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

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 650 – wow – of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you rewrite without overwriting. We’ll discuss tips and techniques for not bogging down your script. We’ll also look at a bunch of items in the news, including the sale of Paramount and a potential IATSE deal. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll discuss the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuits against the AI music generators like Suno and Udio about copyright infringement and how this might relate to folks who write movies and TV.

To help us do this, we welcome back a very, very special guest, the creator of The Good Place, and all-around good guy, Mr. Mike Schur. Mike Schur, welcome back.

**Mike Schur:** I’m honored to be here for number 650. Nice round number.

**John:** Round numbers are our specialty here. We just love when we hit them. Chris McQuarrie always comes back for every 200 episodes, which is exactly how much you want Christopher McQuarrie. No more, no less. I could have you back every 50 episodes, it’d be great. Basically a yearly visit.

**Mike:** Could I come back every 650th episode?

**John:** Good lord, that would be a lot. Episode 1300, we’ll book you.

**Mike:** And 1950.

**John:** Drew, make a note now. Somebody will contact us down the road saying, “Hey, you said that Mike Schur would be back on Episode 1300.” We’ll try to hold to it.

**Mike:** God, that’s so many years away.

**John:** That’s 12 years away. That’s a lot.

**Mike:** I’ll be ready.

**John:** You’ll be ready. Let’s get into some news here. Mr. Mike Schur, you were on the WGA negotiating committee with me. We talked through a lot about all the stuff in the WGA strike and of course, SAG-AFTRA strike. IATSE was the next big union up. It looks like they may have reached a deal.

**Mike:** Yes. This is very exciting. Tentative congratulations to IATSE leadership and also all IATSE members. This was the last big piece of the Hollywood union labor negotiations that had to be completed. There’s a lot of consternation about whether or not there would be another strike at a fragile time in the business. It seems like they have reached an agreement, which is wonderful. I hope all IATSE members are happy with what they’ve negotiated.

This is an especially tricky one, trickier even than SAG or the Writers Guild or the Directors Guild, in part because IATSE itself is comprised of so many different sorts of people. It’s an all-purpose trade craft union. It represents a lot of different folks who do a lot of different jobs on movie sets and TV sets and stuff like that. To find an agreement that satisfies everyone is a very difficult task.

I don’t know if you’ve talked to folks about it. Anecdotally, the folks that I’ve talked to seem to generally be pretty happy with what was achieved. Is that your experience too?

**John:** That is my experience. As we’re recording this just yesterday, the full details came out, so I don’t know that people had a lot of time to parse every little bit of things. But let’s talk through some of the top line stuff that they’ve told us.

If you’re on a set and you’re working more than 15 elapsed hours, you move into triple time. This is an effort to combat the endless days of production. It’s a bigger penalty if you move into 15 hours. Now, there’s been some push back saying 15 hours, it still means that you’re working crews 15 hours. That’s still the problem. There was a desire for a hard cap on the hours, and they didn’t get that. But triple time should incentivize, hopefully, productions to stop at a certain sane hour.

There’s new protections around artificial intelligence. Obviously, that’s a thing we’re very focused on in the WGA negotiations. There’s new language that says that employees cannot be required to provide AI prompts in a manner that would displace a covered employee. That sounds complicated. But it was always going to be complicated with such a broad cross section of members who were doing this stuff. The AI concerns of an editor are not the same as the AI concerns of costume designer or a production artist. They’re all doing very different things. As a general solution, maybe this is helpful. Have you talked to any folks about the AI concerns here?

**Mike:** Yes. Your point is well taken, because just as one example, I’m finishing a show now that I did for Netflix. It’ll be on in November, I think. I was talking to one of our sound engineers. We’ve recorded a scene at Pier 39 in San Francisco, famous location in San Francisco where sea lions come and they hang out on these docks. It’s very cute. The problem with sea lions when they gather en masse is that they bark a lot and they make recording dialogue extremely difficult.

We looked at the first version of the scene, and it was nearly inaudible. Two actors are talking, and all you hear is “arr arr arr arr” in the background. I was like, “Oh my god, we’re screwed. We’ll never be able to use this.” The sound engineer, he’s like, “Give me four hours,” and sent it back, and it was completely audible and the sea lions were gone. I said, “How did that happen?” He was like, “We have tools for that now.” Those tools essentially are AI tools. It’s like this extremely powerful computerized program that finds the wave form of a certain sound, combs through the track, and removes it.

There are aspects of AI that these folks use in different capacities in different jobs that are wonderful, that are beneficial to productions, that help everybody. They help actors. They help writers. They help productions. Then there are ones that are meant to essentially replace those people. The idea of trying to legislate at this moment in a time a rule or a series of rules that does nothing but help and doesn’t hurt is a very tall order.

Again, we are just now going over the details of this agreement, but it appears that what IATSE has done is not that different from what we did in the WGA, which is to say we tried to put up some guardrails, we tried to put up some fences that loosely captured what it was that we were trying to preserve, and largely kept out what we were trying to keep out.

In places where it’s impossible to get granular and really pin down exactly what we’re talking about, we just reserved our right to continue to fight in the future. That is a huge key. That was a huge key for us in the WGA negotiations was that the staff did so much work in crafting language that essentially reserved our rights to continue to try to legislate what we thought needed to be legislated. It appears to me, at least from first glance, that that’s what IATSE did as well. Is that your read on the situation?

**John:** It is. Earlier this summer, I was at a conference in Italy, and I was on a panel talking about AI. I was the lone voice, weirdly, who had to defend, like, okay, we need to make sure that the AI that’s coming online is being used by workers rather than to replace workers. It sounds like that what’s they’re trying to go for here. Your example with the sea lions is exactly that. We want to make sure that this is a technology that’s being used in the furtherance of a person’s career and profession rather than to replace that person or profession.

One of the things I try to always underline when I talk about AI things is I try not to use the word tool, because tool is a positive term. No one is anti-hammer. But tools can be used as weapons. That’s why I always try to make sure that I’m saying technology, because technology is a more neutral term, and recognize that you can use technologies for good means or for bad means.

As people who are negotiating on behalf of workers, you want to make sure these technologies are being used by the workers in the furtherance of their job. It feels like that was the spirit of these AI protections. Again, language similar to the WGA, in the sense of they cannot require you to use AI technologies, and they may prohibit you from using some of these AI technologies, because they’re concerned about things like copyright infringement. Just like as we get into in our Bonus Segment, that’s going to be a real worry.

If one of their concerns is going to be like, okay, what if a director or a production designer uses one of these technologies to generate some image? That image ends up becoming ruled as being infringing on copyright. Yikes. There’s all these concerns they have too.

**Mike:** For the record, I am deeply anti-hammer. Nothing good has ever happened with a use of hammer.

**John:** Mike, your position as being team screwdriver is really well known. This is where it’s gonna go from here on out. Like all negotiations, they got wage increases, so percentage increases on the basic rates that go up. Theirs matched pretty close to what SAG-AFTRA got, which is great. It’s a bigger bump in the first year, smaller in the next two years. They got additional money for their health plan, which is important. Their streaming residuals, it’s important to understand, doesn’t go to the person itself. It goes to fund the underlying health fund, which is important. Keep them solvent.

**Mike:** I have heard a couple folks say that there was some ongoing debate and maybe a little bit of dissatisfaction – and I hope I’m not speaking out of turn here – regarding specific details of the VFX editors wing of IATSE. This is a big thing, because obviously, there are entire movies now that are essentially being made through the hard work and labor of visual effects editors.

I don’t think I can speak authoritatively about what exactly they got and what they didn’t get. That I would assume though will be something that is revisited in pretty much every IATSE negotiation going forward, because I don’t think that VFX editing is going to get less important over time in the movie industry specifically. But again, in the handful of folks that I’ve spoken to who are covered by IATSE, some costume designers, some hair and makeup folks, some editors, people generally seem to be pleased with the gains that were made, which is wonderful. I hope that that’s not a non-representative sample of the membership. I hope that most of the folks…

Like in anything else in the WGA, negotiations, for example, in SAG, there are always going to be some folks who end up feeling like they didn’t quite get what everybody else got. I think that’s doubly or triply so for IATSE, because again, you’re talking about grip and craft service and art directors and costumers and all sorts – studio teachers is one thing – groups covered by IATSE at all of these different individual important parts of the engine that drives the locomotive.

The thing that people should understand about IATSE is these groups of people are all individually vital to a production. It’s very hard to imagine making – take your pick – Bridgerton without costume designers. That’s not possible. It’s very hard to imagine making the Three Body Problem without video effects designers. Individually, all of these people are absolutely vital. It’s just that they are all collected into one union, and so it’s going to be very difficult at any moment for IATSE to reach an agreement that every group of people feels that their needs are addressed.

But importantly, it feels like this was a big step forward for them, especially compared to previous negotiations they’ve had that have left I think more people dissatisfied with the result than are currently dissatisfied with this one. Congrats to them again.

**John:** There are people out there who are trying to sell the narrative that the WGA strike and the SAG-AFTRA strike were basically giant wealth transfers from hardworking writers and industry people to Netflix and to AI, and that what should’ve happened is that the WGA should’ve partnered up with the studios to take on the AI companies, and it was idiotic to have ever gone on strike. Your opinion there, Mike?

**Mike:** A couple things. First of all, I think IATSE would be the first to say that a large reason that they got what they got was because of the strikes, because the WGA and SAG drew a line in the sand and said we’re not going to just take these minimal gains in the basic salaries of our employees, but rather, we’re going to fundamentally try to shift the way that studios think about compensating the labor who work for them. It’s a completely false read to say, “Look, IATSE did it. Why couldn’t you guys do it?” Because IATSE did it, because we did it. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is partnering with the studios to do anything is a pipe dream. It’s not like the studios are like, “Guys, please, I beg you, come partner with us to take on AI companies.” It’s quite the opposite. The studios are deeply interested in AI, for a number of reasons, some sinister and some not sinister, which I think you and I both learned.

I would say for those of you listening out there, John was the AI expert, so to speak, of the WGA negotiation committee. You were the guy I think who understood what AI was and how it was positioned to affect us as a union, and all unions, better than anybody. We all took our lead from you. I was very grateful for that. I think you educated a lot of us over the course of many months about what exactly AI was and what it was trying to do.

AI went from a thing – when we first got together to discuss our agenda, it was 23rd on the list of things that we felt was important. There were a lot more big, famous problems. So-called mini rooms were a huge problem in television. Free work was a huge problem for screenwriters. Minimum guarantees of duration was a huge thing for late-night and variety writers. Then 23rd on the list was like, hey, we should do something about AI. By the time I’d say we were deep into negotiations, right around the time when negotiations fell apart, most of us in the committee had come around to a position of like, oh, wait, AI is maybe the most important thing, or at least it’s a top five issue I think facing labor.

Part of the reason for that was that we came to realize through those negotiations how much it mattered to the studios. That was something that I don’t think we totally understood. But we were told flatly, “Stay away from this. Guys, don’t try to do anything with AI. That’s a nonstarter.” When your adversary in negotiations says don’t try to do anything with this issue, that’s how you know it’s a really important issue.

The idea that it is as simple as labor unions saying to studios, their employers, “Hey, let’s wrap our arms around each other and take on this other adversary,” that’s absurd. That’s such a facile way to try to understand the role that AI is playing in the world and in Hollywood in particular. That’s not an option.

It’s not an option to go to the studios and say, “Look, I know that we’re on opposite sides of a lot of issues here, but why don’t we team up and fight these companies against their advancements in AI,” because the studios are deeply interested and invested, financially and otherwise, in what AI might be able to do for them. The whole point of our approach in the AI negotiations was to say, “Hey, if we don’t do something about this, this is what will replace us.” Anyone who believes that it was as simple as us teaming up with studios to fight the advancement of artificial intelligence does not understand what is happening in the world right now.

**John:** I’m not quite sure what the name for the logical fallacy is. It’s not a straw man, but it’s things should just magically be different, basically like, “Oh, you guys should’ve done this thing, which I don’t know if it’s completely impossible or not, but that’s what you should’ve done.” It’s like, “Oh, okay, great, we’ll do that thing that’s actually not even a possible thing. That’s what we will do.”

**Mike:** It is at least adjacent to the content of a straw man, because you’re basically just saying, “Why didn’t you just do X.” It’s like, because X is not possible. That’s why. The one thing that I will say about the Writers Guild staff, which is a tireless group of people who are largely anonymous even to WGA members, but whose only purpose in life is to protect writers and help writers get what they deserve, is that in the years of study that went into the negotiation in 2023, they did not miss something as simple as, “What if we team up with the studios to [inaudible 00:16:49] AI?” I promise you that in all of the if-then scenarios that they worked out, that was not available to us as an option. Saying, “Why didn’t you just do that?” is very silly.

**John:** Absolutely. I think the other criticism I’ve seen about the WGA and “the strike was a mistake” was about this was a terrible time to go on strike, because the industry was going through a change and transition, and so you just made it easier for them to make the cuts that they wanted to make, and the idea that you’ve hastened the inevitable thing that was going to happen. You can’t hasten inevitability. It’s a weird place to land. It’s like, yes, things are going through a transition, and that’s probably why it’s very important to take a strong stand and defend what you can.

**Mike:** Of course. The number of things that contributed to what has happened to the industry in the last five years is large. It’s a large number of things. COVID, for example.

**John:** Oh, god.

**Mike:** If anything hastened anything, it was COVID, in my opinion. There was an out-of-control land grab that was going on where these companies were all starting their own streamers and they were all making this transition from over-the-air broadcasting or cable broadcasting to try owning all of their content in perpetuity in every territory on earth. In order to do that, they had to build up their libraries. In order to build up their libraries, they had to throw a ton of money at a ton of people to try to make a ton of stuff very quickly. Then COVID hit, and it really shook everything up.

One person I remember I talked to, a high-placed industry type person I was talking to right after COVID started, and I said, “What does this mean for us?” This person said, “It means Netflix wins forever.” The reason that they said that was that Netflix had a lead in the race. Disney Plus was racing to try to catch up. But in the race to be essentially everyone’s number one option for entertainment, they had such a huge lead. Then when COVID hit and everyone had to stay in their houses, the other companies hadn’t yet been able to get to the point where they had the same amount of stuff that Netflix did. As a result, everyone watched Netflix, and Netflix became even more indispensable to people’s lives.

That one thing that no union had control over led to the companies really taking a step back and saying, “Okay, wait a second. Are we gonna ever be able to beat them? Should we even be trying to beat them? Can we find another niche or another avenue that we can drive down in terms of making our in-house streamer more viable or more attractive to people?” Not to mention the fact that also coinciding with that was all production stopped for a very long time.

The same kind of person who says, “Why didn’t you just partner with the studios in order to team up against AI?” would probably say something like, “Why didn’t you guys just stop COVID? If you had just stopped COVID, then-”

**John:** 100 percent.

**Mike:** There were things that were completely out of anyone’s control, including the studios and networks. The correction that was happening was already deep into its history by the time that we were even able to begin negotiating. It’s also worth saying that a lot of the stuff that the Guild tried to do and accomplished in 2023, our original plan was to do it in 2020. We went into that negotiation saying, “Look, things are already changing. Because they’re already changing and we see where this is going, we need to make some moves here.” Then COVID hit. You can’t go on strike when you’re not allowed to leave your house and collect in large areas and have big discussions when there’s no cure for a very deadly disease that everyone’s afraid of.

Both WGA and I think SAG did what we did as quickly and efficiently as we possibly could have. It is not the case that there was an easy alternative to what we did either temporally or structurally. I was and will always be very proud of the union and proud of SAG and all of the other unions that fought for what we fought for. I don’t believe that there was any strategic mistake in what we did, in terms of when we did it or how we did it.

There’s always going to be naysayers or folks who look back and go, “You just should’ve done this.” But the number of moving parts here, the number of variables and difficult-to-control aspects of this situation that we all found ourselves in was so numerous, so enormous, that any reading of what we did, what all of the unions did, that falls into the category of like, “Why didn’t you just do X?” is just facile and unhelpful.

**John:** 100 percent. I think as listeners are hearing people give the, “They should’ve just,” or, “This was a mistake,” or, “This cost the industry X number of dollars,” just remember these were necessary things that were done in the time they needed to be done, and the gains that were made last for the next 50 years. Yes, there was short-term pain, and the pain was real. The strike lasted as long as it did because the studios chose to not come to the table and make a deal. That doesn’t mean you can just magically wave it all away. There were real, important things to be fighting for. Most of the things we fought for, we ended up winning.

**Mike:** That’s another important part of it, I think, is part of those arguments amount to, “Here’s how much you lost, and here’s how long it will take you to recoup it.” That is a classic management-side argument for why unions should never strike is, “You’re just gonna lose this and it’s gonna take you that long to get it back.” That’s true. That’s 100 percent true. The point is if you don’t give up those contemporary gains for future gains, that’s in some ways-

**John:** We would have no residuals. We would have no health plan. All of the things we have are-

**Mike:** All of the stuff we had were because people made short-term sacrifices for long-term gains. It’s a classic argument made by the folks who own stuff to the folks who don’t. That’s what they say is, “You’re just gonna lose all this money right now.”

I’m a big sports fan. I know folks who have worked in the management of sports unions. I talked to them a lot during the buildup to the strike and also during the strike about the similarities and differences. One of the things that I was told repeatedly was, one of the reasons it’s so hard, for example, for the NFL players union to go on strike is that NFL careers are so short. The average NFL career is a year and a half long. Guys wash out. They get hurt. They wash out of the league instantly. They’re always being replaced every year by younger guys because that sport is so brutal. A huge reason that it’s hard for them to have a massive labor action is that what you’re going to give up in terms of what you’re gonna have in the future, that could be literally the entirety of the earnings potential of a significant part of your union. It’s a much bigger problem.

It’s always a problem for a union. Always. The pain is real. The pain that was suffered by Writers Guild members was real. We knew it was real. We knew how serious it was. We thought about that probably more than anything else, I would say, while we were negotiating. But unlike NFL players, hopefully a writer’s career is more than one and a half years long, which is what it is in the NFL.

That was our job and the job of leadership was to weigh those things against each other, to say is it worth the pain, the real pain, the potential loss of apartments and houses or cars or people having to move or having to get other jobs? All that stuff that was very, very real and very painful, we’re weighing that now against what we want the union to get out of the next 25, 35, 50, 75 years. It’s a very difficult calculation to make. The Guild what not have done what it did unless we really felt like it was worth it.

**John:** In addition to sometimes calling for strikes, WGA also does things in between those periods, including going after people who violate the MBA. An announcement this past week that the WGA reached a settlement for a total of $3 million for 24 affected writers for CBS shows who were having writers doing writing work, covered Article 14 work, during times in which their writers’ rooms were officially closed.

This is a thing that the Guild does all the time. They’ve collected more than $100 million through enforcement of the contract over the past two and a half years. This is just another example of going after situations where writers come to the Guild and say, “Hey, they’re having me do this stuff. They’re saying it’s not covered work because the writers’ room’s closed.” The Guild won here.

**Mike:** I don’t understand why we didn’t just partner with the studios to get this money more easily.

**John:** Exactly. We could put up a phone call, say, “Hey, guys.”

**Mike:** “Guys.”

**John:** “You really should be paying them for this. You should be paying their weekly pay, their pension, their health, the parental leave contributions you owe. You should really be paying these things.”

**Mike:** I do a presentation every year at the Writers Guild Showrunners program, which is a wonderful program that helps people who are maybe just about to take over their first show or have recently become a showrunner for the first time. It amounts to just epigrammatic wisdom that has been passed to me from all of the people I’ve worked for and with over the years or spoken to.

One of the things that I like to say is that you need to think at all times when you’re a showrunner about to whom you are loyal. You have a loyalty to your show and the characters in that show and the writers who work with you and for you. You need to be loyal to the studio that’s paying you and the network that’s airing your show. But also, you need to be loyal to your union.

By the way, the point of this is sometimes those loyalties come into conflict in that moment of decision that you need to make about, “Where is my loyalty right now at this moment? Is it to my employees? To my studio? To my network?” Whatever.

The reason I add the union into the equation – there are many reasons, but one of them is decisions like this, because without maybe knowing it directly, or without closely following it, the union has your back all the time. It is constantly doing things like they just did, which is to say identifying places in which the studios have cheaped out, have tried to skirt the rules, have gone through the back door and are trying to get work out of you and your fellow writers that they’re not paying for.

I don’t even blame them. You don’t blame a snake in the wild for attacking its prey. That is just what it’s designed to do. These companies are designed. Their only loyalty is to their shareholders, really. They’re a capitalistic entity, like a company. Its only job is to figure out how to make more money and spend less money. They’re constantly probing and testing at the boundaries of what they’re contractually obligated to do, and figuring out ways to not spend money.

The union is the safeguard against that. That’s why we have a union is for things like this, where this staff put together this incredibly difficult presentation and arbitration case to say, “This is what they’ve done. This is why it’s not legal. This is how much they owe us.”

At the end of the day, it’s really wild. If you look at it, it’s one company – one of the many companies that employ writers – owed $3 million for this one thing. This is one aspect of the MBA that they were skirting, and it’s $3 million. $3 million for CBS, Paramount, whatever they are now, Skydance, I suppose, that’s a rounding error. That’s an accounting error on their annual report. But for the writers-

**John:** 24 affected writers. It’s not gonna divide evenly between them, but that’s serious money.

**Mike:** That’s serious money. That’s yearly income that makes an enormous difference in the lives of them and their children and their partners and their lives. Again, the reason that folks in this guild have to remember and keep in their brains that they are loyal to their union is because this is the function, the raison d’être of the union, is to find these places where writers are getting screwed and try to unscrew them. It’s really wonderful. Congratulations to the staff and the Guild in general.

**John:** These 24 affected writers first off may not have been aware that they were owed this money. But individually, they had no leverage to get this money. Their agencies weren’t gonna be able to get this money for them. Their managers couldn’t get this money for them. That’s the job of the union is to say, “Here’s the contract. This is the violation. Pay up.”

**Mike:** Yeah, and they did. The great thing about decisions like this, or the Bird Box decision, which was another huge win for the Guild in terms of money being denied screenwriters, is that now there’s precedent. Now, it becomes much easier to go to the other companies that are trying to pull similar shenanigans and say, “Listen, we know what you’re doing. We fought it once. Here’s what happened. Just don’t fight this. Don’t pretend like you’re not doing this. We know you’re doing it. Here’s how it played out. In the other case, save the money that you’re gonna give to your lawyers and just instead give that money to the writers like you should’ve the first time.”

**John:** Absolutely. You hinted at it, but the other big news of this past week is that Skydance has apparently purchased Paramount. The deal is so complicated. I’ve read a couple of explainers talking about how Skydance bought National Amusements, and based on voting shares and who has voting stock and non-voting stock, and there are three steps they have to go through. You have to close your eyes and turn around four times. But at the end of this, Skydance Corporation will in theory own Paramount, CBS, Viacom, which I think to me is really good news.

Of all the outcomes of this, I was happiest about this. I want to make sure that the Paramount brand stays. I want to make sure that not just the mountain logo but the idea of what Paramount is continues. It feels like this was the best way to see that happen.

**Mike:** I totally agree. Paramount is iconic in this town. It’s where Peewee Herman ended up in Peewee’s Big Adventure. It’s in Hollywood proper, which I think symbolically matters. It’s right on Melrose. Those gates are iconic.

**John:** Those gates in front of which you and I both picketed quite a lot. We had many conversations in front of the gates of Paramount.

**Mike:** We did. That was our home base during the strike. But I think more than symbolically important, this is important because among the many scenarios that we heard as possibilities were an extant studio buying Paramount and just folding it into – is Warner Bros gonna somehow borrow even more money and buy Paramount? Is Comcast gonna buy Paramount? Whatever.

The reason that that would have been worse is because consolidation is bad for labor. Consolidation means that there are fewer individual places who have the means and opportunity to buy scripts from screenwriters and from TV writers. Skydance, which has been their partner on some of their biggest movie franchises in their history, Top Gun and Transformers and-

**John:** Mission Impossible.

**Mike:** … Mission Impossible and stuff like that – the fact that Skydance is actually the company that’s buying them means that they stay an option, another option. It’s hard enough right now to sell anything, a TV show or a movie or anything. If Paramount had essentially been absorbed by one of the other places that buys stuff, that just means there’s one fewer place that buys stuff.

The independence of Paramount as a buyer and the installation of showbiz veteran types to run it would send the message of like, “We’re in the business of Hollywood. We are gonna keep buying stuff and making stuff.” That is only good for the writers and actors and directors and IATSE members who are hoping to have viable careers in the industry.

**John:** I’m excited to see what’s next. I’m excited to keep Paramount around as a company, as a brand, but also as a buyer, as you said, because it’s not a theoretical example. When Disney bought Fox, a bunch of people lost their jobs, but we also lost a major buyer. Yes, there are still things that are put out under the Fox brand. Great. But it’s not the same. We’ve lost a huge place to develop stuff.

**Mike:** You could argue that we lost more than one, because when Disney bought Fox, we lost Fox in general, but also Hulu became completely controlled by Disney-

**John:** Totally.

**Mike:** … where it hadn’t been before. I would have to think back, but I’m sure there were projects that I took out to the marketplace where I pitched individually to Disney, Fox, and Hulu, and then suddenly all three of those were one thing. You’re pitching just to Disney. If they want to buy it, they might say, “This is good for Fox network,” or, “This is good for Hulu,” or, “This is good for Disney Plus.” But it’s all one person. If that one company decided they didn’t want to buy it, it took three options off the table. That is nothing but bad.

**John:** I remember going back even further, there used to be a brand called Fox 2000. I remember projects which we pitched to Fox, Fox 2000, and Fox Searchlight. The fact that they’re all folded into one amorphous mass now is not good. The more buyers, the better.

**Mike:** Exactly. I’m happy, happy, happy that this worked out the way it did.

**John:** Drew, let’s have you hop on for a second, because I wanted you to talk about Weekend Read, because you are the person, along with Jonathan Wigdortz, who’s been assembling the scripts for people to read in Weekend Read. For folks who are not familiar with it, Weekend Read is the app our company makes for reading scripts on your phone. Makes it handy. But what you do, Drew, is pulling together a list of new scripts every week on a theme for people to read if they’ve not had a chance to read these scripts. Tell us about what you put into Weekend Read this week.

**Drew Marquardt:** This week’s theme is Frankenstein’s monster. I was thinking about all the different iterations of that myth or character. We have, of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Young Frankenstein, but also Edward Scissorhands and Poor Things and Ex Machina, Stranger Things, Rocky Horror, Weird Science, all that good stuff.

**John:** Fantastic. If people want to read these, Weekend Read is in app store. Just download it on your phone. Also works on iPad. You can take a look at all these scripts, which is great.

Drew, while we have you, last week on the show we asked if any of our listeners were experienced WordPress developers, because we were having a problem with the Scrippets plugin we use on johnaugust.com. Sometimes we want to put little short snippets of scripts in a blog post, and we developed this thing called Scrippets, which is no longer working within most recent versions. You guys are of course fantastic as always. We got, what, six or seven people write in to help us out.

**Drew:** Maybe more. Maybe a dozen.

**John:** We are good. We have solved the problem. Thank you to everybody who wrote in. You guys are the best. We have the plugin fixed. I want to thank again our tremendous listeners for getting that figured out.

Let’s do some more follow-up here. Back in Episode 646 we talked about script revisions. Drew, can you help us out with what our writer said here.

**Drew:** Unlocking the ADs wrote, “I’m producing an indie feature right now. As we’re shifting from blue pages to pink, lo and behold, the writer director did not lock the script pages when they made revisions over the weekend. So the second AD is kvetching, ‘In the production trailer, the pages won’t line up. Everyone’s gonna have to get a whole new script.’ I tried to broach the subject. ‘But aren’t the scene numbers still the same? Does it actually matter if the page numbers change? Who uses the actual page numbers?’ Needless to say, I got my head bitten off by the whole AD team, because it’s the way it’s done. However, I didn’t get an answer as to why it’s the way it’s done, and certainly no answer as to who uses the page numbers. If or when this comes up again, how can I approach this to try and convince some folks stuck in their way?”

**John:** Mike Schur, let me get you up to speed. When Craig was on the podcast most recently, we were talking about locked pages. Craig said that he is done with locked pages and that he believes that we should just stop doing that. For next season of The Last of Us, he says, “We’re not gonna lock pages anymore.” You just finished production. I assume you had locked pages. You were a traditional show. Tell us about that. I saw your reaction there when I said not lock pages. Tell me what you’re thinking.

**Mike:** I don’t know what it’s like in the movie world. In the TV world-

**John:** We lock pages in film too.

**Mike:** Right, but what I was gonna say is, I don’t know how you feel about it. I feel Craig here, because it’s basically this aspect of getting scripts to the set to be actually produced, where when you make a change, you end up with… Let’s say when you lock a script, you make a change. You add a back and forth in the middle of the scene. You end up with this weird thing where there’s one line and the rest of the page is completely blank.

**John:** With a giant Sharpie X across it to really show that it’s blank.

**Mike:** Yeah. It has always been a mystery to me of what the big advantage is. It has been explained to me before by ADs and by script coordinators. I have at various times been like, “Okay, yeah, I guess I understand what that means.” But it makes everything look chaotic to me, and odd. You end up with a lot of pages of different colors mixed into these scripts. It makes things look more – I don’t know if the word is unprofessional, but it makes it look like someone made a mistake.

**John:** Exactly.

**Mike:** It is one of these “this is the way things have always been done” old saws that you hear about all the time. I can’t argue for it. I really can’t. You should have a script coordinator or an AD come on and make the argument for locked pages. But to my mind, it seems like it creates more confusion than it does clarity.

I will say this though, to argue the other side. My first job was at Saturday Night Live. There was a Microsoft Word template that we use to make our scripts. That was a huge improvement over the previous version, which had been that writers in the early ’90s wrote their sketches longhand and then gave them to assistants who then typed them into the format. Writers in the early ’90s apparently didn’t even have computers in their offices. By the time I got there in ’98, we at least had computers in our offices. We all had this really primitive Microsoft Word template that we used.

There was this bananas system, because you talk about a show with a lot of changes. There’s changes happening 10 minutes before a sketch is made. The process by which we made changes in scripts or rewrote scripts or then handed those scripts to the script coordinators and script assistants, who then went over those changes with the cue card folks, it was so primitive and so bad. It was like, “Please, someone has to change this.”

The argument not to change it was, this show is chaotic by its nature. We have all learned this system, and this system, just barely, works. To change it or to try to improve it, the stakes of it were so high, because if it didn’t work on the season premier and everything was chaos and the cue cards didn’t get written properly, then it’s live TV, and everything would fall apart. The argument not to change it was, “Look, it’s not perfect, but everybody knows what this is and everybody functions with this system in place. And so we’d rather leave it in place than change it and risk complete collapse of the system.”

I don’t know if that’s why we do it this way still or whether an AD or a script coordinator would tell us right now, “No, you guys are idiots. This is the real benefit of this.” I don’t know which of those things is true, but one of them is true, or perhaps both.

**John:** So many things to respond to here. First let’s talk with Saturday Night Live, because we had Simon Rich on the show this last week, and he was talking about his time on Saturday Night Live, which I think was after yours. My belief is that the current system in Saturday Night Live is that they’re using Final Draft for most of the show, but the Weekend Update segment is being done in Scripto, which is the system that’s used to do a lot of late-night shows. Colbert actually I think owns or is an investor in Scripto. That’s the online-only software for writing that stuff, because basically, it’s like a big Google doc where everyone can throw in on the same thing. That segment is written in there.

But then as we look at normal scripted film and television, I really wonder whether we’re keeping this metaphor of colored pages, because they’re not really colored pages anymore and locking pages from a physical paper type of universe. We’re trying to drive this into this digital world that we’re in, because Craig says on his show there are no printed scripts. Everything is always a digital thing just for security purposes.

I really think we could probably break with this. Would it be an adjustment? Yeah, but I think we’d come out the other side better and we’d actually save money and save time, and there’d be less confusion rather than more confusion. I really think we can do it, because even the script supervisors, maybe some of them are still using paper, but from what I’ve heard, they’re all using iPad version stuff that they’re using to track what’s actually being done.

**Mike:** This show that I just finished the first season of on Netflix was the first time that I, when we would rehearse a scene, almost all of the actors who had scripts that they were referring to had them on iPads. A lot of the writers, most of whom at this point are way younger than I am, are following them on iPads and making notes on their iPads.

It was the first time that it really felt to me like I am officially a dinosaur, because I can’t do it that way. It’s too deeply ingrained in me. I have to be holding a script. I have to be able to flip pages. I have to be able to make notes on a piece of paper. Now, it should be noted in other areas of my life. I refuse to read books on a Kindle. It’s very hard for me to read on my phone. Just too many years of physical paper to make this change now. Just put me on a raft and shove me off the shore and let me float away and die, is the way I feel.

But when I saw the actors using the iPads to keep track of what they wanted to do, that was when I felt like we have crossed the Rubicon here. We are now fully in a digital world on the physical set of the show. It did make me feel like the idea of like, “Hey, can someone print out copies of these changes I just made and get them to me?” was extremely antiquated. I might as well have been saying, “Could you please shovel a shovel full of coal into the steam engine so the locomotive can move down the tracks?”

I think you’re right. I think that we’re probably two years away from most productions saying, “This is pointless. Why are we printing out these pages? Why are we locking these pages at all? Why aren’t we just refreshing the Google doc or the Scripto doc or the Final Draft document?” We’re just gonna text it to everyone, email it to everyone, and then everyone will have it on their individual device. Then we will know definitively. We’ll just timestamp it and everyone will know. “Okay, everyone refer to Scene 326, Version 6.4,” is what we’re doing now. That will probably ultimately be how it lives forever and ever afterwards.

**John:** How do we make this transition happen? I’m wondering whether we could actually just get together a group of showrunners and ADs and maybe some scriptees and other folks who really are affected by this and say, “Hey, what if we were to just actually stop doing this? How would this change your lives? What things do we need to be aware of?” Because maybe there are some aspects of that. I’m always mindful of the Chesterton’s Fence metaphor. Things were built a certain way for a certain reason. Don’t tear down that fence until you know why it was there. But I think we know what the fence was for, and I think we’ve realized we don’t need that fence anymore.

**Mike:** Saving paper is the 1,000th most important benefit of this, but it’s not nothing. Paper does clog up people’s lives. I have in my office still at Universal, stacks and stacks and stacks of scripts that I just don’t need and never really needed. It would’ve been a lot easier. I think probably the reason for the system remaining in place is just stubbornness or habit and that there is a better workflow.

I think it’s probably the case that if the show that I worked on were to go to a second season, I would probably sit down with the ADs and with the scriptees and with everybody, with the actors to some extent, to say, “What’s a better system we can devise? There must be a way that we can all get on the same page here.” The thing is, that better system will still allow – the folks who want to have a paper script can still have a paper script. You can still print out individual scripts. It’s just that the workflow will probably be streamlined a lot with a better, more digital system.

**John:** I’m finishing edits on the Scriptnotes book. One of the things I’m wrestling with is we have a little chapter about rewrites during production and A and B pages and how not to lose your mind doing this. I’m reading these paragraphs like, “Should this even be in there? Should this whole idea just go away?” Because no one benefited from A and B pages. It was a hack for a physical time that we’re just not in anymore.

**Mike:** You’re probably right. It’s a little bit sad, because there is something magical about holding a script in your hand. I honestly think that to me – and this is, by far, not one of the 25 most important aspects of the process – but I really like read-throughs with physical scripts. I think there’s something magical about holding a tangible product in your hand as the rubber meets the road, as it comes out of the theoretical work of the writers’ room and becomes the literal work of the whole staff of people, the actors and all of the department heads and everybody else. I think there’s something wonderful about holding that product in your hand tangibly.

I have this thing I do at the end of every table read. We get to the end, and I say, “End of episode,” or whatever, and everybody claps. I flip back to the front and I write my name on the front, which I started way back at I think Parks and Recreation, because I remember thinking there were so many copies of this script. I had made notes in mine, and I just wanted to write my name on the front, so that I could easily identify it in case it got lost in a shuffle. I get up and I hug people and I shake people’s hands and then I can’t find my script. I just wrote my name on the front right after we were done. I’ve done that every single read through of every single of episode of every single show.

I would be a little bit sad if I were doing that with an Apple Pen, flipping back to page 1 of a doc, of a pdf. But again, that is just habit. That’s not making anyone’s life easier. I think it’s probably time for all of us who live in this dinosaur age that I live in to give up on some of the little traditions or habits or whatever you call them, to make the workflow go a little easier for everybody.

**John:** Let’s get to our main topic for today, which is rewriting and overwriting. This comes from a friend of the show. Drew, would you mind reading this for us?

**Drew:** “I’m rewriting a project, and I am resistant, not because I don’t want to write more, but because I’m not sure that the rewrite is going to be better. It’ll just be different. How do you weigh that? I’ve watched a couple friends who have producers attached to projects, and they’ve taken on so much feedback that at this point in their rewrites, I’m like, this has lost the pacing and weirdness of your voice. It feels overwritten. In TV I’ve been in writers’ rooms where there’s also this balance of, we’ll write this thing for the executives and take it out later. So sometimes overwriting seems strategic. I’m curious to hear your take on how you’d weigh that as creators.”

**John:** Overwriting. I’ve definitely felt this in my own drafts at times. I’ve felt this in other people’s drafts too. I haven’t gone through and produced a lot of people’s stuff that wasn’t my own. But in looking at people trying to incorporate notes sometimes, they’re both trying to incorporate the new notes and preserve everything else that was in there. You just feel like a bunch of stuff is wedged in there that is not helping to serve the story. Mike, do you see this in TV happening too?

**Mike:** This is a huge thing in TV. Yes. A couple different things are being raised, I think, by this question. The easiest one to address is the thing of, “We’ll write this in for the executives and take it out later.” That’s not overwriting to me. That is strategic management of your relationship with your studio or your executives. I think that’s a separate issue.

The overwriting thing is a real problem. I think one of the most important skills you can learn as a writer and as a showrunner is the art of the surgical fix. Most of the lessons that I’ve learned about writing came from The Office, which was my first sitcom job.

I worked for Greg Daniels, who is a true genius of the genre. He’s got an enormous, juicy brain. He’s the guy who sees the matrix code of scrips and of storytelling. But he also has this thing where he would become fixated on a problem in a script and he would spiral. He would be like, “Oh, no, we’ve ruined this somehow. We did this. This character’s motivation is unclear,” or, “The plot doesn’t make any sense if you have this scene in it, because this is what the characters are going through.” Sometimes he would get so spirally that he would just lie down on the floor, and on the dirty, disgusting carpet of the office we were in.

There was this one moment in particular where we did a readthrough and it went really well, but this one piece of the story was, I would say, overwritten. There was too much stuff in it. He was a character who had a motivation. I don’t remember the details. There was a character who had a specific storyline, a specific motivation. We had written in this scene for this character where he was saying something to someone else that muddied that motivation. There was too much going on. We had added too much stuff.

Greg was really freaked out by it. It was late on a Thursday night. We were starting to shoot it on Monday. It was like, “Oh, god.” We were all texting our husbands and wives and loved ones and saying, “I don’t think I’m coming home for dinner.” Greg was expounding out loud, as he lay on the floor, the exact specific reasons why this scene was screwing up the story. I was like, “Oh, boy, we’re really screwed. We’re going to be here forever.”

Then I said out loud – and I thought I was being stupid – I was like, “What if we just cut those two lines?” There was a beat, and then Greg was like, “Yeah, I think that’ll work.” He just popped back up and he went into the script and he cut the two lines that we were fixated on. I was like, “Oh, okay. Thank god.” The surgical fix is a key weapon for writers, especially in TV, because I think a lot of overwriting comes with good intentions.

**John:** Totally.

**Mike:** You are trying to make everything really clear to the audience. Especially in comedy, clarity is vitally important. People have to know what the characters are thinking and feeling and why they’re doing what they’re doing in order for the jokes to land. Sometimes when you add a bunch of stuff to try to make it more clear why they’re doing what they’re doing, you end up with a bunch of just muddy, mushy stuff that actually does the exact opposite. The surgical fix, the, “Wait, these six words in the middle of this sentence are making everything muddy and stupid,” and if we just remove them, then you’ll breathe a sigh of relief, because the scene will flow so much better.

The fix to an overwritten scene, in my experience, can often be fixed with a good analysis of what’s wrong and a surgical strike on the dialogue. That’s my instinct every time I feel like something is overwritten, is to try to say, “What are the clauses or phrases or sentences that are making us feel this way, and what happens if we just remove them?” Very frequently, that seems to be the answer to how to fix it.

**John:** As a feature writer, a lot of times I’ll get a script for a rewrite, and it has been through multiple writers before. One of the things I’ll notice is it’s overwritten because the writers before me, with very good intentions, were trying to address the notes and problems of the script that they were handed, what they were being told to fix and to rewrite. They’re addressing those problems, but those problems aren’t the problems of the script right now. There’s all this digital crap in there that can just go away. What I’d love to be able to do is just go through and do a clean pass that just takes away all this cruft that’s built up over the months or years or drafts that this script has been around. When I give the script to the people, like, “Oh my god, this reads so much better.” It’s like, “Yes, because I took out all your dumb notes from all the previous drafts, because they were not important.”

Especially I think in feature land, so often you’re doing a rewrite, you’re doing a polish, you want to show how much work you’ve done. You’re making changes that show the work you’ve done, because literally, it makes a little star in the margin to show, “Look how much I did.” Often, the stuff that you’re doing is not actually really improving stuff. It’s just adding. When you talking about removing clauses, removing sentences, in a lot of cases I’m removing scenes that just don’t need to be there anymore. They’re repetitive. They’re not speaking into the actual story we’re trying to tell.

When it’s your turn and when you’re getting notes to address a thing, I really look for what are ways to do things in a better or different way that’s not adding stuff to it. How do you make sure that you’re best addressing both the note and what the movie wants to be, which could mean scrapping that scene that you have and doing a different scene actually to use these goals, rather than trying to graft on this idea to a scene that really wasn’t built to support it. It’s being smart. You say surgical, but sometimes it’s just rebuilding a thing so it can actually support this note, rather than trying to adapt what’s there.

**Mike:** There’s two things that I think are really important. One of them is, there’s different kinds of overwritten. The kind that you’re talking about is a bunch of different people have given a bunch of different notes, and a bunch of different people have then gone in and tried to address those notes. As a result, you get this mish-mosh of stuff.

The question that kicked off this discussion is that sometimes those rewrites, those endless patches that people have put onto scenes, have made it so that it doesn’t seem like there’s a voice in the script. You don’t get the sense that this is the result of a person’s idea or work. Those rough edges, those uniquenesses, are what can often make the difference between a movie that you as a viewer love and respond to emotionally and make you feel something, and a movie that feels like a processed hot dog that’s just bland and mushy and not very interesting.

Look, different movies have different objectives and goals. If you’re making a $300 million summer blockbuster, the goal isn’t to celebrate the uniqueness of the artist’s voice. The goal is to just make a giant, loud, fun, entertaining thing. But the movies that I think we as viewers really just connect with or respond to are the ones where it feels like, wow, one specific person did this one specific idea and executed it.

I don’t know, I think of Nicole Holofcener’s movies, which I love. No one can write a Nicole Holofcener movie except Nicole Holofcener. Part of the reason is because there are rhythms and specificities to her voice that make it unique. If someone came in and took a Nicole Holofcener movie and took a bunch of notes from the studio and addressed them, it would just smooth everything out and make it bland. There’s that kind of rewriting or undoing of overwriting, which is like, let’s try to get back to the feeling that this is a unique idea from a unique artist.

There’s another thing that happens in comedy, and it happens in comedy movies. I’ve been a part of a number of comedy movie rewrites. But it happens within writers’ rooms too. The people who are writing jokes for a TV script or a TV movie script when there’s a rewrite, like a round table rewrite, are coming into that process bringing with them the most recent shows that they’ve worked on.

You have a comedy movie, and you get a writers’ room together. The writers’ room has writers from Barry and then The Bear and The Great and whatever, Everybody Loves Raymond, going back as far as you want. When you’re going through a scene and you’re pitching different jokes for a different scene, those writers are going to write jokes in the style of the kinds of shows that they have recently worked on.

As a result, when you sit back and look at the entire script, you’re going to be like, “This is a joke from The Great, and this is a joke from Everybody Loves Raymond, and this is a joke from The Office, and this is a joke from Rick and Morty.” It’s going to have no thematic consistency to the humor. It’s going to be just this crazy hodgepodge of whatever tone and style was the funniest in that moment. Sometimes you’ll see a comedy movie script where that’s the problem. It’s not just that it’s overwritten. It was overwritten by people who had very different senses of humor.

The hardest thing to do as a comedy showrunner, or I would imagine as a comedy screenwriter, is to remove a joke that you know is funny because it doesn’t fit the tone of the project you’re working on. It’s a really hard thing. I have had to defend that decision to a number of writers in TV writers’ rooms over the years, like, “Yes, this joke is funny, but also, it’s tonally off,” or it’s a character-damaging joke. Suddenly, this character takes on a color that we don’t want him or her to, or it just screws something up.

The point of a comedy show isn’t to just make as many jokes as you can, regardless of what their tone or style is. The idea is to have the show feel holistic and feel like there is a singular humorous voice at work. There’s room for variance within that, of course. Part of the real joy of working on a TV writers’ room is that you know Megan Amram is going to write a very different kind of joke from Alan Yang or Andrew Law or Jen Statsky or whoever the person is. But all of those jokes have to feel like they’re part of the same general holistic crew of humor writers. If they don’t, if those jokes are too crazy, then they just shouldn’t be in the script.

A big part of undoing overwriting to me sometimes in comedy rooms is saying, “Is this joke funny? Yes, it’s hilarious. Should it exist in this script? Should it be said by this exact character at this exact moment? Maybe not.” It’s painful, because jokes are hard, man. They’re hard to come by. Removing one that you know is funny is a very hard task. But I think when you are the steward of the show, of the tone of the show, of the style of the show, it’s a decision you have to make a lot.

**John:** You and I both live in Hancock Park. Some of the streets in our neighborhood are traditional asphalt, and some of them have been replaced by concrete. The concrete streets are really, really nice. The problem comes though if they have to cut into the street or if there’s some damage to the street. They fill it with asphalt. Of course, other neighborhoods, you might have just potholes and things like that too. So often, I think when you run into overwriting and things that [inaudible 01:02:31] it literally is, you fill that pothole. You took out that hole, but the patch is really not feeling great.

I think what we’re asking for is – it sounds like a lot of work to actually go through and repave that street, but you gotta repave that street. You gotta make it smooth, because ultimately, you’re trying to deliver a nice, smooth experience for the reader and ultimately for the audience with this scene that you’re writing. Just avoid filling the potholes, if you can.

**Mike:** This is one of the most difficult lessons that I learned. I have to relearn it again and again and again. When you read a script through, which in the TV world you’ll read every script through 75 times. Every time you go through it, every time you do a readthrough, but then you do a rewrite or you’re reading it at home or whatever, there are moments in the script where you get a little feeling in your chest, where you’re like, “Eh, there’s something wrong with that. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.” Then you keep going.

You can convince yourself that that pothole was filled in the right way, but you’ll just keep having that feeling. If you don’t fix it, if you don’t do the work to really dig up all of the surrounding area and cut out the part that’s mushy and replace it with something more sturdy, you will have that feeling all the way through shooting, all the way through editing, all the way through sound mixing. You’ll never get over that feeling.

Paying attention to that feeling when you have it is a really good skill to develop, because you can convince yourself, because it sounds like so much work to dig up that whole scene or throw away that whole scene or conceive of a new scene or conceive of an entirely new chunk of a script. It sounds like so much work. If it’s a B-minus patch, it’s very easy to convince yourself that everything is fine. But if you have that feeling, that feeling is never going away. You’ll never suddenly read that part of a script and go, “Yeah, no, I was wrong. Actually, it’s totally fine.” You will always feel like it needed to be fixed. The sooner you fix it, the better off you will be in the end.

**John:** To continue this metaphor, there’s a hole in the road and you see it coming up there. One of your strategies might be like, “Okay, I’m going to just put up some cones and drive around that hole.” You can feel that. That often feels like, “Wait, why are we doing this thing? Why are we zigzagging around this thing that’s a natural place to go?”

I think what we’re urging you to do is – probably the goal is to drive through that place and build a new thing that can go through that. But if that’s not really possible, you probably need to back up and just take a different road. Rather than try to do a little zigzag around it, actually just take a different route to get there, because maybe there’s no scene that can actually do what you’re trying to do here and you need to just find a different way to approach it.

**Mike:** This metaphor is surprisingly resilient.

**John:** It really is.

**Mike:** It’s really holding up under the stress we’re putting on it. But yes, it’s a perfect way to put it, which is to say, if every time you drive down a certain route – which is to say get to a certain part of your script – you find yourself having to dodge and weave, and you’re barely hanging on as your car wheels around in this complicated way. You got to where you were going. You reach your destination on the other side. But you have to just understand that there is a better path.

I don’t know how far we want to extend the metaphor. But there’s no GPS. There’s no, “Hey, find me the best route here,” which is what makes it so annoying, because it requires you to erase six pages of your script and then pace around your room and think, “Okay, here’s where I am. Here’s where I need to go. How can I get there a smoother way?” It’s really annoying. It’s one of the most annoying parts of rewriting.

I would say that, going back to the original question, oftentimes the reason that there’s a problem in the route to begin with is it’s been overwritten. A bunch of different people did a bunch of different things and patched this route together. Someone needs to come in and say, “Wait, I’ve got a better path here.”

**John:** You also will recognize that there’s times where you read through the script, you’re like, “Wait, you actually took a whole loop there and then you finally made it. In trying to get around this problem, you went way out of your way to get there.” We feel that as an audience. We feel like we are repeating this moments. “We already saw that house before. Something is deeply wrong here.”

**Mike:** I will say, on the plus side, there are few things in writing as satisfying as realizing that you can cut-

**John:** I love it so much.

**Mike:** … six pages of a script and replace it with two lines. The earliest lesson of show business that anyone remembers is leave them wanting more. You would always rather do something more quickly, unless the whole point of it is to be patient and deliberate. If you’re talking about plot mechanics, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line is a good adage to remember. If you’re finding you’re taking this crazy, loopy journey to do something that isn’t that hard or shouldn’t be that hard to do, try to find that straight line. I think that’s a good lesson.

**John:** Cool. It has come time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. First off is the book Project Hail Mary, which is by Andy Weir. He’s the guy who wrote The Martian. I’m reading it right now, and I’m really enjoying it. I debated whether to read it or not, because it’s being made into a movie right now. Drew Goddard wrote the script. Chris Miller and Phil Lord are directing it. They’re all friends. They’ll all come on the podcast hopefully to talk about it. I could just wait and see the movie when it comes out. But I’m excited that I’m reading it now.

I’m going to encourage listeners to read the book, because it’s going to be a challenging adaptation. I’m really curious what they’re going to do with things that appear in the book and how they’re going to make it all work. I think if you read the book now, yes, you’ll be spoiled a little bit on some of the surprises that happen in the movie, but I think you’ll also be delighted to see, “Oh, they made this choice. They made that choice. This is what they did with point of view on things.” It can be a good exercise to have read the book first before seeing the movie. That’s my recommendation for that.

My second One Cool Thing is a game. It’s a game that we actually made here in the office. Pretty much every Friday we play this game called AlphaBirds, which is a word game. It’s like Boggle or Scrabble but much easier and simpler. You can drink a beer while playing it. Years ago, we printed 100 decks and sent them off to some friends and left it at that. But enough people asked for it that we actually went through and printed a whole bunch more. We got the proper trademark on AlphaBirds with a little TM at the end, so we can sell them legally. They’re now available to anybody. If you want to play this game, it’s a fun little card game. It’s available on Amazon, or if you go to alphabirdsgame.com, you can buy it through there. There’s a code, Scriptnotes, that saves you five bucks off of it if you want to play AlphaBirds. It’s a great little game that Drew can testify is quite a bit of fun to play.

**Mike:** It sounds like a fun office. You guys have a fun office.

**John:** Every Friday after 4:00, we stop and we play some games and drink some beers.

**Mike:** That’s fantastic. My One Cool Thing is when I was making the show The Good Place, we had a philosophical advisor who is a professor. His name is Todd May. He actually appears in the finale of The Good Place, playing himself. He’s the best kind of philosopher to my mind, which is to say he’s a philosopher whose writing you can actually understand when you read it. It’s a very rare thing in the world of philosophy. Todd has a new book. It is not out yet, but it will be out within a month. I think August 6 is the publication date. The subject matter is wonderful and hilarious. The title of the book is Should We Go Extinct? A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times. He is literally answering the question of would the universe be better off if humans just went extinct.

What’s great about him as a writer and what attracted me to him to begin with is he takes on these incredibly huge, thorny problems, but he writes about them with a tremendous amount of empathy and humanity, in a very clear and straightforward way that anyone can understand. You do not have to have studied philosophy in college or any other place in order to understand it. He argues the pros for us going extinct. He argues the cons for us going extinct. He makes compelling arguments on both sides. I read the book. He sent me a copy of it when it was in galleys. It’s 176 pages long.

**John:** Love it.

**Mike:** It is not overbearing or exhausting. I encourage everyone to check it out when it comes out next month.

**John:** Mike Schur, you introduced me to Todd May years ago. I just emailed with him this morning.

**Mike:** Really?

**John:** There’s a thing of mine that he’s reading through which is philosophically oriented. He’s giving me some notes and thoughts on that, so thank you for making that introduction.

**Mike:** Absolutely. I hope you enjoy his book. It’s really great.

**John:** I’m looking forward to it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help this week from Jonathan Wigdortz. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Vance Lovett. 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 like the ones we answered today.

You’ll 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 and glassware. They’re all cool and great. You can 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 we’re about to record on AI music. But Michael Schur, what an absolute pleasure having you back on the show. Thank you so much.

**Mike:** It is an absolute joy to be here. I will see you for Episode 1300.

**John:** I’m so excited.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Mike Schur, we’re springing this on you. But about two or three weeks ago, the Recording Industry Association of America filed these two lawsuits against these AI music producers called Suno and Udio over copyright infringement. I was a little skeptical at the start, because in general, I think the music copyright stuff has been overblown and overdone.

I remember the Blurred Lines lawsuit. I thought that was actually crazy, because did the song Blurred Lines feel like a Marvin Gaye song? Yes. But did it actually infringe? Can you actually say this is the same notes, the same thing? Could it be mistaken for a specific Marvin Gaye song? I think not. I was skeptical of this lawsuit, and then I listened to some of the examples. Let me play a few samples here from this lawsuit.

(AI song samples)

What we just listened to, obviously, that sounded like Mariah Carey singing All I Want for Christmas is You. But that was not prompted for Mariah Carey. It was basically like, give me a Christmas song that’s a pop song that’s in this style, and that’s what it generated was something that was basically-

**Mike:** Whoa. Really?

**John:** Yeah, really.

**Mike:** Oh, no.

**John:** The prompt did not even include the words Mariah Carey. It just generated this. Apparently, for the one that sounded like Green Day there, “A reproduction of a nostalgic acoustic ballad by a pop band famous in the 1990s whose name rhymes with mean nay, whose lead singer has a name that rhymes with Millie No Marmstrong, with a sense of musical urgency.” They’re really trying to tip it in there. But for the one that sounded like the Beach Boys, it didn’t reference the Beach Boys at all, and it comes up with Good Vibrations.

**Mike:** Wow. That’s intense. I had not heard those before. That American Idiot is just the song American Idiot which a very slightly different chord progression, it sounds like. The Mariah Carey song was just the Mariah… I thought you were playing the Mariah Carey song so that you could then play a song that was a ripoff of the Mariah Carey song. I didn’t know that that was the ripoff. That’s intense, man.

**John:** What the lawsuit brings up, and I think what we’re grappling with, is it infringement to make these things or to use these things in other ways? Is the copyright infringement the existence of a model that could create these things, or is copyright infringement only when you use these things to create a knockoff of a song? I think that’s not quite clear where we’re at there, because it’s clearly not copyright infringement to listen to a song. If you then, having listened to that song, make a song that is functionally identical, that’s the problem.

**Mike:** I would say this entire conversation has to be prefaced, at least on my end, by saying, boy, am I not a lawyer and do I not know what I’m talking about. But this was the fear that the Writers Guild had. In fact, the two main fears I would say that the Writers Guild had were, one, how is the work that we have written being used to train AI, and two, what is AI going to do with that work?

The nightmare scenario is that they feed all of our scripts into a machine, and the machine breaks them down into their component parts and understands the mechanics of storytelling and so forth. Then someone says, “You know what we need next summer is a romantic comedy set in New York, featuring a character who is a police officer and a character who works in an advertising agency, and the meet cute is that the police officer arrests,” and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then the computer searches the database and finds 600 romantic comedies, Nora Ephron’s and yours and whoever’s, and spits out an entire script in .01 milliseconds that is a fully realized screenplay with story beats and moves and characters and jokes and whatever.

What has happened is a bunch of human-designed material has been mushed around and muddied up, and then something is spit out that is entirely derivative of that work. No one whose work went into the programming of that computer gets paid for it. Also, no one wrote that script really, and so they don’t have to pay anybody. That’s the nightmare that we were addressing.

The thing about songs that I think is different is that there’s only so many variations on a three-minute pop song. I think we’ve all had the experience of hearing songs and going, “You know what this reminds me of is this.” That doesn’t mean that the person who wrote the second song was consciously thinking of the first song. How many songs have the same chord progression? Thousands and thousands and thousands of songs.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Mike:** There’s a fundamental difference, I think, between pop songwriting and screenwriting. But at essence, the questions are the same. The questions are, should the people who are the humans who create these things be compensated for some way when those things are used to program a machine that could spit out versions of them that the people didn’t write themselves.

**John:** Absolutely. To that extent, I say A, yes, they should be compensated, but B, there’s this larger existential question of what are we losing. What are we losing from the fabric of being alive on earth? If we outsource the work of creativity to machines that are only creative inasmuch as we have programmed them to be creative, that’s the part of it that really makes me not sleep well at night is I don’t know what humanity is.

If the most fundamental work of humanity, which is to say artistic endeavor, is outsourced to a machine that only exists because we built it and we fed all of our previous creativity into it and asked it to kick out new versions of things, that’s the part that is so unsettling, so uncanny valley, and so unappealing to me. I think without being a lawyer, without knowing the legitimacy of these claims, I wholeheartedly support the idea that the recording industry is trying to stop this from happening.

**John:** So many different threads we can pull at. I’m going to try to pull at a bunch, and it’s going to probably be a very messy sweater by the end. As we went into the WGA negotiations, we talked about the Nora Ephron problem. Basically, if you train a model on all of the scripts of Nora Ephron and you ask it to generate a new Nora Ephron script, who should get credit for that? Literally, who should be credited as the writer of the screenplay? But also, shouldn’t she or her estate have some ability to determine how that all works?

Looking at the parallels between songwriting and screenwriting, one of the things about these examples we just played, All I Want for Christmas is You, it’s so clear that this is the same thing. It’s based on the same thing. Or even American Idiot, we can see this is the same thing. But that analogy does not hold especially true for movies, because so often, movies are referencing each other.

These movies are similar, but rarely do we have a situation where you say, “That movie is actually just this movie.” We will have lawsuits saying, “Oh, this was actually based on my screenplay,” or there was some sort of chicanery happening behind the scenes, but almost never do we say, “This movie is exactly the clone of this movie,” except for weird cases where it was some Nigerian knockoff of Star Wars, which we love for its just sheer ballsiness.

That’s not a thing that we’ve had to worry about so far, but in theory, we could be worrying about this, where the version of this software that’s not making songs but it’s making video could just say, “Make me a Star Wars,” and it just goes off and it makes you a Star Wars. That’s coming eventually. Music is always the canary in the coalmine for where these things are.

I want to play a little devil’s advocate here, because we say that these things are trained on all of the stuff and then they are generating new stuff based on what they’ve done. That’s also the process of culture. The process of culture is reading and watching everything that has happened out there. Then a human being or a group of human beings takes that and synthesizes it and creates a new version of it. I think our concern is that there’s not a human in the mix, and also that the new version in this case isn’t new enough. It’s not original enough. It just feels like a shitty copy rather than something new and a synthesis that actually pushes stuff forward.

**Mike:** This is the philosophical question involved in all of this, which is right now the technology in its nascency is bad, in the sense that if you say, “Give me a song that kind of sounds like a Christmas song with female voice,” it literally just spits out All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey.

Now, given the ways in which computational power advances, the speed at which software gets better, the difference between the iPhone 2 and the iPhone 15, which didn’t take that long to get from A to B, you would imagine that in three years if you say, “Give me a Christmas song with a female voice,” it’s going to just generate a Christmas song. There will be new lyrics. It won’t sound like Mariah Carey. But it will be the result of Mariah Carey’s work and the work of a lot of other artists, a lot of other songwriters, a lot of other performers.

Right now we are able to hear those clips and say, “Oh my god, this is horrifying.” In three years, I don’t think we will, because it’ll just play a song, and we will say, “I like that song,” or, “I don’t like that song.” But it will just be a song. It won’t be so obviously derivative and ripped off.

The philosophical question that we’re really asking, I think, is do we want to live in a culture where we are no longer allowing or relying on human ability and instinct to be the primary generator of pieces of art, creativity? I think there will be some people, some futurists, and some folks who are like, “Who cares? It’s art. It’s art. Art is art. What does it matter?” Maybe they’ll think, in a post-modern Banksy way, that it’s cooler. Was it really art when, who was it, Duchamp put the urinal in the museum? Is that art, or is it just a urinal that he threw into a museum? I’m not unsympathetic to that argument.

I think there’s an argument to be made that says this is where we are in 2025 and going forward is we as a species have invented these powerful machines. The powerful machines have capabilities because we programmed them to have capabilities. You could make the argument that it is no less valid a piece of art to have a person program a machine that looks at the history of songwriting and generates its own songs than it is to have a human generate those songs. I don’t think that’s an invalid argument. I think there’s something to that.

We always talk about what separates us from the animal, like it’s our ability to cognitively reason or it’s our ability to maintain complex relationships with other members of our species. I have always felt like the thing that separates us from the animals is art. It just is. There’s occasionally a story about an elephant in Thailand who can paint, and that’s really cool and awesome. There’s occasionally a story of a crow who will create a sculpture by picking up little buttons and pieces of metal and making them into something. Yes, fine, the exception that proves the rule. There isn’t a hedgehog that wrote Casablanca.

When I get into this discussion, and we had many of them over the course of the WGA negotiations, the thing that I feel the most deeply – not that I reason out the most or that I focus on in contractual language the most – but the thing I feel the most is, I fear the loss of something fundamentally human when we have gotten to a point where anyone can say to a piece of software, “Hey, give me a two-hour movie about a guy running a bar in West Africa during World War Two.” Then you get a pretty good screenplay. I fear what that means for us as a species. That’s not an argument that we could make to the folks that run movie studios. It’s not an argument that could be made to the folks who run AI software companies that generate pop songs, because their response will be like, “Sorry, man. Sorry that you fear this, but whatever.” It’s the philosophical component of this that makes me lose sleep at night.

I think there is a difference between someone looking at the world that they live in and painting Guernica or putting a urinal into a fine art museum, and a piece of software saying, “Here’s a random object that represents a sort of unpleasant part of humanity. I’m going to just install that into a museum and call it art.” I think there’s a fundamental difference when you insert the middle man of technology between the artist and a thing they’re creating.

**John:** One of the things you’re pointing to is intention, is that Duchamp has an intention behind that, Picasso has an intention behind when he paints Guernica, and the AI does not have an intention other than to please the person who typed in the prompt. I think another thing you’re getting to is, in the WGA negotiation, the WGA is negotiating with the studios, and that is the one place we can negotiate. We had to really draw lines around what our relationship with them was going to be like in terms of AI.

With something like this, it’s like, yes, you can say maybe it’s governmental reaction to AI companies or what the laws are going to be, but it’s really societal, because it goes beyond our borders. It’s just like, what choices are we going to make about what is okay and what is not okay? Collectively as a group and individually, what do we feel are the right paths through there?

As I look at AI in my own life, I’m always thinking about is this use of AI replacing a person’s work that I would otherwise be going to? Going all the way back to your example of taking the sea lions barking out of the back of this audio, there are other ways they could’ve maybe addressed that without AI, but it would not have as successful or nearly as efficient to do it.

**Mike:** Efficient, yeah.

**John:** This was a right choice, and I feel like very, very defensible. But I think we have to ask ourselves, any time we’re using one of these technologies, is this the right use of this? If it’s to create a knockoff Mariah Carey song, I think the answer is no.

**Mike:** Just to go one step further – and again, these are philosophical arguments. I’m not sure that they would sway a lot of people, but they’re how I feel. The process of making something like a TV show or a movie, it amounts to 10 phases of creativity with 10 different groups of people.

In TV, the final phase is a sound and color correction mix, where you are in a room in a dark studio and there’s a group of people around you and those people all have different jobs. There’s dialogue mixers. There’s sound effects mixers. There’s a music editor and a composer who’s composed music. You’re putting the final ribbon on the thing that you have spent months, if not years, creating. It’s incredibly collaborative. It’s really magically a team sport at the end.

By the way, every one of these phases is a team sport, regardless of whether you’ve written something completely by yourself or with a group of people. They’re all team sports. The shooting process is a team sport. The editing process is a team sport.

Its final phase is one of my favorites, because we are now done with everything. We have edited the picture the right way. We have chosen the right takes. The actors have done their jobs. The costumers and props people and art directors and caterers, everyone has done their jobs as well as they can do them. We’re at the very end. Now we’re going to make sure that everyone who watches this gets the best possible viewing and auditory experience. Every phone ring in an office comes at the right exact moment. Every little bit of dialogue. Maybe the actor got a little choked up when they said this line, and we want everyone to see exactly, hear exactly how they got choked up. It’s like painting a grain of rice. It’s like a group of people all coming together to paint this grain of rice and get it perfect.

When the sound editor presents that cleaned-up audio of that scene in San Francisco, and what he has done in this case is remove the stuff you don’t want to hear, so that you can hear the stuff you do want to hear, he has used AI to do that, and he’s used a computer to do that. But he has been there the whole time, combing through every moment, just making sure that every single little thing is exactly right, and by the way, at various times, has put some of those seal noises back in. When you cut to a shot, there’s a moment where you cut to a shot of the sea lions. At that moment, he undid what the AI had done, so that you could hear those seals barking, because we want the audience to hear them bark at that moment and not at other moments.

What I’m getting at here is that yes, that software program made his job a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but it’s still his job. He is still doing the work of going moment by moment and examining every nook and cranny of that scene with his headphones on, staring at wave forms on a computer and getting everything exactly right. That is not a thing that you could tell an AI to do. It’s impossible, because that requires the observation and thought and careful work of a human being observing what you’ve made and thinking, when we do we want to hear what and when and how and why.

I find that in other words, if you told me that right now we could replace all of the people in that room with software programs and that the process of sound mixing and color correcting an episode of TV could be 10 minutes long instead of four hours, which it often is, that sounds horrible to me. That sounds awful. That’s a worst-case scenario for how you complete the final phase of the thing that you spent so much time working on, because what I want it to be is a group of people who are thinking about doing what they’re doing and have, like you say, an intention. The intention is let’s make this piece of art as good as we can make it.

I think that the philosophical argument becomes pretty non-philosophical when you think of it that way, when you think of it as, what do we want this to be. We want it to be the product of a group of people who are all thinking really hard about how to make it as good as possible. Thinking really hard about something is not a job for an AI. It just isn’t.

**John:** Mike Schur, thank you so much for all your philosophical musings on this topic and everything else. I’m going to let you get back to that sound mix and be done with those sea lions. Absolute pleasure talking with you.

**Mike:** Thank you, buddy. Talk to you soon.

Links:

* [Mike Schur](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1321658/) on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Schur)
* [Weekend Read 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* [IATSE tentative basic agreement](https://basic.iatse.net/)
* [David Ellison’s Skydance Taking Over Paramount After $8 Billion Investment](https://deadline.com/2024/07/david-ellison-skydance-paramount-takeover-1236002996/) by Dade Hayes for Deadline
* [WGA West Reaches $3 Million Settlement With CBS Studios Over Writer Fees and Benefit Payments](https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/wga-west-cbs-settlement-writers-mcgyver-hawaii-50-seal-team-1236066838/) by Cynthia Littleton for Variety
* [Project Hail Mary](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611060/project-hail-mary-by-andy-weir/) by Andy Weir
* [Alphabirds](https://alphabirdsgame.com/)
* [Should We Go Extinct?](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760946/should-we-go-extinct-by-todd-may-introduction-by-michael-schur-creator-of-the-good-place/) by Todd May
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* [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 Vance Lovett ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.drewmarquardt.com/) with help from [Jonathan Wigdortz](https://www.wiggy.rocks/). It is 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/650V2standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 648 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you say goodbye? We’ll take a look at farewell scenes to explore what makes them work. We’ll also answer listener questions about managers, fairies, and moving to Los Angeles. To help us do all of this, let’s welcome back our OG guest host, Aline Brosh McKenna. Aline, welcome back.

Aline Brosh McKenna: I’m actually Craig Mazin.

John: You are Craig Mazin. Craig always affects different voices, and he’s been working-

Aline: Je suis Craig Mazin.

John: I really respect his dedication to the craft. He really finds what it is, that unique kind of thing. As busy as he’s been doing The Last of Us, he still found time to. Craig, thank you again for all of the hard work you’ve done.

Aline: He’s doing a great impression of Aline. I’m doing a really good impression of Aline.

John: We’ve lost the thread here. Aline, it’s so nice to see you.

Aline: Thank you. Thank you for being so gracious about me being late. Anyone who knows me know I am scrupulously on time. And I was on time for the time I thought I was, which was 11:00. But for 10:30, when it actually was, not on time.

John: Not on time. Aline, I haven’t seen you for a bit. Tell me in just a general sense – you don’t have to name projects, but what are you working on? What’s under your fingers right now?

Aline: I have two thrusts to my day. There’s the things that I personally am writing, and then I have a company called Lean Machine, which is run by the wonderful-

John: Can I stop you for a sec?

Aline: Yeah.

John: I just recognized that Lean is actually related to Aline.

Aline: It is.

John: I’ve known you 10 years. I just now got this.

Aline: It’s because when I met my husband – people really love to call me AY-leen, and my husband said, “You should tell people it’s Aline Mean Fighting Machine.” When I started my company, I had to choose between Lean Machine and Fighting Machine.

John: No Fighting Machine.

Aline: I chose Lean, because we’re on time and under budget. I have a company that I run with this woman named Heather Morris, who’s wonderful, fantastic, used to work for Mindy Kaling. We have about 15 to 20 projects. About maybe 30 percent of them are things I’m writing in TV and film, and then the rest we work with other writers. That has been just a pure delight.

I’m not shocking anyone when I tell you it’s a tough time in the business right now. And so what I’ve really focused on is trying to be the producer that I would have wanted to have, which is someone you can really call for story input, because sometimes you work with producers and they are really helpful for story, and sometimes you work with producers and you call them when you have a story problem and you’re like, “Never mind.” It’s like when you ask your parents for advice about your friends, and then they start and you’re like, “Never mind.”

We provide a lot of story support. We help break stories. We make decks for writers. We proofread their scripts. We get sandwiches from Sycamore Kitchen. We try and get things in as good situation for the writers, so that they’re very proud and excited about what they do. I was telling you we started this company in 2019, which was just really great time to start.

John: A great time, because the business was expanding, so there were many more opportunities. However, you could not have known all the roadblocks ahead.

Aline: We did run into a buzzsaw. In fact, Heather started February of 2020, and we moved her right into her office, and then she wasn’t there for months. But I’ve really enjoyed working with writers. There is something fun about breaking a story with a writer and then seeing what they come back with. We work with wonderful people. That’s been really fun.

In this time, still creating things in collaboration with people, which is my favorite thing, I still get to do that. Then I split time between TV and movies. Right now, I’m working on a rewrite, and then I have another movie that we’re making a deal for. Then we have a project that has popped out of a place that it used to be, and we’re trying to find a home for that.

One of the interesting things is, in addition to the market being very soft, I don’t know if you found this, but the making-a-deal process has become glacial beyond my understanding. We have a running joke, because it’ll be like, “Oh, the BA guy is water skiing. Oh, the BA guy sprained his Achilles.”

John: BA being business affairs.

Aline: Yeah.

John: A thing that’s important to understand is, when they say, “Oh, congratulations. We’re gonna have a deal. We’re gonna hire you to do this thing,” that is the start of a process. When you and I started in this business, it could take not usually days; it was weeks to get that deal settled. Your agents and your lawyers and everyone would go back and forth, but you’d come up with a deal, and then you’d start writing. Over the course of the last decade, but really I think in a crisis point since the pandemic, to make a deal has taken forever. There’s times where you’re waiting 11 months to actually make your deal and start writing. Just crazy.

Aline: The movie stuff that I’m doing has been okay, has moved apace really, because if you’re working on something that they have in their mind as like, “Oh, we need this,” or, “We’re making this.” But TV is the thing that used to be, we would be saying, “Oh, TV’s so great, because they need things every season.”

John: There’s a season. There’s a schedule.

Aline: But there’s no seasons anymore. One of the things we’re taking out soon, we’re adding a producer, and we had this writer, and I think that deal took 10 months to make or something like that. And then some of these deals were interrupted by the strike. So we would’ve started it, then there was the six months of the strike, then you come back and you’re still making the deal.

Those poor BA people opened a door and a bunch of snow fell on them, because all these deals that had not gotten done before the strike, they’re doing those. So there’s just been, especially in TV, where you often have numerous components… Sometimes when I come onto a movie, it’s just me; it’s not my company. But things where you have multiple companies coming together with the writers, with maybe a rights deal, a book deal, it’s so funny, because as you said, all this enthusiasm, we’re making this thing, and then 10 months later you’re like, “Oh, right, yeah, no. Yes, this guy.”

John: I’m in that same situation right now. There’s two feature projects, both of which I would love to do. I’m halfway allowing myself to commit to them, like, “Oh, these are things I’m going to write.” But I’m also recognizing it could take so long to make the deals, I’ll probably be writing something else before I’m writing those projects.

I just came off five weeks on a project, which was really interesting for me, because you and I have done weekly work on features, where we come in and we’re working on a thing that is in trouble. It’s about to go into production, it’s in production, or maybe it’s in post and they’re gonna do rewrites. I had this situation for a series that had already been shot and was going to go back and do rewrites.

It was very challenging, interesting work, because I had to write new material that could fit between things that were already established and were gonna stay in the series. But then I had to keep in mind that, “Oh, this new scene also has to pay off in Episode 2, 3, 4, and 5.” Then there were things that could change and couldn’t change. It was really difficult. Drew had to go through all this with me, because there were times where I had to ask. I’m like, “Wait, what happens in Episode 4?” because I want to make sure I’m not duplicating this thing or making the thing that happens in Episode 4 impossible.

Aline: That’s kind of cool. We like to do our puzzles. That’s a puzzle.

John: It was a jigsaw puzzle, the kind of thing that Craig would hate.

Aline: That’s correct.

John: But Craig’s not here to complain about it.

Aline: That’s correct.

John: We’ll talk about these things, but also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I thought we might talk about journaling. I don’t know if you journal at all. It’s a thing I keep trying to do. I never actually do.

Aline: Great.

John: But should we be keeping track of what we’re doing all day?

Aline: Oh, can’t wait to talk about that.

John: We’ll talk about that. In the news, Inside Out 2 opened huge. It opened in $155 million in the U.S. and Canada, $295 million worldwide, a huge, giant opening hit for the summer. I’m so happy for everybody at Pixar and the people who made it.

Aline: God, I’m rooting for anything that works. Rooting, rooting. Just need those things to work and for people to be excited.

John: Yeah, so it was great to see that. I was honestly surprised. I didn’t know that the world had a huge, pent-up demand for Inside Out. I liked the first movie. It wasn’t like, oh, that’s a surefire sequel. I was surprised.

Aline: I think that that has built up an increased following on Disney Plus, where kids have really dug into some of the older animated titles. I know Moana and-

John: Encanto.

Aline: Encanto. Those have I think become huge juggernauts on Disney Plus. I think that that’s Inside Out. If you’ve been watching it at home, it’s exciting to take your… It’s an all-audience… I think because that movie’s a little more sophisticated, in that it has these more, almost Charlie Kaufman-y themes to it. It’s like a Charlie Kaufman movie for kids. I think adults enjoy unpacking the math of that.

John: It wasn’t the only good news about the box office. Bad Boys 4 opened up really well, and opened up better than I think people expected as well. A $56 million opening weekend, made $214 cumulative as we’re recording this. That’s great for them. Good job, Sony.

Also, Sony and George Gallo settled their suit. Apparently, there was an ongoing lawsuit for many, many years. The original movie was based on a George Gallo short story, and it was a question of, do they have to pay him for that short story for the other things. Apparently, they finally settled that lawsuit that had been going on for years and years and years.

Aline: Do you know how that was settled?

John: Of course no one ever talks about what the actual settlement details were. But both sides are apparently happy that the thing is resolved. It’s really about derivative works, because obviously they buy the short story to make the first movie, and then it’s a question of are all other movies based on that short story or not.

Aline: Got it.

John: Sony’s also busy; they’re buying Alamo Drafthouse. I don’t know if you saw this.

Aline: I did see that.

John: Do you like the Alamo Drafthouse? Have you been down there?

Aline: I love it. I love it. Now, how branded is it gonna be? I saw a movie at The Egyptian, which is owned by Netflix.

John: It’s Netflix’s Egyptian, right?

Aline: Yes. It’s beautiful. I don’t know what it looked like before, but it’s sparkling new. Concessions are good. It’s a really nice place to see a movie. I just wonder, are we gonna be looking at Charlie’s Angels everywhere? How branded do you think it’ll be?

John: I doubt it’ll be very branded, but we’ll see what happens. For international listeners who aren’t familiar with the chain, Alamo Drafthouse came out of Alamo, Texas and was known for having a real love of movies and retrospectives of films, older things in addition to new releases. They also had food that came to your seat, which was delicious. Just a really good movie-going experience. We have one in Downtown Los Angeles. For me and Aline, it’s a bit of a hassle to get to, but it’s worth it when you want to see a movie down there. I’m hoping that the chain stays the same and they keep that same vibe.

But it’s important to bring up the fact that it feels like this was a thing that wasn’t supposed to be allowed to happen, because we don’t think about movie studios being able to own theaters, because of the consent decrees. We’ve talked about this on the show before, but back in 1948, the government said that you could not be both a movie studio and also own the theaters, because that was a vertical integration. That was bad. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Apparently, that only applied to Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, and MGM. It didn’t apply to Columbia, because Columbia didn’t own movie theaters at the time. And so even if that had not been overturned relatively recently, nothing was stopping Sony from owning a theater.

Aline: Listen. I wish someone would buy the ArcLight. I miss the ArcLight every day. I know they’re gonna reopen the Cinerama Dome, but the actual ArcLight, that’s where my kids grew up going to the movies. It was the greatest. I wish someone would buy that and bring that back.

John: I feel like eventually ArcLight Complex will reopen. It’s been so tough to see it happening. What I’ve heard is that the ongoing issue is that ArcLight Theaters owed money to the studios and basically had to figure out some sort of settlement for unpaid film rental, and that may be what’s actually keeping them from being back in business. I hope it gets resolved. It was such a great place to see movies.

Aline: The best.

John: The best. More follow-up. Drew, talk to us about 3 wing 4. I did not understand this.

Drew Marquardt: In our last Three Page Challenge, there was a script called The Long Haul, where two of the characters were talking about 3 wing 4. You and Craig and me had no idea what that meant. Several listeners wrote in that this comes from the Enneagrams.

Aline: Oh, I’ve done this. I’ve done this.

Drew: Which is a personality profiling system kind of like Myers-Briggs.

John: Great. 3 wing 4 refers to what your personality type would be. In Myers-Briggs, I was an ENTJ or whatever that was.

Aline: So am I.

John: Not surprising that we’re successfully driven screenwriters and have the same kind of things. We’ll put a link in the show notes to what these descriptions are.

Aline: I did this, but I can’t remember what it was. There was a thing where this was going around. Someone sent this to me. Whatever I got, the person who sent it to me was like, “Oh yeah, you’re such a that.” But I don’t know. How useful do you think this is?

John: I don’t know if it’s especially useful for an individual or for a character. I guess there’s two threads I want to talk about. The fact that Craig and I didn’t understand what this was would mean that a lot of people are gonna have no idea what the hell you’re talking about on page 2 of a screenplay. So that’s an issue there.

I always look at these kind of things like astrology. It’s just like, okay, everyone says that this is what your energy is. It’s like, okay, fine, great, if it helps you as a writer make choices for the character that underline that. But I worry that it could be a shorthand for not actually doing the work on the page to create that character who has these characteristics.

Aline: I know this is not a thing that will endear me to folks, but I have an easier time believing in these things than astrology. I’m puzzled. Maybe I am under-informed. But there’s so much chance that goes into when you’re born, like when the doctor can get there or when you push or how you’re pushing or who’s there or whether your mom got there yet.

John: Yeah, or did they fill out the right thing on the form? Turns out you were actually born the next day. They just wrote the wrong thing down on this.

Aline: It’s really, really popular among younger people, especially women. And so often people want to talk to me about it. I usually say, “This won’t be a fun conversation for you, because I will not be yes anding you. I will be wondering why.”

John: I think I’m in your camp here, because it feels like things like Myers-Briggs or what this Enneagram is, which I don’t really know very well, it’s based on, okay, looking at the choices that you make in your life, what are characteristics that group together like that. That kind of tracks for me. But where you were born, when you were born, where the stars were, how Mercury was doing that day doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Aline: I think it goes to, you know in scripts, the idea of the chosen one, the Harry Potter? It’s most religious things. It’s like, oh, no, this guy matters more than all the other people. I think there’s a fantasy in your specialness that even the stars would pull you in certain directions.

Listen. I get it, because as I was saying to someone the other day, it doesn’t sound cute, but we are meat that will be dirt. Of course we will look for greater meaning. I get that. It’s just the exact moment of when you were born, as someone who gave birth twice, just don’t know what that would correlate to, because there is actually a bit of… You could nudge it if you wanted to.

John: My daughter, we had to induce. When she was born was kind of a choice that a group of people made.

Let’s talk about these kinds of scenes. This is a feature we do on Scriptnotes every once in a great while. The first time we did this segment, it was about your first day on the job, and we referenced Devil Wears Prada. We’ve also talked about breakups. Today I want to talk about farewells, which is that moment in a movie where two characters are saying goodbye presumably for the last time.

We’ll talk through some examples of these scenes in movies, but also, what are the characteristics of a farewell scene. This could be the end of a romance. It could be that one character is dying. And so Big Fish, of course, obviously has a farewell scene. We have the deathbed scene and the funeral there too. Or it could be some other situation that is pulling these two characters apart. Maybe buddies who’ve come to – they were rivals at the start, they became friends, and now they’re having to say farewell, and we see the journey there.

But I want to talk through the aspects of farewell scenes, how they work, why they work, and what things writers should be looking for if they’re crafting a farewell scene. Can you think of farewell scenes that you’ve written?

Aline: The one that I’ve spoken about the most probably is the end of Prada where they see each other on the street and Miranda does a little tip of the hat to Andy. I think you can interpret that in a number of ways. Is that a salute? Is that a farewell? She has a little bit of a lingering smile when she gets into the limo. And then Meryl says, “Go.” I say Meryl, because in the way it was scripted, actually, in the screen description, it said, “She looks at the driver. Go.” It was in the scene description, and they had actually shot it, were packing up, and Meryl wanted to go back and say, “Go,” to the driver. It snaps you back into her actual MO.

It’s funny, because I think about this also with respect to romantic comedies that end with people kissing, and that has a finality. But you need to make either your coming togethers or your coming aparts feel final, because you don’t want to feel like they said goodbye forever at the end of Casablanca and then they ran into each other at a bar two days later. The same thing with rom-coms. If it’s like, end of Pretty Woman, he rescued her, she rescued him right back, you don’t want to feel like, cut to four days later where it’s like, “This is insane. You leave your pants on the floor. What is this?” How do you make any ending feel like it stuck?

John: That’s why I think because movies are one-time journeys for characters, we mostly think about farewells in the course of movies. Of course, some series, especially with ongoing regular characters, they will say farewell to a character, and that can be incredibly meaningful at that same time.

But let’s think through the aspects of a farewell. Generally, the characters in that scene acknowledge that this is the end. They may not go into the scene knowing that it’s the end, but at some point in the course of the scene, they realize this is the end. The location they’re at generally is relevant to the scene. Either it’s a special place for them or creates a situation in which they have to say goodbye. Ideally, it needs to rhyme with an earlier moment in the story.

Aline: That’s a great point. That’s a great tip for writers. It should not be a random place. It should be something that goes, “Ah. The irony.”

John: It could be the location rhymes or we’re back in a place we were before, the dialogue is rhyming back to an earlier thing that was said before. Something about this moment needs to feel like it echoes a thing that happened before.

Looking through these examples, we’re gonna see that there’s a bunch of nonverbal story points. There’s a lot of silences in these. That’s honestly the characteristics of these. And it’s why sometimes we’re not gonna be playing the audio for this, because it’s a lot of people not talking.

Aline: I hope you’re gonna put these up on the website, because this is fantastic. Drew, did you make this? This is fantastic. This is really good.

I did send you that funny – there’s a funny piece about the end of Big and how many problems it brings up, where it’s like, are there missing posters for him as an adult? Are there missing posters for the boy? I had read that in the original end of Big, that he goes back to class and there’s a girl named Susan in his class and they wink, like, this is gonna be Elizabeth Perkins. But they dropped that, and so they’re never gonna see each other again. I had been trying to think of comedies, and that’s one. E.T. is probably one of the…

As we had discussed, I think Past Lives is – people were hysterically sobbing at that moment of, they’d been separated for so long, and this is another separation, and possibly permanent.

John: I think what’s important – and Past Lives is a good example of this – is that you’re closing hopefully two characters’ arcs. And so it’s not just your protagonist that you’re seeing through this, and this is the end of their journey. Hopefully, the other character, it’s the end of their journey too, at least in terms of what we’ve seen them go through. Past Lives is a great example of that.

If there’s a choice to be made, hopefully your characters are making the choice. Sometimes the situation may just require them to separate. But I think the farewells that land best, one of the characters is making a choice for this to be the end, and that feels great.

Aline: Can I ask you a question?

John: Please.

Aline: How do you feel about this Bill Murray whisper at the end of Lost in Translation? Is that tantalizing to you, or is that frustrating for you?

John: For me, it’s a little bit frustrating. And also, as I went back to look at the kiss, my recollection of the real movie is that it was a friendship and it was a relationship, but it wasn’t a romance at all. And then he kisses her on the lips, and I’m like, “Wait, he did?” That sounds weird. It felt like it was more of a-

Aline: Of a cheek moment.

John: Yeah, a cheek moment rather than an on-the-lips moment. I was like, “Oh.” I didn’t like the moment when I just watched the clip out of context.

Aline: Lip kissing is out. I used to have a couple friends who were lip kissers, which was always like when you saw them coming towards you and time slows down, because my lip kissing policy would be spouse or gave birth to. That’s about it, pretty much. Those people are coming at you and you’re like, slow motion turn the face. But I think it’s post COVID.

John: To me, lip kissing is a romantic gesture.

Aline: Can you imagine if I lip kissed John on the way out of here?

Drew: I don’t-

Aline: Drew would be so uncomfortable. Or if I lip kissed Drew on the way out of here. It would be so weird.

John: We’d all be so uncomfortable.

Aline: So weird. The French…

John: Yeah, but it’s the cheeks.

Aline: The cheek. The cheek. It felt like this wanted to be a two-cheeker, but we don’t do that in America. But I agree with you. I have a memory of this being a cheek kiss, and it’s not.

John: It’s not.

Aline: You’re saying it’s a full lip kissing. Interesting.

John: Full lip kiss. We can look at the video.

Aline: But what do you feel about not knowing what he said?

John: I’m a little bit frustrated, but I’m also kind of okay with it. How do you feel about it?

Aline: I think it suits this movie, which has a thread of enigma running towards it, and I think suits Sofia Coppola’s vibes, so I think that sense of intrigue and that sense that people are layered and mysterious. I think it works for this. If this was in a really super mainstream Hollywood movie, you’d be irritated.

John: We as an audience need to see that growth or change has happened. A farewell will not be meaningful to us unless we’ve seen the characters are in a different place now than they were at the start of the story, and not just because of circumstances, but because of things they chose to do.

Also, as an audience, we need to see what the characters believe, even if they’re not saying it out loud or speaking it, because oftentimes in these things, one character’s being stoic and holding back. There’s reasons why they’re not fully expressing themselves. But we as an audience have to have insight into what they’re actually really feeling inside there.

Aline: Something I think about a lot is that, because if you have a quieter moment movie, you can have a quieter ending. Past Lives is a very quiet movie with a beautifully quiet ending. E.T., interestingly, which is one of my favorite movies that I’ve seen a lot, for a sci-fi movie, the level of relief on that is pretty low. The enemy is Keys. It never really gets that heightened. I know that if you made that movie now, there would be an interstellar shootout, there would be so much action packed into that end.

I think about that a lot, because anything that we’re working on that has a genre element, it just feels like it needs to get into a third act where there’s giant caterpillars invading from space, that need to be shot. I do feel like that movie now, you’d get a lot of notes about making it huge.

I would put this up there with Casablanca for me, in terms of merely really meaningful goodbye. And I think it’s because the ’70s aesthetic was still at play there, where you could have these quieter movies then. I really mourn that, because now it feels like that’s reserved for the smaller movies. And the bigger movies, if you’re not exhausted, on the ground, with a pounding headache by the end of a sci-fi movie, they’ve not done their job.

John: Let’s take a listen to Casablanca. Of course, we’ve avoided Casablanca throughout almost the entire podcast, just because it’s so cliché. But of course, as farewell scenes go, this is the one that people think about. So let’s take a listen here.

[Casablanca clip]

Rick Blaine: If you don’t mind, you fill in the names. That’ll make it even more official.

Captain Louis Renault: You think of everything, don’t you?

Rick: And the names are Mr. and Mrs. Victor Laszlo.

Ilsa Lund: But why my name, Richard?

Rick: Because you’re getting on that place.

Ilsa: I don’t understand. What about you?

Rick: I’m staying here with him until the plane gets safely away.

Ilsa: No, Richard, no. What has happened to you? Last night we said-

Rick: Last night we said a great many things. You said I was to do the thinking for both of us. Well, I’ve done a lot of it since then and it all adds up to one thing. You’re getting on that plane with Victor where you belong.

Ilsa: But Richard, no, I-

Rick: You’ve got to listen to me. Do you have any idea what you’d like to look forward to if you stayed here? Nine chances out of 10 we’d both wind up in a concentration camp. Isn’t that true, Louis?

Louis: I’m afraid Major Strasser would insist.

Ilsa: You’re saying this only to make me go.

Rick: I’m saying it because it’s true. Inside of us we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

Ilsa: But what about us?

Rick: We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have, we’d lost it, until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.

Ilsa: When I said I would never leave you.

Rick: And you never will. But I’ve got a job to do too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble. But it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that. Now, now. Here’s looking at you, kid.

[End of clip]

John: This is a situation where one character knows this is gonna be a farewell leading into it, and she doesn’t know this, and she’s processing this in real time.

Aline: I don’t love the use of the word “kid.” I’m not loving that. That’s giving infantilization to me. I’m just wondering if you could just say a normal goodbye without… I’m not calling you “daddy,” so I’d appreciate not being called a kid. That would be a slightly different ending.

John: Yeah, it would be.

Aline: But I think this idea that’s embedded into this goodbye is this idea that they’re sacrificing for the greater good of the world. Does that still resonate? Do you feel like if you made a movie where it’s like, I need to go do this more public servicey – not public service, but global redemption thing that they have to go do. They’re dedicating themself. Their problems, their love is less than what the world requires of them. Maybe a climate change movie?

John: Or perhaps a movie about a robot apocalypse. Let’s take a listen to Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Aline: Just his best transitions.

John: Right now, they’re at the forge, and they’ve just thrown the chips into…

[Terminator 2: Judgment Day clip]

Sarah Connor: It’s over.

The Terminator: No. There is one more chip.

John August: He points to his forehead.

The Terminator: And it must be destroyed also. Here. I cannot self-terminate. You must lower me into the steel.

John Connor: No. No.

The Terminator: I’m sorry, John.

John Connor: No!

The Terminator: I’m sorry.

John Connor: No, it’ll be okay! Stay with us! It’ll be okay!

The Terminator: I have to go away.

John Connor: No, don’t do it, please! Don’t go!

The Terminator: I must go away, John.

John Connor: No! No, wait, wait! You don’t have to do this.

The Terminator: Sorry.

John Connor: No, don’t do it! Don’t go!

The Terminator: It has to end here.

John Connor: I order you not to go. I order you not to go! I order you not to go!

The Terminator: I know now why you cry, but it’s something I can never do.

[End of clip]

John: So again here, we have a character who knows that this is going to be a farewell and the other character does not know it and is resisting that moment at the same time, and it’s for the greater good. This is self-sacrifice for the greater good.

Aline: One thing I will say is that where movies really let me down is – not to bring this way, way down, but dying in movies is really glossed over, even in movies about illness. Everybody looks real pretty. They’re beautifully arranged in a bed, and they go cough, cough, and then they look to the side and close their eyes. I had not had a lot of experience with that. My dad passed away two years ago, and the process of that was kind of shocking to me.

I know that love is not what’s in movies, so I don’t know why… And birth is not what’s in movies. People in births are always screaming, and screaming at the husband. I know that those things are not… But we do a very bad job with what it actually looks to leave this world in movies. Maybe it’s too nitty gritty. Maybe all those things are too nitty gritty. Maybe movies don’t need to show people peeing or people performing basic body processes. But maybe these are stand-ins for that. There’s a goodbye we all know is happening, is going to happen, and that these are wonderful, satisfying goodbyes that you can cry at. None of these are death, right? No, Philadelphia is.

John: Philadelphia, I want to focus on a moment that’s not the actual death. It’s not the moment on screen where he dies, but it’s the farewell moment. Initially, it’s Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington talking, and then he’s saying goodbye to other people. But if you listen, he’s never actually saying goodbye. Everyone’s basically saying, “I’ll come back tomorrow. I’ll see you soon.” Let’s take a listen to Philadelphia here.

[Philadelphia clip]

Joe Miller: How you doing?

John August: He’s taking off the oxygen mask so he can speak.

Andrew Beckett: What do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean?

Joe: I don’t know.

Andrew: A good start. Excellent work, Counselor. I thank you.

Joe: It was great working with you, Counselor.

John: Here, Denzel Washington is putting the oxygen mask back on Tom Hanks’s face, because he was having a hard time doing it himself. It’s a moment of tenderness that we’re seeing.

Joe: Well, I’d better go.

Andrew: Yeah, sure thing.

Joe: I’ll see you later?

Andrew: Thanks for stopping by.

Joe: I’ll see you again. Well, I’ll keep it on ice for you.

[End of clip]

John: He just brought a bottle of champagne to celebrate the winning of the case. He’s putting it there and he’s saying goodbye to the rest of the family. Over the course of the rest of this, we’re gonna see the rest of the family members say goodbye. Some of them happen more emotional; some of them don’t. Of course the conscious is they’re saying goodbye for the night, but it’s clear to an audience that this is the last goodbye. Really well done. Not surprisingly, really well done.

It’s a great example of how it’s the subtext that is carrying the scene. They’re not actually saying the things they’re supposed to say, but the writer, Ron Nyswaner, has created a space to let the actors play those things in eyes that they’re not actually saying.

Aline: Beautiful.

John: That’s a final goodbye. But I really want to play this clip from Weekend. Have you seen Weekend, Andrew Haigh’s film?

Aline: It’s the top of the list of things I should see.

John: It’s really terrific.

Aline: I know.

John: I pulled this because I just did the Sundance Labs, where we were talking with filmmakers about the next things they’re gonna shoot, and the theme for the clips we were supposed to bring in was finales or conclusions. What I loved about this moment at the end of Weekend is…

So the premise is it’s these two guys who hook up on a Friday night, not really knowing each other, and they spend the weekend together. But one of them is going off to America, and so they know there’s no future for this. The one guy, he’s at a kid’s birthday party for a friend. The guy’s like, “If you like this guy, why don’t you just into the train station and stop him?” He’s like, “Oh, no, that’s too movie of a thing to do.” I just love that these two characters realize that they’re in a movie kind of moment. Let’s take a listen to a scene from Weekend.

[Weekend clip]

Russell: Looks like it, eh?

Glen: So is this our Notting Hill moment?

Russell: You know, I’ve never seen it, ever.

Glen: Neither have I, but I imagine there’s a declaration of love and everybody applauds.

Russell: Yeah. Do you reckon that’s what would happen with us?

Glen: Might do. Could give it a go. They’d either clap or throw us under a train.

John August: What happens in this next little sequence is there’s a train going by, and so like Lost in Translation, we’re not able to quite understand what they’re saying. But clearly, one character is telling something more meaningful, and then we catch in at the end sort of what that conversation was.

Automated Voice: 24-hour CCTV recording is in operation at this station.

Russell: I want you to not know I’m not here to stop you from going.

Glen: Please be quiet. Shut up! No, no, no.

Russell: I just want to… I just want to… I just want you to know that…

Glen: Oh, fuck. You’re a bastard for coming down here. Fuck me. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

Russell: You’ll be great. You’ll have the most amazing time.

Glen: Fuck’s sake. Fuck.

[End of clip]

John: Like Past Lives, there’s a lot of sounds, there’s a lot of things left open, which makes the moment feel very real and very extended. The kind of thing you couldn’t probably do earlier on in the story, but because you’re invested in these characters, you’re willing to watch them struggle to figure out what the next thing is to say.

What I also liked about it is that these characters are recognizing this is a movie kind of thing to do, to race to the train station to stop him before he goes. But once they get there, like, am I actually stopping you? They don’t quite know themselves what the real goal is. They’re just recognizing that this is probably the last moment that they’re gonna have together.

Aline: Has anyone ever done, in a rom-com, a run to the airport where you can’t park, you can’t get through TSA? Actually trying to stop someone at the gate now… That’s ’70s only. Post 9/11, actually trying to say goodbye to someone at a gate is science fiction. You can’t do it.

John: I think probably two examples of it. First, in 30 Rock, there’s a moment where Liz is trying to get to Jason Sudeikis’s character before he moves off to Cleveland. She tries to do the whole thing. She has her special sandwich. They give her a sandwich to get through the TSA. But I also feel like David Wain’s movie They Came Together, with Paul Rudd and…

Aline: Amy Poehler.

John: Amy Poehler. I feel like that must’ve happened in that, because it’s playing all of those rom-com cliches. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a lot of these other clips.

Aline: This is beautiful. This is a great resource. This podcast is free.

John: Free.

Aline: You don’t have to fast forward through ads. This is great stuff right here. This is great. This is the kind of thing, if I was a baby writer, I would be so grateful for, just to focus yourself in on. As you’ve often said, pick the thing that has the best ending. Write something where you know the ending. If something occurs to you for a final scene, that’ll guide you through the whole writing of your movie. It’s really great to study these things. I think this is a wonderful resource.

John: Big Fish would not exist if it weren’t for that last scene. You’re leading up to that. I always describe Big Fish as it’s a long joke that ends in tears rather than a punchline. And it’s getting to that place. The other ones we’re gonna include on the show notes here. The end of The Wizard of Oz, of course she has to say goodbye to all of her friends, that she’s leaving. E.T., of course, saying goodbye to E.T. Toy Story 3, which is a sort of special case. Oh, god, Michael Arndt.

Aline: It’s a killer.

John: Killing us here.

Aline: Yeah, killer.

John: It’s Andy giving up his toys and sending them off to the girl who’s gonna take care of them. Dead Poets Society. All such great choices. Farewell scenes.

Aline: Well done.

John: Well done. Let’s continue with momentum and talk about some listener questions. We’ve got a manager question here from Annie.

Drew: Annie writes, “My manager and I recently broke up. We weren’t a good fit for one another, but he also wanted 10 percent of my day job salary, a gig unrelated to what they were representing me for. However, a script I wrote was doing well on the blacklist, and a studio reached out to my manager during the fallout. But my manager won’t give me the studio’s contact info. It’s been a month. So should I assume my project’s dead? I looked on IMDb Pro for an assistant or someone to reach out to at the company, but I was unsuccessful. If the studio really wanted the script, they would find me, I guess. I’m pretty sad about it, and I’m not sure how to find new management. Thanks.”

Aline: That’s not nice.

John: That’s horrible. That’s horrible on every level.

Aline: That’s really not nice.

John: First off, that manager should not be trying to take 10 percent of your day job salary. That is crazy. I’ve not heard of this.

Aline: Craig would be turning this desk over.

John: Absolutely. Craig has destroyed so much furniture on this podcast. It’s really tough.

Aline: This is shitty.

John: This is. Let’s talk about what happens next. First off, on your script, you have contact information on that. Hopefully, they’re not stripping that contact information off the title page, so they can get a hold of you directly. You, Annie, need to have some public presence out there in the world, Twitter, Instagram, some other place where people can find you, because they will be able to find you if that comes up. Put up a website, Annie, whatever your last name is, screenwriter. Make sure you have a way that people can find you. Obviously, if you’re a WGA member, you’re in the WGA directory, and so people can always look you up there.

Aline: If they were desperate, if they really wanted it. And it may have been an idle inquiry. But this actually just sounds like someone being sadistic and just trying to punish you.

John: Annie, when you say it’s doing well on the blacklist, I assume it’s the blacklist-

Aline: Ratings.

John: The ratings site and not the-

Aline: List.

John: Not the actual list, the end of the year stuff-

Aline: That sounds like it to me too.

John: … because that’s a thing when people would’ve tracked you down more specifically. Pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. As you’re looking for new managers, new reps, try not to be too burned by this experience. Remember that you’re always advocating for yourself first, and keep doing the next thing. It’s good that you had a script that people liked. It’s proof that you can write a thing that people will like. You need to keep writing those things. I’m sorry. All I can do is commiserate with you here.

Aline: Same, same.

John: Question from TJ here.

Drew: TJ writes, “Like many feature writers, I cheered the huge and very real win of guaranteed second steps in the new MBA, but I’m wondering what, if any, recourse we have if a second step remains unstepped. Chalk it up to strike disruption or executive turnover, but I have two feature projects at major studios, with multiple contractually guaranteed rewrite and polished steps, that have been sitting on ice for over a year. I’ve been doing this long enough to understand the writing is likely on the wall for these projects – or not. Who knows? And that’s fine. I’m an expert at moving on. But negotiating guaranteed money and turning in a draft, only to get ghosted on further steps, feels extra mega shitty, especially while trying to string together qualifying years for health coverage. Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.”

John: I’ve had this happen too. Let’s remember what a guaranteed second step is. It’s that if you’re hired to write a feature project, you are hired for the initial draft, and if you’re under a certain cap, they have to also guarantee you a second step, a chance to do that rewrite on that project. This is good. This is a big win. Sometimes what happens is you’ve turned in a first draft and there’s a guaranteed reading period, and after that point they should be coming up to you for the rewrite. Sometimes this stretches out for a very long time, because things are just not-

Aline: But they’re supposed to pay you at the end of that reading period.

John: They are supposed to pay you at the end of the reading period. It’s your reps who are there to remind them, “You need to pay them.”

Aline: I’ve done that, for sure.

John: I’ve done that too, fairly recently.

Aline: Some people don’t know that they have a limited amount of time to get back to you and that they have to get back to you.

John: Someone made this deal. If it wasn’t your agent or manager, there was probably a lawyer involved. It’s time to call them and say, “Hey, we need to nudge this.” What can happen sometimes is there’s a little bit of a negotiation, like, “We don’t really don’t want to do this some more. Can we figure a thing out here?” You might be able to settle for less than that if they really don’t have you doing that next thing. There may be a way out of here. But you should be getting paid and-

Aline: On a schedule.

John: On a schedule. TJ, your concern about getting paid money so that your health insurance and everything else continues is correct. And so get that money coming in.

Aline: God, two of the most depressing things when you’re a young writer is trying to get paid, especially when it’s not a ton of money to other people but it is very meaningful for you, and then the other thing is – have you ever been on a money where they don’t want to give you your per diem? Then you’re calling your agent about something so minor. I have friends who were just telling me that this happened to them. It’s literally the most embarrassing, because you’re just trying to get money for a sandwich. There’s this embedded idea that you get paid enough, you should be fine. But if you’ve relocated, then you want that.

John: Totally.

Aline: But there’s nothing in it for your reps really. Early on in my career, I remember having to do that, and it was just so embarrassing, which is like, “No, I really would like money for that latte, so if you don’t mind.” Then the people they’re calling, they’re production people, not the creatives, creative executives. I don’t know. Anything where you have to ask for money, it’s such a bad day. It’s just such a bad feeling.

John: I recently re-watched Tropic Thunder, which largely holds up. Some stuff didn’t hold up so especially well. But one of the ongoing jokes in it is that in the actor’s contract he’s supposed to have a TiVo, and his TiVo didn’t show up. And so he’s like, “Where’s my TiVo?” The agent, Matthew McConaughey, is always trying to track down this guy’s TiVo. It’s silly. My daughter ended up not wanting to watch it, so I wanted to ask her, what is a TiVo. Does she even know? There’s a sense of-

Aline: That’s how my son taught himself to read was to use the TiVo, because he would run down in the morning to turn on the TV and figure out where Sesame Street was. That’s how he taught himself to read and work the TiVo at like four.

John: Of course.

Aline: It’s just funny, the tiny humiliations that we sustain as a writer, that are like, you’re just asking for the basic thing that you’re guaranteed, and then everybody acts like you’re a weenie for asking. It’s one of those things that can really grind you down.

John: This is a bit in the weeds here, but on this project I mentioned that was a five-week rewrite, it came at a time in which I did not have an agent or a manager, because I switched representation. It was just negotiated with my lawyer, who did a fantastic job. But also, it meant we actually had to bill for stuff ourselves. We invoiced for ourselves. It was weird dealing with it.

When you and I are starting a project, it goes from some special magic development account, and it’s this thing. But when you’re actually on a thing that’s running, it’s being paid out of the actual payroll for the actual production. I was talking to the accountant for this thing. It was clear that I’m filling out these forms that, as a writer, I should not be filling out this form. It was weird.

Aline: Wild.

John: Ultimately, the checks still cashed. Money is fungible. But it was weird to be paid out of just different pot of money.

Aline: Please, sir. Please, sir. Please, sir, may I have my paycheck. I’m sorry, TJ. You just have to find the right person to ask. But they do owe you something. Guaranteed means guaranteed.

John: Early on in my career, I did a project for Fox 2000. I did my draft and my set, and I had no more guaranteed steps. But my agent got a call saying, “Oh yeah, we decided to let the option on this book lapse, and so we’re closing out the books on this project. And there’s one polish step on his deal that we’re not gonna use, and so we’re just gonna settle that out and pay it.” I’m like, “But why are you doing that?” They wrote me this check.

Aline: Nice. Take that out. Take that out. Take that out. That never happened.

John: The statute of limitations on that has passed a long time ago.

Aline: That’s right. That’s long ago been spent on some fabulous vacations we’re gonna hear about.

John: We have a question from John about NDAs.

Drew: “I’m new and started shopping my first script around that I’ve written. I’m unrepresented at this point by an agent or manager, though I have a new lawyer. I’ve submitted the script to the US Copyright Office and the WGA. I’ve labeled the cover page with copyright at 2024, my name. I sent a log line to an executive. He responded favorably and asked to read it. I sent it. My lawyer told me that I should get an NDA signed by anyone who wants to read the script before. Is that necessary or common? My instinct is that it adds friction to the process, and if it’s copyrighted, what’s the risk? Is it common practice to have people sign NDAs?”

John: Uh-uh, absolutely not. This is not a thing that happens. We’ve had many fabulous guests on the podcast. We had Christopher Nolan on the podcast. I bet you probably have to sign an NDA when you read a Christopher Nolan script, because he sends a person over with a script that you have to read in person.

Aline: I will say this. If someone sends you, John August, a script to read, and they are not represented, then they would have to sign a form. But just watermark it.

John: You’ve written the script. You own the copyright on it. Worry less, John. It’s just not a thing. It’s a thing that happens with super high secret projects where there can be NDAs on things. This is not that situation.

Aline: You’ve seen the scripts printed on red paper?

John: Yeah.

Aline: I once worked on a project where they insisted on printing it on that silver, iridescent paper. Do you know what I’m talking about?

John: I’ve done another different thing.

Aline: It’s silver, iridescent craft paper. 99 percent of the things that I’ve written are just – people are not digging through files to find romantic comedies or whatever. But this particular company, we had to send it out. And that paper weighs like 100 pounds. We submitted it to a director who’s a friend of mine, and he was like, “I’m not reading that. That’s insulting to me that it would be sent in 20 pounds of iridescent paper. I promise I’m not doing anything with it.” But in a world where things can leak… That’s not this though. Just watermark it. Really, watermarking it takes two seconds, and then you’ll feel like you did something.

John: I would disagree on the watermarking. Anything that gets in the way of a person’s picking up the script and reading it is a barrier, and I feel like that watermark could hurt you.

Aline: Maybe it makes it feel-

John: Special.

Aline: Special. I don’t know. But definitely, you don’t need an NDA. If it’s submitted through a lawyer especially.

John: I feel like if I got something that was watermarked from some person who didn’t have stuff, I’m like, “Wait, you don’t trust me to read your script? You think I am going to steal this thing? That I am going to do something?” I get when a studio sends me a thing that’s a little more secret to me. But also, I would say in this day, in that situation, you’re probably not getting the pdf anyway. They’re sending you some special link to some dumb thing.

Aline: Have you had that, where they can tell how much you’ve read and where you are on it?

John: Yes. That’s spooky.

Aline: That’s a weird feeling, because you want to feel like I’m spending enough time on each page. You don’t know how much data they’re getting. But you don’t want them to know if you were whipping through it. That hasn’t happened to me in a long time. I haven’t gotten one of those in a long… Maybe just because I haven’t done as many of those rewrites. But I haven’t had as many like, give us a vial of your blood, and then disappearing ink on your computer. Also, by the way, half the time I don’t know how to do it.

John: I don’t know how to do it. I was talking with a showrunner who was describing a situation where they were meeting with two different actors for something, and so they sent them that script through that process, in a situation where they had to read it in an app in order to read the thing. They said, “Oh, no, we’re gonna go with this one actor,” and so they pulled the script from the other actor in the moment.

Aline: Off the computer.

John: Off the computer. He tried to flip a page, and then it was all gone. That’s how he found he didn’t get the… Brutal. Let’s talk about some fairies. What does Chris in Ireland have to say?

Drew: Chris in Ireland writes, “I’m writing a spec animated feature set in Ireland where a group of fairies are the antagonists. In Irish folklore, fairies are seen as unpredictable, mischievous, and often malevolent, the complete opposite of Tinkerbell, who I feel has become the dominant representation of fairies in popular culture. I want this movie to celebrate Irish folklore and culture with people around the world. But as the primary audience is children, I’m wondering how to navigate the Tinkerbell issue with, A, potential investors, and B, with audiences. So do I stick to calling them fairies, or should I refer to them as something else?”

John: I say you just redefine what fairies mean in your world. I think it’s great.

Aline: Yeah. I don’t know. It depends on the tone. I was just thinking about that. You may not want to go too meta. If it’s a comedy, you can talk about the fact that people have a preconception about what fairies are, but they’re actually not. Tinkerbell is one of my favorite Disney characters, because she is kind of a pain in the ass. She’s jealous and she’s capricious, and that’s one of the reasons I like her. She’s giving a word I can’t say on this podcast. But I love that about Tinkerbell. I think mischief is part of it. But I know, he’s talking about van art fairies. And so I agree with you. If you can redefine fairies, that’s fun.

John: Absolutely. Obviously, what you’re trying to do with any movie you do is let the audience know what genre you’re in but also how you’re changing the rules of that genre and what you’re bending in that world, and that feels like that’s what you’re bending. So go for it. Let’s wrap up with Dave.

Drew: Dave writes, “I’m an Australian-based DP and I’ve been listening to the podcast for many years now. I’ve been shooting a Netflix show since it started in Australia, and this year I’ve been fortunate to come on board as DP of the latest season of the U.S. version. I moved to my Santa Monica apartment yesterday and I’m looking forward to my next five months in LA. A big part of why I felt comfortable saying yes to the job was because Scriptnotes has made the idea of being in LA a whole lot less intimidating, so thank you. I’d love to know if there’s any resources you’d recommend for looking up screenings or industry events that might be handy for someone like me with a bit of time on their hands.”

John: Dave, you chose to move in Santa Monica. I’m sure you had a reason for doing that. It probably feels most like Australia. You’re kind of a ways away from the center of town of stuff, but that’s fine. Hopefully, you can get on the freeway quickly. What things should he be doing in LA?

Aline: This is a good segue into talking about something I love, which is Revival Hub. Do you follow Revival Hub on Instagram?

John: No. Tell me all about it.

Aline: Revival Hub consolidates all the revival screenings in LA, so all the rooftop screenings, the cemetery screenings, the Alamo special screenings. There’s the Academy Museum, which is open to the public. Every day. Maybe we could put the link to that. It’s every one that’s happening. Back to the Future was playing last week, and E.T. If you go to those, it’ll be packed with industry people generally are the ones.

I’ll tell you a hilarious thing. On Memorial Day, when most would be barbecuing, me and my son and his girlfriend went to the Academy Museum to see Shiva Baby. There were a fair number of people there, but not a ton. That’s not the traditional way of celebrating Memorial Day. And in comes Phil Hay and Karyn Kusama and their son, who we know. Phil and Karyn and I have been laughing for weeks about – I saw them walk in, and I was like, “That tracks.” And they were like, “Yeah, that tracks,” that that’s what we’re doing on that holiday.

You’ll find like-minded people who want to go in a nice air-conditioned screening of Shiva Baby, which I loved – we all loved. You’ll find your people there if you’re comfortable chatting with people. And if you’re working on a project, maybe you’ll know some people there.

John: Absolutely.

Aline: Or you can put up on your Facebook page, “Hey, I want to go see this revival screening of Urban Cowboy or whatever. Does anybody want to come with me?” That’s what I would recommend, because if I had more time, I would be doing those all the time. Obviously, there’s New Beverly. There’s lots of them.

John: I was gonna recommend the Academy screenings, which you can just find online. We’ll put a link in the show notes. But Revival Hub sounds great, because there’s always a ton of them around town. There’s an upcoming July 5th Charlie’s Angels at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery with fireworks afterwards, so I’ll be going to that. There’s gonna be retrospective screenings of Go coming up. There’s always gonna be those things that happen.

Aline: It’s really fun. It’s great. It’ll make you feel like you’re in the biz, because LA is really dispersed.

John: Fewer things out in Santa Monica, but even out there, there’ll be some stuff.

Aline: Oh yeah, there’s places that are close to there. There’s the New Art, some of the places in Revival Hub. But also, summer is a great time for special screenings. In Malibu they do them on the cliff. It’s fun.

John: I love it. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Malta. I just got back from Malta. Have you been to Malta?

Aline: I have not, no.

John: Malta is really cool. It is an island nation, of course, south of Sicily. It feels kind of impossible, because it is a foreign country that speaks English. You definitely know you’re in a foreign country, but everyone speaks English, because it’s the second language of the island is English.

It’s incredibly urban and dense, except for the parts that are totally rural. It’s really cool. All the names seem like they’re Arabic, because it’s Semitic language, and yet it’s not. It’s really a very cool place. I really dug it. A lot of stuff has filmed there over the years, like Gladiator stuff, a Popeye film there. They kept all the sets from the Robin Williams Popeye.

Aline: How do you get there?

John: We flew. I was in Italy for a conference, and we flew. We were so close. I could literally almost see it. But we had fly back to Rome, and Rome to Malta. Air Malta was good. I just dug it. I’m thumbs up on Malta. They have a nice big tax credit. I’m looking for a thing to shoot in Malta, because it’d be a cool place to do a thing. Everything is white limestone, and it feels like you’re in North Africa.

Aline: Cool.

John: That was great.

Aline: Love that. I did enjoy it on your Instagram.

John: Thank you. Game of Thrones shot some stuff there. Things like a lot of exteriors got shot for various seasons in Malta. So check out Malta.

Aline: Check out Malta.

John: I’m head of the tourism board.

Aline: Have we discussed that I am the other person who loves this drink?

John: She is pointing at caffeine-free Coke Zero, or Coke Zero Zero, as we call it in the house.

Aline: That’s the best stuff. I would drink 10 of those if I could.

John: What’s stopping you?

Aline: Because it disrupts my biome. It’s really not good for you. But that is the best one.

John: Craig Mazin does not believe me on this. I will bring it over to his house.

Aline: Incorrect.

John: He’s like, “Oh, I’ll have regular.”

Aline: No, it’s this.

John: He’ll have caffeine-free Diet Coke, which is not nearly as good.

Aline: No, no, this is the thing.

John: This is the thing.

Aline: It’s not my One Cool Thing, but it’s our one cool thing.

John: But Aline, it’s hard to find.

Aline: Oh, believe me. I have it always stocked in my office and at my house, so come over.

John: When people are shopping for you, they may have trouble finding it, but the one hint-

Aline: It’s red.

John: It’s red. You need to find it at the Ralph’s on Wilshire. Will always have about eight of them, and so I will always take seven, so I can leave one so they remember it.

Aline: I have two One Cool Things. They’re short. But I like to do something girly always on this most male of podcasts. I chose a color that was too dark today. I have two, and I picked the wrong one. There’s a thing called peel-off lip stain.

John: What’s this?

Aline: You put what looks like a very, very dark lipstick on. You’d actually like this, because it’s pretty cool. You put a lot of lipstick on, and then over the next 10 minutes it dries into a film, that you then peel off.

John: I like peeling off stuff. That feels great.

Aline: It’s a delight.

John: Like glue on your hands as a kid. Love it.

Aline: It’s like that. It leaves this color on your lips. There’s a few things you gotta master to get it right. You can just go to Amazon and write peel-off lip stain. It’s fun. The one I used this morning, as I said, is too dark, but look. It’s not moved since I’ve been here.

John: It matches your shirt.

Aline: It’s not moved since I’ve been here. It’s just a fun, silly thing that I got from TikTok, which leads me into my last thing that you would love. Are you a TikTok guy? You’re not.

John: I’m not. I’m a Reels guy, so I watch like TikTok two weeks late.

Aline: No, not two weeks late, my friend. Six months later. I love when someone puts up a funny song clip or something. There’s two that are really big right now. What happens is somebody will put up a funny song clip and then people will duet it. They’ll play along to it. They’ll sing along to it. They’ll rearrange it. They’ll do dances to it. There’s two right now that are big on TikTok. One is “I’m looking for a man in finance.”

John: Of course. Love it. So good.

Aline: You know that?

John: Yeah.

Aline: There’s a million remixes of “I’m looking for a man in finance” that are great. The newest one is a hilarious guy who does comedy songs. This one is (sings) “put a little dirt under the pillow for the dirt man in case he comes to town.” People have sung along to it, played along to it, danced to it. If you go to TikTok and you find the original – you’ll just put “a little dirt under the pillow for the dirt man” or just put “dirt man,” and then you’ll find the original one. Then what you do is you click on that sound. Watch the ones that have the most views. The ones that have like two views are not gonna be great. But “looking for a man in finance” has just taken off like a rocket. And Dirt Man, which is a real ear worm, has also taken off. I just recommend, especially if you’re new to TikTok and you’re trying to figure out what’s fun about it.

What I love about TikTok is that people are so creative. They are so creative. And so many people can sing. I really love the ones where people sing in harmony. But dancing, adding saxophone, they’re really fun. And maybe we can link to some of the better ones for those two sounds. But “looking for a man in finance” has now become iconic. Ariana DeBose did a parody of it for the Emmys.

I know that in a world where we are constantly afraid of what social media is doing to us, I see TikTok and other forms of social media too can be an area for great expression. YouTube is how I found Rachel Bloom. There’s good stuff on the internet.

John: My newest obsession in TikTok/Reels is I love seeing incredibly talented music producers take a thing and redo it. What I found this morning was a guy who could take a Dua Lipa, like, “What if Phil Collins had written this Dua Lipa song?”

Aline: Yes, I saw that. It’s fantastic.

John: It’s genius. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that too.

Aline: It’s great.

John: It sounds great. It’s like, I really love this. I want Phil Collins to have done this song.

Aline: There’s that Celine Dion remix that started on TikTok. Then sometimes things get popular on TikTok and it takes them a while to clear it legally so that they can stream it. But the Celine Dion one, which they turned it into a dance song, you can now get on Spotify. Humans are awful, but also wonderful and so creative. And there are so many talented people out there. And TikTok is a good venue for that and for some horribly useless things. But it’s also a venue for some wonderful stuff.

John: That is our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Matthew Jordan.

If you have an outro, you can send your link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. 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 weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and glasses and hats now. You can find all those 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. Thank you to all our Scriptnotes Premium Members. We’re gonna be talking about journaling. But it’s always lovely to have you here on the show, Aline Brosh McKenna.

Aline: I’m actually Craig.

John: Yes, really, your commitment to the bit, Craig, I really respect that.

Aline: He did good.

John: He did good.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Bonus Segment. I want to talk about journals and journaling and this idea that we should be writing down what we did all day, because it feels right and feels useful and I’ve done it at times, but I don’t do it consistently. I’d like to do it more often. Aline, are you doing it?

Aline: I shockingly don’t. Not only do I not journal, I also don’t copiously write down ideas or bits of things. Very rarely do I do that. My husband is shocked at how little I record. I think I have this core belief that – I don’t know what the term for this is, but I don’t have a specific episode memory. I have a synthetic memory. That’s the term I would use, which is when I walk around the world, I’m noticing patterns more than I am trying to record actual instances of things. I find that if I concretize things too much too early, it prevents me from doing that process of synthesis.

Who doesn’t write in their diary when they’re a teen? “Nobody here understands me.” I certainly did that, but I have not found it useful. I know we’re gonna talk about journaling. I know I’m supposed to do it. I know it’s good for you. I know both those things are good for you. But I think it depends on what sort of person you are. I find that I do my ruminative stuff in a different way. We can talk about this on another episode, but do you narrate your life to yourself, or do you not?

John: I guess I narrate to the degree to which I am aware of the thing I’m doing. I have a very active internal voice, if that makes sense.

Aline: You do. I don’t. Some people are like, “Oh, here I am. I’m at the podcast. Look at Drew,” and they’re talking to themselves. I don’t, in a flow state. And I also can visualize things. I think that part of like – I’m gonna make up a word – synthetic memory, I assimilate things and sort them. I don’t dwell on specifics. Look. So many people do it. It’s probably better, and I should do it, but I don’t.

John: This is not in any way meant to be like, “This is a thing you should do.” I just want to talk about when it’s been useful and when I’ve done it and why I mostly don’t do it often.

A couple years back, I went through a really rough time. And one of the things that people recommended was this Five Minute Journal, which is this little white book. At the end of every day, you write down, like, here are some good things that happened today. It has these specific prompts. It sounds really stupid, but it’s just incredibly helpful, just by putting some context around stuff, like, “Oh, today wasn’t entirely shit. There actually were some good things, some things I noticed. Okay. Take a deep breath. It actually wasn’t awful.” Sometimes even over the course of the day, it got me thinking, “Oh, this is an actually okay moment.”

Aline: “Good latte.”

John: Take the small wins for what you got. I’m not using that book at all anymore, but it was useful for that. On the iPhone now, they have this app called Journal, which is a built-in app from Apple, which is surprisingly poor. It doesn’t actually do very much for you. But I thought, oh, that’ll be a good way to remind me to actually write down some stuff, because what I find I will do is I will happily email a person about the stuff I was working on or text somebody, but I won’t spend the time to actually text myself about, like, this is the thing that happened, and so there’s no record. I don’t have a good way of looking back, like, “When did that happen?”

Aline: My husband has an amazing book. We went out to dinner last night. He gets the card for the restaurant. He puts it in his journal. It says dinner with so-and-so at this restaurant. He has these little notebooks, and he’ll just paste them in. He has a record of the things we’ve done and the places we’ve been.

I think it depends on what sort of brain you have. But I had read a thing which is – and this is good for writers. You know when you’re working on a long-form thing and you feel like, “What did I do today?” Making a list of what you actually accomplished in a day, “Did a workout. Wrote four pages. Called my mother,” things that you to-done list. I did that for like three days.

John: Now, your husband is an attorney.

Aline: No, he works at a mutual fund.

John: For some reason, I was convinced your husband was an attorney. I was thinking there’s people who have billable hours who need to actually show the work they’ve done. That feels like a natural instinct.

Aline: He doesn’t have that. He doesn’t do that. People’s brains are a lot more organized that mine. I guess we’re at the age where you decide your faults or your strengths. I think I have more of a birds eye view than a day-to-day view, in a certain sense.

John: One of the things I recognized is that my photo roll becomes essentially my diary, because it’s like, “What was I doing in April?” Then I scroll back to April, like, “Oh, that’s what I was doing.”

Aline: Yes! John and I are sort of the same person. Have you noticed? ENTJs who like the exact same kind of Diet Coke. That’s exactly what I do. I love looking back and saying, “What was I doing a year ago?” Then you send it to a friend and they go, “Okay.”

John: “Okay.” But one of my frustrations I’m recognizing is that – I’ll get to what I’m actually doing and trying to do more now – but on my trip to Italy and my trip to Malta, I will think through, like, what am I gonna post on my Instagram stories, but I won’t do that for myself. I’m fine publicly presenting a history thing, but I won’t keep that for myself.

Aline: That’s what those social media things are. They’re like we’re writing our own lovely tribute to ourselves. I wonder if she would be okay with us name checking her, but Katie Dippold once said to me and Craig – we were talking about something, and she said there should be a button before you post something online that says, “Wait, but why?” It’s so true.

Listen. I started an Instagram for my dog, Sir Jimmy Jim. Why? I don’t know. I put one-second work into the caption. They’re terrible. But there’s a need to concretize. Now that you can publicly concretize, it’s very tempting. But you’re right, why not privately concretize?

John: What I’m using right now is called Day One. It’s an app that’s for iOS and also on your Mac. You can write some stuff in there about what happened. You can also link it to things. I use Strava for running, and so all my runs show up in there, and so it keeps track of that. You can add photos to it and make stuff work.

What I’ve found has been helpful for me to do is, on my iPhone I will start a new entry and then I’ll just hit the voice transcription thing, where you click the button and you just talk at it, because I don’t care that it’s perfect or that it’s exactly right. I just want to dump it out there and make a record, because I’m probably the only person who’s ever gonna read this again. That’s been useful. It’s one less barrier of a thing to do.

Aline: There’s a thing called the external brain that my husband talks about where getting things out of your brain into Evernote or into something-

John: I use Notion for that.

Aline: Because otherwise you wake up in the middle of the night going, “Oh.”

John: I’ve talked about it on the podcast, but I keep a stack of index cards by the bed, in the bathroom, and various places. I’ll write the thing down and then it’s done. I’ll put it by the bedroom door. It’s out of my brain. I can stop thinking about it.

Aline: You should do that. Again, these are all things that I should do and don’t.

John: Listeners, if you have suggestions for journaling things you want to be doing… Oh, but I do also want to ask you – several writers who we know do things called Morning Pages, where they write all the stuff… I see you shaking your head. That does not feel like an Aline thing. The idea behind these is that you unlock the artist within and fight the war of art and get all that stuff out of you. I’ve just never found it super helpful. I’ve tried it. It’s like, sure, I can vomit out a bunch of stuff, but my day isn’t better for me having done it.

Aline: The time that I’m writing, I want to consolidate into purposeful writing. I think it would make me feel despair.

John: Yeah, it could. Aline, always a pleasure having you here.

Links:

• ‘Bad Boys’ Settlement by Dominic Patten for Deadline
• Why did Sony buy Alamo Drafthouse — and is it actually a good thing? by Ryan Faughnder for LA Times
• The Nine Enneagram Type Descriptions
• Farewell – Casablanca
• Farewell – Past Lives
• Farewell – Lost in Translation
• Farewell – Weekend
• Farewell – Philadelphia
• Farewell – The Shawshank Redemption
• Farewell – Harold and Maude
• Farewell – Terminator 2
• Farewell – The Way We Were
• Farewell – The Wizard of Oz
• Farewell – E.T.
• Farewell – Toy Story 3
• Farewell – Dead Poets Society
• Revival Hub LA
• Visit Malta
• Peel off lip stain
• Dirt Man by Carter Vail, and some of Aline’s favorite remixes, via TikTok
• Phil Collins’ Houdini
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

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.

Links:

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* [Corporate Transparency Act: An Overview of Impending Reporting Obligations](https://www.faegredrinker.com/en/insights/publications/2023/10/corporate-transparency-act-an-overview-of-impending-reporting-obligations)
* [MoviePass, MovieCrash | Official Trailer](https://youtu.be/3G75RASEmUI?si=b5W5zEmpV4r8UzCT) from HBO
* [The Film Fund](https://www.thefilmfund.co/) and [the Reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/Filmmakers/comments/16ftex6/is_the_film_fund_a_reliable_website/)
* [LOST – Desmond in the Hatch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgsNjTyGsRk)
* [Suwada Nail Clippers](https://www.suwada.co.jp/en/products_en/nailnippers)
* [Song Exploder – Madonna’s “Hung Up”](https://songexploder.net/madonna)
* [The Ladder](https://www.hatchescapes.com/the-ladder) by Hatch Escapes
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

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