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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-one-with-sarah-polley).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 583 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ve got a very special guest. Sarah Polley is a writer/director whose credits include Take This Waltz, Away From Her, and Stories We Tell. She’s also the star of my very first movie, Go. Welcome to the podcast, Sarah Polley.

**Craig:** Woo!

**Sarah Polley:** Nice to see you. You look exactly the same, and it’s really eerie.

**John:** Somehow I don’t age. It’s a lot of wearing a hat I think is what does it.

**Sarah:** It’s frightening.

**Craig:** I worry that what’s going to happen is you’re going to age all at once.

**John:** That’s going to be terrifying.

**Craig:** One day we’re going to be like, “Oh, no, what happened? He’s a hundred.”

**Sarah:** I think it’s like a Death Becomes Her type scenario. Actually, this house that we’re recording this in reminds me a bit of Death Becomes Her, so it’s all coming together. Some kind of illegal potion, and Bruce Willis is somewhere.

**Craig:** Yes. We should do a deep dive on that one. I love that movie.

**Sarah:** Oh my god, that’s one of my favorite movies of all time.

**Craig:** It’s so good.

**Sarah:** I’ve seen that movie probably 30 times. There was a period in high school where we watched it every weekend. We just kept watching it.

**Craig:** It’s so good. It’s such a good movie.

**John:** Sarah Polley, I remember you from Go, obviously, because that was my first movie making experience, so it was all overwhelming. You had made a zillion things before that point. I distinctly remember there was a point in which you wrapped, and the next night we were shooting, and there’s Sarah again, and she’s sitting on the floor of this hotel room, in a scene that you’re not in at all, just watching. Do you always know that you wanted to direct? It seemed like you were studying it from the moment I saw you.

**Sarah:** That actually happened as a result of that movie in a way, because I remember meeting with Doug. I remember I was not feeling particularly ambitious as an actor. I didn’t want to make a movie in LA. I remember Doug hadn’t read the script yet. I remember he waylaid me at a hotel somewhere, was like, “Just meet with me for an hour,” before I got on a plane.

I remember him talking about his filmmaking and how he wanted to break the rules and light differently, and he operated his own camera, and rules of filmmaking that he felt were outmoded, that he was going to change. I literally had a moment in that meeting where I just went, “If I can shadow you and learn about what the hell you’re talking about right now, I’m in. I don’t particularly want to act, but I’d really like to spend my time this way.” I loved the characters.

It turned into this kind of apprenticeship where I was watching Doug working and watching you working with him. That became something I suddenly was interested in was filmmaking. Even though I’d been acting for a long time, I never thought of it as something I was interested in before that movie. Then yeah, I was watching a lot.

**John:** I want to get more into filmmaking and writing and directing, but specifically I want to talk about your new movie, Women Talking, which Craig and I both just absolutely loved.

**Sarah:** Thank you.

**John:** It’s up for all sorts of awards this season. It’s really, really good. We’ll talk about that. I also want to talk about your book, Run Towards the Danger, which is a moment in your life, but also good general life philosophy advice. I think it’s a generally applicable thing you apply to your life and your career, correct?

**Sarah:** I think that recovering from this concussion, which I had for about three and a half years, and having little success doing so, and then finally finding this amazing treatment program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where the advice I’d been given was turned on its head, so the advice to either rest in a dark room, or the best advice I got was walk and do stuff, but as soon as you start to feel symptoms, come on, go down to zero.

He shook that all up, this amazing doctor, Dr. Michael Collins, and he said, “Look, if you remember one thing from this meeting, it’s this. Run towards the danger. You’re not going to get better at handling the things that are difficult for you with a concussion by avoiding them.” There’s a bunch of very specific exercises and vestibular exercises, but basically, your main treatment is exposure therapy. The things that cause discomfort, you have to do more of. That became this paradigm shift for me that permeated every aspect of my life.

**John:** Great. We’ll talk about that in relation to life but also filmmaking and the decision to make this movie after a 10-year gap. We’ll get into all of it. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I’d love to talk about child actors, because you were a child actor. You have strong opinions about child actors. I watched your movie, and there were a bunch of child actors in it. I’m like, “Sarah, there’s a bunch of kid actors in here.” We’re going to get into that. Craig, I don’t know even what your theory is on child actors.

**Craig:** It’s fraught with danger for everyone. It’s fraught with danger for the children. It’s fraught with danger for their parents and the relationship between the parents and the children, and it’s fraught with danger for the people making the movie or the show, because you can’t help but put your production first. The panic when you’re making something and making your days and all that is just so palpable. You can easily forget that it’s a child. There are so many ways to go wrong, but I think also there are ways to go right.

**John:** We’ll dig into all of that in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members.

**Sarah:** I love the way you articulated that, by the way.

**Craig:** Thank you. We’re now best friends.

**John:** This is a whole bunch of stuff we want to talk about. We might as well start by framing it in the conversation about this movie that you’ve just made, because it was great. It’s based on a book. I’m curious how the book came to you and what the decision process was, like, “Okay, this is something I’m going to choose to adapt and choose to spend years of my life making.” Talk to us about Women Talking.

**Sarah:** I read it when it first came out. I actually heard about it first through a member of my book club. It wasn’t the book we were doing, but she took me inside into the kitchen and said, “Going to tell you the background events behind this novel. When I do that, you’re not going to want to make this into a film.” The book isn’t about that. It’s about what happens after. She told me the background, which is of course this devastating story of these series of assaults in this Mennonite colony in Bolivia. I said, “I don’t want to make that into a film.” She said, “I told you you were going to say that. Just wait.”

Then she told me what the film was about, or what the book was about, which was about this incredible meeting between these women, this incredibly rich, dynamic, challenging conversation about how to respond to these series of attacks, whether or not they’re going to stay and fight, whether they leave, whether they stay and do nothing, and this incredibly democratic process and difficult discussion that they have. Really, by the end of her talking, and I already loved Miriam Toews as an author, I was pretty intrigued. I ran and got the book.

Really the day I finished reading it, on my Twitter feed it comes up that Frances McDormand and Dede Gardner have the rights to it. I reach out through my manager, Frank Frattaroli, who’s also Fran’s manager. My email says, “Women Talking, do they have a writer and director for this?” He sends me an email he received within the hour before mine.

**John:** That’s great.

**Sarah:** It says, from Frances McDormand, “Women Talking with Sarah Polley doing these days.”

**Craig:** That never happens.

**Sarah:** It was all very thrilling.

**John:** That part felt like it was meant to be. Reading the book, did you have a sense of how you would make this into a movie? The movie has a really strange form, but did you know it was going to have that strange form from the start? For folks who haven’t seen it, it all takes place really over the course of 24 hours. It’s these conversations between these women that punctuated at different times. They break up and they get back together. We’re all seeing it through the lens of this decision. I guess 12 Angry Men would be one of the early comparisons to it. When did you know it was going to feel like that?

**Sarah:** I feel like what I was excited about was figuring out if this could be a movie or not. I won’t claim that I had a moment where I just knew this is a movie. I felt very tingly about it and very excited about the idea of what an incredible cast could do with a conversation like this.

I don’t think I would’ve embarked upon it without partners like Dede Gardner and Frances McDormand, who could help me hash it out. This was an incredibly collaborative process from the beginning, and a thrilling one, of these conversations with women that were rich and wild and bonkers. This process of figuring it out was a real process. I think what I was excited about was trying to figure out with them if this was a movie or not. I think as we worked on it more and more and I honed the drafts more and more, we realized it was.

**John:** Now, a strange thing about the movie is that there’s not a protagonist in a classic sense. There’s a group protagonist. It’s a group of people arriving at a decision and making a decision together. The storytelling decisions are all diffuse among these different people. How early on did you land on that? Were you writing scenes? What was your drafts and documents along the way that got you figuring out what stuff was going to happen, what people were saying, where stuff would fall.

**Sarah:** It’s interesting what you say about there not being a clear protagonist, because I think my first two films, Away from Her and Take This Waltz, the anchor I held onto was, I am going to make this as concretely from one person’s point of view as humanly possible and stay as close to that character as I can. I think anything I like about those films, that’s what it is, is that we never leave that person whose eyes the story is through.

Then I think when I made my documentary, Stories We Tell, things cracked open for me in a way that made me very interested in what it means to tell a story through a chorus of voices and what does that feel like and what does that look like. There was this real break for me with that form of a singular perspective. I always knew it would feel like a true ensemble. I always knew that I couldn’t lose the perspective of any one character at all, so I had to write multiple drafts from each character’s point of view, as though they were the only character in the movie, just so I could keep the thread alive, even if they weren’t active in the scene, that I was looking at the script from their point of view and really gauging how this was impacting them.

In terms of the documents along the way, the first thing I do when I’m adapting something is, after I’ve done the first read of the book, before I read it again, I write from memory what I think the key points are and the most beautiful images are from the book and that I want in the film. I’m always fascinated to go back for that second read and realize how many of those moments I’ve made up. They’re not in there. You project it on.

**John:** So much of Big Fish, I’m like, oh, I took that from the book. No, it wasn’t there, ever.

**Sarah:** No way.

**John:** There’s no circus in the book. There’s no war in the book.

**Sarah:** Wow.

**John:** It’s all creations.

**Sarah:** Were those things that you knew right away you wanted in there that you-

**John:** It was actually while we were still shooting Go, I was reading through Big Fish.

**Sarah:** Wow.

**John:** As I was flipping pages, like, “Oh, the Will character has to have someone to talk to, so I’m going to give him a wife. I think she’ll be French and her name will be Josephine.” On that first read through, you create things, you invent things.

**Sarah:** I think I’m also curious about the things that you just don’t know you’ve invented, like, “That image really spoke to me.” You realize something in your subconscious has mapped something from your life onto the book. I think that’s the really juicy stuff to explore is what’s that distance between you and the book and how are you traversing it in unconscious ways. Unpacking that material of what’s connecting you is super interesting.

**Craig:** One of the things that struck me is that it is an ensemble piece, and you are studiously, and therefore effortlessly, or appearing effortlessly, showing it from all these different perspectives. You can tell you’ve done your work, because sometimes you cut away from the person talking to somebody else, and they’re not simply listening. They are doing things. Sometimes they’re not listening, which is fantastic. Nonetheless, the drama begins to organize itself, as it almost always does, around an axis. For me, it was almost like Rooney Mara’s character was the protagonist and Jessie Buckley’s character was the antagonist. Then at some point you start to feel like, “Wait, maybe Jessie Buckley is the protagonist.”

Interestingly, I’m just curious if this was anything that you were cognizant of, a story about a group of women trying to figure out what is true and what is correct and what is the smart way to do things and changing their minds, that in a reflective way, who we in the audience are attaching ourselves to begins to change and swing back and forth in pretty dramatic ways.

**Sarah:** Yeah, absolutely. It was really interesting through the casting process how every actor I met with was really gravitating towards Salome or Ona, because they thought they were the protagonists. I was constantly saying, actually, by the end, the person this actually revolves around ultimately, and she’s not the protagonist, it is a true ensemble, but the more complex journey which I think ends up surprising you is the character Mariche, is Jessie Buckley’s character, who ends up moving towards becoming the person who leads them forward in the direction they’re going to go, which I think is a surprise. I think it is genuinely an ensemble, but I did want it to feel like we could go back and forth in perspective in terms of who we were most connected to, and to be surprised by the end by our connection to Mariche.

**Craig:** It’s pretty amazing to watch. Jessie is such a good actor. Isn’t it a shame that she’s such a bad person though? One of the nicest people.

**John:** One of the stars of Chernobyl, we should say.

**Craig:** One of the nicest people I’ve ever been on a set with, just so lovely.

**Sarah:** I’m going to be honest. They all were. I know people always talk a whole lot of bullshit about the people they worked with and how great they were. This was the most unbelievable community of human beings. They all shared a greenroom. No one had a trailer. They spent every hour together. It was a time where the Canadian women’s soccer team was doing really well. There were all these amazing videos of their team spirit, and when one of them would of them would struggle, how all of them would run and lift one of them up. I just felt like that’s what we were living. Someone would have a great moment or a monologue, and everyone could feel it when it worked. There’d be crazy applause. They’d literally be lifted up into the air.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Sarah:** It was just this sense of collective celebration of each other and connectedness and also challenging each other and pushing each other, but in very, very healthy ways.

**John:** I want to talk to you about the setting of the movie, because I don’t know how much of this came from the book as well. When you say it’s a Mennonite community in Bolivia, my natural assumption is all this should’ve been taking place in Spanish and stuff, but the actual Mennonite community that was there, that was all in German. It was all in low German.

**Sarah:** In Plautdietsch, yeah.

**John:** In Plautdietsch. It was this weird, insular kind of place. When did you know that you were going to shoot it in Canada? When did you know that you were going to do it in English? Were those just fundamental, baked in decisions from the start?

**Sarah:** Yeah. This book was written as a response to real life events in this Mennonite colony in Bolivia, but the movie takes a little bit of a step from that. While we’re happy to talk about those events, and it’s important to, the film exists more in the realm of a fable. I want it to be placeless. I wanted it to be timeless. I didn’t want people to be able to pin these issues which we’re dealing with in every patriarchal society to some degree or another on this obscure, already misunderstood community. I think it’s really important we talk about that story. For the purposes of the film, I did want it to feel we were basically nowhere.

**John:** There’s a moment at which a 1980s Census taker comes through, 1990s?

**Sarah:** 2010 but he’s playing Daydream Believer.

**John:** Making it clear that we’re not in space, we’re not in some sort of alien dimension. There is an outside world that does exist, but these characters have no connection to it. They have no relationship to it, which is so important as we’re trying to figure these things out.

They’re trying to figure it out in a vacuum, because they don’t have the benefit of having read all the other theory about stuff. As they’re trying to figure out collective action and what we do, these are not literary characters who can do these things, and yet they speak at a level of sophistication that makes it seem like they have had some greater conversations about these things, or at least through their biblical training, have had some elevated level of discourse.

**Sarah:** There is this incredible oral tradition, and especially in communities of faith, where even if there’s no literacy, there’s been an incredible amount of analysis of text and interpretation of text and of thinking about spiritual and philosophical ideas. I did play with the dialog a little bit, because in the book, it’s through August’s point of view, the male, educated narrator. The language at times is more sophisticated than what it would be. I did a lot of work of trying to put it in their mouths in a realistic way. When I started to go too far and make it too pedestrian, I started to feel uncomfortable ethically with that decision.

I had this really interesting conversation with my husband who’s a legal academic. I was like, “I don’t actually want to dumb this down, because I don’t believe that they’re not capable of these kinds of sophisticated ideas and thoughts just because they haven’t received an education. I think they’ve lived in community. They have a sense of the collective and selflessness and faith.” He just looked at me and said, “Why not put the most sophisticated language into the mouths of the most marginalized people you can think of?” These women were incredibly marginalized. There was something that felt like a radical act about that and also that there is a heightened reality to the film that I didn’t want to shy away from.

**Craig:** That comes through beautifully. In thinking about the speech patterns that you’re talking about, it was unique. Listening to them speak, you got the sense that they had been raised to be remarkably articulate. Everyone is speaking very clearly and without many apostrophes. There are not a lot of contractions. It’s very florid but also grounded, and yet some of them are better at it than others. It was interesting to watch how different characters had… For instance, Jessie Buckley, her character doesn’t quite engage on the same structured language level that Rooney Mara’s character engages on, or Claire Foy’s. There’s more structure.

I’m curious if there was a dial that you were turning back and forth in terms of the level of articulation and the level of sophistication or formality of that language, because this is such a dialog-centric piece.

**Sarah:** Absolutely. There’s a reference briefly in the film to something that’s a bigger thing in the book, which is that some of these women like Ona have had access to August’s mother, who’s had this secret schoolhouse. She has brought in some of these ideas and talked about things and had more access to somewhat of an education. There are some differences in terms of exposure amongst the women.

**Craig:** It was a really smart choice to give them that inflection. I really loved it, because it also helped me feel that they were in the center of a religious colony. They’re quoting the bible all the time. If they can’t read, this means that they have been drilled over and over in this kind of biblical instruction, which was remarkable.

Also, just to circle back to an earlier point that you and John were talking about, the fact that you don’t tell us where they are I thought was a fantastic choice, because I’m as afraid as they are when they start to contemplate, “If we leave, where do we go?” because I don’t know where they are. They talk about the city. Where? I felt as insulated as they were, which I thought was such a smart choice.

**Sarah:** Thanks.

**John:** Let’s talk about the script itself a little bit. We printed out some pages here. We’re going to have a link in the show notes to the full script so people can read what you wrote here. This draft we’re looking at is dated April 12, 2021 as the production draft, and then a whole bunch of revisions, double pink revisions on August 16, 2021. This April 12th original production draft, how much does it resemble the movie we saw?

**Sarah:** There are some really seismic changes. All of the films I’ve made thus far, excluding Stories We Tell, you would look at the script, and it’s basically the movie. This one, when they released it publicly recently, I went, “Oh, dear god.”

**John:** I want to talk about that.

**Sarah:** We made huge changes in the editing room.

**John:** Craig and I have a friend who one of his jobs is, when it comes to awards seasons, he has to take like, okay, here’s a shooting script, and here’s the actual movie, and he has to make the script match the actual movie rather than this. I loved being able to see this, because I got to see, oh, I can see why those changes were made.

**Sarah:** Interesting.

**John:** The biggest change of course is, in the draft we have here, the narration is from August’s point of view. I’m not even sure who’s narrating it. It’s a woman who’s narrating it to her unborn child. Is it Jessie Buckley’s child? Who’s narrating it?

**Sarah:** Autje, the youngest woman in the room, the teenager, is narrating it to Rooney Mara’s unborn child from the future colony.

**John:** Great. It completely works in the movie, and it could’ve worked on the page here, but it seems like you didn’t know if that was a thing that needed to happen.

**Sarah:** No. In fact, it’s funny, because I love August narrating it in the book. The narration is so beautiful. Ben Whishaw read it so beautifully.

**John:** He’s a talented actor there, yes.

**Sarah:** He killed it. He killed it.

**John:** He’s Paddington Bear.

**Sarah:** There was no way to think of it as anything but that in my mind. I chafed at some of the… This was a lauded book, and everybody loved it. Some of the criticisms were, “Why would you have a male narrator?” which I just found so boring and beside the point. Actually, it’s also about men listening and taking notes. There is such a thing as a useful presence in a room when someone knows how to be a good ally. There was something about it that just felt so one-dimensional about the criticism. I think I was also quite defensive of the idea of August as the narrator.

**John:** You’re a person who defends the writers’ room’s assistant who takes all the notes in the room. You’re defending that person.

**Sarah:** Exactly. I’m totally defending that person. I just was like, “No, this is amazing.” Again, Ben doing that narration was so beautiful. We cut the film together. The scenes were where we wanted them to be. There was some disconnect. There was some distance between us and the film. Then there was this amazing brainstorming session that we had with Dede Gardner and Frances and with Chris Donaldson. We had another editor, Roslyn Kalloo.

There was this moment where I think it was Dede who originally said, “Should we be looking at the narrator here?” Then the idea originally was maybe it’s Rooney’s character talking to her unborn child. Then I think it was Chris who said actually, “What would be amazing is if it’s the youngest person in the room, Autje,” because we had fallen in love with Kate Hallett’s performance. I’d fallen in love with her. She has a poetry about her and just a way of processing things and going through the world that’s so fresh but also sophisticated.

As an experiment, I asked Kate to send me her notes on her character when she was prepping, because I knew at her age I made these beautiful notes that no one ever saw. Sure enough, there were these beautiful notes, which provided the inspiration for me to go back and write this whole other document, which was me trying to remember what it felt like to be 16 years old, around the age I knew you, and how I saw the world, how uncompromising I was, and fierce, but also there was a sense of poetry and connectedness with my true self and how I was processing things.

I just wrote this stream of consciousness document and would have Kate send back these voice memos to us in the editing room of recording them. We didn’t necessarily know where they were even going to go. We would create sequences around them, or we would take sequences that were there and change them according to the voiceover. Suddenly, we started to find the film. Suddenly, what we started to find actually was the spirit of the book that we had lost by remaining too close to it.

**John:** That’s amazing. Let’s talk about the first page here, because you do some stuff that is so helpful to the reader, but the audience doesn’t get to see. You have this list of the women broken down by family. We see the 11 main characters of the story. We’re introduced to them here, so we can see what the connection is, because later on, you’re going to shotgun them at us, and we’re going to be in a room with all of them and have to sort ourselves out. Visually, when we see it in a movie, we can do that, because you recognize actors.

**Sarah:** Exactly.

**John:** On a page, we would have no sense of what this what. It’s going to get really confusing without this little guide map here at the start.

You also say, “VISUAL NOTE: The flashbacks of trauma will be shot at 15 frames per second and there will be a ‘roar’ over these scenes, animal and/or machine-like.” Early on, you knew that there would be moments where you have to acknowledge these things happening, but you didn’t want them to feel like the rest of the film.

**Sarah:** That’s right.

**John:** You didn’t want the audience to be sitting in them that same way.

**Sarah:** Again, the manifestation of how we created that difference ended up not being what I’ve written there. It was a sense that there would be a differentiating factor. What we ended up using was actually this very, very simple bell that Hildur Guðnadóttir brought to us, in place of my idea of this different frame rate and this roar. Actually, what it boiled down to is something extremely simple. There was some sense in which I wanted the reader to be able to imagine those things.

I think that legend is really important in terms of the characters, because when you’re reading them on paper, I find still as a reader, reading scripts, it’s just this dry document staring at you. It is hard to pull apart who is who.

**John:** The other job of these first three pages is to set up the premise. You get right to it. Right away, we know these things happened. The men are out of the village momentarily, and we have to make this decision whether we’re going to stay or go. I was surprised how little like, let’s set up the world, let’s set up everything else. Nope, you’re going to learn about the world as we’re getting into this decision making process. Is that from the book or that was you coming in to start telling the story?

**Sarah:** It’s me. Also, my first draft of this, there’s about 35 pages cut from the beginning of the film.

**John:** Wow.

**Sarah:** This was the best script note I’ve ever received, which was from Dede Gardner. My first draft had all of August’s childhood and backstory, and we got to know the world. We got to know everyone’s backstory, basically. There were some beautiful scenes from the book that I really genuinely wanted in there.

I remembered my first notes call about this script. I’m used to working with Canadians, where it’s, “Oh my god, it’s so good. I just have one little thing.” That’s not Dede Gardner or Frances McDormand. It’s like, “Okay, let’s get down to business.” The first question Dede asked was, “The beginning of the film, the first 20 to 40 pages, did you write these because you wanted to or because you felt you had to?”

**John:** Oh, wow.

**Sarah:** That was really eye-opening for me in terms of, oh, this gets to be what I want it to be, not what I feel I need to do. That for me then set the tone for every decision I made afterwards.

**Craig:** There is something interesting about a movie that is so much… Let’s say we go back in time, and you don’t cut those pages, and you do shoot that, and it is in the movie. Once they isolate themselves in the barn, that’s where they stay, mostly. We have a couple of brief excursions. If you had gone around and seen their backstories and them as children, once you got them in that barn, there is a danger that you’re like, wait, are we just stuck in the barn now? If you start in the barn and you stay in the barn, then it’s this magical space. I think you made the right choice, certainly.

**Sarah:** Thank you.

**John:** What we often talk about, you have to teach the audience how to watch your movie. What’s crucial for your audience is that they understand this is how our movie’s going to work. We’re going to be in this barn largely. We’re going to jump out of the barn at any time for different reasons. We’re going to be in this barn. Our women are going to speak this way. They’re going to speak at this heightened level that’s not quite natural. The first three to five minutes, you have the ability to teach your audience what the rules are. If you hadn’t come out of the gate like that, once we got into the barn it would’ve felt really strange and artificial.

**Sarah:** I also feel that looking back at my first two features, I would love to go back and cut 10 minutes from both of them. I think there’s too many endings to both of them. I think there’s a time somewhere in the middle that kind of lags, and the beginning of Take This Waltz doesn’t really recover, I don’t think. I think knowing that, having this 10-year gap, and going, wouldn’t it be great to create a scenario where I don’t look back in 10 years and go, “I know where that 10 minutes is.” What if I know where that 10 minutes is now?

I had this, and I said it out loud, which committed me so deeply to this, which was my first meeting with Dede and Fran, I said, “I’m not delivering a script over 95 pages, because I know I’m going to regret it, and that’s still going to be too long. I’m still going to need to cut another… ” As it turned out, I didn’t go over that, and we still cut half an hour out of the movie from our first cut.

I just felt like this film really needed to be efficient, especially because of what we’re asking from the audience. It had to be just pulled tight. I’m also just finding maybe since becoming a parent that I’m becoming really impatient with long movies. I just don’t have it in me anymore. I hit 40, and I was like, “Oh, no, it’s over 90 minutes. What am I going to do?”

**John:** Absolutely. It’s a huge commitment. Thinking back to Go, you came back for the reshoots on Go. That was my first movie, so I didn’t know better. I’m always surprised how few movies plan for reshoots and just really look at, okay, what does the movie want to be now and how do we create the scenes that actually best support that movie? People may not know that the jumping-off place where we get to each of the different three storylines, that was all reshoots, and we brought you guys back for that.

**Sarah:** Which was it? What was it?

**John:** In the back of the grocery store where you’re getting evicted and going out with Simon, and then the TV. Those scenes existed, but they were three separate scenes. We had to go back and make them into one scene so we always knew we were jumping off from the same place. On a script level we didn’t know that. On a read through level we didn’t know that. When we actually watch the movie, it’s like, oh yeah, that’s absolutely true. That’s how it has to be.

**Sarah:** That isn’t a function of you not doing your work. You literally can’t know those things until that chemical reaction emerges between all the different elements you’ve brought together. It’s not something that can always be predicted.

**John:** August as the narrator is a thing that you could not have predicted. What else changed? What could you have not predicted until you actually saw the edit and saw like, oh, that was a thing I didn’t need.

**Sarah:** We had more of August’s backstory too. August at the beginning of the film is about to kill himself. Ona comes up to him in a field and says, “No, we need you. We need you to take the minutes for a meeting.” In a way, she does that to give him a function and a purpose. That’s not in there. There are whole swaths of the conversation where any time we felt we were repeating something unnecessarily, we took out.

We took out stuff in the editing room that nobody has noticed. Where all the characters are sitting down, there’s an entire conversation that happens. Somebody comes in, they all stand up. Then they leave. We’ve taken it out. Actually, the people are completely on different ends of the room geographically. We just put in a sound effect of people standing up or something off camera. Nobody notices it. We’ve taken out 30 minutes of the movie. It’s just incredible what you can get away with.

**John:** I’d love to talk about the speeches, because this is a movie where people have to articulate their opinions. There are some long speeches. Page 54, we have a big speech from Salome. This is a thing where I see excerpted as a credit, because Claire Foy does this brilliant job with this speech, but so much of the film relies on us being able to understand what the characters are saying, but why they’re saying it and what their purpose is in trying to communicate that. When you’re writing it but also as you’re working with actors, how are you getting it to feel like it’s in the moment as they’re saying it?

**Sarah:** First of all, I felt like we had to cast this thing within an inch of its life, so I wanted to make sure the majority, the percentage of actors had a theater background, because I think there’s just a certain relationship they’re trained to have with text that was really important for what we were asking them to do in this film.

We had a lot of conversations ahead of time, a lot of family meetings and meetings between people of various relationships. We had a really full-on rehearsal process. We had a week over Zoom of just text analysis and working through the scenes that way, and then we had a week in the actual location before we started shooting. All of that was necessary, because it was really functioning in so many ways as this almost theatrical experience.

**Craig:** I’m curious, just in talking about rehearsals and looking at the cover page of the script, which, in correct fashion, documents when the different revisions took place. You were a busy, busy bee at the end of June and through most of July.

**Sarah:** I love that someone notices this. It’s so satisfying. I was. Look at these dates.

**Craig:** I’m just wondering, was this the result of rehearsals? What was going on there during that? It’s really just one solid month of work there.

**Sarah:** That was rehearsals. It was Zoom meetings. It was rehearsals. I see I have a draft on July 8th and one on July 9th and one on the 10th and one the 18th. It was finding those moments and input from actors and movements within the space and discovering things that I didn’t know.

**John:** Your Zoom rehearsals, obviously you don’t have the same sense of being in a space. When did you first put scenes on their feet? You said you were in a space to be able to do those things. I’m curious really about that main barn set, because I always assumed that it was a one-story thing and they had a ladder down for the stuff that they need that. Looking at production photos, it really was a two-story set. People were really up in that loft, and you had a crane going in there the whole time. It was a set. There was a blue screen behind everything. You had to digitally replace everything around there. That was the space you were able to be in to rehearse?

**Sarah:** Yeah. I have had this thing on every film where I’ve just driven everyone nuts. It drives line producers crazy. It drives the art department crazy. I’m like, “I need the set dressed two weeks in advance.” I need to be able to rehearse in the spaces with the actors, because what I don’t want ever is a crew to be standing around while an actor’s trying to figure something out and for there to be time pressure on that.

I also don’t want to adjust to new blocking in five seconds, because I want to be really thoughtful about how I’m moving a camera and accommodating for how an actor is choosing to move. It allows me to give the actors freedom in terms of their blocking and me time to process that and come up with an intentional way of shooting it.

**John:** A project like this, you can absolutely do it, because there is one main set you’re coming back to. There were also a lot of other, smaller things. I guess they’re not really dialog scenes. Basically, every place else that we’re hanging out during that time, they’re not big, juicy scenes between actors.j

**Sarah:** We actually had quite a few exterior days, because even though the premise of film, so much of it is in the hayloft, there are actually a lot of sequences outside. Those got to be these just visual, beautiful, meditative, poetic moments. Those days when we were out on that farm shooting, we were all so happy to bust out of that hayloft.

**John:** A question about Frances McDormand’s character. I see her in the first scene thinking, oh, she’s going to be the driving force of this movie. It’s all going to be about her. She’s actually a very small role in it. How early did you know that that was going to be a plan?

**Sarah:** It’s funny. When it wasn’t sure that Fran was even going to be in the movie, Fran talked early about wouldn’t it be awesome to get somebody amazing, like a Meryl Streep or someone you expect to be the lead in that movie, and then they just walk out, and you don’t see them again, just in terms of subverted expectations, but someone who you can map enough onto that that perspective stays alive even when they’re not there, because you have them somewhere subconsciously in the back of your mind.

There was something about Fran playing that part that I loved both for that reason but also because she can show you strength and vulnerability in an instant without moving a muscle. We needed to feel something for that character. We also needed to be intimidated by her. We need to feel a million things, and she’s there for so little time.

**John:** She’s definitely intimidating.

**Craig:** That’s something that I think you really balance gorgeously, which is a sense of empathy for everyone. Frances McDormand, when she shows up, she’s tough and she’s not interested in what they’re doing. A conventional story would have her ratting everyone out. You felt like, uh-oh, she’s trouble. By the end, you have successfully managed to instill empathy in her. She’s sad. She’s so enslaved that she can’t imagine being free.

Similarly, you do this over and over with the women who are in the hayloft, which I call barn, because I’m stupid, but in any case, where I kept being surprised with how empathetic they were to each other. Look, it’s called 12 Angry Men for a reason. If you put a bunch of men in the hayloft, they’re going to be shouting. Someone’s going to go full Pacino real fast, and then there’s going to be a lot of anger.

Particularly, I loved the way the generations were striated, that the older women would just moderate the younger women through empathy. The empathy was drawn from their religious background, that they were actually, even though this colony and their religious upbringing had led to this terrible crime, they still believed and were using it in the best possible way.

As you’re writing these speeches and as you’re writing the reaction to these speeches, how did you approach the task of making all of us feel empathetic all the time, even when for instance a character like Jessie Buckley’s is being pretty awful?

**Sarah:** I think that that process of writing and rewriting the script from each character’s point of view helped, just forcing myself to make sure I could see it clearly from everyone’s point of view.

One of the things I love about Sidney Lumet as a filmmaker is if you go back and watch all of his films, I’m not thinking specifically of 12 Angry Men although that’s in there too, but he just loves all of his characters. There’s no one that he others, which means he ended up being so ahead of his time on so many levels of these characters, not necessarily because he was the most progressive guy. I don’t know what his politics were.

If that’s your starting principle, that you will love your characters equally and force yourself to do so, and take their perspective no matter what, you’re going to be ahead of your time. Thirty years later, you’re not going to look so bad in the way you’ve represented someone that had an experience completely other than you. It’s funny, I spent a lot of the pandemic rewatching his movies, and I just took that as my operating principle is that I will love these characters equally.

**Craig:** It shows.

**John:** I want to talk about the decision to make this movie. Also, you have a 10-year gap between this movie and your last movie, and the things that happened in between. You had three kids, which is a lot of it. You also had a concussion. It looked like you were going to be knocked out of commission for who knows.

**Sarah:** Ever.

**John:** Forever. Can you tell us about the decision, like, “Okay, now I’m going to step ahead and make this movie,” and what led up to, “Oh yeah, that’s right, I’m a filmmaker. I’m going to go back and start making films.”

**Sarah:** It’s funny, because I definitely didn’t think I was going to be able to make a film again, because I couldn’t multitask anymore. I couldn’t handle bright lights or a lot of noise, couldn’t handle too many activities in a day after my concussion.

I remember when I did this treatment with Dr. Michael Collins. I’ve been told by doctors before… When I said, “Will I be able to make a film again?” they would look at me sympathetically and say, “It’s a good goal to have.” It was clear they did not think I was going to be able to. I remember my first meeting with him, saying, “Will I ever be able to make film again?” He said, “Let me put it this way. You’re not going to get better until you make a film again, because that’s part of what makes you you. That’s what you’re working towards. That’s what you’re going to have to do. You’re not going to be a hundred percent until you’ve done that impossible thing.” That was an amazing paradigm shift. That for me opened up, for the first time, “Okay, maybe I will make a film again.”

Then this came along. I’m not one of these filmmakers where I have to make a film all the time and I want to have some illustrious career. I don’t need people to tell stories about me being a filmmaker. I make things because I feel like I have to and it’s urgent. I hadn’t felt like that about anything in a really long time. I felt like that about this book and working with these people. I did feel like by the time I embarked upon it, I was way better than I had been, but through the process of making it, all of my headaches went away.

**John:** Let’s talk about the accommodations, because it sounds like you didn’t end up having to make accommodations for disability, because you were actually able to tackle what was standing physically in your way and deal with that, but there were other things that were standing in the way of women with three kids making films.

**Sarah:** Absolutely.

**John:** What were some of the things that you were able to do and your producers were able to do to make it possible for you to make this movie this way?

**Sarah:** The first thing that I said to Fran and Dede was, “I love the idea of writing this. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years, like many female filmmakers I know who have made one or two films and then have a kid and go, ‘I don’t want to disappear forever, and so I’m going to write.’ I would love to direct again, but I don’t think I can, because I don’t think I can work those hours. I want to see my kids on a daily basis. This is probably impossible, but is is possible to work way shorter hours so people get home for dinner and put their kids to bed?”

Fran took a pause and said, “Men have written the rules of this film industry, and we’re women talking, and we’re going to rewrite the rules. Let’s just make that happen. We’re going to have to fight for more money to do it and more days. It’s going to be hard, and we’ll do it.”

**John:** What are some of the changes that you made?

**Sarah:** We had 10-hour working days, which in any other industry doesn’t sound that spectacular, but in the film industry, for some reason, that’s incredible.

**Craig:** My god, what a luxury.

**Sarah:** I believe we won the 40-hour work week like a hundred years ago, but in the film industry this is revolutionary. We had a rule that if anyone ever needed a break, they could take one. If anyone needed to take a call from their kid or elderly parent or vet or if they needed to breastfeed their baby or if they needed a break from the intensity of the work, we took one.

I learned that trick from my sister Suzie, who’s a GP, who often will give patients her cellphone number and say, “You can call me anytime over the weekend or at night.” What happens is she rarely gets a call. What she does get is a much less stressed out Monday morning, because people know they could. I think that thing of like, anyone can take a break at any time, people panicked when I said that. It happened maybe once or twice. The knowledge that people could I think just created a safer, more nurturing environment that really helped us.

We had a therapist on set, because a lot of stuff I knew would come up. Some of my crew I knew had come from histories of abuse and from backgrounds actually unfortunately like the women in the film. She was available for harder days if people needed and always accessible by phone. We just tried to build in the presence of care as a basic principle of the working environment, which leads us to the conversation about kids, where for me the basic operating principle with the kids was, “If you’re not having fun, if you’re even a bit bored, you can leave. When we do have you here, we’re basically just going to play. We’ll follow you around and have fun together. If you’re not having fun, you don’t have to stay. We’ll work around that.”

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** That sounds like somebody who did in fact work as an actor as a child. There is something nice about being able to retroactively fix some of the crimes of the past. We’ll get into that in our bonus episode.

**Sarah:** I was going to say, I don’t want to give away anything from the bonus people. I’ll keep my trauma to myself for the bonus people.

**Craig:** You’re costing us eights or nines of dollars.

**John:** Talk to us about the plan for making the movie announced to releasing the movie. Did you know it was United Artists from the start? Did it sell at a festival? I don’t even know what the history of this was.

**Sarah:** This is interesting. I originally was going to write it. Dede and Fran had basically raised the money for us to make it with somebody who was going to pay for me to write the script and ultimately make the film or finance the film. There was just a moment early on where I just felt like, not so much in his interactions with me, but just… A couple emails went by with Dede and Fran where I went, “You know what? How about I write this on spec, and then let’s figure out who our partner is?” because already there were caps on budget and all of these things, where it’s like, we don’t have any of this information yet.

I wrote it on spec. Then Dede had a deal at MGM. This was her picture at MGM that year. It both created this incredibly liberating space in which to make the film, but also our partners there at the time were Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy, who just absolutely understood the film, believed in Dede and Fran, believed in me. It was this utopian studio experience, the likes of which I am certain I will never have again.

**John:** This is MGM when it was functioning. It feels like a Fox Searchlight movie. It feels like a specialty film thing, so they could see it as, oh, this is a thing we could release theatrically, and they had a plan for it. This is all pre-pandemic, right, when this is being set up?

**Sarah:** Yeah.

**John:** Then a pandemic happens, and everything gets pushed.

**Sarah:** We delayed for a year, and then we went back to it.

**Craig:** It’s Orion. It was so lovely to see the Orion [crosstalk 00:46:23]. It was like, ah, I’m back.

**Sarah:** Awesome, yes, but when we were cutting, we were using the old Orion logo.

**John:** The original one is so beautiful.

**Sarah:** I loved it so much.

**Craig:** I know. What happened?

**Sarah:** I was so sad to see it go.

**Craig:** Do they not own it anymore?

**Sarah:** They do. I think that they were revisiting what Orion was and meant, and they wanted it to be more indicative of that, which I actually think makes sense. Now that I’ve lived with it a bit longer, I’m like, okay. I was having a very eh reaction to it.

**John:** I associate Orion with Robocop. There’s a certain kind of movies. I just loved seeing that Orion logo. It’s so good.

**Craig:** It’s so great, just circling stars.

**Sarah:** [Crosstalk 00:46:58].

**Craig:** It makes me happy.

**John:** We have a listener question I think is actually perfect for Sarah Polley. Megana, you want to read it for us?

**Megana:** JM asks, “I’m a novelist, but I recently wrote my first screenplay, submitted it to Austin, made the second round, went to the festival, without really any idea of why I was there. However, at the WGA party, I met an indie director and producer who were looking for exactly what I had, and now they want to make a film. They had a feature film in the festival in the same genre as mine, and we even are from the same part of Canada, so we’ve met up here too.

“This will be a union job in Canada. I’m a dual citizen, but not a member of the WGA or the WGC. I’m waiting for the option now, but the director did tell me he wants to proceed and he’s putting it all together. I’ve had a literary agent since 2009, but I left him last fall, as we’d run our course, and I have a new novel I’m shopping around to agents now, so I’m also agent-less. Basically, I have no clue how this all works or what I should be doing. Please help.”

**John:** This Canadian novelist screenwriter seems to be in a pretty good spot. It’s just looking for an agent or somebody to help out making the deal. Sarah, what’s your first instinct?

**Sarah:** My first instinct is to get the agent thing sorted out. I do think it’s a dangerous thing to be at this stage with an agent. I think people can really undervalue having that protection and that wisdom around a process. It does feel like if someone’s trying to make your thing, it seems like a perfect time to be doing some very real research about who the good agents would be to approach. You would know more about this question than [crosstalk 00:48:34].

**John:** I’m curious whether you think this person needs a Canadian agent manager person or would a Los Angeles person be okay?

**Sarah:** I think either would be okay. I think it’s about the connection. I would meet with both and figure out who you feel most connected to and safest with. Margaret Atwood always says this thing, because sometimes she’s waited for people like me for years and years to make their thing when she’s had other options. She always says go with the one who loves you. Whether that person has more or less status doesn’t matter. Go with the one who loves you.

**John:** Craig, what are you thinking? Does this person need an agent? Would a lawyer be okay for this point? What do you want JM to be asking for?

**Craig:** I agree with Sarah. I think an agent is extremely important. There’s always one little moment of these questions that makes me go (gasps). The (gasps) moment of this one was, “The director did tell me he wants to proceed, and he’s putting it all together.” I’m like, what about you, JM? You’re the one who’s writing it. I get nervous when someone’s like, “Don’t you worry. I got this.” Someone has to be advocating for you. You as a writer will never have more leverage than the moments right before you sign away the rights to a thing you wrote.

**Sarah:** You don’t do that without an agent, because actually, I just have a friend in a situation, worked on an idea for years, and the series is going ahead right now without his name on it anywhere. Get your agent.

**Craig:** These things happen. I’m not sure how the WGC functions in terms of credit and all the rest. It’s a different situation because Canada does have [inaudible 00:50:14], and they don’t have work for hire the same way that we do. There are also other limitations to being in the WGC. I’m not sure there’s much in the way of residuals there, the way there are for the WGA. There are all these questions. The agent will then get a lawyer on board. The lawyer can handle a lot of the details. Somebody needs to be advocating for you. This is the most pro-Canadian thing I can say, as somebody that just lived there for a year and a half. Polite people get chewed up all the time.

**Sarah:** Yeah, a hundred percent.

**Craig:** Canadians are beautifully and wonderfully polite. Your natural instinct may be to accommodate and bend and compromise. That’s why you need a jerk who’s American to advocate for you.

**Sarah:** I could not agree with this statement more. I’ve learned this the hard way over and over and over again. The other thing I would say that I’ve learned far too recently is that clear is kind. I’ve done a lot in my life of being nice and accommodating and all those things. People in a professional environment, clarity is the most kind thing you can do for yourself and for others. It’s underrated in my country.

**Craig:** Right on.

**John:** Sarah, can you talk to us about the state of Canadian filmmaking? It’s a lot to be throwing at you, but is this film a Canadian film or an American film?

**Sarah:** It’s an American film.

**John:** It’s an American film?

**Sarah:** It’s my first American film.

**John:** Your first American film.

**Craig:** Where did you shoot it, Sarah, just out of curiosity?

**Sarah:** In Canada, so mostly Canadian crew and lots of Canadian cast. Just outside of Toronto.

**Craig:** In Toronto.

**Sarah:** Just outside of Toronto, but American finance.

**John:** Talk to us about the differences between Native Canadian films and American films. Do people try to go back and forth and do both? We have listeners in Canada right now. I’m really asking on their behalf. Should they be focused on trying to make a Canadian film or trying to get someone in the US to try to make their thing? What is your instinct? There’s so much talent in Canada.

**Sarah:** I’m a little bit out of touch with the Canadian system, because I haven’t made a film there for 10 years. I obviously live there and I have lots of friends who are going through it all the time. I think you look for the people with whom you can make your film the most authentic to what you want that film to be. You don’t go for the shiny apple where you have this whisper of huge mistrust, but you know they can get a big platform for it. I think you go with the people who help you make the film the most you want to make it.

In my experience, that’s been more in Canada, because there have been some protections, when you get public money for a film, around your creative vision. However, I will say more and more I hear that it is just part of the process now in Canada that you test screen everything. Nobody’s immune to that. With this film at MGM, with a bigger budget than I’ve ever worked with, I did not have to test screen it.

**Craig:** Oh, joy.

**Sarah:** I would say I had not just creative freedom on this, but enormous help from people, where I wasn’t afraid of their notes. I was excited for their notes. It was an idyllic process. I don’t know if it’s as much Canadian versus American as the specific people you can find to make your film with.

**John:** It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Sarah, you said you had two cool things to share with us. Let’s get you started here.

**Craig:** Overachiever.

**Sarah:** I love the novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I’ve read it over and over and over again. I think it had a huge impact on my approach to this film, just in terms of the love and the kindness in it.

**John:** I know nothing about this book.

**Sarah:** Oh my god.

**John:** Now I’m excited, because it’s new to me.

**Sarah:** It’s so beautiful.

**John:** Everyone else may know what it is, but I don’t know, so pitch me.

**Sarah:** It’s written in the form of a letter. This older man who’s a preacher, and he’s writing a letter to his seven-year-old son. He’s dying. It’s about his father and grandfather in the Civil War. It’s about him. It’s about spirituality. It’s about his love of his son. Every sentence is stunning. It gives you some faith in human beings. There was a moment where I just felt I was reading all these great novels, but I just wanted to read about a good person who I might like to be. It’s the most stunningly beautiful book. Whether you’re religious or not, it’s stunning.

I think that a film that I’ve not seen get the attention it deserves this year is Till. I think it’s an incredible film. For me, it’s the best performance of the year, with Danielle Deadwyler. Chinonye Chukwu just is a masterful director. I just recommend everyone go see that movie. Don’t be afraid to go see it. I think people are really afraid. She really protects her audience. She’s very conscious of making it a really fruitful, rich experience to watch it and not a damaging one. I just recommend everybody go see it.

**John:** Protecting your audience feels like that was also a goal in your approach to filmmaking, especially for this movie, because it could’ve been harrowing and terrifying and gruesome, and that’s not what your movie’s about.

**Sarah:** That’s right. We never showed the assaults. We don’t go deeply into that. What we go into is the recovery and the healing and the conversation.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is something that could be a How Would This be a Movie. It could be for that segment that we often do. It’s this article I read this week by David Epstein. It is about this 39-year-old Iowa mother named Jill Viles. She knows she has some form of muscular dystrophy. Her arms and her legs are wasting away. Her torso is normal proportions, but everything else is wasting away and she ends up having to use a scooter.

When she goes to college, even though she wasn’t a biology major, she spends all of her time in the library just researching different things like, “What is it that I could possibly have?” She comes across this syndrome that she thinks maybe she has and maybe her father has in slightly different manifestations.

Where the author, Epstein, gets involved is, she reaches out to him to say, “I think there is this famous athlete, this Priscilla Lopes-Schliep, who is a Canadian sprinter. I think she has the same thing, but slightly different. I think she has the opposite, where her muscles are over-developed in ways that are interesting.” Through Epstein’s help, she’s able to get genetic testing and all of it. It turns out, yes, they basically discovered this one genetic mutation anomaly that is the cause of both of their situations. It’s a good, long read. It’s in ProPublica, but just a fascinating story.

**Sarah:** Wow.

**John:** It is movie fodder. Allison Williams is apparently already developing it, because she’d be perfect for it. It’s so inspiring to see somebody who says, “Listen, I know I’m not the person who’s supposed to be able to figure this out, but I want to figure this out,” and she just does it.

**Sarah:** Amazing.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** It reminds me of Lorenzo’s Oil.

**Sarah:** Sounds incredible.

**John:** It’s another relationship to it. Craig, what you got?

**Craig:** I feel like we’ve just overdosed on inspiration, so let me bring things down a bit.

**Sarah:** Good for you.

**Craig:** The most mundane possible One Cool Thing. Bo Shim, who used to be my assistant and is now a writer, got me a holiday gift that I am so in love with. I take it everywhere. I’m the worst person to get gifts for, because either I just don’t need a lot of things, and if I do want something, I just buy it. I don’t believe in waiting, because life’s too short. Get the thing you want. She got me this thing. It’s the Mophie 3-in-1 travel charger. It’s like a trifold wallet that you fold back up again. In one part there’s a little tray for your air buds.

**John:** AirPods.

**Craig:** AirPods, not air buds, because I’m stupid. Then there’s a bit for your phone. Then there’s a bit for your Apple watch. It’s incredibly compact and so useful around travel time, because I used to have to fight over who had their watch charger. It’s all said and done.

**Sarah:** I like that.

**Craig:** It just wraps right back up. It’s not expensive. I don’t mean to say that Bo’s cheap. I’m just saying, folks at home, you can buy this. In fact, I’m going to tell you how much it is right now.

**Sarah:** I like this idea a lot, because I’m not a very organized person, unlike John August, whose house I’m in right now, and is terrifying. It’s Sleeping with the Enemy in here.

**Craig:** For sure.

**Sarah:** Everything has been thought of. It’s absolutely terrifying, but these are my aspirations, and so I would like that.

**Craig:** Every room in John’s house is a killing floor. No question.

**John:** There’s a drain in the side, straight down.

**Craig:** Every single room.

**Sarah:** When you open the drawers, everything’s perfect. You know how terrifying that was in that movie?

**Craig:** I want to amend my statement. This was expensive.

**John:** I’m looking at it. It’s $150, Craig.

**Sarah:** You jerk.

**Craig:** It’s $150.

**Sarah:** You got us all excited.

**Craig:** Now I feel terrible but not super terrible, because honestly, it really is great. Sarah Polley, I do believe that if you are looking to slightly upgrade your life organization, pick this thing up.

**John:** I like it. Craig, I was thinking what an air bud charger would be. I think it’s when you plug in your dog. You plug in your dog, air bud, and so he can catch the footballs.

**Craig:** You insert it gently into your dog.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Gross.

**John:** That’s our show for the week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli as always.

**Craig:** Yay! What what.

**John:** Outro this week is by Timothy Lenko. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, sometimes I’m still around Twitter. Are you still on Twitter, Sarah?

**Sarah:** I’m on Twitter.

**John:** You and I DM’ed on Twitter once. Craig’s gone though, so don’t talk to him.

**Sarah:** Are you gone for moral and ethical reasons?

**Craig:** I am gone for moral and ethical reasons, yes.

**Sarah:** Wow. Should I be thinking about this? Is this what’s happening?

**Craig:** I am a fairly low bar, so yeah, I think so.

**Sarah:** [inaudible 01:00:09].

**John:** I’m also on Mastodon and the other things, so I have my backup plans.

**Sarah:** Where am I going? Mastodon, is that where I’m going?

**John:** Yeah, probably Mastodon.

**Craig:** [Crosstalk 01:00:18].

**Sarah:** It’s so complicated.

**John:** I’m also on Instagram. Instagram’s easy.

**Craig:** It’s so complicated. It’s so annoying that Twitter got ruined. Not like it was just a paragon of loveliness. Still.

**John:** People 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’ll put a link in the show notes to the script for Women Talking, so you can see where it was before it became the movie. If you want to watch the movie though, is it on Amazon at this point? Where can people see it?

**Sarah:** It’s in theaters only right now.

**John:** Theaters only right now. Go to your theater and see the film on a big screen. 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 child actors. Sarah Polley, it’s so amazing to see you again.

**Craig:** It was lovely talking with you, Sarah.

**Sarah:** Thank you so much for having me. I loved being here. I love the show. I listen to it all the time.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Sarah Polley, you were a child actor. You were in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Sweet Hereafter, which I think is the movie right before Go, the bus crash movie. It’s like, “Oh yeah, that girl from the bus crash, she should play a checkout clerk who’s trying to make a drug deal.” You’ve written to and about Terry Gilliam and your experience on Baron Munchausen. What’s the synopsis of that? Basically, it was traumatic in a way that you felt like hadn’t been acknowledged? What was your feeling about being a child actor?

**Sarah:** In general, my feeling about being a child actor is that it’s not a good experience and that it’s also really hard to untangle what a child’s really feeling from what the expectations are of them, by either their parents or other adults in the room. It’s really hard to get the truth out of a kid who feels the pressure of adults.

In general, I think that film sets are generally populated with people who are not trained or particularly interested in the well-being of children. Craig very eloquently put it, the production is always going to come first. When you put the panic, emergency room mentality around something, a kid’s well-being is going to be forgotten, no matter how conscious you are of it.

I had particularly traumatic experiences, for sure. They were on the extreme end, which led to a whole interaction with Terry Gilliam later when he was about to cast another child actor. I reached out to him to explain how difficult my experiences had been on that set, which I felt very, very unsafe. I felt that things had been very dangerous, scared for my life at times. Again, it was extreme, but I’ve seen child actors with less extreme in terms of the tangible, physical danger experiences, and still, I don’t buy it.

There was a really concrete example of what Craig was talking about on my set, because I had this horror of, I can’t make this religious community that’s doing this whole thing to basically fight for the future generation and build a new world without ever showing children.

**John:** That’s crucial.

**Sarah:** That’s exactly what these women are fighting for. I did a couple things. One was, yes, the kids are going to run around and play. We’re just going to follow them with the camera. I’m going to make an announcement every single day, they can leave whenever they want. It’s no problem.

My kids couldn’t visit set, because of COVID, unless they were gainfully employed by the production. My oldest has always wanted to be an actor, because every button gets pushed by your children. There was this advocating that happened for my kids going, “We’re coming to set. It’s the only way we get to see you at work. You’ve never been working like this since we were born. We’re coming to watch you work, and we’re going to be background performers, and we’re really excited about it.”

My kid’s there. It’s my seven-year-old’s birthday. Of course, it’s a giant crane shot and a drone shot at magic hour. As the crane comes into my seven-year-old’s face, my kids keep looking at the camera and flaring their nostrils. It’s this giant crane shot. Literally, we have five minutes to get the shot. We’re just coming in, and they’re like, “Ha ha, let’s screw up mama’s shot again.” They thought it was so funny.

I literally had this moment where I empathized with every filmmaker who [inaudible 01:04:40] for granted as a child actor, which is why kids shouldn’t be on set, because even me, with my past and my trauma and my own children, I had a hundred people standing around panicking, and this kid was potentially between us and getting the shot, and this is why children should never be on sets. I just proved my own point.

**Craig:** It’s true. It’s true. I had a really interesting, I guess I could call it a revelation or good learning experience, making The Last of Us, because we cast an actor who, I believe he was eight or nine. He’s deaf. The thing about casting a kid who’s deaf is nobody questions how much support is required. His mom is there, but also, he’s got an interpreter, and he’s got a coach, one of whom is deaf and obviously communicates with him through ASL. Then the translator, or the interpreter rather, is helping us back and forth. There’s all this support around this kid.

Then I thought, wait, shouldn’t be there all of this even if you’re not deaf? Any kid being on set should be carefully bubble wrapped. Schedules should presume that the kid is not going to be able to nail the crane shot the first three or four times.

**Sarah:** There you go.

**Craig:** What ends up happening when you’re panicked and running out of money and you’ve got this studio gun to your head, whatever it is that is all of our madness while we’re making these things, is children become these annoying obstacles. They can’t work as many hours. Oh, we get to send him to lunch. Oh, he gets a break. Oh, he has to go to class. School they call it, fake school in the trailer, whatever it is. You’re like, “Ugh.” Now you’re angry.

I’ve been angry at babies. I got angry at a baby once, not to its face. I didn’t yell at the baby. Obviously, I’m in the tent by a monitor. I’m like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe this baby. We don’t have another 20 minutes with the baby?” They’re like, “It’s a baby.”

**Sarah:** I literally had this moment a couple of times on my set, where I was like, “Oh my god, we’re bringing the kids again. Oh my god, bringing the kids again. Oh my god.” I remember the parents all coming up to me and going, “No, we’re okay.” I’m like, “I can’t, because I actually literally wrote this rule.”

**Craig:** I know. I know.

**Sarah:** I wrote this rule in the ACTRA, in the Canadian actors union. I’m not breaking it. I promise.

**Craig:** At that moment you were like, “It was really more of a guideline and not so much a rule.”

**Sarah:** Exactly.

**Craig:** “Got to make my day.”

**Sarah:** Here’s the other thing that should be presumed. The other thing that should be presumed, whether it’s true or not, and a lot of the time this isn’t true but it should be presumed just in case, is that the parents don’t have the kids’ best interest at heart.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Sarah:** That’s a really hard thing to presume, because you always go, “If the parent’s okay. It’s their department.” We have no idea. Whatever face that parent is presenting to us, whatever face the kid is presenting to us, we have no idea what the pressures look like at home. I’ve seen those be two very different things in my own experience of other kid actors I was working with. I would see one face that the parent presented on set and another one that I would see in private moments with the kid. There has to be a third party that is not paid for by either the production or the parent who makes calls that will sometimes fly in the face of what both the production and the parents say is okay.

**Craig:** I think that’s so true.

**Sarah:** I think that person has to be there. I also think kids can’t sign long contracts for series. I’m sorry. There should be a limit on how much a kid could work in a year, maybe one project, maybe two projects a year. I don’t know. I think there have to be some really serious things in place to allow for the fact that as a society we have decided children should not work, but we’ve made this exception for this Wild West of an industry that’s probably the last place that should be given this exception.

**Craig:** You’re on to something there.

**John:** First movie I directed, Elle Fanning was the star of it. Small role, but she was fantastic. She was Elle Fanning before she was Elle Fanning. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, you’re great. I’m going to write additional scenes for you.” We’re shooting exterior. It’s Ryan Reynolds, Melissa McCarthy, and Elle Fanning. We’re setting up these shots. Elle Fanning can only work a certain number of hours.

The AD goes, “Oh, and this is her stand-in.” The stand-in is some other kid. I’m just like, “Wait. First of all, this kid’s really annoying.” I didn’t like this kid. Also, what is this kid getting out of it at all? This kid is not going to show up on camera. This kid is not acting. This kid is just there just to occupy space and is just working.

**Sarah:** They’re not being treated particularly well. Those kid stand-ins get treated badly.

**John:** The kid was annoying. I said, “I never want to see that kid again.”

**Craig:** Did they murder the kid?

**John:** Yes, they did. “Get her out of my sight.”

**Sarah:** “Take her away.”

**John:** Also, I don’t ever want a kid stand-in. I want to find some other way to do this, whether it’s a little person or some other situation where we can just find a person to do that role. That kid could not get anything out of it.

**Sarah:** No, because they’re not even getting the fun, whatever, toxic coddling that can feel good in the moment.

**John:** Absolutely, as opposed to Elle Fanning, who was clearly a superstar in those little moments I saw her. She’s giant and can do all these impersonations. She was having the time of her life. This other kid was there because her mom wanted her to be there.

**Craig:** John, what if that kid is a fan of Scriptnotes? They’ve grown up. They listen to Scriptnotes every week.

**Sarah:** [crosstalk 01:10:04].

**John:** This whole time.

**Craig:** They’re like, “Apparently, I was annoying.”

**John:** I just ruined things [crosstalk 01:10:09]. The other thing I want to point people to is the second season of Nathan For You is about this experiment where Nathan puts together this house to figure out what it’d be like to have a kid. This woman wants to know what it’d be like to have a kid. They hire a bunch of child actors to be this woman’s kid.

**Sarah:** That’s really funny.

**John:** They go through all this stuff. Later on in the season, it becomes clear, oh, some of these child actors have really enjoyed it and enjoyed being part of the family and this relationship and what is responsibility to child actors. Like all Nathan For You, it doesn’t answer the question at all. It just makes you really uncomfortable about it. It was a good exploration of what it feels like to be using children to be doing this emotional labor.

**Sarah:** The other thing about it is it’s this toxic combination of coddling and neglect. You have on the one hand, everyone’s going to laugh at that kid’s jokes, everyone’s going to tell them how great they are. Everyone’s going to lie to them if they’re behaving horribly and laugh it off. There’s no boundaries on behavior really. No one actually deeply cares about that kid’s well-being beyond what their purpose is on that set. There may be one or two angels that come out of the woodwork. In my case, there were. The kid’s experience is not the priority on that set. It’s getting the day. It’s a terrible thing it does to one’s head of both this superficial ego boost and the sense that nobody cares about me really.

**Craig:** Then on the other side of things, there’s the more modern problem. I know Bella Ramsey’s been talking about this. When she started with us, she was 17, so there was still a K on her number. Then she turned 18 fairly early on. When she started shooting with us, she was still not a legal adult. Then you come out on the other side of shooting, and hopefully everything’s gone well and you’re treated well. In our case, we were also very lucky, because her mom was there, and she was fantastic. Everything’s wonderful. Then the internet has to talk about your face and your body and your this and your that and your hair and your eyes and everything and take you apart.

**Sarah:** It’s a whole other dynamic now.

**Craig:** This is difficult for adults, difficult, borderline impossible for adults to handle. For a child, it’s terrifying to think, I want to really tell this story and I want to make a TV show but am I damaging someone. We talked about it a lot. We still talk about it a lot. It’s a scary thing. It’s something that’s made I think being a child actor even harder than it used to be.

**John:** Sarah, you are a parent of a kid who wants to be an actor.

**Sarah:** I am.

**John:** Let’s say you’re a listener whose kid wants to be an actor. At what age do you think you might allow a kid to start, it’s like, “Okay, you can start doing this.” When do you think that maturity might be a thing where you feel like they have some agency in the situation?

**Sarah:** It’s so fun, because I’ve always had to talk about this in the abstract, and now I can talk about it for real as a parent of a kid who really wants to go into it, to the point where I have almost weakened. It’s so desperate, this need and want.

The first thing I would say is we have loaded my oldest kid up with after-school theater programs, weekend improv classes, to get that creative stuff going, because that’s legitimate. Wanting to create things shouldn’t be held back, but in an environment that is designed to be nurturing and exciting and educational. We’ve done a lot of that. We’ve talked about 16 as the age where we can start talking about it if they still have this intense desire to do it professionally. I still think that’s young, but we’re willing to talk about it.

I had a hilarious experience recently. My brother’s a casting director, and he was casting this film with child actors. My oldest was being babysat at the time, last-minute thing. I had to drop off my kid. He was doing these Zoom auditions. My oldest was like, “Just get me on.” My kid goes on, gets the part.

**Craig:** Love it.

**Sarah:** I watched then. I get there. I watched for the rest of the Zoom calls, hidden, and go, “Okay, this woman has cracked the code of how to deal with child actors.” I saw her subvert horrible stage parents who I have worked with and make it a good experience for those kids. This woman was a genius, clearly. Then at the end, I talked to the woman, and she’s like, “I just read your book. It’s becoming part of our model for how we’re going to treat child actors.”

I’m like, “Okay, it’s only four days. I’m free for these four days.” I was like, “Eve, if you’re willing to put up with me being the most obnoxious on-set parent where I’m literally shutting down that production, pulling the lights at the slightest discomfort for anyone.” Eve was like, “Yeah, I’ll deal with that.” We’re about to do it. Eve reads the script. It was a great script based on a great novel, but Eve was like, “This is about a kid with a disability, and I don’t trust that your generation of filmmakers is going to get how to do this in a way that’s not sensitive. There isn’t someone with a disability making this film. I can’t be part of it.” Eve passed.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Sarah:** Eve passed. Eve passed.

**John:** That’s totally Sarah Polley.

**Sarah:** Just like their mom. Just like their mother. All I really wanted to ever do was pass. I never really wanted to work as an actor. I just liked passing on stuff. It was my favorite.

**John:** You passed on Go a bit too.

**Sarah:** I passed on Go. I passed on everything. It was the best part.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** I remember one person had to fly you up and walk you through immigration in Canada to get you here to Los Angeles.

**Sarah:** I know, because I bailed at the last second, because customs was a tricky, and I was like, “You know what? I didn’t really want to do this anyway.”

**Craig:** I love that.

**Sarah:** “Forget it.” Chuck Schumer got involved. It was a whole thing. With Eve, they wanted to do this so badly, and they passed. Now, I don’t know where we are, because I finally caved on this that was so intense for me.

**Craig:** Maybe that’s all they needed was just permission.

**Sarah:** I wonder if it was also like they saw this thing was on the others in terms of me having this red line around something and went, “We’re just going to get rid of that and then we can move on.”

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** On Episode 2000 of Scriptnotes, they’ll come on this show, and we’ll talk to them about what it was like growing up with a director parent and why they are now the filmmaker they are today.

**Craig:** Yes, when their book, I Hate You, Mom, comes out, it’ll be great. We can go through it and really dig in to what happened.

**John:** Sarah Polley, such an amazing pleasure.

**Craig:** Thank you, Sarah.

**Sarah:** This was so fun. This is the middle of a crazy, soul-crushing part of the process of putting the film out, and this was by far the highlight.

**John:** Yay.

**Sarah:** Thank you for the very awesome conversation, you guys.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**Sarah:** This was amazing.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thanks.

**Sarah:** Thank you.

**John:** I’ll see you later, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks. Bye.

**Sarah:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Sarah Polley on IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001631/) and on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/realsarahpolley/)
* [Women Talking](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13669038/) film and [novel](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/562880/women-talking-by-miriam-toews/9780735273979) by Miriam Toews
* [Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory By Sarah Polley](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/688129/run-towards-the-danger-by-sarah-polley/)
* [Find the Women Talking Script by Sarah Polley here](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Women-Talking-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf)
* [The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene by David Epstein](https://www.propublica.org/article/muscular-dystrophy-patient-olympic-medalist-same-genetic-mutation) for ProPublica
* [Mophie 3-in-1 Charger with MagSafe](https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HPTA2ZM/A/mophie-3-in-1-travel-charger-with-magsafe?)
* [Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson](https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/marilynne-robinson)
* [Till](https://www.mgm.com/movies/till) film
* [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://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Timothy Lenko ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/583standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/any-given-wednesday).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 578 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Often when we have guests on the show, I am meeting them for the first time right before we start recording. My guests today I’ve known for almost 30 years, which is impossible, Al Gough and Miles Millar, the writer/producers known for Smallville, Shanghai Noon, Into the Badlands, and a zillion other movies and TV series. Their latest is the Netflix hit series Wednesday. Welcome Al and Miles.

**Al Gough:** Good to see you.

**Miles Millar:** Absolutely. Great.

**John:** We actually went to film school together a thousand years ago.

**Al:** Yes, we did, 1992.

**John:** 1992. I want to get into a little bit of that. Maybe in our Bonus Segment, let’s talk about film schools, because Craig hates film schools. It was actually incredibly important for the three of us. I think we can get the other side of film school and whether we would do it again.

**Miles:** I think the answer for all of us is yes.

**John:** I think it would be yes, but I might do it differently this time. We’ll see when we get into that. That’ll be our Bonus Segment. For you guys right now, I really want to start by contrasting… I remember as your whole career began. Usually, this would be the point where I would ask you to do an origin story. Let me see if I can give the origin story, Al and Miles, see how much I get right and what stuff I get wrong. Al Gough, before you came out for film school, you were working some place in the East Coast. You went to Washington University?

**Al:** No, I went to Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

**John:** Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Something like that. You came out to Stark with the intention of becoming a producer.

**Al:** Correct.

**John:** Miles Millar, you came from the UK. You had been working in London before that?

**Miles:** Yep.

**John:** You came into the program, the Stark Program at USC, with the intention of being a producer, or did you also know you were going to write?

**Miles:** I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was my excuse to get to America. That was really the reason. I loved the idea of film. I’d been obsessed with film my whole life. That was my dream. I didn’t really know how to navigate Hollywood. The program felt like a grab bag of you figure it out.

**John:** That’s honestly very close to my experience there too. I knew I could write in a general sense, but I had no sense of how Hollywood worked. It was my introduction to everything. We should explain to people listening what 1992 was like. It was pre-internet, basically.

**Al:** It was pre-internet. Also, we say the party was over, but the after-party was starting. Corporations buying movie studios was just becoming a thing. I think Sony had bought Columbia. I think at that point, Matsushita had bought Universal.

**Miles:** Turner had bought-

**Al:** Not yet. That wasn’t until ’94.

**Miles:** It was a gold rush era.

**Al:** It was a gold rush era.

**Miles:** It was incredible.

**John:** It’s important for how we all came up and rose into it, because it was definitely a period of great expansion that we were coming into it. You guys met in our very small film program. Only 25 students per year in that group. How quickly did you hit it off as friends and then did you start thinking about writing together? That’s where I’m not quite clear, because it was in that first year you must’ve started writing together.

**Al:** We were friends almost… I think we met the second day of film school.

**Miles:** Yeah, we had that cocktail party. USC film school had this bizarre, brutalist architecture. It had this garden well, where there was a bad cocktail party we had for students.

**John:** It was a kegger really.

**Miles:** Exactly right.

**Al:** A kegger, yeah.

**Miles:** We met there. At the end, I gave Al my phone number. I’m terrible. I’m the worst with numbers.

**Al:** Terrible.

**Miles:** I gave him the wrong number, so he couldn’t get in touch with me. A few days later, he said, “I tried to reach you.” I was like, “Oh, whoops.” We did hit it off immediately.

**Al:** Miles is terrible with numbers still.

**Miles:** I have to copy his-

**Al:** I do the WGA dues, and then I take a picture of it and send it to him.

**Miles:** I’m always [crosstalk 00:03:44].

**John:** You guys eventually hit it off. In our first year of Stark, we were writing scenes. We had a class taught by Bobette Buster. We were writing scenes for that, and we were writing individual scenes. You guys were separately trying to work on some stuff together?

**Al:** No, because remember, she partnered us up.

**John:** Did you?

**Al:** I think we all did an outline and 30 pages.

**Miles:** It was the outline and the first act of a screenplay. You had to partner up with someone. I love this story, by the way, because we had to partner up. I partner with Al. My story was the worst story. It was a very commercial idea, but found out later on it was the worst story as a professional writer, which was a story about a cop and an orangutan, because they were buddies, called Mango. Al lost faith in me pretty quickly and tried to bail. Luckily for us, the head of the program, Larry Turman, who is the producer of The Graduate, told him he couldn’t do it, that he couldn’t bail on me, and so he was forced to work with me. Lucky he did, because…

**Al:** Then that led to Mango, led to the first sale.

**John:** What was crucial to understand about this origin story is that you guys wrote this project together. You had the initial idea, but you end up working on it as a team. In our second year of Stark, you end up selling this spec script for a lot of money.

**Al:** That’s another thing too, which we tell young writers. Again, it was a different era. Where now we’re in the era of IP and everything, there it was literally the era of spec scripts. It was Shane Black and Joe Eszterhas and all of that.

**Miles:** Every day you’d go to Variety and you’d read five scripts sold for a lot of money, and they were high-concept stories, and first-timers breaking in every day. It really was this gold rush mentality of you just needed to get the story out, and people would buy the idea. It was really amazing, all of us, the three of us to launch at that point as writers, because it allowed us… We always talk about the [inaudible 00:05:36] to learn how to write. Without that sale, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. It was all about the gift of that era.

**John:** As we all know, Mango got an immediate green light and went on to make $200 million. It was a giant hit that made your whole career. No, Mango did not get made, and yet it did start your career. Let’s talk through that, because going from a sale, which doesn’t really happen so much… A spec sale of a script doesn’t happen that often anymore. There are scripts that get attention, and then people go off in meetings. That’s really an important next step for you guys is not that Mango happened, got shot as a film, but you guys were taken seriously. You got agents and managers, got started with a career.

**Al:** Exactly. As Miles was saying, we sold Mango. It was the week after Ace Ventura opened. Some of it, you hit the right moment. People loved the concept. They liked the writing enough. What we found is then you go for these general meetings at Disney, at New Line, Warner’s, and they’re offering you animal comedies. This is not what you want to be known for.

**Miles:** It was literally our very first script. It was total beginner’s luck. We didn’t know really the craft of writing yet, so we spent the next three years working every day. We’ve always had a really good joint work ethic. I’m sure John does too. It’s all about not the grind, but it’s really about treating it as a profession, that there’s never a day when we’re not writing. That’s something that’s I think stood us well in terms of we just keep on working. We’re workhorses, and we’ll always do that. Even when it’s hard, we’ll still work.

**John:** It’s also important though to think back to that time and the expansion of the industry. It’s not just that there were spec scripts selling. The reason why there were spec scripts selling is because they were trying to make so many movies.

**Miles:** Correct.

**John:** That was also an era where Disney was trying to do 40 feature films a year.

**Al:** Yeah, each division, Disney, Touchstone, and Hollywood Pictures were each making 25 movies a year, because it was also the era of DVDs. Basically, even if a movie didn’t make all its money back in theatrical, the DVD aftermarkets were huge. A lot of them got made.

**Miles:** There’s a similar era now in terms of content. The streamers desperately need content. It’s not dissimilar. I think for writers, it was a better period when we started out, just in terms of you could hit the jackpot, literally.

**John:** Coming off of Mango, what was the next big step in your career? I was trying to [inaudible 00:08:03] is there another big thing, like, “Oh, that’s a shining beacon,” before we get to Smallville?

**Al:** Oh, yeah. We wrote a couple more specs. The next one we sold was a political thriller called Favorite Son. We sold it to… It was a producer named Leonard Goldberg. He was Aaron Spelling’s partner.

**John:** Absolutely. He did Charlie’s Angels.

**Al:** Exactly. We sold it to Laura Ziskin, who was a producer we all had as a film school teacher, who was then running a division of 20th Century Fox. For us, that was the first script that was… It was a great sample, and it opened different doors. I think that’s the great thing about being a writer is you don’t need permission, and you can always write yourself out of any corner. Finally, with that script, we were able to do that. It just got us out of the animal comedy cul-de-sac.

**John:** Absolutely. I was pigeonholed as a guy who’d do movies about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas, very soft family things. Then Go was the thing that got me out of that.

**Al:** Go, right.

**John:** People could read it for whatever they wanted to do. You have written Favorite Son. That gets set up at Fox 2000?

**Al:** Fox 2000, yeah.

**John:** From that, you’re taking other meetings. Are you getting any rewrite work? What’s the next step?

**Miles:** We’ve been a little bit in the rewrite business but not really. It’s never been something that we’ve had time to do or focused on, because then we pretty quickly got into TV. We had an agency change. We changed agencies and went to William Morris, and then they put us with a TV agent as well as a feature agent, because we’d done… Our first TV credit was this British BBC show called Bugs. That was our first-

**John:** Oh, that’s right. I forgot about Bugs.

**Miles:** It was a really obscure but fun BBC show.

**Al:** It was an action-adventure series. The reason they liked us is because Miles is British and I was American. They couldn’t find British writers who could write Mission Impossible type stories, which is what these were.

**Miles:** That got us when we went to William Morris. They’re like, “Oh, you do TV. You should have a TV agent.”

**John:** Because it was a UK show, you were not in a room with a staff writing that show.

**Miles:** No.

**John:** You pitched an episode, wrote an episode.

**Miles:** We used to fax the pages to them in London. That’s how old we are. It was a great experience. Then that led to our interest in TV. Then we started staffing on TV. We met some writers. They said the way to be successful in television is, just fair enough, you have to learn the hierarchy, and you’ve gotta go up from staff writer to story editor to the various stages of TV writer. We did that. Our first TV credit in America was Timecop, which is based on the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

**John:** ABC show? I’m trying to remember.

**Miles:** ABC, yeah.

**Al:** ABC.

**John:** Did it run for a season?

**Al:** No, I think it ran for eight, and then it was out.

**Miles:** It was an era they thought TV drama was dead, but sitcoms were the king. The idea of doing that show… You have to sign a three-year contract. It was like, “Oh my god, if we do this for three years, I will literally die.” It ran for eight. We were heroes on that show, because there was such infighting with the young guys on the totem pole. We ended up writing… Was it three scripts?

**Al:** Yeah, we wrote three of the eight.

**Miles:** Three.

**Al:** One of ours became the new first episode, because ABC hated the pilot episode of the show. With writers too, we call it the “fuck you, I’m doing Nazis” approach. When they were pitching the show, ABC said, “Whatever you do in Timecop, don’t have them go back to Nazi Germany, because Germany’s a huge market for us, and we don’t want to do it.” What did they do? They go back to Nazi Germany and stop something. That started.

There was no room on that show. You’d go pitch to the executive producer. We did, and then we wrote the script. He came in, and he goes, “Yep, this one’s going to be the first episode.” Timecop. Then we got our first pilot at ABC from that, which got made but didn’t go to air. Then we staffed on a show that Carlton Cuse created called Martial Law.

**John:** That’s right.

**Al:** That’s the TV side of the story. Then meanwhile, on the feature side, we had done some work for Joel Silver and Dick Donner on these low-budget genre movies, which led to Lethal Weapon 4.

**John:** I remember visiting set with you on a movie you’d written that starred Heather Locklear.

**Miles:** That was called Double Tap. That was our very first feature credit. It was directed by Greg Yaitanes, who is now a huge TV director. He just did House of the Dragon.

**Al:** House of the Dragon.

**John:** That’s right.

**Miles:** It’s weird we’re all still here. Those were really cheap movies, but we learned a lot doing those. We never said no. That was also our thing. We always just said yes to anything, and still do. That’s part of our problem is never saying no. We’re not as selective as John.

**John:** There’s also two of you, so you can get twice as much done. Are we almost caught up to Smallville at this point?

**Al:** Yes. On the TV side, during Martial Law, we got a deal at Warner Bros, and we did this show from Lethal Weapon 4 with the producer, Joel Silver, called The Strip, which was an action buddy thing set in Las Vegas. We’d sold it to Fox. They had a regime change. A thing that did happen in 1999 was you’d sell a pilot to another network. They sold it to UPN, which was another network that no longer exists. Because it was on UPN and was so under the radar, they let us run the show. We really hit it off with Peter Roth.

**Miles:** He was the head of Warner Bros.

**Al:** He was the head of Warner’s Television, just retired a year or two ago. They made an overall deal with us. The Strip ran eight episodes, got canceled.

**Miles:** First-time showrunners, we had no idea what we were doing. I’ll say for the first three pilots, we had no idea what we were doing. Then it began to click in terms of what we needed to do and be set forward. There’s always this thing about showrunning, which is you’re basically two guys in a garage writing scripts, and suddenly you’re in charge of a huge business, and they expect you to know what you’re doing, and you don’t.

**John:** You also had very few opportunities for mentorship, because you’d been on some sets, with Double Tap and things like that, I guess Martial Law. You have seen some of it. Was Martial Law shot in Los Angeles?

**Al:** It was, yeah. You’re right, you don’t really get that much-

**Miles:** You’re stuck in the writers’ room.

**Al:** You’re stuck in the writers’ room. We had a deal. At that point, I always tell people there was no Marvel Cinematic Universe. The later iteration of Superman had been Lois and Clark. The last iteration of Batman had been Batman and Robin. This was like the Nadir of superheros. Warner’s, who was like, “Sure, TV, you can have Superman,” they didn’t care.

Peter Roth came to us and said, “I have the rights to do Superman, and I want to do kind of like a Superboy show. We were like, “We don’t want to do Superboy.” We came up with the pitch for Smallville, which was no flights, no tights, making the parents younger, introducing the idea of the meteor shower and all these different things.

Then we went out and sold… We only went to Fox and to The WB. What was funny at the time is The WB and Warner’s Studio did not have a good relationship. Peter was brought in to smooth it over. They had just pitched them the idea of like, “Oh, we’re doing a Superman in high school show.” They’re like, “Eh.” They weren’t interested.

**Miles:** This is the era of Dawson’s Creek.

**Al:** Dawson’s Creek, yeah. We went to Fox, and we sold it in the room to Gail Berman. Then that afternoon, we had to go to The WB, just because they’re corporate siblings. Peter’s like, “Just go in. Pitch it. It doesn’t matter. We’re not going to sell it. We’re going to sell it to Fox.” We go in and pitch it to The WB, to an executive named Susanne Daniels. It’s one of those things, you could tell during the pitch. In the beginning, it was a little like sitting back, and then as they heard the pitch, they were like, “Oh, this might actually be good.” Then by the end, we left, and we’re like, “Oh, that went better than we thought.” Peter’s like, “We’re going to Fox.” Then three days later, we were at The WB, which is where it should’ve been.

**Miles:** The great story there is that the other executive in the room, who’s a friend of ours, we’d had lunch with the year before, and she’d told us point blank, “You guys aren’t WB material. Sorry.”

**Al:** “You do buddy action,” because at that point we’d done Lethal 4 and Shanghai Noon. “You’re buddy two-hander guys.” Then the next year, we’re at The WB.

**John:** I want to compare and contrast that experience, taking an iconic piece of property, a piece of IP that people know, Superman, and turning it into a teen show, to Wednesday, which is, again, an iconic piece of property everybody knows, and taking the character from that and putting it at the center of a teen series. On the surface, kind of similar, but actually, the way we make things now is so vastly different between the two of them. I want to contrast the two of those experiences. Let’s talk through the pitch on Wednesday Addams. How does Wednesday Addams come into your universe?

**Al:** It was 2018. We had just finished doing this show called Into the Badlands, which we did for AMC for four seasons. We were, frankly, looking for our next thing, and knowing how IP-obsessed everybody is… The Addams Family seemed to be… We knew MGM had the animated movies, but Paramount had done movies.

In a similar way that Smallville tells an unknown chapter of Clark Kent’s story, it’s a story nobody’s ever told. We wanted to do Wednesday, but we’re like, “Teenage Wednesday Addams in boarding school.” That was really the eureka moment. We sat down. We knew we wanted it to be a supernatural murder mystery. We talked about do we just put her in a normal high school or do we do something different. We realized if we just put her in a normal high school, it becomes a very one-note show.

**Miles:** She goes home to her family at the end.

**Al:** She went home to her family. The opening of the first episode is her in a regular high school. She gets expelled, and then she goes to Nevermore, because it gave us the Addams ethos without being the… It’s like if you took the Addams mansion and the Addams vibe but then you put it in the school. Then it was the school where her parents met. Literally, we had the idea. We came up with the whole pitch.

**Miles:** We did it on spec.

**Al:** On spec.

**Miles:** We wrote a 20-page bible.

**Al:** Bible.

**Miles:** Then we approached MGM, said to the head of the studio, “Okay, this is what we want to do,” and he loved it. It was the first step. It was the first step with us coming up with the idea. It wasn’t like they approached us.

**Al:** Nobody approached us.

**John:** There wasn’t any notion, like, “Hey, let’s do a Wednesday Addams show.”

**Al:** No, it wasn’t.

**John:** [inaudible 00:18:40].

**Al:** In fact, they didn’t even know if they had the live-action TV rights. We were like, “Does Paramount have those?” We pitched the head of the Addams Foundation, who controls the estate. He loved it. That’s how it all got started. It was very different. Smallville was like, “We have this idea. Can you guys crack it?” This one, we brought them something they didn’t frankly even know they had.

**John:** Great. In both cases, the idea is now set up. Was the idea set up at Netflix, or did you have to write a script first?

**Miles:** Now it seems like a no-brainer, but it wasn’t at all. It’s been a three-and-a-half-year journey to get to this point. We’d written it. They loved it. In terms of the pitch, we went out and pitched it around to all the different streamers, to Apple and Amazon, Netflix. Actually, Netflix bought it. This is great.

**Al:** This was fall of 2019. This was this time 2019.

**Miles:** They couldn’t make a deal, so it fell apart.

**John:** It fell apart. They couldn’t make a deal because of underlying rights or your rights or just everything?

**Al:** Basically, whatever Netflix was offering, MGM said, “That’s not enough.” This was basically January of 2020. They had already basically given us the go-ahead to write the pilot script. They’d written that. We thought it was kind of dead. Then Steve Stark, who was the head of television at the time-

**Miles:** At MGM.

**Al:** … at MGM, convinced MGM to basically fork over money for a writers’ room, for a mini room, and said, “We’ll write a bunch of scripts, and then we’ll go back out with it,” which to be honest with you, is a terrible idea. Most streamers aren’t going to buy a show that they had no hand in developing. We were like, “If it keeps the project alive, great.”

**John:** That said, Station Eleven was a similar situation.

**Al:** Was it really?

**John:** He came on to talk through the Station Eleven process. Paramount did put together a mini room for that, so they could write scripts. It ended up working out really well for them.

**Al:** Same here.

**John:** At this point, there’s a pilot, and you have a room together. How many scripts are you trying to get out of this room?

**Al:** We’re trying to get another seven scripts out of the room.

**John:** Which is the whole season.

**Al:** The whole season, because we had the bible for the whole season, and so we were breaking it. Of course, we had to push the room a week, because it was literally the first week of lockdown. The pandemic started. We did it fully on Zoom.

**Miles:** Which I think was a really great… No one had ever done a Zoom room. It was actually incredibly efficient, because often my beef of writers’ rooms is everyone sits around talking about war stories. It’s so inefficient, whereas a Zoom, it’s actually much more focused. It can be exhausting, but we got an incredible amount of work done in a limited amount of time.

**Al:** Yeah, we did. We did. It was spring of 2020. Before we went out, we wanted to package it. Tim was always our first-

**John:** A natural choice.

**Al:** A natural choice.

**John:** Tim’s always wanted to do an Addams Family story.

**Al:** We’d heard. Of course, everybody’s like, “He’s not done television. He’s not going to do it.” We’re like, “If we don’t ask, the answer’s no.” Steve’s partner, Andrew Mittman, got the script to Mike Simpson, who’s Tim’s agent at WME. Mike read it and really loved it. We heard all this later. He sent it to Tim, and then four days later, we get a text, “You’re not going to believe this. Tim read the script. He really loves it. He wants to talk to you guys.” Tim lives in London. We thought, “Okay, great, so his assistant’s going to set up Zoom?” He’s like, “Nope.” Mike goes, “I’m texting you his number, and you’re going to FaceTime with him tomorrow.” It was Memorial Day weekend 2020. We called. We FaceTimed with Tim. He was in Oxford.

**Miles:** Oxford. He has an amazing house in Oxford with this beautiful garden with these life-size dinosaur models. He was out there wandering around in this garden talking to us about Wednesday Addams and how she would’ve been his girlfriend in high school. It was really, really great. He was a bit nervous, I think, about launching to TV, but also really intrigued about doing extended storytelling. Long-form storytelling was something he’d never done. It was really something that he thought would be a great challenge. He’d always loved the Addams Family, and Wednesday in particular.

**Al:** What we did know, the opening of the script, it opens with Wednesday terrorizing the water polo team. We didn’t know Tim played water polo in Burbank.

**Miles:** At Burbank High.

**Al:** He must’ve been reading the script going, “What is happening?”

**Miles:** That’s how it happened.

**John:** I want to also flash back to Smallville though, because bringing on the pilot director has always been a big thing. That’s a big deciding factor of which pilots get ordered is what kind of director you can get on board, but they’re never the iconic name that a Tim Burton is.

**Al:** Correct.

**John:** It’s never that level of [inaudible 00:23:23] directors. It’s always like Michael Dinner. It’s some person you’ve never heard of.

**Miles:** Michael Dinner, yeah.

**John:** Normal people don’t have that. It’s such a change from this. Also, in a classic way you pick pilots to make, it’s on a casting. For Smallville, talk through the casting on that, because I remember my WB show, the way you had to bring in actors to audition in the room in front of Susanne Daniels and everything else was a very specific, scary, terrifying process. I want to contrast it with now. Talk us through Smallville casting, and then we’ll go to Wednesday casting.

**Al:** Again, this was in 2000. We sold it in the fall of 2000. When we sold it, it’s interesting. In old-time network television, they usually didn’t let you cast a pilot until they green-lit the pilot. Here they bought the project and they said, “We’re going to let you start casting.” We hadn’t written the script yet.

**Miles:** We hadn’t written the script yet.

**Al:** This was actually a great exercise, which we’ve done. We don’t really do it in features, but we do it in television. We wrote a bunch of the scenes from the pilot that they could audition with. It’s good, because you realize you can give them handles. We always call it secret lines, where if they get that right, it’s like, “Oh, they understand it.” We wrote a Lex and Clark scene.

**Miles:** All of which ended up in the show.

**Al:** All of them are in the pilot. It was a Clark-Lana graveyard scene, which is in the pilot. There’s a Lex-Clark fencing scene, which is in the pilot, the parents, which was great, because when we went to write the pilot, we had a bunch of scenes written already. They let us do that. We actually got to spend about four months casting. The other thing was, we knew exactly who we wanted to direct the pilot, which was David Nutter, who certainly at the time-

**John:** He was [inaudible 00:25:08] him or Michael Dinner [crosstalk 00:25:09].

**Al:** David was the Steven Spielberg of TV pilots. His track record of getting-

**Miles:** He’d done a lot of great… Not The X-Files. He’d done a lot of X-Files to start off with.

**Al:** He’d done X-Files to start off. I think he’d done Roswell the year before.

**Miles:** Dark Angel.

**Al:** He’d done Dark Angel. What’s great is Peter Roth, who had just come over from Fox, knew David very well. He literally got on the phone, pitched him, sent him the same-

**Miles:** David was a huge Superman-

**Al:** He was a huge Superman fan.

**Miles:** It was the perfect marriage. The process, as John suggested, it’s so awful, which is the person, or they have to sit in the room outside, and have to come into a room with probably 15 people watching them, which is the most artificial experience for TV performance, and have to perform like they’re auditioning for a school play, in front of these people. It is the most nerve-wracking experience. For example, Zach Levi was our top choice for Lex Luthor. He came in and was amazing. Then he came in to do this network audition, and he really just didn’t click. Then we ended up with Michael, who was fantastic. It was just the whole process and the idea of having to perform in this really bizarre way for a TV show.

**Al:** It was always very weird. It’s stressful all around.

**Miles:** Absolutely.

**Al:** So artificial.

**John:** Also, we have to remember that back in those days, these truly were pilots. They were going to shoot a bunch of pilots and only pick up certain series, as they were trying to figure out what are the elements that are going to be useful in this show versus that show. It’s not the same situation with something like Wednesday, because it’s the first episode, but how that first episode goes is not going to determine whether the rest of the series shoots. You’re going to shoot the whole series.

**Al:** Correct. We even had this on our last couple shows. Everybody now does it online. They self-tape. I think actors must think it’s great, because they can do as many takes as they want until they get the one they like.

**John:** They don’t get the feedback.

**Al:** They don’t get the feedback, but they get that.

**John:** Also, we’re seeing what do they look like through a lens.

**Miles:** Exactly.

**John:** It’s really what it is.

**Miles:** That’s the point, exactly. It’s the old-fashioned screen test is how you should do it. On Wednesday, I’ll say we did do chemistry tests over Zoom. We’d all meet with the actor, talk to them, and then our screens would go black, and then we’d watch the audition. Then we’d give notes and Tim would give notes. I think it was intimidating, because it was the first time they met Tim, and over Zoom. The first time we did it, Tim just gave them one chance. They were so nervous.

**Al:** We did it once, and it was a disaster. What’s great about Tim is Tim Burton doesn’t realize he’s Tim Burton. We’re like, “Tim, here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll introduce them. We’ll introduce you, let you say hi. We’ll do it twice, so you can give them notes in between. Even if you don’t have notes, let’s just let them do it again.” Then he was like, “Great.” Once they got over the initial shock of the Tim Burton part, then they could ease in and do it. Even on the Brady Bunch screens, you could at least go, “Oh, okay.” You see what they look like side by side on camera.

**John:** Which is crucial. I want to back up in the process a little bit here, because you’d been in writers’ rooms before. You’d been in a writer’s room for Martial Law. You had that experience. This time you’re running a writers’ room on Zoom for your show. How did you go about thinking about who you wanted in that writers’ room with you? It was a mini room. Was that the only room you ever got together?

**Al:** That was a mini room. We frankly picked two writers, Kayla Alpert and April Blair. We knew.

**John:** Experienced.

**Al:** They were like, “We’re going to pay for a room. You can only have a couple writers.” It’s like, “We need people who we’ve worked with before, who we know are good, who can be helpful.” Obviously, we wanted the female voices in the room too. We heard a lot of Zoom room horror stories, but I think because it was a bunch of people who have never worked together, so I’m sure it was a lot of bad first date theater. We had that room. It was a 10, 11-week room. That was the only room we had.

**John:** What was your schedule? What was your writing process? How long were the rooms going for? What were you trying to get done in a day’s work in a room?

**Miles:** I think first it’s having a very clear idea of where the trajectory of the season’s going. We just had the first episode, so they had a sense of what the show was, which is important.

**John:** It’s crucial to set up… That first episode, you set so many plates spinning in terms of who these characters are, and each of them is going to have a thing. You had a sense of where they were going. You had to actually track out where that information would go. Those were the first weeks. You were just figuring out all the rest of those-

**Miles:** Yes. I think the first season, we certainly had ideas. I guess because we’re old-school TV people, every episode, unlike some binge shows, conceptualized. One episode’s about the school dance. One episode’s about Parents Weekend. Each one feels like a complete chapter of a book, rather than just… Sometimes shows are like mud. You couldn’t identify what the-

**John:** It’s like an eight-hour movie.

**Miles:** For us it’s much more compartmentalized. It’s figuring out the beginning, middle, end of each episode so it feels complete in itself, although it still leads on and has this propulsive energy, which is always something that we aim for, that it’s never boring. That’s our motto in terms of story breaking, that it has to keep going so it’s propulsive and delicious and you want to keep consuming. You want to be able to not turn it off at 3 a.m. in the morning and finish. That’s our goal as storytellers is that it has to be relentless. Then it’s really working out the beats and where are the characters going, so what’s the arc over the course of the season and how will that person get there.

The first week is just figuring out big ideas, what a great set piece is, where do you want to see these characters, what are the scenes you want to see with them. That’s something we learned from Carlton Cuse, which is what are the scenes you want to see in this episode, between these two characters. That was something that we always do, and just like, “What are the craziest ideas we can put Wednesday Addams in?” That’s something. It’s just an exercise. We always ask people when they first come to the room to bring a lot of ideas. I want to see a list of 50 ideas. Where could she be, what’s funny, and what situations or locations she could be at or just concepts for [inaudible 00:31:27].

**John:** What documents are you trying to get out of this? Ultimately, you’re going to get to scripts. At what point are you generating outlines? Are you generating beat sheets? How much are those shared outside of the room or just for your purposes?

**Al:** We do cards.

**Miles:** The first thing we do is we break out the stories. We do the little paragraphs.

**Al:** Paragraphs.

**Miles:** By the end of probably week two, we have eight one-page ideas for what each episode’s going to be. It has to be really quick and fast. You can adjust.

**John:** Is that a Google Doc, or how are you sharing that among your team?

**Miles:** It’s Google Docs.

**Al:** It is a Google Doc.

**Miles:** We have the writer’s assistant who takes notes every day and assembles that. We split up to write the one-pagers we call them, which is just each episode, so we have a sense of what the season is, because you can’t spend too long conceptualizing. We just need to start really thinking about the stories.

**Al:** We did the one-pagers. Then we do beat sheets. Those have, here are all the scenes.

**John:** The scenes.

**Al:** They’re in skeletal form. The other thing, we had never done a closed mystery, a cards down mystery, where you don’t know, it’s the whodunit.

**John:** Absolutely. We have the same information as the audience as Wednesday does.

**Al:** Exactly. We knew how it ended. Then it was working backwards. Then it was do we have enough red herrings. Even when we were shooting it, we’re like-

**Miles:** Oh, gosh.

**Al:** … “Oh my god, is this going to be too obvious?” It’s all the red herrings. You have to play by the rules, so that if you go back and did a re-watch, it’s… I remember there’s one thing we caught in the first episode. We’re like, “Oh, that character could never be there at that time, so we can’t do that.” You’re doing the math of it. There was that aspect. Then once we broke them out, then I think we verbally pitched out to the studio at that point, just to get their feedback.

**John:** The studio being Netflix.

**Al:** No, actually at the time, just MGM.

**John:** Just MGM, that’s right, because [inaudible 00:33:26]. You’re pitching them to make sure that they understand what the vision is for the things.

**Al:** Correct.

**John:** They’re not reading things.

**Al:** Not yet. Once we got their thoughts and sign off, then we went and we did 10-page outlines.

**Miles:** Our whole philosophy always is to, I’d say overshare. There’s no surprises is our thing.

**Al:** I think they got the one-pagers. They got the one-pagers.

**Miles:** For us it’s always about we have nothing to hide. If you try and hide things or keep people at bay… We’re really looking for great notes and not guidance, but it’s great to have some… You’re stuck in a room. Even if it’s a Zoom room, you’re stuck in this little bubble. To have some outside viewpoint about what you’re doing, for us is always very helpful. It’s true with the whole process in terms of what we do. We’ll take a good note from literally anybody.

**Al:** Because everybody’s a viewer. Even if it’s their job, everybody’s still a viewer.

**Miles:** It doesn’t mean we’re going to take it.

**Al:** It doesn’t mean we’re going to listen.

**Miles:** We’re incredibly open and say to the actors, to everybody that we want feedback and need feedback. It’s always about the best product. That process goes all the way to the end, to ADR, to the post, to everything. It’s always about evolving until you finish.

**John:** Let’s run through the documents again. We’re starting off with these one-paragraph synopses of episodes. Then it goes to a beat sheet. Then it goes to a 10-page outline. Then from 10-page outline, those are assigned to a writer to write the full 60-page script.

**Al:** Correct.

**Miles:** I will say before that as well, we have the bible, and then we usually do a look book as well, so they have a sense of what [crosstalk 00:35:02].

**John:** Before they got there, they were looking through that.

**Miles:** Yeah, so they have a sense of what the show will look like in our minds. We shared that with Tim. It’s always about the communication, and everyone’s on the same page about what we’re doing. It’s always about that clarity of vision, “This is the show we’re going to make. This is what we’re doing,” so there’s no confusion, and keeping the lines of communication open between every department, which is hard.

**John:** Are all these scripts written by the time this room finishes?

**Al:** No. I would say four of the eight were written, and there were four that there were drafts for.

**John:** Great. Let’s take a moment and contrast that back to Smallville, because this was not at all the schedule on Smallville. Smallville, you’re shooting, rather than 8 episodes over the course of however long it takes, you had 22 episodes to shoot.

**Al:** 22 episodes.

**John:** These are 40-page scripts probably?

**Al:** I think Season 1, they were probably 50-page scripts. Probably they were too long.

**John:** They were long. You’re responsible for delivering basically one of these a week.

**Miles:** It was an absolute nightmare. The first season of Smallville is a total blur of insanity and sleepless nights and just us hammering away. Also, in the middle of this, we had 9/11, and we didn’t stop shooting for that. It was just a really crazy time. That’s where we really learned how to run a show. The first season was absolute chaos. The writers hated us. We used to write all day, turn up at work at 6 p.m., work until 12. It was just [inaudible 00:36:29] horror stories of writers’ rooms, that first season was like, oh my god.

**John:** That was you?

**Al:** Yeah, that was us.

**Miles:** Yeah, because you don’t know. It’s like a freight train, and then it becomes a hit, so you have this added pressure and then the studio. It’s just overwhelming.

**Al:** You have a process that moves twice as fast, but you have two levels. You have a studio giving notes and then a network giving notes.

**John:** The other crucial thing though is you are also not writing these scripts in a vacuum like you were in this mini room.

**Al:** Correct.

**John:** You were trying to write these things while you’re actually trying to produce the show.

**Miles:** Exactly.

**John:** You’re dealing with all the fires happening on set while you’re doing this and dealing with the post. In this case, you had the luxury, you had these… How long was your mini room? Was it 10 weeks, 12 weeks?

**Miles:** Yeah.

**John:** To just focus on the writing and not focus on anything else.

**Miles:** I’ll say the difference is that I think [inaudible 00:37:13] on a streaming show, on a show like this, is every episode has to be a Faberge egg-

**John:** Wow.

**Miles:** … whereas on network, you know you’re going to have some clunkers. You know that not every script’s going to be great. It doesn’t take the pressure off, but it’s impossible to have 22 amazing episodes of network TV.

**Al:** What was interesting too with Smallville, it was the era where TV on DVD was starting to become a thing. We would say Wednesday is chapters of a book, where Smallville is short stories in a world. You have some mythology episodes and some bigger ideas that then tie the whole season together, because they tell you an avid viewer of a network show watches one in four episodes. There’s a certain amount of repetition, at least in the first season, where you’re starting, where you don’t want people to be like, “I watched the pilot, and then I’m coming in an episode. What the heck’s happening now?”

**Miles:** It’s not a sausage factory, but it kind of is, in terms of there is that repetition. Then once you get into the rhythm of a writers’ room, it’s still incredibly difficult to turn out 22 good episodes of TV. It becomes a machine. That’s certainly what we aimed for and achieved in subsequent seasons in terms of the writers’ room and everything else became a machine.

**Al:** We trained people. It’s another thing too. It sounds weird. The show tells you what it can and can’t do. I think in Season 1, we had to break so many more stories that didn’t work to get to the 22 episodes that did.

**Miles:** [inaudible 00:38:41] in terms of what it wants to do. Everything’s always too big.

**Al:** It’s too big, and I get blamed.

**John:** You’re learning what your cast can do. You’re learning what your crew can do.

**Al:** Exactly.

**John:** You’re learning, “Okay, we can do two stunts or whatever it is for your thing, so how are we going to budget our two stunts for this?”

**Al:** Exactly.

**Miles:** Exactly right.

**Al:** Exactly right.

**Miles:** You have to figure out what’s the pattern of what you can do. The first season of Smallville, we were resisting a pattern. It was like, “No, we’re going to do four stunts an episode. Then second season we’re going to make lives easier for ourselves. We’re going to find the pattern, then we’re going to do it.”

**Al:** We did, because at a certain point, a TV show either runs like a TV show or it implodes. Two of the Smallville stars are doing a podcast where they’re re-watching all the episodes. They had us do one. We watched this episode in Season 1, which literally four directors worked on, then we had to shut down for a week just to finish it. When we watched it back, it was actually a pretty good episode, but we’re like, “We were insane.” I’m like, “What were we thinking?”

**John:** Smallville was shot in Vancouver. For this show, you wanted to keep it nice and close and local, clearly.

**Al:** Absolutely.

**John:** You wanted to keep making life easy for yourself. Where did you choose to shoot Wednesday?

**Al:** We shot in Romania.

**John:** What was the decision for Romania?

**Al:** There’s a couple. One was, there was literally no studio space anywhere else in the world. We looked in Ireland. We looked in the UK.

**John:** If you were shooting this at the peak of coming out of pandemic…

**Al:** The studio wanted us to go to Toronto.

**Miles:** Toronto.

**Al:** The thing with Tim is, it’s the sets. You need the sound stages to be able to build these amazing sets.

**John:** Size.

**Miles:** It’s size. You’re looking at Tim’s work. It’s all about giant sets and physical sets. The studio was obsessed with us going to use The Handmaid’s Tale sound stages, but the roof with those sound stages is 12 feet or something.

**Al:** It was 19 feet.

**Miles:** 19 feet. [inaudible 00:40:37]. It was like, “We’re not going to do that,” because what you want with a Tim show is to have built sets. They also never accepted that. The show was budgeted like a CW show. As soon as you get Tim Burton directing the show, it’s not going to be a CW budget. They never understood that. The big fight with that show was always like, you don’t hire Tim Burton and give him that budget, because he’s not going to do it.

**Al:** We also said Tim doesn’t show up and go, “I’ll do the discount TV version of Tim.” Tim shoots as Tim shoots, one camera, very efficiently actually, but-

**John:** Romania.

**Al:** We ended up in Romania, because they actually had massive sound stages. There’s no tax credit there, but they do have crew. If you drew a longitude-latitude line from New England across, it actually hits Romania.

**Miles:** There’s an abandoned Soviet era studio, which was phenomenal, with huge sound stages. Then it had an area next to it of woods and a lake.

**Al:** Right outside the gate.

**Miles:** Then it had an area where you could build this huge town. It had these amazing architectural gems in the city of Bucharest, which we used as interior sets, with these beautiful decrepit villas. It just had such texture and reality to it. I went on a location scout with Tim. It was completely obvious we had to shoot there, and we did.

We’ve shot all over the world, in New Zealand and Ireland, Canada, but we’ve never shot in a country that didn’t speak the same language, the crew. It was challenging, and in the middle of COVID. Then we had the war happen in Ukraine, which neighbors Romania, which freaked out most of the cast. It was a very, very challenging shoot.

**John:** We were talking about the phases of getting things made. You have your writing phase. That’s all day. You have production phase. Challenging. Mostly done in Europe. Are you posting at the same time, or you’re waiting for all the post when everything’s done being shot? Were you shooting sequentially or were you cross-boarding the show?

**Al:** A couple things. We shot the show in blocks of two, but we didn’t go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

**Miles:** Unfortunately.

**Al:** We did one, two, five, six, three, four, seven, eight.

**Miles:** Makes total sense.

**Al:** Part of it is because Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzman, who play Gomez and Morticia, are in Episodes 1 and 5, and we needed them to come to Romania once. Secondly, Tim was doing two blocks and needed time to prep.

**John:** A prep break.

**Al:** He wanted to do the first four. It was challenging, especially when you’re doing a mystery show and you’re trying to keep everything straight, and the actors are trying to keep their emotional arc straight. That was definitely a challenge. Tim’s editor was on site in Romania with us. We do all of our post at a place called Take 5 in Toronto. We’ve done that for the past three shows. What was interesting, even compared to our last show, is just all the technology.

**John:** It’s gotten so much better.

**Al:** It’s amazing.

**Miles:** Oh my god. In our last show, which is Into the Badlands, it used to be you go to a special studio and do a cineSync. It actually never worked. You’d talk to your editor live in Toronto, but the feed you’re getting back was slightly out of whack. It was never coordinated.

**Al:** Then you would have to go up for a week too.

**Miles:** I’d go up to Toronto.

**Al:** Just to sit in the rooms and finish everything.

**Miles:** Constantly fly up to Toronto. We were doing a show in New Zealand and Ireland at the same time, and then I’d fly to Toronto. It was an absolute nightmare. This was a dream experience. It’s completely synced up. You can talk to your editor.

**John:** You’re watching it on your laptop.

**Miles:** You’re talking to your editor on Zoom, watching the cut on your laptop. You can give notes in real time. It works incredibly well. The only thing you have to go for is now the sound mix. You go to a place in Hollywood, watch the sound mix. None of us went to Toronto. If we had to go from Romania to Toronto in COVID, you’d have to come back and spend 10 days in quarantine. It just wouldn’t have worked. Now technology is so… It’s really advanced in four or five years. It’s ridiculous.

**Al:** It was pretty incredible.

**John:** Great. We have some listener questions. I thought maybe you guys could help us out with some of the listener questions.

**Al:** Absolutely.

**John:** Let’s start with Hilary’s question.

**Megana Rao:** Hilary in Los Angeles asked, “I mentioned a feature idea I’m working on to an executive friend at a production company, and he said that if I tweak one insignificant bit of it, it’s exactly what they’re looking for for their new deal with a major streamer. He asked me to send him a one-pager of the feature and said that the streamer is paying for outlines and scripts. Is this different than No Writing Left Behind or is this essentially the same no-no, in that this executive could then use my one-pager at their will and cut me out completely?”

**John:** Let’s talk about No Writing Left Behind and when it’s appropriate to give somebody a written document versus not giving somebody a written document. You guys, you’re big on sharing. You’re big on showing stuff. In this case, it feels like Hilary’s written this original things, so she owns it and controls it. It feels pretty safe for her. What are you guys thinking?

**Miles:** I think maybe we’re dumb and naïve, but we always share. We have no problem leaving anything behind, because we’re fearless about what we have next. The chance of someone stealing something and executing something is minimal.

**Al:** I think again, she has the paper trail. The other thing too is you can always register with the Guild first so you have that stamp. Does that work?

**John:** It doesn’t really work. Let’s talk registering with the Guild, because obviously, I’ve followed the WGA for a long time. You can register your document with the WGA. Basically, they stick it in an envelope and say, “We sealed this envelope on this date.” It proves that it existed at a certain point in time. That’s no more meaningful than actually-

**Al:** Do it yourself.

**John:** … doing it yourself or showing an email that you sent it to somebody. It doesn’t do any more than that. It doesn’t provide an extra protection. I worry it’s basically what people feel good about, but it doesn’t necessarily do a thing. A situation where Hilary probably would not want to leave something behind, let’s say she’s one of six writers going in on a project, and you’re going out with your pitch, don’t leave them that pitch.

**Al:** Do not leave behind, because that’s when things can get used in the studio for parts.

**John:** Your details got moved into their thing.

**Miles:** That’s true.

**Al:** We have seen this, where you do have younger writers who are working with producers or a production company or a studio, and they’re just doing all this free work.

**Miles:** It’s just a bigger issue.

**Al:** You gotta stop. That’s just where it’s-

**Miles:** We worked with one writer. She hasn’t been paid. We’re supervising her. We were asked to come in for some producer friends of ours. She’s been working on this thing for three years. The pitch keeps getting delayed.

**Al:** It keeps getting pushed down. We’re like, “Guys, she’s been doing… This isn’t fair. She needs to be able to pitch this.” That’s incredibly frustrating.

**John:** Hilary should definitely, if she feels like writing up a one-page and sending it in, great, but if the guy keeps asking for more and more details-

**Al:** Do not. Do not.

**John:** … that’s when you start getting into problems.

**Miles:** That’s when you gotta say no.

**John:** Also, she has a whole script, so at some point just share the script.

**Miles:** Is it a script?

**John:** Yeah, she says it’s a script, or it’s a feature idea.

**Miles:** If it’s a finished script, then she’s fine.

**John:** Cool.

**Megana:** Mike from San Jose asks, “For someone who’s equally open to starting a career in either features or TV, does it even make sense to write spec feature scripts in the current environment? What I mean by that is, it appears that the vast majority of professional work nowadays is on the TV side of things. If a writer was to write a great feature spec, at best, it might lead them to an increasingly narrow field of work that appears to be getting narrower at a rapid pace, whereas a strong television pilot may perhaps help open the door to a much larger field of work opportunities. If equally interested in both, why would someone choose to write a feature spec in this current marketplace?”

**John:** This is a great question for where we were at 30 years ago versus where we’re at right now, because some people are writing TV spec pilots, but not really 30 years ago. Now, if you’re trying to staff a show, you might read a spec pilot, you might read a pilot, but you’d also read a feature. You’d read whatever, right?

**Miles:** Absolutely.

**Al:** Yeah, but I think it seems a sad reality that features are dying. I would never recommend anyone writing a feature, starting out now. I’d definitely aim at TV. That’s not a badge of shame anymore. We have Tim Burton directing now a TV show. It’s really changed everything. It’s an amazing opportunity now, what has happened. I think writing a 90-minute movie or a feature script is not the way to go, starting out.

**Megana:** Would you guys read a feature spec as a sample for a writers’ room?

**Miles:** Absolutely.

**Al:** Absolutely.

**Megana:** It’s not like what he’s saying.

**Al:** No, it’s not even church and state. We’d read it. It’s just the writer might have more opportunities with a spec pilot script to sell versus a spec feature script to sell. We read both.

**Miles:** Also, in terms of it takes half the time to write. It’s not as strict as a… It’s an easier option. It’s definitely I think the way to go. There’s more opportunity just for employment in television. What’s great, when you’re looking at a stack of scripts to read when you’re staffing a show, the shorter scripts are attractive. It really is.

**Al:** It’s true.

**John:** Although somebody could read the first half of the feature script and say, “Listen, I know this person can write. I want to meet this writer.” There are examples of TV pilots that are just… People read a random pilot, and they say, “I want to make this show.” Severance is a case of where it was just a great script and they said, “Let’s make this into a show.” That’s really rare from a person who has no TV experience, where they wrote a spec pilot and suddenly they’re shooting a show, where some movies can get made in different ways. There’s always cases of… Go was a spec script, and it sold and got made.

**Miles:** It’s just that I think the market for movies has shrunk and is shrinking. I think you have more opportunity in terms of selling, or even if you staff on a show and you have written three spec pilots that you can bring out and say, “Hey, I got this spec pilot that I wrote four years ago,” and present it as a new thing. It feels like there’s opportunities for your war chest of scripts.

**Al:** That’s where TV has gotten a little more like features, because it used to be with networks you’d write pilots every year. Then if that pilot didn’t go, it was like the pilot never existed. They didn’t go, “You had a great version of this last season. Why don’t you just do that pilot again?” Nobody ever did. Now it is more like you can have it in your drawer, because there’s not that machine of you’ve got to pick everything up in May, be shooting in July to be on the air in September. That whole system is gone with the wind.

**John:** One thing I think listeners may not understand is that… Let’s say you staff on a show. Let’s say you staff on Wednesday or staff on some other show, on a streamer show. You may have writing credit on some of those episodes, but those aren’t necessarily going to be good things for people to read, because they don’t know what you did on that versus someone else writing on that.

**Al:** Correct.

**John:** They may look at your work history and say, “It’s great that you worked on this show,” but they want to read something that’s original to you.

**Miles:** Hundred percent. That’s something that’s important. Usually, we like to read an original piece of work. In the old days, we also used to write spec episodes of shows that existed, which is a less-

**John:** Very uncommon now.

**Miles:** Yeah, but it was actually useful, because they could see if they could imitate your voice. That was something that I think has been lost. You can hire somebody who’s an amazing writer, but they have no aptitude to write our voice, because that’s what you want when you staff people is that they have that facility to be able to mimic you, which is an odd thing for some writers to do.

**Megana:** Jack says, “I’m Jack from England, and I’m a screenwriting student. I wanted to ask you about procrastination. I love writing. I’ve written several shorts and two pilots. I really want to take the next step and write a feature. I keep putting it off, and I know why. I’m terrified of it being terrible and discouraging me. Instead, I find myself procrastinating, and I’m stuck in a terrible place. Do you guys have any tips of squashing procrastination and finally getting around to starting that project?”

**John:** We’ve talked about procrastination a lot of times on the show. Episode 99, we have a big segment on it. I’m curious, the two of you together probably is a good barrier to procrastination, because you hold each other accountable.

**Al:** Exactly. We can also get together and kick around ideas, and it gets that process going, because a lot of times when people are like, “I have writer’s block,” you probably have story block, and you’re trying to work through things or you just hit something. I can see that getting in that cycle of like, oh, is it going to work or not? I think that is the nice thing about a partnership is you do… We always treated it like a job, so you do hold each other accountable.

**Miles:** If we get, as Al says, story blocked, we usually go get pie or doughnuts.

**Al:** Sugar’s great.

**Miles:** Sugar’s great. We just figure it out. The ability to talk it out with someone is often… How you get motivated is usually with a writers’ group or someone who can help you work through the story issues.

Also, often, it can mean that your story isn’t fully formed yet, so spending longer on the outline, making sure that works, so you haven’t written 40 pages of your script and realize the story’s not working, which that leads to depression and starting again. It’s really not launching too early. It’s always wanting to start too soon before you’ve actually… The heavy lifting is the story break, so making sure that you feel confident and you’ve pitched the story to people so you know the structure’s working. Once the structure works, then everything else should be much easier in terms of flowing.

**John:** Advice for Jack, what I hear Miles and Al saying is that having someone who you can work with is incredibly useful. If you don’t have a writing partner, having someone else who can be on your side or just hold you accountable to getting stuff done could be great to get you over the procrastination.

Jack’s also worried about, “The thing I write is going to be terrible,” and it’s going to be discouraging to him. Maybe try approaching it from the opposite way, like, “This is going to suck. This is going to be terrible. This is going to be awful, but I’m going to just do it anyway. It’s going to be bad. I’m going to learn from it.” Try to get yourself started that way, but don’t hold yourself to some impossibly high standard. Hold yourself to actually a pretty low standard [inaudible 00:54:58] to get the work done. You’ve already finished two shorts and two pilots. Great. You know you’re able to actually get stuff done. A feature’s a longer thing, but you can get a feature done.

**Al:** We were talking about this the other day. When we got Lethal Weapon 4, and it was our first big thing, and then you’re like, “Oh shit, how are we going to write this?”

**Miles:** You’re overwhelmed and intimidated.

**Al:** Overwhelmed and intimidated, because movies you loved in college and things like that.

**Miles:** Mimi Leder had written an article actually in Written By, which is the Writers Guild magazine, about this movie Deep Impact and how she got through that. She got through it one scene at a time. It’s really not thinking about the big picture. It’s thinking about every scene is a building block to something. Really, what got us through that script was just focusing on the scene where it was ahead of us and just writing that. We just accumulated scenes.

**Al:** It got you past the intimidation of the-

**Miles:** You just needed to get through a page and a half of a scene, and then you’re fine.

**Megana:** I really like that distinction of story block. Is that something that you’re encountering when you’re going from outline to scriptwriting phase?

**Al:** Our outlines are pretty detailed. When we look at the paragraphs for the scenes, sometimes there’s dialog in them. In some ways it’s kind of a little like a first draft, because you’re trying to work through… We say if it’s a roadmap, it’s giving you all the interstates, so that when you sit down to write, it’s like, “Oh, I can go off to this back road and try this.” It actually frees you up to I think be more creative when you’re actually writing the scenes and not be worried about the math and the architecture, and just being able to focus on writing the scene and knowing it works, so if all else fails, you can go back to this. It does give you opportunities.

**Megana:** You’re figuring out more of that before you even start the outlines.

**Miles:** Absolutely. That’s the key element, that you don’t start before you’re ready. It’s knowing when you’re ready. We’ll spend weeks, months, years sometimes working on just the architecture before we launch in, because you don’t want to launch in and realize, oh, that’s where the story block happens.

**Al:** That’s a lot of what you’re working through in the writers’ room. This was interesting, because we love Zoom rooms, and it’s great when you got the big picture stuff, but then sometimes when you’re writing and you’re getting into the more granular pieces… We’ve said this a couple of times, “I wish we’d all just get in a whiteboard, and we would totally figure this out in a couple hours.” I think there’s that element of it as well.

**John:** The two of you, what is your process for that early stage stuff? Are you guys index carders? Are you whiteboarders? Do you have a thing you go to, or is it just conversation and notes?

**Miles:** A lot of conversations at cafes. We go to the [inaudible 00:57:37] and sit upstairs and eats doughnuts, just sit there for hours talking through the store.

**Al:** We’re like, “Let’s write this down before we forget.” It’s a lot of that. Again, we’ve been writing together for nearly 30 years. I always know if we get together, whatever kind of problem or block we’re having, we will ultimately figure it out. Might not figure it out today. Might be two days from now. It takes a lot of talking through it.

**John:** Either you’ll solve the problem or you’ll realize that you’re trying to answer the wrong questions and figure out something different.

**Al:** Exactly right. You’ll, exactly, do something different.

**Miles:** It is just hours of talking.

**Al:** Even in the writers’ rooms, like we said, we really want the outlines. Everybody knows what it is. The writer knows what the scene’s about. It’s not just the logistics of the scene. It’s what’s the scene about.

**John:** Let’s talk through the last stage of what the scene’s about is really that tone meeting discussion. The script’s been written. It’s there. Everyone can agree on what the words are that are going to be said. The actual approach to how you’re going to shoot the scene and how you’re going to edit the scene, that last conversation is really important too. Can you just talk us through, working with Tim or working with any of your other directors, what is the tone discussion going into a given scene or a given day’s work?

**Al:** What’s interesting is what we… Tim is different than obviously the directors, because what we would do with him… We worked this out, because he’s obviously never had showrunners before. We wanted to respect his process but be available, because it’s keeping a bigger story in your head. What we would do is, we would meet with him in the trailer in the morning and go through all the scenes. He would ask any questions he had. he would then say, “Are there certain things you want to make sure that I hit?”

**Miles:** That’s right.

**Al:** He was also like, “You guys are keeping the big mystery, and so I want to make sure I’m getting all the… ” We’d say, “This is important. That’s important.”

**Miles:** He was amazingly collaborative in all stages, except when he was directing, when he got into his whole directing… He was different in terms of he got into…

**John:** I knew that from Big Fish. I was really curious what that was going to be like on the set, because on Big Fish, it’s like this garage door goes down in front of him.

**Miles:** Exactly.

**John:** He doesn’t want to have that conversation.

**Al:** There were a few days of a pre-shoot so the crew could get their feet. We realized on the first day, we’re like, “We gotta figure out… ” It was a little awkward. We went to him and said, “Look, we want to figure out a system so that we’re respectful of you.” He was like, “I’m glad you guys talked.” He said, “Let’s do it this way.” In the old days, we would just have one big, long tone meeting with the director, and they’d go off and shoot. Then what we started doing, I think it was on Shannara, is we would meet with the director on the weekends, because it’s a block. It’s actually two episodes you’re shooting.

**Miles:** There’s a long-

**Al:** It’s a long-

**Miles:** It’s like 35 days.

**Al:** To keep in your head. We’d go and meet with him and just go through the week’s work when it was a Sunday afternoon and there was no meter running.

**Miles:** They’ve now worked with the actors. Also, we’d sit there and say, “These are the actors’ strengths and weaknesses. This is the crew’s strengths and weaknesses,” just so they have a full picture of what we’re doing. Then we also talk about how we want the scenes shot. We usually have a specific way we want them shot and understanding the visual effects element or whatever it is. It’s making sure that’s communicated so it has a consistence. It’s all about consistency, so every episode feels like it’s the same vision rather than five different directors. That’s always the goal.

Each thing you do, I’m sure John would agree, you learn something new about the process. You never get there. It’s always like, “Oh my gosh.” This one was all about the camera operators, how important they were. It’s always a fascinating learning experience.

**John:** The most difficult people, the most dangerous people you’re going to meet in this business are the ones who’ve had some success and will never change from the way they’ve always classically done things. Those are the situations where you cannot convince them otherwise. The ship can be sinking, and they’re going to stick to their plan, because that’s what’s always worked for them.

**Al:** Exactly right. It’s so true. The other thing too, on this one specifically, is the other directors got all of the dailies. They got to watch all of Tim’s dailies, just to see his process.

**Miles:** [Crosstalk 01:01:59] to match the style.

**Al:** To match the style.

**John:** Great. You have an ongoing crew that’s going to help with everything else, but still, you want to make sure they’re making the same choice about how you’re coming into scenes.

**Al:** Exactly.

**John:** It’s not just about lenses. It’s really what the approach is.

**Miles:** Exactly.

**John:** Great. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Do you guys have things to recommend to our listeners?

**Al:** My One Cool Thing, because I have a one-track mind, I’m reading a book. It’s called The Way They Were, which is about the making of the movie The Way We Were. It is a fascinating look at the studio process in the ’70s. That movie is a total studio movie. It’s not an auteur movie.

**Miles:** Say what the movie is.

**Al:** The Way We Were.

**John:** The Way We Were.

**Al:** The Way We Were.

**John:** The Redford, Streisand movie.

**Al:** Redford, Streisand, Sydney Pollack.

**John:** I remember that there was a poster of that in our Stark classroom.

**Al:** Yes, there was, because Ray Stark, who was the benefactor, it was his movie. I always forget Art Murphy, who was the first head of the Stark Program, who used to review movies for Variety. He met Ray Stark when he wrote a review of The Way We Were, which he didn’t like. His first line of the review was, “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” Anyway, it’s a fascinating book just looking at an actual studio movie getting made. It was rewritten by every top screenwriter in town in the ’70s. You had Sydney Pollack as the director, who was a classic studio prestige movie director. It’s a great read, because everybody talks.

**John:** The nice thing about a movie with that much time going past, no one has an ax to grind.

**Al:** Exactly.

**Miles:** Mine’s a little more practical, which is I always use a Moleskine notebook, which is lined, for just jotting down lines or observations or lists, just so it’s actually not just a random thing, so it feels special. I always keep it with me. I think it’s a really good writer’s tool, that you actually physically write stuff, not just note it down on your iPad or iPhone, so it really feels like you’re writing. I think that’s something that’s very useful and I’ve really come to love as a tool.

**John:** Let’s get very Moleskine-specific here. What you’re talking about is about six inches wide, eight inches tall?

**Miles:** Yeah. It’s the hardback small book.

**Al:** It feels like it’s a book.

**John:** Are you a both sides of the page or one side of the page?

**Miles:** I’m both sides.

**John:** You’re both sides of the page. Do you date the pages?

**Miles:** I don’t.

**John:** It’s just continuous going through it all. When you’re done with the notebook, what do you do with it?

**Miles:** I keep them in a stack.

**John:** Are they labeled on the spine, or how do you find them?

**Miles:** No. I got five of them. They’re all full.

**Al:** It’s like a serial killer book.

**Miles:** Each one’s a horrible memory of a different production. They’re sitting there like scars. They’re incredibly useful. I think that’s a really valuable tool, just the physicality of writing what you need to do. That’s my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Absolutely. I use the notebooks for actually taking notes, not just my to-do list kind of stuff, but for taking notes. I’ll find it’s really useful in meetings just to note who said a thing, and a lot with WGA stuff, who made a point, and so you can go back to it and remember that person was actually a smart person. I have found that being able to go back through and actually find my old note has been really, really useful.

**Miles:** I always do that with casting, when I’m looking at Zoom stuff. I can write all the people down, because sometimes you don’t get the person you want. Just having that physical book rather than just a piece of paper, you can go back to refer to. Even years later you can go back and say, “I like that kid,” or, “I like that actor. What was their name?” You’ve starred that person. It’s really a great tool that’s been lost. I think that’s something that’s great.

**John:** Yeah, because the casting sheets we always used to get were two or three sheets of paper stapled together. You don’t hold onto that. You might take little notes on it, but you’re not going to hold onto it for a while.

**Miles:** The person you like is the one you pick. There could be three other people that are actually pretty good. Also, you don’t necessarily get the first person you want. People can evolve. It’s really I think useful.

**John:** I remember Josh Holloway, who became Sawyer on Lost, came in for a pilot of mine. He was supposed to be playing this Alaska State Trooper. He’s the least Alaskan person you’re ever going to meet. I think I said to him in the room, “You’re not right for this, but you’re fantastic. You’re absolutely going to kill it.” I was right. Those are the kind of people you star and you remember and you keep-

**Miles:** Who did we have? Rachel McAdams came to see us.

**Al:** Rachel McAdams.

**John:** Wow.

**Miles:** For Lois Lane.

**Al:** Lois Lane. This was in Season 3 of Smallville. We didn’t get Lois until Season 4. We met with her, and she had just done a pilot for ABC.

**Miles:** She hadn’t got it, remember?

**Al:** Nancy Drew. Was it Nancy Drew?

**Miles:** She was up for Nancy Drew and she hadn’t got it. We said, “You know what? That’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you, because you’re going to be a movie star. Don’t worry about it.”

**Al:** You said, “This has been a great meeting. A year from now, you will not be here.”

**John:** I’m sure you’ve had this experience where the network of the studio will have an actor they absolutely love, and they’ll send them to you, and you’re like, “I don’t understand what you see in this person.”

**Al:** A lot.

**Miles:** A lot.

**Al:** We got a lot of that from The WB.

**Miles:** We’ve put people in the show as well. I won’t mention names. It’s like, “Oh my goodness, what were we thinking?” We want to play ball. Whatever happens happens. We don’t really now take that pressure, do we?

**Al:** No. Also, shows are different. Obviously, ’22, you had a lot of guest stars. You had a lot of those, more opportunities.

**John:** We’ve all been there. My One Cool Thing is incredibly self-serving. For Scriptnotes, we have our Premium subscriptions where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record. People can sign up for that scriptnotes.net. Also, scriptnotes.net, you can click on the Gifts tab, and you can buy a $29 gift pass for Scriptnotes Premium for six months or $49 for a year. You might want to give that as a gift.

Actually, I think the more clever thing to do, as many of our listeners have done, is… You know how you always have that parent or that grandparent that’s like, “I want to get you something for Christmas. I don’t know what to get you,” and you’re like, “I have no idea what to get me.” Ask them to get you a Scriptnotes Premium subscription, because you’ll actually learn something about screenwriting. They’ll feel happy that they got you something that’s going to advance your career. You’ll be happy because you’ll get to hear all the Bonus Segments and Megana laughing at the things we’re saying in the background. If you would like a gift subscription to Scriptnotes or just general Scriptnotes Premium, scriptnotes.net, and there’s a Gifts tab at the top. Al and Miles, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Miles:** Thank you.

**Al:** Thank you. It was great.

**Miles:** Great.

**John:** It was really great. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Adam Locke Norton. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, Craig is no longer on Twitter, I’m still @johnaugust for the moment. Are you guys on Twitter or any of the social medias?

**Al:** Not on Twitter, no, on Instagram.

**John:** We’re going to probably take this out of the outline, because no one’s on Twitter anymore. 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 hoodies. 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 those back-episodes, the Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on film school. Al and Miles, thank you so much.

**Al:** Thank you.

**Miles:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The three of us met in film school. I applied to the Stark Program coming from Iowa. I knew nothing about the film industry. I knew what I’d read in Premiere magazine, and that was it.

**Miles:** Premiere magazine.

**John:** I miss Premiere magazines.

**Miles:** I know.

**Al:** Me too.

**John:** Oh my god, it was so good. We all showed up here. We knew nothing, and we came. This was an era before the internet. One of the reasons why I loved USC film school was it had this giant script library. I remember checking out scripts in the library and learning so much. [inaudible 01:09:55] had her own script library. You could check out two a week. It was an invaluable resource. Now that’s just the internet. Any script you ever want to read, it’s there.

Let’s think about recommendations for people who are thinking about film school, pros and cons, who should, who should not be thinking about it. Would the three of us go to film school in 2022 if we were similarly situated? Would you, Al?

**Al:** I probably would. We all have now college-age or almost college-age kids. I don’t think I’d go to film school undergrad.

**John:** I wouldn’t either.

**Al:** I think that’s kind of a waste. I think that was great about our program was it was 25 students. They were all type-A personalities. It was like a reality show before reality shows. I think a lot of these schools cater to the graduate students. I certainly felt like we got all of the information, equipment, everything we needed. It did open doors. We all had internships. We were able to really learn the business. I only wanted to go to film school in Los Angeles. I only applied to USC and I applied to UCLA, both to the producers’ programs, and got into USC, thank god. That really was the entrée in, because we were all coming up together. None of us knew anybody.

**Miles:** Or anything.

**Al:** Or anything, because like you said, it was pre-internet. I would still do it again.

**John:** Miles, would you do it again in 2022?

**Miles:** I would a hundred percent do it again. I would be absolutely nowhere without that experience at film school in terms of a career. It was really what launched us totally, utterly. We still have friends who employ us every now and again from that experience.

For me, it was literally a kid in the UK, “How do I get to Hollywood?” because I had no interest in making films in the UK, because that sensibility was not mine. It was a way to come to America, which was a huge deal as an international student. That was great. I always loved Hollywood movies, so being in LA, that to me was like… It makes sense to come to LA, because that really is still the center of this business. I know there are great film schools all over America and all over the world. I always wanted to make Hollywood movies and be here, so for me it made total sense.

Then I also didn’t know what exactly I wanted to do within the business. Our program in particular was like a grab bag of writing, directing, producing, all of it. I think looking back now, I would like to have directed a lot more. Would I like to have gone to a directors’ program? Probably. That’s what I should’ve done. I’m not complaining about my writing career. It’s an interesting thing.

What I didn’t realize before I came to film school and what I learned very quickly at film school was writing is the essential element of this business. Without a script, without an idea that is executed well, there’s nothing. Writers really are kings. I think that’s amazing that we’re still so undervalued and underappreciated and our lives are hell most of the time. It’s still true. That’s still the lesson I think I learned, which is a revelation when I came, because I always thought the director was everything. Oh my god.

You read the scripts, as John says, from the film library, and you see everything is in the script. You read a great script for everything. There it is, written down, interpreted and executed by the director, but it actually comes from the mind and imagination of the writer.

**Al:** It’s funny, I thought that was interesting. The Oscars I think a couple years ago put the page all the description and answered the question, which we all get, “Do you guys just write the dialog, or do the actors just make that up?” No, they do not.

**Miles:** Exactly. It’s, “What do you guys do?” It’s like, you work it all out.

**John:** Miles, would you go to undergrad for film school?

**Miles:** I wouldn’t, no.

**John:** I agree with you both. I don’t think undergrad film school makes a lot of sense. I think if someone who is an 18-year-old is super into films, great. Go get a liberal arts degree in something else that you also really enjoy. Makes film on the side. Do a bunch of stuff. That should be your complete hobby is making films and learning about films, but it doesn’t have to be your main focus of those four years. Maybe save some money in those first four years. Go someplace that’s not super expensive.

If you really want to go to film school, go to film school for grad school, because that is where you’re going to meet a group of people who are trying to enter into this business at the same time, because as much as I learned in my two years of Stark, it was my classmates.

**Al:** Totally.

**John:** 100%. It was you guys being successful and incredibly competitive at the start. It was all of the drama and all that stuff. It was really helpful.

**Miles:** Of course. Absolutely.

**John:** Of our 25 students, 12 or more are major players in the industry now, because we all rose up together. You guys read my stuff. I read your stuff. Finding a core group of people was essential. I could not have this career without it.

**Miles:** That’s right.

**Al:** Agreed.

**Miles:** It is always a class of 25. 12 of us have been very successful. I feel bad for the others, because it’s a big financial commitment. Nowadays, obviously, you can sit in a room and make amazing stuff on your computer. You have an iPhone, which is incredible. If you want to be a director, there’s no excuse. You can go make a movie tomorrow, five minutes or an hour. Whatever you want to do, you can… The technology is there, and it’s dirt cheap. That’s a difference from our period. You can put it online. It can go viral. It’s amazing what people do. The guy Wes Ball, who did Maze Runner, it’s all from his thing he did in his computer at home in his basement. It’s huge opportunity. I think film school is great in many ways, but that networking element for us was critical.

**John:** I want to circle back to something you said, Miles, because you said as a person coming from the UK. Our program that we went through is now mostly international students. If you are a person who wants to get to Los Angeles, who wants to get to America just to learn about doing stuff, getting into a college is a way to get yourself into the US. You wouldn’t have been able to get a work visa to come here and do stuff.

**Miles:** No, it’s impossible. It wasn’t my motivation for coming, but in terms of coming to Hollywood, it was like, “Oh my god.” I couldn’t believe I got in, for one thing. It was a dream come true to come here to the epicenter of the movie business. It was a big deal.

**Megana:** Would you choose to do a producing program again?

**John:** It was the right choice for me because I didn’t know anything about anything. I think I imagine myself as a 22-year-old in 2022 who has listened to Scriptnotes and knows that I want to be a writer, maybe I would’ve done that. I may have done a more true production program. I’m sometimes skeptical of the pure writing programs in that it’s a lot of theory and you may not actually get a lot out of it. The nice thing about the program we were in or a production program is that you’re around people who are making stuff and that you’re seeing, “Okay, from what I just wrote here, this is the scene that actually come out.” You get [inaudible 01:16:55] a lot more.

**Al:** Also, I think what the Stark Program was was incredibly practical. Very few of our classes were actually at USC. They were out at Sony. They were at lawyers’ offices. They were at different things. You were just immersed in it right away.

**Miles:** From what John said, a lot of writing programs are navel gazing, over-intellectualized. That’s great if you want to make arthouse movies, but if you want to make commercial Hollywood movies or TV shows, that’s not a great place to start. You’re always going to be resisting, like, “This is my personal story.” It’s like, “That’s great, but that’s not going to be a global sensation or it’s not going to travel. It’s a small movie.” I think for us, USC was about commercial, like Spielberg, George Lucas. That was the goal, wasn’t it?

**Al:** Yeah.

**John:** The other crucial thing people need to remember is that unlike law school or medical school, how you’re doing in your classes does not matter at all. I have no idea what grades I got. I’m sure I did great, but I don’t care.

**Miles:** Remember the documentary class?

**John:** Oh yeah. Classically, people who don’t know the stories, we had this documentary class. Mitchell Block I think was who was teaching it.

**Miles:** Exactly.

**John:** He was so great and so dedicated about how you make documentaries, really about how you raise money to make documentaries. I remember one night he was talking through about PBS grants and how you can get up to $6,000 from PBS for this kind of thing and talking about how you cobble it together. Net to me, our friend Jen, her cellphone goes off. You should not have your cellphone in a classroom. Her cellphone goes off. She runs out into the hall. She comes back, she says, “Al and Miles just sold their script for a million dollars.” Poor Mitchell Block then had to go back to saying how you could get $9,000 from this other little-

**Miles:** Remember he had a great thing about, “You can become your own church and get a grant.”

**Al:** That’s right.

**Miles:** It was like, what are you talking about?

**Al:** I know.

**Miles:** You can’t be serious. Oh my god.

**Al:** So funny.

**John:** The other thing which I would say was really helpful that I got out of Stark, which I would never have really learned otherwise, is that budgeting and scheduling class. It was a drag. I did not enjoy doing it. The fact I can actually read a budget and a schedule and understand what those choices are how to make them… I don’t ever want to do that again, but I can actually understand. I would’ve had a hard time learning how that all worked if I hadn’t had a class that really just walked me through the whole thing.

**Miles:** That gave us a global view of everything, didn’t it?

**John:** Yes.

**Miles:** In terms of the TV thing and the legal element, which is really useful in terms of contracts. It was really a great thing. I think the issue for many people though is just owning what you want to do. Sometimes you don’t know it. I want to be a writer is a hard thing for someone to say and admit, because people will think you’re… Like, “Really?” How do you prove that? It’s like I think declaring you want to be a director. Then you’ve gotta direct and do something, which you can do on an iPhone. If you want to be a writer, you’ve gotta write. It’s not talking about writing. You’ve actually gotta do it. I think that’s something that is difficult for people. I understand why it’s difficult, because it’s really a declaration of your life, a life choice. It’s hard.

**John:** Let’s think through some of the below-the-line skills as well. If you want to be an editor, should you go to film school, if you want to be a cinematographer? I’d say maybe. The pros of it is you’re going to be taught by people who actually have some theory behind stuff, which is great. You may make relationships with people who will actually make a lot of movies down the road too. That could be great. You could DP on their things while they’re in film school, and they keep you around. There are people who have been building whole careers out of that. Yet that’s still not the same kind of practical experience you’d get just working on a set. Being a PA might teach you more about what that all is than [crosstalk 01:20:37].

**Miles:** I agree. The best experience is practical. There’s also a wealth of production now. I think if I were in the UK right now, this is the dream period. There’s so much production in the UK. It’s like, why to go film school? You can work on a Marvel movie or a Star Wars show. It’s about persistence. It’s about the hustle. That’s a great lesson.

I love this lesson from film school. We had this really aggressive producing instructor. He was an old-school Hollywood. He drove this huge Mercedes. He came to his class and said, “I was just pulled over in Beverly Hills speeding to this class. It was the best lesson I’m going to teach you right now about producing, which is beg. When the cop pulled me over, I said, ‘I’m going to get out of this ticket. You know how I’m going to do it? Beg.’ That’s what Hollywood’s about. You beg until they say yes.”

**Al:** Is this Jack Brodsky?

**Miles:** Yeah, Jack. He said, “Guess what? I got no ticket. I bluffed my way out of it, and no ticket.” It’s like, oh my god, that is such the Hollywood hustle.

**Al:** It is true, yeah, because that’s the thing sometimes I think writers forget is that you are an entrepreneur. You do have to really generate your own material. Again, you can change the perception of you with one script. It’s always that. You can’t wait for people to hire you or put you on staff or rely on agents or managers. You really do have to do it yourself. Then the rest comes from that.

**John:** Great. Thanks.

**Al:** Thank you.

**Miles:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Al Gough](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0332184/) on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/goughalfred/?hl=en)
* [Miles Millar](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0587692/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/milesmillar)
* [Wednesday on Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/title/81231974)
* [The Way They Were](https://www.amazon.com/Way-They-Were-Battles-Hollywood/dp/0806542322/ref=asc_df_0806542322/) book about the movie The Way We Were
* [Moleskine Notebooks](https://www.moleskine.com/en-us/shop/notebooks/)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Locke Norton ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/578standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/adapting-station-eleven).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 553 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Station Eleven was one of my previous One Cool Things. Today on the show, I’m very excited to chat with the series creator, Patrick Somerville. Patrick, welcome.

**Patrick Somerville:** Thank you for having me, John. 553, intense.

**John:** 553. 553 episodes.

**Patrick:** That’s a lot. That’s a lot of podcasts.

**John:** We finally get to you. Now in addition to Station Eleven, we should also say you are a TV expert, because you wrote on Leftovers, Maniac, Made for Love. You’re writing a new thing called The Glass Hotel, based on another book by the same author. I’d love to talk to you about adaptations in television and getting into it. You actually started as a novelist. Isn’t that right?

**Patrick:** I did. I never actually had any plan or thought that getting into TV and film was even possibly, honestly. I think 12-year-old me went down to the Brown County Public Library in Green Bay, Wisconsin and got George Lucas and Steven Spielberg biographies and desperately wanted to be a movie director and wrote letters to both of those gentlemen. I think when I was 16 or 17, I think being from Green Bay, just not having connections, I just was like, “Writing fiction seems like the way to go if you have no resources, no connections at all.” I went all in in that direction. It wasn’t until my early 30s after I’d published 4 books that a manager cold-emailed me and asked if I liked TV, and I said, “Yes, I do.” Then I ended up in Hollywood.

**John:** That seems impossible. I do want to get back into the origin story of you and how you started writing for film and television. I want to actually really drill in deep on Station Eleven and the process of going from here’s a book you read to here’s a book you’re adapting to assembling a writers room, putting this show up on its feet. I really want to do a deep dive in that. We haven’t had a chance to really deep dive on a project for a while. Also, we have some listener questions I think are right up your alley, because there’s TV stuff that I won’t know the answer to, but you definitely will.

**Patrick:** Maybe. We’ll see.

**John:** If you’re willing to, in the Bonus Segment I want to talk about making a pandemic show during a pandemic, because that just feels like an extra weird complication on top of complications.

**Patrick:** You’re right. That’s exactly what it was.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get back to… You were growing up in Wisconsin. You are a kid who reads books, like pretty much everyone who’s listened to this podcast. I’m guessing you were always a writer, you were always singled out for being good at writing, and yet you didn’t have any way to approach film and TV writing, so you started working in books.

**Patrick:** A lot of those details are exactly right about me. I decided to be a writer when I was seven, standing in I guess my 1st grade classroom. I had written a short story called How to Be a Molecule. I loved writing it, but the thing that got me was reading it out loud to the audience, to all my fellow students, and them clapping afterwards. Something in there, in that whole mix, just sparked me in a way nothing ever had and hasn’t since then, honestly. I didn’t know how to do it, but I think my heart knew what I wanted to be really early, which is a gift. There’s lots of people who I meet now in our business and otherwise. I think there’s something about those 10 years of insane teenager energy devoted to being a writer that I actually think matters.

**John:** If you were a person who was great at basketball and you didn’t spend those 10 years playing basketball, you wouldn’t have developed all the skills and the muscle memory for how to do these things. Like you, I was the kid who was writing in 1st grade and declared myself a writer. I didn’t know what I wanted to write, but I definitely knew I was a writer, because that’s the thing that I was good at that people kept telling me that I was good at.

**Patrick:** You were good at it. I think it wasn’t just feedback. You had some special ability with the language that put you ahead.

**John:** Now, did you study writing? Did you go through a writing program? How did you go from this kid who was writing a story in 1st grade to a guy who published four books?

**Patrick:** I was standoffish about the profession of writing, especially growing up in the Midwest. There’s a bit of an eye roll when you say, “I’m going to be a writer,” just because like, good luck, kid. My dad was a doctor. I had this plan that I would go and be an English and biology major and go to medical school and then also write fiction. I don’t know if it was my cover. Actually, I think I believed it until about sophomore year of college, when I just dropped the bio part, because fruit flies, counting fruit flies, John. I was like, “I am guesstimating these fruit flies right now. I don’t like this. I’m not detail-oriented in the right way. I’m going to kill someone if I’m a doctor, because I’m going to, I don’t know, eyeball something that I shouldn’t be eyeballing.”

I didn’t really get the idea of creative writing as a subject. I just was an English major. I just was like, “If I want to be a writer, I should just read as much as possible.” I was an English major. I didn’t really take creative writing classes, but I did then move to New York for a year in 2001. I was a waiter, and very quickly realized that I needed to be back in academia to somehow insulate myself from the job market and the regular world. It was also 9/11 three weeks after I’d moved to New York. It was a strange moment. I applied to MFA programs. I got into Cornell, which was a great one, and went up there for three years.

**John:** My perception of writing programs, and this is probably a broad stereotype, it’s just a bunch of people who were always told they were good writers, who were then put in a hothouse environment to… I don’t think it’s a Survivor situation. You’re theoretically trying to help each other, but at the same time there’s a competitive aspect between you guys. What was it like being in an MFA writing program?

**Patrick:** It’s a bit that, but for Cornell, it’s a very small program. The cohort is only four people of total fiction writers and four poets coming in each year. There’s eight total in the program. Unlike other programs, everyone’s totally funded. There isn’t a tiered list of funding. Everyone has the same deal. Everybody’s getting paid and getting a stipend to live in Ithaca and teach and write. We weren’t competitive for resources. We were friends. It was a pretty good vibe there, even though there were different approaches maybe to using the time from different people. I was young. I was 23. Everyone but one other incoming writer was 27 or 28 and had been in the workforce. I just was in psycho devoted writer mode. I would just hole up in my apartment for 12 hours, not see the outside world, and write a short story over and over and over again. I was feasting on my hermit fantasy of writing.

**John:** What was your output during that time? You say you’re working on a short story and rewriting it. On a given week or a given month, how much were you generating?

**Patrick:** A lot. More than is realistic to be good. Too much probably, but my imagination was really firing. I think it was that moment when your technical skills starts, just to get to a place where you’re like, “My taste thinks this is good.” It’s very frustrating when you’re young because you can’t… I couldn’t make it feel like the books that I read when I was writing yet, but it was coming. It’s just slow. In the end you leave with a thesis, which became my first book, Trouble, pretty soon thereafter. I probably wrote three times as much as that thesis.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** I probably wrote a thousand pages of fiction while I was in my MFA program.

**John:** Circling back to what you’re saying there, you were describing what Ira Glass describes as the crisis where you have taste, but you don’t actually have the ability to reach that taste. You know that you’re not quite good enough. Maybe that program gave you the chance to actually get your skills up to what the level of your taste was.

**Patrick:** It helped. Also, I’m funny in that my taste was stunted, I think, which was a gift also. It took me a while. I was behind in cultural matters, I think, in a lot of ways. Also, just the way my brain is built, I don’t overwhelm myself with self-criticism that much, which I think is unusual for writers. My problem’s in the other direction. I think everything is good. Then it takes a little while for my taste to settle in and be like, “Actually, that’s not good, Pat.” I didn’t crush myself, but I did know that my technical skill as a prose writer was a ways off from the caliber of fiction that I wanted to be producing. To me it’s just read and write and read and write and do reps in that time.

**John:** You started writing prose fiction. At what point do you become aware of screenwriting, or at least the form of screenwriting, and what it’s like to write for film and television? Was that during this program or after?

**Patrick:** No, it was 10 years later. One thing that was happening at Cornell, it was right when the last season of Sopranos was premiering. I got cable, I remember, so I could watch that. The Wire and Deadwood were both on then too. I was like, “What are these shows?” because I had loved a choice selection of TV shows, like Northern Exposure, growing up. What else? Six Feet Under. I guess Dream On from the old HBO days, The Larry Sanders Show. I had glimpsed kinds of TV that I loved. That year it just was like everything on HBO was as good as any book that I was reading. I was like, “This is the same.” I watched those then. I just continued on the fiction road. It wasn’t until that manager, Brian Steinberg from Artists First cold emailed me and asked me if I was interested in writing for TV that I read a script, I think. Then I downloaded Breaking Bad and Mad Men and Six Feet Under and Sopranos I think. I read them all, and I wrote a pilot of a TV show.

**John:** Right now, a bunch of listeners are throwing their phones across the room, that a manager cold emails you, a person who’s not even a screenwriter, to offer to represent you.

**Patrick:** He didn’t quite do that. He had read one of my novels, and he had noticed that the dialog I wrote lent itself to screenwriting and was curious. I was like, “Are you real?” I had to look up… I felt like it was a phishing scam or something, but it wasn’t. It took I think a year and a half to actually get repped by them and another year maybe for WME to decide they wanted to sign me.

**John:** You’ve now downloaded these scripts. You’re reading these scripts. You’re learning about the form. What were the first scripts that you wrote?

**Patrick:** The first script I ever wrote was called Very Honest. It was a pilot. It was an idea I had for a short story that I did as a show. It was about a right-wing radio guy, Bill O’Reilly at the time was the comp, who received a phone call from a Speak and Spell that basically said, “I know what you did. Tomorrow on your show I want you to say, ‘I am a fucking asshole,’ and I want you to turn your show into a show about how you are a fucking asshole. Unless you do this, I’m going to reveal what you did.” The guy’s such a dick that he has to make a list of the 10 people it could be who are blackmailing him. Then the shape of the show is him trying to figure out whether it was someone inside his family, his son, his daughter, his wife, or various people he’d run afoul and had problems with in the past. He does, in the end of the pilot, lean into his mic and start talking about what a dipshit he is, which I think is very wish fulfillment on my part at that time.

**John:** Now, this very much feels like it was in keeping with the HBO shows at the time. You have this antihero at the center of your story, a person who should be unlikable, and yet because we are laser focused on him, we can see through the bad stuff into the good side.

**Patrick:** I think actually what you just said is why it wasn’t a good project ultimately, because I didn’t have the vision yet to see the wall I was going to run into about how my political anger was aligned with the blackmailer, not the protagonist. I think ultimately that was going to end up having to make me humanize a bad person that I didn’t want to make a whole show or write a show about or watch a show about.

**John:** After this script, how many more scripts had you written by the time you got repped, by the time you started meeting on shows to be working on?

**Patrick:** I probably wrote a half dozen pilots in that period. This is right after my son was born, my first son. I was 32, 33. We were living in Chicago. We had no intention of ever leaving Chicago. It was Pat’s dabbling around in Hollywood things, I guess. When you’re a fiction writer on that side, you tend to get real skeptical of like, “Oh, someone’s optioning my novel. Oh, someone wants to work with me.” That stuff comes and it seems like it’s life-changing when you’re on the fiction writer side. Then you realize when you get here, oh, that was just someone taking a shot at something. There was never any chance of that turning into anything. When you’re a fiction writer, you’re like, “My life has changed forever. I am going to be rich. They’re making a movie out of my novel.” The movie didn’t come ever.

When I did actually get a job suddenly, on The Bridge on FX, via a Skype meeting with Meredith Stiehm and Elwood Reid, I had to go home from my office and tell my wife I’d just been hired for a job in Los Angeles that started the next Monday.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** She said, “What the fuck?” I ended up commuting for a whole year. I flew to LA on Monday mornings, went to the room all week, or set, came home Friday nights and helped my very, very brave and loving wife take care of our son.

**John:** The first show you’re working on is The Bridge. I know Meredith. This is an adaptation of a Scandinavian show. It was a show in its first year, right? This was still all being figured out. What did you learn being in that room for the first time? Being a novelist is always a solitary job. You’re just doing this all yourself. Suddenly, you’re having to be in a group environment, figuring out this show. What did you learn?

**Patrick:** So much. It’s almost like waves of learning, because I had no context. Unlike the other track of assistants, I think, witnessing rooms for a while and then getting it, getting the language, I was completely in the dark. I think I learned that listening is really good early. I learned that it was very, very, very good for me to come in at the staff writer level way down on the bottom rung and have to learn and do the work to learn how to be a screenwriter, because what I also learned is I had no idea how to be a screenwriter. I was good enough I think to earn my place in that room that first year. I didn’t really know what pitching was. I didn’t really know what a scene was. It took me that year of watching it and listening to understand that the fundamentals of fiction writing are just not the same as screenwriting. There’s an overlap, sure, but I needed to pay my dues. I think that first year was paying my dues.

**John:** The Bridge, you were on that for just one season, and then what was your next job after that? How did you get from that to your next job?

**Patrick:** I was at The Bridge for both seasons. Right around the end of the first season of The Bridge, Meredith introduced me to Howard Gordon. He had a need for a young writer in the 24 room for the limited series, the last episode of 24 that Jack was in. I went over and met those guys one day at the Fox lot. I was like, “What is going on?” because I love 24 and that kind of storytelling, more specifically, just the intensity and drive and clarity and just like da da da da da da da da da da. I didn’t know how to do it. I was a literary fiction writer, but I was a fan. That’s how I met them. They offered me a job. Right when I was coming back, I had to tell my wife I got another job. That’s when we decided to move, when we moved to LA. I went right from the 24 room back to The Bridge Season 2 room.

**John:** Great. That was between two seasons you were doing this 24. Was Leftovers the next show after The Bridge?

**Patrick:** It was. The Bridge got canceled in the summertime I think of 2013. I was always wanting to get to the showrunner level and not ready, but wanting nevertheless. I think when The Bridge ended, I was going down that road. I wrote a cop show set in Chicago that I was into and trying to get set up. Then The Leftovers came around. That show in particular, the combination I think, Tom Perrotta and Damon Lindelof, and also just it had everything that I wanted in terms of what the next step was. I didn’t think I was going to get that job. It took 400 meetings to even get to Damon to have lunch with him. We hit it off when we met. I think it was only after spending two years in that room with so many amazing writers that I realized I wasn’t ready for anything at that moment before Leftovers. I needed that time. I needed those two seasons to really learn the last things I needed to learn before I took a crack at it.

**John:** We’re working on the Scriptnotes book right now. Just yesterday I was reading through the Damon Lindelof interview I did a zillion years ago where he’s talking about The Leftovers room. It’s weird to hear Damon talking about this. This is pre-Watchmen. Leftovers was still on the air. He doesn’t send writers to set. He believes that he wants writers in the room. He himself doesn’t seem like he wants to go to set. He’s a creature of the room. How different was that from your experience on The Bridge or on 24? It just feels like there’s so many different ways that showrunners run shows.

**Patrick:** It was the complete opposite as what Meredith and Elwood did and thought. I was sitting on set within a month, and I didn’t know what to do there. I had too many jobs to enforce and not enough context. It’s a great way to learn, especially if you’re humble about it and read the room well and understand it’s the director’s set but you’re there to support the script. It was great. The thing about Damon’s point of view that I think is right is it does make it so the script has to be the script. That requires a very complicated system to make that true. It was good for me to have that two-year period where it was very room-centric, but now I am not like that at all as a showrunner. I am very present on set. I very much believe in having the writers come to set too. I couldn’t for Station Eleven because of the pandemic. I’m active on set, in rehearsal, in the dialog with the HODs and with the actors.

**John:** Now, I want to get to Station Eleven, but I don’t want to skip over completely Maniac or Made for Love. What were those experiences like? My hunch is that Maniac was completely scripted before it was shot, but maybe there was some stuff along the way. What were those room experiences and development experiences like?

**Patrick:** Different. Both of those shows were specific situations and different setups. Maniac was ordered straight to series before they had a writer. That was complicated. We incubated all 10 scripts in a room, the way I had learned it. They changed a lot once we got into prep. That largely had to do with the collaboration with Cary, my creative partner on that show. That was a whole different kind of experience that I would characterize probably more like a movie.

Made for Love, we had a great room and did a lot of the work up front. I think that’s the one where I learned, I think, about budget and production realities and how you have to protect your show and your people by acknowledging the cost of scripts at the front end and insulating them from being deconstructed during prep, because that’s a dangerous thing.

**John:** When you say acknowledging the cost of scripts, basically acknowledging what in the script is going to be expensive, what is going to push it over the edge, that’s going to force dramatic cuts or compromises down the road?

**Patrick:** Yeah. I think putting your producer cap on when you’re in the writers room or privately doing it, because it infects the conversation if you do it too much. You won’t end up in the right creative place. I think I was coming from more maybe a purist point of view where we don’t talk about that when we’re in the room, we’ll figure it out after. Now that I’ve been through it a few cycles, and I can even feel it, the way I pitch, the way I think about scripts now is some part of my head is always thinking what’s this going to cost and what’s the core of this beat and how are we paying for it in another part of the season, how do we get it back or how do we do it in the one tenth of the cost way. I think that’s just about experience too. You learn a new layer of this business every time you go through the cycle. That one, I was learning about being a producer at the front end.

Then Station Eleven came along right on top of the beginning of Made for Love. I transitioned over to exclusively being the showrunner of Station Eleven when we were in prep in the fall of 2019 in Chicago.

**John:** I want to talk to you about how you came upon the book and whether you knew from the start the shape it was going to be in. This is a book by Emily St. John Mandel, which I’d read early on in the pandemic. I think my first conversation with you, I DM’ed you on Twitter saying, “Hey, just read this.” I think my question was, “Does COVID exist in your world?” I was just really fascinated by how you were going to do this thing. How did the book come to you?

**Patrick:** I just loved the book. I read the book when it came out, because I very, very barely knew Emily from the fiction world. We had read together once in Chicago and had a great conversation, in which I said, “I don’t think I can support myself and my family or pull my weight as a fiction writer, even though my books are getting reviewed in the New York Times.” I was successful by all metrics, at least that I’d built for myself. I was broke. I was like, “Emily, math doesn’t make sense.” She was like, “I know. I’m going to try to write one more and see how that goes.” I went to the Bridge job, and about a year later I see her book just everywhere and on the bestseller list. I was like, “Oh, okay, Emily figured it out.” When I read it, I just loved it. I loved the element, the weird combination of post-apocalyptic Shakespeare at Hollywood, the idea of, I don’t know, the minutia of everyday life in the apocalypse instead of death over and over again. I loved it.

**John:** For folks who haven’t read the book or seen your show, what’s the quick elevator pitch version of the story? How do you describe it?

**Patrick:** This is how I pitched it. Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic show about joy. I think story-wise, a flu descends very rapidly on the world in our modern era and wipes out 99.9% of the population. Most of the book takes place around the Great Lakes with a traveling group of artists putting on Shakespeare plays to little villages 20 years later. It’s not about the horrible survival times. It’s about the rebuild times. It’s actually life-affirming, even though so many people die in the beginning.

**John:** It’s not The Walking Dead. I think whenever you hear post-apocalyptic, you assume it’s going to be this. I would say some of the choices you made in the adaptation make it a little less ominously The Walking Dead. You made some clear choices. I’m wondering when those choices came about. For example, keeping Jeevan with Kirsten through much more of the story, the changes with the prophet, who Miranda is and how she comes upon the graphic novel. How early on into this conception of like, oh, if I took this book and could make it into a series, when did you know you were going to make those changes?

**Patrick:** Right after Maniac, I called Emily, because I had heard that the book was coming available again. They’d been trying to make a movie script out of it and failing. I got a meeting on the books with Scott Steindorff, the producer who had the rights for something else. I just went to his office, and I was like, “Hey, Station Eleven, how about a limited series?” I told him what I thought it should be, and he agreed, and we made a deal with Paramount. I was in an overall with Paramount then. They paid for a mini room for me. It was just two weeks.

All those ideas, the big ideas that you’re talking about, the Jeevan Kirsten stuff, their separation and reunion, the change of Tyler as a standard cult leader into a different kind of cult leader, and how to handle the airport, the big ideas, we cracked a lot of the huge ideas in that two weeks. That was enough to help me write the first two scripts on my own. That’s what was the document that I sent to Hiro when he signed on. Then we sold the show, all on the energy of that early development.

**John:** Hiro Murai, who’s the director who did the first two episodes.

**Patrick:** Yeah, and really a creative partner at the development level for months and months and months beyond his duties doing prep for those two episodes. It was a very close partnership I think to crack that show, the tone of that show.

**John:** I want to go back to this mini room you put together, because it’s two weeks. How many writers did you have together to tackle this?

**Patrick:** It was just four writers. It was Nick Hughes, Gina Welch, Mauricio Katz, and Kim Steele and me.

**John:** I recognize two of those writers who wrote scripts later on on the show. What were you actually doing in that room? Was it just filling up whiteboards of stuff? Was it chatting? What happened in that room?

**Patrick:** There was one whiteboard. There was a big couch and a table and one whiteboard. We just would chat. We were just talking. They had all read the book. We just came together and like, “How would we do this?” It was just putting the big ideas up on the board.

**John:** The end result of this two weeks, you come out of there, and did you then need to pitch to Paramount and to other places about what the show’s going to be? Obviously, Paramount had gotten involved here, but had it already been set up at HBO Max? What was the status of the show at this point?

**Patrick:** It was not set up at HBO Max. It was an in-house Paramount development. I’ve always gravitated more toward writing scripts than pitching verbally. I think I’ve gotten much better at pitching verbally, but I like to lead with the text to show people what the show is. I wrote those two. We talked with Scott and the early producers about them. Eventually, right in there, the head of Paramount Television changed over and was just a reset for everyone who’s under an overall. Nicole Clemens came in and really doubled down on Station Eleven and endorsed the project and said she was very excited about it. We lined up the pitches once Hiro was attached and went around and pitched in April of the following year. I sold Made for Love in between in that story.

**John:** Just to make sure we’re clear on the timelines, so you’d gotten together this writers room. Two weeks coming out of it, you had a whole bunch of notes. With those, you wrote two scripts. You wrote these first two scripts, then attached Hiro to direct, and then went out to pitch?

**Patrick:** Yeah. I wrote Episode 1 while the room was going, in the background of the room. Then we internally talked about it, the producers and the studio, and everyone decided we wanted a second script. That took another month. I think I was on my own for that. Then Hiro, and then we went and pitched.

**John:** The decision about the second script was that the first one was entirely in present day, and the second episode jumps forward 20 years. You really could get a sense of what that world was going to look like and feel like.

**Patrick:** We needed the second world, but we also needed to understand the lead, adult Kirsten.

**John:** She’s not in that first episode. She shows up at the very end.

**Patrick:** Yeah, we needed a full episode with her. I was into it. It was hard. It was daunting to do it by myself, especially because you are faking the world building. When you’re there, you have guesses, and you have the novel. I didn’t know some truths about the traveling symphony or about the characters yet. You have to leap of faith your way through a script in those early days.

**John:** You’re taking us around to the various streamers and networks. How quickly did you end up at HBO Max? It sounds like based on your experience in the shows that had informed you so much, HBO felt like a great home for this.

**Patrick:** HBO Max didn’t exist.

**John:** That’s right, so just HBO.

**Patrick:** The first day we pitched was to HBO and to Warner Media, which I didn’t really know what the difference was. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure they did. Then throughout the next week, we pitched to all the places and had a number of offers that coalesced down into Netflix and Warner Media. We went with Warner Media for a lot of reasons. Sarah Aubrey was there, who I knew from The Leftovers and also from the sale of Made for Love. They felt like a good home for the show.

**John:** Cool. I want us to start talking about the pilot script for this. In the show notes for this, people can see, we’re going to have links to the pdfs of all eight episodes so people can read through the scripts and really see what the show looked like on the page. I really want to, on this episode, talk about the pilot script and some things I’ve noticed from this. Episode 1 of 1, Wheel of Fire. Why is it called Wheel of Fire?

**Patrick:** There’s a burning Ferris wheel at the end.

**John:** That’s true. There is a burning Ferris wheel at the end. There you go.

**Patrick:** That term has some older connotations as well. The wheel was going to be a motif and theme.

**John:** For the traveling circus.

**Patrick:** For the whole show. I wanted it to be in there. I just thought it sounded cool too.

**John:** It does sound cool. Do you call this a pilot or not a pilot? If it’s a limited series, does it actually have a pilot or it’s just the first episode?

**Patrick:** I don’t know. It depends who you’re asking, because they ordered the series straight to series, but that doesn’t mean straight to series, I think. There’s always an opportunity for the streamer to bail at any time. I did call it Episode 1 on principle. I think collectively 1 and 3 operated as pilots for the show.

**John:** Just because we’re not looking at TV production scripts very often, this second page is revision history. The draft we’re actually looking at is the third white revisions. As I look through this revision draft, there’s 12 revisions here. There’s a noticeable gap here. The second pink revisions were December 1, 2020, which would’ve been production-ish. Then more than a year later, we have second yellow revisions on 1/4/21, which would’ve been production post-pandemic or once you can get back into development. We show also what pages are revised in each of these scripts, which is so helpful, so people can zoom right to what might be different.

**Patrick:** You know what happened between 12/1/20 and 1/4/21.

**John:** The actual pandemic, the thing that eclipsed a lot of what you were trying to talk about in the show.

**Patrick:** Yeah, but we also shot the episode between those two dates. The reason it kept getting revised after we had shot it is there was one piece left to do in Canada. We had to keep adjusting and adjusting and adjusting that.

**John:** What is the sequence that was left over from that first episode?

**Patrick:** On page 53, after we’ve gone to space, we’re coming back, and scene 47 we land on a stage, different version of a stage than where our story began. We see wagons. We hear actors. We’re hearing lines from the play King Lear. Then we’re finding people playing King Lear, but not at all in the context that the episode began in Chicago. This is the traveling symphony out in the wild and Kirsten playing the same part Arthur played at the beginning of the episode. That was the wheel. We were trying to close that loop in the script.

**John:** It was meant to be a clean bookend, where it starts with King Lear and ends with King Lear. That’s not how the actual episode ends, as I recall what I watched.

**Patrick:** It’s not. It’s not at all. We shot this. Our costume team made an amazing new set of costumes for Lear, and Jeremy shot the shit out of it. Mackenzie and company crushed it. When we put it all together, we didn’t feel like it was quit capturing the bang of the year 20 feeling that we needed. I think actually, this is so superficial seeming, I guess, but simple, I don’t know. We shot this at night. That was a problem, I think, because all of Episode 1 is dark and night. I think we needed it to be day. We needed to see the green, and we needed to see the lushness of year 20. We needed to know, just to know that that was Kirsten inherently.

**John:** You needed someone to yell Kirsten and her to look over.

**Patrick:** Yeah. That’s actually a piece from Episode 4 that Helen Shaver shot. It’s a scene that we come back to by Episode 4. One of our editors had that idea. What’s so great about it and what Hiro loved too is that the book is there. That is the linking piece that has been the thread through the whole episode.

**John:** The book plays a much more important role in the series than it does inside the book, I think partly because it’s a visual medium. Seeing who has the book, who has exposure to the book becomes incredibly important in the series. You’re letting the audience know, pay attention to this graphic novel.

**Patrick:** Who wrote the book was the other thing. We had to write the book, basically, to make the show make sense to us.

**John:** That’s a lot. Second page of the script, or sorry, third page I guess, is the cast list, so showing who is in our episode. We have a scratch through for the conductor, Lori Petty, because she’s no longer in that first episode because of changes that you guys just described. That makes sense. Locations list, this is where you’re talking about the producer hat and where the money’s going. Locations that you’re only going to see once that are expensive are costly. People that are getting the script, who is going to be focused on the location list? Obviously, your location manager, but why else is this page important in the script?

**Patrick:** I think your production designer and art department is going to sit down and get a feeling for this spread of the episode. We talk about world building in terms of big fantasy and big tent pole stuff, but every episode has world building to it. What is the world of Episode 1?

I think for Ruth Ammon, our production designer, Frank’s apartment was critical, not just for this episode, because we have a big VFX shot in it, but for the whole series. Lake Point Tower is a very specific building that we fell in love with and communicated a lot about the show. You can see it stacked there, how many Lake Point Tower locations there are. That’s a pretty quick sequence. That’s on the way in, which we shot really there. In the lobby we shot. To the elevator we shot. Then we built Frank’s apartment. That one is on our stage. The hallway we also built. The stairwell was a different stairwell. It’s a very important sequence, stacked as dense as the theater, which we also constructed out of four Chicago theaters.

**John:** As you watch the whole run of the show, you start to realize, oh, these are the standing sets that we’re coming back to. Frank’s apartment is an incredibly important standing set that we’re going to come back to. The airport is incredibly important standing set that we’re always going to be able to base ourselves around. Even as a person who was just watching the show, the producer brain does kick in, and I start to realize, okay, these are the things they actually built or found or headquartered in versus some place they traveled to to shoot for a couple days.

**Patrick:** Actually, the crazy thing about Frank’s apartment is we trucked it from Chicago to Toronto during the pandemic and rebuilt it as well. It traveled. Our standing set traveled.

**John:** Anything can travel. On this last page here is a day and night breakdown. Tell me, who is responsible for making these pages that are going at the front of the script? Who was doing these pages?

**Patrick:** Katie French, who had gone from our writers assistant in the room to our script coordinator through the whole run of the show and who ultimately was promoted to staff writer right at the end of production. She’s in the mini room for The Glass Hotel now.

**John:** Fantastic. Finally, on the sixth page of the pdf, we’re actually at the first page of the script. Some things I notice right from the start, you are a double spacer. You hit that space bar twice after every period. That’s fine.

**Patrick:** That’s correct.

**John:** Some people do.

**Patrick:** We can talk about it if you want. We don’t have to talk about it.

**John:** There are no wrong choices about spaces. I used to be a double spacer. I famously gave up my double spacing and never looked back, but nothing wrong with-

**Patrick:** I’m not as passionate as I once was.

**John:** You might be the last one. You might be the last one.

**Patrick:** That’s fine too. It’s just I think that I’m wrong. I actually think that I’m wrong. I keep doing it. I don’t know why. I can’t tell you why.

**John:** Because you have muscle memory. If you try to stop it, it’ll feel weird for a sec, and then you’ll get over it.

**Patrick:** What happened to you? Are you a fundamentalist now? Are you open?

**John:** I used to be a fundamentalist about double spacing, to the degree which I would actually do a find replace in my script before I turned it in, make sure all the spaces were double spaced. Then I started to realize I’m the only person left doing this, because double spacing went away completely on the internet. Html actually gets rid of double spaces. At a certain point I was like, “You know what? I’m going to stop fighting this fight.” I gave up. It’s smooth sailing. Here’s the reason why we don’t need to do it anymore. Our eyes are used to seeing capital letters start sentences. We don’t need that double space anymore. It’s just a vestige of how we used to do things with typewriters, truly.

**Patrick:** As insane as I am about the way the script looks personally, I don’t care also. Every writer who’s ever been in my room is rolling their eyes right now because I made them do it. I think I’m done fighting this fight. It’s stupid.

**John:** I want to talk about how good this first page looks, because I answered a question on Twitter this last week about… Someone said, “Is it wrong to not have any dialog on your first page?” Here’s a first page that has no dialog on it.

**Patrick:** Not a great sign. Not a great sign, I got to say.

**John:** If you’re going to have a page without any dialog on it, your choices of when to bold stuff is helping a lot. It’s helping me get my eyes down the page and make me less terrified about reading just a wall of text. A thing I notice as I read through this, because I just read this this morning, versus watching the show, is we have post-apocalyptic guy, post-apocalyptic boy, who are set up as these recurring characters throughout the pilot. They don’t actually recur throughout the pilot as shot or as shown to us. When did that idea drop down or diminish?

**Patrick:** In post we shot them. Hiro was having an instinct that there was something wonky about them coalescing in his head. He liked them too. It was almost too cute in the way that it was pretending to be The Walking Dead. They looked unlike any of the traveling symphony people. they looked ratty. They looked like the dad and the kid from the road. We were trying to tell a little bit of a story with the boy. I think Hiro’s instinct ultimately was the right one, which was it’s too much story freight to be asking the audience to track too soon about people who don’t matter in our story. Hiro I think also knew that these opening moments are about place, not about people. The ferns were doing the work. We didn’t need a boy and a dad too.

**John:** A thing you do on the second page here… I’m going to just read aloud this paragraph. “Somehow the boy didn’t even hear that. Watch out, boy. Where is your father? You are about to be eaten by a man in rags who has teleported from another network’s very earnest, self-serious prestige cable limited series about pain, starvation, and how all humans are horrible at their core.” You spent five lines just talking to us as the reader about what your show was opposed to another post-apocalyptic show would be. I like it. It reminds me of… Lost scripts would do that, where they would actually just really give you a sense of, this is what it’s meant to feel like as a person watching the show.

**Patrick:** I think obviously I watched Damon do that for years. I had been doing maybe a version of it myself. It fought the screenwriting advice that’s pretty standard, which is don’t do that. I think the reason I do it, I have to do it, because my writing is really, really dependent on tone. Whether or not a scene, any given scene I write works is entirely up to getting the tone right. Therefore, I think I need the person reading the script to understand it a little bit more than what the very skeletal version of the scene would do.

Some of it maybe reflects my anxiety changing over from the novelist to the screenwriter and not knowing how to make tone happen because of the scene, if that makes sense, or I’m still learning, I think, in that regard. I think part of it is also these are sales documents. You have to attract your crew. You have to attract your actors. You have to get people to want to buy it. The script has to be a read in and of itself.

**John:** Yeah, because you’re asking someone to take an hour of their day to read the script. You’re trying to make it a worthwhile hour of their day, and not having them skim, not having them skip through things.

**Patrick:** In this case too, post-apocalyptic genre comes with a lot of baggage. I think very early I wanted to make it very clear that we both had a lighthearted and wry point of view about all this, and we’re not doing the thing that that genre often did do.

**John:** I don’t want to talk about every page. There’s a moment you have happening on page 8, near the bottom of the page. “Jeevan moves away, crosses past Arthur’s body, and asserts himself between it and little Kirsten, who’s still staring, fascinated and unable to look away.” You’re doing some very specific blocking of two actors. It works really well. I remember that moment working as shot. On the page I can see he’s trying to physically do something here to keep this girl from seeing this. We’re learning about both Jeevan and Kirsten in this moment. I just wanted to single that out, because it’s the kind of thing that I think a lot of writers feel like, “Oh, that’s overstepping my boundaries. I’m directing too much from the page.” It’s not at all. It’s absolutely essential to make that beat work.

**Patrick:** Blocking is unbelievably important. Whole scenes can crumple when the blocking changes. On top of all that, this is just how I imagine. I think that blocking says a lot about Jeevan and who he is and how he’s safe and how he’s driven fundamentally by concern for the well-being of a stranger. That’s happened twice now in the last couple pages. I think in terms of the director conversation, any confident director will just say, “That blocking sucks. Let’s do it this way.” Any confident writer showrunner who knows what they’re doing will either say, “You’re totally right,” or, “No, we got to keep it.” I think if you’re all there doing the same thing, the blocking will end up what it needs to be.

Hiro, Christian, every director, Jeremy, they all knew they could change it if they needed to, from what I did. I often was lurking too. I would be like, “The problem with that though is this line doesn’t make sense anymore.” We worked together. Half the time I’m wrong on the page here, but I was doing it for a reason all the time. I think that’s the key in the collaboration. If everybody knows that, then we’re good. We changed a ton of stuff left and right.

**John:** What you’re doing on the page has set the tone. It’s the pre-tone meeting in terms of what is this scene actually really about. You can tell because of the specific stuff that you put in the scene.

**Patrick:** I find directors, actually that’s what they’re looking for, what is the core essential truth in this scene. I think the hard thing about being a director in Hollywood is getting scripts that just don’t speak to that at all.

**John:** We could focus for another hour on the script, but let’s actually turn our attention back to the room, because you’ve now set up the series. You are going to be going straight to series, but you need to actually write all these scripts. This is where you’re assembling a new room to put together the scripts for this 10 episodes. How many weeks was that? How did you find your writers? What was the process for putting together a room on Station Eleven?

**Patrick:** It was a 20-week room.

**John:** 20 weeks, that seems like a lot.

**Patrick:** It wasn’t enough. At the same time, yes, in today’s conversation I think that’s just… Leftovers, Season 2 was 42 seeks, and Season 3 I think was 44.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Patrick:** We moved slow. When the script came out of those rooms, it was the episode. There wasn’t any fluctuation in prep or in production. That was the show. We moved slow. Damon really believed in collective consents. We wouldn’t move forward if someone was bumping anywhere. We would overcome it as a group. You often would bog for three days on one scene because of that.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** The problem though I faced at the beginning of this fall of 2019 was that because of Hiro’s coming schedule with Atlanta, because of my various entanglements in Los Angeles where Made for Love was shooting, the room was starting, and we had 20 weeks to go. We had 2 scripts, and we needed to output a bunch of them. I was getting pulled to Chicago and a set in LA. We had originally planned to shoot Station Eleven much later but had to pull it up into the fall of 2019 because of what Hiro’s coming schedule was going to be. It’s crazy to think about it, because it created a very difficult situation for the room. I was not in it all the time. I think that made it hard for the room sometimes. It’s crazy to think, had we not done this, we never would’ve made Station Eleven, because there’s no way in hell HBO Max would’ve said go ahead if we had shot nothing and the pandemic descended.

I built the room out of writers I knew and new writers to me. Nick Hughes came, a writer named Shannon Houston, who’s brilliant, who I’d been talking to for a while, Cord Jefferson, Kim Steele, Will Weggel. My former assistant also came in. A few other people. We were underway together, and September rolled forward for about a month before I started popping around to different places, and they tried to keep hacking away at it.

**John:** Looking through, just on IMDB, some of these people who I don’t know, it felt like the room was bottom-heavy. So often with small rooms, you see here’s a consulting producer or these are near showrunner levels. These were a lot of people who felt newer, or newer to their career.

**Patrick:** That’s true.

**John:** A deliberate choice?

**Patrick:** Sarah McCarron I forgot to mention, who’s also a brilliant writer. A deliberate choice? Maybe not consciously aware. I trended that way. Honestly, all these people are brilliant people who are in the room. We had plenty of brain power to get the show baked enough. I think a mistake I made as a younger, inexperienced showrunner was often to do this, and I think honestly reflects more than anything my own insecurity being able to run a room and being intimidated by the idea of someone more experienced than me in the room with me. I think this room reflects the end of that time for me when I was starting to realize that it was a mistake to not embrace as much experience as I could around me and take the wisdom and help of people who’d done it and been through 10 cycles of production. It was silly, but I think I didn’t quite know that that was happening consciously. I don’t think if I time traveled to me and confronted me about it, old me would admit that that was what was happening. Does that make sense?

**John:** Absolutely. We had Liz Meriwether and Liz Hannah on the show recently. They were talking about the rooms for their two limited series and how incredibly important it was to have a writer on it who’s like, “Okay, that’s all well and good. Here’s how we make a TV show.” It was important to have a writer who just really knew how stuff got done. That was useful.

**Patrick:** I thought that was me. I think I was overestimating that too. You need help. You need experience. You need people who have gone through it a bunch of times who can guide you. It doesn’t mean that you’re not a good leader, I think. I think it probably means you’re a better leader to know that.

**John:** What internal documents or tools were you using to get the show figured out? I assume there was a whiteboard, because you’re actually recording this in the room where you put the room together, I guess. You have whiteboards, but what were the internal documents or what things were you guys looking at as a group?

**Patrick:** We had a bunch of stuff going at the same time. If I had to do it all over again, I would’ve started in a different order. We had whiteboards. We had a board that had a guess at what the 10 episodes were wanting to be, what the flow of the season was wanting to be. One thing that was very right was Episode 103 firmly planted as Episode 103, which later became a point of discussion a lot about whether that was the right place for it. We always thought that Miranda’s story needed to be right there early, even though it was a departure from the central story. The break was going for whatever episode we were on. Damon always likes to do a scenes we like board, which was the pre-break conversation for a few days. There was that going. We only got through the break of Episode 5 before the show was in production, 5 or 6.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** What happened was the amount of world building was unbelievably gigantic, more so than I think I ever thought it could be, between Tyler, the airport, the way to separate Kirsten from the troupe, the way to reunite everyone, the scenes of the show. There was a lot to talk about. I think it was like, “I’m going to go out for a hike,” and then walking up to the base of Mount Kilimanjaro and realizing at the last minute that you hadn’t brought some important climbing gear or tents and stuff. Do you relate to that experience?

**John:** Oh my god, yeah. Backstory behind all of this is that my first and really only experience running a television show was a disaster, back in the year 2000, 1999, where I was the hotshot young screenwriter who set up a show at the WB and was running the show that I had no business running, and just this slow-motion car crash of trying to do all this. I’m nodding as you’re saying that fear of having more experienced people in the room. I didn’t have more experienced people in the room. I surrounded myself with just the wrong folks.

**Patrick:** In my case, I was surrounded by the right folks, but I think I needed to be surrounded by more folks.

**John:** Exactly. You were too lean.

**Patrick:** I’m not sure my health was okay as those months of prep continued and I kept flying back and forth on red-eyes and not sleeping. I definitely was thinking that I was totally okay, but I was, I think in hindsight, slowly getting pulled into a whirlpool down. I think it was one of those things where we had just enough. I had the support I needed at the critical times I needed it. I think Hiro and his team and Christian and the HODs we had hired together in Chicago were so good. They were so brilliant and so pursuing the right questions, the times I wasn’t there in Chicago. The studio and the network ultimately had my back, just enough to get us rolling.

When we were rolling, I don’t think we ever missed on a day of dailies. I don’t think there’s a bad take in anything Hiro shot for the first 28 days of production that he directed 1 and 3 for. I think that’s when the Schrodinger’s box of is this showrunner a conman or not gets opened and that you start to show episodes, and they work and they’re good. Our cast also, they were so incredibly grounded and on it emotionally. Everyone knew what they were playing so well, so intuitively that I was learning from them as they shot scenes, to tell you the truth.

**John:** You said before, you couldn’t have actually waited any longer, because the pandemic would’ve happened, and you would never be making the show. The show would not have existed if you hadn’t started shooting before the actual real-life pandemic. In a perfect world, what would you have wanted to do or what would you want to do in the future. Would you want to have clear separation between the writing phase and production phase? What would’ve been different about how you would set up a show like this?

**Patrick:** Station Eleven is special in that the way in which things happened in the wrong order created the magic of it. I don’t mean to say that it should be that way. It’s hard to think about… For example, Danielle Deadwyler shot the end of Episode 3, her speech in the boardroom in Malaysia on day 3 of our shoot.

**John:** That’s crazy.

**Patrick:** I had that to aim for as an idea of the show always. I couldn’t have written some things without seeing what Danielle did. The right way to do it to me is the room outputs all the scripts that are at production draft level and ready to shoot before prep starts. That’s the right way to do it, I think.

**John:** That’s the fantasy. You’re actually prepping a thing you know how to make.

**Patrick:** Stability too, for the actors, for the sake of the departments and everyone’s ability, because people below the line in our business can pivot amazingly. Sure, they can do it. Do you want to do that every day to people? No, it won’t get you the best show. It’s not okay. It’s ultimately the showrunner’s responsibility to be good at his or her job and prevent that from happening. I’m learning. I’m trying to get better at that.

**John:** My cohost, Craig Mazin, has been away for the better part of a year making his own show up in Calgary. He’s obviously having to do a lot of writing on set and producing on set. Talk to me about your experience of being on set as the writer, creator, showrunner, and what you see as your function there.

**Patrick:** There needs to be someone there who just knows the answer. That’s both a creative thing and I think a leadership thing and a morale thing too. Scripts were still changing all the time, even the next year when we were in Toronto. Somehow in that year gap and having the two episodes and having written it all, something had internalized in me where I just understood the show. I felt like I was ahead of everyone in a weird way, because I just had been in the scripts. I felt like I could come to set, I could see if something was off, maybe with the blocking or with set deck, or someone needs to be there with the director when he says this scene isn’t quite right in the writing. There’s got to be one person on set who knows. I felt like every scene of the show, there’s some little nudge or change or alteration that I think I’m not sure it would be unified in the right way if I hadn’t been there.

**John:** Talk to me about post. Were you posting while you were shooting? Was post up in Chicago and then Toronto or was it back in Los Angeles? How did all that work?

**Patrick:** The first part of the show, the Hiro episodes, we shot them and then we posted them linearly. That’s when the pandemic descended in the middle of the post process for those two eps. Then post came back up online in January right when I flew to Toronto. A few weeks into the shoot, here’s my morning. It’s 5 a.m. in Toronto. It’s dark. It’s 1 degree. Go to the stages, which is an airport and a facility near an airport. I enter my trailer, because it’s COVID. I have three monitors up. I have post back home, which will come online at noon. I have the sets, which is 150 feet away from me, but I’m not in it, because it’s COVID. I would need a reason to be in it, which usually just means your rehearsal and then I go back to my trailer. Then I have prep meetings on the third monitor happening about concept meetings for Episode 9.

**John:** Zooms.

**Patrick:** Yeah.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** My day is in there and then going to set and then coming back into the trailer and then going to set, in that case when Lucy needed me. We shot Episode 7 first.

**John:** Throughout all this whole process, what is HBO Max seeing? What is Paramount seeing? Are they getting outlines? How do they know what the show is that you’re making?

**Patrick:** By Part 2 in Canada, they had all 10 scripts.

**John:** That’s true.

**Patrick:** On Part 1 when they had a total of 3 scripts. They had 1, 2, and 3 when we shot 1 and 3. Soon after we started, I published 4 and 5. Then I published 7 during the January and February shooting period. I went and gave a big presentation and pitched the entire season out right after we wrapped that first iteration. We got behind in the room. We were supposed to have outputted more than that. That’s not on the writers room. That’s just on me not wanting to publish a script that felt not right yet. You know that thing, where it sometimes feels like it’s going to do more damage to your show to publish the wrong script than to publish no script? Like I said, the world building feat was just more gigantic than I think I had realized. That was what was happening slower back in the room, back in LA. Ultimately, that’s what I used to write the rest of the show, the work that the room did.

**John:** At what point do writers who are in that room get assigned, “Okay, you take this script. You take that script.” When is that decision made?

**Patrick:** That was pretty early. I think everyone in there got a script, and everyone knew what their script was going to be. It was tougher for 7, 8, 9, for Kim, Sarah, and Will, because the break, we really had only gotten to an outline place for those ones by the time the room was wrapping. What I think the room ended knowing and getting right was what emotionally each episode needed to be and a basic break of it. Then I think in all those different cases we continued, or I continued to do the writing.

**John:** Great. We have a listener question here which is right up your alley. Megana, do you want to help us out with that?

**Megana:** Nicole asks, “I have my first interview ever for a staffing position on a legal drama. I listened to your episode Advice for a New Staff Writer and was just wondering, do you have any tips for preparing for the interview? This is a new series that’s just been ordered. Any tips of advice would help.”

**John:** Pat, you’ve been through both scenarios here. You’ve been the new person interviewing for a job, and you’ve had to interview someone who wants to be a staff writer on a show. What advice can you give for Nicole? What should she be thinking about as she goes in that room?

**Patrick:** I’m thinking back to that Skype I had with Meredith and Elwood. I’m trying to remember. I’ll say it this was as the hirer. I think what I want is someone who seems to be both sophisticated socially, someone who can read a room and feel their way through a situation, just getting the sense of that, the life skill, and then someone who seems to have clear ideas, whether or not they agree with me. I think it’s very easy to get into this thinking that you’re supposed to serve the showrunner. Then sometimes that feels like without critical thinking. I don’t know. You need to show them that you’re not necessarily pliable, you’re not just there to please their imagination. It’s a tough needle to thread, honestly, because you got to be a good worker too. You got to, quote unquote, get it, whatever the fuck that means.

**John:** When Nicole goes into this room for staffing, how quickly does she bring up how much she loves the script that she read, the other writers’ previous work? What are the kinds of things that Nicole should just have cued up, ready to go when she walks into the room?

**Patrick:** I think if someone’s read the script, and if someone says one sentence… It doesn’t have to be, “I loved it.” It just has to be something that catches me like, whoa. If someone says, “I think this show is about blank,” and it dings a bell in my head as the creator, then I’m really paying attention. If someone has a thematic understanding of the story in a way that feels new to me, that’s really great. I don’t think it’s about praising it. It’s about understanding it. That’s when I feel as a showrunner someone’s going to come in the room and really help me.

**John:** Great. As the showrunner, you’re looking for somebody who can help you. That doesn’t just mean flatter you. It’s somebody who actually can bring something that you sense that you need. How could Nicole communicate that I guess is what I’m trying to get to. What does she say?

**Patrick:** I think it’s about the read of the script, honestly, what do you think this show is about, because the person doing the hiring in that situation doesn’t know the answer yet, usually. I think the anxiety best served is how do I help the showrunner know what this show is and find her vision, find his point of view.

**John:** Wonderful. It has come time in our podcast for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article I’ve just read this last week about the time in Ethiopia. I know that different cultures will have different calendars, just for cultural reasons. If you’re in Ethiopia, 1 a.m. is when dawn happens. Dawn is 1 a.m. It goes through 12 hours and then starts over again after 12 hours. It just made me realize it is so arbitrary that we start our days at midnight, in the middle of the night, as opposed to starting it at dawn, which feels like a very natural way to start your days.

**Patrick:** I got a good one.

**John:** Tell me.

**Patrick:** I’m not an expert, but this is what I’m doing lately in the last week. I saw a tweet last week that was a quote from Bell Hooks about friendship. I texted my friend who knows a lot about Bell Hooks, and I asked her about the quote, and she put me onto All About Love. What the quote was about, and why I’m fascinated, I’m about to dive into Bell Hooks, I guess, what she was saying is we live in this world of systems right now that we’ve already lost in a lot of ways in terms of power, just as a democracy. This is why friendship is so important, that we should treat friendship like the stakes are as high as anything else.

In the pandemic, I found it was really easy to let go and not put energy into a certain tier of friendships, the kind that you would maintain in regular life. I don’t know, I just started to feel that loss as very important, myself personally. Showrunning does this to you too. You can’t keep up with friendships properly, which it’s nefarious. It’s actually really important to find a way to keep balance in your life. Read All About Love, but also listen to Bell Hooks on friendship. That’s my one thing.

**John:** Your show is a lot about friendship as well. Arthur’s friendship and the trials that he goes through with their relationship is crucial story points there.

**Patrick:** It’s weird stuff for TV. It’s like Clark saying, “I miss friendships. I just miss friendships,” which just kills me still the way David Wilmot did that, because I do. There’s usually not a good way to frame that in TV and movie storytelling, but it’s a powerful emotion if you can get to it.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is Pedro Aguilera. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Patrick, what are you on Twitter?

**Patrick:** I am @patrickerville. It’s Patrick E-R-V-I-L-L-E.

**John:** Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find all eight episodes of Station Eleven scripts that you can download and read at your leisure. You’ll find the transcripts there and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we are about to record talking about making a pandemic show during the pandemic.

**Patrick:** Don’t try it.

**John:** Thank you so much for coming on the show.

**Patrick:** Thanks for having me. 553 represent.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** We’re back. Patrick, as I said in the main body of the episode, I first reached out to you during the pandemic because I had just read Station Eleven and wondered how the hell you were going to make a show about a pandemic after a pandemic had happened, whether you were going to acknowledge COVID. I think you said, “We’re in a separate timeline where that pandemic never happened.” Is that where you ended up?

**Patrick:** Yeah. What’s crazy was that our date I think for the pandemic was December 12, 2020.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Patrick:** That was just what we had done well before it was even happening in Wuhan. We were shooting then in January in 2020, and then the show premiered December 16, 2021. I had no idea when you texted me or when you tweeted, DMed me… You couldn’t tell. We were watching cuts of our own show and being like, “I literally can’t tell if this will be tone deaf or not a year from now.”

**John:** It came out at just the right time. It came out at a time where it’s like, oh, it’s beautiful, and a memory of a different world, in a weird way. The most jarring moments for me watching your show were when we were in the hospital with Siya, his sister, and no one is wearing masks. I’m like, “Of course they’d be wearing masks.” At the time you were shooting that pilot, that first episode, it was reasonable that they wouldn’t be wearing masks.

**Patrick:** The other crazy thing about that scene is the kids are wearing masks. That was the thing in the script. It got erased by the pandemic. What was chilling about that scene was the idea of seeing children in masks. Now that’s normal. It doesn’t read right anymore, but it doesn’t matter.

**John:** I’ve finally gotten to the place in watching film and television where I don’t bristle at, “Oh wait, these people are standing too close to each other in the elevator.” I’ve gotten past some of that early pandemic fear. A question for you is how far were you into shooting, what was the last thing you shot before you had to shut down because of COVID?

**Patrick:** I think our last day of shooting was Arthur’s house at the dinner party. We were finishing up the dinner party and the fire. That was the pool house on fire. That was somewhere around February 20th or 25th of 2020. What’s crazy to me is the first shot of the show, the theater that’s full, that’s practical. You can’t shoot with that many people in a place anymore. That’s 300 people. Our before is the before, if that makes sense. We shot all that in the time when no one had heard of COVID yet.

**John:** That’s wild. Talk about the day when you had to shut down, because I’ve talked with other friends who’ve literally had to… They got the call, and 10 minutes later they’re packing up the trucks. What was it like for you?

**Patrick:** We were in post. It was very memorable, because post is a place where you go down into this hole, and in reality it doesn’t exist. It’s alarming to say this, but that morning, Friday the 13th, my wife had stopped by with my two-year-old daughter to say hi in the morning. It was like, this feels scary, but we don’t know what’s going to happen. We had just I think heard the term shelter in-place a day or two before when San Francisco closed down. That’s how oblivious and not at the same time we were.

Hiro and I, we had really been grinding. We were at some microscopic stuff in 101. We worked all day with Isaac Hagy and the editor of Episode 1. Right around 5 p.m., Hiro’s producing partner and one of our EPs on the show, Nate Matteson, just burst into the bay. His hair was just wild and everywhere. It was scary, because you could see a person who had been spending the day in a different world, and he was like, “What the fuck are you guys doing?” That kind of energy. He had to come down, I think, to properly communicate to us that we had to go. It was scary. It was really human. We’d been through a lot together making the show. I hugged Hiro goodbye in the parking structure. I don’t know when the next time I saw him in the flesh was, a long, long time. We got back to work I think a week later online and continued editing Episode 3.

**John:** This was in Los Angeles or this was in Chicago?

**Patrick:** That’s LA. That was all in LA.

**John:** That’s LA. You were basically the grocery store cashier, and someone had to come and tell you, “Oh no, no, you should probably just leave. The world as you knew it no longer exists.”

**Patrick:** Is this that thing, that flu thing? Greatest day player of all time, that dude. Holy shit, he’s good. Yeah, that was me. That was all of us. We were at work. We were head down in the show.

**John:** Talk to me about the decision to go back into production. Were you ever worried that they were just going to pull the plug and say, “We’re just not going to make the show at all.”

**Patrick:** As much as everyone was about everything.

**John:** Because of the subject matter. Basically, you were thinking-

**Patrick:** No. That part I wasn’t worried about, because 1 and 3 were just too good, I thought. Also, we always were set up to be… If any show was going to be continued, it was going to be ours, because it was about rebuilding. It was about connection and joy. It wasn’t about pain exactly. I think if either of those episodes had been distressed episodes, that would’ve been a problem. I think Hiro, the cast, everyone delivered. I think people just wanted to see the show. What we had to decide was where to shoot. We had to wait for a while, and then we had to make a choice about where to go, because it didn’t feel like Chicago was going to be safe on the timeline they wanted to shoot. That was the big conversation over the summer.

**John:** Had there been no pandemic, you would’ve done those two episodes and then immediately gone into shooting the rest of the show or was there always going to be a break between the two episodes that had been shot and the rest of things?

**Patrick:** We had eight weeks more prep in Chicago and time for me to write. We were going to come back up in the late spring and shoot year 20 stuff with Mackenzie in and around Chicago. That plan went out the window.

**John:** All the prep you’ve done for Chicago is moot, because you had to prep completely from scratch in Toronto to figure out here are our exteriors, here are our locations, here’s how we’re going to do everything.

**Patrick:** It wasn’t moot. It wasn’t moot, because the prep we’d done in Chicago was conceptual about the show. It was about the space station. We hadn’t even gotten to the wagons and the airport yet. It was deeply valuable, that prep in Chicago. The loss of those eight weeks was-

**John:** You knew what you wanted to do. You didn’t know what the specific locations were and such.

**Patrick:** We hadn’t scouted yet for the next stuff, so we didn’t lose that. The loss of that eight weeks was horrific. We needed that. We got some of it back in the summer online with art and costume. We needed all of it. We were playing catch-up all through the shoot.

**John:** I wish you no pandemics for the next things you’re going off to shoot. You’re in the room right now for the next Emily St. John Mandel book?

**Patrick:** We’re working on The Glass Hotel. We’re working on a different version of The Glass Hotel that fits into the Station Eleven world that we made.

**John:** It’s set around Miranda, right, so a character who exists in Station Eleven?

**Patrick:** Yeah, that’s right. I think unlike in the novel, the role that Miranda plays in the story is much bigger.

**John:** Great.

**Patrick:** It’s the financial collapse in 2008. It’s new zone for us. It’s also, this is my favorite, it’s a mystery. We’re learning all those new kinds of story moves, but in our way.

**John:** That’s great. How far are you into the process of the room, this new product?

**Patrick:** We’re early. We’re finishing up what’s been a six-week mini room. We’re going to output the first two episodes and we’re going to go talk to HBO Max about making the show.

**John:** That’s awesome. Good luck with that. Absolute pleasure talking with you, Patrick.

**Patrick:** Thank you, John. This has been great.

Links:

* Follow along with the [Station Eleven pilot](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/S11_101_3rd-White-Revisions_6.15.21_Collated.pdf) discussion! Read all of the Station Eleven scripts [here](https://johnaugust.com/library).
* [Station Eleven](https://play.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GYZWoOQ6F9cLDCAEAAABP?camp=googleHBOMAX&action=play) the series on HBO
* [Station Eleven](https://bookshop.org/books/station-eleven-9781594138829/9780804172448) the book by Emily St. John Mandel
* [Patrick Somerville](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5821126/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/patrickerville?lang=en)
* [All about Love: New Visions by bell hooks](https://bookshop.org/books/all-about-love-new-visions/9780060959470)
* [Time in Ethiopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Pedro Aguilera ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/553standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/how-much-progress).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 570 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s a followupisode.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** We’re taking a look at several of the big industry problems we’ve discussed over the past few years and examining what progress had been made. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’re going to tell a heartwarming story just for Craig about firing your managers.

**Craig:** Don’t go further. We have to talk about followupisode.

**John:** Isn’t that so adorable?

**Craig:** It’s adorable. Did you just invent that?

**John:** As I was typing it up yesterday in the show notes, I decided that’s what it is. It’s followupisode.

**Craig:** Followupisode. I’m actually angry about how many people are going to steal that. I’m angry at them, and I’m angry for you about it. Wonderful.

**John:** I don’t know that I actually invented it. I bet if we did a Google search, we could find someone else who’d said it before. It feels right for our show.

**Craig:** Then I’m going to get angry at you. Here’s the point. I’m going to get angry.

**John:** Craig, there are no original thoughts. Just like you can’t be angry at somebody for stealing your idea for a movie about tennis players, you can’t be upset about-

**Craig:** Followupisode. It’s a followupisode. I love this.

**John:** To help us with our followupisode, we have not one but two special guests. Liz Alper is a writer/producer who’s worked on Chicago Fire, Hawaii Five-0, The Rookie, and Day of the Dead. She co-founded the Hollywood Pay Up movement and serves on the WGA board. Liz Alper, welcome back.

**Liz Alper:** It’s so nice to be back.

**Craig:** Hi.

**Liz:** Hello. It’s so nice to hear your voices.

**Craig:** Likewise.

**John:** Yay.

**Liz:** Yay.

**John:** Brittani Nichols is a comedy writer, actress, and organizer known for Suicide Kale, A Black Lady Sketch Show, and the Emmy Award-winning Abbott Elementary, on which she’s also a producer. Welcome, Brittani.

**Brittani Nichols:** Hello, and thank you for having me again.

**Craig:** Welcome.

**John:** Now, Brittani, apparently we are pulling you out of the Abbott Elementary room. I feel like it’s maybe our responsibility to give you some pitches to take back into the room. Guys, let’s help her out here. What could Brittani pitch when she goes back in there?

**Craig:** That’s what she was hoping for, randoms pitching her ideas on her show, because that never happens.

**John:** I’ve not seen any comic runners about the classroom pets. Sometimes there’s hermit crabs. There can be gerbils, guinea pigs, hamsters. One hamster always eats the other hamster.

**Liz:** They always escape. They’re always infesting the school. They’re somewhere. It’s a treasure hunt for them.

**Brittani:** That’s good. Stealing that. Please cut this out so no one can trace it back to this podcast.

**John:** I also have really distinct memories of when it’d be rainy and so we couldn’t go out for recess, how we did recess in the classroom, and thumbs up, seven up. Do you remember thumbs up, seven up?

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Brittani:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** You don’t see that very often.

**Craig:** Terrible game.

**John:** I remember the way my desk would smell. I could smell the cleaner on my desk when you lay your head down for thumbs up, seven up.

**Craig:** I remember that smell. My parents were public school teachers, so the stories that I could share would just be… I don’t know, you guys run for what, is it 24 minutes?

**Brittani:** 21.

**Craig:** 21 minutes of heavy Jewish sighing. I think that would be a very accurate episode. To my parents.

**Liz:** Craig, I had a similar experience growing up, but one of my parents is Asian. It was just a melding of cultures in one sigh. It was beautiful. It was a beautiful coming together.

**Craig:** Heavy Asian sighing is also-

**Liz:** The disappointment translates to any language.

**Craig:** Oh my god, Megana, tell us about heavy Indian sighing, would you? It’s a thing. It’s just a thing.

**Megana:** It’s an art form.

**Craig:** It is an art form of just disappointment, giving up.

**Megana:** With an Asian sigh, the disappointment manages to carry the entire immigrant experience in that one sigh.

**Craig:** All of it, yes, the whole thing.

**Megana:** The burden.

**Craig:** That’s the generational trauma.

**Liz:** It’s an ancestral sigh. You feel the weight of your ancestors coming out in that disappointment.

**Craig:** That’s right. There are ghosts in that sigh. That’s 21 minutes, for sure.

**John:** I just had the WASPy sort of eh. There was no special pressure on my side.

**Craig:** No, WASPs are not like that. They don’t have it. They don’t have the sigh.

**John:** We got nothing. Generational power but nothing else, I’ll say.

**Craig:** You probably came out better than we did just all around. It’s exciting to have both of you on, because we do have quite a bit of follow-up. John had a really good point that we do these shows and we dig into these movements that happen. There have been quite a few movements over the last five years. It is good to take stock as you go, because it’s very easy to fall into the trap of promoting stuff when it’s exciting and hot and new and everyone is focused on it, because it’s fresh injury. Then we can forget. We don’t want to forget.

**John:** Craig, we have two live shows coming up. Do you want to remind our listeners when our live shows our?

**Craig:** I do. Our first live show, they’re almost back to back, it’s on October 19th here in Los Angeles. It is sold out, because we are the Jon Bon Jovi/Bon Jovi band of podcasts. You can still get tickets for the livestream.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** You can not only see the show, but also you will see all the things that ultimately we ask Matthew to take out. That’s when you’ll realize that each podcast recording is 19 hours long.

**John:** He cuts it down to a tight little over an hour.

**Craig:** A tight hour.

**John:** It’s a lot going into that.

**Craig:** Seven hours of just crying. We will also be doing two, not one, but two live shows at the Austin Film Festival. One of them will be a live Three Page Challenge. The other one will be a good old-fashioned, slightly drunk live show.

**John:** I think it’s a 10 p.m. start on that. It’s going to be fun.

**Craig:** You know when I say slightly drunk I mean medium to seriously drunk. If you’re going to be at the Austin Film Festival and you want to be considered for that Three Page Challenge, we’ve added a new checkbox on the submission form, and when I say we, I mean John and Megana have, at johnaugust.com/threepage. That’s the word three and page.

**John:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Megana, I guess we also have some follow-up from our previous episode about our going to Austin Film Festival. What did Melissa have to say?

**Megana:** Melissa wrote in and said, “In a recent episode, Craig and John discuss their initial hesitation to return to the Austin Film Festival this year due to the atrocious political policies in Texas, specifically towards women. As a writer born and raised in Texas, I also feel conflicted whenever I go back there, but ultimately decided to attend AFF again as well. I put together a list of local female-owned restaurants and bars within two miles from the conference center so that at the very least we can spend our vacation money at places that support the women that are stuck in the Texas hellscape.”

**Craig:** That’s a really useful thing to have. Thank you, Melissa, because in all fairness, John and I are returning to Austin with some conflict in our hearts. This is a nice way to help. I like this. We will be doing some other things, I’m sure.

**John:** If you want to follow through, there’s a link in the show notes. It goes to a Google doc that she’s put together. It’s great and talks through some really great restaurants and places that I wouldn’t have considered, I didn’t know existed. Now I will go there and support some local restaurants, some local female restaurateurs.

Let’s get to our marquee topic here. The reason why we all assembled today is to talk about what progress has been made on some social issues, some issues facing this industry. I thought we’d do it in chronological order. We’re going to look at Me Too, assistant pay, policing/cop shows, and abortion rights. I suspect we’ll find common themes between them is that it’s very easy to focus on a thing when it’s new and right in front of you, but it’s hard to keep up that pressure, and that things tend to revert to a mean, and also that the pandemic changed things. I think there was some momentum on some stuff that got derailed by the pandemic. We’ll see whether we can get that back or what is the next step on that. Let’s jump into it.

Let’s start with Me Too. Hashtag Me Too apparently goes back to 2006, but it’s really in 2017 when we first had the Harvey Weinstein articles. There was the Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey article. There was also the Ronan Farrow piece. I think we had a great villain in Harvey Weinstein at the start. We have a movement focused on holding men accountable for terrible things they were doing in the industry and outside of the industry.

**Craig:** We are at the five-year point. When you listen to this, it’ll just be a few days after, but we’re recording this, so essentially the day before the five-year anniversary of Me Too. In my lifetime, I can’t think of too many movements that caught fire and had as much fast impact as the Me Too movement. That is not to say it is complete impact. I think we can all look around and see that there is a line. There was before that, and there’s after that. The after that does look quite different. I guess we should dig into how different and what’s gone well and where do we still need to do work.

**John:** Liz, can you help us out by thinking back to five years ago and as this story broke, what was surprising to you about it at the moment? What did you see happening right away? What impact did you feel immediately, and what were the ripples after that?

**Liz:** It’s interesting that you guys brought up the five-year mark, because I think that was such a crucial point for so many of these movements that we see that took off. Bringing that up at the beginning, because Me Too has been so much more than just holding abusers accountable.

There was a shift when the Me Too movement came on the scene, especially for women like me, who at the time of the Me Too movement, I was basically in my late 20s, early 30s, and was realizing that all of these things that I had been told to normalize – the fact that I would be sexually harassed on set, and I had been sexually harassed on set for many, many years – that that was not okay.

Before, there was this idea of, this is part of paying my dues as a young woman in Hollywood. When Me Too burst on the scene, it shifted this view of what dues meant in Hollywood and the fact that because I was a woman, I was expected to pay a price that was so much higher than my male counterparts, or most of my male counterparts, because Me Too does affect a lot of men, as we’ve heard the stories. I don’t want to ostracize those victims either. I think it really did immediately change how we had viewed the culture of Hollywood. Suddenly, it wasn’t something to be glorified. It was something to be deemed toxic and needed fixing.

I think immediately, when all of this happened, and especially with Harvey being held responsible, it really did feel like, “Wow, maybe these awful feelings that I have, maybe these aren’t my fault. Maybe this isn’t my fault that I feel bad when this supervisor touches my rear when I’m on set or says gross, sexualized things to me when no one else is around. Maybe that really isn’t okay.” It wasn’t.

I think now, we are hopefully helping a new generation of Hollywood newbies come in and say, “You should be be protected.” It’s no longer a, “You won’t be protected. This is an open secret. This is just what you have to do in order to show that you belong here.” Now, it’s, “No, you’re absolutely right. You deserve to be respected, and you deserve to be protected, and you deserve to feel safe in your workplace.” I do feel like that feeling has permeated the Hollywood culture. That’s nice to see.

**John:** Brittani, I’m curious, what was your initial reaction to the Me Too movement, and how has it progressed or changed in your mind? What is your feeling about the impact that calling these people out and calling out this culture has had in the industry?

**Brittani:** When Liz was talking, I was thinking about what I was doing when this first happened. I remembered just how everyone was talking about it, people that weren’t in entertainment. I was still on Facebook at the time, unfortunately, and seeing people there talk about it.

I remember this pressure to share, which was I think another side of it that doesn’t get talked about a lot, because it was really nice to witness people having the freedom to finally tell these stories and feel like they were being heard. Just in my own mind, I was like, “If I don’t do this, if I don’t use this hashtag, do people think that nothing bad has ever happened to me?” I was like, “Am I now hurting by not saying yes, here is another voice, here is another identity that you might think might not be impacted by these things? If I’m not speaking up, do people think it’s happening to less people?” I just remember having that internal battle of, “Do I have to say something now or am I letting someone down by not saying something?” Grappling with that was my feelings I think at the initial moment.

Going forward, I have the same feelings that I think I have about every movement or moment, which is just it’s so hard to keep momentum going. Keeping the conversation going and talking to people about it in your everyday life feels like the stickiest way to make it present and to make it felt is to just keep having conversations with people even when this national moment or the media attention goes away, just letting people know that you haven’t forgotten, that you still are there, is how I think it still crops up for me personally.

**Craig:** I feel like as far as these movements go that sometimes flame up and then disappear a little bit, Me Too has been incredibly successful from just looking at the way it has turned into a steady cultural norm as opposed to a movement. New social morays were established that should’ve been there from the start and unfortunately weren’t. Now, they seem like they’re there. That’s not to say that bad things don’t continue to happen. They don’t continue to happen inside of a culture that nods, quietly approves, passively approves. It does seem like there has been real change in that regard. It’s nice to see.

I think that in a strange way, it also affirmed how many good people there were, in a nice way, because after all these things came to light, there were still so many women who were still working happily hand in hand with men. There were so many men that were still working happily hand in hand with women and continue to. There are men and women, lots, most, I believe most, who are capable of working together in a way that is respectful of each other. Maybe I’m a Pollyanna, but I feel like we did illuminate perhaps some of the better angels of our nature. Am I a Pollyanna?

**John:** I don’t know. Let’s look at what has been achieved, because I think if you’re looking for the good things that have happened out of this, there was accountability for some really terrible people who did some terrible things, and so Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby.

**Craig:** Les Moonves.

**John:** Les Moonves. We had other showrunners who are no longer running their shows.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Maybe a good thing. Also some big misses, like Donald Trump still got elected after doing clear sexual harassment. I would agree with you that this notion – let’s use the term open secret – this idea that we would just look the other way at people who were doing this stuff, that probably has changed over the past five years, that we recognize, “Oh, you cannot be doing that. He cannot be doing that. This is a problem.” I think we’re more likely to believe a woman who says that a thing happened from the start. Actually, this might be a good time to bring out a listener question here, because Megana had a person, Stay Or Go, who was talking about a project that has a known harasser involved with it. Do you want to read us through this question?

**Megana:** Stay Or Go wrote in and said, “Recently, I was in talks for a project when the producer mentioned he had an actor with a proven in court of law history of abuse in mind to play the lead. I’d worked for this producer before, and in the past, he’d been quick to call out abusers. I was surprised and asked if he was aware of this person’s checkered past. He said he was aware, but then segued into a lecture saying there are two sides to every story, Me Too was a good thing in theory but had gone too far, and so on. I politely passed, and the project moved forward with another writer and the actor in question. Then a week later, I found out a different producer that I was currently working for also decided to hire this very same actor.

“I work in the low-budget genre space, and no matter the producer, well-documented abusers always seem to find their way onto the list of casting suggestions and are usually defended any time I try to steer the conversation away from them. I understand getting any movie made is hard. These names still trigger financing. They’re looking to work. No one wants to be reduced to their worst moments for all their days. Yet very few have faced real consequences or shown remorse beyond the customary apologetic press release. That’s not even getting into alleged abusers. Given that a no-name like myself has little influence on who may come aboard later in the process, is this simply a reality one has to begrudgingly learn to live with?”

**Craig:** That’s a tricky one.

**John:** That’s a tricky one, because I think it actually speaks to this moment that we’re in, is that maybe we’ve knocked out some of the worst, biggest offenders, but there’s people we know have some history we don’t feel great about. We’re like, “What are we going to do about this?” We’ve had the conversation about John Lasseter, who was let go from Pixar for his issues. People have the decision whether they’re going to work for him at his new animation company. Liz, when you see Stay Or Go’s letter here, what’s your instinct? Could Stay Or Go choose to not work on a project that might have a bad person involved on it? What’s your instinct?

**Liz:** When I hear that letter, she’s absolutely right, because the people who have seen the consequences of Me Too have been the ones with the highest profile, because they have the most to lose, because what they really value is their public image. Their public image is what gets them work, what gets them jobs. If you are flying below the radar, you are essentially escaping any sort of significant consequence. That’s something that we’ve seen not just for sexual harassers and the Me Too movement but also for chronic emotional, mental, sometimes even physical abusers and bullies in the industry who maybe have no history of sexual abuse or harassment but are harassers of a different nature. I think asking those questions and demanding an answer is exactly what she should be doing. I think to continue doing that, she’s going to be able to find the people whose values align with hers.

At this point in our industry, if you can say no, say no, if you can say no. Don’t ever feel like you are less than or you are condoning something if you are in a position where you have to take the work. That’s the thing that I feel a lot of people in the industry struggle with, because how do you feel like you are a morally righteous person if you are agreeing to work on a project that has a known abuser attached to it? Quite honestly, the reason is because you have to fight another day. You have to be able to be here to fight another day, because you have to be the one that others hook up with in order to actually enact that change. If you’re not here for us to bring into the next phase of justice in this industry, then we’re worse for it.

Really, it comes down to can you take the work, do you think you can forgive yourself for taking the work, knowing that it’s so you can have the money to survive in this industry for long enough to bring about HR reform or any sort of workplace reform that is necessary to ensure that people like that don’t get jobs and that there are actual solid consequences to the actions of those who are flying under the radar. That’s something that you will have to decide.

You should also know that you should be able to forgive yourself if you find yourself in a position that you have to say yes, because that’s usually what happens is that people are in a position where they cannot say no and feel as though they are part of the problem when they’ve been put in that position, they haven’t been given a choice. I think what she’s asking is really, “What do I do in order to survive this?” which is something that I’m asking every single day. There’s no good answer to it. It’s just take it case by case and see what your tolerance for it is.

**John:** Brittani, I remember at the start of all this, we would have workshops, we’d have panels, groups would come together to try to figure out what it was that we were going to do as an industry to grapple with this. There was always talk. There was a special committee formed. Anita Hill was leading a thing. There was going to be anonymous reporting lines. None of that structure seems like it really happened. There’s the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, but there’s not a hotline you call for sexual harassment or for the issues that Me Too was grappling with.

When you encounter a situation like this or your friends encounter a situation like this, what is your advice to do when you’re either facing abuse or dealing with a person who is taking unfair advantage of situations? What is your advice to writers facing these situations?

**Brittani:** Be loud about it to the people that you trust I think is unfortunately where we’ve landed with all this. I think that the things you’re talking about, things that Liz just mentioned, so much of it is about accountability. What I always say when people talk about accountability is that when you’re asking for accountability, something bad has already happened.

We’re not putting in enough effort, I think, into prevention, into how does this stuff trickle down. We’re always having these very high-minded, high-level conversations about bad shit. So much of our energy is put into that, when so often there are just warning signs, red flags left and right about the way that these people interact and the way that they treat people. That’s not the only bad thing they’re doing. That might be the only bad thing that people think rises to some level in which it needs to be addressed. That’s why I think we’re going… When people are weird, you should very openly be able to talk about people behaving weirdly. That is usually a sign that something more nefarious is going on.

I think until, as writers especially, we have an established norm for rooms where even low-level abuse is just not allowed, we’re always going to be dealing with what do we do in the aftermath instead of what can we be doing to make sure that these black dots on the white page, that we pay attention to them and that we don’t just ignore them.

**Craig:** That goes to who actually does carry out the work, because in the early days of these things, there are organizations and there are panels and blue ribbon commissions and so forth, but ultimately, it’s just everybody doing the work. It’s all of us, day to day, who work with other people, trying our best to treat each other better. That part, again I’ll just be a bit of a Pollyanna about it, does seem to have improved somewhat. I think that people are thinking more about each other. It just feels like even if they’re dragged into it kicking and screaming that empathy and putting yourself in other people’s shoes and asking yourself how would this feel to another person does seem like more of a thing.

When I started in this business in the ’90s, the culture was… I don’t know if this was left over from the ’80s and whatever amount of cocaine was still just exogenously in the air, but it was aggressive. It was very competitive. It was all very cutthroat. It doesn’t seem as much that way anymore.

I never want to downplay what a movement has done positively, because we can lead to despair. I think that even though our business is still very imperfect and there are still people that have yet to be exposed, there are more and more people who are being exposed. That’s 2% of the situation. Then 98% of the situation is just the day-to-day business of working with each other, which seems to have improved somewhat. Progress, but not perfection.

**John:** I would agree with you there. I think as I look back to the conversations we had on Scriptnotes early on in Me Too about writers coming and talking about their experiences, I don’t envision those writers having the same experiences five years later that they did then. I think the norms have changed enough about what people can get away with, that the most egregious things have not been happening, and that some better conversations have been happening about how to do stuff. Liz, Brittani, how much progress do you think we’ve made on Me Too over the last five years? It doesn’t have to be a report card, but some progress, a little progress, a lot of progress? What’s your feeling?

**Liz:** Yeah, some progress. This is my opinion. I think it’s possibly going to be an unpopular one. We’re five years into a movement that’s attempting to undue attitudes towards women that have existed for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. The fact that women in I believe it was the 1960s or the 1970s still couldn’t get a credit card without their husband’s approval and signature… This is the very, very beginning of progress. Yes, some progress. Please keep it coming. Also understanding that five years I don’t think can solve what hundreds and hundreds of years of this sort of misogynistic-based culture that we live in in this country has brought. I think we’re trying.

**John:** Brittani, no progress, some progress, lots of progress? What’s your feeling on Me Too?

**Brittani:** I think there’s been some progress. I think that if we think that the progress is going to happen via systems that have always failed us, as Liz has mentioned, we’re never going to get where we want to be. I think Craig is right in that so much of this is about personal responsibility and people reckoning with their own behavior. I think in that letter, it really came down to one dude saying, “No, but this one is different,” until people realize that that’s what everyone thinks. There are a thousand people saying that, “This time, this friend, this person that I know, this was the exception to the rule. I get it, but this one doesn’t count.”

Until people really are willing to be uncomfortable and willing to make other people uncomfortable and really willing to deal with a high level of discomfort themselves, we’re never going to get where we’re trying to go, because we can’t rely on any structure or any corporate entity to inject morality into an inherently evil business, which is everything. Capitalism is evil. We’ll never figure it out if we’re depending on the people whose entire goal is to just make money, and they don’t care about us.

**John:** Fast forward to September 2019, so Episode 419, we reflected on Me Too and asked what other issues we are not addressing in our industry. Listeners wrote in about assistant pay. That was the first episode where we started talking about assistant pay. Megana Rao got so many emails about assistant pay and stories stacking up and stacking up. As we started telling those stories and started getting outraged on people’s behalves, Liz Alper stepped into the fore and helped start up the Pay Up Hollywood movement, where you’re surveying and talking about how much assistant staff in Hollywood were getting paid and how egregiously low it was. Liz, talk us through those early days of Pay Up Hollywood and this discussion, what happened, and where we are now, if you can, the overview of Pay Up Hollywood.

**Liz:** At the very beginning of Pay Up Hollywood, it was, for me at least, very akin to when Me Too exploded onto Twitter, because again, it was this curtain being pulled back, where all of a sudden, all of this anger and these abuses and this entire industry-long history of abuse and culture of taking advantage of people at the very beginning of their careers was really outed as being the awful, demoralizing, corrupt, and just cowardly thing that was happening in our industry. It was this wild time of everyone feeling like they could share their horror stories without fearing repercussion for once. They could share these publicly.

As Brittani mentioned, there was also this pressure of feeling like you had to share your stories whether you were comfortable doing so or not, because you were worried that if people weren’t really coming out and sharing the worst of their experiences, then the worst of their experiences would be swept under the rug, or people would look at the state of the industry and go, “This isn’t so bad.”

It really became this moment in time where assistants felt, I don’t want to say completely a hundred percent felt safe to share these stories of the awful things that happened to them. I don’t think anyone ever feels truly safe sharing that. I think for once, assistants realized how much they deserve to be better treated and better paid and that they’re worth that, when they had spent years and even decades in Hollywood being told that they have to earn that. It was a dangling carrot that just kept being pulled higher and higher and higher. It was crazy. It was a big, empowering moment that happened when we first exploded on the scene.

**John:** One of the big differences between Me Too and Pay Up is that we actually had numbers here, because we can actually ask, “How much are you getting paid? What is your weekly take home pay?” and see that that is not going to actually be able to afford an apartment in Los Angeles. It was more concrete in a way that what we could have with Me Too.

**Liz:** I think the other thing is this really was born… I’m sure you guys heard a lot about this at the time too, is that assistants felt very left out of the Me Too movement, and rightfully so, because for them, the people who had really in their minds seen a lot of progress with the Me Too movement were people who were higher up the food chain, people with larger profiles, who were saying, “If this could happen to me, imagine what’s going on for other people.” Assistants were the other people. It was something that we were able to get concrete information for, because we realized that concrete information had not been gathered necessarily for me too in seeing which pockets of the industry were being left out of the conversation.

**Craig:** I think there’s a nice intersectionality, if you will, when we help people who are at the assistant level while we are also as an industry making an effort to bring in more women and more people of color. You start to hit a lot of different sectors, because that’s where everyone’s coming in. We have this big lobby for our business. Forever until whenever, we’re talking about three years ago or so, forever, the point of the lobby was you’re getting hazed. That was basically it. You’re getting hazed. It was celebrated. It was funny. It was laughed at. There were articles in the LA Times giggling over how Scott Rudin abused his employees. It was part of our culture, the way that frat culture does that stuff. The idea was you’ll pay your dues and this is how it is and then you become an employer and now you continue the cycle of abuse, lol, ha ha ha.

That more than anything I think has been the thing that has been examined. I know that still there are people who mistreat assistants all the time. Even though we did get some big wins with the agencies raising their payments and just some general attitudes, it’s always going to be an issue. I do think that at least we no longer celebrate a culture of abusing assistants. That’s huge. It’s sad, but it’s huge.

**Liz:** I remember, and I’m sure you guys have experiences like this, and Brittani, I think you may have some experiences like this too, but being assistants and almost comparing war stories of who is getting the most crap at work, who had something thrown at them. There was this survivalist mentality, where it was, “Because I’m able to take all of this abuse, this must mean I’m meant for greatness, because look how much I can handle.” There are assistants now who have talked about the worst abuse that they have gotten is coming from some former assistants who had internalized this idea that this is what it’s supposed to be, this is how you become a great contributor to Hollywood. I don’t think anyone has that attitude anymore. That’s great.

**Craig:** That is great.

**Liz:** That is great because that’s normalizing toxicity in a way that Me Too shone a light on as well. It’s huge.

**Craig:** I do think that a lot of us who come to this business have had, let’s just call it complicated childhoods. Not everyone, but many of us. We are already vulnerable. We are already seeking approval and love. We probably, a lot of us, already have some experience doing exactly what you described, which is essentially winning the battle between yourself and a person who’s attempting to drive you insane. I had definitely had experience like that myself here in this business, where simply because I was able to withstand the madness, I withstood the madness. I’m so glad that this is changing, that that is no longer seen as the test of success, because it shouldn’t be. What for? How about we just get rid of the people who create the madness? There’s a thought. Then we can just do our jobs somewhat happily. It’s hard enough without all the rest of it.

I know people complain all the time, because I see them on Twitter complaining about woke woke woke woke woke woke. If I have to see the word woke one more effing time and how, “Oh, the costs… ” It’s the telling of the costs of just going out of your way to be thoughtful. I’m not getting into policies or anything. I’m just saying generally, what is our individual burden when it come to Pay Up Hollywood or Me Too? Take a moment to just be a little bit thoughtful. You will fail. You’ll have your moments. Everybody isn’t perfect. Everybody will mess up. When you mess up, own it and apologize. Make amends. Move on. I think the more you make empathy and considering other people part of the way you go through it, in theory, the more it will come back to you. God, you know what? I’m very positive today.

**John:** You’re very positive.

**Craig:** It’s disturbing.

**John:** Someone check his medications here.

**Craig:** This is really weird.

**Brittani:** If I could just hop in, because I think Liz named me as someone who possibly had assistant experience. I just want to go on record and say I was not privileged to be an abused assistant. I didn’t have a car for the first three years that I was in LA, and so I couldn’t be an assistant. I think that that is also a part of the conversation that sometimes gets left out when we’re talking about this low-level pay, about the people that can’t even afford to have that low-level pay, to get into these entry-level positions. I don’t have the numbers specifically. I don’t think this is a thing anyone is keeping track of.

I see it in the support staff of the shows that I’ve been on. Sometimes, a lot of the times, actually, the room is more diverse than our support staff, because people just can’t afford to be support staff. They don’t have the support system to be able to be paid $17 or whatever it used to be for 6 years and then maybe get a script if someone’s being kind, and you get 22 episodes in year 7. It’s just cutting out so many people.

The people that are getting pushed out of those spaces because they can’t withstand that abuse of pay and emotionally, they never get to make it to the next level, because they don’t have the resources to withstand what is expected of people that are at the, quote unquote, entry-level position, which oftentimes is not an entry-level position.

**Craig:** I think that’s so important. One of the things that we all hoped – I know, Liz, we talked about this quite a bit in the early days of Pay Up Hollywood – was really that we would try, and by improving the entry, improving the starting position, that you would make it possible for people who otherwise could not afford to take on these terrible jobs, that other people could afford it. Otherwise, we were going to get a lot of kids whose moms and dads were paying for their apartment and their car and their insurance, and not a lot of kids who didn’t have that available.

There is absolutely nothing stopping any of the large institutions in Hollywood or even individual, fabulously wealthy showrunners from, for instance, purchasing a car that could be used for an assistant. People are so much richer than they ought to be. There’s this stinginess. By the way, that is also part of our culture. That’s not Hollywood culture. That’s American culture, that poverty’s good for you, and if I give you stuff, then you’ll be lazy. This goes back to the Puritans. It’s very Calvinistic. We behave as if the crucible is what proves merit. We’ll come back around to this when I get to my One Cool Thing today. The crucible doesn’t prove merit at all. At all.

**John:** All it does is burn things. I have some real life follow-up from last night. I was at the Simpsons premier party at Universal, which was tremendously fun. It was the Halloween episode. I highly recommend the Halloween episode.

We were waiting for it to start, and a young woman came up to me, and she introduced herself saying that she was one of the people who wrote in early on in Pay Up Hollywood. The name she used for that was Christian. Hello, Christian. I asked, “What happened after that time?” because I almost vaguely remembered who she was when she wrote in originally. She said she ended up quitting her last assistant job and just focusing on writing, because she came to this town to become a writer. She had realized that for two years as an assistant, she hadn’t written anything. Basically, she had no capacity left to write when she came home. She had these depression piles around her apartment and couldn’t get focused on anything new.

She felt like some progress had been made, at least in terms of having the conversation about Pay Up Hollywood. She was getting originally minimum wage, $13 an hour for this work that she was doing, incredibly long hours. Sony wouldn’t pay for her cellphone usage. She was supposed to have a stipend for cellphone usage for using her own cellphone. She both wanted me to know she was thankful for us having the conversation, but also that things hadn’t turned out so great.

I asked her, “What advice would you give to somebody who’s moving to town to become a writer and wants one of these writer assistant jobs that always get lauded as being the thing to do?” She said she would recommend to get on one show and be an assistant learn as much as you can on that one show, meet as many people as you can, and then get a job as a receptionist at a law firm, where you can actually make some decent money and actually have brain space to write. That’s her perspective on this.

I think it’s worth thinking about that maybe we are so glamorizing the support staff role as how you’re going to get started in the industry that we’re forgetting that it’s not just the money, it’s the time and the brain space and everything else, that we may be over-hyping what these roles need to be and how foundational they should be for a person coming into the industry.

**Liz:** It’s really hard, because what Pay Up Hollywood does… I honestly can’t sum up what we do better than what Brittani said we needed, because our entire mission has been trying to bring a spotlight to the low pay and the fact that this creates a barrier for a lot of people to get into Hollywood, the fact that Hollywood is not a meritocracy, it’s a pay-to-play industry. If you cannot afford to be here, then it doesn’t matter how well you can write. It doesn’t matter how talented of a director or how good of an agent you could be if you can’t even afford to get onto these apprentice traps. Ultimately, it’s going to be a lot harder for you to break in. I think she’s right that you absolutely need the brain space to be able to write. You need to have the emotional and mental health to be able to write.

The one thing that I have to disagree with and the thing that I hate disagreeing is that you really do have to make sure that you’re networking all the time, because it really does come down to who do you know, who are the people that can represent you. I think you guys have talked about this on the podcast before too. When you get signed by an agent or a manager, the first thing that they ask you is, “Who do you know that we could put you in front of right now and they’ll staff you on their show immediately?” That plays a huge role in who’s getting signed nowadays. I think that’s more of an asterisk to her advice, because it’s great advice.

I just want to make sure that this part of it isn’t glossed over because unfortunately, is the assistant track glamorized? Yeah, because there’s this idea that it’s all upward trajectory, just like with movements. With Pay Up Hollywood and from Me Too and everything that we’re doing, there’s this idea that in order to be successful, it always has to be upward momentum. The truth of the matter is it is jagged. It is signs and cosigns. It is all over the place. Sometimes it is flat-lining, and then you’re revived. It’s just about being able to keep going forward. If you can’t afford to keep going forward, then it’s game over, so yeah, it’s hard.

**John:** Liz, unlike a lot of the things we talk about on the show today, there is an ongoing structure behind this. Payuphollywood.com, people can go there. It’s now an official organization that you are helping to run. You have funding from Women in Film. There’s some ongoing work here. That ongoing work is you’re continuing to do this survey to figure out what their real life conditions are on the ground. Obviously, at the start of the pandemic, Craig and I and a bunch of other people tried to raise money for emergency relief for folks who were out of work because of the shutdowns. What should a person do who wants to learn more about Pay Up Hollywood right now? What’s the next step for them?

**Liz:** First, I’m not going to let you gloss over the emergency fund that you two especially helped raise half a million dollars for, because that was massive. That honestly helped a lot of people who really, really needed it at the time that the pandemic hit. It’s important for us too, because it really shone a light with how few protections there are for the support staff and honestly how few resources, how few financial resources, how few mental health resources there are. If you’re in that position, you don’t know where to go.

We’ve just launched our website. We’ve just received funding from Women in Film. That’s huge, because as a grassroots movement, the work has been done mostly by a group of three. Three people trying to change a living wage in this industry, making sure that people are aware of the fact that people cannot afford to work in Hollywood and are going hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, most likely, in many instances.

For us, we realize that this structure is going to let us expand. I think a lot of the bulk of our wins have been with what we’re looking at as more administrative assistants, so writers’ assistants, script coordinators, people who tend to work in office buildings, who have set hours, who have more structure in their jobs than assistants on set, like set PAs, hair and makeup PAs, any production PAs. This structure’s going to help us expand our exposure to those people.

It’s also giving us time to hire a couple… Hopefully, if we can raise the donations, we’ll be able to hire someone whose full-time job is going to be figuring out solutions and helping us make connections to expand our influence throughout the industry, in different parts of the industry than the ones that I’ve had immediate access to. Being a writer and producer, it’s easier for me to know how to reach people in the writing world rather than people who work in reality television.

It’s upward momentum. It’s slow upward momentum. Hopefully, with this expansion, we’re going to be able to talk to a lot more people, not just in agencies and in writers’ rooms and with showrunners, but people at the DGA, people who are onset line producers, mail room heads, people who are also suffering from being woefully underpaid, working in parts of the industry that are crucial to the creative process and not even remotely compensated for it, and also areas that people are saying we need to see more diversity, we need to see more women, we need to see more people from historically under-served groups who are also coming from a background that can’t normally afford to work in these positions. We need their presence. We’re just not willing to pay for it. We’re hoping that we can get them to say we need their presence, and we are now willing to pay for it, because we understand how crucial this is to the process.

All of this structure is letting us get that message out and reach more people who feel the same way we do and just didn’t have an outlet to express it. We’re the outlet. We’re the ones who are gathering all of the resources from the Entertainment Community Fund to JHRTS, all of the organizations, SELA, who can help with financial resources, mental health resources, Legal Aid in case you’re in a situation where you feel like you’re being subjected workplace abuse and you don’t know where to turn.

We’re hoping we can be a hub for support staffers in this industry to turn to if you have a question or you need to be pointed in a direction or you’re looking to contribute to the data and to the picture that we’re building, to show really how bad it is, but also how we can fix it, how we can course-correct, to ensure that we’re not just looking at things that are going to fix the current state, but preventative measures.

We’ve always been campaigning for a 3% increase in salary for every support staffer and really every worker from assistant to coordinator to even manager, because a lot of those people are taking on assistant duties in order to just have a better title, just making sure that we are looking at the sort of measures that are going to keep us from being in this situation again, because we really are coming to a head.

It’s what Craig said. We’re looking at a homogenized industry where the next generation of decision makers are all going to be cut from the same background, and there will be no diversity in storytelling, there will be no diversity in thought, because the people who are in those roles are all the same. That’s really sad.

**John:** Payuphollywood.com is the place where you’re going to go to start with that. Liz, again, thank you for everything you’ve done to keep that fire burning. Let’s go on to a listener question from Gabe. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Gabe wrote in and said, “Post the George Floyd uprisings, I expected some kind of change in our industry that perpetuates the myth of the hero cop, not huge changes at first. The police procedural industrial complex is too big and lucrative to dismantle immediately, but I expected to see less new copaganda shows and movies.”

**Craig:** That’s a great term.

**Megana:** “The tide of new cop shows getting announced hasn’t diminished. If anything, it’s grown, often with showrunners and casts from historically marginalized backgrounds, to show how inclusive copaganda can be. Why aren’t there a flood of shows about private investigators, defense attorneys, and restorative justice? Perry Mason was in production before George Floyd, but it shows that you can make commercial procedurals without making cops and prosecutors the heroes. In fact, our industry used to do it a lot. Are they being pitched but no one is buying?”

**John:** Brittani Nichols, based on your Twitter feed, I think you have strong opinions about policing in America. How do you feel about what’s happened on television in terms of our fictional portrayals of policing on the screen?

**Brittani:** I hate it. I can’t even really speak to it intelligently, because I refuse to watch it. I have a friend actually who is going to be directing an episode of the new Rookie spin-off with Niecy Nash. She’s like, “Oh yeah, and Niecy’s character’s dad, who’s formerly incarcerated, and so there’s this really interesting conversation that they’re having.” I’m like, “Yeah, they’re having the conversation embedded in a show that is still largely about how even if it’s not that cops are good, it’s that this one cop is good.” I’m waiting for the show where it’s just plainly, “No, there’s no good cop. This is what’s happening. This is how this is insidious, and you are complicit, even if you think you are good,” and showing the realities of bad cops. What was the show based on-

**John:** The Shield, Michael Chiklis.

**Brittani:** The Shield, sure.

**John:** Reaching way back for that.

**Brittani:** The Shield. I was watching it with my girlfriend, who is a journalist who focuses on police accountability in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Watching it, she was like, “This is satire, right?” I was like, “No, I don’t think that it is.” I’m not really old enough to have been watching it live and only have looked at Wikipedia and articles to be like, no, I think this was a very well-regarded show that just simply because it was a slightly more interesting, greedy look at sometimes cops are bad, that was enough. Just the bar is on the floor when it comes to these shows. I don’t think they should exist.

**Craig:** They continue to exist. My guess is they will not stop making them, because procedurals, they’re easy generators. When you have to make all these shows, you know that a process is going to get us lots of these shows. Copaganda always is heroes. The problem with portraying reality… This is a really interesting question. Let’s say I’m wandering away from the world of the limited series and I’m talking about an ongoing series that is going to show the reality of how police function. That’s going to be a very frustrating show to watch, because basically, every week, the bad guys win. That’s a hard show to write. That’s a hard to show to write. It’s a hard show to watch. I don’t know how I would approach it in a way where I wouldn’t feel beaten down by it. That’s a challenge more than anything. I think I would do it. I would do it if I could figure out how to do it.

**John:** Liz, you wrote on some of these shows.

**Liz:** I did, yeah. I wrote on The Rookie.

**John:** You are a copagandist.

**Craig:** Yeah, you copagandist.

**John:** You must still know people who are writing on these shows. Tell us about the conversations you’re having with them or they’re having in their rooms.

**Liz:** It’s hard. It’s hard. I also want to point out that the script that I wrote that got me on these copaganda shows was a high-concept sci-fi take on Treasure Island. Someone was like, “This is a great cop show writer. This is someone who can write grounded shit really well.” This is not my fault. That said, I have a lot of people on these shows that I love and respect. I know that they’re struggling with exactly this topic, because they feel culpable. They feel responsible putting this on the air. The question is how do we do this show responsibly, because if I don’t, someone who doesn’t give a shit will come in and do it any way that they want.

**John:** Isn’t that people who worked in Donald Trump’s office, that same idea of like, “Oh, it’s going to be someone worse if it’s not me.” It gets back to some pretty fundamental problems. The problem is the structure of the show itself. It’s what you’re doing. I need to credit Megana here, because she actually did a list of all the shows that are on the air right now. It’s staggering. Craig, help me read through this list, because you forget how many shows there are.

**Craig:** It’s extensive. CSI: Las Vegas, Blue Bloods, Law and Order, Law and Order: SVU, Law and Order: Organized Crime, Chicago PD, Chicago FBI, The Equalizer, NCIS: Los Angeles, SWAT, NCIS, NCIS: Hawaii, FBI, FBI: International, FBI: Most Wanted, Cops, and then there’s police-adjacent.

**John:** These are lawyer shows.

**Craig:** Lawyer shows. We’ve got So Help Me Todd, SEAL Team, Jack Ryan, 911, and Your Honor. Then there are new shows coming, Reasonable Doubt, The Calling, East New York, The Rookie: Feds, Criminal Minds: Evolution, and The Recruit. If you are interested in watching some shows about police officers and the prosecution of citizens, you have a choice. You have a choice. Look, we have friends who work on these shows. My thing is, ideally, the shows begin to slowly incorporate a sense of reality. That would be good. I’m honest. I don’t watch most of these.

**Brittani:** I just want to hop in and say they won’t. They’re not going to do that.

**Craig:** They’re not going to do it.

**Brittani:** There are so many of them for a reason. It’s not an accident. It’s not, “Oops, the procedurals are great.” No, the cops want these shows to exist, because they want people to think that they are good people. I would like to challenge that, doing a show that is realistic and does show that these systems suck and that the people that are policing are often the scum of the earth and doing things that are unimaginably terrible in ways that people watching television have absolutely no idea about.

We watch shows about bad white men all the time. People get on board. Mad Men. Breaking Bad. Succession. All these shows, they’re not critically going, “Yes, I understand that they are evil, and I’m conflicted about enjoying this television show.” No, everyone just cheers for the bad guy. I don’t think that that would be an actual barrier, because Americans love cheering for bad white dudes.

**Craig:** Yes, but Americans are also authoritarian. I believe this, that there is this incredibly strong authoritarian streak throughout a lot of white America in particular. They love to, quote unquote, back the blue. They like the badge. They like that stuff. They don’t mind police brutality. I’ve always said that there’s a huge segment of this country that doesn’t protest when Black people are brutalized by the police. They also don’t protest when white people are brutalized by the police. They don’t care. They like it. That’s where some of the audience is here, I think.

I think people like antiheroes or they like rooting for white guy villains like Tony Soprano and Walter White. When you put the uniform on, suddenly it’s this different thing. There’s just something that happens where I think people want to see those people being the dark, vengeful father that protects us. There must be something in our bones, because look how many of these shows there are. It’s hitting some dopamine, right?

**John:** Craig, I’m going to put a link in the show notes to this article that Megana found from Vox called How 70 Years of Cop Shows Taught Us to Valorize the Police. One thing the article points out really clearly is that cop shows weren’t always this way. Cops used to be bungling cops. They used to be fools. It was really the rise of the police procedural and the need to actually use the police as consultants and everything else and to shoot in Los Angeles that the police became more noble and more noble and more noble and infallible.

The film and TV industry, there’s some of the responsibility for the current state of policing in America based on it’s assumed that the police know right. We’ve talked before on the show about the CSI effect. We just assume if they’re showing this proof, then that proof is proof, and those bite marks really must’ve come from this person, because we’ve seen it on TV. I’m frustrated. I don’t see a solution here. Brittani, do you see a solution? We take them all off the air. How do you fix this?

**Craig:** They’re not coming off the air, so what do we do to counter this?

**Brittani:** I would love to see anything. These shows are the greatest works of fiction that exist in entertainment. Anything that just realistically counters these narratives I think would be valuable, because yeah, I think you’re right, they’re not just all going to disappear overnight. Having a show that does show what cops are actually like and what they’re actually doing and does not balk at how people will respond, I would like to see that. I would like to see someone actually try.

**John:** I think it’s safe to just summarize that we’re feeling that little to no progress has been made on copaganda since the George Floyd protest. Is that fair?

**Craig:** I don’t see any. I detect no progress.

**John:** Let’s wrap up this topic by something that’s almost brand new. This is showrunners for abortion rights. We have 1,500 of the top showrunners, creators, directors, signing a letter asking the studios for what they are going to do to help safeguard abortion rights for crews who are working in states that are now limiting abortions after the fall of Roe versus Wade. This is new. This is fresh. As we’re recording this, new stuff may have come out. As we’re recording this, no specific plans have come out of any of these studios for what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** Shocking.

**John:** Shocking. My question for the group though is, based on the conversation we’ve had about these previous topics, where do we see this going in the next few years? Obviously, thing could change, the legal landscape. We don’t know what’s going to happen there. This movement for safeguarding reproductive rights for people working in these states, what happens? Is there going to be enough of a structure? Is it going to revert to a meme? Are we going to forget about this? Are we going to still be talking about this five years from now? Brittani, what’s your instinct? Do you think this is going to be a thing we’re still grappling with five years from now? This letter from the showrunners, will this still be a part of the conversation?

**Brittani:** Pass.

**John:** Pass.

**Brittani:** It’s just annoying. Whenever I see 1,500 showrunners do anything, I know that absolutely nothing is going to happen.

**Craig:** Nothing will happen. Oh my god, I love you so much. I’m one of them.

**John:** Craig and I signed it.

**Craig:** You’re right. We have to try. I love an open letter. It’s absolutely true. The people behind the open letter have been doing things, which is really nice. Whatever you call the steering committee, there’s a group of women at the core of this who have been trying quite hard. I think getting the list of 1,500… First of all, there is not such a thing as 1,500 top anything in our business. That already is giggly worthy. I sense from you what I feel in myself, which is it’s a good effort but we are still coming hat in hand to the employers and saying, “What are you going to do?” What I think the employers are going to do is nothing. That’s what I think they’re going to do. I think they’re going to put some window dressing up. They don’t want to stop shooting in Georgia. They don’t want to stop, and they’re not going to.

**John:** Liz, do you have any instinct about what’s going to be happening five years from now? Will we still be talking about this letter five years from now, the same way we’re talking about the Time’s Up articles?

**Liz:** Do I think the letter is going to make people at the studios do anything that’s right? Not all of them. I think that what they’re going to see is a financial risk. When we’re talking about the studios, they talk in terms of profits. Right now, Craig, I know you said we’re never going to stop shooting in Georgia.

**Craig:** They won’t stop.

**Liz:** I actually wonder what would happen is that they use it as a smokescreen, like, “We’re not shooting in Georgia because it’s the right thing to do,” but really it’s because Georgia’s getting more and more expensive to shoot in, because I’ve worked on a couple of shows right now where I’ve said, “We could shoot this in Georgia,” and they’re going, “Georgia’s too expensive.” I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens.

**Craig:** They’re still going to be shooting in Louisiana. That’s the thing. There are too many of these places where they want to go. It’s easy for them to say, “Hey, we shot our show in Canada. If we do it again, we will shoot it again in Canada.” That makes me comfortable. I individually refuse to, say, work on a show in a state that does not guarantee reproductive health rights for women. I won’t do it personally, but I’m rich. That’s no skin off my back. I’m not a hero.

The people who are in the situation where it’s like, “Hey, you’re getting a show for the first time. You’re going to make a show for the first time. This is going to be your career. You will go on. We’re shooting it in New Orleans.” There’s a choice. The only people that can prevent that from happening are the studios, and they’re not going to. What they will do is probably guarantee individual employees some sort of payment and assistance.

Look, there are a bunch of things that our industry does that I just shake my head at and laugh. Any time our industry talks about how progressive they are, sometimes I want to barf, because of the people that so many of these studios are in bed with financially and the way that they will go on. They will host Democratic candidates in their mansions, and then they will turn around as the people who run the studios and go ahead and pump more money into states that won’t guarantee the safety of their own employees. They may be waiting to see if Georgia changes, but that’s not going to stop them from shooting in New Orleans. New Orleans isn’t changing. Louisiana’s Louisiana. It ain’t happening there.

It makes me really angry. I’m just blown away that they couldn’t even just do something. They couldn’t even be bothered with window dressing. I don’t think it’s because they’re locked up in a hundred committee meetings sweating over this. I think that they just go, “Oh look, if we wait three weeks, something will happen. Someone is going to send a dick pic to the wrong person, and that’s what everyone’s going to talk about, and everyone will forget about this.” To some extent, they’re right, because no one’s holding their feet to the fire on this, no matter what we do.

**Liz:** I will say just one last thing about that letter though, because I know you and John both signed it. I have talked to a lot of assistants, as I normally do, who were very happy to at least see the letter, because they felt it was a show of solidarity. That’s what I feel that letter did best is show solidarity with a lot of people who right now don’t necessarily have the access to each other like we do, who felt, “Okay, I feel like if I worked for those people, I could be safe. This is someone who actually values my safety, and that means something to me.”

**Craig:** I love that. By the way, the real percentage is probably 80%. If you worked for 80% of these people, you would be safe. I always think at least 20% of these people are absolutely shameless hypocrites, but at least 80%, I think… Again, I want to credit the women that put it together. They’re really doing the work. All we did was we sent money and we signed a thing. They put it together. They’re pushing the agenda. They’re trying to make stuff happen. What they’re doing is the real work.

**John:** We know how hard the real work is, because early on in Pay Up Hollywood, we were doing the real work. I remember being on calls with Liz. We were trying to talk to this agency boss about raising their minimums. We all know how hard that is. I think if we want to wrap up this whole segment, just say that the things we’ve learned is that it’s very easy to focus on one flashpoint moment. It’s very easy to focus on, “Oh shit, this decision came down, and abortion is now up for grabs.” It’s easy to build up a lot of energy around that. It’s hard to keep it going. I’ll be curious whether showrunners for abortion rights will have the structure to keep things going or if it needs a structure to keep things going. Copaganda, there was no force behind that, so it’s hard to make any of those changes happen. Wow, the follow-up is that it’s tough. It’s tough to do these things, man.

**Craig:** Things are happening.

**John:** Things are happening. Some progress has been made. It’s not like we’ve gone backwards on everything.

**Craig:** In the last 5 years, there has been more progress in our industry over all of these issues than there has been in all the other 25 years now, I think, I’ve been doing this. That’s something. At least because I’m old, I have the perspective of time. There was nothing. Nothing at all happened with any of this for about 25 years. Of course, nothing happened with any of it in all the time before I showed up. Really, I think there is room for hope here. Even as we struggle and fall down in some areas, there’s room for hope. There has been a lot of positive change.

**John:** It’s been a long episode. We’ve gotten through so much. I think we deserve some fun. I think it’s time for some One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** I will do my One Cool Thing first, which is a New Yorker article by Leslie Jamison on the history of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I was going to save this for a How Would This Be a Movie, but I think it’s actually just a good article to read independently, the history of how these two men came to form Choose Your Own Adventure and then went to a publisher, took it away from the publisher to defend their brand, how they figured out the algorithm for Choose Your Own Adventure books. They were a really important part of my literary life for about three years in elementary school. I just loved them. I think if you’re a person who read Choose Your Own Adventure books, you will enjoy this article on the history of the Choose Your Own Adventure brand.

**Craig:** I love those books. They’re wonderful.

**John:** Craig, what you got for us?

**Craig:** I have an article. This is an article in Current Affairs, which is a somewhat thinky internet publication, a magazine of politics and culture. It’s wonderful. It goes right to something that I’m very passionate about. It’s written by Aravind “Vinny” Byju. It is called Why You Hate Your Job. It is an investigation. He says, “A theory on the function of bullshit jobs: to maintain the illusion of meritocracy and to provide status and prestige for elites.” Oh, does this go right to my happy place. He draws a distinction between bullshit jobs, which are jobs that they don’t do anything, but they are hard to get, there’s a competition for them, and they signify your elite status, as opposed to shit jobs, which are jobs that are underpaid, where people are treated poorly, but the job itself is perfectly noble, like for instance teaching or being a janitor.

It’s rather long, but it’s brilliantly written. It’s just a gorgeous exploration of how we create a competition system for elitism, and we keep putting velvet ropes in front of things and making people fight over them. When you do that, they will. Then on the other side of the velvet rope is a bunch of bullshit. Well worth reading because I think the entire higher education system is a nightmare in this country. Why You Hate Your Job by Aravind “Vinny” Byju.

**John:** Fantastic. Brittani, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with our listeners?

**Brittani:** I sure do. My One Cool Thing is a little off the beaten path, I guess. It’s my girlfriend.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** My heart. We’re in trouble, because I don’t think we’ve ever done… John’s never done his husband. I’ve never done my wife. This is really bad. Go ahead, ruin everything for us. I don’t care.

**Brittani:** Her name is Cerise Castle. I’ve mentioned that she’s a journalist. She has done this thing called A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which is a 15-part investigative series. She also just did a study on copaganda for Color of Change. I don’t think it’s out yet. She just has worked on so many of the things specifically surrounding television actually and police. I hope people just go check her out. She has a podcast about it that’s going to be coming out October 19th called A Tradition of Violence. It’s going to hit on just so many of the things that we talked about today. She’s @cerisecastle on Twitter. She’s very cool.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Excellent. Cerise Castle, a One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Amazing and romantic.

**John:** It is. I like it so much. Liz, how about a One Cool Thing for us?

**Liz:** It’s not going to be nearly as good as Brittani’s. I’m obsessed with tallowtok. If you watch TikTok, there is a wonderful creator named Mirenda Rosenberg. She lives in Ireland. She’s an expat. She is very much into sustainable living. She lives on a budget, so one of the things that she does is she makes soap with tallow, which is cut off beef fat. She gets it cheap from her local butcher. She walks you through the process of how to make soap. She’ll also walk you through her small homestead in the Irish countryside. It’s really relaxing. It’s something that I watch almost daily, because she’s just a very giving and very generous person when it comes to her knowledge and how she gardens, how she makes soap, all of the different processes.

Her entire philosophy is, “I’m going to teach you how to be zero waste in an easy and affordable way, because I’m broke, you’re probably broke, let’s be broke together, and we can still do good things for the environment.” It’s tallowtok. If you just follow that hashtag on Twitter, it’s easy to find. It is genuinely some of the greatest mental hugs you can give yourself right now.

**John:** Love it. That was our show for this week. Thank you, Liz and Brittani, so much. Reminder, it’s a last call for Writer Emergency Pack XL on Kickstarter. If you want to get a Writer Emergency Pack XL, you can get that now on Kickstarter. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long wait until we get them back into stores. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Holly Overton. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you could send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. Liz, where are you on Twitter?

**Liz:** I am at @lizalps.

**John:** Brittani?

**Brittani:** @bishilarious.

**John:** B is hilarious, it’s true. 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. There’s lots of links to things about writing. You can ign 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 just for Craig about the success of firing your reps. Brittani, Liz, thank you so, so much for joining us on this incredibly detailed followupisode. You’re the best.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Liz:** Thank you guys. Thank you very much.

**Brittani:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** This happened. I swear this happened in real life. I’m trying to think the best way to get into this. About eight months ago, I had a phone call with a TV writer, a colleague. He’d been a staff writer on a couple shows, actually I think some copaganda shows, but was finding it really hard to get his next job and wanted some advice. We did the normal things that Craig and I would do. We talked about what he was writing, what new samples he was working on, what shows he was going out for. He was making really smart choices, but he was really concerned that he was just never going to get hired again. This is also pandemicy times, so everything was up in the air. I channeled that inner Craig, and I said, “Maybe the problem is your reps.”

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** He said he really liked his reps but yeah, maybe that was part of the issue. He wrote me back the next week and told me he’d fired them and was going to sign at a new place. Fast forward a year. He and I exchanged emails this week. I asked if I could share his experience. Craig, I think maybe you could read the bold parts here, because this is what you want to hear.

**Craig:** This is what I came for. “I just wanted to check in with another update. Thankfully, the switch to new reps has continued to pay off. Frankly, it’s been downright miraculous. I’m several weeks into a staff job on another show and will be heading out of town next year to produce it. In the last few months, I’ve also sold a pilot and a scripted podcast. It’s felt like a complete 180 from the doldrums of the pandemic, my reps, and the lack of anxiety that having bad reps caused has been a huge part of the turnaround. Thanks for the good advice.”

**John:** I wrote him back and said, “What is it about this new reps that is so much better? Are they doing more? Are they positioning you better? Is there something else?” He wrote back.

**Craig:** “It seems to be mostly about relationships. Even though it’s a boutique management company, everyone in television seems to know them, love them, and hold them in high esteem. That patina seems to get transferred to me as a client. It’s also a strategy. They’re very targeted in their approach and push hard for things that are good fits, and they ignore everything else. They’ve been very up front about the fact that they don’t put clients up for jobs or send them on pitches unless they think there’s a 50% or higher chance that it will end with success. I think part of it, frankly, is that I’ve been able to be a better client, because I’m not so constantly panicked about trying to manage my own reps.” Exactly.

“I feel the wind at my back in a way I haven’t in a long time, and it’s made my work better and my approach to everything that much more confident. I didn’t realize how much my lack of faith in my team was affecting my ability to sell myself.”

**John:** Craig, are you misting up a little bit? I’m honestly a little emotional.

**Craig:** I’m horny. I’m horny. This is not sad. I love it. The reason that we say fire your manager, fire your agent, it’s not blithe. I think a lot of times, we are so cultured to think that if you get an agent or a manager, you’ve somehow broken through and made something happen. They are the first people to say to you, “You could be a professional.” That psychological bond is very powerful. It is so powerful, not only can it withstand their poor performance, it often just masks it completely. You just don’t realize that they’re not special, they are not anointing you with any authority that is objectively relevant, and in trusting them to do things for you, you’re actually worse off than you were when you were afraid and doing it yourself.

If things aren’t working, there’s really no point in clinging to that raft. The raft is not there to make you feel good. It’s not there to make you feel like you’re a represented writer. It’s there to get you a job. If it doesn’t get you a job, move on to a different raft.

**John:** Now Brittani, you are in a writers’ room, so you get to talk with writers all the time about what they’re doing, what they’re working on. I bet reps come up a fair amount. Is this the kind of conversation you’ve had with people in your rooms?

**Brittani:** Yeah, I famously enjoy fake firing people. I just tell people to fire people all the time. I don’t currently have agents. A lot of people in our room actually don’t. I tell them just don’t do it unless you really feel like you have a solid reason to do so.

**Craig:** You have a manager?

**Brittani:** I have a manager, yeah.

**Craig:** And a lawyer?

**Brittani:** And a lawyer, yes.

**Craig:** I feel like if you have 15% going out the door, that’s nothing, whether it’s an agent or a lawyer, manager and a lawyer. I know some people have both. My guess is they’re overpaying. Sometimes the combination works well. I continue to have strong feelings for you, Brittani, because I just like your style.

**John:** My role on the podcast is to introduce Craig to people who he’s obsessed with suddenly. Brittani, I’m sorry. This is what happens to you next. Liz, what’s your feeling as you’re listening to this letter? Is this an experience that you could understand or relate to?

**Liz:** Oh yeah, good for that person. I fired a manager and reps before. I’m very happy with my people. Right now, I have an agent and a manager. My agent is someone who has terrorized business affairs until I get the white boy money is what we call it. I’ve gotten paid more with her than I ever had. I’ve known her for 10 years. She’s the only Middle Eastern agent in the game right now. She has absolutely no tolerance for anybody that doesn’t show respect to her BIPOC clients as they do to her white clients. She is my lioness. I love her. I love her to death. It’s a good match.

**John:** Nice. We’ll leave it on that. We’re not telling everyone they need to fire their reps immediately. I guess we’re saying hey, if there’s a problem, don’t hold onto your reps because you think you’re not going to get another one. You’re probably better off without those reps. Brittani doesn’t even have an agent right now, and look, she’s producing Abbott Elementary. You can do it.

**Craig:** You can do it.

**John:** Thanks, all.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

**Liz:** Bye.

Links:

* [Liz Alper](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3225554/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/lizalps)
* [Brittani Nichols](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4575382/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/BisHilarious)
* Buy Tickets for our first Live Show post-pandemic – [Dynasty Typewriter Livestream](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/scriptnotes-live-tickets-412411342427?aff=ebdsoporgprofile) October 19 at 7:30pm PT
* Are you going to Austin Film Festival? Submit to the AFF [Three Page Challenge](https://johnaugust.com/threepage)!
* [List of Female Run Restaurants in Austin, TX](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wo4lV2vUacQb7QhcmBEkZD1jSz8k2HOjcAlLmnfyt1A/edit) from Melissa
* [Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.html) by Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey and [Alyssa Milano’s Tweet](https://twitter.com/Alyssa_Milano/status/919659438700670976?s=20&t=k-vvSWG6CmgL6NbP3GeJ2A) and [From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories) by Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker
* [#MeToo, Five Years Later: Accusers Reflect](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/me-too-five-years-later-1235228665/) by THR Staff
* [#MeToo, Five Years Later: No One’s Fully Returned From “Cancellation”](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/metoo-five-years-later-cancellation-comebacks-1235228191/) by Gary Baum for THR
* [Check out the new survey results at the brand new #PAYUPHOLLYWOOD website](https://www.payuphollywood.com/)
* Read the [full update](https://johnaugust.com/2022/payuphollywood-progress-an-update-from-christian) from ‘Christian’
* [How 70 Years of Cop Shows Taught Us to Valorize the Police](https://www.vox.com/culture/22375412/police-show-procedurals-hollywood-history-dragnet-keystone-cops-brooklyn-nine-nine-wire-blue-bloods) by Constance Grady for Vox
* [Studio Response to Showrunners for Abortion Rights](https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/showrunners-group-studios-abortion-safety-variety-ad-1235381785/)
* [The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/the-enduring-allure-of-choose-your-own-adventure-books) by Leslie Jamison for The New Yorker
* [Why Your Hate Your Job](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/why-you-hate-your-job) by Aravind “Vinny” Byju
* Follow journalist [Cerise Castle](https://cerisecastle.me/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/cerisecastle)
* Checkout [Tallowtalk](https://www.instagram.com/tallowtalk/?hl=en) soaps on [Etsy!](https://www.etsy.com/shop/TallowTalkSoapCo)
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* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Holly Overton ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/570standard.mp3).