Search Results for: book rights

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2018/the-worst-of-the-worst).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 378 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to dash hopes, ruin friendships, and destroy things we love most.

**Craig:** Oh, thank god.

**John:** As we talk about why bad things need to happen to characters we love. Plus, we’ll be answering questions about WGA signatories and old TV scripts.

**Craig:** Well that sounds fun.

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

**Craig:** It’s good to be back. I’m so sorry I missed – since I’ve been working and traveling, you’re working and traveling, and then I had some needle shoved into my spine last week.

**John:** Oh, no, not good. Don’t do that.

**Craig:** It wasn’t an accident. It was on purpose. There was a medical professional doing it.

**John:** All the kids are doing it.

**Craig:** All the kids are doing it.

**John:** Yeah, just inject – first it was Juuls, and then they’re injecting things into their spines.

**Craig:** Exactly. So that was why. Initially it was supposed to happen first thing in the morning and our podcast interview with Phil and Matt was going to be in the afternoon, and then they had an adjustment. So when I got out of that thing I was about two hours away from doing the podcast and just feeling really weird and oogie. So, yeah, but I’m back. I’m back.

**John:** He’s back. He’s no longer oogie. He’s full of boogie. And you can see Craig in person on December 12th which is tomorrow as this episode comes out. We are doing our live show in Hollywood. Our guests are fantastic. Zoanne Clack of Grey’s Anatomy, Pamela Ribon of Ralph Breaks the Internet. Cherry Chevapravatdumrong of Family Guy and The Orville, plus Phil Lord and Chris Miller of Lego Movie and the new Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse. So we are hyping this show, but for all I know we’re sold out and it’s just–

**Craig:** We should be based on that list of people. By the way, Zoanne Clack I think is a medical doctor.

**John:** She’s a medical doctor. So if Craig has an emergency, she’s the person.

**Craig:** We’ll be talking about my spine on that show. But this is an amazing lineup of people. Totally – everybody from different places – well, we do have three representatives of animation come to think of it. All right. All right. Lord and Miller, I mean, boom, Pam Ribon has got this huge movie out. Everybody is famous. And you know what? Why would anyone not want to go to this show? Plus, me and you.

**John:** Well that’s us. I mean, that’s the other celebrities in this whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Sometimes we like try to land a big name and then it’s like, you know what, let us be the big names sometimes.

**Craig:** We’re the big name.

**John:** Zoanne Clack, yes, she’s a medical doctor, but what I really want to talk to her about on the show is how she’s transitioned from being a doctor to writing a show about doctors. Because we get so many questions from listeners about like “I am a police detective, but I want to write detective stories.” And that’s an interesting, fascinating transition. She has done it, so she will be able to tell us what that life is like.

**Craig:** Maybe she can also chat a little bit about our episode where we went through all the mistakes that, like the fake medicine on TV. I wonder if she’s ever – well, you know what, let’s save the Zoanne questions for when we’re with Zoanne.

**John:** Absolutely. We also have another live show to announce. I’m very excited to announce that we are doing a screening of Princess Bride and an episode afterwards in which we’ll be talking about the movie we just saw. So, William Goldman passed away this past month. We are going to be doing a series of screenings for the WGA. This is going to be at the WGA Theater on January 27th. So, Craig and I will watch the movie then discuss the movie afterwards with the audience. And so this is I think going to be open up to everyone. So once there are tickets there will be a link in the show notes for that. I’m very excited to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Me too. It’s one of my favorite movies and William Goldman was a giant. So it’ll be nice. It’ll be nice to do that in his memory.

**John:** Absolutely. And so this will be kind of a trial run also because I’d like to do more of these on the whole. So if this goes well there’s some movies down the road I want to do a deep dive on. We’ll screen them and then do a deep dive. So we’ll let this be a test run.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**John:** Brilliant. We have some follow up. First is from Partis about the Start Button. Craig, do you want to take this?

**Craig:** Sure. OK, so Pardis writes, “The problem with the system you outlined on the podcast where the WGA can be the bad guy if you ask them to, calling the studio on your behalf to enforce the terms of your writing agreement is that the studio knows the WGA is only calling because you, the writer, have asked them to. And since writers are more dispensable than directors, yes, you can get labeled as a diva or as a problem child or as more trouble than you’re worth and lose out on future writing assignments as a result. So, what’s the solution?”

Pardis says, “A system whereby the WGA is alerted to commencement on a feature automatically. And a system whereby the WGA checks on progress for all feature products automatically without asking the writer first. That way the studio can’t blame any specific writer for asking the guild to be the bad guy. There’s just automatic oversight across the board. But, how can we put this system into place if the guild isn’t already alerted to commencement automatically?

“Option number 1: Negotiate a meaningful financial penalty into the next contract for studios that fail to file their paperwork for new project with an X number of days of the agreement being signed. That money can go toward covering the guild’s increased oversight and enforcement costs.

“Option number 2: Create a small financial penalty for writers who fail to alert the WGA that they’ve started work on a new project. Option 2, because then the studio can’t get mad at writers for alerting the WGA about new projects because writers have no choice but to inform the WGA directly less the writers be penalized themselves.”

**John:** All right, so let’s take a look at Pardis’ suggestions here and sort of how Pardis is laying out the situation. So, I think what Pardis is suggesting overall have some merit to it. You want the WGA to be the bad guy. You want the WGA to step up and do this work on behalf of writers. And if it feels like the WGA is only calling the studio or only getting involved because the writer complained I can understand that hesitation.

That said, the goal is for this to feel like it is just automatic. It’s like changing the way we’re just doing this on a regular basis. And so that even without a financial penalty for failing to hit the Start Button and report a new project, that it will become a matter of course for writers to do this. And the WGA has increased already the number of enforcement people there are to do that work. And so they are going to be checking up on people anyway. And so regardless of hitting the Start Button or not hitting the Start Button, there’s a lot more outreach to say like, hey, what are you working on, how is this going, and are you being paid on time? Is anything going on? And that is one of the overall goals and functions of the WGA is to make sure that our members are being paid and are treated appropriately.

**Craig:** These ideas, all ideas really, have been discussed ad nauseam since I have been involved in WGA stuff, which is, you know, over 14 years ago or something. But I would say that Pardis you’re not the first person to suggest that we should maybe start penalizing writers. But good luck. It’s not a great idea, honestly, to essentially crack down on writers to solve the problem that is created by studios. We already have enough problems. You’re dealing with writers that are already being abused and now they have to send money to the guild because they’ve been abused? It’s not great.

Can you get a meaningful financial penalty for studios that fail to file their paperwork? No. Probably not. And again when things start is kind of fuzzy. So, the Start Button actually is the best idea I’ve seen to date. And I think it will bear fruit. So I would say, Pardis, patience.

**John:** Related aspect here is that when you are hitting a Start Button or even now if you’re not hitting the Start Button, you are supposed to upload your contracts. And so I have been uploading my contracts. Everyone is supposed to upload their contracts that show all the steps of your deal. When the WGA has this information they can be checking on it independently so they don’t need to necessarily wait for you to say that there’s a problem. They can say like, hey, according to what we have this is what’s happening on this project – is this accurate? And you need to answer that honestly. And so that is a way in which the WGA can become involved, even if you are not reaching out to them to say help me here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Hopefully this works the way we would want it to in an ideal situation where the guild is helping you without feeling like they’re bonking you on the head. And in getting in your work process. So, let’s see how it goes.

**John:** Second bit of follow up, a previous One Cool Thing was the show Please Like Me. And last night I was out and randomly bumped into Josh Thomas the creator and star of Please Like Me. And so I want to talk a little bit about sort of what to do when you meet somebody who you’ve only seen their work in person. Because it can be sometimes kind of awkward. So what I did is I said, “Oh hey, you don’t know me, but I thought your show was fantastic and you do great work.” I asked him if he moved to Los Angeles fulltime and is writing here and he is. And then I left him be and let him sort of go on and be about his night.

So maybe we’ll get him on the show at some point and he can talk about what he’s doing here. But as a person who gets approached like Josh Thomas gets approached in that situation I want to talk about sort of best practices when you’re going up to talk to someone whose work you admire, but it’s in a social situation. Because, Craig, you must encounter this, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s not on a daily basis by any stretch of the imagination, but it does happen. And mostly people seem to do it well. You know, I haven’t had any weird encounters. Any actor that’s on television has astronomically more of these encounters than you or I. And my guess is just that numbers wise they’re going to run into some odd ducks, probably at least once a day.

**John:** Yeah. So I would just say I would encourage – if there’s a person who is doing great work and you want to say like, oh, I really like the thing you’re doing. It’s good to say that, because sometimes it’s just good to hear that you’re making stuff that the world appreciates. But I would say if you’re going to make that approach plan for an out that’s going to get you out of that conversation within 30 seconds to a minute, because they were going about their life before you interrupted them. And so you want to be able to say what you need to say and then like let them go off and do their thing. If they want to keep engaged, they can engage. But make sure you’re giving them the release to get out of the conversation.

**Craig:** And take a look at their face before you walk up to them, because listen, everybody is a person. Everybody is going through stuff. Sometimes we’re in a nice happy mood, sometimes we’re in a neutral state of mind. Sometimes we’re concerned, we’re running late, we’re sad, we’re nervous. And then we don’t want anyone talking to us. Anyone, by the way. Much less people that we don’t know. So, just take a look. I know it’s hard because – and again, this isn’t something that I think anyone has towards somebody like me – but when people see a movie star in their minds they think you know what it doesn’t matter how they’re feeling and it doesn’t matter what’s going on. This is my moment to shake Tom Cruise’s hand and I’m doing it. Because the rest of my life I shook Tom Cruise’s hand, right? I had that moment. And he’ll get over it and he will. He will. But, you know, it’s not that big – who cares? I guess that’s my whole thing is like who cares.

**John:** My ground zero for getting recognized, well of course Austin Film Festival I get recognized a lot there, which is – I sort of go there knowing that’s going to happen. The lobby of the ArcLight I get spotted a lot. And sometimes at the Grove. And there was one time I was walking through the lobby of the ArcLight and this guy goes, “Wait, you’re that writer guy. You’re good.” I’m like, OK. I guess I’m good. Thank you, random stranger. That’s nice.

**Craig:** You’re that writer guy. Well, that’s pretty much right. This is one of the nice things about living in La Cañada is that nobody cares. Nobody cares. They don’t care.

**John:** Let’s get to our marquee topic which is bad things and bad things happening to the characters that you love. This came up for me this morning because I was working through the third book of Arlo Finch and I was looking at my outline and just looking at how many bad things happen, which is just a tremendous number. I think partly because it is the third and final book, so if something could happen this is the last place where it could happen. But also the character has grown to a place where he can handle some things that he couldn’t otherwise handle. So, there’s a lot of serious stuff that happens in the third book.

But I want to talk about it because I think there’s this instinct to sort of protect our heroes, protect our characters, and it’s hard to sort of get us over the hump of like, no, no, no, you have to – not just allow bad things to happen but make bad things happen to your heroes in order to generate story. And this is really very much probably more a feature conversation than a television conversation because in ongoing series there will be conflict within an episode, but you won’t destroy everything in their life every week. But in features that’s a really important part.

**Craig:** It’s a huge part. And, yes, you’re right. In television you need to make sure that people come back the next week in roughly the same shape you found them. So there will be little mini ups and downs. But in movies we feel narratively like we have to see people torn apart. And this goes all the way back to the bible.

**John:** Oh, the bible.

**Craig:** The story of Job.

**John:** Tell me the story of Job.

**Craig:** I will. And I should mention I don’t believe in anything in the bible. However, the bible is evidence of something. And it is evidence I think of deep seeded instinctive narrative patterns in the human mind. They are expressions of these things that are in us. They are not always sensible or logical, but they are there. So, that’s how I’m going to take a look at the story of Job. It’s a very simple story. Job is a very pious guy. He believes in God. He’s just super godly. And God therefore rewards him with a fortune and health and, I don’t know, bountiful crops, or I don’t know, whatever God would give people. And God is hanging out one day with Satan, as he used to do, and Satan says, “You know, Job only loves you because you reward him.” And this is a general moral conundrum that has been dissected over time. You watch The Good Place, right?

**John:** Oh yeah. It’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Of course, so they refer to this as moral dessert. The idea that you behave well so that you get your reward from whatever metaphysical/supernatural deity you believe in. And God says, “No, no, no, no, no. Job loves me because he’s a good guy. And I’ll prove it. I will remove my protection from him and you go ahead and do whatever you want to him. And you’ll see. He’ll stand by me.” And so that’s what happens. God removes his protection and Satan begins to torment Job – torment him – torment his health, and ruin his crops, and scatter his children. It’s just awful. Like every bad thing you could do to somebody he does to Job. And Job just stands by God.

And in the end, you’re the winner Job, and God rerewards him and gives him even more crops and frankincense or whatever they had back then.

So, why am I bringing up the story of Job? Because there’s a moral inherent to it that I think is why we need, narratively, to torture our characters. And the idea is that our goodliness or our growth or whatever you want to call the evolution of our selves, the betterment of our selves, it doesn’t count to other people unless it is perceived to come at terrible cost.

Now, is that actually true? I don’t think so. I think it’s perfectly possible to become a better person without suffering. But when it comes to narrative it seems like we need it or we don’t believe the change.

**John:** Yeah. We didn’t see the work. We didn’t see the struggle. We didn’t see sort of the cost and it doesn’t feel like it was merited.

**Craig:** Exactly. So what we like to see is somebody that has experienced a trauma and they’re going to get over the trauma but only by facing it in the most hard and difficult way. They are going to repair a relationship with somebody by that person leaving them. They’re going to appreciate what they have because they lose it all. So, every character starts with this flaw and then we as the writers we torment them and force them to confront it through a series of increasingly difficult trials the way that Satan did to Job. And through that there is this falling apart. Break you down to lift you up. And we call this the low point.

The low point in a movie is the low point because the writer has tortured the hero to the point where they give up. They finally give up. That’s what you have to do is – you’ve lost your, whatever your ego is, and your hubris, and you give up and from that you will rise back. But those moments are so notable. And one of my favorite versions of that is the Team America puke scene which is just perfect. It’s perfect.

**John:** Let’s play a clip from the Team America puke scene.

[Clip plays]

So this scene classically is a character who has lost everything and then sort of loses more and in this case is literally vomiting up the last they have left. But let’s talk about some of those things that a character can lose and list off some of those classic things you’ll see characters losing here.

Some bad things might be to take away their home. So you might literally burn it down, or you might cast them out of society. You might take away their support system, so taking away their friends, their family, the institutions, the organizations that they’re a part of. You might have the rest of the world see them as the villain. And so you have a hero who is being perceived as the villain which is horrible. Incarcerate them. I have a note here sort of incarceration, also the weird case of Paul Manafort at this moment. So as we’re recording this, this is a guy who is going to probably be in jail for the rest of his life and he’s acting really strangely which leads me to believe that there’s something else he could lose, which is always fascinating to speculate on that. There’s something worse than being in prison for all this time and so he’s acting on behalf of that. So figuring out what that is.

You can kill a character. You can lop off a limb. You can force them to act against their own beliefs, so classically they have the daughter kidnapped and so therefore they have to do things that they can’t believe. You can sew tension and conflict between their allies. You can destroy the item they love most, so it’s like he finally gets that car he’s been hoping for his all his life and you destroy that thing.

So, those losses are bad things you’re doing to your character and they’re pretty crucial. If you don’t do some of those kinds of things over the course of your movie it’s probably not a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, what you’re doing is burning away what needs to be burned away. And it’s unpleasant. And we need it to be unpleasant. We need to see this character suffer. What is it, hamartia I think is the Greek word for suffering. And then catharsis is essentially vomiting. Which is one of the reasons why I like that scene so much because they just did it.

Humiliation is something that we see all the time. The writer creates circumstances in which the hero is humiliated. Where they lose all sense of self-worth and pride. We can kill or harm the people they love the most. We can make them feel terribly guilty and confront them with the consequences of what they’ve done. It’s good because it’s tortuous.

There’s that scene, people of our age always remember this moment in the second Superman movie from the late ‘70s/early ‘80s where Superman willingly gives up his power so that he can marry Lois Lane. And he gets beaten up by some guy in a bar. And it’s crushing. It’s crushing because you see someone brought low. I remember seeing that scene in the theater and feeling terrible inside. And it was the same feeling I had when I watched the animated The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe when all the evil Snow Queen and her minions shave the mane off of Aslan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Take his hair away and reduce him to just this pathetic wretch. And, yeah, it’s – you need it. You need it or else when they come back you don’t feel anything.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about the timing of when these bad things happen, because there’s a couple different moments over the course of a movie where you see these things happening classically. So, the first is the inciting incident or whatever you want to call that moment early in the story that sort of kicks this story into gear. And so, you know, in the first 10 to 15 minutes of a story where a change has happened. This is the village is raided and the hero’s parents are killed. This is a big change has happened that is starting this story with this character.

Often the end of act one. So you’ve arrived at a new place. We’re not in Kansas anymore. The hero’s house has burnt down. We’re entering a new world. There’s a big change and the hero has lost something. They may be excited about what they’re headed towards, but there is a loss. They’ve crossed into a place where they can’t get back to where they were before.

There’s a lot of times, moments in the second act that are going to be losses, where allies turn on them, where new obstacles arise. There’s a plan that fails, seeing things that were important to the character that we were hoping for for the character don’t come true. And then classically the biggest of these losses, which is probably the vomit scene from Team America, is the end of act two, sort of the worst of the worst, which is you’ve gotten to this point and you’ve lost everything. It should generally be the character’s lowest point, or at least the lowest point in this character and how they’ve evolved over the course of the story. That thing that looked like it was potentially in their reach has been taken away from them. And that’s classically the end of the second act.

**Craig:** It’s the end because there’s nothing left to lose. You, the writer, have beaten it all out of them. They have no pride left. They have no resources. Or whatever it is. You’ve removed the stuff that they were relying on. Their crutches are all gone.

It’s important to note that when you visit these bad things on your character you must do so sadistically. It’s not enough to just have some bad things happen. You have to do them in a way that is deeply ironic and miserable. Especially miserable. Because then oddly the more exquisite the torture the more we feel positively when they overcome it.

So, the example I always think about is Marlin at the beginning of Finding Nemo. He’s a happy fish and he’s there with his wife and their hundreds of little babies. And they’ve found a place to live. And then his wife is eaten and all of the babies are eaten except for one. And that is very bad. But then Pixar understood it’s not bad enough. They have to make that little one disabled. They have to give him a bad fin so that he will need even more protection. And then that’s not enough. He is the one that goes missing. And so you have to go get him. And that’s not enough. In the end you have to let him go into more danger to save a friend. And then that’s not enough. You have to feel like he died there. And in that moment where Marlin thinks that Nemo is dead, he flashes back to holding him as a little egg and if you’re human you cry. Because the torture has been so exquisite. And therefore the relief and joy is beautiful and our appreciation for how far Marlin has come as a character is real.

They earned it. Did I ever tell the story of Jose Fernandez, the pitcher?

**John:** No. Tell me.

**Craig:** So this sort of goes to what I think of as the essential ingredient of character torture is irony. It’s not enough to just sort of make bad things happen. You have to do it in a way that feels ironic, as if the world had conspired against them.

So, it’s a guy named Jose Fernandez. Like a lot of baseball players he came from Cuba. So he had to escape from Cuba and he escaped on a small boat with – it was one of these crowded boats full of refugees and at some point on the voyage the boat gets tossed and turned and someone says, “Someone has gone overboard,” and without even thinking Jose Fernandez just jumps into the ocean to save whoever that person is. And he does. He grabs them. He brings them back on board. He pulls them up. They live. And it turns out that the person he saved was his own mother. He didn’t even know it.

He arrives in the United States and he becomes a baseball player. Not just a baseball player. He is an amazing pitcher. He plays for the Marlins. He is fantastic. He is going to earn many, many hundreds of millions of dollars. So, just the kind of dream come true for somebody that had to escape Cuba on a small boat and rescue his mother from drowning.

Unfortunately, two years ago he died. He died in an accident. And if I told you that he died in a car accident you would think that’s bad. But he didn’t die in a car accident. He died in a boating accident.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** And that is ironic in a terrible way. It implies that the universe was doing something. It had its thumbs on the scale so to speak. It is tortuous to think of. And when we write our terrible tortures for our characters I think it’s important for us to think of that. Because – and it’s a sad thing of course – but the worse it is and the more ironic it is the better the ending feels.

**John:** Yeah. Well let’s talk about sort of how those bad things come into the story. Because I can think of three main ways you see those bad things happening. The first is an external event. So that’s the earthquake. That’s the world war. In Finding Nemo that is the – is it a shark who eats the fish originally?

**Craig:** No, he gets grabbed by some fishermen who are looking to capture fish to sell, like for aquariums.

**John:** No, but at the very start of the movie where–

**Craig:** Oh yeah, it’s like a barracuda or something like that.

**John:** So that’s really an external threat because that – so barracuda is not the primary villain of the story. I don’t remember Finding Nemo that well. That barracuda itself never comes back.

**Craig:** Correct. It was just nature.

**John:** It’s nature actually. So some external force that you cannot actually defeat comes back. But sometimes it is the villain itself who is the character who arrives who is the one who is causing the suffering. So, every James Bond movie. Many fairy tales. Die Hard is an example. So, there’s a personified threat. A villain who is doing the thing that is causing the suffering. That is beginning the suffering.

But in some of my favorite movies it is the hero themselves that is doing the action that is causing the problem. So if you look at Inside Out or Ralph Breaks the Internet or Toy Story, it is the hero who is causing the problem. The hero who is ultimately responsible for the suffering that the characters are going through. And that’s often great writing. Because it gets back to the idea of like what is the character’s flaw and something about that character’s flaw is causing the suffering. And we see them having to address that flaw in order to stop the suffering.

**Craig:** No question. It’s very common with Pixar movies. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of a Pixar movie where the bad stuff is majority villain driven other than Bug’s Life, where Kevin Spacey, a real life villain, portrayed a villainous grasshopper. But typically in Pixar films – and sort of I guess in The Incredibles, but yeah, mostly they bring it upon themselves because it is more interesting.

**John:** I mean, in The Incredibles movies there’s sort of an attenuated thing where it’s like it’s because of past actions, it’s a boomerang effect that sort of comes back in, but it’s not a thing we saw them do at the start of the movie. It’s not generally responsible for most of the suffering.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But movies are about consequences and if characters are allowed to freely make choices and then have to suffer the consequences of those choices, that is good and appropriate and compelling storytelling, especially for a feature which is something that is designed to happen just once.

So, a television show theoretically should be able to repeat itself ad nauseam. A feature is sort of a one-time journey for a character. And so that one-time journey is going to about big steps and big swings and big failures when they happen.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** So some takeaway on this idea of bad things happening to your characters. I would say really as you’re breaking a story you have to be thinking about what are the biggest worst things that could happen. And when I say the biggest worst things that are in the universe of your story. So, obviously you can’t stick a tornado in space. But within the context of your movie what are those and what are the character effects for it?

I think so often when we get notes about like well the stakes feel light here, sometimes the proposed solution is to make it be – it’s the end of the world. Like if we don’t do this then everyone else around us dies. I think that sometimes that’s mistaking the bigger scale for more personal consequences for the things that the characters are going through. So, making sure that it feels like a punishment very specifically tailored to this character that you’ve created.

**Craig:** Exactly. And you don’t have to – you don’t have to substitute volume of badness for quality of badness. In the beginning of John Wick the bad guys basically kill his dog. Which in and of itself would be like OK that’s bad, except it was the last gift he received from his deceased wife. That’s all it takes. I’m good.

And, you know, it doesn’t have to be this massive visitation of problems. Sometimes it’s just the cruelty of it really. Little bits of cruelty.

**John:** The Wizard of Oz, she’s trying to take Toto away at the start. That horrible woman is trying to bicycle away with Toto. That’s horrible. And that’s absolutely the right scale of problem for that movie so before the tornado comes that is what we’re experiencing. We can see it from Dorothy’s eyes like this is one of the worst things she can imagine ever happening.

**Craig:** A lot of times I do think about The Wizard of Oz when people start harping on stakes in meetings. Because I’m like what are the stakes exactly? What are the stakes?

**John:** There aren’t stakes in a classic way. It’s not like the Lollipop Guild was being horribly oppressed. It’s not like there was – she ended up changing the world but kind of by accident.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess the stakes were that she would get killed or something. I don’t know. But yeah, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes it’s really more about how closely we empathize with the character and the stakes are whatever is stakey to them. It’s about what makes them feel. And if you make me feel what they’re feeling, those are stakes. That counts.

**John:** Absolutely. In a previous discussion we talked about want and want versus need, which I think is a false dichotomy. But when characters express their wants they have a positive vision of the future. So they can imagine a future and in that future their life is better because they have this thing that they want. And that’s a positive vision. Fear is a negative vision of the future. And so they are afraid. They’ve seen the future and in the future their life is worse because this thing has happened or has been taken away from them.

That’s really what we’re talking about with these things we’re trying to – these horrors we’re trying to visit upon our characters is that those things that they feared or those things they didn’t even think they had to fear, those are happening to them now in this story and they have to figure out how to deal with it.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to some listener questions. First off is James in Napier, New Zealand. I assume it’s Napier, but maybe it’s pronounced a different way. It feels like one of those words where it could be Napier, or Napier.

**Craig:** I think it’s probably Napier.

**John:** Napier. James writes, “How in god’s name do you make sure a TV script is the right length? There’s a lot of flexibility in how feature film scripts can run. I know the one-minute per page rule is a rough guide when you’re writing. TV and radio are much more time-constrained so how do you make sure the script is exactly the right length to start with? And how do you keep it that way during production?”

Craig, you just went through TV.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re doing this right now. Don’t panic over here, James. It’s no big deal. Generally speaking, you know, we’ve got this rough 30-page/60-page guideline for half an hour or an hour. But the truth of the matter is it’s all guess work. The pages don’t really conform clearly to one-minute per page. Things are going to get cut. Some things are going to be expanded.

The good news is that we don’t really live in the world where the vast majority of television is constrained by rigid time formats. Everything is far more loosey-goosey now which is nice. If you’re writing for network television, different story. But with that point I would say, again, don’t panic. You can edit. And you can speed things up or slow them down editorially. So just generally, you know, get roughly in that zone and that’s what it will be.

And, you know, my experience at least with Chernobyl so far is that the scripts – at least for the first four episodes – are around 59 to 63 pages and they’re all timing out to be about an hour.

**John:** It does work that way. I was talking with Rob Thomas, the creator of Veronica Mars and iZombie and other shows and Rob hates the one-page-per-minute rule because he feels that sometimes networks try to value it too much. And so the way he writes it doesn’t really match up that well. He believes that you could probably actually do a word count that would more accurately reflect how long something really will take to fill.

I don’t know if that’s true, but I think it’s an interesting experiment. The truth though is that once you start making a show, so iZombie or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or any of Derek’s Chicago shows, they know. Ultimately they get a sense of like, OK, our scripts need to be about this length because this is what the episodes cut out to be. And even then there will be episodes that are running long for a while and they have to find way to get two minutes out of it. And when we had the Game of Thrones creators on, Benioff and Weiss, they were talking about how in the first season their episodes were too short. They didn’t understand sort of how long stuff was going to play. And so they needed to add additional scenes to sort of fill them out because they just didn’t have a sense of how long an episode was going to be based on the script page.

**Craig:** Exactly. All right. Joe has a question. He writes, “I am a WGA member. I have an offer on the table from a reputable Middle Eastern production company looking to produce a more Western style show. The offer is about 15% less than WGA minimums. They won’t go any higher because they say lower budgets and the Arabic-speaking portion of the MENA territory,” Middle East, I don’t know, “simply doesn’t support it. I asked the WGA and they said flatly I cannot work for any company who is not a WGA signatory.

“I asked my reps and was told the WGA does not have jurisdiction here and becoming a signatory should not be what stands in the way of signing this deal. To be honest, the WGA response rubbed me the wrong way because it felt like they were using me to gain signatories when they didn’t have anything to lose and I did. A job.

“That said, I owe a lot to the WGA. I’m eking out a meager living as a writer and I recognize the WGA is part of that. But I don’t have so much work that I can just turn stuff down willy-nilly. So, does the WGA actually have jurisdiction here?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** I think there’s probably some situation in which you can be hired by a foreign company as a WGA member and they don’t have to pay you minimums. But this is probably not one of those situations. I know there’s international working rules, essentially one of the things the WGA needs to make sure never happens is that international companies sort of come in and sort of scoop up American writers to really write American things but try to pay them less than that. So I think that is why the WGA’s response is that.

But, Craig, you know more about the rules. Tell me.

**Craig:** Well, I have an understanding here, but it will be interesting. I would love to get the WGA’s official position on this. My understanding is that the WGA here is correct. The issue is that Joe is here and the WGA’s jurisdiction covers the United States. It is chartered by the Department of Labor. So, if you are a member of the WGA and you are writing something here in the United States it has to be for a WGA signatory. You cannot go lower than that. Period. The end. Assuming that there is an applicable collective bargaining agreement which obviously there is here.

So, no, you can’t do that. Listen, Sony, right, owns Columbia. We call them Sony now. Well obviously Sony is a Japanese company. So why wouldn’t Sony just start saying everybody who works for Columbia Pictures, we’re actually employing you under the Japanese branch of Sony, so you don’t have to do WGA. No. That doesn’t work that way. At all.

**John:** So I suspect that where we could get to with Joe is if this company was willing to fly you over to the Middle East and put you up there and you were doing your writing services there–

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** They could pay you less than that and that would not be a great situation for you. So not only are you giving up 15% of this money, which by the way 15% of scale is not a ton of money. I just feel like they could find that money for you. But, you are giving up your credit protections. You are giving up kind of all the stuff. Health and pension. You’re giving up much more than you sort of think to take that job. So that is why we have protections like this so that you cannot be undercut by a foreign thing.

So could this company form a WGA signatory? Yes they could. It would be great if they did.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think the WGA, by the way, Joe is using you to get this company to sign up as a signatory. I don’t think they care about this company. I think they care about everybody else that’s in the WGA and the value of our minimums not being degraded. So, what I would say here is you can say to them, listen, this isn’t me asking you for anything. I’m not allowed to do this. And, by the way, company, if you come here to the United States you can’t get anybody in the WGA to do this. None of us will be able to do this. You’re going to have get a non-WGA writer.

So, you know, which generally speaking won’t probably be as good. So, that’s where they’re at, Joe.

**John:** All right. Kofi from Woodbridge, New Jersey writes, “My question pertains to the release of completed scripts after a television show has aired or a movie has been released to the public. Who decides whether or not the completed script will ever be released? I’d love to read the script for every episode of my favorite shows, but usually only the scripts for the pilot and episodes selected for awards are available. Movie scripts can be hit or miss, too. Why isn’t every script made available to be read for educational purposes?”

**Craig:** Well, there are certain circumstances where the writers actually have the publication rights over screenplays. If you have separated rights in feature films that means you have a Story By or Written By credit then I believe you have the right to publish your screenplay.

But, look, by and large they don’t do it because it takes time and it costs some amount of money and it takes some tiny bit of effort and they’re just not willing. It’s no one’s job. It’s a massive company and they can look around and who wants to be the person responsible for scanning and posting 4,000 screenplays. Nobody wants to do it. And there isn’t really a huge clamoring for it, which, you know, is a bit of a bummer. That said, there are plenty of kind of underground swap meets for these things online. I’ve seen them around.

So, yeah, it would be nice. But it comes down to sheer laziness and lack of interest, I think.

**John:** So, the situation is actually a lot different than it was 25 years ago when Craig and I were starting. I remember when I arrived at USC for film school they had a script library. You could go down and could check out two scripts from this library and they were literally printed bound scripts. Not even brads in them, but these special posts that sort of like are sturdier than brads. You could check them out and read them and take them back in. And it was a great experience for me to read all of these scripts from classic movies I loved but also things that had never been produced and it was a really good experience.

So, I think reading scripts is fantastic. But, now there’s the Internet and now there are PDFs of screenplays. And so while Kofi can’t find all the screenplays he wants to read, he can find a ton of them. I mean, even just in Weekend Read we have hundreds of scripts. Things that are going for awards, those are posted online and those things are easy to find. It’s harder to find the scripts for movies that are not sort of award contenders. But, you can kind of find them.

But Kofi’s more interesting point is he wants to read the episodic scripts. Those are harder to find. You tend to find pilots or just those marquee episodes of things. And it’s great to read the normal episodes. That’s one of those things where it actually is much easier to do if you are in this town. Because then you just have networks and assistants at places who can get you copies of scripts. They’re not really under lock and key. They don’t have a lot of value in and of themselves. You can’t do anything with the scripts and so no one is trying to sort of keep them from you. But what Craig said is like it’s no one’s job to publish them or post them. That’s why they don’t happen.

**Craig:** That’s why they don’t happen. Well, keep looking. And by the way, Kofi, spent a lot of time in the mall over there in Woodbridge myself, so just waving hi to you back there in the old country.

And we’ve got one more question here from Cory right here in LA who writes, “I’ve got an award-winning short film and I just hired a screenwriter to adapt it into a feature. Though I’ve come up with much of the story, he will be hitting the keys to bring the story and script together. I am a one-man production band with a small production company. I’d like to make sure that I am setting both he and I up for success.” That should be him and I. Setting both him and me. Yeah. Because, right. Anyway.

“I’d like to make sure that I’m setting both him and me up for success and possible WGA membership or eligible points toward. First, should or must I make my company a WGA signatory? Second, since I or rather my company is self-financing his writing of the screenplay do I need to adhere to WGA payment standards to allow him eligibility? Finally, if I’m the creator of the original work and I’ve come up and will be credited with Story By is there an opportunity for me to earn WGA points or is that just for the screenwriter?”

Oh, excellent list of membership questions there, John. What do you think?

**John:** Absolutely. So, I don’t have all the answers but I will tell you that you’re not the first person to encounter this and I think the WGA has done a much better job over the last ten years dealing with these kinds of situations. I think Howard Rodman deserves a lot of the credit for that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you’re describing is probably a low budget independent film. And if you go to the WGA website there are resources there to talk you through what happens with low budget independent films. Classically these were done outside of WGA jurisdiction. But recognizing that some of the best work was happening there and this was obviously writer’s first work they set up these low budget agreements so that you can do this kind of stuff. That you don’t have to pay people the full amounts for writing services and other things but still allows for things like credit protections. It allows for other parts of what you get with a WGA package for these productions.

So, I suspect you will click through on the site, we’ll put a link in the show notes, and see what you need to do and how you sort of put the script into a place where it’s eligible for these low budget agreements. And I don’t think you will have to become a full signatory. I think there’s just ways you can sort of use an associate membership to get you started here. So, it’s good you’re doing it. It’s good you’re thinking about this now. But just read the stuff and then make the thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Definitely you want to take a look at that low budget independent film agreement. To become a full-fledged WGA signatory there are quite a few hoops to jump through. I mean, it’s not trial by fire or anything, but for instance you need to show that you have enough financial resources to be able to cover your residuals obligations. So in this case because it’s just you and this is just one independent film I think that’s the way to go. Take a look at it.

In terms of credit, the original work will be considered source material. It was written outside of the WGA so it will be based on a short film by blah-blah-blah. If you want proper WGA story credit, on the title page of the screenplay it would need to say Screenplay by Jim, Story by Jim and Corey. And that, of course, requires Jim to agree. The truth is the story in the original film is essentially akin to the story in a novel. The novelist doesn’t automatically get WGA credit for the movie of it. They have to actually do some work. So in this case what you would need to do to warrant Story by credit or Shared Story by credit is to work up a written story for the new movie that you’re talking about, either on your own or with the screenwriter that you’re hiring, and then that is now part of this chain of title of the work that’s leading up to this film that would be covered by the independent film low budget agreement.

Hopefully that makes sense.

**John:** I think it makes sense.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing feels like a Craig One Cool Thing, but it’s the story in the New York Times by Moises Velasquez-Manoff and it’s about how emergency rooms and other medical professionals are starting to examine ketamine as a suicide prevention or a suicide drug for dealing with people who show up suicidal and it seems like it is potentially a quick life-saving drug to be using for people with severe suicide ideation.

So, it’s a really nicely written up story about the potential of a drug which we only think of in sort of bad context possibly having some really good uses.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a fascinating article. Totally my kind of thing. Ketamine is one of these drugs that’s been around for a long time and it’s kind of one of those – I think the World Health Organization has their list of essential medicines, like if you were building your doomsday locker of medicines you’d want ketamine in there. It is a sedative. It is kind of a tranquilizer sort of thing. It can be used anesthetically, you know.

And what they found, and I didn’t realize this, but in this article they are saying that very small doses of ketamine can almost stop suicidal ideation in its tracks. So you have somebody coming in who is in severe distress who was just taken by the cops off of the side of a bridge and brought to the emergency room and you give them this tiny injection of ketamine and suddenly they don’t have that anymore. They don’t want to jump.

And, now, that doesn’t last obviously, right? So then there’s work to be done after that. But what they’re pointing out is that suicidal ideation, kind of underlying depression, to reverse that pharmacologically with say serotonin reuptake inhibitors takes weeks. Maybe months. Same thing with talk therapy. But if you need to make sure that someone doesn’t hurt themselves over the two, three, four weeks, this may be a viable deal.

Now, part of the issue is that it can be used recreationally and if there’s a certain dosage you start to have hallucinations and, you know, psychoactive effects. So, that’s why I think in general people are a little, you know, but we have to kind of get over some of this stuff. You know?

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Doctors in the emergency rooms are pretty good at figuring out who is there because they’re actually suicidal and who is pretending to be because they feel like getting a ketamine dose.

**John:** You look at sort of this work, you look at work on LSD, you look at work on ecstasy, these are clearly drugs that should be studied for what they can do in a clinical setting and sort of what good can come out of them. But instead they sort of become demonized because of dangerous uses of them recreationally.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we wouldn’t use them recreationally if they didn’t work on some level. So, yeah, obviously how much we use and all the rest. So, anyway, that was really promising. So you did that and I went the other direction. I went all the way over into computer world. So I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption 2, of course, and I want to call out the people that worked on the environment because it’s so good. It’s the best environment experience I’ve ever had playing a videogame.

There was a moment where – it’s not just the detail of the appearance of things, which is quite extraordinary. But it’s the way it interacts sort of synergistically. Just sort of trotting along on my horse and I’m going through sort of a path with some trees on either side and the wind kind of blows and leaves rustle off the trees and kind of swirl in the air around me and then fall to the ground. And I’m like, what? This is getting good.

The wind people talked to the tree people. And then the tree people decided, you know what, some leaves come off when wind blows but not a lot of them, not all of them, and how do they come off? And what happens when they go? And it’s perfect. It’s really amazing how well they did with those little things. And you and I know because we work in movies and television how much work goes into making something look effortless.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** God only knows how many hours were spent trying to make the wind make the leaves go just right. It’s really well done. So, tip of the hat. My One Cool Thing this week the people that did the environment in Red Dead 2.

**John:** Very nice. Those leaf physicists, they did God’s work there.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael O’Konis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

But short questions are great on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

You can find the links in the show notes for the things we talked about, so that’s at johnaugust.com. Just follow through to the links there. Or if you’re listening to this on most of the players swipe and you will see a list of links there.

Come see us at our live show tomorrow night if there are still tickets. But also January 27th is our big show for William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. Looking forward to that.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. While you’re there, leave us a review. Those are lovely. We need to read some of those reviews aloud so we’ll try to remember to do that.

Transcripts go up within the week and so you can find transcripts for all the episodes back to the first episode. You can find the audio for all our episodes at Scriptnotes.net. It is $2 a month for all of those back episodes and bonus episodes, too.

**Craig:** So cheap.

**John:** So cheap.

**Craig:** So cheap.

**John:** Craig, I will see you tomorrow for the live show.

**Craig:** See you tomorrow for the live show, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Tickets](https://go.wgfoundation.org/campaigns/8810-the-scriptnotes-holiday-live-show) are on sale for the Holiday Live Show!
* The Team America: World Police [puke scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKqGXeX9LhQ), with some bad language
* The opening of [Finding Nemo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG3L98NFyro)
* Aslan’s sacrifice in [The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ6VAGyhWXM)
* [Can We Stop Suicides?](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/opinion/sunday/suicide-ketamine-depression.html) by Moises Velasquez-Manoff for the New York Times
* The environment in [Red Dead Redemption 2](https://www.rockstargames.com/reddeadredemption2/)
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael O’Konis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_378.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2018/commencement).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 376 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’ll be looking at how you know when it’s okay to start writing on that project you’ve been hired to write, and how that ties into the new Start Button the WGA is unveiling this week. We’ll also be answering a three-part listener question about television and some other listener questions as well.

**Craig:** Terrific. And you’ve been working on this one for quite some time, so this is–

**John:** This has been a long term project.

**Craig:** I’m excited. It’s good though. This is why we elected you, John.

**John:** Aw, thank you.

**Craig:** Oh, and you know what? Well, I guess I’ll put it in follow up. I have follow up.

**John:** All right. We’ll put it in follow up. My little bit of news is I’m just now back from book tour. So I did a book tour of Europe. I did a book tour of Texas and Colorado. And I love it and I love signing people’s books and meeting people. But I can’t sign everyone’s books. So I’m doing what a lot of other authors do which is if you’d like me to sign a bookplate which is essentially a fancy sticker that you can put in your book that has my name on it and your name on it, I’m doing that now.

So, if you would like your Arlo Finch copy signed, maybe as a Christmas present, or a gift for some other young reader, you can do that now. So there’s a link in the show notes or just go to johnaugust.com. You’ll see the Arlo Finch little thing there. And I can send you a sticker that you can put in your book as a gift. So if you’d like that just go to johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** We don’t do any kind of Scriptnotes gift exchange at the end of the year.

**John:** We don’t. I mean, why don’t we do that, Craig?

**Craig:** Probably because I hate people and you aren’t really a person.

**John:** No, I would say that it’s because I don’t like giving gifts. I’ve just never been especially gifty. Stuart Friedel, our former producer of Scriptnotes, he was so good at gifts. He would pick the perfect gift for my daughter. He clearly had a brain that was just always on the hunt for the perfect gift for people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You know, Craig, I think we should break tradition and actually exchange gifts and I think we should do it at our live Scriptnotes show.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** So we’re doing a Scriptnotes show on December 12 in Hollywood. And maybe we should exchange gifts at that event.

**Craig:** We have to give ourselves some kind of limitation. Otherwise it could become absurd.

**John:** So less than $1,000?

**Craig:** Oh god. That’s an enormous number.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s crazy. I’ve lost interest.

**John:** All right, so we will exchange some sort of gift but it should be a meaningful gift that the other person will like and we should do it at the live show.

**Craig:** OK. We’ll figure it out. But we’ll have to put a reasonable financial limit on it so that one person doesn’t overwhelm the other with insanity.

**John:** Why don’t we say $20 because the tickets are $20?

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** So that will be the baseline. We’re going to be announcing our special guest for the show really soon. We were talking about it right before we got on the air.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So we’re excited. We’re excited to be back in Hollywood doing our annual holiday live show. Tickets are on sale now. You can click on the link in the show notes or go to writersguildfoundation.org, or wgafoundation.org. It’s the usual place. And you can get a ticket for the show.

**Craig:** And we have not yet settled firmly on guests, but we have some excellent ideas that will blow your minds.

**John:** Blow our minds. So come see that. We have some follow up. So, Craig, why don’t you start with your follow up first?

**Craig:** My follow up is just some exciting news. We’ve been going on and on about these credit proposals and they passed.

**John:** They did pass.

**Craig:** Super excited by that. They passed by a very healthy margin, despite a little pushback from a prominent member of the legal community here in Los Angeles. But I think we as a committee we made a good strong case. And the nice thing is that all the changes that we made are really for the benefit of writers.

So, I’m really happy about that. It’s a great way for me to kind of ride into the sunset as I believe this incarnation of the credits committee is being sunsetted. I have been involved on a credits committee now in one form or another for like a decade. So, this is a nice retirement for me.

**John:** Very nice. So I will be joining the credits committee and I think the plan going forward is to listen to members about sort of the things they’re experiencing with credits. And as you and I have talked about there are some unique things happening with movies being written in really unusual ways that make determining credit a challenge and so we need to rise to figure out how to deal with those challenges.

**Craig:** We have actually done I think a very good job as a union to shift our perspective on how credits should interact with the world around us. When we joined the union we were still kind of living with the burden of the old philosophy which is we will write credits rules in such a way that will change the way the business does things.

No. Business doesn’t care. Go ahead and penalize rewriters all you want. They’ll keep hiring people to rewrite things. So, there was a nice philosophical pivot that happened over the last 10 years where the guild said, OK, this is how movies are actually written. How can we better serve our membership who are writing them? And that’s been a good change and there’s obviously lots of more room for improvement. These things have to be done carefully and incrementally and they’re subject to votes. And sometimes even subject to negotiation with the studios. So it’s a tricky, tricky business. But if anyone can do it, John, it’s you. And me. But not me this time. I’m not doing it anymore.

**John:** Not you this time. There will be many wise, smart people on both the East and the West figuring this out together, so I’m excited about that.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** So, a big piece of follow up, Craig many, many, many episodes ago you had made a spontaneous offer that if any studio wanted us to come in and talk about their notes process you and I would be willing to do that. And this last week we did.

**Craig:** We actually did it. So Disney invited us. They were the only studio brave enough to just listen to two writers talk for an hour. That’s all we ever suggested doing. At no cost to them. They were the only ones that even expressed interest in hearing what writers thought about the notes process, which on the one hand speaks glowingly of them, and on the other hand makes everybody else look a bit, well, tawdry to me.

We came and we did it. And I hope that they actually shared that experience with their other studio, their fellow studio people, because they seemed to really like it a lot. And what you and I did was speak about how notes feel on our side of the table and try and help them tailor the way they give notes to us and our responses so that they actually get better work out of us, better responses, better conversations, less strife, less drama, less trouble.

And it went really well. You know, tip of the hat to Disney for doing that. I was really pleased and just a roomful of executives who were willing to listen to writers talk about this. And, by the way, they seemed legitimately interested, which I really appreciated.

**John:** Absolutely. So it was a good conversation. We sort of laid out kind of just best practices, like some dos and don’ts, and really what it feels like to be on the receiving end of those notes and which notes are helpful to us and which notes are maddening because they don’t actually recognize the writing process or the filmmaking process.

And we actually got into a bit of back and forth because they say like, “Well sometimes we have to give that note because of X, Y, and Z.” And we said, great, so tell us why you’re giving us those notes if they are crazy notes. So it was a good conversation.

I know we’re going to be going in to talk with some other development executives down the road, but I guess we’re offering this to other folks as well?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, my feeling is there’s no reason that executives at Warner Bros, executives at Fox, executives at Sony, executives at Universal wouldn’t want to hear this. What does it cost beyond an hour? And just to be clear, we don’t walk in there and go, “You guys are stupid. Your notes are dumb.” That’s not at all what we do. What we do is really talk about the psychological experience of writing something and receiving notes and where the notes are helpful. We divided in half. This is helpful. This is not helpful. So, it’s very pro-note and it’s really designed to kind of help improve the relationship between note givers and note takers. Why wouldn’t they want? It makes no sense to me.

But, you know, hey, Disney, trailblazers.

**John:** Yep. So, another thing we’ve been talking about on the podcast and also in the guild is the sense of No Writing Left Behind. This idea that you should not be leaving your materials behind after a pitch, so that it doesn’t become free work you’re doing for folks. And today we have two new folks who have written in who aren’t screenwriters but are encountering the same kind of thing. Craig, do you want to take the first one here?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. So this is what this person writes in. “In following the No Work Left Behind thread over the last number of episodes I wanted to relay a similar issue in the feature directing world, specifically the pitching process. For writers it sounds like “Show us exactly how you would write the script for free and then we’ll decide if we want to pay you.” For directors it sounds like “Show us exactly how you would direct the movie for free and then we’ll decide if we want to pay you.” In my experience, a typical feature film directing pitch from start to finish takes 250 hours or more over about two or three months. It’s free work. If you don’t get the job you don’t get paid.

“And often after going through the entire process the outcome is that the movie gets canceled or the studio hires a bigger name director. If one were to pitch for three or four projects you’re talking about more than 4.5 to six months of fulltime, unpaid speculative pitching work. This is reflective of my 2018. And no one seems surprised by this. In fact, it’s expected.

“I’m a WGA and DGA member, and while the WGA is brilliantly taking on the free work issue, I haven’t gotten a straight answer from the DGA, my reps, or anyone else about the free work required of directors. The only answer I’ve received is when you’re starting out you just have to do a lot of pitching. It’s pretty normal.

“One now well-known director’s rep told me that this director was consistently a runner-up on directing job hires for three years. I know Scriptnotes is a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, but would you be willing to lend any insights or suggestions about the free work issues in directing? No one else seems to be willing to talk about this issue.”

John, I feel like we could help this person.

**John:** I think we could as well. So, talking with director friends, this is absolutely true. And so I want to distinguish between a little bit – you know, writers write words and so we focus on like don’t leave your words behind, but there’s obviously a lot of work that’s being done to go in and pitch. And so if we’re telling you like, OK, you may have to pitch this project 10 times but you’re not leaving that document behind that’s still a tremendous amount of your time. And you and I both know many feature writers who are spending a tremendous amount of time pitching and pitching and pitching on projects.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This is a director who is doing the same thing. But what the director is coming in with is not a document. It is usually a huge mood board and cut of videos and rip reels from other things to show what he or she is planning to do were they to get the job of directing this movie.

And I would share this director’s frustration that like you are basically giving the studio an option for like this is what the movie could look like and getting almost nothing out of it in return.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, this is one of those rare moments where in the feature business writers have it better than directors. And I say rare because once the jobs are handed out, way better to be the director in features than the writer. The director is treated with respect and has some creative authority and the writer has none of those things.

But prior to employment however the writers do have a certain advantage because as you point out our work product is words on a page. So, it’s really easy for us to withhold that because that’s the only thing we’re paid for. For a director, what they’re paid for is film in a can and, well, or on a small digital card, and there is no way to essentially withhold that because that’s not going to get made anyway. It seems to me that if you are spending that much time creating a kind of film directing pitch and it’s not converting into jobs then you I suppose must ask the question what is converting into jobs for people.

If you’re spending six months of fulltime, unpaid speculative pitching work I feel like maybe the answer is to spend six months shooting something that is kind of remarkable.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, one of the luxuries writers have is that it’s cheap for us to do our jobs. And so we can just – you and I can just go off and write a thing. No one can stop us and it’s free. For a director to make something costs money and takes time and to make a film requires a tremendous amount of money. Even to make a small film you’re spending a tremendous amount of time and money to do that.

So, just this past week we had a launch party for Start Button stuff. And I was talking with a feature writer who was saying that he was going in pitch after pitch after pitch on this project and at a certain point he wanted to say, “OK, I will go back in and pitch again but you need to start paying me some money.” And he’d be fine if that was money against what they were ultimately going to pay him. But if it costs $500 or $1,000 to take another meeting that would at least incentivize both sides to really ask is this worth it. Is this money well spent? Is this time well spent? Because it becomes crazy after a certain point.

**Craig:** It does. I mean, look, the problem is I think from the point of a studio that’s contemplating hiring a director and paying them some amount of money that’s significant and then also putting them creatively in charge of a project that’s worth millions and millions of dollars they might look at that as penny ante nonsense and slightly unprofessional or dinky. And it may hurt you.

And you’re right. It is really hard to, well, it’s much harder for directors to create speculative work, like a proper film, than it is for writers to create speculative work on paper. But it’s cheaper now than it’s ever been before.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it seems to me that we’re collecting quite a list of writers who are saying I have work that no one seems to want to pay for and directors who are saying I’m doing work that no one seems to want to pay for. And maybe they should get together and in actual partnership start working together to create work together that will benefit them together. And I’m pretty sure there’s about four billion actors who are saying I’m not getting work.

Do you know what I mean? If I were an agent I would be saying, “OK, here are three really talented directors that are underemployed. Here are three really talented writers that are underemployed. Get in a room and start talking guys. I need you people to figure out how to work together and create something that lets me be able to sell you.”

So, you know what, I’m blaming the agents, again.

**John:** I would also ask our listeners if you know of a system, it could be a different industry, we have people writing in from ad industry as well, if you know of a system that is set up to sort of help deal with this, to help deal with the sort of pitch again, pitch again, pitching for free forever. I mean, actors go through this, again, with auditions. And if you know of a system that you think actually does help with this I’d love to hear what you think could be a solution.

So, whether it’s an existing system or your pitch for how you actually fix this issue. Because I do think it’s the next wave of stuff we have to take into account.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s always been bad. It’s getting worse. And it will continue to get worse. And the thing that makes me really nervous, because look the part where employees like directors and writers, artist employees are being mistreated, that makes me feel bad. But what makes me nervous is that when you start to move large groups of people into states of scarcity, resource scarcity, they begin to turn on each other. It’s inevitable. And I think Hollywood, that is to say corporate Hollywood, has done a wonderful job pitting directors, actors, and writers against each other all the time in their system in such a way that the artists do not unite, regardless of the creation of a studio called United Artists. And they’re just really good at that. They’re smart. In general it makes sense that that’s what they’re good at. And we tend to bite each other’s backs, writers and directors in particular, really just go at it, fighting over the scraps that they toss down.

I know I sound a little bit like a Marxist nut job right now, and I’m not normally, but it’s not good what’s going on out there.

**John:** No. Well, I mean I think what tends to happen is there’s a race towards the bottom. And fortunately because of our unions we do have a bottom in terms of compensation which is scale. And so you cannot undercut each other on that financial level.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But creatively you can undercut each other and the one person who decides like, oh, I will turn in this 50-page treatment and sort of ruins it for everybody else. And that’s a real thing. And so we’ve got to make sure that we understand that it doesn’t get better until everyone sort of agrees on some terms.

**Craig:** Yeah. I completely agree with you. And one thing that I did once that worked out beautifully, and this is not for our director friend but for our writer friends, is that I made a deal for a project and they were a little bit like, hmm, we’re not sure if we want to do that. And I said I’ll tell you what. Let’s make a deal for it. And I will write a very extensive treatment. And the deal will have a cut off after the treatment. So just go ahead and pay me scale for the treatment. And if you read the treatment and you think, yeah, you know what, we don’t want to go ahead with this, you’re done. But if you do want to go ahead with it, then we have the deal and you go ahead and you trigger the first step and I start writing. And it worked out because they did like it and they did trigger the first step. But I got paid for that.

And I think any time you can say, listen, let’s just start dealing with scale. How about that? Because sometimes I think we’re so afraid to say, OK, just give me scale for something that we go ahead and accept nothing in its place. And nothing is in fact worse than scale.

**John:** It is in fact worse than scale.

**Craig:** And in that case doing the scale work got me my full fee and then some for the rest of it. I don’t mind being quasi speculative in that regard, but you got to pay me something. So, scale seems reasonable.

**John:** Yeah. So, this last week we got a tweet from Anïas with three questions and I thought they were all good questions, so let’s try to answer all three of these. Number one, what makes a good procedural TV show work, Craig?

**Craig:** Oh, OK. We’re going to go one by one. I like it. These were good questions. I am not the biggest procedural show fan. That said, I’ve certainly seen my share of procedural shows. To me, the most important thing for a procedural show is that the concept of the show is such that the actors involved have a job that is episodic. So, whatever they do for a living it changes on a daily basis or a weekly basis. They get something new that will have a beginning, middle, and end.

This is why most procedural shows are cops, lawyers, doctors, firefighters, because they get cases. But, you know, there are certain other kinds of procedural shows that are based around the nomadic lifestyle of the hero, for instance Highway to Heaven. Or, when we were children The Hulk, the Incredible Hulk was essentially a nomad show where a loner roams from town to town, arrives in a new place, deals with a new situation that has a beginning, middle, and end, and then can leave. But the important thing is that conceptually there is no continuing action beyond the kind of interplay between the characters who are doing the job, but the world/the plot always has hard ins and outs. And the concept needs to support the reality of that.

**John:** I would say a good procedural show is like one of Craig’s best crossword puzzles in that you sit down with it and you sort of know what you’re going to get. You’re not sure how it’s all going to fit together. But it delivers on what your expectations were for that period of time for that experience. You know sort of exactly what you’re going to get and that is I think why the good procedural shows keep going on forever and forever because they just deliver what you expect. It’s like McDonald’s hamburgers. They’re exactly what you think they’re going to be.

You know, when you talk with people who work on procedural shows, they will at the start of the season on a big white board figure out the giant arcs of characters over the course of the seasons, like what kinds of things we’re going to do. This character is going to buy a house. And these things will change. But episode to episode not a lot is going to change. And in many cases you could take episode 10 and episode four and swap them and nothing bad would happen. Serialized shows that wouldn’t work.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And interestingly there’s been an evolution in comedy, in televised comedy. Sitcoms were always procedurals. We don’t think of them necessarily as procedurals, but they always were. It’s just the procedural wasn’t saving a life or trying a case. It was my dog got free, or I agreed to date two people at the same time. So it’s the situation right. And it was a procedure. And then it was done. And so week after week it was a new story entirely.

Comedy has now drifted more towards a serialization because of the changing nature of the way television is delivered to people. So even on network, for instance, Blackish is still a procedural essentially. It’s a comedy procedural. But something like The Good Place is serialized. They literally – each episode gets a chapter number, because they’re telling one continuing story like an ongoing soap opera.

So things are changing somewhat. And I think what has kept procedure, like classic procedure – for instance, our friend Derek has 20 procedural shows on the air.

**John:** He has all the Chicago shows.

**Craig:** He’s all the Chicago shows and the new FBI show. And what has kept procedurals going so strong for so long is how easy it is to essentially replay them. You can run them again and again and again in any order, at any time, and no one has to scratch their heads and go, “Wait, what?” You can’t show somebody episode 21 of The Good Place and have them understand anything. But I can literally watch any single episode of Chicago Fire and aside from, OK, I don’t necessarily know what the characters are talking about in terms of their relationships with each other, but the fire story I can watch that and be like, oh damn, OK. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it works.

**John:** Every episode of a procedural basically contains its premise. That this is a group of people that does this thing. Versus a true serialized show that wouldn’t make sense. You would not be able to follow episode 13 of that show if you just started watching right there.

**Craig:** Right. And I will say to people at home, don’t sleep on procedurals. Sometimes we think of them as old fashioned, and I guess in way they are old fashioned, but they work. People love them. And if you get yourself in a good groove with a good procedural. I mean, Dick Wolf’s entire trillion dollar empire is based on procedurals. And great writers have cut their teeth and then some in procedurals and mastered the craft. John Wells is one of the most successful television writers of all time. You know, was involved in huge procedurals.

**John:** Like ER. Like West Wing. And West Wing really is functionally a procedural. There’s great writing and there’s great characters and lots of stuff is happening, but the episode begins and the episode ends and there’s been an arc in that episode. It’s fitting into a larger piece but it is the crisis of the week.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is essentially a procedural.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s the monster of the week. Yes, there’s great big arcs and if you didn’t know who some of those characters were at the start it would be confusing a bit, but there’s still – you know what you’re going to get over the course of an episode generally. And then the unique episodes where they really broke those expectations stand out because it is just so jarring. The Body is great example of like it broke the expectation of what’s supposed to happen in an episode of Buffy.

**Craig:** Yeah, so you know Buffy is a good example of a very cool procedural in case you think like, oh, maybe they’re a little fuddy-duddy or a little boring. They’re not. And when they’re done well they’re done wonderfully well. And all shows ultimately are borrowing elements of procedurals. There’s always some kind of plot inside of a single episode that gets kind of consumed within the episode. So, something to definitely think about. Don’t necessarily think that you have to chase whatever you might think of as avant-garde or sexy or cutting edge. If you love procedurals, by god, write one. Because there’s still gold in them thar hills.

**John:** Yep. We’re only a third of the way through Anïas’s tweet. Her second question is what makes a show better to watch once a week versus bulk release.

**Craig:** Well, I have a little bit of a possibly unpopular opinion here, because I think this is a question of opinion. I’m not sure that there’s anything particular that makes a show more enjoyable in one way or another. I think all shows are better when you get them once a week. I think all shows are made better with anticipation. I just do. I think that there’s a certain joy to waiting and then to being satisfied. And sometimes you wait forever. I mean, we’ve been waiting for this last season of Game of Thrones for quite some time and we’ll continue to. And then it’s going to be satisfying.

And as we watch it week by week we all share in it together. Yes, some people watch it a little bit later than others, but for all the people that watched it when it was available we get to talk about it and share it and it’s the watercooler syndrome. All the shows that are kind of dumped at you, there’s no watercooler. Everybody watches them at different times. They watch them a lot, a little. So for me, I love a nice once-a-week. I do.

**John:** I watch a lot of once-a-weeks, but of course I’m also binging shows on Netflix at the same time. Many episodes back we’ll find a link to it. I had Damon Lindelof on the show and he and I were talking about Lost. And Lost was a once-a-week show that had a giant mythology and I think some of the success of Lost has to be attributed to the fact that it was coming out once a week and that fans could build up the theories over the course of the week and there was a chance to do it.

It would be a completely different experience if Lost had dropped all its episodes in a bulk. Like it would have been a very different experience. And, you know, a great example of that is when the writer’s strike happened their season got split. And so it ended up being a giant gap between those initial episodes of the season and the later ones. And it got strange. It got weird. Like once it got off of its rhythm, the fans had a hard time sort of grabbing back onto the show.

I’m in conversations now to do something that would be a once-a-day thing, which I think is a sort of interesting blend between the two. So there’s a watercooler moment, but you can also catch up which is a good thing, too. Sometimes the once-a-week shows, I guess a good thing about them is once I hear about them I’m not so far behind that I can’t catch up.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Sometimes when a 10-episode, 13-episode thing drops on Netflix all at once I’m like, oh god, I’m just never going to be able to. It’s just daunting. I’m never going to be able to catch up to the conversation about it. So if you have something that needs to have a big cultural conversation to really work I think that speaks towards the once-a-week or the not all at once release plan.

**Craig:** Yep. I’m just old fashioned that way. I like it better.

**John:** So, third point in Annalise for the Win’s tweet is what in storytelling differentiates a serialized bulk release from a movie? So storytelling wise what is different between what you’re doing for Chernobyl, which is a serialized – it’s not bulk release. You’re still doing it once a week. But what is different about Stranger Things dropping 10 episodes at once versus a long movie? Storytelling wise, how do you think about those things differently?

**Craig:** Well I think that the bulk release – the release pattern there is a bit of a red herring. I don’t think whether it’s released all at once or once a week is necessarily changing how you write your shows. Because each episode needs to have some driving force at the end of it that makes you want to watch the next one. Essentially it’s that page-turning feeling that you want to create whether that second episode is available immediately or it’s going to be available a week from then.

The real question is what’s the difference between that and a very long movie and that’s kind of it, what I just said. It is a long movie. There are a million differences in terms of how much time you get to spend on things and the way that you can make certain storylines and characters elastic. You can expand them as you desire. You can take a moment and just do a side trip that’s fascinating because it gets a beginning, middle, and end. The most important thing is at the end of it you keep moving toward the next one. And that when you are done you have clearly told a story that had its beginning at the beginning, and the ending is relevant to that beginning.

So, for me, having gone through the experience of writing Chernobyl it was the best because it was everything I love about writing closed end narrative and none of the things that I hate about writing closed end narrative.

**John:** Yeah. I would say a thing to think about the difference between a movie versus a long drop of a series is the previously on. So, in many of these shows that are all dropped all at once they got rid of the previously ons. So it’s essentially assuming that you may just be watching this whole thing through from the start and so therefore we are not going to give you a previously on.

I’m always a fan of previously ons because I think they can help steer the viewer’s eye and attention for the things that are going to be important for just this episode. I just finished watching Bodyguard which is a BBC production that’s on Netflix now.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And I think it was – I don’t know – maybe it was a week-to-week originally in the BBC but they kept the previously ons and I thought the previously ons were incredibly helpful in just steering you towards what to focus on in a given episode because even though it’s only six hours long a tremendous amount happens and you would have a hard time noticing those things. So, you know, with that I think they were able to get rid of some clunky scenes that would have otherwise just been there to remind the viewer that something had happened.

Movies don’t have previously ons. It’s just a run.

**Craig:** They don’t. And what’s also great about previously ons is that they can dip back – they can redefine what previously is. So, Game of Thrones occasionally in a previously on bit will show you something that happened two seasons earlier, because it’s suddenly relevant now. In fact, sometimes it annoys me a little bit because they’ll show me some random thing from two seasons ago and I’ll be like, OK, that’s tipped me off quite a bit about what’s going to happen here.

So, sometimes it can actually diminish a little bit of surprise. But with something that is as sprawling and as multi-episode as Game of Thrones you need it. It’s really important. But even for Chernobyl we’re certainly going to have to do some version of that. I’m a big believer in giving people a little bit of a short refresher and then before the HBO static comes on. And I’m a big fan of giving them a glimpse of what’s about to come. Which, again, is maybe what’s happening in next week’s episode, or maybe it’s a little bit of a glimpse ahead to the episode three weeks from now. They never really tell you which I think is cool. So you get to shape the kind of set up and the expectation for next time which you can’t do in movies.

Again, like, I don’t know, I think I should just keep doing. I mean, I just love it. The thing that always scared me away from television I think was just kind of the endless – but even now I think about the endless ongoing thing and I think you know what that was only a nightmare for me when I considered the idea of doing a procedural. I could never do what Derek does because it’s just not how my mind works. You know?

But now you can make these seasons that are eight episodes long. That is a miniseries essentially. And you just need to know that like, OK, and then I can do a second miniseries of those characters in this situation again the following season and it’s not so daunting. It’s actually quite lovely.

**John:** All right. Now, before we lose Craig to television forever, I want to get his opinion on something that’s really more of a feature issue which is our marquee topic today which is commencement. Commencement is a fancy word for beginning, but actually it’s a term of art that means something especially for screenwriters. It means that you can now start writing the thing.

And so let’s talk about this from the perspective of Craig you have just been hired to write a movie for somebody.

**Craig:** Which I have been.

**John:** Congratulations. Which is true.

**Craig:** It’s true.

**John:** And so it doesn’t matter really if it’s a first draft or if it’s a rewrite or a polish, ultimately you’re going to be turning in a draft.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And a draft is sort of two things. I mean, it is a bunch of pages that have text on them and that is a thing they will hopefully shoot and make into a movie. But a draft from your perspective and as you’re planning your life, a draft is also time. It is a chunk of time in which you are going to be writing this thing. And because it’s both of these things sometimes it’s useful to think about just kind of a timeline. And on this timeline there’s one point where you start writing. That is commencement. And there’s one point where you give them the script. That is delivery. And ideally those are really clearly defined moments and everyone agrees on what those moments are and everything is happy and wonderful.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** The experience that you and I both had as screenwriters and which all other screenwriters can nod and attest to is that it’s really murky sometimes what those moments are. So take the delivery side, like I send in my script. You and I both grew up in a time where we had to print our scripts and put them in an envelope and a messenger would come and pick them up. Or we would literally drop them off someplace. Now we’re attaching them to an email and we’re sending them in as a PDF. And so we think like, “I delivered.” But did you deliver? Is it all done? Is it all final? Or did you just send it to the producer and the producer is going to come back with notes? Is the studio exec going to say like, oh, could we do a little bit more?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And if you’re still within your initial writing period, which we should also talk about, yeah maybe you do do a little bit more of that stuff. But that becomes the endless rewrites. Those endless unpaid rewrites. Ultimately, you want to come at the end of this to be you really delivered when they’re cutting you a check. That is the moment that you can really know like, OK, I am done with this draft. This draft is both this document, this time, this moment has ended. And you don’t get to the end until you start.

**Craig:** Well, look, that’s how our contracts are designed. It’s essentially what they’re advertising to you. And then they immediately say now here’s how it really works. What they’re advertising to you is you write the script. You deliver the script, we give you a check. And also you started the script, we’ll give you half the money. Great. You deliver it, we give you the other half.

And then they do everything they can to subvert that. Everything they can, including taking forever to pay you the first half. They may say we’re not paying you the first half until the long form contract is done, but in the meantime you have to start writing because we need this soon.

I have been in situations, and this was a long time, the very first movie I ever worked on they dragged their heels so much that when we – because I had a writing partner at the time – when we finished the draft we called and said you can’t have this until you pay us commencement and delivery. You can’t have it. And it was a scary thing to do for two 25 year olds to say to the Walt Disney Corporation. But it worked.

But I never forgot how they dragged that out miserably. And while you’re looking at a piece of paper that says, OK, I officially have 12 weeks to do this. My contract says I have 12 weeks. Everything that they’re going to do is designed to make you work for 800 weeks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you think like, oh, in a contract where you have a job and then you have a timeline where you have to do the job by that the person hiring you would want to enforce that. They specifically don’t want to enforce it.

**John:** No. The studio executive is being paid for every week of work. They’re not getting paid for like, oh, you know, make some movies and then we’ll pay you eventually. No, they’re being paid for their work and as writers we’re not paid for our work in the same way. Because we’re still working under the assumption that our work is this draft that we’re handing them, they will try to extend that time endlessly.

Our goal of this conversation is to talk about starting the clock and so that once you’ve started the clock you know the clock is running and then you can actually stop the clock when you’ve turned in the thing.

So, let’s talk about commencement because commencement is that sense of like, OK, it’s OK to go ahead and start writing your script. Now, the people who might tell you that it’s OK to start writing your script but you shouldn’t necessarily believe them are your agent, your manager, the producer, the junior studio executive. They might all say, “Great. You’re good. We all agree. You can go start writing the thing.” When you should really probably start writing the thing is when your attorney who is negotiating this says we’re good. So I would trust that person. I would also trust if you get a check in your hand that is a sign that you are truly commenced.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** Short of that check in your hand, you kind of don’t really know. If you signed your long form agreement that’s a good sign, too. But that check in your hand is really what means that like they believe you are starting writing, so start writing.

**Craig:** I don’t think I’ve ever waited for the check in hand.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But I have certainly waited for the certificate of authorship, which is a pretty decent stand in for a long form. And it’s something that if a studio is seemingly dragging their heels and saying we’re not going to actually pay you until you sign this long form but please start writing, that’s when your lawyer should be asking for a certificate of authorship. And what that does is it basically just establishes the most important fact for all parties involved. They’re hiring you. They’re paying you. You are doing it as a work-for-hire so that they have the basic minimum required to be able to cut you a check.

**John:** Yeah. So, what I’ve taken to doing over the past couple of years is when I’m starting on the project I will send an email to the producers, to the executives, to everybody who is involved and say like, OK guys, I’m starting writing. We all agree that I’m starting writing. And I anticipate handing this in at about this date. And just having some sort of virtual paper trail that says like this is when I think – these are the boundaries I think are on this project is helpful, because it gets them in a sense of like, oh, you know, we can’t actually expect him to be turning this in sooner than that because that’s not realistic. And we can’t be dragging him on a long time after this because there is some limit to it.

If you don’t define your edges a little bit they’re going to just keep trying to get more out of you.

**Craig:** That’s correct. What they will do is say, listen, we need to get this as soon as possible. Everybody wants everything as soon as possible.

**John:** Everything is a crisis.

**Craig:** Everything is a crisis. But what they really want, and this cuts directly to producers. This is more about producers than the studio. The producers will not get paid unless the movie is made. That’s where they make their money. They get a very, very large fee for a green lit movie and then of course a percentage of the grosses is quite likely as well.

So, they want to get a green light-able movie as fast as possible. Which means they want you to write your first draft as fast as possible. Give it to them. They can tell you how it’s going to need to change to get the green light. Then you’re going to write that new change as quickly as possible and they’re going to keep doing that until they have something that they believe is going to slam dunk it on in there. And while that’s going on often they are showing it to the studio and kind of basically playing development without paying you. That’s sort of the gig.

And that’s why I don’t do it.

**John:** Yep. So my previous solution in terms of like sending out the email to everyone saying like this is – I’m starting writing. This is good. It was useful for me, but that’s not a sort of general purpose solution. And so one of the things we’ve been working on with the WGA West over the last six months is something we’re calling the Start Button. So that’s what we introduced this past week. And if you’re a WGA West member you can play along with us at home.

If you go to my.wga.org/sb for start button, or you can just say Start Button, you’ll log in and you’ll see a brand new thing there called Welcome to the Start Button. And it gives you a chance to update an existing project, create a new project, or go back to the main page.

If you create a new project it gives you a couple fields. And, Craig, you just did this. So do you want to talk us through what you did and how it worked?

**Craig:** Yes. Pretty simple. I said, yep, I’m starting a new thing and I hit that button. And then it asked me for the working title of the project. I typed that in. It asked me for the studio. It didn’t have the exact name of the studio in there because it’s sort of a prepopulated list and studios have like 14 million different weird names. So I was able to just type in the studio’s name and it took it. And then I put down essentially what kind of step it was and when I anticipated delivering it, which is basically the amount of weeks. And in that case I went for the maximum of 12 weeks.

**John:** 12 weeks.

**Craig:** And then that was it.

**John:** Yeah. So you could have put in an expected delivery date or 12 weeks and you hit start.

**Craig:** And then I hit start. That was it.

**John:** That’s all you do.

**Craig:** Done.

**John:** So what Craig did when he did that was create a record in the WGA that says like this is a project that exists. This is a movie that someone is working on and 12 weeks from now we can check in with him and say like, hey, is everything OK with this project.

Now, it seems like, well, shouldn’t the WGA already know that this movie exists? They don’t. And that’s the crazy thing is because in television, you know, the WGA knows week by week every writer who is working on every television project. In features we don’t because all that paperwork, all the pay records, they can be months and months and months behind. So, this is a way for the guild to know what writers are working on at the time and help out if you’re in situations where you are being asked to do endless free rewrites, if you are being paid late.

It’s a way for us to check and see like what’s actually going on with this project. And in a general sense where are writers having the most challenges and where are writers having a pretty OK time.

As you go through the second screen you see there’s also a chance to upload your contract. Uploading your contract is super helpful because it lets the guild know kind of what’s happening out there in the world overall and what are the general trends that writers are seeing. Because the guild is responsible for making sure you’re getting paid your minimums, but the guild also wants you to get paid as much as you can be paid. And so keeping track of that over scale payment is another crucial function.

**Craig:** And I would imagine that if the guild has a copy of your contract and it has your start date and all the rest that when it calls and says, look, what’s going on. And you say, um, well I mean I’m done but they just keep asking me to do more. That they can say, well, we’re the bad guy and we can call the producer and the studio and say, “You guys are violating his contract and this is part of the minimum basic term because it’s effecting,” and they cite some MBA rules and you’re not allowed to do that so you have to pay him.

**John:** Yeah. And so to clarify, the guild is not going to suddenly call you. The guild is not going to call on your behalf unless you say so. So, what’s going to happen is 12 weeks go by. You get an email saying like, hey, checking in. Seeing what’s going on with that.

If you go back and you say like everything is cool, it’s all fine. Great. Nothing else. If you say there’s a problem we’ll ask do you want us to call you and talk to you about it. And if you say yes then the guild contacts you and figures out what’s going on. And figures out whether they should get involved on your behalf.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think what Craig said is probably the most crucial thing. It allows the guild to be the bad guy because the guild should be the bad guy in this situation. It’s so hard for writers to stick up for themselves in a lot of these situations, but that’s why you have a union.

It’s also why you have agents and managers who should be doing some of this, too. But it’s why you have a union. And the union is good at this. And the union is good at collecting money and let them be the bad guy in these situations.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And if you are worried that it’s going to somehow end up, you know, blackballing you, driving you out of the business, I point to the aforementioned DGA which acts as a bad guy on behalf of its directors all the time. Now, granted in the case that we read earlier they’re not particularly interested in advocating on behalf of directors that have not yet been hired. But when you are hired by the DGA and you’re working under the DGA, which I have done, they spring into action. They’re there. They show up on your set. They start talking to you. And they make a presence known. And if they sniff any kind of trouble, any sort of encroachment on what they consider to be directorial rights they are on it.

And the attitude in Hollywood is not well let’s not work with that director anymore. The attitude is, oh god, we have a DGA problem.

**John:** Yep. Yeah. And so I guess a crucial difference is the DGA reps, they can show up at a set because a set is a physical place. The WGA people can’t show up at your office and say what’s going on here. This actually gets them closer to being able to say, hey, what’s going on here. Is everything OK? I want to make sure that our writers aren’t being abused.

**Craig:** Correct. So it’s a really good idea. You’re smart for having done it. And this is why we elected you and such.

**John:** Hooray. Great. So it’s available now. Check it out. So if you’re starting writing something it’s a good time to do it, or if you’re on a rewrite for something. So try it out and see what it feels like.

All right, we’ve got time for one question. Shari writes in, “Friends and family who have read my pilot say it’s ‘too dark for television,” that it could never be produced. Yet South Park gets away with having woodland creatures banging each other in a satanic ritual on Christmas, while Frank in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia screams he has AIDS to cut through the line at an amusement park. My writing is not nearly as dark, I don’t think, but my script tries to poke fun at the fact that people sometimes have no choice but to experience some dark moments in life.

“Looking back on it, those moments can be funny as hell. So how do dark comedies redeem themselves? Do dark comedy writers follow different craft and structural rules in order to secure their audience? Is there are market for dark comedies on television? What does it look like to have crossed the line in dark comedy?”

**Craig:** Well, I would say that your friends and family may not be as dark as you. And you’re right. There is dark comedy on television. There’s more of it now than ever. And it’s been around forever. Seinfeld got incredibly dark. Even though it wasn’t maybe as overtly dark as South Park sometimes gets, in its own way was pretty brutal.

And you’re right. It’s Always Sunny definitely goes there. And so the answer is how do dark comedies redeems themselves, they don’t necessarily. They are there to be enjoyed by people who love that kind of edge.

We need to know that the people that we’re watching aren’t cruel. That is to say they’re not sadistic. They don’t enjoy the pain of others. The people that we like watching in dark comedies are selfish. They are self-obsessed. They’re egotistical. They are locked in self-defeating patterns. So it’s a little bit of kind of they are dark people operating in a moral universe, which is why I actually love the final episode of Seinfeld because it just basically took them to task for their behavior over the course of all their seasons.

Is there different craft or structural rules? No, it’s about your tone, your voice, and what you think is funny. I would say don’t apologize for any of it. If you’re going to be dark, be dark. And if you think it’s funny, then you think it’s funny and you stand by it. Yes, there’s a market for dark comedy on television, there’s a market for television on television at this point given that we have more and more content producers making more and more shows.

What does it look like to have crossed the line in a dark comedy? When people stop laughing. That’s what it looks like. When they just go, “Oh, that’s actually not funny.”

Years and years ago I was talking to a friend of mine and we were discussing that there’s that complaint that some white comedians used to make where like, OK, black comedians get to make fun of white people. Why can’t white comedians make fun of black people? And the answer is it’s not funny. That’s why. It’s not funny. It’s not about justice, or what’s right or wrong, or balancing. It’s not funny. Punching down generally isn’t funny, although sometimes it’s hysterical.

It’s hard to describe. We just know it when we see it. And for some people they will say, you know what, that crossed the line for me. And other people will say, oh my god, thank god they did that. The line has just moved again. Hooray.

You find your tribe. You do your comedy for them and you hope it’s a big tribe and you hope they love it.

**John:** Yeah. Craig’s you know it when you see it really speaks to expectation. And so my hunch is that friends and family who are reading your script right now Shari they are not expecting it to be what it is. And so that may be something about because they already know you, or it could be because of what they’re seeing on those first two pages. But there’s a mismatch between the thing they think they’re going to get and what they’re actually reading. And so they may not be the audience for it all, but if they were the audience for that kind of stuff they’re not being led into it in the right way to let them understand what the rules of your sort of moral universe are. And how the darkness is going to work in your writing.

So, I would look both at your friends and family. Look at who your readers are and are they the right readers for this thing. But also look at your writing and trying to figure out is there something about how I’m presenting this, really how I’m setting this up, that is leading people in the wrong direction so they think it’s one thing and it’s actually a very different darker thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, when Todd Phillips and I were writing the Hangover sequels we oftentimes would go places that were so horrifyingly dark, so incredibly dark that we kind of knew that we had crossed the line a little bit. And that’s keeping in mind the fact that we opened the third movie with a giraffe being decapitated on a freeway. But it was fun. We needed to do it. We needed to get in that zone. I mean, we had this idea – I don’t think I’ve ever said this before – we had this idea that – it would never fit in any of the movies. We were just talking about Mr. Chow, the character of Mr. Chow. And we just had this weird fantasy of shooting a scene where Mr. Chow goes to find his father who he’s not spoken to or seen in 30 years.

And he finds his elderly father and his father says, “Leslie?” And Mr. Chow says, “That’s right, mother-f-er.” And then he cuts his throat. He cuts his father’s throat. And his father’s final words are, “At last you make me proud.” [laughs]

It’s so sick. It makes me so happy. Now, I don’t know if anybody would think that was funny, but oh my god we thought it was hysterical. Just the idea of this family that was so sick that – anyway, I don’t have to explain it. It’s bizarre, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you go down these roads of this total F-ed up stuff. And then you come back from it and you, you know, you write things that are still F-ed up but maybe not so wildly F-ed up. But you need room to be transgressive, particularly if that’s the style of comedy you’re doing at that point. And it sounds like, Shari, you’re pretty transgressive. Go for it.

**John:** Go for it.

All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Art and Arcana. Now, Craig, have you bought this book yet?

**Craig:** You know I haven’t.

**John:** It’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah, I probably should.

**John:** I feel guilty sort of recommending $125 book on Dungeons and Dragons artwork and history, but there’s also a $34 version which is just the book. So, the big fancy one comes in a box with extra stuff. But you do you. Decide what version of this you want because if you want this you really want this. It is the history of Dungeons and Dragons as told by the creators and showing all the artwork and how this thing came to be.

And so I have just – it’s one of those books that’s so giant that I have to sort of sit down on the couch and prop it on my legs and just fully engross myself in it. I found it just terrific.

**Craig:** That sounds like something I may slip my wife on a gift list for Christmas, you know.

**John:** Nice. Very good.

**Craig:** Because she hates – every time Christmas rolls around she’s like what do I get this guy.

**John:** Yeah, I know that Melissa loves Dungeons and Dragons. There’s nothing she gets more excited about than that. [laughs]

**Craig:** She hates it so much. So it will be fun to force her to buy that. My One Cool Thing is a fascinating discovery in the world of pain management. I was so excited when I read this article. It’s in Wired. And it’s an article about a cactus plant that grows in Morocco. Now, you’re probably familiar with the Scoville Scale of hotness, John?

**John:** Absolutely. So like pepper sauces are rated on how hot they are.

**Craig:** Exactly. So for instance the world’s hottest pepper, I don’t know, it’s so many hundreds of thousands of Scoville units.

This thing, this cactus like plant, clocks in at 16 billion units. So it is 10,000 times hotter than the Carolina Reaper, which is the world’s hottest pepper. 10,000 times hotter. And it’s that way because of this chemical in it called resiniferatoxin. I think I’m pronouncing that right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’ve had a jalapeno before?

**John:** I have. I’ve had good and bad experiences with jalapenos.

**Craig:** So this cactus is 4.5 million times hotter than a jalapeno. You cannot eat this. You can’t eat it.

So here’s what happens with this stuff. The reason that your tongue burns when you eat a pepper is because there’s a chemical in there that essentially stimulates the nerves that would be stimulated if you had actually lit your tongue on fire.

So, this thing does that so massively that it literally burns – it destroys the ends of the fibers of nerve bundles that generate pain signals. But only pain signals. So what it does is it doesn’t burn out nerves that sense pressure or cold or hot or feeling, just pain.

Now, the problem is if you’re going to do this it’s also going to cause you tremendous pain while it’s doing it. But, for this stuff that they pulled out of it, RTX, what they do is they give you an anesthetic. So let’s say you have knee pain. They give you an anesthetic in your knee so that you won’t feel the terrible pain of the RTX. Then they inject the RTX. The RTX binds to pain-sensing nerve endings and essentially blows them out to the point where they can’t really come back on for about six months.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** And then when you’re anesthesia wears off in your knee you might feel a little bit of like, ow, my god, but after an hour or so it’s over and then there’s this incredible pain relief. And the best part is there is no associated reinforcement effect. There is no euphoria. There is no reason to become addicted to it.

**John:** It’s not a neurotransmitter situation.

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s not an opioid or anything like that. And given how disastrous pain management has become in this country, something like this could be a huge, huge game changer, particularly for people that have chronic pain and also end of life terminal pain associated with cancer and things like this.

So, if you have arthritis or any kind of longstanding pain, this is exciting. So I hope that it – they’re just starting now, but it looks good.

**John:** Good. I like that. Optimistic.

Our show was sort of all over the place this week. And so we started and stopped so many times. So I wanted to quickly recap some of the things we talked about.

If you would like an Arlo Finch bookplate you can go to johnaugust.com. Click a link there and you get a bookplate. It makes a lovely gift.

If you are a WGA West member and want to try the Start Button, it’s available right now in your MyWGA panel, mywga.org/sb, so try that out.

If you want any of the other stuff we talked about you can find the links in the show notes.

Lastly, if you would like tickets to our live show on December 12 they are available now. So you can click a link in the show notes or go to wgafoundation.org.

Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is fantastic. It’s by Andrew Burns. 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 like the ones we answered today.

Short questions on Twitter are fantastic. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you’re listening to this right now. Leave us a review. That helps people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

If you want to get to all the back episodes, they are at Scriptnotes.net. It is two bucks a month for all the back episodes and bonus episodes back to the beginning of time.

There are no more USB drives. The USB drives have sold out.

**Craig:** Sweet. When do I get my check?

**John:** Oh, a giant check is coming. Well, on the 12th you’ll get your gift for less than $20.

**Craig:** [laughs] Getting ripped off again.

**John:** Yeah. At the live show you’ll get it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Great.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next time.

**John:** All right, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Signed [Arlo Finch bookplates](https://johnaugust.com/signed-arlo-finch) are available with a copy of your receipt.
* [Tickets for the Scriptnotes Holiday Live Show](https://go.wgfoundation.org/campaigns/8810-the-scriptnotes-holiday-live-show) are on sale now.
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 296: Television with Damon Lindelof](http://johnaugust.com/2017/television-with-damon-lindelof)
* [Start Button](https://my.wga.org/home/Login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fhome%2f) for WGA members
* Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana [box set](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0399582754/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) or just the [book](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0399580948/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [This Chemical Is So Hot It Destroys Nerve Endings — In a Good Way](https://www.wired.com/story/resiniferatoxin/) by Matt Simon for Wired
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Andrew Burns ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_376.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2018/real-world-villains).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 374 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show it’s a new round of How Would This Be a Movie? where we take a look at stories in the news and discuss how they could be turned into big screen entertainment, or realistically small screen entertainment because that’s where all the action is.

Plus, we’ll be answering a listener question about ensemble movies.

But we’re only going to do this if people vote, because this episode is coming out on Election Day. So if you are a US citizen who is of age to vote you need to stop what you’re doing right now and go vote and come back and listen to this episode after you’ve voted. Is that fair?

**Craig:** I think it’s more than fair. And if you’re still here and you haven’t voted and you’re still listening, I’m angry. So now you’ll enjoy the gift of my anger. What are you doing? Stop it. Do you enjoy this? Do you like podcasts and people saying what they want to say and freedom and, I don’t know, a planet that isn’t sweltering hot? Just go and vote. Just go vote, dumb-dumb, and then come back.

**John:** Yeah. We’re recording this on a Friday. I have no idea what I’m actually going to do on Tuesday other than sort of, you know, panic a little bit.

**Craig:** Well, at this point I’m preparing to curl up into the fetal position, but anything – anything better than that will be a joy.

**John:** It will be a joy. What is also a joy is the Random Advice episode that is now out for people to listen to. So if you are a premium subscriber, which you can subscribe to at Scriptnotes.net, you have for you to listen to the Random Advice episode that Craig and I recorded.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** So good. It’s actually a delightful episode. It has almost nothing to do with screenwriting. It’s just other stuff that listeners wrote in with their questions and we answered it.

**Craig:** But we’re so good at everything.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve got opinions on most everything and we answered most of those opinions.

**Craig:** But just really good. I mean, we’re really good at this. And, I mean, for $1.99, geez-Louise. I mean, you’re not voting. You’re not giving us two dollars a month. What good are you? I’m talking to you, listener. What good are you?

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** This is how I like to drum up listenership. This is direct abuse.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a strategy.

**Craig:** It’s fun.

**John:** Several people have written to us about FilmStruck shutting down. I was not a subscriber to FilmStruck, which is probably part of the reason why. It was me. It was my fault.

**Craig:** You did it.

**John:** I was the person. I did it. But it ties in very well to this conversation we had earlier about missing movies and sort of the research I’d done on movies that are no longer available. So FilmStruck was one of the ways that some people could see some of those movies that were missing. But of course the answer is that you can’t have one service that you rely on to solve all of the problem of missing movies and it has to be a systemic situation where the people who own copyright on these movies actively put them out there in ways that people can see them. And FilmStruck by itself couldn’t do that.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m the reason it shut down because I did subscribe to FilmStruck and I enjoyed it. Melissa enjoyed it. And so, of course, that was it. They found out that we were enjoying it and they took it away.

For years I’ve paid for Cinemax. I don’t think I’ve ever watched anything on Cinemax.

**John:** No, no.

**Craig:** And Cinemax is still going strong.

**John:** I think I have CBS All Access. Haven’t used it.

**Craig:** There you go. But you will once you turn 90. [laughs] Was a cheap shot. You know what that was? A cheap shot.

**John:** Yeah, it’s fine. Luke in San Diego wrote to us and said, “Thank you for single handedly bringing back the rom-com,” which we did. So that was in the repeat episode, the Tess Morris on rom-coms.

**Craig:** Oh yes, we did.

**John:** “So I wonder if you can work your magic to bring back my all-time favorite film genre, the terrible live action family Christmas comedy, a la Christmas with the Cranks, Deck the Halls, and Four Christmases. It seems like all of the bad Christmas movies coming out of Hollywood these days are either animated features or R-rated comedies. Will you please help return the true spirit of Christmas to our cinema screens?”

**Craig:** There is a genre of those sort of corny Christmas comedies. Jingle All the Way is one of my favorites. It’s corny. And the reason that they’re corny is because Christmas is corny. I mean, the whole thing. Let me see, what will the theme of this Christmas movie be? It is better to give than to receive. Done. It’s always the same thing. It’s always family and faith and spirit and giving. That’s what Christmas is about. It’s always the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over.

So, I don’t know, do we need more? Or can we just sort of live off the stored up fat of this particular genre?

**John:** I don’t know. Maybe we do need more. I mean, maybe we need, I mean, I’m sure we have the African American family version of this.

**Craig:** Oh yes, there is.

**John:** But there’s certainly always new opportunities to do new versions of this. I also just really kind of want to be on the set when it’s like July and everybody has to wear their parkas and they’re just miserable. And there’s fake snow everywhere. That’s just the movie magic of Hollywood.

**Craig:** Yeah, that is never fun. Never fun for anybody. There’s a scene where someone in our show had to be in a snowy park, wearing a parka, bundled up because it’s Ukrainian winter, and pregnant, so wearing like pregnant padding. And I think it was probably 94 degrees that day. Unpleasant. Or as they would say over there 31.

**John:** Yeah. Celsius. I tried to really master my Celsius while I was living in France. I just never really did it. It makes so much more sense and yet I love the granularity that we can sort of distinguish between like, oh, it’s 72 versus 73.

**Craig:** Exactly. Normally I’m with them on this. I get it. Metric system base 10, the whole thing. Yep. Yep. Totally. But the extra gradations of temperature are actually quite valuable. So, yeah, a little bit of a tradeoff. For some reason our water freezes at 32 instead of a rational zero.

**John:** Oh, and water boils at 212.

**Craig:** Instead of a rational 100. But we do have – you know what – like I like my office at 74. What is it, 21? Whatever.

**John:** My husband is listening right now and just–

**Craig:** So grumpy. [laughs]

**John:** He loves the metric system.

**Craig:** Good. Of course he does.

**John:** Prefers Celsius. Do you want to take this thing about No Writing Left Behind?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. So we got a little bit of a communicado in from a Matt with a Day Job. And he writes, “Last summer I was approached by a production company via my agent to adapt a comic book series into a feature film. They sent me the comic and even put me in touch with its creator. I went in for the pitch and it was just as Craig said, it was a fantastic conversation about what made both myself and the executives passionate about that story. They then asked me to write a brief outline of what I saw the movie to be before any formal deal was signed.

“Being the new writer on the block, and not really knowing any better, I agreed. Thus began a,” are you sitting, dear listener, “a six-month process of writing and rewriting an outline that varied from 11 pages to 28 pages long. I was otherwise unemployed at the time, so as you can imagine this process was incredibly frustrating. After several drafts totally somewhere around 80 pages across various drafts like Craig I lost the job to ‘we decided not to make this movie.’ During this time my agent encouraged me to do the same with two other projects with another production company, so for seven months I worked on multiple drafts of multiple outlines for multiple projects. Needless to say I felt completely duped and foolish.

“Oh, and I will never, ever do that again.”

I wish John that this were a rare story, but it is not.

**John:** It is not. And even in this last week talking to some working screenwriters you and I both know this kind of thing still happens. Where they’re just like, “Oh, could you just write up this thing because it’s between you and this other person and this could help put you over the top.” Argh.

So, what Matt does bring up here is that in this case the agent said to do it. We’ve also heard from people who said like, oh, my manager told me to do it. My manager told me it’s totally normal. That’s bad. That’s not good. Because the agent and the manager, they’re not getting paid for that free work either. So it should be in their interest to make sure that their clients are being paid to write and yet they seem to have forgotten that key part of their job.

**Craig:** Yeah. Your agent or your manager who tells you you should do this is literally saying the following to you, whether you realize it or not. “I, your representative, do not feel that I can get you employment unless you debase yourself in this manner. I just don’t think I can do it. I’m not good enough. I’m not good enough to call this production company and say, ‘You like my client? You think they’re amazing? Hire them. Otherwise, I’m too smart to let my client work for six months and generate free labor for you in violation of a number of laws, by the way, because you’re not allowed to do that.’ And then not get the job. So I’m not good enough to handle that for you, dear client. Therefore you should just go do that.”

That’s what they’re saying to you. They’re useless. They’re worse than useless. In this situation you’re better off without an agent or a manager giving you this terrible advice. And to the people that do this to writers, all I can tell you is your time has come. We’re not going to stop talking about this. We are not going to stop. You are going to stop. Because we’re going to keep telling these stories and sharing these stories. The thing that ruins your little plan is when we all talk to each other and realize how often it doesn’t turn into anything except misery.

So listen at home friends. When you say, “Well, you know, John and Craig are just trying to keep us from doing this, keep us out of the business,” no. What we’re trying to do is save you from the misery that Matt had to deal with. And I’m going to repeat again: six months, 80 pages, no employment.

**John:** Yep. I’m trying to think of other industries that have agents and managers and people trying to be hired to do things and where this would be possible. So, I think about professional athletes. You know, the agent for a professional athlete, the manager for a professional athlete, is not going to let them go and play for six months for free hoping that they’ll get signed on the team. That just doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** No, I mean, the equivalent would be a tryout. So you’re not signed, go to a tryout. Great. Go to a tryout camp. That’s a week or two, but you’re not going to let them go on for six months. All they’re going to do is get injured. Are we playing for you or not? You have enough information to decide. Yes or no. Do it. Because what they can’t do, what any team can’t do, is see enough to guarantee this guy is going to help us win a championship. Nobody knows anything. You’ve got to let it just happen. Just let it happen. Trust it. Have faith.

**John:** Yeah. So if you were a model would the manager say like, “Oh, no, no, just go and let them take a ton of photos. No, no, let them take a ton more photos. Let them use your photos. No. Definitely go. Spend six months.”

No. That person would say like you want to take this person’s picture that is a job. You’re taking up their time. That’s the thing. It’s like it is ultimately their time is what they are billing. And they should bill for that time.

**Craig:** Their time is being abused and also their – I honestly just think that they are being abused. Their personhood is being abused by this behavior. And the people who did this, this production company, or if you are in a production company right now and you work for one, you’re listening to this, I want to tell you take this seriously. We’re not just mouthing off on a podcast. It’s stopping. We’re coming for you and we’re going to share names. We do that. We know. And you know what, I’ll start saying names on this show. I don’t care. I’ll blow my career up. I’m basically good.

You know what I mean? Like I don’t care anymore. I really don’t. It’s enough already.

**John:** Yeah. He’s been pushed too far.

**Craig:** I’ve been pushed too far.

**John:** Nothing left to lose.

**Craig:** I’ve got nothing left to lose. I have one day to retirement. [laughs]

**John:** How many more clichés can we stack on top of this guy as he goes into this journey?

**Craig:** I’m getting too old for this poop.

**John:** Katie wrote in. She said, “I’ve been catching up on about two years of Scriptnotes episodes and just today reached Episode 346, the episode with Christina Hodson. The question of how to indicate to casting that a character is ‘open’ gave me an idea. Why not work to implement and popularize a shorthand abbreviation that means open race or non-specified race? It could be as simple as Teddy Johnson, early 30s, OR, or NSR, removes his jet pack and glowers at the gathered crowd.

“Even if many writers choose not to use it, it could become a recognizable and accepted term that could help writers, executives, and casting departments move towards a more diverse range of actors.”

Craig, what do you think of OR or NSR?

**Craig:** This is not a bad idea at all. Things like abbreviations like OR or NSR may seem a little unwieldy, but then again we have lots of abbreviations that we use in screenwriting all the time that are a little odd like OS and VO and blah-blah-blah. However, what I think is if something like this is going to have a prayer of succeeding it needs to be employer-driven, because ultimately it’s the studios that set the standards for screenplays. If all the studios said, “Listen, this is a thing, part of our screenplay deal, it’s in your contract, is that this is part of the format we use,” then we would use it. But if you’re just going to ask screenwriters in general to do it, it’s just going to be incredibly difficult to reach critical mass, especially because most screenwriters and most screenplay material is for television where the cast is already in place.

**John:** Although every television show is always bringing in new actors to play new little parts. And so there’s always casting that’s happening on a weekly basis in television. I think television may actually be the opportunity. I can see if a network or a studio or even just a show decided like, oh you know what, we’re going to always just mark it in a thing that it’s NSR and it’s going to be – just to make it clear to our own internal team that like we are looking for a broad range of, you know, different possibilities for this role.

**Craig:** Just my impression of television writing, I could be wrong, just from what I’ve seen is that they don’t really call the stuff out in their scripts. Because they’re in production all the time, it’s a casting breakdown kind of thing.

**John:** Yeah, but I suspect race is still indicated in scripts where it’s important, even in television, even in like episode 11 of a show.

**Craig:** Right. Where it’s important, for sure, I guess so. But here where it’s not, I don’t know. I think if studios and large production companies made it part of the format than yes. But, hard to get people to just kind of piecemeal adapt it. That’s my gut.

**John:** That’s my gut, too. But if this already existed, I would be delighted for it to already exist.

**Craig:** Yeah. It seems like it would be helpful.

**John:** I agree. All right, a bigger topic was suggested by Aaron Sauerland. He tweeted at me. He said, “Hey John August, have you and CL Mazin ever done an episode on writing scripts with an ensemble cast. My writing partner and I are writing one right now and would love any insight on balancing characters for a story like that.”

Craig, you and I have both written ensemble movies.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s talk through some general advice for Aaron and his writing partner as they are getting started on theirs.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, no matter what the ensemble is, there’s going to be one main character, meaning one protagonist. There will be, typically in ensemble films A stories, B stories, C stories. There are some true ensemble films which are more in the kind of Love Actually mode where you are actually dividing a movie into really three movies that you’re running simultaneously or something like that. And that’s not this. But for a proper ensemble I think you have your main story with your main character and then there’s a sub story with sub characters. John Hughes would do this quite a bit.

You have to make sure who is who. And then you have to make sure that all the characters have a purpose. There is a thing that happens sometimes, and I will see it actually interestingly on sitcoms, where three people, four people, six people are confronted by somebody and one of the group has a back and forth with that person. And everyone else is just standing there. That can be awkward. Even after a minute or two you start to wonder why people are just standing.

**John:** As you were describing the kinds of movies that are ensembles, I think maybe we should break them down a little bit more because I have one idea for what an ensemble movie is, but there clearly are kind of many different ensemble movies. So, something like The Hangover is what you’re describing where, yes, there are multiple characters but there is one character who is sort of going to protagonate over the course of it and the other characters are going to have a function in that.

But I look at a movie like Go which truly has different protagonists in each of its sections. And so in each of those chapters a different character really is the central character and the one who has to go through the biggest change.

And then you look at Robert Altman movies which just have a bunch of people who are just doing stuff and it’s hard to say that that one character is the central character of the film. In fact, in an Altman movie generally you could take out one entire character from the whole movie and the movie would still work. And so they’re kaleidoscopic in that way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What Aaron should maybe keep in mind as he and his writing partner are getting started is that within a scene, like what you’re describing in the sitcom thing where like one character is driving and other characters are just sitting there, it’s something we talked about two episodes ago on the show, you’re often going to have one character who is the central character in that scene and he’s sort of the hero of that scene. And if you think of every scene as being its own little movie, there’s probably going to be one person who is the central character in that moment. And you’re going to have to figure out how to use the other characters to support that main character’s idea in that sequence.

Continue that through the whole movie and even if you’re doing an Altman-esque movie, or a movie like Go that has truly sort of multiple protagonists – Big Fish also has multiple protagonists – you’re still looking for a thread that follows a single character, even though there’s multiple characters around you.

**Craig:** Yeah. And again I tend to think of ensemble movies as more a unified story with a lot of actors sort of rotating around it as opposed to more of the kind of fragmented storytelling which is more of the Tarantino kind of action in Pulp Fiction. I think Go as well. There’s intersections, right, but it seems like there’s sort of somewhat independent stories going on.

**John:** Yeah. There are chapters.

**Craig:** Chapters. Whereas like when I think of a classic ensemble film I think of something like Bridesmaids where there are a lot of characters and you do get to follow these mini stories. And what’s very important for you, Aaron, as you’re balancing these things out and you understand what your A story is and you understand what your B story is and you know that, OK, the A story needs to have the most stuff in it and the most emotionally complicated stuff. And it sort of needs the biggest beginning, middle, and end.

As you go down the list of B, C, D, the stories need to get simpler and shorter. Simpler and shorter. Simpler and shorter. To the point where on a D story it may just be somebody wanted something in the very beginning of the movie and they get it at the very end. It literally could be that. But it’s really important to also keep in mind that when you have characters that feel really peripheral to the movie at some point they need to become incredibly important. It is just satisfying when for instance in Bridesmaids we see Melissa McCarthy’s character and we think she’s just a goof, and for a while she is just a goof. She isn’t really super friendly with our main character and she steals puppies. She’s kind of crazy. But at a crucial point in the film it’s Melissa McCarthy’s character who finally shakes Kristen Wiig’s character out of her funk and says stop it, go be the better you. She becomes incredibly crucial to the story. And that’s really important. That’s what you want to see in a movie where you’re layering people. Make that somebody that you didn’t think was that important become super important suddenly.

We like that.

**John:** Yeah. So a movie of my own that I can’t believe wasn’t the first thing that came to mind is Charlie’s Angels. So in the Charlie’s Angels movies there is no one protagonist. The three angels are all heroes and protagonists and not any one of them is the main character. They’re all three the main character. And so one of the great challenges of that movie is trying build arcs for all three of them so they each have their own journey, so that they each affect each other’s journey, that we still have a villain plot, and you still have overall surprises and twists. That makes it really challenging because every scene has to do a bunch of different work to service the movie plot but also to service really the character moments, the story moments that the characters are going through.

So in that case, I think what’s really crucial is to remember that no matter how many characters you’re sort of dividing that protagonist role between they need to all be addressing the same central dramatic question, the same thematic issue just from a slightly different way. So they all feel like they need to be in the same movie because they’re all tackling the same thematic territory. If you just have a character who is nothing but just a wild card who is out there to sort of throw hand grenades, you can’t give that character too much time or else they’re just going to pull the movie into a very bad place.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s a really good point. And one thing I would say to you, Aaron, is if you do kind of confront people saying well everybody needs their own arc, everybody needs the kind of attention and focus that the main character gets, think about just as a point of rebuttal think about a movie like The Big Chill where you can kind of see where the main characters are and you can see the A, B, and C story. But you also can say reasonably that the character arc for a number of those characters is the relationship that they all share. That’s kind of – so it’s a little bit of a family story. We as a family have a problem. We as a family confront it. We as a family move past it.

That’s reasonable. And in this way you don’t end up having to do individual little stories for every single person. It becomes exhausting. And more importantly it begins to feel super fake because in life we’re not all equally struggling with really important stuff that’s going to be handled in the moment of the story of the movie.

**John:** Yep. Most people’s lives are not going to fall into that two-hour block of screen time that we’re talking about. So it is unrealistic to think that everyone is going to have this giant transformational journey over the course of those two hours.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I just now realized what movie Aaron is writing. He is writing the PG Christmas comedy that people so desperately want.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** That is the ensemble movie that I’m sure Aaron is writing and I cannot wait to see what he and his writing partner are working on.

**Craig:** Every single elf needs a backstory.

**John:** Yeah. Every one of them.

**Craig:** Every one of them.

**John:** So, I mean, it’s Tim Allen’s coming back – oh, I bet it’s a new sequel to The Santa Clause. So Tim Allen is like handing off the mantle to the next person.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s going to be good.

**Craig:** Right. There was a The Santa Clause, and then there was The Santa Clause – what was the sequel?

**John:** There was a Santa Clause 2? Is there more?

**Craig:** But it had like a funny name like the Re-Clause, it doesn’t matter. All right.

**John:** If only we had an IMDb and could look it up.

Let’s get to our main topic which is How Would This Be a Movie? So, this is how this works. People send us either via email or by tweet saying, hey John and Craig, how would this be a movie, and a link to an article that they found in the news that they found fascinating and they are all fascinating. So, I will say that people do a very good job of sending us stuff. In our outline here we have at least ten things that I’ve passed on because they were good. I just didn’t find them interesting enough to be our marquee topics here. But in the show notes we’ll have links to all the things that people have also submitted, because there’s good stuff. There’s a love story that upended the Texas prison system. There is a woman who made her ex think she was dead for five years after he dumped her by text. Oh, not dead for five years. That he was a dad for five years.

**Craig:** I think the first version could be a movie.

**John:** Yeah. Both could be good. And heroin. There’s always heroin and drug stuff. But the ones I picked for today, three of them are about sort of real world villains and some of them have sort of political connections. And the other two are just delightful. So, let’s start with this first one. This is from Laurel Wamsley writing for NPR. Mystery novelist wife kills chef-husband after penning 2011 essay on how to kill one’s husband. Basically this woman, she had written up a blog post and she’s also sort of an author of a sort. Wrote this blog post about how to kill your husband. Then her husband dies and everyone is like, “Wait, did you kill your husband?” And she’s like, ah.

**Craig:** Maybe.

**John:** Maybe. So also the visuals are helpful here because the woman kind of looks like my grandma. She’s not a young woman.

**Craig:** No. She’s 68. 68 years old. This is an interesting one. So what’s sort of fascinating is when she writes this essay the thesis of the essay basically is it’s really easy to get caught killing someone. You should probably be really, really careful about it. Here’s what you don’t want to do. Don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this. And the conclusion essentially was, you know what, she writes, “It’s easier to wish people dead than to actually kill them.”

Years later she proceeds to make essentially every single mistake that she iterated in that essay which makes me think that in fact at the time she wrote it it was not at all any kind of indication of premeditation. That something had happened in the last couple of years that had sent her on this path where she decided to just shoot her husband, who apparently was a lovely man, and seemingly treated her really well.

So, the question is what do you, like how do you make this a movie. And I do think that there’s an interesting deal here where maybe an editor starts working with a promising novelist who is writing a mystery novel and the editor does what editors do which is to constantly means test and logic challenge this person’s murder mystery. And keep saying, no, no, no, you’d be caught doing this. You’d be caught. She’s supposed to be, no, your killer is supposed to be a genius. And then one day when it’s done perfectly the author’s husband disappears. And then the only person that knows for sure, or at least she suspects that she has essentially helped this woman design the murder of her spouse. Be kind of a cool – I think that could be a cool sort of Gone Baby Gone kind of movie.

**John:** Yeah, so this idea for a movie strikes me as a Joe Eszterhas classic. So Joe Eszterhas for people who don’t know was the premier screenwriter, or really prominent screenwriter of the ‘80s as we were getting stated. So he did Basic Instinct. He did Jagged Edge, which I also loved. Jagged Edge is about an author. Basic Instinct I think Catherine Tramell had also written a book about murder. And so it feels like that kind of space.

So the fact that she’s sort of a granny is a twist on this. So whether you keep that or don’t keep that. I like Craig’s basic pitch for it that you have somebody who has insight into this author ahead of time and has to figure out what’s really going on.

What was good about Basic – actually Jagged Edge was the person who has insight into it is also kind of falling for the person who may be the murderer.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which is a nice aspect of it, too. One of my favorite moments in Jagged Edge is Glenn Close has the typewriter and types, “He is innocent,” and the T misaligned exactly the way that it was in this one clue.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That was great. Well done Joe Eszterhas. So, yeah, I think there’s something here. And you don’t have to go goofy with it. You could go straight thriller. We just don’t make those thrillers very much anymore.

**Craig:** Well we don’t in theatrical unless it’s based on a very popular novel a la Gone Baby Gone. And even in that circumstance you still need a top flight director and a top flight – well, at least somebody they consider to be a movie star, or else it’s not going to happen. But they do make things like this all the time for television now. Joe Eszterhas was famous for the – he did it, he didn’t do it, he did it structure. So you would kind of be lured into believing that this person whether it was Jeff Bridges or whether it was Sharon Stone was clearly the killer. And then as you got deeper in you realize “Oh my god they’re not.” They’re not the killer and the real killer is going to get away with this because this person just seems so awful that we thought they were the killer. And then at the very end of the movie, oh no, they were the killer. [laughs] That was his go to. He used it a number of times.

But, yeah, I think there’s something here. I think, you know, it’s a good concept at least to kind of put a fresh spin on a murder mystery. There’s something a little Throw Mama from the Train about it also. I don’t know, there’s a dark comedy aspect to it I think that could happen here. The straight up direct version of this, no. You just need a little bit of an inspiration from this I would say.

**John:** Yeah. One quote that, a two-part quote here that I’ll read. “’I have sad news to relate. My husband and best friend, Chef Dan Brophy was killed yesterday morning. For those of you who are close to me and feel this deserved a phone call, you are right, but I’m struggling to make sense of everything right now’ she wrote. ‘While I appreciate all of your loving responses, I am overwhelmed. Please save phone calls for a few days until I can function.’”

I believe that. I mean, a person who is trying to pull their stuff together, I get that. And then later on, “Asked whether the police had been keeping her updated, she said, ‘No, I’m a suspect,’ without emotion, McConnell said.” That’s interesting.

**Craig:** Yeah. That was pretty good. A neighbor said of her in the days following the murder, “She never showed any signs of being upset or sad. I would say she had an air of relief, like it was almost a godsend.” That’s…yeah.

**John:** Maybe.

**Craig:** Don’t have an air of relief.

**John:** No, no. Let’s go on to our next story. Craig, I picked this one for you because I felt like this woman might drive you especially crazy.

**Craig:** I just don’t understand what’s happening here. So this article was entitled Never Go Full Trump: The Lena Epstein Story. And this was written by somebody I actually know. Josh Marshal who I came to know at the last college reunion I went to because he’s married to a former college mate of mine.

**John:** Oh nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. Great guy. He does excellent work. He is the primary editor/writer at TalkingPointsMemo.com, which is a political blog, quite good stuff over there. By the way, they have a new thing like TPM Gold or I don’t know–

**John:** Prime or something like that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I did it. I did it. I did it because I like TPM. I like Josh.

**John:** You’re supporting the media. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m supporting the media. And we don’t advertise anything so this is as close as I get to advertising something. So this article, Never Go Full Trump: The Lena Epstein Story, is essentially about this bizarre moment that happened recently where Vice President Mike Pence held an event, a fundraising event I believe, on behalf of candidate Lena Epstein. She is running for what? What is she running for?

**John:** It’s not entirely clear. So she was a Republican candidate running for I believe it is–

**Craig:** Congress. It’s congress.

**John:** Congress of Michigan.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s running for the House of Representatives in the 11th District of Michigan. She is the daughter of one of Michigan’s wealthiest Jewish families. She is Harvard educated. And she was a dyed in the wool democrat until at least her mid-20s. And then went kind of super far right. And what makes this particularly bizarre is that at this event Mike Pence had a “rabbi” named Loren Jacobs who was asked to say a prayer on behalf of the eleven Jews murdered at the synagogue in Pittsburgh. And it turns out that Loren Jacobs I think kind of got invited there by Epstein. Except Loren Jacobs is not actually a rabbi. Loren Jacobs was a clergy in the Jews for Jesus movement which is a culty not at all Jewish thing that Jewish people really – I can tell you as a Jewish person when I grew up like they were spoken of in the harshest possible terms.

But amazingly Loren Jacobs wasn’t even good enough to stay a rabbi for them. Even they kicked her out. So this was a doubly defrocked “rabbi.” But what’s interesting is the notion of a candidate who is of a certain ethnicity that begins to pal around repeatedly with people who seem to be in direct opposition of her faith, her ethnicity, her background.

John, what do you make of all this?

**John:** So I found her to be a fascinating character. And so she is – whether she is the central character who you’re actually seeing the whole world through, which that’s an exhausting movie but kind of fascinating. Or she is a character off to the side. Like she’s the annoying sister of our actual protagonist who has to deal with her. But there was something great about exactly what you’re describing. You seem to be promoting something that is completely antithetical to your cultural heritage and not even your self-interest but just like you’re doing an incredible disservice to your people. And she is fascinating in those ways.

It reminded me kind of a Reese Witherspoon character from like one of her–

**Craig:** Election type days.

**John:** Election. Like her Election character, but taken really, really dark and sort of self-serving. I thought she was really just fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that this is character more than a movie. I think you’re absolutely right. And it feels to me like if you were doing kind of an ongoing dramatic series for instance about politics or a wealthy family or something like that that having one of the people be strangely affiliated with folks that want – it’s sort of that self-hating minority trope I guess. But it’s not really a trope. I mean, having grown up as part of a minority group in the United States, I saw it. I mean, it’s a thing. It’s a real thing. There are people that come to sort of internalize the external criticism of the group they’re in. And they kind of turn on it. I mean–

**John:** There’s the gay Republicans, or the Gays for Trump. Like he’ll be the best person ever for this. I have seen that first hand and that’s the equivalent thing in my community.

**Craig:** Did you see, what’s her face, Jenner, Caitlin.

**John:** Oh, Caitlin Jenner.

**Craig:** Caitlin Jenner finally was like, oh well, maybe, should I have not supported him? [laughs] Oh, Caitlin. You silly goose.

So, yeah, I think a character here. And I think that the mechanism, the psychological mechanism of self-hatred is actually quite fascinating and complicated and importantly in there is a kernel of something that I think we can all empathize with. Because inevitably you start to see how someone has been a bit manipulated by the world around them. That in their desire to pass, which is a real phenomenon that has been studied numerous times, they begin to separate from the truth of who they are. And where they’re from. And it is – there is a kind of empathy you can have for people like that.

But it becomes tested, severely tested, when for instance the case of somebody like this, she’s found to be following and liking posts from people like David Duke, who is, of course, a Nazi. And, you know, that’s not good.

**John:** It’s not good. I think where we both end up is that she is a great character as part of an ensemble probably recurring drama, so something like a Succession, where she’s one of the siblings in that kind of show.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** But you probably don’t base everything around her.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. A similar but also delightful thing from this past week is The Humiliating Crash and Burn of Pro-Trump Media Star Jacob Wohl is the Best Political Story of the Season. I’m linking to an article by Dustin Rowles for Pajiba but there’s a zillion other things. You can follow this rabbit hole all the way down. This I just found delightful. Just because I knew in a general sense who Jacob Wohl was, and it just became crazier and crazier.

So Jacob Wohl for people who are lucky enough not to know who he is, he’s a disgraced financial trader. And it’s like I saw that description, but he’s like–

**Craig:** 12.

**John:** A teenager. Yeah. He’s 20 years old but he’s already banned from making financial trades because of stuff he’s done. He’s a super Pro-Trumper, Instagrammer. And just annoying as hell.

But, so he was trying to peddle this story about Robert Mueller having committed a rape at some point in the past, and he was going to have a witness. And he was trying to get different media outlets to buy into this story. All of them said like I don’t think that’s going to be accurate or real. And they were right. And this has come to bite him in a delightful way.

Again, I really thought he was a fascinating character. It reminded me a bit of Shattered Glass.

**Craig:** Yeah. Billy Ray.

**John:** Disgraced journalist. So it reminded me a bit of that. But, Craig, what do you take? Do you think there’s a movie to be made around him or this circus?

**Craig:** I think around the circus maybe. There is something fascinating about the gang that couldn’t shoot straight-ness of this. Because what happens here is he creates his own source. So essentially he says some intelligence firm has gathered this intelligence and has given it to me, I guess. I don’t know why. Well, it turns out that this intelligence company doesn’t really exist. He’s smart enough to create a fake website for it, which is very much Shattered Glass. Not smart enough to leave his name off the actual registration for the domain name.

But he just keeps digging, which is amazing. He says I’ve got a picture of the woman who was going to testify but I blanked her face out. And then somebody just did a reverse image search and was like, nope, that’s your girlfriend. [laughs] He’s so inept. You almost feel like, wait, is he working for the Democrats? Because he’s so bad at this. I mean, I couldn’t think of anything more exculpatory for Bob Mueller than this ding-a-ling attempting to smear him so terribly. I mean, it’s so incompetent. And incompetence on that level one has to look at as comedy.

I don’t know how else you look at it.

**John:** I think you’re right. And so the gif that I saw applied most to this whole story as it was breaking was Brad Pitt from Burn After Reading and so he’s just pumping the air because he’s so convinced he’s made a big score and he’s really landed it. And so there’s a Coen Brothers kind of quality to this.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** You could see this as ineptitude like Veep. But it’s more like a Coen Brothers, like you had no business even getting into this realm and now you’re going to be hugely embarrassed.

**Craig:** Well, not just hugely embarrassed, but the FBI is investigating this because it’s a crime. I mean, what he was doing was essentially creating fraud and making false accusations. And at some point you’re dealing – for god’s sake, you’re doing it to the former Director of the FBI. I mean, look, you know, you want to egg someone’s house, maybe drive past the former town police sheriff’s house because, you know, it’s like you know how the world works. I mean, Geez-Louise.

Anyway, he’s incredibly stupid. What are you going to do? Just so dumb. So dumb.

**John:** So dumb. I don’t know that there’s necessarily a movie here. And like I loved the book – I loved the story that became Shattered Glass. And I tried to get the rights to that. Billy Ray got the rights to it and made a really good movie. But I think part of the frustration of watching that movie is you are spending all of your time watching this character squirm you don’t really like. And it’s hard to sit with that character for 100 minutes/two hours because it’s just really uncomfortable and you just kind of want to get away from that kind of person.

**Craig:** Although, I don’t know if you watch Fargo. I mean, that’s kind of what – that’s the bread and butter there. And they do it very, very well. You do sort of sit there and watch Ewan McGregor be a weasel for a number of episodes. And it grabs you. So, I mean, I think that you’re right. And that is a Coen Brothers world. Right? Even though they don’t do that show. So I think there is a Coen-y Brothers-y kind of thing here. But in the lens of what’s going on right now it’s just how did Coen Brothers characters actually become news in real life?

Oh boy, well let’s take a look at this next one. This is called Nicole From Last Night. And in this story which was sent to us by – sorry, it was written by Maiia Kappler for the Huffington Post. So a gentlemen named Carlos Zetina who is a student at the University of Calgary meets a girl one night in a bar and he hits it off with her and he helps her and her friend get home. And he knows her name. And she gives him her number but she accidentally gave him the wrong phone number so he couldn’t get in touch with her.

**John:** Or was it an accident?

**Craig:** [laughs] Well that’s sort of the part where we’re not really sure. So her name is Nicole. So he writes an email to all 247 people in the University of Calgary’s directory whose name included some variation of the name Nicole, even including professors. And the email simply said, “Hi, this is a mass email to all Nicoles. If you don’t fit this description then ignore, and if you are the one and just don’t want to talk to me that’s OK as well. If your name is Nicole and you’re from Holland and you think Nietzsche is depressing then text me, his number. I’m Carlos, by the way. I’m the guy who took you and your friend home last night.”

So, I mean, he gave her an out there. He said if you don’t want to talk to me that’s fine. And what happened was all these Nicoles were like, oh this is interesting, and started emailing each other. It wasn’t even about him. At that point there just became this like weird Nicole from Last Night club which now has 80 members and they hang out, which is hysterical. And the mystery Nicole was identified and she actually did I think connect with him and agree to see him for a date or something like that, which is romantic.

**John:** Yeah. So I dug this story. And I think there’s something to do here. It’s the intersection of that guy in the movie who does the big romantic gesture, like I’ve got to find this girl, and sort of what the consequences of that are. I love all the other women coming together. I love that the original girl finally actually does find him. Oh yeah, I truly did mess up in giving you the wrong number. Yeah, we could go out on a date. But the sense of like all of the Nicoles is kind of great.

I feel like there is a thing to be done here.

**Craig:** I agree, too. And I think you’ve put your finger on it. The deal where someone guys, “Hey, missed connection,” I’ve seen this a billion times. There’s nothing new there. What’s new is that all these Nicoles form a Nicole army. And there’s so many ways to go about this. I mean, the rom-com version is that the Nicole that he’s actually trying to reach is a little frazzled or worried or something and all these Nicoles kind of get together to find her maybe and to help her, I don’t know, do something. That’s a very sort of old school romantic comedy.

But I’m more interested in like this is a bad dude and the Nicole army is like there to protect Nicole and also like take him down. The idea of your – talk about ensemble – you’ve got a cast of eight women and they have nothing in common. They’ve never met each other before. Except that they’re all named Nicole and they got a problem with this guy. That’s kind of cool. I kind of like that.

**John:** So the other variation of this is basically like a Cinderella kind of story where he’s met this girl and then he can’t find this girl. And so instead of her shoe as the only clue he just has her name. And so he’s just going out and searching by her name. And you can create a scenario in which he never got to see her, or it was unclear, or like they were only talking on the phone, there’s something like that. Then like you know if he’s putting this thing out there into the world there are all these Nicoles and maybe he’s trying to figure out who was the actual girl I spoke with. So it was in VR or something so he didn’t know what she really looked like and he’s trying to find her and there’s all these Nicoles coming together.

There’s a version of that that could work, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like that.

**John:** We’ve saved the romantic comedy, so I just want to make sure that we keep it going. We have to provide sort of new logs to keep that fire burning.

**Craig:** You know what’s interesting is that this story probably doesn’t even become a story if Nicole isn’t named Nicole. If she’s named like Greta or Amy. Amy is a common name, right?

**John:** It’s not common anymore. It used to be. But Nicole is just such a common name.

**Craig:** But there’s something also just about Nicole from last night. It sounds like a title of something.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** And also when you say 80 Nicoles that’s really funny. Whereas if it was like 80 Jessicas is not as funny to me, or like Jessica from last night. Nicole from last night – there’s just something about it. It’s sort of the perfect name for this story.

**John:** Our last How Would This Be a Movie is a story from Face 2 Face Africa. It is written up by Elizabeth Ofosuah Johnson. And it was just a part of WWII that I never heard of before. Meet the gallant all-black American female battalion that served in Europe during WWII. So the write up of the story is nice, but I was honestly really drawn in by the photos. So these black and white photos of these African American women in uniform lined up walking down the street. They were largely like a nurse’s corps and sort of mail delivery and getting people their mail. But I’d just never seen – honestly I’d just never seen black faces in uniform in this context and in WWII. And I loved seeing them.

And so what we actually have in this little write up isn’t very much, but there was a character – a real life person who is mentioned. And I did a little bit more research on her. Mary McLeod Bethune who was sort of a very important civil rights person of the era who actually had a really fascinating life. I wonder if she’s tied into the story you’d actually make here. But I mostly just liked this as a story space. I loved sort of seeing black American women in Europe in WWII.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve seen black men in these pictures, but you’re right I’d never seen black women particularly in uniform together like this in the European theater. So the pictures are fascinating. I think that given that – so primarily they were part of something called the 6888, which I guess they called the Six Triple Eight Central Postal Directory Battalion. So this is an all-black female battalion of the women’s army corps that was sent to parts of France and England to basically deliver mail. This was several years of abandoned and backlogged mail in Europe.

And they were doing this during WWII. It was sort of the tail end, but during WWII. Now, when I see that what I think is the one thing you want to avoid is sort of saying here’s what this movie is. Look, black women in uniform. You’re like, “And, yes? Great. And?” You don’t want to turn into a, see, look, they’re doing it.

So, but what I’ve never seen before is a war drama about delivering a letter. And it reminded me of a little bit of that Saving Private Ryan feel of some small act that needed to happen that wasn’t about capturing a hill or assassinating the enemy. It was about preserving some small shred of humanity for one person who is somewhere out there. And the way they sort of put it here, this could be mail that needed to be delivered to one of our soldiers, but it could also be mail that needed to be delivered to just somebody who lived in Europe. And I think that that provides a possible just storyline for a good old fashioned war story. And based in history. So I thought this was really – I think fairly fertile fodder for a good WWII movie about the kinds of people we haven’t seen before. And when I say kinds of people I don’t mean black women, I mean mail delivery people. Like to me that’s fascinating. And then you put on top of it the fact that we’re dealing with African American women and this was kind of their sort of entrée into the war. I think there’s all sorts of interesting stuff that can come out of it.

**John:** Absolutely. So you know we had other stories about postal carriers. So we have Il Postino. We have The Postman. We have that sense of part of reestablishing – a lot of this happens after the war. So, reestablishing normalcy is like getting the mail back and making those connections again which I think is great and fascinating. You have a whole – Europe has to rebuild and so you’re trying to come out of this dark place and back to a normalcy and trying to find some sort of normalcy.

What I do think is interesting in having African American women here is that they are completely out of their element. They’re out of America at the time and all the challenges of America at the time. So while there are new challenges in Europe, they aren’t carrying with them – or they’re not confronted at every moment by sort of the expectations of America and being a black woman in America. And so there could be more latitude. They can have different opportunities in Europe than they might be able to have in the United States.

They have the structure of the army. But they also – they’re in Europe. They’re in France. And I think that is potentially great, too. So you can track just the same way that the men who fought in WWII had never expected to go to Europe in their lifetimes and suddenly they’re in Europe. These women are in Europe. They had no prior expectations they would ever be there.

So, I think it’s cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like it. I think that there’s good fodder there for sure.

**John:** But I think you’re making basically an entirely new story.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** With these people. Or you’re finding, you’re doing a lot of research to find who those people could be that could make it all fit together.

**Craig:** I would be shocked if there were enough realistic material for a grip – I mean, because honestly when you pour through all of what happened in WWII people are still kind of making up stuff to sort of be able to do the delivery system, like Saving Private Ryan, which I think was based loosely on a sort of thing. You know what I mean?

So I would imagine there would have to be quite a bit of invention here.

**John:** All right. So it’s come time for us to wrap up and figure out which of these How Would This Be a Movies would be a movie because as listeners know we have a very high track record of the things we pick almost always one of them becomes slated for development.

**Craig:** It’s almost like people are listening to this. [laughs]

**John:** Maybe they’re listening to this. So, Craig, if you were to pick one of the five stories we talked about, which one do you think is most likely to become a movie?

**Craig:** Most likely to become a movie I think–

**John:** Or picked up for development.

**Craig:** Picked up for development, it’s a tie. It’s a tie between what I’ll call 80 Nicoles and the Triple Eight Six. Yeah. I think both are likely to be developed.

**John:** I think both are likely to be developed and I think those are the two winners by far. So the other things had interesting stuff. I bet the Lena Epstein story ends up influencing some other character down the road, but you don’t need to use her. Jacob Wohl, we’ll find characters who are sort of the equivalent of a Jacob Wohl character. That Jacob Wohl character will show up on a Law & Order: SVU at some point.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** But, no, I don’t think we need any of the specific details from that. I do think there’s a good movie spaced around the Nicoles and this female battalion.

**Craig:** And I would say the odds in terms of actually being made, 80 Nicoles. Because just in general period pieces and war movies are hard to make. They’re expensive. And there’s sort of a built in reduction in demand. That said, because there is such a hunger based on lack of supply for movies about African American women — Hidden Figures showed us that that can overcome the period piece. And even the sort of what you might consider to be dry subject matter of rocketry math. So that may actually kind of undo what I’m saying here, because 80 Nicoles seems like a fun sort of possible rom-com thing to do. But the Triple Eight Six may be – I hope somebody might look at that and say this fits an underserved demand. Maybe we should make this movie.

**John:** I also think the 80 Nicoles, like Netflix is already like when can we have that movie.

**Craig:** They may be done with it right now.

**John:** No, no, no, we need that movie in 60 days, so get shopping.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. I think that Netflix green lit that when we started talking about it, and they’re currently screen testing it right now. [laughs]

**John:** Indeed. They’ve got it out to casting.

**Craig:** Netflix, slow down guys. Slow down. It’s like what I tell my kids when they’re eating. Chew. Chew.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing was sent in by Mike Birbiglia because he wrote it. It is 8 Tips for Getting Your Solo Play to Broadway. Mike Birbiglia, a friend of the show. He’s been on the show once or twice, maybe three times. He is a fantastic writer and performer and comedian. He has a brand new show on Broadway. He wrote up an article for the New York Times, that small little paper, about how you put together a show for Broadway, a one-man show for Broadway, which is delightful like all things Mike Birbiglia. So I would recommend that you read this article and then get tickets to his show and enjoy his show because it’s going to be a terrific show.

So, Mike Birbiglia gets to be my One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Mike Birby. Birbs, as I call him, is fantastic. It was really just a coin toss who was going to get to recommend him as our One Cool Thing because he’s a friend of our show. He’s been on our show. And everything he does is really, really good. And I have no doubt that his show is going to be extremely well reviewed, critically acclaimed, because he’s everyone’s darling. He’s certainly my darling. I love that guy.

And talk about a talented block of people. He lives right near Jorma Taccone and Mari Heller.

**John:** I believe they share a wall actually.

**Craig:** They do. I think they’re in a duplex sort of, I don’t know, thing.

**John:** It’s a NYC thing.

**Craig:** It’s in New York. It’s really cool. So anyone, Mike Birbiglia. Awesome. I’m going to see that show for sure.

My One Cool Thing is way dorkier than that. It’s a game called Decrypto. Have you played it yet, John?

**John:** No, I have not. But I opened this up. So it’s on Board Game Geek. It looks like it’s a board game. Why am I not playing this right now?

**Craig:** I don’t know. So here is the deal. Have you played Code Names?

**John:** Of course. Code Names is great.

**Craig:** Of course you have. Decrypto is kind of Code Names in reverse. It’s incredibly simple to play. So the idea is let’s say you and I are on a team together. We have four words that you and I can see. Those four words do not change throughout the many rounds. It’s like pumpkin, hat, sand, and car. And every round one of us will pick a card that has numbers on it like 1-2-4, or 4-3-3, or 4-3-2, and basically it’s giving us an order and we’re supposed to clue. I need to clue to you in order which of those words I want you to say back to me.

And you’re thinking well how hard is that, we’re both looking at the words. What’s the big deal? Here’s the problem. The other team is hearing my clue words to you. They’re writing them down. And the deal is if they can figure out from clue words what our clue words are then they’re going to win. So I have to clue these to you in such a way that you get them, but misdirect anybody else that might be listening who doesn’t see what the words are.

It’s so much fun. I love it. I was introduced to it by no surprise David Kwong. Decrypto is super fun. And you can play it honestly I think as a family it doesn’t require a lot of age stuff. Sort of like Code Names. It’s great that way. It’s super simple. You learn it in about, I don’t know, five minutes. And then it just becomes really – it just becomes really fun.

So, a big thumbs up for Decrypto. I’m playing it tonight in fact.

**John:** Very nice. I look forward to playing that with you at some point in the future.

That’s our show for this week. So as always our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Matthew. And so it’s sort of a horror theme, and I know Halloween has already passed, but you know what, terror can strike at any moment.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Yeah. I want to make a Halloween movie that takes place mostly on November 2. Just like you think you’re out of it, nope. Nope.

**Craig:** I like that. I like November 2nd. Yeah. That’s pretty good.

**John:** It’s like After the Day of the Dead.

**Craig:** Open up another beach head in the horror front.

**John:** Yes. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We need some more outros. We’ve got a few saved up, but we can always use more. So remember just like as long as it includes some version of [hums] that’s all an outro has to have in it.

ask@johnaugust.com is also the place where you send your questions and follow up things like the people who did today. For short questions on Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you’re listening to this right now. But if you could leave us a review that would be swell because it helps people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We will put in links to all of the articles we talked about, but also a bunch of articles we didn’t talk about because they were other potentially good movies. In some cases the articles were just really long and I didn’t want to read them.

**Craig:** Too long; didn’t read.

**John:** Yep. But you’ll find the transcripts also at johnaugust.com. They go up within the week of the episode airing. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. That’s also where you’ll find the Random Advice episode that we just posted which is delightful, so thank you to everyone who subscribed and sent in a question because that’s why that episode exists.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** All right, Craig, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John, and I’ll see you next time.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [FilmStruck is Shutting Down](https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/filmstruck-shutdown-warnermedia-turner-1202998364/)
* Aaron Sauerland’s [tweet](https://twitter.com/aaronsauerland/status/1057425706450206720?s=21) about writing for ensembles
* [Novelist Who Penned ‘How To Murder Your Husband’ Essay Charged With Husband’s Murder](https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647113406/novelist-who-penned-how-to-murder-your-husband-essay-charged-with-husband-s-murd) by Laurel Wamsley for NPR
* [Never Go Full Trump: The Lena Epstein Story](https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/never-go-full-trump-the-lena-epstein-story) by Josh Marshal for TPM
* [The Humiliating Crash and Burn of Pro-Trump Media Star Jacob Wohl Is the Best Political Story of the Season](http://www.pajiba.com/politics/the-downfall-of-protrump-media-star-jacob-wohl-is-the-best-political-story-of-2018.php?fbclid=IwAR2C81ZC3YUUb7HOzQGblTDb1dicPKKQtD1nGnJthaXFBgWXSI5WXyaqNtw) by Dustin Rowles for Pajiba
* [‘Nicole From Last Night’: University Of Calgary Student Mass Emails 247 Nicoles](https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/09/09/nicole-from-last-night-university-of-calgary-email_a_23521669/) by Maija Kappler for Huffington Post
* [Meet the gallant all-black American female battalion that served in Europe during World War II](https://face2faceafrica.com/article/meet-the-gallant-all-black-american-female-battalion-that-served-in-europe-during-world-war-ii) by Elizabeth Ofosuah Johnson for Face 2 Face Africa.
* [Mary McLeod Bethune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McLeod_Bethune)
* [6 Tips for Getting Your Solo Play to Broadway](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/theater/mike-birbiglia-broadway-the-new-one.amp.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&smid=nytcore-ios-share#click=https://t.co/Ggwb3dYQgI) by Mike Birbiglia
* [Decrypto](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/225694/decrypto)
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_374v2.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. So today’s episode of Scriptnotes was recorded live at the Austin Film Festival. There is some swearing, so keep that in mind if you’re listening in the car with your kids. There’s also a very special introduction by Beto O’Rourke. So, if you want to see the video of how that all went you can click on a link in the show notes. So, enjoy.

Beto O’Rourke: Good evening Austin and welcome to Scriptnotes Live. I’m just going to take a quick moment to remind you that you can vote any time between October 22 and November 2, early voting in your polling location of choice in the county that you’re registered. And then if you didn’t get a chance to vote early, vote the 6th of November, Election Day.

Craig Mazin told me to tell you so. And we’re all counting on you turning out and winning the victory of our lifetimes for Texas, and for the country.

And now on with the show.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is…this is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are…?

Crowd: Interesting to screenwriters.

John: You guys are so good.

Craig: Well trained. Well trained.

John: This is the 19,000th year we’ve done a live show at Scriptnotes.

Craig: Yes indeed.

John: Here at the Austin Film Festival.

Craig: Correct. Although we’ve never quite had that amount of firepower to open it up.

John: That was a lot of firepower.

Craig: Concentrated firepower. I have to say I was a little concerned because there was a chance that maybe all these people would be Ted Cruz fans. [laughs] Just a small chance. And if you are, get out!

John: Done.

Craig: Not a Republican/Democrat thing, just a me thing. It’s just a me thing.

John: Yeah. Because you have a personal issue.

Craig: A little bit of a thing. Little bit of a thing. But we’re so happy to see you all here. What an incredible crowd. And this is our favorite, honestly, it’s my favorite show of the year because there’s just a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and we love seeing you all and we have great guests and we have so much cool stuff, although we’ve sort of piqued, so you know, lower the expectations now and everything will be great.

John: So, for people listening at home I always think of the listeners at home. And so it is 10pm at night. It is a Friday. I have lost all track of what day it is.

Craig: It’s a weekend night.

John: It’s Austin time. And we are in an incredibly crowded room with standing room only with amazing screenwriter people. They’re all wearing something around their necks. It’s like a blue band. Do you recognize what this–?

Craig: Yeah, I don’t have to do that shit.

John: Yeah. So they’re all wearing–

Craig: I’m too cool.

John: They’re all wearing these lanyards that say Highland 2 on them.

Craig: Wait, what?

John: Yeah. If you notice they all–

Craig: Oh my god, you did that?

John: I did that, yeah. And so I got this for you. I spent thousands of dollars so that Craig would have to use Highland 2 for a weekend.

Craig: I’m not going to use it, but that’s, I mean, no, that’s actually pretty amazing. I can’t believe you – god, I’m not paying for this, am I?

John: No, no, no.

Craig: Oh, you’re paying for this. OK, great.

John: You pay for nothing and I pay for everything.

Craig: Phew. Got a little freaked out there. That’s actually pretty impressive. And I will say that I have bumped into a bunch of people that do use Highland 2.

John: Yes.

Craig: And they love it. I’m not an anti-Highland guy in any way, shape, or form.

John: No, you just promote my competitor at every moment. And that’s OK. That’s absolutely fine.

Craig: I like his work. Yeah.

John: Absolutely. Let us sit down and we can do some follow up, because one of the first things we have to do in any normal episode of Scriptnotes is some follow up.

Craig: Follow up. Yep.

John: So in the last episode of Scriptnotes we talked about this WGA campaign for No Writing Left Behind. So that’s a thing which happened. So we got some great emails back from people and some representative stories. We got some, you know, well what about this situation. But we got this email that I was like oh yeah that’s exactly the right thing to talk about.

So this is an email from Eva. So I’m going to read aloud Eva’s letter because this is what a good live podcast is is reading aloud stuff.

Craig: We should, before you know Eva is going to be listening to this, we have to let her know just as a disclosure that we’re a little drunk. So, OK. Traditionally this is our drunk show. We’re not Austin drunk. This is like Austin breakfast level alcohol. But still for us, yeah.

John: For me especially. All right. So Eva writes about No Writing Left Behind. She says, “This just happened to me in a very brutal way. I was asked to read two novels a company had just bought rights to and they asked about what I thought about them and what was in my opinion the best way to adapt them. When we finished our meeting I was asked to put together a document that talked about all these things. So, I’m aware I’m a ‘new writer,’ so I will only do that if it’s clear that I will get the job. They say I am the frontrunner. That my credits are not an issue.

“Fast forward two weeks later, and they have a pitch booklet/look book, complete bible for a premium TV series adaptation with a breakdown for the entire 12 episodes of the first season. And then I am called into a meeting with all parties involved. I am praised for my work. Everyone is so impressed. They just need to send to the director and see what he thinks.”

Craig, what happens?

Craig: “A week later I receive a call. The director doesn’t feel comfortable having someone so new onboard. So they’ve decided to look somewhere else, meaning a more established writer.” You didn’t take that job, did you?

John: I did not.

Craig: That would have been brutal. “Before meeting with me they didn’t even know what they were going to do with the source material. Now they have everything they need to develop a TV show, and they have literally thrown me to the curb.”

She doesn’t mean literally there. “And what control—“

John: Figuratively.

Craig: “And what control do I have in how they use those documents moving forward? Zero. If you need a clear example to support your cause I am more than willing to share. This is a very big company we all know and the director and other producers are also very big. Thanks for giving a voice to us writers.”

John: “Thank you guys for making us feel less lonely.”

Craig: Yep. Just checking the grammar on that.

John: So, Eva’s situation is sort of a why we were talking about that last week because that is the thing that happens where you’ve gone in and you’ve done all this work for somebody and then it’s not your work because you didn’t own those books. You didn’t own the stuff underneath that.

So, we were talking this afternoon Craig and you and I had two different opinions about sort of what Ava’s situation was and what her best play was now. So the best play Ava could make would be to build a time machine, go back, and not give those pages. And not do all that free work for those people. Best scenario. Second best scenario in my mind would be to go to those people right now and say like, “Look, I wrote all this stuff. I clearly wrote all this stuff. You are in a weird place because all the stuff you’re basing this on is stuff I wrote. Make a deal with me now. It’s going to be a scale deal. It’s going to be some deal that sort of says that I am the first writer that wrote this stuff. Even if you go with the other fancy writer, I was in the chain of title. That’s my play. What’s your play?

Craig: And that is what a reasonable person would do.

John: All right. Let’s hear Craig’s version.

Craig: What I say is: lie in wait. Because one day they’re going to make that thing and then about, oh, I don’t know, three weeks before the first air date you call them up and say, “I’m suing you. Because you stole my shit.” And then they’re going to settle. And it’s happened. This happened before. It’s just maximizing your leverage via evil. And the service of an attorney. But it’s deserved. They asked for it. They are doing a bad thing.

And the reason I’m so glad that you made this our follow up here because for you guys out here there is a decent chance this is how it’s going to happen to you when it happens. Your first encounter very frequently when you have that first sale, that first good meeting, that first kind of yes/almost yes, there’s a decent chance you’re going to be dealing either with peripheral people who are maybe a touch on the shady side, or you’re going to be dealing with established people who are still on the shady side.

The cost of someone asking you to just do a little free work is zero. Zero. So they’re going to do it. And then you are put in this terrible spot. But we’re here to tell you it’s actually not that terrible. The answer is nah. And if you’ve done a good job and you’re impressive and the work you’ve done at least in describing what you want to do is impressive that should be enough.

If you have to write a bunch of stuff up the potential for abuse is enormous and the potential for wasted time is enormous. But I guess there is the one up side that you may be able to lie in wait and sue. But if you’re not particularly litigious, don’t leave anything behind.

John: Yeah. All right. The other categories of responses we got in Twitter would fall into sort of four basic general buckets. The first one is the question of like well what if it’s my own thing. What if I came up with this original idea, this original pitch, this original thing, and went in to describe to these people and they said like, “Oh, could you send me through that thing you wrote about?” You could theoretically do that. That is your own thing. That is not mostly what we’re talking about here. You own that idea. The only thing I will caution you is the moment your idea becomes four paragraphs you’re sending through, then it’s all about those four paragraphs and it’s not about you and you as a visionary writer with those ideas. It becomes about that thing. So while you can legally do that and maybe in some situations it makes sense to do that, the more you can keep it in the realm of talking before you get to a screenplay is usually a good thing.

Craig: Professional writers get paid to write. So if you want to be a professional writer, and I’m thinking a lot of you do, get paid to write. If you are writing something for free you must control it all the way, meaning it’s your own spec work. It’s your original work. If someone is saying to you I have a book, I have an idea, I have a piece of this, I have a song, I have a toy – anything – that you don’t control completely you start writing when they agree to pay you, in writing, period, the end.

John: The other thing which showed up in our Twitter feeds, Craig what would you call this category of like people objecting to this idea of not leaving stuff behind?

Craig: There were a certain category of people who said, “Don’t interfere with my right to take abuse in order to get a job.”

John: My process is to be abused.

Craig: Sort of like you fat cats are trying to keep us out of the business by taking away our ability to write for free.

John: How dare you, Craig.

Craig: Right. Your rhetoric has disqualified you from our business. I don’t know how else to say. It’s just a silly line of reasoning. If your way into the business is writing for free, big headline, you’re not in the business.

John: Yeah. A related category of criticism was “but what about…” It’s what about ism. It’s basically like this thing you just said, yeah, but this other thing is more interesting. OK, great. This thing we’re talking about is specifically leaving stuff behind in a room. There are many challenges facing feature writers. They all are worthy of attention. Most of them are worthy of attention. This is about the one thing. So, what about ism I’m always vigilant for.

Craig: “Tu quoque”, is that how you pronounce that?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: It’s the you too. It’s a fallacy. It’s Latin. Guys, it’s Latin.

John: Latin. Latin.

Craig: It’s Latin for what he just said.

John: The last thing which came up a lot in this thing was the sense of like “Well why did nobody tell me about this before?” And the somebody telling you about things from before that’s institutional knowledge. And I feel like that’s a thing maybe we haven’t done a great job on is like when Craig and I were starting in the business other screenwriters would say like, “Oh, no, whatever you do don’t leave stuff behind.” And I guess we didn’t communicate that message through to everybody else. And so part of the reason why we have these amazing guests with us here tonight is so we can pass along some of our institutional knowledge of what’s happened before and hopefully fix people in the future.

Craig: Yeah, you know, maybe whatever happens, maybe it’s a little late. Maybe we should have said this earlier. Acknowledge/stipulated. But that’s not a reason to suddenly question the validity of it now. It is valid now. And so we’re saying to all of you don’t do that. For yourselves. Honestly for yourselves. It doesn’t change our lives, but for yourselves. And also I guess for the people that are with you in the room tonight. There is a certain impact we have with each other. And every time we agree to a condition that is unprofessional and debasing we’re making it a little harder for the next writer, or the writer next to us, to be treated well.

So, consider that as you go through your lives, you wonderful people.

John: Let us bring up a panel of institutional knowledge we are so lucky to have. First off, Wendy Calhoun. She is a writer whose credits include – Wendy Calhoun – credits include Station 19, Empire. She’s on a development deal right now. Wendy Calhoun, welcome to the show.

Wendy Calhoun: Thank you. It’s such an honor.

John: Yay. Next up we have Phil Hay.

Craig: Phil Hay.

John: Phil Hay, oh my god. Phil Hay has done a ton. The Invitation, which was amazing. Destroyer, which is coming out soon. Crazy Beautiful. Ride Along. Clash of the Titans.

Phil Hay: Right on.

John: Phil Hay, welcome to our program.

Phil: Can I ask a quick question before we start?

John: Yes.

Craig: There’s another guest coming. You know that right?

John: Two more.

Phil: Yes, no, it’s addressed to Craig and it’s regarding the video. How the fuck did you get so relevant? I can’t believe it.

Craig: I was born relevant, yo. When I came out people were like this means something.

John: This guy is…

Craig: This is important.

Phil: In relation to something else, this guy…

Craig: Nurses who literally deliver nothing but babies all day long, day after day, were like, “Stop everyone. Something just happened.”

John: One day you will have a famous roommate. He’ll have a famous college roommate and everything will change.

Phil: That’s it.

John: Nicole Perlman.

Craig: Yeah!

John: Nicole Perlman. Her credits of course include Guardians of the Galaxy, the upcoming Captain Marvel, Detective Pikachu. Nicole Perlman, welcome to our program. Thank you very much.

Nicole Perlman: Thank you for having me.

John: Finally Jason Fuchs. Jason Fuchs.

Craig: Fuchs.

John: Writer whose credits include Wonder Woman, Ice Age: Continental Drift. Jason Fuchs, welcome to our show, a return guest from last year. Nicely done.

Jason Fuchs: Thanks for having me back.

John: Yeah. So you passed some test with Craig.

Craig: Did you guys hear the show last year? Do you remember the greatest story in the world that Jason Fuchs told us? He can’t top that this year, can he? No, not a chance. Try. That’s a challenge.

John: We’re not trying to top, we’re trying to educate. We’re trying to discuss.

Phil: And what about the year before, Craig? What about the year before that?

Craig: Phil killed it.

Phil: It was fantastic.

Craig: Phil killed it.

Phil: This is a very controversial item with John.

John: Craig wanted like 20 people on stage and I said like let’s limit it to four.

Craig: Oh, I’m sorry I wanted to give you guys more.

John: Always the buzz kill. I sent through a depressing article for everyone to look at. So if you’re following me on Twitter you see that we’re going to discuss this article. This is an article that came out by Nicole Laporte on Fast Company. It came out yesterday. And it’s titled The Death of the Middle Class, but it’s really about how streaming has effected writers’ lives and streaming not just for TV, because you think about TV being all the TV shows that are going to Netflix and other channels, but also increasingly for features. So, I want to–

Craig: Happy time is over.

John: Happy time is over.

Craig: Here we go guys.

John: So we have four writers up here who work in sort of various capacities. Now Craig now has a TV show for HBO. And I want to talk about the change that’s happening for writers right now because these are mostly people who are moving into this industry and while there are more TV programs on the air than ever, in some ways it’s harder to make a living, or at least a middle class living in this. In this article that she lays out the people at the very top, the people who are making the giant deals, they’re making a lot. But the people who are going show to show, it’s actually harder than ever.

So, Wendy, I want to start with you because you have the most TV experience of the people here. What have you seen changing over the last maybe five years? And as you talk to writers who are trying to make a living, what’s different now?

Wendy: Well, I mean, I can use a very personal example. How about that?

John: I like those.

Wendy: I was on a show called Nashville. I worked on the first two seasons of that show.

John: Heard of it.

Wendy: I don’t know if anyone has seen it. Thank you. It’s about country music. The show was the hardest show I’ve had to launch. I’ve been a part of seven new series and that was the hardest. So to break up a bit of the sadness and monotony that we had in the room I would come in and pitch the black version of the show. And very often those pitches landed, by the way.

So, when we were in season two and I got sent by a friend a pilot script that had not been shot yet but was to star Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard called Empire I read it and I said, holy crap, I’ve been pitching this for two years.

So, I had to quit my job at Nashville without having an offer yet for Empire. It was a real flyer. I had kind of built my entire career writing, sorry to say, but white men with guns. And I thought this would be a really kind of different thing. I’d like to write a show with black people. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it?

I did get the offer, thank goodness. I went on as a co-executive producer of the show. I worked my ass off. The show came out of the box and it was a big hit. Now, we on Nashville were making 22 episodes a year. Fox ordered 11 episodes of Empire. That’s a half pay cut for me. Right?

Craig: Because just be clear, when you’re working in television you are paid per episode. Not by time, but by episode.

Wendy: By episode. Right. So do this math. So we got that going. And on top of that they added 12 weeks to the schedule before we actually shot. So, we had scripts written before we actually shot, which is different for broadcast television. So my money is not only half but it’s stretched out over three extra months.

Now, the show comes out, is a big hit. And I’m thinking, well, those residual checks will start rolling in. The green envelopes will start coming, right? No. The show goes directly to Hulu and I don’t get any–

Craig: I love the way you say Hulu.

John: I love that you say Hulu.

Wendy: Hulu.

Jason: I can tell you, Hulu actually pays way better.

John: Directly for Hulu, yeah.

Wendy: Not for broadcast repeats it does not.

John: But Hulu, the other one, it’s the wrong one. That’s the problem.

Wendy: Because it’s sponsored by Le Croix. Anyways, so you can kind of see how that is just one example of the economic impact that’s happened in the last five years. And that is to a broadcast television writer-producer. So you can only imagine when you start talking about cable where you’re making, what, $0.60 on the dollar? When you’re talking about digital where you are trying to – you have to rely on your management and agents and reps to try to get you some sort of back end participation so that you actually see some sort of money for all of your shows being shown again. And it becomes a real issue. A real issue in the middle when you’re in the middle.

Craig: So this is something that the Writers Guild had a big deal with the companies and we kind of went up to the edge of a strike with. So the old way of doing things, if you became a writer, a new writer, and you worked on staff at a show like Nashville, which was a classic network show, 22 episodes a year, you were paid per episode usually some sort of producing fee or consulting or something per episode. You got your episodes that you wrote. They had a rerun. Those generated a lot of extra money for you.

Now they cut that in half or even less. Sometimes it’s just eight episodes. That’s all you’re getting paid. But the amount of time you spend on it gets expanded so essentially what was a living at a certain number has been quartered in some senses by this evolution that we all kind of love as consumers. But as writers it’s become a real problem. It’s a real squeeze.

Wendy: Yeah. It’s an interesting conundrum because on the one hand side I love what digital has done in terms of democratizing our ability to distribute content. On the other hand side, this digital revolution is led by disruptors and they are disrupting the content creators so that they can have content for their technology.

John: Nicole, what are you seeing? So right now you are doing Captain Marvel, so it’s going to be a giant Disney/Marvel/Touchstone, or Guardians of the Galaxy. That is a big movie that gets a big theatrical release. It has a whole residual life to it.

Nicole: I mean, yeah, all the movies, the hope is that you’ll make a lot of money and the residuals and that will sort of make up for all the pain and suffering that goes into the writing process. But I haven’t written for television and frankly I’m so in the dark about all of it. I always assumed that my reps would warn me about it. And then just talking to you guys out in the hallway they’re like, oh, that company that you’re pitching for, yeah, that’s rough. And I was like, what? Wait, what?

And it’s not that I haven’t been paying attention, but I haven’t been paying attention.

John: And one of the challenges, so classically what Wendy is describing is a thing that’s been happening to TV writers over a period of time. But increasingly it’s happening to feature writers, too. So I went in to meet on a project at Fox, a big Fox movie. And my question was like but, wait, will there still be a Fox? Where does this movie go? And so you ask this question and they’re like, well, we’re not sure. I’m like, wait, is this going to go to the Disney streaming thing? They’re like “Maybe.”

And so I said like, OK, on one hand it’s going to be great if the thing got made. But then I’m thinking like, wait, then there are no residuals because then it never goes anywhere else. And so then it’s only showing up on Disney. It’s like, wait, then I don’t have a back end. Or that thing that I had in my deal with like box office bonuses if it crosses a certain threshold, well, there’s no box office, so it all goes away.

Phil, have you encountered that in any of your deals yet? Have you started looking at feature stuff where it’s like you don’t know where the feature is going to end up? Like you just did Destroyer. It was an indie movie. So you didn’t know who the distributor was going in.

Phil: Yeah, I mean, I think that if you make independent movies you’re comfortable with the idea that you don’t know what that end is. And that you don’t know if the movie that you’ve made and intended to be released in theaters is going to ever be released in theaters because for example Netflix has the power to take whatever they want. So, had we – we were fortunate that we’re with the distributor Annapurna that is committed to releasing movies in theaters. But we were well aware that Netflix could have at any time decided to take the movie because of the amount of money that they offered and there was not much you could do.

And many people are thrilled with that actually, but I think when I think about some of the stuff we’re talking about what strikes me is that there’s a real short-sidedness that is happening with the kind of business strategy that’s going on that I think is extremely inhumane and very brutal. And there’s sort of I think maybe a culture that certainly in Hollywood and in Silicon Valley that kind of values brutality. That there’s some truth to that. There’s some core Hobbesian thing that they’re chasing. When in fact I think that when we talk about the demise of the middle class of writers that the idea that it’s very short-sided to kill the ability of people to develop and to be able to create the things that are going to make you a lot of money. Because people have options, right? I mean, you know, I grew up wanting to be a screenwriter and people grew up wanting to be TV writers and people still want to do that because there is something truly magical and special about it.

But people can do other stuff, right? And the business as a whole has an interest in keeping people able to have a life and a family and develop their craft to then create stuff that makes money. And I’m afraid that now all the opportunities are at the very beginning level, which is great because you need those opportunities, and at the very, very top level. And if you’re at that level that’s great because you can do those things. But that part in the middle that we’ve talked about for several years and seems to be accelerating, I think it’s beyond a business problem. It’s a societal problem. It’s not valuing the ability to make a living at something, and to develop, and to work, and thus you’re going to drive talented people into other businesses. And that’s my biggest worry for us as a business.

Craig: Yep. And my guess is they won’t stop until they start feeling the impact of it, of their loss of talent. I mean, for you guys the thing to understand about the way a career in television – because television is just statistically where you will get your start. They just make a thousand television shows now. Netflix will have 700 titles. 700 original Netflix titles. It’s insane.

So, they’re making thousands of these TV shows across these new platforms. But traditionally television writers, the people that ran the show, these were the big guys, the big guns, and they were the new writers. But the bulk of people kind of – what they would do is they would get a job working on a show. And maybe if the money they paid you to write a script or two or work on that show wasn’t quite enough to afford to live in a place like Los Angeles, which is expensive, there were these residuals. That was the reuse money. When they would do reruns you would get this extra money and it would keep you going and you could raise a family and support a family and send your kids to college. The American dream.

And what they’ve done – and I think part of it is what Phil is saying, it’s a Silicon Valley, well, humans are just meat and computers are computing. Like we don’t care. They’ve eliminated a lot of that rolling support. So you now are hand to mouth. And when you are hand to mouth you tend to, I think, emphasize younger workers, newer workers who are willing to deal with it. And then when they get to a certain point if they don’t have their own show they look around and go I can’t make a living at this.

John: I think what you’re describing is that in some ways the proliferation of all these services and all the shows mean there are more jobs, total number of jobs, for writers. And so in many ways people entering the business like there’s more spots open, there’s more chairs. The thing is you’re not advancing because the shows don’t go on, or they’re only half a season so you’re jumping from show to show. It’s very hard to build up from one to the next. Agents aren’t pushing to advance your quote so your quote is how much you got paid on your last job, how much you’re getting paid on your next job. There’s not an incentive to sort of keep pushing your quote up. And so it makes it harder and harder to grow up the ranks of a business.

Wendy: I thought it was really interesting the fact that linking, I mean, maybe it’s obvious, but linking back that Netflix doesn’t release data on how well your show is doing, it takes away a leverage that you might have to say this is a top three rated show that you have. We deserve to be getting paid more. You can’t say that if there’s no data to point to.

Jason: I think everything everyone is saying is spot on.

Craig: Thank you. Thank you, Jason.

Jason: It’s probably something that the guild – particularly you Craig.

Craig: Thank you. I agree.

Jason: But isn’t there a certain component of this that’s organically also going to tilt a little bit in our favor? What you said, John, or Craig, you said 700 Netflix shows, so it feels like there’s this proliferation of material, but really it’s not competitive because you can’t very well tell Netflix you’re going to go off and do this other Netflix show. It’s still them.

As the studios all develop their own streaming platforms, right, Disney over the top has won. But at a certain point Time Warner has already announced it. It’s going to make sense for all of these studios to develop streaming platforms. There’s also going to be a proliferation of competition. I’m not saying that’s going to be enough to create a playing field where we can negotiate fair deals, but I also think it will help level the playing field a little bit.

John: I have a very specific question for you, because on a previous panel you were saying how you developed this new project with a director, you were very excited to do it, like it was a shared interest, a piece of property that you guys did together. As you have developed that property did you say like oh we want to go to a studio, or were you open to the idea of going to a Netflix, of going to an Amazon, or going to an Apple rather than going to a studio? Because it changes the equation of what that is.

John: The project he’s referring to is Robotech, which I’m writing for Sony and Andy Muschietti is directing. No, it wasn’t a conversation on that because Sony controlled the rights. It was something we knew Sony had and had been developing. So it wasn’t–

John: But if Sony wanted to do it for a Sony streaming platform would it have been as interesting to you?

Jason: For me it would have. I can’t speak for Andy. For me, I’m still in shock at the opportunities that I have. Robotech is a property that I loved. I loved the series growing up. So, yeah, for me the creative would have driven me to do that regardless of whether maybe it was a less financially rewarding situation. But I think it’s something we’re all going to face. I mean, as I’m developing more original stuff, it’s a big conversation with filmmakers. Do you want theatrical or not? Does it matter? Does it have to be a theatrical experience? And every writer is going to have to make their own choice.

Craig: I’m kind of curious what you guys think. I hate to do the Applause-o-meter but if you think that something means more because it’s in a theater as opposed to being on a streaming platform please applaud if it means more. OK. Now, if you don’t really care one way or the other whether it comes through a streaming platform in television or if it’s in theater, please applaud.

Interesting. Now. You do that six years ago, that’s everybody in the first applause, no one in the second applause.

John: So I’m here at the Austin Film Festival, but I’m also here at the Texas Book Festival which happens to be the same weekend. And so for Arlo Finch I’m doing all the book events for that. And so this morning at 7:20 in the morning a van picked me up and I went to a grade school and I talked to 300 kids about Arlo Finch and did my little slideshow. It was great. I’m really tired now.

But, I asked the same question. And so there’s been a lot of talk about will you do Arlo Finch as a movie or as a TV series, and so I polled the audience. I did the same thing. You don’t let kids clap. They had to raise their hand quietly. And so I asked them “Should Arlo Finch be a movie or like a Netflix show?” And it was pretty evenly split.

Craig: And so I’m glad that some of the kids knew what a movie was. That’s very good.

John: Yeah, exactly. What’s a movie?

Craig: A theater?

John: A recurring topic that will be a topic on Scriptnotes for the next however long we do the show is what is a movie? We talk about like is a movie a piece of entertainment that’s about two hours long that is a one-time story? Probably, because right now we have these definitions of what a movie is versus what a TV movie is for Netflix, which are just ridiculous. They don’t match reality at all.

Phil: But I think it’s a cultural. It’s not just the responsibility of the people making the stuff, or the people distributing the stuff, because you know what I would say as a person who is a diehard believer in the theatrical experience. It’s just what I love. But to look at it and say that it’s really the responsibility of people who write about movies, people that talk about movies. For example, right now I would say – and this may be changing really fast – but I’d say right now a TV show on Netflix, there’s no difference in the culture between a TV show on Netflix and a TV show anywhere else. It is not less than, it is not different than. It just is.

For some reason, and I think it’s because maybe the critical establishment or maybe the press doesn’t treat them the same, a movie that’s on Netflix is not quite the same. And that can change. That just takes the culture changing to kind of embrace and treat them the same way. So that’s the thing that I’m interested in seeing is if the people that kind of keep the culture alive decide that there’s no difference between a movie that is streaming only versus a movie that appears in theaters for however long it does. That will be different. There’s power in that in itself.

Jason: Is that also just a qualitative distinction? Like the reason that there’s no difference between a Netflix show and a broadcast show or cable show, I think, is because it’s just so good. Right? There’s started to become content on streaming and Netflix–?

Craig: Wendy hates what you just said.

Jason: No, no, no, but there were so many shows–

Wendy: That’s a relative opinion though, isn’t it?

Craig: Finally a fight.

Jason: It’s all a relative opinion. But didn’t – there started to become content on streaming that people were really excited about and so people started to take it seriously because they loved it. And I think that it’s not to say there aren’t films particularly in the last year like Roma that have come out in streaming, but I suspect that as there are more great films on streaming platforms, perhaps that will change people’s opinions just a little bit of what a streaming two-hour film could be.

Craig: In rebuttal–

Wendy: Having developed for both Netflix and broadcast television–

John: The expert in the room.

Craig: Here we go.

Wendy: They’re very, very different. They’re completely different. They have totally different models about how they approach content and about the kind of content they want to create. Typically what I find is when I’m developing with a streamer or with a cable, they want to do something that is absolutely the opposite of what’s happening on broadcast. And when I’m developing with broadcast, which by the way I’m developing two at this very moment, they are still playing by an old rule book.

So, I’m not going to say necessarily that what you’re saying like all of Netflix’s content is great, because I think some people here beg to differ.

Jason: No, I don’t think it is.

Wendy: You can’t have that volume and have that much greatness. But there is still something to really be said for broadcast. I mean, I love developing in broadcast and I’ll tell you why. I do believe that the Netflix, let’s call it a revolution, is changing the landscape of what kind of stories can be told and how much an audience can absorb and how smart audiences can be. And that is something that the broadcasters are catching up to fast.

There’s a reason that Fox gave us 12 extra weeks in the room, because they know how impossible it is to write a series in the short amount of window that was that traditional broadcast model. Right? A lot of times if you were on a broadcast show you would start writing in May and you had to start shooting by July. So they realize that that time crunch was an issue.

And, you know, people that are working on Netflix shows, they may be developing for a year before that show is even shot. I mean, it could go on forever.

John: Yeah. But in developing for a year, the extra time in Empire, the extra year for Netflix, that’s costing you as a writer money.

Wendy: It’s costing us money. Absolutely.

Craig: They’re penalizing you for the care you put into your own show.

Wendy: That’s right. And people say this all the time. I’m not the first person to say this. They say well the quality of shows, these shows are winning all these Emmys. OK, I got an opinion about that, too. But, winning all these Emmys versus broadcast and it is true. And broadcast is a completely different monster that you’re playing with. You are on a train that you’ve got to deliver every week a certain amount of content that is not equal to what’s happening on Netflix or even FX or anything.

Craig: And Nicole you were ready to jump in there as well.

Nicole: I was just going to say exactly what Wendy said. Not at all.

Wendy: Now that you got me fired up. Now that my Coca Cola has kicked in. Coca Cola.

John: Coca Cola, nothing more. Well, we need to move on to a craft topic that everyone can relate to. So we’re not all going to be making TV shows, but we’re all going to be writing stuff.

Craig: Most of these people will be making TV shows.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: If Netflix continues at this rate.

John: Everyone in this room.

Craig: Almost everyone here will have a TV show.

John: As you walk out, please pick up your No Writing Left Behind sticker and your Netflix deal.

Craig: You will all work for Hulu.

John: This was a tweet that was sent to me and to Craig. Nicola Prigg tweeted, “Is there any storytelling reason why we get bored during an episode of television? Or why we feel a story is slow in a movie?”

So Craig and I both saw this tweet. Craig said, “Yes, that’s a good topic for an episode.”

Craig: Yeah. Do something about it, John.

John: And so I said, yes, let me put it in the outline where we actually keep these ideas for episodes.

Craig: He’s scolding me now. Because I’m lazy. But it worked.

John: But Nicola Prigg actually had a really good topic. So why sometimes as you’re watching TV or watching a movie–

Craig: Or reading a script.

John: Or reading a script, yeah, which is the prototype to sort of both of these. I’m bored. And this actually happened to me this last week. I was talking to a writer-director about his script, which I loved, but I had to say like, starting at about page 45 I got kind of bored until we got to this moment. And I could describe exactly why it was. And so I want to talk with this panel here, as you’re watching a movie, as you’re reading a script, the things that get you bored.

And so I can tell you what happened to me was the writer had set up that in like two days this thing is going to be happening. And so once he established that landmark, like this is a thing we’re going to be watching for, everything that wasn’t that was kind of filler and felt boring to me. So that was a reason why I was getting bored in that script. As you’re reading–

Phil: I know the answer, John.

John: Tell me why you get bored.

Craig: Came out of the gate very strong there. You have nothing. Got nothing.

Phil: No. I think that one of the best pieces of advice I ever got about writing in classic form, I don’t remember who gave me this advice, but I remember the advice. And the advice was to get rid of everything in your script that seems remotely obligatory. And so I think people get bored when they smell that there’s something even in a well-written, engaging, funny, interesting script something obligatory is happening. We have to show that this is a good person. We have to show that they’re really worried about this. Any statement that starts with we have to do this, and I think you hear when you work with people, a lot of times you hear that exact verbiage. We have to see this. We have to see this. We have to know that.

Sometimes that feeling, sometimes you do have to know stuff, yes, but to me that’s the thing like if I’m watching a movie or I’m reading a script, when I get bored is when I can smell that the person is doing it because they think they have to. And the scene is over and it’s not over because there’s still a little bit more – we have to show how nice this guy is now, or something.

So I think the word obligatory is what always comes to me as boring.

Craig: I think that’s good advice.

John: So that sense of like you’re doing a thing because you feel like you need to do it rather than you want to do it. There’s not an excitement. And there’s no curiosity from the reader because—

Phil: They see it coming. They’ve already seen this story.

Craig: The calculation is evident right. When you’re reading it you go, oh, they’re doing that thing because they feel that they have to do the thing. That immediately is boring. And it’s probably a sign that you didn’t need to do the thing at all.

Phil: And maybe the remedy or the experiment doesn’t work every time is to try to do exactly the opposite and see what happens because sometimes that does work. To truly deny the thing that everyone has told you to do could. So just even as an experiment in your writing, I mean, I found that helpful in our writing is to sometimes do the thing that’s the opposite and see what happens.

Craig: Nicole, you are particularly good at entertaining me, in particular. And you’re not at all boring, you’re the opposite of a boring writer to me. What are you doing to avoid being boring and what are worried about when you read things and you go, oh, it’s happening?

Nicole: Of my own work?

Craig: No, of other people’s. You are never boring.

Nicole: Well, so I read a lot of scripts because I mentor a lot, so I do a lot of work with Sundance and with SF Film and with Sun Foundation. And so I’ve read a lot of scripts that I would say, there’re a few things. I mean, I could speak many things of this. But one is when the writer doesn’t trust the reader to be following them, and so it’s not breadcrumbs, it’s like loaves of bread being heaved at you. And you’re like, yes, I get that they have an issue with their mother. OK. This is like the fourth time you told us. So obviously the thing with the girlfriend is going to echo the mother. We know. And then you’re just waiting for it to happen.

And I think a lot of times I’m sitting around reading a script waiting for them to get to the part where the story really should start. Or just like get past the thing that is the big reveal that we all saw coming. So I would say people who don’t trust their reader to be more subtle or to be more complex or sophisticated. Or they’re just telling us too much. Shoe leather I think can be really boring. A lot of the like how did they get from this file that they found on the desk, and then they have to go to the gas station to talk to the guy. And a lot of the times it’s just following a paint-by-numbers kind of thing and it’s just not that interesting because there’s not necessarily any compelling emotion or conflict that’s inherent in that scene. They’re just sort of following a to do list. And so then we feel like we’re reading somebody’s to do list.

And the other thing I would say is that as much as I love research and I’m a big research fan, I think I’ve read a lot of scripts especially because I frequently am given science-based stories that are just like there’s an interesting fact that I’m going to shoe-horn in there that isn’t that interesting. And it’s like maybe if I was reading it in a game of Trivial Pursuit, but not in the second act reversal.

Phil: And just to add to that, I think that what you’re saying is so right because I think a lot of times there’s a false value that has kind of taken hold which is no one should ever be confused for even a second. No one should ever wonder for a second. Or just think, whoa, what, for a second. That there’s this weird impulse that everything has to be explained. It doesn’t come from us. It comes from other people.

Craig: Them.

Phil: But that idea that it can be fun and entertaining to sit in not knowing and wondering. It’s a whole concept called suspense. That’s a great concept but that is kind of weirdly under attack all the time, with the fear that the audience will just be so mad that they don’t know right that second. And I just don’t believe in that, but I know that there’s a lot of people who do. And so I think a lot of the stuff that you’re talking about is exactly that. That people are trying to cover all their bases and make sure no one is ever wondering for a second. And to me wondering is an amazing thing. That’s a great thing.

Craig: Wendy?

Wendy: Sure.

Craig: Love of my life.

Wendy: Hello. What’s your number? Just kidding.

Craig: I just love, “Wendy, love of my life” is the greatest movie quote of all time. Any time I hear your name I’m like, “Wendy, love of my life.” You guys know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

Wendy: The Shining.

Craig: Thank you, Wendy. The Shining. I’m not being creepy. I mean, I am.

John: We’re in a hotel.

Craig: I mean, I’m being creepy a la The Shining.

Wendy: A couple of things. When I go into a writers’ room and we are breaking the story for an episode of television, I’m going to stick with broadcast because the gauntlet has been thrown down there. So, in broadcast television, which millions upon millions of people watch–

Craig: Do it. Keep going.

Wendy: Maybe less than five years ago.

Craig: Yes.

Wendy: But there’s still a lot of people who don’t pay for content and want to watch it for free and don’t bother watching a tampon commercial. OK, so.

Craig: You’re the villain of the podcast now.

Jason: Just to clarify, I was not taking down broadcast.

Craig: No, no, no, it’s too late. It’s too late. You’ve been defined.

Wendy: He likes the conflict. And that’s actually what this is all about.

Craig: I love conflict.

Wendy: This is where I’m going. I always go into the room when we’re breaking a new episode and I say, OK everybody, what is the climax of this story. Show me the climax. I want to see what’s happening at that act five break. And I drive people bananas because they’re like, well, we want to talk about the teaser. And we have an idea–

John: You have act breaks. That’s a crucial difference in broadcast. You have act breaks that you’re building up to.

Wendy: Yes. And if you have story blocks that don’t service that climax, bye. It’s not here. We’re not using that. And, by the way, it takes me a while to get there. As a writer I’m very honest about this. What I find in my drafts as I go along is I’ll just – I don’t know, we’re in Texas so I’ll use a gun analogy because ya’ll understand that.

So like, OK, imagine you’re at target practice, right. You’ve got your gun. You’re looking down range. So, what I find in my scripts, especially the first few drafts, is that I’ve shot all around the middle target. Like the scenes are almost there, but they’re not quite there. And when I hit the bullseye, damn, you know that’s not boring. Right? So to me that’s really how I feel. I often say what is the highest point of drama that I can find in this story I’m trying to tell and then what are the highest points of drama that will get me to that place.

And so that’s how I keep it from getting boring.

Craig: That’s kind of where I’m at. Well done. And I think when I’m reading something and I get bored, or when I’m watching something and I get bored it’s because the show has decided to take a break, or the movie has taken a break. And what I mean by that is there is a propulsion going on. Somebody needs something. At all points something must be done about something, or someone. And then another thing happens that makes it really hard, or really surprising. But every now and then a show will take a break and go, OK, let’s just have a chat. Or, you know what, I want to tell you what I think. That’s a break.

I don’t want it. Even when people – sometimes you’ll have that moment in a movie where someone will sit down and there will be a little fireside chat of some kind and someone will start telling a story, but you don’t get bored because there’s a meaning to the story that impacts the end. Case in point, Gandalf sits down at one point. They are lost in the mines of Moria. And little Frodo notices that Gollum has been following and he says, “Oh, Gollum has been following me.” “Yes, he’s been following us for a long time.”

And then they have this very long – this is an action-packed movie and now it’s just two people talking. But what it comes down to is Frodo says, “I just wish I were not alive right now.” And he says, “It’s not our choice to determine when we’re alive. It’s only our choice to determine what we do with the time we have.” That is literally the theme of the entire series and it is why in the end the end happens the way the end happens. That is not a boring scene.

Right? Because they understood if you dare stop and take a break you better deliver something that matters. OK? If you dare to stop it’s got to be amazing. Like that. Just so you know, write Gollum.

John: So that’s a quiet moment. But so often I get bored during really loud moments. So like a bunch of stuff, like cities are being destroyed, and I’m like I’m just so bored. And because I’m not watching characters do anything that I care about. I’m just watching stuff happen. And it’s basically they’ve stopped actually the story of the movie just to show a bunch of special effects. And you can only take so much of that. It’s just like, no, I’m done, let’s get onto the next – stop. Stop destroying the buildings.

Craig: How many buildings can you blow up? At some point there’s just enough–

John: So many it turns out.

Craig: Oh no, the city is, again with the buildings. And I also think about the insurance adjustors.

John: Yeah. That poor man.

Craig: Or just like people that erect and take down scaffolding. There’s so much work to be done.

John: There’s a lot of work to be done. So, Jason, I wanted to get to you because you have done some of the big smashy things. So, can you give us any suggestions for a bunch of smashy stuff is happening, what are you doing to keep us engaged during the smashy-smashy bits?

Jason: I think the thing about broadcast is…

Wendy: Bring it.

Craig: You’re so funny. You’re so funny.

Jason: When you’re writing these big action sequences I think it’s very easy for audiences to tune out. It’s very easy for it to become about the logistics, about sort of the physics of what’s going on and the visual effects. And it just has to be about character. And it’s so rare that you have big action sequences that are driven by character. And I think Nicole you did something really brilliant with the finale set piece of Guardians of the Galaxy where it’s just about this group finally learning to trust each other and to work as one. And so it really is just a group of friends who all got thrown together, or hate each other, trying to figure out how not to for one moment.

And the stuff that’s going on around them is cool and beautiful and James Gunn does an amazing job of visualizing it, but it really does feel like it’s just a character piece. That’s what I aspired to do with Wonder Woman. And I think it all stems, you know, to your earlier question about why audiences get bored when they get bored. I think a big part of it is familiarity. And everyone was sort of hinting at the same thing which is lack of faith in the audience.

And I think audiences are ready for smaller act three set pieces. I think an example, well, World War Z is a movie that’s not necessarily beloved.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: So World War Z is a great lesson because initially the climax of World War Z was a massive action set piece that took place in Moscow.

Jason: Big Red Square finale set piece.

Craig: Where Brad Pitt faced off against waves of Russian zombies, which we wouldn’t know anything about now today, but when it was revised it was determined that actually Brad Pitt versus one zombie.

Jason: And it works way better because it’s character.

Craig: Much better.

Jason: But I think underestimating – we’re still I feel like–

Phil: Would have loved to see a sky portal in that opening.

Jason: Sky portal would have been nice.

Phil: Just for me.

Craig: Just one portal.

Jason: But I do think we’re still a little bit behind the audiences in big studio feature film land. I think audiences have gotten so smart and so willing to experience different things from characters. And it’s not just about, I think confusion is a good point. There’s a real aversion to allowing audiences to live in that space of confusion which I think is valuable as he was saying. But I also think audiences are able to process complicated characters. I think probably all of us, or at least maybe this is just me, you get the note about characters being likeable. Your hero being likeable.

Craig: Oh, that’s the worst note.

Jason: Heroic enough. And that’s boring.

Craig: Never do that. Never do that.

Jason: People can be unlikeable.

Craig: If anyone ever says to you your character is not likeable, you say thank you.

Phil: And even worse if they say the word relatable. Because honestly, you know, we just made a movie about a character who is not likeable and not relatable. And the only thing that’s important to me is if you think the character is interesting. That’s all that matters.

Wendy: And now add gender and race to that equation. Tell me. You know what I’m saying.

Phil: Exactly.

Wendy: It’s very, very different.

Phil: Exactly.

John: You can’t throw that out there and not do anything more with that.

Craig: What else is there to say? She said gender and race. End of discussion.

John: End of discussion.

Wendy: If you don’t know what that means I can’t help you.

Phil: But relatable to who, likeable by who.

Wendy: Exactly. Exactly. Who says what’s relatable? Who says what’s likeable?

Craig: There we go.

John: There it is. I wanted some closure on that moment. This next moment–

Phil: You did it again. Perfectly.

John: Is a moment we’ve been waiting for for 370 episodes perhaps. So this is about a character who is perhaps relatable.

Craig: Not likeable.

John: Not always likeable. Not always entirely consistent. But it’s a character who we’ve all come to know really, really well. So this is a new game we’re going to play tonight called Why is Craig So Mad?

So, one of the things we did very early from the start of Scriptnotes is we have transcripts of every episode. So I can Google words to see certain words. Words like “angry,” or “umbrage.” And so what I did yesterday–

Craig: Or “fucking.”

John: Is I went through and I looked through the transcripts to find examples of like Craig being angry. And the question is would even Craig remember what he was angry about. So, in previous years we’ve brought a person out from the audience to guess. When I showed this to Craig, Craig had no idea so Craig will be the contestant and the host of this.

So, we’re going to take things, real things from the transcripts and Craig is going to have to figure out what he was so angry about. And our panelists here, so you have this Why is Craig So Mad? And so we’ll be reading down A, B, C, and D so you’ll be offering these alternatives.

This is from Episode 34, way early on. Episode Umbrage Farms. Craig, can you reenact your speech here?

Craig: The thought that you would poison your show with somebody because their daddy was somebody is insane and inane. I mean, I don’t know, I haven’t watched the show. Obviously you do and you like it. I haven’t seen it yet.

John: All right. What is Craig so angry about? Option A.

Wendy: Now do I read the parenthesis as well or no?

John: Including the parenthesis, yeah.

Wendy: OK. He’s really angry about Zoey Deschanel on New Girl. Her father is acclaimed cinematographer Caleb Deschanel.

John: Or Option B?

Phil: He’s actually angry about Allison Williams on Girls. Her father is disgraced news anchor Brian Williams.

John: Or is it Option C?

Nicole: Angelina Jolie in Girl Interrupted. Her father is wackadoodle actor Jon Voight.

John: Or is it Option D?

Jason: Jason Ritter, in Another Period. His father is actor John Ritter, rest in peace. Why did I get the sad one?

John: So, Craig, talk us through your mental process here.

Jason: Tonal train wrecks in this show.

Craig: By process of elimination it can’t be Jason Ritter because it can’t be. That would be crazy. I can’t imagine that happening. Who would dare question lovely Jason Ritter? And I can’t imagine Angeline Jolie. I’m torn between Zoey Deschanel and Allison Williams. I’m going to go with Allison Williams on Girls.

John: You are correct. It is Allison Williams on Girls.

Craig: I’m so proud of myself for guessing something I said once.

John: Indeed. Zosia Mamet would also have counted for the same thing. All right, by the way, I should say you weren’t angry at her. You were angry at people who were angry at her being cast on the show.

Craig: Correct. Correct. I was in support of Allison Williams.

John: Yes. Next up is Episode 305. Forever Young and Stupid. Craig, take it away.

Craig: Second of all… [laughs] You can see by Episode 305 I had really fallen into my kind of rhythm. Second of all, screenwriters working in the feature business, I mean, the people that are constantly telling us, hey, things have to change are directors. And now directors are just shocked. Hey, it’s the same deal with us. You took a check. You did something as a work-for-hire piece. Shut up. Piss off.

John: What is Craig so angry about?

Craig: I don’t know.

John: Option A?

Wendy: Sony’s plan to sell clean versions of its movies with none of that upside down kissing in Spider Man.

John: Or B.

Phil: Bryan Singer complaining that he was fired off Bohemian Rhapsody after, you know, not showing up for days at a time.

John: Or Option C.

Nicole: Louis C.K.’s movie, I Love You Daddy, being pulled from theaters after Louis C.K. pulled his dick out.

John: Or Option D.

Jason: DGA complaints about Netflix not showing director credits on the ten thousand billboards they buy around Los Angeles.

John: Craig Mazin, which of these things were you so angry about?

Craig: Oh no. Sony’s plan to sell clean versions of its movies?

John: Craig was right!

Craig: Again, I’m so bizarrely proud of something that should just be normal.

John: Yeah, so I don’t even know, did Sony do the clean versions? I don’t know. But we talked about it.

All right, last one. So Craig has two so far.

Craig: Two out of three. Basic memory, yeah.

John: Absolutely. Episode 221, Nobody Knows Anything Including What this Quote Means.

Craig: Because you’re a good person – I’m talking about you – because you’re a good person. You know, here’s the difference between you and me. A good person sees something that is deserving of vomit and says I don’t understand. Those words don’t fit together. I’m puzzled. I will take a nap. The bad person says I am filled with rage because I can see the bad conscience behind this.

John: What is Craig so angry about? Is it?

Wendy: Warvey Heinstein? Or, I’m sorry, Harvey Weinstein.

John: Harvey Weinstein. Or is it, B?

Phil: Final Draft!

John: Is it C?

Nicole: College students protesting Kimberly Peirce.

Craig: Ooh.

John: Or is it D?

Jason: The Blue Cat Screenplay Competition.

Craig: Shit.

John: That’s a hard one. I got a good one for this last one.

Craig: I mean, they’re all really good. God, it would be so depressing if it was the Blue Cat Screenplay Competition. I got to go with an old chestnut here. Final Draft.

John: It was the Blue Cat Screenplay Competition! Oh, Craig, you almost won the whole game.

Wendy: You’ve got to trust your gut.

Craig: You’re right.

Wendy: Trust your gut.

Craig: Never change your answer.

John: Yeah. You could have won the Showcase Showdown. Instead you gave it up at the end.

Craig: Could have spun the big wheel. Dammit. That’s great. I’m smart. “A good person sees something that is deserving of vomit.” That’s great.

John: We have transcripts for the whole thing. If you listen to the show or read the transcripts you would have an idea of what our show actually is.

Craig: I just finally got why they listen to the show.

John: Yeah. Sometimes it’s funny.

Craig: It’s actually quite entertaining.

John: Yeah. With some planning it sometimes works out pretty well.

Craig: You guys aren’t crazy. This makes sense.

John: We have time for some questions. So, who would like to raise your hand to ask a question?

Hello, what’s your name?

Atticus: Atticus.

John: Atticus like Atticus Finch?

Atticus: Yeah.

John: All right. Very nice.

Atticus: So my question has to do with like writing for TV and streaming and stuff like that, like the difference. So, with the culture of like binge-watching shows now where like on Netflix and streaming stuff you can do a whole season in a day, like do you have to tailor your writing of a TV series differently nowadays?

Craig: That is a great question.

John: Yeah, because you do that.

Craig: That is a really good question. It deserves commendation. It does. You guys have been around these festivals. They’re not always good.

John: So let’s talk about why that was a good question. So that is a good question because it speaks to the expertise that people have on the stage. That’s always good. It is a thing that will be generally interesting to everybody else around you. That’s another good thing.

Craig: Also, there’s something very real and craft about the way that has changed. So, I’m going to start with you here on this one and maybe you have the full answer to this one, Wendy, because you are primarily working in network where you do write week by week, but have you written anything in the binge space?

Wendy: Yes.

Craig: So do you do it differently?

Wendy: Yes.

Craig: Tell us.

Wendy: The companies that make binge product [laughs] really believe that their audience will sit through probably the first three episodes before a major incident happens. That’s very different from network television, where we have about 15 minutes. So that’s a completely different way of thinking. So, that extra two to three hours allows you to develop character, place, set a world that in broadcast your window is about that big. So, you can imagine then the type of choices you can make as a writer.

So, when you’re writing in broadcast and you’ve only got 15 minutes to sell it, you have to go right for the punches. And when you’re doing something on a streamer you can take your time with it. You can flow with it. You can let it go a little looser.

Craig: And you’ve got, I guess the most helpful tool in your tool belt to ensure that somebody comes back seven days later because they don’t have another episode to watch is the cliffhanger.

Wendy: Right. Right. I mean, both models use the cliffhanger. That’s for sure. Because they do want you to keep watching. But I would say that on the streamers, because they do slow it down so much – sometimes too much if you ask me. Sometimes I’m not willing to invest that amount of money. Money, ha. Time. Time is money. What am I saying? But you know what I mean. So it is interesting, because it does change the way you approach the story. It changes the way you approach the season because when you’re making the season and you’re not having the constant interaction of an audience that comes through social media or through ratings or through any kind of, you know, that sort of constant interaction that you have when you have a show that’s on week to week, and you’re making it in a bubble and you’re going to release all of them at the same time you can really approach your storytelling in a much different way.

I know that the way they try to emulate is they imagine that it’s – if you’ve got ten episodes you think of it as a long feature. Right? So your first act break is actually the third episode. Second act break is actually towards the seventh or eighth episode.

Craig: All right.

John: So another episode you might want to listen to, Stephen Schiff came on and we talked about The Americans. And so The Americans is a show that kind of feels like it was streaming, but it was a week to week show. And so they talked a lot about the previously ons and sort of how you have to build in the expectation like a person could be watching them all at once or the person is watching them week by week and you have to make sure that they’re caught up in a way that’s different. Because classically on Netflix there’s no previously on. It just assumes that you’ve watched all of them all together.

Another question. Who has a question?

Male Voice: Hi. After writing so many successful comedies, how did you come to Chernobyl and what was the experience like?

Craig: And who is that question for?

Male Voice: For the whole panel. And when do we get to see it?

Craig: Thank you for asking. Don’t know when I’m allowed to say.

John: Not when it comes out, but you can say why you wrote it.

Craig: It will be coming out next year. Not past the halfway point. The first half of next year.

The way I came about writing it is, I mean, the thing is it doesn’t matter the other stuff I wrote. Like Phil for instance writes all sorts of stuff. I don’t know if you saw The Invitation. It’s a wonderful movie that he wrote with Matt Manfredi and Karyn Kusama directed. It’s a fantastic movie. It is not at all like for instance Ride Along. But he also wrote Ride Along.

I generally think that people that write funny things can do anything. I like the Vince Gilligan method of hiring funny people to play dramatic parts. But I’ve always been interested in not funny things. It’s just that they were mostly paying me to write funny things, so I just did what I could. But probably Chernobyl is the most me thing I’ve ever done. So, really I guess it was just me being me. There you go.

John: You being you. We have time for one more question. So, right behind him is a gentleman who is wearing a shirt. Great, you, sir. The gentleman in a shirt. That’s a really specific thing. You sir, what is your name?

Christian: Christian.

John: Hi Christian. What is your question?

Christian: OK, so Oscars are coming up, award season. What’s one screenplay for each of you that you hope gets nominated, besides your own?

John: I would hope that Black Panther gets nominated, because Black Panther is fantastic. And it’s a fantastically well-made movie, but it’s also a great script. And so Joe Robert Cole and the director also deserve huge credits for how good the writing was in that. I’m trying to think of another – there’s other good stuff, I just wasn’t thinking about what was great this year.

Craig: Oscars are coming up now already? Didn’t we just do them?

John: No. I know it feels like we did.

Craig: I so don’t care.

John: Yeah. Franklin was the show and we talked about like we just don’t care about the awards.

Craig: I mean, I just like movies. The whole rat race of it all. I mean, I know people do get into and everything. I just wish – I love the way the AFI does it where they’re just like it’s 2018. Here are ten movies we loved. Let’s celebrate these ten movies. They’re great. Instead of like pitting them against each other in a fight. But that’s just – oh, probably also because I’m never going to get an Oscar so it’s easy for me to say that, isn’t it. To be like oh Oscars, blech.

John: Can I punt your question a little bit and say that one of – the only good thing I will say about the whole award season bullshit is that the studios all publish their scripts. And so you as writers who are like curious about screenplays–

Craig: Oh, that is true. This is good.

John: You can now read all the screenplays. And like us growing up, it was hard to find screenplays–

Craig: Is there an app that they could read those on?

John: You could read it on Weekend Read, for example. So, Megan, is also going to be putting all of those scripts as they become available up on Weekend Read. So that’s a place you can read them, but you can also find the PDFs other places, too.

Read good scripts. You should also read some terrible scripts so you can understand what never works in scripts. But reading really good screenplays is a great way sort of to develop those muscles and sort of see like, oh, I should aspire to do these really good things. And you see like what it looks like on the page before it becomes the movie.

Craig: I feel like there should be one more question.

John: There should be one more question because I kind of punted that question.

Craig: Can maybe not a dude ask the last one?

John: Which woman in the audience – this young woman right here has raised her hand. She’s wearing a–

Craig: A shirt.

John: She’s wearing a shirt.

Female Voice: I’m also wearing a shirt.

John: All right. People in shirts. But it’s the same color. Is that an Austin Film Festival shirt?

Female Voice: No, it’s just palm trees.

John: Because that is the Austin Film Festival color. The official staff are wearing those shirts.

Female Voice: Oh that’s true. Please don’t ask me anything. I don’t know anything.

John: All right. But you have a question for us.

Female Voice: So my question is at this level of your writing I hear a lot of you guys talking about assignments and I want to know how often, I don’t know, weekly or if it’s maybe daily, you get to work on your kind of pet projects and your own things that nobody pays you for. Or, are they paying you for those?

John: They’re not paying. So, let’s talk about that. Let’s start at the end. Jason Fuchs, how much are you chasing or writing on assignments versus your own thing?

Jason: I would say right now it’s probably weighted more heavily on assignment stuff. But I think that part of staying sort of fertile and fresh creatively is focusing on things that are originals that mean a lot to you. So my time for the most part right now is divided between Robotech which is, although it’s a passion thing, it’s obviously something was an assignment. And an original. And so I try to split time between that and then in the back of my mind there are always original ideas percolating. But I think it’s really easy to get excited about open writing assignments and these are things that you have to work very hard to get.

And oftentimes they’re properties that you fall in love with and that you care as much about, at least in my case, certainly as some originals. But I think it’s really helpful to still focus on what those originals might be.

John: Nicole, what’s your split?

Nicole: Well, let’s see. The last year has been really intense. So, I did a studio project that was an assignment but it was based on an IP that was just basically a title and like a bad guy, so it felt like an original but it wasn’t. And a pilot that was also based very, very loosely on a short film. And then I wrote my own short film and adapted it from a New Yorker short story and directed it. That was a passion project which was great. My agent was like where have you been for three months? So that was fun. And then I have two passion projects I’m working on now in addition to the writing stuff. So, I would say that it’s about 50/50, but this year it’s been more like 60/40. It’s been a lot.

John: So Phil Hay, you do assignments but also this Destroyer, would you consider that – that’s your own thing? That’s your fun thing?

Phil: Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, it’s changed for us. So, my partner Matt and I who have been together for a really, really long time now work with my wife, Karyn, so the three of us – we basically have a family business. So we try to always have – we have one way where we’re trying to just make our own stuff at whatever budget level that is. And sometimes the next thing we do might be a studio. We have a studio that we might do next, but we also have an independent thing that we’re writing. So, for me personally and really fulfillingly the needle has shifted way toward just building stuff originally from the bottom up. And then doing assignments that really has a goal because it’s just our little group doing it.

But still doing some studio assignment work. But I would say like generally my lesson of my whole life and career, and I’m sure you guys feel similarly, you said something similar, is that you need to be doing your own stuff. Regardless of whether the results of it, just for you to be you as a writer and to stay alive emotionally and intellectually.

So, the original stuff always had a huge spot for me. But sometimes it’s had more of an economic spot and sometimes it’s had less of an economic spot. But it’s always been equally important.

Wendy: Yeah, I mean, he’s clapping. Like a dad.

Phil: I’m going to buy you a beer. Let’s go.

John: Wendy, do you get a chance to do your own original stuff? You’re doing TV for folks?

Wendy: Well, god, I’m so lucky right now. I feel kind of shamed.

Craig: You’re ashamed because good things are happening to you?

Wendy: Because good things are happening. Yeah. Yeah.

Craig: That’s the most writerly shit of all time.

Phil: Here truly is a writer.

John: Tell us why you said that. Why do you think he said that?

Craig: That is so writerly.

Wendy: Because I’m so used to losing, man.

Craig: There you go. There you go.

Wendy: I’m so used to being the – I had actually a showrunner once say to me in the room, “Learn to take a yes.” And, I mean, that’s me. I’m so used to fighting. I’m so used to having to push so hard. But this year was pretty brilliant.

So I’m in a deal and I sold two projects that I love. And so they’re assignments, but they were created by me. So, I don’t know, where does that fit in? So I would say 45% on the one piece that I sold, probably 45% on the other piece that I sold. But you know me. I always save 10% just for me. So I got 10% of things that are stories that I’m incubating that I’d like to go sell next year. Because, I mean, it takes a long time to develop what could be the concept for a television show.

You’re talking about millions upon millions of dollars of investment. So it’s important. I take that 10% and I invest my own money, not very smart but whatever. I invest my own time and really try to develop those stories so that come next June when the wonderful studio I’m working for comes and says, OK, what do you want to go pitch, I can say I got this ready, I got this. What are we going to do?

Craig: Great.

John: Craig Mazin, obviously Chernobyl is a passion project. It’s your own thing that you sort of came out and created.

Craig: It’s my own thing.

John: But the sort of – the stuff you don’t talk about on the show, you’ve also done a lot of work for other folks this last year, too.

Craig: Mostly. I mean, the truth is I have deferred for the longest time any kind of me time.

John: The personal enjoyment.

Craig: Like I’ve just always been somebody that’s helping someone else do what they do. And a lot of it has been wonderful and fulfilling. I don’t mean to ever suggest that I was not grateful for it. And a lot of it I loved doing. I mean, I loved working with Todd Phillips. That was great. But those were his things, you know. And I’ve spent so much time helping other people with their things, or coming in and fixing things, or dealing with distressed property, whatever it is, and to finally just do my own thing was wonderful. And I want to keep doing it. And so I think I’m going to.

And, you know, you can do the other kinds of stuff if you need money and you’ve shown that you have a track record of doing those things. That’s great. But I’m an odd one actually. I do feel like I’m very odd in the sense that I kind of started in a weird way, even though the first thing I did was like my own thing kind of. But it was really honestly it was a service job. It was like you guys need a movie like this. I’ve always been that. And only now weirdly after fucking 23 years am I finally just – so it’ll be tragic if it’s awful, wouldn’t it? I hope you don’t think it’s awful. Because if you do, then you think I’m awful.

John: No, we don’t think you’re awful, Craig.

Craig: I’m a little bit awful.

Wendy: Would somebody buy him a beer?

John: And so I will say from my perspective like doing Arlo Finch was a chance to just do completely my own thing. And so the best thing about making movies and television is it’s incredibly collaborative. The worst thing about making movies and television is it’s incredibly collaborative. And no matter what your vision is going into a thing, it’s always being filtered through a bunch of other people. And so to actually say like, oh, you know, that comma is there because I want that comma there and it matters to me was a great change for me and really, really good.

I won’t ever have that in features because it doesn’t matter. The screenplay is a plan for making the other thing. But to make the thing as a book was great. So that’s been my three books of doing my own stuff.

Craig: That was also a good question.

John: Yeah, see.

Craig: This row was nailing it.

John: The question row. Another free beer.

Phil: Another free beer.

John: This was a really – this was a pretty good Scriptnotes I think.

Craig: I don’t know. Was it?

Phil: It’s really up to them.

John: A good audience! We need to thank some very important people, starting with Beto O’Rourke.

Craig: Yes. And in all seriousness, how many of you – just raise your hand if you are a registered voter in the state of Texas. Now, lower your hand if you have not yet voted. So if you’ve voted lower your hand. If you still have yet to vote keep your hand up. You haven’t voted yet. And you can vote in the state of Texas. Very few of you. Wonderful. You’re voting, right? Good.

John: Good.

Craig: Yeah. Yep. I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, but I will tell you do not vote for Ted Cruz.

John: The only thing he asks is not to vote for Ted Cruz. We need to thank Megan McDonnell who made this whole night possible. Megan McDonnell, our producer.

Craig: Where is she?

John: She’s right there.

Craig: There she is.

John: Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you Austin Film Festival’s Colin Hyer. Thank you very much for having us here again.

Craig: Always wonderful.

John: Olivia Riordan. Travis, Joseph, Sonja, James. All the Austin Film Festival volunteers. You are fantastic. So let’s thank everybody here at Austin Film Festival. And Ben thank you very much for the lights. Hey guys, thank you very much. This was another fun year to do this.

Come tomorrow if you can get into our Three Page Challenge. We’re going to be talking through three Three Page Challenges.

Craig: We’ll be tearing humans apart in front of you.

John: Indeed. And we won’t be drunk. Well, we may be a little bit drunk.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Thank you all very much. Have a good night.

Craig: Thanks guys. Have a great night.

John: And Craig has one more thing to say.

Craig: So, if you’re a WGA member you now know that you can vote on our proposal to amend the credits rules for screenwriters. We strongly, strongly, strongly, both of us, urge you to vote yes on this. If you have questions, take a look in the booklet. There is a statement against it, which I strongly disagree with. And in fact you’ll see that the committee, including a lot of terrific screenwriters, have put together a very clear argument rebutting all of those points. So we really, really urge you to vote yes. It’s something that we need as writers.

Links:

• Thanks for joining us, Wendy Calhoun, Phil Hay, Nicole Perlman, and Jason Fuchs!
• And thank you, Beto, for the message! Check out the video from the audience.
• The Death of Hollywood’s Middle Class by Nicole Laporte for Fast Company
• This tweet by Nicola Prigg
• Keep an eye on Weekend Read for screenplays this awards season.
• T-shirts are available here! We’ve got new designs, including Colored Revisions, Karateka, and Highland2.
• The USB drives!
• Wendy Calhoun on Twitter
• Phil Hay on Twitter
• Nicole Perlman on Twitter
• Jason Fuchs on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.