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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is episode 212 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today, we will be looking at how you get your first movie made, with special guest Mari Heller, writer and director of Diary of a Teenage Girl. She’s three feet away from us and I cannot wait to tell her how good her movie is.

Craig: But don’t tell her yet.

John: No. But first, we have to do some follow-up, Craig. T-shirts. So sometime next week, we will have them up in the store for people to look at and pre-order. They’ll be available for pre-order for at least two weeks. We will be sending them out to you in your homes middle of October. So they should be on your body in time for the Austin Film Festival.

Craig: Oh, the Austin Film Festival is something that we’re both going to be at.

John: We will both be there. That’s the second piece of follow-up. We’re going to be doing two live Scriptnotes shows. We’ll do —

Craig: Two.

John: Two.

Craig: Two.

John: First is a normal Scriptnotes with some special guests. The second is a live Three Page Challenge.

Craig: Live Three Page Challenge, I believe we will be joined by Kelly Marcel. Is that correct?

John: She is going to be on stage with us looking through those three pages.

Craig: She asked me the other day, “You’ll have to tell me what’s involved in that.” And I said, “You read three pages.”

John: Yeah. So there’ll be three or four people. So it will be maybe a total of 12 pages to look at. Because you can skip the title page because we’ll tell you who that actual writer is.

Craig: I didn’t want to overwhelm her.

John: [laughs]

Craig: Can we talk about some of the people that we’re going to have on the other show or we should not?

John: I think we can talk about them because no one’s fully officially confirmed. But I think we’re going to have those folks.

Craig: Well, all right.

John: So, Andrea Berloff.

Craig: Andrea Berloff who has Straight Outta Compton in movie theaters right now.

John: A small independent film that I think has a shot.

Craig: Small tiny film.

John: She’s also running for the WGA Board.

Craig: So Andrea Berloff is a college friend’s cousin. It’s a buddy of mine from college. She is his cousin. He’s just a very Jewishy guy, just like me, but Jewisherer. And she’s his Jewishererer cousin. So like Andrea Berloff, I just, I’m still just — I just love the fact that Andrea Berloff wrote Straight Outta Compton. It makes me happy. It makes the world feel right. I love it.

John: I saw Andrea last night and I was telling her where we were going to go for dinner. And she was chastising me because she had once had dinner there and her salmon and her salad were touching, and that’s just wrong.

Craig: Do you understand what I’m saying?

John: [laughs] I do completely understand what you’re saying. She has to be somebody’s Jewish cousin.

Craig: She is Andrew Blaw’s Jewish cousin.

John: Our other guests will include Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber and a third guest who is not yet confirmed but I think would be great.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: So that would be great.

Craig: All right.

John: Stuart Friedel will not be with us but I think we’re going to have a special Austin Stuart. So it’s got a lot of new things to look forward to.

Craig: Austin Stuart.

John: Austin Stuart, because there ends up being enough stuff that has to be done and dealt with when we try to do these shows. And I try to do it myself and I do a bad job. So you and I will have somebody —

Craig: Great.

John: A utility person.

Craig: My knuckles are looking forward to smashing into that person’s face.

John: But I’m mostly looking forward to our topic for today, which is Mari Heller. So, welcome to our show.

Marielle Heller: I am so excited to be here.

Craig: Mari Heller. Here’s how she comes to us.

John: Right.

Craig: So Mike Birbiglia, standup comedian, filmmaker, occasional radio commentator —

Marielle: Yup.

Craig: I was in New York and he invited me to come to his house in hipsterton. I believe it’s in the hipsterton section of Brooklyn.

Marielle: [laughs] Yes. All of Brooklyn is sort of hipsterton. But, yes, North Hipsterton —

Craig: This was like North Hipsterton.

Marielle: Yes.

Craig: But as the night was winding down he said, “By the way, you know who lives right on the other side of this wall in my duplex here in hipsterton is Jorma Taccone and Mari Heller.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s cool,” because, you know, as I’ve mentioned on the show [laughs] many, many times, I think MacGruber is one of the great American films and should be in the Library of Congress.

Marielle: I totally agree.

Craig: And it’s awesome. But I didn’t really know much about you.

Marielle: No.

Craig: I was just very excited about Jorma. And he said, “Well, you know, Jorma and Mari are big fans of the show.” I was like, “Wow, this is great.” You know, and he said, “And she’s a filmmaker. She’s got this movie coming out.” And I was like, “Uh-huh, well, great.”

Marielle: [laughs]

Craig: [laughs] I’m sure she does. Why don’t we get them both on the show? It’ll be terrific.

Marielle: But really, you just wanted to talk about MacGruber.

Craig: Mostly. I was like —

Marielle: Let’s be honest.

Craig: I had MacGruber in my eyes and I was really, really excited. Head back home to my hotel. And there is an email waiting for me from Dan Chariton, another friend of ours, who said, “Hey, weirdest thing. I was at the park. We’re having a little baby play day and Jorma Taccone and Mari Heller were there. And they were talking about how they’re big fans of the show.” And I was like, well this is…this is…

Marielle: It was weird.

Craig: It was weird.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: So then we started talking. And then I realized actually that the movie you had made was supposed to be pretty awesome. And I was like, well —

John: But did Craig run out and see the movie right away? No.

Craig: Well, no, no. I don’t do that.

Marielle: No. I know.

Craig: Let’s just be clear. I don’t do things like that.

John: But you have seen it now because we both watched it last night. And it is fantastic.

Craig: Well, so this is the thing. And this is what I want to say to you before we let you start talking. Because when we let you start talking, then you go and you go.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And we won’t stop you. It’s better than MacGruber.

Marielle: Ohh!

Craig: And I know — and I feel a little weird about saying it. And I know some people would be like, are you being sarcastic? I’m not being sarcastic. MacGruber is a great American film. This is better than MacGruber. And obviously it’s a very different film.

Marielle: Very different.

Craig: But you two together ring both sides my bell so great. I mean your kid is going to grow up to be an amazing filmmaker who really pleases — I mean just was blown away. So thank you, Mari Heller, for coming to talk to us on our show.

Marielle: Oh my God, I’m so happy. And there are so many other weird coincidences on the other side of all of those coincidences.

Craig: Okay, tell me.

Marielle: You just — well, Mike Birbiglia is the one who introduced me to your guys’ show. We moved next door to each other randomly. We knew Mike. We bought our place in New York and we’re in escrow, we were like — we didn’t even have the keys yet. And I happen to go into our agent’s office and an agent popped her head out, and was like, “Hey, I hear you’re moving to blah, blah, blah,” named our address.

And I was like, “How does she know this? We don’t even own the place yet.” And she was like, “I know who your next door neighbor is.” And we’re like, “Who?” She was like, “Mike Birbiglia.” And we were like, “Wait, we know Mike. He’s our buddy. We didn’t know him that well yet.” So we ended up moving in randomly, sharing a wall.

Craig: Sharing a wall.

Marielle: We’ve become such close friends with he and his wife. Like they are just some of our best friends now. They have a baby, we have a baby. It’s like — it’s amazing.

Craig: So when there is one screaming, crying on the side of the wall —

Marielle: Who cares?

John: Who cares?

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: I think it would actually be cool if you did care and you were constantly banging the wall.

John: [laughs]

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: And when your baby was crying, you’re like —

Marielle: You’re like, “Get over it.”

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s a baby, ass.

Marielle: Exactly. Yeah, so that was random. And then he is the one who introduced me to your guys’ podcast and got me totally addicted. And we talk about it all the time.

Craig: Yeah.

Marielle: We talk about filmmaking. We talk about your podcast. We talk about — we watch movies together all the time. It’s this great little —

Craig: That’s awesome.

Marielle: We’re building a great little life in Brooklyn [laughs] together. And we have a little artistic —

Craig: You’re little kibbutz.

Marielle: Yeah, kibbutz, exactly.

John: Well, now that you’re here with us, I want to talk about your movie. And people who have not seen your movie, which is probably most of America because you’ve just come out —

Marielle: Yes.

John: I want to give a little bit of a back story on what this movie is so people know what the hell we’re talking about. So Diary of a Teenage Girl is a new movie out in theaters right now. It stars Bel Powley.

Marielle: Bel Powley.

John: Bel Powley as the titular 15-year-old Minnie living in 1976 San Francisco. And we have a clip from it. So we’re going to play a clip from the trailer so people know what we’re talking about.

Marielle: Awesome.

Craig: We can do that?

John: We can do that.

(Video Starts Playing)

Minnie Goetze: My name is Minnie Goetze. I’m recording this onto a cassette tape because my life has gotten really crazy of late. I had sex today.

Female: What? So happy. [laughs]

Minnie Goetze: If you’re listening to this without my permission, please stop now. Just stop.

Female: I’m going to kill you.

Minnie Goetze: This makes me officially an adult. Do I look different than I did yesterday?

Male: Hey.

Minnie Goetze: Hey. It feels so good to imagine that he might be thinking about me. I wonder if anybody loves me who I don’t know about.

Male: (Inaudible).

Minnie Goetze: I get distracted sometimes, overwhelmed by my all-consuming thoughts about sex and men.

Female: I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I think he’d be more into boys.

Male: What are you waiting for?

Female: You have a kind of power, you know. You just don’t know it yet.

(Video Ends)

John: So the film also stars Kristen Wiig who you just heard as Minnie’s mother. And Alexander SkarsgÂrd as the mother’s boyfriend with whom Minnie begins a very complicated affair which is really the bulk of this movie.

Marielle: Yeah.

John: The film debuted at Sundance this last year to —

Marielle: Yes.

John: Huge acclaim. It is 94% Rotten Tomatoes. It’s just crazy and it’s really, really good. So thank you very much for —

Marielle: Thank you.

John: Coming here to talk to us about it.

Marielle: Yeah. And I also went through the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and Directors Lab with the movie.

Craig: With Scott Frank.

Marielle: With Scott Frank was one — so that was another connection.

Craig: So that’s another one. So Scott cast you in Walk Among the Tombstones.

Marielle: And cast me in A Walk Among the Tombstones, which I largely was cut out. I did have a scene where I was sort of alive, almost like a ghost and then —

Craig: You were briefly alive.

Marielle: And then I got cut out.

Craig: He sends his love. So he was one of your advisors.

Marielle: He was.

Craig: And he said he just thinks the world of you and is just —

Marielle: And I feel the same about him, yeah. I texted him at some point when you guys were talking about him on the podcast. And I was like, “I just heard them talking about you on Scriptnotes.”

Craig: Oh, yeah. He’s like, he hates all the — you know how I hate podcasts?

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: He really hates podcasts.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

Marielle: I can imagine that about him. But that makes me love him even more. He’s a great guy.

Craig: Obviously I agree.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: Obviously I agree.

John: Talk to us about your movie. So where does this movie come from? So I know it’s based on a graphic novel. And did you find the graphic novel and that was the start? How did this movie come to be?

Marielle: This project has been like an eight-year total passion project for me and actually was the project that started me writing. I was a theater actor mostly. And I just read this book that my sister gave me. She gave it to me as a Christmas present. And I fell in love with it. And I had been thinking about writing. And I had wanted to write something for a while and the right thing hadn’t come along, I hadn’t had the idea that I felt like was the right thing.

And reading this graphic novel, I was so blown away by this character. She felt like the most honest depiction of what it really felt like to be a teenage girl. There’s a lot of movies and a lot of books about teenage boys and not a lot what it really feels like to be a teenage girl.

Anyway, I was so blown away by it. I actually closed the cover and called the publisher. Like Googled the name of the publisher, picked up the phone, and started rambling about, “I want to make this into something.” And I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t even have an agent at the time. So I was just trying to get the rights myself.

I got kind of shut down by [laughs] her agents at some point who were like, “Who are you? No.” And then just kept pestering and stalking the author and her agents until they eventually gave me the rights to it.

And first, I wrote it as a play, as a stage play. And then —

John: Did you end up performing it as a stage play?

Marielle: Yeah, we did the stage play in New York in 2010. I played the lead character. And I wrote it, produced it. I had other people direct it and I was in it. Kind of put it away for a little while and then started to think about it as a screenplay because meanwhile the project had sort of sparked me to writing. So over the course of the many years it took me to put the play up, I started writing screenplays, I started working with a writing partner.

We wrote a number of screenplays and kind of started getting work on, we wrote a couple of pilots and wrote a few screenplays, none of which got produced sadly. But, you know, we were like making our living as a writer. So I had gotten that bug and then I started thinking about this as a screenplay and started writing it. And somebody early on said, “This is going to be a really hard movie to make.”

John: Yeah. You set a very — you set a very low bar. So it’s a 15-year-old girl exploring her sexuality —

Marielle: Yes.

John: In period San Francisco.

Marielle: Yes.

John: Easy.

Craig: They do those all the time. That’s all Fox makes now.

John: Yeah. It’s 100% —

Marielle: Yeah, yeah.

John: They have a whole specialty label that it’s just those movies.

Marielle: I know. God, it’s like every other movie.

John: But what was it that sparked to you about this idea? Because we’re all too young to have actually lived —

Marielle: Yeah.

John: As a teenager in those times. And yet, there’s a specificity to what you’re trying to do with this experience.

Marielle: But I did grow up in the Bay Area. And the Bay Area has a really specific culture. And there was just something about this girl’s voice that felt really, really authentic. And I have this pet peeve about the way all teenagers but mostly teenage girls are depicted mostly in movies and TV where they’re always either — they’re just two-dimensional. They’re really quippy and they have like a perfect response for everything, which is just not how it felt to be a teenager to me.

I was really dramatic and everything felt like it was life or death. I was not able to cope with the world with everything rolling off my back and some little sarcastic response to everything that happened. It was actually a painful time of life for me. And I felt like this book kind of captured what that really felt like, even though it wasn’t my exact experiences. It was just, it captured what it felt like to be a girl starting to have sexual thoughts who doesn’t know what to do with them. And it just felt important for that reason.

Craig: Well, before we get into some of the interesting writing challenges that you had in the movie and how I think you sailed through them beautifully, let me just say I’m glad that you found writing and I’m glad that you found filmmaking because this is what you’re supposed to be doing. I’m sure that you were great on —

Marielle: Thanks, Craig.

Craig: I’m sure that you were a fine actor on stage. I’m sure. However, there’s like a billion of those people, right? There’s precious few people, honestly, who can do what you did. And what’s so interesting when I was watching the movie was every now and again — and, by the way, it’s not always when it’s the same writer and directors, because writer/directors can fall into traps as well.

But every now and then, I see a movie and I think it’s all of a piece. I don’t see the separation between the filmmaking and the writing and the writing and the directing and the acting and the dialogue. It’s all of a piece. It feels perfectly integrated. You did a spectacular job. I mean, you have such a good eye —

Marielle: Oh, thank you.

Craig: By the way. Just a remarkable eye. I mean, these are things that I don’t think anyone can teach. I know they try and teach these things but I think it’s a waste of time. You know how I feel about all that stuff.

I just love watching movies where I think, “Well, I couldn’t have done that in a million years. I don’t even know — why did she put the camera there? I don’t know. I’m glad she did. I would’ve never put the camera there.” So I just wanted to say right off the bat, you’re supposed to be doing this.

Marielle: [laughs]

Craig: So don’t do other things. Do this now, okay?

Marielle: I appreciate that. And this is what I want to do now.

Craig: Good.

Marielle: So —

Craig: Well, many people will be calling and offering you Transformers sequels but we’ll work on what —

Marielle: [laughs]

John: [laughs] We have a lot of creative advice for like sort of which projects to tackle next.

Marielle: I appreciate it.

John: Yeah. But that’ll be off air.

Marielle: Okay.

John: Talk to me about then moving from the play to moving to a screenplay. What were the writing changes that happened there? And then how did Sundance get involved? What were the next steps there?

Marielle: I sort of started from scratch when I started to think about it as a movie because obviously, it’s such a different — the play was sort of this distilled version of the story. It was five characters, it was a really intimate play. We performed it in the round. It was very theatrical. I thought the whole time when writing it, why does this have to be a play?

And I tried to write a version that couldn’t be a movie, that couldn’t be just a book, but that needed to be a play. And then had to basically toss all of that to start thinking of it, “Okay, now why does it have to be a movie? And what are the ways in which it’s inherently filmic? What are the ways in which it’s visual?”

It’s based on a graphic novel, so that sort of led to this animation. The graphic novel isn’t a traditional graphic novel. It’s not all comic book panels. It’s diary entries with full page illustrations and comic book sections. So it’s sort of a hybrid, so that kind of gave me the inspiration for the movie to be a bit of a hybrid and have mixed media all kind of playing with each other.

Yeah, and the world can be so much wider when you write it as a screenplay. You can have more than five people who speak.

Craig: Yes. Unless you’re the movie Ghost.

Marielle: Right, right. [laughs] I enjoyed that episode very much. Yeah, obviously I knew the material so inside and out after working on it as a play and I had written so many drafts of it as a play. So I had the material really already. It was all memorized also because I had played the character. But I really did kind of start from scratch when I started writing it as a screenplay.

And then going through the Screenwriters Lab was really key for me, too. It really changed a lot of things and kind of clarified — I was so clear about the story and all of the things that were important to me. But the ways that those were functioning the way I wanted them to be and the ways that I was failing at how I wanted it to function just became really clear.

John: Talk through the experience out of the Screenwriters Lab for you. So, you come into the lab with a finished screenplay.

Marielle: Yeah.

John: You’re sitting down with a bunch of advisors, you’re up on a mountain in Utah.

Marielle: Yeah.

John: What is the, I don’t know, psychological process of going through and talking with the different advisors about this thing you’re trying to make?

Marielle: I mean, it kind of breaks you down and sort of destroys you mentally in a really good way but I think forces you to learn how to take feedback. You sit down one-on-one with advisors who’ve read your script in a more detailed way than I’d ever have anyone read a script for me.

I was so used to having these really surface-level conversations with people who had done a really loose pass of reading the script and given me their first thoughts. And they would get the names wrong or they would miss whole sections when they were remembering how it had been. This was not like that. This is sitting down with people who are like, “On page 15, you have this moment where you,” and you’re like, “Oh, you are serious about this. Okay.”

John: Is that Susan Shilliday?

Marielle: [laughs] I did have a Susan Shilliday. But everybody there, everybody has read it in such a thoughtful way and is there just to help you make your movie the best it can be. There’s no second agenda there. It’s just to help you make your script as good as possible. But that doesn’t mean everybody agrees with each other, too. So you’ll have like a three-hour meeting with Scott Frank. You’ll sit down, he’ll give you all of his thoughts about the script. And you’ll leave going, “Okay, I know exactly how I’m going to rewrite.”

And then you’ll sit down with Dana Stevens and she’ll tell you something totally opposite. “Oh no, I loved that part, I hated this part. This is what I think about this.” And then you leave going, “Oh my god, now I have no idea what I’m going to do.”

Craig: That in and of itself is great training and you almost have to have a meta awareness of how this all works because we — I think we’re all sponges by nature. That’s how we do what we do. We can’t really talk about the world, describe the world, describe humans if we’re not absorbing the people around us.

Dangerously, however then, we absorb strong voices. Look, I’m writing a movie right now for Scott to direct and Lindsay Doran is the producer. They don’t always agree.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: But boy, they’re convincing when they’re talking. And what happens, you have to be really careful about is that feeling where suddenly you realize, “Where is my compass?”

Marielle: Exactly.

Craig: “Where is my vote? I’ve lost — ”

Marielle: Exactly.

Craig: “I’ve lost my vote in here somehow.” And now I’m just kind of chasing. And then that’s a great time to step back and say, “Everyone, shut up.” [Laughs]

Marielle: Let me digest this. Let me figure out —

Craig: Now it’s my time.

Marielle: How it’s sitting.

Craig: Correct.

Marielle: And what they do so smartly at the Writers Lab is they don’t let you write.

Craig: That is a great thing because you have to absorb, absorb.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: And then you can’t write towards anyone, you go away. Because here’s the thing, you also learn a lesson there, which is, they can’t all be right.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: They can all be brilliant but they can’t all be right. They can only be right for the movie that they would make of your movie.

Marielle: Exactly. There isn’t really a right. All there is is who’s helping you get closer to what you want it to be.

Craig: Bingo.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: And unfortunately then what that means is the movie that you want it to be, your understanding of what it’s supposed to be, ultimately comes down to something that is inherent to you, is not teachable.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: Right? So there needs to be some core of substance there that people can work upon.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: They can’t make it for you. So —

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: I love the story because I love listening to people getting the disparate views and then synthesizing them through themselves.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: It’s the only way we get stuff done. Because you’ve gone through these iterations.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: I’m wondering, did you ever feel like writer Mari was having an argument with director Mari or vice versa? And how would those arguments be litigated? Or did it all feel like —

Marielle: I did feel like I had those moments mostly actually in production. Up until then, I was really much more in my writer place for so many years. And then I had this weird moment where I would be just sitting and talking with the actors and they’d go, “You know, could I change this line?” We did a lot of rehearsal, which not everybody gets to do on their movies. But I come from theater, I love rehearsal. I really wanted to rehearse with the actors. And I had great actors who wanted to rehearse.

But we would be sitting around and talking about a scene and, you know, maybe Alexander would say like, “I don’t know, the way this line is coming out of my mouth isn’t feeling quite right.” But what I loved about working with him and with Bell and with Kristen is they wouldn’t just change it. We would talk about it and I’d go, “Okay, let me rewrite that.” And I’d come back the next day with new pages based on their thoughts or their notes.

But sometimes they’d go, “Could I change this line in this?” And I’d go, “Yeah.” And then in my mind I’d go, “Wait, this is the final rewrite.” Whatever we’re deciding right now, I’ve done 85 drafts of this script over these many, many years. And it’s always felt fine to try something new and to shift something, “Yeah, let’s change that line,” because it was never a final choice.

Craig: Right.

Marielle: And then to suddenly be in production and to go, “Oh, wait, whatever choice we make right now, that’s the final rewrite.”

John: Yeah.

Marielle: That felt really scary all of a sudden. So I would have those moments where my writer-self and my director-self would kind of bump up against each other.

Craig: Yeah, I’m very familiar with that. You know, I don’t blame actors at all because they only see what you give them. They don’t see the mile behind it of stuff. And frankly, sometimes either they’re right because their perspective is new or it doesn’t matter, they have to say it.

Marielle: Totally.

Craig: And if it doesn’t come out right from their mouth —

Marielle: And their version of this character is maybe different than the version you had in your head, at least a little bit. Shade is different. And I had actors with great instincts. So often, if they came to me and said, “Something about this isn’t feeling right,” they were right.

Craig: Yeah. I think that you have to find some ego gratification in the sense that, look, I did this for all this time and now this person is coming and going, “Can I just change it?” and not think to yourself, “Oh, is it that easy? We’re just going to change it, la-la-la.” But to think what they’re asking to — their change only exists as a result of what I’ve done —

Marielle: Right. Right.

Craig: You know, and the current text around it.

Marielle: And what I grew to love about the way the actors were approaching it was they felt really protective of these characters because they had felt like they knew them based on all the work I had done. They felt like these were characters who they loved and they wanted to protect and they wanted to do right by. So if they wanted to make a change, it was because they were invested. And that was a good thing.

Craig: Right. They cared.

Marielle: They cared.

John: So you had many years to work on the writing of this.

Marielle: Yes.

John: How did you learn about directing? Because you seem to be a very quick study. It’s really, really well-directed. I mean on every level, on production design, on shot design, it’s all really smartly done and performances you get are astonishing. What was the process of learning how to direct?

Marielle: Well, I didn’t go to film school. I went to a theater school.

Craig: Good.

Marielle: [laughs].

Craig: Good. I’m telling you, good.

Marielle: Yeah. But as you said, my husband’s a director. And so I’ve been on a lot of sets and I’ve been around and honestly wasn’t that interested in directing for a long time.

Craig: Watching him you were just bored to death.

Marielle: No, no, I mean I was kind of like, “Okay, this is interesting,” and I enjoy being on set. But I was never eager to talk about like lenses with him or like how you were going to set up a stunt or anything like that. Mostly because I’m really character-based in the way that I get excited about things, too, and some of the technology felt like, “Well, this isn’t the thing that’s driving me.”

But as I started to imagine my movie being directed by somebody else, I was like, “Oh, no. I have to direct my movie. This is my movie.” So I just had to figure it out kind of. And I sort of used the Sundance Directors Lab as like my sort of film school.

John: So talk us through that because people might not be familiar with that part of it. So the screenwriters lab — were you the winter’s lab?

Marielle: Yeah.

John: Because you were up on a snowy mountain.

Marielle: Snowy mountain just in your head.

John: Just in your head, a bunch of writers.

Marielle: Yes.

John: It’s really small. Directors Lab is a much different experience.

Marielle: Directors Lab is like so physical. The Writers Lab is just this totally internal heady experience where you’re having one-on-one meetings. And then the Directors Lab is five weeks where you get a small cast, you get a small crew, you take the hardest scenes of your movie and you workshop them. And you shoot them.

And it’s almost like a reality show because you do like one day of prep, one day of shooting, one day of editing, and they limit your hours. So at 5 o’clock, someone knocks on your edit door and is like, “You’re done.”

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s miserable.

Marielle: Yeah.

John: Yeah, but you probably learned a lot there. So which scenes did you pick to be the ones you wanted to — ?

Marielle: So —

John: They don’t say your hardest scenes, they say the ones that scare you the most.

Marielle: The ones that scare you the most. And these will only make sense if somebody’s seen my movie. But pick the scene where they do acid.

Craig: Right.

Marielle: Which was one of my hardest scenes through the writing process, [laughs] the shooting process. Every part of the process, that was a really, really difficult scene to nail because it’s a drug sequence. People have done drug sequences in movies forever. Sometimes they’re done really well, sometimes they’re done really poorly.

I didn’t want to do the same version that I’d seen before but it’s also a really critical turning point. And both of the characters have a major emotional moment that happens that has to be treated seriously, so you can’t just be laughing at them through the whole thing either like, “Ha-ha, they’re on drugs. Isn’t this hilarious?”

Craig: Right.

Marielle: You actually have to believe the emotional build that happens throughout the scene, too. So that was a really complicated one. That was the one I failed the most at when I was at the labs.

John: [laughs]

Marielle: I did a scene where they have a big fight in the car and she ends up going into this sort of fantasy sequence in the bath tub.

Craig: Right.

Marielle: And sinks down into the —

Craig: Yes.

Marielle: Into the —

Craig: Into the ocean.

Marielle: Yeah, yeah. So I did that sequence kind of trying to mesh a really realistic, difficult emotional scene with this sort of fantasy.

Craig: You shot even like the wide shot of her.

Marielle: I didn’t get the wide shot of her.

Craig: You didn’t get that one, right.

Marielle: But I did like in the bathtub and we did all of these practical effects and we did it in this really small way at the labs. That’s part of the fun thing about the Directors Lab, it teaches you how to do things really practically. And that was really good for me.

Craig: I was fascinated by the general, let’s call them the technicals of this movie. And there were a bunch of things that I watched over again just to watch and see. Like for instance, that one. I guess I saw it and the best of it is you don’t notice it. And then after it goes by, I think, “Wait, hold on, where did that ocean — ” I want to see like what’s the line there. And I watched it and so I can see what’s happening and I assume it’s a pool or something —

Marielle: It was a pool, yeah.

Craig: There was a big light. But I loved the way the light worked behind it.

Marielle: That was a pool with garbage bags lining it.

Craig: Yeah.

Marielle: And a giant light over it.

Craig: A big light.

Marielle: I mean it was —

Craig: It’s amazing how that works, right?

Marielle: And it was dirty. The pool got dirty and the particles ended up being like this beautiful —

Craig: Filter, right?

Marielle: It was amazing.

Craig: I mean first of all, I’m fascinated by the look of the movie because — did you shoot digital and then filter the hell out of it?

Marielle: No. We shot digitally but we shot anamorphic. And we shot with these beautiful lenses from the ’60s.

Craig: Okay, so you shot —

Marielle: So we shot on the red epic —

Craig: Vintage lenses.

Marielle: But we shot with vintage lenses.

Craig: Fascinating. And then, but color-wise too, I mean it’s like —

Marielle: So this is a little tidbit I love. Brandon Trost who was our DP, shot movies like The Interview, Neighbors —

Craig: Wow.

Marielle: MacGruber.

John: So I was looking at his credits and I was like — it was such a great lesson to like not necessarily judge a person’s artistic abilities based on the things they had done before —

Marielle: Totally.

John: Because none of these things would ever suggest to me that he could do the DP for your movie.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: MacGruber was shot brilliantly.

John: Yes, but as a comedy.

Craig: Brilliantly.

Marielle: Brilliantly. And what’s really funny is I think Brandon sort of became the comedy DP because of MacGruber. But the whole reason that Jorma wanted him to do MacGruber was because he didn’t look like a comedy DP. He didn’t do this like blanket lighting, really bright —

Craig: Walmart lighting.

Marielle: He shot it like an action movie. And that’s what Jorma wanted for MacGruber. So he hired him because he was the anti-comedy DP.

Craig: Right.

Marielle: And then it ended up leading all of these people to be like, “I want that guy.” And so he’s done all of these comedies —

Craig: Yeah. This movie is going to change —

John: Oh, yeah.

Craig: That for him.

Marielle: The way people see him. I know.

Craig: Because, I mean it just was beautifully done. And then on your end of things and with your effects team, the way that the animation was integrated was really gorgeous and I loved how simple it was and —

John: Well, it looks simple. But I was watching this last night and thinking like, “Oh, she must have been so excited when she like wrapped production.” It’s like, “Oh, now we have to make an entire animated film on top of this movie.”

Marielle: Yeah.

John: I mean that was —

Marielle: We actually started the animation really early. That was the first element that I started. It was all done essentially by one animator, Sara, who’s an Icelandic animator who lives in New York who’s amazing. And she hand-drew everything.

So I brought her on creatively like a year before we started filming because I was like, “This is huge and I think we need to figure a lot of this out before we film.” Just so I could shoot based on what we needed for the animation. Some stuff we found later but a lot of things were planned out ahead of time. But also, she just had so much work to do with it.

Craig: There was a moment in the animation that I almost felt was like, “Is this rotoscoped?” And I couldn’t tell. When the guy is telling her you’re too intense and that, you know. And in animation, she’s holding the monster and just looks away and a tear. Was that rotoscoped or was that — ?

Marielle: The tear or the face?

Craig: Yeah, the face and the tear at that moment.

Marielle: The face was rotoscoped in that moment but not the tear.

Craig: Okay, but I knew the face were —

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: Because it was great.

Marielle: Yes.

Craig: All right, so rotoscoping, for those of you playing at home, rotoscoping is when you take film, live action film, and then you — it’s a process where you draw over it. And there are a lot of good examples of rotoscoping in movies where it’s essentially they’re animating real live footage. So it has that funky look to it. But there was something about that moment where it’s like it had to be because it had to be real.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: You know? And god, that look away that she does there is nuts.

Marielle: That’s one of my favorite kind of plays between the animation and the live action, too, is that sequence because it kind of really — there’s something about it. She’s having this experience with a boy who’s kind of shaming her and making her feel really bad about herself sexually and then she’s imagining herself as this gross big monster stomping through the city.

That’s how you feel emotionally in that moment and it was just personifying that. That was one of the moments that I was happy with how it came out. And I thought you were going to bring up the moment in the acid trip where she kind of turns into a bird, because that’s another rotoscoping moment.

Craig: Yes, that was rotoscoped. Correct. It was rotoscope because it needed to be rotoscoped —

Marielle: Right.

Craig: Because it was on her.

Marielle: But it was rotoscoped in maybe a way that you wouldn’t even know. What we discovered when we were doing tests for that was that in order to get the movement of feathers, it’s really difficult to do that animation-wise in a way that felt really real. So we did all these tests and she realized, you know, this looks better if we have real feathers moving. So then our costume designer had to hand-sew a bird suit where she sewed every single feather on in a way that they could all move. And so it was the most difficult —

Craig: And then you rotoscoped on top of it.

Marielle: And then we rotoscoped on top of — every single feather got rotoscoped.

Craig: Wow.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: Wow, well that works.

John: So before you had rotoscoped those feathers, you actually had to raise the money to put this movie into production.

Marielle: Yes.

John: And that’s the thing I was sort of most curious about watching this last night because, as we talked about, it’s such a difficult movie to get made.

Marielle: Yes.

John: So you’re dealing not only with period, you’re dealing with a young girl. You’re dealing with a really, potentially uncomfortable — I mean this would now be statutory rape, so —

Marielle: It would have been then, too.

John: Okay.

Marielle: I mean age of consent was 18 at the time in San Francisco.

Craig: She’s 15?

Marielle: She’s 15 and having sex with a 35-year-old man.

John: Right. And in certain markets like in England, you have like a harder time getting released.

Marielle: Yeah.

John: Here it’s a rated R movie.

Marielle: Yeah.

John: So these are all things that a financier would look at and say like, “Well, what is the upside of making this movie?”

Marielle: Yeah.

John: Like basically you wrote a movie that has to be just like brilliantly perfect. And good luck and congratulations it is but —

Marielle: And a lot of it was going to ride on execution and tone because some people would read the script and would find it incredibly dark. And what I’m proud of with the movie is I actually think there’s a lot of humor in it and there’s a lot of lightness. It’s a tough subject matter but it hopefully doesn’t make you feel horrible about the world.

John: What were the conversations? So like who were you sending this to? Were you sending this to small production companies, like what were the — ?

Marielle: I was sending it to small production companies or people that I was hearing were excited to take risks, who were interested in interesting projects rather than — obviously this was not going to be a giant budget movie. So coming out of the labs, I felt really like I’m ready to make this movie.

Jorma already had a relationship with a commercial company called Caviar and we knew they were wanting to start making movies. So we sent them the script and they were the first people who came on financier-wise. And they were really just excited about the script and felt like this is a project that I want to get involved with.

But actually, the way that the process really went was I actually got the actors involved first. So I got Kristen Wiig involved before I had even really set up the money.

Craig: Which helped?

Marielle: Which helped. And it was a juicy part. It was something she could get excited about. And it was kind of a backdoor way of getting the movie made was sort of getting the actors involved and then getting the money to follow basically.

Craig: What was the budget for this film? I have a guess number.

Marielle: I can’t really talk about it.

Craig: Oh, you can’t?

Marielle: I think I’m not supposed to talk about it, yeah.

John: You never supposed to talk about with Sundance movies —

Craig: You’re not allowed to talk about it?

Marielle: No.

John: They’re never supposed talk about it because —

Marielle: Because it’s Sundance, it’s a Sony and like —

Craig: Oh, that’s right. You have to sell the movie. But it already sold.

Marielle: It’s sold but I’m still — I don’t know.

John: Yeah, you still don’t ever say.

Marielle: I’m still not supposed to say.

John: With The Nines I never say what the budget was.

Marielle: But I can tell you after.

Craig: Yeah, let’s see if I was close.

Marielle: Yeah.

John: But you can tell us about sort of the challenges of production because —

Marielle: It was a small budget. I will say that. It was a very small budget and we shot the whole movie in 24 days in San Francisco.

Craig: Wow. That’s remarkable.

John: But shooting in San Francisco, you know, is notoriously one of the worst places on earth to film.

Marielle: So apparently if I had gone to film school, I would have learned a lot of things that I was not supposed to do on my first movie. Not set it in a period, not have 38 locations, which is what I think we had, not shoot in San Francisco. What are the other big mistakes I made? But I didn’t go to film school, yeah —

John: But you also had a lot —

Craig: And no dogs.

Marielle: A cat.

Craig: Oh, you had the cat.

Marielle: I had a cat.

Craig: And the cat had to hiss on —

John: That was good luck.

Marielle: That just happened. That was my cat.

Craig: That cat nailed it.

John: Domino.

Marielle: I know.

Craig: Nailed it.

Marielle: I know.

John: You also had situations where you had to shoot night for night because you were in this apartment and windows were looking out of the whole city.

Marielle: Oh, everything had to be.

John: But that was all great production design and production value, you know, out of that.

Marielle: Yes.

John: How early did you have a production designer, art designer on to find all of those yellows you have in your movie?

Marielle: Our production designer, Jonah Markowitz, who is brilliant, came on four weeks, eight weeks?

John: Wow.

Marielle: But maybe I met him eight weeks before we went in and we only had four weeks to prep. It was crazy.

John: So —

Marielle: Yeah. I mean, on such a small budget, we had so many sets and they had to basically take an apartment that existed in San Francisco, which did have the bones that felt like a real ’70s apartment. But every single thing you see in that movie, every piece of wallpaper, every piece of furniture, every rug, every little detail, they did. They painted, they, you know.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And boy, does it look great.

Marielle: I know.

Craig: It reminds me because I mean, look, 1976, I was five. I can remember it

Marielle: We looked through a lot of our families’ pictures and kind of tried to really — because growing up in the Bay Area, there’s a specific vibe there. It’s different than Ohio in 1976 or New York in 1976. And so we really wanted to get that right of like, “There’s a lot of stuff from the ’60s still hanging around. It’s not just the newest thing that came out in 1976.”

Craig: That’s right. That’s a mistake that people make —

Marielle: Definitely.

Craig: When it’s definitely like, “Look, everybody, it’s disco.” No, people actually don’t like — by the way, I had that tape recorder. I had it. I saw it and my heart just —

Marielle: Oh, I love that.

Craig: Exploded, with the stupid mic.

Marielle: Yeah. I mean, didn’t we all do that? Another thing I really related to about this character was being a kid who just makes projects out of anything.

Craig: Of course.

Marielle: You’re an artist. You’re always like recording things or recording yourself or pretending you have a radio show or —

Craig: Oh, my god. My sister and I —

Marielle: We didn’t know podcasts yet but —

Craig: My sister and I would record interviews with each other.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: It was insane. We would put on shows all the time.

Marielle: Totally.

Craig: Yeah.

Marielle: Yeah.

John: So what scenes did not make it into the movie? What stuff that you filmed isn’t in the movie we watched last night?

Marielle: There’s a whole story line where Pascal, who’s Chris Meloni’s character in the movie —

John: I had a hunch he had more.

Marielle: Sleeps with Minnie’s best friend, Kimmie.

John: Aha.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

Marielle: And Minnie finds out that they’ve been sleeping together. And has a huge breakup with her best friend, basically. So on top of everything else in her life kind of going really wrong —

Craig: I could see —

Marielle: She also has this breakup.

Craig: I knew why that’s there. That would make me really tense because I’m like, “Oh God, if that’s a problemó”

Marielle: Right. She has nobody.

Craig: But the truth is I also can see why you don’t need it.

John: So at what point did that storyline, you know —

Marielle: I cut it out in the edit, probably like, eight weeks in the edit, maybe more, where we had watched a number of cuts of the movie. And it was running a little long, but it was also kind of taking us off track emotionally. And I had fought to keep it in in the script.

Craig: Of course.

Marielle: There had been people who had suggested it going earlier and I wasn’t ready. And we shot it and I’m —

John: It was Scott Frank, wasn’t it? Scott Frank is the —

Marielle: No.

Craig: Well, it’s funny that mentioned, because Scott, I had a moment with Scott where he had shown me his draft of A Walk Among the Tombstones in script stage. And I said, “Look, here’s the storyline between Liam Neeson and Liam Neeson’s son that could probably just go.”

Marielle: Right.

Craig: And he’s like, “I know.” And he fought for it and he kept it and he shot it.

Marielle: Got cut out in the edit.

Craig: And the thing is there are times when people say, “You don’t need this.” And you fight for it. And you did need it.

John: Yes.

Marielle: Yes. And I totally had those moments.

Craig: Right. But then, there are those times where it’s like — and it just goes to show you can’t be perfect. That’s kind of why I love the way that you were able to sort of start making the movie before you made the movie. If everybody gets the chance to do that, because the truth is most people go and make the movie, they don’t have your experience at Sundance. So they can’t shoot the LSD scene —

Marielle: Right.

Craig: Three or four times. They just shoot your first bad version of it.

Marielle: Right. Exactly. And then, they go into the edit and they go, “What do I do?”

Craig: Pretty much.

Marielle: “This is not what I want it to be. This isn’t telling the story I needed to tell.”

Craig: I know.

Marielle: I also found it really helpful that I did a number of readings of the script, which Mike Birbiglia does those readings. There’s something about just hearing it out loud that I want to do for every movie I ever do also because you do just hear things and recognize problems when you hear — it’s so different than when you’re just writing something.

Craig: Every stage that gets it further away from text —

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: Is informative. The reading is informative. Watching them do it on set is informative, so you go, “Okay. This next take, let’s try something else.” Your first — watching your first cut is informative. And then as many times as you’ve seen the cut, watching it with other people, it’s like you’re seeing a different movie.

Marielle: Totally.

Craig: Every single time, you learn more.

Marielle: It’s true. Yeah. And I’m never going to get to have the experience of going to the Sundance Labs again with my movies, unfortunately. I wish I would, because you just learning as much as you possibly can before you’re shooting. Because shooting is so fast —

John: Yes.

Marielle: It happens so quickly.

Craig: And final.

Marielle: And it’s final. And there’s that weird feeling of this is final. I want to take as much time as I can before you get to that phase of getting to know all of your problems.

John: Yeah, I think sometimes people are afraid of doing the prep work because it’s like, “Oh, you know, I want to be bold. I want to make big bold choices.” But I find that, honestly, if you don’t do the prep, you’d end up sort of making way too safe of choices sometimes.

Marielle: I think that’s right.

John: You over cover things because like, “I don’t know how I am going to do this. I’m just going to shoot it a thousand different ways.” And you’ve lost that great shot you could have gotten because —

Marielle: Right.

John: You didn’t trust yourself.

Marielle: You don’t trust yourself to just, “Let’s get this as one big oner.”

John: Yeah.

Marielle: That’ll be so fun. And you if really know, if you’ve worked it out, you can trust that’ll work in my edit. I know this will work. And Sundance does that really well. They push you to take crazy chances —

John: Yes.

Marielle: When you’re shooting your scenes and to make mistakes.

Craig: Yeah, if you’re not prepared, you end up making other people’s choices.

John: Yeah.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: You end up making the AD’s choice or the DP’s choice —

Marielle: You get swayed by people on set. You get —

Craig: Absolutely.

Marielle: Swayed by your actors. You’re like, “Oh, look at that really funny thing the actor is doing. It doesn’t have to do with the original scene, but maybe that will be great.” And sometimes it might be great and sometimes it might take the scene totally off course.

Craig: Sabotage.

Marielle: Yes.

Craig: They’re all trying to sabotage you.

Marielle: Or, “Oh, look at that cool lighting that just happened.”

Craig: Right

Marielle: “Maybe we should shoot the scene like this instead because of that cool lighting.” All of those things are problems that —

Craig: They all see their own movie, right?

Marielle: Yes.

Craig: And the actor’s movie is about their character.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: And the DP’s movie is about the look.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: And the AD’s movie is about getting out on time.

Marielle: Yes. [laughs]

Craig: Literally.

Marielle: Yes.

Craig: Which is their job and they’re all important, but only you see all of it.

Marielle: Yeah. And the props department cares about that lighter. And whether that lighter gets used right —

Craig: Only about it.

Marielle: Yes. And you need everyone to care that much about their jobs in order to do a good a job, but you have to be the one who keeps it all together and doesn’t let yourself get —

Craig: Exactly.

Marielle: Swayed by all of those.

Craig: Because in the absence of your choices, they will fill in. Oh, my god, will they fill in.

Marielle: Yes, it’s so true.

Craig: And then, you’re at the mercy.

Marielle: It’s true.

John: So one of the biggest things in preparation you probably had to do is figuring out all of the sex scenes in the movie.

Marielle: Yes.

John: Because you have — there’s a tremendous number of sex scenes in the film.

Marielle: Yes.

Craig: So many sex scenes.

Marielle: So many sex scenes.

John: So much sex.

Marielle: There’s a fair amount of — there’s a fair amount of boning.

John: I think there’s like 12.

Craig: 12, really?

John: I bet there’s 12.

Marielle: I don’t think there’s 12. I think there’s probably about six.

John: Six. All right.

Craig: Yes, that sounds like —

John: Or maybe sequences.

Marielle: Well, it depends on how you can —

John: Yes, exactly.

Marielle: We have a little montage. [laughs]

John: I’m accounting you to the little shots of the montage.

Marielle: Yeah.

John: But you had to think about sort of —

Craig: The thing in the bathroom doesn’t count as a sex scene for me —

Marielle: Right.

Craig: That was a transaction.

Marielle: Right. Right.

John: But within the sex scenes, you have to figure out sort of, obviously, where you’re at with the characters emotionally.

Marielle: Yes.

John: But also, where, as a movie you are with the nudity, where you’re at with the relationship.

Marielle: Yeah, it’s a really fine line to balance all of the amount — how much nudity you’re going to see, how much sex you’re going to see.

John: So what are the conversations you’re having internally? And then, what are the conversations you’re having with your crew and with your actors and sort of how you’re going to do all of this.

Marielle: Well, I kind of made rules for myself while I was writing about — I never wanted the nudity to feel exploitative and I never wanted it to feel gratuitous, but you can’t make a movie about coming of age and a girl’s sexuality without showing some nudity and having some sex scenes. So I sort of just laid out certain guidelines, which is like, the scenes where you see the most nudity are non-sexual situations. So she’s examining her body in the mirror. They have a big fight, where she’s almost totally naked. They’re not sexual. And then, the sex scenes tended to be therefore sort of where there’s less nudity, you see less. There’s more implied. There’s actual sex happening, but we also wanted the sex to be more truthful. And so it’s not like shot with quick cuts and really sexy angles. It’s much more straight on.

Craig: I was surprised by the lack of saxophone.

Marielle: Yeah.

John: [laughs]

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: Really shocked.

Marielle: Especially after seeing MacGruber. You’re like —

John: Yeah. [laughs]

Marielle: They love saxophone.

Craig: Oh, God, MacGruber. The sex scene in MacGruber. Sorry.

Marielle: The sex scene in MacGruber —

Craig: May be the greatest sex scene.

Marielle: Ruined sex

John: Yes.

Craig: It may be the greatest.

Marielle: So many people have said to Jorma like, “Wow, that sex scene really kind of ruined sex for me for a while.”

Craig: No, that sex scene —

Marielle: Enhanced sex for you?

Craig: Absolute — it’s like all —

Marielle: Oh, that’s a problem. That’s a problem, I think.

John: [laughs]

Craig: “Uh, uh, ohh, ooh, I’m going to shoot.”

Marielle: “I’m going to shoot.”

Craig: “I’m going to shoot.”

Marielle: Oh, God.

Craig: I say that to my wife all the time.

Marielle: There’s one shot in MacGruber where you can see Kristen during the sex scene as starting to laugh.

Craig: Yeah.

Marielle: And she has to turn her head away from the camera.

Craig: I know that, too. I know that well. Of course, because I’ve seen it many times.

Marielle: And it — but it was such a good take of Will, you couldn’t cut away from it. It was too important.

Craig: And I’m sorry to hijack this, because we’re going to talk to Jorma about all of this. But also the look on —

Marielle: Ryan Phillippe?

Craig: No. no, no.

Marielle: Val Kilmer?

Craig: No. His dead wife.

Marielle: Oh, Maya Rudolph.

Craig: It’s so weird because I’m like literally Minnie Riperton’s daughter. That’s how like the mind works sometimes. We’re you’re like the obvious name is gone. The trivia is there.

Marielle: Yes.

Craig: Maya Rudolph is making this face when he’s having sex with her.

Marielle: Yes.

Craig: And it’s like — it’s not disgust, but it’s almost disgust. She’s like looking down her nose. I think she’s into it. It’s hard to tell.

Marielle: So she was eight or nine months pregnant —

John: Pregnant, I know.

Marielle: While they filmed that.

John: She’s basically always pregnant. [laughs]

Marielle: Yes, she’s had four kids. [laughs] She was so pregnant shooting the grossest sex scene in a graveyard.

Craig: So great. So great.

Marielle: [laughs] And then they had to like digitally take out her belly. It was so ridiculous. And I was — we were all sitting there during that sex scene when that was being filmed, just being like, this baby, like what is this baby’s experience of this?

Craig: I know. The baby is like, “Why?”

Marielle: This is so insane.

Craig: She will always have that moment on film.

Marielle: Yes.

Craig: Well, I think that you accomplished what you were setting out to do because the truth is I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie with that much nudity where there was no arousal whatsoever on my part. There was nothing arousing about any of it. And it wasn’t like it was off putting either.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: It was more — I was really invested entirely in what was going on emotionally with the characters.

Marielle: Well, hopefully, you’re more in her perspective.

John: Yes.

Marielle: I mean —

Craig: Yes, 100%.

Marielle: That was sort of the point. It was like, being in the teenage girls’ perspective more than being — we tend to see sex scenes from a male perspective. That’s how they tend to be shot.

Craig: Right.

Marielle: That’s how they tend to be written. And this was a movie that we were just trying the whole time to not be in the grown up perspective and to not be in the male perspective. We wanted to be in the teenage girl’s.

Craig: Well, let’s talk about this for a moment because you succeeded on that level. And you also managed to — because sometimes when I have seen scenes from the — they’re strictly from the female perspective, that sex is then automatically a problem. I don’t like this.

Marielle: Oh, no. No.

Craig: Or this is, you know — she does like it.

Marielle: This is a character who’s totally into it.

Craig: She really likes it. And so, I guess the larger question is, it seems to me that you very cannily avoided tropes just everywhere you could.

Marielle: Oh, good. Yeah.

Craig: However, there is a risk when your primary goal is let’s not do what other people have done because, of course, at the heart of every trope, there’s something that’s real that connects to people. That’s how they became tropes in the first place.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: So, did you ever worry that you were essentially wandering off the reservation to the extent where maybe people would not be able to recognize themselves in this character or —

Marielle: Well, the particular trope that teenage girl characters tend to fall into, which is that they don’t like sex and that the narrative that we’re given as teenage girls is like boys are going to want us to have sex with you and you’re going to have to decide when to give it up.

Craig: Right.

Marielle: But you’re not going to want it yourself. That particular trope is just not true.

Craig: Right.

Marielle: And so for me personally that always felt like something that —

Craig: That was an easy one to smash.

Marielle: It was like this isn’t truthful and when you’re a teenage girl and you’ve never seen that told in a truthful way, it’s actually really damaging because you think something’s wrong with you, if you think about sex. And the only examples you have in movies are like boys think about sex, girls don’t think about sex.

Craig: Right.

Marielle: So for me, that made me feel when I was young, like, maybe I’m a boy? Or like, maybe something’s wrong with me because I think about sex. And so that was like no question. This is a trope that needs to go. This is a teenage girl who thinks about sex and —

Craig: Right.

Marielle: Wants to have sex. But I did worry, I suppose, about the whole movie being so specific and so about this one time and place. And I thought, I hoped that the specificity of it would make people connect to it more. But I guess I did worry that it might be a movie for a small group of people.

Craig: Well, it is — I think you made a movie that I would show anyone. And by the way, this is a movie I would show my daughter, not yet. She’s 10.

Marielle: How old is she? No. Yeah, not yet.

Craig: But here’s the interesting thing. What this character does is it reminds me a lot of movies, if I were to translate it over to the boy zone, where there are movies about teenage boys who do outrageous things that I go, “Okay, I understand why you did those outrageous things, I understand the spirit of those. I share that spirit and that impulse. I don’t do those.”

Marielle: Right.

John: Yeah.

Marielle: You don’t have to act on all of those impulses —

Craig: Correct.

Marielle: In order to relate to them.

Craig: Exactly. And so —

Marielle: It’s like Into the Wild. Like I never ran away from entire my life but there’s something about the humanness of that impulse to like get — just to leave your whole life, your parents, everything you grew up with, all of the rules that you’ve been taught your entire life and throw them to the wind and to just like go out into the wilderness. I’d never do it but I relate to the impulse.

Craig: I related. You know, that’s the thing. Even when she was doing things that were dangerous, I’ve — one of the best choices in the movie is when she and her friend, after the bathroom scene, say we should not have done that.

Marielle: Right.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because I needed that.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: I literally needed it or I was going to start —

Marielle: You need the remorse.

John: Yeah.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: I was going to start to lose her.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: You know, I needed it because she’s making terrible choices over and over and over.

Marielle: As most of us did when we were teenagers.

Craig: That’s what —

John: Yes.

Marielle: Even if they weren’t like that extreme, we all still probably made some pretty bad choices.

Craig: We all made some bad — well, this is the thing. Children, we tend to idealize children in movies, when in fact, children are the worst of us. I believe.

Marielle: Right. [laughs]

Craig: Basically, they are the worst of us. If children ran the world, it would just be flames and broken glass in the next five minutes. But we then doubly do it to girls.

Marielle: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Because we ask that our female characters are more moral.

John: Mm-hmm.

Marielle: We do. Particularly, teenage girls, we want them to be examples of how we wished teenage girls were. We don’t want to see what they truly are.

Craig: And, you know, so you don’t have a sister, do you?

John: I don’t.

Craig: So my sister is a year and half younger than I am. So when I was in high school, and we shared a bathroom. So when I was in high school, I would, you know — when I would go to the bathroom, she’s got her Seventeen Magazines all stacked up. So I would sit there flipping through Seventeen Magazine. And it would make me laugh because every Seventeen Magazine gave girls the following two messages. Here’s how to look as sexy as possible. Do not have sex.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: Well —

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: How can we expect any girl to not lose her mind?

Marielle: Exactly.

Craig: So I loved all — I mean I just thought that you managed to avoid tropes but at the same time, there was — it was also you made a new trope. I don’t know, it’s like weird way of saying it, but like, a new thing that’s true, a truism, that people just weren’t ready to talk about.

Marielle: Mm-hmm. Interesting.

Craig: Which is the way that female sexuality is so scrambled up at the age. Anyway, you did a fantastic job.

John: You did a fantastic job.

Marielle: Thank you.

John: Has the TV show Girls come up in any of the making of the movie, the discussion of the movie? Because I —

Marielle: Totally.

John: I look at this character and you can see a Hannah Horvath character if she was transported through, you know, time and space and put there, some of the same issues and struggles that she’s facing. And has that been a useful thing for you as a filmmaker or a frustrating thing when those comparisons come up?

Marielle: Well — oh, no, it’s been useful. I mean, I started working on this movie before Girls came out.

John: Yeah.

Marielle: But I remember when Girls came out kind of feeling like maybe this will help me because people will be a little more open to this conversation right now.

John: Yeah.

Marielle: And it felt like I was sort of cluing into, I don’t know, this bigger conversation happening in our society about female sexuality.

John: That there’s an audience, there’s an eagerness to talk about —

Marielle: Yeah.

John: Sexuality

Marielle: And it’s always nice to think when you’re writing something, I don’t think you can plan it this way, but when suddenly you recognize that there’s a bigger conversation that you’re sort of stepping into and becoming a part of and it has to just — the timing has to work out right. And it felt that way with this. It felt like, “Oh, we’re sort of becoming part of the conversation.”

Craig: I have to say, though, this is why I love that movies are still here and I know that television does great work in — and has done better work lately than ever before, but this is the kind of thing that a movie does best. Because when you have television and the characters must continue on, what ends up happening is a sort of ultimately a trivialization of these incredibly I’ll say traumatic and yet wonderful experiences that happen to us in our lives.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: This is what movies do best, is they focus in on those moments — the big change moment of your life. Television will ultimately have to trivialize it.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: Because they have to keep doing it over and over again.

Marielle: Well, television has to be about more mundane things in order to kind of keep us involved.

Craig: Correct.

Marielle: And it can’t — it can’t — if the stakes were that high all the time in TV, you’d get burned out.

Craig: You’d get burned out. I mean, you — and the fact is just by repetition of seeing a certain circumstance over and over and over, you’d become burned out. This is what movies do best. And there is a — you know, this moment when your childhood breaks apart and you slowly put yourself back together, movies will always do this better.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: I mean, it’s a terrific coming of age movie. And I honestly feel like everybody over the age of 15 [laughs] should see it.

Marielle: Thank you.

John: Can we talk about the nature of your role now after you made this movie? The movie comes out at Sundance, it sells.

Marielle: Yes.

John: But you were still on a treadmill for quite a long time to —

Marielle: Yes.

John: Make this movie out. So, you know, we are friends through friends and that’s why you’re here, but you were on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. You were —

Marielle: Yeah.

John: You were talking. And this is going to be continuing all the way through the award season. So, your job continues.

Marielle: Nobody talks about this. How long —

John: So let’s talk about this.

Marielle: The period of —

John: Let’s talk about this.

Marielle: Movie making is.

John: It’s a haul. Especially —

Marielle: It’s a halt.

John: When you have a January Sundance movie that’s coming out the next year.

Marielle: And when you are first time filmmaker and so it’s the little film that really needs that kind of word of mouth and it needs the hustle behind it in order to get it seen.

Craig: Yeah.

Marielle: So, yeah, we’ve done the festivals circuit, so we did Sundance. We got bought by Sony Pictures Classics there, which was amazing and so much more than I could have dreamed. Then, we went to Berlin. I should mention, I had a 5.5-week-old at Sundance.

Craig: God.

Marielle: And then he was eight weeks by the time we went to Berlin.

John: This is a human child.

Marielle: Human child.

John: Not a dog. This is a human child that she gave birth to.

Marielle: Yes, yes, yes, exactly.

Craig: And then let’s also point out then all of the pregnant time prior to that?

Marielle: Right, so I wrapped filming and got pregnant within about a month and then was pregnant all of post.

Craig: Wow.

Marielle: And then —

Craig: So you weren’t throwing up after you saw that first assembly because it was bad.

Marielle: Right. Who knows? Who knows why I was throwing up?

Craig: It may have been bad.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: It may have been the baby.

Marielle: It may have been the baby. It’s hard to know.

Craig: Either way, you’re puking.

Marielle: Yeah, I was puking, puking, puking. Exactly. Yeah, there was — I had, I had a meeting set with distributors for the day that I went into labor. It was all like, it was all pushed up to the limit.

Craig: That happened to me.

Marielle: Yeah, I know it’s a classic story.

Craig: Oh, yeah.

Marielle: So then we did the festival circuit. We did New Directors, New Films at MoMA which was a really cool festival. The movie has travelled to even more festivals than I’ve been able to go to because it’s gone to like Sydney and Seoul and it’s gone all over the world. And I’ve been able to go to a certain number of festivals. Bell has gone to a certain number of festivals, the lead actress from the movie. We’ve gone to some together. Alexander’s gone to some with us. So kind of through the fall we did the L.A Film Festival. We’ve done a ton of festivals. And then we sort of started the bigger press roll out. So we’ve been doing press in L.A. and Dallas, and San Francisco.

Craig: The movie is out in theaters now.

Marielle: It’s out in theaters now. We just expanded this weekend.

Craig: This weekend, okay, this past weekend.

Marielle: This past weekend, right. This comes out on Tuesday’s. I know you guys, I’m a really big fan. So at this point, I think were in about 30 cities.

Craig: Great.

Marielle: So it’s getting much wider.

John: So this is sort of the Whiplash plan where like it’s a very slow rollout.

Marielle: Right.

John: And there’s no video-on-demand. It’s strictly theatrical.

Marielle: It’s only theatrical and the hope is that word of mouth helps build, you know, helps to build an audience because it is such a small movie. It’s not going to be the type of movie that we blast everywhere all at the same time but build slowly.

Craig: I hope that you’re getting a lot of attention from people at our movie studios because I if were running a movie studio, I would be saying to you, “Please, please even these are the movies I’m making pick one and do it.”

Marielle: I got to say I am getting a lot of attention.

John: Good, that’s fantastic. I put you on a list this morning.

Marielle: You did?

John: I did.

Marielle: Thank you. It’s a funny time to be a female filmmaker. There’s a lot articles being written, a lot of conversations, the ACLU hearing that happened. There’s a lot of conversations about how underrepresented women are behind the camera. 9% of Hollywood movies are getting made by women. That number hasn’t changed in 30 years.

So right now in this moment, though, I think public opinion has started to shaming the studios into catching up and there’s this feeling of like, “Oh, we got to be doing more. We need to be hiring more women.” And kind of am getting one of the [laughs] —

John: Great.

Marielle: I’m getting to see the benefits of that.

Craig: I’m going to disagree with you slightly. I do think that they are right now making an aggressive effort.

Marielle: Yes.

Craig: I do because I think they are embarrassed. I don’t think that’s why they’re calling you.

Marielle: Thank you.

Craig: I have to say, as one of the, it’s one of the unfortunate side effects of any kind of effort to improve diversity statistics is that then if they go up, there’s always that question are you —

Marielle: Of like did it happen because they were good or did it happen because they were just a girl?

Craig: Are you in here because affirmative action? Are you here because you’re a girl or you’re in here because of quota or whatever?

Marielle: Right.

Craig: And that sucks, it sucks all around, but I will say that in your case I truly believe that because, look, they just love money more than anything. They love money and I think they look at your movie and they look at you and I think this is an incredibly assured filmmaker with a voice and an eye and she writes. We can make money off of this person. That’s what I think it’s about.

Marielle: I think that’s probably true. I mean I feel I can tell the difference between the calls that are about people who truly love what I’ve done and the types of stories that I want tell and the people who are like what are the women? Who are the women? Who we’ve approved? Who do we put on this list? Let’s find a woman for this.

Craig: Just make sure that Mari is not like some European guy.

Marielle: Yeah, [laughs] exactly.

John: “That is a woman, right?”

Marielle: Like I did get a call, I think it’s okay for me to say this. There was that moment where the director of Wonder Woman fell out, there was like that one day scramble and my agents called and were like are you a huge Wonder Woman fan?

John: [laughs].

Marielle: Because your name is coming up and I was like, “Wow, they are really just pulling any woman that they can.” There’s just trying to find a woman director who they can — yeah. And I —

Craig: It was certainly there was — it appeared that there was like — there was that panic that day. Yes.

Marielle: For that one day, and now they have a wonderful woman involved and who probably should be and whatever but it was a funny moment where I was like, “I’m just getting this call because I’m a girl right now.”

Craig: Yeah, probably [laughs].

Marielle: Yeah, [laughs].

Craig: I think so [laughs]. That one, I’ll give you that.

Marielle: That one, yeah.

Craig: I’ll give you that.

John: I would step back and take a look at, you know, Colin Trevorrow coming off of Safety Not Guarantee jumping up to Jurassic World.

Marielle: Yes.

John: Like your movie and his movie, they’re similarly like really well done versions of tiny little indie movies.

Marielle: There, that’s a big conversations that’s happened out of Sundance is like why is it that the white male directors who come out of Sundance who make a million dollar movie get offered hundred million dollar franchises and the women very rarely. They might get their next movie is the $3 million movie. Why is that leap not happening?

Craig: Yeah.

John: Maybe, maybe break that pattern.

Marielle: Yeah.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Well, in part, it will require you to want to make one of those movies.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: You know, Colin Trevorrow wanted to make Jurassic World. And so here’s my secret hope because as again, I love MacGruber. So you know the kind of movies — I mean I love this movie, I love MacGruber. I love lots of movies.

Marielle: It’s a great double feature [laughs].

Craig: It really is amazing. By the way, the best of all.

Marielle: Which one should go first?

John: I think the mashup version is really good.

Craig: The mashup would be great no. You have to Diary first, to get everybody really like, “Wow.” And then just hit them with MacGruber.

Marielle: Yeah, and just get — the laughter just leaves you.

Craig: Take these broken wings — okay, anyway, so we’ll have that episode. But I hope you that actually you can find a movie, you know, because they open up their big cabinet and they’re like look at the stuff we stuff we want to make.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: A lot of times what they want to make is horrendous. But sometimes in there there’s something great and I hope you find something that you can get a budget for and you can get a big movie with, and you can get all the toys to play with and that you want to do.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: Because that would be the best thing of all. I mean I really — this is what you should be doing, do this for sure.

Marielle: I want to. I mean I really did enjoy it and this, there was something about directing that just felt really natural to me because I am an actor and I love actors and I love working with actors and I loved — and being on set is just so fun. It’s so infectious like it’s just a great experience. It’s so stressful, it’s so hard [laughs]. The whole thing is so difficult but it’s also so great.

Craig: You did a fantastic job.

John: Hooray.

Craig: Yeah.

John: It’s come time for One Cool Things. Craig, what is your One Cool Thing this week?

Craig: So, I actually have a One Cool Thing this week and I’m going to do it — while I’m talking about it, I’m going to do it.

John: Do it.

Craig: It’s so cool and actually weird and I got before I saw your movie, Mari, but it kind of flows into it. So this is called, VHS camcorder. And it’s like, I don’t know, four bucks or something. And so I’m going to do this, so it’s got this like little thing. And it basically turns video into like — into VHS and you can even change the — but it really actually does look like it. I mean it’s the weirdest thing.

John: So for people who are at home who can’t see this.

Craig: Put this up. Say hi.

Marielle: Hi.

John: There’s time code in the bottom and it very much feels like —

Craig: Now I sound like a crazy man. [laughs]

Marielle: Hello.

Craig: And there’s John.

John: And I’m here.

Craig: Hello and welcome to Scriptnotes and even though it says August 21, 2015, really?

Marielle: Does it look like the beginning of Elf?

Craig: It looks [laughs] do a head turn for me like you’re on Elf. Starring Mari Heller.

Marielle: Wait, wait. I have to be — I have to be on the phone.

Craig: Okay [laughs]. Okay, that’s perfect. Anyway, it’s a great app and it’s fun and it’s cheap. And I don’t know, for kids like I showed it to my kids, I’m like, “Look, this is what Daddy’s videos used to look like.” And they’re like, actually my son was like, “Wow, this is pretty cool.” Like because, you know, for them now everything is like add vinyl noise to my, you know, my electronic music track, so anyway that’s my One Cool Thing.

John: Very cool. My One Cool Thing is an article I just read this morning. It is called I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago by Rachel Ward. And it’s a true story so she’s a producer for Morning Edition and it’s her talking through the last two years after her husband died. So she’s, you know, a young married woman.

Marielle: Oh my God.

John: Her husband died in a very sudden —

Craig: Literally coughed to death?

John: Yes.

Craig: Just like he started coughing —

John: And then died.

Craig: Just randomly?

John: Yeah. So, it goes into sort of what actually happened or to the degree to which they understand what actually happened. But on the podcast, previously, we talked about sort of how those moments of death that we see in movies and sort of the ambulance coming or the coroner like are never quite the way it is in real life. And so she talks through what that reality is, but also in a very smart way talks through what it’s like to have to introduce to yourself to new people as like, “I’m a widow.” Like it’s a strange thing.

Marielle: Yeah.

John: So what I’m bringing it up here is that she’s kind of actually kind of like a great movie character. You can very much envision sort of this is the start of a movie story and sort of what that is. So I thought it was just a really well written piece.

Marielle: It’s kind of like The Year of Magical Thinking.

John: Yeah it is, but a very, you know, young version of that which is so different. Also just fascinating to see it on Medium which is such a weird medium for it to be in because you’re used to this being like if it was a New Yorker article, you sort of know what that’s supposed to feel like but Medium where there’s like a comments like midway through and stuff. It’s an odd format for it but also very relevant at the time. Mari, do you have a One Cool Thing?

Marielle: I do, you guys I agonized over my One Cool Thing. I’m such a big fan of the show that I was like texting people being like I have to come up with a One Cool Thing. I don’t know that I came up with the best one but it’s a parenting thing and you guys do talk about parenting on here sometimes. I’m a parent of a young, young baby, 8 months and there is an app called Wonder Weeks that I have found to be really useful.

It kind of goes through the major cognitive leaps that a baby goes through, it’s really focused on brain development. And babies do tend to follow pretty clear patterns like between six and eight weeks this major leap happens to them, they learn to see patterns in the world or whatever it is.

At this point at four months, they’re able to understand the concept of something going inside of a cup and something coming out of that cup [laughs]. You know, these really kind of basic leaps but they — what happens is when a baby is going through a major leap, they tend to have a lot behavioral problems, their sleep gets disrupted because their brain is making this major leap and they’re figuring things out and they’re practicing when they should be sleeping, instead they’re like practicing things with their hands or their minds.

So it’s really helpful to know what those leaps are as you’re going along so that you can be a little patient and you can have some empathy for what your baby is going through and you can go, “Okay, this is just a normal leap they’re going through and in a week, it’s going to settle back down.”

Craig: Do they have that app for teenagers?

Marielle: They should. [laughs]

John: That would be awesome.

Craig: Because I would really like that.

Marielle: I don’t know if it’s as predictable with teenagers as it is with little babies. But yeah, I found it to be, to make me a more patient parent where I can look at this app and it has a whole calendar listing of where all the different leaps happen. It’s just, and it makes me kind of, it makes me empathize with him and what he’s going through and how much he’s growing and learning.

Craig: They don’t have the fear of the unknown.

Marielle: Yes.

Craig: So why is he shrieking all of a sudden for last three days?

Marielle: Right.

Craig: And usually people, the immediate thing that parents think is what did we feed him, what did we feed him?” He’s got — most kids are fine. You feed them whatever they want, they’re like goats. But that makes sense that they’re — that cognitively because think about it, it’s like it’s brain damage in reverse.

Marielle: Right.

Craig: I mean every time your brain changes, it’s traumatic.

Marielle: Right. And my kid just started scooting. So he’s just figured out how to move and it has totally flipped his brain out. I mean he’s so excited, but he can’t go to sleep because he’s like trying to scoot around everywhere and it’s —

Craig: Boys by the way are — they’re just so hyper.

Marielle: He’s so hyper. And he wakes up just bouncing off the wall, so excited because his body can suddenly do things that he’s clearly wanted to do for so long.

Craig: I’m so glad I didn’t have two boys. If I had had two boys, honestly, I would just — all right, I —

Marielle: Jorma and I were talking about that this morning. I was like, I have to say my biggest fear of us having a second kid is that I’d have another boy, and I’d just be this one lone woman in a house full of boys.

Craig: Yeah, in a house full of — yeah.

Marielle: It’s scary to me.

Craig: Yeah, especially during the teenage years. My daughter — I mean that’s other great cure for panic over what’s going through your baby’s mind is having your second baby, because then you’re like, whatever. It works out.

Marielle: It works out, I know.

Craig: I know what’s on the other side of this at the very least.

Marielle: I also just find it kind of interesting to understand what they’re going through and that babies do fall into such clear patterns and that almost every baby does kind of follow these patterns. It’s so crazy.

Craig: All those — you know the things that like this, this thing that the baby does, whatever they call it —

John: The Heisman?

Craig: They call it, yeah, the fencing maneuver, it’s like and then the startle thing, all babies do this.

Marielle: Yeah, that’s called like moray.

John: Yeah, reflex.

Marielle: Something reflex, right and it’s not moray, that’s when —

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah, but they think — they do that and no one can see because it’s a podcast. This is why I don’t listen to podcasts because you can’t see. Anyway, yeah, we’re all incredibly similar

Marielle: Well, and that one I heard the startle reflex is from when we were apes or when were — it’s evolution when we were having to hold on to our mother’s backs and the hair.

Craig: Wait, evolution, you believe in evolution? [laughs]

Marielle: No, no [laughs]. But that when that babies needed to hold on to their mother’s hair if they were falling, so they would do this in order to not fall off.

Craig: That would work with you though, you actually have incredible hair.

Marielle: My baby pulls on to my hair and uses it as ropes to lift himself up, yes.

Craig: I bet he does.

John: Good stuff. You can find that information about Wonder Weeks and VHS Camcorder apps and this article I talked about on our show notes on the show page, johnaugust.com. You can also find this on the iTunes store. We are at Scriptnotes, just look for us there, you can also find the app. Our outro this week is composed by a young composer named Jack Mazin.

Craig: Oh yes, my son has —

Marielle: How cool.

Craig: He’s been working — he’s starting to do like electronic music and stuff and this is one of his first compositions.

Marielle: That’s so cool.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Yeah. Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew. And Mari Heller, thank you so much for coming and talking to us about directing.

Marielle: I want to keep going, I just don’t want this to ever be over. This is such an exciting moment for me.

Craig: We’ll have you back. I mean this isn’t the end. This isn’t the end.

Marielle: I’ll just come back when you have Jorma on to talk about MacGruber and I’ll just listen.

Craig: By the way, you have to be here. That would be great.

Marielle: Yeah.

Craig: And we should also put in the show notes just because it’s not like — there aren’t billboards out there, let’s put a link in for people to go get tickets to go see on Diary of a Teenage Girl.

John: Absolutely. So we’ll have a link to the website which will have all that information and to the trailer.

Craig: Great job, Mari. Mari, you were an excellent guest.

Marielle: I’m so happy.

John: Thanks.

Links:

• Later this week, Scriptnotes shirts will be available for pre-order in the John August Store
• Scriptnotes and a live Three Page Challenge will be at the 2015 Austin Film Festival
• Marielle Heller on IMDb
• The Diary of a Teenage Girl official site and the trailer
• Scriptnotes, 121: My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend’s Screenwriter, with Mike Birbiglia
• Sundance Institute Feature Film Program
• Director of Photography Brandon Trost on Wikipedia
• Rotoscoping on Wikipedia
• Mari Heller on NPR’s Fresh Air
• VHS Camcorder
• I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago by Rachel Ward
• The Wonder Weeks App
• Outro by Jack Mazin (send us yours!)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/how-descriptive-audio-works).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode has some explicit language. So if you’re traveling in a car with children, you may not want to listen to this episode in the car where your kids could hear it. Thanks.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

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

Today on the show, we are going to be looking at narrative audio description and how that all works. We’re going to look at the WGA financial numbers and see what that means for screenwriters and for television writers. And we are going to answer a bunch of listener questions.

But first, last week on the show, we talked about Scriptnotes t-shirts.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s nothing more revelatory about what your audience thinks of you than what designs they send at you.

**Craig:** I can’t.

**John:** Looking through the initial batch of ideas —

**Craig:** [laughs] I don’t want to know. How bad is it?

**John:** Well, there’s a lot of Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** Oh well, as well there should be.

**John:** There’s a lot of typed pages. And typed pages like seemed a good idea for a podcast about screenwriting, but I don’t know that anybody really wants to read your shirt closely. So we’ll see if that’s the winning idea.

**Craig:** People don’t want to read screenplays either. [laughs] So I don’t want to read shirts.

**John:** [laughs] And there are a few references to Stuart. So I put a link to that in the Workflowy so you can see one of the Stuart shirts because Stuart is really the unvoiced third voice of the Scriptnotes podcast.

But if you have an idea for a Scriptnotes t-shirt that you would desperately want to see, you can go visit johnaugust.com/shirt and there are full instructions about sort of what we’re looking for and what we’re not looking for and sort of best practices and guidelines. Deadline is August 11th, so you have a few more weeks to figure out your ideal Scriptnotes t-shirt design.

**Craig:** Great. I can’t wait to see at least one or two of the Sexy Craig drawings. I mean you’re going to send them to me, right?

**John:** Yes, I will send to you the ones that are especially not safe for work.

**Craig:** You know who is not at all interested in Sexy Craig t-shirts?

**John:** Who’s that?

**Craig:** Sexy Craig. You don’t have to —

**John:** Does Sexy Craig not wear t-shirts?

**Craig:** No, he doesn’t have time for t-shirts.

**John:** All right, he’s too busy smoking and hanging out.

**Craig:** Well, it’s not what he’s doing, John. He’s busy though. Oh, he’s busy.

**John:** He’s probably busy playing Capitals. So your One Cool Thing last week was this game Capitals for iOS.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s Nerdy Craig.

**John:** That’s Nerdy Craig. Nerdy Craig has beaten me probably four times I think in Capitals.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Right now we’re in the middle of an endless game that will, I mean —

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s, here’s what basically was happening is —

**John:** Through the next century, we’ll be playing this game.

**Craig:** I am denying John. He is going to win this game. It’s inevitable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I’m doing that — it’s like Masada. I’m basically now at the top of the hill [laughs] and at the very last moment, I’ll kill myself. But I’m going to make him lose — yeah, it’s 300. I’m the 300 Spartans. You’re Xerxes.

**John:** So I would say after a week of playing this game, my observation and my biggest criticism is that it falls into like a consistent kind of game design trap of once you’re ahead, it’s very hard to not stay ahead and sort of conversely, once you fall behind, it’s very unlikely that you’re ever going to win the game. So classically Risk is that kind of game. Monopoly, if you play the endless version of Monopoly, it’s sort of this game.

And I’m frustrated by Capitals for that reason, is that basically once you get into a position like we are in in this game, it’s just going to be a long, long stalemate.

**Craig:** Well, okay, but here’s the thing, what if I win?

**John:** If you win, then you’ve proven to be the exception to the rule and therefore, you know, you’re the underdog story perhaps.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And maybe there’s a narrative arc that you could find from your sudden victory in Capitals, but I have a feeling it’s just going to be a long slog because both of us are going to be play incredibly defensively in order to make this game go on forever.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. What I’m hoping for is that I get a random splash of letters that lets me break through.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** And if I can do that —

**John:** You’re waiting for the miracle. You’re waiting for the sudden eclipse that sort of terrifies the soldiers and they flee and therefore you’re able to charge across the board and somehow capture my little castle dude.

**Craig:** You ask me for a miracle, I give you the FBI.

**John:** Very nice. Our second bit of follow up is also about capitals. This is a letter from Michael W. who writes, “It really hit me hard when Craig said that he was in favor of capitalizing whatever you want in a screenplay when in reference to the Aliens screenplay. This is without a doubt my biggest pet peeve in screenwriting. I don’t understand why it happens so often.

“Surely, you want the capitalization to really stand out and mean something. Whenever I see capitalization used more than once per page, especially if there seems to be no real pattern to what gets a cap, it just comes across as obnoxious and irritating, almost like a person who thinks that shouting random words in their sentences is a great way to get people to listen to them.

“I’m a big fan of caps when used sparingly. But when it feels like the text is in caps, to me, it just feels like a cheap gimmick that gets really old quickly and makes me want to pay less interest. So why the love of random caps, Craig? Why?”

**Craig:** Well, obviously, when I’m writing for the studio that Michael W. owns, I really pull back on those caps because I’m very concerned with what makes — what feels like a cheap gimmick to Michael W. and what gets old really quickly and makes Michael W. want to pay less interest. [laughs]

Normally, however, I’m not working for the studio that Michael W. owns. I work for the other studios and they don’t seem to mind. And so this here, this right here, we have an example, John, of someone who has externalized that their internal taste to the world. They have determined that because they loathe something, surely it is wrong and the rest of the world also loathes it. No.

Here’s my biggest pet hate [laughs] in opinionating. People who have a strong opinion and think it matters. I understand you don’t like it. If I were writing this letter, I would’ve written this letter, “I’m really surprised that you like that. For some reason, I hate it. It just strikes me wrong. But I get that other people seem to like it. So my question is, have you ever run across anybody in your professional life who’s pushed back on that or not?” That would be a good question.

**John:** It would be a great question.

**Craig:** It would be a really good question because then it would be relevant to other people instead of externalizing your individual [laughs] opinion to the world, you would be trying to find a consensus in pragmatic use for our podcast time together, Michael W., but you have failed to do that. So my response to you is —

**John:** I would love to answer the rephrased question that Craig just asked. And that I do feel like there are times in which one writer’s personal style can be to the detriment of his or her work being taken the best possible way.

And I think there is generally a band of which, you know, a certain amount of capitalization is fine up to that point and more than that, people will just sort of tune you out. And I think, you know, there are individual writer voices. Individual writer of voices are wonderful things as we write movies for Hollywood studios.

There is a — I find a fairly wide band of sort of what you can do in those pages in order to make it come across well to an average reader.

One thing I think we talked about on the show before is, Craig, have you gone in and done a rewrite and the writer before you had a very different page style than you did and you had to either adapt to their page style or go through and change the whole script, you know, the scene description to match your style.

**Craig:** Yeah, it just ends up frequently that on rewrites I am starting — often at times I’m starting from scratch. But there have been times, a really weird instance on The Huntsman where someone had come in to just do a week while I was off doing another thing. And then I had to come back to finish. And the stuff that they had done in the week, now we are in production, right?

So I’m looking at some of the things and I’m like, okay, that’s fine, but I just — I don’t like the way he does his dashes and his dot-dots. And there’s like a weird extra space between two words, it’s just a mistake. But if I fix it, it’s a changed page.

**John:** You’re not going to do that.

**Craig:** I didn’t do it. But God, I wanted to. It was driving me crazy. But yeah, I think that if you are working on something, I have done something where I needed to sort of fit in. I don’t try and fit into their style. I have to do what I’m doing. People are paying me to do whatever I can do.

So to me, where I need to fit in stylistically is with the characters’ voices. That’s the area where people will notice. But people in the audience will not notice that I describe things somewhat differently. My job now behind the scenes is to get everybody on the same page in terms of what the intention is.

You know, I don’t care if my three pages in the middle of your script look a little different in terms of how things are described. I just need to know that in terms of the choices that are made and the words the people say and the tone of the material on screen that it is seamless.

**John:** Yeah, I think that’s a good working rule is to try to make sure that you’re consistently carrying the torch of what an audience actually experiences. And if the scene description is not a cohesive experience throughout the entire script, that’s maybe not the most crucial thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There have been times where I have come in and I’m literally just going to be there for two days, I’m just working on one specific little thing. And if the other writer has a much more bombastic style, I will adapt to their bombastic style just so that the scene won’t feel weird.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Especially if you’re doing a lot of action sequences. And there’s some project in which the Wibberleys and I were both working on it sort of separately, but they were really the primary force there. And they are much bigger all caps, underlines, you know, some bold face in there. And I’ll happily do that when that is the case.

It also reminds me of TV shows tend to have house styles for how their scripts read and look so that it feels the same episode after episode no matter who wrote the episode. And so classically both the Damon Lindelof shows and the J.J. Abrams shows, they use a lot of fucking in the scene description. And so a giant fucking explosion will happen.

We just posted in Weekend Read the pilot script for Once Upon a Time by Kitsis and Horowitz. And they are from that camp. And so they use fucking all the time in their things and like this script had like seven fuckings in it just for like a 60-minute pilot.

And when we posted it, Adam Horowitz was like mortified. He’s like, “Oh, I can send you the cleaned up version that we use for when we’re having people sign scripts and stuff like that.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “Doesn’t have all the F-bombs in it.” It’s like, no, it’s really how they write their scripts. It’s like they need the F-words in there to sell the scale of what those moments are like.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Both styles are fine.

**Craig:** I will do that at times. I don’t do that often. But maybe once or twice in the screenplay where I know it’s not meant to be rated R, I’ll still in description, you know, I might have somebody say, you know, she stares at him, “What the fuck?” You know, what the fuck is an incredibly evocative phrase. It puts a face on a character in your mind. You immediately know so much about what they’re thinking and how they’re supposed to look. It’s just really terse. You know, it’s a good way to quickly state something without any confusion in the reader.

I mean when it comes to this capitalization stuff, I’ve read screenplays from all sorts of people and while there are always little things that are like, “Oh, I wouldn’t, you know, I don’t do my thing like this. And I don’t do mine like that,” I’ve never read a script where I thought, “What’s with so — there’s so many capitalized words. My God, half the page is capitalized. I’ve never seen anyone even come close to that.”

Michael W. doesn’t want more than one per page which seems just like the most arbitrary and frankly dumb thing I’ve ever heard, like why? Why is two a problem? What does that even mean? This is a bad question. It’s not a question.

**John:** That’s not a question. It’s just like a statement or opinion, phrased as a question.

**Craig:** No, no. Yeah, he basically just wanted to do like his own version of an umbrage rant and then end it with, so why the love of random caps to make it officially a question. But look, Michael, I got to tell you, this isn’t how you do umbrage. You need a whole class [laughs] on umbrage because I’m not believing it. I don’t believe it. You’re not feeling it, man.

**John:** So what is the guidelines for umbrage? I think you need to firmly state your opinion and then like categorically break down the reasons why you have this opinion, sort of restate your opinion more strongly, and express moral outrage that somebody could have an opinion that is opposite than yours. Is that a schema? Is that a sort of way of thinking about an umbrage rant?

**Craig:** It’s not bad. Like it’s your understanding of it, which is really [laughs] interesting. But to me, it has to start with a kernel of something that you hold very true and near and dear to you. And then you have to see that other people are just denying it. They’re denying it. And they’re doing so in a way that is causing themselves and other people problems.

The umbrage isn’t about I have an opinion and the rest of the world needs to agree with me. I see things all the time, like, “I don’t like that.” But who gives a crap if I don’t like it? “I don’t like this sandwich.” That’s not umbrage material. “You capitalize too much.” That’s not umbrage material.

Umbrage material is more like, you’ve decided that the best way to go about something is to do A, B and C, and I’m telling you you’re hurting yourself and others. That’s umbrage material. I’m getting angry now thinking about my hypothetical example that only has A, B and C in it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s an emotional place. You have to understand, it’s an emotional [laughs] place I can occupy. You know, like some actors can just cry on the spot?

**John:** Oh yeah, I’m a good crier actually.

**Craig:** There you go. I can’t do that, but I can become furious in a second.

**John:** That’s nice. And is it that you’re imagining the hypotheticals or you’re imagining the conversations or you’re imagining the other side of the argument? Is that how you’re getting to that furious place?

**Craig:** I’m literally just placing myself in the emotional space of watching somebody do something that is hurting themselves or other people. And I have a thing in my brain, I don’t believe you have, John, [laughs], it’s just another area in my brain that begins to pulsate and send out signals and it’s that — you see people don’t understand. The umbrage is not about this kind of snotty, hypercritical view of the world. I’m the opposite of — I’m hypocritical of art and personal expressions. I don’t care, like I — people were sending around, “Oh my God, you got to see this. This guy goes on this amazing rant about Pixels and totally takes it down.”

Well, I’m not going to watch that because I don’t give a shit. Oh my God, a guy worked himself up into a fake frenzy over a fucking movie? A movie for fucking 13-year-olds and that’s what you’re going to do, adult man? [laughs] You’re going to go out and you’re going to go crazy about that?” Something’s gone wrong with you and I don’t care. It’s not for you. What drives me crazy is the other stuff. It’s when I watch my union say, “We’ve got a great idea.” And I go, “No, you’re going to hurt people with that.” That’s what makes me crazy.

**John:** I want to briefly defend the Pixels rants because I was, like you, convinced like, “Oh come on, what are you complaining about?” Like this is the Pixels movie. And then Stuart watched it, so I actually watched it and I actually found there were moments of artistry within his anger that was not really manufactured, but actually a true expression of loss and sadness. That’s why I found that one to be interesting, but I agree with you the general sense of angry nerd ranting, there’s a column in Wired called Angry Nerd which is just that manufactured umbrage.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is just completely fake. It’s as fake as —

**Craig:** It’s fake.

**John:** A listicle in BuzzFeed.

**Craig:** And I’m sorry. If you legitimately have honest, sad, torn up feelings over fucking Pixels, then you need meds. You need meds. Meds. Meds. [laughs] Now, I’m getting angry. Getting angry about that.

**John:** Our next bit follow up. In last week’s episode, we talked about audio description for films and TV shows designed for the vision impaired or the blind and we really knew almost nothing about it. And our question was whether the people who are writing this description are using a script or if they’re just watching the filmed product and writing the description based on that. And so the minute the podcast went up, we had a bunch of emails from people who actually did this for a living and they were incredibly helpful, so I did a follow-up blog post which I’ll put into the show notes about that.

The short version of it is it’s really based on what shows up on screen and they’re very carefully tailoring the things they say and to fit them in small pauses to really give you the best experience of what this would be like if you were actually being able to watch the finished product. It’s an incredibly difficult job obviously because you are trying to, you know, with very limited time and resources create the experience of watching a thing when you only have audio. As screenwriters, we’re doing everything that we can to describe a movie with what people see and what we hear. Here, we have to take away all those visions and that’s an interesting challenge.

So I wanted to actually play examples because it was really strange to talk about something without being able to hear it. So here are two examples from Daredevil. So Daredevil is a TV show on Netflix. It was actually controversial when it first launched because the audio descriptions weren’t ready and so then they added them later on and they’re really good. So first I want to play you a scene from the pilot and this is just what you would see on screen, so just the audio that would actually match with the video that you would see.

(Daredevil scene begins)

[Girls screaming]

**Turk Barrett:** Hey, hey. Man, shut up. I’m getting $1,000 a head for y’all. So, you be quiet, I’ll let you have a bucket. You don’t — .

[Girls screaming]

**Man:** [Speaking Foreign Language]

**Turk Barrett:** Scream all you want. Come on, let me hear you scream. Scream louder. Nobody gives a shit down here. [laughs]

(Daredevil scene ends)

**John:** Okay. So, Craig, I think that we can safely assume that you’ve not seen the pilot for Daredevil because you watch no television.

**Craig:** Right, it’s on television, so you had a 99.9% chance.

**John:** All right, so let’s — just based on what you heard there, what do you think is happening in that scene?

**Craig:** Okay. There’s a bad guy. He’s black, I’m guessing from his voice. He’s got hostages. One of them has asked for a bucket, [laughs] I’m not sure why. And he says he’ll give them a bucket, and then he’s tasing them. It sounds like he’s tasing them to torture them, and then he’s laughing ha-ha-ha. Then I think we switched perspective to Daredevil because I feel like I’m hearing his echo location sound effect, and I assume then he comes in, just starts beating the crap out of everybody. And yeah, that’s what I think happens.

**John:** And that’s actually pretty close. But now, let’s take a listen to that descriptive audio that goes with that, and it will paint a little bit more a full picture of what’s happening here.

**Craig:** Okay.

(Daredevil scene begins)

[Girls screaming]

**Narrator:** Two thugs drag three young women to a storage container on the docks. A man in a leather coat appears around the opening door.

**Turk Barrett:** Hey, hey. Man, shut up. I’m getting a $1,000 a head for y’all. So, you be quiet, I’ll let you have a bucket. You don’t —

**Narrator:** He holds up a cattle prod.

[Tasing sound]

**Narrator:** Then jams it into one woman’s belly while an overweight man in a lawn chair watches at the edge of the dock.

[Girls screaming] [Tasing]

**Man:** [Speaking foreign language]

**Narrator:** The injured woman and the others are shoved into the container.

**Turk Barrett:** Scream all you want. Come on, let me hear you scream. Scream louder. Nobody gives a shit down here. [Laughs]

**Narrator:** A man with a crude mask covering his head and eyes crouches behind the thug. The thug turns as the man leaps knocking him down. The cattle prod rolls on the filthy wet dock. The man stands, it’s Matt. He listens as the thugs rush in. One thug goes down instantly. The terrorized girls watch.

Matt fights the other thug. He batters the man in a storm of punches knocking him against the container door, then flipping him over onto the dock. The other creep charges getting in some hard punches before Matt knees him in the gut and headbutts him. As they fight, the leader comes too, woozily reaching into his back waist band.

Matt, crouched, swing kicks the thug, then snaps his leg at the knee. He hears the leader cock the gun. The leader turns and shoots. The masked man flings himself into a roll and grabs the cattle prod.

**John:** So, what did you think?

**Craig:** I mean, I kind of love it. It’s interesting. It’s a huge job, first of all. That’s what that I was thinking when I was listening was somebody has to write all that because that’s not the way we would write the screenplay. For starters, we won’t know all those things when we’re writing the screenplay. We won’t know exactly how the fight was going to go down. That gets structured by the stunt guys, and then sort of shown to everybody, and then done on the day, and then edited.

So, you can’t have the screenplay be as accurate as somebody describing what they’re seeing, meaning somebody is writing the description. And that’s a big job. Deciding what to say and what to not say is a big job. You picked an interesting one here because there’s not a lot of dialogue, you know, so you could see how he’s sort of getting out of the way when there is, and giving us some basic context. I like that everything — didn’t seem like they were skipping anything. So, you know, an overweight man in a lawn chair on the other side of the dock is watching. That’s information I didn’t have without the descriptive audio, and —

**John:** Absolutely. I think that’s crucial because like, I mean even the person who’s writing up the description for this episode doesn’t know if that man is actually going to come back and become important later on. So, you got to put him in there.

**Craig:** Yeah, and you’d also don’t know, even as the screenwriter, you don’t know exactly when you’re going to cut to that guy. I mean you might have an indication when you’re going to cut, but then in the editing room things happen, so again it’s all done after the fact as far as I could tell. It reminds me a little bit of like a book on tape because you immediately start painting your own visual picture in your head. I can see the shipping container. I liked that it was the wet filthy ground instead of just the ground. You know, so I liked that they were adding things that helped the mind paint that image. It was cool.

**John:** It was cool. And I thought it was actually really well performed like that the narrator they use for this does a great job. So the Daredevil pilot was written by Drew Goddard who’s amazingly talented. I’m trying to find the credit of the guy who or the people who wrote up the descriptive audio for it because I thought they did a great job too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I agree with you that it’s not — you know, when it got into the fight sequence, I wondered if they might have looked at what the text was from the fight as written on the page because like some of those flurry of blows, that kind of stuff, that felt scene description-y. I can see that being part of the fight scene description, but it’s never going to be so directly matching what the fight choreography was going to be. So, you know, I thought it was really well done.

**Craig:** Yeah, like maybe they take what’s in the script and then remove bits that have been edited out and kind of add things in that were done on the day. You know, so they use the script as a basis and then kind of go from there.

**John:** So, what Daredevil makes clear is that writing this descriptive audio is not easy. And I wanted to talk to somebody who did this for a living. So, yesterday I got on Skype with Alice Sanders in London. Alice, thank you so much for being with us.

**Alice Sanders:** My pleasure.

**John:** So, can you tell us some of the movies you’ve worked on?

**Alice:** Oh, I’ve worked on so many films. One of my favorites to describe was Up, the Pixar film. I’ve worked on Inception, and Bridesmaids. I tend to get given a lot of comedy films or films for kids. I did Nanny McPhee because apparently I have a light-hearted comedy voice. So you tend to write the films that you also voice, but that’s not always the case.

**John:** So, at what point does a film come to you for descriptive audio?

**Alice:** Well, normally when it’s completely finished, although again, that is not always the case. We have had films that have not had all their special effects and stuff finished, which obviously makes it very difficult to describe properly because we need to see everything in order to describe it for visually impaired people.

**John:** So, which company do you actually work for? Is it one place that does all of it for movies or is it different companies contract out?

**Alice:** No. Well, I work for Deluxe, but obviously I work in London. And I know that Deluxe in L.A. also does movies, but their movie audio description will be different to the British one.

**John:** So, for each market — so, the U.K. English versus the American English would have different descriptive audio?

**Alice:** Absolutely. The actual writing will tend to be very similar, although obviously there’ll be a few words that are different like, you know, lift and elevator and all those kind of things. But also the American one will have an American voice and the British one will have a British voice.

**John:** So, let’s take the movie Up. So, this movie comes to you for descriptive audio, what is the first thing you do?

**Alice:** The first thing I do is open the clip and start watching it. I don’t watch the film before I start describing it, but I don’t describe it in real time because that would be impossibly difficult. So, what you do is you pause the film. I mean you can stop, and rewind and fast forward, you know, wherever you like.

And then what you start to do is you time in what I would call a box, which is a single description. And obviously you do it between dialogue, so the shortest description would tend to be a second, you wouldn’t go under that. But you can have anything up to, you know, well even minutes and minutes of silence in a film, although you would tend to break that up into descriptions rather than record kind of five minutes straight of audio description.

**John:** So, when you do this process, are you typing up a document or is this in specialized software?

**Alice:** It’s in specialized software, which is also used for subtitling. On the program, we can time in a box to the exact frame of the film. So, I could have a box that was like one second. I could have a box that was like 38 seconds and four frames.

**John:** And so, once you have this box described, you’re writing up the description for what the narrator is ultimately going to say in that space?

**Alice:** Exactly. So, once you’ve timed in the box, then you write the description. And so, the description will include anything that’s going on visually really. If you have a short space, then what you’re trying to get in is the relevant piece of information for a visually impaired person to understand what is happening in the film conceptually like plot-wise.

**John:** Now, are there any cases where you have to sort of move a piece of information from one time period to another time period because there wasn’t a space there to get that crucial detail in there? The Daredevil thing we just listened to, there was like a man sitting in a chair by the river. And it felt like it wasn’t especially important that you establish that now, as long you establish it in the scene. So do you ever slide where you describe something?

**Alice:** As much as possible, you try to get it in at the moment that it’s happening because you almost always describe in present tense or present tense continuous. But occasionally, of course, that happens. So there’ll be dialogue over a very important action. And then you can do something in past tense.

**John:** Describing in the present tense, screenplays are also written in the present tense. Do you ever look at the original screenplay for the movie as you’re doing the descriptions?

**Alice:** Yes. If we have the script, that’s really, really helpful because, first of all, it will give you all the characters’ names. Because what you’re doing when you’re audio describing as well is, this sounds like a silly thing to say, but we’re trying to understand what’s going on as quickly as possible, which I guess you’re doing as a viewer of a movie.

But as an audio describer, you sort of have to be one step ahead. So you get very good at quickly understanding like a plot or a character and stuff like that. But having a script means that you have all the character names so that you can correctly identify characters easily. If you have a, what’s it called, like a spotting script, you’ll have visual directions as well, which of course are really, really useful to us because it’s not always really obvious where you are all the time.

**John:** What was the most difficult movie you had to describe?

**Alice:** The most [laughs] difficult film I have ever described, without a doubt, is David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

**John:** And why was it difficult?

**Alice:** Have you seen Inland Empire?

**John:** I have seen it. It feels like you would have a very hard time explaining what was on the screen.

**Alice:** So there were so many reasons that it was hard. I’m a massive Lynch fan, but it is a deeply weird movie even for Lynch. So you have these scenes where there are sort of like human-like figures but with bunny heads kind of interspersed into the other plot. I call it a plot. I mean, it’s certainly not a linear or obvious story.

The other thing that was really, really hard was that there’s two characters that are actors who also play a role that has a different name. So, essentially, they’re playing two characters. And at a certain point in the movie, you can no longer be certain whether they’re the actor or the role. You know, they switch between the two characters sort of fluidly and you don’t really know.

And so it’s the only time ever, really, in an audio description that I’ve broken the fourth wall because I just didn’t know anymore. So I just was like, “Listen, guys, it might be this character or this character. I mean, I’ll choose a name but, you know, from here on in, you can decide for yourself because I don’t know anymore.”

**John:** Well, it sounds like the descriptive audio is trying to make something that is potentially ambiguous and make it less ambiguous. So someone who’s listening to just the soundtrack might not really know what’s going on. And so your job is to make it more clear what’s going on.

And in the case of Inland Empire, you just can’t do that because you, yourself as a viewer, have no clear sense of what is supposed to be happening and what the audience is supposed to be feeling.

**Alice:** Absolutely.

**John:** Do you ever use wes or like do you use the second person plural? In screenwriting, we often will fall back to ‘we see’, ‘we hear’, ‘we do this’, or is it just simple present tense scene description?

**Alice:** We tend to avoid that [laughs] because I think sometimes it can take you out of the moment almost. We tend to also avoid using any kind of technical language about shots or, you know, camera angles or anything like that. We may very, very rarely use those if it’s extremely relevant. Like, for example, in a kind of 3D thing, if something leaps out at you. Or if maybe somebody turns to the camera and sort of like addresses the camera directly, we might say that because that’s quite an unusual thing to happen in a film. But, yeah, we tend to just present tense, very simple.

**John:** Great. Alice, how does somebody get your job?

**Alice:** [laughs] Well, I just did a writing test and a voice test to get my job. Obviously, you have to be quite a good writer, she says bidding herself up. You have to be very concise a lot of the time because you’ll have so little time and you really have to get across those salient points for a visually impaired person to be able to understand the film.

You also have to sound fairly decent on a microphone. And I think sometimes having a nice voice isn’t always enough. I think it took me a while, actually, to sound natural on a microphone. At first, I think I was quite nervous. But audio descriptions should sort of fit in with the film. It shouldn’t jolt you out of the film. So you should be able to kind of weave in and out quite naturally, which is actually also more difficult than it sounds I think.

**John:** When you’re writing this description, how often are you going to be the person who’s doing the narration versus another person?

**Alice:** They tend to try and give you films that you will voice because it’s much easier to — because what you do when you record is, again, the software will queue you up to every description but only sort of a second or two seconds before each run. So if you’re reading your own work, it is of course much easier because you sort of have an idea of what’s coming up. You know, you don’t know it off by heart but you know what you’ve written.

Whereas if you’re sight-reading someone else’s work, that’s quite difficult. So they do try to give you the writing if you’re going to record. But it doesn’t always work out like that.

**John:** Are there cases where a movie will have a lot of women characters in it and they therefore would want to have a man be the other voice so no one gets confused or people just can sort that out?

**Alice:** Well, no, absolutely. And the film companies will often choose the voice of the film. So they might get sent a few samples. And, yeah, they definitely sometimes choose, you know, a man because it’s mainly women and therefore to sort of, yeah, differentiate. But, again, like I said, I sort of get chosen for a lot of lighthearted things because apparently I sound lighthearted even though I’m a very serious person. And normally, you’ll probably get a man doing an action film and a woman doing a rom-com and that kind of thing.

**John:** That’s great. Alice, thank you so much for talking us through this. I understand this so much better than I did five minutes ago.

**Alice:** [laughs] That’s good, great.

**John:** Great. Alice, thank you.

**Alice:** You’re welcome.

**John:** And that is descriptive audio. So, thank you to everybody who wrote in with suggestions and especially for people who put me in contact with Alice to talk about what it was like to write descriptive audio, a thing I knew nothing about and a week later, I know so much more.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a big job.

**John:** Big job.

**Craig:** You know, there’s this other hidden job that I would love for you and I — you know what, I just had an idea, John. John, every now and then, I have an idea. So you write a movie, the movie gets made. And then as we all know, the movie play overseas. What we forget is that all across the world, in many, many, many countries, there are people whose job is to dub the movie. Most American movies play overseas dubbed, I believe. I mean, you can probably find some subtitled versions, too.

But the people who dub in the other languages, that’s a fascinating gig because they have to essentially do this really quickly. Sometimes, you know, with the way things are released, they maybe have two weeks to dub an entire movie. And then translation is a real art. You know, especially in comedy, you have a line, it’s a joke but it’s based on wordplay, how do you translate that? How does it make sense?

I’d love to get somebody on who does that for a living, to talk to them about how they go through the way the screenplay is showing through the movie and how they turn that into another language.

**John:** So, luckily, I know several people who do this for a living.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Yeah. These are French friends who do it. And your instinct is right in that in many markets, movies are dubbed. In many markets, movies are subtitled. But often, the people who would do subtitling are not the same people who do dubbing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s a completely complicated, crazy world in which they work. But, yes, I can get them on the air and they would be fantastic. One of them, Mannu, actually did a blog post for me, talking through what his process was. So I’ll put a link to Mannu’s post in the show notes.

**Craig:** Well, great.

**John:** But we’ll get either him or my friend, Fred, on to talk about that job because it is really crazy. And so my husband, Mike, who speaks French, sometimes Mannu will email Mike saying like, “What does this joke even mean?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Like, essentially, he’s looking at an American movie, he’s like, “I’m trying to understand what this is actually supposed to be.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And Mike will give him some sense of what it could be and so then Mannu has to find the French equivalent.

**Craig:** What if Mike just had no sense of humor?

**John:** That would be awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah. So he would just guess at what it meant. It’s so confusing for the world over.

**John:** Yeah. Well, I think what’s also interesting, the difference between people who are doing dubbing and subtitling versus descriptive audio is that the dubbers and subtitlers are almost invariably, they are native speakers of the language they are converting into. So they speak English but they’re converting it into French or Arabic or some other language.

People who are doing descriptive audio necessarily need to be sighted so they can see what’s actually happening there but they also need to be able to experience the movie as a blind person would experience it. So the people who wrote in with their experiences about how they did it, some of them would talk about like watching something with the picture turned off just to see like what was there and what you could get with no visual information.

**Craig:** It’s a great idea. Right, like you think to yourself, “Okay, I almost need to see it.” I mean, I assume with practice, that’s no longer necessary. But to watch it first without the picture and then see what emerged from you, well, that difference is what you’re filling in. Very cool.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Very cool.

**John:** All right, onto this week’s show with some questions from listeners. Rick Silcox asks, “As a follow-up to the discussion about getting ideas from the media such as FIFA, can you talk about your processes for vetting your ideas? How much will you develop an idea in your head before you decide to start writing it or drop the idea? Once you’ve started writing, what will make you give up on the idea? Do you ever truly give up on a notion or do you keep it in mind in case some new revelation comes along?”

So, Craig, what is your vetting process for an idea?

**Craig:** Well, I would say there is the left brain vetting and the right brain vetting. The left brain needs to feel like there is a through line that can be followed where the end is a commentary on the beginning, that the process and journey of the movie will be interesting, and there will be places for characters to evolve and change, and that the premise of the movie is fertile ground for stuff to happen.

And that’s all good. But then there’s the right brain vetting which is, “Do I love this or is this just something I could do? Am I excited? Is this getting me going? Do I want to write this?” You know, early on in your career, you have to kind of shut your right brain down a little bit because you’re starving and you need to pay your rent. And so you’re like, “Well, I don’t love this but I could do it. So I will left brain my way through this. And maybe as I do it, I will come to love it. I will grow to love it.”

But, yeah, ideally, you want to have both. So I do drop ideas. I have ideas sometimes that people are like, “Yeah, we’d buy that.” And I think, “Great, let me just get to the place where I feel like I would be able to write it for sure.” And sometimes I don’t. And then I say, “Well, I’m not going to do it,” you know, because it doesn’t seem like something that would delight me.

And there’s only so many things you can write. We’re all on a clock. I’ve wasted a lot of time writing a lot of stuff I didn’t want to write. That’s the God’s honest truth. So I try now more than ever to only write things I do want to write.

**John:** Yeah. I completely understand that sense of lost time writing things that seemed like a good idea to write. It’s like your left brain convinces you like, “Oh, you should totally write that.” And I knew I could write that but it really wasn’t the thing I should have written. And there were some years that have been lost to sort of writing the wrong thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And some of those movies got made, some of those movies didn’t get made. Most of those movies didn’t get made. And on some level, it was I think in part because I didn’t fundamentally love them.

**Craig:** Honestly, it’s worse when they do get made. God’s honest truth, that’s the worst because then you’re sitting there like, “Why did no one stop this thing?” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] One of my crucial questions for myself is, would I pay to see this movie? And if I wouldn’t pay to see this movie, then I have no business writing it. And that’s just a very simple gut check for me.

There was a project that got offered in my direction. I won’t say it was fully offered to me but like they said, “Hey, would you be interested in writing this thing?” And it was very tantalizing because it was very high profile kind of thing. And yet, as I had the phone call conversations with it and sort of went through it, I couldn’t fundamentally see myself being happy writing this movie three years from now.

And you have to approach any project like that as, you know, a multiyear commitment. And I just didn’t see myself necessarily wanting to spend all those years on this project to the exclusion of other projects. I mean, everything you say yes to is something else you’re saying no to. And the opportunity cost of this one was just higher than I was willing to spend.

That’s part of the reason why I think some writers in our position end up rewriting a bunch of other little things because the opportunity cost seems so much smaller to just spend a couple of weeks on something. It’s when you’ve done a couple of weeks on a bunch of things, you realize like, “Oh, wow, I could have written a whole other script in the time that I’ve been tinkering with these other people’s movies.”

**Craig:** I know. Yeah. I mean, people always wonder, “Why don’t they write original things anymore?” Well, because when you get the little jobs and they say, “Here, come on board for two weeks or three weeks,” in a weird way, there’s no pressure. People are saying, “Help us.” And you can definitely help in two or three weeks, always, you know.

I mean, if you’re decent, you’re hopefully not one of those people that’s going to make it go backwards but let’s say you don’t, you know what to do, you feel comfortable with it and you can make it go forward, it’s only two or three weeks of your life. That’s no big deal. And, you know, they pay you pretty well for those things. And you don’t have a sense of loss over it.

If someone says, “Oh, we just don’t like the thing you did on this part of it,” okay, I’ll change that. I mean, I get it. I’m here to visit for two or three weeks. You don’t feel the pain.

A lot of times, those jobs are like, they’re all ups and no downs. The only down is that, you know, you’re servicing something for two or three weeks and that’s not necessarily the kind of thing that you can do all the time. I mean, ultimately, Hollywood will ask you to do that stuff all the time, until one day, they go, “This guy is just one of those guys that just keeps taking from our plate. [laughs] What is he going to give?”

So you have to do both. And it’s tricky. These days, a lot of what I think about with my ideas is who would be the right person to collaborate on with this, whether it’s a director or a producer or an actor. And if I can think of the right person, then that also gets me excited because a lot of the work that I’ve done that I’ve been happiest with has been the product of good relationships.

**John:** That makes a lot of sense. Part of my vetting process is, “Can I write a trailer for it?” which seems really strange but like I have to have a sense of like I know what this movie would feel like on a screen. I know what somebody would see that would make them want to come spend, you know, $15 to see this on the big screen.

And so writing the trailer early on is sort of a crucial first step for me. Something I said in the 100th episode of Scriptnotes was I write the movie that has the best ending. And so if I don’t have a sense of where this movie is going to end up, I won’t start writing it.

And the last thing which has been really helpful for me is describing it to Kelly Marcel because for whatever reason, if Kelly Marcel is enthusiastic about something I’m thinking about writing, I suddenly want to write it because I want to keep Kelly happy.

**Craig:** She’s an amazing cheerleader that way. I’ve pitched many things over time to her and she’s just naturally very supportive about that stuff. Although, have you gotten like the anti-Marcel, like has she ever kind of just gotten heavy-lidded and like, “No?”

**John:** [laughs] You know, it was so funny because when you started to describe the anti-Marcel, I saw like a sadness in her eyes and I knew exactly what you were going for. Yes, I have seen that sort of like, you know, “Oh, yeah, I just felt my heart sink a little bit.” But those can be useful, too.

**Craig:** And then she went, “Um, John, um, I don’t know. I don’t know.” Yeah.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But that’s useful, too.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know, you said a couple of things that I definitely do. I definitely think of the trailer. Specifically, I think of trailer moments because like I’ll go, all right, my left brain is good enough to know to not start writing something that you couldn’t make a trailer out of. But I’m looking for those moments where the trailer exceeds expectations and basically turns things on its head a little bit for people and they go, “Wait, what?” you know.

So that’s always useful. And the ending is everything. So, like you, I’m obsessed with the ending. And in fact, this thing I’m working on right now, you know, for months I’ve been thinking there’s something wrong with this beginning because I know what the ending is supposed to be but this beginning will never earn me that ending. And I kind of just had a meltdown about it two days ago and then went, “Oh, wait, wait, wait, I know what to do with this beginning.” And it’s the smallest thing and it will make me earn my ending and I’m happy now.

But until that happens, how do you proceed, you know? I need to know. The beginning and the ending is the movie. That’s the point of a movie.

**John:** Yeah. All right, next question. Will in San Diego writes, “I’m just starting to write my first screenplay. I wish to include the use of a specific song in my piece. Can I put the song in the screenplay and just change it later if necessary?”

Simple answer. What’s the simple answer, Craig?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes, you may. You may cite the use of a specific song in your screenplay that is completely fine and fair use and no one will look askance. Does that mean that that song will necessarily be in the movie? No. But does it help the reader get a sense of what that section of the screenplay feels like? Sure, it could help.

Don’t make your screenplay be like a playlist because that is annoying. To me, my pet peeve is like capitalization, like that’s the thing where it’s like, “Come on, I’m reading a screenplay not a playlist.” But if the use of that song helps, go for it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that what can strike a reader as amateurish is when you’ve got multiple scenes showing, say, a car driving down the road and we hear China Grove from The Doobie Brothers. You know, like, well, yes, we could hear a typical driving rock song there or another driving rock song. Don’t give me generic choices. If you’re going to do it, it has to be very purposeful.

Now, interesting, you got to find this weird middle space. It can’t be generic. It has to be purposeful. But it can’t be something that — at least I would recommend strongly that it’s not something that indicates to a buyer we absolutely must get this song because it’s now a plot point, you know.

Like in Cowboy Ninja Viking, there was this moment where the camera was sort of floating through this abandoned mental hospital. There is an abandoned hospital on — I’m not going to say where it is because I don’t want to give away my secret location. But this very cool, like from 1910, 1920 abandoned mental hospital.

And I wanted something that wasn’t like just creepy score. I didn’t want it to feel horror movie. I wanted it to feel like kind of odd and I wanted to comment on thematically what was going on with the main character who is about to enter this place.

And I’m a big Pink Floyd fan and there’s this great Pink Floyd song called If. And it’s, you know, as far as Floyd goes, it’s fairly obscure. Not a lot of people know it but it has these really beautiful lyrics and this really beautiful feeling to it, so I included that. I even included the lyrics because I felt like I’m writing a visual montage and I’m suggesting that this is sort of the tone that we would go for so that you understand how it feels.

And that’s okay. It doesn’t mean it has to be that song, but it’s not a generic song.

**John:** Yeah. In my script for Dark Shadows, there’s a section in which Barnabas Collins kills all the members of this terrible cult. And it is scored to Sunshine of Your Love which was just a lovely sort of counterpoint to the horrific violence of the scene. And it was a charming sequence which I wish would have shot.

And that’s the case where they probably would have used that song. But they didn’t have to use that song. But it gave you a good feel for what that section was supposed to feel like. It gave you a sense of what the texture of that section was.

**Craig:** There’s a great Sunshine of Your Love section of Goodfellas, I believe.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** [makes guitar sound]

**John:** [makes guitar sound] You know what, I said Sunshine of Your Love, I meant Age of Aquarius.

**Craig:** Totally different song.

**John:** This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. It’s a different song.

**Craig:** That is a completely different song.

**John:** But happy in that sort of happy in the ’70s way.

**Craig:** Yeah, because Sunshine of Your Love actually is kind of creepy. But, yeah, Age of Aquarius is a little more upbeat and “harmony and understanding”.

**John:** Yeah, so when you’re decapitating people with a sword, it’s a fun choice.

**Craig:** Yup, that is a fun choice.

**John:** Brad in Maryland writes, “I’ve been working on a buddy road trip comedy between a fictional character and a celebrity from a ’90s sitcom. The celebrity character is a completely outrageous, obviously fictional portrayal. The only thing he shares with the real person is his name and a love interest from the ’90s. I don’t intend for this to be made. It’s merely a writing sample. And if it generates buzz on The Black List, that’s a plus. Am I vulnerable to a libel lawsuit if I continue down this road? I know libel needs to be false and defamatory statements of fact. But do celebrities get special treatment because of their brand?”

Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** I think celebrities do get special treatment in favor of you. They’re public figures. So, essentially, they are more open to lampooning and spoofing and parodying than people that aren’t public figures. You should be fine. I mean, the basic test is, would anybody reasonably assume that what you’re suggesting in the screenplay is true and that this person has done those things?

The fact that it’s already a fictional screenplay, I mean, you can write [laughs] a fictional screenplay on the cover if you want. But, you know, the other issue is damages. Generally speaking, if somebody, let’s see, it’s a celebrity from a ’90s sitcom. I’ll go with television’s Matthew Perry.

So, Matthew, you’ve written a buddy road trip comedy about, you know, a guy who meets Matthew Perry in a bar and they go on the road. Matthew Perry finds out about this and he goes, “Oh, my god, the script is suggesting that I’m blah, blah, blah and blah, blah, blah and I’m not. And that’s defamatory.” And he runs to his lawyer and his lawyer says, “Well, yeah, but what are the damages at this point? You’re going to sue this Brad in Maryland, you know?”

And Brad, I mean, unless you’re a DuPont — oh, no, those are Delaware, aren’t they? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I’m just going to assume, Brad, you’re just an average American guy who has a certain amount of assets that would not be significant to the star of a ’90s sitcom, so he’s not going to want to sue you. What he would want to do is wait and sue the movie [laughs] or the studio. And so their legal department will make their process through.

I don’t think that you would be vulnerable to a libel lawsuit. I, not an attorney, do not think that you would be vulnerable. So if you want to cover that base for sure, always best to talk to a lawyer.

**John:** Brad, I think you have precedent on your side, too. If you look at Being John Malkovich, John Malkovich was not involved in that project until it was going to become a movie. So his name was in the title and it was not yet involving him.

Another example is Harold & Kumar. I could be wrong but I think Neil Patrick Harris was always scripted in to be that role in Harold & Kumar. And he is obviously a fictional version of himself and he decided to do it. I think it’s not a bad idea, honestly, to take — a good execution of what you’re describing could be a great writing example that people enjoy reading. And the ability to sort of, you know, tweak a known celebrity’s persona could be fine.

So, basically don’t worry about it. Forge ahead, I say.

**Craig:** I’m with that, yeah.

**John:** Do you want to take this last one?

**Craig:** Sure. Anthony, Anthony writes, “The New York Times just published a feature about the lawlessness of the High Seas, basically crimes that can happen onboard cargo ships on Trans-Atlantic voyages. Note, the article isn’t about pirating, as portrayed in Captain Phillips. It’s a world I probably wouldn’t have known about if not for this one specific article. In doing some more additional research, there isn’t much documentation of it elsewhere online.

It’s not a commonly known or reported world and the events that take place in a completely fictionalized story would likely resemble events referenced in the article because the article talks broadly about the types of crimes that take place onboard these ships. Because this article is essentially the only source of that information, couldn’t The New York Times, theoretically speaking, say that I infringed their copyright or not obtained the rights to the article when they feel I should have?”

**John:** I thought this was a really good question because it talks about that sort of murky grey line between what are just facts that are available for everyone to use and what is specific implementation of details that are protectable by copyright. And I thought this fell in a really nice zone where he couldn’t find anything that wasn’t in this article that talks about the things he wants to talk about. And so if he wants to make a movie about this specific thing, he would be well-served, I think, having the rights to this article.

Now, let’s say he liked a lot of the ideas in it but like, “But I want to set this in space,” well, just go for it. But because, to me, this felt like he wants to use some very specific details that he could only find in this article, he should strongly consider getting this article. Craig, what did you think?

**Craig:** It is, I would say, de rigueur for studios to pick up articles like this. In fact, somebody probably already has. And therein lies your problem, Anthony. They’ll buy the rights to these articles. When they buy the rights to the articles, I always feel like most of the time what they’re really buying is the right to the whole body of work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because the article isn’t going to cover everything. So, all of their research, all of their sources, the ability to talk to their contacts, the contact information, it just becomes a lot easier.

Here’s a simple truth. Facts are in the public domain. So The New York Times does not own the facts in that story that they’ve reported. You may use any of those facts because they’re facts. People, so for instance, there’s a captain of one of the boats. Well, if elements of his life are suddenly appearing in your movie, that’s an issue most likely because he’s not a public figure. So you would have to get life rights.

A lot of times, what happens with articles is that agencies will represent both the article writer, the journalist, and the key person that the story is about or if there is a key person, the life rights, so that it’s all bundled together into one package so that you’re free and clear to make the movie you need to make.

In this case, I would think that you shouldn’t worry about The New York Times. You should worry about the people that The New York Times is quoting. That’s just my gut feeling. And that you should fictionalize your characters so that they’re not overlapping with real people’s lives. That becomes a problem. The facts that there are boats and these crimes take place, those facts are free and clear to all human beings.

**John:** I think you made some really crucial distinction in that in most cases, it’s not a screenwriter who goes out and gets the rights to a New York Times’ article, it’s a producer. It’s a producer or it’s a studio who says, we think there is a story idea here and we’re going to try to lock this down so that we can make a movie about this. And they want something they can protect and defend so that they can then hire on a writer to write them that movie.

And so a lot of movies you wouldn’t think are based on articles are based on things like this. So way back to like the John Travolta movie, Perfect, I think it’s based on like a Rolling Stone article about aerobics instructors. There’s —

**Craig:** Saturday Night Fever. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So there are weird examples of movies you wouldn’t think would have to be based on anything, which are based on non-fiction articles. So there is a precedent for it. Could you have made a movie like Saturday Night Fever without an underlying article? Of course, you could have. But somebody wanted to make a movie in that space and they bought that article and therefore the movie became based upon that article.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I would say in a very general sense, if you as an individual writer want to do something set in a specific world and there’s, you know, there’s limited research, but there’s one article you find. I would not set your hopes on getting the rights to that one article because you are then bound to that article and you’re bound to the underlying article rights of that article. And it just becomes complicated. The degree to which writer can control his or her complete destiny and not have any chain of title issues behind your property, you’re going be happier and better.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree.

**John:** Cool. Last final topic for this week’s show is the WGA financial report which just came out. And Craig took a look through it. I’ve just cracked it open. But Craig, can you give us any highlights from this financial report?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. It’s not good news for those of us who work in movies, I’ll tell you that much. Total earnings for writers were basically flat from the year prior, technically down 0.2%, I think that’s essentially a flat line.

And the number of writers reporting earnings, so how many of us worked, down 1% from last year overall. If you’re interested in knowing, the number of writers reporting earnings in 2014, 4,899. So just under 5,000 professional writers in the Writers Guild West. Very small amount.

**John:** Very small amount.

**Craig:** That’s it. Yeah.

**John:** If you want to read along with us, we’ll have a link for this in the show notes. You can see a PDF of the annual report. So the WGA is required to publish this every year to show what its members are actually earning, what’s coming in for both film and for television and in residuals.

And so the television picture is I think as we could anecdotally guess is not that bad. It was actually — there’s pretty good employment in television. If you are a writer who wanted to work in Hollywood, television would seem to be the place to go. So what’s the best numbers to look at? What’s the best chart here? Earnings and employment in screen.

**Craig:** Well, first we’ll say that television in terms of number of writers reporting in was sort of flat. It was up 1% and earning is up 2.3%, which is not bad. It beats the bank account these days.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But of interest is you’ve got 4,900 writers reporting earnings in Writers Guild West. Of that 4,900, a full 3,900 of them, so essentially, you know, three-quarters, right, or more are in TV. So that’s a lot. Now, there are some that write in TV and movies, so there’s some overlap. But the great bulk of people working and voting in the Writers Guild West are TV writers.

Now, if everything is flat, then hopefully it stayed at least flat or better in screen — oh, here comes the — here, it just get worse and worse. And by the way, as far as I can tell, no plan. Not plan to stop it. And I’m not sure that there is a plan that will stop it.

Earnings and employment in screen, the number of writers — so to contrast, in 2009, there were 3,166 working writers in television. 2014, 3,888. So that’s an increase of about 700 and a little bit. In screen, we’ve dropped about 300, from 1,836 in 2009 to 1,556 in 2014. But what is even worse is that that has been a steady trend down and down and down. For instance, this year, down almost 6% in terms of working screenwriters from the prior year. And I’m talking about 2014 to 2013.

And then of course, what are we making? And not surprisingly, fewer writers means less money. It’s not like they’re spending the same amount of money and just giving fewer writers more of it. The pie is shrinking. And it has been shrinking steadily year after year after year in a kind of grinding freefall. The total earnings reported in 2009 for screen were $432 million. In 2014, we’re down to $313 million. That’s about 70% of what it was in 2009. And it dropped 5.5% from 2013 to 2014. I have no reason to think it’s not going to get worse. It just, it’s bad. It’s bad.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And part of the problem for guys like you and me is that we are now kind of entering a minority phase in our union. We are both a numeric minority and we are a financial minority. And our interests will, as this — it’s a real catch 22, the less you make and the fewer of you there are, the less power you have to use, you know, to kind of exercise you and your muscle to help yourselves. So I’m not sure what to do.

**John:** I don’t know what to do either. If there’s any, you know, silver lining to all of this is that the gains in television have made up for some of the losses in screen, on the big screen. And so therefore, some of these writers who are not making a living on writing for features are making a writing living in television and maybe they’re happy in television, so maybe it’s not a bad thing.

But if you’re a writer, whose goal is to really work on the big screen, it’s increasingly less likely you’re going to have a great career doing that.

The last bit to look at here is total residuals, which seemed fairly flat to me. Theatrical residuals were down 0.15% from 13 to 15. Television residuals were up 4.8%. That’s not the worst thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I mean the residuals are — because the residuals are based on the library, they will shield you from certain realities for a while. But there will be an echo. What’s happening now in feature film employment will echo forward. And we will see the commensurate drop in residuals down the line. It’s inevitable because they’re just not making as many movies.

**John:** Exactly. So fewer movies being made, fewer movies getting residuals. And then we don’t know what the structural changes to people not buying DVDs anymore, people streaming. We don’t know the full extent to which that’s going implement how much money is coming in on those checks.

**Craig:** Yeah. We did see a kind of an interesting bump in theatrical reuse, miscellaneous theatrical reuse. I don’t know what that means. I’m kind of curious about that because they breakdown theatricals residuals — the big number is in television.

So we make movies and then they replay them on TV all over the world for free essentially, but supported by ads of course. Then there’s home video, which we all know. It’s been, I mean, decimated from — it’s dropped from 2009 to 2014, that’s down 36%, horrendous.

Pay TV continues a nice climb. So that’s your HBOs and so forth. DVD script fee is nonsense, it doesn’t matter. It’s $5,000 every time you write a movie. New media reuse is up, not surprisingly, 1,421% [laughs] over the last five years. But in doing so, only now is starting to hit numbers that are significant. So for instance, pay TV generates $53 million in residuals in 2014 for screenwriters, new media reuse, $11.5 million. But still, better.

Then there’s this thing, this miscellaneous theatrical reuse. The numbers aren’t big. I’m just kind of —

**John:** I don’t know what it is.

**Craig:** I don’t know what it is either. I wonder what that is. Anyway, they’re small numbers, who cares? Point being, total theatrical residuals, down 1.5%. Total television residuals, up nearly 5%. And I got to say, anything that goes up 5% right now when a typical savings account is giving you 0.7%, is really good. And down 1.5% is really bad. And that’s going to — that number, I’m afraid, is going to get worse and worse.

**John:** Yeah, I’m looking through why the numbers are up for television residuals. And the big gains seem to be in obviously new media reuse, so that’s the new services that we have for doing stuff. And great, as we talked about on the show before, writers get more money in residuals if they rent a movie on iTunes than they would have if they were to stream a movie on Netflix and honestly probably more money than it would on a DVD sale, at least DVD sale at most common prices. So we’ll see. There’s some reason for optimism there.

It is time to wrap up our show. So let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this weird sculpture website that I went to and actually bought something off it. It’s a place called Bathsheba. And Craig, click on the link because I think you’ll actually really dig these things.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** They’re basically these things you can buy that are sort of paper weight size generally and they’re all 3D printed, but they’re 3D printed in metal. And there are these impossible shapes that look like, I don’t know, things we’d find in Star Trek. They are just kind of great.

So there are knots that seem impossible. The thing I’m holding is sort of — it’s four-sided, it sort of feels like a four-sided die, but it’s actually all one piece, but it’s sharp and spiky. It feels like you could throw it as cling on weapon. I just really dug it.

So I found this site through Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site, which is another great site. I’ll put a link in the show notes, which has just like random stuff you can buy. So Bathsheba Sculptures is my One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** That one that you have, I think it’s called Rajina.

**John:** Yeah. It feels like a spiky kind of —

**Craig:** It could be Rajina.

**John:** Rajina, the queen.

**Craig:** Nothing there — a Rajina is not a spiky pipe. Okay. Here we go. One Cool Thing for me. Oh, so here’s like an interesting one. It’s like a One Cool Thing that’s trumped an old One Cool Thing. So it’s an app called MacID. So we talked about Knock before. That was one of our One Cool Things. And the idea of Knock was you’ve got your computer locked down with a simple login password. And instead of having to type in your password every time, you can just — your phone will know, the app on the phone syncs up Bluetooth-wise with your computer. It knows that it needs that. And it says, hey, knock on the back of me. And you knock on the back of your phone and it fills the password in for you and it’s great.

And that was great for a bit and then it just stopped working for me.

**John:** It’s not working for me too.

**Craig:** Okay. It’s just a mess. I don’t know what happened with it. But it ain’t working. Even worse, the whole point of it which was knocking on stuff basically became obliterated once they introduced the touch ID functionality. And even Knock was like no more knocking, just use touch. It just doesn’t work at least for me and for you [laughs] for 1,000% of us, it doesn’t work.

So MacID, same thing. I mean in terms of what it’s supposed to do and it does it. And it works.

**John:** It’s great.

**Craig:** So get it.

**John:** But I haven’t tried it yet. I’m excited to try it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Now, Craig, my question for you is, you and I both have Apple watches. Shouldn’t our computers just that we are in front of them because we have our Apple watches on? Shouldn’t that be identify enough?

**Craig:** It should and it — well, it is. But the point is you may not want to unlock your computer just because you’re walking by it. So actually MacID works really well with your watch. So when I sit down — maybe the first time after a couple of hours, it takes like a second or two and then my wrist buzzes and I look down and I tap my thing and unlocked.

**John:** Oh nice.

**Craig:** But then after that, you know, it’s really quick and like, boop, boop, and it fills in your passwords. I’m very happy with it.

**John:** Great. That is our show this week. Reminder, that if you have an idea for a Scriptnotes t-shirt, we would love to see it. So go to johnaugust.com/shirts and there’s some instructions there for how you can tell the world about your Scriptnotes -t-shirt idea. August 11th is the deadline for that.

If you would like to know more about some of the things we talked about, there are show notes at johnaugust.com. Just search johnaugust.com/scriptnotes and you’ll see all of the back episodes including transcripts.

Thank you Stuart Friedel for getting those transcripts together. He’s our producer. Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week. I would like to thank Alice for coming on the show to talk to us about describers and what they do. And Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, John.

Links:

* [Submit your Fall 2015 Scriptnotes shirt design](http://johnaugust.com/shirt) by August 11
* [Capitals](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/capitals-free-word-battle/id968456900?mt=8) for iOS
* [MovieBob Reviews: Pixels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFD2293oGvA) (NSFW)
* [Subtitling for screenwriters](http://johnaugust.com/2013/subtitling-for-screenwriters) on johnaugust.com
* [Can you reference specific, proper-noun products/songs/locations/etc. in your screenplay?](http://screenwriting.io/can-you-reference-specific-proper-noun-productssongslocationsetc-in-your-screenplay/) on screenwriting.io
* [2015 WGAw Annual Report to Writers](http://wga.org/subpage_whoweare.aspx?id=230)
* [Bathsheba Sculptures](https://www.bathsheba.com/)
* Kevin Kelly’s [Cool Tools](http://kk.org/cooltools/)
* [MacID](http://macid.co/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-one-with-alec-berg).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 205 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now like most weeks, I’m here in Los Angeles, but Craig is way off in the other side of the country. He has kidnapped a famous writer/director who we both like, Alec Berg, and he’s holding him hostage in a house. So this can be sort of a special episode because Craig is going to interrogate him and get all the information he can out of Alec Berg.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Bergs and the Mazins are on a little mini vacation together right now. All of the children are out of our hair, spectacular. And what we like to do when we go on vacation is record podcasts.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** So I’ve got him. And I’m going to be asking him all the questions that people want to know. You know, a lot of questions about Alec Berg that have gone unanswered over the years and they’re all going to be asked, and I will get answers. Oh, I will.

**John:** And I’m looking forward to it. So before you do that, let’s do just a tiny bit of follow up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In the last episode, we described the new 200 episodes Scriptnotes USB drive that people can purchase. A bunch of people purchased them so we are not quite in danger of selling out of them but they will sell out relatively soon. So if you would like to get the entire back catalogue of Scriptnotes on a USB drive, you should go to store.johnaugust.com and probably not wait too long for those because they will go. But thank you for everyone who bought one of those.

And Craig, do you remember what the promo code was that you picked for these USB drives?

**Craig:** Yes, the promo code was SINGULARITY.

**John:** That is the promo code that will save you 20% which would almost cover the shipping cost of those in the U.S. So if you want one of those —

**Craig:** Huge savings.

**John:** Huge savings. Second, our final bit of follow up — I’m kind of sad about this, on Tess Gerritsen and her Gravity lawsuit. Craig, talk us through it.

**Craig:** Well, you know, we’ve been following Tess Gerritsen. She alleged that she was owed a whole bunch of money because the Warner Bros. film Gravity, at least in her point of view, was based on her book Gravity that she had sold the rights to New Line, and she’d been suing. And all along the way, we had been following this and saying, “We don’t think she has a case.” Well, neither did the judge, repeatedly. And now she’s saying, alas, she’s giving up.

But she’s saying she’s giving up in the weirdest way. And it’s kind of consistent with everything she’s done so far. I mean, her whole thing is — she would go on her blog and say, “This is why I have this amazing case and this is why it’s terrible and this is why Warner Bros. can’t get away with this.” This is an incredibly one sided thing that even then both you and I felt was flimsy and not substantive.

And her final goodbye here is similar. Rather than saying — so the title of the piece is Gravity Lawsuit: Why I’m Giving Up. The proper answer is because I have no case. That’s not the answer she gives. The answer she gives instead is because the court is nuts and didn’t allow us to prove our justice and so forth. But I disagree. I disagree.

She even cites — I don’t know if you noticed this John, she cites for the first time something, right? What she never gave us was anything from her book and then something from the movie for us all to look at and say, “Oh yeah, that’s very, very similar.” What she does instead now is she cites something from her contract and she believes that this is determinative, and it says, “Owner agrees that the company may assign this agreement blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” May, she just doesn’t see the word may there. Interesting, very interesting.

**John:** Yeah. So this is the end of our Gravity saga and I guess I’ll kind of miss it. The good news/bad news is that people have been tweeting in with all sorts of other lawsuits that are similar, some of which are making it through the court system as we speak. So in a future episode, we will talk through some of these other ones that have percolated up.

My hunch is that we are seeing more of these but they’ve always been there. You and I have both been around long enough that we’ve seen a lot of these things happen, what’s interesting to me is I think more of these are actually going to trial rather being settled before they ever become publicly known. So we’ll talk through some of those. I expect our opinions on them will probably be similar to the Gravity lawsuit but we’ll look at them as they come up.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, a general rule of thumb is if it goes to trial, the studio is going to win. They don’t go to trial with losers in general, they just settle them. They never came close to settling on this one as far as I could tell. I think, you know, when I see something like this, I just keep thinking that at some point, somebody must have reached out from the plaintiff side to say, “Well, do you guys just want to make this go away or what?” And when the studio says, “No. Actually, we would love to go all the way with this.” That’s when you know, they just — that’s just not the way corporate lawyers behave when they don’t have something locked down.

**John:** Yeah. I doubt it’s a philosophical change where the corporate lawyer decided to just become much more aggressive and like, “Oh yeah, we’d love to go to trial.” I think there’s something that has shifted in terms of how they respond into these kind of complaints or just that they felt there were no grounds for the complaint.

**Craig:** I agree. I’ll tell you that I don’t blame Tess Gerritsen for anything she did. I am concerned with her lawyers who I think kind of sold her a bill of goods here, but that’s my opinion, my non-lawyerly opinion that her legal team may have led her down the primrose path.

**John:** Great. So for the rest of this podcast, you are going to be talking to Alec Berg and I will not be there in the room to defend Alec Berg as you beat him up. He’s tied to a chair. You’re going to slap the answers out of him, correct?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. I’m going to slap a lot out of him.

**John:** But what I’d love to know is how he helped create such an amazing show called Silicon Valley and how he actually topped the work in the first season with the second season. And how he prepares for the crushing disappointment of the third season which cannot possibly live up to expectation.

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny, I was not aware that he was involved in a show called — what is it? Silicon what?

**John:** Silicon Valley.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And so apparently it’s about the silicon mining industry, and also intercut with the plastic surgery industry. So it’s really a great, gripping drama that enfolds over, you know, this sort of nonlinear storytelling mode. So maybe while you’re on vacation with him, you could, you know, rent the DVDs and watch them.

**Craig:** Just to be clear, I’m here with a guy name Alex Berg, I don’t know — do you?

**John:** Oh man, the wrong person, sorry.

**Craig:** Yeah. But this is Alex Berg. He’s not — I mean he’s a writer of a kind-ish. [laughs]

**John:** Well, Craig, I’ll leave it to you to figure out who this man is and why he should be on our podcast.

**Craig:** All right, here we go. So at last, I’m here with Alec Berg.

**Alec Berg:** Indeed you are, sir.

**Craig:** Got rid of Alex Berg, turns out he was useless.

**Alec:** Alex Berg, a real guy, actor.

**Craig:** Oh?

**Alec:** Yes

**Craig:** Not useless.

**Alec:** No. There is an Alex Berg who is an actor, and there’s an Alec Berg who’s a musician, I believe, in Portland. And there’s an Alec Berg who is a tech writer, oddly enough. I think he’s in upstate New York and he tweets constantly. So if you go to Twitter, he’s Alec Berg and I had to be pretentiously real Alec Berg like he’s not real because I’m the real Alec Berg, but —

**Craig:** By the way, you’re not real —

**Alec:** No.

**Craig:** And he is probably real.

**Alec:** He’s much more real than I am.

**Craig:** He seems real than you are.

**Alec:** He certainly tweeted several hundred thousand times more than I have.

**Craig:** Oh, he’s doing — oh, and that means, therefore, real.

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** As we all know, volume equals substance.

**Alec:** Well, sure.

**Craig:** Well, [laughs] so here I am with the real, real Alec Berg —

**Alec:** @realalecberg.

**Craig:** And we are on vacation together.

**Alec:** We are.

**Craig:** With our wives.

**Alec:** Not the way —

**Craig:** I don’t want to start any weird rumors or nothing, although we do have a free path to happiness across the country.

**Alec:** Craig, please, this is going out to the public.

**Craig:** That is true, that is true.

**Alec:** We will end at that part.

**Craig:** Yes, yes.

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Let’s keep it in. So Alec, I’ve known you for many years but I’ve never interviewed you. So I’m going to start a little bit where most of the interviews start and then we’re going to wander off. Because what we like to do on our show is talk about things from the writing perspective as writers. It’s not the same old questions. Nonetheless, I’m going to start with the same old question. You began your Swedish life as a writer at Harvard, I believe. Were you writing even prior to college?

**Alec:** Yeah. I mean, I did a lot of like, you know, the usual creative writing classes and things like that. And those were always the classes that I was, you know, enjoying the most in junior high and high school. I went to high school with Ted Griffin who I don’t know if you’ve had on this podcast or not, but —

**Craig:** No. Ted is simply not important enough.

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** No. We’ll get him on for sure.

**Alec:** Screenwriter of much repute —

**Craig:** Ocean’s Eleven

**Alec:** Ocean’s Eleven and Matchstick Men.

**Craig:** And Matchstick Men.

**Alec:** And he created a show on —

**Craig:** Terriers.

**Alec:** FX called Terriers which was amazing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** Anyway, Ted and I went to junior high and high school together and he was, you know, probably from birth, like just obsessed with the film business. It’s in his family. His grandfather was a director. So he was aggressively making short films. We were actually editing short films together where we would have to plug two VCRs into each other and you would have to play from one into the other.

**Craig:** Basically like the first EditDroid from Lucas.

**Alec:** Yes. Yeah, right, right.

**Craig:** But only with two instead of like twenty.

**Alec:** Yeah, right. But like I remember sitting in his apartment when I think I was in like ninth grade and he was in seventh grade and we were, you know, editing. And I grew up in Pasadena so it was close enough to the film business that I knew it was there. Like I wasn’t like a child of the film business but I definitely was very aware of it.

**Craig:** Did you look at the film business as kind of a trap for feckless dreamers?

**Alec:** I had no sense, really, of what it was. And I certainly had no pretension of like — I always assumed like even from that age like, “Oh, I’d like to do something peripherally pertaining to entertainment.” I was really obsessed with stand-ups. Like when I was eight years old, I could do two-and-half hours of Bill Cosby kind of word perfect.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And then Steve Martin became like the game changer for me, like those few first few albums.

**Craig:** It’s interesting. I went through the same thing. I remember Delirious, Eddie Murphy’s Delirious. It’s like you memorized it almost word for word.

**Alec:** Well, somebody just wrote an amazing piece. Somebody interviewed like a hundred comedians and said, “What was the thing that made you want to be a comedian?” And of those hundred comedians, I think like 80 of them referenced Eddie Murphy’s Delirious. Like that really was like the — that’s the Star Wars of stand-ups.

**Craig:** It kind of is. And I remember, yeah, you would sit with your friends and sort of compete to see who had the most word for word.

**Alec:** Yes. And it’s still amazing. If you watch it now, it’s like it’s not one of those things where you go, “Oh yeah. Well sure, 30 years ago.”

**Craig:** It’s still really funny stuff, yes.

**Alec:** It’s unbelievably edgy. It’s great stuff still. So I was kind of a comedy nerd and we did — Ted and I did — but I mean Ted, far more than I, like driven by show business, show business. So I came to be enamored with the entertainment business, but I always thought I’d be an executive or, you know, an attorney or something like that. Like I don’t really ever think — until I got to college and I started writing — I worked at the Harvard Lampoon and that was where all of a sudden I became aware of like, “Oh, there are people who graduated a few years ago who write for Letterman, who write for The Simpsons,” had just started. The Simpsons started when I think I was a sophomore in college.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And that was one of those things where it’s like, “Oh, this is a thing.” Like people actually, like they don’t get jobs, they don’t go to law school. But I don’t think I was really like, it’s become a very weird thing now where like, there are like sophomores at the Lampoon who are like writing spec scripts and, “Oh yeah, this is my sketch package.”

**Craig:** Weaponize their ambition, yeah. .

**Alec:** It’s like what? Like I didn’t even know what that was or like that’s how you got a job. But I did a bunch of filmmaking in college and then the part of it that I thought I was sort of best at and I was most interested in was writing.

**Craig:** Right. So you were in that — it’s interesting, I was — because we’re going to leap ahead to a question I was going to ask you later, but I want to ask you now because you kind of segued into it perfectly. When you and I — we both got into the business roughly around the same time, in the early mid-90s —

**Alec:** Yes, the good old days.

**Craig:** The good old days. And we came out of what does seem like a fairly naive place. I mean, I remember, when I first came to L.A. that I got this book, Ken Auletta I think was his name, he wrote a book called Three Blind Mice and it was the story of the networks. And I got it because I just didn’t understand what the difference was between a network and those stations that weren’t networks and who made shows. Wait, wait, networks don’t make shows and I had no idea how any of it worked.

**Alec:** Well, the nice thing is that nobody knows how that works still to the this day —

**Craig:** Still to this day, exactly.

**Alec:** And now more than ever.

**Craig:** But, you know, you were at the Lampoon going, “Oh wow, there’s people who write on those shows, maybe I could do that too.” And you’re right. Now it seems very formalized. Everybody seems to be aware of everything very early on. Do you think that — and I promise we’ll get back to you in a second, but do you think that whatever you call it, the farm system, the incubation of new writers, is that damaged beyond repair or is it just too self-aware right now?

**Alec:** You know, it’s funny, I have no sense — people always ask me like, people always like people ask me questions like all the time.

**Craig:** Like just this morning this guy asked you.

**Alec:** Yeah. I can’t go anywhere without people asking me. When I do get asked about like how do you break into the business, the answer I sort of come around to is I kind of look at it like breaking into a bank. Or it’s like, I can tell you how I robbed the bank.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** I can tell you what I did to short the alarm system and to fool people into thinking I was the security guard —

**Craig:** They’ve closed that loop a lot, yeah.

**Alec:** That’s my thing. It’s like people are like, “How do I break into the business?” And my honest answer is, “I have no idea.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Like I know what people were expecting of me back then, like you’d write a couple of spec scripts of existing shows. The rule then was, don’t write a spec pilot because people don’t want to read spec pilots, they want to read existing shows, they want to read —

**Craig:** Just the opposite of what it is now.

**Alec:** Right, right. And now it’s like when I read writer submissions, it’s like — nobody’s writing Modern Family. Like all I’m getting are pilots because that’s the thing people do now.

**Craig:** Do you think that the cohort — I mean, I’m asking to throw an entire generation under the bus, but you don’t have to. But do you think that the cohort of writers that you came up with is stronger at least in inception than say this one now?

**Alec:** I think it’s a generational thing. It’s always going to be, you always think that like because you prize your skills in a certain, you know, order, I think you value certain things that people of your era valued, right?

**Craig:** Right. Like quality.

**Alec:** Well, it’s like, you know, the whole point of like rock music was to piss of your parents. And if your parents like the music, it’s not working correctly. It feels like it’s the same thing where it’s like each generation — like personally, I feel like — especially in sketch, you feel the influence of UCB and that kind zany improv like, “Oh, the twist in the middle of the sketch is this thing goes completely sideways and it turns out we’re on an alien planet watching this on TV.” And to me, as a sort of traditionalist, that offends me, because when I think of sketches I think come up with a really solid premise.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And serve the premise. And this idea of like in the middle of the sketch you go zany sideways, and it’s — you turn the whole thing upside down. That feels like a quit to me. But people who grew up prizing those zany left-turns as like, “Oh, that’s the comedy gold,” I think that —

**Craig:** Oh, but you know —

**Alec:** That feels right to them. So I guess what I’m saying is, without even realizing it, I’ve become hacky and —

**Craig:** [laughs] At last I’ve led you to the truth.

**Alec:** It’s over. It’s over for me.

**Craig:** Halfway through this, you’re going to quit the business.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And at the end you’re going to shoot yourself.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is going to be great, yeah.

**Alec:** People would just say, we always used to joke about this, like the hardest thing about show business really is like you never get pink slipped, right?

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Alec:** It not like somebody just calls you and goes, “Yeah, we appreciate your contributions. Here’s your severance package. Don’t come in tomorrow.”

**Craig:** Your last day looks just like all your other days.

**Alec:** Right. You keep going in and then all of a sudden you realize that you haven’t been on the payroll for weeks.

**Craig:** That’s right. And you don’t know any of these people.

**Alec:** No. But also, everyone else knows you’re not working there anymore but they haven’t said anything.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Alec:** And that’s the most brutal part. It’s just like it’s a very slow, quiet, there’s no definitive end moment.

**Craig:** That’s actually great news for us, I think. Because I plan on just drifting out of the business.

**Alec:** But the terrifying thing is that, we may be done.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Without even knowing it.

**Craig:** You said it’s terrifying and my heart is singing right now. I’m still happy. It means we can extend this vacation. Let’s just keep driving, man, like Thelma and Louise.

**Alec:** Wouldn’t that be amazing? You suddenly realize there’s just no compelling reason to go back.

**Craig:** Well, you know, a lot of people — no one really knows this except for you and for me, but we’ll share it with them that you and I have this fantasy —

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’ve been talking about it for years — quitting writing.

**Alec:** Dare to dream.

**Craig:** Dare to dream, quit writing, and the two of us just open some kind of — we’d become lawyers. And I honestly feel like we could get our law degrees — I’m not kidding — in months. I feel like if you and I tried really hard —

**Alec:** I think you can get a law degree. I don’t know if it would be reputable at all but it does seem like —

**Craig:** It would be a degree.

**Alec:** It would be a physical piece of paper that says we have —

**Craig:** Right. If you and I said, “Look, the bar is one year from now, let’s start studying now,” and we’ll take the bar a year from now, I think we could do it.

**Alec:** If our sole reason for studying was to pass the bar, as opposed to amassing actual useable legal knowledge —

**Craig:** Not interested in that.

**Alec:** [laughs] That’s applicable in some real world.

**Craig:** I already feel like I’m more of a lawyer than you are because of the way I’m approaching it —

**Alec:** Yeah. No, you’ve already — you adjudicated this entire thing.

**Craig:** Your scruples [laughs] —

**Alec:** Masterfully. Yeah. No. See, again, this is the problem, I’m out of that business also before I even got in.

**Craig:** I need a new partner. You and I become lawyers and then — and sort of, like, lawyers-managers-agents. We become like some sort of weird new thing. We take on all of our friends, we stop writing, and we just advise them on how to go through their careers. We probably would end up making more money. Now, we’re taking 10% of 20 or 30 A-list writers.

**Alec:** Yeah. And I don’t know that I would end up being more happy doing that, but I’ll bet you I would be less sad.

**Craig:** Well, and then there’s that. Let’s talk about that. Why —

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So Alec, this is what I think a lot of people will never understand. So you and your occasional partners, and for many years you were really tied at the hip with Jeff Schaffer and David Mandel.

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** So Berg, Schaffer, Mandel. Even when I started working, I remember people were like, well, there’s Berg, Schaffer, Mandel. That’s like a thing. They’re like a big comedy corporation. And you guys did everything — Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, a ton of movies. You wrote and directed EuroTrip and then there was a lot of movies that you worked on that you didn’t get credit for —

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But a ton of work there. Everything seems to be going great and yet, sad. And I talk about this all the time. And I think in a weird way, people, when they hear me say that I’m sad a lot, they I go, “Yeah, you should be.” [laughs] But I think people would be surprised to hear that you get glum about things. What is going on?

**Alec:** I’ve made peace of it. It’s the creative process. That’s just what it is. I think in any creative endeavor, I feel like if you’re not unhappy with where your product is, whatever it is, you’re not going to strive to do better. Like as soon as — I think complacency is just absolutely anathema to doing good work. Especially in comedy which — I mean, you know, this is a sidebar, but like comedy really is binary, right? Like it’s either funny or it’s not. It’s not like, “We’re going to get it to a certain level and then we’ll just make it a little funnier and a little funnier.” Like certain things are like, “That’s funny,” or, “That’s not funny.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Right? So if it’s not working, it’s just white hot death. I think as soon as you start to feel smug or complacent or satisfied, you know, unfortunately, you stop trying desperately to make everything better. And I feel like everything I do creatively, I always approach from the standpoint of, “This is terrible. This is going to get out into the world, and people are going to laugh at me in a bad way.” Not like a “Ha-ha, this is hilarious” way, like in a “This is what passes for professional work? This is a joke. That guy stinks. He’s terrible. We’ve discovered his dirty secret. He’s talentless.”

**Craig:** Right. There’s a lot of that going around.

**Alec:** And that is the way I approach everything. And it’s like — it makes it difficult because even, you know, when I get an occasional Emmy nomination, for about 10 seconds, that’s awesome, and then it becomes, “Oh, my God. The fall is going to be even more precipitous and more ugly, and people are going to watch —

**Craig:** What do I do now?

**Alec:** The crap that I turned out next and go, ‘Somebody got nominated for an Emmy for this?'”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** But ultimately, as awful as all that sounds, I’ve sort of made peace with it because it’s good for the work. It just is. It’s a professional hazard but it makes the work better because I don’t stop.

**Craig:** But do you think it’s possible to be happy and still also be committed to — for instance, Jerry Seinfeld, you worked with him for many years.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He strikes me as the guy that isn’t torturing himself. Am I wildly off-base there?

**Alec:** I think he is very hard on himself, but no. He definitely has figured out a way, I think, to feel positive and good about the good work that he’s doing and —

**Craig:** In a healthy way.

**Alec:** The pleasure he derives from his work seems not to have led him to a place of complacency and mediocrity.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** But there’s a reason that you’re citing him as an example because he stands out.

**Craig:** Exception to the rule.

**Alec:** Right? Like, “Oh, there is somebody who can do that and he’s that guy.” Like the vast majority of people are, you know, when Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld worked together on Seinfeld, Jerry was always the positive one who’s like, “If we set our minds to this, we will do it and we will crush it and we will be great.”

**Craig:** And Larry —

**Alec:** And Larry’s whole thing is, “No, we can’t do this. This will never work.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**Alec:** “Let’s not even try, because what’s the point?”

**Craig:** And that was a pretty great combination.

**Alec:** And the yin and yang of that was really exceptional.

**Craig:** And that’s an interesting thing for you to bring up because for many years you did have this very — it was a unique partnership. You don’t see a three-man team or a three-person team almost ever.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In writing, at least. It’s every now and then, but you guys really are the only one of note that I can think of.

**Alec:** Well, Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, those three guys were — there’s a slightly different division of labor there.

**Alec:** Yeah you’ve worked with those —

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean —

**Alec:** So you tell me.

**Craig:** Because in a weird way, there was almost four of them because Pat Proft was usually in the mix as well. One of them, often David, was directing more, you know. But you guys were like a traditional, like the three of you would write a script.

**Alec:** Yeah. And the three of us would direct when we directed. I mean, it really was — yeah, that is a —

**Craig:** Correct. It was extremely —

**Alec:** That is the interesting thing about that partnership because I do see a lot of partnerships where like one guy is the this guy and the other one is the that guy. All three of us did everything.

**Craig:** Right. All three of you did everything in a kind of an equal way. But now, you have sort of said, “Okay, just as Schaffer is off doing The League and Mandel is currently now running Veep.”

**Alec:** He just started running Veep, yes.

**Craig:** Right. And you are running Silicon Valley, and have been running it as the writer from the start.

**Alec:** Yes. I came on after the pilot.

**Craig:** Oh, came on after the pilot.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, after everybody else had done the hardest part of it.

**Alec:** That’s right.

**Craig:** And cleared away all the possible mines that you certainly would have stepped on.

**Alec:** Yeah. No. I showed up for dessert.

**Craig:** You showed up after they loosened it and then just went wee, wee, wee, and out came gold.

**Alec:** That seems fair.

**Craig:** Right. So congrats.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Good.

**Alec:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Nice job. But that’s an interesting thing that you have wandered away from what I would imagine would be this comforting nest where you knew, okay, maybe, and each of you might have had this thought at some point. Maybe on our own, we’re only a third of a great person but together we’re one great person?

**Alec:** I think part of us thought that way. I don’t think we ever had one discussion about, like, how do we work and what is our — like, we just did the work. There wasn’t a lot of, like, you know, talk about process and who does what and who’s better at what and why and how can we, you know, make this process more efficient or hone it in any way. Like there was no —

**Craig:** The other two guys just agreed that you were the best of them.

**Alec:** Well, I always used to joke that Jeff and Dave argued and disagreed about almost everything. So functionally, I got to make every decision because that’s the way — it was majority rules.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**Alec:** And that part of it —

**Craig:** You would just wait

**Alec:** Yes. So in a funny way, it was really like it was — they were helping me make decisions but really —

**Craig:** They should have just even stopped trying to make decisions.

**Alec:** Yeah. Which is not entirely true. I mean —

**Craig:** It’s entirely true.

**Alec:** All right.

**Craig:** It’s entirely true.

**Alec:** No. I mean, we just didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing how it worked. We just did it. And actually, I would say it’s funny. Like there are a lot of writing teams, particularly in comedy, of two people. And you’re right, not that many three-person teams. What’s weird is a three-person team actually makes it much easier. Because with two people you get into these deadlocks —

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Where it’s like, “I think it should be black,” “I think it should be white.” And you fight about it. You fight about it, and all sorts of teams have all sorts of different ways of breaking the ties. Some alternate, some flip a coin.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** With three people —

**Craig:** There is no question.

**Alec:** If two people really have an argument, they argue it out and the third person is almost literally watching it like a tennis match. Just listening to the argument meaning that in the end, well, a lot of times, me, but —

**Craig:** I could totally see it.

**Alec:** But really — but here’s — this was also the —

**Craig:** Here’s what’s going on. You have one Swedish guy, you, watching two Jews beating each other up, just waiting.

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Just waiting for them to tire each other out with words.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you come in and in your flat affect way, just say, “We will do the following.”

**Alec:** Yeah. But what was interesting is, you know, I got outvoted a lot. And what was interesting about that is there just was a level of trust. Like, those guys are both really talented, skilled guys.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And you just get to a point where you go, “I think they are absolutely wrong. I don’t see what they’re agreeing about here. They’re just flat wrong.” But if both of those guys see something in going this other route —

**Craig:** There might be something —

**Alec:** There must be something.

**Craig:** There must be something.

**Alec:** There must be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** Like we just got to that level of trust where it’s like, “I think you’re wrong — ”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** “But I also believe that because of past experience, if both of you see it, you’re right.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I always felt — when I was writing with Todd Philips and he would say, “No, no, no. This should be this way,” and I would think, “I don’t like that. I don’t think that’s true. But I know that if you see it, then you will at least know how to make it good.”

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when I say good, I mean, I may never love that one thing but I’ll know that it will work.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because in your mind, if you say to me, “I know how to make this work,” I trust you, you know how to make it work. I would imagine that it was probably that way with those two guys.

**Alec:** Absolutely. No, 100%. That even the things that I was most like adamantly opposed to, in the end I would always come around to and I’d go, “Oh, okay. Now, I get it.”

**Craig:** All right. So the brief journey here, you graduated from Harvard, which is a second tier school, you end up in Los Angeles.

**Alec:** Yeah. It’s the Princeton of Cambridge.

**Craig:** [laughs] It is the Princeton. It’s the Princeton of — I don’t even think — I think it’s actually the Cornell of Cambridge, but fine.

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** So you end up out here back home, essentially.

**Alec:** Yes, yeah.

**Craig:** Where you’re from.

**Alec:** Well, my folks moved to Boston after I graduated from high school. So I finally —

**Craig:** To be near you?

**Alec:** No, my dad is a college professor, my mom is college professor. They got work on the East Coast.

**Craig:** Idiots.

**Alec:** Yeah, they went that way.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Alec:** So I finally, after graduating college, moved really away from them for the first time.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was going to say. Like you thought you were getting away from them?

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then when was that? Like freshman year? Surprise.

**Alec:** Yeah. Well, no. What was really funny is — no, they moved the summer before my freshman year.

**Craig:** Oh, my. You never even had a day?

**Alec:** So we sort of went to college together.

**Craig:** Oh.

**Alec:** But what was funny is, my brother went — my brother’s in college in Connecticut, he ended up seeing and talking to my parents much more than I did even though they were ten blocks away. Because psychologically I’m like, “I don’t have to call them, they’re right there.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** “I don’t have to go see them, they’re right there.” And so I would go months —

**Craig:** The distance —

**Alec:** Without talking to them or seeing them.

**Craig:** I’m really rethinking my strategy of moving halfway across the country, entirely across the country with my parents. I should be next door.

**Alec:** Yeah. No, I was — I didn’t have to call them, they’re right there.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**Alec:** Why? What do I need to call them for?

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**Alec:** I could shout to them.

**Craig:** And so I won’t.

**Alec:** Yeah, so —

**Craig:** So, you came out here —

**Alec:** Yeah, I graduated. I spent about six months living at home, writing specs because I had a friend who was a couple years older who had moved out to L.A. and had worked in an agency.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Alec:** Chris Moore.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, Chris.

**Alec:** Who ended up producing the American Pie movies. And he worked at a little agency called InterTalent. And he basically said, “Look, I just got promoted. I have my own desk. I’m an agent now and I don’t really have a lot of clients. I can sort of represent you, but you’ve got to move to L.A.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And he said, “When you get here, you need writing samples.” So I spent six months writing.

Jeff Schaffer graduated the same year I did. He basically lived in Cambridge for six months. And we didn’t work together-together, but everything I wrote, he read. Everything he wrote, I read. We would trade things back and forth. Yeah. We were, you know, we helped each other.

**Craig:** And somewhere out there was Mandel.

**Alec:** Mandel was a year younger.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Alec:** So we had worked with him on a bunch of Lampoon stuff but he was still in college when we were out. So Jeff and I moved — packed up his Toyota Camry and we moved to L.A. And our intention initially was to work.

**Craig:** He had a Camry?

**Alec:** He did.

**Craig:** Rich kid.

**Alec:** Yeah. Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Rich kid. I had a Corolla.

**Alec:** It was something.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** With the leather and the —

**Craig:** Leather?

**Alec:** Yeah. Oh, it had a CD player in it.

**Craig:** Chic.

Alex: Ooh, yeah, no, it was fancy.

**Craig:** God. CD player?

**Alec:** Yeah. I actually ended up crashing his car at one point.

**Craig:** Nice.

**Alec:** So I took him down a peg.

**Craig:** Nice.

**Alec:** So we moved to L.A. and we sat down with Chris Moore. And Chris Moore at that point was trying to get more into features. He represented a young Zak Penn and Adam Leff actually who had just sold the Last Action Hero.

**Craig:** I always put Leff first just to piss Zak off.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Leff and Penn. That team was —

**Alec:** And Zak is —

**Craig:** It was Adam Leff, and Adam Leff’s partner.

**Alec:** Yeah, that’s right. And a slight annex of Adam Leff.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Alec:** So we moved out. Chris was going to represent us. He became a feature agent, so he put us in a room with two kind of fledgling TV agents, one of whom we ended up working with. The other of whom was a young kid named Ari Emanuel.

**Craig:** That kid’s name was Ari Emanuel.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And was it Ari Emanuel or just a different Israeli?

**Alec:** Who can tell, really? I’m Swedish, I can’t tell the difference.

**Craig:** Alec Berg, anti-Semite. I got my news story.

**Alec:** Edit this out.

**Craig:** No, editing it in.

**Alec:** The thing that happened immediately was these agents all said, “Look, you guys have the same background, you like the same shows, you want to work in the same places, you have very similar samples, you’ve worked together for several years in the Lampoon — ”

**Craig:** Right. Formalize it.

**Alec:** “Be a team.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** “We’re going to send you out against each other or we can send you out with each other,” and people feel like rightfully so they’re getting more for their money when they hire a team because you really are getting two — especially in a comedy room they’re —

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re getting more.

**Alec:** You’ve got two brains instead of one.

**Craig:** Let’s take a side trip and talk for a second to the — because, you know, we have a lot of people who listen to the show that are aspiring writers, many of whom have partners. How do you get screwed when you’re a — I mean, you guys got particularly screwed as a three-man team but what are the ways that writing teams get screwed?

**Alec:** Well, I mean, you know, there’s a big thing going on with the Writers Guild about paper teams, right? Where like TV shows will basically say, “I want to hire you and I want to hire you. You don’t work together, but if you become a team, I can hire both of you for one salary and you guys can both work at the show.” And people who aren’t actually teams —

**Craig:** Yes, they’re getting their salaries halved — they’re getting their residuals halved.

**Alec:** Team up and basically each take half.

**Craig:** Right. There’s also — for you guys, there’s — you know, we get money — when we get paid there’s a percentage on top of that that the studios kick in for our healthcare and our pension. And they don’t really double it exactly or like they don’t double the cap for teams. And tripling God only knows what it is.

**Alec:** You know far more about —

**Craig:** What I’m trying to tell you that you’ve been really damaged over the years.

**Alec:** Yeah, no, just —

**Craig:** Deeply damaged by this.

**Alec:** I was aware of that, I just don’t know the extent to which I’ve been damaged.

**Craig:** Let me take out a spreadsheet and then just take a look at these numbers.

**Alec:** I feel like knowing the extent to which I’ve been damaged is going to damage me that much further.

**Craig:** Yes. So as I said, at the end of the show, you’ll kill yourself. [laughs] I’m working towards the gunshot.

**Alec:** Yeah. You’re just going to show me a printout of my career stats and I’ll off myself.

**Craig:** Here’s your pension information. Here are some texts that I’ve had with your wife. Here’s — okay.

**Alec:** [laughs].

**Craig:** But now —

**Alec:** File all of these under “mistakes made.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly. This is the conception of this thing that eventually turns into this amazing career in television. And I want to talk about this — what I think of as — because I’m catching up to Silicon Valley in a way. I’m going to, like, I’m speeding through Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, getting to Silicon Valley in part because I feel like there’s something that unites them. And I always think of a certain kind of story as very Bergian. You prefer Bergian? Bergess?

**Alec:** I prefer neither.

**Craig:** Bergish? Yes.

**Alec:** Speaking [crosstalk].

**Craig:** So Bergian, we all know what Bergian means. Crap.

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But also —

**Alec:** That’s what I’m thinking in my head. That’s Hollywood translation.

**Craig:** Yes, but also, “God, that’s Bergian.”

**Alec:** On the fly.

**Craig:** But also there is a certain kind of recursive self-referential plotting, a kind of a Rube Goldberg plotting that goes on, I see it Silicon Valley the way I would see it in Curb and Seinfeld, too, to maybe a lesser extent, but it’s there. And it’s this thing where these really funny jokes happen. And when you’re writing a comedy and there’re jokes that are connected to plot, they’re on plot, they’re on the specific character relationship that story is about. Then there are these little side jokes, they’re there for funsies. Those become important to the plot. You just don’t realize it’s happening.

**Alec:** Absolutely. No, there’s nothing better than something that plays purely as a joke that all of a sudden you realize it’s like a magic trick.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Alec:** And it’s just like —

**Craig:** This is what I think of as Bergian.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I guess my craft question is how intentional is that? I mean, do you stop and go, “I know I need something that doesn’t seem like plot and seems like pure icing to turn into cake later.”

**Alec:** That’s a great question. The answer honestly is we cheat, which is that I would say way more often than not, that little joke early that becomes plot was written after the plot was written.

**Craig:** Got it. So you’re retrofitting.

**Alec:** That’s the big difference is that you watch a show in a linear fashion.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** The show is never written in a linear fashion. And in fact, one of the great joys of Silicon Valley is because we only do 10 episodes, we can do the same trick from show to show where we’ll come up with something in show six as we’re writing it and we’ll go, “Wait a second, there was a moment in show two where we talked about a similar thing. Let’s go back — ”

**Craig:** Let’s go back and retrofit.

**Alec:** “Let’s put something in the show two script — ”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** “That sets this up.” And there are things that we do all the time in the show where, you know, there’s a conversation in the first episode of the season where somebody says, “Watch out or this will happen, you got to be careful.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And then in show nine or 10, that happens.

**Craig:** What’s the board, the — ?

**Alec:** We have a big grid on the wall in the office.

**Craig:** No. I mean, on the show itself, what’s —

**Alec:** Oh, the SWOT board?

**Craig:** The SWOT board, yeah. Like that was something that you could see like, “Okay, that was just funny. That was just a sad joke.”

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then it became like a runner. I mean, even like the condor, you know, the joke was —

**Alec:** That’s a great example.

**Craig:** It was like, “Okay, we’re making a joke about Schrodinger’s bird, Schrodinger’s egg.”

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** And then that becomes — I always think of that as a very Bergian thing, the ferrets.

**Alec:** But that’s the rewriting process, right, is that you go, “Oh, we can reference that here, we can set that up here.” And you’re basically, yeah, you’ve got a chunk of something and you’re pulling little tendrils out of it and plugging them in in other places so that eventually everything is woven in, right? I mean, that I learned from — that’s Larry David. You know, Larry and Jerry kind of invented —

**Craig:** He invented that in a way.

**Alec:** I think so. I mean, I don’t know, there’s probably somebody who did something 10 years earlier who’s listening to this going, “Damn you. It was me.” But —

**Craig:** Well, sorry, sucker.

**Alec:** Yeah. I just made a joke about somebody listening to this.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Alec:** No, but the honest answer, that’s where I learned it is the whole method of telling stories in Seinfeld is, first of all, there were no freestanding jokes in that show. And it’s what makes that show endure, I think, is when you tell somebody the plot of a Seinfeld episode, that’s the comedy, right?

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** It’s not like a traditional sitcom where it’s like, “Oh, he told somebody that he was he was going to do them a favor and then he didn’t want to do it and here of the funny jokes that happened during that.” The story of Seinfeld episodes, when you just say what happened, that’s the comedy of it.

**Craig:** Right. How far can we go without running out of gas?

**Alec:** Right, exactly. But those are the laughs, right?

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Is the comedy and the story are the same and that is something that I kind of learned to do from Larry. And we did that in Curb also, that like, what’s the story? The story is the comedy, right? Like what’s a funny idea? Oh, that’s a comedy idea? That’s what happens.

**Craig:** Right. Jerry Zucker, I think — I don’t know, David will probably say that he said it first because that’s the way they are. But he said early on they said, “Make plot points jokes, and make jokes plot points,” which is very similar. But what’s different about what you do and I’m using you as the common thread even though obviously all you ever did was just rip off Larry David.

**Alec:** I hope this analysis doesn’t screw me up because I’ve never thought about what I do or how I do it, I just do it.

**Craig:** Let me reiterate again. At the end of the show, you will kill yourself. [laughs]

What you do specifically is you make non-plot jokes plot points. There are certain kinds of jokes that never feel like they’re meant to be plot. They just seem like minor, they seem like minor things that are just there because they’re amusing. And you take those out and really — and no one ever sees that coming because we’re trained, I think, now as just consumers of so much culture and a lot of comedy, we’re trained to see setups and payoffs. We know they’re coming.

**Alec:** Yeah, well it’s like the insert shot of something, right? Like if somebody puts their phone down, there’s a tight shot of the phone. It’s like, “Oh, okay. Here it comes.”

**Craig:** That means something. Right. We are trained for setups and payoffs. You know, we know when somebody says, “There is absolutely no way I’m going in there…” Right? And you’re really good at paying off setups that we didn’t think could ever be setups for anything anyway, like why would the ferret thing ever be relevant?

**Alec:** Right.

**Craig:** You know.

**Alec:** Well, the condor is an example of like where we wanted Jared’s idea of live streaming the condor egg to be just a dumb Jared suggestion.

**Craig:** Correct. But that’s exactly right. Like, I thought the joke was Jared is just being a sweet dork the way he is and these guys are torturing him by making him think that he’s going to kill the bird by calling, which is classic those guys, right? And so that felt great to me. And it turns out, yeah, and then in an Alec Berg way — so sorry for the suicide that’s coming — you say, “That’s what we should be paying off. Not, for instance, making a huge payoff about the guy and that the other company and their competing software,” which is what I think everybody else would do.

**Alec:** Yeah. But again, the way that’s actually constructed is a lot of times in reverse, right? Where we know that we’re doing this thing at the end where there’s this guy on a cliff and that’s the live stream and that catches on. And then we sort of back into all that other stuff.

**Craig:** Great.

**Alec:** And sometimes it’s the reverse. Sometimes you have a funny joke and then later in the show you’re like, “What are we going to do here?” And then somebody goes, “Well, what if that thing becomes this?” “Oh, great.” Boom.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** But a lot of times, you back into it. You know, you go back and you go, “Oh, this should be the funny thing that we do there.”

**Craig:** Really, to me, I think what makes you special and different than a lot of writers is —

**Alec:** Aww.

**Craig:** It’s not good [laughs]. It’s just how incompetent you are —

**Alec:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** And yet you still get paid at such a high level.

**Alec:** Oh, shocking.

**Craig:** It’s that it’s what you choose. It’s when you go backwards, where do you go backwards to? And I find that that’s where you make interesting choices all the time. Because, I mean, you know, everybody, I think, plays the setup/payoff game. But where you go looking for those setups in the kind of retroactive fit ways is very clever and it’s always really funny.

**Alec:** Oh, thank you.

**Craig:** Now, so Silicon Valley, I suspect that you felt great going into the second season. You thought, “We’ve had a great first season, what could possibly go wrong in the second season?”

**Alec:** No, no. Precisely the opposite. I mean, actually in a weird way, the first season was very freeing because it was — “We’re doing this show.” “What is it?” “I don’t know. It could be this.” “What if this is the show?” “How about they — ” “Yeah, that could be the show,” “This could be the show,” “That could be the show.” And you’re just — you’re vamping. You’re just kind of like, you know, you’re really like kind of freeform —

**Craig:** Free.

**Alec:** And it’s like, “This could be the show.” And if it’s not the show, no one will see us fail because no one’s watching the show.

**Craig:** No one will see it. Exactly.

**Alec:** Right?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** So it’s very freeing in a way because it’s really like you’re just backstage doing it for yourself. And then when it got out and it sort of worked, Season 2 was like the, “Okay, now prove this wasn’t a fluke.”

**Craig:** Well, first of all, you guys suffered a ridiculous tragedy in between those seasons. I mean —

**Alec:** Well, it was in the middle of Season 1 —

**Craig:** You were in the middle of Season 1, right.

**Alec:** Chris Evan Welch who played Peter Gregory, brilliant, brilliant actor, unbelievably great guy.

**Craig:** And potentially the reason — I mean, this is the thing, that when I heard the news about that, what killed me was that — and I think we all knew by the time the show started airing, correct?

**Alec:** He died when we were shooting shows five and six of the eight initial shows.

**Craig:** But he didn’t die after the first episode aired on HBO, did he?

**Alec:** No, no. He died while we were filming.

**Craig:** While you were filming.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we all knew.

**Alec:** There were scenes that we had written for him in the last two episodes of the first season that — and toughest thing I’ve ever had to do as a writer is soon after learning of his death, it was like we got — this train is on the tracks and moving —

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** You know, the show must go on. I had to sit and delete him from these scripts —

**Craig:** Oh, my god.

**Alec:** I mean we loved him, we loved the character, we loved the scenes.

**Craig:** Right. You are part Swedish and, I don’t know, maybe you have a thousandth of the average human’s emotion.

**Alec:** Do I? I can’t find it. I defy you.

**Craig:** If I ever were on a show where the main character died in the middle and I had to do these tragic things like delete their name while I was in mourning and replace them, I would call you.

**Alec:** It was awful, it was really —

**Craig:** Yeah. Even you thought it was awful.

**Alec:** It was grim. No. I was like, I realized in that moment, I’m like, “Oh, this is what it’s like to feel.”

**Craig:** [laughs] At last.

**Alec:** Yeah. No. No wonder —

**Craig:** And then you said, “Ow.”

**Alec:** Yeah. No wonder my wife gets so down. Like if this is what it’s like, god.

**Craig:** She’s like this every day.

**Alec:** Yeah, man.

**Craig:** But he was potentially the reason to watch that show.

**Alec:** He was amazing. Amazing. He was the guy who every time you shot with him —

**Craig:** Something happened, right?

**Alec:** For the next day or two, everybody like, you know, at craft service was like mimicking his delivery and his lines and it was like —

**Craig:** It was a kind of an impossible creation because it doesn’t seem like you can do anything truly new in that space, in a performance space like that. All you can do is versions of things. I had never seen anything like that in my life.

**Alec:** He was brilliant. And what was amazing about it is it was completely farcical and insanely broad but at the same time 100% real.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** Like you believed everything he did was a real human, a very strange —

**Craig:** Very strange but internally —

**Alec:** But very particular human being.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** But everything was real. And that was his brilliance. Like there was not a phony beat to anything he did.

**Craig:** No. It was all consistent to his character. You know, when he called the hamburger buns breadings, I believed it 100%. And these breadings have sesame seeds, these breadings do not.

**Alec:** Yeah. And, you know, have you been to Burger King.

**Craig:** Yeah. Burger King.

**Alec:** Do people like it? Is it enjoyed?

**Craig:** [laughs] Is it enjoyed? And then there’s that thing he did that you made me notice. I mean, I think I would have noticed it anyway, when he has that chance encounter with —

**Alec:** Yeah. Belson, yeah.

**Craig:** With Gavin Belson and the rest —

**Alec:** I think my favorite scene to date that we’ve done on the show.

**Craig:** And instead of saying goodbye, he does like a weird hand —

**Alec:** His wave.

**Craig:** His wave.

**Alec:** It’s very strange, where he has his hand at his side and he kind of brings it up sort of across his chest and lowers it like he knows he’s supposed to wave because someone has told him that moving your hand in a certain way is a human way of communicating farewell. And he knows that he’s supposed to —

**Craig:** Incredible.

**Alec:** But it’s just a fascinating thing.

**Craig:** And the reason I also love —

**Alec:** And that was all him, by the way, like there was no like, “Hey, do a weird wave.” He just did it.

**Craig:** And we’re going to get into that question, too, in a second. But that character, what I also loved about him was I believed all of his behavior, all of his behavioral problems, but I also believed because of the way you guys portrayed him that he actually deserved every cent of his billions of dollars.

**Alec:** This is one of the things that we worked I think probably hardest on in Silicon Valley is that there’s a huge amount of protecting the characters. And we talk about that all the time. We can kick the crap out of Richard a lot —

**Craig:** But he has to be at least —

**Alec:** But you have to believe that he’s good at this because ultimately you want to root for him to succeed. And like when we first started, a lot of people, especially like tech journalists and people in the tech business were like, “Wait, is this just like — are you just like kicking the tar out of us? Like is this just a poison pen letter?”

And the answer was, no, of course not. Like, we’re going to take shots and we’re going to call out, you know, things that we see as ridiculous. But we’re not indicting the tech business because our characters are striving to succeed in that business. And if we’re saying that what they’re striving to do is nonsense, then we’re telling the audience not to root for them to succeed.

**Craig:** Not to root for them, not to care about our show.

**Alec:** Right. So ultimately, what we’re saying is there’s a right way and a wrong way to succeed in the business, you know. But we’re not saying that success in that business means that you’re a bad person or is a bad thing because then the audience is going to go, “Well, why am I rooting for somebody to get to something that I know is bad?”

**Craig:** It’s odd to me that the tech community missed the subtle cues of what you were presenting there. But nonetheless, I think you guys do a great job of that. And, you know, particularly good job with him because he did seem like if you pushed him even three or four more millimeters one way or the other that I would just stop believing that he had actually earned all that money. Whereas a guy like Gavin Belson, I think of as somebody who actually probably can’t do much but was a very aggressive businessman.

**Alec:** Of course. No, I mean look, we play with that a lot, too. Like, we can’t render Gavin as a complete buffoon because he needs to be formidable.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Right? We need a real enemy. We need a real heavy that Richard has to actually battle and those battles have to be real and hard. And if Gavin is just a buffoon —

**Craig:** Well, you look at him as this incredibly — he is like a Steve Ballmer kind of guy, like I don’t think of Steve Ballmer as a big tech head, but I think of him as a corporate bully.

**Alec:** Yeah, but oddly, most CEOs are not engineers.

**Craig:** That’s right, exactly. Gates was — Jobs really wasn’t —

**Alec:** Well, we did a joke in the pilot about that, right, where Richard sort of, you know, raises his nose at Jobs, right, because Jobs didn’t even write code, right?

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Alec:** And it is a funny like engineers versus management thing.

**Craig:** 100%.

**Alec:** It was like Jobs versus Woz. You know there is a yin and yang. Where engineers traditionally don’t make great CEOs because they’re so in their heads.

**Craig:** Exactly, and so that’s what’s interesting that that’s the story that you’ve set up now for Season 3.

**Alec:** Yes. But we have to have that conversation about protecting all of the characters. Like Gilfoyle and Dinesh giving Jared crap is something where it’s fun to watch, but we have to be very careful about making Gilfoyle and Dinesh too mean because it’s just like once they’re just slapping a baby, it’s like you hate them for that. And so it’s like you like them beating him up, but we have to be very careful about how far we go.

And it’s funny, we always talk about — Mike and I have kind of come up with this thing that we call the Price is Right school of comedy where it’s better to be significantly under the line than to be even one penny over the line.

**Craig:** One dollar over, exactly.

**Alec:** Right? Like you’d rather be $10 under than $0.01 over.

**Craig:** Well, because nobody really gives you credit for being slightly over the line. Either you are or you’re not.

**Alec:** It is damaging, and sometimes it just destroys everything. And so you’d rather miss under, under, under, under, under than ever miss over.

**Craig:** When you were evaluating this, I mean, because here’s what I think people probably — for people that are writing, they put so much pressure on themselves to get it right. When you’re writing especially this kind of comedy which is truly about generating laughs, you just acknowledge upfront you’re going to blow some things. You have to. There’s no way, you can’t hit home runs if you’re not occasionally whiffing. So there’s I assume this very painful and painstaking process in editing where it’s like, “No, that went too far.”

**Alec:** 100%. No, we do it in the writing process, we do it on the stage when we’re shooting, we pull people back, we, “Okay, go for it. Try it. And if it doesn’t work, you know, we’ll pull it back later.” And yeah, we do a tremendous amount of writing in the edit on the show where there’s a huge amount of lines on people’s backs that we do in ADR, and reconfiguring things.

And, you know, a lot of times if you’re on somebody’s close up and you want to build a pause into that, that pause is not they were pausing when they performed it, there was somebody else off-camera talking. And we take that line out so you build a pause in, like you play with rhythms and —

**Craig:** You know, when it comes to comedy, I wish that there could be some kind of program or something for up and coming comedy writers to watch comedy people edit comedy because that is where you see so much happening. The rescue missions that happen when you’re editing comedy and the tricks, the bag of tricks that are enormous, I mean, especially when you’re doing joke-based comedy and you and I both spend time doing a lot of jokes-based comedy. It’s all about the rhythm and finding, oh, my god, if I need him to just stare and then look briefly to the right, where is that? Find that.

**Alec:** Oh, the number of times like you’ll use a piece of like after you’ve cut —

**Craig:** After you’ve cut.

**Alec:** And somebody says like, “Hey can we do one more?” And the actor will kind of look up to hear who’s off-camera talking to them.

**Craig:** Gold.

**Alec:** You use that piece because it’s like we need something where he turns to his right so that we can cut to that guy and he looks like he’s looking.

**Craig:** Have you ever done one where you played it backwards?

**Alec:** We have. We did it. There was a scene in an episode in the first season where they hired a guy named The Carver and then we shot two scenes and we realized in the edit that those two scenes really should be one scene. And we glued them together. We had a shot of Kumail in the second scene standing up and leaving. And we used that shot played in reverse so that at the end of the first scene, we cut to a shot of Kumail sitting into his chair which was actually a shot of him standing up from the second scene.

**Craig:** This is the epitome —

**Alec:** And you put some footsteps in, so you hear him enter.

**Craig:** These are the tricks.

**Alec:** Right. So when you’re watching the show, you go, “Somebody’s walking into the room.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And then you caught to Kumail sitting. You go, “Oh, that was Kumail who walked in.” And then the second scene starts.

**Craig:** Kumail does act ambidextrously. I mean, the reputation that he has is like —

**Alec:** You can’t tell.

**Craig:** You can’t tell. Even when he’s walking forward, if you play him backwards, it seems natural.

**Alec:** It’s his gift. He walks forward backwards.

**Craig:** He walks forward backwards. He’s incredible.

**Alec:** He’s a talent.

**Craig:** By the way, I mean like I’ve told you many, many times, if all the show were Gilfoyle and Dinesh talking, I would watch it. I would. I know I would.

**Alec:** But see, here’s all I will say. And those guys are brilliant, super, super funny. I respect the hell out of them. But —

**Craig:** Throw them under the bus.

**Alec:** But the fact is, this is an ensemble show. And the reason that you want to watch those guys all day every day —

**Craig:** Of course. You’re right.

**Alec:** Is that they’re part of a bigger machine that works.

**Craig:** You can’t eat dessert all day. I get it.

**Alec:** Right.

**Craig:** I get it. And it’s true. And —

**Alec:** But it’s great that people think that. Like people want the Erlich show, people want the Jared show, people want the Dinesh and Gilfoyle show.

**Craig:** That means you’re doing it right.

**Alec:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s interesting. I saw an interview with those guys and they said something that made me so happy because whenever actors are being interviewed for junkets and things, somebody inevitably, in comedy always, will say, “How much of this is improv?” And the actors will always give one answer and the writers will always give another. It’s just hysterical.

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “Yes, you know, they let us kind of do, you know, obviously there’s the script and, you know, then they kind of — we find stuff in the moment.” And the writer answers always like, “Less than you think. Less than you think.”

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] “Ever here and there.” And what I find fascinating about you guys is that you guys switched. In this interview, the actors are all like, “No, the scripts are really tightly put together, so we stick to them.” But when I talk to you, you’re like, you know, you’ll say like Zach Woods is an incredible improv artist and that Kumail and —

**Alec:** They’re all super nimble and yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, and that they go on these incredible runs and that there is improv in the show. So is it just that you guys are all incredibly humble or is the answer sort of somewhere in the middle?

**Alec:** I think that we’ve just found a balance. And I’ve worked on shows where the writers are very sort of hostile about the cast and the cast are very hostile about the writers and there is a lot of like, “Oh, you want me to go out there and say this? I’m going to look like an idiot.” And that there’s this animosity and there really is this cliquishness where like the writers are mad that the actors are tanking their jokes. And the actors are mad that the writers are giving this garbage. It’s exactly the opposite on this show. I just think that it is a special show in that regard that I think the actors have tremendous respect for the writing and we all have tremendous respect for them as performers. And it’s just a good —

**Craig:** It’s a good mix.

**Alec:** It’s a good ecosystem. And I credit Mike Judge for that as well, like he’s just a super laid back guy. He was a musician and you can tell from the way he writes and the way he directs that it’s all done by ear. It’s not “I have rules and I’m going to, no, this is the way I shoot.”

**Craig:** He feels it.

**Alec:** “I have a style.” He just listens. And if it sounds right, it works. And if it doesn’t sound right, he wants to adjust.

**Craig:** And so, heading into Season 3, I assume now at last, right? So, okay, first season’s whatever.

**Alec:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Second season, very scary. I mean, what are we going to do?

**Alec:** Sure.

**Craig:** We lost a key cast member and I was so worried. But then we put together a really good season. So now you’re comfortable and happy and perfectly ready for Season 3 knowing that nothing can go wrong.

**Alec:** Of course.

**Craig:** And by the way, here’s the gun, here’s how it works.

**Alec:** Yes, right.

**Craig:** Now, answer the question. Yeah. [laughs]

**Alec:** I see what you’re doing. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, what do you think?

**Alec:** You’re [crosstalk].

**Craig:** [laughs] Are you excited?

**Alec:** Look, I feel like, like I said, there was a freedom to Season 1 that, you know, I think in the moment, I was terrified because, “What is this? We have to make a show out of this. How do we do that?” Look, this applies to everything. I feel like I wish that I could figure out a way to enjoy anything that I’m doing in the moment.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** I enjoy an enormous amount of what I do retroactively.

**Craig:** Like this for instance.

**Alec:** Right. Yes.

**Craig:** You will later look back at this.

**Alec:** Like, right now, this is awful. And at a certain point, I might look back after I realized that this led to the freedom of not having to work again where I’ll go, “Oh, that was good.”

**Craig:** This was the moment.

**Alec:** Yeah. That was pink slip moment. But, virtually, nothing that I do, like during any of it, during the writing process, during the directing, during the editing, if you said to me, “Are you having fun right now?” The answer, 100% of the time, is no.

**Craig:** Is no. So, you’re looking forward to more of that?

**Alec:** “But did you enjoy doing that?” I did. Tremendously. “Did you enjoy that thing?” I enjoyed having done things.

**Craig:** In the past. Right.

**Alec:** Yes, of course.

**Craig:** So, you appreciate the past.

**Alec:** Right.

**Craig:** The present is misery.

**Alec:** I wish I were better because there have been an enormous amount of things that I’ve done that I look back at and I go, “That was awesome that I got to do that. That was an amazing thing that I was allowed to do.”

**Craig:** “But while I was doing it, I hated it.”

**Alec:** “I wish, in the moment, I had been able to relax and have more fun doing it.”

**Craig:** I mean, let’s —

**Alec:** I can’t. I can’t.

**Craig:** Let’s end with this.

**Alec:** Pow!

**Craig:** [laughs] That was Alec Berg in his last interview.

**Alec:** Beep.

**Craig:** [laughs] Reporting live from the Sonoma County Coroner’s Office. Do you think it’s possible, when you say you can’t, if you at least intellectually acknowledge that you’ve worried in all of the moments, some of the results have been good and some have been bad.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Therefore, we can take that variable out. The worrying isn’t what makes the work good. Can you at least then say, “Well, why don’t I just stop worrying since it’s having no effect?”

**Alec:** But, see, I feel like you’ve made a spurious leap of logic there.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Alec:** Which is I believe, unfortunately, that the worrying is what makes the work good. That being so terrified of caulking it up —

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Is what makes me reexamine and reexamine and shred and tear apart and rebuild and —

**Craig:** Okay. But let me —

**Alec:** And if I’m ever enjoying this machine that I’m building in the moment and going, “This works great,” then I’m not scrutinizing it to the point where I’m going to make it work as well as it can.

**Craig:** But I think you’re confounding joy with satisfaction. In other words, you can enjoy the process while saying, “Well, it’s not good enough but it will get better.”

**Alec:** Except that I believe that my motivation to really push and work hard —

**Craig:** Is dread.

**Alec:** I’m not a person who runs to something. I’m not running to quality. I’m running from failure.

**Craig:** Okay, running away. Well, it’s Woody Allen’s thing, you know, that his big goal when they asked him, “What are you always trying to achieve when you make a movie?” And he said, “To not embarrass myself.”

**Alec:** Yeah. And that’s it. That is the sole drive. And I know you would think having done this the way I’ve done it and having worked on the things I’ve worked on, that worked the way a lot of them worked, that at a certain point I would go, “At this point, having done this 20 plus years, I kind of know what I’m doing.” I don’t feel like that at all. I feel like I know less now about how to do it than I did when I started. What I know is I think I have a better idea of what doesn’t work.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** So, I can look at something that 20 years ago I might have looked at something and I might have said, “Yeah, I think that’s pretty good.” Now, I’ll look at it and go, “This doesn’t work, and here are 50 reasons why. That’s no good. This is no good. That guy shouldn’t be this way, that guy shouldn’t be this way, she shouldn’t be talking like that.”

**Craig:** Suddenly, the channel for success becomes incredibly narrow.

**Alec:** Yes. But I don’t know any better now how to make things work.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** I just am much better at identifying flaws.

**Craig:** You just see all the mines in the field.

**Alec:** Right.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** So, it gets harder and harder as I do it. Not easier and easier.

**Craig:** Well, there is one way out, Alec.

**Alec:** Yeah. No, I think we’ve come to that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Here, let me show you how this works. [laughs] And take that. No, no, don’t touch that yet.

**Alec:** What’s this X here?

**Craig:** That, you want to push that down.

**Alec:** Orange dot. What do I do with that?

**Craig:** The orange dot you want to be looking at directly or taste it.

**Alec:** Oh, that’s right.

**Craig:** Well, Alec, a tremendously insightful conversation. I, like you, am soaking in misery all the time. I share this with our listeners constantly.

**Alec:** Yes. But that’s the job.

**Craig:** It’s kind of the gig. It’s part of what we do. I try as best I can now to find little bits of joy.

**Alec:** Yes. It’s funny, we always used to have this running joke that there’s not a funny comedian on earth with washboard abs. And the reason is, once you take the time to focus on yourself and take yourself seriously enough to sculpt your body like that —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** You’re taking yourself seriously.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Alec:** And you’re not kicking the tar out of yourself and you’re not going to be as funny as you can be. And I sort of have just embraced that.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Alec:** At a certain point, I’m sorry for all the misery that I caused my wife and every time I come home and I say, “This show is not good. You don’t understand,” I know I said it wasn’t good before, this time —

**Craig:** That you’ve been saying this to me, I mean, like, you were really worried about this season.

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** Really worried.

**Alec:** Desperately worried. I was convinced that it was a colossal — like we had just driven it right into a cliff.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** I swear to you, it’s not a —

**Craig:** It’s not false —

**Alec:** I need approbation, somebody telling me how good I am. It’s really not. I was genuinely 100% convinced that Season 2 was a disaster.

**Craig:** When you said that to me, it wasn’t like I thought to myself, “Oh, no, no. There’s something I can tell him that will make him feel good.” I thought, “He’s giving me something as he sees it as a fact.”

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** I’m not going to tell him that his, you know, dead cat is really alive by shaking it in the air.

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** And I understood, by the way, exactly where you were coming from. Exactly. Because it’s a very hard thing to do. I mean, it’s essentially a sequel. Every season is a sequel. And you’re always on the horns of, “I want to be different but I don’t want to be so different that it’s — ”

**Alec:** Both.

**Craig:** We have to kind of the same, we have —

**Alec:** It’s like releasing albums. I think like every band, you know, like, there are AC/DCs who just make the same album over and over and over again. And they’re great.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Right?

**Craig:** And that’s what their fans want.

**Alec:** Right. There’s Madonnas who, like, “Oh, now, she’s this woman. And now, she’s the Marilyn Monroe lookalike, and now she’s Vogueing,” and there are people who can reinvent themselves and each version is good.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Right? And then there are bands that, you know, they do an album or two and then they put something out and you go, well, I don’t want this. It’s over.”

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s over. You’re done. Here’s your gun, go ahead.

**Alec:** Yeah. Yeah, they are the one-hit wonders.

**Craig:** No, I got actually why you were so upset or concerned, really.

**Alec:** Yeah. Terrified.

**Craig:** But what I know about your show is that the characters are so strong. And I think that no matter what you do plot-wise — because here’s the truth, if you were to say to me, “Figure out the Season 3 plot line,” I think I could sit and come up with a plot line, sure. Would I care about it? I wouldn’t care about the plot line as much as I would care about the characters as they moved through it. To me, that’s the heart of television. The true heart of television is the characters.

**Alec:** Everything is so interdependent that I’d think you care about the characters because the characters care about executing certain things. And that’s the plot.

**Craig:** Yes. But I will tell you as just — this is my experience of the show. I was not worried that they were going to lose their company. And here’s why. Either they were going to lose their company and then I was excited to see what those characters would do, or they were going to get their company and I was excited to see what those characters would do. The dilemma and the building the case — by the way, the lawyer, I mean, just an amazing performance. It was a great, great performance.

**Alec:** Oh, Matt McCoy?

**Craig:** Matt McCoy.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just crushed it.

**Alec:** Unbelievable.

**Craig:** That’s another great lesson, by the way, is those little characters have to be like your best characters you know. Just your best characters in their own quiet way.

**Alec:** Yeah. And he was so freakishly good. So great.

**Craig:** So good, so good. Anyway, I wasn’t worried. I’m not worried for Season 3 either, although you probably will fail this time.

**Alec:** Oh, we just started writing a couple of weeks ago and I’m already — I just go, “That’s it. It’s over.”

**Craig:** Actually, this time I believe you.

**Alec:** We had a good run.

**Craig:** Yeah — not even — two seasons is not a good run. [laughs]

**Alec:** Eighteen episodes, that’s a lot.

**Craig:** In Britain. [laughs] I mean, come on, man.

**Alec:** We had a good run.

**Craig:** No, this is going to be one of those like, “What happened?”

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Did you ever watch Silicon Valley?” “No. Should I?” “Well, only the first two seasons. Only the first two seasons. Don’t go after that.”

**Alec:** By the way, you’re channeling — this is my internal monologue.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wonder how I know what that sounds like.

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Ladies and gentlemen, Alec Berg. Thank you very much for joining us.

**Alec:** Thank you for having me. This was fun.

**Craig:** And we’ll do it again. We’ll get you on live with John.

**Alec:** Would love to, yeah.

**Craig:** So you can face his withering questions.

**Alec:** Bring it on.

**Craig:** All right, that was Alec Berg and now back to the regular show.

**John:** So, Craig, that was your interview with Alec Berg which I did not hear a bit of, but I assume that you got all the answers out of him, that he’s not bleeding too hard, that there are not any marks that cannot be healed with time or with plastic surgery.

**Craig:** Not only that, but I fully expect a Pulitzer for — I mean, truly one of the great coops of journalism right there.

**John:** It was basically Frost/Nixon but in a podcast form.

**Craig:** It was. It was Frost/Nixon except important.

**John:** Yes. [laughs] Let’s talk about our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing this week is a video that was sent around because the subway, the purple line of the Los Angeles subway is being constructed very, very close to my house. I will be near one of the new subway stops. And so they sent through all this information about the street closures and everything else they have to do to make this subway happen. It’ll be open in like in 2020, so it’s quite a ways off.

The coolest thing they sent was this video that describes and shows how the subway boring machine works, how they actually create the tunnels. And it is so different than you would think. I had a hard time believing that such a robot existed. It felt like something of Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, that we’re actually able to build this thing that can bore and also take all the ore and transport it back.

It was so amazing that I immediately want to set a movie inside a subway digging construction. So it’s a 15-minute video I’m going to send you from a German subway boring tunnel machine. And I think you will find it fascinating.

**Craig:** That is such a boring machine. You know who drives the boring machine? Arkham Knight. Are you playing Arkham Knight?

**John:** I’m not playing Arkham Knight. Is Arkham Knight great?

**Craig:** It’s the greatest and the Arkham Knight who is not Batman. That’s the whole question is, who is the Arkham Knight? I know. He drives a boring machine at one point.

**John:** I think that’s great. You know, the villain at the very end of the Incredibles is the Underminer. Perhaps he is the boring knight.

**Craig:** He is the boring knight.

**John:** Arkham Knight, is it a open sandbox or is it a strict sort of campaign storyline?

**Craig:** Yeah, if you’ve played the other Arkham games, it’s essentially the same thing. You’re in a general sandbox area but your missions are on rails. It’s Arkham. It’s very, very good. It’s very, very good. But that’s not my One Cool Thing this week.

My One Cool Thing this week is “Rex Parker Does the New York Times Crossword Puzzle”. And when I say One Cool Thing, I mean one kind of cool thing because the truth is, Rex is not cool at all. [laughs] He’s not cool. Rex Parker is a man named Michael Sharp. He is a professor I think at — I want to say SUNY Binghamton. I’m guessing on that one, I think.

But what’s interesting about Rex is that he runs a blog, “Rex Parker Does the New York Times Crossword Puzzle”. He does the New York Times Crossword Puzzle every single day. And then he puts the solution on his blog and then analyzes and critiques the puzzle.

And what’s fascinating is, because I do the puzzle every day, and it’s like, if there were no film critics in the world, if nobody reviewed movies at all, that wasn’t even a thing, except for one guy, one guy did it, that’s kind of what this is like. He’s the only crossword critic I think that exists.

And amazingly, even though he’s the only one, he is incredibly typical for critics. He’s just cranky as hell. He hates most of the puzzles that he does, so of course you’re left thinking, “Why do you do them every day?”

He hates about 90% of them. That’s just my unscientific tally from reading his reviews each day. He particularly hates bad fill. Fill is what they call in crosswords — you have your longer theme answers and then Fill are the shorter answers. So, you know, a lot of bad crossword words that people learn, he’s not a big fan of those.

But I do check him out every day after I do the puzzle and it makes me understand how people use movie reviews I think because the way I use his stuff is, I complete the puzzle and then I go over to Rex to see if I’m either angry at him because he’s wrong, or happy with him because he’s right. Either way, I get validation. I get the validation of anger at him because he’s stupid or pleasure with him because he’s smart. It has nothing to do with him. It has everything to do with me. And as it turns out, I agree with him about 50% of the time.

But if you are interested in getting started on the New York Times Crossword Puzzle, you could do worst. At least at his site, you can get the answers pretty quickly and you can see how he constructs his solutions. And to be fair to Michael Sharp who is cranky, cranky, cranky, he’s a very good solver. His solve times are fairly extraordinary. Well, as he says on his website, he is the 9th greatest crossword solver in the universe based on the 2015 Indie 500 Crossword Tournament.

**John:** He sounds like an amazing character, so even though I could not care less about crossword puzzles, I will check out his site just because that persona you’re describing sounds amazing.

**Craig:** It’s kind of great.

**John:** What do you think is his day job?

**Craig:** I know in the day he’s a professor, so I think that his deal is he is — I want to say a professor of English, possibly? Yeah, at SUNY Binghamton, I believe. So he’s an academic.

**John:** Cool. Very nice. I have one last plug. So every Friday this summer, we are going to be putting up some brand new scripts in Weekend Read. Weekend Read is the app that I make for iOS, for iPad and for iPhone.

And so the scripts are only up for the weekend. It’s truly only a weekend read. So if you’re listening to this on Tuesday, there are no scripts up there for you to read because they were only available from Friday until Sunday night. So you just missed out on Josh Freedman’s original script pilot for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, you missed out on Lorene Scafaria’s Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, and a highly recommend Black List script.

So, every Friday, check out Weekend Read because there will be brand new stuff up there all summer long.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel who’s also on vacation on the West Coast. Matthew Chilelli edited our show and did the amazing outro of this week. Our thanks to Alec Berg, our wonderful guest. I hope his wounds heal. Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes 200 Episode USB drives are available now!](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Tess Gerritsen on why she is giving up the Gravity lawsuit](http://www.tessgerritsen.com/gravity-lawsuit-why-i-am-giving-up/)
* Alec Berg on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Berg), [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0073688/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/realalecberg)
* [The Harvard Lampoon](http://harvardlampoon.com/), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harvard_Lampoon)
* [Jeff Schaffer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Schaffer) and [David Mandel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mandel) on Wikipedia
* Silicon Valley on [HBO.com](http://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series))
* [Christopher Evan Welch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Evan_Welch)
* [Crenshaw/LAX Tunnel Boring Machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLbkiTnRw5qna2lET4HkTFbIQ8EXEAoZhT&v=iN_bnsFrGBA)
* [Batman: Arkham Knight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_Arkham_Knight)
* [Rex Parker Does The NY Times Crossword Puzzle](http://rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com/)
* [Check out Featured Fridays](http://johnaugust.com/2015/weekend-read-featured-fridays) on [Weekend Read](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weekend-read/id502725173?mt=8)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/no-one-makes-those-movies-anymore).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 204 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, as you know, I’m watching these two dogs for this summer and really enjoying it. I’m enjoying my life as a dog sitter. But as I was putting them to bed last night, I had a sudden flash of this one dog, who’s 12 years old. She’s, you know, she’s the Maggie Smith of these two dogs. She’s older, the dame —

**Craig:** The dame. The Dame Maggie Smith of dogs.

**John:** And so, while I want her to live another 20 years, that is just not just likely, and so she is at the — nearing twilight of her life. And I suddenly had this horrifying thought, like, what if people only lived as long as dogs? And whether society could even exist if humans did not live as long as they live?

**Craig:** I think so. It would look very different.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** There would be so much more sex.

**John:** Oh, yeah, it would have to be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, except you would have sex with teenagers though.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s all weird.

**Craig:** Oh, oh, is that…

**John:** I guess, what I’m postulating is, what if humans developed as quickly as dogs do so they could actually, like, you know, that a four-year-old could do something useful and productive. But would you actually have society if people only live such a short period of time?

**Craig:** I think so. I think so — I mean, look, we’re the weird ones in the animal kingdom, you know. I mean, most four-year-old animals are perfectly capable of doing everything that animals must do. We’re born stupid because we have to be born too early because of our huge heads.

**John:** That said, you know, we are the weird ones, but we’re also the only ones who developed speech and culture and the ability to build cities and roads and do all sorts of other things. So I wonder if the other postulate would be, if we could live twice as long or three times as long, would society be vastly different?

**Craig:** It would be crankier, the driving would go downhill, just the overall quality of driving. I wouldn’t go anywhere near a farmer’s market, I’ll tell you that much.

**John:** Yeah, there would be so many slow shuffles

**Craig:** Oh, God. Just, you know, it would get — I think we’re in a decent spot now. They keep telling us that sooner or later, they’ll be able to take our brains and put them in a computer and we’ll live forever. Here’s my question for you, John. This is what keeps me up at night.

**John:** All right. I want to hear.

**Craig:** All right. So the brain is a big network of neurons, and though we can’t do it now, it’s — at least, let’s stipulate that one day it will be possible to take a scan of your brain, see every neuron, analyze every connection and then replicate it technologically.

**John:** I would agree.

**Craig:** Okay, fine. Stipulating that, what happens when I take you, copy your brain, put it in the computer and then I turn it on while you’re still alive.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s two of you now.

**John:** Well, you’ve made the world significantly better.

**Craig:** But here’s my question, which one is you? Is the computer you? Are you you? You don’t see through the computer’s eyes at the same time, so there’s two you. So, if I kill you — you, you, you’re dead. But then this other you is alive, so are you still alive?

**John:** Oh, no. You certainly committed a murder because you killed a human being. I think the other interesting question is, if you turned off that computer, did you — is that the same kind of murder as murdering a living, breathing human being?

**Craig:** But even putting aside murder, you don’t really live forever in that circumstance. What happens is your clone lives forever. But you, you, with the experience that you have, you’re going to die.

**John:** Yeah. You know, you’re fundamentally asking the question of, is a person the body and the organs and the everything else, or is the person the processes — is the person the hardware or the software? And that is a question that has been wrestled with by philosophers even before there was a real distinction between hardware and software.

**Craig:** Well, especially because the brain is both. You know, the brain is hardware-software. So I wonder about that. To me, really, what I’m hoping for here is that they figure out a way to take my brain and keep my brain alive forever because that’s me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So then I’m good. I’m covered.

**John:** All right. In the first two minutes of this podcast, we’ve outlaid a number of premises for a sci-fi movies that Hollywood won’t make. But we can talk through the day’s work ahead of us, which is, the question is, is Hollywood making too many movies overall? What does Apple music mean for screenwriters? And we will also take a quick run-through a screenwriter’s job from pitch to premier. Those are big topics for today’s show.

But before we get to it, we have exciting news. So way back in Episode — I don’t know — 201, we asked our listeners whether — if we had a USB drive that had all of the episodes of Scriptnotes, all 200 episodes, plus the bonus episodes, would they want to buy such a mythical USB drive? And people said in a loud chorus, yes. So we are making those USB drives and we will be shipping them starting next week.

So if people would like to buy a USB drive with all the episodes of Scriptnotes and all the Three Page Challenges and all the other supplementary things, The Dirty Show with Rebel Wilson and Dan Savage, they can do so now. So it’s at store.johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** And would you say that’s like a $70,000 value?

**John:** It is — probably, you know, as we’ve gone through the ways that people could spend their money on screenwriting, I think it’s a pretty good bargain at $20.

**Craig:** I think it’s a great bargain at $20, yes.

**John:** But, Craig — I mean, do you want to offer any incentive to our long-time listeners? Is there anything we’d want to make sure that the people who actually listened to the show, who listened through our two minutes of philosophical ponderings about death and immortality —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Should we cut them a break? Should we give them a discount?

**Craig:** I hate discounts, but yes.

**John:** All right. So you can pick whatever words you would like and that can be the word that they can type in for a discount because we haven’t set this yet, so it’s your — it’s up to you, Craig.

**Craig:** I’m going to go with “singularity.”

**John:** Wow, that’s a challenging word but I like it. “Singularity”. So at checkout, if you type in the word “singularity” in a special little promo code box field, you can save 10%, so —

**Craig:** That’s $2. Totally worth it.

**John:** Totally worth it. That basically covers your shipping. So shipping in the US is like $2.79.

**Craig:** “Singularity” has saved you money.

**John:** Singularity has saved your money. Yes, so they’re brand new. If you bought the 100 episode one way back when, you’ll recognize it’s a similar kind of thing. So this one is white, it has our signatures on it, so, yeah.

**Craig:** Have we discontinued the confederate flag USB drive?

**John:** You know what? It was a controversial choice and it was really a lot of hemming and hawing, but no, we’re no longer selling the confederate flag USB drive that we never sold.

**Craig:** I’m disgusted. We’ve bowed to pressure, outside pressure. We had a tradition, sir. [laughs]

**John:** Yes, we had a tradition of not doing something and we’re going to continue not doing something.

**Craig:** Confederate flag, come on.

**John:** Oh, it’s madness

**Craig:** I know. That’s on our other podcast.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. The old timey racism podcast.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, we have a lot to follow up on this week, and you wanted to start off with something about reversion, which is a topic we covered in last week’s episode.

**Craig:** Yeah, we got a nice comment in from a writer out there whose lawyer had, I guess, reviewed what we said and added one factor that I had forgotten about, and it’s absolutely true. We talked about if you write an original screenplay, you have the chance to get the rights back. It’s involved, you got to pay them the money they paid you and all that.

But the timeline was such that five years after the sale or the completion of your first employment on the project, you have this window. And it was basically a two-year window to get the rights back and set up somewhere else. And the little part that I forgot was that that two-year window has to happen within a five-year window. So you have these two years, but five years after the window begins, it shuts and you lose reversion possibility, I think permanently.

**John:** All right. So in my head, I’m trying to visualize this. And so what I see is a gray bar, and then after that gray bar that was five years long, and there’s an equally sized gray bar, equal size but like maybe a lighter gray bar, and within that lighter gray bar there’s like a red two-year slider that — it has to fall within that two-year slider within that five years. This is why movies are so rarely reverting to the original writers.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ve got a very limited window. But the truth is, I wish that this were the worst part of it, but it’s not. The financials, the fact that the purchasing company has to pay back interest on all the development fees that the first studio paid. Those are the things that really make it very difficult. But the timeline is tough. I mean, look, the truth is, practically, if you haven’t figured out how to get the reversion rights back within, you know, two or three years of the window opening, it’s never going to happen anyway, so.

**John:** Yeah, I agree with you. What’s interesting to me is that the point at which the writer had the most leverage to try to negotiate better reversion terms is also the moment which he or she was not likely to push for them. So that moment at which you’re selling this project for the very first time, that was the moment where you could have pushed for really strong reversion rights. But you’re also pushing for a lot of other things, and mostly, you’re pushing for upfront money which is a very reasonable thing to be asking for. And paradoxically, that upfront money that you’re getting is money that would have to be paid back. There’s a whole bunch of other reasons why studios don’t want to pay both a lot of money and make it very easy for you to get the script back.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s true. And there’s also psychologically a little bit of a problem when a studio says, “We want to buy your screenplay,” and you start negotiating with them and one of your big points is, “Now, when this doesn’t work, can I blank, blank, blank?” Just psychologically it’s a little harder to do that and to be really aggressive about it. Everybody on the other side starts thinking, “Why are you so concerned about this failing?” So it’s a tough one, but, yeah.

**John:** Craig, something that occurs to me, which we didn’t really get into in last week’s episode, was what happens when a studio goes bankrupt? So let’s say you sold this to a production company that no longer exists.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Those assets could theoretically be purchased by another studio or — is are there sort of fire sales on intellectual property? What have you seen?

**Craig:** Yes, that’s exactly what happens. Basically, if a company that — and let’s presume it’s a WGA Signatory, because otherwise it doesn’t really matter. A WGA Signatory that owns screenplays goes under, they are either bought by another company in whole or they begin to sell off their assets. The WGA — the minimum basic agreement has many, many, many pages dedicated to assumption agreements.

You’re assuming certain rights when you buy things that have WGA stuff, but it’s very complicated. It’s very complicated and it does come up. You know, I’ve never worked for anyone other than the big studios, so I’ve never worried about it. But interestingly, I had like a weird thing happen when — back when we were doing the Scary Movies.

When we started them, Miramax was owned by Disney. By the time we finished the second one, I think, they had gone off on their own. And when they split, Disney and Miramax kind of decided they would share custody of the Scary Movies stuff as part of the divorce agreement. So we had two employers there at one point. It gets complicated. But honestly, if I talked about assumption agreements, I would be way out on a limb. That is advanced lawyer stuff.

**John:** Absolutely. And part of the reason why assumption agreements are so important is that, sometimes these companies are bought and sold, but the movies that actually were produced, somebody has to be responsible for continuing to pay the money that is owed to those writers for residuals and everything else. So it becomes an important part of our contract.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s like, if you buy a company and they’re selling you things that have liens on them essentially, so, I go out of business, I’m a restaurant owner, I’m selling you all my kitchen equipment, but I owe a bunch of people money for that kitchen equipment. Well, when you buy it, you now owe those people money for the kitchen equipment. And it’s the same thing with movies. They’re assuming responsibility for all the residuals.

Now, there is an interesting thing that happens. There have been cases where companies have gone out of business. The assets essentially don’t get purchased and they become what we call orphan works.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Most of the orphan works are very old but there’s been a real effort between the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild to get the United States government which controls the Copyright Office to recognize screenwriters and directors as co-authors. That means copyright holders of orphaned works that had been owned by other people as part of work for hire, but those entities no longer exist. So it’s an interesting thing. In modern era, it will never happen because everybody now understands how valuable IP is.

**John:** Yeah. Next bit of follow up, back in Episode 201, we talked about the FIFA scandal. And we wondered aloud if it could become a movie. Craig, what is the answer?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes, indeed. So this past week, just today as we’re recording this, it was announced that Ben Affleck will be producing a FIFA movie for Warner Bros. all about the FIFA scandal. This is the summary here. Capping off eight days in negotiations, Warner Bros. has won a bidding war for Houses of Deceit, a book by BuzzFeed investigator reporter Ken Bensinger which is being seen as a definitive account of the American FIFA exec Chuck Blazer and his role in the largest sports and public corruption scandal in history.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Gavin O’Connor who recently wrapped the Affleck thriller, The Accountant, for the studio is attached to direct and will co-write the script with Anthony Tambakis. So —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That movie is going to be there. So we were speculating what kind of movie they would make and this doesn’t say specifically, but it gives us some hint about it. They’re focusing on Chuck Blazer who’s an American exec, which is certainly kind of reasonable to make it for an American audience. What else do we see from this summary here?

**Craig:** Well, in terms of the tone, it sounds like they’re approaching it the way we thought a studio would, that is head on. Not from the side as a comedy or something else, but head on. One interesting thing that they had picked up on it, that we just didn’t know, you and I just didn’t know about it, is that this guy, Chuck Blazer, I think was involved in the corruption itself. He became, as far as I can tell, I could be wrong, but he became essentially an informer.

And so what you have now is more of — their take is a little bit more like the movie The Insider.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know if you remember that movie, a really good movie. And they did say, Loretta Lynch, I guess teamed up with this guy back when she was just working at the IRS or something like that, so she has been actually tracking this. Now that’s interesting. Because if you start this character before she’s — you know, we said, “Look, the Attorney-General is too big,” and we were right, but if she’s not yet the Attorney-General and she becomes the Attorney-General towards the end of it, that’s really interesting. So an interesting version of it.

I’m kind of curious to see what the theme of it is. I’m curious to see if the theme is at all related to my thing about America finding its way towards kind of promising American justice again, or if they go a different way and there’s a whole different theme. Very interesting. But note, the movie is about two people, it’s about a relationship, it’s about one who is a soccer person and one who isn’t a soccer person. We nailed it.

**John:** We did.

**Craig:** Not that hard really. [laughs]

**John:** It really wasn’t that hard.

**Craig:** It’s kind of obvious.

**John:** I was curious like who they would pick as the character to focus on. And I didn’t really know about Chuck Blazer’s role in this, but it seems like a very natural fit for the kind of movie we would actually want to make.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** Yeah, good luck to them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So obviously, how many movies get announced versus get made? Quite a few. But I think the people involved have a good track record of being able to make movies, so let’s hope.

**Craig:** Also, good object lesson for people out there who are like, “Oh my God, they stole my movie idea.” No, they didn’t. Shut up. Is there one cell in your body that’s like, “We talked about it and now they’re doing it” — even one?

**John:** Not a bit. Oh, God, no. No.

**Craig:** No, no, no. It’s ridiculous. Ridiculous. I’m now manufacturing umbrage. I’m making something up that isn’t true and then getting angry about it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know why, because it’s been too long.

**John:** Yeah. Now, if next week there is a Hadron Super Collider romantic comedy announced — and actually, it turns out there was, like I think David Koepp had worked on a romantic comedy many years ago, somebody like sent us a link to that. But if all three of our what-ifs became movies, then I would be a little bit suspicious. Or I would wonder whether we were not making the best use of our time. That we should have been out pitching these movies rather than describing them for free on a podcast.

**Craig:** Hey man. Pitching is easy. It’s the writing that sucks.

**John:** Yeah. We’re going to talk about that in our third topic today.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** The next bit of follow-up comes from Joe in Rancho Cucamonga. So in episode 194, you guys answered a question for me about how I would receive credit on an indie movie I co-wrote if I were in the WGA, and now I have another question regarding that situation. The movie did in fact go into production and wrapped a couple of weeks ago.

**Craig:** Congrats.

**John:** I was sent a copy of the shooting script and I discovered that I did in fact receive a written by credit with the director but so did another writing team. There’s really nothing I can do about it. But what I want to know is, assuming the best case scenario, once the movie gets picked up for some kind of distribution, how can I benefit from this movie?

It’s impossible for anyone watching the movie to tell what I wrote, so how will agents or managers or producers know what value I have as a writer? Am I at the mercy of whatever opportunities come to the director’s way and hope he reaches out for me again? I contributed quite a bit to this movie, and if it’s successful, I’d like to be one of the people recognized for it. I’d love your opinion on how to proceed with all of this.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, I’m going to make an assumption here because it’s not quite clear in the question. And the assumption is that this movie was not a WGA movie.

**John:** No, it was not. So flashing back to the previous episode, he wrote this thing but it was not a WGA covered movie whatsoever. So he said, you know, “What would have been different if it had been a WGA movie?”

**Craig:** First of all, he’s not allowed to do that. I hope he knows. Not allowed to write on non-WGA movies if you’re in the WGA, I believe, but fine.

**John:** Clarify more. He is a writer who has not joined the WGA.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So he’s a pre-WGA member. So he wrote on this indie film that is not a WGA film. He’s not WGA. So he wrote in asking in his initial question —

**Craig:** Oh, if I were.

**John:** Yeah. “How would it be different if I had been a member of the WGA?

**Craig:** Well, now that we cleared all that up, I have a clear answer for Joe from Rancho Cucamonga. So what happened is they decided on their own what the credit would be. That’s what happens when it’s not a WGA film. You get a written by credit sharing with an ampersand director and then these other two who the producers have stuck their names on perhaps legitimately and who knows also as written by. So written by A ampersand B, and C ampersand D.

What you’re asking is, how am I going to be credited for this in reality inside the business? The answer is that, in my opinion, you will absolutely be lumped in with the director. If people loved the movie, they’re going to immediately want to know who the director is. They’re going to see that the director was writing with somebody. And they’re going to lump you in as the director’s writing partner.

If you want to not continue to work with that director then you have to go and make an aggressive tour to say, “Look, let me explain the narrative of how this movie came to be,” and in that narrative you are the hero. And I’m just going to presume that that’s true.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not that people don’t occasionally tell stories that aren’t true, but presuming that’s true, you say, “Look, here’s how this actually came about and here’s what I think the reality of that movie is.” And if you talk about it in a convincing way, then people will understand that you were clearly a part of it.

But I want to caution you, Joe, that there will not be, unless this movie is literally nominated for an Oscar or makes a hundred times its budget, you will not get waves of attention for this credit.

**John:** I completely agree. You know, we don’t know exactly what genre of movie this is. If it is a small little thriller or a horror film or whatever, if people like the movie, that’s great. And that will only help Joe. There’s nothing in the situation is going to hurt Joe. While he hasn’t taken any steps back with his credit, it hasn’t pushed him very far forward.

So I think he still needs to think of himself as, “I’m a writer who is very fortunate to have something I wrote produced.” And if you were talking with an agent or manager or producer, they can see like, “Oh, he’s actually been through the process to some degree, like words he’s written have actually been filmed.” So that’s useful. But they’re mostly going to be hiring you based on the script that they’re reading on the page rather than this movie that you were one of four writers on.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Yeah, and so that’s fine.

**Craig:** It is. You’re right, there’s no bad news here. I mean, that he’s better off today than he was a year ago. But he does have to be realistic here. And I actually love that he’s asking the question because it’s an indication that he’s already — that A, he doesn’t have a tendency to sort of smell his own farts. I mean, he knows that he has work to do still. And he’s going to have to tackle this.

This isn’t necessarily a clean kill. So he’s right to think about how to circumvent the obstacles that that credit is created for.

**John:** So I would also say that if the movie is good, and he should be really honest about whether the movie is good, what his feelings are and what other people who see the movie, what their response is, and if his relationship with these producers and the director is good, he should try to become involved in the publicity and news of the movie as it goes out there. And so that means to the degree that there are screenings and stuff, try to make sure that he’s invited to those things so he can talk about the movie as a major participant in it.

If the movie is not good, he’s not helping himself by going to those things and he can just stay home and write.

**Craig:** I’m with you on that one.

**John:** Cool. Our first topic today, is Hollywood making too many movies? That is the headline which is usually generally best answered by Betteridge’s law of headlines, in which if the question mark comes at the end of the headline, the answer is no.

**Craig:** I love that.

**John:** So this is an article by Brent Lang writing for Variety. And the central question really is not is Hollywood making too many movies? But it’s looking at the kinds of movies that Hollywood makes and asking the question where are the sort of mid-level movies? Like, you know, we seem to be making a tremendous number of indie films and releasing them theatrically, and we’re also making a huge number of giant movies. We’re not making any sort of mid-budget level movies. And mid-budget but also sort of like mid-performer movies. We’re making very few movies that make between $50 million and $100 million dollars. We’re only making sort of giant blockbusters and things that make $0.30.

So some of the stats he cites, in 2004, roughly 490 films were released on fewer than 1,000 screens according to data compiled by NATO the people who actually track this stuff. Last year, that number ballooned to 563 movies. So 490 to 563. The problem is that the greater profits didn’t follow the influx of films.

In 2004, revenue from films in this sector hit $380 million while admissions topped at $61 million. Ten years later, revenue stood down at $370 million while admissions sputtered to $45 million. So basically, we released a lot more movies on fewer than 1,000 screens but they made collectively less money.

**Craig:** Yeah. John, I am so puzzled by this article. The statistics are irrelevant. They don’t answer the question that he’s asked. I’m so puzzled by Brent Lang’s article here.

**John:** I think this would have been much better served by kind of three different articles because I think trying to address this all in one article is part of where the problem lies. Lay? Lies?

**Craig:** One of those.

**John:** Yeah, either one is great. English is an evolving language, I could say either one.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So let’s talk about this Indie film argument because I think this is actually something I felt is real and true is that this sense of getting your hand stamped by a theatrical release and then going to video on demand. A ton of movies that are sort of put out every weekend to the point where the New York Times and other major outlets have said, “You know what? We don’t have enough resources to actually review every movie that comes out theatrically, sorry. We’re stopping that policy.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s a real change the affects people who make smaller movies.

**Craig:** Ish. Ish. I mean, because look, when you say hand stamped, that’s exactly right. So people have to understand something. When financiers make an independent film, they are funding it not with money out of their own pocket typically but rather from foreign presales. So they’re going to all these overseas people and saying, “Would you be interested in having the rights to run a movie starring these three people about this topic?” And they go, “Yeah, we’ll give you this much for that. We don’t even care about the script and who’s in it. Just those names, that, we’ll give you this much money.” “Great, thank you.”

They collect all those pledges of money. Now they have enough to make the movies, sometimes they have more than the movie costs and off they go. But part of the deal is, “But you can’t just give us some direct to DVD movie or direct to online movie, we need it to be an actual theatrical release. And here are the terms of what qualifies as theatrical.” So that gets worked into the whole business plan. And then at times they will go out and do a “theatrical release.” That release is to qualify them to then go and collect on all the money from all the foreign distributors. So it’s not really being released is the point. If we have more of those movies, we will have more of these rubber stampers.

**John:** The scenario that you just described is absolutely true for certain kinds of movies. And I remember a couple of years ago, there was an article about this movie, Zyzzyx Road, that had made the least amount of money theatrically of any movie. And that really was one of those situations where it was completely just supposed to get its hand stamped. It ran like three showings at a tiny theatre somewhere in the U.S and it was that scenario.

What I see more often though now is the movie that was like pretty good at Sundance that used to not get a theatrical release which now does get a theatrical release because of this day and date video on demand releasing, so we’re releasing to theaters and video on demand at the same time. Now, I think an interesting question to ask is, is that theatrical release component mostly just there to please the filmmaker or does it have a true value for the good of the film?

**Craig:** I think, still, that most of the times when you’re talking about — even though — here is why the statistic is so bad. He’s talking about movies that are released on fewer than 1,000 screens. How many screens? 999 or 1?

**John:** Yeah, I think that’s a weird cutoff.

**Craig:** Way too broad of a number there, right? Because, you know, if you’re talking about movies that are released on fewer than 10 screens, it’s all rubber stamping, it’s all to satisfy the filmmaker or an actor or to satisfy the terms of the deal and has nothing to do with a real theatrical release. If you were to say to me, “Look, the world of movies that are released on 800 screens, that’s really suffering,” that would mean something. But I can’t tell that from this number. So I’m going to refuse to draw a conclusion about how movies with smaller releases are actually performing.

**John:** Great. So the more interesting article which I think you and I would actually love to talk about is the article that looks at, what movies are we not making? Because the only movies that get released theatrically are these tiny ones and these super giant blockbusters, the movies that are incredibly expensive, that open super wide, and have to make $200 million for the movie to be successful.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And those are genres in which you and I have traditionally written some movies and those movies are, in some cases, much harder to make these days.

**Craig:** That is true. And if only Brent had talked about any of that, but Brent doesn’t talk about that. Because what you’re talking about is budget. What Brent is talking about is how much the movies made, which is the weirdest choice of focus for this article and that question, that the headline questioner is asking or even what the article seems to be addressing.

I don’t care how much the movies make. He’s essentially equating high performance with high budget. That’s not the way it works. There are movies that cost $80 million that make $20 million and there are movies that cost $30 million that make $150 million. So there’s a really good question to be asked about the middle-budget movies.

**John:** So I think there’s sort of two questions that are co-related here. Are we not making these movies because they’re not successful at the box office? Or are they not successful at the box office because we’re just not making them? Is it evidence of absence or absence of evidence for the reason why we see so few mid-budget thrillers, why we see no romantic comedies of a certain size being released anymore?

**Craig:** All right. So now we’re talking about the article that you and I would write. And here’s what I would talk about. I do think that part of the issue with the middle budget movie is that in success, they don’t make enough, which is a weird thing to say. But the cost of marketing has accelerated dramatically as movie studios seek to drag you away not from just three networks but from 78 possible entertainment options at home, plus the Internet, plus whatever the hell else is going on in your life. So it’s really expensive.

If you make a $30 million movie, you’re going to be spending more than the cost of the movie to advertise it. That’s a tough one, right? You know, whereas if you make a $200 million movie, you’re probably going to spend $200 million to market it. That would be overkill. So they’re expensive. And you may say, “Well, the $30 million movie made $150 million domestically,” and they’d say “Great, it was profitable.” It wasn’t. I mean, like I can’t really do a jig that it’s profitable because the studio next door, they just put out Avengers 3 and grossed $2 billion. What am I supposed to be? Happy that my movie made $20 million? Nobody cares. It’s just — so there’s a question of how profitable can that middle budget be.

The other thing that’s squeezing the middle budget movies is that in the non-comedy areas, a lot of the genre that used to live there — thrillers, police stories, what we call adult dramas, not pornographic dramas, but dramas about adult things — television has really come so far and done such a great job narratively in those genres that people seem to be more interested in watching those things play out episodically than they are in a self-contained two-hour format. So there’s the double squeeze that’s happened there.

**John:** I agree with you. The marketing thing is the challenge of — it’s like a switch you flip and you have to spend a tremendous amount of money or sort of no money if you’re sort of just like putting it out on a screen and going to a home video. If you’ve committed to releasing a movie wide, you’re committed to spending tens of millions of dollars, and that’s just the reality of a wide release.

The other thing I think is a factor is salaries. And so if you want to cast Jason Sudeikis in your movie, and you’re making a tiny little indie movie, he does it for free, essentially he does it for scale. If you’re trying to cast Jason Sudeikis in a bigger sort of action comedy, he’s going to full rate. And so there’s — it becomes very difficult to make movies for the sort of inexpensively enough that you’re saving enough money to make it really make sense to make that middle budget movie. Either you’re paying him all his cost or not paying all of his cost. There’s no sort of in between rate for these sort of romantic comedies or something else.

The other thing I would talk about is technology. And so it’s true that it’s never been cheaper to make a great looking little indie film. And that’s because we have amazing cameras, we have ability to do great stuff in computers, we can make things look great. And so we see these demo reels of these sci-fi short films like, “My God, that looks like a full theatrical production.” It’s absolutely true, you can do amazing things.

The challenges on making a real feature film, the cost isn’t in the technology, the cost is in time and days. And that does not scale. That does not get cheaper you know with technology just days or days you’re spending money on actors in making a movie and trucks and all of that stuff. So it’s very hard to realize those cost savings from technology in making these movies. And so if you’re making a romantic comedy, at a certain point you’re still — you know, you’re still doing 40 days of shooting and that’s going to add up.

**Craig:** No question, it’s a really good point you’re making. Bob Weinstein, I remember he used to constantly complain, why does this cost so much? Some guy is doing this on his computer. Yeah, well he’s doing one shot on his computer. You’re exactly right. If you’re making a typical VFX-laden feature film, you’re talking about hundreds of shots, hundreds of VFX shots.

And the only places that can deliver that many shots, and you can’t divide it up between a hundred different companies. There has to be some cohesion, I mean you can use two or three, and plenty of movies do, but not much more than that. Well, the only places that can handle that bulk, are large places. And guess what? They are fully aware that they are in low supply. There are not a lot of companies that can do the work in the amount of time you have. Therefore, they charge you. Of course they do. And you’re right, they are charging you, as they say, good fast cheap pick two. Well, when you want it good and you want it fast, and trust me when you’re making a movie, it has to be fast. Cheap goes out the window. No question. Yes.

**John:** Absolutely true. So let’s take a look at sort of what some of the solutions are for this, because there are some movies and some genres that we’re able to make and make money at. And so I was thinking about the sort of low budget horror film that get released, you know, there’s one coming out this weekend. We have a template for that. We have a template for making those movies inexpensively, releasing them wide, and they make money. And so that’s the thing that we sort of figured out how to do. Tyler Perry figured out how to make movies with predominantly African-American casts that would make money.

There’s a pattern for how you make those things. And I wonder if we can find a pattern for making the mid-budget comedy, a pattern for making the romantic comedy again so that those things become profitable to make. And it may not be that the giant studios are going to be willing to spend the money and time to figure out how to do that because the point that you made is like, “Well you know the guys next door just made $2 billion. We need to make $2 billion.” But if you’re another company that’s making no movies at all, it may be worthwhile for you to look at like, “I would love to make a movie that makes $50 million.”

**Craig:** Sure, of course I mean that’s the problem. You’re sitting in the office, you’re running a studio, and you’ve got three movies that each cost $40 million. That’s three sets of producers that are driving you crazy, three sets of actors that are insane, three sets of directors that won’t listen to you, three sets of writers that screwed up. All the problems that you have running a studio, there’s three of them right? The best you think — you’re thinking though, “Each one might make $50 million.” That’s a $150 million for all the blood, sweat, and tears that go into managing three movies.

Down the street they’re only making one movie, that one movie makes $1 billion. And they only need to deal one crazy producer, one crazy director, one crazy actor. So you can see how seductive it becomes. And certainly, the world of corporate America is not to find in a binary fashion of make money or lose money. It’s, how much did you make. I can’t keep you on if everybody else in the competitive space is making more in profit than you are. There’s something wrong with you. That’s the way it works, right?

Now, that aside, we know that occasionally there are movies in that $30 million to $50 million space that make a ton of money and are also repeatable. So a film like Pitch Perfect for instance comes along. It’s a smaller budget movie. It doesn’t even do that well box office wise the first time out, but then has this huge second life in ancillary markets, so they can go and make another one and make a ton of money off of it. For comedy, I think the mid-budget comedy is actually still the rule.

**John:** And what would you define as mid-budget in 2015?

**Craig:** 2015 mid-budget is $20 million to $50 million. So between $20 million and $50 million — and really I think $20 million to $40 million is the sweet spot. What you’re trying to do is get one or two comic actors that you know are brand names with the audience. And you are trying to keep the production aspects as manageable as possible because you know from a comedy point of view that people aren’t laughing at stuff because it’s lavish, they’re laughing because it’s funny.

So a movie like Identity Thief is not — it’s far from lavish. I mean, it’s really what it was, ultimately, was an independent movie budget at a studio because by the time you’re done paying Jason and Melissa and me and Seth and Scott Stuber and all the people that are above the line, there’s not that much left to make the movie. You’re kind of making it shoestring, and you’re doing the best you can. And we were cutting corners everywhere. And that was okay, you know. And I’m sure part of what happens, it’s interesting, is when comedy directors have a bunch of hits in a row, they tend to start being able to command larger budgets. Inevitably there is a snap back at them because the larger budgets usually don’t end up warranting themselves.

You know it’s interesting like I’m looking at Spy. I don’t know what Spy cost, but I’m guessing it cost a lot. And it’s interesting because I don’t think it’s going to make that much more than The Heat did, at least not domestically, overseas it’s doing much better. But that’s where comedies get risky when you start getting into that, like the Hangover, the first Hangover I think was $32 million. Now the second and the third started costing a lot because of the above the line but it was understood they would make their money back, and they did. But to go out and make a first — like a first of a comedy, and have it be $70 million, it’s risky. I wouldn’t do it. I’d be nervous.

**John:** So Craig, not talking about any one specific ones of your movies, but let’s say you’re making a $40 million comedy, what is the split above the line versus below the line? And to explain terms, above the line is your top tier actors, it is your director, your producers, your writers. So what is the split between above the line and below the line?

**Craig:** If I’m looking at a $40 million comedy, I would have no problem. Literally no problem with like a 40-60 split, where like 40% of that went to cast, writer, director, producer, and the rest was to make the movie, because I know that people aren’t coming to see a spectacle, they’re coming to see Melissa McCarthy, they’re coming to see Zach Galifianakis, they’re coming to see Jennifer Lawrence. That’s what matter. You know when you’re making a Hunger Games, it’s Jennifer Lawrence. You need Jennifer Lawrence to pay for the spectacle. But for the comedy, you need Jennifer Lawrence so the people go see Jennifer Lawrence. That’s what they want you know. So I would be aggressive about that.

**John:** So circling back, you look at one of these comedies that you’re making for $40 million, and there is the possibility that it breaks out and it becomes a giant, giant hit. And those are wonderful when it happens, but more likely, it’s like well it’s going to make some good money. It’s going to cross over 100 and people are happy?

It reminds me though of a conversation that I was just listening to on StartUp Podcast. So StartUp, talks to a business that’s just beginning and is trying to raise VC capital and grow. And they’re talking about two kinds of businesses, they talk about you know the Twitter, the Facebook, the giant and sort of moon shot corporations, and those are the ones who are trying to become you know, reach a billion dollar valuation. And they talked about lifestyle businesses sort of pejoratively, basically it makes money but like it’s not really interesting to investors because it’s not a good use of their time and their money. And I think in many cases, we dismiss these other types of movies that aren’t going to make you know a billion dollars as kind of lifestyle businesses where they’re just like, “Yes, it’s not the thing we want to do.” And I think, to a large degree, the major studies have been focusing on just these giant hits because that’s the pressure that they’re under.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean I honestly don’t blame them. I think that if I were running a studio, I would hand this off in a way say like, “Here’s a division that makes comedies from this number to this number.” And so then those people understand that it’s not a problem if their movie returns 10% or 20% on investment. And it’s not a problem that the people down the street just made a billion dollars because that’s not their job. Their job is to do this, and to make money this way. And it would be nice to see especially because the hits can really take off and be hits for a long time. And they generate money in the library for years and years and years.

You know I mean look, Vacation, I mean the movie Vacation was made decades ago. It was a risk like anything else. I guarantee you it didn’t cost a lot. Well, now there’s another Vacation and how many Vacation sequels were there? And there will certainly be many Vacation sequels of this Vacation reboot. And you know the upside is real for these things. So that’s what I would do, I would say, “Hey, big studios, make a little — make a little division, you know.”

**John:** You know our friend Billy Ray is directing a movie for this company STX, which I had no idea of what this company was. I saw their logo when I saw a little screening of his film. And it’s a company set up deliberately to try to make adult dramas that no one else is making. And maybe that’ll work, maybe it won’t work, but it was an opportunity for Billy to make a movie for grownups. And that is an exciting opportunity.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s been a lot of written and many tears shed over the demise of the grownup movie. And I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re coming back. I — you know it would be nice, but I don’t know.

**John:** Ben Affleck will make his FIFA movie and maybe that will be a watershed.

**Craig:** FIFA!

**John:** FIFA! By the time this podcast comes out, Apple Music should be existing in the world. It’s supposed to launch Tuesday that this episode comes out. So Apple Music is a subscription music program that Apple has promised and should be unveiling. People can sign up to stream all the music they kind of want to stream. About two weeks ago, Taylor Swift sent an open letter to Apple complaining about their plan to not pay artists during the three-month free trial. Apple reverses course and is now going to pay its artists. So we are not singer-songwriters. Well, Craig sings, and I’ve written songs.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But that is not our main focus of this podcast. We’re mostly talking about things interesting to screenwriters. So I wanted to talk about what does streaming mean for screenwriters and what analogous situations could we find for people who are writing for film and television to the singer-songwriters who are concerned about Apple Music?

**Craig:** Yeah, we’ve been in this situation for a while now. We just have one major difference between ourselves and singer-songwriters. So we’ve had iTunes streaming television shows and episodes for free supported by ads in certain circumstances or Hulu. And of course there’s Netflix. Netflix is the ultimate subscription service. You pay your monthly subscription and it’s all you can eat of the movies they have to offer you. And the difference between us and singer-songwriters like Taylor Swift is that Taylor Swift when she writes a song has copyright, we don’t. So the people that we fight with, all the time, in this circumstance become our best friends and our advocates.

This is the great value of the percentage base residuals formula. The more they make, the more we make. So we rely on the studios to be as rapacious with these other vendors as they are with us. And they are. So they negotiate very aggressively with Netflix and all these other companies to try and get as much as they can for the product that they’re giving them. And interestingly, the networks themselves like television networks will say to writers, “We want to stream. We, ourselves will stream a couple of episodes for free, to get people to sample the show and we’re not going to pay your residuals for those.” And we go, “Okay.” But they don’t let anybody else do that.

It’s not like they let Netflix stream their movies for free for a while. They don’t. So we’re actually fairly well covered in this front. And I’m glad that Taylor Swift did this because the truth is, that Apple can afford to pay everybody while they’re not making money for three months. Apple could afford to pay everybody while they’re not making money for 15 years. That’s the God’s honest truth. So while it made business sense for Apple to do that, I’m glad that they kind of caved to the pressure. It was the right thing to do.

**John:** Yeah, thinking about sort what our situation is versus the artists that are going to be covered by Apple Music, it also reminds me of like authors and their dealings with publishers and their dealings with Amazon. It’s very complicated, the nature of the people who make the work and the people who buy the work and what the relationship really is. And it’s also complicated by the fact that we’re moving to sort of post-ownership society. So traditionally when you or I have written a movie, and someone purchases that movie, they’re buying the DVD, and we get that residual payment exactly once. Now, that person pays to rent the movie, in this case, they’re paying a monthly fee to — the ability to stream whatever movies for sort of all they can eat. And we’re given a percentage of the money that the studio has gotten from Apple for that thing.

It’s just another layer of abstraction and it’s harder to track viewing or units or anything like that. We just know that a number comes to us, and that is the money that we are receiving.

**Craig:** That’s right, and so the guilds will collectively audit the companies every few years. I suspect this is part of it. The companies themselves have to do a pretty good job of the counting because part of their decision about making movies now is, — well, okay, let’s run the model. How much will we get from Box Office? How much will we get from paid TV, from free TV? How much are we going to get from Netflix? So when they get — Netflix says, “Well, we’ll give you this much for this movie. And then these many people stream it and we’ll give you…”I don’t know how it works. All I know is that they have to, the studios have to account for the Netflix money.

It’s not like, “Oh, we just have a bunch of Netflix money. This movie got this much Netflix money, this movie got this much.” So that’s how we get our little piece of it. It’s a pretty good arrangement for us actually, because we don’t have to go toe to toe. We don’t have an ASCAP or BMI that we’re dealing with. But the real question is, and this is the thing that people have been puzzling over is, “What will end up getting us more? The old way where people would buy the DVD or the new way where people will…” — I mean I’ve watched my daughter rent the same movie five times. I’m like “ehh.” But that happens a lot.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** And we actually, our deal on internet rentals is spectacular.

**John:** Talk to us about the deal, difference between internet rentals and internet streaming and sort of which is generally better for a screenwriter.

**Craig:** The best thing you can do to support directors and — well, I don’t know what the directing deal is — the best thing you can do to support screenwriters is to rent on the internet. So, you go to iTunes, it’s not a Netflix deal, you’re going to iTunes and you’re renting the movie and let’s say it’s, I don’t know whatever it is, like three bucks to rent or something. We get whatever the studio gets. So Apple keeps a piece, they send the rest off to the studio. Of that amount, we get 1.2%.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** It’s very good. If somebody buys the movie on the internet and that’s like $9.99 or whatever, Apple takes their cut, they send the rest to the studio, we get something like 0.6%.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** It’s not as good.

**John:** Yeah, and it’s not as good also because if your daughter rents the same movie three times in a row, we’ve made so much more money.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s just a better deal.

**John:** So basically, our financial solvency is dependent on your daughter making irresponsible choices.

**Craig:** On my specific daughter which I think bodes well for all of us.

**John:** [laughs] She’ll never learn.

**Craig:** She will never learn.

**John:** Talk to us about the accounting for the Netflix model. So Netflix agrees to purchase a bundle of movies, the rights to a bundle of movies that they can air during a certain window.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, if I choose to watch Identity Thief which is while it’s on Netflix, is my individual viewing of Identity Thief at all accounted for you in your residuals, or was it only in the deal that was struck between the studio and Netflix for that window of time?

**Craig:** The God’s honest truth is that I don’t know.

**John:** It’s so complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know for instance when you talk about HBO, it’s not accounted for by viewing. So HBO will negotiate to air a particular movie. They’ll say, “Okay, I want to put Go on HBO. What’s going to cost me to run Go for a year?” And they’ll give you a number and they’ll negotiate and that’s the number and that’s it. It doesn’t matter if a million people see Go or five people see Go. Obviously, the people that are selling Go will try and figure that number out because if it seems super popular, they’re going charge HBO more for the next cycle. I imagine the same thing is true for Netflix but I don’t know. Netflix may even have a situation with the studios where they are apportioning things out by these — I just don’t know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re really secretive about the whole thing. I mean they won’t even publish the viewing data for the shows they make.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** I don’t blame them.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s talk through really quick, we’ll try to do this in two minutes, the process of a screenwriter’s job from the initial idea and pitch to premiere. And just look at sort of what are the stages that a screenwriter goes through, and also really notate at what points in this process are you getting paid? Because I think there’s a misconception sometimes along the way. So, let’s say you have an idea for a movie, Craig, that is about, it can go back to your initial idea of what if people lived for only 12 years and then they were dead.

**Craig:** That was your idea.

**John:** Oh, it’s my idea but you can take it.

**Craig:** Oh, great. Thank you. Okay, so I have this idea, I write up a little pitch on my own, and then I call up my agent and say, “I’ve got this idea for a movie, set me some pitches up.” And he calls around and people say, “Yeah, I like that or I don’t.” And then I have a bunch of meetings. I’d go and I’d pitch it out and I get a call. One or more than that were interested and we agree that’s the one and we make a deal.

**John:** Great. So, at this point you’ve done a lot of work, but you’ve not received any money.

**Craig:** Not a dime.

**John:** Not a dime. But the deal is now made.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so you’ve signed your contracts, the contracts have gone in, and you are starting to write, and you’re writing your first script and ka-ching, you get paid.

**Craig:** Kind of.

**John:** Kind of?

**Craig:** Maybe. So a lot of places will say, especially new writers, we’re not going to pay you until the full long form contract is signed, and we’re going to take months to create that long form contract. Most places with established screenwriters or if your lawyer has a good working relationship with, the company will say, “While we’re working on the long form contract, can we all agree that these are the basic points of the deal? Let’s sign a certificate of authorship where the writer is saying okay, I’m officially acknowledging that you guys own copyright in this, I’m doing it as work for hire, that will get me my delivery money.” So get your delivery money.

The key is, when you’re ready to turn that first draft in, make sure you get your — if you haven’t gotten your commencement money yet, sorry, it’s commencement money to begin with. If you haven’t gotten your commencement money, don’t turn it in.

**John:** Yeah. For people who don’t understand, usually, when you’re writing for a studio, you’re paid half the money upfront and half the money when you deliver the script. So it’s just sort of keeps both sides honest that you’re not doing this for free and that you actually have to deliver in order to get the rest of your money.

**Craig:** So, you’ve written the script, you’ve turned it in, you’ve gotten your commencement money, you’ve gotten your delivery money, now they have a whole bunch of notes and you’re going to move on to your next step. And you’re going to do it again, and maybe there’s a polish and blah, blah, blah, and then suddenly they’re like, “You know what, we like this movie. Let’s go out to a director.”

**John:** Great. And you might have a chance to weigh in on who that director is, you might not. You will hopefully have a chance to meet with that director and discuss your shared visions for what the movie is supposed to be. That doesn’t always happen, it’s just really situational.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. It runs the gamut from, “Oh, did you hear? There’s a director on your movie now, to sit in a room with us while we audition directors.” And I’ve been in both of those spots.

But then they’ll say, “We have our director and we’re going to go into production.” At this point, the director — and I’m just presuming that you haven’t been fired yet. So the director’s like, “Hey, I’ve got a bunch of thoughts, let’s sit for a while and talk about this.” So you start doing some production work on the movie. And you’re doing your pages and your asterisks, and your scene numbers if you’re a good-doobie.

**John:** Absolutely, and perhaps there’s even a table reading where all the actors gather around the table and read your script aloud just once so you know they actually did read it once. And maybe you’re doing some work after that because you’ve realized that certain actors cannot say certain words or that there are opportunities that you had not foreseen until you had this cast in front of you.

**Craig:** And God forbid maybe one of your precious lines of dialogue is sucky. It happens. So then you — there’s a big production meeting, the day or a couple days before the first day of shooting where all the departments sit around a big, big table and they ask questions and occasionally someone turns to you and goes, “Yeah, what is that? What did you mean there? When you said a tree, what kind of tree?” So you have that big meeting and then there’s production where you hopefully have some time to be on the set and watch your work being produced.

**John:** Yeah, and that can, again, run the gamut from being there every frame shot to — oh, hi! This is the writer. Okay, bye. And then you’re done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You don’t know what it’s going to be, but you probably have some sense of what it’s going to be based what the process has been up to that point.

**Craig:** That’s right. At that point, by the time production rolls around, you should know where your place is in the world of this movie. And then the movie is done, right? So they’re going to run a screening, you’re probably going to go to the first test screening if you’re still involved with the movie. There may be some additional photography required. You know what, we really need a scene here.

**John:** Yeah. Some of my best experiences in making movies has been in that post-production process where you’re sitting in the editing room, you’re seeing opportunities, you are offering suggestions to help make that movie better because you have some fresh eyes that the director does not have because she’s been starting at this footage this entire time. You can remember what the original intention was. So maybe you’re useful in that point.

**Craig:** And also when you are writing for additional photography, it’s so surgical, it’s so targeted, everybody — you know that you’re writing something that fits right in between existing footage so it’s just easier to do I think. You know, there’s less of a theory about it and more of a fact, a plan.

**John:** Yeah. And I do want to point out one thing. So everything we’ve described, the only times you’ve gotten paid, have been times where we said write.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so, you weren’t getting paid for these meetings about directors, you weren’t getting paid for usually the time that you were in — it depends. The time that you’re in production, contractually by WGA standards they don’t have to pay you if you’re just watching. Is that correct?

**Craig:** Yeah, they have to pay you if you’re writing stuff down on paper. So, if you are going to be doing any writing, what they usually do at that point is make what they call an “all services deal” where you’re no longer delivering drafts, you’re just — they’re just saying, “This is an amount of money for all the writing we need you to do from now until the movie is done.”

**John:** Exactly, so could include these rewrites you did during post-production or additional photography — there’s some deal that you’re probably happy to sign because your movie is getting made. Hooray.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And then they sell it, they make posters and trailers. You usually look at the trailer and you go, “Oh my God.” And then you send some thoughts to somebody that maybe gets listened to and maybe doesn’t. And then there’s a premiere and you get two tickets.

**John:** Ooh boy.

**Craig:** Usually. Sometimes you get more. You go to the premiere, you realize that you don’t know anybody there, you realize that the premiere is not at all for people that made the movie. The premiere is to sell the movie. You are uncomfortable typically at the premiere. There’s a party afterwards. You again don’t know any of the people there. If the movie does really well, there could be an awards thing going on. Most movies, that is not the case.

**John:** Some cases you will have to do some post release marketing so even if it’s not awards stuff, there might be things about the home video release or might be like going in and doing a DVD commentary. They’re may be some additional stuff they ask you to do or other special screenings that they set up after the release. I remember for Big Fish having to go out to the Palm Springs Film Festival and they wanted somebody from the movie to be there, so it’s me and Alison Lohman. And they had these fish balloons for us to stand by, but they were like the Finding Nemo fish.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And so there’s these great photos out there of like, me and Alison Lohman and the Finding Nemo fish for Big Fish.

**Craig:** That’s terrible.

**John:** Yes. So was I getting paid for any of that? No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because as a writer, you get paid for writing, you don’t get paid for anything else.

**Craig:** Correct. Literary material as they say. And then you’re — at this point, you probably never want to think about that movie again.

**John:** The only thing you might want to think about is, if this was your original idea, which in this case it was, you do own the publishing rights to the screenplay so you could theoretically publish the book form of the screen play and you would make absolutely no money in that, but that is a thing you could do.

**Craig:** You mean that’s not valued at $70,000?

**John:** No. It’s not valued at really any money whatsoever.

**Craig:** Bummer.

**John:** That took more than two minutes, but I just wanted to sort of really walk through the whole process and point out that writers only get paid for writing and there’s so many more parts of the job that you have to do and sometimes your life coaches and marketers and other hats you have to wear, all of which are just part of your job but not getting paid part of your job. It’s time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** So, my One Cool Thing, easy, gay marriage.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** So the Supreme Court, five to four, I don’t think that tally is at all surprising. If anything, maybe it could have been six to three. We didn’t quite know where Roberts was going to end up, but five to four. And you know what, what I kind of — other than the fact that I think it’s a terrific decision and a well-warranted decision, what I thought today was, you know, it’s so American to beat up America. It’s what we do. The rest of the world thinks that we’re all self-absorbed and self-satisfied. Far from it.

We beat up America more than anybody else does in a way that French people don’t beat up France and English people don’t beat up England. We really are this — we think of America like a business that could be doing better all the time. But I have a certain American optimism as well and my optimism is that even though at times it seems like we’re going backwards or down, that over time, America gets better. Over time I believe that. And I think that today was a real sign of how over time, America got better.

**John:** I agree with you. And so I’ve been involved with various versions of lawsuits challenging for federal marriage equality for eight years now?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it’s a great outcome and so I’m incredibly happy for everyone involved and I liked as people have acknowledged this victory that it was actually the result of many, many, many tiny steps all along the way and little acts of courage. I was gratified to see this and hopeful for what it bodes for the future.

My One Cool Thing is Neil Gaiman’s advice to writers who just can’t get anything on paper. And so I will put a link to this in the show notes, but essentially some fan wrote to ask, you know, I have all these great ideas but I can’t seem to put it down on paper. And Neil Gaiman wrote a fantastic Tumblr post of his advice for how to get those things down on paper which includes in part, “You must catch, with your bare hands, the smallest of the crows, and you must force it to give up the berry. The crows do not swallow the berries. They carry them across the ocean, to an enchanter’s garden to drop one by one, into the mouth of the daughter, who will awake from an enchanted sleep only when a thousand such berries have been fed to her.”

So he goes through this elaborate process for everything you can do if you choose not to actually just sit your butt down in a chair and write. There’s a whole magical way that Neil Gaiman outlines for getting your story written.

**Craig:** That is the most Neil Gaiman-y anything ever.

**John:** I loved it.

**Craig:** An enchanter’s garden, dropping berries into the mouth of his daughter, she has enchanted sleep. Very Neil Gaiman.

**John:** It’s very Neil Gaiman. And this has been our very Scriptnotesy podcast. So if you would like to subscribe to our show, you should go to iTunes and subscribe to Scriptnotes. If you would like a USB drive of 200 episodes —

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Plus bonus episodes of the show, you should go to store.johnaugust.com and you should enter the promo code “singularity” in order to save 10%. That’s Craig’s choice for “Singularity.” Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. If you have a question for Craig Mazin, you should write to him on Twitter, he’s @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Longer questions you can write into ask@johnaugust.com. And, Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** See ya. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes 200 Episode USB drives are available now!](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Ben Affleck to Produce FIFA Scandal Film for Warner Bros.](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bookmark/fifa-scandal-ben-affleck-producing-805295)
* [Scriptnotes, 194: Poking the Bear](http://johnaugust.com/2015/poking-the-bear)
* [Is Hollywood Making Too Many Movies?](http://variety.com/2015/film/news/hollywood-making-too-many-movies-1201526094/)
* [Betteridge’s law of headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge’s_law_of_headlines)
* [STX Entertainment](https://stxentertainment.com/) and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STX_Entertainment)
* [To Apple, Love Taylor](http://taylorswift.tumblr.com/post/122071902085/to-apple-love-taylor)
* [Taylor Swift Scuffle Aside, Apple’s New Music Service Is Expected to Thrive](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/business/apple-can-skate-by-taylor-swift-but-not-product-missteps.html?_r=0)
* [Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage.html)
* [Neil Gaiman’s advice for getting idea on paper](http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/107713982316/i-have-been-trying-to-write-for-a-while-now-i)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))