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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/how-to-listen).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 438 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we’re going to be talking about dialogue and specifically about listening. Then we’ll be answering listener questions about submission agreements, strikes, and character POV. And in our bonus segment for Premium subscribers Craig and I are going to talk about the state of the Democratic primary.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Because Craig I was realizing that there are not enough podcasts that talk about politics. It’s really a gap that’s out there in the media landscape. And so I thought maybe we’d do that and we’ll do it just for Premium subscribers so that the rest of the Internet can’t hear it.

**Craig:** Yeah and they won’t. I’m sure it will never get out. RIP our mentions. It’s my new favorite phrase. [laughs]

**John:** Oy. Oy.

**Craig:** Yeah, oy.

**John:** Oh, something to look forward to at the end of the show, but first some follow up. Some follow up from Episode 436. That was the one where Liz Hannah was on. We were talking about How Would This Be a Movie.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The last of those was how would this be a rom-com and Craig tell us about the happy endings.

**Craig:** So, you know, you had this married couple, both of them quite beautiful. This was a very good-looking Irish couple. And they were both running for the same office. They were running kind of against each other, so that was the, as the article said, “It sounds like a bad rom-com.” The slight anti-dramatic circumstance of this was that actually there were two seats available and three people were running, so you and I and Liz, I think all three of us thought, you know, of course the movie ends with the two of them winning. And sure enough the two of them won. They were both elected. So they get to go to work together and represent the people of Ireland together. And then they get to go home together. Boy, if they have children those kids are going to look great. God.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** Pretty people.

**John:** Good for them. Apparently it was a squeaker of an outcome. And so it was only on a recount or sort of like the subsequent counting of things that she got her seat here. But congratulations to them. Yeah, some version of this kind of story will happen I predict within the next five years. It won’t be based on them specifically but you will see a couple running against each other for political office within five years. I guarantee it.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like where you’re going with this. Well, we kind of have a slight preview of it with the weird relationship between married couple Kellyanne Conway and George Conway.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Kellyanne Conway the – I don’t know what her job is, Trump Flack I’ll call her – and George Conway, erstwhile conservative, Never Trumper. But they’re married. So, he attacks Trump on Twitter daily. She defends Trump on Twitter daily. And then they go home and just do it like weasels.

**John:** Apparently so. Things we don’t understand but leave them to their relationship.

**Craig:** Whatever it takes, man. You know, I mean, marriage is tough. [laughs] When you’ve been married for a while you’ve got to spice it up.

**John:** Another bit of follow up, Yurian from the Netherlands is a Premium subscriber and he was just listening to Episode 241 in the back catalog. In this episode you and I were discussing a How Would This Be a Movie idea. And I said the following, so let’s play a clip.

“I think the idea of somebody living in your basement is a good starting place for either a thriller or a horror movie, where like somebody in the family thinks there’s something happening in the basement, or the kid sort of sees the person living in the basement and no one else believes him. And like the secret door that he’s hiding behind is so good that you can go down there and you’d swear there’s nobody in your basement. And so you think you’re paranoid. And, of course, there actually is somebody in your basement. And it’s kind of like Panic Room but in reverse.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah. So, Craig, I predicted Parasite apparently.

**Craig:** You didn’t just predict it. Prediction doesn’t give that justice. You did it. [laughs]

**John:** I did it.

**Craig:** That’s it. I mean, of course Parasite is more than the function of its main plot twist, but you even got down to like the secret door that is so good no one knows it’s there. You got it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** Yeah, this is crazy. And so Episode 241, this is like three, or five years ago? This is a long time back.

**Craig:** Is there any chance that director Bong listens to Scriptnotes and was like, “Hmm…” No.

**John:** No. Of course there’s not. And honestly of course we were talking about a How Would This Be a Movie which was based on a story in the news which actually turned out to be fake about this scientist who was living in the basement. So, absolutely did not come from me. March 16, 2016 was when the episode aired. So, it did not come from that. But it is a good movie idea twist and I was right then and I was right because that movie won Best Picture.

**Craig:** It’s almost like you yourself are some kind of professional writer.

**John:** Maybe so. Maybe like after all of these years of doing Scriptnotes I’ve come to appreciate what makes a good movie idea.

**Craig:** Apparently you had it halfway through all these years of doing Scriptnotes. This is really good. 241. That’s like 30 years ago. Yeah, we were 12 when you did that.

**John:** We were so young. God, I remember – god, do you remember as we were riding our Penny-farthings down the cobblestone streets?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And we kept talking about if only there were a way that we could have these conversations but people who weren’t here with us in the room could hear these conversations. And you said, “Listen, Hitler is rising in Germany. That’s really what we’ve got to focus on.”

**Craig:** I was concerned about that. But mostly I just remember that I was delighted by my stick and hoop. Ah, the stick and hoop.

**John:** Nothing really beats a good stick and a hoop.

**Craig:** No. That was the best-selling toy of that year. Stick and Hoop. That’s what kids had. They had a stick and a hoop.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** And you know what? I bet it was actually really fun.

**Craig:** It probably was. Probably was pretty good.

**John:** And we’ve not given enough thought to stick and hoop technology.

**Craig:** Yeah. Stick and hoop tech.

**John:** Last week we were talking about treatments. And this week I actually had follow up on sort of the treatment that I had to write that sort of motivated the whole segment. I had the meeting at the studio to talk through stuff. And I will say that like it was actually a little bit easier getting the notes and processing some of the notes because I wasn’t defensive at all about sort of the script I’d written, because I hadn’t written the script yet. We were just talking about the treatment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in some defense of the stage of writing a treatment and discussing it that way, it was easier for me to think through stuff because I could just say like, OK, so what we need before I actually implement this note and I wasn’t destroying everything I’d actually already done. I was just not doing work I had not done yet. And so that was helpful and constructive on that front.

**Craig:** It is. And I find, too, that when they give notes on these detailed treatments they themselves are less likely to give you the kind of note that would unravel a ton of things because they can see it themselves how it would unravel a ton of things. As opposed to when you’re sort of in a verbal pitch situation and they might not see those ramifications. So I think it helps everybody. I really do.

I was in a situation where I found myself revising the treatment, which I did not love doing, mostly because I just think like, OK, I agree on points A through C. I don’t agree with D. And then E through H sound great. So, I’m going to do those in the script. And then it was sort of like, “Then can you also just do it in the treatment?” OK.

**John:** I actually have a step in this deal where do I have to turn in a revised treatment. So I’m going to do that and it’s going to be great.

**Craig:** It’s going to be great.

**John:** So it’ll be an even more detailed plan for writing the screenplay hopefully that I’ll get to write.

**Craig:** But this is good. This is a good thing. I like this. I welcome you to the treatment family.

**John:** But I do want to point out a downside, because this is something I’ve heard from several former Scriptnotes producers who are now writers, people tell tale of getting trapped in treatment for forever.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Where you’re constantly revising this document which is not the actual thing you’re trying to make in order please different audiences. And so while I was happy about today’s meeting I definitely can see situations in which it could come into like you never actually get to write a script because you’re always trying to rewrite this treatment.

**Craig:** This is an area where your representative, whether they’re a lawyer or a manager, or a legal agent, should be picking up a phone and saying, “Right, so my client is the most lovely person in the world. They begged me to let them to continue to revise this treatment for you and the 15 other stakeholders in this project. And I said I’m so sorry but no. I’m not going to let them do that. So they’ve gotten all the notes, they get it, it’s time to commence them on the script per the contract.”

I wish that more representatives would do their job.

**John:** That would be fantastic.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So unfortunately sometimes it does fall to you as the actual writer to say enough and I’m done. It’s time to move onto the next step. Advocating for yourself is a tricky thing. It’s a hard thing to learn but it’s also a thing you end up doing at every stage in your career.

**Craig:** Yeah. Pretty much. And part of the job unfortunately of being a screenwriter in Hollywood, it’s not anything that should be part of our job, it certainly has nothing to do with writing, is the ability to determine exactly where you stand and then apply an amount of leverage and self-advocacy that is concomitant with your standing at that moment. Because a lot of writers push too hard when people actually want to get rid of them. And a lot of writers don’t push hard enough when people are desperate to keep them.

**John:** Yep. It’s absolutely true. And I do have to single out your use of concomitant, because again a word I’ve read and never tried to use in conversation. Well done, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Thank you. And I give it as a gift to you.

**John:** Aw. Thank you. We have talked a lot about assistants and assistant pay this last year on Scriptnotes. A thing we’re going to put out this week, Megana before she left on vacation she reached out to a bunch of people who had written into the show and other assistants she knew asking for their advice to showrunners who are staffing up rooms for the new television season. And so this is advice that assistants, so writer’s assistants, script coordinators, what their advice is for these showrunners and for these rooms as they’re being put together.

We put it together as a little PDF and so people can download it. I’ll also have it up on the website to take a look. But Craig I thought you and I might take a quick look through here and just highlight some of the things that assistants have said.

**Craig:** This is great. First of all, no surprise, it looks beautiful. So well done on the fonts.

**John:** Thank you. That was me.

**Craig:** Yeah, you did a great job there. And I like the fact that you’ve got the headers are Sans-serif and then the actual body text is – I like it when things break up like that. So this looks like the kind of thing that should go on the wall, sort of like the Heimlich poster that goes on the wall in restaurants. So this is great.

The first category is Respect Boundaries. Basically don’t treat your employees like they don’t have a life beyond the job they’re doing.

**John:** Yeah. One piece of advice here I like is don’t procrastinate and stay late and make your staff stay late too. Yeah, you know what? That’s true. As a writer I do procrastinate, but I shouldn’t procrastinate in a way that makes everybody else suffer.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I also like this: don’t use your assistants as emotional support and therapy. Don’t overshare about your life and feelings. So, there’s a show that I’m a consulting producer on called Mythic Quest, which is on the air right now on Apple–

**John:** Congratulations, Craig. I meant to single you out on that. Nicely done.

**Craig:** Is it called Apple Plus? Apple TV? Apple TV Plus? I should probably know this.

**John:** Apple TV Plus.

**Craig:** Apple TV Plus. It’s a really funny show. Rob McElhenney and his team have done a great job. Megan Ganz, among others. And there’s a character Carol who is the head of HR at this videogame company. And everybody treats her as their therapist. She’s like, “I’m not – I’m in HR.” People come to her and they’re like, “I’m in love with one of my coworkers. I don’t know how to tell them.” And she’s like, “My god.” “I’m worried that someone is going to report me.” And she’s like, “If they did, I would be the person they would be reporting to. I am not your therapist.”

This is one of those boundary lines that people blithely cross all the time. This is excellent advice.

**John:** I want to say if we keep watching future episodes of the show will we see more of your influence and presence in the show?

**Craig:** You will see my character, Lou, I think he’s in almost every episode in the second half of the season, and I have been told and have no reason to disbelieve that he’s going to be back for quite a few episodes in season two which is currently underway. And, yes, and there’s some other stuff that, yeah, I’ve been helping with with those guys there. They’re great. So, there may be more influence.

My character will never have more than one or two lines. [laughs] I like those characters that just pop in, have one or two lines.

**John:** Yeah. You’re like a Creed.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like Glenn the Demon on The Good Place. Ah, The Good Place. That was such a nice ending. I really loved it.

**John:** That was so lovely. Yeah.

So, to wrap up with our assistant pay stuff, because we got a little sidetracked there, just really simple advice and we tried to keep it as just short quotes from the actual people. There are 20 assistants who wrote in with their opinions. We sort of chopped it all up and put it into categories. But hopefully this will be useful for assistants to be thinking about, but more importantly for shows to be thinking about as they’re ramping up for this next – shouldn’t even really call it a season. Like, TV just never stops now.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But more rooms are being put together in this period than last month.

**Craig:** This is a great document. Just sample headline, “Set Expectations. Tell Us Who is in Charge. Delegate Thoughtfully. Solicit Diverse Perspectives. Give Appropriate Credit. Know How Much We Make. Keep People Healthy. Invite Assistants Inside.” These are all really good things.

And this is an eminently reasonable document. This is not some kind of revolutionary screed. This is something that any decent showrunner would want to do I should think. So, it is well-written and it is followable which is the most important thing. I can’t imagine anybody looking at this and going, “No.”

**John:** “No, none of this.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just like wake up. Get yourself – be a woke showrunner when it comes to your assistants.

**John:** Great. All right, let’s transition to a discussion of dialogue. So this is going to be a craft episode. This is where we’re going to talk about the things that characters say in movies, which is what people outside of the industry think all screenwriters do is just to write the dialogue. That’s all we do, right Craig? We just write the words the pretty people say.

**Craig:** I thought the actors wrote that. I thought they came up with what they say. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, that’s right.

**Craig:** I don’t know what we do.

**John:** We write down what they’ve said.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just so that there’s a record of it. Yeah.

**Craig:** Of course. We write down what the director wants to do. You know, in the old movies the director would walk up to the actors and say, “OK, in this scene you’re coming in and you want her to do this. And she’s going to say no to that.” So there’s no script at all and in fact on any given day what you’re shooting is whatever the director imagined. And then the actors make up their dialogue and the director goes, “Cut. Print. Moving on.” Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. So when Greta Gerwig was on the show a couple episodes back we were talking about mumblecore which was the movement that she was an important part of. And classically in mumblecore it’s very under-scripted. There’s a plan for sort of what the movie is about. There might be a plan for what the scenes are. But they’re not detailed plans for who is saying what and what’s happening. And so she came out of that movement and I was surprised that as someone who emerged from that movement that she’s so fastidious and meticulous about what the words are on the page and exactly when overlapping dialogue is going to overlap.

And she said that really did come out of the experience of like being an actor who was not given lines to say. She kind of felt boxed in by not knowing what was going to come next. There was not a plan for how to get through stuff. And that she really loves having written dialogue that she can work from so that she can actually find everything else in the scene and not to be worried about, ah, what am I going to say.

**Craig:** I am not surprised by that at all because when you think about the way conversations work in the real world a lot of times one person is just dominating the other. And if you put two characters in a room without a script that has not been balanced and thought through carefully by a screenwriter, one actor may very well dominate the other. And that’s – how is that good for anybody?

**John:** It’s probably not good for anybody. So in this discussion of dialogue I want to start by looking at realistic dialogue. Really how people would speak in the real world. And the way you find out how people speak in the real world is to listen to them. And, you know, you can eavesdrop on people. You can just be paying attention to conversations happening around you. But to really notice people don’t talk in real life the way they do in movies. And when you see movie dialogue that feels artificial, it’s because it’s as if they’re talking in a movie rather than actually how people could speak in real life.

And movie dialogue tends to be an optimization. A synthesized version of real speech. But it has to be based on some real speech. So I thought we’d take a listen to some real life speakers and how they’re doing things. Listen to them and then after each clip talk through what we’re hearing and sort of how we could do that on the page and sort of what lessons we could take from the clip we’ve heard and apply it to the actual dialogue we’re writing.

**Craig:** I love this so much.

**John:** Great. It was actually harder to find some of the stuff than I would have guessed. So, online you can find a lot of examples of recordings of people about their accent and where they’re reading the same text so you can hear specifically how they’re doing diphthongs and upspeak and stuff. But I wanted to hear people talk in sort of more natural conversation. This first one is from a clip about Appalachian English or mountain talk. And so let’s take a listen to this.

**Male Voice:** Everybody hears about Graham County, don’t they? And how good the people is, how they’re happy. I run into people I don’t know, ever seen them in my life. And I help them in any way I can. Somebody the other day said you’ll get knocked in the head. And I said, well, if I do I’m just knocked. It’s just good-hearted. Everybody you meet, just 99% of them. If I didn’t live here I’d move, wouldn’t you?

**Male Voice:** Where you going to go on vacation? If I was going to go on a vacation I’d just stay right on here.

**Male Voice:** Oh yes.

**Male Voice:** On my days off I’m in here.

**John:** All right. So there’s so much to unpack there. And so obviously we should spend a long time on his accent, which is fascinating. But I really want to look at his choice of words and sort of how he’s putting his thoughts together.

That question at the end, like “don’t they” at the end of something. It’s an emphasis. It’s a softener. You know, he’s not speaking in straightforward sentences that end in periods. There’s question marks at the end of things that’s not kind of classically uptalk. You know, his use of the verb to be, he’s using is where we would traditionally use a different form. There’s a lot there that you could write down and it would give you a very good sense of his voice as a character.

**Craig:** Yeah. His sentences, let’s just call them phrases, because sentences is really a function of prose. When we talk we talk in phrases. And his phrases are usually built around a word. So they’re not balanced phrases. They’re leading up to a thing. Like wood. Like carrying wood. Like I’m going to say something about a garbage bag. I’m going to say something about blah-blah. Mountain talk. I love talk by the way. Talk.

**John:** Talk.

**Craig:** Talk. So there’s a certain staccato element to it. And they’re built around a single thing. They’re not complicated in terms of structure. There’s no internal clauses. The sentences are very direct. Very clipped. Love that.

**John:** Yeah. So, if you were to write this kind of character into your script, my instinct would be if he’s using alternate words for places, use those alternate words to reflect what he’s actually doing, but don’t go crazy trying to indicate the dialect and to try to spell things the way he’s saying them. Because that’s only going to be frustrating for the reader. And it’s not actually going to be helpful for the actor or anyone else down the road. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** I completely agree. So, what you don’t want to do is get into that weird, because it almost looks like you’re just making fun of it or something. Use the words. I’m a big believer of the flexibility of language when it comes to these things. Obviously I wrote a show where people in Soviet Ukraine were speaking English with English accents. I just think what is the most natural thing to convey – intent. But with a character like this I think it’s fair to use vocabulary, like you say, that we might not know. And then I think about the reader as somebody that just like you when you’re listening to somebody like this instead of stopping them every single time they say a word you’re not quite sure of, you wait. And you try and figure it out yourself using context. And generally speaking we kind of can. So, the point is you got the basic idea, right?

And if you were totally confused then that’s an interesting thing to happen. So you just think how would I actually receive this. Would I be able to piece it together and get the basic idea? Or would I be utterly lost? That’s a good decision that you should make as a writer.

**John:** Another thing to listen for is how a speaker will incorporate other people’s speech into what they’re saying. And so people don’t say like “and then he says blah-blah-blah.” They will actually just shift their voice a little bit to indicate that it’s a different person speaking within their own speech. And so listen for how characters do that in movies, but also how folks do that in the real world. And that a person will be speaking as two different people without necessarily making it crystal clear on the page what they’re doing.

And so what you might end up doing in a block of dialogue is putting some of that stuff into italics to indicate that you’re speaking as the other person. Or sometimes you need to break that out as a parenthetical. But people can convey a surprisingly dense amount of information in what’s actually a very short bit of dialogue there.

**Craig:** My grandparents did this very Brooklyn thing. When they would tell a story about something that happened to them in the past, even like a day earlier, “Oh, I ran into Rose at the market and she says…and I says…and she says…” It was always she says, I says. So says, sez, became this all-purpose describer of her turn to talk, my turn to talk. But it was always there. It was never we’re just going to shift with voices. And it was never I said and she said. It’s the weirdest thing. I remember as a kid just thinking that is bizarre. But they all did it.

**John:** They’re staying in the present tense as they’re narrating a past event. And that’s really common.

**Craig:** But also violating the conjugation of the verb to say.

**John:** Oh, of course.

**Craig:** Because it’s not “I says.” It was like says became a new way of saying said.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very interesting.

**John:** Vernacular is great. Let’s take a listen to this is a woman who has moved to Austin, Texas. I’m not clear where actually she moved from. She’s being interviewed by a person, so it is a little bit more – it’s not a natural conversation, but it reminded me sort of if you were being deposed as a witness. Or often in movie scenes someone has to sort of tell a history of something. And it feels more like that. So, let’s take a listen to this lady from Austin.

**Female Voice:** About eight years ago we picked Austin. We didn’t know anything about Austin. None of us had ever been to Texas. We didn’t even honestly know it was the capitol of Texas. I mean, I’m embarrassed to say, but I didn’t know anything. I thought it was a small town actually. And so we flew to Austin, my husband and I flew to Austin, and we really liked it. And we came here for about a week on our own for our little vacation and then we flew our boys in. They both lived in different places. And we flew our boys in. And so we had a family vacation for a week with just my husband and myself and then a week with our boys.

**Male Voice:** Great.

**Female Voice:** And we all really liked Austin, but yeah, we just thought oh well, Austin. It was just another place we’d, you know, gone. And we went to a lot of the different sites. You know, Lady Bird Lake. And the wildflowers. And we took a tour of the capitol. And we did all kinds of things like that.

**Craig:** So this is not actually a lady from Austin.

**John:** No. It’s a lady who has moved to Austin.

**Craig:** She has moved to Austin. Interesting. So she doesn’t have that classic Texan accent. Even the Austin accent which is quite a bit more muted than like a Houston accent or a Dallas accent. Very singsong-y. Very kind of rambly tale-telling. I like it. Not an efficient talker.

**John:** Well, there is an efficiency, but there’s no periods in that whole clip. She basically–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s as if she never wants to actually finish a thought so somebody else could interject. I also think it’s really interesting how she is continuously clarifying what she just said.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So when we moved to Austin, we moved to Austin, my husband and my boys and I, blah-blah-blah. It’s commas, and commas, and commas. She sort of clarified the thing she just said. Not to soften it but just to paint out the whole picture of stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a kind of indecisiveness going on in there, even the details of the story are somewhat indecisive. We got to Austin and it was just another place. It was just Austin. But as she’s telling it you can kind of feel like she’s building it as she goes and revising it as she goes. And when she makes a list it’s like a this, and then a this, and then a this, and then a this.

Because efficient is not a term of judgment. Efficient would be I visited Austin with my husband. I loved it. I thought perhaps I could live here. I invited my sons. We looked around. And we decided, yes, we want to live her. That is efficient. This is more of a kind of exploration, you know, kind of verbal discovery. Some people discover as they go. And I do think you’ve pointed out something really smart. Some people do speak with a kind of grammatical integrity. I’m aware that I’m one of those people that speaks with a certain grammatical integrity. Most people do not. Most people will stick sentences inside of sentences and then abruptly cut it off and begin something new. And that’s an important part of understanding the music of dialogue.

**John:** A thing that frustrates me often as I read interviews that I’ve done for people is they will try to transcribe literally what I said, which has a lot of ands. Basically one continuous thought that never really stops. And so I will tell people, no, no, it’s OK. You can put in periods in places. Because otherwise it will feel sort of like what this lady was talking about where it just keeps going, and keeps going, and keeps going. You do sometimes want to provide some structure here.

The other thing I think is important to understand about the context of this, she seems a little bit nervous.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** During this interview. I think that’s part of her rambling is her being nervous. But it’s also a weirdly artificial thing for it to not be a true conversation. If she was doing that and she was in a conversation with somebody, they would talk over the other person, or give “uh-huhs” or affirmatives to keep the flow going. And so she’s trying to keep the flow going by herself and it’s a little bit like dancing by yourself. It’s a little bit awkward what she’s doing.

**Craig:** Yes. There are people that are not comfortable leading a conversation. Just like we were saying some actors could easily dominate another actor if they were all left to their own devices. I suspect that this woman is not comfortable leading a conversation solo like that. This is not somebody practiced in the art of soliloquy.

So, there are moments where I suspect she’s waiting for somebody to jump in and they don’t. And she’s filling space to kind of be able to get to the next thing because she was not necessarily prepared to immediately go to the next thing or explain herself. It can be eerie when somebody asks you a question and then never interrupts you. You start to feel like perhaps you’re slowly hanging yourself because you just keep talking. Because you’re waiting for an interruption that never comes.

**John:** That’s a very classic technique, especially in documentary interviews, where they’ll just let you be silent for a moment. You’ll answer a question and they just won’t put another question back. And so therefore you’re just like I’ve got to keep talking. I’ve got to get stuff out there. It’s a very natural instinct. I remember I had to do a deposition for this legal case and at first I was trying to explain everything. And then in a break the lawyers on my side said you’re trying to explain this as if you’re on a DVD commentary. Don’t do that. Just answer the question in an efficient way as you can and move on.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s all about context. I’m sure in other situations she could be much more what we’re saying efficient and direct and not try to keep the conversation going.

**Craig:** But there is a beauty to it. Again, the poetry of somebody stringing it all together in one long melody is really useful. This is very useful. People really should be listening carefully to this. Just so we’re clear about what happens when we read things, and when people in Hollywood receive scripts, the very first thing that will stick out is bad dialogue.

It is not the worst sin that you can commit. Dialogue can be repaired. The worst sin you can commit is a boring story about nothing that matters. But, no one will realize it’s a boring story about nothing that matters on page one. What they will recognize maybe even halfway down the page is that no one sounds like a human being. So this is really important for people to hopefully absorb.

**John:** One thing I should point out here is if you were to put what she said into your script it would be terrible. It would be terrible because it’s not interesting at all. Because I don’t care about anything that she’s saying right there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But if she were talking about something interesting and she was talking about it in the way that she’s talking about it there, that could be great. If she had to describe the events of a night, like a horrible thing had happened and she had to describe it and she was using some of that stuff. That would be fantastic. Or if she was trying to conceal something. Love it. That could be great.

**Craig:** Yes. There’s a tendency writers have to convert every human being into a grand orator when it is time to talk about something that is important or hurtful or emotional. Suddenly they become these beautiful speechmakers. That is not how people tell these stories. I’ve listened to people tell heartbreaking stories. And that is when they’re at their most inefficient. And stilting. And self-interruptive. And self-denying and contradicting and fixing and repairing.

It’s what makes us human in those moments. Emotion does not make us more eloquent. It makes us less eloquent.

**John:** Yeah. A great example is the scene in Marriage Story where Scarlett Johansson’s character, she has an incredibly long speech where she’s in the office with Laura Dern. Laura Dern, everything she’s saying is practiced because she’s given that exact same talk a hundred times. Scarlett Johansson’s character is discovering these things for the first time and it’s going to be inefficient, but it’s also going to be emotional and have this ability to cycle back on itself. So both kinds of speech can happen in the same scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are characters, like I think of the character that Jared Harris plays in Chernobyl. He is a scientist and he is someone whose emotions are very bottled up. He’s an emotionally constipated man. And he’s very intellectual. And when it comes time for him to say something important at long last when he does it does have a sort of speech integrity to it because he’s that kind of person. I believe it from him. I don’t think I would believe it from say Stellan Skarsgård’s character. When Stellan Skarsgård’s character, Boris Shcherbina, has a moment where he is emotional and needs to declare something, it comes out as a series of outrageous cursing and then just violence towards a phone. Because he is not an intellectual man. And he does not speak in that way.

It’s just important. It’s one of the ways that we help defeat the most dreaded of notes. “All of your characters sound the same.”

**John:** The worst. So, these were two examples of people speaking by themselves. I was looking for better examples of dialogue and interaction between characters which was surprisingly hard to find until I remembered, oh that’s right, there are podcasts. So this first clip I want to play is from the Las Culturistas podcast is by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers. It’s a weekly podcast or semi-weekly podcast. They had Ben Platt on. And so this is the three of them talking. So just notice how they talk over each other. How they acknowledge what the other person is saying. How thoughts don’t get completed and sort of get clarified before the full thing was done. How they know you’re a little bit ahead of where they’re going so they don’t feel like they have to finish thoughts. I thought it was just an interesting clip. So let’s take a listen to this clip with Ben Platt.

**Matt Rogers:** You’re telling me like when you’re like doing a show on a Friday night, are you giving it a little bit more than you are on a Sunday? On a matinee? Tell me.

**Ben Platt:** Uh, it depends. It’s like very specific to the actual night. It depends who I know is in the audience. It depends how many shows are left in the week. Because sometimes, obviously because it’s a Friday night it’s exciting, it is like easier to give more than on Sunday. But also Sunday you have 36 hours ahead of you that are free, so you can kind of give abandon. So it depends. I would say like a Wednesday Matt is not ideal.

**Matt:** Not the best.

**Ben:** To come to, unless you’re like 65 and up.

**Matt:** Yeah. Yeah. And you get that little discount ticket.

**Ben:** There’s definitely like an A, B, C version of the show that you have to have.

**Bowen Yang:** Yes.

**Ben:** This is what I’m doing if I feel completely healthy and I have all of the faculties. And then B is like I’m trying to save a little for something exciting at the end of the week. And C is like I can barely be bothered to be here.

**Bowen:** Oh wow. You’ve like very clearly delineated all of these scenarios though.

**Ben:** Oh yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time in that wonderful show.

**Matt:** In that show. So basically, wait, hold on. So do you usually know when someone notable is coming? And do you prefer to know?

**Ben:** I ask to know. So I would receive like literally like an itemized list before like a half hour every night of everyone that was there. Because at the beginning it was–

**Matt:** You don’t want to go out on stage and then see Beyoncé.

**Bowen:** Right.

**Ben:** One million percent. Like I don’t want to clock Meryl like mid-number. And also like in that show in particular like I spend so much time out at the fourth wall or whatever.

**Matt:** Yeah.

**Ben:** So like I’m going to see. And it’s a small house, so I’m going to see whoever it is. And they’re always in the same like nice house seats. So I love to have all the information. That’s like a theme in my life in general is I like to have all the information.

**Matt:** Please. Beforehand.

**Ben:** Because anything unknown is far more anxiety-provoking to me than just like dealing with what the actual reality is going to be.

**John:** All right. So this feels like three people around a table. You can imagine they’re in a diner and they’re having this conversation. So, it’s a little bit heightened because it’s a podcast and there’s microphones in front of them, but it feels pretty genuine to what they would actually be, how they would actually be talking as a group. And you notice there at the very end Ben Platt starts a word and stops it and just keeps going on. He knows you know what he’s going to say and he can just sort of keep moving on to the next thought.

I also really want to point out how much along the way the other two guys are acknowledging and sort of affirming what he’s saying. They’re checking in that they’re actually hearing and they’re listening to him.

**Craig:** That’s the thing that I picked up on the most. So, first of all, these three guys are young. I mean, they’re not young like children, but they’re younger than we are. So there’s a certain youth to their discussion and it is indicated by energy. They are all three of them very energetic. They are listening intently to each other and their conversation is a little bit, I’m not going to say combat, it’s not competition, but it’s a group sport. They understand, each one of them, that they’re supposed to be talking. Right? No one is just going to be quiet for a while.

**John:** It feels like they’re all learning forward.

**Craig:** Yes. They’re all leaning forward. So, what that means is, and you can tell Ben Platt understands they’re leaning forward and he’s used to it. He’s fine with it. But that means he has to speak really quickly. Listen how fast he’s talking. Because he knows they’re fast. They’re on everything he says. There’s no chance for him to slow down, because immediately one or two of them, Bowen or Matt, or both at the same time will go “Yes.” Which as you point out is affirming. They themselves are playing a role of supportive interviewer who wants to play.

So, they don’t just say yes and then ask a question. They also notice the kinds of things he’s saying and then they kind of kick it back and make a little observation, a slightly humorous observation. This is very naturalistic. Count how many times all of them say the word like. A billion. But it’s not dreadful. It’s not caricature. It’s just a natural sort of use of the vernacular like. And they have no problem interrupting each other. Interruption is almost essential to that kind of discussion.

**John:** Yeah. So I think when we’re talking about natural dialogue I think too often we’re assuming it means slow. That it means it’s paced down and it’s very sort of stuff just comes out when it sort of comes out. This is natural dialogue. People are doing kind of what they would naturally do. But it is pretty fast. It’s like it’s Sorkin-level speed. And the conversation they’re having isn’t exactly sort of what you’d expect in an Aaron Sorkin movie. You can imagine having this kind of discussion in an Aaron Sorkin script.

Now, think about what this would actually look like on the page. You wouldn’t have all of those affirmations being put in as dual dialogue or interruptions there along the way. It would be far too much. But you would need to have some indication that people are freely able to speak over each other and that we’re able to process both conversations happening at the same time. This would be a great example of Greta Gerwig’s script where she does the little slashes in the dialogue to indicate where overlaps are supposed to happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This would be great for that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it implies a certain kind of direction as well. Because when you are shooting a scene like this, if I’m making a movie and in the movie there’s a scene where Ben Platt, Bowen Yang, and Matt Rogers are discussing how Ben Platt either does or doesn’t go full out on a given performance based on the day, and how he reacts or wants to react when famous people are in the audience, their conversation is so simultaneous and fast and Bowen and Matt are so interactive with Ben. And we understand that the ground rules of their discussion are such that anyone at any point can jump in and talk and not stop the train. You need to shoot it where all three of them are visible.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Because what happens when you’re shooting and there’s only one person on camera you can’t have anyone overlap with them because it won’t cut together with the master shot where they all are. So, it implies, in my mind at least, it implies you want a master shot and you almost – there’s a version of this where you just move the camera slowly around the table. And the camera doesn’t necessarily respond to what anyone is doing. You’re just absorbing the speed and the rhythm of it.

**John:** Yeah. The other option of course here is that you’re shooting multiple cameras at once. You could be on singles on people as long as you were actually doing the same shot.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** That’s the other option to sort of get into that situation. But it does feel very – it’s very live, very present. This is rat-a-tat-tat stuff happening here. And the whole show is pitched up at that speed.

**Craig:** Yes. I love the speed of it.

**John:** So here’s a different example. And this one feels a little bit more sitting back rather than leaning forward into the conversation. This is from a podcast called F-Work, But I’m Going to Go. This one is just two women. They have this podcast every week. They’re friends. They’re having a conversation. But let’s take a listen to their clip.

**Female Voice:** I would love to travel and work.

**Female Voice:** I would say I would – I would trade anything to have that life again. Letting the company pay for everything.

**Female Voice:** Everything.

**Female Voice:** On my travel. True. Oh my gosh, like and you just go a couple of seminars, you know. You work with a couple of teams. That’s it. And then after that you’re good. You got a day, a day and a half, or two days to chill.

**Female Voice:** Especially when I used to travel back and forth to Houston like it was just great. Because I’m like [unintelligible], tour the Budweiser facility, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. And get to hang out with my friends down there. You can really make places a second home at that point when your job is paying them for—

**Female Voice:** Hey I’m going to be in the city on so-and-so, so-and-so date.

**Female Voice:** Right.

**Female Voice:** And then especially if you know somebody there, you can take that. I could use this little hotel money for some more food and drink. Give me that American Express card.

**Female Voice:** Right.

**Female Voice:** So, yeah.

**Female Voice:** Cash me out.

**Female Voice:** But the people that don’t have that work-life balance, I couldn’t imagine like just the money sacrifice for your mental health. Like does that money, does your pay rate, does your salary sacrifice for you not having a life?

**Female Voice:** But see I’m just trying to think about what millennials that I know that I don’t know have a work-life balance.

**Female Voice:** I don’t know none, but you know it’s some out there.

**Female Voice:** Of course. Of course.

**John:** So, as opposed to the other conversation which felt very leaned forward, this one felt leaned back to me. This feels like people who are comfortable in their chairs having this conversation. So they’re very actively listening, but there’s not that frenzied pitch of sort of like got to get on the next thing, got to get on the next thing. And there’s no hunger to be funny, or to score a point.

**Craig:** Correct. So the difference here contextually is what happens when you’re dealing with a conversation where three people who don’t necessarily know each other are conducting an interview and being hyper engaged or two people who know each other really well. These two women know each other really well. It almost seems like what’s happening is they share a brain. And they’re having thoughts and they’re just alternating which one of them is going to say the shared brain’s thoughts. Because they’re in utter agreement and there’s no inquisition. It’s just a complete commiseration, celebration of agreement. The pace of it slows down because they’re in no rush to kind of impress or keep anyone’s interest, by the way.

They don’t seem to be aware that anybody would be listening. They are literally there for each other. It’s wonderful.

**John:** Yes. But I need to point out this is Episode 404, so this podcast has been going on for a very long time.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Which I think is also great. So they have such a long history. You know, as long a history as you and I do basically. And they know each other so well, so they can sort of anticipate the brain.

Now let’s think about this kind of conversation in your script. And talk about first what they’re talking about. They’re talking about work-life balance. They’re talking about taking business trips. Their conversation is so terrific and specific to sort of what they’re looking for in a business trip and sort of what is important. And how they would describe it versus two other people would describe it versus two other people is what makes these characters’ voices seem distinct and different. So it’s not about, yes, these are two young black women and they have millennial voices. There’s vocal fry. There’s all these sort of like very specific things about the actual audio tone of the language which is so great and worth studying.

But just the words on the page and sort of how they are framing their thoughts about it is what makes their conversation unique and specific.

**Craig:** Yeah. For something like this if I were trying to build a scene with these two women having a conversation about this topic my concentration would be on the woman who is listening. Because the interesting parts in a weird way between these two, at least in terms of their dialogue, is when the moment of agreement and hand-off occurs. “Yes.” I love – I mean, there’s this drawn out thing that happens which is much different than when Bowen and Matt go, “Right,” together. “Right.” This is like, “Yes!” It’s like a relief. You just said something true.

And I love the person listening and it’s like they’re hearing this wonderful – it’s like eating delicious food and then going, “Yes, this is so good.” And now let me talk. And then I want to switch over to the other one. And I would be describing them. And even editorially I would constantly be on the person listening, because that’s where to me at least that’s the fun part of these two is how much they – it’s their agreement. It’s their joy of agreement.

**John:** It’s easy to imagine characters who are like these two women in your story and finding great things for them to talk about. And I sort of like keep wanting to give them stories to hear how they would talk through it and how they would wrestle with a problem. So I kind of want to see them solving mysteries. I want to see them doing stuff because I think they actually have a really cool relationship with each other and it’s exciting to think about how they would talk about the stuff they’re encountering.

**Craig:** There’s something also very comic about agreement. I don’t know why. It’s just funny. When you imagine a scene where someone is explaining something to another person. Maybe they’re in opposition. But they have an ally with them. So they’re delivering a speech. And their ally occasionally goes, “That’s right. Damn straight. Amen. Sure said something there.” And at some point the person is going to turn to them and go, “Would you shut up? Stop agreeing.” Agreeing is funny. I don’t know why. It’s just the notion of just full agreement is amusing to me.

So, when I’m listening to them I have a smile on my face just from how happy they are to agree. And it’s a different kind of, like I said, there is a purity and an intimacy to these two because they don’t have any motives here. They’re not trying to get somebody to open up and inform them or educate them about their process or anything. There’s no guest. It’s just the two of them. It’s lovely.

**John:** We often think about well scenes have to have conflict and if there’s no conflict then there’s no scene. That is still largely true. But the conflict doesn’t have to become between the two characters who are talking in the scene. The conflict can be about what is happening in this situation. A conflict could be an outside party. But like it doesn’t mean that the two characters in any scene have to be directly in conflict. That’s not at all a goal.

Something about their relationship also reminded me about Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn in Swingers. And like, yes, they have contrasting styles, but they’re also buds and they can hang out. And the ability to hang out with interesting people is something that dialogue should give us.

**Craig:** There’s also the potential for – if we know you have a conflict, right, there may be an instinct to just get to the conflict. Jane shows up and tells Sheila, “I’m angry at you. Here’s why.” But sometimes the best way to introduce conflict is to just have an agreement fest and then suddenly on point seven someone says this and the other woman goes…

There’s a great sketch if you want to talk about dialogue and how much you can do with one word, there’s a great Key and Peele sketch where they play two women and one of them, Key, is going on and on about how she’s done with her man. And Peele is playing her friend. And all she says is, “OK.” And she has a thousand different Okays for like exactly, completely, I totally agree, right, oh that’s so true. And then Key’s character starts to say some things that are a little off and the OK becomes O-kay. And she never says anything else except OK. But there’s I think 50 different Okays. They each mean a different thing. It’s brilliant.

**John:** That’s great. And again in your script that probably is a good example of like a parenthetical where you’re going to have to put what is the actual shading of that OK in the situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. Great. Well that was a fun exercise. So let’s maybe try to do this again on some future occasion.

**Craig:** I would love to.

**John:** Because that was lovely to do.

Let’s do some questions. Matt from Massachusetts asks, “As I write a feature screenplay I am periodically trapped up by a vestigial thought from my novel writing days about first person versus third person omniscient perspective. In a novel it’s pretty obvious. But do you ever think about this in terms of screenplays, particularly if they don’t have voiceover? If your main character is in a situation where they can’t possibly know something we have to decide whether or not to become omniscient and share that information with the viewer.”

Craig, what is your thinking about limited perspective and omniscience as you’re coming up with a story? And do you always have a plan from the start, or is it situational?

**Craig:** It’s situational. So you make choices about perspective all the time. And I think we’ve done, certainly we’ve done at least an episode about perspective as a specific tool in our tool belt. You want to know from whose perspective and there are choices. It’s either from a character’s perspective or it is from the omniscient camera’s perspective. And if it’s from the camera’s perspective the point is we’re going to see something that the people don’t. Or, that we are seeing something that is a shared perspective by a lot of people. A crowd scene for instance.

So, you want to choose those moments carefully. Typically the kind of omniscient we’re going to see something but nobody else will, it’s the bailiwick of mysteries, thrillers, twisty kind of things. They are associated with the dum-dum-dum kind of sound in your head. And it needs to be used carefully I think. A little goes a long way.

**John:** My daughter has started watching Criminal Intent. Not, Criminal Intent. She’s started watching one of the CBS procedurals that’s been on for like 20 years. And so she’s watching an episode from the first season and I was so surprised because it opens with this scene that’s from the point of view from none of the actual main characters of the show. And it basically shows the crime but hides who the killer was in the crime. And then the rest of the episode is trying to figure out who the killer was. And it’s just not a format that I’m used to at all. But it was a very common format for a long time in procedurals.

So, I agree with Craig that you’re going to be making choices based on the situation you’re going to find yourself in and sort of whether it’s going to be most effective for us as the audience to have information that the protagonist doesn’t have. You’re also going to make some fundamental choices about how your story is told. And so this thing I was writing the treatment on I had to very explicitly from the start say we are not cutting away to this villain’s point of view. This is not going to be a movie where we ever see what the villain is doing independent of the hero.

**Craig:** And you’re allowed to set those ground rules. Just know that if you are going to make a point of saying here’s a thing that someone doesn’t know but now I’m telling it to you, it will always threaten artifice. It disrupts our verisimilitude. Because life doesn’t work that way.

In life we have a perspective. It’s through our two eyes. That’s what we get. So, it’s a little artificial. It can be wonderful. It can also be slightly cheaty. It’s one of those things.

**John:** Yeah. 1917 which was a great movie from this past year had incredibly limited POV where you only follow those guys as they’re walking through the trenches and doing everything. That’s an extreme example. But Parasite also does limited POV. And it could have cutaway to any of those character’s perspective on what they thought was going on. And director and writers really figured out what would be the most effective way to tell their specific story.

**Craig:** Exactly. All right. MJ writes, “Last year I made it to the second round of Austin Film Festival.” I assume that’s the screenwriting contest portion of that. “And after receiving the feedback and making changes I felt that my script was ready to submit to my company as a prospective buyer.” Hmm, they have their own company? Maybe they mean another company. “After reading the submission agreement, which they make every submitter sign, I became wary of signing it. My fiancé’s dad is a lawyer. And he said he became unhinged after reading the agreement. There’s one section in particular that concerns us.” And I think what MJ is saying is this is the agreement with the Austin Film Festival? I don’t know. Or with the company?

**John:** So he’s submitting it to a company it looks like. And so the submission agreement had some clauses in it.

**Craig:** OK. So their submission agreement is the problem. “Section five in short states that any damages awarded through arbitration shall not exceed $10,000 for film or $40,000 for television series. I have two questions regarding this. One, is this sort of agreement common? Two, what’s the likelihood that I could be screwed over by signing something like this?”

John? You have a law degree. I mean—[laughs]

**John:** As a lawyer…so what I will say is from other folks that I’ve talked to, some places do have you sign submission agreements. They’re not absolutely all that uncommon. I’m not particularly freaked out by this. I think if you’re approaching everything from a defensive posture like oh my god they’re going to steal my stuff and take my work and it’s all going to be a disaster, you’re not going to have a very good, happy time in this industry.

So, submission agreements are there because the company is trying to protect themselves from claims that someone stole – that their movie was stolen. This blockbuster was actually based on this thing that I sent into the company. So that’s why companies have submission agreements. Studios have them. Other places have them. I’m not actually not worried about it.

But I would ask is the place you’re submitting to have they made movies? Have they actually done things that are out there in the world? If it’s just some person you’ve never heard of, then I don’t know that it’s worth signing any submission agreement because I’m not sure that they’re worth anything at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. And behind all this there is a legal concept called adhesion contract. And adhesion contract, it sort of describes a lot of the sort of boilerplate that we are confronted with all the time. For instance, terms of use. We’re constantly signing terms of use that we do not read. And adhesion contract is basically boilerplate language that has been defined by one party. It’s usually a party that is bigger and stronger. And is set up as a kind of hard and fast and unnegotiable gate through which a kind of lesser powerful party has to go through. You don’t have a choice. Sign this or piss off.

And when you do have an adhesion contract there is a possibility that a court – let’s say this company did somehow do something damaging to you then a court would say, yeah, the fact that this poor writer had to sign your dumb agreement does not mean that it’s actually enforceable to the extent that you wish it would be.

That’s something that a lawyer would have to go through. And it’s not anything I think that anybody could ever count on. But just be aware that that is a concept in law. So, we’re held I guess to the standards of these boilerplate definitions maybe not quite as strongly as we think we are.

**John:** Yeah. So I think I’m speaking for both of us saying I’m not especially worried about this thing, but just any place you’re sending this to just keep an eye out for are they really a reputable place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. And, I mean, just remember that some of these things are signs of who they are. You know? Are they worried that people are going to be suing – have other people sued them? Is that why this is in there? Because they’ve…

By and large, again, you know, our position is people aren’t really actively ripping other people off actively. But there are a lot of bad actors in the world who do fuzzy – that gray area stuff. That’s where it gets gross. And if they’re all wired up on avoiding lawsuits and going to arbitration and limiting damages it makes me wonder why. So, anyway, something – food for thought.

**John:** Food for thought. Justin in Pasadena writes, “If a writers strike does end up happening, what advice can you give to us non-WGA writers? Are there any unique opportunities we should know about? Or might there be some workarounds we should use to our advantage? And, of course, how can we not step on any toes in the process?”

So prefacing all of this by saying we can talk through hypotheticals about a writers strike, but there’s nothing saying that’s going to happen. But Craig you and I were both around in the 2008 strike and I remember we both interacted with some folks who were not WGA members who were coming out to the picket lines and stuff like that, too. So, let’s talk through at least what we remember from the 2007-2008 strike.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, just as a matter of law, if you’re not a member of the Writers Guild, and the Writers Guild is on strike, that means there’s no current contract between the companies and the union. And you can certainly legally work for them. There used to be a thing, and maybe it’s still there, when you apply for a membership to the Writers Guild it says, “Did you work during the strike?” And you’re supposed to say “yeah I did” if you did. And then they in theory could kind of imply that you can never be a member here, but they’re actually not allowed to do that at all. I remember that came up in a boardroom discussion.

But that’s the legal reality. The ethical reality is, you know, the world does not look kindly on replacement players. Because what you’re doing is making it harder for the union to end the strike and ideally to end the strike in favor of the union that you want to want to be part of. Because one thing is for sure, Justin. The strike will end. And when it ends then you’re going to want to be part of that union. And you’re going to want to be part of a union that has made the best possible deal for its members. So, the question is were you making that easier or harder to do by taking this replacement writer job?

And also what do you think the companies are going to be paying you? Do they think they’re going to be paying you union stuff? You’re not going to be getting pension. You’re not going to be getting health. You’re not going to be getting residuals. You’re not going to be getting credit protections. So, do you want to know how to not step on any toes in the process, don’t take those jobs.

**John:** Yeah. Don’t take those jobs. I would also say back in 2008 it was sort of hard to find screenwriters and actually talk with them. And so one of the nice things about picketing, maybe the only nice thing about picketing is you got to meet a lot of other people. And so I got to meet a lot of other writers who I’d only sort of seen their credits. But I also got to meet a lot of writers who were not yet WGA members who’d come out at Paramount at 6:30 in the morning when I was picketing there. And I would talk to them as we walked in small circles. And some of them have gone on to become brand name writers in this industry.

So, it was a chance to be out there and talk with folks. But that was 2008. This is not 2008. I mean, there’s so many more opportunities to meet writers in person.

**Craig:** Way more.

**John:** Now than there ever were before. So that’s not a good cause for a work stoppage. Hopefully the situation will not come up at all, but if it were to come up I agree with Craig. You’re doing yourself and no one any favors by looking at this as an opportunity for you to advance your career.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s pretty shortsighted. I have a side question. I mean, what is the value of the actual act of picketing for us? I’ve always wondered this. Traditionally the point of a picket line would be to picket the institution you were striking against. A factory. A hospital. A hotel. And then if scabs were coming into work they would have to go through the picket line and the people picketing would go “boo” and shame them. But just make it hard for other unions – so a lot of unions, we’re respecting the picket line. We’re not going through. We don’t really have that ability. It’s not like the trucks stopped rolling into these lots, or anybody else stopped rolling into the lots. We wouldn’t even picket every single thing.

In our circumstance, isn’t the best tool we have to just not work? I’m just curious. What do we get from the picketing other than the kind of meeting other writers and getting exercise, which for us honestly as a group super important?

**John:** I would say, top of my head I would say visibility just to make it clear that this is an actual thing that’s happened. Something that news cameras can point out is kind of useful. A reminder that a thing is actually happening so that people who work inside a studio on a daily basis can see like, oh that’s right, this is actually a thing that’s happening, even if they’re not in a development role. If they’re an accountant they say like, ah, this is a thing that’s happening. So that the president of the studio has to drive past that picket line every day is not probably a great thing for them.

But I think there’s also an aspect of solidarity and just sort of – because what is different about a person who is working on a factory line is that they see their coworkers every day. Screenwriters don’t see each other every day. I mean, TV writers do see each other every day. And so there is probably a solidarity and we’re all in this together thing which is I’m guessing important about picketing classically. But I think it’s fair to ask. This is a different time now than 20 years ago. Things do change.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m just kind of curious if there’s some other less industrial revolution way of doing this. Because I don’t perceive that in the 2007-2008 strike that the act of picketing itself had a dramatic impact on what we did. I could be wildly wrong on that. There’s a certain performative aspect to it that I’m just wondering. Like is there something better? I guess really I’m not saying don’t do something, but rather is there a better version or a more impactful modern version?

**John:** If you have thoughts about that as listeners you can write in and tell us what you think.

**Craig:** Neo-picketing. What would it look like?

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this website called Travel Time. And so often with Google Maps and other things you can figure out how long it will take you to get from point A to point B. So like from my house to Disney, how long will it take for me to get there as I’m getting my picketing sign ready to march there? This is the opposite of that. So this basically says given a certain amount of time from a certain location how far could you get. This is based on usual traffic or how transit lines work. And it’s really fascinating to look at different cities and say like, OK, from the center of London in one hour I can get through to basically anywhere in London. Center of Los Angeles, how far can I get to somewhere in the Los Angeles region? And it’s disappointingly small in number.

**Craig:** Well, I would love to see how far you can get in London in one hour, because I feel like there was one point where I think I went three blocks in an hour.

**John:** Oh, certainly not driving. But like through the Tube and other ways.

**Craig:** Through the Tube, yes. Or walking even, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Walking. So it’s an interesting way of comparing cities and sort of the choices cities have made. Also just how geography sometimes constrains the ability of cities to function certain ways.

**Craig:** That sounds excellent. I love any tool that makes traveling easier. I have to travel a lot more than I ever thought I would. And so I’ve become like super fussy about making it easier for myself.

My One Cool Thing is another person. So I think two weeks in a row that my One Cool Thing is a person. And this is slightly political. Not even slightly. It’s completely political. My One Cool Thing this week is a man named Mark Kelly. Mark Kelly is running for the Senate in Arizona. He’s the Democratic Party candidate for the Senate in Arizona. This is going to be a special election because of the death of John McCain. So when John McCain died the Governor of Arizona appointed Republican Martha McSally who is not good.

And so Mark Kelly is running. Mark Kelly, I’ve met him, he is fascinating. He is a former astronaut. And he is a combat veteran as well with the navy. And he is also the husband of Gabby Giffords, who was the former congresswoman from Arizona until she was shot by a deranged gunman. And, you know, went through traumatic brain injury. And he’s had one hell of a life.

And he is just a remarkably decent guy and kind of a reminder that there are still these wonderfully principled people who have dedicated their lives to this country. And who have also suffered personally because of the way some of our laws work in this country and have not given up. If anything else they have tripled down and said I want to fix it. And sometimes there are days when I think I don’t want to be here anymore. [laughs] And then I look at – and I talk to a guy like Mark Kelly who says of course you do. And we fix it. That’s what we do.

So my One Cool Thing this week is Mark Kelly. And, of course, if you want to – he doesn’t do PACs or anything like that. He’s just taking personal donations. So if you want to donate to him just look up I think – what’s the website? Think Blue? Act Blue?

**John:** Act Blue.

**Craig:** Act Blue. Think Blue is the Dodgers slogan. Sorry. Act Blue is the header organization that collects individual donations for democratic candidates. And you can Google up Mark Kelly and find his Act Blue site and make a donation if you so desire.

**John:** Fantastic. We’ll have a link in the show notes to that as well. Stick around after the credits because we will be talking much more politics. But for now, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao with production assistance this week by Stuart Friedel and Dustin Bocks. It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is again by James Launch and Jim Bond.

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.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. In those show notes you’ll have the links to all the clips that we used. Thank you to the people who put that stuff online. That’s great. It helps us figure out how people talk in real life.

You’ll find the transcript for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We get them usually within the week the episode airs. And remember you can sign up to become a Premium member of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net. That gets you all the back episodes and the bonus segments like the one we’re going to do right now. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, more politics.

**Craig:** Oh goodie.

**John:** Oh goodie. Good stuff. So, here’s a thing that I’ve been doing recently, and I think this was a suggestion from Jon Lovett on Pod Save America. Is when someone says, “Oh, you know Trump is going to get reelected,” the response should be what are you doing today to stop that.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** Basically to throw that back at it. So, on my daily to do list I have this sort of quarter sheet that I use as my to-do list of what I’m going to do every day. And at breakfast I fill it out. I have a new entry in there and it’s Defeat Trump. And every day I have to do something that will actually advance that goal. And so generally it is donating to political candidates, but sometimes it’s actually reading up about things. It’s filling out my California ballot. It’s researching sort of who I want in certain offices. So, I’m trying to do something every day to make sure that I don’t wake up a year from now in an actual fascist nation.

**Craig:** Well I think that’s a great plan. Have you considered somehow destroying the orange makeup factory? How deep do you go?

Yes, I also do not want to – look, I think we are actually every day waking up in a country that is – I’m not going to be an alarmist and say that we are currently living in a fascist state. But we are living in something that is in between what we were and a fascist state.

**John:** Yeah. It’s trending in a bad direction.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. And particularly this latest thing. I mean, the wall between the Justice Department and the White House has always been a kind of necessary check and balance to power. It’s gone. That is terrifying. And the rule of law is breaking down. And one of the reasons why it’s just as important to me that if you have to put all your money on one bet, and it’s a proposition bet, yes or no, you’re always going to be incurring a lot of risk, even if the odds are in your favor you’re incurring risk. So, if the big bet is get rid of Trump that is incurring risk that you will fail.

What you do to hedge that is actively support people who are running for the Senate in particular. I don’t think the makeup of the House of Representatives is going to change dramatically. I think if anything it will even get better, I hope, in terms of people who are opposed to Trump. If the Senate can swing over and be opposed to Trump that is a big deal. Then it is a different situation. It is a wildly different situation.

So, I’m working on that as well. But I think that you’re right. People who sit there and go, “Well you know…” Look, no. Because, OK, fine, then what are we supposed to do? Just curl up and die? I mean, you fight. You rage, rage against the dying of the light.

**John:** Yes. I think back to the special episode we recorded right after Trump was elected called Everything is Going to be OK.

**Craig:** Is it? Were we right?

**John:** But here’s what I’ll say. The fear I was feeling at that moment was so intense. And I sort of thought we would get to this place that we’re at right now. I thought we would get there within a few weeks. And so I guess I was surprised that it’s actually taken this long to do it and the sort of level of incompetence with evil is sort of what’s taken so long to do that.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** That Stephen Miller didn’t know how to do all the terrible things he wanted to do so clearly.

**Craig:** Ted Cruz would have done way more damage by now.

**John:** Oh yeah. Absolutely. So I can take some comfort in that and also in the great successes that happened in the 2018 elections where you saw like, oh, people will actually show up and vote the smart people in. So that gives me a lot of hope.

What’s been frustrating I would say, especially the last three weeks, is looking at the Democratic primaries and the degree to which the people who should be most outraged about what’s happening, the Justice Department things, are directing all of their vitriol at Democratic candidates, which is ridiculous and pointless.

**Craig:** So stupid.

**John:** Let me stipulate, the Democratic nominee is very likely going to be Jewish, gay, or a woman.

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** Almost a guarantee. Unless Biden somehow magically pulls out, it’s going to be one of those three things.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** But it’s true though, right?

**Craig:** Yeah, it does seem – well, the one thing I will say–

**John:** Oh, Bloomberg.

**Craig:** Yeah. And Biden, we are pretty early. So we’re going to run into these other states. We don’t know.

**John:** Or it’s going to either be–

**Craig:** Old.

**John:** It’s either going to be Jewish, gay, woman, or it’s going to be Joe Biden.

**Craig:** Yes. Correct.

**John:** So we have to be prepared for those scenarios. And in preparing for those scenarios let’s be more mindful about the things we are saying about those groups and Joe Biden, because that may be who we are running. So you and I recorded a segment we actually snipped out of the show because it was just goodbye mentions where I ranted about sort of the homophobia and sort of antigay stuff I was seeing being directed towards Pete Buttigieg which was really happening. And I was so frustrated that it was from these people who claim to be giant liberal supporters and that I wasn’t seeing it being called out.

You could say the same about the sexism. You could say the same about anti-Bidenism. Whatever you want to call that.

**Craig:** Antisemitism appears to be missing, which is I guess good? I mean, it is good. Of course it’s good. It’s just kind of curious.

**John:** If we end up with Sanders as the nominee–

**Craig:** Then it will come roaring back.

**John:** It’ll come roaring back and it’s going to be harder to claim the moral high ground when you went after the gay guy fine, you went after the woman fine. So, let’s just, I mean, let’s all be better.

**Craig:** I know. I’m bracing for that. I never forget like how – well, I do. Sometimes I forget. And then America reminds me how many people in America just hate Jewish people and believe that they’re some sort of weird devils in charge of everything. And so I’m bracing for that. If Bernie Sanders is the nominee I just feel like oh boy here we go. Which is a very – you know, it’s a pretty Jewish thing of me think. It’s the way we are.

But, I have been so just – I guess like a dum-dum, just simply focused on doing what needs to be done to get rid of Trump, and I’m happy to make positive arguments, and I could I think make positive arguments for all of those candidates. Maybe not Mike Bloomberg. But all the other ones. But the idea of tearing any of them down right now seems virtually insane.

**John:** Yeah. It does.

**Craig:** What? What? I mean, love who you love. It’s a little bit like my attitude towards movies and television. Like I talk about the things that I love because I think that’s where you actually get the most information. I mean, when they attack each other I feel sick right now, truly sick, in a way I never did before because I just think like, no, we can’t – we can’t. My god.

**John:** We can’t slice each other up over really what are minor differences in what we’re trying to do. The idea that this candidate who is not as progressive or this candidate who is more progressive is going to destroy everything if they become elected is a tremendous fallacy. And so dangerous and so feeds into exactly what the disinformation campaigns are hoping for, where you can’t even tell who are the bots and who are the people who just aren’t thinking this through very well.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, look, we know that social media is designed to amplify the extremes. It’s just what it does. Because the only way to rise above a kind of large averaged point of view is to be extreme. And then by getting amplified the extremes begin to pull more people to the extremes.

You want to know who I want to vote for? Whoever is running against Donald Trump.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** That’s who I want to vote for.

**John:** And I do like that the candidates will repeatedly say that. They’ll say after each primary they’ll say of course we’re going to support whoever. That’s great. But I think it’s also a good moment to call out like and don’t be assholes to everyone else online because we need everybody here and we need to all be rowing in the same direction.

**Craig:** All hands on deck. All hands on deck. And, look, do I have a preference right now? I mean, I have some. Because, look, California we don’t have to vote just yet. So, I’ve been thinking about it because I don’t feel a great need to decide in this moment right now and commit to a team and be Team Blank or Team Blank. I’m just thinking about it and reading. And that’s how that’s going to go. But I will say that the argument that we have to vote for A or you cannot vote for B because they can’t beat Trump is horseshit.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Every single one of these candidates can beat Donald Trump. Every single one of them. I believe that at the bottom of my heart. Anybody that says Bernie Sanders can’t beat Donald Trump is nuts. And anybody that says that Pete Buttigieg can’t beat Donald Trump is nuts. And the same for Amy Klobuchar and the same for Joe Biden. And by the way, the same even for Mike Bloomberg. Honestly I do believe that in the end what’s going to happen is the great majority of people are going to be voting against Donald Trump.

**John:** Yep. It has to happen.

**Craig:** Let’s not cripple our candidate before they get in there. Let’s not hobble them, you know.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s look at these as competitors for that spot, but not as opponents. Not as villains. We are trying to pick who it is that we think can run this race the best. But that does not mean that we are going to cede any ground to the person who is already in that office.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, I think that because I believe that all of them are capable of beating Donald Trump, then I can also actually then I who would I like to be president of these people. Who would be my preferred candidate? And there are all sorts of reasons to say one or the other. But my god the thought of going out there and saying something cruel about another one of these candidates, I mean, at times I lose my patience with the supporters of a certain candidate because they just are, you know, a handful.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that’s not going to translate to me tearing that candidate down.

**John:** 100%. And I will knock on doors for whoever that person is who is running against Donald Trump.

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely. I will donate the maximum amount that I can as an individual. I presume that my wife will as well. And, yeah, I’ll knock on doors and I’ll do what I have to do. I think we’ll all just line up. I mean, that’s the thing. We have to line up and do what needs to be done. And accept that there is no perfect answer. There’s just a better answer. So can we please just choose our better answer with respect for each other and advocate as hard as we can? And I could be wrong, but again with the exception of Mayor Bloomberg who I’m a little concerned about, which is fair, I’m allowed to be concerned, I don’t think that any of the candidates pose an existential threat in the way that Donald Trump does to everyone. But particularly Donald Trump poses an existential threat to immigrants, to people of color, to trans people. Generally to LGBTQ people, I think. And to journalists. And to the law.

Now, what else do I need to say?

**John:** To the notion of democracy. Yes.

**Craig:** Correct. To our existence. It is an existential threat to us and our standing in the world and our place in the world and our future. And in the end – oh, I forgot the biggest one – to our ability to live on this planet.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because he is not helping solve the coming climate crisis. He’s like how can we speed it up.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So really we’re going to tear down any of these candidates while we’re – here comes a car. The car is about to hit you. Who would you like to stop that person in the car? Only this person, no one else.

**John:** No one else.

**Craig:** OK. So what if that person, you don’t get that person? Then I’m getting run over. O-kay. Cool. Cool man. Cool. Good for you.

**John:** Good plan. Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Bye.

* [Victory for both partnered Irish election opponents](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/10/irish-election-couple-who-ran-against-each-other-social-democrats-fianna-fail-both-get-elected) we discussed in [episode 436](https://johnaugust.com/2020/political-movies)
* [Scriptnotes, episode 241](https://johnaugust.com/2016/fan-fiction-and-ghost-taxis), in which John predicts Parasite
* [Assistants’ Advice to Showrunners](https://johnaugust.com/2020/assistants-advice-to-showrunners)
* [Mythic Quest](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/mythic-quest-ravens-banquet/umc.cmc.1nfdfd5zlk05fo1bwwetzldy3) on Apple TV+
* [California Penal Code 632](https://www.wklaw.com/practice-areas/eavesdropping-penal-code-section-632/) and the legality of eavesdropping
* [Scriptnotes, episode 433](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-one-with-greta-gerwig) with Greta Gerwig
* [Appalachian English](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU&feature=youtu.be) from Mountain Talk
* The Austin History Center’s [accounts from visitors](https://soundcloud.com/austinhistorycenter/ahc-3303-klempner-cindy) and an [interview with architect Tom Hatch](https://soundcloud.com/austinhistorycenter/ahc-3341-hatch-tom-20180502a-clip2)
* Ben Platt on [Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang](https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/las-culturistas/e/65248782?autoplay=true)
* [Fck Work But Ima Go, episode 404](https://anchor.fm/fckworkpodcast/episodes/Ep–404—Is-You-Gone-Help-or-Micromanage-eao8pe/a-a1ebg8f)
* Key & Peele’s [OK (uncensored)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pufATqebv8)
* [Scriptnotes, episode 45](https://johnaugust.com/2012/setting-perspective-and-terrible-numbers), in which we discuss perspective
* [Adhesion contracts](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adhesion_contract_(contract_of_adhesion))
* [Travel Time](https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/search/0_lat=34.05513&0_lng=-118.25703&0_title=Los%20Angeles%2C%20CA%2C%20USA&0_tt=90)
* [Mark Kelly](https://markkelly.com/) is running for Senate in Arizona
* [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 James Llonch ([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/438standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/the-new-one-with-mike-birbiglia).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi folks. This is Craig. Today’s podcast episode will contain some salty language. So if you are with kids in the car or people that just don’t like that kind of talk, go and put the headphones on. Or pull over and stop.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 427 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at writing samples sent in by listeners and discuss what’s working and what’s not. To help us do that we’re excited to welcome back Mike Birbiglia. He is the writer-director-performer of Sleepwalk with Me, Don’t Think Twice, and The New One now playing in Los Angeles and coming to Netflix very soon. Welcome back, Mike.

**Mike Birbiglia:** Thanks so much.

**Craig:** We got the Bigs.

**Mike:** I’m Patient Zero on the pod. I was one of the first listeners.

**Craig:** You’re the only person that calls it The Pod, by the way. Nobody else calls it that.

**Mike:** Really?

**Craig:** You’re the only one.

**Mike:** First of all, I love The Pod. And then second of all I plug The Pod.

**Craig:** Really?

**Mike:** When I did the tour, The New One, in DC and went back to Georgetown to my screenwriting class taught by John Glavin I told the students, “You should listen to every episode of Scriptnotes or at the very least the top 20 recommended ones.” It is a great public service that you’re doing for free—

**Craig:** Well, I’m doing it for free. John has been paid very well. [laughs]

**Mike:** But that it’s a great service and it is as good, I believe, as any film program in America. If not better.

**Craig:** Correct me if I’m wrong, not free?

**Mike:** No, they’re quite expensive.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re quite expensive.

**Mike:** Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

**Craig:** So if you could have something for free, or something that’s like it but not as good for $50,000 a year?

**Mike:** I’m going to go with free.

**Craig:** You’re going to go with free.

**Mike:** This is the ad. It’s a 30-second spot. We’ll run it on Fox Business.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Right. Do we have our own personal 800 number so that we know to give credit to Birbiglia for these subscriptions?

**John:** Absolutely, yes. So use the promo code Birbiglia to save 100% on your zero dollar—

**Mike:** Use that easy-to-spell hashtag Birbiglia.

**Craig:** Yeah. But take out most of the Is, but not all of them. Keep the one that matters.

**John:** While you’re searching for Birbiglia on Scriptnotes you could listen to Episode 121 and Episode 261, your early ones on the show. So thank you very much for coming back the third time.

**Craig:** It’s his third time. You’re going to get a jacket soon.

**John:** The fourth episode.

**Craig:** I think the fifth. SNL does a five-time club.

**Mike:** Wow.

**John:** Craig, we have a live show coming up. We can plug the live show. December 12, it’s a Thursday, in Hollywood. People can get their tickets right now. They should get their tickets right now. Craig, why is this the episode they should come for?

**Craig:** Well we have fantastic guests. One I think is going to be a big draw particularly, but the other ones should be equally as big. We have Lorene Scafaria, who is fantastic, and recently wrote and directed Hustlers, which is a big hit. And she is a wise individual.

**Mike:** She was great, one of the times I heard her on this show was tremendous.

**John:** She’s amazing.

**Craig:** By the way, didn’t seem to realize that it was going to be a live show. Yeah, she just said, “Wait, this is live?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yes it is Lorene. We also have Shoshannah Stern and Josh Feldman who are the co-creators and co-stars of This Close which is on Sundance Channel.

**John:** It’s a fantastic show.

**Craig:** Amazing. I met Shoshannah on a panel for the TV Academy. She was remarkable. Super funny. Really smart. Just one of the – you know sometimes you meet somebody and you’re like, oh yeah, yep, your brain, my brain, we’re the same kind of screwed up.

**John:** In a world of coincidences, Josh Feldman was assigned to me by the Sundance Labs to – I’m his mentor. And so I’ve been meeting with him for the last year.

**Craig:** Shoshannah has selected me as her mentor now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, yeah.

**John:** Our mentees are going to battle it out live on stage.

**Mike:** I think what’s special about the live event, because I did one in Austin with you folks once.

**John:** That’s right.

**Mike:** Is that the level of nerd in the audience is so beautiful.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** Oh, just wait till this one.

**Craig:** Wait.

**Mike:** And, no, hold one. But I believe that the level of nerd is so strong that I think, especially if you’re single, perfect place to find your life partner.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** That’s beautiful.

**Mike:** Another screenwriter.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We have not had a Scriptnotes wedding yet. I think that is a goal for–

**Craig:** We might have.

**John:** We might have.

**Craig:** No one has told us.

**John:** Tell us if it has happened. But first tell us who the fourth guest is.

**Craig:** If you wanted to increase the concentration of lovely dorks, our kind of nerds in the audience, what better way could you do than have Kevin Feige, the head of Marvel, the chief creative officer of Marvel.

**Mike:** That’s pretty over the top.

**Craig:** Show up. So Kevin is a producer. Kevin is a studio executive. Kevin is sort of also a writer of a kind. He’s the puppet master of all of these Marvel movies, all of which have done remarkably well. So Kevin is going to be joining us. And I have a feeling that we’re going to bring in different nerds. I mean, we have our nerds. And I think we’re going to get some new nerds.

**Mike:** Do you have Scorsese coming by?

**John:** Oh my god. We should get them together.

**Mike:** I would love to see that conversation.

**Craig:** You know what we’ll do? I will be Martin Scorsese. I’ll do my Scorsese impression. I’ll be Scorsese. It’ll be great. I’ll be Scorsese doing a Birbiglia impression.

**Mike:** What you do isn’t cinema.

**Craig:** You’ve got to go really fast. So the thing is, the thing is, when you look at the movies, when you look at all the films, when you look at the great films, you’re talking about like The Searchers. And Marvel, I’m not taking anything away from them. They’re great movies. They’re great movies. People love them. But is it cinema? Is it cinema? It’s not cinema.

**Mike:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** It’s like Martin Scorsese is here.

**Mike:** It’s pretty good.

**John:** It was really good.

**Craig:** It’s not as good as my Birbiglia.

**Mike:** No, but that’s strong. What’s your Birbiglia? What’s your Birbiglia?

**Craig:** The Birbiglia, this is all I have so far. So Jenny and I were doing great. We were doing great. We were talking to each other. We were having a great time. We were sharing the sofa. Everything was going great. Everything was amazing. And then one day she said to me, “Hey, I think I want to have a kid.” And I said, oh no.

That’s it.

**Mike:** I think it’s OK.

**Craig:** It’s not bad, right?

**John:** But it’s not fantastic.

**Craig:** Your assistant thinks it’s F-in amazing.

**Mike:** Peter, yeah.

**Craig:** Peter is all over that. Two thumbs up from Peter. You’re so angry.

**Mike:** The vocal quality isn’t right.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not that kind of impressionist.

**Mike:** It’s kind of a summary of some stories that I’ve told. A summary of the stories I’ve told.

**Craig:** It’s a style. It’s a style. I think what it is, is it’s fast and the stop and then the heartfelt.

**Mike:** I think it’s more of a [pray-see] than a precise.

**Craig:** Correct. It is an imprecise [pray-see].

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Correct. But if you are not feeling well tonight, because you have a little bit of a cold, and you need me to just do it. I’m not sure 100% of the audience will know.

**Mike:** I’ll call Bill Hader.

**Craig:** Right. If Hader says no.

**Mike:** And then if Hader says no, I’ll call you.

**Craig:** Then you call me. That’s what they do on Barry, by the way.

**Mike:** Hader does one that’s menacingly mean. One of the things about the SNL folks, Fred Armisen does, too. One of the things about the SNL folks that people don’t often realize is that not just can they do impressions of famous people, they can do them of their friends. And they’re pitch perfect. And they’re mean. They’re mean-spirited and they make you feel bad.

**Craig:** I hope that mine didn’t make you feel bad.

**Mike:** No, no, no, that was fine. But one time I did a show with Fred Armisen at a college in New Jersey and he just got on stage and he did five minutes of me.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**Mike:** And it was hilarious, but like impressions are mean. I mean, you basically pull out a thing that’s notable and then you put it times ten.

**Craig:** Here’s a non-mean. Have you ever heard Tig Notaro’s impression of a clown horn? It’s really great. It’s like – it’s really good. I like that one.

**John:** Good stuff. Other bits of news. The premium feed is going to be coming pretty soon. So we’re setting up the new thing that’s going to replace the old thing, which was bad, and janky, and broken. But in fixing some stuff we had to change some pipes behind the scenes. So if this episode did not show up as you expect it to, just go and re-subscribe in whatever service you’re using.

**Craig:** How would they know if it didn’t – how would they hear this?

**John:** So what I’m saying is if it’s been a while and you’re like I can see this episode on iTunes, but it didn’t show up for me, you should actually just go ahead and re-subscribe because something got broken. I think it’s going to be OK for most people, but people are on weird players sometimes.

**Craig:** And is my share of the revenue going to increase?

**John:** All of those details are going to be announced at the live show.

**Mike:** There’s a lot of news at the live show about your revenue streams, Craig.

**Craig:** I think we know what’s happening.

**John:** But one of the things I want to test out, were going to do a trial run today, which is to have a bonus segment after the credits. So just like Marvel movies have a little bonus segment afterwards, so in our bonus segment today after the credits I want to talk about scams.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Because you and I have both encountered scams this past week.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. And, Mike, for a while that was your main source of income was just running scams.

**Mike:** Yeah, yeah, that’s what I do.

**Craig:** On the streets of Brooklyn.

**Mike:** Yep.

**John:** Finally. A bit of follow up. We’ve been talking a lot about assistant pay. One of the ideas that came in from listeners was to have a town hall. That is actually happening. So Sunday November 24 at 3pm at the SAG Building there’s going to be a town hall. The venue is pretty small, so we’re going to try to live stream it as well. Details are going to be in the show notes for this episode or just check my Twitter. This is not an official Scriptnotes event. I’m going to be there, but it’s really the folks behind PayUpHollywood and the Young Entertainment Activists.

**Craig:** How much are you charging assistants to show up?

**John:** That is a free show.

**Craig:** Oh, you’re not charging them? [laughs] How great would that be? We’re charging assistants to come to a town hall about improving their pay.

**Mike:** That’s Hollywood in a nutshell, by the way.

**Craig:** That is kind of how it works, isn’t it? Have you been following assistant – Peter, have you been following along? Oh, yes, yes, Peter is pulling his credit card out right now for us. Excellent.

**Mike:** To buy a ticket to the assistant pay event.

**Craig:** Oh, Hollywood.

**Mike:** I’ve only been following it a little bit. I saw a few threads that John I think had retweeted that I thought were very powerful. And I think it’s a good movement.

**Craig:** Hopefully it’s an effective one, too. You know, one of the other ideas that we had heard was the notion of some kind of pledge, and we don’t know necessarily what the details of it would be, but a worthy topic for the town hall. A pledge that is essentially a kind of minimum, where you can say as an employer, whether I’m a show runner or I run a large company, whatever it is, I’m signing onto this pledge and promising I will never pay an assistant less than this dollar amount per week. No matter what the hours are, this is the base pay. I’m not going under it.

And in that way people could look and see, oh, here are the people that are at least not terrible. It may not be necessarily people that are great. But if we could remove terrible from the equation it would be a huge improvement.

**Mike:** I think that’s great.

**Craig:** We’ll see.

**John:** Mike Birbiglia, you’re in town because you are at the Ahmanson doing The New One, which is a new show. What do you actually call that thing that you are doing? Because it’s not standup. It is a one-man show, but it’s not a one-man show in the way that other – what do you call what you’re doing?

**Mike:** People call it many things. And I have no problem with whatever people call it. Some people call it standup. Some people call it a solo play. Some people call it a one-man show. Some people call it a monologue. It’s something that, you know, I did four of them now with my director, Seth Barrish. Sleepwalk With Me, My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend. Sleepwalk With Me, which became a movie. My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend which is on Netflix and maybe right now on Prime. Thank God for Jokes which is on Netflix. And The New One, which comes out November 26 on Netflix. And they are, you know, they take about three or four years to develop. I develop them in front of audiences. I tour the country with them. They have a story to them. They have a singular story that contains stories within them. They form an arc. They sometimes have emotion, depending on how the audience experiences it.

Some people love them. And some people are perplexed by them. I think the same way that some people loved and were perplexed by Hannah Gadsby’s show that won the Emmy, which I loved. But some people were like, “Wait a minute. It’s not jokes the way I understand jokes to be.” But I’m proud of that. I think the same way that Hannah is. And other people who do these kinds of shows are.

**Craig:** I listen to standup all the time just on Slacker on Internet radio in my car, just to keep up. I like to keep up with comedians. And there is a set that Janeane Garofalo did and at some point she said someone came up to her after one of her sets and said, “I really enjoyed your talk.”

**Mike:** Your talk.

**Craig:** Here it is. That’s it. That’s what I do. That’s it. I do a talk. But there is something very writerly about it. You are maybe writing this thing in slow motion because I assume you’re amending and—

**Mike:** Every night.

**Craig:** Every night.

**Mike:** Every show. Even now when it’s already in the can.

**Craig:** So every show you’re—

**Mike:** And when people hear this I believe Monday there will be eight more performances at the Ahmanson. I’ll still be making changes and it’s already in the can coming out next week.

**Craig:** I think I’m seeing maybe like your second to last show or something like that.

**Mike:** It will be a good one.

**Craig:** You know what? Maybe don’t do one more after I do it.

**Mike:** OK.

**Craig:** When I’m there you’re done.

**Mike:** Wow. This is a real power move. I’m going to bring this up at the assistant event.

**Craig:** Well you’ll have to pay your way into that.

**Mike:** Yeah, $40.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

**John:** So all four of these shows are autobiographical. And we had Lulu Wang on last week talking about the autobiography that was in her movie. To what degree as you’re developing this are you being absolutely faithful to the sequence of events, how they happened, versus what actually works on stage?

**Mike:** Well it’s funny because, you know, David Sedaris who does this I think as well as almost anybody, if not anybody, people ask him that a lot. How true is this? And his answer makes me laugh. “True enough for you.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah.

**Mike:** And I think that that’s part of it. What you want to do is tell a story that has an arc and makes people feel and experience something. You also want people to believe that it happened. And so does it have to be true to a police log? No. It doesn’t.

**Craig:** But true enough to the spirit of what you felt and—

**Mike:** Absolutely. And it absolutely is that.

**Craig:** I always think about, especially when someone is telling stories about their own family, and you’re telling stories about your wife, at some point she’s going to say, “Yeah, that’s not true enough.” Do you get that from her a lot?

**Mike:** Sure. Constantly. Jen wrote this show with me and this is a very specific thing. At a certain point I reached this point where I was – the spirit, if people haven’t seen the show, the spirit of the show is the first half of the show is about all of the reasons no one should ever want to have a child. Second half of the show is about how I had a child and how I was right. And then in the emotional twist how I was wrong. And that sort of is like one little tease of the ending, of like, oh, OK, there’s hope for this person.

Because it’s dark. It’s a very dark comedic show.

**John:** Looking at yourself as a character, you’re not entirely sympathetic through a lot of this.

**Mike:** No. Absolutely not.

**Craig:** Ever. Even on this podcast. Ever.

**Mike:** But at a certain point, you know, my wife is a poet and I would say like, “Hey, could you tell me what it was like? What did it feel like – because she’s such a character in the show – what did it feel like when our daughter was dealing with different milestones, crawling,” and you know, and so for example she showed me – she goes, “Well, I wrote this poem about her crawling.” And I read that and I just go, well, that’s better than anything that I could write. And so I thought I’ll just read this on stage. And so then she became a credited additional writer on the show.

And so it really became – to Craig’s question of how much do you sort of vet the stuff – with this one it’s like I’d say every line in the show is vetted. And to the point where like, it’s funny, I won’t spoil – Elizabeth Banks came last night and she was – which is a huge honor, because I’m a huge admirer of hers. And she was laughing about there’s this line where I admit something about myself that maybe I’m not pulling my weight around the house quite enough. And she was like, “Oof, that moment is so devastating.” And I said to her, I go, “It’s not true. I actually do, do that thing.” And you take one for the team as an autobiographical writer because the drama wants conflict.

**John:** Yeah.

**Mike:** And the drama wants the protagonist to be wrong.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** So that the protagonist can grow and change and do all of these things.

**Craig:** And there’s a great tradition of this. I mean, you know, very famously Dean Martin would host all of these wonderful roasts and be drunk off his ass and everybody loved him because he was old Drunk Dino. And he didn’t drink at all.

**Mike:** That’s hilarious. I didn’t know that.

**Craig:** It was apple juice. Because you can’t function at those things and have timing and be funny if you’re literally lit. So he just faked it.

**Mike:** That’s fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just what we do. I mean, not on this podcast.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** 1.5 glasses of wine.

**Craig:** 1.5 glasses.

**John:** For a morning show like this 1.5 glasses of wine is perfect.

**Craig:** 1.5 glasses.

**John:** Talk about the writing process. So, the idea for doing The New One. Obviously you’re having a kid. A natural life event that’s happening. But what is the start of writing and when do you have stuff on a page that you’re starting to put in front of people to listen?

**Mike:** So for years I had – Jen and I had talked when we got married. She’s an introverted poet. I’m more of an extroverted comedian who talks about my life on stage. And we talked about when we get married I’m going to talk about us on stage. That’s sort of the nature of what I do. And I don’t know what to do. We talked that through.

When we had our daughter, when Jen got pregnant she was like, “I don’t want you talking about this.” And so I was like, OK. And so I wrote Thank God for Jokes which has nothing to do with me really. It’s about the concept of jokes and context really. And at a certain point we were at the Nantucket Film Festival for my movie Don’t Think Twice, and the director of the festival said there’s a storytelling night and the theme is jealousy. And Jen in the car looked at me and goes, “Well you’re jealous of our daughter Una. You should talk about that.”

**Craig:** Oh, you got the green light.

**John:** Yeah. OK, great.

**Craig:** You cracked the seal. Watch what happens now.

**Mike:** Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, OK, great. I’m going to talk about this. And it killed.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Mike:** I told a story about being jealous of our daughter because the premise being, and this ends up being a line in the show, which is my wife and daughter love each other so much and I’m there, too. I’m the pudgy, milk-less Vice President of the family. And that became essentially the thesis of the show The New One, which is about how Jen and I were two people who were one. And then at a certain point another one came and I was on the outside of that group. I was the one and they were the two. And then ultimately the communion of the ending of the show is that three becomes one.

**Craig:** Theme, my friends. Unifying theme. It works for everything. And it does elevate everything. And you mention Don’t Think Twice. So now I have to ask, because I was there during the early midwife-ing of Don’t Think Twice.

**Mike:** You were in my living room, on the couch, which I reference in the show, in the special.

**Craig:** And I thought the movie turned out beautifully.

**Mike:** Thanks.

**Craig:** And I’m of course, greedy audience member that I am, I’m wondering, OK, when is the next big cinematic Birbiglia experience coming? Or are you out of it?

**Mike:** I’m writing it.

**Craig:** Oh, you are? Are you?

**Mike:** I am. I am. There’s a few things I’m writing. I’m writing something for the stage that I’m very excited about. And it’s different from anything I’ve ever done. And I’m writing something for the screen that’s very different from anything I’ve ever done. And then Jen and I just finished a book called The New and Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad with poems by J. Hope Stein that merges comedy stories and poetry. That comes out for Mother’s Day.

**John:** That’s great.

**Mike:** So those are the three writing projects I’m working on right now.

**John:** Very cool. That’s a lot.

**Craig:** The Birbiglia industries are humming along.

**Mike:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** Beautiful.

**Mike:** Well Bill Gates asked me if I could raise productivity.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** And so said well I have to.

**Craig:** Well as a – I mean, I own quite a bit of stock in – what’s the stock symbol? BRBG?

**Mike:** Yeah, that’s what it is.

**Craig:** BRBG. I own a ton of BRBG. Yeah, so please. Faster.

**Mike:** Keep up the—

**Craig:** More and faster. More and faster.

**Mike:** If I could plug one thing, if people like what I’m doing, if they watched the special on Netflix, sign up for my mailing list on Birbigs.com. And what you’ll get is I’m doing a pre-order of my wife and my book, which comes out in May, and if you order that you’ll get a card, like a holiday card from me, and then my wife’s poetry book Little Astronaut, which is gorgeous.

**John:** Cool.

**Mike:** It’s spectacular. And this is actually – it’s a subject of a special that I’m working on for a couple years from now, but I’m increasingly a huge fan of supporting what you like. If you like the local pizzeria, go to the local pizzeria. If you like the local bookstore, go to the local bookstore. If you like small movies, see it in the theater. And I feel that way about my work. Like I so appreciate my fans. Because I’m not supported by a studio or network, it’s just people signing up for my mailing list and pre-ordering things. And that makes me able to make more things.

**Craig:** And what percentage of that money do I get?

**Mike:** Wait, you don’t get any of it.

**Craig:** Again? Is there any revenue stream I share in?

**Mike:** I think that you—

**John:** Chernobyl DVDs.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I get a little something from that.

**Mike:** The way that Elizabeth Warren feels about you, Craig.

**Craig:** I’m the problem. I’m the problem. I know. I know. I know.

**John:** I have a question about a specific technique I saw you do in the show, and I’m wondering sort of how you get to it. There are moments where you’ll finish a thought and sort of blunt cut to a completely different thought. And it feels like there’s a ticking clock you have to get back to to tie it back in in a short period of time. But it was the first time I ever noticed you doing it, but it works really well. It felt like in a weird way kind of a cinematic technique where you cut to something different, and like got to get back to how this is going to fit in. Can you talk about that?

**Mike:** It’s funny you should say that. The show in a certain sense is a spoken film in a certain way. Like my director, Seth Barrish, and I would always think in terms of pictures. You know, it’s like, you know, it’s more evocative to talk about sitting on the couch than just to talk about a conversation between me and my wife. Lying on the couch together, sharing hot and sour soup is more evocative than just talking, etc.

And yet in terms of like the driving force of the show, my director and I talk about a lot, is all about intent. And that the audience knows that we’re going somewhere. I’m digressing about how people with kids are like zombies. And I do like a flourish of four minutes of comedy about that. I come back to ultimately what I’m really saying is Jen says to me, “I think that if we had a kid I think it would be different.” And there’s a focus in the part where I’m saying Jen said this that I bring my voice down. The lighting designer does a nice job of coloring it in a way and focusing the lights so that the audience knows like pay attention to this part. Because this is actually the spine.

**Craig:** It’s kind of a nice mirror of who you are. Because you are very, like you say, you’re effusive, you’re outgoing, you’re funny. And so there is a lot of stuff coming out of you. And then I think sometimes you stop and go, wait, hold on. I’m in trouble.

**Mike:** Sure.

**Craig:** Or I feel a certain thing. And it reminds me – you get the best of all of it. And it’s a natural separation I think for you.

**Mike:** Thanks. Exactly. I would say the free association quality of the show is an outgrowth of my personality and how I communicate, but it’s essentially honing that thing. Codifying that thing.

**John:** So, in a traditional standup set you can sort of jump to another thing and there’s not expectation that everything has to circle back around. Because it is meant to be a dramatic piece it all comes back together at the end. You have to build a trust with the audience that you really are going to get back to this place.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Three Page Challenge. You’ve listened to the Three Page Challenges before on this podcast. So what we do is every once and a while we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their script. It could be a pilot. It could be a drama. It could be a – kind of whatever. Some of these are web series apparently. But we take a look at them and give our honest feedback. So this is all voluntary. Everyone who signs up for this knows what they’re signing up for. If you want to send in your Three Page Challenges you go to johnaugust.com/threepage. If you want to read these Three Page Challenges there will be links in the show notes to them.

All right, our first Three Page Challenge is called F.T.S, Episode 1, Menstrual Pain, but Danielle Motley. Mia, late 20s, sits in the large stall of her workplace restroom facing a period stain on her pants as an automated air freshener spritzes in her face. Mia asks Siri on her phone to call a contact named Fuck Boy before two women enter the bathroom and Mia hangs up before the call connects. Mia responds to text messages from Fuck Boy, who is annoyed that she called if she couldn’t talk.

Mia waits for the women to finish their conversation and leave. Mia then calls her sister, Bug. Mia begs Bug to bring her a change of clothes. After teasing her, Bug says she’ll be there in 30 minutes. Stuck in the stall until Bug comes, Mia hears a tiny girl enter the bathroom and explode the next stall. The air freshener stops working.

That’s where we’re at at the bottom of three pages. Mike Birbiglia, we’ll start with you. So, all four of the Three Page Challenges we selected this week are comedies or comedic. What was your first impression looking at F.T.S.?

**Mike:** So what I like about it, and this is a challenging thing for me. You guys do this all the time. I listen to it on The Pod.

**Craig:** Cast. [laughs]

**Mike:** It’s hard to be critical, because I want all writers to know the thing I tell myself is keep writing, essentially. And so it’s hard to be critical. What I like about it is it’s personal. And it’s sensitive. It’s writing from a place of pain, literally, which I think is great. And I think it’s a good place to start comedy from. I always think that’s a great place to start comedy from.

I flagged like one thing just as a rule of thumb in comedy which is there’s a character named Basic Bitch and I think that that’s a trope of some kind. Basic Bitch. I think it’s someone else’s joke maybe. Or not. Or just it’s a trope. And I just think if you’re writing comedy whenever you have something that is a trope just think of three alts for it. What else could it be other than Basic Bitch? Because I think that your equity with the audience, your trust from the audience, is that you don’t use tropes. As a comedian, the moment when I’m watching a comedian use a trope I go like I’m not sure I trust the writer anymore.

**John:** There’s some tropes in some of these pages and I think we should point them out when we see them. Craig, your first impression of these three pages?

**Craig:** I struggled. I struggled. I want to talk through where I thought things were going well, Danielle, but also where I think you ran aground.

Let’s start just with what you want me to see and how you present the thing you want me to see. Because there is a moment here right off the bat. And right off the bat what you’re telling me is that this woman is not just simply going to the bathroom. She’s a surprise period, right. So, it’s gotten on her clothes and she has a huge problem. In disbelief she says, “This is bullshit.” That’s terrific. I like that opening because that felt very real to me.

The problem is I’m going to read back to you, here’s what I get. I am in a woman’s bathroom in a corporate building. I’m not sure how I would know it’s a corporate building just from this woman’s bathroom, but that’s fine. In the largest stall, the one that’s supposed to be reserved for those with disabilities, Mia, late 20s, sits on the toilet, pants and underwear at her knees. Her neat braids pulled tightly into a chignon, regrettable college tattoos hidden under expensive clothing.

I’m already frustrated. I can’t see those tattoos. Why are you telling me about them now? And then you say she is without a disability, by the way. Also cannot know that at this point. And then you say she is not, however, without a huge period blood stain on her silky green panties and brown slacks. That’s how you would relate that maybe in prose, but what’s happening here is I’m seeing this person. I’m seeing her looking at this. Then you’re showing it to me and she’s saying, “This is bullshit.” And the problem with that is that means she’s been staring at it long enough to have already said this is bullshit.

This is a weird thing to go through, because it’s so logic intensive and it feels picky and annoying. But I promise you it actually is the essence of what makes things funnier not on film. If you show me this woman in a stall staring down and she says, “This is bullshit,” and then you show me what she’s looking at, then I will probably laugh. But if you show me what she’s looking at and then she says, “This is bullshit,” it feels very stilted. So there’s a rhythm and an order thing that you have to kind of consider.

The other issue is I think Mike is 100% right. Chatty Bitch and Basic Bitch means that you just don’t know. And by the way there’s nothing – Basic Bitch wasn’t any less chatty than Chatty Bitch, so I wasn’t really sure what the difference between the two is. There was sort of a faux attitude there. So your character names are implying an attitude that will not come through because they don’t have name tags on that say Chatty Bitch or Basic Bitch. And their discussion that these two women are having just felt like water treading to me. It just didn’t matter. It could have been just wah-wah in the background while she’s trying to figure out at the same time how do I solve this problem.

I’m not sure why she calls Fuck Boy as opposed to her sister first. But, you know, so be it. But I don’t also quite get a sense of her – I know you want me to think that she is in trouble, but it doesn’t seem like she’s in trouble. It’s weird.

**John:** There’s a lack of urgency to it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, your comment about it feeling a little bit like prose, like novel writing versus screenwriting, I agree with you. Because there were some stuff that was really smart and funny but it’s going to not really work on a screen. The example being the deodorizer thing. There’s probably a way you can shoot that where you actually the little spray. Because it pays off nicely at the end. But it felt more like a novel kind of joke. Because since we can’t smell anything on screen we’re not getting the hit of it, which you could describe it in a book version.

**Craig:** When it first comes in, let’s see. Where does it first show up?

**John:** It first shows up on page one.

**Craig:** Ah, yeah, right there, the “automatic air freshener mounted on the wall above her eeks,” that’s misspelled by the way, “ekes out a puff of scented aerosol spray. Rolling Meadow scented to be exact.” That is prose. It doesn’t matter to me – that’s cleverness that I can never get credit for. But what I can get is if she says, “This is bullshit,” and then the next thing in the action is a buzz above her and air freshener squirts out some horrible smell that’s slightly better than the smell in the bathroom. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. And then, buzz, again. You can just have buzz, puff. And then we would know that there’s this sound, you know. Something…

OK, and then last thing here. Danielle, there’s a certain focus that we have when we’re doing body comedy, so any kind of comedy that surrounds bodily functions there is a cumulative effect. It can be incredibly funny. God knows I’m not above it, clearly. But what is really hard to do is two kinds of body comedy on top of each other. Monty Python had better blood jokes than anybody. So people would be bleeding, squirting blood.

**Mike:** Incredible.

**Craig:** it was the greatest. But they wouldn’t also have somebody shitting at the same time. It’s like you get one body function at a time. In this case it’s period blood. I don’t think we can handle the shitting.

**John:** Mike, you do a lot of body comedy in all your acts. So Sleepwalk With Me obviously—

**Mike:** There’s a lot of physical maladies that I discuss in my shows.

**John:** And so you’re trying to create a visual, visceral reaction to it which makes us sympathetic to your situation but it’s not sort of the main point of it. It’s to be able to talk about something else.

**Mike:** Yeah. And I think that one of the things in my show is I sort of go out of my way to phrase bodily things in a way that I’ve never heard them be phrased before. And I think that that’s sort of the key to comedy because – one of the keys to comedy – because you want to surprise people. We’ve all seen things that have shitting in them. We’ve all seen things that have period blood in them. But it’s like what’s your take? What comes to mind when I think of period blood. I think of Superbad had that really memorable period blood in it. And I think what was – what was so memorable, like they’re dancing or something.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Mike:** And there’s something about it and it’s very subtle. And it’s very like all of a sudden you’re like, oh, I see what’s happening here. The filmmaker, Greg Mottola in this case, is sort of clearly thinking about the ways that period blood have been depicted in cinema historically and then he’s making a choice to do it. I’m going to do it this different way. Because bodily functions are so much a part of the human existence that you have to think about how has it been done, how am I going to do it differently?

**Craig:** And there has to be more than just it. Right? So if you’re going to be doing a joke about someone having their period and surprise period, then it can’t just be, “Argh, blood.” You know? And if you’re going to do a joke about somebody shitting it can’t just be shitting noises, right? They’re crazy. There has to be a context to it of some kind or another that makes it, I don’t know, just more panicky, more funny. We just can’t rely on the fact that it exists. In and of itself it’s not that funny.

**John:** Wrapping this up, I want to emphasize some things that I really did like about these pages. And so on the bottom of page one Basic Bitch shakes the locked door to Mia’s stall. Twice, underlined. Mia, “Really?” Like that twice moment was a very specific thing. Like when someone doesn’t rattle it once but rattles it twice, like you didn’t get it the first time? That tells me that Danielle is noticing something about what that situation is.

I like the idea that Fuck Boy is called Fuck Boy. I didn’t buy using Siri to call it. That’s not a thing I believe. She’s in the stall. There’s no reason why she needs Siri to do it. So I didn’t quite get that.

We talk a lot about texting in movies. It’s absolutely a valid thing to do and to show. In this case I would have probably bolded those texts just because I think there’s the risk that people are going to skip over those texts because they’re not seeing them as crucial dialogue kind of information.

And here’s an example of a confusion that happens. On page three, the door opens again and a tiny woman in clear discomfort rushes into the stall furthest from the one Mia is in. Mia jumps as she slams the door. The she and Mia is confusing. So you’ve got to be looking at your sentences to make sure there’s not a confusion there. Because you read it twice, you’re like, wait, did Mia slam the door? So just always be looking for ways that people could get confused.

**Craig:** And where’s the camera? I mean, I’m with her. She’s talking with her friend. And then are we cutting out of the stall to see this woman running in and running into a different stall, pause, pause, pause, pause, go back into the stall and her whisper yelling, like she had to wait for the camera to leave the stall. Just why?

**John:** Yeah. Really thinking about it as what we’re going to see on screen I think will help this.

**Craig:** Yeah. Geography.

**John:** I think Danielle actually has a sense of what’s funny and what can work. It’s making it cinematically funny is going to be the next step.

**Craig:** You know what? I agree. And I would say to her this is very common. This kind of comedy is really hard to do. And you’re going to need passes at it. Just like imagine yourself as a 3D printer. You’ve laid down your first. Now you have to lay down the next layer. The next layer. The next layer.

**John:** Craig, do you want to talk us through Dunked by John Bickerstaff?

**Craig:** Bickerstaff. This is Dunked by John Bickerstaff. Inside a beautiful church we watch as a line of handsome young teens, first a young man, then a woman, submerge and emerge from their baptisms. Behind them stands 16-year-old pudgy and scared Simon. Simon receives a kiss from his girlfriend Emma before stepping into the tank and into Pastor Roy’s arms.

Pastor Roy tries to gently lean Simon into the pool, but Simon won’t budge. He says he can’t swim. So Pastor Roy reassures him and applies more pressure. Simon resists, even using his mouth to hold onto the lip of the tub. When Pastor Roy finally does dunk Simon, Simon reaches up and slaps him across the face.

Later we find Simon sulking in the bathtub before his mother barges into the bathroom. She feels guilty that since she home-schooled Simon he never learned to swim and she’s bought him swim trunks.

Well, John, why don’t we start with you on this one?

**John:** So, there’s a lot here I liked. And so I want to talk about two scenes that we see here. There’s the baptism scene and then there’s the bathroom scene with his mom. Let’s talk about the baptism. Totally valid idea. It gets you into the crux of what this story is about right away. We see that he’s obviously a kid in a religious setting. There’s going to be a baptism. We have a sense that after these first two kids are being dunked that there’s going to be some problem. Just a natural sort of setup/payoff kind of thing that happens in comedies.

And the way he resists going underneath the water – I can see the joke happening there and I can also see when you’re on the day shooting that thing you can try a bunch of different ways and it can be really funny. So I can see that all working.

I had bigger problems in the second scene, which is the dialogue between Simon and his mom. There was a lot of stuff in there that I wanted to cut. And I also sort of want to discuss with you guys about tone and voice. “Cheese and Rice Ma!” felt too impossible even for the world that I think we’re supposed to be in.

So there’s a lot of stuff here I enjoyed. I didn’t think it all worked.

**Mike:** Also, Cheese and Rise, Ma, so that we don’t think that we’re in Cheese and Rise Massachusetts, one of my favorite towns in America.

**Craig:** I mean, bad drivers. Great food.

**John:** Just the absolute best. Other things I’ll point out. Simon, 16, tubby and terrified. Great. I get tubby and terrified.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Emma, 15, his girlfriend.

**Craig:** That’s it.

**John:** Period.

**Craig:** Girlfriend.

**John:** Girlfriend.

**Craig:** Oh, I know how to cast that. Let’s find…girlfriend.

**John:** We’re looking for…girlfriend. So, all we know is that she’s one year younger. Who dates a tubby and terrified 16-year-old? That’s a fascinating choice. So you’ve got to give us something specific about this, because otherwise we don’t know who this is.

**Craig:** Girlfriend.

**John:** Craig, what are your–?

**Craig:** Similar issues. Just as an interesting thing that happens right off the bat is a question of perspective. So we have our main character, Simon, and he is terrified of being baptized specifically because he’s terrified of going into the water. He thinks he’s going to drown, I guess. I mean, that’s sort of implied here.

Well, then his perspective matters. I want to see him looking at that water. I want to feel his fear of that water. Right now what I’m getting is a handsome guy and another handsome guy and Pastor Roy, 45, rugged but nebbish, which is an impossible combination.

**John:** Good luck, casting director. Find rugged but nebbish.

**Craig:** Well, we looked through every single person on the planet. There is no one. So, that’s not a combination you can do. But that guy guides him out of the tank. He brings in a teen girl into the tank. And meanwhile it’s just happening. And then we show this guy and he’s nervous. And I don’t know why. I don’t know that he’s nervous because of the water. I need to know he’s nervous because of the water because otherwise he’s just vaguely terrified of nothing. And his girlfriend says the weirdest thing in this moment, which I kind of thought was remarkable and could be amazing if I understood why she said it. She says, “I love you.” Why? Why is she saying that? Is she saying it because she knows he’s terrified? Is she comforting him? It could be great.

And the physical comedy of this I think could be really funny. I would make it bigger. So I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what it looks like – one of the things if you’re training to become a lifeguard they teach you – you have to be really careful because drowning people will try and kill you. They are in a full panic. They will try and kill you.

**John:** Fight or flight kicks in.

**Craig:** 100%. If I go in that water I’m going to die, therefore I have to fight you. And I want this to just get bigger.

**Mike:** That’s a really smart point.

**Craig:** And Pastor Roy is big. And Simon is probably not in great shape. And this could be a great – and also the idea of getting beaten up by a pastor in a church while this organ music is playing is really funny.

**John:** And also remember that as an audience we have an expectation that something is going to go wrong, so you have to meet that expectation but also exceed that expectation. And still continue to surprise us even though we knew that something like this could happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only other thing I would say is I agree with you, tonally in that second scene, and I’m kind of curious what you think about this, too, Mike. Everything was sort of fine. I mean, even like Cheese and Rice is sort of like well maybe they’re Mormons or something, even though they’re not. But where I tripped up was Mom says, “Si, what are you doing in there?” Which is a weird question also since he’s just in the bathroom taking a bath. It’s not that crazy.

And he says, “I’m baptizing myself. In the name of the humiliation, the mortification, and the condemnation. Amen.” So I don’t believe that. I just don’t know where that line is coming from.

**John:** That line does not exist in a reasonable world.

**Craig:** Sometimes John what we’ll say is that line feels really written, meaning, OK, you might be super proud of the combination of words there, and they are smart. But they just don’t belong coming out this person’s mouth, so you don’t get credit for it.

**John:** Mike Birbiglia, talk us through.

**Mike:** Yeah. It’s funny you should mention that, in the name of humiliation, mortification run, because I didn’t have the exact note you did, but I found myself reading it three or four times. Because I kept thinking – and that’s what you don’t want. You don’t want people in their head as the reader going, “Did I miss something? I’m going to read this again. Wait, did I miss it again? I’m going to read it again.” Like you want people going, going, and going, and they’re in. And I found myself out at that point.

I think that what I liked about the pages is that I found it immediately visual in a way that understood in one page, which is impressive. To do anything in three pages is very hard. In one page I understood the dunk tank and I understood what was happening. And that’s impressive and a lot of potential for comedy in it, which I think is great and original. I haven’t seen it.

And then what I liked was title card, Dunked, pivot to the tub water, which to me feels cinematic and it feels like it has a vision. It’s presenting a visual language. And to me I’m reading someone’s pages who is trying to make a film instead of just a comedy.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** They’re not just trying to make me laugh. They’re trying to tell a story with pictures. And so immediately I go, oh, OK, what is the relationship between the baptism and him in the bath. This is going to be what this is about, but in a way that I don’t understand yet. But I’m intrigued.

**Craig:** I agree with that. It seems like there’s potential for this to be a really interesting story. Just needs to be some sort of – you know, it’s the same thing. Just rigor. Apply rigor to it. And at no point should anyone hearing any of this feel like they’ve failed. This is what writing is.

**Craig:** To John’s point about girlfriend being a generic, there’s this great story from an interview I think years ago I read of Noah Baumbach where he was saying like when he wrote Squid and the Whale, one of my favorite movies, it was on hold for so many years that he rewrote it from all the different character’s perspectives. He’d do a pass for, you know, the Jeff Daniels character. He’d do a pass for the Laura Linney character, etc.

**Craig:** There you go. Yeah.

**Mike:** And then what you end up with something so layered that you could never in a million years think of those characters as girlfriend, or boyfriend, or mother, or father.

**Craig:** Also, you couldn’t in a million years write that all at the same time. So that’s sort of my—

**Mike:** To your layer point.

**Craig:** Yeah. Make sure that as we go through this that you guys give yourselves breaks and understand that this is part of the process. You can’t get it all right all at once.

**Mike:** Yeah. And you guys have said this on the show a lot, and I’ll say it even again, both of my movies, Sleepwalk with Me and Don’t Think Twice, I’d say 12, 13, 14 drafts, full drafts, is what is on the screen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I gave you a little bit of a high colonic on—

**Mike:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** On your last one.

**Mike:** You crushed me.

**Craig:** I didn’t crush you.

**Mike:** You gave me really tough notes that were very helpful.

**Craig:** I mean, yeah. Well I’m glad they were helpful.

**Mike:** They were.

**Craig:** But they’re the only ones that matter, I guess. You know? It’s like you just have to kind of – you have to go through it. Everybody does. I’ve gone through it a billion times. Never let Scott Frank do it to you, by the way.

**Mike:** Oh, I can’t even imagine. I’ve heard him on the podcast here and holy cow.

**Craig:** I wrote a script once. I showed it to Scott Frank. He spoke about it with me for about two hours. I took the script. I put it in a drawer. Literally never looked at it again.

**Mike:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** It’s gone. I purged it from my mind.

**Mike:** Wow.

**Craig:** Yeah. No one could have killed something with more – it was actually – his killing of it was far better than the script. I should write a script about what he said.

**Mike:** One time I was trying to explain to my wife who Craig was, because she had just met him once in our living room after a reading. And she goes, “Is he the guy who was shouting at you after the reading? With the beard?” Oh yeah, that’s Craig.

**Craig:** I can’t imagine I was shouting.

**Mike:** No, I don’t think so.

**Craig:** No, you see what happened? That’s true enough.

**Mike:** True enough.

**Craig:** That’s true enough.

**John:** I want to talk about Karen on page three because while I want to get rid of some stuff on page two that she does, her voice is actually really interesting and passive-aggressive. So I do like, “Well, you shouldn’t be doing anything you need a locked door for anyway. What if there’s an emergency? I’m not strong enough to break down a door.” She’s going through the list, well I might need to break down this door.

Also, we do a cut of dialogue here which is good and appropriate, so people just take a look at it. She says, “Which I don’t think is entirely true. I can’t. But I home-schooled you.” So when characters interrupt each other, that’s a thing that happens a lot. And so you’ve done a good job here on page three interrupting in a way that is actually helpful and sort of conveys more information. So I did like that.

Finally, I didn’t buy the floral bathing trunks at the end. It just didn’t feel like they would have to exist. It felt forced to me.

**Craig:** Yeah, like a prop joke.

**John:** Yeah, a prop joke.

**Craig:** Ha-ha, flowers. No, she could have bought any bathing suit theory.

**Mike:** Or they could have done the floral trunks and they don’t even mention it.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Mike:** And you don’t hang a lantern on it, so as to tell the audience to laugh.

**Craig:** You just have the kid, you can have Simon just look at it like WTF mom.

**John:** Excellent. Do that.

**Craig:** Good point.

**John:** Let’s stop there on the Three Page Challenges. I think those were two good different examples.

**Craig:** Terrific.

**John:** And we have a listener question that comes in from Akiva Schaffer.

**Mike:** Oh gosh.

**Craig:** Here we go. It’s a good one.

**Mike:** Heavy hitter.

**Craig:** So Akiva wrote this in. Avid listener of the podcast.

**Mike:** Podcast, yeah. Who I have made a film with. I played a small role in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.

**Craig:** Never Stop Never Stopping.

**Mike:** Never Stop Never Stopping is the subtitle.

**Craig:** So great.

**Mike:** From The Lonely Island. Brilliant director.

**Craig:** Akiva is one of the – yes, along with Andy Sandburg and Jorma Taccone who is another friend of our show, and your neighbor. Your wall neighbor.

**Mike:** Was my wall neighbor. We just recently moved down the street.

**Craig:** Oh, to get away from Jorma.

**Mike:** Which by the way, the—

**Craig:** And Mari Heller.

**Mike:** And Marielle Heller, whose Mister Rodgers film is tremendous.

**Craig:** I hear that. And she is also starring in Scott Frank’s, the aforementioned Scott Frank’s—

**Mike:** I know. I know. She’s a great actor, too.

**Craig:** You know what? Scott never showed me that script. I never got a chance to yell at him over that script.

**Mike:** Oh wow.

**Craig:** He knows. This is what Akiva writes. He says, “Hey, I have a bit of Hollywood umbrage.” Nice. He does listen. He listens to the show.

**Mike:** Well done. Well done.

**Craig:** “And it’s so petty and privileged that I don’t know where to put it.” We’ll welcome you in, Akiva. “So I thought maybe you were the show that would have the platform or correct showbiz audience where it could be appropriate. It’s about screeners, specifically the waste.”

**Mike:** Yes, this drives me nuts.

**Craig:** Yeah, so let me just back up for a second for those of you wondering. Around the award season, which is—

**John:** Starting now.

**Craig:** Roughly now, around Golden Globes, Academy Awards, the Writers Guild Awards, the DGA Awards, SAG Awards, the companies that have movies and shows that are up for these things will start mailing you at home a DVD of them if you are in one of those groups. God help you if you’re in all of them. Because you will get one of these for all of them. So you will get eight – I think the most I got was like eight versions of Us. For whatever reason in the last Academy cycle, or last award cycle I got eight Us DVDs. I don’t know why.

So, what he says is, “First we have the materials themselves. The paper, the cardboard, the DVDs, the huge boxes, the random photo presentations or posters.” Mrs. Maisel is a huge—

**John:** Oh man. The wrapping paper. The poster.

**Craig:** Crazy. “Then there are the duplicates. Last year I received three copies of most movies because I’m in the DGA, the WGA, and SAG. There are the trucks that deliver them. For the TV screeners it’s even worse. There are bigger box sets.”

**Mike:** It’s endless. It’s endless.

**Craig:** “It’s a ridiculous waste and no one uses DVDs anymore. Can’t we be more eco-conscious?” I’ve abridged this slightly.

**Mike:** He’s absolutely right.

**Craig:** He is.

**Mike:** It’s infuriating. And also you can’t to my knowledge – I researched this last year because I had the same frustration. You can’t really recycle DVDs.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. You can’t.

**Craig:** They live forever.

**John:** Because they’re metal and plastic.

**Craig:** So, I’m sure John you are in the Film Academy.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I am now in the Television Academy.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Mike:** Wow.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right. I’m in an Academy now.

**John:** He’s an Academy voter.

**Craig:** I suspect that one of the things we would hear if we brought this issue to our respective Academies is, “Uh, yeah, no one uses DVDs anymore under the age of blankety-blank, but we have a lot of voters who are over that age and they do use them.” What do we say to that?

**John:** It’s the first mover problem. The first studio that stops sending DVDs is going to feel like they’re at a disadvantage for awards.

**Craig:** Yes. Of course.

**John:** That’s going to happen. So I know the studios aren’t supposed to collude about stuff and get together to meet about things, but I think an outside group could bring them all together perhaps and say like what if you all agreed to send out DVDs, then I think we could do it. Because honestly the digital codes they do send out for some things, they work, and they actually help prevent privacy because they can see how many times each of those have been downloaded and stop a URL from downloading again if they need to.

**Craig:** I would love for them to stop this. It does seem absurd.

**John:** I think I want to give Warners credit. I think Warners was the first one to have a good For Your Consideration app that installs on Apple TV that you can register it.

**Craig:** That just sounds so much better.

**John:** It is better. So the devil’s advocate, like there are times in which you are off the Internet and there are people who go to their cabin in the woods and watch a bunch of screeners. I’m sorry. That’s going to be more difficult now.

**Mike:** There’s also an upon request version of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Like I need a DVD. Send me my DVD. But otherwise, yeah. Default to it. I think the Academies actually could just say we’re going to make the rules that if you send physical screeners by default you’re not eligible for an award. How about that? Problem solved.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And a lot of angry art members. I will be an art member soon.

**Mike:** I work as an actor on the show Billions.

**Craig:** Of course. Yes.

**Mike:** And it’s a much more eco-friendly set than I’ve worked on in the past.

**Craig:** Brian Koppelman is 100% recyclable.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. It’s really compostable, but it’s really the same idea.

**Mike:** Actually if you recycle him he actually comes out as Scott Frank.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Funny how that works.

**Craig:** Levine, not recyclable. Cannot–

**John:** He’s like the Terminator. You have to melt him down.

**Craig:** David Levine is one of the nicest people ever and his face – his face just implies that he wants to murder you. He has—

**Mike:** That’s true.

**Craig:** He has such an intensity about him.

**Mike:** And he’s in great shape.

**Craig:** He’s in amazing shape.

**Mike:** Very intimidating thing about him.

**Craig:** He’s tough as nails. But he’s nice. He doesn’t want to murder you.

**Mike:** Yeah, very nice.

**Craig:** But his eyes say take a step back, I might murder you. Whereas Koppelman, you know, 100% recyclable.

**Mike:** Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

**John:** All right. It’s come time for out One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a thing called Spleeter. It’s an open source music separation library. What this actually means is it can take a track of music and split the vocals out from the—

**Mike:** Oh my gosh. Really?

**John:** It seems like a magic trick. So I’m going to play this here for you. So here is a demo. Here is Lizzo’s Truth Hurts.

[Truth Hurts plays]

All right, so that’s the vocals. But useful, more useful sometimes is getting the actual backing track so you can do your–

**Craig:** Do some karaoke.

[Truth Hurts Plays]

**Mike:** That’s incredible.

**John:** So it’s machine learning that does it. So basically they’ve just—

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**John:** They’ve gone through thousands and thousands and thousands of clips and are able to figure out like oh this must be voice, this must be background, and then it’s filling in the pieces that are missing.

**Craig:** It’s terrifying.

**John:** Yeah. So it’s the same thing that enables people to do face swaps essentially.

**Craig:** I just took a DNA test. I’m 99.5% that Ashkenazi Jew.

**Mike:** Oh wow.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s how Jewish I am. That’s how Jewish I am. I just drew a target on myself for racists, again.

**John:** Craig, One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Sure. So I probably talked about this before. One of the great mysteries of medical science is why do we sleep. We don’t really know why, or at least we didn’t really know why. And this goes across all mammals for sure. It’s not that we sleep because we get tired. Something is going on. And if you prevent people from sleeping they will go crazy.

**John:** And die.

**Craig:** And then they will die. So what is actually happening? So there is a new study out from Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, a professor of neurosurgery at The University of Rochester, and an author of a study in Science. And basically what they found was they know that as our brain works and metabolizes and does things throughout the day there is a creation of harmful toxins. There are proteins and plaques. These things eventually can build up and cause dementia and Alzheimer’s in old people if they can’t be cleared out.

How do they get cleared out? Well they get cleared out by cerebral spinal fluid. What they found is during sleep the flow of cerebral spinal fluid in the brain increases dramatically, essentially washing away harmful waste proteins that build up between brain cells during waking hours. It’s washing our brains. We have to sleep so that our brains can wash themselves.

And they’re doing this literally in a kind of cyclical way like a dishwasher. Brain cells when we sleep actually kind of shrink, making easier for the fluid to kind of go through and move in and out. It’s bananas.

So we may – and by we, I’m not one of the authors of the study. But we humans may have finally figured out why we have to sleep and what’s actually going on.

**John:** Now if you’re intrigued by this topic I think I may have made this a previous One Cool Thing, a book I read a couple months ago, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker goes into more detail not only about sort of the cleaning up of proteins but also why we have the two kinds of sleep, the REM and NREM sleep and sort of the specific functions that they’re trying to do in those things. And you need both kinds of it. So one of it is for more physical stuff, one is for memory formation. And if you interrupt those things – basically you read through this book and it’s basically a bunch of horrifying studies where they keep waking people up and up and up and up.

**Craig:** And this I assume is of some specific interest to you because you very famously have a fairly rare but serious sleep disorder.

**Mike:** I have a sleep disorder, and like you’re saying, it’s a field of study that people don’t know the answers to the questions. Why do we sleep? Why do people sleepwalk? You know, and there’s researchers who are doing tremendous work. But yeah, it’s endlessly fascinating.

**Craig:** Well maybe based on this in ten or 15 years you can take those mittens off when you sleep. Your sleep mittens.

**Mike:** Indeed.

**Craig:** You should sell sleep mittens.

**Mike:** I’ve thought about selling a lot of things, Craig.

**Craig:** That’s birbigs.com.

**Mike:** There’s a sheet that you’ll see in the show that I sleep – instead of sleeping in the sleeping bag lately I created a fitted sleep sheet that fits me into my bed with a hole for my head.

**Craig:** Oh wow.

**Mike:** Yeah, and it’s pretty inventive.

**Craig:** Like a nun.

**Mike:** And the reason – and people always say you should sell that, you should sell that. There’s something about the medical liability.

**John:** Oh of course.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Mike:** That scares the lights out of me. This idea of like what if someone is hurt or injured or god forbid dies trying to do this thing, and it’s like Mike Birbiglia’s sleep sheet killed them. Look, man, I’m just trying to make a living out there.

**Craig:** You sell that thing and literally 98% of people that use it die.

**Mike:** Yeah. With my luck.

**Craig:** Exactly. It wouldn’t be just one rare case that you have to deal with. It’s almost everyone.

**Mike:** So my One Cool Thing harkens back to something I was saying earlier which is – it’s something Mark Duplass had tweeted recently which is supporting local. Supporting local bookstores. Supporting local pizza. Supporting your local cinema.

It’s in some ways, you know, in my case I live in Brooklyn. We buy all of our books from Books are Magic. It’s a tremendous bookstore run by an author. Her name is Emma Straub. And she opened her own bookstore. And I feel like in some ways this local movement is political. It’s a political response to the wealth disparity in society right now. There’s people with billions, there’s people with nothing. And I feel like let’s support the people who are making good food, who are selling good groceries, or selling good books and putting a lot of heart and soul into their work.

**John:** Buy local, buy Birbiglia.

**Craig:** Buy Birbiglia. The guy has no store. You will. His death sheets are currently on sale.

**Mike:** Oh my god.

**John:** We’re going to make our own death sheets and we’re going to put your face on them.

**Craig:** I’ve got thousands of these things. I don’t know what to do with them.

**Mike:** Oh my god. This will be the end of me.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Mike:** And you, for $19.95.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve been waiting for the end for a long time. Bring it on.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. A reminder to stick around after the credits because we’re going to talk briefly about scams. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Launch and Jim Bond. 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. You are @–

**Mike:** @birbigs.

**John:** Nice. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll find details about the town hall, about Mike’s show, all sorts of stuff. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs. And you should come to our live show which is December 12.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, you got to come to that. We’re the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts, so you do need to get your tickets immediately. They will sell out.

**Mike:** Jon Bon Jovi now or Jon Bon Jovi 1987?

**Craig:** Always. Just all Jon Bon Jovis.

**John:** Let’s talk some scams. So Craig and I both got hit up by serious scams this past week.

**Mike:** Oh wow.

**John:** Craig, summarize what happened with you and the Amazon thing.

**Craig:** Very strange. I received a package addressed to me from Amazon which happens all the time. I buy things on Amazon all the time because I spit on Mike Birbiglia’s buy local theory. No, no, I love buying local, just sometimes there are things that are not available locally.

**Mike:** Sure.

**Craig:** So I get them on Amazon. But I open this package and I did not recognize any of the items as something I had purchased. There was a toy car. There was a selfie stick. And there was a vibrator. The vibrator was not called Selfie Stick, but I’ve been thinking that that would be a great name for a vibrator.

**John:** That is a selfie stick, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a kind of a selfie stick. So I said, hey Melissa, did you buy a toy car, a selfie stick, and a vibrator. And she said no. And I believed her. Because of the toy car. So I called up Amazon and I’m like what do I do with this. And they’re like, oh, it must just be a mistake. You can just keep it or throw it out. So we kept the vibrator.

Then the next day another package shows up with junk in it like hemp oil and a phone case. This happened like seven or eight times. And I got more and more angry. And what basically the scam is this. This is what we found out. Either they get ahold of a credit card that isn’t theirs, or they have their own credit card they’re using, or gift certificates. They purchase these items and they create an account using your name and your address, but they register it under a phone number that isn’t yours.

**Mike:** Terrible.

**Craig:** And then they send these things to you and because it has been delivered to you on Amazon they’re able to now review their own product as a verified purchaser, which moves the product up in the algorithms. It’s called brushing. And Amazon appears to be one billion miles behind this problem. Like they are nowhere near solving this. They’re barely acknowledging it exists. And the more I read about it, the more it seemed like it was everywhere. Like this is going on constantly. Yeah, it was a real bummer. But we seem to have shut it down. For now.

**John:** So my scam that happened is we ordered from Door Dash a pizza delivery and so the guy picks up the pizza, calls us and says, “Hey, there’s a problem. The wrong Door Dasher picked up your pizza. I’ll stay here and I’ll get the order refilled. Sorry about the hassle.” And so we’re like, oh, this is a very helpful guy.

But then he sort of keeps calling, and that’s where something is not right here. And says like, oh, so you need to call Door Dash and cancel the order and that way they can refund your money because this is taking too long. I was like, yes, we can do that. And through the app you can cancel the order. And then Door Dash calls and says like, hey, did you cancel this order. And I’m like, yes, but we think the food is still on the way.

It gets really complicated. But the guy then calls and says, “Hey, I’m nearly at your house. I’m here.” So I go down and meet him on the street. At this point I’m already suspicious. Something is just not right here. And essentially the scam is that they get you to cancel the Door Dash order and they say, oh, I paid for it myself and so you can pay me all of the money. And they try to use Apple Pay so that it feels like it’s a legitimate thing happening through the app, but they’re not really using the app at all.

**Craig:** How did they know how to get in between you and your pizza?

**John:** So he was – he genuinely did work for Door Dash. And so he picked up the order and then pretended that it had been canceled. So I don’t think that’s a scam with long life to it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But what I was impressed by is he had very good social engineering on the phone and in person. Like when I actually met him I was like, oh, you’re one of those people who is trying to pull the gold ring scam in Paris. Like you just have a whole pattern of how this whole thing works.

**Craig:** I mean, to pervert pizza, which is something that you and I both feel so—

**Mike:** It crosses a line.

**Craig:** It really does.

**Mike:** It slices right through the line and divides it into eight slices.

**Craig:** Delicious slices.

**Mike:** Perfect, perfect triangles.

**John:** So Mike, do you believe in the goodness of humanity?

**Craig:** Not anymore he doesn’t.

**Mike:** Well, we talk about that quite a bit in the show. I think people are fundamentally decent and trying.

**John:** Yeah. That’s good. That’s a good approach to it. I genuinely do believe and trust people because I feel like in the absence of trust and the absence of the ability to believe that this thing will happen and this person is going to be a good actor society just breaks down. But I will say it was incredibly – it rattled me. For a good two hours afterwards I was just like down on humanity.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, that’s how I am every day. So what you experienced there briefly was my life. I generally trust people when I sense that there is a baked in component of mutual benefit. So I trust that somebody is going to stay stopped at that red light when I go through the green light because that’s to their benefit to do so.

**Mike:** That’s right. Defensive driving, so to speak.

**Craig:** Yeah. If there’s a situation where somebody is going to benefit for sure more than I am, then I don’t trust them. I don’t trust salesmen. Why should I? I know for a fact that the entire point of sales is to manipulate and lie to get you to give them money. That’s how it works. I’m not even angry at them for it.

You talk about how expensive the sofa was, right? And when I was a kid I worked at a clothing store. And they were like you have to try and sell these today because we have too many of them. The specials.

**Mike:** The same thing when I was a waiter. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a lie. The special is literally the opposite of special. So you just have to be aware of that. So I just – caveat emptor – I don’t blame people for it. I don’t think it’s necessarily immoral on those kinds of levels. It’s just people have to survive and they’ve got to do what they’ve got to do. And also sometimes, you know, we all have to do it to some extent to get through the day. Although, I don’t know, as writers we don’t really do that. We don’t have an opportunity to do that, do we?

**John:** If we – there are very few scams that we can pull, because ultimately our name is on it. So that’s the thing, this Door Dash was sort of anonymous but sort of not anonymous. So ultimately when I reported him I could say like it was this person and this was the phone number I got a call from. But I was relying on this faceless entity who I didn’t know, this company, to be doing the work of actually stopping him for doing this to other people.

**Mike:** This might be off-topic, but the subtle scam of show business I find – and this is not all personal managers, but some personal managers are essentially taking on too many clients. They’re managing 30, 40 people.

**Craig:** Sure.

**Mike:** In the hopes that one of them hits it and then their 10% of that fortune. If five of them hit it then they’re blah, blah, blah. And so I dealt with this in my career where I worked with many managers over the years where they’re basically pretending that they value me in a certain way and see my trajectory in a certain way, but secretly they don’t think that.

**Craig:** I think it goes both ways, too. I mean, listen, I know that no matter what your agent says to you about how much they love or care for you, if you start sucking and you can’t get work, they’re going to dump you. And similarly no matter how much you say to your agent, “I love you and you’re so wonderful,” if the best agent in the world shows up and says, “I’m ready to take you on,” then you’re gone. It’s going to happen. Because it’s not – that is a business relationship and I don’t even think of that necessarily – that to me is sales. It is a little bit of like it’s in the zone of sales.

**Mike:** Right. You have to be a better consumer. A smarter consumer.

**Craig:** Caveat emptor and caveat vendor. Right? But there are very few scam-scams that writers can pull on you. I guess the closest is there are writers who take on too much work.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Knowing fully well that they can’t do it all, or can’t do it all well. So that is a kind of a scammy sort of theft thing. It’s just it’s not self-sustaining.

**John:** Yeah. So you and I both know – I’m not going to actually say his name – but there was a writer who was notorious for like taking on a bunch of projects that he was not himself actually writing.

**Craig:** Mike Birbiglia.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, I wasn’t supposed to say.

**John:** So he would have a team of young writers who were actually doing all of the work. But I don’t hear about that anymore, I think because it doesn’t happen, but maybe I’m being naïve.

**Craig:** No, I mean, there are people that still do these things, or people sometimes take on a weekly assignment which is very highly paid thing to get and then they just don’t deliver, which you know, like I say even if it’s not a scam, even if it’s just, I don’t know if they got tired or they weren’t right for the job, the point is it’s not a self-sustaining thing. Because everyone talks and it is so hard to get on the list of people that they give weekly assignments to, and it is so easy to get booted off of it. Like just don’t take the job. It’s going to cost you more in the long run to take one of those jobs and not do it right then it is to just do it right.

**John:** Do it right.

**Craig:** Do it right.

**John:** Thank you, sirs.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Mike:** Thanks guys.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/writing-about-mental-health-and-addiction).

**John August:** Hey this is John. Today’s episode comes from a panel recorded last week in cooperation with Hollywood Health and Society. If you want to see video from the panel there’s a link in the show notes. But realistically if you’re already listening to this audio you are fine. You don’t need to see the video. There’s no slides or anything you’re going to miss.

Now, Craig was planning to cohost this panel with me, but he has had a family medical situation, so I did this one solo. But I think Craig is really going to enjoy this episode, if he listens, which I hope he listens to it because he really will like this episode. We have a remarkable showrunner, Gemma Baker, we also have a medical doctor who can talk about the science of addiction. We have a therapist who can talk about young people and mental health. And we have a journalist who writes extensively on drug policy. It’s a really great group.

We talk about writing protagonists dealing with mental health and addiction issues, their impact on other characters, the responsibility of writers addressing those topics, and what writers need to keep in mind about their own mental health.

This episode pairs really well with Episode 99 if you want to go back and listen to that one.

Today’s episode was produced by Megana Rao, with music and editing by Matthew Chilelli. Special thanks to Marty Kaplan, Kate Folb, and everyone at Hollywood Health and Society for putting together the event. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. I host a weekly podcast with Craig Mazin called Scriptnotes and we talk a lot about writing and things that are interesting to screenwriters. And as we talk about screenwriting we’re always trying to focus on specifics, like what is the specificity of this moment, what is the reality behind this thing? Why are characters doing what they’re doing? We will talk about the words on the page, but we’ll also talk about the experience of watching the stories that we’re trying to tell. And we’ll bring on guests sometimes to talk about very specific things that they wish we as writers could do a better job at.

We had Rachel Bloom on recently to talk about how we portray sex on screen and how we can portray sex more realistically on screen.

So when I found out this panel was happening I virtually threw myself in front of Kate to say like, hey, do you need a host, because I really wanted to talk with these very smart people about addiction and mental health.

Another thing we talk about on Scriptnotes a lot is structure, so let me talk a little bit about the structure of tonight’s evening. I want to start by talking about the experience of a character facing addiction or mental health challenges. Then talk about the characters around them, sort of how that character is impacting the world around them. We’ll then step outside a little bit and talk about how the stories we tell are perceived by the world out there and what is our responsibility, what are our opportunities as we’re telling these stories. And finally as we’re talking about addiction and mental health, how do we as creators have to be mindful of our own mental health? And things we can be looking out for for ourselves.

So that’s sort of the structure for the evening. There will be questions and Q&A at the end, so if a question comes up along the way remember it because we’ll get to that at the end. But I want to start by talking about how our characters come into our stories and I want to start with you, Gemma. So, Gemma Baker is a writer and producer and the co-creator of the hit CBS comedy series, Mom, a show lauded for its portrayal of addiction. She previously wrote on Two and a Half Men. She graduated from Tisch with a degree in theater.

**Gemma Baker:** Hello.

**John:** My question for you, so the two lead characters on Mom both have addiction issues. How early in the process of coming up with Mom did you know that this was a thing that you were going to want to explore?

**Gemma:** In the very, very beginning. So when it was first being talked about the idea was for the character to be a mom who has addiction, active addiction and drug problem. They knew they wanted – it was Chuck Lorre and Eddie Gorodetsky – and they wanted to do a show about a mom and they thought we’re going to bring in a mom. And they asked me if I thought that could be funny. And I just thought, well, if people don’t think that the kids are safe they’re not going to feel OK laughing. And so what if the character was in recovery? And you could root for her, because you knew she was trying to change. And so that was our starting point.

**John:** What was the starting point for your research into this? How did you find out about what recovery would look like and sort of where the opportunities were and where the challenges were for these characters? What was that research process like for you?

**Gemma:** I think one of the things that was really important for us was that a lot of times when recovery is portrayed, not necessarily now, but then it felt like it was dreary and that there was no joy and light and there wasn’t a lot of hope in the portrayal of it. And I think that that is what we felt was missing, you know. And that anyone who knows and loves someone in recovery knows that that’s such a huge part of it. And also so often recovery is the end of the story. You know, you watch a whole movie about addiction and it’s so awful and painful and heart-wrenching and then at the very end it’s like and then they got sober, the end, roll credits.

**John:** Sometimes they’ll give you nice little title cards.

**Gemma:** And then they got sober and it worked out.

**John:** Yep.

**Gemma:** And I think that recovery is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the story. It is having a chance. It is where it’s the beginning. And so we wanted to tell a story that started there. That was really important to us.

**John:** That’s great. Well let’s talk more about recovery. So our next guest, Dr. Corey Waller, is a nationally-recognized addiction expert and currently practicing specialist in addiction, pain, and emergency medicine. Through his work with the Health Management Associates and the National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs he has developed addiction treatment methods, provider training, and educational outreach delivered by that center. Dr. Corey Waller, thank you for being here.

**Dr. Corey Waller:** Thanks.

**John:** We’re going to be talking about addiction and mental health. And because you’re the actual doctor here can you help us get our terms straight. When we say someone is dealing with addiction what does addiction mean in a medical sense? Or what’s helpful for us to be thinking about when you use the term addiction?

**Corey:** That’s a great question and I think a lot of people misinterpret what addiction is. Addiction is not the presence or absence of a drug in somebody’s system. It’s the way in which they behave in obtaining and using the drug. And we actually define addiction based on nine very specific behaviors. That means they’re predictable. I mean, in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual we’ve identified nine specific behaviors associated with both drugs and/or a behavior like gambling that ultimately tell us whether or not someone has addiction. And we can use those behaviors and the presence or absence of those to determine how severe it is.

And so with that, that’s how we create our interventions and have done all of our testing to identify how to appropriately treat people at the beginning because they have predictable behaviors that we identify as addiction. And unfortunately those behaviors many times are misinterpreted as frustration or anger when in actuality they’re just symptoms of a disease. And so I think that’s the big piece around addiction is that it’s definable, it’s identifiable, and it’s not because somebody is mean or it’s not because somebody got drunk at a party. And it’s not because somebody used cocaine on a Friday. It’s what does that look like in their life in general and do they have control over that drug. Do they have control over their behavior when obtaining that drug? Do they try to obtain that drug over their safety or over the safety of their kids? Or do they lose their job because of the drug? These are the ways we define it.

And so many times that term is slung around in a pretty messy way. But medically we have very specific criteria for what addiction is. And we actually know more about the neurobiology of addiction than any other chronic brain disease.

**John:** So as we’re talking about terms, addictions can have a pejorative context. Like someone has – and we need to get past that. That’s the stigma thing we’re trying to get past tonight. But a word like addict – is addict a useful word or not a useful word? What’s helpful for us to be saying when we’re talking with somebody who is dealing with these issues?

**Corey:** Well person. If we just start with that. But in general people aren’t defined by their disease. We’ve gone really far to make sure that people with diabetes and cancer and other medical illnesses aren’t defined as their disease, because they’re a person with that disease. And the disease is a part of who they are, but it’s not how we define them.

So we don’t in a perfect world call them addicts. We call them a person with addiction. And then we can get very specific in healthcare terms. They have an opioid use disorder, or a substance use disorder. Terms like clean and dirty, those are terms that are utilized that have no medical connection whatsoever. Even like a urine drug test. They dropped “dirty.” I have doctors say that. There is no clinical terminology. What does that mean? It get mud in it? I don’t really know.

What we have to start doing is not taking on how the patient’s very self-stigmatizing language is utilized. And it’s used a little bit to combat the shame and the fear of this disease and not take that language and somehow weaponize it toward them. Because as people in healthcare and even just society in general, using a term like a person with addiction is just – it is what it is. And that’s where I think we should start.

**John:** And thinking about this as writers, as we’re coming up with character descriptions, we’re trying to describe what a character is like, if we use a word like addict that just stops us dead it’s very hard to see anything else around that character. We’re not seeing what they’re doing and we’re not seeing the choices they’re making. It’s taken all the agency away from that character. And so finding the right words to use feels really important.

The other part of our panel tonight, our discussion, is about mental health. Where are the overlaps between people with problems with addiction and mental health things? Is there a big crossover between the two?

**Corey:** Yeah. And so the crossover seems to really be identified in those with what we call adverse childhood events. So early life trauma. I ran a clinic dedicated to pregnant and parenting females. So we saw hundreds of females who had addiction while they were pregnant and all but two of those hundreds had a significant early life trauma, most of that sexual trauma. And so the early life experiences that occur to someone increase the chances of them having not only addiction but a co-occurring mental health disorder.

And that mental health disorder if not treated while you’re treating addiction will make the addiction unstable. And if you’re treating the mental health disorder on one side but not addressing the addiction you’re never going to get the addiction stable. So it’s a matter of most people who have addiction also have a co-occurring identifiable mental health disorder.

It’s unclear early in treatment if that’s going to be there after we stabilize them in treatment. And so you have to go through a pretty significant process. But quite honestly as you’ll hear, one side doesn’t necessarily talk to the other. You hear, “I treat addiction,” or “I treat only psychiatric ailments.” But rarely do those ships meet in the night. I mean, honestly, it’s crazy because that one book has all of the descriptions and a third of it is about addiction but then there are psychiatrists who are like, “Eh, I just kind of ignored that part,” and moved on. And then addiction medicine providers who don’t read the other stuff. So it’s very disconnected where it really shouldn’t be.

**John:** All right. Let’s keep looking for that crossover. Our next guest is Dr. Holly Daniels. She is the managing director of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, supporting 32,000 clinicians. She has worked as a clinician, teacher, therapeutic consultant for over 15 years, specializing in addictions, eating disorders, and other mental health issues using her extensive knowledge with treatment programs on university and college campuses to help young adults thrive. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from Sophia University. So you’re working with younger populations, what are some things that we as sort of non – older than college students – might not be aware of that are happening on campuses, college campuses and high school campuses? What do you see that we may not be aware of? What are the things that young people are facing?

**Dr. Holly Daniels:** Well there’s a really interesting dynamic right now in that our society as a whole has embraced talking more about mental illness in general and substance use disorder. And that’s really prevalent in the younger generation. So kids are actually talking more on campus about – even about their mental health issues, about having anxiety, about being depressed, and there’s more of a discourse. And I would say thank you to television and film, actually, for opening up a lot of that discourse. Kids feel more free to talk about it. But, you know, there is kind of that backlash of the more they’re talking about it and there isn’t really the science-based support to help them through it, right, there’s still a lot of issues with drug and alcohol abuse, you know, from age 10 up. And there really isn’t unfortunately enough support in our school systems or in our education system. And the education that they’re getting about mental health issues and substance use issues is coming from the media, right.

I mean, that is their discourse. The film and television and what they’re watching. And so sometimes it’s a really helpful education. And I don’t know if anybody has seen Eighth Grade, but I loved Eighth Grade by Bo Burnham which talked a lot about anxiety. We have shows like Euphoria which I’ll let us – maybe I’ll talk about that later. I have different ideas, I have thoughts, too.

But overall I would say the big positive is that, just like Corey was talking about, we really need to chance as a society and stop penalizing mental health issues and criminalizing substance use. And the great thing is when we can see those stories in television and film and we can see people having compassion and leaning in to support the people who are struggling that gives our young kids, our adolescents and our young adults, that model to be like, oh, if somebody is struggling I reach in and help. I don’t call them a bad person or say that they have a moral failing. I want to help.

And that’s actually really a hopeful thing that’s happening on campuses is that kids want to help each other. They want to be there for each other and that’s a beautiful thing.

**John:** Yeah. I definitely noticed that kids, teenagers, want to help each other but sometimes don’t have the actual skills to be helping each other.

**Holly:** Right.

**John:** And to what degree do we need to be aware of contagion or the sense of like a person with a challenge spreads to other – like how as a person who is dealing with young populations what are some things that we have to be aware of with teenagers? Are there are different things that happen with them?

**Holly:** Such a good question. And this is why the work that Hollywood Health and Society does is so important and being able to as film and TV writers reach out to experts to understand where that fine line is when you’re portraying heroin use, or when you’re talking about kids committing suicide. What are the things that you can do so that the visuals, right, are not more triggering than they need to be? It’s a fine line of we want to be able to talk about this, and we want to be able to portray it because that’s important. But we also don’t want to cause children out there to hurt themselves, right, or create an atmosphere in which they feel like it’s glamorized or it’s cool to self-harm.

**John:** So finding that balance between realism and glamorization is a challenging thing. We’ll keep talking about more of that tonight. But I want to introduce Zachary Siegel. He is a journalist who covers public health, mental health, and criminal justice. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, New Republic, Slate, Wired, and Politico Magazine. He’s currently a journalism fellow at Northeastern University, the university’s Health and Justice Action Lab where he has spearheaded the “Change the Narrative” project. He cohosts Narcotica, a podcast about drugs that’s informed by science, policy, and the lives of real drug users.

I have a rival podcaster on the panel. I’m not sure I—

**Zachary Siegel:** That’s OK.

**Kate Folb:** That’s why we put them as far away as possible.

**Zachary:** We’re hoping to steal this audio, too, for our own podcast so we’ll talk later.

**John:** All right. It all crosses over. Zach, could we talk about sort of your experiences with addiction and sort of the degree to which Hollywood and the things you saw in movies and television influenced the start of that, the progress of that, the recovery from that. What did you see as you were encountering it for the first time?

**Zachary:** Yeah, so I’ll try to keep this brief because it’s a long story. So, full disclosure, when I was about 17 had opioid use disorder as we call it now. And it really started with friends and I exchanging pharmaceuticals and really what happened was as a young, anxious, sort of nervous Jewish teenager trying to figure out what the world was like I took an opioid and finally felt normal. Like I finally felt OK. And it’s a cliché at this point, but it is really true. When most people take opioids they get kind itchy and constipated and they don’t really like them. When I take an opioid it was like, OK, the clouds have parted and I feel very, very comfortable, which can be a very dangerous feeling for a teenager.

And so that progressed and progressed and progressed, like all the way up to heroin use, but to not like [unintelligible] with that story because really I was just like watching movies like pretty zonked out five hours a day. It was not a productive time of my life. But I did watch a lot of media. So I can talk about, for example, like how maybe the first time I ever saw injection heroin use on screen was Basketball Diaries with Leonardo DiCaprio. And I think that had a huge impact on me and I wanted to be a writer and be in like sort of the beat scene in New York and that whole thing was very attractive. But, you know, the sort of delusion that has to be confronted is like people on drugs typically, you know, life is really hard and you can’t necessarily be productive.

Like I was not a successful writer when I was using heroin because I had to think basically in six-hour timetables where, OK, here’s one fix and where’s money for the next one. And to live in this sort of collapsed time where you’re very much encased by the next one and the next one. It was incredibly difficult. And so I can talk more about media, but yeah I do think the way that I consumed media and the things that I saw were very impactful.

It may sound random, but there’s a documentary called Methadonia produced on HBO. I don’t know if anyone saw this, but it was a horrific portrayal of a drug called Methadone. And just the quick facts, Methadone saves lives. It reduces someone’s risk of fatally overdosing by 50% or more. And this documentary however portrayed it so negatively and I think I was a teenager watching that before I’d ever really like thought that one day I might need this drug. But as the recovery process sort of unfolded for me and I didn’t wind up in a Methadone program I had to confront my own stigma about people who take Methadone because of that documentary.

So these things have – it’s just a huge responsibility to portray this.

**John:** So I thought we would start by talking about the experience of a central character in our story, so either a movie or a television show, who is dealing with an issue and sort of talk about the timeframe, the things, the challenges, what are the realities there so we can then think about how we are going to portray them and sort of what are the opportunities. And so my hypothetical character I want to introduce is a character named Jane. She’s 28. Boyfriend, not married. An alcoholic. And we can talk about where her alcoholism is. I use the term alcoholic. I probably should use a person dealing with alcoholism. But this is where the character is that we’re meeting. But we could meet her at many places along the spectrum.

So Gemma, you decided for your show to show somebody who is already in recovery. Corey, can you talk me through someone who is dealing with alcoholism where are some points along the way we might meet that character? What are the stages where we might meet a character who is grappling with it?

**Corey:** Well, I mean, a bar. Common location. So a couple of things—

**John:** The timespan. The stages of—

**Corey:** I know. So as we look at this, alcohol use disorder is the most prevalent addiction period. You add all the other ones together, it’s still not as many people that have alcohol use disorder in the country. So it is still the most prevalent, but it’s also the one that is more normalized. And so people can go to a bar and get barely able to stand or walk and we’ll call them an Uber and send them home, but we don’t think about that in the context of alcohol use disorder a lot. So somebody tied one on, or you’re hungover this morning, or that kind of piece.

But generally speaking the first time that we interact with them in a healthcare setting is going to be when they accidentally fall and break an ankle. Or they get picked up by police and are incoherent and show up – you know, I’m an emergency medicine doctor, I still practice – and so I’ll see people in the emergency department and that’s how I first encounter them many times is intoxicated. And just being intoxicated doesn’t mean you have an alcohol use disorder, but it starts to really add up a lot of those points that we talked about when you are intoxicated, and you fell, and you hurt yourself, and you ended up in the emergency department because of the intoxication.

So it’s not always just the homeless intoxicated person who shows up to the emergency department. The early part of the disease means that there are times in which things are stable. They’re still able to generally go to work. They’re still able to have an interaction. They’re still able to have friends and connections. And over time those things start to wane. So that first time that we get them is the best time to intervene because we generally have milder disease than if we wait this out.

And so this concept of they’ll come and get help when they’re ready, or this concept of rock bottom, basically means we’re going to see if they wash out through dying before we treat them. And so the times that we’re going to interact are going to be the times that they drunk dial mom at three o’clock in the morning. The times that their boyfriend confronts them because they’re frustrated about how they embarrassed them at these places. Or the boyfriend or significant other also has an alcohol use disorder and maybe they’re perpetuating this.

Those are the times that we’re more likely to make the biggest difference in someone are those early signs of addiction which is they’re missing work. And so I have a staff of 30 people and I was the chief of pain medicine for a health system, so if a doctor started having odd behavior I would pull them aside and have to be like, “What’s going on?” We are scared to do that in society. We’re scared to call people out because we don’t know how to do it many times. But an empathetic ear and somebody just saying I care about you, if you want to chat about this, really opens up the door for that early interaction to occur.

By the time I get them, I mean, the train has crashed at that point. This is a point where they’re either mandated by court or intervened by family or their life is in complete shambles and they have nowhere else to go. And that’s just too late. And so I think recognizing that 60% of people who at some point meet for an alcohol use disorder self-resolve.

So, I always use the anecdote of when I was in college I tried really hard to be an alcoholic. It just didn’t work. And that’s good for me, but that’s a lot of people. If you think about back in school and that the number of people who drank to the point of failing a class or missing class or failing out of college but then kind of bounced back, early in life – in adolescence and in early adulthood we have kind of resolution of an acute version of addiction. Now that is an increased risk for later that something may recur, but if you can catch them at that phase and really kind of work with them we don’t necessarily have to even label them long term.

I mean, I have a roommate who drank just as much as I did. He has a label of an alcohol use disorder. But I don’t. And we have the same trajectory in the end. So it’s just a matter of when you catch them. So I think early and it’s those little pieces where we find them the most. And that’s where they start to struggle with isolation which we find is the early form of kind of the fear and stigma they put on themselves. And from a character perspective, being able to portray that shame and isolation that occurs very early in this disease that is the path to the more severe version of the disease that leads to bad outcomes that I would see.

And so that guilt and shame keeps them – they hide. They start to drink alone. They start to separate from people. Go to different bars where they’re not going to be noticed. And it’s not a control issue. It’s a part of the brain. You know, we know exactly what part of the brain it is. It’s the default behavior for an input called cue associated relapse. And it’s not a decision like we think about. It’s not a pros and cons sheet. It’s a reflex once they’ve started using.

**John:** Gemma, he’s talking about self-stopping and sort of control. And we always as we write our characters we want our characters to – we’re sort of cruel gods aren’t we as writers? We’re always creating these challenges and obstacles for our characters to face. As you look at the characters you’re dealing with in your show how are you as a writer and as a writers’ room talking about characters’ awareness of the behaviors that they’re doing? Awareness of the problems that they are encountering for themselves? Because it sounds like any one of the characters we set off in our stories could end up in a very dark place. And yet you are mostly responsible for getting them back to a good place by the end of 30 minutes. So how are you talking about that in a writers’ room? How are you figuring out sort of how to get a character through these situations?

**Gemma:** Well, I think, you know, one of the things that sitcom characters are not known for is growth and change. So, but we have this amazing opportunity, and I think responsibility, to say that these characters, now we’re going into season seven, they have grown. They have changed because they’re sober and because they’re facing life in a new way and because they’re doing it together and because they’re using certain principles to change and grow.

And so I think that’s been really fun. When we feel like they’re starting to get stuck we’re like, oh, you know, that season two Bonnie, that’s not season seven Bonnie. Season seven Bonnie is going to handle that better. So we keep ourselves sort of accountable to that. We sometimes have the actual meeting portrayed. We have this device of people sharing. Also on a sitcom you don’t necessarily see someone just tell you where they’re at for two minutes, but we have that ability to do that because our characters literally are sharing where they’re at. And so that helps us to – they might begin their share thinking one thing and then hear something and get to another place quickly.

**John:** So the idea of a group meeting, a 12-step meeting, or some other place where people come in and describe what they’re going through, Holly could you speak to sort of what the role of group meetings is in Jane’s life. Let’s say that Jane is making progress. What would that meeting really be like and what are the things you don’t see that we might be showing better?

**Holly:** Well, there’s really huge power in group share. And that’s why the Alcoholics Anonymous movement has been so successful actually in helping a lot of people get sober and get better. And it’s a place where you can feel like somebody sees you and somebody gives you space to be who you are and be going through what you’re going through. And that is huge and that actually is what television and film does for us, too, right. When there’s a representation in a television show or a film of what we’re going through and how we can identify that’s just so very powerful and empowering.

And so when we’re working with people who are dealing with mental health issues or substance use issues definitely we want to employ groups and as an individual therapist I would definitely and do definitely encourage my clients to find a group and to utilize the group and the support of the group. But that is kind of on the recovery side.

And I did want to mention, and maybe you’re going to get to this John, but what I would like to see more in film and television is the group that the person is with while they are in their addiction, while they’re really struggling, because we are systems people. Right? We’re in a system. And there are always people who are enabling or ignoring what we’re going through, or you might meet Jane at a bar but then fairly soon you’re going to meet Jane in her room drinking by herself and she’s waking up and shaking and her boyfriend is going and buying her some alcohol because he wants to help stop the shaking. But he doesn’t realize that he’s actually perpetuating her illness.

And there are some really complex dynamics that go into the system that is supporting the person who is struggling to continue to struggle unfortunately. And that’s something that I haven’t seen really deeply portrayed in all of its complexity which would be really neat to see.

**John:** Zach, as you watch film and television and you watch individual therapists or you watch group settings what are we getting right and what do you think we’re missing? And what is the ideal role of the expert, the therapist, the person who is there to help the person. Again, I think we idealize them so much in Hollywood, but what is the real function of that person that you see?

**Zach:** Well, I think to, yeah, be scientifically and medically accurate and grounded as any expert in this field treating addiction should be. And that means oftentimes not sending people to Malibu for 30 days and pet horses on a ranch. Like that is not how we treat any other addiction or any other medical condition.

**Holly:** I used to work at one of those places so I take offense.

**Zach:** Sorry. And especially in terms of opioids which it’s on my mind a lot, there’s an overdose crisis, and I think that there’s a lot of opportunity to communicate health messaging with media by having a therapist say, “You know what? Actually you’re a perfect candidate for Buprenorphine. And let’s get you to the right doctor who can prescribe this drug and, you know what, maybe when you go to a recovery meeting or group share on Buprenorphine you might be stigmatized because within this community frankly they don’t often have most science-based approach to things like medication.”

So I think to see that play out in a narrative would be very powerful.

**John:** Well, I should say writers, we love conflict. So if there is a conflict that can be introduced that could be a useful thing. And do you–

**Zach:** This one has been going on forever.

**John:** Yeah. But I would say that most people don’t realize it exists.

**Corey:** Well, I think two pieces that I would pull out is, one, for our 28-year-old female character she’s prey in these settings sometimes. If you get into the wrong meeting and you’re very unstable in your disease people that are also unstable in their disease can be a predator in that setting. And so it can be very unsettling for that person to show up to that meeting to someone to seems to get them unlike their boyfriend or maybe unlike their parents. And they use that angle to actually connect themselves in a pretty pathological way. And I’ve seen that happen a number of times for females in recovery going to some meeting. So they need to find the right one, right? It can’t just be any random place.

And I think the other portion is to understand that everybody has their path to recovery. But at this point for opioid use disorder 12-step abstinence-based treatment is only 8 to 12% effective. Now, for alcohol use disorder it has a higher rate of effectiveness. But the research was done on generally speaking doctors, pilots, and lawyers of white origin, so when we start to think about what modalities we’re looking at and what the data looks like that data looks very clearly good for doctors, pilots, and lawyers, especially those that are Caucasian. It’s about 85 to 90% effective for alcohol use disorder.

But for the population that I see when I was in Camden or when I was in Detroit or Philly, wherever that is, that’s not effective treatment for them. But it’s also about timing and dosing. So thinking about somebody who is really unstable, that’s probably not the best time for that. We do find, however, when they need to reconnect that may be the perfect time to add something like that. So just recognizing that it’s not the default treatment for everybody. Most people get treatment outpatient. Most people don’t go to residential treatment. Most people get their treatment in an outpatient setting just like they would for congestive heart failure.

So sometimes creating less conflict with it, because there’s plenty of conflict in their life otherwise, so the treatment of their addiction doesn’t have to be the conflict point. There are so many other pathways because this disease is such a socially connected disease. It creates conflict in families. Conflict at work. Conflict in just going to the store and walking past beer. I mean, those are conflicts that are there.

So creating the conflict in the treatment sometimes stigmatizes the treatment. So I think that it’s a little lazy, to be honest, because it’s not the place where drama has to be. We know how to treat it. We have effective treatments. It’s pretty matter of fact. And we know how to know where they go. I mean, so that part of it and understanding where meetings are and what role they do play, it’s not the treatment. It’s just a part of a larger normal approach to treatment that we would take.

**Holly:** And if I may add to that, Corey, I agree. Not only is it a place where people could be preyed upon or, you know, but it also is a place that you actually don’t want to go into a group setting – to piggyback off what Corey said – until you really are stabilized internally. Because it might be very difficult and re-traumatizing for somebody to hear everybody else’s stories about their trauma. And when we’re talking about trauma I’m not talking about getting shot with a gun or run over by a car, I’m talking about complex emotional relational trauma we call that which goes back to the adverse childhood experiences which so many of the people struggling with substance use have.

And so you have to maybe work one-on-one with medication, get yourself stabilized, before you go into a group where you’re going to hear a bunch of stories about a bunch of other people’s really difficult times because that can be very triggering and re-traumatizing.

**Corey:** By the way, you guys portray – it’s the only show I can actually watch with addiction, to be honest.

**Holly:** Love your show, Gemma.

**Corey:** The rest of them are triggering to me, honestly, as a practitioner, frustrates me and gets me angry so I can’t watch it. But so this one is one that does it in a way that people in recovery they do well in those situations.

**Gemma:** Thank you.

**John:** And I think it’s because you’re offering hope. There’s characters who are dealing with a thing and it’s never going to be completely resolved. It’s not like the monster is ever fully killed. But they are able to have productive lives. And that’s obviously an early decision you’ve made that you’ve been able to keep up for eight seasons.

**Gemma:** Yeah. To be able to watch someone’s life get bigger. To have our main character. If I could go back in time in the pilot we said that she wanted to be a psychologist and then we quickly changed her into a lawyer. If I had a time machine and I would go back and just correct that one line in the pilot to say she wanted to be a lawyer. But I can’t, so we just ignore it. And pretend that her dream was always to be a lawyer.

And it was important for us to do that. It takes a while to become a lawyer and it’s hard to write becoming a lawyer stuff. But we’re doing it – and make it funny – but we’re doing it in real time because we hope that we are going to be on long enough to see that happen and to watch that whole process. And for her the ups and downs and the doubts and just showing up for all of it sober.

**John:** Cool. Let’s try and experiment with a different character. Carlos, 35, depression. And so this is a character who is dealing with depression. What things will we see outwardly as we’re looking at the character of Carlos that might tell us that he’s dealing with depression and help me figure out both his inner state, so what he’s going through, but what externally we would see for Carlos. What would be the things that we would be noticing? Holly, do you have a sense of what we’d see first?

**Holly:** Yeah. I think that, you know, it’s not totally unlike symptoms of substance use disorder in that you’ll see changes in behavior that suddenly Carlos isn’t around very much, or he made plans and he didn’t keep them, right, that his circle will notice. That he’s just not feeling up to doing the regular activities that he might want to do. And when it really progresses he might lose his job because he can’t get into work and he can’t get out of bed and doesn’t want to return phone calls. And maybe then when is confronted is able to like buck up enough to be like, “I’m fine, I’m fine, everybody don’t worry. I just need some time alone. Don’t worry.” And it really takes a supportive person in Carlos’s circle to say, “You’re not fine. Can we help you get some support?”

Because depression is one of those things. It can be a little bit under wraps. You know, people can be really struggling with depression for a really long time and still show up to life just enough that they’re not going to get into a car accident or break their ankle or do something that’s so big because of being high or drunk that it can really go under the wire for a long time.

And that’s what is so scary about it, too. And especially if Carlos starts to become suicidal. And most people who die from suicide don’t leave a note or give any signs beforehand. And so it really takes a community, right, to be around Carlos to say, “Hey, you know, this is the fourth time you haven’t come out and you usually came out with us and ate dinner every Friday night and now you’re not doing that anymore. What’s going on? And can we help?” Because Carlos can hide it for a good deal of time.

**John:** Quite a few people I follow on Twitter self-identify as dealing with depression and they’ll talk about medications they’re on. They’ll talk about the struggles that they’re going through. I admire them for doing it. Is that useful for them? Is it useful for everybody else? I always wonder the degree to which self-identifying as this can become an identity of being a depressed person. What is the current science and best thinking in terms of when a person who has depression is in treatment and is improving talking about it? What is the best way to interact with that character?

Let’s say Carlos has started getting some help. What do we do with Carlos? And what changes do we see with Carlos?

**Holly:** That’s a really good question. It’s a personal question, right? So sometimes the diagnosis can be really empowering and it’s something that you can share and you can say, “Omg this is what’s going on with me. I have this chemical imbalance and it is a disease and it’s an illness.” And so it’s a little bit freeing. For some people having a diagnosis is very shaming and it’s very difficult for them to carry that with them. So that’s part of our job as mental health workers to kind of be there with each individual and decide is this somebody who is going to feel empowered with the diagnosis? Is this somebody who is going to feel shame with the diagnosis and to be able to talk through all of that with them?

But for the most part I think it is, for the people I’ve worked with, it’s empowering. And it’s a way to build community because mental health illness and substance use disorder they are isolating. That is one of the things that happens is people become more and more isolated. So if you can say, “Hey, I’m struggling with this thing” and find other people in the community that say, “Hey, me too.” And you can have that back and forth and connection. It can be really a powerful help. Yeah.

**John:** Let’s point our discussion and talk about the community around Jane and Carlos and sort of how they’re interacting with family, with friends, with the medical establishment, with the police. What do those interactions look like? So we talked about earlier that Jane would come into a medical situation because she’d broken her ankle or law enforcement if she was drunk driving. There’s natural ways to do that. How would Carlos come into a medical community? How would he come into a law enforcement community? What are the interactions that we see with these characters as they’re doing their thing and the impacts they’re having around other people. Zach, what do you see as Jane’s – the circle that she was drinking with? The social circle that was helping her stay there. How do we portray them responsibly and accurately?

I mean, the people who are in some ways helping her stay the way she is.

**Zach:** I mean, I think it’s super contextual. And I think there’s one very recent example of a portrayal of depression is Euphoria. And in a recent episode of Euphoria, so Rue is the main character and she is so depressed that she has watched 22 hours of Love Island straight. And there’s this sort of ongoing, very painful experience of being too depressed to walk up to go to the restroom. And so her bladder begins to hurt and so I think one thing that was really interesting and somewhat playful there was that depression hurts. It’s not just an emotional/psychological pain. It is physical. Like if you really miss someone, like it hurts when they’re not around. And I think that having different ways of portraying psychological pain manifesting as physical pain could be an interesting thing to show onscreen.

**Corey:** I would say that the science backs that up 100% because the two chemicals responsible for depression are norepinephrine and serotonin, these two chemicals. Dopamine can play a place in one type. But those are also really important chemicals in pain. So, in theory if you have a low serotonin level and a low norepinephrine level you’re going to have depression. We find this really commonly. Interestingly, if I decrease those in the spinal cord that also makes your pain sensor higher. Everything hurts worse, literally.

So, when somebody has depression almost always they have physical pain. And it may manifest—

**Holly:** Which is why they want to use drugs.

**Corey:** Right. No, exactly. And here’s an opioid and I’ve just wrecked your life. So the pieces, there’s really hard science to back up physical ailments that go with anxiety or depression. The place in the body with the most serotonin is not your brain, it’s your gut. So this why we see nausea and stuff in people with low serotonin states because it’s not working properly. They don’t digest food properly. It’s one of the most common complaints I would get for patients with depression. They wouldn’t complain about being sad or crying. They would complain about their belly. And then when you dig into it a little more it’s major depressive disorder.

**Holly:** Especially for young kids, right?

**Corey:** Absolutely.

**Holly:** When a young child is dealing with a mental health issue they’re almost always going to tell you their stomach hurts. It’s a big thing to know.

**John:** Great. So let’s talk about a young child. Let’s talk about a young child dealing with depression or anxiety or these issues. What are the idealized perfect Hollywood parents and what are realistic parents that we’re maybe not seeing as much onscreen? Holly, what’s your take on those parents?

**Holly:** The perfect parent would say to their young child, “How are you feeling? Can you talk to me about what you’re feeling? If you can’t use words can you give it a color? Can you describe it in some way? All feelings are welcome here. We want to talk about all feelings. They’re important. Your feelings are important. And if you’re having some painful feelings, or if your stomach keeps hurting well guess what? We know where we can go and find some help and find somebody who can support you and help you feel better because as your parents we’re here for you, but we don’t have all the answers either. And sometimes we hurt, too. And so let’s go to the experts and find somebody who can help us out.”

**John:** That’s the perfect. That’s the dream. But let’s talk about more realistic things, because in real life parents don’t know what they’re doing. They’re busy doing lots of other things. They have jobs. They have other stresses. They are going through their other issues. On your show Allison Janney’s character is dealing with addiction herself and has a daughter dealing with it. So, and yet you’re trying to be a comedy. So, how do you find the balance of talking about these things and still finding the funny in there? And dealing with the fact that she’s not a perfect mother?

**Gemma:** We don’t have perfect parents on our show. No. I think that’s why people like it. I think it’s a relief. I think I don’t want to after I’ve made a mistake as a parent tune in and watch a perfect parent. Like that just makes me feel worse. Really just, oh, I could have done that and I didn’t.

I like characters that are flawed. That are trying but who fall down and make mistakes. And I think that that is where we find humor is in the trying. And, you know, we deal with a lot of difficult subjects. And those are the scripts that I want to write. Those are the ones that are so much fun, because there’s something to hold onto. And those are the ones where you can go into some really deep, painful places. I’ve always loved like a lot of sadness in my comedy, which did not make me a successful standup. But I found a place where it’s working.

But I think that’s – I don’t know, I think that’s the fun stuff to write. The pain.

**John:** And there’s also a lot of fear. I know as a parent there’s also a tremendous amount of fear. So it’s not that you’re just ignorant to what’s going on, but you’re also afraid of what’s going on. You’re afraid is this a small thing or is this a giant thing? Where does this all lead?

And one of the other fears is the cost of things. And so if we have a character with a child who might be having these issues what is the reality of going to get help? And so would they first go to their pediatrician? Would they then go to a specialist? How much of that could be covered by whatever insurance? What are the realities of someone seeking treatment for addiction or for mental health? Where does that money come from?

And Zach you may have some sense of this, too. You’ve done reporting on the realities of this. What does it look like right now in 2019 at least in the US for someone dealing with these things?

**Zach:** Well so there are too many uninsured people in this country. Too many people who are underinsured in this country. And I think getting into healthcare policy and portraying that rightly in an entertainment narrative would be quite difficult. But I do think that having conversations about insurance do work and is done. In 6 Balloons, did anyone see 6 Balloons? It’s like a day in the life of a heroin user played by Dave Franco and Abbi Jacobson from Broad City is his sister and they take him to detox which is kind of the wrong thing to do. Detox for opioids is not really a thing. But they take him to detox and there’s this whole rigmarole because insurance isn’t paying for it and they don’t have the right coverage. And then someone says, “Well, go down to this clinic. They might have the right coverage.”

And so I think that’s actually a very realistic run-in with the bureaucracy of American healthcare. And I think that’s actually very realistic because I think people do have a lot of trouble what’s in their provider, what’s out of their provider. I think health insurance adds a very complex layer to this. We can also get into parity insurance. It’s forced to, but sometimes doesn’t cover mental health as it should like they do with physical health. These things are separate and I think it’s very critical that we don’t separate these things. That they’re all part of hospital treatment and primary care and that these are all treated by doctors like this guy.

**Holly:** And when they aren’t treated by doctors, I mean I think there’s a very common experience that I’ve even had working with young adults, even in Los Angeles which is not the poor rural area where I grew up in that people, like adolescents and young adults, want therapy but their parents can’t afford therapy. And it’s like this lament, the young adult lament of like I want therapy or you’re 26 and you’re no longer on your parents’ insurance and you want therapy and you can’t find it. And it’s really sad. But this is actually – and I don’t want to get too tangential, but this is where the social media platforms actually can be a positive.

Because I’m not saying anybody should go get therapy on a Facebook group. The kids don’t use Facebook anymore. I don’t know what I’m what I’m talking about. But there are Reddit, I don’t know, listservs somewhere. Kids are able to find support groups. And I, through some of my clients, and I also have two teenagers, have been able to look into some of these online support groups and they’re not terrible. You know, the kids are like offering each other some support and some good advice. And it’s really interesting how the support that our community is offering is changing in this way because of social media. Social media is not all bad. There’s actually some really positive things that can come from it.

**Zach:** So I don’t go to AA or NA meetings, but Twitter is my support group.

**Holly:** There you go.

**Zach:** No joke. A bunch of my good friends on Twitter are in this room and we are always on it. And we’re working together. We’re part of something bigger. It’s really important to me.

**Corey:** For young kids, I had three in my clinic that were pretty recalcitrant and very difficult to treat. And I started playing video games with them on Xbox and we would play Halo and have a closed chat. And actually they told me everything there, but when I was in front of them as an old guy in front of them they didn’t want to say a word. They were clammed up. But when I game them my gamer tag and they came on and we literally sat down and played Halo, you know, in the evening sometimes I got everything from them. And then they would come in and tell me more there.

So it’s about building a connection, which means you have to break down these preconceived barriers with kids. And I think we don’t really build – we haven’t built a system for that. We’ve built a security for adults that we somehow adapted to kids and it doesn’t really work. I mean, I use this now even with my kids. When I’m on the road we play Apex and just can chat. And they’ll tell me more things.

So I think there are some things with gaming and social media and a new path that have real potential to make big change. And just kind of throwing those out there as nuggets for what connects to kids and allowing kids to inform that because the minute that they break down those walls they’re ready to talk about stuff. They don’t like where they are. They’re frustrated. They’re scared. They’re sad. They want to be successful. They want their peers to see them in a certain way and they hate that they’re being seen as this person. But the minute they’re that person they will fully embody it because they have this need to own it. Which many times can rapidly create severe illness. And so just figuring out these other ways that we can come at it would be really important.

**John:** Classically we talk about our protagonist, generally our hero who is – the character is going on a journey. The character who is changing over the course of the story. And there’s an antagonist. And sometimes we think of that antagonist as being a villain, like the bad guy of the story. But it sounds like what you’re describing really is a therapist as antagonist. The person who is helping the protagonist change, is causing the change. And so there can be friction there at the start, but ultimately you’re trying to get to a relationship there so that you can help this person get to the next place. That sounds like the nature of that relationship there. Great.

We are mostly talking about characters, but we are also writers who have minds ourselves. And sometimes deal with these issues ourselves. So before we get to questions I want to ask you guys – if someone is watching this from the Facebook stream or they’re here in the audience and they’re saying like, oh, you know what, I think this has made me realize that I may have a substance use problem, that I may actually have some mental health thing that I should be doing something about. What is the thing they should do tonight? Like what is the first step that somebody who is watching this or listening to this should be doing if they have that moment of awareness?

**Corey:** Don’t go to Google. I mean, honestly, this is the problem because at this point in time mainstream medicine is still really crappy at this. I mean, the vast majority of people aren’t really trained. It’s not mandated in medical schools for a doctor to be trained. I mean, I’m board certified and I’ve done it for over a decade. I feel comfortable in the neuroscience of it. That’s kind of not the average person who sees a patient when they walk into a hospital and there’s still this stigma that we have to break down.

And so what I would say for a person in here, first is get my LinkedIn and call me. I’ll hook you up. I mean, I know everybody who does this work. I mean, honestly it comes down to a provider being available to help a person in need, but more importantly a friend being willing to walk with them through this. And I think that’s one of the biggest pieces, and you talked about not only the character but the people around them. The thing I’ve never seen portrayed truly effectively is a non-family member friend having a truly empathetic connection with a person with addiction to help them take that next step. What we call the trans-theoretical model of change.

And moving them from this pre-contemplative state to actually going and get help. And it’s very simple. You look at them and you say I care about you and I have your back. Because they feel so isolated that they don’t do it. And as a physician when I say that in the emergency department it’s amazing the switch that flips in people when I’m treating them in a time of crisis to actually want to get help and kind of empty themselves a little bit at that point.

And so I think the biggest thing that I would say is I could give you the one-liner of go to the SAMHSA website, Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, and type in your zip code and it will give you providers. Or I could say go to the – if you feel unsafe. But find the person you trust the most and connect with them. And ask for them to walk with you through this. And they really will. That’s the first step. And then together you can start to find the pathway for treatment because it’s not predictable yet. We’re just now building these systems appropriately and that’s why these billions of dollars from federal government are coming in because the systems don’t exist.

It’s been kind of an on-your-own pathway. And so don’t let it be on your own. The first thing is to make that strong connection with the person you trust the most. And then start the journey together. And that can be a family member. It can be a friend. Whoever doesn’t trigger you and enable you, identify them. Not the person who just says yes to whatever you want to do. But somebody who cares about you. And I think that’s the first step that I would say for anybody in here who is struggling with this.

And you know what? 10% of you are. And so this is just a reality. And so that would be it. And honestly find me, call me, I’m happy to answer those questions with you. I still have my homeless population in Camden that I see that still calls my cell phone sometimes randomly.

**Holly:** And as the therapist I’m going to say if somebody feels like they might be struggling and they don’t know, if they are and they’re wondering if they should take that step to reach out to take a really deep breath, to love yourself, to understand that we are all experiencing pain and we’re all going through something and that it’s OK to be struggling. And that you deserve a good life and happiness and allow yourself to reach out for help. Because sometimes that’s the very first step that has to happen because the self-loathing is so great that people feel like they don’t even deserve to be able to ask for help. And that’s sometimes the biggest hurdle. Love yourself. Allow it to be – we’re all human. We’re all in this together. None of us really knows why we’re here, right? And we’re doing the best we can and it’s OK to be struggling and it’s OK to need help.

**John:** Zach as a writer you’re often dealing with the struggle of getting stuff down on the page. Is there any special thing you want to say about sort of the writing process and how it ties into these two things and the desire to recognize when you need help? Is there anything that’s different about that?

**Zach:** So I work from home and I joke that I’m a stay at home dad with no kids. And so it’s really nice that I have a partner, Logan. She gets home at around five. So I try to simulate as best I can a 9 to 5 job. Because if you’re writing it’s not 9 to 5 and it’s whenever you get an email or it’s whenever someone shares the doc and you’re in it.

So, I think because things are unstable and not exactly steady I would try my best – and this is just what helps me is get structure. I think – any writer I think is very obsessive. Reading the same sentence a hundred times and it doesn’t look any different and I keep reading the same sentence. I think there’s just part of the process that for someone like me who has had addiction that I have found a way to channel some of the obsessiveness that is part of addiction into something that I think is helpful and something that I think is useful.

Like I don’t really have a big writing process because journalistically things are just moving too fast sometimes to have a cup of tea and put on the right music. It’s like, no, it’s just like–

**John:** The deadline.

**Zach:** I’ve just got to go.

**John:** Gemma, now you get to work – you don’t have to work all by yourself because you get to work with a staff.

**Gemma:** Oh thank god.

**John:** But there must be some aspect of the caretaking that you guys are doing of each other and sort of watching out for each other. And there’s the whole production of the crew that makes your show. As a person who is managing these people how do you look out for these folks? And how does a writer on your staff, how could she feel comfortable speaking up if she’s struggling, if she’s having an issue? What guidance could you give to somebody who is on a writing staff, not yours necessarily? But in general what should they do if they’re struggling?

**Gemma:** Well first of all I mean in our room we get taken care of so well. Like we are fed and watered and coffee’d. Like over our hiatus I almost starved to death because I didn’t know how to get lunch. Sort of a joke but not totally.

**John:** I know it.

**Gemma:** So I think self-care in general is so important. And I think – I don’t know necessarily about other people, but I know for myself there’s a lot of gymnastics that I have to go through to get to the point that I can, I don’t know, find the funny, you know. And I’ve had to face a lot of stuff and deal with a lot of stuff on my time and get through that. Because if I don’t get through that I’m going to bring that – I’m just going to come into work and weep. And I need to find another way.

You know, so I do things every day. I try to meditate before work. I try to get some exercise in. I try to do that book, The Artist’s Way.

**John:** Five minutes–

**Gemma:** The three pages. I’m on week one, year eight. I’ve never gotten past week one. But week one is great because she talks about the morning pages. And I do that which is like the three – and if take a moment, and a lot of moments, 30 moments in the morning to do that. To just write down the voices in my head that are like you don’t deserve anything. You know, if I can just write that down so that I don’t bring that into the room I do so much better.

And my husband and I have a deal if I meet an untimely death that he will never read my morning pages notebook because he will so worry about what I was going through. But it’s just that yammering to get that out.

And then certainly if anyone in our room is going through something I think that we give them the feeling that they can come to us and that, you know, there’s a lot of trust that has to happen in a writers’ room. And you’re sharing your personal stories and experiences and some of them are funny and a lot of them are not. And you need to be able to trust that that is sort of a sacred space where that stuff isn’t going to get shared elsewhere. And the people in my room know me really well. You know, they know a lot. And there’s something wonderful about that. It’s also difficult sometimes because they know me really well. But I don’t know, it’s a very cool relationship.

**John:** Now usually on the podcast we would do a One Cool Thing, but for tonight I wanted to do a new segment called Please Stop. And so I asked everyone to prepare a Please Stop for something that they see in films and television that they wish they would not see ever again, or that people would cut way back on.

So, here’s my Please Stop. Can we please stop with the actual quantity of alcohol we see characters drinking in movies and TV shows? Because it’s physically impossible. You see these characters, I mean, this is really an appeal to writers and directors, but also like the prop people. Because people will drink these massive quantities. And we all know that it’s like tea or something in there, so they’re not actually drinking bourbon. But characters drink so much that they would be dead in some of these things.

So if we could keep an extra eye out for the actual volume of alcohol we’re having our characters drink that would be my appeal and ask to Please Stop overdoing the alcohol.

Gemma, do you have a Please Stop?

**Gemma:** Yes. Can we Please Stop when people are, you know, identifying in a 12-step meeting and they say, “Hi. My name is Bob.” And then everyone says, “Hi Bob.” That, I just, I don’t like it. I don’t like it. It’s so depressing and it’s so – I don’t know.

**John:** It’s cliché. Corey, what do you have?

**Corey:** I’d say the biggest one is Please Stop portraying someone who is in recovery from addiction as having a weakness inherently. And on the opposite side of that just to add to it, don’t portray people who decide not to use drugs or drink as lame. Because what it does is it portrays, one, that those who did drink and it happened to be the thing that made them feel normal for the first time and they develop addiction, but then they went through all the work and frustration and pain in that to get well. Treat them like they’ve overcome cancer because this disease has the same mortality rate.

So, as we start to look at it they have fought to get there. And they should actually be as someone who has really been through a battle and won. And it should be portrayed positively as like this is a person I want on my team because I’ve seen them fight a fight and win. But on the other side don’t make the dude who’s like, “Yeah, I’m cool, I don’t want a drink,” as like the lame-o that night. Or “I don’t smoke weed” is like boo, he can’t go to White Castle. Like I still go to White Castle, I don’t smoke weed. So it’s OK.

And so I just think those two pieces go together.

**John:** Both in our media but also in real life. I mean, a thing I often say is if someone says they don’t drink you don’t have to ask a follow up question. They’ve said, great, so they can have something else and let’s move on and have a great night. Holly?

**Holly:** Please Stop portraying mental illness and substance use disorder as anomalies. Almost 25% of people have a diagnosable mental health issue. I would say millions more have maybe a sub-clinical anxiety or depression issue. So, it’s a lot of us and it shouldn’t be like that character has a mental health issue, or that character has an addiction. It’s much more ubiquitous than that and would love to see a more realistic portrayal of that.

**John:** Zach, what’s your Please Stop?

**Zach:** OK. I would say to stop glorifying DEA agents and criminalizing the US/Mexico border.

**Holly:** Here here!

**Zach:** So just one thing, obviously DEA agents, like we make them look tough. And their job is futile and they’re abysmal at doing it. So, let’s just not make them cool people.

**John:** Thank you, Zach. All right. Sicario [as a comedy]. Now we have time for some questions. So if you have a question – a reminder that a question is a question. It’s not a story with a question mark at the end – raise your hand and I’m happy to call on you. Right here?

**Male Audience Member:** Well I guess this is for all of you. I’m just curious, I read Michael Pollan’s new book How to Change Your Mind, which I don’t know if you guys are familiar with that, but they start talking about drug addiction and the use of psychedelics and other drugs. I haven’t gotten all the way through the book yet. But I’m just curious if you’ve researched any of that or could talk about that for a second.

**Corey:** So the psychedelic research is kind of resurgent. There was a time in the ‘60s in which it was actually done quite a bit and looked pretty promising even then. I think that the research that’s now coming out looks equally as promising. So I think it’s about dosing and timing and you have to do science. And science is you have to identify whether or not if I give somebody this versus somebody who got a placebo, like a sugar pill, does it work in that scenario? Because we develop an idea of should I use this based on if nobody knows what’s happening do they do better. And if that’s the case then game on. I mean, there’s nobody really against this in medicine. Medicine is pretty straightforward. I mean, we just like to see a randomized control trial in a population we can believe by a scientist we can trust. And we’re like, OK, cool, this is great.

So, yeah, I think it definitely has a future. And in the mental health there’s a lot of research there where I think for depression and stuff looks great.

**Holly:** Absolutely. Depression, trauma, PTSD. It’s very effective, ketamine treatment and LSD micro-dosing. Very effective. And it’s hopefully going to just be allowed to be used more. Unfortunately it’s over-regulated right now.

**Zach:** One more DEA thing. It’s because of the DEA that we cannot research these drugs.

**Holly:** Yes. That’s true.

**Zach:** So let’s de-schedule these so we can actually research and see what kind of potentials they have.

**Holly:** Right.

**John:** Another question, right here.

**Female Audience Member:** I’ve been researching neuro feedback that people do. I did it as a kid and I didn’t realize I was doing it. I was just brought by my mom. But I just listened to a podcast about it and they claim that there’s no such thing as a chemical imbalance. And I’m confused by that because I currently take medication and it works great. And the neuro feedback I do not remember working at all for ADHD.

**Corey:** I’m a neuro molecular biologist at grad school, so this stuff is really interesting to me. So sometimes we oversimplify things to the point of being wrong. And it’s not necessarily an imbalance, because neuro feedback has very little to do with the actual neuro transmitter, the chemical, and more to do with actually building certain signal pathways. Because if you do neuro feedback you’re creating a default reaction to a cue. I mean, we know the lateral habenula. We know exactly what part of the brain we’re working on because it’s the default reaction to a cue that we’re trying to change. And so neuro feedback is I’m feeling anxious but let’s focus on your heart and see if we can decrease your heart rate during that moment.

And so that cue would be to switch from being anxious to thinking about this, which would then lay down new tracks. It would then lower your heart rate and decrease your anxiety. It’s not a chemical imbalance to be depressed because I may – it’s a chemical imbalance in the sense that for your brain the chemicals are a little bit out of whack. And whether that’s structure, or chemicals, we never know. Because some people have – like schizophrenia is a structural problem, not a chemical problem. It’s what we call arborization which is where over time your brain connects a bunch of nerves. And then it trims a bunch of nerves, too, so that you don’t have too many, so that your brain can communicate. So you can have internal thoughts while you’re having external thoughts.

If you don’t trim those branches then you can have internal thoughts way too loudly while you’re having external thoughts and you get a different voice. So it’s these changes in structure. So mental illness is not a chemical imbalance, unless it is, which in that case it’s a lower or higher serotonin. It could be structural or this. So it’s an oversimplification.

The heterogeneity of mental illness has a lot to do with trauma. Has to do with is it group trauma, meaning a whole group of people experience this versus an individual. It changes the whole dynamic of the brain is wired. So, oversimplification, but they’re also wrong because they became black and white. So if anybody is black and white in this space they’re wrong. It’s all grey. Because the science we know a lot, but we don’t know everything.

So if they’re not speaking in – if they’re speaking in absolutes turn it off, because it’s just wrong.

**Zach:** And pharmaceutical companies wrote the copy for chemical imbalance. Like it’s not a thing.

**John:** All right. A hand right there. Yes?

**Female Audience Member:** Thank you. The thing I’ve personally experienced a lot is somebody whose friends and family think they have an addiction or mental health issue but that person either doesn’t think they do or doesn’t want treatment. What does the ideal friend or family member do in that situation and how does that fit in the timeline of issues that we’ve been talking about?

**Holly:** Should bug them every day. Tell them they have to go to treatment. The people around them should spend all their time worrying about whether the person is in treatment yet.

**John:** Just badger, badger, badger.

**Holly:** Yes, badger, badger, badger. That’s what works. I’m good.

No, yeah, you know, grownups make their own decisions. And if somebody is not ready to get treatment they’re not ready to get treatment. And we have to respect that and live our own lives and take care of our own selves. But you can still be there in a way to say, “Look, I’m here when you are ready to get help. I’m here if ever you want to get help.” And you might want to say that every couple of weeks, but probably not every day, right? So that they know when they are ready to get help that you’re there. You can’t force anybody to be ready to go to treatment, right? Or to get any kind of help.

What you’re talking to, and I don’t want to get too complicated, is actually though one of the systemic problems of something that might keep somebody sick. Because there might be what we call enablers, and I hate that word, but it’s a good word, who are spending their entire lives worrying about that other person. Wanting to make sure that they’re OK. Resentful that they’re spending all their time worrying about the other person being OK. And in that system the sick person almost might want to stay sick unconsciously because they’re getting all that attention around them and there are these weird payoffs. So actually the healthiest thing to do is to step back, be your own person, you know, say when my loved one is ready to get treatment he or she will. And until then I’ll live my own life. I’ll be a model of setting good boundaries and living my best life. And as long as they know I’m here that’s all I can do.

**Corey:** And from a provider’s standpoint we use a technique called motivational interviewing which is basically a science-based interaction technique. It’s like The Force. It’s awesome. I mean, literally these are not the droids you’re looking for. I mean, you can get someone through just appropriate empathetic questioning, but it has rigid structure in the way in which you approach it. So, if you want to know the right way to say things that might help someone move through those stages of change and get ready faster rarely can a family member do this because there’s too much emotional connection and discourse.

**Holly:** Can be shaming, sorry Corey. It can be a little shaming.

**Corey:** Yeah. It can be, if overdone. But at the same time motivational interviewing is the basis for getting someone to start to slowly move through these stages of change. And it’s the language that should be mimicked if you’re going to try to portray someone who is kind of doing the right thing. Not overdoing it. But the basics of it.

**Zach:** A last thing I’ll add is if someone is actively using and they are not ready to stop it’s a good time for them to learn about harm reduction. It’s a good time for them to find out where the local syringe exchange program is, where they distribute in a naloxone, where someone around them can naloxone which reverses the effects overdoses which someone who knows how to do the proper breathing in case this person isn’t breathing. So there’s ways to keep this person safe and know that they’re cared for even though treatment isn’t on the table right now.

**Holly:** That’s a huge important point. If you have somebody in your life who has an opioid addiction or might have an opioid addiction get some Narcan. And will you explain more what that is? And you can get it at your pharmacy. You can ask your pharmacy for Narcan to be there. If there is an overdose you can help them stay alive.

**Corey:** Yeah. So an overdose is when the opioid or other substance, or a combination of substances, in fact most overdoses are not just opioids. They’re an opioid plus like a benzodiazepine like Xanax or Valium or alcohol on top of it. And it suppresses the breathing in the brain stem. And so when that occurs if that’s not reversed then the patient will die because you’re not breathing.

Narcan, or naloxone, which is a nose stray or an injection. In fact, what’s out in the public right now is just a nasal spray.

**Holly:** It’s easy.

**Corey:** It gets to the brain. It blocks the receptor that the opioid goes to and reverses that. So, what it does is it wakes them up and puts them into [floored] withdrawal, but it keeps them from dying. And that’s the important part. Because I can never get somebody who is dead well. So, we need to make sure that any chance that we have this. My seven-year-old knows how to deliver this. My nine-year-old knows how to deliver. They carry it in their backpacks. And I live in Ann Arbor, which is not really a place where you’re most likely going to find as much of this in density. But it should just be that ubiquitously.

So if I asked the question how many of you have Narcan on you, it honestly should be kind of everybody, because it is the one thing that literally is a life-saving drug that anybody can give that nobody is going to steal. It has no street value other than keeping somebody alive. And if I’m walking back to my hotel tonight, you know, you need to be able to give that.

**Holly:** Go to your pharmacy and say I’d like some Narcan or some naloxone and your pharmacist will help you figure that out.

**John:** There are going to be so many scenes with Narcan in these people’s scripts and it’s going to be great.

**Zach:** That’s good. That’s very good. More naloxone.

**John:** Question right here.

**Female Audience Member:** So, as you know what happens to people of color who have mental health or addiction is very different from what happens to white people in this country. And I’m wondering what you would like to see be different in the program that we have around race and mental health and addiction.

**John:** Let’s talk about both sort of portrayals right now and also reality, so we make sure that we are addressing both things.

**Corey:** The data is very clear that medicine is racist. I mean, very racist. Not a little bit. This is not unconscious bias. It’s racism. And so racism is shown to be systemic in even doctors of color. And so it’s not just everybody. It’s the field of medicine that is racist. And this has been well studied and it basically shows that if you are an African American female you are going to receive the least effective care that we can deliver as compared to anybody else. And the spectrum changes. So poverty and the appearance of poverty and color also put you even below that.

So the minute you come in and you code as impoverished or you code as African American from that culture, or you code as American Indian or Latino, you’re going to get worse care. And so that’s a reality and I think quite honestly is worth beating up in TV shows. Meaning this needs to be called out.

I have this conversation with my patients, because obviously they’re going to look at me and be like well what do you know about this. I’m a white male doctor. I can walk into a room and have immediate power without having done anything, right? That’s just a reality of America.

And so I think what I would love to see is how to actually have that conversation from someone like me and someone like that to cross that bridge because it’s crossable. It really is. But you have to call out the fact that the entire system is actually built against that population. And that’s a systemic historical problematic issue that we’re going to have to deal with. And until we really beat it up in anecdote and emotion and story it’s not going to change in the bigger picture. That’s a great question.

**Holly:** It is a great question. And something that I wish – we all wish – was more addressed in television and film, too. Because it’s just so empowering to make sure that there is representation in our media. Mental health wise, too. It’s really unfortunate that there is a bias within the system and there are also cultural biases, some groups are more prevalent to ask for help or reach out for help. And I wish that story was told more, too, because it’s really, really important.

**John:** Yeah. This panel is set up to talk about stigma and I think it’s also important as we do our research on these things make sure we’re looking at cultural groups and what are the stigmas about these specific things within that group that would cause different outcomes or cause people to make different choices, be it for getting help or other things. It doesn’t stop at sort of doing the research on what is the issue, but like what is that issue within that culture is crucial. And that’s why you have to have representation in your room to figure out what’s going on there.

I think we can take one more question. I didn’t anyone in the back, so I see one hand in the back. I can’t even really see your face, but I see your hand up very, very high.

**Male Audience Member:** Back to screenwriting, within the 12-step programs there’s actually a tradition in not talking about the 12 steps in radio, television, and film. So as screenwriters how do you approach that because you would want to be responsible to that. And like Zach said with the doc he watched that gave him an unconscious bias on wanting to take methadone, so if as screenwriters we do the best that we can, or don’t, like what is our level of responsibility? And is there a higher level to the networks and studios to oversee how we’re portraying these 12-step programs or recovery in general?

**John:** I can start answering the question, but I think we have very smart people up here who can also answer it. I think as screenwriters we’re always looking for that balance of what is realism versus what is the point that we’re trying to make. And what you’re describing is that sometimes the absolutely realistic version of what that 12-step program might be like might be divulging stuff that is not helpful for the community as a whole. So you may want to make some choices that are different.

You’re always going to approach the scene from what are you trying to do for that character. What is the essence of that scene for that character? And there may be ways to use the nature of that scene or sort of what’s the arc of that scene to get at that thing without revealing things that you don’t need to be revealing. Or getting into esoterica that’s not meant to be discussed. But what do you guys think? To what degree is talking about the specifics of recovery, or sometimes the specific of a certain kind of treatment where you can’t walk somebody through the whole thing and you’re going to be doing some short-handing.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a show I loved and in this final season Rachel Bloom’s character is going through a program and you can sort of squint and probably figure out what she’s going through, but they weren’t specific about the nature of the program. Is that an appropriate choice to not give it the name? Where do you guys land on this?

**Gemma:** Well I can speak to that. My understanding of that tradition is that it is not to break personal anonymity but not that you can’t discuss the program. So, that is a difference and we’re dealing with fictional characters. And to do it in a responsible way I think is definitely important. But I don’t think it breaks that tradition. And that’s sort of the stigma of recovery that I was sort of talking about earlier is something that is real and it gives people a sense that there isn’t hope and that if you seek recovery that your life is over and that you won’t find joy or happiness again. And I think that that is false.

**Corey:** It’s national security. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to divulge something that’s going to make every person with addiction suddenly worse. I think transparency is really important for all aspects of treatment. Both for addiction and mental health. And in that because the more we normalize these things the more likely it’s less stigmatizing. And I think hiding it and separating it and keeping it under the covers just continues to perpetuate that stigma about people who are in recovery and what these things mean.

And if somebody goes to a cancer support group then we talk all about that. In fact, that’s entire storylines of pathways for people in shows. So I think that with this it’s a step. It’s a pathway in their recovery. And sometimes and for some people it’s not a part at all. Some people it’s a big part. Some people it’s transient. And it just is what it is. So normalizing it as much as you can through the stories that you tell becomes really important for destigmatizing the treatment of addiction and not keeping things under wraps and scary in a sense.

**Zach:** Yeah. I just think anonymity, it’s important for people who want to protect their identity, obviously. But I do think we are in, like that book, The Traditions, I think it was written in the 1930s or the 1940s, and I don’t think these traditions are mapping super neatly onto where we are now as a culture in society, namely that when there was an HIV epidemic a saying was literally Science = Death. That was the slogan. And right now there’s an overdose crisis where 70,000 people are dying every single year. And I think that there’s a responsibility to not be quiet about that. And to speak up. And the more that people like me are in places like this and the more that there’s people who use drugs, people who are using drugs, we need to hear from them. And, yeah, so I don’t think they should be anonymous. But that’s just my take.

**John:** I want to thank our fantastic panelists for a very great night.

Links:

* [Hollywood Health and Society](https://hollywoodhealthandsociety.org/events/addiction-mental-health-breaking-stigma)
* [6 Balloons with Dave Franco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uF4XjvS_Z0)
* [Motivational Interviewing](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/motivational-interviewing)
* [Narcan](https://www.narcan.com/)
* Follow Corey Waller on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/rcwallermd).
* Follow Holly Daniels on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/drhollydaniels).
* Follow Zachary Siegel on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/ZachWritesStuff). Follow his project Changing the Narrative on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/hijaction) or using #ChangingtheNarrative.
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_412_mha.mp3)