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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/what-if-hollywood-edition).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 634 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

What if Alexander the Great had died at the Battle of Granicus River? What if Robert E. Lee hadn’t lost Special Order 191? Historians consider these questions as counterfactuals, exploring how major world outcomes sometimes hinge on relatively small moments that could’ve gone either way. Today on the show, we’ll explore a range of Hollywood counterfactuals, looking at some moments, people, and events that could’ve gone very differently. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, capitalism. Craig, is it good or bad?

**Craig:** Uh-oh.

**John:** We will definitively answer the question once and for all.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Oh, boy. Craig, it’s so nice to have you back!

**Craig:** It’s so good to be back. I’m sorry that I was gone for so long. The small matter of directing the first episode of the second season of The Last of Us, which I’m almost done with – we have a few days still outstanding that we need to do in a different location. I’ve been monitoring things on the internet a little bit. People are very clever. They like to see where we’re shooting, and then they have all these brilliant theories about what it means.

**John:** Yeah, and they’re all right. 100 percent of them are correct, right?

**Craig:** I wish I could put my arm around each one of them and say, “No.”

**John:** No. No.

**Craig:** No, most of the theories are incorrect. Some of them are halfways correct. Some of the conjecture is like 28 percent correct. But I do enjoy it all. I like the interest. It’s fun. But I’m mostly done with my directing stuff and very happily enjoying watching the second episode being done from the more traditional showrunner point of view, which is nice. I do like directing, but also, it’s the most exhausting thing ever. I miss it when it’s over, and then while it’s happening, I just keep asking myself why, why, why am I doing – why did I do-

**John:** Hey, Craig. Hey, Craig. I have friends who direct sitcoms, and let me tell you, one week they’re in and they’re out. If you could go back, why not make it a sitcom? Then you could direct as much as you wanted to direct, because it’s just a week of your time. James Burrows is not exhausted the way that you’re exhausted.

**Craig:** No. It sounds like you’re talking about a good old-fashioned three-camera.

**John:** Three-camera, oh yeah.

**Craig:** So you’re really just working on a stage play that three cameras are capturing. You don’t have to figure out angles and coverage and turning around. That sounds wonderful. Plus just a week. Yeah, so if there is some sort of box I failed to check to have James Burrows’s career and money… That sounds like a plan.

**John:** Did I tell you I finally met James Burrows? After all these years, I met him backstage at a play. And of course, as you could expect, the most lovely man.

**Craig:** I would hope so. If he were just unpleasant-

**John:** Yeah, a monster.

**Craig:** … what a weird choice to keep going back and back and back. Those days are kind of over though, aren’t they? The three-camera sitcom is sort of-

**John:** There are more this development season than in previous years.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting.

**John:** Yeah, I think there’s still some hope for it. There tend to be more of the half-hour single-camera things, which again though, are pretty short schedules. Modern Family apparently did a light shoot. They’d show up to the location, they’d shoot every scene a couple ways, and they were done.

**Craig:** Yeah, the classic network model of doing something like that, the standard is shoot a master and then hose it down, as they say, just simple coverage. If you’re shooting a couple cameras at the same time, the thing about a show like Modern Family is the coverage really doesn’t have to be particularly specific. It’s people talking, and what they’re saying and their faces are the most important things, whereas when you get into these big dramas – and the big dramas are like, each episode is kind of a movie.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Eesh. Oof.

**John:** Eesh. Yeah. I will say, the shows that are like The Office or like Modern Family, they do rely sometimes on the camera finding a joke, because the conceit, of course, is that it’s a documentary crew, so the camera’s finding the joke at times. Abbott Elementary has the same thing. But it is much more straightforward. It’s a very survivable life.

**Craig:** I don’t think it requires less skill. It simply is easier from a kind of how much stuff you have to do perspective. But the specific talent required to know where the camera ought to be – and also, editing those shows is very tricky. Editing comedy is incredibly specific.

**John:** Yeah, it is. Let’s get into some follow-up. This is mostly follow-up on things I think you were maybe not here for, but you could still weigh in. Drew, help us out with some follow-up here. Let’s start with the table reads bit.

**Drew Marquardt:** A few episodes ago, Jacob wrote in asking a question on whether you should send a script for a table read ahead of time or have everyone read it cold.

**John:** Craig, what’s your instinct on that? Let’s say you’re doing a table read with some friends. Do you think you should send the script ahead to those folks or have them come in cold to read it? What’s your instinct?

**Craig:** I’m not a huge table read fan. I think I’ve said that as much. But if I were to do one, I would do it cold.

**John:** That was Celine Song’s recommendation as well. Jacob wrote in with some follow-up here.

**Drew:** Jacob wrote, “Our table read was already scheduled for five days after the episode’s release date, so we ended up going with the dual method. Half of the attendees had the script ahead of time, and the other half read cold. And guess what? Celine was right. Our actor friends who had the script ahead of time put way too much energy in coming up with ways to play their characters, and bizarrely, even some had accents. We definitely preferred the read from those who did not have the script ahead of time, but it was still helpful to receive feedback from people who were able to discover the under-the-radar jokes that might’ve required a reread to enjoy.”

**John:** We talked about this with Celine Song. Mike Birbiglia does this thing where in his development process, he’ll have an interim draft. He’ll have a bunch of his friends, and they’ll have pizza and read through his script. That’s an important part of his process. But he really makes sure that they’re not auditioning for roles in that, that they’re there to read the script aloud. That feels like the right instinct here.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s especially the right instinct when you’re dealing with maybe actors who aren’t as experienced or at a particularly high level. So I don’t know where Jacob is in his life and I don’t know if his actor friends are well experienced or highly professional or quasi professional or aspiring. The more aspiring they are, the more important it is to not give them the script ahead of time, because they’re just going to do the thing. They’re just going to do it. They’re going to do the thing where they care way too much. That’s not the purpose. The purpose is, I assume in this case, for the writer to hear the words out loud, note the things that do seem to be working, note where it gets slow, note where it gets too fast, etc.

**John:** We’ve got differing opinion here from a guy who’s done it the opposite way. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Tom Harp says, “I’ve done reads both ways, with writers and with actors. But I wanted to offer my experience as a counter to what John and Celine said. In my own process, my trusted writer friends read early drafts and gave notes. But before I give it to my agents, I always do a read-through with actors.

“During the read, I’m listening to the pace and flow of the dialogue, but maybe the most important part is the Q and A I do afterwards. Actors have a different set of antenna than writers do, and their instincts have saved me several times. I’ve been told, ‘This feels false,’ or, ‘I don’t think my character would do or say this,’ when none of my writer friends noticed it, nor did I, because writers get why the story needs it. But down the line, an actor is going to call emotional bullshit on set, and then you’ve got your production’s boot on your neck as you try and solve it.”

**John:** Not quite on the same focus here. He’s saying that actors do bring something different to a read, because they’re bringing experience of how to sell a line, and they don’t know how to actually do a line.

**Craig:** I’m not going to disagree with Tom, because he’s obviously getting some use out of that. The only flag I would wave here is that casting is a thing. One of the reasons casting is important is because you’re trying to match an actor whose instincts match the instincts of the character you have created. When you have somebody show up because they’re available or they are your friend, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the right casting for that part.

And they may indeed think, “This feels false,” or, “I don’t think my character would say this.” A, it’s not their character yet. And B, they might not be right for the part, for that very reason. That’s not to say that there aren’t going to be things that almost every actor in that spot would go, “Oh, I don’t quite understand why I would say or do this here.” So that matters. That logic is important.

But if you don’t pick up on it until the actor comes up to you after, so you listen to the whole thing, sounds good to you, and then they call, come over, and say, “I don’t think that this… ” Maybe it’s just that the actor is not the right actor for that part. That’s the only thing I would flag there. But if it works for Tom, it works for Tom.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s get to the meat of this episode, which is counterfactuals. Some setup here. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading this book called What If?, which is a series of essays edited by Robert Cowley, about military history. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this book. The important part is that it’s really talking through counterfactuals versus alternative history.

I want to spend a moment to describe the difference between counterfactuals and alternative history. A counterfactual is basically the outcome of this battle or event could’ve turned out different in a way that’s very possible. There’s a distinct moment that could’ve gone either way, a kind of a coin toss. And if it’d have gone the opposite direction, outcomes would’ve been very different.

Alternative history I’ll define as something happened in a very different way or in a different timeline, like what if Africa had industrialized first, or we discovered nuclear power in the 1800s? You’d still get to a place where the outcomes are very different, but it’s not hinging on one moment, one thing where it could’ve gone either way.

So we put out this call to our listeners, saying hey, what counterfactuals do you want us to talk through? Some of them were incredibly useful, but a lot of them were actually just alternative histories, where, like, oh, what if this had happened, or what if this had happened, but it wasn’t hinging on a specific event. It was just like, there’s a different version that came out of here.

Some of the alt histories that people proposed, like what if Zoetrope Studios had succeeded, sure, but it’s not based on one movie succeeding. What if Jacksonville, Florida had become the filmmaking capital of the world? It could’ve happened, because it was an alternative way things could’ve gone, but it wasn’t based on one moment that could’ve happened. Or the wars in Europe, like what if the wars in Europe hadn’t happened or had happened differently, and European film industry became the dominant one rather than American? Again, it’s not based on one event. I just wanted to make it clear that thank you for sending those through, but those are really alternative histories and not the counterfactuals I was looking for.

**Craig:** You were really looking for those fork in the road moments, where there’s definitely-

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** … two ways you can go. Things went left instead of right, but what if they had gone right instead of left?

**John:** Exactly. The first I want to talk through is Edison. Back in 1915, he’d already invented many incredible devices that we use today, electricity. How he was getting electricity and light bulbs and things out into the world were incredibly important. But he also had patents on the original motion picture camera and projection technology. Because he had this patent and was trying to enforce it very vigorously, a lot of people who were trying to avoid his sort of patent thugs were heading out to the West Coast. It’s one of the reasons why the Hollywood industry developed out in California was just to get away from this guy and his very ambitious enforcement of his trademark over things.

He lost a 1915 court case, which was crucial in his ability to constrain how people could use his devices and whether these things he was creating, these projectors, could only show his own creations. This feels like an important moment in terms of the evolution of the early film industry, so 1915.

**Craig:** 1915. You have this court case that basically allows an industry to exist. Prior to that court case, everybody had to go through Edison and his company, the Motion Picture Patents Company. I did not know this until – I’m looking at the article that you linked to in the Saturday Evening Post.

When you say “patent thugs,” you mean it. Edison famously occupied a space in New Jersey. There is an Edison Township, New Jersey. I believe that is named for him. But in West Orange, New Jersey, that’s where his base was. He would hire mobsters – and there sure were a lot of them up there on the East Coast – to literally beat up people, filmmakers that were using cameras and film. Edison’s argument basically was, I control the entire chain of creation of motion pictures, from film stock to projection. And anybody that tried to get around him and do whatever they wanted without getting his approval could even theoretically get physically assaulted.

The court case said no. Basically, the court said you can sue somebody for infringing, but you can’t use your patent as, quote, “a weapon to disable a rival contestant or to drive him from the field.”

This’ll tie into our capitalism versus anti-capitalism discussion later on. We used to be quite invested in busting trusts, monopolies in this country, particularly around then. Teddy Roosevelt was quite the pioneer in that effort to create a healthy form of capitalism. We seem to have lost our way. There are a number of companies, I look around now, who I think Teddy Roosevelt would be thrilled to break apart. But yes, if that goes the other way, then John, you and I are probably working in New Jersey.

**John:** Yeah, I think we’re working for the Edison company or some offshoot of the Edison company. It’s hard to find a perfect analogy for what this system would’ve been like, because it’s not quite like the app store, where everything has to be done through the app store. It’s not quite that. But it is like there’s just basically one funnel, and everything has to either license or be done by this one company. All motion pictures have to go through this one channel, which would be vastly different than what we’re expecting.

Do I think this would’ve lasted forever? No. I think there would’ve been other ways around this, other alternative technologies that didn’t infringe on the patent. There would’ve been ways to do it. But clearly, our early film industry would’ve been very different. What we do goes back to 100 years ago when this was all being figured out.

**Craig:** It’s almost certain that in order to get around this, a healthy motion picture industry would’ve sprouted outside of the bounds of the United States.

**John:** That’s a good point.

**Craig:** Where would that have taken place?

**John:** France?

**Craig:** Europe, certainly. But in terms of what we do, the Hollywood style, the very American style of creating things and making a huge business out of it, as opposed to thinking about it specifically in terms of art and cinema, which is a very European and certainly French way of approaching things.

I think about where I’m sitting right now in Vancouver. Canada would’ve been a wonderful place. The immigrants who founded Hollywood way, way back when, Warner Bros and so on, may have just headed up to Montreal or Toronto.

**John:** Mexico would’ve been another great choice. There’s other venues.

**Craig:** Lots of sunshine.

**John:** Again, we are not legal experts in here. This is really our first glimpse of the history here. But it looks like it’s the projection technology is the issue. Basically, if any projector sold in the U.S. could only project things that Edison had approved, that still would’ve been a challenge for American audiences. It’s not just where you film the things. It’s also how you’re showing the things. It would’ve gotten sorted out. There would be some way to do it, but it would’ve really limited the spread of Hollywood movies.

**Craig:** When you have something that people want, it will find a way to exist. It’s a little bit like Prohibition, which also fell apart a few years after this happened.

**John:** Rather than the manufacture of distribution of alcohol, manufacture and distribution of film.

**Craig:** People want it.

**John:** People want it.

**Craig:** If you really want to go down that other fork in the road, the movie business is run by cartels, and it is an entirely criminal enterprise.

**John:** That would’ve been great. That’s a How Would This Be a Movie, because you can envision that. In some ways, the Man in the High Castle and the hidden films, the stolen films of the alternative history, how this all ties back together, is an example of that. There’s a currency for these films that show what happens in the other timeline.

**Craig:** Yeah, I would see that.

**John:** Our next one is actually similar. This is the Paramount consent decree, which we’ve talked about on the podcast several times. Again, this is a question of manufacture and distribution of film materials.

Prior to going into this, the very thumbnail version of this, the studios were allowed to also own movie theaters, and they could control the entire channel of, we’re making the movies, we’re showing them in our theaters, we’re constraining all of our product. The Paramount consent decree held that the studios cannot own exhibitors, and therefore films from other companies can be shown in theaters.

**Craig:** Had that not fallen apart, I think you would’ve seen a creative paralysis in the business. What happened immediately following the collapse of that was the breakdown of this incredibly formalized manner of presenting art to people.

Even though there are incredible movies that were made in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s, there were also very clearly rigid constrictions. Because it seems like a long time ago, it’s hard for us to see how fast things changed and how dramatically they changed, because it was before our time. But let’s say you were born in the ’30s. You’re used to watching movies of a certain sort. By the time you get into the ’60s, you now have nudity and graphic sexuality being shown on screen. You couldn’t even show people kissing with tongue, and now there’s sex. It’s kind of incredible how fast it changed, because if the studios don’t control the screens, other people can make movies to put on the screens. That’s the big difference. The other people didn’t have to follow along this rigid formality.

**John:** It’s important to understand this both from a producer and a supplier point of view, because this allowed theaters that were not affiliated with studios to compete for titles they wanted. So it allowed for more independent theaters, but also allowed for filmmaking that took place outside of the studio system. Those are the ones that you first see nudity and moving past the Hays Code and really pushing what cinema could be.

Obviously, this had a huge business transformation on Hollywood, but also had a huge creative impact. If the Paramount consent decree hadn’t happened, we would be in a different place. The irony, of course, is that the Paramount consent decree was overturned in the past 5 years, 10 years. How long have we been doing this podcast? In theory, now studios can own movie theaters. We haven’t seen a huge change in that. They haven’t come in and bought out the AMCs in the world.

**Craig:** Probably because it’s not a great business to be in.

**John:** It’s not an amazing business.

**Craig:** It’s funny, the Paramount decree fell apart right around the time it was no longer necessary, because studios found a new bunch of screens they could control via streaming. However, because of that window from the 1950s through let’s say up to 10 years ago, where the screens were so important, the proliferation of different kinds of content occurred. That toothpaste cannot go back in the tube. We’ve all grown up with and have become used to a certain kind of entertainment.

Ironically, when you look at the movies Paramount itself was making in the ’70s, starting with The Godfather, and onward and the kind of filmmakers they were supporting, they themselves benefited more almost than anyone from this, because they were allowed to make new kinds of things.

The companies do now control their own screens via streaming, but people want what they want. It’s one thing to say, “I want some things that I haven’t seen, but I would imagine I’d like them,” and it’s another to say, “I have seen the things I like. You can’t take them away.”

**John:** Before we move on, I think it’s worth looking at; both the Edison case and the Paramount consent decree, at the time these things were being decided, the justices and everyone else involved couldn’t have anticipated what the long-term effects are. They could only really look at what is this date right now, because they really couldn’t know what was going to come 10 years, 20 years down the road. I guarantee you that there was not an awareness of like, this will change the type of movies that get made if this gets overturned. They were just looking at it in terms of, this is a law, this is restrain of trade, this is anti-competitive, and therefore-

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** … we’re going to knock these things down.

**Craig:** If they had taken the other path, I think we would still to this day have a much more restrained kind of content. People look at the ’70s, the freewheeling ’70s, and the rise of the auteurist and all the rest of it as some sort of product of the cultural revolution in this country. And I would argue that no, that is not the case, that in fact, those things happened because of this court case.

I would point directly at network television as proof, because network television is the control of screens. And when you look at what was allowed on network television and is to this day allowed on network television, it is so much more constrained than what is allowed in movies. It’s not even close. Language, nudity, content. There’s just limits. People lost their minds when, in the ’90s, NYPD Blue showed a butt. A butt. They’re still not allowed to drop F-bombs and so on and so forth. I would just say that’s what movies would be like. Movies would be like network television. You’d be constrained.

**John:** And of course, European cinema, Asian cinema could’ve made different choices. But the problem is, if there’s no way to exhibit those films here, it’s moot.

**Craig:** That’s right. Absolutely. That was always the case. In the ’40s or the ’30s, people referred to – my grandfather referred to French films. Those were sort of early Blue Movies with nudity. Sure. But mostly, it would have operated the way network television still operates, under those constraints, which some people argue are positive on some levels. Creative restraint does force certain kinds of creative creativity. But you would not have the things that we have in movies if this had not gone that way.

**John:** Yeah. Simpler what ifs. What if George Lucas had died in his car accident?

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** This is June 12th, 1962.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** “As Lucas made a left turn, a Chevy Impala came flying from the opposite direction and broadsided him. The racing belt snapped, and Lucas was flung onto the pavement just before the car slammed into a giant walnut tree. Unconscious, Lucas turned blue and began vomiting blood as he was rushed off to the hospital.”

This is George Lucas, who at this time is a promising young film student. I guess he’s made some stuff at this point, but he had not made Star Wars. He had not made Raiders of the Lost Ark. How different would it be if we did not have George Lucas as a filmmaker? What are the knock-on effects of this?

**Craig:** For starters, I just want to say as an unlicensed doctor, if you turn blue and start vomiting, it’s not good. That’s really bad. There’s two ways of looking at this. One way is – let’s go the obvious way – George Lucas doesn’t create Star Wars. He doesn’t bring about the era of the blockbuster. Movies stay a bit smaller. Special effects and visual effects do not advance as far as they did and as fast as they did. The hyper-merchandization of films and the creation of so-called franchises does not occur.

However, a couple of counter-arguments to that. One is that somebody else probably would have done something of the size that would’ve created that anyway. George Lucas was really important, as we’ve discussed, in the creation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I do feel like there’s going to be a – Steven Spielberg was making his own blockbusters, Jaws.

**John:** He’s making Jaws. He’s still making blockbusters.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think there’s going to be blockbusters. But just as importantly, it seems like George Lucas’s brush with fate here was actually quite informative to him as a filmmaker. He sits there in the hospital and starts thinking about what saved his life in that car, and eventually, I think that sort of turns into American Graffiti. There’s this world where it’s like, if he doesn’t get into the – he needs to get into the car accident, I think.

What happens? If he dies in his car accident, we don’t get these movies. If he doesn’t die in the car accident, we do get these movies. We definitely wouldn’t have Star Wars. There would be no Star Wars. That’s for sure.

**John:** A world without Star Wars is different. Beyond the business things you’ve laid out, how it popularized a kind of space opera, children’s stories but for all ages, it did a very specific thing. We already had Star Trek. Star Trek would still exist without Star Wars, but I feel like we kind of need both of those things for in order for us to have-

**Craig:** Sort of. Star Trek is a network television show that gets canceled after, I think it was three seasons. Then Star Wars happens, and shortly after that, Star Trek the movie happens. Star Trek the movie does not happen if Star Wars doesn’t happen. There’s just no chance.

**John:** Very good point. Very good point.

**Craig:** Similarly, all the movies that were inspired by Star Wars sort of happen. The movie that’s coming to mind actually is Dune, because Dune was really the only thing that could’ve been Star Wars, because it preexisted Star Wars as a novel. Maybe the Dune that gets made doesn’t get made. I don’t think the Lynch Dune gets made without Star Wars.

**John:** And the Jodorowsky Dune doesn’t get made either.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s not going to get made either. But at some point, somebody, let’s say it’s Spielberg, in the absence of a huge-

**John:** Or Coppola or somebody.

**Craig:** Or Coppola or somebody. Somebody figures out how to make Dune and gives us the Denis Villeneuve standard type Dune earlier, and that leads – because there’s obviously great interest in those large-scale science fiction fantasies.

**John:** Because it’s crucial to understand there was a huge science fiction community before Star Wars. It popularized it in a way that was important. I think you don’t have the volume of science fiction fandom until you have Star Wars.

**Craig:** Star Wars, it was like giving a very loud and passionate fan base the world’s biggest megaphone, because everybody sort of flooded into the tent. It’s a really interesting thing, a world without Star Wars.

A fun thing I do like to think about when we’re talking about these counterfactuals is that we are currently living in counterfactuals, meaning in our world, Melissa Suzanne – the worst fake name ever – Melissa Suzanne does die in a car accident, doesn’t make blah da bloo, which is the biggest fricking thing of all time in that, and we’re living in the counterfactual where it didn’t happen. We don’t know what we don’t have.

**John:** Exactly. Yeah, we don’t. Let’s talk about another movie that it would be different if it hadn’t existed, which is Titanic. You and I were both in Hollywood as Titanic was happening. Some backstory for folks who don’t know. Filming was supposed to last six months. It stretched to eight months. The budget doubled from a reported $110 million, making it even costlier than Water World’s $200 million price tag. Another counterfactual would be like, what if Water World were a hit? But it was not a hit.

Titanic was incredibly expensive. Craig and I will both testify to the fact that there was real discussion about, “Oh my god, this movie could be a disaster. It could completely tank.”

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And sink both Fox and Paramount, who were both putting up the money for it. That didn’t happen. It became a giant hit and changed exhibition. It just kept running and running forever, despite its long running time. What happens, Craig, if Titanic had tanked, sunk?

**Craig:** The thing is, we do live in the world where these enormous movies tanked and sunk. That one might’ve killed Paramount. Paramount I believe was the initial production company. And it got so bad that they had to go to their competitor, Fox, and say, would you basically put in all the money we put in, on top of the money we put in, and we’ll give you all of the international, I think is how it worked out. That’s unheard of. I don’t even think it’s happened since on that scale. I think in part it hasn’t happened since on that scale because Titanic did become a huge hit. And the only thing that scares these companies more than a massive bomb is missing out on all of the money of a massive hit.

**John:** Of a hit, yeah.

**Craig:** But I think we would still unfortunately be in a world where some massive films just tank because people take these big swings. The weird thing about Titanic succeeding is that it probably has created more flops in its wake, because everyone goes, “What if it’s Titanic?” Then someone’s like, “We’ve done research, and it’s projected to only make… ” I think Titanic its opening weekend made – $28.6 million is what it made, which is really good for 1997.

**John:** Really good.

**Craig:** Very good opening weekend.

**John:** For a four-hour movie, yes.

**Craig:** Yes, but if it followed what normally happens, which is then the following weekend would be, let’s say-

**John:** Drops 50 percent, 40 percent.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s say the following weekend’s like 15 million, and then it goes to 7 and 3 and 2.

**John:** Disaster.

**Craig:** Oh my god. But in fact, it made more. It went up. I just remember how it just kept making somewhere in the 20s every single weekend forever. There’s never been anything quite like it, box office wise.

**John:** My husband, Mike, was running the AMC Theatres in Burbank at that point. He had 30 screens. And Titanic nearly killed him, because they’d add screenings and those would sell out. So they’d add 9:00 in the morning screenings and not even advertise them, and they would sell out. It was crazy. Yes, it’s really good money for the exhibitors, because they’re getting a cut of that, but it was just so hard on everybody, just staffing those endless screenings.

**Craig:** The creation of that movie was incredibly difficult to do. It is certainly no fun to be making something that massive while the people that are paying for it are freaking out and basically telling you, “We’re screwed.” Making things is hard enough. When you are confidence shaken, it’s really hard, because you already want to curl up and die just from the exhaustion of doing it. And Titanic was an incredibly exhausting thing to make. To think, while you’re making it, that also everyone’s miserable and it’s going to fail, oh my god, how do you even wake up in the morning?

**John:** But you do.

**Craig:** They did, and so people just keep pointing back at this and saying, “Look.” The one thing I think that would be different is maybe there would be fewer flops.

**John:** There’d be fewer big swings. I think there would’ve been someone going like, “No, we absolutely cannot do this thing.” One thing that is different about our current moment is we have some places that have so much money, and they don’t actually need the box office, but they can just spend a ton. Apple, on Killers of the Flower Moon. In any normal situation, that would be a disaster. But it’s not a disaster for them, because they kind of don’t really care about the money. And so they can make a very long, very expensive movie that doesn’t perform at the box office, because that’s not really what they care about.

**Craig:** Yeah, and similarly, Netflix doesn’t – I don’t know what their metrics – I don’t know how any of it works. I work for a company that is oddly old-fashioned in the sense that even though there’s a big streaming service for Max, a lot of people still watch HBO through cable or satellite, and those are subscriber fees that get paid in, and there’s ratings for that stuff. But yeah, Netflix makes these enormous things and go, it kind of doesn’t matter. I don’t understand any of it.

But certainly in the case of Amazon and Apple, those companies are so enormous. Their production wings are such a small piece of what they do, that they can easily absorb any of these things. No problem. The world of Titanic, it was back – I don’t know, who owned Paramount back then? Was it Gulf Western?

**John:** It could’ve still been Gulf Western.

**Craig:** That was a big oil company. If you read about the history of The Godfather, for instance, they were all freaking out when they were making The Godfather, because they were going to lose – they couldn’t stand the notion of losing money.

**John:** There was a history of disastrous films costing studios so much they had to change, like Cleopatra and Fox. We have Century City in part because Fox had to sell off some of that lot to actually earn money, and that became Century City.

**Craig:** Exactly. There’s Heaven’s Gate, which basically destroyed a studio. There’s been movies that were so big and so massive and so horrifying in terms of their costs that just entire companies fell apart.

**John:** A movie that did not cost the company but was a big swing and a big miss was John Carter. John Carter of Mars was a film that Disney made. We’ll link to an article by Richard Newby for The Hollywood Reporter, called John Carter Changed Hollywood, but Not in the Way Disney Hoped. Based on the numbers, John Carter earned $284 million on a $306 million budget. That sounds like, oh, it was close, but of course, there’s hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing on top of that.

Newby argues that Disney realized, like, “Okay, we were trying to create Star Wars. Maybe we should just buy Star Wars.” They might not have reached for Lucasfilm at that moment if John Carter had worked. Possibly. They also were coming off other challenges, like The Lone Ranger, which was another expensive flop. And Newby argues that because of back-to-back misses, Disney got very conservative and were just banking on sure bets.

**Craig:** I’ll push back a little bit on this one.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** It seems like Mr. Newby’s hanging a little too much around the neck of John Carter. Yes, it was a flop, but it wasn’t a studio-destroying flop. $284 million against $306 is not good, obviously, because that doesn’t include the, let’s say, $100 million of marketing. And then, of course, they don’t actually get all the money from the ticket sales, but there was video and all the rest. I’m not sure that that’s why they said, “We need Star Wars.” I think anybody who has the chance to get Star Wars and has the capital to do it and also the brand that would convince Lucas to allow it-

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** … which in this case was Disney and no one else, unless there wasn’t an old existing Paramount that wasn’t there anymore, of the way that he was familiar, yeah, I think anybody would buy Star Wars. I don’t think that you can put too much around the neck of John Carter. The fact is he cites Lone Ranger as an example of how it didn’t help matters. But that’s proof that John Carter wasn’t enough of a cage rattler, because they did make Lone Ranger, so I don’t know.

**John:** Let’s rephrase this though. Let’s refrain it. Rather than saying what if John Carter hadn’t bombed, what if John Carter was a huge, huge, huge hit? What if it were kind of Star Wars level? That I think would’ve been a bit of a game changer, because then it would be validating, like, yes, let’s spend a lot of money, take really big swings on pieces of IP that are kind of known but not hugely known. I would say John Carter of Mars is more in the level of a Narnia book, in the sense of people kind of know what it is, but they’re not necessarily directly familiar with it. That could’ve changed some things. If it were a giant hit, would they still have bought Lucasfilm? Probably, because they would just have so much money.

**Craig:** I think it’s still probably presuming too much logic on the part of the folks that make these things, because there’s always been this strange gravitation towards, quote unquote, IP that I think most people would look at and go, “Okay. If you think that that matters.” When they made – what was the one with Billy Zane? Was it The Phantom?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The Phantom, that was something-

**John:** In Europe, yeah.

**Craig:** My dad was into that, barely, as a child. It was not relevant anymore. But it seemed like, oh, that thing. Now, in the age of algorithm-driven companies, I think the computers, as much as we hate them, probably would’ve said, “Please do not make The Phantom.” But you still see what I would call attempts to recreate other people’s large successes. And they sort of work, or sometimes they don’t work.

Amazon and Netflix, without naming names, have certainly tried to reproduce their – “We want our Game of Thrones. Where’s our Game of Thrones?” Then they go looking for IP that people are sort of interested in or maybe not that interested in. Some of it works great; some of it doesn’t. It’s hard to predict sometimes. There are book series that people love but just don’t want to watch adapted. There are other things that people don’t really care that much about, but when they get adapted, catch on. It’s not as logical as all that.

I think if John Carter had been a hit, I don’t even think it would’ve stopped Disney from buying Star Wars. The only thing that would change: a lot more John Carter movies and then a whole lot more movies that are sort of John Carter-ish that don’t work.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** When I was a kid, my dad said, “You’re going to love these books. When I was a kid, I read them. Doc Savage.” You know the Doc Savage books?

**John:** I recognize the title. I don’t know anything about them.

**Craig:** I think they were, I want to say 1930s era.

**John:** They were pulp fiction.

**Craig:** Pulp fiction, adventure stories, largely for boys, about a group of courageous people that go on to the far-flung reaches. Doc Savage was definitely an inspiration for Indiana Jones and even James Bond to some extent. Every now and then, somebody would bring it up in Hollywood as I was coming up. Now I’m like, that’s so old. Maybe there’d be a bunch of Doc Savage – or a Doc Savage movie would’ve been at a large scale and failed. But I don’t know if the world would’ve changed that much if John Carter had succeeded.

**John:** But Craig, what if Iron Man had bombed?

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** I think we’ve talked on this podcast before – I carried a football on Iron Man for just a couple weeks. I love everybody involved. I got to go to the premier. I remember going to the premier and the after-party at the Roosevelt Hotel across the street and saying, “Wow, that was really effing good. That’s going to be a giant hit.” But I will tell you that there was no guarantee that movie was going to be a giant hit.

You look at the folks involved, like Favreau, so smart, so great, had done some movies, but there was no guarantee that he could direct this movie. There was no guarantee that Robert Downey Jr was a good choice or even a rational choice for this, because he was not in the best place in his career. There were a lot of things that could’ve really derailed this movie, and yet it was a giant hit and started a franchise, which has made billions of dollars for the companies involved.

**Craig:** Billions and billions and billions and changed the shape of multinational mega-corporations.

**John:** It’s important to acknowledge that there were multiple movies before that that had not worked, and we’ve still got the Marvel Universe. But I would argue that if Iron Man had flopped, you doing have the Kevin Feige Marvel Cinematic Universe.

**Craig:** Without question. Without question. You could even go further back and say what if the X-Men movies flopped? Because superhero movies – other than Batman always seemed to work, Superman worked for-

**John:** Sometimes.

**Craig:** … two movies. But the other movies that they tried to do, the other things they tried, it all just, eh. Spider-Man also is another one where if that had not worked right…

There were preexisting superhero films that had done well, but those were not controlled by Marvel per se. X-Men was controlled by Fox. Spider-Man was controlled by Sony. Batman was controlled by Warner Bros. Here’s Marvel as a company suddenly finding a partner to make Iron Man with and do it well, and that directly leads into the entire Avengers thing. It also created all the feeder ones, Thor. Obviously, you never get to Guardians of the Galaxy or any of that stuff.

**John:** No, none of that stuff.

**Craig:** Ever, ever, ever.

**John:** I will acknowledge that if you had Iron Man but didn’t have a good follow-up with that first Captain America movie, it would’ve been much more difficult. But you have to have Iron Man first. But the whole choice to center this whole thread on Iron Man was a weird one too, because he wasn’t the biggest available hero there.

**Craig:** No. I loved Iron Man comics when I was a kid, because the suit’s awesome. But the actual Iron Man stories got kind of morose. He was an alcoholic. The comics went into a whole story about alcoholism.

Also, you would not have the superhero saturation and the way that superhero films… There’s going to be some amazing books written 10 years from now about it. The transformation of our culture by that movie and everything that came beyond it is remarkable. What it did to our business, for better or worse – and in a lot of cases worse – is remarkable. What it did to the visual effects industry but also technology is remarkable.

And then here’s this question: does any of this work without Iron Man? Does any of this work without Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr, or does it just begin to fall apart? Obviously, Marvel has created this incredible system with phases.

**John:** We’re in a struggling phase right now. I think it’s not hard to see. We don’t know what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** I think on our next episode, we’ll talk a little about when you hire stars, how careful you have to be, because they are going to be the face of your entity. In the case of Jonathan Majors, that did not work out well. In the case of Robert Downey Jr, it worked out great. But if you were to look at those two people at the start, I would’ve bet on Jonathan Majors.

**Craig:** I don’t know what was known, but here’s what was definitely known about Robert Downey Jr prior to Iron Man. He had gone through a very long period of substance abuse problems. He had gone through a very long period where he was highly unreliable. He was considered to be mercurial and brilliant but uncontrollable. He had had issues with the law. There was an infamous story where he just woke up in somebody’s bed in a house, because he broke in, because he was completely out of his mind on whatever he was – I don’t know what substances he was abusing. There was this sense that the last person in the world you put an enormous thing on top of would be Robert Downey Jr, and they just went for it.

**John:** They did.

**Craig:** This is the weird thing about trying to game or predict. You want the real hero here. If I can point to one person that is the reason why our culture is full of superhero movies and why Marvel is worth as much as it is and has had as much success, Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr’s wife and producing partner, who is the stabilizing force in his life, who clearly got him back on track and got him sober and focused. If Hollywood could give a Nobel Prize, it should go to Susan Downey. She’s remarkable. As far as I’m concerned, Marvel should write her a check for a billion dollars.

**John:** Let’s do a very short version on this. We’ve talked about fin-syn before. Fin-syn limited the degree to which networks could own the production entities. It’s like Paramount consent decrees in the sense of it’s about how much vertical integration you could have over the course of production. It was abolished in 1993 by a decision. It counts as a counterfactual, because the decision could’ve gone the other way. In a short version, if in 1993 fin-syn hadn’t been eradicated, how would Hollywood look different today?

**Craig:** Oh, boy. You can argue in a lot of different directions here. The deal with fin-syn is it created a system where the only people who could afford to produce television good enough to be on networks were companies that could afford to operate under a system called deficit financing. The only way you could make money making a television show, because the networks couldn’t make them – therefore the networks made money off of licensing, so the networks pay you money to license the show you produced. They run it on the air, and then they sell ads. The amount of ads that they sell hopefully is way more than the licensing fee they’re paying you. But how do you make money? You don’t, because the licensing fee doesn’t even come close to paying you back.

**John:** To covering your costs.

**Craig:** Doesn’t even come close. The only you make money-

**John:** You’re relying on syndication.

**Craig:** Exactly. Basically, you need a hit. If the show makes it to, 100 episodes was considered the classic number to hit, then it could be syndicated, meaning it could then go into reruns. At that point, it just starts to spin off insane amounts of money through licensing fees forever. The game was, right, we’re going to lose a whole lot of money to make a whole lot of money. The only people that can afford to do that are very large companies; in this case, movie studios, basically. Those were the ones doing it.

**John:** If fin-syn hadn’t gotten shut down, you can imagine somehow more capital would’ve flown in to create more things that were like the Carsey-Werners and that stuff. The experienced producers would somehow be able to raise enough money to be able to make the shows they’re going to be able to make. But it would still be dicier. Those people would be very wealthy in hits, but these companies would also go bankrupt more often. Generally, you want to strike down vertical integration where you see it, because it is anti-competitive. It can drive down wages for people, because there’s fewer places you can sell your thing.

But it would’ve greatly changed how we’re doing stuff. It’s hard to know what would this look like in today’s streaming world, because there are companies that bring their own money to do stuff today. Those things still exist. It’s just different. You have the Legendaries. You have the Fifth Seasons. You have the companies that actually are coming in with their own money to do stuff. It would look a lot different. I can’t even suss out what the real changes would’ve been.

**Craig:** I think that you would probably have had much larger productions. We can look at companies that are not impacted by fin-syn. Fin-syn fell apart. But when you look at Netflix, for example, Netflix produces and distributes their own material. They are not beholden to these rules. The reason that fin-syn was a thing is because it applied to broadcast television. Broadcast television used the public airwaves to send their signals out, so the government therefore had the ability to get in the way and create regulations. There’s no regulations on an end-to-end agreement like Netflix, where they’re not using public airwaves whatsoever.

**John:** The FTC or the Justice Department could still come in there, but without the broadcast aspect of it, it’s much harder to enforce anything like that. It’d be much harder for them to win the judgment they would have to win.

**Craig:** Yes. The government has a clear, established interest in the rules regarding the use of public airwaves, going all the way back to the age of radio and so forth. But with internet carriers, it’s different. Netflix and companies, Amazon, etc., they’ve never operated under anything like this. They’ve always been able to make their own stuff and exhibit their own stuff. And what you see are massive productions, because there is no arrangement where you deficit finance in the hopes for syndication, and meanwhile the exhibitor is making money off of the sale of ads. In fact, Netflix and Amazon don’t have ads, although now they’re starting to. But even then, they’re starting to just put more money in their pockets.

I don’t know how the finances of these companies work, but you could argue that for Amazon, for instance, it’s possible that their production wing is really a loss leader, and it is a deficit financing, just to drive customers to their other aspect, which is buying toilet paper and pencils. I don’t know. But it does seem like if there had not been fin-syn and the networks could’ve reaped the benefits of their own syndication, that probably you would’ve seen some larger productions happening.

**John:** Last bit of counterfactual. Remember when Netflix was red envelopes you got in the mail?

**Craig:** Yeah, I actually do.

**John:** What if Netflix had stuck with their DVD model, that they were a company that sends you DVDs?

**Craig:** This is a great one.

**John:** They never started a whole streaming business. How would the world be different if Netflix hadn’t started the streaming revolution?

**Craig:** I’m going to contradict myself a little bit here. Most of what I’ve been saying is when the world wants something, it finds a way to get it. In this case, I suspect that if Netflix hadn’t done what they did, nobody would’ve done it. The reason why nobody would’ve done it is because I’m not sure it, meaning the streaming model, actually makes sense. We watched this happen. Netflix did this. They churned through an enormous amount of money to build the business out of nothing, a little bit the way Amazon did with their larger business.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Then everybody else said, oh my god, we have to do it too. Then they all looked at each other and went, “How do you make money doing this exactly?” That makes me suspect nobody would’ve done it, because it doesn’t make sense. A lot of what we all went through with our convulsions in the labor movement in Hollywood was trying to make Hollywood confront the fact that they had blown up a system that worked fairly well for them and fairly well for us. They had blown it up chasing something that wasn’t like them and something that they could never be like. I think the world would be enormously different if Netflix had just stuck to the red envelopes.

**John:** Counterfactual to your counterfactual. I would say that internet video is going to want to happen. The fact that YouTube exists, there was a market for – people wanted to watch things through video. Even before we had Netflix, we did have webisodes of your favorite shows. The idea that we were going to be getting our TV or TV-like things over the internet I think is kind of inevitable.

The business model behind that could’ve gone many, many different ways. But I do think you would’ve ultimately seen things that looked like Netflix that were using money they got from investors to create shows and put them on the internet. And some of those would’ve grown into things that are maybe not the size or scale of what Netflix became, but it would’ve been big enough that even the other studios would’ve developed their own wings that were doing that kind of stuff. We would’ve gotten to something that looked like what we’re doing now, but just not with the full scale.

**Craig:** I think you’re right that in terms of a distribution platform, places like YouTube would’ve absolutely worked, and they kind of were. If you think back to what we were arguing about in our penultimate strike, the big concern was that the companies were going to use the internet to run our content and have ads run in it, just like it would on any syndicated channel, but because it was the internet as opposed to Channel 5 in New York, that somehow residuals wouldn’t apply.

I think YouTube did and continues to have a very robust system where they run ads. Yes, I think they would’ve struck deals with the companies to rebroadcast stuff. I think the whole thing of like, “YouTube is going to make its own stuff,” they sure tried. It didn’t work. What was it, YouTube Red? That was sort of a thing. Is it still a thing? I don’t even know if it’s a thing.

**John:** They got rid of YouTube Red.

**Craig:** They got rid of it. They got rid of it. Quibi. Good lord.

**John:** If it weren’t for Netflix, then we would’ve never had Quibi.

**Craig:** We would’ve never had the 4 million easy jokes about Quibi. The idea that these independent internet companies would… Remember Amazon Studios? Remember us discussing that whole baloney nonsense?

**John:** Yeah. They were always looking to do a thing. But again, Amazon still, with all their money, they probably would’ve tried to develop something that – again, it’s not Netflix, but they would’ve developed their own-

**Craig:** Maybe.

**John:** … video streaming service.

**Craig:** Maybe, or maybe they would have just said, “We are happy to be in the business where we pay you a licensing fee to rebroadcast your stuff on our platform,” just like Walmart pays for the DVDs that they then resell. And then Amazon, just like anything, will collect the ad money, and that’ll be that.

**John:** They probably would’ve looked at YouTube and said, “We want to be in the YouTube business,” and the revolution of that.

**Craig:** Where the internet was before Netflix decided to go bananas was this… You and I got yelled at a lot, as I recall, for decrying the concept of the democratization of entertainment creation. There are certainly a lot of people making money as influencers and all the rest of that, but that’s its own category.

There was this moment, and we were podcasting through it, where these companies were like, “The only reason that everybody doesn’t have great television to make is because of the gatekeepers, and if we just allow everybody to … ” No. The answer to that is no. None of that would’ve happened. None of that ever will happen. That’s not a thing. It doesn’t happen. It’s hard to do what we do. There are not a lot of people who do it.

It’s sort of like saying, “We’re going to democratize Major League Baseball. Everybody can show up and play.” Nope, actually, we still just want Juan Soto, which as you know, Juan is going to take the Yankees to the World Series this year. I know that you’ve been thinking it.

**John:** I basically stay awake at night really thinking about all the scenarios that gets him to the World Series.

**Craig:** Soto and then Judge, that number 3, number 4 lineup punch. We’ve talked about it a lot. It’s a big deal.

**John:** There are so many scenarios that it’s why I can’t sleep.

**Craig:** There’s really only the one scenario.

**John:** But you never know. The counterfactual is that, what if he gets hit by a bus, and therefore-

**Craig:** I’ll tell you, if Juan Soto gets hit by a bus, the Yankees will have another season like they did last year, which is really bad. David Benioff, John Gatins, and I have a little three-person group chat that is just nothing but us complaining about the Yankees. That’s all we do. It is just a constant ruing. This season hopefully will be different.

But in any case, I really think that what Netflix did was so improbable and so risky and so crazy. I’m still waiting for gravity to kick in.

**John:** It has basically worked for Netflix. It has not worked for everybody else. Netflix now actually makes a profit. But it was a wild, wild gamble. And they were able to use cheat money to do it. The circumstances worked out the way they worked out.

**Craig:** The circumstances worked out the way they worked out. I think the proof is in the pudding. Even as Netflix started to be successful, the legacy companies still weren’t like, “Oh god, we gotta … ” No, they were like, “Great. Keep licensing our stuff. Here. Friends. Give us money. You can run Friends.” It really wasn’t until they felt that there was an existential threat to their existence, and I think that was a miscalculation, by the way.

**John:** Here’s a question for you. Let’s say streaming never happens. Netflix doesn’t happen, and streaming never happens. Do the cable companies get even more powerful? Because they were the people not making the shows, but controlling access to people’s TVs.

**Craig:** Cable and satellite become more powerful. It is possible that a company like YouTube, which has successfully replaced a lot of cables and satellite dishes, would have become the other new dominant delivery system, but they would’ve been a delivery system. They wouldn’t have been a creation/delivery system. That’s the difference.

**John:** I agree. Let’s wrap up our big counterfactuals segment here talking through why I think it’s useful. It’s because when you look at the coin tosses, the ways things could’ve gone one way or the other way, you recognize that, as you said before, Craig, we are in a counterfactual. We’re in somebody else’s counterfactual. Things worked out the way they worked out, but they were not inevitable. We have to be mindful that the choices we make now will have repercussions down the road that we can’t always anticipate. I think it’s always nice looking at this ecosystem we find ourselves in was not the only possible version of this.

**Craig:** No. It is an either distressing or comforting notion to think that we are in the alternate reality, and in our version of the sim that we all live in, yeah, we’re missing some awesome things or we dodged massive bullets.

**John:** For sure. Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** We haven’t done a One Cool Thing together for a while.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Mine is on post-quantum cryptography, which is a mouthful but actually makes a lot of sense. I’ll link to an Apple Security blog post they did about it. The idea of post-quantum cryptography is – obviously, cryptography is so important for securing our communications. It’s making sure that the things we want to say private stay private, and messaging, all that stuff. Right now, we are using cryptography which is so strong that computers could spend 1,000 years trying to break the codes behind stuff, and they wouldn’t be able to open these messages. The problem is, at some point we’re going to get to quantum computers that are so powerful and so fast that this cryptography will fall apart. It will not be useful.

And so a thing that is happening is very well-resourced companies or nations can just say, “Okay, we’re going to suck up all this data. We can’t actually process it now. We can’t actually break the codes. But we know that in a couple years, we will be able to.” This becomes like, then how do you prevent that?

This paper goes through these plans for and these actual new algorithms to figure it out, for living in a post-quantum cryptography world, so basically, how do you encode things now so that as quantum computers come online, you still can’t open those messages.

The good news is there’s math that can get you there, so that it’s still going to be incredibly difficult for these super-super-super-computers to open those messages. There are things you can turn on now or soon in these messaging platforms that will keep stuff locked down whenever these quantum computers come online. Interesting. I like that it’s both dealing with problems now and problems 10, 20 years from now.

**Craig:** That’s smart. Phew. There is a problem I hadn’t thought of. Thanks. Now I’ll be awake at night. My One Cool Thing is a bit sweeter, pun intended, but also a bit sad, and somehow one of the most gripping articles I’ve ever read about marshmallows.

**John:** I love marshmallows.

**Craig:** John, have you ever had a Smashmallow?

**John:** I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Neither did I. Drew, Smashmallow?

**Drew:** I’ve never had a Smashmallow.

**Craig:** Apparently, these were a bit popular a bit ago. There’s this guy, Jon Sebastiani. This is an article in Business Insider. Jon Sebastiani is a scion of a big wine company in Sonoma. He created the company Krave, with a K, which makes fancy beef jerky and so forth. He got into this new area of creating fancy marshmallows, fancy handmade marshmallows that were delicious and had lots of different flavors, and they were hand-cut. And people really dug them.

Then he decided, “It’s time to upscale this business. Let’s go big.” What ensued was an incredible collision of desire and reality, on an engineering level, because as it turns out, making marshmallows to scale is enormously hard. The marshmallows that we all know, Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Kraft marshmallow type marshmallows, the reason they are the way they are and they just all vaguely suck is because that’s as good as they can do. Even the shape is necessary. Those are cylinders. Smashmallows were handmade. They would make these big slabs and cut them in squares, and people really liked the squares. Making squares at scale, making cubes, really, really hard.

What happens and how this whole thing falls apart is actually fascinating from a chemical, physical, and business level. And of course, it all comes tumbling down. There are lawsuits. And Smashmallow is no more.

**John:** It’s great. As I’m skimming through this article, it’s the Theranos of marshmallows.

**Craig:** Isn’t that great? It really is. When you read it, you’re like… People were lying. He’s looking for this company that can build new machines to make the Smashmallows at scale. This company, I think it’s in the Netherlands, says, “We can do it. We can do it. We’re going to send you a sample of what we made to show you.” He was like, “Oh my god, you did it.” The big secret was they didn’t make that sample with a machine at all.

**John:** It was handcut.

**Craig:** They just lied.

**John:** They lied.

**Craig:** They just lied.

**John:** They lied.

**Craig:** Just lied.

**John:** This past week, I had to go in for a blood test, and I remember coming back and telling Mike, “Man, I was there, and it just seems really inefficient. I felt like there’s a way you could have a machine that could just do this for you.” I’m like, “Oh shoot, I’m pitching Theranos, aren’t I? I’m going to stop right now. I am pitching Theranos.”

**Craig:** Just to tie back to our counterfactual, was her machine called the Edison?

**John:** Maybe so. A counterfactual is, what if she’d actually been able to make that machine? In theory, it’s a really good idea. But apparently, it’s like the Smashmallow. Yes, you think you should be able to make that thing, when it turns out you can’t.

**Craig:** I think if she had been able to make that machine, somebody would’ve made that machine already. When she was like, “We’re going to take a drop of blood and do all of your blood tests from a drop of blood,” I remember her mentor at Stanford, this wonderful professor, just said to her, “No. That is literally physically impossible on a molecular level.” But there was maybe slightly more of a chance that the marshmallow thing could’ve worked.

**John:** I’m sure that professor would’ve told Thomas Edison that he couldn’t make a motion picture projector, and look at him, he did.

**Craig:** Definitely a better chance of that than the-

**Drew:** Theranos machine ever working.

**John:** Theranos machines. Craig, a pleasure talking with you again.

**Craig:** Great to be back.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Hooray!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Zach Lo. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We love when good outros come through. Reminder that outros involve some version of (sings). You can hide it in there, but I’m always listening for it. Sometimes we’ll get these outros that are like, that is musically beautiful, but it’s not a Scriptnotes outro. You gotta get that in there. We gotta hear that.

Ask@johnaugust.com is also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That is 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. The one this past week was really good. It’s about oases and the moments in a story where characters find a bit of respite and escape from the plot and how important those are in stories. Inneresting.

We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on capitalism.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Yay.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Craig, it’s so nice to have you back.

**Craig:** Great to be back, John.

**John:** Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, capitalism.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** It is the water we are swimming in. It is the system of finance and economics that we’ve grown up in. At the same time, when I see people complain about things in the world or about technology or about AI or other things, I’m like, yeah, but that is actually just capitalism you’re concerned about. That’s just how things are. Craig, I’m curious, when were you aware of capitalism?

**Craig:** Early age. Social studies class. You learn about different forms of economy. Certainly, we learned about the alternatives. In the ’80s, there wasn’t a lot of discussion of capitalism as a problem.

**John:** Yeah, because we had capitalism versus Communists. It was us versus the Russians.

**Craig:** There was the middle ground of socialism. But I think there was also a less angry discussion over it. Deregulation began in earnest under Ronald Reagan in the ’80s. But prior to that, we had and still have things like Social Security, which has the world “social” in it, which people that hate socialism are really angry about if you say that you would take it away. We have Medicare, and we have Medicaid, and we have Workman’s Comp, and we have Disability, and we have taxes. The thing is, we do live in a socialist system. I don’t know how you can’t, other than some sort of Ayn Rand fantasy-ville.

Capitalism was never seen as some sort of pure thing, but rather it was a negotiating thing. Tying back to what we were talking about earlier with Edison, one of the things we learned about quite a bit was how capitalism unchecked became a real problem around the turn of the century in the United States, the turn of the 20th century, and Sinclair Lewis and child labor, the meatpacking industry, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, labor movement, and all that leading into the busting of monopolies, robber barons, etc. There was a time when in our country, capitalism got out of hand, and the government stepped in and put it in check, and it hasn’t done so again effectively since.

Where I’m sitting here, I agree with you. When people are complaining, what they are complaining about is capitalism. But from my point of view, I would say what they’re really, really, really complaining about is the dysregulated capitalism.

**John:** We were alive during the time of Reagan and, “We’re going to take away all these rules about stuff that are holding us back.” And it’s hard to remember that there was a time before then, when there were more controls over what people could do, what companies could do and the size and scale of what they’re able to do.

I remember my dad worked for AT&T, or Bell Labs, and when the phone monopoly got broken up, I was like, “Oh my god, what are they doing? That’s crazy.” But it was the right choice, in retrospect. It was a dumb system we were living in. The innovation that was possible afterwards was important.

Let’s talk for a moment about definitions of what capitalism is, because there’s things that are in capitalism that are also common in other systems too. But important distinctions: the idea of a competitive market, that you want to have multiple companies competing for buyers, and buyers can choose between places they want to buy from; the sense of price finding, that there’s not a set price, but the price will find its right balance based on supply and demand; the idea of private property, property rights recognition, which includes patents and trademarks and copyright; the idea of wage labor, which seems so basic, but obviously in a lot of other economic systems, you don’t get paid wages for things.

You could argue, was America set up under a capitalism system? Kind of. The term wasn’t really used. But we also had slavery, so you can’t say that we were under any true wage system.

**Craig:** We certainly were not.

**John:** No. It’s complicated, but I think we have this fundamental belief and understanding that America has always been this capitalist nation. It’s like, not really.

**Craig:** No, we were more akin to a feudal nation. I think our economy was somewhat feudal. Obviously, there were two economies in the early United States. But one economy was victorious in the end, and that was industry. The growth of industry and the Industrial Revolution created what we consider capitalism today, I do believe. That was also what Marx was reacting to, and Hegel and the rest of them.

What industry did was create a both tremendous energy of creation and freedom and wealth, and also terrible exploitation and destruction. On one hand, industry – which we have in our brains converted into technology, but if we lived in China, we would understand is also industry, where everything is manufactured still – has led to longer lives, has led to tremendous advances in technology that liberates and connects. The creation of simple things like washing machines was essential to the liberation of women, who were traditionally stuck washing clothes literally all day.

But without regulation, almost every single time, what ends up happening is terrible pollution, the abuse of children, the underpayment of labor, extremist slavery, and then monopolization, which undoes what you call price seeking and freedom and actually begins to destroy creativity, and it kills itself. Capitalism is like bacteria that works well in our body until it runs rampant and then it can kill us.

**John:** A term I hear used a lot is late-stage capitalism. I wasn’t even quite clear what people are trying to refer to with it. It’s basically this moment that we’re in right now that has not just giant corporations, but multinational corporations, where you can’t even point to a center of them. They’re harder to control and regulate because they exist beyond national boundaries.

A thing that we’re both agreeing on here is that capitalism relies on a government system to enforce contracts and do certain things, and yet as individuals, we rely on the government to protect us from the worst abuses that these companies are going to enforce upon us. That is a real challenge when companies exist beyond all conceivable boundaries. It requires multinational government agreement on how to deal with these corporations. That’s not a thing that we really have a good structure for at this moment.

**Craig:** No. The closest we have is the United States government, which is being held hostage by one political party that at this point seems to only have, “We don’t like government,” as a purpose. And then there is the European economic community, which does represent itself fairly well as a large corporation of companies. It is in fact Europe that seems to be doing the only holding companies to accountability action. Now, they are not a particularly efficient group. Government is notorious for being inefficient. It’s why capitalism is also necessary. If government is in charge of creation, production, and payment, in general, you end up with a bureaucratic sludge.

Capitalism, to me, is really just the expression of human nature in economic form. But just like human nature, we need law. What we do see is Europe, representing a very large market, can say to, for instance, Google or Amazon, “No, you can’t do that anymore. We don’t like that anymore. Stop it.” The United States used to do that. It’s been quite some time, and these companies seem to be just flouting all of the rules. But the United States still represents an enormous marketplace. If the United States, for instance, said to Amazon or Netflix, “You can’t do these things anymore,” then it would have to stop.

That said, some of the things that Europe has done, particularly vis a vis technology to try and curb late-stage capitalistic companies, just is ineffectual nuisance. For instance, the constant asking me if I want to accept the cookies. Okay. Sure.

**John:** Yeah, or like, you must use USB-C. Sure, great. There’s the concern that they will tend to favor European companies over American companies. Yeah, we get all that. I think what it comes down to is – I say people’s complaints are really about capitalism. The second part of that answer is, and the solutions to these things are demanding of your government to address these concerns, because you’re not going to be able to address these concerns. You can’t yell at the corporation to do better. You actually have to – it requires action to make any of these changes.

**Craig:** Yes. Corporations, by charter, are designed to maximize profits for their shareholders. That is their sole purpose. What that means is that if they could get away with paying their workers five cents an hour, including hiring children, they would, because that satisfies their charter, to maximize profits. That’s where we need regulation.

The people that are angry about capitalism probably, almost certainly, are reasonably angry, because they’re probably being underpaid. Most people are. Wages have not progressed as they should. And if the United States government were functional and mandated a healthy minimum wage, I think people would be complaining less, because that’s a huge problem. They don’t get paid enough.

Also, companies – particularly, the financial industry has become so complicated and so disconnected from creation that this concept of too big to fail is real. We’re now on the system where capitalism – some companies simply cannot lose. If they lose, society falls apart, because they’re too integrated into our backbone. That’s a huge problem.

**John:** I think a previous One Cool Thing on an earlier episode was a book I was reading on the history of corporations. Corporations have existed before capitalism. They were originally designed to do sailing expeditions to different places, basically how you’d raise enough money to do a thing. Importantly, corporations had to get a charter that was literally from the royals. The imperial state had to give them the charter.

The argument is basically that government should basically have that same kind of charter thing, saying you actually have to serve the public in what your corporation does. There has to be a purpose beyond just making money. That’s an idea that we’ve completely lost. That seems insane, but that was the idea.

**Craig:** That was the idea. Just as certain concepts like copyright have become abused or weaponized, so too has the notion of corporatism and the idea that corporation now begins to shield all human beings from accountability. The creation of corporations is something that, at least in the state of Delaware, appears to be a hand wave. You and I both made corporations for ourselves, loan-out corporations.

**John:** Scriptnotes is an LLC.

**Craig:** There you go. Those corporations required a whole lot of one page of paperwork.

**John:** Yes, indeed.

**Craig:** They exist to take advantage of certain business things and certain tax things, so the tax code, all of it. Think about that, that the tax code – that’s the oxygen that government breathes to live – is in and of itself interwoven into corporate creation and corporate function. The economists argue with each other constantly over how this all works. I suppose if we step back really, really far and boil it down to its simplest, simplest version, it’s that there needs to be a balance, and we are out of balance.

**John:** We’re out of balance. We’re simplifying, yet it’s actually accurate, because we recognize that all the good things about capitalism and corporations, in terms of price finding and all that stuff, there is an efficiency there that you cannot replace. But without the acknowledgement of the individual value of people and societies and the environment, you’re going to end up in a terrible, dark place.

**Craig:** If you only value profit, you will die. You have to also value things that will diminish profit, like the health and welfare of human beings, because in the end, that’s what the economy is for. What our economy has turned into is an economy that exists to hyper-enrich an incredibly small amount of people. It’s just not going to work. We’ve been here before. I think the richest person ever in terms of dollars out of the amount of dollars that existed on the planet was Rockefeller perhaps or maybe Getty.

**John:** Perhaps, yeah.

**Craig:** The original oil barons, the robber barons. That’s why it changed. There was that period in the earlier part of the 20th century where America corrected what had been an out-of-control corporatization in our country. We are so clearly in need of that now.

Part of what we struggle with is that all of the messaging and discussion and the politics and the way politics functions as – these campaigns are corporations – the corporations themselves are sitting there, including the ones you and I work for, guiding the discussion. The people who want to not return balance to the system are the ones that have their finger on the play button.

**John:** At least we’ve solved it. That’s the good news. We talked it through. We figured it out. So problems resolved.

**Craig:** Problem solved. There’s something counterfactual where Rupert Murdoch isn’t born or decides to learn guitar and be in a band, a lovely band in Australia.

**John:** Or he has some sort of Christmas Carol kind of visiting by three ghosts, and things turn out very differently.

**Craig:** Where are the ghosts when you need them?

**John:** That’s the question. Never the ghosts when you want one. Craig, Drew, thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [What If?](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/406281) by Robert Cowley
* [Thomas Edison: The Unintentional Founder of Hollywood](https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2021/03/thomas-edison-the-unintentional-founder-of-hollywood/) by Garrett O’Brien for the Saturday Evening Post
* [United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc.) on Wikipedia
* [George Lucas: The Car Wreck That Changed His Life and Led Him to ‘Star Wars’](https://www.biography.com/movies-tv/george-lucas-car-crash-star-wars) by Tim Ott for Biography
* [When ‘Titanic’ Was Expected to Be a Huge Flop](https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/titanic-movie-flop-history-facts) by Jake Rossen for Mental Floss
* [‘John Carter’ Changed Hollywood, but Not in the Way Disney Hoped](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/john-carter-bombed-1235109193/) by Richard Newby for THR
* [Financial Interest and Syndication Rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Interest_and_Syndication_Rules)
* [Post-Quantum Cryptography](https://security.apple.com/blog/imessage-pq3/)
* [S’more! S’more! His artisanal marshmallows were the greatest. Then he tried to scale them.](https://www.businessinsider.com/smashmallow-lawsuit-marshmallow-failure-silicon-valley-business-growth-2024-1) by Adam Rogers
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Zach Lo ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/634standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/reviving-a-dormant-project).

**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 this is Episode 633 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Any screenwriter who’s been working for a few years likely has projects that have stalled out or otherwise gone dormant. Today on the show, what happens when you revive one of those projects and actually get it made 20 years later. We’ll talk with a writer who’s done just that.

John Gatins is a screenwriter and producer whose credits include Coach Carter, Dreamer, Real Steel, Power Rangers, and Flight, for which he received the Academy Award nomination. He’s also an actor you can see in movies including The Nines. Welcome, John Gatins.

**John Gatins:** Thank you.

**John August:** This is not your first time on Scriptnotes. We often see you and hear you at our live shows, because you are the person who is introducing us to Hollywood Heart, a fantastic charity.

**John Gatins:** I thank you both, all of you. You’ve done such great things for us and that really cool, cool, cool organization.

**John August:** We love doing our live shows with you guys, so thank you for that.

**John Gatins:** Of course.

**John August:** We’re not here to talk about those organizations today. We’re going to instead talk about your new movie, Little Wing, which kind of falls into a general genre I’d also love to talk with you about, which is sports movies or sports competition kinds of movies, because you have quite a few of those on your resume. I want to talk about how we construct and execute sports movies. Then we’ll also answer some listener questions about compartmentalization, mid-credit scenes, work ethics.

And in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, kind of a grab bag. After a long solo career, you’re starting to work with a partner now, so I want to talk about the shift of partners. You’re also one of the people I think who is smartest and savviest about figuring out credits. When there’s a bunch of writers who have worked on a movie together, you are the person who figures out, “Hey, can we all figure out a good deal on this?” I want to talk through that process with you.

**John Gatins:** Sure.

**John August:** Cool.

**John Gatins:** Great.

**John August:** We’ll start with some news. John Gatins, have you ever heard this term? This came to me in an email I got from one of my agents, talking about what this one studio was looking for. One of the terms was “bro soaps.” What do you think a bro soap is?

**John Gatins:** A bro soap?

**John August:** Uh-huh.

**John Gatins:** I don’t know. It’s a two-handed movie with two guys who are endeavoring to do something. I failed, right?

**John August:** It’s a series. They’re looking at it like a soap opera. The definition in this email was, “A muscular drama that appeals to men.” Sons of Anarchy.

**John Gatins:** Would Suits be a bro soap?

**John August:** Yeah, exactly.

**John Gatins:** Because those two guys are kind of in love with each other.

**John August:** Yeah, I think that would be a bro soap. I think it’s not so specifically broey. Sons of Anarchy is broey.

**John Gatins:** That show I don’t know.

**John August:** Or Ray Donovan. It’s very masculine energy. Drew, we have some follow-up.

**Drew Marquardt:** We do. Last week, John, you had the flu. You were saying we don’t have flu tests in the U.S. Travis wrote in to say at-home flu tests are available in the USA. Lucira by Pfizer is the one that is available. They’re about $50 each.

**John August:** I looked at this one. John, do you remember early on in the pandemic, we had those at-home tests, and some of them were electronic, or sort of electronic, where you’d put the little sample, and you’d put it into a base, and then it gave a red or a green light? Do you remember any of those? Did you ever do any of those?

**John Gatins:** I don’t. I don’t remember.

**John August:** It was a thing that was happening for a while. This looks like one of those. It’s great that it exists. It’s 50 bucks, which is really expensive for an at-home test. It also just feels like so much extra waste to do this electronic thing, because it should just be… We know how to do a test now. You just stick the little thing in. You look for the little lines. Apparently, these electronic ones, they really are just creating a line. They have a little sensor that reads whether the line is there or not. I’m glad this exists, I guess, but I want those cheap European tests that you swab and you see, do I have the flu, do I have COVID, do I have RSV. That’s what I want.

**John Gatins:** Look. I had COVID before anybody.

**John August:** You’ve always been a pioneer.

**John Gatins:** I had COVID, didn’t know it. Nobody knew what COVID was. It was the sickest I’ve ever been. I had a night in my kitchen by myself at 4:00 in the morning where I had a 105 fever. I was like, “I might need to call 911. I just don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Then I recovered slowly. Then I started reading about the symptoms when it was finally a thing. Then my doc said, “Does anybody want a test for the antibodies?” I said, “I do.” Ling was like, “You’re nuts.” I was like, “I’m telling you I had this.” He was like, “I’ve tested so many people. You’re the one guy with antibodies, so you’ve had it.”

**John August:** I’d never had the flu as an adult until this last week, and it was the sickest I’ve been.

**John Gatins:** The flu is no joke. Flu kills lots of people, friends.

**John August:** It does kill a lot of people. It was bad. I had, again, a 105 fever. It was like, “Do I go to the emergency room?”

**John Gatins:** I know. I was literally googling “dangerous fever for old men.”

**John August:** We’re both alive to talk about it, so that’s the real victory. More follow-up on the Tiffany Problem. Explanation, Tiffany Problem is that Tiffany was actually a pretty common old name, but if you’d name a character in a period movie Tiffany, everyone’s like, “That feels wrong.”

**John Gatins:** Really?

**John August:** Yeah.

**John Gatins:** Why? Because they think of the pop star?

**John August:** It seems like a modern name, but it’s actually an old name.

**Drew:** It goes back to the medieval times. Jake from Pandora wrote in to say, “I’m a VFX artist on the Avatar sequels over at Lightstorm Entertainment, which P.S., we just voted to unionize.”

**John August:** Congratulations.

**Drew:** “A major problem we face is that on Pandora, gravity is two thirds of Earth’s gravity. Presumably, this was decided to make an 8 to 10-foot-tall Na’vi seemingly move as a human does, so our perception of physics would be similar to that on Earth. But the Tiffany Problem of it all is that if we show someone jumping, it looks like they’re floating, if we multiply gravity times 0.667, which is the correct math according to Jim and the Oscar winners. Also, fires, water, and basically all physics simulations look fake at two thirds gravity. This would make absolutely everything we perceive to be so different, more so than a casual moviegoer would realize.”

**John August:** That’s a great point. You want to be realistic and truthful as much as you can in a movie and follow the rules of the world that you’re setting, but sometimes you have to bend those rules, because otherwise it just doesn’t seem plausible.

**John Gatins:** I remember working on Behind Enemy Lines, and we had a retired admiral. We kept trying to do things in the script that were like, “The master sergeant comes in and says this to the… ” It’s like, “He would never say… That just doesn’t happen.” We’re like, “It has to happen, because we need a problem in the movie.” It’s like, “No, that just doesn’t… They would never say that to that guy.” He was like, “That’s so disrespectful.” It’s like, “We’re going to have to though.”

**John August:** I remember calling Jack Warner, the dinosaur expert for the Jurassic Park movies. I needed to say, “Could this thing plausibly do this?” This point, it’s a couple of movies. It’s like, “I’d say that’s plausible. I think it’s defensible that this thing could happen.” You reach a point where it’s like, okay, I can understand that this feels right within the context of this movie, whether it’s actually supported by-

**John Gatins:** Berloff and I are working on a black hole movie, and we talked to this black hole scientist, and we pitched them a bunch of things, until we got to, “But you’re saying there’s a… I mean, you could.” He was like, “I guess.” You just look for one kernel of some sort of scientist tiny little something to hang onto and be like, “That’s the thing.”

**John August:** Going back to Pandora and the Avatar movies, literally, they’re after unobtainium. There are moments there which are clearly fantasy moments, which give them latitude to do some things that are useful for what they need to do. Finally, my favorite kind of follow-up is Arlo Finch follow-up.

**Drew:** Yes. Ethan wrote, “Couldn’t help but write in when I heard you and Craig talking about Arlo Finch the dog. My dear cat and erstwhile writing companion is named Arlo after Arlo Finch. His shelter name was Largo, which is not his personality, so that had to go. We adopted him in October 2017, and at that time, John had mentioned working on the Arlo Finch novels, and I loved the name. Something about it is adventurous and a touch anachronistic. As you mentioned, it’s also an easy name to howl across the apartment to get his attention.”

**John August:** We have a picture here of Arlo Finch the cat. So handsome. Look at this cat.

**John Gatins:** That’s a handsome cat.

**John August:** That’s a handsome cat. I’m not even a huge cat person, but I would say that’s a handsome cat. Then we were also talking about two-syllable dog names, because the best dog names are two syllables, and for reasons we’re going to get into in this email.

**Drew:** Chris writes, “Listening to you mention dog names generally being two syllables struck a chord. When I was a child, my father was a breeder of German shepherds. I always remember him saying that whether you were naming a dog or a child, the name had to yell good. English wasn’t his first language. I definitely took that into consideration when naming my kids Marcus and Ian.”

**John Gatins:** We have two dogs, named Riri and Farley.

**John August:** Exactly, you can yell.

**John Gatins:** We can yell those. They get that.

**John August:** Arlo. It yells out well. It’s a good dog name, a good kid name. John Gatins, talk to us about why you’re here. I want to get into a general sense of reviving old projects and what that’s like. Before we get into yours specifically, Drew has been doing research here. A bunch of recent movies are actually really old scripts that have been rejuvenated. Drive Away Dolls, the new Ethan Cohen movie, is an old script. Mad Max: Fury Road sat around for a long time. Unforgiven notoriously sat around for 20 years. Dallas Buyers Club. Beau is Afraid. A lot of times, things will sit around.

**John Gatins:** I’m going to ask you this question, but I’ll share this first. I can’t think of a movie that I’ve worked on, that got made, that didn’t take… I can’t even think of the fastest one, because I don’t think it’s inside five years, to be honest.

**John August:** The rare exceptions would be things where it felt like there was just huge movement towards… The Charlie’s Angels movies happened pretty quickly. But yeah, in most cases, stuff did take a long-

**John Gatins:** Stuff takes a long time.

**John August:** Yeah, but there’s a difference between stuff takes a long time, it’s slowly churning along, to there was no movement and then you came in with EMT paddles and zapped it back into life, which sounds like what happened to Little Wing. Can you give us the backstory on Little Wing?

**John Gatins:** Yeah. In around 2004, I wrote and directed a movie for Dreamworks called Dreamer. Dakota Fanning, Kurt Russell horse-racing movie. I had a great experience at Dreamworks. They were so cool and collaborative. It was great to have a studio run by Stacy Snyder and Steven Spielberg, who’s a filmmaker. It’s like a different thing, because when he says things to you, what he’s saying, it’s like, “Hey, I’d do this,” and so it’s a little bit different. It was interesting, because I really liked working there. It’s a cool little campus. You know it. They have lunch every day in a courtyard. It’s just collegial and kind of fun.

I got this call from my agent that said, “Steven wants to send you this article that he bought, that he loves, called Little Wing.” Susan Orlean wrote this really beautiful piece for the New Yorker. As you know, she wrote The Orchid Thief, which became adaptation, which is famously about someone trying to adapt a book that they don’t know how to adapt. They wrote a script about how, “I don’t know how to adapt this movie,” which was brilliant. And it’s such a cool movie. I thought that was kind of funny.

I read the article. It was great. It was about her when she was spending time in Boston and walking her dog at this dog park. She encountered this girl, who was a 12-year-old girl who had racing pigeons, which she just thought was fascinating. So she befriended the girl and her mom and had this relationship, and she wrote this really elegant piece about it. Steven, it just really struck him. So I get called to Steven’s office. I’m like, “Oh, cool.” I go up there. It’s so cool to sit in his office.

**John August:** I have been in his office. Yeah, for sure.

**John Gatins:** He has the Rosebud sled in a Lucite box on his wall. There’s a Norman Rockwell painting. It’s incredible. You’re just mesmerized. You’re in this thing. Steven was so chatty and fun. Dakota Fanning was in my movie, but I had to go to five-day weeks with her, to get her out in time to go do War of the Worlds. We were sharing this actor, and it was just kind of interesting. He was watching all my dailies and everything else. We talked about his movie. We talked about my movie.

**John August:** That’s so great.

**John Gatins:** They’re both kind of 9/11 movies. We had this whole connective, great, soulful chat. Then he starts talking about the article. I was like, “Yeah, so I was thinking, the article’s amazing, but I don’t know what a movie is based on this. I have no idea.” I left the meeting feeling like, oh my god, I had this great time I got to spend with Steven Spielberg, and I’ll tell this story forever, and blah blah blah, and that’s that.

I get to my car. My agent calls and says, “Look, they’re making this deal.” I was like, “What deal?” She was like, “Steven really wants you to write the movie.” I was like, “What is the movie? I don’t know what the… ” But then how do you say no to the guy and his partner, Stacy, who let me make this movie there, my first movie as a first-time director, on a script that I’d wrote? I was like, “Okay,” but I was terrified, that sweat of like, I have to figure out how to create something around this thing of this girl and whatever. I agreed, and I was in such a panic about it.

I met Susan Orlean, who was super cool. We chatted a bit, and she said, “You should really meet the girl.” I flew to Boston, and I met the girl and her mom, who worked in police. They were super nice. We spent a couple hours chatting in this hotel lobby. Then I went to the Red Sox-Yankees game. I’m a huge Yankees fan. The Yankees destroyed the Red Sox. It was super fun. Then I still was totally off the planet with like, “What do I do?”

**John August:** Let me stop you there, because I can anticipate what you were going through, because you have maybe a protagonist. You have a central character, but there’s not an arc there. There’s not a confrontation. There’s not an obstacle in the face of her. There’s no villain. There’s no urgency for why does the story start and end.

**John Gatins:** The other thing that was in this young person’s life was that her parents had gone through a divorce. There was a little bit of that. So I was like, “Maybe it’s a divorce movie. Maybe it’s like whatever.” I just started, as we do as a writer, just making shit up and just trying to figure some things out and adding characters to it and having this girl go through this moment. Then it became about, maybe they’re losing their house, and they have to move, and she’s upset about that, and she doesn’t want to leave.

Then I started researching racing pigeons, which I knew nothing about. I was like, “Wow, that’s a really fascinating world.” I was like, “Some of these pigeons are worth a lot of money. Who knew that racing pigeons brought all this money?” Then I think that’s where the thread of the idea of, what if she, in an attempt to save her house, goes and steals some racing pigeon from some famous old racing pigeon guy. It becomes a heist. There’s a little heist in the middle.

There’s a boy across the street who was her friend, but now they’re of an age where it’s like that coming-of-age story of, like, are we friends, or is there more? Is there something to it? How is school? Is school hard? How do people treat you? How do you see yourself? I love writing about teenagers, because they’re such curious characters. You kind of love them, but I always say teenagers have been sneaking out of their window since the dawn of time.

**John August:** Romeo and Juliet, yeah.

**John Gatins:** It’s just to make bad decisions. We love them, and we forgive them, but they really can be unpredictable and fun as movie characters.

**John August:** You’re starting to figure out the pieces of this. Are you going back to pitch Steven and Stacy, or are you just writing a script and delivering?

**John Gatins:** Literally, they left me alone, which was the great and awful news at the same time, because it was like, “I need some help.” I was terrified. Honestly, it’s one of those experiences where I wrote the script and I turned it in and I flew to New York. I have family in New York, and we were on a family vacation. We went there. I was just terrified. Clicking send was like, “This is the end. They’re going to look at this and say, ‘What the fuck did you do? What is it?'”

Steven Spielberg called me, and he was like, “I love this. I want to make this movie.” I was like, “Okay. Sure. What do you need from me?” kind of thing. It was such a small movie too that I was like, “Why would Steven Spielberg-”

**John August:** Because this was made for Universal?

**John Gatins:** I think, yeah, their output was Universal at that time, I think. But Steven was really enthralled with the movie. It’s funny, because I feel like some of the only other Irish guys in the movie business are the Burns brothers. Brian was a good friend of my brother’s. He called my brother, and he said, “Eddie,” – his brother, Ed Burns – he said, “was with Steven Spielberg this weekend. Steven kept talking about this bird script that your brother wrote,” and blah blah blah. I was like, “Wow, it’s genuine. It’s really on Steven’s mind.”

Steven was so supportive of it, because it was just kind of unique. It was just kind of this strange, unique coming-of-age story of this girl and has a heist and a little bit of a love story. She meets this older character guy, and they smash into each other. Y’all have seen the movie.

Steven was a really supporter of it. But the business changes all the time. We’re talking about scripts that die. Part of the reason the script dies is because these producers’ deals ended, and the studio owns the movie, so then it moves on, and then someone finds it, or a new executive comes in and says, “Hey, there’s this John August script on the shelf. Let’s take a look at that. Maybe we should breathe some life into this,” get the paddles, as you say. And maybe another writer has an approach. It’s like, “Read it. You read it. See what you think.” It went to Paramount, because they had this split, so it was dead, basically, for Dreamworks.

But what was cool about it was that Steven, I think, really lobbied for me to work on Real Steel. Now it’s 2007, and I get brought into the Peter Berg world of, they’re going to make this movie, Real Steel, which is one of the properties they kept. And I went on the whole ride with that movie for two years or whatever. Little Wing was dead and gone.

**John August:** Dead and gone after a draft? Had you gotten a draft set and polished?

**John Gatins:** I probably had done a rewrite based on some notes, because when it went to Paramount, they pulled it out and said, “Hey, we should make this for Nick.” It was Nickelodeon. It was like, “This could fit for them. It could be a small movie,” whatever. I think I did a draft with them. The Nickelodeon movie people there were cool. I think there was a moment of trying to make it whatever, and then it went quiet.

Then it was years and years later. I don’t even remember. Donald DeLine called me. He was at Warner Bros. He said, “Susan and these guys came in, and they wanted to do an animated version of this Little Wing story.” He said, “I started looking through the rights and realized you’d written a script, so then I went and got the script. I think the script is great. Let’s make this movie.” I was like, “Okay. I don’t know how to do that.”

Paramount Players was in existence then. They took a shot. We talked about it. We met some directors and whatever else. But we’re trying to make the movie for literally $5 million or less. It was like, “I don’t really know how to do… I’m here to help you guys, whatever.” It kind of died again.

Then I think the next thing along the line was, I had worked on Power Rangers with Dean Israelite, and I sent it to him. I said, “What do you think of this?” He was like, “I love this. I want to help make this movie.” Brian Robbins, who’d been a collaborator who I’d written movies for way in the past-

**John August:** And was running Paramount.

**John Gatins:** And now had just came in to run Paramount. And he started working with Dean. We said to him, “We want to do this.” He said, “I love this script. If you guys can get Brian Cox to play Jaan Vari,” who was my high school health teacher, by the way, who I worked for over the summer. He was a Vietnam vet. I worked for him as a lifeguard over the summer. I had a long relationship with Jaan, who was a really cool guy. Suddenly, he’s like, “If you guys can get this to happen, we’ll make the movie.” Through a lot of craziness, we got Brian Cox to agree to do the movie, so it made the movie kind of go.

**John August:** This was a few years into Succession?

**John Gatins:** It was right towards the tail end. I think they were working the last season or something. We were like, “Great.” Then they were like, “Can you get Kelly Reilly?” I’m like, “How do I get Kelly?” Yes, I knew her from Flight, loved her. She’s amazing. We actually lived next door to each other in the hotel that we were all staying in when we were making that movie in Georgia. I sent her an email. I was just like, “Hey, do you remember me?” I said, “Would you look at this script and whatever?” I also knew her agent, so I reached out to him as well, and we texted back and forth and whatever. She texted me, like, “I love this script.” I said, “Meet Dean.” Then Dean, the director, and she had a Zoom and whatever, and suddenly she wanted to do the movie.

**John August:** At what point were you actually producing? Functionally, what you’re doing is producing, but at what point were you actually a producer on this?

**John Gatins:** I think what was cool is that my partners in that were Donald, because it had come to him, and he breathed life into it. And then I had been working with Karen Rosenfelt on something else, and I said, “Hey,” I said, “Will you look at this?” She read it. She was like, “I’ll help you.” I said, “Okay.” I pulled Karen in. Then Karen and Donald know each other. Then the three of us were exchanging info to say, “I know so-and-so. I’ll call them,” whatever. It was a little bit like, “I got a washboard. I have a drum set. Let’s make a band.” It’s like, “Here we go.” I knew Dean. We just put this little thing together. Brian kept saying to us, “Okay.” Brian Robbins kept saying, “I trust you guys. Okay.”

**John August:** There was also a unique opportunity at a new channel to put it towards, because you could put it towards Paramount Plus, and so you didn’t have the expectation of like, this is a movie that has to open at a certain amount on a weekend. It doesn’t have to hit this metric or that metric. It can be its own thing.

**John Gatins:** We didn’t know what a streaming movie was. They have all these labels under Paramount. It’s Awesomeness and Nickelodeon, all these different things. I think, what I can tell from the birth of the streaming moment is that they need content. So what is a streaming movie? It’s like, “I don’t know. I guess this is a streaming movie.” So that’s what we did, basically.

**John August:** Looking at the final film, it’s the kind of thing that could’ve been made with outside money and sold at a festival. It’s one of those kind of things that could’ve happened.”

**John Gatins:** I kept saying that to Dean. I was like, “This is a movie from the 1990s.” I was like, “This is a movie that could’ve been a… ” I said exactly that, John. I was like, “This could’ve been one of those movies that people say, ‘I really like that movie. That movie’s got some soul. This is cool.'” I kept saying to Dean, “We don’t really make these movies anymore.” I was like, “This is kind of a rare thing.”

Interestingly, Dean really wanted to set it in 2007 with the mortgage crisis about to blow up and everything else. The studio was a little bit like, “We don’t really want to date the movie that way.” We were like, “We don’t want cellphones in the movie. We don’t want all this texting with teenagers and stuff.” We had to find the right middle ground where we make it a little bit just, you don’t really know. We’re not saying it’s this time or that time or whatever. We’re not trying to give timestamps of what moment you’re in.

The movie we would’ve liked to set in Boston, because that’s where this young person was from, but it ended up being Portland for budget reasons and lots of things. Portland was a perfect town.

**John August:** It feels right.

**John Gatins:** It’s such an interesting place, Portland, and is a little bit worn out in areas, and it felt right for this kind of story.

**John August:** Cool. In a very broad sense, this fits into, I would say, a sports competition movie, because even though we’re not seeing them racing per se, it’s not about the birds themselves racing, it fits into your general oeuvre of sports competitions. You did Summer Catch, Hardball, Coach Carter, Dreamer, Real Steel. I want to talk a little bit about the broad shapes of sports movies, because in some cases, the sport is the focus, and we’re literally watching, like, “Will they win the game?” And sometimes sports is just the background. Summer Catch, I would say it’s a movie with baseball, but it’s not a movie about baseball. Is that fair?

**John Gatins:** Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair.

**John August:** In all these kind of movies, we’re really talking about what is the POV? Is the POV of the player? Is it the coach? Is it the parents, like in The Blind Side? You can make a zillion different football movies. It really ultimately comes down to whose POV you’re trying to tell the story from.

**John Gatins:** Look. Sports culture in America is a really specific thing. We use those catchphrases all the time. People in the office are like, “Come on, guys. Bottom of the ninth. We got to hit it out of the park.” It’s part of who we are. Look how many people watch the Super Bowl. This year we had Taylor Swift. It’s crazy. I think that those stories are endlessly fascinating, like all the cool documentary series now about sports guys. And the Jordan documentary, that series that we watched, was incredible, that Mike Tollin made. I think that we’re enthralled by that because it’s dramatic. Are you going to win or lose? It’s personal.

Ling is my wife. John knows. I’m saying that, Drew, my wife’s name’s Ling. Ling always says to me she’ll watch sports with me because I do the background commentary. I’m like, “Oh, this guy actually had broken his leg. He’s on the comeback. He’s late 30s. He shouldn’t be this good. This is really amazing that this guy is able to do this thing.” Now she’s really interested. You hear the personal story, and it’s like, “Oh, now I’m in. Now I’m in.”

**John August:** The idea of the sports commentary behind the scenes, you’ll provide context in the room, but often one of the things you’re wrestling with in writing the movie is how much commentary are you providing, and are you actually providing a commentary character to help explain things.

I was talking to a friend with his script about esports. I said, “One of the things I really missed in this final competition sequence was the sense of live commentary happening to provide context for what I’m seeing, because that way it’s not beholden on my character’s doing it.” It’s nice to have some authoritative voice explaining what it is we’re actually watching.

**John Gatins:** Look. Remember Rocky, which created everything for sports movies in a way? There’s one crucial scene in Rocky that I try to put in every sports movie I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a few. He says to her, “I can’t win.” The guy is like, “I can’t win. That’s the problem here.” Guess what, guys? He doesn’t win. That’s not what the movie’s about, honestly. It’s that he did it. I think that that’s what we relate to as humans. I’d love to do a lot of things. There’s a lot of things I’m not ever going to do. I’m not going to win at things that I think that I would like to try to do. But I think we get inspired by those things, to say, “Wow, that’s heroic that this person is trying to do this thing.”

Guys, the Olympics are coming. We’re all going to get invested in the Olympics, about sports and people in that sport that I know nothing about. There’s some young female athlete that’s going to do some incredible thing that I don’t know anything about right now. But you catch me after the summer, I’m going to tell you everything there is to know about that person, because I’ve watched the journey, and I’ve seen the backstory now. It’s like, “Oh, she lived with her mom,” and this and that. It’s going to be some incredible, inspiring story. We just as humans have that kind of emotional connection to those things, because we put ourselves in those situations, like, “Oh my god, what would I do if I had one run left on the ski hill?” It’s like, “I got to go full out. I have to risk my life to try to win this medal.”

**John August:** We’re putting ourselves in their place. We’re performing this relationship with them. But equally crucial is the relationships happening inside the context of the movie and figuring out what those are early on, which is obviously a problem for Little Wing. It’s figuring what is the relationship here, who you’re going to try to follow.

Let’s talk about coach movies, so Hardball versus Coach Carter, figuring out who is the central relationship. Obviously, one part of that’s going to be the coach. But is it with a single player? Is it with multiple players? How do you work that through?

**John Gatins:** It’s tough, because – you know this from writing movies – you write a great scene, and you’re like, “That scene, along with every other scene, is going to fight for its life to get to the screen.” Sometimes you shoot, you write, they shoot, they perform amazing scenes, and they die, because it just doesn’t fit the ultimate quilt that is the movie.

When you have a sports movie, you’ve got five guys in the basketball team, but who are the ones who are going to pop? You try to give everybody a moment and everybody a story and a little bit of an arc and something that you’re rooting for for that specific character. You hope that you get it right enough that everybody is able to shine through in the movie and have their movie inside your movie.

**John August:** Exactly.

**John Gatins:** That’s really the idea is like, “Oh, it’s a story about this guy who played short stop.” That’s not really what the movie’s about, but he has a movie in the movie. Yeah, it’s tough.

**John August:** It’s tough, tough. Did you see Nyad?

**John Gatins:** I haven’t seen it yet.

**John August:** Nyad is fantastic. One of the things I really liked about the model of it is, the same filmmakers did a bunch of rock climbing movies, which are a similar dynamic, which is it’s one person against an obstacle. Within that context, you have, will they achieve the thing? Will she swim from Cuba to Florida? Will this guy ascend this impossible mountain face? You still have to find relationships. You still have to find moments of emotional stakes that are not just the will they or won’t they. I thought Nyad did a fantastic job doing that.

**John Gatins:** That’s cool. That’s on my list. I’m going to see that.

**John August:** Again, making a choice of what is the central relationship, which is, of course, in this one, her friendship with Jodie Foster’s character and all the permutations and struggles they’re in.

**John Gatins:** Plus, I love those actors. That’s the thing too is you’re going to see it because of them.

**John August:** Let’s answer some listener questions. Let’s start with David here.

**Drew:** David in London sent in an audio question. We’ll play that now.

**David:** I’m a few weeks away from being on set for my first production as a writer, feature film. And I’ve put in a lot of prep and spade work over the years. I know I’m the right person for this job right here and right now. But what I’m not prepared for is being public facing. You guys both demonstrate an incredible ability to talk about your work, to talk about your relationships in a proper and correct way. You never badmouth anyone, but you also feel very open and authentic as you speak to us. How? When I speak, I’m always telling anecdotes about people I work with and things that have happened. And I bet you guys have got great stories you share privately about Pedro Pascal or Guy Ritchie or whatever. I’m scared that I am going to make a terrible cockup on social media or in person when I’m speaking as a professional. So I guess my question is, how do you guys compartmentalize?

**John August:** Let’s talk about how you talk about the things you worked on, because you just brought up Steven Spielberg. In talking about Spielberg, you said all the positive things. You said how supportive he was and didn’t go into any frustrations there, which is I think part of the advice we have for David. You have to talk openly and honestly, but just talking about the good things.

**John Gatins:** Look, it’s funny, because before you started to roll, we were talking about credit stuff, which I think we’ll talk about later. I don’t know. It’s interesting, because y’all have done this podcast for a long time. I get texts sometimes. People say, “Mazin talked about you on him and John’s podcast today,” or whatever, which I always think is kind of funny. It’s hard, because screenwriters, we work really closely, we work right next to Pedro Pascal. We’re not Pedro Pascal. People want to talk to Pedro Pascal. They don’t really want to talk to the guy who wrote the thing that he’s going to say. But you guys have proven that a little bit wrong, because how many people listen to this podcast?

**John August:** Tens of thousands.

**John Gatins:** That’s a lot of people who are very fascinated by how the soup gets made. I’m going to use sports metaphors again.

**John August:** It’s fine.

**John Gatins:** [Crosstalk 00:31:07].

**John August:** Stick on theme.

**John Gatins:** Patrick Mahomes wins the Super Bowl. What does he say? He’s like, “The defense was amazing today.” He didn’t say, “I did that 40-yard run that basically won the Super Bowl,” which I watched. I was like, “Dude, you did that.” It’s a thing of, take less credit. People like people who take less credit. Bring people along. There’s a lot of people.

Naomi Despres made this movie, Little Wing. I invited her in. I said, “Can you help us? Because I can’t go to Portland and be on the ground every day.” She moved her world around to do it. She has so much hand in making this movie, even creatively. There’s a moment in the movie where she talks about Bikini Kill and Kathleen Hanna. That’s Naomi, who said to me, “There’s a band.” I’d heard of Bikini Kill, but I didn’t really know them. The woman’s story and the song and everything else really fit. I had written Tupac Shakur 15 years ago. This was a really relevant, local to Portland thing. It was genius. That was amazing. She doesn’t have writing credit on the movie. But she’s such an integral part of us making that movie that that’s an incredible thing.

Maybe an advice to this guy is to say, listen, remember how you got there. We don’t make this movie by ourselves. You’re God when you’re sitting by your computer by yourself and you’re creating a world. You’re on your own. You are the god and creator of that universe. As soon as I say to you, John, my friend, “Hey, can you read this for me? Can you help me? Do you want to produce this movie?” now I’m sharing godship. By the time you’re sitting on the set, there’s 200 people there doing all kinds of things. Now everybody’s a little bit God in their own piece of universe.

Realize that it is a collaborative thing. There is somebody who says, that’s the director, that’s that title, producer, executive producer, script supervisor. Everybody has a role in this thing. Just bear that in mind that we did this. Somebody gave us the opportunity to do this. Without Steven Spielberg, this movie doesn’t exist. That was the inception. Without Susan Orlean, who wrote this thing, that got Steven to do a thing, that got him to make me do this thing. You’re a piece of a really big thing I think is maybe the takeaway.

**John August:** I would also say, David, you’re asking about speaking professionally, and it really is the context that matters. If you’re doing the literal press junket for the movie, you’re going to have a very narrow list of things you’re going to say and talk about. You’re going to talk about what a great experience it was. What John is saying in terms of, be really generous giving credit out there. You can contextualize your part of the process. Always make sure that you speak up for the existence of the writer. That is so important.

**John Gatins:** Of course.

**John August:** But you’re giving full credit. As you get into narrower groups, you can be a little bit more forthright about the pros and the cons and the ups and the downs, and you can avoid shitting on somebody, but also say this was a struggle for these reasons.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, exactly.

**John August:** I will talk about a filmmaker I’ve worked with and say, “Listen, he has this reputation,” and you’d go into it knowing that this is the kinds of things you’re going to be doing or not doing. That’s also fair. When you get into really small conversations, when it’s you and an executive, you can be much more open about, “These are the pros and the cons. This was the real struggle we had.” That bonds you a little bit closer, because you’re telling the truth there.

**John Gatins:** Look, I think I’ve had a unique experience, because as you know, I’m a failed actor who started trying to do that. I became a writer. I’ve produced. I’ve directed. I’ve now done a little bit of all of it. I’m very comfortable on a movie set. I think he’s asking a question about, he’s feeling a little bit like, “I don’t know that this is my world.” You have your place in that world. You’ll see how comfortable you are or aren’t vis a vis that. Those conversations, like you said, he may get specific questions that are like, “Why did you write this movie? What inspired you to do it? Did you write it every day? How many hours a day can you work? Do you outline?” All this stuff that people want to ask, specific questions about being a writer.

**John August:** Totally.

**John Gatins:** You’re going to answer those questions really honestly. They may also put a mic in his face and say, “What was it like meeting Pedro Pascal?”

**John August:** They will ask that, yeah.

**John Gatins:** They’ll ask that, and you’ll be like, “It’s amazing. He’s great. In my mind, I wrote for him. The whole time, I had his voice in my head.” Maybe that’s true; maybe it’s not. Maybe you say, “I wrote it for George Clooney, but Pedro Pascal is better.” I don’t know. It depends on the question and the situation.

It can be kind of overwhelming, because I’ve sat on stages with movie stars, and they ask me questions about specific script stuff. You’re always a little bit like, “Is this the forum to have this conversation?” because you realize you have these people here who people really want to hear from. I don’t know. That’s why I appreciate what y’all do. It’s talking to writers about writing. It’s really interesting.

**John August:** Great. Another question.

**Drew:** Leann from Burbank writes, “I’m writing a comedic feature script which has a proper ending, but after cutting to black, then has a couple scenes that play alongside the rolling end credits, like Principal Rooney getting on the school bus during the credits of Ferris Bueller. Have you seen a mid-credit roll sequence dictated in a script before? Any thoughts on best practices?”

**John August:** I absolutely have seen those. I think I might’ve put them in some of my scripts too. You do a cut to black, you do a fade out, and then a page break, and then mid-credits or a mid-credit roll or after credits, it’s an extra scene.

**John Gatins:** I’m trying to think. I’ve been asked to do things where it’s like, “Give us written summations of what happened to people a little bit.” The movie ends, but it’s like, “By the way, in 2010, this happened.” Seeing additional scenes, I don’t know, a lot of times they feel like they’re stuff that was shot in the movie that you kind of want to see, but it didn’t fit into the quilt. It’s like, this is cool stuff that didn’t get in there. That’s a square that didn’t make the quilt, but it’s cool, and I think you guys might ask about, “Whatever happened when he got on that bus? Did he get on the bus?”

**John August:** Remember the script is meant to encapsulate the experience of watching the movie. If part of watching the movie is those mid-credit scenes or after-credit scenes, they should be in the script.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, I guess so. I guess the task a lot of times is you’re trying to jam a bunch of shit inside a 120-page box, so good luck with that. The stuff that spills out the top, either you find a place and jam it in or take something out and jam it in.

**John August:** Would it be fair to mark those as pages 119A and 119B? Sure, maybe. They’re part of the running time, but other stuff’s happening at the same time. You’re not responsible for the credits in your script. I would say if they’re important to your story, then they should be in the script, because your script is the movie. Another question.

**Drew:** Old Bruce writes, “Have I officially become the old guy looking at all these youngsters who seem to struggle with the reality of what work is? Is there a universal and generational confusion that success is not a right but earned? And have people’s threshold of try become much lower than it used to be?”

**John August:** Old Bruce, you’re completely correct on every level.

**John Gatins:** The two Old Johns will collude with you, Old Bruce.

**John August:** These young people today have no idea. Of course, if you were to slide this conversation back 30 years, the equivalent of Bruce would say, “These young people have no sense of what it is to work.” You’ve reached a point where you are generationally appropriately complaining about the generation behind you.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, and I think that’s a rite of passage.

**John August:** I would say that a thing I notice about this younger generation is there can be that hustle and grindy culture. I guess we had some of that when we started in our 20s, but it’s more deliberate. It feels more calculated, more planned. People are willing to put themselves in uncomfortable, long situations to do stuff that I don’t know I necessarily was. But also, there’s the internet. Stuff is also just different.

**John Gatins:** I know. They just need to get off my lawn. Believe me. But it’s different. We’ve been doing it so long. It changes. You become a different writer along the way, because trust me, if we could go back in time, there’s moments that I would pick that would be embarrassing, where I would literally be the guy who’d be like, “I’m going to tell you why water’s wet, guys. I got this. I know all the answers, man. You want to talk about screenwriting? I know everything. I can do anything.” I don’t feel that way anymore. I feel like I’ve earned it. I’ve earned the idea that I don’t know or I’m going to learn more or remain teachable and be like, “Let me see something else. A streaming movie? What television has become?” Television used to be like, we were screenwriters [unintelligible 00:39:30] TV. Now it’s like TV’s the greatest shit there is.

**John August:** One of the things I’m aware of increasingly is that I expect young writers today to actually understand the references that I had when I was in my 20s, but that’s not realistic. It’s not accurate. Why have you not seen Point Break? Of course you should’ve seen Point Break. Or a bunch of stuff where it’s like, of course it’s just my part of film history canon.

**John Gatins:** I know.

**John August:** They cannot have caught up on all of that stuff.

**John Gatins:** I know.

**John August:** That’s a thing I just have to get past and remind myself, of course you’re not going to see that, because that is the equivalent of Casablanca or something to them. It’s very far in the past.

**John Gatins:** I think the other thing too is there’s an immediacy to culture now because of cellphones. When I first started as a screenwriter, I remember faxing pages.

**John August:** Oh yeah, we faxed pages.

**John Gatins:** From Austin, Texas, when I was working on Varsity Blues, faxing pages. Being on location doing Behind Enemy Lines. There was only three hours a day where we could talk to the people at Fox. So we would just hide. We’d just be like, “If they don’t call us in this hour, we’re just going to keep shooting.”

**John August:** Yeah, totally.

**John Gatins:** “We’re going to just do what we’re doing.” But I think everything is so immediate. Good writing is rewriting. You don’t write a script and like, “That’s it. I’m done.” There’s a thousand drafts you’re going to do. I think that’s a little bit baked into that question. You got to realize, I know you think that’s the finish line. It really isn’t. There’s so much work to do beyond that finish line. You have no idea. In this world of boom, boom, the phone, click click click click, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not as immediate as you want it to be, because what we talked about before is movies take forever to get there. Movies don’t get made. They fight. They fight their way to life. Sometimes it takes 17 years. It’s just the truth.

**John August:** Could I challenge you on something you said about Little Wing? You said you clicked send to Steven Spielberg for the script, but you probably didn’t click send. You probably sent an actual script.

**John Gatins:** That’s a really good question.

**John August:** I remember distinctly, and you’ll have this memory too, you’d call the agent or the executive for them to send a messenger.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, to pick it up.

**John August:** You’d still be printing the script. Then you’d catch a typo and like, “Oh, no, I have to reprint that page.”

**John Gatins:** I had this stamp that my wife Ling’s parents had given me. It’s this jade thing that had the characters of my name, John, and then it had J-O-H-N underneath it, and it had a little ink pad. It was in red. I would put a stamp when I was done and I’d printed it. I’d stamp it. It was so silly. But I was superstitious then too. I was like, “That went well the first time, so I got to stamp it every time.”

**John August:** Absolutely.

**John Gatins:** It’s printing the script and doing the stamp and the whole thing. It’s like, “I don’t have my stamp!” It was this whole crazy thing, printing the script and sending it. I think that that was email, but I still was in the world of printing it. I don’t know.

**John August:** The reason why I bring that up is because we talked about faxing pages, and I have this very distinct memory of being bunkered in this really bad hotel room in Kauai and having to fax pages from the front desk to Kathy Kennedy. That was the only way to get pages to her. It was crazy.

**John Gatins:** They were those thin, weird pages that after two days they were dust. You couldn’t even see what was-

**John August:** I had flown with my StyleWriter printer so I could print out my pages and then fax them through to Kathy Kennedy. It’s wild. These younger generations, they have no idea how we suffered to get them to where we are right now, now that it’s-

**John Gatins:** It’s true.

**John August:** … typing away and-

**John Gatins:** Oh my god.

**John August:** … emailing stuff through. Let’s answer one more question.

**Drew:** Under Wraps writes, “Right before the pandemic, I signed an option agreement with a production company. About a week or two after we signed, the strike was officially called. I assumed since we finalized everything before that, that it wouldn’t affect my getting paid. However, the producer let me know that he was instructed to hold all payments until after the strike was over.

“Fast-forward to the strike ending, and after not hearing anything from the producer for a few weeks, I shot him a message. I didn’t specifically bring up the money, but just asked about plans now that the strike was over. He informs me that he’s moving forward with production and is optimistic.

“Jump to now, months later, we haven’t spoken since. I know these things move slowly, but the difference here was that I was actually supposed to be getting a nice little chunk of cash. I don’t want to sound money-focused, just messaging the producer, ‘Yo, where my money at?’ But I really could use it right now. I don’t have any reps to handle this for me, and I’m at a loss for how to word this kind of message. How do I get what I’m owed without coming off like a money-hungry jerk writer who doesn’t care about the art of film development?”

**John August:** This could be a generational issue. I think I was much more direct about, “Need money. Need check now.” A couple things, Under Wraps. First off, if you sign an option agreement, the strike had nothing to do with that, and so you still needed to get paid. You get paid. They owe you the money. They’re shopping this thing around that they’ve optioned from you, but they haven’t actually really done the option, because they’ve not paid you the money. You need to be much more direct about, like, “You may have forgotten, but you never actually paid me for this thing.”

**John Gatins:** The not having reps thing is tough in that situation, because there’s somebody whose job it is, hopefully, to be the one that says, “We need the money,” because it is show business. So there is a business side to it. And it’s good to have partners, be they lawyers, agents, managers, that can have that conversation on your behalf.

**John August:** Absolutely. We had Aline on the show a couple weeks ago. We talked about being agentic, taking agency in your life. This is a situation where this guy needs to take agency and to say, “Oh, this thing needs to happen. I’m going to make it happen.” Pretend you are your own best friend and you’re going to go in and just do this thing for your friend, which is get your friend paid.

**John Gatins:** I would get the guy on the phone too. Email’s a little bit removed. Just say, “Hey, call me quick.”

**John August:** In that conversation you had about what was happening next, segueing from that into like, “Oh, it’s so great this is happening. Also, you haven’t paid me. You may have forgotten that you haven’t paid me.” You can [unintelligible 00:45:28] they forgot, but they have to pay you. Got to get paid.

It is time for our One Cool Things. John Gatins, what is your One Cool Thing?

**John Gatins:** It’s interesting. Ling’s uncle and aunt came to visit recently from Arkansas. They’re retired. They’re the coolest people. They were like, “We just have to tell you,” because they were staying in our guest area, and they said, “You have this kind of finch. You’ve got this kind of woodpecker,” and whatever. I was like, “What?” They were like, “There’s this app called Merlin, which you can download for free, and you can literally record singing birds, and it will tell you what the bird is, and it shows you a picture and this whole thing.” They showed us all of these pictures of these birds. They were excited, because they don’t live in this part of the world. They were like, “Check it out. You’ve got this short, blah blah blah woodpecker thing.” I was like, “Oh my god.” Pearl used to be so annoyed by this woodpecker outside her window. She’s like, “There’s this bird.” It’s this really beautiful looking bird. I just thought that was the coolest thing. I was like, “Oh my god.” Who knew there’s an app that can identify birds?

**John August:** That’s awesome. Just this morning, there was a bird who I remember hearing from before. It was a morning bird that can be really annoying. But we sleep with the white noise machine turned so high that I don’t hear it anymore. Sometimes in the bathroom early in the night I hear it.

**John Gatins:** Just download Merlin, and you can maybe understand where that bird’s coming from a little bit.

**John August:** Absolutely. 100 percent.

**John Gatins:** That bird’s trying to tell you something, John.

**John August:** Absolutely.

**John Gatins:** It’s like, “Listen.”

**John August:** It’s like when you have noisy neighbors, and you’re like, “I hate them,” and then you meet them, it’s like, “Oh, it’s actually not so bad.”

**John Gatins:** That bird might have notes on your scripts that you need.

**John August:** It might have notes.

**John Gatins:** You don’t know.

**John August:** My One Cool Thing is sort of a strange one. We were having a conversation a week or two ago about spinoffs and what is the longest show that’s been on the air if you include the spinoffs from the original show.

**John Gatins:** Whoa.

**John August:** That led me down a rabbit hole towards The Facts of Life. I loved the show The Facts of Life, which for people who are not familiar with it, it is about this girls’ school. You follow these four or five girls who get in trouble and they live in their own little part of the girls’ school with Mrs. Garrett, who’s the cook, and they often work for Mrs. Garrett. It was a shrunk down version of a bigger school. It was a strange situation where the first situation is actually very different than later seasons.

Anyway, they kept trying to spin shows off of The Facts of Life, which I think is great. They would do backdoor pilots. A backdoor pilot is one of the normal 22 episodes of a season, they would introduce new characters and set them up and see whether they would work right, and then the hope would be to spin them off of the original show into a new thing. The Facts of Life was a spin-off of Diff’rent Strokes, and so this is trying to spin off other things.

Here are some of the backdoor pilots attempted to come out of The Facts of Life: Brian and Sylvia, a Season Two episode in which Tootie and Natalie go to Buffalo, New York to visit Tootie’s Aunt Sylvia, who has recently married a white man. It’s about Brian and Sylvia, these other people. The situation, you’re bringing your protagonist to a new place and trying to spin off these characters.

The Academy was a Season Three episode set at Stone Academy, the all-boys military school that was located near the existing school, so basically a boys version of Facts of Life. Jo’s Cousin, another Season Three episode. Jo visits her family in the Bronx, including her cousin Terry, a 14-year-old girl going through adolescence in a family full of men, so just a completely different family show.

The Big Fight was a Season Four episode set at Stone Academy, that boys’ military school, so it was another attempt to get that going there. One called Graduation. They’re trying to spin off a show about Blair and Jo and their life in college.

There was a Big Apple Blues, a Season Nine episode in which Natalie spends the night with a group of eccentric young people living in a SoHo loft, so trying to create that show.

**John Gatins:** Oh my god.

**John August:** Then The Beginning of the End/The Beginning of the Beginning, which is the two-part series finale, which they were trying to set up these two characters taking over Mrs. Garrett’s role at the school. It’s remarkable over the course of all these years, they just kept trying to spin other things out of it. It’s not a thing we get these days.

**John Gatins:** Wasn’t Clooney a recurring character?

**John August:** That feels right, yes.

**John Gatins:** As you were going through, I’m like, weren’t any of them trying to launch Clooney as a guy who was featured in one of those?

**John August:** You feel like he should. That was pre-ER. I was saying we don’t have spinoffs. I guess we do have spinoffs, because we have all those Yellowstone spinoffs.

**Drew:** There’s also Blackish. It has Brownish and all those.

**John August:** Blackish, yeah.

**John Gatins:** The Walking Dead has-

**John August:** You’re absolutely right.

**John Gatins:** … 15 million. Whatever. I got into watching The Walking Dead when I was on location in Georgia, and it used to freak me out, because it’s shot there.

**John August:** It’s Georgia.

**John Gatins:** I’m like, “That looks like the woods where the walkers are.” Now I just watched the first episode of Those That Lived or I don’t know what. When I was looking for it, 10 other spinoffs, the Daryl Dixon show and then this one and that one. I’m like, “Holy cow.” Fear the Walking Dead. The Walking Dead will never-

**John August:** They will never stop.

**John Gatins:** The zombies, they will never stop. The zombies will never go away.

**John August:** You’re completely right. I guess I’ve been thinking of a very specific, very deliberate, like, “Okay, we’re going to introduce new characters and try to spin them off in a new thing.” But franchisization of shows is really clear now. It’s not just the Cheers to Frasier to Frasier. There’s other ways to do it now. Sell a universe.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Alee Karim. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send your questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. I’m wearing both a T-shirt and a hoodie right at the moment. 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 John Gatins’s mastery of credits and partnership, I guess. John Gatins, congratulations on your movie, and thank you for coming on Scriptnotes.

**John Gatins:** Of course. Thank you guys for having me. I appreciate it.

[Bonus Segment]

**John August:** John Gatins, as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been a solo writer. You’re a person who comes in and brings your own pen. You do your work. Then you take off. But recently started working with Andrea Berloff, another friend of the show, and you guys have been writing as partners. Talk to us about that transition. How’d it all come about?

**John Gatins:** It was interesting, because Andrea and I knew of each other, and then we really met in the strike of 2008.

**John August:** We should say that you were a strike captain in 2008 and were always out there with your black parka, a big cheerleader.

**John Gatins:** It’s funny too, because I don’t know that I was ever officially penciled as such, but I think I emailed people and said, “I’m going to be at Universal,” and then friends of mine just started showing up. Then you were there. There was a lot of people that we knew there. I had the acapella group from UCLA come. We had fun. Whatever. Strikes are not fun. That’s not the idea.

But Andrea showed up there. She was like, “Hey.” She always tells the story, she’s like, “You’re the first person besides my husband to know that I was pregnant.” I was like, “Oh, okay,” because she was like, “Look, I’m going to be a little intermittent.” I was like, “Andrea, I’m not in charge.” I was like, “You do whatever. Trust me.” We were like the MASH unit of Strikeville. We became friendly there.

Then I can’t even remember the year it was. It was 2014. I don’t know. I’m making it up. But we both got invited to be in a room, quote unquote, for Activision Blizzard. Stacey Sher invited us to be writers in this room, because they were trying to figure out Call of Duty movies.

**John August:** Why has there not been a Call of Duty movie?

**John Gatins:** Why has there not been?

**John August:** Yeah.

**John Gatins:** I’ll give my own opinion.

**John August:** Please.

**John Gatins:** Again, it’s going to be very uneducated. But it was an incredible room. We heard so many military experts who came in. It was incredible. Guys who had really done… Will Staples was really integral in facilitating the intros to these people in the military world and politicians. It was incredible. I learned so much, because I really don’t know that much about the military.

I think at the end of the day, you realize when they release a Call of Duty, it makes hundreds of millions of dollars in a weekend. To try to say that you would make a movie that would help that event, it would really have to be a movie that would be on a level that I think ultimately they never saw anything that led them to believe that this is going to in fact help their brand in a way.

That’s just, again, my take, because it was really a big aspirational attempt to try to launch three different series of movies, because there was Call of Duty, there was Modern Warfare, there was Black Ops. There was a bunch of different segments in the game world from that umbrella, and they tried to attack all fronts at the same time with lots of really smart people in a room. And there was lots of good ideas, but it just never full came together, I think.

**John August:** My hunch is they should’ve found the best military spec they could’ve found and called it Call of Duty.

**John Gatins:** That’s a really smart thing. Who knows? They may actually ultimately do that. But in that room, Andrea and I, we partnered up as producers, because they took six writers and made three teams of two to be producers that were assigned a screenwriter. Then we helped that person form an idea based on the franchise we were working on kind of thing.

Andrea and I were together every day for a month. Somewhere in the middle of it, we said, “We should write a movie together,” which as you said, I’ve never done that before. Neither had she, by the way. She has a great, thriving career all on her own. It was this weird thing of like, “Maybe.” We talked to our agents about it a little bit and whatever and said, “We’ll just try.” We didn’t think it was going to be like, “We’re going to do this forever.” It was this odd thing of like, “Oh my god, I’m actually going to write with another writer.”

We called Phil and Matt actually and said to them, “Hey, guys, how do you do it?” They gave us their thing of cards on a board of this scene, this scene, this scene, and then saying, “I want to write that one. Why don’t you do that? No, I want to do this one.” You divvy up the work and you do it and then you share and you back and forth and whatever.

We figured it out. It was interesting, because we’re at a point now where we don’t… I don’t think, anyway. She can speak for herself if you ask her. We joke all the time. It’s like, “You wrote that.” She’s like, “No, you wrote that.” I’m like, “Oh, I did?” It’s like, “No.” It’s a little bit seamless at this point, which I think is a good place to be. It’s great to have a lab partner. It’s such a solemn, weird thing that we do. Humans are social creatures. I don’t know. It’s been good. It’s actually been really fun.

**John August:** You’re the only writer I can think of who, at this stage in their career, partnered up, because it’s just much more generally people are splitting apart at this age. You guys, you’re holding each other accountable, but also you’re showing up to work in a way that is important.

**John Gatins:** We take meetings. We work for Netflix now, and have for over a year, in an exclusive kind of deal with them, which has been really fun and great. It’s just really nice. I think we were both at the perfect time in our lives that it was like, “This would be a cool thing to try to do together.” It’s been really awesome, honestly.

**John August:** The other thing I would love to talk to you about on mic a little bit is, of all the writers I’ve met over my career, you are the most savvy when it comes to, “Okay, six of us worked on a movie, and it’s now time to figure out credits.” It will go to arbitration or we can decide amongst ourselves and all agree on what the credits should be. You are very good at starting those conversations and figuring out ways to get everyone to agree on credits. Can you talk me through how that started and what your approach is for it?

**John Gatins:** To be honest, I don’t remember exactly how it started, but I’ve come to the place where a lot of times when I think back on the… There was a very long run in my career where I was a guy who would come in towards the end, and I’d do production rewrite work. I’ve also been fortunate that I am comfortable on a set, and directors I’ve been paired with, I’ve gotten along well with, who were like, “Hey, come help me.” I worked with a couple of first-time directors or younger directors, and it was great. It was like the Bull Durham relationship of like, I’m the old guy, and here’s a young person trying to do something. The studio liked me and felt like I could help. So I’d be on set and that kind of thing.

When it would come down to the credit thing, at some point maybe I knew one of the other writers initially and just reached out and said, “What are you thinking? They’re going to make a recommendation, and then we’re all going to go to our corners and try to write a manifesto that says, ‘This is what I think I deserve.’ Maybe we can have a conversation.”

I got to know the Guild people enough, having been through enough arbitrations and been an arbiter, that I would have a conversation with them. I would immediately come out and say, “Hey, can I have so-and-so’s number, or can you tell them here’s my number? If they want to chat with me, great, call me. If they don’t, that’s okay too.”

I would always start the conversation the same way and say, “Hey, listen. You worked on this, and I worked on this. If you’re open to a conversation, we can have it. I fully understand that there’s a really good chance this is going to arbitration, which is okay. We’ve all been through it. But because we’re in the soup together, is there anything you want to share?” or, “I feel this,” or, “I feel that,” or, “Maybe there’s a way that we can work it out.”

The Guild, I think that they would appreciate that, because it’s pitting writers against writers, which is never great, because as we said, it’s about resume, and there’s money and residuals, bonus residual. There’s all kinds of things about ownership of things and movie posters that don’t have your name on it that you feel like, “I deserve to have my name on it.” It’s very difficult.

Of course, the credits thing came up with additional writers at the end of the thing. It’s such a ballyhoo kind of thing that it’s difficult. It’s never perfect. It’s the best system we have. I know Craig’s worked hard on the manual, to try to say, listen, let’s revisit some of these things about what are the percentages and how do we mete this all out to make it make sense?

Look. My experiences vary. I’ve met some really cool writers that way. There’s been some things that have really gotten sorted, and it felt really fair and cool, and everyone walked away being like, “Hey, I appreciate you did that. This is cool,” and that kind of thing. Other times, it’s been not as good. It’s been like, “Look, we’ll just go to arbitration and see how it works out.”

**John August:** I’ve had both situations. I think, inspired by your example, I’ve reached out to writers on projects to see whether there’s a useful way for us to think about what the credits should be. Also, if I’ve come onto a project, I try to reach out to the original writer or writers to see where the bodies are buried. That almost starts the relationship a little bit earlier before it becomes figuring out the credits. Important to remember is that these writers can figure it out amongst themselves unless one of them is a production executive.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, that’s a little different.

**John August:** If someone’s a director or a producer.

**John Gatins:** That’s different.

**John August:** Increasingly, if a director is going for credit, that’s off the table, because-

**John Gatins:** It’s an automatic arbitration.

**John August:** Automatic arbitration. And same if someone’s a producer. It makes sense why, because that person would have undue power and control over the situation and might have their fingers on the scale. Now, one of the things I’ve heard you talk about is that there is the credit you see on screen and the list of credits, but behind the scenes there’s also math about what percentages go to which writers. Those things don’t have to line up precisely. Is that accurate?

**John Gatins:** I think so. It’s such a difficult thing.

**John August:** Here’s what I’m getting to. You will actually have the conversation about, “Let’s talk about money,” because one of the reasons why you want to talk about money is that different writers would have different box office bonuses based on what credit they get.

**John Gatins:** That’s a conversation that people have. That can get into lawyer land, where you say, “Listen. I appreciate what they’ve done. I was in a different situation. I was on a weekly. I don’t have a bonus on this movie. But I’m probably going to get credit. You may have been diminished enough that you’re not going to get credit.” That person says, “Then let me inspire you to invite me in, because I think I deserve credit on the movie.” At times, there’s a financial deal to be made as well. Different things mean different things to different people.

If you asked me this question 15 years ago, I might’ve given you a different answer, because having my names on movies was going to change the trajectory of my career or my opportunities. I’m old now. I wish that maybe there was executives out there who haven’t met me or don’t have a preformed opinion of what I do or how I can do or what I’m right for or where I fit on any kind of list on any given day. But I think that there is a little bit of, I don’t know, I am who I am. I’m going to try to do what I do. It’s a fairly difficult thing to apply math to a creative event.

**John August:** 100 percent.

**John Gatins:** That’s I think what you’re asking is to say, “Okay. Look at the script and tell me who did 33 percent of these four or five elements.”

**John August:** We’ve both been arbiters. It’s really tough.

**John Gatins:** It’s a really tough thing.

**John August:** Luckily, there’s the 33 percent math, but it’s really basically, did this person do so much work that they’ve crossed a threshold into getting this. It only gets down to 33 percents of stuff when there’s just too many names and too many people could be jockeying for that thing.

**John Gatins:** It’s hard. Derek Haas has been an arbiter, and he says his approach is he reads the shooting script and then he reads backwards. You try to figure, how do we get to this thing?

**John August:** [Crosstalk 01:03:17].

**John Gatins:** I was like, that’s a really smart way to say, because you may have written an amazing script, but it was set in 1914. The movie’s actually set in the 1980s now. You go, “What does that 1914 script have to do with the movie that actually got shot?”

**John August:** You may find that there’s a lot, but it may be-

**John Gatins:** It’s like, look, that 1914 script may be the reason the movie got made, but it doesn’t factor into the document that was actually filmed.

**John August:** That’s the crucial thing to remember about the credits process. It’s not about the process of making the movie. It’s literally about the final document. That’s why it can be so crucial, what is the final document? Does the final document actually reflect the movie? We’ve gotten into this before too, where this is the, quote unquote, final shooting script, but that’s not the movie that’s on the screen at all, so you have to go through that stuff too. It’s a challenging situation.

**John Gatins:** It’s a really challenging situation.

**John August:** I do feel like one of the changes from when we first started the business is if I worked really hard on a movie and didn’t get one of those top credits, I just disappeared, and it was like a year of my life just vanished. Additional literary material at least acknowledges, oh, that person, you existed. It’s a change for writers who otherwise might be completely forgotten. It’s proof that you did some work. There’s pros and cons to it.

**John Gatins:** It’s a tough one. It’s difficult. I’m not sure about the additional writing credit thing. I think I’ve probably been in that situation a little bit, because maybe I’ve done work on things where that was an opportunity.

**John August:** I can think of one movie you worked your ass off on, and I was so surprised that your name is not on that movie. You know what I’m talking about.

**John Gatins:** That’s where I learned a lot of lessons, because the statement that I wrote on my behalf was a ridiculous, embarrassing, emotional love letter to a college girlfriend, basically. It was like, “I gave my T-shirt on the day that Van Der Beek wore, and he wore it. I was there.” I’m like, no, you write a comparative literature paper that’s like, “Hey, I did these things,” and whatever. That one didn’t go my way for a lot of reasons. I didn’t help my cause on that one.

**John August:** I’m thinking of a different movie. That’s how many movies there are.

**John Gatins:** Oh my god.

**John August:** I’m thinking of a much more recent movie, a sci-fi movie that you-

**John Gatins:** Look. That was a situation that was really difficult, because I got to know the other writers and had a conversation, because that was one that was very confusing. It was a little bit like, how did we actually get here? Look. We tried. That was one where it was a failure, and it was a little bit like, huh. It was heartbreaking. But it was what it was.

**John August:** You got paid the money during production.

**John Gatins:** I did, I did. I did have a sizable win on the other side that I was feeling like was going to come through and did not. That was not a great moment. It’s a little bit of the peril of doing what I do, which has been a guy who, “Look, I was the fourth writer,” or something. That’s not a very advantageous position to be in. You just said to me, knowing nothing, “John, come on. You’re this guy who came in.” I’m like, “Yeah, but I went through all this.” It’s like calling other writers and saying, “Dude, I know you wrote a great script, but guess what? I’m the one who had to listen to all the nuts-ness of all the craziness and deal with blah blah blah.”

**John August:** Yeah, you had to shoulder and bear so much. You had to body a lot of the problems.

**John Gatins:** It was what it was. Time helps. You get some distance from it and everything. I thought you were talking about Varsity Blues. My thing is, I owe everything to Varsity Blues. That movie did everything for me. My name appears nowhere in that universe, but they paid my bonus anyway. They felt that. How about that?

**John August:** Nice.

**John Gatins:** That executive, Don Granger, was like… My agent called and said, “There’s something here for him.” He goes, “I don’t know anything about that.” It was one of those great movie moment inside the movie business.

**John August:** Love it.

**John Gatins:** It was a really gracious thing that they did. It was very nice. It led to me doing Hardball for them and doing so much work at that studio. I can’t fault that movie. I didn’t help myself in the process. I really didn’t know. That’s the thing I think that upset me most as a really young writer in that moment, the first movie, was that there was nobody in the Writers Guild… I didn’t know a lot of screenwriters. If I’d met somebody who’d said to me, “Hey, listen, man. Why don’t you let me look at that statement?” That’s the point, John. If I’d been an arbiter and I’d gotten that statement…

You’ve read plenty of arbiter statements where you want to say, “Don’t ever write a statement like that. This is no help. Trust me. I know you think you’re going to appeal to some emotional whatever. No, no. That’s not an emotional document. This is a document that compares the work you did, compares to the shooting script and to the other documents. That’s what it is.” I shot myself in the foot in that situation. Like I said, that experience and that movie and the success of that movie, I owe so much to.

**John August:** I owe a lot of my success to movies that my names are not on. That’s the reality of this career. John Gatins, so great to talk with you.

**John Gatins:** Great to talk to you, man. Thank you. I really appreciate you guys let me coming on.

Links:

* [Little Wing – On Paramount+ March 13th](https://youtu.be/kZeaCkIgN3o?si=JWbnJrw1ATTayZcR)
* John Gatins on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gatins) and [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0309691/?ref_=tt_ov_wr)
* [Little Wing by Susan Orlean](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/little-wing) for the New Yorker
* [LUCIRA by Pfizer COVID-19 & Flu Home Test](https://www.lucirabypfizer.com/)
* [Merlin Bird ID](https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/)
* [The Facts of Life – Attempted Spin-offs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Facts_of_Life_(TV_series)#Attempted_spin-offs)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Alee Karim ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/633standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 630 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome Celine Song, a playwright, screenwriter, and director, whose movie Past Lives is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

We will talk about that movie, but also getting staffed on a TV show, raising financing, making your first feature in two different countries. But before that, staffing on a TV show, deciding between film school versus playwriting school. We’ll answer some listener questions. It’s a great conversation. And in a bonus conversation for premium members, Celine and I discuss Zoom and other online performances, including her staging of The Seagull on Sims 4. But first, Drew, we have some follow-up. We have the best listeners in the world, and they came through this week.

Drew Marquardt: We had a lot of people write in about examples of the Tiffany problem, which we talked about last week.

John: The Tiffany problem, that’s where Tiffany is actually an old name, so people used to be called Tiffany, but if you use that name now, people think that just seems weird, a period film should not have a character named Tiffany.

Drew: There’s quite a few examples. Courtney wrote in, “As a birdwatcher, one Tiffany problem I know of is the call of a bald eagle. Most Americans associate a bald eagle’s call with soaring, almost echoing screech, not pretty per se, but definitely powerful and approaching majestic. Here’s an example. (bird screech) But that’s actually the sound of a red-tailed hawk. An accurate bald eagle sound is almost painfully high-pitched and typically kind of chippy, like a yapping dog.” (eagle call)

John: Wow. That is really, really different. We’ll put a link into the YouTube videos of those two, because when you see the bald eagle doing its thing, it’s like, that’s not a graceful way of making a sound.

Drew: No, not at all.

John: A perfect example of a Tiffany problem, because if you put in the real thing, people would laugh. It just doesn’t sound right. We associate the bald eagle sounding a particular way, even though it’s not the situation. Unless you’re going to call it out, I think you’d go with the wrong version. What else do we have for Tiffany problems?

Drew: Michael in Astoria writes, “My favorite reference for the Tiffany problem is Deadwood and its infamous use of profanity. When researching, David Milch discovered that while historic analogs for his character did in fact swear freely, they would use archaic profanity that is comical to modern ears, would’ve had all the characters sounding like Yosemite Sam if they’d insisted on historical accuracy. So rather than provoke unwanted laughter in the audience, he opted for modern profanity that was accurate to the spirit of how the curse words were intended, but which the characters would not have actually used.”

John: Again, a problem where historical accuracy and specificity could’ve worked against you, and so you made the choice to have everyone dropping F bombs all the time. I get it. It does change our perception of how people spoke in that time, but they just don’t have any other real, good Western examples of profanity, so it felt real to me.

Drew: Although now I’m curious what those weird swears were.

John: I want to hear what all those words were.

Drew: Kate writes, “I used to be a children’s book editor, and I once edited a book of short stories set during the First World War. One author wrote a story set at a girls’ school, and she included a scene in which one girl wrote a note to another reading, ‘See you at,’ like the at sign, ‘break.’ And I queried this use of the at symbol. And the author assured me that the at symbol had been in use since at least the 1500s. It was used that way in the early 20th century. I told her that didn’t matter; it would seem anachronistic to a reader anyway.”

John: I grew up knowing that that symbol meant at or that we used it to mean at, although I think it also could mean to or at for a quantity at a certain amount at a certain price. I remember seeing it on typewriters, but of course we didn’t really use it everyday use until there were email addresses and ultimately handles for things. I agree with Kate here. At feels strange historically. I think it could bum for some people, even though it’s accurate.

Drew: Phillip writes, “Recently, my mom mentioned rewatching her favorite film, The American President, and how it occurred to her how much paper the people in the White House are shown using. This is accurate to the time it was shot. But it was shocking to her how much digitization has changed office work.”

John: Yes, I think if you look at older things… I remember looking at broadcast news. They have to use these tapes. They’re literally carrying tapes around.

Drew: Oh my god.

John: It seems impossible. Older movies are going to have paper in them. We talked about all the kazoos in Maestro, which is basically like, yes, people would’ve been smoking a lot in that time, but it’s just distracting, because there’s just so much of it. This mention of The American President, I have to take a little sidebar to talk about, Rob Reiner was on Love It or Leave It, this other podcast I listen to, and was talking about how Aaron Sorkin’s script for The American President was like 350 pages. It was some crazy, crazy long script. Sorkin later apologized for the script being so long, but apparently, a lot of the stuff that got pulled out of the script for The American President became The West Wing. So maybe that’s an argument for writing long sometimes.

Drew: I love The American President. It’s nice and tight.

John: Nice and tight. It was not nice and tight to begin with. Examples of the Tiffany problem. What else do we have for follow-up?

Drew: We had some listeners write in about different foreign courts, because we were talking about Anatomy of a Fall. Anonymous writes in to say, “I’ll share what I know of a Russian courtroom, which will probably come as no surprise to anyone who’s read stories of people charged and quickly convicted in Russia.

“Back when adoptions there were allowed, you had to go to court to get yours approved. In our region, even with the foot-high stack of stamped, embossed, certified, and Apostille documents testifying to every aspect of your interest and ability to adopt and raise the child, there was still no guarantee you would get approved. And why? The room setup gives a clue.

“While the judge presides over the court from a familiar front-and-center raised platform, what’s completely freaky is that when you walk in, you see that the entire left of the room is taken up by a prison cell made up of heavy iron bars on all four sides and the top. This is where the defendant stands during the trial, though thankfully not prospective adoptive parents. We get hard, wooden benches.

“When I asked why, it was explained that contrary to our legal principles of innocent until proven guilty, in Russia when someone is charged, it’s assumed they’re guilty and you must prove your innocence from jail. I looked it up later, and legally, this is in fact not true. But as they say in Sleepless in Seattle, it sure feels and looks true.”

John: This is an example of just the courtroom setup. Imagine that there was a scene taking place in a Russian courtroom. If, in the script, you did not actually describe what things are like, we would default to our American expectations of a courtroom, and they would be wrong. It would be a very different feel from what we actually would see in the film. This feels crucial information for a screenwriter to know if you’re going with this kind of scene. Similarly, in Anatomy of a Fall, if you didn’t know what that French courtroom was set up like and would just default to an American thing, you would be just incredibly wrong.

Drew: David in Australia writes, “I want to share my experience sitting on a jury in Australia. The biggest disappointment for me was that the jury was removed from the court any time there were matters of law to discuss. Whenever a lawyer would overstep or they needed to discuss precedent in certain areas of the case, the jury wasn’t privy to this information. The public galley could stay and listen during these moments, but the Australian system seems to think that this would taint the jurors. I guess it’s probably better than having a judge tell the jury, ‘Disregard everything you just heard,’ because let’s be honest, no one’s disregarding that stuff.”

John: I’ve been on one jury trial, and there were situations where I felt like the matters of law went to the judge’s chamber, so rather than us leaving, the judge and the counsel leaves to talk in his chamber. But yeah, it again is a structural thing. You do need to know what the differences are in a different country, because otherwise you could get this wrong in a way that would hurt your story. Let’s wrap up with, I see Lewant has a thing from the Netherlands.

Drew: To your point about defaulting to the American style, Lewant says, “A one-panel comic from a Dutch newspaper says, ‘Fulk and Zuk spend most of their student days watching TV.’ And this judge says, ‘Will you please stop referring to the stenographer as members of the jury?’ The joke is that the Dutch court system does not have a jury system, yet most of us personally witness it through U.S. media.”

John: Exactly. If you’re in one of these countries, and you’re expecting a jury trial, and there is no jury, that is very different. Again, if you’re writing a scene that is taking place in a foreign courtroom, don’t rely on your American expectations of how things are supposed to work, because it could be very, very wrong. Drew, thank you for the follow-up.

Now, let’s welcome on our guest. Celine Song is a playwright, screenwriter, and director, whose movie Past Lives is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Celine, welcome.

Celine Song: Thank you. Hi, hi. So happy to be here.

John: We’re so happy to have you here. I really want to talk to you, of all the folks out there on awards season, because I think your experience feels probably the most relevant to a lot of our listeners, who are aspiring filmmakers, because not only is this your first feature, but you’ve made it internationally. It’s complicated between two countries. It’s a very personal story that you could’ve done as a book or as a play, but to do it as a movie felt like the right choice.

We had Lulu Wang on a couple years ago to talk about The Farewell. It felt like she was telling a story that only she could direct, and so same like you only would make sense for you to direct this. It just felt so relevant to a lot of our listeners.

I’m so excited to talk to you about not just your movie, but also the process of getting to the point where you could make that movie. Could we start back at the beginning? What is your experience or history with storytelling and with filmmaking? Where did that start for you?

Celine: To me, I went to grad school for playwriting. Then I stayed in playwriting. I was a playwright for 10 years, including my years in grad school. I was doing a lot of plays in New York City, off-Broadway. I wrote on a TV show as a staff writer, Wheel of Time. That was the first for-screen writing that I’ve done. I think it really was writing the script for Past Lives, and it really was the script that did the work of getting itself made. But I’ve been a dramatist for a lot longer. I feel like that would be the right word for it. I’ve been a dramatic storyteller.

John: Can we wind all the way back though? Because I’m really curious when you were aware of stories being told on screen. What got you to the point of, “Oh.” Because before you decided, “I’m going to go to school to learn this,” you had to think, “This is a thing that’s interesting to me.” What are those original sparks? Were there things you were seeing? Were there plays you were seeing? How did it all start?

Celine: I think when I was very young – I was like seven – I wrote a poem about a spider eating a butterfly. The poem was about how it is sad that the spider is eating the butterfly, and the butterfly is getting eaten, but what can you do about it? Because spider is really hungry. Spider has to eat. I think that really is my first foray into writing really more than anything. I really do think about that as my first piece of work, because I think that there’s something about that, what that poem is about, that I think lives in me pretty fundamentally. For example, there not ever being any villains.

John: I want to get into that with Past Lives, because it’s a story without villains. I think you said in an interview the only villains are time and circumstance. It’s fate that’s made this thing not be possible in a certain way.

Celine: Time and space.

John: Of course, your characters are able to overcome some of that because of the wonders of technology and Skype, but there’s limits to how much that can happen. But still staying on your trajectory there, you’ve written a poem. You can write a story with characters. But why go into playwriting, why go into filmmaking ultimately, rather than becoming a poet or a novelist? What was the trajectory there? At this point, were you in Korea when you were writing that story? Had you already come over to Canada? What was your history there?

Celine: I wrote the poem in Korea, in Korean. Then when I turned, I think, 13 is when I moved to Canada. I was ESL, so I was learning English. I think that was a main thing that I was doing, and keeping up with schoolwork while being ESL. Eventually though, I took Latin in school, and I became a part of Classics Club.

In Ontario, where I grew up, Ontario, Canada, there is a classics conference. There they actually have a play competition, where you write a play and you get to put it on. There’s also a filmmaking competition, both of which I wrote and directed something for. Mind you, I was still a little ESL. But I wrote a movie and directed it, and then I wrote a play and directed it. This was high school. I think that those were some of the ways that I was just doing it sometimes, doing it any opportunity I could get.

But when I went to college, I went to university for psychology, and I minored in philosophy. I think that for a while there, I thought that I was going to be a psychologist. But I never made it, because in my final year as a psychology student, I wrote two plays for the short play festival that was happening at my university. I was like, “I think I just have to write fictional things, write dramatic things.” Then I think that after that, I started applying to grad school, and I decided to go to school for theater.

John: We have a lot of listeners who are ESL, who either they’re living in the States but grew up ESL, or they’re living internationally and they’re debating between writing in their own native language and writing in English. At what point were you deciding, “I’m going to focus on English,” or, “I’m going to use the two of them.” At what point did you feel like the artistic work needed to incorporate both or one thing? What was your process there?

Celine: I think that to me, it really has to do with who the audience is. I think that if I am making something for a Korean-speaking audience, then I would probably write it in Korean. But I think because my audience that I had moved to New York City to be a part of the community for is an English-speaking audience, so I was writing in English. I think it was very much about, how do I tell the story in a way that the audience is going to come meet it? Who’s going to fill the seats? I think that really was the impetus behind it.

I think something that is very difficult about being ESL is actually less the not knowing English of it, but the lack of confidence, or the way that it is harder to hold onto the confidence, especially as a writer. To be a professional writer, the professional writer means that you are the expert, you’re the chosen expert, or you’re the expert in a community for communication and being able to use language and being able to experiment with language, all of those things.

The ESL, it is, of course, a bit of a chip on your shoulder about, “Yeah, but it’s not my native language, so how good can I be?” That’s of course something that is coming from everyone around you, who when they find out that you’re ESL – or in my situation, I have a light accent for being an immigrant – and all of those things, there is a way in which you are questioned or underestimated by people who English is a native language. But some of that, I think that of course becomes a little bit internalized. So you walk around feeling like, “If I’m ESL, how good can I be?”

But I think that something that really shifted that for me and really gave me such confidence is that, actually, I have a handle on two languages. When I think about the language of English, being able to look at it objectively or think about it objectively or from the outsider perspective, even a little bit, gives me actually more control. It actually gives me a deeper understanding of how English as a language works.

There was a really amazing feeling that I had working on a play where I was like, actually, I am in the engine of the English language, because it didn’t come naturally to me. I didn’t just show up and then English was there for me. I actually had to learn the parts of it. In that way, I can be better at it than a native speaker.

In the meantime, I also have the context of an entirely different language that works completely differently structurally, that gives me the depths of knowledge around language, generally, that it makes me actually a better mechanic in general of any kind of language too. Also, I know what the alternative is. I’m like, “There isn’t a word for it in English, and there is a word for it in Korean.”

What an amazing thing that just the way that I think about the world, the way that I think about character, story, can be just a little bit bigger, because I speak more than one language. I think that that was such a big turning point for my life as ESL. I hope that moment and that feeling of confidence comes to all your listeners who are ESL as well.

John: What I hear you saying is to avoid that tendency to apologize or to step back from the fact that you’re not a native speaker and lean into the fact that because you had to learn it, you actually recognize some things about the language, and you recognize what’s beyond the edges of what’s possible in normal English.

Celine: Yeah, and also specificity. When I’m choosing a word, I can be more specific with it, because it’s not how I have always thought about that word. I can be really specific with it.

John: I grew up in English, but then I had Spanish very early on. Spanish was my first process of learning a language and actually learning, oh, there are verbs, there are nouns, there are adjectives. I actually had to learn all this structural stuff that comes with the language. Getting that in the third grade was really early for me, but it was incredibly helpful to recognize, oh, we must have these same things in English and probably every other language too, and just give you a systematic sense of like, languages will do very different things, but they’ll still have the same concepts behind how they are organizing themselves. It made me just more curious about English, because I could see where the roots of things were. You saw how things grew together and grew apart over time.

Celine: Exactly, yeah.

John: Now, I want to talk to you about writing in English and writing in Korean, because obviously in Past Lives, characters can speak Korean, and we will subtitle it, which is great, because that’s a convention of film is that we can subtitle things. But if you’re doing a play work with Korean characters, subtitling is much more difficult. I haven’t seen your play Endlings, but in that play, are the characters speaking English and speaking Korean? How do you approach that for the stage?

Celine: They speak English. I think that something that I really found is the way that Past Lives is a script that’s written is bilingually. I would write what I wanted the character to say in Korean, and underneath, I would translate it in the way that I saw the subtitles. And of course, I knew that the subtitles is a part of the story.

For example, there’s a scene in the film where the character Hae Sung, who only speaks Korean, the character Arthur, who only speaks English, they meet each other for the very first time. If this movie was about a traditional love triangle, they would start being angry with each other. Because this is an unconventional love triangle, what happens is that Hae Sung and Arthur, they look at each other, and then the first thing that they do is Arthur says hello in Korean, in bad Korean, and Hae Sung says hello in English to Arthur, and in bad English. I

n that way, you’re seeing that these two characters are trying to speak in the other person’s language, and really choosing to speak in a language that is not comfortable for themselves. I think in that way, the movie is fundamentally a bilingual story. It’s actually about bilingualism. It’s about the way that the main character, Nora, holds two parts of herself that are in different languages and different cultures. I think in that way, I knew it needed to be written bilingually, and I am bilingual myself, so that is what I wanted to do.

Then when it came to subtitling the film, I wanted the subtitles to be a part of the picture. It’s part of the visual language of it. When the subtitles show up or the subtitles don’t was something that I wanted to be really specific about, because some part of the language has to remain a mystery, because it is about the mystery of not speaking the other person’s language or not speaking the language of the person that you’re in a marriage with, even. It had to work that way.

John: Obviously, in the childhood sections that are set in Korea, or if you’re with Hae Sung and his friends who are speaking Korean, it’s more conventionally subtitled. You’ve written English lines. You know exactly what they need to be. But it feels more traditional in the New York sections, where there are characters who wouldn’t be able to speak with each other. You’ve been much more cinematic in terms of recognizing the communication gaps between them.

Celine: Of course. Of course, some of the translation is not meant for direct accuracy. It is sometimes rewritten to express the feeling that I need it to be. I think that sometimes it’s like, the metaphor, the poetry of it in English is not going to translate to Korean and vice versa. I think that those are the things that I wanted to be deep in it with, because that’s really what the script was about, and it’s what the movie’s about.

John: Now, before you could go off and make this movie, you actually had another credit. You’re working on Wheel of Time, the Amazon series. I’m really curious, what else were you writing that got you staffed on Wheel of Time? That was your first staffing job. Could you talk us through that? Because a lot of our listeners are probably thinking about, it seems impossible to be staffed on an American show like that. What was your process getting there?

Celine: I think I just wrote a pilot. I wrote a pilot as a spec pilot. It was about professional poker players. It was just there as a sample. It was a traditional three-act with commercial breaks, kind of like a hardcore TV pilot. But the thing is, I know that this is something the showrunner of Wheel of Time, Rafe, and I talked about as the reason why Rafe hired me, which is that Rafe doesn’t play poker, but when he read my pilot, he understood poker, if not the game itself, but what poker is at its heart. Even if you don’t know the mechanic of poker, you understood why poker is fun.

That is a skillset as a writer that he was looking for, because of course, Wheel of Time is a very intricate and deep, with magical systems, fantasy show. You need a writer who is able to translate just a wall of meaning kind of story and to find something that even somebody who’s not familiar with the world can love. I think that that’s why he loved the pilot and that’s why he hired me for it. Also, I am a TV writer who had read Wheel of Time before. I think that was another part that I think was really great.

John: I realize I’m falling into a trap that so often happens in interviews where you assume that every step was deliberate and planned, so that you wrote this pilot so you could get staffed on Wheel of Time. That wouldn’t be the case at all. You’ve gone and got your degree in playwriting, right, as a graduate degree?

Celine: Mm-hmm.

John: But what were those years in between? What were you trying to do that caused you to make the choices you did, to write the plays you did, to write this as a pilot? When did you get your first representation? What was that process like? Because it wasn’t overnight.

Celine: No, of course not. I think that if it is overnight, I think that you pay for it being overnight somewhere else in your career. Does that make sense?

John: Yeah.

Celine: I think that’s a very real thing. But it was certainly not overnight. I graduated from my MFA program for playwriting, and then I didn’t have representation. For many years, I think I really didn’t have anything except for my plays that were getting done in smaller spaces or off-off-Broadway, or if you’re lucky, a little bit of something at off-Broadway. So much of it is about just walking around with your play and submitting your play and hanging out with other playwrights and complaining about how no one’s doing our play. I think so much of it is about working in theater and living in theater.

John: Were you teaching? What else were you doing? What other jobs were you-

Celine: I would have a day job, or it would just be like getting by on things. I had a play that was getting done in Omaha, that got done in Chicago. Sometimes those checks would come in, and that would be really great. But it’s a check for like $500, which at the time was like, “Okay, now I can pay rent.” But it is like that.

I think that in 2017 – I’d been out of school for, I guess at that point, three years – is when I got my agent. I got my agent through, there’s this program at the public theater called Emerging Writers Group. Only people without agents can apply to that program. I went there, and at the end of the two-year program, they set you up on a few dates with agents. One of the agents that I went on a date with is my theater agent now as well. He’s at CAA. Of course, because of the nature of the agent that CAA is, they have many other departments besides theater.

I met my theater agent, and then he helped me get a team together. Then I told them that I would like to staff on something or something. Meanwhile, I was talking to my current film agent. I was telling her about, I’ve been thinking about this movie, Past Lives. I think it’s happening a little bit like that. It really is the work of my agents, who both got me the staff writing gig for Wheel of Time, because they’re the ones who put my poker pilot on Rafe’s desk.

John: Before we jump on to getting Past Lives made, just a moment on Wheel of Time, because that would be a situation where you’re writing in a room. You have a bunch of other writers around you. In what ways was it similar or different to what your experience was as a playwright? Because you were apparently in a playwrights community, so you had some folks around you, but this had to have been different.

Celine: Oh, completely different. But also, I think that the thing that carries us through all of it, through every medium, is our understanding and authorship of characters, story, what we need when it comes to performance. Everything that we know about what is going to work about the script is going to be the thing that carries us through all of it: story and character. That’s it. In that way, it’s not different, because all day in a writers’ room, we’re just talking about story and character. That’s what I was doing in theater. That’s what I was doing on the set of Past Lives too.

The way that it is different is that – especially for a show like Wheel of Time, where the fans of the books themselves is the audience. They’re the primary audience. They’re the ones that we are showing up for – it’s an amazing giving kind of a process. I found it to be a very giving process, where it’s like, “I would like it to be like this.” It’s like, no, no, no, these characters exist. These characters are also dealing with already existing beyond my own personal imagination. They exist in the audience’s imagination, and then of course it all begins with the imagination of the book itself. I think that some of it is about serving the characters or serving the story, which is not necessarily how I think about writing a play, for example.

I think that’s part of it, and also working with other writers on story and character. There’s always something to learn from any writer. My whole writers’ room, I learned so much from every single writer that I worked with there, because the way that I think about story is going to be different than the way they think about story. We may go my way or their way, but either way, it’s all going to be this amazing learning process of me learning how she thinks about the story this way and I think about the story this way. What an amazing thing that there is a different way to think about the same story. I think in that way, I learned so much from it. I don’t know. It was amazing.

John: Now, with Past Lives, you’ve now written a script. You have shown it to your reps. You’re talking about, “I think this is a movie I want to get made.” From those initial conversations, was it, “This is a thing I’ve written for myself to direct.” Was that always part of the framing of it?

Celine: I think that I really wanted to direct, and I really wanted them to see me as the director for it. But I think that it’s a script being written bilingually, and myself being bilingual, or it being such a personal story that is inspired by an autobiographical moment, all of these things were great reasons for them to let me be the director. I think that I was just also making an argument with the script itself, because the script was very much a pitch document for how I imagined this movie to get made. It wasn’t just a script for its own sake. It was very much a description of what I imagined the movie to be. I think these were all things that I was stacking up so that they would really seriously consider letting me direct it. Of course, when I got to, I was so happy.

John: It’s hard to imagine someone reading the script and then meeting you, and it’s like, “Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” or, “She doesn’t know what this is.” Clearly, it was very close to your personal experience. Let’s talk about the process of going out and trying to find producers, trying to find money, what that was like. You have this script, but you also have yourself. Was there a reel? Was there anything else you were showing to convince people this is the vision for the movie?

Celine: There was no reel. There was no deck. It really was just a script. I think it was a script and a conversation. I think that’s the truth of it, because my studio, A24, they read the script, and they felt the things that the audiences are feeling now about the movie at the end. They cried for the same reasons that the audiences are crying about Past Lives now. I think that they were moved by it genuinely. Then it wasn’t a long process from going from there to getting the movie green-lit.

John: To bring the movie into A24, was there a producer? Was Killer Films already attached to it, or did that come later on? Was it CAA who was taking it to A24, or was there other producers brought on first?

Celine: CAA’s bringing it to A24 first, because I always knew that, especially if I wanted to direct it, they’re the ones who take the risk.

John: That felt like the right studio for it, for sure.

Celine: They’re the right studio, because they’re the ones who take the risk on first-time filmmakers. They’ll just go for it that way. I think that we always knew that we wanted to end up there. I feel like that’s one of the first conversations. I feel like when we were there, when I’m talking to them, I think that so much of it is about instilling confidence in them that I can do it.

Besides that, the thing that really opened the door, and the thing I think that, especially because this is a podcast about writing, I feel like something I want to for sure say is that the script is the thing that bursts through every door for me. This movie was going to get made because of the script, and that’s it. I didn’t have to tell them what I could do by making a reel or a short film or anything. Those things were not necessary, because the script was a movie that they wanted to make.

Then from there, even beyond that, from the producers to department heads, every single person who worked in the movie, the thing they were coming to make this movie with me for is not me or my reel, because they’re coming to this project because of the script. Usually, I could tell who was right for the project by how they felt about the script, because of course, when I was talking to my production designer, I knew she was the right person right away, because we just started talking to each other about the script. I knew that this was the right person, because I knew that she understood the script.

It’s an amazing way to also, in a way, learn if this is the right person for the project, which is, did they understand the script? Did they feel the script? Did they feel connected to the script? If they did, they were going to work on the movie. The script was the center of gravity. All I had to do was to remember that even when I didn’t know how to make the movie, because my first movie, and I don’t know how to read a call sheet, even then, I just knew that as long as I hold the key to the script, as long as I’m the expert on the script that I wrote, I’m the ultimate authority on the project.

John: A thing we’ve talked about on the podcast a lot is that the script has to serve so many functions these days. Christopher Nolan was actually on the podcast recently talking about the same thing, which is that even at his level, the script is still the sales document. It’s not just the blueprint, but it’s also embodying the feeling of what this movie’s going to feel like. And that is not only getting the studio involved – A24 in your case – but also all your collaborators, just making sure that they recognize how they can fit into this vision of what you’re trying to do.

When we were meeting with crew for Big Fish or for Charlie’s Angels, those are very different scripts, but do they connect to the vision of it? Because if they don’t connect to the vision of it, they’re not going to be the right person for it. If they don’t get the style, the feel of it, they’re not going to be the right fit, and that’s okay.

Celine: Of course.

John: It’s recognizing that some relationships are meant to work in that thing, and some relationships aren’t. Sometimes you find issues where a person is fantastic; they’re just not the right person for this specific role, this specific part in a production. Sometimes longtime collaborators will split up on a thing, because it’s just not the right fit for both of them.

Celine: I think that’s right about it being the sales document, but I also think about it as the first line of defense too, as in what the project is and how well it’s going to go or what’s going to work about it is going to be all in there. Part of the vision for a thing is coming out of that.

The vision for it, it’s like, I can make as many mood boards as I want. If the story and character and dialog, what the performance needs to be, if those things are not there, there’s no amount of mood boarding that’s going to get any director through anything. I feel like a part of the reason I know that is because I’ve been a writer for the longest part of my life. I also know that so much of it is coming from, that’s the first step towards the vision for it. It is going to completely dictate the vision for it, especially if I am the one who’s directing it. I think you’re right; it also is about collaborators. Maybe it’s just not right for them to work on it, even though they are longtime collaborators and all of that.

But I also think that it’s like, the director is the person who is the passionate core of the whole thing, the writer director, because the script is the center of gravity. And then, of course, all around it, part of how it should work is that the fire that you have, the fire that the script communicates – because that’s how it is. I know that there’s a fire in me that I’m communicating through the script. When they read the script, when they encounter the script, the people who might work on the movie, either it’s going to set them on fire, or they’re not going to understand why it is on fire. Then what you’re hoping for is everybody showing up burning to make this make this movie with you. I think in that way the document has to be damn flammable.

John: Exactly. Now, Celine, when you wrote this script though, this flammable script, you had not been through the process of casting and location scouting and directing and editing, all that stuff. You’ve now gone through all this process. As you’re looking at the writing you’re doing now and the writing going forward, how much do you think the experience of having been through this will influence the words on the page and the script you’re writing going forward?

Celine: Completely. Everything that one does is built on the things that one has done before. I think in that way, without question. I do think that there are parts of going through the whole process that I had done before. For example, casting, I had done before, because I was in theater.

Editing, I realized, I had done before, because editing is such a fundamental part of writing. Editing is something that is happening all the time. Of course, in the editing of a film, you’re also editing it visually on top of it just being text or it just being the way that a performance is going. It’s a funny thing, because those parts, I had no fear or problem around, because this is a thing that I knew how to do.

Editing I knew how to do and casting I knew how to do. Being on set, I did not know how to do. Location scouting, some parts of it, I know what it is, because at the very least, I knew when it wasn’t right, and I knew when it was right. In that way I knew. But now, when I go on location scout, will I actually be able to look at it through the eyes of someone who actually has to go and shoot it? Absolutely. There are parts of prep that I think I just feel so much more equipped for because of it. The writing of it, of course, has always been the way it’s always been. The writing of it is the same.

I do think that I am more efficient though in my second script, my script after Past Lives, because I think that I can already imagine myself sitting in the edit and being like, “Did I need to shoot that scene?” What’s amazing is now that I know what kind of resources are put into shooting a scene, it means in the case of our film, which is, of course, shot in New York, it’s about parking 20 trucks in New York City and bringing hundreds of people around New York City. The work of that, the pain of that, the effort of that, the collective, beautiful effort, the stakes that are involved in shooting a scene I think really does inform the way that I write now, as in when I write a scene, it’s always like, “Is this absolutely the scene that has to be in the film?” The answer has to always be yes, because otherwise, you’re going to be sitting in the editing, it’s like, “Look at the half a million dollars just-”

John: Burning there, yeah.

Celine: “… on the editing room floor.”

John: I made a bunch of movies before I directed my first one. I knew a lot about production and post-production and how it all fit together and worked. But by the time I was writing my first thing that I’m going to direct, I could understand what the constraints were and use those constraints in a really helpful way, to recognize, okay, these locations are going to be onerous unless I make decisions that makes it much more feasible to shoot in these locations.

Recognizing what’s hard and what’s easy in production can really help you out when it comes to making the choices in the script. That’s why we always, on this podcast, encourage people to crew up on a film, experiment, just go out there and learn how actual things get made, because it will help you figure out, in your own writing, how to prioritize if stuff is actually going to work and not get so stuck on things that may end up on the cutting room floor.

Celine: Yeah, totally.

John: We have two listener questions I think you would be a perfect person to help out with here. Drew, can you help us out?

Drew: Nikolai in Denmark writes, “I would love nothing more than to find a writing job in Los Angeles. However, I’m currently an undergraduate student studying literature in Copenhagen, and there’s 5,000 miles and two years of school before even buying a plane ticket to LA is feasible. I was wondering if you think going to a top screenwriting program in LA could be a path towards finding a job, any job, right out of college and starting a career that way.”

Celine: I think that the moving to LA of it feels pretty necessary if you want to make movies in LA. My favorite part of moving to New York City to go to school in New York is also finding the community there, because I didn’t have a community at all in New York City. When I got to go there, I got to meet my classmates, which was a built-in community that comes with the school. They themselves had communities of their own that they could share with me. In that way, I could walk into New York City with the community built in, and one that is expanding. In that way, it was a really rewarding process.

The thing that I don’t think that a MFA program necessarily does for you is make you a better writer, because I think that you walk in as a writer you are, and then you become a better writer by writing a lot in a low-stakes way, which is something amazing about these writing programs. What’s amazing is that you can keep writing and sharing it with peers and keep failing and being bad and all of those things, without there being any professional stakes or any kind of financial stakes, except for, of course, the tuition fee. That’s a stake. But as long as that’s figured out, I think you are able to fail outside of the view of anybody who is in the industry or anything for a really long time. I think through that, you become a better writer.

Of course, one can find mentorship in the professors, who have gone through the industry and the life as an artist for far longer than you have, or far deeper than you have, at least. They’re able to provide such mentorship or a sense of how to navigate certain things. These are some of the things that really work about it.

Now, if you think that you’re going to move to LA and go to school there and then you’re going to have a career outside of it when you come out of it, I think, unfortunately, that is not a guarantee, to say the least. You still got to do it yourself. Every single part of this is something that you have to do yourself. No one else can do it for you, not even the grad school program that you’re paying a lot of money to go to.

John: Celine, you and I both have MFAs. No one has ever asked to see our MFA.

Celine: Oh my god. Why would they? I wouldn’t ask to see my MFA.

John: A huge plus one on everything you said. I think it’s such good advice, that you’re going to find a community and some mentorship, and those are all good things about a film program. The downside, of course, is the cost. What is probably useful for Nikolai to be thinking about is that getting into one of these programs is a way to get his visa and get him to the U.S. and get him here for two years. That’s worth a lot, so that’s really a lot of what you’re going to be spending your money on.

If you decide to do it, Nikolai, I would just say make sure you’re really approaching this as this is your mission, this is your job. You’re coming here to do a thing, because you’re only going to get out of one of these programs as much as you put in. Really be looking at it like, “I’m full speed going ahead.” If you don’t think you’re quite ready for it right after undergrad, then take a year, just grow up a little bit, so that way you would actually come to a program, you’re ready to kick ass in it. Drew, another question from Jacob here.

Drew: Jacob writes, “My writing partner and I just finished writing the pilot for a comedy show we’re developing. We’ve begun inviting our writer and actor friends to join us for a table read, so that we can hear our script out loud and hopefully get some honest feedback. My writing partner and I are in disagreement. Do we share the script ahead of time for our writer and actor friends, or do we have them read it blind?”

John: Celine, what’s your instinct on table reads? Because you probably do this in theater as well.

Celine: Theater is just all table reads. Theater is just reading after reading after reading. I actually have trouble really seeing the script that I’ve written, whether it’s a play or a screenplay, unless I’ve heard it out loud in a little room full of my friends.

My answer to this question is I think that they should read it blind, as though they are your audience, because how good the performance is in the reading is not helpful. In fact, I really don’t personally ever invite actors to the reading of my first draft, because actors can make the script sound a lot better than it is. We love actors, and we rely on them so much, but I think sometimes what happens is the actors are also auditioning for the role when they’re reading it. Sometimes that’s undue pressure on the script.

I think the performance part of it is not necessarily valuable for a script, because what you would need from that reading is objectivity. What you need from that reading is the way that the story and the writing itself is hitting the first very small group of audience. I usually invite fellow writers or people who are not in the industry or something, but are able to read on sight.

I’m sure you can go through your list of friends, and you can find a funny list there. But I think it’s usually somebody whose main job is not being an actor and somebody who’s able to read on sight and is able to be clear in their reading, but does not have high stakes when they show up, and will talk to you, like a very first audience member, and who’s not going to be weird or mean about anything, who’s not going to be strange about it, but who’s going to be a wonderful vibe on top of everything. I think that once you find some of those people, I think they’re the folks who have to read it.

But I don’t think you should show it in advance, because you just want to see the way that the script is hitting them live, because that’s where you’re going to learn if the script is working. If the joke doesn’t hit, you don’t want to wonder if the reason why the joke didn’t hit is because they already read the joke and they already laughed about it. You want to see if the joke actually isn’t hitting the audience or that it is actually hitting the audience.

John: Mike Birbiglia, when he is doing one of his movies, he will bring over a group of friends, and with pizza. I think he’s very deliberately, like what you say, lowering the stakes. No one is auditioning for a part. They’re just reading through the script and getting a sense of does this feel like it’s working. They can have constructive conversations. Agreed, Celine; if you bring an actress to do that, they can sell something that doesn’t really quite work. There’s that feeling that they’re auditioning for stuff, and that can just be really tough, so I think really smart advice here.

It’s time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our audience that they should check out, something useful or fun. Mine is something I just find myself using all the time. I don’t think I’ve talked about it on the podcast before. It’s called Shottr. It’s an app for the Macintosh which basically just takes screenshots.

So often, there’s something on your screen that you want to take a shot of and send to somebody or remember. You have the built-in screenshotting stuff in the Mac, but then it just saves it as some randomly named file. This is an app that you hit the keyboard command, take your little screenshot, and then you can just do stuff with it. You can mark it up. You can annotate it. You can put little arrows, like, “This is the problem.” It just makes life so much easier and handier. A quick little utility. I think it’s five bucks. Called Shottr. It’s S-H-O-T-T-R dot-CC is the URL for it. Check it out if you’re on Macintosh and you take some screenshots. Celine, do you have anything to recommend?

Celine: Yes. Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s what I recommend.

John: Oh my god, it’s so amazing. We talk about it on the podcast all the time. Tell us, Celine, who are you playing as your hero, and what’s your experience in it?

Celine: I am a custom character. Her name is Faunta. Part of it is that I just treat it as a story mode dating sim a little bit.

John: 100 percent, because you’re trying to connect with all the different characters in the game.

Celine: Exactly. I think you can play it however you want. It’s one of the most in-depth storytelling, I don’t even know what to call it, storytelling thing that I’ve ever experienced.

John: Isn’t it just so well written? I’m flabbergasted how well it’s put together.

Celine: It’s beautifully written. I’m fully invested in the characters. I’m fully invested in the story. Of course it has so many things that are usually just fantasy things, like the magic. It’s because it’s so foundational to the fantasy genre, the Dungeons and Dragons of it anyway. I think that those things are all there, but I think even beyond that, I just feel so immersed in it. I really do think that these characters are living and walking around in that way. I don’t know. I’m just so moved by it. I’m obsessed with it. I play it all the time.

I think that as a storytelling thing, I’m just, you’re right, flabbergasted. I’m just totally blown away by how good it is, and how I’ll just get into a story, and I’ll be so in it, and it’ll be so complex. The characters are all responding to it in an unbelievably sophisticated way.

John: Then to recognize how many branching decisions they had to plan for, because is that character even still alive at this point? Has Astarion ever met this character? It’s wild.

Celine: Of course. The consequence is real. There are real consequences to the story. It’s not like, however you play, you’re going to all end up here. No, you may not end up there. You may have a completely different situation. Now, you cannot deal with this character that way anymore because of what you’ve done last chapter. I don’t know. I’m just so into it. My TikTok algorithm is all Baldur’s Gate right now. Anyway, it’s so good.

John: The YouTube algorithm keeps sending me videos of like, here’s the interactions you missed or when Minthara becomes a zombie. It’s all the different wild things that could happen because of choices character make.

Celine: Of course.

John: Just that sense of agency that it gives you as the protagonist, whatever your hero is in it is just really remarkable.

Celine: It’s really remarkable, yeah.

John: Basically, we have a podcast now where we talk about how good Baldur’s Gate 3 is, but it’s true. It’s really, really good.

Celine: It’s true. It is really, really good. Game of the year.

John: What’s also really, really good is Past Lives, your film. Congratulations on it. Congratulations on your nominations. It’s such a delight to see. I remember my first experience with Past Lives was I was on a long international flight, and the woman next to me was watching Past Lives. I wasn’t even sure what it was. I could see Greta Lee and just some movie there. She must’ve watched it like three times on the flight. I’m like, why are you watching this movie again and again and again? I waited and watched it in a proper non-airplane environment. But it really is so well done, so congratulations on everything you’ve achieved so far.

Celine: Thank you so much.

John: I can’t wait to see what you do next.

Celine: Thank you. It’s in movie theaters again.

John: That’s exciting.

Celine: So amazing.

John: People can see it.

Celine: So exciting.

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

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on The Seagull staged in Sims 4. Celine Song, absolute pleasure having you on the show.

Celine: Thanks for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

John: When I saw this in your bio, I knew I had to talk to you about this. You staged a version of The Seagull, the classic play, but you staged it inside Sims 4 and streamed it on Twitch; is that right?

Celine: Mm-hmm.

John: Talk to us about your impetus behind doing that. I also would just love to talk about this notion of theater kind of things that happen online. Tell us about how this came to be.

Celine: It was just really during COVID. The theater that I had a play, Endlings, done at, because of COVID, had shut down prematurely. We had two weeks of previews, we had opening night and then we got to do one more performance, and then the play got shut down. I was, of course, so heartbroken.

Then I think the theater was, because it is so much about people gathering and it’s about live performance, that I think there were questions about what theater community can be doing at this moment to make theater. I think that New York Theater Workshop, which is the theater that did Endlings, they asked me if I want to do anything in the virtual space, whether a Zoom play or whatever. They were like, “Whatever you want to do, we’ll do it. We’ll do a production of it, whatever it may be.”

I really just thought at that moment, it’s like, “I’ve been watching a lot of live performance, actually,” and a lot of live performances in the video game streaming world, where all of these characters and personalities, they were streaming video games. It’s a funny durational performance in a way, because they’re streaming for like six hours playing Overwatch or something. I was watching a lot of it. In fact, there is all the joys of a live performance in that. There’s something about it where there’s the spontaneity in it. There is a bit of like, we know what we’re going to do, but it also is a little bit unknown, we don’t actually know what’s going to happen, feeling of it.

I think that at that moment, I was like, “What if I was to stage a play in a video game?” Then a thought I had was, because The Sims is, I’ve always felt, so Chekhovian, because The Sims is about life as it is, and the difficulty of life as it is, and the pain of living as it is. Those are things that are fundamental to a Chekhov play. My favorite Chekhov play is The Seagull. It really was that the New York Theater Workshop called me, and then I think on that phone call I came up with the idea. I was like, “What if I stage a play in The Sims? It should be a Chekhov play, maybe The Seagull.” I think that’s really the process for it.

Then of course, what I really loved is that when I was doing the play, the two completely different communities came together. Then of course, there was community that had a relationship to both sides, which is the people who are theater goers, who never watch video game streaming, who don’t have a relationship to video games, and video game players and video game stream watchers, who don’t actually know anything about the classic play. Then there were those of us who were in the middle of that Venn diagram, where we are in a circle that contains both of those communities. We were like, “We know video games. We play Sims. We grew up on Sims. That’s part of our community. But also, we know what Chekhov is.” I think that all three groups of people came together.

I staged a play for two nights. I think each performance, quote unquote, was four hours each, and it happened over two nights. It started from me basically casting and costuming the characters to going through all four acts of the play.

John: That’s great. I remember during the pandemic, my daughter was in high school at the time, and she was involved with theater. Their plays got knocked to being Zoom plays. One of them was more traditional. One of them was just chaos. It was interesting to be able to experience this as a live event – a sort of live event. My mom could watch it from Colorado. People could participate in something in a way that wasn’t traditional. And yet I do feel like I associated so strongly with the pandemic and being trapped in that place that it’s hard for me to vision them trying to do that kind of thing now. And yet there was something really amazing about that new form being out there.

What do you see as things you took from that or things you’ve seen since then that we could keep doing, bringing weird communities together, or finding new ways to stage either classic things or storytelling that is meant to be streamed live, versus a classic either filmed or stage entertainment? What do you think is still entertainment in that space?

Celine: The ancient way of storytelling, which is just the setup, the revelation, introducing a character, you see the rise and fall of that character, there is certain things about storytelling that is fundamental in the bones of it. It’s always going to be, no matter in what form and no matter in what generation, is going to just work, because as a story, that just works. I think it’s about remembering that part while we are adapting and navigating the new realities, the new ways of watching things, the new ways of hearing stories, new ways of telling stories.

I think that even through all of that, what I find over and over again is that there are stories that endure, and these are the stories that have existed forever. We know that cavemen told these stories. To know that those stories are still going to be the same stories that is going to move us, that’s going to mean something to us, I think that it is to hold these two contradictory thoughts themselves. I don’t think we can stop progress or the way the technology is coming in or the way that storytelling as a form is changing all the time. I don’t think it’s possible for… It’s like trying to stop the ocean with your hand.

But I know that even through all of that, what I’ve learned, and what I’ve also learned through telling the story that is Past Lives, and to tell it globally, and to tell it to every generation, it is always that every step of the way, what works about the Past Lives story is one that would’ve worked on the cavemen too. I think it’s that. It sounds contradictory, but I know it’s not, the feeling that it’s both. It is that it is eternally traditional and conventional and ancient and that it is brand new. It’s always changing. It’s always different.

John: On this thread of classic stories or ancient stories or retold in different ways, I want to acknowledge that Sleep No More is closing in New York. Sleep No More as an experiential place, where the story was happening around you, and yet you weren’t always seeing all parts of it. In some ways is like Baldur’s Gate, in which you’re not going to catch all the threads. There’s no way to actually see all the different possible branches of it. I do think there’s room for experimentation. There’s room to try new things.

Some of our listeners who are probably so focused on, “I want to staff on a TV show,” or, “I want to go make a movie,” should not discount the possibility that there could be some fascinating way to tell a story that’s not part of those traditional buckets, and do that if it’s interesting to them, because they are more likely to find that new thing than an established filmmaker is to do it. They have the freedom and the access and the membership in a community that might be able to help them find a new way to tell a story.

Celine: Of course. Also, the truth is that everybody’s looking for the thing that worked before. I think some of it is about how we break through the risk-averseness of the industry.

John: Celine, absolute pleasure talking with you about this as well.

Celine: So fun. Thank you so much.

Links:

• Celine Song on IMDb and Instagram
• Past Lives
• The Seagull on The Sims 4
• The Wheel of Time
• A real bald eagle call vs a red-tailed hawk
• Deadwood and The American President
• Shottr
• Baldur’s Gate 3
• 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 Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and 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-fandom-menace).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 628 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, Craig and I will discuss how things get cool, then hot, then terrible. We’ll have listener questions and a ton of follow-up, including about secret projects and alternative screenplay formats, something that Craig is always into talking about.

**Craig:** I’m into it.

**John:** In our bonus segment for premium members, we will look at various fandoms and do our best to absolutely enrage them.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** Oh, no. That’s why we put it behind the paywall. If you want to be angry with you, you gotta pay us some money.

**Craig:** Pay $5 to watch us get beat into a pulp. Fun.

**John:** Craig, we missed you last week. Aline was on, and we discussed How Would This Be a Movie. We had some new topics for How Would This Be a Movies. Also, this week, I was looking through the chapter on picking which movie to write, for the Scriptnotes book. I mentioned, oh, a bunch of our previous How Would This Be a Movies have become movies. I had Drew get on the case to figure out how many of those that we discussed actually did become movies. The number is shocking. Drew’s going to help us out, talking through the things that became movies, the things that became documentaries, and the things that are in development right now. Drew.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Talk us through how many of these projects have actually been made since we discussed them.

**Drew Marquardt:** Twelve of these have actually been made as narrative feature films.

**Craig:** Jeez. Wow.

**Drew:** Or series.

**John:** Also, Craig, you start to realize, man, we’ve been doing this for 10 years, so some of them I knew, like The 15:17 to Paris, which is about those Americans who prevented the terrorist attack. That was a Clint Eastwood movie. I knew that happened. Zola we talked about at the Austin Film Festival. That became a movie. Do you remember The Hatton Garden Job, which was the old men-

**Craig:** The old guys, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, the heist. Two of those happened.

**Craig:** They made two of those?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like that. You’re making the movie, and someone’s like, “We’ve gotta beat the other The Hatton Garden Job movie.” Oh, business.

**John:** Business, business. But Drew, talk us through some of the other things we had in How Would This Be a Movie.

**Drew:** There was also The Act, which was the Dee Dee Blanchard and Gypsy-Rose Blanchard.

**John:** She just got out of prison, right? I didn’t really follow that story closely.

**Craig:** Yeah. Apparently, our daughters’ generation is obsessed with Gypsy-Rose and her impending freedom, or freedom. She’s become a cult hero among the children, because she murdered someone or whatever.

**John:** What else we got, Drew?

**Drew:** There’s also The Mandela Effect, which was just the idea that we had talked about, but they made into a feature. There’s Stolen By My Mother: the Kamiyah Mobley Story, which was the young woman who discovered she was kidnapped as a baby by the woman she thought was her mom.

**Craig:** I don’t even remember that one.

**John:** I don’t remember that one at all.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Drew:** There’s the Danish series The Investigation, which is about Kim Wall’s murder.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It’s a submarine murder. That’s right.

**Drew:** Six Triple Eight, which is in post-production right now, but Tyler Perry directed it. It’s about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, which was the predominantly Black battalion of women during World War II in the Army Corps.

**John:** I do remember that. I remember thinking, “Is there enough of a story there?” It was a part of history I didn’t know existed. We’ll see if there’s a story there.

**Drew:** We have How to Murder Your Husband, which was about the woman who wrote the book How to Murder Your Husband and then murdered her husband.

**Craig:** Oh, murder lady. Come on.

**John:** It’s a great title, so that’s why it needed to happen.

**Craig:** How to murder your husband, step 1: don’t write a thing about how to murder your husband. Jeez.

**John:** It could actually go on endlessly, because if you make a movie called How to Murder Your Husband, everyone’s going to suspect you of murdering your husband. It’s perfect.

**Craig:** Now I’m rooting for that person to murder their husband. What else did we do?

**Drew:** Death Saved My Life they made into a Lifetime movie, which is the wife who showed up at her own funeral, because her husband had her killed but not well.

**Craig:** Oh, man.

**John:** Death Saved My Life, I guess that’s a good title. It’s a good Lifetime title. It’s a good book title, so sure, I’ll get that.

**Craig:** I’m with them.

**Drew:** There’s Dumb Money, which came out last year.

**John:** We talked about that. It’s about the GameStop situation and story. Not at all surprised that happened.

**Craig:** No, considering that I personally received multiple calls from multiple companies about it.

**John:** As did I.

**Craig:** I was like, “Okay, apparently they’re making this thing.”

**John:** Craig, you and I should’ve both taken the job for different companies and just raced to see which one-

**Craig:** Wow. Just go head to head in the theaters.

**Drew:** Then finally, Holiday Road, which I think might’ve been a TV movie, but that was the 13 stranded strangers who all rent a van together when they can’t get a flight.

**Craig:** Here’s my question. Of all of these, how was our batting average on predicting whether or not they would be made?

**John:** That could be good follow-up for Drew, because I don’t think you went through and looked at that. Drew, maybe for next week, can you take a look at, of those movies, how many did we say, okay, that’s definitely going to happen?

**Drew:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Similarly, were there any where we were like, “Never in a million years will anyone make this.”

**John:** That’s what I’m excited to see. We’ll put it on the blog so people can see which of these movies happened and which one didn’t. But you also found 10 things that are in development, including-

**Craig:** Jeez.

**John:** … one about Jim Obergefell, the Hulk Hogan Gawker lawsuit, Dr. James Barry, who was a gender-fluid Victorian doctor, which I remember we thought was really interesting, and apparently is Rachel Weisz. Feels like the perfect casting for that.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** There’s the PTA mom for drug dealing. You May Want to Marry My Husband. These Witchsy founders who formed a fake male co-founder.

**Drew:** Brie Larson got that one.

**Craig:** Oh, nice.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** McDonald’s Monopoly.

**Craig:** That one is a great one.

**John:** The Scottish hip-hop hoax. Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. There’s a bunch of those things. That was also a thing that came to me a couple times. There probably will be a Sam Bankman-Fried movie. I think it’s tough. I think the relative lack of success of Dumb Money is going to very much hurt the Sam Bankman-Fried movie, but we’ll see.

**Craig:** They’re going to make it anyway.

**John:** George Santos, there’s at least one movie. That’s right, we talked about that, the George Santos movie, the one that Frank Rich is doing.

**Craig:** All I need to know is Frank Rich. I’m in. That’s great. This is pretty remarkable. Similarly, I’m interested to see if any of these we thought were not even worthy of development. The conceited question is, hey, are people listening to us and then just rushing out to get this done? But I suspect not. I suspect there is an industry of assistants that are doing nothing but Buzzfeed-style collating whatever buzzy news item of the day is and putting it in front of people, and then there’s just a general race to get rights and make a thing. It is amazing how many of these are getting made.

**John:** I was just surprised at the total numbers here. We’ll also include in the blog post the ones that were made as documentaries, because I think a thing we often talked about is, is the best version of this a fictionalized version, or do we just want to see the documentary series that tracks that, which in some cases may be more compelling.

**Craig:** That’s very interesting. Good to know that we’re not just wildly off, at least with the things we’re considering. I root for all movies.

**John:** Root for movies and TV series. Some more follow-up. We talked two episodes ago about accurate but distracting, so things that, if you put them in your script, they might be actually accurate to what happens in real life, but would be distracting to the viewer or to the reader. We have some follow-up from that.

**Drew:** Richard in Boston writes, “There’s an example of this that historical fiction writers have to deal with called the Tiffany Problem. It was coined by fantasy writer Joe Walton. The Tiffany Problem describes the tension between historical fact and the average, everyday person’s idea of history. If you’re reading a book that takes place in medieval times, you’ll have trouble believing that a character’s name could be Tiffany, even though Tiffany is actually a medieval name that goes back to the 12th century. But in our modern perception of the medieval world, Tiffany just doesn’t fit. Even though authors might research carefully and want to include historically accurate information in their book, like a medieval character named Tiffany, a popular audience likely won’t buy it.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Totally tracks. I love that as a name for that phenomenon.

**Craig:** That really does track. I would absolutely be stopped in my tracks if there was a scene in a medieval story and Tiffany shows up. That would just seem anachronistic. That’s a great example. I guess in the end, it really doesn’t… There’s no victory in saying afterwards, “No no no, Tiffany was a name,” because people are like, “I guess now that I know, that’s interesting, but in the meantime, it screwed up my enjoyment of this story.” Tiffany. All right. I like that.

**John:** Now, I don’t want to get Drew’s mailbox overflowing with stuff, but if you are a listener who has another example of something that really does match the Tiffany Problem, which is basically something that is historically accurate or accurate to true life but is distracting if you were to encounter it, I’d love more examples of that, because it feels like Tiffany’s great, but I think we can find more ways that this manifests.

A thing I’ve talked about on the show a lot is that when I want a bedtime book, I love a book that is really interesting and completely forgettable, that you can read, and the minute you set the book down, you don’t think about it, so you can fall back asleep. I’ve been reading some books on counterfactual history, basically like, what if this thing happened in a certain way.

**Craig:** Alternative history, yeah.

**John:** Love it. One of the stories I wasn’t familiar with was Arminius, who’s also known as Hermann, who’s the German barbarian chief who drove back the Romans at a certain time. In reading this account of Arminius, “That’s a fascinating movie. I’m surprised no one has made a movie about that. Let me Google and see why no one has made a movie about it.” It turns out there’s two seasons of a Netflix show that is specifically about that. There’s just too much-

**Craig:** Netflix.

**John:** … Netflix.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** There’s just too much Netflix.

**Craig:** It’s almost like Netflix has become like Google, but instead of getting a search result, you get a series.

**John:** Yes, exactly.

**Craig:** It’s insane.

**John:** I looked at the trailer. It looked great. I’m like, “Great. Someone has already made the thing I was thinking about making.” Congratulations. I will say I’ve not watched a frame of the actual series. They shot it in Latin and in German, which feels great.

**Craig:** Whoa. That’s impressive.

**John:** Kudos to them. Kudos to everybody involved in making Barbarians, which I may watch at some point, I may not watch at some point. But I know it’s out there, and I know that I, John August, don’t have to write it. That sometimes is the greatest relief.

**Craig:** Apparently, we don’t have to write anything, because Netflix did it.

**John:** Another thing I don’t have to write is the Harry Potter series.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** Episode 623, I talked about a project. This is when we were talking about bake-offs. I talked about a project that had come into my orbit, and they asked, “Hey, would you want to adapt this very popular piece of IP.” I’m sure, Craig, you were guessing it was Harry Potter. We can now reveal it was Harry Potter. They’re doing a Harry Potter series for HBO Max or Max. Deadline posted a story about who the finalists were who are going through the process. I wish them all well. They did find people who have good, proper credits. I do wish them well. I do think it’s just a very hard road ahead for them.

**Craig:** I have no inside information on this. I work at HBO, but no one has ever talked to me about Harry Potter. I don’t know what it is. It seems like it’s about adapting the books. That was what I initially thought. But then they’re saying in this article, “We’ve heard that the group of writers were commissioned by Max.” First of all, that’s cool that they’re paying them.

**John:** Yeah, they’re paying somebody.

**Craig:** “To create pitches for a series reflecting their take on the IP.” Now, I guess my question is – and this is my dum-dum question – what take? I thought that the idea was, we’re going to take each book and adapt it fully over a season, because those books are big. When they were adapted into movies, very successfully, of course they had to do quite a bit of compacting. I guess maybe there’s more to it than that. I don’t know. I’m fascinated by this.

I would be terrified to be one of these people. They’re way braver than I am. There’s something very scary about knowing that there’s somebody somewhere else doing what you were doing, to try and do what you’re doing, and maybe will do what you do instead of you. It’s scary. But I do think on the plus side, they’re being paid, so that’s actually quite good. On the downside, I could also see where this becomes this cottage industry, where you’re paying people to do these pitches, but you’re not paying that much. The thing about pitching a season is you have to do quite a bit of work.

**John:** Oh god, so much.

**Craig:** That’s definitely an imposing prospect. I guess for something that is as huge as Harry Potter is – and it is – it’s almost as close as you can get to a guaranteed success, as far as I can tell. I can see why it is like this, because I assume also that these people will have to meet with JK Rowling and get along with her, because she’s always part of it.

**John:** If you look at the attempts to expand the franchise beyond those books, they’ve not succeeded. They’ve succeeded in physical spaces. I feel like the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, tremendous success, those things, but the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them have had diminishing returns. Hardcore Harry Potter fans are not as enamored with those as with the original books, of course. It looks like, based on this article – and we don’t know the inside truth here – is that some of these takes may be moving outside of the books, some of them may be more faithful adaptations of the books.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Those movies, I guess they did well enough for them to make more. They ran into some trouble, because Johnny Depp suddenly was in a situation. They may have not been the size of the original Harry Potter films, but I think they were doing okay. The Harry Potter play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is a phenomenon, our friend Jack Thorne being the primary playwright there. Well, the playwright. I guess, technically, Jack wrote the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child from an original story by him, JK Rowling, and John Tiffany. Tiffany. Then the Harry Potter video game was an enormous hit.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** In the world of video games, there are some enormous hits. When they are enormous, they dwarf what we do. That was one of them.

**John:** I guess I should restate that they’ve had a hard time expanding it out as a filmed franchise, but this is maybe possible, going to happen. For folks who are looking at, oh, what is a popular book series that did not get a good treatment, Percy Jackson. The movies were not a big success. The new series on Disney Plus is terrific. For folks who are curious about that, really worth watching. I thought it was just a very smart adaptation, much more faithful to the books. My daughter, who grew up reading those books, loved it. They really are quite enjoyable. It was well cast. So difficult to get great performances from young actors, and this succeeded in it.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’d recommend it for people.

**Craig:** Great. We wish those folks the best of luck. I don’t know if they’ll want to do this, but when it’s all done and the winner of, what is it, the tri-cup wizard, the tri-wizard tournament, whoever wins the big cup that actually turns out to be a Horcrux or, no, a Portkey, it would be great to have them on our show, just to talk about the process, if they’re willing.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** It’s fascinating to me. I get it, but also, it makes me nervous.

**John:** It does. Also, I think you have to look at are you going with people who are familiar with the movie series or new folks. That’s a challenging [crosstalk 16:09].

**Craig:** I could be wildly off here, but I suspect that the Harry Potter books are transgenerational, that people who read them as children are now reading them to their children, that they aren’t going anywhere ever.

**John:** I don’t know that to be the case. I feel like there’s been such a backlash against JK Rowling that I wonder if that’s still the case.

**Craig:** There is a backlash against JK Rowling on Twitter and social media, no question. I don’t think that that has translated into the actual audience and how they interact with the stories and the characters. I will cite the video game again, because when the video game came out, that was thick in the middle-

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** … of JK Rowling and her controversies. People were really angry about the game and angry at the game, and yet it sold a gazillion copies. There is a disconnect, I think, between… There’s a topic. One day we should probably jump on the third rail, John, and discuss the notion of separating the art from the artist, because this comes up all the time.

**John:** For sure. Noted for future discussion is how we separate those things. We’ll find some other good examples of what do you do with problematic people who also make art.

**Craig:** Roald Dahl.

**John:** Roald Dahl, Joss Whedon. It’s tough. There’s that tendency to retroactively discount the thing that they were able to make and do, because we now believe that they’re terrible people.

**Craig:** There’s also this weird phenomenon of feeling guilty about enjoying something. Roald Dahl said a lot of really antisemitic stuff. Not mildly. Very. I love Roald Dahl books. I do. I love them. I really enjoy the Wes Anderson Henry Sugar adaptation. I feel like I’m a little like, “Should I?” Then I’m like, “I really like the stories.”

**John:** Let’s talk about some UK writing credits. In 625, I think we were answering a listener question about UK credits, and we said we know they work differently. Tom wrote in with some follow-up about that.

**Drew:** Tom is the chair of the Writers Guild of Great Britain Film Committee, which is the WGGB. He writes, “Per the question from the British writer, I thought that you and indeed he would be interested to know that the WGGB and the Producers Alliance of Cinema and Television, or PACT, negotiated the screenwriting credits agreement way back in 1974. This agreement is referenced in the 1992 basic screenwriting agreement between our two organizations. Both these agreements are in the process of being updated, as we seek to bake in some of the gains secured in last year’s WGA strike, so thank you for that. We operate under a different labor framework in the UK, so these agreements are only advisory. Specific clauses can be negotiated out, though obviously we discourage that. Most screen credits are agreed in consultation between the producers and the writers in question. However, the Writers Guild of Great Britain does arbitrate on small number of credit disputes every year, following similar guidance to that used by the WGA.”

**John:** That’s great. It’s good to have some answers there.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is not surprising. The Writers Guild of America has a very legalistic system to arbitrate and assign credits. It is contractually the sole arbiter and sole authority of credit assignation. Other places, there’s that big bus-sized loophole that you can drive through, which is advisory or in consultation between producers and writers. It is not as strong of a system, presuming one agrees that the Writers Guild has the best interest of writers at heart, which I think it does. It’s just that when you are deciding what credits should be, there are sometimes winners and losers, and people that don’t get the credit are upset. But it’s good to know that there’s something. But I’m not surprised to see that it is not the ironclad structure that we have here in the U.S.

**John:** Absolutely. All these things come down to power. In the U.S., the Writers Guild has the power to basically force this system upon the makers of film and television. But the Producers Guild, for example, does not have that degree of power. But they have been able to negotiate and cajole and get people to take their PGA credits seriously, so that now when you see a PGA after a producer’s name, you can recognize, oh, that’s the person who did really more of the producing job, and it’s just not a person whose name showed up for various contractual reasons.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. I am a member of the PGA. I don’t put the PGA thing after my name, only because it just feels a little bit like a odd degree I earned in college or something.

**John:** But if you were producing a feature film, you might be more inclined to use it, I suspect.

**Craig:** Ultimately, I don’t think people at home care, but what the PGA does do is leverage its agreement with the Academies to determine who is eligible to win awards. That is actually quite a bit of interesting power that they’ve garnered for themselves. I think ultimately serves as their most relevant function. When the Oscars are coming, and Best Picture is announced, producers will go up to accept the Best Picture. Those producers have been vetted by the PGA. This works for the Emmys as well. We get a questionnaire, and they ask me, “What did these people do? Just tell us what they did.” And I do, and then they make their decisions.

**John:** More follow-up in Episode 626. We talked about the Nobel Prize and the Ig Nobel Prize, which I knew was a thing, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. Matt wrote in with some more specificity here.

**Drew:** Matt says, “The Ig Nobel Prize already exists, and they celebrated their 33rd First Annual Ceremony in 2023, based on offbeat yet real science. The prizes are often presented by true Nobel laureates.” Matt says, “I personally appreciate their method of preventing long acceptance speeches, where an eight-year-old girl marches on stage to tell the recipients to, ‘Please stop. I’m bored,’ while the audience throws paper airplanes at the stage.”

**Craig:** That is very reminiscent of what happened at this year’s Emmys, where Anthony Anderson, the host, brought his mom. When people talked too long, they put a camera on his mom with a mic, and she just told the people to stop. I gotta tell you, it only really happened once. After that one time, I think everybody was terrified of Anthony Anderson’s mom.

I think she should be at all of these award shows. There’s really no excuse for it. They tell you very clearly you have 45 seconds, which is actually a lot of time. Some people go up there and just don’t seem to… They think, “Oh, but not really.” No, really. We’re in show business. We all understand that there’s timing. It’s remarkable to me that people just don’t do that. In any case, Anthony Anderson’s mom or an eight-year-old girl marching on stage, either way, yes, genius. Much better than the playoff music.

**John:** Craig, I did not watch any of the award shows so far this year. You attended many of them.

**Craig:** You missed it.

**John:** Give us a quick review.

**Craig:** I lost.

**John:** How was it for you?

**Craig:** I lost. I lost.

**John:** You lost and you lost and lost and lost and lost.

**Craig:** I lost. I lost. And then I lost.

**John:** But your show won many awards that were not part of the main telecast, which is great.

**Craig:** Yes, we did. We won eight Emmy Awards, which is one shy, I believe, of the record for most for a first-season show. That was terrific. I would have probably felt a bit more glum about constantly losing all the big awards, had it not been that I was losing to Jesse Armstrong and Succession. He is such a lovely, wonderful guy. Have we not had him on the show?

**John:** No, we’ve never had him on the show. We should get him on the show.

**Craig:** Oh, good lord. Let’s fix that. He’s wonderful and so smart and so deserving. Also, there’s a nice thing about certainty going into these awards shows, where you don’t really have to worry. I didn’t write speeches, for instance. You go and enjoy that, and it’s actually quite nice. I have a few friends there that are also up for other awards. Quinta Brunson, who we love, won an Emmy, which was wonderful to see. You do get to see a lot of people that you’ve come to like and enjoy.

I made a shorter night of all those things, just because the strikes had that weird impact of jamming four awards things into the course of 10 days. Oh, god, man, I walked out of one of those things. I’m like, “This thing was 4 hours long, and I feel more tired than I do shooting for 12 hours.” I didn’t do anything. I just sat there. It’s oddly exhausting.

**John:** Now, everything has got jammed up, tied together, but the alternative is it gets dragged out over the course of weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, which wouldn’t have been great either.

**Craig:** That would be worse. It was a way, at least, for people to go. Everybody’s schedules, once the strikes ended, everybody accelerated into work. Maybe not so much the actors, because there’s a bit of a lag time for them, but certainly writers and producers are working on things.

There will be awards shows coming up. We were very nicely nominated for the aforementioned PGA award. Going to be difficult for me to get down there and lose again, because I’m going to be shooting. I will have to lose in absentia. It was good to get it all done in this crazy pressure cooker 10 days, because it was Golden Globes, and then it was AFI, and then it was Critics Choice, and then it was Emmys, all boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and the Oscars are right around the corner.

**John:** Yeah, crazy. Last bit of follow-up is another Arlo Finch. Karen Finch wrote in and said, “Would you believe my dog is Arlo Finch? He’s nine, so technically, I named him first.” This dog is gorgeous.

**Craig:** Look at this little boy.

**John:** Oh my god, such a good dog.

**Craig:** What a cutie. He’s got his little toy.

**John:** His toy.

**Craig:** It’s so funny. My younger dog, Bonnie, she loves toys. But my older dog, Cookie, no interest in toys. Bonnie, when you come home, she sees you, and then she immediately runs away from you, gets a toy, and runs and brings it over to you, like, look, I have a toy. It always looks like this, just ripped up and gummy and dirty. Aw, look at this little boy, Arlo Finch.

**John:** It makes sense. Karen Finch, obviously her last name was already Finch. Arlo does feel like one of those names that probably starts in dogs and then goes to kids. Basically, it’s a fun name for an animal, and then you hear that name a lot and you start applying it to kids. It makes sense. Cooper was probably the same situation. I know there are a lot of Cooper dogs, and then you started having Cooper kids.

**Craig:** Cooper kids. Maybe Craig. It’s possible. Used to be a Scottish dog name. Craig!

**John:** You know that dog names tend to be two syllables, so you can yell out for them and they come back. Craig doesn’t work well as a dog name. Arlo does.

**Craig:** There’s Spike, Butch. I’m always thinking of the cartoon dogs. You’re right. Fido. Who names their dog Fido anymore?

**John:** It’s a good name though.

**Craig:** It’s a good one.

**John:** Craig, a thing we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast, probably from the very start, is that the screenplay format is well established. We’ve been used to it since the days of Casablanca. It’s 12-point Courier. The margins are a certain place. The dialog works a certain way. Character names are above stuff. As the Oscar nominations came out, we always try to make sure that we have all of the Oscar-nominated screenplays available on Weekend Read. That’s Drew’s responsibility, so Drew has been a hero to getting this all to make sure they look fantastic in Weekend Read.

We’ve got all of them except for one, which is Anatomy of a Fall, which is a fantastic script, a fantastic movie. It is not going to be possible to format that in Weekend Read, because it is bizarre. We’ll put a link in the show notes to how it looks. But I also pulled out some screenshots here.

It looks to be maybe in Times Roman, I’m guessing. It’s some sort of serif font. There are scene headers. It’s “8 – Chalet, Extérieur,” “Interior plus exterior/day.” We see that kind of stuff. It’s all in French, but you can totally tell what’s happening there. There are letters for A in parentheses, talking through the scene description. It is in the present tense, like the way we’d expect this to be. There are photos. There are photos of what the chalet looks like. Dialog is blocked over to the right in a way, with the character name above it but not centered. It’s just different. Craig, how are you feeling as you look at this?

**Craig:** I love it. I love this. This is going to start happening more and more. For screenplays that are speculative – and I don’t mean just spec screenplays that people are writing without money being paid; I mean even things in development, that are not necessarily automatically going to be produced – perhaps this would be too much or unnecessary.

But if you are writing for production, what I love about this is how many questions it answers for people, because, look, I’m in prep right now. People that work on movies, to produce the movies, all the department heads, they don’t read these scripts the way people that are gatekeeping at festivals or development executives read them. They’re reading them as instruction sets for what they’re supposed to do. The more information they can have, the clearer it becomes, and the fewer questions the filmmakers have to answer, because answering questions becomes the bane of your existence in prep. You have to do it. That’s sort of the point. But the fewer questions that are floating out there, the happier your day is.

This is brilliant looking at this. It answers so many things. It makes so many things clear. You’re going to end up drawing these things anyway. You’re going to end up taking photos of these things anyway. For a movie like Anatomy of a Fall, which is so specific about a space and what occurred in the space and the relative position of the window to the attic to the downstairs to the outside, this makes complete sense. It’s very easy to read. I have no problem with this whatsoever. None.

**John:** It does French things too, where they tend not to put extra blank lines between paragraphs, which is something I would choose to do. Looking on page 15, for example, there’s a sketch of how this attic space works and which windows open and which ones don’t. Just super helpful for anyone reading the script to get a sense of what the actual plan is here. We’ll try to get Justine on the podcast to talk through this, because I’m really curious-

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous.

**John:** … how early in the process did she know this was the house, this is how it’s all going to work. The other thing, which we always talk about, are alt lines and how you handle that. For this tidbit here, Sandra, in parentheses, “taking time to reflect or think about it,” she answers, “Not always, but often, yes, because of the wood dust.” And then, in parentheses beneath it, “Alt: often, yes, because of the wood dust. Alt: I think so, yes, because of the wood dust.” Here, those alts are there, already in the script there as a plan. Great. It feels very useful for production to know this is the situation, this is what we’re getting into, this is how we’re going to be doing it.

**Craig:** It’s a perfectly good thing to do. At some point, very early on, when you enter production, or let’s say you’ve been green-lit and now you’re in prep, as a writer you are confronted with how unromantic everyone is about creating it. You know the parable of the blind men and the elephant. The makeup people see makeup. The hair people see hair. The clothing people see clothing. The production designer sees spaces, materials, construction. They aren’t necessarily plugged into your grand, romantic, artistic dream. They’re just trying to make it happen. It’s so practical. This kind of work is incredibly practical, including listing the alts, because then your actors are aware. You can have that discussion. You can decide on the day, “Do we want that other line? Which of these do you prefer?” It’s all very practical.

I’m in complete support of it. I think the screenplay format that we use is a perfectly fine format for people to read and decide, “Would I want to invest in this? Would I want to see this happen?” It is not a useful document for, “How do we make this happen?” It’s just not. This is very clever, very well done.

**John:** Also, if we do get her on the show, I want to talk about decisions of when to be in French, when to be in English, because if you’re reading this document, you basically have to be able to speak both French and English to parse it and understand what’s happening there. It’s a French script with just really mostly English dialog in it. It’s just such a fascinating hybrid form.

**Craig:** Yeah, which reflects the reality of the film, where it’s taking place in France, and yet one character is often answering questions that are posed in French in English.

**John:** It’s delightful. Here’s the other thing is, we talked about the Tiffany Problem, like it’s realistic, but would you believe it. As an American, you’re watching these courtroom sequences, you’re like, “Wait, there’s no possible way you’re allowed to do that.” Of course, but no, it’s France, and you can do things that way. The way that the prosecutor behaves, it’s like, “How is that possible? Is she always on the witness stand, and she can just stand up and talk whenever?” It’s wild.

**Craig:** It is wild. I think a lot of people have that natural, like, “Did they just invent this to make the courtrooms seem more interesting?” The answer is no. Then following that, there was quite a discourse of, “What is wrong with France?” The way they conduct a trial just feels bad. It feels bad.

**John:** It feels incredibly unfair to the defendant.

**Craig:** It really does. In a country where there is a history of just chopping people’s heads off for political expressions, it does seem a little like, oh, I don’t like this feeling. But then we know in, for instance, the case in Italy with Amanda Knox, the way other countries investigate, prosecute, pursue, charge, and judge is not like we do. It’s interesting.

**John:** I would love to hear from international listeners, because they must see so much of the American courtroom process, because it’s in all our movies, it’s in all of our TV shows. How much does that color their expectation about how stuff should work in their own legal systems? They must have some expectation it’s going to work similarly, and it clearly doesn’t.

**Craig:** The other interesting thing about the constant presentation of the American justice system is that typically, for the purposes of drama, the stories that we tell are of falsely accused people or people who are guilty in the letter of the law but not in the spirit of the law. That’s what’s exciting to us. But there are times where we do tell stories of people who are guilty. The question is are they guilty or not.

The aforementioned Jack Thorne wrote a terrific miniseries that was centered around an actor who was accused of sexually assaulting people. It became a courtroom drama where you were rooting for guilt. That’s an interesting concept we don’t often see. But even though a lot of American lawyers… If we had Ken White on, for instance, he would run down how inaccurate and stupid American courtroom dramas are. It does at least give you a sense of our process and form, which is way more rigorous than apparently France, which is like, this is a free-for-all. This is kind of exciting though.

**John:** For our main topic, I want to talk a little bit about fandom and the dynamics of fandom. The jumping-off point was a blog post I read, which turned out was all from 2015, so it’s a little dated there. But I really liked how he laid out how subcultures become fandoms become these bigger things and tend to ultimately implode or get warped. This is a post by David Chapman. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it. He talks through that generally the dynamic you see is that there is a scene where you have some creators who are doing a new thing. It could be a musical new thing. It could be an artistic new thing. Some sort of cultural product that they’re making which feels new. That then attracts fanatics, who are people who are not making the things themselves, but are so into it and want to follow it and follow those creators. Both these creators and the fandoms are geeks, in the sense that they are deeply, deeply into it. This is more than just a weird hobby. It’s becoming an actual subculture.

Once that gets up to a certain critical mass, you have what he calls MOPs, members of the public, who are attracted to it and start to enjoy it, but they’re not on the inside. They get kind of geeky about it, but they’re not actual hardcore fans. They’re like tourists coming to the thing. Sometimes there’s in-grouping and out-grouping, where these new people you label as posers, because they’re not true believers, they’re not really part of it.

But what I found so fascinating is he also charts it through to generally you get a place where there are sociopaths who become attracted to this movement, this thing that’s more than a scene. It’s become a subculture. They adopt some aspects of it, and ultimately the drive either is for money or to do some other kind of nefarious purpose.

I thought it was just an interesting dynamic. It’s very easy to chart this to the rise of the hippie movement. It feels accurate to a lot of the ways we see things begin, blossom, grow, and fall apart.

**Craig:** This is an interesting dissection of the phenomenon of phenomena and how things catch fire and become a social exercise. There are certain presumptions baked into this that I think are worth questioning.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** For instance, is it better to be a fanatic than to be a casual enjoyer? One of the things I think about as a person that does create things is what do I want my audience to be. If I had a wish, how would I want them to be reacting and interacting with the work I make.

I don’t think I have a great desire for people to be fanatics, per se. What I want is for people to enjoy. I want them to take from it what I intended to give. The fandom itself is separate from what I want. I just want people to watch it and feel things that I hope they feel and think about things that I want them to consider. I am not doing this so that people tattoo it on themselves or go to every show and get signatures and autographs and things like that, but people do. I understand that, because I’ve tattooed myself, so I get that.

I do question the premise that one kind of fandom, there’s a pure, truer fandom than another. I wonder if most creators are really just trying to appeal to what this author refers to as MOPs, members of the public.

**John:** I think that’s a great distinction. Also, maybe we can talk about it both in the terms of the things we write and make, so Last of Us for you, or Chernobyl, versus what we’re doing right now, which is that we have fans of Scriptnotes, who are listening to this podcast that we’re making, and to what degree do we feel like we need to engage with that community that forms around, because we made a thing that the community is around it, or that we want to distance ourselves or not really think about and worry about that.

The answer is different for different things. I think with Scriptnotes, we do engage our community to a pretty significant degree, not a degree to which a YouTuber or a Vine star back in the day might’ve. But we’re answering their questions. We’re meeting them at live shows. Some of them are paying us $5 a month. There is a sense that we are attempting to service that community to some degree by also doing a thing that we want to do, which is different than what you’re doing with Last of Us, which is you’re trying to make the thing, and you recognize that there is a role to which you need to go out and promote the thing and go to Brazil to do a fan launch of the thing, and yet you’re still trying to maintain some boundaries around your exposure to that community.

**Craig:** Because the goal ultimately is the point. The goal of making things is hopefully for people to see it and appreciate it. When I say people, I mean as many as possible. I don’t think anyone makes a show or writes a book or writes a song so that very few people will listen to it.

There’s this thing that happens when something is new – this author refers to it as the new thing – where the first people to appreciate it feel a kind of ownership. They feel special, because they fought their way to it. They found it when it wasn’t promoted to them, when no one told them about it. They had a pure experience with it. Then other people don’t, in their minds. Other people are promoted to. Their friends tell them.

In reality, I’m not sure it matters, because let’s say I’ve never heard of a thing. I remember somebody… I think it was Shannon Woodward. Yeah, it was Shannon. I was having lunch with her or something. She’s like, “Have you seen Stranger Things?” I said, “No,” because you know me. I don’t watch stuff. She’s like, “There’s this girl who plays this little girl who’s just a phenomenal… She’s just doing this stuff that’s just mind-blowing to me as an actor.” I was like, “That’s a pretty good recommendation. I’ll check it out.” Then I watched it, and I was like, “Wow. Millie Bobby Brown is really good at this. The Duffer brothers are really good at this. This is great.” Is my appreciation less valuable because I was told, as opposed to somebody who’s just flipping through the 4,000 shows on Netflix, lands on something, and goes, “Yes, this. I have unearthed it.” I don’t know.

**John:** I think we often have the experience of being champions of a thing that we want other people to see. Our One Cool Things are like, “Hey, take a look at this thing that you may not have otherwise been aware of.” That signaling thing is important. We’re using some of our cache and our authority, to whatever degree we have it, to say this is a thing that is worth your attention. We sometimes seek out people who can recommend good things to us. A lot of the blogs I follow are basically like, I like that person’s taste, and so if they are recommending something to me, I will click through that link, because they don’t steer me wrong, which is absolutely great and true.

I think what’s different though is that the difference between a recommendation and something that becomes a fandom is a fandom requires some kind of organization. Interesting that a lot of times, fandom, it is self-organizing. It’s not the creator who’s going out there and creating that community and organizing that community. They’re just making their thing. That community is creating its own rules and its own structure around it. The relationship between that fan organization and that creator can be great. It can be toxic. It can be problematic. That’s a real challenge.

**Craig:** Yeah. What this guy is describing is fandom protecting itself, which actually has nothing to do with the art. It’s only about the community that’s built around the art, which I understand. When you find a community, it’s important to you. As we all know, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, belonging is the most important of the non-fundamental needs like food, shelter. You find belonging, especially if you are someone who struggles with belonging. Let’s say you’re on the spectrum. You’re on the autism spectrum. It’s hard for you to find belonging in the real-world space, but you connect with other people who have a similar struggle, over your shared joy of this new thing. You get really deep into it. Then your community is now something different and important from the art itself.

What this is talking about is how to protect that, because what happens as things become more popular is a lot of people enter the community that maybe you don’t think have the same depth of connection to the work that you do, or some people – and in this article they’re described just fully on as sociopaths – enter the community for purely exploitative reasons, to sell things, to get attention for themselves. And then they can, quote unquote, ruin the culture, the subculture.

The truth is all of this analysis does matter to a lot of people, because most people are fans, not creators. But for those of us who make things, I think it’s important to appreciate fans, to appreciate early fans, rabid fans, passionate fans, and the community they build up, while also maintaining that what we do is meant for anyone who enjoys it. Anyone. There is nothing exclusive about what we do. There is, however, apparently something exclusive about the people that begin that first community.

**John:** This is a thing I was holding back for maybe a future How Would This Be a Movie, but I think it’s actually good to bring up right now. There’s an article by Sarah Viren which ran in the New York Times this past week. It’s looking at this woman whose sister was murdered when she was a kid. Fifty years have passed. It’s a cold case. But this woman said, “Listen, I feel a calling from God. I need to figure out who killed my sister in this brutal way 50 years ago.” She goes to a true-crime con thing and meets these podcasters who had done similar kinds of things, and starts working with them about, “How are we going to try to solve this? How are we going to group-source this?” The podcasters have a plan. They’re going to build up a Facebook group. They’re going to get people involved in working through this. They start putting together episodes. They’re making some progress. The police agree to reopen the case. Things are proceeding.

But ultimately, this woman starts to have frustrations with these podcasters, feeling like they violated some confidences that she had shared with them, and doesn’t go on this one Zoom. And essentially, this whole community turns against her, the actual person who is the instigator of all this, the one whose sister actually died. I found that to be fascinating too, because who’s the creator in this situation? Is it the podcasters who did organize this group, or is it her? And who is the victim in this situation?

True crime fandom is a thing. In this case, it’s a community that was formed around this one murder, and the only thing they have in common is that there’s a curiosity about this, but they’re not making the thing. They’re just contributing. The sense of online communities in particular can be incredibly toxic, because you’re not doing it to someone’s face.

**Craig:** It’s also a question of what is it that you are obsessed with. Here’s a woman who’s obsessed with who killed her sister. That is a fact, and that is a crime. That’s somebody that she loved and cared for. The fandom is obsessed with a podcast, so now they are interested in what is an act of creation. It’s a show.

If you care mostly about the show, I always think of this as the Skyler problem. Skyler White on Breaking Bad. Anna Gunn is an incredible actor and portrayed Walter White’s wife beautifully and had to carry the burden of a very difficult part. There was this thing where the Breaking Bad fandom just started to hate her, hate both Anna Gunn and Skyler White. Why? Because Skyler’s character was in direct opposite to Walter and his stuff. If she finds out what he is doing, she’s going to be angry and make him stop. When she does find out what he’s doing, she is upset. She becomes sort of a co-conspirator, and then eventually just no more. But her character was a threat to the existence of the show. If Skyler wins, Walter White stops making meth, and there’s no more show. What the audience cared about was that the show would keep going, and so they started to hate a character. I find that fascinating.

I think in this case, I could definitely see where if the woman whose sister was a victim became uncomfortable with the show and was threatening the continuation of the show, the community gets angry at her, because they don’t care about her and her justice. They care about the show. And that is where fandom gets a little squiggly, when you’re dealing with stuff that isn’t purely fictional, but rather a presentation of truth.

**John:** Absolutely. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to continue this conversation and talk about different fandoms and the degree to which it feels like the creators have some control over that and the degree to which the creators are being held captive to their fandoms, which I think is a challenging situation, which happens far too often. Let’s answer some listener questions. Drew, what you got for us?

**Drew:** Brent writes, “My understanding is that if a stage musical is adapted into a film, the songwriter retains copyright, and the songs are licensed to the film. But how does ownership and authorship work with original songs written for an original musical film? Are they considered separate from the screenplay? Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA? And how is that songwriter typically contracted?

**John:** Here’s a question I could actually answer, because I have-

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** … much experience with this. First, Brett’s assumption that a stage musical adapted into a film, yes, and so that the lyricist composer of the original Broadway or stage production, they own the copyright on those songs, and so those are licensed as part of the package to make the movie. The Mean Girls movie, Jeff Richmond, who wrote the songs for that – and I don’t remember who the lyricist was – those songs were licensed for the movie, pretty straightforward.

When you write an original song for a movie, and so if you’re Billie Eilish to do for Barbie, they come to you and they say, “Hey, would you write this song for this movie?” You write it. It’s phenomenal. There’s a separate contract for that. It is licensed to be in the movie. It’s relatively clean. It’s similar to how it would’ve worked the other way around, like if the song had previously existed.

What gets to be complicated is when you are writing stuff that is fundamentally integrated into the movie. For Corpse Bride or for Frankenweenie and for Big Fish, I wrote songs into the script that became part of the movie. Those, I was not contracted separately. They were just part of the script. They were folded into my writing fee for writing the movie. But those songs, which also Danny Elfman then did the music for, also exist separately, and so I am paid separately for those, for royalties and for all the other music-y things that songwriters get paid for. I get separate checks for each of those things. When it plays in Norway, I get 13 cents, and those checks accumulate separately, by different accounting systems, so ASCAP or BMI.

**Craig:** Yep, I’ve done the same. That’s how it works. You do retain authorship of those songs. I have the distinct honor of receiving checks from ASCAP every now and then for a song called Douchebag of the Year in Superhero Movie, which how many people can boast that, John? Very few.

**John:** It’s nice.

**Craig:** I wrote a rap song for Scary Movie 3, and I get royalties for writing the lyrics. Your outline is exactly correct. Authorship of lyrics and authorship of music will always generate royalties through ASCAP and BMI, and not only if they’re played just on their own, but also if they’re played in the movie. It is an interesting hybrid there, but generally speaking, you do retain more rights and more financial interest with songs than you do with, say, a work for hire as a script, because in that case, you’re really relying on the WGA formula for residuals and nothing else.

**John:** One other question embedded in here. Is the lyricist considered a co-writer of the script by the WGA?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Generally, no. It’s a thing we’ve talked about with Rachel Bloom a couple times is that writing the songs for things like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she’s often writing actual story material. She’s writing everything that happens in the song. It’s like she’s not just writing dialog, but she’s writing a whole sequence. You could imagine there could be scenarios in which the songs are so much of what the actual story is that it crosses into situations where it really should be considered literary material that goes into WGA arbitrations. Maybe that’s happened in the past, but classically, no, it’s not considered literary material in that same way.

**Craig:** Generally, no. If you’re dealing with something that is a recitative, where everything is sung, for instance, Les Mis, then certainly, I think the Writers Guild has the ability, through its pre-arbitration structure and participating writer investigations, to say, “Hey, look, even though this is in a lyric format, it is dialog. It is screenplay material. It is literary material.” We have the ability to be flexible on that front and to pose the questions and ask them. It’s another reason why the WGA’s sole authority is important, because it can, as an institution, allow for some flexibility and exclusions and exceptions. There are ways for it to actually account for unique properties like that.

**John:** Next question.

**Drew:** Kaylan in Alaska writes, “Are there best practices to follow as to not break up scenes or dialog in an annoying way? I specifically mean when a scene begins at the bottom of a page, and only one line of scene description fits, or when dialog gets broken between two pages in a way that feels like it might break up the reading of the line. My brain really wants that soothing feeling of a scene starting at the top of a page.”

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what my brain wants, Kaylan. My brain is trying to anagram and Kaylan and Alaska together. There’s so many overlapping letters. I love it. Best practices are what you feel good with, what makes you happy. Most people reading, my opinion, don’t care. For me as a writer, I care so much. I don’t like splitting up dialog across pages. If I can mitigate that, I do, because, I don’t know, I don’t like it. It just feels bad. If you can avoid ending a scene with a single line of action that’s on the subsequent page and then start a new scene, yeah, do it. Avoid it. It’s actually not that hard to do. As long as you don’t get into a situation where you’re actually hurting things to make it look better on the page, you’re fine. My brain wants that soothing feeling as well, and there’s nothing wrong with a little self-soothing there as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Here’s one situation where screenwriting software, from Final Draft to Fade In to Highland, all the legitimate applications, are going to be doing some of this work for you. What they will all do is they will not let you start a scene at the very bottom of a page. They’ll push that scene header to the next page. If there’s a single line on the next page, they’ll pull stuff across, so that you don’t have a little orphan or a widow there happening. Some of that stuff happens automatically.

What Craig is describing is generally the last looks before you’re printing or turning in a script to somebody, is just going through it one last time and seeing are there any really weird breaks that I want to fix here, and seeing if there’s way you could pull stuff, push it down or pull it across, so you don’t get those weirdos there. I used to be much more of a freak about it. I just don’t let it stress me out too much. I will look for situations where that’s actually confusing because it broke that way.

The other thing you don’t appreciate until you actually have to build the software to do it, most of these apps will also break at the sentence, rather than breaking at the end of the line. If dialog has to break across a page, they will create the break, add a period, rather than just having the line taper off, which is just helpful. It just makes it much easier to read.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**Drew:** Not Too Happy writes, “I wrote a script in 2014 that became my calling card for many years. It performed well on The Black List site, found producers, went to all the agencies, got offered to a bunch of different actresses and directors, and spent years almost getting made. Then a few weeks ago, I saw a Deadline announcement that a very famous actor is set to produce and star in a movie with the exact same plot. Normally, that would be an oh well, what are you going to do? But in this case, that actor was sent my script in 2015, along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead. This all went through their reps at the time, from reputable producers on my end, above board, blah blah blah. Now, I’m not accusing anyone of knowingly stealing anything, but I can’t help but feeling like I’m being ripped off. My manager offered a, ‘That sucks,’ and my lawyer advises a wait-and-see approach. I’d rather not. Do I have any recourse, and what would you do?”

**John:** Not Too Happy provided some context here which Craig and I can take a look at, but we’re not going to discuss on the show.

**Craig:** It is quite the context. It is certainly relevant. Not Too Happy, I get why you’re not too happy. Your manager actually here is giving you the proper answer, which is that sucks. Your lawyer advising a wait-and-see approach, that’s the lawyer’s version of, “We’re not doing anything.” Here’s why.

Unfortunately – and we’ve talked about this quite a few times on the show – premises, plots, these are not really intellectual property. They fall under the general heading of ideas. Let’s say I write a script, and it’s about two guys who discover that they’ve grown up separately, but actually, turns out that they’re brothers, and in fact, they’re weirdly twins. They’re fraternal twins. But one of them is really short, and one of them is tall and super strong. They don’t look anything alike. Okay. That’s Twins. That’s cool. What I just described, anyone can write a movie like that.

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:58:50].

**Craig:** I could sit down, I could write another movie today with a different title that is the exact same plot, and it is not legally actionable, because unless you get into unique expression in fixed form, there’s no infringement there. If you get a copy of the script that this star is going to be making, and they have taken chunks of your action description or runs of dialog that are non-generic, okay, that’s just straight up copyright infringement. They won’t.

**John:** They won’t.

**Craig:** Unfortunately, this is one of those things where we can’t even say that the person went, “Oh, you know what? I love this idea, but I just don’t like the script. Can somebody else do this idea?” Maybe that’s what happened, which by the way, that’s not stealing either. Is it ethical? No. But is it criminal? No. You can’t steal something that isn’t property. And unfortunately, concepts and ideas and general plot lines, not property.

**John:** We don’t know the backstory on how this actor came to do this project, which is apparently moving forward. My hunch though is someone else had basically the same idea and wrote it up, and the actor said, “Oh yeah, I’ve always wanted to do something that’s in that space,” and said yes to that thing. I suspect that the second writer really did come up with that idea on their own, because it’s a good idea, but it’s also an idea that a lot of people could have, honestly. They wrote their own thing. This star attached themselves to it. If you cannot show that there is a connection between that second writer having exposure to your script and having decided, “I’m going to do this thing that’s basically the same premise,” there’s no case to be made here.

Your manager and your lawyer are saying the right thing. The lawyer saying, “Let’s wait and see,” is also saying you don’t know this thing’s ever even going to happen. If this thing actually goes in production and it clearly looks like there is an infringement case to be made here, that’s the time when she would raise her hand and do something.

**Craig:** There almost certainly won’t be. Let’s also dig in a little bit on Not Too Happy here. When you said, “That actor,” the one that’s now said to produce and star in the movie, “was sent my script in 2015,” so almost a decade ago, “along with an official offer of a million dollars to play the lead,” now, that sounds impressive. But the fact is, actors of a certain level are constantly getting stuff submitted with an official offer of whatever their quote is, or maybe their quote is less than that. They might not have even read it.

Listen. I get offered things where someone says, “Here’s something. We’ve bought a book, and we want you to write this,” and blah blah blah. I’m like, “No, I’m not interested.” I just tell my agent, “It doesn’t sound for me. No, thank you.” Then four years later, someone that I’m really fascinated by starts talking to me about that book or a different book on the same topic, and now suddenly I am interested, because there’s just a different context to it. Did I do something wrong? No. I changed my mind, or I wasn’t in the same place, or something was more attractive to me about this other version of it.

The point being, what I think you need to do is let yourself off the hook of feeling like you’ve been screwed, because that’s a terrible feeling to walk around with. I don’t think you’ve been legally screwed. If you were somewhat ethically screwed with, let’s look at the bright side. You had an idea that other people thought was worth making. Now, what you need to do for the next step, Not Too Happy, is to write a script of an idea that people like, that is so good they want to make that script. That’s ultimately what separates the steadily working writers from folks who are trying to be steadily working writers. Good idea and undeniable execution, as opposed to good idea, decent execution.

It’s not fun to hear. By the way, your script may have been amazing. But in this case, it sounds like, by your own admission, it went to all the agencies, lots of different actresses and directors, and it just ultimately wasn’t compelling in and of itself to get that next level going.

As John says, in this case, I’m looking at this article that talks about this. There are articles like this every five minutes. “So-and-so is attached to produce some blah da blah such and such,” and then it never happens. Who knows?

**John:** Who knows? Let’s try one more question, Drew. Let’s do Will here.

**Drew:** Will writes, “Before Christmas, I reached out to the representation of a character actor I had in mind for my script. Today they got back to me asking about financing. How do I answer them saying I don’t have financing without scaring them off?”

**John:** That’s going to be the first question you’re going to get back. It’s good we bring this up, because any time you’re reaching out to a specific actor, who’d be the character actor who’s exactly perfect for this, the reps are doing their job. They’re saying, “Okay, is there any money here?” The answer is, “There’s no money here. These are the producers that I want to approach. This is my plan going forward.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Look. Character actors really should be asking about this. Basically, what the reps are saying is, are you offering us a job, or are you asking us to attach a name? Will, you’re referring to an independent film. There’s a long, glorious tradition of independent films trying to get financing using the actor’s name to help them get financing. The financing is like, “Do you have an actor attached?” Everybody’s basically in a catch-22.

But attaching yourself to a script ultimately isn’t much of a commitment. No actor’s going to say, “Yes, I’m attaching myself to your unfinanced project, and also I’m clearing the decks for these months, and I will take no other jobs for those months.” That’s not a thing.

How do I answer them? Honestly. You answer them honestly. You say, “We are looking for financing. We honestly feel that we will have a much better chance of getting financing if we can say that this actor is attached and happy to play this part, should all of the other things that need to happen line up, like schedule, payment, etc.” If they’re like, “Yeah, no, we don’t actually want to attach ourselves to this without financing,” what you just heard is “no.” And that’s just life.

**John:** Yeah. Is there a future situation where somehow you’re able to find financing, and you come back to that actor, and suddenly they’re interested? Yes, that could happen too. Don’t bank on it, but that’s possible too. You’ve burned nothing to do this. Being honest is the right approach.

Whoever the reps are for this character actor, this is a chance for them to be more in a lead role. That’s exciting for them. There may be ways that you can spin this as helpful. They may also know people who are, relationships that that actor has with producers or something. There may be some way that it could be helpful. So be honest and open to what they’re saying next.

**Craig:** These reps, we don’t know, they may have been yelled at by their client two weeks earlier, saying, “Stop sending me stuff that isn’t financed and isn’t, quote unquote, ‘real.'” Because here’s the thing. They gotta read all this stuff. They gotta read all of it. They gotta get excited by it. And then they do, and someone’s like, “Great. We actually have no money. We’ll talk to you in a year.” Then they’re like, “Why did I go through all that?”

**John:** The same thing happens for writers, of course, is that you get approached, like, “There’s this book,” blah blah blah. It’s like, that’s fantastic. Some cases I’m willing to engage, and I’ll at least try to set this up someplace. Other places, no. If there’s actually a home for this, then I’ll talk about this, but I’m not going to spend three months of my life trying to get this thing set up.

**Craig:** Or, god forbid, help you get the rights, by saying, “I’ll adapt it.” Hell no.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Get your own rights. Otherwise, what do I need you for? Do you know what I mean? I’ll just go get the rights then.

**John:** Yoink. Cool. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book that I read over the Christmas holidays. For whatever reason, I plow through books during the holidays. I had three this time. One of them I really enjoyed was Going Zero by Anthony McCarten.

So the premise of this is – it’s fiction – there is a joint program between the CIA and a Facebook kind of organization. What they’re trying to do is to be able to track people who fall off the grid, who disappear, and to see how quickly we can find those people, prevent terrorist attacks and other nefarious things. To test this system, they are going to recruit, I believe it’s 10 people, and basically say, “We’re going to tell you one day that you have to go zero. You have to disappear, fall off the grid. If you can stay hidden for 30 days, we’ll give you $3 million.” It’s a good premise. The story’s alternating between the people who are trying to hide and the people who are looking for them. So that’s that cat-and-mouse game.

**Craig:** That’s cool.

**John:** Naturally, there are complications that ensue. I read this as a pure, clean, looking for a good read, and of course, as a person who makes film and television, I’m like, “I know how to adapt this.” But I deliberately did not look up the credits of the person who wrote the book until I was finished. I looked him up. Anthony McCarten is actually a very successful, very produced screenwriter, who I ended up emailing him, and he has his own plans for the book. So I’m excited to see what’s going to happen next to it. But if you are into a fun, breezy thriller to read, I recommend Going Zero by Anthony McCarten. If you read it now, then you can also see what becomes of it. It’s sort of a how would this become a property down the road.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Good recommendation. My One Cool Thing is full-on nepo baby.

**John:** This is your incredibly successful father who gave you your career. That’s what you’re talking about. You are the nepo baby.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m the nepo baby. My father was an incredibly successful social studies teacher in the New York City public school system.

**John:** Without him, you would not have been able to find Chernobyl.

**Craig:** He taught American history, so actually, I didn’t even have that. No. I speak of my youngest child, Jessica Mazin, who is currently attending school at Berklee College of Music in Boston. John’s daughter is also there in school in Boston. She is a budding songwriter and has written some really good songs. She’s written stuff that actually got…

There’s a song she wrote – talk about fandom – that was based on a book series on Wattpad, which I know you’re familiar with, because you also have a daughter. Wattpad’s basically a fanfiction conglomeration site, as far as I can tell. There was this incredibly popular series there. She wrote a song based on characters and things from the series, and it actually got, I don’t know, millions of listens on Spotify. It’s pretty remarkable. She got paid money. She got over a million listens to that. In a nepo daddy way, I also had her sing a cover of a Depeche Mode song for The Last of Us. But I did so because I think she’s awesome.

**John:** She’s really good.

**Craig:** I actually think she’s great. It’s an interesting thing of creating a person who creates things, and then I listen to the things they’ve created, and it’s like this weird echo of creation. She’s written a song called The Devil. She wrote the lyrics and the music, and she performs it, and then her friend Henry Dearborn, who’s an also very talented young guy, produced it and helped add instrumentation and mix and all that. I think it’s really good.

**John:** Yeah, I agree. I listened to it.

**Craig:** That is a really good song. It’s super catchy. I think the lyrics are really intriguing. I’m making Jessica and her song The Devil my One Cool Thing. It is on Spotify. I think you’ll enjoy it. I actually think you’ll like it. It goes down easy, and it’s got a good chorus. She’s just very good. I actually think she’s really, really good.

**John:** We’ll start playing the song now. It’ll become our outro for this episode. One thing I think is so interesting about Spotify is there’s obviously so many criticisms with Spotify, but the fact that Jessica is on Spotify the same way that Beyonce and Taylor Swift are on Spotify, or Girl in Red, it equals things out in ways that are really fascinating and unprecedented, so that’s nice. The fact that people could discover her – my daughter discovers music all the time on Spotify – is exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is. I’m very proud of her. I’m proud of how independent she is from me. She doesn’t do what I do. She doesn’t ask me for help. She doesn’t ask my opinion. What happens is it just appears, and then I listen to it like anyone else. I think maybe that’s what I’m most proud of is that she doesn’t give a sweet damn what I think. I like it. I love it, actually, honestly, anyway.

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

**Craig:** Woo woo!

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Jessica Mazin. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. Our list of outros is getting a little bit sparse, so we’d love some more outros coming in here. Ask@johnaugust.com is also 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 the transcripts, sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on creators and fandom. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Craig. Continuing our conversation about fans and creators, I have a list here in the Workflowy of different kinds of fandoms. I want to think about what is the relationship between them and their creators and the people who own the underlying material behind this.

I’ll start with Formula One, because last year I went to my first Formula One race. I just didn’t realize what a giant community that is, just the money they mint doing that. It’s interesting, because I feel like with Formula One, they’d already had fans, but then the Netflix show really drew up a whole bunch of new fans, including my daughter, to it. Where’s the center of fandom for it? Is it the individual teams? Is it the organization that puts on the races? Is it the Netflix show? It feels like it’s one of those in-between things, and it’s hard to say who’s in control of it.

**Craig:** It’s a bit scary, actually, how fandom as a business can get larger than the core business. This satellite business that grows around it. It is remarkable. One thing that I think really big artists have become very good at is getting ahead of it. BTS, for instance, that group is also its own fandom industry. They got ahead of it. They control it. They run it. Yes, there are obviously a lot of independents that grow up around it, but they’ve created so much of it. It was baked in from the jump, whereas some of the boy bands that we remember from the ’90s, for instance, were just selling records and selling tour tickets and merch, which we used to call merchandise. Merch, it’s like IP. That was like backstage talk that was slightly cynical, and now it’s front stage talk for everyone.

The business now, I think, is such that creators are starting to get more of a handle on it. I would imagine Taylor Swift at some point woke up one day and said, “Why are other people making more money off of me than me?” Because that actually probably doesn’t feel great. It feels a little exploitative, and yet it’s all about the energy of people that are in love with what you do.

**John:** I’d be curious what Jessica’s relationship is like with her fans at this point, because she has enough people who are listening to her music, who are curious about her next thing that’s going to be happening, that they feel some investment in her. They’re rooting for her. They discovered her early on. Maybe Berklee School of Music is the perfect place for her to learn some of this. How should she be thinking about that? To what degree does she need to start thinking about her mailing list, how she’s communicating with the people who are her truest fans?

**Craig:** I think in a healthy way, like any young artist, she’s mostly concerned about getting better, about creating work, getting better, learning. She’s got some gigs now. Berklee’s amazing about how they facilitate this. She’s going to start getting paid to perform live. But she definitely does have the Generation Z TikTok conversation with people who like what she does.

I have a feeling that fandom is a hockey stick chart, where there’s a little bit, there’s a little bit, and then something happens, and then boom, it just explodes. Even in the article we were discussing where the guy was talking about the fanatics, the fanatics aren’t the first people in. There’s always other people that are in first, and then there’s that moment that happens where there’s a big upswing, and then it becomes a real thing. I think she’s got her head on in the right place. There are obviously a lot of people for whom the fandom is the point. Those people tend to head more off into the influencer zone as opposed to trying to create things.

Taylor Swift is a wonderful example of somebody that clearly was about creating art, and it became enormously popular, and now there is an industry. But she didn’t start for that. I’ve never read an interview with her or seen her talk and thought to myself, oh, this was all calculated. No, she’s just a really good artist that people love.

**John:** Yes. I will note Taylor Swift has her challenges with her community as well, like the Gaylor Swift, the people who are obsessed that she’s actually lesbian and that all these songs have coded meanings in them.

**Craig:** Gaylor Swift.

**John:** How does she both refute that without driving those people away in a way that makes them feel unseen and unheard? It’s so challenging, because she’s an artist trying to tell stories, and people, false stories, they’re going to derive their own meaning from them, which is exactly the point. And yet when there’s a community that is obsessed with picking everything apart to discover a secret, hidden meaning behind things, it’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It would be fascinating to talk with her about this, although we never will, because she now exists on Mount Olympus. But when we start out as artists, we are looking for the outliers, the people who will love what we do, because most people are going to ignore new things. We’re looking for somebody – ideally somebody with some influence –to love what we do. That one special person, even if they’re just 1% of the people that have been listening, helped spread the word, and now lots of people listen. But then, once it gets really big – and Taylor Swift operates on a massive scale – then what you’re dealing with are outlier problems.

Let’s say 99.9% of your fans are healthy people who just love your music, which I think is probably the case for Taylor. That .1% is the problem. They’re the people who are driving an enormous amount of discourse online, who are agitated, aggressive, angry, possessive, parasocial. Those are also the people that are showing up at your house, trying to climb over the wall, sending you weird messages, stalking. The outlier becomes the problem. I think sometimes in our culture, we mistake the outlier discussion for the mainstream discussion when it’s not.

Gaylor Swift is a fascinating concept. I suspect the great majority of Taylor Swift fans are just enjoying the music and are not at that level of, “I need you to like who I want you to like,” which is just I think part of an outlier behavior.

**John:** One of the other books I read over the holidays was Taylor Lorenz’s book Extremely Online, which tracks creators and fandoms and the rise of internet creator culture. It goes back from vloggers and mommy bloggers and the rise and fall of those. But one of the most fascinating sections is on Vine, because Vine was never meant to be what Vine became. You had these young men, some women, but mostly young men, who became extremely famous for doing little Vines, but also just became famous for being famous, in the way that Paris Hilton’s famously famous for being famous. People need to figure out, how do we monetize that? How do we exploit that? They would have these mall tours where they’d put together these Vine stars to perform, kind of. There was teenage girls who were their fans. They really weren’t part of the community.

It was a strange fit, particularly because the platform that they were on, Vine, did not like them. It did not want them around. That tension between the space you’re in and what you’re trying to do can be a real factor as well. It’s a thing we see again and again with studios and their stars and filmmakers and the need to do press and publicity but also feel constrained by it. It’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It is. It is an interesting concept, the notion of a platform that you intend the platform to be used one way, it ends up being used another way. OnlyFans comes to mind.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** I don’t know, but I assume that OnlyFans began as a thing of like, hey, this is where people can talk to their fans, because they’re songwriters or they’re visual artists or whatever it is, and this is a way for them to get paid for what they do by the people that love them. From what I understand, John…

**John:** That’s not really where it is right now. I think OnlyFans may have known that sex work was going to be part of it from the start. But there’s wholesome versions of that as well that are just not as successful.

**Craig:** OnlyFans I guess was uncomfortable enough with the fact that it had become a platform for sex work that they said no more sex on OnlyFans, and everyone went, then what the hell are you for? It’s like if McDonald’s was like, “We didn’t mean to sell chicken nuggets. We were hamburgers. No more chicken nuggets,” and everyone lost their minds. Then OnlyFans was like, “Okay, I guess this is what we are now.”

**John:** Credit card processing with anything involving sex work is also incredibly complicated. Let’s wind back to Star Trek. We think of Star Trek was designed to be a delightful show about space travel, wagon to the stars. It did sell toys. It had its own stuff that it was doing, its own merch. But fan culture around Star Trek became its own industry. Suddenly, there’s actors who appeared on one episode now being booked for fan conventions. It’s self-sustained in a way that was important and made it possible ultimately for the renaissance of Star Trek and for the movies and for everything else to have happened after the fact. It was necessary for those fans to exist, and yet they’ve always been in a bit of a strange relationship with the owners and creators of Star Trek.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a pretty famous sketch on Saturday Night Live. William Shatner was the guest host. The sketch was him at a Star Trek convention where people are asking him questions, and he finally just broke down and told them all to get a life. This was very funny to the people in the audience there in the studio, whatever it is, 8A. But a lot of people in the fan community were upset. They were hurt.

Listen. A lot of people – and we’ve mentioned this before – who join these communities struggle to find other communities. Here was somebody basically making fun of them for that specific struggle. They weren’t just there as part of the Trekker community because of how much they love Star Trek. It’s because of also how much they loved and were loved by people who loved Star Trek, as opposed to everywhere else in their lives, where maybe they were being discounted or put down. For the objects, the center of the wheel to behave towards them the way that the jocks at high school behaved had to have been pretty hurtful.

There are certain genres that do tend to appeal more to people who do struggle with, we’ll call non-virtual communities. I think it’s important for people to be aware of that and to be kind, because I have another daughter, who’s on the autism spectrum, and we talk all the time about her special interests and the things that she’s super into and how she finds community with other people that love it, and it’s important to her.

**John:** A community that’s growing very quickly – I’d really be curious what the subculture’s like two or three years from now – is pickleball.

**Craig:** Pickleball.

**John:** The number of people who tried to recruit me to play pickleball is somewhat astonishing. It’s also interesting to watch the fights that are happening in communities about the conversion of normal tennis courts to pickleball courts and, of course, the noise that pickleball creates.

**Craig:** Fricking noise. Yeah, pickleball really came out of nowhere there. Wow. You’re absolutely right. Now, pickleball is an interesting one, because unlike most fandoms we discuss, which are driven by the young, pickleball is driven by the old. Old people – and I don’t say that with any stink on it, because I’m getting there, man. Let’s call them older people. Older people are tough. They’re organized. They have money. They know how systems work.

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** Fans of a new rap star who comes on the scene, fans of that rap star generally aren’t going to be also serving on city councils or know how hearings work, but the pickleball fans do. They’re lawyers. They’re doctors. They’re heads of the PTAs. Now it becomes interesting. Watch out for the pickleball people. They’ll get you.

**John:** It’s good stuff. The last thing I want to distinguish between is there’s fandom, and there’s also collectors. Watching what’s happening right now with Stanley cups. Have you been tracking that at all?

**Craig:** I sure have. I live in Canada now.

**John:** Just the obsession with these collectible cups. It’s great that you love them, but no one needs 30 of them. That’s the difference between, are you entering into it because you want to be part of a community that collects these novelty cups, or are you doing it because you see a market for it, and that sense of really what is the angle. Are you seeing this in a capitalist sense, like the crypto bros were? Crypto bros saw this as a way to make a bunch of money, but also they had that missionary zeal, like we’re going to convert the world over to this thing. We all know how Stanley cup collecting will end up. It’s going to end up with a bunch of these things in landfills.

**Craig:** This is the bust and boom of these things. When I was a kid in high school, my friends and I would go down to Point Pleasant in New Jersey, which is on the shore, and it had a big boardwalk. The boardwalk had rides and restaurants and lots of little stands that would sell things. Every summer, there was a stand that was selling the new hot ticket toy. It was different every summer. The rabidity was consistent. It was just the thing that people were obsessed with that changed.

When I was really young, my sister, like many young girls, was pulled into the Cabbage Patch doll craze. I have the distinct memory of being in a Toys R Us in Brooklyn, watching adults fighting, almost physically, as Toys R Us employees pulled out a large shipping box of Cabbage Patch dolls, because of the insanity of it.

Humans are not good at valuing things. We’re notoriously irrational about it. Forced scarcity or this belief that something is valuable will drive our behavior. I think Bill Maher once famously said if you put a velvet rope in front of a toxic waste dump in LA, people will start lining up. There’s just something wrong with our brains.

I will say – and I’m not boasting here, this is just dumb luck of my brain – I don’t understand collecting. I’ve never collected anything. I don’t see the point of it. It just seems like a pointless accruing. I don’t quite know what it means. But I do recognize I’m alone, or, not alone; I’m rare, I guess.

**John:** I have some cool vintage typewriters, but I have them because they’re individually cool. But I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know anything about the community. It’s not part of anything. I guess what I’m trying to distinguish between is there’s people who collect and enter into a community about those collections, and it does enter into a fandom situation, and then there’s people who are just there to make a buck and don’t actually care about it, which I guess does tie into the whole poser issue of fandom is who are the true believers and who are the follow-ons who are trying to exploit it. It is a good moment for me to remind everybody to buy your Scriptnotes T-shirts on Cotton Bureau, especially the limited editions, which will only be sold for periods of time, because-

**Craig:** So rare.

**John:** When those drop, sometimes it’s only 100 of them that were done.

**Craig:** When they drop. If you’re a real Scriptnotes fan, not a poser, if you’re real. The ultimate posers are the people that sell stuff. Those are the posers. Hasbro.

**John:** There were times out on the picket line where I’d see a Scriptnotes shirt that I’d never seen out in the wild. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, I need to photograph that, because that is a true fan who has that,” or has the Courier Prime shirt, which we only made for a short period of time.

**Craig:** Or maybe that was the brother of a true fan who stopped being a true fan and just left that T-shirt behind when they moved.

**John:** No, I don’t believe it.

**Craig:** I’m so much more cynical.

**John:** When I asked that person who was wearing that very distinct shirt, also, “How’d you get that so crisp?” he’s like, “Oh, I never put it in the dryer. I always hand-dry it.”

**Craig:** Wow. It gives me a little bit of anxiety.

**John:** It’s true fandom for me. Craig, I’ll always be a fan of yours.

**Craig:** Aw, John. I’m a fan of yours too. You know what? Let’s just do this podcast until one of us just drops dead on our desk.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do.

**Craig:** And hopefully during a podcast. It’ll make a great bonus segment.

**John:** You have to hear that thump.

**Craig:** Yeah, just a thump. And then like, “Oh, okay. That’s Scriptnotes for you.”

**John:** That’s why we turn the Zoom off, so you can’t see when one of us drops. You have to listen for it. Thanks, Drew.

**Drew:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Tiffany Problem](https://dmnes.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/the-tiffany-problem/)
* [‘Harry Potter’ TV Series Zeroes In On Premise As Selected Writers Pitch Their Ideas To Max](https://deadline.com/2024/01/harry-potter-tv-series-premise-writers-set-max-1235798159/)
* [WGGB Screenwriting Credits Agreement](https://writersguild.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screenwriting_credits_agreement.pdf)
* [Ig Nobel Prize – “Please stop, I’m Bored”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAnVNXaa5oA)
* [Anatomy of a Fall – Screenplay](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Anatomy-Of-A-Fall-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [Podcasters Took Up Her Sister’s Murder Investigation. Then They Turned on Her](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/magazine/murder-podcast-debbie-williamson.html) by Sarah Viren for the New York Times
* [Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution](https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) by David Chapman
* [Going Zero by Anthony McCarten](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/going-zero-anthony-mccarten?variant=40641169686562)
* [The Devil by Jessica Mazin](https://open.spotify.com/track/6mgwrkmCQMfxRj810BOlvB?si=ed91e62ef4cc43e4) on Spotify
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jessica Mazin ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/628standardV2.mp3).