The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/what-characters-know).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** You are listening to Episode 641 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, what do your characters know, and how do we know if they know it? We’ll stare in the epistemological looking glass and offer some guidance on building characters who feel appropriately informed. We’ll also look at TV ad breaks and what they’ve become in the age of streaming shows that may or may not have predetermined act breaks. We’ll also answer some listener questions, and in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what should you do when meeting a famous person, and what should you not do? Craig?
**Craig:** I did not get the memo that we’re being British.
**John:** We’re being very British on the podcast today for no good reason.
**Craig:** I’ll do it for the entire time. Just curious why.
**John:** Some mornings I wake up and I’m just channeling the spirit of Claire Foy. Claire Foy is still alive, and yet Claire Foy’s voice as the Queen in The Crown just seeps into my body, and I just want to channel that Claire Foy energy.
**Craig:** We’re doing Received Pronunciation. That would be very, very appropriate.
**John:** Extreme Received Pronunciation.
**Craig:** Oh, so RP. We’re so RP, darling.
**John:** So RP. It’s just fantastic. We’re not required to keep doing it, but it’s just fun sometimes to just be in that space-
**Craig:** Absolutely.
**John:** … be in that voice. I remember when I got to college, this young woman said, “What is your accent? I like it, but what is your accent?” I’d really had no idea, but later I realized it’s just closeted gay kid. That was my accent.
**Craig:** Yes, there is a gay accent.
**John:** Striving gay kid.
**Craig:** Oh my god, that’s so specific. What a specific dialect. Striving gay kid. I like that. Did we talk about that documentary about gay voice?
**John:** I think we did.
**Craig:** It is interesting. It’s a thing.
**John:** I think that documentary was Do I Sound Gay?
**Craig:** Do I Sound Gay?, yeah, I think that’s what it was. But then there’s the RP version. Do I Sound Gay? Do I?
**John:** Yeah, is it gay or British? It’s hard for people to distinguish at times.
**Craig:** There are so many reasons that our British listeners are angry at us right now. I work with a lot of British people, like British actors who are doing American accents, like Bella Ramsey. We also have British directors. We’ll do our versions. “Here’s my London. Here’s my East London. Here’s my Northern England. Here’s my this.” There are people who are amazing at accents, there are people who are decent, and then there are people who are horrible. I was talking with Mark Mylod, incredible, multi-award-winning director. He said, “I can’t do the American accent. I can’t do it at all.” I’m like, “Oh, sure you can.” Have you heard when British people do a bad American accent?
**John:** Oh, it’s so bad.
**Craig:** It sort of sounds like this. This is how they do. I was like, “Oh, do it. It’ll probably be that.” He said something like, “I’m going to… ” It was like a monster.
**John:** It’s because he’s trying to go rhotic. He’s trying to put his R’s back in, and that’s a way to do it.
**Craig:** There’s an attitude, like (monstrous noises). I was weeping laughing, because it’s incredible.
**John:** Amazing.
**Craig:** It was incredible. Loved it.
**John:** Loved it so much. I was talking to a dialect coach yesterday. He often works with actors who get the audition requests for, “Okay, you’re going in on this accent,” and they’re like, “Crap, I need to quickly get up to speed on that.” One of his frustrations, which I can totally understand, is that the breakdown will say New Jersey or Brooklyn or this thing, and that’s not actually a real thing. Basically, the New Jersey accent is an Italian American accent, so it’s not specific to New Jersey. It’s really specific to a cultural group. But they don’t want to say the cultural group, so they’ll put it on a region. People in Brooklyn don’t actually speak with that Brooklyn accent anymore.
**Craig:** Not anymore. My parents did, and my mom still does. They’re not Italian. It’s a different vibe than the Sopranos style. There’s just a different kind of thing going on there. New Jersey has about 12 accents. The weirdest one, although probably the most common one, is the Bruce Springsteen, Central/Southern Jersey. It’s sort of Philly. It’s sort of country. It’s a weird one. It’s a really weird one.
**John:** It’s a really weird one.
**Craig:** We’re going down to get a hoagie. Anyway, that’s our show.
**John:** That’s our show. It’s I think really good. As always, our show was produced by Drew Marquardt and-
**Craig:** Drew Marquardt.
**John:** Drew Marquardt and-
**Craig:** Marquardt.
**John:** … edited by Matthew Chilelli. Before we get to the wrap-up, we have some follow-up. In Episode 637, we talked about AI transcription and specifically we wondered whether our own transcriptions for our show, which we’ve done since the very beginning, were currently being done by a human or if they were just humanized versions of AI transcriptions. We have an answer. Drew, help us out.
**Drew Marquardt:** Our very own transcriptionist, Dima Cass, wrote in, says, “Hey, y’all. I’m Dima, a real human, and I’ve been happily transcribing Scriptnotes for over two years, since Episode 536. I actually just hit 100 episodes. I transcribe everything from scratch as opposed to using any AI. I have, quote unquote, ‘humanized’ AI transcripts for other jobs, but I personally find it time-consuming and tedious. I imagine there would be a lot of editing involved if Scriptnotes used AI transcription, because John speaks rather quickly-”
**John:** I do.
**Drew:** “… almost blending words together sometimes, while Craig tends to make sound effects and use different accents.”
**Craig:** Look who’s using different accents today, Dima.
**Drew:** “You also often discuss pronunciation, which is sometimes a difficult thing to capture in written words.”
**Craig:** Oh, boy.
**Drew:** Which I’ll say Dima does a great job doing. “I’ve been doing transcription for a decade now, and AI has actually taken some of my jobs over the past year. The current trend is that entities will hire transcribers for half the price and have them touch up AI transcripts. It’s similar to what’s happening with script coverage work.
“I know most people don’t enjoy transcribing, but I’m one of the strange few who does. I learn a lot and it fits my lifestyle as an introverted, neurodivergent queer person living in the Bible Belt. Thankfully there are still some fields of transcription in which humans are still preferred over AI, for instance in legal proceedings where every detail is very important.”
**John:** That’s awesome.
**Craig:** Then Dima sent a photo of themself “squinting in a huge field of tulips as further proof I am a human.” Yeah, Dima’s a human being. There’s a real Dima, unless AI… That does sound like an AI prompt, doesn’t it?
**John:** I will say, this is Dima posing in this field of perfectly lit-up flowers. It could be an AI backdrop. Tell me that doesn’t look like it could be an AI backdrop.
**Craig:** I just think, “Dall-E, create neurodivergent queer person in Bible Belt squinting, huge field of tulips.” I love the cardinal shirt. He’s got a shirt with a cardinal on it. Dima, thank you for doing this. It’s really nice to meet you. I’m very glad that you’re a human being. Look, let’s face it. Everybody knows that John makes the decisions around here, but to the extent that I get a vote, I vote that we never use AI and we always use a person to do this.
**John:** Yeah, I think it’s great. There’s subtleties that a human being is gonna understand about what’s important and what’s not important. Dima does the transcripts. Drew reads through the transcripts to make sure they fit what we want, gets them posted up there. We started doing the transcripts early on just for accessibility, because we have folks who are deaf or hard of hearing and need to be able to read it. It’s better for them. But then other people who don’t have those conditions also benefit from the transcripts. And it also means we can Google search and find if we ever talked about the thing we’re thinking about talking about, because we probably did. So transcripts are good.
**Craig:** I love the fact that we have transcripts. I myself would vastly prefer to read through a transcript than listen to a pod… Oh, god, look what I just did to Dima. “Listen to a pod,” and then I cut off the word “podcast.” I’m now thinking about Dima all the time. Also, I get to say Dima is wonderful. And now Dima gets to transcribe “Dima is wonderful.” Thank you, Dima.
**John:** Good stuff. In Episode 637 we talked about gendered words in English. We had some feedback on that.
**Drew:** Adam Pineless wrote in, “Another interesting gendered word like fiancé or divorcé is blond, because blond for men is spelled without an E.”
**John:** That one I’m kind of willing to let go a bit, because it’s only when you’re using it as a noun that you do it that way. I get why it’s confusing for people to use it in English. It’s strange for us.
**Craig:** “Blonde” to me is actually in the same category as fiancé and divorcé, and that is French words that are gendered. “Blonde” is a French word. I was actually talking about this with Melissa the other day. People have basically stopped using “fiancé” with the single E to describe a male betrothed. Everyone just uses the two E’s now.
**John:** I see the opposite more often.
**Craig:** Oh, sorry. You’re right, you’re right. It’s the other way around. It’s that there’s only one E, right?
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** No one uses two E’s. Sorry. That’s exactly right. No one uses the two E’s. There was an interesting case where I thought about the word “née.” N-E-E we will see as born as.
**John:** Born as.
**Craig:** Typically, it was used for a woman who had taken her husband’s last name. Melissa is Melissa Mazin née Frye, and it’s N-E-E with the accent on the first E. But you never see “ne,” N-E. But now you can, now that we have marriage between men. Mike August could be Mike August ne, N-E, and then whatever his last name was. But I have a feeling that we’re never gonna see N-E.
**John:** I also haven’t heard people pronounce that aloud. But I bet there’s a whole generation of people who have seen that word but never pronounced it, and they’re gonna say née [nee], because we don’t know what to do with that thing.
**Craig:** Now we have a new thing that we need to… Look, maybe we lost the battle of begging the question, but we will not lose the battle over ne.
**John:** Of ne.
**Craig:** Never. Nay!
**John:** Never!
**Craig:** Nay, I say.
**John:** Craig, here’s a question for you. “She had blond hair.” Spell blond.
**Craig:** In that case, I would use not an E. I would go blond without an E.
**John:** I think that’s right. I think that most style guides will say that.
**Craig:** “She is a blonde,” I would use an E.
**John:** But should you even say “she is a blonde”?
**Craig:** Why not? “She is a redhead. She is a blonde. She is a brunette.” I have no problem with that. There’s a word for this. Synecdoche, is that it, where you take a part of what someone is and use it to describe the whole?
**John:** Charlie Kaufman could tell us that.
**Craig:** Synecdoche, I’m looking it up now. “A figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole.” I guess, yes, a blonde. Or a metonymy.
**John:** Fun. In Episode 635, you were talking about dialog and character voice, and we have feedback on that as well.
**Drew:** Matt Yang King writes, “I loved your discussion on character voice, but I noticed you guys were missing a huge resource. One of the major websites I use when wearing my acting hat is the International Dialects of English Archive. It’s an incredible asset for anyone who wants to know the flow and cadence of various different languages and how they’re spoken in English. Also, it’s hugely helpful in building a real, grounded character. Every person who speaks into the archives speaks from a common script, so that you learn how they pronounce similar vowels and consonants, and then they give a little talk on who they are.”
**Craig:** Wow.
**John:** You’re absolutely right. This is by Paul Meier. If you’re gonna do any accent work, you’re probably gonna do any accent work, you’re probably gonna pick up his book, Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen, which I was working through this last year when I was studying dialect and accents. Independently, I also learned how to write stuff in the IPA, which you’re gonna see in this book as well. Really, really useful.
You wouldn’t want to stop at this website. You should go beyond that and look at YouTube and other places. But it is really handy that they are all speaking through the same script. You could get a sense of, like, oh, what does this person from Glasgow, what does it sound like when they’re speaking versus this person from Northern Ireland. It really is useful on that level.
**Craig:** This site is really cool. Just looking through it, I picked Africa, and then I picked Cameroon. There are three different audio examples of people from Cameroon at different times – they even list the year – speaking English, so that you can zero in on accents that granularly, which I think is fantastic.
**John:** Let’s take a listen to the first of these examples here. This is Cameroon 1. It’s a 32-year-old man from Kumba, Cameroon.
**Man From Cameroon:** Well, here’s a story for you. Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who had been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory, so she was very happy to start a new job at a superb private practice in North Square near the Duke Street Tower.
**John:** Great. They’re gonna be reading through the same script. You heard him rolling his R’s. He had a trill on his R’s, which is really interesting.
**Craig:** There is a specific thing going on there that is a little bit surprising to me. We do hear this kind of generic African English dialect, which that doesn’t sound far off from it, but there are very specific things going on. I thought it would be a little bit more French, more French-ish, because it’s Cameroon. But the point is, this is a great website. You can go and listen to all these things and avoid either just being wrong or being generic.
**John:** The other thing I would recommend people take a listen to is Accent Tag, which is a series of YouTube videos. Basically, just follow the hashtag #accenttag, and it’s people who do read through a similar script, and then they talk about their lives a little bit. They’re reading through also how they pronounce certain words, which can be really funny just to hear how vastly different it is and sometimes how unaware they are about the choices that they’re making, because people say, “I don’t trill my R’s at all,” and of course they’re trilling every one of them.
**Craig:** I’m gonna start trilling my-
**John:** Trilling.
**Craig:** Tapping the R’s.
**John:** Little tap there. Great stuff. I encourage people to take a look at that. That is dialectsarchive.com.
**Craig:** Very cool.
**John:** Our main topic here, this was prompted by a couple different things that happened this past week. Before we hopped on the Zoom for D&D this week, we were talking with Kevin, our friend who was on Jeopardy. I wanted to know specifically, when he was ringing the buzzer, did he always know the answer to the question. Craig, what do you think? Did Kevin always know the answer as he buzzed in?
**Craig:** I’m gonna say no. I’m gonna say yes and no. I’m gonna say that there was a part of his brain that knew that he knew the answer before the answer appeared, and that was the part of the brain that was buzzing in. And then there was a second for the answer to actually make its way from one section of the brain to the other. How close am I?
**John:** I think that’s pretty close. He said he mostly knew the answer. But really, I think what was so fascinating about the conversation, it really came down to what does it even mean to know a thing. Are you buzzing because you know it or because you think you will know it in time? Kevin described situations where they record Jeopardy, and six months later it shows up on TV. He’s watching the episodes that he was in. A question would come up, and he wouldn’t know the answer, but then the Kevin who was on screen got the answer right.
**Craig:** Whoa.
**John:** What does it even mean to know the answer to something? It’s very situational sometimes. You’re in the moment and you know it in the moment, but you don’t know it beyond that. I liked that as one aspect of knowing a thing.
But then also, during the D&D game, a thing happened which often happens in D&D, which is last week you encountered a new creature that none of you ever had seen before. It’s a Kruthik, and none of you had any idea what the hell this thing was. You asked, “Can I do a nature check to see if I know what this thing is?” And you rolled and you failed. You had no idea what it was. But then this past week, you encountered a troll. And you all know what a troll is, but would your characters know what a troll was? Again, we’re rolling dice to see do your characters know what this thing is and what its unique disadvantages are or abilities are.
**Craig:** One of the things that DMs deal with – you’re DM-ing now, so you have to deal with it – is metagaming. We all know lots of stuff. You play lots of campaigns. You meet things. Since we’re not in a game right now, and I know a lot about D&D, when we encounter a troll, I, Craig, know that trolls regenerate health, unless they take acid or fire damage, in which case they don’t. But it’s really important then for fair play and for fun play to deny your character that knowledge. There’s no reason for a character that doesn’t know about trolls to think, “You know what I should do? I should throw fire at it.” But if you deal with a troll and you learn that, then yeah. We have to do the same thing when we’re writing.
**John:** Yeah, that’s the point.
**Craig:** We know everything. But what do our characters know, and what should they not know, and how did they learn it? And also, what’s the knowledge gap between what the audience knows about a character and what they know about themselves?
**John:** Yeah, it’s tough, and it’s really like, what is the theory of knowledge that is informing the author, the piece, and the characters inside the piece, and the audience? There’s all these different things you’re trying to balance. You have no choice but to acknowledge the meta-game behind it all, because the audience is aware of things, because they’re aware of the genre, they have a sense of this, and they also have a theory of mind about what the characters inside this story should know or should not know.
An example will be, I’ve seen things happen in movies where I as the audience know something, and suddenly this character knows this thing, but I know that they could not know that. There was no opportunity for them to have learned this fact. We’re willing to forgive that or it seems natural if some time has progressed. But there was never that moment. They never got that call from the other character telling them that thing, so how do they know that this thing is possible? Those are things that screenwriters are always, back of your mind, thinking about, wondering about. What do the characters know about what’s going on? Do they have a sense of what genre of movie that they’re in? These are all challenges.
**Craig:** The converse is also a problem. I see this frequently, where you think, “Why are you willfully not knowing something?” It’s helpful, of course, to put obstacles in front of your characters, but if they are willfully not aware of something that they should be aware of because of what you’ve been watching, it’s incredibly frustrating. Similarly, it’s frustrating when characters withhold knowledge from each other for no reason whatsoever, other than that it will deny a scene from happening. If characters should be sharing information with each other, then they should share the information.
I have a particular sore spot with characters saying the following cliched line: “I want to show you something.” “What?” “Just trust me.” And then they show them a thing that they could’ve just described or mentioned. They could’ve said, “By the way, you need to know that the dog next door has two heads.” “What?” “Yeah. Come on, follow me.” It’s a frustrating thing. As we often say, anything that makes the audience stop and notice that they’re in a movie is harming the illusion we are intending to create.
**John:** The other vector we have to consider is, is this character specifically well informed about a subject or in general, because if so, we need to signal that pretty early on, or else it’s gonna be really frustrating when they suddenly have information, like, “How did they know this? I didn’t know that they were a doctor. I didn’t know that they were this kind of thing.” Or if they’re specifically uninformed, I think you need to clue that in to the audience quickly.
A thing that occurred to me in the office yesterday is a character who doesn’t seem to know anything about dogs at all would be surprising. You say, “How old is your dog? How old do you think he is?” “I don’t know, 30.” That’s absurd. Any reasonable person should know that dogs do not live to be 30, but that could be a really good character moment, as long as we’ve established that it’s plausible this character is that dumb.
**Craig:** If a character does say something like that, everyone should stop and say, “What?” and then grill that person on their stupidity, their weird knowledge gap. But you get one of those. You don’t get multiples, unless the point of the character is that they are absolutely idiotic.
**John:** Drew brought up in the office yesterday a good corollary example, which is, in Top Gun: Maverick, Maverick is a Navy pilot, but he doesn’t know anything about boats, and so he’s on the sailboat and has no idea how to sail at all. That’s good. That’s funny. I get that. It’s surprising, and yet it made sense for the character, and it was a good moment in the story.
**Craig:** Yeah. Navy pilots fly, and they land on boats, but they don’t sail, so that’s reasonable. That is a reasonable thing. It’s also a kind of thing that maybe some people wouldn’t necessarily be aware of, because they think of the Navy as boats, boats, boats. But yeah, I’d buy that completely.
**John:** We’re coming up with characters who are gonna be in our story. We have to be thinking, okay, what do they know, what are their subject areas, and then within the story, how much information do they have that the audience also is right there with them and knows, versus they’re ahead of the audience or the audience is a little bit ahead of them. Finding that balance is really tough.
There’s movies where characters know a lot more than the audience. Gone Girl comes to mind, where there’s a whole con being played on the audience, which is very important. But also Civil War, which I just saw this last week and really, really liked a lot, the characters in that movie know a lot more than the movie will ever tell us about what’s actually going on in the world. For me, it worked, because they’re not gonna talk about that stuff, because everybody around them knows it, so there’s no reason for them to discuss it. That was something that worked for me about that movie is they know really what happened that brought us to the Civil War, even though we as the audience never will.
**Craig:** One of the worst phrases you type in a screenplay is “as you know.”
**John:** Oh, god.
**Craig:** If you know it, why are you saying it? There is an unspoken contract that there are things that we both know. Now, how we get that to the audience can be difficult. Let’s acknowledge that for a second. The reason that “as you know” came into being is because sometimes two characters who both know a thing need to impart that to the audience somehow.
**John:** Now, Craig, I just want to point out, you just “as you know”-ed me to do that.
**Craig:** As you know.
**John:** As you know, as a screenwriter, but now we have to share it with the audience.
**Craig:** We have to share it with the podcast audience, yes, as you know. Now, as we know… I like that. That’s fun. We meta “as we know”-ed.
How do we do it? How do we get that information across? There are some good old-fashioned tips and tricks. The easiest and most obvious is bring a third party in who doesn’t know. There’s also a version where someone is saying, “Look, I went through the normal thing. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It didn’t work,” so that part of the way they’re imparting that information to their friend is, “It’s obvious to both of us, but the reason I’m running it down is because the outcome isn’t what we expected.” You have to come up with ways that feel naturalistic to share that information.
**John:** Some cases, you will be able to just show it directly to the audience, just actually show the thing and cut away from the characters doing the thing and actually put that information out there so the audience directly knows the thing that the characters inside the world would know. That’s great when it works, but it may not be the right choice for your movie. Some movies cling very closely to their characters. The camera feels like it’s right over their shoulder the whole time, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to cut away to something else to give that piece of information. But other ones are jumping all over the place. If you’re doing The Big Short, you could jump all over the place, because that’s the style of the movie, and you can talk about a thing. You can talk directly to the audience about a thing if you want to, because that’s the rules you’ve established for your world.
**Craig:** Yes. And even inside The Big Short, before they would get to the fourth wall breaking, where people would explain what a derivative was, you had Steve Carell’s character sitting with somebody, and he’s saying, “Okay, explain this to me, because I’m a finance guy, but this is a very specialized thing. You’re saying that blah blah blah blah blah?” And the guy’s like, “Yeah, and in fact, we then take these things and we repackage them into derivatives of derivatives.” And he’s like, “Wait, what?” And then you cut to somebody explaining. But you do have a character that we’re invested in who is asking questions and revealing that there are gaps in his knowledge, which makes sense, given what that story was, that people were literally finding out as this was happening, that these, I think, going to call them weapons of mass financial destruction had been created.
**John:** We’re gonna go back to our probably most cliché phrase on this podcast: specificity. But I think you also look for what is the specific conversation that these characters would be having that would reveal to the audience the thing we need them to know but would actually be necessary for the conversation for them to be having to move forward to do the next thing. That’s actually moving the scene forward, but in the context of moving the scene forward, will also provide this explanation and give the audience the knowledge they need to have to go forward.
**Craig:** That’s right. We have to think about how we do this on a day-to-day basis. There are times where you might say to somebody, “I arrested this guy. I brought him in. What do you think happened next?” And then the other character says A, B, C, D, and E. And the first guy says, A, B, C, D, and then not E, weirdly, H, because he’s setting this person up to make the story interesting, and in doing so, there’s our package of information. But it’s natural. We just have to make sure we don’t do that lazy thing of people just dumping information at us. And similarly, we can’t do the lazy thing where people are missing information. We’ve talked about the cellphone problem. If they had the information, now what?
**John:** What should also be clear is that there’s times where you don’t need to see all the connections being done, because you feel like enough time has passed that it’s naturally going to happen. I think through Succession. In a given episode of Succession, sometimes they’re really tight and it’s almost real time, but sometimes we’re covering a period of a couple weeks, and then, yeah, those communications were had, but I didn’t see them. But I believe that Logan knows that this thing is happening. All those pieces were put together behind the scenes. If you trust in the storytelling enough, you’re not gonna worry about how did this person find out this thing, because they spoke it. It’s gonna get through.
**Craig:** I have a personal thing. I don’t know. It’s part of my style, maybe. I don’t know. Part of my voice. But my thing is that there are times when people need to explain things to other people, and the best way to go about it is to just do it, to embrace the active explanation. We do explain things to each other all the time, so it’s okay, as long as the characters are acknowledging that that’s what’s happening.
Part of the problem with an elegant exposition is that people try to make it elegant. But here’s the deal. It’s either don’t be elegant and just say, “I am now gonna explain something,” or be elegant and don’t enough notice that the explanation happened. But anywhere in the middle, lame. It just comes out lame.
I personally have no problem embracing explanations. If you look at Chernobyl or if you look at The Last of Us, you’ll see scenes all the time where people are just saying, “Can you explain what happened?” and someone says, “Yes, here’s my… ” Now, explaining things is its own art. You have to be interesting when you explain things. The people who are explaining things have to be good at telling a story. That’s important.
**John:** But Craig, the examples you’re making, like Chernobyl in particular, those explanations are germane, because those characters really would be explaining those things to the other people around them. They were actually necessary to do, so it doesn’t feel forced on. Where our concern is is when characters are explaining things that don’t need to be explained within context of the world, that they’re just there for the audience so that the audience can be up to speed. That’s the real challenge. That’s where you need to search for elegant ways to get that information out there.
**Craig:** You need to be elegant. You can’t always have somebody explaining something. But when you have information that is actually interesting, then just do it, just explain it.
**John:** Another thing I think is crucial about these explanation scenes, when it is a straightforward explanation, is it doesn’t mean that all conflict stops. There needs to be something else that’s happening and that’s not just we’re on all the same page together. There has to be some urgency that’s getting you through the scene. Otherwise, we’ll be informed but we’ll be bored.
**Craig:** Correct. The scene must have a beginning and an end. And the beginning is not as important as the ending. The ending of these scenes cannot simply be, “All right. Now I know.” The ending of the scene needs to be personal. It needs to have some sense of a relationship. And it needs to explain why the information we received is relevant not only from a plot point of view but from a personal point of view. It must come back to the human being. Otherwise, it just floats there as info.
**John:** Yeah. A show I liked a lot on Netflix this last year was The Diplomat. One of the things I enjoyed about it was that there were moments where you just had to explain things, but all the explanations came kind of in conflict, because there were competing ideas. You’re jostling for supremacy within them, and also a lot of interpersonal conflicts that were happening at the same time the explanations were coming out. And that made for good scene work. And it was a delight to see when that show was working so well.
**Craig:** I love it. Personally, I love when information is relayed, and I’m excited and interested. I love The Big Short. I don’t understand money. I still don’t understand money. But I loved learning. Even if I have forgotten, I don’t think I could explain it as well as I could have, say, an hour after I saw the movie the first time. But while I was watching it, I was fascinated by it.
When I watch shows of any genre where the information is revealed in fascinating ways and it seems like there’s craft and art to characters learning, explaining, and also when there’s a lovely and satisfying gap between what I know and what the character knows, whether it’s that I know more than the character knows about themselves, like, say, the movie In and Out, where we all know he’s gay from the start, but he just doesn’t get it yet, or when somebody knows way more than I do, like for instance, My Cousin Vinny. Marisa Tomei is on the stand, and she suddenly has this epiphany about the tire marks. And she’s like, “No. The defense’s argument is wrong.” Okay. She knows everything now. And Joe Pesci knows what she knows. And he’s like, “Really? Why do you think that?” And I’m like, “Okay, now they both know something.” And the gap between what they know and me not knowing is curiosity, and I’m leaning all the way forward knowing that I’m gonna be satisfied, which is wonderful.
**John:** Let’s circle back to the troll problem, where the audience is ahead of the characters, where the audience knows how trolls work and the characters inside the story don’t. There can be frustration from the audience, like, “You dummy. This is the rules. You don’t have this. You don’t understand how vampires work,” or whatever. There’s a fundamental sort of disconnect there. To me, the crucial thing here is you need to establish your characters well in the world well enough that the audience is on board with understanding what the characters could know and could not know and that they’re on board the ride and they’re willing to turn off that part of their brain that is aware of the genre and the rules around the genre.
**Craig:** It’s frustrating for us when we watch. It’s not necessary. There is a way to do it correctly. There are some television shows, I think because, specifically procedurals, they just don’t have the time sometimes. We’ve gotten more time as storytellers in television where you don’t have ad breaks. But good old-fashioned ad break television, like the kind you and I grew up with on the networks, they just didn’t have the time. They have to just dump the information out. It’s tricky. It’s also why you see procedurals that work in specified job areas are incredibly popular, because it allows them to say information that is specific, that we wouldn’t otherwise know. I don’t know necessarily why doctors are constantly explaining medicine to each other, but the fact that we don’t know any of it helps.
**John:** Yeah, it does help a lot. You just mentioned ad breaks, which segues naturally to our next topic, which is that we’ve talked on the show before about shows that were written without act breaks, like Chernobyl, but now they have ads inserted into them, and those ads were inserted kind of randomly. There’s no plan for it, because you didn’t plan for a moment where this ad would go, which was so different than how we used to do television and still do television on a broadcast model, which is that you have acts that build up to rising tension, and at this moment of great tension, fade to black, a commercial goes in, you come back out of the act break, pick things up again and move on. That was a way we wrote television for 50 years, and now we don’t tend to do that very often. We’ve talked to writers who were doing spec pilots, like, “Are you putting act breaks in? Are you not putting act breaks in?” That’s a choice you make.
This last week, I think it was Chris in our office, was talking about he was watching an old episode of The X-Files, which is a show that had act breaks in it. He was watching it on Prime. But they didn’t use the actual defined act breaks. They just inserted their ads kind of wherever, and it was really frustrating.
**Craig:** Yes. I know that some of the stuff that I do for HBO does get chopped up and ad-breaked in other countries or in other services. I try to just not think about it. Then again, as film writers, you and I have dealing with this our whole lives, because traditionally, movies would eventually sell to broadcast or cable, where they would be chopped up and ads would be shoved in.
**John:** Almost all the Bond movies I watched were on ABC, the Sunday before school started in the fall. I absolutely loved them, but they were full of random ad breaks.
**Craig:** Full of random ad breaks. Now, my One Cool Thing this week, I won’t give it away, because I don’t want to give the audience too much information, but it is a show that has been made for a premium streamer, and that streamer now has options. You can either watch ad-free or not ad-free. Even though I’m watching ad-free, there are moments where the shows just cuts to black, and then, boop, we’re into the next scene, and it’s very clear that the way they built it was like, “We are picking the ad breaks.” You won’t have to watch ads when you watch it ad-free. But you’re gonna see the moments where the ads would go. You just don’t have to sit there for 15 or 30 seconds.
**John:** But here is the question. Will those ads really go in those spots? Because that’s the issue. Are they keeping track of the metadata for where those things go? Because clearly, in X-Files, they were not. Oour own Drew Marquardt spent the afternoon yesterday looking through a bunch of shows to see which ones were actually inserting where the natural ad break would be and which ones were not looking for the act breaks at all. Drew, what did you find as you were scanning through stuff?
**Drew:** It was a very scientific process. Prime it seemed like would have an act break at 19 minutes no matter what and 32 and a half minutes no matter what. But things like FreeV, which is also an Amazon service, would put act breaks where they were supposed to go, for both shows that they didn’t produce or ones that they did, and Peacock seemed to be pretty good about it too.
**Craig:** I think that what’s going on is some sort of dictate that says ads must happen at a certain point or wherever, and we don’t care where the ads used to go. But when they are making their own shows, that dictate is certainly built in. There’s no chance that they’re making their own material with ad breaks that they’re gonna ignore. Those ad breaks are obviously designed by whatever algorithm runs the kingdom.
**John:** I hope we’ll have some listeners who write in who actually have first-hand experience with how this works on the other side and will break whatever NDAs they’re gonna be breaking. My guess is that for a show like The X-Files, produced by Fox, for Fox, I think, Amazon licenses it, they get the video file. I wonder if they are not getting special metadata about where the actual act breaks are, that they could slot those things in, and they’re just putting it wherever, or they’re getting that metadata and saying, “Screw it. We don’t care. Our own internal metrics show that it’s most effective for us to put these commercials here and here and here, regardless of what the original plan was for the show.”
**Craig:** I suspect it’s the latter. I remember my first internship in Hollywood was at Fox Network. When we would review the shows before they air, it was just clear. On the tape, every quarter inch, it would go to black, and then there was a second, and then it would come back. It’s pretty clear. I think that Amazon basically is like, “We can’t put as many ads in as network put in for whatever this medium tier is, and yes, our data says that people will deal with two ad breaks in this point and this point, and we’ll just shove them in there.”
**John:** Obviously, YouTube works that way. If you don’t pay for YouTube Premium, it’s just shoving in wherever they want to put it in. I didn’t watch Mad Men on its original run, but my recollection of people talking about it was Matthew Weiner didn’t write act breaks at all, and the commercials would just show up where they showed up.
**Craig:** It was on AMC. I didn’t watch it as it was airing either. I watched it after. So I don’t know the answer to that.
**John:** I don’t know what the right answer, the right choice is here. Clearly, we’re in this transitional, frustrating moment where you don’t know as a show creator how much you should be planning for where those act breaks are gonna be, where the ads are gonna go, or just ignore it, and the algorithm’s gonna figure it out. And even if you got an answer from your executive, is that gonna really hold true when people are watching two years from now.
**Craig:** I know that Max does have an ad-supported tier. No one has asked me. I know that much. Maybe they haven’t asked me because they know that I would be like, “Rah rah rah-”
**John:** “Rah rah rah.”
**Craig:** … and just be like, “Shove it anywhere. It doesn’t matter. You’re ruining it, so just ruin it however you want.” That is basically what I would say, so my guess is they just haven’t bothered asking.
**John:** I think maybe you could just start putting digital logos on characters’ clothes, and it’s like NASCAR.
**Craig:** I don’t know if this is real or not, but it was making the rounds on social media. It was an old broadcast of Star Wars. It was in, I think, Peru perhaps. They didn’t want to stop the show to do ads. So instead, when Obi-Wan reaches into his little footlocker to get Darth Vader’s lightsaber to give to Luke Skywalker, they just stop and cut to a cooler being opened with a bunch of beer in it, and they do a little beer ad. And then they go right back to him handing him the lightsaber, which is kind of incredible and horrible.
**John:** Apparently, it was real.
**Craig:** Oh my goodness. Really?
**John:** We’ll find a link to the story about it.
**Craig:** Incredible. It’s terrible, but also hysterical.
**John:** Yeah, it’s good stuff. Let’s try to answer some listener questions. Drew, what do you have for us?
**Drew:** Eerie Resemblance writes, “So a film recently came out featuring the same job as the industry I’m in and, arguably, what I do within that industry. The main character was also a woman in my industry, which is a big deal because we are still under-represented. Someone from the film reached out and invited some women from our field to watch a private screening about two months before the release. Turns out the main character and I share a lot of commonalities, including a very similar name, we work from the same company, and we are even from the same state. Also, I focus on the same issues as this main character was.
“I was able to give feedback to the people contracted to show us the film. They said they would pass it on. But I’ve listened to y’all’s podcast long enough to know that two months before release is zero time to change anything or really take notes. I’m wondering if filmmakers actually take any of these notes when they do stuff like this, or was this just checking the box because we are three women who are in the same industry as the main character? And secondly, as I mentioned, the main character’s coincidences with me were eerie. But I’m giving the writer of the benefit of the doubt that it was just three crazy coincidences, and I found it kind of funny.
“But my question is, do y’all think about the consequences of creating a character, especially in a story that’s highly traumatic, who’s very close to a real person? Obviously, you can’t worry about that all the time, but are there ethical considerations to think about when it comes to your research and how that character may psychologically affect that person or a small group of people that they’re based off of in real life. I’m actually really glad that I’ve been listening to this podcast before seeing this film, because I think if I hadn’t been, the movie would’ve messed with me a lot more.”
**John:** So many good questions in here and issues that are brought up. I want to start first with what was the purpose of that screening, Craig. Why do you think she and the other people who do what her job is were invited to see that early screening?
**Craig:** This feels like manipulative PR move. Eerie Resemblance, your gut is correct. If the movie is about to come out in two months, this is box checking. They’re not gonna be changing anything, unless there’s some very simple thing an ADR line would address. Otherwise, no, they’re looking basically for cover, to say, oh, we screened it for all these people, and they really enjoyed it. This feels like CYA stuff to me.
**John:** I think their logic was probably – let’s say there’s 10 people who might have an opinion about this specific thing. If the movie comes out and they react really negatively to it, we’re gonna have to deal with that. But if we can sort of preempt that by showing it to them and getting them on our side to some degree, that’s gonna help them out. And so that’s probably why they were bringing you in.
**Craig:** Yeah, I think it’s preemptive. Now, the other question is an interesting one. The fact is that, just as the birthday paradox, if you have, I think, 23 people, there’s more than a 50 percent chance that one of those people will have your exact same birthday. This is gonna happen.
Eerie, the name was sort of close to your name. They were from the same state. They work for the same company. Once you’re working for the same company, the odds are you might be from a state like the one that the company’s in. Lots of names are similar. It was probably not intentional. In fact, it’s actually quite annoying how fussy lawyers can be when they say, “Oh, this is actually too close to this person.” Screenwriters and filmmakers are smart enough to know to not just try and duplicate another human into their script. They’re aware that there’s a legal problem on the other side.
**John:** We can be more specific about that. At some point in the development process, the screenwriter’s gonna have to sign something that says, “These are not based on real people.” There’s gonna be some kind of contractor sign that’s making that clear. Or if they are, you’re gonna have to go through a lot more scrutiny on that. You’ve dealt with that in some of the stuff you worked on.
In terms of names, that becomes a thing. One of the clearance reports they’re going through is they’re gonna look for the names of the characters in your story and the people who actually do that job in the real world. And this could’ve been flagged. This could’ve been a thing that was a concern. It’s not your exact name. We know a little more of the details. And it didn’t set off their alarm bells. But there have been times where I’ve had to change characters’ names because it was too similar to an actual real person who existed in the world.
**Craig:** The thing about names is, if you name somebody Cassie, that is possibly close to Cathy, Catie, Cara, Carrie, Cass, Cat. Names don’t really mean much. If it’s not your name, it’s not your name. Even if it’s your first name and not your last name – and it wouldn’t be your first and last name – it just doesn’t really matter.
The issue is, do we think about the consequences of creating a character who’s very close to a real person? I gotta be honest with you. No, because we’re trying not. The fact is, we’re not trying to be close to a real person, or we’re saying we are doing a dramatization of a real person. If we’re dramatizing a real person, then they’re out there, and they can complain, or maybe not. Maybe we bought the life rights. Maybe we haven’t. We’ll be accountable to that.
But if we’re creating a fictional character that does a job in a certain way for a certain company, no, we’re not thinking, “Oh, what if there happens to be somebody that has a similar name that does this and works for that same company? What will the psychological impact be on that person?” No, I don’t think we do. Because what can we do, other than confining ourselves, out of hyper concern, because somebody at some point is gonna say, “Oh, that reminds me of me.” We’re writing people that are supposed to remind you of real human beings, just not specific ones.
**John:** I would say I mostly agree with you. I think there are situations where even if you’re not thinking about the specific individual, you’re thinking about the people who are in that position and how the existence of your movie or TV show might negatively impact their ability to do the work they’re doing. Let’s say your show involved some NGO workers in Malawi and South Africa and portrayed them in a very negative light. That could be true, and it could be absolutely accurate within the course of your movie, but it could also make it very difficult for the people who are really doing that work to not be kind of painted by that brush, not in a legally difficult way, but in a… I don’t know. I think there’s some moral and ethical considerations you’d have there about are you making their ability to do their humanitarian work more difficult by your portrayal.
**Craig:** If you’re portraying an organization that is clearly meant to be like another organization, and you are suggesting that that organization, even if it’s fictional in your movie, is corrupt or whatever, then yes, you can impact an organization. You have ethical obligations, I think, as a screenwriter.
One of the things that I was worried about when I did Chernobyl was not coming off as an anti-nuclear-power show. That was not the purpose. In fact, it was important for me that the main character explained very clearly the difference between all of the nuclear reactors in the West and the one that they were using in Chernobyl, which was just wildly different and didn’t have a containment building around it, etc., because the fact is I support nuclear power. I don’t think the lesson there is no nuclear power. I think nuclear power is kind of essential if we’re gonna avoid continuing climate crisis. But I’ve said so. I made that as open of an opinion as I could. I still got a whole lot of crap from paid nuclear industry lobbyists who were super cranky. I don’t care about them. That’s their job. They’re paid to be cranky. But I felt like I fulfilled my obligation as a creator to at least not be wildly misunderstood. Yes, we do have to think about that. But an individual’s name, no. Somebody somewhere is gonna say, “Oh, that reminds me of me,” and there’s nothing we can do about that.
**John:** Yeah, sounds good. Let’s try one more question.
**Drew:** John in LA writes, “About four months ago, I met a producer who has worked in development at several big companies. Last month, she sent me a young adult novel that I really responded to. We’ve emailed and called several times about adaptation ideas. At the end of our last call, I asked her if she’d hire me to adapt the novel in full. She said yes and told me to, quote, start thinking about my contract. I’m not in the WGA. She has a new production company that is not yet a Guild signatory. Her intention is to become a signatory. Is it appropriate for me to ask if she’ll do the Guild paperwork so I can get a fair deal? I feel awkward making that ask.”
**John:** You should not feel awkward.
**Craig:** No.
**John:** This producer has worked in Hollywood, has worked in this industry. Since their production company that’s not yet a signatory but is intended to become a signatory, guess what? They can become a signatory with your project. You can break that seal. Hurrah.
**Craig:** I’m a little nervous here, John in LA, who’s writing about this, because the producer says her intention is to become a signatory. That’s a little nerve-wracking. Let’s make this easy for you. You shouldn’t have to ask anything, nor should you be thinking about your contract. Not only are you not in the WGA; you’re not a lawyer. What you need is a lawyer, and the lawyer can do all of this. Here’s the thing you need to be aware of, John in LA. It’s not as simple as saying, “I’m hiring a WGA writer, and I’m hiring them under a WGA deal because I’m a signatory.”
To be a signatory to the Writers Guild, you need to prove a certain amount of financial security, such that you demonstrate that you are able to meet your obligations as a signatory, specifically paying out residuals. You can’t just say, “I’m a producer, and I’m gonna hire a WGA writer. Just give me some boilerplate WGA stuff and I’ll sign the thing and I’ll be a signatory.” It’s not that simple. It’s not that simple, because people have done that in the past and then just not paid.
**John:** Yeah, reneged on it.
**Craig:** Right, not fulfilled their obligations. You need a lawyer. The good news is she’s saying she wants to hire you. She’s saying she wants to be a signatory. The lawyer will get paid therefore. So you should find one that’s willing to paper this for you, and they can have that discussion with them. It’s as simple as that. If her intention is to become a signatory, she should begin doing so. That’s on her.
**John:** It’s not an onerous process to become a signatory. I had to do it for my movie. It’s fine.
**Craig:** Exactly. They ask you a bunch of questions. You show them some evidence. You sign a piece of paper. Voila.
**John:** Exactly, because ultimately, when it comes to residuals and paying out stuff down the road, you’re basically having to guarantee that any future contracts that the thing is sold to will take care of the residual. It’s doable, and so this person can do it. It’s fine.
**Craig:** It is fine and is doable. They just need to do it. If that’s her intention, she should convert her intention into reality, and your lawyer should be thinking about your contract, not you. You don’t do that.
**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things this week. First off, it’s a Patreon but also a website called tacticalmap.com. For the DM-ing I’m doing right now for our group, we’re using Roll20, which we’ve talked about, which is basically a virtual tabletop that we’re all looking at the same thing. You need maps for that. Some really good maps I found that are inexpensive online are at tacticalmap.com. It’s a guy who just develops some really beautiful top-down maps of different scenarios. We have a cliffhanger going on right now where there’s a troll attack. There’s this great fort in the mountains. It was perfect. I got this map, threw it in there, put some trolls in there. We’ve got a party. I like tacticalmap.com. You can find these maps.
Then my other one is a game that I wish we had played with you, Craig, while you were in town, because you would absolutely love this. It’s called Letter Jam. The concept behind this is, it’s a cooperative word game where you have a bunch of players around the table. Each of them has a letter on a stand in front of them, but they can’t see their own letter. They’re trying to work together to get through all of the words that are in front of them. They could say, “I can make a four-letter word using four player letters and this wildcard.” Then you’re going around the table. It’s who can make the biggest word and what that is, but without ever revealing that word. Then you are taking those clues on your little clue sheet, trying to figure out, like, what the hell is the letter in front of me. Its really smartly done.
**Craig:** I see, I see. People are saying, “I can make this word.” You’re like, “Okay, that person said they can make this word. This person said they can make this word.” I’m learning who maybe has what letter-
**John:** Exactly.
**Craig:** … and who maybe doesn’t have what letter. That’s interesting.
**John:** That person never says what that word is, but instead, they’re putting little tokens in front of different people’s spaces to show, this is letter 1, 2, 3. You can see the other stuff. You can never see what yours is. It’s really smartly done.
**Craig:** Sort of like Cluedo but with letters. I like it. That sounds like a fun time.
**John:** Letter Jam is a Czech game, but you can find it on Amazon and other places. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that.
**Craig:** Fantastic. The Czechs make excellent games, like Codenames.
**John:** Like Codenames. The same company that makes Codenames.
**Craig:** Oh, there you go. They’re great. My One Cool Thing this week is the television show Fallout. Now you have the information. Fallout on Amazon.
**John:** On Prime.
**Craig:** On Prime. I loved it. I loved it from start to finish. It was so well done, I thought. A lot of the reviews for it would talk about The Last of Us and video game adaptations, and I wish they wouldn’t, because to me, it’s taking away, first of all, from what those folks did at Fallout, and saying, “Oh, this one’s also a video game.” It’s like, “Okay, and these two movies were both adapted from books. Let’s compare those.” There’s no point. It doesn’t matter. It’s a wildly different show, different tone.
I played Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4, and I’m just a fan, a Fallout fan. I thought that they did a terrific job of adapting that in the way it should’ve been adapted. It was just a fun watch. It was well acted. Walt Goggins is terrific in it. It might not be for everyone. It’s an overtly kind of gory, kind of like that comedy gore, which is true to the game. I thought it was great. I just loved it from start to finish. They’ve been renewed for Season 2. Not at all surprised to see that. I look forward to that, I assume, in… It’s a massive show. I know what it takes to make a show this size. I think they probably are bigger, budget-wise, I think. I hope so, based on what I saw. It was like, oh my god, this is insane.
**John:** But I saw they got their California tax incentive for Season 2, so they’ll be here, so that’ll be great.
**Craig:** Maybe I’ll come visit the set if they invite me. I’m a fan. I really enjoyed the show a lot.
**John:** That’s great to hear. It feels like the kind of show that my husband will not want to watch, so I think while he’s gone this weekend, I will burn through it myself.
**Craig:** Now, I will say-
**John:** You still would want to-
**Craig:** You know what I’m gonna say.
**John:** Yeah, you want it to be a weekly show.
**Craig:** Not only do I want it to be a weekly show. This, of all shows-
**John:** Of all shows should’ve been.
**Craig:** … should’ve been a weekly show. Hey, Jeff Bezos, I know you listen to our show. He does not. That’s just stupid. I don’t know how else to put it. I wish there were a different way.
**John:** He doesn’t even run Amazon Prime Video, but still, yeah.
**Craig:** I don’t know who does. The most polite way I can say it is, it’s just fully stupid, because that show-
**John:** The footprint is smaller than it should be.
**Craig:** It’s so much smaller than it should be, and that show is such a “oh my god, I can’t wait to see what happens next” show, which is why you should make them wait. Make them wait a week. Then with, I think it’s eight episodes, you’d have a cultural conversation over two months.
I’ll just keep pointing over to Shogun, which has one more episode to go. Tuesday, when this episode airs, that night will be the finale, the finale, the finale of Shogun. People have been talking about it for months, because it goes one a week via Hulu.
There’s no reason for Fallout to be all at once. It just felt wasteful, like, I’m gonna cook you a week’s worth of food, and then you just throw it after, because you consumed it all too much. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to maximize the discussion around something as good as Fallout that is so watchable and addictible – addictive.
**John:** Addictive.
**Craig:** Addictive. I said “addictible.” That’s not a word.
**John:** Addictible, yeah. It could be.
**Craig:** It shouldn’t be.
**John:** The kids will make it a word.
**Craig:** Damn kids.
**John:** Damn kids. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.
**Craig:** Is it?
**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Craig:** Oh, dear.
**John:** Our outro this week is by Nica Brooke. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re fantastic. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on what you should do when you meet a famous person.
**Craig:** Oh, I thought you were gonna say what you should do when you get lots of emails from English people complaining.
**John:** You can send those emails to ask@johnaugust.com.
**Craig:** Ask.
**John:** Great.
**Craig:** Ask@johnaugust.com.
**John:** Ask@johnaugust.com. Thank you, Craig.
**Craig:** Thank you.
**John:** Thank you, Drew.
**Drew:** Thanks, guys.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Craig, let’s talk through what a person should do when they meet a famous person. And by what you should do meeting a famous person, I don’t mean you or me, who actually have different contexts, but you’re an ordinary person. You meet a famous person. Let’s talk through the different contexts in which this might happen. First off, you were called into a meeting with a famous person, a famous actor, a famous director, producer, who cares. How do you acknowledge or not acknowledge the fame differential between you and that famous person?
**Craig:** In the context of a professional meeting, you want to acknowledge it as little as possible, because you don’t want to seem like you don’t belong in the room. The tried and true method is to simply say, “I’m such a fan. It’s so lovely to meet you.” I do that with actors that I cast in the show that are famous and have done lots of things. It’s 99 percent of the time exactly true. And beyond that, you don’t want to go too much further, because at that point, you’re putting yourself in fan box as opposed to collaborator box.
**John:** 100 percent. I had a meeting with Henry Cavill. He’s so charming and just so incredibly handsome, but if I were to acknowledge too much, like, oh, this famous person is two feet away from me, that’s not gonna be useful for the meeting. That’s just noise and buzz and it’s not on topic. Address it just the way Craig said. “Such a fan. It’s really good to meet you. I really liked this thing.” You can talk about other stuff. But don’t talk about, like, “What’s it like being famous?”
**Craig:** They don’t necessarily want to listen to that. Hopefully, if it’s a professional context, they’re also familiar with you and some of the things you’ve done. There may be a polite exchange of, “I really love this. I really like this.” The other thing that you don’t want to do in a professional context is try.
This is pretty common. For any human being, when you meet somebody famous, there’s gonna be a natural instinct to try. You’re gonna want to impress them. You’re gonna want to make them laugh. You’re gonna want to make them like you. You’re gonna want them to be your friend, because they’re famous and they have this distortion field around them that’s so fascinating. Don’t do that, because what will end up happening is either faceplanting or just inauthenticity. It’s a bit sweaty. The hardest advice and the most common advice is to just be yourself. Unfortunately, in this situation, you must just be yourself.
**John:** I would say don’t try to match their energy, their accent, because again, they have a gravitational pull sometimes, and it can be really natural to do that. No, you’re there to be yourself and to do your thing. Don’t try to get there.
I had an actor camp coming in. I was gonna come in to do a rewrite on a project, and he was just bouncing off the walls. I didn’t react to how hyper he was. I was just back to focus on, like, “This is what I want to do. This is how we can do this. I hear why that’s important to you, and here’s a way we can achieve that.” You can validate all you want, but don’t try to match them at their energy, because that’s not your job.
**Craig:** It’s not. Also, don’t give away your authority. You’re in the room for a reason. You know something. You do a job they don’t do. You have value. Don’t give it away. You don’t have to be a pompous jerk about it. You don’t have to be arrogant. But it’s all right for you to have opinions. It’s all right for you to say, “Yes. However, one of the things I’ve learned is blah.” You are allowed to be valuable. You’re not there simply to go, “Oh my god, that’s so great. Oh my god, you’re so awesome. Oh my god, everything you say is right.” It’s not. It’s not. They’re just people. They’re just people, especially in that context. You must people-ify these individuals that prior to that meeting were godlike to you because they were on screen.
**John:** Back in the time when you and me both used to do more emergency work or coming in to help out on troubled things, I really felt like a lot of times the reason I got hired is I could survive in those rooms, that I could actually do my job in the presence of just a lot of chaotic energy and big egos and things. I could navigate my way through that. You get better at that by just meeting more famous, powerful people and not being swept away by them.
**Craig:** Correct. There’s another skill involved in those situations where you need to make your way through a meeting with that person, giving them some kind of comfort, and then separately talking with the adults and saying, “Okay. Now, what do we need, and how much of that do you want?” Navigating that is a very difficult thing to do. But it is important, because ultimately, a lot of these famous people need to be happy. If it’s fixit stuff, it’s fair to say no one’s happy. Everyone is feeling wanting. How do you satisfy everybody somehow?
Look, you can piss off the head of a studio. They can stop talking to you for three weeks. But if you piss off – I don’t know, I’m just gonna pick somebody. You’ve come in to fix a Thor movie and you’ve pissed off Chris Hemsworth, you’re fired, because he’s the one who’s showing up on screen. You can’t lose that piece. That’s the additional political power that these folks have just by dint of the job they do.
**John:** Let’s talk a different context. It’s not a meeting, but you just saw their show, you saw their movie, or you’re backstage at their theater performance. How do you interact with that person in those moments?
**Craig:** Keep it short. Keep it simple. And keep your expectations to zero. Your expectations should simply be shake their hand, tell them how great they did, say one quick thing. If you want a photo, they’re so used to that. And always ask, “Is it okay if I take a picture with you?” They’ll be happy to take a picture with you, because most of the time, backstage is when that’s supposed to happen. That’s sort of the deal. And also, it means this interaction is about to end.
You and I have had these. We’re not famous-famous, but people know us from the things we do and from this podcast. When there is, either it’s at a live show or let’s say you’re just at a restaurant and somebody notices you and they are a big fan of you, when they say, “Can I get a photo?” in my mind I’m like, A, yes, and B, we have concluded this interaction and I can go back to whatever I’m doing. That’s a good thing. If you go too long, I don’t know, more than 15, 20 seconds, it becomes an imposition.
**John:** I would differentiate the backstage of the show versus out at a restaurant. If you can find a moment in a public space where you feel like you can grab the person without breaking their world, that’s great, but I’d say don’t – I don’t know, I don’t want to blanket recommendation to never come up to the table, but kind of never come up to the table.
**Craig:** I wouldn’t say come up to the table. If they’re having dinner, leave them be. But when they’re leaving-
**John:** Waiting for the valet, waiting for [crosstalk 01:05:57].
**Craig:** … waiting for the valet, those are perfectly fine moments, because the other thing is, if you just imagine yourself in their shoes, if you’re in the middle of dinner, you’re in the middle. That means somebody comes up, talks to you, goes back and sits down, and now they’re over there, and now you’re aware that they’re there. Other people might take this as an opportunity for them to come up. Leave famous people alone when they’re clearly in the middle of conversations, dinner, etc., working. But when it is a little breather moment, like leaving, then sure. Just always be polite if you can.
**John:** This last week after seeing Civil War, I was walking back to the car, and a listener of the podcast stopped me to say, “Oh hey, I really liked the show.” That was great. It was lovely. It was a brief conversation. Completely 100 percent appropriate.
**Craig:** Oh, of course. Look, there are actors who are infamous for being super grouchy about this. I don’t begrudge them their grouchiness. It’s just like, hey, did no one tell you that being famous would mean you’d be famous? Most famous people I know are perfectly fine and gracious with those interactions. There are ways that they mitigate some of these things.
Every now and then, I’ll go catch a Dodger game with Jason Bateman. When it’s time to leave the game, nobody walks faster and with more purpose than Jason Bateman leaving Dodger Stadium. It’s because there are sometimes upwards of 50,000 people there. At least, I don’t know, 30 percent of them are like, “That’s Jason Bateman.” If you’re walking real fast, people will go like, “Oh, Jason.” He’s like, “Hey,” and then he keeps walking, and so there’s no chance to get stopped and mobbed. That’s reasonable. But if somebody were to walk over to him when he’s sitting there and say, “Hey, my son’s a big fan. Would you sign this?” yeah, of course.
**John:** Dodgers Stadium, the equivalent for us is Austin during the film festival, where I do need to walk pretty quickly and with laser-focused eyes, because otherwise I just won’t ever make it to my destination.
**Craig:** There was one year, I think it was the last time I was in Austin, I got off the plane. I landed in Austin, got off the plane, emerged from the jetway into the airport, and within three seconds, I heard someone say my name to another person. I was like, “Ah, shit.” The thing is, listen, of course, it’s a nice thing when people know you and like you. But if you feel like, uh-oh, it’s gonna be a lot of this, it does become a little bit like… I’m not built for it necessarily. I’m always nice. I’m never a jerk, ever, ever, ever. But if somebody could say, “Hey, here’s a potion you could drink when you’re at the Austin Film Festival and you’ll be invisible for the next three hours,” oh my god, I would pay a lot.
**John:** Love it.
**Craig:** I’d pay money.
**John:** Another context, a social event. Actually, there’s two different levels of this. There’s a social event which is the bigger social event, where there’s a lot of people mingling around, it’s a cocktail-y party kind of thing, or an after-screening kind of thing, where there’s a famous person there and you’re kind of introduced. Do you acknowledge how famous the other person is? A lot of it, you can do the – it’s like a meeting thing, where it’s just like, “I love doing this thing.” But other times, it can be weird. You’re folded into a conversation with somebody who’s much more famous. Do I acknowledge, like, “Oh my god, you’re Amy Poehler.”
**Craig:** This is an example of a moment like that that I had. Normally, when I walk away from moments like that, I think to myself, I screwed it up. In this one, I thought, “Nailed it,” because it was so honest. I was at the Golden Globes. It was before the show started. I was talking to Kevin Huvane, one of the guys that runs CAA, and we were by the bathrooms. And he said, “Oh, I’m waiting here for Meryl Streep.” I was like, “Oh my god.” He’s like, “You want to meet her?” I’m like, “Meryl Streep? I would love to meet her.” She came out. He’s like, “Oh, Meryl, this is Craig Mazin.” I shook her hand. This is what I did. I went, “You know.” And she said, “I know.” I was like, okay, well, there you go, because she’s heard it a billion times. I didn’t want to say it all to her, but also, I wanted her to know, like, “I love you and I love everything you’re in and you’re amazing. You’re the greatest actor of your generation. Here’s the whole thing.” I think I could boil it down to just, you are aware of what’s happening in my brain. She was so nice and gracious about it.
**John:** That’s great.
**Craig:** It was the perfect length. It was a good old-fashioned 15-second chitchat, and that was the end of that.
**John:** What’s great about that example is Kevin Huvane could be the hinge that introduced the two of you, and that makes things much more natural. If she was 10 feet away, would you have gone up to say anything?
**Craig:** Oh my gosh. Now I’ll tell you when I blew it. This is so long ago. This was like 1992. I was with a friend. Is Johnny Rockets still there on La Cienega?
**John:** No, it’s not, alas.
**Craig:** It was an old burger joint across from the Beverly Center. We were there. It was, I don’t know, 8:00 p.m. or something sort of late. My friend – and we were sitting outside – he goes, “Look who’s over there. It’s Seinfeld.” It was Jerry Seinfeld. He was talking to someone else. They were having dinner. I was like, “Oh my god, oh my god, Jerry Seinfeld.” When we were done, we’re walking by, and I was like, “I’m not gonna do it. I’m not gonna say anything.” I had already passed him by two steps when I just was like, “No, I must.” I turned around and then went back towards him. I’m sure he thought, like, “Oh shit, I’m getting assassinated.” I was just like, “Oh, hi. Just a big fan.” He was like, “Oh, great.” Then I walked away. My friend was like, “That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. He must’ve shit his pants, because you looked like you were coming back to throw a punch at him.” But I was so nervous and awkward about it.
That said, sometimes – and you’ve probably felt this, John, maybe at Austin, where people come up to you and you can see how nervous they are to talk to you. It’s adorable, actually. It’s kind of sweet.
**John:** You immediately do the thing to put them at ease and make you feel okay about the whole thing.
**Craig:** Exactly. Everybody has these moments with famous people where they just fall apart, forget themselves, regress to childhood, feel like an idiot. That’s also fine and normal. If you can see that they’re like eh, just thank them for meeting them and leave. Don’t push it. I’m sorry, Jerry Seinfeld. I’ve never met him since. I’ve never met him. We’ve talked to Julia Louis-Dreyfus on our show, and I know Jason Alexander. These are lovely people. I’m at a different time in my life. I’m very comfortable around these people. But I still feel like if I were to meet Jerry Seinfeld today, I would have to say, “I need to take you back to 1992 and apologize.”
**John:** Example just from this last week. We were at the WGA Awards. Craig, congratulations on your WGA Award-
**Craig:** Oh, thank you.
**John:** … for Best New Series, which is terrific. At the after-party thing, Quinta Brunson was like three feet away from me, talking with other people. And I was talking with other people. But I didn’t know whether to say hi to Quinta, because she came on the podcast, but it was just a one-time thing. I don’t know that she really remembers who I am out of this context. Of course, there’s a disparity, because she’s just much more famous. I know her because she’s a very successful creator and star of a thing. I did not end up saying hi, and I had an opportunity, because a friend of mine was talking with her, and I could’ve worked my way back in, but you don’t always have to take advantage of those opportunities.
**Craig:** No.
**John:** Nothing good would’ve happened.
**Craig:** If you have nothing to say… I had met Quinta before, through Natasha Lyonne. Then we had her on the show. Now we sort of know each other. Melissa and I were both just wiped out, so we just went home. But if I had gone to that party and I had seen Quinta there, my guess is I probably would’ve just waved and then just kept going, because I don’t have anything specifically to say other than, “Hey, we know each other.”
**John:** Exactly.
**Craig:** Yes, and?
**John:** Yeah. There’s that. Craig, as a famous person I get to do a podcast with every week, always a pleasure.
**Craig:** Famous, quote unquote.
**John:** Quote unquote, famous.
**Craig:** Thanks, John.
**John:** Thanks. Bye.
Links:
* [Do I Sound Gay? Documentary](https://www.doisoundgay.com/)
* [International Dialects of English Archive](https://www.dialectsarchive.com/)
* [Accent Tag on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=accent+tag)
* [Chilean beer ads in Star Wars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSgMWAi9YPA)
* [Letter Jam](https://czechgames.com/for-press/lj.html)
* [TacticalMap](https://tactical-map.com/)
* [Fallout](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0CN4HV16N/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r) on Prime Video
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nica Brooke ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/641standard.mp3).