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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 500 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’ll revisit what we learned in our first 499 episodes with some of the folks who know it best. We welcome back Scriptnotes producers Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, and Megan McDonnell, along with longtime editor Matthew Chilelli, and our current producer, Megana Rao.

We’re going to be enlisting them to help answer listener questions, plus we’ll play a game with two Scriptnotes super fans. Craig, you love games.

**Craig:** And I love Scriptnotes super fans. Are there are only two Scriptnotes super fans? Or did we select them from a number of Scriptnotes super fans?

**John:** I put out a call on Twitter asking for like who has listened to every episode of Scriptnotes. And these are people who raised their hands and said like they listened to every episode of Scriptnotes, so we will see if they were listening carefully.

**Craig:** These are the most damaged of our fans.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for premium members we’re going to turn the tables and our producers will ask Craig and I if we remember a damn thing about what we said over these 500 episodes.

**Craig:** I mean, the answer is no. I’m just going to tell you right now. It’s no. I mean, well we’ll see how we do. I’m just so happy to see all of these – so we’re looking at them on Zoom. We can see their fresh faces. It’s nice. I saw a very tiny mini Friedel walk by. That was wonderful to see. And I’m also, obviously I’m happy to see Megan and always happy to see Matthew. But particularly happy to see Megana today because there was a weird Twitter rumor that she was just leaving. And I don’t know if they meant leaving the show, or leaving the world. Did you see that Megana?

**Megana Rao:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like on Twitter. Someone was like, oh, it was like what will happen in the 500th episode? And one of the choices was Megana Rao leaves. And then, you know, it’s Twitter. That’s all they needed. And they were off and running.

**Megana:** I’m going to be here for 500 more. Sorry Twitter.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** So Stuart Friedel has our longest history. He has over 200 episodes of produced Scriptnotes. So Megana has been doing it for a good long time, but she’s got a lot of runway ahead of her if she wants to beat that. But I think the reason there could have been speculation on Twitter is because we had promised that there was going to be a big announcement in today’s show, and so we should get to the big announcement, the big news. Because for nearly 10 years Scriptnotes has only been a podcast that Craig doesn’t listen to.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And soon Scriptnotes will be a book that Craig won’t read.

**Craig:** Right. Right. And this is wonderful. Like all of the ideas that we have on the show, I didn’t have this idea. I like to say we had ideas because technically we had them. If I and you together have ideas, and you come up with all the ideas, we had ideas. This book is one of them.

**John:** There’s been talk of doing a Scriptnotes book for a long time and we ended up doing a Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide a while back just because it was a way to sort of get that out there. We have transcripts going all the way back to the very start of the show, but we looked at sort of like well what if we were to just bind the transcripts and it would be like 100 volumes. There’s like no good way to do this.

**Craig:** Oh, I think we should have gone that way actually. I think we should have done a full 100.

**John:** Just take up a whole library. It should just be Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Yeah. Scriptnotes Volume 78.

**John:** You pull that out and flip through it. Little codecs.

**Craig:** And I want it to look like those books that Gandalf was looking through when he was trying to figure out if the one ring was really the one ring.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Or the Game of Thrones libraries where the books are all chained up. That’s another way we could do it. You have to go to a place to get to the Scriptnotes information.

**Craig:** The Citadel, obviously.

**John:** The Citadel. So instead we are going to have a book that is properly edited. So Chris Sont who does our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting is doing the editing on the book. It’s going to have interviews with many of the fantastic guests we’ve had on the show. Plus sort of the best of on different topics, nicely condensed and compressed. So it will still be me and Craig talking but sort of an optimized version of us talking about all the things we talked about over these 499 episodes.

**Craig:** This is our 500th episode.

**John:** And I did not predict we’d get to here.

**Craig:** No, well first of all there was a while there where I didn’t think anyone was going to get to here. So, things are a little more stable out there in the world. But 500 episodes, it’s not quite 10 years of Scriptnotes, but it’s freaking close.

**John:** We’re getting close. Yeah. So we made a list of our previous Scriptnotes guests and there were so many here and Megana this afternoon was like, “Oh, what about Ice Cube?” I forgot there’s a bonus episode with Ice Cube that hadn’t made it onto the list. So, Craig, let’s quickly run through who our guests have been, because there were surprises here for me as well.

**Craig:** Oh, in terms of who we’ve had in the past?

**John:** Yeah. All right, so just in the Bs we have Jason Bateman, Noah Baumbach, David Benioff, Alec Berg, Rachel Bloom.

**Craig:** OK, then we have one C. Ice Cube. Which I don’t know if that – I guess Cube is the last name there. But we have Ben Falcone, Kevin Feige of Marvel, and we also have Dana Fox.

**John:** Greta Gerwig, David Goyer, Mari Heller, Lisa Joy, Mindy Kaling, Lawrence Kasdan.

**Craig:** I mean, that’s pretty good. Continuing with our final K, David Koepp. Lawrence Kasdan to David Koepp is strong. And then it goes to Jennifer Lee, very strong. We also have Natasha Leggero, Damon Lindelof, Riki Lindhome, Phil Lord.

**John:** Yeah. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was here in our little recording studio.

**Craig:** How about that? That was pretty awesome.

**John:** Kelly Marcel, a frequent guest. Of course she moved to England. Christopher Markus. Melissa McCarthy. Rob McElhenney.

**Craig:** Stephen McFeely, Aline Brosh McKenna, Chris McQuarrie. Just the MCs alone is impressive. Chris Miller. Chris Nee. Ashley Nicole Black.

**John:** Jonathan Nolan. BJ Novak. Ryan Reynolds was on the show.

**Craig:** Ryan Reynolds.

**John:** Dailyn Rodriguez. Seth Rogan. Dan Savage. Do you remember we did a Dan Savage episode?

**Craig:** The Dirty Episode. Of course.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then finishing off we had Justin Simien, Malcolm Spellman, Rawson Marshall Thurber. David Wain. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Dan Weiss. And Rebel Wilson.

**John:** And that’s not all the guests. That’s just sort of the big names we’ve talked to over these–

**Craig:** Those are the ones we liked.

**John:** Those are the ones we liked.

**Craig:** No, we liked them all.

**John:** We liked all of them. But we’ve had a lot of other people come through here and share what they knew. So I’m excited to make a book. If you want more information about the book go to Scriptnotes.net. Basically all that you will see there is a little place for a mailing list, because we send you sample chapters/information about it.

We’re not quite sure how we’re doing it. We’d love the book to come out in 2022. We could go through a normal publisher. We could publish it ourselves. We’ll see what makes the most sense. But people have asked for the book for a while now and we’re going to try to do it.

**Craig:** I’m excited. I think this will be the hottest Christmas item of 2022.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** 2022.

**John:** 2022.

**Craig:** 2022.

**John:** A safe bet for 2022.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. So usually on this program we answer listener questions. And so our producers go through the questions and pull them and put them in the outline and we answer those questions. Today I want to flip those a bit. These are still listener questions, but you and I will ask the questions kind of of our producers. Because these are folks who are out there working in the industry and may actually know things that we don’t know about these things.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Let’s start with a question from Sarah. Sarah writes in, “I had a question for you all about how you met and started the podcast. You sort of addressed it in a season one episode where you basically explained that you weren’t friends beforehand, but you didn’t say much else. If you covered this in a later episode I will find out soon enough, but if you did not I’d love to hear more about how this partnership came to be and how your friendship has evolved over the years.”

So, Stuart Friedel was the very first Scriptnotes producer. He was working as my assistant. Stuart, what can you tell us about the early days of Scriptnotes?

**Stuart Friedel:** About how you and Craig met?

**John:** Or just what Scriptnotes was like. Because Scriptnotes was I think just kind of a “hey I think I’m going to do a podcast” idea. I kind of remember having the notion of doing it. And, here Stuart, do this work. So talk to us about what the early episodes felt like.

**Stuart:** I mean, you pretty much nailed it. I remember I joined, and within maybe two or three weeks of me starting you had this idea. It may have even been like an inkling of a notion before I joined. But pretty much right away.

If you look at the number of episodes per week you can break that down and that’s almost exactly the amount of time that I worked for you. And so Craig had a blog that was not quite as active as yours.

**Craig:** Right.

**Stuart:** By the time you were talking to me about it you already knew that Craig was going to be your partner on it. I remember like drilling a hole in your desk so that we could install this microphone arm. And going to some weird, the sort of electronics shop that doesn’t exist anymore.

**Craig:** Fry’s.

**Stuart:** To get windscreens and get microphones and figure all that out.

**John:** Or Amitron.

**Stuart:** But if you listen to the early episodes, I mean, I edited them to start and you can really tell the jump in quality when Matthew joined. And also frankly if you look at episode length they started at 20 minutes and I think they pretty quickly got up to about where they are now. I think that you guys really – it became second nature pretty quickly, but there certainly is an early batch of episodes where you’re not quite the well-oiled machine yet.

And then from there, I mean, in some ways the bulk of my job for the next bunch of years was getting Scriptnotes at first edited, but then just everything in place for Matthew to do his work. Getting everything in place to upload it to the blog. And over the years it really evolved about how it went onto the blog and what the blog looked like. And that’s all technical stuff. Yeah, you had a pretty good handle on it.

**John:** So Matthew, let’s segue over to you. Because you took over the editing reins from originally me and then Stuart and sort of just did a much better job of it. You came to Scriptnotes kind of in a weird way, because you just started writing outros for it. So when did you find out about Scriptnotes and when did you start deciding to become more involved?

**Matthew Chilelli:** I found out about Scriptnotes through your blog. It was something where I went to school at Ithaca people would talk about you’ve got to check this out. It’s just a really easy way to find a quick answer if you’re trying to write a screenplay or if you have some question about moviemaking. And then I started listening to the show. And when you asked for outros somewhere around Episode 98 or so I was I guess first through the gate. And that I think was our introduction was through music, not through editing.

**John:** I was trying to figure it out today. I think you took over editing on Episode 152. It’s the first one I see you credited as the editor. And weirdly the job of producer and editor are kind of fungible in podcast land. So when you hear credits on a lot of podcasts you won’t hear as editor as a description because it will say produced by and that person actually was cutting the audio. Really we tried to keep it very separate here. So our producers are sort of organizing the show and getting all the material together, but you are the person who is fixing all of my mistakes and making it sound good.

**Matthew:** Yeah. And there were fewer and fewer of them as time goes on. I think you’ve both gotten very good at editing yourselves.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, try and not stick you with too much trouble when we mess up. But am I allowed – can I answer the question also a little bit?

**John:** Please, please.

**Craig:** Just to get a little sappy for a second. Because Sarah is asking how our partnership came to be. Just because John called and said do you want to do this and I was like D’OK. Because I didn’t want to write a blog anymore. But when you ask how our friendship has evolved over the years, you’ve kind of all heard it. This is it.

This is how we became friends. It’s not like we were friends-friends when we started. We were really just like podcast partners. I don’t know how else to put that, you know. And we got to know each other through doing the show. We got to understand each other through doing the show. And we became friends by doing the show. And I really do believe that – if I may use the word “love” if I may – that love is a function of time and commitment.

And John and I are both married people, so we obviously get the value of commitment and time. And that’s I think what you hopefully have heard over almost 10 years is the function of time and commitment to each other. So, in a way John this is like our anniversary.

**John:** Yeah, it is like our anniversary. We were acquaintances beforehand. And we were friendly beforehand, but we weren’t really friends. And I remember on some episode I said, some early episode, we can find the transcripts, I said like, “Well, it’s not like we’re friends off mic.” I said something like that. I could hear your heart breaking there a little bit.

**Craig:** Oh, oh, I see.

**John:** It was a mean thing for me to say.

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** But also we’ve become better friends because we play Dungeons & Dragons. We do things that are not the podcast now, too, in ways we didn’t before. We were just two guys who did the podcast before.

**Craig:** Exactly. And I think we trust each other. When you do a show like this there’s a certain amount of trust that happens. You rely on each other and you trust each other. And that trust over time is rewarded. Sometimes with people you trust them and over time it’s punished. And that’s how you know things are bad. Your trust was punished. And that has not happened. So it’s been just a very, I mean, for me it’s been incredibly easy.

Obviously I don’t get paid. Everyone knows that. That I’m being ripped off on the daily. But, it’s very easy for me to just show up. I don’t have to do anything. You do everything. It’s so nice. It’s so nice. It’s worth the money I lose. Now I’m saying that I’m losing money, by the way.

**John:** Like it’s costing you. Although, it did cost you in the early days because originally we were actually hosting the files on Amazon.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was costing us like $200 or $300 a month, just the storage fees for it.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it was a nice expense because it meant people were listening. By the way, how many people listen now? Every now and then I’ll ask you. This is how clueless I am. Where are we at?

**John:** Megana, what’s our weekly listenership right now?

**Megana:** I would say weekly we have about 30,000 listeners.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And our premiums are in the 3000s now.

**Craig:** Every time I hear a number I just say wow. It doesn’t matter what it is. Honestly, if it were 12 people. You hear like 12 people listen every week I would be like wow.

**John:** I will say that it’s great to see the total numbers, but when somebody who I really respect in the industry says they listen to the show that’s incredibly gratifying to me as well. When you find out you have some fans out there.

**Craig:** It certainly is well listened to here in town. And I don’t mean Calgary.

**John:** All right. Let’s go onto Brett in Los Angeles. He writes, “Your podcast really helped me after Covid destroyed my industry and I had to take a mind-numbing overnight job to pay the mortgage. Now I’m considering moving away from Los Angeles because it is just too difficult to stay afloat here with a house and a pregnant wife, while also chasing the dream of being a working writer. So my question is pre-Covid you guys have discussed the difficulties of living outside Los Angeles. But now with Zoom has that changed? What about writer rooms? Would it be impossible to be staffed if I were in Dallas or Nashville?

“I don’t have a lot of traction now, so maybe it’s a moot point. Still, I believe in my work and I worry there might never be traction if I leave.”

So, Megan and Stuart, you guys have both done a lot of work this last year on Zoom. Stuart, you’ve been in writer’s rooms. Megan, I think your WandaVision experience was mostly pre-lockdown. But what do you think about Brett’s situation and how viable would it be for Brett to be working mostly remotely? Megan, we’ll start with you. What do you think?

**Megan McDonnell:** I think definitely while writer’s rooms are still over Zoom I don’t see why not. I feel – and like meetings and stuff. I feel like the trick about living in LA is just making friends in LA and that’s such a big part of how you hear about stuff. I want to believe that it’s becoming more inclusive as far as where you can be living and find your way in. But I just don’t know. What do you think, Stuart?

**Stuart:** Yeah. I mean, we have no idea what the – first of all, how long this tail is going to be, the end of Covid, and second of all what things are going to look like as we get out, come out the other side even. But I am currently in a writer’s room with six people. Two of those people left LA when lockdown started and as far as I know don’t have plans to come back any time soon. I don’t know how right that is.

But I also know that as our show in general moves back into an office the writer’s room is the last and least urgent group to move back into an office. I think we’re probably going to stay on Zoom for the foreseeable future. I don’t see why we wouldn’t. It works really well for us.

I don’t know that it works really well for every writer’s room. I’ve heard friends that really don’t like it and they’re eager to get back into in-person in LA. So I think there’s just so many moving parts. But I think you hit the nail on the head that it’s more about getting the jobs. And it helps to be in those social circles, in those conversations in LA. Also though just being relevant and being seen like in offices. I think you make such a stronger impression when you shake somebody’s hand than you do over Zoom. And I’m kind of eager to get back into that.

I can’t say for a fact that it’s impossible, because it currently is possible. I just don’t know if any of my friends who have moved away would have gotten the jobs that they can do from far away if they weren’t in LA when they got the job in the first place.

**John:** Now, Megan, I know you’ve been pitching on some projects during Zoom and having to do that. How do you like that versus doing it in person? Congratulations on your Marvel movie which is about to start shooting. When you got that that was an in-person situation. But the stuff since then has been a lot of sort of Zoom stuff. And how are you finding the difference? Are you able to land those jobs doing it on Zoom?

**Megan:** Great question. I have not thought about not getting jobs because of Zoom. [laughs] I think that it’s nice to be in person because it’s easier to communicate excitement in person. I feel like that’s half the battle of pitching is this idea is so exciting, don’t you think? And they’re like, wow, I guess it is. I don’t know. I haven’t minded the Zoom stuff. It feels more casual or something. There’s something nice about it.

But I do think in-person is helpful, too, if you have a complicated idea that requires a lot of like – I pitched something that involved a lot of like John’s artboards. He does these boards when he’s pitching, and so I stole that. And did a lot of acting with the boards and with pieces and stuff. And if it’s like a visual thing I feel like, I don’t know, people do it over Zoom, too. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve been able to do it on Zoom, too. I think you’re right in the sense of like when you’re in those meetings when you have to get a sense of like are they really getting it, are they responding? Is this the right vibe? Or should I throw everything else out? That’s really hard to gauge on Zoom. But those initial meetings or just like “hey how are you,” happy not to do it. We said this on the podcast a bunch of times. If I never have to drive to Santa Monica in the afternoon I’ll be just delighted.

**Craig:** Seriously.

**John:** It’s a beast.

**Stuart:** Takes away your podcast commute time where you can really listen. I do think like assuming there is a concrete number of jobs, which I don’t think is a fair assumption, but it’s the same advantage and disadvantage as everybody else has. I have found though that anecdotally it seems like people expect a deck.

Decks I think were rising in popularity, like PowerPoint presentations precipitously even before this, but now it seems like everybody seems to want that or be doing that. So, I’ve kind of gone the opposite and for the pitch I’m doing now I have tactile maps and props and I start just looking at you and then throughout my pitch I turn my camera and there’s a map on the wall. I don’t know whether that’s been good for me or not, but at the end of the day it feels a little bit like more and more the job of a screenwriter strains towards you also have to be a PowerPoint maker and you also have to be a song and a dancer. And I think Zoom has made that even more so the case. So I’m eager to get back in a room.

**John:** Cool. Emily in Los Angeles wrote, “I recently brought a script to a new writer’s group I joined and it got decimated. This was the first time this group had seen any of my writing and we spent about two hours going through each scene and pretty much talking about all the reasons it sucked. I’m always open to criticism and have received constructive feedback on the script from other writing groups I’m in. But at the two-hour mark my feelings were hurt. The notes didn’t feel constructive or actionable. They felt mean-spirited and based on personal preference.

“I took a break from the script and have recently come back to it, but I can’t get their notes out of my head. Now I’m doubting every scene and choice I’ve made. It’s making me want to abandon this script forever. How do I get these notes I disagree with out of my head and get back to writing the movie I want to make?”

So Megan and Megana, you guys have the most experience of anyone on this call in writers groups and sort of like groups of writers who are coming together voluntarily to talk over their work. So first let me start with it sounded like something went wrong with this writers group. What you diagnose what’s happening here? Megana, why don’t we start with you – what’s your reaction to what Emily is experiencing?

**Megana:** It kind of sounds like maybe there was somebody who had a bad vibe and everybody jumped on. And maybe the negativity was infectious. Something that I’ve learned through writers groups is I think they should be like your midwives of your story, like very supportive and coaching you along the way. And I’m very lucky to have that in my writers groups which have included Megan who is awesome.

I think the other thing is like whenever I get really just harsh, horrible feedback I usually come to the conclusion weeks later that the person is actually just not the right audience for this material. And I’ve also found that it’s usually coming from someplace of insecurity.

For Emily I would advise you like this is not about you, or your script. It sounds like this is a weird group dynamic thing and maybe you should find a new writers group.

**Craig:** Mmm.

**John:** Megan, if this were happening in a group that you were leading would you have tried to – is there a way to sort of stop that from happening? Is there a way to head that off with the pass?

**Megan:** I agree that sometimes it can get negative. And it’s easy to just find good things about it to say, even if it’s just to like recalibrate the tone of the room. You can always find something cool that’s working, or that’s good, or that is interesting. Or ask questions. Like, wow, this choice, this is a choice. What was that about? And then that can be helpful.

I think for being a writers group participant I think part of it is also so much like, OK, what is this writer going for and how do I help them get there instead of how do I make this the script that I would have written.

**Craig:** I have umbrage. I have so much umbrage over this.

**John:** Craig, go for it.

**Craig:** I think that Megan and Megana are showing how lovely they are, and just how instinctively nice and empathetic they are. But I am instinctively not. And I think that regardless of what Emily wrote, maybe what Emily wrote was bad. It happens. Sometimes you write bad things. But two hours of kicking around something like that? Two hours? That’s toxic.

And that point I worry about the writers group dynamic where everybody is just using feedback to puff themselves up. They’re just kicking somebody because they feel important. It makes them feel like they’re in the business or something. I don’t know what it is.

I went to one writers group once, many, many, many, many years ago. And I left and thought I will never, ever, ever go back to that group again because it just felt like somehow this group had organized itself into like, you know, there’s like the alpha personality that is like everyone just agrees that person is the best. Like in acting classes everyone just knows that person is the best. They’re not. They’re not the best. They’re just the most whatever. You know?

So, Emily, I would say if you’re in a writing group and they spent two hours going through every scene and talking about all the reasons it sucks that’s not a good writing group. That’s not a writing group. I don’t really know what the point is.

It’s hard to write things. And the fact that you felt like you’re doubting every scene and choice you made, of course you are. I would. I don’t think I would be able to come back to that script. I would feel so bad. We are emotional creatures and to be damaged like that for two – you say at the two-hour mark my feelings were hurt and I’m almost like at the two-minute mark I’m sure your feelings were hurt.

I mean, for two hours? What’s wrong with those people? How could the notes be constructive or actionable after two hours? I would run. I would run from that group.

**John:** Now, do you guys have any suggestions for, like ground rules for a writers group. Do you guys talk at the outset like this is how we’re going to do things? I see some nodding there. So Megana what are some ground rules you’d like to have?

**Megana:** Sure. When we first start meeting with a writers group I feel like we talk about how we’re doing it for fun and to encourage each other. And just constructive feedback. So if there’s something you disagree with, like Megan said, asking questions, bringing it up as this is a choice that you made, where were you going with this, so that you can give them the benefit of the doubt if something is not working for you.

But we try pretty hard to just set some ground rules that negativity or criticism that is not actionable, please do not bring that into the writers group.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Megana:** I really appreciate when people, because you guys said it in the notes meeting with execs that you don’t really like pitches, but I love whenever somebody is giving me a note if they just pitch, so I get a better sense of what they’re talking about. I feel like it helps me get momentum.

**Craig:** Well it’s certainly better than just kicking something for two hours. Sometimes when I read things I really only have a negative criticism. And the negative criticism is “this is bad.” You know, now I can dress up bad nicely by saying, “It just feels like none of the characters seem real to me. The dialogue isn’t feeling real and it’s not quite sounding like the way people talk.” That takes ten seconds. What is the point of going on and on about it? That’s the part that I don’t understand.

I don’t recognize the value of that at all.

**Megana:** Two hours seems ludicrous to be spending on one person’s script.

**Megan:** Yeah. In any case, like that’s so long to be talking about one person in the group’s script.

**Craig:** It’s long to be talking about anything. You know? It’s so hard to talk about anything for two hours, but much less – and you know the person is sitting there and you’re like everybody – somebody had to get up and pee and come back and continue criticizing her. That’s too long.

**John:** It is.

**Megan:** I also can see, sometimes if that’s the case where maybe you don’t like a script and maybe it’s just generally not appreciated in the group, then sometimes you can be like, OK, pitch us the idea and then you can kind of get a sense of like, OK, what is exciting to you about this script? And that can be helpful in reframing what notes you give.

**Stuart:** Yeah, if you have two hours of micro notes then you should be giving five minutes of macro notes.

**Craig:** Correct. And you can’t have two hours of micro notes. You can’t. You can’t. It’s outrageous.

**John:** Yeah. If you’re producing this movie and it’s going into production and you have to sort of do it last thing. I imagine you’ve had two-hour meetings with Lindsay Doran.

**Craig:** I’ve had two-hour meetings with Lindsay Doran about two pages.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But they were these conversations that were predicated on the fact that she was happy. And I was happy. And so the question wasn’t why is this bad. The question was well what if, or OK, here’s a thought. And so it was creative and constructive in the best way. But, OK, now here’s the problem with this scene. Because you know every time they turn the page she was like, “OK, we got over that.” And then they’re like, “OK, now let’s start why we hate this new season. And it’s like, “Oh god.”

And it never stopped. I just want to hug Emily and buy her lunch.

**John:** Craig, do you want to ask the question here from Austin?

**Craig:** Here we go. Austin asks, or says, “I had a realization about myself and my writing the other day. I don’t write the people in my life into my work. I realized this the other day after having a disagreement with a friend. I was angry with the person and I began to really analyze why I thought they were acting the way they were. In that moment of analysis I realized that even though I’m an observant person I’m never endeavored to use the people closest to me, even people I dislike, as characters in fiction. I sat with that thought for a little while and asked myself even if I thought I could. And the answer I felt coming back was a resounding no.

“It felt like the betrayal of an intimacy maybe. I’m not totally sure. I come from a background in nonfiction in the social sciences, so observing and presenting the lives of others isn’t new to me. But fictionalizing them for my own work feels odd. I was just curious if this is an issue you,” I guess he meant John, “or Craig ever deal with.” Or you, Godwin. “Or if using individuals in your own life as the bases for characters is something that comes totally natural to both of you? Am I missing a major tool in my writing by not doing this? Do you have any suggestions on how to work on this?”

Godwin, boiling all that down, what’s your feeling about taking the people you know in your real life and using them as inspiration for the characters in the work you write?

**Godwin Jabangwe:** I think it’s a great thing to do. What I would suggest is to combine three or four different people into one. Pick what you need from that one person and then you build a character. Don’t make a facsimile copy of that person. So if you have like three or four people that you know, or you want one specific thing, then you take that one specific thing and then you build a whole other character that’s not a direct mirror reflection of that person. I think that’s how I would go about that.

**John:** Megana, I was also thinking about you because having read your scripts you are very specifically portraying a kind of, because of your history, people I feel like you know very specifically. Are any of those people based on specific people in your own life? Do you feel like you’re asking permission? Are you sort of taking them in? What’s your relationship to some of the characters you’re portraying in your scripts?

**Megana:** That’s a great point. I feel most comfortable taking from my own life and sort of making fun of things that I personally have done. And if anything is inspired by – like I have one script inspired by a bunch of Indian aunties that I grew up with. And that I feel like I am doing with so much love and it’s not exact things that they’re saying.

But I had a friend who actually wrote a script with dialogue that we had had together lifted.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**Megana:** And, yeah, I’m curious to hear your guy’s thoughts.

**Craig:** What about you, John? Do you do this? Is it part of your tool box?

**John:** I do to some degree. And so I was even just this morning on a Zoom and I was thinking back to an early script I’d done that got made and it was like, oh yeah, I wouldn’t want to say that character is based on this real life person, but it was important that I actually knew that this person could exist. It was sort of an extreme character. And it’s like, oh no, no, no, there’s a real person who is that person who can do those things. And so I think it’s important that you should be able to imagine somebody in real life being those characters. So if you don’t even have the exact – it’s not based on one person that that person could exist.

This comedy that I’m doing right now I’m writing for some very specific actors with very specific voices knowing that we may not get those actors. But I know my sense will be at least one person in that role. And so then if it makes sense in the script with that person it can make sense with other people, too. So that’s the kind of appropriation of not real people, but actors you’re sort of casting in your movie at the start.

**Craig:** So, Austin, I think what you’re hearing is that everyone is different. And some people do it and some people don’t. And you start with a realization about yourself. I think that’s good enough. You can stop right there. You don’t write those people into your life and are you missing a major tool in your writing? I don’t think so. Because you don’t instinctively feel like you should do it.

I don’t do it. I know that. I never do it. Not out of moral reasons. It’s just not the way my mind works. I tend to daydream and you know like in your dreams there are other people. And those other people say things. And they’re not you. And you don’t know what they’re going to say before they say them, but they all came out of your brain, because you’re dreaming it. So we can do it. So I just try and do that when I’m awake. I do a lot of daydreaming imagining people and what they would do, and think, and feel. And putting myself in their shoes. And that’s how I do it. Everybody is different.

I would – trust your gut on this. If it works for you, great. If it doesn’t, you’re not missing out.

**John:** So we have one last question on the Workflowy here about open writing assignment and I’m going to actually just skip the question and just ask the folks on this Zoom about their experience with open writing assignments over the last few years. Because you guys have all pursued them. And so I think I might start with Godwin. We also call Etai. So, it’s confusing we’re calling Godwin Etai. We call him both.

Godwin, what’s been your experience pursuing projects that are out there in the world over the last couple of years? How much prep are you doing when you’re going out to try to land one of those jobs? What does it feel like?

**Godwin:** It’s a lot of work. And most times it’s frustration because it doesn’t go your way. I’ve had one where I prepared a pitch and by the time I went to the meeting to pitch and I got there and they told me that they weren’t doing the thing anymore. Because Disney had bought…

Yeah, like they didn’t bother to tell me all day. And I drove all the way to Burbank. And they’re like, “Oh, you’re here. We should let you know that we’re now longer doing this thing anymore.” So, you know, it’s like that. And then there’s some way you learn to pick the ones that you actually want to do, but in the beginning you’re just going for everything, because you’re like, ooh, I really want to do this.

And so over time I’ve learned that sometimes it’s OK to say I’ll pass on this. There’s nothing in it that I can give to the story. So, but then that takes time and a little getting to know – you will find one that works for you eventually. So, yeah, that’s been my experience. It’s a lot of frustration.

**John:** Megan, you’ve pitched on these kind of projects, too. How do you decide when something is something you’re really pursuing versus you know what that’s a fishing expedition? I’m not going to try to get that one.

**Megan:** I think upon reading whatever it is, an adaptation or whatever, I feel like there’s a pretty quick thing of like, ooh, this is something I’m interested in. This is something that excites me. And I feel like you got to have that kind of right away. And maybe not. Because if you do get it, you’re going to be on it for a long time. And if you’re not excited about the beginning, like you’re going to do a better job on something that you are genuinely excited about.

**John:** Yeah. Stuart? What’s your feeling on OWAs?

**Stuart:** Yeah, I mean, by the time I am pitching I have to kind of know the whole thing. The difference between prepping for a pitch and writing the project is one more step. So, the work that goes into that pitch is considerable. And I’ve had the same experience as Godwin where like you do weeks of work on something, you love it, and then you find out they killed the project, or somebody else already got the job. Or you go in and you do the pitch, you think you nailed it, you don’t hear anything for three months, and then a Deadline article comes out about some mega celebrity has been signed on and it’s their pet project.

And these days I would say I’m a little bit more protective of my time. But you have to love it. You have to want to do it. You hear about it and immediately it’s like clear my schedule, I’m so jazzed. And otherwise I’m probably not doing it.

**John:** Yeah. My organizing principle for 2021 has been hell yeah or no. That basically everything has to fall into one category. Either I’m absolutely so excited to do it, or nah. And to say no more often.

**Craig:** What about Matthew? He’s so quiet and I want to know what he thinks.

**Matthew:** I haven’t done any open writing assignments, but I’ve done a comparable thing for music a lot. And it is kind of funny, I suppose, how similar those two things really are. Because you’re competing with a lot of other people and there’s so much work that goes into something that you’re probably not going to get. And I’ve had such more rewarding experiences when, you know, you just know that you’re the one. You’re the one they’re going with from the beginning, which is like, of course – of course that would be more rewarding. But it’s tough to go up against a bunch of other people because you don’t know what everyone else is submitting.

And I imagine that’s probably what open writing assignments are like, too. It’s like you’re fighting against this imaginary foe that’s making all the right moves.

**Craig:** Well, it always struck me about open writing assignments that the only reason they were open writing assignments is because the people who were offering it also didn’t know. I mean, that’s why you do that. Right? They all sit around a room and go, what, who? Who should do this? What kind of person? I don’t know. Well, I guess we’ll just put an ad out in the paper. And everybody at CAA and UTA and WME and all that stuff will just start sending people over.

And so you’re already in a bit of a hole because you’re working hard to try and imagine something, but you’re talking to people who don’t quite know what it is they want either.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the trick of it.

**Stuart:** And there’s no feedback usually at the end of the tunnel.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Stuart:** Was I the worst you’ve ever heard? Or was I like a coin flip away from getting this?

**Craig:** They have no time for it. And I know that for myself when we go through casting I would love to be able to call every single person and talk through all of that stuff. I just can’t. I can’t do it. And I imagine that if they did nine out of ten writers would receive that information gracefully, and one would throw a tantrum and then go on Twitter. And so it kind of makes sense.

**John:** All right, so it is time for a game show segment. When we do our live shows we always love doing our game shows. So this is not a normal live show, but we have a small audience. We have a small audience of former Scriptnotes producers. So let’s welcome on two self-identified super fans who have listened to every episode of Scriptnotes to see how much they actually remember about what we said on the show. Probably more than we do.

First let’s welcome Kate Hadley from Los Angeles. Welcome Kate.

**Craig:** Welcome Kate.

**Kate Hadley:** Hi.

**Craig:** Hi.

**John:** And Dion Bardeau – where are you living right now Dion?

**Dion Bardeau:** I live in Los Angeles as well.

**John:** All right. So we are all LA ringers. Sort of like how Jeopardy! this season has all been LA folks.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** We’re pulling on very local. We could go anywhere, but we are focusing on our LA folks. When did you start listening to the show, Kate Hadley?

**Kate:** I started listening in October 2011. So Episode 7, but I listened to all the back episodes in an afternoon.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Wow. That’s awesome.

**John:** And Dion when did you start listening to the show?

**Dion:** So I started, it was in 2012, and it was maybe around Episode 40. It was the episode where you guys talked about how do you get an agent. And then I went back and listened to all the previous ones. But that’s where I started.

**Craig:** I’m still – I’ve listened to maybe three. [laughs] I’ve heard about three of these. They were good. They were all right.

**Dion:** You’re missing out, man.

**Craig:** I know. Believe me, I know. On everything.

**John:** All right. So we have cameras turned on. We’re going to ask a question. If you know the answer raise your hand and then we’ll call on you. And so we’ll try to be fair judges here, but we also have the other producers here who can be our jury if it comes down to it.

**Craig:** Do I get to also try and answer? Because I will not win.

**John:** Well, you can also see the answers though in the Workflowy though. So that’s not fair.

**Craig:** Oh, tht would be cheating.

**John:** That would be cheating. Craig, why don’t you ask the first question?

**Craig:** OK, here we go, guys. Are you ready?

**Dion:** Let’s do it. Good luck, Kate.

**Craig:** Good luck to both of you.

**Kate:** Good luck to you as well.

**Craig:** So you’re just going to raise your hand and John will call whichever one goes first. Here we go. And it’s not like Jeopardy! You don’t get locked out. But you don’t hear the rest of the question. Over the years we’ve done 15 deep dive episodes where we spend the entire show discussing one movie. What was the first movie to receive this treatment?

**John:** Kate.

**Kate:** I believe it was The Little Mermaid.

**John:** That is not correct. Dion?

**Dion:** I’m going to go with Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**Craig:** Raiders of the Lost Ark is correct. That is one point for Dion.

Kate. That was my other answer.

**Craig:** Of course it was. I think I would have gotten that right. .

**Kate:** That and Ghost.

**Craig:** I think I would have gotten that right. I think. All right. John, should I just keep–

**John:** Honestly, keep being the host. This is your Jeopardy! hosting try out.

**Craig:** This is my audition for Jeopardy! OK. Here we go.

**Dion:** Well, folks, this has been a good show. I’ll just take the W right there.

**Craig:** No sir. We are still in the first inning. Here we go. While the show has many amazing guests, the visitor first appeared by name in Episode 136 and was asked by John never to return. Guess if you have to guess. I have a guess. OK, can I do my guess?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** My guess is Sexy Craig.

**John:** Sexy Craig is correct.

**Craig:** Yes, Sexy Craig. Yes!

**John:** So Sexy Craig’s first appearance was in Episode 135 by a voice. My name is John August, my name is Craig Mazin. And that was disturbing. But the next episode you labeled that voice Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** And Sexy Craig – the thing is he really doesn’t show up much.

**Dion:** I know. I can’t imagine a world without Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** Neither can I, exactly. Thank you.

**John:** I can and it’s glorious.

**Craig:** Yeah, John lives in that world.

**John:** It gets so uncomfortable. All right.

**Craig:** So it’s still 1-0. Here we go. Question number three. Scriptnotes Episode 235 was a live show featuring Jason Bateman and creators of Game of Thrones, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Weiss and Benioff were last minute replacements. Who was supposed to be the guest? That’s a hard one. That’s a hard one.

**John:** We’re stumping the super fans. I like this.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is great. Stumping the supers. I think we’re going to go–

**John:** Actually, no, we’ll go to the producers. Stuart Friedel, tell us the answer.

**Stuart:** I think I know the answer. I might be wrong. Is it Lawrence Kasdan?

**Craig:** It was Lawrence Kasdan.

**Kate:** I would have never gotten that.

**Craig:** He was not feeling well.

**Kate:** Like me, right now.

**Craig:** Scrambled up and got ourselves the GoT guys. All right, here we go. Question number four. Let’s get some redemption guys. In Scriptnotes 187 Live from New York John and Craig both sing songs. Who was their guest for that show? I was told these were super fans. [laughs]

**Dion:** I think now, right? Kate, what are we doing?

**Kate:** I’ve listened to every episode exactly once.

**Dion:** Every episode.

**Kate:** Once.

**Craig:** I know. Well there you go. By the way, I’ve got to tell you something. I don’t know who the guest was. I don’t know the answer to this. I don’t. I remember that Andrew Lippa was there, but he wasn’t our guest-guest was he?

**John:** He was our guest.

**Craig:** Oh, he was the guest.

**John:** That’s the correct answer. Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, Andrew Lippa. OK, great. I thought he was sort of like, oh that’s right, Andrew Lippa.

**John:** The bonus would be if you could figure out what songs we actually sang. Craig, do you remember what song you sang?

**Craig:** Yes I do. I sang What More Can I Say from Falsetto Land.

**John:** Yeah. And I sang a song from Yank, which was a musical that never transferred to Broadway.

**Craig:** That was it. That was my big Broadway debut and final performance.

**Kate:** We’re going to get ourselves cut from this episode.

**Dion:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No, this one, one of you is going to get for sure. Here we go. Of course, the most famous Scriptnotes music is the opening jingle. How many notes are in it?

**John:** Kate.

**Kate:** Five.

**Craig:** Yes. I did the same thing you did. We all did the same thing. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Five is the answer. So I believe we are tied. We are tied at one a piece, which is exactly the way I like things. Here we go. In Episode 212 writer-director Mari Heller talks about her experience making Diary of a Teenage Girl. Craig said her film was better than this film written by Heller’s husband.

**John:** Dion.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Dion:** The Andy Samberg movie. I can’t think of it. Kate for the steal?

**Kate:** Hey Siri…I have no idea.

**Craig:** I’m pretty sure that I said it was better than MacGruber.

**Dion:** Ah, MacGruber.

**Craig:** By Jorma Taccone and MacGruber is actually the second best movie ever made. Diary of a Teenage Girl apparently was the best movie. OK, here we go. Speaking of movie power couples in 2020 John hosted separate deep dive episodes with each half of this duo, each of whom had made movies in awards contention. So we’re looking for – Dion.

**Dion:** Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** Correct.

**Craig:** That’s right. For Little Women and for Marriage Story.

**Dion:** That’s right.

**Craig:** So it’s 2-1. Dion with two. Kate with one.

**Kate:** Oh, it’s 2-1. I thought it was like 3-1.

**Craig:** No, it’s 2-1.

**Kate:** Cool, so I can still—

**John:** You can still win this.

**Dion:** You’re stealing it, Kate.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Everyone is in it. Here’s another marriage question. John and Craig have mentioned their spouses many times over the 500 episodes. What are their names?

**John:** Kate.

**Kate:** Mike, Melissa.

**Craig:** Yes! And we are tied at 2-2 and here’s the best part, there’s only one question left.

**Dion:** Here we go.

**Kate:** Oh dear god.

**Craig:** How can you not be romantic about baseball? Here we go. Oh my god, this is so hard. [laughs] Oh my god. I don’t know the answer to this. What are John and Craig’s Myers-Briggs personality types? Bonus points if you can answer with John’s newest personality test result too.

**Dion:** Oh god.

**Craig:** This is brutal. I’m with you. I’m with both of you on this.

**Kate:** I’m going to have to have to just guess.

**John:** It’s worth a guess. Worth a guess.

**Craig:** Listen, it’s the final shot. The clock is counting down. Go for it.

**Kate:** INFP and can I remember, I think it’s the other one.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think at this point this is just a fishing expedition.

**Kate:** Oh, it is. It’s completely–

**John:** It’s like the open writing assignment of personality types.

**Craig:** The one you mentioned wasn’t one of them. I think we can say it ain’t happening here.

**Kate:** Oh no. It’s not happening.

**Craig:** Apparently both of us were the same Myers-Briggs personality type, which I didn’t realize. We are both ENTJ. Otherwise known as the mad lunatic. But however in Episode 437 John revealed that he had evolved. I don’t like evolved because that makes it seem like you got better than me. You devolved into an ENFP. Oh, you actually flipped two of the things there. So, you’ve changed quite a bit.

Here’s the good news, folks. Because it’s a tie you’re both winners.

**John:** You’re both winners. So thank you for listening to all those episodes and to give you a chance to listen back to all those episodes we are giving you free lifetime memberships to Scriptnotes Premium.

**Dion:** How about that? That’s awesome.

**Craig:** It’s real money.

**Dion:** That’s fantastic.

**Craig:** And it’s not costing me anything, I know that much. [laughs]

**John:** So thank you both very much for listening to the show. It really means a tremendous amount. And thank you for coming on the show and playing this dumb game with us.

**Craig:** We are nothing without you.

**Kate:** Thank you.

**Dion:** Thank you for having me.

**Kate:** It was wonderful.

**Dion:** Thank you guys so much. You guys were Master Class before Master Class. You have no idea. Well, you probably do have some idea. I’m sure you’ve helped Kate. You’ve definitely helped me and thousands of others. So thank you. Really appreciate it fellas.

**Craig:** Thank you, Dion. That’s so nice.

**John:** Thank you, Dion.

**Kate:** You guys are my One Cool Thing.

**Dion:** There you go. Always and forever.

**Craig:** Thank you, Kate.

**Dion:** Appreciate you guys.

**Craig:** Thank you. All right. Keep listening guys. Thank you.

**Dion:** I will. Take care guys.

**Kate:** Bye.

**Craig:** See you later. That was exciting.

**John:** That was nice.

**Craig:** That went right down to the wire there, you know, because they were tied and we were going to that last question. I don’t know, I felt the tension of championship on the line. Those were hard questions. Who came up with those?

**John:** So I came up with most of them. Megana threw in the Myers-Briggs things at the end. And I don’t know if I would have gotten that one right.

**Megana:** I really thought that was going to be super easy. You guys are both ENTJs.

**Craig:** I don’t even know if I would have remembered my own.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow. You know what though? That’s what you want for the last. That’s what you want a tiebreaker to be. It’s got to be a real skull-cracker, you know.

**John:** I really thought they would have gotten the Lawrence Kasdan. That was a big deal and then he actually came back on in Episode 247 to sort of make good on–

**Craig:** That one felt like more of a gettable one. But you know the one that I was impressed with was Dion getting Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. That was pretty good.

**John:** Because those were episodes you didn’t listen to.

**Craig:** I don’t listen to any of the episodes. You could just say those like all 100, all 499 before this.

**Megana:** Also, if you guys thought those were hard, just wait for the premium segment because I wrote all of those.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Before we get to the premium segment Kate did a great job of setting up our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing this week – I may have had it on a previous episode, but it’s so good I want to make sure everybody knows about it. If you are not sleeping with a white noise machine you should try sleeping with a white noise machine. It genuinely will help you.

And, yes, you can do it off your phone but then it just loops and it’s not as good. The best white noise machine is this Electro-Fan White Noise Machine. It is a little electronic device you plug in. Wirecutter ranks it the best. It is genuinely terrific. So good that we actually travel with it rather than using the one on our phone.

So you probably need a white noise machine. You should try it. It just shuts out the outside world completely. So the best one is this little $49 white noise machine. You should get it.

**Craig:** OK, great. I do use – I use an app on the iPad, I admit it. But I also use ear plugs, so I think the fancier white noise machine value would be lost on me. Also, the nice thing about the app is it gives you pink noise, white noise, brown noise, purple noise.

**John:** This gives you a choice of sort of what kind of sound you want.

**Craig:** I like the brown noise. That’s my jam. Here’s my One Cool Thing. I don’t know if we have this in the United States, but I’m here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We’re working on The Last of Us. We have a fairly large facility for the production. And we have all sorts of people working on it. And every day there is lunch. And the old way of doing things was somebody would come around, typically a poor, aggrieved PA to say, “Oh, we’re taking lunch orders. What would you like? We’re ordering from these two places. Here’s a menu.” And everyone is like, what, I don’t know, eh. And it takes forever.

And then you go and something went wrong. And everyone has got like a million little changes. So what they do here is they use something called Hunger Hub. And the night before you go on and it shows you there are two restaurant choices and there are a bunch of menu options for each restaurant. And you pick it. Pick it that night. And then it all just happens magically. And I was like what a smart way to streamline a miserable process.

So when we all get back to our writing rooms and real life, once Covid is gone, maybe some enterprising service if there isn’t one already will be doing something like this in the US. Hunger Hub.

**John:** So like Mythic Quest doesn’t do that for its lunch orders?

**Craig:** No, I mean, I haven’t been in the room, you know, physically for Mythic Quest since well over a year ago. But, no, it would be the–

**John:** Old-fashioned way.

**Craig:** Pass around a sheet and write down what you want from the menu of the thing, and the thing, and the thing.

**John:** Progress. Canadian progress.

**Craig:** Progress. Or as we say in Canada, progress.

**John:** Progress. So if you are a person who has listened to many of the back episodes we would love to have your help. We are coming up with the 500 Episode Listener Guide, so this is an update to our 300 Episode Listener Guide. Megana is actively reading through people’s submissions for what they think are the best episodes, the ones you cannot miss.

She also spearheaded this week this drive to get an index of all the episodes, which has been so helpful, so we can see actually what episodes have Three Page Challenges, or How Would This Be a Movie, who our guests were. So if you are looking at which episodes should I go back and listen to, or I really want the craft episodes, this index will be available to you as well. So we’ll have a link in the show notes to that. But also tell us what you think should be in the Listeners’ Guide. So you go to johnaugust.com/guide and there’s a little form you can fill out to tell us which episodes you think people should really listen to. So do that if you could.

And that is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Special thanks to Dustin Box, Nima Yousefi, Chris Sont, and Amy August for their help this week.

**Craig:** Oh, Amy August.

**John:** Amy August helped with the index.

**Craig:** Oh, are you paying her?

**John:** I am paying her. I pay people.

**Craig:** Everybody gets paid.

**John:** Here’s how this came to be. Mike and I went out to a restaurant for the first time, like an actual restaurant to have our anniversary dinner.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** And it’s owned by this chef whose son was in preschool with Amy. And when Mike went to the bathroom he’s like oh my god I saw Bruno was working back, he was washing dishes in the kitchen. And I was like, oh, the kitchen of our family business is really tedious data entry. And so Amy did the tedious data entry.

**Craig:** Nice!

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. I hope you paid her well.

**John:** I paid her minimum wage. I paid her $15 an hour.

**Craig:** OK. I mean, we did have a series of episodes about how we were aiming for $20 an hour, but OK. I guess if it’s your kid.

**John:** It’s my kid, yes, so it’s the kid discount. I’ve paid for everything for her entire life.

**Craig:** You did provide her with everything else.

**John:** Our intro this week was by the amazing Matthew Chilelli. Our outro, Matthew if you could please play us an outro, the very first outro you ever did for Scriptnotes. That feels like a good bookend for us.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** If you have an intro or an outro, just an outro actually, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts, and they’re great. So you should show your pride of 500 episodes with a new t-shirt. They’re at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. That’s also where you can hear our producers make fun of me and Craig for not understanding the show that we’ve done 499 episodes of in this segment we’re about to record.

So thank you to all of our producers and Matthew for coming back for this special 500th episode. And thank you everyone for listening.

**Craig:** Thanks guys. 500 episodes. Amazing.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Megana Rao, you are in charge of the podcast from here forward. So take it away. What do you want us to do?

**Megana:** OK. So we have a trivia game for you.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**Megana:** And it is a mix of Scriptnotes trivia, but also as we talked about in that discussion on your friendship there’s a little bit of The Newlywed Game. So it’s a little bit also of how well you two know each other and have been listening to each other. And then we have a sprinkling of Stuart-written, Stuart-centric questions that are also in here.

**Craig:** Oh. OK.

**Stuart:** I thought I specifically didn’t want to get too Stuart-centric.

**Craig:** Well, no one cares, Stuart.

**Stuart:** Stuart-ed it out. All right.

**Megana:** I feel like Stuart lure is a big part of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** Totally.

**Megana:** So I felt like it had to be in there.

**Craig:** It is. OK, well I’m very excited. I hope I lose. I’m going to lose. I don’t have to hope.

**John:** I’m nervous.

**Megana:** So there’s certain questions that are just specifically targeted for one of you. But for the other ones you guys can raise your hands.

**Craig:** I see. We will raise our hands if there is a competitive question.

**Megana:** Cool. And then the producers and Matthew each have three or four questions that we will ask and I wish you both the best of luck. So, we’re starting with Stuart.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**Stuart:** What location does Craig frequently refer to as his sacred place?

**Craig:** I’ve raised my hand.

**Megana:** You can answer that one.

**Craig:** The shower.

**Megana:** Correct. I wanted to start off easy.

**Craig:** Thank you. I have a feeling that that’s a set up. A total set up. I’m going to go down in flames now.

**Stuart:** Question two. You’ve done 17 episodes where you dissect one movie and nine where it’s just the two of you analyzing a movie. Can you name seven of these deep dives?

**John:** I’m going to try this first. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Aliens. The Little Mermaid. Unforgiven. Die Hard. If we’re going to count Marriage Story and Ghost.

**Craig:** Yes. See, we help each other.

**John:** We help each other. What were the other ones? What did I miss?

**Stuart:** Raiders, Little Mermaid, Groundhog Day.

**John:** Oh, Groundhog Day, yeah.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Stuart:** Ghost. Whiplash. The Addams Family. Unforgiven. The Princess Bride. Clueless.

**Craig:** Right.

**Stuart:** And the Christmas bonus episode on Die Hard.

**Megana:** Wait. I don’t believe that we’ve done an Aliens deep dive.

**John:** I think we’ve always meant to do one and we didn’t do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was thinking, man, I really don’t know this show very well because I don’t remember that at all.

**John:** It was a dream I had. A fugue state.

**Craig:** It was a dream.

**Stuart:** Question three in the highlighted Stuart section. In the Scriptnotes Wikipedia article it says that Stuart’s voice was never heard on the show except for Episode 259, The Exit Interview. This is in fact incorrect. When else was Stuart heard on the show?

**John:** Huh. Well you probably said something during a live show. I feel like there was going to be some moment at which you stood up in the audience where I acknowledged. So I bet we’re going to hear your voice there. But I’m trying to think of another example of – I don’t think you read any questions aloud or anything.

**Craig:** I would have said at the Christmas show I think we might have made him say something. Like I’m Stuart. But I can’t remember.

**John:** Or like, no, I’m Stuart, or I’m Stuart.

**Craig:** Oh that I’m real or something.

**Stuart:** You’re conflating a few things but you’re definitely on the right track. At one point – there are a few Stuart doppelgängers in Los Angeles and at one point we had the idea to get all of them in a row and to all stand up at the live show and wave. I think only one or maybe two showed up, but still we had the effect of three bearded redheads.

But there was an episode, according to this it was the 124 Q&A from the Holiday Spectacular. And I got on stage and I know that because my parents have a photo from that.

**Craig:** Of course they do.

**Stuart:** On their living room table or whatever.

**John:** You know, really we should have brought on Stuart’s parents as the Scriptnotes super fans because they are–

**Craig:** I know. Up until the point where Stuart stops producing it. And then we never listened to it again.

**Stuart:** They’re fans. My dad. My dad certainly listens.

**Craig:** He’s a dentist.

**Stuart:** He’s dedicated.

**Craig:** He’s a dentist.

**Stuart:** And maybe the rest of you have had the same experience, but my parents know nothing about what I do for a living. And Scriptnotes has been a very nice – they can speak some of the language now.

**Craig:** My parents have never listened to it either. So it’s genetic.

**Stuart:** I will point out though that my wife has been a voice on the show many times. More than me.

**Craig:** Ah, reading questions? Or–?

**Stuart:** Originally back in the day when you would have an article you were talking about or discussing and you wanted to do the reenactment, she would be the female reenactment voice.

**Craig:** Right. She was the only woman we knew. Those were different days. All right. Well we kind of bombed out on that one. All right, what’s next?

**Megana:** Next up we have Matthew asking the questions.

**Matthew:** Question four. Which two guests have come on to specifically talk about sex on screen?

**John:** Craig had his hand up.

**Craig:** I think it was Dan Savage and Rachel Bloom.

**Matthew:** That’s correct. That’s correct.

**Craig:** It is correct. See, John doesn’t get it.

**John:** What about Rachel Bloom? Rachel Bloom came on specifically.

**Craig:** I said Rachel Bloom. Dan Savage and Rachel Bloom.

**Megana:** Can you do episode numbers John or Craig?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Oh wow, really?

**John:** So, yes, Dan Savage. But I was thinking actors. So I was thinking it should be Rebel Wilson and Rachel Bloom. That would be my answer.

**Craig:** Rebel Wilson was part of the dirty show. So she didn’t really come on to talk about sex.

**John:** That’s fair.

**Craig:** She just came on to be a bit bawdy.

**John:** She was bawdy. She was mostly talking about shitting in a beret.

**Craig:** Correct. Which is the best thing I’ve ever heard in my life. But Dan and Rachel very specifically we were talking about all the fun bits and parts.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I feel great.

**John:** You’re actually beating me. So you should feel great.

**Craig:** That’s not why I feel great.

**Megana:** I mean, well John this one is specifically for you.

**John:** All right. Let’s see if I can get it right.

**Matthew:** Question five, John. What scene does Craig frequently refer to as the hardest he’s ever laughed?

**John:** Wow. What’s the hardest that Craig has ever laughed. Maybe it’s MacGruber where he’s offering sex to get out of something?

**Craig:** That’s a great scene. And happens multiple times in MacGruber. But that is not the answer.

**John:** What is the answer?

**Craig:** Well I have two that I refer to. I don’t know which one I refer to more than the other. But one is the naked fight in Borat and the other is the puppet vomiting in South Park Team America.

**John:** That’s the right one, right?

**Matthew:** Yeah, it’s Team America, the puke scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just the funniest thing.

**Matthew:** 286, 481, and 387.

**Craig:** Nice.

**Megana:** I just got tired of citing the episode. It’s multiple episodes.

**Matthew:** Possibly more.

**Craig:** Possibly more.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s amazing.

**Matthew:** And question number six for Craig. What is the first project John pitched on?

**Craig:** How to Eat Fried Worms.

**John:** That’s impressive.

**Craig:** I know my guy. I know my guy.

**Stuart:** Wow.

**John:** Bonus if you can answer what did I bring to that pitch meeting?

**Craig:** I don’t know, so I’m going to guess that you brought – because I believe it was in like a sandwich. Maybe you brought a sandwich with worms on it.

**John:** I did bring a Styrofoam container of worms that I dumped out on a plate for that.

**Craig:** Did you eat one?

**John:** I did not eat one. But they were worried I was going to eat one.

**Megana:** Did it go over well?

**John:** It went well. Yeah.

**Stuart:** Like living worms?

**John:** Yeah. Living worms. From a bait store. I had to drive to Santa Monica. There’s not a lot of bait stores in Los Angeles. So.

**Craig:** And when you got there they were like pitching on the open writing assignment for How to Eat Fried Worms?

**John:** That’s what it is.

**Craig:** The ninth nerd that came in here this morning. Exactly. We know you’re not a fisherman. We know that.

**John:** No. You can just look at me. I’m not a fisherman.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’re in the Writers Guild. OK, feeling good. Feeling good.

**Megana:** All right. And next up we have Godwin.

**Godwin:** My first question is what is the name of the sandwich Malcolm Spellman ate after recording Episode 185? And I can give you a hit. It’s from Mendocino Farms.

**John:** A sandwich study in heat?

**Godwin:** Yes.

**Craig:** Wow. I would have never in a million years. Wow.

**John:** The only reason I was pretty sure about that answer is because the Malcolm Spellman episode is titled A Study in Heat.

**Craig:** Ah. Do you know I once watched Malcolm eat an entire sleeve of Mint Oreo cookies? And the best part of it was while he was eating them, this was at my house, he was halfway through the sleeve. He said, “I hate these. I hate Mint Oreo cookies. I hate them.” And I’m like but why are you eating them? He goes, “I don’t know.”

And then he gets to the bottom of the sleeve and I’m like, dude, you’re going to be sick. And he goes, “No, it’s not even as much as you think. It’s like 250 calories.” And I’m like no it’s not. And he goes, “Yeah it is.” And I’m like, no, no, that’s per serving, not per sleeve. And he’s like, “What?” You have to imagine deeper, “What?”

And so he had eaten essentially like 2,000 or 3,000 calories worth of Mint Oreo cookies that he did not like. We talk about that a lot in my house. It was a great day.

**Godwin:** All right. Next question. Who were the first two Scriptnotes guests? John?

**John:** I think it was Aline and Derek. Derek Haas.

**Godwin:** No.

**Megana:** Craig, are you going to steal?

**Craig:** Give me a moment. Momentito. I’ve got nothing.

**Godwin:** It’s Franklin Leonard. And Aline.

**John:** And Aline, OK. That I guessed.

**Craig:** Franklin. Oh wow. I thought maybe Aline would have been like a trick, like a trap to fall into. But, all right, interesting. We both whiffed.

**John:** I very much believe that. But I’m also mesmerized by the idea of what if Franklin and Leonard were different people.

**Craig:** Oh, Franklin and Leonard.

**John:** Yeah. Wow. The power they would have.

**Craig:** The world of people with two first names is funny.

**Stuart:** Were they on one episode together or was it?

**Megana:** Episode 60. They both came together.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Godwin:** The next question is for Craig. What was the marquee feature of the Highland software?

**Craig:** I believe it was to melt PDFs.

**Godwin:** Correct.

**John:** Nicely done.

**Godwin:** And for my last question. There was a short-lived segment called Change Craig’s Mind. What was the first and only topic discussed? Yes John?

**John:** Ventriloquism.

**Godwin:** Correct.

**Craig:** Oh my god. That’s amazing. So, first of all, I wish we would bring that back.

**John:** We have to. Megana, please, put that on top of the Workflowy. We’ve got to bring that back.

**Craig:** That’s amazing because it’s such a challenge to change Craig’s mind. It’s a challenge. And I have – my feelings about ventriloquism have only deepened. My anger about it, my just general resentment that it’s considered–

**John:** An art form.

**Craig:** Entertainment. An art form? [laughs] I just get angrier about it by the day. OK, we have to bring that back. That’s a wonderful idea.

**John:** What’s so good about that segment is that you’re basically an anti-vaxxer when it comes to ventriloquism. Like the more facts we give you the deeper you dig into your bunker there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because it’s like if vaccines actually were boring and pointless then I would be an anti-vaxxer. But they’re amazing and they save lives. Unlike ventriloquism, which is boring and stupid.

**Stuart:** Is it topics that you want your mind changed on?

**Craig:** I don’t come up with them. That’s the thing. I didn’t come up with that. It just happened.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Megana:** Do we have a score count? So we’re moving on to Megan and–

**Craig:** Oh god. Was anyone keeping score? I wasn’t keeping score.

**John:** I wasn’t keeping score.

**Stuart:** Is there a prize for the winner?

**John:** I think Craig may be slightly ahead though honestly.

**Craig:** Do I get a free lifetime, because I pay the $6 a month, I do. I get charged $6 a month, so I’m hoping I get the free one.

**Megana:** We’ll think about it.

**Craig:** Fair enough.

**Megana:** All right. Megan, you’re up.

**Megan:** Question 11. On September 13, 2014, Stuart Friedel wrote an email based on a discussion in Episode 108. On September 10, 2018 at 3:02am, five years later, that email came through to the ask@johnaugust.com account. What was the discussion that you wanted to check in on?

**John:** Huh. I think the dates might be meaningful. But I don’t know.

**Craig:** The first date was what year?

**John:** 2014?

**Megan:** 2014.

**Craig:** And the second date was what year?

**Megan:** 2018.

**John:** Wow.

**Stuart:** Something there, it says five years later.

**Megan:** It does say five years later.

**Craig:** OK. That’s why I was asking.

**John:** So five years happened.

**Craig:** It was a five year checkup. This feels like something that the initial, my gut tells me that the initial email was something he was angry about. I don’t know why. I just feel like he was indignant and was thinking to himself you guys, five years from now, you’ll see. And he was probably right. But I don’t know what it is.

**John:** It could have been a situation where we may have asked on the show for – let us know five years from now sort of what happens. But I can’t think what the specific scenario was.

**Craig:** We don’t know this.

**John:** Tell us. We don’t know this.

**Megan:** It said, “Dear John’s current assistant. Please look back on Scriptnotes Episode 108 where John and Craig discussed the future of iPads in movie theaters and remind them that this next episode is to address the five years later of it all. Sincerely yours, John’s current, 2013, assistant.”

**Craig:** Yes, that’s right. Got it. So this wasn’t about Stuart’s indignant. This was a disagreement that John and I had about whether or not iPads and the use of them would become prominent in theaters with children. And what we didn’t know was that nobody would be in theaters. Not only would there not be iPads, or there wouldn’t be humans.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s right. I forgot that one. That was a good one.

**John:** I’m happy there are not iPads in theaters. I could have envisioned a scenario in which that happened and it would have been worse. But not worse than a pandemic.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** So if I had to choose iPads in theaters versus a global pandemic that killed millions.

**Craig:** I don’t know. [laughs] I’m on the fence.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m on the fence. OK. Next question.

**Megan:** Question 12. In Episode 240 who do you decide would win in an all-out brawl to the death, John or Craig? And why?

**John:** I said that Craig would win just because he would be just savage and he would not stop.

**Craig:** I think I probably said the same thing about John. That John would win because he would clamp down or do something really like vicious that I wasn’t expecting. Maybe like a neck bite.

**Megan:** Per Megana the answer is Craig, because he’s angry and heavier, but most importantly because he would not hesitate. There would be no pause.

**Craig:** That’s true. That’s true. You don’t have any advantage if you don’t use your advantage. That’s the thing. You’re right. So I got to get him on the ground fast is the key. I got to get John down on the ground.

**John:** If we were in a Zombie apocalypse scenario and needed to say like, OK, if I get bitten you need to kill me, I would tell Craig to be the one to kill me because he would do it.

**Megana:** Oh.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Do it for the good of the group. Yeah. He’s the one you want to pick.

**Craig:** No, I would do it even before. Even before you got the sentence done.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I always joke like that with Melissa. Because you know that Michael Haneke movie where he has to kill his wife with the pillow because she has Alzheimer’s? It’s the most beautiful Oscar-y movie ever. And I’m like I’m going to do that to you. And she’s like–

**John:** That’s how much I love you.

**Craig:** When she walks in she’s like, “I cannot remember where I put my keys.” And I’m like pillow time. That’s enough. [laughs] That’s all I needed to hear. Let’s go. Come on.

**Megan:** Question 13. Who is the credited producer on Episode 17 of Scriptnotes?

**Craig:** Ooh. OK. Well, so the implication is that it’s pre-Stuart, so I’m going to say Nima?

**John:** I’m going to guess Carlton [Miniacus] who was – it was a pseudonym that was being used.

**Craig:** Who?

**Stuart:** Did we fact check this one?

**Megana:** We did.

**Stuart:** Because I wrote this question, but I wasn’t certain of the answer.

**Craig:** I can’t wait to hear what the actual answer theoretically is.

**Megan:** The answer is there’s no credited producer, because it was before Matthew, and so Stuart was credited as the editor.

**Craig:** Oh, so it was a trick question.

**Stuart:** I actually thought you guys would get this because of the spoilers. We discussed this in the opening.

**Craig:** Well that’s the thing. I thought that maybe there was some random person.

**John:** Being so specific, because we didn’t start crediting you until what episode?

**Stuart:** I don’t know. But this was the exact – if you read in the Google Doc this is the exact discussion we’re having. It originally was Episode 5. We decided that it would be more of a red herring if we used a more “random” sounding number.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** Clever.

**Craig:** So this was just a set up to humiliate us. I understand.

**Stuart:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Fine. Done. Achieved.

**Megana:** OK, final round. John, what recent meme shares a name with Craig’s family member?

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** I don’t know what the recent meme is. I can’t think of a Jessie or a Jack or a Melissa.

**Craig:** Can I steal?

**Megana:** OK, Craig, you can steal.

**Craig:** My sister’s name is Karen.

**John:** Ooh, that’s right.

**Craig:** My sister’s children call her “a Karen” all the time. It infuriates her. It’s wonderful. She’s never asked for the manager, by the way, ever. Not once.

**Megana:** So in an early episode, Episode 2, you both declare blank as the death of all screenwriters.

**Craig:** Both declare blank as the death of all screenwriters? Ooh. Go ahead.

**John:** So like lack of limitations, or freedom in a way?

**Megana:** Craig, do you want to do a guess?

**Craig:** Wildly different guess. Focus groups. Movie focus groups.

**Megana:** The correct answer is children.

**Craig:** Oh, we said it before.

**John:** Obviously, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s correct. Yeah. Stuart gets it now. It’s the death of all screenwriters. They just hollow you out from the inside.

**Stuart:** I like my kid personally.

**Craig:** Just wait. [laughs]

**John:** Just wait till that kid can get out of the crib and actually find you.

**Craig:** Just wait. Oh, the places you’ll go.

**Megana:** OK, we are at our last question.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** Buckle up.

**Megana:** I want you both to close your eyes, meditate on your lives, your careers, almost a decade, 500 episodes of Scriptnotes. What is your favorite quality in Megana Rao? Just kidding. I’m just kidding. You guys can email me afterwards. OK, the real question is what is your favorite quality in your cohost?

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** This is, now it’s just going to be about tears.

**John:** Yeah. I would say that Craig is just remarkably good at winging it and just speaking extemporaneously about whatever topic without any real preparation at all. And so it’s not that he hasn’t thought about these things before, but he can just actually articulate clear, cogent thoughts without any preparation and make it seem so effortless. And with me I feel like I’m Taylor Swift where all I do is try, try, try.

**Craig:** [laughs] But Taylor Swift is hot. You know? And super successful. So I think that works out great.

**John:** So it works out well for me, too.

**Craig:** It works out well for you. I would say that I think the thing that I appreciate the most in John and have for a long time is that he is empathetic in a logical way. Because there’s this mushy, weepy spirituality empathy and I’ve said many times on the show I literally don’t even understand what spirituality is. I don’t know what the word means. Any time people try and explain it to me I’m just like religion right. And they’re like, yeah, but no. And I’m like nah, it is.

But John has a very logical kind of empathy and that has I think – it’s rubbed off on me. I think I’ve learned from it. Because I respect it. And he makes the idea of kindness and acceptance and making your first choice the benefit of the doubt choice in a rational way. I’ve learned from that. And I’ve definitely – he’s been a good model for me because my first choice typically was just to destroy.

It’s my second choice. I don’t want people to think that it’s not there anymore. It’s right there. It’s right behind it. But, yes, I would say that for sure.

**John:** Aw. Thank you Craig.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**Megana:** Well thank you both for playing. You’re both winners.

**Craig:** I feel like a winner. I’m so glad I got anything right. I was terrified.

**Megana:** I guess Craig is kind of the winner because he had the upset a bit.

**John:** Yeah, he did. But still.

**Craig:** Kind of the winner is the best I’ve ever been. Kind of a winner.

**John:** I think we were the winners to have such amazing producers and editor.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Here with us today.

**Craig:** Yes, we are the beneficiaries of all of you. And your hard work. And you make us sound good. You make us look good. Definitely make me sound and look good, because I don’t, you know–

**John:** And I’m always just so happy and proud to see your smiling faces and to see you guys kicking ass out there.

**Craig:** Exactly. That’s awesome.

**John:** So thank you for being so awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there’s been like marriages and children and all these wonderful life changes that are happening. Look, we do another 500 of these.

**John:** Another 10 years. Wow.

**Craig:** At that point I fully plan on being in the hover chair from Wall-E. But you guys will still be vital members of society. [laughs]

**John:** And I’ll be begging Megan to get me a job working on some Marvel project.

**Craig:** Yes. And my wife will come to me with the pillow and be like. It’s time. It’s you that gets the pillow, my friend.

**John:** All right. Thank you all so much.

**Craig:** Thanks folks.

**Stuart:** Great seeing you guys.

**Megan:** So nice to see you.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Find out more information about the [The Scriptnotes Book](https://www.scriptnotes.net)
* Review the past 500 episodes at [The Scriptnotes Index](https://johnaugust.com/scriptnotes-index)
* [Stuart Friedel](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2069640/) on [the web](http://stuartfriedel.com/)
* [Godwin Jabangwe](https://twitter.com/godwinitai) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/godwinitai)
* [Megan McDonnell](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6876585/) on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6876585/)
* [Matthew Chilelli](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7072990/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/machelli?lang=en), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/machellic/), [Soundcloud](https://soundcloud.com/matthew-chilelli), and [the web](https://www.matthewchilelli.com/)
* [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/meganarao) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/meganarao)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) (and [intro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros)!) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/500standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 493 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’ll take a look at opening scenes, how they work, and what writers should consider when planning them out. Then we’ll dive into the weird world of foreign levies and why our friend Stuart is getting mysterious checks.

**Craig:** I don’t want to know.

**John:** Finally we’ll discuss the rise of the megaplex and with it the past and future of movie-going.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for premium members Craig and I will help a listener answer a question about clichés and conventions. This is a listener in Copenhagen, so it’s a Copenhagen question about clichés and conventions.

**Craig:** All right. We’ll get into it.

**John:** We will do it all. But, first, Craig you and I have not talked about this on mic or off mic, but if you are planning to have another kid my advice for you would be to wait until after May 2. If you can wait until after May 2 it will behoove you.

**Craig:** You would have chosen by now if you were to be having a kid after May 2. I’m definitely not having any more kids. You know what, I say definitely, you never know.

**John:** You never know.

**Craig:** You never know.

**John:** I would say that the shop is closed, but I see babies and man I like babies. If I could have a baby for like a year I would be just the happiest person in the world. It’s that toddler and sort of like – honestly it’s that awkward kid’s birthday party stage I don’t want to go through again.

**Craig:** I’m good with five to 10. That’s what I like. I like when kids are children and they’re running around and playing and they’re going to grade school and nothing really matters and they can laugh and have fun. But they also aren’t peeing and pooping in their pants. And they’re not teenagers.

**John:** Yes. I believe it’s important that writers make decisions about when they want to have kids.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And that could be a little bit easier for some writers in the WGA because starting May 2 the details have just been announced that on May 2 the paid parental leave will go into effect.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So this was something that was one at this most recent round of negotiations. And it’s pretty good. And so if you are a WGA member and you have a kid after May 2, or adopt a kid, or otherwise add to your family after May 2 you are eligible for the paid parental leave. And it could be a real boon for many writers in our guild.

**Craig:** Yeah. So basically the rule is you can’t work and also receive – you need to the leave part of the paid parental leave in order to get the benefit, but the benefit is pretty solid, especially if you are a staff writer on a show. They’re trying to kind of get in near whatever perhaps minimums might be. So, $2,000 a week for up to eight weeks and they don’t need to be taken consecutively. And it looks like it also covers both birth and adoption and fostering. And placement for adoption. That’s interesting.

**John:** So if you are also a married writing couple who both of you are WGA members and you are having a kid you are both eligible for it, which was something I wasn’t sure was going to happen. So, that’s also a boon. Anyway, just some good news. It’s the first ever of its kind in the nation. The first ever sort of union paid parental leave that goes with you wherever your job is. It applies to screenwriters, variety/comedy writers as well. So, check that out if you are thinking about having kids or if you are currently pregnant try to wait till May 2 to give birth.

I was actually talking with a writer who is in that situation. Who is like my due date is May 1 but we’re trying to make it May 2.

**Craig:** It’s OK because the benefit is available for a 12-month window from the date of birth, adoption, or placement. So, you might have a couple of weeks of unpaid parental leave but then it gets paid. So, there is that. And it doesn’t have to be taken consecutively. So, you can do four weeks on, four weeks off. So that’s a terrific thing and it’s wonderful that we did get that concession from the companies as part of our collective bargaining power.

**John:** Yeah. So for follow-up. Hannah asks a question about gray areas. This is from Episode 492. Do you want to take Hannah’s question?

**Craig:** Sure. Hannah says, her question is regarding screenplay credit before it has been arbitrated. She says, “I have seen several examples now of writers being listed as the, insert big movie name, writer when the movie has not in fact come out yet. But the writer is taking credit where credit may or may not be due. Where do you come down on screenwriters taking credit and using it for personal promotional gain pre-arbitration?”

And we have talked about this to some extent before. John, where do you come down on this?

**John:** So, before credit is determined obviously if there’s a Variety story if someone was hired on to work on a thing that’s part of what you’re currently working on, so it’s totally fair game to talk about you working on it. No one has any disputes about that. Where it gets more awkward, I was actually having a conversation with another screenwriter about that, is when you’re talking about a project where you have a really minimal credit but you still talk about it as if you’re the writer on the thing. Or it’s a thing where you kind of feel like you probably won’t get credit on it, but you’re being listed for it. It’s awkward. And it’s a known awkwardness in how stuff is discussed in this town.

**Craig:** Yeah. So Hannah there’s something that might help you a little bit with the gray area here is that part of our rules are that before the arbitration happens the company does have the right to make a good faith guess of what the credit should or would be and then publicize it. Meaning they’re allowed to put the name of the writer on a movie poster before the arbitration is done. And there have been cases where there are posters with credits that then don’t reflect the final credits, so the poster changes. The idea there was we didn’t want writers to be disappeared off of things just because the arbitration hasn’t happened.

And arbitration sometimes take a really long time to get to. And they take a long time to finish. So, my feeling is that it’s perfectly fine for a writer to say, yes, if Variety is saying they worked on this to say, yes, I did work on it. That’s the way I put it. I worked on it. What I don’t think we should say is, “I wrote it,” because other people might also have written it.

**John:** Yeah. So, I think we’re trying to distinguish between employment and writing credit. And writing credit is a WGA credit. And employment, like I am working on this thing, is a thing you would say in a meeting, that’s a different beast.

Another follow-up question. Anonymous wrote in about whisper networks, which we talked about last episode. “One thing I felt was missing from that segment is that the whisper network exists to be amplified by those in positions of relative power. Those disempowered cannot convince the empowered of injustice or mistreatment because they’ve already been disempowered. So if someone like Harvey Weinstein hears from a woman that women are not his personal sex vessels it means nothing because he’s already decided that women are not worthy of full agency. It takes a whole bunch of men, people he respects, condemning him to rectify that.

“It’s hard to use Harvey Weinstein as an example here because it doesn’t seem that he respects anyone, but I hope I’m getting my point across.”

So, Craig, let’s follow up on this whisper network thing because I feel like Anonymous has a different idea of whisper networks than what you and I were talking about. So, for my conception a whisper network is like a warning system to others in a group rather than something that’s trying to systematically take down the abuser.

**Craig:** That’s my understanding, too. That is in fact why it is whispered. The point is the whisper networks, I think, would benefit from being amplified by those in positions of relative power, but they come into existence because specifically there is not a free and respected space for those opinions or information to be expressed.

**John:** So the whispering part of this is important. It’s like you’re not publically saying it out loud. But I think the network part is really especially problematic here because you have to be in the network to get the warning. So you have to – you know, a whisper network is only useful if you are actually able to hear the whisper network, or you’re part of it. And that can be the problem is that people who can be taken advantage of or having bad things happen to them is because they’re not benefiting from this network that they’re being excluded from. And that is a real issue.

And when we talk about the gray areas and sort of like when someone like you or I should speak up it’s because there are people who are being excluded from this whisper network as well that can’t get the warnings that you and I have heard.

**Craig:** Well right. So, that’s the other thing that’s important to note is that because of the nature of those whisper networks and the fact that they are typically an in-group kind of network it’s quite often the case that people who are in positions of relative power don’t know about it, because it’s being whispered. So, I did not know about a whisper network about Harvey Weinstein. I was not part of the whisper network about Harvey Weinstein for good reason. Nobody is going to call me up and say, “By the way, you need to know that if you’re going to take a job over there that you don’t want to be alone with Harvey,” because I’m not the one that’s going to be suffering there.

And so they’re actually protective of each other I think in a good way because they’re concerned that exposure will have negative impacts. That’s at least my understanding of how it functions.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, Harvey Weinstein is sort of an extreme example. Let’s step back and say that for many, many years I heard people talk about how Ellen DeGeneres was mean. I think you probably had the same experience too. People would talk about Ellen and Ellen is mean and that she has a great public persona but she’s actually mean behind the scenes. And I don’t know that to be true, but I heard it a lot.

And could I have spoken up more about it? I don’t know that it would have benefited me or anyone, but also there’s a difference between what I was hearing was sort of like she’s kind of mean and I wasn’t hearing anything worse than that. And so I did nothing.

**Craig:** Well, that’s also part of the issue with the whisper networks is that they have a freedom that expressed and amplified points of view don’t have. Expressed and amplified points of view are often held accountable to fact and truth. And so that’s where you start to end up in situations where you’re saying, OK, I have heard and therefore I need everybody to know that yada-yada-yada, well we have defamation laws. And we have lawsuits and we have all the rest of it, and for good reason, because you don’t want people to just simply say – anybody can say anything about anyone, of course. So, what I find fascinating and encouraging about the whisper networks that have existed from what I can tell they have operated extraordinarily responsibly.

I know that there are some people who don’t think so. Usually they’re the people that are being knocked by some of the whisper networks. And then you have to sort of, OK, figure that part out. But, you know, one thing that has maybe not been observed enough about the era that we live in now, we’ll call it the #MeToo or post #MeToo era, I guess we’re still in the #MeToo era and we will be until that problem goes away, is that there is enormous amount of power available to somebody in a sense to take someone else down.

And it doesn’t seem to me like people are behaving poorly, or abusing that power, which is rather amazing. Because the whole thing is in response to abusive power. And so there’s a group of people that have been the victims of abusive power. They get a kind of power which is to name and shame and they don’t abuse it. They just use it responsibly and fairly and justly. That is pretty amazing. And gratifying. And encouraging.

**John:** And I will say that when you try to move from informal networks, like whisper networks, to official systematized processes for investigation and such there’s definite pros to that. There’s definitely accountability. You can actually take actions that you couldn’t take in an informal network.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** But it also is really challenging to decide sort of what the rules are you’re going to make and what are the standards. It is really difficult and it is a thing we’ve seen out of #MeToo. It’s a thing we’ve seen in other efforts to hold people accountable for their actions. So just to acknowledge that it’s difficult.

**Craig:** Incredibly so. And terrifying. Because just knowing something to be true isn’t enough. And I think most reasonable people understand this. It’s not good. We don’t like it. But we know that just knowing something is true is not enough to save your abuser from re-abusing you, casting you in a different light, turning themselves into the victim, turning you into the problem. This is the playbook. In fact, we know from the Harvey Weinstein, was it Lisa Bloom? Was that his lawyer? Was essentially saying this is the playbook. This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to destroy these women by dragging their reputations through the mud.

If you know that that’s going to happen then it takes a remarkable amount of bravery to get out there and say what you say. And people are going to come at you. And they’re going to come at you for all sorts of reasons. I mean, when I look at the sort of things that have been said about Rose McGowan, there’s a mountain of stuff that just gets slung their way and it’s a hell of a thing to go out there and take all the shots, know that you’re going to take all the shots, and still stand up for what fact is, and what truth is.

**John:** Yeah. So, we will not be able to solve these problems in the industry.

**Craig:** Segue.

**John:** Segue. But, what we can do is talk about really specific crafty things which I feel like you and I are much better in our element to discuss. And so this actually comes from a question that Martin in Sandringham, Australia wrote in to ask. “I’m curious about the process to decide on the beginning point of your screenplays. Have you noticed a pattern of thinking that you tend to follow when choosing that first line of a script to be in the story? Or is it purely driven by the unique nature of the story that you’re telling?”

So, Craig, it occurs to me that often we do a Three Page Challenge and we’re looking at the first three pages of a script. We’re really looking at these opening scenes and yet because we’re only looking at that scene we don’t really have a sense of what that scene is doing for the telling of the rest of the movie. We’re really just focused on what is the experience reading these scenes, what are the words on the page, but not what is that scene doing to establish the bigger picture of the movie.

So, I thought today we’d spend some time really looking at opening scenes and our process as we go into thinking about an opening scene for a movie, or writing one.

**Craig:** It’s a great question, Martin. And I think it has changed over time stylistically, which is no surprise. When we were kids and we saw movies from 30 years earlier, meaning the ‘50s, the opening scenes seemed a lot different than the opening scenes we were used to. I mean, we’re sitting at home watching a VHS tape of Raiders of the Lost Ark. We see how that opening goes. And then maybe dad shows us a movie from 1955 and it’s much slower, and more expository in a flat sort of way. Perhaps there’s jaunty music happening or sweeping violins.

These days as time has gone on it seems like opening scenes more and more are about a strange kind of disorientation, a giving to you of a puzzle that the implied contract is this will all make sense. But I think of maybe the most influential opening sequence or scene in recent television history was the opening sequence of Breaking Bad which was designed specifically to be what the hell is going on. What is that? Why are there pants there? Why is there an RV? What is happening? Why are there bullet holes? And then the puzzle gets solved.

**John:** So, I like that you’re bringing up the change from earlier movies to sort of present day movies in how openings work because I think you could make the same observation about how teasers and trailers for movies from a previous time worked versus how they work now. And you look at those old trailers and you’re like oh my god this is so boring. This is not selling me on the movie at all. And in many ways we now look for these opening scenes, opening sequences, to really be like a trailer for the movie you’re about to see. They’re really setting stuff up and getting you excited to watch this movie you’re about to watch and to sort of reward you for like thank you for sitting down in your seat and giving me your attention because this is what’s going to happen.

So let’s maybe start by talking about what are the story elements that need to happen in these opening scenes or opening sequences. They don’t have to happen, but tend to happen in these opening sequences. What are we trying to do story wise, plot wise, or character wise in these scenes?

**Craig:** Well you have choices. You don’t actually have to do anything. Sometimes the opening is just about meeting a person. And you are accentuating the lack of story. They’re happy. They’re carefree. Everything is fine. But I agree with you. More and more there is a kind of trailerification of the opening of a movie or a television show. And there is the indication of a thing. And it’s often a thing that the characters don’t even see. Or if they do see it they’re looking at it from a different time. This is later, or this is earlier, whatever it is, but there is an indication of something, there is a crack in reality that needs to be healed somehow.

**John:** Yeah. So from a story perspective you’re generally meeting characters. If you’re not meeting your central character you’re meeting another character who is important or a character who represents an important part of the story. So in that opening scene you might be meeting a character who ends up dying at the end of that scene or sequence but it’s setting up an important thing about what’s going to happen in the course of your story, the course of your movie.

You’re hopefully learning about the tone of this piece. And what it feels like to be watching this movie. The setting of this world. How the movie kind of works. And some of the rules of this world. Like if you’re in a fantasy universe is there magic? How does gravity work? What are the edges of what this kind of movie can be? Because in that opening scene you want to have a sense of like this is the general kind of movie that we’re watching so that you can benefit from all the expectations that an audience brings into that because of the genre, because of the type of movie that you’re setting up.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think about openings that have always stuck with me as being confusing. And challenging, which I’ve always loved. And I often look at, very curious opening to Blade Runner, which was not the original opening that they had planned. But it’s the opening they ended up with. And neither of the characters in that scene are main characters. There is an unknown investigator and there is a replicant who we don’t know is a replicant. But he’s not the important one. He’s not the head villain. He’s a henchman essentially.

And you have no idea what the hell is going on. There’s one man in a very strange device that might be futuristic, or antique, asking strange questions of this guy and seemingly zeroing in on something important. And then the man feeling somewhat trapped by the series of very abstract questions kills the investigator.

What happens there is a challenge to you to try and keep up and a promise that it will make sense later. But in addition I know that this world looks a certain way. I know people are going to dress a certain way. And I also know that it is going to expect some things of me. It’s good if the first scene gives the audience a difficulty level. It doesn’t have to be high difficulty, right? I mean, sometimes your first scene says this is going to be an easy play. But let people know what the difficulty is with that first scene.

**John:** So, as you’re talking about that I’m now recalling that scene and it works really well and it’s setting up that this is a mystery story. That there are going to be questions of identity and sort of existential issues here. Even though you don’t know that it’s necessarily a science-fiction world it’s a pretty grounded science-fiction if it is a science-fiction world, so all these things are really important.

Now, Craig, an experience I’ve had sometimes reading a friend’s script, or someone I’m working with’s script is that I will really enjoy the movie that they’ve written, but I’ll come back and say this is not your first scene. You have written a first scene that does not actually match your movie and does not actually help your movie. And it’s a weird way to run into, but I often find that some scripts I really like they just don’t start right. They start on the wrong beat.

Or, and sort of dig deeper, you find that the writer wrote that scene first but then they kind of wrote a different movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they need to write a new first scene that actually helps set up the movie they actually really wrote. Is that a common experience you’ve had?

**Craig:** I’ve noticed this. I think sometimes, well, it’s hard to hit that mark because nothing else has been written yet. So, it’s your first swing. Sometimes the first scene suffers from a sense of, oh, you’ve been thinking about this as a short film for about seven years and you finally got the nerve worked up to finish it. But the problem is this thing feels like it’s a seven-year-long thoughtful short film, and then the rest of it is just a movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes there’s a sense that the opening is fine, but it is not special. And the opening is our chance to be brave. I think that we have two moments in movies or in any particular episode of television where the audience will forgive us a lot. And it’s at the very beginning and it’s at the very end. In the middle you’ve got to stay in between the lines on the road. But in the beginning and the end you get to have fun.

**John:** Let’s talk about why you have that special relationship with the audience at the start, because they’ve deliberately sat down to watch the thing that you’ve created. And so if they were going into a movie theater to watch it there they’ve put forth a lot of effort. They bought a ticket. They’ve driven themselves to that theater. They’re going to probably watch your whole movie whether they love it or they don’t love it.

And so in those first minutes they really, really, really want to love what you’re giving them. Their guards are down. In TV they could flip away more easily, so there’s some issues there. But their expectations are very malleable at that start. So you really can kind of take them anywhere and you get a lot of things for free. You get some – they come in with a bit of trust. And if you can sort of honor that trust and honor that expectation and get them to keep trusting you they’re going to go on your story. If you don’t set that hook well they may just wander off and they may never really fully engage with the story that you’re trying to tell.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re hungry at the beginning. They’re hungry. So don’t just immediately shove all the food down their throat. You can have some fun here. You know that they want to feel that anticipation. When you go to a concert and there’s the opening act, and then they’re done and they leave, and then the PA system is playing just songs and you’re waiting. And then the lights go down. And it’s not like the lights go down and then the band comes out, “Here we are, let’s go,” and then they immediately start a song. There’s usually some sort of like…you know, they get you ready. And it can go on for a while. Because everybody knows oh my god it’s happening. Right?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So let it be happening. Don’t have it just happen if that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about some of our own writing and our own opening scenes and sort of what our experience was with this. So, I’m thinking back to Chernobyl. Chernobyl if I recall correctly opens with an old woman and a cow.

**Craig:** That is how episode four or three opens.

**John:** That’s right. So it was later on. It’s not the very first image of it. What is the first image of the first episode?

**Craig:** The first image of the first episode is a couch with sort of an afghan type thing of a deer and we hear a man talking. We actually hear his voice before we ever see anything.

**John:** Yeah. And so we don’t realize at the time it’s going to be a Stuart Special. That we are setting up the past and that we’re going to be jumping back and forth.

I think the reason why I was remembering that cow scene is it’s an example of we don’t have context of who these characters are, sort of why what’s happening is happening. Are these characters going to be important? No, not really. You were just setting up sort of the question of that episode and that world and what kind of story this episode is going to be. And I thought it just worked really well.

**Craig:** Well thank you. So every episode needs its own beginning. And so I’m pretty sure it was the beginning of episode four. It’s sad that it’s all mushing together now.

But that was designed to be a bit confusing. Because we don’t know what exactly this guy is doing there. And we’re not sure what his orders are. And we definitely aren’t sure what her deal is. And we don’t know he’s just standing there. And so this goes on. And then at the end of it we know. We know a lot. And that is kind of a standalone intro, which we didn’t do much of. And generally I don’t. But sometimes it’s OK to make this opening its own thing that announces something about the world and then we catch up to the people that we know and care about.

And we think, oh, did they know that they’re in a world where that other thing is happening?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So certainly one way to go.

**John:** So, completely analogous situation is the opening of the Charlie’s Angels movie.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, of course, again, you’re establishing a place, and a time, and a world, except that it’s in a very candy-colored, we’re in a plane and we see all these characters. We see LL Cool J is the first recognizable star that we see. And there’s clearly some sort of heist thing happening. And it’s only as the sequence plays on that we realize like, oh, the Angels were actually part of this the entire time and this is an elaborate sequence to get this terrorist off this plane before he does something dastardly.

That sequence was important to establish the tone and feeling of this movie. And sort of what the rules are of this movie. And the heightened kind of gravity-optional nature of this movie. And sort of what it’s going to feel like to watch this movie.

So nothing that actually happens in that becomes important for the plot. It’s just introducing you to who the Angels are in a very general sense. The fact that they could kind of go into slow motion at any point if it’s glamorous. And just kind of how it feels. And it was one of the only sequences that made it all the way through from very early, before I came onboard to the movie, through to the end because it just felt like a good, goofy, fun start to this franchise.

**Craig:** With a punchline. I always feel like your openings need punchlines. And it’s weird to say like, OK, the punchline of the opening of the first episode of Chernobyl is a man hangs himself, but that’s kind of the punchline in the sense of there’s a surprise end. Similarly the old woman and the cow you’re pretty sure that soldier is going to shoot her and he doesn’t shoot her. He shoots the cow. Punchline.

You need to land something surprising. If you can, then the additional benefit you get from your opening is you’re putting the audience on alert that you are one step ahead of them so far. So, this is a good thing now. They’re leaning in. They’re trying to see what comes next. But they are also aware that you’re not just going to feed them straight up stuff, which is good.

**John:** The most difficult opening sequence I ever did was Big Fish. And I’m trying to establish so many things. I’m establishing two different worlds. A real world and a story world. That there are two protagonists and that both of them have storytelling power. So getting through those first eight pages of Big Fish and sort of setting up the storytelling dynamic of Big Fish was really, really tough, yet crucial. That was the case where like if I didn’t have that opening sequence the movie just couldn’t have worked because you wouldn’t know what to follow and what to pay attention to.

**Craig:** This is kind of high anxiety time. I like that you care – I think sometimes when I read these scripts, and we’ve said I think the word “precious real estate” or phrase a thousand times. You need to nail it. You’ve got to make that opening fascinating so that the audience says I will keep watching. If it’s just kind of meh then, I mean, you could have done anything there. The moment you have an opening you have limited what can come next. There’s a narrow possibility for what comes next.

**John:** You build a funnel. Yeah.

**Craig:** You make a funnel. A logical funnel. But not in the beginning. In the beginning there’s no funnel. You can do anything. And if you don’t do anything interesting I don’t see why people would think, well, this will get better. It won’t.

**John:** No. And weirdly it is probably the scene or sequence that as writers we spend the most time looking at just because by nature we’re going to kind of end up rereading it and sort of tweaking it a zillion times. And I do wonder if sometimes, let’s talk process here, at what point do you figure out that opening scene versus figuring out everything else in your story?

Sometimes I think the best approach would be to figure out where your story overall wants to go before you write that opening scene. Because so often you can be sort of trapped in that opening scene and love that opening scene but it’s not actually doing the best job possible establishing the rest of the things you want to do in your story.

**Craig:** 100%. If you do know what your end is. It would be lovely if you had that in mind when you wrote your beginning. Certainly I did when I did Chernobyl because it works like Pink Floyd’s The Wall album. It begins with I think it’s maybe David Gilmore saying, “Where we came in,” and then the song starts and then that album happens. And then at the very end you hear him say, “Isn’t this where?” And so you go, ah, ah-ha, in a very Pink Floyd cool way. I see what you did there, Pink Floyd.

And I like that. I like the sense that you catch up. And you complete the circle. It doesn’t have to be temporal like that. It can just be commentary. It can be somebody’s face ending in a similar position to how it began.

Here’s an example. Social Network. Opening scene, fantastic. And down to nothing but dialogue and performance. Two people sitting and talking. That’s it. Excellently written and excellently performed and excellently shot. And at the very, very end of the movie he goes back to looking at that girl’s profile on Facebook. She is not mentioned. Or referred to at any other time. It’s just the beginning and then the end. And then you go, oh man, this guy.

And so that’s how you can kind of think about these things. The beginning is the end, the end is the beginning. Know them both. It will help you define that opening scene much, much more sharply.

**John:** Cool. And now as we look at Three Page Challenges going forward let’s also try to remember to ask that question in terms of like what movie do we think this opening scene is setting up. Because that’s really kind of a fundamental question. We’ve talked so much about how those first three pages, that first opening scene is so crucial to getting people to read more of your script. But let’s also be thinking about what movie we think is actually establishing because we have strong expectations off the start of that.

So just a note for ourselves. We will try to think about how those opening scenes are setting our expectation for the rest of the movie that we’re not reading.

**Craig:** I think that tees us up nicely for a Three Page Challenge next week.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll try to do it. All right, next up we got a question from Stuart Friedel, former Scriptnotes producer. Do you want to read Stuart’s question?

**Craig:** Stuart, aw, writes–

**John:** We love Stuart.

**Craig:** “I just got a check in the mail from the WGA for foreign royalties for two episodes of Vampirina that I wrote. It’s the first time I’ve ever gotten anything like this. It was made out to me, not my S-Corp,” his loan-out corporation, “through which I got paid for these episodes originally. And the show is Animation Guild, not WGA. Is this normal? What’s going on here?”

John, is this normal?

**John:** It is both normal and weird. So writers get these checks all the time. But it’s not normal WGA residuals. It’s a whole special thing that I actually had to look up again because I remember it and then I forget and then I remember it and then I forget it.

**Craig:** I think we’ve done a run-through on the show at some point. It was probably years ago.

**John:** Stuart has listened to every episode, so Stuart should have known.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** But we’ll give a brief recap here. So foreign levies are the fees that some foreign countries, largely European countries, they collect and they’re mean to compensate the rights holders when films or TV are broadcast or copied in things.

I remember originally it was like blank VHS tapes and blank DVDs, there was like a tax put on those thing.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, still. In fact probably the largest chunk of the foreign levies we collect are feed levied on blank disc media, disc drives. So basically the theory, it’s a lot of South American countries, too. The theory is that people are going to use blank media to copy things and watch them again. The artist should be compensated for that, but we don’t know how many times they’re watching things. So we’ll just tax the things that let them do that.

It’s a fascinating sort of thing to do. And we are not the authors of stuff here. But we are there. And that’s where it gets fun.

**John:** Yeah. It’s where it gets complicated. So under US law we tend to write these things as work-for-hire. So, we sort of pretend that the studios are the authors of the properties. But many of the countries say like, no, no, that’s actually not true. It’s the writers and the directors who are the authors. And so it became this big fight. And so in the show notes we’ll link to the history of how foreign levies came to be and how the DGA and the WGA came to collect that money. It’s fascinating and complicated. And there was a lawsuit about how the money was being distributed out.

But, the answer for Stuart is that the foreign countries are sending in that money and it is the WGA’s responsibility and the DGA’s responsibility to figure out who those people are and get the checks out to them. And so that’s a thing they do.

**Craig:** It’s not based on union work. So, the rest of the world does not have work-for-hire and they have moral rights of authors. So, France collects this money and then they turn to us and say we would like to give this to the moral – the moral authors of this movie, which we consider to be the writer and the director. And over here the studios are like but there’s no moral author. We’re the author. And so France said, nah, we’re not going to give it to you then.

And so then we had to hammer out some deal. The split between us and the studios did adjust over time. It’s been a while. It should be 100% us. So, will continue to have to broker that somehow. But then this other issue happens where they say, well, OK the WGA steps up and says we will collect all this. The other countries say, “Uh, just one thing, we’re not breaking this out by who is in your union and who is not in your union because we don’t care. We’re just going to send it all to you and you distribute it.”

And so now the WGA has this interesting situation where they’re collecting money on behalf of people that aren’t members, like for instance in this case while Stuart Friedel is the member of the Writers Guild they’re collecting money for him that he earned through the Animation Guild. Here’s another fun fact. We collect a ton of foreign levies from porn.

**John:** Hmm.

**Craig:** So we have to find the porn directors and writers. And that is kind of how we did it. We just agreed that we would do this. And for that there is some fee, of course, some sort of administrative fee that the Writers Guild takes. This has been litigated. Members of the Writers Guild have sued over it. Other people have sued over it. It was sort of like incredibly hot potato in the 2000s and has since ceased to be that hot potato. It’s now just kind of this passive stream of money that shows up in a brown envelope, or on a brown check instead of a green check.

**John:** Yeah. So to date the WGA West has distributed $246 million in foreign levies, and including $37 million to non-members and beneficiaries.

**Craig:** Ah, yes, that’s the other thing. If someone is dead–

**John:** They still get it.

**Craig:** They have to give it to whoever controls the estate.

**John:** Yeah. So right now there’s a little bit over $9 million that can’t be matched to writers and directors. And so we’ll put a link in the show notes. There’s a way you can search for like, oh, am I owed foreign levies. And so they try to match up those funds. But it’s possible that some money will just never go to the place it’s actually supposed to go, or to the person it’s supposed to go to. So, based on the settlement at a certain point that money, if there’s any money left over, goes to the Actor’s Fund which we’ve talked about before is the charity that supports the industry.

**Craig:** Correct. And that number, $9 million, sounds high. It’s not. It used to be much higher. There was a point where it was like at $25 million. It was becoming a real liability. You can’t just sit on $25 million of other people’s money and not do something about it. So the guild has actually made really good progress on that front. My guess is that’s probably as low as it’s going to be, because there’s always going to be some stuff that comes – it’s really hard sometimes to understand these – you have governments sending you lists of taxation based on their information. Sometimes it’s not complete.

**John:** Yeah. It’s going to happen. All right. This last week I was listening to an episode of 99 Percent Invisible, and this one was one megaplexes. It was about sort of how everything changed when AMC opened up the Grand 24 in Dallas. And I realize we’ve talked about exhibition before on the show, but I think we’ve never talked about our experiences of going to the movies and sort of when movie theaters changed.

And for people who are younger than us they probably don’t remember clearly a time before megaplexes and before stadium seating and sort of what that life was like, but we saw both sides of it. So I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about our experience with that. And also the podcast episode, which was trying to make the point that the physical changes of theaters actually had a big impact on sort of what movies were getting made and then as theaters started to collapse a bit also change what movies were getting made. So I thought we’d talk about both our experience as movie goers but also what we saw happening in the industry as the exhibition itself changed.

**Craig:** I used to go see movies at the Amboy Multiplex. The Amboy Multiplex, not a megaplex like the AMC Grand 24, the Amboy Multiplex I think had eight screens which was considered insane at the time.

**John:** That was pretty big at the time. Was that the first theater you remember going to?

**Craig:** The Amboy Multiplex might have been the first multiplex. It’s in New Jersey. Well, it was. It’s no longer there. And I believe they opened in maybe ’78 or ’79. I remember for instance seeing Star Wars in just a single screen movie theater. And that was kind of what you had. The multiplex was pretty great because if you were a family my dad and I could go see Raiders of the Lost Ark and my mom and my sister could go see, you know, Max Dugan Returns or something, I don’t know. I can’t remember what was going on.

But the point is families could split up and see different things.

**John:** That was such a great point. And I had not considered it, but yes, I mean, on a single screen theater everyone is going to see the same movie and you can’t do that thing where you divide up and see different stuff starting about the same time. And that’s a huge difference. Like you’ve sold more tickets because more people can go.

**Craig:** Correct. And they also because they had that many more screens running the concessions became a massive part of it. Because now you’re not feeding the amount of people that fit into one room. You’re feeding the amount of people that fit into eight rooms. It all becomes a much bigger money maker. And you could just feel like, OK, if I’m a single movie theater and I’m showing one freaking thing, first of all if there’s a – so the blockbuster emerges out of the ‘70s out of Jaws and Star Wars.

Now, you can say we have these blockbuster films like Raiders, we can show them on more than one screen. So you’re losing money when you’re turning people away from a theater. The multiplexes didn’t have to. They said we’ll just stick it on another screen. No problem.

**John:** Now growing up in Boulder, Colorado my first experience in a theater was probably either the Base-Mar, which had two giant screens, or there was the Village 4 which were one really big screen and three smaller screens. That’s probably where I watched Star Wars. It’s where I saw 9 to 5. Or I saw a lot of early movies. I saw The Muppet Movie there.

But eventually we had – Mann built a six-pack theater with six identical size theaters and I think at about six is where you start to see some of those economies of scale. Where they can just sell more concessions. They can put the same movie on two different screens at the same time. There really are reasons they can just make more money off of things by sort of sticking a bunch of screens together.

But that was a real innovation. So, you know, the history of movie theaters were those giant sort of movie palaces that sometimes would get carved into smaller screens. But it’s still a pretty bad experience and not very efficient.

Now, something like the six-pack that I saw most of my movies in high school at that was still pre-stadium seating. When was the first time you experienced stadium seating Craig?

**Craig:** That’s a great question. I think it was when we – I’m going to say it was back in the early 2000s I remember going to a test – we were doing a test screening and it was out in like Chatsworth or something. And there was this stadium seating and I thought well this is absolutely terrible for comedies. And it is. It’s the worst. Because you laugh outwards and you basically hear yourself and some of the people behind you and that’s it.

Whereas in the old days when you were in that flat room everybody heard everybody and laughs were just so much bigger. It was like being in a comedy show. And now it’s not. Obviously it’s terrific for viewing. I get that. But I was disturbed.

And now that’s it. It’s that and nothing else.

**John:** Yeah. So younger listeners don’t have a memory of going to see movies and having to make sure you weren’t sitting behind someone taller than you. And having to look behind you to make sure you weren’t blocking somebody.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And that whole experience. And what’s also surprising to folks who live in Los Angeles now is you said you went to a screening out in Chatsworth and that’s where you saw stadium seating, like LA when I moved here had the worst movie theaters.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Bad.

**John:** We had Mann’s Chinese which was like a movie palace and just gorgeous, but it actually had terrible projection and sound.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And could only show one movie at a time. It was great to see a big movie there because it was huge, but was not a good theater. And all the rest of the theaters were just terrible. They were sticky floor monstrosities. And so now we have great ones, but we were kind of late to get our great theaters.

**Craig:** It’s true. We were. And there is now a generation of parents who don’t have the joy of saying, “I can’t see!” When you would go to a theater and you would say, “I can’t see,” would your parents say some version of, “Don’t worry, when it starts you won’t even notice.” Because my parents would always say, “Oh yeah, don’t worry about it. When the movie starts you won’t even notice that that guy is blocking half of the screen.”

And they were kind of right, in a sense.

**John:** They weren’t entirely wrong. I would say because I had an older brother, it was my older brother who was mostly responsible for taking me to movies. And so he and I might switch sometimes, but that was going to be about the extent of my accommodation for my shortness growing up and going to movie theaters.

Now, let’s talk about the impact of the change in movie theaters had on the movies that were getting made, because this is a point that this podcast was trying to make and I wanted to push back against it but then I thought, OK, you know what? They actually did have a point here.

So, I remember pre-multiplexes if you wanted to see a David Cronenberg film, if you wanted to see a David Lynch film, if you wanted to see an art film you had to go to an art house movie theater. But with the rise of these bigger and bigger multiplexes it became possible to have one screen that was showing a Being John Malkovich, showing something that was – a Miramax movie. Something that was outside the realm of just the big studio blockbusters. And I think more people saw some indie movies on a big screen in their home town than would have if we hadn’t built out these multiplexes.

**Craig:** Depending on your town, I think. Obviously it’s a little easier if you’re in a city. It’s a lot easier if you’re in a city. But that’s true. And there are still theaters now that kind of pride themselves on showing you a mix of both. So the ArcLight companies for instance, they take pride in their cinematic fidelity. And part of that is not only sound and picture, but that you can see a Spider-Man film and you can also see a Jim Jarmusch movie and that’s kind of their thing.

But over time I think the big megaplexes, the AMCs, and whatever the Regal Cinemas or whatever they’re called, they’ve really adapted to the way that studios have changed, because studios used to put out a movie every week or two. And now they put out a movie every month and a half. Maybe. And what that means is that movie is just steroided-out. It’s the equivalent of the Butterball Turkey. It can barely stand on its own legs because it has been steroided and fed for size.

And now everybody has been like, oh my god, we’ve got to go see The Avengers 7, and so Jesus put it on all 28 of your screens. And so then these movie theaters kind of become like The Avengers’ movie theater for four weeks.

**John:** Now even the ArcLight which can still hold some screens for the smaller movies, but Spider-Man is going to be on eight of the 14 screens. Which can be good for an audience because it means I can actually see something opening weekend. And I do definitely appreciate that. The frustration of not being able to see a thing that you want to see is a thing. And not be part of the cultural conversation about the thing. It is great to be able to see things opening weekend and I look forward to being able to see things opening weekend as theaters start to reopen.

But, I don’t know, the anticipation was part of the experience as well. And I remember before there was reserved seating having to line up and get there in time to sort of get your seat. Yes, it was a hassle, but it also was part of the experience of going to see the movies.

**Craig:** It was communal. But another shot has been fired. It was fired yesterday. Another shot across the bow of the way movies are released and seen. And that shot was Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about that.

**Craig:** So, Zack Snyder shot Justice League. He was in the middle of editing and working on it and then there was a family tragedy and he had to stop. So, the studio brought in Joss Whedon. I assume just to sort of finish and Joss Whedon was like, ah-ha, how about instead of finishing I just redo most of this.

And so he did. And it was a different movie. And people did not like it. And for many, many years there’s been this clamoring for the Zack Snyder cut. Now, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never mentioned before on this podcast.

**John:** Tell us.

**Craig:** I saw the Zack Snyder cut back when he was working on it. Because they were talking about maybe doing a week or reshoots or something like that. And so he invited two or three – I think there were three or four of us, writers, to watch the movie in the state it was in and then just have a conversation about some things that they might be able to do to tweak some things up over the course of a week of writing.

And I, you know me, I’m not like a huge superhero movie guy, but I really liked it. I liked it. I thought it was really good. I thought there were a couple things, like OK here’s some suggestions and things. And then Zack left the project. And so that was it. Literally, I think he left like the next week. And I never saw the Joss Whedon version.

But all this time while there was this fan movement for the Zack, there was like a mythologizing that the Zack Snyder cut was going to be amazing and it was going to save that movie. And a lot of people are like why would you think that? And I quietly was sort of like but it’s really good actually, like I hope that that does happen. But I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want to be in the news. Because people are obsessed with this stuff.

Well, I watched it last night and it’s fascinating. First of all, it is good. I really enjoyed it. It’s four hours.

**John:** Now, was the movie you watched previously four hours long?

**Craig:** It was probably three-ish. I think he went and shot some additional material. In fact, I know he shot additional material because there’s like an entire sequence at the end that wasn’t there when I saw the film. And there was a bunch of things that I think he went and reshot and did some work on.

But by and large, yeah, the movie was the movie I saw. Except like finished and good. And what I find fascinating – and people have received it very well. It has been reviewed very well and people are enjoying it. And I think this is a new kind of thing now. Everybody is going to stop and go wait a second, so now we can do these like really long experiences and people will watch them on streaming.

And that is a new challenge to what movies had become, which was we’re going to give you the 2.5 hour extravaganzas. And now people are like, “Or, give us four hours.”

**John:** Four hours at home.

**Craig:** At home. And this is interesting now.

**John:** So, I have a counterpoint for you. We can wrap up the sequence with the counterpoint example of another superhero epic, the last Avengers movie. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the fan reaction to the arrival of the other superheroes at the end of Avengers.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s great.

**John:** And to hear, I mean, you’re not seeing the audience, you’re just hearing the audience and the audience’s reaction to what happens at the end there is a great reminder of sort of why the communal movie theater experience is so different and so vital.

You talk about test screenings with a comedy and how a comedy plays with a crowd, well this isn’t a comedy but the cheering you hear and the feeling you get off of people’s reaction to it is just so different and so dynamic and it’s a thing you’re never going to get in streaming obviously.

**Craig:** Correct. And I don’t think that we’re going to lose that big movie experience, meaning I think movies will return. But, I also think that there may be room now for this other thing, which is the mega-movie, gig-a-movie. You see like say Avengers, the final one, and then two years later you see this four hours version of it, where all this other stuff is happening. Some of which was cut out. And some of it is just new. Like you can keep making those movies.

**John:** Yeah. I would say basically the whole Marvel canon in a way does feel like it is already kind of there. It’s this epic movie that just sort of keeps going. It’s like a series that just keeps going and there’s always a new installment, a new chapter. And WandaVision feels like it’s a six to eight hour Marvel movie that’s in the middle of it. So, it’s exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ll see where it goes.

**John:** But let’s wrap this up and talk about the megaplex experience because theaters kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and nicer, and nicer, and nicer, and I’ll be curious to see what happens next with the theater experience. And assuming we get back to just butts in seats and people are watching things, you know, I think this may give an opportunity for closing off those less performing locations and focusing on building good new theaters.

Sometimes when there is a crisis people can sort of cull things off their sheets in ways that is useful. Like Alamo Drafthouse filed for bankruptcy but I don’t think Alamo Drafthouse I will go away. I think it will just reorganize.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, bankruptcy doesn’t mean you go out of business, it just means you’re taking a pause to pay your creditors back because you need time. And, yeah, I don’t romanticize small movie theaters with terrible projection and awful sound. I think the trend towards making a movie theater more like your living room will continue. So you’ll have the lazy chair style seating and reserved seating. Ticket prices will go up.

If movie studios purchase large theater chains, and I think they’re sitting back and waiting. If theater experience comes roaring back I think we’ll see that. And then at that point you’re going to get to variable pricing on tickets. All sorts of things are going to happen.

But the theater business was remarkably stable, as much as everybody kept screaming about it, ticket sales were insanely stable for decades. And now all bets are off. I have no idea what happens now.

**John:** But, whatever does happen, MoviePass is going to be part of it. Because MoviePass is coming back. And when there’s an update we’ll see what that is. But they announced that they’re coming back, so in some version there’s going to be a MoviePass out there.

**Craig:** [laughs] Man, I’ll tell you. I want to give us a pat on the back for that, but I can’t. It was so obviously ridiculous.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh lord.

**John:** You know I’m not joking? MoviePass has announced – MoviePass really is coming back in some version.

**Craig:** What? I’m sorry, no. What? Oh no.

**John:** Who knows what it’ll be. But the MoviePass account is suddenly active again. So something is happening.

**Craig:** So MoviePass is going to come back and they’re like, OK, new deal. You pay us $80 and we let you see one movie.

**John:** Craig, it will involve the block chain in some way.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** [Unintelligible].

**John:** Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things. Before we get to your One Cool Thing, I’ve been asked by Megana for an update on your Upstep insoles. How are your insoles going?

**Craig:** Now, Megana, are you asking because you are also interested in some foot support?

**Megana Rao:** No. But as I was listening to the episode I was just like I wonder how that’s going.

**Craig:** I like that you’re just generally interested in my foot health.

**Megana:** The anticipation from all of that unboxing.

**Craig:** OK. It has worked great. They fit perfectly and they are very comfortable. They do this thing that all kind of orthotic inserts do which is they squeak. So when I walk it’s wah-wah-wah. I think over time that will probably stop.

**John:** Well WD40 should help.

**Craig:** Exactly. That’s what you want in your shoes. But, yeah, they work great. And they are experientially identical to the ones tht cost way more that you’d have to go to the doctor for. So, I give a big thumb’s up to the Upstep insoles.

**John:** And don’t forget to use the promo code “umbrage” at checkout to save 15%.

**Craig:** CraigsFootHealth49. Yeah, I just did an ad for Upstep and I’m not getting paid.

**John:** Weird. Weird that.

**Craig:** God, my streak of not getting paid on this show continues.

**John:** Yeah. What’s your real One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** You know what? Let’s make it that. It’s really good.

**John:** Craig wasn’t prepared.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** My One Cool Thing, I was a guest on another podcast this last week which I think many of our listeners would really enjoy, like the podcast overall. My episode sure, but this is the Screenwriting Life Podcast. It’s by Meg LeFauve and Lorien McKenna. They do it weekly. They are up to episode 35 right now, so it’s going to stick around for a while. What I really dig about their podcast is it’s very much just about talking through the writing that you’re doing each week and what the highs and the lows were. And it’s very much the emotional process of it all. So, we had a good interview and I’m sure all their interviews are great. But I really enjoyed how the two of them just talked about the work they were doing on a regular basis.

Now, Craig, you and I have referred previously on the show to you and I sort of write in our little bubbles and we just do our own writing. We don’t sort of share and don’t talk about stuff. But we have friends, especially women friends, who are involved in each other’s writing a lot. And I’ve always been really envious of that and I really appreciate the way they can just focus on what the experience is of writing on a daily basis. And so especially for aspiring writers who are listening to this I think just check out them and their advice because I really think you’ll enjoy that show.

**Craig:** It’s got to be mentally healthier than what I do, which is just curl up in a ball and shiver with fear and self-loathing. Right? It’s got to be healthier than that?

**John:** And play some videogames.

**Craig:** Oh yean. And D&D.

**John:** And D&D.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Peter Hoopes. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions, but for short questions on Twitter I’m @johnaugust. I might be able to answer your question.

We have t-shirts. They’re lovely. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Craig, we got a question from Julie in Copenhagen. Can you read Julie in Copenhagen’s question?

**Craig:** Indeed. She writes, “I’m currently writing my master thesis in film and media studies focusing on the meaning and use of clichés and genre conventions in Danish youth dramedy television series. I have interviewed Danish screenwriters, critics, and two focus groups of the target audience to hear how they define and feel about clichés.

“But there doesn’t seem to be a clear cut definition of what a cliché is and how it differs from genre conventions, or what the relationship is between conventions and clichés.”

Well, this is a question that is universal. It travels beyond the borders of Denmark.

**John:** Absolutely. Even places without Lego, they have clichés.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, let’s talk about that, because as she raised the question I was trying to sort through what I felt is a cliché versus what is a genre convention.

And so I went to Wikipedia to look at their definition of cliché which is pretty good. They say, “A cliché is an element of an artistic work, saying, or idea that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being trite or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel.” And I think that last clause is really important there because a cliché didn’t start as a cliché. A cliché probably started as something relatively clever or sort of clever or at least new. But just through overuse it’s not that anymore and it just feels terrible. It’s an idea that doesn’t know that it’s busted.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. I think that is a valuable way to discriminate between the two. I would say, Julie, that clichés are specific things that put your teeth on edge because you’re like, uh, it’s mean to make me smile, laugh, or be shocked or something and it’s not because it’s just unoriginal. Conventions are things that just keep showing up. They’re not demanding a lot of attention. They’re just sort of baked into the structure or concept.

So, for instance a convention of a space opera is a dogfight between spaceships shooting lasers at each other. That’s just a convention.

**John:** Yeah, not a cliché. So clichéd moments can happen during it, but the idea of a space battle, fine.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, like a cliché is someone gets shots a laser into my X-Wing and I go, “I’m hit, I’m hit.” That’s a cliché. It’s like, oh, what an original moment. But the existence of the convention of the space dogfight could actually be good.

So, there was like some really cool stuff that Rian did in The Last Jedi. It’s a convention, but inside of that convention original and interesting things happen. Please don’t @ me, because I like that movie. I don’t care.

So, I would say that like in zombie movies the convention is that a lot of people are zombies and a group of people who are not zombies need to get away from them. But inside of that there could be a ton of clichés. A ton of little moments that you’ve seen a billion, billion times.

**John:** Yeah. So trying to save someone’s life in an extreme situation can be a genre convention. There’s military versions of trying to save a person’s life, like doing CPR on a person. That is a convention. That’s great. We get it. Saying, “Don’t die on me,” that is a cliché. There’s no version of “don’t die on me” that will not be a cliché. And it will ring the bells.

And the first time a character said that it was great. But then the fourth time a character said that it’s like, ugh, that’s not fresh. We know it’s not fresh. And that not fresh feeling is really what makes something a cliché.

**Craig:** That not so fresh feeling.

**John:** An example of good genre conventions, we have vampires, we have vampires drinking blood. There’s lots of things about vampires that are genre conventions that are good, sort of come for free. But the vampire flourishing his cape in front of his face that’s just a cliché. You feel like you’re in Count Chocula territory when you do that.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So you’ve got to be mindful of that.

**Craig:** Yes. So, a vampire speaking with a vaguely Romanian accent is sort of cliché. It’s not a convention, because vampires can be anywhere. And that’s sort of the deal. Conventions in and of themselves aren’t bad. You can absolutely do something and be unconventional in the way you do it. But you will find just as often that there are vampire conventions that are turned around because they are executed in a way that is not cliché.

So, I think we talked about Near Talk at some point.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Kathryn Bigelow’s first film.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** So good. A ton of vampire conventions in there. Sun burns you and you’ve got to drink blood. And there’s a lead vampire. But the execution, the setting, the tone, all that stuff, clearly she avoided cliché every step of the way and it’s one of the reasons that the film feels so exciting even though it’s full of vampire conventions.

**John:** So here’s a convention I want to throw your way. You’re in a western and there is a hooker a heart of gold. Is that a cliché or a convention?

**Craig:** I think it’s a cliché because the convention I always think of is connected to plot, setting, the inciting incident, the goal, that sort of thing. So a convention would be a bunch of unlikely allies in a western have to make it from one town to another while being pursued by bad buys. Well, if you are doing Stagecoach, well there’s the hooker with the heart of gold. That’s fine. It was 1930-whatever. But these days you wouldn’t do that. Because it is cliché.

You would want the individual characters to feel fresh even inside of the convention of it all. So in The Hateful Eight there’s a lot of western convention in there. But then these characters are just, whoa. Not clichéd characters.

**John:** So I would steer listeners to TV Tropes which is a great site which sort of goes through in any genre what are the clichés and conventions. And so you have to be careful to read through this to not assume that anything you see there is by default a thing you need to avoid. A lot of those things are just part of the genre. So you have to sort of understand what everyone sort of accepts as an audience and what things are hackneyed or stale.

And so you have to be a student of what’s happened in that genre before in order to avoid those clichés.

**Craig:** Yeah. So if you’re doing a romantic comedy you will want to fulfill certain conventions of the genre, most likely. But you’re going to want to avoid the cliché ways of getting them across. A girl meets a man. Girl meets a boy. Boy meets a girl. Boy meets a boy. Man meets a man. Whatever it is, then you don’t want them bumping into each other in the middle of the street and one person dropping all their stuff and the other person saying, “Oh let me help you pick that up,” and then they look in each other’s eyes and go, “Ah!” because that’s cliché.

But you’re going to want them to meet.

**John:** Yeah. They do have to meet at some point.

**Craig:** That’s the challenge. Do the convention. But be original.

**John:** And Tess Morris has been on the show to talk about rom-coms. And like, yes, again it’s always about understanding the conventions while avoiding the clichés.

We’ll put a link in the show notes to a video essay talking through the makeover sequence, the makeover montage. And that transformation of essentially the female character in one of these stories and how troubling it is and how we really need to look at that sequence and think about what it is we’re trying to say through those sequences.

**Craig:** We’re trying to say that if you’re pretty you’re valuable, and if you’re not you’re not.

**John:** There’s that.

**Craig:** That’s pretty much what those movies are telling everybody as far as I can tell. That until you are physically attractive by some normative definition you’re worthless and a loser. And I say that as somebody who has never been attractive in any normal sort of way. I’ve always been like but my face is weird. What about me?

**John:** Aw. Craig.

**Craig:** Oh, Craig.

**John:** Thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [WGA Parental Leave](https://www.wga.org/members/membership-information/new-paid-parental-leave-benefit-details) begins May 2!
* [Learn more about foreign levies](https://www.wga.org/the-guild/levies-payments/foreign-levies-program/history)
* [99 Percent Invisible Podcast Episode: The Megaplex](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-megaplex/)
* [We’ve Outgrown the Ugly Duckling Transformation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa4bR5ZO3dM) by Mina Le on Youtube
* [TV Tropes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VampireTropes) – Vampires
* [Listener Guide Submissions](https://johnaugust.com/guide) send in your favorite episodes from 300-500!
* [Check out the Screenwriting Life Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-screenwriting-life-with-meg-lefauve-and-lorien-mckenna/id1501641442) and this episode with [John!](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/35-john-august-on-worldbuilding-in-your-writing/id1501641442?i=1000512898141)
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* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Peter Hoopes ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/493standard1.mp3).

The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/unions-and-guilds).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 485 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we make good on our promise to explain Hollywood’s guilds and unions. Then we’ll tackle the problem of good and evil, law and chaos, as it relates to character alignment and whether it’s helpful for writers to be thinking along these axes. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will talk about the screenwriting guru/QAnon connection which is as obvious and obnoxious as you’d think.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, I can’t wait. Can’t wait.

**John:** Yeah. But before we get into any of this, Craig, I know you are a person who loves puzzles.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** I suspect you also love mysteries.

**Craig:** I love mysteries.

**John:** I could see you in another life becoming a detective.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, I have a mystery for you to help me solve. And there is an answer. I promise.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** Since about Thanksgiving a thing I’ve noticed is when I wake up in the mornings my fingers smell sweet. Not like maple syrup, but kind of like an agave syrup. Just they smell genuinely sweet. And this was incredibly puzzling to me. I wondered what could be going on.

I found what the answer was. But I’m curious what your process might be towards figuring out what was going on.

**Craig:** OK. Well, I suppose the first thing I would do is to try and determine when the crime occurred. So, before I would go to bed I would very carefully smell and taste my own fingers to make sure that they weren’t already sweet.

**John:** And, yes, I smelled my fingers before going to bed and they did not smell sweet. It’s only when I woke up in the morning that they smelled sweet.

**Craig:** Interesting. So then the next thing I would do would be to figure out if there was something where maybe inside of my pillowcase or something that there was some sort of – maybe there was something in there that was rubbing off on my fingers. So I would check the bedding, for instance.

**John:** Yeah. And so I did check that. And I noticed nothing – like my pillowcases did not smell like it. My pillow didn’t smell like it. I couldn’t find that smell anywhere else. It was only on specifically my fingers.

**Craig:** Fingers. Next thing I would ask is are you wearing any sort of mouth appliance at night.

**John:** I am. I wear a mouth guard at night.

**Craig:** Ah-ha.

**John:** I could not imagine sleeping without a mouth guard.

**Craig:** OK. So now what I’m wondering is when you wake up in the morning and you’re smelling the sweetness on your fingers is it after you’ve removed your mouth guard or before?

**John:** It is both.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So before I’ve taken it off I do smell it and I still smell it after I take it out.

**Craig:** OK, so it’s not for instance perhaps you’ve done a good job scrubbing and cleaning your mouth guard and gotten some residual toothpaste on it or something like that.

**John:** Yeah. That would be a natural thought, but no.

**Craig:** Right. And it’s not for instance that you’ve left any sort of toothpaste residue around.

**John:** No. Nothing. And I would say it’s not minty. I don’t want to – it smells more like kind of like a syrup. I don’t want to go typically maple syrup, but it’s that kind of sweet. Or sort of like baked goods sweet.

**Craig:** Hmm. Mm. OK. All right. I’m now engaging my literal gray cells. My little gray cells.

**John:** How about this. Why don’t we keep talking about the mystery as we go through this episode, so we can actually get to some of the screenwriting stuff? But we’ll come back to this mystery, because there will be answer by the end, I promise.

**Craig:** Great. Like in between–

**John:** You won’t have to flip to the back of the book.

**Craig:** Right. Like in between our topics. OK, great.

**John:** All right. So some follow up. In a previous episode we talked about, or I sort of brought up that I never see female characters grappling with ethical concerns. And some people wrote in with some suggestions. But one of the best ones I thought was Joshua who writes, “In Contact the character of Dr. Ellie Arroway, played by Jodie Foster, is ultimately forced to reconcile her atheism with a transcendent experience she cannot prove, culminating in a memorable congressional hearing where we see her struggling mightily to make sense of what she’s gone through and what it means for how she sees the world and herself.” Let’s listen to a clip.

**Male Voice:** Then why don’t you simply withdraw your testimony and concede that this journey to the center of the galaxy in fact never took place?

**Jodie Foster:** Because I can’t. I had an experience I can’t prove, I can’t even explain it. But everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real. I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever, a vision of the universe, that tells us undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are. A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves. That we are not – that none of us are alone. I wish I could share that. I wish that everyone, if even for one moment, could feel that awe and humility and that hope…but…that continues to be my wish.

**John:** So that’s not quite what I’m talking about in terms of an ethical concern. It’s a revelation that I don’t often see female characters have, but it’s not the ethical concern that I’m thinking about in terms of like 12 Angry Men.

**Craig:** Right. I love that movie, but that’s the part of the movie that I don’t particularly love because it seemed kind of forced in there. There was a slight sense of an engineered ethical conflict when in fact because we were sort of on the journey with her we kind of got it. There actually really isn’t – she’s not struggling mightily to make sense of what she’s gone through because there’s a pretty clear explanation. Aliens did stuff. [laughs] You know? How they did it and why they did it that way they kind of explain. So, there’s not really a question of did I see a ghost or was it something else. So, I agree with you, not quite what we’re getting at.

**John:** Yeah. But what I do like about that example is that is a character who is encountering a moment and her being male or female is not relevant to this. And that we more often see a male character in that spot. So I do want to give it some partial credit for that reason.

**Craig:** Partial credit.

**John:** Let’s also give partial credit to the eight sequence structure. So we talked about this in Episode 483 and we were very dismissive of this idea of an eight sequence structure. A colleague and classmate, Scott Murphy, he went through USC at the same time I did, we were in different programs. He was in the graduate screenwriting program and I was in the Stark producing program. But he said that at USC they actually taught that. And that’s how they taught that. And so he felt it was a little unfair that we were dismissing it based on kind of the first Google result I got, which I guess that is kind of true. I hadn’t done any deep research.

And he says that the first thing that I brought up was the most extreme version of sort of a labeling of what all those sequences would be. And that really the point in teaching eight sequence structure is to get people thinking about sequences rather than 30-page acts. And to really be thinking about sequences having a beginning, a middle, and an end, which sounds more like the kinds of things that you and I would say. There’s a notion of scenes, there’s a notion of sequences, and they build out to become bigger things.

So I want to give some partial credit to this idea of sequences rather than capital-S Structure.

**Craig:** I still don’t quite know what the value is in terms of teaching people how to create something, because while it is true that you can break these things down into sequences, I mean, you could also break it into sub-sequences and have a 16 sequence structure. But the real question is well what do I write in the sequence. So there’s supposed to be a sequence here but what am I supposed to do? And what if it doesn’t fit inside of this? And what if it’s just a simple moment? It feels pedantic.

**John:** And pedantic also in the sense of like I can understand why it is maybe a useful teaching way to get people to think about smaller blocks of story rather than 30 pages, you know, thinking about something that’s achievable, and beginning, middle, and end. But it’s also really clear to me how a way of teaching something can quickly morph into becoming a prescribed formula for how things have to work. And it feels like maybe that’s the mistake I was making at looking at this one sheet, but also what I worry about sort of over-generalizing this eight sequence structure is that this may be a useful way to teach people how to build up blocks that sort of become a bigger thing and understand what sequences are. But it’s not the magical formula.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think when you mistake the formula for the actual reality of the script that’s the problem.

**Craig:** I could definitely see myself teaching a class, something that would arrive at an eight sequence structure. But I would kind of want to begin with one sequence structure. Meaning let’s just talk about what your story is from beginning to end in a very big sort of bird’s eye view. So that we understand the rough movement of it. That’s one sequence.

Now let’s divide that into two sequences. So, halves of that big thing. Let’s talk about what happens in this first half. Now, great, we’ve done that. Now let’s divide each one of those again. And lo and behold, just like that, you’ve got yourself–

**John:** You’re getting there.

**Craig:** You’re getting there. You get yourself four and you do it again. And off you go.

**John:** Yeah. And we’ve often talked about there’s a fractal quality to storytelling is that like there should be movement within a scene. There needs to be movement within a sequence. Movement within whatever you want to call an act to get to this whole story. And so every scene is like its own little movie. Every sequence is like its own little movie. So I can understand, again, why it is helpful to be thinking that way as you’re teaching. I just worry then coming back and trying to impose that as capital-S Structure. And any time somebody brings up structure my [unintelligible] just immediately come up because I feel like that’s, you know, you’re giving us a formula and that’s not going to work.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s not going to help me make a thing.

**John:** So, one revelation of this past week is Megana has gotten in a bunch of emails about IP stuff and we now have an umbrella term for it. We’re going to call this Mockable IP.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** So the things like the Slinky Movie, mockable IP. Josh who is pitching sort of a packing peanuts or plywood thing, he said the criteria for a mockable IP is the product should be something real that a company sells. It should be something that makes zero sense as a movie but you can still see someone from the company pitching it to a studio executive’s office. And, third, that it will never, ever be a movie no matter what. Those feel like useful criteria for us to be thinking about with these kinds of IP.

**Craig:** Well, that’s where I disagree with Josh. It was number three.

**John:** You think some of these things will happen?

**Craig:** I think in fact they must be possibly a movie. For us to consider it, because otherwise again we can come down to things like gravel. For us to consider it it has to be something that you know what they might make this. If we talk about, like Slinky, we would do that all the time, and they did it. And we were scooped and they did it. And, yeah. So it has to be something that can be a movie.

**John:** Maybe this number three is like they could make it, but it would immediately be mocked. The mockability, I guess that is begging the question literally. But that’s a crucial part of this.

**Craig:** Right. And good use of begging the question. Thank you.

**John:** Really, I was so excited when I realized I could use that term properly for once. But I also want to, as we talk about this mockable IP, call out a clip that was on the Stephen Colbert show, the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, by a listener who directed it, Ballard C. Boyd. It’s a great – got to combine two things we love in Scriptnotes which is Queen’s Gambit, the Scott Frank show, and Rubik’s Cube. So this was The Queen’s Gambit Rubik’s Cube limited series they were pitching. Let’s take a listen to a clip.

**Female Voice:** I wasn’t just handed my seat. I had to overcome so much. Sexism. A sprained wrist. Temporary color-blindness.

**Male Voice:** You may be the greatest natural talent I’ve ever seen. But you must master the opening move known only to distinguished players. It’s called “turn the left bottom middle forward to the front-facing part. It’s not like chess.” We don’t get to have cool names for things.

**Female Voice:** It may be just a block covered in little stickers to you, but to me it’s the entire world. Oh, also drugs. I do tons of drugs. You don’t know me.

**John:** So we’ll put a link in the show notes to the full trailer for that, but I thought it was a delightful way to combine two things we love in Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** That’s one way to do it. We got some other suggestions in here I see.

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Erica suggests Scrub Daddy. Now, I got to say, that’s possible because it has a face. It’s the goofy sponge that has eyes and a mouth. And I think there’s like a Scrub Mommy and a Scrub Baby. So, I could see a scrub family.

**John:** Yeah, little Scrubbing Bubbles. I love them.

**Craig:** Yeah. Chuck says Fidget Spinner. No.

**John:** No. Because one company doesn’t own it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not a thing. It’s a thing, but it’s not.

**John:** I guess there was the Emoji Movie which no one actually owns, but still I don’t think fidget spinner is going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. But emojis are literally everywhere, all over. The fidget spinner was a fad that’s already gone. I don’t think it’s a thing.

Let’s see, Philip from LA suggests Pogs. No.

**John:** I barely remember Pogs. They were sort of – I was in a gap between Pogs. It was elementary school but I think I’d outgrown them by the time they became a thing.

**Craig:** Pogs came back in the ‘90s. And, no, no. Nope.

Danny from St. Louis suggests Preparation H. Now, Danny, now you’re just being silly. This is real. You have to take this seriously. [laughs]

I like Sophie’s though. Sophie I’m pretty sure is touching on something that has been in development. Chia Pet. Surely that’s been, like scripts have been written right?

**John:** Yeah. There must be scripts written about Chia Pet. Or at least parody scripts for Chia Pet.

**Craig:** Or at least parody scripts. And then finally Matt, we do get this suggestion a lot, Pet Rock. For sure. But Pet Rock–

**John:** Dwayne Johnson is in it. It has a meta quality.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it would have to be a period piece because pet rocks did exist happily in the ‘70s and never after.

**John:** Yeah. I had a pet rock for like a day and a half maybe. And then I realized that it was just a rock with some googly eyes attached to it. And I stopped paying attention.

**Craig:** I didn’t understand the joke. Because I was too young. I got a pet rock. I was like seven. And everyone was like there you go. And I’m like, OK. But, wait, why? And they’re like, “Well, it’s kind of making fun of the whole idea of toys.” What?

**John:** Why would you make fun of toys?

**Craig:** Right. What do you mean the idea of toys? Let’s just back up to that for a second. So this is my introduction to irony. Pet Rock.

**John:** I think all the things we’re talking about, they have to have eyes. That’s really what it comes down to. If you have to add eyes to it that’s a problem. So, there was an animated Rubik’s Cube cartoon at some point, but it was like Rubik’s Cube and then they added eyes to it. Well that’s disturbing. Versus like Pac-Man, he already had eyes.

**Craig:** Well, the Slinky doesn’t have eyes, but of course Slinky isn’t a character. It’s about the people that made the Slinky. What do you think about – you know what, that movie, the Seth Rogan animated movie that was basically all just food.

**John:** Food. Yeah. And so they added food to it, but I think they got away with it because it was just so–

**Craig:** Dirty.

**John:** It was such an absurd concept. And it was really dirty.

**Craig:** It was dirty.

**John:** It was really, really raunchy.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was dirty.

**John:** Like Towelie is one of my favorite characters in South Park and that’s just a towel with eyes.

**Craig:** A towel with googly eyes.

**John:** Who is really stoned.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Really red googly stoner eyes.

**Craig:** I remember the paper clip guy from Microsoft that everybody hates. It’s a paper clip with eyes.

**John:** Oh yeah. Clippy. Yeah.

**Craig:** And eyebrows weirdly.

**John:** Yeah. Well it’s important because you can’t get full expression without that.

**Craig:** Right. Yes.

**John:** So, Craig, interstitial here, do you have any more questions here about my sweet, sweet fingers?

**Craig:** Yes. This may be violating HIPAA. Do you have diabetes?

**John:** I do not have diabetes. Happy to report I do not have diabetes.

**Craig:** OK. I have another question for you.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Does this happen every single morning, or some mornings?

**John:** Every single morning.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s interesting. One possibility was that it was related to a food you were eating.

**John:** That was a thought I had as well. I thought perhaps around Thanksgiving I was baking yeasty things that maybe there was something about the baking or the foods I was eating that were specific to the season. But it continued.

**Craig:** OK. I have another question for you. Even though you like I are in the brotherhood of the bald, do you put any sort of product in your hair or any sort of skincare product that might have an odor to it?

**John:** The answer to your first question is no. I don’t use Rogaine or any sort of topical hair product. So it’s not that. But, I do want to say that you are getting close to the solution there. Yeah.

**Craig:** Interesting. Wait, what about Mike?

**John:** No, it’s not Mike. So it is my own situation here.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** The second part of your question was a skincare product. And, yes, I put on a moisturizer. The moisturizer does not smell like that though.

**Craig:** I see. I see. I see. OK. All right. Well we should probably take another break.

**John:** We’ll continue on and we’ll talk about unions and guilds.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So this was something we promised we were going to do I think last week. And there’s actually two kind of news hooks for it this week because – we’ll put a link of the Deadline article of Hollywood Unions Celebrate the Inauguration of President Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris. The Most Pro-Union President and Partner in the White House. So all the unions and guilds were very excited and little tweets about that.

And also Biden fired the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. And then the replacement person for that. So there’s going to be a new person there. And I will say that doing guild stuff that the people who have been running NLRB has been a challenge for the WGA. You don’t want to go to them for help because they might side with the other side. So, those were two things in the news just this week that are related to Hollywood guilds and unions.

**Craig:** It’s a big deal. And John is right. You can’t really overestimate the impact that these things have on unions and the way they not only just conduct their week to week business but also how they go into negotiations. Because ultimately when you’re negotiating with companies as a union or when you’re trying to figure out how far to push things with management in between contracts your leverage is that maybe they’re violating the law. Or maybe there is an issue of law that is undecided that could be decided in your favor. Or, maybe there’s an issue in the contract that’s undecided that could be decided by mediators or arbitrators or eventually be heard by the National Labor Relations Board.

And if that government body is skewed to be anti-union you are automatically and reasonably way more gun shy about all sorts of things. The meddling that the government can do to hurt unions is not limited just to how they decide disputes. Sometimes it comes down to just aggravating paperwork.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When I was on the board way, way back when in the mid-2000s the Bush administration changed the rules. So every union must every year file a financial report that is publicly available. And basically under the Bush administration they changed the rules so you just had to report way more information. It was more burdensome to the unions to put it all together. And also it just was like you had to just open your kimono completely. Everybody should be able to see everything. And it was, you know, designed ultimately to kind of put their thumb in the union’s eye.

Over the decades since the big unionization movements in the early part of the 20th century the government has steadily chipped away. Steadily chipped away at organized labor and their power. And this is a much needed course correction on that part.

**John:** Yeah. So in this conversation we’re talking about unions and guilds as they exist in Hollywood and really only in the US. And so that’s necessarily going to be very limited to this because while there are international Writers Guilds they are more like professional societies because they’re not true unions where they’re representing employees. And we’ll get into some of sort of why the unique way we do it in the US allows for writers’ unions that wouldn’t exist or make sense other places.

And I started to put together a lot of links to the history of organized labor in Hollywood and I realized we are not a history podcast. We are going to mess up way more than we’re going to illuminate, but we’ll have some links in the show notes to that. Important things to understand in terms of background, the film industry is about 100 years old. It’s centered in Los Angeles. Radio and television was originally based out of New York. Even though more production moved to LA, there was still a lot of late night TV and news largely stayed in New York. That still exists. You still see the shadows of that in sort of how the unions are set up.

Interestingly, the first of the Hollywood unions IATSE, created all of this because they were the teamsters who were part of Broadway, sort of vaudeville, Broadway stuff. So it goes even back before there was film there were unions that were involved in the film production.

And, Craig, I remember when you were on Karina’s podcast did you play Louis B. Mayer? I’m trying to remember who you played.

**Craig:** That’s right. I was Louis B. Mayer.

**John:** So, this is a thing I did not know and I’ll put a link in the show notes to this, too, but I hadn’t realized the degree to which Mayer and the birth of the Oscars was really a response and an anticipation of organized labor.

**Craig:** Yup. So Louis B. Mayer, sensing that the artists under this control were starting to organize and come together and talk, and thus threaten his hegemony – and he really was the king of the council of kings – he very brilliantly created the Oscars because his theory was if you are possibly in danger of having to compete for resources with artists hold up a shiny trophy and they’ll forget about you and just fight each other for it. And that’s exactly what happened. [laughs] And continues to happen to this day.

So, the entire awards industry is in and of itself a massive distraction that not only gets artists competing with each other, but gets them competing with each other in a way that allows the entertainment industry to also make money off of their competing with each other. It’s spectacular.

**John:** It really is a remarkable achievement.

**Craig:** Remarkable achievement.

**John:** So a thing that’s important to understand is that when you talk about unions they only make sense really when you talk about the fact that there are employers and there’s somebody that you’re negotiating with and against. And so you can negotiate with the studios individually, with the streamers individually, but you tend to negotiate with them as a group. And that group that you’re negotiating with is the AMPTP, the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which is the Academy, which I got that confused when I first got out here because it seems like they’re two big organizations that run movies and stuff. But AMPTP is the collective body that we negotiate with as unions and guilds for our contract.

And you look at the different kinds of unions and guilds that there are, there’s a wide range. So you have actors, you have writers, you have directors, all of whom are sort of doing kind of intellectual labor, artistic labor. And then you have much more sort of physical crafts and trades peoples. You have grips and electricians and teamsters who are driving trucks. And you have all the other sort of unions that are involved in actual physical production.

And they seem so disparate and yet there are some commonalities, so I wanted to talk through some of the commonalities before we get into sort of why the different unions and guilds are positioned so differently.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So what are some common threads, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, all of us are working gig work. So, typical union jobs you work at let’s say the Ford plant building trucks. That’s your job. Year in and year out, your job, welder on the line. That’s what you do. And you do it at one place for one employer. In Hollywood everyone is essentially freelancing for their entire careers.

So, you’re getting work from movie to movie, from script to script, from edit job to edit job. Everyone is constantly looking for the next thing because our businesses are organized around shows and movies, not around the steady production of a single product, like for instance a Rubik’s Cube.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we’re not all together on the same floor, nor do we have longevity in a position or vis-à-vis each other or with one product. We’re constantly moving and swirling around.

**John:** Yeah. And we should say this idea of skilled labor, like welding is a skill and there’s training that goes into it. The same way that somebody who is working as an editor has a certain skillset. A welder has certain skillsets. But that welder is going to probably be working at the Ford plant for years and years and years and years and really has one employer. Versus this editor who is going to be hopping around from various jobs to various jobs. And it’s cobbling together enough money to make a living through many jobs rather than just one job.

There are exceptions, of course. There’s people who have been on TV shows for forever, but in general you’re hopping from place to place to place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those are pretty rare. And similarly where somebody that is in a union as a nurse will have the potential ability to work at dozens of different hospitals, clinics, healthcare centers, etc., we’re more like professional athletes who can work for a single organization of teams. And our teams are Disney, Warner Bros., Sony, Universal, and Paramount, and their associated television networks and things like that.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s an oligopoly in the sense that there’s a very limited number of buyers. And so the big names, I don’t know if it’s 75% of employment, they represent a huge amount of the actual employment is to and for those people. So they have a lot of power because they are the buyers of note.

What is interesting about us as writers and which we should get into this is that we are doing work-for-hire. So intellectual property is commissioned from us. The people who are hiring us to do the thing, they ultimately own the copyright. And therefore as writers, as artists, we are an employee of the commissioner. So same with like an artist who is working at Disney animation, they’re drawing stuff but Disney owns everything that they’re drawing for Disney.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this works against us and it works for us. I mean, the only good part of this and we are unique in this regard here in the United States is that we can be a proper employer, therefore we can have a proper union. And as a result of our proper union we do have certain benefits that are better than some of the benefits that other similar artists receive elsewhere even as they retain copyright in their country. Because these large corporations here are exceptionally good at exploiting reuse. They’re really, really good at it.

Do we get enough of the share of that reuse? As sufficient amount as we should? No. Is the insufficient amount that we get typically more than what other people get in royalties elsewhere? Yeah, it is. So, it’s an interesting thing. We have a tiny piece of a very large pie which sometimes adds up to more than the entire piece of a very tiny, tiny pie. A little miniature molecular pie.

**John:** And so we talk about residuals and we talk about back-ends on things and that is an important part, especially for writers to maintain a career, but there’s other kind of fundamental union things which are also important. So things like worker safety and safety on a set. These are things that come about because of unions. Minimum hours/maximum hours. Just other sort of quality of life issues that are only possible because we have unions. So, it’s very easy to be myopic and only think about this in terms of how this works for a writer, but unions help everyone in all these different trades.

So let’s talk about the different unions.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, in Europe a lot of these other things that unions do like enforcing safety and things like that the government does.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Our government is less interested in mandating things and so you do find situations where in order to attract production and employment people will just sort of look the other way. I mean, very famously we have a massive problem in our industry with lack of sleep. We know that. There should be a statutory cap on how much you can work, how many hours in a row. And that’s it. No more. We don’t have it. I don’t know what the number is. I don’t know if there is a number.

I’ve worked 20 hour days. I’ve done it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On set. It was terrible. Because you didn’t have a choice. So, that’s the kind of thing where our unions have to sort of step in where our government has failed.

**John:** Absolutely. So, things like – that kind of worker safety, but also it’s through unions that we have healthcare. In other countries the healthcare would be a national priority.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And we don’t have that here. Pensions are also through a union. So these are crucial things that were one sort of strike after strike over the course of time for the different unions.

So let’s talk about what the unions are. There’s SAG/AFTRA, which used to be two separate actor’s unions which then got combined together. They represent actors, but both in film and television and in radio. Other performers under AFTRA, I always get confused sort of what the boundaries were between this. I would say my general impression, and I think Craig alluded to this last episode, is that SAG/AFTRA is often fighting with itself more than it’s fighting the town.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, SAG in particular has a long history of kind of the bitter internal feud between I guess you could call them the more militant folks and the more pragmatic folks. Pick your adjective. But they’ve been struggling with that for a long, long time. And that all came to a head when they merged with AFTRA which was something the pragmatists really wanted to do. AFTRA definitely covered things like voiceover work for radio. I could never quite tell exactly how the division worked. But they are combined now.

They are definitely a much larger union than the Writers Guild or the Directors Guild. That said, they don’t have the kind of employment requirements that we do. You don’t become a Writers Guild member for life. I mean, technically you do, but what happens is if you don’t work after a while you become post-current. So you’re still a member of the union but you don’t get any of the benefits. You’re not voting.

**John:** You’re not going to vote.

**Craig:** You’re not voting. That’s the big one. You don’t have a say on whether or not for instance a new contract gets approved. You need to have some employment skin in the game for that. Not so with SAG. I believe once you’re a member you’re a member.

**John:** And that really does change things a lot. SAG has not gone on strike, at least during the time that I’ve been working for here. If SAG were to go on strike it would shut down everything because we have not just actors in dramatic stuff, but all of our hosts in late night. Those are all going to be SAG people. And so it would be a big deal if it happened. It hasn’t happened. Could it happen? Sure. You never know.

Let’s talk about the DGA. So DGA represents directors the same way that the WGA represents writers, but the DGA also represents assistant directors, so the folks who are running – keeping the sets running properly. UPMs, that class of sort of folks who are making sets function is covered by the DGA, which is odd to me. It’s very different from what we’re used to in the WGA.

**Craig:** Yes. Well in particular because certainly the UPM job and the AD job are not primarily creative positions. They primarily are positions involved with the management of a production. Scheduling. Coordination. Budget. The employment of others. Management. This is going to come up again very quickly when we talk about the WGA and the reason we need to talk about it is because there’s a rule, it’s not a secret, it’s a rule – management is not allowed to be in a union. That’s just a rule. Which makes sense. You know, because if your boss could be in the union then you just get out-voted by a bunch of bosses and then what’s the point of the union?

So what is a manager roughly speaking the way the government defines it is somebody who is directly in charge of the hiring or firing of other employees, or the management of their time and how they do their job. That’s management. Well…

**John:** You definitely see that in the DGA. You see that in the WGA as we’re going to get to. But you also see it in this next, the biggest of the unions I think, we’re going to talk about which is IATSE. So IATSE is everything else you can imagine that is probably a Hollywood job follows under IATSE. And there are a tremendous number of smaller guilds within IATSE, locals, who specialize in one area of it. So there’s classically the Editors Guild, which is underneath IATSE, and over the last year has had real frustrations with sort of the lack of attention being paid to their specific specialty within there.

Within each of these places, though, you know, you’ll see that there are people who are responsible for hiring for other people. It’s just a thing that necessarily happens where you’re looking at, OK, I’m going to be in charge of this department so I need to fill my ranks. There’s a management function there. So it’s complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think if you’re talking about sort of foreman type position, that’s acceptable. Some employees have a higher position of authority than others. So, I get that. You know, a pit boss that works for a casino is still an employee. And the dealer is an employee. And the pit boss is looking. But the pit boss is not hiring or firing the dealer.

And in IATSE there’s probably not a ton of situations where there’s specifically – I mean, technically it’s always the producer who is hiring or firing. Sometimes it’s the UPM in the DGA. IATSE is a great example of too much of a good thing. It is – you want a union to be sizable enough that you have collective strength. That’s the value of collective bargaining. If you have a union that represents six people at one Subway, it’s not that great. If you had a union that represents all Subway employees, I mean the sandwich, not the metro, then they can get something done.

IATSE, what they’ve done is conglomerate a lot of unions together because individually there may not be enough say onset painters to have collective strength. But then they create locals and they get bundled together. And then IATSE is the meta bundle of all the bundles. But the problem is that if you’re in one of these smaller locals, like for instance the Animation Guild. You’re just not going to be able to convince IATSE, all 100-and – I don’t know how many people are in it, 100,000? You’re not going to be able to convince all of them to go on strike so that your 30 members can get a slightly better deal. So you’re stuck. And that is not a great arrangement.

**John:** It is not a great arrangement. And something you’ve often brought up on the show, a somewhat analogous situation, is screenwriters, feature writers, within the WGA. And that folks who primarily write features in the WGA can feel like their issues are not getting as much attention as TV writers who are the bulk of the membership of the WGA. That’s changing now and there’s – obviously people do a lot more of both. You are now a TV writer. But it’s a genuine concern. And so you’re always having these conflicting instincts to broaden your base so that you can represent more kinds of people and sort of protect yourself. And to specialize so you can really focus on your core constituencies.

And there’s not going to be a great answer for that. You know, we often will talk about videogame writing is very much like screenwriting. There’s clear analogs between how those work. And maybe we should represent and protect videogame writing because that is clearly going to become something that is like animation. We want to make sure we don’t miss out on that.

But, are we going to do the best job representing those videogame writers? Is it pulling focus away? There’s a lot of writing that happens in reality shows. Not just where you aim the camera, but also all the narration. Shouldn’t all that writing be covered by the WGA? Sure. Maybe. But are we going to lose focus in trying to organize that work? So it’s always tough. It’s always going to be decisions and conflicts.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we’re hamstrung a bit by the law, again. For instance, we can’t necessarily compel union membership for people that are working in Canada. In fact, we can’t at all because they’re not here and jurisdiction sort of stops at the border. So, in videogames there are a lot of people, a lot of companies, that are foreign, international, and they’re not American. And there are a lot of writers that are working overseas. Also the entire videogame industry is vigilantly anti-union. So, one of the tricky things is to try and crack into those places is you’ve got a company where there are 400 people, all of whom would love to be in the union and they’ve all been told you can’t be. And they can’t. And then somebody else comes along and says, “We’re going to successfully unionize four of you.” That becomes hard to do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then there’s suddenly a ton of resentments and difficulties and problems. So, they just cracked down on all of it. They are brutally anti-union. And this, again, is why the more strength and pro-union impact you can have at the governmental level, and it has to be the federal level. They’re the only ones. This is all federal. If you get that federal level then some of these things start to tilt your way. If you don’t, running up hill in shoes made of ice.

**John:** The last sort of evergreen issue I want to make sure we talk about is that we usually think of unions representing the minimums. Basically trying to raise the minimums and protect the people at the bottom. Basically to set a floor on things. And that they’re not especially focused on what we’ll call above scale. So scale being the minimum you could pay somebody. Above scale being whatever beyond that. So much of the work that happens in the WGA is above scale. It’s beyond sort of scale payments. And Craig mentioned earlier in professional sports the player’s unions are sort of similar in position to us in that they are going to set minimums, but most of the members are working way above that and are going to have issues that are not the same as the lowest members. And there’s a natural conflict there. I mean, the degree to which you’re focusing on those bottom line issues for people making scale versus people above scale. And it’s challenging to balance those two demands.

**Craig:** It’s made more difficult by the fact that a number of the people in the Writers Guild who are making a lot of money are management. They just are. Showrunners who are hiring and firing other writers. They’re management. And so the Writers Guild is engaged in kind of an interesting dance. It comes more powerful vis-à-vis the companies by representing those powerful members of management, showrunners. And in theory that increased leverage helps them get more stuff for everyone. I don’t know if that’s true though. [laughs] So, it’s an interesting thing. And it does create kind of weird situations where you’ve got very wealthy people coming out there and saying things like, “Everybody needs to strike.” And you look at them and go, “That’s not a problem for you. You could strike for the rest of your life. You’re fine.”

There are tensions within our union because of the vast disparity of income which is even wider – well, I don’t know if it’s wider than the overall income disparity in our country, but it’s up there. I mean, we have writers that are scratching by and barely earning the right to have healthcare and making maybe $40,000 in a year gross. And then we have writers who are making $70 million in a year. So hard to hold that ship together perfectly, or even well.

**John:** Yeah. It’s an ongoing challenge. And it’s kind of always been this challenge. And it’s probably only accelerating. But let’s talk about the WGA because it’s also important to remind everybody that there’s actually two WGAs. So there’s the Writers Guild of America West and then there’s the Writers Guild of America East. They’re technically separate unions. They are sister unions. And luckily, thank god, we get along really, really well. We haven’t always gotten along really well.

I’ve been lucky to be on two negotiating committees within this last year and honestly Zoom makes it so much easier for everybody to be on the same conversation. Because traditionally what would happen is the WGA West handles all of the negotiations for the film and TV contracts. So we deal with the AMPTP and the WGA East basically takes that deal and their members vote yes on the deal.

Usually what would happen is that several representatives from the WGA East would come out and sit in on all these negotiation sessions and say, yes, great, and that would be it. Or raise their concerns about specific things that are of concerns to the East members. In these last negotiations we had a full contingent of East folks who were in all of those Zooms and were participating and that was great. So I think things are closer than they’ve ever been. But it’s important to understand they are different unions and they are kind of representing different priorities.

Theoretically any member of the West could also be a member of the East. But the East also represents. They’ve done a lot more organizing in online writing. So, organizing websites that have writers and they’re going through and representing those writers, which is great but also very different and I don’t know on the West side whether we’d want – it becomes an issue of how broad do you go. Would they be a good fit in the West? I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t understand this anymore. [laughs] It’s pointless. This exists literally because it exists. It’s just – it started–

**John:** It’s just because of history.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because of history. But it has long outlived its actual practical purpose. To the point where the Writers Guild West processes residuals for all Writers Guild West and East members, mails the checks to the Writers Guild East for them to just put in Writers Guild East envelopes and mail to their members. We are done to that amount of silliness. And the arcane nature of how the council and the board vote, it all is an unnecessary – what do you call it? Cruft? If that what it is in code? It’s organizational cruft. There shouldn’t be a West or an East. There should just be the WGA.

**John:** Yeah. So traditional arguments against it is that what I said in terms of East actually represents some kinds of writers that are not sort of classically West writers. And, yes, West represents some news folks too, but I don’t know that we do an especially good job of that. Traditionally it’s been like, well, how do you have national meetings? How do you actually have somebody – basically you can’t get everyone in a room together. In the age of Zoom it’s become much less important. And so the fact that none of these people have been in rooms for a long time, maybe it’s less important than it’s ever been before.

It’s hard to do that sort of on the ground work and have the meetings and do the stuff with membership when people are spread hither and yon. But it’s probably more possible – it is more possible now than it’s ever been before to conceive of some unification. But to me I would say having been on the board recently and been through this last bit of negotiations, it’s just not a giant priority for me. It’s I think a lower priority for me than it is for you.

**Craig:** It will remain a low priority until there’s a problem. And there have been problems and there will be problems again. And that’s when it will become – this has to be solved. We have writers all over the country. Basically if you’re west of the Mississippi you go to the West. If you’re east you go to the East. You’re right. You can switch. You can’t be in both at the same time. But you could switch. And it’s all just – we have two award ceremonies running simultaneously.

**John:** It’s goofy.

**Craig:** It’s just dumb. It’s dumb. And there’s duplication. We have two executive directors. Why? And sometimes it actually does cause problems when, for instance, in credit administration. If you are in a credit arbitration with a writer from the East there is a chance that the East may handle the arbitration instead of the West. Well what’s the difference? Well, there is I believe one lawyer on the staff of the Writers Guild East. There are about 12 lawyers just in the credits department of the Writers Guild West, all of whom are the ones that essentially take the lead on all of the negotiation, arbitration, and enforcement of credit rules with the companies. You want those guys running the arbitration because that’s what they do.

**John:** You want the cardiac surgeon who has done 100 of them rather than the first one.

**Craig:** And it just – let’s just fold it all together. You can have two. If you need an office over there, like people go to a physical office anymore. I mean, all that stuff is going away. So it would be ideal to solve this before it becomes a problem again. Because the actuality is when you look at the constitutions of the Writers Guild West and East, if the East wanted to cause a major problem it can. It has a way to do that. It hasn’t in a long time, happily. But it would be nice to get rid of it. Pointless.

**John:** Yeah. Last thing I probably should have stressed earlier in this conversation is that a frequent question I get is how do I join the Writers Guild. Or how do I join the Screen Actors Guild or anything.

**Craig:** Fill out this form.

**John:** It’s actually one of those amazing things where you don’t have to do anything.

**Craig:** They’ll find you.

**John:** They will find you. Once you’re hired to work on a project that is union-covered you will be required to join that union. A certain requirement has to be met. But you can’t join until you have to join and then you have to join and then you’re in. That’s really the simple explanation for it.

**Craig:** They will hunt you down. And one of the reasons they hunt you down is because when you become a member of the Writers Guild you are required to become a member of the Writers Guild. And therefore you’re required to send them quite a fat check for initiation. So, believe me, they get you. You’ll know. You’ll know. Congrats. Surprise.

**John:** Yup. All right. So that’s a quick overview. There’s obviously a lot more we could talk about with the guilds and the unions, but I want to make sure that we get some more time to resolve the mystery of the sticky fingers.

**Craig:** Mm, OK.

**John:** Not sticky, I should stress. Sweet, not sticky.

**Craig:** Sweet. Not sticky. Sweet. So, I was sort of getting close when I was talking about potentially some sort of hair product. So my theory is that you’re touching something that has that smell on it and it is transferring, but it’s happening while you’re sleeping. And I’ve already investigated the bedding, the begging material. It’s not that. It’s not your mouth guard. It’s not any sort of skincare product, as far as I can tell.

**John:** Going back, it is a skincare product. That’s the distinction. But none of the skincare products smell like that.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting. So perhaps there is a skincare product that when exposed to the air oxidizes and turns into a different smell.

**John:** That is essentially what has happened. That is the answer to the mystery. And so it is this facial moisturizer I put on. It’s like the last thing I put on at night. And it doesn’t have any smell at all. But somehow overnight it has like vitamin C in it or something. That changes – basically I don’t wash my hands afterwards because it’s just moisturizer. And the chemical reaction that happens is it smells sweet in the morning.

And so I was able to test this out by – that was my theory – and so what I tried is like, OK, I’m going to put this stuff on but I’m going to put it on with like a Q-Tip and not actually touch it. And so I tried that for two nights and then I went back to using my fingers. And that is exactly what is happening. It’s a chemical reaction to the moisturizer I’m putting on before bedtime.

**Craig:** Right. I have never done that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s important to moisturize.

**Craig:** Everyone says that. Everyone says it. I’m not going to do it. You know I’m not going to do it.

**John:** You’re not going to do it. You’re just not going to do it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I come from a long line of men that just stupidly don’t care about the largest organ in their body. It’s the skin.

**John:** Craig, can I ask you a question about sleeping? Because we played D&D till pretty late last night. And then I know you had to take your puppy out to pee. And yet when I look on Twitter like you were up hours before I was. So I worry are you sleeping enough?

**Craig:** Sometimes I am. And sometimes I’m not. And it’s really weird. So I didn’t have to wake up that early. I had my alarm set for a bit later. And I just happened to wake up that early. Sometimes when I wake up earlier than I should I don’t feel tired. And I’m fine. Right now I don’t feel particularly tired. I’ll probably sleep longer tonight.

There are sometimes where I get like eight hours and the alarm wakes me up at eight hours and I feel like I could sleep another 20 hours and I’m miserable. It’s really weird. I can’t quite explain it. But, yeah, I only slept I would say four hours last night.

**John:** Yeah. That would not be enough for me.

**Craig:** It’s just natural. Yeah, it’s weird. Normally I would be a zombie, but I don’t know. Coasting on adrenaline.

**John:** One of the tweets that I saw recently from you was about D&D alignments as pertaining to crossword puzzles. And so what I saw in your tweet from January 17 was you can imagine like a Tic-Tac-Toe grid and in it was different layouts of crossword puzzles and they’re identified as being lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good. And so it was a meme that you were sharing.

And I want to talk quickly about D&D alignment charts and that idea of the nine kinds of alignments and whether they have any relevance to the work that you and I do as writers.

**Craig:** Sure. So the classic breakdown in Dungeons & Dragons is there are three general axes of goodness. There’s good, there’s neutral, and there’s evil. So that’s kind of your moral approach. You are a person that is – you believe in some sort of moral positivity, you just don’t care, or you’re just actually evil. And then those are divided into kind of ordering mechanisms. There’s lawful, neutral, and chaotic. So, lawful, you tend to follow some sort of rigid code. Neutral, you sort of make decisions on the fly as you need to. And chaotic, you don’t follow any rhyme or reason. You’re all over the place. And you can apply those to any of those. So there’s lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good. Lawful neutral, true neutral, which is neutral-neutral, and chaotic neutral. And then lawful evil, neutral evil, and chaotic evil.

**John:** And so classically you see that arranged as a Tic-Tac-Toe grid where true neutral is the center square.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so my first exposure to I think morality or sort of the concept of regimented morality was in fifth grade playing D&D for the first time and seeing this alignment chart, which I don’t know that it pre-dated Gary Gygax and the original D&D or not, but it was my introduction to this idea of systemic kind of morality and approaches to these things. And we’ll put links in the show notes to a bunch of different memes about Arrested Development or Marvel, Harry Potter, or Star Wars, looking at that grid with classic characters from those mythologies and how they would fit into that grid. And it’s useful to some degree I guess. But I wanted to talk about sort of what’s good about it and sort of the pros and the cons of it.

I guess for me it’s useful to distinguish between approaches to a problem as a hero, so lawful good versus chaotic good. I can see the differences there. And imagining a lawful evil, like a really organized orderly evil versus a pure chaotic evil can be helpful. And so I think as I’m approaching my own writing to some degree I’m aware of that as an approach. I’m never – in no character breakdown have I ever written like somebody is lawful good for a screenplay. But it is somewhat useful as a framing device if you’re thinking of a character’s approach. What would you say?

**Craig:** I probably get – the only use I get out of it other than entertainment when somebody breaks down a show that I love into these characters. It’s the Game of Thrones alignment chart. Who’s in what? But I do think that it’s good if you find yourself feeling like you’re stuck between two easy, obvious polls and you can go, oh, this is just like a good guy or a bad guy. Well, it’s good to think in these terms and think about what would happen if – what does it mean to be chaotic neutral? And what would happen to my character if I took away their sense of morality? I didn’t make them evil. I didn’t make them good. I just made them not care. What would happen if my bad guy didn’t really follow a code, but also wasn’t a lunatic. And these things are interesting.

Look, the classic boring ones are lawful good, which is just like–

**John:** Dudley Do-Right.

**Craig:** Yeah. Superman. Lawful good. And then chaotic evil is just a monster like a wolf-man running around and biting people. It’s chaotic evil. But then you have these really interesting ones like chaotic good. And lawful evil. And true neutral, which is very rare. So it’s fun to kind of challenge yourself a little bit if you feel like you’re stuck. But, I mean, it’s a pretty blunt tool. I wouldn’t go too far.

**John:** It’s a pretty blunt tool. We’ve talked before about the Myers-Briggs personality assessment. And this is really kind of a version of that. Because like the Myers-Briggs you’re looking at two polls and sort of putting people on a spectrum between these two polls. And grouping them together in ways that sort of feel like, OK, if someone were lawful but they’re also good this is what the characters would be like. But you can really do that for any qualities that have two polls. Anywhere there’s a spectra of how they could come out. So you could look at this in terms of like how much is this person a planner versus an improviser? Are they serious or are they funny? Are they warm versus cold? Introverted versus extroverted?

You can really take any two opposites there and look at where a character is on that scale and as you combine the other things you kind of feel what they’re like. But I do just worry, even going back to eight sequence structure, it can just become a lot of busywork, a lot of ticking of boxes that’s not actually doing the work about what is making that character interesting, distinctive, and specific to this story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, in the end if you can neatly fit a character perfectly into one of those boxes then they’re not a person. They’re a box.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. I would say the last thing that’s been helpful for me thinking about alignment or these opposites is that it’s useful – once you’ve figured out who your hero is, who your protagonist is, thinking about who the polar opposite of that character is can be really helpful in terms of thinking about your villain, your antagonist. What is it about that antagonist that is uniquely challenging to that protagonist? And that can be a useful starting place for thinking about who is the person to put opposite your hero.

All right. We have time for a few short questions. Let’s invite Megana Rao, our producer, on to ask some questions that our listeners have sent in. Megana, what have you got for us this week?

**Megana Rao:** OK. So Adrianne from LA asks, “These days every company has its own streaming service that exclusively exhibits its content. Disney has Disney+. Apple has AppleTV+. And now Netflix creates originals not shown anywhere else. How is this not a modern day violation of the Paramount decrees? And how does this all factor in with the termination of the Paramount decrees? Please help me understand. I’m so confused.”

**John:** Yeah. So it’s a separate piece of that. The Paramount consent decrees are about studios owning movie theaters. Basically said that the studios were not allowed to own movie theaters. That’s going to go away and studios are going to buy the movie theaters. That’s kind of inevitable.

What you’re describing, Adrianne, is a little closer to Fin-Syn which was the change in the ‘80s I’m guessing that allowed for networks–

**Craig:** I think so.

**John:** ‘90s? When was it?

**Craig:** I think it was the late ‘80s or possibly early ‘90s. Yeah.

**John:** Regardless, there was a time in which NBC could not own its own programming. They basically had to buy from somebody else. That changed. And that’s kind of more like what we’re talking about here. A form of vertical integration. I think it’s not great. But it’s where we’re at.

**Craig:** Yeah. So Fin-Syn or financial syndication laws were why networks licensed their shows. So the way network television used to work is a studio like say Paramount would produce a show like Star Trek. And Star Trek cost a whole lot of money to make. And the network that showed Star Trek would pay Paramount a license fee per episode of some amount to run that show in Primetime, or syndication, or whatever.

And, if you could make enough of those then you could rerun them and that’s where you make all your money, and so on and so forth. And then for the network their whole game was pay out less in licensing than they take in in advertising. That was how that business worked. It has not worked that way in decades. John is absolutely right. Fin-Syn is what you’re thinking of here.

Paramount decrees really just referred to the brick and mortar buildings where they show movies and obviously that’s also gone. So, hopefully that helps you understand. Basically imagine all the possible barriers there could be and then get rid of them all. There you go. That’s what we got.

**John:** Yup. Megana, what have you got for us next?

**Megana:** So Tara asks, “My script made the Black List, got me agents, and several generals, and we’re finally getting a little heat. I’ve been writing in my free time for 20 years, but the business end of this is all new to me at 46 years old. My team is brilliant, but here’s my question for you and Craig. We’re trying to build a package. We may be close to getting the perfect lead attached. And the perfect director is tentatively interested. Hopefully I’ve got meetings with them in the next few weeks. What should I ask them and what can I expect them to ask me?”

**John:** Great. First off, Tara, congratulations. That’s awesome that you’re getting this together.

**Craig:** Good job.

**John:** And I’m guessing this is a feature that you’re putting together. I mean, it could be a limited series. It could be a TV pilot. But when we say a package, don’t worry or mistake the idea of a packaging fee, the kind of thing we’ve been fighting against for in the WGA. A package is a grouping of great bits of talent together to make this thing attractive to buyers. So it’s awesome this is happening for you.

Those questions when you’re talking to a big actor or director is sort of what attracts them to the project. What are they excited about? What are the questions they have for you? What is it about their previous work that you have questions about? Talk about the thing you’re hoping to make. Talk about the sort of – just get a sense of whether this is a shared vision for things. That’s the most crucial thing is to feel like what is it going to be like working with this person.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I just want to point out that if I were on your team I would – this is a great sentence. My team is brilliant, and you can see them sort of sitting up straighter in their chairs. But here’s my question for you and Craig. And then they’d go, oh, dammit. You know, there is no special questions. There’s no secret handshake. I don’t know what they’re going to ask you. Because sometimes they ask great questions and sometimes they ask terrible questions.

I can’t tell if you’re talking about a feature or if you’re talking about a movie – it feels like you’re talking about a movie. So a lot of times with movies the directors barely want to even acknowledge that you are a human in the room, which is terrible, but true. And I hate that.

So, just have the conversation. And if you have the ability to decide in some way, to help decide who is getting this and who is doing it, then have the conversation and then just check your gut after. The only thing you need to make sure of is that the person that you’re going into business with, if you have any control over it, agrees with you about what this is, and what the tone is, and why it’s good. And if they don’t, then they’re not the perfect lead or director. That’s kind of what you’re about to find out.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s a longer conversation. Maybe we should put that on the list. What do you do when there’s a person who is circling your thing who you don’t really like? And I’ve been in Tara’s situation where there’s been a director and it’s like, ugh, how do you shake that person away without burning bridges? It can be challenging. So maybe we’ll ask Megana to put that on the list for follow up, because getting rid of somebody you don’t want is sometimes harder than attracting the person you do want.

**Craig:** True, true.

**John:** Megana, thank you for these questions. I see there’s a whole bunch more we have on the Workflowy, so thank you to all the listeners who sent in questions. Anything more you want to share, Megana?

**Megana:** No, I think that’s great. Thanks guys.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is type related. So, the New York Times has banner headlines occasionally for really big things. One of them was recently Trump Impeached and Trump Impeached Again. When you have letters that are next to each other you have to sometimes worry about how those letters are bumping into each other. In the case of impeached, when you have that uppercase, the E and the A next to each other looks kind of weird. There’s actually a lot of space. And so you’ll do some kerning to try to get those things a little bit closer. But then if they bump it feels weird.

So I’m going to link to an article that goes through the New York Times’ decision to build a special ligature, a special combination EA for headline situations where those capital letters are showing up next to each other so it forms one kind of letter glyph. And ligatures are pretty common in type overall. You’ll see them a lot with FL or FFL. There’s special combinations for those things because otherwise the letters would bump together in weird ways. I love ligatures and so I loved this little article explaining how and why they created a special EA for the word “impeached.”

**Craig:** Impeached. I also see they used it in Biden Beats Trump.

**John:** Yeah. Special.

**Craig:** Biden Beats Trump.

**John:** Feels nice.

**Craig:** I just like the sound of it. Thank you, John. My One Cool Thing this week is a website called Wordlisted from a gentleman named Adam Aaronson. There are a few resources on the Internet that allow you to – well, they give you a little bit of a helping hand if you are constructing a puzzle, and they can certainly give you a very big helping hand if you’re trying to solve a puzzle. And I probably cited some of them before like One Look for instance.

This one is quite the Swiss Army knife. First of all, it allows you to upload your own dictionary. And you’re like, what, I don’t have a dictionary. Well, a lot of puzzle folks create word lists. So, some terms that may have not made it into the dictionary or phrases, for instance, that they can sort of add on to the regular dictionary. And then you have all sorts of options doing simple pattern searches where question marks are missing letters and asterisks are missing strings of letters. There’s anagrams. Hidden anagrams where if you need to figure out, take the word MATE, how many words have an anagram of MATE inside of it. So, “steamed” for instance would be an example of that.

There’s letter banks where you put in eight letters and it tells you all the letters that come from just using those letters, with repeaters. There’s sandwich words. There’s replacements. Deletions. Prefixes. Suffixes. Consonancy. Consonancy is when two words have the same order of consonants but the vowels are different. Of course, there are palindromes.

And it’s all sortable by length or by alphabet. It’s a wonderful tool. And it’s free. So, thank you, Adam Aaronson. Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you. So you can find this. Wordlisted. We’ll throw a link in the show notes for you. But if you’re listening at home it’s Aaronson, that’s with two As. Aaronson.org/wordlisted.

**John:** Very nice. And right underneath that link we’ll also put a link to Rhyme Zone which is a thing I use as a writer all the time and I think it’s the best online rhyming dictionary. And so if you need to rhyme something, a very good tool for that.

As we wrap up, I need to give a special shout out to Megan McDonnell, our former Scriptnotes producer, who has her first produced credit this week. So episode three of Wandavision, the Marvel show that I think is just delightful, has a nice little credit that says Megan McDonnell, because she wrote it. So we’re very, very proud of Megan and–

**Craig:** Well, you know what? That’s your first credit. That’s a big deal.

**John:** Yeah. It’s awesome. First of many credits to come. So, congratulations to her.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Scriptnotes is currently produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week, and thank you so much for people sending in outros, this new one is by Malakai Bisel. It’s great. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for the weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re going to talk about right after this on QAnon.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** And we’re back. So James in New Zealand wrote in to say, “It’s been reported that one of the top QAnon influencers is a ‘failed Hollywood screenwriter.’ That started me pondering two things. One, what is a failed screenwriter? Most of us, present company included, have failed in some aspect of screenwriting. Two, do you think most screenwriters would be good at creating conspiracy theories? At its core it’s about writing a compelling story. I’m wondering if there’s a Save the Cat template for conspiracy theories.”

So, Craig, the confluence of things in our lives. So, many, many years ago there was a guy named Script Shadow who was a thorn in our collective sides, well before the podcast even started I think. But the QAnon guy is not the guy who is this guy, but there’s relations. Basically Script Shadow had reviewed one of these guys’ scripts and they sort of knew each other, the QAnon guy. And another listener wrote in with a longer explanation of sort of the history behind all this stuff.

I am not at all surprised that some of the QAnon folks are aspiring screenwriters.

**Craig:** Me neither. And this guy apparently was kind of haunting Franklin Leonard for a while on social media because he didn’t do well on the Black List. It’s not like Franklin sits there just digging into screenplays one by one and adjusting the scores and giggling. He doesn’t do that.

So, this was a grouchy guy that wasn’t getting the pat on the head that he thought he deserved, which is something that entitled people have in common. And so question number one. What is a failed screenwriter? I don’t know. I think if you abandon screenwriting, if you wanted to try and be a screenwriter and it didn’t work out and you didn’t get paid, or you got paid once and never again, and you leave it, then your attempts to have a kind of ongoing career as a screenwriter have failed. And that’s most screenwriters. I mean, honestly most people out there are failed screenwriters if they’ve written a script. Because very few screenwriters are able to kind of keep that going. It’s unfortunate. That’s the way it is.

Do you think most screenwriters would be good at creating conspiracy theories? No. Here’s the thing. I’m not surprised that a guy that was struggling to be a successful screenwriter was not struggling to be a successful conspiracy theorist because conspiracy theories are by definition overly complicated, pointlessly involved, illogical explanation of simple things. They are the opposite of elegant.

We are always trying to create elegant plotting that is simple, and compelling, and there’s not a lot of like weird rules stacked on top of each other of why this thing actually doesn’t work this way, but really this way. And that’s all these conspiracy theories. They’re terrible screenplays.

When you look at the QAnon screenplay for what’s going on you go, “Wait, what? That’s terrible. That’s just bad writing. That’s not how humans are. It’s not how organizations work. It’s not how anybody behaves. This is ridiculous. Ridiculous.”

Every single one of these conspiracy theories fails the “yeah, but why” test. Like, oh, didn’t you get it. There’s 17 flags behind him and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. But why? What does that actually achieve? Nothing. Nothing! Oh my god.

**John:** So, Craig, you’re saying that a screenwriter wouldn’t be great at creating conspiracy theories, but a screenwriting guru, or a wannabe aspiring screenwriter guru, that does feel like the sweet spot. And that’s apparently who this person really was.

So this is a person who was not successful as a screenwriter but then ended up setting up a website about how to make it in Hollywood. Basically giving all his tips. And that feels like such a great connection there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because you’ve discerned a pattern for success and you’ve broken the code of Hollywood and now you’re going to expose the real secrets within it.

**Craig:** Grift. Utter grift.

**John:** And that feels exactly – yeah, but grift and self-delusion are all part and parcel with a conspiracy theory.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** It’s an elaborate mythology that you’re building and that you have the actual secret for seeing past the illusion.

**Craig:** Well, the level of either self-delusion or just outright, just shamelessness required to, A, not succeed at something, and then, B, subsequently take people’s money to inform them how to succeed at the thing you could not succeed at is mind-blowing. Mind-blowing.

So I looked at a couple of the articles and I saw the nature of the way this guy would post things. And it was terrible. It was just a lot of “don’t you get it.” A lot of these aimless questions. Like, “You might have missed it. Don’t you get it? Think about this.” Just open-ended.

You know, like when people accuse a television series of not being accountable to its own stuff, like it starts to make up mysteries and rules and things and then it never actually pays them off. And that’s bad. That’s all this stuff is. It’s literally like you never got anywhere. I mean, there are people who have been, I hope, that a lot of the people who were caught up in this silly cult now understand, OK, that’s what it was. And I hope that they didn’t lose too much money. I hope that they didn’t lose too many people in their lives and family members. I hope that they didn’t hurt anybody. I hope that they can just gently return to sanity. They deserve the right to return to sanity.

But now that they’re hopefully able to see they can see that this was just a ridiculous game of Lucy pulling an imaginary football away from Charlie Brown day after day after day.

**John:** I think who I’m angriest at are the people who clearly didn’t believe any of it, but were using it to maximize – the Ted Cruzes. Who clearly doesn’t believe a single bit of it.

**Craig:** Of course not.

**John:** But is using it, the furor over it, to advance his own aims. That drives me crazy. I want to both be able to punish him and provide a ramp back to normal society for the folks who got caught up in it like it was Lost. And didn’t understand this is not actual reality. And I’m curious to figure out what are the best ways to get people re-involved in a normal functioning society and feeling like what they do matters because it actually does matter.

To me it feels like them volunteering at a soup kitchen a couple Sundays in a row might get them thinking about the world outside of them that’s beyond their screens. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Well, you know, people got stuck in their homes. And they were frustrated. And they were afraid. And they were being fed a fascinating story. Obviously they were inclined to want to believe it. I don’t think anybody who has been voting for the Democratic Party their whole lives was suddenly grabbed hold of by Q and went, “Oh, wait, hold on a second.” The willful manipulators, the crooked Bible-thumping fake preachers are always going to make us angrier, always, with their deceit and their nonsense which is so blatantly tuned to earn them money.

A lot of the leaders of this Q movement were selling Q merchandise. And their platforms were monetized on YouTube. And Facebook. And Google and Facebook should not only be ashamed, but they’re the ones who need to do the penance. They’re the ones who have screwed us.

But, yeah, this QAnon guy, that’s perfect, isn’t it? Freaking screen guru selling consultation fee sessions while he’s also just – he’s like, here, let me go ahead and grift you like this, and with my other hand I’m going to grift these people like this, because I’m bad.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Sorry. We can’t always be hopeful. But, yeah.

**Craig:** Ugh. Ugh.

**John:** Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

 

Links:

* Ballard C Boyd for Stephen Colbert’s show [Queen’s Gambit Rubik’s Cube](https://news.avclub.com/stephen-colbert-has-the-next-the-queens-gambit-all-squa-1846107922)
* [Hollywood’s Unions Celebrate Inauguration Of President Joe Biden & VP Kamala Harris: “Most Pro-Union President” & “Partner In The White House”](https://deadline.com/2021/01/inauguation-hollywood-unions-celebrate-president-joe-biden-vp-kamala-harris-1234677017/) by David Robb
* [Biden Gave Trump’s Union Busters a Taste of Their Own Medicine](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/peter-robb-alice-stock-nlrb-fired.html) by Mark Joseph Stern
* [Impeached Ligature EA](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/21/insider/banner-headlines-letters.html)
* [Wordlisted](https://aaronson.org/wordlisted/) by Adam Aaronson
* [Rhyme Zone](https://www.rhymezone.com)
* [Wandavision](https://www.disneyplus.com/series/wandavision/4SrN28ZjDLwH?pid=AssistantSearch) check out episode 3, written by [Megan McDonnell](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6876585/)!
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Malakai Bisel ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/485standard.mp3).