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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/the-power-of-the-cold-open).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 644 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we will sing the praises of the cold open. Those scenes that occur at the beginning of an episode, often before the opening titles. We’ll discuss how they work and how to make them work for you. We will also check out new requirements for loan-out corporations and answer listener questions on exposition, motivation, and agents. Finally, Craig and I have both discussed our love for the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her. Love that movie. It’s so good.

**Craig:** Love that movie.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, let’s talk about how OpenAI’s new chat capabilities might have us talking to human-like AIs and how we feel about that.

**Craig:** Okay. I don’t want to fall in love is all I’m saying.

**John:** It’s gonna be up to you whether you fall in love. First rule is never fall in love.

**Craig:** Oh, I see what’s coming next, and boy do I like what I’m looking at.

**John:** I’ll let you do the honors here. Tell us what we now have for our listeners.

**Craig:** We now have official Scriptnotes hats. These are baseball style hats. They’ve got the name Scriptnotes written across the front. But why I love it so is because the S that begins and the S that ends the name Scriptnotes is the legendary cool S.

**John:** The cool S. It’s the very cool PT folder kind of Scriptnotes S. We’ve had T-shirts of this logo for a while, but Dustin Box, our designer, said, “Hey, how about hats?” And I said, “Absolutely.”

**Craig:** I gotta get a hat.

**John:** You gotta get a hat. You and I are both gentlemen with not a lot of hair on top of our heads. Hats are very important for us. Gotta protect our bald pates.

**Craig:** Hats are not fashion for us. Hats are self-care. I gotta get one of these. I’m ordering one of these. Can I order one now? How do I do it?

**John:** You can order one now.

**Craig:** How do I get a hat?

**John:** The same place you get our shirts. They are available on Cotton Bureau.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Just let them know they are embroidered rather than being printed. I think they should be great.

**Craig:** John, you could also get glassware.

**John:** Yeah, we have drinkware there.

**Craig:** Scriptnotes themed glassware. I gotta tell you, I love this, because what is my cocktail of choice?

**John:** An old-fashioned.

**Craig:** And where does an old-fashioned belong?

**John:** In an old-fashioned tumbler, so a short, squat, cylindrical glass.

**Craig:** It is a rocks glass. I’m gonna get one. I love it. I’m gonna do some shopping today. I’m losing money.

**John:** Absolutely. Always been a money-losing podcast, and now Craig is personally losing some funds to the Scriptnotes branding.

**Craig:** It’s like you’re watching Scarface snorting his own coke right now.

**John:** I’m excited for these hats. I’ve not gotten my first Scriptnotes hat, but I’m excited to wear one, although I do recognize that sometimes I’ll be out in the wild, I’ll be wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt, and people will come up to me like, “Hey, John.” It’s like, “How did you recognize me?” Oh, because you think that’s probably John August and he’s actually wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. But you know what? Let’s face it. We’re not that famous. Every now and again, somebody goes… I could hardly say, “Oh god, I can’t even walk outside.” I can totally walk outside.

**John:** We can totally walk outside. We are not at the level of an actual actor. We’re not at Glen Powell level of celebrity.

**Craig:** I like that. Good choice.

**John:** Good choice. I will say I was wearing my Scriptnotes T-shirt this past week when I jumped out of an airplane for the first time.

**Craig:** Oh my god, you did what?

**John:** I went skydiving with my daughter. We went to a place in Oceanside. It’s a jump by the ocean kind of place. I was wearing my Scriptnotes shirt. I realized, oh, this is being filmed on the GoPro. Can I write this off? Basically, this is promotion for the Scriptnotes podcast. I decided no, I don’t think that’s ethically correct for me to do. But I did, I jumped out of a plane. It was actually fine and good. For me, it wasn’t personally terrifying. Aline was terrified on my behalf, but I was not terrified.

**Craig:** I am terrified. I will share with you Melissa Mazin’s philosophy, if I have not already on the program. It goes like this. If you do something like jump out of an airplane, go deep-sea diving, and you die, you deserve it. You deserve it. Now, I’m sure a lot of people listening who are avid skydivers are gonna feel very upset by that. I just want to remind them that’s what my wife says. That’s not me.

**John:** Blame it on Melissa there. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the video of me jumping out of a plane if people are curious to see me jumping out of a plane and want to see a Scriptnotes T-shirt in action.

I’ve done things like this. I’ve bungee jumped, which was much more terrifying, because – we can talk about agency here – bungee jumping, you actually have a lot of agency, because you are responsible for stepping off all by yourself. That is a hard thing to convince your body, which does not want to fall and die, that no, you have to go do this. That’s a tough thing to do. In the case of skydiving, I am strapped to the instructor, so I really have no agency. I’m gonna be out of this plane no matter what. I was like, “Might as well just go for it.”

**Craig:** That’s a huge distinction, because I did go rappelling once. Once. The moment where you sit back over air is basically like you just have to tell yourself to commit suicide. It’s the same feeling. It’s insane.

**John:** Craig, my palms are literally sweating just picturing that.

**Craig:** It’s horrible. Once you’ve done that, now you’re just going down the hill and it’s fine. But the moment where you just have to trust that this rope is going to hold you as you let yourself die… I could do that or I could do what I did yesterday, which is to solve the latest issue of Panda Magazine Puzzle Hunt with my friend Dave Shukan, in my seat, without falling off a hill.

**John:** They’re both thrilling. Only one will kill you potentially.

**Craig:** One is thrilling, and the other one is just sweaty and scary.

**John:** There’s a thing I’ve done which is similar to the skydiving. When we were living in France, we were in Chamonix, and we went paragliding, which is where you’re at the top of the mountain, and again, you are strapped to a person. The parachute is laid out on the snow behind you. You just start running forward and the parachute goes up. I guess it’s really a sail goes up. Then you jump off a cliff. But then you are literally just flying in the air. It’s 30 minutes. It’s incredibly relaxing and peaceful. You don’t have that sense of falling at any point.

I would say skydiving, the moments where you’re free-falling is incredibly loud in ways I hadn’t anticipated, and unpleasant. But then once the chute opens, it was just like paragliding again. I got to control the going to the left, going to the right. I was pulling on the ropes. I got to go through a hole in the clouds. That felt really cool.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** The answer is no from Craig.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I don’t think I’ll do it again. Just the hassle of getting down there and setting up… If I lived by an airstrip where I could just go on a random afternoon and just do it, I might. But it wasn’t that life-changing.

**Craig:** You didn’t get the bug for this?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** I’m not an adrenaline junkie, for sure. I was wearing my Scriptnotes T-shirt. I could’ve potentially taken a tax write-off, but that would’ve been a not necessarily kosher thing to do, because corporations are under a lot of scrutiny these days. This is our bit of news here.

You and I both have loan-out corporations – and we’ve talked about this before on the show – which is when somebody wants to hire us to do some writing work, they are not hiring us directly. They are hiring a corporation that we control, and that corporation then hires us to do the work. It’s an abstraction that is very, very common in the film and television industry.

**Craig:** I don’t know if this is referring to… John, have you done the annual report to the Secretary of State of California? Is that what this is referring to?

**John:** Yeah. It’s a new requirement. Traditionally, when you set up a loan-out corporation, your attorney fills out this paperwork and creates this corporation. Then once per year, you have to cement this on-paper annual meeting that describes what happened to the corporation. It’s just very perfunctory. What has changed is that starting in January 2024, most entities like corporations or LLCs, partnerships, have these new US federal disclosures-

**Craig:** Federal.

**John:** … because of the Corporate Transparency Act. It’s actually a big deal, because if you do not file these reports properly, there’s civil and even criminal penalties. It’s all in an effort to combat money laundering.

You and I and our individual corporations but also the Scriptnotes LLC now have to file this new paperwork. Our law firms who generally set up these things have said, “We’re not doing that anymore. This is beyond the scope of things that we are able to do for you.” Most folks listening to this podcast who have loan-out corporations are going to have to do something different this year, which probably means bringing on an outside firm and paying them 100 bucks, 200 bucks to file this new paperwork that has to be filed every year.

**Craig:** I will not be filing the paperwork personally. Here’s the order of business. Buy Scriptnotes old-fashioned rocks glass. Buy Scriptnotes hat. Talk to business managers and lawyers about who is gonna fill out my new report. Then I’ll have lunch.

**John:** That’s what it is. For most of us, it is an email. It’s a little annoying thing. But if you are a listener who ignores this, I would say maybe don’t ignore this, because it’s this year that you have to start doing it, and everyone’s gonna be scrambling to do it.

The kinds of things that have to go in this new report are principal place of business, if you’ve hired full-time US employees, and if you’re a beneficial owner of the company, which you and I would both be that for Scriptnotes, legal name. We have to file your primary residential address or if you got a new passport or driver’s license. Basically things that could look shady in the sense of money laundering, all that stuff has to be disclosed.

**Craig:** I can imagine you running through all these things as you were free-falling through the sky.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Thinking, “Should I write this? Probably not.” You know what? That means that this law is doing its job. It’s making very small business owners think twice, while massive corporations will simply assign a division of A-holes to get around all of this.

**John:** What’s actually interesting is these new regulations apply to companies with 20 or fewer employees. I think because that’s who tends to have the money laundering kind of problems.

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**John:** That is gonna affect almost all of us, because unless you’re Shonda or Greg Berlanti, you’re gonna have 20 or fewer employees as a loan-out corporation.

**Craig:** I can’t even imagine that Shonda or Greg have more than 20 employees, because most of the employees are being hired and employed by the studio or network, for writers, etc. It would come down to producing partners, assistants. Then I don’t hire, for instance, our landscape folks. The only people that are hired through my company really are me and my producing partner, and that’s it.

**John:** But how about your chauffeur and your assistant butler? Those are things that should go through your loan-out, because they’re helping you get your writing done.

**Craig:** My chauffeur and my assistant butler I got from overseas.

**John:** That’s nice. Like an au pair service.

**Craig:** It’s an au pair/indentured servitude.

**John:** It’s good, because you’re giving them an opportunity. You’re letting them move to the United States. You have a little space in the back of the guesthouse. It’s a cabinet basically they can sleep underneath.

**Craig:** It’s under the stairs. I call it a Harry Potter suite. It’s lovely.

**John:** It’s themed. I really like that. It makes it really feel [crosstalk 00:11:56].

**Craig:** I love they made Harry Potter sleep under the stairs. That’s fantastic.

**John:** In our house, there is actually a little room underneath our stairs. Is it the same in your place? Can you get into that space underneath your stairs?

**Craig:** I cannot.

**John:** You don’t know what’s hidden there, basically. It could be anything underneath there.

**Craig:** I think the stairs are solid.

**John:** That’s not true.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** The stairs going up to your second story, they’re not solid.

**Craig:** Of course they’re not solid. I don’t know exactly what is under there.

**John:** I think Kevin Williamson hid something there for you. Somewhere down the road, it’s gonna come out.

**Craig:** We do have a screening room in the basement, which is under the stairs. That goes down itself. Maybe there is a person still under the stairs that I’m not aware of. I gotta talk to Kevin.

**John:** If things go mysteriously missing, yeah.

**Craig:** Wait, if you buy-

**John:** They have to disclose that. It’s in the standard residential buying of a property.

**Craig:** But I purchased my home from one of the most famous horror writers to ever live. Surely he left behind some kind of nightmare. I gotta check in with him.

**John:** Actually, I am thinking about the geography of when you go down the steps into the basement where the screening room is, there is that little nook where the popcorn machine was originally at some point. That’s kind of underneath the stairs. That could be that space.

**Craig:** I think that is. What is currently there is the Chernobyl Mickey Mouse.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** By the way, we had the Chernobyl Mickey Mouse made in Europe. Folks made it there. I asked if I could have it at the end of the show, and everybody said sure. Shipping it to the United States was such a nightmare, because you had to declare it as a artwork. You had to pay customs. It had to have an assigned value. There needed to be so much paperwork filled out, I think in part because it also needed to be really carefully inspected, because it looked like the kind of thing you would fill with bags of cocaine.

**John:** It’s paper mâché, yeah.

**Craig:** It was so suspicious. I just kept going, “It’s from a show. I like it.” They were like, “Fill more papers out, please.”

**John:** Fortunately, there’s somebody on your payroll who just does that. It’s not the assistant butler. Who was it? Was it your vice accountant?

**Craig:** That was just my assistant Bo, who did a great job navigating the US customs people.

**John:** The thing about being an assistant is you never know what kind of weird stuff you have to figure out suddenly. Here’s a onetime only situation. Handle it.

**Craig:** Keeps you on your toes.

**John:** We have some follow-up. First off, Craig, you’ll be relieved to know there is a MoviePass movie now for you to watch.

**Craig:** There is a documentary on HBO that I will absolutely watch. It’s coming out a couple of weeks from now. It is a documentary about the rise and fall of MoviePass. But I think it should be subtitled “the thing that John and Craig predicted over and over and over.”

**John:** I’m a little upset that they did not interview you for this documentary, because come on. Who would be a better talking head than Craig Mazin on this?

**Craig:** I was really clear about it from the start.

**John:** You work for HBO, and you were available.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was. I don’t know. They seemed to concentrate, for some reason, on people that were actually involved. But I will say that the actual collapse of MoviePass, it was a moment that reminded me that the world still makes sense.

**John:** That there is gravity, yes.

**Craig:** Yes, because so many times, things happen, I’m like, “What the… ” That one at least, we were like, “Finally. Yes, there’s gravity. Exactly. Something that doesn’t make sense actually doesn’t make sense.” I’m gonna definitely give that one a watch. Of course, MoviePass, still out there. Zombie MoviePass trying to come back to life in some, I don’t know, new altered state. But the old MoviePass, oof.

**John:** Oof.

**Craig:** I watched the trailer for the documentary. It looks like not only did their business plan make absolutely no sense, but then they were also spending money like drunken sailors.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to this trailer. I want to say this trailer’s also the most HBO documentary trailer. It hits all the beats of an HBO documentary trailer. It feels exactly like what it should be.

**Craig:** They’re pretty good at what they do.

**John:** They know what they’re doing. We have talked about streaming ad breaks, so the idea that you write something and you produce a thing and it goes out there, and it might have act breaks already in there. But because of streaming, they make different choices about where those act breaks go. We asked for our listeners who had firsthand experience, who do this for a living, what the realities are on the ground. We had two folks write in. Drew, can you start us off with Lachlan?

**Drew Marquardt:** Lachlan in the UK writes, “I’ve been an editor for 12 years, and for much of that time I was working with one of the biggest broadcasters in the UK. Even if shows were delivered with specific ad break moments, often we would have to re-edit them to change where these ad breaks would happen. This is because we have a different amount of ad breaks in the UK than in other places like the US or Australia. Here, for a 30-minute slot we have one ad break, for a 60-minute slot we have two ad breaks, and so on. So often we would be joining up ad breaks, usually the old dip to black, and then the compliance team would dictate where the new ad breaks would happen.

“Unfortunately, these days, I believe they don’t use editors as much for this job, and the compliance team creates the ad breaks themselves. This means that even if you watch a show on VOD, it still has a title card that pops up every time the linear version would be going to a break, which gets very frustrating when trying to watch any HBO show in the UK. Sorry, Craig, this is the same with Chernobyl and The Last of Us.”

**John:** Again, what Lachlan is telling us is editing is a skill, and even editing like putting in the act breaks, getting out those fades to black is actually a skill. If you try to not use an actual editor to do it and it’s just some functionary who doesn’t have any experience with this, it’s gonna be unartful. It sounds like it’s unartful.

**Craig:** It is frustrating to hear that about the stuff that I’ve done. There are ways, of course, to find a spot and make a reasonable ad break in a show. But if the compliance team, which doesn’t care about any of that and is simply looking for, “Okay, at this point, at this point, at this point,” yeah, that is frustrating.

This is one of the bummers about working for a network that isn’t streaming only. That is that I have no control over how most people watch the shows I make for HBO, because most people are not watching it on HBO. Most people are watching it on the local service that HBO sells it to. For instance, in the UK, I believe that’s Sky. Sky just I guess just shoves stuff in. That’s a bummer.

You know what? I’m not gonna cry. People are watching it, and they can do the math. Listen. You know what a bigger problem is? The fact that people have motion smoothing on their TVs. That’s where I’m gonna cry. I can’t cry over this.

**John:** No. Zack wrote in with more information about streaming breaks. This is his experience doing a series where he had to put in the breaks. Let’s listen to Zack.

**Drew:** Zack writes, “Last year I edited a three-part series for Peacock. For every cut, we were asked to break up roughly 50-minute episodes into six acts, all with loose targets for duration. The execs noted that Act 1 should be longer than the subsequent acts, but overall there was a fair amount of flexibility. I found that mandatory act breaks impose some fun structural challenges on the team. We might send a viewer into a break with a question that we’d answer at the top of the next act or leave a loose end that we’d pay off in two acts down the road.

“We were forced to build well-defined phrases with sharp edges ending each act. Do writers think in terms of sharp edges the way that editors do? A sharp edge often means a clean break between scenes that shifts point of view, shifts a story from an A story to a B story, cleanses the palette, or maybe does all three. Too many sharp edges can leave you feeling a bit disjointed, while too few can make for a soupy edit. Often, the best sharp edges mark the end of the phrase or a movement. If you have a flowy, prelapsey series of scenes all following a single character, story, or theme, that sharp edge will be all the more noticeable when it shows up.”

**John:** What Zack is describing, I think he might’ve been cutting a reality show or a documentary show, because it sounds like it wasn’t something that was written for act breaks. There wasn’t a writer involved in determining where those things go in. They might be looking at, “Okay, given the footage we’ve got, what’s an interesting question to leave at the end of an act break? How do we get people to come back after the act break?” which is really the job that writers have traditionally done in traditional television, which is we think of act breaks as moments that have rising action, that end on a question mark, so that there’s a real intriguing moment to come back. That was very much the art of TV writing for 30, 40 years.

**Craig:** This is the way it should be done, because there are things that are not written with ad breaks in mind. I think that if you are writing a piece that is meant to be viewed all in one, you shouldn’t be worried about this other part. This other part is not your problem. But then if there are artful editors, like Zack, who can at least make it decent and reasonable when it is chopped up, fantastic. But we need those people. They can’t just be arbitrary.

**John:** I think AIs or just human eyes can actually figure out, “Okay, this is the end of one scene. This is the start of another scene. But is that the right place for an act break?”

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** It’s not necessarily the right choice. If you were to delay that 30 more seconds, it might be a more narratively useful place to put that break.

**Craig:** Also, it’s more valuable for the people advertising, because if it breaks at a dumb spot, that’s where people might just go, “Meh. Actually, meh.”

**John:** “I’m done.”

**Craig:** “I’m done. I’m not coming back.” Soap operas, that’s all they ever did was somebody would go, “You didn’t know? She’s alive.” Cut. Soap, soap, soap, soap, and then back.

**John:** We’ll talk about this more in the cold open section, but I’ve been working on this project that is a bunch of episodes. These are designed without traditional act breaks. But I also know that ultimately there will be act breaks going into this thing. While it’s not the top of my mind, I am thinking about, where would you slot in these ad breaks down the road? I feel pretty good about these episodes since there are natural places where you can put this thing in and it won’t disrupt the flow, and in some cases will give you that sense like, “Oh, I’m curious what’s going to happen next.”

Sometimes it’s just basic good writing. Scenes should end on a moment that has an energy going into that cut so you want to come and see what the next scene is. Most episodes of TV that are written without intentional act breaks should have that kind of momentum that you can get through it if there is an ad inserted there.

**Craig:** I agree. If, for instance, HBO said, “Hey, everybody is gonna watch your show on HBO in some streaming method. Some people, however, are paying less money and it will be an ad-supported experience. Where would you like to put these breaks?” I would take the hour or two with my editors to come up with those moments. The problem for me is that’s not what’s happening.

**John:** They don’t do that.

**Craig:** That’s what they did with Fallout. Even as I’m watching without ads-

**John:** It fades out.

**Craig:** … it fades out and then it comes back. But for me, it doesn’t matter. I could send it that way, and whatever the company is that shows it to people in, I don’t know, India, they have their own needs, and it won’t have anything to do with those things I put in, and so it’ll be even worse. I’m just gonna not think about it.

**John:** What I admire about Fallout, because they clearly anticipated people are gonna encounter these ad breaks and we’re gonna plan for them, it’s not just about fading to black. It’s also thinking about what is the music doing here, because that is what’s so awkward. If it’s just wedged in, music goes up to a moment and then it doesn’t pay off, or then you’re coming back from an ad break and suddenly we’re at this very high level, like, “Why is the music up here?”

**Craig:** Exactly. Because you will only watch Fallout on Amazon, no matter where you live, they have the luxury of dictating that. I thought that was smart.

**John:** Let’s move on to Andrew who wrote in about email anxiety. We had a previous listener who was so terrified and so nervous to send out an email because they wanted everything to be perfect and they got hung up on it. Andrew has a suggestion.

**Drew:** Andrew writes, “I was listening to your podcast where your listener Richard had anxiety about sending an email, and I had a suggestion. Recently, I was listening to Brian Grazer on someone’s podcast, and he had a strategy for getting the most positive response from emails. Apparently, what Grazer does is he watches the stock market and looks for when the studio he wants to work with has their stock go up. It’s on the day that their stock goes up that he sends emails to people he wants to finance his projects. Maybe this method would make Richard a little less anxious.”

**John:** First off, Andrew, I don’t think we said it was okay for you to listen to any other podcasts. You shouldn’t have been even listening to anything that Brian Grazer said, because you shouldn’t have been listening to any other podcasts. Scriptnotes will tell you everything you need to know about the film and television industry. That’s what we’re here for, not other people’s podcasts.

That stipulated, Craig, this is your strategy, I know, because you are tracking the stock market every day, and you’re only making the calls based on how well a certain company’s stock is doing.

**Craig:** No disrespect to Mr. Brian Grazer, but I don’t think this is gonna ever work. First of all, most of the people that we writers are sending emails to are not the owners of the company or people looking to exercise massive amounts of stock options. But even if they were, whatever the stock market happens to be doing that day can’t possibly be that meaningful to these people. Hopefully, the people that are at that level understand that any day’s movement, other than some insane delta, is not relevant to anything. This feels like a way to make yourself feel better about something. That feels like an attempt to calculate your way to success, which in this business is easier said than done.

**John:** I want to give full benefit of the doubt to Brian Grazer. Let’s imagine he’s talking to Bob Iger. If the Disney stock is just bouncing around its normal amount, I can’t imagine it’s gonna make any difference, because Bob Iger is smart enough to know the stocks can bounce around. Now, if the stock was suddenly down like 25 percent-

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** … then yes, it’s not the moment to try to sell your expensive thing there. I completely get that. But small normal things, no way.

**Craig:** Also, none of us are selling anything to Bob Iger. He’s 12 levels removed from that. It does not make sense. It’s adorable. It’s adorable.

**John:** Last bit of follow-up here. We’ve talked in the past about AI being used for coverage and that AI is really good at summarizing things, but we’re very suspicious about AI providing any kind of critical analysis of what material actually is or its worth or its merit. Greg in Illinois gave us his experience with The Film Fund.

**Drew:** Greg in Illinois writes, “I recently stumbled upon an interesting example of AI being used for feedback and coverage. The Film Fund is an organization that provides resources to filmmakers to produce short films. Their flagship program is a competition in which the filmmaker pays $35 to submit a one-sentence description of their film’s premise and how they would use the funds if they win. Winning films receive up to 10 grand. For an additional fee of $14, winners can opt for feedback on their one-sentence pitch.

“In a Reddit thread from last year, a couple of contestants complained that the feedback they received was worthless. The founder of The Film Fund replied, assuring them the situation would be much better in future contests, because they’re gonna use AI to generate feedback. These are his exact words. ‘Going forward, we’re implementing a different approach with our feedback service to ensure a consistent and high level of quality. We’ve trained a custom AI model explicitly on what our judges look for in entries and what makes a good pitch in the eyes of the judges. We’ve tested the output by this AI model thoroughly, and it greatly exceeds the feedback responses we were sending previously.’

“To his credit, he appears to be responsive and reasonably transparent. I don’t get the impression he’s trying to scam anyone. But it’s a bit surprising that he doesn’t perceive how this might undermine whatever credibility the contest has.”

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Here’s what I’m saying. Transparent doesn’t mean good. If someone says, “I am going to rob you,” that’s transparent. Doesn’t mean it’s good. This feels dumb. You’ve spent $49 on a thing that you shouldn’t have probably spent $49 on. This AI coverage, I will not believe that The Film Fund’s special training on what they’re looking for is worth $14 that you couldn’t get from a normal, free ChatGPT or whatever, which you shouldn’t be using anyway for feedback on your writing project.

**Craig:** I’ve never heard of The Film Fund, but I’m looking at their website. What I don’t see is that they are registered as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization, meaning they’re a business. I see no mention of being a charity of any kind. I could be wrong, but I don’t see any of it. I don’t know if they’re a for-profit company or not. But I will say if you have to pay money to submit a one-sentence description of your film’s premise, that’s ridiculous.

You’re paying $35 for somebody to read a sentence? And then for an additional fee of $14, which is a very odd number – it’s an even number, but it’s a curious number – they now will give you an AI feedback based on the input. The AI’s trained on what the judges did. The judges’ feedback is the very thing that they are also admitting was useless. This is ridiculous!

**John:** It is ridiculous.

**Craig:** It is ridiculous. It is absolutely ridiculous. Winning films receive up to $10,000. I don’t know how many they’ve made.

**John:** I’m looking at the examples and winners. They show how much prize money these different people get. They show the example pitch sentences here.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** We’ll look at their thing.

**Craig:** Look at this. Look at this. First of all, on their examples, no one has received $10,000. The most anyone has received to make a film is $6,000. Now, if I have, I don’t know, 15,000 people sending me 35 bucks and I hand out $6,000, okay. But then there are some people who, quote unquote, won a prize of $400.

**John:** Or a three-month subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.

**Craig:** What is this? What is this?

**John:** What is this?

**Craig:** What is this?

**John:** I think it was created just to annoy Craig.

**Craig:** It almost seems like it was. It literally seems like it was.

**John:** AI is being used to just create sites to annoy Craig. That would be a good use of AI is just to build websites that are specifically there to frustrate Craig.

**Craig:** This is really frustrating. I don’t know if it’s the deals that they make money from all the $35 and then they give some out. I guess I would have to look more about them to see. I love this. I hate these people so much. In their frequently asked questions, here’s a frequently asked question. “Do I need to give credit to The Film Fund?” The answer is, “Yes, and we’ll be honored.” How can you be honored by a credit that you are making mandatory? How is that an honor?

**John:** I initially thought this was something European or British, because there are, like The Irish Film Fund, these film funds that are actually national funds, where it’s a whole system by which they help support their local film communities. That’s a valid thing. But by calling yourself The Film Fund, it seems like it’s not even a competition; it’s just a thing.

**Craig:** It’s just a thing. They say, “Where does the money come from? It comes from filmmakers like you who have also submitted their sentence to The Film Fund.” They’re just making people pay to ask a question.

**John:** I do like on the fact, “Why are you doing this?” the answer is, “We know there’s a simpler way to fund films.” That’s a real answer.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** “Who are the judges? You can check them out here.” Let’s take a look through here.

**Craig:** Let’s see. No offense to any of these people. One of the judges is the founder and CEO of The Film Fund.

**John:** I’ll take a screenshot, just because this of course could change. But I do want to point out that at least on my thing, there’s an ad being served underneath one of these people’s photos that says, “Notice this site contains real police records, background reports.” An ad is breaking up this thing, making it look like this person is actually a felon, which is not accurate.

**Craig:** The folks here do not appear to be what you would imagine would be judging what films should be financed. I’m sure they’re all excellent people and valid in their own rights. But there’s a certain expectation of a kind of level of accomplishment for judges. What we see over and over in these kinds of things is that’s not what you get. This is a do not recommend for me.

**John:** I will say four of these people I’ve noticed are all from Lehigh University, which I don’t know of.

**Craig:** Oh, Lehigh University, it’s in Pennsylvania.

**John:** Which is the center of all film production.

**Craig:** That is very strange. We have college friends who sat around, and I’m not suggesting they were high or drinking, but they were sitting around going, “How do we make money?” This is operating like the lottery.

**John:** Here’s what I kind of respect. Over the years on Scriptnotes, we’ve criticized so many of these things that are like, “Send us your scripts and we will judge them.” Here they say, “How do we improve on this process? We don’t have to even read the script. We just have to read one sentence.”

**Craig:** “We read one sentence. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna charge people $35.” Usually, it’s $35 to send your finished film into our festival or send your finished script in. No, $35 to send your log line, and then an extra, if you want a little bonus action for our premium service, we’ll have ChatGPT barf some crap out about it, for free for us but $14 for you. Thumbs down. Do not like. This seems very silly. I’m sure they’re gonna yell at us now.

**John:** Yeah, which is fine, but Drew is ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** When they start these things, I’m sure everybody’s like, “At some point, John and Craig are just gonna swing a bat at us, because they don’t like these things.” It doesn’t mean we’re right. It’s just our opinion, man.

**John:** That’s all we can give. Hey, while we’re having a little bit of rants, I have a rant that I’ve just wanted to talk about for a while, and I think this is the moment to talk about it. Can we please stop sending Word documents around on emails? So often, I will get something that is a Word document that should’ve been a pdf. The problem if you send a Word document is like, okay, am I supposed to edit this? What do you want me to do? No, this is actually a press release, but you’re putting it in a Word document so that it looks terrible when I open it in QuickLook or Pages, because I don’t actually have Word installed on my computer. There’s no reason to send a Word document. Send a pdf or a link to a webpage. Do not send me a Word document. It’s so frustrating for me.

**Craig:** It is a rare thing for me to send a Word document. I only do it when I am essentially saying to somebody, “I’m sending this to you, and I’m specifically sending it as a Word document because I want you to have the ability to edit it if you’d like.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That is the only reason.

**John:** If it’s something you want me to be able to copy and paste out of it, you can do that from a pdf.

**Craig:** Absolutely. It’s literally only like, “Hey, I’ve written this. I’m thinking you’re gonna want to change a few sentences here and there. Do that, send it back to me.” For that, great. But otherwise-

**John:** But I’ll say a Google Doc could be better than that, because that way you can just send the link and they can edit that link.

**Craig:** You’re right. You’re right.

**John:** For WGA stuff, whenever we have to figure out what’s the press release we’re sending out, what’s the thing, we did it as Google docs, because that way we could actually all edit it and look at it. A little more sympathy for sometimes sending the Excel spreadsheet, because sometimes there is stuff they need to tweak and move around there. But also Google Sheets is available, and maybe try that instead.

**Craig:** Those of us who solve puzzles for a not-living use Google Sheets all the time. Incredibly useful.

**John:** So good. So useful. Let’s get to our marquee topic. This is the cold open. We’ve talked about the cold open several times on the program before. I know it’s a little bit of a repeat. But I was reminded of how important and how useful the cold open is because of this project I’ve been working on, because I’m getting the chance to write a bunch of cold opens, which is so wonderful and exciting.

I thought we might start by talking about what we’re talking about, because obviously, every episode of television is going to open with something. Sometimes that’s a teaser for what’s going to happen. Sometimes it’s continually the action from what happened in the previous episode. If it was a cliffhanger, it might go right back to this moment. But you also have the option in television to open with characters you’ve never seen before and just establish a brand new thread of something. It’s a great way to introduce a new character who’s going to be important to the series or at least important to that episode.

I just love a cold open. It’s just one of the most powerful things we have in episodic television. Sometimes people are not using the full power of the cold open. I want to just sing the praises of and talk through how it works, when to use it, why we love it so much.

**Craig:** You have a choice every single time. There is no such thing as an episode that can’t have one. The first decision you have to make is do I want to put one here or not.

They are enormously fun. They are fun for the audience. They work like appetizers. They are wonderfully free of rules. They are not bound into the normal narrative timeline, nor are they bound by the normal rules of who’s that and where am I and what’s going on. They can be mysteries. They can feature people that you never see again.

They’re often great ways to reveal information. You can have an episode where 20 minutes in, one character starts explaining something to another and you’re like, “Okay.” You could also just start the scene with one character explaining something to another and you don’t even know who they are or where they are. You’re leaning forward, and then you get to the end of it, and it’s a little short story that has a twist or something that makes you go, “Whoa.”

Then the show starts, and now you’re fully appetized and ready to go into the main storyline. The main storyline feels like an entrée has been served. Psychologically, I find it very comforting. I don’t do a cold open in every episode myself, but quite a few. Quite a few have them.

**John:** I think the quintessential cold open, the one we’ll put a link to in the show notes, is the introduction to Desmond’s character in Lost. Lost, I think it’s in Season 2, opens with this person we’ve never met before. We’re not even seeing his face. He’s waking up. He’s going through his daily routine. He’s inside someplace, but we’re not sure what it is. We would assume naturally as an audience that it is going to be one of the flashbacks that the show is known for, where you’re establishing who people were off the island. Ultimately, we’re gonna reveal that, oh, no, he’s actually down in this hatch that we’ve been working to figure out what’s inside there. It is a tremendous sequence, and it’s done so, so well and sets up this character that we’re now intrigued by and just really broadens the geography of what Lost could be about.

That’s I think what I love so much about a cold open is that you are creating these scenes that you could not put anywhere else in the episode. Almost by definition, if you’re starting in some brand new place, it would be very hard to slide this anywhere else in an episode. It basically has to start, and in many cases should start before the opening titles. You need all of the viewer’s attention. You need it to not be in the chain of events of the normal episode. Once you’ve started the normal sequence, it’s very hard to stop that and go to some place that’s completely different to establish a new person, a new place, a new way that the show’s going to work.

**Craig:** As you described that, something occurred to me that I don’t think has occurred to me before. That is that a cold open reveals a mystery to the audience with nobody in between. In the normal method of plotting in the main body of your story, when there are mysteries, they are discovered by and solved by and revealed to characters, but not in a cold open. In a cold open, it’s just you. That is a very exciting thing for the very reasons you said. It can’t really happen in the middle.

Once we are in the perspective of our main characters, we must stay there. We can certainly see some things they don’t see, but we can’t have scenes that are speaking directly to us. But you can absolutely have that at the beginning, before you begin the main storyline. That’s a great example where instead of somebody finding a tunnel, going through something, or opening the hatch itself and discovering this man, the show says now, this is just for you, directly for you only.

**John:** The point of view is the audience’s point of view rather than any of the one character’s points of view, which is great, so powerful. Honestly, some shows are built around this kind of idea. Law and Order almost always starts with the discovery of a crime by people we’ve not seen before.

**Craig:** Thunk thunk.

**John:** Thunk thunk. Poker Face, one of the things I love so much about that show is, generally we’re starting with a crime itself. It’s a question of when the hell is Natasha Lyonne gonna show up. You don’t know. She’s gonna come up sometime. Generally, we’re not starting with her.

**Craig:** She’s gonna be there when she gets there, and that’s no big deal.

**John:** She might be in the background of something or we see her arrive and we don’t know how are these two things gonna connect. That’s the joy of this. I love cold opens. Also, the sense that you cannot slide it anywhere else in time, this project we’re working on, has really made me appreciate, god, day and night is so tough, because there’s so many times where you would love to move this scene after that scene, and day and night is killing you, where this scene can’t happen before, because then you’re creating an extra day that is impossible. I’m sure you’ve encountered that in your writing as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s been more of an issue for me when I was writing movies than television, because you have a little bit more of a timeline flexibility there. But the day and night situation, especially as we enter this next storytelling phase of The Last of Us, is important, and so you do have to stay within the bounds of it. But that’s another reason why a cold open is so valuable.

**John:** Yeah. You’re not tethered to the timeline at all, which is so nice.

**Craig:** At all. Doesn’t even matter what year it is. You could be wherever. You could be in the future. You could be in the past. You could do whatever you want. That is freeing, and also, I think the audience appreciates it. They appreciate that they get spoken to directly without any rules whatsoever, before they settle into the traditional experience of the show.

**John:** Yeah, this cold open I just wrote covers a 14-year time span for a character we’ve never met before. It’s delightful to have the opportunity. We’re going from the past into a time beyond when the events of the series are happening. It’s delightful to give you a sense of like, oh, this is bigger than just this one moment in front of you. We’ll see if that makes it through the end, but that was the intention behind it.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Let’s answer some listener questions. I see the first one here is from Matt. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Matt writes, “As an Asian American actor, I’ve gone from being basically Johnny exposition guy in every television show and movie I was in, to now seeing true parts with complex, interesting characters being offered to me. One of the reasons I decided to start writing was because I was tired of being the furniture and wanted to be the interior designer. Since I keenly feel the plight of being the guy asked to give massive exposition dumps, what are some ways that writers can give the necessary exposition without relying on a single character for the purpose or at least make it interesting?”

**John:** What I love so much about Matt’s entry point here is that as an Asian American actor, he feels like he’s Johnny exposition guy. It never really occurred to me, but yeah, I could totally see that. I could completely imagine that the size that he’s getting for an episodic role, he’s just the guy who explains the thing and actually has no character beyond that. Hopefully, that’s changing. It sounds like it’s changing for Matt here in his experience.

We’ve talked on exposition a ton before. But Matt’s instinct here is that, like, god, it’s the worst when one character has to do all the heavy lifting. It’s so true.

**Craig:** Yes. For writers, we’ll do a very, very short sum-up. It is just as important to characterize the person receiving the information and to understand why they want the information and why they need the information and also how they feel about the information as the information is delivered. Relationship.

The scene where somebody is – we say an exposition dump. If it’s an exposition dump and that’s how you’re describing it, you’re doing it wrong. It is a conversation between two people who have a knowledge gap. The knowledge that is being imparted needs to impact the other person. The way it’s imparted needs to be crafted. It needs to feel like a little story. It needs to be interesting enough that people lean in, because when we say exposition dump, what we’re really saying is boring. But people can explain things in a way that is fascinating. You just have to write it well. So write well.

**John:** A recent conversation we had on this podcast, I think you were the one who was talking about how an explanation does happen in real life. People do explain things to each other in real life.

**Craig:** All the time.

**John:** Look for ways in which this would happen in real life, and that’s a way to hopefully keep that scene grounded and unapologetic about its need to get the information out there, because it’s being given from one character to another and not just to the audience.

**Craig:** Think of it as teaching. It’s not exposition. It’s teaching. You’re teaching somebody something. Teaching means that one character takes into account the other character’s education level, information level, what they deserve to know, what they ought to know, and then lays it out in a structured way so that they get it. That is as much fun to write as anything as far as I’m concerned.

But when we think of it as an exposition dump, what we’re really saying is, Character B needs to know and the audience needs to know a bunch of crap. Just have some guy say it. That’s not artful. That is not looking at it as an opportunity. That’s looking at it as a chore.

**John:** I would also say look for moments within those conversations where information is coming out, to have it not just be about that information, but there actually be some character not necessarily in conflict, but some challenge, some revelation that there’s something more there. A scene in which a character says, “Yeah, I knew that, because I’ve actually been following your career over these years.” That’s interesting. That makes us lean in and doesn’t just feel like, okay, now we’re being told this thing. Look for moments where there’s actually some interesting character moment happening there that’s not just about the text.

**Craig:** Yeah, agreed.

**John:** Another question here. It looks like Dean wants to ask us about titles.

**Drew:** Dean writes, “What makes a good title? Does it have to be unique more than it has to be relevant to the theme of the movie? Does a good title help get a script made, or is it just a good script that gets scripts made? Do writers even get the final say on titles, or is that all up to Brian in marketing? What are the best titles you’ve come across, and have you noticed any trends in titles?”

**Craig:** That’s a whole discussion.

**John:** That’s a whole episode. Titles are crucially important and yet the writer who has spent so much time thinking about the right title for their movie does not have the final say. The second Charlie’s Angels was Charlie’s Angels: Forever, it was Charlie’s Angels: Halo, and Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle came because the marketing person always wanted to do something called Full Throttle, and that became Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.

**Craig:** Full Throttle.

**John:** Full Throttle.

**Craig:** Full Throttle.

**John:** But yes, titles are important, because it is the first idea a person has about your script, about your movie is gonna be that title. So yeah, it does matter.

**Craig:** There was a trend – I don’t know if it’s still continued – where scripts that were going out, original screenplays, needed to have bizarro titles, long, bizarre, weird titles, because that was what was jumping out, because people were tired of the short, punchy title. But by the time things make it to a movie theater, they generally do have the short, punchy title. Yes, it is up to Brian in marketing.

A screenplay with a boring title I think is at a disadvantage. But if it’s what we’d call a good old-fashioned punchy title or a weirdo title or a title that is somewhat provocative, just to get them to get to Page 1, that’s really all it is, just literally to Page 1, and then off you go. Try to not have a title that feels like a rip-off of something else, just a blatant rip-off. By the time you get to the movie theater, the title itself is not up to you.

Famously, the movie I’m thinking of is title-cursed is Shawshank Redemption. It’s a wonderful film. It was released into theaters, and nobody went to it, because nobody knew what the word “Shawshank” or “redemption” meant, and certainly not the two words together. It just said nope, don’t come here. Then eventually, people found the movie and it is beloved. But it was a flop in the theaters, likely because of the title. But putting Shawshank Redemption on the cover of a screenplay that you’re trying to sell, no problem at all. None. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

**John:** Unforgiven was The Cut-Whore Killings.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** We’ve talked before on the podcast, I think, about there are rules about titles. The MPAA I believe is the one who has a title registry. If you have a movie that’s coming out with a title that is too much like another title, there can be a challenge. There can be a whole issue. Basically, so we don’t have two movies with the exact same title coming out at the same time.

My movie The Nines was coming out the same year as there was a movie Nine, and the Nine and a Half movie. We had registered our title first, and so we had to give permission for the other people to have their titles. It all worked out. But there is a reason why you don’t see too much of a log jam with the people with the same titles coming out the same year.

**Craig:** Yes. First movie I ever had out in theaters, the script was Space Cadet. Turned out Lucas had squatted on that one with the MPAA. I still haven’t seen his Space Cadet film, but we had to change our title. Did I ever tell you my crazy [bleeps] story about this?

**John:** I want to hear the [bleeps] story.

**Craig:** I’m telling everybody the [bleeps] story. I’m in a room with [bleeps]. Already interesting. He says, “Hey, I have registered a lot of titles with the MPAA. I tell my assistants, if you see some interesting words, I go and I register it, because it doesn’t cost that much.”

**John:** It’s domain squatting.

**Craig:** Literally. Then he goes, “Other people happen to need the title, they pay me.” He was literally domain squatting. He goes, “But some of these would be great movies, so I’m gonna give you some names.” He goes, “Oh, this is my favorite. This has to be a movie, so tell me if you want to write this.” By the way, by “this,” he means title, Body Bag. I’m like, A, in my brain, I don’t think that is a very good title, and B, no. But I was fascinated by the thought process of seeing the phrase “body bag,” picking up the phone, spending the whatever it cost, $5,000 or something, to register that title with the MPAA, even though you have nothing, and then asking writers to write a script for a title.

**John:** It’s not even IP. It’s awesome. I love it.

**Craig:** It’s nothing.

**John:** It actually reminds me of this past week. I was approached to do this movie. There’s a director who wants to do this movie. He basically has a story space. He has a cool deck of cool images. This is a filmmaker who could make something really cool. But there was actually no narrative to this. It was exciting, but also it made me really recognize how much we need constraints.

The fact there was basically no constraints other than it looks like this, it was tough to think about what is the story. What are constraints that are interesting to me? What are the things that I want to avoid about the kind of movie that would have this as a pitch deck? Once I got that narrowed down, then it could go like, oh, okay, this is probably what the movie actually wants to be or what’s interesting to me. But the lack of constraints, where it’s just, here’s an image or here is a title called Body Bag, it’s just too open.

**Craig:** There’s nothing there.

**John:** It’s harder because there’s nothing to push against. There’s no walls to it.

**Craig:** There’s nothing there.

**John:** Let’s get to a question from Spencer here. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Spencer writes, “My writing partner Parker and I just finished a new draft of a project that draws on our extremely unusual relationship. You see, I’m a wheelchair user, due to a form of muscular dystrophy. For years before we started writing together, Parker was my friend, roommate, and live-in caregiver. Our script is a crime genre buddy comedy that follows two people in a similar situation as they try to figure out the limits of their obligation to one another.

“Though one of the things I’m most proud of is the level of specificity we were able to bring to the story, I worry that readers and producers will find it too specific. We’ve felt this concern since the very beginning and have leaned heavily into genre conventions and broad-ish comedy, hoping to ease audiences into the often alien way of life that a disability entails. Do you have any strategies or recommendations for taking out a script that deals with such a particular context? And given the reports of the belt tightening across the industry, the representation boom seems over. Are we too late?”

**Craig:** Spencer, you’re asking a question that I think presumes more than exists, meaning I don’t think anybody is actually reading things through the lens of how specific is this or how authentic is this. I think they’re just reading through things to say, will an audience be entertained, moved, feel something, appreciate what we’re doing here? It sounds like you’ve tried to deliver entertainment, because you’re talking about leaning into genre conventions and delivering broad comedy.

I think the things that are unique to your voice and your writing partner’s voice are the things that are valuable in the script. Otherwise, anyone could do it. I don’t think there’s a specific strategy or recommendation here, other than to say when you submit the script, it’s important for people to know that you are in a wheelchair, because the concern will not be, uh-oh, somebody in a wheelchair wrote a story about somebody in a wheelchair. The concern will be, uh-oh, somebody not in a wheelchair wrote a story about somebody in a wheelchair.

The representation boom, I can’t speak to that, but the representation concern still certainly exists. I think people are looking for authentic voices when we’re talking about things like, for instance, living with disabilities.

**John:** I completely agree with Craig. Really what matters is what is the person’s reaction to this. Are they enjoying the script that they’re reading and can imagine a movie that an audience will enjoy reading? That’s all great. The specificity that you bring hopefully is just making the script better for its own sake.

I would consider including maybe not a preface page, but maybe a page at the end to say, “Oh, so you know, I actually am a wheelchair user. I’m not some sort of person pretending this experience.” That could be useful just for a person who reads the script without knowing who you actually are.

Obviously, we want your movie to get made. That’d be fantastic. But also, this thing will serve as a calling card for you. The fact that it reflects your own experience, when you come in to have that meeting or get on Zoom to have that meeting, it’s gonna be great that they actually have something to connect you with, like, “Oh, these guys wrote this funny script about the situation, and these are the guys.” That is useful to you when you have those general meetings and you start talking about writing stuff for other people. I think you made the right choices. I hope your script is good.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Let’s wrap it up there. We have a couple more questions we’ll save for a future episode. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Craig, I see you have a One Cool Thing listed here.

**Craig:** I do. John, are you a nail biter or a nail clipper?

**John:** I’m a nail clipper. I’ve never bit my nails.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. I have been biting my nails for so long, but I decided to stop. I stopped for I guess 2024. It was, by the way, not difficult. Not difficult. One of the things that has made it not difficult, one of the best gifts I ever got, from my intrepid assistant, Allie Chang, she gave me a pair of Suwada nail clippers. That’s Suwada, S-U-W-A-D-A. Do you have these, John?

**John:** I don’t believe I do, but now I’m looking them up to see what they are.

**Craig:** Oh, baby.

**John:** Oh, look at them. They look so different. They look more like pliers. Wow.

**Craig:** Exactly. They look like pliers or wire cutters. They’re made by a Japanese company called Suwada. They are so superior to the standard nail-clipping device that we can pick up anywhere, because they have so much better leverage, and the curved nature of the clipping edge itself just is so lovely and fits so right. They work like a dream. A standard nail clipper thing is, what, $8? This thing is $85. But if you’re gonna use it for the rest of your life, couldn’t recommend it more highly.

**John:** It also feels like a nice gift for a person who obviously does need a gift.

**Craig:** Yes, you can’t go wrong with this one. For somebody that was never a nail clipper, now I look forward to it. If I’m rubbing my thumb against my index finger and I feel a little like there’s too much nail there, I’m like, “Oh, I get home, I’m getting my Suwada nail clippers out. Kaching. Kaching.”

**John:** How much did you say nail clippers cost? I almost felt like there was a “how much could a banana cost” moment there, because I think cheap nail clippers are even cheaper than you think.

**Craig:** I was saying $8.

**John:** I think they’re like two bucks. They’re like two bucks.

**Craig:** Two bucks. You’re getting what you pay for with the two buck nail clipper. The handles are kind of this lovely texturized rubber or something like that. Also, it’s a particularly good gift, I think, for a dad, because just standard dads love tools. This is a tool. This isn’t a grooming device. It’s a tool.

**John:** It’s a meaningful tool.

**Craig:** It’s a butch-coded nail clipper.

**John:** That’s what we like. Absolutely. It also feels like for people who have their premium knives that they want to treasure and own, it’s the same kind of thing. Get the best tool for the job.

**Craig:** It’s a good tool.

**John:** I have two little One Cool Things. The first is an episode of Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a podcast that many people have probably heard of where they take an existing song, generally a pop song, and they interview the people who made it and go through the stems and figure out how the song came to be, and just interview things. It’s a short episode, like 15 minutes. It’s great. I’ve enjoyed listening to that podcast.

But one episode I want to point people to is Madonna’s episode on Hung Up, which is a great song. It’s the interview with Madonna, over 40 years we’ve known Madonna, the most direct and just work-focused I’ve ever heard. She’s so focused and smart on it. She’s not defensive. She’s not just doing any of the normal Madonna things you’d expect. Talking about how she and the producer came up with Hung Up and the different iterations they went through, what worked, what didn’t work, trying to get the sample from Abba and hand-writing a letter and going to meet with Abba individually. It just made me really, I don’t know, respect her as a songwriter and producer more than I ever had before. Song Exploder’s Hung Up on Madonna.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** My second One Cool Thing is The Ladder, which is a great new experience from the folks who made Lab Rat, the escape room that we love so much.

**Craig:** Hatch Escapes.

**John:** Hatch Escapes. Craig and I were both Kickstarter backers of this thing. We went and played it with a group of 8 people, 10 people last week. It was just terrifically well done. It is different than an escape room. It’s more of an experience. It’s 90 minutes long. It’s all the things you would expect in that escape room in terms of puzzles, but the goal is not to escape, but to do something different. It is replayable in ways that are really clever. I just think it’s a really great evolution of the form.

I want to commend Tommy Wallach and everybody else who put together The Ladder. If you’re in Los Angeles and you love escape rooms, you should book a time for The Ladder at Hatch Escapes. It’s just really, really well done.

**Craig:** I’m waiting to return to LA from production here. Once I do, The Ladder is high up on my list of things to get to.

**John:** It’s gonna be great.

**Craig:** I’m very excited for that.

**John:** Craig, you will see that you are actually a part of the experience itself. I don’t want to spoil any more than that. But you will see Craig Mazin as part of the experience if you go take your time through The Ladder.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Oh, boy.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

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

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Don’t know him.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson, in an homage to Severance, which actually feels very much like The Ladder. It all fits together nicely. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.

You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hats and hoodies. They’re all great. Oh, and drinkware now too. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau, so get your stuff there.

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 on the new [indiscernible 01:03:16] chatty voice features of OpenAI and what it means and how we feel about it. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Before we start, a little context. Craig and I recorded this segment about OpenAI before Scarlett Johansson called shenanigans on the voice that was being used. If you’re wondering why we’re not talking about that, it’s because it hadn’t come out yet.

Craig, recently, OpenAI had a demo for their new features in ChatGPT-4o, which is their omni-media thing, which does a lot of normal ChatGPT stuff but also could handle images and audio and speech all natively. It’s just much, much faster and can interact with you in a chat fashion more quickly and in ways that just feel novel and new.

I’m going to play one little clip. This is a guy named Rocky who is talking to ChatGPT on his phone. Over the course of it, he’s gonna put on a stupid hat. That’s the only thing you should know if you’re not watching this video.

**Rocky:** In a few minutes I’m gonna be interviewing at OpenAI. Have you heard of them?

**ChatGPT:** OpenAI? Huh? Sounds vaguely familiar. Kidding, of course. That’s incredible, Rocky. What kind of interview?

**Rocky:** It’s for a software engineering role, but I just need to know, do I look presentable, professional?

**ChatGPT:** Rocky, you definitely have the “I’ve been coding all night” look down, which could actually work in your favor. Maybe just run a hand through your hair or lean into the mad genius vibe. Your enthusiasm is what’s really gonna shine through.

**Rocky:** I don’t have a lot of time, so I’m just gonna throw this on. What do you think?

**ChatGPT:** Oh, Rocky, that’s quite a statement piece. I mean, you’ll definitely stand out. Though maybe not in the way you’re hoping for an interview.

**Rocky:** Okay. I got it, I got it.

**John:** Craig, what is your reaction to Rocky’s discussion with OpenAI?

**Craig:** The OpenAI personality I find toxically positive.

**John:** People describe it as like a kindergarten teacher.

**Craig:** Yes, like a bizarrely positive and a little bit condescending, slightly patronizing, like, “Oh, Rocky, you silly billy.” I didn’t believe any of it. I’m impressed. Certainly, it’s cool that an AI can look at an image, parse out what it’s seeing, have a general sense of category, and then make some sort of comment.

It’s sort of like, what do I care about a generic comment about my appearance? What possible valuable information can I get there? Generally speaking, we want information from people that we really care about or people that we believe have specific expertise, not from some vague amalgamation, because that’s what JCrew has on their rack. That’s what the amalgamation is. We don’t need that. I’m mostly just unnerved by the toxic positivity.

**John:** There’s a lot of things to unpack here. First off, of course, we’re playing a snippet of a demo, so this is an optimized version of what this is. From the longer live demo, you can clearly tune the personality of the chat bot. This was probably tuned to be incredibly positive and giggly and all that stuff and flirty in ways. You could turn that down. You can dial that pretty easily, apparently.

What is interesting is this is not a sentient system. This thing is not alive. This thing is not conscious. It’s not her. And yet the illusion of it is so clear to see, because it feels like that because it has the ability to have back and forth and actually really enter into a dialog, it crosses that uncanny valley and makes it feel like there’s really a person there, that there’s an intelligence there that is not actually there.

**Craig:** It certainly prompts the question of whether or not – not begs the question, but prompts the question.

**John:** Prompts the question. Invites the question.

**Craig:** Invites the question of whether or not the Turing test is the proper test. I think in Alan Turing’s day, it made absolute sense. But what we’re seeing now is that this person is a real person, is the illusion of being a real person, is not in and of itself indicative of intelligence, and in fact, creating the illusion of a real person talking to you is easier than we might’ve thought.

So much of it just comes down to how synthetic the voice is. Yeah, sure, she sounds real, and I think would pass the Turing test in the most rigid sort of way. But it’s unnerving. I find it unnerving.

**John:** We know that this is a demo of an AI speaking back to us, but I can just imagine a year from now, two years from now, there’d be a lot of situations where we just don’t know if we are talking to a real person or not talking to a real person. That feels like, I don’t know, a social boundary that we’re not really prepared for.

If I’m talking to customer service right now, I get a sense of when it’s a real person, when it’s not a real person. I won’t a year from now, two years from now. That is different. I will know that if I’m talking to an executive on Zoom, that’s a real person. But we may soon not really know if that’s an actual real person we’re speaking with. I don’t know, something makes me feel uncomfortable as a human not knowing that.

In situations where I do know that I’m talking to an AI, I think there could be useful things coming out of that. Siri is so frustrating and useless most of the time. Same with Alexa. But this seems like you could actually get meaningful information out of it. If I was in a situation where I needed to know something, I might just ask the question out loud rather than googling it, and that feels great.

**Craig:** It’s an extension of Siri, which nobody thinks of as being alive. It’s interesting, one of the things that AI seems to struggle with is the concept of being interrupted. Interruption is hard, and yet it is fundamental to the way humans talk to each other. We somehow managed to interrupt each other without destroying each other’s train of thought. We don’t keep talking. There’s an interesting back-and-forth rhythm that I think they have to figure out. Do you know the comedian Ron Funches?

**John:** I recognize that name, but I couldn’t think of what he’s known for.

**Craig:** He’s so funny. He’s so, so, so funny. He has this bit about filling out CAPTCHA things. What he says is, “Why do I always have to prove to a robot that I’m not a robot?” He’s like, “The thing is what the robot is asking me to do, to enter a random series of letters and numbers, is pretty much the kind of thing a robot should be able to be good at. It’s not even a good test. It’s really proving that I am a robot.” I just love that. I love that concept of what the robots think is indicative of humanity and then how they give it back to us.

Look. The AI thing at this point I’m just starting of think of as a meteor that might miss the planet or smash into it, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing.

**John:** There’s things we can do to mitigate certain harms, but there’s overall bigger things that are way outside of our pay scale and what we can control.

I want to go back to interruptability, because I think one of the things that made this demo impressive was there was better interruptability. It wasn’t perfect, but you could just talk over the AI, and it would still hear you when you’re talking over it. You didn’t have to wait for it to be done before you can say the next thing, which is useful and good.

But it’s also a great reminder of, when movie dialog feels artificial, it’s because you feel like people are not allowed to talk over each other, they’re not allowed to interrupt each other, they’re not allowed to interject before a sentence is finished, and in real life we’re doing that all the time.

**Craig:** Yes. Maybe what they’ll get better at is the idea of not stopping when somebody interrupts you, but continuing and then going, “Oh, exactly.” Hearing and talking at the same time is tricky. I feel like right now, AI either listens or talks. Certainly, Siri is horrible at that. Do you find yourself getting angry when you’re like, “Hey, lady, play me the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof,” and then there’s a long pause, and then she’s like, “Playing Hamilton, the 1983 free version.”

**John:** So incredibly frustrating.

**Craig:** I’m like, “What?”

**John:** Here is our daily struggle. While we’re making breakfast, we have Alexa Flash News. Flash News should play NPR’s brief little three-minute “here are the headlines” kind of thing. Maybe 70 percent of the time, that’s what happens, but another 30 percent of the time, anything else could happen. It could play Fox News. It could play on a different speaker in a different room. It’s so frustrating. It feels like I’m in some sort of experiment, where it’s like how much can we torment John before he’s had coffee.

**Craig:** Then you find yourself having this increasingly stern, escalating argument. “I said the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof.” “Now playing Annie.” I’m like, “I said… ” I’ll say, “No.” Now I realize it’s like I’m talking to my dog at this point. “No, Bonnie. No.”

**John:** Maybe what we need is we need the AI’s kindergarten teacher, like, “You did a good job. Oh, Rocky, I think that’s great that you were able to play that.”

**Craig:** I feel like this version would be like, “Sounds like you’re a little frustrated. I get it completely. Doing my best. Tell me one more time.”

**John:** That’s what we’re gonna hear.

**Craig:** Ah! Ugh! Eck!

**John:** Ah!

**Craig:** Ugh!

**John:** Ee! Also, now, imagine being a kid. You’re a two-year-old, a three-year-old who’s growing up in this world now. It’s just gonna be very different. The expectation that there’s a disembodied voice who should always be able to tell you things, to tell you a story, to do whatever, it’s just a very different experience.

**Craig:** Then our children will look at that generation like, “Oh my god. The worst.”

**John:** “So coddled.”

**Craig:** “The worst.” Instead of iPad kids, now they’re AI kids. Just sit the kid in front of the AI and let them talk to their imaginary friend. God. You know what? Generation X, John. We were the last ones out.

**John:** The last true generation.

**Craig:** Last true generation before all this crap. We’re the best. (sings) We’re the best around. Nothing’s ever gonna bring me down. I think I can get that out before the copyright kicks in.

**John:** Love it. Craig, thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/644standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/whispering-loudly).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 636 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

(Whispers:) Today on the show, what’s with all the whispering in movies? Is it a deliberate narrative choice or just a fad? We’ll discuss voice and volume. We’ll also look at what you can learn from reading early drafts, the threat of TikTok and YouTube, and answer some listener questions. Helping us out with all of this is returning guest host Pamela Ribon. Welcome back.

**Pamela Ribon:** Hi.

**John:** Woo!

**Pamela:** Yay! Hi. Thanks. Woo. I don’t normally get a woo on.

**John:** Woohoo.

**Pamela:** Oh, hello.

**John:** Woo woos are very, very nice. We had you on this summer, and you were absolutely a phenomenal guest. But since that time, I got to see your movie Nimona, which was fantastic.

**Pamela:** Aw, thanks. It’s a lot of people’s movies, but yes.

**John:** It’s a lot of people’s movies.

**Pamela:** It’s a lot of people’s movies. But yes, I’m so glad you got to see it. That is a miracle.

**John:** It’s a very long process. I do want to talk some about the history of that and how it moved around and finally got made. But I also want to talk about, you got to go to the Academy Awards with that. I thought for the Bonus Segment we would just talk about going to the Academy Awards and what it’s like to go to the Academy Awards.

**Pamela:** Totally. That’s one of my favorite things to talk about. We’ll do it.

**John:** Not only were you there, you showed up in the background of so many famous people’s shots, which I love.

**Pamela:** Yes, most unexpected.

**John:** Very nice. Before we started with that, Drew, we have some follow-up.

**Drew Marquardt:** We do. Foxy wrote in some follow-up about vetting in last week’s episode. She wrote, “I was so stoked about the discussion of vetting in 635, because it’s something I’ve been wondering ever since Me Too. You guys gave great advice, but I have more questions. With Me Too, most of the behavior being called out was not on set. It was behind closed doors. Most abuse functions that way. The abuser often wants to keep it a secret so they can keep their good reputation intact, hence whisper networks. Now, I’m a woman, but I’ve never been tapped into any whisper network in any area of my life. And I would never want to hire someone who was abusing someone behind closed doors at home. How do you vet for this? Because cutting ties and showing there’s professional, reputational consequences for this behavior is super important, but how do you find out in the first place if they’re keeping it secret?”

**John:** Foxy’s question here reminds me of this thing we really should’ve gotten into in last discussion is that we were talking about vetting as an employer, but you’re also vetting as an employee. You’re wondering, is this person I’m gonna work for, are they a good person or not a good person. That can be just as important.

Pamela, I’m curious whether you have any thoughts about this. How do you check to see whether that person you’re gonna be working with, either you’re gonna hire them or gonna be working for them, how do you start to check about a person?

**Pamela:** Often, it’s not really all that whispered, I find. So there’s that. And then you have to believe women. You have to believe what you hear, even if that’s inconvenient for you and what you’d like to do. You can check with your reps, and you can check with people that you know who’ve worked with these people or for these people before. I find usually people will start with that, because they don’t want you getting into a situation that they could help you avoid.

**John:** I had an incident just this past week where we’re talking about a person, and there was a passing comment about, “Oh yeah, there’s some sort of Me Too thing, but… “ When I heard that “Me Too but,” I’m like, “Oh my, oh my.” That was a signal to me that I do need to investigate this more, and so asking around additional people and getting some confirmation that some folks were uncomfortable with this person. That’s good information to have. It really influences what you’re trying to do.

Either way, if you’re not tapped into any official whisper networks, I think it’s good advice to check to see whether that person is working with the same people again and again, which is generally a good sign that they want people around, unless they’re working with the same people again and again because those people are helping to cover up some behavior. When you do ask about a person, there’s this line where sometimes they’re not willing to report the behavior they saw, but they’re willing to tell you in confidence that this wasn’t great.

**Pamela:** I think of that as the whisper network. I don’t know about a network either, just to help Foxy feel like… You’re in the network if you’re talking to people and they’re talking to you. That’s kind of how it is. If there’s a database, I don’t know about it. But I would also say this is a good time to bring up hiresurvivorshollywood.org.

**John:** Tell me about that. I’ve never heard of this.

**Pamela:** This is an organization that was created by Sarah Ann Masse – I don’t know, it might be Masse – who was one of the Weinstein silence breakers. It is to address the issue of career retaliation against those who have been sexually violated and those who have shared those details publicly.

One of the ways that you can help make sure that you’re not hiring an abuser is to hire a survivor who spoke out, who might be suffering some of the things that happen to you, even though they tell you won’t happen to you and can’t happen to you, and even HR says can’t happen to you if you talk about what has happened. I think it’s important that we are able to say you can come forward and you can talk, and you are not just protected, you are gonna continue to have your career, which is one of the first things they threaten you with.

**John:** It’s important to remember that in Hollywood, where you tend to go from job to job to job, having a break where you’ve not been working is a problem. If you haven’t been working for six months, it’s increasingly harder to get that next job. I could totally see someone who was speaking up and speaking out and didn’t get that next gig or that gig after that. It can be harder to keep momentum in your job, in your career.

**Pamela:** Yeah, you can get labeled as a troublemaker or someone who encourages people to talk and speak out. That’s the opposite of the whisper network, so we don’t have to whisper anymore. I do feel like that’s part of vetting is, if you’re even having to wonder is it worth it for this person, then maybe there’s another person out there who is worth it.

**John:** Let’s go from whisper networks to literal whispering in movies. This is something that came up this past week with people’s observations that in the movie Dune 2, there’s just a lot of whispering, and characters are whispering in situations where you really wonder whether they’d be whispering in real life. Let’s play a little clip here. This is Timothée Chalamet’s character and Zendaya’s character talking. It’s a little, intimate scene. Let’s play a bit of this.

[Dune 2 clip]

**Zendaya:** Your blood comes from dukes and great houses. We don’t have that here. Here, we’re equal, man and woman alike. What we do, we do for the benefit of all.

**Timothée Chalamet:** I’d very much like to be equal to you.

**Zendaya:** Paul Muad’Dib Usul. Maybe you could be Fremen. Maybe I’ll show you the way.

**John:** This is leading up to their first kiss. I actually really like this scene. I love Timothée Chalamet saying, “I’d like to be equal to you.” If you are just listening to this at home and don’t have the visual here, you might think, okay, they’re in bed someplace, there’s people around, they’re whispering for some reason. But no, they are on the top of a sand dune with no one else around at all, and yet they’re whispering.

**Pamela:** (Whispers:) That’s right.

**John:** That’s right.

**Pamela:** Because that’s love, baby.

**John:** That’s love. Let’s talk about that. It is intimate, and so there is an intimacy created by the whispering. This scene didn’t bug me when I watched it in the theater. It’s only when someone pointed out it’s really weird that they’re whispering here that it stands out.

**Pamela:** I just think of Timothée Chalamet as just – he is whisper. If you could make a human out of the word whisper. He’s just whispering in doorways and leaning in and wants to be equal with you. Come on.

**John:** Come.

**Pamela:** Don’t make him volume. I’m leaning all the way in. Same with Zendaya. She’s so much beauty and talent. You’re like, just give it to me on level 2. It’s all I can take.

**John:** Full Zendaya, I couldn’t take it in this moment.

**Pamela:** No, we’d explode.

**John:** We have not read the script for Dune 2, so we don’t know whether in the scene description it’s talking about the fact that they’re whispering. I doubt it is. It was a choice made by the actors and director in staging the scene to do it this way. It’s a very deliberate choice.

But let’s talk about, as screenwriters, situations where we might want to have our characters whispering, when it would make sense, when we would actually put it in a script, and when it would just feel natural along the way. Obviously, the main reason characters whisper is so that other people around them don’t hear it. That feels really natural. When you see that in a movie, you get it. You’re whispering so people can’t hear. Sometimes that’s an aside. Sometimes that is so the guards 10 feet away are not hearing that. Other examples, Pamela, what are you thinking of?

**Pamela:** I don’t even think of this as whispering, what they’re doing, but in a movie this loud, this is considered whisper. That’s part of it too is you want to whisper so that you can have the opposite effect of what the rest of the film is going – or the rest of the scene. I think comedic tension whispers are my favorite whispers, where it’s like, “I can’t even believe,” because then you really get to hiss at each other. Comedic whispering is the best.

**John:** That’s really good. I think about not waking the baby. The parent arguments are happening so that they don’t wake the baby. There’s comedy there too, where you’re shouting and whispering at the same time. That can be a fun moment.

In the scene we just watched, it’s an intimate moment. I don’t know in real life if they really would be whispering, but it does bring us in closer to them. That’s honestly sometimes the job of a whisper is to invite us into that closeup so we’re really close in. Weirdly, because the camera does get close on people’s faces, if people are talking at full voice, it can feel a little strange. It can feel a little shouty.

**Pamela:** I’m thinking about times also in a script you might want someone to whisper to get all of the attention. You’re whispering on purpose. I suppose I’m just now thinking of my dad. It’s very parental. The angrier he got, the quieter he would get, so that you were like, “Oh, boy.”

**John:** Don’t worry about dad when he’s shouting. Worry when he’s whispering. People whisper to themselves, or sometimes they’ll whisper to a character who they know can’t hear them. Some examples. In Rear Window, he sees that the guy’s coming back and he’s whispering, “Get out of there.” He knows he can’t. He’s saying what he wishes he could say to the actual person, and there’s no way to actually say that. You also see that when people are watching something on a screen or a monitor and they’re trying to say, “Aha,” and there’s no way to communicate it. Weirdly, whispering is a thing people do in those situations.

**Pamela:** Yeah, but that’s to let us, the audience, know that he knows he can’t talk to them.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a question of would you do that in real life, or is that just a movie convention, that you’re vocalizing what you know you can’t say to the real person. Weakness, so a person who’s on their deathbed, we’re used to the whispering there. Confessions.

**Pamela:** I’m sorry, I’m still laughing that you have weakness equated with deathbed confessions. I was thinking weakness like, “It’s too heavy. I think we need to take some of the weight… ” But you were like, “It’s buried under the backyard flower bed.” You’re like, what a weak man.

**John:** What a weak man. I mean to separate weakness and confessions. Weakness, a person who’s physically frail, it makes sense that they can’t put their full voice behind things. Confessions I will say is a separate thing, like, “I see dead people.” You’re letting somebody in on a secret. Sometimes you whisper secrets, even if there’s no real reason to whisper.

**Pamela:** Particularly creepy secrets.

**John:** Whispering is creepy at times.

**Pamela:** (Whispers:) “I’m here for you.” That kind of stuff.

**John:** We were looking through some examples of famous whispers. Of course, “Rosebud.” “The horror.” Scar leans in to say, “I killed Mufasa.” And then, of course, “My precious.” That’s of course a character who is basically entirely whispers. His actual voice quality is what we would consider a whisper.

**Pamela:** I wrote one in Nimona, which is, “He’s perfect.” After all these reasons that this man’s a terrible villain, number one, everybody’s after him, and nobody will ever love him again, she’s looking at all of this news info, and she says, “He’s perfect.” I went to look at the script to see what did I say, and I had just put it in italics. Then I was like, oh, I don’t even remember how it’s done in the end. This is pretty amazing that you can just open it up in Netflix and I just hit a button and it went right to the line. I was like, no, that’s fresh in there. But she kind of growls it. Chloe kind of growls, like, “He’s perfect.”

**John:** The whisper growl is a thing too. Bane’s voice in Batman, or really Batman’s voice in Christopher Nolan’s Batman is a whisper growl. It’s like speaking softly but with a weird masculine intensity.

**Pamela:** The 30 Rock quote is the “talking like this” contest.

**John:** It’s good stuff. In the case of Nimona, you probably put that line in italics, and italics makes sense for that. It stands out. Other choice would be to put the parenthetical above that to indicate that this you say whispering, that it’s not at full voice. There’s a thing there.

But in the case, again, where characters are whispering lines that they wouldn’t necessarily need to whisper, that can be an on-the-set choice. That can be a choice the actors are making, the director’s making. And as long as everyone’s on the same page, it can work.

Kind of related is the issue of – on the podcast a lot recently we’ve been talking about word choices. And the last week we were talking about characters whose native language is not English and how you mark that in scripts and how you make choices that indicate that English is not their native language as you’re writing those characters.

Fundie baby voice came up. Our friend Chris pointed this out. It was something I’d not been aware of until you see the examples, like, “Oh, I totally get this.” This is an example of – it’s called fundie baby voice.

[Clip]

**Kelly Johnson:** I used to be a schoolteacher. I loved that, but I just felt burdened for so many people and I felt the calling to go back to school to become a Christian counselor.

**John:** This is Mike Johnson’s wife. It’s a voice. It’s a choice. It’s a very specific way of speaking. If you had a character who was speaking this way, you would need to indicate that in the script, because it really fundamentally changes our instinct about how those lines sound in our delivery. Have you experienced this in your real life or in scripts yet?

**Pamela:** I was just thinking this is such a church voice. You were like, “It’s learned. It’s a choice.” I think it might be ingrained. You may learn this growing up, of keep sweet and obey. This is the voice that you’re supposed to use to be, as you’ve got written here, childlike, sweet, submissive, and honey. But this voice to me is – I understand it’s fundamentalist, but it doesn’t take much to turn it into you’re in the South with the same voice.

**John:** As a counterexample, you look at Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos and the way she was deliberately pitching her voice lower, pulling down to a different register to give her authority that she felt like she couldn’t have in her normal voice. I just wonder if it’s just how we fundamentally police women’s voices the way we also police bodies. There’s no right way for a woman to speak.

**Pamela:** That’s true. I have done the Theranos, as we call this act, in rooms when I recognize that the sound of my regular voice giving ideas isn’t reaching ears anymore and it’s getting tuned out. Then I just start saying it like this. It definitely works. Definitely works.

**John:** Are people aware that you’re doing it?

**Pamela:** Only, yes, because I tell them. That’s who I am. I’m like, “Do you like it better when I say it like this?” They’ll be like, “I do.” I’m like, “I know you do. We’re gonna look into this.” This voice very much works. She’s not the only one who knows. It doesn’t take much. You just say it like this. When I look at videos of me in high school, as I did a bunch for My Year of Dicks, my voice is lower back then.

**John:** Wow.

**Pamela:** Because I think I was hanging around boys all the time, and that was just where my voice hung out. It’s very Janeane Garofalo probably. It was the style at the time.

**John:** Let’s talk about that, because obviously, whether it’s Christian fundie voice or the Theranos voice you’re doing, you’re pulling your voice examples based on the community around you and what seems to be working and how you fit in with the community around you. Mike Johnson’s wife, she’s probably doing that voice because that is the community that she’s in, and that feels like the right choice. And if she were to make a different choice, there would be consequences for her doing that within her community. That’s the choice that she’s making.

You were referencing My Year of Dicks, which is of course the incredible, originally a series and then done as a film you did and got the Oscar nomination for. As you’re watching those videos, do you remember deliberately choosing to lower your voice, or that was just at thing that happened?

**Pamela:** I don’t know that I definitely chose to lower my voice. I think I probably always – I still have a bit of a lower voice, and it’s only getting more so. I definitely know that there was an affect of – I think maybe it just happens in your teens, when you get your first official hormonal whatevers, and you just lean back in that sound of detachment that stayed that way.

I don’t know that I would ever write in a script how someone should do their voice, because isn’t that what the actor is bringing to the table? Unless it was she was masking her voice for some reason and doing an impression or something like that. I don’t know that I would say, “She’s got fundie voice,” even if I were writing a character who was a fundamentalist.

**John:** It’s interesting, because I feel like sometimes I need to be able to hear that character’s voice in my head. If I’m hearing it in a way that is not going to actually translate on the page without me calling it out, that feels important. Obviously, if some other character’s referencing it, you’re gonna need to put it there.

I don’t know, there’s a musicality to how these people are doing it that is different. Elizabeth Holmes, not only is she pushing it lower, she’s also going more monotone. The same words are gonna come across very differently, given that. You’re gonna make some different little word choices to fit that pattern and how it’s gonna fit.

**Pamela:** Word choices is true. I think I would maybe blend some words and italicize some words to get that musicality of the reader can hear what it says. But I don’t know that I would even talk about their pitch or something like that. But you’re right. If someone else is, “She’s definitely a lower talker, isn’t she?” there you go. You got it.

**John:** You’re going back to the Seinfeld reference. You say you pitched your voice lower. I’m sure there was some moment in which I internally recognized I had gay voice and changed, and so that I pitched lower, I made choices to sound less gay. But I don’t remember when that was, and I don’t have good examples of me on tape showing when my voice shifted. I’d love to see some forensics on that, but I just don’t think that material exists, to figure out was it in 5th grade or 7th grade that I did make that shift, because my register is much lower than it probably should be for my overall size and shape. At some point, that was just where I landed.

**Pamela:** It was a bunch of tiny recalculations probably, more than like, “Oh, the summer I turned this voice.”

**John:** This conversation is reminding me of a movie that I really, really loved, Lake Bell’s In a World. I want her to make many more movies. I really like this, but I was a little troubled by one thread of this. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a woman who wants to be the narrator announcer for film, so like, “In a world where,” blah blah blah blah, and how that business is so male-dominated. But it’s her conversations with other women that become a bit of an issue and come through at the end. So let’s take a listen to one clip here.

[In a World clip]

**Woman:** Hey! Watch it! That is so rude.

**Lake Bell (as Carol Solomon):** Oh my god. Okay. Excuse me. I’m so sorry. I just want to give you my card. I’m not a vocal coach anymore, but I would make an exception for you, because you sound like a squeaky toy. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. But I mean, like, I think you’re better than that. You know what I mean? And I think we’re all better than that. It’s good for the species. You know what I mean? But there’s also a Jamba Juice like two blocks away from here if you wanted to, because I bet you were looking for a smoothie. Maybe not. I don’t know. But if you were, you know where it is.

Over the next six weeks, Louis will be recording your voices, and we will listen to your sounds evolve right before your very ears, because women should sound like women, not baby dolls who end everything in a question. Let’s make a statement.

**Pamela:** Speaking of policing women’s voices, she just stopped her outside.

**John:** Yeah. Again, I really like the movie. This was just a thing that I think does not read so well to me now, 10 years or whatever years later. It does feel very police-y, like, people aren’t gonna take you seriously or maybe shouldn’t take you seriously because of your vocal choices.

**Pamela:** That being said, I was a logger for The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, so I listened to uncut footage 12 hours at a time in a graveyard shift. I don’t recommend it. I type what I hear, so that you’re logging for story editors for the writers to make this show. There was a season where there was a girl, I just prayed every week she was about to get voted off. She really was up in here, sitting in a hot tub, and she had a high wiggle in her voice. It’s not her fault, but it was a lot, and it was in my ears. I had to type everything she said, which was mostly, “That’s amazing. Oh, yeah, I love that.” I’m not policing her. I could not leave her. It was my job to listen to her until she was voted off.

**John:** I am curious whether the job that you were doing exists in the same way today, because that feels like an absolutely perfect use of AI to log that.

**Pamela:** John, that was a paid gig.

**John:** That was a paid gig.

**Pamela:** That’s how I kept on living.

**John:** I’m not saying it should go away. I’m just saying that feels like very low-hanging fruit.

**Pamela:** Stop it!

**John:** I’m sorry. I’m not advocating for those jobs to be replaced. I think it’s fantastic that you got paid. I want people to get paid.

**Pamela:** I was helping writers who also weren’t getting called writers. Where’s our union? Logging is a job that is not for the weak, but it’s definitely for people who need to be underpaid to survive living in LA for the first few years. It’s definitely probably an AI job now, except they don’t know what they’re doing when they’re not talking, and I watched a lot of non-talking footage. Then I would just make up what she was thinking, which is why I was not cut out for that job.

**John:** I would say AIs right now are pretty good at being able to describe what is literally happening on screen. Is it gonna be useful for the editor who’s assembling stuff? Maybe not. And so you may still need actual human beings there to do that.

But anyway, back to our discussion of whispering and voices and the choices people are making. I think we have ways of indicating on a script what volumes should be. We put things in uppercase when people are shouting. We will put parentheticals in there to give a sense of what that is.

When someone has an overall vocal quality, I think you’re right, sometimes you do want to call it out if it’s going to be something that other characters are going to remark upon. But you don’t want to box in your actor unnecessarily. You still need to let them make their own choices.

**Pamela:** I wonder if that In a World girl’s character is just Baby Voice Girl. Maybe she’s in it later, she had a character name. But that’s usually how it’s done, isn’t it, so that you don’t even get a choice? The character is called Annoying Voice Girl.

**John:** I would like to talk now about Nimona, because as I watched this, I kept hearing your voice all over it. My guess was that you recorded scratch for her for a lot of it. Is that true.

**Pamela:** Oh, that’s funny. No.

**John:** Really?

**Pamela:** Because we already had Chloe hired. I’m trying to remember if we did scratch, gosh, because we did it during lockdown. I’m trying to remember how that all worked. But I don’t remember. I don’t remember. Some of these things we just block out. I was making My Year of Dicks and Nimona at the same time, in this office, in this room, during lockdown, while I was also slightly teaching 1st and 2nd grade, so forgive me if I don’t remember. But we definitely read it out loud and read it in the room and did all of that stuff. So that is probably what you’re hearing too is, yes, acting it out.

**John:** She has an incredibly expressive voice. I would say next to Sarah Silverman’s character in the Wreck-It movies, it’s probably one of the biggest little girl voices I’ve seen, because she’s not always a little girl, of course. But she’s really super, super expressive. Was it fun to write that character?

**Pamela:** It was fun. Also, I was brought in at a time when it was like, we need to really dig into Nimona and get her voice out. This IP has been around, and Nate is a part of it too, so this is a voice that was already on the page and in the creator. But being able to play around in that back and forth and, “I’m not a little girl, I’m Nimona,” was just a fun place. Then also, Riz was already cast too, so you knew the dynamic you could play there.

**John:** Talk to us about when you came on board and what the brief was, what had changed. I should say this is available for anybody who wants to watch it on Netflix. You should absolutely see it. It was one of the five Oscar-nominated animated films this year, so congratulations on it. At what point were you coming on? There was obviously a graphic novel. It sounds like there was already a script, but you were still digging in on how to service the best out of her?

**Pamela:** It had been around for quite a bit before I came on board, because Patrick Osborne was working on it at Fox Animation. I know I was still working on Ralph Breaks the Internet. But a part of me feels like I might’ve still been on Moana when it started. I’m not sure. It was a long time coming. They had talked about me coming on earlier. Blue Sky is based in Connecticut. And I didn’t think that I could go move out there and work on the movie. That was why I had passed at that point. And then March came around. They were like, what if we just come to your house every day?

At that point, Nick and Troy were involved as the directors, and I met with them and we all hit it off. They had had this rewrite that had gone well in the boards that they had had, and it was starting to work. I came in at a time where they had tried so many things. That was the hard part coming into the story team so late. Even this beginning of, to talk about, “He’s perfect,” she wasn’t doing the opening narration. That was one of the first things I was pitching, because you don’t meet her for a while.

**John:** She’s the title character. It seems like she has sidekick energy, and yet she ends up becoming the central character in ways that are really unusual and feel like it’s almost a commentary on how we treat secondary characters in animated films.

**Pamela:** Even the draft I had read before these reels where I came in, it had changed a bunch. They had really tried to figure this one out in many, many ways. Even saying like, “What if you hear her before you meet… ” They’re like, “We tried it.” We had to get through a lot of “we tried its”. You have to be really careful and confident when you’re coming in in that way of like, “But with all due respect, we haven’t tried it, the we that includes me now. Let me see if I can show you a little what I mean.” And even then, that takes time. That’s a real double Dutch of, “I’ll leave that whole area alone. I know my instincts, but we’re not there yet to talk about it.”

But anyway, the studio was shut down while we were still working on it. But as we kept working together, it was getting stronger. Trying to figure out, I would say the story structure stayed the same, but we were moving around the parts of when do we know what we know and why and how, and that stuff got shifted around quite a bit.

But being able to gleefully play with Nimona, luckily, that was always encouraged. Everybody on this movie was so funny. Once she was really sparkling, there were a lot of like, “Oh, I bet she’d say this. I bet she’d say this.” But people got protective of Nimona, as they should.

I had said something about her speaking in a different language at some point. They were like, “No, she doesn’t know other languages. She’s never really been anywhere else.” You got this with Ralph Breaks the Internet too, where they were like, “He can’t wear glasses. His eyes won’t deteriorate. He’s a digital figure.” I was like, “He’s eating a churro. I don’t know what to say. I’m confused.”

**John:** The rules of your world are complicated. She seems to know animals that she probably has not seen. Has she seen a rhino in real life? Yes.

**Pamela:** You’ve worked so hard to understand this world that doesn’t exist, that when someone else comes in and points, just says something like, “Never,” you have to be like, “All right.” I will be like this too one day. I know it, where I will be like, “No, you can’t turn off surge protect,” just weird things that you get so mad about, where you’re like, “That’s fundamentally against the core of who she is.” That’s where you get, and that’s when you know you’re really in it.

**John:** Hearing about the development process, it also strikes me that it helps answer a question I had, which is that the film uses its time in unusual ways, and things that in other films would be like, “We need to figure out a way to do this. The next sequence will be about doing that,” instead the next scene really does that thing. Like, “We have to clear my name,” and then literally, in the next scene, we clear his name. I liked it, but it seems to jump past a lot of the normal sequence of describe the obstacle, attempt to overcome the obstacle, overcome the obstacle. It uses its time in an unusual way.

**Pamela:** I don’t know how to speak to that, because part of me feels like that’s family animation a lot of times, so that we’re letting everyone in the whole wide world, which is the demographic, know what’s going on. There is a lot of “how did we get here’s” and then “what are we gonna dos.”

**John:** Oh yeah, but I was saying I think that is a hallmark of family animation is that you are talking about the thing you need to do and then how you’re gonna do it, and then you do the thing. What’s unusual in Nimona is they describe, oh, we need to do a thing, and suddenly they just do the thing. Where I’d expected, like, okay, this’ll be in the next 10 minutes, it’s like, no, that was taken care of in the next minute, which was unusual. I think that may be a consequence of discovering some parts of the story as you’re going through it.

**Pamela:** Also, I think because they were new to each other, they were doing a lot of emotional processing while talking about how did that just happen. Instead of needing to do it, they really did work it through each other.

**John:** That’s fun. Everyone check that out. The next topic I’d like to dig into is about early drafts. It occurs to me because when you read the scripts for the Oscar-nominated films, it’s like, “Oh, that’s perfect.” Of course, it’s always that way. But of course, we’re reading the very final draft. In some cases, we’re reading stuff that really reflects the final edit rather than the actual script they went into production with. I find it to be so educational to look at early drafts.

One of the things that I was able to do when I was at USC is – they had this big script library. They would have the final shooting script, but they would also have earlier drafts. It was so cool to see the stuff that had changed from the original idea to the final film. I remember reading the Point Break script and loving it, the James Cameron rewrite of it. It’s just great. But it’s different. It’s not the final film. You see what that looked like on the page, and ideas that were important at one point that then got dropped are great.

Also, during WGA arbitrations, a lot of times I’m reading seven scripts back, and you see what the initial instinct was versus what the final film was. You see how much stuff changes over the course of it. I think it’s really a good process for any screenwriter to see how much things really do change along the way.

**Pamela:** They solidify in your brain so differently too when you look back, because I did that a little, looking back here for you, for prepping, and I was blown away by what I didn’t remember. That’s just a good reminder to yourself of you have told yourself a story that you have believed. Thank you for your service on arbitration, honestly. What a job. What a hard thing to do, John, to go and read all those drafts and make these decisions.

**John:** I enjoy it, and so I will say yes most of the times when they call me about doing one of them, just because it’s important. You want to give people the credit that they deserve for the hard work they did.

One of the things you have in the notes here is about Natural Born Killers. Had you read a script for that early on? Had you read it before you saw the movie?

**Pamela:** No, not before I saw the film. That USC film script library sounds cool, but I was in a software company in Austin, Texas with the internet. The version that we had of that was trying to find people illegally uploading websites full of scripts. The early Natural Born Killers script was one I remember finding and being like, “Look at this. It’s so different than this film that I saw a billion times.” It’s very Tarantino-y. When you go in there, you’re like, it’s very Tarantino-y. They still have up the 1990 Tarantino script, which you can compare to the 1993 Oliver Stone and other writers’ draft.

But what’s also interesting is that then when you dive even further into people talking about it, because I only know internet rabbit holes about this script, but it came out of True Romance, which was also a rewrite of a script. In True Romance, Natural Born Killers is the screenplay that Clarence is writing while they’re on a road trip. That’s interesting. It’s the Facts of Life of – the spin-off series of the Tarantino universe.

**John:** I read Natural Born Killers from the USC script library. I remember reading it. This would’ve been 1992. It was the first script where I read the whole thing and then just went back and just started reading again from page 1. I was just blown away by it and how it upended the conventions of what I expected a movie to do, the fact that it moved into sitcoms and other things. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the script so you can see what it was. It was just amazing and blew my mind, like, “Oh, this is a thing I could do on the page.” It was incredible. Then I ended up working for the producers of Natural Born Killers. I was their assistant and ended up writing the novelization of Natural Born Killers. I had a full experience there.

**Pamela:** That’s cool. Did you go all the way back to this first one?

**John:** I tried to pull things that I thought were really interesting about the first one into the novelization. The novelization really does not resemble the final movie very much at all. Oprah gets killed in the novelization. A lot of very different stuff happens in it. No one should read the novelization. Just don’t. But I was happy with the draft I wrote. I was not happy with the draft that got published.

But weirdly, the novelization of Natural Born Killers became my comedy sample that helped me get my very first job writing a screenplay, which was How to Eat Fried Worms, because naturally, the person who wrote Natural Born Killers novelization should write a charming children’s film about a kid who eats worms.

**Pamela:** Take it from the writer of My Year of Dicks, you can also write Moana. What’s interesting about that first script is I remember it was smaller and I feel like it was mostly the trial of Mickey and Mallory Knox. That’s so different than what you get in Natural Born Killers and such an Oliver Stone kind of film. I think that that original indie film that Tarantino had made also, in that Reservoir Dogs world, would’ve thrived.

**John:** 100 percent. It would’ve totally blown up. It was really just terrific. The Oliver Stone movie I like. It’s just I really miss the movie that I couldn’t see, which was the 1990 script, because that would’ve been special in its own way. But you mentioned Moana earlier, and this was actually probably what got me thinking about seeing earlier drafts, because on an audio podcast, it’s hard for us to compare pages from two different versions of Natural Born Killers. But what we can do is listen to two different songs and compare them. I had not realized until this recent car trip where we started playing “I want” songs from movies, is that How Far I’ll Go, which I think is a fantastic “I want” song from Moana, was the second version of the “I want” song, and the original one was More. Let’s play a sample from More.

[More (Outtake) from Moana]

**John:** If I had not told you that this was from Moana, you probably would’ve figured it out. She’s talking about being on an island. She’s talking about wanting to get beyond this island. It is the same general broad strokes idea, but it’s not the same. It doesn’t really serve the same function as the finished song does.

**Pamela:** Yeah. Boy, that song takes me back. It’s like you just threw me in a time machine. Woo!

**John:** You were working on this movie back when this was the “I want” song?

**Pamela:** Yeah. I was like, “How did this all happen?” because before there was this song, I would write in the script fake lyrics or poems or ideas of where this song might be, before we had Lin and the music team involved. More came right towards the end of my time on Moana. I did get to work with Lin a little bit about what this song could be. We had gone back and forth in emails and in person, and more came out of that.

**John:** I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this. Did I ever come into the room with you when you were working on Moana? Because I came into a room for an afternoon on Moana, but you may not have been on the project at that point.

**Pamela:** I think you might’ve walked in as my door closed. It was a real all-hands moment. When you change the writer, it is easier than anything, but we are on contracts. I think I did not meet with you. I did sit with Michael Arndt. If you were around any time around Michael, that was around that time.

**John:** I literally came in one afternoon. My pencil never touched anything. I saw a bunch of artwork on the walls. They didn’t show me any clips. They just showed me all the art on the walls and talked me through the story. I’m like, “Oh boy. Oh boy. This isn’t gonna work.” I was wrong. It worked really, really well. It was only a year out from the movie. I’m like, “I don’t know what you guys are doing here.” They pulled it out. But in the process of figuring this stuff out, let’s compare. We just listened to More. Let’s listen to the “I want” song that’s actually in the movie. This is How Far I’ll Go.

[How Far I’ll Go from Moana]

**John:** What we’ve done here is we’ve flipped the ideas around. In More, she’s complaining about how stuck she feels on this island, and wouldn’t it be great to be out there. In this version she’s saying, “My island is fantastic. I love everybody here, but I’m still pulled to go and leave.” There’s a tension there that’s very different. The brief of what we’re supposed to understand about her is so different.

**Pamela:** Gosh. Moana’s journey changed quite a bit also. At one point, her family was lost at sea, so she was gonna have to go and get them. The want had to change each time. You had at the base of a problem with Moana is her island is wonderful and her life is great. That wasn’t something that was really supposed to change. We had gone to these islands and interviewed young women of Moana’s age. They often said that they wanted to be pilots or missionaries or people who would leave their island but then have to come home, need to come home and want to come home. You couldn’t have a want that was… Also, I’ll just say the problem with wanting more is you get that at the end of Act 1, and then you did it. Here we are. Here is more. It’s interesting in How Far I’ll Go, you hear that, “Every trail I track.” There’s parts of More that do end up in How Far I’ll Go.

**John:** Let’s listen to that. Here’s a little clip of that.

[How Far I’ll Go from Moana]

**John:** That musical idea made it back through into the final song.

**Pamela:** I remember in the boards, it was like, “That part works. There she is. That’s the thing. That’s the feeling and the movement.” I’m not surprised that that got stuck and stayed throughout the next version.

**John:** Comparing these two things, it’s just a good reminder that, be it in our scripts or, in this case, the songs, you recognize that you went in with a specific idea, like, “This is how we get from this place to this place. This is who the character is.” Sometimes it’s only when you go to get through the draft, you realize that was not actually the story or that’s not actually the motivation, that’s not the best way to do this. You discover something by playing through it. All the outlines you want to make, all the thinking you can do is not as helpful as actually trying and seeing what works. That’s one of the huge advantages of animation is that you actually get to see does this work. You have these intermediate steps where you get to see a thing.

Broadway musicals are the same thing, where you have readings, you have workshops, you stage it, you’re changing it every night, and you get to see what actually works. Our live action features on television, we don’t get those opportunities. We go in, we shoot a thing once, we spend a long time in the editing room trying to make it work, but there’s no chance to make big changes to things.

**Pamela:** You’re also working on two different versions of the story at the same time, because you’d have a scene that then would just get lifted and be like, “Actually, I can turn that into a song and save you five minutes of screen time with a three-minute song.” As a writer, you’re like, “These are all just workable ideas. These are just thoughts.” The script is thoughts a lot of times, because you’re not recording what they’re gonna say for a very long time. That won’t be the same either, because as soon as you’re in front of them and they’re trying every line a few different ways and then you’re improvising – and it is a ball you’re playing with a lot of times, but it’s your ball, so it’s very hard.

**John:** That’s my ball.

**Pamela:** It’s like, “That’s my ball.” But it’s not, because you hit it over the net quite a few times. There’s a bunch of teams. I’ll keep metaphoring. I don’t care.

**John:** 100 percent. Weirdly, a lot of the animation I’ve done has been stop-motion animation, which is kind of the exception, where we get to shoot a thing once. You pre-record; you shoot a thing once. You can’t change a lot. It’s more like live action. I’ve found it frustrating to try to do traditional animation, because I would deliver a script, like, “Here’s a script. Go for it,” and then I will get these boards back, and it’s like, “Wait, what are you doing? That’s not the script at all. You’ve just chosen a completely different thing to animate that’s not actually useful for my script.” That’s John August struggling with how traditional animation is done.

**Pamela:** It’s not for the weak.

**John:** It’s not for the weak. I compared animation to Broadway musicals. I’m thinking back to when we were doing the Big Fish musical. We did our out-of-town tryout in Chicago. We had a really rough time, because we were trying to make big changes, but every night we had to put on a show that people could actually watch and make sense. We would introduce stuff in blocks and pieces so it could all still fit together every night, but we still were changing a lot. We were adding new songs. We were moving stuff. We were cutting stuff.

One of the things we realized is that we did not have a an “I want” song for Will that worked. The challenge I put for Andrew Lippa was like, “You need to write an ‘I want’ song for Will. Let’s talk about what’s in there. Let’s talk about what ideas there are.” I remember being in the basement of the Oriental Theater, and he played me the song which became Stranger, which was the big “I want” song for Will. It was perfect. It was wonderful. We couldn’t do anything with it. There was no way to stick it to the show. We couldn’t tell the company that this new song existed until we closed in Chicago, went back to New York, were in the workshop again, and we could introduce this new song, which transformed big parts of the show. I just remember tears out there, like, “Oh my god, we did it. We actually made the thing happen.” But there was no way to actually make that fix live until we can get back into a safe place to insert it. It was such a different experience than anything I would’ve had doing features.

**Pamela:** Even in Moana, I think it was weird to put that want song, because it can come too late, and now she’s complaining, or it’s too early, and you are like, “Why? What is she even talking about? I don’t agree.” You have to agree with their want. It has to be like, “Me too. That’s exactly what I want for you.” I had pulled up all the stuff around the time that More was written to remember the brain that we were in. We were very much like, “Okay. Look. We know there’s nine things the song has to do.” Poor Lin. There are nine things the song has to do.

At one point there’s this document that was sent to him that was like, “Here’s just possible titles. This is my favorite.” I was like, “This is amusing, as a writer.” I think it’s alchemy, people who are able to write songs if they hear music or even how they – I felt so embarrassed every time I knew someone was reading one of these fake song poems I was trying to do, like I’m in a coffee shop, on a stage.

We sent the following: “Here’s just some possible titles.” Why? But anyway. “Set Sail. I’ll Find My Way. I Know My Way. I Learn Too Well. Why Not Now? If Not Now, When? To Sail is Life. I Want to Sail. The Next Step. The Biggest Step. I Hear You. My Life’s at Sea. My Dream is to Sail. The Far Horizon. Beyond the Reef. The Endless Beyond. Beyond the Edge of Nowhere. There’s Somewhere There Past Nowhere. I Am Moana: Daughter of the Sea. My Life, My Ocean. A Different Voice. A Different Song. A Different Rhythm.” Just take that, Lin.

**John:** Some of those are terrible, but some of those actually totally make sense. You can completely imagine some of those things being that “I want” song. I saw this in France. When I saw it, it was Vaiana. She wasn’t Moana.

**Pamela:** You know why, yes?

**John:** I know why, because Moana was a porn star in Italy, I think, and then also a trademark in other places. In Europe, it’s just Vaiana. It always was Vaiana. My question is, I don’t remember, is this the second song? Because classically, the “I want” song in a musical is the second song. There’s a “welcome to the world” song that sets up the whole universe, and then this is the second song. Is it the second song in Moana?

**Pamela:** I don’t think it is, because you’ve got We Know the Way and Where You Are. Let’s see. Track listing, it’s number four, but that’s I think because of the opening sound.

**John:** That’s score stuff.

**Pamela:** Yeah, score stuff. It might be How Far I’ll Go is after Where You Are. That’s the thing. Where You Are, this is the “perfect world” song. That’s it. We Know the Way used to always open. It was the first song they wrote as a team. It was so great. We were like, “This is it.” It was considered, “This is how the movie has to open,” which then your third song would be a want song, which feels a little late.

**John:** It does feel a little bit late.

**Pamela:** She also used to sing a song before that of who Maui was. There was a whole Maui song too.

**John:** No, that’s not gonna work.

**Pamela:** It was a lot. It was a lot.

**John:** I could’ve come into the room and said, “It’s not gonna work.”

**Pamela:** It was an Act 1 break. She was singing like, “I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta find my way. I hope my dad doesn’t mind. I hope he’s not mad at me. I’ve gotta get this right. I think this is who I am, and I won’t know if I don’t go see it.” It was that want song. It was a little like, “I want to know if this feeling inside me is okay to have.”

**John:** Which is a good thought. That actually holds through into How Far I’ll Go, which is like, “I feel this tension, because I love everything here and yet I am completely drawn out there. I want to be a good daughter, and yet I feel like I can’t be.” Those are real things.

Let’s talk for a moment about the article by Mark Harris called How Bad Could It Get for Hollywood, really looking at the futures of YouTube and TikTok, coming down to the idea that young Americans aren’t thinking about movies and television in the same way, and so the industry that we’ve built to entertain people is in danger of being supplanted by a video that they’re watching that is not created by studios and, of course, union writers. What did you take from this?

**Pamela:** I feel like, oh, here’s this article again. I don’t know. Is that okay to say?

**John:** I would generally agree with you. You’re safe to predict doom and gloom every year.

**Pamela:** It’s TV and film. There’s another one going on, video games. It’s all the doom and gloom of all the things. It’s all supposed to be really bad. I feel like I’m always in whatever is the version – wherever they’re complaining that it’s over and it’s dead is where I’m employed. That seems to be-

**John:** Always good.

**Pamela:** Then they’re like, “You’re not getting employed. Over here, this is where the people are really employed.” I don’t really read these, because I don’t take them into… My husband is someone who will be like, “Your job’s [unintelligible 00:52:36].” Even this article that you’ve linked I kind of read with one eye squinting, because I don’t want it to get in my heart or my head.

**John:** There’s always an existential threat, which is basically that people are gonna stop watching the stuff that we’re making, and because people have a certain number of hours in the day, they’re gonna spend those hours doing things that are not movies or television.

The prediction that the actual movies will fail and that no one will go to the movie theaters anymore – is attendance down? Sure. But there’s still something kind of great about being in a public space with people all watching the same things. Even my teenage daughter does like doing that at times. She loves TikTok. She loves YouTube. But there’s something great about the event of everyone staring at the same screen, watching a thing.

There’s something appealing about television events that get everyone watching the same thing and talking about the same thing. There’s reasons why that works and will probably continue to work. And yet I think we do need to be mindful that there’s new threats pulling at people’s attention. And that attention could make it harder for some of the economics of our business to work.

**Pamela:** Yeah. You’ve really said it. We can all like a TikTok, but we can’t all go watch a TikTok and talk about it together and go on a date to TikTok. There’s still communal events. They’re still bringing us together. And if they’re the kinds of things that people are talking about, you’ve gotta go do the thing, to see the thing to be able to talk about it too.

That being said, I was at a friend’s house recently where they just had on the television two things from YouTube. One was a screensaver that they just had on. Every once in a while the neon sign in the image would blink, and they’d all be like, “Yay.” They’d also watch marble runs where it’s elaborate. I just said, “Why do we work so hard?” Someone in that house was also in the industry. No, they both are. I was like, “Why do we work so hard? You guys just sit here and watch marble runs.” They were like, “Look at it go. Yay.”

**John:** That’s so nice.

**Pamela:** Yay. There’s that element to what we make too, of can you shut off your head and have fun. I think that’s what the Eras Tour is proving, like, “Oh my gosh. We just want Barbie. Let’s go have fun.” They certainly tried to make Oppenheimer seem like a rollicking good time. “Let’s go out and have fun.” And it worked, because people were ready to do that.

**John:** We have some listener questions here that are perfect for Pamela Ribon, our guest today. Drew, start us off.

**Drew:** Lark in Virginia writes, “Recently I’ve been doing some rewrites for a series pilot, and as I’ve been going back, I’ve been considering how this show may be if it was animation instead of live action. Just how different is writing animation compared to live action? Do you still follow the formula in terms of writing on the page? How have things changed with writing for animation now in the after-days of the strike? I feel like there are more eyes on both the WGA in both a good way and a bad way and more awareness towards TAG in general.”

**John:** We’ve talked a lot about, for writing animation, even in this episode, if you actually look at a script for an animated series and a live action series, they’re not different. Animated half-hours, like a Simpsons, is double spaced in ways, but otherwise it’s the same kind of formatting all throughout.

**Pamela:** I didn’t even think that this was a format question, because the formulas – you’re writing scripts for telling stories. They’re the same. Your budget is different, maybe. Maybe. They’re pretty expensive too. The character talking might be a cat, so that’s different. But no, you don’t write it differently. You ask yourself, does it need to be animated? That’s what’s different mostly.

**John:** There’s an animated series that I may be doing here soon. You’re figuring out how you’re going to do it, because when you say animation, there’s 15 different things and ways you could be doing an animated series. They have different costs and different requirements. But the actual script, the stuff that you’re writing, that’s not gonna change that much. That feels the same between live action and animation.

Rarely do you see a script that was written for live action that you can just immediately take and then just turn into animation. You’re gonna make some different choices just based on how audiences see things, how stuff fits together, how transitions work. You tend to write knowing something’s gonna be animated or non-animated. If you’re a person who can write live action, you’re a person who can write animation, and vice versa.

The differences and challenges is that writing something how you guys were writing Moana was a much more iterative process than what a writer would normally encounter. That’s something you have to deal with, and being good with – you said like, here’s a bundle of ideas that you know are gonna change. That’s a very different experience.

**Pamela:** I would say it still happens in live action too. When it is, you’re still like, “Iterative.” That’s just the word that I hear a lot now. But yes, in animation, it is kind of the point of it, and particularly if you’re coming around during development, before the thing is in actual production, which then is still in reels. You’re never really shooting a thing. You’re never shooting it. That’s it, John.

**John:** That’s the thing is you’re never shooting and you’re never really in post. It’s all one blurry thing. There’s development, which there can still be an artist in that time, but it’s before you have this expectation of like, we’re really making this thing. But even when they say they’re really making the thing, they may not be making the thing. Nimona, it sounds like they were kind of making the thing, and then they decided they weren’t making the thing, and then, luckily, someone else said, “Sure, we’ll make the thing.”

**Pamela:** I think of scenes that we made and finished in Ralph Breaks the Internet that were done in animation for the most part and then got cut. That’s that. Then you’re like, “Post-credit sequence.”

**John:** Yay.

**Pamela:** “Yay. We’ll still use it.” It’s never being shot.

**John:** We had Jennifer Lee on to talk about Frozen. They were way down the road in a lot of stuff, and they made giant changes. There are sequences that they couldn’t go back through and completely redo, that are just – they’re not quite the same movie, and yet you roll with it because you roll with it. I think it was the abominable snowman sequence. It’s like, it’s not kind of the same movie, those aren’t kind of the same characters, and yet it works, because it needs to work. They did not have the time to go back through and completely change that the way they would want to change that. You’re always making those choices. In that way, it feels more like traditional film and TV, where you shot a thing, and you gotta make it work in the editing room.

**Pamela:** Sometimes you’re just so close that you really are the only one who’s noticing. In its whole, people are like, “Yay.” But this question of how have things changed with writing for animation now in the after-days of the strike – nothing.

**John:** Nothing. Here’s what I would say is different. One of the best things about the strike for me were the days that I was at, generally, Warner Bros and would see a zillion TAG, The Animation Guild, folks out there on the picket line with us. I know you’ve pushed hard for improving conditions for writers working under TAG contracts. I think there was a sense of WGA versus TAG. That’s a ridiculous dichotomy. Really, the case is you want things to be WGA and TAG, because TAG is not just folks who are writing animation, but it’s all the other folks who are working in animation. It’s storyboard artists and other crucial people in animation. We would love to see movies and TV shows that have WGA writers who have the full protections and credits and residuals for the writing that they’re doing, and those projects have full TAG union members getting everything else done. We want union animation.

**Pamela:** Yes, we’re union parity. Putting it under TAG doesn’t mean I don’t have the same kind of protections and residuals that I would’ve had if you had made it WGA. Since TAG can’t free their writers, then that was what needs to happen within TAG. But not just writers. There are many, many members of TAG who are not being treated appropriately, which is why TAG might go on strike.

It is nice that it is less thinking that, “I thought everybody was WGA,” or, “I had no idea that most of you were being forced to work without a union at all, depending on the studio.” And I think just also an awareness of what a union does. But I think TAG still has a long way to go for people to understand and respect its union members.

**John:** Obviously, those negotiations are starting right now. TAG is part of larger IATSE, but TAG also has its own contracts it negotiates. It’s complicated. But we need to be mindful of it and just never pretend that writing animation is lesser than writing live action.

**Pamela:** That’s right. The things we were on strike for in the WGA are what does happen in TAG now.

**John:** Exactly.

**Pamela:** AI is already in TAG. It’s happening there. I’ve seen it. A lot of these protections that we were on strike about are because we know it can happen, because it does happen in animation.

**John:** Minimum staff size, for an example, we would talk to TAG animation writers, showrunners who basically could not hire any writing staff, and so were basically having to do everything themselves. That’s a danger you want to avoid in live action so that you don’t have showrunners just melting down because they don’t have the writing support they need.

**Pamela:** As a for instance.

**John:** As a for instance. As one of many for instances. Let’s do our One Cool Things. I’m so excited to see what you have for your One Cool Thing.

**Pamela:** I know you lived in Paris for some time. As an adult, you can do things that you didn’t get to do in high school, like learn French. Once I started going to the Annecy Animation Festival in France, I was like, “I want to keep coming back here, but I want to know more French every time.”

There’s this place called Coucou. Coucou French classes are based in Los Angeles and New York, where a lot of writers live. Coucou has two locations in LA, I think Silver Lake and their new one is in Culver City. But they’re also online. This is a way to learn French that has a lot of… For me I’ve always done it online, although there’s one down the street. We get together. We are conversing. We are learning. They have all different fun ways to practice your French. They send out newsletters for, “Here are some French rom-coms to watch.” They have little classes in poetry, book reading, flower arrangement. It is what if learning another language was a fun community as opposed to something you did alone and got confused about.

**John:** Going beyond just talking to Duolingo every day and making that little green owl happy.

**Pamela:** See, because Duolingo is a slot machine. Duolingo is the Vegas of language learning. I think it’s pretty cool to jam it in there. The Pimsleur method has its own way. But those are lonely tasks. I invite you to the Coucou community. There’s private lessons. There’s group classes. There’s workshops and events. You can walk down to your little French location and hang out and have a baguette. It’s fun.

**John:** That’s awesome. That’s fun. My One Cool Thing is a video I saw this past week by David Friedman. He was looking at the Fox sitcom ‘Til Death, which I remember the title, but I never saw a single frame of that sitcom. The video talks through the fact that ‘Til Death made it to four seasons, not because anybody was watching it, but because Sony, who was making the show, made a deal with Fox to say, “We’ll give it to you for free.” They just wanted to hit that 100 episodes so they could hit syndication.

In that fourth season, they had a new showrunner. Because no one was watching, they could just make some really weird, wild swings. Characters became aware that they were on a sitcom. They just did some things you shouldn’t be able to do in a sitcom, that were kind of fun and interesting. I don’t need to go back and watch the sitcom, but I do enjoy Friedman’s exploration of how strange this sitcom got, because it was just allowed to get so strange.

The other thing I thought was interesting was a blog post Friedman did about how he constructed it, because this was 80 hours of video to watch. He didn’t want to watch the whole sitcom. He built a script that went through and figured out which cast members were in which things, because they kept changing out cast members, and basically built an Excel spreadsheet that showed where the changes were, so that he could just look at those moments and not have to watch the whole thing, which was just very smart and felt very much like how I would do it. I enjoyed the video and his explanation behind the scenes.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Vincent DeVito. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes to this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

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 Pamela and I are about to talk through on the Oscars and attending the Oscars and how fun the Oscars are. But that couldn’t be as much fun as having Pamela on again as a co-host here. An absolute delight getting to chat with you about these things.

**Pamela:** So much fun. I can’t wait to come back again. I hope you invite me. Thank you.

**John:** We will. Also, remind us where we can find you, because you have your other podcast as well. Talk through, how do we find you?

**Pamela:** My other podcast, like this is one of mine – I’ll take it. I cohost a podcast called Listen to Sassy, where we go through every issue of the beloved ’90s magazine, that you can find all about at Listen to Sassy – I was like, “Is it dot-com or dot-net? Hold on.” It’s dot-com. Of course it is. Listentosassy.com. I don’t go to Twitter.

**John:** I stopped Twitter too.

**Pamela:** You can find me on Instagram @pamelaribon. Listen to Sassy is a great way to hear more about what it’s like from the years when you talked like this.

**John:** Perfect.

**Pamela:** You know what else though? If you do want to watch My Year of Dicks, it’s at myyearofdicks.com.

**John:** I love it. Everyone should watch it. It’s so, so good. People will tell me, “Oh, Pamela Ribon was on the show, and I finally watched My Year of Dicks. It was really good.” I’m like, “Yes, I told you that last summer.”

**Pamela:** You guys were very early supporters. I thank you. I don’t know that we would – segue – be getting to the Oscars without you, so thank you so much.

**John:** Hooray.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The Oscars. You were just at the Oscars. This is your second time at the Oscars, because you were nominated for My Year of Dicks. This time I saw you on Instagram in the back of other people’s photos. I’ve been to the Oscars a couple times, but only in the balcony stuff, because I’ve never had a thing nominated. Talk to us about your Oscars experience either of these two years.

**Pamela:** Who’s counting? This is the fourth film I’ve worked on that’s been nominated for an Oscar.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Pamela:** But only the second time I had tickets. That’s how it goes. Last year when we were nominees, we were seated where you go. It’s kind of the mezzanine. You’re not all the way down there. Through a series of surprise events, I ended up way down there in the orchestra. Listen. I don’t think it’ll ever be more fun, unless I ever win an Oscar, to go to the Oscars. It was a most unexpected place to find myself. We could talk about the two different versions.

**John:** I want the celebrity-filled glamour version. This most recent version, paint the scene. Who was around you? You were very close to Charlize Theron and a bunch of other folks.

**Pamela:** Yes. I assumed it was like Forrest Gump really. “What’s Pam doing there?” In the past, usually my friends will go, “Are you at the Oscars?” and I’ll have to say, “That is Patricia Arquette.” This year it really threw my friends off, because they were like, “I knew you were going, but I knew you weren’t supposed to be seen, so what are you doing behind Charlize Theron?”

I asked an usher, “Where are these seats?” They said, “They’re down there.” I thought, “That’s a mistake. I’ll keep walking and figure out what that means,” because they said O means orchestra. I was like, “Okay. These letters don’t make any sense, because this says F.” Truly, someone was like, “The stage is A, and you’re at F,” slowly explained to me, which is what I needed, because at this point my eyes were exploding, because I’m like, “That’s Slash. Why is Slash here?” That’s the first thing I saw was a hat.

**John:** Are you at the right awards show? Is this the Grammys?

**Pamela:** I was like, “That’s Nicholas Cage.” Nothing made sense for a second, because, again, once you see Slash’s hat, you stop making sense. Then I saw Eugene Lee Yang, and their outfit was this Billy Porter-esque red suit-gown. I was like, “Oh, that’s the Nimona group.” Then they pointed me that way. Then I sat next to Lloyd, who’s another one of the credited writers.

And then Riz, who was going to sit next to me, had not been seated yet, so I didn’t know it was gonna be him. But right before I left the house, I thought, “Riz Ahmed did us a real service by making announcing My Year of Dicks a viral event,” and so I had a little thank you dick for him, because I’m classy. I have these little crystal dicks – Malala also has one – that I give out when you come near My Year of Dicks and help it out in some way. I thought, “Whatever, I’ve kept this one for Riz. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll see him after the after-party or something.” Then he’s sitting next to me.

The first thing I do, because I don’t know, I’m like, “They’re certainly gonna kick me out of this seat,” because I turned to Lloyd, I’m like, “The writers don’t get to sit here. Someone’s made a mistake. I don’t know what’s going on. Thank you, Netflix, to the Academy. But regardless, we’re not gonna mess this up.” That’s all I kept saying, “We’re not gonna mess this up,” because that is Steven Spielberg sitting next to me, and I’m in front of the Poor Things team. And I don’t even know yet that Christopher Nolan is to my left. I’m too busy. Lloyd is doing the same thing. He’s like, “Pam, I see Jennifer Lawrence.” It’s so wild. I’m like, “That is Bradley Cooper.” It went Downey, Blunt, Cillian, Sir Ben Kingsley, Jon Batiste, Pam, like that makes any sense.

**John:** Do you have an explanation now of what happened?

**Pamela:** These are the seats. These are the seats that I was told to sit in. I was like, “Okay.” I would give out gum at breaks and then be like, “We’re getting rid of the gum when the commercials are over, because I am not gonna be gum girl.” I could really only see a number of memes happening, of me opening my mouth and just like, “Yeah, y’all,” just gums.

I will say I kept it together for the most part, but there was a moment when they were putting down all the lights in the aisle. They were just putting down a bunch of lights in the aisle. And I went, “The Kens are coming. The Kens are coming. The Kens are coming.” I turned to an usher. I went, “Right? I didn’t miss it?” How would I have missed it? Pam, you’ve been here the whole time. “The Kens are coming?” The guy goes, “The Kens are coming.” I was like, “Ah! It’s happening! [Unintelligible 01:13:01] Kens!” Which was such a chaotic moment that I didn’t really get to see his Ken piece, because they lift him in the air. We were under the show. I didn’t know the screen was telling people to grab flashlights and sing. I saw none of that. But it was still glorious. I highly recommend fifth row seats to the Oscars.

**John:** It’s good stuff.

**Pamela:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** I’ve been twice, I guess. The Oscars are fun in person. It’s different than watching them at home, because, obviously, during the commercial breaks, stuff is happening. I don’t know if during your awards they deliberately did stuff, or was it just everybody running for the bathrooms and the seat fillers coming in. But it’s fun when you’re – the off-camera moments are really delightful too.

**Pamela:** There was a lot of people getting up and walking around. I will say the year before when we were up in the mezzanine, which, wonderful seats, but when you’re a nominee for a category that has to move you, we were waiting for our category and then we didn’t know exactly when it was gonna be. Then they move you down to the seats that are for your category. There’s a camera on you that isn’t gonna be used or needed. Then you don’t win, and then the Oscars are over, really. That’s it. You’ve worked so hard, and then that moment happens, and you can go out to the lobby and have a drink and nurse your wounds. That is how I did it last year.

**John:** In this situation, Nimona could’ve won. Would you have gone up on stage if Nimona had won?

**Pamela:** We had been told by the team, “Hey, man, if we win, you guys, please, everybody come up,” which I’m pretty sure we would’ve. We would’ve been so excited. And we were a jumpable distance to the stage. But traditionally, no. Animation, they’re just like, “We can move on with this.”

It was the third category this year, so we also pretty early on were like, “That’s it. We just get to sit here and enjoy the show.” I don’t know if I had been back there with the rest of the team or even any – there were three different groups of Nimona all around in the Oscars. Probably we would’ve gone to find each other.

But we were so close that even Lloyd was like, “I think I’ll go get a drink,” and I was like, “Lloyd, look, if you leave, there’s a seat filler. Who knows what you’re gonna miss? I bet it’s Billie Eilish,” which it would’ve been. I said, “We’re just gonna sit here and be grateful for the shortest Oscars experience we’ll ever have.” It was over in a blink.

I thought watching it on my couch in my pajamas with my friends was fun. Going as a nominee but then not winning was its own kind of fun. This was fantastic. This was joyous. Miyazaki won. What are you gonna do? It wasn’t even the kind of thing where the winner is like, “Come on, that hack.”

**John:** You didn’t go into this with the expectation like, “Oh, we’re gonna beat Spider-Man and Miyazaki.”

**Pamela:** That’s pretty tough. The miracle of it existing – the studio was shut down. The miracle of it getting a nomination, which that requires your peers in the animation community to recognize the film and nominate it. There were a lot of wonderful films that year that didn’t make that final five. To win? How do you get all of the other branches to know about a movie on Netflix that didn’t have a theatrical release when you’re up against Spider-Verse and then Miyazaki? All of the short-list nominees really were contenders.

I saw Robert DeNiro. He did not have a good time at those Oscars. You could probably go and get jaded from it all, but I don’t know, for me – I love watching people win things in general, and particularly if they are young females. It’s just my favorite thing to watch is a young woman win something.

**John:** The editor of Oppenheimer, loved her.

**Pamela:** Absolutely. The girl with the short film. Any young woman clutching something she won is my favorite thing. The Oscars this year, it was a pretty – then I’m like, no, not every film was a happy, happy film, obviously, but there was an atmosphere down there of, “The show’s about to begin, and I think it’s gonna be a good time.”

**John:** It was a good time. It was a good show.

**Pamela:** Nicholas Cage was right in front of me. I couldn’t stop. Maybe you don’t know this. Why would you? When I was a little girl, my imaginary friends were all celebrities.

**John:** Wow.

**Pamela:** I moved a lot. You’d make a friend, and then you’d lose touch with her. But these celebrities always moved with me, time to time. There have been a couple of times in life when I’ve worked with someone who was my imaginary friend when I was a kid. I don’t tell all of them that, but I do wait, if there is a moment, and I let them know, because why not? But this was what it looked like when I was a little kid going to bed, and I had all my imaginary friends hanging out with me before bedtime. This is the closest to that experience.

**John:** Pam, you didn’t win an Oscar, but you’ve won the Oscars. You probably had the most fun of anyone there, and I love that.

**Pamela:** I will say then, here’s this Charlize moment. She wasn’t sitting in front of me. Jon Batiste was sitting in front of me. Then he went to go do his song, and then some seat fillers were sitting in front after that. Then at one point this beautiful woman is walking toward me. I’ve seen Charlize Theron more than once in person. Never I’ve spoken to her. But every time the same thing happens in my head, which is, “Does she live in my neighborhood? Does she have kids at my school?”

**John:** Totally.

**Pamela:** I don’t know why. Then she sat down. Lloyd’s like, “That’s Charlize Theron.” I was like, “That’s a seat filler. We know this.” He goes, “You can’t see what I can see. 100 percent, Charlize Theron is sitting directly in front of you.”

Then they started passing out these little tequila bottles, and they said, “There’s gonna be a toast.” That’s all we knew. You get used to these cameras moving around to position themselves in front of nominees or Steven Spielberg for the bit. The cameras were whipping around the front. The bit began with Jimmy, of like, “This is my wife, Charlize Theron.” As soon as he said, “My wife, Charlize Theron,” Lloyd elbows me, goes, “We’re definitely about to be on TV.” But I already had figured this out. I was just like, “You guys, act the part.” The actor in me went, “And we’re on.” Then the camera came up for her reaction shot. I was like, “You’re not gonna mess this up.” I’m just like, “My role is audience lady behind Charlize.”

**John:** Absolutely. You’re gonna be present but not necessarily in focus.

**Pamela:** You can totally see it in the clip. You can see me go, “And we’re live.” I wasn’t gonna mess it up. I wasn’t gonna be gum girl. I wasn’t gonna get kicked out of those seats. It was an honor and a privilege to be in a scene at the Academy Awards. Please ask me back. Riz and I were like, “I think every year.” We’re like, “Every year.”

**John:** Every year.

**Pamela:** He’s like, “Next year, what if we’re two rows up?” I said, “Maybe we have to make something to do that.” I said, “But I’m fine with that, as long as two years from now we’re on stage announcing best animated short film.”

**John:** Love it.

**Pamela:** These are the goals.

**John:** Pam, congratulations again. Yay. Thank you for sharing your Oscar experience.

**Pamela:** Thanks. I can’t wait to hear your next one.

**John:** Yay.

Links:

* [Pamela Ribon](https://pamie.com/) on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/pamelaribon/)
* [Listen to Sassy](https://listentosassy.com/)
* [My Year of Dicks](https://myyearofdicks.com/)
* [Nimona](https://www.netflix.com/title/81444554) on Netflix
* [Hire Survivors Hollywood](https://hiresurvivorshollywood.org/)
* [Dune: Part Two Clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZpGLqLoBJA)
* [‘Fundie Baby Voice’ Seems To Be Everywhere Now. Here’s What You Should Know](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fundie-baby-voice_l_65eb6b2fe4b05ec1ccd9e9b9) by Caroline Bologna for Huffpost
* [In a World – Smoothie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvficd_IxBc)
* [Natural Born Killers 1990 Draft](https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/Natural_Born_Killers.PDF)
* [Natural Born Killers 1993 Draft](https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/natural-born-killers_shoot.html)
* [Lin-Manuel Miranda on ‘I Want’ Songs, Going Method for ‘Moana’ and Fearing David Bowie](https://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/lin-manuel-miranda/)
* [More (Outtake)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGtjl5YbPdQ) from Moana
* [How Far I’ll Go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPAbx5kgCJo) from Moana
* [How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood?](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/opinion/oscars-hollywood-extinction-event.html) by Mark Harris for NYT
* [This Sitcom Got WEIRD When Nobody Watched It](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkGsk6RBSgg) by David Friedman
* [Researching An Old Sitcom With AI](https://ironicsans.beehiiv.com/p/researching-old-sitcom-ai) by David Friedman
* [Coucou French classes](https://coucoufrenchclasses.com/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Vincent DeVito ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont, 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/636standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 620 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what is it about this moment at the end of 2023 that feels so uncertain, so unsettled? We’ll discuss how we’re feeling about the industry and beyond. We also have follow-up on advice we gave listeners in previous episodes, and new questions on composite characters, anecdotes, and sustaining a D&D group. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we are going to freestyle an introduction to the Scriptnotes book, the first draft of which, Craig, is due in January.

**Craig:** Oh, no. I haven’t done anything.

**John:** It’s a nightmare where you wake up and you realize the exam is happening.

**Craig:** I haven’t studied.

**John:** You forgot to drop the class.

**Craig:** My essay isn’t finished.

**John:** The book is in good shape, but we don’t have an introduction. Most of the book is really just based on our transcripts. We will have a freestyle discussion, and that’ll become the introduction to the book.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** People can hear it here first. First, Drew, we have some follow-up on previous people who wrote in with questions.

**Drew Marquardt:** We heard back from Ghosted, who is no longer ghosted. They wrote, “I just wanted to write in with an encouraging follow-up. After having been ghosted by the studio for six months when a film I wrote disappeared off a streaming site, the director emailed today to tell me that it is now available to rent and buy on Apple and Amazon. Thank you for encouraging me to go directly to the director and to contact the WGA about my concerns over not having a copy of my work. I did both, and I’m not sure if it led to this outcome, but at least it helped me feel less helpless.”

**Craig:** That’s quite good.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** I think people, especially in Hollywood, we’re trained early on to, “Don’t overdo it. Don’t write in too much.” That can sometimes turn into utter passivity. Don’t be scared.

**John:** Just in my own life this past week, I had heard back about this project. I got news through my agent about, “Oh, it’s sort of unsettled here. We’re not really quite sure.” It’s like, “I’m just going to text the producer and ask.”

**Craig:** Yeah, “What’s going on?”

**John:** It nudged things forward. Don’t feel like you’re going to be a dick to ask about what’s going on.

**Craig:** There’s a difference between shy and weak. You’re allowed to be shy while you’re asking people questions. It’s perfectly fine. You can be a little nervous, especially if you’re new, because we’ve all heard the stories of the person that emailed every day, three times a day, because they had gone to persistence school or whatever. Nobody likes them. But you’re not that person, shy lady or guy. You’re just a little reluctant.

**John:** Good. Our next bit of follow-up is a similar vein here. This is from Ben.

**Drew:** Ben writes, “I was the person whose boss’s boss’s boss forwarded my script to a creative executive at the studio I work at as an office coordinator. The creative executive loved my script, and I had a general meeting with him. Here’s what happened in the past year. I took John and Craig’s advice and emailed my new creative executive friend and asked him if he could send my script, along with his general good feelings and approval, to an agent he would feel to be best suited for me. The creative executive never emailed me back. That’s fine.”

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**Drew:** “He’s super busy, and he probably just didn’t have an answer for me, so I just continued to write. I decided to write a middle-grade novel as my grad school thesis. I’m happy to report that not only did I graduate with my MFA, I also currently have interest from seven publishing agents.

“However, after the strike ended, I reached out to my creative executive friend. He seemed excited to hear from me. We got on Zoom to talk. When he asked me what I was working on, I said I had a comedy pilot. He said he’d love to read it. I sent it to him, but it’s been two months, and I haven’t heard back. Not sure what to do about that, but my instinct tells me to simply wait it out and keep writing. My dad always says it’ll work out for you, just not in the way you think it will, and I’m going to go with that.”

**Craig:** Your dad’s very Zen.

**John:** Your dad is very Zen. Dad may be a little bit too Zen, for two months.

**Craig:** I agree. Dad’s moving towards just flat-lining there.

**John:** I would say it’s worth following up with the creative executive, say, “Hey, checking in to see if you’ve had a chance to read that pilot I sent through to you. Also, some good news on this front that this book I wrote seems to be attracting some interest.”

**Craig:** There’s another possibility, which is that he’s just not that into you. There is always that situation where maybe there’s an initial spark of interest, and then it dies down. You have to accept that that’s a possibility. In our business, people get very excited very quickly about things, a little bit like overdramatic people in their love lives, just fall in love within seconds, and then two weeks later, they’re like, “Who?” You may have just caught a spike, and the spike is gone. That’s okay. Really, the advice here is don’t just rely on this one connection. Start looking for another one.

**John:** You need to date around some, Ben.

**Craig:** This well may have run dry.

**John:** Yeah, which is fine and fair. That absolutely does happen. That is not a crisis for you. I like that, Ben, you went back and just kept writing, which is crucial.

**Craig:** That’s the key.

**John:** You did a new thing, which is important. That will get you far in life, we’ll hope. It’s time for my thesis for this episode. Craig, I’m going to lay this out. We haven’t talked about this at all ahead of time. I’m curious what you think.

My belief is that, as people, we go through life with this expectation that next month, next year, all of the tomorrows will be largely as they are today, and while there will be change, we can generally anticipate what those changes are going to be and incorporate them into our vision of the future, because we are nothing more than a predictive species. We think, “What’s going to happen tomorrow? What’s going to happen next season?”

For example, every year, we can anticipate there’s going to be a new iPhone. It will be faster. The camera will be better. But it’s not going to fundamentally transform society. It’s not going to change our personal lives. We’re not going to put off next year’s vacation because, “Oh, I don’t know what the next iPhone is going to be like.” That would be absurd.

But then there are changes that do transform society. Sometimes those are slow enough that we don’t really notice that they’re happening. You and I were both around for the start of the internet. The internet did change everything, and yet it was a very slow roll-out. It didn’t feel like day after day-

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** … we had to anticipate things are going to be vastly different in our lives. Even when Amazon came or when Napster came, yeah, it was new stuff, but it didn’t fundamentally transform how we thought about the future.

But then there have been some moments that were really abrupt shocks, where things feel like, “Oh, I just don’t know what’s going to happen next.” 9/11 was one of those. We talked about the 2016 election. We did that special episode after that, because it was hard to envision how things were going to fit. The pandemic was another thing. It totally knocked us off track. We just didn’t know what life would be like after that, how would we get back to a normal space.

What I’m feeling right now, as we’re recording this at the end of November 2023, is a different but kind of related sensation. It’s that we’re not in one moment of particular crisis – this is not a pandemic, this is not a 9/11 – but I feel like personally, as an industry, I’m having a harder time envisioning the future than I normally would. Some of that is obviously just coming out of the strikes and knowing how stuff is going to start up again. Some of it is the upcoming election. A fair amount of it is AI stuff. But I feel like we’re in this moment of unprecedented uncertainty.

I’m out pitching a movie right now. In a best-case scenario, we might start shooting in 2025, may come out in 2026. I’m having a harder time envisioning 2025 and 2026 than I should be, what two or three years from now is going to look like. That’s just the vibes I’m feeling, this unspecified anxiety. I thought we’d talk through this on a couple different axes. I’m curious whether you’re feeling anything similar, Craig.

**Craig:** To an extent. I have a little bit more certainty in my career, because I basically am parked at a place, making a thing. Unless there’s a dramatic upheaval where nobody wants to watch any television at all, my future’s stuck in a place for a few years. However, it’s very easy for me to go, let’s just play the game. Let’s say you’re not making the show, and I’m not parked at a place. I would absolutely be feeling this uncertainly.

First of all, there’s been a lot of movement in terms of who runs places. Things have changed across the board in that regard. Also, I think you could just feel in the air that Netflix is experiencing things. I don’t know how you would describe their experience of things. There was an article that came out. I don’t know if you read this article about Carl Rinsch.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’s incredible. It’s Ringe or Rinsch. Carl Rinsch, he directed that movie 47 Ronin.

**John:** Now I know what you’re talking about. The recap of this, I believe, is that he directed a movie called 47 Ronin, a Keanu Reeves movie that was a bomb. Then Netflix said, “Sure, we’ll make this series with you.”

**Craig:** They won a bidding war with Amazon. He went out with this idea for a series, and they gave him, ultimately, $55 million, and they did not get a series. Apparently, at one point, he asked for an injection of cash to help him keep going. It was $11 million, which by the way, I didn’t know you could do that. Did you know you could call a studio and just say, “I need $11 million.” They gave it to him.

**John:** To him.

**Craig:** To his production company, and then he used it to bet on crypto.

**John:** And actually made money on bets on crypto.

**Craig:** Made money and then bought Rolls Royces and just went insane.

**John:** We should specify, we are not saying he went insane. Insane things happened, based on this. We read an article.

**Craig:** I’m following the article. I’m not a psychologist. When I say he went insane, I mean he definitely did things in an unorthodox fashion. Netflix, it seems like that’s the way they used to operate, so that was how it went. That is not at all how it goes now. All of these places seem to have finally realized that the Netflix business plan was not a very good plan. Everybody is contracting and trying to figure out what they’re going to do with streaming. No one really knows. All they know is that they have taught everyone to watch everything that way.

Because I work for HBO, I know that there are still linear viewers, people that get HBO on a satellite dish or through cable, and programs come on at an hour on a certain night. It’s a larger amount than you would think, but if you watch the graph, it’s going down as people die. There’s usually one year of paying for DIRECTV after someone dies before they realize they’ve got to cut it off.

I have no idea what’s going on. Disney bought Hulu. Disney bought Fox. Marvel, which used to be the most blue chip brand in Hollywood, seems to be a little tarnished right now in terms of performance.

**John:** [Crosstalk 10:51] what’s going to happen with their next set of movies.

**Craig:** Yeah. The latest one just did not do very well. Star Wars has been stumbling around for a while. Also, weirdly, Pixar. I’m not picking on Disney here. It’s just they happen to own everything. Pixar, which used to be the most reliable brand, feels like it’s swallowing its own tail at this point. People don’t really seem to care the way they used to. Then we have these black swan events, like Barbie, because Barbie, people were like, “Well, of course.” No.

**John:** That was not a given at all.

**Craig:** No. Every movie that’s made from a toy generally stinks. Barbie was Lego Movie-ish in its surprise-ness, and so was Oppenheimer, a movie that theoretically would only appeal to older men that watch the History Channel. Nobody knows anything has become even more powerful. I should say nobody KNOWS anything.

**John:** You gotta emphasize the right word.

**Craig:** Nobody KNOWS anything. I’m with you. I don’t feel comfortable predicting, by the way. If we do our, “Hey, let’s predict-”

**John:** No, no, no. I think that’s actually my point is that, in general, you could make some predictions and feel relatively good about, it’s going to fall within this range. I don’t have a good sense of what the range of acceptable predictions would be for the next couple of years.

We were talking about Marvel films underperforming. Someone brought up in a podcast recently that Marvels was an expensive movie, but Killers of the Flower Moon was just as expensive of a movie, and we don’t talk about that as being a disappointment, because it was made for Apple. We just have the entry of these huge companies who have no… It doesn’t actually really matter to them whether a movie makes money. That’s a huge difference from the last 20 years that you and I have been in the industry.

**Craig:** Normally, when people come into Hollywood, they are absolutely trying to make money. Apple, with Killers of the Flower Moon, definitely felt like they were making a prestige play and an Oscar play. A lot of it is about, these companies want to be taken seriously. They understand that, in a weird way, awards and things like that do confer a legitimacy. If Apple can win Best Picture, that’s a big deal. It means other filmmakers are going to want to go there and do that.

Killers of the Flower Moon was not intended to be a blockbuster, whereas every Marvel film is intended to be a blockbuster. In a year, there may be 20 more superhero movies that do great, but it does feel like the curve on superhero movies, that we are on the way down. We haven’t started to crest. We crested, it feels like to me. It finally happened: the glut of Westerns killed the Western. Hollywood just loves to overeat.

**John:** I feel like, Craig, on any of our prior 10 years of doing this show, we could’ve talked about the trends in genres and things like that, like, oh, superhero movies are rising or falling. What’s different about this one is that a year ago, there wasn’t AI. There wasn’t AI in the sense that there is now.

It was exactly a year ago that ChatGPT came out. We had Rian Johnson on the show. We did that experiment where we talked about, “Oh, let’s imagine what the next thing would be.” What I can say to you listeners now is that there are parts we cut out of that episode, because afterwards, we were like, “That was really uncomfortable,” thinking about how this would mirror or not mirror a future movie that Rian would want to make.

Since that time, I haven’t used ChatGPT for anything, but we did have Nima, who works for us, train a model on the Scriptnotes transcripts, to figure out how well could it mimic what we would say about screenwriting.

**Craig:** How’d it do?

**John:** It was a mixed bag. Drew, you’d say it was not that impressive.

**Drew:** It would start, and the first two sentences would be sort of right, and then it would just devolve.

**John:** That will get better.

**Craig:** Good, because then you can replace me, seamlessly.

**John:** Craigbot.

**Craig:** Yeah, Craigbot.

**John:** The thing we found is that it was fluent but generic. Ultimately, it wasn’t very specific to what our experience would be. It wasn’t useful for doing the book. We thought it would be a good research tool for the book, like, go through this and see what we talked about in terms of character conflict. It really wasn’t bad. It wasn’t better than this, which is why Drew and Chris have had to kill themselves over the last six months to pull these chapters together.

AI overall is probably the root of a lot of the uncertainty I’m feeling about the future. Every other podcast for the last week has talked about Sam Altman’s ouster at OpenAI, which was a big episode of Succession.

**Craig:** His un-ouster.

**John:** His un-ouster there, which was really interesting. The conflict behind the scenes there really seemed to be about these two different movements, of the effect of altruism trying to slow down or stop progress on AI stuff, and the effect of accelerationism, which is basically, “No, no, let’s take off all the brakes and go wild.” It feels like it’s a philosophical question, wrestling about Terminator and to what degree we’re going to do that. That always felt like a science fiction premise. Now that it doesn’t feel like a science fiction premise is partly why I’m feeling really unclear about what the next couple years look like.

**Craig:** Asimov famously came up with his three laws of robotics. Even though our federal government is staffed primarily by dotards and morons and do-nothings, at some point the government is going to need to regulate this. It’s just inevitable, or we face our doom. It’s inevitable, of course. If it’s unchecked, it’s inevitable.

I wonder if the progress of AI is going to be hindered a little bit or go a little more slowly than we think, because… This is something you were saying about training the AI to do the transcripts. I wonder if quality – that is that feeling that this is human and intelligent – comes down to the last .1% of similarity, that there is just that one little, tiny, tiny thing that is really hard to get to. Obviously, if it’s unchecked, it’s unchecked, and it will get there. That’s inevitable.

**John:** We’re also in this moment right now where SAG is deciding whether to ratify their contract. That’s a bit here. We should say, for folks who haven’t been paying attention, the source of contention within SAG-AFTRA at this moment is really over the AI provisions and whether those are enough protections for performers.

**Craig:** I’m going to just make some statements here that I believe are true, based on my understanding of how labor law works. What isn’t really happening in the discussion over ratification is, “What happens if you say no?” because it’s a disaster if you say no. Basically, the way it works is the negotiators come back, and they say, “This is the deal we recommend.” Then the board says, “We agree. We are recommending that the membership vote yes, and we are also ending the strike.” All of that happened. As a SAG member, I would urge people to make their voices heard and to prepare for the next negotiation. I think that the vote will ratify.

**John:** I think it will ratify as well. I do think the discussion around this has been good and interesting, just because brand new terms were invented in this contract that make us really think about how we’re going to be dealing with non-human representations on screen. The two basic things – we talked through this stuff before on the sidecast – a digital replica is a representation of an actual performer who is there, and a synthetic performer is a made-up thing, a human-like character that has no basis in an actual person.

**Craig:** That’s right. On our show, for instance, I know that for certain large crowd scenes, we do use digital replicas to fill things in.

**John:** Probably digital replicas where you’re scanning an actual person.

**Craig:** We’re scanning an actual person.

**John:** An actual person.

**Craig:** In fact, creating a digital replica that is not based on the scan of an actual person is incredibly hard to do. It’s expensive and time-consuming. You want to scan actual actors. That makes your life so much easier, because once they’re scanned, you then have something that you can…

The other thing we do a lot of times is just shoot real people on green screen doing actions, running, jumping, turning, and then we can comp then in digitally and adjust, paint in something on their head or something like that.

Generally speaking, we’ve already been doing this. The horrible outcome that you want to avoid is, there was a movie where some kids were in a bleachers in a gym, and clearly Disney had just AI’ed in four people that were just nightmare, the kind of people you see in previs. It was horrifying. Yes, in schlock, I suppose that might be a problem, but generally speaking, for credible productions, we’re scanning real people.

**John:** Craig, forgive my ignorance, because you are shooting your show in Canada, and so obviously, your Americans actors are under a SAG contract, but for your background performers, is that a Canadian contract?

**Craig:** Yes. There’s a Canadian Actors Union. Most of the actors that we employ are Canadian. The Americans or the Brits we bring in for obviously certain… The thing is, it’s not like we’re like, “Oh, only Americans can get the good parts.” An example is Lamar Johnson, who played Henry in our show, is from Toronto. He’s Emmy-nominated for his performance. We’ll look in Canada. We’ll look in America. Most people on the show ultimately by number are Canadian, under Canadian acting contracts. We also have directors in the DGA. I’m a DGA director, so I direct under a DGA contract. Other directors that we had who were from overseas would direct under a Canadian Directors Guild contract.

**John:** A new aspect of the AI stuff, I want to talk about coverage. We have friends who write coverage. I started off writing coverage for, first, this little [indiscernible 21:01] Pictures. Then I was a paid reader for TriStar Pictures. Every day I would go into TriStar, pick up two scripts. I’d be paid $60 a script to write coverage on those.

**Craig:** Pretty sweet.

**John:** Pretty sweet job.

**Craig:** Not bad.

**John:** I’d drop those off the next day.

**Craig:** Not bad.

**John:** Coverage, of course, consists of a synopsis of the material, so generally a one-page typed-up synopsis, and then an analysis, half a page, three quarters of a page, talking through whether you recommended this, basically, what’s working in the script, what’s not working in the script. It’s a way for the executive who didn’t read the script, or read the script a week ago and doesn’t remember it, can have something to say about this thing. Also, it becomes something that is filed away, to say, “We did read this script. This is a person we’re [indiscernible 00:21:41] as a writer.”

Since ChatGPT came out, I thought, okay, that’s going to be a vulnerable job, because the kinds of writing you’re doing, and the synopsizing is something that ChatGPT seems really good at. You can just feed into it a script right now, and ChatGPT would write a reasonably good synopsis.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Last week, a listener wrote in saying that he had experience with this AI coverage thing. He was a screenwriter but got approached to beta test this screenwriting coverage tool. He said, “I thought it would suck, but I agreed to beta test it. I’m writing to you because it didn’t suck. I have the coverage it generated on one of my old specs that I can share with you if you want. It was generated in five minutes. While it had some generic beats, it felt like a huge step in how Hollywood might use AI, and it’s coming much sooner than expected.”
Craig, that is the pages you have in front of you right now. It has a log line. It shows genre, keywords, time period, occasion, setting, and then the script score, which I feel very nervous about, about character development, plot construction, dialog, originality, social engagement, theme, and message – those would be a grid that you would normally see on a top sheet of coverage – a synopsis, a short one, a long one, then it goes into premise and notes, some things about things you should be thinking about in terms of the characters and their archetypes. It has suggestions for main character casting, with name actors for these different roles, and comp movies to be thinking about in comparison. The writer who wrote in said this was all accurate. He felt like there was some generic stuff in here, but this clearly was really talking about the script that it had read.

**Craig:** I think that this is probably a good example of how stuff that’s not in that .1% is manageable. Most scripts are not great. Most scripts that get covered, probably 99.9% of them don’t get bought or produced. A lot of what coverage is is people presuming that a script is going to be bad, because it’s a safe bet, having somebody write something down, so that when they talk to the person who wrote it, they can sound like they knew that they read it, even though they didn’t, and look at some key things, or just simply not have to worry about passing it along or processing it. The question I have about this is, what does it do with Jerry Maguire.

**John:** I would say that experience as a reader at TriStar… I have my little database of all the coverage I wrote. I wrote like 100 pieces of coverage for them. I recommended two things, and I got called to the mat for both of those two things that I recommended. My job was to say no. My job was to say, “This is a pass because of X, Y, and Z.” Most of them were very easy passes, like, this was not a movie we were going to make. There was nothing so exciting about this writing that you say, “Okay, you should at least read this writer.” That is also my concern is that this is probably really good at saying no to stuff, and it’s going to miss things that would otherwise be exceptional.

**Craig:** I wonder also – because everything of course is machined, there is some sort of algorithm going on here – is it designed to basically always deliver you a balance? “Here’s what I like. Here’s what I didn’t like. Here are some numbers.” But you can’t get that passion thing. You can’t get the thing of like, “No, no, no. It’s completely messed up. There are 12 things that are really, really wrong with this. But the stuff that’s right is so blindingly, gorgeously right.” Does ChatGPT understand yet the difference between this needs work that will be really hard to do, or this needs some simple work to be incredible? That’s where I think it’s going to need some time. Pump the brakes, Sam. Apparently, all those people walked off the job because they, like Sam, were like, “Don’t pump the brakes.”

**John:** They also believed that they would follow Sam to another company, to do the work that they’re doing. In the case of OpenAI, it was that they believe that they were doing good things and that they were doing it in a safe manner.

**Craig:** That sounds culty to me.

**John:** People like us too. It’s always a cult with other people.

**Craig:** No, no, we have a cult.

**John:** We have a cult.

**Craig:** We’re cult leaders, for sure. We’re just very kind, benevolent cult leaders.

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** We demand nothing from our-

**John:** Maybe $5 a month.

**Craig:** We don’t even demand it. We gently suggest it.

**John:** If you want the Bonus Segment at the end of the episode.

**Craig:** Many of our cult followers say no.

**John:** Yeah, of course. Great. We should say that this coverage program is not ChatGPT, apparently. It’s based on a different thing. If this guy could do it, other people could do it. This is obviously coming. It’s here. Difficult to predict, but let’s talk about some of the repercussions of this existing. My job, which I was paid $60 a script for, would be on the line, because mostly what they’re paying me for is that synopsis and that critique. There’s no reason to do that. You should feed this thing in. What this is kicking out is as good as the stuff I was doing.

**Craig:** I think that if your job is to figure out how to mulch through a ton of scripts that you suspect are going to be bad, because you’re dealing with just general submissions, then yes, you’re going to want a machine to do it. You’re going to miss stuff, but then again, you knew you were missing stuff anyway, because you were paying people $60 an hour, most of whom were not John August.

**John:** It was $60 a script, not an hour.

**Craig:** Sorry, $60 a script, even better for the people paying. Most readers aren’t you. Hollywood is full of stories of people paying $60 to get coverage that says, “This stinks,” and it turned out to be Pulp Fiction. Those people will just continue their imperfect process without paying the $60 a script, but by paying, I don’t know, some licensing fee to whatever.

Where I think we are still going to need people are like people like our friend Kevin, who don’t just do coverage; they do story analysis. They are really there to essentially give the studio executives the notes that they give the writers. That is thoughtful. That is dramaturgical. That is also about understanding the breadth of cinema, reacting in real time to the audience and what their tastes are and how they feel. All of those things, that’s science. That’s much more connected to what we do, which is creating things.

I think it’s going to be a little time before this thing actually can spit out a reliable predicting number, because the other thing that’s going to happen, of course, is ChatGPT or its cousins will all agree that a script is a 3 out of 10, somebody nuts will make it, and it will be a blockbuster.

**John:** Everything Everywhere All At Once was a script that I feel like probably would not thrive in this environment. I love those guys to death, but it was a challenging script to read. That’s going to be an aspect of all of these situations.

I want to think about, if you are a producer, a director, anyone who’s getting sent stuff, if you are a showrunner who’s being sent stuff, it’s going to be hard not to say, first, pass this through here, and let that be the first filtering process. If that is going to be the first filtering process, every writer with a spec script is going to go to these things and say, “What is this system going to say about my thing?” That’s the different thing, because it would be one thing to go to a person who reads for a studio, does coverage, and say, “Hey, would you read this for me and tell me whether this would make it through?” Here, you’re going to pay your 5 bucks or whatever, submit it, and get this report back.

**Craig:** That’s a great point, that basically, if Hollywood switched over to this, it would be like they just pay $60 a script to one person to cover everything. If people can figure out who that guy is or who that girl is, then they’re just going to game it, because they know that person has a certain kind of taste.

**John:** You could just iterate, iterate, iterate, just get the script up to the point where it gets the highest score possible off of this. Is that good for you, or for cinema? I don’t think so.

**Craig:** The thing is, it’s inevitable that some script is going to get a 10 across the board, and people are going to make it, but while people are making it, the other humans are like, “This stinks. This is the emperor and his new clothes. This is not a 10 out of 10.” It’s just something the computer liked.

**John:** It’s also important to remember that all programs are based on large language models or things that are churning images too. Often, they’re based on some sort of seed. There’s a random number that is being created. That becomes the underlying pattern for how it’s going to be doing some stuff. If you were to feed the same script through three times, you might get three different answers, just like you might get three different answers from readers. I think we’re going to be chasing this dangerous thing.

**Craig:** Look. Coverage has always been imperfect. If they have mechanized an imperfect thing to make it a faster and cheaper imperfect thing, then yes, I agree, people that make their living from coverage should be concerned.

**Drew:** Can I add one more thing to that?

**Craig:** Yes, please.

**Drew:** I also feel like a lot of young execs are trained on writing coverage, and that’s how a lot of their tastes are developed. That feeling of, “Oh, I love this script,” is helpful, and even if you hate it, you have to articulate yourself. I feel like that’s going to hurt writers too, because you’re going to have execs who are not able to articulate why.

**Craig:** So execs are going to get worse.

**John:** That’s what we need. The only optimistic case I’ll make for this is that some of writing coverage, yes, it is a learning process, but it’s also absolute drudgery. To get rid of the drudgery… Writing synopses was always the worst part of coverage. It’s like, “How do I try to synopsize down this script and make it make sense in these paragraphs?” It’s not a useful skill, and so I’m really delighted to send that off to a system to do that. It’s the analysis and how to talk about what’s not working, what is working, and how to talk to the writer or talk to everybody else about that-

**Craig:** That’s a great point.

**John:** … is a crucial skill.

**Craig:** The robots are ruining everything.

**John:** A friend of mine works and does coding for a very specific kind of machine that uses a language that is esoteric to its one thing. He said that for what he’s doing, ChatGPT is not useful. It can’t write that language, because there’s just not enough examples online of how that language works.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** He also has to do JavaScript as bridges on stuff. He’s not that good at JavaScript, so he uses ChatGPT every day to write all the JavaScript for all the stuff he’s-

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** … doing for this, and it’s crucial.

**Craig:** ChatGPT will code for you?

**John:** ChatGPT is really good at coding.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** It’s very good at coding.

**Craig:** I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. This code is good at itself.

**John:** You can use it to write an iOS app that does this kind of thing.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It can iterate through it and does a really good job.

**Craig:** Wow. That’s cool.

**John:** Most coders these days are not on Macs, basically, because Mac, it’s not so set up for it. But there’s a thing called Copilot for Microsoft, which is writing code with you the whole time. It’s becoming a crucial part of coding stuff. My friend was talking about this esoteric language he’s using. He says it’s just a matter of time before it can do it, and that he feels he has maybe three to five years left in the industry, and then anybody could do his job. His special training’s not going to be useful.

**Craig:** That is a very good thing for him to say. I think a lot of people just deny and do not want to imagine a world where their skill has been reduced to useless, because it’s terrifying, and it’s challenging to your core identity. It’s actually quite brave of him to say that. It’s really smart, because I assume he’s looking to do something else while he’s got his three to five years left. I assume he’s retirement age or-

**John:** Oh, no. He’s 30.

**Craig:** Then he I assume is thinking about, “What else can I do?” because that’s a real thing.

**John:** These machines he writes code for are still going to exist. Somebody’s going to have to essentially tell the ChatGPT what code needs to be written, but there’s fewer and fewer jobs for doing that.

**Craig:** The skill required for that is reduced.

**John:** You could outsource it. You could do whatever.

**Craig:** It used to be one of the safest jobs in the world was guy who understands the one thing to engineer this thing that everyone has. That’s the safest job in the world. I think it’s important for people to keep their eyes open on this stuff. Again, it’s an interesting debate.

We can’t necessarily just go, “You know what? A lot of people make their living driving horse buggies, so we can’t have these cars.” We can. We will. It’s happening. Horse buggy guys need to find a different gig.

**John:** Many fewer horses in America than there used to be.

**Craig:** Correct. We try and figure out things. The government does come in and prop businesses up. Based on the way our system works, there’s really no reason for us to be mining coal anymore, other than the fact that there are two senators from West Virginia. We will, however, progress. It’s just inevitable. Very smart of him and very brave.

**John:** Last thing, I wanted to give you this demo, where I was going to play two clips for you, one which I have recorded my voice reading a thing, and one which I trained a model to read it for you.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Unfortunately, I couldn’t do it, because actually, it was too complicated to do. It was this whole Google collab. I looked at the video. I was trying to do the thing. I couldn’t translate it out of Japanese. This is a situation where literally weeks from now, it’ll be simpler to do. I just didn’t want to take my voice sample and give it to some sort of outside service. I was doing it all on my own machine.

**Craig:** I see, I see. I’m excited for that.

**John:** It’s incredibly straightforward to do. If I was willing to pay 20 bucks, it would’ve been really easy to do.

**Craig:** I would’ve given you the 20 bucks.

**John:** I just didn’t want my voice out there already training a model.

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

**John:** I was trying to do it myself. I was thinking about our podcast is us talking through this stuff. I feel like for many of our listeners, we are our voices. It’s so easy to synthesize these now.

**Craig:** At some point, we do enter this area where verifiability will actually become its own resource. Diamonds look like cubic zirconias, and vice versa. Zirconiums? Zirconias? Zirconias. I think it’s zirconias. Cubic zirconias. I can’t tell the goddamn… Nobody can tell the difference just staring at it, except for diamond experts. Then they get their little loop out, and they stare at it, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, this is fake, and this is real.” If you can’t tell the difference just walking around, who cares? Gold-plated versus solid gold, who can tell the difference, if you don’t pick it up? But it matters to us. It matters. This is an original Chagall. This is a Chagall print. Can you tell the difference? No. Does it matter? Enormously.

It’s funny how the NFT thing was all about verifiability without any product. All they were selling was an empty verifiability. Verifiability of actual things will become important to people, and that will become a job. You should tell your friend. The discernment between the fake and the real. People care. It matters to them that it’s real. It really, really matters.

**John:** Two points of verifiability that I want to bring up. First off, during the pandemic, you and I noticed that we always used to have to sign contracts, and suddenly, no, no, you can just DocuSign it.

**Craig:** I love that.

**John:** You’re just clicking, and it’s filling in a little thing.

**Craig:** Click, click, click, click, click.

**John:** Somehow, we decided that was okay, and it stayed. Bless it. Love it.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** Also, when I need to do a wire transfer, I need to move stuff from one account to another account, they call me, and I have to go through a voice verification of this thing, “I approve this transfer,” and stuff like that. It’s ridiculous, because I can record this now once and just play it, and it’ll be there.

**Craig:** Anybody can record it or synthesize your voice and play it back. We just sold our house in La Cañada. When you do the first big document, where you say I’m selling my house and for this price, there are like 8,000 signatures. I remember having to do it by hand, like, are you kidding? There’s just a pile. Now it’s just like tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

**John:** Oh, good. I haven’t bought a house in 20 years.

**Craig:** Oh my god, just tap, tap, tap, yes, yes, yes. I’m signing it before the page loads, just because it doesn’t matter anyway.

**John:** There was a whole person whose job that was to show up and walk you through all those forms. That person doesn’t have that job anymore.

**Craig:** That person doesn’t have that job anymore.

**John:** It was a terrible job.

**Craig:** It was a bad job. 80 pages of just California state boilerplate disclosure, blah, blah, blah, what happens if grass exists, asbestos. You’re just like, “I’m not reading any of this,” just sign, sign, sign. So yeah, sign, sign, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, it’s wonderful.

**John:** I will say a point for verifiability is our own Stuart Friedel is now a notary public. Stuart Friedel notarized some forms for us recently. It was an absolute delightful process. If you need a notary in Los Angeles, Stuart Friedel’s your man.

**Craig:** Stuart Friedel is your man. I will say that Stuart does have that notary thing going on, which is just this inherent trustability. You’re like, “Yeah, you’re a good egg. I trust you. That’s why the County has authorized you with your stamp.” I love notary stuff. It’s actually fun.

**John:** With you and your family, have you developed any passwords for things, so if someone calls asking for-

**Craig:** Oh, hostage?

**John:** Hostage situation. Have you developed that with your family?

**Craig:** No, because my answer is no.

**John:** “I’m not paying anything.”

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly.

**John:** You are Mel Gibson in Kidnapped.

**Craig:** Basically. “What’s that? You’ve got them all? Good.” No, we don’t have that. It never occurred to me that… If my family calls asking for money, I’m going to be like, “What? What do you mean?” I think after a few questions, I’ll be able to-

**John:** Suss it out.

**Craig:** … sense that something’s up. We do have 1Password, which is very helpful, I will say, in terms of…

**John:** 1Password, the system for making sure you have different passwords for all your different things, but there’s one central repository?

**Craig:** Yeah. 1Password, the app has a family plan, and so you can create vaults. We have a shared vault. What’s really helpful is like, “Dad, I ran out of medicine at college.” I’m like, “Okay. Probably getting emails, but fine. I can access your stuff, because I have your password, so I can log into your thing,” and that’s helpful.

**John:** That’s helpful. Most of this anxiety conversation has been about… We talked about industry stuff. We talked about AI stuff. Briefly, I think the prospect of going through another election cycle is absolutely dreadful to me.

**Craig:** Horrifying.

**John:** Horrifying. The fact that we know going into this that we’re going to see so much more misinformation that looks really good and is incredibly personalized, which is frustrating, and the possibility of an authoritarian state at the end of this election cycle. One of the reasons it’s harder for me to envision 2025, 2026 is the world looks very different based on the outcome of that election.

**Craig:** Yes. We will all be dreading it. Everyone will be dreading it. I choose to not think about it. This is one of those areas where I’ve really been making an effort lately to acknowledge that thinking about terrible things that are going on in and of itself is not productive. Donating money, donating time, talking to other human beings and wishing them well and telling them I’m concerned about them and just letting them know that I’m caring, that matters. Sitting and fretting-

**John:** Ruminating does nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing. And yet, that’s what the system of news delivery is designed to do. It’s actually no longer designed to inform. It is designed to get you to keep clicking on a thing, like a rat trying to get cocaine. I refuse to do it. I’m a voter in California. We are going to vote for Joe Biden. That’s happening. My vote in California is useless. I’m voting, of course, for president, but I don’t have to ruminate in that regard, nor do I have to worry about trying to get my neighbors to vote a certain way or any of that stuff. Also, we don’t have to worry about watching ads. We get away with murder here. If you live in Ohio, I think that’s all you get are president ads. I’m trying to not ruminate. There’s my New Year’s resolution.

**John:** Less rumination?

**Craig:** Less rumination.

**John:** Then I think, lastly, on labor, we’re all going into this next year anticipating IATSE’s contract is going to be a difficult one to fight, and there could likely be a strike, and so any production we’re thinking about going into could bump up against a potential strike.

**Craig:** When is that?

**John:** The summer.

**Craig:** The summer. That’ll be exciting for us. I remember in our first season, there was a vote. It was interesting. IATSE, they’re not quite like the way we do things. They had a contract with HBO that was different than the contract they had with everybody else. Technically, our crew would not have gone on strike. However, they probably wouldn’t have shown up. We didn’t quite know what was going to happen. I guess we’ll be there again. I really hope that the powers that be learn from what just happened, really, really learn from it.

**John:** I think they have to have a different strategy going into this, which is basically, “How do we avoid a strike? How do we make a deal with these unions that hears them, listens to them, understands what the concerns are, and addresses those concerns in a way? Basically, how do you present the negotiating committee with a deal that is so good that they don’t want to say no?”

**Craig:** If they were to optimize, the way to optimize would be, I don’t even think, in this case, “How do we get to 11:59 p.m.?” It’s, “How do we get one week?” for a strike vote, or, “How do we get them to not call for an authorization vote? What do we need to do?” If they go in there thinking, “We’ve got to beat them and teach them that they can’t do what these other unions do,” they will do what the other unions did-

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** … which is, A, strike, and B, win. Carol.

**John:** Or whoever is going to be in charge of that.

**Craig:** Exactly. Jeez. Sheesh.

**John:** Sheesh. Let’s get to some of our questions here, because I did promise those at the start.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I thought we would start with Anonymous.

**Drew:** Anonymous writes, “I’m writing a pilot, and recently saw an anecdote in a Reddit thread that was so good I want to use the basic idea as my opening scene. I just want to use a situation the person described. The rest of the pilot has very little to do with it, but it’s an amazing entry point for the character arc. However, I do not want this person to feel like I stole from their life story. What is your take on this? Should I, A, reach out to the person, B, avoid the whole thing, or C, just use it and change it up a bit?”

**John:** I’m voting C.

**Craig:** C, use it and change it up a bit. We’re writers, for god’s sake. Look. You’re not stealing anything. What are we at, 600-and-what episode?

**John:** 620.

**Craig:** 620, so this will be the 612th time that we have said that ideas are not intellectual property. Unique expression in fixed form is. You do not want to take that person’s actual literary material, their sentence structure and their vocabulary and all the rest of it. You don’t want to plagiarize. But if somebody tells a story about something that happened to them, you can absolutely use the premise of that story for something. Of course you can.

If you’re feeling guilty about it, then don’t. But if you aren’t, do. The one thing you shouldn’t do is go ask for permission, because you’re just opening up a can of worms for yourself that’s just awful. When people put things online, whether they realize it or not, they are publishing things that are now publicly available. You can’t plagiarize, but you can take an idea. That’s not property.

**John:** The other thing I would say is that the times you ask for permission is when it’s somebody who might be using that in their own material, both because you don’t want to be a dick, but also because they would be doing the same kind of thing with it. There was an anecdote that a friend told me about a hotel room. He was also a writer. “The story you told me was fantastic. Are you using that for anything? Because if not, I want to incorporate that.” It became a part of a moment in a sequence in Go! I asked him first, because I wanted to make sure he wasn’t doing anything with it, because I wanted it to be free and clear and open.

**Craig:** Professional courtesy. Courtesy among writers, of course. Listen. All those things that people put on Reddit, Am I The Asshole, and all the stuff that goes on, what is it, the Didn’t Happen of the Year Awards and all that, it’s out there. It’s out there. People need to learn the difference between inspiration and plagiarism.

**John:** One from Steve?

**Drew:** Steve writes, “I have a question about composite characters in real life adaptations. I wrote a script based on true events where the main characters are represented in court by a lawyer. The lawyer is a minor character based on a real person who wasn’t a great guy and may have sabotaged the case. My version has made the shady lawyer a nicer guy who does the right thing, as I replace the subsequent lawyers with this one guy. Should I change the real lawyer’s name? He’s become a composite character. Does he need a composite name? I made him a better man in my script than he was in life, so I’m not worried about being sued for defamation. I am, however, concerned that keeping his name may lend merit to his problematic legacy, resulting in unwarranted good will.”

**Craig:** That’s an easy one for me. Change the name.

**John:** I say change the name.

**Craig:** Why wouldn’t you? Unless the name has some sort of amazing value, change it, of course.

**John:** Steve says, “Where the main characters are represented in court by a lawyer.” The lawyer is not the central character. The lawyer is not Erin Brockovich, and so change that.

**Craig:** Exactly. Change it. Inherit the Wind changed the names of the lawyers. Why wouldn’t you? It doesn’t matter. It’s a composite character anyway. Change it.

**John:** Change it. Let’s wrap it up with an easy one about D&D.

**Drew:** Sam writes, “During the strike, I was able to finally put together a D&D group over the last six months. Seeing them every week has been the best thing that has happened for my mental health and creativity. However, we are all television and film people. As shows start crewing, people will have to travel for work. I worry that the precious little thing will fall apart if we don’t see each other every week. John and Craig have talked about being part of a long-running D&D campaign and group, and I’m wondering how it works when some people are away.”

**John:** Two points of answer here. First is technology, and second off is group dynamics and what are rules are going to be for when people are gone.

**Craig:** You want, ideally, a group that is sizable enough that you don’t need everyone there, or even everybody minus one there, to have the evening. Most D&D adventures are, by default, designed for a party of four characters. If you have four people there, you should be able to play. Now, a good DM understands also how to adjust the encounters if it’s four people or eight people. That in and of itself is a D&D class that I would love to teach one day. That’s primary. Then secondary is Zoom. Using Roll20 has been great for us.

**John:** We should talk, for people who don’t remember, Roll20 is the system which we are all on our own computers, looking at a top-down view map. We see our characters. We can take our actions and click through things. We’re still playing D&D, but the representation, rather than being little lead figures, is on screen.

**Craig:** We should probably never use lead figures.

**John:** I guess we called them lead figures. They were never actually lead.

**Craig:** I think at some point they were lead, and then a lot of-

**John:** Little painted figurines.

**Craig:** Little painted lead figurines. It’s remarkable how technology just blended together in this moment when suddenly we couldn’t be together.

**John:** We started in the pandemic.

**Craig:** We had been playing prior to the pandemic. The pandemic, like the question-writer here, did suddenly create a circumstance where we played way more often. We were playing once a month before, because it was so hard to get everybody to agree to it. Now it’s just like, if I don’t want to leave my house, or if I’m in a hotel, but I have three hours, yeah, I’m logging in, and I’m playing D&D. You have a hybrid situation. We are basically just one session left of our massive Dungeon of the Mad Mage campaign.

**John:** Which has been four years, five years?

**Craig:** It’s just been endless and wonderful in its own way. Lot of memories. Then what comes next will be really interesting to see. I’m in Canada, so it’s going to have to be remote for a while, where we all just log in, or we do a hybrid. Sometimes everyone sits around a table, and then there’s a laptop down there with a talking head.

**John:** I was out with COVID once, and so I Zoomed in for that because I had COVID.

**Craig:** Zoomed in, exactly.

**John:** I would say you have to have enough people for that to work. If it’s a group of really just four people, you can probably find times for all four of those people to be together. We would submit to those online calendar services where you would say what dates are you available, and everyone clicks the same link, and they can figure out what times you can actually all get together, either in person or online. It’s worth trying to find ways to stay together and to keep the momentum going. Cool.

**Drew:** Great.

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a show I saw this past week, Just For Us, by Alex Edelman. I saw it down at the Taper. I think it’s closing the Taper now. I think the time has run out for it. I know it’s coming to Boston, Berkeley, Detroit, Chicago. If it’s in one of those cities, you should see it.

The show is a one-man show. He’s a writer-performer, sort of like Mike Birbiglia, who’s been on the show a couple times. Alex was also a staff writer on TV shows before this. The premise of this, and I won’t spoil too much of it, is that he decides to attend this meeting of white supremacists at an apartment in New York City. That’s the central event, and then he’s jumping off to all these different stories and anecdotes about how it all fits together in his Jewish identity.

What I loved about it structurally… And it’s so interesting to study how you delineate and perform a bunch of different characters in a one-man show, and the choices you make about how you’re going to do that. With him, it was a lot of location-based stuff. It’s like, that stool represents this person; this stool represents this person. So he doesn’t have to do all the voices, but now he’s in this person’s role and that person’s role. And also, how you establish the present tense of the main story and then go off to all the little anecdotes and detours and still bring you back in that. I’m sure that was a situation where there was a written plan, and then in performing it, you realize how far you can pull that string before you have to come back to the main storyline. If you get a chance to see it, Just For Us, by Alex Edelman. I really enjoyed it.

**Craig:** Where is that running again?

**John:** It was at the Taper.

**Craig:** Taper.

**John:** Now, I think it’s last few days, so by the time this comes out, it may have closed down, unless they added some more dates. But new cities it’s coming to, and I’m sure it’ll be filmed at some point.

**Craig:** It’ll be on Netflix. Amazing. My One Cool Thing was a device that I used yesterday for our Thanksgiving feast. My friend Josh Epstein brought it. He’s a theatrical lighting designer, very technically oriented guy, but also, like me, the chef in the family. Our two families do Thanksgiving together. Our wives, lovely as they are, are not allowed to cook. We do all of it. The two of us love surfing the cooking trends for Thanksgiving. We were on the spatchcock train pretty early, which again, I just have to say, if you’re not spatchcocking your turkey, you’re just doing it wrong. It took an hour and 15 minutes.

**John:** It’s crazy how fast it is to cook a turkey that way.

**Craig:** It’s just wonderful.

**John:** Cutting out that backbone makes a lot of difference.

**Craig:** Poultry shears, bone, done.

**John:** It is brutal cutting it out, but once, you’re done.

**Craig:** If you have poultry shears, takes three minutes. That’s the key. If you’re using regular kitchen shears, impossible. Poultry shears, easy. It’s incredible what the right tools will do. One thing that he brought this year, because what we did was… We love heritage turkeys. We each got two heritage turkeys that were smallish medium, because one big, huge turkey’s kind of annoying, because people want some more white meat, and they’re like, “Oh, look, we have all these massive turkey legs that nobody really wants.” We put them in. They were both spatchcock, brine, put them in.

He brought this thing that was so cool. I think, John, you in particular would love this. It’s called the Weber Connect Smart Grilling Hub. It’s a little black box receiver. You can put some temperature information on it. But of course, like everything else now on the internet of things, you have an app for it. What I loved about this thing was it had inputs for four different probes. We were able to have two probes for both turkeys’ white meat and two probes for both turkeys’ dark meat. The probes come out of the oven and go into this thing. It tracks on a graph as it’s cooking.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** The one that I had was maybe three pounds heavier than the one he had. It was just a little bit longer to cook. It was consistently, as they both rose up, the delta between the two lines was perfect. We were so happy with it. There was no confusion, like, “Oh, is it done? Is it not done?” No. It’s done.

**John:** You’re constantly opening the oven to check whether something is done enough, but then you’re losing the heat of the oven.

**Craig:** You’re losing heat. This one was like, you just knew. You’re like, “And done.” Take it out. Boom.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** It was flawless. Love that. Great technology. You don’t cook, do you? You have that “I don’t cook” face.

**Drew:** Oh, no, I feel like I-

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**Drew:** I try most of the time. I’m not amazing. I didn’t grow up in a house that cooked.

**Craig:** What did you do about Thanksgiving?

**Drew:** I went to John’s.

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**Drew:** I let John cook for me.

**Craig:** Of course. Did you make the turkey, John?

**John:** There was no turkey in our Thanksgiving.

**Craig:** Are you a vegetarian?

**John:** No. We had duck.

**Craig:** Oh, duck.

**John:** Yeah, we had duck confit.

**Craig:** I love duck confit.

**John:** I think I may have pitched this on an earlier show. We just decided turkey, even with all the technology, even with all the brining and everything else, it’s good, but it’s never fantastic. Duck confit is fantastic.

**Craig:** Duck confit is one of my favorite foods in the world.

**John:** Absolutely. We get it. It comes canned from France. You pull it out of the can, you heat it up, and it’s done.

**Craig:** And it’s done.

**John:** It’s delicious.

**Craig:** I want to try and make some homemade duck confit.

**John:** Great. Go for it.

**Craig:** I’m going to make it.

**John:** You should do that, and then you should try the canned duck confit and tell me whether it was worth it.

**Craig:** The canned duck confit will be better. But I just love trying.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Because they do stuff that you just don’t know to do, because they’re French. Duck confit is exactly the kind of thing that you can package and redo. That’s no question. But I’m going to try it.

**John:** My big Thanksgiving adventure was I did Claire Saffitz’s sweet potato rosemary rolls. They’re like a Parker House roll that had sweet potatoes and rosemary. It turned out great.

**Craig:** Sounds delicious. Happy Thanksgiving to everybody.

**John:** Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

**Craig:** This is our, what, 19th Thanksgiving with you at home?

**John:** It’s a lot. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Thank you, Drew. Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Outro this week is by Alex Winder. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. I’ve not seen any of the Scriptnotes University T-shirts out in the wild. I want to see those next. Those are good. You can become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on the intro to our book. Craig and Drew, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Drew:** Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, so the book is in good shape. All the chapters are there on the grid. I need to go through and do some cleanup on a lot of stuff. A lot of my December will be work there. One thing we do not have mapped out at all is an introduction to the book. I thought you and I could have a discussion that could become the basis for this introductory chapter.

To start by, the question is, why write a Scriptnotes book at all? What is the purpose of a Scriptnotes book? What do you hope this can do for the aspiring writer, or for anyone interested in film?

**Craig:** After all this time, we have accrued so many hours that our normal advice, which is, “Oh, do you want to learn about screenwriting? Just listen to the free podcast we do,” doesn’t really apply anymore. It’s not possible. It would take too long. Also, there’s repetition.

**John:** People do it, but still, it’s a-

**Craig:** It’s not what I would call an efficient process at this point.

**John:** You can’t refer back to a podcast. You can’t go back to this moment.

**Craig:** That’s right. It would be excruciating. Putting together our best hits in a book, it feels like we’ve kind of boiled down the essence. It is, I think, a wonderful reference. People will ask me, “Hey, can you give me some tips? Can I have coffee with you and pick your brain?” I say, “No, because I’ve done a podcast for free for a decade.” But I realize it’s not super helpful. Now, I can just say, “Here’s a book. Actually, buy a book.”

**John:** Buy the book. Please buy it.

**Craig:** Buy the book.

**John:** Don’t pirate online. Let’s talk about books, and how we feel about books about screenwriting, because I feel like I have a mixed history with books about screenwriting. I read Syd Field as I first started here. It was my first introduction to what the form is like. I never read Save the Cat! People love Save the Cat!, but I’ve always felt like these were people who did not actually know what they were doing talking about screenwriting.

**Craig:** Yes, and those books were very much practical, how-to, so, “Oh, you want to be a screenwriter? Here’s a bunch of rules that you as a not-screenwriter can follow, and you’ll be a screenwriter.” We know that that’s not true. We’ve never really set out to be that.

What we, I think, have done is provided a lot of peripheral wisdom that we’ve gleaned over the years doing this job, that will help inform people in a creative way. People that are actually capable of doing this – and they’re out there – will be, I think, tremendously assisted by this, because it’s not prescriptive. It is descriptive. It’s just telling you what our observations are and giving you choices.

When we say, “Here’s a chapter about conflict,” we’re not saying this is how you write conflict. What we’re saying is, “Here are different kinds of conflict. Here are the ways you can approach it. Here are some things you should try and avoid. Here are some traps we’ve fallen into.” To me, that’s how you learn, not by a book writing a chart.

**John:** It’s interesting you brought up conflict, because that was the chapter I just went through. It’s a really good chapter. I’m really happy with it. Looking at the points in there, I think you probably mapped out the six kinds of conflict that are there, and then we had a discussion about them. It was better than what you by yourself would’ve done or what I by myself would’ve done. It’s really a synthesis of both of us.

One of the big challenges for Drew and for Chris and Megana, who’s also been working on this, has been how to find a census of voice between the two of us, because we generally are on the same kind of wavelength, but we don’t have quite the same voice. I also think about our intended reader, who may be a little bit different than our average listener is. Craig, who do you hope reads this book?

**Craig:** Who I hope reads it, people who are aspirational and serious about trying to do this professionally. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think it’s inappropriate for other people. This is a perfectly fine book if you’re a hobbyist. This is a perfectly fine book if it’s a little side thing you do that maybe one day might work. It’s a perfectly fine thing to do if you’re having a midlife career shift and want to approach this.

But mostly, the people that I want to be the Catcher in the Rye for are people in film school who are being mistaught, and who are paying dearly for the privilege of being mistaught. I would like them to read this. I would also like the people who teach in schools to read this. It’s a little frustrating to me that, again, a lot of these schools collect massive amounts of tuition, and sometimes we get sent screen caps from classrooms with our stuff on the board. I’m glad our stuff is on the board. It’s just annoying that other people are getting away with charging tuition to regurgitate something on a free podcast. Now you get it regurgitated here in this beautiful book. But I think it’s an excellent companion, hopefully, for people who are learning.

**John:** When I started my blog, I always said that my idealized writer was the kid in Iowa, growing up, who was curious about screenwriting and had really no way to really get into it. I would say that’s still true for the book, but also the Julia Turners out there, who are really interested in screenwriting and stuff, but they’re not going to ever write a screenplay themselves. It’s not their goal, but they really are curious about what goes into the craft and the business of it all.

The basic kind of chapters we’d find in there, there’s really three big categories you could put them into. First is topic chapters, which would be about conflict or getting notes or-

**Craig:** Craft.

**John:** … craft and business. We have the interview chapters, where we’re talking with filmmakers, which is really practical advice about how they navigate all this stuff. Then we have our deep dive chapters, where we really go deep on one movie, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, talking about how it works. Those feel like the kinds of things you need to understand in order to get started in this business.

**Craig:** You’re actually prompting me now to think of somebody else I would like to read this book.

**John:** Who?

**Craig:** Critics.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Critics, our budding critics, fully fledged critics. I think having insight into how things are created helps you have insight into why you do or do not like the thing that you see. Certainly, understanding how the business functions may help people more accurately write reviews. When they say, “Oh, the dialog is clunky; the screenwriter must be bad,” or not, or maybe a screenwriter was bad, but it’s not the one that you see credited, or who knows?

There are lots of things that I hope people can glean from that about how we go through the discussion of creating work, but also, even how we break down stories, how we think about stories, which is different, generally, than how critics do. It might make them better. It might.

**John:** One thing that’s been so different working on this book versus the Arlo Finch books is Arlo Finch is designed to be read from beginning to end. It had a consistent narrative flow to it. There are some nonfiction books that are like that, where basically, this chapter builds on a previous chapter builds on a previous chapter. Here, that wasn’t really possible. The organization of which chapter goes after which chapter will hopefully have some kind of connection. We’ll try to put in a filmmaker chapter that is a little bit related to what we just talked about in one of these other things.

The better reference for me is the Player’s Handbook from D&D. You can constantly refer back to this thing. If you want to look, like, “Oh, I’m stuck on this moment. What is theme again?” it’s like, “Oh, I can go back to the theme chapter.” We can talk about what theme is. You can read it independently of having read the rest of the book.

**Craig:** It’s a bathroom book.

**John:** It is a bathroom book is really what I’m trying to-

**Craig:** This is a bathroom book.

**John:** No shame in a bathroom book.

**Craig:** We don’t mean for the bath. It’s a toilet book. I love books like that. They’re great. You pick them up. You just open them anywhere, start reading. Fine. Good.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** Bathroom book. Great Christmas gift.

**John:** Great Christmas gift for 2025.

**Craig:** For 2025, yeah, exactly.

**John:** In 2025, your gift-giving needs are set.

**Craig:** Put that under the Christmas tree next year.

**John:** Next year. Great. I think we have enough material here to start a chapter, and Chris and Drew can get going on it.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Can’t wait for people to read what I just said, on the toilet.

**John:** Thanks, guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Strange $55 Million Saga of a Netflix Series You’ll Never See](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/business/carl-rinsch-netflix-conquest.html) by John Carreyrou for the New York Times
* [Digital background actors in Disney’s Prom Pact](https://x.com/caiden_reed/status/1712403348597694692?s=20)
* [Sacking, revolt, return: how crisis at OpenAI over Sam Altman unfolded](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/25/how-crisis-openai-sam-altman-unfolded) by Dan Milmo for The Guardian
* [Alex Edelman: Just for Us](https://www.justforusshow.com/)
* [Weber Connect Smart Grilling Hub](https://www.weber.com/US/en/accessories/smart-grilling/weber-connect-smart-grilling-hub/3201.html)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Alex Winder ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt 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/620standard.mp3).