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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/marveling-with-michael-waldron).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 555 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, I’m talking with the Emmy Award-winning writer behind Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the Emmy Award-winning writer of Marvel’s Loki series, who happened to be the very same person. Welcome to the show, Michael Waldron.

**Michael Waldron:** Thanks for having me. Five hundred and how many?

**John:** Five hundred and fifty-five episodes.

**Michael:** Wow.

**John:** That’s a lot.

**Michael:** You brought me on for this milestone episode. Thank you so much.

**John:** This is the milestone, yes. Chris McCoy we always bring on every 200 episodes, to celebrate our bicentennial or whatever. You’re every whatever 555 is. That’s what you are.

**Michael:** I’ll see you the 1,010th episode.

**John:** That’s when we’ll bring you back on. By that point, we’ll have even more to talk about, but what I want to talk with you about today is the mushy boundaries between TV and movies and the role of writer and this weird transition and convergence that we’re facing. We’ll also have some listener questions that I think you’re especially well suited to answer. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk with you about Atlanta, because you’re from Atlanta. You live in Atlanta now while you’re shooting some stuff. It feels like all of Hollywood will eventually live in Atlanta. I’m hoping that maybe you can give our listeners your writer’s guide to Atlanta.

**Michael:** Cool, sounds great.

**John:** Let’s get into it. I’m just for the first time meeting you on this Zoom. I really have no idea about your backstory and how you became a writer. What is the quick Michael Waldron origin story?

**Michael:** Yes, I’m from Atlanta. I went to University of Georgia. I guess I graduated from college in 2010, which was a time that… It was before the whole movie industry had moved out here. It felt like being a screenwriter was an impossible thing to do. I had not grown up really writing scripts or anything. I just loved movies. I was going to go to law school, and at the last second was like, “I don’t want to be a lawyer. I just like watching Jeff Winger on Community. I like lawyers in movies and on TV.” I bailed on that, and I went out to California, which is the first time I’d even been. I’d never even seen the Pacific Ocean until I got out there.

I went to Pepperdine. They have a screenwriting MFA program, which was great for me. I fell under the tutelage of some really amazing mentors, a guy named Chris Chluess, who was the showrunner of Night Court for a long time, Emmy-winning writer and just a genius, and Sheryl Anderson, who’s the creator/showrunner, Sweet Magnolias on Netflix. I had some great professors. Before, I just knew how to write some jokes and some funny, stupid stuff. They really taught me how to write scripts. From there, I was fortunate enough to land an internship on the first season of Rick and Morty. That was really, really lucky. I was a huge fan of Dan Harmon, because I love Community, even when I was back in Georgia.

**John:** Before we get on there, I want to talk to you about film school here, because we get a lot of questions about like, “Oh, should I go to film school?” It sounds like for you, you were growing up in Atlanta, you were going to school in Atlanta, you were interested in film, so you just applied to film school and had no other plan or exposure to the film industry, other than like this is how you were going to get started, right?

**Michael:** Yeah. To me, it was the way I could wrap my head around getting out to LA, because I had no connections, knew nobody in the industry, had no way of getting a job. I was like, “I’ll just go into debt. I’ll just take on a lot of student loan debt.”

**John:** I want to get more, because we don’t have a lot of guests who actually went through film school. I went through film school for grad school. You show up. Is it a two-year program or a three-year program?

**Michael:** It’s a two-year program. I think you could take your time. I did it in two years because I wanted to get out and start working. The cool thing about Pepperdine was it was very practical. It was based on just writing pilots, specs. Each semester, you were creating an original piece of work. I had that very difficult process demystified for me very early on, where I was like, “Okay, I know how to write a pilot and create a world.”

Chris Chluess, my professor, did a great thing, where at the end of the semester, I took a half-hour comedy pilot writing class with him, where at the end you had to come in and pitch the show to him and an agent that he brought in. Only at the end did we learn that the agent was actually a real estate agent who was a neighbor of his in the Palisades. It was an incredible simulation of the pressure that I would go on to feel later in my career in some rooms where there’s some real skin in the game. I benefited from a couple of really fantastic professors.

**John:** You have good professors, but you obviously did something right while you were in that program. Imagine you’re a listener listening to this right now who is in a film program, is in a screenwriting program. What are things you could do in a screenwriting class to get the most out of it? What are the practical steps a student could take if you’re in one of those classes right now, to really dig the most out?

**Michael:** It’s the time. You’re paying a lot of money to be focused on writing. Now is the time. When I went there, I was still a lazy undergrad college kid. I had to shift out of that mentality and start learning how to be a professional writer, treat deadlines like real deadlines.

The other thing that was actually really helpful for me was the process of reading classmates’ stuff and giving notes on that, because that’s what you’re doing as a writer, especially in a writers’ room, all the time, is you’re reading stuff, you’re pitching, you’re giving feedback.

I was there with Eric Martin, a guy who became a close friend of mine and wrote on Loki with me, went on to work with me on Loki. He and I, we just said we’re going to treat each class like a writers’ room, and every script is a professional script that we want to try and get made with our feedback and everything. I think you just take it seriously. It really is one of those things that you get out of it what you put into it.

**John:** Yeah, because it’s not like going through a law program or a medical program where there’s clearly like, these are the things you’re going to learn, and you’re going to be tested on these things. It’s not that, because you could probably graduate that program and not really have learned a lot or not really have grown that much, correct?

**Michael:** A thousand percent. Also, your degree-

**John:** Has anyone ever asked for your degree?

**Michael:** Nobody cares. It’s worthless. You’re only there to learn, to make connections, and to hopefully come out of there with original material. That’s the other thing, samples that you can show to potential collaborators, people that are going to help you on your way up in the industry. I wrote the first draft of Heels, my show on Starz, in a class at Pepperdine. It was very, very helpful for me, because I was just finishing stuff.

**John:** Now, the other thing you got out of this program, apparently, was connections that got you an internship. You got an internship with Dan Harmon’s company. That was set up through the school?

**Michael:** It was set up through a buddy of mine who was a classmate, who was working on the first season of Rick and Morty. I had a chance to go on and be an intern on the first season, which was a blast.

**John:** We had Drew Goddard on the show, we’ve had Damon Lindelof on the show, who both said that working on a first season of the show was incredibly hard or being on the ground in a first season of the show was hard because everything was chaos and was constantly falling apart. Sometimes, because of the chaos, you could really learn a lot and you could see how it’s all being put together and be useful. Were you able to be helpful on that first season?

**Michael:** I think so. I think I totally benefited from the fact that it was a first season show. Nobody knew what it was going to be, at a little fledgling animation studio that Dan had just started with a couple of friends. I came in as the intern. The thing that I did is I made sure everybody knew from the beginning that I wanted to be a writer. That was who I was. Any time there was a hole that could be plugged with an intern who knew how to write, I was the first one to raise my hand.

The other thing that I did while I was there, weirdly, was I started a softball team, I guess as a stealth way to get to know Dan and Dino Stamatopoulos, one of the other owners. They played on the team. I was the coach. It worked out for me, because I went from being the intern to the coach. In that sense, I became a friend and a peer. That friendship led to my first real job as a writer’s PA on Season 5 of Community.

**John:** You talk about being an intern and offering to write anything they needed to have written. What are some examples of things you would’ve written as an intern on that show?

**Michael:** It wasn’t even necessarily Rick and Morty specific. It was just as simple as somebody’s got to make a sign to wash your hands or to wash the dishes in the kitchen. It’s like, that’s a chance to be creative. At some point, one of these great writers that’s working here you hope is going to see this stuff and say, “This is actually funny. Who’s doing this stuff?” You’re just trying to put yourself out there. Then writing coverage and just treating everything, every assignment like your life depends on it from a writing standpoint, because as far as I was concerned, it did.

**John:** You’re working there. You’re writing there on small things. When are you letting them or asking them to read the stuff you’ve been writing for Pepperdine? When are you asking if someone’s willing to read your samples?

**Michael:** A long time, if ever. I don’t know if I ever did. That was another great piece of advice I got from my mentor, Chris Chluess. He said, “Think of it. You’re sitting at a card table. You only get to cash in those chips, your equity with these guys, one time. You have to be really, really shrewd with where you asked for something, essentially.” It’s a political game. In fact, I think earlier in your career… Obviously, it’s harder now because not everything’s in person. You’re almost, I found, better off selling people on your personality as a colleague and as a collaborator, and then let them be blown away down the line when you’re actually a really good writer. I can’t remember how long it took for me to ask Dan to read something. It was years and years down from our relationship.

**John:** You’re starting off in Rick and Morty land. Then you’re going over to Community. You said you’re a writers’ room assistant?

**Michael:** I was the writer’s PA.

**John:** What was your job like doing that?

**Michael:** It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare.

**John:** Were you getting the lunch order?

**Michael:** Oh my god, the lunch, the dinner, the snack, the coffees, the midnight stack. It really was a blast, but that was a grind. I don’t know, there were like 13 writers that season. It was Season 5 of a network show, 13 or 14 writers. They had assistants. Each coffee order was a double decker, two boxes. I just remember trudging across Paramount with all that. I was getting lunches, getting meals and everything, but I asked Dan if when I wasn’t doing that, if I could sit in the writers’ room and just listen and learn. He was great, and he let me. Then I got to know all the other great writers there and suddenly had a whole new network of great mentors, which included Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who’d written all the Spider-Man movies. I would show up early to sit in Erik Sommers’s office and just ask him, “What does a manager do vs an agent? What does your attorney… ” I really benefited from there just being so many good folks who wanted to help me learn.

After a certain amount of time, I had I guess earned enough trust to open my mouth and start pitching bad jokes. I got to feel that feeling of, oh, I just pitched a joke that crashed and burned. It was no good. Then I got to feel the feeling of, the world didn’t end. Nobody cares, because everybody’s pitching stuff all day, and a lot of it dies. Then the next thing you know, you pitch something that makes it into the show, and you can tell your wife, “Hey, look, I wrote that joke.” I think that was 2014. We worked from June until January. It was crazy. The hours were insane. In a lot of ways, I feel like I learned everything there.

**John:** Now, there was an amazing chance to learn things there. We’ve been talking with support staff over the last couple years about those jobs and how underpaid they are and how hard it is for some people to make a living or even keep a roof over their head doing those jobs. Was that your experience? Was the pay low, the hours long? How were you surviving during that time?

**Michael:** You’re certainly not handsomely paid. On that show, we worked such insane hours that I was actually making a decent amount from overtime. I got some checks that I was like, “Holy crap.” I was lucky in that sense. The food budget was so astronomical. I was in charge of the food. There was always an extra pizza or a tray of sushi coming home with me. I figured out how to scrounge my way through life. Of course, it’s a grind. Everybody, all the support staff is working just as hard as the writers and as everybody else. We’ve got to take better care of those folks, because you can’t do the job without them.

**John:** Now, what is your transition from you’re sort of in the room on Community, you’re now a repped writer who’s making things? What was that transition? 2014 or so when you’re in this writers’ room. When do you start getting some stuff that is Michael Waldron as a writer in himself?

**Michael:** That was on the end of Community. I got an email from a guy on the support staff, another assistant, who said that a young agent was looking to discover talent on the support staff, which I know now, an absolute lie. I said, “Wow, this is my big shot.” I sent this supposed young agent the pilot for Heels. They responded. This guy named Harry turned out to just be the assistant to a manager, who was a guy my age, but wanted to meet me.

Long story short, the guy’s my manager until today. We met. We went to The Den in West Hollywood or something. I had my first experience of, oh wow, here’s a guy who feels like a real gatekeeper talking to me about an original script I wrote, giving me feedback but also talking like he wants to be an advocate for me, and he was. I did some revisions on that script based on his feedback and some other folks he introduced me to.

That kicked off I guess that first general meeting tour. You’re meeting the people your age. Everybody’s climbing the ladder at the same pace. You’re meeting young creative executives or assistants and people that are looking to be somebody who discovered someone. Through that, I guess I legitimized the project enough, and there was enough interest in it, that my manager’s company LBI actually took me on as a client. They called me in to their big office, and I sat on the giant table for network. I was like, “Oh my god.” It was like, “We want to rep you.” That felt like wow, I did it. Then of course, you didn’t do it. You didn’t do anything.

Shortly after that, I met a guy who was working at Paramount television who would go on to become one of my best friends. He really championed the show over there. In about 2015, 2016, Paramount Television optioned Heels. It was funny how it happened. He called me and he was like, “Yeah, we want to have a general with you. Some of my bosses read it.” Then on the way over, called me and was like, “No, this is a pitch. We’re really interested.”

**John:** Oh my god.

**Michael:** It’s like, I don’t know what happens in this show. This is a sample. There was a lot of tap dancing and making it up as I went, but they got it. I got really lucky to just get into development on something original of my own very young. I was just learning and getting to go through that process. You learn so, so much.

**John:** If we were to watch the pilot of Heels today, the series that exists, and the sample that you wrote in film school, how close are they?

**Michael:** The one that I wrote in film school was markedly worse. I actually can look and realize that my writing took a genuine professional leap after going through Community, working on Community, and then suddenly finding myself in real professional situations where the stakes are higher. That actually made me raise my game. It’s not just a homework assignment anymore. You realize that this is something I’m trying to get on television and change my life. I have to put everything I have into this. It’s a hell of a lot better.

**John:** At this stage, you’re working on Heels. It’s great to have development. This is actually getting money coming in the door, which is fantastic and probably much needed. Were you thinking, okay, now I should try to staff on TV, now I should try to write a feature? What were the other things you were thinking about doing? Obviously, it’s never just one job. You need to keep it going.

**Michael:** Money coming in the door was insane. I thought about staffing. I guess in my mind, I was like, “I’m a showrunner. I’m a creator. I’m a showrunner. I’m going to get this show made.” So naïve. So stupid. I was like 26. That was I was determined to do. I had the good fortune of I was continuing to work with Dan in a more producorial, executive context. I had some other money coming in the door. I was helping Dan develop some stuff as a producer, which I only knew anything about that because I was just going through it on my own on the other side. I hadn’t written a feature.

**John:** That’s crazy you had not written a feature, throughout the whole time in film school that you never finished one feature.

**Michael:** I thought I was going to be a comedy writer. I was mostly focused on that. Then I fell in love with the one-hour world. Like I said, I got lucky, and then Heels caught fire. People really responded to it. It always felt like it had so much momentum. I was like, “I don’t want to step away from this thing. I want to always be able to run it.” Now, I remember I applied for the WGA Showrunner Training Program. In my interview, they were like, “Why are you applying for… Why don’t you go get a staff job? What are you doing?” I was like, “I don’t know, I’m a writer.”

**John:** I had the experience where I had a very hot script go that was getting a lot of attention. I was able to sell a TV show and make a TV show, a one-hour TV show for the WB. I was a showrunner who had no business being a showrunner. I think the WGA folks would’ve looked at me as well and said, “Why the hell are you doing… You should not be doing this.” I wish someone had pulled me aside to tell me that.

**Michael:** I needed it, yeah, jeez, because eventually, I would get into that position a year later and have no clue what I was doing.

**John:** It was just rough. Jump us forward a little bit in time to… Was Heels the first thing of yours that was wholly yours that got made?

**Michael:** No, the first thing that was wholly mine that got made was Loki.

**John:** Did Loki come out before Heels?

**Michael:** Yeah, Loki came out last June, and Heels came out in August. Long story short, what happened was Heels went to a mini room that I ran, as an idiot, but had a great writing staff. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know how to lead a writing staff. I had some great collaborators and ended up writing a great season. We just couldn’t cast it, couldn’t cast the show. Starz put it on a shelf. I was like, “That’s it for me. I’m moving home. That’s end. That’s the end of my meteoric rise.” I licked my wounds, wrote a feature, just to do it, and then went off and actually got that staffing experience on Rick and Morty.

I was a writer and producer on Season 4 of Rick and Morty, went back and got to feel like what it was like on the other side of the whiteboard, which was very helpful, to be a showrunner, to know what your writers are feeling like and their anxieties as they’re pitching and coming in every day. Then right toward the end of Season 4, that feature that I’d written made its way over to Marvel. It was a time travel action comedy that just happened to be the perfect sample for the Loki show they were developing. That’s how I got in the game on that project.

**John:** Great. Now, before we get into Loki here, I do want to talk about the mini room you did for Heels. How many writers did you have in that room? You said you did it wrong. Tell us some lessons you learned in doing it wrong.

**Michael:** There was six of us, I believe. I didn’t know how to synthesize all of my writers’ tremendous ideas while still making it be my vision. That was just a hard thing of how do I take what your room is wanting it to be and reconcile that with what I want it to be. Every day I walked away being like, “Am I making the show I even want to make?” Then I wasn’t really giving them great instructions for the first half of the room. It took a while for me to realize that at least my best approach to a writers’ room is if you’re the showrunner, if it’s your thing, then your writers’ room is an extension of your vision, the voices in your head.

The best thing I think you can do as a showrunner is just listen, is to throw something out there, an idea that you’re interested in pursuing, part of your vision, and then let your writers take it somewhere really, because that’s what you’ll be doing at home in your head anyways. Here you have the benefit of great professionals who can do it out loud. It just took me a while to realize that that was the way to do it as opposed to I was a guy who was used to just sitting at home on my couch writing and doing it all on my own. That’s what I had to learn is you don’t have to do it all on your own.

**John:** Now, when Heels finally did shoot, were they using the scripts that you had come out of from that room, or did you have to go back and take everything out of that?

**Michael:** It was a combination. The first half of the season was pretty much locked and loaded. We needed to do big revisions on the back half. They brought in Mike O’Malley, the great writer and actor who had created Survivor’s Remorse for Starz, brought in him as showrunner. It was crazy, because it really did feel like I was giving my baby to someone. When they wanted to revive it in 2019, I was off doing Loki, and so there was no way I could do it. I had to give Mike the keys to this car that was very personal to me. Really, I owe Heels everything. I owe it my life, those characters and that world. He was just so gracious and generous and made the show better every step of the way. That in itself was a great learning experience of the ultimate collaboration, giving something so personal to someone else.

**John:** Let’s jump ahead to Loki here. I want to talk through the process from, okay, Michael, you got the job to now the cameras are rolling and we’re starting to shoot this show. What time frame was that? What were the steps along the way? They’re meeting with you. You’re pitching how you would do it. You get the job. What is your first step? Are you making documents just by yourself? Are you immediately going into a room situation? What is the process like for this Marvel series?

**Michael:** It was really the dawn of the Marvel series. Loki was the third or fourth one to go. It was at first very solitary. It felt almost like I guess developing a feature. Then it was just meeting with our executive team and pitching on… The core idea they had was, here’s Loki, and it’s Loki and the TVA. The pitch that I developed was where does it go from there. It’s Loki hunting a variant of himself across time.

Once I got the job, first off there was a process of mourning leaving Rick and Morty, where I’d been for nine months and created a lot of great friendships and was very comfortable. There was a real comfort level there. I was going into a situation of total unknown. It was hiring a staff and launching a room. This time around, I knew what I was doing.

On the first day of the Heels writers’ room, the only person I actually knew what to tell to do was the writers’ PA. I was like, “Here’s how the lunch order should go,” because that was the job I had had. On the first day in the Loki writers’ room, I knew I have a vision for how I want this story to go, and I want us to all get there together.

**John:** Is everybody looking at the same document? Are you talking at them for an hour about the big, broad strokes vision? What are those initial conversations?

**Michael:** There was a core document that I… They read my pitch that I gave to Kevin Feige that got me the job. It was pretty thorough. Here are the six episodes. Honestly, they’re generally what the episodes ended up being. Episode 3 is Loki and Sylvie are crossing a moon together. Then you want to hear, okay, my brilliant writers, what do you think the best version of a Loki show can be? They know the general framework and where I and Marvel would like to take it.

In the case of that show, our first job was let’s figure out the emotional story of this thing. Let’s figure out what each of the six episodes is. We can say Episode 2 is the zodiac episode. Episode 3 is Before Sunrise. We know what each episode is. Then we had to take about two weeks and just do time travel, which was its own… That was a new experience of really doing a sci-fi camp together, of a lot of us drawing lines, squiggly lines on the whiteboard, and just trying to create a shared institutional language of what is time travel in this show, what is a time law, how can it be broken, because we had to all be on the same page. By the end, it felt like we’d been in the writers’ room for 60 weeks, not 3 or 4.

**John:** That first writers’ room was how many weeks long?

**Michael:** Twenty, and that was it.

**John:** Was it enough?

**Michael:** It was enough to get solid first drafts of everything. The one tricky part of it is I hadn’t written the pilot. That’s the one atypical part of the process there was I hadn’t written the pilot as the writers’ room launched. It was about 9 or 10 weeks in, it became really important for me to get a decent version of the pilot written so that we could establish the tone of the show. Otherwise, it becomes really hard to write a writer’s draft if you don’t really know what the tone of the show is going to be.

**John:** For sure. During this 20 weeks, you guys are breaking these 6 episodes. Were there story areas? Were there outlines? What are the actual written documents that are coming out of this process, before there are scripts?

**Michael:** Everything starts with me with a story circle, which comes from the Dan Harmon camp.

**John:** Very familiar, yes.

**Michael:** From the Dan Harmon camp. That was how we broke our stories, which probably drove everybody else crazy, because I think everybody else prefers to do note cards. Even I am like, note cards are probably more efficient. It was outlines. It was let’s get a beat sheet that we feel good about and then let’s send a writer off to write an outline. That outline goes up the flagpole. Once that’s approved, we’ll write a draft.

**John:** A beat sheet is one to two pages. An outline is longer. Are those the right lengths?

**Michael:** Yeah, I think our outlines were, I don’t know, never more than 10 pages. Again, that’s probably a function of my own personal style. I am a bad planner. I like to discover it on the page. I’m more apt to send someone off to outline or to script with a little less figured out and leave some room for discovery, which is exactly what happened in Loki Episode 102 a lot. So much of the great stuff with Loki and Mobius in that episode was Elissa Karasik, our writer. I just trusted her to go off and say, “Go figure some of this stuff out,” and she did. It was all great. I was glad that we didn’t waste time in the room trying to figure out all the details when you can just rely on your writers to do that.

**John:** Is the first time the studio is seeing the specifics of what happens, are they seeing [inaudible 00:33:17] or they’re seeing the outline?

**Michael:** In the Loki process, we actually had our executives, our producers in the room with us. It was atypical but really fantastic.

**John:** Were they listening or contributing?

**Michael:** Contributing. It was great. It was like having other writers, other producers, somebody there who, A, is incredibly steeped in the Marvel lore, what’s come before. They also know what’s coming next. The most important role that is Stephen Broussard and Kevin Wright, they’re producers, but they’re also filmmakers. They may as well have been writers on our team for all the great ideas they had. Some of the most valuable things they did was know the stuff that Kevin Feige and the higher-ups were not going to respond to. Instead of spending five days in the room chasing a storyline that’s just going to end up being an absolute non-starter, you’ve got somebody to say, “No, don’t go there. I don’t think anybody’s going to really respond to that.” As a showrunner, or as somebody running a room, that is invaluable to not have to burn that time.

**John:** Jac Schaeffer was on the show, and she was talking about how on the first day of her writers’ room, she had up on all the walls all this imagery about what she wanted the show to look like and feel like, because she was in a physical room. You were in a physical room your whole time too, because this is all pre-pandemic.

**Michael:** Yes, I was in a physical room. The first time I walked by Jac’s room and saw it, absolutely, I was like, “I got to quit.” I was like, “This is a nightmare. I’m bad at my job,” because we shared a wall. They were the room right next to us. You look in there, and I was like, “Oh my god, it’s so organized.” By the way, her writer’s assistant was a guy named Clay Lapari, who was the writer’s assistant on Community with me a hundred years ago. It all comes back around. I came in, I was like, “We got to print some pictures out.” We did. I felt better once we had that stuff up there.

**John:** Earlier you referenced on Heels this other guy, Mike O’Malley, was coming in to be a showrunner on that show, and yet you’re listed as head writer on Loki. What is the distinction? Is there a meaningful distinction? Job-wise, what he was doing versus what you’re doing, are they similar?

**Michael:** The Marvel shows don’t have a showrunner. I guess the best way I know to put it is it’s you and the director, whoever the producing director is, you’re passing a baton over to them and working in tandem together, whereas if you’re Mike O’Malley, the showrunner, he’s the final say over the head of directors on set, through the edit, through everything.

The Marvel process is I guess a much more collaborative one, where at least in TV I’m not necessarily the final say. I was like, “There’s definitely an opportunity to have my ego bruised by this.” You realize, “I’m not the showrunner of this.” Then quickly it’s like, “I just want the show to be great.” When we hired Kate, her and I were so instantly on the same page creatively, and her level of ambition with the show matched mine. It was like, “This is going to be good. This is going to work.”

**John:** This is Kate Herron, the director?

**Michael:** Yes.

**John:** At what point in the process did she come on board and did you start having these conversations? Was the room finished? Was the room still going?

**Michael:** Yeah, maybe, I don’t know, a month or two prior. She came in at a great time in the process where we had our first drafts. I was making my way through my revisions on everything. She represented just creative, fresh eyes. I’m like, “Hey, we’ve all gone insane this summer making this crazy time travel show. Does this make any sense to you as a normal person?” Also, a practical filmmaker’s perspective. We’ve got a trained heist sequence. I could sit with Kate so I’m not wasting a week writing an action sequence that is simply un-renderable on screen.

**John:** I want to get to some listener questions, but I don’t want to skip all over Doctor Strange and your involvement on Doctor Strange. I’ve done a zillion features. This was your first feature to do. How did you take your experiences on these TV shows and apply it here? Did they apply? What did it feel like to be a writer on a feature?

**Michael:** Weirdly, it felt like TV. Sometimes it felt like showrunning. That’s just a testament to how collaborative Sam Raimi is and that he empowered me so much. He and I had a really special kinship together, forged by the fact that we were coming up with a movie over the course of 2020 when the world was ending around us. I was not on set of Loki. I was getting ready to fly to Atlanta to be on set. I got a call that said, “We need you more right now on Doctor Strange.”

**John:** Doctor Strange was shooting in London?

**Michael:** Shooting in London. Then COVID hit, and it became the last two and a half years of my life. I was on set every day of Doctor Strange. I was there for six months last year locked down in London. When I think about Doctor Strange, really I think about it as much of a filmmaking experience as a writing one. I was writing, but it was also just so much working with our actors and working alongside and learning from Sam about directing and everything he does. When I think about Doctor Strange, I just think about being cold on set in London.

**John:** A lot of being on set is just being cold or hot or being in the sun when you don’t want to be in the sun.

**Michael:** Exactly.

**John:** Or cursing the sun for coming up when you’re supposed to be shooting nights and you run out of night.

**Michael:** Precisely. It was an absolute adventure that didn’t… Probably 2020 and 2021 for a lot of people doesn’t quite feel real, but yet again was an amazing experience, where I just got to learn so much.

**John:** Great. We have some listener questions. This first one I see is actually about film school. It feels like exactly what we should have you talk to us about. Megana, what’s the first question here?

**Megana Rao:** Live and Die By Approval from Columbus, Ohio wrote in, “I was recently accepted to USC School of Cinematic Arts. As a country bumpkin from the shire of Ohio in the twilight of his 20s, this is an honor and huge dream come true. Recently, we had a meeting about financial aid options. The thing I most anticipated hearing about were merit-based scholarships. Turns out they emailed everyone who had received a scholarship earlier that day, and I received no such email. It’s funny, despite having gotten into one of the most competitive film schools in the world, I already feel like I’m not enough. If this class is a group of people who they view as having a unique voice among thousands of other voices, I somehow feel like I’m already on the low end of this elite totem pole.

“I guess I’m asking for any words of advice you may have on handling rejection or I’m not enough self-judgments. It’s one thing to battle those voices in your personal life. In dating, for instance, sometimes people just don’t fit. It’s another thing entirely when there’s something as measurable as money at stake to validate your insecurities.”

**John:** To summarize, Live and Die has gotten into a great film school but feels bad because they didn’t get a merit-based scholarship. They feel like they’re coming in at the bottom of this class or not at the top of this class.

**Michael:** As somebody who got rejected from USC’s screenwriting program, I would say congratulations. Also, your ability to focus on defeat, even in the glow of victory, means you’ll probably be a very successful writer, because that is a quality we all share.

If I’m reading between the lines of that, I know what it’s like to feel like a country bumpkin wanting to go out to Hollywood and make it. I’d say first off, that is a voice that needs to be… Shit, I’ve made a career out of it. Hollywood needs country bumpkins too. It is an honor to get in, and Hollywood does need your voice, clearly, or you wouldn’t have gotten accepted. I think rejection that is tied to finances is a bummer. That’s just your first lesson in film school, because that is going to be your whole career is rejection tied to finances. Steel yourself now.

**John:** I would say, Live and Die, that you’re having a feeling, and feelings don’t come from logic. Sometimes we try to use logic to justify the feelings that we’re having. If we actually check the facts, you got into one of the best film schools in the country, if not the best film school. This obsession with a merit-based scholarship is like… What are they actually measuring? Do you even know how many people are getting them, why people get them? Do the people who get them succeed more often than the people who don’t?

I think just hearing Michael on this podcast today, he was talking about how you get value out of film school. It’s actually by showing up and just doing the work all the time and try to do your very best in it. So often, I think as writers, we were probably really good at being in school and were probably really good at getting grades and everyone commending for our writing. Suddenly, when you get into a place where you’re not necessarily the best, you panic that you’re the worst. That’s just not true. You could come in there with a head of steam and actually get amazing stuff done while you’re in film school. I understand your feelings, but you got to push them aside and be excited to be at USC. Megana, do we have another question?

**Megana:** Yes. Cherry asks, “After years of struggling to break in, I’ve signed my first contract to write a feature, and it will qualify me for the WGA. I’m thrilled to finally be in the game, but now the real work begins. My primary focus is nailing it with this project. My question is, what should I be doing to prepare myself for the next step?

“I have new spec scripts that will be ready to share soon. I’ve had a couple meetings with managers and an offer of representation. I have a light relationship with some producers, agents, and development execs who have read my work. How do I go about getting the next job or getting my new material in front of the right people? It seems like the next step would be to sign with a manager, but I’m not sure how to navigate that. What am I looking for in a manager? More importantly, what am I looking to avoid in a manager? If I didn’t work with a manager at this stage, what would an alternative game plan be?”

**John:** Michael, you’ve had a manager all this time. Talk to us about managers.

**Michael:** My relationship with my two managers has been one of the most important parts of my career, as has my relationship with my agents. I’ve had the same team my whole career, which is atypical. My answer to that is it’s all personality base. I am teamed with people that I click with on a personal level whose values align with mine. It’s not based on agency or management company clout. Wherever you’re going to seek representation, I wouldn’t even say tell yourself you need a manager vs an agent. You need somebody that you connect with and that can be an advocate for you. That’s the most important thing.

Then as far as what is that next thing, it’s doing a great job on the project you just landed, which is amazing. Congratulations. That is the most important thing. That’s what will get you the next jobs is kicking ass on the thing you just got hired on. Really, don’t think too much beyond that other than maybe know what is the one thing that I have behind this that I believe in the most that I would show someone when that next opportunity comes calling.

**John:** You’re going to probably end up signing with some manager, Cherry, who is going to take you on the water bottle tour of Los Angeles that Michael was describing earlier where they just sit you in a bunch of rooms and you talk with people. That’s good. That’s a natural function. Whether it’s this person who’s already introduced themselves to you and wants to represent you… Maybe it’s them.

A really good place to check on that is the other producers you have light relationships with. Ask them. Say, “Hey, this person offered to represent me. What do you think of this person? Is this a good match?” If not, they might suggest a better person or a different person you could meet with. All of my previous assistants have gone on to have writing careers, and most of them had managers. In every case, they would come to me like, “I think this person is great, but I get a weird feeling.” If you get a weird feeling, that’s not the right person. You should not sign with a manager or a representative or a lawyer who you dread taking their phone calls or dread getting their emails. It has to be somebody you’re excited to be on the phone with, because otherwise it’s just not going to work.

**Michael:** Hundred percent agree with that.

**John:** Megana, do you have another question for us?

**Megana:** Yes. Moomin asks, “In the conception phase before any word of the screenplay is put to paper, what tools or methods do you both use to keep everything organized? Where do you compile all your thoughts, ideas, and bits and pieces?”

**John:** What are you doing for that stuff, Michael?

**Michael:** Not being as efficient as I should. A lot of my writing is done walking my dog, going for walks in the woods, or driving around. Then as far as recording it, it’s usually going onto my iPad and doing story circles and stuff.

**John:** Are you doing story circles just with a pen and drawing?

**Michael:** Yeah, just to get it down. In the inception phase, that’s what I’m doing. I spend a lot of time just daydreaming. I don’t necessarily need to write it all down, because I feel like anything that I don’t remember probably wasn’t that good of an idea to begin with. It’s the stuff that I can’t let go of, finally I know it’s time to put this down. Then when I’m actually writing a script, my process becomes really inefficient, because the way I’ll write a scene is I’ll just retype it over and over and over again, making little, minute changes here and there, because I just need to… It’s how I play the scene out in my head is typing it out.

**John:** I loop scenes just in my head first. I have the blocking for everybody and the rough dialog. I will do a scribble version, which I’m just like, the quickest version on paper I can possibly get down so I don’t forget it. Then I’ll start tackling the scene. I’ll know that sometimes in this loose version, some stuff’s just not making sense. I’ll work on that when I get to the real final version. That scribbling process isn’t part of my overall note taking or overall recordkeeping.

I think more what Moomin’s asking for is those general ideas that come to you, you don’t want to lose. I’ll have index cards everywhere. I’ll just scribble it down on an index card. Then I just try to process those once a day. I just put them in. Now we’re using Notion, but we used to use other tools for that, just so they are someplace. I don’t look back to that that often, but sometimes I do need to find that thing, or if at least it’s in the same document, I can say, oh, all of these ideas go together, and they fit in a meaningful way. If I don’t write something down, I’m going to have to keep spending brain cycles to remember it, because it’ll go away. I want to use those brain cycles to do new stuff, rather than just remembering stuff.

**Michael:** That’s how I end up looking back in my Notes app. I’m like, “2016 Moby Dick in space?”

**John:** Fantastic.

**Michael:** What an idea.

**John:** It’s come time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our listeners. Michael, do you have something to recommend to the folks listening to this podcast?

**Michael:** Yes. A cool thing that I’m going to recommend is giving blood, which is a cause that has become near and dear to my heart. One of my best friends, a writer and actor named Breck Denny, who was a member of the Groundlings, he passed away earlier this year. He was a beneficiary of a lot of blood donations. They were trying to save him. Cycled through an outrageous amount of blood in the hospital. What I learned on the other end of that process is just how bad of a blood shortage there is in the country right now and how far a single blood donation can go. We’re at a historic shortage of blood in the country.

My buddy, he was one of the first people to get COVID back in 2020. After that, he started giving blood religiously, so they could test blood, and was actually part of vaccine trials and everything. He was just a great guy. As a way to honor him, we created a blood drive called Blood for Breck. You can find it in my Instagram bio. I think it’s on my Twitter. You can go there and pledge to give blood.

Really, giving blood, it’s an awesome thing that you go, you do it for 30 minutes, you get to take a picture. It just makes such a difference. It really does save lives. I don’t know. I feel like in a day and age where we spend a lot of time being like, “How can I help?” and it’s like, if I just do an online challenge and donate money, where does that money go? What is this? A bag of your blood is going to go into somebody’s body that’s fighting for their life. It’s just not a thing I ever really thought about until this touched our world, and so now it’s something I’m passionate about.

**John:** That’s great. Back in college I donated blood and loved donating blood. As of right now, we’re recording this in Pride month of 2022, gay men still can’t donate blood in the US, which is crazy. There’s lots of work being done to try to fix that problem. If you can donate blood, donating blood is a great idea. We’ll put a link in the show notes to your blood donation charity and some other blood donation drives out there across the country.

**Michael:** Great.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is this essay I read this week by Elizabeth Williamson in Slate. It was an excerpt from her book about Sandy Hook. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this. I’ve always been fascinated by conspiracy theorists and people who believe in impossible things. The people who believe school shootings didn’t happen are just this weird, special breed. This is what the article’s really getting into. This one talks about this Tulsa grandmother who goes by the handle gr8mom and really dives into why is she going after parents of Sandy Hook families and continues to believe that all these school shootings are nonsense, and digs into it.

It describes a dark triad of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, which is basically you really fundamentally cannot convince them that this is not the way it is. There’s no reasoning with them. They literally just cannot be swayed from the path that they think they’re on. If you point out any inconsistency in their logic, they will “what about” to get to another thing.

It wasn’t a hopeful article to be reading, but I think it actually helped me understand more like, oh, they’re actually just psychopaths, really, some of the people who are believing the wildest of these things. As opposed to other people who get sucked into it and they can be talked out of it, there are some people who are just never going to be talked out of this, and maybe we shouldn’t try.

**Michael:** You found some depression I hadn’t even thought about in a while. That’s great.

**John:** Absolute pleasure to have you on the show this week. That’s our program. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ryan Gerberding. 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’m @johnaugust. Michael, are you on Twitter? That’s where I reached out to you the first time.

**Michael:** Yes, @michaelwaldron and on Instagram @fakemichaelwaldron.

**John:** Love it. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We have one Loki-inspired T-shirt, which you should check out. Our 10th anniversary T-shirt is Loki-inspired. Our designer Dustin Box did a great job making it feel both like Scriptnotes and like Loki.

You can find the show notes to this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. You can sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record about Atlanta. In the meantime, Michael Waldron, thank you so much for coming on Scriptnotes and sharing your history here.

**Michael:** Thanks for having me. It was an honor. I’ll see you after another 555 episodes.

**John:** It’s going to be great. We’ll be living in the future.

**Michael:** Yes, exactly.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** We’re back, and we’re here with Michael Waldron, who is not only a film writer and a TV writer, he is a person who came from Atlanta, who now works in Atlanta. We will all inevitably now work in Atlanta, it seems. Can you give us some tips for… Let’s say I’m a Los Angeles person who is moving to Atlanta for work, to work on a thing. Where should I live in Atlanta? What should I do in Atlanta? Give me an overview of life in Atlanta for a writer.

**Michael:** Right now I think the heat index is 106 degrees, so don’t come. That’s my biggest advice.

**John:** We won’t. Okay, done, won’t come.

**Michael:** It’s great here. It’s been amazing to watch the city become more progressive and grow up as the years have passed. As far as living, the places that you’re going to feel the most like LA, like what you’re used to probably, it’s Inman Park is what you always hear, down south side of the city. Inman Park, Grant Park, Old Fourth Ward.

**John:** What are the Los Angeles equivalents of any of these neighborhoods? What’s the Silver Lake?

**Michael:** Inman Park is like the Silver Lake. It’s like one big Silver Lake. There’s a bunch of different areas around there. That’s probably the place to look at if you’re moving that’ll feel like LA. It’s very walkable. Atlanta’s great. There’s a thing called the BeltLine. It’s a sidewalk. It’s a sidewalk that stretches throughout the entire city. You can walk or bike across the whole city. There’s great restaurants and breweries and all sorts of stuff all around it. Inman Park or anywhere right around there, that’s going to be your best bet.

**John:** If I’m moving to Inman Park, but I’m working on a Marvel property, a Marvel project, how long is my commute to get from where I’m living to-

**Michael:** Marvel, we shoot all our stuff down at… It’s called Trilith Studios now, which is the old Pinewood, which is in Fayetteville, which is… I don’t know, it’s about a half hour with traffic and stuff. If you’re from LA, you’re not going to be daunted by any of the travel times out here, unless there’s a wreck on 85. Then you’ll be like, “What on earth?”

**John:** Like, what choices have you made?

**Michael:** You can get screwed, but it’s nothing. The traffic here, it’s as congested as LA, but somehow you’re always still going 80. It’s like Nascar. Get ready. It’s an intense vehicular experience.

**John:** Now, when I’ve been shooting things in Vancouver or Toronto, one of the things we have to watch for is any line that a local player has to say that has a U sound in it, so no “abouts” and that sort of problem. There are certain lines we’re going to write around certain things. Is there any local casting things you should be aware of if you’re filming something in Atlanta that is not supposed to be in Atlanta?

**Michael:** I’m always delighted with the local casting around here. It’s some real talented folks. What wouldn’t you want? I don’t know, if you can write stuff with Southern accents, you’re going to have an easier time. That’s for sure.

**John:** Now, something like Loki, which obviously had a tremendous amount of set work, you had some real practical exteriors as well in that show, because the main… Or at least the places that weren’t sound stages, like that TVA building. Was that a real building?

**Michael:** The shot of the archives with the elevators coming down, yeah, that’s an old hotel in Atlanta. Everything else was, generally in the TVA, that was a practical set that we built down there at Trilith. That was Kasra Farahani, our brilliant production designer.

**John:** Are people who have to come into Atlanta and leave from Atlanta, are there now direct flights? Are there enough direct flights that you can always get back and forth reliably or are you flying two places now?

**Michael:** It’s so easy out of LA. There’s probably eight or nine flights out of the day. Atlanta, it’s the Delta hub. The airport is massive. You’ll never want to go back to LAX after you’ve been to the Atlanta Airport. Before COVID, they’d added direct Burbank to Atlanta flights, which were really nice, but they were always on planes that felt like they were from the ‘60s. You’d get excited, and you’d take them, and then it was a real like, “I don’t know about this.” You’re normally on a nice airbus if you’re flying Delta to and from LA. It’s pretty easy travel-wise.

**John:** Now today, a lot of productions have moved to Atlanta, obviously. How much post-production on these shows is happening in Atlanta versus other places in the world? Is any writing happening in Atlanta? I feel like maybe Walking Dead maybe did writing in Atlanta. Do you see either writing or more post happening there?

**Michael:** I don’t know. I’m certain there’s got to be post going on here. Maybe, sure, Adult Swim does some of their stuff. None of my shows have posted here. That’s all still LA. Writing-wise, still LA, but maybe in the future. I think that if you were doing something that was very specifically Southern, maybe it would be helpful to immerse yourself in the fast food and the fried catfish and stuff for a couple weeks.

**John:** You as a student who was going to high school and then college in Atlanta, there would’ve been opportunities for you now to be working on sets and doing PA kind of stuff…

**Michael:** Totally.

**John:** …that there wouldn’t have been before.

**Michael:** I was an extra. They were shooting a Revenge of the Nerds reboot that got killed. I got to be an extra in it. I was like, “The movies came to Atlanta. I can’t believe it.” Now it’s everywhere. I think, yeah, if you’re a kid now who loves show business, you can just get out there and do anything, put honey buns in a basket somewhere as a PA, and you’re going to meet people who can help you get that next job.

**John:** This is not a specific Atlanta question, but what’s your instinct on writers’ rooms going back to in person versus staying virtual? What’s the split going to be? Is it mostly going to be in person? Is it mostly going to be virtual?

**Michael:** I guess it’ll be dictated by showrunners. Generally, I think people prefer to work in person. You just get better work. I think about so many of our great ideas come from just the moment, the times after lunch when you’re screwing around. It’s like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Loki went to Walmart?” and suddenly-

**John:** Then he’s at Walmart, yeah.

**Michael:** That’s not how that came about, by the way. That was just an example. I think it’ll go back to in person, but probably not the five days out of the week grind. Like in anything in show business, there can be a lot of wasted time in a writers’ room. Hopefully, if we go back to in person, we retain the efficiencies that we’ve picked up from doing it on Zoom.

Links:

* [Michael Waldron](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5642271/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/michaelwaldron?lang=en) and on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/fakemichaelwaldron/?hl=en)
* Donate blood with the Red Cross [#BloodforBreck](https://sleevesup.redcrossblood.org/campaign/blood-for-breck-the-breck-denny-memorial-blood-drive/)
* [“Prove to the World You’ve Lost Your Son”](https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/06/shooting-school-texas-uvalde-sandy-hook-conspiracy.html) by Elizabeth Williamson for Slate from [Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1524746576/?tag=slatmaga-20)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Ryan Gerberding ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/555standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/other-things-screenwriters-write).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 437 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, sure, we’ll talk about screenplays, but we’ll also focus on other things that screenwriters write, including outlines and treatments, because Craig you and I, we’ve been doing a lot of that recently.

**Craig:** Good lord have we.

**John:** Then we’ll be answering questions from listeners just like you. And in our bonus segment Craig and I are going to discuss the Myers-Briggs personality test. And we will reveal which four letters tell everything you need to know about us.

**Craig:** Uh, I don’t know why anybody listening to this show hasn’t kicked in the whatever it costs to get these bonus segments. They’re better than the show. They’re the best. [laughs] They’re really better.

**John:** Sometimes they are really quite delightful. So, if you want to sign up for these it’s obviously at Scriptnotes.net and you can get in on all the bonus action.

All right, a little bit of news. I’m doing a criminal justice panel called Beyond Bars: Changing the Narrative on Criminal Justice. That’s February 26. This is one of those special little panels that will hopefully livestream, but if you want to be there live in the audience you should come to it. So, I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It’s going to be me and some TV showrunners and some criminal justice experts talking about our portrayals of the whole system on screen and what the realities are and how we can do a better job making those things match up.

So, it’s sort of a companion piece to the mental health and addiction panel that I did last year.

**Craig:** And where is this panel taking place?

**John:** It’ll be at the SAG building, so on Wilshire.

**Craig:** Got it. Got it.

**John:** Pretty small space. So a lot smaller space than what we do for our live Scriptnotes shows. But if you want to come see that that is available to you on February 26.

**Craig:** You know what I wish in terms of follow up and news and all the rest, I will there was something you could tell us about Highland 2.

**John:** Oh, thank you. I was even going to omit that for this week, but now I’ll say it.

**Craig:** No, I refuse. Say it.

**John:** A couple shows ago I talked about student licenses. So if you are a student who needs to use Highland 2 we do have the capability of adding your whole school so that if you have a .edu address for that we can sign you up for that. You need to give us the contact information for your program or professor. I didn’t really explain very well this first time. I’ll try to explain better now.

But you can send us an email at brand@johnaugust.com. That’s brand@johnaugust.com. Say what program you’re in, but most importantly who the instructor is who teaches your writing program so that we can contact them and they can actually send out the form for signing everybody up. So it’s not just like a “hey I’m a student, give me the license.” We actually need to get your program signed up so we can see that you genuinely are part of that writing program.

**Craig:** On behalf of the public school district in my town of La Canada, I’m curious do you also offer this to public school districts, for high school maybe?

**John:** At this moment we don’t because we need to have somebody who has a .edu address. And high school kids generally don’t. College kids generally do. So, if we can expand at any point down the road we will, but it’s kind of a manpower problem. We need to actually verify who these people are.

**Craig:** I was thinking more of like the schoolwide thing, you know. If a district called you and said we want to purchase a school license.

**John:** Oh yeah. That’s very doable. And that’s already doable sort of in existing plans.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** Totally possible.

**Craig:** All right. Great.

**John:** Let’s segue to the main topic today which is the stuff that we write that is not screenplays. So we’ve talked a lot about screenplays obviously over the course of 400-and-a-zillion episodes. All the words on the page. The format. How to best convey things. But this last couple months I’ve found myself having to write treatments for things. And I’ve sometimes written a treatment for myself which is basically a set of notes, a plan for how I’m going to attack a movie. But this was the first time in a decade that I’ve had to write a treatment that is being turned in. It is like the plan before the plan for the movie. And I found it difficult to write. I found it difficult to convey some of the stuff I would normally be able to do in a scene in just paragraph form, especially when it comes to conveying the inner thoughts of characters. Why they’re doing what they’re doing. A sense of tone. The comedy. The decision about when to move into italics for suggestion of dialogue.

I found it kind of a frustrating form. And you’ve done a little bit more of this than I have, so I wanted to talk through why we write outlines and treatments and sort of best ways to use that document form to convey the movie you hope to write.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Because I’ve written a lot of treatments and my treatments are very scriptment like. The last one I wrote I think was about 70 pages. And so I believe in them, but I also find them painful for so many reasons. But ultimately a good pain.

So, I’ve done it all for all sorts of things. And it’s not something that is necessary unless you’re being commanded to do it as a condition of employment, which is rare.

**John:** Is rare but actually the thing I’m doing right now, one of the steps was a treatment.

**Craig:** Well there you go. Then you’ve got to do it.

**John:** And so to have a document that is going to be judged based on how well they can understand the movie in this was new for me.

**Craig:** Well, then this is a good opportunity for us to kind of talk about some best practices and some techniques that make things a little bit easier. And also some tips and tricks, because there are some pitfalls. You can get trapped inside of a treatment pretty easily trying to achieve an effect that ultimately is not really achievable inside that format.

So, I guess maybe the first thing to sort of ask is how do you even define one of these documents.

**John:** I think that’s a great place to start, because I would say you scale up from sort of a beat sheet, to an outline, to a treatment, to a scriptment. And the first time I ever heard the term scriptment was in relation to James Cameron who writes these very long, sort of 70-page scriptments that actually do have some dialogue in there and are almost – if you squint you can sort of see the screenplay in them.

But let’s start with that smallest form. Do you have any different levels of document that you would describe?

**Craig:** No. And the truth is I’ve never done a beat sheet because once I start thinking that specifically then I’m already kind of writing an outline.

**John:** I would define a beat sheet, and these are much more common in procedural television, but I would define a beat sheet as not necessarily single sentences but really kind of bullet points that sort of talk through these are the moments in the story, especially in television leading up to act breaks to sort of show you – it’s almost like just the index cards of how you would get through the story. And so they’re very minimal and you’re just sort of looking at the big actions that happen there, or the big reversals, the big moments.

An outline is a much more flexible term, and you’ll see things that I would describe as really kind of a treatment but they call it an outline. An outline is, to me, a much more – a better fleshed out version of the beat sheet that actually shows – tends to show scene by scene, definitely sequence by sequence how you’re getting from point A to point B, what is introduced where, the callbacks to things. It’s a longer document. So to me an outline is probably a 10-page document. What are you thinking?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, outline is basically a very thorough beat sheet, where you’re not just saying things like “police station, they interrogate the suspect.” And outline would say “Police station. This person and this person interrogate the suspect. They want to know this. She says this. They’re not sure. They decide to go talk to somebody else. Next bit.” That’s kind of like how you would scale up I would imagine from beat sheet to outline.

**John:** I find outlines very difficult to read if I’m not actually familiar with the story itself. I’m thinking back to an arbitration I did a year or two years ago and where one of the documents in it was an outline. And I would say it was 15 pages. And it was almost incomprehensible. It was very hard to follow bullet point to bullet point, paragraph to paragraph sort of what was happening. It was in this weird middle ground where it wasn’t kind of telling the story. It was just sort of saying – it was just giving the scene without enough of the transitions and segues between moments to really help me understand what movie I was watching.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I find outlines to be in a kind of useless no man’s land. I mean, I understand the value of a beat sheet. It’s this minimal organizational tool. It’s sort of the equivalent of continuity. So when you’re making a movie or a television show and you’re in editorial at some point someone will generate a continuity which is just literally a list of scenes in order with their numbers and the briefest description of what happens in them.

But as a plan, an outline kind of falls in between. It’s almost like so if a beat sheet is the plan for tonight is chicken with rice and string beans, an outline is chicken, butter, parsley, string beans, this thing. But there’s no instructions of like how long do you cook, how do you cook it, are there any other ingredients. When? It’s just not enough. It’s not enough to be anything.

Once I decide – this is personal – but once I decide to flesh something out it’s going to be a treatment or a scriptment. Those are really where I find myself living.

**John:** So this project I was writing this treatment for was going to be one of those longer form things. And so I wasn’t stuck in this sort of no man’s land. I really was sort of writing up the whole thing. I really looked at it as this is a prose document that is describing the movie that you’re going to be watching. And so it’s not trying to be an approximation of the screenplay. It’s really describing sort of sequence by sequence this is what’s happening in this sequence but told in really prose form. And when I needed to use dialogue I would move into italics, which is sort of a common choice. Then it always becomes awkward when you have two characters who need to talk to each other. Generally one person is in italics, one person is not in italics. It’s not perfect. But it works.

The other thing I will say about this treatment that I turned in, it had a lot of preamble that was not filmable material but was really talking you through this is the world, these are the characters, these are the challenges, this is what you expect, this is what you don’t expect. So there was quite a bit before we actually got to the story part of the treatment which is a luxury you generally don’t have when you’re turning in the screenplay. You don’t have five pages to talk through the plan for the thing. You’re actually delivering the actual object itself.

**Craig:** And how many pages did that – you’re describing this as a treatment.

**John:** This whole treatment was 26 pages altogether.

**Craig:** Perfect. So this about makes sense to me. To me, the only difference between a treatment and a scriptment is that in a treatment you are prose-ifying the plan for the movie, but you’re not saying everything. You don’t have to explain every transition or every tiny little thing. You can compress a couple scenes into one descriptive paragraph about the sort of thing that happens. For instance, if there’s a battle you can kind of summarize the battle and explain what matters. And as scriptment you’re doing it like a script, where you just now will say everything. Every moment, every little detail, every little transition. It’s all being spelled out in prose.

Prose is more efficient than screenplay to an extent. Although what I suspect is that I probably have written more words in the 70-page scriptment than I am in the 110-page script because in a script it’s just the description is, I don’t know, it’s just a little bit more efficient. And dialogue is a little punchier.

So, do you have to do – there’s no reason to do a scriptment, by the way. I’m one of the few people that does them. I guess James Cameron is one of the other ones. They’re a bear. It’s just that what happens with me is if you said to me, “Hey, I need you to write the classic 25-page treatment,” I’d start and I’d end up with a 70-page scriptment. Because that’s just kind of how my process goes.

**John:** Yeah. It was everything I could do to stop myself from doing that and to actually not keep expanding, keep expanding, keep expanding from the inside-out, but actually sort of limit myself to, OK, in this section, about ten minutes of screen time, it’s going to be about this much page count in my treatment and I’m not going to keep expanding and keep expanding. It was a real danger at certain points.

**Craig:** I mean, the benefit of the scriptment is, well, there are two main benefits. One I think is pretty much a wash with the treatment. The other one isn’t. Both a treatment and a scriptment will provide your collaborators with a very clear picture of your intentions. It’s very hard for them to say afterward, “Why did you do this? Or why did you do that?” You told them you would. It was incredibly clear, in fact. They can disagree. Meaning they can read your script later and go, “OK, we know you said you would do that, and you did it, and we now realize we don’t like it.” That’s fine.

But they can’t be surprised. The benefit, the special benefit of a scriptment, is that you are that much more prepared to write the script. The script becomes that much easier because you’ve kind of written it. You haven’t written all of it. There’s all those wonderful nuances and bits and bobs that come out in scene-crafting. But you’re never wondering, well, OK, now how am I going to get from this to this? Every question has essentially been answered. And so the writing becomes a little bit more of an extension of the scriptment as opposed to just starting up a new process.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk some pros and cons here. I would say a con for the treatment is that as a screenwriter you don’t have all of your tools. Like you don’t have your ability to easily do dialogue, to do transitions, to do a lot of – the film craft of this is not available when you’re just doing sort of prose form. And so you don’t get all the magic you get in writing a screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** An advantage I would say though is as I head in now to get notes on this I’m probably a little less protective of what I’ve written because it’s not sort of the finished versions of things. And so it will hopefully be a conversation about this is what I’m trying to go for in this scene, this thing that is not fully written yet. So, while it’s frustrating that I cannot give them the full version of what that scene would be or what that sequence would be like, it’s going to be very easy to change my plan for it based on their feedback and their reactions and get the director’s input into these moments before we’ve even written the scene.

**Craig:** No question. There is a rigidity that is implied in a scriptment. That said, what I have discovered is that producers have no problem blasting through that rigidity.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** But the nice thing is even then revising a scriptment as I just did last week is also relatively academic. Because so much of what is there is there. And even when they are saying, well, OK, it seems like a better version of this would be this, or we would prefer if this would happen, that it’s all still within the context of the scriptment. That they’re sort of subconsciously working within the framework that you’ve created. They are aware that there are certain things that if you knock down are a much bigger deal. That is an added benefit of the scriptment. It is a little harder for them to fall into the trap of “we’re making a small thing, a tiny suggestion,” that in fact would unravel the rug. They kind of can see that it would unravel the rug, and so they’re a little more crafty about how they’re going to approach things, presuming that they want the script done within some reasonable amount of time.

**John:** Also, you can talk about the story as a story rather than the execution. So you can talk about this is why we think this is not going to work. Or this is why we’re not happy with how the story is tracking here. As opposed to we are not happy with the dialogue you wrote in this scene. And so it is a chance to sort of focus on story without the question of is the problem what happens in the scene or is the problem the words that I used to describe the scene.

**Craig:** For people who might be hearing a strange noise it’s in my office. The heat system sometimes does this little rattle-y thing. It’s a very old building. This building is like from 1908.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve not been to your new offices yet, but based on everything I’ve heard on my side of the microphone I think it’s like a steampunk kind of collective place.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** And that there’s artists and people living together in this big giant space. And they sometimes have a drum circle going.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. We all wear top hats with goggles on them. And–

**John:** A lot of unicycles. A surprising number of unicycles.

**Craig:** Unicycles powered by little flamethrowers. Yeah, that’s how it is over here. It’s very steampunk. Steampunk is the nerdiest of nerd stuff.

**John:** I love how nerdy it is.

**Craig:** It’s so nerdy.

**John:** I mean, I don’t enjoy it for myself, but I really enjoy that people enjoy it so much.

**Craig:** Like do you like science fiction? And Victorian England? It’s such a weird combo. Anyway, you were talking earlier and you said something interesting that I kind of filed away that I wanted to circle back around to. And that was the issue of comedy. It is very difficult to be funny in a treatment or an outline or certainly a beat sheet. To the extent that I don’t really try too much. The only kind of comedy I will ever try and include in a scriptment is if it’s the kind of comedy that could be neatly encapsulated in a three-sentence exchange between two people.

But beyond that you can just sort of vaguely say an insane thing ensues, or something like this, and describe it. But if you’re trying to get laughs with this thing you’re going to be sorely disappointed. And you probably will risk seeming a bit sweaty.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree. Both of the things I’ve been writing in treatment form recently have been comedies. And there’s moments in which like I’ll put in the right line that sort of indicates what the tone of the dialogue is. But more I think I’m indicating like these are funny elements that will be together. Like you can see why these characters in this situation will be funny and what the specific moments are that can happen. But I’m not trying to get you down to the granular joke level, because it’s just not the right medium for it.

**Craig:** Yes. And, so balancing out the fact that comedy is really difficult, one thing that’s actually very easy to do in a treatment or scriptment, which is very helpful I think for us as writers to both prepare for ourselves and also share with our collaborators, is subtext. Because there are things that characters can be thinking. And as you know from writing a novel prose is brilliant at letting us know what someone is thinking. Whereas in movies and television, the entire point of the process is for us in the audience to discern what someone is thinking through their behavior, their choices, their performance, and so we write toward that. We write to create subtext.

A treatment or an outline or a scriptment allows you to make that subtext clear. So nobody has to wonder what someone is thinking. They know because you’ve told them. Now, whether or not you execute that correctly in the script, who knows. And rewriting is always necessary. But there can be a discussion about intention. Because what happens is a lot of times is without this step, without the treatment or the outline, you turn in a script, it comes back, and they go, “Well we don’t like this scene.” Well why? “Because she’s being mean.” And you go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, she’s actually being gray. See, here’s what’s going on. And I thought that was clear. It wasn’t clear to you. But this is what’s going on. This is how it should be done on the day. And they go, “OK, OK, OK, we see that, we see that, we see that. Got it. Got it. Got it. Maybe you could just throw another word in or something just so we…” Because people get confused and draw the wrong conclusion all the time. I do it as a reader, too.

Scriptment kind of helps pave the way for that.

**John:** Yeah. Because you essentially can cheat in that the scriptment form doesn’t have the same rules in that you can only write what can be seen or heard. You can sort of veer into character’s thoughts to make it clear why they’re doing what they’re doing. It comes with the territory there. It’s nice.

**Craig:** Absolutely. So, it is an exhausting process. I find it very exhausting. And I had to do two of them recently for complicated reasons. I mean, not one and then the same one again, but rather two different ones, but somewhat related. And it’s exhausting. It is as exhausting as writing a screenplay.

But it is really helpful. It is the kind of I think most useful homework you can do. It will always save you from fundamental problems of not knowing where you’re writing to. I think some people get concerned that it may limit them somehow. That it will limit their imagination. But my response to that is always twofold. One, once you’re writing the script if you want to deviate from your scriptment or your outline, do it. And, two, you are perfectly free when you’re writing the scriptment. In other words, you can’t argue that it’s restraining or anti-imagination. You’re using your imagination when you’re writing that. It’s just a question of when do you start making decisions. Do you start then or now? I personally like to do it before I start writing the script because writing a script is really hard and I get very anxious when I have no clue what’s coming next.

**John:** Yeah. See, I’m generally not a planner ahead. I generally start writing the script without any sort of detailed outline or treatment going into it. So this will be the first time I’ll be doing that based on my treatment. And I will say I am looking forward to the fact that some complicated decisions will have already been made about like how I’m going to get all these things together. That’s great.

But thinking back to Arlo Finch, you know, with Arlo Finch I started the first book with a pretty detailed plan. The second book I didn’t go into it with a specific plan for how I was going to achieve all the things I wanted to achieve. And I really loved that process of discovery. And I discovered the villain who I thought was going to be the series villain was not the series villain and there’s a whole different character. And so I respect that like my not having a very good plan going into the second book probably freed me up in some ways.

But then in the third book I did end up writing an outline and it was helpful. So I’m saying I guess it really does depend on your situation, how much time you have, and sort of which way you work best.

**Craig:** I’m not surprised that that’s how it went for you. Because if you think about it, you planned chapter one, you planned act one. And you planned act three. And then act two you let yourself roam around a little bit. And that makes sense to me actually. The areas where you get the most screwed when you kind of don’t know what you’re doing is in the beginning and in the end. And it’s only because, look, the inherent risk to full-on freedom, the kind of freedom that comes with the fog of war, of not knowing necessarily right off the bat what comes next, the cost is that you may suddenly realize, oh god, I’ve literally written myself into this terrible corner.

If you’ve planned your beginning and you’ve planned your end, then I think makes total sense – give yourself some license to roam around in the middle.

**John:** I agree. At some point we will have Michael Arndt on the show. Michael Arndt I think is still in the process of this movie that he’s written that I think he’s directed several versions of along the way. He is the ne plus ultra of what Craig is describing where by making a plan and then sort of building on a plan and building on a plan and building on the plan you can make something hopefully terrific. So, we’ll get Michael on the show at some point because I’m curious to see – he’s probably the most extreme version of this process.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s a big planner, isn’t he?

**John:** He is. All right. Let’s get to some questions. And the first question is actually about that planning. So Michael writes in, “I’m wondering how long the Chernobyl bible that Craig delivered with his pilot was for his development deal. I’m about to start pitching an historical series with a similar scope. And I’m curious to know what kind of deal my reps should be asking for and what kind of document was sufficient for the pickup.”

**Craig:** OK. Good questions. So I’m looking at it right now. And it was 65 pages. The 64 pages included, let me just give you a sense of it so you have a basic sense of the range, an overview, which was basically a mission statement. This is why I’m writing this. And this is ultimately what it’s about. Then were a number of pages that were about the characters. So the main characters would each get their own page and a description. And then the sort of sub-characters, secondary and tertiary characters would maybe get bundled onto a page together. And then each episode would get its own outline. And those outlines were not scriptments.

So, I’m going to pick a random episode. Episode two is about 12 pages.

**John:** And these are paragraph pages. And your paragraphs are five to nine sentences maybe?

**Craig:** Well, you know me, I’m a big white space guy. So typically the average would be three I would say. So I like lots of white space. I also would include photos to kind of help people have references as I was talking through things. And so that was it. I kind of did it that way. And laid it all out in that regard.

Now in terms of the deal, the deal that I made which I think was fairly standard was that I would provide them with a show bible, and then I would provide them with a pilot script. That’s kind of what they do. I think that’s pretty standard. I mean, Michael I’m not sure if you’re going to places like HBO or streamers, or if this is a network thing. I don’t know. Probably not network because you’re saying it’s a six-hour miniseries, so I assume it’s like an HBO kind of thing. That’s basically what you’re going to get. I mean, that’s how they do it.

Now, I had never written a show bible before. I asked Carolyn Strauss to get me an example. She sent me one. And lo and behold I did mine much longer. It’s just what I do. So I’ve written the longest show bible ever and probably ruined it for people after me who are going to be like, “Well, you know, Craig’s show bible was…” Sorry. Sorry other writers.

**John:** I do hear other folks who are doing shows for streamers find that they are being asked to write a bunch of additional stuff that was sort of not in their original contract between delivery of the pilot script and the decision to actually pick up the series. And that can be incredibly frustrating. And that is a situation which you do want to stand up for yourself and say like, “OK, I’m doing this because it’s helpful for me, but at a certain point you need to start paying me for the things I’m writing.”

It sounds like your show bible was already part of your contract which is great, which is how it should be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And honestly it’s all about get the show or don’t get the show. And I’m going to do that anyway. I mean, it’s just part of my process regardless. So the thing about the term show bible is it’s incredibly flexible. It can be, I suppose, whatever you want it to be. I saw one sample that was like five pages long. And I’m like I don’t know how this is a bible per se. So it’s really what you make of it. Just like same in features. Same deal.

All right. Next question. Anonymous writes, “I have a short film that I’ve birthed.” Oh, I like that. “I hired a writer.” Wait, so did you birth it or, OK?

“I hired a writer to write a 14-page script and now after a year of revisions a team of people are helping produce the film on a very small scale. A producer came onboard to help, non-paid, and they are insisting that you can’t have the word ‘I’ in the title. Apparently they are OK with the letter ‘I’ but not the word “I.” They say you are asking the audience to be in the position of a character before knowing anything about them. They have taught screenwriting in college and won screenplay competitions and apparently this is a big sticking point for them. Am I missing something? Is there filmmaking gospel that I missed about the word ‘I’ in titles? I am Legend. And I, Tonya seemed to do just fine. I acknowledge the word ‘I’ sounds weird in a title but I think the uniqueness helps it stand out. And there is some logic to using I am blank based on our story.”

John, this is a puzzling question.

**John:** It is a puzzling question. So, Anonymous, you are not crazy. It is absolutely fine to use “I” in the title. The reason why I picked this question and put it here is because it comes down to the issue of what is rules and what is taste. And the producer has certain taste, and the producer does not like the word “I” in a title. That’s fine. That producer can have that opinion. That does not make it gospel. It does not make it right. You can freely debate that person on whether “I” can be there. But there certainly is no rule.

And people have tastes. People have opinions. And I remember on Charlie’s Angels one of the producers was really obsesses with – she wanted to see the Angels eat to make sure that it was clear that for all the physical activity that they’re doing they do actually eat food. But didn’t want them to eat food in a messy way. And she had a problem with any sort of like Carl’s Jr kind of messiness. And I get that. That’s taste. That’s not actually a story point. It is just her taste and her opinion. And when you are bringing somebody in on your project you do want their taste and their opinion. But it does not mean that you always have to follow it or treat that as being gospel.

**Craig:** Yeah. First of all, Anonymous, if you hire a writer to write a 14-page script I just want to caution you to not write into a screenwriting podcast and say that you have a short film that you birthed. My problem with “I” is that. It’s when you say I’ve birthed. How about you and the writer birthed it, since the writer wrote the 14-page script.

But that said, you say a producer came onboard to help, nonpaid. So I’m not really sure what that means. But what you’re describing that they’re doing is this – it’s called appeal to authority. Rather than expressing their opinion as an opinion, they say it’s not an opinion because, A, I have taught screenwriting in college, and B, I have won screenplay competitions. Well, that in fact represents zero authority I’m sorry to say to that particular individual. Also, this is art. It has nothing to do with authority whatsoever. Either it’s good or it’s not, depending on who you are and where you’re standing and how you see it.

No, there’s no rule. And anybody that starts to do stuff like that needs to go away. Especially when they’re tossing out rules that you know are wrong. I mean, you just know that’s wrong. How is this person walking around in a world where this is plenty of stuff that has the word “I” in it and thinking that somehow you’re going to be fooled? That’s the part about this that I find vaguely sociopathic.

**John:** Yeah. That they’re holding onto their opinions so strongly even despite evidence to the contrary.

**Craig:** Right. Like clear evidence. And they presume that somehow you won’t unearth it? You will.

**John:** Oh no! They have IMDb.

**Craig:** Wait a second. Before I say what I’m about to say, do you have or have you ever heard of the Internet? You haven’t, great. So you can never say “I” in a title. Yeah, no, that’s just silly.

**John:** Not true. Salvatore from Australia writes, “Listening to Episode 436 with Liz Hannah you mentioned that the writer should always focus on what their own unique perspective is when writing a project. But what exactly does that mean in this context? I’ve heard that a lot but I’ve never actually heard it defined. For example, what did Craig recognize as his own unique perspective in the Chernobyl disaster? Was it the theme that lies always incur a debt of truth? In other words, how do I answer the question of why should I be the one to tell this story?”

**Craig:** Those are two different questions.

**John:** OK. Different questions. But let’s try to answer both.

**Craig:** Yes. So, you have one question, Salvatore, which is what does it mean to have a unique perspective on something. And then the other question is why should I be the one to tell this story. There is no answer to the second question. Nobody should be somebody to tell any story. You want to, you are compelled to, you feel a need to. It would give you artistic pleasure to do so. That’s why. I don’t believe in this kind of notion that one person or another is specifically anointed by fate or the universe to tell a particular story.

What is your unique perspective? The way your mind works. That’s it. Meaning when we say that to people what we’re really saying is do this the way that feels instinctively beautiful to you. Don’t do it the way you think other people do it or would want you to do it. So, when I sit down and I think I’m going to write something like Chernobyl, what I don’t do is go and watch a bunch of other limited series based on historical events and go, OK, oh, that’s good, I should do it like that. Or obviously I wanted to do it like this, but they do it like that. I should really do it like that.

No. I just follow my gut. So that’s what we really mean. Every writer has some sort of instinctive understanding of what they want to do. And that’s the part that you provide that nobody else can. So, let that be your loadstone.

**John:** Yeah. Salvatore is asking about unique perspective. I think what we tend to look for is unique vision and unique voice. And those are things you can find in writing, both writing on the page and sort of what the ultimate thing is that gets made. But it’s sometimes easier to think about that in terms of other media. So like with a composer, like composers have very distinct styles. You could imagine sort of a Danny Elfman score on this movie versus a – I cannot pronounce Craig’s Chernobyl composer, but–

**Craig:** Hildur Guðnadóttir.

**John:** They would be very different approaches. And they have different ears, different visions, different voices when it comes to how they are going to do their work and do their art. And so it’s a question of like what are you brining about your art and your perspective, your vision to this material. And that’s why Aaron Sorkin writing about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook is going to be very different than Craig writing about that or me writing about that. There’s different things that interest us and there’s different things we’re going to highlight. It’s just going to be a different thing.

And so you are inevitably going to be coming into a project with all of your priors. All your history. Your tastes. Your fears. That is going to make it unique. I think what Craig is arguing is don’t try to minimize what makes you unique in order to write the version of the movie that someone else could write, because that’s pointless.

**Craig:** Exactly. That’s exactly right.

**John:** Cool. Do you want to take Breton Zinger?

**Craig:** All right. Our next question is from Breton Zinger, which is awesome.

**John:** It’s a great name.

**Craig:** I want to be Breton Zinger. Breton Zinger writes – this is not a question. This is an order. “You should do a segment on how to be productive writing wise while traveling. I always have grand plans to get X, Y, and Z done, and then I only get X started.” Yeah, what do you think? You’ve done a lot of traveling. I’ve done a lot of traveling. How do you manage this?

**John:** A recent thing I’ve started doing while traveling, and I went to Korea and Japan, and I had very long flights ahead of me. And so a thing I’ve started doing which I really recommend for everybody is you know you’re going to have two, five, 13 hours on a plane. That’s great time where no one is going to interrupt you. While we’re in the plane before we’ve taken off I make a list of here’s all the things I want to do on this flight. And that’s stuff I want to actually accomplish, but also I want to watch that movie I’ve been meaning to watch. I’ll go through and figure out what movies are on the seat back that I’ve not seen yet that I do want to see.

I have books and it’s like I want to read two chapters in this book. So not just the stuff that I have to get done, but the stuff I’ve always kind of wanted to get done. Because to me there’s nothing more dispiriting than having spent 13 hours on a plane and realize like, oh, I got kind of nothing done in that 13 hours. Or I played games on my phone that I could have done anywhere.

So, I try to make that time really productive. And so whether it’s travel, whether it’s jury service, whether it’s some other thing where you have a block of time that is uncommitted, use that time.

The other thing that I’ve been much better about in the last few years, especially with writing the books, is that I need to have at least an hour of uninterrupted writing time every day. And so I claim that with my family saying I’m going to need this time. And so I can go downstairs to the lobby. I can go somewhere else. But I need to be uninterrupted for one hour to do my work. And that’s been great. And I’ve actually been pretty productive during breaks because I’ve sort of blocked off that time.

**Craig:** Those are all very strong notions. Yeah, long flights are nice because you actually get so bored that the notion of doing work becomes attractive.

The one thing to keep in mind, Breton, is that when you are traveling you’re going to be more tired than you normally are. So I think possibly just lower the expectations. There’s possibly going to be some jetlag. Also, you’re traveling, so that means you’re probably there for some purpose. To see things, or do things. So you’re going to have less time and your mind is going to be a little more distracted. And also the writing is something that is contextualized within your normal life at home and you’re not in your normal life at home.

So, I would say also give yourself a little bit of a break and maybe don’t make grand plans to get X, Y, and Z done. Since you only get X started, how about next time just make a plan, a non-grand plan to get X done. And see if you can do a little bit more on X, and then you don’t have Y and Z staring down at you going, “You suck.” And see if that works. If that works then maybe next time you could do, OK, do X and start Y. Just manage your expectations. It’s hard.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed. Patrick Tebow writes, “During the Three Page Challenge section of Episode 434 you two briefly touched on the use of pictures in a scene, such as when a character looks at a photo on a desk. Is this prop and avoid at all cost kind of situation? Or is it mostly a problem when a picture is used as a cheap way to start a conversation between two characters?” Craig, what do you think? Is it always a bad idea to be referencing a photo or a picture in movies?

**Craig:** It’s mostly always a bad idea.

**John:** I agree with you.

**Craig:** I never want to say anything is always wrong, but somebody using a photo to start a conversation between two characters, that’s easily avoidable. The bigger issue is when a character is alone and looking at a photograph. Because that’s a cheap way for the people making something to externalize a thought. I need to know that they miss mom. Or, you know, the classic one is some guy picks up a photo and it’s him and this woman and he’s sad. And we realize that she’s either dead or left him. And it’s just pretty tropey. It’s pretty clunky. And it’s kind of incumbent upon us to come up with interesting new ways to do that. I think at this point in 2020 pulling the old staring at a photo thing is going to feel a little soap opera. A little The Young and the Restless.

**John:** I agree with you. Because I’ve never actually had the experience of wanting to pull out a photo and stare at it. It’s just not a thing I’ve ever done. And I don’t believe it. The movie 1917 which I enjoyed very much does have that as an element. I think it gets away with it to a larger degree than you’d expect because it’s set up in the plot and also because we have an expectation that these soldiers actually would have been carrying those photos with them and it’s a prop that is actually handed off and sort of useful story wise in the course of the movie.

So I believed the characters more when they are referencing photos because that’s a thing that soldiers do.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. So if it’s appropriate to the time then it makes total sense. I mean, but if you’re telling a story now you’re right. I mean, I don’t look at photos ever by the way. That’s a whole other side conversation. What’s happened to our culture with photos, I just don’t understand it. I mean, do you ever just sit there and start looking through old photos?

**John:** No, I look through Instagram to look at other people’s photos.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** Photos are about what’s happening right now, not about history.

**Craig:** Right. So that’s also insane, by the way. So it’s all crazy. But when people are like we have to get a photo of ourselves I’m like, OK. Why? Are we going to – I mean, I’m becoming that guy who is like, fine, I’ll do it, but will this ever be looked at again? Why are we doing it? It’s so weird. Anyway.

**John:** Let’s do one last letter. This is from Mark who is actually Mike. So this is the guy who wrote in saying that he is moving to Los Angeles and wanted advice and people wrote in with advice. His real name is actually Mike. We changed it to Mark because we’ve sort of gotten in the habit of changing everyone’s names unless there’s a real reason to keep their real name because of all the assistant stuff we’ve been doing. We just don’t want to accidentally put people’s real names in things. But his name is actually Mike even though we called him Mark early on.

Craig, would you read this for us?

**Craig:** Yeah. This is his update. He says, “Thank you so much for airing my question about moving to LA. I’d also like to thank the listeners for their fantastic advice. I especially appreciate how widely the advice has ranged from esoteric to practical. Passion, enthusiasm, patience, and consistency will still with me for years. But don’t write at home and get a California driver’s license are going to be equally useful.

“Here’s my update. I landed yesterday after a hectic month of packing my Brooklyn apartment, quitting my job, and using up every last drop of healthcare I could squeeze out of my employer-sponsored plan.” Oh America. “It’s a huge relief to finally be here. All I’ve seen of the city so far has been the freeway from LAX and the two-block radius surrounding my North Hollywood apartment.” Ah, that’s where I was.

“And I can’t wait to get a car so I can continue to explore. I’m heading to a D&D game tonight.” What? This guy is amazing. “And I’m hoping to meet a bunch of fellow nerds and writers. Would it be possible for you to put me in contact with Eric from Episode 432? If he’s comfortable sharing his contact info with me I’d like to reach out regarding writer’s groups. Thanks again for your time and everything you do. I’m hoping to make it out to a live event soon. Best, Mike.”

Well that’s, I mean–

**John:** That’s lovely.

**Craig:** He sounds like us.

**John:** He does. So I did put him in contact with Eric. Eric wrote back and said, “Sure,” and so they are going to be talking about a writer’s group.

**Craig:** Three months later we’re going to be doing a How Would This Be a Movie. Eric has murdered Mike.

**John:** [laughs] Wouldn’t that be fantastic? So it’s really two outcomes. Either like the same way that Megan McDonnell was hired to write Captain Marvel 2, it could be that Mike was hired to write another Marvel movie, or he killed Eric.

**Craig:** Or Mike and Eric met and fell in love. And then just started doing crimes like–

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Just like Bonnie & Clyde. Listen, there’s a lot that we can do with this.

**John:** It’s a ripe story area.

**Craig:** We really got to see how this turns out. This is exciting.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a Reddit thread called r/imsorryjon. It is told from the perspective of Garfield, sort of. Basically it’s a re-imagination of Garfield in which Garfield is a Lovecraftian monster who kills and possessed Jon Arbuckle and does horrible, horrible things. It is a dark, disturbing thread to go down. And I just greatly enjoyed it. I just love appropriation of cultural elements and twisting them into wild shapes.

I particularly like this idea that Garfield is sort of one of those lantern fish that sort of like lures people in. So I would just say if you want to see some disturbing Garfield imagery I would point you to this Reddit thread.

**Craig:** I mean, yeah, I do want to see that. How could I not want to see that? My One Cool Thing this week is a person. And I don’t know if you know him, John, but I certainly do very well. His name is Scott Silver. Scott is a screenwriter like you and I and Scott is nominated for the second time for an Academy Award. This time around it’s for co-writing Joker with Todd Phillips. He was also nominated for 8 Mile.

And I just want to call him out because I think a lot of times what ends up happening, especially when you’re writing with a director is that suddenly the other writer kind of starts to disappear a little bit for whatever reason.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And weirdly the reverse happens in television where I notice that suddenly – like Johan just started disappearing from things. And even sometimes people would say “Chernobyl director Craig Mazin” and I would have to be like, no, for the love of – let me right it and tell you why that’s not true.

But Scott has been doing fantastic work forever. He wrote and directed Johns. That was his first movie, which is a really cool movie. He wrote 8 Mile. And he also wrote The Fighter which is awesome. And now Joker. And so he’s had a very long, very productive career. And he’s a terrific guy and an excellent writer. And so I just thought, yeah, I’m going to give this guy a little extra love because, you know, a lot of times when this stuff is going on you can get easily overshadowed by the actors, and the directors, especially in features. And so my One Cool Thing this week is Scott Silver.

**John:** And also Scott is an east coast based writer as well I believe. Right? He’s not living in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yes. He lives in Manhattan.

**John:** Fantastic. So, again, you can run your career from wherever you choose to live. Easier in Los Angeles, but definitely doable in New York.

Stick around if you’re a Premium member because we will be discussing the Myers-Briggs personality index. But otherwise that’s the end of our show.

Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with production assistance this week by Stuart Friedel and Dustin [Box]. 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 like the ones we answered today.

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. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. And a reminder, of course, sign up for Premium membership at Scriptnotes.net to get all the back episodes and our bonus segments. Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** OK, Craig. When did you first hear about the Myers-Briggs type indicator?

**Craig:** Many, many years ago. It was I think literally when I met Melissa. Because–

**John:** So college?

**Craig:** College. Because her parents were super into it.

**John:** So for people who don’t understand what we’re talking about, it is an assessment, it’s a test, it’s a short three to five minute test you take where you answer a bunch of questions and then it scores you. This is back in the days of pencil and paper when I was doing this in college. It scores you and you get a four letter code that sort of indicates your personality type.

So there’s four criteria. There’s four sort of characteristics. And it comes out to be a grid of 16 personality types.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this is all based roughly on Jungian stuff. Jung, how will I say this as charitably as possible, was wrong about a billion things.

**John:** As was Freud.

**Craig:** Correct. But that’s the point. They were early. They were wrong the way that a lot of people thought the world was flat and yet they were brilliant. So, Aristotle did not know that the world was round, but he’s a pretty brilliant guy. So they were, you know, at the forefront of things. Did Aristotle not know that the world was round?

**John:** I don’t think he–

**Craig:** I don’t think he did.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Well we’ll put that in the hopper for a later discussion. But so, you know, he had these theories, this kind of collective unconscious and these archetypes and these things that meant something to all of us. Regardless, out of that comes this fascinating way of analyzing personality. And unlike a lot of other ways of analyzing personality which basically come down to asking you are you a this kind of person or a that kind of person, Myers-Briggs uses like a quad-axis formula where there are four different scales. They are binary scales. You go this way or you go that way. So for instance you are extroverted or introverted. The words don’t always mean what they mean colloquially.

What’s fascinating about this is that they take the results of those four things and then analyze each combination. There are 16 in all. And out of the combinations of these things they make inferences which aren’t necessarily intuitive to what the individual parts of the collective four letter descriptor is. But for whatever reason when they look at it and combine those four things and assign this, OK, if you’re this, this, this, and this, you’re going to be this. It’s kind of right. It kind of works.

**John:** It’s kind of right but it’s also kind of right in the way that horoscopes are kind of right sometimes.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Or your astrological sign or a lot of other things that feel like this does apply to me as opposed to the other criteria. So, we’ll put a link to one of these tests so if people want to test for themselves to see what the score would be for their personality type. You told me that you came out as an ENTJ?

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah.

**John:** And so when I took this test in college I also came out as either an ENTJ or an INTJ. Anyone who knows me that I’ve become much more extroverted over time. So, that I became an E over time. When I took the test last night I came out as ENFP, which was different. But honestly I think I messaged you the actual scorecard I got. I was very close to the median on all of these things, and so it really was not a strong thing. Like answering one question slightly differently would have changed my score. So I think I probably am very similar to you on a lot of these things.

Judgment versus perception. I would perceive you to be strongly judgmental. That sounds negative and loaded, but you do tend to have very strong opinions on things.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it’s not in the Myers-Briggs model, judgment is not necessarily like I’m judge-y.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s rather – and neither is perception more like, oh, I notice lots of things. In the Myers-Briggs model judgment is basically about, well, frankly it’s related to what we were talking about in the main episode about scriptments. Judgment is really about planning, and being decisive, and you’re preference if you are more towards judgment is liking things to be a bit more clear-cut and decided. You don’t do well with a general sense of not knowing what’s going to happen. Uncertainty is not your friend.

Whereas people who are more towards the perception side of things, it’s a little easier for them to adapt to changing circumstances. They’re OK with a kind of I’m not really sure what I’m going to do next. I mean, really what it comes down to is are you the kind of writer that likes to know the next scene or are you not. And that’s kind of cool actually.

**John:** That does describe the difference between you and me. It’s that I am a little bit more on the seat of my pants. We should I think say that mental health professionals don’t use this test.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So it really is a thing that is interesting for lay people to do and explore. Have you ever tried to use anything like this for the characters that you’re writing?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nor have I. But I do feel like it’s the kind of thing where aspiring screenwriters might that that, oh, this will be a great insight. I suspect there are tools out there that will help you figure out the personality types for your characters. And I just do not think it would be a useful way to spend your time on thinking about your characters.

**Craig:** Not even remotely. Because ultimately what it is is there’s 16 of them. So what are we saying? There’s only 16 kinds of humans in the world? Not at all. It really is just a general sense of how you – the only useful aspect to this as far as I’m concerned, other than just vague curiosity, is that it might help you feel a little bit seen and a little bit normal. Because there’s a description of who you are and it’s kind of cast in the most positive light.

For instance, I think in our society we tend to view extroversion as a very positive thing. You’re a people person. Whereas introverts are a bit suspicious. They’re shy. And maybe they’re afraid. And what Myers-Briggs says is neither of those are two. Extroversion/introversion are simply defined as what energizes you more, being around people or not? And that’s a very positive way of thinking about who you are.

So that part is really helpful. And in that sense it’s fun to do.

Should you use this for writing? No. Should you go to those sites that are like if you’re this type you want to marry that type? No. [laughs] That’s nonsense. That’s all just nonsense.

That said, if you are with someone, as you and I are, not just by the way with our spouses but with each other, and you’re involved with people, and you’re–

**John:** You have relationships in work relationships, in friendships, everything.

**Craig:** Exactly. And you’re kind of curious why when you relate to a certain person there are some times where there are conflicts or confusions, doing this could actually give you a little bit of insight. And by insight really what I mean is understanding and empathy. You go, OK, they actually do see the things a bit differently.

So it’s easy to say, ugh, the problem with that person is they’re so rigid. They’re always just trying to quickly decide what we’re doing next. They’re not open-minded. And the other person could say, oh my god, that person literally doesn’t plan ahead or think of anything, they’re just improvising constantly and it’s just this mush. Well, those are negative ways of thinking about those things but there are positive ways of thinking about those things. And I think this helps you do that.

**John:** Yeah. And the degree to which those could be complementary traits for the other person.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In terms of thinking about this with your characters, as I was going through the questions yesterday I would say that some of the questions are worth asking of the characters in your story. So, I would say I don’t think it’s a good idea to come out with what is the four-letter score for this character. But asking question about like does this person seek out parties and social interactions, or does this person want to sort of retreat and build up energy for themselves? Is this person quick to make a decision or want to gather everything in before making a decision? Those are useful metrics that could apply to some characters in your script. And especially if you’re looking at the protagonist in your script and how he or she works then you might decide, OK, you know what’s going to be great and frustrating for this character in this comedy that I’m writing is a person who is going to do the opposite. And that is probably a useful way of thinking about some of these traits in terms of the characters we’re writing.

**Craig:** Yes. It is a really good way to interrogate your own personality bias that may be getting imposed on your characters. Especially if people say all your characters sound the same. Well my guess is then they all sound like you. And so you have a way of thinking about things and suddenly all of your characters are. So taking a look at the ways other people think about things, not as deficits or failures but rather simply as differences might help you expand some things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For instance, one of the axes of the Myers-Briggs test is sensing versus intuition. By the way, their words are terrible.

**John:** I think they’re bad choices. Because it’s not like sensitive is more sensitive. It’s actually relating to does it have to have data or you’re going on gut feeling.

**Craig:** Yeah. They didn’t pick great words. But regardless, the sensing side of things are people that are rather detail-oriented. They’re somewhat literal and practical. They like to deal with concrete stuff. And the other side, the opposite on that axis is intuition. These are people who are more conceptual. They’re more abstract. They like to know what the overall theory or big picture is. They like to know what’s the point of this as opposed to how does it function. There’s an interesting dichotomy there.

**John:** I’m not sure it quite is a dichotomy though. That’s [unintelligible].

**Craig:** Right. It’s kind of an arbitrary thing that they’ve done. All of it is arbitrary, honestly. But it is a nice way to challenge yourself when you’re writing your characters to say, wait, if they’re all sounding the same is it because they’re all kind of super detail-oriented people? Where’s the person that gets frustrated with that and just wants to know why and how? Just big picture this for me, I’m a dreamer, I’m a conceiver, I’m an imaginer. Whatever it is. Just nice ways to get out of your own head. Weirdly I suppose the tool is designed to get into your own head. But I like to think of it as getting out of your head.

**John:** So, as I was doing research last night another sort of test that’s done in a similar way is called the Big Five personality traits. So OCEAN is the model they have on call. And those five characteristics are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m neuroticism. All of it.

**John:** Yes. 100%. And I bring it up just because in the traits that the Myers-Briggs is looking at, those aren’t the only meaningful traits that help define how we react in the world.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I would say just if it’s helpful for you to look at it that way, great. But that’s not going to give you a complete picture of why someone does the things that they do.

**Craig:** No question. This is just I think more than anything it’s food for thought and a fun party trick to do when you’re – I mean, when I would sit and do this with Melissa’s family, half of the discussion was, “Wait, you say you’re a blah-blah-blah? No you’re not.” The other problem with this is that usually these tests are, well, they’re asking you a question and you’re answering it. But we don’t always know what we are.

**John:** 100%. And you’re imagining one scenario in which you remember, oh that’s right, I left that party early. But that other time where I stayed out till 4am. Wait, so how do I answer this?

**Craig:** Correct. Sometimes people also – they think that one way is better than another and so they answer that way.

**John:** Totally. My personality type is that I want to ace the test.

**Craig:** Well there you go. So then you’re starting to min-max this thing.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I think you do, min-maxing the Myers-Briggs. We’re nerds.

**John:** Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you John.

**John:** Bye.

* John will be part of the [Beyond Bars: Changing the Narrative on Criminal Justice](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/beyond-bars-changing-the-narrative-on-criminal-justice-tickets-91710373195) panel on February 26th
* Contact [brand@johnaugust.com](mailto:brand@johnaugust.com) for information on [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/) for students and educators
* [Outlines](https://screenwriting.io/what-does-an-outline-look-like/) and [treatments](https://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-treatment/) on screenwriting.io, and some examples in the [johnaugust.com library](https://johnaugust.com/library)
* Scriptnotes, episodes [436](https://johnaugust.com/2020/political-movies), [434](https://johnaugust.com/2020/ambition-and-anxiety), and [432](https://johnaugust.com/2020/learning-from-movies)
* Reddit’s [r/imsorryjon](https://www.reddit.com/r/imsorryjon/top/?t=all)
* Scott Silver on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0798788/?ref_=tt_ov_wr) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Silver)
* The [Myers–Briggs Type Indicator on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator) and an [online test](https://www.16personalities.com/)
* The [Big Five personality traits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits)
* [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/437standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 429 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll finally answer some long gestating listener questions. Plus we’ll look at two moves by the US Justice Department and their impact on screenwriters. Plus in bonus segment Craig and I will do a meme and compare not our faces but rather our beliefs at the start and end of the decade.

**Craig:** I used to believe in things and now I believe in nothing.

**John:** Completely. All belief has been stripped away. It’s just day by day getting through it. It’s Mad Max anarchy for Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** It’s just a howling chasm.

**John:** Can I confess that I want to say nihilism, but a part of me also thinks am I saying that word right? It’s a word I always see written and I don’t actually say it aloud often.

**Craig:** I think generally pronounce it as nihilism but it comes from nihil which I think is a Latin word. So, you could see nihilism or nihilism. And the truth is it doesn’t really matter, does it? Because if you’re a nihilist or a nihilist what’s the point? Who cares? Pronunciation is just another lie.

**John:** I Googled it as we were speaking and both are acceptable.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** There you go. So maybe I should get over my fears of misspeaking in public.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Yeah. Some follow up first. Our live show is happening December 12. As we’re recording this, which is almost a week away from when this episode comes out, there are still tickets. But maybe there are not tickets. Who knows? But our guests are phenomenal. Kevin Feige, Lorene Scafaria, Shoshannah Stern, and Josh Feldman, and other special surprises at our live show, December 12 in Hollywood. You should go to Writers Guild Foundation, wgfoundation.org and get yourself some tickets for that, because it’s going to be a great show.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re probably pretty close to being sold out by now. I think we were on the way, so you know how it is. It always is. I mean, what are you waiting for? Why don’t you get your loved one the gift that gives exactly once? A ticket to the Scriptnotes live show.

**John:** Absolutely. They can say they were there when that scandalous event happened.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Something will happen. Usually it does.

**John:** Usually does. Two Sundays ago we had the Assistant Town Hall, so this is an event that I was at along with other folks involved in the movement to try to get assistants paid better. So, we have audio from that. It may already be in your feed. If it’s not already in your feed it’s coming soon. So we cut down sort of two hours into a little bit more than an hour so people can listen to what was said in that room.

I thought it was a great event. And one of the things that I did, Craig, is I relaxed our normal rule about if you come up to the microphone you have to say a question that ends in a question mark. Because this was actually a chance for people to make statements. And some of the statements people made were really great and useful.

One I wanted to single out was a woman who said that as an assistant in the entertainment industry she feels like she has to basically carry three jobs. One is being an assistant. One is doing all the other sort of gig work, like babysitting and driving for Uber to make a living. And the third is actually writing and doing all the spec scripts that she should be writing as an aspiring writer. And it was a really interesting way of framing what it’s like to be an assistant because obviously you are going to be doing those three things and any of our aspiring writers out there who are listening probably recognizing that they’re doing two of those things, they are working a normal job and writing specs at home, but weirdly in Hollywood doing that third job where you’re also writing on your “free time” is expected as part of your first main job.

**Craig:** It used to be that the third job was maintaining a relationship with another human being. And I worry sometimes–

**John:** That’s impossible.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like that just sort of falls away and now nobody gets to have a relationship because you have a job, and a job, and a job. Which is terrible. I can’t imagine why you would have ever viewed it as a Q&A since really it did sound like an opportunity for people to just vent. But you know I’m glad that it’s happening. I’m hearing things. I’m hearing good things. There’s stuff blowing in the wind. People are noticing.

Now, has there been any large or special change? No. But I continue to hear people say, “By the way, because of what’s happened now things are being looked at differently.”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Maybe things that were considered unnecessary to even consider before are now being considered carefully. So, things are happening. That doesn’t mean enough is happening. It doesn’t mean that it’s happening fast enough. But, it’s happening. And I’m pleased.

**John:** Yeah. One of the things we laid out at the town hall was that this was sort of a big general meeting to talk overall issues. But that in 2020 early on in the year we are planning to have sort of breakout sessions to really talk about assistants at agencies, assistants in the writer’s room. Assistants and healthcare. Assistants and nondisclosure agreements. And sort of issues that are sort of unique to entertainment industry assistants. And how do we sort of drill in and focus on those things, which are sometimes very special issues that don’t apply to all assistants but apply to a big group of entertainment industry assistants.

So I think that stuff will continue and I think the folks who came to this first event and listened in on the livestream seem very engaged about keeping the conversation going.

**Craig:** Great. I hope they do.

**John:** Now, we talked about assistants in Episode 428. We got some follow up. Do you want to read what Sylvia wrote in?

**Craig:** Sure. Sylvia writes, “Your first letter writer mentioned that they were assigned to write outlines and hoped for story credit in response. Your point was that writing outlines is essentially clerical work and shouldn’t get credit.” John, I have to stop right there. Is that what we said?

**John:** We said that there were certain – in that first letter we were talking about the spectrum of work that an assistant might do in that writer’s room, and that first letter writer I think you and I both agreed that like if you’re just taking down what’s on the whiteboard, that’s not writing.

**Craig:** Right. If you’re just assembling bullet points that’s not actually writing an outline. So, just Sylvia right off the bat I’m not sure that that is correct. But I will continue your question. “I wanted to distinguish between compiling an informal and internal outline or a beat sheet off of which the writing staff can write their draft, and writing an official outline or story document which is sent to the studio and the network. In the former case, this is clearly clerical and falls under assistant duties. In the latter, the document produced is guild-covered work. It’s like the treatment phase in features. And the use of assistants to produce these documents is widespread and almost always uncompensated.”

I’m going to stop here again. Isn’t that exactly what we said?

**John:** I think it is. I think she’s trying to distinguish though to make sure that we and our listeners recognize that there’s really two different things we’re talking about. There is this first thing where you’re transcribing what’s on the board and you’re just doing this kind of internal document which is just for the staff. That we’re saying is clerical work.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think we are fully in agreement and acknowledgment that the thing you send into the studio, that’s an outline, that’s a story document, that is really truly guild-covered work.

**Craig:** Unless, just pushing back for a second, unless a particular showrunner just sends bullet points or simple not really outlines, but just here’s somebody typed up what we said. This is what we said. Then that’s not writing because that’s just typing. So I mean this is where the difference – this is what we talked about – I thought this is what we talked about.

**John:** This is what we talked about. And let’s continue with her statement and then get into it a little bit more.

**Craig:** So let’s continue on with Sylvia’s question/comment. “I’ve been asked to do both in my career and have done so eagerly and without complaint. I’ve also been asked to take on writing scenes for group written episodes. I’ve agreed mainly because I’ve been fortunate enough to work for showrunners who made it clear to me that this work was a proving ground to showcase my abilities, something I credit with getting assigned a freelance episode of the show I work on now. But it makes me uncomfortable and I wish these practices had light shined on them.”

Well that point. Yeah. I mean, what do you think about this last bit, John?

**John:** So, listen, so we’re trying to distinguish taking notes of what’s happening in the room versus the thing you send through to the studio and those are different experiences. Like I’m thinking back to even feature like roundtable things where there’s a person in the corner who is typing what’s being said. That’s not really writing. That’s just taking notes of what’s happening in the room. The thing you send in to the studio that is real writing.

Some of what Sylvia writes here though is like well you are crossing a line into guild-covered work. And we’re recording this actually only a day after the episode dropped, so hopefully some of our showrunner friends will quietly talk to me and Craig about their best practices for sort of how their using those writers in the room to make sure they get experience but they’re not crossing into really doing guild work.

**Craig:** I agree. I will say that if the showrunner says to you as someone clearly said to Sylvia, “Listen, I want you to just do a version of this scene for us.” In terms of credit I will say it’s essentially impossible for you to be credited for screenplay work on a television episode if you wrote one scene. And you’re not the first writer. I mean, you didn’t write the script. So it’s not like someone is taking advantage of you from a credit point of view. Technically however that is writing work.

Now, is there a job called Rewrite a Scene? Nope. We don’t have that. You could be paid guild-minimum for a week. You know, which would be nice, if they paid you a little extra. But in this case it seems like what somebody was saying essentially was I’d like you to audition by writing a scene for something and then can maybe get an episode. I think if you want to audition assistants have them write scenes for things that maybe you’re not working on right at that moment because that is exploitative. And if you’re going to use that that just seems weird.

But it is an interesting area because again if you just say to somebody write a scene – we don’t really have something that covers that per se other than a time-based assignment. So she said she did it and she agreed to do it because she believed it was going to work out in her favor and it did. But she’s right to feel uncomfortable because for a lot of people it doesn’t work out. I’d love to say that there’s strong overlap between cases where it worked out and the writing was really good, meaning for a lot of the people where it didn’t work out the writing wasn’t that good and so therefore it wasn’t being used. You know what I mean? They weren’t getting ripped off per se. But there’s got to be a better way of approaching this.

**John:** Yeah. I always come back to the point that the staff writer is supposed to be the person who is doing some of what we’re talking about here. And that staff writer used to be the journeyman sort of entry level writer position on a show. And I want to make sure that we are not hiring assistants in place of actual staff writers on shows.

**Craig:** Right. And I don’t think we will be.

**John:** On some of these little like mini room shows though we’ve gotten response that they basically are doing that, which is no bueno.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is no bueno. Yes, it is possible. At some point it just doesn’t seem very sustainable for any individual show to have people writing but not really writing. You can’t – literally the network can’t use it, or the production company can’t use it. It has to be guild-covered work. It’s literary material.

So, in the case of somebody like Sylvia I could see that there’s a staff writer as essentially cover and then Sylvia is going to write a scene, but there is a guild employee. If there isn’t one, I don’t know. That doesn’t sound right at all.

**John:** No. So let’s continue to follow up on this as we hear back from other people on other shows about how they’re doing this properly.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** More follow up. Last episode Mark from New York asked for our advice on what to do when moving to Los Angeles. Craig and I did this so long ago that our advice is not current. So we asked our listeners, hey, if you’ve moved to Los Angeles recently and have good advice for Mark write in. So we’ve gotten a few in. Let’s share what Ben wrote.

He said, “I wanted to share my advice for moving to Los Angeles. I was encouraged to make the move from Chicago by the wonderful Emily Zulauf who I met at the Austin Film Festival.” Emily, a former Scriptnotes guest. She’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** “Before I started I wanted to say a quick thank you to her. Thank you, Emily. I moved to LA a year and a half ago and I had a really smooth transition. What I did first was get a job in front of house for a theater, basically plays not movies, in Culver City. I took this job because all I had to do was babysit the show and sit in the lobby. This gives me two hours of built in writing time a day, or however long the show is. Also I had some pretty big actors, directors, writers give me advice on my work who are part of that theater, so that’s pretty neat.

“The only thing I would have done differently was to try harder to get an assistant job or anything in the industry. I tried for months and months but couldn’t even get an interview and my bank account was really hurting, so I had no choice but to work a different kind of job. I have yet to get a writing job, but I’ve written two features and two novels just this year. So I feel like I’m right where I need to be right now.

“I found my apartment on Facebook Marketplace. And my roommate who posted it is super cool and more importantly sane. It’s cheap for Culver City, $990 a month,” which I assume is his portion a month. “Just make sure you message them first and get a feel for whether they’re cool/sane. I’m not in the business yet, so I don’t know if this is good advice, but it has given me enough cash to fly to Austin Film Festival, make some connections, and have plenty of time to write.”

**Craig:** Well that’s a pretty good method. I would say if you are looking to get a job as an assistant in the industry and you can’t find one, your bank account shouldn’t be hurting because you should have a job also during that time. Like never not work. If you need to work part time at Starbucks or Ralph’s or something, or take on some temp work, if you can type or answer phones. Just do something to put money in your pocket. You’re just going to be miserable if you’re sitting around just waiting.

It makes the waiting brutal. And there will be almost certainly some waiting. Two features and two novels just this year. OK. That’s way more than I’ve ever done. So, tip my hat on that one. Did not know about this Facebook Marketplace thing. This sounds like the 2019 of that weird fax thing that you and I used.

**John:** Indeed. So a couple things that Ben did here which I think are smart is that he wasn’t able to find an assistant job so he picked a job that was pretty good and also gave him time to write. And that takes me back to my days as an intern at Universal where I had a really mindless job and so at lunch I could just type up the scenes that I’d handwritten at home. It worked out great and actually had a very productive summer during that internship. I theoretically had a job for eight hours a day, but I actually had a lot of free time, and most importantly a lot of free brain space.

The job that Ben has sounds mindless and so he comes home without having used a lot of his writing brain, so that’s great.

And it looks like he knew he would need a roommate. He needed a roommate in a pretty cheap part of town. Culver City is a perfectly valid place to live. I lived in Palms, which is the even more boring version of Culver City.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Pick an unexciting place and it’s cheaper. If you pick a more interesting place you might bump into people a little bit more often, but it’s going to probably be more expensive. So he made some good choices.

**Craig:** I agree. Good job, Ben. So far so good.

**John:** So Ben thank you for your advice. If you have more advice for Mark who is moving from New York send it in and we’ll share it with Mark.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Last bit of follow up, back in Episode 419 I was talking with Craig about my speech I was going to give in Des Moines on professionalism. I did that. That went great. I posted a blog version of the speech at my site. I cites Craig and Phil Hay who had really good suggestions for things I should add to my list of professional characteristics.

**Craig:** Aw, thanks.

**John:** Yeah. So if you want to take a read through that it is super long, but hopefully useful in terms of thinking about what it means to be professional in 2019, heading into 2020. I also talked a bit about influencers and sort of the weird way that influencers are kind of professional amateurs. And how to think about influencers in this conversation about professionalism.

**Craig:** Don’t be influenced by them.

**John:** You should not be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, now to some news. We have two bits of news about the Justice Department. So the first is the most recent and topical thing. The Justice Department weighing in on the WGA/agency controversy and the lawsuits they’re in. So this happened Tuesday of last week. The Justice Department sent a memo, a legal document, saying that in the lawsuit between the WGA and the agencies that the court should not dismiss the agencies’ complaints against the WGA, saying that the court should establish a fact pattern regarding the labor exemption.

So we’ll put a link to the PDF of what the Justice Department wrote in to say. David Goodman in his official statement said, “It’s not surprising that Trump’s Justice Department has filed a brief designed to weaken a labor union’s efforts to protect its members and eliminate conflicts of interests by talent agencies. The agencies’ anti-trust claims are contrary to Supreme Court precedent and we remain confident that the court will dismiss them.”

So this is a federal lawsuit about the agencies and packaging. Involved the four biggest agencies. The brief history of this is that the lawsuit was initially filed by the WGA in California court. The counter claim was filed in federal court. That moved the California complaint to federal. It’s complicated. It’s legal. But the simplest version to think about this is that the Justice Department looked at both sides and decided to sort of put its finger on the scale of the agencies’ side.

**Craig:** Not surprising at all as David Goodman says. But this leads me to a question. Weren’t we the ones that asked for the venue change?

**John:** No. The venue change happened because the agencies filed in federal court. So they filed this anti-trust thing in federal court, so we had to respond to them in federal court. So everything was going to head to federal court, so that’s why we pulled out of California and put it into the federal thing. Once they filed the federal it allowed us to add in some complaints that we couldn’t file in California court. That’s the short version of it, again as explained by a non-lawyer.

**Craig:** OK. So we didn’t have a choice. Once the agencies did that we had leave? The only reason I’m asking is because when some of the stuff I’ve been reading just feels like – in terms of our response – feels a little strangely naïve like what did you think was going to happen? I mean, look at this joke of a Justice Department in the way they are about everything. Of course they’re going to be – I’m kind of shocked that it wasn’t worse, you know, in terms of what they said.

**John:** They said they didn’t want to sort of weigh in on the merits of the case. They said they wanted a fact pattern. But, yeah, if you look at the guy who heads up anti-trust for the Justice Department it’s a guy named Makan Delrahim. We’ll put a link to his Wikipedia page. But he had an op-ed in the New York Post during the elections, a pro-Trump post there. He’s very much sort of in that wheelhouse. And the next thing we’re going to talk about is also his weighing in, oh, anti-trust is silly. People should be able to do what they want to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. That seems to be their position. I mean, again, I guess my question is have we been overly rosy about our chances here? We seem to have gotten ourselves into a game on someone else’s home field and it’s not going well.

**John:** I don’t know if that’s to be the case. And so nothing has been decided at all in federal courts yet. So the first thing will be these motions to dismiss. And we filed to dismiss their motions. They filed to dismiss our motions. The first round of those decisions doesn’t come until December. So, I don’t know that necessarily anything has happened.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the court is not bound by what the Department of Justice says.

**Craig:** Sure. Of course.

**John:** So all the time the Justice Department can weigh in on one side or the other and the court itself decides what it’s going to do. If this made it all the way to the Supreme Court could you imagine that given the current makeup of the Supreme Court that it would not be ideally what we would want, maybe? But existing federal law is very clearly on our side in terms of how a union can represent its members in terms of representation based on the National Basketball Players Association precedent.

**Craig:** OK. Well you have more faith in our legal minds than I do.

**John:** And it should also be pointed out that it’s not just the WGA’s legal minds. It is outside counsel that does most of this which is great.

**Craig:** So we’re paying for two sets of lawyers. [laughs] Just pointing out.

**John:** Yeah. Of course. But this is a recent blip, but what we meant to talk about on a previous episode and we forgot to put it on the Workflowy is the Paramount decree. The Paramount consent decree which a couple of listeners had wrote in about. Craig, can you talk us through the briefest summary of what the Paramount consent decree was and why it was important?

**Craig:** Yeah. Basically there was in the early days of Hollywood a kind of lock down on the business where the same small group of people that made movies were the same small group of people that owned all the theaters. So essentially you could as one of those big movie companies block out any independent film companies from really existing. Because you can make a movie, but if you don’t have anywhere to show it then you’re not going to survive.

So, at some point the government came in and said, look, this is becoming a monopoly. You’re harming competition. So what we’re going to say is a consent decree meaning all of you are going to agree without us having to pass a law that you can’t own theaters. So you can own your studios, you can make your stuff, you just can’t own the theaters that exhibit it. And that has suddenly gone away, poof.

**John:** Yeah. Well it hasn’t actually poofed yet, but there’s a very strong probability that it will go away, poof. The only other thing I want to add to consent decree is it helps theoretically protect independent movie producers because it allows them to get their movies into theaters. It also protects independent theaters that can get access to movies that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to get to. So, it’s providing competition in the theatrical distribution space.

**Craig:** Correct. So what is the world going to look like when Disney can own movie theaters? So this is a little trickier. I think it’s probably not going to look hugely different. It may even weirdly look better. It’s not necessarily going to be better, but it might for a brief while look better because there really are three exhibitors that kind of exist fully in our country. Three huge ones. And I can easily see a scenario when the consent decree disappears where all three of them are essentially gobbled up by three of the large multi-nationals that make all of our content or at least most of it. So now what we’re talking about is most of it, right. Not all of it. There’s still some independent film theaters. But all of your AMCs and your Regals and that stuff, theoretically they get gobbled up. Are they going to not show competitor’s films? Ridiculous. Of course they are. They’ll all want a share. Because they all want each other’s blockbusters the way that a network that is owned by Disney is more than happy to run material on its network produced by say Warner Bros. That happens all the time.

And I think that the theaters may get a little revitalized, a little spiffed up perhaps. But what you might start to lose completely are the smaller theaters. They may just not be able to compete at all. So, it’s not great, but in a weird way we already kind of lost because the era of the consent decree did not have three huge exhibitor chains. It had lots and lots and lots and lots of individual theaters. Well, we already kind of live in that monopoly space, so the question is is this going to lead to just a name change on the door and little else? Hard to say.

**John:** So I’m less rosy than you are. So, I mean, I’m not painting you as being rosy, but if you are sort of a dark vision that has a little bit of a rosy glow there on the edges, I think my rosy glow is a little less there. I think, yes, we are currently in an oligopoly where we have basically two oligopolies. We have an oligopoly of big movie producers, the studios. And we have an oligopoly of theater chains. Combining those two oligopolies I think will be to the detriment of kind of everyone.

Maybe not people who want to buy a ticket for a nice theater. I think that could actually – I agree – that could actually improve. I think Disney probably would do a lovely job managing a space because they do a great job managing their parks.

Here’s a couple of my concerns. You and I can speak from a place in a giant city where we have all three chains essentially. We have competition among multiple places. In many markets they don’t have competition. So, there’s essentially one chain owns all the theaters in that market. That becomes problematic if Disney owns that and decides, you know what, we are going to put all the best theaters – we’re going to keep all the best theaters for our product and make it very expensive for you to get your movie onto one of our screens. That will be problematic.

And so, yes, I agree it’s in their interest to show movies and make money, but they’re always going to be preferring their own product to someone else’s product. Right now if Disney and Paramount are both trying to get a great screen at the Grove they have to bargain for it. And I think less of that bargaining is going to lead to – that decrease in competition will not be great for that screen.

The other thing is like while the big studios make the majority of our product, they don’t make everything. So I worry about things like Knives Out. Rian Johnson’s movie is a Lions Gate production. How does it find its theaters? It debuted on I think 3,000 screens. How does it get 3,000 screens? Well, in this post-Paramount decree world I think they can’t get those screens unless they let one of the big studio buyers buy in and take a piece of that movie. That’s my hunch.

**Craig:** It’s possible, but you know again I just suspect because of the nature of money if they think something is going to be a hit and they think they’re going to be able to make money off of it they’ll take it.

**John:** But they have much more leverage on the deal that they cut with Rian Johnson’s producer to get that screen. And so I think that’s my worry.

**Craig:** All right. They’re dealing with either three people this way or three people that way. But we’ll see what happens. I mean, it is an interesting situation. I’m not freaked out.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** But, yeah, I’m not freaked out but I’m not thrilled either.

**John:** No. I think the only people who are thrilled are stockholders in either of those sides, because that merger will – those mergers will happen.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** As I understand it, again, it’s the same guy who said that the agency – came out on the agency side for the agency/WGA dispute was saying that, “The Paramount decree is a long ago to the horizontal conspiracy among movie companies in the ‘30s and ‘40s and undid effects of that conspiracy in the marketplace. The division has concluded that these decrees have served their purpose and their continue to existence may actually harm American consumers by standing in the way of innovative business models for the exhibition of America’s great creative films.”

In that last segment I think he’s talking about the window. He’s talking the idea that there’s a theatrical window and then there’s a time before things show up on TV. If Disney owns both the theaters and Disney+ they can decide like, OK, three weeks after it’s in the theaters we can put it on Disney+. So that’s a change.

**Craig:** Well that’s going to happen. I mean, Netflix is already doing it. That’s inevitable. In that sense he’s right. I mean, one possible positive thing out of this is they might stop charging so damn much for concessions because that’s where these theaters make all their money. They might actually reduce some of that. That would be nice. I don’t know if they will, but it would be nice.

**John:** I don’t know. I mean, food at Disneyland is pretty expensive.

**Craig:** 100%. Because you’re there, right? There isn’t like a Disneyland across the street that you can go to instead. But I can see where like, OK, we can see this at Regal or we can see it at AMC. We could see it – you know what I mean?

**John:** Craig, my point is that you won’t be able to see it at Regal or at AMC. Because it’s only going to be at the one place.

**Craig:** Oh, I don’t think that’s true. I just don’t think that’s how – I could be wrong, but I just don’t think that that’s – they won’t – they’re leaving money on the table if they do that. I mean, the only thing I ever think about these companies is that you can trust them for is being incredibly greedy.

**John:** Of course. Of course. So, let’s make a note to follow up in five years, in ten years to see where we’re at in this.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** Because I do think that most likely the consent decrees are going away. I don’t see that changing unless we have a huge new administration that puts a giant priority on stopping it. I don’t see that train stopping.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to some listener questions. It’s been far too long since we’ve gotten into this mailbag. So, let’s start with Justina. Justina asks, “What happens if an intercut naturally ends? For example, let’s say someone is making dinner or throwing a party inside a house while someone else is watching the sunset outside. In this case you might use intercut to show the two people doing those things. Eventually the sunset ends and the person goes inside. If you intercut between the dinner and the person watching the sunset, how would you end the intercut when the person goes inside? Would it still be a cut to?”

So Craig what do you do when you’ve been intercutting and you need to signal to the reader that the intercut has ended?

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t really bother with this intercut thing. I think it’s this overly formal thing. We know what we mean. I mean, what I generally would do for something like this is I would say INT. KITCHEN/EXT. DECK. While so and so is in the kitchen preparing food, such and such is out on the deck. And then she’s in the kitchen, I write what she’s doing. And then maybe an action, outside, and then Steve is like, “Wow, what a beautiful sun.” And then Steve heads inside. You know, heads inside to the kitchen. Eileen turns to him. “What have you been doing?”

Just get rid of all this bric-a-brac. There’s too much formality in these things. It gets in the way of just letting people see the movie. I think people get so hung up on these little tweakedy things when the truth is none of it really is useful. I mean, eventually production needs to know when this space is different than this space, but that’s what the header does. Yeah, so I don’t get all hung up on this intercut stuff.

**John:** Yeah. So I think intercut is a very useful way to signal – say the word intercut as an intermediary slug line by itself, just an uppercase line all by itself. It’s sometimes a helpful way to indicate to the reader I’m not going to cut back and forth INT/EXT every time this is going to happen, but naturally you’re going to see the two things are happening. So your action lines just read from both sides simultaneously.

Very useful on the page. Very common. I think the reason why I will sometimes say End Intercutting is if one side is continuing and we’re never cutting back to the other side again. So in the example that Justina gives and that Craig shows, if that character moves into the first scene well obviously intercut is over. You can stop with – you don’t have to say end intercutting.

But if you’re just dropping one side away then I think actually calling it out and saying End Intercutting is valid. So if you look through some of my scripts in the library you’ll see I do that occasionally, but you don’t always have to do it. Always put it there if otherwise there would be confusion. That’s really the goal of all of these things is how do you avoid the reader becoming confused.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you make that your goal rather than conforming to some suspected format then you’ll be fine. That’s generally good advice.

Jeremy has a question about contracts. He asks, “One thing that has baffled me since learning of it is that it is standard practice to not only begin work on a script before the contract is signed but that the process of finalizing the paperwork will often outlast the length of the project itself. To wit, I just happened upon this tweet from Jeffrey Lieber. ‘I just yesterday signed a contract on a script I finished in October 2018 and has been dead since March 2019. They will now pay me the last 10%.’

“This seems to me bonkers. Can you please tell me why I’m wrong in thinking that this is insane? And what the consequences of this are in terms of writers getting paid, the potential for terms to be altered after the work is completed? Etc.”

John? What do you think about this situation?

**John:** Oh, contracts. So it is true that you will sometimes begin writing on a project before your contract is signed. Sometimes you will deliver a project before the final version of the contracts are signed. But here’s what’s important to think about as a screenwriter. There is going to be a point at which the studio says, “OK, we will pay you.” At the moment at which they will pay you you’re generally OK to start writing. Some studios will refuse to pay until the final contracts are signed. Paramount is sort of notorious for this. Some will have a certificate of authorship, a COA, and that’s enough. Some will do it on a deal memo. Different studios will work different ways. It is a little weird and bizarre that things will happen before contracts are signed, but sometimes it is just so urgent to get stuff done that you just do it, especially on weeklies and things that are more timely and pressing.

It is weird. It is slightly bonkers. But it is somewhat standard practice. The important thing that I will always stress is that it is not your executive who says, “OK, you can start writing.” It is going to be a business executive who says, or a business affairs person who says like, “OK, we are good to cut you a check.” Or it is your lawyer telling you it’s OK for you to start writing. Do not just trust your creative executive to be the one saying like it’s all good, start writing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree with all of that. And this is one hard and fast rule I have followed since the very beginning of my career, since the very first project I was hired on way, way back when. And it is this: you may drag your feet about finishing a contract. But until you send out a check for delivery, meaning the check for turning the work in, I’m not giving you the script. Because the second you turn it in they don’t have any reason to ever finish the contract or ever pay you. And it will take them forever. So what I would say to somebody like Jeffery Lieber is if you signed a contract on script that you finished in October 2018, that was the day – that was the month – you should have said I’m done, you can’t have it until you pay me. We could finish the contract or you can have me just sign something else, or just send me the check. Doesn’t matter. But I’m not giving this to you until you pay me. And usually one day later a check is in the mail.

**John:** OK. I want to clarify something here. You are asking for your delivery check before you turn it in or your commencement check before you turn it in?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t like to start without a commencement check in place. So, now, sometimes I’ll get a jump on things and then the commencement check will come a week or two later, which I consider to be fine. But, yeah, no, I’m always asking to be commenced. But there are times when they’ve been dragging it out and you definitely need both commencement and delivery before you turn the script in. But also I don’t turn the script in until they’ve paid delivery. Meaning they are issuing delivery – it’s like a hostage negotiation. You throw the Idol, I’ll give you the whip.

**John:** That is fascinating to me. I can’t believe we’ve been doing this show for this long and never had this come up. I have never required delivery before actually turning in the script. And so I’ll always say like I delivered, pay me the money. And so I’ve never reversed that. Never once.

**Craig:** Usually, nine times out of ten, there is a signed contract. So I don’t have to do that.

**John:** OK. I see what you’re saying.

**Craig:** Because the contract compels it. But if they’re still working on the long form, they have to send it first.

**John:** That’s fair. So those situations, yeah, I can totally see that. Dean asks, “In the age of streaming, when an episode of a show can be any length, how does that affect formatting? Do I still need act breaks? Or is neglecting traditional TV formatting limiting my prospects purely to streamers? Should I care?”

Act breaks in scripts written in 2019/2020 – Craig, what are your thoughts?

**Craig:** It depends on the kind of show you’re writing, Dean. Yeah, I think you should care, but not an enormous amount. You’re right, if you’re writing something that feels like a streamer kind of show then it is not crucially important. I mean, the Mandalorian just on its own has blown through the last of the – it’s blown through the guardrails. We now have episodes that are 38 minutes. What is that? That’s not a thing? So, yeah, doesn’t matter there.

If, however, you are writing what you feel to be good network/basic cable procedural, you’re writing what you think is the next Grey’s Anatomy, then I think you should be accounting for commercial breaks. And the idea of structuring with act breaks makes sense. If you don’t do it then you’re going to have to do it anyway. So part of it is just figuring out what it is that you want to do, what kind of show you want to write. There’s a creative difference between those things. There are some shows where it could be a this or be a that, in which case pick the one that you think serves you best, and if you have to adjust after you adjust.

**John:** Yeah. And so 100% on all of Craig’s advice. I will say that even experienced writers who are doing this now, I was talking to a friend who is doing a pilot as sort of a sample and he’s trying to decide do I put in act breaks, do I not put in act breaks? He decided not to put in act breaks. Because it felt a little fancier and more premium cable to not have the act breaks. But he was writing a show that really could go either place and that is what he chose to do. So it’s fine either way. If you’re writing something that feels like it should be a Chicago Something then put in those act breaks.

**Craig:** Yeah. Chicago Chicago is my new idea. I’m going to pitch that to Derek.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** All right. Greg asks about staying organized. “Dear John and Craig, can you discuss the practical concerns of files, file naming, folders, drafts, when to save, how to name, archiving scripts in the computer? I’m afraid I’ve made a mess of things and there’s no going back. But there is hope for the future and future drafts to be in a clean and tidy system.” I suspect we both have very finicky little systems.

**John:** Mine is actually not super finicky, but let me talk you through mine and we’ll hear what you’re doing. I create a folder for every project. Everything is in Dropbox. But I create a folder for it. All my files go in there. I will duplicate and create a new file if it’s really truly a new draft, like I’m turning in a brand new thing to the studio, but I will basically otherwise just keep working in the same file.

As we talked about previously, tend to write out of sequence. And so I will often have a subfolder in that folder called just Scenes. And I will just type up individual scenes and I they will stack up in that folder. Then I will assemble them for the final script and that will become the first draft.

But for every project I have, be it Arlo Finch, be it whatever, it’s all in one folder. The Arlo Finch books are just separate subfolders for each book. But I keep it kind of simple. And I name things just the title of the script and generally the date. I don’t say like first draft, second draft, whatever. I use the date for the date that I’m turning it in, whatever the date would be on the cover page of that script.

Craig, talk me through what you do.

**Craig:** Pretty similar. I’ve got a – I have a folder called Scripts in Progress. And inside that folder are all the active jobs, meaning things that are still either in development or I’m writing now or I know I have to write after. So they’re in process. Each project gets its own folder inside of that. And inside of that, like you, when I’m writing a draft it’s just one file that I’m using. But because I’m always sort of PDFing my progress as I go to share with the people I work with, I’ll have a lot of like 1-8, 1-20, 1-26. You can sort of see the progress of things just by the length of those things. And then I finish the draft, it’s done. Now that gets Draft 1 as a subfolder. Then it’s time for draft 2 and the process starts again.

If it goes into production then inside I’ll also have subfolders for scouting, for casting, for budget, for schedule, all that stuff. Everything gets its own little subfolder in there. And in this way you should have everything kind of beautiful laid out and nested.

When a project is done, it goes over into the Writing Archive folder. And that’s where all the old things live. Like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** And it’s such a relief to send something that you hate, like oh god, this was the worst, I’ve been on this thing for like – they beat me up for four weeks on some production rewrite. I’m so glad it’s over. Be gone to the writing archive. But sometimes it’s sad. Like when I moved Chernobyl into to the writing archive it was like, oh man, it’s been like six years looking at that folder. Bye. And then it goes. But it’s a good way to kind of realize this is our life. You do it. It’s done. And you move on.

**John:** So a difference between you and me is you have more subfolders than I do. And the reason why I don’t tend to have a lot of subfolders is that sometimes things get lost in subfolders. Like you’re not quite sure where would it be and where is that thing. So that’s why I tend to have – there could be 100 files in the folder.

What I do find useful is if there’s a particular file or draft that I want to sort of keep going back to, like this is an official draft I turned in, I will use the label feature in finder to put a little purple label on it, so I can say, oh, that’s the one. And so for Arlo Finch for example if I have a PDF of book one that is really the definitive version, that it matches the printed book, I will have that label so I can click on that and say like, OK, this is what I called that character in this book, and so I can very easily refer back to it and know that I’m looking at definitively the true version of things.

But I’m not a big subfolder person beyond that. Of course I will subfolder for things like scouting or casting and that stuff. But for the actual writing it tends to be just one giant folder.

**Craig:** Hmm. Yep, there you go. So I guess really the answer is whatever feels good, Greg.

**John:** In terms of backups, we should always stress Dropbox is sort of its own backup, so that’s one stage of backup in backing up. I use Time Machine and I also will do a full disc dup of my hard drive every couple weeks. So, between those three I have a very good way of getting back to the state of any file.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m kind of in the same situation. I have Dropbox. I have Time Machine. And then I use Back Blaze. So it’s triplicate. Feels pretty good.

**John:** Do it. David asks a question about the trades. “Every so often you and Craig make brief mention of or reference to the trades. I understand that the trades are places to find industry information, but for someone trying to break into the screenwriting business what does it actually mean? Are the trades something I should be paying attention to? What are some trade publications or sites that I need to follow? Are some better than the others? What should I know about the trades?”

**Craig:** I mean, no.

**John:** Let’s list them. When we say the trades what are we talking about?

**Craig:** We’re talking about Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** That’s what we’re talking about. It used to just be Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. And when you and I started, and you probably I guess felt the same way, it seemed like a common thing to feel that Variety was kind of the New York Times. And then The Hollywood Reporter was the other one.

**John:** The Post.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was a little bit of The Post. And then in the age of the Internet Deadline came along and did what Internet publications do which is ruin everything. So what had been kind of a somewhat restrained business periodical turned into a gossipy crapfest. And now that’s not to say that there isn’t good journalism at those three publications. There is. Sometimes they do really interesting work. And then sometimes they just take a transcript of what you and I say and republish it and call it exclusive.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s a lot of that. And because they are now in a cycle of exclusives, which I don’t understand the value of really since it’s going to be non-exclusive 14 seconds after you publish it, they will race, they will screw up, they will not report things cleanly. It just happens all the time. I think among industry professionals there’s a certain sense that the trades need to be graded on a curve. That if they get it even close to right that’s a good day.

Do you need to read these things? No. I don’t see why. I think mostly they’re full of, you know, just junk. Like so-and-so takes job as fifth assistant VP at company you don’t know. It just doesn’t matter.

**John:** So when I first came out to Los Angeles I was in the Stark program and we got free copies of Variety every day. And so I remember going to my little USC mailbox and get my Variety. And it was actually really helpful for me to learn some lingo and sort of like learn how people talked in the industry. So I do think there’s some merit to having a familiarity with them. I don’t think you need to keep up with them every day, every week. You don’t need to know the pulse of what’s going on, because they really aren’t the pulse of what’s going on.

Megana, who is sort of new to the industry, I get Variety for free during award season for no good reason, so she will actually read them. And it’s good. It gets her up to speed on sort of like who the studios are and what they’re talking about. That part is kind of useful. But it should be the tiniest fraction of your time. Do not feel like you need to internalize this. And I will say a danger of reading the trades is as a screenwriter it can get you kind of in this hunting mode where it’s like, oh, this is what’s hot. I should be writing this thing. Or these are the sales. That’s not good. That’s not bueno. You should be writing your own stuff and not worrying about what other people are buying.

**Craig:** I agree. And I would say that if you’re quality shopping among the trades, because each one of them will provide quality at times, look for things that aren’t the news of the day. Because it’s actually – it’s the – so when I think about Variety and The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline and I think about breaking, blah-blah-blah, that’s actually usually not great.

**John:** Not important.

**Craig:** Yeah. What is good, what they do really well, are in-depth interviews with people that matter. Whether they’re on the arts side or the business side. You can really learn from those, just from the interviews alone? I think also when they have editorials or essays that analyze trends there is value there. Where it’s less interesting to me is the kind of full on opinion pieces like why did such-and-such movie flop and then here comes a bunch of retroactive explanation for something that you would have said completely differently if it had succeeded.

Or breaking, blah-blah-blah. So, yeah, just pick and choose carefully. Because there’s actually great in all of them. And then there’s junk in all of them. Which is sort of like true for what you and I do. [laughs]

**John:** It is. It is true. Let’s wrap it up with Doug’s question. He writes, “The recent episode on fantasy world-building was wonderful. I was thinking about Episode 400, movies they don’t make anymore, it seems to me the only kind of fantasy that studios are interested in are series. The Witcher. The new Lord of the Rings project at Amazon. His Dark Materials. What advice would you give to a screenwriter hoping to write a standalone fantasy? Is it worth the time for something that isn’t popping up as often? What would need to be in a pitch or other document in order to entice studios to tell a story that is fantasy without being backed by source material?”

**Craig:** It’s very difficult.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Doug, here’s the problem. They’re incredibly expensive to do. And if they are not backed up by underlying material then it is quite unlikely that they will do it at all. It would have to come with Brad Pitt and, I don’t know, everyone. It would have to be like that selfie that Ellen DeGeneres took at the Oscars. It would need all of those people in it.

So when John and I were growing up there were a billion fantasy movies and they made a billion fantasy movies that weren’t based on underlying material because they were dirt cheap to make. Go out into the desert. Put some very pretty people in stupid barbarian costumes. And have them swing swords and occasional terrible visual effects occur. That was it. So they were cheap.

But to do a fantasy series – essentially since Lord of the Rings set a bar for what fantasy should be on film. Yeah, if you don’t have either the promise of underlying material to support an ongoing theatrical experience, or you don’t have a kind of ongoing experience that as an original thing a network could see as an ongoing series, it’s really going to be uphill.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you, because you’re talking about making a very expensive movie that’s not based on anything which is difficult in any genre. But particularly a thing about fantasy properties is they tend to be based on really successful books or other franchises and that’s why they sort of cross that threshold. So I think you’re going to be happier picking the second genre you love very much and working on that one. Or if you really want to work in that fantasy genre, you know, find a way to get on one of these other series that’s happening, because then you’ll be very happy writing one of those shows.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s exactly right.

**John:** All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a cocktail. I don’t think we’ve ever done a cocktail for a One Cool Thing. So, in our house I had some parsley and it’s like there must be a cocktail to make with parsley. So I Googled and I found a Parsley Julip. It is delicious, Craig. It’s like a mint julip. It uses parsley, lime juice, simple syrup, gin. I used my friend’s Aviation Gin, which is fantastic. And it’s a delicious drink. I mean, it’s really kind of more a summer drink. But even in the winter it is a delicious drink. It is refreshing. So I would recommend a Parsley Julip if you are in the mood for a cocktail.

**Craig:** I could definitely see Melissa Mazin enjoying a Parsley Julip.

**John:** What I like about parsley is it’s not a flavor you kind of expect in a cocktail. But you just get a sense of it and it’s just lovely.

**Craig:** If you say so.

**John:** You’re not a parsley person?

**Craig:** I am literally an old fashioned drinker. That’s how. I am so old fashioned I drink an Old Fashioned. Yeah, no, and I’m not a big gin guy to be honest with you.

**John:** Generally I’m not a big gin guy overall, but this is tasty for me.

**Craig:** It’s coming back. Well I have a culinary One Cool Thing as well. As faithful listeners know every Thanksgiving I do a ton of cooking for the holiday and inevitably that involves a pie. A pie will happen. And because I like to do things from scratch I’m making my own crust. And one of the things that savvy bakers know when they’re making pie crusts is that pie weights are super useful. So, pie weights are typically little ceramic beads and you just pour them on top of the shell before you put it in the oven. And the idea is that when inevitably some little water pockets turn to steam and a bubble wants to form and blow out like a pizza bubble it doesn’t happen because these things are weighing it down.

The bummer about the pie weights is when you take your pie out of the oven you got to spill all of these hot ceramic beads out somewhere, wait for them to cool, and then put them back in their jar. Well, this year I found and it’s not like it’s new, but it’s new to me and so I’m thrilled, a pie weight chain. So instead of the ceramic beads that uses essentially ball bearings, little metal ball bearings, which do the trick just fine as well, but what they’ve done is they’ve just sort of strung them together like a long necklace. And so you put it on your pie and it does the same damn thing, but when it’s time to take it off you’ve just got to get the end and then you lift the whole damn thing out, one piece, done.

**John:** Craig, that is a very smart idea. Again, you’re saying it’s not new, but it’s new to me and I can’t believe that I’ve been wasting time with non-threaded beads to do this.

**Craig:** I mean, now when I took it out of the package my wife remarked that it looked a little bit like a sex toy.

**John:** Yeah. It does.

**Craig:** I mean, but you know what, I think in life most really useful things do look vaguely like sex toys.

**John:** Anything can be a sex toy if you’re imaginative enough.

**Craig:** As Adam Carolla once said, “Within five minutes of something new being invented, it’s up someone’s butt.” Somewhere in the world it’s gone up a butt. [laughs]

**John:** If you are looking for a gift this holiday season you can get a pie weight chain, or parsley for a Parsley Julip, but we also have Scriptnotes t-shirts that you can buy. Craig, have you gotten your Scriptnotes t-shirts? Megana was giving them to Bo to give them to you. Have you gotten your t-shirts yet?

**Craig:** I believe they’re in transit. I’m very excited.

**John:** They turned out great. So we put in a big order for all of us in Scriptnotes land. They’re great. And the one I’m wearing right now is the old Scriptnotes tour shirt, the one with the sort of metal typewriter on it.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** And so mine had become so faded you couldn’t see the typewriter anymore, but now it is nice and dark. So, get yourself a new Scriptnotes t-shirt if you’d like to.

Also we’ll put links in to Alphabirds which is a game that my office plays every Friday. And Writer Emergency Pack which has been our sort of mainstay for a while of a little stocking stocker for the writer in your life. So if you want a gift those links are there.

Stick around after the credits because Craig and I are going to talk about things we think about differently after ten years. But for now, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Jemma Moran. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. We will have a new version of the premium feed coming very, very soon. But you can find all the back episodes for now at store.johnaugust.com.

All right, and now a bonus segment. So a meme that was really popular this past week was comparing the 2009 you versus the 2019 you. So people would put up side by side photos to show how different they looked from those times. I almost did that same meme, but I kind of look the same basically. Because when you’re a bald guy your visible signs of aging aren’t as pronounced, so it would just be a vanity post from me.

But I thought what we might do is talk about not what’s changed in our faces but what views we hold that are different now than they were in 2009.

**Craig:** You mean personal growth in other words.

**John:** Have we grown at all as people? Or I guess we could also be backsliding. We could have grown in a negative way.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** We could have calcified.

**Craig:** Devolved.

**John:** Devolved. I would say some views that I hold that are different, one is meritocracy, which I used to think is a good word which I now recognize is probably not a good word and actually not a really great concept. I think the idea of meritocracy is that everyone gets there based on their own worth and their own hard work and that’s what’s the key to success. I think I believed that a lot more in 2009 than I do in 2019. Is recognizing that a lot of people are successful who you would think it’s because they worked really hard, and they did work really hard, but that wasn’t the main factor on why they succeeded. So I think I’m much more aware of that than I was in 2009.

**Craig:** It sounds a little bit like it’s not that you don’t value what is inherently good about a theoretical meritocracy, but rather you’re saying we’re not in on. And a lot of the things that we’ve been told are meritocracies are not.

**John:** That is a good way to put it. Is that meritocracy as an idea is probably not bad, it’s just the fantasy that we’re living in one now is truly a fantasy.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. And I think that that kind of ties into one of the changes that I have, which is similar, and it’s that I think ten years ago I was more of an optimist not in a rosy way but rather what I would call a defensive optimist. So a defensive optimist says, OK, you’re pointing out problems but it’s important to me that we sort of look at what works right and not exaggerate the problems. Because if we exaggerate the problems we kind of fall into this sense of inertia and victimhood. And that’s a kind of defensive optimism.

And I think now I’m probably more of an accepting pessimist, which is to say I am still optimistic about things but I’m not upset by accepting how some things are getting worse or are just bad. In other words it’s not a threat to your optimism, your hope, or your sense of what is and what can be by acknowledging what is bad. Sometimes the most important thing you can do is just accept that some things are not great at all.

**John:** That’s true. And I think that’s psychologically a helpful thing to embrace is recognizing that accepting reality for what reality is and not sort of pushing it away is helpful both for your own planning but also for your own mental health.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess what I would say is I’ve come to appreciate the joy of bad news.

**John:** OK. Here’s a very simple thing that I’m different at. Back in 2009 I think I double spaced after the period pretty consistently. I don’t anymore. I’m a single-spacer. I look at things that are double spaced and it drives me crazy.

**Craig:** It’s the worst. I think I might have been ahead of you on this one, but just barely.

**John:** In 2012 in Episode 65 I talked about my transition to becoming a single-spacer. And so I was along the way, but it definitely happened during this decade.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Craig, a thing I’ve noticed about you, and I think also we didn’t have Twitter in 2009, or people weren’t on Twitter the same degree in 2009, but as I see the things you tweet about and sort of who you retweet, I feel that you are much more politically active and engaged now than you were back then.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, mostly I like just being an annoying contrarian. I have a high disagreeability level. So for a long time Hollywood was just full of what I consider to be, and still do in many ways, lazy thinking, hypocritical, self-described liberals who aren’t really liberal and who don’t treat working people well. And who don’t treat women well. And who don’t treat minorities well. Who don’t vaccinate their children. And the sanctimonious hypocrisy that all was a joy to sneer at. And I still do. However, what has happened is that – well first of all it’s clear to me that most people aren’t that. In other words there are people like that, but they don’t define what our business is and who lives here and what’s going on.

And you can ignore for instance a coterie of Brentwood ding-a-lings and just concentrate on what good people are doing. And there are so many good people doing good things to progress. And that is really important. So when I look at for instance the Women’s March and I think, OK, maybe a tiny bunch of those people are Brentwood ding-a-lings, but really most of them are just regular people who believe something and care.

And so I’ve become a bit more – what’s the word–?

**John:** Are you generous in your assumptions?

**Craig:** I mean, I think I’m a little bit more idealistic. I do. I think that I have decided that it’s more important to concentrate on what good can come from positive thinking and ideas – and this is kind of against the background of accepting bad news – and less important on making fun of idiots. I do like making fun of idiots. Don’t get me wrong. But making fun of idiots doesn’t actually move the ball forward. So while I enjoy making fun of idiots online, and on Twitter, and I love making fun of Ted Cruz, the kind of all idiots, I contribute way more to political causes than I used to before. And I show up to political things way more than I used to before. And I read more about political things way more than I used to before. And I try and also read a variety.

So I get as much as I can from what I consider to be reputable sources.

**John:** And that’s obviously a change from 2009 to 2019 is that the notion of reputable sources is so different than it used to be in the sense that we have – it used to be much clearer sort of what the facts of things were and sort of everyone was actually talking about facts in ways that were different. And also I think I believed in systems a lot more then than I do now. Because I’ve seen, oh, the systems won’t always be there to protect you and save you. And so sometimes you have to do some stuff yourself. And that’s been an awakening I would say over these last couple of years.

Another thing that’s different about 2009 Craig versus 2019 Craig is you didn’t have an Emmy back then. You weren’t a fancy – you weren’t the fancy writer that you are now.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** That is true. I wasn’t expecting that. But it’s not really a difference. It’s some trophies. I like trophies.

**John:** And you play more D&D now than you did in 2009.

**Craig:** Far more, which is the greatest joy of all. It’s actually fascinating to contemplate, and this is a scary number to say, 2030. OK, we’re on the doorstep of 2020. In 2030, first of all we’ll still be doing the show which is crazy. [laughs]

**John:** Imagine.

**Craig:** Imagine. And think of where our D&D adventures will have taken us.

**John:** Wow. Nice. Yeah, some good stuff. And it should have been my One Cool Thing this week. The Eberron book came out from Wizards of the Coast.

**Craig:** Did you get it?

**John:** It’s terrific. It’s terrific. It’s a great guide book, a great source book of sort of all stuff. And so little steam punky. Really smartly done. You will love it, Craig.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** That should be a gift to yourself for Christmas.

**Craig:** You’re the gift to myself.

**John:** Aw. Thanks Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Holiday Live Show](https://www.wgfoundation.org/events/all/2019/12/12/the-scriptnotes-holiday-live-show)
* [Assistant Townhall Extra Episode]()
* [Assistant Townhall Full Livestream](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5x_jDCftkg)
* [Justice Department](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2019-11-26/doj-wga-agencies-lawsuit) on WGA ATA negotiations
* [Justice Department Moves to End Paramount Decree](https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/paramount-decrees-end-makan-delrahim-1203408484/)
* [Scriptnotes T-shirts](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast) now featuring all past designs!
* [Writer Emergency Pack](https://store.johnaugust.com/products/writer-emergency-pack-single-deck)
* [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)
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jemma Moran ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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