Search Results for: book rights

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 295 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program Malcolm Spellman returns to help us answer a bunch of listener questions, including the most important one of all – what’s Malcolm up to.

**Craig:** Oh, he’s not going to know the answer to that. I’ll fill that in for him.

**John:** All right. So, I sound a little bit strange because I just flew from Rome to London. I made it here, but my microphone did not. My bag got lost, and so I’m on a pair of really crappy white iPhone headphones. So, Craig and Malcolm are going to take most of this episode by themselves. So, through the magic of editing I’m going to be here for the intro and for the outro, but it’s going to be the Craig and Malcolm show. So I am as excited as the listeners are to hear what Malcolm is going to say.

**Craig:** Everybody hang on to your seat. And I guess we should probably mention that when Malcolm is on the show, the chance of us not having the explicit rating is zero. So, folks who are listening in the car with children be aware that we will be using adult language in today’s program.

**John:** I think it’s a very strong bet. Some follow up. First off, the tickets for the live show on May 1 are now up for sale. You can go and find them at HollywoodHeart.org. That is Monday May 1, 7:30pm to 9:15pm, at ArcLight Hollywood. That’s Rian Johnson. That’s Dana Fox. That’s Rob McElhenney. It’s going to be amazing, so you guys should go see that. I will look forward to hearing it myself.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s for charity. Hollywood Heart is a terrific charity that our friend, John Gatins, is involved in. And of all the live shows that we’ve done, this may be the most impressive guest lineup we’ve ever had. First of all, just Rian alone. Star Wars, people. Star Wars. But with Dana, and then you throw on Rob McElhenney, creator and star of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which now is like the longest running sitcom in television history.

**John:** That’s remarkable.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. It’s amazing. So that’s our lineup. And it’s like the tickets are not that expensive. And it goes to charity. So, if there’s even any left, jump on them.

**John:** Sounds good. Next up, one of our very first episodes of How Would This be a Movie was the Hatton Garden Job. So if you don’t remember that, that was a bunch of British bank robbers who carried off a very complicated bank robbery where they broke in through walls. It was a bunch of old geezers. And we figured, you know what, someone is going to try to make this into a movie. The first movie version of Hatton Garden Job is actually coming out. April 14. The writing credits are Ray Bogdanovich, Dean Lines, and Ronnie Thompson, who also directed. Reviews seem pretty good so far, so hey, there’s already one of these movies out there in the world. So, I think it’s our first movie that we successfully made out of the Scriptnotes podcast.

**Craig:** Shouldn’t we have some sort of thing that we could put on a movie like the way the ASPCA puts stuff on No Animals Were Harmed. Like this gets the Scriptnotes Seal of Prediction, or something?

**John:** Well, I think it needed a little special laurel around it that says Scriptnotes. Yeah.

**Craig:** Win. [laughs]

**John:** As inspired by Scriptnotes. As discussed on Scriptnotes. Win, yes.

**Craig:** Win.

**John:** Win. That was a reference to last week’s episode where we talked about the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition. We had another listener write in. This was Guy Poland who wrote in. He says, “I, too, was a winner in said contest. A three-time winner, thank you very much. I won gold for comedy, a silver for a thriller, and I was a finalist for comedy for Meeting Mr. Gimbel.” So, let’s pause here to say why did you enter this competition three times? You won three times, I guess. But wow.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, after the first time when your life didn’t change, maybe save the entry fee.

**John:** Well, I guess he submitted for all three of these things simultaneously. So, he put three different scripts in in three different categories.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** But it’s like $30 a pop, I’m sure. So he writes that “I, too, emailed to ask about prize money. I was not afforded a response and didn’t push the issue because I knew it was all bullshit. They did, however, send me three nice winner certificates in a PDF format that I can print out, frame, and hang on my wall. Note that they misspelled Comedy on the certificates and had to redo it. No prize money or coupons whatsoever. Certainly not $200.”

**Craig:** Hold on a second. This poor guy didn’t even get the coupon to the non-existent software. And I love this. You enter a contest and the contest said on their webpage, Malcolm, they say, “$20,000 in prize money and stuff, or whatever, in prizes.” Nobody gets anything. And I love that when you win the contest you have to email them, “So, can I get the prize?” And they’re like, “Um, no.” And then you go, “OK.” And then they send you PDFs of a certificate that the best part is they couldn’t even mail them a real certificate. They sent him PDFs that he had to print out himself. My god.

**John:** No, he writes there was another option. So they also gave him the option of receiving a winner’s trophy, “Which I would have the pleasure of paying for at the modest price of $150, plus $20 shipping.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Now, the point of a screenplay competition is, of course, to get interest from the industry. It says he got zero read requests as a result of winning these three things. Let’s see, “Oh, a bonus fuck up for you. At some point the competition staff mixed up some of the winning scripts with the wrong writer. Put another way, the scripts were posted on their site, but the corresponding writer was wrong. They finally got that straightened out.”

**Craig:** Oh, well that’s good. They’re on top of it then over there at the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition which appears, from what we’ve heard, to be the worst screenplay competition in the world. And that’s saying something because pretty much all of them are horrendous. This one, though, wow.

**Malcolm Spellman:** It’s the Russian version.

**Craig:** It’s the Russian Screenplay Competition. They’re just mining your data. Amazing. Amazing.

**John:** So, we get to hear Malcolm Spellman in the background, but Malcolm I want you to lean a little closer to the microphone and tell us what you’re up to, because I have not seen you in nearly a year. But listeners haven’t seen you even kind of for longer than that. Last we talked with you, you were on Empire. I honestly don’t know what you’re doing at this moment. Fill us in a little bit on what’s happening in the Malcolm Spellman universe.

**Malcolm:** It’s a big point of transition for me right now. So, I did three years on Empire, which was awesome. And learned a ton. Probably learned more in that three years than the entire 13 years leading up to that I was in screenwriting. And I’m moving on now, but amicably. And I am enjoying Hollywood with some heat for the first time since I first broke in.

**Craig:** Since your fumbled heat.

**Malcolm:** Since my fumbled heat. And it’s very, very interesting to see the difference in temperature when I walk into the room. And it feels like I am now in a position where maybe some shit can happen. You know what I’m saying? We’ll see.

**Craig:** All right. That’s a pretty good position.

**John:** And what is the shit that’s happening? Are you doing TV shows? Are you doing movies? Where’s your focus right now?

**Malcolm:** I’m doing a pilot with a buddy of mine at Hulu. And I have a couple of things. I’m overseeing a couple of writers on a pilot also. And I have a feature I’m writing for Warner Bros. And I think there’s a couple things pending. I’ve got a lot going on, John. It’s popping.

**John:** That’s fantastic. And you’ve also promised that if Craig kills me for some reason, you’ll investigate my death and avenge me if it turns out to be Craig. I have your word on air right now?

**Malcolm:** I’m not that good investigating, but I’m definitely good at avenging, so it gets to that part.

**Craig:** If you believe him, because maybe I already hired him and he’s just doing his job right now making you think that.

**John:** Man, Craig Mazin, you’re really, really good.

**Malcolm:** He’s Russian.

**John:** So, I’m going to leave you guys to talk through, we have a bunch of questions here that listeners have written in with.

**Craig:** Did you just call me racist?

**Malcolm:** No, I called you Russian. But that’s the same thing. That’s absolutely the same thing.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Malcolm:** In Russia, you spell Racist – Russian.

**Craig:** It’s the same word. It’s like the Eskimos have 50 words for snow and Russians have one word for racist. Russian. All right. Sorry about that, John. We’re having fun over here.

**John:** Which is really good. So, I’m going to bow out for the bulk of this episode, but I left you a bunch of really nicely organized questions.

**Craig:** You did. You did.

**John:** In the outline. So I look forward to hearing your answers to a bunch of these questions. You know what? I got to stay for at least this first one because it has some good vocabulary. So I’m going to stay for this first one, and then I’m going to bail, then let you answer some more questions. This was a question we got from Blake. He says, “Why do so many shows, no matter the network or targeted age group, seem to act as if no sexual acts exist that don’t involve full penetration and the possibility of pregnancy. Basically, where are the hand jobs and blow jobs? There are a number of shows that talk about sex in a fairly frank manner, but they’re almost all judgmental and fearful. And most willingly ignore or underplay sexual activities that are less likely to involve a pregnancy.”

So, Malcolm, you come from a show that was a big Fox show. Were there blow jobs and hand jobs on Empire? I didn’t see. So tell me.

**Malcolm:** They fuck. I got to think, and there’s a good amount of gay sex.

**Craig:** But the specific question here is why is it only just fucking. Why in television shows and movies do people not just sit there and watch somebody getting a hand job?

**Malcolm:** Man, I got to imagine it’s because no one cares about – I mean, grown-ups don’t care about hand jobs.

**Craig:** I’m so with you on this.

**Malcolm:** Grown-ups don’t – I mean, you’re not making TV for kids – listen, if there’s a hand job or a blow job and it’s not for kids, and if it’s a grown-up, they want fucking or further.

**Craig:** Yeah, it just feels like kind of funny to me. Watching somebody get a hand job is funny because it’s so lazy.

**John:** So, a couple of perspectives I have on this. So, first off, in the Showtime pilot for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she gives the guy a hand job in the pilot. And it becomes a very funny plot point. And I agree it is sort of funny, because she’s trying to interrogate him while giving him a hand job. And they actually play the fact that her hand is on his dick.

My theory is that it’s very hard to hide a penis. Like, if you’re showing sex, then you’re not sort of seeing the penis. But if you’re showing a blow job or a hand job, it’s sort of hard to hide it. And that may be part of the reason why we’re not seeing them so often in television.

**Craig:** Well, but you can fake it. You could do it in such a way where you weren’t seeing a dick, but the thing is it is funny. It’s just so – and I think that just a natural thing – there’s like a weird narrative short hand. If I see somebody getting a blow job in a movie, I don’t like them. I feel like they’ve done something wrong. And if I see somebody getting a hand job in a movie, I feel like they’re lazy and inattentive.

I don’t know why. Because in real life, of course, blow jobs and hand jobs mean neither of those things. Most of the time I would hope that they’re just mutually happy. I don’t know. Maybe it’s boring to watch?

**Malcolm:** There was a blow job on Billions last weekend.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. And how did it come off, so to speak?

**Malcolm:** Someone was fucking up.

**Craig:** They were fucking up.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, the dude was not supposed to be getting a blow job.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Malcolm:** And he was getting one.

**Craig:** See? There’s like this thing where if you’re getting a blow job in a movie or a television show, you’re a villain. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** [laughs] Sucking dick is for bad guys.

**Craig:** No, sucking dick is for good guys. Getting your dick sucked is for bad guys.

**Malcolm:** So, wait, if it’s two dudes–

**Craig:** If it’s two dudes, then the guy that’s blowing the other guy is like a good guy who is probably getting taken advantage of or there’s a misunderstanding.

**Malcolm:** You’re right.

**Craig:** Something is going wrong. He’s being paid–

**Malcolm:** That’s so fucking right.

**Craig:** There’s so many things, right? And the guy getting one is just a bad dude.

**Malcolm:** It’s true. You just cracked the code. Even as you’re saying it as a joke, it’s fucking true.

**Craig:** It’s just true. John, do you agree that I’ve cracked the code?

**John:** I think you may have cracked a trope. I don’t think it’s anything we should aspire to. I think the underlying question here that Blake is writing is in real life people are having sex in ways that are just not depicted on screen. There was an HBO show called Tell Me You Love Me which was sort of notorious for like they had a lot of sex in it and they actually showed penises. And so like Adam Scott was in that show and so he had this fake penis that you saw a lot. And so he would be getting blow jobs and you would see his fake penis getting a blow job. And it was weird just because you’re not used to seeing that part of the body.

Even a show like Girls on HBO, there’s a lot of sex in there, and you see like a lot of anatomy, but you don’t see dicks, really. And it’s a strange thing even in that show where like they talk about everything, but you’re not seeing that specific part of the action.

**Craig:** You know, I think sometimes we forget that sex, like all human behavior, comes in varying degrees of interesting illustration. I mean, like a lot of people eat lunch by hunching over their desk and shoveling it into their mouth as fast as they can. It’s really weird.

**Malcolm:** That’s me.

**Craig:** Like Malcolm. But we don’t really show that in movies and TV, unless we’re trying to make a joke of it. Because even though it’s completely normal and expected, it’s just not – I don’t know, we just don’t like watching it so much.

**John:** That’s true. I don’t know why. All right. I’m going to jump out for a bit and let you guys answer questions about martial arts, about managers, about parentheticals in dialogue. So, those are all going to be great things. Then I’m going to circle back and come to you when it comes time for One Cool Things and our outros.

**Craig:** All right. So, now it’s just down to you and me. So let’s answer some questions here. We’re going to blow through as many of these that we can in the time that we have. I’m just going to tee them up and you’re going to answer them as best you can.

**Malcolm:** OK.

**Craig:** All right. So we’ve already heard from Blake and we already discussed blow jobs and hand jobs. How could we possibly top that? We can’t. But, we do have something from Alan, South Carolina. And Alan wants to know, “When writing a spec feature or series that would rely heavily on specific types of martial arts, like Kung-Fu, Highlander, Badlands, etc., how can the writer convey this emphasis without assuming the mantle of the fight choreographer or bogging the story down in specific fight details that would likely be ignored anyway?”

**Malcolm:** It’s a dance. It’s definitely good to flavor a script, especially if you have expertise in it, because I know one of the things – like when I was first coming up as a writer, I used to love reading action scripts where someone had done enough research that like, oh, this dude knows his guns. Or this dude knows the physics of what’s happening to play out here. So, if you can quickly reference why – naming a specific martial art is important to the scene, meaning this, like this form of martial arts specialize in weapons, so this dude is going to be picking up every single thing in the room. Then you ain’t getting bogged down in it, but you understand that a different dynamic is at play and you’re getting a different set piece.

**Craig:** Yeah. That to me right there is the key. I don’t think I particularly care about where on the body you’re striking somebody unless it’s sort of a signature move or something like that. And I think it’s probably boring to sit and read, you know, “Reverse kick, then rib punch, then…he ducks the leg and then turns around.” It’s really about the character moments, right? Every fight has a choice or two in it. Something that means something dramatically. Getting up off the ground when you think you don’t have enough left in you, but you do anyway. Doing the thing you were taught to do that you weren’t able to do before but now you can.

Whatever it is, those choice points are what matters. Technically speaking, if there’s something like whatever the heart of the particular martial art is, show it. Yeah, makes total sense. You know, if you’re like sword master, do sword stuff. So, early Steven Seagal, like before Steven Seagal went crazy.

**Malcolm:** Before he got fatter.

**Craig:** Right. But in the early days, the three word days, where it was like Above the Law, and Out for Justice, and whatever there was. You know, the typical Steven Seagal scene is he would walk into a pool hall full of thugs, and he would beat them all up using the things that were there, like his moves were you can’t punch me because I slap your hands out in the air and then I pick up a pool ball and I hit you with it. And then I pick up a cue stick and I hit you with it. And I use the environment. Those are the important things.

**Malcolm:** I think like also if you’re facing off with a martial art form you’ve never seen before, then that’s going to evoke a feeling in your lead character. You know what I’m saying? Like oh my god, this dude is using the crane technique. I have no counter for this. And it’s not just about no counter. It’s how it makes me feel. All of a sudden my confidence is bleeding out.

**Craig:** Character. As always. So, I would say, Alan, the key there is to think about character. If it’s something that is a specific fiddly thing that a fight choreographer can change without impacting the character or the scene, then perhaps it’s not the most important thing to put in the pages. All right, next up, Sasha writes, “Up until–,” oh, you’re going to like this one.

**Malcolm:** Oh shit.

**Craig:** You ready? “Up until about three hours ago,” now I don’t know exactly when Sasha was writing this, but let’s just say recently, “up until about three hours ago I was working with an extremely unprofessional and volatile manager. I never signed a contract as I always had a bad feeling about him. Today, after he threatened to assault my writing partner…”

**Malcolm:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “…I sent him a very calm email explaining why we should no longer work together. Duh, the dude repeatedly used the phrase, ‘I’m going to punch him in the fucking face.’” That’s the manager to her writing partner. “The manager is now firing off a series of missives demanding commissions on projects that have yet to sell. He wrote, ‘As is customary in our business,’” we’re going to be challenging that in a second, “’if a job or a sale on one of these projects happens in the next 12 months, I am entitled to a commission on it for the life of the deal.’”

Sasha continues, “I’m guessing he’s just peacocking, trying to scare me into submission, but is there any validity to his claim?”

**Malcolm:** No, but also how the fuck do people meet these kind of people? Like, I think more importantly fuck that manager and he can’t do shit to you. And don’t ever – when you do sell something, you will have a lawyer and then he’ll deal with that manager. So that’s the answer to that.

But I do think like, you know, on the board or whatever, I’ve been hearing more and more stories about writers of various levels, some who are pretty high level, dealing with slightly abusive or reps that take you on. And I think for writers who are coming up, you have to have a sense of destiny or you’re going to – there’s no way – I know a ton of fucking up-and-coming writers who haven’t made it yet who would not be dealing with a manager like that for one fucking minute.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** And that’s because they believe they’re going to make it, and therefore it allows them to actually behave in a way that will get them to a proper manager more quickly, because they ain’t wasting a minute with a motherfucker like that. You can’t.

**Craig:** It’s pretty crazy, right? Well, let’s talk about the legal stuff for a second. Malcolm is right. What he said here is complete bullshit. In fact, I got to tell you, Sasha, that if your manager has done anything to violate the Talent Agency Act, which would include for instance procuring you work or attempting to procure you work, then not only do you not have to pay him for the rest of your life now that he’s fired, on anything you make, but you could file a grievance against him with the Labor Commissioner of the State of California and actually get him to cough up money that you have paid to him. Which I’m sure he wouldn’t want.

I strongly recommend that if you do not have an attorney now, you get one. And that you have the attorney state to that person in no uncertain terms, “Fuck off. You’re getting nothing.” The rules on how managers work in the State of California, I believe a lawyer once told me that it’s called On the Wheel, Off the Wheel. So, the deal is that unlike agents who earn 10% for the deals they negotiate, and who collect that money even if you fire them the day after they close the deal, they collect the 10%. Because their 10% is based on what they negotiated.

But managers really are service employees. You are paying them while they service you as a manager. They’re on the wheel. When you fire them, they’re off the wheel. They are not, even though they collect commissions, they are not entitled to the money that keeps coming out. The idea is that the commission is simply paying them for the work they’re doing while they are your manager, and not one minute after.

**Malcolm:** But also, you know what, that dude is threatening to hit people. Call the fucking police. You know, if you got time, make him pay. You know what I’m saying? He shouldn’t be doing that.

**Craig:** All right. So then let’s talk about this other issue, which is how writers deal with abusive people. And first of all, why? Why are there so many abusive people? Look, I think every business has abusive people. Every business has bullies. But, in Hollywood I think there are certain kinds of predators who understand that artists – and I’m talking about writers, and directors, and actors – come out here because they’re looking for validation. They’re looking for love. And they take advantage of it. And I think it’s in their interest to make us feel afraid. And most importantly, it’s in their interest to make us feel like we need them. And so, you know, it’s an abusive spouse situation when it gets like that.

You actually don’t need any single agent or manager or lawyer. You need an agent. You need a lawyer. Maybe you feel you need a manager. But there is no specific individual one that is going to change your life or make a huge difference. Your work will. Your work got you this manager, your work will get you another manager. If you’re listening, and anybody in your professional life is treating you in any kind of abusive way, get out. And they get nothing. Ooh, that felt good.

All right, let’s move on to Seth. Seth says, “In addition to being a writer, I’m also a voiceover director, and I find that when I write dialogue I lean heavily on the use of ellipses and other punctuation to create specific rhythms and flow. Do you think that’s micromanaging the actor’s potential performance? How much use of punctuation to control the flow of dialogue is reasonable?”

**Malcolm:** I am just starting to wean myself off that. So, he probably is micromanaging, but it’s also something you learn over time. Like I use less parenthesis than I used to. I like some ellipses though. I do. I do. It really is an effective tool.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**Malcolm:** You know what I’m saying? So, yeah, he’s probably micromanaging a little bit and you will as you write become more and more confident in the fact that your readers, especially if you’re fucking with pros, are going to know – they’ve done this a million times. They know how it shown be flown. You know what I’m saying? And you start to wean yourself off of it. I’m almost done with exclamation points. Not quite. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Yeah, I use those pretty rarely.

**Malcolm:** You know who killed me on that?

**Craig:** McQuarrie?

**Malcolm:** Yes. Worst thing ever.

**Craig:** He’s the devil.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** McQuarrie is too obsessive about exclamation points. But you get a couple per episode, you know.

**Malcolm:** His quote was every time you use an exclamation point it’s an admission of failure. [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s a little strong. Look, I used ellipses all the time. I use dashes all the time. When I do, I like to take a moment to stop and go, do I need it? It’s always more elegant without. Of course. But I think that Seth’s focus on micromanaging the actor’s potential performance is off the mark. Actors don’t give a damn about any of that stuff. They remember the lines and then they start acting. It’s not like they sit there and go, “Oh god, there’s a dash-dash, I got to respect that.” They don’t. They perform it how they perform it. And the director works with them and it becomes – it’s entirely about the reader. It’s about the reader getting the scene and feeling the pace and feeling a trail-off.

See, the dot-dot-dot at the end of a line isn’t anything an actor is supposed to perform anyway. It’s the way almost every sentence ends. I just did it.

**Malcolm:** You did.

**Craig:** Right? Very few sentences end with a period.

**Malcolm:** Mine do. I make people uncomfortable with that shit.

**Craig:** OK. Maybe you do. But most people kind of – there’s an invitation to continue the conversation. So I think people worry too much about this stuff. I wouldn’t be too concerned about it. I do think that if a reader is saying I got distracted or thrown off by the mass of punctuation and other stuff, take that seriously because that’s who you’re trying to put a movie inside of. You know? Inception.

Jeff in San Jose, California writes, “In Episode 134…” You remember, Malc, right? Episode 134?

**Malcolm:** Yeah, I listen to all you guys’ podcasts.

**Craig:** “Craig takes umbrage with Oscar winners who neglect to thank their writers in their acceptance speeches.” Fact. “To paraphrase Craig, without the screenplay nobody working on a movie can even begin to do their job and all Oscar winners should thank their writer first.” It’s true. “My question is do you have any sense of how many writers who win the Oscar thank the other writers, if any, who worked on the screenplay but did not receive credit?”

Damn, Jeff has got a pretty good – this is a nice shot here.

**Malcolm:** It’s getting weird.

**Craig:** But it’s a good shot. I like it. “I don’t recall any Oscar-winning writer actually saying during the ceremony, ‘I’d like to thank Jane Doe for her uncredited writing on my screenplay.’ Then again, perhaps those uncredited writers are among the names rattled off during the winner’s speech.”

All right. So, Jeff is calling us out on the mat a little bit here. You got an opinion on this?

**Malcolm:** Well, for starters, Jeff’s got to understand 90% of writers think they wrote everything, so they wouldn’t be – in their mind whatever is on there is all them. You know what I’m saying? So, they can’t go through that. On top of that, I would imagine it could get weird legally if you start naming people, like if people ain’t getting credit on a movie, you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** I don’t think there’s a legal problem. If you were trying to erase somebody’s name, maybe then, you know, there would be an issue.

**Malcolm:** OK, well maybe not legal for a lawsuit, but I don’t think that the graciousness of doing that actually would have the effect you think it would be.

**Craig:** I agree.

**Malcolm:** Because you’re calling in ghosts and shit who didn’t make it past the threshold of an arbitration that had nothing to do with any of you guys. And you’re giving them credit. You know, that’s weird. You know what I’m saying? But mostly all writers think they wrote everything, so why would they do it?

**Craig:** I think that’s a huge part of it. I mean, if you have credit on a movie and somebody else did not receive it, then they couldn’t have done that much. And, no, you’re probably thinking to yourself this Oscar belongs to me. I’m the one that got the credit. I did all the work. And maybe that’s true. The other thing is that I’m not sure other writers would necessarily want that. If I worked on a movie for a couple of weeks quietly like that. I suppose if somebody thanked me I would feel really nice about it, but the studios would hate it.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** The press people would hate it. The people representing the movie would hate it, because all you’re doing now is calling into question the illusion. And it is an illusion that a person did everything. Right? So when directors get up there to – you know, a film by blah-blah-blah, what a joke, right? But that’s movie magic that they’re using to sell stuff. So I think the studios would hate it. That’s probably why I’m guessing.

**Malcolm:** But mostly it’s because the writer who is up there believes he did it all.

**Craig:** I think that’s probably the lion’s share of it, too. Greg writes, “What if the first three pages don’t grab you? Are there movies that went on to be successful that due to complexity or weirdness or something else didn’t grab the agent/director/studio/or producer in a compelling way in the first three pages if there was something still that made it worth reading just a little further?”

**Malcolm:** Yeah. This whole culture that’s happening online and like sometimes a professional writer or a big time producer or director will tell you you got to grab them the first three pages. And that is a good thing to do. And they’re not thinking that they just made that statement that they’re going off to work on a script that deliberately meanders for 20 or 30 pages and then takes off. They don’t even realize that off that statement, a bunch of novice screenwriters are thinking you always have to do this.

And you absolutely don’t. Yes, it’s good to grab someone in the first three pages, but the other thing is usually within three pages you know if a motherfucker can write. That’s really what’s happening.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** And so that’s the next threshold. And if you can promise that you’re going to go somewhere, then you don’t have to grab someone because you’re promising. You know what I’m saying? You’re saying, hey, in these first three pages it’s very clear that this writer has a handle on what’s going on and is leading me somewhere and wants me to be kind of a little bit mundane or whatever. You know?

**Craig:** I could not agree more. In fact, I think the problem is what people think the word “grab” means. I think they think it means everything has to explode on page one, and then on page two the planet collides into another planet, and on page three you find out that your dad is really your mother. That’s just plot. I am not grabbed by that ever. I’m grabbed by that intangible thing.

I can read three pages where nobody says a word and nothing is happening and yet while I’m reading it I think I’m in the hands of somebody. They’re doing something. I’m fascinated by this. I want to keep – I’m grabbed.

So, that’s the problem. When they hear the first three pages got to grab you, they think, oh my god, let’s just get out the clowns juggling, the chainsaws, and people on fire and all. No. No, no. It means just write something that makes me want to keep reading. That’s it. And usually, at least for me, the thing that makes me want to keep reading is it’s good. I can’t define it any better than that.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s good. There are plenty of movies where, I mean, god, can you imagine sitting down and reading the first three pages of Unforgiven, which is one of the best screenplays ever written. And I’m pretty sure it starts with a guy just feeding pigs while his kids watch, and then he can’t get on a horse. And he’s old and he’s tired. And there’s a grave there. Right? Zzzz.

Except it’s written so beautifully. And you wouldn’t know from the first few pages what’s coming.

All right, let’s get to our next question. Heather from Agora Hills wonders, “If I have a specific scene from an old movie that I would like to play alongside the end credits, how do I write it? Do I put it in before Fade Out and before The End, or in between those two? The only examples I’ve been able to find simply state Roll or Over Credits, then whatever it is the writer wants to show. They didn’t write Fade Out or The End at all.”

This feels like a question we can just solve right here permanently. This feels like it has an answer.

**Malcolm:** Give it.

**Craig:** My answer is you get to the end of the movie, you want to do stuff over credits, you can say Fade Out if you want to Fade Out, or Cut to Black, and then you write Roll Credits, and then you describe whatever the hell you want. And then instead of saying the end just write End Credits. And you’re done.

**Malcolm:** Yes.

**Craig:** All right. We’ve answered that. Heather, that’s the answer. That’s literally the answer. Damon writes, “I’m currently working on a sci-fi spec and I’m getting into some complicated storytelling territory. It’s not a time travel movie, but I can compare it to that kind of created world with lots of moving parts, difficult to understand science, and multiple timelines. Some of these elements won’t show up in the film, but I need to understand them to make sure I have all of my bases covered in the final story. Do you have any suggestions or tools for keeping complicated details in order as you figure out how the story will play out?”

Malcolm, any suggestions for Damon?

**Malcolm:** I will say that in general being complicated and messy is probably my biggest weakness as a writer. And I advise people to bat that shit down and get it to where you can express it verbally very, very cleanly.

I saw a movie, I’m going to go ahead and name the filmmaker. There are films in which when you start doing world-building if your rules aren’t neat and tidy, you have to constantly keep resetting the rules and explaining a new rule. Right?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** And that can become exhausting.

**Craig:** It is. Well, it’s exhausting because you feel like all they’re doing is constantly moving the goal posts. Why should I believe anything you’re telling me when ten minutes later you’re going to say, oh, but only if blah-blah-blah?

**Malcolm:** Yep. And M. Night did it in that movie there’s a pool in it. You couldn’t see the people.

**Craig:** Lady in the Water.

**Malcolm:** Yeah. And it’s like, so, rules and world-building really need to be reduced to what is active and matters, because honestly one of the things I learned about sci-fi writing in general – you may know this already – but this was a revelation to me. In general, when you pick – like let’s say you’re writing something that’s set in the future or whatever, right, where there is some sci-fi dynamic. Usually there is one thing that is different about the world than that is kind of the main thing you’re exploring.

So, if you look at Minority Report, it is this is how crime is solved in the future. And yeah, they’ve got flying cars and shit, but that’s the main thing, and that’s what you keep coming back to. And when you’re just doing a world in general, which I’ve seen, I have a buddy who has a history, he does this a lot, right? And it’s not one thing you’re investigating. It just becomes a sprawling mass – it’s like a comic book.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a comic book or maybe it’s, you know, a very involved miniseries. But, yeah, I mean, if you look at Star Wars, other than the space ships and things, what’s the thing, the force. That’s the thing.

**Malcolm:** Inception you’re entering the brain. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Exactly. So, I would say tools-wise, Damon, I’m not sure what to recommend here. I know a lot of people like this program, Scrivener, because it apparently lets you organize all sorts of things and then tag them back and forth together and connect them to a screenplay. I’ve never used it. My main tool is a corkboard. Corkboard and index cards.

**Malcolm:** So unsexy.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s like you get the work done by getting the work done. So, you write everything down, you put it up on the board. Things that are related, you connect them together. And what ends up happening over time is you just know it. You just know your world. You know what’s going on, especially because you’re inventing it. But the complicated things and the feedback, I know that Rian Johnson when he was writing Looper was really careful about that. And he had very carefully worked out diagrams so he understood. So anybody asked him a question, he has an answer for it. So, I think maybe the tool is your brain and the suggestion is work hard, which you’re going to have to because it does sound kind of complicated.

We’ll do one more. What do you say, one more?

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’ll done one more.

**Malcolm:** One more.

**Craig:** Lucas, he’s going to give us our last one of the day. Lucas writes, “I just finished a revision on a screenplay and here’s the thing. The screenplay has no dialogue. It’s something like the first half hour of There Will Be Blood.” Love that movie.

**Malcolm:** All-timer.

**Craig:** All-timer. “Do you have any advice or experience on restricting yourselves this way? Do you have any specific things you do when trying to tell the story visually? Any general advice on telling a story like this?”

There’s a couple of things, I mean, WALL-E comes to mind, that very long extended no dialogue section. And our forefathers who started screenwriting, they didn’t have dialogue, right? They weren’t talkies. So they had to write almost everything like that and then just little cards of dialogue.

When you’re writing extended sequences with no dialogue, are there some tricks? Some tips?

**Malcolm:** Be efficient. You know what I’m saying? Because you’re asking a lot. And that will actually probably help you clarify whatever the purpose is in any given scene. And I think personally, I don’t know, this still feels like something that would drive some screenwriters crazy. I think it’s OK to cheat. I’m not someone who believes in never do anything that you can’t film or whatever, especially if you’re doing something like this. You might have to write a sentence that lets the audience know what they need to be expecting moving forward through this scene. You know what I’m saying? Like in this scene Tom is about to confront his inner most fear. Because you ain’t got no dialogue. You know what I’m saying?

In this scene Tom is going to – like you can cheat like that, I think. Especially in a situation like this.

**Craig:** I agree, but I’d do a little differently, and I don’t think it’s cheating at all, in that what I think is if there’s not going to be dialogue, but I want the audience to understand what the character is thinking, then I am OK with writing their dialogue in italics in action. So, they look at something and it’s like we’re reading their minds kind of. But we know it’s not going to be spoken. But I get it. I know that an actor can perform that face.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** And I know that that face is something the audience can perceive. So to me, that’s all right. That’s completely all right. The cheating that drives me the craziest is when people introduce characters and tell us about their life story when all I’m doing is looking at them sitting at a bar and nothing else, so that’s cheating. But this is different, right?

So, if you have a character, he turns the corner, and he sees a man holding a gun to his brother’s head. And so let’s say our character here is Charlie. Charlie stops, stares. And then I might put in parenthesis, (Please don’t, please). He can act that. Charlie can act that. So, I try and think a lot about that, because it can become very technical and it can get boring, I think, for people reading.

You know, when people read scripts, I think a lot of them just read the dialogue.

**Malcolm:** Damn right.

**Craig:** And so I perversely then spend so much time thinking about the not dialogue, because I want them to read it. So I try and make the not dialogue entertaining, and interesting, and fun, because if they’re not reading it, then they’re just getting the dialogue and they’re not seeing the movie.

You know, I think we’ll hold back a couple of these other questions for next time. I think we got a good show in.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, they don’t all have to be two hours long.

**Malcolm:** Nah, they don’t, Craig.

**Craig:** No. They don’t.

**Malcolm:** It’s OK.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like if you and I did this show together, let’s say we killed John.

**Malcolm:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Keep talking.

**Malcolm:** No, I understand exactly what you’re saying.

**Craig:** I think the show would be – it would run 45 minutes, right? That’s not the end of the world.

**Malcolm:** It would run hot, too, though.

**Craig:** It would run hot. See, that’s the thing. The 45 minutes would be fiery.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** Fiery. People would talk.

**Malcolm:** Right. There’d be occasional falling outs between us in the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, and when we say occasional we mean every single episode something would go wrong. Well, with that being our last question, I think we should probably go to One Cool Things.

All right, so let’s bring John back to wrap our show up now that we’ve answered those questions expertly. Mr. August?

**John:** Pleasure to be back. My One Cool Thing this week is Patrick Lenton’s story of the Dog in Skyrim. So, this is actually a Twitter thread he did a year ago, and someone put it back up in Twitter this last week. And I just remember how much I loved it. So, it’s this guy who’s playing Skyrim and he basically tells this long story of how in Skyrim he’s sort of adopted this dog. And the dog was just an incredible drain on his life, because he was always so worried about the dog dying that he had to sort of do all these things to try to keep the dog alive. And to like build a house where he could have a family and have an orphan who could adopt the dog so the dog wouldn’t be killed.

And it just reminded me so much of playing Skyrim, but also it felt very much like how life actually is, is that you end up becoming attached to this one thing and then you sort of focus all of your energy on saving this one thing, even if it’s not your real goal. So you end up not fighting dragons. You end up sort of worrying about mining ore and saving this virtual dog who you don’t really care about, but you just don’t want to see die. So, that was a great recap of the experience of trying to save a dog in Skyrim but also sort of go through your life.

**Craig:** Yeah. I play Skyrim, of course, and I play every Bethesda game. Fallout 4. And one of the first things I do when I play those games is I just make a choice. No companions. Don’t want them. Don’t want them near me. Don’t want to care about them. Don’t want to bring them with me. I got that dog in Fallout and I immediately sent it home. Just stay at home.

**Malcolm:** That’s fucked.

**Craig:** Everybody that was like can I walk around with you, no you can’t. Yes you can until I get the quest that that unlocks, and then I’m sending you home. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** That is awful.

**John:** So, I’m playing Skyrim right now, so I’m playing the up-res version of it and really enjoying it. So, I do have like one companion I go through and I did kill my first companion and I felt just horrible about it. This guy who I am playing with now seems really sturdy, but I’m not going to be upset if he dies. But I’m definitely not adopting any orphans. I don’t care about my little house and breeze home. I’m trying not to play that. I’m actually just playing the quest.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. I can’t remember, I know in Fallout 4 you can fall in love and sleep with your companions, but I don’t think you can do that in Skyrim.

**John:** You sort of can. There are companions that you can marry and companions you can’t marry, but I married the first time and I completely lost interest in the game once I got married.

**Craig:** Just like life.

**Malcolm:** Just like life.

**Craig:** Just drains the color out of everything, doesn’t it? It’s amazing.

**John:** [laughs] Why are there no blow jobs in Skyrim? That’s the real question.

**Craig:** Why are there no blow jobs? I almost had the first gay sex of my life in Fallout 4. Almost. I came close.

**Malcolm:** And you ended up having it in real life. You were like, fuck it, didn’t happen in Fallout 4, so I decided to in real life.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was like, exactly, like that guy turned me down, so I got to get Grindr. No, I came close. I came close. But what can I say? I got to be me. I ended up sleeping with the newspaper editor lady. I don’t know. She had a way about her. But I got close. I got close, John. I’m getting there.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Give me time. All right, my One Cool Thing is a super short One Cool Thing, but it’s also videogame based. Every year San Diego Studios puts out MLB The Show for the Sony PlayStation platform. And this year they are up to MLB The Show 17. MLB The Show series is fascinating because of the weird way that licensing worked for a long time with Major League Baseball. They had given their exclusive rights to I think Electronic Arts and the only way that you could get the rights to baseball player’s names and likenesses is if you made a game for your specific platform, but you couldn’t cross platform games.

So, the Electronic Arts game was not very good, but MLB The Show is spectacular and it’s just getting better and better. And the reason that it’s my One Cool Thing this year is because this version of the game does this – there was something that was making me crazy about this game for so long, but I understood it was hard. Baseballs have stitches on them. That’s why you can throw curveballs and sliders. You can make them do things. But similarly when you hit a baseball really hard, it will not travel in a straight line. It will curve. It will bend. Sometimes it almost seems like it takes off in the air mid-air because of top spin and air pressure. All this stuff.

And, of course, in videogames it’s hard to do. Well, this year they nailed it. It just looks so good. When you hit a baseball coming off the bat it just bends and it drops and it hangs. It does all the things that baseballs do. So, I love that. Love this game. If you’re a baseball fan, like I am, and the season has begun, MLB The Show 17 for Sony PlayStation 4. Highly recommend.

Malcolm, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Malcolm:** I do. I thought of it. My One Cool Thing is Fantastic Negrito is opening up–

**John:** I knew it.

**Malcolm:** He’s opening up for an artist named Sturgill Simpson. And it’s a big deal to us. We wanted to get on tour with him for a while. When you bring up other musicians, it’s very hard to find people who, for Negrito anyway, are like, oh yeah, I’ve been watching that guy. You know what I’m saying? I’m into his shit. And what Sturgill represents, and the fact that Negrito already knew about him, and that we tried to get on his tour before, it’s a big deal for us because it represents something. Like it’s not about this is an established artist so much as this feels like a connection in the trajectory of this dude’s career that is meaningful. Like I said, it represents something. So, that’s a cool thing. He’s opening up for Sturgill all over the country.

**Craig:** Well, pretty much everything this guy is doing is working these days. So, I have to assume that’s going to work, too.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced, as always, by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Jeff Bayson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones Craig and Malcolm tackled today. For short questions, though, I’m on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Malcom is @malcolmspellman.

**Malcolm:** Yep.

**John:** We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes podcast. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there leave us a comment or a review. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

And you can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net. You can listen to them through the apps you can find on your applicable app store.

So, Malcolm, thank you so much for being on the show this week. You were fantastic as always.

**Malcolm:** Thank you for having me this week.

**John:** And Craig and I will be back next week. Hopefully my microphone will be back and I can join for an entire episode. But until then, have a great week.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Thanks guys. Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Live Show Tickets](http://hollywoodheart.org/upcoming/)
* [The Hatton Garden Job](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5351458/)
* [Patrick Lenton’s Dog Story](https://twitter.com/patricklenton/status/717163582115307521)
* [MLB The Show 17](http://theshow.com/)
* [Fantastic Negrito](http://www.fantasticnegrito.com/)
* [Malcolm Spellman](https://twitter.com/MalcolmSpellman) on Twitter
* [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 Jeff Bayson ([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_295.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 293 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at three stories in the news and figure out how we might convince a director like say Jordan Peele to attach himself to the project. Craig, have you seen Get Out yet?

**Craig:** Get out.

**John:** Get out. I’m guessing you’ve not seen it yet, because you don’t see a lot of movies.

**Craig:** I haven’t, but I’m going to because everybody loves it and everybody says it’s great. And I’m sure it is great. I’m sure it’s awesome. And I’m a huge fan of Key & Peele. And I know this is different. So, yes I’m going to see it. Haven’t seen it yet. Not ashamed.

**John:** You should not be ashamed. But you should see it. And I’m looking forward to seeing it whenever I get a chance to see it. It’s not here in Paris yet. But hopefully it will come here sooner, because it has been so successful. And I’m so happy for that.

But I do think that Jordan Peele could get nearly any movie to happen. Like he has so much heat at this moment that the world is his oyster.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you might be right. The list of directors in features is incredibly short. And all of them work. All of them. There is currently as we all know a push for diversity among the cadre of feature film directors, which is blindingly white and blindingly male. And so I can’t think for even a second that you’re not exactly right. I would imagine that he’s on the top of every list. And apparently well earned. But not yet willing to confirm that on my own behalf because I haven’t seen the movie.

**John:** Yeah. But I trust that everyone in America is correct and it’s a phenomenal movie, so I look forward to seeing it. But let us talk not about a movie that already exists but movies that could exist. It is our segue to How Would This Be a Movie, one of our favorite features to do. This week we needed a special to really help us out here.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I’m very happy to introduce a writer who has done several of these true life adaptations. Irene Turner is a novelist and screenwriter of An American Crime. Her new film is The Most Hated Woman in America, which just debuted at South by Southwest. Welcome Irene.

**Irene Turner:** Hi guys. Thanks for having me on. I have seen Get Out.

**Craig:** Get Out.

**Irene:** All right. And I’m out. I did love it, so there you go.

**Craig:** All right.

**Irene:** And I don’t even go to horror films.

**Craig:** Well, I’ve heard it’s not really a horror film. It’s more like a – well, like old school thriller.

**Irene:** Old school thriller. And the end – and you’re cringing in your seat and wanting to run. And I enjoyed it. But no spoilers.

**Craig:** Got it. Got it.

**John:** Zero spoilers. So, you are just back from South by Southwest. You’re back from Austin. And like literally just last night landed. So thank you for coming to do this. But tell us about this movie because I think as long as I’ve known you you’ve been working on this movie. So this is the story of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a famous atheist, who is kidnapped. But what is your journey on this movie? How did you come to write this movie?

**Irene:** It’s been a minute on this one. And I guess we started – the idea got brought to us by our producers, Max Handelman and Elizabeth Banks. And neither Tommy O’Haver nor I, who is the director and also my writing partner, had heard of her.

**Craig:** You hadn’t heard of Elizabeth Banks?

**Irene:** Well, Elizabeth Banks we had heard of. But Madalyn Murray O’Hair we had not heard of. And in fact nobody under the age of about 70 had heard of her.

**Craig:** Except of course for me.

**Irene:** Well, except for Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** I’m sort of an MMOH fan.

**Irene:** Well then there you go. But Madalyn was once really well known for fighting to get forced prayer out of public schools in Baltimore, Maryland. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court with it. And after that formed an organization called American Atheist. And kind of fighting atheist causes and fighting for First Amendment rights, which are near and dear to my heart.

And the great thing about her as making a movie about her is that she was conflicted, complicated, opinionated, got in her own way. And had problematic relationships with her family. So, oh boy, strong character. Fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. It seems to me. I mean, one of the things we talk about all the time when we go through these How Would This Be a Movie is we see the facts of some complications, circumstantial drama, and then we are inevitably asking, OK, but what about the people. Where is the people stuff? And she was a fascinating person and kind of a little bit of a monster.

**Irene:** She was a big bit of a monster. She got in her own way. She had problematic relationships with her kids. She smothered them and pushed them. And her one son, Billy Murray, Jr. actually, ended up being an alcoholic and had other issues and finally found god.

**Craig:** Oh man.

**Irene:** Yeah. And at this point is still alive and is fighting to get prayer back in public schools.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Irene:** But she was so difficult. She ended up having sometimes hiring felons to work for her at her atheist organization. They didn’t pay very well. And she felt like she could just judge character and it would be fine. Kind of difficult.

**Craig:** And how did that work out for her?

**Irene:** Not real well. See the movie.

**Craig:** And this movie, this is a Netflix film, correct?

**Irene:** Yeah. One of the reasons it took so long to make is that Netflix as a streaming organization making original movies didn’t exist when we started writing it. And so Netflix, I think, fills a really important niche to get independent small films out there. It’s not really a big studio movie. Mm, murdered atheist that nobody remembers except Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Franchise!

**Irene:** Mm-hmm. But where’s the sequel potential? So just getting to make those kind of niche films. And Netflix has a lot of other kind of films as well. But I think they’ve been really a force in the indie world for making sure that what otherwise might be a festival film and two theaters in New York and LA, at best, gets out there.

**John:** So, talk to us about, so Elizabeth Banks and Max Handelman came to you with this idea. Was it just the idea? Was it a specific book? What were you working off of when you sat down to start writing this movie?

**Irene:** We had thought about using a book and then that morphed into there’s so many different points of view about her and what she wrote, what other people wrote about her. And we ended up, it’s actually original. We sources. We used her diary. We used books about her. She did a lot of press.

**Craig:** She did talk a lot, didn’t she?

**Irene:** She talked a lot. I appreciate that. Because, yeah, she lived in an era where Johnny Carson would invite people to get on the Tonight Show and talk about atheism in America. So her opinions on things are well known and so we kind of gathered from lots of sources to try and discover what made her tick. You know, what she wanted in life. How she got where she was. What, you know.

**Craig:** So, when you go through all these sources, because I’m dealing with this right now on this miniseries I’m doing. It’s based on true events, and so true people. Did you have any sort of legal guidance about what you could and couldn’t use without having say rights to an estate or rights to this or that?

**Irene:** Well, the basic principle is having multiple sources for facts that are in the public sphere. The great thing about Madalyn is she did give so many interviews and she’s been written about so much that nothing is only coming from one source. If you’re only coming from one source on something, then you can’t use it without getting the rights to that source.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**Irene:** That’s the basic answer.

**Craig:** OK. Fair enough.

**John:** Were there any concerns about libel or sort of the public rights of the people who are still involved? So you say that her son is still alive. So was there any sort of zone of safety around that character to make sure you weren’t doing anything with that character that the person could come after you for?

**Irene:** Yeah. With him, yes, we had to be very, very careful, because we don’t have his life rights. And we had to use sources from the time period and what he said or did to newspapers. Fortunately, he did a lot of speaking tours and things like that, which were reported on. But you know with the characters who are no longer living, you can’t libel the dead, and so that makes the standard much easier to deal with.

**Craig:** Can you slander them?

**Irene:** Only if you want to.

**Craig:** Because I know so many dead people I want to say wrong things about.

**Irene:** You can get sued by family members of dead people who are saying that you’re libeling their family legacy and things. And it can kind of get tricky. On An American Crime we had a 90-year-old lawyer who pretty much hated the film. I mean, and it’s a child abuse film and there are children abusing other children. Very difficult subject matter. Some of them are alive, although most of the living ones had taken assumed names in the interim. So just tricky. And he just didn’t think we should be discussing the subject at all, in my humble opinion. And so 90% of the dialogue in that film is from court transcripts. And he actually made us adjust a scene where a 12-year-old boy who has been abusing another girl, we have him teasing a dog. And we had to cut that back because there was no evidence that this character had been teasing a dog in this way.

**Craig:** Oh, well.

**Irene:** It’s a standard.

**Craig:** And is that 90-year-old lawyer still available? Because he sounds great. Or has he since moved on?

**Irene:** I don’t know. And I’m trying to forget him because I got stuck at the last minute with annotating everything and anything. And it was not easy.

**Craig:** Well, you know what? Maybe we’re free to slander him at this point. You know, if he’s, you know.

**Irene:** Dead? Yeah.

**John:** So your movie, people can see it starting on March 24 on Netflix, correct?

**Irene:** March 24 on Netflix. Yes. Worldwide day-and-date. Which is crazy to me. You want to see Melissa Leo in Spanish, Italian, French, go to it.

**Craig:** That’s so great. And she is, from what I hear – I mean, obviously I haven’t seen it yet because it’s not out – but I hear that she, as per usual, is spectacular in this role.

**Irene:** She is Melissa Leo-ing all over the Melissa Leo and she is great. If you don’t like Melissa Leo, don’t watch this film because she dominates it in a really great way. Like there’s a fabulous supporting cast and things like that, but the center of it is Madalyn. So, and she is–

**Craig:** The Most Hated Woman in America. So that’s Netflix. March 24. Melissa Leo. Josh Lucas. Adam Scott. Pretty great cast you go there. Directed by your writing partner, Tommy O’Haver.

**Irene:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Well fantastic. Congratulations. But I feel like we should use you here because you’re obviously good at this. Because what we like to do is find these articles and try and figure out how would they be a movie. And you’re kind of an expert at that. So would you be willing to help us with this?

**Irene:** I would love to.

**Craig:** Well–

**John:** Very good.

**Craig:** John, we’ve got ourselves a partner.

**John:** We got a partner here. So, our first story is The New Underground Railroad. It’s a New Yorker article by Jake Halpern. So it’s centered around a safe house in Buffalo, New York, where asylum seekers from around the world prepare to flee the United States for Canada. So, it’s based around this New Yorker article, but I actually first encountered this as part of a Trumpcast episode, Slate’s Trumpcast, where Halpern did an interview with Virginia Heffernan and it was a really great piece. And so if you are a podcast person, which you probably are because you’re listening to this podcast, I would actually go to the podcast first because it’s really great and it gets much more into Halpern’s reporting of the story which I find is also fascinating.

So, guys, how are we going to start digging into this story because there’s a lot here? So, we’re looking at this house, basically this old abandoned schoolhouse called Vive, which is founded by these nuns, and it’s been a safe house for asylum seekers since 1984. We have the different asylum seekers who are coming through here. We have Halpern himself. Where do we want to start with the idea of this as a movie?

**Craig:** Irene, what do you think?

**Irene:** Hahaha, I knew you were going to make me start.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Irene:** I mean, it’s a great setting for a movie. And there’s the potential for great characters. And what intrigues me about it, and it’s the sort of thing I would have enjoyed doing, is it’s a spin on all the kind of movies where people are trying to get into the United States. And so the spin on people, A, trying to get out. People undergoing great hardships to both get here and then to get to Canada.

And also these individuals’ stories, there’s so many of them. I mean, the problem for me would be like picking the right stories of the right refugees and also avoiding the trap of going in, you know, kind of from the American protagonist. That you want to make sure that you’ve got a variety of voices in there. Kind of picking the characters and picking the separate journeys. The other problem that just struck me right away was make sure you haven’t set yourself up for a play. Because this sanctuary is so isolated and contained and just kind of know where you’re going to be able to break out of it and see parts of the – you know, like the containment. Make sure you’re not writing a play.

**Craig:** That is absolutely the thing that jumped out at me as well. I was very concerned with the insularity of it and the internal nature of it, because it really is in this one small house in a terrible neighborhood. A neighborhood that’s so bad that they warn everybody, “Don’t leave the house.” They even describe it sort of quasi-prison like in a sense, even though they’re willingly there. But it is cramped and it is small. And they are using this really to funnel people, as you said, sort of in and then out. So it seems to me if I were approaching this material, I would probably start by saying this is not going to be a movie about this house. This house is going to be one part of a movie that is about being a refugee and your relationship to the United States and your relationship to the world and the struggles that you have.

And I guess I would probably call Stephen Gaghan up and just say, “Hey Stephen, remember doing Traffic? Do you remember doing Syriana? Can you do that again, but about immigration?” Because it just seems like this is in his wheelhouse to gather disparate stories – a government official, a fleeing person, a nun, a border patrol. Telling all sides of this story so that all of the proverbial blind men feeling the elephant, we get the whole elephant. It just feels like I would want to Gaghan this up.

**John:** Yeah. I definitely was thinking of Syriana and I was also thinking of Babel, where you have these separate stories being told in different parts of the world. And basically you’re setting up these characters who are all going to cross through this nexus and then try to find their way into Canada through different means. And so let’s talk about who some of these characters are. I’m going to pick out three, but there’s more who are in the world of the story.

The first we meet is Tita. She’s an Eritrean woman. She’s trying to reunite with her family who are already in Canada. She has a husband who she got married to at a previous refugee situation. So she was able to make it out of Africa, I think to somewhere in Europe, then to Brazil, then to Mexico. Then she crossed the border and she made her way to Buffalo, New York. So she has this huge journey, paying this trafficker $15,000 to get her to this place.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And still not quite sure if she’s going to be able to get back to her husband and her young son who doesn’t really necessarily remember her. So she’s got an amazing story.

**Craig:** And she’s sort of married. But the marriage is a religious marriage and it’s not a government-recognized marriage, so there’s – actually one of the things about that story that really jumped out at me was how important paperwork suddenly becomes. And in just now your life is in limbo because of papers.

**Irene:** Papers define who you are. It defines your personhood. It makes you either a person or a non-person, or someone who can go places or can’t. And we’re not used to that for those of us who are not refugees or whose families have been in this country for a long time. That being defined by a piece of paper says what and who you are.

**Craig:** That part of it I found fascinating.

**John:** Absolutely. So another character who we follow through this, and I think Halpern has the most direct relationship with, is Fernando. He’s the young Columbian man fleeing gang violence. So he’s made his way to Vive and he’s trying to find his way across. And so this is where we get into a strange part of the immigration law here. Whatever country, either US or Canada, that you enter into first, that has to be the place where you’re supposed to be seeking asylum. And so if he were just to cross the border and try to get asylum in Canada, they would just send him right back. And so there’s a loophole though: if he can cross further into Canada and go to not a place on the border, but deeper in, he can seek asylum.

So he’s trying to find a way to get across from New York into Canada and get deep enough in that he can go to a place and sort of try to document himself there.

Here we have a young man fleeing gang violence. He’s the most action-adventure things that are happening in the New York/American section of the story.

**Irene:** Oh yeah. Absolutely. Because there’s that tension in his journey. How far is he going to get? I mean, he really needs to get – it’s not just step over a line and then freedom. You’re outside of the Eastern Bloc. You’re over the Berlin Wall, and then it’s done, in the ‘70s, or things like that. And he’s also got the most tenuous situation in terms of he’s not coming from a war-torn country. In a sense it’s a gang-torn country and he’s seeking asylum for those kind of reasons. And those are more difficult.

And so, yes, his journey is very fraught. And the physicality of that. That gets you outside that box.

**John:** Absolutely. What I liked about it is like if you follow Tita’s journey, it’s like a long journey. There’s a lot of little speedbumps along the way. But his is the most like an action movie, where he literally is going into a dark field and not sure what’s on the far side. And it’s that panic of getting lost and falling in a river and nearly freezing to death. He has the most sort of movie adventure beats. It’s also nice that that probably happened late in the story when you’ve already gotten to this place of comparable safety.

**Craig:** There’s something inherently ironic, which we’re always looking for. Somebody is escaping violence and the escape from violence is putting them in a situation where they might die.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And that’s what we’re afraid of in the back of our head. That the narrative is leading us to that Twilight Zone ending. And so we’re so, so hopeful we don’t get that.

**Irene:** Yes. The stakes are very, very high for all of them and especially him.

**John:** So the last characters I’ll single out are the two Mohammeds. They’ve come from Afghanistan. They are both soldiers. They’re here in the US for training. And so they have a day off where they go to Washington, DC. They don’t get back on the bus. Instead they’ve hooked up with an Afghan family who has gotten them up to this haven in Buffalo, New York. And that’s where they’re trying to make the crossover into Canada. They are the only of the stories that we’re singling out here where they were not successful and they are ultimately sent back to Afghanistan.

So they were trying to get out of Afghanistan because they were going to be assigned to watch over the poppy fields and they felt like they were going to die if they went back to Afghanistan. So, they felt their life was in huge danger if they go back. And ultimately they are sent back. So I think we learned the least about them in the story, but I liked that they were coming in a very different way than the other two characters.

**Irene:** Also, John, I think their story is good and maybe if you were diving further into this you might find another one that’s good as well. But you have to show the refugees that don’t make it. That get turned back. It can’t just be the feel good story of the ones that got through, because that’s not the real situation, and you kind of have a duty to make sure that you’re showing the heartbreak and the sadness as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. This one, I think the value was that there is failure at the end of it, but probably would want a little something else going on here. I would want a parent who had lost a child. Or I would want someone falling in love with another person. They don’t even speak the same language, but they’re two refugees who have both lost people they love, and now they’re in this little house and they fall in love. And then one of them gets to move on, and one of them has to go back.

So, I want something a little bit more. The nature of their story, I mean, obviously in a true-life sense is tragic. But in a narrative sense, didn’t – I would probably veer away from the specificity of it, because I’m not sure I would get enough drama that I would want. Or a different kind of drama.

**Irene:** Yeah. I was fascinated and the article didn’t go into them as much, but their residence – they tried to make private rooms for the people who just had been there forever. And who couldn’t move. And that’s hard to show cinematically. But as a small thread of a larger picture, there’s a residence there and I would try and show it.

**John:** So let’s talk about what the characters might be in this movie. So, there’s obviously the people who are running the organization. So it was originally created by nuns. It’s no longer really run by nuns. And some of the people who are working there are former refugees who have been through the system or are there for one reason or another. Also, a question of whether Halpern himself becomes a character in the story. Because especially in the podcast I listened to, he’s a very big character in the Fernando story. And there’s a really interesting line of like as a journalist does he cross over or not cross over in terms of like giving advice to this kid who is trying to make it across. And he has the normal human and kind of paternal feelings of like I don’t want this kid to die out in the woods. And yet as a journalist he needs to step back and sort of like report the story and not create the story.

So, he’s a potentially interesting character, but also potentially troubling for the sort of white savior aspect of this character in this movie. What did you guys think?

**Craig:** Well, on that front I actually never really find the crusading journalist character particularly, well, let’s not call them crusading journalist, but the protective journalist character, it just feels like a false struggle. Because I don’t have that problem in my life because I’m not a journalist. So it’s something that’s very specific. It’s a very specific ethical problem for journalists. I’m not sure I would love to watch that unfold on screen.

If I’m watching a border patrol guy who catches him and has to bring him back, and then catches him again and brings him back, and then the third time he thinks he’s going to go out there again and he might die tonight because of X, Y, or Z, what should I do. That I find compelling. And it’s not about savoir. It’s just about two people on the opposite side of a fight discovering this shared humanity. I would probably go in that direction more than the journalist direction.

**Irene:** Yeah it’s not The Year of Living Dangerously, or you know, films where journalists are going into hot spots and trying to bring back a story that people need to hear. In that sense it’s not that you couldn’t have him as a minor character, but I think it would be a mistake to make him kind of the eyes of the audience character, or the protagonist, or starting the story on him starting this story. I think it would be problematic.

**John:** I agree. So let’s talk about this as a movie. And so where do we see a movie like this happening? Like what are the scenarios in which this kind of movie could exist?

**Craig:** Netflix. Amazon.

**Irene:** We love us some Netflix.

**Craig:** It’s not a studio film.

**John:** Oh, I think it is a studio movie. I think this to me feels like the studio’s Oscar movie. So this to me feels like an A24, it feels like we’re going to go for it and we’re going to push. And I think because it’s timely, because it does have the possibility of some really big visuals, because you’re going to a lot of different environments, so you get to go to Africa, you get to go to Afghanistan, you go to Mexico. So I just feel like you’re going to be able to find the filmmaker, probably the international filmmaker, who is the right person for this. And I think you’re going to be able to do something great.

**Irene:** Cast-dependent. You better right that script so well that that name cast comes in kind of brings it up to an Oscar-bait movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, even A24, you’re still talking about an independent financed film. But it would have to be – yeah, so I mean a studio could pick it up and release it, but I totally agree with Irene. This is where you need somebody like Matt Damon for Syriana, or you need, well, all of the people that you had in Traffic. Quite a collection of actors.

**Irene:** An Idris Elba. You know, kind of a cast that combines on that kind of level where they’re really making interesting choices and give actors meaty roles.

**Craig:** Right. Like Emily Blunt is in Sicario. I’m not sure you can get Sicario made without Emily Blunt. So, I think that that’s correct. And this, by the way, this is part of the problem that writers run into when they’re trying to avoid the white savior problem, and then what happens is a lot times the foreign sales people, because in independent films the independent film financiers aren’t going to do it unless they can presale the film overseas. And the foreign sales entities are saying, “Well we need one of the following list of stars. And they have to be the star.” And they’re all white. And now what do you do? This is where it gets insidious. This is a movie that has to be pretty carefully – so I guess what I’m saying is I don’t see it as a mainstream studio developed project.

I think it would be independent and then released.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a version of this where it’s sort of like a Plan B, Brad Pitt, you know, like 12 Years a Slave is an example of a movie that you’re able to make because, yes, he can play one part in it, but like it just has enough high class people around it that people are going to – a studio will roll the dice and spend the money they need to spend on making this movie. And, yes, it’s very execution dependent, but in good execution you’ve made a movie that could do really well.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a movie to be made about immigration and the state of being a refugee in the world today. I don’t know if the halfway house is where I would begin. I guess I would put it that way. I think it’s a little bottleneck-y for me.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get on to our next story. This is called You May Want to Marry My Husband. It is by Amy Krouse Rosenthal writing for the New York Times Modern Love section. So Rosenthal, who at the time of writing the article was dying from cancer, makes the pitch for potential suitors about why her husband is such a catch. So it’s her writing about her husband and how great he is. And how much she’ll miss him, yet also ladies pay attention. This is a guy you want to keep on your list. Where do we start with this kind of movie? Who wants to take this off?

**Irene:** Well, this is so outside the kind of movie that I might write. The problem with this is, and I’m guessing it has been optioned because it got so much buzz, and the author has since passed away. The article itself is sort of a jumping off point. There’s so many questions I have. Is it about their relationship? The article makes me want to read her memoir and read more, actually more about her husband to see if there’s – like what’s the story?

We’ve kind of seen the movies, like is it Step Mom with Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon, where Susan Sarandon is dying and Julia Roberts is going to kind of mother her kids and things. Is it the husband’s story after the author of the article has passed away, has died? It’s really – I looked at it and I went, wow, I’m glad nobody offered me a lot of money to adapt this because it’s got like a thousand directions you could go. And I’m not sure what the right one would be.

**Craig:** Well, it’s very sad, obviously, and it’s very sweet. Amy Krouse Rosenthal is an excellent writer. You can see that she’s just in total command of her art. And here she is. Actually the first line says, “I’ve been trying to write this for a while, but the morphine and lack of juicy cheeseburgers (what has it been now, five weeks without real food?) have drained my energy and interfered with whatever prose prowess remains.”

Well, I disagree. That’s a pretty amazing sentence. And she wrote this on March 3. She died ten days later. It is a beautiful thing and it is the scariest kind of thing to try and turn into a movie because the potential for what snopes.com calls Glurge is extraordinarily high here.

**John:** Define Glurge for us here.

**Irene:** Yes please.

**Craig:** Glurge is, they apply it generally to things that you might see passed around on Facebook and so forth. They are incredibly sentimental, sweet, sappy, tear-jerky stories about dying children or puppies who are missing a leg. Or a grandmother that reunites with her long-lost twin. And it’s so – it’s glurge. It’s overtly whip out your Kleenex time and cry.

So, when you’re talking about a woman penning a letter to America saying, “Won’t one of you marry my husband because I love him very, very much and I’m about to die,” I’m already going, OK, this is very–

**Irene:** It’s saved by her prose, but the movie doesn’t have her prose.

**Craig:** It doesn’t. The movie doesn’t have her voice. Now, you could theoretically create a sense where she’s over the movie like a Ghost, obviously you don’t see her, but you hear her.

**Irene:** But like Ghost. Not the thriller-ish, but yeah.

**Craig:** The way that Kevin Spacey is doing the voiceover in American Beauty and as it turns out he’s dead the whole time. You can hear this voice. But even so, again, the potential for glurge is high. And as a writer, I would not take this job on because specifically I feel like she did what she had to do. She wrote this article. Those were her words. That was her feeling. She did it beautifully. Who needs me to come along and turn it into fake drama? It just seems gross.

So out of respect, frankly, even though I could come up with all sorts of easy, cheapo ways to do this, I wouldn’t. I just wouldn’t.

**John:** I’m not that scared about the glurge. Yes, there’s a lot to be avoided, but I think there’s a lot to sort of lean into here as well. So, yes, we have to be mindful that part of what makes this article so effective is her voice is just so terrific. And we won’t have that literary voice in the movie. But I think you do have a generosity of spirit, a sense of what is special about these two people’s relationship. And to be able to see that is a good thing.

And so while the headline, which she probably didn’t write the headline because they rarely write their own headlines, the headline by itself feels like a great – obviously a great Facebook title, but it’s also a good title for a movie in general. But I think the movie itself may want to be that story of tracking their relationship and sort of like what do you do with that relationship when you know it’s going to end. It’s sort of what happens to a marriage as the kids move out and you have all these plans. And the plans are taken away from you because of this diagnosis.

And we’ve seen the bad version of that so many times. But a really good version of that, a James L. Brooks version of that could be something remarkable. And so I think that’s the opportunity here. How do you take a tragedy and find some good in it? And that’s what she was able to do in her piece. And I think that’s the challenge for anyone trying to take this story and move it to the big screen is finding what is the fresh, engaging way to deal with this thing that could be so horrible. And I think that’s the opportunity.

That’s why I think there is a reason to be thinking about this as a movie.

**Irene:** The thing is it made me want to read her memoir to learn more about her as a person because the article is so much obviously about him and what she wants to leave for him. And that’s how I kind of discover whether I think there was more of a movie in it than this thing right here. Yeah, it scares me. It’s way outside what I generally do and I – ooh.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? I can like to write sentimentally at times. I just feel like – almost feel like this story has put its thumb on the scale so heavily that it doesn’t need me. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s like it doesn’t need me. I would be working really hard to say look at this fresh interesting take on this very sad and yet beautiful thing this woman did. And I just don’t think we need it. This is why I shouldn’t be running a studio, because I’m sure every studio would be like, “Yeah, of course we’re going to make this.”

**Irene:** And it would turn into a Nicholas Sparks movie.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, that’s the thing. It would.

**Irene:** And I can’t write Nicholas Sparks movies. But I couldn’t write, you know, the version that I would want to write, that would be tough.

**Craig:** See, if somebody came to me and said, “Look, we want you to write a movie and we have an idea. And the idea is a woman is dying and she writes a letter to America saying you should marry my husband.” I would say, oh, that’s an amazing idea. I know how to write that movie. And I could see all sorts of fascinating ways to approach it. Not the least of which is tracking this man as these women appear to him because it worked. But he’s so broken and yet so alone and lost and ashamed to think that maybe he would—

There’s a whole exploration of grief and recovery and finding new love. But because it’s real, I don’t want to do it. It feels creepy.

**John:** Craig, is it because it’s real or is it because it’s successful? Like if you had come across this thing and it was not a giant popular article, would you be as scared of it? I don’t think you would be. I have to believe that it’s because this is a big thing out there, and so there’s a giant spotlight on her and this one thing. But if it was just a little thing that only you knew about, you wouldn’t be so worried about it.

**Craig:** No, I wouldn’t. But that’s the point. It’s that there wouldn’t be a thumb on the scale. Because this is so well known, and because she did a brilliant job of achieving her goal here, I’m just kind of using it. It’s like I’m using her pain and her beauty and her brilliance to get you to cry in a movie theater and fork over $12 and buy some popcorn. It just doesn’t feel right.

**John:** Yeah. So I go back to Big Fish. And so I read Big Fish when it was a book. And Daniel Wallace wrote a great book. And it’s really a lot of stories about him and his dad, but I was able to take that and say like, OK, I can’t really use those directly, but it’s a way for me to talk about the things that I want to talk about and incorporate what I knew sort of about that whole world and that emotional terrain. And so I feel like, yes, her story is going to be the jumping off point, but I think there’s great material to explore and great intra-emotional material to explore given this framework.

**Craig:** But Big Fish is fiction.

**John:** But it’s not entirely fiction, though. I mean, yes, it’s fantastical, but the emotional stuff underneath it.

**Craig:** Oh, sure, sure, but it’s different.

**John:** No, but I’m saying Daniel’s relationship with his father, that is the story of Big Fish. And so I was taking a lot of his own personal stuff and mucking around with it. But that’s the nature of what adaptation is.

**Craig:** Yes, but–

**Irene:** The tricky thing with this article is it’s her voice as the voice of the article, and yet if we’re speaking in screenwriter terms, she’s the character who is dying and do you then write a film – you know if it’s an idea as Craig said, then do you write the film about the guy in recovery trying to navigate this post-Amy world? Then that’s something I can kind of see, and yet her voice is so strong that you don’t want to negate that. So then do you write the film that leads up to that? Or do you do double stands?

It scares me. I admit it. Raising hand.

**John:** Yeah. I get why it’s scary. Before we finish this up, I do want to circle back to the Nicholas Sparks of it all. Because I think we’re using Nicholas Sparks as a shorthand for sort of like the bad version of this kind of movie. And just like we sometimes we’ll throw Katherine Heigl for like the bad version of romantic comedies. But we can’t be paralyzed about a whole genre just because there’s bad versions out there that we’re afraid we’re going to trip into. Like there’s bad versions of sort of every genre. I just think there’s potentially a great version of this movie. We shouldn’t be afraid of writing the great version of this movie.

**Craig:** I agree with you. Look, and the truth is I like The Notebook. My issue with Nicholas Sparks’ movies is that there have been so many of them. And they aren’t different enough that over time I feel like I don’t need see them. I saw The Notebook. It was very sweet.

The problem with the Sparks-ing of a story like this isn’t that Nicholas Sparks’ movies are inherently bad. Not at all. It’s that this is real. And it is public. And we have all seen it. And it was specifically intended to be real and public and personal. And none of the Nicholas Sparks stories are real at all. They’re just made up – they’re made up glurge. But they’re oftentimes well done glurge.

**Irene:** Some of them are really great and some of it have become a little bit of a factory.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. This to me – look, you’re going to make all the money on this.

**Irene:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But Irene and I will be here like, yeah, but you know what, we kept it real.

**John:** You kept it real. So, our third and final topic for today is about Prenda. And so this is the movie that you’ve not ever seen before. So, I originally put in the outline this article by Nate Anderson who is writing for Ars Technica about Prenda, but it’s actually so obscure and so far at the end of this story that I think honestly the Wikipedia article is a better place to start your adventures in Prenda.

So, in the early 2010s, a Chicago-based law firm named Prenda Law went after porn downloaders for copyright infringement. And so this is from a different Ars Technica article by Joe Mullen. “The basic scheme worked like this. Prenda Law, or one of several attorneys who worked for the law firm, would file a copyright lawsuit over illegal downloads against a ‘John Doe’ defendant they knew only by an IP address. They would then use the discovery process to find out the subscriber name from various ISPs around the country. Once they got it, they’d send out letters and phone calls demanding a settlement payment, typically around $4,000, warning the defendant that if they didn’t pay quickly they would face public allegations over downloading porn.”

**Craig:** These guys were so brilliant. What an amazing plot. So they’re like, OK, so they’re sitting at home and they go, you know how the Recording Industry Association of America, they send out these letters to people they occasionally catch file-sharing songs, and then they jack them up for a grand or two. We can do that. Oh yeah, we could, but we don’t actually have stuff we own. Well, let’s make some stuff. Let’s make porn and then let’s put it out there ourselves, then let’s watch it, make sure somebody downloads it “illegally.” Then we’ll send them a letter and they’ll totally pay up, because if they don’t everybody is going to find out because we’re going to file a court case that they were watching our screwed up porn.

It’s genius. And it almost worked.

**Irene:** It’s genius. It’s evil. It’s hilarious in a certain sense. And you would totally want to see these guys get caught.

**Craig:** I would totally see this. And I should add that I have a personal friend, a great guy named Ken White, who is a criminal defense attorney. He used to be a federal prosecutor. And he is also the primary author at the website Popehat, which is a pretty popular blog that talks about legal issues about rights.

**Irene:** It’s a great blog.

**Craig:** It’s terrific. Freedom of speech, and so on and so forth. And he has been all over Prenda since the start. He was one of the big – the early investigators of their whole – because somebody basically forwarded him one of the takedown letters that Prenda had sent. And he smelled a rat from the start. I mean, this feels like a Coen Brothers scheme, doesn’t it?

**John:** It does. So I think it’s great that you brought up the Coen Brothers, because I was really having hard time figuring out what are we actually seeing on screen and who are we following. Because they’re so despicable. So ultimately they claim to have raked in about $15 million, or at some points they have claimed $15 million. There’s reasons to doubt that because there’s reasons to doubt everything they’ve ever said.

So in a 2013 civil ruling, they were found to have undertaken vexatious litigation, misrepresentation, calculated deception, professional misconduct, and to have shown moral turpitude.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I think Coen Brothers, Craig, is a really interesting way to go into that, because it allows it to be like nasty and fun at the same time. Because I was worried it was just going to be nasty. And I don’t want to just see a nasty movie.

**Craig:** No, I think it’s hysterical this thing. I mean, look, you’ve got these guys, Paul Hansmeier and John Steele. Right off the bat, those names are amazing, right? And it does feel like Fargo. Like you’re watching weasels turning on each other. These guys, if you read all about this, I mean, they were inventing fake people and there was some guy that they said worked for them and he literally didn’t work for them, but he knew them vaguely. And they were just using his address.

They just get deeper and deeper, and what’s so beautiful about Paul Hansmeier and John Steele as far as I can tell, because I never met these two people, they’re actually not that smart. They’re just ambitious as hell. And watching them get hoisted by their own petard over and over is so incredibly satisfying. So, I just think I would approach this from the black comedy perspective. What about you, Irene?

**Irene:** Absolutely. I mean, everybody likes to see evil lawyers go down. I mean, seriously, it’s almost a trope, and it’s fun every time. And their machinations are so ridiculous. And so all of it, it’s funny. I don’t know if you guys have seen I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore, which won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance – now streaming on Netflix.

**Craig:** There you go.

**Irene:** Oh, I hope Netflix is listening. I love you guys. But yeah, that’s also kind of a Blood Simple-esque story with Melanie Lynskey–

**Craig:** I got to watch it, because I love Melanie Lynskey.

**John:** We all love Melanie.

**Irene:** If you love her, you should see it. It’s an indie – it’s good.

**Craig:** Done. Sold.

**Irene:** But everyone says, oh, you have to have a sympathetic character to follow and we all know that that’s insane. And I mean I keep writing about difficult people and, you know, people who are tough to love and problematic situations and complications are fun and interesting. They make better films. And even these guys, just the joy of watching these guys go down would be just great to write.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you’ll get a natural good guy in the lawyer that’s pursuing, but it’s that Texas, Murdering Texas Chainsaw.

**Irene:** Cheerleader.

**Craig:** The Cheerleader Mom. It’s just watching these petty creepy people who are just greedy little monsters. And they just aren’t anywhere near as smart as they think they are. And just watching the walls close in on them is delicious.

**John:** So, how do we see this though? Is this Fargo on the big screen, or is this Fargo on the small screen? Is this better as a movie, or is this better as a TV show or as a season of a TV show? How do we do this?

**Craig:** Again, it’s casting-dependent entirely. But I could see this absolutely being on the big screen. It’s not going to be some big summer movie, but if you’ve got the right people and you had a great trailer where you really were laughing – and obviously make this for a price, right? So, like the way John Lee made The Founder or something like that. You make this for $20 million and you cast two terrific. You know, you cast Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as Hansmeier and Steele, or whoever. You know, McConaughey and whatever. And you just have fun with it. Yeah, I think you could do just fine.

I mean, keep the expectations low. But it seems like it would be entertaining as hell.

**Irene:** I think you could do the $5 million Get Out version of it, too. You know, kind of the – it feels more like a film because I’m not sure there’s enough substance in there to go ten episodes in terms of twists and back and forth. I mean, it would depend on who I was pitching to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Irene:** Maybe I could find a TV series if I thought I could get a job doing one, but I think I would probably aim for a film version.

**John:** I could also see like Seth Rogan and sort of his folks, Jonah Hill. I could see a version of that that uses those kind of people in there, because that’s sort of the new batch of people we have who do this kind of comedy. And they could do a great job. So, I can see the big screen version of it. But I can also imagine a small screen version of this working.

**Irene:** Actors love playing larger-than-life assholes.

**Craig:** They do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No question. So do I, by the way. I don’t know if people have noticed.

**John:** We’ve heard the voices, Craig.

**Craig:** I have so many different voices.

**John:** Ugh, so many. So at the end of these we like to figure out which of these How Would This Be a Movie will actually become movies. And our batting average has been remarkably good. So, usually if we’ve singled something out, like someone is going to make that as a movie, within a few weeks someone has optioned the rights to that. So, of these three, which do we think are the most likely to become actual movies?

**Craig:** Well, unfortunately I think if the estate of Amy Krouse Rosenthal or Amy herself prior to her passing agreed to sell the film rights to her New York Times essay, that will certainly be bought and somebody will attempt to make it. I don’t think they should, but fine. And I think that’s probably it. I don’t really imagine that we’re going to see a Prenda movie. Maybe on cable. I think it would be great, but unless somebody like the Coen Brothers comes along, I just don’t think it’s going to happen. And I have to say I don’t think the Underground Railroad is a movie.

**Irene:** I would love to see the Underground Railroad get made. It’s just in the realistic look at what does get made, it’s tough. I mean, I feel like the Prenda stuff, I mean, you’d have to go in with attachments and pitch it with attachments. Or spec it or things like that. It would really need to start with more things worked out than are in an article right now.

**Craig:** And what about the You Want to Marry My Husband?

**Irene:** It’s got so much reach and so widespread that it feels like unless the estate, or you know her husband, unless they’re so wrapped up in her passing away, which is so recent, it just feels like it’s inevitably going to get made because those kind of cultural events like that tend to.

**Craig:** Unless they don’t agree to sell the rights.

**Irene:** Yeah. They may not. It may not be what he wants to do. So, or what she wanted to do.

**Craig:** What do you think, John?

**John:** So, I actually think the most likely movie to get made is the Underground Railroad. I think we will see an announcement about rights on this within the next two months. I think someone will try to make this movie.

**Irene:** I hope you’re right.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure.

**John:** I agree with you that the You Should Marry My Husband is either – it’s all a question of whether they agree to sell the rights to this or not. And I can see good arguments both ways. I didn’t think there was any chance of the Prenda movie, but you guys actually completely convinced me that there is a movie here. Because I was not seeing the black comedy part of it. And that makes it delightful.

So, if the Prenda movie happens, I think it will be because we helped frame some borders on that. And I think we deserve our 1% take on that.

**Craig:** Get a little taste.

**John:** A little taste. Just a little off the top there. It’s time for our One Cool Things. So, Craig, why don’t you start?

**Craig:** Well, my One Cool Thing is super easy this week. It’s obvious, how could it not be, a new podcast. I know, hold on a second. Everyone is going, “Wait, wait, wait, wait. You don’t listen to podcasts.” And that’s true. I don’t. Except when this happens. New podcast called You Had Us At Hello, cohosted by Tess Morris, our beloved Tess, and Billy Mernit. And I believe it’s going to be a limited run podcast, but it’s basically the two of them discussing romantic comedies, the writing of, producing of romantic comedies. Why they love the ones they love.

Tess Morris, as most of you know, friend of our show. Screenwriter of the most excellent Man Up. And Billy Mernit wrote a book called Writing the Romantic Comedy, which was highly influential for Tess. Billy also works in the story department at Universal where he reads every script that everybody writes over there and puts all the notes down on paper for all of us. So, including a lot of my work. And so I am grateful to Billy and his whole crew over there. So, I’m definitely going to listen to this. And I think we might even have – a little sampler for people?

**John:** We do. So at the end of our show, after our outro, you can hear about ten minutes of this first episode that they did. What I love so much about it is it’s completely Tess. And so you can hear the teacups and the china. And you can hear the dogs barking in the background. And it feels like two good friends sitting around a table, talking about their favorite subject which is romantic comedies. So, congratulations Tess.

**Craig:** You know the only thing that could possibly make it better?

**John:** Oh, no. It would make it much, much worse, Craig.

**Craig:** No, I don’t think it would, John.

**John:** I thought you were going to do Sexy Craig. The Bane is actually probably much worse in this.

**Craig:** Is that tea? Are you drinking tea, Billy?

**John:** Irene, do you have a One Cool Thing to save us?

**Irene:** You know what? Watch I Don’t Feel At Home in this World Anymore. I really liked it. And Melanie Lynskey is great. And I’ve loved her since Heavenly Creatures. And if you don’t want to watch that on Netflix, watch Heavenly Creatures.

**Craig:** You know I have the biggest crush on Melanie Lynskey. I mean, I’m friends with her husband, so I can’t–

**Irene:** You can’t do anything about it?

**Craig:** Or, I don’t know, are they married? Jason Ritter. Greatest guy. Yeah, no, no, no. It’s a platonic crush.

**Irene:** Don’t we all carry just like a little flame for Melanie Lynskey? Just like a teeny bit?

**John:** We all do. 100%.

**Craig:** And literally the nicest person I’ve ever met in my life. She’s the greatest. You can’t even believe.

**Irene:** I am so happy to hear that. Because there are some actors I don’t want to hear that they’re terrible in real life.

**Craig:** I know. Well, like I want her to be my mom.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s amazing. So I’m going to totally watch that.

**John:** That’s good. My One Cool Thing this week is two apps, but it’s really more kind of a concept. It’s called Couch to 5K. It’s this idea that if you’re a person who does not run, but you want to learn how to run, that’s sort of the couch part of it. Like you’ve been sitting on a couch for a long time. You can get up to running a 5K race pretty easily. It just takes a couple weeks of training. And basically every other day you’re sort of building up a little bit more, a little bit more. So you have the app that’s sort of talking you through when you’re walking and when you’re running, and it gets you up to running a 5K.

So, I did the 5K version of this when I was back in LA. I’ve done the 10K version of it here in Paris. And so I can now run a 10K, which is sort of remarkable. Because I’m not a person who ever was sort of born to run. But it’s been great. So, I’ll put links to these two apps in the show notes.

But there’s actually a lot of other apps, so while I like these apps, you should try some other ones because they all work a little bit differently. But they’re all gradually up to running a full 10K.

**Craig:** Wonderful. Good. Will keep you alive.

**John:** That is our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Victor Krause. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. For short questions, I am on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Irene, you’re on Twitter?

**Irene:** I am. @renila.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** I should follow you. Do I follow you?

**Irene:** I don’t know that you do.

**Craig:** I’m gonna. Doing it right now.

**John:** It’s so interesting to hear you pronounce it, because I would pronounce it Renila. But it’s like Irena LA. So, yeah, it makes much more sense.

**Irene:** Everybody does. It came from like an old online dating handle, Renila, from like 10 years ago. And so it’s short, so it became my Twitter handle.

**Craig:** Following.

**John:** Following. We are on Facebook. You can search for Scriptnotes podcast. Find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Leave us a review. We’ll love you for it. We might even read it aloud. Also, while you’re on iTunes, you can download the Scriptnotes app. There’s an equivalent Android app. That’s right now the only way to get to all of the back episodes of the show. So we have 292 previous episodes, plus bonus episodes.

**Craig:** So many.

**John:** You go, you subscribe to those. It’s $2 a month. Show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We’ll try to get those up a couple days after. But in the show notes you’ll find links to Irene’s movie, which is on Netflix, so you can watch that.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And all the things we talked about, including the articles. And, Irene, it was so great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming in.

**Irene:** I love you, John. I love you, Craig.

**Craig:** We love you, too. And congratulations on your movie.

**Irene:** Thank you so much. It’s good to get things made.

**Craig:** Isn’t it?

**John:** It’s the best.

**Irene:** It is so good. Ah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** See you guys.

**Craig:** See you next week, John.

Links:

* [Most Hated Woman in America | Official Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsAIPE2f0QQ)
* [The New Underground Railroad](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/the-underground-railroad-for-refugees)
* [A Safe House for Refugees](http://www.panoply.fm/podcasts/trumpcast/episodes/46O6tturlKCUeKq6sAUIEo)
* [You May Want to Marry My Husband](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/style/modern-love-you-may-want-to-marry-my-husband.html?)
* [Prenda, Copyright and Porn](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/its-official-prenda-copyright-trolls-made-their-own-porn-seeded-on-pirate-bay/)
* [Prenda Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law)
* [Couch to 5K](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/couch-to-5k-running-app-and-training-coach/id448474423?mt=8)
* [5K to 10K](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/5k-to-10k/id526458735?mt=8)
* [You Had Us At Hello](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/you-had-us-at-hello/id1215934253)
* [I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a891D5_bGY4)
* [Irene Turner](https://twitter.com/renila) on Twitter
* [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 Victor Krause ([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_293.mp3).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, my name is Sexy Craig Mazin.

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

**Craig:** Interesting. Mm.

**John:** Today on the podcast, we will be looking at how and whether screenwriters should use social media and in addition to answering some listener questions we will be asking longtime listeners to tell us which episodes are worth pointing out to newcomers. So, Craig, I was trying to hedge you off with the Sexy Craig, but you went right to the Sexy Craig. You went right to your safe place.

**Craig:** You want to head off Sexy Craig? You can head off Sexy Craig.

**John:** I thought maybe Smooth John could talk us through some of these rough patches in life.

**Craig:** So smooth.

**John:** So smooth.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the problem. Sexy Craig, it’s really, it’s just impossible. He’s impossible.

**John:** He’s just the worst. Or the best. He’s superlative in many ways.

**Craig:** It’s really about how sexy you’re feeling at any given point.

**John:** Yeah. I’m not feeling sexy right now. Let’s do some follow up. We’ve got a lot of follow up, so let’s try to crank through this. Joe Bruckner tweeted at us. He said, “In Scriptnotes Episode 72, you say we’ll be giggling about UltraViolet in a few years. Four years later, what’s the verdict, Craig?”

Craig, how do you feel about UltraViolet?

**Craig:** I would be giggling even I even remembered what the hell it is, so I guess that sort of says it all, right? It was like that weird digital locker that we were all going to be using for 14 seconds or something?

**John:** Yeah. So I had to look back at the episode to make sure that really was what we were talking about. So, yes, it was the studio’s plan for basically you buy a DVD and you also get a digital copy that goes in your magic locker. And so I just sort of assumed it had gone away and that it had died, but then I looked it up. And so on January 6 of this year the DEG reported that UltraViolet accounts grew by almost 20% in 2015 to hit more than 25 million with 165 million movies and television shows in UltraViolet libraries.

So, it’s one of those weird sort of undead things where it’s like it’s not really dead, but no one is talking about it.

**Craig:** No. And I – I mean, I guess, yes, accounts grew. Who the? I don’t know anybody using this. It is not culturally important. The studios do not talk about it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is certainly not relevant. And, yes, it is giggle-worthy. We were correct.

**John:** We were correct. So, I was on a panel at CES in Las Vegas. It was an industry panel and they brought me as like the filmmaker/screenwriter to be with all these studio people. And they were so excited about UltraViolet and how it was going to change the industry. And I was the one person saying like, “I don’t really think it’s going to change the industry.” And everyone is like, “Shut up. Shut up.” And I don’t think it changed the industry.

But if you are a listener who has inside information that it actually has changed the industry and that Craig and I are just ignoring it somehow, do let us know. But I don’t think we’re wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re not. I’m just going to say we’re not wrong.

**John:** Ivan Munoz tweeted at us to point us to this article by Christopher Mele for New York Times, talking about filler words and discourse markers. So, we talked about the discourse markers on a previous episode and how they’re crucial bits of connecting material between lines of dialogue in real life and in film. But this article was really interesting because it was talking about the other use of those kind of words, which is just for fillers. It’s not just the uhs and the ums, but the likes in the middle of sentences. The sort of stall and pause and the ways of sort of – just what I just did right there – of putting a gap in your speech.

And so I thought it was a really interesting article. Did you have a chance to take a look at that?

**Craig:** I did. And this is something that I’ve thought about for a long time, because I remember very specifically, I think it was maybe when I was in my sophomore year of high school. When I just decided that saying “like” was stupid. And I forced myself to stop saying like. And I do not. I just don’t do it.

**John:** A piece of advice that’s in this article, which is absolutely true from my own experience, is that if you tape record yourself long enough you will stop doing some of these annoying behaviors. And so doing this podcast every week, the first 20 or 30 episodes I edited myself. And when you have to take out all of those annoying pause-discourse marker-filler words, that is a drag. So you learn to be much, much better about not sticking those things in there.

So, I feel like I’m a much smoother speaker after having done this podcast for nearly 300 episodes.

**Craig:** No question. I’m kind of curious, were there certain pause words like that that I repeatedly did?

**John:** You know, you probably have more than you think you have. Sometimes I’ll see Matthew’s actual edit and you’ll see sort of what gets dropped out. Sometimes they’re just actual pauses. They’re just open spaces while you’re sort of thinking of the next part of the sentence and he can tighten things together. But there are some uhs, some ums. There’s little things that sort of get stuff stuck together again.

**Craig:** I mean, I would say that there are things like um and uh, if they’re not, um, see, I just did it. If they’re not, um, routine, then I don’t think that in and of itself is a signifier of something. I mean, the danger of certain of these words is that they signify stupidity.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s the problem. There’s actually no reason for the word like to signify stupidity as opposed to the word um. They are doing the same thing. But because like is associated with youth, and particularly a kind of flight-full youth, then they are viewed as signifiers of stupidity. And they’re not, but that’s a problem.

I mean, it’s all optics, really. You know, I have a friend who says, “You know what I’m saying? You know what I’m saying?” That’s his like.

**John:** That’s his like.

**Craig:** He will use – it’s a very long like, you know what I’m saying. What does it actually mean? Nothing.

**John:** It means nothing.

**Craig:** It means nothing.

**John:** A listener tweeted at me this last week and I don’t have his name in front of me, so I’m sorry, but he pointed out that I say somewhat or sort of alike, and it’s a way of sort of taking the spin off of things. And I think I sort of try to undercut what I’m about to say by using somewhat or sort of to dial it down a little bit. And that’s something I was actually happy he pointed that out, because I will try to listen for myself doing that and not do that as much.

But I think Ivan Munoz was trying to point out when he sent us this article is how does this influence how we actually write dialogue for our characters. Should we script in those little filler words? And the answer is really no, unless it’s actually crucial to the scene. Because you got to let the actor actually put in those filler words if it’s actually important to how they’re performing that line.

But I would not generally script those things in, unless it’s actually crucial to understanding how the scene is working.

**Craig:** Yeah. Every now and then I might have a character throw in a like to – because I think it would be funny in that particular spot of dialogue. But, other than that, no.

**John:** A lot of times what we are really doing for that is the parenthetical within a block of dialogue to indicate that there’s a shift, that there’s something that’s happening in there. You sort of scripting an action or scripting a reaction within that block of dialogue. And they may end up using a filler word to sort of cover that change, but that’s not necessarily a thing you need to script in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if you’re writing a comedy, maybe it’s a dark comedy, and there’s a teenager. And someone is pointing a gun at them. That teenager can say, “Are you going to shoot me?” But if you script, if you actually write in, “Are you like going to like shoot me?” That’s funnier.

**John:** It’s much, much funnier.

**Craig:** It’s just funnier. So those are the only times I would ever do it is to call it out. You know, I’m saying to the actor you really should do it here, otherwise, you know.

**John:** Otherwise, I know.

**Craig:** Sorta.

**John:** Sort of. Kind of. Somewhat.

Several listeners pointed at this article. It’s actually a FDA announcement that these homeopathic teething tablets have been pulled off the market for concerns about them. So this comes directly from the FDA announcement. “Inconsistent amounts of belladonna, a toxic substance, in certain homeopathic teething tablets, sometimes far exceeding the amount claimed on the label. The agency is warning consumers that homeopathic teething tablets containing belladonna pose an unnecessary risk to infants and children and urges consumers not to use these products.”

**Craig:** You know, belladonna is nightshade. You know like – like witches, you use nightshade?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s belladonna. It’s deadly nightshade. That’s what it is. It’s actually got some great stuff in it, like have you ever used the – sorry to derail you here – but you ever used the patch for sea sickness?

**John:** I’ve not used the patch for sea sickness. Is that belladonna as well?

**Craig:** Well, it’s scopolamine which is one of the poisonous compounds in deadly nightshade/belladonna. And scopolamine is a very powerful drug. I mean, even when you use it for sea sickness, you – they make sure when you use that patch, it’s a very tiny, tiny amount. You have to wash your hands really thoroughly afterwards and do not put your hands anywhere near your eyes, because you will literally dilate your pupils and not be able to see very well.

And that’s a tiny, tiny amount. So, apparently these people went a little monkey with it. Go ahead.

**John:** So, what’s fascinating is like they’re saying like, “Oh, there was too much of this substance in there.” And when we talked about homeopathic treatments before, the problem is generally in homeopathic treatments there’s nothing in there. It’s just sugar. So this is just sugar and poison.

**Craig:** Right. So the fun part of this is it really exposes the stupidity of homeopathic “medicine,” because I presume that what they were trying to do was take deadly nightshade, belladonna, scopolamine, and a few other things that are in there, and then using their principle of nonsense, water those poisons down to less than could possibly exist. And then magically the water would have memory of it. And then help teething babies for some bananas reason.

So, there are really only two possible outcomes to the manufacture of a product like this. Outcome number one: they have manufactured a useless sugar pill that will do nothing for your infant or your child. Outcome number two: they’ll slip up and mistakenly put in an actual amount of poison, which will injure your infant or child. This is all you can get from homeopathic medicine. Just so people are clear. You will either get nothing or an unintended bad consequence. Congratulations homeopaths.

**John:** Here’s the embarrassing part. I’m pretty sure we actually used this brand of teething tablets when my daughter was an infant.

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** And so here’s how we used them, and I think we were even told this will do nothing, but it will make you feel better to use them. We sort of took the tablet and rubbed it right on the part that hurt. And you know why it probably helped?

**Craig:** You were rubbing.

**John:** Because you’re rubbing the part that hurt. And you’re giving the baby something sweet that made her feel better about the pain.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**John:** That’s what it is. It was the sugar being rubbed into her gum.

**Craig:** Yeah. You were just rubbing sugar into her gum. You could have just dipped your finger in some Sprite and it would have done the same thing.

**John:** Yeah. Or Whiskey, which is my go-to, instead of homeopathy.

**Craig:** Yeah. By the way, yeah. And way better. I mean, god forbid that – there’s no reason to buy these things. They have to stop them. By the way, I would argue that a company like CVS for instance, which in this case was marketing two of the products containing too much, meaning any belladonna – CVS should stop selling these things. CVS, for instance, is a huge pharmaceuticals/sundries chain here in the United States. CVS should stop selling all of this. They stopped selling cigarettes.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Right. So, they don’t sell cigarettes, because cigarettes are bad for you. They should stop selling these products because they don’t work.

**John:** I mean, cigarettes or baby poison. I mean, you got to make some choices about the things you’re not going to sell.

**Craig:** Right. I also feel like if you are selling a proper array of medicines, whether they’re over-the-counter, or prescription, and you are advertising yourself as a place where people will come to make themselves better, you should not sell any substance as far as I’m concerned that is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not one. And it makes me nuts.

**John:** It does make me nuts, too. All right, let’s move on to our next thing which will make us less nuts. So last week’s episode we talked about – we sort of ripped into an article about avoid screenwriting traps. I argued this article was ridiculous to say that scripts from professional writers and scripts from new writers are fundamentally different. I argued that the things that Craig and I are writing are on the page identical to what an aspiring writer should be writing.

Listener Cody wrote in with a counter point. Do you want to read that?

**Craig:** Sure. Cody says, “With factors like the Black List, a rise of literary managers, and a new generation of young executives, I’ve watched as screenwriting styles have evolved in even just the 17 years since I’ve been writing in Los Angeles. Aspiring writers look for inventive ways to make their work stand out, writing in a stylized, edgier voice to make it a better read, despite that it has nothing to do with what we see on screen.

“It’s a trick that clearly worked to impress development executives, gain heat, and land on the Black List, which helps many new writers get noticed and find representation.”

What do you think about that?

**John:** I am ready to concede Cody’s point here. And I would be curious to have Franklin Leonard on the show, or somebody else who is reading a lot of newer writers, to see whether they find this true as well. Is that I can imagine just like the way that a lot of times spec scripts have these like crazy inventive titles that sort of get attention, even though you would never release the movie with that title, I do believe that sometimes writers are deliberately kind of not even over-writing, but sort of like super-stylized writing in order to sort of get attention.

I can imagine that happening and I don’t have evidence that it’s not happening.

**Craig:** Yeah. That seems plausible to me. I’m not sure, and here’s where Franklin would grimace, or will grimace when he hears this, I’m not sure that it’s relevant particularly whether you get on the official Black List. I don’t know how relevant that is. Because a lot of those scripts were good scripts that get on the Black List and also are going into production. There’s the whole correlation and causation thing.

And standing out and being noticed for a flashy, wild read happens. It, for instance, got the guy that wrote the Lax Mandis script, he sure got attention. It wasn’t the good kind. Getting attention is important. Getting attention doth not a career make. It doesn’t even make a sale. It just means attention.

So, I’m all for writing something that is stand out. You are always, I think, best advised to write something that stands out because your voice is unique and you have written something that is producible and should be a movie. Gimmicky stuff is gimmicky. So, I smell the rise of gimmickry. I do. I can see Cody’s point here that there’s a lot of that going on. I know that titles have become a playground for gimmickry.

**John:** What I do wonder if what Cody’s leaning towards is that in some ways some of these spec scripts are super voice-y, it’s like this crazy writer voice that’s coming through the script and it may not be the kind of thing that we’re necessarily being asked to write as we’re writing stuff for studios. So I can see that as being a possibility in the sense that my script Go, which sort of broke out, it is written a little differently than some of the other stuff I’ve written, but not crazily. And so I just don’t feel like in my career there was a huge shift from the scripts I’ve written for myself and the scripts that I’m writing for other studios. But this is a 20-year career. And I can imagine there might be more pressure for some new writers now doing that.

I still do not believe that the article that was the jumping off place for all this proved its point that writers need to be writing vastly different scripts for readers than they are for producers or going into production.

**Craig:** I completely agree. At some point you have to decide what is the hurdle you’re trying to jump. It’s not like the hurdles are lined up in linear fashion. It’s not as if you manage to get yourself a good rating to the regular Black List site, and then the next hurdle is to get a manager. And then the next hurdle is to get on the official Black List. And then the next one is to get an agent. And the next one is to sell your script. And the next one is that it gets made.

Not at all. The hurdles are all horizontal. None of those hurdles lead to another hurdle inexorably. So, the question is which hurdle are you trying to get over?

**John:** Get the movie made.

**Craig:** Yeah. Get the movie made. Some of them will kind of – they will help, to some extent. But the only hurdle worth getting over is sell a movie, get a made. That’s it.

**John:** Yeah. And get the next one set up.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** Start a career.

**Craig:** Start a career.

**John:** So, next up, on a bunch of previous episodes I’ve threatened that we would read through some of the reviews that people leave for us on iTunes, because people leave such nice reviews on iTunes. And this week it’s actually relevant, so I thought we’d read three recent reviews on iTunes and talk through them and sort of what they mean about the future of the show. So, Craig, do you want to read this first one?

**Craig:** Sure. This first one is titled, “Best Dose of Reality Ever, Five Stars,” by S. Wright. This is from November 11, 2016. And S. Wright writes, “The reason I love this podcast is for all of the pain and suffering it saved me. After writing three scripts, and despite living in Maryland, not Los Angeles, my hubris buried the needle. Then I found this amazing and honest podcast. I quickly listened to all of the earlier episodes. And now I’m a loyal listener of over four years. They dashed my dream, but it felt so good. These are two of the smartest guys and I am truly thankful not to be pursuing a sale anymore. It remains my favorite podcast.”

**John:** Aw. Thank you, S. That’s very nice. So, a second review comes from T. Tippet. It says, “More Umbrage.” It’s five stars, from November 29, 2016. “Just started listening and actually went back to start from the beginning on their app. And John and Craig are awesome. It is great as a new/aspiring screenwriter to be able to learn the ins and outs of the business from two guys who are very ‘inneresting.’ I would and have recommended this podcast to anyone interested in screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters. Keep up the great work, guys.”

**Craig:** All right. Well, that’s lovely to hear. We will. We will!

**John:** We will. We promise.

**Craig:** We have one more. And this is from Levy Ryan from December 23, 2016 entitled “Post-Partum Depression.” Uh-oh. “Started listening four months ago and just polished off the archives. Well, what now? Listen to Mr. Kasdan again? The way Episode 247 ends has you sitting in silence for an hour afterwards.”

**John:** Very nice, Ryan. So, I wanted to bring up those three because one of the things that’s really weird about our show as opposed to other podcasts is that that back catalog actually does get listened to a lot. And so on Twitter kind of every week somebody writes in saying like, “Oh, I just finished going through all the archives and I’ve been through now 289 episodes and now I’m caught up.” And that sense of being caught up on a podcast, you know, with Serial or something that’s shorter and contained, you can sort of see that. There’s a narrative. But some people actually have listened to the whole show.

And so this last week on Slack, Godwin our producer, suggested, “You should do a book of the Scriptnotes transcripts.” Because we have transcripts for every episode. And so Godwin’s suggestion was we could do a physically printed book so you could have on your shelf like the transcripts of the entire series. Just like how we sell the USB drives, it would be really cool to have a printed book for the whole show.

**Craig:** Ooh, like bound in Corinthian leather?

**John:** Corinthian leather, perhaps. And so Dustin, who works for me, a designer, I asked him to do up like one chapter which would basically be one episode, the transcript, to see sort of what it would like. And he did it and it looked really good. Craig, it’s in the folder if you want to take a look at sort of how it looks.

**Craig:** Ooh. I’m going to look at this while you’re talking. No one else can see it, but I can see it.

**John:** We’ll put a link to that in the show notes, too.

**Craig:** Argh.

**John:** But what’s – so what’s fascinating, Craig, is I think that looks really nice. How big a book do you think the Scriptnotes transcripts would be? How many pages?

**Craig:** Well, first of all, I’m looking at this. It does look really nice. Oh my god, how many pages? Well, well, I guess I could do the math because these are so many pages for one episode. My goodness. Oh my god. [laughs] OK, so good lord, we talk a lot. So about 14 pages here. Quickly doing the math. We’re talking about 520-page book.

**John:** No, it’s actually between 3,000 and 4,500 pages. So when you actually do out all the math for all of the episodes.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** It gets really, really, really big.

**Craig:** Oh my god. How is that possible? Because we have to put in all of the Three Page Challenges and–

**John:** The other stuff. And so it gets to be quite big. So, there’s not going to be a printed copy of the entire Scriptnotes catalog. But, the process was really good because we could certainly do an e-book version of this. And so we’re talking about doing that. So, it’s something you could get on your Kindle or your iPad or your other device. Something you could get as a PDF. It would be the entire catalog, which would be great, so people could have that.

**Craig:** You’re going to get so rich.

**John:** So, so rich. But, one of the other suggestions that we sort of came to is if you are one of these people who is trying to catch up on the whole thing, you might not really want to listen to every episode. You might want to listen to certain episodes that are especially good or especially relevant or about a specific topic. And when we have them on the website, it would be great to have some sort of reference for that.

And so that’s where I thought we might be able to enlist our listeners, because some of our listeners really have listened to every episode. And so what I’m asking for is if you have recommendations for these are the episodes that you can’t miss, or that you should definitely try to single out if you’re listening through the catalog, right into us with those. And don’t just write into the Ask account I set up a special page for you to leave a review and a recommendation for this is a good episode because of these reasons.

So if you go to johnaugust.com/guide, there’s a little form you fill out. You put in the episode number, you tell us who it’s for, and then give us a little blurb about that episode. And if we get enough of these and good enough ones of these, we’ll try to put out some sort of e-book or even a printed book that people can sort of look through as sort of an index and a guide to Scriptnotes. Because we’re coming up on 300 episodes. It would be great to be able to point to people like, oh, if you’re curious about these things, this is the episode you should go to. Or, if you don’t really care about screenwriting, but you just want to hear the funny episodes, this is a way to do that. So, these reviews would really help us figure out which episodes to highlight.

**Craig:** That’s a great idea. I’ve decided it’s my idea. I had a terrific idea.

**John:** So tell us this great idea. Can you summarize in your own words what the idea is?

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re reaching out to our listeners and asking them what their favorite episodes are. And we’re going to even categorize their favorite episodes in such a way that new listeners can find our show and start with some of the most loved episodes. I am so smart.

**John:** You really are smart. And what is the URL people should go to if they want to tell us what the best episodes are?

**Craig:** They should go to craigmazin.com. [laughs] They should go to johnaugust.com/ – I love when they say forward slash in ads like we don’t even know. Forward slash guide.

**John:** Yep. So this all goes into a database. If it works out well and it’s interesting, we’ll try to do this thing. So, it’s all on your guys at this point. Thank you in advance the people who might want to leave some reviews. And, by the way, you can leave reviews on multiple episodes. So if you know like the ten best episodes, just leave ten separate reviews for those episodes and we’ll get them all.

**Craig:** Brilliant. Brilliant.

**John:** Brilliant. So, so much of what we talked about today was generated based on things people tweeted at us. And so you suggested that we do a segment on social media and how screenwriters should use social media.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it for a while because the truth is it’s not quite as casual as it used to be. They – they meaning the studios – they actually care about this stuff now. It’s remarkable. I’m still not sure that they should be caring about it, because I’m still not sure how directly impactful it is. But, it is to some extent. So, we know that when we’re talking about casting movies and we’re looking for very popular movie stars, the amount of followers they have is actually a topic of discussion in the room. It matters.

**John:** It’s not when they’re like casting, “Oh, should we cast Will Smith,” but it’s like when you’re casting that third or fourth person down. Sometimes you are kind of looking for the degree to which they are moving the needle.

**Craig:** That’s right. Or sometimes when they’re saying, “Hey, we want to make a movie starring this person that maybe you wouldn’t think of starring in a movie, but look at how many followers they have.” They will do things like that. They will also talk about how many times a trailer is retweeted or mentioned. And every showrunner is now being tasked directly with tweeting, live-tweeting, engaging with the audience.

For screenwriters, for feature writers, it’s a little less directly connected, but we’re starting to see more and more writers achieve a high profile on Twitter, and for some of them it translates into a real career. So, I thought we should talk about how that all works and maybe some advice on how to do it well. Because, you know–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I think you and I actually do it pretty well.

**John:** I think we do it pretty well, too. And it’s worth pointing out that Aline Brosh McKenna, who has been a longtime guest on the show, she’s finally on Twitter now. And she’s finally broken the seal and gotten on Twitter. And I think that’s partly because she is a showrunner now and there is that responsibility of being able to speak for your show and sort of engage with the fans of your show. I don’t feel it happening as much with screenwriters right now, but I think it’s also because we are much more loosely coupled to our films than TV writers are to their TV shows.

There’s less of a direct relationship to our movies. We’re not the spokespeople for our movies to the degree that a showrunner is for her show. And do we know what we’re talking about? We kind of know what we’re talking about. Craig, you have 94,000 followers on Twitter.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s my army. And they really are my followers, just so you know. If I tell them to do something, they’re doing it.

**John:** They’ll absolutely do it.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** But you did not have those last year. So, they were a growth. They’re largely due to things you talked about in a very honest way about your former roommate.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was somewhere around like, I don’t know, I was actually fairly new – I was late to Twitter. I wasn’t an early tweeting tweetie guy, and you know that because I’m saying things like I wasn’t an early tweetie guy. I had about, I don’t know, 12,000 followers or something like that. And then the Ted Cruz thing happened.

But, you know, I’ve held onto them.

**John:** You’ve definitely held on to them. And you’ve done a very good job sort of managing them. You engage with them in ways that I would not engage with them, but we can get to that when we talk about sort of how you deal with people.

**Craig:** It’s fun.

**John:** I have about 59,000 followers. And I was very early to Twitter, not surprisingly. I was on Twitter in 2007, before everyone was really saying Tweet. It was like a “Twitter post.” I was on Twitter before there was actually an App you could use.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** So you were texting to a number. So I used it at Sundance when my movie, The Nines, was there. And it was great. But it’s so interesting to go back and look at your very early tweets, because it was just a very different medium at that time. It was before there was native retweeting. It was a really different world.

We talked about it’s important for actors, but I would say it was also a little bit important for me with Arlo Finch, because novelists are incredibly closely coupled to their work. And so when we were going out to sell Arlo Finch, this wasn’t a major factor, but I think they did take notice of like, oh wow, he has a bunch of Twitter followers. And they look at that and say like, “He sort of knows how to go out and promote things.” And that is probably useful to a publisher that wants to make money off this book.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s absolutely true. The thing about screenwriters and Twitter is our movies come out very sporadically, and that’s for the best of us. You know, you have a movie come out once every two or three years, you are among the crème de la crème of screenwriters. So, there’s a sporadic nature to that.

So it’s not quite as vital, I think, for screenwriters in terms of the commerce. However, if in those in between times you do build up some goodwill and some notoriety, when you do have something that you want to promote, they’re there, which is helpful.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But no question if you are a novelist, and that is yours, I mean, so many of the writers that follow me, for instance, I’ve noticed, are novelists.

**John:** And some of them do a great job. So, let’s talk about sort of why it might matter for a screenwriter. And so I have four basic thoughts about why it might matter to be on Twitter and to sort of use Twitter well.

I think Twitter helps prove that you’re not a crazy person. And so one of the first things I do if like a new person’s name comes across my desk is I will Google them and I will see if they’re on Twitter, because then I can go through their timeline and see like is this a crazy person, is this is a crank? And that can be very helpful to know that, oh no, they’re actually a sane, rational person. Or, they are a crazy person and I won’t engage with them. So, Twitter is a very public way of sort of seeing whether somebody is somebody you want to engage with.

It can show if you’re funny, if you’re supposed to be funny. And Twitter doesn’t have to be funny. Twitter tends to be sort of funny. It tended to be funnier before the election. But it does sort of show who actually has a sense of what a joke is, and that can be really important if you’re looking for a funny person.

Twitter can potentially connect you with interesting people. And by this I mean it lets you be reachable by other interesting people, so like because I’m @johnaugust on Twitter, people can reach towards me and I can sort of engage with them if I choose to. It also lets me reach out to certain people. And if I don’t know somebody, I can tweet at them and sometimes they’ll respond.

We’re going to talk about sort of like best practices for that, but it’s a way to sort of get towards somebody that’s not crazy and stalkery.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, finally, the most important thing I think is it allows you to publicly respond to things. Rarely are screenwriters sort of in the midst of controversy, but if there is a controversy, that Twitter handle is sort of your public face and it lets you sort of directly address something that’s going on in a very quick and sort of clearly your voice way.

**Craig:** That is an excellent summary of what you have there. And a couple of those things I hadn’t really considered. But, yeah, prove you’re not a crazy person. It is true. I mean, whether it’s rational or not, when we meet somebody for the first time and we don’t know much about them, and I’m saying this in the absence of Twitter, and someone else says, “Oh, they are extraordinarily popular and the following people just love them,” I think, OK. That’s relevant.

Well, Twitter sort of does that. If I meet somebody and I see who’s following them and I see who they’re following, then I get a sense that, OK, this person is at least acceptable enough that the following other people that I accept have accepted them. And that matters. There is a social currency to that.

**John:** And I find that there’s more of a social currency to Twitter for me than for Facebook, because if I see he’s friends with that person, it’s like I don’t really know what “friends” means, but if I see that other person has engaged with them on their timeline then it’s like, oh OK, there’s something there. They’re actually pals in some meaningful way.

**Craig:** Precisely. I mean, the problem with Facebook is some people just will – people say can I be your friend? So they’re asking you for something and then you have to agree. And many people just say, sure, you can be my friend, you can be my friend. So, sometimes somebody will ask to be my friend. And I try and keep Facebook for my actual friends.

**John:** So do I.

**Craig:** But they’ll say I want to be your friend and we have a mutual friend. And I’ll click on it and it’s Derek Haas every time. Because Derek – he’s cool. He’s like, you want to be my friend? You’re my friend.

On Twitter, people have to follow you. You know, it’s not like they’re asking do you want to be. So, people make a choice. I can’t stop. So, here would be something cool. It would be cool if Stephen King followed me on Twitter. I don’t think he does. But I follow him.

Stephen King has to make a choice to follow me. That’s kind of cool. You know?

**John:** It is kind of cool.

**Craig:** Because if he does, it’s awesome. I don’t he does. But he should.

**John:** He totally should.

**Craig:** He should. I’m wonderful.

**John:** So, Craig, can you give us some suggestions about best practices or what you should do if you’re new to Twitter or how to use your Twitter account?

**Craig:** Well, yeah. And these are – I’m going to tailor these for writers. And they’re best practices and they’re also worse practices. And to be honest with you, I see all of this. And as many times as I see people doing it right, like Megan Amram, who is just the queen of Twitter, I see people doing it wrong and I cringe. I cringe and I cringe and I triple cringe.

So, some easy positive things. If you can be funny, be funny. Being funny on Twitter is a tricky thing because it’s like you are doing a late night monologue and there are 14 billion other people doing a late night monologue right next to you. So, just a little advice, if it’s sort of the obvious joke, don’t do it. Because there’s so many other people doing the obvious joke. And if you’re not that funny, don’t worry about it. Just don’t push it. You know, it’s not that big of a deal.

**John:** What I will say is if I have the idea for like there’s a news event, something has just happened, and I have the idea for the joke, and it’s like five minutes after the event has happened, I will search for what I would sort of use in the joke term to see if someone else has made the joke. Because you just know it’s going to happen so quickly. So, you got to be quick with it, or just let it pass.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think sometimes in lieu of being ha-ha funny, being clever is good. Because a lot of times I don’t – it’s a little bit like when I watch The Simpsons. When I watch The Simpsons, I don’t actually typically laugh out loud that much. I just appreciate how clever it is going through. It is entertaining me and it is comedic, but it’s a different kind of appreciation. There’s a wryness to it. And I think that that’s perfectly fine on Twitter. Being passionate is always a wonderful thing, especially if you’re positively passionate. Everybody likes somebody loving something. They do. It’s informative. And it’s attractive, honestly, to hear somebody talk about something they love.

Here’s some things to not do, and I see this all the time and it makes me cringe – when you are promoting something, promote. Fine. But do it sparingly and do it informationally. And avoid the walking billboard syndrome. There are some people that are just – they so obviously have gone on Twitter because someone has told them this is a wonderful way to promote your brand, and they just keep whacking that button over and over and over until nobody cares, because they get it. You’re just there to manipulate people into doing what you want, which is the worst way to get them to do what you want on Twitter. And I would suggest that you’ll never know, because losing followers is sort of old school. Getting muted is new school. That’s what you don’t want.

You don’t want people muting you.

**John:** Yeah, so essentially those people who are still following you, they’re just actually not seeing your tweets. And so you’re basically shouting and they’re not hearing you at all. And I find the awkward self-promotion tends to be from people who I don’t think are actually on Twitter that often. Basically they go on Twitter maybe two times a week and maybe scroll through it and then they tweet the thing they need to tweet. And then they get off Twitter. And so they don’t sort of understand the conversational nature of it. They don’t sort of read the room. And so they just go in, they promote something, and then they disappear. And that’s not a great choice.

**Craig:** No, it’s not. I mean, you really do have to think of yourself like a late night talk show host. And all of your tweets consist of the stuff you would do during your show. And then the commercials in between the show. Well, you got to limit your commercials, and they have to be varied, and the preponderance of the stuff you put out has to be show. So, there are some people who come on and they’re not even doing it frequently. They come on every couple of weeks and what they’ll do is either promote themselves or they’ll just retweet other people’s promotions, which I think is generally the worst.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, basic rule of thumb, if somebody says something lovely to you, you give it a little heart. But you don’t retweet it. That’s just my rule.

**John:** I don’t retweet the praise. And so I will give the heart or I will give the reply thanks, or the actual acknowledgment of the specific thing they said, which is great and lovely. And it’s all good. And when you do that, by the way, when you actually reply to somebody, that also shows up in your timeline if people are actually looking at your tweets and replies, and it sort of shows like, oh, you’re engaging the person in a normal, human kind of way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But honestly the heart, the little like, that’s generally enough. It’s the head nod to say like thank you for that, I get that, I see that. And it’s appreciated.

**Craig:** 100%. I mean, the worst of it is when somebody does the like and does the thank you, but puts the period in front of the name of the person they’re doing it to so everyone in the world can see. Automatically, look what I did. Look at what they said about me. It’s just so transparent.

You know, begging for approval on Twitter is a bad deal, because the good news is you’ll get it, and the bad news is you’ll get it. And so it doesn’t mean a damn thing. It really doesn’t. Just be secure. Yeah, just be secure about it.

**John:** Let’s talk about how you convey what you’re actually feeling or how you put into words the thing you want to say. Because that sense of authenticity is really tough when you have 140 characters. And so sometimes people do the sort of tweet storms, they’ll do the threaded comments. By the way, if people don’t know how to do threaded comments, let’s just have a little sidebar here, because it’s really helpful if you can sort of do threaded tweets so that it actually works right. You do the first tweet, then you reply to your tweet. You can delete off your name, but it will keep those things threaded together. The metadata will hold it all together. It lets people sort of see your tweets in a proper run, so they’re not just randomly spread out tweets.

If you have more to say than one tweet, maybe consider doing the multiple tweets, but don’t do that too often because you’ll annoy everybody.

**Craig:** Threaded tweeting. I think I’ve screwed that up twice. Or thrice.

**John:** It’s really easy to screw up. My best tip for you is to write the tweets in advance, like sort of figure out the tweets and make sure they’re the right length. And then you do the first tweet. You reply to that first tweet, paste in the second thing. You reply to the second one to the next thing. It’s not at all obvious or intuitive, but it’s a way to get it done.

**Craig:** So on the third one I’m replying to the second one?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, then I’ve done it right, I think. I think. Well.

**John:** But it’s really easy to mess up.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t do – I’ve done only maybe in my Twitter career I think three rants. I’m not a big ranter. The things that I think tend to work well are honest expressions. You will inevitably upset people with some of the things you say, particularly if you’re talking about things that are aggressive in some way.

But if you are honest, and you are authentic, in the long run presuming that you aren’t professing honest and authentic opinions that everyone detests, you will be viewed positively. The worst of it is the lying. Humble-bragging is not bad because it’s bragging. It’s bad because it’s false. Because it’s manipulative. You know, when you see a writer go on and say something like, “OK, woke up, realized I have three scripts due, and tomorrow we start shooting one. And my agent keeps calling. And, argh, this is going to be a crazy day,” I just want to reach through the computer and punch them in the face. And punch through their face. Through. All the way out the back. And then do that thing where you twist your fist around a little bit. And then pull it back out, just to make sure I get all the bits.

Because that’s terrible.

**John:** Yeah. And so the person who did that didn’t mean for it to be read that way, but that’s exactly how we do read it. It’s like, oh, look at me, look at my luxury problems that I have three movies to write and another movie in production. You’re not doing yourself any favors by tweeting that. Don’t tweet that.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this weird counterpart that has risen somewhat recently that I call – I don’t know what to call it – because it’s kind of the negative counterpart to humble-bragging. So I call it bravery-complaining. And bravery-complaining goes a little bit something like, here – here’s the one I’ve written as a sample. “Some people clearly want me to believe I’m not capable of telling this story. But I am. I’m a writer. And I won’t be ignored.”

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** OK. I don’t know who those some people are. I don’t know what the story is. I don’t know if you are capable of telling it. I don’t know anything other than this: that tweet was designed for a whole bunch of people to say, “We are behind you. You are amazing. Don’t let anyone get you down.” Blah, blah, blah. It’s fake.

And, more importantly, that tweet exists to help no one but yourself.

**John:** Yeah, going back to both of these kind of tweets is the relatable version of that tweet actually has something that like everyone else can sort of nod to. It’s like, oh yeah, I’ve felt that same thing, too. So, they’re able to be very specific about sort of this situation, but everyone can sort of see like, oh yeah, I get that. In sort of the same way that standup jokes work is because, oh yeah, I recognize that situation and you’re making a good observation about it. The two examples you gave, the humblebrag and the bravery-complaining do none of those things. They’re just about look at me. They’re sort of narcissistic and unhelpful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you can proud-brag if you want. Proud-brag. And if people are like, “Jeez, it’s a little braggy,” you can say I know, I’m sorry, but I’m really proud of myself. That’s honest. And you can sad-complain. You know? And you can ask for advice if you really do need it. And if you’ve gone through something where people knocked you down and you got back up again, then maybe you can use it as an instructive example for others, so say look, if you’re in this position just know there is a better way. There is hope. That’s instructive and helpful to others.

In the end, we’re not coming to Twitter to help you. We’re coming to Twitter for you to help us. That’s why I follow people. I want information coming from them to me. I certainly don’t want them begging me to fill whatever emotional gap they have on that particular day.

**John:** Yeah. So, an example of authenticity, sort of earlier on as I was here in Paris, about two months in I got really homesick. And on Instagram I posted like the photo of the kale salad I found. And in the description I wrote how incredibly homesick I was and this was like the thing that actually sort of got me through it. And I got some really genuine responses to that because it feels so kind of embarrassing to admit that you’re homesick in a really pretty lovely place, but I was genuinely homesick. And people could sort of see it was truly how I was feeling and I was dealing with it. And people could sort of nod along with it.

And so that’s specific but also kind of universal and relatable. That’s fine. But it’s honestly a better Instagram post than a tweet because it literally wouldn’t have worked the same way on Twitter.

**Craig:** Well, it might. I mean, look, that’s a sad-complain. I mean, there’s this component, because the bravery complaint I wrote had this very important thing that bravery complaints have, which is the bravery part. Where they’ll say, “This is something that I think is wrong, but guess what? It won’t work.” OK. So are you asking me to empathize with you? Or are you telling me you are untouchable? Because what I’m hearing is somebody whose feelings have been hurt, insisting that their feelings haven’t been hurt, which is a very fourth grade boy way of dealing with the world.

**John:** 100%. So the other thing I notice a lot among writers on Twitter and sometimes frustratingly aspiring writers is that they are suddenly giving advice to the world about how to write. And some of these people are good people, and I’m not subtweeting anybody by saying this, but there are writers out there who I think are good writers but I think they should also really watch how much they are sort of offering advice out to the world about how to be a writer, or talk about their process in such exhausting detail.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, you and I do this every week. We come on this show and we give a lot of advice. One of the things that I find, well, I’m just pleased by is that from the very start, from Episode 1, neither you nor I have taken on any kind of Yoda like persona. We are not cult leaders. We do not profess to stare into the great cosmic eye. I think we are fairly self-deprecating in a funny way. We both know our limitations. We both know we’re not perfect.

We give honest advice in the most honest way we can. There are some people on Twitter who are clearly dolling out advice as if they are sitting cross-legged on the top of a mountain in Tibet, having achieved some kind of nirvana. And they’re doing it in a way that I can’t help but think is about them. Is about crafting an image for themselves as a guru, as wiser than they are.

It is important for writers who are achieving at a certain level to pass on and – not to die – but to pass information on. It’s crucial. I’m actually really emboldened by what I see, because when you and I started nobody was telling us anything. And now there’s this wonderful culture.

All I would suggest is it’s a question of tone. When you are sharing your earned wisdom with others, do it in a way that is self-aware, that doesn’t have an air of infallibility, because you are not. And unless you’re Larry Kasdan, or Scott Frank, or Callie Khouri, maybe just dial the Yoda vibe down a notch. Just a notch. Because the more authentic you are, I honestly believe the more you will be listened to.

**John:** I would agree. So, some advice if you do have that sort of moment of insight is look at how Jane Espenson offers out advice. She will find something delightful and she will write about it and say like, “Isn’t this delightful?” As if it’s a little discovery she saw in somebody else’s work. That’s wonderful because she’s not claiming brilliance for herself. She’s saying like, oh, I found this thing, or like, oh, is this a clam that’s developing? A lot of times there’s a sense of a question, and so like you might say like, “Has this ever worked?” That can sound really negative. But has there ever been a good joke about blank? That’s a structure of a tweet that offers both advice but also invites a reply. That’s a great way to sort of approach those kinds of moments where you kind of have a Yoda thought but don’t phrase it as a Yoda thought.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a great point, John, and Jane is wonderful on Twitter. If you’re going to talk about some wonderful piece of writing, make it somebody else’s, for god’s sakes. You know, you and I on the show, we love talking about other people’s writing. We love talking about other writers. We have them on the show. And then occasionally, and we are long overdue for one of these, we do a big deep dive into a movie we love and we really talk about why we love it.

We’re not so much sitting here over and over saying, “When I had this brilliant idea for…” That’s not what we do. Because it’s weird. It’s weird. We’re all proud of the work that we’ve done, some of it at least. But it’s a strange thing to teach people with your own work. It’s so much more interesting to teach them with other people’s work. It immediately eliminates any whiff of self-promotion or a general sense that this so-called guru is actually desperately insecure and needs our worship.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think a general point to take out of this is like to talk about the things you love. And so talk about the writing you love. Talk about the things you see out in the world that are fantastic. So that means movies and TV shows. Don’t crap on people’s movies. And don’t crap on people’s TV shows. Because, you know what, they worked really hard on those movies. And you’re doing nobody a favor to say what a terrible movie that thing was. Rather than do that, find something really good somebody can watch and get them to watch it.

Or like a great movie is on HBO right now and you’re watching it, tweet about that and why you love this thing, rather than crapping on something.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. Look, live by the sword, die by the sword. If you want to go on Twitter and you want to take shots at other people’s movies, they’re all coming back to you. All of them. Every last one of them. And god help you if you complain when they do. And generally speaking, the people that take swipes at other people’s movies and television shows do complain when it comes back to them. Which delegitimizes them even further. The last thing you want to become is a Twitter sideshow freak.

**John:** 100%. And what we say about don’t crap on people’s TV shows or movies, do not crap on other writers. And I see this every once and awhile and nothing drives me crazier. So, to publicly trash a writer is kind of unforgivable. But to do the subtweet where it’s clear you’re talking about a specific person, even if you’re not naming that person, is just – it’s not classy. It just shows your own insecurity and your own sort of desire to lash out at somebody, but your fear of lashing out at somebody. It’s not cool. It does no one any service.

**Craig:** No subtweeting does anyone any service at all, but you’re absolutely right. To subtweet writers or movies or shows is gross. I mean, we either are or are not a community that sticks together. And any writer that works on anything knows that it is hard. And there is no circumstance – none – in which I would go after a writer or their work on Twitter. Absolutely none.

**John:** Yep. So, Craig, let’s try to give some practical advice. Let’s say you’re on Twitter, you have put out some tweets that people are loving. You put out some things that people are not loving. What do you do with the trolls? Because you get a lot of trolls?

**Craig:** I do? [laughs]

**John:** You get some negative things headed your direction. So what’s some good advice for dealing with negative things headed in your direction?

**Craig:** OK. Well, it’s part of life on Twitter. The quickest thing to do is to mute them. I generally do not block people. The only people I block really on Twitter, anti-vaccination people. Because I just – I just – it’s fun. It’s just fun for me. But other than that, and there aren’t too many of those, at least I haven’t encountered too many. For the rest of it, I just mute them. They have no idea and it’s wonderful. And now I don’t know that they’re there. And so they’re gone.

**John:** And for people who don’t understand the difference between muting and blocking, muting just means that you don’t see their tweets anymore. And so they don’t know that you’ve done anything, but they’ve just disappeared. You’ve made them invisible. And it’s a delightful little feature that people should use much more frequently. Blocking is like sort of a public act and they can see that you’ve blocked them. There’s really very rarely a point to blocking somebody. Just make them mute and make them invisible.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s all.

**John:** Now, you and I probably should have prefaced this whole conversation is that the trolls and the negativity that we deal with is nothing compared to what some people on Twitter deal with, especially women on Twitter. So, I do want to say that like – to acknowledge that we are in a place where, you know, we’re getting some haters, but we’re not getting the kind of haters that some women and people of color and other people–

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** Craig sometimes does.

**Craig:** You know, I’ve been threatened with death and told that I should be put in an oven. And I’ve been called a kike. And I’ve gotten some pretty heavy stuff. I think murder threats, that seems like about as bad as it gets, right?

**John:** It gets bad, yes. Murder is bad.

**Craig:** Murder is bad.

**John:** Murder is bad. I don’t want to sort of say like, oh, well the mute button will solve all your problems. It certainly won’t do that. And I think there’s definitely a call for better actions on Twitter’s side, but it’s not sort of within the power of this podcast.

But I want to offer some examples of people who we think do Twitter really well. We talked about Megan Amram, Jane Espenson. Adam Rose is a guy we both know. He’s an actor and a writer.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** He’s great at it. He’s also great in other media, so Instagram and Snapchat. Derek Haas I think is great. So, we were making fun of him for his Facebook friending, but he does a great job as a showrunner. Every week does ten questions that people can write in about his shows. There’s no one better in the world at Twitter than Rob Delaney, so the creator of Catastrophe. He was a Twitter person before he was the creator of that show. He’s brilliant.

A guy who is not a big writer yet, but I thought was really good on Twitter and is how I first got to know him is Aaron Fullerton. He hosts the 3rd and Fairfax podcast, but he’s a staff writer.

Kumail Nanjiani, star of Silicon Valley, is great on Twitter. And so he’s the person who I don’t actually know, but just because of seeing him on Twitter I just really like him. And he’s so smart at being able to both be funny and political at the same time.

**Craig:** Kumail is the best. You have to follow Kumail. I’m saying it. You’re done. You’re following Kumail.

**John:** And then also Felicia Day, who is sort of early to Twitter, she’s sort of an Internet person, but she’s really good at it. And I didn’t appreciate how good she was at Twitter and the Internet and what a unique skillset that is, but she’s really good. And she built her career off of doing that and being able to marry the things she was making with the things she was presenting online. She’s really great. So, definitely another person to watch and model as you start to look at Twitter as a way to build your portfolio.

**Craig:** Brilliant. Brilliant.

**John:** Some general advice from me about interacting with people you don’t know on Twitter. So, if you are tweeting at somebody who does not follow you, that’s fine. But don’t multi-tweet. Like tweet them once and if they don’t reply back, let it go. And don’t try to reengage with them for a while. Just because there’s sort of nothing more frustrating than like when somebody keeps trying to get your attention and you don’t really want their attention.

If you’re going to reply to something they say, try to add to the conversation. Don’t just sort of say, “Hey, notice me.” That’s the “hey pretty lady” kind of thing. Don’t do that. Contribute to the conversation or just give a like. That’s plenty.

And if you’re asking a question, make it a good question, because people will reply to an interesting question or a new way of thinking about things. But look at sort of the other replies they’ve gotten and that they’re not answering the same question again and again. So if they’ve already answered your question, don’t ask the same question.

**Craig:** Hey, I have one for people that follow you and me. Don’t ask us to retweet your short films.

**John:** We won’t do it.

**Craig:** Because we can’t. Because if you’re asking, you can only imagine how many other people are asking. We just can’t do it. We can’t watch them and we can’t retweet them because we don’t have the time. And also that’s not why we’re there. We’re not there to advertise your work. It’s nothing personal. It’s just there’s too many people asking. And so the only real possible policy is to never do it.

So, we apologize. Really, we want to help everybody as we can, but you know the life boat will get swamped.

**John:** It will get swamped.

My last bit of advice is a utility I found really helpful, which I think I turned you onto, called Fruji. And it’s from Roman Mittermaier, who is a Scriptnotes listener. And it’s a really useful utility for figuring out who follows you. And so basically you log in with your Twitter handle and then it charts who is following you. And so it’s been really useful for me to figure out, oh, those are people I didn’t know who followed me who I actually really like, who I should follow. And it sort of creates relationships in ways that are really interesting. So, it’s a good way of sort of keeping track of connections you might not know you have in your Twitter timeline. So, an example would be Stephen Falk, who is the showrunner of You’re the Worst, I figured out followed me on Twitter and that was great. And I love his show and so we can have a conversation about his show, even though I’ve never met him in person.

**Craig:** I’m Fruji-ing right now.

**John:** I thought I sent you that when your Twitter population exploded.

**Craig:** I probably did it and then I just stopped doing it. And now I’m doing it again. I don’t know why.

**John:** Yeah. You should do it, because you’ll be fascinated. I mean, when Stephen King follows you, that will be how you figure out that he followed you.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a good point. Maybe he’s following me already. No, he’s not.

**John:** So, anyway, our general advice for social media, honestly we’re Twitter people, so it’s mostly Twitter advice. But I think a lot of this applies for YouTube. YouTube is where Aline and Rachel first got to know each other, which is great. Facebook is useful for some people. It’s just not useful for me. But, sure, leave us a comment on our Facebook page.

Snapchat is great if you understand how Snapchat works. It’s just not for me.

**Craig:** It’s for my kids.

**John:** Some people are finding great stuff on Snapchat. And Instagram is really good as long as you’re doing something visual. And so I find, like there’s photographers who I got to know through Instagram. There’s a photographer who actually took my headshots who I got to know because of Instagram and he was great. And definitely I would say use social media. Just be smart about social media. Listen a lot before you start speaking. And sort of figure out what the culture is before you go in and start chatting up people.

**Craig:** Smart.

**John:** Cool. Let’s answer a listener question. And so–

**Craig:** Should we?

**John:** We should. So, Space Jennings wrote in with a question about short films. Let’s take a listen to that.

Space Jennings: I wonder if you can answer a question related more to filmmaking/screenwriting. I’m trying to write my very first short film to direct, and I wonder if you can provide your opinion on what you think makes a truly great short. What do you think is too short or too long? What would you avoid in a short film? What makes you cringe watching a short film? And what’s absolutely essential to include and how to basically make it stand out? More importantly, I’d like to hear your opinion on what you think makes a really bad short film and what not to do. Thanks a lot. I love the podcast. Best thing I ever discovered. Keep it up.

**John:** So I love this question because this last week I went in and spoke to my daughter’s school here in Paris. And because they’re doing this short story competition, so basically everyone in the sixth grade has to write a short story. It’s part of this Parisian competition. And so they wanted to ask what makes a good short story. And I think the things that make a great story are the same things that make a great short film is that they are short. And by short they need to be simple in a way that it can be about one idea.

I think a great short story and a great short film, they sort of have the structure of a joke in that there’s things that set up and they lead to a punchline and then they’re over. Even if they’re not a funny short film, it leads up to a thing, a conclusion, a clear end, and then it’s done. And when I see bad short films and bad short stories, it feels like it’s trying to be the first chapter of something much longer. Or something that’s much, much longer and sort of got compressed and squeezed down.

It has to be a clear simple expression of one idea that follows sort of one story with a beginning, middle, and end, and really wants to be a short. Not just a movie that happens to be short.

Craig, what are your thoughts about short films?

**Craig:** First of all, Space Jennings, incredible name.

**John:** What a great name.

**Craig:** I wish my name were Space. It is not. For me, great short films employ full use of every second of the time they have. Because they’re short films, my understanding is – just this is the contract between me and the short film. I’m in the audience. You have five minutes, ten minutes, 20 minutes, I think beyond 20 minutes you’re running out of short film territory kind of. Maybe 30, right?

You don’t have a whole two hours to tell your story. You are telling this compact tight thing. That means it must be machined. Perfect. No wasted space. Every decision must be beautiful and purposeful. And so that requires like John said a certain narrowing of focus. It still needs thematics and still needs that beginning, middle, and end, but you have to really make use of everything. I want to feel like every choice you made was purposeful.

The last thing in the world I want to see in a short film is something that I think, oh, you could have cut that out.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** If your short film can be shorter, it should be shorter, right? So efficiency and just a careful crafting of each moment.

Bad short films tend to wobble. The worst short films are moving towards a twist you see coming. The worst short films are moving towards a twist. You may not know what the twist is, but you’re like, ugh, it’s obviously something kooky is going to happen. It’s either this, or this, or this. You’re not actually in it. When you go and watch old Twilight Zones, and Space, you should, the most incredible thing about those shows, especially the best of them, is that you’re watching the Twilight Zone. You know what that means. It means that at some point there’s going to be this crazy twist ending. Oh my god. But so many of them are done so well that by the time you’re a minute into it you’ve forgotten that. You’re with people. And you’re just watching a story unfold. The way that when I went to go see Titanic, I actually forgot the boat was going to sink, because I was into the love story.

I mean, I didn’t forget-forget, but my mind was no longer on it. So, to me, avoiding that syndrome of, ugh, just get to the big stupid twist already. This is all filler. No. The joy of the joke and the punchline that you’re telling with a short film, whether it’s comedy or not, but that rhythm, is that all the lead up is and of itself delicious and meaningful and fascinating. It will make the ending so much more relevant.

So, watch old Twilight Zones and read short stories, because all of the DNA is in there. If you read The Lottery, if you read The Catbird Seat, you will see how to make a great short film.

**John:** Absolutely. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to one of my favorite little short films, which does the classic sort of joke format, but does it really, really well, called It’s Not About The Nail. I think it’s Jason Headley directed it.

**Craig:** Oh, so good.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s wonderful.

**John:** It’s a great example of you have this idea and it’s clearly just a short film idea. And that’s what is so crucial to me is that it has to be an idea that wants to be expressed as a short film and it’s not just trying to be a short movie. It really is compact in that setting and it doesn’t need to be a second longer or a second shorter. So, I will put that in the show notes as well.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** I think it’s time for One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing – actually I have two One Cool Things. I’m going to cheat. The first is archive.org. So this is founded back in 1996. The Internet archive is sort of this giant dump of all of the Internet from different ages. And so basically it crawls the entire Internet. It saves a copy of it. And so it has 150 billion web pages going back to 1996. And so the point is it’s trying to offer permanent access to parts of the web as pages get taken down or changed.

And so it’s so fun to go there and enter in the URL for a website that you go to, so like I go to johnaugust.com and you can see the original version of johnaugust.com and sort of all the changes along the way.

What’s so helpful, though, is also it finds when things have been changed. And so a week or two ago I saw this tweet saying like, oh, the Trump White House has changed the Bill of Rights page on the whitehouse.gov site. And they’ve changed people to citizens, so that the Bill of Rights only applies to citizens and not to people in the United States. And like that’s horrifying and shocking, I can’t believe that. Wait, I kind of don’t believe that. And so I could go to archive.org and look at that same page back through the years and find out that page was actually that way three years ago. So it wasn’t a new thing and I could tweet out and say like, hey, I know this feels true, but that was not actually true. And put the link to archive.org.

Incredibly useful. So many people don’t know about it, so definitely it’s a great sink hole to find yourself drifting through old versions of things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My second thing is very relevant to these next two weeks, because the LA elections are soon. And so I had to fill out my ballot here in Paris to send back to LA. And Ballotpedia is just the best resource I have found for ballot measures that are coming up. And so it’s like Wikipedia, but it just goes through and like here is the ballot measure, here are the arguments for it, here are the arguments against it. Here is who is supporting and here is who is against it. Really useful. And very clear information about ballot measures which are I think designed to be completely perplexing.

**Craig:** Yeah. The people who write them generally write them to promote the opposite of what they actually intend. It’s remarkable. It’s all flimflam. If you see a ballot measure that’s called Fewer Taxes for You, it means more taxes. [laughs] And if there’s something called the Medical Freedom Act, it means they’re trying to take your medical freedom away. It’s amazing how pernicious this is.

**John:** So, definitely please vote on March 7, because there’s actually a lot happening in Los Angeles. Measure S is the one that’s getting the most attention. You should vote against Measure S. But you should go to Ballotpedia and figure out what all those initiatives are, because it’s really, really helpful.

**Craig:** I don’t live in Los Angeles, so I’m just with you in spirit.

**John:** There’s an LA County measure though that you do need to check out as well.

**Craig:** Yes. I will take a look at Measure H. Measure H.

**John:** Very good.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a lot like my One Cool Thing last week, which as you recall was an app called Fran Bow, which is a creepy, creepy game, which I loved.

Well, this is another one. This one is even creepier.

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** This one is macabre and downright disturbing and yet brilliant and I love it. It’s called Rusty Lake: Roots. And it is very similar to Fran Bow in that it is a simple point and click game where you’re solving puzzles of various kinds. But, you are doing so as part of a family over the years who live in a house by a lake and terrible, terrible things are happening. And oh my god. It is done in the most bizarre way.

It is so worth playing. Rusty Lake: Roots. Available on iOS and possibly on Android, but I don’t care.

**John:** Is it a better iPhone game or an iPad game?

**Craig:** I think all games are better iPad games, like this, these kinds of puzzle-solving games, just because it’s not meant to be played casually. You’re meant to sit there and really work on it. So, I would definitely recommend iPad.

**John:** Very cool. I will check it out.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** And that’s our show this week. So, our show as always is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Eric Pearson. 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, social media. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. I’m also on Instagram @johnaugust if you want to see me there.

Our show is on Facebook. You can search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, you can leave a comment like the three we read aloud today.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all back episodes at johnaugust.com. While you’re at johnaugust.com, please go to johnaugust.com/guide and let us know which episodes you think are the ones that people should definitely tune into if they’re coming to the show new.

At johnaugust.com you’ll find the transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episodes air. And you can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. It is $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** $1.99.

**John:** And you get access to the whole back catalog. And you can also listen to them through your app of choice. Scriptnotes on iOS and on Android. And that is our show for this week. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Talk to you soon. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [UltraViolet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraViolet_(system))
* [Stop Using Filler Words](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/us/verbal-ticks-like-um.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1&referer=https://t.co/v2Lw3fCWIc)
* [Homeopathic Teething Tablets](https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm538684.htm)
* [Scriptnotes Listener Guide](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [Fruji](http://start.fruji.com/)
* [It’s Not About The Nail](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg)
* [Archive.org](https://archive.org/)
* [Ballotpedia](https://ballotpedia.org/March_7,_2017_ballot_measures_in_California)
* [Rusty Lake: Roots](http://store.steampowered.com/app/532110/)
* [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 Eric Pearson ([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_290.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 285 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, oh, it’s another episode of How Would This Be a Movie where we take a look at stories in the news, or things we just kind of came across, and try to make sense of them the only way we know how – which is to try to squeeze them into a two-hour block of big screen entertainment.

So this week we’ve got Sinbad, we’ve got sea monkeys, we’ve got kidnapping and Nazis. We’ve got metaphysical paradoxes. We’ve got a possible Nicole Perlman situation. I think it’s going to be a good round of the How Would This Be a Movie.

**Craig:** I’ve got to tell you, I think there’s a great movie where you jam all of that together.

**John:** Oh, 100 percent.

**Craig:** And I think the title of it is Possible Nicole Perlman situation. And it’s Sinbad, it’s sea monkeys, it’s kidnapping, it’s Nazis, it’s metaphysical paradoxes. I mean, I’d see that. I’m not sure if I’d see any individual one of those.

**John:** Yeah, but all together?

**Craig:** All together.

**John:** This could be one of those rare situations, because we’ve had so much success in How Would This Be a Movie before, where we talked about the bank robberies, and we talked about sort of the weird Southern California people trying to frame each other. But this one, it’s going to be tough to make each one of these individual movies, but I think they need to gang up together. You need to get all the rights, put them together, put them in the blender, hit puree, and then you’ve got a movie.

**Craig:** Hit puree. That’s the tag line for the movie.

**John:** Absolutely. It was so delightful listening to this past week’s episode with you and Derek Haas. So, Derek is a good friend in Los Angeles. I realize that I hadn’t heard his voice since I moved to Paris, and it’s because I don’t call people on the telephone. Like, I don’t call friends and talk on the telephone because who does that anymore? It’s all emails. And so I’ve emailed with him, but to hear his voice was just lovely.

**Craig:** Aw. That’s nice. It’s true. The phone call is essentially dead. It’s only used for business at this point. My kids never, ever – they will – when they talk to each other – sorry, when they talk to their friends, they use FaceTime.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** But the idea of just an audio-only call. No one does that. Ever. They just text or they FaceTime. That middle zone is gone.

**John:** So, I’ve emailed Kelly Marcel many times, but the only time I’ve spoken to her since I’ve been here was for the podcast.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** That’s crazy.

**Craig:** See that?

**John:** Yeah. But it was delightful. Thank you for bringing Derek on and answering a whole bunch of listener questions. We have three more listener questions we’ll try to get to today.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But you guys did that episode without me because I was in Madrid last week, and it was so much fun, and I want to talk about that. So, I was a guest for ALMA, which is the Spanish Writers Guild, and it was a two-day thing. I spoke at a university and then I did a master class on a Saturday where I spoke for six hours, which is madness, which I don’t think I’ll ever do that again.

**Craig:** Six hours?

**John:** Six hours. It was basically just me. And so I went through two–

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Sort of like slide show presentations. I did some audience Q&A. I had a little interview section. But it was just tremendously fun. It was also my first time doing live translation, so where I would talk and people would have headsets and sort of like at the UN they’d be translating in real time. And my translator was phenomenal. Stella, thank you very much for what you did. But it was so much fun. And I really enjoyed it. I had great, smart questions.

If you are curious what I spoke about, two guys wrote up the whole experience, and so I’m going to link to the blog posts they did. So it’s Àlvar López and Carlos Muñoz Gadea and on Bloguionistas they wrote up sort of what I talked about. And if you don’t speak Spanish, you can probably Google Translate it and get most of it. But it was a really good fun conversation.

**Craig:** You know, have we talked about Google Translate? Was that my One Cool Thing, how they’ve had that crazy huge leap? Have we discussed that?

**John:** I’m not sure we have. But let’s have that conversation now, because it’s gotten so much better. And you’ve read the articles about why it got so much better, right?

**Craig:** Yeah. So they completely changed their entire way of approaching it. It used to be a very formal kind of thing of this word goes to this word, and here are grammar rules. And they switched over to an entirely different thing which is essentially a kind of a neural net learning process. And it’s fascinating.

So, they turn this thing on and just let it start learning kind of. And they have made this enormous leap forward in their ability to translate things. And I did sort of check it out. I wanted to go see like, okay, let’s see how good this is. It’s really good. And the way you can tell it’s really good is because you can take something – I mean, the test they always say is take something in the language you know, have the translation turn it to a different language, and then have that translation turn it back to your language and see how close it is. And it was like really good.

They have taken this huge leap forward and they’ve also – there’s this interesting thing, I don’t know if you read about this, where it seems that what the Google Translate software is doing is creating what they call – I can’t remember quite the name – it’s like an intermediate language–

**John:** It’s like an Esperanto, like a machine language Esperanto.

**Craig:** In a weird way. Like it’s kind of having this weird midpoint. It’s not like it’s invented its own language. It hasn’t. But it’s doing this thing that actual translators do, which is that there’s this weird middle language in between the two languages that they’re moving things back and forward through. It’s kind of amazing.

**John:** Yeah. The process of translation is phenomenal. And to see Stella do this work in real time, so she has to be able to pay attention to what I’m saying and still keep the translation going. I was looking over her notepad and she had sort of a shorthand she kept for like what I was saying. But it wasn’t in words. It was all in symbols. And so she would have like a circle to, with an arrow out, and it was all just a way of keeping track of what I was saying so that she could do it. It was really a remarkable skill.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** And to have to do that for six hours is just nuts.

**Craig:** Six hours. My god.

**John:** So, the other thing which was fascinating going to Madrid is I had not been to Spain since high school. And I had liked it in high school, but I had never been back. And so I thought, you know what, my Spanish is actually probably pretty good. I mean, it’s probably a little bit messed up because of my French. My Spanish was actually like really surprisingly pretty good. And so at the start when I was doing press interviews on the Friday before, she was doing translation. Like they’d ask a question and she did a translation. And by the third interview I was like, you know what, I kind of got this. And so I was able to hear the question in Spanish, answer back in English, and it was just delightful to actually be able to hit the ball back over the net, which I still don’t feel I do very well in French.

**Craig:** That’s fantastic. I would not have done that. I look at myself as just I try and be an expert in English. [laughs] But that’s my thing.

**John:** You do pretty well in English, Craig. You really do.

**Craig:** I’m really trying my best. You know, we have a new president now. And he has set a very high bar for English proficiency.

**John:** Mastery.

**Craig:** Mastery.

**John:** He’s using the best words.

**Craig:** He’s all the best words.

**John:** So important to have. The last thing I want to point out about going to Spain, so I was talking with this Writers Guild of Spain. It was called ALMA. And only this year did I start to realize like, oh you know what, there really are Writers Guilds in all the different countries, but they’re not like our Writers Guild. So, Howard Rodman came over to Paris in the fall and he was talking to all the European Writers Guilds. And so Spain has one, France has one, UK has one. And in the US, our WGA is a genuine union. We are actually a labor organization. In most of these countries, they’re not. They don’t have the same sort of negotiating power that we do. And you would think, well, in some ways that’s great. They’re not going to go on strike and do crazy things. But they don’t have the leverage that we do.

In fact, some of the Spanish people were telling us you can’t, even on their website, give like recommended minimums for how much you should charge for a draft. That is considered restraint of trade. And so it’s so weird to enter into a system where everyone is just a free agent and when everyone is a free agent, prices do not do well.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s the strange unintended consequence of what at least at first blush is a very pro-writer policy. And that is that in the rest of the world there is Droit Moral, the author’s right, and so what they don’t have in Europe, certainly not in Spain, is work for hire, which we have here in the United States. Work for hire in the United States means that when we’re hired to write things, the employer can retain copyright. So that seems not as good for writers as would be the case in Spain, where no one can take their copyright. They always have copyright. But what it does for us is it makes us employees. And as employees, we can unionize.

So, we do have things here in the United States that they just simply can’t get over there, because they’re not employees. And that is where you run into things like restraint of trade because they are not employees, they’re not unionizing, they’re independent people that are essentially colluding to try and fix prices in an open market.

And so also the other things that come with being an employee, like pensions, healthcare, and all that other stuff aren’t there. In the United States, we have our system, when we talk about residuals that is essentially our attempt to mimic royalties, which obviously copyright holders do get.

So, yeah, it’s kind of a – it’s not even a double-edged sword. I think it’s a one-edged sword. I think our system is actually better for writers, at least in screen.

**John:** I think it’s better for writers to make a continuous living, and that’s really I think what most writers want to do in film and television. I’m starting to recognize that it is an artifact of sort of when Hollywood came to be is that we came up in a time when there were strong unions. And I have a hard time imagining that if today movies were invented, we’d be able to organize. And I mean it’s the same reason why video game companies have a hard time organizing those employees. We’re not in a labor time these days.

**Craig:** I completely agree. And you can see the impact of that on animation. Let’s just say, we’ll call it computer animation, CGI animation, which didn’t exist really until the ‘90s in any meaningful way. In the feature business, that is not a union business. So the people that write any of these movies, well, any animation period. But all the Pixar movies, not one of those writers, not one of those directors has ever gotten a penny in residuals. And that’s not great.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** I completely agree with you. If we had not built our industry in a time of enormous unionization, we would not be unionized.

**John:** Yes. It’s true. All right. Let’s move onto our big feature topic today, which is How Would This Be a Movie. And so we’re going to take a look at three stories in the news, or things that fell over the transom, and talk about them in their possibility of moviedom.

So, let’s start with the story from the New York Times this past week. It was written by Frances Robles. Abduct at Birth and found 18 Years Later. It tells the story of Alexis Manigo, who at 18 finds out that she’s been kidnapped as a newborn from a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida. Authorities tell her her real name is Kamiyah Mobley. And Gloria Williams, the woman she thinks of as her mother, actually abducted her when she was a baby.

So, Alexis says, “I never had any ID or driver’s license, but other than that, everything was totally normal.” She did acknowledge stymied a few months ago when she applied for work at a Shoney’s, but lack the Social Security she needed to get the job. And when she was kidnapped from the hospital, there was this large financial settlement that her birth family got from the hospital for basically mismanaging her, or basically for letting her be kidnapped. And now she’s 18 and it’s really unclear where that money goes.

So, this is the framework. Craig, what’s the movie here?

**Craig:** Well, so you have somewhat of a Lifetime movie-ish kind of thing. Baby stolen, raised by another woman, family never gives up. 18 years later, they find her and get her back. OK.

But here’s what’s fascinating about this. This is a quote from Ms. Manigo, who is the young woman who was kidnapped talking about Gloria Williams, the woman who is alleged but it seems quite clearly did it, the woman he kidnapped her. She said, “She took care of everything I ever needed. I never wanted for anything. I always trusted her with it.” She said that Ms. Williams, her kidnapper, was not mentally ill and that she had not been overprotective. “She was a very smart woman.” Ms. Williams worked at a navy yard, handling medical records, and was set to receive her Master’s Degree this year.

So, what’s remarkable is that this perverts everything that we would think would be the case about a criminal, because it’s a criminal act. And remarkably what this young woman says in response to being raised by this woman, Gloria Williams, the kidnapper, is “I feel like I was blessed. I never had a reason to question. A blessing like that. Someone loving you so much.” Fascinating.

I mean, what do you – to me, that’s where you begin. Right?

**John:** I think it is. I think there’s obvious movies trace back to sort of we talk about the Lifetime movie version of this, which is sort of the sensationalistic. And I don’t want to sort of dis all Lifetime movies. I think there’s a reason why that genre of movie exists. But I think there’s a bigger feature version that we’re sort of hoping for for this.

You look at Room. And Room is a story of, of course kidnapping, but that’s an incredibly bleak story of survival and escape and what you do afterwards. And here she’s not trying to escape anything. It’s basically her whole life has been upended. It’s more like you’re not the person you thought you were. How do you find a new identity?

It also reminds me of this most recent year’s movie, Lion, where you have a guy who is like on a quest to figure out who he really is and who is family was. So, there’s templates for it, but what I also find so unique about this template is, so, she’s African American. Everybody in this story is basically African American. If you look at the picture of her in the New York Times article, she looks like an Obama daughter. So, it’s not the classic sort of pretty white blond girl being kidnapped.

And l love, though, what you’ve singled out about what she’s saying. That doesn’t even feel like Stockholm syndrome. She actually had a pretty normal life. And she had no reason to suspect that anything was wrong until pretty recently.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, to me, what the movie is about is about an 18-year-old, through whom we can all identify, and we should, coming to grips with a couple of strange things about life. Namely, somebody can do something very bad to you. That is a harm to you. To steal you from your own parents. And, yet, be a good person to you. And maybe even be a good person for you. That is a very complicated thing.

And then, of course, there’s the notion of finding a relationship with these people that now you come from. And struggling with the fact, I mean, I think there’s a wonderful scene here. Sometimes you think about these movies and you think what’s the great scene. And the great scene is after the hullabaloo of being found and returned and all the rest, and recriminations, and how could this woman have done this, and all the rest. And I thought I knew her, and I don’t. Being in the home that you were supposed to be in with the people you’re supposed to be in. And wanting to go back.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** To the only mother you know, who never treated you wrongly, except for this thing that was in fact terribly wrong. That, to me, that’s an interesting movie. That’s pretty deep stuff. And I’m fascinated by it because it feels real.

Lifetime movies, some of them are very good. I completely agree with you. When we say Lifetime movie, it’s a little bit unfair to Lifetime. Really what we’re talking about is a soap opera-ized movie. Which is kind of an overwrought thing where everything is pushed out dramatically. And here, I think it’s the opposite. Here I think we’re asking these really tricky questions about what it means to love somebody and care for somebody and even the nature of parenthood. Because I think a lot of people who adopt children will say quite eagerly, you know, obviously they’re not stealing somebody. Right? They don’t commit a crime. But they love somebody that they did not give birth to. And that person loves them.

We know that love is real. What do you do when that love is real, but it’s predicated on a crime? That’s fascinating to me.

**John:** Absolutely. And, you know, this is the maternal love. But we’ve seen those sort of love stories where like it’s a relationship that was based on a fundamental lie, and yet 30 years later they find out the truth behind things. Sort of like what is the statute of limitations on that truth? And when does that misdeed become forgiven?

I think her motivation, Gloria’s motivation, is also really fascinating here, because obviously we’re going to see this from the point of view – the story is going to tell us from the point of view of this girl and her family who was searching for her for all these years. But what was the inciting incident that happened with Gloria that made her hold this baby and say like, “You know what? I’m going to take this baby with me.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And was it a spontaneous decision? Was it something about this family? Was it something she read about this couple and their daughter made her think like either I could take this, or I should take this baby, because this baby is not safe with them? And I know nothing about the actual biological family here. I’m hoping they’re lovely and wonderful.

But there’s definitely a version of this story where Gloria perceives herself to be the hero, saving this kid from a bad life. And to some degree, she has some vindication because it looks like she gave her a pretty good life. And she seems like an organized stable woman who managed to get a Master’s Degree, which is, again, not the stereotype, the prototype we think of for a kidnapper.

**Craig:** No. It’s true. And we do know at least one fact that at the time of this, let’s see, her name again – well, she has so many different names. Alexis Manigo, whose real name is in fact Kamiyah Mobley, that when she was born the mother, I think, was 16 years old. I think that’s what the article says. So, yes, it’s possible that this woman though, “Oh, I’ll be rescuing this girl from a bad situation.” It’s still a crime, of course. It’s not her call.

There is another interesting way in on this. So, Kamiyah/Alexis’s real parents, her birth parents I should say, are Craig Aiken and Shanara Mobley. The fact that her real name is Kamiyah Mobley, I suspect maybe Craig Aiken and Shanara Mobley are not still married. I don’t think they indicate – or were ever married. I don’t think that was ever an issue.

But there is another way in which is Shanara Mobley. So, this is a young girl, a 16-year-old girl, I believe from the article, who gives birth to a baby. The baby is stolen. She never gives up believing that that baby is still out there somewhere. And she is fighting a system, trying to find this kid. And nobody seems to be able to help.

And then she finally gets her back. And she now has to try and become a mother. And the interesting thing is she never actually had the chance to. She was supposed to be a mother and all of this time goes by and now she is one. But she’s not a mother of a baby. She’s the mother of an 18-year-old young woman. And adult. Who has been raised by somebody else entirely. The feelings that she has towards this girl – is this girl a stranger to her? Even though she has her face?

And what does she feel about this other woman, who she must hate on the one hand, and on the other hand in a weird way has to kind of – she owes her something for keeping this child alive and raising her so well. So, that’s another way in, is the mother.

**John:** Yeah. In that version of the story, we have other prototypes for the birth mother who gave up for adoption and then the adoptive mother and sort of what the tension is between those two. This is just heightened in such a strange degree because it’s not an adoption situation. It is – there’s a crime underneath all of this. And I think that makes it potentially fascinating.

I’m curious whether this specific story is worth pursuing for a movie. Like whether it’s worth it to try and get the rights to this specific case and this specific situation, or do you do it like Room where you are just – you’re taking a general sense of these kinds of situations and building a fictional story out of it.

I can see both sides. My hunch is that you’re not going to get a lot of specific value out of these individual people. And that you might be better off looking for a fictional situation to build around this kind of story. What do you think?

**Craig:** I agree with you. I totally agree. I think it’s actually important that you not use their story, because I’m not sure how much more road there is dramatically to drive here. I think we may have gotten it. And you need to be able to create your own circumstances to tell a dramatic story here with a point and a resolution. And so I don’t think you want the life rights here.

I think you just want an idea, which is a baby is stolen and raised beautifully, apparently, by this criminal. And then it is exposed. And that’s probably the end of act one, or something like that. And then what happens after? And you have the story also of parents that never gave up, and so on and so forth. And I think that actually could be a terrific movie.

I think it’s a small movie. It doesn’t need to be a lot of money.

**John:** No, it doesn’t at all.

**Craig:** I don’t see any call for a large budget here. I love the fact that it’s African American, because I think we tend to see these kids of – I think you pointed at this. We tend to see these kinds of dramas, like what was that movie, the Michelle Pfeiffer movie, The Deep End of the Ocean. I think Steven Schiff wrote that.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** They tend to be white families mourning the loss of white children. And there’s something good and valuable about representing these kinds of stories with African American families that aren’t about the kind of tropes of drugs, and shootings, and gangs, and all the rest of it. But, just a regular family drama. Which I think is really interesting. So, I do think this could be a terrific movie.

**John:** Yeah. Going back to sort of how you structure it, I think what you described is probably the most natural structure for it, where early in the film you discover something is wrong. Probably by the first act break, that’s when Gloria is arrested and now you’re going back and you’re having to sort of meet this new family. And things proceed from there. So it’s sort of like the second half of Room, where you’re trying to reintegrate into a life.

But I think there’s also potentially a version of this that slices up time in interesting ways. So that we get the reveal of like this is your real family, and then we go back and time to see it from Gloria’s point of view, or you basically get the kaleidoscope version of what this is. And that in the round version of this you see multiple points of view and really understand that it’s much more complicated. You’re navigating through a minefield. And you don’t try to focus on just the one protagonist, but you just sort of see a kaleidoscopic view of this weird situation, and what it means to – thematically that sense of motherhood and sort of what that is like and how it can drive a person to make some big choices.

**Craig:** Absolutely true. You don’t have to be chained to any kind of traditional narrative with something like this. You only want to chain yourself to the version that lets you get the most emotional resonance out of it. When you look at movies like this, one way to think of them – think of them as disaster movies. Like Titanic is a disaster movie with a romance in it, right? And in Titanic, because it was based on a real thing and everybody knew the story of the Titanic, they didn’t bother surprising you with the fact that the Titanic hit an iceberg. If anything, they begin by showing an old lady in a movie saying, “This is how it worked,” and then she goes, “Nah, it was actually a little bit more interesting than that.”

So, you have a disaster here which is a woman steals a baby. And you could work backwards to that. You could begin with it, it could happen in the middle. It could be a memory. It could be a dream. It could be any – there’s all different ways to do this. The key is to find that core thing that you’re really trying to hammer home to people. And for me, it’s that strange love. And the existence of that strange love. And maybe even the notion that love can be bad. There’s no such thing as pure love. That there is something maybe dark on the other side of all love. That’s fascinating to me.

So, somebody brilliant – this is an ambitious thing though, if you’re going to do it. As they say in the movie business, John, it’s execution-dependent.

**John:** It is. It does not sell itself. You have to really write this one. And you have to make this one. And it has to sort of just work. You have to stick the landing on this, or you don’t got a movie.

**Craig:** Do you worry that when we do these that 5,000 people then turn around and attempt to write – and suddenly the market is flooded with versions of this story next year?

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. Well, it would be better than some of the other kinds of tropes that get trotted out.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But if Franklin Leonard at the Black List gets overwhelmed with these, he’ll tell us.

**Craig:** He’ll let us know. It’s our fault. Sorry.

**John:** Sorry. All right next up, we have something potentially light and fun. We’ll see.

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** So, sea monkeys. And so when I put this on the outline I’m like, oh, well everybody knows what sea monkeys are. And then I realized, you know what, they might not, because we have international listeners. And sea monkeys I perceive as being a largely American phenomenon, because they were a phenomena we grew up with. They were big in comic books. Can you talk us through just the quick version of what sea monkeys are, in case people have no idea what we’re talking about?

**Craig:** Sure. So for you and I, kids who were growing up in the ’60s and ‘70s, every comic book you got had ads in it, pages where they were selling novelty items. Things that were meant for kids, like prank bubble gum that would turn your mouth black. Or, you know, sneezing powder.

**John:** X-ray specs.

**Craig:** Yeah, which were not X-ray specs. But the biggest ad was always for sea monkeys. Sea monkeys were these remarkable creatures, and the cartoon portrayed them as a family. A nuclear family. A father. A mother. And two lovely children.

**John:** A teenage daughter and like a younger brother.

**Craig:** That’s right. Exactly. It was a little bit like the Jetsons in that regard. And they were these sort of pink creatures with weird sort of projections on their head that looked like little crowns to me. And they lived in a fishbowl, with a little castle, and they were just having the best time. And they were sea monkeys. And you could buy them.

And you would send a dollar in, and what you’d get back were these packets and what the ad promised was that you would put the packets into a regular fishbowl of water and lo and behold within seconds these sea monkeys would come to life. And they were trainable. And they would do acts for you and put on shows. [laughs] And, you know, even as an impressionable child who probably still thought that there was a Santa Claus and all of that, I knew – no.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Well, it turns out that sea monkeys are in fact brine shrimp. And brine shrimp have this strange property where when they lay eggs, the eggs can stay dormant and essentially dehydrated and dormant for a long time. And if you put them in water, they will then reconstitute and hatch and out will come brine shrimp, which look nothing like the cartoon of sea monkeys. They’re just tiny little bait shrimp.

**John:** Absolutely. They’re tiny little specs of sand that are kind of floating around and do not even look that cool. So, I remember getting sea monkeys with my brother, and we put the conditioner pack in the water and waited the 24 hours you have to wait. And we put the little sea monkeys, the second packet, and put that in. And you look at them and you’re like, well that’s interesting for about 20 seconds. And then what do you do? And then eventually the water dries up and you just toss the whole thing away. Because there’s not even a pet. It’s like even a hermit crab. It could kind of move around a little bit.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This was not even that.

**Craig:** No. No. It was a terrible thing. It was essentially a scam. One of the remarkable things about those packets is the first packet is special water purifier. And so you had to pour that in the water. And for 24 hours it would purify the water. And then the second packet would be the sea monkey eggs. And they would immediately come to life. Well, as it turns out the first packet are the eggs. It takes them 24 hours. And the second packet was a blue dye to make it so that you could actually see the damn things.

And, yet, there is this story lurking behind it that’s kind of remarkable.

**John:** Before we get to the story behind it, let’s say that someone approached you with just the story of sea monkeys. We have the rights to the name sea monkeys. So let’s talk about this version of this, because we’ve all encountered these things. And we make fun of the Slinky movie, but like there are bits of IP especially based on toys that they’ll be shopped around as like, “Hey, we’re going to try to make this movie.”

And so when we encounter those things, sometimes they are like, well, we got this piece of property. Come in and pitch us your take on how you would do this thing. And so team after team of writers comes in pitches them like how they would make this movie. More increasingly what happens is they’ll get together a writers room of some experienced writers, some newer writers, and they’ll spend four weeks breaking possibilities for stories for sea monkeys in the room. And Nicole Perlman, our friend, who is a twice guest on the show, she runs a lot of these rooms. She’s really good at this, apparently, at sort of talking people through how we’re going to do this. And running that team that’s figuring out how we’re going to take this piece of intellectual property – in this case sea monkeys – and make them into a movie.

So, what would those sea monkey pitches be like? What do you think, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you know, if somebody put a gun in my mouth – it would have to be in my mouth, by the way. If the gun is to my head, I’m going to take my chances that it maybe ricochets off my skull. But if it’s in my mouth, I would say, well, you could do a story where the guy who originally – the mysterious man who is selling sea monkeys insisted until his dying day that he saw real sea monkeys. He did. And that it wasn’t a lie. And that one day people will see. And that these things – one of them, it’s going to happen to him, because he did it himself. And they were real sea monkeys. And he swears.

But, you know, he’s been dead for a while, and nobody believes that. But they’re still selling sea monkeys. And this kid, who is very lonely and maybe, you know, usual thing. Mom died. Dad died. Divorce. You know, one of those things. He’s lonely and he wants sea monkeys. And they’re like, “You’re stupid. Sea monkeys are baloney.” And he gets the packet of sea monkeys. He puts it in and it’s just, yeah, there they are, the little dots of brine shrimp, and it’s lame.

And he goes to bed. And then there’s like a meteor or something and aliens who were the original sea monkeys. The guy was telling the truth. They get into his water and he has real sea monkeys. And they need his help to get home, or something. That’s probably… – And then hopefully the gun would come out of my mouth. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] They’re like, OK, that was just good enough to get the gun out of your mouth.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. Or, at that point I’d feel so bad I’d pull the trigger myself.

**John:** I should stipulate that in Frankenweenie, there actually is sort of the equivalent of sea monkeys. I’m sure we don’t call them sea monkeys. But that same idea where everyone is trying to resurrect their dead pets. And so this guy like dumps all the sea monkeys in the pool and they become giant live things. So they become like one of the big monster threats of Frankenweenie, these things that are like sea monkeys.

I was thinking more on the order of Smurfs, where you basically just take the name and then you sort of create what is their life like. And so it’s an animated movie where you are following the adventures of these sea monkeys and you establish whatever rules. And you really sort of go by what they sort of look like on the package. So, it’s, you know, it’s the Jetsons under water kind of to some degree. I don’t think that’s a movie you make, but I bet it’s a movie that would get developed. If the right producer with the right hustle and like ended up at the right studio that was appropriately desperate, you could go through a couple of development cycles on Sea Monkeys.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s a great way of saying – if you had the exact perfect mix of people, you would get to go through a couple of development cycles. You know, the thing about sea monkeys–

**John:** Well, Craig–

**Craig:** Yeah?

**John:** Craig, we did make the movie Monster Trucks.

**Craig:** We did. Well, we didn’t.

**John:** Yeah, but as Hollywood, together, we all basically made Monster Trucks.

**Craig:** But, you know what, let me say something about Monster Trucks.

**John:** Let’s talk about Monster Trucks.

**Craig:** Let’s talk about Monster Trucks. So, this movie came and crashed and burned. And it was very, very expensive. And any time this happens, people go bananas in our town. And, you know, look, you see the trailer for Monster Trucks and you think, well, this does not look particularly good. It’s kind of corny. It feels very old-fashioned, sort of like Herbie the Love Bug, expect instead of the Volkswagen being alive, there’s an incredibly expensive CGI creature that’s making the truck move.

And it looked very paint by numbers, you know, guy finds a friend and his buddy. And even the design of the creature borrowed from other movies like How to Train Your Dragon, and so forth. But, you know what? They weren’t building it on an existing title. They were trying to make something new. So, for that alone, you know, I tip my hat. Maybe it didn’t work out. OK. And maybe it wasn’t a good bet and it cost too much damn money. But they were at least trying to do something new.

I mean, the problem with things like sea monkeys is what happens is – as you know – people just sit in offices making lists of names of things people know and then backing movies into those things.

**John:** I would argue Monster Trucks is exactly the same situation, Craig. Because we both know it was a title. They had sort of no idea what that was going to be, but it was a title. And then basically a title. It’s like Cars, but they’re trucks. That’s really what it is. So, I’m not going to give you a pass on the like, “Oh, no, it’s a brilliant original idea.”

**Craig:** I didn’t say brilliant. I didn’t say brilliant.

**John:** OK. This was not The Matrix, Craig.

**Craig:** All right. I’ll give you that.

**John:** And so I really don’t mean to hate on that movie, but I would say that like you shouldn’t compare against the worst possible example of something, but I feel like there’s a movie – the Lego Movie, like sea monkeys at least have faces. I mean, they have a thing to them. They’re not as popular as Lego, but like the Lego Movie is a really good movie. And so I think there probably is a really good movie you could make out of sea monkeys, but you have to have the equivalent of those guys to do it.

**Craig:** Well, sure, but also, no, because the thing is Legos are an experience that multi-generations have. And they are an experience connected through creativity. And there’s an enormous amount of Lego stuff, of varying types, for different ages. And, of course, you’re not able to do the Lego Movie, I don’t think, if you don’t have the existence of all the encompassed brands that Lego has.

**John:** That is true.

**Craig:** Sea monkeys are one thing. That’s it. And they’re not interactive. And they’re not multi-generational. My child today, I mean, I don’t think either one of my kids would have any clue what a sea monkey is. None.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** You would have to play on the nostalgia somehow and – but it’s not like the Smurfs even. You know, the Smurfs are also a global brand. I don’t think sea monkeys are a global brand.

**John:** The Smurfs are Les Schtroumpfs here.

**Craig:** They’re Les Schtroumpfs. I think the way – it’s funny, because you listed a few movies down here. And before you listed those movies, in my mind I’m like, the real story here is the John Lee Hancock version of the man who invented sea monkeys. That’s the real story.

**John:** Yeah, so the man behind this, we’re going to link to a really good film by Penny Lee that is like a short documentary that she made for CNN Films that talks about the guy who created sea monkeys. And so essentially he wasn’t an inventor. He was really a really good marketer. And he figured out, like, I want to sell the bait. I want to sell these sea monkeys, these little brine shrimp, but I’m going to call them – he came up with the name sea monkeys. He came up with the artistic concept. Advertising them in the back of comic books. And he built this whole thing.

So his name was Harold von Braunhut. He died in 2003. So he also made X-ray specs. You know, and so you could look at this as like, well, congratulations to this guy. He was able to find value in this thing. He sort of brought joy to kids’ lives for like the 20 seconds that these sea monkeys stayed alive.

But he could trigger that thing in the imagination, which was great. And so you could see like that’s a very American story. But, he’s also, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, he is also – was also a virulent racist who supported the KKK and a number of white supremacist groups. This is a guy that they actually have on film saying, “Heil Hitler.” And talking about blacks and Jews using words that are not black and Jew. Just a horrendous person, and, yet, oddly, was born Jewish.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So, what? [laughs]

**John:** You got a lot there. You got a whole thing. And so I find that that’s so fascinating. Because, well, you naturally kind of want him to be the protagonist of the story, because he’s the main guy. He’s the guy who comes up with the idea. He goes through struggles and adversities. He sees the ups and downs. But then you’re like, but it’s also like a KKK person. So he can’t be the hero of your story. I mean, not the hero in the sense that you’re actually genuinely rooting for him. So it makes it very uncomfortable, which is why I think it circles so nicely John Lee Hancock’s movie because you have The Founder and like I saw his movie this last week and Michael Keaton is phenomenal–

**Craig:** He’s great.

**John:** And his performances are great, but John Lee Hancock does not, you know, he’s making a story about a guy who was ultimately not the guy you kind of want to be rooting for. And he’s not a Nazi, but it’s like, I mean, you can’t sort of compare with the KKK.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But it gets to a really uncomfortable place, which I was surprised by, because I was thinking, oh, it’s going to be an inspiring story about the guy who created McDonald’s.

**Craig:** No, not at all.

**John:** No. No it’s not. And so I’m curious whether you think like the sea monkey movie but Braunhut could be a movie-movie, it is an HBO movie? If you make this, where do you make this movie for?

**Craig:** Definitely not for theatrical release. Because, you know, even The Founder is kind of a limited target audience. I think it’s opening this weekend – by the way, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, because I believe it’s opening a few days before this airs, do see The Founder. It’s terrific. But, you know, it’s platformed and it’s meant for a narrow audience. But, that’s about McDonalds, which is one of the truly well-known global brands. Sea monkeys, not at all. It does feel like maybe an interesting hour-long thing for HBO or something like that. Maybe even it might actually be a better documentary in a weird way to sort of expand on this video that we’re linking to into more of a – I think it’s about an 18-minute video or something like that. Maybe it could be a 45-minute kind of thing.

There is something that struck me when I was reading about Harold von Braunhut, the Jewish anti-Semite and racist, and that was when I was a kid and I saw the sea monkey ads, one of the things that struck me was how mainstream and kind of aspirationally American the sea monkey family was. Even though they’re sea monkeys, they’re clearly white. They have very Caucasian features. Very WASPY features. They have that kind of perfect American family thing. They weren’t six Jews crammed in too-small house, screaming at each other, like my family.

Although they were in a fishbowl, it seemed like a much nicer place to live than Staten Island. There’s an interesting angle there that this guy had this weird self-hatred. And this worship of an idealized life that he thought he was robbed of being a part of. And even with these stupid things, he understood that this was something people would want. Joe Orlando, who was – I don’t know if he still is – a major guy at DC Comics, he was the guy that drew the illustrations. And it was something that obviously struck a chord with kids.

It’s not just the copy about – it’s the pictures. You wanted that perfect family in a fishbowl. Like is your family terrible? Would you like a perfect family, in a fishbowl? You can have one with sea monkeys.

**John:** Yeah. That classic thing of like the utopian ideal, which is really destruction. Basically like you want to erase the part of yourself that you hate, and so therefore you portray this idealized version of how things could be or should be. And so you don’t want to make Hitler comparisons, but this guy was the Hitler of brine shrimp.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He was selling this vision of not Aryans, but sort of aquatic Aryans.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Where everything was better in the little bowl. He’s like the reverse Little Mermaid. He wants to go back into the water.

**Craig:** Exactly. Well, and you know–

**John:** Because it’s happier there.

**Craig:** There’s certain parallels to Disney. You know, Disney always sold a perfected view of white America. And you can see it now, too, with the Make America Great Again. The question is, well OK, that means it was once great. When do you think it was great? There’s some interesting videos where they go and ask Trump supporters, “OK, when was America great?” And they give a lot of fascinating answers that seem pretty unaware of things like slavery, and war, and disease.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** But when you look at Disneyworld, for instance, or Disneyland, and you walk down Main Street, it’s like 1910, early 1920s Americana. So right before the Great Depression. Right before we became an international country, really. You know, we were still just America, despite our doughboys sort of kind of participating in WWI. And before everything fell apart. And you get a similar kind of vibe here. It’s a castle, by the way. The sea monkeys have a castle.

**John:** Of course, because they have a little crown, so of course they have castles. They’re royalty.

**Craig:** They’re royalty. There is something really interesting about the creepiness underneath all of it. But to me, probably better served by a documentary than a movie.

**John:** I agree with you. But I would not be surprised if within the next five years we see somebody buying that title as an idea for an animated something. I just feel like Nicole Perlman is going to get a phone call and she’s going to decide, do I do this? And maybe she does it because she’s so good at it.

**Craig:** Well, listen, the thing is they’re not just going to say, “We want to make a sea monkey movie.” They’re going to say, “We want to break a three-movie sea monkey arc.”

**John:** That’s what it is. It has to be. Yeah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Five seasons and a movie. Finally, a unique case where we’re not talking How Would This Be a Movie, but we’re talking about a movie itself. And so most of us are probably familiar with Sinbad. I shouldn’t say most of us. Many of us are probably familiar with Sinbad. He was the standup comic and actor. Made a lot of movies in the ‘90s. But then over the Christmas holiday, you Craig, you emailed me about this movie. And I was like, oh wow, that’s actually so fascinating.

So I was sitting across from my husband, Mike, and we were at the hotel bar downstairs. So, I’m going to play some audio and you’re going to hear the chatter in the background, but bear with it because I was asking Mike about his experience with the Sinbad movie where Sinbad plays a genie, and he had a very specific memory of it. So, let’s play the audio and then talk about our experience.

[Audio begins]

**John:** So there’s a movie where Sinbad played a genie, did you see it, or was it at your theater? What was it?

Mike: When I was working on Woodland Hills, managing that location, I think the movie was out then and Sinbad lived nearby. And so I remember him sort of coming in maybe around the time of the movie being in theaters.

**John:** What was the name of the movie?

Mike: Shazaam.

**John:** And it was about the DC Comics character? How was it spelled?

Mike: I think so.

**John:** Great. So you would say ’95?

Mike: No, it would have been, if I was working in Woodland Hills it would have been between ’97 and ’99.

**John:** OK. And just him. Do you remember anybody else being in it, or any trailer or anything?

Mike: No. I vaguely remember – I can vaguely picture the poster. And I think there might be two kids in it, which makes me think that somehow he might be like the family maid, or like manny or something like that. And he’s a genie/he’s a nanny, or something.

**John:** All right. Can you think of any reason why I would be bringing this up or asking questions about it?

Mike: Other than you’re having another Shazaam movie.

**John:** OK. Craig just sent through an article about it and about the movie and a whole Reddit thread about the movie. So, everyone has essentially your memory of the movie, but the movie never existed. So, what’s strange is a lot of people have exactly your memory of Sinbad in a movie–

Mike: Well, and Sinbad lived in Woodland Hills and he still used to come into our theater.

**John:** Do you believe that? Or do you think it’s a hoax, someone is pretended it never existed?

[Audio ends]

**John:** So, Craig, talk us off this weird metaphysical ledge. Is it a hoax? What is the deal with the Sinbad genie movie?

**Craig:** Well, it’s not a hoax, because I think far too many people have far too strong of a personally held belief that they remember this movie existing. So, some facts. The movie did not exist. At all. We know this because it’s impossible to hide a movie in 2017. And Sinbad himself is absolutely mystified by this whole thing. [laughs] You’d think he would remember. It’s also not something that would have any reason to be covered up, or hidden, or buried, or squirreled away.

So, what you have is a failure of memory in the precise way, in the precise same way across lots of people. Now, there are explanations for this. Why people have the same faulty memory. And, of course, it’s easy to think, oh, there must be some kind of – let’s call it a metaphysical reason.

**John:** A glitch in the matrix.

**Craig:** A glitch in the matrix.

**John:** Or like a parallel universe and things crossed over, things disappeared.

**Craig:** But in my mind, it’s as simple as this. And perhaps I’m being reductive here. But Sinbad, the comedian, his real name is not Sinbad. He took the name Sinbad, I’m not sure why, but Sinbad himself, that’s a fictional character from Arabian folklore. There have been movies where Sinbad has appeared, the character of Sinbad, who generally wears a turban and comes from the same culture and the same stories that included genies. And so I think people in their minds there’s an unconscious dot-dot-dot between Sinbad and genies. And I think for a lot of – I’d be interested in seeing the racial statistics on people who remember Sinbad being in a genie movie called Shazaam, because Shaquille O’Neal, the basketball player, was in a genie movie called Kazaam.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And I wonder if a lot of this is white people just confusing two black actors, who are roughly the same age, playing genies, at roughly the same time. But beyond that–

**John:** I think there’s clearly more than just that. So, the Shazaam/Kazaam thing was sort of my first go to. It’s like, oh, they’re just confusing that, and because they’re both black people. And I agree with you that the Sinbad name carries with it that whole Arabian folklore thing. So those little parts of your brain sort of connect. But what’s so interesting is when you dig down into these threads and you talk to people who were not preconditioned to have a certain response, they’re like, “Oh yeah, I remember Kazaam. That’s a different movie. And I remember not seeing Kazaam because I thought it was just a remake of the Sinbad movie.”

**Craig:** A rip-off of Shazaam.

**John:** It was a rip-off of Shazaam. And so people have very distinct memories of the whole plot of it. And so, again, I’m not saying that this thing actually happened, but I think it’s actually more interesting and more subtly confusing, sort of the way that the dress that looked two different colors based on when you looked at it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s the narrative version of that. Like there’s a version of your memory where that actually did happen. And I think it’s so interesting that we think of our memories as being written down someplace, but they’re actually just rehearsed. So this one memory can sort of feel like it really happened, but it’s just this little loop that’s rehearsing and creating a fictitious memory there. And it’s fascinating that for so many people it’s essentially the same memory.

**Craig:** That’s right. I remember in college I took a class on cognitive psychology, which is a fascinating field, because this is all it really concerns itself with. Essentially the flaws of cognition. And one of the theories that they had at the time, I don’t know if it’s still the case, is that the experience of déjà vu, which is universal, and which in the Matrix was in fact explained as a glitch in the Matrix, that déjà vu occurs because there is a neurological routine that serves to give us the sense of familiarity. When we see something that is familiar to us, we feel it is familiar because our brain goes, “Hit the familiar button on this.”

And déjà vu is essentially a hiccup of that. It’s when the brain hits the familiar button on something that isn’t familiar. But we can’t tell the difference. All we know is familiar is familiar. And if it’s familiar, it’s familiar. And so part of this may just be that this thing is naturally tweaking. There’s something about the combination of these elements that is naturally tweaking the familiarity button in people.

In the end, we’re left grasping for straws here because we just – there’s no really cogent, convincing explanation of this. This does go into the “we don’t know what’s going on box.”

**John:** I think why this is so appropriate for this segment because I think it is the How Would This Be a Movie mechanism is kicking in and I feel like we see the combination of Sinbad, a genie, what would that movie be like? And I think we would all chart basically the same kind of movie. Like you imagine, oh, these kids find a genie in a bottle and he does these things. You can sort of imagine the things that would happen in that Sinbad/genie movie really easily. And you can sort of picture the time that it’s happening.

So when I drilled deeper with Mike about what do you think was actually really going on in your head there, how do you think you got this confused, and he’s like, “You know what,” so he was looking through IMDb, like other Sinbad movies. “You know, what? I think I was taking the poster for First Kid, which is a Sinbad, and sort of combining it with Kazaam.” He could sort of see like what he was doing.

It was a strange situation though where he was literally working in the theater where Sinbad was coming in all the time, so it felt so specific that he was thinking like, oh, this movie that must have come out between this year and this year because he knows what movies come out what year because he worked in a theater. It is just a strange thing where like sort of like The Dress, it just hits those buttons in your brain and makes you think, oh, this must be – it’s a narrative optical illusion.

**Craig:** It’s a narrative optical illusion. I think that’s a great way of putting it. And it’s funny, we know that optical illusions fool us. And we don’t question whether or not they’re real. We don’t. Even the ones that are really, really good, like the one with the grey squares and the white squares, which is amazing.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** We just accept, OK, our eyes and our brain are bad at this. But we don’t accept it with memory. And we don’t accept it – so, a lot of what cognitive psychology was about was investigating things like the reliability of eye witness testimony, which is terribly unreliable. For these reasons. And, by the way, this is why we do what we do and why people want to see the things that writers do. Because our brains are narrative. It’s also what gets us into trouble as we can see around us right now.

Politics. Everything. Everybody has figured this out. Every marketer, every politician, every lawyer in a courtroom. Everyone has figured out that the way to make the most effective impression on another person’s mind is to do so through narrative. Because our brains are wired narratively.

**John:** I think the only remaining question is do you make the Sinbad/genie movie now? Just should you take advantage of this weird moment and just go back and retroactively make the movie? And you should make it like it was in the ‘90s and just like actually make it and blow everyone’s brains. Just like, oh, now it exists. This thing that you always wanted to exist, now it’s there.

**Craig:** Or, you do a meta thing where it’s like you find Sinbad, because you’re like I know that this actually happened. And I think you are a genie. I think you got rid of it because you’re a genie and you don’t want people to know. And I get why, you know, it’s like because people were bothering you because you’re really a genie, but I know you’re a genie and I need your help. And Sinbad is like, you’re crazy, you’re out of your mind. And then it’s like, OK, yeah, it’s true. I’m a genie. What do you need?

**John:** [laughs] I made the wish to make the movie go away because it was bad.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So, one of the things I’m sad that I’m missing that’s happening in Los Angeles right now that I’m hoping you get a chance to go see. You know the Jerry Maguire Video Store?

**Craig:** I’ve read about this. The crazy pop up Jerry Maguire Video Store that only sells I think thousands of copies of Jerry Maguire.

**John:** On VHS.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course.

**John:** So it’s like an art installation that you can visit, but it’s a video store that just sells Jerry Maguire. And I find it fascinating. And it feels like it’s related to this whole sense of like this movie that doesn’t really exist that everybody remembers. It’s all of a piece. There’s something magical happening there. So, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

Craig, we have these three questions. We don’t have time for these questions. They’re going to get punted back for another week because we got busy talking about Nazis and Nicole Perlman.

**Craig:** Yep. Nazis and Nicole Perlman. That’ll keep us busy.

**John:** I don’t regret a bit of that. But I have a really good One Cool Thing. So, this is the video for Wyclef Jean by Young Thug. So it’s directed by Pop and Clout, which I think is just the director’s name for Ryan Staake. So, the video is terrible. It’s just awful. And the reason why you should watch it is the director basically explains what went wrong in the course of the making of the video. So, they spent $100,000 to shoot this rap video for Young Thug. And Young Thug never showed up. And so he was like ten hours late and then never got out of his car. And so Young Thug had very specific instructions about things he wanted in the video. So they started shooting just like B-roll footage for what that stuff was, but then he never actually showed up to be part of it.

And so if you watch this video, it will show the footage, but then it will just be these insert title cards from the director explaining what was supposed to be happening here. And it’s one of my favorite videos of the year. It’s just delightful.

**Craig:** And that’s the video, by the way.

**John:** Yeah. It is the video. The real video is the director’s video.

**Craig:** That’s the real video. So it includes like, “Audio of Young Thug explaining what he wants which is incoherent and insane.” And then this guy doing it and just remarking on the stupidity of it all. And it’s the video. [laughs] That’s the thing. And I guess either Young Thug never watched it, or was just like this is dope. Let’s put it out.

It’s great. It’s the video of the year.

**John:** So I want to thank Matt Jebson in my Twitter feed for recommending it. It really is just terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. My One Cool Thing is, it’s a little dark. A little dark today.

**John:** Man, so I just expanded the little tab to see what it was, and my heart got palpitating, because I know what this is for, and I’m not happy to see this. It’s not a One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Sorry, it’s not.

**John:** It could save a person’s life, I guess. But oh no, Craig.

**Craig:** It’s a One Scary Thing. Well, listen, I’ve been working on this – I haven’t talked about this HBO thing. And I don’t want to yet until it’s like real. We’re close on this. But it is a miniseries that involves – the topic of radiation comes up.

**John:** It’s Silkwood 2, but yeah.

**Craig:** What’s that?

**John:** It’s Silkwood 2.

**Craig:** It’s Silkwood 2. It’s Silkwood meets the Sea Monkeys. But I’ve been doing a lot of research and we live in an uncertain time. It seems to have gotten a bit more uncertain. And I’m not suggesting that we are on the verge of nuclear war. I don’t believe we are at all. But we are currently threatened, all of us, by at least the proliferation of nuclear material and terrorism and the possibility of dirty bombs and so forth.

And so there’s an item that I think everybody should have just as a matter of course, like a standard first aid item, just the way you would protect against earthquakes if you live in an earthquake zone, and things like that. And it’s potassium iodide. And you can get potassium iodide pills quite easily. They’re over the counter. You can get them on Amazon or local store. And the reason you should have them is simply this: if there is any kind of radioactive disaster, or accident, one of the most dangerous isotopes, radioactive isotopes, is the radioactive isotype of iodine. And your thyroid gland is really good at absorbing iodine. And so we see that one of the first impacts of any kind of radioactive disaster is an increase in thyroid cancer. Sometimes a dramatic increase in thyroid cancer, which can kill you.

So what they suggest, if something like this should happen, is that you take potassium iodide, only by the way when this happens. Do not take it normally. That is not good for you. But, if there is some kind of problem, you take potassium iodide which is a stable form of iodine. The thyroid will essentially uptake that and be flooded with it and not want to take any more iodine. And so if radioactive isotypes of iodine then waft over to you, you will not be up-taking and absorbing them. It’s very cheap and it’s just a good thing to have around. Sorry to be a downer.

**John:** Man, we should have reversed the order of our One Cool Things. But, yes, I agree it’s a necessary thing. It’s a thing that I was already planning to get, have in our first aid kid, and in our survival things. So, yes.

**Craig:** Sorry about that, guys.

**John:** That’s all right. That’s our show for this week. As always, it was produced by Godwin Jabangwe and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is a Matthew Chilelli classic. So, thank you, Matthew, for making such great music.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we meant to answer today. For short questions, we’re on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re also on Facebook. Look for Scriptnotes Podcast.

You can find us on iTunes. Search for Scriptnotes. That’s also where you’ll find the Scriptnotes App. We also are now in Google Play Store.

**Craig:** What? That’s a thing?

**John:** No, actually I think we’re the Google Music. People wanted us to be accessible through this Google thing, and so we sent them a URL. And now magically our podcast shows up there.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** If you’re in any of those places and want to leave us a comment, we really will read those. And maybe we’ll read them on the air at some point, because those are always fun to do.

Show notes for this episode, and all episodes, are at johnaugust.com. So that’s where you’ll see the article links for the stuff we talked about today and for buying potassium iodide for impending nuclear winter.

**Craig:** [laughs] Sorry.

**John:** And we’ll also have transcripts to read. So, you know, while the lights are out, you can maybe print them or something and remember what Scriptnotes used to be in the days before the big flash and bang.

**Craig:** Kaboom.

**John:** And thank you to everybody who subscribes at Scriptnotes.net. That’s where you get all the back episodes. So, we have no more USB drives, but if you want all those back episodes, including episodes with John Lee Hancock talking about The Founder, Kelly Marcel, Nicole Perlman, who has been on the show twice when she’s not running writers rooms–

**Craig:** For sea monkeys.

**John:** When she’s not surrounded by sea monkeys and Nazis. She is on previous episodes and is phenomenal. So, you can find those at Scriptnotes.net. It is $2 a month.

And that is all the boilerplate I have to offer. Craig, thanks for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Talk to you soon.

**John:** All right. Talk to you soon. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [John’s Madrid Talk](https://bloguionistas.wordpress.com/2017/01/16/john-august-1/)
* [John’s Madrid Talk II](https://bloguionistas.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/john-august-ii/)
* [Abducted at Birth and Found 18 Years Later](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/alexis-anigo-kamiyah-mobley-kidnapping.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&_r=0)
* [The Real Story of Sea Monkeys](http://boingboing.net/2016/12/28/the-real-story-of-sea-monkeys.html)
* [Sinbad in the Genie Movie](http://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/internet/2016/12/movie-doesn-t-exist-and-redditors-who-think-it-does)
* [The Mandela Effect](http://www.snopes.com/2016/07/24/the-mandela-effect/)
* [Young Thug – Wyclef Jean](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9L3j-lVLwk)
* [Potassium Iodide](https://emergency.cdc.gov/radiation/ki.asp)
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_285.mp3).