s helpful.
John: That’s helpful. Most of this anxiety conversation has been about… We talked about industry stuff. We talked about AI stuff. Briefly, I think the prospect of going through another election cycle is absolutely dreadful to me.
Craig: Horrifying.
John: Horrifying. The fact that we know going into this that we’re going to see so much more misinformation that looks really good and is incredibly personalized, which is frustrating, and the possibility of an authoritarian state at the end of this election cycle. One of the reasons it’s harder for me to envision 2025, 2026 is the world looks very different based on the outcome of that election.
Craig: Yes. We will all be dreading it. Everyone will be dreading it. I choose to not think about it. This is one of those areas where I’ve really been making an effort lately to acknowledge that thinking about terrible things that are going on in and of itself is not productive. Donating money, donating time, talking to other human beings and wishing them well and telling them I’m concerned about them and just letting them know that I’m caring, that matters. Sitting and fretting-
John: Ruminating does nothing.
Craig: Nothing. And yet, that’s what the system of news delivery is designed to do. It’s actually no longer designed to inform. It is designed to get you to keep clicking on a thing, like a rat trying to get cocaine. I refuse to do it. I’m a voter in California. We are going to vote for Joe Biden. That’s happening. My vote in California is useless. I’m voting, of course, for president, but I don’t have to ruminate in that regard, nor do I have to worry about trying to get my neighbors to vote a certain way or any of that stuff. Also, we don’t have to worry about watching ads. We get away with murder here. If you live in Ohio, I think that’s all you get are president ads. I’m trying to not ruminate. There’s my New Year’s resolution.
John: Less rumination?
Craig: Less rumination.
John: Then I think, lastly, on labor, we’re all going into this next year anticipating IATSE’s contract is going to be a difficult one to fight, and there could likely be a strike, and so any production we’re thinking about going into could bump up against a potential strike.
Craig: When is that?
John: The summer.
Craig: The summer. That’ll be exciting for us. I remember in our first season, there was a vote. It was interesting. IATSE, they’re not quite like the way we do things. They had a contract with HBO that was different than the contract they had with everybody else. Technically, our crew would not have gone on strike. However, they probably wouldn’t have shown up. We didn’t quite know what was going to happen. I guess we’ll be there again. I really hope that the powers that be learn from what just happened, really, really learn from it.
John: I think they have to have a different strategy going into this, which is basically, “How do we avoid a strike? How do we make a deal with these unions that hears them, listens to them, understands what the concerns are, and addresses those concerns in a way? Basically, how do you present the negotiating committee with a deal that is so good that they don’t want to say no?”
Craig: If they were to optimize, the way to optimize would be, I don’t even think, in this case, “How do we get to 11:59 p.m.?” It’s, “How do we get one week?” for a strike vote, or, “How do we get them to not call for an authorization vote? What do we need to do?” If they go in there thinking, “We’ve got to beat them and teach them that they can’t do what these other unions do,” they will do what the other unions did-
John: 100%.
Craig: … which is, A, strike, and B, win. Carol.
John: Or whoever is going to be in charge of that.
Craig: Exactly. Jeez. Sheesh.
John: Sheesh. Let’s get to some of our questions here, because I did promise those at the start.
Craig: Great.
John: I thought we would start with Anonymous.
Drew: Anonymous writes, “I’m writing a pilot, and recently saw an anecdote in a Reddit thread that was so good I want to use the basic idea as my opening scene. I just want to use a situation the person described. The rest of the pilot has very little to do with it, but it’s an amazing entry point for the character arc. However, I do not want this person to feel like I stole from their life story. What is your take on this? Should I, A, reach out to the person, B, avoid the whole thing, or C, just use it and change it up a bit?”
John: I’m voting C.
Craig: C, use it and change it up a bit. We’re writers, for god’s sake. Look. You’re not stealing anything. What are we at, 600-and-what episode?
John: 620.
Craig: 620, so this will be the 612th time that we have said that ideas are not intellectual property. Unique expression in fixed form is. You do not want to take that person’s actual literary material, their sentence structure and their vocabulary and all the rest of it. You don’t want to plagiarize. But if somebody tells a story about something that happened to them, you can absolutely use the premise of that story for something. Of course you can.
If you’re feeling guilty about it, then don’t. But if you aren’t, do. The one thing you shouldn’t do is go ask for permission, because you’re just opening up a can of worms for yourself that’s just awful. When people put things online, whether they realize it or not, they are publishing things that are now publicly available. You can’t plagiarize, but you can take an idea. That’s not property.
John: The other thing I would say is that the times you ask for permission is when it’s somebody who might be using that in their own material, both because you don’t want to be a dick, but also because they would be doing the same kind of thing with it. There was an anecdote that a friend told me about a hotel room. He was also a writer. “The story you told me was fantastic. Are you using that for anything? Because if not, I want to incorporate that.” It became a part of a moment in a sequence in Go! I asked him first, because I wanted to make sure he wasn’t doing anything with it, because I wanted it to be free and clear and open.
Craig: Professional courtesy. Courtesy among writers, of course. Listen. All those things that people put on Reddit, Am I The Asshole, and all the stuff that goes on, what is it, the Didn’t Happen of the Year Awards and all that, it’s out there. It’s out there. People need to learn the difference between inspiration and plagiarism.
John: One from Steve?
Drew: Steve writes, “I have a question about composite characters in real life adaptations. I wrote a script based on true events where the main characters are represented in court by a lawyer. The lawyer is a minor character based on a real person who wasn’t a great guy and may have sabotaged the case. My version has made the shady lawyer a nicer guy who does the right thing, as I replace the subsequent lawyers with this one guy. Should I change the real lawyer’s name? He’s become a composite character. Does he need a composite name? I made him a better man in my script than he was in life, so I’m not worried about being sued for defamation. I am, however, concerned that keeping his name may lend merit to his problematic legacy, resulting in unwarranted good will.”
Craig: That’s an easy one for me. Change the name.
John: I say change the name.
Craig: Why wouldn’t you? Unless the name has some sort of amazing value, change it, of course.
John: Steve says, “Where the main characters are represented in court by a lawyer.” The lawyer is not the central character. The lawyer is not Erin Brockovich, and so change that.
Craig: Exactly. Change it. Inherit the Wind changed the names of the lawyers. Why wouldn’t you? It doesn’t matter. It’s a composite character anyway. Change it.
John: Change it. Let’s wrap it up with an easy one about D&D.
Drew: Sam writes, “During the strike, I was able to finally put together a D&D group over the last six months. Seeing them every week has been the best thing that has happened for my mental health and creativity. However, we are all television and film people. As shows start crewing, people will have to travel for work. I worry that the precious little thing will fall apart if we don’t see each other every week. John and Craig have talked about being part of a long-running D&D campaign and group, and I’m wondering how it works when some people are away.”
John: Two points of answer here. First is technology, and second off is group dynamics and what are rules are going to be for when people are gone.
Craig: You want, ideally, a group that is sizable enough that you don’t need everyone there, or even everybody minus one there, to have the evening. Most D&D adventures are, by default, designed for a party of four characters. If you have four people there, you should be able to play. Now, a good DM understands also how to adjust the encounters if it’s four people or eight people. That in and of itself is a D&D class that I would love to teach one day. That’s primary. Then secondary is Zoom. Using Roll20 has been great for us.
John: We should talk, for people who don’t remember, Roll20 is the system which we are all on our own computers, looking at a top-down view map. We see our characters. We can take our actions and click through things. We’re still playing D&D, but the representation, rather than being little lead figures, is on screen.
Craig: We should probably never use lead figures.
John: I guess we called them lead figures. They were never actually lead.
Craig: I think at some point they were lead, and then a lot of-
John: Little painted figurines.
Craig: Little painted lead figurines. It’s remarkable how technology just blended together in this moment when suddenly we couldn’t be together.
John: We started in the pandemic.
Craig: We had been playing prior to the pandemic. The pandemic, like the question-writer here, did suddenly create a circumstance where we played way more often. We were playing once a month before, because it was so hard to get everybody to agree to it. Now it’s just like, if I don’t want to leave my house, or if I’m in a hotel, but I have three hours, yeah, I’m logging in, and I’m playing D&D. You have a hybrid situation. We are basically just one session left of our massive Dungeon of the Mad Mage campaign.
John: Which has been four years, five years?
Craig: It’s just been endless and wonderful in its own way. Lot of memories. Then what comes next will be really interesting to see. I’m in Canada, so it’s going to have to be remote for a while, where we all just log in, or we do a hybrid. Sometimes everyone sits around a table, and then there’s a laptop down there with a talking head.
John: I was out with COVID once, and so I Zoomed in for that because I had COVID.
Craig: Zoomed in, exactly.
John: I would say you have to have enough people for that to work. If it’s a group of really just four people, you can probably find times for all four of those people to be together. We would submit to those online calendar services where you would say what dates are you available, and everyone clicks the same link, and they can figure out what times you can actually all get together, either in person or online. It’s worth trying to find ways to stay together and to keep the momentum going. Cool.
Drew: Great.
John: It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a show I saw this past week, Just For Us, by Alex Edelman. I saw it down at the Taper. I think it’s closing the Taper now. I think the time has run out for it. I know it’s coming to Boston, Berkeley, Detroit, Chicago. If it’s in one of those cities, you should see it.
The show is a one-man show. He’s a writer-performer, sort of like Mike Birbiglia, who’s been on the show a couple times. Alex was also a staff writer on TV shows before this. The premise of this, and I won’t spoil too much of it, is that he decides to attend this meeting of white supremacists at an apartment in New York City. That’s the central event, and then he’s jumping off to all these different stories and anecdotes about how it all fits together in his Jewish identity.
What I loved about it structurally… And it’s so interesting to study how you delineate and perform a bunch of different characters in a one-man show, and the choices you make about how you’re going to do that. With him, it was a lot of location-based stuff. It’s like, that stool represents this person; this stool represents this person. So he doesn’t have to do all the voices, but now he’s in this person’s role and that person’s role. And also, how you establish the present tense of the main story and then go off to all the little anecdotes and detours and still bring you back in that. I’m sure that was a situation where there was a written plan, and then in performing it, you realize how far you can pull that string before you have to come back to the main storyline. If you get a chance to see it, Just For Us, by Alex Edelman. I really enjoyed it.
Craig: Where is that running again?
John: It was at the Taper.
Craig: Taper.
John: Now, I think it’s last few days, so by the time this comes out, it may have closed down, unless they added some more dates. But new cities it’s coming to, and I’m sure it’ll be filmed at some point.
Craig: It’ll be on Netflix. Amazing. My One Cool Thing was a device that I used yesterday for our Thanksgiving feast. My friend Josh Epstein brought it. He’s a theatrical lighting designer, very technically oriented guy, but also, like me, the chef in the family. Our two families do Thanksgiving together. Our wives, lovely as they are, are not allowed to cook. We do all of it. The two of us love surfing the cooking trends for Thanksgiving. We were on the spatchcock train pretty early, which again, I just have to say, if you’re not spatchcocking your turkey, you’re just doing it wrong. It took an hour and 15 minutes.
John: It’s crazy how fast it is to cook a turkey that way.
Craig: It’s just wonderful.
John: Cutting out that backbone makes a lot of difference.
Craig: Poultry shears, bone, done.
John: It is brutal cutting it out, but once, you’re done.
Craig: If you have poultry shears, takes three minutes. That’s the key. If you’re using regular kitchen shears, impossible. Poultry shears, easy. It’s incredible what the right tools will do. One thing that he brought this year, because what we did was… We love heritage turkeys. We each got two heritage turkeys that were smallish medium, because one big, huge turkey’s kind of annoying, because people want some more white meat, and they’re like, “Oh, look, we have all these massive turkey legs that nobody really wants.” We put them in. They were both spatchcock, brine, put them in.
He brought this thing that was so cool. I think, John, you in particular would love this. It’s called the Weber Connect Smart Grilling Hub. It’s a little black box receiver. You can put some temperature information on it. But of course, like everything else now on the internet of things, you have an app for it. What I loved about this thing was it had inputs for four different probes. We were able to have two probes for both turkeys’ white meat and two probes for both turkeys’ dark meat. The probes come out of the oven and go into this thing. It tracks on a graph as it’s cooking.
John: That’s great.
Craig: The one that I had was maybe three pounds heavier than the one he had. It was just a little bit longer to cook. It was consistently, as they both rose up, the delta between the two lines was perfect. We were so happy with it. There was no confusion, like, “Oh, is it done? Is it not done?” No. It’s done.
John: You’re constantly opening the oven to check whether something is done enough, but then you’re losing the heat of the oven.
Craig: You’re losing heat. This one was like, you just knew. You’re like, “And done.” Take it out. Boom.
John: Love it.
Craig: It was flawless. Love that. Great technology. You don’t cook, do you? You have that “I don’t cook” face.
Drew: Oh, no, I feel like I-
Craig: Oh, really?
Drew: I try most of the time. I’m not amazing. I didn’t grow up in a house that cooked.
Craig: What did you do about Thanksgiving?
Drew: I went to John’s.
Craig: Of course you did.
Drew: I let John cook for me.
Craig: Of course. Did you make the turkey, John?
John: There was no turkey in our Thanksgiving.
Craig: Are you a vegetarian?
John: No. We had duck.
Craig: Oh, duck.
John: Yeah, we had duck confit.
Craig: I love duck confit.
John: I think I may have pitched this on an earlier show. We just decided turkey, even with all the technology, even with all the brining and everything else, it’s good, but it’s never fantastic. Duck confit is fantastic.
Craig: Duck confit is one of my favorite foods in the world.
John: Absolutely. We get it. It comes canned from France. You pull it out of the can, you heat it up, and it’s done.
Craig: And it’s done.
John: It’s delicious.
Craig: I want to try and make some homemade duck confit.
John: Great. Go for it.
Craig: I’m going to make it.
John: You should do that, and then you should try the canned duck confit and tell me whether it was worth it.
Craig: The canned duck confit will be better. But I just love trying.
John: Great.
Craig: Because they do stuff that you just don’t know to do, because they’re French. Duck confit is exactly the kind of thing that you can package and redo. That’s no question. But I’m going to try it.
John: My big Thanksgiving adventure was I did Claire Saffitz’s sweet potato rosemary rolls. They’re like a Parker House roll that had sweet potatoes and rosemary. It turned out great.
Craig: Sounds delicious. Happy Thanksgiving to everybody.
John: Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.
Craig: This is our, what, 19th Thanksgiving with you at home?
John: It’s a lot. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Thank you, Drew. Edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Indeed.
John: Outro this week is by Alex Winder. 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 like the ones we answered today. You can 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.
We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. I’ve not seen any of the Scriptnotes University T-shirts out in the wild. I want to see those next. Those are good. You can become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on the intro to our book. Craig and Drew, thank you so much.
Craig: Thank you.
Drew: Thanks.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, so the book is in good shape. All the chapters are there on the grid. I need to go through and do some cleanup on a lot of stuff. A lot of my December will be work there. One thing we do not have mapped out at all is an introduction to the book. I thought you and I could have a discussion that could become the basis for this introductory chapter.
To start by, the question is, why write a Scriptnotes book at all? What is the purpose of a Scriptnotes book? What do you hope this can do for the aspiring writer, or for anyone interested in film?
Craig: After all this time, we have accrued so many hours that our normal advice, which is, “Oh, do you want to learn about screenwriting? Just listen to the free podcast we do,” doesn’t really apply anymore. It’s not possible. It would take too long. Also, there’s repetition.
John: People do it, but still, it’s a-
Craig: It’s not what I would call an efficient process at this point.
John: You can’t refer back to a podcast. You can’t go back to this moment.
Craig: That’s right. It would be excruciating. Putting together our best hits in a book, it feels like we’ve kind of boiled down the essence. It is, I think, a wonderful reference. People will ask me, “Hey, can you give me some tips? Can I have coffee with you and pick your brain?” I say, “No, because I’ve done a podcast for free for a decade.” But I realize it’s not super helpful. Now, I can just say, “Here’s a book. Actually, buy a book.”
John: Buy the book. Please buy it.
Craig: Buy the book.
John: Don’t pirate online. Let’s talk about books, and how we feel about books about screenwriting, because I feel like I have a mixed history with books about screenwriting. I read Syd Field as I first started here. It was my first introduction to what the form is like. I never read Save the Cat! People love Save the Cat!, but I’ve always felt like these were people who did not actually know what they were doing talking about screenwriting.
Craig: Yes, and those books were very much practical, how-to, so, “Oh, you want to be a screenwriter? Here’s a bunch of rules that you as a not-screenwriter can follow, and you’ll be a screenwriter.” We know that that’s not true. We’ve never really set out to be that.
What we, I think, have done is provided a lot of peripheral wisdom that we’ve gleaned over the years doing this job, that will help inform people in a creative way. People that are actually capable of doing this – and they’re out there – will be, I think, tremendously assisted by this, because it’s not prescriptive. It is descriptive. It’s just telling you what our observations are and giving you choices.
When we say, “Here’s a chapter about conflict,” we’re not saying this is how you write conflict. What we’re saying is, “Here are different kinds of conflict. Here are the ways you can approach it. Here are some things you should try and avoid. Here are some traps we’ve fallen into.” To me, that’s how you learn, not by a book writing a chart.
John: It’s interesting you brought up conflict, because that was the chapter I just went through. It’s a really good chapter. I’m really happy with it. Looking at the points in there, I think you probably mapped out the six kinds of conflict that are there, and then we had a discussion about them. It was better than what you by yourself would’ve done or what I by myself would’ve done. It’s really a synthesis of both of us.
One of the big challenges for Drew and for Chris and Megana, who’s also been working on this, has been how to find a census of voice between the two of us, because we generally are on the same kind of wavelength, but we don’t have quite the same voice. I also think about our intended reader, who may be a little bit different than our average listener is. Craig, who do you hope reads this book?
Craig: Who I hope reads it, people who are aspirational and serious about trying to do this professionally. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think it’s inappropriate for other people. This is a perfectly fine book if you’re a hobbyist. This is a perfectly fine book if it’s a little side thing you do that maybe one day might work. It’s a perfectly fine thing to do if you’re having a midlife career shift and want to approach this.
But mostly, the people that I want to be the Catcher in the Rye for are people in film school who are being mistaught, and who are paying dearly for the privilege of being mistaught. I would like them to read this. I would also like the people who teach in schools to read this. It’s a little frustrating to me that, again, a lot of these schools collect massive amounts of tuition, and sometimes we get sent screen caps from classrooms with our stuff on the board. I’m glad our stuff is on the board. It’s just annoying that other people are getting away with charging tuition to regurgitate something on a free podcast. Now you get it regurgitated here in this beautiful book. But I think it’s an excellent companion, hopefully, for people who are learning.
John: When I started my blog, I always said that my idealized writer was the kid in Iowa, growing up, who was curious about screenwriting and had really no way to really get into it. I would say that’s still true for the book, but also the Julia Turners out there, who are really interested in screenwriting and stuff, but they’re not going to ever write a screenplay themselves. It’s not their goal, but they really are curious about what goes into the craft and the business of it all.
The basic kind of chapters we’d find in there, there’s really three big categories you could put them into. First is topic chapters, which would be about conflict or getting notes or-
Craig: Craft.
John: … craft and business. We have the interview chapters, where we’re talking with filmmakers, which is really practical advice about how they navigate all this stuff. Then we have our deep dive chapters, where we really go deep on one movie, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, talking about how it works. Those feel like the kinds of things you need to understand in order to get started in this business.
Craig: You’re actually prompting me now to think of somebody else I would like to read this book.
John: Who?
Craig: Critics.
John: Yes.
Craig: Critics, our budding critics, fully fledged critics. I think having insight into how things are created helps you have insight into why you do or do not like the thing that you see. Certainly, understanding how the business functions may help people more accurately write reviews. When they say, “Oh, the dialog is clunky; the screenwriter must be bad,” or not, or maybe a screenwriter was bad, but it’s not the one that you see credited, or who knows?
There are lots of things that I hope people can glean from that about how we go through the discussion of creating work, but also, even how we break down stories, how we think about stories, which is different, generally, than how critics do. It might make them better. It might.
John: One thing that’s been so different working on this book versus the Arlo Finch books is Arlo Finch is designed to be read from beginning to end. It had a consistent narrative flow to it. There are some nonfiction books that are like that, where basically, this chapter builds on a previous chapter builds on a previous chapter. Here, that wasn’t really possible. The organization of which chapter goes after which chapter will hopefully have some kind of connection. We’ll try to put in a filmmaker chapter that is a little bit related to what we just talked about in one of these other things.
The better reference for me is the Player’s Handbook from D&D. You can constantly refer back to this thing. If you want to look, like, “Oh, I’m stuck on this moment. What is theme again?” it’s like, “Oh, I can go back to the theme chapter.” We can talk about what theme is. You can read it independently of having read the rest of the book.
Craig: It’s a bathroom book.
John: It is a bathroom book is really what I’m trying to-
Craig: This is a bathroom book.
John: No shame in a bathroom book.
Craig: We don’t mean for the bath. It’s a toilet book. I love books like that. They’re great. You pick them up. You just open them anywhere, start reading. Fine. Good.
John: Good.
Craig: Bathroom book. Great Christmas gift.
John: Great Christmas gift for 2025.
Craig: For 2025, yeah, exactly.
John: In 2025, your gift-giving needs are set.
Craig: Put that under the Christmas tree next year.
John: Next year. Great. I think we have enough material here to start a chapter, and Chris and Drew can get going on it.
Craig: Fantastic. Can’t wait for people to read what I just said, on the toilet.
John: Thanks, guys.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Bye.
Links:
- The Strange $55 Million Saga of a Netflix Series You’ll Never See by John Carreyrou for the New York Times
- Digital background actors in Disney’s Prom Pact
- Sacking, revolt, return: how crisis at OpenAI over Sam Altman unfolded by Dan Milmo for The Guardian
- Alex Edelman: Just for Us
- Weber Connect Smart Grilling Hub
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