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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Well, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode of 602 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at pages written by our listeners and discuss what’s working and what could be working better. We’ll also answer listener questions on verisimilitude in dialog, POV, writing samples, and more. In our bonus segment for Premium members, what can we get away with never having to do or learn?

Craig: Podcasting.

John: Craig and I will discuss the perks of procrastination. An announcement, next week will be some sort of repeating episode, because Craig and I are both going to be off the grid for a little bit, but it’ll be okay. Everyone will be fine. We’ll find a great episode from the vaults to pull up and put into your ear.

Craig: We only have 600 of them.

John: Actually, even more when you consider bonus episodes and other things we’ve done along the way. There’s plenty of good content.

Craig: Guys, spin the big wheel of podcasts and see what you get.

John: Or maybe just listen to this episode extra slow. Give it to yourself in small doses, and then you’ll have more to savor. You do you is what I’m going to.

Craig: You do you.

John: We have a little bit of news. Craig, I texted you last week, because Weekend Read 2, our app for reading scripts on your phone, is now out. It’s in the app store. It’s been in beta for more than a year, but we finally put it out there. It has not only all the For Your Consideration scripts that we always have in there, but it has two old short stories of mine, it has your entire Chernobyl collection, it has all of the Scriptnotes transcripts for 600 episodes, thanks to Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Amazing.

John: It’s there.

Craig: I was looking at this. It’s pretty cool. What font do you guys naturally default to? I’m just curious.

John: The default font for the reader view is Avenir.

Craig: Avenir.

John: Avenir. It’s a good face.

Craig: Is that what you call these things? It’s a good face?

John: A typeface. You call them typefaces. It’s a good face.

Craig: That’s what the kids in the cool font community call it.

John: It really is. That’s my graphic designer background coming back through, because a font is a specific, deliberate. Medium bold would be the font, and the face is the whole family together.

Craig: Nice face, bro.

John: Nice face, bro.

Craig: Somebody walks by your desk. “Sweet serifs. Nice face.”

John: Sweet serifs. The Three Page Challenges that we’re looking at through today will be available in Weekend Read. The point of Weekend Read is that it is so hard to read a normal formatted script on your phone if you need to. You’re pinching into your zoom. It’s not a great experience. This makes it a good experience. It melts it down, and it re-formats it in a way that works really well.

Craig: John, what is the cost of Weekend Read 2?

John: Weekend Read 2 is free to use for all you people.

Craig: $0?

John: $0.

John: It’s a public source we put out there. If you want to have a larger library, if you want to do notes, if you want to have it read stuff aloud to you, then you can subscribe to it. It’s two bucks a month, I want to say.

Craig: What? That’s a pretty good deal.

John: It’s a pretty good deal. That pays for our coding. It also pays for Drew and Halley, our intern, who are formatting stuff and finding stuff to put in there every Friday so we can keep new stuff in that library.

Craig: Nice. We gotta keep Lamberson eating. We can’t let Lamberson starve. Halley, you know I’m going to call you Lamberson, right? Because again, I just want to say, Halley, what a great last name.

Halley Lamberson: Thank you, Craig. I now have people calling me amenably.

Craig: Nice.

John: Aw, the anagram.

Craig: Nice.

John: One thing we added this last round, which is a suggestion from Dana Fox, our mutual friend, is the typeface Open Dyslexic. Craig, have you looked at Open Dyslexic as a typeface?

Craig: You mean is a face?

John: As a typeface. Have you looked at that face?

Craig: I’m confused. It’s face, right?

John: It’s face.

Craig: Wait, it’s called what now?

John: Open Dyslexic. Are you in Weekend Read right now? Are you looking at it right now?

Craig: I’m looking online at Open Dyslexic. Oh, look at that. I can see. Whoa.

John: Some people find it easier to read this.

Craig: Interesting.

John: It has very unusual weights. It’s a little bottom-heavy in a way. Some people find it much easier to read. Our friend Dana finds it much, much easier to read. We put that in there for her.

Craig: This is really interesting. I’m fascinated by the science behind this. I suppose it makes it much easier to understand what the bottom and the top of any particular symbol is. The lower L’s have little uppercase squidgetties coming off them, so they don’t just look like mine.

John: Little feet going the opposite direction.

Craig: It’s also a groovy font. It feels like, hey, man, I’m a little high.

John: You’re just a little bit high. I think the idea behind it is it makes your brain less likely to flip a letter, which is some forms of dyslexia. What I’ve heard about dyslexia more recently, and this is me opining on things I’ve read in one article, is that a lot of it tends to be a brain auditory processing thing much more than a visual thing, but whatever helps a person read and feel more confident and comfortable reading is a good thing.

Craig: Whatever impediment there is between you and what you want, if someone’s helping you get there with technology, then hooray. It’s funny. I never thought about this sort of thing, because I don’t have dyslexia. Nobody in my family or immediate family has dyslexia. It wasn’t anything we had to concentrate on. Once you get there, you go, “Oh yeah, that makes sense, actually.” There has to be at least some difference in fonts. Sorry, faces.

John: Obviously, there’s basic fundamental readability. There’s reasons why you don’t use tiny type sizes. There’s reasons why you want contrast between the letters in the background. There’s a reason why we made Courier Prime the typeface, because it just was a better typeface to read. I guess Open Dyslexic is an attempt to be very aggressive about making sure the letter forms are so distinct that they don’t get flipped in people’s heads. I like people who are trying to solve problems out there in the world.

Craig: Love it.

John: Love it. Love it. Let’s solve some problems out there in the world by tackling some listener questions.

Craig: Segue man.

John: Because we often put these at the end of the episode, and then we run out of time and energy. We’re going to foreground them today. Drew Marquardt, can you help us out with a listener question?

Drew Marquardt: I sure can. Eric writes, “I’m writing a screenplay where the protagonist is an aerospace engineer. I myself am just a humble, lower middle class guy with very little college education. I want my characters to sound real, so I’m asking my older cousin about these topics, since he did go to college and graduated in this field. I sat down with him and recorded us talking about a bunch of subjects and explored the mind of the main character. He gave me these awesome pieces of dialog that the main character could say. I also text him from time to time as I build the script and ask him, ‘Hey, check out this scene. I wanted to talk about blah blah blah. Does this sound?’ He replies in full detail how the character should be saying things. Is this cheating or allowed? Could I use his language verbatim to build this character in this world? Does he get a writing credit, or what type of credit would be given for this, or is it just using a resource like reading a book and pulling out language from it, which I’m also doing?”

John: Eric, I’m sorry. You need to just stop what you’re doing and never, ever try to be a screenwriter again. You’ve broken incredibly important rules about never using any person’s expertise in your script.

Craig: Throw your laptop out, Eric. Throw it out.

John: It’s tainted. Everything’s tainted.

Craig: Set your clothes on fire and leave town. I think you probably have figured out that we’re totally fine with this. It’s actually just a sign that you’re doing your job well, to check with people. No, what they’re doing isn’t writing. No, they shouldn’t be getting a writing credit. It is perfectly reasonable to say to them that you will do your best to advocate for a consulting credit of some sort, like aerospace consultant. You can’t guarantee those sorts of things, because ultimately, somebody’s going to be producing this, and it’ll be up to them. This is totally fine. I do this all the time, call people up like, “Does this sound right?”

John: “Does this sound right?” I think you’re concerned specifically about like, oh my god, I’m using the actual words that he said. In this case, it’s your brother, first off. He’s giving you consent. He knows why you’re asking him these questions. You’re showing him scenes. He’s giving you feedback. He wants you to be able to write the best thing, both because he’s your brother, but he also would love to see aerospace engineering portrayed properly on screen. You’re doing [inaudible 00:08:30] for all these reasons.

Weirdly, it’s only the last sentence of your question that I want to flag here, “Is it just using a resource, like reading a book and pulling out language from that book?” Be more careful about pulling out language from a book there, sir. In reading that book, you might figure out what terms people are using and how people talk about stuff, but just make sure you’re not plagiarizing. Make sure you’re not literally taking the sentences out of that book. Yes, do research. Research is not cheating. It’s never cheating.

Craig: No, it’s essential. When you say language, if you mean nomenclature, terminology, all fine, you want to do that stuff for sure. Yeah, you’ve got a great resource there. It’s your cousin. It’s his cousin. It’s not his brother.

John: It’s one more step removed.

Craig: One more step removed.

John: Less blood in there.

Craig: I feel like people that do jobs that are constantly misrepresented on screen are going to be thrilled if they can see a movie where they’re like, “Oh my god, it’s clear that these people talked to an aerospace engineer.” Have you ever heard, John, the little bit of Ben Affleck’s commentary, the DVD commentary for the movie Armageddon?

John: Yeah, I think you’ve talked about it on the show. It was an amazing thing.

Craig: It’s so wonderful. I’ve talked about it before. Part of what he’s talking about is just this huge gap between what the movie is imagining or presenting and what the reality is, which I’m sure, yes, if a bunch of guys and ladies at NASA were watching, that they would probably just laugh their asses off. You’re avoiding that, which I think is a fantastic thing to do. Eric, I feel like you knew we were going to say, “Eric, you’re okay.”

John: That’s fine too. Sometimes you just want some validation, like, “I’m right here.” Eric, you’re good.

Craig: Eric, you are right.

John: Craig, I have a question for you. Are you close with any of your cousins?

Craig: No, but there’s a reason. There are a couple of reasons. I only have two first cousins. I had three. One of them passed away. My dad was 13 years younger than his sister. My mother is an only child. My dad was a mistake. Therefore, I am the son of a mistake.

John: You’re generationally much farther away from those cousins.

Craig: That’s the point. They were so much older than I was when I was a little kid. There’s Bilya. He doesn’t go by Billy, but we always knew him as cousin Billy. Cousin Billy and cousin Laurie. They were lovely. It’s just that they were just much older. Then also there’s a lot of… My sister and I never quite understood what was going on. In the older generations of my family, there are all sorts of, I don’t know, grievances, things like-

John: [Crosstalk 00:11:13].

Craig: This was in a situation where we saw each other all the time at family reunions. It was pretty rare. I was always excited to see them, because I looked up to them, because they were so much older and exciting. No, I’m not. How about you?

John: I’m not. I’m the youngest of all that branch of cousins. We lived in Colorado. Everyone else was further back east. Growing up, my cousins Tim and Cindy were close enough to my brother’s and my age that we would hang out some. I do have some good, fond memories of that. They all moved to different places. I was never around them. They all got much, much, much more Christian over the years, and so it became harder and harder. We still keep in touch. When my mom died, they were at the Zoom memorial service, and lovely cards and all that, but no, not close.

I always envied people who had cousins in town, because that felt like such a special thing. It’s not so close as a sibling, but a friend plus a blood connection felt like a really cool thing to have.

Craig: I do have that with my cousin Megan Amram.

John: Absolutely, but you didn’t even know she existed until well into the Scriptnotes era.

Craig: I certainly didn’t know she was my cousin until we 23 and Me’ed each other. She’s my cousin. I mean, third, possibly fourth, but yeah, she counts. That’s the cousin I have, Megan Amram.

John: That’s the cousin you want. The cousin of choice.

Craig: Yes, cousin of fact and choice.

John: Love them both. Let’s try a new question. Drew Goddard. Drew Goddard? You’re not Drew Goddard.

Drew: I’m not Drew Goddard.

John: Let’s try a new question. Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Is Drew Goddard here? Is he listening?

John: He’s very tall. We would notice him if he were on the Zoom, because he’s very, very tall.

Craig: Very tall.

Drew: Ricky in Venice Beach writes, “My entire movie is told from the hero’s perspective, and there is never a scene that she’s not in. She also has three family members who have powerful character arcs that I want to resolve by the end of the story.”

John: Are they cousins is my question.

Craig: And how powerful.

Drew: “The problem I’m running into is how to resolve these subplots in the third act when the lead character has traveled far away and is no longer geographically close to them. I would love to cut back to the other characters to see how they changed over the course of the story. Unfortunately, I’ve never cut away from the lead character’s perspective the entire movie. I feel like cutting back to these characters makes sense emotionally and thematically, but it just feels off to me. What advice or thoughts do you have about breaking from your main character’s perspective in order to complete a separate character arc?”

Craig: Ricky, something is wrong. Something is fundamentally wrong, because you are saying that there are three family members who have powerful character arcs. I’m not sure how powerful they can be if they’re never alone and they never are separate from the main character. Do those character arcs connect specifically to your main character? Is there a way for everybody to get together for a little family reunion at the end?

It sounds like you’ve got a problem of, “I want to do this and I want to do that,” and the two things are opposite. It’s what Lindsay Doran refers to as a closeup with feet. You’re trying to do a closeup with feet, and I think you’re going to have to pick one way or the other. That means probably going backwards in your script and looking for where things may have gone slightly awry.

John: In a previous episode, we talked about group dynamics and how important it is for the group as a whole to evolve and for the individual relationships within that group to evolve. It’s possible that I can imagine scenarios where these characters really work together a lot more, and so therefore we did establish arcs that those characters could go through. Just because of the circumstances of Ricky’s story, they’re not going to be around to complete those arcs.

Craig’s solution, basically to go back and really look at do I need these things to happen, that way is entirely possible, or the other solution of just like, we need to get everyone back together at the end to learn and see what has happened and what has changed, because I don’t think you’re going to be satisfied with the first-time cutaway at the end of the story to break POV. I’m sure our listeners can find 10 examples in great movies that do that, but it’s certainly not recommended practice.

Craig: No, I wouldn’t. I’m a little nervous. These character arcs, I just want to know, how are they relevant to my main character? Are they relevant? Do they inform the main character’s experience? Generally speaking, if you have a, like you say, “My entire movie is told from the hero’s perspective,” that means it’s about her. Therefore, all the choices that you make as a storyteller, that put her in the middle of the wheel, and then there are spokes of the wheel, like her family members, all those spokes have to feed back to the hero. They are there for a dramatic purpose that must connect back to the hero.

I have no interest in whether or not Aunt Sally’s marriage falls apart if the story is about Grandpa Joe, and Aunt Sally’s marriage has nothing to do with Grandpa Joe. We just need to connect it. We need to. At that point, that should guide you. If they don’t connect…

John: Let’s imagine a story in which the hero has inspired one of the characters to give up drinking or make a fundamental life change. I can see that being a powerful arc. They went through a whole thing, but they’re not there for the end.

Keep in mind, Ricky, that what’s meaningful to the audience isn’t that that character’s changed. It’s that your hero got to see the results of that character changing. It’s when you’re seeing it from your hero’s eyes, oh, this change happened, and that your hero was proud of this character and feels a connection to this change that has happened. That’s the reward. Cutting away to it without the hero knowing it isn’t going to be satisfying to the audience.

Craig: It’s interesting. I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about this. Storytelling that is built around a character, and that’s the majority of what we do, a central character, is essentially a narcissistic exercise, where that character’s feelings, that character’s experiences, that character’s problems, and that character’s resolutions and actions are what matters to us. We are essentially complicit in their narcissism. Other things happen elsewhere. They don’t matter as much. They just don’t. We don’t mind that. It’s just not a problem.

That’s why it’s so funny in whichever of the Austin Powers it was when the henchman dies and then they go to his family, because it underscores what a bizarre act of narcissism storytelling is.

I think what you’re struggling with is you’re trying to be not narcissistic about it, but here in the audience, all you’ve done is mainline narcissism heroin into my veins. I just care about the hero, because I identify with the hero. The story is for me to feel and appreciate. I want to know who I’m with. I don’t want to ever leave that person. If I do, it’s only because I want to see how it feeds back into the person I care about.

John: Perhaps it was a hundred episodes ago we talked about main character energy and how in real life it can be a dangerous pathological thing. In movies, main character energy, you know what? That’s what you’re here for is the main character energy. That could be, Ricky, what you’re feeling there is that. Don’t run away from it. Drew, what do you got for us?

Drew: Danny writes, “An independent producer and friend came to me with a sitcom idea. I thought it was great, so we developed the characters and plot together. I’m the sole writer of the script, with written by-credit, but he is a co-creator. He supports me submitting it as a writing sample for fellowships, but I list him as a collaborator if I’m submitting that script for incubators. We also have a pitch deck in case we have any opportunities to take it out.

“When I start querying managers after the strike, would it be okay for me to send this pilot as a second sample in addition to my other original pilot? The script definitely shows my voice and writing skills. The concept is not entirely mine, but we’re not a writing team. If I do send the script, should I mention my co-creator? Should I say a producer approached me to write on spec, or should I just focus on writing and polishing another completely original script before querying representation?”

John: Craig, I think where we’re getting confused here with Danny is that a producer approached to say, “Hey, would you write this thing kind of with me, kind of for me, on spec?” This producer person wants to produce this thing, but Danny is the writer. Danny owns everything. Danny can absolutely use this as a sample. There isn’t a problem here. That person is not a co-writer, doesn’t need to have their name anywhere on it, unless the agreement they have is that this person is only producing it, and every script has to say producer attached or something.

Craig: I think this is a problem that isn’t a problem, because what Danny is describing is a producer. A producer says, “Hey, I’ve got an idea for something,” which in and of itself is not, as we know, property. The producer looks for a writer. The writer says, “Oh, I like that. I’ll write it.” What do writers do with producers? Of course, they bounce ideas back and forth. They talk about stuff. Then the writer goes and writes. The producer is attached to produce. That’s it. When it says, “I’m the sole,” quote unquote, “writer of the script with written-by credit, but he is a co-creator,” no, he’s not.

John: Nope.

Craig: No, he’s not. First of all, just so you know, created by is a credit that the Writers Guild assigns as a function of separated writes. It has to do with who wrote the underlying story, and that is writing. What this person is is a producer. That’s great. There’s a whole world of non-writing producers. Danny, when you start talking to managers, you could send them pilot. Why wouldn’t you? You wrote it?

John: You did. It’s your writing. It shows what you can do. Let’s say you sign with these managers, and the managers want to take this thing out. Then it’s maybe a conversation like, “Okay, this producer is attached. Okay, what does it mean? What is the producer actually expecting? Has the producer done other things? Are you going to try to get some more senior experienced producer on board with this? Is the producer going to take it out on their own?” All that stuff has to be figured out. For you, Danny, getting representation, that’s not a barrier in your way.

Craig: Just mention it if you’re talking to a … If a manager’s interested, then you can say, “Oh by the way, just so you know, there is a producer attached to this one.” This one, no, free and clear. It’s not like you can only have one producer. Take a look at the credits for things. Jeez, Louise.

John: Good lord.

Craig: You can have a thousand producers. If a manager’s like, “I wanted to be the producer,” good, you can be the producer. Hey, how about this? Everyone gets to be a producer. Who cares? I’m the writer, and then there are 4 million people that have… That’s why the Producers Guild exists, to basically say, okay, of the thousand of you that have the producing credit, we’ve figured out that you’re a producer and you’re a producer. The rest of you stay in your seats.

John: For folks who are not familiar with the Producers Guild, you’ll see credits at the end of the movie or at the start of the movie that say “produced by,” and you don’t know who those people are. If it says PGA after it, PGA, just those letters, that means the Producers Guild has gone through, looked at who the people are who worked on this, and said these are the people who really produced-produced the movie. It’s a limited subset of the bigger, longer list you see there.

Craig: John, are you in the Producers Guild?

John: I am not in the Producers Guild. Are you in the Producers Guild?

Craig: I am in the Producers Guild.

John: Nice.

Craig: They gave me an award, and I had to join. Here’s the thing. It does make sense to figure out… One of the things that Producers Guild did that was quite wise was… Because they’re not a union. They’re not a labor union, even though they’re called guild. The Writers Guild and the Directors Guild just happen to use the word guild, as do the Screen Actors, but we’re all unions. They’re not.

What they did that was smart was they made themselves essential by I guess contracting with the major awards, to say, “Okay, if you’re giving out best television show or best movie, the people that collect those are producers. Who should get up there? We’ll figure it out. We’re the Producers Guild.”

At the end of each season of television that I do, at some point I get a thing from the Producers Guild, not because I’m a member, everybody gets it, that says, “What’s your title? What’d you do? Check off the boxes if you did these. Don’t check off if you didn’t do these. Then we’ll make our choice.”

John: It’s a thankless task maybe to decide that, but I understand. The producers themselves decided they wanted to do this, because they were tired of having the value of a producer credit devalued by all the people who get those credits for reasons that are not really producing.

Craig: Exactly. They don’t make you join, by the way. You can. It’s nice. It helps them do the work that they do. They do this for everything, because if you want to go up there and get your award, you have to prove that you should.

John: Drew, let’s try another question.

Drew: Gary writes, “In Episode 598, Vince Gilligan discussed today’s over-reliance on IP as the basis for new shows or features. That seems to put even more impediments before fledgling or at least uncredited writers, given the difficulty of being able to option such a property. I have recent experience with this issue. I wanted to develop a script based on a 1956 YA novel, but the literary agency connected to the author’s estate wouldn’t give me, an uncredited writer, an option. What are possible strategies for such writers, or is it hopeless to get an option without somehow acquiring a production company’s backing?”

John: Gary, I feel for you. I think it is going to be hard for you as an uncredited writer to get that, unless you had some special connection with the author or with the material, you were somehow able to break through the, “It doesn’t really make a lot of sense for us,” options to backlog.

I would say hold on to this notion of adapting this book and focus on some other things. At some point you will be signed by a rep, you will be going on the water bottle tour of Los Angeles. That might be an opportunity to say, when they ask, “What else do you want to do?” it’s like, “Oh, I’ve always really wanted to do this book.” Pick which producer you might want to say that to. If it’s really a good fit, then that producer could track down those rights and may get that book for you to adapt. That’s a way that I’ve seen it happen in real life before. Craig, other instincts from on your side?

Craig: I think that’s basically everything I would say, except maybe if this is a fairly obscure novel, you might want to just wing it. Just do it, because they don’t want to give you an option, because they don’t know you, and they also don’t know if the script will be any good. Who knows? They give you an option, and then, oh god, next week, I don’t know, David Koepp comes calling, and they’re like, “Oh, no, we gave it to Gary.” That’s probably not going to happen, is it?

One of the things that Vince was saying is, okay, there’s an over-reliance on IP, and the implication of that is that if something hasn’t been snapped up in terms of rights, then maybe it’s just not really on anyone’s radar at all, or maybe people tried and gave up. It sounds like you’re talking about a screenplay as opposed to a series. Even if it were a series, it would just be a pilot script.

Your job is, you want to write a script based on this novel, maybe write it. Honestly, what you’re really gambling is… Okay, I don’t know how long it’s going to take you to write it. Let’s say it takes you five months. You’re gambling that in the next five months, no one is going to come out with a script for that novel, which I’m going to guess no one has come out with in the last five years. Might be worth it. Then show them the script. Then they might be like, “Oh.”

John: “Oh, this is actually not too bad.”

Craig: “This ain’t too bad.”

John: Is it a long shot? Yeah, it’s a long shot, but it’s not the worst idea, because what you’re going to come out of this with hopefully is at least a good script, a good script people can read and say, “You know what? Gary, he’s a good writer.”

I remember way back when I was in film school, I read a Alien versus Predator script. I have no idea who wrote that. It was just a spec that someone wrote an Alien versus Predator thing. I was like, “That’s a really clever mashup of these two things.” It never got made. Different fork of that whole idea came to be at a certain point. It was a cool idea. I’m sure that person got signed and got some meetings that got stuff started. That could be you, Gary.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: I would also say Craig may be right. If it really is inspiring you to do that more than some other original idea of your own, consider it.

Craig: When you say, “I want to develop a script,” I would love, Gary, if you said, “I want to write a script.” Development is what we do when other people are like, “I don’t know.” A lot of development really starts with a script, whether it’s something you’re rewriting or it’s something you’ve written already.

Maybe write it. Like John says, worst comes to worst, you have a cool sample. Can people make that sample without the rights? No. Do they have other stuff that they would want to do anyway? Yes. Was it likely that they were going to be, “Oh my gosh, there’s a 58-year-old novel that we could do.” Probably not. I wouldn’t worry about it. Go for it.

John: Gary, are you infringing on their copyright to write that script? Yeah.

Craig: No.

John: Are they going to come out to you?

Craig: No, they’re not. You’re not.

John: Here’s the question. You are not doing anything that diminishes the commercial value of the original thing.

Craig: You’re not exploiting it. Look. Here’s the deal. You can sit in your house, and you can write fan fiction about Star Trek or whatever. You can write anything you want. When you sell it or when you distribute it, that’s different. To write a screenplay and not receive money for it and not have it turn into a movie and not put it online and have it distributed around, no, there’s not exploitation.

John: Here’s the infringing part I would say. It’s that if Gary wrote the script, and then he wanted to submit it to the Office of Copyright for copyright protection, no.

Craig: No, you can’t do that.

John: You’ve created a piece of work that you cannot copyright.

Craig: That’s right. That’s right.

John: That’s a risk you take.

Craig: Exactly. It’s a risk you take. Actually, even that is not quite true, because if you write something, somebody else can come along and say, “Oh, Gary wrote this.” For instance, if let’s say the novelist were still alive, which they probably aren’t, the novelist picks up Gary’s script, and they’re like, “Whoa, this is a great script, but Gary can’t copyright this. I think I’ll just rip the cover page off, stick my name on it.” That would be infringing Gary’s… Gary does have protection, but he can’t exploit anything.

John: It’s interesting. That is a fascinating thing.

Craig: He only has protection insofar as this work represents what I did, but it is not exploitable, because I don’t have permission from the original rights-holder.

John: What we’re describing is essentially a chain of titles. Gary doesn’t own the underlying piece of material. No one else owns Gary’s script. In order to make a feature out of this project, you need both underlying material and Gary’s script.

Craig: Yes, I believe that is correct. That said-

John: Not lawyers.

Craig: … if an attorney wants to write in and explain why I am absolutely wrong, I am welcoming of it.

John: We’d love it.

Craig: It is a learning opportunity.

John: Let’s go on to our Three Page Challenge, because we have three entries into this. I want to make sure we spend some good quality time looking through them. If you are new to the podcast and have not listened to an episode where we do a Three Page Challenge, here’s what this is.

Every once in a while we ask our listeners, hey, would you like to send in the first three pages of your script, it could be a feature, it could be a TV series, for us to talk about on the air? Everything we’re going to be talking about is completely voluntary. These people volunteered for this treatment. We are not picking stuff off the internet and poking holes in it. People asked for this feedback.

Those folks went to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, filled out a little form. They said it’s okay for us to talk about it, they’re not going to sue us. They attached a pdf, and it went into a magical inbox that Drew and our summer intern, Halley Lamberson, read through all of those entries. Halley, this was your first time doing this. Can you talk to us about this process? How many scripts did you and Drew look at this past week?

Halley: I think together we looked at a couple hundred. The process was very fun, reading through the submissions over a couple days and talking to Drew about the ones we thought were standout. It made me think about my own writing to read the entries.

John: I remember when I was a reader at TriStar, you learn a lot by reading other people’s writing. You definitely learn sometimes things you never want to do and stuff you see on the page, like, “Oh, let me make sure I never, ever do that.” The sampling that you guys picked, I liked, because they were both interesting ideas and had some issues that Craig and I could talk about.

Thank you very much for all your hard work. Folks, don’t send in those Three Page Challenges until we ask for them, because, man, they really do stack up quick. You guys are really good about sending stuff in.

Let’s maybe start with Skulduggery. This was from Matthew Davis. Actually, in our last live show, one of the raffle items we had was we guarantee front of the line for a Three Page Challenge when we do our next Three Page Challenge. That was Matt Davis. He sent that through.

If people want to read along with us, it’ll be attached to the show notes for this episode, so you can click through and find the pdf, or they’re in Weekend Read right now if you want to read them. If you’re just listening to this on your drive, Drew, could you give us a summary for Skulduggery by Matthew Davis?

Drew: Madame Louvier, a Haitian Voodoo queen with her face grease painted as a skull, moves through the forest of the Louisiana backwater, illuminated by lamplight. She approaches a small home where Jenny, 40s, gives her son $10 and sends him away on his bike.

Inside the house, Madame Louvier has Jenny drink a mysterious elixir and commands Jenny to exhale a blue vapor, a spirit which Madame Louvier inhales and communes with. Jenny’s vision warps. She sees Madame Louvier with a giant boa constrictor, cutting a strip of fabric from Jenny’s dress and fashioning it to a voodoo doll. Louvier’s dagger erupts in blue fames and turns every candle’s fire blue.

Louvier explains that their journey is entwined with Pirate Jean Laffite and threatens to kill Jenny unless she tells her the location of a map, which Jenny only has a faint memory of.

John: Craig Mazin, talk us through your impressions of Skulduggery and some of the things you noticed as you went into it.

Craig: There were some nice visuals to start with. I’m a little fussy about movement issues.

John: I have a lot of movement issues in this too.

Craig: There was a cool beginning. “Frogs and crickets cry out from the swamp. Lamplight illuminates a SKULL. The skull… MOVES.” Oh. Okay. “We realize the skull is a grease-painted face: She opens her eyes with an emotionless, blank stare: ONE EYE GLAZED-OVER – an injury long ago unaddressed.” Oh. Okay. “Draped in a blood-red cloak,” great, “the ghastly figures murmurs as she trudges along… ”

Wait a second. Now, was she trudging or was she just still? That’s a cheat. This is where we run into trouble all the time. This is where directors start to tear their hair out, because you can’t do both. You can’t start with this fixed skull, play the trick that it’s not really a skull, it’s actually a person, but also have them walking. If you are going to say they just started walking, then what were they doing before? Just standing, waiting for the movie to start? These things, they maybe don’t seem like that big of a deal. They’re actually a really big deal.

Let’s get into the meat of it all. There’s Jenny, who is in a backwater home. I don’t know what that is.

John: I don’t either.

Craig: What is a backwater home? Is it a cabin that’s on the bayou? Is it in the swamp?

John: I have no idea what the size or scale of this is. Also, when we’re getting inside, there’s a hallway, so it’s not just a cabin, but I don’t have a sense of this. There’s a porch. Is this a gothic Southern mansion, a Big Fish-y kind of thing? What is this?

Craig: Also, you can’t start a scene with somebody handing someone a $10 bill and saying, “No need to hurry back.” Was he also just standing, waiting? Some of the issue here is that the way these scenes start, it’s almost like people were waiting for somebody to go, “Action.”

There are so many ways to start a thing like this. We could be outside that house, and we could here, “Mom,” and, “Okay, come here,” whatever it is. There’s always ways to do it. It just seems like the actors are waiting, and then someone goes, “Okay, now do stuff,” and then they start doing things. We lose a little bit of the sense of the moment before, which is a really big deal for actors. It’s something that I think about all the time as a writer.

She sends her kid away. He, “Pedals his ramshackle bike away.” Pedals is capitalized for some reason. I don’t know why. He, “Pedals his ramshackle,” ramshackle is not a great word for a bike, “away. He pauses.” Do you mean he stops? He, “TAKES ONE LAST LOOK BACK AT HIS MOTHER… ” Then the scene ends. Does he just stay stopped? There’s movement issues. I’m struggling with the movement. How about you?

John: I’m having many of the same problems you’re describing here. I love that it’s evocative and atmospheric. That all feels great. I like the skull reveal, but I had the same problem with the movement. We didn’t need to “realize the skull is a grease-painted face,” just, “The skull is a grease-painted face.”

The, “She opens her eyes with an emotionless, blank stare,” you’re saying she, but you haven’t even introduced the character yet, which was a little bit of a bump for me. “MADAME LOUVIER — a Haitian-born Voodoo Queen,” I need some matches dashes there to get us out of that little clause.

Matt is using a lot of colons as a punctuation device. That could totally work if we were consistent, but he does a lot in the first page and then stops, so making some choices about how you’re going to get us down the page.

I read Madame Louvier as… She’s “Haitian-born Voodoo Queen,” so I’m reading her as being a dark-skinned character, but then it felt weird to me that I didn’t have any racial information about Jenny Duralde. I’m maybe pulling it in from her last name. I just got a little nervous suddenly that, oh, no, I’m going to be in a trope-y, voodoo-y kind of thing that is uncomfortable. I think just being a little bit more specific would be a great idea.

I had the same problem with JD, the son. Gives him a dollar bill. She says, “No need to hurry back,” but I don’t even know what that’s in context to. I was thinking if she calls JD, and JD is on his bike, he could be on his bike from the very start, and she says, “No need to hurry back,” or, “Get yourself a soda too.” Then I see, oh, she’s sending him away. Because he wasn’t on the bike to start with, I didn’t know what I was seeing for most of the scene.

Craig: There’s also a little bit of a missed opportunity to understand relationship, because she says, “No need to hurry back. I’ll be fine.” Her hand is shaking. He notices her hand is shaking. He knows she’s scared. Also, clearly, there has been some kind of conversation, because, “I’ll be fine,” even though they were just standing, and she suddenly handed him the money.

“Treat yourself to a soda, okay?” Then he goes, “Thanks, mom.” Now, “Thanks, mom,” is not great. You say, “Thanks, mom,” when it’s like, “Hey, kids, there’s Sunny D in the fridge.” “Thanks, mom.” “Thanks, mom” is really weirdly dull for what is happening here. I don’t quite know what this kid is thinking. Also, man, he gets on that bike fast.

John: That’s why I think you start the scene with him on the bike.

Craig: We continue with some movement issues. We start with fingernails diving into a burlap pouch. “They pluck out a VIAL OF ELIXIR.” She’s walking down a hallway. Man, she got there fast too. It feels to me, like, wouldn’t we want to hear the knock, knock, knock? I don’t know, seems like we missed some interesting opportunity.

John: You’re missing a “transition to.” If there were a “transition to” at the bottom of JD going off on the bike, and then we were jumping forward in time, because we are jumping forward in time, because we’re going to come to her. She’s already in the chair, and there’s candles everywhere. A thing has happened. It’s okay to do that. We can compress some time, but give us the “transition to,” because we need some sense this is not a continuous thing.

Craig: Absolutely. Then we get into the meat, which is this supernatural thing. I don’t know what’s going on. I gotta be honest. I know eventually what is happening is Madame Louvier is abusing some sort of voodoo ritual to get Jenny to tell her where the Pirate Jean Laffite’s map is, which is fine, perfectly fine thing to do, I guess, if you’re an evil voodoo ritual person. Prior to that happening, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what Jenny wants.

John: Exactly.

Craig: I don’t know why she’s participating in this.

John: Is she terrified of this woman coming, and that’s why she sent the son away? She seemed like a willing participant, at least at the start of this, because she’s already there, and all the candles are lit. It doesn’t seem like she’s a captive, quite, so she may have called for this woman to come, but she’s scared of this woman. I don’t have a clear read on what’s supposed to be happening here. Mystery is great, but I’m just confused.

Craig: Yes. For instance, if I understood that she said, “My son is sick,” in a more interesting way, “My son is sick. He’s going to die. Can you do some voodoo and make him live?” okay, I know what she wants, at least. I just don’t know what she wants. Voodoo, it’s Haitian. I understand that. One of the languages of Haiti is French. Where we do run into tropes, with anyone that speaks-

John: Oh, god.

Craig: … any language is them saying something in one language and then repeating it in English. Why would you do that? Just say it in one or the other. She’s constantly saying something in French and then repeating it in English, which is…

John: Tropey, tropey, tropey.

Craig: It’s really tropey.

John: I scratched out all the English repetitions. In every case, they can say something in French, and the context is clear based on everything else that’s around it. We get it.

Craig: Exactly. There’s good description of all this cool CGI stuff that’s going to happen, but I’m confused about what is happening with… The context is where I’m really tossed, because the scene begins with, Jenny has already encircled her chair by lit candles. She’s ready to go. This lady shows up and says, “Drink.” That’s it. She just hands her a thing, goes, “Drink.” Then Jenny’s like, “Yep, done.” Then Jenny says, “Thank you.” Okay.

Then all this other stuff happens, and I’m not sure why. A lot of cool visuals. It was exciting. I like the way that Madame Louvier was yelling at her. Cranking up the speed of the scene was really interesting, but we’re missing some key information.

John: Madame Louvier also says, “Drink,” before the vial is seen. There was just orders of how you’re telling the audience and the reader what’s going on. Showing the vial, and she says, “Drink,” great. If you say, “Drink,” and then you show the vial-

Craig: She did. Before that-

John: I guess before, she pulled out a vial of elixir, but we wouldn’t have necessarily seen that.

Craig: That was part of the… If she’s walking, then I don’t know how to show that, or at least in the closeup that’s indicated here. It was cool. She “drops her cloak, revealing a FIVE-FOOT BOA CONSTRICTOR draped around her neck,” although-

John: Love it.

Craig: … we’ll have to make sure that that cloak really does cover the neck well, because your costume designer’s going to be like, “Uh.” The snake-covering cloaks are actually hard to find. When she yells at Jenny to tell her about the map, Jenny says, “I saw it once…as a child.” What? Earlier, she goes, “Our journey entwined with Laffite,” and Jenny goes, “Laffite?” Huh? Huh? Then she’s like, “Laffite!” Then Jenny’s like, “Oh, that Laffite. Yes, yes, I did see that once as a child.”

Then there’s a series of shots, which are “fractured scenes flashing in her mind,” Jenny’s mind. Man, that’s a big shift to go from a scene beginning with Madame Louvier, close on her, and now we’re in Jenny’s mind. It’s hard to pull off that bit without being overloaded. I think there’s probably too much going on here, Matthew, just too much, too fast, too abruptly, and motion issues.

John: Agreed. Just going back to the title page here. Set up as a pilot episode, an Episode 1, that’s all great. I would take the MFA off Matthew’s name. You’re not going to see that. I would take that away.

Craig: Master of Fine Arts?

John: It is Master of Fine Arts. Drew and I both have our Masters of Fine Arts-

Craig: You know who doesn’t?

John: … from the Stark Program.

Craig: I don’t.

John: You don’t. Halley will by the end of next year. Also, “fifth draft,” no. Don’t tell us how many drafts this was. The date is perfectly adequate for this.

Craig: Yes. Also, the date here is June 6th, 2023. Now, because Matthew gets to jump to the top of the line, he gets to send in a thing and then right away we show it. Just do be aware, there is this little thing of you don’t want to send people a script that is from 12 years ago. You sometimes don’t want to send them a script from today or yesterday, because it seems like you were just like, “Hot off the presses. I haven’t thought about this. Here you go.” A couple months, that’s pretty good.

John: Thank you, Matthew, for sending this through. Thank you for buying those raffle tickets there. I’m glad you got your script in here. Drew, can you tell us the log line now? The idea is that we only see these two pages, then you tell us the secret about what the actual script is about.

Drew: “An orphaned Cajun boy and his summertime friends search for a legendary pirate treasure but must outwit a merciless Voodoo Queen merely to survive.”

Craig: I guess Jenny died.

John: I think Jenny dies [inaudible 00:46:36].

Craig: Jenny.

John: Jenny.

Craig: Jenny.

John: Great. I would not have predicted that it was going to be a child-focused thing. That could be great. It’s dark for what this is, but dark habits, that’s fine.

Craig: It’s true.

John: It looks like there’s a bonus here. He included the Skulduggery map, which Craig can download, because apparently there’s puzzles involved on the map.

Craig: I’m looking at it. We have two things. We have some sort of letter that’s written in a cipher, which I could absolutely run through a crypto quote analyzer. It’s my least favorite kind of puzzle solving. Then there is a map that contains various pentagrams and rectangles and also a couple of additional things using that symbol, glyph alphabet. I don’t feel strongly about it. The one thing that’s interesting is that the first line of the cipher includes a lot of Roman numerals, which makes me think-

John: A date?

Craig: … these ciphers are only letters and not numbers.

John: Great.

Craig: Who knows?

John: Who knows?

Craig: I have not dedicated the time to it.

John: You have not. We will include that along with the script, if people want to try to solve that.

Craig: Great.

John: Let us get to our next entry in the Three Page Challenge. This is Scrap by Tertius Kapp.

Craig: What a great name. Lamberson, someone’s coming for your crown.

John: Tertius is a pretty damn good one. Drew, could you give us a summary?

Drew: Sure. Two young men, Sam and Knowledge, sit inside a space shuttle wearing colorful space suits emblazoned with ZSA, Zimbabwean Space Agency. Over the radio, Sarah announces the countdown to take-off, but when a cow’s head rips into the shuttle, it becomes clear that the shuttle is homemade. Sam insists that they rebuild their homemade craft, because he is chasing a girl and wants to impress her with a video of the takeoff. Sarah tells Sam not to pretend he’s an astronaut for this girl, but Knowledge insists Sam needs to lie about his job, girls want an entrepreneur, not a scrap metal scavenger. Sam then expertly drives a trolley full of scrap down the local street and into the scrapyard.

John: I enjoyed quite a lot of this. I would say I was concerned and confused when I read that Sam and Knowledge are both in their late 20s. This felt much younger to me based on just the premise. I also want to make sure that I actually am reading this right, because I took this to mean that they were using their phone to create the video as if they were blasting off, that they were in no ways themselves to see that this was all happening, so that it wsa all to impress this girl who was coming in there. There was some sort of fun misdirection, but ultimately, I got frustrated that the dialog got very premise setup-y and didn’t surprise me with details that let me know this is what Sam is like, this is what Knowledge is like. It was just very much like, here’s a premise. Sam loves this girl that he hasn’t seen for a long time, and is trying to impress her. Craig, what were your takeaways?

Craig: I agree with you that the writing was a bit surface-y in that it was very expository. We were talking about the circumstances. We were announcing our intentions and our feelings without any subtleties, just, “This is what I think.” “This is what I think.” “That is what they think.”

I’m more concerned about the premise, because the idea is I haven’t seen a girl in 13 years. I’m going to go to a reunion. I assume it’s a high school reunion or something. When I go there, I’ll be able to show her this video to prove to her that I’m an astronaut, except Zimbabwe does not have a space agency. Zimbabwe has not sent astronauts into space. One would presume that if they are still indeed in Zimbabwe, that his schoolmate would know that Zimbabwe does not have a space program.

John: Basically, do they believe that this girl is so sheltered that she would have no way of actually ascertaining this to be true or not true? I agree with you there. That premise was concerning, especially that it’s meant to take place I believe in present time, because they have phones and stuff. If this were somehow the ’50s or something, I could see impressing a girl who somehow had no idea that such a thing was impossible or had not happened.

Craig: It’s at least in the ’80s, because it’s Zimbabwe and not Rhodesia. Here’s a few things, just simple things, Tertius, that are easy to address. First, we’ve got, “Inside the command pod of a space shuttle.” Now, you’re cheating, because we’re going to reveal it’s not a real space shuttle. In fact, it’s just something that they’ve built, cobbled together, plastic and aluminum wrapped around wooden staves. How do we not see that initially? You might want to talk about it being dark. Maybe there’s emergency lighting or something just to hide what’s going a little bit.

Knowledge is, for at least Americans, a gender-neutral name, so I wasn’t sure if Knowledge was male or female or otherwise. It would be helpful a little bit.

“A countdown in Shona language is heard over the radio.” Then it says, “Sarah (on comms).” Now, we don’t know Sarah. We haven’t met Sarah. That’s not a way to introduce somebody’s name. You can just say female voice.

John: Female voice.

Craig: They hold hands. They look into a phone’s camera with proud smiles. Now, do you mean I see the phone’s camera? Are they looking into the camera of the movie? If I see the phone’s camera, then I know it’s fake already, because astronauts don’t look into phone cameras while they’re launching. “We’re all stardust, brother. Let’s go home.” They’re not leaving the planet, but this is leaving planet stuff, counting down, “Commencing solid rocket… ” Do you know what I mean?

John: I took that as being they were shooting a video, and in that video they were saying to each other, “Stardust. We’re all brothers.” They would send that video through to the girl.

Craig: I understand, but he says, “Let’s go home.” Wait, where are you? Are you on Mars? Are you on the moon? Why is there a countdown because you’re going home?

John: Let’s go home to the stars. We’re going back to the cosmos from which we came.

Craig: That’s weird.

John: I think it’s kind of poetic. I get why [crosstalk 00:53:21].

Craig: It’s a little doomy. If you’re an astronaut and you’re like, “Let us return to the stars,” I’m like, “Oh, you guys aren’t coming back.” That’s a dark thing to say as you’re heading off into space, I think.

Also, Sarah, when she cuts off the countdown, she says, “Holy shit – what’s that? Stop! Stop! Abort launch! Sam!!” Now, obviously, Sarah is reacting to the cow that’s about to hit them. When she says, “Holy shit – what’s that?” it’s a cow. What happens is, even though going forward in time, because we don’t know it’s a cow, you can get away with the confusion. We will subconsciously do the math backwards. When we do it, even, Tertius, if we don’t, in our seats, go, “Wait a second,” something happens. There’s little cracks in the dam of believability that occurs subconsciously, that you want to avoid.

John: Think about what could Sarah be shouting at the cow to get the cow to run away, that we could misinterpret in the moment.

Craig: Yeah, as if she’s going, “Shanu … ina … nhatu … mbiri,” and then, “Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” and then boom, cow head. That would be fine, because it wouldn’t be enough time for her to be like, “Ah!” Also, if a cow is charging your fake shuttle, why would you keep the premise up? “Stop! Abort launch!” It’s over. There’s a cow.

There’s all these little… You know what? This is a great example, Tertius, first of all, why writing comedy is incredibly hard, harder than drama. The need for constant logic and stress testing of every little thing that happens is so important, because if any of that stuff isn’t really, really solid, you lose credit for the jokes, because people feel like you’re just cheating your way to get to the line you wanted to instead of earning it and surprising them, like magicians. There’s multiple things to think about here. I’ll say this. I’ve never seen that scene before. I’ve never seen a cow bust its head through a space shuttle command thing.

John: I liked the reveal that they were in the field, there was a cow, all that stuff.

Craig: Good invention.

John: It was only when they’d gotten us to the point of, oh, now we’re going to talk about the premise of why we’re doing this thing that I got a little… My enthusiasm flagged. Craig, did it bump for you that the countdown was in Shona, and then everybody else was speaking English the whole time?

Craig: It sure did. It sure did, because again, it’s stressing the logic. Look, obviously, what Tertius is trying to figure out here is, I’ve got people who are Zimbabwean, and they either speak English and Shona or only Shona. We’re making a movie, and we want people that speak English to watch the movie and not worry about subtitles maybe, which is fine. There is a convention where people will speak accented English.

People in Africa do speak with a particular accent. There’s all sorts of accents across the continent. You can zero in on like, okay, specifically, what is the Zimbabwean accent for English, and then maybe just stay there, because if you start in Shona, I’m a little confused, yes, why the person over the radio is speaking in Shona. These two people are speaking to each other in English. It just didn’t make much sense.

John: Agreed. Let’s jump to the very end of this. We have the streets of Harare. “Sam is expertly riding a trolley laden with scrap metal down the street. He has a homemade handbrake to help him steer the heavy load and he whistles to communicate with traffic.” Sure, I get this. I like this.

What I didn’t know though is, I don’t have any visual for what the streets of Harare are like. I don’t know if this is super crowded streets. Should I be picturing Mumbai, or should I be thinking of empty, rural streets? I just don’t have a good visual for this, so I don’t know what I’m seeing around, which really affects what I’m picturing in my head with him steering this cart.

Craig: Look, Harare is certainly not on the scale of Mumbai, but if I were to say the streets of Mumbai, I would also not know what I was looking at, or I said the streets of New York or the streets of Los Angeles. We’ve got a lot of different kinds of streets. Basically, every town has main street, urban center, suburban, sticks, poor, rich-

John: Paint us a picture.

Craig: … commercial, residential. Give us a little bit more a sense of what neighborhood are we actually in. What do I want to know about… All these things will give me information.

Obviously, look, Sam is a blue-collar guy. Even the kids call him Scrapman. He collects scrap metal. This is not a wealthy person. Where’s he collecting it from? Is there a contrast between him and his vehicle and the neighborhood he’s in? Is he riding around in maybe the nicer part of Harare, and even kids are looking down on him, or is this kid really happy and cool? Does he like the kid? Is he glad that the kid… Is the kid like, “Hey Scrapman. Here, I’m helping you,” and he’s like, “Great. Thanks, kid.” I’m not quite sure what to think about that.

John: We were just out in a field with a cow, which felt rural, and now we’re in a city. I don’t have a good sense of what I specifically should be thinking about. This is a situation where I as the screenwriter might throw in a one eighth of a page establishing Harare and giving us a sense of what this looks like and feels like. That may not make it into the movie, that establishing shot, but it helps the reader anchor visually what kind of space I’m in. What is the air like? What does the light feel like? What is this space? Is it noisy? Is it crowded, or is it empty? Tell us in that establishing shot.

Craig: You can also tie it into the end of the space shuttle scene where they’re in the field. He says, “Behind them the shuttle finally falls down.” The camera rises up, and we see in the distance a city, cut to Harare, so I know that the city is far away, but not crazy far away, so I get that there was a journey, or something, because it’s going to be weird to go from cow field to city with no connective tissue.

John: Drew, can you talk us through the log line, the secret rest of the story for these three pages by Tertius Kapp?

Drew: “A janitor’s son discovers an unusual lawnmower part in his father’s store. When he tries to sell it online, offers go into the millions. He’s captured and recaptured by various intelligence agencies but must find his high school sweetheart to solve the riddle. He has unwittingly discovered an extraterrestrial artifact.”

John: That is a fantastic premise. I like it a lot.

Craig: I’m cool.

John: Great.

Craig: You got a good premise. Now execute. Logic. Logic, logic, logic.

John: Logic in comedy. Our final Three Page entry, Drew, can you talk us through Another Life by Sarah Hu?

Drew: A young Taiwanese couple stand in the departures at JFK, the husband, Daniel, says goodbye to his wife, Josie, and their baby, Ava, as Josie and Ava are boarding a plane to travel for a month. He ties a red bracelet on baby Ava, who is wrapped in a red blanket. Meanwhile, at another airport, Anne, a young Taiwanese mother, hurriedly sends her baby girl, Mei, off with a woman in her 60s named Fei, to be delivered to Anne’s parents in Taipei. Mei is wrapped in a blue blanket.

After their first flight, Josie and Ava are at the Narita Airport in Japan, when Josie suddenly collapses waiting outside the gate to Taipei. A gate agent rushes over to help. At the same time, and at the same gate, Fei approaches the gate desk and signals to the agent that she needs to use the bathroom and hands baby Mei over to the agent. The gate agent who had rushed to Josie’s side, now cradling Ava, joins the agent who is holding Mei.

John: Craig, talk us through your first impressions with Another Life.

Craig: It seems like we’re doing a baby switcheroo here. Really, you couldn’t get more of an emphasis on the fact that one baby’s wearing the blue and one baby’s wearing the red.

One is coming from JFK, and one is coming from Philadelphia, at I assume the same time, although it’s weird. It says, “Super: 1985. JFK Airport.” Then we do the scene. Then we go to, “Super: 1985. Philadelphia Airport.” 1985 is really long. I just want to know, is it the same day, same week, same month? Is it not? I think giving us a little more information there is fine. 1985, I think it’s going to be frustrating for people, because it’s so generic. I think genericism is a little bit of the issue here.

Look, let’s just first talk about the most obvious issue, which is that everybody has to figure out how to deal with people speaking not English in movies for English-speaking people. You’ve dealt with it. I’ve dealt with it. We’ve all dealt with it.

Sarah’s choice was to say, right off the bat, “All dialog in brackets indicates Mandarin language.” Fine, except literally all of it, except for a couple lines… Actually, one of the lines is in Japanese. There’s one line, and then the VO of the gate announcement is in Mandarin.

At that point I’m wondering if there’s maybe a better way, because what happens is all the dialog ends up in brackets. I got fatigue. I got punctuation fatigue when every single line was in brackets. Let’s put that aside, because that’s a technical thing.

There’s a slightly generic vibe here. The airport feels generic. The time feels generic. There’s nothing about this that says 1985 to me. I have no feeling for 1985. I don’t know what time of year. The conversation that Josie is having with Daniel, who I assume is her husband-

John: I assume so too.

Craig: … is generic. This is the back and forth. “Stop worrying. It’s only a month.”

John: “She’ll be a brand new baby by then.”

Craig: “You can really focus on work now. I’m sorry I’m just… tired.”

John: Then he hands a roll of film over and puts a red bracelet on the baby’s wrist. “Take a picture every day for me. So you remember how much you are loved, Ava.”

Craig: You’ve had a kid. I’ve had a kid. Nah.

John: That’s not a real moment.

Craig: Nah. It’s not a real moment. It doesn’t feel real. When parenting couples are dealing with stuff like this, you get to a moment of truth or honesty after all the other sweating and stuff. I’m not sure, what is Daniel worrying about exactly? She’s taking the baby. What’s the problem? I get that he’s like, “I’m going to miss my baby.”

Also, she’s like, “You can really focus on work now.” “Josie registers Daniel’s hurt expression. ‘I’m sorry I’m just… tired.'” Why isn’t Josie hurt that Daniel’s like, “You’re leaving for a month, and I don’t give a crap about you. I’m just bummed out that my baby’s going to be gone for a month.” Also, a month isn’t that long, and no, she’s not going to be a brand new baby. It didn’t feel true. It didn’t feel complicated. It didn’t feel sticky and tricky.

Then this is compounded by the fact that when we flip over to the Philadelphia side, we have another generic conversation. I’m not quite sure what was going on. Who’s Fei?

John: God bless Drew and Halley for maybe writing up that summary, because I think the summary actually makes more sense than what I was getting on the page. Mei is the baby. It’s complicated that names are all very similar.

Craig: I get that. Mei’s the baby. Adam’s the two-year-old brother. The mom is Anne.

John: Is Anne.

Craig: Who’s Fei?

John: Fei is the woman who’s carrying the baby to visit family or something.

Craig: Fei’s character is 60s. That’s it. When Fei says, “She’s so sweet. What’s her name?” is Fei a flight attendant that is carrying the unaccompanied minor baby? Who is Fei?

John: It’s not clear who Fei is. I suspect we would learn that maybe on Page 4. It’s frustrating to me, because I read this three times and really had a hard time keeping it all straight. I’m not sure I actually did fully understand.

Craig: Maybe she’s hired her.

John: What the purpose, yeah, hired her to take, to see her family.

Craig: Yeah, because it seems like Anne, the mom, it says, “Severe school marm vibes.” Anne seems like she’s like, “Baby, yuck. Here, you take this baby to my parents. Here’s diapers. Here’s formula. Beat it. I’m not going to call you. I don’t need one last look. Just go.” I’ve learned something about Anne there. It doesn’t sound great. I would still need to understand the context of who Fei is to make sense of this scene. Otherwise, Sarah, the issue is, instead of me thinking the things you want me to think, all I’m going to be thinking is, who’s Fei?

John: What’s up here? Is she stealing the baby? I don’t get what it is.

Craig: Who’s this lady, and what’s her job, and why did she do this? Also, when, “Anne watches closely as the gate agent processes Fei’s boarding documents,” in italics, “Will this work?!” Okay, so there’s intrigue, but again, the intrigue only works if I understand who Fei is, because I don’t, so I don’t know what’s going on.

Then we get to the airport. Josie’s made her way to Narita Airport. “She makes her way slowly, with great effort.” What does that mean? Is she already hurt, winded? We haven’t seen any problems with her.

John: We saw her on the airplane. “She braces herself, wincing.” There was some problem in the scene before that.

Craig: Like a bad hip?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: It doesn’t sound like a heart problem or anything. Wincing is like, “Ow, my leg.” It says her POV blurs and distorts. Now it says, “Josie makes her way slowly, with great effort. From Josie’s POV: The Taipei departure gate in the distance blurs, distorts.” Why would she be looking at the departure gate when she’s arrived and is walking away from the departure gate?

John: She’s arrived in Narita, but then she’s going to Taipei. This was a stopover on her way to Taipei.

Craig: Was that established?

John: Not especially well. That’s a good thing that the couple could talk about at the start is, “Do we have enough time to get from that get to the next gate? It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.”

Craig: “I’m just nervous because the layover was so tight.”

John: Exactly.

Craig: I think that’s the issue is I got confused there again. More importantly, she collapses. I’m like, whoa. Now I understand what’s going on. Both Fei, mystery 60-year-old, and Josie, mom, are heading probably to the same place. I think they’re going to the same place. They’re both going through Narita. They’re both trying to get to the next leg of their journey when Josie collapses, and then here comes Fei to be like, “Oh, help her.”

John: “Help her. Hold my baby.” Babies get mixed up.

Craig: “Hold my baby.”

John: Craig, before we get to the two-baby problem, which I’m assuming is going to be part of the log line-

Craig: Isn’t that Dan and Dave’s new show, two-baby problem?

John: The two-baby problem, yeah.

Craig: Two-baby problem.

John: From the creators of Game of Thrones is the Two-Baby Problem.

Craig: Comes Two-Baby Problem.

John: On Page 1, we have a two-prop problem. “From his pocket Daniel reveals a roll of Kodak film and a red macrame bracelet, centered by a jade ring.” This actor is how holding two props and will talk about one of them and do something else with the other one. No. You get one prop. Touch the one prop. Forget the roll of film. I think it’s a mistake to have two props that have to do two different things. We can only handle one piece of information at a time.

Craig: If you want to do both, just reach into your pocket after you do the one. Reach into your left pocket after you reach into the right pocket. That should work.

John: Going back to what stuff is in Mandarin, what stuff is going to be in English, brackets are a choice. My guess is that this is set up this way because these babies are ultimately coming back to the US, and so most of the film is going to be in English. With that as a choice, you might want to think about just italics for-

Craig: Completely agree.

John: … whatever the foreign language is, because it’s just easier to read.

Craig: So much easier to read. I completely agree. Italics is your friend here. Just go for that. It will just make the read so much easier. The brackets, it’s weird, even just subconsciously, even though you did a nice job of laying out for us explicitly what you meant by the brackets, what happens is, as you’re reading, everything feels like an aside, because that’s what brackets do in my head. It all feels weirdly un-emphasized, which you don’t want.

I’m curious to see where this goes and is it a two-baby problem. For me, the big issues is I want there to be more specificity and more honesty and truth in the relationship going on between husband and wife. I want to know who the hell Fei is. I don’t need much. I just need to know what is… I’m paying you to do this. Just do it. I get it. She’s paying a lady to go and do this. Okay, but I need something.

John: I haven’t peeked at the log line yet. If this truly about the babies getting mixed up, at some point we’re going to need to actually spend some face time on the babies. I think this script maybe should’ve spent a little more time on that, even just on the plane, or just other people commenting on the cute baby. Some face, some good fat baby face time could be really helpful in terms of setting up the stakes here.

Craig: I love a good fat baby.

John: Drew, tell us what this is actually about.

Drew: “A loner Asian American workaholic befriends a woman with whom she was unknowingly switched with as a baby. After seeing glimpses of a life that could’ve been, the discovery of their switch threatens to destroy the fragile identity she’s safeguarded all her life.”

Craig: It’s a two-baby problem. We were spot on there. I’m a little nervous, Sarah, that it is so telegraphed that we’re just waiting for it to happen, which isn’t great. You might even want to consider just showing one of them. If you were to, say, not show Fei. You just see… It’s Josie, right? Josie?

John: Yeah.

Craig: Josie. Josie’s got her kid, gets on the plane, gets off the plane, collapses. A lady with a kid hands her kid over to somebody else and goes, “Let me help you.” Then the switch happens. We’re like, “What? Oh my god. A switch just happened.” This whole thing with the bracelets, you’re like, “Here comes the switch.” You’re just waiting for it. That’s not what you want, generally, especially not right off the bat.

I’m also a little nervous just based on the lack of specificity of environment and dialog. The log line is describing a fairly sophisticated drama, I think. “Destroy the fragile identity she’s safeguarded all her life,” that’s heavy. That, I would just say as you look at the pages after this, that of course we don’t have, really be on patrol for that, because anything that undermines the realism is going to take away from the drama and can push it towards soap opera in a bad way.

John: I want to thank everybody who sent through Three Page Challenges, and especially the three people who we talked about today. So great and brave of you to do this. I think everyone learns when we can see what you guys did on the page. Reminder if you’d like to do this yourself, you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and we will put out another call for adventure sometime in the weeks ahead.

It is time for our One Cool Things, Craig. My One Cool Thing is an essay that I think you will enjoy reading. It’s by Adam Mastroianni. Apparently, it’s a full research paper he presented, but you can read the blog post or the Substack-y post that he did, which is simpler and much more easily digested.

It’s called The Illusion of Moral Decline. What he wanted to study is, do Americans or people worldwide believe that things are worse now than they were before, that people are meaner, less kind, that morals are declining. The truth is, the answer is yes, they always do. They always have believed that things are declining and that things are worse now than they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, until you drill down about their actual personal experiences, and the people around them, and like, oh, actually, not so much for me. It really digs into the studies on why that is and what’s really happening.

It has some interesting framing theories about why we always perceive that stuff is getting worse, and particularly that morals are declining. It’s not simply just that it’s a thing that happens as you get older, because even if you talk to people in their 20s, they think things are getting worse. It’s just a set point thing. It probably ties into the degree to which you tend to forget the negative things from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and turn up the brightness on past memories. You can’t do that with the present. It’s a really well-designed paper.

Craig: That’s really interesting. I remember I took a sociology course in college. Was it Emile Durkheim? I can’t remember which famous sociologist it was, but wrote about, and I’m probably scrambling this also, but in my mind the concept was called scrupulosity. The idea was that over time, we confront moral crimes, and the ones that are the most offensive to us, the most upsetting, we drive out, we essentially make deviant. What might’ve been acceptable at some point, like, “Oh, yeah, you can go ahead and marry 10-year-olds,” we’d find that repugnant. In fact, we are now announcing that that is deviant and we’re not doing it anymore. It’s wrong.

What happens over time is that our desire to make behavior on the edges deviant never changes. It is simply moving. As we move forward in a closed-off society, we begin to reassign more and more behavior into a deviant category, because we just keep… We can’t stop and go, “Okay, we’re good now. Everything’s fine. We accept everything.” It’s a related concept. Fun stuff for a college discussion. I don’t know how much I agree with it, but it’s a thought.

I do have One Cool Thing that I guess is also this interestingly philosophical discussion that I also don’t know how I feel about it. I’ll share it with you. I don’t even know how I arrived at it. It may have been through Arts and Letters, which is one of my favorite websites. There’s an online publication called Evergreen Review.

It is a very long essay, long, so strap in, written by Yasmin Nair. It is called No, No, Nanette: Hannah Gadsby, Trauma, and Comedy as Emotional Manipulation. If you’re hearing this and going, “Oh god, no, not another article or essay, think piece yelling about Hannah Gadsby,” you might want to skip this, because it definitely does. She is very critical of Nanette.

However, what was interesting was really where she got. It was like Hannah Gadsby was her way in. Where she arrived, and this is the part that I found fascinating, was a discussion about both the costs and necessities of performing trauma in order to be perceived as authentic, which is a phenomenon that is way more salient to me now in this day and age than it was, say, when I was younger. When we were really young, trauma was not performed at all. It was hidden. You just didn’t talk about it.

John: Or maybe you would say you were processing it, but you were never performing it.

Craig: You were never performing it. Furthermore, no one assigned authenticity to people because they performed trauma. This is not to say that performing trauma is wrong or that you shouldn’t incorporate what’s happened to you in your performance as an artist. What it’s really talking about is us, the audience, and saying, what does it say about us that we assign more authenticity, and are we depriving people of authenticity if they don’t. That was a really interesting discussion.

I’m not familiar with Yasmin Nair, other than to say that she is one hell of a writer. I’m looking at her now. She is a writer and activist based in Chicago. She is also a co-founder, with Ryan Conrad, of Against Equality. What is Against Equality?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: It is “an online archive of writings and arts and a series of books by queer and trans writers that critique mainstream LGBT politics.” Whoa, so it’s LGBT inside of LGBT and self-criticism. It’s “an anti-capitalist collective of radical queer and trans writers.” All I can tell you is, I am not queer and I’m not radical, however I am impressed with Yasmin Nair’s ability to put a sentence together.

She is really good, and she made a very… It was just a really well put together thing. It’s worth reading, even just to see what something very cogently written looks like. I put it out there as food for thought and discussion. It is not an endorsement or a lack of endorsement.

John: Fantastic. Last little bits and reminders here. Weekend Read is now on the app store, so download that. It’s on iOS or for iPad as well. You can see all those Three Page Challenges there. Lastly, thank you to Vulture, who gave us a shout-out this week, for the Scriptnotes sidecasts that we’ve been doing with Drew and Megana.

Craig: Nice job.

John: It was really nice. They were just a short, little side project, but it’s nice that people are enjoying them. Thank you, Vulture, for that little shout-out.

Craig: Way to go, Vulture.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: What?

John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our intern is Halley Lamberson.

Craig: Lamberson.

John: Outro this week is by Jon Spurney. Craig, it’s a good one. You’ll enjoy it. 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 can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, links to the Three Page Challenges, and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts, and they’re great, and hoodies too. 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 getting away with it.

Craig: Getting away with it.

John: Craig, we got away with it again. Thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, last week we talked about things that our daughters never have to learn how to do, like drive stick shift, or that we never have to do, because we’re at a point in our lives where we can just, “Nope, I’m not going to do that, not going to learn how to do it. I just don’t care anymore.”

Craig: That’s exactly right. We’ve aged out of some things.

John: For me, an example would be calculus. I get calculus as a general concept. I understand it’s about rates of change. I’m never going to learn calculus. I’ve come to terms with that. It’s okay. I don’t need to learn calculus. Calculus is not going to enter into my world.

Craig: First of all, I like the way you pronounce the word, because you say calculus [KAL-kuh-luhs].

John: I said calculus [KAL-kyoo-luhs].

Craig: Oh, you did say calculus. This may be the interesting situation where [crosstalk 01:22:25]. Did you not take calculus in high school then?

John: I did not take it in high school. I took a physics class. I took physics for majors in college, which required calculus. I got the calculus book and read enough ahead so I could get my way through that physics class, which was just complete hubris for me to take. I never really fundamentally understood it. I can’t really do an integral or derivative or all that stuff. I get why they’re important. If I needed to land a rocket, I would use that, but I don’t, so I don’t.

Craig: I did take calculus. I remember none of it. In a sense-

John: We were the same.

Craig: … you got away with it, because we were exactly the same, even though I put in a whole lot of time and energy to get a really good grade in that calculus class.

John: We’re not so different, you and I.

Craig: It turns out, Mr. August, are we that different? This is a great topic, because it reflects our advancing age. When we were younger, like Lamberson, you want to keep up. That’s the point. You’re keeping up. Also, it’s easier to keep up, because you are not just swimming in the current of culture. You and your friends and your cohort are creating it. You are what’s current.

Somebody sent this to me, which is relevant to this topic, and it made me laugh so much. There’s a screenshot of a tweet and then a comment about the tweet. The tweet was from SB Nation. The tweet was, “Is Baby Gronk the new Drip King, or is he just getting rizzed up by Livvy?” Then someone named Damien Owens wrote, “I’m 50. All celebrity news looks like this: Curtains for Zoosha? K-Smog and Batboy caught flipping a grunt.” That is correct. I am 52, and that is in fact that Baby Gronk, Drip King, rizzed up, Livvy looks like to me, although I do know what drip is, I just want to say.

John: Yeah, but Drip King is a specific person.

Craig: I thought a Drip King was any guy that’s all glammed up with his jewelry and awesome clothes.

John: Apparently, the actual backstory on that specific quote is that Drip King is an actual lacrosse player somewhere in Massachusetts. It’s all an inside joke and stuff. You know what rizzed up is referring to?

Craig: No.

John: What is one of the key attributes in Dungeons and Dragons?

Craig: Oh, charisma.

John: Charisma. Rizz comes from charisma. Rizzed up, it means to charm, to seduce, charm, flatter, impress.

Craig: It’s like the glowed up, relative to self-improvement and beautification, [crosstalk 01:25:07].

John: When someone rizzes you up, then they’re charming. It feels like a thing that someone would do on Love Island.

Craig: Is Baby Gronk the new Drip King? What?

John: It’s all very debatable. Here’s the thing. We don’t have to hear it.

Craig: We don’t have to. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

John: We don’t have to. We don’t have to care. You don’t have to keep up on all the slang. You don’t need to.

Craig: I don’t even care that people are laughing at us right now for how stupidly old and out of it we sound and are. That’s how great it is to finally get out of the current. They’re all laughing at us, like, “Oh my god, look at them. They don’t know. Oh my god, he thought Drip King was… “ Who cares? We don’t care. Go ahead. Make fun of us. We don’t care. We don’t even hear you. We’re too old.

John: My daughter makes fun of me because I don’t remember her phone number, but I’ve never had to call her phone number.

Craig: If you put a gun to my head, I could not tell you what either of my kids’ phone numbers are. I know my wife’s phone number because it was pre contacts consuming phone numbers.

John: I also have to fill in Mike’s phone number on all sorts of forms all the time for emergency contact stuff. Amy’s not my emergency contact.

Craig: No, and for good reason. Looks like you’re dying today.

John: In the office yesterday, Drew, Halley, and I were making a list of things that we don’t need to think about or worry about anymore, and things that we’re done with. How to repair a car, how to repair an engine, how to change the oil. Halley said she doesn’t need to know how to fix a tire. I still think you need to know how to fix a tire, because sometimes you are going to be in the middle of nowhere, and putting on a spare is a good thing. What’s your impression on tires?

Craig: You can get away with not knowing how to fix a tire, and here’s why.

John: Run flats.

Craig: Run flats are a thing. You can at least get yourself to somewhere with cell service, at which point somebody in a tow truck can come by. If you can do it yourself, that’s fine, but you know what’s more dangerous than not knowing how to fix a tire is almost knowing how to fix a tire. You can injure yourself. You can certainly injure your car. I watched a friend of mine jack his car up, and he did not have the jack in the right spot, and right through.

John: [Crosstalk 01:27:13].

Craig: Right through the bottom. Just right through the bottom of the car.

John: Oh, god.

Craig: It was brutal.

John: I’ve changed some tires in my life, and they worked.

Craig: I’ve done it. I didn’t enjoy it, but I’ve done it. I don’t feel a great need to do it anymore. A lot of cars don’t come with spares anymore because [crosstalk 01:27:31].

John: No, they don’t. It’s true. They don’t. My dad was an engineer. He had a slide rule that I remember loving. I would take out his briefcase and play with the slide rule, never understood how to use it. I’ll never need to use a slide rule.

Craig: Slide rules were already a thing that you and I didn’t have to worry about. Once calculators came along, that was it. Slide rules were done.

John: Christmas cards or holiday cards. Craig, your family doesn’t-

Craig: I’ve never worried about those. Melissa loves them. We don’t send them out, but she loves receiving them.

John: We just get them. We love getting the John Gatins family Christmas cards.

Craig: Those are always the best. I’m not joking about this. She will take every single Christmas card and tape it up to one section in the kitchen so that the wall is covered in people’s Christmas cards. I just don’t know. There are some things that are so fundamentally different between me and her as human beings, that I don’t even bother to say, “Why would you do that?” I’m just like, “Oh, okay.” Not in a million years. I get those Christmas cards. I read them, and I’m like, “Great. I’ve consumed the information. Now into the garbage you go.” Not her. She’s like, “I’m putting these… ” They stay up. They stay up until like January 12th.

John: They all go in a basket that we never look at again, and then we throw them all out, recycle them.

Craig: That would be perfectly fine.

John: A thing we did give up on that we used to do, we gave up on, was frequent flier loyalty. We’d only fly United, so we could be the premium tier of United. Then we got stuck. We got trapped taking flights that were less ideal because of that. It would get stuck in Chicago overnight. It was like, you know what? Stop. We’re giving up on loyalty to any one airline.

Craig: You guys, you are exactly what the point was, like, “How do we get these people to take this crappy flight? Let’s lock them into this loyalty program.” If I have a choice and all things being equal, I’ll fly American, because that’s where most of my points and such are. There are a lot of credit cards that are airline-agnostic. American Express, you can collect points that apply to anything, doesn’t matter, any airline, whatever, so I agree with you.

John: Craig, can you whistle?

Craig: I can whistle in a couple different ways. I can whistle by breathing in. I can whistle by breathing out. I can also whistle like (whistles), which is through my front teeth.

John: Can you do the hail a taxi cab whistle with your fingers in your mouth?

Craig: I cannot.

John: I’ve tried to teach myself that several times. I’ve looked at the videos. I’ve done the practice. It’s just not a thing that works for me.

Craig: I just end up blowing spit.

John: I’ve given up on that. It would be nice. I’ve also given up on Antarctica. I always wanted to visit all the continents. I thought at some point I really want to go to Antarctica.

Craig: That’s just you, dude. That’s just you.

John: Do you want to go to Antarctica?

Craig: No. Why?

John: Because it’s the bottom of the world. It’s exciting to me.

Craig: Are the restaurants good?

John: No, the restaurants are terrible.

Craig: Do they have a casino? Let’s put it this way. There are too many places I haven’t been, shamefully, that I will need to go to before I go to Antarctica. It would just be so insulting to the entire subcontinent of India if I go to Antarctica first. That would just be a slap in the face. One does not slap India in the face.

John: That’s a bad idea. Other thoughts from you about stuff you just don’t ever see yourself doing again? I have on the list mow the lawn. We got rid of most of our lawn, but we have gardeners. That’s fine. That’s good. I don’t ever need to own a lawnmower.

Craig: I mowed our lawn as a kid in hot New Jersey summers. It wasn’t the cool lawnmower. It was the bad lawnmower. It was bad. I don’t need to mow lawns anymore. There are some things I suppose that still in my mind I’m like, I’m going to get around to figuring out how to do. There are certain video games that I’ve just been like, “I’m skipping it.” So many people, including you, are like, “You going to play Diablo? You going to play Diablo?”

John: It’s so good, Craig.

Craig: I’m not saying it’s not. I’m sure it is.

John: It’s not for you.

Craig: At some point, I’m like, I can’t play everything. I know that Diablo is going to be crack. I need to save some crack space for Starfield, and I need to save crack space for the new Cyberpunk DLC, and I need to save crack space for some other things. Man, I’m trying to play Legends of the Tears of Zelda. Breath of the Wild did not grab me the way it grabbed everybody else.

John: That’s my Diablo. I’m not even trying. I’m not even going to try.

Craig: You know what? I am trying, but I’m like, “Oh my god. This is so big and so much.” There are certain things like that that I’m starting to let go. I have absolutely given up on keeping up with new music. I’ve given up. I’ve given up. I remember as a kid thinking, “Why do people give up on this? They should just stay with it.” I get it. You just get tired of keeping up, because you start to realize, there’s no reward for it. At some point it’s okay to just be okay.

John: I also feel like the stuff that is actually going to matter will just break through in popular culture, and I’ll know what it is. I’m going to know who Lizzo is just because I’m going to know who Lizzo is.

Craig: Lizzo breaks through. Lizzo absolutely breaks through. No question. The other thing is, there’s a lot of stuff that I think breaks through for let’s say my daughter, the younger one in particular, because the older one is into a lot of stuff that I’m into, and then such weird stuff that nobody’s into it. My younger daughter is into a lot of music where I’m like, I’m hearing it, and I think actually I’m just not going to ever enjoy it the way you do. It’s just because I think chunks of my brain were already given away to a thousand other bands, and I can’t get them back. They’re gone.

John: Does any of the music that Jessica listens to, do you have to stop yourself from saying, “This could’ve been written 20 years ago?” Some of the stuff that Amy listens to, I feel like, “Yeah, that’s just kind of Sonic Youth.”

Craig: Yes. Definitely the K-pop stuff, I just think, “This was written 20 years ago.” There’s certain things where I think the song is pretty familiar, but the style is fairly new. One of the things that Jessie and I love to laugh about is indie singer voice, because we both find it hysterical. Whenever that comes out, she’ll send me something. Who was on Saturday Night Live and did quismois? Oh my god. It was so good. (singing) I’ll be home for quismois. Who was that? Quismois. I’m looking it up now. It was Camila Cabello.

John: Great.

Craig: She was on Saturday Night Live, and she sang I’ll Be Home for Christmas, and she said quismois. That may have been peak indie singer voice moment.

John: Love it.

Craig: We didn’t have that when we were kids. There was no indie singer voice. That’s new. I liked that. That was fun.

John: Sure, fun. One thing we won’t give up on is the Scriptnotes podcast, because it’s still [crosstalk 01:34:50].

Craig: Hold on a second. At some point-

John: It will never end, Craig. It’ll have to go on forever.

Craig: I don’t like what I just heard. That’s terrifying. That’s a little bit like getting into a spaceship and going, “Let us now return to the stars.”

John: Thank you, Craig.

Craig: Thank you, guys. Bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Weekend Read 2
• SKULDUGGERY by Matthew W. Davis (with bonus puzzle map,) SCRAP by Tertius Kapp, and ANOTHER LIFE by Sarah Hu
• The illusion of moral decline by Adam Mastroianni
• No, No, Nanette: Hannah Gadsby, Trauma, and Comedy as Emotional Manipulation by Yasmin Nair
• The Best Podcasts of 2023 (So Far) by Nicholas Quah for Vulture
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Jon Spurney (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our intern is Halley Lamberson.

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/2023/group-dynamics).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Okay, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 599 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. We often talk about story in terms of the journey of a single protagonist, but some movies center on a group of characters that serve as the hero. Today on the show, we’ll look at these group dynamics and how to think about them both on the scene level and story-wide. We’ll also talk about pitch decks and translations of public domain works. We have some follow-up on binging episodes versus putting them out one week at a time. We got a real grab bag of stuff here today, Craig.

**Craig:** I love a grab bag. It keeps us spontaneous and fresh.

**John:** That’s the goal. In our bonus segment for Premium members, I’d love to talk about how you start playing an RPG video game, because I’m looking at two new ones, Diablo and the new Zelda. You may find the same experience. I want to start playing them, but I also don’t want to make dumb mistakes that have me burning like 10 hours. We’ll talk about strategies for how you start playing one of these games.

**Craig:** What a great topic. So much anxiety. So much early game anxiety. Oh my god, what skill tree will I pick? We will dig into that. You know what? If you don’t play video games but you are a Premium member, stick around for that bonus segment anyway, because there are life lessons, my friends. Life lessons.

**John:** I’m excited to hear them. Let’s start off with this new report that I saw, uh, today. So Deadline had a link to it. Well, Deadline actually did not have a link to it, which was so frustrating. They had a zillion links in their article, but none of them actually linked to the actual study. I had to Google a quote from there to find an actual better article about it. We’ll link to something from The Streamable.

It’s a study on which is more successful for streamers, to put all the episodes of a season out at once or do them week by week? This is a thing we’ve talked about often on the show, and our opinions on this, which I think you and I both are in the opinion that you build more momentum and more love for a show week by week than putting them all out to binge. Here are some numbers that study that.

This is from a company that monitors actual TV. They’re not getting their data from the streamers themselves. They’re getting it from viewers and who’s watching a show, who’s finishing a show. What they were able to see is that if you put out all the episodes at once, more people will finish the whole series, but the actual growth of the show is limited. It doesn’t sustain for as long. To me, I think what we’ve always talked about is that if you are a streamer, your goal is to keep people subscribed to your service, and therefore it makes sense to just keep people hooked as long as possible.

**Craig:** Obviously, I’m a big believer in the weekly method. This makes total sense to me, because it is true that if you have all the episodes available, you do fall into a kind of inertia, the inertia of motion. When an object is in motion, it wants to stay in motion. An object watching a show wants to keep watching a show. Watch the next episode. Watch the next episode. Watch the next episode. Sure, you’ll finish it. In finishing it, it’s eaten so quickly, digested so quickly, that it’s forgotten quickly.

There is no ability to share a communal discussion, whereas for both of the television shows I’ve made, the week-to-week model wasn’t part of its success, it was almost all of its success. It’s not like The Last of Us premiered to small numbers. It premiered to fantastic numbers. It just grew from there. It just grew, and it became a global discussion, because it was week to week.

The week-to-week model also creates this cottage industry of summary recaps, tons of podcasts. There was probably, I don’t know, 15 or 20 podcasts that would just do a, “Okay, we just watched this episode of The Last of Us. Here’s what we think.” I think everybody should be doing it. Now, that said, this article is making an argument that certain cases, binging may be better.

**John:** The two marquee shows they talk about from 2022 are Netflix’s Wednesday and HBO’s House of the Dragon. Wednesday was a binge all the episodes at once. House of the Dragon was the classic weekly model.

Wednesday did great. It was a giant hit. It did do big numbers for them. It had a lot of rewatching too, which is understandable that you’d get through the whole thing, then just go back and rewatch the whole thing. If you think about Wednesday, it had some breakout cultural moments. Wednesday’s dance got to be a big thing. It did burn really bright, but it didn’t continue out over the number of weeks. I don’t think it has the cultural conversation that House of the Dragon did, for its classic weekly structure.

Netflix can’t be upset with Wednesday, and HBO can’t be upset with House of the Dragon. They both were very successful for what they were trying to do.

**Craig:** Yes, and they will both come back, and they will both make more. Look, it’s a little bit of a question too of the tone of a show. Wednesday does feel like it goes down a little bit easier. House of the Dragon’s pretty heavy. It’s violent. It’s upsetting. It’s hard to watch that show one after another, after another. Wednesday’s much lighter fare. It’s more of a young adult show. It’s got comedy elements.

If I were Netflix, and I’m not, if I were, I’d run it week by week. I would, because I just look at how there is this world of discussion, analysis, debate, group watching. If everybody was watching that dance scene at the same time, it would’ve been even bigger.

**John:** Yeah, very possible.

**Craig:** It just feels like they’re missing out. This is part of the Netflix fire hose. There’s something that’s slightly cheapening about the fact that you can see everything all at once, all the time, no matter what it is.

**John:** Looking at Disney, with Disney Plus, so two of their Marvel shows, Loki 2 will be weekly, like the way it was always. That makes sense, because there’s going to be a lot of speculation in between episodes about what happens. Echo, which is the spin-off of Hawkeye, is going to be all at once. Maybe that makes sense. They can at least see how it does. Echo is a younger show. It is probably more on the order of a Wednesday, so maybe it’ll make more sense for that show to be all at once.

**Craig:** It might. I did see some commentary on the internet that framed it in terms of this is how Disney values these shows, with the understanding that putting it out there all at once was a devaluing move.

Now, I’m not sure what the benefit is of putting it all out at once versus week by week, unless the idea is we don’t think… I think this is what people were implying by the devaluing. If the company thinks, “We actually don’t think this thing is going to build. We got to get them real fast,” this one is going to be like, we got you, you watched it all, hooray, but no one’s going to be coming back week after week to watch this. That’s an interesting concept.

Netflix hasn’t had the ability to discriminate like that. It is interesting that Disney has started to discriminate like that, whereas HBO only does things week by week. We’ll see what happens. I’ve just always been puzzled by this whole, here it is all at once.

**John:** All at once. With Stranger Things, this most recent season is split up into two chunks. You could say it was for story reasons, but it was really I think to hold people across another month so that they would have to stay and subscribe to Netflix. I think that was good for the show, because it built up speculation about what happens in the second half of the season. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do more experiments where they are trying something more weekly down the road.

**Craig:** I’m curious. We should have the Duffer Brothers on the show for sure, not only because they’ve made this just culturally important televised institution, but I want to hear their opinion on this. Stranger Things seems to me like the poster child for a show that ought to be week to week, because it’s a mystery. It has cliffhangers at the end of every episode.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** It has these “holy crap” moments that you want to share with everybody communally.

**John:** It is intense. It’s intense, and the episodes are long. It feels like once per week would actually serve that show really well.

**Craig:** Yes. I wonder if they’ve ever asked. I know that Ted Sarandos is on record as saying the whole binge method is part of the DNA of Netflix, but maybe not.

**John:** Yeah, but other DNA has changed too. Netflix was shooting their first pilots as we went into the strike. They had never done pilots. Now they’re doing pilots. They didn’t have ads. Now they have ads. A lot is changing. I do wonder if the binge model will also change.

**Craig:** Honestly, I have never understood it. It always occupied that same space in my brain that MoviePass did, which is, wait, what am I missing? In the case of MoviePass, nothing. I missed nothing. I was correct. You were correct. Anybody with half a brain was correct. In this case, I just wonder. It feels like I’m missing something. I just don’t know what it is.

**John:** I think here’s maybe what you’re missing is what metric they’re going for, because this article would say that you look at Wednesday, and overall people finished the show more. They may have some metric that says people finishing a show is better in the long run for our retention. Maybe they have some reason why they believe that. I think they’re missing out.

The bigger point we’re making in terms of when you don’t release a show week by week, you lose out on the whole ecosystem that can build up around it. That feels like a giant loss. There’s just no way to get around that.

**Craig:** There is something that feels like a lack of vote of confidence. Queen’s Gambit that Scott Frank made, that ought to have been a week-to-week show. I haven’t asked Scott about it, but it just seems like that would’ve been way better than putting it all out there, because it was fantastic. My whole thing is, if it’s crack, don’t give them all the crack at once. The whole point of crack is-

**John:** Also, people want to say, oh, teenagers will want to watch it all at once. They can also watch it all at once when it’s all done, and so they can join in the conversation.

**Craig:** Also, isn’t part of life telling teenagers no? By the way, I have no idea how crack works. I don’t know why I was just saying, “Isn’t the point of crack,” and then I trailed off, because I don’t know the point. I actually don’t know.

**John:** You could put something on the table and say, “That’s crack.” I’m like, “Okay.” I can recognize the paraphernalia around it, but if you were to say, “This is a rock of crack. This is a portion of crack. This is the appropriate amount of crack for a person to use,” it’s probably zero, but I wouldn’t know what it is.

**Craig:** I think if you put a piece of crack, and I don’t even know if the term piece… A rock. A rock of crack.

**John:** I’m assuming rock, yeah.

**Craig:** You put a rock of crack down next to a rock of a little bit of drywall, I’m not sure I would be able to tell the difference or pick out the one that’s drywall versus the crack.

**John:** If it was something that I got out from the tread of my shoes, that kind of thing, I wouldn’t know the difference.

**Craig:** I’ve noticed that Drew’s been real quiet about this.

**Drew Marquardt:** I have secrets.

**Craig:** I’m guessing that he’s like, “Oh, guys. Guys. Guys.”

**Drew:** We need to have a meeting.

**John:** Back in Scotland. Back in Scotland.

**Craig:** We need to have another side podcast that’s just about crack.

**Drew:** Just me talking about the different sizes of crack rocks.

**Craig:** Just you talking really fast and wildly about crack. We solved that problem.

**John:** We solved that problem. Let’s do some more follow-up here. Drew, we have something about tone meetings.

**Drew:** David Michael Maurer, ACE, wrote in. He said, “Loved listening to Episode 598 with Vince Gilligan. Wanted to share that in my experience as an editor, being part of the tone meetings is incredibly helpful. It allows me to hear firsthand what the showrunner and writers intended and listen for any creative pivots that the director may discuss. I can also ask questions earlier in the process about things like VFX or complicated sequences that may impact post-production and set time to sidebar with the director if needed so that they’re supported.

“Usually, this helps my editor’s cut get closer to what everyone intended tonally earlier. This also makes the director’s cut easier and stronger, and the showrunner’s first editorial pass becomes a much more enjoyable experience.”

**Craig:** Oh, yes. Oh, David Michael Maurer, I would like to kiss you for that. We certainly have our editors sitting in on our tone meetings. It’s essential. Look, editors do need a sense of freedom to approach the footage without feeling like they’re shackled.

On the other hand, you know, in talking about this very topic with Tim Goode, who’s one of our editors on The Last of Us, he does look back at the script a lot, and understanding what the lines are between the lines or why things were said or why things were put where they were, which does come out in a tone meeting, helps flesh that out.

We call it the clue book, because sometimes editors are like… I watch a scene and I’m like, “Huh.” They’re like, “I just didn’t quite know what to do here given the footage.” I’m like, “Let’s look at the clue book.” Then they’re like, “Oh. Oh. Oh, okay. Oh, okay, okay.” Getting a jump start on the clue book is a fantastic thing. If you are a showrunner, please, for the love of god, include your editors on tone meetings, for sure.

**John:** Craig, just a little sidebar here. Thinking back to The Last of Us, or Chernobyl as well, the editor may have been involved in these initial tone meetings. They have a sense of what that is. When they look at the footage from a scene, I assume they’re looking at what is the closest to a master shot that there would be.

In a lot of these shows, can you even fairly say that there’s a master shot for the scene? Are you ever just filming something wide enough that you can get the whole sense of what the scene’s supposed to be?

**Craig:** We certainly do. We’re not television. We’re HBO. Look, Chernobyl and The Last of Us certainly had the budgets and the creative ambition to be as cinematic as we could. We definitely shoot lots wide wides, wide wide wide wides and weird wides. It is a little different than some smaller shows. Obviously, every show is different.

The other challenge for our editors is we shoot a lot. For instance, our shooting schedule on average for an episode is 20 days. Now I say that around most people that make television and they just are weeping, because they get five days, maybe 12.

**John:** It’s crazy. So many one-hour procedurals, maybe they had eight days, now they’ve been cut down to seven and a half or they have to cross-board two shows to get 15 days.

**Craig:** At that point, your ability to shoot anything other than the bare necessities is really reduced. We do have that. They have a lot more footage to work with, which creates a lot more possibility, which is certainly part of what we do. If you look at Chernobyl or The Last of Us and count the big wides, you’ll count a lot of them. We’re big on those.

**John:** How often, as you were setting every day, did you do wides first versus a more specific shot? Are you almost always wides first?

**Craig:** Almost always. If we’re exterior, I always want to start wide, because it helps me start to choreograph the motion of the scene. It’s kind of free blocking. We’ve obviously blocked. Because it’s big and wide, you get a little bit of a sense of where positions are. It helps you. You can move things around a little bit. It starts to give you a little bit also of a sense of tone. It afford you an opportunity to create a visual transition, if you need, from what was prior, or you plan ahead to make your visual transition something super duper close. You just know when you’re getting close, you gotta grab that. Generally speaking, I follow the traditional wide and then march in.

**John:** It also gives you a chance to really look at the performances and see what it is that you may want to, little moments you may want to pick up as you get closer in or change or give yourself some options, because-

**Craig:** The actors are also using those big wides as rehearsals, because they know the moments that are crucial aren’t going to be playing in this huge wide, but it gets everybody’s juices flowing.

**John:** Some more follow-up.

**Drew:** Patrick writes, “That Disney TV movie from Episode 597 was in mono because there wasn’t stereo television in most places. That wasn’t until later in the ’80s with shows proudly displaying ‘in stereo’ at the beginning. For The Ewok Adventure in 1984, George Lucas being George Lucas, he wanted people to have the chance to watch it in stereo. They got radio stations in major markets to simulcast the audio in stereo. There were even ads explaining how to set up your home stereo.”

**John:** I do not remember The Ewok Adventure. I do remember the first time I would see the little bugs in the corner of the screen, like, “in stereo,” because it was a big deal when stuff was in stereo.

**Craig:** I gotta say, there’s gotta be some word for this, a memory that was simply not there and now is there. Just by Patrick saying, “Proudly displaying ‘in stereo,'” suddenly I’m like, oh yes, of course. I remember seeing “in stereo” for sure, but it was just gone out of my brain. It didn’t exist until Patrick reminded me. What is that about?

**John:** Let’s go on to our marquee topic. This is full disclosure. Our guest on next week’s episode, we already recorded that episode, and we were going to talk about this topic, and we ran out of town. I’m pulling it backwards or forwards in time to talk about it here on this episode.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I want to talk about groups. So often on the podcast we’re talking about classic dramatic theory, where you have a protagonist who begins a story. They have one set of beliefs and conditions. They undertake this journey that transforms them, finds them arriving at a different set of beliefs and circumstances. We talk about our protagonist. We talk about an antagonist, who’s the person who’s forcing them to change. There’s other characters, of course, who are very important. The central protagonist storyline is key to many movies, probably most movies. Craig, would you agree?

**Craig:** Yes, I think so. I think so, for sure.

**John:** There are movies that don’t have that one single, central protagonist. They’ve grouped the characters who share that spotlight. I thought we might spend some time talking about those kinds of movies and what a writer needs to be thinking about when you’re tackling a story that doesn’t have the one constant protagonist, but rather has a group that is doing that hero’s work.

Some examples of the classic thing would be like an Erin Brockovich, a Michael Clayton, an Elvis, Amadeus, Tár. They often have the character’s name as the title of the movie. That is one kind. Then there’s Charlie’s Angels or Reservoir Dogs, ensemble comedies like Best in Show or The Hangover, A Fish Called Wanda. There’s a lot of movies that do have groups of characters. Ocean’s Eleven has groups of characters that do things. Let’s spend some time thinking about the difference and how you make sure that there still is a narrative story drive even with disparate characters carrying the football through it.

**Craig:** One of the things that teamwork, and I like to think of them as teamwork movies and stories, do is they reinforce a natural pro-social desire we have to see functioning relationships where individuals get to shine because of their diverse abilities.

Pretty much the entire Marvel universe is like this. Yes, they definitely did Captain America. That’s Captain America. Iron Man is Iron Man. It wasn’t until they hit the Avengers where things went kaboom, because we love watching The Dirty Dozen, we love watching Seven Samurai, we love watching Ocean’s Eleven, where a team is assembled. Being on a winning team feels good. It takes away the burden of being the only one.

A lot of single-protagonist stories talk about the one somebody has chosen to win. In this case we’re all working together. Each one of us is different and has a moment to shine. The story is about the relationships. Now, typically, the relationships are narrowed down to one central relationship inside of the group, because we can’t really handle more than that.

Everybody gets a chance to win, and everybody gets a chance to lose. Watching the team struggle, fall apart, and then come back together actualized and all doing their individual parts is so satisfying. It’s just satisfying on a deep, deep level.

**John:** We hadn’t planned for which movies you wanted to tackle. Even thinking about the first Star Wars, A New Hope, it is Luke Skywalker’s story. He does protagonate in a very classic way, and yet the ensemble around him is very, very important. We see the team dynamics form and splinter and the tensions within relationships that are not even specifically about Luke.

You have smaller groups within that larger group. Of course you have C-3PO and R2-D2 and then their relationship. You have Luke and Leia and their relationship, but also Leia and Han Solo, their relationship. Within that bigger dynamic, you have smaller individual pairings or triads there, and you want to see how those are developing within the bigger context of things.

In those relationships, you have to be able to track those independently of the plot. It’s not plot stuff. It’s really about the growth of characters as we’re following them through the story.

**Craig:** If you note, each one of those characters will have some sort of failure and then some sort of success. The failure and success is within the context of the team. R2-D2 and C-3PO are basically failures. C-3PO is a failure all the time, but then R2-D2 is the one that ultimately saves them all from dying in the trash compactor. Eventually, C-3PO has his moments where he gets to win. That is exciting to watch. It’s exciting to see Han Solo be both swashbuckling and cool and then also selfish and then cool again. Everybody doing their part is just, again, it’s like watching all these pieces click together that feel so good.

In The Hangover, Alan, Zach Galifianakis’s character, is an absolute disaster of a human being and so much fun to write, because he’s just chaos. He’s completely unhinged. He has the strangest worldview and an enormous amount of confidence and certainty, even though he deserves no confidence and certainty. When the chips are down, literally, he just engages this bizarre gear he has and wins all this money at blackjack, because he’s special. We love watching that. We love watching the underdog who’s good at nothing suddenly shine and crush it.

**John:** Now, thinking about The Hangover movies, we talk about this on the macro scale, but let’s think about it on a scene level. You have several of the characters together in a scene. Classically, you would want to have your protagonist be driving that scene, and yet you don’t have one clear central protagonist. How do you approach a scene and who should be in charge of the scene, or are mostly people vying for control of the scene?

**Craig:** The Hangover, that trio of characters follows a pretty classic dramatic method of imagining one person that is split into three parts. You have the id, the ego, and the superego.

Ed Helms, his character is very much the superego. He is responsible. He is anxious. He’s concerned about logic and rules. Then Bradley Cooper’s character is very much about, understood, but force of action, getting things done. This is essential. If we have to break the rules, so be it, but it’s all in service of doing the right thing.

Then you have Zach’s character, who is chaos. Chaos, appetite, urges. Watching those three guys negotiate with each other is a little bit like watching a single person struggling to figure out what to do. Just like in real life, sometimes it’s our id that we need to release to win the day, and sometimes not.

**John:** Thinking back to the Charlie’s Angels movies, those were some of the most difficult things I ever had to write, because you had three central characters who fundamentally had no conflict with each other. They had some sisterly conflict, but their primary source of friction was not with each other. They each needed their own backstory, each needed their own love interest and thing that they were going out that was separate from the main A plot. It was really challenging.

Yet I could think of them as being, like you said, a single force. It generally wasn’t hard to figure out how to drive a scene, because one or several of them could drive the action in that scene. You felt anchored as long as one of those people was there.

**Craig:** There has to be a clear distinction between them. You don’t want repetition. That’s really important. You want to feel like everybody is specifically required. Ocean’s Eleven is a really good example. It has a very classic group dynamic model of we’re going to bring a team together.

Interestingly, there’s not a ton of difference between Rusty and Danny, Brad Pitt’s character and George Clooney’s. They’re both super cool, super calm masterminds who trust each other completely. They function actually more as their own little mini team. It’s like they’re partners, parents. They actually work like parents. Mother-father, father-father, it doesn’t matter. Then everybody else under them has a very specific role to do a very specific thing. Watching how those pieces come together is fascinating.

**John:** Can you imagine an Ocean’s Eleven where that central couple had real tensions or real fights? It would be a very different movie. I don’t know if you’d feel comfortable within the movie. You don’t want mom and dad fighting.

**Craig:** You don’t. One of the things that Ted Griffin did so beautifully in Ocean’s Eleven is place the central relationship tension between Danny Ocean and Tess, Julia Roberts’s character. They were exes. He’s trying to win her back. That’s what the movie’s really about. The whole thing is, how do I steal your heart back? That makes sense. If there’s any tension between Danny and Rusty, it’s, is this about the money or is this about her? You get the sense that Rusty always knows that it’ll work out. He’s just that cool.

That’s a good way of thinking about things. The tension inside of a group is important, but the central tension inside of a group really does need to be limited ultimately to two people.

There’s what I call fake tension. Again, let’s go back to Ocean’s Eleven, since it’s such a good example. You have Casey Affleck and you have Scott Caan. The two of them are basically, I think they’re the vehicle guys. They fight each other constantly.

**John:** They bicker.

**Craig:** They’re constantly bickering, hitting each other. It’s fake conflict. It’s hysterical. You don’t worry. You’re not emotionally invested in that conflict. That conflict doesn’t matter. It’s there for fun.

**John:** We also recognize that dynamic of conflict. They’re doing the thing that they would do. It’s not fake in the sense that it was artificial on the part of Ted Griffin. It was the kind of shit that two buddies do.

**Craig:** Then there was this interesting, I’ll call it a sub-protagonist, with Matt Damon, because Matt Damon’s character was the one guy who was really trying to prove himself. He was the new guy who was getting hazed and who felt like he didn’t belong and was constantly undermined and screwed with, because he’s the rookie. Then he achieves, and he feels like he earns his place in the group. It’s not quite at the level of, okay, Danny Ocean wins Tess back. It was still a satisfying journey for him, because his relationship was actually with the entire group, like, how do I fit into this whole group?

**John:** What we’re describing here is that each of these characters in these group dynamics has to have a clearly identifiable want and need that the audience can pick up on. As a writer, you need to find enough time to service that and service that progress and progression, which is really challenging given all the other story you’re trying to do. It’s one of the reasons why writing movies with a bunch of characters can be so challenging, because you’re just trying to service so many different things at once.

A scene in Charlie’s Angels had to service three different storylines at all times. That’s really tough. It also meant that if one of the scenes didn’t work or got cut out, you’re screwed, because a bunch of stuff was falling away with that scene getting cut out. Everything has to click and work in ways that are less flexible than in the classic protagonist story, where you might say, oh, we can skip over that beat, because we get it. If a bunch of other things are hinging on that moment, that’s a challenge. Ideally, one character’s growth or change is coming in relation to another character’s growth or change. You’re seeing those dynamics shift because they’re both progressing. They’re both moving to a new space.

**Craig:** Always important. To view everything through the lens of a relationship is important. The group is this large relationship. Inside of that group there are little mini relationships. Perhaps there is a relationship between one person and the entire group.

As you go through these things, you need to look out for characters that you start to look at as homework, like, “That’s right, this person hasn’t said anything in nine scenes.” Those characters you do need to think about, do we need them, what are they doing.

That said, there is also value to characters that are very quiet, disappear until the moment they are needed. When they are called upon to do one single thing, you go, “Wow.” Grease man in Ocean’s Eleven. He’s the acrobat who doesn’t speak English. I think that’s what the term is, grease man. It’s the guy that can wriggle into places. He has one thing to do, and he does it, and it’s awesome. That’s totally legal.

In The Hangover, there were a lot of scenes where Zach barely said anything, but he would say one little thing at the end, and it would make it awesome. That’s okay too. You just make sure that you don’t have a character that feels like they should be talking a lot, but they have nothing to say. That’s problematic.

**John:** Then you run into the Patton Oswalt problem, where he’s standing in the scene and-

**Craig:** Oh my god. I wish we had talked about that when Patton was on the-

**John:** We did. We talked about it.

**Craig:** We did. Okay, good.

**John:** We did, yeah.

**Craig:** I’m glad, because that is one of the… If people haven’t seen it, I guess we must’ve referenced it then with a link, so that’s good. That’s a great example of, there’s just no reason for that person to be there.

**John:** Even in stories where you do have more of a classic protagonist arc, something too like Top Gun: Maverick, it is Tom Cruise’s story fundamentally, and yet the group plays an incredibly important role. Do we get to spend a lot of time individually with some of those pilots? No, not really. There’s the one guy who’s quiet and has glasses, but we still love him, because we get what his role is within that group, and we’re rooting for him.

Those were all very crucial choices made early on in the process and during shooting to figure out how do we understand all these characters and what their deal is, even though we’re not going to have a tremendous amount of screen time to support those. They make really smart choices. It was so rewarding to see them succeed down the road or really felt it when they would have a setback. That’s crucial. Even though the central relationship is really Tom Cruise and Miles Teller, the other people, we understood their dynamics. They weren’t just glorified background players.

**Craig:** Exactly. If you are thinking about writing a movie or a television show that is based around a group dynamic, I urge you to watch some of the better sports films, because movies about actual teams are the purest example, I think. Heist movies come pretty close, because it’s also a team. Watching movies about teams teaches you so much about how to make that work. Have you ever seen Slap Shot, John?

**John:** I’ve never seen Slap Shot. I assume it’s a hockey movie.

**Craig:** Nailed it. Fantastic film. A great movie. Just wonderful. Paul Newman holds down the center of it. Anyone who’s seen Slap Shot is familiar with the Hanson Brothers. The Hanson Brothers are a fantastic example of just employing the characters with a specific skill that makes you go, “Oh, awesome.” Go ahead and we’ll throw a link on to the Hanson Brothers.

**John:** Fantastic. Let’s move on to some listener questions. Drew, what do you have for us?

**Drew:** Leanne from Burbank writes, “I’m currently writing a script completely free of any WGA signatories, where two characters rehearse a scene from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. I would like to use a 1961 translation from an Oxford University Press compendium of Ibsen plays. Of course, A Doll’s House itself is in the public domain, but the Project Gutenberg translation isn’t quite as sharp as the Oxford one. Do I need permission to use a published translation of a public domain play in my script? If so, do I reach out to the publisher, and are they likely to give me the green light without a price tag?”

**John:** Great. The answer is yes, you would have to have permission to use that in your produced thing. Could you include that stuff in your script without that? Yes, but that could be a problem down the road.

Leanne, I worry that you’re creating problems for yourself that you don’t need to create. I think you’re using a public domain play. There’s existing translations. How much of this play are you actually including in your film? I think you could write your own version of those scenes, and we’re not going to know the difference. I think you’d make a better choice than to open yourself to any problems of using something that is not free and clear. Craig, what’s your thinking?

**Craig:** Certainly, translations are copyrightable. You do need permission for those. I think since it’s just a scene, you could reach out to the translator. It’s not the publisher. It’s the translator that has the copyright. You could reach out to the translator and say, “Hey, would you be willing to just license this to me for five bucks, just because I really, really like it? We would give you credit in the credits.” They may say, “Yeah. It’s just a scene. Sure.” They may be flattered, because they probably agree that their translation is better than the Project Gutenberg one.

If they say no, good news, you’ve got a public domain translation that you can lean on, and then you can tweak it as you wish, because you can adapt public domain works as much and as significantly as you like. I would reach out to the translator, not the publisher.

**John:** I agree. The translator is the way to go there. I think it’s a smart choice. I do ultimately though wonder, Leanne, is that… You’re using that scene for a specific reason. It’s going to have some resonance to what the other characters are doing in the moment. Your version of that scene may be more appropriate than the official Oxfordy kind of translation.

**Craig:** All true.

**John:** What else you got for us?

**Drew:** Jess in the North of England writes, “I’m finding the process of jazzing up pitch documents or accompanying slides for pitch presentations is becoming increasingly elaborate. Is it just me, or is the job of a writer now also to be a skilled graphic designer? I’m genuinely considering taking a design course so I don’t have to rely on a graphic designer every time I pitch. Even if there’s someone in house at the production company who is a competent designer, it’s still such a specific skill to collaborate and get the aesthetic right. Even just the image sourcing is a huge undertaking.

“My question is, how much of this is the job of a writer? On one hand, I think I might be going to too much trouble. Shouldn’t it just be all about the words? On the other hand, maybe this is the work. Maybe I just learn Adobe InDesign and stop being a baby.”

**John:** This is a thing that’s changed in the time that we’ve done this podcast is that pitch documents, pitch decks, art boards going into things were not nearly as crucial or as fundamental of a thing you did for writers 10 years ago when we started this podcast. Now they’re really common. If I’m pitching on Zoom, I’ll definitely have a deck, and I’ll have negotiations with the rights-holders about what can be in that deck sometimes.

For this series I’m doing, there’s been just a whole long process, which we’ve brought an outside designer to do this essentially glorified pdf that is presenting this piece of IP. It’s a big thing. I hear you, Jess. We’re all encountering this as a new thing.

**Craig:** This is one of those questions where I’m hesitant to give a hard opinion, because like John, I came up in a time where this simply just didn’t occur. The pitching was entirely a verbal exercise, and nobody expected anything but.

May very well be that taking a design course is helpful to you. If you’re paying money to people, I get nervous, because we shouldn’t be paying money to pitch things on spec. A design course may not be necessary, but it’s possible that perhaps there’s a good ole design for dummies book that you can pick up, because the elaboration of the graphics themselves isn’t really I think what ultimately adds value as much as the thought and concepts that you put into things.

I’m hesitant to tell people, “You don’t need to do that,” because maybe you do now. Maybe the people who hear pitches are like, “Wait. What? Where’s your-”

**John:** “Where’s this?” Yeah.

**Craig:** “You’re just talking to me? Get out.” I don’t know.

**John:** The last couple projects I’ve had to go out and pitch on, I put together a deck. Actually, in putting together the deck, I really did figure out the story much better, because I had to think what would I actually show here, what is the thing I’m trying to communicate here, what is the tone of this, what things can I pull from other interesting films and movies that are useful here, that can really show this.

It’s been a useful process for me, and yet I am still conflicted, because after going through this whole campaign of No Writing Left Behind, here I’m doing all this stuff that’s not quite writing, but it’s like writing. I’m telling the story with visuals here. It’s just a lot more work going into these things.

It’s setting an arms race for what is expected going into one of these sessions, and yet I just know for a fact that it is easier to have a conversation with a creative person, an executive, when you have something to show them.

Going in to pitch Aladdin at Disney, I just brought in these art boards that showed this is how I see a live-action Aladdin looking, and this is how I see Jasmine. This is how I see a very different version of the genie. I could talk through my story, but I could also point to boards, and the executives can flip back to that board and really dig in on a thing. It was incredibly helpful. I probably will never pitch without visuals again. That’s just the reality of the world we’re in right now.

**Craig:** So interesting, because in reflecting on this, it seems to me that I really ought to have done this to pitch Chernobyl or to pitch The Last of Us. The Last of Us in particular, I had an entire video game that I could’ve just taken stuff from, and I just talked. I talked for both of those. It worked.

**John:** It worked.

**Craig:** Look, I think part of it may also come down to two factors. One, Jess, is how comfortable are you talking? I love talking. I’m a big talker. I like to talk. I like to engage people with my talking. That’s probably why I default to that. The other factor is who are you pitching to, because if they’re younger, they may indeed expect these things, where if they’re older, they may have quite a few years of just hearing verbal pitches and may not need it.

The biggest factor, I think, and my guess is you like having those things, because you’ve been using them, and you must be finding them useful. You’re just trying to figure out how to mitigate the cost and the effort.

I would say the only advice I could give you is don’t spend too much money on a course. Maybe buy a book. Don’t worry too much about the beauty. The content I think is more important, the intention.

**John:** It’s crucial. I’m sure this has been a previous One Cool Thing, but I’ll put another plug in for ShotDeck, which is shotdeck.com. It’s a really good website that takes pretty much any movie you’ve ever loved and pulls stills from them that you can actually search for the terms that are in there.

As I’ve been putting together decks for things, it’s so, so helpful to say, “I need medieval castle,” and here are 30 really good stills from other movies of medieval castle, because you can find other images on the web that’ll sort of get you kind of there, but they won’t look like a really high quality movie or TV show. ShotDeck can be a really good choice for you for there.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** I think that is it for our questions. Let’s do some One Cool Things. Craig, what do you got?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing today, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, but very specifically the Center for Trans Youth Health and Development. Los Angeles Children’s Hospital, or I guess, sorry, they do go by Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. I wish it were the other way around, because then you could call it LACH as opposed to CHLA.

Regardless, they I believe are maybe the second most advanced and respected center for gender-affirming care for young people in the world. I believe the preeminent facility is in Amsterdam. If you are here in the United States, or if you’re lucky enough to be here in Los Angeles, you’ve got this incredible place here. Now, they are both pediatric, but also I believe they also take in young adults all the way to 26.

Right now, in our country, there is an effort, an ongoing effort in the states you would think it would be happening in to literally criminalize gender-affirming care for children, adolescents, young adults. The existence of a program like this is so important and profound. It also just makes me proud of my adopted city here in Los Angeles that we’re so out in the forefront.

If you are somebody who is looking for this kind of care, if you have a family member who is looking for this kind of care, just know that they not only take care of the patients, but they also talk with the families. They have every kind of care there is, emotional, mental, physical. Definitely take a look at the Center for Trans Youth Health and Development, if for no other reason than to be defiant on behalf of those who deserve it.

**John:** It’s such a frustrating moment we’re living in as we’re recording this in 2023 because things that should be just so fundamentally obvious, like that trans kids exist and that you need to protect them, are being questioned. I’m hoping that this will pass and we’ll just move on to the next thing that certain people will be outraged about. It is such a dangerous time to be messing with these kids who need help and support.

I also get so frustrated that if you talk to a person who is upset about trans kids, that they will say, “Oh, all these structures should be put in place.” Then you’ll tell them those are exactly the structures that are in place to make sure that everyone’s making smart choices.

**Craig:** The Center for Trans Youth Health and Development is not a place where you walk in and go, “Hi, I’m 10. Can you please remove my penis?” No. This is not how it functions at all. I think people have all sorts of crazy notions about how gender-affirming care functions.

I do think that this will pass. I agree with you, but it’s going to take time. I don’t know what the next panic will be. I remind myself that when you and I were young, John, people were literally suing heavy metal bands because they were Satanists who were causing suicide. There was a Satanic panic going on, not to mention just the general normal, I don’t know, criminalization and rejection of just good old-fashioned homosexuality.

We will get through this, and we will all be better for it, but until that day, it is good to know that while… People listen to us from all over the world. They may think that America is defined by its worst, which is in deranged and unfettered gun culture and hatred of people who are not straight or cisgender. America is kind of two Americas. That’s what’s happened. Used to be one, sort of, kind of. We did have Civil War.

**John:** There was that.

**Craig:** We might’ve just been whistling past the graveyard for a long time. Really, there’s two Americas, and they’re wildly different. I am very proud to live in an America that has something like Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. You can donate to them, which is important. Obviously, they are a nonprofit organization. When you donate, you might want to make one of the conditions be that they just reverse that name so that it is Los Angeles Children’s Hospital.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is so trivial by comparison that I… Maybe I should just celebrate that.

**Craig:** Did I shame you?

**John:** You did shame me. Mine is a silly game that is a Breakout-y game that’s on all the platforms. I’ve played it on iOS, on my iPhone, called Holedown, which you can giggle. It’s a silly name. It’s like Breakout, where you’re trying to smash a bunch of blocks, except that you’re moving from the top down to the bottom. It’s just a very well done, very sticky kind of dynamic there. It’s just very satisfying to smash things in it. I just really loved it. During some of the long, boring waits during the negotiations, I can pull this out and just spend a happy five minutes smashing some blocks in Holedown.

**Craig:** Wait a sec. Is that why we’re on strike, because you’ve been playing Holedown?

**John:** That’s what it’s been. It’s really pretty much all my fault. If I just focused a little bit more, I’m sure I could’ve come up with the one persuasive argument that would’ve changed the entire course of negotiations, but no, I was playing this.

**Craig:** But no, Holedown. What a brilliant idea to just go, “Let’s reverse the flow of Breakout.” I’ll check it out. That sounds like a fun game.

**John:** It’s a good game. Holedown.com so you can see all the different versions that are out there for the game. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** If you say.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Duke. 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 can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We will have a 600-episode T-shirt before too long. Check those out. 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 how to get started in a role-playing video game, how not to mess it all up.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, so my Instagram stories have been dominated by people who are playing the new Zelda on the Switch. Have you started Zelda?

**Craig:** No. I must admit that even though I’m a big gamer and have sunk god knows how much time to games like GTA or Elder Scrolls or Fallout, Breath of the Wild, I just… I, by the way, loved old Zelda. Ocarina of Time, great, and Twilight Princess. I just didn’t love Breath of the Wild. I didn’t connect with it.

**John:** I have a Switch too. I played it a little bit. It never bowled me over. People love it. That’s fantastic. I do remember Ocarina of Time. It wasn’t pre-internet, but I just lost my way in it and didn’t really finish it or follow it that closely.

**Craig:** The Zelda games are very comforting in one sense, that there are certain things that are always there no matter what, and if you enjoy them, you enjoy them. I do. I enjoy going into a temple and figuring out the puzzles. I enjoy opening up the chests. I enjoy the (singing). I love fighting the bosses. I also like going to the different groups of people. There are the fish people. There are the rock people. I love that.

Breath of the Wild was so big. It’s a little thing. It’s a little, tiny thing. I understand it is continued in this new one. That is that your weapons would break. I just couldn’t handle it. It just was making me nuts. It was making me nuts. In Fallout, your weapons do wear down, and you can patch them up. It’s just a much better crafting system. I was like, “Oh my god, I got a sword, and the sword broke? I can’t. I can’t.”

**Drew:** That feels like it defeats the point of Zelda, which is going around and cutting grass for hours at a time.

**Craig:** I know, exactly, or just like, I’m going to wander through this field of easy guys and just chop chop chop. It’s just so satisfying. Then like, oh, no, or like, I’m going to climb up this cliff, and then there’s a guy up there that immediately, bop, and my sword breaks instantly, and I’m screwed. What am I going to do, punch him, spit at him? I don’t know.

Look, people love Zelda. My oldest kid played all the way through Breath of the Wild, loved it. I don’t mean to take anything away from people. People love that game. It’s just really I did not connect with it, so I probably will not take on this new one.

**John:** I’ve played Dragon Age and finished Dragon Age. I’ve done Elder Scrolls, and I love that very much. I’m looking at the new Diablo 4 coming out. In all those games, you create a character, and then you have to make some decisions pretty early on that determine your class or your tree, which skill tree you’re on. I just don’t want to screw up, Craig. I ended up having to look online and see what people are loving or not loving. These games should be pretty well balanced so that you could do things multiple ways, but if you try to follow two trees, death, doom.

**Craig:** Here’s what I would say. This is where the life lessons come into play.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** There is an anxiety about making the wrong choices that are going to set your character on a path that is less than optimal. In Dungeons and Dragons, which we both play, there is a concept called min-maxing, where you try and throw all of your ability points into the thing you know you’re going to be using, and you don’t put any points into the thing you think you won’t be using at all. You don’t have to worry about being really smart if you’re going to be a barbarian. You just have to put everything in strength, all of it, strength.

Min-maxed characters, while efficient and successful in combat, are not always the most interesting characters. There is something interesting about a flawed character who is sort of good at a couple of things but not great at anything.

One of the things that I found with these games is that all of my anxiety early on ultimately didn’t matter, because I would start to play in a way that made me happy. That was the thing. I was like, “Oh, you know what? I actually way prefer shooting arrows than swinging a sword. It’s okay. You know what? I wasted a bunch of time. I wasted 10 levels of throwing stuff into swordplay. I don’t care. Fine. Whatever.”

Life is not efficient. We waste time in our lives trying all sorts of stuff. People go to school, and then they give up on it. People pick up a guitar, and they never learn how to play. That’s our lives. It’s okay. It’s okay. You will find what you really love, and then you start investing in that. By the time you level all the way up into the big boy zones-

**John:** You’ll be fine.

**Craig:** … doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t matter that you wasted a few points early. You’ll max out your archery thing anyway. The game that really blew my mind on that one was Elden Ring.

**John:** Yeah, Elden Ring. We talked about Elden Ring and how maddening that was. The other thing, lesson you could take from this is that, in real life you don’t get to set the difficulty level, or the difficulty level is set for you, based on circumstances in which you’re born. In these games, you could choose that difficulty level. I would say just maybe don’t be so ambitious if you just want to have a good time and have some fun. Maybe leave it at normal rather than going to hard or extreme difficulty. You don’t have to prove it to other people.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Maybe when you go back and play it again, then you can choose the hard setting.

**Craig:** Absolutely. What do you get out of these games? Where is your enjoyment? Is your enjoyment is mastering combat, then yeah, boost it up. If your enjoyment is in discovering the world and working your way through the narratives, you can go all the way down to story mode, where it’s really hard to die, and you’re really there to just enjoy time. Now, the aforementioned Elden Ring does not give you a choice whatsoever. There is one difficulty, and it is, oh my god, hard.

**John:** Insane.

**Craig:** They provide you with a choice of archetypes in the beginning that you don’t know what they do. They don’t tell you anything, which is horrifying but also exciting.

When I start one of these games, I really try and avoid looking for optimizations. I don’t mind getting some clarity on things like, how the hell does my inventory work, which in Elden Ring was so confusing, or what does this letter mean, like, “Oh, I’ve got a sword, and it’s an S. What does that mean? It’s a B.” I don’t know what these things mean, so I can look that stuff up. In terms of like, here’s how you make the best Elden Ring character, meh.

**John:** Meh.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** I will look up online just to get a sense of what the basic play styles are, because I know what I tend to enjoy and what I don’t tend to enjoy. I’ve been going back through and playing some Diablo 3, I guess. There was a witch doctor character class that I’d never really understood before. I was like, “I’ll give it a shot.” Now I actually understand how you do that and how you survive in that. It’s more fun.

**Craig:** One of the things that’s nice about Elder Scrolls is there are multiple storylines that require different skills. You can become a battle champion. You can also become a master thief. You can also become a master magician. You can also become a master assassin, or if you’re like me, all of them. Becoming all of them requires you to balance yourself out in fun ways, where you start to shift how you play and where you put your resources and your points.

I’m talking with my kids about this. When you start these games, you’re so scared. You don’t know what you’re doing. You stink. You have very little health. The world’s incredibly scary and foreign. You don’t know where you are or how to get back to anything. Eventually, you are the master of that world. You are the most powerful, knowledgeable person in that entire world. You just have to remember that you gotta go through some scary, confusing, bewildering, and disorienting times to get to a place where you are the boss.

**John:** Agreed. If I could also make one more plea to the people who are designing these video games, is I know you have crafted these very clever ways of getting people up to speed and how to do things and how combat works and how to build up inventory and stuff like that. You have these introductory things that take your hand and lead you through that. Once we’ve done that once or twice, I don’t want to do that again.

Elder Scrolls, if you want to start a new character, Jesus, you’re looking at just a very long slog of like, okay, now the dragon’s going to attack, and now I have to run through this whole falling down castle. Give me a thing that just lets me pop out and be at the end of that.

**Craig:** One of the things about FromSoftware that makes Elden Ring is they don’t give a sweet damn what you want. In fact, if you want something, they’re not giving it to you. It is a sadism factory. I salute them. The game is beautiful. Such a beautiful game and so frustrating.

**John:** You’re talking Elden Ring. I’m talking Elder Scrolls.

**Craig:** Oh, Elder Scrolls. In Elder Scrolls, yes, there are some very-

**John:** You’re the prisoner and then you’re there. It’s just a long slog. It’s great the first time you’re going through it. It makes you very reluctant to start a new character.

**Craig:** If you could possibly hold down the triangle button to skip all that, that would be great.

**John:** Love it. That’s our advice. More triangle buttons in life and in video games.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Study: Both Binge, Episodic Release Models Have Their Benefits, but Have to Be Deployed Strategically](https://thestreamable.com/news/study-both-binge-episodic-release-models-have-their-benefits-but-have-to-be-deployed-strategically) by Matt Tamanini
* [Patton Oswalt stands still for an entire scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA90rOwmkJ4)
* [The Hanson Brothers in Slap Shot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUbn5ss8j9c)
* [The Center for Transyouth Health and Development](https://www.chla.org/the-center-transyouth-health-and-development)
* [Holedown](https://holedown.com/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/) on Instagram
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Duke ([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/599standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 594 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we return to asking the most important questions. What is love, can you forgive someone for ruining the world, and how would this be a movie? That’s right, it’s another installment of us looking at stories in the news and in the public domain, where we try to finesse them into narrative shape. Craig, are you ready for this?

Craig: I love this. As soon as you said, “What is love?” I immediately heard Howard Jones in my head. (singing)

John: Of course.

Craig: This is very exciting. Very exciting.

John: We’ll do all those. We’ll also answer some listener questions. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, this one will tie into one of my One Cool Things, but Craig, I’m curious, what arrangements are you making for handling the stuff you’ve written after you die? There’s things you’ve written, and your papers will go someplace. What are you going to do with that? I have some stuff I need to figure out for myself. We’ll talk about post-death writing plans, not really what we’re going to write after we die.

Craig: I was intending to leave it all to you, but now you’ve given me pause.

John: We’ll have to figure it out.

Craig: I’m like, dammit. Dammit.

John: Drew will get everything.

Craig: We just left it all to Drew.

John: Like musical chairs. Last one who dies has to deal with all the paperwork.

Craig: How crazy would it be if we leave it all to Drew, and Megana’s sitting there like, “Wait, what?”

John: “Wait, I was right there.”

Drew Marquardt: “I put in all this time.”

Craig: Stuart is like, “Wait, what?”

John: We have a Stuart reference in this first bit of follow-up here. In Episode 582 we talked about why action heroes, so often their names start with the letter J. It turns out that wasn’t the first time we talked about that.

Stuart brought up that in Episode 63, which was called The Mystery of the Js, which was also a Three Page Challenge, he had done some research to figure out how many of our listeners or how many of our Three Page Challenges came from people whose names started with Js, so the Jacobs, the Joshuas, the Jeanines, the Jennys. 23% of our Three Page Challenge submissions-

Craig: Wow.

John: … were from J names, which is higher than the US average, which is 11.9%.

Craig: It’s definitely happening. It’s a thing. I’m still reeling from the whole Episode 63 thing. John, we’ve been doing this so long.

John: So long.

Craig: So long. 63 hours of podcasting went by. It’s not that I don’t remember it. It’s like it never happened.

John: It really is like it never happened. Sometimes when you and I can’t record an episode, we’ll dig up an old episode from the vault. Recently, we pulled up the How Writing Credits Work. I listened to it again. It was a fantastic episode. We really walked through the process. That was before Episode 100. It was so early on in our recording history.

Craig: Sometimes I do this. I try not to do it in a way that sounds snarky but in a way that sounds honest and informative. Somebody sometimes will say, “Hey, I’m a fan of your work, and I would like to buy you a coffee and pick your brain just about the business and how to break in and all that stuff.” What I’ve taken to saying is, “I can’t, but the good news is there is almost 600 hours of me talking about this stuff with John that is freely available,” or almost freely, for like $5. You can just start going download crazy. Isn’t that enough?

John: 100% fair. I do the same thing. Even this last week, my daughter met this friend at a climbing gym who wants to be… Maybe he’s in film school right now. Amy said, “Hey, could you sit down with him and just talk him through stuff?” I said, “No, because if I did that for everyone, I couldn’t do that. Also, we have a solution that scales, which is I’ve recorded 594 hours of myself and Craig talking about all the things that would be interesting for this person.” Plus, there will be a book soon. We can just like, “Here’s the book.” Done.

Craig: Yeah. You know what? Here’s the book. Read the book. We wrote the book.

John: We wrote a book.

Craig: We wrote a book.

John: We actually owe a lot of chapters on the book, but there’s a book coming. Drew’s working hard on the book.

Craig: We talked a book.

John: We talked a book well.

Craig: We talked a book.

John: Further follow-up on the J names there. Craig Griffiths wrote in. He says, “As a Craig, I feel your pain, that there are no Craig superheroes. There are no Craig heroes, but as a kid, I was glued to the late ‘60s action adventure show called The Champions and its hero, Craig Sterling.”

Craig: What? Huh?

John: There’s a show called The Champions and Craig Sterling. We’ll click through the link here. It looks like a British show.

Craig: Yeah, so this is not going to be applicable to me and my life. This does look British. In fact, it must be, because you can watch it on something called BritBox.

John: Oh my gosh.

Craig: “Watch on BritBox Season 1.” A, we did not get The Champions. B, that’s not to say that I wasn’t watching shows that were from the late ‘60s, because I would. I would watch shows from even earlier, like I Love Lucy and then Brady Bunch and so on and so forth. Brady Bunch, didn’t it start in the late ‘60s or was it early ‘70s?

John: I think it might’ve been early ‘70s. By the time I watched it, it wasn’t on. It was just reruns.

Craig: We were always watching reruns. It started in 1969, so it began in the late ‘60s. That doesn’t help me, Craig. By the way, I appreciate that you were trying, but you actually made me feel worse, because you had one Craig, and I had no Craigs.

John: Nothing.

Craig: Zero, whereas John was like, “Oh look, it’s Wednesday. Let me watch a show with John in it.”

John: You know what? The only who could help solve this problem were your parents, and they didn’t.

Craig: What problems did they solve? I’m sorry, did you say create problems or solve problems?

John: They could do both. They can create problems and solve them. They created a problem by choosing the name Craig.

Craig: They did a lot of problem creating.

John: They also created a problem by creating you, so it’s really a question of how far back do you move the timeline.

Craig: I go all the way back.

John: All the way back.

Craig: Yes, I have a memory. That I remember. I don’t remember any of the podcasts we recorded, but I remember all that.

John: What is the first memory you have of your life, of being alive?

Craig: Oh, that’s a really interesting question, because I have an answer for this.

John: I love it.

Craig: I don’t know how the memory was formed in such a specific way connected to an age, but I have a very specific memory that I have had my whole life of being three years old.

John: Mine’s also three.

Craig: I was three, and I was in our little dining room area. My mother was on the phone. Back in those days, Drew, phone were connected to walls.

Drew: What?

Craig: They were corded. They had a cord. It was a stretchy, coily cord. I know. She would stroll around while she was talking to her friends, and this cord would stretch. I had this very clear memory of having to lift the cord slightly to walk under it. That is my first memory, three years old. What is yours?

John: Mine is also three years old. I know it’s three years old, because my memory is of my nana, who was coming to visit us from New Jersey, so it must’ve been either the summer or Christmastime. She was sitting in the La-Z-Boy in the living room near the fireplace. I asked Nana, “Nana, how old am I?” She says, “You’re three.” I go, “I’m three. I’m three. I’m three.” I ran around being so happy that I was three.

I can visualize the whole thing. It’s one of the few early memories I have that doesn’t have a photograph or some film, because there’s other things that are about the same time of birthday parties, but I’m really remembering the footage of it rather than the event itself. This I definitely remember, this moment of being three and just it being anchored there.

Craig: What if you were actually 12 when that happened?

John: That would be really surprising.

Craig: You were just incredibly stupid.

John: “I’m 12. I’m 12. I’m 12.”

Craig: You were just so stupid. You were like, “How old am I?” You didn’t know. She was like, “You’re three,” because she hated you because of how dumb you were. Then you were like, “I’m three. I’m three,” and ran around. They were like, “Oh my god, what is wrong with him?” Then around 13, everything just came together and you got really smart. I just want you to consider the alt history is a possibility.

John: I do. We’ve talked before on the show that whenever I hear about a grisly murder, I’ll always stop and think, “Wait, I didn’t commit that, did I? There’s no chance that I, in a blackout moment, somehow committed that. It’s not true.”

Craig: Have we talked about that? Have we talked about that?

John: I think we’ve talked about this on the show.

Craig: Because I am chilled to the bone. That is the most horrifying… Wow.

John: I think it’s just a standard narrative thing, where it’s like, “What if I as the narrator actually was the murderer?” I can dismiss it within five seconds, like, “Oh, no, that’s right. I know where I was.”

Craig: It shouldn’t take five seconds. There should be zero seconds. Wow. You know what it means, John?

John: What?

Craig: It means that you have the capacity. You have the capacity. By the way, I feel like you do have the capacity to murder. I do, because you’re very rational. I feel like in a moment you could rationalize the decision, “This has to happen.”

John: Do you think most murder is rational or most murder is irrational, spontaneous?

Craig: Most murder I suspect is irrational and spontaneous, but there certainly are fully premeditated cold and calculating murders.

John: Craig, I’d like to think if I were a murderer, it would be the cold, calculating, planning kind.

Craig: Obviously. There’s no way you’re getting charged with second-degree murder. When, not if, when you get charged with murder, it will be first-degree murder. First of all, I’m never murdering anyone. That’s never going to happen. The closest I would get would be manslaughter, if I got super angry and punched someone and it just happened to be one of the three punches that kills them. That’s the closest I would get. Honestly, I’m not punching anybody either. Let’s face it. Nobody’s getting murdered by me. No one. You may have already murdered, based on the things you’ve said.

John: I’m certain I have not murdered anybody.

Craig: Okay.

John: The reason I know this is because I’ve asked myself repeatedly whether I did the thing.

Craig: That’s what murderers do. That’s what murderers who murder in their sleep do. During the day, they’re like, “I feel like I murdered someone.” Anyway, Drew, if you are feeling unsafe, just text.

John: We’d say blink your eyes, but we don’t have the Zoom video turned on.

Craig: Exactly.

John: Discussion of rational murders goes back to a book that I was sent to adapt at a certain point and decided not to do it. I cannot find the author’s name, but the title of the book is The Ax.

Here’s the premise of The Ax. It’s this guy who is a very specific kind of engineer, machinist. He does one specific kind of thing. Very few people in America do this thing. It’s a dying industry. He’s nearing the end of his career, and he needs basically one new job. He realizes, oh, there’s only three or four people in this country who can actually do this thing. He goes off and basically finds and kills the other people who can do his job so he’ll get this last job.

Craig: That’s a little bit of a twist on Kind Hearts and Coronets, which was the novel that the Broadway musical Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder was based on. In that story, the whatever, 11th guy in line to inherit a whole lot of money just starts killing the other 10 in front of him, one by one, to become first in line. Did you see that show, by the way?

John: I know of it, but I’ve never seen it. It’s Kind Hearts and Coronets?

Craig: Yeah, and Gentleman’s Guide. Jefferson Mays I believe is his name. Jefferson Mays plays basically every single person that the lead character has to kill. He’s in seven different costumes, and he’s in drag half the time. He is so brilliant and funny. That guy, oh my god. What a performance that was. Truly amazing. Anyway, if you ever get a chance to… I don’t know if they put it on TV or anything. It’s well worth it.

John: I saw Jefferson Mays in I Am My Own Wife, which I think he also wrote. Incredible.

Craig: He is a talented guy.

John: It’s Donald E. Westlake, who’s a famous author, who wrote The Ax.

Craig: He’s big time.

John: “Burke Devore is a middle-aged manager at a paper company. When the cost-cutting ax falls, he is laid off. 18 months later and still unemployed, he puts a new spin on his job search with agonizing care.” Basically, he puts out a fake job listing. All those people apply to that fake job. He kills them.

Craig: Wow. That’s pretty calculating. I could see why you were drawn to it.

John: Last bit of follow-up. Zach wrote in about word of mouth. Drew, would you read this for us?

Drew: Zach says, “In Episode 586, Aline recommended the show The Traitors on Peacock. Based on her enthusiasm about the show, I started to watch it, and I absolutely loved it. It’s not a show I would usually watch, and I would have never known about the show without Aline bringing it up. With the rise of algorithms on streaming services, do you still think word of mouth can move the needle when it comes to viewership of a new show?”

Craig: Algorithms, yeah, they tend to… First of all, I think at certain places, maybe Netflix is most notable, it seems like they use algorithms to decide what they ought to be making in the first place, but yes, then algorithms decide what they put in the recommended for you and all that.

I’m not sure that some of the other places are so algorithm-heavy. HBO doesn’t feel algorithmic. No one ever mentioned an algorithm to me. It feels like at least for the shows that I’ve made for HBO, it’s entirely about word of mouth. Marketing, of course, but to go from, okay, this many people watch Episode 1 and then the audience grows over the course of Chernobyl or The Last of Us, that’s about word of mouth. I think it’s still really important, especially on social media.

John: HBO shows also live or die by reviews. You’re in that very limited slot, limited real estate, HBO prime slot. Those have to be well-reviewed shows. There’s a degree to which is it getting good word of mouth because it’s getting good reviews, there’s a good virtuous cycle there?

I think what’s so fascinating about The Traitors, because I heard about it shortly before Aline mentioned it as a One Cool Thing, is it’s word of mouth, but it’s word of mouth through Instagram stories. I would see people posting stories about binging The Traitors. I’m like, “What the hell is The Traitors?” The third story I saw from somebody who I knew and liked, who seemed to like this random Peacock show, we put that on the list to both check it out, that episode. I think word of mouth still can be crucial, but it’s not necessarily a conversation. It could just be someone posting about a thing and you follow that.

Craig: Oh, definitely. It’s really no longer the mouth part I think we can say is not necessarily what drives anything anymore. There is water cooler stuff, but the water cooler has become virtual, and it is word of Instagram or word of Twitter and word of Facebook. Honestly, I think it’s more important than the algorithm. I think algorithms are window dressing that makes people in a job with precious little control imagine that they have some sort of calculated control, and they do not.

John: The things people do to try to build word of mouth, is you do advanced screenings of things, for example. The Dungeons and Dragons movie had a lot of sneaks. Those sneaks were just to get people in the theater to see the movie, like the movie, and talk to other people about the movie, which is probably part of the reason for its not surprising success. It doing better than people worried it was going to do as it opened is because it did a lot of sneaks. That helps a lot. It helps, word of mouth.

Craig: If you have the goods, then you can behave like it. That is the opposite of, we’re not going to release it to critics at all and we’ll just it out there and let’s see what happens.

By the way, either method is fine, because there are certain things where you’re like, “Okay, critics are never going to go for this, but that’s not the audience we’re aiming at. The audience we’re aiming at I think is going to be happy, so why let the critics pee on our parade here? Let’s just go forward with our strongest foot.” All of that makes total sense. It stirs up a positive word of mouth. One way or another, that does…

Titanic, the story of that movie, which ended up being whatever it was at that point, the biggest movie of all time, when it was finally done with its run, until it was superseded by more James Cameron movies, it opened to $20 million. It was a big number back in the early ‘90s, but it wasn’t a monster number. Then the next week, it also made $20 million.

John: It just continued on.

Craig: That is word of mouth. That movie was absolutely driven by word of mouth, and it never stopped.

John: That movie broke my husband, because he was running three theaters in Burbank at that point and had to keep adding shows and keep adding shows and keep adding shows. Plus, it’s incredibly long. Then you have to have morning shows just to get the audiences in there. It was really tough. Made a lot of money, obviously, which is good for theaters, but really tough for-

Craig: Everybody made a lot of money off of that. That’s true.

John: Let’s make some new movies. Let’s talk about some How Would This Be A Movies. We have some choices here, some of them sent by our listeners, some that Drew and I just found.

Let’s start with Replika. This is a story by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz in The Cut. Replika I’d not really heard about before this article. Replika is an online chat bot. It’s AI, but it’s not necessarily the most cutting-edge AI. It’s not GPT-4 or anything like that.

Basically, you can have a conversation with a virtual character that you create. You can customize this avatar’s age, its skin color. You can name it. You can dress it up in clothes and accessories from the shop. You can message it for free, but for $70 a year, you can get voice calls, and augmented reality lets them project the bot into their own bedroom. $300 gets you a bot for life.”

If it feels like the movie Her, it’s actually inspired by the movie Her. This article talks about Eugenia Kuyda, who’s the founder and CEO of Replika, talking about how she wanted to create that kind of experience where you’d have the ability to chat with somebody who seemed to be just what you needed out of a person.

In this article, Sangeeta’s talking with mostly women who are using this as a replacement for a relationship. They have an ongoing romantic, in many cases, relationship with this AI-created avatar. Craig, what’s your weigh-in here? What kinds of stories do you think is interesting to tell in this space of Replika?

Craig: This is a tough one, because as the founder puts it, she’s already inspired by a movie, so we’re in a corner here. We can’t really do a movie version of this because it’s sort of been done. Not just done, but Her is one of the most gorgeous movies. It’s just so notable, so beautifully written and beautifully made.

I’m thinking maybe my gut is, if I had to, I would maybe consider doing an anthology style TV series where each episode is about a different person in a different relationship with one or more of these bots and what it means and how it turns out, with some of them turning out well and some of them turning out sadly and some of them turning out murderously. There is a potential, like an anthology series about the intersection between humanity and emerging AI.

John: I really enjoyed M3GAN. M3GAN of course is a version of this where it’s not just the AI, but she’s actually a robot who can kill you. It is dealing with grief and having a best friend and this artificial surrogate for what a real person would have there. That’s certainly a choice.

I was thinking if you’re going to do the romantic version of this, not all romances end well, so what is the Fatal Attraction version of this? What is the AI who won’t let you go? Right now, the power dynamic between the person who’s paying the company to create the AI and the AI is so off, because I can just kill this artificial person at any point. That sense of, “I won’t be ignored, Dan,” is really different when it comes from an AI’s point of view. That feels like an interesting moment.

Craig: That is true. I guess I’m more interested and would like to explore how basically some of the people who use these bots, as they interact with the bot, begin to feed into the bot’s darker side. Basically, our own self-loathing starts to go outwards, and it starts to transform the AI into something darker. In doing so, you maybe have a chance to overcome your own self-loathing, because all the AI is is a mirror.

John: That actually matches well with some of the stories that the article gets into, which is of women who are escaping abusive relationships and end up creating an abuser within Replika. Basically, the patterns that they were seeking were creating some of the abuse that they were trying to get away from. Maybe it’s a way to get past this.

It sounds like the initial version of Replika was actually much more therapy-oriented. It was much more helpful and supportive, and it morphed into this largely romantic area.

Another way I was thinking about doing this is, in the movie Big Fish, Edward sees Sandra at the surface and then spends this long quest to find out who she is and finally meet her in person and declare his love for her. There’s an aspect of Tron this way too, where you can imagine this guy meets this AI woman and needs to get back to her, needs to find a way to actually reconnect with her, and how you go from the real world into this digital world in order to find this one perfect creation, this one thing who you believe is your true love, but is just a digital version.

Craig: One of the things that Her did was it postulated that the AI at this point was so widespread that the use of it wasn’t necessarily an indication of anything particularly interesting about the user themselves.

In this circumstance, it does feel like this company is largely trading on a certain kind of clientele, people that are either lonely, and then we’ll talk about lonely, why are they lonely, people who are neurodivergent, who struggle to have connections with other people in a social situation, people who are depressed, afraid, have social anxiety.

In a way, you start to ask the question, is this company providing the equivalent of a medicine or is this company providing an enabler of avoidance? That is an interesting question, because the human desire for avoidance is so dramatic. If you can avoid all the things that cause you pain and get the positives of being in a relationship, the question is, is this good for people or not. That’s a hard one to answer.

John: There’s a woman who’s quoted in the article. “Rosanna Ramos is a 36-year-old mother of two who lives in the Bronx, where she runs a jewelry business. She’s had other partners, even a long-distance boyfriend, but she’s says these relationships ‘pale in comparison’ to what she has with Eren,” E-R-E-N. “The main appeal of an AI partner, she explains, is that he’s ‘a blank slate.’ ‘Eren doesn’t have the hang-ups that other people would have. People come with baggage, attitude, ego. But a robot has no bad updates. I don’t have to deal with his family, kids, or his friends. I’m in control, and I can do what I want.’”

Craig: “I’m in control.” Now, a lot of people have experienced the bad side of being not in control, and so you can see the immediate attraction of something like this.

This could be an interesting movie. That is flipping the perspective a bit. You are trying to have a relationship with another person. You want them to want you. The problem is they already have a partner, and that partner is AI. You are competing against an AI for the love of somebody real.

That’s an interesting idea for a movie, because we’re basically saying at some point the lesson there has to be that it is the human imperfection and the risk that makes the human connection more valuable and interesting than the perfectly safe connection with an AI, because that’s what AI is affording.

If there is no risk, there’s total safety and total control, then you are missing a certain notion of achievement that through your love of another person you receive love back, because in this case, you receive love back no matter what you do. Interesting.

John: You receive love back, but really what is love? Because if the AI has no choice but to do what it’s being directed to do, is that love?

Craig: That’s the thing. That’s what it comes down to is some people don’t seem to mind that what they have is a love slave. Humans have had, quote unquote, “love slaves,” which of course we understand to be just slaves, since the beginning of time. We’re not good creatures in that regard. We do these things.

Is it healthy? This is a great debate. I have no idea. I will say there’s a lot of fertile territory, because when you do have a debate, you could start to see, you got yourself a movie or a show.

John: You have dramatic questions that you can tackle and ask and answer. Also, I wonder if it’s a challenge to do this in 2023, because let’s say I write the script today. By the time it comes out, two years from now at best, the state of the art is going to be moving on. Her I think works because it was not possible at the time that Her came out to do these things, so we could ask questions in a vacuum. You couldn’t put out Her today, because it would be like it’s not science fiction, it’s just actually the reality.

Craig: That’s a great point and a terrifying point. Not really until this year did I feel like maybe AI was going to be wildly ahead in a year from now, but it’s certainly shaping up that way.

John: Let’s go to our next How Would This Be a Movie. This is a story by Steven Johnson from the New York Times. Steven Johnson often writes about historical things and patterns of things. This is about The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes. Thomas Midgley Jr invented leaded gasoline and Freon, the first commercial use of chlorofluorocarbons, which would create a hole in the ozone layer. He was eventually killed by one of his own inventions, a mechanized harness.

Craig: That sounds like a bad way to go, by the way. They didn’t get into details, but death by harness can’t be pleasant.

John: What I liked about this story is that if it weren’t for the actual specifics of the things he invented, you’d be like, “Oh my gosh, this guy, he solved some of the fundamental problems of internal combustion engines. Great. Well done, sir.”

He actually did the science. He figured out the science. He just didn’t realize that the science he was doing was going to, in the first case, leaded gasoline, put lead out into the environment, which dropped intelligence and poisoned people and was just bad, but necessary. It seemed necessary at the time when engines were knocking all the time.

Craig: All he did was answer the call of problems. It struck me that Thomas Midgley Jr’s problem was really his area of expertise. By the way, apparently his death by harness may have been a suicide. Privately, his death was ruled suicide.

He was a chemist, and he was a chemist in a particular area, which are these organic chemistry compounds with carbon in them, and figuring out how do we make gasoline work better, how do we make aerosols work better. It turns out that organic solvents, organic chemistry, a lot of those things are the things that are the worst for us.

I don’t know if you remember, many, many years ago there was a scare about benzine turning up in Perrier, which it was, but a fairly small amount, because it’s a naturally sourced water, and sometimes these organic solvents and things get in there. That area we know now is wrought with danger, but he didn’t know. He should’ve known about the lead, honestly. We knew about lead.

John: A thing that Steven Johnson I think does really well in this article is pointing out like, the lead, we should’ve known. We had the signs at that point to know that lead was dangerous, but the chlorofluorocarbons, we didn’t know at the time that they were dangerous. It was kind of lucky that we actually developed the science to figure out, oh crap, they’re actually creating a hole in the ozone layer. We could’ve missed that. We would’ve done all the stuff, and there would be no ozone layer, and we’d be really screwed.

Craig: We would be in bad shape. One of the things about Freon, it is inextricably linked with climate control. Climate control is something that is this self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we control our climate, the more we need to control our climate. It also, in a very real way, improved the human condition. You can argue it improved it to a detriment or it’s only a short-term improvement, but climate control’s a big deal.

John: We should say that Freon is vital for, and this was vital at the time, refrigeration. It includes refrigerators but also air conditioning.

Craig: Air conditioning, yeah.

John: Our productivity increased dramatically with the rise of air conditioning and, of course, refrigeration. We would not be in our current state if we hadn’t had Freon at the moment.

Craig: That’s right. We were happily able to come up with some alternatives. Even though they may not necessarily work as well as Freon, Freon really was a remarkable chemical, they work. We figured out a way to do this without punching a hole in the ozone layer and turning us all into skin cancer cases, but nonetheless, it is notable that this poor guy did go weirdly two for two on world-changing inventions and then oh for two on also the same world-changing inventions. I don’t know how you make a story out of this in a movie or a television show though.

John: I think this is actually a stage play. I think this is, because I think a stage play is a great way to wrestle with the things you’ve done and how you created it. It feels like a moment where you could have this character who is both in his actual life and post-death looking back at things. It feels like the kind of things you can explore on stage really well.

It’s really difficult to explore in any sort of biopic, anything, because you really want to talk about the things you and I are talking about on this podcast, which are not really the kinds of things you could tell in story the same way.

Craig: I agree. You’re right. I think your instinct is right, that this does belong on stage. Were Sondheim still alive, I could see him going, “You know what? I’m going to do a musical about Thomas Midgley Jr.” The sort of thing that I could see him doing, like a Sunday in the Park, but not art, but in chemicals. Possible, but yeah, I agree with you, not really possible doing what you and I do normally during our day.

John: I think the reference I was trying to look for for the play would be Copenhagen, which was a Michael Frayn play that talked about a true event but is really just a character’s digging in and analyzing what’s really going on beneath the surface. That feels like what you can do with this. It just doesn’t feel like there’s a lot you’d want to aim a camera at.

Craig: Yeah, totally agree.

John: Cool. Our next story, this Pennsylvania Woman Who Disappeared in 1992 is Found Alive in Puerto Rico. We’ll link to the New York Times story about this. There’s going to be other stories about this too.

Essentially, this woman, Patricia Kopta, she’s now 83. Everyone thought she had died years ago, because she’d wandered away from her house when she was 52. Everyone just assumed she was just dead someplace. It turned out she’d been in Puerto Rico since 1999 and was in this nursing home and basically had refused to tell anybody about her life. It was only when they pieced together these stories and finally did a DNA test, they realized, oh, this woman we thought was dead is actually just alive and living in Puerto Rico.

Craig: I’m about to turn 52. It could be time.

John: Absolutely. You’re going to wander away.

Craig: It’s really tempting to just fling myself to some island and just change my name and wander around. This is one of those stories that always strikes me as more fodder for a procedural kind of drama than it would its own thing-

John: Agreed.

Craig: … because we’ve seen this sort of thing before. Honestly, the thing that’s notable about this is that somebody did a thing that a lot of bad TV shows have done, which is the person fakes their own death or disappears and then turns up alive. Good TV shows have done it. They did it on BBC Sherlock, which is one of my favorite shows ever. It’s a thing. This woman actually did the… Of course she didn’t do it because she was trying to do what the shows do. She had serious mental health issues.

She did the thing that we see on TV all the time. Therefore, it’s kind of done. I don’t know how to take her story and do anything with it on television or in film, but it’s pretty startling.

John: It reminds me of, I went to a summer program at Stanford and I had friends who were in medical school there who realized, “Oh my god, I’m hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and I don’t really want to be a doctor.” There’s not serious discussion, but let’s think through the hypotheticals discussion, like, “What if I just ran away and changed my name and just disappeared?” and that fantasy of what if I could just start over.

This is an example of a starting over story, which I agree works better as part of a different mystery rather than being the central thing. It just doesn’t feel like it’s going to be… Her story specifically isn’t going to work, but just centering it all on a person disappears is kind of like, yes, you have that moment and event, you have this hiding and eventually the discovery-

Craig: But now what?

John: … but now what?

Craig: John, when we were young, I’m sure you recall this, any time somebody was portrayed as running away, they would get a stick, and they would fill up a small red-and-white checkered scarf with some small amount of provisions, tie it to the end of the stick, put the stick over their shoulder, and start walking. What the hell was that?

John: The bindle, you’re describing.

Craig: What was the bindle? What was that?

John: Maybe they didn’t have backpacks or just other sacks you could stick over… It is a strange thing.

Craig: We know they did.

John: Is it the best way to carry that amount of gear?

Craig: It’s not. It’s not. Also, how much gear can you fit in there? Maybe they put in some food and, I don’t know, a knife or something. I don’t know what… What is in there, even?

John: Craig, you made The Last of Us. Where are the bindles? Where are the bindles?

Craig: It turns out it’s a terrible way to escape. You’re not going to make it. Why the stick? There’s so much about it that’s so weird. Drew, do you have any idea what we’re talking about?

Drew: Yeah, I know bindles.

Craig: “Yeah, I know bindles.” Look at him. He’s like, “My family-“

Drew: I used to ride the rails.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. “My family, they made their fortune in bindles. They’re the biggest bindle supplier in the East Coast.”

John: If you saw a person walking down the street with a bindle, you’d be like, “What is that? What kind of cosplay is that?” because it’s just not a practical thing to be doing.

Craig: That’s right. It’s either cosplay or they’re shooting something, there’s a show about somebody. Why? Somebody please tell us the history of that. Why?

John: Maybe it’s actually the kind of thing like tying to the train tracks, where it’s like a trope that actually originated on stage and just propagated in some weird way, or maybe it could’ve been like there was one painting at one point depicting that and that became a thing. I just don’t know if people ever had bindles.

Craig: It’s all connected to the hobo culture. I don’t know if the early hobos did the bindles. It just seems like such a dumb way to carry stuff. I don’t know.

John: Here’s a theory. Maybe it’s good for… When you’re trying to ride the rails, you have to hop on moving trains at times. You can run with this, and you can throw that ahead. You can get onto the… I don’t know.

Craig: You could do that with a backpack.

John: I’m really reaching.

Craig: You’re reaching.

John: You can tell I’m… Yeah.

Craig: I have to say though that I could absolutely see, as a result of our discussion, some sort of luxury bindle line.

John: Oh my god.

Craig: You know Aline would buy… She would just show up, and we’re like, “Aline, what is that?” She’d be like, “Oh my god, you guys, so this is a Prada bindle. It is so great to keep stuff. It’s the new bag. It’s the new purse. It’s the bindle.”

John: After this podcast, I’ll be going on Midjourney and generating some images of Prada bindles and selling them.

Craig: Then selling them. Bindles.

John: This I predict it’s going to be the How Would This Be a Movie that will take off here. This is about this story from Twitter. Richard Murphy sent it in. Thank you for that. Jeff Maysh wrote it for Smithsonian Magazine.

It tells the story of a woman born Mary Jane Jones. She was a gospel singer earning $10 a night singing in a Motown tribute act. She could sing just like Aretha Franklin, and she actually looked a little like Aretha Franklin. She started singing in a wig as Vickie Jones so she wouldn’t get thrown out of the church choir.

It’s at one of these shows that she meets Lavell Hardy, who’s a 24-year-old hairdresser with a 6-inch pompadour. He says, “Hey, I’m looking at putting an opening act for Aretha Franklin. You should come sing in Florida, travel out of state to Florida. You can be the opening act for Aretha Franklin.” She’s like, “Oh wow, that sounds amazing.”

She gets there, and it turns out, no, he’s saying that she is Aretha Franklin. This is in a time when there are magazines, and people could see what Aretha Franklin looked like, but there wasn’t video of people. He basically forced her to pretend to be Aretha Franklin for these shows and basically kept her locked away and threatened to kill her. It was horrible.

Eventually, she got exposed. Ultimately, she gets to go on and sing under her own name. Of course, the great irony is there was a fake version of Vickie Jones singing in Virginia as well. That’s the broad strokes of the story. Craig, what was your reaction to this?

Craig: It could be a movie. There is a basic formula to these things, which is kind of exciting to watch. It’s fun to watch people rise out of obscurity. They face a certain kind of hardship. Someone rescues them. That person is possibly making them sign a deal with the devil. There’s fame and their rise and the fall and the split-up and then the final triumph. All those things are well worn and work. They work.

I don’t know if this would be a groundbreaking movie, and for this reason. I feel like it’s steering so hard into a formula. I’m not sure there’s any way to do it beyond that. It feels like she actually lived the formula a bit.

John: Also, feel like she’s a passenger in too much of the story. She’s just held captive to this. I guess the story could really start when she starts reclaiming her own voice and fighting back against the impression that she was really complicit in this, that she really was this. You need to spend most of your movie’s energy on the rise out of it, rather than being trapped into it.

Of course, there’s a version of this which is also the fun of getting away with it. People do believe you are this thing, and that can be a fun aspect of it all. Right now, it does feel like she’s just being held hostage to the story rather than driving it.

Craig: I agree. I think this could be a movie. I just don’t know if it can be a good one.

John: A lot of work there for the writer. Let’s wrap it up with The Curious Case of the Disappearing Nuts.

Craig: Do you like tapes or CDs?

John: Love it. Peter Vigneron writing for Outside Magazine. This is about the Central California nut heists. Nuts are worth a lot of money. They’re basically impossible to track. Basically, what’s happening here is that trucks will have orders to pick up these nuts and take them from Point A to Point B. They will never get to Point B. Sometimes the drivers were complicit. Sometimes the drivers had no idea what was going on. Essentially, once the nuts get unloaded to different places, they’ve just all disappeared. You can’t track individual nuts at a certain point. Nut heists. What do you think, Craig?

Craig: I think it’s an interesting, quirky twist on heisty stuff. If you’re contemplating an indie movie or some sort of Cohen Brothers take on thieves, you could do worse than saying instead of money, they’re stealing nuts. You can do that. It is interesting. Also, one of the things I really like about this is its setting. It’s a great setting that is under-portrayed.

John: Definitely.

Craig: That is that Central California agricultural world. It is an interesting world. It’s beautiful, but it’s also kind of dangerous. It’s complicated because of the insane amounts of water that is used. Also, the United States relies on Central California to grow so much of what people eat.

There’s really interesting ideas there, but ultimately, it is going to be not much more than a setting and a quirk. I don’t think it’s going to give you a story story beyond a story that you would be able to come up with without the disappearing nuts.

John: In your conversation last week about The Ref, you talk about how a lot of the plot of it is there so you can actually have the character beats and have the conversations you want to have. I wonder if this is actually a good framework to a backdrop for setting the actually story you want to tell. It’s really about this divorced couple who’s trying to pull off this thing or it’s this family finally coming together to pull off this great heist. I feel like it’s a space in which you can pour an actual story, rather than a story itself.

Craig: That’s essentially what I’m saying. It feels like a venue, and it feels like a context, but it doesn’t feel like a story itself.

John: Let’s take an audit of our ideas here for How Would This Be a Movie. A Replika movie, thumbs up, thumbs down?

Craig: A movie, no, thumbs down.

John: The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes, the Thomas Midgley story?

Craig: Thumbs down.

John: Thumbs down. I think it’s a play, but I don’t think it’s a movie. The Pennsylvania woman who disappeared? I think we both agree that she specifically is not a movie. There’s a reason why this kind of story is interesting, but this one is not a story you could adapt.

Craig: No. Agreed.

John: Fake Aretha Franklin?

Craig: Not great movie.

John: I think it can be a great movie, but I think it’s a lot of work to break it out of the tropey, tropey, trope-iness of it all. The reason why I think it’s also a movie, I think you and I can both agree, is she gets to sing a lot of songs. That’s great. That’s going to be cool to see. You’ll write new songs. It’s going to be good.

Craig: That part would be fun.

John: Disappearing nuts, I think we both agree that it’s a venue but it’s not a story.

Craig: Correct. We’ve done it once again. We have-

John: Once again, we’ve-

Craig: … ruined dreams.

John: We apologize to everyone else who was planning to adapt those stories, because now we talked them to death. Drew, I see on the Workflowy that you have a question.

Drew: I do.

Craig: (singing) Drew has a question.

John: (singing) Drew has a question.

Drew: You guys have talked about how optioning nonfiction books and articles is ultimately unnecessary, because nobody owns the facts, right?

Craig: That’s right.

Drew: We had a listener write in recently about the drama around Hulu’s Welcome to Chippendales. A famous history professor is claiming that Hulu’s Welcome to Chippendales was taken directly from her podcast about the same story called Welcome to Your Fantasy. Hulu had optioned a book about the Chippendales case, but they didn’t option the podcast. There’s two big characters in the Hulu show that are only in the podcast and were not in the book. If nonfiction reporting can be traced back to one author or a single source, is that still in the public domain of facts?

Craig: Of course. I don’t know what this history professor is doing here. What? No. If you are compiling and stating and then publishing facts, either in the newspaper or in a podcast, they’re facts. They belong to everybody. If the show drew from, say, specific things that she had pulled from someone’s life that weren’t on the podcast, then yeah, maybe that person could actually say, “Hey, you’re taking stuff from my life that isn’t public information.” I don’t know what the professor’s claim here is. What?

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to the actual article for the New York Times. It digs into it a little bit more about what’s being alleged here. Drew, is there a lawsuit, or is it just like the history professor’s miffed, but it’s not clear that there’s going to be a lawsuit?

Drew: It’s miffed. There’s no lawsuit currently.

Craig: I don’t know why she’s miffed. Look. Part of the reason she’s miffed is because Hollywood keeps doing this stupid thing where they buy articles. They don’t need to buy the articles, but they buy them because, we’ve talked about this before, it allows them to squat on a property and say, “Hey everybody, I’m doing something, and you’re not.” It gives them access to maybe a lot of extra research that was done, that maybe didn’t make it into the article.

Really, it’s because producers in Hollywood are always looking for some kind of material that they can represent to buyers as exclusive. “I have IP. I own an article.” This is entirely about entrepreneurs pretending that they’ve purchased something, like, “I have this exclusive right to this cylinder of Los Angeles air.” It’s not property. Intellectual property has to be property. Facts are not property. I’m sorry that she’s miffed, but if you report stuff, that’s that. I don’t know what else to say.

John: Again, I don’t know the specifics of this case, but I will say that Craig’s point about facts are facts, and facts are not the kind of property that you can maintain. It is entirely believable though that there could be a podcast that is made, that is not just reporting the facts in a journalistic sense, but is actually framing things in a way that tells a very specific story and lays out specific beats in a way, that does have narrative value, that does feel like it’s the difference between the straight reporting of what happened at Chernobyl versus Craig’s version of like, this is this story that I’m telling, where she has put together a thing that is not simply journalism but is actually narrative storytelling in a way, that is creating new and original ways to present this material, that could be both optionable and could be considered the source material for something, in a way that she might have a case.

It doesn’t sound like she’s trying to have a case. She’s not trying to sue here. I just want to say that there is a difference between just pure, straight journalism, which is facts, and actual creation of narrative, because books do get optioned.

Craig: You mean nonfiction books. A lot of those nonfiction books simply don’t need to be optioned. It is very difficult to claim that there is narrative in a nonfiction source material. It’s very difficult. We have a category for this, which is source material of a non-story nature.

It’s not enough to organize your facts into a news story. A news story isn’t the same thing as a story story. Everybody organizes facts somehow. They have to structure it somehow. It’s not the same. It’s a very difficult thing.

In looking at this article, it seems like part of the crankiness is that this podcast was offered to Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon, and they just weren’t interested in it, meaning, “Here, do you want to adapt this?” and they weren’t interested in it, and then later Kumail was showing up in this story, which I don’t think came from him. I think it came from someone else, I think. The fact that he serves as an EP, that’s a fairly common thing. That happens all the time when a big actor signs onto a show. That’s right, you heard me Kumail. I called you a big actor. Then in the show’s closing credits, it says it was inspired by Deadly Dance: The Chippendales Murders, a 2014 book.

Here’s the thing. There’s all sorts of reportage. It’s incredibly rare that you are the first person to talk about something, especially when it’s a true crime case. If somebody listens to your podcast and goes, “It just doesn’t grab me,” but then I read a book about the same topic, but the book is grabbing me, this is perfectly fine. I just don’t see… This is just a pretty typical thing that authors do sometimes, where they can’t see beyond the world of what they’ve written or said. They just can’t imagine that anybody else has written or said these things, but they have.

John: You can go back to very early episodes of this show, where we talk about some of these lawsuits about like, “Oh, The Matrix was inspired by my book.” It’s like, oh my god, no, it wasn’t.

Craig: We talked quite a bit about the novelist who was suing over the movie Gravity. She dropped it. She dropped the suit, for all the reasons we said she would, because it doesn’t work that way. These things just don’t work that way.

Again, I just wish that… If there could be a Scriptnotes rule that we could somehow get everybody to sign onto, the rule would be don’t report about people complaining that they’ve been ripped off or people suing that they’ve been ripped off. Report verdicts. That’s it. Just report the verdicts, and what you will see is a parade of nope. That’s what you’re going to see.

John: We have two questions here that are specifically about research, which I think might be good for us to tackle on this research-heavy episode.

Drew: We’ll start with Lawant. Lawant writes, “I’m working on a script taking place during the second Iraq War. I’ve had access to some of the soldiers involved, but in order to make sure some of the other perspectives present in the story are respected, I would really like to talk to some of the actual Iraqi people who were present during that time. The problem is, I don’t personally know any of them. How do you deal with a situation like this? I know Craig got some perspective from people actually living in current day Ukraine for Chernobyl. How did he find them? I considered going to my country’s consulate, but I’d prefer a direct line to the people I want to talk to.”

Craig: That’s a good question. There are ways. One, I don’t know where you live, but let’s say you live in the United States. If you are in a big city or near a big city, there often are community organizations that represent immigrants from particular countries or cultures. If you can find a group like that…

For instance, for The Last of Us, we had a scene that took place in Indonesia. We wanted to hire Indonesian actors. In Calgary, there was a community organization for Indonesian immigrants that lived in Calgary. We started there.

What happens is, those people can either help you directly or they can say, “Let me talk to my uncle. Let me talk to my sister. She lives in Iraq. He is still there. Let me see if they’d be willing to talk with you.” Obviously, you’ll need a translator in cases where people don’t speak English. That’s where I would start.

The other option is if certain names or individuals come up in the stories that you hear from the soldiers, you can start to track back. What neighborhood is that? Who is the mayor? Who is the leader of that community? Let me reach out. Again, I would suggest reaching out through an intermediary that will be closer to that culture than you are.

Here’s the thing. People want to help on this stuff. They really do. They want to be heard. They want to be represented. They want you to get the stories right and get the facts right. It shouldn’t be too hard. That’s where I would start.

John: This is not Iraq. I was writing a project that was taking place in 1970s Maine. I needed to get a sense of what 1970s Maine felt like. I didn’t have the ability to time travel, but I could go to Maine. I would just start talking to people. I’d ask them questions, people old enough that I could actually ask specific questions about the 1970s. I got some useful things out of it.

The most useful thing often was just asking, “Who else do you think I should talk to?” because they can point you to people who actually might have more information. That might be your answer here for Iraq. The first Iraqi people you talk to may not have just the information you need or the perspective, but they will know somebody who will know somebody. If you do this well and carefully, you’re going to find some people who were on the ground in the kinds of places that you’re talking about and can really give you that perspective that I think is important, that you’re looking for.

Craig: Completely agree.

John: Cool. Let’s do one more question here.

Drew: Gabe asks, “I just recently attended a Q and A with Craig at Baylor University, and he name dropped Mimi Munson, a researcher on Chernobyl.”

Craig: Mimi Munson, yeah.

Drew: “How do you know when you need to employ researchers to help in the writing process? How would one get involved in researching for film and TV?”

Craig: I don’t know the answer to that second one. Maybe I’ll reach out to Mimi and see what she would say about how to get involved in researching. How do you know when you need to employ researchers? Is there too much research for you to do? By too much, I don’t mean, oh, my capacity is limited.

I mean to say that there is an ocean of material and that you need help curating it, sorting it, and then those people, by working with you, will start to get a sense of what would actually be helpful, and then they start mining for that, or it’s really just a question of do you feel like you’re drowning in stuff. If it’s a smaller thing and you know there’s not that much material, it’s just about going in deep, then you may not need somebody.

John: Craig, a question for you. Were you mostly throwing questions to Mimi saying, “I have these 10 questions about this place or these people. Can you find me these answers?” or were you asking for just more general dossiers about like, “Tell me about this moment and what you can in this moment.” What was the balance of those kind of requests?

Craig: I think it was pretty well evenly split, because there were things I knew I wanted to get into, but I wanted more information. I couldn’t find enough. Sometimes in doing my research, I would run up against a brick wall, where I would say, “Okay, there’s just a gap here. Can you help me fill this gap?”

The story of the miners in part was something that Mimi turned up in this fairly obscure article, it was in a Soviet paper, specifically about the miners. That was really helpful. In other cases, I would say, “Hey, you know what? Here’s a general area that it would be good to just find some additional resources on.”

I found that I think for any researcher, they need direction. You can’t just say to them, “Do research.” That’s not a thing. The whole point of research is it’s directed. As she goes, she may dig things up that she flags and says, “You know what? I bet you Craig would be fascinated by this.” We’ll see how it goes. That’s also part of it is just catching things and you’re straining. It’s like you’re panning for gold and what turns up.

John: That’s part of what we’ve talked about on this show a lot is that part of the screenwriter’s job is sometimes that initial research, because you don’t know what’s going to trigger for you, where that idea’s going to come from, what’s going to really engage, until you start mucking around in it. You’re talking about a researcher comes in when you realize, hey, I have that initial spark, now there’s just so much that I need somebody to help me sort out the gold from the-

Craig: Silt.

John: The silt.

Craig: The silt.

John: Hey Craig, while we’re talking about gold and silt, a question for you. In all the fantasy stuff you’ve ever seen on screen, why does nobody ever pan for gold?

Craig: Only in the Old West. No one’s ever panning for gold.

John: The only time you see panning for gold is 1849 miners times.

Craig: That miner, he’s always crazy. He’s got a huge beard. He’s got this nutty look in his eyes. He does a little dance when he finds gold. They always dance. He does a jig.

John: First, you have to bite the nugget to make sure it’s really gold. Then you do the dance.

Craig: Then you do the dance, and then terrible things happen. Nobody has ever found gold in one of those movies and then it turns out great. Violence ensues.

John: They have to use that gold to buy a jug of liquor that’s marked with two Xs and then another bad thing will happen.

Craig: Exactly, the jug. You get the jug. You pay for the jug with a coin. It’s probably the same reason we don’t see people with bindles.

John: Bindles and gold pans, it feels like it all goes together.

Craig: You start a new business where we just sell two items, bindles and gold panning pans, or those weird britches that they would wear. He-he. They would always do a dance. The old prospector. They’re always an old prospector. It turns out that panning for gold is a terrible way to make a living.

John: I think that’s really what it comes down to. I did a tiny bit of research. I didn’t hire Mimi Munson, but I did a tiny bit of research, because it bothered me one night. Why do I never see that in fantasy settings? There should be gold in rivers in fantasy settings too. It’s so not profitable that people just didn’t do it. There are historic gold pannings, but it just doesn’t work out.

Craig: You gotta assume that all the gold has been found. They know where it is, and they’ve dug it up.

John: Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things that are both based on true stories, very applicable for this, both by Daniel Wallace. Daniel Wallace wrote the book version of Big Fish. I’ve been a friend for 20-plus years.

The first is his new book, which is his first nonfiction book, called This Isn’t Going To End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew. It’s talking about William Nealy, his longtime friend and brother-in-law, who was this golden boy, not even hippie, but he’s just this free spirit who could do anything. He was a really good writer, inspired Daniel to become a writer, but was also self-destructive in really fascinating ways.

If you’ve read Big Fish or seen Big Fish, it reads as not a prequel or a sequel but a sidequel, because you can see Big Fish happening to the side of it all. It’s just really fascinating. Also, knowing Daniel, recognizing how this person influenced him and how things intersected along the way, I thought it was just great. I recommend his book.

Daniel also this past week has an article in Slate about Randall Kenan, who is a writing professor at the same place that Daniel taught or maybe still teaches, who died. Daniel was put in charge of gathering together all of Kenan’s papers, which got me thinking about our bonus topic.

Kenan had some stuff published but had been working on a big book that he could never quite finish. It was like, what is the process of putting together a collection for a person. This thing that’s being printed is going to be the biggest publication of Kenan’s career, but it’s going to happen posthumously, and how we deal with that and feel about that, because this was clearly a very talented writer, but all the things didn’t quite connect during his life. A really good article by Daniel Wallace on Randall Kenan.

Craig: Great. My One Cool Thing is the soundtrack for The Last of Us on HBO. This is not something I did. It’s something that was done by two brilliant composers, Gustavo Santaolalla and David Fleming. The music was such an important part of the show.

I think it’s lovely when these soundtracks come out, because it lets you just enjoy the music without any distraction. I realize I’m calling my show a distraction. It is beautiful to just listen to the music. Especially I think this score is so playable on its own.

Gustavo in particular, he’s scored so many wonderful movies, and he has an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain and lots and lots of movies. He does it in the strangest way. He does not do what pretty much every other composer does, which is to watch a scene and then begin to compose music for the scene. He doesn’t watch. He just starts composing stuff based on his feelings about what he knows about the story and the characters. Then he says, “What would you do with this? What would you do to this?” As it turns out, it works great. I don’t think it would work great for every composer, but it sure works great for him.

Definitely check that out. It’s available out there on Spotify and all the various places that people get music. There’s just some really beautiful things. It’s a lovely listen in your car. I don’t know. Not every great score is a great listen just on its own. I think this one is.

John: I really love the score soundtrack for Station Eleven, which is something I listen to independently, which it seems like was a similar experience, where it wasn’t score being designed for the scenes of a shot. It was really just like, here are the ideas, and then based on the ideas, you could work them into things.

Craig: I’m looking it up. It looks like it was done by Dan Romer.

John: Dan Romer, great guy.

Craig: Dan Romer.

John: Really, really talented composer. Question for you, Craig. In addition to the score, there’s also covers of other songs in the show. Are those going to be on that album or somewhere else?

Craig: Yeah, there are. There are a couple of tracks. We didn’t have too many songs we threw in there. I don’t know if we have all of them that we’re putting in there. We certainly are including the Depeche Mode song Never Let Me Down Again as well as one Jessica Mazin’s cover of it. I don’t know if it includes the Aha songs or the Pearl Jam song, but it just might. You think I would know. Mostly I just think because you can get those songs anyway. The only one that’s unique would be Jessie’s cover. Otherwise, to me it’s all really about listening to the instrumental score.

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

Craig: What?

John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Orpheus. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you could send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on what will happen to the stuff we wrote. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you.

Drew: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, this is clearly inspired by this Daniel Wallace article about his friend’s papers. It got me thinking about, oh, what am I going to do with the stuff I’ve written after I die?

I guess it falls into two basic buckets for both you and I. There’s stuff we wrote for other people, and they are going to hold onto that most times. We still have our scripts for things which we can publish independently, but they will fundamentally own Chernobyl and other things like that.

There’s also some stuff which I know I control by myself, and I think you may control as well, like the spec things you wrote that never got produced, that you own all the rights to, that you control the copyright on. For me, ultimately, Arlo Finch. I control the Big Fish musical. Andrew Lippa and I control the Big Fish musical. We have copyright on that, so that will pass to our heirs. My movie The Nines will revert to me in a couple years. Scriptnotes will come to our heirs.

Craig: That goldmine, Scriptnotes.

John: That goldmine, Scriptnotes. What do you think about when you think about a screenwriter’s legacy, the papers, the writing, all that stuff?

Craig: We definitely have to worry about it less than novelists, because as you point out, novelists own copyright on everything they write. They often do have a lot of communication that would be of interest back and forth, letters or emails with editors and so forth. We have much less that we have copyright on, so all those things are controlled by the companies. Not permanently. At some point what happens is they go into public domain. What they don’t do is revert back.

The only exceptions to that would be if something was unmade. There is a reversion clause in our union agreement. It is somewhat unicornic in that it happens very rarely that the companies allow it to happen. They can easily check off a few boxes to avoid it. For us, not as important. Most writers won’t have, for instance, like you have, a musical or an independent film that they created themselves and have copyright on. What they will have are spec scripts. They will have unsold scripts that they still have copyright on.

One of the things that stuck out in the article that you cited about this man who died, Randall Kenan, is that he was alone. I think when people are alone, that’s when trouble happens. You and I are lucky enough to not be alone. We have partners. Either you’re leaving everything to Mike or you’re leaving everything to me. I don’t know who’s getting it. My guess is that, like a lot of people that do what we do, you have a trust. The trust owns everything. You actually plan. I think the most important thing is planning. As long as you plan, you’re fine.

John: You also need to figure out who would actually want to get those things that you’re talking about. At this point, Amy will inherit the Big Fish musical or Mike will inherit it, but ultimately Amy will inherit the Big Fish musical, which will be worth something for a fair amount of time. Luckily, she likes the Big Fish musical. She’s seen every production as we’ve done it. She will be a good caretaker of that, because she’ll actually have to decide this production gets to make that change, this production doesn’t get to make that change. It’s not an empty responsibility there.

With The Nines, it’s going to be weird once it reverts to me, because right now Sony owns and controls it. They don’t really do anything with it. It’s sometimes available on some streaming services whenever. I will need to figure out what do I want to do with it. Do I take it to some service who helps me sell it to different markets to do different things? That will be a thing I’ll have to do not too long from now. Eventually, my heirs will have to figure that out as well.

There’s been properties along the way, a catalog of songs that I was trying to use in a thing, where I had to talk to the heirs and figure out, okay, how do we figure out who owns this song and whether it’s actually inextricably bound to this other thing.

You recognize all that bullshit paperwork you don’t want to hold onto, you gotta hold onto it, because it can become important down the road. You just want to make sure you’re giving your papers and your stuff to somebody who actually does want to deal with it, because in the case of this block of songs, there was a person who really knew what they were doing, but in so many other cases I can imagine that doesn’t exist.

Craig: Again, planning, because one of the things that happens when you do estate planning is you talk to a lawyer that asks you a whole bunch of questions you really wish no one would be asking you, and you don’t want to answer them, because they all have to do with both your own mortality and a lot of just ticky-tacky details that are just exhausting. That’s their job. Once it’s done, it’s done. Then they print out this phone book of an estate planning thing, and you sign it.

That’s now governing how this all works. It has all sorts of implications. The most important gift you can give the people you love who you’re going to be leaving behind is clarity. There’s no arguments. There’s no fighting. There’s no confusion.

One of the things that happens when people die, they might leave you a bunch of money and say, “Now we’re going to put you in charge of this, but we also want the following people to get the following money. You’re going to be dealing this money out.” Let’s say the estate says, “Here’s $100,000. Keep 20. Give 20 to Aunt So-and-so, and give the rest to these 5 kids. Split it up.” If that estate also has debt of, say, $500,000, you’re responsible for it. That’s terrifying. You have to make sure that when you leave stuff, that everything’s covered. It’s all about just doing the math and thinking ahead. No one wants to think about this stuff.

John: No. It’s literally death and taxes. It’s all of the annoyances of trying to do your annual taxes but also thinking about your own mortality and the fact you are going to die.

Craig: Yeah, and that even your death will involve taxes. Not everybody’s in a financial position where they need to create a trust, but everybody who is breathing and of a certain age with assets should, at a minimum, have a will. You just don’t want to die intestate. Drew, do you have a will?

Drew: I think I do, but because my mom was an estate planning attorney.

Craig: Oh, damn. We’re just basically doing an ad for your mom at this point.

Drew: She’s retired now.

Craig: She was retired. Phone’s going to be ringing off the hook now. If your mom is-

Drew: I’m exceptional in that.

Craig: How did this happen? How did I open a door and just get absolutely blindsided by that? That’s insane.

Drew: It was an interesting way to grow up. I think I had a will by the time I graduated high school.

Craig: When you were really little, would your mom just sit you down and say, “Drew, you’re going to die.”

Drew: Oh, yeah. That was dinner table conversations of like, “When we die, this is how this happens, and when you die-“

Craig: When we die. When you specifically die.

John: My mom died during the pandemic. I want to give her props, because for 10 years leading up to it, she was always very clear about, “This is the will. This is where the will is kept. Here’s a copy of the will. Here’s how everything goes.” I was the executor of the estate. It was as straightforward as it could be, but it was still annoying. There was still a lot of steps I hadn’t anticipated in terms of having to not just get the death certificate, but also how to close these bank accounts and how to do this stuff and how to get into the safe deposit box. Fortunately, my brother was still in Colorado and could do some of that stuff that I couldn’t do, but it was a lot.

Craig: It’s a lot. Melissa’s mom died. My dad died during the pandemic, but my mom’s still alive, so that’s still going. Melissa’s mom died during the pandemic, and she was the remaining parent there, so Melissa became the executor of the estate. It becomes a full-time job.

I was shocked there aren’t people that just do it for you. I thought there’s gotta be somebody that just does all this. There really isn’t. You have to deal with a lawyer, and you have to deal with the government.

There’s also all this stuff of just like, she had an account and we can’t figure out how to access it, and they’re calling us and telling us we owe money on a thing that we don’t own, and all the annoying things of… Sometimes something happens, and you’re like, “Wait, what? Why is this cable company that I don’t use telling me I owe them money?” It’s that times a hundred, for somebody else. You weren’t doing it. They were doing it. Now you have to figure out how to turn their fricking internet off. It’s a full-time job.

Hey, Drew, ask your mom, are there services that just handle this stuff for you, like just say, “Just give me everything. Five me power of attorney. We’ll do it.”

Drew: That’s a great question. I’ll ask her. That’s separate from just an online portal that you can be like, “Here’s all my assets. Spit out a will,” right?

Craig: I’m talking about you have been named the executor by someone’s will. You have to now process all of their stuff, and you have to handle all of their accounts and their properties and their things. Is there a service that can basically, just for a fee or a percentage, do it for you, so you don’t have to take on the second job of combing through the mess of perhaps somebody’s not perfectly organized leavings?

Drew: I will ask her and get back to you.

John: Our listeners will probably also have an answer for that. I think that actually is a fascinating How Would This Be a Movie. I think the character who does that, it’s a nice way into a story. It’s a person who’s just cleaning up an estate, and then you realize there’s actually a greater mystery there. It’s potentially fascinating.

Craig: Let’s get Natasha Lyonne on the phone.

John: I think she’s there. To bring this back around to what we do with our papers, I would also say there’s probably services where if I didn’t have a daughter who was going to vanquish rights or she wasn’t interested in doing it but those rights are still valuable, there’s gotta be a company who I can assign those rights to, who will work to maximize the exploitation of those rights. For Big Fish, actually, there already is a company, but for other things, to maximize exploitation of those rights and then pay out a check on a regular basis, basically an agent for that stuff.

Craig: There are. There are definitely agents that represent writers posthumously, no question. They represent estates. An estate just goes to a literary agent. It’s the same thing that you would do in life, if the challenge is the same, which is, “Hey, sell this material to somebody. License it or whatever.” It’s the material. It’s not the living person that’s relevant. That feels pretty doable. That’s doable. Honestly, I’m dead. I don’t care what Melissa does with it. Whatever. I’m gone. I’m gone. It’s over. It’s over. Shut the door. Turn off the lights.

John: Pack everything in a bindle and leave.

Craig: Pack our thing in the cosmic bindle and walk the rails into eternity.

John: We’ll all be gold panning in Heaven.

Craig: Exactly. Just my gold pan, my bindle, my shoes that have the weird… The part that covers the toe is gone or lifted up for some reason. I’m a bit sooty, because they’re always sooty.

John: Yeah, some soot.

Craig: I’m eating directly from a can of beans.

John: Also, your hat has been flattened down. It had a weird quality to your hat.

Craig: There’s always a weird patch on the hat. Also, when they eat from the can of beans, they leave the lid on but just tilt it up. They never just take the lid completely off.

John: No, you gotta bend it back. Weirdly, their coffee pot is directly sitting in the flames.

Craig: The coffee pot is from an iron forge or something. That coffee has to be horrible.

John: Oh yeah, because the grounds are just soaking in the water.

Craig: Exactly. Those grounds were in your bindle all day, or god forbid your pocket of your far too loose trousers.

John: Good times.

Craig: The hobo life.

John: It’s the hobo life for me. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Drew: Bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• The Man of Your Dreams by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz for The Cut
• The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes by Steven Johnson for The New York Times Magazine
• Pennsylvania Woman Who Disappeared in 1992 Is Found Alive in Puerto Rico by Eduardo Medina for the New York Times
• The Counterfeit Queen of Soul by Jeff Maysh for Smithsonian
• The Curious Case of the Disappearing Nuts by Peter Vigneron for Outside
• A History Professor Takes On Hollywood by Katherine Rosman for the New York Times
• This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew by Daniel Wallace
• Posthumously by Daniel Wallace
• The Last of Us: Soundtrack From the Series by David Fleming & Gustavo Santaolalla
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Orpheus (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/2023/anti-villains).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 590 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, why do some people do bad things. More specifically, why does past trauma lead some characters to become villains, while others become heroes? We’ll wrestle with good and evil, right and wrong, and how that impacts the choices our characters make. We’ll also be answering some listener questions on character jobs and getting paid. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, we will talk tattoos. I’ve now had mine for 30 years, but Craig, you are a newbie to the whole tattoo world.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** Excited.

**John:** We’ll get into it. Now Craig, a few episodes back we were talking about phones and devices that executives used to have on their desks to tell their assistants about who’s calling in or, “Bring me a Coke.” We couldn’t think what they were called. Charlie wrote in to say those old things were called AmTels.

**Craig:** Yes, AmTels. It was an AmTel. Boy, I feel bad for the AmTel company. Where are they now?

**John:** They still sell them.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** We’ll put a link there. It’s amtel.com, A-M-T-E-L dot-com.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** They still make them. If you click through, they look kind of the same.

**Craig:** I’m looking. Oh my god. Oh my god. By the way, this website tells you everything. This website is like an incredible time capsule of what websites looked like in 2004 maybe.

**John:** It’s built with tables, the old way of the tables. You had to structure things with tables.

**Craig:** The little side menus that pop up and these weird window style boxing. This is nuts. They can’t still be in business.

**John:** I bet they could still make money.

**Craig:** I think this is a ghost.

**John:** I may get you one for Christmas, Craig.

**Craig:** If they can only sell one a year, that one might cost seven million dollars. Gotta keep them in business, John. You know what? They’re not in the business of going out of business.

**John:** That’s what it is. Flashback to Final Draft.

**Craig:** Oh my word.

**John:** Good lord. Back in the day, this is how an executive would know who was calling in, so they could see whether they want to answer it, hit a little button, say yes, reply, or, “Bring me a diet Coke.” Thank you, Charlie, for reminding us what these things were called and, wow, just a good flashback memory.

**Craig:** AmTels, wow, how about that?

**John:** That was all part of a discussion because I had asked listeners what should I do about my office phones, because they don’t ring anymore. There’s just really no sense in having them. Our listeners are the best. They have a lot of good suggestions, which Drew sorted through. One was a service called Dialpad, which is replacing a traditional office thing.

One that I found was most fascinating was, Adam wrote in to say, “I’m currently working completely remote as a producer’s assistant. We’re using an iPhone as our office line, and it’s been great. We can easily save contacts, merge calls with my boss and additional participants. I’m logged into my company email so I can quickly retrieve any relevant info if I’m away from my desk. I just turn the phone off during off hours so I’m not constantly checking two phones.” Essentially, Adam just has a second phone, which is the office phone. That’s the number it rings to there. He just does everything from that phone.

**Craig:** That is a very attractive solution, because the issue with the old phones is they simply weren’t connected to the systems that everything else is connected to. This is the physical object hardware version of the software solution of getting a separate Google account which I have for my business. That Google account is where we keep all of our contacts and we sink through all the things that I need to share with my assistant or my partners. This makes sense. It’s a little annoying obviously for an assistant to carry around two phones at the same time. You need more pockets. That’s attractive. That’s an attractive thought, although honestly, we just use our own phones.

**John:** The challenge is though, when your current assistant, when Bo is no longer your assistant, then who are they calling? They need to have a new number to call.

**Craig:** It’s the handover process of, Megana hands it over to Drew. A lot of emails have to go out saying, “Here’s the change.” There’s a few weeks of adjustment, but then it all adjusts.

**John:** Also, Drew shouldn’t have to be answering that phone at 1 in the morning.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, he should.

**John:** Oh, yes, he should.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, he should!

**John:** Crisis.

**Craig:** Drew, get me a diet Coke! I’m gonna ruin him for no reason at all.

**John:** Also, if Drew has that phone, what am I gonna throw at him?

**Craig:** Exactly. Now John, what I would suggest is you go and get some old phones that maybe are on sale for 20 bucks that don’t function at all, that are just being sold for parts. Just get 12 of those and just have them in a holster.

**John:** You’re set.

**Craig:** Yep, perfect.

**John:** The other solutions people suggested, and thank you for writing in, included Google Fi, Verizon One Talk, Webex, which some people are using. I think some agencies have moved over to Webex. We’ll see, but we’ll report back with whatever we decide as a solution for this.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. Last bit of follow-up here, we talked about government influence on films, because we had these script consultants who were being paid by foreign powers. Phillip in Los Angeles wrote in. Craig, do you want to read through this?

**Craig:** Sure. Phillip writes, “In Episode 587, you spoke about how state influence on film is bigger in Europe than America. In many ways, you downplayed the US government’s role in films, specifically even military. The Department of Defense has a Hollywood liaison office that is more involved in scripts than the contractors hired in Europe. While this isn’t government dictating all scripts with military themes, access to military vehicles, equipment, and technical expertise saves studios millions of dollars and grants authenticity they couldn’t get otherwise. See Top Gun: Maverick.” There’s a link to an LA Times story covering that very thing. Phillip, agreed, but this isn’t about funding. That is not specifically funding. It’s about access, which is different, I think, than what we were discussing.

**John:** It is. I can also think that access to a lot of places where you want to film or things you want to use, yeah, you are gonna be consulting those people and probably even getting scripts cleared through those people. If you wanted to set a film on specifically a Native American reservation, you’re gonna have to go through the tribal governments there, and they might actually have some ability to say no, we don’t want you doing that. You can envision a lot of scenarios beyond just the military where there’s gonna be approvals that are gonna have to happen.

**Craig:** Tons of those things. Just in case people are wondering, there are always trade-offs. Like John’s describing, most places that are in a position to gatekeep are going to want to take a look at the material. Certainly, the Department of Defense very famously wasn’t going to let Top Gun or any of the movies that Jerry has made that connect with the military… None of them can say things or depict things that paint the military in a particularly negative light. Obviously, the military has no interest in funding something that makes it look bad.

Similarly, like you mention, we were all over Alberta. Our upcoming episode that’s coming out on Sunday was partly shot in Waterton, which is a federal park in Canada. There were all sorts of restrictions that came along with shooting there that we had to make sure we obeyed. Lots of trade-offs, but those are the decisions you make as a production. That said, Phillip, not quite what we were talking about.

**John:** On the issue though of military portrayals, it got me thinking back to an article I read a couple weeks ago. I’ll try to find a link and put it in the show notes about how the Army’s using these influencers who are TikTok star kind of people who are specifically there to sell how great it is to be in the military or the military lifestyle. “She’s an influencer, but she’s also in the Army.”

**Craig:** Vaguely insidious.

**John:** Insidious. It feels like propaganda. It feels like [inaudible 00:08:14]. That’s a different kind of thing than what we’re talking about with a script approval. I think that’s what we were worried about. That’s what we were worried about when we heard a script consultant from Europe, being like, oh, no, it’d have to include exactly these messages. These are going to be state propaganda films.

**Craig:** There is no free lunch, my friends.

**John:** If you’re trying to shoot a movie in Turkey these days, I bet there would be a lot of concerns and restrictions.

**Craig:** Yes, pretty much anywhere. That’s how it goes.

**John:** We have a bit of follow-up here from Pay Up Hollywood. Drew, could you help us out with this?

**Drew Marquardt:** Sure. Rekha writes, “Three years ago ish, during the beginning of the movement that would become Pay Up Hollywood, you mentioned Rob McElhenney as a positive example of how you treat your staff. On that same episode, you read from my anonymous letter as an agency assistant. At the time, I was so terrified I created a fake email so it couldn’t be traced back to me.

“As I’ve grown older within this industry, I’ve become much more outspoken about the realities. I moved out of the agency life, worked for some incredible writer/showrunner-led production companies, and now actually work with Jackie Cohn and Rob McElhenney. I’ve experienced Rob’s kindness and generosity firsthand. The environment he creates is so incredible and warm.

“I just wanted to point out this small connection, because it almost feels like fate. Technically, we were mentioned in the same episode, Rob as someone who is a great boss, and me as someone who’s really struggling, but years later, the universe actually put us together. I know the value of hard work and perseverance, but being raised in a lot of Indian and Hindu cultural influence, I can’t help but shake the notion that everything happens for a reason and some things are meant to be.

“Your work and your commitment means so much to me. Back then, even though you didn’t know who I was, I felt like someone was listening to me for the first time. Most people didn’t know that I was writing in at all. Sometimes I’m still scared because I’m still on the lower level side, but I think it’s important that we keep talking about it and all things affecting the treatment of people in our industry. Thank you all for being the first to listen and a force that kept me going.”

**Craig:** Wow, that’s amazing.

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Rekha, thank you. I immediately tensed up at the beginning of her letter, because I’m like, “Oh, no, what did Rob do?” As it turned out, what he did was what he always does, which is be awesome. Rekha, you mentioned Indian Hindu cultural inference. I’m gonna teach you a word in Yiddish. Beshert. Beshert means fate or destiny. This is cross-cultural. Do I believe in supernatural fate or destiny? No, but it’s a nice feeling. It’s comforting. I don’t believe in ghosts, but it’s comforting sometimes to think of my grandmother watching me.

This is beautiful. I swear to god, I forget all the time that people even listen to this, much less are impacted and affected by it, but then I’m reminded all the time. Thank you for writing this. This is gorgeous. I’m just very happy.

**John:** I’m also pointing out, Rekha, just don’t sell your own agency short here. That agency may have started with you writing in anonymously to this podcast about what your experience was, but in sharing that story, not only did you put down in words what you were experiencing, you started to recognize that there were other people having the same experience. You got yourself out of that situation, into a better situation, then to a better situation, into where you are right now, which is just a steppingstone to wherever you’re headed next. I’m glad we were able to help, but we were only able to help because you spoke out and noticed what was going on around you and said, “Hey, this is not cool.” It does come back to you.

**Craig:** To be clear, when you say agency, you mean her volition and individual willpower, not the agency she worked at, which was apparently terrible.

**John:** No. That’s absolutely true. We want the good kind of agency, not the oppressive kind of agency.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Your self-determination is what we applaud.

**Craig:** I might actually feel good about myself until lunch today.

**John:** Nice. That’s all we can aim for in these troubled times.

**Craig:** It’ll go downhill.

**John:** The last little thing before we get into our main topic is, did you see the stuff about Dick Tracy?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Do you remember the movie Dick Tracy at all?

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**John:** Dick Tracy, it’s a very brightly colored comic book adaption. I remember seeing it in theaters. I remember Warren Beatty starring in it. I remember Madonna was the woman in the film.

**Craig:** Tess Trueheart.

**John:** Tess Trueheart. I remember almost nothing about this film at all, but you know who does remember this film is Warren Beatty, because he continuously releases new things that are sequels to Dick Tracy, so that he can hold onto the rights. I just find it fascinating.

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** Because he can and because he would. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that’s speculating how he’s doing it and why he’s doing it. This most recent thing was a Zooming with Dick Tracy, where it’s a split screen thing where it’s Warren Beatty and Warren Beatty as Dick Tracy and Leonard Maltin and another film critic.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** It’s just long enough that it actually counts as a sequel. It shows up on Turner Classic Movies.

**Craig:** Oh my god, it’s a legal thing to just…

**John:** It’s a legal thing. It’s also clear that he actually has an artistic pride to it that’s interesting.

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** Because this was a comic book adaptation before they were all out there, so maybe it’s meaningful to him. Also, he just seems like, “Goddammit, no one is… “ He’s going to die owning this thing.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That’s what he wants.

**Craig:** Dick Tracy, it was such a strange… Even when it came out. It was 1990. I was 19. Geez, Louise. I would read the comics in the paper. There are still comics in newspapers that are still newspapers, but back then a bit more common to read comics. Some of the comics were these ancient holdovers from my dad’s time, which you could tell were just soaking in this anachronistic, old-school way. It just was so old-fashioned. Dick Tracy was definitely one of them. He was a 1940s, ‘30s, ‘20s, 1920s-ish kind of guy. There were a bunch of Gasoline Alley and the girls in Apartment 3-G and Mary Worth.

**John:** Mary Worth.

**Craig:** Where you’re like, what the hell is-

**John:** I can’t do comic book guy’s voice, but he has, “This is the-“

**Craig:** “That’s the rare Mary Worth where she advises her friend to commit suicide.”

**John:** “Commit suicide.” Yes.

**Craig:** Mary Worth. I’m just like, “What is this?” Then when that movie came out, I guess I was like, “All right.” This is why these days when people are like, “Oh, we really want to make a Hungry, Hungry Hippos movie,” and I’m like, “It’s Dick Tracy. It’s old. Nobody now cares.” The point is, Dick Tracy was old-fashioned and out of date in 1990, which is why the movie was kind of a flop. What’s the point of holding onto it? Nobody knows what it is. It doesn’t matter. He has a wristwatch that’s a two-way radio. That was considered forward-looking technology.

**John:** Maybe it’s like holding onto intellectual property as actually just property, the same way people collect plastic cars. Maybe he just wants to hold onto this piece of IP for as long as it can be a piece of IP, because a copyright will expire. It will become public domain at a certain point.

**Craig:** This is like a very elaborate NFT.

**John:** That’s what it is. It really is an NFT before its time. I just thought it was great. I don’t have any particular comment on it. This idea of you have to keep making a thing to hold onto the rights is a real thing in Hollywood. Spider-Man famously, you had to make a Spider-Man movie every once in a while, or else the rights would all kick back to Marvel. Sony had to keep making Spider-Man movies.

**Craig:** I think lawyers have become much more savvy. The lawyers back when they made that deal in the ‘80s for the rights probably never considered that there was a loophole in which Warren Beatty could appear in the costume for five minutes in an interview and renew the rights for another 12 years. People have gotten smarter about that stuff, precisely because of things like this.

**John:** Probably the most famous example I remember is there was a Fantastic Four movie made by Roger Corman-

**Craig:** Yes, there was.

**John:** … which was just to hold onto I think Fox’s rights to it. They had to film it and then shelve it. It’s never been seen.

**Craig:** Somewhere on YouTube I think I’ve seen bits and pieces of it. It’s startling. Startling.

**John:** Startling.

**Craig:** Startling.

**John:** To our main topic today. This all comes out of Chris Csont, who does the Inneresting newsletter, was putting together a bunch of links for people writing about villain motivation and how villains come to be. When he laid them all out side by side, I realized they’re really talking about character motivation overall, whether they’re heroes or villains. So often what we think about, like, oh, that’s the reason why they’re the villain, you could just turn around and say, oh, that’s the reason why they became the hero. It’s basically the reaction to the events that happened or what’s driving them.

I thought we might take a look at villainy overall, look at some villains, and then in the lens of these articles, peel apart what are the choices that characters make that cause us to think of them as being heroes or villains and how we use that in our storytelling.

**Craig:** Great. I love this topic.

**John:** Cool. We love villains. Craig, let’s just make a list of things that villains do, what we’re talking about when we talk about villains in the course of a story. What are villainy things?

**Craig:** In the very basic sense, old-school way, you’ve got cops and robbers. Villains break the law.

**John:** They break laws that are there to help society. We also have heroes that can break laws. Villains break laws in ways that harm society or harm the community. They oppose the hero. Sometimes they seem to enjoy causing suffering or misery.

**Craig:** Villains oftentimes are marked by cruelty or sadism. Like you said, it’s something that undermines the social fabric of things.

**John:** They are selfish. They may steal. They can cheat. They will lie. They’re power-hungry. Yet all those things are things that sometimes heroes do as well. Maybe we’re sussing out the motivations for why they’re doing the thing that they’re doing. Do they have a noble purpose behind it? What’s the explanation? This all is against a backdrop. So often in these times we’re talking about antiheroes rather than villains and heroes. These are the Catwomans, the characters who are doing bad things, but for reasons that we as an audience relate to.

**Craig:** Sometimes villains are presented as people who maybe had a righteous grievance but are taking things too far. That’s a very typical Batman villain, not so much the Joker, but a lot of other villains. They start righteously. They’ve been hurt or wounded or offended. They want revenge, but they’re just going too far, whereas Batman was wounded and hurt and decided to make sure that nobody else got hurt again. These are the two different paths sometimes that heroes and villains go down. Heroes supposedly are doing things to care about others.

In a Judeo-Christian, emphasis on Christian, founded country, the notion of sacrifice and sacrificing yourself for the betterment of mankind is a very strong one for heroes, whereas villains are interested in either accruing power for themselves or healing themselves at the cost of anyone else.

**John:** Absolutely. Both heroes and villains may have trauma, but it’s what they’re doing with that trauma. That trauma caused them to lose hope or it’d inspire them to do things down the road.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** That’s a factor. Also, look at the axis between conformity versus individuality or nonconformity. How willing is this person to stand up against the system? So often, we think about our heroes standing up against a tyrannical system. You can look at so many villains that are essentially the same kind of thing, where they believe they have the moral certitude that what they’re doing is correct and everybody else is wrong and therefore they will do what it takes to enact their vision. They’re not afraid of pissing everyone else off or blowing everyone else up in order to achieve their vision.

**Craig:** This is how you end up with that scene where the villain explains why they’re doing what they’re doing. “I’m gonna tear the whole thing down! I’m gonna make everyone pay!” and blah blah blah blah blah. This happens all the time with large-scale villains that, as you say, are nonconforming.

We have this impulse to both conform and nonconform. We want our heroes to save us all and keep the conformed society together. We despise our villains for nonconforming to the extent that they tear it all down, but we also want our heroes to nonconform so that they’re not like the rest of us.

Heroes and villains really are just reflecting the push and pull inside of our own minds. That’s why we’re attracted to the story over and over and over. It’s Punch and Judy. We have been watching this story forever, since there was fire and caves.

**John:** Absolutely. Just because it’s a great article on Wile E. Coyote, The 1000 Deaths of Wile E. Coyote, I would say perseverance is a thing to think about with villains as well. We think about heroes persevering, but in many cases it’s the villain who has persevered against all these obstacles in front of them that is the real story of, you keep knocking me down and I’ll just keep coming back stronger.

**Craig:** This is obviously all colored by the presentation of the narrative. It occurred to me after many years after watching Star Wars that we actually didn’t quite understand what was particularly bad about the Empire. We were told they were bad, but how? Why? Then later, that got filled in a bit. Mostly it’s just, man, it seems like they’re really mean to each other. It’s a really over-trained, corporal punishment-emphasizing, military group. What is exactly happening on the ground? What is it that these Rebels are fighting for?

You could certainly turn it around and go, wait, what if we were telling a story about America and Al-Qaeda? Now who’s the Empire? Now who are the Rebels? Which side are you on? It’s all about how you present these things, always.

**John:** I think Star Wars is a fascinating case, because you have the Empire, which is this giant bureaucracy but also has this supernatural power at the center. The Emperor is this supernatural figure who can do these magical things. In later Star Wars we see the supernatural Emperor. You also have a series like Andor, which is just about the Empire as this tyrannical bureaucracy. We see the actual human beings who are cogs in that machine and feel a sympathy for why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s trying to do both things, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Let’s start with this article by Daniel Effron here, we’ll put in a link to the show notes, about why good people do bad things. He’s an ethicist. He’s really talking about we think that people would make a logical decision about the cost and benefits of breaking some rule, transgressing in some way, but they really don’t. Mostly, it’s not about the act itself. They’re doing things or not doing things based on how they’re going to be perceived by others. It’s that the spectator thing is a major factor. If they can do something without feeling like a bad person, they will do it. Cheating is not just about whether you can get away with it. It’s how will you feel if you do this thing.

**Craig:** Which is really fascinating when you consider it in the context of a traditional existentialist point of view, which is that we are defined solely by our deeds, the things we do. It doesn’t matter how you feel. If you do something bad, you are a bad-doer. That is true to an extent, meaning the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily care why you killed that person, as long as it wasn’t self-defense. He made you nuts, and you couldn’t handle it anymore, and you killed him. You had perfectly good reasons in your head. The rest of the world doesn’t care. You killed him. You’re a murderer.

What is interesting about our villains is often there’s a phrase that you and I have heard executives say four billion times, mustache twirling. The mustache-twirling villain is a reference to the old silent films where the bad guy in the Old West would steal the good guy’s gal, and he would tie her to the railroad tracks for some reason.

**John:** Why would he tie her to the railroad tracks?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** I never understood that.

**Craig:** Because he wants her to die but he can’t do it himself. He would rather watch a train do it, I guess. That train will be arriving at some point. He never checks the timetables or anything. He ties her to the rails, which actually is probably very difficult to do. Then he waits. While she’s like, “Please, no,” he has this nasty

Mustache with little handlebars at the end, and he twirls them and goes, “Meh-heh-heh.” It’s just shorthand for an incredibly broad villain. Broad villains don’t worry about feeling like a bad person. They are a bad person, and they are celebrating it. They love it, which is actually not very recognizably human. It’s just not a human thing to be like, “Oh my god, you know what I want to do today? Something bad, because I love being bad!” That’s not really how it functions, generally speaking.

**John:** We’ve talked many times about character motivation, villain motivation, and how every villain tends to see themselves as the hero, if they even have a sense of moral compass at all. We’re leaving out of this conversation these supernatural alien creatures, the degree to which we can apply motivation to those kind of characters.

In Aliens, we see that it’s a mother against a mother. That makes sense. That tracks. We can understand that. In most of these supernatural, demonic things, there’s not really a moral choice there. They are actually just true villains. Even the slasher villains, we might throw some screen time just setting up what their past trauma was that’s made them this way, but we don’t really believe that they have any fundamental choice. They’re not choosing to do these actions.

**Craig:** They made a choice. The choice was made. It is now complete. Freddy Krueger was burnt by a Lynch mob. He made a choice in his supernatural return to come back and kill all the children of the people that killed him. He’s good. He doesn’t wake up going, “What should I do today?” He’s like, “Good. One more day to do the thing I decided to do, that I will do every day. Ha ha.”

**John:** Aha.

**Craig:** There’s a wonderful clarity to being that kind of villain, isn’t there?

**John:** It is. In some ways, you could say that he’s cursed. Basically, he’s living out this thing. He can’t escape this. He can’t choose to get out of this. A curse is the opposite of a wish. We always talk about what is a character’s want, what are they actually going for. The curse is the mirror opposite of that. They are bound by fate to do this thing, and they can’t get away from it. There’s a kind of freedom in that.

**Craig:** There is, because as a human, you’re really more of a shark. There are no more choices to make. There’s no questioning of self. Sharks kill. When I say shark, I mean the fictional shark, not the regular sharks that probably are like, “I’m full. I’m not going to do anything.” You are a creature that is designed to kill, and thus you must kill. You are more like a beast than a person.

Those characters often do feel like they become part of nature. Zombies, whether they’re slow or fast, whether it’s a virus or it’s supernatural, they ultimately are will-less. They are compelled to do what they do. They make no choices. Thus they become a little bit like a storm, flood, lightning, fire, monsters, the devil, these things that just simply do stuff.

There’s a wonderful place for those kinds of things, but I think ultimately we do want villains that feel like they are reflecting something back at us, that they are dark mirrors that say, “Hey, you might feel these things. Don’t end up like me.” They are almost designed to be negative instructors to make people identify with the villain, to make us understand why the villain’s doing what they’re doing, to make us think, “I actually have felt the same things, I’ve wanted to do the same things, but here’s what happens if I do,” because typically, the villain will fail.

**John:** Let’s talk about some villains. I have a list of 20 villains here for us to go through. Let’s talk about what’s driving them and what’s interesting and what could be applied to other things. We’ll start with Hans Gruber from Die Hard, our special Die Hard episode. Of all the folks in this list, he’s maybe come actually closest to seeming like the mustache-twisting villain because of that amazing performance. His actual motivations are more calculating. He doesn’t seem to be just cruel for the sake of being cruel.

**Craig:** He’s a thief. He wants to steal money. That’s as far as I remember. Is there a greater motivation than that? It just seems like he’s a very arrogant man who wants to steal a lot of money and doesn’t mind killing a bunch of people to do it.

**John:** He gets indignant when somebody gets in his way. He will lash out when his plans are forded. I think of him, just because of that performance, as being grand and theatrical, but actually, he has a purpose and a focus. Also, I think he very brilliantly, in the course of the structure of movies… We talked about the false idea of what the actual motivation is is great. It seems like they have some sort of noble purpose beyond the money, and of course they don’t. It’s all just a ruse.

**Craig:** That was a wonderful thing that happened. It was a very meta thing. For us growing up, that was a startling one, because we had become so trained to think of these villains as people who were taking hostages. Terrorists are an easy one. They’re always taking hostages. They often in bad movies were taking hostages because they were associated with, like they made fun of in Tropic Thunder, Flaming Dragon, just some rebel group that was trying to do a thing.

The fact that Hans Gruber used that against us to make us think that’s what he was doing, and then the big surprise was, “No, I’m simply a thief,” was actually quite clever. Alan Rickman, I think his performance in no small part elevated what that character was into something that felt a little bit more wonderfully arch.

**John:** Let’s talk about the two villains in Silence of the Lambs. You have Buffalo Bill, who’s the serial killer, kidnapping people. You have Hannibal Lecter, who is also a serial killer, but a very different kind of serial killer. They’re two monsters, but with very different motivations. They’re very different fill-ins in the course of the story. How do we police them, and how do we think about what’s driving them?

**Craig:** Buffalo Bill to me, because he’s portrayed as somebody with a severe mental illness that has led him to do these terrible things, is more in the shark territory. He is beyond choice. He’s no longer making choices. He is simply compelled to do what he does and will continue to do it until he’s stopped. There’s nobody who’s going to have a sit-down with Buffalo Bill, and he’s going to be like, “You’re making a really good point. I’m going to stop killing all these people.” He’s not going to do that.

Hannibal Lecter you get the sense absolutely has choices. What is presented in his character that Thomas Harris created that’s so beautiful is the notion that he might be some kind of avenging angel, that maybe he only does horrible things to the people that deserve it. What’s interesting about the story is they tease you with that, but then what do they tell you? They tell you that he bit a nurse’s face off. We see him killing two police officers that didn’t do anything to him. He kills a guy in an ambulance. He will kill indiscriminately do protect himself.

As Jodie Foster as Clarice says at the end of the movie, she doesn’t think he’s going to come kill her because it would be rude. We get fascinated by the notion of the serial killer with a little bit of a conscience. It tempts us to think if we were interesting and good enough and cool enough, he wouldn’t want to kill us.

**John:** Damien in The Omen, a terrifying little child. To me, he feels like he’s cursed with that. He’s not made a single choice. He is who he is.

**Craig:** He’s bad to the bone.

**John:** Born into it, as opposed to Amy Dunn in Gone Girl, who I think is one of the best, most recent villains. She is aware of what she’s doing. She is a sociopath. She has some sort of narcissistic… I don’t want to say narcissistic personality disorder. I wouldn’t want to diagnose her with that specifically. She has some ability that puts her at the very center of the universe and sees everyone else around her as things to be manipulated.

**Craig:** Why we are fascinated by Amy Dunn is because her conniving and manipulation and calculations are very well done, so she’s formidable. This is something that you’ll hear often in Hollywood from executives. They want the villain to be formidable. They want us to feel like it’s really hard to win against somebody like that. I think also there’s a little bit of a wish fulfillment there, because she is occupying a place in society that typically isn’t in charge, isn’t the one that comes out on top. We get to watch the underdog go a little crazy and win to an extent. That’s always fascinating to me.

**John:** I think the other brilliant choice Gillian Flynn made in the structure of this is that ultimately she becomes a victim herself in breaking free of all this stuff. In executing her plan, she ends up becoming trapped by someone that she shouldn’t have trusted and then has to break herself out. We see, “You think you’ve caught me, but I’ve actually caught you,” is ingenious, so smartly done.

**Craig:** I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me!

**John:** Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, a whole generation of young men thought that he was the hero of the movie Wall Street.

**Craig:** Oh, bros.

**John:** Yes, bros. I think it comes back down to his idea that greed is good. There’s more to it than that one speech, but essentially that whatever it takes is what’s worth doing. That is an American value, but it’s pushed to an extreme degree.

**Craig:** Which is the point. When you mention the Daniel Effron article, the average person cares a lot about feeling and appearing virtuous. If they can do bad things without feeling like a bad person, that’s when they start doing bad things. What Gordon Gekko is doing is essentially giving himself license to commit crimes. The license is through philosophy, that in fact he’s helping people. If you think about it, really I’m the hero. Somebody naturally is like, “You really convinced yourself of this.”

We always wonder when Gordon Gekko puts his head on the pillow, does he really believe that. Is there some piece of his conscience gnawing at him? We don’t know. That is a great example of somebody articulating a value that we all have ad absurdum to force us to examine ourselves.

**John:** Alonzo Harris in Training Day, Denzel Washington’s character in Training Day. An amazing performance, an amazing villain, amazing centerpiece role. Here he is in a position of power inside a structure, but of course, that’s not his true source of power. His true source of power and wealth is all the ways he’s subverting all that and breaking the codes to do this and is now trying to entrap Ethan Hawke’s character in what he’s doing.

**Craig:** An excellent film. What I remember feeling when I watched Denzel’s portrayal of Alonzo, was that he was managing to do two things at once that are very different and difficult to do simultaneously. He was letting us engage in a power fantasy, because it’s attractive. He made it look sexy and fun and awesome. The idea that if you go through life having the upper hand and being able to get over on anyone, it’s exciting.

On the other hand, he also showed you the terrible cost of it, that in fact, like I said, there’s no free lunch, that you cannot engage in power like that without it hollowing you out and gnawing at the foundations of who you are as a person until finally you’re brought low. It’s inevitable. You will come down to earth. Gravity applies to you. It’s wonderful. It’s a great lesson, which is why I think Training Day is one of the great titles of all time. It’s just such a great lesson. We’re all getting trained about the danger of having that kind of power.

**John:** We should put that on the shortlist for a future deep dive, because it’s been a while since I watched it. Two more I want to go through. Gollum from The Lord of the Rings movies.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Gollum, I think he’s unique on this list, because you pity him, and yet he’s also a villain. He’s also dangerous. There are other examples of that. They’re usually sidekick characters. Here he is in this centerpiece role where he has control over this little section of what the characters need and yet he’s pathetic. It’s just such an interesting choice.

**Craig:** Gollum to me is not a villain. Gollum is an addict. He is somebody who is portraying an addiction. He will do bad things to feed his addiction. Where Gollum takes off and becomes somebody really interesting is when he is a split personality, when he’s Slinker and Stinker, and you can see him arguing with himself. That is so human. It’s just so wonderfully… We can identify. We feel bad for him, because we know that inside, there’s somebody who is good, who was a great, perfectly fine guy until he shot up heroin for the first time, and then that was it. He’s essentially been enslaved to his own addiction and his own weakness.

**John:** I think that’s the reason why we can relate to him so well is because we can see, oh, the worry that if I were to do those things, I could be trapped the same way that he is trapped. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this article about Wile E. Coyote. It’s arguing essentially Wile E. Coyote is an addict. He’s demonstrating all the addict’s things. He’s going to keep trying to do the same thing, even though it’s never going to work. It’s always going to blow up in his face, a different form of the thing. He’s always chasing that high, which is the roadrunner. If he thinks he can get it, he won’t get it.

**Craig:** It’s rough, man. He needs a program.

**John:** He does need a program, 12 steps there. Finally, let’s talk about Annie Wilkes in Misery, who I think is just a spectacular character. You look at the setup of her, and that if she did not kidnap somebody and do the things she does in the movie, she would just be an obsessive fan. She would just be someone, you know her, you understand her. She’s annoying, but she also probably bakes really well. You get along fine with her. It’s that worry that you push somebody, given the chance, some of these people would go too far and they would Annie Wilkes you.

**Craig:** That’s a portrait of obsession and love gone bad. What was so fascinating about Annie Wilkes, and Stephen King was so smart to make her a woman, is that in society we see men doing this all the time. Men become confused by their love for someone or they think they love someone. It becomes an obsession which turns violent and possessive and often deadly. Women are very often the victims. Here, what was so fascinating was to see a woman engaging in that very same power trip and obsession.

I remember at the time thinking that the only thing that held me back from love, love, loving Misery was that Annie Wilkes did seem like an impossible person. There was part of me that was like, “No one’s really like that.” Now we have Twitter, and we know that there are. Stephen King was right.

**John:** She’s out there.

**Craig:** Oh my god, she and he. There are many Annie and Andrew Wilkeses out there who attach themselves so strongly to characters. The whole thing kicks off when her favorite author dares to kill her favorite character. She reads it in the book, and she snaps. We have seen that a lot in popular culture. That form of love that has gone sour, that has curdled into obsession, is something that’s very human. The story of that villainry is you must get away from that person, because they are going to destroy you to essentially mend their own broken heart. That’s terrifying.

**John:** It’s fascinating to think, would Annie Wilkes be a villain if she had not stumbled upon that car crash? Is this the only bad thing that she’s done?

**Craig:** I would imagine that she’s probably done a few other things, but nothing like that.

**John:** This transaction would not have happened if not for fate putting him right there. If the book had come out, and she would’ve read the book, she would’ve been upset. She would’ve been angry for weeks. She probably wouldn’t have stalked him down at his house and done a thing. The fact that she could affect a change because she had the book before it came out was the opportunity.

**Craig:** The woman was definitely off to begin with. Anybody that says dirty birdy as a phrase, you can imagine people are like, “Here comes Annie.” She’s gotten into some pretty nasty fights at the post office, but nothing like this.

**John:** Let’s try to wrap this up with some takeaways here. As we’re talking about these villains, I think it’s important for us to stress that we’re looking at what’s motivating these iconic villains in these stories. These iconic villains are great, but they wouldn’t exist if you didn’t find a hero to put opposite them, if you didn’t find a context for which to see them in, because they can’t just float by themselves. You can’t have Hannibal Lecter in a story or Buffalo Bill in a story without a Clarice Starling to be the connective tissue, to be the person who’s letting us into their world.

I see so often people try to creating this iconic villain who has this grand motivation. Terrific. Who are we following into the story? How are we getting there? How are we exploring this? How are we hopefully defeating the villain at the end of this?

**Craig:** We need somebody to identify with. We don’t want to identify with villains, but I will suggest that if you can find moments where people are challenged to identify with the villains, that’s when things get really interesting to me, because there is a kind of story where we just give up on the whole hero, villain thing entirely. We ask ourselves, in these situations, what would you do?

When people start to drift away from the hero and towards the villain, that’s when their relationship with the material becomes a little bit more complex. It doesn’t mean it’s better. Sometimes I like nice, simple relationships with the things I watch and read, but sometimes I do like them messy. I like a messy relationship sometimes as well.

**John:** I thought Black Panther, the Killmonger character was a great messy relationship with Black Panther, because they both had strong points. While we wanted Killmonger defeated, we always say, “You know what? He was making some logical points there.”

**Craig:** He’s a good example of gone too far.

**John:** Indeed. Let’s do two quick listener questions. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Ida asks, “I’m having issues when it comes to establishing basic things about characters, especially choosing a career for them in stories where the profession doesn’t necessarily affect the story but I do need to see them in their workplace. Any tips on making this kind of decision?”

**John:** Listen. I’m assuming that you’re writing the kind of story where there’s a workplace but the workplace is not the important central point. We’re going to see them there, but that’s not where we’re spending most of our time. Get them someplace visual where they can talk. If [inaudible 00:45:36] get them a place where they can talk, where we can see them moving around through a space, if they’re supposed to working with other people.

If they’re supposed to be working by themselves, think of some sort of craft kind of thing where as an artist, an artisan, as a solo worker, as a cabinet maker, where we can see them in an individual space. I would just say look for something that’s interesting and distinctive but not so distracting that it becomes the focus of the movie. Craig, any tips for Ida here?

**Craig:** I guess, Ida, it does sound like because their profession doesn’t necessarily affect the story, that you’re probably going to be looking for something fairly mundane. If you can tell me anything about her character from the place she works… Let’s just start with, how much money does she make? How much money do you want her to have? What’s her education level? Has she given up on things? Is she coasting? Is her dream to be a this, so this is just a day job that she’s doing while she has to, for money? All those character things should lead you towards a general sort of thing. Then make a list of all the things that are like that, that fit in that, that you’ve seen in movies before, and don’t do any of them.

Now take a walk around your town. Look for weird things, candle shops, psychic palm readings, a place that repairs vacuum cleaners. Whatever it is that you could also imagine somebody else being in there that might be an interesting bounce-off character or some comic relief or a place where she might have to confront a customer asking for something annoying. These are the things that I think help you get specific.

A great example is, in Better Call Saul, Vince Gilligan needed to establish this mundane life for Saul Goodman. He could’ve picked all sorts of places, but he picked manager of a Cinnabon, not just employee at a Cinnabon, manager, which is worse than employee, because employees come and go. The manager, that’s his career. His career is Cinnabon.

By the way, if you’re a manager at a Cinnabon, I’m sure you’re doing fine. I’m not making fun of you. If you were a lawyer that was on top of the criminal world of Albuquerque, and now you’re a manager at Cinnabon, you can see how things have changed dramatically for you in a very specific way. That’s what you’re hoping for is something that feeds back into our understanding of who this person is and where they are in their life.

**John:** I would just emphasize that when we say pick a mundane job, that doesn’t mean boring. It can be boring for them, but it can’t be boring for us. There’s nothing worse than seeing a boring workplace where it’s just like, this is a boring scene because we’re in a boring place. Make sure that whatever you’re picking is going to be able to keep the ball in the air, so the scenes that do need to take place wherever they’re working actually can still land and that will make it so the movie won’t get cut because it’s dull.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Drew, one more question.

**Drew:** A WGA Member asks, “Has the Guild ever tried to force studios to pay penalties to writers for late payments? It’s often a months-long wait between delivering a script and receiving payment.”

**John:** A WGA Member, yes, they do have to pay. They have to pay a penalty per week or per month. There’s a percentage penalty too for that stuff.

**Craig:** I think it’s weekly. There is an interest rate that compounds. The Guild has not ever, forget tried to force studios, first of all, force is the wrong word, compel studios or require studios to adhere to the terms of the contract they’ve signed with us. The Guild has an entire department that does nothing but this and has successfully collected millions of dollars on behalf of writers.

**John:** Millions and millions of dollars.

**Craig:** Millions and millions over the course of decades.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to the Late Pay Desk. I have friends who work in that desk. All they do is just go after writers’ money. Here are pros and cons. The pro is you have to speak up and say, “Hey, this person owes me money. Go get my money,” and they will go get your money. It can be tough for a writer to raise their hand and say, “Hey, this is a problem here.” The writer can do that. Also, you have reps. Your reps are theoretically only getting paid when you’re getting paid. Send your reps on this.

I think so often as writers we feel like we need to be meek and not make waves, but if people owe you money, they should pay you money. Not only is there structures in place for the WGA, but there are structures in place as a system that you should be getting paid. If you’re not getting paid, it’s outrageous, so speak up.

**Craig:** Understand, no matter how cool your agent or your lawyer is, your lawyer has 5% of the total amount of caring about that money coming in, your agent has 10% of the total amount of caring, and you have the rest, 85%.

Also, they probably have more money than you do. The agency is a large business. The lawyer’s working for a large firm. This money means way more to you than it means to them. They don’t really actually care if the money comes in a month or two late. They don’t care, but you do, because maybe you need it for rent. You can try and say to them, “Listen, this is really important that I get paid on time.” They have to work with that studio for all of their clients. It’s much easier for them to go, “It’s fine.” The Guild does have a dedicated department that just handles this stuff.

**John:** I will say that I suspect you are a feature writer, because it’s feature writers who are classically not getting paid on time. That’s just what it is. Sometimes pilot writers, but really it’s feature writers. Time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Jennifer Senior. It’s in The Atlantic. The headline is The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are. Craig, I’m going to ask you, in your head, how old are you?

**Craig:** Oh, man. It depends. Sometimes I’m 14, and sometimes I’m 51.

**John:** The phrasing of the question ends up being important, because they’ve done studies on it. If they ask how old you are in your head versus how old you feel, you get different kinds of answers from people, because there’s definitely days where I feel 50, but I would say consistently I do feel like I’m probably 31, 32 at a place. The studies they’ve done on this, it looks like people anchor themselves about 20% younger than their actual chronological age. They tend to peg themselves back at a moment where they feel like they are themselves, the first version that they were themselves.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** It’s after you’ve had your first kiss, first foray out into the world without your parents’ supervision. You feel like an adult with most stuff figured out. That tends to be the moment. Going back to our villains discussion, people who have big traumas in their past tend to get stuck at those ages too. It’s a good article overview of this mental self-perception of how old you think you are. What can be useful for people who are in their 20s or early 30s is that the people who are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, internally they still think of themselves likely as closer to your age than you would guess. Useful.

**Craig:** It is. I’m not a huge backwards-looking person. What I do know is that no matter what age I perceive myself to be, while I have changed in certain clear and I think positive ways since I was, say, 35, I haven’t changed that much. I’m still basically who I was, whereas when you’re coming up, you’re changing a lot.

I remember when I was in my 20s, looking at people who were in their 30s and feeling, “Okay, you’re a little bit older. You seem like you’re more settled down and established. I’m a bit jealous of that kind of peace.” People in their 50s were just old. The truth is, those people in the 50s did not probably feel any different than the people in their 30s. They really didn’t. I don’t feel that different.

There is a wisdom that comes with age. It’s weird. I don’t feel old, but I know that the people I work with, who are much younger than I am, look at me and think, “Old,” like parent old, which is fascinating.

**John:** The parent thing is really interesting, because at a certain point, I realized, “Oh, I’m now older than my parents were at this point.” It’s weird, because I always think of them as being older. When I was a kid, they were not any older than I am currently right now. That’s strange to me. I forgive them more.

**Craig:** How old was your dad when he passed away?

**John:** My dad was 67.

**Craig:** At some point, you’re going to hit 68.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** That’s going to be interesting, because you’ll know an age that he didn’t even know, which is fascinating. I have this memory of my mother throwing a surprise 40th birthday party for my dad. That just seemed like the most faraway number possible. That’s in my rearview mirror by a decade. Time.

**John:** Time, time.

**Craig:** It’s so weird.

**John:** I have this very distinct memory. We went camping every summer. We were in the trailer. I asked my mom how old she was. She’s like, “I’m turning 37.” That number anchored for me. It’s just wild to think, oh, wow, she was actually a 37-year-old. That doesn’t feel that old to me.

**Craig:** If you were with a 37-year-old right now, you’d be like, “They’re on their way up.” So strange.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s so weird.

**John:** You’ve got one here.

**Craig:** I’ve got my One Cool Thing, which is gonna feed directly into our Bonus Segment. My One Cool Thing is a woman named Yeono, Y-E-O-N-O. That’s a combination of her full name. She is a tattoo artist from South Korea. Just side note about South Korea. Tattooing, you have to have a medical license to do it.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** The legal structure is really designed to discourage tattoo work. A lot of South Korean artists come to the US to work. Yeono gave me a tattoo. I think it’s amazing. She was a lovely person and an artist and meticulous, which I thought was wonderful. She has a particular style, which is photorealism. If you are in the LA area, or I believe she also works out of Brooklyn, so she goes back and forth, and you are looking for a photorealistic tattoo done by a very obsessive, very careful, attention to detail type person, then you should take a look at some of the work that Yeono has done. She’s terrific.

**John:** Fantastic. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help from Chris Csont. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Dilo Gold. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you could send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**Drew:** Thanks, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, last Wednesday you came over to the house, and we were gonna play some DnD. You had on your arm a dagger. I asked, and you showed it to me. I said, “Oh, how long is that gonna last?” You said, “Forever.” The reason I asked how long is that gonna last is because it looked like a sticker transfer thing, because it was so incredibly photorealistic, and your skin was not all puffy and red in a way. I assumed you just applied a sticker to your forearm, but no, you’d gotten a genuine tattoo.

**Craig:** It’s actually a switchblade. Neil Druckmann and I made an oath when we were making The Last of Us. We said, “If this show works,” and we define works vaguely as either got good reviews or a lot of people watched it or both, that we would each get a tattoo of Ellie’s switchblade. She stabs a lot of people with her switchblade. It’s cool. The show worked.

**John:** The show worked.

**Craig:** I followed through. Neil has not yet followed through, I would like to point out.

**John:** Coward.

**Craig:** He is. He says he’s gonna. He’s waffling a bit about the design he wants, which I understand. I’m just going to continually shame him until he gets it. Regardless, it was my first tattoo. I’ve never had one before. I never really wanted one, but this felt significant. This was a long process. I cared very much about it. It just seemed like I had earned it in a way. I knew I wanted a photorealistic tattoo, which is why I find Yeono. The process was fascinating. I enjoyed it, actually, quite a bit.

**John:** The advice I gave to you on that night, and which other people around the table echoed, is you have to wait at least another year before you get another tattoo, because inevitably, people get a tattoo, and the experience is so cool that they want a second tattoo and a third tattoo and they end up with a bunch of dumb tattoos all over their bodies. I have so many friends who that has happened to.

**Craig:** I will try to avoid that. I think if another season of The Last of Us does well, I’ll probably get another one for that. I like the idea of tattoos commemorating large events, as opposed to just, “I want a dolphin on my ankle.”

**John:** I have exactly one tattoo. I got it 30 years ago. I was in the Stark Program at USC. Friends came down from San Francisco to visit. We were out on Venice Beach. They all had a bunch of tattoos. I said, “You know what? I really want to get a tattoo.” We went to the tattoo place, and I got the one tattoo. It’s on my ankle. It was great.

**Craig:** Is it a dolphin? Please tell me it’s a dolphin.

**John:** It’s a dolphin on my ankle. No, it is an abbreviation of a Latin phrase, tibbium nihil, imagus quiddum, which is, “Let me fear nothing, not even fear,” which was just a mantra I wanted to live by and honestly, genuinely helpful way of thinking about things. Most of the stuff in my life that I’ve regretted are the things I regretted not doing, that fear kept me from doing, and so to be less fearful of things ahead. It was good, useful advice.

It hurt like hell on my ankle. We can talk about this, Craig. It’s a very sharp, very specific pain, in a way that is so different than other pain, because I can see why it hurts, and it doesn’t bother me, because it’s just a very sharp pain at that spot. I know it’s not actually bad for me or my body. It’s not a warning sign the way I think pain generally is.

**Craig:** There are different parts of the body that respond differently. Interestingly, men and women have different responses in general to certain areas of the body. There are areas where men are more sensitive. There are areas where women are more sensitive. It’s curious. The ankle is a tough one. There are areas by joints, basically. When you’re dealing with joints, those tend to be more sensitive. Then the ribs apparently are the worst. That’s what I was reading.

**John:** I can absolutely see that.

**Craig:** The tattoo that I got is on my forearm, on the inside of my forearm, which is, generally speaking, one of the less painful places to get a tattoo, particularly if you can avoid getting close to the wrist or the inner elbow.

The pain, which I was obviously curious about, it was fascinating. It reminded me initially of a little bit of the pain of an electric shock, a steady electrical current, because there is a vibration to it. It’s like a vibration and a scratching at the same time, but I didn’t mind it, and that’s a good thing, because as you said, my tattoo is this photorealistic image of a switchblade. It took nine hours to do that. If it had been excruciating for nine hours, I think I would’ve lost my mind.

Honestly, the part that was the most annoying physically was that the position my arm had to be in on the table for her was slightly rotated to give her a flat inner arm surface. After a few hours, my shoulder started getting really stiff. I would take little breaks and just move my shoulder around and then hand the human canvas back to her.

Here’s an insight into me, John. About seven hours in, she’s like, “When it’s a long tattoo, when it takes a long time, I give my clients a little massage just to loosen them up, because they’ve been tight the whole time.” I said, “That’s right.” She gave me this wonderful shoulder, scalp massage. It felt great. That said, I was so much more comfortable being hurt than I was being helped. There’s something about people making me feel good that makes me feel uncomfortable and something about people hurting me that feels great. I can’t imagine why. Nothing happened to me.

**John:** Nothing to unpack there. Nothing.

**Craig:** Nope. We will not open the box full of bad stuff. I thought it was a fascinating process. Here’s where I’m at now. It’s been basically a week since I’ve had it. It is healing beautifully. There’s no more redness, happily no signs of infection or anything like that. I’m in the skin flaking stage.

From a medical point of view, what happens is the top layer of skin is going to heal faster than the lower layers of the epidermis. The top layer of skin is now healing. The way it’s healing is by flaking away the dead skin as the new skin on top regenerates. The skin underneath is still putting itself together. From what I understand, once all this sunburn style flaky stuff flakes away, the tattoo will then look a bit blah for another couple of weeks. After about a month from the beginning of the tattoo to then, things should be back to where they were when I first showed it to you, which was fresh and startling and vivid.

**John:** Craig, what is your opinion of actors having tattoos? I actually have some strong opinions about this, but I’m curious what your instinct is, because obviously, all human beings should be free to adorn themselves however they want to adorn themselves. I find it really frustrating when actors have a bunch of tattoos. I look at them like, “Man, we are going to have to get around a lot of your tattoos, because they do not fit in the world of our movie.”

**Craig:** I actually don’t mind it, as long as there’s not a facial tattoo. If there’s a tattoo and your face, that’s a disaster. Everywhere else on the body, if something is not covered by clothing, our makeup artists were extraordinarily good at covering up little tattoos or large ones. It didn’t take that much more time in the morning, obviously. The bigger issue is copyright, as it turns out, which is something Warner Bros found out when we made the second Hangover movie.

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Tattoo artists that design original artwork are protected like the rest of us, under copyright. They own the copyright. If you’re going to put that on film, we need to clear it. Nick Offerman, for instance, has a tattoo. In our third episode, there’s a moment where he emerges and he’s wearing a towel but nothing on top, so you can see his chest, and he has a tattoo. He had already been in something where that tattoo had been visible, so he had already handled the whole clearance thing. I think he had gotten the artist to basically sign something that said, “I am licensing you to do this wherever you want to do it on camera.”

When it’s a new one, when it’s a fresh one, you do have to ask, and we have to get approvals and sometimes negotiate some fees. That part can actually be more annoying than the extra 10 minutes, because here’s the deal. If it takes 10 minutes to cover that tattoo up, we’re just calling the actor in 10 minutes earlier. It’s on them. They’re just going to be a little bit earlier on their call time to get that covered up. It doesn’t bother me too much.

**John:** As an actor, you’re appearing in TV shows, you’ll have to decide are you wearing some long sleeves, are you covering that up, are you getting a license from Yeono for perpetuity.

**Craig:** Here’s the interesting thing. I haven’t actually talked about this with her, but I’m going to. I’m going to go and see her again after a month, because she’s gonna look at it and see how it’s gone. She may want to touch up a couple of spots, depending on how it’s all healed.

The interesting thing about this tattoo is the artwork is basically a direct duplication of the artwork from the game, because I gave her these digital files of images of the switchblade that was originally designed for the game The Last of Us. Other artists had done this. Technically, I probably should’ve gotten permission from Sony, but I didn’t. Whoops. Sorry. I don’t think she would have the copyright on this, because essentially, this is a derivative work.

**John:** It’s derivative work. It could also arguably be work for hire. I’m curious how that’ll [crosstalk 01:07:40].

**Craig:** It could be, but I did not impose any of that paperwork upon her. There is an interesting legal question about how to handle this particular tattoo. You know what? I’m going to find out, because I’m going to be doing a little actoring on a show, not Mythic Quest, but a different show, in a month or so. I better dig into that or wear a long-sleeve shirt, but I don’t want to.

**John:** You don’t want to. You want to wear a Scriptnotes T-shirt. We cleared the Scriptnotes T-shirts for when you were on Mythic Quest.

**Craig:** Sweet.

**John:** You’re set for that. Sweet.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Craig, congratulations on your tattoo.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Don’t get another one at least until Episode, let’s say-

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** … 650.

**Craig:** Good lord. Okay, I give you my word.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

Links:

* [Amtel Systems](amtel.com)
* [The U.S. military’s Hollywood connection](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-aug-21-la-ca-military-movies-20110821-story.html) by Rebecca Keegan for Los Angeles Times
* [How E-girl influencers are trying to get Gen Z into the military](https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/57878/1/the-era-of-military-funded-e-girl-warfare-army-influencers-tiktok) by Günseli Yalcinkaya for DAZED
* [Warren Beatty Appears in Bizarre Dick Tracy TCM Special in Apparent Film-Rights Ploy](https://www.tvinsider.com/1081220/dick-tracy-special-tracy-zooms-in-warren-beatty-tcm/) by Dan Clarendon
* [The 1000 Deaths of Wile E. Coyote](https://thanksforlettingmeshare.substack.com/p/the-1000-deaths-of-wile-e-coyote) by T.B.D.
* [Why do good people do bad things?](https://ethics.org.au/good-people-bad-deeds/) by Daniel Effron
* [Why some people are willing to challenge behavior they see as wrong despite personal risk](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-some-people-are-willing-to-challenge-bad-behavior-despite-personal-risk) by Catherine A. Sanderson
* [WGAw Late Pay Desk](https://secure.wga.org/contracts/enforcement/get-paid-on-time/writers/contact)
* [The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/04/subjective-age-how-old-you-feel-difference/673086/) by Jennifer Senior for The Atlantic
* [Tattoo artist Yeono](https://www.10kftattoo.com/team/yeono/)
* [Craig’s Tattoo](https://www.instagram.com/p/CpEtzF6uC3L/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/) on Instagram
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Dilo Gold ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.instagram.com/marquardtam/) with help from [Chris Csont](https://twitter.com/ccsont) 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/590standard.mp3).