Search Results for: book rights

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/netflix-killed-the-video-store).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 364 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today Craig is off in Chernobyl land in a hotel that from his descriptions sounds like Eastern Europe’s equivalent of the Overlook, so he is my Daniel Lloyd, I am his Dick Halloran, except instead of The Shining we have spotty text messaging. Assuming he escapes the hedge maze he will be back next week.

In the meantime, I am lucky to have a special guest. Kate Hagen is Director of Community, is that correct?

**Kate Hagen:** That’s right, yeah.

**John:** At the Black List. I want to talk to her about what that means, but mostly I want to talk to her about her blog post about the state of home video, video stores, and the many movies that are weirdly unavailable. Kate, welcome.

**Kate:** Thanks so much for having me, John. This is a pleasure to be able to be on the much-loved Scriptnotes.

**John:** And so I’d seen your blog post, the one that kicked this all off about the last great video store months ago. And I had always bookmarked it. It was going to be a One Cool Thing, but it felt too big to be a One Cool Thing because I actually wanted to talk about it. And it sort of slipped down in my feed of stuff to discuss. And in the past two weeks I had trouble trying to find a copy of The Flamingo Kid, and it all surfaced up again. So, I was encountering what you had encountered. What was the movie that you were trying to look for?

**Kate:** I was trying to look for a movie called Fresh Horses, which is most notable for being the only reteaming of Andrew McCarthy and Mollie Ringwald after Pretty in Pink. It’s not a good movie, it’s just one of those ‘80s curiosities that I was like, “Oh, I’d like to see this again.” And I started looking for it one night and the only version I could find was on like a very illegal website where it was dubbed in Polish. And I was like well that’s pretty nuts. This movie is 30 years old. Ben Stiller and Viggo Mortensen are also in it, so it’s not like a nobodies’ movie. And the only way you can get Fresh Horses currently is in one of those six-movie ‘80s collections on Amazon, which is a bummer, because then it’s just like a crappy version of the movie.

**John:** Cool. So let’s try to figure out and solve all the problems of missing home videos in the next hour.

**Kate:** I think we can do it.

**John:** But we’ll start with simpler things which you can explain what you actually do at the Black List.

**Kate:** Yeah. So my fun answer for this is I am like the ultimate Internet team for the Black List. So I’m kind of the online mom of the Black List. I make sure all of our online community is healthy and getting along with each other. That includes everything from doing all of our social media, to editing and curating our blog, to overseeing customer support. I run point on all of our site partnerships. So, Franklin likes to put it that Megan and I – Megan is our director of events – and she kind of handles everything that is an in-person interaction and I handle everything that’s an online interaction.

**John:** So Franklin Leonard launched the Black List as a site shortly after one of the Austin Film Festival appearances. So he came on the show, on a live show, to talk about this plan he had for the Black List and it’s been fascinating to watch it grow into this big thing that it is right now.

So, you are part of a small team, and so as people are submitting scripts that they want to show up on the site for coverage and for other things for professionals to look at them, you are part of the team that interacts with those folks?

**Kate:** Yeah. So like day-to-day I’m just keeping an eye on everything that’s coming through the website in terms of evaluations, if there are any issues with any scripts or anything. I’m kind of just the keeper of all of that stuff. And, you know, making sure people can opt into partnerships, all that kind of good stuff.

**John:** Now at this point are you still reading scripts that come in, or are your days as a reader behind you?

**Kate:** My days as a reader are behind me. I was a reader – it was my full-time gig for about eight months, but I was doing freelance for about a year and a half. And I covered about 500 scripts in that time. Yeah, and there are definitely days when I miss being a reader. I mean, there are other days where I’m super glad I don’t have to do that anymore. But like friends will reach out to give notes on their scripts and I’m like, “Oh, I really like doing this,” the kind of page notes where you have a good relationship with someone and you can be like this is not working and they’re not going to get mad at you, as opposed to just sending coverage off into the void.

**John:** Weirdly over the course of all these episodes of Scriptnotes I don’t think we’ve talked that much about the job of a reader, sort of what it’s like to be a reader. So, my first jobs in Hollywood were as a reader. I started as a reader covering scripts for Prelude Pictures, which doesn’t exist anymore. It was this tiny little company based over at Paramount. And every week I’d go in, they’d give me two scripts. I would write up my coverage on these two scripts, then come back in, deliver those, and pick up new scripts. This was back in the day when there weren’t PDFs, so you were actually physically picking up scripts and reading them and writing up your coverage, and printing them out and sending them back in.

I assume this is all happening digitally these days?

**Kate:** Yeah. It’s all happening digitally at least as far as the Black List is concerned. People just upload their scripts to the site. The readers are then able to access those scripts, and they provide an evaluation. And our coverage is a little bit different than traditional coverage. It’s meant to be kind of a high level notes for the writer. It’s not getting into like page-by-page details some of the time. Although some readers choose to do that. It’s more focused on what’s working in the script, what’s not working in the script, and what the likely audience for that might be.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a very different relationship to the writer than coverage traditionally is. Because coverage classically what I was doing for Prelude, then I was a reader at TriStar, you’re really just a gatekeeper in that function. Basically a script comes in, the executive doesn’t have time to read it, so you are basically writing a book report, a summary of what happens in the script and your overall reaction to the script. Sometimes it’s a page and a half of summary and then one page of comments talking through characters, plot, sort of overall impressions of “Is this a good writer?” a recommendation – like consider this script, consider this writer, consider both. And generally the answer is consider neither for most–

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the function is basically to say no to everything.

**Kate:** Yeah. It’s so funny. So before I was reading for the Black List I was reading freelance for Bold Films. And I read probably I’d say about 100 scripts for them in that period of time. And the only two things I ever recommended were Arrival and Dark Places, the script for that. But, yeah, I think most people don’t realize that as a reader and a gatekeeper you need to be passing on 95% of stuff. It’s very rare that you get anything that kind of emerges from the pile.

But I would have moments, too, where like it would be a very talented writer who was given like not a great book to adapt or something. And it was nice to be able to be like, “Hey, this writer is really great, even if this material is not working.” And I do think that’s something that like we don’t focus on enough in evaluating scripts. It’s all about the script itself, and obviously you have to execute a script, but it would be nice sometimes if we directed some of that love back to the writer if they’re doing a good job.

**John:** Definitely. Sometimes the function of a reader is you’re looking for a specific thing that this company can make, and so if something doesn’t fall into the purview of what this company would make you’re going to pass on it because you don’t want to waste the executive’s time reading this thing that they can’t actually do. But along the way you sometimes will read good writing and in my time reading for TriStar I read 200 scripts. I still have a list of all that coverage. And none of the things I read ended up getting made. Two of the things I ended up recommending I sort of got called to the mat for wasting people’s time for recommending them. It’s so frustrating.

**Kate:** And taste is so crazy. You know, there’s a sort of consensus I feel like in terms of what’s good in Hollywood, but then you get a lot of outliers and it depends on people’s bosses and all that kind of good stuff. And like you were saying in terms of what a given company can make within a calendar year, or couple of calendar years. Yeah, so it’s a tricky gig.

I think a lot of screenwriters have this kind of attitude about readers that like they’re trying to pull one over on them. And it’s like, no guys, we just want to read good scripts. Like that’s all we ever want to do. And I’m sorry that most scripts are not good. It’s a bummer. I would love to recommend scripts all the time.

**John:** And I think another thing people don’t understand is that most readers are writers, or at least a sizable portion of readers are actually screenwriters themselves. And it’s a very classic first job in Hollywood is to be one of those readers. If someone wants to be a reader, I mean, the Black List is a sort of a special case, but in general how are people getting hired as readers these days?

**Kate:** Yeah, I mean, this is a tricky question. I have a number of friends who are still reading and I think a lot of it like everything in life and especially in this business is relationship-based.

It was funny, when I graduated college there was this idea of like you move to Los Angeles and you went to film school for screenwriting and you’ll get a reader job like that. It’ll be no problem. You’ll be able to support yourself. Those days are long past. So most folks I know are either reading for multiple companies or reading is just one of the many things they do.

But I think a lot of that is based on your relationships with assistants, with executives, finding folks that like even if your taste is not the same it’s in the same ballpark so that you know that like even if we disagree about a script we can argue both sides of this to come to some sort of agreement on whether or not we’re going to recommend it.

**John:** When someone is being hired as a reader there’s usually sample coverage that they’re looking at. So, you will have written up coverage on a script, and even if they haven’t read the script that it’s based on you get a sense of like this person can evaluate story. This person can summarize things well enough so I can understand what the plot of a script is.

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** One of the biggest challenges I always had as a reader is you read a script and you’re trying to write the summary and how do you even summarize this thing. The story makes no sense. And sometimes, in the course of writing the synopsis, I’m kind of inventing – in the simplification of it I’m trying to create story so there is a narrative thread to go through there.

**Kate:** Ugh, that was always a challenge. I remember one time I got a script where I believe it was four different versions of the protagonist and the way that this was denoted in the script was different levels of gray scale to tell you which version of the protagonist was interacting within which scene. And you’re like I don’t know what the medium gray is after 30 pages. What am I supposed to do to keep up with that? It can be a real challenge sometimes to just even, you know, pick your way through the narrative and like you said try to find some kind of cohesive narrative thread.

**John:** Are most readers still in Los Angeles or with the rise of the Internet are they just spread out throughout the country?

**Kate:** Speaking for the Black List, we have folks who read all over America and some folks throughout other parts of the world. But most folks I know who are reading as any kind of full-time or steady gig are here, because they have other aspirations in the industry and reading is just a part of that.

**John:** And when they say they’re doing it as a full-time gig or a steady gig, is it still a per-script basis where you’re getting paid per unit? You’re getting X dollars for reading a script?

**Kate:** Yeah. I’ve always heard rumors of these fabled studio readers, WGA readers. I have never met one in the flesh. I don’t know if that’s just something that used to exist and no longer exists. But I only ever got paid for script coverage on a by-script basis. I never got any kind of like weekly fee or anything.

**John:** And what are the ranges you’re hearing about in Los Angeles these days?

**Kate:** It really depends. I have gotten paid everything from $10 to $300 to evaluate a single script. So there’s a wide range. I would say most folks’ going rate for kind of a script evaluation is in the $40 to $50 range. I think especially there’s so many folks reading and because the Internet exists and because we’re all on electronic devices anyway all the time it’s a little easier to read a script then like when you were talking about, you know, got to go to the office, got to pick up the paper copies. The fact that you can do it remotely.

So there are definitely some factors I think that have dropped the price a little bit. But I would love to see a world in which reading was like a legitimate full-time gig for many people that had its own union and all that fun stuff.

**John:** Yeah. It’s horrifying that you say it’s $40 to $50 because that’s – I was getting $50 to $65 20 years ago reading at TriStar.

**Kate:** It’s hard out there. When I was reading full-time I was usually reading two or three scripts a day, depending. And then I know some folks who have been doing it for ten years and can do five or six scripts a day. I would occasionally do four scripts a day, but at that point you’re like I have no brain function left at all.

**John:** And reading that many scripts does just burn a hole in your brain. I feel like at a certain point – it was good, like the first 100 or 200 it was very helpful for me as a writer being able to understand what kind of never worked on a page, and also what my personal taste – I never want to write that kind of way because I sort of feel what happens when you try to do that thing. But it ultimately is using some of the same parts of your brain you need as a writer. You’re visualizing all these things. And it can be really sad.

**Kate:** Yeah. But I mean, it’s also super instructive. I highly recommend that most folks, even if you’re not doing it in a professional capacity, even if you can go on a screenwriting forum and pull a bunch of amateur scripts or something just to give yourself the challenge of writing coverage. Because nothing will teach you more about what not to do as a screenwriter then reading a bunch of really bad scripts.

**John:** That’s actually a great idea. I don’t know if we’ll ever do it as a feature, but it would be interesting to take a script and have people just go off and write coverage for it and be able to cover the coverage and sort of see what people are–

**Kate:** Right before I got hired for Black List I was in consideration for another job for a small production company. And it was down to me and one other person to be the kind of assistant executive catch-all role. And they gave us both the same script and they said one of the execs likes this script and one of the execs doesn’t like this script. And we are going to hire based on your coverage.

The script was just this very boring, middle-of-the-road white guy coming of age sexual fantasy. And I told them about it. And I did not get that job. But I was like, “Well, I guess I didn’t want this job anyway because our taste was not going to align.”

**John:** Well let’s transition now to talking about video, because your piece which was great when I read it, as I go back and reread it now it’s like, oh, she actually answers some of the questions that I had sort of in my head about the availability of movies and sort of our misperception of how big some of these video stores really were in the day and where we’re at right now.

And I also want to get into sort of the difference between streaming and online download and stuff like that because they’re similar but they’re not quite the same thing. And even in your piece, I realized today as I was reading through it again, you did have some answers for sort of why some of these movies are missing and there are sort of big structural issues that need to be tackled to get into it.

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of issues that keep movies off streaming, off home video. A couple of the big ones, the one that’s most compelling to me is music rights. I’m also a huge music person, so the idea that films can’t be put on home video with their original music intact is just absolutely sacrilegious to me. But at the same time, you know, that’s one of the few ways you can still make money off music anymore is by licensing it to a film. So, like my friend Marc Heuck who is quoted in the piece talks about, it’s much cheaper for most studios to just do nothing with these titles rather than relicense the music and put it out in some kind of official home video release or get it back on streaming.

And that’s a huge bummer. There are so many movies for which the soundtrack is an essential part of them and the idea that that’s what’s keeping them out of the public sphere is a huge bummer.

I would say for a lot of the ‘90s indies it’s really interesting. A lot of those production companies have since folded and like even the parent companies have folded. So then it becomes a chain of title situation of like do the rights revert back to the producer, the director. Who ended up with the rights to these films? And most of the time you can’t see your way through the darkness and so it’s very difficult to get those films on streaming. But, you know, these movies are 25 years old and all of a sudden unavailable and you’re like, guys, this is going to be like a second silent era kind of erasure if we’re not careful.

**John:** So, before we get into fixing the problem, let’s talk about the scope of the problem. I think most people’s perception is that when Netflix by Mail existed that kind of solved the problem. It seemed like it solved the problem because any movie you could possibly imagine, oh well, it was available on Netflix by Mail before it was even “By Mail” back then. That sense where they would send you a little disc in a red envelope and it would come and show up.

Obviously it was a solution only for movies that existed on home video. It was only for movies in North America. Obviously we’re in a global world, but right now we’re just focusing on what happens in the US and Canada. But for a while it seemed really good and it was very hard to think of a movie that you’d want to see that wasn’t available sort of through Netflix.

As Netflix moves to streaming, I think most of us, myself included, just sort of assumed that well obviously they’re not going to be able to have all the same kind of content there, but it’s just bits. So it sits on a server someplace and if one person a month wants to watch that movie, great, it’s going to be available for them to watch. That’s not at all what happened.

So, in your piece you talk about Netflix at the time of your writing has about 3,686 films available for streaming at any point. But even like a Blockbuster back in the day could have 10,000.

**Kate:** That was a really mind-blowing stat to me. I would have never guessed that my local Blockbuster was stocking 10,000 movies and then putting that next to the Netflix number you’re like, “Wait a minute, so we just get like drama, children’s, and comedy.” And so much of the Netflix content is original and from the last ten years. I mean, that’s a whole different conversation, too, the idea of classic films that are kept off of streaming. I mean, Netflix only has 100 movies on the service from 1900 to 1990, which is absolutely insane.

**John:** And so we can’t rely on Netflix to be the solution to all the problems and obviously Amazon Video has their own streaming services, but Amazon and iTunes/Apple they also offer the ability to rent or to purchase these movies. And I guess I assumed that that was going to be the other solution, because it feels like once a movie is available for purchase or for rental through those sites it can sort of just be permanently there. And at least in your article I can’t find a listing of sort of how many movies are available for rental or purchase on iTunes or through Amazon.

**Kate:** iTunes I have not also been able to figure out. Amazon you can look at through Just Watch, which is the website I used for much of the piece. And that will list everything that’s available for rental. But you know the way I think about that is particularly like I’m thinking about this a lot in terms of the young film fan, kids, teenagers who are just getting into movies. You know, if you’re 14 are you going to watch the free movie on Netflix or are you going to go to your parents and be like “Can I have the credit card, can I do the $3 movie purchase?” No, you’re going to pick the free stuff or you’re not going to watch anything or you’re going to watch YouTube clips. And, you know, I will gladly pay $2 or $3 to rent something on Amazon or iTunes or whatever, but you know, that’s still not fixing the problem that’s still gatekeeping in a way.

My friend, Kate Barr, at Scarecrow in Seattle said the most interesting thing about Amazon and Netflix in particular and she was talking about this idea that for her it’s a First Amendment issue that, you know, when home video began it was suddenly freedom of choice for people in a way that they had never had before. You could pick exactly what you wanted to watch when you wanted to watch it. And in a weird way we’ve come full circle to like limiting our choices again. Like we went from having so many choices to not as many choices, even though it seems like streaming is more accessible.

**John:** Yeah. So I’ll push back a little bit on some of that stuff. I mean, First Amendment, it’s not government control, but it is that access, that sense of I need to be able to access culture and I am being denied the ability to see that thing of culture because of weird corporate restrictions. I think what is so great about the piece you did on Scarecrow Video, so we’re going to link to your main article, but you have done great follow-ups at other video stores and talking to the folks who run these video stores, many of which have become non-profits because they’re really about access to these movies rather than trying to earn a buck.

I would say that we can have this sort of golden age idea of like, “Oh, I could get to all those movies because I could go to Scarecrow Video or I could go to these places and all those movies were there,” but that relied on your ability to actually get to those places.

**Kate:** Sure.

**John:** And so for kids who grew up in rural Iowa there was no video store, so they were completely dependent on what would show up on TV or what was available at their little small tiny video store. I guess what’s surprising is even those small video stores had more than I think we sort of remember them having.

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, I would say two things about that. I think something that became really apparent to me in writing this piece was how much I had undervalued and I think how much most of us undervalued the video store as a living library archive, as just kind of a history of record. Because, you know, it doesn’t matter what the quality of a movie is, you know, for new releases most video stores are buying all new releases every week. When you start doing that you start to build up a pretty robust collection of stuff and that also kind of catches movies that might slip through the cracks otherwise. And nobody really thinks about that when they think about video store erasure. Like I think about some of the great video stores have closed and it’s like what happens to all these movies when they do close?

I would also – I have not figured out a way to zero in on this, but you were talking about the idea of what was available to folks on television, like to me that is something that has significantly shrunk, too, the kinds of movies we show on TV. Like when I was a kid I watched a ton of weird stuff on IFC and Sundance and movies like Kissed that have never even been put on DVD. And to me now cable is about 250 movies that we have decided we’re going to show and that’s it. And I don’t know if that’s also a licensing issue and with streaming, but to me that’s a huge pool that shrunk, too, and it’s much harder to stumble upon something on cable.

It’s just like, hey guess what, it’s Ghostbusters or Pulp Fiction again.

**John:** Yep. So you talk about video stores used to be kind of the movie libraries of a community, and so obviously one solution to that is the actual library. Andrew in LA wrote in based on what we talked about last week saying, “A couple years ago I discovered what a great resource the LA Public Library is for movies that were otherwise unavailable online. I was one of the first holdouts with the Netflix DVD subscription so I could have access to older, more obscure stuff, but I found that the library had all that was on Netflix and more. The Flamingo Kid is no exception. Just a suggestion for next time you run into that issue.”

**Kate:** Yeah. When I was a kid we rented from the library I would say maybe about a third as much as we rented from Blockbuster. All I had as a kid was Blockbuster, so that’s where we went. But, yeah, the library is an incredible resource. Also I know there are certain library subscriptions where like they will put the catalog online so with your library card you can then stream titles which is really cool.

But, yeah, these kind of creative solutions to working around the streaming bubble. I think people don’t realize there are still – at least when I wrote the piece – there are still at least 90,000 DVDS that one can rent from Netflix online, which is pretty nuts. Part of me has wondered if I should go back to disc Netflix, which is like a very weird thing to do in the Year of our Lord 2018. And, you know, those DVD subscriptions are still playing quite a bit of Netflix’s overall budget for the year. So, people are still doing it. People still want access to more films than what is at the streaming service at any given time.

**John:** As a WGA board member I also have to bring up the issue that while the ability to get to those discs is fantastic for people who want to watch those movies, those discs that are sitting at the LA Public Library that were sitting at Blockbuster, they earn nothing for the writer. So figuring out how to make this available for streaming, for rental, for purchase online is actually very meaningful to any writer, director, actor who is relying on residuals from these movies, because if you were to go stream Charlie’s Angels I get paid for that. If you go find a DVD, you get it from Redbox or you get it from the library, I don’t get paid for that. So it’s worth solving on many fronts and not just sort of like getting access to those physical things again.

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, that’s something definitely to think about. This is something like I was talking a little bit about the ‘90s titles. For all of those creative teams, and like that’s so unfair to them that just because the company who put it out folded that they now have no ownership over this title anymore. And those rights should, you know, of course there are legal – all that kind of stuff you have to go through and hoops, but the chain of title on that stuff should revert back to the creators at some point if there is kind of no powers that be left.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s talk about the legal teams involved here, because as you look at classic film preservation, so there’s the kinds of movies that are in the danger of being lost to history because the only print was in a vault someplace and it’s falling apart, and so we have these really smart chemists and colorists who go through and they save these movies and then we do a giant projection, 70mm, and everyone cheers because this movie has been saved.

For every one of those movies there’s thousands that are not being saved because they only exist on VHS or they sort of never really came out on video. And those are the movies that we need to be able to salvage. And it’s not that there’s no copy of them available, there’s just no legal copy of them available. There’s no way to actually get to it. And I kind of feel like we need that band of lawyers and sort of paralegals and other folks who can just figure out the copyright on the stuff and get those things out there the same way we have the chemists and the colorists saving those big prints, just so that we don’t lose this kind of culture.

You talk about sort of a silent moment, especially movies in the ‘70s, ‘80s, early ‘90s that are in real danger of just being lost because they are unavailable. There’s no place to find them.

**Kate:** Yeah. And I mean to say nothing of all of the kind of home video ephemera that arose as a part of that whole movement, you know, where you’d get trailer compilations or a behind-the-scenes documentary, or cartoon compilations. All of that kind of stuff has also vanished. And, you know, most streaming services aren’t offering those kind of special features, bonus features, and that’s as much of a content apocalypse as the movies themselves, like just getting rid of all of the kind of additional materials that were attached to that.

**John:** So, overall goals. We talk about film preservation and film history, sort of the chemists who are making those prints actually work. We talk about the archivists and sort of the film buff, but also the film student. And so those folks are going to be able to find that collection of animated shorts. If someone is willing to put in five hours to sort of discover this place and to drive to that place and find that one copy of something, she’s going to be able to find it somewhere. At least for now she’s going to be able to find it somewhere. But I think your point about the kid who is used to just being able to get everything online immediately is not going to seek that stuff out and there’s a whole bunch of culture that’s going to be lost because that kid is not going to have any way to sort of find it.

**Kate:** Yeah. And I mean I have this argument with folks all the time of like, you know, “Well kids are curious. They’ll figure it out on their own.” I’m like, no, not if they don’t have the tools. Not if they’ve never been to a video store before and not if they’ve never used a library archive system to like truly dig for something. Most of us have lizard brain. Like we just want instant gratification, whatever is easiest. And, you know, as these things become more and more challenging to find and there are other distractions it becomes easier to just be like, “I’ll get to that later.”

**John:** Mm-hmm. So things are holding these movies off, and Marc Edward Heuck had a really good point that you mentioned in your blog post about music rights. And so this really makes sense, because as a person who has made movies when you are putting a song in a movie, you’re putting a piece of existing music in a movie, you are buying sync rights and mechanical rights which are the ability to include that song on a soundtrack of your film.

And along with that you might say like this is for theatrical distribution, so this if for a certain number of years of home video. And you may no longer have the ability to have that song in your movie, which is really a challenge when it comes time to actually try to release that movie again on home video. If you don’t control the rights of the thing that’s in there, either you can’t do it yourself, or you can’t sell it to somebody who would put it out on home video because they worry about getting sued.

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** Have you talked to anybody who has been through this situation or do you have any sense of how you sort this out?

**Kate:** That’s a great question. I know that there have been some films released with alternate soundtracks in the last couple of years, or put on streaming with alternate soundtracks. And, you know, is that better than not being able to see the film at all? Yes. Is it a bummer that you can’t see the movie as it was originally made? Absolutely. I would love to get more of a pulse on the whole music rights situation because so many of my favorite films, like Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, it’s like you strip the music from that there is no movie. And like that’s a DVD that’s out of print. It was in print for a couple of years and now is like $50 on the used market.

Yeah, but I am not entirely sure what can be done to kind of rectify that because that’s also a problem with the record industry and the way online availability of music kind of tanked the entire record industry. And you’re like, “Oh, but we can get some pennies out of relicensing this for movies or television.” So I understand where the record companies are coming from. But also it feels like there needs to be a more reasonable solution for both parties.

**John:** Well also it feels like it’s very much targeting the movies that set us off, which is the early ‘80s movies which would have had pop songs of the time and things could just be complicated. Those were also companies that were bought and sold multiple times. The Flamingo Kid was MGM, but like who knows – MGM has been so many different things over the years. That entire catalog has come and gone a zillion times.

**Kate:** Yeah. It’s wild when you think about all the tiny production shingles that have since folded and then, you know, just what happens to these movies when that company no longer exists. Yeah, like Little Darlings is another big one for me that’s really hard to find and that’s got a bunch of very expensive music cues. There’s a John Lennon song in it. And that has been broadcast once on TCM like several years ago and that’s the only way you can see that movie if you can’t find a VHS tape, which is a huge bummer.

**John:** Marc’s piece also talks about The Heartbreak Kid, Stepford Wives, and Sleuth, which basically were made by a secondary studio. They were made by a smaller company, and so a bigger company buys them out and really has no interest in putting those movies out because it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be profitable for them to put them out. They want those titles because they can be remade. And so they want them for the remake rights, not for the actual underlying thing itself.

And I don’t know how you pressure them to actually do anything. And I do wonder if there is some legislation, some sort of bigger movement to get these titles sort of set free. The challenge is who pushes that? The copyright holders have a vested interest in not changing anything. And so it’s going to have to be filmmakers who sort of insist that their early works be released into the public sphere. It’s the kind of thing where in France it would be actually easier for those filmmakers to probably get stuff to happen than it is here.

**Kate:** Yeah. Something really interesting that happened, so Dilcia Barrera, a programmer at LACMA, reached out to me after the piece and was like would you like to show Fresh Horses at LACMA? And I was like absolutely. So, Sony did not have a functional print of Fresh Horses, so they struck a brand new beautiful 35mm print for the screening. And now there’s a chance that it might be put out on Blu-Ray because this new print was struck. So I think that’s an interesting piece to consider, you know, if you demand these movies theatrically and that kind of forces the hand of companies to make new prints. Even if it’s a digital version, whatever.

**John:** Great.

**Kate:** Just a new version of the film that could then be put on streaming or released on home video, that’s awesome.

**John:** Well, Kate, what you’re saying, which is very encouraging to me, is that it’s not that the negative had been lost to all time. So they had a negative. So if you have a negative you can make a beautiful digital version of it and that digital version can go out.

So do you know anything about what was the hold up with Fresh Horses? Was it a music issue? Why had it gone off–?

**Kate:** Fresh Horses was released by Hemdale which I’m fairly sure does not exist and has not existed for many years, but I mean, Hemdale also put out Blade Runner. What was I just watching this weekend that was a Hemdale movie? Oh, Miracle Mile from the ‘80s.

I would just assume that they folded and whoever the kind of rights defaulted to are like “We don’t need to do anything with movies like Fresh Horses or Miracle Mile.” I know Miracle Mile got a Blu-Ray a couple of years ago and obviously like Blade Runner has many home video editions, but you know, that’s a beloved and classic film, so it’s a little easier to figure out the rights situation for that than something like a Fresh Horses, which is not as beloved.

**John:** This idea of being able to watch Fresh Horses, it seems odd to do a screening of Fresh Horses because it wasn’t like a masterpiece that everyone was clamoring for, but it is very true that most people who are going to see this movie are going to see this movie on video. And that’s true even for the movies that are coming out next week at the cinema, most people are ultimately going to see that movie on home video and how do you make sure that that home video is going to still be around 20 years, 30 years, 40 years down the road?

**Kate:** I am really disturbed by the fact that Amazon and Netflix seem to not care about putting any of their original movies or TV series on disc. Like I know Stranger Things got a disc release, but like people really had to pressure Amazon to get Blu-Rays of Wonderstruck. And to me that suggests a scary overall trend for those companies that they’re treating these products as disposable. It’s like we’re not even going to put it on any kind of permanent format. It’s either on the streaming service or it’s not on the streaming service. And that’s a bummer for folks who still like home media, who want to guarantee that they will have these movies or TV shows in perpetuity.

Yeah, and I think there is a market for home video, especially as home theaters become more and more in depth and people get more into the idea of movie screenings in your own home. I just wish more folks would realize that.

**John:** I just saw the trailer for Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which is a Netflix film, black and white, gorgeous-looking, at least from the trailer. I mean, of course it’s going to be gorgeous. He’s an incredibly talented filmmaker. But it will be fascinating to see is there going to be a Blu-Ray for Roma? Because it’s going to come out theatrically and on Netflix. And for Alfonso Cuarón as a filmmaker, fantastic he got to make exactly the movie he wanted to make. He probably got the budget he wanted. It’s great for cinema that Netflix stepped up and sort of helped him make this movie. But I do wonder whether it’s great for cinema ten years from now, 20 years from now that this was made for a digital platform that has no vested interest in the long term existence of a physical version of this thing?

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, that’s a really good example. I feel like also Scorsese’s The Irishman is going to be a real make it or break it moment for Netflix. You know, the idea – if we’re not giving home video releases, if these are films aren’t getting nominated for Oscars, if they’re not picking up theatrically. You know, the Irishman especially is about as prestige of a prestige project as you could get, and popular as a prestige project could get. And if that doesn’t get the kind of reception that a normal theatrical release might then I think that kind of indicates where the vibe is on Netflix in terms of how they’re going to release prestige movies going forward.

**John:** Yeah. It’s easy to look at Netflix now, which is so successful and everybody has it and it’s thriving, but there’s lot of companies that just go away. And if Netflix just goes away, what happens to all those things that were made for Netflix? And it’s not entirely clear. And folks who I know who have made deals with Netflix, no one I’ve talked to has anything in their deals that says like if the company doesn’t exist ten years from now I get the rights back to something.

**Kate:** Yeah. That’s got to be really sobering as a creator. I mean, I figured this out when I was writing the piece. Only ten years ago Netflix had their first production arm which was called Red Letter Media, which has since folded. So I think it’s really hard for anybody to try to predict where Netflix or any of the streaming services are going to be ten years from now. So much has changed.

**John:** Speaking of so much has changed, so this is a thing that’s been recurring on the podcast and we could probably do a segment on it every week, but this past week it looks like MoviePass has gone under. If it hasn’t officially gone under, it’s about as close as you get to going under. The stock did a reverse split which I didn’t even know was a thing. It’s worth very little. And people who try to leave the service are being prohibited from leaving the service. What’s been your relationship with MoviePass?

**Kate:** So I got MoviePass at the end of last year. I did the annual $90 one. I’ve gone to about 12 movies, so I’m like it paid for itself. Great. I have a lot of friends in the LA rep scene in particular who have really been using it to go to way more rep screenings than they would normally ever go to. And to me that’s a bummer with like the loss of MoviePass is the ability to see more movies than you would on a normal budget.

But, yeah, you know, I do think MoviePass is ultimately going to be a good thing to show that there is an appetite for these kind of pass programs. I would love it for instance if all the LA repertory theaters would ban together and be like, OK, you pay $25 a month and then you get X number of tickets to the Egyptian, the New Beverly, etc.

But I mean the MoviePass flameout has been kind of spectacular to watch on film Twitter, because, you know, it’s a totally unsustainable model. We all knew–

**John:** Yeah. We knew it was. This is all going to end in tears. It was like taking Omarosa into the White House. Like it wasn’t going to last. You knew it was doomed.

I think on the whole MoviePass you have to see the pros of it, in that for about a year a bunch of VC money gave people free movie tickets.

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it helped the movie industry and it allowed people to see more movies. I think it definitely got more people to see the indie films because it’s like, “Well, I got to use this thing. I’ve seen everything else. I’m going to go see this movie.” And I think that does help those things.

You’re the first person I’ve heard talk about this idea of an indie pass that sort of goes to all those smaller chains. That would be fantastic.

**Kate:** I would be amazing.

**John:** If it helps keep those art houses in business the same way that we need to keep video stores in business that would be fantastic. Bigger chains, AMCs, have rolled out their own plans which seem great. And I guess I’m all for studios figuring out deals with those exhibitors just to sort of get butts in seats and keep butts in seats. Because what MoviePass did show is that people do want to still go to the movie theaters. There’s this myth that as home screens get better, as TVs get better people are just going to stay home and only watch movies on their TV screens. And it’s like, no, people actually want to go out and be with people and see movies.

And what was partly doing MoviePass in is that young people with friends were like well we all have MoviePass, let’s go out and see like three movies. And they would.

**Kate:** Yeah.

**John:** And if we can encourage that behavior that’s awesome.

**Kate:** Yeah. It’s interesting. I would say I definitely know a lot more young folks that got really into MoviePass, but I’ve also talked to some folks that like their parents – this became a huge thing to get them back to the theater after many years of not going to the theater. You know, the idea of a deal suddenly becomes more exciting.

But, you know, last weekend, I went last Sunday. I went to a matinee of BlacKkKlansman at the ArcLight that was almost sold out. And then that night I went to a screening of Wanda at the Egyptian that was sold out. It was in the small theater, the Spielberg. But, you know, obviously we’re in the movie capital of the world so that’s necessarily the best comp for most of the country.

But I do think that, you know, when you make these options easier for people to get on board with, how about that, they go back to the theater. It’s not rocket science. And I would hope folks realize the void that MoviePass will leave and we get an indie pass, or more subscription programs from major chains. Because I do think that people like being among other people. Like I really enjoy, this is a similar thing with video stores, even if you don’t talk to anybody else, you don’t like meet up with friends, just being among other people, not in front of your black computer screen, in very nice.

**John:** And your pieces on the different video stores you visited, I think that sense of community was really crucial and something I’d kind of forgotten. Is that while my local Blockbuster was just like whatever, who cares about that, when you go to a place that’s genuinely a video store with people who like love movies, not just the employees, but the people who are wandering through the aisles looking for stuff, they can give you recommendations. You can see the taxonomy is very much set up based on a hive brain of like these kinds of movies belong together even if it’s not sort of genre wise which you’d expect.

You have some maps of some of your interior layouts of these video stores that really show how they’re thinking about movies and how stuff fits together. Bookstores, which are thriving these days, smaller bookstores are thriving these days, I think it’s the same sense. That people want to go to a place where people kind of care about the things that are on the shelves.

**Kate:** Yeah. It was really interesting. Last Saturday I went up to Odyssey Video in North Hollywood which is closing unfortunately. It was an extremely cool video store. They had a lot of rare VHS still, particularly on the children’s side of things. But that was really interesting because it’s an everything must go kind of sale. So they’re selling off their entire stock. But it was a Saturday afternoon at four o’clock and there are 25 people in this video store right now. And we were all extremely amused. There was this extremely precocious kid who was just like running around being like “Do you have Poltergeist? Do you have Pretty in Pink? Why can’t I go in the back?”

And, you know, it was really invigorating to see like an 11-year-old kid just like so excited about movies, about picking up the physical movie, like crossing movies off the list. And like, I don’t know, streaming is just never going to generate that kind of enthusiasm. Like I don’t care what anybody says. That kind of tactile human community experience. We’re just never going to get that via a streaming platform.

**John:** You’ve convinced me. So I would say, and as recently as three weeks ago I was having a little Twitter disagreement with Robin Sloan, an author, and he had basically the thesis of video stores, things were better in the video store era. And I said, yes, if you compare to streaming. But if you add in iTunes, there’s actually more availability. We don’t have the real numbers to see sort of how many things are on iTunes, but I’ve been convinced over the past few weeks that something really has been lost as we’ve transitioned so thoroughly away from physical media that some stuff is just very hard to find.

And when I actually finally had to go out and get a physical copy of The Flamingo Kid, I realized like I have no player that can actually play this thing, which is a very strange place to get to in your life. Where I have all these drawers full of DVDs that I haven’t watched in a long time because instead I just watch Netflix or I watch iTunes. And I’ve actually found myself being guilty of like I think I have a DVD of that, but it’s actually just $2.99 for me to get it on iTunes, and so I just look for it on iTunes. And in some cases the iTunes quality is better. So it’s not a crisis to do that. But I’m not going back to those DVDs very often. And the existence of physical media is sort of a bulwark. It’s a protection against things being lost.

**Kate:** Yeah. My friend Matt Shiverdecker is very in the loop in terms of home video licensing and who owns what and that kind of thing and he has one of the most impressive home collections I’ve ever seen. And he has just kind of a running list of, you know, here are things that never got put on DVD that I love. Here are things that never got put on any kind of HD transfer that I love.

I mean, it’s shocking some of the things that aren’t available. A couple of months ago I was looking for Cronenberg’s Crash and I ended up watching it on YouTube with Spanish subtitles because that was the only version of the movie I could find. And I was like this was an important movie in the ‘90s. The fact that this was only on an out-of-print DVD right now is crazy. Cronenberg is a major filmmaker.

**John:** Yeah. Well, we need to talk before we wrap this up, we had to talk about piracy, because in some ways piracy is both the answer to and the cause of a lot of these problems. Is that without piracy some of these things would be impossible to find. If you hadn’t found that bootleg Spanish thing on YouTube you would not have been able to watch that. So, good that it exists there, sort of, with an asterisk. But piracy is also part of the reason why these companies feel like it’s not in their interest to try to make a legal version of it available because they’re like I could spend all this time figuring out the rights on this thing, getting it on iTunes, getting it on a streaming service, and I’m not going to sell anything because someone is going to just get the pirated version. That’s what happened to the music industry. That’s what’s going to happen to me. So–

**Kate:** It’s a tough conundrum. I don’t know what the good answer is to that because, you know, I would say I did a lot more torrenting and illegally watching of movies like ten years ago. And I would say it was much easier to do then than it is now.

But there are many things you’re like, you know, I have tried the legal methods. I have done my diligence. If I can’t find it, I’m going to watch the illegal version. Like, I’m sorry, and thank god that there are still people who put movies like Crash and Times Square up on YouTube to find, because otherwise then we can’t access the movie. And that’s really terrible.

**John:** Consolidation in the industry has left us with so few companies controlling so much. And some of your folks have acknowledged as you’ve talked to them about their video stores is that in a weird way we ceded control to giant corporations who are ultimately gatekeepers of like whether a thing can be seen or not. So, between Apple and Netflix and HBO, sort of those, and art studios which are so small, in some ways the zillion companies that made all these movies it was better because there were multiple people producing films. They were going out to many, many venues. There were video stores all across the country. And as the funnel gets narrower and narrower, I don’t know if this actually happening, but if someone at Apple really despises a certain movie they could just make the movie not available. And there’s really sort of nothing we as a culture or as that filmmaker could step up and get in the way of that.

**Kate:** Yeah. I mean, you know, losing that kind of personal choice that video stores provided where you were not at the mercy of corporations. Where you could rent a Hitchcock classic and like a garbage horror movie and like a kid’s program all in the same day. When that control is given to major corporations who have bottom lines and financial interests to hit, you know, they’re not going to put stuff on the service that nobody is watching. They’re not going to put stuff on the service that nobody is taking note of. But that doesn’t mean that those films still aren’t valid and deserve to be seen by the people who want to see them.

**John:** Cool. As we wrap this up, do you have any recommendation for a film that people should check out and where they should find it if it’s hard to find?

**Kate:** Ooh, interesting. I feel like I could go all day on this kind of subject. Let’s see. I was just talking about I found Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains on DVD, which was great. I’d been looking for that one for quite a while. So, something I would recommend, if you guys don’t have FilmStruck, you’ve got to get FilmStruck. They are really picking up a lot of the slack in terms of classic movies. And not just, you know, when we think of classic movies we think of like ‘50s epics, but you know like Bill & Ted is currently on FilmStruck. So, it’s a tide that raises all boats.

But my favorite thing on FilmStruck is Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which is completely unavailable elsewhere. It’s this incredible gangster movie with John Cassavetes and Peter Falk. It’s most famous because Elaine May fought like hell with Paramount about the final cut. At one point she stole the print from them and was like hiding it in her garage because she didn’t want them to keep tinkering with it. This movie is very hard to find and it is now on FilmStruck, so you’ve got to check it out.

**John:** Fantastic. FilmStruck I’ve not used yet but I definitely will. Rian Johnson loves it and tweets about it a lot. So that will be fantastic.

All right, it comes time for our One Cool Things. So this is where we recommend things that are out there in culture that people should go out and see or read. In my case it is a book. It is My Life as a Goddess by Guy Branum. It is fantastic. So you will probably recognize Guy because he’s often a guest on talk show kind of things. He’s a comedian. He’s been on Midnight, Larry Wilmore’s show, Chelsea Lately. But this book he’s written is fantastic.

So, it details sort of his growing up in rural Northern California, sort of the agriculture community. It’s just great, great writing and he’s really, really funny. So, Mindy Kaling who was our guest two weeks ago, she wrote the forward to the book and she’s exactly correct when she says that it is fantastic and you should check it out. So, Guy Branum’s My Life as a Goddess.

**Kate:** That sounds great. I’ve been hearing a lot of really wonderful things about that book. I’ve got to check it out.

**John:** It reminded me of Lindy West’s book, which I also loved, and sort of because Guy is a big, giant guy. And it reminded me some of what she wrote about in her book. But the specificity of where he grew up and what his life was like was fantastic. And not to spoil too much about it, but My Life as a Goddess refers to this Greek goddess who suffers all these challenges and then at one moment realizes, wait, I’m a goddess, and just transforms everything around her. And that sense of recognizing your own personal self-power is great.

**Kate:** Sounds awesome.

**John:** Cool. Anything more you want to recommend? Because you just made a great recommendation on that film.

**Kate:** Yeah. I’m going to plug a great movie t-shirt website. It’s called Tees-En-Scène. It is Colin Stacy who is a wonderful dude in Texas who has taken up the mantle of making these incredible t-shirts that highlight female writer-directors mostly. There are two out right now. There is the Elaine May t-shirt who we were just talking about. And then he just put out a t-shirt for Barbara Loden who made Wanda. He’s got an Amy Heckerling t-shirt in the pipeline. But they’re really cool because he pulls the frame of Written and Directed by from the movie itself on the t-shirt so it’s not just like boring text.

**John:** Oh neat.

**Kate:** He’s got Kathleen Collins coming up. And also some of the proceeds are funneled back to women of color filmmakers. So you get to get a dope t-shirt and you get to support a great cause. Check it out, Tees-En-Scene, or if you want to google Elaine May t-shirt, Barbara Loden t-shirt you can find it.

**John:** Very, very cool. All right. That is our show for this week. As always it is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Davis. 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. But short questions are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Kate, are you on Twitter?

**Kate:** I am. I’m @thathagengrrl like Riot Grrl.

**John:** Fantastic. You can find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. But I will note that podcast feeds are actually directory based, and so Apple does not control your ability to get to our podcast. So, you really could find us any way. You could just type it into your little browser of choice and it would still be there. So for all the talk about like, oh, censorship control, podcasts are still an RSS-based medium. They’re still available out there in the world. They’re more free like the web than people think they are. Apple doesn’t actually host us. We’re just sort of out there.

But you can find us anywhere, just search for Scriptnotes. If you find us on a service, leave a comment because that helps people find the show.

Show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. We’ll have links to Kate’s pieces that she’s written for the Black List. You’ll also find transcripts for our show at johnaugust.com. They go up about four days after the episode airs.

All the back episodes are at Scriptnotes.net. We also sell seasons of 50 episodes at store.johnaugust.com.

Kate Hagen, thank you so much for coming on to talk to us about reading and video and some great recommendations.

**Kate:** Thanks so much, John. And just one final thing. If you’ve got a video store in your neighborhood and you haven’t been there yet, what are you doing? Go to the video store.

**John:** Go to your video store. Thanks Kate.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Kate Hagen](https://blog.blcklst.com/@thathagengrrl)!
* [In Search of the Last Great Video Store](https://blog.blcklst.com/in-search-of-the-last-great-video-store-efcc393f2982) by Kate Hagen
* [The Black List](https://blcklst.com/register/highlights.html#industry)
* [Netflix’s DVD service](https://dvd.netflix.com/MemberHome)
* [Fresh Horses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF2wY3uJdng) was one of those missing movies.
* [The Fall of MoviePass](https://variety.com/2018/film/news/moviepass-ending-subscription-service-1202891561/) and its [reverse stock split](https://deadline.com/2018/07/moviepass-parents-stock-plummets-44-after-reverse-split-takes-effect-1202433444/)
* Kate recommends [Ladies & Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06kCwPpyjCk), [Mikey and Nicky](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_qMg8ZG0ic) and [FilmStruck](https://www.filmstruck.com/us/?utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=MIDF&utm_term=filmstruck&utm_content=A200_A203_A015526&c=A200_A203_A015526&pid=adwords&cid=ppc_adwords_A200_A203_A015526&creator=Fetch&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIv_z-toj93AIVl6DsCh1Y0QjEEAAYASAAEgLAkfD_BwE) to watch classic movies.
* [My Life as a Goddess](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075RNFTTW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Guy Branum
* [Tees-En-Scène](http://www.teesenscene.com) sells shirts that highlight and support female writer/directors.
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Kate Hagen](https://twitter.com/thathagengrrl) 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 Luke Davis ([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_364.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/best-popular-screenwriting-podcast).

**Megan Amram:** And the award for Best Popular Screenwriting Podcast goes to…oh my god…Scriptnotes!

**Michael Gilvary:** This is the first nomination and the first award for Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig Mazin:** Oh wow, OK, I was not prepared for this. I did not think we were going to get this. OK, time is running out. I just want to thank, first of all, everybody that made this podcast possible. Obviously my agent, and my wife Melissa.

**John August:** We have to thank our listeners, our fans, the people at the live show. You’re the reason why we do this. You make it all so worthwhile.

**Craig:** And we do this because we care about you, the screenwriters, and this is for you, the screenwriters. This is why we do it every day – week in and week out. We’re not doing it for money. We’re doing it because we care about the people out there and we always will. We love you and we thank you so much for this. And every single one of you, if you have a dream. [Crosstalk]

**John:** Amy go to bed.

Today on the program we get Craig’s opinion on a range of topics, including changes to the Oscars. The Editors Guild vs. IATSE. Disney buying Fox. The Department of Justice. And WGA dues. My function in these topics is just to set the ball so that Craig can spike it.

**Craig:** Oh fun.

**John:** But we’ll also talk about my experience with the unavailability of a specific movie and what you can do to help. Craig, you’ve been gone for so long that we have just so many things stacked up.

**Craig:** It’s incredible.

**John:** And we need to knock them down.

**Craig:** I know. So I’m doing this long range from Lithuania. Coming at you live from Eastern Europe. I really enjoyed our opening. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to winning something.

**John:** But you never know. I have high hopes in the future that you will be rewarded with something for your tireless devotion to the business and craft of screenwriting.

**Craig:** Well, it’s getting easier, right?

**John:** The posthumous Oscar.

**Craig:** They’re making new categories. Ooh, I like – maybe I can just get into that death montage right? That was something.

**John:** Ha! That’s what you want. So, a little bit of news before we get into the other topics. Scriptnotes is now on Spotify. So, they added us to Spotify this last week, so that’s great. If you would like to listen to us on Spotify–

**Craig:** Did we take Alex Jones’s spot? Is that what happened? Like they took him off and we go on?

**John:** That’s what it is. They got rid of one. He goes out, we go in.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** So now we’re on Spotify. So, if you would like to listen to us on Spotify, that’s great. You can leave a review for us there, or star us, or whatever the ratings are there because that helps people find the show. And also some updates on the Austin Film Festival. So that happens at the end of October. Starts October 25 and goes through that weekend. So in addition to our live show, and a Three Page Challenge, Craig is judging the pitch finals. And I am now hosting a career panel with Tess Morris, Christina Hodson, Nicole Perlman, and Jason Fuchs on Friday the 26th.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** At 3:15.

**Craig:** That is a great lineup. Those are four of my favorite people in the world. That’s going to be spectacular.

**John:** Yeah. I got to hand pick my people, and man, it’s going to be a great, fun panel.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** Nailed it. So come see us in Austin if you’re not already planning to come. Come and I don’t want to spoil it, but everybody who comes to the Austin Film Festival will get a special piece of swag that they will enjoy.

**Craig:** Including me? Do I get the swag?

**John:** You get the swag, too. Everyone gets one.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** I’m Oprah-ing this. Everyone gets the swag.

**Craig:** And you get a – is it a car?

**John:** It’s not a car.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** But we are shipping these bits of swag to Austin tomorrow. So it will be there in time.

**Craig:** Holy – so wait – you’re pre-shipping swag ahead of time?

**John:** We’re pre-shipping swag ahead of time.

**Craig:** Oh wow. My mind is working overtime. Do not tell me what it is. I want to be surprised with everybody.

**John:** I won’t. You’ll be surprised.

**Craig:** Even if you did tell me, I would forget, so I would be surprised again. It would be amazing.

**John:** We had a bit of follow up here. Do you want to take this letter from Chris Fousek?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure Chris Fousek writes, “I am a long time listener of the podcast and screenwriting procrastinator extraordinaire. I have just contacted Chevalier’s bookstore about a personalized copy and thought maybe I would write you a quick email as well.” Personalized copy of what? Let’s find out.

“We recently just welcomed our own Arlo into the world and just wanted to thank you for all that you do for the writing community as well as the creation of Arlo Finch.” I think they’re talking about you, John. “A decisive inspiration in naming our new baby Arlo Leigh Fousek.” What an amazing thing. How about that?

**John:** Yeah. There’s an extra Arlo in the world. So, Chris had sent in a little photo of a newborn baby. All newborn babies are cute. This was a cute baby along with all other babies. I have a hunch that there are going to be plenty of Arlos being born independent of Arlo Finch. I feel like it’s a name that’s going to be on the rise because it has a good throwback quality, but I’m excited to have helped name one baby out there in the world.

**Craig:** And Arlo to me seems like it could go gender neutral.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like I don’t know if Arlo Leigh is a boy or girl. Because both of those names are gender neutral.

**John:** They are. Looking at this – actually I do know that this one is a boy because in the little photo that was sent through the little thing says Arlo and there’s a boy sticker on the hospital card. But I agree. Arlo, you could name a girl Arlo.

**Craig:** Baby has a beard. That’s the other giveaway. A full beard.

**John:** Well, yeah, and they sent the full nude baby picture, which I guess–

**Craig:** That often [crosstalk]. Not this time. Good. You know what? I’m glad they didn’t do that. That’s not appropriate.

**John:** Nope. So anyway, that’s a nice little bit of Arlo Finch news.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** Another bit of follow up. Back in our conflict of interest episode we talked about how the WGA and the agencies were talking about renegotiating their deal, their contract, or essentially the WGA had given notice that they wanted to renegotiate the contract which started this one year ticking clock. And basically nothing has happened since that point until last week the Association of Talent Agencies, which represents all the agencies, came back and said, “Wow, we really wish you wouldn’t have put us on shout like that, but they, let’s have some informal talks.”

So, it looks like something will slowly start to happen on the negotiations between agents and the WGA.

**Craig:** Yeah. I generally remain skeptical about all negotiations between the WGA and anyone. The WGA negotiating with a sandwich place, I am skeptical of the negotiation. But we did have a pretty solid negotiation last time around with the companies. This is a different deal. Very different deal. And I think the big problem that we have, well, ultimately I think is going to come down to some judge somewhere deciding if our point of view is correct or their point of view is correct.

I will say this. As a new arrival to the world of television, I find the existence of packaging fees, which is one of the big bugaboos that we’re digging into with these agencies, to be the most odious, absurd nonsense every devised by Hollywood. At least financially speaking. I think it’s ridiculous. And I’m going to do everything I can to destroy it. I don’t know, I mean, I’m willing to, I don’t know, go full Katniss Everdeen.

**John:** Very good. And I will say my concern is that as noxious as these packaging fees are, my bigger concern is that as agencies becomes more involved in the actual production of material we as writers become employees of agencies which is a real messed up situation. So it’s not just that they have a piece of the backend. They are actually producing stuff. And that becomes really problematic.

**Craig:** Never. Never. I will also Katniss Everdeen that.

**John:** Never.

**Craig:** No, who is the other guy? Peeta Mellark?

**John:** Yeah, that sounds right.

**Craig:** All right. Pretty decent pull. I’ll Peeta that one and I’ll Katniss the other one. I don’t care.

**John:** Great. So, we’ll be under a giant Thunderdome and there will be cheers and people will be watching. It will be great.

**Craig:** I will wear a fiery dress.

**John:** She’s on fire.

All right. Let’s get to our main topics because there are so many main topics.

**Craig:** So much.

**John:** This past Wednesday the Academy Board of Governors announced several changes coming to the Awards telecast. So basically they’re going to get down to a three-hour total running time, which means that certain awards are going to be given during commercial breaks rather than during the main telecast. They’re going to move the whole Oscars earlier in the calendar, so not this year, but the next year it will be moving up two or three weeks, so February 9th is the target date for those.

And, finally, and sort of most controversially they want to add a new category, Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film.

Craig, what’s your hot take on these? It’s not even a hot take because we’re recoding this almost a week after it’s been announced.

**Craig:** A warmed-over take.

**John:** What’s your lukewarm take on this?

**Craig:** Well, look, in general I kind of can’t get too worked up over this stuff. There are certain kinds of people that are Oscarologists. They take the Oscars super-duper seriously. They care a lot about them. They think they matter a lot. And to some extent they do. They can matter a lot for individual films and, of course, I think for people that win Oscars, I mean, we have statistics. They actually tend to live longer than their cohorts. It is the closest thing that we have to objectively announcing that somebody is good at their job, in movies at least.

Certain awards being given during commercial breaks, it was inevitable. You know, these award shows go on forever. It’s kind of become a running joke. And while I’m not sure while ones they’ve shunted off, but if it’s the short form animation or something like that I’m not shocked. It makes sense. People essentially watch these shows for the actors. That’s kind of the deal. That’s why the SAG Awards for instance are televised, whereas nobody would ever both televising the DGA Awards or the WGA Awards or the Editors Guild Awards because nobody wants to see those people. They want to see actors. They’re famous.

So, I get those changes. The earlier date, fine. New category: Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film. I cannot describe how much I hate this idea. I can’t put it on a scale of hatred. Zero to all of my hatred. This is all of my hatred plus five. I hate it. I hate it. And I’m really curious what you think, before I discuss why. You’re a member of the Academy. I don’t know if they asked you about this stuff or polled you guys about this, or if you were involved. Are you allowed to say what you think about it?

**John:** I am allowed to say what I think about it. I’m not on the Board of Governors. I’m just a normal Academy member. So I got the news the same time everybody else got the news. So I don’t like the name. I don’t like the idea. But I will, just for the devil’s advocate, I will explain sort of where I think it is coming from.

I think it’s not coming from the Academy. It’s coming from ABC. It’s coming from the company that is actually broadcasting the awards. And ABC is looking at the fact that last year the ratings for the show dropped 20%. So it’s still the biggest, or second biggest television event of the year, right after the Super Bowl. But it wasn’t as big of a thing as it had been previous years. And so they’re looking and saying we need to give an award to a movie that everybody has seen so people will actually tune in to watch it.

And I get that as an instinct. I’m not a fan of the existence of this award or the choice to add it. I really don’t like the name.

**Craig:** Ugh, the name.

**John:** I think that could have been workshopped a lot better.

**Craig:** Oof.

**John:** And it’s not even clear what the criteria will be for this award. So, I think the general sense of like we need to also make sure we are awarding great movies that are not sort of art house movies. I get that. And that we don’t only look at this sparkling little gems in the distance, but really look at the movies that are right in front of us. But I don’t see this award, especially with this name, and this presentation doing that.

**Craig:** I’ll go one step further. I don’t think it’s going to happen. I think that they are going to–

**John:** I think it’s going to get pulled.

**Craig:** So much negative feedback, because first of all the name is outrageous. And it actually ends up hurting the very thing they want to help. If they want to help, for instance, a movie like Get Out, or a movie like Black Panther, or even movies that people really love like some Disney movies, you know, it’s not helping them. It’s essentially ghettoizing them. So, it’s like, “OK, here’s the real Oscar for the best movie. And then here’s – you’re popular. They bought your tickets. So here’s a special kind of side Oscar. It’s not a real Oscar.”

And to me if I could wave the magic wand, because I do believe that the Oscars really do have a problem. They no longer routinely reward Hollywood for what they do. What they’re doing is routinely rewarding independent films for what they do. And so what I would do is I would essentially create a category of best independent film or best limited release film. Ghettoize them. But keep the best movies – so in other words you say, look, if you’ve been released on fewer than a thousand screens you are the best limited release film. And then all these movies that slip into theaters for five days or one day in 12 theaters to qualify, all that stuff goes away. You have to actually be in a – and then the Oscar is reserved for movies that are on a thousand screens or more, meaning movies that maybe people could have possibly seen. Because that’s what they used to be.

I mean, when you look back at what Oscars were they gave awards to big movies, not little – I mean, I love little movies. I tend to like them more than the big movies, but you know, at some point either this is for Hollywood or it’s not.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s a smart choice. So hopefully they will listen to you and come to their senses and some of these things will not come to pass the way they are being presented right now. I guess I’m sympathetic to the notion that it is both an organization trying to award excellence in its field and also a worldwide telecast that is meant to be popular and beloved and that individual movie lovers take ownership of the Oscars. And so they’re trying to balance these two things. I just don’t think they balance them very well.

**Craig:** No. And it’s just an indication that there’s – something is wrong over there. I don’t know what it is, because I don’t know how they operate. And I never will. But something seems wrong with the way they’re governing in general. It just seems like maybe there’s too many people. I feel like the place is paralyzed or something and it’s too bad, because it’s an amazing organization actually. They do a lot of really great work.

**John:** Yeah. For instance they hosted our 100th episode of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** That was obviously their brightest moment. But, you know, there’s the Nicholl Fellowship. And the Library. They do a lot of really good things. Everybody knows them for the Oscars. That’s supposed to be their moneymaking gig. If people stop watching it – this feels a little pander-y. I don’t know. I hope they change it.

**John:** We’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ll see what happens.

**John:** In the category we’ll see what happens. The Editors Guild is not happy with IATSE. So, this is a complicated union situation. I actually had to look up the history of how these things came to be. IATSE stands for the – ready? – The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists, and Allied Crafts in the United States, its territories, and Canada.

That is a very long name, so that’s why we call it IATSE. But IATSE is essentially the super union that covers a bunch of the trades in Hollywood. They also do other stuff, but particularly the trades in Hollywood. They’re a total of 375 local unions, including the Animation Guild, which is a source of great annoyance to writers who work in animation; the International Cinematographers Guild; and the Motion Picture Editors Guild.

So this past month they were renegotiating their contract with the AMPTP, the same people we negotiate our WGA contract with, and the editors were not happy with how this deal was shaping up.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a – well, I think the problem here is, again, one of a structural thing. We were just talking about the Academy. So let’s talk about IATSE. IATSE is just huge. It’s massive. And it covers segments of the labor force that are really different from each other. I mean, the Writers Guild sometimes runs into trouble now and then between representing feature writers and representing television writers. And the Directors Guild has television directors and film directors. And they have first ADs versus directors. But nothing like IATSE.

In IATSE you have an enormous amount of grips. You also have them representing costume designers. And you have them representing cinematographers and editors. Everyone is doing a very different job with very different needs and very different problems. The issue is that this union never strikes, ever, even though they do have easily the single best strike threat in town.

**John:** If IATSE were to strike there’s no alternative. All production would stop immediately if IATSE were to strike.

**Craig:** Instantly. Instantly. Also, all post-production would stop instantly.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** All pre-production would stop instantly. Everything would stop. Period. The end. And they do need to strike together, I believe. The problem is when a particular local like Editors Guild Local 700 has a problem with their contract, big IATSE starts talking with – essentially they start negotiating internally. So, it’s not just I have to figure out how to get what I need out of the AMPTP. I also have to figure out how to convince Grips Local 80 that they should be striking with us over our editors’ issues.

And what ends up happening is, at least in this case, and I think that this probably is fairly common in IATSE, big IATSE goes ahead and negotiates a deal on behalf of the editors. And now the editors local is saying to their members don’t vote yes on this even though our union, specifically represented by Matt Loeb, their president, is saying that they have created “a huge victory.” That’s what he’s calling this contract that the editors are saying – unanimously the Editors Guild Board of Directors said to recommend that their members vote no. Now that’s a huge schism in their – not much of a union is it at that point, at least there’s no union in the union.

**John:** Nope. So, complicating everything else is that each of these individual local guilds has their own leadership. So Cathy Repola is the Executive Director of the Editors Guild, but she is the one who is coming out against this deal. Her specific concerns with it were for editors there’s a nine-hour turnaround time versus a ten-hour turnaround time.

Turnaround is one of those things that we don’t think about much as writers but is so crucial to everybody else working on a production. So turnaround is from the time you leave work to the time that you have to come back to work, that is turnaround. And SAG has turnaround negotiated for all of its actors. And IATSE negotiates turnaround. It’s ten hours for almost everybody except for editors who only get a nine-hour turnaround.

**Craig:** Which is crazy.

**John:** Imagine you work till midnight. You leave at 12:01. They can call you back to work at 9:00am. So how are you supposed to have a life, much less sleep, if that is what they’re insisting upon?

**Craig:** It’s outrageous. And, by the way, the real shame should always be on the companies for insisting that that – because, listen, they can say, “Well, blah, blah, blah.” Really what it comes down to is just dollars and cents. It’s a spreadsheet. And there’s a certain amount of money that they don’t want to have to spend to give people what I think is just humane treatment. I mean, ten hours is barely humane frankly as turnaround. It should be 12. But, OK, if everybody else below the line is getting ten, how do you warrant this nine-hour thing? It’s outrageous.

But then, secondarily, you have to look at IATSE and say, listen, your editors have a point. If the implication that editors are making is that big IATSE has essentially thrown them under the bus to keep everybody else working and happy, well, that looks pretty much like that’s what happened. Because there’s just no – I don’t see how you could possibly justify calling something a “huge victory” when you haven’t changed the single most brutal aspect of that working contract.

**John:** Nope. So the other thing that she points out is that one of the quoted big gains of the contract was new media residuals sort of being refigured out. So the same way that writers like Craig and I get residuals for stuff we’ve written that shows up on Netflix or shows up, you know, downloads through iTunes, those are residuals that are paid to us individually as writers. For IATSE guilds, those residuals go in to help pay their pension fund. And the pension fund is a crucial aspect of survivability in this industry.

Her concern, which I think is a lot of people’s concerns, is that it’s not going to be enough money going into the pension fund to keep it solvent. And that the pensions that we’ve come to rely on and expect will not be solvent if they don’t negotiate a better rate.

So that is one of the other bigger concerns that they’re facing and other unions are going to be facing.

**Craig:** And this is something that is specific to them, although the DGA has a somewhat similar thing. When the writers and actors, well, I don’t want to speak about the actors. I know for sure that when writers get residuals those residuals come to us. They are not siphoned off to help support the pension plan or the health plan. The pension plan and the health plan are paid for by basically premiums that the studios pay on top of the money they pay us, up to a certain point.

The Directors Guild will siphon off some of the residuals to help support their pension and health. And I believe IATSE siphons all of it off. I don’t think like a grip or an editor is getting residuals. It’s all going to support the pension and health plan. And when somebody says, for instance, Tom Davis, the business agent of Grips Local 80 and the second international vice president of IATSE, when he says this is a good deal, he’s proud of it, and provides for secure funding of your pension plan. It ensures that your health plan is fully funded. The question is for how long. Define secure.

Because you can say you’ve solved a problem for the next eight months, but very clearly going by any reasonable projection you haven’t solved it long term. And if you haven’t, you haven’t. Which means you live hand to mouth, negotiation to negotiation.

And therefore every time you go in you are in a terribly weak position. You want to ask for a ten-hour turnaround. But now you’re just begging for health care and keep to your pension plan solvent.

This will become an increasing problem. The companies, their tactics, their strategy, there’s no secret there. It’s quite clear what they want to do is exactly what I just said. Every single union, every negotiating cycle should come in on the brink of insolvency in health and pension and therefore the companies are only obligated to save those basic needs and do nothing else.

And I think that at some point everybody in IATSE has to kind of look at each other and say, “Do we all recognize that we’re sitting on this nuclear bomb that we refuse to use, ever? And why?”

**John:** When I look at it from the editors’ point of view, I am so frustrated on their behalf just because I also look at animation writers who are covered by IATSE and are similarly frustrated because while there’s a huge range of different professions that are covered by IATSE. Many of them are folks who are going to a set and doing work on that set and then going home. So they’re working on a production for a limited period time, on a set, and then they leave. That even goes down to like studio teachers. They’re working on that set and then they’re going home.

The jobs of editors, the jobs of animation writers are not at all like those jobs. And so it’s not surprising that this massive union is not looking out for their interests in the way that WGA would look out for animation writers’ interests or if the Editors Guild could be its own union could really look after the needs of editors. And so there’s likely no way to break off the Editors Guild and let it be its own union.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But of course that’s what they’d love to do.

**Craig:** They can’t. It’s just never going to happen. The labor laws that govern decertification in these things are impossible. This toothpaste is out of the tube. But here’s what’s so shocking to me. If the editors did peel off and became their own Editors Guild they would be remarkably powerless. Because as just editors they could go on strike and then people would say, “OK, well prep continues, production continues, post is going to be delayed, but let’s see if we can bring some more editors in somehow. And we’ll deal.”

So then you could see, well, what if we as editors got together with the cinematographers. Then we could shut down post and production. Well, hold on a second. Let’s also get together with the costume designers and the makeup designers and now prep is stopped. Hey, let’s form an international alliance of theatrical stage employees and then we can strike.

And this is what blows my mind. They’ve solved the problem. They just won’t do it. And there’s something rotten at the core of this union if they are allowing this to happen to their members. I don’t get it. I don’t understand it.

**John:** I don’t understand it either. We will not solve it, but we will be in solidarity in sadness with our editor friends.

**Craig:** You’re sad. I have umbrage.

**John:** All right. Sadness/umbrage. They’re related emotions.

**Craig:** Yes. True, true.

**John:** Let’s direct our umbrage to a new thing that is coming up. I’m actually curious what you think about this. So, this past week the Department of Justice announced that they are going to be reviewing the Paramount Consent Decrees. So we’ve talked about this on two previous episodes, 327 and 347. The Paramount Consent Decree was 70 years ago that basically said that a motion picture studio could not also own theatrical exhibition. So they could not own their own theaters. It’s breaking up that sort of vertical monopoly that studios were having.

It had very specific other requirements in terms of blocked booking. And you couldn’t require theaters to take a whole slate of movies. Very specific things that were thrown down 70 years ago. The Department of Justice is looking at changing these rules. Craig, what’s your take on this review?

**Craig:** It’s interesting. I remember thinking when Fin-Syn went away, that was sort of the equivalent. That was where television networks couldn’t produce their own content. That went away. And then television networks started doing that and it was not the end of the world. But I remember thinking, Hmm, you know, I could see a lot of opportunity for abuse. And there have been problems particularly in the area of self-dealing, where networks buy products from the studios that the parent company owns and so forth.

In this case, I kind of am OK with it because I feel like the current system is a little busted. Theaters/exhibitors are problematic. They have remained problematic for the film industry. They are stuck in an old model, incredibly stuck in an old model, where every ticket for every movie essentially costs the same with slight variations for 3D premiums and so forth. They make most of their money selling you incredibly overpriced garbage. And the facilities themselves often are resistant to improvement. And it is not sustainable because home theaters are getting better and better. And I’m not talking about fancy home theaters. I’m talking about an average middle class family in the United States has a flat screen TV that is so much bigger and larger than anything you or I had as kids. And the sound is really, really good.

And so at some point something has to give. And maybe the studios would do a better job of this.

**John:** I am skeptical that the studios would do a better job at this. I think it would ultimately – I can envision scenarios in which just like Fin-Syn this goes away and everything stays basically OK. But I can also imagine it really just crushing theatrical exhibition, or sort of your ability to see the movie you want to see the day you want to see it at the theater you want to see it. Because if Disney buys out specific theaters and so Disney movies are only available at specific theaters in certain markets then they can’t get to other things. It becomes really problematic.

I would also challenge this assumption that exhibition is flailing or going down. I don’t know the exact numbers, but box office is actually doing quite well. And I would say compared to when I moved to Los Angeles, exhibition in Los Angeles is much, much better. And so I do see the chains investing in facilities and sort of getting better. So, I don’t think that this threat of, oh, our home television screens are going to be so good that we’re not going to go out to the movies. I don’t that’s borne out by the last 15 years.

**Craig:** Well, I do agree with you that movie-going is fairly robust. I think it’s just more the economics of the exhibition itself. In other words, the tickets sales are the ticket sales. They’re doing quite well. But how much money the exhibitors are collecting and putting back into their facilities, that’s the part where I’m starting to wonder if they have the ability to revolutionize or advance or, I don’t know, innovate in any kind of interesting way.

Yes, in Los Angeles there are these wonderful movie theaters that have these big super cushy seats and they lean back and you can reserve a seat and you can get dinner and a drink and it’s amazing. But the vast majority of the country it’s still a box that is not particularly well cleaned and the popcorn costs way too much and the projection equipment maybe isn’t the best. And sometimes the sound is meh.

And I just – like for instance, let’s say Disney were allowed to exhibit Disney films. There would be no shortage of places to go see a Disney film. That’s the one thing they would solve immediately by constructing new theaters. And those new theaters would be amazing. And when it was time for Star Wars, every Disney theater would be a Star Wars theater. And there would be no problem seeing Star Wars and it would be – you wouldn’t have that restriction, right?

So, there would be flexible supply and demand. And, of course, ticket prices would probably become flexible, too, which is something that I kind of think maybe is reasonable. You know?

**John:** I’m not objecting to any sort of those innovations along the way. I guess my concern is for if you’re Lionsgate and you have The Hunger Games and you want to come out 4,000 screens across the country that is increasingly difficult if Disney owns a third of those screens. And those negotiations become very tough.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ish. I mean, because look, you still can see a ton of Warner Bros. television shows on other people’s networks. And I think if people see that The Hunger Games is going to be a hit frankly I think there’d be quite a bit of competition to get those.

**John:** Yeah. But I think the competition to get those would be that Disney would have to have a piece of The Hunger Games. So I think that giant corporation would say like, “OK, well you want to be on our screens, then we get 10% of your movie.”

**Craig:** That’s possible. But then of course they could go to Fox and say – well, Ok, not Fox.

**John:** Not Fox.

**Craig:** OK, Universal. They could go to the Universal theater chain and say would you just run this and take the normal share of ticket price. Because, look, the truth is that the exhibitors get essentially, what, a 40% take. That’s the best take there is. And that, by the way, is why ticket prices cannot budge because the exhibitors refuse to do it, because there’s nothing in it for them ultimately.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see where this goes. I mean, it’s a 70-year-old deal. Yes, the industry has changed greatly since this was all negotiated. I’m just not convinced that we will see changes that actually benefit movies and that benefit people who love to see movies. I think we’ll probably see changes that benefit Disney and that’s a scary thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think no matter what we do somehow Disney will benefit.

**John:** Well that’s our next topic which is the Disney/Fox merger looks like it’s going to happen. Basically all the roadblocks along the way have been lifted. What’s strange to me as I talk to folks around town is nobody quite knows what happens next. It’s not really clear whether Fox continues to exist, both as a motion picture studio and as a television network. Do you go in and pitch something at Fox?

We had a discussion about sort of an initiative we wanted to go talk to places, so do we go in and talk to Fox? Does Fox still exist? We just don’t know. Craig, what are you hearing and feeling about Fox these days?

**Craig:** Absolute confusion. I was on the lot for a few days a couple weeks ago helping somebody out on a project and just walking around that lot, it was the first lot I ever worked on in Hollywood as an intern. It’s before I even graduated college. So it holds a special place in my heart. It’s a wonderful lot.

**John:** Yeah, it is.

**Craig:** And it just occurred to me that it was kind of the crazy situation. I think Disney purchased Fox Studios, they purchased 20th Television. They didn’t purchase Fox Broadcasting Network. They did not purchase Fox News or Fox Sports. But I believe they did purchase the lot. I think that’s part of it is they own this lot now and no one there – and I asked – no one really knows. They don’t know.

I think that there was a reluctance to make any serious decisions until they knew it was actually happening. Well, now it’s actually happening.

**John:** I had a friend who works at Fox who was describing this lunch she saw which was a bunch of Disney employees coming over to meet with their equivalent people at Fox. And there was like a lunch where they’d get to know each other. But she said it was weird to think about like in most of these cases one of those people is going to go. There’s going to be redundancies and one of those people is going to go away.

And so if I were merging these two things, yes, there’s probably places where you could really combine things and do a better job. So if you combine home video, you combine sort of those backend things, but the actual production and the actual labeling, I would keep Fox around. I just think it helps so much for Disney to have a Fox label for all those movies that are not Disney movies, and also just to have different smart people working on those things and getting them out there in the world.

I don’t know if they’re going to do that, but that’s what I would do.

**Craig:** I think they will. Yes, obviously the big prize is the library and I guess to a lesser extent a certain amount of real estate, but it does seem to me that – I mean, look, you certainly don’t buy Fox and own the Simpsons and not want to keep making the Simpsons, or keep making Family Guy. That continues.

With that in mind, you then turn your eye to the feature film studio. So television, you guys keep on doing what you do. Feature films, Fox does great. They really do. They’re incredibly successful. They have a good team over there. Emma Watts is a very good executive. She knows what she’s doing. And they have had a lot of success.

You’re absolutely right. Why would you stop? Why would you eliminate those jobs? You can’t release those movies. You can’t make Deadpool at Disney. It’s not possible.

**John:** No, you can’t.

**Craig:** You can’t.

**John:** So Emma Watts is fantastic, of course, but you look at Elizabeth Gabler, Fox 2000, that’s a kind of movie that – so they’re mostly book adaptations. The John Green books are over there. Those are movies that Disney is not making themselves.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Disney is not making Love Simon. And so you keep Fox 2000 for that. And Fox Searchlight gets a couple Academy Award nominations every year. Disney doesn’t. So you’d keep Fox Searchlight. So I guess we’re arguing for keep the film side of Fox, you know, Fox.

**Craig:** And I think they will. It just seems so odd to me to purchase a movie studio and then not use the movie studio. It’s like, I don’t know, taking the peel and throwing out the fruit on the inside. It’s got great value and they have franchises over there. And obviously, look, they could cherry pick. But I just think they would be giving away money. Makes sense. Keep them.

**John:** So specific questions that have come up this last week that I don’t have the answers for is what happens to Blue Sky Animation. So Blue Sky does Ice Age. Their Fox’s sort of in-house CG animation. Chris Wedge does a lot of their movies. They make good movies and they make a lot of money. But they feel really redundant to a company that already has Pixar and has Disney animation. So, don’t know what happens there.

And you brought up Family Guy and Simpsons. Those are some of the only animated WGA-covered shows on the air. It’s because of a special deal that was made with the WGA and Fox back in the day. So the Fox animation shows that show up on Fox are WGA-covered and that’s fantastic for those writers. But what happens now that this is all moving over to Disney? Will we be able to get more WGA-covered shows in animation there? We’ll see.

**Craig:** I mean, I think technically what happens is there’s a work area and an employer and once you have organized that area then you have it. So, Fox Primetime Animation is WGA. I don’t see that changing. They make those shows for Fox Broadcasting. So The Simpsons aren’t airing on ABC now. They’re going to continue airing on Fox, which is not owned by Disney. And 20th will continue to employ those people under a Writers Guild contract because there is one. They have jurisdiction now. That’s sort of irreversible as far as I now. Will they be tougher on new entries into that space? No question.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, so they could just basically stop, saying we’re not going to do any new shows for Fox Broadcasting because those would have to be WGA shows.

**Craig:** No. I think actually 20th is the WGA signatory.

**John:** 20th is the signatory.

**Craig:** But essentially what they carved out is if 20th Television is making primetime animation, whether it’s at Fox or anywhere, it just turns out that it always is at Fox, I believe that the deal is that those have to be WGA shows. Now, I don’t think that Disney is going to turn down the opportunity, like for instance Family Guy has generated some spinoff shows. If The Simpsons should generate a spinoff show, which is incredibly unlikely, but let’s say, it’s going to be a WGA show.

But are they interested in developing new animation? Probably. I mean, I don’t know why they would be honestly because the shows that they have that work work, and that’s that. And they keep going. But Blue Sky is an interesting one. I think there’s an argument to be made that they keep doing Blue Sky. But I don’t know. It’s like even money to me. I look at them and like, well because look, Disney has Pixar, but Disney also has Disney Animation. So, then there could also be Fox animation which is a very different vibe.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** So, boy, I don’t know. Anybody that’s going to predict probably ends up with egg on their face here.

**John:** Yeah. The backdrop for all of this, of course, Disney wants to have its own streaming service, so they are no longer going to be putting their movies through Netflix. So all the Marvel movies, the Star Wars movies, and other stuff will be going through the streaming service. So that’s going to be a whole interesting thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And an issue of self-dealing. It will be fascinating to see what happens there. Apple, of course, has their own service. It’s not clear whether it’s subscription or what it’s going to be. But we have friends who are working on shows for Apple, so it’s going to be a very different landscape two, three years from now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that was going to be true no matter what. You know, whether these companies buy each other or not, three years from now god only knows.

**John:** Craig, you had a thing to put on the outline which was about the WGA, specifically dues. What was your thinking there?

**Craig:** Well, every year I like to take my nerdy walk through the Writers Guild of America West Incorporated Annual Financial Report, which they are constitutionally required to issue to all of us who are members. And I believe out of the roughly 7,000 Writers Guild of America West members, one reads this thing, and that’s me. I read it very carefully.

**John:** I read it, too.

**Craig:** Yes, of course. The board doesn’t count. But you did when you were not on the board. You also read it. You were good.

**John:** I did read it.

**Craig:** The first thing I always look at, of course, because as you know you and I are both tireless champions of the working feature screenwriter was just to see how things were going for our long depressed ilk, and not great. So, not as bad as it had been, but still pretty bad. The number I look at is essentially the number of writers that are reporting earnings in the year and then the total earnings reported. When you look at – and they give us a span of 2012 to 2017 – 2012 total earnings, $368 million. And total earnings in 2017, $421, which seems like quite a nice rise, until you look at the number of writers reporting earnings and you see that in 2012, 1,664 writers shared that pie of $368. And in 2017, 1,940 writers shared the $421.

Effectively what this means is that the average earning, this is the mean, this is not how it actually works out, but the mean average from 2012 to 2017 has actually dropped. It has dropped slightly about $4,000. I would be so much more interested in the median earnings, just because I think that’s probably more representative of what’s going on.

But regardless, our earnings are not just flat. They’re going down. And they’re going down in non-adjusted dollars. If we were to adjust for inflation it would be even worse. So, this is not good. It continues to be bad news for feature film screenwriters. And as you and I have discussed numerous times it is my great hope that the guild starts to address this as kind of thoroughly and actively as it can. And I know that you’re taking the lead on that now.

**John:** So, a thing I think is crucial for you to understand, which is very hard to reflect in the data, is that when you show the number of writers who have feature income, keep in mind that 80% of feature screenwriters are also TV writers. So, we need to look at sort of how much they’re making overall in a year, and not just how much they’re making on the movie side.

So, my concern is that are these people making enough money that they can keep working as a writer? And if they are not able to do that, that means there’s a huge crisis. But I think it can be a little bit misleading because you and I both know that from 2012 to 2017 it’s been increasingly common for folks who would normally just be feature writers to also be working in television. Like you, you’re working in both features and in television.

So, while I share your concern that the feature earnings are down, I don’t know that the actual earnings for individual members are down, because they may also have TV earnings.

**Craig:** Fair enough. However these earnings are – obviously these are the earnings that are just from their feature work. And I think that it is not great if what we’re saying is the only way to make a living in features, or to at least keep pace with inflation, is to also then work in television as well. And it’s particularly concerning when you are talking about new feature writers, the ones who generally are making the least, if they are entering a business where people are saying literally you can’t actually just do this job. You have to also do television. Or you can just do television. But being a feature film screenwriter isn’t a job anymore that can be on its own. That’s sort of a rough one.

**John:** That existential concern I think is a really valid one. And so we have to look at what is happening that is causing their income to fall. And my hunch is that they’re doing just as many drafts as the writers back in 2012 were doing, but they’re not getting paid for those drafts. And they’re probably working on multiple passes for the price of one pass. Unpaid work.

**Craig:** That’s right. So there’s a lot of unpaid labor here. Exactly. But I did have this concern, then that kind of led me to this concern about dues.

And the reason I’m concerned about dues is for a couple of reasons. First the screenwriters proportionally pay more in dues than television writers, simply because screenwriting income is all writing income. A large amount of television writing income is actually parsed out as “producing income.” So that doesn’t get dues-ed. Dues-ed is my nice little verb there.

**John:** Yeah. That’s what they say in the WGA, too. They say Dues-ed.

**Craig:** So screenwriters have always carried a disproportionately heavy burden of the dues. Now, the dues that we pay are 1.5% of what we earn, both for employment and also what we earn in residuals. It wasn’t always 1.5%. It used to be 1%. And at some point, I think possibly in the ‘90s, or rather the ‘80s it was bumped up to 1.5% because the guild was struggling a little bit and the guild was also going through a number of strikes and needed to beef up its rainy day fund and its good and welfare fund so when we go on strike they’re able to help people out, give them bridge loans. That is no longer the situation.

We have been at 1.5% for decades at this point. I think my entire tenure in the guild I’ve been at 1.5%. And lo and behold this year the guild had an operating surplus of $8.2 million. And that’s up from before. And it was the product of growth and overall writer earnings led by, it’s no big surprise, television. And by investment gains.

So my issue, and this is going to sound a little libertarian, so bear with me, but there is that thing where people say we have to increase taxes to pay for a problem. And the people who are against tax raises say, sure, but you’re never going to unraise the taxes are you? Because taxes have a way of sticking around. One went up to 1.5%. There is no longer a problem. In fact, there seems to be the opposite of a problem. We are now sitting on extra money that we don’t know how to spend. And we should lower the dues rate if for no other reason than to help out feature writers who are struggling, particularly new feature writers for whom that 1.5% is real money that really hurts and is coming generally on top of 25% that they’re paying out to agents, managers, and lawyers.

**John:** Yes. So I’m actually on a dues subcommittee for the guild, so these things are discussed. There’s an operating surplus this year. There’s not always a surplus. But I’m curious, so I sort of can’t talk about discussions happening internally, but I’m curious Craig how you would see addressing this. Because you say at this point things are good, but you don’t know sort of what the future holds. How would you address the concern that if you were to lower it to a certain point you may need to raise it back up again later on? Do you put a sunset clause in there? Do you a temporary thing? What are some mechanisms you would like to see done for addressing the dues situation?

**Craig:** Great question. And I think there’s a very simple answer. The dues rate is set by the Board of Directors. Simple as that. So, the Board of Directors has the flexibility to adjust the dues rate depending on circumstance. What’s happened is they’ve just stopped. And they shouldn’t. I think there should be a set review. We go and have negotiations every three years. There should be a set dues rate review every three years. And if it looks like, well, we might need to throttle back up, we throttle back up. And if it looks like we can throttle down, we throttle down.

But it seems punitive to force new members, and I’m talking about a woman who is just recently out of college, she’s 24, she’s got student loans. She’s just gotten a job. She just had to pay out $5,000 in her dues initiation on top of everything else. And she also has to pay that extra half percent of her income because the guild just can’t be bothered to pay attention. I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s fair. We’re running a surplus. We should make these adjustments on the fly regularly.

**John:** So a thing I should put in here for context is that the dues that we’re discussing, these are things that are the operating expenses of the guild on a day to day basis, but they are not your health and your pension. And so it can be confusing as you sort of join the guild is that you are responsible for paying the percentage of your income, the residuals percentages is calculated automatically. Every quarter you are sent a form, you fill it out, you send it back in, and they send you another form that says this is how much you owe for this quarter. That is the kind of dues we’re talking about.

The kind of money that goes into pay for your health care, the health plan, and the pension plan is handled by a whole separate thing and those funds are pretty good right now. As we talked about the IATSE thing, the concern overall is making sure that those things stay solvent, but this is not the money that goes to making those solvent.

So, yeah, Craig, I can’t argue with you. I think there’s a reasonable case to be made for looking at what our dues are and making sure that it reflects the needs of the guild and the needs of the members.

**Craig:** This is why we need you at the guild.

**John:** Thank you. And I should also say that the guild elections will be coming up pretty soon, so in a future episode we’ll talk through the folks who are running for this. I’ll encourage you to go the candidates’ night if you want to. I’ve gotten a chance to meet a lot of the people who are running this year and there’s some really great, great people running. Sometimes you’re really twisting arms to get enough people to run and this year we had a ton of people running and a ton of really great new ideas. So, it’s going to be a good episode to talk through who is running and who we think you should support.

**Craig:** Absolutely. We’ve got I guess some sort of candidate list we can go through. I think we should probably wait until we get a little closer to the election. Is that right?

**John:** Yeah. So maybe two weeks from now we’ll do that.

**Craig:** That sounds like a good idea.

**John:** Cool. All right, our last big topic for today is movies that you cannot find anywhere. So this past week I wanted to watch The Flamingo Kid. Craig, you’ve probably seen The Flamingo Kid.

**Craig:** It’s one of my favorite movies of all time.

**John:** Holy cow. Well, Craig, you could not watch this movie online if you tried. And so–

**Craig:** What the?

**John:** I just assumed I could go to iTunes and go to The Flamingo Kid and Garry Marshall’s Flamingo Kid starring Matt Dillon would be there for me to watch. But, no, it is not on iTunes. It is not on Amazon. It is not on any streaming service.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** You cannot find a legal digital copy of The Flamingo Kid anywhere you go.

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** So, that is maddening. And I have theories but I want to tell you that the only way I was able to get The Flamingo Kid was to go on Amazon. I found through a third party reseller that was selling it through fulfilled by Amazon. It came two days later on a disc. I watched it like a caveman off of a DVD. We don’t even have a DVD player that would play it, so I ended up watching Garry Marshall’s movie on a 12-inch MacBook screen which was very frustrating.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**John:** And so I tweeted about it and a lot of people tweeted back. Franklin Leonard tweeted at me this great post by Kate Hagen talking through her similar thing trying to find this movie Fresh Horses from the ‘80s.

My hunch is that what’s happened with The Flamingo Kid is that it was an ABC/MGM coproduction and it’s unclear right now who probably has the home video rights and so therefore no one has sold the home video rights. My suspicion furthermore is that there’s a lot of movies in that situation, including movies that you would think like, well of course they’re going to be available, which are not available.

**Craig:** Fascinating. I love that movie. Hector Elizondo and of course Matt Dillon. You know my favorite thing in that movie is when Matt Dillon goes in the bathroom in the fancy house and he thinks the soap is candy. It’s the greatest thing. The face he makes is one of the greatest things that has ever been put on film.

I think you’re absolutely right. It’s a case of a dispute or maybe a nonexistent business partner and an ownership problem, and then so who has the rights? And who can actually release it? And who can make the money off the release. It’s such a bummer.

**John:** Yeah. So if you are a listener who has some time on your hands, I have two things you can do. So if you are a person who is a coder or a person who is good at sort of scripting things to go out into the Internet and search for things, this is something you could do for me and I’d be delighted to see what your results are.

So, I’m curious to look at the top 100 grossing movies of each year going back to around 1980. I’m stopping at 1980 because I feel like movies after 1980 are more likely to have been on home video at some point. Before then it’s catch is catch can. But so if you go back to 1980, make that list, that would be 3,700 movies. And then if you can set up a script to go through and check which of those movies are actually available on a service online. So, iTunes, Amazon, whatever service you want to find to compare to to see which of those movies are just not available anywhere.

I’d be curious to see that list of movies that are not available anywhere. And that’s a thing that a clever scripter could probably do in an afternoon.

But if you are not a clever scripter and you find another movie that you think should be available but is not available anywhere, I set up a special Google form where you can fill out the name of the movie, your name, and sort of where you checked. And we’ll start to make a list just anecdotally like “Surprisingly this movie you’d think would be out there is not out there.” So there will be a link in the show notes for the Google form you can fill out. And basically just build a spreadsheet of these movies that you think are out there that are not out there.

**Craig:** Missing movies. OK. Good plan.

**John:** Yeah. So the other thing to think about is who is ultimately responsible for solving this. And so I will not solve this. But to me going all the way back to the Academy, I think it’s the Academy that’s responsible for this. I think it’s the Academy who is responsible for film preservation, for film promotion. I feel like they’re the ones who should take up the mantle of making sure that these movies – these movies that are made by their members – are out there in the world.

So, I’ve been talking to some folks over at the Academy about really looking into this and making sure that film preservation isn’t just about, you know, making sure that Gunga Din is pristine on 35mm, but that you can get The Flamingo Kid.

**Craig:** Well, The Flamingo Kid is the Gunga Din of our youth.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** So, I say yeah. No, listen, this is one of those deals where two people may have a dispute over who owns something so they’re each happier with everyone getting all of nothing than something of something. And that’s a great idea. Maybe the Academy can step in. See, these are the sorts of things that would get them some goodwill. I like that idea.

**John:** All right. So we’ll see if that happens. We’ll follow up on that in a while. But Craig, we made it through all of these things. I can’t believe we did it.

**Craig:** We did it. We did it. And I knew we would do it because, you know what? Unlike our awards speech we have a generally good sense of time. We finish on time. Not like some podcasts. I’m saying that as if I ever listened to a podcast. I don’t. So I don’t know if what I’m saying is correct.

Oh, you know, I’m on a podcast by the way.

**John:** What’s this?

**Craig:** I guest-starred. Guest-starred? Guest appeared on the Freakonomics Podcast.

**John:** Holy cow. That’s great. Mike listens to Freakonomics. So what did you do on the Freakonomics Podcast?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t think the episode is out yet, but I had a really good discussion about – well, I thought it was going to be a discussion about creativity. This is with Stephen Dubner. And it just sort of became more of a conversation about I guess my career and choices and things and how stuff happened. It was a very – I mean, he’s a very very good interviewer. And they do it very similar to the way you and I do things. It’s a little more high tech because you have to go to a studio and everything. But he’s in New York and I’m here. But I’m very used to this, talking to the disembodied voice. He was very good. We had a great time. And I understand – I have come to understand this is a very popular podcast. Yeah, it’s like number five, I don’t know. It’s up there.

**John:** But it’s not the Best Popular Screenwriting Podcast.

**Craig:** No. I mean, obviously that’s us. And I don’t really know why anybody else would even do a screenwriting podcast. It seems futile. It’s like opening up a burger place next to In-and-Out. What are you doing? Stop it.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing is a Craigy kind of thing. It’s a game for iOS. It’s called Antihero. It is a turn-based game, sort of like a board game, but you play this master thief, sort of the head of this Thieves Guild, who is trying to spread influence across this little town. You can play against the computer or against another player. I thought it was really well done. And so you start to find these urchins that you can send out to infiltrate different businesses.

Craig, you would really dig it as a person who likes games on iOS. And thieves. So, Antihero for iOS.

**Craig:** Somebody says Thieves Guild to me I get all aquiver. I love it. You know in Elder Scrolls, Thieves Guild. Got to be coming.

**John:** I never do that tree.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Sorry.

**Craig:** What, no? You know that? From The Happening, the Mark Wahlberg thing?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**John:** The best. Never seen the movie. I’ve only seen the memes.

**Craig:** Seriously. I’ve only seen, what, no. And where they slow it down it gets even better.

My One Cool Thing is, so I think I’ve talked about Mark Halpin before. A prior One Cool Thing was his Labor Day Puzzle Extravaganza which David Kwong and I are just levitating in anticipation of. I literally think David is going to live with me for a week while we do that. But in the meantime I’ve been practicing by doing Mark Halpin’s puzzles that he’s made for The Nation. The Nation Magazine, the periodical. Each month for quite some time now he has done a special cryptic crossword puzzle, oftentimes based around his love of Broadway, specifically his love of Sondheim. So, now we’re really hitting like all of my bells at once. I mean, it’s just like – I don’t know how. This man was made for me. It’s just perfect.

So, Mark Halpin I think is the best cryptic crossword constructor on the planet. He doesn’t just come up with great clues and tough puzzles, and these are very, very tough, but there is always a four or five-step process to lead you to some brilliant meta solution. They are incredibly ingenious. This is not casual puzzle time. This is if you are a meta puzzle super dork like me. Definitely check these out. We will include a link in the show notes.

He provides all of the puzzles that have appeared in The Nation he has hosted on his own website, freely available for download and printing. Strongly recommend them.

**John:** Very cool. All right. That is our show for this week. As always it is produced by Megan McDonnell and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Davis. If you have an outro you’d like us to hear, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But short questions are great on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just search for Scriptnotes. Leave us a review while you’re there. That helps people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. In the show notes for this one you’ll find the link to the Google form that I’ve set up for missing movies. So, if you can think of a movie that you cannot find anywhere, let us know.

You can find the transcripts. They go up about four days after the episode airs. And you can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net, or at store.johnaugust.com where you can buy them in seasons of 50 episodes.

**Craig:** Such a smart idea.

**John:** And that’s our show.

**Craig:** Great show, John. You know what? Fantastic show.

**John:** Fantastic show. Maybe the best screenwriting podcast ever.

**Craig:** Not maybe. Definitely.

**John:** Not maybe.

**Craig:** Nah, for sure.

**John:** All right. Take care. Have a good week.

**Craig:** See you next time.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Scriptnotes is now on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/6ohMdZ91g1sXIYz8ylNgD9)!
* The [Austin Film Festival](https://austinfilmfestival.com) is coming up on October 25th!
* [Changes are coming to the Oscars](https://www.npr.org/2018/08/08/636743517/changes-are-coming-to-the-oscars-heres-what-we-know), including a new category for “Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film.”
* [IATSE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alliance_of_Theatrical_Stage_Employees) is [not backing](https://deadline.com/2018/07/editors-guilds-rejects-iatse-film-tv-contract-1202435757/) its Editors Guild in asking for a reasonable turnaround and pension support.
* [The Department of Justice will review the Paramount Consent Decree](https://deadline.com/2018/08/doj-to-review-paramount-consent-decrees-governing-how-studios-distribute-movies-to-theaters-1202439066/).
* [In Search of the Last Great Video Store](https://blog.blcklst.com/in-search-of-the-last-great-video-store-efcc393f2982) by Kate Hagen for the Black List blog.
* Add to [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdt2TnjvPuS5OWBrTwgWSnBp-18yGfuI1jc1ASlrkHa_Wh8vQ/viewform) if you find a movie that isn’t streamable.
* [Antihero](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/antihero-digital-board-game/id1265355382?mt=80) game for iOS.
* Mark Halpin’s [puzzles](http://www.markhalpin.com/puzzles/puzzles.html) for The Nation
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [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 Luke Davis ([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_363.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/where-movies-come-from).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 359 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to be looking at where movies come from with a focus on feature rooms, IP deals from Wattpad and DMG, and a story of someone impersonating film producers. Then we’ll be answering listener questions about accents, agents, and Lovecraft.

**Craig:** I don’t know how we can possibly do better than last week. I just want to remind you last week’s episode was perfect, correct?

**John:** It was, in fact, a perfect episode. So we’re not going to try to duplicate the perfection of a two-person episode, but because we have so much on our plate we have an extra guest. That is Liz Hannah who is joining us. She’s a screenwriter with all sorts of nominations for The Post. She’s also writing so many movies at the moment and literally just came from a pitch. Liz Hannah, welcome to the show.

**Liz Hannah:** Hi, thanks for having me. This is super exciting.

**Craig:** Welcome.

**John:** Yay! So I first met Liz up at the Sundance Filmmakers Lab and I was just impressed by how smart and devoted you were as a first-time adviser up there. You seemed to just get it in a way that was so exciting.

**Liz:** It’s all an illusion. It was all a trick so I could just be on this podcast. I was just auditioning the whole time.

No, I mean, I think I was really impressed. I didn’t really know what to expect about the Sundance Lab. And I was so impressed obviously by the scripts I read and by the people there, but also just the dedication of the advisers. I mean, it’s sort of contagious how much you talk about the fellows and how much you – and it’s also really – it’s so educational to go back to brass tacks of screenwriting and talk about structure, and character, and exposition, and it’s very helpful then when I was writing a pilot that day. I was like, “Oh, these are the things I should think about.”

**John:** Absolutely. So our last episodes have been brass tacks. They’ve all been about craft. None of that today.

**Liz:** Great. Love it.

**John:** Today is just the industry.

**Liz:** Super exciting.

**John:** Today is just how movies get sort of put together.

Before we get to that though we have follow up. So, two episodes ago, or maybe last episode, a listener wrote in with a question about the Jackman shot. And so a Jackman shot was something he had found in an old screenplay and wondered what is a Jackman shot. And we had no idea. Luckily, a listener did.

Simon in San Francisco says, “I did a little web sleuthing and I think I found the source of the term Jackman shot. Fred Jackman was a director, cinematographer, and special effects guru in the ‘20s and ‘30s. He had a remarkable 88 credits as a cinematographer from the mid ‘10s through the late ‘20s, as well as 11 credits as a director including the 1923 production of The Call of the Wild, which he also wrote.” So a screenwriter.

“From 1930 to ’41 he worked in special effects, winning an Academy Award in 1934 for ‘the development and effective use of the translucent cellulose screen in composite photography.’”

**Craig:** Obviously. Yeah, I mean, now that you say that, of course that’s what the Jackman shot is.

**Liz:** By the way, this is why you needed me on the show last week, because I obviously knew the answer to that off the top of my head.

**John:** There’s nothing like primitive visual effects. That’s your wheelhouse.

**Liz:** Absolutely.

**John:** So what they’re describing though, it sounds very reasonable. If it was written in a script as a Jackman shot because it was a brand new idea to have sort of like, OK, we’re superimposing a translucent thing in front of the screen to sort of build a matte shot kind of thing. That was new.

**Craig:** You know what’s interesting is that all those years ago, decades and decades ago, screenwriters were still writing camera shots into their screenplays. Isn’t that nice to know, world of dumbass modern gurus?

**Liz:** I mean, the thing also that I think is cool is like he was a multi-hyphenate in many different things. It’s always encouraging when you talk to young writers or you talk to anybody who wants to write is like, well, whatever you past experience is just bring that into your writing. Whatever you’ve been influenced by. Whatever makes you different, you can bring that into your writing. So that’s how we got the Jackman shot.

**Craig:** And then you might get a shot named after you.

**Liz:** I’m going to be real honest. I’m a little disappointed it has nothing to do with Hugh. I was really hoping for that. But, I’ll take it.

**Craig:** Just as a phrase it’s a little porny.

**Liz:** It’s very porny. I was very nervous about what we were discussing. I was like, wow, hot take.

**Craig:** Yeah, starting off with the Jackman shot. You normally end with that. OK. Moving on.

**John:** Well, what I thought was cool about looking at this guy’s bio, so he’s working in like 1910, 1920, like literally the start of the film industry. So Liz saying he’s a hyphenate, well, I guess everyone at the start of an industry is sort of a hyphenate because what are these jobs. It’s not obvious that you need a screenwriter and a director to be separate people.

**Liz:** Is it still obvious that that’s a thing–

**John:** Well that’s a thing we can talk about. The idea of a screenplay was sort of invented sort of in these early stages because like we have to figure out what we’re actually shooting. And so the idea of like I’m going to do visual effects, like is that a thing that we need?

So you look around today, we have new media stuff happening. So we have VR stuff. It’s like well what are those jobs? Obviously people are going to be moving back and forth between a lot of things because new stuff is being invented every day. And so you look back early as film and it feels a lot like where we are right now with some of the new technologies.

**Liz:** I mean, even think about sort of what I spent most of my morning talking about is like what is the movie industry going to look like in five years depending on say the Disney acquisition, depending on what happens with studios. And then you’re reinventing sort of what a Chairman looks like, what a CEO looks like, what the President of Production looks like because you’re going to be cross-boarding these things with different people that have been doing that job and now they’re going to work at the same place.

I mean, and I think just in the process of how the industry has developed really over the last I’d say five years, I mean, who knows kind of what is going to be profitable and also keep people in jobs in the next two years.

**Craig:** I’ll be honest. Not me. I have no idea. I am just – I have never felt less confident about what the future was going to hold for our business. If you are some kind of Hollywood or film and television industry prognosticator I actually feel bad for you. Because I don’t think there’s any way any of us can foresee what’s going to happen. Just based on the track record of the last 12 years, almost foolishness to try and predict at this point.

**Liz:** Well, I mean, the fact that the Mister Rogers documentary and RBG were two of the most successful movies so far of 2018, like obviously in comparison to what their budget was. That’s insane. Who would have said that a year ago? Well, maybe a year ago we would have said it. But who would have said that three years ago?

**Craig:** I can think of one person. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Definitely.

**Liz:** Oh, well, also Ruth be doing those planks, girl. Please, right now, be planking.

**John:** We need you.

**Liz:** We need you. Do you need a liver? Do you need a heart? What do you need? We got you.

**Craig:** We got some Heparin for you over here. What can I do? Can I massage your shins?

**Liz:** Anything.

**Craig:** Let’s keep the blood moving.

**John:** So what Liz brings up is this question of as studios are merging and possibly the Fox/Disney merger, I was in a meeting yesterday and we were talking about going out with these things. Like, well, do we go out to Fox because is Fox a thing? And we just don’t know whether six months from now whether Fox still exists as a brand, as an entity. Do you go out with this project to them or is it just not worth your time because ultimately you’re dealing with Disney down the road.

**Liz:** Well, and it has to do also with control. Right? If you are going to say sell it to Fox, or I think Fox is sort of test case of what’s going to happen in the next two or three years for every studio. I mean, if it goes well then who knows what happens? If it doesn’t go well, who knows what happens? But it’s also at the end of the day is if you sell something to one of these studios that may not be what it is now right now then is it going to go and disappear into the hands of somebody you’ve never met before because of the chain of command of how that goes?

So I think as creators right now the biggest decision, it’s always been a big decision, but it has never been more important than it is now of who you’re selling your material to.

**John:** Well let’s talk about that material. So our feature topic today is where movies come from. And so as we all know when a mommy movie and a daddy movie love each other very, very much sometimes they make another movie.

**Liz:** I thought it was a stork movie.

**John:** Oh, that’s right. I forget.

**Liz:** Come on. We’ve got kids listening.

**Craig:** Women. Daddy loves a stork very, very much.

**John:** But I think so often on this podcast we talk about the script is where, a screenplay is where a movie begins. It’s the first iteration of the movie. It’s the genesis of the movie. It’s the plan for the movie. And while that’s true, it is the first time that we have a vision for what the final movie is going to be, this is what it’s going to feel like to sit in a theater and watch it. The screenplay captures of that experience. So much of what we work on isn’t the original idea behind it, the original sort of like this is a movie behind it started before there was a screenplay.

So, let’s talk about some of our recent projects. Like The Post, where did The Post come from? What is the genesis of The Post?

**Liz:** The genesis of The Post was really my reading of Katharine Graham’s memoir Personal History. It’s an original screenplay. It was not adapted from the book. It was the first time I had ever heard of this woman more than in a casual mention. And I read this book which she won the Pulitzer Prize for. It’s one of the most incredible – excuse me – one of the most incredible memoirs I’ve read. The audiobook she reads herself, which is truly amazing. But I just thought she had such an amazing perspective on her life. And she was a different version of a woman that I had seen depicted in cinema.

And I was I think in my early 20s when I first read the book, and I was like this should be a movie. So, you know, all of these overnight successes, it takes ten years or longer. But I didn’t sit down to write it really until March of 2016 when I kind of had really lost my way with writing a little bit. I felt very discouraged. I hadn’t sold something. I was kind of thinking maybe I’m going to give this up. And then my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time and then I married purely because of this advice, was like “You should probably write that Katharine Graham movie that you’ve been talking about for six years or whatever.”

And so I sat down to write it. And, you know, it was I think for me very much about a woman finding her voice. Very much about a woman standing on her own two feet. It was extraordinarily universal in terms of you don’t have to be a 55-year-old woman in 1971 to feel excluded. You also don’t, I think, have to be a woman to feel like the underdog. That was something that was really interesting about the making of the movie was sort of transcending even just the gender discussion of it.

But, yeah, I mean, it came really from my love of Katharine Graham. And then it just proceeded from there.

**John:** So your project, you got the inspiration, you got the vision for it from reading this book and sort of the life of Katharine Graham, it’s not based on anything. There was no preexisting piece of intellectual property where they bought this book and they hired a writer to do it?

**Liz:** Correct.

**John:** Craig that sounds similar to you and your situation with Chernobyl where you had a vision for telling the story of Chernobyl but it wasn’t based on any one piece of source material. Fair?

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s absolutely true. And I love Liz’s story here because it is a little bit of a beacon for people at home who are in the same position that she was in. Because we are I think falsely told that Hollywood only makes things that are based on IP. The fact that we all just casually use the word IP or those initials IP is so embarrassing to me. It’s a little bit like the way we were saying last week that fans now use the word franchise which is just this awful corporate word, but the truth is if you are fascinated by a story that Hollywood wouldn’t necessarily kneejerk their way into making, well, you’ve discovered something special. And you don’t need to buy anything.

So, the really simple rules are if it’s a fact it’s not anybody’d property. Facts are not property. If you read someone’s autobiography they have put the facts of their life into the public domain. The book isn’t in the public domain. You have to purchase the book. That’s a fixed copy of something. But the facts are representable. And so in this case Liz came across this memoir. She read it. And that it sounds like inspired her to gather lots and lots of research and that’s exactly what happened to me with Chernobyl.

I read just a random article and then I started looking at Wikipedia. And then suddenly I was just buying books. And one book in particular moved me and made me need to write this show.

If what you’re writing is based on truth you have this wonderful opportunity to research and write it.

**Liz:** And I also always think truth, you know, when people start to fictionalize things of the past it can get really dicey. And I have sort of a kneejerk nauseating reaction to that. And the thing I always tell people is you obviously have to dramatize things to make it a piece of narrative work. It’s not a documentary. Tom Hanks is not actually Ben Bradley. But if you’re condensing storylines you’re dramatizing things or you’re amalgamating characters because of whatever, there’s too many. That’s fine. But truth often is much more entertaining than fiction. And that’s the thing that I’ve often learned in working in the nonfiction space is any time I felt that I’m being sort of pigeonholed or something because of the truth or because of the facts of the history it’s like you go read one more book, and you go read one more article, or you go watch a documentary and like, “Oh no, that is way more interesting than anything else I could come up with.”

**Craig:** That is so true. It’s such a good point. You know, I think that if you fall in love with a topic the way you fell in love with yours and the way I fell in love with mine, you begin to have a sense of loyalty to the facts. You do feel a bit queasy about changing them up. To the point for me where part of my deal with HBO is that when we finally do air this miniseries at the conclusion of each airing, initial airing, we’ll have a little separate podcast that will be me talking about what changes were necessary to be made and what the true-true truth was because–

**Liz:** That’s great.

**Craig:** I’m obsessed with just the accuracy of it. Like you said, you have to do some things, but you’re so right. The more you can just stick with what’s real I think people can feel it. And if you stray they can smell the cheating, you know.

**Liz:** Totally, and I think it’s already hard to commit people to watch I think – I guess it’s not hard to commit them to watch true stories, but it’s hard to commit them to watch biopics, or period pieces, or things like that. And if there is something false or inaccurate, you’re right, they’ll sniff it out. And it’s immediately a punching bag. And you don’t need to give somebody a target like that.

**John:** Now, most of the movies that we’re making these days are not biopics. They’re not based on true events. The big movies are big movies and increasingly they are based on previous material. So, I’m about to start working on a project that is not a remake but is sort of related to an existing big studio property. And it’s fascinating because it’s a movie I very much wanted to do for a long time but I couldn’t do it any other place. They have a hold of this thing. So it’s the one place I could do it.

We had Kelly Marcel on before who talked about Saving Mr. Banks which was a movie that she could sort of only do at Disney.

**Craig:** It’s a big swing to take, right?

**John:** That’s a rare case where it is based on true events but it could only be made at Disney.

**Liz:** 100%.

**John:** So getting back to the discussion of Fox and Disney, some of these big moves are really about underlying properties that they want to control. They would need to have a big enough catalog of things to do. There are three different articles I wanted to take a look at in this segment. The first was this thing that broke this last week. Chris Lee was writing for Vulture about Wattpad. And I knew of Wattpad only through my daughter who started to read these things and it was one of her first sort of social media kind of things. We let her read stories on Wattpad. But if you don’t know it, it is a site. It’s mostly through an app. It has 65 million unique visitors per month. And it’s all digital literature. So, there’s a lot of fan fiction but it’s also other original literature.

This article though was talking about how some of the projects that began on that thing have become real Hollywood properties. So, Kissing Booth was a 2011 story book series that got turned into a movie that aired on Netflix and was a big sensation on Netflix. Hulu made a 10-episode straight to series order for Light as a Feather based on a Wattpad story. And what the Wattpad creators are describing and they say is their unique advantage is that all the stories that are read on the platform have all these eyeballs and comments about what people love about it. And so there’s free – there’s engagement for it before it ever becomes a movie or a TV series in ways that most of the projects that we make, you know, or people have read it before there’s a greenlight for it to go into production.

So, it reminded me a little bit of we talked years ago about Amazon Studios which was trying to do this thing where they—

**Liz:** The pilot movie.

**John:** The crowd-sourcing. And maybe perhaps a difference is that the crowd-sourcing that’s happening on this literature on Wattpad, they’re actually reading the real thing. They’re not trying to read a script. They’re reading an actual story and responding to the story. They’re not responding to this theoretical movie down the road.

But, Liz, if someone came to you with a Wattpad story and said it has this big sensation behind it, what would be your first instinct? Would you look at it just as the thing itself? Or do you feel the weight of all the eyes behind it?

**Liz:** No, I think you have to just look at it as yourself. I knew absolutely nothing about Wattpad until I read this article this morning and I was like both traumatized and horrified and intrigued. I can’t imagine having anyone vote on scenes. Like we have to deal with notes from so many people. If I had to get notes, I mean, poor Rian Johnson was like all I could think about while reading this. He’s living the Wattpad life on a constant basis.

But that was really I think for me – that’s what my reaction is to that. I got looped into one tweet that Rian did about Star Wars and all of a sudden it was this cacophony of opinions and negative things. Like telling me what I was supposed to do about it. I was like I’m not involved in Star Wars. You know, hey, give me a call, but like I’m not involved. I’m not doing that. So, you know, I think for me in this Wattpad world, sure, if there’s an original story then I would just treat it as any original story. I mean, I’ve adapted books before. I’m about to adapt another book. And I think you take what works. You streamline the story to convert it into a two-hour visual piece. And you make sure that the emotions and the integrity of the story is still present.

But we live in a visual medium. We don’t live on the page. So, I think you have to make choices and sacrifices that way.

But, yeah, I also think I would be extraordinarily wary knowing that 65 million people had voted on like two sentences. And whether or not X and Y were going to hook up in the next chapter. Like that’s not that enticing.

**John:** It’s great that you bring up Star Wars because we talk about that on the show quite a lot. That sense of ownership over the course of things and how stuff goes next. And Fifty Shades of Grey was, you know, it was not Wattpad. It was the same kind of thing where there was a tremendous sense of excitement about it before it was really even a book series and then before it was a movie. And so that author had a tremendous amount of control.

I do wonder if sort of from Wattpad’s point of view, because they don’t own anything, and so I guess they have a relationship with these authors and they can help facilitate some stuff, or they could maybe help surface some things that could be promising to Hollywood. But I don’t see how Wattpad sort of grows to the next step.

Craig, what was your feeling reading through this?

**Craig:** It does feel a little bit like one of these Internet stories, and I’m doing the thing I said I wouldn’t do, which is try and predict the future, but a lot of these Internet entities grow rapidly, build up, and then collapse under their own weight. There’s some sort of change happens. A lot of times it’s related to the company attempting at long-last to make money off of it. Which ends up ruining it.

My daughter is also a Wattpad user. I personally, I think this is about as double-edged as a sword can get. On the one hand, I think it’s fascinating to see how people that otherwise wouldn’t even be looked at by the traditional publishing industry, and I’m not even going into the usual list of marginalized identities. How about let’s just talk about age?

**Liz:** Yeah, for sure.

**Craig:** The girl who wrote, what’s the big one that they – Kissing Booth? 15 years old. It was 15 years old. It was a book series. And it was read 19 million times. Now that’s amazing. That just is simply something that until three years ago not only didn’t happen, couldn’t happen. Not possible to happen. So I love that.

Here’s the part that’s terrifying to me. My daughter and your daughter, John, are being raised in a world where this is not new. The total integration of reader and writer, there is now this complete loop. And it is not new to them. It’s normal. And I’m terrified by this because I am concerned that something is going to happen to our ability to create things if all of the artists ultimately become marketers before they’re able to mature as artists. Because that’s what something like this does to you. When our kids learn from apps and things like Wattpad that their worth and the worth of their creativity and thought and output is defined by likes and views, well, they become marketers.

And I personally think that it’s nice to have a little bit of separation between the people who are attempting to pry my money out of my wallet and people who are trying to create art. And I don’t mean high art. I mean any art. Even if it’s Funny Guy Falls Down art.

So, this is concerning. And I…that’s my general vibe is “Ugh.”

**Liz:** Yeah, it’s funny, I mean, because I think we’ve been seeing the sort of disintegration of the relationship between the storyteller and the audience over the past few years, specifically with Twitter I think. The veil has been lifted. You can speak to almost anybody. And I think that’s a really important relationship. And I think there are also really important roles. And the role of the storyteller is one thing and the role of the audience is another thing. That does not mean that one is greater than the other. They’re actually in my mind both equal in what they’re trying to do.

But to people who are commenting on Wattpad about what should change in a story, my question to them is are you trying to be a storyteller and then in that way go write your own story and we’ll read that and read it. Or, are you an audience that is trying to engage in a different way and in a Choose Your Own Adventure way, because that’s what’s been taught to us now through social media that can happen.

And so I think that’s really what’s confusing/concerning with me about this. Like we can’t just create something and have it go into the ether and have it be challenged or accepted or questioned or any of these things that happen without tearing it apart. You know?

**John:** Yeah. I think the praise for Wattpad is that unlike a lot of online systems it does seem to be surprisingly positive. That there’s a community of not ripping each other apart and bringing each other down. And so if they can maintain that that’s fantastic.

And I can think of myself as the 14-year-old version of me who would have written and probably would have written on one of these platforms and it would have been great to have that experience and that exposure. But I’m not sure I would want my same name, my same pen name, I don’t know that I want to be for the rest of my life my 14-year-old self.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I do wonder and worry about the degree that like Beth Reekles who is the 15-year-old who did this and another girl was a 14-year-old who wrote Death to my BFF. And so now they’re doing a TV series based on it. And you can’t escape from some of that stuff. The choices you made when you were 14, I just feel like you should be able to—

**Liz:** Be a kid.

**John:** Yeah. And you should be able to like wipe that stuff clean and start again. And so what has been so nice about us growing up where our lives professionally sort of started after college is you could sort of go through all that rocky stuff and get on the other side and announce yourself as the person you are. You could sort of debut. And these people are sort of debuting so early, so young, and maybe that’s just the time we live in. Maybe that’s the time of Parkland shootings and stuff that you are who you are at an earlier age.

**Craig:** I don’t think so.

**John:** But I do wonder and worry for these kids.

**Liz:** I don’t know. I mean, I think, A, these two girls, 14, 15 year olds, like when I was 14 and 15 I was trying to figure out how to like sleep over at somebody’s house and not cry I’m sure. I was not in a place that I was writing a book series.

**Craig:** I feel like we’re the same person.

**Liz:** I know. It’s really weird. No, but I can’t not like give them so many props and it’s such an accomplishment. They should be super proud. But I do agree. I mean, I think – the anonymity of being an adolescent and a teenager and being able to mess up and being able to make choices I think is really important. I also think it’s really important as a writer to develop your own voice. And I think choosing one criticism, be it positive or negative, coming into shape that voice is really important. And I mean I know you guys have talked about this a lot and I’ve talked about it before is choosing who the people are that read your drafts. Choosing the people that you get. And it’s not looking for necessarily I’m going to the people who are going to always give me positive reinforcement, but I know that they are respectful. And they’re going to be honest. And they also know what I’m trying to do.

And it’s not them trying to make what they want to make. It’s what I’m trying to make. And when you don’t have access those five people when you have access to 65 million people, I think that is really scary. I don’t want to watch a movie and not know that the filmmaker has a voice and opinion that is wholly their own behind it. I want to go see something that is very definitively done by a person.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**Liz:** Not by a crowd source.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes! Amen.

**John:** The second article I put here to discuss. This is an article by Scott Johnson writing for the Hollywood Reporter. It is nuts. And so this was—

**Liz:** Oh, bananas. This one, bananas.

**Craig:** The best.

**John:** So this one could have also been a How Would This Be a Movie. But because it was about the movies I thought it was good to talk about it here. So what’s happened is for several years now, but increasingly in this last year, some of the most powerful women in entertainment, so producers, studio executives, have been contacting men generally or other rich folks and getting them excited about a project they’re developing. They tend to go off to Indonesia. They do some research stuff. They end up paying local guides. And only after months in some cases and thousands of dollars spent do they realize the people that they were talking with were not at all the people they were talking with, especially this one woman who somebody impersonates Amy Pascal who produced your movie, Sherry Lansing, Stacy Snyder, Gigi Pritzker.

So this article we will link to has audio recordings of some of these calls as well. It’s just nuts. And I think it speaks to both the classic sort of like con men and sort of like you believe what you want to believe, but sort of uniquely that these people believe like, “Oh, there might be a movie underneath all this.” The dream of like I’m going to be involved with the movies I think is partly what’s getting these people to go to these lengths.

So, I’ll encourage you all to read the story, but I’m just curious what you thought of – first off, you know Amy Pascal. You and I both know Amy Pascal so well. I can’t – she is in my head inimitable. And so—

**Liz:** I don’t know how you make that up.

**John:** But to somebody else who is getting an email from her—

**Liz:** Sure. Of course.

**John:** And talking on a phone call.

**Liz:** You know, it’s funny. I was talking to my husband about this article this morning because I said I was like, you know, particularly about the photographer who is mentioned, and again, this is a horrible thing that happened to him and I’m not faulting him in any way, but I was like why wouldn’t you just call Amy’s office? That was sort of my first question. And then my husband was like, “Well, those numbers are really hard to find. And if you called the Sony switchboard they’re not necessarily going to do…”

There were a number of things that I understood the process of why you wouldn’t do that and how that could be difficult. But yeah, I mean, I don’t know, it just sounded so shady to me. The whole thing. Like you’re getting on a plane to go to Indonesia paid for by somebody that you’ve never met before? Like I’m not going to get on the phone with a lot of people I’ve never met before. I think that – but I do think it is a dream scenario. And I do think it is a lot of times the ability to jump start your dreams in a really quick way because somebody is offering the path to do it. And it can blind you to a lot of things. But I don’t know. It’s scary.

**John:** Yeah, it’s the con man who flatters you and then also makes you think that you sort of are ahead of them in a way. So you’re thinking like, “Oh well, I’m going to get points on this project. It’s going to be a big thing.” They’re envisioning an outcome that is unlikely at all. Man, I felt so bad for them.

**Liz:** I felt so bad.

**John:** And my instinct was also your instinct which is just like you do sort of – Sydney Bristow in the pilot of Alias where like you walk into the CIA so you can actually see that this is the real place.

**Liz:** Exactly.

**John:** And you’re talking to an actual person.

**Craig:** I mean, this is going to sound like victim-blaming, but here’s my thing. You have to have the world’s healthiest ego to believe that any of the people that this particular woman is imitating, that any of these people is calling you, person, and specifically zeroing in on you and needing you to go to Indonesia. That’s not right. I mean, I don’t believe anybody will ever want anything from me. I continue to believe that. Anybody that calls me and says, “Oh, I want you to do something,” my first thought is, ooh, that’s unexpected. Not, yeah, of course.

**Liz:** My first thought is how many people said no. How many people did you call before you called me? I’m very happy you made the call, but I definitely know I was not the first person.

**Craig:** Exactly. You will work forever. So this is the point that, you know, if you have not been operating on an A level in Hollywood, and an A+ level producer or executive or billionaire calls you and offers – directly – and for some reason needs you to do something that also you will have outlay cash for. Are you out of your mind? Are you out of your mind? That part is…

Now—

**Liz:** The laying down your own money part is the part that really like bumps me.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**Liz:** If I’m going to give notes on this story, that bumps me.

**Craig:** So that’s a huge one right there. Now, in their defense did you guys listen to the recording? There’s two recordings in–

**John:** I listened to them, yeah. And I thought they were pretty good. I think, you know, her TH on there is a D and that felt weird to me. But what would be your instincts on it?

**Craig:** It’s not so much the accent that I thought was super impressive or the specific impression of Amy Pascal that was super impressive, although this woman is skilled. I mean, she’s way better at this sort of thing than I would be.

**John:** Very skilled.

**Craig:** What blew my mind was how good she was at double speak and confusion talk. It’s that thing that Kellyanne Conway became famous for of I ask you a very simple, very direct question like this: where is my money. That’s four words and it is unambiguous. And her response was so confusing as to almost seem reasonable. But it wasn’t even an excuse. It was just word salad. And those sociopaths can by breaking all of the contractual bonds of conversation they can sometimes really mess your head up.

But I have to believe that part of this also is just I don’t think this would happen to women. I don’t know if this scam works with a guy calling women up because I just think there’s something about men that believe that this woman calls them up, offers them a bunch of money, and is sexually attracted to them.

**Liz:** I think that’s a really good point. I also think what you said about sociopathy, like that is another aspect of this is like this is not just a con man scheme. This woman then spoke to this photographer for what seemed months after the entire money scheme was over. I mean, that is a whole other level of control that has nothing to do with the $30,000 that he gave her.

**Craig:** Yeah. She just likes it. She enjoys it.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, if you listen to the Dirty John podcast, clearly there’s people who can do it in real life, too. Like who don’t even have to have the distermination of the phone. And to be able to do this kind of thing.

But I think about situations in my own life where I’ve reached out to strangers. And I’ve emailed strangers, but I feel like I’m publicly accessible enough that people can find me. And it’s one of the reasons why reaching out through Twitter is so helpful. And you follow somebody and they follow you back and then you exchange a DM. You can at least say like this is the real person. So unless my account was hacked or something like I am the real person. You’re talking to the actual me.

**Liz:** Well, I mean the blue check mark, it does verify to a certain extent where you know that this person is who they’re saying they are to the extent that it’s the most provable thing. I mean, they make you give a lot of stuff to get that, you know, personal information. So, I mean, the other thing I think is like I’ve done the same thing. I’ve reached out to people that I don’t know and I’ve reached out to people that have no idea who I am for research or for projects and things like that. And the thing that I almost often try and do is find someone that is, even if it’s like a ten degree separation, that we know in common so that there’s some verifiable way. Because I don’t want someone to feel like they’re getting conned or they’re getting schemed.

And that’s always my first question if someone reaches out to me and I’ve never heard of them is like, “OK, well I’m going to do a little research and figure out if you are who you say you are.”

**John:** Yeah. Or you’ll ask somebody like could you CC me in on an email to somebody.

**Liz:** 100%.

**John:** That’s a very common business practice. Now that I’ve said this on this podcast people will use that scheme to sort of like, you know, a fake Franklin Leonard will do – oh, that’s Franklin.

**Liz:** Exactly. Sorry, Franklin.

**John:** Sorry Franklin. But those are common practices. But I would say it’s not a common practice for Amy Pascal to reach out to a stranger herself.

**Liz:** Yes. I mean, obviously we both know Amy. We all know Amy really well. I don’t think it’s common practice for Amy to reach out unless it is for very specific reasons and there is a point to it. I mean, she is one of the most busy people I have ever met in my life. There’s not a lot of extraneous time she has to call up somebody and be like I want to do this random art project.

**Craig:** Why would she anyway? I mean, the point is like people call her. I mean, you get to a place where you just have to be aware of the way power works in the world. If somebody far more powerful than you is calling you, they better be damn convincing and they certainly cannot be asking you for money in any way, shape, or form.

**Liz:** That’s the thing that’s so weird. The money thing is like why would you ever believe that like, “Oh, just pay your way and I’ll pay you back.” No.

**Craig:** What? What?

**Liz:** Absolutely not.

**Craig:** Ever. Never, ever, ever, in any circumstance, I have never outlaid a dime in my career for anything. Ever. We don’t need to.

**Liz:** I mean, it’s like the reddest flag. It is the tallest, reddest flag.

**Craig:** It is. Agreed. You know, just general rule for all of you. Don’t spend your own money in Hollywood. It’s the classic rule. Never spend your own money. And the second rule is never spend your own money. It’s from The Producers, folks. Mel Brooks wouldn’t lie to you.

**John:** The last article I wanted to single out here is a piece Borys Kit did for the Hollywood Reporter about DMG and Valiant. So DMG is a company that represents intellectual property on various things including Valiant comics. And I think what seemed to make it valuable is because Disney has Marvel Comics. Warner Brothers has DC. There are a limited number of existing comics out there and so Valiant is one of them. And so they set up a bunch of deals. Harbinger and Bloodshot are at Sony. Bloodshot is about to shoot.

I get that comics are a big deal. I just found it strange that these comics I’ve never heard of are worth spending all this time and money to try to make into a thing when they don’t have a history behind them.

Like if the comic has a brilliant idea, great, and you want to make that into a movie, fantastic. But I get frustrated when like that exact same idea if it started as a script rather than a comic book would not be worth anything. We wouldn’t be talking about it.

**Liz:** Well, it would have to be a spec and then it would have to be made either into like a cartoon. You know, I think the thing that makes me frustrated by all of this, goes back to what we were talking about before of IP, is how people overvalue IP. And that does not mean that certain IP is not extraordinarily important. But there are sort of tastemaker, if we’re going to use that term, pieces of IP that exist because of how well they’ve been cared for. How well they’ve been done. How well they’ve been produced in the past, and written, and directed. And all of these things that come up into whatever it is.

But just trying to manufacture that out of thin air for me is infuriating as somebody who is a content creator. Like as people who sit here and come up with original ideas, it’s just another way to be replaceable. And that’s not saying there’s not any value in their comics. I mean, I haven’t read them so I can’t speak to that in any way. There could be a lot of value in it, but it’s exactly what you said. It’s like if any of us just wrote this as an original script it would be nowhere near as interesting to these people.

**John:** So a true story from my own life. This is 15 years ago. But I wrote a spec to sell and so we went out on the town and I got an offer from a studio. And they said like, “Oh, we think this could be the blank movie.” Basically, it would become the comic book adaptation. And basically, it was close enough to the general conceit that they felt like, “Oh, we could tweak this around and it could become that movie.” And ultimately I said no and I held on to the rights to it because I didn’t spend six months writing this spec to have it become a comic book adaptation and not sort of be my thing. It was really frustrating. But that was 15 years ago, so I think it’s only accelerated from that point forward.

**Craig:** And you also have this problem of copy loss that it’s the same thing that happened – I remember when they were making a big deal about trying to adapt Halo into a movie. The videogame Halo. And when I read that I thought but Halo is so obviously just an adaptation in and of itself, albeit an official one, of Aliens. It’s space marines shooting aliens that look like the alien sort of from Aliens that infest bodies and then pop out.

It’s Aliens. And when you look at a lot of the third tier, so once you get past Marvel and DC, a lot of these comic labels are sort of mimicking. They’re copying a little bit. Or they’re copying movies. So they’re taking movies, whether it’s some ninja movie or something, or an action movie, and then they’re doing a comic version of that. And then somebody else repackages it and resells it so that you can make a new movie out of thing that’s already a copy of a copy. And it’s a bit like that thing in The Big Short where you suddenly realize that banks are just repackaging their own debt and selling it back and forth to each other.

It can’t hold up. It won’t last. A lot of these assets I think ultimately become junk. And do you need to buy an entire company for this? I don’t think so. I mean, Men in Black was a tiny little comic book that no one read. And they found it. They didn’t buy a company. They bought a story. And then they made a movie out of it.

These people now, I mean, some of the stuff when I read it – this is a quote. It says, “For Mintz, Valiant occupies a valuable position in the IP field. Not only is it something with a global awareness, but it is also something that people pay for, month in and month out, and is in a ‘tipping point’ place, making it ready for a next-level jump. ‘This is something that is validated already and is on a road that has already been traveled by Marvel and DC.’”

What does any of that mean?

**John:** Yeah. It’s trying to play it safe. It’s the sense of like, well, making movies is a gamble but this is a safer gamble because look at how many people already love this thing, so therefore—

**Liz:** I mean, my thing is like, OK, take Men in Black which was an original piece of material that, again, you didn’t need to buy the company for, but was an original piece of material. It wasn’t like it blew the roof off of anything. It worked. It was great. It was super entertaining.

A, that is hard to find because original material is difficult to create and have it be articulate and creative and universal and global. I’m not discounting that. But, if you look at things like The Last of Us, for instance, which I think is a videogame that is absolutely incredible.

**Craig:** The best.

**Liz:** It is super unique. It is a wholly original story. And I know they are going to adapt it or they want to adapt it and I’m happy to see that because I just want more of that. But that is The Last of Us. That’s not every videogame. And just because The Last of Us is original and can be adapted, or should or shouldn’t, whatever it is, doesn’t mean that every single thing that is somewhat in the realm of The Last of Us is something that should be made.

**Craig:** But, Liz, you don’t understand. All of those other videogames are traveling – they’re on a road that has already been traveled by The Last of Us. This is what garbage language sounds like.

So, get this back a little bit to the con-artistry, you know, and the way people use words, because it becomes – everything that is a comic book, literally every comic book, is on the road that has been traveled by Marvel and DC. And this is sort of what happens. They begin to try and sell things by association.

Well, they have a comic book company. And they have a comic book company. Shouldn’t you have a comic book company? No. No. Frankly, only one of those comic book companies is doing really well anyway. The other one is in trouble and that’s literally the second biggest one in the world.

So, I just don’t understand these things. And I am also – I am so frustrated because it is evidence, pure and simple starkly in front of us. Evidence that a lot of the people who make decisions about how to spend money in Hollywood are utterly lost. It’s not that they’re stupid. And I’m not even sure if they’re afraid. They used to be afraid. Now I think they’re just lost. Because there’s just, I mean, why?

**Liz:** Well I think there’s so much content now. It’s grasping at straws to make somebody watch something. But like original material is hard. It should be hard. Finding an original idea that you as either the writer or whomever, the comic book artist, whatever, video gamers, something that you want to spend a year and a half of your life on, bare minimum, that is a hard thing to find. It should be. And it is hard to make it good. It is hard to make it all of these things that I’m saying. That doesn’t mean that it is a useless amount of time to be spent on something. It just means it’s slightly more difficult. But let me tell you, as somebody who made an original film that I never thought was going to get made, like to everyone out there who thinks they have to go find a piece of IP, it can happen. It can.

**John:** Well let’s talk about sort of take home advice for people here as we wrap up this segment.

So we are not recommending folks go out and find that piece of IP. And really I don’t think we’re recommending that if they have an idea for a big giant movie that they need to write it as a comic book first because trust me people have been trying to do that for five to ten years. And it doesn’t seem like that really works either. Sometimes those properties get picked up, but more often they don’t.

**Craig:** And should they buy their own comic book company, John?

**John:** Everyone should buy their comic book company. Start a fake comic book company and then do it.

So, I can definitely see a future season of South Park where they create a comic book company to sell the comic book company.

**Liz:** This is Westworld Season Three. That’s what’s happening.

**John:** That is clearly Westworld Season Three.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** But I think what we can say is as you are writing your scripts and as people are getting noticed, and like if The Post hadn’t been picked up to – if Spielberg hadn’t shot The Post, it still would have been a script that people loved and you’d still be going out for all those meetings and be staffed on things.

**Liz:** 100%.

**John:** And so just be aware that part of the nature of feature writing at this point is that you’re going to write something original that people are going to love and it’s challenging to get that made. And you will be going in for things that are coming in from some other medium, be it Wattpad, be it a crazy story in the news, or be it a comic book movie adaptation. Those are the jobs you’re more likely to get hired to do. And that is sort of the reality.

And one of the reasons why writers who can try to work in television or streaming is because more original stuff is happening there. And so just to be aware that, you know, I don’t think this IP fever is going to go away. It’s just going to probably move on to something after comic books.

**Craig:** And probably also as a result of my rant here today, at least three of the movies from this comic book company will become massive hits, along the lines of Star Wars. And I will just be an idiot for the rest of the time. I will be like one of those people that says things historically like no one will ever want to use a calculator or a computer.

**John:** Because you bring up Star Wars, Star Wars was an original project. It wasn’t a piece of IP. Raiders of the Lost Ark is original project. It was a call back to a kind of movie that people loved but we hadn’t seen for a while.

**Liz:** Well, I think the other thing is, if you’re adapting IP, this is sort of my feeling about it and if I get approached for it it’s always my conversation that I want to have which is “Well why should I be the one writing it?” I think there are plenty of writers who can adapt something and make it – and I don’t mean this in a negative way – but make it serviceable. Make it exactly what the movie can be and make it make $400 million because that’s what all these movies are going to make no matter what. But why would I do it?

And I think the greatest example for me and I think we’ve talked about this was Black Panther. Like here’s Black Panther. Black Panther is a comic book. It exists. It is a piece of IP. And Ryan Coogler went out and made his version of Black Panther that is wholly original in his voice. And so there are ways within the studio system, the IP system, to make it unique. I don’t think it happens all the time. And I think it’s very difficult to do. But that should be the goal. That should be your goal if you’re going up against that.

**John:** Cool. We have a couple listener questions. Let’s try to plow through these. Craig, do you want to take Ray from Melbourne?

**Craig:** Yeah, Ray from Melbourne, Australia writes, “This may be a silly question, but what are your thoughts on the use of accents in movies. Recently I watched Valkyrie and they do this thing at the beginning where Tom Cruise is thinking in German but his thoughts gradually change to English and then for the rest of the film the characters, although German, are speaking in their own American or English accent.

“On the flip side, in Schindler’s List, the Germans, Ralph Fiennes character, Amon Göth, et cetera, speak with a German accent. Do Craig’s characters in Chernobyl have Russian accents? Do they speak in American accents? Or is it subtitled?”

John, do my characters have Russian accents? Do they speak in American accents? Or are they subtitled?

**John:** We actually I think had this conversation maybe I think it was on the podcast, but maybe we had the conversation between you and me. My recollection is that you decided that they are speaking a kind of British English that everyone is in the same universe of a British English accent. Is that correct?

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s basically right. And this is not a silly question at all, Ray. In fact, this topic of accent became somewhat of an obsession for everybody for quite some time. Extending all the way really into early casting. And it was actually the casting experience that made it clear to us what we did and did not want to do.

The truth is that when movies, I think, try to explain the accent thing away they end up hurting themselves more than helping themselves. We know that those people aren’t German. We know Tom Cruise is not a German, nor does he exist in 1943. We don’t therefore need the movie to excuse his not German-ness, any more than we needed Hunt for Red October to excuse the fact that Sean Connery is Scottish and not in fact Russian. For us, we were thinking, “Well, maybe we’ll have just kind of a vagueness Eastern European accent.” But then we realized with well over a hundred speaking parts and also actors from the UK, from Ireland, from different parts of the UK, from Sweden, from Denmark, that they weren’t going to do the same accent at all.

And, we also found that when you ask actors to do accents they get extremely excited. They get extremely specific. And they start mostly thinking about the accent. And we had all these wonderful actors that we wanted to cast and mostly we just thought, “Oh, enough with this.” So all we ever asked, we just said, “Just speak in your own accent. And if you have a very strong Scottish accent or strong Geordie accent, or strong Irish or strong Swedish, just maybe take the edges off a little bit.” But even then I kind of don’t care. Nor do I think will anyone at home care.

We all know that they’re speaking English and therefore that choice was made. There is a world where you can make something very true to life. You’re making a movie let’s say that’s set in the Soviet Union. All of your actors speak Russian. You can do that. But now your pool of available actors is dramatically limited. And we didn’t want to do that.

**Liz:** I also just want to say Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Liz:** That’s all I’m going to say.

**Craig:** Yeah, the accent that comes and goes. Oh boy.

**Liz:** It like sort of disappears, and then you can tell when they shot at the beginning because two hours into the movie all of a sudden it’s back. It’s just tough. It’s a tough one.

**Craig:** By the way, it’s also like in Star Wars Princess Leia briefly is British.

**John:** Every once and a while.

**Craig:** And then the more you squeeze your grasp, it will slip through your fingers. And then later she’s like, “Hey buddy.”

**Liz:** I’m from California, guys. What’s up?

**John:** California.

**Craig:** Exactly. I’m from LA. Let’s do this.

**John:** In terms of accents I highly recommend taking a look at Death of Stalin. So, you know, in an interview with the director he said they talked about Russian accents and ultimately decided no accents whatsoever. Everyone just use your own accent. So Americans speak with an American accent. And his argument was that the Soviet Union was actually a giant place and has a whole bunch of different accents. And if they were speaking Russian we couldn’t tell them apart, but by letting people use their own accents you get a sense of just how big the place is.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s a great point. We thought about that, too, because also the Soviet Union wasn’t just geographically big. It also encompassed I think 13 different republics and inside of those were mini-republics where people literally were vastly different from each other. And the other thing about the Soviet Union was that they were essentially a classless society, so you didn’t have those structures that you often see in UK, the Brits are extremely conscious of accent. I have discovered this. Because to them, accent is an indicator of class. Less so for us in the United States where class, economic class, isn’t such a huge thing to us because we don’t have that tradition of nobility and Upstairs/Downstairs, and all that stuff.

So, they were very much about making sure that it didn’t feel like, “Oh, all of the people that are miners sound like they’re Cockney and all the people who are scientists sound like they’re posh.” So, it’s a whole big thing, but I think generally speaking the less is more theory is a good theory.

**John:** Next question comes from Jack. He said, “I had two paid assignments and sold one script this year. They’re all nonunion, sub $1 million, family-friendly holiday films. All three were produced and will air this fall or winter. What exactly should I do now? I don’t have a manager or agent. Are there specific agents or managers who are dedicated to these kind of films? It would be nice to work on these projects under WGA jurisdiction and rates if that even exists.

“This is the first semblance of success I’ve had as a writer so I’d like to figure out a way to keep the momentum going. I’m not entirely sure where to turn next.”

So, I can answer some of this. There are rates for these things and these could be WGA movies. And these should be WGA movies down the road. So, this space, sounds like TV movies, could be like a Hallmark or those kind of things, there is patterns for these where people are WGA writers and you can be doing that. It’s awesome you had three things made. You should have an agent and you should have a manager and be working on the next thing after this.

It’s awesome you’ve had these things done, but yes, you should be thinking about the next stuff. You have stuff made and shot. That’s awesome.

**Liz:** Yeah, I mean, I think I would talk to the people who bought your material or produced your material and ask them if they know managers or agents that they would recommend you for. And then you don’t have to cold call. You’ll get like a meeting from them. But if you’ve sold material, I mean, congratulations, and that’s a great step into this. But, yeah, also WGA it. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a weird one. I’m not really sure what these gigs are in the sense that the budget is under a million dollars but they’re produced and aired. On what? I mean, a budget under a million dollars is really, really small.

**John:** Yeah. So the patterns for these things, I’ve seen some of these things come through in WGA discussions, so there’s a whole subset of companies that do these kind of things. It’s I guess a 17-day schedule or shorter than 17-day schedule and you’re really plowing through to get these movies made. It’s great that they’re all like holiday family films.

**Craig:** Is this like a churchy kind of thing?

**John:** Sometimes they’re churchy, but oftentimes they’re not. It’s based sometimes on some greeting card. They’re really simple, but you know—

**Liz:** I mean, after 17 days we are all going to church because, woof.

**Craig:** I’ve done it. I’ve done that. That is no fun.

**John:** So what I would say to Jack is that Liz’s advice is usually right to go to the producer or the company and get that, but if they’re all kind of for the same people they’re not going – they have an advantage of keeping you and getting you not paid, or not moving up the food chain. So I would say look in the trades. Figure out who is representing writers like you. And then I think you can reach out directly to them saying like, look, I have these three movies made. I’m not some person off the street. But I want an agent and a manager.

**Craig:** Yeah. All you have to do is go to Indonesia. Front a little bit of money.

**Liz:** Well, yeah, I’m going to have some friends call you and they will meet you in Indonesia.

**Craig:** For a small fee.

**Liz:** The bank wire will not work, but it will be great.

**Craig:** It will not work. One other thing you might want to try, Jack, is your shows are airing on something. I don’t know what it is because you don’t say. Reach out to the people who are airing the shows. There’s got to be somebody at this entity that you can talk to because they probably don’t have a vested interest in keeping the man down. They’re just airing your stuff, so they’re familiar with you. And if they like you they might just do that favor of at least an introductory email. It doesn’t cost them anything because they’re not budgeting these things. They’re just airing them.

**John:** Tiny last bit of advice for Jack is that someone else is writing your kind of movie. So figure out who the other writers are who are writing your kind of movie and just reach out to them. Find a way to reach out to them and see sort of what their deal is.

**Liz:** Or go to Twitter like we talked about.

**John:** Yeah, go to Twitter.

**Craig:** Tweet it up.

**John:** Last one. Do you want to take Tyler?

**Craig:** Last one. Yeah. Tyler. All right, last question, Tyler in Bellingham, Washington writes, “My writing partner and I are writing a screenplay based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft.” Very cool. “Although it isn’t a straight adaptation of a specific work by Lovecraft, it draws heavily from his many stories, references, characters, and locals from those stories and explores the Cthulhu Mythos Lovecraft created. Here’s the thing. Lovecraft was horribly racist.” As opposed to, you know, amusingly racist.

“I feel like we should somehow address the racism issue head on. At the very least, I think we should specify characters as minorities in the script. But then this is a horror movie and literally no major character makes it out alive. I’m concerned that if we portray a minority’s character in a negative light, as either victim or villain, we only make matters worse. Or perhaps we should make an integral part of the plot. Should we undermine Lovecraft’s toxic philosophy in a movie based on his works? Or am I overthinking it?”

What do you guys think?

**John:** Liz, is Tyler overthinking it?

**Liz:** I don’t think you are necessarily overthinking it, but I think you are – I think you should consider what representation means in the world right now. I don’t necessarily think you have to talk about Lovecraft’s racism, but I do think you should consider articulating in your characters of the race and gender of them.

I would not worry if everybody dies about the crises that have happened in television and film from certain characters being killed, because you know, if it’s all equal and everybody dies then nobody can be mad about singling anybody out. But I do think it is really important right now for representation of every gender and every race and everybody. And, I mean, what better way to do it in a situation where everybody dies. So we’re not weighing the importance of one or the other. We’re all in it together. That would be my advice.

**John:** When I read this, two things came to mind. First off, I wrote a Lovecraft movie. I wrote a Lovecraft movie for Imagine which is based on a comic book, so bringing things full circle. And that actually used Lovecraft as a character in the story, but it was a fictionalized alternate universe kind of story. So I didn’t have to sort of go into his racism.

But the other thing I was thinking about is I knew that Jordan Peele and Misha Green have a series called Lovecraft Country which I think involves sort of the black experience and Lovecrafty things. So, they’re looking at that, too. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it for your own thing.

One of the things I love about Lovecraft’s work overall is that he encouraged people to tinker with it and use it right from the start. It was always meant to be a mix your own Cthulhu. And so there’s no underlying IP really to own for Lovecraft. Weirdly there was a comic book that my thing was based on, but really Lovecraft is sort of IP-less in a way that’s kind of lovely.

**Liz:** It’s the Wattpad. We’re just bringing it all back to Wattpad.

**Craig:** It’s the Wattpad of giant squid monsters. I’m pretty sure Lovecraft is in the public domain anyway, so even if there were some part of it that he had kind of let you use specifically, oh OK, so I guess it’s half and half. There’s some before and some after.

But I think Tyler you’re not overthinking it, but I think you thought it. And now you should just stop thinking it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because, yes, Lovecraft was horribly racist. True. I’m pretty sure every white person from 1900 and before was racist. People were racist. Racism wasn’t this thing that we think of it as now. Racism was just what people were. That’s how people operated. Racists. Even people who were abolitionists were also racist.

So, it’s like the Founding Fathers of our country, some of them were really cool, but none of them wanted to give women the right to vote.

**Liz:** They still don’t, so it’s fine. We’re still living there.

**Craig:** Some of them still…

So, you’re going to have to just, OK, just bite the bullet on that because that’s what culture is for a long portion of our history. And if you’re using characters from somebody’s work, those are the characters. It’s not the person. Should you shove Lovecraft into your story if you weren’t planning on otherwise? Well, no, that’s a massively different thing. Now, that’s a very intentional thing to do. You don’t want to do that simply to try and get off the hook of something.

Basically it sounds like you’re writing out of fear. So stop doing that. Don’t write because you’re afraid. Write towards something because you love it.

I completely agree with Liz. I think now is the time when we do want to avoid the default white syndrome. Call out how you want your people in your movie to be. Give suggestions. Think about who lives in the places where your show is set. Be true to life. Don’t fall into the trap of just checking boxes, because that can also become incredibly awkward. But just be true and write towards something that you love.

The last thing you want to do is write a character who is a character and then also is black. Right? It’s just like why. Give me a choice for everything, including white. Why are they white? Why are they black? Why does it matter? Why do you care? And if you don’t care at all, then you just say this person could be any race, it doesn’t matter. The thing that’s most important about them is that they are autistic. And then you can do these things, right? Make your choices. But write towards something. Don’t write because you’re worried that people on Twitter are going to beat you up. They will anyway.

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book. It is called Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. It’s by David Reich. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book. I just love it. So, Craig and I have previously talked about 23andMe. This is not actually so much about looking at people’s modern DNA. It’s about going through and finding old bones of early humans and figuring out sort of who they were and how – obviously all humans came out of Africa, but we came out in different waves.

We now know that we mixed in with Neanderthals at different times. We now know that people crossed over the Bering Sea and in ways we didn’t anticipate before. This guy is a genetic researcher who has sort of done all this lab work. It can be kind of heavy in the lab work and sort of how you connect all the dots. And you may skim through some things. But I just thought it was great and was just a really good look at overall our evolving understanding of how human beings came to be human beings and the many different weird ways it happened.

One of the things I found actually most fascinating, Craig and I have talked a lot about English on the show and sort of Indo-European, and sort of how the language has split apart, there’s a compelling case to be made that it was really just one migration of humans, early humans, that sort of were essentially this ghost tribe of the Indo-Europeans and sort of like when they crossed. And they can really see the markers of that in genetic evidence.

So, really cool book.

**Liz:** Did you do 23andMe?

**John:** We did 23andMe. Craig and I are not related it turns out.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m human. And John is a machine.

**Liz:** Understood.

**John:** I’m fully robot.

**Craig:** I am as Jewish as Jewish gets. I found somebody slightly more Jewish than me. Actually, you know who is a little more Jewish than me? Benj Pasek of Pasek and Paul.

**Liz:** Oh yeah. You know I went to high school with Justin Paul?

**Craig:** Did you really?

**Liz:** I did.

**Craig:** He’s the nicest.

**Liz:** I know. They’re the best.

**Craig:** Well, Benj may be. I mean, they’re tied.

**Liz:** Yes. They’re very tied. But they’re both just truly wonderful.

**Craig:** I’ve been in this endless, you know, beat me at being Jewish game with 23andMe because I’m 98% Jewish. And I edged out Megan Amram by like a half a percent. But Benj Pasek comes over the top with a fully 99% Jewish.

**Liz:** Wow. That’s pretty impressive.

**Craig:** Amazing, right?

**Liz:** But do you have an Emmy nomination for your own web series about getting nominated for an Emmy like Megan has?

**Craig:** I mean, it’s just like—

**Liz:** I just can’t.

**Craig:** What she has done, so by the way you know that she’s my cousin because of 23andMe. Did you know this?

**Liz:** I did not know this.

**Craig:** We talk about this all the time. Yeah, we found out through 23andMe that we’re cousins, which I love.

**Liz:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** And we kind of knew it weirdly before it even happened. We’ve just always been like I know your mind. What Megan has done is the most amazing thing. And I believe she’s going to win, by the way.

**Liz:** I do, too.

**John:** Yeah, she will.

**Liz:** I totally think she’s going to win.

**Craig:** And she should win, by the way.

**Liz:** She should.

**Craig:** She should.

**Liz:** I love it. I think it’s so – I mean, honestly it started as a joke. I know it started as a joke. But it is like really inspiring in a weird way. Something really uplifting about it that’s really pure of like this is how you can do it. I kind of loved it.

**Craig:** She’s the greatest. Well, that’s the thing, it’s uplifting on the one hand. This is how you can do it.

**Liz:** Oh yeah, of course.

**Craig:** On the other hand it’s not uplifting because you have to be Megan Amram to think of that in the first place. That’s the problem. That’s the problem for most people who aren’t that level of genius. My daughter loves Megan Amram so much it’s hard to put it into – she would trade me, my wife, her brother, the dog, everything to just go move in with Megan. In a heartbeat. In a heartbeat.

**Liz:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** Let’s see, my One Cool Thing this week, real easy one. It’s something called GamePigeon. John, do you have GamePigeon on your phone?

**John:** I recognize the name but I never saw it.

**Liz:** No I do not.

**John:** Tell me about it.

**Craig:** So my poor son had some surgery a couple of weeks ago and he’s been recuperating at the house. And so we sit there and I’ve had to do this – I’ve learned how to do – I don’t stick the IV needle in. It’s already in. But then I can hook up the IV thing which is pretty cool. But then we have to wait for this stupid antibiotic thing to drain out into his veins. So we would play this thing and it’s basically – it’s free. It’s a free app for iOS. And you use iMessage and essentially texting to back and forth a very simple game app. So we played Eight Ball, basically pool, about a hundred times. And it’s extremely fun. And it’s super easy to do. And you do it by text so you can be in another state and you can have a little chess game. It’s like a lot of that sort of thing. Little simple games that you can play via text. It’s fun to do with your kids.

GamePigeon. Available freely at the app store.

**John:** Very nice. Liz, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Liz:** I do have a One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing is something the New York Times has been doing called Overlooked, which is since 1851 obituaries in the New York Times have been dominated by white men. Now we’re adding the stories of other remarkable people. So, every week they write and add a new obituary for someone who passed away and that was remarkable and left a mark on the world but had not for whatever reason been given their due in the newspaper.

And so they actually have this great quote on the site which says, “Obituary writing is about more life than death, the last word. Yet who gets remembered and how inherently involves judgment. To look back at the obituary archives can therefore be a stark lesson in how society valued various achievements and achievers.”

And so I saw one yesterday, the one that made me think about it, is they had one yesterday about this woman who invented White Out.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Liz:** Which I had no idea about it.

**Craig:** Wait. Isn’t that the mom of—?

**Liz:** A Monkee.

**Craig:** One of the guys in The Monkees.

**Liz:** Yep. Had no idea. And I was just on Twitter and I had been sort of casually reading this. But because it’s an obituary so it covers her entire life. You know, this woman was a single mother and she wanted to be I think a pianist or something. Oh no, excuse me, she was a painter. That was how the whole White Out came out. She was a painter. She was a very good painter but she had to become a secretary because she was a single mom. And she was a very bad secretary. And so kept making mistakes and so she used her painterly ways to create White Out, which it’s the different word for White Out. Whatever it is.

**Craig:** Liquid Paper I think.

**Liz:** Liquid Paper, yes. Liquid Paper. It was amazing. And it was so inspiring to read this. I mean, I think it’s weird to suggest obituaries, but to be honest a lot of these people have been dead for a very long time so it’s not like, you know. But it is also just so inspiring to read these stories that nobody ever heard about and haven’t been covered. And I think it’s a really wonderful thing that the New York Times is doing.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Well, let me tell you what I wish I had known when I was young and dreamed of glory. You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.

**Liz:** What if I came on here and was like my One Cool Thing is Hamilton. I don’t know if you guys have talked about it.

**Craig:** We’d be like “Get off.”

**John:** It’s a little show. You may have heard of it. That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Larry Douziech. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s the also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Short things are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Do you want to put your Twitter handle here?

**Liz:** Sure. I’m @itslizhannah.

**John:** @itslizhannah. You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there 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. We’ll have links to the articles we talked about and some other things as well. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. We try to get them about four days after the episode airs. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

We also have albums of the first seven seasons of Scriptnotes available in 50-block chunks at store.johnaugust.com.

And a bunch of people have been buying those, so that’s great.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** If you’d like those, that’s cool. So they’re $5 apiece and it’s all 50 episodes plus the bonus episodes that would have fallen in that season.

**Craig:** So excited for my cut. Can’t wait.

**John:** So helpful. Liz Hannah, it was fantastic having you on the show.

**Liz:** Thank you. Thanks guys. This was great.

**Craig:** Thank you, Liz.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Liz Hannah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Hannah)! Liz’s film, [The Post](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_(film)), was a Best Picture nominee.
* [Fred Jackman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Jackman), [cinematographer/writer/director/special effects hero](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0413164/), is the apparent namesake of the Jackman shot.
* [How Wattpad is Rewriting the Rules of Hollywood](http://www.vulture.com/2018/07/how-wattpad-is-rewriting-the-rules-of-hollywood.html), by Chris Lee writing for Vulture
* [Hunting the Con Queen of Hollywood: Who’s the “Crazy Evil Genius” Behind a Global Racket?](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/hunting-con-queen-hollywood-1125932), by Scott Johnson writing for the Hollywood Reporter
* [Comic Book Shake-Up: DMG Entertainment Acquires Valiant ](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/valiant-acquired-by-dmg-entertainment-comic-book-shake-up-1078980), by Borys Kit for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Valkyrie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6n3hRZmgxU), [Schindler’s List](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdRGC-w9syA) and [The Death of Stalin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukJ5dMYx2no) are examples of how one can handle the indication of foreign language.
* [Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past](https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-How-Got-Here/dp/110187032X) by David Reich
* [GamePigeon](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gamepigeon/id1124197642?mt=8)
* [Overlooked](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/obituaries/overlooked.html) by the New York Times adds obituaries for remarkable people that were overlooked in their time, like Bette Nesmith Graham who invented liquid paper.
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Liz Hannah](https://twitter.com/itslizhannah) 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 Larry Douziech ([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_359_v2.mp3).