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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 301 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’re looking at The Addams Family, not just the 1991 film and its sequel, but the property itself, to see what lessons we can learn when adapting for the big screen. I think this is the first episode that’s based on a previous One Cool Thing. Because your One Cool Thing a couple weeks ago was The Addams Family pinball game. And look at us now. We’re talking about the entire franchise.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, you know, here I am, I’m playing the Addams Family pinball game, and it has all these wonderful recorded lines from the movie and then some new ones that they recorded for the game. And it just made me, well, nostalgic for The Addams Family. You know, sometimes you go back and you watch these movies that you loved and you’re a different person now and you just don’t love them anymore. Well, I am a different person than I was when the Addams Family movie, the first one came out, in 1991. I mean, that’s, my god, 26 years ago.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I love it even more now. I think as a screenwriter I have so much more appreciation for how good of a job they did at a task that has ruined many, many a filmmaker, namely adapting a television show that a studio is probably saying do because people know the title. And turning it into something of quality. And that’s what happened there. It’s just a terrific film. So, it’s going to be fun to talk about that and the sequel as well today.

**John:** Absolutely. So, a bit of follow up before we get into that. A couple episodes ago, god, maybe 10 episodes ago we talked about the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide, or as Craig wanted to call it the ScriptDecks.

**Craig:** ScriptDecks.

**John:** Which was a catalog of all the back episodes where we asked our listeners to go through and single out the episodes that they thought people should definitely catch. Because we get new listeners every week and they are joining us at episode 301. And they’re like, well, which of the 300 previous episodes should I actually listen to, because it would be an entire life if you wanted to dedicate yourself to all the previous episodes, which some people have done.

So, people have been filing in these reviews of previous episodes and talking about why they were so important to them. And so that is now ready almost for consumption. So, Dustin Box has done a heroic job in putting it together. It’s about a 100-page booklet.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Of the episodes that people singled out with their reviews and what’s in there and the summaries. So, we talked about printing it. It’s not going to make sense to print it. But we’re going to release it as a PDF for folks. And so it’s in pretty good shape. The thing is the most recent episodes have no reviews at all because they’re so new. So if you are a person who has listened to the last 20 or so Scriptnotes and you want to single out any of those, I really need some more reviews of those because it just sort of stops at 280 right now.

So, if you can go to johnaugust.com/guide, and if there’s any episodes in that last batch that you want to single out for why people should listen to them, please do. And I think we’re only a couple weeks away from being able to share it with the world.

**Craig:** And what will it cost, John?

**John:** The plan is for it to be free.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Look at you.

**John:** So the theory is like it’s free, but if you want to listen to all those back episodes they’re of course available at Scriptnotes.net, which is $2 a month, and so you can go through and listen to all those back episodes. And we will be making more of the USB drives. They are actually extra cool USB drives. We think we’re going to be able to make the ones that I want. They will survive any catastrophe that happens in the world, I think. So, they are definitely a time capsule of the first 300 episodes.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, we want to make sure that after the apocalypse those episodes are still available. It’s a bit like the seed bank. Do you know about the seed bank?

**John:** I know about the seed bank. But you also know that the seed bank flooded because of the permafrost melting?

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** That happened like just today.

**Craig:** It happened today? We lost our seed bank?

**John:** We haven’t lost it, but it has been damaged by the flooding permafrost, because they deliberately built it in an arctic location that was safe and cold. It is no longer safe and cold.

**Craig:** I like that the thing that we were using to hedge against the apocalypse was damaged by the encroaching apocalypse.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We could do better. I mean, the seed bank should be a little more protected than that.

**John:** So, I mean, I don’t want to go too deep into the Alanis Morissette discussion, but is that ironic? Is it ironic that–?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, so it’s tragic. But how could that seed bank thing be ironic in the classic definition of irony?

**Craig:** Um, it would be ironic if – here’s how. The world ends because seeds become incredibly aggressive and literally tear apart buildings and everything. So, the end of the world that the seed bank was preparing for was brought about by an overabundance of seeds.

**John:** OK. But couldn’t you say that deliberately placing it in – picking the location that was safe and arctic ended up becoming its undoing, that’s ironic. Is it not?

**Craig:** Just feels like bad planning.

**John:** Yeah, perhaps.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like it’s not ironic to say that I put my – you know what happened, I put my documents for my fire insurance in the fireplace. That’s not ironic. That’s just dumb. And then the fire destroyed them. You know, that’s just dumb.

**John:** I was listening to a podcast today. I was listening to Trumpcast. And the interviewer used Begs the Question completely appropriately.

**Craig:** Oh yay.

**John:** It was just such a delight. I got this little tingle of joy.

**Craig:** It’s like when Haley’s Comet swings around every seven or eight decades. It’s nice to hear it when it happens. You sit up. You applaud. There’s still hope, John. There’s still hope.

**John:** There is still hope.

Let’s get to some questions. So Doug in LA wrote in with a question. “What does it mean when you say a scene is working? Is a ‘working’ scene the minimum viable shootable version of a scene? Is a script full of ‘working’ scenes in a great script? Or is the working scene like pornography – difficult to define, but easy to identify?”

**Craig:** Oh, well that’s an interesting question. I mean, the truth of the matter is when we talk about these terms of art, it probably means different things to different people. For me, it’s definitely not – I can at least rule out one of these. It is not the minimum viable shootable version of a scene.

When I say a scene is working, what I mean to say is that whatever the intention of that scene was, it is coming across clearly. It is interesting to me. And the craft of the scene unfolds in such a way that everything feels harmonious and dramatic and interesting or funny. Whatever the ultimate entertainment intent of that scene was, it is happening in a very satisfying way.

**John:** I completely agree. I would also add to it that there’s a time-based element to this. So, you could say a scene is working when it’s on the page. You could say a scene is working or not working when it is in front of the camera and the actors are trying to do it. You see that it’s just not working. And you have to figure out what’s happening there or not happening there properly.

You also ask is this scene working when you’re in the edit room. And you’re looking at there like this scene is not working. And so sometimes the writing really was the issue. But sometimes something else is the issue. And so you’re going through and trying to figure out how do we get this scene to work because it is simply not doing the job it is supposed to be doing in this moment. It is not living up to the narrative potential or to the tone potential of what that scene is supposed to be doing.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And it is probably the case that we use this term most frequently when we are in the editing room, because that is the ultimate test of the scene. There is a scene on paper that ideally when you arrive you feel like this is a good basis of a working scene. Now let us go make a scene. But when you are in the editing room, it is very common to look at something and go, “It’s just not working. I’m feeling a little bored. I’m feeling a little confused. Maybe it’s too long. Maybe it’s too short. Maybe there’s one of those intangible things. I know I’m supposed to feel something at this moment, but I don’t.”

So, it’s not working.

**John:** The moment of panic is when a scene is not working and you’re on the set. So, you may have gone through blocking with the actors and they’re trying to do it and they’re like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. This isn’t working for me. I don’t understand what’s going on.” And that can be a moment where as a writer you’re like the scene works, I know it fundamentally works, and yet you’re not able to make the scene work. And so therefore I’m going to have to have this conversation to try to figure out what it is that is not working for you and the director, of course, and try to find a way to make sure it works for everybody. Because if an actor has no idea what the scene is supposed to be doing, or cannot find his or her way into the scene, it’s unlikely – not impossible – that you’re going to be able to find that later on.

So, those are the moments I dread is when you maybe shot one, or you’re about to start shooting, and like they just don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. And those are the moments where the floor just falls out of your heart.

**Craig:** Yeah. That happens. Similarly, you will find yourself in situations where everybody seems to understand what they’re doing. And it’s all going according to plan. And you’re watching it and thinking, “It’s not working. There’s just something amiss here.”

And in those moments, I think this is where experience really comes into play. They talk about this in sports all the time. I mean, you have two teams that make it to a championship game. A Super Bowl. The World Series. And so therefore they’re all not only professional athletes, but they’re at the top of their game. They are the best of the athletes in that league. But one team has been to the big show before. They’ve played in the World Series before. They’ve played in a Super Bowl before. And very typically people will say they have an edge because they have a certain experience.

And you think, well, it’s a game. The rules aren’t any different. There is this comfort that you get from having been there before. The longer you do this job, and the more times you arrive at a place where something isn’t working, first of all the impulse to deny that it’s not working, it’s not there. Because you’ve already felt the sting and the consequence of that denial in the past. So, there’s no struggle against that. You immediately accept that it is true. But you also remember that you were able to fix things. And if you take a breath, take a moment, think about what it was that this scene was supposed to do, and look with dispassionate scrutiny upon what the scene is currently doing, a lot of times with just 30 minutes or 40 minutes you can cook up something new.

And production is used to this. You will get to a place where you’re not quite sure – it’s clearly not right. I remember Todd Phillips and I, we were – it was I think the third Hangover movie. There was a scene where the guys were in a car. And Todd was really adamant about not shooting car scenes the way most car scenes are shot today, which is on a soundstage against green screen. He really liked the old school style of processed cars where you’re towing a car and shooting it for real.

And so it’s a very involved bit of production work, because you can only go so far in that car. You have to turn around, go back. So, takes take a long time. And the scene just wasn’t working. So, we sort of hit the red button, stopped. Said, “Let’s just shoot something else today.” And then we took a day to figure out what it was and come up with something else. And we did. And then we did that and it worked great.

That is something that I think experience teaches you about non-working scenes, because I think a lot of people, particularly early directors, first-time directors, and early screenwriters are hearing people say, “We’re here and we spent all this money. We got to make this work.” And so you just go, OK, I’ll do my best. It’s not working though.

**John:** You and I don’t have experience working on traditional sitcoms where they have a process where over the course of the week they’re writing and then they have a table read and they have blocking. And so they’re working on the script as they go through it. And in that process, at the table read, or while they’re first trying to stage things, they could say like, OK, that’s not working. They can see it in front of their eyes. Like, OK, that’s not working. And it’s built into their process. Like, the things that aren’t working, we’re going to fix them. And by the time we’re doing the real taping, we will get it worked out.

And so it’s a luxury we don’t often have in features, because generally a scene is in front of the cameras, that’s the only time you’re going to shoot that scene unless something crazy happens or unless you are in a movie where you have the luxury of being able to shoot things multiple times. I would just say like if something is not working it’s not a sign that everything is doom and gloom. It may just be part of the process. And it can be a really terrifying part of the process in a feature. And it’s probably less terrifying in the television medium where it’s expected that you’re going to keep working on things.

**Craig:** There’s no question. This is why movies, to me, are the tight rope act of our business, because you’re asking people to sit in a theater and experience this one time. That’s it. There are no commercial breaks, nor can they hit pause. Television always has more leeway because there’s a certain casualness to the manner in which it is consumed. Not so with movies where you’re asking people to go somewhere and park and sit and watch it with total attention, captive audience, and then go home.

And, also of course, in television, even serialized television single-camera dramatic stuff, there are so many locations and sets that are reused over and over and over. Obviously in sitcoms, well, let’s talk about the traditional three-camera sitcom, the sets are the same literally every week. So, the variables are reduced down to almost nothing. The only real variable is what are these people doing and saying and thinking. But you’re not in a new location. You’re not stuck there all day with a scene that doesn’t work. You know what I man?

So, always much more pressure, I think, in movies. Very scary business. But I will say that when Doug asks is a script full of working scenes a great script, I probably would say no because that’s not how we judge a great script. We judge a great script as a whole. So, yes, all the scenes should be working, but also they should be working together. That’s kind of one of the big factors.

**John:** Absolutely. In the show notes I want to put a link into an episode of this podcast that goes into the backstory of The Americans. So The Americans is a fantastic show and for the last few seasons Slate has done a podcast series where after every episode they do a spoiler special where they talk about the episode, but they also interview the showrunners and somebody else involved with the production.

And this past week, they talked with the producing director whose job it is to direct the first two episodes of the season and the last episode. And to work with the directors who are doing the course of the season. And he was talking about being the guy, in shooting the last episode, he’s also the guy who shoots all the clean up on previous episodes. Because there will always be some things that don’t work or things that they missed because of weather or an actor changes or something. And so he shoots all those cleanup things. And that’s sort of a unique thing as TV shows, at least how we’re doing them right now, they have that opportunity to go back and like fix things in a way which is just amazing.

**Craig:** Indeed. Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. Tim in Ohio writes, “Can a writer take a previously produced show, write a few episodes for it, then submit it as a writing sample? My idea is to take the former number one show Dallas and spin it into a sitcom.”

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. Generally speaking, what used to be common is now looked down upon, which is to advertise yourself as a writer by writing an episode of an existing show. So, when you and I came into the business and if you wanted to get into television, you would write a spec episode of Seinfeld, or a spec episode of Frasier.

People don’t really do that anymore. Now the folks who are hiring writers for television shows are looking for original pilot material to say, OK, how are you as a writer on your own creating characters and situations that are unique to you. But, in a situation like this, of course, you could certainly take a show like Dallas and turn it into a sitcom. That sounds very inventive. It could be really fun and funny to read.

A couple of warnings. One, obviously that’s never going to get made, because you don’t have the rights. So that really is just a calling card kind of piece of work. Two, it requires that the reader be familiar with the substrate. So, if Dallas was on the air when you and I were children, that’s a show from the ‘80s, it may very well be that some people who are reading this material and judging you as a writer are not that familiar with it. So, it might not work for them. It might not be that funny. But those concerns aside, I don’t see any problem with it.

**John:** No, I think it’s the right kind of idea. So, I don’t know if Dallas as a sitcom is the right idea, but the right kind of idea to sort of take something that people are familiar with and do a very different twist on it. That’s great. And it kind of busts the clutter a little bit, because these people are reading a zillion samples for things, they’ll remember this one if it’s a clever take on something that was familiar to them.

So, yes, I think it’s absolutely fine and fair. Are you violating somebody’s copyright? Well, not in a way that is meaningful, because you’re not trying to sell this. You are not trying to do anything other than prove your writing talent. So, it is a common practice to do spec episodes. This is essentially the same kind of idea.

**Craig:** Correctamundo.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our big feature topic which is The Addams Family. When you and I first talked about this on email, we were going to focus on one movie and sort of do one of those deep dives like we did on Little Mermaid or Indiana Jones. And then as we started sort of talking through it and you were watching one movie and I was watching another movie, we decided let’s just talk about The Addams Family in general. So, you were going to focus on the first movie. I was going to take the second movie. But then I think it’s also interesting just to look at how would you approach The Addams Family overall. Because it’s the kind of property that if we were doing it right now in 2017, you would probably put together a room. You would put together a room of writers and they’d spend four weeks on it and figure out what the movie was going to be and what the spinoff HBO show was going to be.

It’s that kind of big property that you do things with. And it’s so interesting that we have already a TV show and movies to look at. So, The Addams Family.

**Craig:** Yeah. This could have gone so, so wrong. And it went so, so right. I mean, let’s remember that The Addams Family started as a cartoon in The New Yorker. Charles Addams did these one-panel cartoons. And I see here in the show notes, thank you for supplying this information, John, began in the ‘30s. So this goes way, way back. And it eventually was adapted into a television show in the ‘60s, which you and I, I mean, I certainly was watching that when I was a kid. They were in black and white. Was that one of the shows that then transitioned to color at some point?

**John:** I honestly don’t remember. And actually my memory of The Addams Family versus The Munsters is kind of blurry. The general, like there was a house, and there was kooky people living in it, but it wasn’t a clear distinct memory for me. Like I can remember, I can keep my Bewitched and my I Dream of Jeannie separate. But these kind of got conflated to me as TV shows.

**Craig:** There was a time, because there were only three networks, where you could get away with this. You could have a hit show and then another network can go, “Let’s make a that show. Make that exact show, just change a few names. It will basically be the same show.” And that’s what they did when The Addams Family came on. It was a hit. And then The Munsters came along to be the same show. It was kind of remarkable.

The show was very typical for television in the ’60s. It was a sitcom. It had a laugh track. It was pretty cheesy. And most importantly because it was meant for families, it pulled punches. The cartoons that Charles Addams drew were – they were a bit like Gorey’s cartoons. They were dark, macabre. They didn’t pull punches. And then the show sort of did.

And then you come along to 1991 and in a very typical Hollywood move they say, “We can get the rights to this thing. Everybody knows the name The Addams Family. Most people know the big characters. They love that song. So let’s make a movie out of it.” And what’s so amazing about the film is that it didn’t pull punches. And so the opening shot tells you everything about what this movie is going to be and it is essentially a filmed version of one of Charles Addams’ most famous one-panel cartoons, which shows a group of carolers merrily singing outside of a door. And then you go all the way up to the top of this gothic mansion and there’s this ghoulish family with a vat of bubbling oil and they’re going to pour it on these people. And the key, really the key to everything that makes The Addams Family work as a movie and as a cartoon is that they are so gleeful about it.

They are not – they don’t look vicious. They look happy as a family. It’s this wonderful – in fact, this is to them what caroling is to not them. This happy, warm feeling. And that general tone sets the path for the entire film.

**John:** Agreed. So the first film is 1991. The second film, Addams Family Values, is 1993. On the previous podcast I said, oh yeah, the second film, Addams Family Vacation, which is not really a film.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But totally could be a film.

**Craig:** It could be.

**John:** So we’ll get into why that could be film.

**Craig:** It’s Addams Family Values, right?

**John:** Values is the second movie. There was a third film written that never shot. Raul Julia, who played Gomez, died. And they never shot the third film. But I think it would be interesting to figure out sort of what that would be.

There have been direct to video sequels since then. In 2010 it was announced that Tim Burton would do a stop motion version for Illumination, but that apparently never happened. But, wow, Tim Burton feels like a perfect match for The Addams Family.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In 2013, it was announced that MGM had hired Pamela Pettler, who did Corpse Bride with me, to do the script for the new animated version. I don’t know any more details about that, but it feels like she should be making something. And finally there’s a Broadway musical that our friend Andrew Lippa wrote, which has obviously played on Broadway but it is now in the UK and traveling around the world. So, we can also get into that for a little bit.

So, we can talk about sort of the common elements of all that, but also what is unique to sort of each version of The Addams Family.

**Craig:** Right. Well, so the 1991 film is written Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson. I don’t know if Paul Rudnick also worked on it. I can only guess. It seems like maybe he did. He is, I think, the only credited screenwriter on the sequel. And there’s a certain Rudnickian humor.

I mean, it’s funny, you can go through particularly the second film and the comedy is very one-liner based. And you can literally go through and divide the jokes into two categories. Jewish or Gay. It’s incredible. There’s like a whole academic study to be on what gay humor is and what Jewish humor is and how The Addams Family just is the king of both of those schools.

But Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson write the script for Addams Family, the first film. It’s directed by Barry Sonnenfeld who I think at this point – had he already done Men in Black? I don’t know.

**John:** But watching the film, it was so striking, because I recently watched Men in Black, and like his style is his style. It very much feels like Men in Black in sort of how it’s visually presented on the screen.

**Craig:** Correct. I mean, Barry Sonnenfeld started as a cinematographer. His style is very – is for the camera to be very present, very bold, big moves. But, here’s what kind of emerges from a screenwriting point of view, why I love The Addams Family. You have this enormous challenge ahead of you, and I always put myself in the shoes of Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson. What do you do?

And so they make this brilliant choice right off the bat. I’m going to take this cartoon and in it is all the DNA you need for a movie. Specifically, family bonded together by the opposite of what most families are bonded together by. And in there also is this strand of the celebration of non-conformity. We all get a little squeamish by those perfect families. Think of Ned Flanders on The Simpsons, right? They’re perfect, we just then want to hurt them because of it, right?

So The Addams Family celebrates the perfect opposite of that. And in that they love each other. And so what is the movie? From a plot point of view, I think they actually make this brilliant choice by picking the dumbest plot ever. In comedy film, there is no more hoary plot than – HOARY plot – not WHOREY plot – than the grandma is going to lose her house essentially.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they live in this mansion. They have all this money. And the plot of the movie is that their financial manager is scheming with somebody that he owes money to to take all of it away from them. And they’re going to do that by having this man pose as the long lost Uncle Fester, even though he is not, because Uncle Fester is the rightful owner of all of that. And once that happens, he can take it all, and kick the Addams Family out, and they get all the money for themselves. That is a terrible plot and it’s perfect for this because the joy of The Addams Family is not plot-based at all. It is entirely about how this family loves each other in the strangest way. This incredible romance between the parents, between Morticia and Gomez. And then ultimately what it means to actually be loved by a family in any way, shape or form.

And all of that requires comedy and set pieces to the point where you feel like you’re almost watching a standup show. And the choice of plot here is brilliant because really the movie is at its best when it doesn’t give a damn about any of that.

**John:** Yeah. Going back to your earlier comment about like it’s the intersection of Jewish comedy and gay comedy, there’s something really fundamentally queer about The Addams Family. And actually I searched “Addams Family Queer” to see who had done their Master’s thesis on it, and there really weren’t a lot of them online. But it is a family that is defined by its otherness to the world around it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And in portraying itself as the alternative to everything out there, it is strangely normalizing. It’s all about this family that loves each other so much, even though they’re not like anything else around them. And all their individual, sort of the natural things you see in a family are magnified to these extreme degrees. So, Gomez and Morticia don’t just love each other. They love each other in a passionate way that is really bizarre. Like it’s almost uncomfortable, but also delightful.

**Craig:** Right. That’s exactly right.

**John:** And so Gomez is sort of feminine in sort of his fawning over his wife, but that’s kind of great. They seem to have a bondage/S&M kind of relationship. But that’s kind of great, also.

Then you look at the two kids, Wednesday and Pugsley, they have sort of the normal sibling rivalry, but taken to such an extreme degree that she’s always trying to kill him, like literally kill him. And you sense that she never really will because it’s the rules of the movie, yet she’s always trying to kill him.

And then the kooky Uncle Fester. And Grandmama, they are the most extreme versions of the wacky Jewish uncle or the Bubbe.

**Craig:** The Bubbe.

**John:** She’s the extreme version of the Bubbe. So, it’s all those things taken to sort of their nth degree, and yet in the nth degree they become very normal. It’s revealing how normal a family they are in relation to all the cold outsiders.

**Craig:** No question. I think that’s exactly why the movie works. And that is the – the interesting subversion that’s in it, there is something – we’ll talk about, OK, the Jewish side of the humor is this – it’s not a suspicion of the perfect WASPY family. It’s more like, ugh, who wants to be perfect like that? You know, we’re not perfect like that. We’re loud, or we’re weird looking. Those perfect people are kind of boring and stuffy. So this is the sort of Jewish humor that you saw with for instance Harold Ramis when you look at movies like Caddyshack for instance. That’s a very Jewish kind of expression. Rodney Dangerfield’s character in Caddyshack. He could have just as easily been in The Addams Family. You get a sense that if he had walked into the Addams Family mansion, he would have made some comments, but otherwise been perfectly fine.

And definitely when you think about the queerness of it, that there’s this straight world out there that doesn’t understand the true fascination of being yourself completely. Because in the straight world, you’re born straight, and nobody gives you a problem with it, so you’re just yourself. There’s no effort to it. And here they’re making a conscious decision. They do love S&M. They talk about it without ever going too far, but, you know, she says – I mean, Gomez is very upset because he is starting to think that maybe Uncle Fester is an imposter and it’s not really his brother. And she says, “Gomez, why torture yourself? That’s my job.” And it’s all – and when they’re literally torturing her, she loves it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She says, “You’ve done this before.” So, it’s very much about a total free acceptance of our non-conforming selves. And all of that is necessary. But I will argue that the reason – they lynchpin to this movie is Wednesday Addams and her portrayal by a very young Christina Ricci who did a sort of impossibly brilliant job. It’s one of the best jobs any child has ever done in any part.

**John:** I completely agree. So, we’ll skip ahead and give a taste of Addams Family Values, because my daughter watched this with me this week. And my daughter is 12 and has not seen any of it. She had no idea what The Addams Family was. And so she hadn’t seen the first movie and we just started watching Addams Family Values. And within the first five minutes she’s in love with Wednesday Addams. Because Wednesday Addams speaks her mind in an adult way but also in a kind of couldn’t care less way. She completely takes agency in every scene in a way that’s just remarkable.

And she says things that like no one should ever say, and yet she’s much freer for that. And so my daughter just completely fell for Wednesday because it’s just such a revelatory character. And Christina Ricci’s performance is superb.

**Craig:** It’s not surprising to me that she fell in love with her because the character of Wednesday Addams is almost a super hero. Everybody else is operating in this world where they are concerned about their love for each other, or money, or whether this brother is real or not. Wednesday Addams is operating on this plain above everyone where, A, she’s the first person to figure out that Fester isn’t really Fester. He’s an imposter. Although, spoiler alert, it turns out he really is Fester. She just knows that, inherently. She’s brilliant. She has this remarkable deadpan, which I think great deadpan characters – like I think of Martin Starr on Silicon Valley.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** What they convey in their perfect deadpan is that they’ve seen it all. It’s almost like you get the sense that that character on Silicon Valley or Wednesday Addams has literally already seen the movie, or the show. They know how it ends. It’s a confidence there. It’s a remarkable confidence. Unflappable. And violent but violent because of a passion to be in control of the world. It’s actually a very kind of traditionally masculine trait to want to dominate the world, right?

Wednesday effortlessly seems like she wants to dominate everything. You got the sense that if Wednesday just decided to end this movie early, she could. And that’s a wonderful choice. And Christina Ricci does these things when she reacts to things that are too cloying, too sweet, too nice, whatever they are. Her eyes go big and her eyes are just, I mean, they should – I wish we could copy them and put them in a museum to show people like this is what eyes can do.

How old was she when this movie was made? It’s just unbelievable that she could do those things.

**John:** Yeah. She was 12.

**Craig:** 12! My daughter is 12. Your daughter is 12. There’s just this preternatural confidence and ability that she had that was just so brilliant.

All right. So, I want to talk about a scene in Addams Family. To me, it’s the pivotal scene. It’s where the movie turns and you start to see why you fall in love with everyone.

So Christopher Lloyd plays this imposter. He’s pretending to be Fester. There’s all this hullabaloo going on. It’s not going very well. Wednesday doesn’t necessarily think – you know, she’s on to him. And he’s a bad guy. I mean, he’s a murderous thug who is basically being sent in there to be a criminal. And because of that, he’s finding a certain commonality. And the strongest connection he has weirdly is with these two kids because he likes them. He likes the things that they do. And at one point, when even Gomez is saying this man is not my brother. He’s an imposter. Imposter. You know, nice and big.

Fester sees Wednesday Addams and, oh, what’s the brother’s name again?

**John:** Pugsley.

**Craig:** Pugsley. Wednesday and Pugsley are pretending to sword fight and it’s nicely grim, you know. Pretending to kill each other. And he watches this. And so it was that old sword under the arm and Wednesday goes, “Oooh,” and pretends to die. And he’s, “No. No, no, no, no, no, no.” And he runs downstairs and teaches them the proper way to kill each other. And it’s in this moment that you understand that there is this connection between freaks that is deeper than the connection we suppose between people who are normal and therefore don’t need that depth of connection. And it pays off in this incredible scene where there’s a school play and it is the perfect example of the outsider behavior you were talking about and the insider behavior, because all of the perfect kids are like, la-la-la, school play.

And then up come Wednesday and Pugsley, who it appears have been well-instructed by Fester, who shows up to watch, proud of them, because now it is a family. And they engage in the sword fight and start lopping off limbs. They’ve rigged fake limbs. And fake blood is spraying everywhere. It’s spraying. And this is where I stand up and applaud. Spraying blood into the faces of audience members, like into their mouths, and this is a family movie and it totally works. It’s awesome. And it’s the best example of how this movie just refused to pull its punches. And you so loved it for that. And at the end of it, you cut to this great shot of this shocked into silence, blood-covered audience, and then the Addams Family standing up and applauding. Ah, brilliant.

**John:** So, the reason why that kind of sequence can work is because as the audience, our sympathies are with the Addams Family at all moments. And so even though we’ll meet other characters who are like normal, we will never go home with them. We’ll never follow them.

And so our experience of the movie is only through their eyes. And because we relate with them, that scene isn’t gory. That scene is hilarious. And so you can imagine the other version of that. Like the bad version of this where we have fallen in love with or tracked people who are outside looking at the Addams Family, they seem disturbed. And you would have natural concerned about the Addams Family, and then this bloody school play would read very differently. So it has to be the triumphant final act of these characters we’ve fallen in love with over the course of the story in order to see it. And you’re setting it up from the very first shot where we see the family trying to pour hot oil on the carolers.

**Craig:** Right. And that’s exactly right. So in that concept of DNA. You and I, we never say to people the Three Page Challenge has to be the first three pages. But, the first three pages should pack in an enormous amount of genetic information. That is the tension and the joy of The Addams Family is that they are on a superficial level horrible people who do horrible things and it’s even implied that they’ve murdered people, you know? But they love each other so purely and the movie is kind of a middle finger to the hypocrisy of family values, which was a big buzz word at the time, and obviously then became the title of the second movie. Because it was essentially saying everybody out there pretending to be all nicety nice, they’re great on a superficial level and rotten on an internal level. And we’re going to flip that. We’re going to make these people rotten on a superficial level and beautiful on an internal level, which is also a very gay/Jewish kind of mélange.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so to wrap up the discussion of the first movie, you have these moments that continue to reinforce the notion that Uncle Fester is drawn specifically to that authenticity. And in fact starts to sense that it is the very thing that will reward him, even though he is a freak. The fact that it turns out that he really is the long lost Uncle Fester is sort of a cherry on top of the sundae. And, in fact, an interesting fact that I read, initially that wasn’t the case. Initially he was not really Fester, but he becomes adopted as Fester. And apparently the cast had a real problem with that. And this is from the documentary, The Making of The Addams Family, Sonnenfeld stated that he meant it to be unclear ultimately in the end whether Fester was really an imposter or not. But all the other actors rebelled and chose, guess who, Christina Ricci, to speak on their behalf who gave this very impassioned plea that Fester shouldn’t be an imposter.

And so, in fact, they ended up changing that plot point to make the actors happy and says Sonnenfeld, “They were right. It was the better way to go.” And of course it was, because – see the thing is it’s not saying, oh, it only worked because of a genetic connection. It works before the genetic connection is ever discovered. That really is your reward essentially. Like, oh, and you really are a part of this. But only after they’ve accepted you as part of it.

So, it was a lovely thing. And it set up a second movie quite brilliantly.

**John:** I agree. So, let’s talk through the plot of Addams Family Values. So this is written by Paul Rudnick. Same director. Same producer. In the opening, Morticia gives birth to a new baby. This is Pubert, who is actually part of mythology. I assumed it was made up for this movie, but it’s actually part of mythology.

Wednesday and Pugsley are jealous, so they try to kill the baby. And so there’s a lot of sequences of how they’re trying to kill the baby. The family hires a nanny named Debbie, who is played by Joan Cusack, who is just spectacular.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** She’s actually the Black Widow Killer, and so she plans to marry and murder Uncle Fester.

**Craig:** Which, let me just interrupt. Again, the dumbest plot ever. Perfect. Perfect. Thank god.

**John:** Wonderful. Debbie sends the kids off to summer camp and from there we’re cutting back and forth between the main A Plot storyline which is at the house and it is Gomez and Morticia and Debbie and Fester, and the other plot line is at Camp Chippewa where we’re following Wednesday and Pugsley there.

Ultimately Debbie marries Fester, but finds him impossible to kill. And she’s ultimately electrocuted by the baby at the very end. She’s basically kidnapped the entire family. She’s going to kill them. But the baby ends up killing her. So, that is his real crowning as an Addams is killing their killer.

**Craig:** So the plot of the baby is set up in I think the very last shot of the first film, where she announces that she’s pregnant and she announces this by showing this little onesie she’s knitting that has too many limbs. And, of course, Gomez immediately recognizes the meaning of it and is thrilled. And then they have this baby in the beginning and, of course, Morticia enjoys labor pains. And, by the way, just another brilliant thing that you got to give Sonnenfeld an enormous amount of credit for. They make a choice in the first film that they carry through the second film. In every scene, no matter what is happening, there is a key light going across Morticia’s eyes. And so Anjelica Huston has this wonderful face.

Now, a key light for those of you who don’t know, it’s a special light and it’s usually very well defined in terms of border. And very typically is hit across someone’s eyes to give a kind of dramatic pop. It’s like the Tabasco sauce of lighting. You use it very carefully in places. And they’re just like, nope. [laughs]

**John:** It’s not careful here. It’s just a giant spotlight.

**Craig:** It’s crazy.

**John:** There are moments, clearly she had very little, like once they did her blocking, she was not allowed to change whatsoever.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Because there’s one inch of like that her face can be in.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So that she’s perfectly in the light. And so watching it this past week, there are a few times where she steps into the light, but essentially she’s frozen throughout most of the movie because of that light.

**Craig:** Which actually weirdly works, because she has this kind of insanely contained character. So even when she’s lying in the stretcher, being wheeled into the delivery room, there’s a key light across her eyes. [laughs] It’s just amazing.

So you have this Black Widow plot. And once again, by the way, Wednesday, she knows. Always knows. And you go back and forth between these things and the truth is that it is kind of a rehash of the plot of the first movie, which I don’t mind. Someone else is trying to steal their money in their house. And it certainly cuts to the family themes. But the movie sings and is at its best, and I think is beloved for all of the scenes at Camp Chippewa because those again cut right to the heart of that let’s just call it the queer Addams Family academic theory of outsiders versus insiders. And it does it in a way that is now even bigger and more obvious.

And it is outstanding. Just once scene after another. Christine Baranski and Peter MacNicol both being like the perfect foils. Every scene there is just gold.

**John:** Well, it’s also worth noting that the summer camp mythos is also a largely Jewish culture thing, too. So like the East Coast summer camp vibe is a real thing. I was trying to figure out whether this came first or Camp Crusty. And they’re almost the same time. The Camp Crusty, the phenomenal Simpsons episode where Bart and Lisa go off to Crusty’s summer camp.

But both of them are presaged by Meatballs, which is an amazing sort of distillation of what the summer camp experience is. So, all the Camp Chippewa stuff is just delightful. I found that my memory of the movie was that, oh, it’s mostly Camp Chippewa.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s actually not that much. It’s just the stuff that’s there is like really, really good and funny. And you sort of remember the parts of the movie that Wednesday is in, and that’s the part of the movie that Wednesday is in.

Some things honestly don’t work phenomenally in this movie. And it’s worth noting what doesn’t quite work, because watching it this past week I had this suspicion that some scenes got dropped, or something got changed along the way. Quite early on Wednesday Addams starts to figure out like oh I think Debbie is not who she says she is. Debbie is going through these papers. But for whatever reason, Wednesday doesn’t say anything and Wednesday gets shipped off the camp. But Wednesday comes back from camp for the wedding, Uncle Fester’s wedding, and yet doesn’t say anything there either.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then goes back to camp. There’s a weird stutter step there. And I would love to talk with somebody involved with the movie to figure out what happened there. Because there’s something that got dropped or changed there, because it was really weird to have Wednesday in some scenes where she could have been taking some agency and she wasn’t taking any agency.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree. There’s an interesting – you could tell that they obviously had made this choice. They want them to go to camp. It’s going to be great. This is how they can have all their fun. But how do you get them there? So, once Debbie, the Black Widow, realizes that Wednesday is on to her, she makes this impassioned plea to Gomez and Morticia to send the kids to camp. And she says, “And they’re going to tell you they don’t want to go, but they really, really do.” And of course Gomez and Morticia are shocked, because that’s just – fresh air and sunshine is so horrible.

But they go along with the plan. They’re fooled, which is fine, but Wednesday doesn’t really protest, which doesn’t make sense. So, that was – it seems like a cheat. It is a cheat.

**John:** It is a cheat. And here’s the thing. I feel like you could get that cheat if it was because it is setting up the fundamental premise, like they’re off at summer camp. So I bought it that moment. It was the stutter step where they come back to the house and then have to go leave again. That was a bridge too far for me. And while it makes sense that they should be there at their uncle’s wedding, if they had revised it in a way that the wedding had to happen suddenly and they couldn’t be there, that would have made maybe even more sense.

And I do wonder if the choice – if what happened in editing or in some sort of reshoot was like, oh, we want to have Wednesday come to this thing, or they want one more scene with Wednesday and the family, so they stuck her into a sequence that she wasn’t naturally in.

**Craig:** It’s quite possible.

**John:** Just a guess.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s quite possible.

**John:** There’s another scene that doesn’t work towards the end or a little sequence that doesn’t work especially well towards the end. It’s that like Gomez and Morticia are phenomenal, but they sort of lose their agency once Fester and Debbie go off. And you sort of lose them as a centerpiece of the movie. So they go to sort of confront Debbie, and then they skulk away. And they go to the police station. There’s a scene with Nathan Lane which doesn’t need to be in the movie at all.

Curiously, Nathan Lane ends up playing Gomez in the Broadway musical, which is a small world kind of thing. But I was watching that scene wondering why that scene was in the movie.

**Craig:** Well, it’s interesting. It is a mirror of a sequence in the first movie, and I suspect that’s why it’s there. Because they felt that it was successful in the first movie, although I would argue that – so in the first movie, towards the – by the end of the second act, beginning of the third act, there’s about ten minutes, which is by the way a lot for a movie that I think is about a 90-minute running time without credits. There’s ten minutes where the Addams Family has been kicked out of their house and they have to go live in this motel. And it is really a sequence of gags. And they’re fun gags. And they even set up this girl who ends up showing up as the girl in the summer camp who is like the perfect little girl.

But it’s just too much. And you start to feel once the Addams Family is – well, OK, now we’re doing a fish out of water movie with the Addams Family? But that’s really not the movie that we were doing. That sequence goes on a bit long in the first movie, and here in the second one it seemed like they were trying to grab at that again. And I agree with you, it didn’t really need to be there. It was more frustrating than entertaining.

**John:** Yeah. But it’s worth talking about the dynamics they were trying to establish with Debbie and Fester and Morticia and Gomez, which is that Morticia and Gomez’s perfect love is intimidating. Like it sets an impossibly high standard for love. And so Christopher Lloyd, who we’re not talking enough about because he’s just phenomenal in both movies–

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** He’s great. And like imbues this bizarre character with a lot of heart. And at every moment is making fascinating choices. The sequences with him and Debbie and with him and Debbie and Morticia, they are really terrific, yet there’s a sameness to them. There’s not a progress. And if I could hope for anything it would be a little bit more engine behind them so that we’re not coming back to the same vibe again and again.

**Craig:** I agree. And it’s worth noting that Christopher Lloyd carries the burden of the protagonist in both movies and does it beautifully well. And it’s a very similar protagonism in each movie. In the first movie he is someone who is struggling with a desire to be loved. He has this unhealthy relationship with this woman who has adopted him who is not his mother, but he has clearly this crazy mamma’s boy thing going on. And bordering on oedipal, because he so desires to be loved and accepted. And then he finds that love an acceptance from his actual family, the Addams Family.

In the second movie, you’re exactly right. They make a brilliant point of setting up a new need in him that is not simply there because. It’s there in response to Gomez and Morticia’s perfect romance. He wants what they have. And they have all these wonderful jokes where he just talks all the time about how he watches them through a keyhole while they have sex and they don’t really seem to care, which is spectacular. I mean, also in the movie you have multiple scenes where Wednesday and Pugsley are not just kind of pretending to kill their infant brother. They are legitimately trying to kill him. And every single time either the baby foils it or the parents foil it and they’re like, “Oh, you kids. I know it’s hard.” Which is brilliant.

But you’re absolutely right. The part of the laboring of the second movie is that Fester’s desire to have a romance and therefore his attraction to Debbie kind of flat lines. When he understands she’s manipulating him, she keeps trying to kill him and it never really works because he’s Fester and it’s really hard to kill an Addams. We know this. It does sort of flat line for a while. And you start to get a little frustrated that Fester isn’t getting it.

In the first movie, Gomez figures out pretty quickly that this guy doesn’t seem like. We aren’t ahead of him. He’s with us. In this movie, we’re so ahead of Fester that it does start to get a little plodding.

**John:** Yeah. My daughter was rooting for Debbie at times. And–

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god. She’s sick. I love it.

**John:** You’re not supposed to, and yet, I mean, Debbie is a kind of very Addams character in a way. You know, to a certain degree she is a Wednesday Addams grown up in the sense that she’s completely empowered in what it is and what she does. And so she’s an outsider, too, she’s just homicidal in a not appropriate way.

And one of the strengths of the movie is like Morticia has a sequence where she confronts her and she’s like, “You do these terrible things, and I like that about you.” Basically sort of like you’re horrible and you’ve killed these men and I applaud that. And, yet, trying to explain that she could still have love for her I guess brother-in-law, it’s not really how everyone is related.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s her brother-in-law.

**John:** But in previous Addams incarnations it’s actually her uncle. It’s all crazy. But there’s a specificity to sort of why she’s doing what she’s trying to do, which is really nice. I just wanted more of that.

**Craig:** I’m with you. I’m with you. There’s this – I mean, you want to talk about like the best jokes in the movie, and it’s so – when I think about Paul Rudnick and his sense of humor, it’s so brilliant. And a great example of like, OK, we’ll put that one in the gay column. When Morticia does confront Debbie she does so at this new mansion that Debbie has purchased with all the money she’s stolen from them. And it’s just the opposite of the Addams Family mansion. It’s all pinks and blues.

And Morticia says to Debbie, “You have gone too far. You have married Fester. You have destroyed his spirit. You have taken him from us. All that I could forgive. But, Debbie, pastels?” It’s just so great. It’s like that’s the thing?

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** Your bad design taste, you know, which is so not Goth. That’s the problem here. That, to me, is the brilliant consistency of the tone that they created in these movies that is just cherishable.

**John:** Let’s take a step back, because we brought up the idea that Fester is essentially the protagonist in both of these movies. Like he is the character who has to change over the course of these movies, and everybody else is just sort of swirling around, and like the family as a unit. And it strikes me that in most of these kind of stories there’s like two ways you could go. Either classically a story is a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. And both of these movies are essentially a stranger comes to town.

So, everything is perfect in Addams Family life, and then an outsider comes in and because he’s an outsider everything is questioned and there’s tumult. And ultimately order is restored. The normalcy is restored after the outsider is either tossed out or accepted into the family.

But I think the reason why I think you could make an Addams Family Vacation is there is a possibility of potentially a Little Miss Sunshine with the Addams Family, where you could take them out of that house and have them grow over the course of a journey. There’s a version of that you could make. It’s just we haven’t seen it yet.

**Craig:** Well, right. And that could descend a bit much into fish out of water, which is a certain kind of joke. I find that the Addams Family is so much more interesting when the fish that are out of water are the people visiting them.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** As opposed to them going to visit other people. But, I would pay many, many hundreds of dollars to see a new Addams Family movie where Christina Ricci is the new matriarch, because she’s so incredible. And we have to talk about, again, her acting ability in the Camp Chippewa sequences. But interesting that her storyline goes completely against the notion of a character arc. Wednesday Addams has no character arc. She is always the boss. And the entire Camp Chippewa story is really like – it’s just watching a superior person win.

**John:** I would say Christina Ricci’s character Wednesday, she has a tiny bit of growth where she gets a little bit closer to the David Krumholtz character.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Who is the asthmatic Jewish kid who is at the camp as well. And, again, it’s a tremendous stereotype and he is fantastic in that role. But her best acting is not a line she was given, but an expression she has to play.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s incredible. Incredible.

**John:** So you talked about her eyes. So, there’s a moment where she is forced to smile. And so the camera just holds her in a close up and you see her trying to evoke this smile and it’s one of the best sort of ten seconds of film you’re going to see. It’s just delightful. And that she could, I guess she was probably 12 or 13 at this point, pull that off is just remarkable.

**Craig:** There’s like a bookend. There’s two moments that I think of and that’s definitely one of them. Because in that moment she’s forcing a smile because she has a plan. And she needs to sucker everybody into thinking that she is now one of them. So she forces this horrible smile. And, of course, they’re horrified by it. But it’s incredible acting.

The other moment is a smaller, simpler thing, but it’s brilliant. They catch Wednesday, Pugsley, and the David Krumholtz character trying to escape. And they catch them at like a fence. And they start to sing Kumbaya. And Wednesday’s eyes get enormously big because it’s like she’s looking into the pits of hell. And she slowly backs up against the fence. It’s incredible. I just don’t know how – that’s the kind of thing where you go, listen, we’re writers, we feel great about what we do, but when you can find a human being that can do something like that, you just have to take off your hat and go, “Well done, actor. Thank god you people exist.” Because my goodness, that was incredible.

**John:** Yep. So, I want to wrap up by talking about a thing that fewer people have seen but is also really worth discussing because it has different challenges and different opportunities. So, there’s a Broadway musical version of The Addams Family. It was written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice did the book. Andrew Lippa, our friend, did music and lyrics. And it is fascinating because of what works differently on a stage.

So, the basic plot for people who probably haven’t seen it, so Wednesday is a little bit older in this. She’s late high school, maybe college. She brings her Midwestern boyfriend, Lucas, and his family from the Midwest also to come visit them at their house. And so this is, again, a stranger comes to town and this is that family and sort of what having that family there sort of unleashes within the household. There’s delightful songs. But I wanted to actually play one little thing, because I know it’s a song you like as well. This is – Uncle Fester sings a song in the second act called The Moon and Me.

So, this is part of Addams Family mythology is that Uncle Fester loves the moon. But in the song he literally loves the moon. Like he’s in love with the moon. The moon is a character. So, let’s listen to a clip.

[Song plays]

What I love about that song is that it reveals a part of Uncle Fester that would be very, very hard to do in a non-singing movie. It’s hard to get that character’s introspection without a song. And it sort of perfectly illuminates what’s going on inside his soul.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s what musicals do best. And what movies tend to do worst. When you’re asking somebody to share this feeling inside of them, and it’s usually a romantic feeling. It’s usually a sentimental feeling. Movies are terrible at that. Just listening to people talk about how much they love somebody is a bit gloppy, you know? But when you sing it, it’s beautiful. And, of course, you have the delicious perversion of the fact that he’s singing it to the moon. And yet then again the answer to that which is, no, no, see, that’s your judgment. It’s actually beautiful and wonderful. And Kevin Chamberlin, who is a fantastic singer and great performer and Broadway legend hits that note at the end. It’s a high C. My god. What a – ugh.

**John:** Do that eight shows a week. Yeah.

**Craig:** Exactly. And do that eight shows a week. It’s just nuts.

**John:** Yeah. But again it’s revealing, we talk about sort of the queerness of it. Like it’s really queer to love the moon. And yet he loves the moon and he loves the moon so honestly that it’s delightful. And so if a character said he loved the moon, well that’s a crazy person. But when you have a song to go with it you’re like, oh, I get it. I get sort of what your deal is and you’re not a bad person. You’re a person who is in love. And that’s – it’s a remarkable little moment that is much easier to illuminate with a song than it would be just a character in a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think Andrew’s key lyric in here and the really important one to speak to that is “though I’m told it’s wrong,” you know? And everything else is very sweet and it’s very much a straight kind of love song to somebody that you love. But he knows that other people think it’s wrong and he doesn’t care because the moon makes him feel great. And this is a real love. And you’re right. It’s definitely that kind of queer take on romance and acceptance and a kind of “I got to be me.”

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s wrap this up by talking about what we can learn from the Addams Family in terms of adapting a property. So, somebody comes to you with a preexisting thing. So, be it Scooby Doo. Be it some other Hanna-Barbera thing, be it something else that has characters in it, where do you start and how might you start differently looking at The Addams Family and the success they’ve had?

**Craig:** Well, the great hope is that there is some kernel of something that is going to light your way. And in The Addams Family, it’s quite clear from that great cartoon that they drew inspiration from, the kernel was this familial love and that inversion between superficial and internal and what looks bad and what is beautiful and good. And then if you can latch onto that, and in doing so you know you have a sentimental, positive payload for an audience that will deliver the joy of relationships to them, then pull no punches on the other side.

And so you’re looking for something that gives you these opportunities. So, when you talk about Scooby Doo, they’ve tried many times. They made some Scooby Doo movies. They were mildly successful. But the problem with something like Scooby Doo is that it doesn’t really have that payload. They’re friends, but they don’t love each other. You would have to start to invent these things. That’s where it starts to feel a little artificial and forced.

So, in a sense you’re looking for a property that maybe gives you a spark that you can then take forward. And the worst situation is when that spark is there and you deny it. And they did not do that here, which is why it’s successful.

**John:** Absolutely. I’m thinking back to Charlie’s Angels. And when I came to Charlie’s Angels, my first pitches, my first meetings on Charlie’s Angels, they weren’t about the plot or even specific set pieces. They were about the feeling of it and sort of what my feeling was towards Charlie’s Angels and having grown up loving it is that I was weirdly proud of the girls. I loved them and I loved their relationship between them. And they struck me as being like the three princesses who work for their father who is the king. And that it felt like a fairy tale in that way. And that the characters could be incredibly proficient when they were on the job and yet in the sense of this being a comedy they could be giant dorks when they were off the job.

And the tone that we sort of described in those initial meetings became the movie. Became what we ended up working on. It was like what it was going to feel like was much more important than what was going to happen at the start. I think the same would be true with The Addams Family. It’s like what does it feel like? And they found a good answer for that and were able to make that work for these two movies and other properties along the way.

**Craig:** No question. No question.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s get to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing this week is the first episode of the second season of Master of None. So we had Alan Yang on the show for our live show quite a while back. But this second season started and the first episode I thought was just remarkable. Alan Yang and Aziz Ansari wrote it. Aziz Ansari is the only one of the recurring characters who is in this first episode. It all take place in Italy. It is all black and white. It is just delightful.

And one of the things I like about it is that if you’ve never watched the show, you could still completely enjoy this episode. It is just a remarkable good half-hour of really great comedy. And just it’s specific and it’s warm. Aziz Ansari directed it. It’s great. So, I strongly recommend you check out this first episode of the new season.

**Craig:** People are talking. People are talking. My One Cool Thing this week comes to me through Boing Boing. And I feel bad, because I’m not sure how to pronounce Xeni Jardin, but am I doing it right, do you think? Xeni Jardin?

**John:** That sounds about right. Xeni Jardin. That, too.

**Craig:** She’s fantastic. And so she put a link up to this and we’ll have the direct link in the show notes. It is – so some folks who are working with neural networks where those are the kind of learning computers, they attempted to see if the neural network could learn how to name colors. So, what they did is they fed it a list of 7,700 Sherwin Williams paint colors, along with their RGB values. Those are the numbers that ultimately define what the pigment will look like.

So, they give it to this and then they just start having it learn. And where it ended up was amazing. So I’m going to read you some names of some paints. Clardic Fug. Snowbonk. Light of Blast. Burble Simp. And my favorite, Turdly.

**John:** Turdly is good. But Sindis Poop is also quite strong.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. We’re thinking about repainting our living room in Stargoon. [laughs] Here’s the thing, that sounds ridiculous, but actual paint names are absurd. At one point, when it was kind of like in the middle, so like – and it’s fascinating to watch how it’s learning. So like initially it’s coming up with things like Rererte Green or Gorlpateehecd. Then, it starts to kind of get in a little closer with Golder Craam and Burf Pink. Then it’s actually locking into words, like Ice Gray. That’s – I mean, it didn’t match Ice Gray to a color that looks like ice gray. But then Gray Pubic is probably not a color that you’re going to see in a store.

**John:** There is one color here. It’s 216 200 185. Stummy Beige.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it actually genuinely looks like, oh, that’s what Stummy Beige would look like.

**Craig:** Yeah. That does look like Stummy Beige. I mean, Grade Bat doesn’t look like Grade Bat to me. And it’s not different enough from Grass Bat. But still, I mean, it’s pretty freaking amazing that it comes up with these like remarkable words that are sort of good, but wrong. It’s the uncanny valley of names. Spectacular stuff. So, I just loved it.

**John:** Great. We’ve talked in previous episodes about scripts written by AI and they’re not quite there yet, but eventually if they can name paint colors, then eventually they can do more and more of our job. At least the naming of our characters. I’ve seen a couple of like online character name things that are designed for like fantasy stuff. And they are kind of clever in the way they’ll put things together. Even these examples. Like, they’re all basically pronounceable. And like making something pronounceable is not simple.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** God bless them.

**Craig:** Listen, we’re laughing now. We won’t laugh when we’re in their labor camps as the neural networks have us creating huge batches of Sturbil Blue or whatever it is. But, still, for now it’s funny.

**John:** For now it’s funny. It’s funny until we die.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Our show this week is produced by Godwin Jabangwe, as always. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast.

You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes. And leave a review there while you’re on iTunes. That’s always delightful.

You can find show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. If you go to johnaugust.com/guide, you can leave a review for some of the most recent episodes so we can get the Scriptnotes Listeners Guide in top shape.

Transcripts go up about four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. We should have 300-episode USB drives eventually, but it could be a couple weeks. So, if you’re hankering for one of those, hold tight.

And, Craig, thank you for another fun show with the Addams Family.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Cool. Bye.

Links:

* [Addams Family TV Show Opening](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL4CV5tlstM)
* [The Addams Family Official Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyyJYyIexq8)
* [Addams Family Values Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmhQzhUbdvo)
* [The Moon And Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYvPeSTS5zY)
* [Master of None – Season 2 | Official Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGE-Mw-Yjsk)
* [New Paint Colors Invented by Neural Network](http://lewisandquark.tumblr.com/post/160776374467/new-paint-colors-invented-by-neural-network)
* [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/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([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_301.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 297 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we’ll be looking at the future of James Bond, script-reading robots, and the realities of overhauling a movie in the editing room. But first, we have quite a bit of follow up.

**Craig:** So much follow up. Let us follow it up. Two weeks ago, Malcolm and I answered a listener question about ellipses in dialogue. And you’d think, John, that that would have gone smoothly. But, no, no.

**John:** No. There were pauses.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there was an issue. And the issue was raised by big shot movie director, former Scriptnotes guest, friend of the podcast, friend of me and you, Mari Heller. And this is what she wrote. “I totally disagree with Craig.” John, I’m tempted to just end the follow up there.

**John:** That basically does it. On any issue, she probably disagrees with you.

**Craig:** Probably. And I feel like it’s going to happen a lot. But no, she says, “I totally disagree with Craig. Craig said that actors don’t worry about the punctuation of a line and it won’t affect the rhythm of their performance. I just finished working on a movie with two wonderful actors, who had a lot of respect for the script. Often we would get into conversations about how the script was written and where the punctuation was guiding them. They took each clue laid out as a guide and tried, unless we decided to dismiss it, to follow the breadcrumbs that the script gave them.

“What’s more, when I got into the edit I realized the editor was also using the details of the script as a guide in creating her assembly. If a beat were indicated, or it was written that an actor hesitated or trailed off, she went to great lengths to find takes that matched the script. I believe when we write scripts all of our choices, like punctuation and parentheticals should be viewed as clues for our collaborators about the rhythms we intend.”

**John:** All right, Mari, thank you so much for writing back with us. First off, it sounded like you had a great experience with really dedicated actors and editors. I would say that your experience has not been classically my experience. But, Craig, I’d love to hear what you think.

**Craig:** I agree. I think this speaks very highly of Mari and her cast and her editor. More often, what I find is that people will come to me – this actually happens all the time – people will come to me and say, “There’s a mistake. There’s a problem.” “What?” “Blah, blah, blah says so and so’s name like they know them, but they haven’t yet met.” “Yes they have.” “No they haven’t.” “Yes, see, here. On this page.” “Oh, you know what? When we did it that day we did it a little differently, so they didn’t meet.” “OK, fine, I understand. However, the script is full of clues.” It’s full of them.

Editors, in particular, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve sat in an editing room and watched something and I’m like, well, why not just do it this way. And they’re like, “Ooh…” and I said, “You know, that’s the way it is in the huge binder next to your keyboard that has this clue book.”

So, the truth is what is Mari is describing is like writer heaven. People are actually paying attention. I guess what you and I were saying about punctuation is given the general state of affairs where people don’t, it’s probably not that much of a thing. But, yeah, ideally it would be.

**John:** Yeah. So, I do like your description of punctuation and parentheticals being the clues that you are leaving to the next people to touch your thing. And it’s great that she has the ability to not only direct this project, but also hire really smart people who are looking for those clues. So, congratulations once again Mari Heller.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yep. So I was there for the first part of that episode and we addressed a listener questioner about why there was so little non-penetrative sex in movies and TV. Basically where are the handies and blowies? And so while we were having that discussion we left out like one really obvious movie which was Moonlight, which features a very crucial handy there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a mistake.

**John:** We weren’t thinking clearly. We were recording this late. I was in London. I lost a microphone. But there is an obvious Oscar-winning movie that has a non-penetrative sex moment that the whole story hinges upon.

**Craig:** It’s an Academy Award-winning handy.

**John:** Yeah. It’s quite a good one. And just a few days later, like this is always the situation where like the minute you notice something you start to notice it everywhere. So, I was watching an episode from this season of The Americans and Keri Russell’s character receives oral sex in a way that I had not seen certainly on TV before, and it was actually completely on story and on point. So, I would like to once again congratulate The Americans on being a fantastic show. And just put a spotlight on my own ignorance to these acts that are in these shows that I’m just not seeing.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, this is probably going to happen, right? We say that something doesn’t happen and then of course it happens. We just didn’t see it. We missed it. Or sometimes we do see it and then we just forget about it. Really, I’m arguing that we just end the podcast. We’re so close to 300. How great would it be if we just ended it at 299 and we’re like, Nah.

**John:** Yeah. There’s days I definitely think about that. Just going out in a blaze of glory.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. 300 podcast episodes is like having 300 wins as a pitcher. That’s a big thing. I think that that gets us into the podcasting Hall of Fame automatically.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s sports metaphors all over the place.

**Craig:** You’re always lost when I do this. It’s wonderful.

In a previous episode, John, we talked about movie clichés for expressing shock or bad news. Zack from New York writes, “I’m proud to say that I splashed water on my face today, possibly for the first time ever. I did not receive bad news or experience something terrifying. But I did take a 20-minute nap on my couch and woke up discombobulated. After staring at the wall for a few minutes, I went into the bathroom and threw water on my face. I think it half-worked. I’m awake enough to write this email, but still sort of discombobulated. However, I’m out of ideas.”

**John:** What I love about Zack’s email is that it’s so present tense. It’s right about this is the moment I’m experiencing right now. And I like that he thought of us first in that moment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I just want to salute Zack for writing in to ask@johnaugust.com to let us know that he splashed water on his face, which we had singled out as a movie cliché that no one does in actual life, but it seemed to sort of help Zack in this moment. So, again, just like with handies and blowies, we’re often wrong.

**Craig:** Oh, god, are we ever. Well, what about this whole situation with you and Lindelof?

**John:** Oh, it’s the worst. So, Damon Lindelof and I talked about the notion of idea debt and we thought like, oh, we’re being clever. But you know who else was clever? Chekhov.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, he was pretty good–

**John:** A little writer. A little writer named Chekhov. So, this is what Chekhov wrote in 1888. So, for the record, that was before we recorded the podcast episode.

**Craig:** Just a little bit, yeah. Just a little before.

**John:** Chekhov wrote, “Subjects for five big stories and two novels swarm in my head. One of the novels was conceived a long time ago, so that several of the cast of characters have grown old without ever having been put down on paper. There is a regular army of people in my brain begging to be summoned forth, and only waiting for the word to be given. All I have written hither to is trash in comparison with what I would like to write.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s Chekhov.

**Craig:** I mean, that is succinct. It’s beautifully said. He did really put you to shame there. And Damon. I think the both of you should feel bad.

**John:** We do feel a little bad. I want to also single out Jason who wrote in with that Chekhov quote to make us feel a little bad. But also I do want to thank everyone on Twitter who said that it was one of the best episodes they’d ever heard of the podcast. So, Craig, at some point–

**Craig:** I’m going to read it.

**John:** If you were to listen to it or read it–

**Craig:** I’m reading it.

**John:** You might enjoy that episode with Damon Lindelof. Finally, we often do segments about How Would This Be a Movie. So, in Episode 214 we did an episode about the French train bros. These were the three American tourists in 2015 who prevented a terrorist attack.

**Craig:** We’re calling them bros? [laughs]

**John:** Well they’re bros. They’re three guys traveling through France. They’re bros.

**Craig:** I guess. Sure.

**John:** They prevented a terrorist attack on a train from Brussels to Paris. They overpowered a guy who had an AK-47. So we said like, well, this could be a movie and Clint Eastwood agreed. So this last week it was announced that he is going to be making a movie based on the book The 1517 to Paris: The Trust Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Heroes, which was written by the eponymous American heroes, along with a guy named Jeffrey Stern. The screenplay version is going to be written by Dorothy Blyskal, and from what I looked up it seems like this is going to be her first screenwriting credit. So, congratulations Dorothy. You answered the question How Would This Be a Movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s one that people will see. You know, boy, I wish I could be on a Clint Eastwood set. I’ve just heard so many amazing things. You know, just the speed. We’ve all heard the stories. I wish I could see that. I’m not going to be able to.

**John:** Are you? Is there some sort of secret thing where you actually will be able to see that?

**Craig:** No, no, never going to be able to there. I’ll just be in my office reading about it. Well, that sounds exciting. I think that will be fun.

**John:** It will be fun.

**Craig:** You know what? I’ve had enough of follow up. I think follow up is done.

**John:** Follow up is done. So, if we were a podcast ahead, like musical interludes, then we would put the music here and then move on to the next thing.

**Craig:** Follow up is done. Yeah!

**John:** So the big feature topic which we obviously have to talk about this past week because everyone on Twitter wrote to us about it. And follows ScriptBook. Well, what is ScriptBook? Well, back in Episode 232, so it’s kind of follow up, we talked about ScriptBook and I actually remember this conversation. I remember the setting of this conversation because I was in Australia at the time and we were talking about this sort of ridiculous AI thing that would read through the scripts and figure out how successful this movie would be. Basically it had digested a bunch of screenplays and it was pitched towards financiers to help them figure out is this a movie to be investing your money into.

But this last week, someone else decided to use ScriptBook and it didn’t go as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, Franklin Leonard over at the Black List worked out some sort of deal with the ScriptBook people where he was offering to his customers an opportunity to get their analysis, the ScriptBook analysis of their script, in exchange for $100. And it did not go over well. You know, he put it out there. And seemingly put it out there in good faith. It certainly wasn’t anything he was requiring people to do. If they wanted to use the other parts of his service, which you and I generally quite like.

Boy, it just didn’t go well for him. I mean, certainly both you and I felt that ScriptBook was stupid, and fake, bordering on completely useless. And therein is the problem. Because there’s two ways of looking at it. One way is this is potentially useful for people. And the other way is this is absolutely useless.

If you believe the former, then you can see where, OK, he’s offering a product. You either like it or you don’t. But if you believe the latter, if you believe it’s truly useless, it starts to feel a little bit scammy. Like you’re selling me snake oil. And I personally do believe it is utter snake oil.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And a lot of other people seem to agree as well.

**John:** Absolutely. So, the minute sort of the word got out about it, you and I were on a long email thread with Franklin about it, but there were also threads on Reddit and there was a lot of sort of hubbub on the Internet about what this was and what it was doing. So, I think we should sort of spoil the punch line here by saying that Franklin has pulled the product, so it is no longer a thing that the Black List is offering, and so we will put a link in the show notes to his original explanation for what the product was and then his email out and sort of his letter about sort of why they were removing it and why he listened to the community and pulled it out of there.

So, I want to talk about two things, which is that question of like is this potentially useful. Like in a perfect world, if this were free, is this a thing you would want to exist in the world? And then the concern of like, well, is this a thing that we feel like screenwriters should be paying $100 for?

Let’s talk about in the perfect world where it’s free, Craig, did you see any value in the product?

**Craig:** No. None. Well, net zero value. Because where there may be little bits of possible potential usefulness in the free version of this, there’s also potential problems that it causes. And that really was the biggest issue for me. So, you know, some of the stuff you go, well, I guess the AI is saying that my predicted genre is half sport and half drama. It’s a sports-drama, but how did I not know that? Um, there’s a predicted MPAA rating, which again really what it comes down to is it’s telling you everybody knows what G is and everybody knows what R is. So, then somehow tell us if you’re PG or PG-13. Nobody in the world cares about that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is stuff about your character likeability. That to me is just dangerous. Because you might think, oh, my character is not likeable enough. Nobody – what – no, that’s not how it works at all.

Predicted target audience. Absolutely useless to you. The marketing department will tell you what the predicted audience is. And then there’s production budget. Potentially useful if you were maybe trying to produce this on your own. Or you were maybe considering to whom you ought to submit the work. And you know, OK, well these people are looking for movies in the $10 to $20 million range. Well, ScriptBook tells me that my script has a 46% chance of being in that range, which ultimately isn’t really very useful either. Because nobody is going to make a budget based on what ScriptBook guesses. They’re going to make a budget by breaking it down and making a budget.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. So, in the show notes we’ll link to a file that the Black List put up which was a sample report for Fences, the Academy Award-nominated script from this past year. And so as you look through it, it’s a nicely presented report. It’s three or four pages long. It talks about rating, genre, the Script DNA, character sentiment, character likeability. I had concerns with all of these things for the reasons that Craig laid out.

Where I think this is actually interesting was there’s this grid where it shows movies that this is like. And I think the axes as they’re labeled are really unfortunate. So it says Audience Rating, in this case from 3 to 10. And creativity from 0 to 1. So looking at this you would say that well Fences is more creative than Hope Springs, or Sideways, but it’s less creative than The Iron Lady or The Verdict. And it’s also more creative than Beasts of the Southern Wild, which seems kind of remarkable.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** So, that was troubling to me. And yet if I were to take away the lines and the axes and just say like this is a cluster of other movies that feel kind of like this, that I could actually see being somewhat useful. Because I would never think of Fences as being like Milk or like The Iron Lady, but in a way that the people who like Milk would probably also like Fences, or the Iron Lady, that actually seems to make some sense.

So that is reasonable to me. And I was actually a little bit impressed that the AI was able to match these up to some degree. Now, I would love to see it matching Identity Thief and seeing what are the movies around that and see if it actually has a good sense of what that is. I thought that was somewhat interesting. But I don’t think it’s $100 interesting for an aspiring screenwriter. I don’t know what an aspiring screenwriter who is putting a script up on the Black List gets out of knowing that it’s like these things. I don’t see how that’s actionable information.

**Craig:** It isn’t. And it’s also information that you as a human are layering your own insight upon. Because the truth is we don’t know – you can say, well, Fences is – I guess in a strange way Fences and Milk are somewhat related. Are they? Really? Well, they’re both dramas. They’re both about adults. They both take place in cities. They both have middle-aged men kind of at the center of it. But, are they really? I mean, I guess anybody could just – at that point you could just say any movie with people like that and go, oh, that’s interesting. I guess those movies are sort of like…

Fences and Sideways are nothing alike. Nothing, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** But I would say they are both in terms of who they are appealing to, I think they’re actually more common than you might necessarily believe. Though the fact that it recognized that Fences was potentially an award movie seems interesting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But again, we don’t know. We’re looking at exactly one example. So I don’t know how much to read into this. But I found that at least interesting. I put the T in there for Aline.

**Craig:** It is vaguely interesting. But anybody who just scrolls through a list of award movies, right, you have Fences. That’s based on a brilliant play. So you’re making an award movie. Just run through a list of award movies then, I guess. I mean, this is not – I don’t understand these metrics. So you have this creativity metric and, well, you could say Fences and Milk are equally creative sort of, I guess whatever that means. But apparently Raging Bull is less creative than Hope Springs. What?

**John:** I don’t know what that means.

**Craig:** Wait. The Usual Suspects is less creative than Malibu’s Most Wanted. That’s right. Let me say this again. That’s the Jamie Kennedy movie, I believe, where he’s – isn’t that right – where he plays a rapper?

**John:** I think it is. Yes. He’s a rapper.

**Craig:** The Usual Suspects – here are the movies that are less creative than Malibu’s Most Wanted: The Usual Suspects, Cool Hand Luke, Heat, Michael Clayton. [laughs] What? And The Avengers.

**John:** Yeah. The Avengers and Catwoman down there at the bottom there.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. Computer, you’re wrong. And Malibu’s Most Wanted shouldn’t be on this. It makes no sense.

**John:** It should not be on there at all.

**Craig:** I also don’t understand the vertical axis of Audience Rating. So, how do we have the audience rating exactly for Cool Hand Luke? What audience? I mean, the audience of over 30 years? Or then? Beasts of the Southern Wild less creative than The Blind Side. And, I mean, I don’t understand this.

**John:** I don’t understand it either. But here’s what I would say zooming way back. I mean, is it clear that there are AI things that can actually find patterns where we wouldn’t see patterns? Absolutely. Do I think this is a case where the kinds of patterns it is finding are going to be useful for the target audience of this service? No, I don’t. I just don’t think that sticking Milk and Fences close to each other on a graph is helping a writer. And a lot of people seem to feel the same way.

So, let’s segue to the scamminess of it all. Because you and I both know and like Franklin. He’s a smart, good guy who is not scammy. And so in our conversations with him, we wanted to sort of make it clear that this felt scammy, but we didn’t think he was scammy. And that we were concerned for him and for the brand because that’s not the way we want to see him out there in the world.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. And he did the thing that people so rarely, rarely do. He listened.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** He listened. I mean, Franklin is a humble guy. He’s a business man and he’s an aggressive business man, but he’s not afraid to say, OK, I made a mistake. And in this case what happened was it wasn’t about you or me. We hadn’t talked about his involvement with this on the air prior to his decision that he made to remove it. But he listened to writers on Twitter. He listened to writers on Reddit. Keith Calder, a good producer, who really went after it on Twitter I think made an impression. And he said, “OK, you know what, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t like this. I did. And I thought people would like it and I think some people still could get use out of it. On the other hand, I hear you. So, we’re dumping it.”

And that’s a big boy grown up thing to do. And in today’s world, it is a rare thing. And so–

**John:** It is. Yeah.

**Craig:** I had a lot of respect for that. And, you know, again, you and I, we like the other part of what Franklin does, which now that we’ve gotten rid of this thing, that is what Franklin does. We like him. He’s our friend. And I think that his general service is a good one. So, it looks like we’re back to a good situation.

**John:** Which is a very good thing. All right, next topic is the battle for James Bond. So, this was – I’m going to link to an article from the New York Times by Brooks Barnes. I’m sorry, Craig.

**Craig:** You know, Brooks Barnes, I had to correct him the other day. He wrote an article about the strike and referred to the long strike of 1998, which did not exist.

**John:** Did not happen.

**Craig:** Oh, Brooks.

**John:** So I can’t verify that all the facts in this article are true, but I will say that in a general sense it raised an interesting issue of what happens when you have a franchise that is essentially a free agent. So, that’s James Bond. When you see a James Bond movie, the opening credits are United Artists, MGM/United Artists. But that’s not actually who releases it. And so for the past four James Bond movies they’ve been released by Sony. But that contract is up. And so now five different companies are competing for the right to make that next James Bond movie. The companies being Warners, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Sony, and Annapurna, which is the little small label that mostly does fancy award movies.

So, that’s kind of an interesting and unusual thing to happen in Hollywood is to have this franchise sort of up for grabs.

**Craig:** It is. And it’s sort of up for grabs, because the truth is they’re not really going to be making it. What they’re going to be doing is giving MGM/UA the money or a big chunk of the money to make the movie, and then they’re going to be advertising the movie and distributing the movie. And therein is the problem, because when you actually look at the way the deal has been structured, if we’re to believe what Brooks has said here, there’s not that much profit really coming back to you. In huge success, you’ll make a pretty good amount of money. You won’t make as much money as say they’re making off of Get Out, because your profit is capped. It’s seriously capped.

So what he describes as under the previous agreement, and I can’t imagine in a bidding war why the new agreement wouldn’t be even more favorable to the Bond folks than the previous one. But, in the previous one Sony paid half of the production costs. So, you pay half of what it costs to make the movie. That’s just to make the movie. And in return for that, you get one-quarter of certain profits, once costs are recouped. That’s probably the certain costs there for those things may involve taxes and insurance and things like that. And obviously, you know, you’re only getting your share of the ticket price and so forth.

**John:** It’s also unclear if Sony is releasing this internationally, like what distribution fee do they get to charge for their distribution services. The math behind this can be very, very complicated.

**Craig:** Extremely. Yeah.

**John:** So it’s not a matter of the film itself becoming profitable. They’re getting money in at every step of the process.

**Craig:** Well, they’re putting money in and they’re taking money out all the time. So, you’re right. For instance, they’ll say, well, we’re going to spend $60, $70, $80 million of the total marketing spend. We’re going to be accountable for that. So we’re spending $80 million. But we’re going to charge you $20 million in marketing fees. So it’s always this weird game. But in the end, here’s the truth: all these people want it because it’s kind of a sure thing. And there is the potential for many more movies. We live in an interesting time.

So, you say to a studio, “You have a choice. Roll the dice on a $20 million movie. It will either make $4 million, or it will make $120 million, but there won’t be another one. Or, make this movie. You will make $30 million off of it. And you can do five more of them. And each one will make you $30 million.” They’re going to go for that second deal all day long.

**John:** Yeah. I think so. And I think it’s as much about the psychology as the actual dollars coming in. So in think about it if you are the head of one of these studios. If you make the Bond movie and it just does OK, no one is going to call you an idiot for making the James Bond movie. It was a safe bet and everyone is going to acknowledge it was a safe bet.

Also, you are keeping the entire machinery of your studio engaged to do it. I mean, one of the weird things about a studio is you have these whole departments that have nothing to do unless you give them a movie to work on. And so a lot of times when studios are in crisis it’s because they actually don’t have a movie. And so they have these huge divisions that have nothing to actually do. So this is a thing to do. It’s a reason to keep all those people employed doing their jobs. Bond is one of those few kind of known brands that whether it’s a fantastic James Bond movie or a just an OK James Bond movie you know you’re going to clear a certain bar with it.

**Craig:** That’s correct. And you know that you’ll have the right to attach one of your other movies’ trailers to that, because studios can do that where they’re like, OK, if you run this movie you have to at least run our trailer with it. And you know that you’re going to be attracting a certain amount of talent which then if the relationship goes well you might be able to transition into a different movie, filmmakers. You’re keeping people close.

The difference with Bond is the people that control Bond are notoriously protective of it and really they do it. You actually don’t really do anything when, as a studio, other than you sell it and you distribute it. So you’re not really getting much back. It’s an interesting thing that all of these studios are so into it. I mean, it just goes to show you that they make more money and they make it more consistently than we know.

**John:** Absolutely true.

**Craig:** Because if they can make consistent money off of this arrangement, and they want to do it again, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. They’re doing OK.

**Craig:** They’re doing all right.

**John:** Let’s look at some of the other reasons why you don’t want to make the Bond movie or why you don’t want to chase it. It has a limited upside. So, you’re capped at sort of how much you can get out of it. Including you’re capped on this movie that you’re making, but down the road if like let’s say you reinvigorate the Bond franchise, well another studio could make the next movie. And it’s like you’ve helped them, but you’re getting nothing for having helped them. So, that’s a concern.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You have limited creative control because the Broccoli family controls it so tightly. Also, you’re weirdly forced to make it. Like, let’s say you get the script and got the director and you’re reading this and you’re like I don’t want to green light this. You have not choice basically. You have to green light this. That’s part of the deal you’re making right now. So these guys are pursuing the rights to Bond, but they’re not looking at a script right now. There is no script right now, I assume. They’re just talking about the idea of making a Bond movie. Maybe with Daniel Craig. Maybe not with Daniel Craig. So, it’s a mystery. And they’re on the hook to make it kind of no matter what happens.

And, finally, there’s an opportunity cost. So, if you’re making the Bond movie, that’s another movie you’re probably not making, either because you don’t have the resources to do it, you know, money wise, or there’s just not a slot in your schedule for another movie right now. Which for some of these studios is probably a good thing, because they’re just looking to do the minimum it takes to sort of keep them in their jobs.

**Craig:** Well, I think that the – you know, it’s so interesting when you talk to people that run studios, one of the things that I’ve heard from a number of them, and it’s very sad actually is that they never really have any moments of victory and joy because when they make these movies, and this is a perfectly good example, they run a spreadsheet and they go, “Well, we are expected to make between this amount and this amount in terms of profit.” The movie is made. It comes out. It either hits that target or it doesn’t. Maybe it exceeds it somewhat. Usually doesn’t.

So, let’s say they have predicted that the movie is going to be quite a success and it’s going to make them $80 million in profit. Two years later, someone says, “OK, yeah, you did it. Check. You did the thing we asked you to do.” There’s no dancing around. There’s no big “oh my god, it’s a huge hit, wow.” Because that implies that they are all just guessing. They’re not.

Unfortunately what also happens is if you miss that target on the low side, the studio bean counters and overlords will say, “Hmm, well, you’re going to have to make it up on one of these other ones.” So even when you exceed expectations, even that triumph is muted because really somebody is going to say, “Well, all right, you should bank that because one of these other ones might miss.” Either way, by the time we get to see the movies it’s like an afterthought for them, because they’ve already priced it and thought about it. And, in fact, they’re now worried about what’s coming out two years from now. And you never get to enjoy it.

**John:** I think if you’re a studio executive, maybe you’re trying to build a hand of three different kinds of suits. You want the guaranteed hits, like the things, you know, Fast & the Furious 9. And, yes, there’s already a spreadsheet for how much that is supposed to make, but you want to be able to hit that thing and hopefully exceed it. You want a couple of cards that are just like they could break out. They have low expectations but they have possible of a lot of upside. You want the Get Outs. The things that could become a Get Out.

And, finally, you want a few of those things that could win awards, because if you’re looking at whether you’re going to be able to reup your contract in a few years, I think you want to be able to show all three things. That you’ve done the expected hits, some surprise hits, and you’ve also gotten the studio some awards. And that’s a lot to try to manage.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is. And I don’t envy them. Honestly, I don’t. I know right now we’re in a bit of a contentious period between writers and the companies, but in terms of the people that I know and I work with, I don’t envy them their jobs. I’m sure they don’t envy me mine. I think everybody that isn’t a screenwriter is horrified by the thought of having to write a screenplay, and I don’t blame them.

But, that’s a difficult gig. And it’s scary. And there’s so much that’s not in your control. That’s the part that’s hardest for me to get my mind around, because you know at the very least we have this wonderful period where we’re in control. And it’s when we’re writing. They never really have that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a strange part of their job is they seem to be the decision makers, and yet they don’t have ultimate control of the thing they’re trying to do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Before we wrap this up, let’s take a look at some other franchises and just look and see where they fall on sort of this matrix, because the James Bond is like one of the most free-agenty kind of things out there. At least in terms of how MGM partners up with a different company every time.

But Terminator strikes me as a similar situation, because that was made by Carolco way back in the day. It keeps I think passing through different sort of financiers who own the rights to it, but it could end up different places.

**Craig:** It has a home now.

**John:** OK, where is it now?

**Craig:** It is at Skydance.

**John:** OK. Well, Skydance I would sort of count as sort of an MGM type situation where they’re a place with a lot of money, but they are not – they don’t have their own distribution deal.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They just distribute through somebody.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But Marvel for a while was sort of like the James Bond situation where they have a bunch of properties and some of them are at Paramount, some were at Fox, some were at Sony. Spider Man was at Sony. Ultimately they all ended up over at Disney, except for the X-Men universe at Fox, and for Spider Man at Sony. But even then they sort of reached back in and sort of reinvested in Spider Man. But for a while they were doing what James Bond was doing. They could move their movies from studio to studio.

**Craig:** They could. And then they got purchased by Disney. So, once Disney bought them, you can see there is just a general effort now to hold all of that in. And the only ones that are left straggling out there are the X-Men, so you have the X-Men part over at Fox, and you have Spider Man at Sony, which they are now co-producing. I don’t know how long that X-Men – I think the deal with the X-Men is they keep it if they keep making X-Men movies, or something like that. I read something like that.

**John:** That’s my understanding is like they’ll keep making X-Men movies because that’s how they keep their rights to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Finally, Star Wars was for a while Lucas Film owned it, so Fox distributed it. But I think Lucas Film really owned the first three prequels that they made, and now of course Disney owns that whole franchise as well. So, again, sort of bringing it in house.

**Craig:** And Disney has been kind of brilliant about this, you know. They just buy the whole company, you know. So, you can negotiate with MGM/UA about the rights to distribute James Bond movies. But if you really want a James Bond movie, just buy MGM/UA. Right? The problem is that’s all they have. They have that. They have the Bond, right? And Bond is very narrow. It’s a fascinating franchise. I’m a huge Bond fan. I’ve seen them all. But it is a very narrow franchise. There I don’t believe there has ever been a Bond spinoff. The entire point is you have James Bond. And then you have a couple of villains that repeat every now and again. Your Blofelds. But there’s a new woman that comes in each time. She comes in, there’s sex, she leaves. Next movie. You know, you have a character like Felix Leiter who is a CIA buddy. No one has ever gone, you know what, now there’s a Bond universe where we’re going to have a movie just about Q and we’re going to have a movie just about Felix Leiter. I’m sure they brought it up at some point or another. But as far as I can tell, nobody on the Bond side of things seems interested in that. So–

**John:** I do remember speculation about Halle Berry’s character being spun off from her movie. Jinx, or whatever her name was.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There was talk of that, but none of that ever came to pass. And it does feel, I agree with you though. Like if another person were to come in and buy that whole franchise, if they bought out the Broccolis for some reason, you would see a universe being formed. Because we know a lot about that universe and it feels like there’s something more you could do with that if you had it.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know like if they had an extended Bond universe, you know the movie I would want to write?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** I would want to write the movie of M. Young M.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** And how M is a spy and it is WWII. I would do a period piece. And sort of the early days of spying and the creation – the notion of why you create the Double O. There’s a great story to be told about why you decide as a person and as a government we need an agency where certain people are allowed to murder. Not shoot in self-defense, or be a soldier on the battlefield. Just kill someone. That is a fascinating question. Licensed to Kill.

**John:** Absolutely. I also think you look at some of the classic villains and, yes, they are people who are up to their own – they have their own plans and devices, but like there’s an Elon Musk-y kind of character who is sort of right on the border between a villain and a hero who could be a fascinating centerpiece to a movie. Who ends up doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. There’s something great about that kind of character as well.

**Craig:** And there is really room there. There’s room there. But for now–

**John:** For now it will be Bond. Our next topic was also suggested by many of our listeners. So, this past week there was a video put out by Nerd Writer on recutting Passengers. Basically proposing the question of what would happen if you did a major cut on the movie Passengers where you sort of limited it to Jennifer Lawrence’s point of view, at least for part of the movie, so she wakes up first. So essentially like she wakes up and Chris Pratt’s character is already walking around the space station. And you and she don’t know that he woke her up deliberately.

And, Craig, I don’t know. Have you seen the movie?

**Craig:** No. But I know the story of the movie. And so I understand the purpose of this change. I’m not really sure – I mean, it would be different.

**John:** It would be different.

**Craig:** I don’t know if the people’s primary objection to that – I mean, no matter how long you delay it, at some point you find out that he woke her up and then you’re asked to believe in their romance. And that seems to be the problematic part for people.

**John:** Absolutely. So, I think it’s an interesting idea. I enjoyed the movie, but I think my problems with the movie were sort of the problems of they had to work really hard to sort of keep Chris Pratt likeable, even though he was doing an unlikeable thing, and it sort of strained under that weight. So, this would be a way of addressing that. But I don’t want to actually get into so much the creative solution proposed here, and just talk about what would happen and what does happen when you are facing a movie and you have this idea for a massive restructuring after it’s already shot.

So, let’s say that you saw this movie before it came out and you were the studio executive, or you are the producer, or the director, and you say like, “I think I want to try this thing.” How would that actually come to pass and what are the realities of trying to implement a change like this?

**Craig:** Well, the first thing that has to happen is a general decision about the scope of the work. Because they’ll make a movie, they’ll test the movie, and then they will discuss – let’s just presume it doesn’t go well, OK? So, the question now is what are we talking about here. Do we need a couple more jokes in the movie? Do we need this one scene that would help improve that? Should we fix the ending? Or, do we have something fundamentally huge going on here and we need to do a lot of work? We need to do two weeks of shooting and shoot a lot and recast a couple of parts?

So, first triage.

**John:** Yeah, and a triage moment only happens if there really is a disastrous test screening. If people really just do not like this movie. And I don’t think that was the case with Passengers. My suspicion was, from people I’ve talked with, the movie tested pretty well and the movie was like pretty well and they were surprised by the reception it got, which wasn’t as strong as they’d hoped.

So, I think you would have to have that bad test screening. The studio panicked. The producer panicked. You have to have a director who is on board with making big changes, or a director you can replace.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Those are the only situations in which you’re able to do big things. But, you’re often doing small things. And so what I will say is that even after a good test screening, you are talking about recuts, reshoots, looking for things that aren’t working, finding your jokes. That happens all the time. And I’ve never worked on a movie that hasn’t had changes based on those early screenings and people’s reactions to them. So, but what’s not common, and you and I have both been in situations where they have done the big recut, that is sort of an emergency all hands on deck. You’re really talking about big brand new ideas. Like, what if we were to rethink how this all works?

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’ve done that. I’ve done that. And it’s hard. It’s hard because first of all it’s a rare thing for the people who are involved in the creation of the movie up to that point to continue to be involved. So, we have a huge problem here. We’re probably going to need a different director to come in and do this work. And we should bring a different writer in to come in and do this work, otherwise we’re at risk of repeating the same mistakes, plus there’s just a lot of emotions and defensiveness. And it’s understandable. It’s a mess.

So, when I come and do this, I sit – I watch the movie. And then inevitably after that there is a discussion of here are the things we just can’t do. We can’t change this. And we can’t change that. We have this much that we can change. How should we best do it? So, it is a very tricky puzzle. This is very Rubik’s Cubey. Figuring out how to fundamentally change a movie without touching a whole bunch of it. And it’s rarely perfectly successfully. It can make a huge difference. And it does. I mean, you can see it in test scores. They run the movie and they’re like, my god, look at the difference.

And I always think, well yeah, but there’s still something just – this movie is still just not right. It’s alive. Very tough to do.

**John:** Yeah. When I come into these situations, I always sort of start with like what is actually working. Are there moments of the movie that actually work that sort of suggest the movie it wants to be? And oftentimes it won’t be at the very start of the movie, it’ll be some moment in the middle where like, OK, just for a moment there you kind of found what the movie was. And it’s possible just through cutting and through moving stuff around, you’ll be able to find more of that movie and sort of get us to that place. But in general I find you want to let the movie be one thing rather than the three things.

When a movie is really not working, it’s trying to do too much at once, and it just loses its focus and its tone. It’s just not a consistent experience. So figuring out what that experience should be is really important.

The first Charlie’s Angels was notoriously a very chaotic production. It was chaotic in post as well. But I remember when I came back in on that movie, one of the first things I really worked on was the opening title sequence, which shouldn’t seem that important, but it was really helpful for setting the tone.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** We’d shot all these scenes, but figuring out what it felt like and sort of what the right kind of goofy was. And so I was sitting with the editors working on do the wipes across and make it feel like the TV show in ways that are fun and right. And once we got that and sort of got that locked, we could sort of step back and say, OK, let’s look at the rest of our scenes and see how we can be a little bit more like that in our style, and that was really helpful.

But ultimately there were reshoots. There were simplifications of logic. They were getting rid of things that didn’t need to be there. Classically, World War Z is a movie that had a much, much bigger ending in its original form. This big assault on Moscow. And the movie did not want to be that. The movie ultimately wanted to be a more intimate movie with Brad Pitt and his family and his own survival. And so that was that whole new third act that Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard had to figure out how to do.

**Craig:** And Chris McQuarrie.

**John:** Chris McQuarrie as well. So, it’s a bunch of hands on deck, really smart people. Looking at what’s there. Looking at what was great, which there was a lot that was great in the first two-thirds of World War Z. And finding a way to carry that through to the end, in that case incredibly successfully.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, those situations are not – thank god – common. It is more common that what happens is – I did this recently. You watch a movie and everyone says, “Here are the things that we’re kind of getting back from the audience on some spots.” And I’ll say, yes, I had those same reactions myself. So that’s good news. It means everybody is kind of in agreement.

Maybe all we need to do here is add a line. You know, so two people are talking and maybe this person says something that just isn’t quite right. It’s causing confusion. So, let’s just have them record a new line and we’ll just be on the other person’s face. And it’s just one line and suddenly that all makes sense now.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** The disruption of experience through poor logic is so dangerous and happily, typically, easily fixable. My least favorite call is come and make the movie funnier with some lines. That’s not going to work.

**John:** Yeah, to try to joke it up. And that will never work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** What I think you’re describing though when you’re adding in a loop line to sort of make something clear, is you talk about people being on the ride or off the ride. And it’s like when did they fall off the ride? And they fall off the ride, they fall off the – they stop believing in the movie when enough things just don’t add up for them. When they start getting confused and sort of confused and annoyed and then they just check out. And so if you can keep them from checking out, if you can keep them engaged, and curious about what’s happening next, you’re probably going to keep them at least somewhat of a fan throughout the rest of the movie.

It’s those moments often in a first act, early in the second act, when people kind of give up on your movie. And if you can keep them from giving up, you’re going to be able to make a lot of those things which weren’t working are suddenly going to feel a lot better.

**Craig:** Exactly. And this is somewhere where a new person coming in is of great help. Because when you’re there from the start and you’re making the movie, you have certain things that you believe. Making a movie is essentially making a million guesses. And you may make almost all the correct guesses, except for two. But, the audience is saying we don’t understand why she’s saying this now but before she said this. And you say, well, it’s because of blah, blah, blah. Right? And somebody else will say, “Well, I didn’t quite get that. I think maybe somebody should say that.” But the people who have been involved, sometimes their feeling is, “But that’s just so on the nose.” Because in their mind it’s in there already. And a new person can say, “It’s kind of not.” And so this is one area where I know it’s going to grate you, because it sounds like it’s on the nose, but for the audience it’s not going to feel – it’s going to actually be interesting, because they’re not getting what you have.

When you do these jobs, you’re actually – this is where being a feature writer feels great, because everybody is, I think, incredibly grateful to the writer who comes in at this point and helps.

**John:** 100 percent. So, let’s wrap this up by talking – go back to Passengers. And so let’s say this is an alternate history version of all this, where they saw the first cut of Passengers, and it wasn’t working. It was sort of like the final movie. And they said like, “You know what? We have this idea for a wild experiment.” What they would actually do next? And we live in a time of wonderful digital editors, so a lot of what the video suggests trying to do, you could actually just do. You could do that in your non-linear editor. I don’t say Avid anymore, because people yell at me when I say Avid.

You would actually chop it up and if there were things that didn’t make sense, you would put in little cards to explain what would happen in this moment. But it’s a day or two to sort of build that cut of the movie and sort of see what it feels like. And maybe it feels great. It certainly would change a lot of your experience of the movie. And then you would have to get buy-in. And that’s where I think they would have a hard time with this radical rethinking, because suddenly your two big movie stars you’re paying $20 million each, they’re not playing the same characters they signed on to in the movie. And they may love it. They may like it a lot more. But suddenly you’re going to be sending them out there in the world to promote this movie which wasn’t at all what they thought it was going to be. You may have already put out a teaser trailer that promised this romance, but the movie that you’re cutting sort of feels more like a thriller.

That can be a real problem as well. So, it’s not honestly as simple as just like, we’ll make the best movie. Make the most compelling movie. There may be reasons why you can’t do some of the things you want to do.

**Craig:** That is precisely why I get frustrated with things like this. Because there is an implication that we out here are just smarter than you. You dumb-dumbs couldn’t see, but we can.

Almost always, no offense to the people that make these videos, they are not thinking of something that we haven’t thought of. Almost always, it’s been thought of and tried and didn’t work with audiences, or it’s been thought of and tried and rejected by the very large number of competing powers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The one thing that people don’t quite understand is it doesn’t matter if something is right. If the movie star, who is going to promote this movie, doesn’t like it. And you may say, “Well, hold on a second. Before we just surrender, can’t we…” And I just want to put my hand up and say, “You’re describing my life. You’re describing my career. That’s half of my job.”

Half of my job is to figure out what to do and get people to agree. The other half is to figure out what to do when the one person who we really need to agree doesn’t agree. Now what do I do? That’s the world we live in. This is collaborative. And some people have an enormous influence on the work.

Sometimes you wish they wouldn’t. But that’s the deal.

**John:** All right. Enough of recutting movies. Let’s go to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing, I actually have two. I’m cheating. My first is a newsletter put out by Quinn Emmett, a friend of the show. It’s called Important, Not Important. And it’s just a weekly recap of the things you may have missed in the news, but also sort of other headlines. Sort of a little bit deeper than what you could get on Twitter.

I find it delightful. I’ve been reading it for months. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

The other thing I loved this week was this Brazilian artist named Butcher Billy. And what he does is he takes a serious of ‘80s pop songs and he reimagines them as Stephen King book covers. And so if you click through the link in the show notes, you’ll see what I mean. Like Careless Whisper or How Deep is Your Love. There is a Light Never Goes Out. It’s sort of like if you take those titles, they actually can be really good Stephen King books. And so he does the artwork for what that Stephen King book would be. And I just thought they were delightful.

So, I always love sort of reimagining things. I love the unsheets, the sort of make believe posters for movies that we’ve all seen and loved, so I thought this was delightful.

**Craig:** This is pretty great. I’m looking at it right now. That’s cool. Love the font.

My One Cool Thing is Pinball Arcade. Are you a pinball fan, John?

**John:** I’m not a big pinball fan. I’ve never been good enough at it to be a big fan, I guess.

**Craig:** Well, here’s your chance to get good. So, pinball is one of those things that actually they can simulate now brilliantly. So, you know, there’s an app and you can play lots of pinball games. But the cool part is that they’ve gone and licensed and recreated a whole bunch of real pinball games, including maybe the best pinball game ever made. Which was the Addams, Family, the pinball game–

**John:** I remember the Addams Family pinball. I have played that.

**Craig:** It’s great. And so it’s based on the movie from the ‘90s, which in and of itself was based on a television show, which itself was based on the cartoons. And it’s fantastic. I play the Addams Family pinball game every day. It’s so much fun.

By the way, John, do you know what?

**John:** Tell me what.

**Craig:** The Addams Family would actually be a pretty great movie for us to do a deep dive into. It’s so well done.

**John:** It’s so, so, so good. I just love The Addams Family. I love the second Addams Family almost more. The whole camp thing is fantastic.

**Craig:** Amazing. Amazing. In fact, maybe we should do the second Addams Family movie.

**John:** Maybe we should do Addams Family Vacation. And we sort of know Paul Rudnick on Twitter.

**Craig:** I know. You know what? We should get Paul Rudnick to come on the show and talk about it. Oh my god, is he brilliant.

**John:** He’s really good.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** Circling back to the pinball game. I will say that one of the things I do love about real pinball games is they’re hot. The lights are actually hot. They have a warmth to them that I find just delightful. They smell a certain way. They have a heat. That is a good thing about real pinball machines.

So, I’m sure they cannot duplicate this quite as well digitally, but still.

**Craig:** They can’t. There’s actually a very interesting – so they’ve had pinball simulators for years and years and years. But the Addams Family only recently, because the rights situation was a nightmare. The game – they had to get clearances from the Addams’ estate. They had to get clearances from Paramount, which made the movie. They had to get clearances from Raul Julia’s estate and from Anjelica Huston. And from – just literally everybody whose voice was in it.

Then they had to go get clearances for the music that was in it. And they wanted to do everything correctly, you know. And they did. Finally they did. So now you can play it.

**John:** Fantastic.

All right, so I will not get to see you at the next Scriptnotes, because you are doing a live show. So you are doing a live show this coming Monday. This episode is out on a Tuesday. On this next Monday, you are recording a live show in Hollywood at the ArcLight. I’m so incredibly jealous for you to hang out with Dana Fox, and Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** A guy named Rian. Well, we have Rob McElhenney who is good.

**John:** Oh yeah. He’s good.

**Craig:** And then we have Rian Johnson who is whatever.

**John:** Just whatever. Delightful.

**Craig:** They can’t all be winners.

**John:** He’s a talented photographer.

**Craig:** [laughs] He’s a good photographer. So, those of you who are still looking for tickets, we have a few left. So, this is – I think it’s a 400-seat auditorium and we’re getting pretty close to 400 at this point. So you better rush.

If you go to HollywoodHeart.org/upcoming, then you can buy tickets. The event is May 1 at 7:30pm in Hollywood at the ArcLight. This is all for charity. Hollywood Heart is a wonderful charity that our friend John Gatins is very involved in. Oscar-nominated John Gatins. And the price of the ticket is $35. And we apologize if that seems a little steep, but again it goes entirely to Hollywood Heart.

Once again, I make nothing.

**John:** Yep. I don’t even make anything on this one.

**Craig:** Even you. [laughs]

**John:** Even I make nothing on this.

**Craig:** God, you’re so rich.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. So, as always, we are produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Big thanks to both these guys because we recorded late this week and they killed themselves to get this out. So, thank you guys.

Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. 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 for short questions, on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We’re on Facebook. Just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes.

Craig, I think the word iTunes is going to go away. I think we’re going to stop saying iTunes.

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** Because I think they’re actually going to get rid of iTunes as a concept completely. My prediction is WWC, they’ll say like Goodbye iTunes. Because they actually got rid of iTunes Podcast and now it says Apple Podcasts. I think they’re just going to call it, I don’t know, Apple–

**Craig:** What are they going to call it?

**John:** Something else.

**Craig:** Whoa. Weird.

**John:** Whoa. But if you’re on iTunes, or whatever they call it next, just search for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

Craig, thank you for a fun show. Have a great show on Monday. I will look forward to good reports.

**Craig:** Thank you, sir. We’ll do our best.

**John:** Cool. Thanks.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Damon Lindelof](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0511541/)
* [The Leftovers: Final Season Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9w0sz5y83k)
* Jessica Abel on [Idea Debt](http://jessicaabel.com/2016/01/27/idea-debt/)
* [How I Got Out of Idea Debt](https://medium.com/@heyjohnsexton/how-i-got-out-of-idea-debt-124d3cdc4031) by John Sexton
* [Occupied](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QWC_DZj0HE)
* [City Girl](https://thehairpin.com/sarah-ramos-explains-how-she-gave-life-to-city-girl-the-rom-com-she-wrote-at-12-years-old-addd405b56b0)
* John Hodgman’s [Only Child](http://www.maximumfun.org/dead-pilots-society/episode-2-only-child-written-john-hodgman)
* [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/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig has the week off, but luckily we have someone remarkably qualified to take his spot. Damon Lindelof is the co-creator and showrunner of Lost, a screenwriter and producer of films including Tomorrowland, Prometheus, and Star Trek: Into Darkness. And most immediately the guy behind the HBO series The Leftovers, which began its third and final season this past Sunday. Damon, welcome to Paris.

**Damon Lindelof:** It is so exciting to be here, looking out the window and seeing the Eiffel Tower. It’s a beautiful sunny day here and a little stressed out about sitting in for Mr. Mazin. I feel like Jerry O’Connell must feel when he’s on Regis & Kelly or whatever it’s called now.

**John:** That’s a high stress job. I mean, Chris Hardwick seems like a very natural choice to fill in there.

**Damon:** That’s true.

**John:** But you have to be very up and present and it’s challenging, but we’re not nearly so demanding of an audience. People are driving in their cars or they’re walking around, so it’s not nearly–

**Damon:** No pressure.

**John:** No pressure.

**Damon:** I understand.

**John:** Yeah. Kelly, she’s always on at the gym. And the gym, that’s a high pressure environment. But you–

**Damon:** That’s true.

**John:** This is nothing. Why are you here in Paris?

**Damon:** I am here for Series Mania or that’s the American pronunciation. Series Mania.

**John:** Sure. That sounds right.

**Damon:** It’s a big TV festival that they have in Paris. And I’m on the jury. So, I’m also premiering the first two episodes of The Leftovers’ third season here in Paris, so that’s going to be tomorrow night at the time of this recording. And so we’re flying in a couple of the actors. So Justin Theroux and Christopher Eccleston will be here. Max Richter, who does our music. So, the premiere is going to kick off this festival, and then I get to watch a lot of great international television that I’ve never seen before. And sort of Sundance or Telluride where we will award a grand jury prize and a couple of acting prizes, etc.

But, it’s basically just an excuse to eat baguettes and coffee and stare out the window at the Eiffel Tower, which I’m going to do right now.

**John:** That sounds really good. So, on today’s podcast, I’m not going to ask you any specific questions about Lost or The Leftovers, because I feel like there’s probably 10,000 hours of tape of you talking about those two shows, which are both fantastic. And I’ve seen every episode of both.

**Damon:** Blah, blah, blah. Yes. Enough.

**John:** But I do want to talk to you about television, because Craig and I get a lot of questions about television and we really don’t know very much about television, so whenever we have a guest–

**Damon:** But you watch a lot of television.

**John:** I watch a ton of television.

**Damon:** So you know a lot about television.

**John:** Yeah, but like the making of television is a very different process. And it’s changed a lot even over the last ten years. So, I’ve not had a series on for quite a long time. But just watching you and sort of your career, it has just transformed a lot. I can tell.

So, I want to talk to you about sort of making a series. But also I’ve known you since before you were a television writer, so I sort of want to talk about growing up, becoming a staff writer, and going into showrunning.

**Damon:** Sure.

**John:** And maybe answer some questions from listeners that have written in. And then finally I want to talk about sort of the back catalog of ideas, because you’re at a place now where you’re done with The Leftovers and you have to figure out what you’re doing next. And I want to talk about how do you decide whether to do something new or to visit something old. So, we’ll go through all of that today if we can.

**Damon:** Oh man. OK.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Damon:** What would Mazin do?

**John:** Mazin would find a way to cut this short and plow through it.

**Damon:** Joke it up.

**John:** He would joke it up.

**Damon:** God love him.

**John:** He’d bring out another character voice.

**Damon:** There’s a closet door behind you and I know that Mazin is going to pop out of it at any moment. And harangue me, which is just the way I want it to happen.

**John:** Sounds good. Let’s go back to sort of your origin story and how you got started as a writer. Because I think I first met you in ’97 or ’98. You were working–

**Damon:** I was working as an assistant probably for Toby Jaffe at the Ladd Company. And I think you were working on a project there. But I remember, like I think I had read Go, but before it was made.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** And you came out of the Stark program, if memory serves. And I just thought, wow, you were the – not that you aren’t still – but you were the young, hot, you know, scribe. And this was a time where Hollywood Reporter and Variety were not yet really online. And you would buy the trades and there were always talks of sales and deals and etc. And I remember being in awe of you, which I still am, as I mentioned.

So you basically had the job that I wanted, which at the time I think probably in the mid to late ‘90s, a movie writer. A screenwriter.

**John:** Yeah. For sure. I think at that point I had stopped working as an assistant and Go might have sold. We hadn’t gotten it made yet. And I had a few other assignments. But we had a mutual friend, so a guy who worked at your company was also a Starkie. And so I remember going to lunch–

**Damon:** Yes. That’s right.

**John:** I remember going out to lunch and going to the [Cuccaro] on Larchmont.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** And how I first got to know you. And I think I remember, we’ll circle back to old projects at the end, but I remember you pitching me a movie you were writing, a script you were writing, that was about hemophilia.

**Damon:** Oh yes. What a genius idea that was. Just to contextualize, at that time still in the mid ‘90s, even though we were many years beyond the initial Die Hard, that idea of like when you were pitching movies or selling movies it was Die Hard in a blank. The specs that were selling were the kind of Shane Black, you know, big action concepts. And my idea, which I thought was brilliant at the time, was what if there was a guy who was a severe hemophiliac to the degree where any kind of significant subcutaneous cut would put him in enormous peril. And he was incredibly wealthy, like Bruce Wayne, and had a tremendous amount of resource, but was basically living in this penthouse apartment in New York City, but never left.

And he kind of had a – he was a grown man, but sort of a state of arrested social development because to get cut would basically kill him. And what if we took this guy and threw him into like an incredible action scenario where every single set piece he couldn’t end up like John McClane. Where it’s like just the single cut. So he is having sort of a Rear Window, like borderline stalking relationship with this beautiful woman who lives in the penthouse across from him. And she’s in a relationship with this dude who is like some kind of Russian – some bad guy.

And he is watching her and fantasizes about like what her life is, in a very cute, innocent PG-13/non-stalkery way. Although it is stalking in hindsight. And these toughs basically break into the apartment and kidnap her. And he realizes that he is the only one who witnessed this and must go and rescue her. And hijinks ensue.

**John:** Hijinks ensue. So, that was a script you wrote?

**Damon:** Oh, I wrote it.

**John:** You wrote it. And was it your first script?

**Damon:** No. I mean, I had probably written like maybe three or four completed screenplays, one of which was a bad Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, kind of like rip-off, like a party comedy, a John Hughes wannabe thing. And then there were a couple like busted action movie ideas. And then I wrote this western called The Perfectionists that was kind of like in the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino ultra-violent comedy western set in Mexico. And that screenplay was the first thing that I wrote that I was like, “Oh, this isn’t the worst thing that I’ve read in my life and I’ll at least let some of my peers read it.” And got some positive feedback from them. And then I submitted it for the Nicholl Fellowship, which is done through the Motion Picture Academy.

At the time they got like maybe 5,000 submissions a year and I started getting letters that I made the first cut, and then the second cut, and the third cut. And it was down to maybe 50 scripts out of those 5,000. And I was like, oh, this is good. I have to choice to make, which is the next letter may say I’m no longer in the running, and that will be incredibly demoralizing and I’ll decide that I’m a terrible writer again. Or, I can just take all of this positivity and make a move.

And so I sent out an email to everyone I knew and at that point I’d just been watching a tremendous amount of television and I started to have some peers who were working in television. And it felt like my skill set would be much better suited to TV because I love collaborating. And I heard about this thing called a writer’s room, as opposed to the way that you know feature writing works, which is there’s no collaboration fundamentally. There’s collaboration between you and the producer and the studio, but those three entities are very rarely in the room at the same time. You’re getting mixed messages. And then if a draft doesn’t come in exactly the way they want it, they fire you and replace you, versus the way that it made much more sense to me and more fun is to basically take four or five talented people and put them all in a room together. And everyone is basically coming up with ideas and supporting one another and challenging ideas that aren’t working, et cetera.

That was only happening in TV. And a friend of mine, Julie Plec, who was running Kevin Williamson’s company at the time as an executive, and now Julie runs – she’s a showrunner. She’s been running The Vampire Diaries which just ended and The Originals, which is the spinoff of that show. But she emailed me back instantly and said, “Kevin just had a show picked up.” This was after Dawson’s Creek. “It’s going to be on ABC. But you need to start – could you start on Monday?” And this was on a Thursday. So, I quit my job. Ladd told me, both encouragingly and discouragingly, “You can always come back.”

**John:** Yes.

**Damon:** “I’ll be here when things don’t work out.” And I took the writer’s assistant job on Wasteland. And that was in the 98/99 season, so that was 19 years ago. I’ll be a professional television writer for 20 years next year.

**John:** That’s crazy. So, I remember Wasteland, because I was doing a competing show.

**Damon:** Really? Very few do.

**John:** I was doing a competing show. I was doing D.C. which was the WB show. Your show was like young twenty-somethings in New York, mine was young twenty-somethings in Washington, D.C.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** Yours lasted like 13 episodes. Mine lasted three.

**Damon:** No, only two episodes of Wasteland aired.

**John:** Oh, fantastic. So, I may have beaten you.

**Damon:** We made 13.

**John:** Yes, absolutely.

**Damon:** And D.C. had a – you know, the premise of Wasteland was Friends as a drama series with no comedy. Like, it was just twenty-somethings having existential crises. But at least D.C. they were in pop–

**John:** Yeah, there was some kind of reason.

**Damon:** There was a franchise.

**John:** Mine was supposed to be like post-Felicity. So it was supposed to be fun. But it was not a good show. Have you gone back and watched any of those early things that you wrote? Because I’ve not gone back to watch DC at all.

**Damon:** Oh my god. No, I have not. But I think I probably should, just to–

**John:** Might be sobering.

**Damon:** Some sort of learning, yeah. I could use some sobering.

**John:** So, you start as a writer’s assistant. And were you able to write an episode during your time as a writer’s assistant? Was that an actual writing job?

**Damon:** What ended up happening on that show, because Kevin Williamson was the de facto showrunner, except he had just handed off Dawson’s Creek to Greg Berlanti who was like a one – I think he was like 24 or 25.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** Running basically Dawson’s Creek.

**John:** And he still seems like a boy wonder.

**Damon:** Amazing.

**John:** The man does not age.

**Damon:** I mean, how prolific and incredible his shows are. Kevin was also directing this movie called Teaching Mrs. Tingle, for New Line, so he was not around for the early days of Wasteland. He would just basically buzz in for an hour or two a day and the room would pitch him ideas. But he was not able based on his other projects to take the reins.

And what ended up happening over the course of just about six weeks is that the showrunner quit, a number of other writers were fired, and by the end of six weeks it was the staff writers and the story editor and very junior level writers and me. And there was no material beyond the fifth episode. And we were about to go into production on it. And I was like I’m just going to write a spec Wasteland, just on my own. And I did that over the course of two days and handed it off to the staff writers and said, “If this is worth anything, rewrite it, put your names on it, but at least we’ll all be employed for another week or two.” And they went into their office and closed the door and I was feeling really anxious and the door remained closed for 45 minutes. And I was like I’ve made a huge mistake. I’ve overstepped my bounds.

And then Kevin, he was a friendly guy, but he’d never – I didn’t even know that he knew that I really existed. And he walked right up to my desk, which was in the kind of bullpen. And he said, “Are you Damon?” And I said, “Uh, yeah.” And he said, “Did you write an episode of the show?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Do you have an agent?” And I said, “No.” And she said, “You better get one.”

**John:** That’s great.

**Damon:** And he went into his office and then moments later Jim and Andy, who were the staff writers, they came out and they were like, “We really liked the script. We called Kevin.” I was like, yeah, he just…

So, you know, it was off to the races from there. So, I ended up writing on three or four of the 13 episodes of Wasteland that were produced, but again only two aired before it was canceled. So, that’s how I got my WGA status and my representation and all that stuff was on that show.

**John:** I want to connect a few dots back earlier. So, Julie Plec was the person who brought you in to do this.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** How did you get to know Julie Plec?

**Damon:** I’m sure it still exists today, but there was just – there was like an assistant circuit of the assistants from agencies, studios, and production companies would have like these mixers, you know, on Thursday nights. And we would just go and basically network with each other and get drunk and make out and make friends. And so everybody started as PAs and then became assistants and then people started getting development jobs. And so I had known Julie, circling back to Jerry O’Connell, he and I were really good friends at NYU. He did Scream 2.

**John:** Which was Kevin Williamson.

**Damon:** For Kevin. And then that’s how I met Julie through that group.

**John:** So you didn’t show up in Los Angeles with any network of anybody? You just started working and built it out from there?

**Damon:** Literally knew nobody. Came out here with my roommate from college in ’94 and we wagon-trained from – he lived in – I came from New Jersey to Chicago. He lived in Michigan. And the two of us, his name is Erik Baiers, he is a big mucky muck at Universal now. He and I drove out and like basically just rented an apartment. And answered ads in the trades. Went to Kinkos and faxed our resumes in. And got internships and then just parlayed that into assistant jobs.

**John:** So, what I like about your story in terms of both leaving the Ladd Company and writing the script for Wasteland is you didn’t ask permission, you just sort of did it, and very politely waited for the next step to happen. You sort of put yourself into positions where you could become lucky by going out for that job, letting people read your script, by letting people read the spec you wrote which you decided to do. That’s a common thread as I’ve talked to a lot of writers who have progressed up is that they didn’t sit around waiting for someone to tell them that they could do something. They just did the thing and sorted it out as it happened.

**Damon:** Yeah. I mean, I think that it didn’t occur to me at the time that – it wasn’t like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Sort of like moxie play. Like in my brain at the time that it was happening it felt like it was a survival play. But there was also this other ingredient in what you’re talking about. Because I agree with what you’re saying. And I feel that there is commonality. But the missing ingredient, other than luck and let’s just say, you know, that you have some fundamental talents or experience, because a lot of people in that situation, you know, it does have to be on the page, or you do have to be able to speak articulately about story, but desperation also happens to be part – usually part of the story. And so I can guarantee you that had Wasteland been a successful show, like on the scale of Dawson’s, that I never would have made that move.

Like, I would have gone through the entire first season doing my job, the job that they hired me to do as writer’s assistant, but it wasn’t like, ooh, I see an opportunity, I’m going to grab it. It really was dark days. The show is going to go down. You know, they’re going to shut us down. We don’t have scripts. Like, I have nothing to lose.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** And it felt like a very low risk play.

**John:** Yeah. I had a good conversation with Drew Goddard and we were talking about sort of his first–

**Damon:** Hack.

**John:** Hack.

**Damon:** Hack. Oh my god. The worst.

**John:** A charming hack. He was talking about his first TV experience and it was with Joss Whedon. A similar kind of situation where like–

**Damon:** Haven’t heard of him.

**John:** You know, the show was really having a crisis and they were lacking an episode. And so he just happened to be the person who was nearby and just started up the conversation and became the idea between takes. And he wrote it. And as I was talking through the whole conversation with him, you see that at sort of every step along the way Drew just worked harder. And also just like he was the guy who did stay up all night to do the thing so it could sort of save the day.

**Damon:** Yeah. And you know I’m a big believer in when we hire writer’s assistants on shows that I’m running, I’m hiring writers. So, the de facto rule is that the writer’s assistant does not speak in the room, because their job is to basically synthesize everything that everyone else is saying. And if they’re thinking about pitching their own ideas, they’re not really listening. That’s the thinking. That said, there are moments in the room and out of the room, like when the room isn’t actually up and running, for the writer’s assistants to pitch. And because there is this – I don’t want to say it’s a political – it’s more of like sort of a social dynamic thing. It’s like you want to hire people who figure out like – who see their moment and take it.

And it’s very hazily defined. Like, you know when it’s too soon. And you know when it’s too late. And it’s hard to do it when it’s just right. But the thing is, you know, what I would say to all writer’s assistants or anybody in that position, you know, the first thing that you say better be great because if that first thing that you pitch is not great, then the second thing that you pitch has to be exponentially greater than that thing.

So, just bide your time, but essentially you have to jump into the Double Dutch jump rope at some point. That is an expectation. And certainly on The Leftovers over the course of the three years we promoted both of our writer’s assistants, both our writer’s assistant on season one, Nick, and our writer’s assistant on season two, Haley, because both of them demonstrated they were able to do the job of writer’s assistant incredibly well, but they also found those moments to demonstrate that they were writers.

**John:** So, when I was doing D.C., my first TV show, I had to put together a staff. I never was a staff writer, and suddenly having to assemble a writing team. And I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have any real good sense of what I needed. So, now that you’ve done this a couple of times, what are you looking for as you’re putting together a writing staff, from writer’s assistant all the way up to the people who are going to help really run the show with you?

**Damon:** Well, almost everything that I learned I learned from Carlton Cuse. He’s been a mentor and continues to be a mentor to me on so many levels. But, following Wasteland, which was not the most functional staff in terms of the way that it was assembled at first, although consisting of amazing writers, I went on to Nash Bridges in its sixth season. Sixth and final season. So it was this well-oiled machine. But something happened at the end of season five where essentially there are just moments in television shows where the entire staff basically goes off to do other things, and it happens simultaneously just because they’re at the end of their three-year deals or whatever.

So, at the end of season five, Shawn Ryan, who basically wrote a spec called The Farm, because he wanted people to think that he could do more than just Nash Bridges, that ended up being like FX’s first drama, The Shield, and one of the greatest television shows of all time. And Glen Mazzara, they both left at the end of season five. So, Carlton basically reconstituted the entire staff because with the exception of he and John Worth and one other writer, Reid Steiner, there were five new hires. Because I think that he realized that Glen and Shawn were so powerful in the room that let’s just kind of do a complete and total overhaul. And I was one of those writers.

And so the first thing that you do is you read samples. And it’s not a zero sum game in terms of this person is a good writer, or this person is a bad writer. Like you have to be able to assess how are they with dialogue, how are they with character, how are they with plot, how are they with humor. How are they with pace? And nobody is going to check all those boxes. And the key is to basically not have redundancies. So, don’t meet with three people who are really great at dialogue because certainly in the sixth season of that show the voice of the show is already clearly defined. And so you have to be a good writer, but it’s a lot more technical.

**John:** So, you were the person being staffed, so you weren’t reading other people’s things for Nash Bridges.

**Damon:** That’s correct.

**John:** So why do you think they hired you for Nash Bridges?

**Damon:** Carlton said he read two of my samples. I wrote a one-act play about time travel and a spec Sopranos. And he read those two pieces of material and met with me. And in the meeting, he was like, “Tell me what’s your story. Where do you come from? What do your parents do?” He didn’t really seem interested at all in what I had to say about Nash Bridges. He was more interested in who I was as an individual. And I think that was the other component which is try to build a room that comes from a different place than you do, and looks at the world in a different way than you do. But then in the overlapping Venn diagram you’re all going to meet at the show, so there has to be some common language.

But I was very candid with him in saying, “Here’s the thing. Nash Bridges is on Friday nights at 9 o’clock. I’m out, like partying. But the episodes that I’ve seen, and I love Miami Vice, I’m a huge Don Johnson fan. I love Cheech. I really think this is a great show. And I think that I could write for it.” But that was like 5% of an hour-long interview.

And to go back to your initial question, so you read somebody’s sample. That gets them in the room. But the intangible is you sit down with them for an hour or 90 minutes if the interview is going particularly well, and you just have to ask yourself could I hang out with this person in a room for nine to ten hours a day and enjoy hanging out with them? And that’s just a gut instinct. And there are some amazing writers, incredible on the page, who I just had very awkward stilted interviews with. We just didn’t click. Like, that’s just as much on me as it is on them. And I ended up not hiring them because of that.

And then each writer you hire you have to basically think about them now existing in that room as you start to build the room around them. And I don’t say this just because it is the politically correct thing to do, but having real diversity in a writers’ room, particularly on gender lines. I mean, I think that the industry has a huge way to go in terms of finding writers of color in general. The agencies are just – their rosters are very anemic when it comes to that. But in terms of men and women, there’s more of an equal balance. And so just start from a de facto place of the room has to be 50/50 because if it’s just eight guys in a room, it’s not going to be good for the show.

**John:** So, you’re making the decisions about who you want to bring on, but there’s also other voices saying, “How about this person? How about this person?” So there’s a studio talking to you, there’s a network talking to you.

**Damon:** Sure. Right.

**John:** There’s a bunch of agents talking to you.

**Damon:** Yes.

**John:** How, as a showrunner, do you sort through all that? And when do you decide to read a person’s script or not read a script? Is there a first vetting process is somebody helping you go through that pile first?

**Damon:** That’s a great question. I mean, I think that probably the loudest voice in that mix is the network. When they’re staffing a show, either shows have just gone done, or they have overall deals with talent, probably less so now than before. Or someone that they’ve been monitoring and they’re huge fans of. So, you know, if HBO when we were putting The Leftovers together, Michael Ellenberg was basically our point exec on that. He had like seven people that he felt would be good on the show and that I should read. They came from a whole spectrum of they were playwrights, some of them were novelists. Very few of them had any actual television experience before because I think the thinking was like let’s put people in this room who haven’t done it before because maybe they’ll come up with more outside-the-box ideas.

So that’s first and foremost if the network says you’ve got to meet with these people, or I think that you would like – you have to do it, just on general principle. And chances are you’re not wasting your time by doing that. And then level two is Warner Bros., the studio, is producing The Leftovers. They also had talent that their executives had been developing. And I think that they have immaculate taste over Warner Bros. So, I met with those people.

And then my agents. So I’m represented by CAA. I’ve had a relationship there for 15 years. And so my agent is not going to waste my time sending me – they know me better than anybody else. Just as a person versus as a writer. And what I’ll try to say to them is just send me like your three or four best. I know that you’ve got a lot of clients to service, but your three or four best. And then the other agencies will send one or two as well.

And in the hiring process, I’ll probably generate a stack of between 30 to 50 scripts of writing samples. And I will read pretty religiously like the first 15 pages of every script. If something is like particularly spectacular, I’ll actually finish it, because I’m just like oh my god, like I just want to see how things turn out. But for the most part, within 15 pages or so I can kind of determine whether or not it’s going to be a match.

**John:** So, you’re putting together this staff for a writer’s room, but I feel like you have sort of different qualifications for writing on something like Leftovers, which correct me if I’m wrong – I think Leftovers you wrote all the episodes before you started shooting. Is that correct?

**Damon:** It is incorrect.

**John:** It is incorrect. So, on the first seasons of Leftovers, how far were you in to the writing before you started filming?

**Damon:** I think that we had three scripts completed and had broken the fourth episode and maybe an outline on it. And potentially had some sense of what the fifth episode would be. That’s beyond the pilot. So, HBO still pilots shows. And so Tom and I wrote the pilot together. We produced the pilot. And Toto edited the pilot. And then HBO said we will pick this up to series. So that was in the can.

So, I really only think we had two scripts when we went into production.

**John:** That’s much more like a traditional broadcast situation. We’ve talked to the Game of Thrones guys, and like they have to write the whole thing ahead of time because they’re block scheduling things that it’s impossible to sort of do that show any other way. But I guess going back to staffing, so you need to find people who can work well in the room, but you also are looking for some people who have the experience of actually producing television so that they can do that functional job of like going to set and looking at a cut. You have to find people who have some skills beyond just throwing words around on the page.

**Damon:** For sure. And that’s why there are staff writers are story editors and the expectation on them because they’re newbies is it’s primarily a writing job, but then once you get to the producing levels you do expect some producing acumen.

On Lost and The Leftovers, we migrated to a philosophy where the writers did not go to the set. And I know a lot of television shows do send the writers to the set, and that’s wonderful. But the model of both those shows was we had incredibly strong producing directors. In the case of Lost, Jack Bender. In the case of The Leftovers, Mimi Leder. And so the idea of having a writer on set felt like to do what. You know, to basically protect their material?

So the writers are always available. They would be involved in the tone. Calls with the directors, which are key. And very heavily involved in the prep phase. But all of which can happen by phone and did. And we had writer-producers, Kath Lingenfelter, and Jacqui Hoyt in season one, who never visited the set, but had incredible – like were totally producing their episodes and the whole series writ large. Gave notes on cuts. Watched dailies. All that stuff.

So, I think that that thinking not just migrated from eliminating the redundancy of nobody should be on set who doesn’t have a clear cut job, but the other issue was I’m just a very room-heavy showrunner. There are other showrunners who float in and out of the room and I want to be in the writer’s room six to eight hours a day. That’s my favorite part of the job. That collaboration. The kicking the tires. We beat out every story with a great degree of specificity.

If you send a writer off to set, and they’re going to be there through prep, on a show like The Leftovers, they’re gone for four weeks. And so the idea of losing a valuable player is like the equivalent of the designated hitter in baseball, where it’s like they only get one at bat every three innings. But you don’t get to use them in the field. And so I just kind of felt like I wanted the writers in the room. Not the best way to do it, but the best way for me.

**John:** So let’s talk about being in the room versus when writers leave the room. So you have your writing team assembled. You’re breaking an episode. So let’s say you’re on episode four of the first season of Leftovers. Is that process going up on the whiteboard? What is the process for breaking an episode of a show like that?

**Damon:** So by the time you get to episode four, you’ve already got some sense of what you want to happen in episode four because you’ve got some sense of hopefully what episode ten is going to be, and what it is you’re moving towards. You’ve learned things from the first three episodes. But essentially, episode three is off the board and is being written and exists in draft form. And you erase all the boards and you’re looking at these big white boards. And you start – we usually would do at least two, sometimes three days of blue-skying. Which is kind of anything can happen in this episode. Let’s talk about what we want to be happening thematically. What do we want to have happen between certain character relationships? In the storytelling mechanism do we want to focus on just one story, or are we doing three stories? So there’s a lot of experimentation and sort of fumbling around.

Until you basically land on what I would say is like the big idea. And in the case of the fourth episode of The Leftovers of season one, somebody pitched, you know, what if the baby Jesus gets stolen from the nativity scene. It’s just a prank. I was like, oh, that’s cool. It has thematic resonance for the idea of the show. It could be a little bit fun and silly. And we’re getting to talk about religion without talking about religion. And it’s something that our chief of police isn’t going to want to deal with because he’s got more important things to be dealing with, like the fact that his wife has joined a cult. But I was just like, OK, so that’s going to be the organizing principle.

And so then you start saying like, what are the beats of that story? And then someone pitched like, oh, it would be really cool to watch that baby being made like in a doll factory. And see the mold being poured. And then it being put on the assembly line. And then having its eyes painted and put in a box. And then the box ends up on a shelf in Target. And then a woman buys the baby and then she dresses it up. And then the whole end of that idea, she puts it in the manger.

And so we’ve just basically shone you how Jesus Christ is made in the real world. And everybody goes like, oh, that’s awesome. That’s a great idea. And then that’s how it’s going to start. And then you try to figure out the corresponding bookend, which is what’s the end of this episode going to be? In the case of episode four, it’s interesting that you just threw that out arbitrarily, which is that’s the episode that I think had the most problems in the first season because we broke an entire story, an entire what we would call a B story, which we stopped doing towards the end of season one, and we started doing much more interconnected singular point of view stories, but we did a story with Kevin’s son and Laurie’s son, Tom, and this girl Christine as they joined this commune of barefoot people who are like these kind of hedonist hippies.

We shot the whole thing, and it was an utter disaster. And we scrapped it. It’s the only thing we ever shot for the show that didn’t air. And then basically re-broke it. And in the process of re-breaking it, we came up with a new ending for the Baby Jesus story which incorporated Matt Jamison, who we had now seen dailies for episode three and we saw what Eccleston was doing. And we were like, oh, we have to – like the payoff for the Baby Jesus story has to be a scene between Kevin and Matt, which didn’t exist in the original draft.

So, the show starts telling you what it wants to do. But, the story-breaking process is what’s the first scene, what’s the last scene, and now let’s just fill in everything that happens. What do you have to do to earn the last scene?

**John:** So this is all going up on a big whiteboard?

**Damon:** Yep.

**John:** And then ultimately whose job is it to transfer what’s on the whiteboard to a document that everyone else can look at?

**Damon:** The writer’s assistant.

**John:** OK.

**Damon:** So one of the low level writers, a staff writer or a story editor, is putting stuff up on the board. So for the blue-sky phase, once we land on something that we like, you just write a sentence. Like baby doll made in Tijuana. And then like last one is Kevin throws baby out window. And it’s literally just those sentences. And after two days, you look and you have about 20 of those sentences up on the board and then you’re ready to go into the next phase, which I think is what I would call the story-breaking phase, where you just go scene-by-scene and you start to pitch specific dialogue, character dynamics, etc.

And so it’s usually for an episode of The Leftovers, wire-to-wire, like a two-week process I think from the beginning of blue-skying until an episode comes off the board. But when it comes off the board, by then all five whiteboards are filled in super mega detail. And then off of that the writer will go to outline.

**John:** Great. So the writer goes to outline, so you assign one of the writers who is in the room, like this is your episode. And does that writer know ahead of time that this is going to be his or her episode?

**Damon:** Yeah. In the first season less so. I mean, usually you try to do it hierarchically, so the more experienced writer-producers get the first scripts. I told everyone when I was hiring them I’m going to be co-writing every episode of The Leftovers with you, so that we can develop and find the tone of the show together. Because I think that that’s going to help me learn how to write the show, but also it will put you in a position to be more successful. And also will generate material, the scripts a lot more quickly, if we’re co-writing them. And everybody was down with that.

So, we just had a rotation. But I co-wrote all the episodes in the first season, say for one, which was episode eight.

**John:** So it’s gone from this detailed five whiteboards to a document, an outline that everyone can look at?

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** And off of that outline, are there notes or changes? Like does the studio see this?

**Damon:** Yes.

**John:** Network sees this? OK.

**Damon:** The outline is the first that the studio and the network catch wind of what it is we want to do. They would give notes. Very good notes. Points of clarification. Our outlines were very detailed, like they were 20 to 30 page documents. Because more importantly, because the scripts were sort of the last thing to come, and we always had the scripts in time for prep, which is a week before the – a week to ten days before the episode shoots. But usually like right up against it.

But, we would also – production would have the outlines. And that – they’d have that like a month ahead of time, and that was really important because they’d know what all the locations were.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** What the cast asks were going to be. They could start to build a schedule and more importantly a budget off of the detail of those outlines. But then particularly in the first season of the show, the notes would sometimes detonate outlines. And I would come back to the room and say we just got blown up. And sometimes you get a note that blows you up and you immediately resist it just because you know how much work it’s going to create for you, but you know that it’s right. And other times a note is potentially explosive, but you feel like it is wrong and you can scrap it out.

We were getting many more good notes than bad notes. I can’t think of any bad notes that we got in the first season. So, the outline is basically the first test. And it’s a little bit like the Congress and the Senate. Like if the bill makes it out of outline, you’re going to have a lot less problems when it crosses the President’s desk. So, we wanted to generate – we didn’t want there to be any surprises in script.

**John:** Yeah. So from the five whiteboards, how long does it take to make an outline? Is that just a day to write that out?

**Damon:** No, because the outline is a piece of writing. So, it’s not – the writer’s assistant has taken what’s off the board and generated notes, but now the writer has to actually write it and create all the things that a writer does. So, it could take like a week from it coming off the board before the writer generates that outline. Because, again, like I said, it’s a pretty lengthy document. And because I would be chugging along on the next episode, that writer would basically generate that outline pretty much independently of me and then I would notes them or rewrite it. But I was much more involved in writing the scripts than the outlines for sure.

**John:** Great. So once you have an outline that everyone has signed off on, or signed off on enough–

**Damon:** Sometimes they say, “We’ll see. We’ll see how it works in the script,” which you know like oh my god that note isn’t going to go away.

**John:** How long is it taking you guys to go from the outline to the script?

**Damon:** That’s fast. I mean, that takes just almost the same amount of time that it takes to go from board to outline. Maybe just a week. And, again, because there’s two of us, we would just divvy it up.

**John:** You just pick scenes and do it?

**Damon:** In the case of the first season, there’d be like the Kevin story and a Jill story and a Laurie story, so you just say like, Kath, you take the Laurie story and I will take the Keven story. Then we started doing episodes like episode three which was just a Matt Jamison story, which I co-wrote with Jacqui. In that case I would be like these are the scenes that I feel like I have a beat on. And she would take the scenes that she felt she had a beat on. And then we would basically exchange notes to each other and then I would do a conformity pass.

**John:** So you’ve divvied up the scenes between the two of you, but in the outline stage is it so clear sort of how a scene is going to begin and end? Because I can just imagine if you have a scene that’s butting up against the scene that she’s writing, you want to have a natural transition between the two of you. Do you just not worry about it until you are assembling the whole thing together? Or are you asking her sort of like what the first thing is there? Or is that already in the outline basically how you’re going to start that next scene?

**Damon:** That’s a great question. I mean, for the first season of a show, as you’re determining what its rhythms are, I think that you’re asking the pivotal question which is how do the transitions feel. How to you carry water from one scene to another? And I think that we learned that essentially we would have a higher degree of success if I took the first 25 pages and the other writer took the last 25 so that you could build your own internal rhythm versus writing patchwork, alternating scenes, for exactly the reason that you specify which is I think that the outline sometimes did indicate here’s the first moment in the scene, but maybe not the first line of dialogue or you would find a different blow, a different out for the scene.

And writing The Leftovers was a much different experience for me than writing Lost at a number of levels, but just in terms of construction Lost had commercials. And so every seven pages of a Lost script had to have–

**John:** You had to start over, yeah.

**Damon:** Bum, bum, bum. Like, you know.

**John:** But you also have the joy of coming in with new energy. And being able to sort of open up the curtain again.

**Damon:** So you could just separate by act. You know, you’d basically say like, OK, Eddie and Adam, you guys take acts two and three and five. And I’ll write the teaser. That’s how you could divvy and you knew like you were just all building into the commercial. Whereas I think writing a pay cable drama, or even a show like Mad Men that has commercials, but those commercials in Mad Men were always like, what? It’s not meant to be watched with commercials. It’s meant to be experienced as a single one-hour movie or whatever it is you want to call it.

**John:** Cool. Let’s tackle some questions, and then I’ll get back to some of my own questions. These are things that listeners have written in. Sam writes, “I co-wrote a pilot script a few years ago, which went out to almost every major studio network. One of the major studios loved it and put a deal in motion to buy and develop the pilot. A few days later, the deal fell apart when it went to business affairs because a production company attachment we had that the studio did not want. Their attachment deal has now expired. And we have full control of the project again. But the development people that wanted the show are no longer at the studio and we’re starting from scratch. We still love the show and believe in it.

“Are agents and basically everyone else is telling us that once a project goes around once, it is old news and no one wants to look at it again. So they don’t want to take it out again. In your experience, is that true? Do we have any shot of reviving this?

**Damon:** The answer is yes and yes. So, yes, our industry does for some reason have a bias towards anything that is rehashed or old news. Or when they think about the narrative of a project, they want to be able to say this thing started with my enthusiasm for it versus somebody else was enthusiastic about it once and now I picked up something someone else rejected. Which to me is like a great narrative. But I do think that the reality is when I think about a question like this, I think it’s all in the hands of the representatives, which is like nobody knows that this event happened other than you and your rep and the development executives who are no longer involved.

And so unless your agent discloses that this happened with this material three to four years ago, there’s nothing that should prohibit them from presenting it as new, especially because you control it now. So–

**John:** Well, he does say though it did go out and everybody read it.

**Damon:** Oh they did?

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** So he’s saying people were enthusiastic about it at one point, but are no longer enthusiastic because it happened years ago.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** To be completely candid, that sounds like a polite pass to me. I mean, I think that strong material, if available, people will snap it up. And another Sam, Sam Esmail, who had no prior showrunning experience and is now on the short list of the greatest auteurs working in television today, you know, he wrote Mr. Robot as a movie, then repurposed it as a television show. And nobody is decrying the fact that it’s the same material in a slightly different format. But–

**John:** Wasn’t Mad Men also like an old script that he dusted off?

**Damon:** My understanding is that Matt wrote Mad Men while he was on Becker, and the Mad Men sample is what got him the job on The Sopranos. And that David Chase loved the Mad Men pilot and wanted to produce it, but HBO passed. And so he took it to AMC. And everybody scoffed because AMC, what’s that, and now 11,000 Emmys later. But he had that material for quite some time.

So, you know, I think that great material is evergreen and I would suggest moving on to the next thing.

**John:** I would suggest moving on to the next thing, too. A thing that I find really weird about TV and tell me if you find this to be true as well. I have friends who staff on shows and when they’re going to move from one show to another show, they need to write a new pilot to represent themselves. And it seems crazy, because I feel like if you’ve written a really good show, especially written on a really good show, that should show your talent. But, no, the agents want a fresh thing that they can send out for staffing, which seems crazy to me.

**Damon:** It does seem crazy to me, too. But I also sort of feel like television writing, and probably any kind of screenwriting, is like the singularity now where the rate at which TV writing is changing and shifting is happening so fast that a piece of material that someone wrote two years ago doesn’t feel of the now because it’s – when you wrote it, you weren’t aware that Stranger Things existed. You weren’t aware that Transparent existed. And so this idea of like a piece of material kind of has to push the buttons that like all this zeitgeist-y shows are pushing and sort of demonstrate kind of like some awareness.

I mean, I remember I wrote a Sopranos spec, and that’s not the same as writing an original pilot. Tony’s mom was in it. And then she died. Nancy Marchand died. And so I was basically like, well, who cares. I mean, it’s still something that I wrote. It’s still The Sopranos. But people would read it and be like, “This doesn’t feel like The Sopranos anymore because the character is dead.” And I think like writ large that idea of pilots have to kind of be of the now. They have to kind of feel like they have that sort of energy. But, I don’t know. I mean, I think a great piece of writing is a great piece of writing. And agents, it is their job to put you in the best possible position to get work. And so if they’re not seeing the best result from your old sample, or they just want you basically exercise that muscle again, etc., or I would venture to guess they’re trying to trick you into writing something that’s so good somebody wants to buy it as a TV show and that it’s not a sample.

I mean, I’ve read some samples, some pilot samples recently where I was like this should be a show this is so good. Like why would I hire this person to be on The Leftovers? This should be a show.

**John:** Cool. Lou writes, “I wrote a spec pilot based on a friend’s idea. He asked me to do it. The story in the pilot is from his real life experience. What would be the appropriate way to write credits on the title page? To clarify, we are not writing this script for anybody other than ourselves at this point.”

**Damon:** Sure. I don’t know what the Writers Guild response to that is, but Lou is the one who is writing it, so it would basically say the name of the – The Adventures of John August by Lou whatever your last name is. And then I put Inspired by the life of John August. Or based upon the memoirs.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** So, you know, I’d solidify the fact that you are the only author of this material, but it is based on the life of your friend.

**John:** That seems fair to me, too. Again, this isn’t sort of the WGA credit. But when there’s an underlying source behind things, it’s important to acknowledge that on the cover page just so – it’s the morally right thing to do, but it’s also just – it’s going out there in the world and it’s based on someone’s real experience.

**Damon:** Completely agree.

**John:** Richard writes, “I’m writing a pilot that contains a mystery surrounding a certain symbol.” This feels very much up your alley. “That symbol is both the opening and closing image of the episode and it carries great importance. Since screenwriting is a highly visual enterprise, I would like to show the symbol in the script rather than just describe it, which would be tedious and devoid of impact. I’ve encountered the opinion that inserting pictures into a script exposes a hack and my screenwriting software does not even include such a feature. What are your thoughts about including a symbol in the script?”

**Damon:** Wow, that’s a great question because I agree with everything that you just said. Now the reality is because it is the first image of the script, normally I would basically say is there a way for the symbol to be the last image of the script. Because you don’t want to send that hack flag up–

**John:** On page one.

**Damon:** On page one. But if your writing is great and the story is great, then you can put it on page 50 and no one will think you’re a hack because they’re completely and totally into the storytelling. I agree that that sends like a real – having illustrations of any kind or symbols is, you know, is immediately sort of you have to find a way to describe the thing without showing it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** I can’t even – I will say this, though. Based on this question I’m like, ugh, what is this symbol?

**John:** What is it?

**Damon:** Like–

**John:** My instinct would be to do it on a page between the title page and the first page of actual script. And so if there was an intermediary page that just had the symbol and didn’t even necessarily explain why that page was there, but then when you sort of read through it you get like, oh, that was what that thing was.

**Damon:** Got it.

**John:** But having it break in the flow of the text, that’s where it feels hack to me. That’s where I get really nervous about doing that.

**Damon:** Right. And the other thing is if you can’t describe it in simple – there has to be a way, even if the symbol feels like it’s complicated to describe, you know, you or I could describe Prince’s symbol in a sentence, which is like it’s kind of like the symbol for male or female but with some artistic flourishes, without saying it’s got arrows on the end of each – you know, you don’t have to be overly descriptive.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you there. Rian Johnson’s script for Looper has one image in it, which describes like one thing sort of late in the script, but it’s not on page one, and he’s also Rian Johnson.

**Damon:** Correct.

**John:** And so that’s a difference between his situation and Richard’s situation.

**Damon:** Yeah. I think that once you’ve established yourself, then symbol it up.

**John:** Yep.

**Damon:** Go symbol crazy.

**John:** So, you’re wrapping up The Leftovers, and all the episodes are shot now. They’re all edited now.

**Damon:** Yep. It’s as done as done gets.

**John:** That’s great. So, a thing we were talking about before we started recording is that while you were doing Lost you kept getting hit with two questions. And I want to sort of address those two questions that everyone always asked you about the show and what effect they could have. So what are the two questions?

**Damon:** I could do like a psychic act where I can say if you were watching Lost, I want you to close your eyes right now and think of what is the one question, especially in terms of process. Forgetting about polar bears and all that fun stuff. Like what you would ask. And I will predict that it will be one of two questions.

The first question is were you making it up as you went along. And certainly as we were writing the show that was in the present tense, are you making it up as you go along? So that’s question number one. And when someone asks you a question like that, they’re not curious. There’s an answer that they want. Because who in the history of the world has been asked that question and you want the answer to be, “Uh, yeah, I’m just making it up as I go along, man. I’m just winging it. I’m President Trump. I’m just like tweeting and figuring things out as I go. This is a tough job.”

You want people to have a plan for sure. So that’s the correct answer is we are absolutely not making it up as we go along. There is a roadmap. There is a bible. All of these things exist. That’s the appropriate answer.

Question number two. How much influence does the audience/fandom have on the outcome of the show? We’re really engaged. We have theories. We go to fan events. We’re on Reddit and Twitter talking about and theorizing about the show. Do you read that stuff and does it influence you? And the answer to that question, the desired answer is, yes, you as an audience have a tremendous influence on the show and the outcome of the show. We’re listening to the things that you don’t like and we’re course-correcting and we’re listening to the things that you like and we’re doing more of that.

And yet there doesn’t seem to be an awareness that these two ideas are paradoxical.

**John:** Absolutely. They’re completely antithetical. Like something can’t be predetermined and be, you know, have free will based on what the audience wants.

**Damon:** That’s a very Rousseau/Locke way of putting it. That those are the philosophers, not the crazy French women and the guy in the wheelchair. But, yes, if there is a plan, the audience has no effect whatsoever on its outcome. And if you’re always listening to what the audience tells you, then you have to be winging it. So, how do you thread the needle?

**John:** And so when you’re doing a show like Lost, which had 24 episodes in its longest season.

**Damon:** Yeah, 25 hours with Season 1.

**John:** It was crazy. And so on a show like that, you are writing the show while you’re filming the show. It’s an ongoing process, so you can actually see sort of what’s working in broadcast and change things.

**Damon:** Correct.

**John:** But with shorter seasons, that’s much less likely to happen. So, even on the first season of The Leftovers, had any of the episodes aired by the time you were producing the final episodes?

**Damon:** Oh, for sure. I mean, we produced the pilot in the summer. You know, in July. And then it got picked up. And then we went into production on the series I think the following January or February in New York. I think we were still in production when the episodes started airing.

**John:** But if somebody watched the first episode or the second episode or the third episode and they said like, oh, I really want it to be more like this, there wasn’t much of an opportunity for that to happen.

**Damon:** No.

**John:** Because it was–

**Damon:** All of the material was already generated. I mean, where the space exists is between seasons. So, certainly between the second and third season of The Leftovers had certain things that we did, like big swings – we did an episode called International Assassin that takes place in a – I’ll just say a different reality than the rest of the show. Had the audience rejected that idea instead of embraced it, that would have affected the storytelling in season three for sure.

In fact, you know, one of the big storylines of the third season, I’m not going to spoil anything here, but if you’ve watched any of the trailers or the promos for the coming season, you know, the idea that Kevin, our main character, died and came back to life is a major story thread. And I think had that not worked out in the second season, we would have just pretended that it had never happened.

**John:** So, this comes up, this idea of like is it all prefigured out or not prefigured out. Two recent series sort of brought this home to me, which were Stranger Things and Westworld. So, Stranger Things is a Netflix show. It all dumped at once. And so you knew from the start that nothing you thought about the show was going to change the show, because the show was done. Because you could see that all of the episodes were there, ready for you to watch.

Versus Westworld as I was watching it week by week, and I love the creators and I’m so happy with the show, but I detected a lot of fan annoyance about how slow things were moving. There was a frustration that was building from fans based on how the storytelling was reeling out which I don’t think would have happened had it been all dumped at once.

**Damon:** Oh for sure. It’s the – did you get me a bike? It’s a bike, right, for Christmas paradigm where your kid basically asks you for something for Christmas and it’s the big gift. And your kid knows that you love them. So, yeah, chances are they’ve got the bike. But they’re not getting it until Christmas. And so all they’ll basically say is whether they believe in Santa or not, another spoiler alert, you know, am I getting a bike? Am I? Am I getting a bike? Did you get me a bike? Am I getting a bike? And I think that there is a certain level of anticlimax and frustration, but your job as a parent is to basically preserve that moment on Christmas morning when they get the bike. And I think Jonah and Lisa have spoken pretty candidly about the idea that they didn’t expect Reddit to reach certain conclusions that fast–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** But the reality is when you can hive-mind a solution it only takes one person to figure it out before something catches on. And so if there’s millions and millions of people watching something like they are in Westworld, they’ll figure it out. And then I think the other thing that’s sort of worth talking about per both those shows and what you’re saying is there’s a time investment. And so what’s interesting is your time investment in watching Stranger Things and Westworld is exactly the same. You invest ten hours in watching those television shows. But in Westworld–

**John:** But they’re ten very different hours.

**Damon:** You actually feel like you’ve invested 100 hours because you’re counting the hours in between the weeks that you are discussing, debating, you know, doing the deep dive on, talking about the men in black. How far in the future are we? Are we on a different planet? All that stuff. That time and energy you also count as your investment. And so the more time you invest, the more possibility for frustration there is.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** Unfairly, I believe.

**John:** I agree that it’s unfair, but it has to be something that’s on your head as you’re thinking about going forward. So, right now Leftovers is finishing up and you need to be thinking of what you want to do down the road. And I don’t know if you’re thinking about TV at all, but you have to be thinking about anything you do in TV now is going to be a decision of like is this a show that should all be watched at once, or are we going to try to do this sort of week by week basis. What’s your feeling?

**Damon:** Here’s what’s interesting. The answer is both. Because, so for me the “have your cake and eat it, too” scenario is you roll it out week by week, so for that portion of the audience, that’s how they watched Big Little Lies. You had to wait until Sunday night in order to watch it. And now it’s over and the finale was widely adored, including by myself, and so the people who didn’t want to take the risk that it wouldn’t turn out well or not to invest in it yet, they’re now going to binge it.

So, the way that the show lives on is always going to be in a binge model. Is always going to be in a you can watch all the episodes at your own leisure. But for this one period of time when you’re first rolling it out, as Dickens did with Great Expectations, you know, I mean, we all read Great Expectations as a novel, but when Dickens put it out it was serialized. So, why not have your cake and eat it, too, and do it both ways. Because I want to engage in shows. Like I wish that Stranger Things dolled it out. You know, because as much as I loved it, when it was over I was like, oh, that – I did it too fast. I wished that I could have been part of the community. Instead I watched this thing for three days and now we’re all talking about the entire series. But I wanted to speculate as to what Barb’s fate was, as opposed to I’m now exactly 90 minutes away from determining Barb’s fate.

**John:** Well, but in order for this cake and eat it, too–

**Damon:** #Barb.

**John:** Barb. You have to have an end. And so in the case of Lost, it was 100 episodes you did?

**Damon:** 121.

**John:** 121. And so it was so many episodes out in the future. And so I know you asked for a stop date at a certain point so you could plan for it, but someone who wasn’t sure whether they were going to commit to the show, they had to decide am I going to wait four years for it to finish. So something like The Leftovers, each season is very discrete. Like you can sort of watch seasons – well, you really can’t – it’s hard to sort of come into season two and for it to make a lot of sense.

**Damon:** Although I’ve heard.

**John:** People do it.

**Damon:** I’ve heard anecdotally some people are like just start with season two, and they’re a little confused at first, but it’s fine.

**John:** It’s fine. But the advantage to Big Little Lies or Stranger Things is that you know that it’s only ten episodes, and so you’re not going to have to wait that long to start watching it if you–

**Damon:** I think Big Little Lies is like seven episodes or something like that. Yeah. No, you know, the thing that I always say is people want to know how thick the book is before they buy the book. So, it’s sort of like it’s why Sorcerer’s Stone is of a certain thickness and Order of the Phoenix is of a – because it’s like by then J.K. Rowling is basically like I got you. So, these are going to be as thick as I want.

But I think if the first book was as thick as Order of the Phoenix, that certainly would give me pause. And so but television, almost until recently you don’t know how thick the book is. And so even Game of Thrones, you know, when HBO started airing it you knew before you watched the pilot of Game of Thrones, and I had read the first three of George’s books at that point, I knew that I was like signing up for the long haul. Like, oh my god, is this going to be ten years of my life if the show works? And I’m down with that. But that’s an intimidating commitment to make. It’s daunting.

And so I really feel like Ryan Murphy and Noah Hawley are at the apex of the newest trend in television which is the serialized anthology. The way that every season of Fargo feels like it is self-contained but part of a larger, sprawling narrative. And they are interconnected in terms of how they move around in time. So, a massacre that was alluded to in season one is actually dramatized in season two. But season two doesn’t feel like a prequel, even though it’s chronologically taking – it feels just as important. And then they connect with the movie Fargo, so the money that Steve Buscemi basically hid and was unresolved in the movie is actually found in season one in Fargo in the Oliver Platt storyline, etc.

But there’s a larger – it’s not just, oh, here’s another season of Fargo. There is a sense of serialization in there. And then Ryan, of course, who with American Horror Story he’ll have actors basically play different characters, but there is also a sense of some meta interconnectedness. And I think that’s a new storytelling form, which is very exciting.

**John:** But, I mean, I will push back a little bit on Noah Hawley. Legion, which I thought was a terrific pilot and a really interesting show, it felt like it was designed for streaming, yet it came every week.

**Damon:** Oh, interesting.

**John:** And so I have a suspicion that the show plays much better if you actually just watch the episodes straight through. But with the week in between you lose the connective tissue. You just can’t actually kind of remember what happened week to week. It’s such a complicated show that without seeing it sort of back to back to back, a week between things have sort of destroyed the momentum.

**Damon:** I had an entirely different reaction to Legion which was that I loved having the anticipation of the next episode, but I also felt like that show was teaching me how to watch it. And you’re probably right in terms of there’s an intricacy in terms of storytelling and plot and figuring out who is Lenny, and is Lenny is a guy. Who’s the shadow king? Like all of those things. But, for me it was in the way that Twin Peaks was, it was more about a mood. And it’s sort of broadcasting at a different frequency. And so I feel like the penultimate episode of Legion, and again not to spoil it if you haven’t seen it yet, or something like that, like dropped into the middle of a binge, and then suddenly that episode would end and you just have – there’s just this amazing – they do this thing with Bolero and then it’s black and white and you’re in a silent movie. And there’s major revelations and this animated thing on a chalk – it’s just like the idea of that episode ending and then immediately going I’m now watching the finale, versus I need to just take some time with that one, I don’t know. I appreciated–

**John:** I can the arguments both ways. I felt like my experience of understanding what actually happened over the course of the season would make a lot more sense if I had watched it all together as one thing than just spread out the way it was spread out.

**Damon:** Yeah, I mean, I think that one thing that sounds super pretentious/precious is that the showrunners of these shows, the storytellers of these shows, should start prescribing the way that they want their shows to be watched. And the audience can choose to ignore them. Like for me, I’d be like, “Noah, what do you want me to do?” And I just assume Noah wants me to watch them every Tuesday night, the week that they’re on, because that’s the way that he’s – Noah Hawley, if he wanted to, he could do the show on Netflix. I mean, maybe he’s in an overall deal at FX or whatever, but like I do want to have a stronger sense of how the people making it feel like it should be watched, even if they’re wrong.

**John:** Yeah. J.K. Rowling with Harry Potter, her initial recommendation was that it’s designed to be like one book a year. And so it’s meant to be you grow up with the kids. And so the later books are more advanced because you’re supposed to be a more advanced person reading them.

**Damon:** For sure.

**John:** It moves from middle-grade fiction into YA.

**Damon:** And we’re reading Half-Blood Prince right now with Van, my son, who is ten years old, and we started Sorcerer’s Stone I think when he was six.

**John:** Yeah, that’s just right.

**Damon:** We’re a little bit faster than once a year, but there was no way that we finished Order of the Phoenix and he wasn’t like, next. At that point he was like, “Let’s get to it.” But you do appreciate how brilliantly she recaps the previous book, because when you and read them the beginning of episode six where they’re dealing with the British PM, having to like basically be apprised of the fact that Cornelius Fudge has been replaced by Rufus Scrimgeour, and then all the things that happen in between books. I remember when I picked up Half-Blood Prince I was like, oh man, it’s been a while since I read Order of the Phoenix. How am I going to remember what happened?

**John:** And there’s a previously on…

**Damon:** And she just did it so brilliantly. Oh my god. She’s the best. The best. And you’ve seen–

**John:** I saw the play.

**Damon:** You saw it.

**John:** Yeah, it’s good. The play is really good.

The last thing I want to get to is this idea of idea debt. And so this was some articles I sent to you. The first one I read was by Jessica Abel. And she had a conversation with Kazu Kibuishi where she’s talking about this sense of the old projects that were sort of always lingering behind. So this is what she actually wrote.

“Let me tell you about Forest Lords.

Forest Lords is a series of ten fantasy novels, each a 1000-page brick, about the epic adventures of Greenleaf Barksley, elf proletarian, and his journeys to attain the Golden Leaf and save his homeland from the scourge of the Curse of the Titaness Denox.

The thing is, none of this series exists—not even Forest Lords Volume One: The Elven Soul. There are binders and binders of “lore.” There are a hell of a lot of character designs (that look suspiciously similar to Elfquest characters). There is the vivid, lively picture the putative author has in his head of how it’s going to feel to write a fantasy series that has everyone panting for the next book or movie or TV show.*

But there is no book. There is only Idea Debt.”

**Damon:** Yes.

**John:** So, this felt really familiar to me.

**Damon:** Yeah. It felt really familiar to me, too. And I had the same smile on my face as I read the article that you have on your face as you read aloud that part. Look, I think that world-building is super exciting. And I think that this idea of a broad and expansive universe and saying that this thing is epic in scope, it’s a saga, is a wonderful thing. But the grounds of creative storytelling are littered with the corpses of these elven warriors. And I think that ultimately my takeaway from reading that article and the others is that that’s the fun part, this world-building. The hard part is actually just writing the first one. And the more worlds you’re building, the less storytelling you’re doing. Because it’s sort of like the world-building is easy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** But what’s getting me into the world, like if you just basically think about like how much time did George R. R. Martin spend building the world of Westeros before he actually started typing chapter one, and now there’s dire wolves. Well, chapter one is kind of our introduction to the White Walkers. But now basically dire wolves pups are being presented to all the Stark kids and Jon Snow. And I guess that there wasn’t a lot of lag time between the idea to do Game of Thrones and the writing of that chapter. And then he started building his world along the way.

And I think that this idea debt is basically prohibiting people from actually working.

**John:** Yeah. I think people approach it with these weird expectations where they think they need to build George R. R. Martin’s world for Game of Thrones, or they need to build the Potter-verse for J.K. Rowling’s universe, without remembering like, oh no, you actually have to write the book first.

**Damon:** Sure.

**John:** And that the universe doesn’t come before the actual text comes. But I think the reason why people want to do that world-building is because there’s no risk. You can’t fail at the world-building because there’s no actual product. But the minute you actually start to write something, it could suck. And that’s the fear. And so you put it off because you’re worried about it.

**Damon:** I couldn’t agree more. And I also feel like the thing that the world-building is devoid of is the fundamental thing that we attach ourselves to in story, which is the characters and the emotions. And if you read George Lucas’s original treatment for Star Wars, you know, whatever, when it’s Luke Star-Killer and it’s, you know, the Wills and all that stuff, is like it’s all that stuff. It’s all that world-building stuff, but it’s lacking the moment on Tatooine, looking out at the twin suns. It’s certainly – he had to write Star Wars to learn that Vader was Luke’s father. Like, that was not in the world-building part.

And so you have to – I know that there’s a lot of debate, and I don’t even know if J.K. Rowling has spoken about this or been asked this, but it seems to me that had she known about Horcruxes prior to when they were revealed in the books that she could have used that word once or twice casually by Azkaban. And the fact that she didn’t leads me to believe that it was an idea – the story was telling her what to tell, because you have to listen to the show. You have to listen to the story. And all the time that you’re not writing it, it’s not telling you what it wants to be.

**John:** Absolutely. The sense of what it wants to be and what it doesn’t want to be, the second part of this idea that like all of those things that you have sort of abandoned along the way, those ideas that sort of got half-developed that you’ve never actually done anything with.

And there’s a guy named John Sexton who has a good piece I’ll also link to in the show notes talking about all those things that you’re sort of dragging with you from apartment to apartment, project to project. Those things you always meant to write that you’ve never actually written. And I found myself nodding a lot as he was going through his list, because I have all those things, like someday I’ll get back to that stuff.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** And I’ll never get back to those things.

**Damon:** Right. If it sits in your storage unit for like a couple of years, there’s a reason for that. It wants to stay there. But I would say that certain things that are tickling you or get you excited as a writer, they will work their way into – like for example, I always wanted to do a show about time travel. And then I suddenly realized, hey, Lost is that show. Like there is not time travel embedded in the pilot of lost, but J.J. and I tried to do everything that we could to open up all possibilities in the pilot so that if we wanted to get to time travel, we could.

And I always wanted to set a show in the ‘70s, and I was like, well, we’ve got time travel now. So Lost is that show, too. And I’ve always wanted to do like a pirate show. Well, Lost could be that show, too. .

So, if you basically find the canvas that can accommodate all those disparate ideas and you can kind of cram them in there, it’s amazing how resilient television storytelling can be, particularly in this day and age. Where the audience will sort of let you go. And the idea that Noah Hawley is like maybe he – I haven’t heard him talk extensively about Legion yet, but he’s a colleague and I’m a huge fan of his, but the idea that Noah Hawley had always wanted to do a super hero show and it ends up being Legion, you know, is sort of like he seems much more interested in other genre elements than the super hero genre, but there are some things that are distinctly super hero-ish in there that he doesn’t seem particularly interested in.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** And that makes the show all the more fascinating that it’s like, oh, like this is an X-Men show. Like it can be this, too? Oh, that’s cool.

**John:** Yeah. Circling back to this sense of the world-building and sort of knowing everything that’s out there before you get started, you know, we were talking about J.K. Rowling, whether she knew Horcruxes, but like you guys didn’t know everything that Lost could be when you were writing the pilot for Lost. You guys were just writing the pilot to make the most compelling pilot possible. And sort of to stake out a giant circle of possibility around you.

But if you had actually had to go into it with a plan for like this is the six seasons. This is how it’s all going to work. This is how these two things connect. There’s no way you could have done it. You had to discover it by doing it.

**Damon:** Yeah. You’re back to do you have a bible. You know, and even the bible was written, you know, I mean I guess there are people out there who believe that the Bible was written by God and then dictated to man, but even the Bible was written one verse at a time, one story at a time. And in the pragmatic reality of storytelling, that’s the only way that you can do it because J.J. and I had ten weeks to basically write and produce and deliver a two-hour movie. That was the two-hour pilot. And the idea that we also in our spare time were able to get together and say like, hey, let’s talk about what season three of Lost might look like. It just didn’t exist.

It’s also hubris. I mean, I think that I always say to studios and networks who are saying like we need a bible or we need to know what season two is, I understand that concern. You’re investing in this thing. You want to know that we have some sense of where we’re going. But, the job – my job right now is to just make one great hour of this thing, not just the pilot. And then episode two has to be – that’s the real pilot of a television show is episode two. But if you make three bad episodes in a row, the audience is out. And it really doesn’t matter if you’ve got a great idea for what season two could be. You should have been more focused on what episode four was.

And so I’m a big believer in look at the episode right in front of you and do everything that you can to make it great. Have some sense of where you want to take things, but then there has to be a discovery process along the way.

**John:** Cool. Let’s go to our One Cool Things.

**Damon:** I discovered the show called Occupied on Netflix. It was recommended by a friend. And I don’t know when it was made, but I have a feeling it was made in the last two years. And it’s about a silk glove invasion of Norway by Russia. It’s kind of I guess got 24 and Homeland baked into its blood. But what’s sort of fascinating about it is I didn’t know anything about Norway. And I’ve always had this idealized version of what it is to be Scandinavian. And this is kind of the nightmare scenario. The storytelling set up is that each episode is a month. It doesn’t take place over a month, but is titled like April, May, June. So they jump 30 days between the ending of and the beginning of episodes, so part of the fun is like, hey, what happened in between these episodes. There’s a little bit of catching up. But essentially over the course of the first season you see what it looks like for a country to be invaded by another country. And particularly in terms of what’s happening in the world right now, it’s the most like V, which is a show–

**John:** Oh, I loved V.

**Damon:** I loved.

**John:** Oh my god. I loved V.

**Damon:** Of anything that I’ve seen in the last two decades, but it’s sort of like what if V happened in the real world. And I’m not saying that the Russians eat guinea pigs. I’m not saying they don’t. I’m not saying they could.

**John:** They peel off their skin, it is reptilian underneath.

**Damon:** But the Russians are–

**John:** Who is the Diana of the show? Is there a person–?

**Damon:** Yeah, there is a Diana.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Damon:** You know, it’s a Russian woman who is essentially – she’s very charismatic. Like the Russians are not just straight up bad guys in it. That’s what’s really interesting about it, too. I would say like the Norwegian Prime Minister is not being presented as this incredibly noble and flawless individual. Lots of different shades in it. And also there’s a lot of English. It makes you, again, hate yourself as an American because every Norwegian and every Russian speaks fluent English. So when they’re talking to each other they speak in English. When the Norwegians are speaking to each other they’re speaking in Norwegian. But you’re like, oh, like all these people are all multi-lingual and here I am like I can order like a burrito and I feel proud of myself.

**John:** I always feel bad on The Americans, because there are times where I’m sort of half paying attention. Like it could be the radio play, where you can sort of hear the discussion, but then they’ll switch into the Russian section and you have to–

**Damon:** You got to watch.

**John:** You got to watch close, because it’s going to be something about the food supply.

My One Cool Thing is also a series. Fits in really well with this idea of recycling your old ideas. It’s called City Girl. I don’t know if you’ve seen this. It’s a romantic comedy done by Parenthood’s Sarah Ramos. And she wrote it in 2003 when she was 12 years old, but it tells the story of this 28-year-old boutique owner and she has this weird affair with her allergist, like her migraine doctor.

But basically, this writer, she found her old script and shot it the way – she didn’t change it. She didn’t update it. She actually just shot it the way she wrote it when she was 12 years old.

**Damon:** Oh my god.

**John:** And so it’s like this weird misunderstanding of sort of like what a 28-year-old is like, and what the motivations are.

**Damon:** Oh, that’s great. They just shot it as is?

**John:** They just shot it as is.

**Damon:** Where is it?

**John:** It’s a series of like web shorts. And so I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. But it’s really–

**Damon:** Oh, that sounds fascinating.

**John:** Brilliantly done.

**Damon:** Can I do one more tiny one?

**John:** Please.

**Damon:** Which is the writer and personality John Hodgman, who is a genius, super amazing. He wrote a pilot that you just reminded me of. They did a live reading of the pilot, because it never got produced. But the premise was that it’s his – it’s a coming of age story of him as like a 13-year-old boy, but it’s played by John Hodgman as an adult. He’s the only adult on the show, so all the other kids are played by actual 13 year olds, including his love interest, who is also a 13-year-old.

It’s amazing. And they did this live reading of it that is listenable. I think they did it as a podcast. It’s amazing. It’s so good.

**John:** Cool. We’ll find a link for that in the show notes as well.

**Damon:** Do it.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show, as always, is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Damon is not on Twitter at all.

**Damon:** I’m off Twitter.

**John:** He’s fully off Twitter.

**Damon:** Craig can keep his day job, because this is big boots to fill.

**John:** Yes. You can find us on Facebook, just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. That’s also where you can find us on iTunes. While you’re there, leave us a comment. That’s always helpful.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. There’s apps for both Android and for iOS. You can listen to all those back episodes.

At johnaugust.com you’ll find transcripts and links to all the show notes. So, Godwin gets the transcripts up about four days after the episode airs. This one might take a little bit longer because it was a longer episode. But, Damon, thank you so much for coming to Paris and being on the show.

**Damon:** It’s so weird, because we live so close to each other in Los Angeles, and you made me come to–

**John:** Yeah, I made you fly all the way here to do this.

**Damon:** But it was worth it.

**John:** Yeah. Cool. Good luck. Bye.

**Damon:** Bye.

Links:

* [Damon Lindelof](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0511541/)
* [The Leftovers: Final Season Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9w0sz5y83k)
* Jessica Abel on [Idea Debt](http://jessicaabel.com/2016/01/27/idea-debt/)
* [How I Got Out of Idea Debt](https://medium.com/@heyjohnsexton/how-i-got-out-of-idea-debt-124d3cdc4031) by John Sexton
* [Occupied](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QWC_DZj0HE)
* [City Girl](https://thehairpin.com/sarah-ramos-explains-how-she-gave-life-to-city-girl-the-rom-com-she-wrote-at-12-years-old-addd405b56b0)
* John Hodgman’s [Only Child](http://www.maximumfun.org/dead-pilots-society/episode-2-only-child-written-john-hodgman)
* [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/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([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_296.mp3).