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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/holiday-live-show-2019).

**John August:** Today’s episode of Scriptnotes contains some explicit language. Also, for this live show we have three guests, one of whom uses sign language. So you’ll be hearing the voice of her interpreter. It will make sense in context, I promise. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** And my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is the Holiday Live Show 2019 for Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, tell the listeners at home where we are.

**Craig:** We are currently recording live in Hollywood – I was about to say that, live in Hollywood – live in Hollywood at the LA Film School.

**John:** It’s nice. So we do this benefit every year for the Writers Guild Foundation which is a fantastic foundation which does a lot of great work throughout the year. A question though for the folks here in this audience. It’s a very packed house. Do we have any assistants in the house? Oh my god, look at all those hands going up. That’s really nice.

**Craig:** Why aren’t you at work?

**John:** So, we have heard from a ton of assistants over this last couple of months, and so it’s so great to see so many folks here.

A tiny bit of news happened this past week. Verve, the agency, stepped up and decided to pay its assistants more, which is great. We are always happy to congratulate the folks who are doing better, so we don’t have to chastise the folks who are doing worse.

**Craig:** Yes. Although, well, I actually love that.

**John:** Because they’re not a bad guy.

**Craig:** I feel like that’s not the last.

**John:** I hope it’s not the last.

**Craig:** Of the important organizations that employ assistants.

**John:** Absolutely. So, hopefully we’ll be also applauding the second, the third, the fourth, and the 15th places that do step up and start paying assistants better. It’s certainly a goal for 2020.

**Craig:** And then we collect a little piece, just a little taste. Whatever your increase is, just, you know.

**John:** Is that called a Vig? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** A little something.

**John:** A little something.

**Craig:** You know, wet my beak.

**John:** It works out. Now, Craig, while we’re talking numbers, I think it’s important at the end of the year for us to sort of review our numbers and really take a look at where we’re at and sort of where we’ve been and where we’re coming to. So let’s take a quick look at the numbers here.

**Craig:** Statistics.

**John:** Statistics. So Scriptnotes, where are we at in terms of the numbers? You’re the guy who crunches the numbers, so tell us.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, I’ve worked real hard on this. We are currently at 430 episodes of Scriptnotes.

**John:** Nice. That’s good.

**Craig:** Yes. For which I have been paid zero dollars.

**John:** Not a cent.

**Craig:** We have every week an average of 80,000 listeners.

**John:** 80,000 listeners across the world.

**Craig:** 80,000.

**John:** We have listeners here from Germany, which is awesome.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Our staff is you, it’s me, it’s Megana, our producer, and it’s Matthew our editor.

**John:** Yeah, that’s good. Every week that’s what we get it done with, four people.

**Craig:** Although I do notice a former staff person here.

**John:** Aw, Stuart Friedel is here.

**Craig:** Stuart. You know, we used to talk about the Stuart Special, but it’s our Special Stuart.

Every week we receive on average 103 emails.

**John:** That’s a lot of emails. Megana is reading a lot of emails. So thank you for sending in–

**Craig:** 99 of them are stupid, but man, those four. Whew.

**John:** Some of them are good emails.

**Craig:** We get some winners. And, of course, we continue to provide transcripts for every single episode.

**John:** Every single episode. So transcripts are a way for people who can’t listen to the show to experience the show. Also it lets me Google to see how often we’ve mentioned Kevin Feige on the show, which is a ton.

**Craig:** Yeah. Weirdly. Mostly critical, so we’ll get into it.

**John:** Yeah. Now.

**Craig:** Because I want to commit career suicide.

**John:** That’s a good idea. All right, so last year at this show we were talking – the big thing was about all the mergers, so we had Disney and 20th Century Fox was merging. That was a big, god, remember that?

**Craig:** I do. For sure. That was crazy.

**John:** That happened. We had Comcast and AT&T.

**Craig:** Wait, I thought AT&T was Warner Bros?

**John:** Oh, I did make that wrong. Somebody else was buying out – it’s so confusing.

**Craig:** That’s Warner Bros.

**John:** Who owns who now?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** That’s the thing. We don’t know who owns who.

**Craig:** I’m pretty sure that that Death Star owns Bugs Bunny.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** So I got a little freaked out this show last year because I was worried like should we merge with somebody, because we could just be swallowed. So I was thinking we could merge with Pod Save America. I mean, that feels like a good, safe choice.

**Craig:** It’s a good show.

**John:** S-Town. S-Town is really popular. I mean, like there’s some problems with it, but it’s a popular show.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And then Dirty John. Really the serial killer thing.

**Craig:** Dirty John.

**John:** Yes. I could be a serial killer.

**Craig:** It’s the partner of Sexy Craig. Dirty John.

**John:** So ultimately though you convinced me. Craig, what did you convince me?

**Craig:** That we should stay indie, man. Because my indie cred is crazy. Yeah.

**John:** So this is to announce we’re not merging with anybody. We’re staying the same way we’ve always stayed.

**Craig:** Which is free.

**John:** Free.

**Craig:** With no ads. It’s sad that I have to look at this to tell you I’ve done 430 of these. We come out every Tuesday as you know.

Now, only the most recent 20 episodes are available freely to everyone. And generally speaking we didn’t do a lot of bonus stuff.

**John:** We didn’t. So we do have a premium feed. For the last couple of years we had a premium feed. And the premium feed has all the back episodes. It has bonus episodes. It requires a really janky app.

**Craig:** That app was jank. It was called jank.app.

**John:** So frustrating. At least like 45 of those 100 emails are about the app. And it’s confusing. Signing up for it was confusing. So we asked our listeners what would be better. And they said anything would be better. And so we’re making some changes here.

**Craig:** We like clear feedback, it’s our favorite feedback.

**John:** So people wanted things to be simple. People wanted to use their own player rather than the janky player. They wanted more bonus stuff. And they wanted all the back episodes.

**Craig:** I know what, let’s use Patreon.

**John:** We talked about Patreon, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** No, we didn’t do it.

**John:** So, here’s the problem. Patreon is simple, kind of.

**Craig:** Just like me.

**John:** You use your player. Great.

**Craig:** Just like me.

**John:** More bonus stuff.

**Craig:** Just like me.

**John:** The problem is we couldn’t get all the back episodes in Patreon.

**Craig:** Also just like me.

**John:** There was no way to do it. So, we ended up going with the folks who do Slate. So we partnered up with them. They didn’t buy us out, though. We’re still indie.

**Craig:** Indie, man.

**John:** Indie, man.

**Craig:** No sellouts here.

**John:** But this is Scriptnotes Premium. Scriptnotes Premium is now the thing. Simple. You can use your own player, whatever you use to listen to normal Scriptnotes in. Listen to it in this. More bonus stuff. And all the back episodes.

**Craig:** Now, as you know, I’m not great with this. So let’s say I have a way I like to listen to podcasts. First of all, let’s imagine I listen to podcasts.

**John:** Yeah, Craig who hosts like multiple award-winning podcasts.

**Craig:** I host them, but listening is–

**John:** I know.

**Craig:** So, let’s say I have my favorite app. But now there’s the thing. How do I get it to go to my favorite app?

**John:** OK. Three steps. First step, you join. You go to Scriptnotes.net. You put in your email address and your credit card. That’s it. There’s no password. There’s no username. Just those two things.

**Craig:** This is where the money comes to me?

**John:** You click subscribe. Then you can subscribe to the Scriptnotes Premium feed, any of the back episodes. We broke it down by seasons so you don’t have to download everything at once. Finally you just listen to it in whatever app you like to use.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That’s pretty cool.

**Craig:** That is pretty good.

**John:** Craig, you get confused sometimes about sort of how stuff works.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We made stuff even simpler. So you just put in your phone number and it will send you a link to how you actually install it in the app. So it’s pretty–

**Craig:** So then I just tell it what I want it to–

**John:** You don’t have to use Siri at all.

**Craig:** I text back, “I use this.” So I’m talking to a robot.

**John:** You tap a link. Can you tap a link?

**Craig:** I talk to a robot all the time.

**John:** Ha, you do. You tap a link. You tell it which app to install it in. It’s installed and it’s there.

**Craig:** This is fantastic.

**John:** And you subscribe.

**Craig:** Even I can do that.

**John:** So you get all the back episodes. All the new episodes. We’re going to do some bonus stuff, too. Craig, talk us through some bonus stuff that we might end up doing.

**Craig:** Well you know we like to do a deep dive every now and then on a classic film.

**John:** Absolutely. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Little Mermaid.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** What should we do first?

**Craig:** I’m thinking Die Hard.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think Die Hard should be the first episode we do. Let’s have it come out on Christmas.

**Craig:** Let’s. Shall we? Because it is a Christmas movie.

**John:** A couple other things. Scriptnotes comes out every Tuesday. Honestly, Megana gets it done on Monday. You get the episodes on Monday afternoon when she’s done.

**Craig:** That Megana.

**John:** And we’ll also try to do things like advance tickets for shows like this. Because we now have your email address, which we never had your email address before, which was weird. So that is the–

**Craig:** To recap, if I may. Nothing is changing about the classic Scriptnotes that theoretically you love.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Scriptnotes Premium does not require that weird, janky app anymore.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Huzzah. And there’s a bunch of new stuff, including early episodes and bonus segments. So that’s pretty great. And you can literally subscribe now to it, although again I just want to make it clear I get none of the money.

**John:** No, Craig will still get nothing.

**Craig:** None of it.

**John:** This money will pay for Matthew. It will pay for Megana. And honestly we probably need to hire somebody new because it’s just been a lot. So it will help us pay for–

**Craig:** The emails alone.

**John:** The emails on assistant stuff alone has been crushing. So, this is Scriptnotes.net. You can sign up for it on your phone right now. But no one in this room should do that because we are going to draw one ticket and that person is going to get a free lifetime subscription to Scriptnotes Premium.

**Craig:** Lifetime.

**John:** Craig, that box is right behind you.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Take a seat and draw one of those cards.

**Craig:** The price will go up yearly. So, ultimately this will be worth millions of dollars.

**John:** Now, technically I should say that this has no cash value. I think it’s something about a raffle, you’re not supposed to say–

**Craig:** I said a million dollars.

**John:** A million dollars.

**Craig:** It has absolutely no value. That’s a weird thing to say. We’re raffling off something that is absolutely valueless.

**John:** Worthless. Last four digits maybe?

**Craig:** Last four? Got your tickets out? 3-2–

**John:** Yeah, people sweating there.

**Craig:** You guys are going to walk out and leave. Raise your hand if you’ve got 3-2. Who has got 3 and 2 so far. Oh god, we’ve got to winnow this down. 7. I know. Who do we have left now?

**John:** Stuart Friedel has his hand up. If Stuart Friedel wins we’re drawing again.

**Craig:** Really? We so are. Stuart, with your fingers what do you have? You lost. Again. 1. Yes.

**John:** Sir, what is your name? James. After the show find me or find Megana and we will sign you up. All right. Hooray. That is the introduction of all this.

Now it is time for our actual show. We are so excited with our guests. We’ve had amazing guests in previous episodes. I’m sort of especially excited by this group of people we have. We have acclaimed writer-directors. We have acclaimed writer-actors. We have a person who created a whole cinematic universe. This is going to be good.

Our first guest is Lorene Scafaria. She is an actress, writer, producer, and director, best known for Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, The Meddler, and most recently for writing and directing Hustlers starring Jennifer Lopez, Constance Wu, and Julia Styles. Welcome back to the program Lorene.

**Lorene Scafaria:** Thank you so much. Appreciate it. This is very nice and overwhelming.

**John:** Overwhelming in a person who has had a movie that has played everywhere that has gotten huge acclaim.

**Lorene:** Yes.

**Craig:** Still overwhelming?

**Lorene:** Yes. You guys are going to use big words and I’m not going to understand half of them.

**Craig:** We won’t be sesquipedalian I promise. Oh my god, I’m so sorry.

**John:** Lorene, I’m going to take a chance here.

**Lorene:** Oh god.

**John:** So April 2018 I was in the backyard of Dana Fox’s house. There was a benefit dinner thing. And I was talking with you about a movie that had just fallen apart. Was that this movie?

**Lorene:** Yes.

**John:** This is Hustlers. It had just fallen apart. You were really frustrated and heartbroken and I felt so bad for you. And now I’m so happy.

**Lorene:** That’s very nice.

**John:** That it got back together again.

**Lorene:** Yeah, thank you.

**John:** So Hustlers is an amazing achievement. On the show often we talk about How Would This Be a Movie. And this is something that’s based on and inspired by an article. Can you talk us through the How Would This Be a Movie for you? What was it about this story that was the first impetus of like, oh, I see how this could be two hours of amazing entertainment? What was the click for you?

**Lorene:** I mean, it was an incredible story. It was really compelling. I read the article that it was based on in the summer of 2016. And it just felt like a world that we haven’t really seen through a certain group’s eyes. We haven’t really followed dancers in a strip club in this way before. So, I was really just taken in by the world and the story and these characters who I think are often misunderstood.

And then there was a crime drama. And a friendship story. And it touched on so many themes I was really excited to talk about. Gender as it relates to the economy and women under capitalism. And all that good stuff.

**Craig:** And when you’re going through that article, the article is just facts. I mean, they create a bit of a narrative but mostly it’s facts. Do you instinctively start to go I’m going to use that, I’m going to use that. That I can’t use. This I got to change. How fast does that happen, that engagement as a writer?

**Lorene:** I would actually look back at the article every now and then just to see if I could read between the lines, if I missed something. You certainly have to embellish a lot. Have to add a lot. It’s obviously creating scenes and dialogue. But that central relationship between the two characters, in real life I think they were more like business partners and it didn’t run that deep, and it wasn’t that mentor/mentee dynamic.

**Craig:** Mother/daughter kind of.

**Lorene:** Yeah, mother/daughter. Whatever kind of love story that is being told. So, yeah, there’d be a sentence that would talk about Christmas. And I would think I can’t wait to see what Christmas looks like for these women. And then my own research, obviously, talking to strippers. Going to clubs. And speaking to people. That all informed a lot. But, yeah, it always felt like the crash, the financial crisis was kind of the end of act one and where to go from there. There is a rise and fall story. There are a couple different timelines. It jumps around. And it’s kind of a reflective story that Constance Wu’s character is telling to this journalist played by Julia Styles. So, there’s some back and forth there. And that was in my original pitch actually for how I would adapt the article.

**John:** Talk us through that original pitch. So is this an article that you found or someone came to you?

**Lorene:** No, it was sent to me by the producers, by Gloria Sanchez and Annapurna who was the studio at the time that was making the film. And they sent it to me. It was certainly not my job yet. And they wanted to know what my take was and how I would adapt it to the screen. So I went in for that meeting and, yeah, gave them my whole pitch and talked about why I thought it was an event movie at the end of the day, even though I thought there was a really nuanced conversation to be had and a very specific way to kind of see their world it felt like at the end of the day. You know, we were going to bring the club to the theater.

**John:** So in that original pitch how closely does that resemble the movie that we saw? So in terms of its central protagonist/antagonist relationship between the Jennifer Lopez character and the Constance Wu character, and in terms of the flashback structure. Did you have all of that when you walked into that room with those producers?

**Lorene:** I had a lot of it. I mean, I look back at my old notes and we stayed pretty true to what I originally set out to do, so that was certainly nice to realize with a large group of people. So, yeah, it was pretty similar. I knew that the journalist was a really compelling, important part of it, not just a device, but a very integral part of the relationship and the dynamic and the judgment that the audience sort of imposes on these women. There was a lot of that in there. And certainly a tone that I think that the tone was what was shifting a little bit. I think the concentration on that central relationship, that love story between them, that changed a lot.

There was an unreliable narrator in the article that I kind of hung onto for a little too long that no longer felt important at some point. So that was different.

It felt more like a story being told by these two different characters. And it was kind of pitting them against each other in a way. So I did a million drafts. The movie fell apart. We lost a home. We brought the script around town to everybody who hated it. [laughs]

**Craig:** Hollywood. Always with their finger on the pulse of America.

**Lorene:** Well, I think maybe a lot of them identified with other characters in the movie.

**Craig:** Huh. Do you mean Lizzo?

**Lorene:** Yes. That’s exactly.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Lorene:** So, yeah, it took a minute to find the right home and we were certainly questioning a lot. I kind of did this page one rewrite after we found this new home and kind of just smashed the script on the ground and opened up at title page and changed it to Destiny and Ramona, the two main characters. And then wrote this love story, this relationship. And, yeah, it was different. A lot of scenes came out of it. The training sequence that’s there. The sort of dynamic between them. That came out of it, that mother/daughter relationship.

But it ultimately wasn’t the right movie, so had to kind of smash it on the ground again and start from scratch.

**Craig:** And you get it to a place where you feel like you got it right. You do have a home. They have given you the funding. You have this great cast. And now I’m always fascinated by writer-directors, how did director Lorene handle her relationship with writer Lorene on a day-to-day basis?

**Lorene:** I did refer to the writer often as—

**Craig:** An asshole?

**Lorene:** An asshole. Yeah, painted us into a lot of corners. And wrote really something too ambitious. It was a $20 million budget which sounds like a lot but it’s not. It grew.

**John:** Oh. For listeners at home she was pointing at Kevin Feige at that moment.

**Craig:** Kevin earlier asked me if the budget for this was $20 million. So he has no sense whatsoever. None.

**Lorene:** And shooting in New York for what it was, so we had a seven-week prep, a 29-day shoot, and an eight-week director’s cut. It was all pretty brutal. Don’t recommend it.

**Craig:** That’s actually a great way to think of it. On any given day you had a plan. And when your writing your plan is perfect. That’s my perfect plan. And now you’re short on money, you’re short on time, you’re dealing with weather I assume occasionally here and there.

**Lorene:** Yeah. Actually out of those 29 days it rained 26 days.

**Craig:** Of course it did.

**Lorene:** Because it was April.

**Craig:** Yeah. So on those days how do you adjust without losing maybe the heart of what it was that you needed to do that day for that moment between those characters?

**Lorene:** I mean, it was certainly a race every single day to finish it, but those fights happened in prep. The cast wasn’t fully on board other than Jennifer and Constance before we got there. So that whole journey I remember there were days where they said like, “Well you don’t need to shoot anything on Wall Street.” And I was like I don’t know about that. I think that’s actually a pretty major part of this, something that we really need to see. So you make compromises here and there. But I think part of it was to go in with a really strong plan and to shot list everything. And to sort of continue to make the arguments that we wouldn’t need much in order to achieve this. We need these locations. We need this amount of hair, makeup, and wardrobe. We need to create a period piece. We need to capture the authenticity of this place. We need a real strip club. We need 300 extras.

**Craig:** Extras are surprisingly expensive.

**Lorene:** They’re really expensive.

**Craig:** Bob Weinstein, true story, once looked at a tent full of extras and then turned to me and said, “Do we pay them?”

**John:** No, Craig, they’re just there for the fun of it.

**Craig:** No, they’re slaves, Bob. Sicko.

**Lorene:** I’m sure they were.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re expensive.

**Lorene:** They are. They are. And, I mean, yeah, dressing them is expensive. And dressing them in 2007 clothes requires its own truck. And that truck costs money.

**Craig:** You could have just come to my closet. That’s what I’m in right now.

**Lorene:** Well that was just it. Eventually we kind of had to ask these guys to bring your own bad shirts.

**Craig:** No problem.

**John:** Now, Lorene because you’re here I get to ask you a question that struck me the moment I saw your film. Which is the moment that Constance Wu comes up on the roof and she sees Jennifer Lopez there in the fur coat is iconic. As you were filming it did you know this is the movie? This is the moment when people will gasp and recognize I’m in the hands of a master.

**Lorene:** Yes.

**John:** You knew it at that moment? You knew as you were shooting it?

**Lorene:** Yeah, Jennifer Lopez is in that outfit underneath that coat sitting on that rooftop.

**John:** To stipulate it’s absurd and absolutely marvelous. It’s such an iconic thing.

**Lorene:** Oh that’s nice. I mean, I say yes, obviously, just because we were in the throes of it and it was so exciting to finally get there. It was the first scene that I wrote in the whole script. I think the last thing we shot. Or second to last thing we shot. So they had already come full circle their relationship. They were so close by then so there was just that magic in the air. But, you know, a lot of thought went into it because I had thought this was the scene. This was the crux of the whole movie. The moment that Jennifer invites Constance into her fur coat. That really is the moment that everybody’s lives is changing.

So, yeah, it felt really, really important. The rooftop felt important. We built that sky light. That fur coat was a journey to find and to convince people that it was something that we needed. You know, just making sure they sat in the right position. I remember there was a moment where they were sitting next to each other and I was like crumbling inside going like, no, it’s not what I was imagining all this time. So, you know, we just found that rhythm. And, yeah, it felt magical.

Honestly, when she reclined with the cigarette that was not something that I had fully envisioned. That was something that just happened in that moment and I thought, yes, we need to cut to this. We need to – when we found that in the edit we first played it for people, it was this laugh out loud moment. And sometimes an applause break.

**John:** Oh yeah. In my theater people did applaud. That’s magic.

**Lorene:** That’s wild. That’s, obviously, but I credit Jennifer Lopez with half of that certainly.

**Craig:** And I’m going to bring up something from your past slightly.

**Lorene:** You guys.

**Craig:** No, but it’s – years ago when they would talk to you, they meaning the press, there was probably something that would come up a lot. Do you remember a name? A special kind of name that would come up frequently? Fempire. Do you remember the Fempire?

**Lorene:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** Back in the day female screenwriters were so rare that they had to give you a special name, like Seal Team 6. And it seems like without saying that we are where we should be, as one of the women that was there in the beginning for me, you know, where I was beginning you were beginning, how do you think it’s going in terms of progress? Bad, good, steady?

**Lorene:** Oh, it’s definitely not steady. I think it’s good and I think it’s muddy. And I think it’s like soup that we’re all kind of sitting in right now and trying to figure it out. So, I don’t know. I think a lot has improved. Obviously the last few years have shed light on a lot of bad behavior and we’ve rooted out some of that. But I think there’s work to do at the root, you know. I think there’s something to just speak to and have nuanced conversations about what the root cause is of all of this and how much of this is unconscious. And not just the broader strokes and the numbers which are important to speak to. But I think also there’s something about female stories and viewing them cinematically. And what does that mean? So there’s something to talk about, the percentage of female directors and all of that, but I don’t know. It’s like I want to get into it a little bit and get a little more nuanced about it. And not just that kind of black and white story.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** All right. It is time for a game.

**Lorene:** Oh, good.

**John:** We are going to read you a list of award shows. You need to tell us if it’s a real award show or if it’s a fake one that I made up.

**Lorene:** I’m so happy about this.

**John:** Now, here’s the twist. Several of these you’ve been nominated for.

**Lorene:** Oh, that’s torture.

**Craig:** So don’t screw those up.

**Lorene:** That’s bad.

**John:** We’ll start with the Gotham Award. Real or fake?

**Lorene:** That was real. I was really there.

**John:** Yeah, Hustlers was nominated. Marriage Story won. Chernobyl lost.

**Craig:** Lost. I like that she got nominated and I got lost. It was the same thing.

**Lorene:** I didn’t win. You lost. I just didn’t win.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. I lost hard. Viewfinder Award.

**Lorene:** Fake.

**Craig:** Fake. It’s so fake.

**John:** The Hollywood Film Award.

**Lorene:** That sounds real.

**John:** It is real. Kevin Feige and Victoria Alonzo won this year for Avengers: End Game.

**Lorene:** Hey, congrats. That’s awesome.

**Craig:** How about National Film and TV Award?

**Lorene:** You know what? This, I’m not kidding, I am so confused because I saw one tweet, only one, that said Jennifer Lopez won.

**John:** You’re right.

**Craig:** She did.

**John:** It is from the UK and she did win.

**Craig:** It’s real.

**Lorene:** OK. But I only saw one tweet so I was like this could be someone just playing a trick on all of us.

**Craig:** That’s a pretty generic name for an award, I got to say.

**John:** Hollywood Critics Association Award.

**Lorene:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. You are nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Female Director.

**Lorene:** Oh, thank you guys so much.

**Craig:** Houston Online Film Critics Association Award?

**Lorene:** Yes.

**Craig:** No.

**Lorene:** Oh.

**Craig:** No, there is no online critics association.

**John:** They merged them. So it’s all one critics association, online and print in Houston.

**Lorene:** What do you mean? Now what is it?

**Craig:** It’s just Houston.

**Lorene:** Houston. Just the city of Houston.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** The Golden Globes.

**Lorene:** Oh, I am wracking my brain. They are very real.

**Craig:** Deeply real.

**John:** Jennifer Lopez is nominated. Craig is nominated, Chernobyl for four Golden Globes.

**Lorene:** Oh my gosh. Craig! That’s amazing. Four.

**Craig:** Well. Golly. The Rose Door? The Golden Rose?

**Lorene:** Why are there are two names.

**John:** It’s French.

**Craig:** I’m just translating it for you. The Rose D’Or. D’Or. Door. The Golden Rose.

**Lorene:** I mean, it sounds real just because of all this fanfare. But I’m going to say no.

**Craig:** It’s absolutely real. Chernobyl won two of them.

**Lorene:** Congrats.

**Craig:** I got two Golden Roses, my friend. I’m a double-roser.

**John:** The Satellite Award.

**Lorene:** That’s real. And that was the only thing I’ve ever been nominated for before Hustlers.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Nice.

**Lorene:** We got one of those somewhere.

**Craig:** OK. The Palm Dog Award. Palm Dog.

**Lorene:** No. No, no, no.

**Craig:** It’s real.

**Lorene:** No.

**Craig:** Yes it is. It’s a yearly alternative award presented by the international film critics during the Cannes Film Festival. And this year it went to Sayuri for her performance as Brandy in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

**Lorene:** So it’s for dogs?

**John:** It’s an award for dogs.

**Craig:** It’s for dogs.

**Lorene:** We had a great dog in Hustlers.

**Craig:** Not great enough.

**John:** Something to shoot for, Lorene. Something to shoot for.

**Lorene:** You have no idea.

**Craig:** Step your shit up, Lorene.

**John:** Lorene, the Annie Award?

**Lorene:** Real.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Animation.

**Craig:** Animation. AARP Grownups in Film Award.

**John:** That’s AARP.

**Craig:** I say AARP.

**Lorene:** Hell yeah. It’s real.

**Craig:** It’s totally real. Jennifer Lopez nominated for an AARP award, which should be pronounced the R-P.

**John:** The Spotlight Award?

**Lorene:** Yes.

**John:** Yes, real. Jennifer Lopez won for Hustlers. Palm Springs International Film Festival.

**Lorene:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** The Dorian Awards.

**Lorene:** I mean, that can’t be real.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** Location Managers Guild Awards.

**Lorene:** No, no, no.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Chernobyl won.

**Craig:** Yeah, we won.

**Lorene:** Really?

**John:** They did.

**Craig:** Our awesome location manager, Jonas Spokas. Great job, Jonas.

**Lorene:** Wow. I might have to boycott, because we had a great, great–

**Craig:** Not great enough. Saturn Awards?

**Lorene:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes. Of course.

**John:** Aladdin was nominated for a Saturn Award.

**Craig:** Well done Aladdin.

**John:** Finally, the last one here. The BRAs.

**Lorene:** It’s real.

**John:** It is real. It is the Black Real Awards. An annual awards ceremony hosted by the Federation for Augmentation of African Americans in Film. Hustlers is nominated.

**Craig:** You got a BRA.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Lorene:** I didn’t know that. I got a BRA.

**Craig:** You got a BRA nom.

**John:** Lorene Scafaria, congratulations on your film. Congratulations on all the nominations and the awards.

**Lorene:** Thank you. It’s been nice.

**John:** I’m so, so happy for the journey that’s come from that backyard at Dana Fox’s house. I’m so happy your movie is out there in the world. It’s so damn good. Lorene Scafaria.

**Lorene:** Thank you. That’s very nice.

**John:** Craig, introduce our next guest.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m so excited. I was lucky enough to meet Shoshannah. We were doing a panel at the Television Academy, a place that up until recently would have had me removed by security. Shoshannah is fantastic. She is an actress and a writer, known for her roles in Jericho, Weeds, The Hammer, and Supernatural. You left off my favorite, Another Period. Spectacular on that show.

She currently stars in This Close, a dramedy series about two deaf best friends navigating their 20s in Los Angeles. Shoshannah co-created the show with her actual best friend and fellow deaf writer-actor Josh Feldman. Spectacular work. Shoshannah Stern, come on up.

**Shoshannah Stern:** I’m disappointed that you have the mic because I want to make – drop the mic. I never actually used a microphone in my whole life, so I wanted to drop it once.

**Craig:** It turns out they’re expensive actually.

**Shoshannah:** I’m sure it is.

**John:** Shoshannah, a thing Craig and I were talking about this afternoon, your show is fantastic. And impossible to watch.

**Craig:** Not because it’s hard, because you can’t find it.

**Shoshannah:** Mm-hmm. Yep.

**John:** So your show is made for Sundance Channel, but it’s hard to find on that. Sometimes you find it on YouTube. Is it frustrating to have made something–?

**Shoshannah:** It’s on YouTube?

**John:** Sometimes.

**Shoshannah:** I mean, I hope it is. I hope it is.

**Craig:** It is not.

**John:** So my question, so many of us are making shows for streamers, for other places, and I’m so happy they made your show, but it’s frustrating that you don’t know if someone is going to be able to watch your show. As you’re writing this, as you’re putting it together is that a worry for you?

**Shoshannah:** It was. I think I’ve made my peace with it, so there’s only so much you can really do – that’s really in your control. And I think it’s like as a woman and as a deaf person creating a show, you know, we’re just reminded that there is no precedent for it. And you sort of have to prioritize what you have to worry about and sometimes you can’t because you just kill yourself over it. So, one of the things that I, you know, unfortunately yes it’s impossible to find the show. But the reason why that happened is because we actually made it for Sundance Now, which is a streaming service for AMC. And then we re-aired it, the first season on Sundance TV while we were shooting season two. I guess we just showed up and we were shooting it and they said your show is doing better than anything. So, we’re like, great, all right. So they were like we’re taking it. And I said, oh, OK, cool, great.

And I thought it would be cool because then I thought people would be able to find the show by just clicking, flipping through their channels, and they might happen across it, and they would find it. Because on Sundance Now you had to buy it, you had to purchase it, in order to find that show.

So, apparently it is now just impossible to find.

**Craig:** It’s very upsetting to me because I – so you said, “You got to watch my show.” And I said, you’re right, I do have to watch your show. And there’s one episode of the new season that’s available online for free. And so I watched it and I was like this is a great show. I mean, I legitimately got into it immediately and I want to watch the rest of it. So, I kind of did ask you to bring me a USB of bootlegged episodes of the show.

**Shoshannah:** You said that like I know how to do that.

**Craig:** I know.

**Shoshannah:** Biggest Luddite ever.

**John:** A question for you. So we were talking with Lorene about how she was pitching Hustlers. What was the pitch for This Close? When you were describing the show to people how were you describing it?

**Shoshannah:** We kind of had to pitch it three times, but in three different iterations. First of all, the idea with my writing partner Josh was about a deaf woman and her hearing gay best friend. And I think I was just so conditioned to seeing a deaf person on screen with a hearing person, a hearing scene partner, a hearing foil, really. You had to have a hearing foil. A deaf person always had to have in order to explain this is my life and it’s different than yours. So really that was what we were used to seeing on the screen.

So we pitched the show that way. And with one production it seemed like it was going pretty well, better than it had in the past. And then finally at the 11th hour they came to us and said, “You know, it’s a great show but we don’t really get why your character has to be deaf. Does she have to be deaf?” And I was like, well really I tried to explain the rationale and I couldn’t tell them. I needed to show it to them. So, I was like, OK, fine, cool. That’s where we’re at.

And we decided just to do it ourselves. It was in that hour that we made a decision over happy hour. We were just like we should just do it ourselves. So we decided to do that. And then just like why don’t we just go balls to the walls and make both of the characters deaf. Because we felt at that point like no one is going to do it anyway. So Josh said to me, “But who is going to play Michael if we do that?” And I just looked at him like, um, and he gave me an expression like, o……kay. And I looked at him and said, ah-ha, that’s who is going to play it.

**John:** Now, Shoshannah you are an actor. You’ve been acting for years. But Josh was not an actor. He was just a writer. And so he does great on the show. And you guys have a wonderful chemistry. Did you know it was going to work from that initial moment? Was there any fear whether the two of you together could work onscreen?

**Shoshannah:** No. I didn’t know. We were just drunk.

**John:** All right. That’s perfect.

**Shoshannah:** I think I just knew that if the show were going to work that it would have that chemistry. And I just felt like we needed to see two deaf people on the screen and if we’re going to have two deaf people and at the heart of show it’s about a friendship and my friend is sitting right here across from me at happy hour. So yeah.

**Craig:** That story kind of mirrors I think in a way the tone of the episode that I watched. The only episode that is available.

**John:** I watched the first season.

**Shoshannah:** Because it’s impossible to watch. Yes, I am aware of that.

**Craig:** Correct. We will keep re-traumatizing you about that.

**Shoshannah:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** No problem. But the show does a beautiful job of tone shifting. It is funny and it is also very, I don’t want to say serious, it’s earnest at times in the sense that it’s real. It’s not a sitcom but it has no problem with somebody fainting and dropping out of screen, which is hysterical in that particular moment because it’s set up beautifully. So, I’m just curious how you guys maneuver that – it’s a very difficult thread to maneuver. You don’t get too broad. You don’t get too sugary. You find this interesting way to move back and forth without feeling like the tone is jarring and the shifts are jarring.

**Shoshannah:** Mm-hmm. I don’t know.

**Craig:** You got drunk again?

**Shoshannah:** Well, yeah. Sure. That’s the answer. We’re drunk pretty much every day during filming. No. I think we just wanted to write things that felt real to us. And we also knew what we didn’t want to write. What we didn’t want to see. I think we knew more about what we didn’t want to show than what we did initially. We wanted to show characters that are centered, not have it be about them being deaf. I felt like that was my problem with the characters that I’d seen before on the screen. Characters that I’ve played to be honest. But the reason why I started writing with Josh is because I had an awful, awful audition and it’s hard to find truth in a character that’s written from somebody else’s perspective about what they think your life is. And you’re trying to find truth in something that’s actually not truthful. So, especially it’s hard when the character is written as a mantle, you know, to carry, you know, like Jesus. You know, Jesus you’re just carrying. I represent all deaf people in the world. It’s impossible.

You can’t write one female character that represents all of the women on the planet. And so there are characters that are underrepresented, misunderstood, and that often happens – it happens more often than we know. So we wanted to write situations that were messy. You know, that were in the gray areas. Deaf characters are messy, too.

**John:** Can I ask you about process? Because we’ve talked to other writing teams who write stuff together. What is the process with you and Josh? Are you in the same room together writing? Do you write an outline and split up? What is the process for you guys going through a script?

**Shoshannah:** Josh and I have a very odd process. You know, it’s sort of what the fuck are they thinking is the process. And that works for us. So we sit in a room and we outline it together. And once we have the outline we go off and we write our own version, each of us, of the script. On our own. Separately. Completely. A complete version. A to Z. And people are like, wait, a complete version on your own, separate from one another? Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s what we do.

So we go off and do that. And then we merge together again, which just means that one of us sits at the computer and the other person is breathing over their shoulder pretty much and says, oh, I like this line better than that line and we kind of merge our two versions together and we submit that. And we get 5,000 notes on it. And then we do it again.

**Craig:** Do you have some epic fights because, man, that sounds like it’s good fuel for arguing?

**Shoshannah:** You know what? Never.

**John:** That’s what a gay best friend will do.

**Shoshannah:** There you go.

**Craig:** It’s true.

**John:** Now, we have a game to play and we would love for the two of you to help us out with this game. So this is something that Craig actually introduced at the last show and Craig set us up.

**Craig:** OK. So this is a game that I originally – it was originally a puzzle that I included as part of a puzzle hunt that I did with David Kwong at the Magic Castle that you attended. And Lorene were you at that one? You were at the one before. Shoshannah, are you a big puzzle solver/crosswords? Oh, OK.

**John:** She’ll be good at this.

**Craig:** And we’re going to have you come to the next one then. So the idea here is – well each of us, we’ll all do this in turn, we read a movie quote and we have a contestant trying to figure out what the quote is.

**John:** We actually have two contestants. So we pre-drew the contestants. Can you come down here to this microphone and re-introduce yourself?

**Craig:** Come on down contestant one and two.

**John:** Hi Zoey. I remember you from before. I’m sorry I forgot your name.

**Zoey:** It’s OK.

**John:** Do you watch a lot of movies?

**Zoey:** I watch some.

**John:** You watch some movies. That’s probably all you need for this competition. And behind you is another person coming up to the microphone. So Lauren and Zoey. Here is what’s going to happen. We are going to read a quote aloud from a movie, except that Craig has–

**Craig:** I’ve basically just created literal versions of these quotes. You’ll get it from the start. Shoshannah is going to do number one because she said earlier that she liked it, so I’m going to let her do number one.

**John:** Fantastic. All right. So Shoshannah is going to give a quote and you need to figure out – so whichever one figures it out first raise your hand and then you’re going to say what the actual real quote is. All right.

**Craig:** OK. So you’re ready to do number one.

**John:** No one yell out in the audience.

**Shoshannah:** I am finished in a good way as a result of our relationship.

**John:** I am finished in a good way as a result of our relationship. Do either of you – Lauren or Zoey, can you name this famous movie quote?

**Female Voice:** I’m really bad at this.

**Craig:** You complete me.

**John:** You complete me. That is what we’re going for. You complete me, from Jerry Maguire.

**Craig:** You got it. This is going to be bad.

**John:** This is hard, Craig.

**Craig:** I mean, that was the easy one.

**Shoshannah:** We have to work together.

**John:** Craig, try the next one.

**Craig:** I’ll do the next one. Strike it from your memory, JJ, or whatever nickname you go by these days. This neighborhood is largely populated by immigrants from Asia’s largest nation.

**John:** Any – all right? Yes, Zoey.

**Zoey:** Forget about it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.

**Craig:** Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.

**John:** All right. One to nothing right now. We will say first to four.

**Craig:** Malodorous tokens of authority. None are in our possession, nor are they necessary. Therefore I’m not obligated to display them as such.

**John:** Do either of you know this?

**Craig:** Audience?

**John:** It’s the we don’t need any stinking badges.

**Craig:** The audience is pretty good. I got to say. All of them together are a little bit better than the two of you.

**Female Voice:** Yeah, this is embarrassing.

**John:** Lorene.

**Lorene:** OK. None of us came ashore on this famed Massachusetts boulder. Rather we were injured by the boulder metaphorically.

**John:** Well let’s try it one more time. Laughter was high.

**Lorene:** None of us came ashore on this famed Massachusetts boulder. Rather we were injured by the boulder metaphorically.

**Female Voice:** Just give it to the audience.

**Craig:** Audience. That’s your Malcolm X right there. OK, Shoshannah do you want to do number five?

**Shoshannah:** The primary directive of this melee association is that the existence thereof must be denied.

**Craig:** The primary directive of this melee association is that the existence thereof must be denied.

**John:** So melee – it’s a very D&D word.

**Craig:** Is it?

**John:** It is a very D&D word. It’s a melee round.

**Craig:** I think of it as a French word myself.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** It means fisticuffs. Nothing?

**Female Voice:** Sorry.

**Craig:** Audience?

**Audience:** First rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.

**Craig:** Again, the audience a little bit better than you guys, I got to say.

Female Voice: It’s pretty obvious afterwards. It’s like you’re standing up here, but then when they say it you’re like, yes, it makes sense. But they’re not standing.

**Craig:** We’re not accepting your excuses. No, no, no.

**John:** No, no, no. Zoey and Lauren, what you guys can’t see is I see a lot of people are like moving their mouths as if they’re talking with the crowd. They really didn’t know.

**Craig:** All right. How about this one. You got this one. They got this one. Ready? Don’t turn away.

**Female Voice:** I want to watch.

**Craig:** No, that’s called cheating. Look at me. Here we go. You’ve got this. Early salutations, country once known as French-Indochina. Early salutations country once known as French – oh, they’re just blatantly cheating now. Go ahead. Go ahead.

**John:** Go ahead. Say it.

**Female Voice:** Good morning, Vietnam.

**Craig:** Yes, good morning, Vietnam. Yes! Yes! I do love this one. Lorene, do you want to do number seven, or the next one?

**Lorene:** Explain your grave nature. Explain your grave nature.

**John:** I have the answers and I kind of don’t get this one.

**Craig:** It’s a hard one.

**Lorene:** Explain…

**Craig:** The speed with which you just gave up was remarkable. Audience? Why so serious? OK. Shoshannah, would you like to do this one?

**Shoshannah:** Man whose last name is synonymous with sharply defined, my condition is unwell.

**Craig:** Hmm. Man whose last name is synonymous with sharply defined, my condition is unwell.

**Female Voice:** Oh.

**John:** One person got it.

**Craig:** Audience? Yes, just you?

Female Voice: I don’t feel so good, Mr. Stark.

**Craig:** Yes, Mr. Stark I don’t feel so good. OK, you guys are dismissed. You did a great job.

**John:** Hey, hey, thank you very much for playing.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Craig, I think this was actually a really good moment for everyone in this room in defining sort of like what you’re like and what I’m like. Because you picked something that was wildly too difficult for this.

**Craig:** No, I’ll tell you what’s too difficult. It’s the bonus question.

**John:** All right. Bonus question. See if the audience can get the bonus question.

**Craig:** Audience, this is for all of you. And this is a TV quote. And I’ll help you out. It’s from a show currently on the air.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So I’ve limited it to 14,000 television shows.

**John:** Including This Close.

**Craig:** Weirdly that one is not, because we can’t find it. OK.

**Shoshannah:** Oh, you’re killing me. Oh, my heart. I’m stomping on it.

**Craig:** Sanctified female parent splitting in two like a road. Clothing for a torso. Round objects. Sanctified – you got it? Holy mother forking shirt balls. Nice work.

**John:** Well done.

**Craig:** That’s my kind of guy right there.

**John:** From The Good Place.

**Craig:** From The Good Place.

**John:** All right. Thank you for participating in this game. Craig, thank you for putting together this game.

**Craig:** No, no, the hell with them. I’ll make it harder next time. I’m going deeper.

**John:** All right. Our next guest, Kevin Feige, has been the driving creative force behind the Marvel cinematic universe. In his current role as producer and president of Marvel Studios Feige is hands-on producer who oversees Marvel Studios’ feature film productions, whose 23 films released have all opened at number one at the box office. And collectively grossed – that can’t be right – $23 billion worldwide.

**Craig:** $23 billion dollars. That’s the same budget – oh, no, you said million. I’m so sorry.

**John:** $23 billion dollars. And you have Black Widow coming up next. Kevin Feige, you are the person who has been mentioned most on Scriptnotes without ever actually appearing on Scriptnotes.

**Kevin Feige:** Is that true? Why is that true? I want to know.

**John:** Tell him, Craig.

**Craig:** We actually like you.

**Kevin:** Oh, phew.

**Craig:** It would have been weird if it had been like, here we go. You’re like the Final Draft guys. Oh, that was a great one. Kevin, we were talking earlier, and I have an interesting question. I think it’s an interesting question. And maybe you don’t have the answer, but you have such a unique job. And I’m sure that while you have your own kind of definition of what it is, is there anybody else in Hollywood that does the job that you do? Or is it separate and apart from what everyone else does? Because that’s how it seems to me.

**Kevin:** I produce movies and I oversee movies. And I think there are a lot of people that do that. I think there are a lot of creative producers out there, many of whom I work with at Marvel Studios, who do what I do which is try to shepherd projects to the screen. The nature of the Marvel element of it, which is fun, and which gets a lot of the attention is the interconnectivity of them which is fun and which early on – I’ve been at Marvel almost 20 years. August of 2020 it will be 20 years, which is almost half my life, not quite.

And for the first six years at Marvel we worked with – we were the IP holders that didn’t have a lot of contractual control, but on the other studio films, on the Fox Fantastic Four films and X-Men films and Daredevil films on the Sony Rami Spider Man films. But I was around and wanted to be in the room where it happens as they say and be a part of the brain trust.

I’ve forgotten what the question was now.

**Craig:** This happens all the time.

**Kevin:** Oh, nobody does it. Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re different, right? I mean, it feels like you run a studio of a kind.

**Kevin:** Yes.

**Craig:** But you’re also a producer. But you’re also planning all of the movies. You are kind of an interesting hub it seems.

**Kevin:** I’ve been a part of maybe ten Marvel movies by the time we became Marvel Studios. And we knew with Iron Man 1 one of the things that could set us apart, because we didn’t have the “A-list” characters, was that we could start interconnecting them. Like the comics did.

**John:** We talk a lot to showrunners on our show, and your job is kind of analogous to a showrunner in that you have a bunch of things that have to continue. So it’s not just this one episode, it’s how it’s going to fit into this greater pattern. The knock we sometimes hear when some of our showrunner friends come on is that like, oh, but you didn’t know what you were doing, or you were vamping, you were making up as you were going along. To what degree as you’re starting Iron Man 1 did you have a sense of where you wanted to be three movies in, six movies in, nine movies in? And how much could you anticipate what the plan was?

**Kevin:** It’s a nice balance. It’s a nice combination of knowing exactly where you want to end up, but changing the ways, being open to changing the ways that you get there. And when we started Iron Man 1 the goal was very simply make Iron Man 1, and also the Incredible Hulk which we were doing at the same time. Go from being fully responsible for zero movies a year to we have to deliver two by summer of 2008. And that was an amazing experience of being like, you know, you take it for granted. I think people still take it for granted that when you see a poster in a movie lobby and there’s a release date on it the movie is coming out on that release date. That is not a given. There are a lot of people that have to work to make that happen.

And there was one terrifying moment during Iron Man 1 where I went that’s us. We’re the ones responsible for making that happen. And the dream was always because we’ve got thousands and thousands of comic books that you make a movie that succeeds and the reward is you get to make another movie. That’s always been the viewpoint that I’ve had. Let’s succeed so we get to do another one. And that was very true with Iron Man because we would not have been a studio if Iron Man didn’t work. And Marvel would have lost the film rights to ten of its characters.

So, we knew midway through Iron Man 1 around the time Sam Jackson agreed to come do a little cameo for us in a tag that we wanted to get to Avengers. That we wanted to do those first five, six films in phase one. After Avengers we started building out towards what became End Game.

**Craig:** So you have this interesting combination of fear that you won’t even be able to hit a release date for your one movie, but you’re planning for like five movies. And I like that combination. But you did have, of course, the benefit – I was a Marvel kid growing up. There’s Marvel kids and there’s DC kids. I guess there’s some kids that are bi-comical or whatever. But I was a Marvel kid. And there was this big book that was like the Marvel compendium of characters.

**John:** Oh yeah, it’s great.

**Craig:** I would just flip through it and there were so many. There’s so many. And so you have this interesting possibility. But I want to read you something. This is I think the first time we brought up, this is without even mentioning your name, but the first time we kind of brought you up. This is all the way back in Episode 44. July 6, 2012, Ah. Remember that?

**John:** Oh my gosh. What a different world we lived in.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Back then Craig didn’t have an Emmy.

**Craig:** I would trade everything.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah.

**Craig:** Everything. OK. So John said, we were talking about Avengers I believe had just come out at that point. And John said, “Joss Whedon was kind of a risky director to pick for that movie. The director hadn’t made anything of that size and that scale. But other studios aren’t going to learn that lesson. They’re just going to learn that it was big and therefore it’s good. Whereas Marvel is smart. Marvel is smart. But that’s not the only lesson to take from that.”

And I said, “No, the lesson to take from that is hire a director and a writer, in this case it was the same person, with a specific point of view and a proven track record with an audience. And have him deliver the goods as best he can. That’s a risk worth taking. It doesn’t always pay off. But to me that’s so much more interesting of a risk and so much more potentially rewarding than the other way of thinking about it with I guarantee you is going on right now where people are sitting around going, ‘OK, please list for me at my studio here all the various heroes we have, create a team for them to be on, and do our version of the Avengers.’ And I guarantee you that that is going on.”

And John says, “Yeah.” And then I say–

**John:** I say yeah a lot.

**Craig:** And I say, “And all those movies are going to be annoying. And people are going to smell it.” It does seem like people have tried to copy the model of what you do. Is there any hope for any of them? I mean, legitimately would you say to them, “Please, no, you’re never going to get there. Or yeah, there’s actually a way for you to do this with any of your stuff?”

**Kevin:** Well, first of all I compliment the transcript because it clearly comes in handy that you do that on every podcast. That’s impressive. The truth is as I just said we set out to make a movie. We didn’t set out to make a universe. We happened to be making movies based on our comics and our comics are an interwoven universe thanks to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and the whole team there that came up with what may be the longest running fictional narrative ever. So it didn’t seem revolutionary to me that I worked at Marvel Studios and wanted to try to emulate what was in the comics. But I wanted to do it slowly because I wanted to make movies. And I wanted to make a lot of movies. And make a lot of different kinds of movies, which is why our first ones were a technological thriller/sci-fi Iron Man film and a crazy outer space Norse god film and a WWII film leading up to – and a monster movie – leading up to The Avengers.

Because what was always cool about Avengers to me in the comics wasn’t that it was a bunch of heroes together, that it was a bunch of heroes that I cared about from other stories interacting with one another. So, I always say we never set out to make a universe. We set out to make movies. And that’s still true today. We set out to do individual stories that have the fun of, a bonus sometimes, of interconnectivity. But we spend as much time going it’s too much. The movie has to stand on its own more, in the development process. The movie has to stand on its own more.

**Craig:** I mean, essentially your advice is stop doing the thing that you people are doing. Because what they do is they start by saying here’s a bunch of our IP, which is a phrase I hate anyway, and let’s make a universe out of it. Absolutely backwards.

**Kevin:** When I started working at Marvel people used to talk about IP and I slowly got the nerve to ask what is IP.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**Kevin:** What are you talking about?

**Craig:** It’s sad. People talk about IP – the first time I heard it I was so depressed. But I think of this as art. And you guys are talking about it as intellectual property, like a product. Same thing when I heard franchise. I was like, ugh, now they’re like McDonald’s now. Now everyone says franchise they’re like, yay, it’s our favorite franchise.

**John:** You will have writers, directors, there’s filmmakers you want to work with. People are coming in to talk with you about doing movies based on your characters, based on movies you want to make. What is it that clicks with you about a certain person to do a certain project for you? What is it that you say when that person comes in the room that makes you say like, OK, that is the right person for me to bring onto this project? What are the things that work for you?

**Kevin:** It varies. I mean, we always start – we don’t have open auditions, so to speak. We don’t have people coming in and going here’s this character, would you make a movie about this character, would you make a movie about this character. We internally at Marvel Studios decide what movie we want to make, kind of what the movie is. So Thor, we decided we wanted to do a third Thor film because we love the character and we love Hemsworth and we thought there was great potential there.

But we knew we wanted to break the mold a little bit. And I was on the set of Age of Ultron talking to Hemsworth and he was in his full regalia for a big sequence. And he was saying, “May – what are we doing for the next one, May? What are we doing?” And I said, well, the truth is on the first Thor, Thor was blond hair, a red cape, and a hammer. Now Thor is you, Chris Hemsworth. So we can smash the hammer, we can rip off the cape, we can cut off the hair. So that started leading us into a general direction of what we wanted to do with it.

It was Taika Waititi that turned it into what we all know and love as Thor: Ragnarok with those elements. And we wanted to put The Hulk in it. And so we have these discussion documents that we call them, share them with writers or filmmakers, and then have them come in and pitch us a better version of it that sometimes is very similar and is sometimes totally different but way better. And that begins the then two to three year process of working together intensely.

**Craig:** You guys are drawing from this enormous base of what I consider to be literary work. I mean, comics are drawn, they’re illustrated, but I always read them. No one says I looked at a comic today. I read it. And because we’re writers and this is a show about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, you know, I’ve had this interesting experience in television and I know you guys are getting into television in a huge way where as a writer they say you are the author here, go and create something. In features, traditionally, the writer has just sort of been a widget. And then the director is viewed as the author.

At Marvel because you seem to be kind of in the, like I said, the hub, in the middle, how do you – and this is not a trap. Don’t worry. They won’t attack you. Feel free to, by the way, if he answers wrong. But how do you balance the authority of the writers and directors that you employ because you do employ a lot of the same ones over and over like Marcus and McFeely and the Russos, etc.

**Kevin:** Yeah. That’s the perfect case example. And, again, it varies person to person of course. I don’t think writers are widgets. I think that they make the whole thing possible. And when you find great writers like Marcus and McFeely who are willing to dedicate their art and their talent to projects you love and want to do, it’s amazing. And that’s why we got to Infinity War and End Game is because of those two.

You know, we were in either post on Iron Man 1 or prep on Iron Man 2 when we were taking meetings and first met Marcus and McFeely to do what became the first Captain America film. And the relationship with Marcus and McFeely and Joe and Anthony Russo is great. Yes, the Russo brothers are the directors of that film, but the authors of the film are the four of them, myself, Trinh Tran, Lou and Victoria from my team at Marvel who spend years together in a very relatively small conference room with more index cards than you’re ever seen in your entire life, putting together those movies. So it does vary.

When you find writers that are as authorial as Marcus and McFeely you keep them around and the directors will listen to them. When you have writers that you’re just starting out with and it doesn’t work, then you find another writer. That can happen with filmmakers, too.

In television, though, it is different as we’re learning. Because we’re trying to do our shows as close as we can to the way we did our films, which is to say it’s one filmmaker on the entire series. And one head writer on the entire series. They have a room because there’s so many–

**Craig:** So many scripts to write.

**Kevin:** Yeah. Although that was the understanding going in. There have been a few moments where that needs to be clarified that in the writer’s room the writer is overseeing much of it. On the set, the director is overseeing it. We haven’t gotten to post yet on those two projects.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s going to be fun. I would like to just come by to watch that. I don’t want to watch what’s on the screen. I just want to watch the people in the room.

**John:** So you’re now moving into a new phase of things. At the end of Avengers: End Game a lot of the characters and the relationships we built up are done and now we’re moving into a new phase. Is it weird for you that you’re both in this moment, but you’re also many years ahead? So is it hard for you to sort of flip back and forth to like, oh that’s right, the rest of the universe doesn’t know that this is a thing that’s happening? Do you find yourself–?

**Kevin:** Only when I’m speaking in public like this is it hard to realize, oh, it’s not 2023 yet so I can’t talk about that. But when you’re in it, no. And, again, like with Iron Man 1 the movie that comes out next gets the most attention. Because sort of nothing else matters. So in that case right now it’s Black Widow. And the primary focus is Black Widow, even though we have another film in production, another film about to go into production, two series in production, another one about to go. What comes next is the focus.

**Craig:** I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up Scorsese-gate. But I don’t want to just—

**Kevin:** Is he here?

**Craig:** Yes. Huge fan of our podcast.

**Kevin:** How many times have you mentioned him?

**Craig:** Way less than we’ve mentioned you.

**John:** That tells me a lot about our show.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Which kind of feeds into this question. Because it’s not so much what he said, but rather what I find interesting is that the movies that you guys make have—

**Kevin:** What he said. And what he said again. And what he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about. And what he said again.

**Craig:** I see you’re not at all sensitive about it.

**Kevin:** OK. I understand.

**Craig:** That aside, so you’re not the only one that I traumatize. I like to do this to everyone. Except Lorene. So, your movies occupy an outsized place in global culture from the time that you started with Iron Man to now. They have made an impression on the world. And they are now interwoven with just our global culture. And I’m kind of curious, rather than talk about what’s cinema and not cinema, because I don’t even know what that word even means. I’d rather just ask you where do you think Marvel films sit in our culture. What do you think they actually mean to people?

And is that what you want them to mean? Or are you airing for a kind of changing place in our culture?

**Kevin:** I think in ways that are both flattering and not flattering over the past decade the word Marvel has come to mean blockbuster movie. Blockbuster movies, “blockbuster movies,” that have a genre spin to them, or have action to them, or have visual effects to them have been the dominant form of box office entertainment my entire life. And that’s why I wanted to make movies. Those are the movies – I’m going to listen to your Die Hard episode on December 25. That movie I loved. And I remember thinking this is the best regular movie I’ve ever seen. And what I meant by regular was there was no time travel, there was no space, there were no aliens.

Because that was my primary – there were no super heroes, no super powers.

**Craig:** Best regular.

**Kevin:** Best regular movie ever. So those have always been the dominant, or maybe just to me, maybe just to my focus. In terms of place in the culture I never, ever think about it. I think about making movies that I always wanted to make with people that I’ve always wanted to work with. And make the movie that we would want to see.

And we have eclectic tastes. And the great thing about the Marvel comics is you can sit down and go, yes, we want to make an Iron Man movie, we want to do another Hulk movie. But we could also say I want to do a WWII movie. We want to do an outer space adventure. I want to do a time travel movie. I want to do a heist film. We want to do a ‘70s political thriller. We want to do a story, which is shooting now, about immortals who have been on earth for years.

All of those genres exist within the Marvel comics. And you can find them and flesh them out. And, again, Black Widow is our 24th film that Marvel Studios has produced in my almost 20 years. We want to keep doing different things. Disney+ has allowed that with the series that are also very different than things we’ve done before. So having the platform to continue to do lots of different types of movies that are shared by two things. One, they originated at some point in our comics. And, two, they have a genre element/sci-fi element to, which I enjoy in movies.

**John:** Kevin, will you come back on Episode 800 and talk us through how the next couple phases went?

**Kevin:** We will see. We’ll see if the references go down between now and 800. Yes.

**Craig:** I think you’re saying you want to keep being mentioned.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do.

**Craig:** Not a problem. Keep making those movies and we will keep praising them.

**John:** All right. We also do a thing on our show called One Cool Thing where we talk through small recommendations. Craig, did you remember One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do. I have a One Cool Thing. I’m an enjoyer of the Twitter. And lately a little bit of an issue with Nazis. Just I encounter them and I say things to them. And they get upset. And so I find myself getting into arguments with Nazis, which is generally bad. But one of the upsides is you start to figure out who the Nazis are.

**Kevin:** Nazis are not your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** No.

**Kevin:** To be sure. Sorry.

**Craig:** Not since forever. But every now and then you run into a head Nazi, like the head vampire, and just like in movie mythology if you can kill the head vampire – if you can kill the Night King all – all – of the dead people go, right? So I encountered a head Nazi the other day and I was like I’m going to block her but I also want to block every one that follows her.

And there is a way to do it.

**John:** Oh, tell us.

**Craig:** It’s called Block Chain. Ah, amazing. So, it’s an extension that you can use in a Chrome browser. So, you know, that’s the only thing you use Chrome for. That’s fine. And you put in the person’s name that you want to block and you also want to block everyone that follows that person. And it’s smart enough to know that it shouldn’t block any of her followers that you follow, because sometimes people follow weird people to see like I’m going to keep tabs on that Nazi, which is fucking bizarre, but regardless. And this particular Nazi had about 80,000 followers.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Well, she probably had 400 humans and a whole bunch of Russian bots. But regardless, they all got blocked. I just watched the number – it was incredibly satisfying. So, if you do manage to run into a Nazi here and there, block chain. Spectacular.

**John:** Nice. My One Cool Thing is a very simple little thing. It’s called AI Dungeon. Some people here may have tried it. It’s an AI thing that generates, sort of like a text-based adventure like Zork. Did you ever play Zork? Ah, yes, you played Zork.

**Craig:** I played ever InfoCom game there was.

**John:** And so what’s clever about it is you’re doing the same things like, you know, look at door, pick up thing, but it’s all using AI. And so you can tell it to do anything and it will change whatever is happening around it to sort of fold that in. So if you said teach Craig to dance it will generate stuff like, you know, you start playing some music and Craig starts dancing.

**Craig:** So if I said pick up knife it will just say, ah, there’s a knife there.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Great game. I’ll play that.

**John:** Tonight. Kevin Feige. Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Kevin:** I was given this question early and just did nothing but give me anxiety and go what am I going to give – what’s one cool that that’s going to be interesting. Because I knew you guys would have something super cool and interesting. Nazis.

**John:** Nazis.

**Craig:** And AI.

**Kevin:** And I got in my car on the way over here and put on the album I’ve been listening to time and time again and thought, oh, I’ll just say that.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Kevin:** Even though it might not sound like the coolest.

**John:** Was it MMMBop?

**Kevin:** Much more obscure than MMMBop.

**Craig:** That’s Kevin Feige.

**Kevin:** There was a documentary called Bathtubs Over Broadway that has an accompanying soundtrack about industrial musicals. And I like to listen to the soundtrack of industrial musicals from the Bathtubs Over Broadway documentary.

**Craig:** Oh wow. That’s awesome.

**Kevin:** That’s a cool thing that I’m enjoying right now.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** Thank you very much. Shoshannah Stern, do you have something you would like to recommend to our audience here?

**Shoshannah:** Yeah. I do. But it requires a backstory. So my daughter is four and three-quarters. And I had an unplanned C-section, which I did not want to have. But it happened very quickly. And I asked if in the OR if I could see her. And they said, yeah, sure.

But at the last minute then I was in the OR and I couldn’t see her. This was the first time that I was really responding to having a physical reaction to sound. Because I heard her cry and I knew that it was my baby and I couldn’t see her. And I had some kind of attack of some sort and I was seeing all of the doctors standing around me looking at me. But I could only see their eyes. I couldn’t read their lips. I couldn’t see anything because they were just looking at me with these masks. And there was this sound but I didn’t know who was talking.

And I just was like, I screamed, “Stop. You’re crucifying me,” because of the IVs and I couldn’t sign. So I was just like grabbing at the IVs. So they brought me my baby. Yes, they did. Thank god. But I was like wow, it’s kind of fucked up to be a deaf person in that situation.

So two months ago the FDA approved a brand new kind of a mask where there’s a clear plastic area on the face mask so that deaf people can actually look and see the lips moving of the people who are wearing them.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**Shoshannah:** I won’t have to go through that fucked up situation again. Or a fucked up situation like that ever again.

**John:** Lorene Scafaria, top that.

**Lorene:** Why?

**John:** [laughs]

**Lorene:** Dolly Parton’s America Podcast.

**John:** Dolly Parton’s America. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Almost as good.

**John:** Almost.

**Craig:** Almost as meaningful.

**Lorene:** Humiliating. It’s really good.

**Craig:** Is it that good though?

**Lorene:** Nope.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** And that is the end of our show. So we want to thank our amazing panelists. Lorene Scafaria. Shoshannah Stern. Kevin Feige. Our producer, Megana Rao. Megana! Our editor, Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** And of course this is all in service of the Writers Guild Foundation and the Writers Guild Foundation has supported us in putting this event on. So of course we want to thank Enid and Dustin and all the volunteers from the Writers Guild Foundation.

**John:** Tonight I want to extend an extra special thanks to our amazing interpreters, Elizabeth and Robby. Thank you very, very much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you to LA Film School, especially Hunter and Jared for tonight.

**Craig:** And finally we’d like to thank you. Our listeners. And a reminder that you can sign up now at Scriptnotes.net. This is why we’re ad-free. You can sign up now at Scripnotes.net. Scriptnotes.net for the Premium Feed. Happy Holidays and good night.

**John:** Happy Holidays everyone. Thank you all very much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you.

We have someone lined up here at the microphone.

**Male Audience Member:** Just to say thank you. This is amazing. My question is to Kevin. But before I do I want to say to the ladies thank you. As a writer-director you guys are an inspiration. Thank you.

**Lorene:** Thank you.

**Male Audience Member:** Kevin, last year at the Produced By Conference I asked you about Ms. Marvel movie and you said you’re going to focus on the Captain Marvel and then you’re going to introduce. Now it’s going to Disney+ with Bisha attached to it. I was wondering if you’re ever going to bring it to the movie world or maybe with Wolverine or something. What are the future–?

**Kevin:** That’s two different questions I think for me. We shifted to Wolverine. Ms. Marvel is coming to Disney+. Yes, Bisha is our head writer on that. And, yes, the intention with that character very much is to introduce her on a Disney+ series and then bring her into the films. And everything we’re doing at Disney+ will start to go back and forth between the streaming service and the movies. Some characters like Falcon, Winter Soldier, and Wanda Maximoff and the Vision and Loki will go from the big screen to Disney+ and back. Some characters starting with Ms. Marvel will be introduced on our Disney+ series and then go into films.

**Craig:** I honestly thought he was asking about Lorene. I heard Wolverine, I heard Wolverine. I think he’s suggesting that Lorene direct.

**Male Audience Member:** Why not?

**Lorene:** That’s what you’re here for. That kind of pressure.

**Craig:** Just putting that in the world. Put it in the universe, see what happens.

**John:** Hello, welcome.

**Male Audience Member:** My question is for Kevin as well.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Male Audience Member:** So you said the comics gave you a good framework for the interconnected narrative. But I’m sure there’s some points where you were at a fork in the road deciding to adhere or to depart from what was already given to you. Can you talk about some specific examples and some of the harder decisions you’ve made and how you decided whether to stick or to depart?

**Kevin:** Well it’s always that decision of how close do you stick to the comics. The comics are both inspiration, sometimes very specifically, sometimes generally. Marcus and McFeely had the task of Civil War when I decided that now was the time to do Civil War. And it was a great comic and ten years before we were developing the movie reading the comic month to month. It was published. It was amazing. Going back and looking at it, it did not apply. It took place, as all the comics do, in the narrative of that moment of the comics’ universe. Did not match up hardly at all with what the Marvel cinematic universe was. But the general idea of Iron Man and Cap representing two different sides of a theological argument was the inspiration. And Marcus and McFeely and Joe and Ant fleshed that out based on where we were in the cinematic universe. So that’s one where it was very specific, even taking the title from a comic, storyline, which we rarely do. But really that was a jumping off point.

**Craig:** I don’t want to stereotype the group that’s waiting, but—

**Male Audience Member:** I got you, Craig, don’t worry about it. My question, not actually directed to Kevin at all. I’ve never heard of any Marvel movies. But I know that there’s this whole Pay Up Hollywood thing. And something that’s very new. And the question that I have to John and Craig is where does accountability come into play? Obviously this is a very difficult city to make it in. And everything that we’ve heard is I can’t afford $1,500 rent. OK, well maybe you need a roommate. I can’t afford to put fuel in the car. Well, you have a car. That sounds pretty nice. And I can’t live off $50,000 a year. Well, there’s seven million people who make that happen.

So, where does accountability come into play?

**Craig:** I have an answer for you. Before I ask people who are making $50,000 to be accountable I’d like to ask the people who are making $50 billion to be accountable. I am, listen, I’m a parent. So I’m always thinking about how to make sure that my kids understand the value of hard work and the value of responsibility. But the fact is that the people who do these jobs, and we know them, and we’ve seen them, are not being treated fairly.

You can extend the argument of accountability down to anything. Well, you’re eating. I mean, a sandwich is a good thing. So, if you get a sandwich a day you should be happy. At some point, right, it’s a slippery slope. So the point is it’s not about subsistence living. It’s about being treated just reasonably.

**John:** I have a related question. A related question and answer here. So I say that accountability is useful for thinking about it in terms of you can’t direct it back at the person who is asking to be treated fairly to say like so often implicit in the answer is, well, I suffered when I came up through this scenario so it’s not – it’s the same for you.

There’s two problems with that. First off, it wasn’t the same. Second off, just because it did happen that way doesn’t mean it was ever right. And that’s a thing that we learned out of #MeToo. It’s a think we need to be talking about now.

The second thing I want to stress to all of us, and as we go into 2020 to be thinking about. It’s great news that we have a higher hourly wage happening in some places. You don’t pay rent with hours. You pay rent with dollars. And so we need to always be thinking about what is the dollars that people are making every week that is going to make it possible to live in Los Angeles. And for people who are coming to Los Angeles with this dream of moving to Hollywood and working in this industry, so they know what dollar figure actually they need to be making in order to stay and survive here. Because equity of access is the first step before we get to equity of outcome where the people who can come to this industry can actually afford to work in this industry and go up the ranks and thrive and write movies for Kevin Feige.

**Craig:** Yes. Absolutely. And I would also say that there is a temptation to think that tough love gets results. That deprivation makes people work harder. It doesn’t. As it turns out, treating people fairly and with respect will get more out of them. I do believe that. And this is a general philosophical mistake I think we make.

And so this is something that we’ve been talking about on our show a lot. And we’ve been talking to agencies. Obviously Verve made a big announcement about this. After we stop talking to the agencies I very much want to start talking to the studios about this. So we’ll be coming. We’ll be coming. But not now.

**John:** Not now.

**Craig:** Not now.

**John:** This is a fun night.

**Craig:** Thank you for your question.

**Male Audience Member:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Thank you. One last question. A lot of pressure on your shoulders. You’re wearing the mantle of the final question of the night.

**Craig:** And surely this is for Shoshannah or Lorene.

**Lorene:** The Hustlers cinematic universe.

**John:** Oh, I want to see that universe.

**Male Audience Member:** This is actually for all three of you. I just wanted to ask very simply what when either you’re going to your computer and you’re trying to break a scene, or you go into your writer’s room and maybe you’re trying to break a film, or a TV show, or you’re on set and you get this wonderful inspirational moment from one of your actors and it inspires a story idea, what are some creative rituals that you do before you go onto set, the writer’s room, or your computer just to kind of get those creative juices flowing? What are some places you go to to get some inspirational ideas from?

**Craig:** Shoshannah, you want to start?

**Shoshannah:** Sure. It’s really simple, but I just put my feet on the ground just to carry my weight evenly on my two feet, fold my hands. I’m not so much praying but I’m just feeling the flow. And I just try to remind myself that I’m grateful to be in this moment, right here, right now, doing what I love really. I just center myself and then do it. You know, whatever is blocking me or whatever I feel might block me I let it dissipate. I just let it go away. It’s not a very interesting answer. Sorry.

**John:** Oh my god, that was fascinating. That’s your ritual, too, right?

**Craig:** I mean, she’s kind of better than all of us.

**Shoshannah:** Say that again. I didn’t quite catch that. I didn’t hear it.

**Craig:** You heard me. I liked your first answer better which was I go with Josh to a bar and we get drunk. I think that’s truer.

**Shoshannah:** Maybe.

**John:** Lorene, do you have any go-tos?

**Lorene:** Yeah, I mean I think in my soul I think trying to reframe things like instead of saying I have to do something it’s saying I get to do something. So trying to remind myself of that at the beginning of a day, or a task. On a set I try to have three or four beverages first thing. I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before lunch and then a peanut butter and jelly sandwich after lunch. And no lunch.

**Craig:** That is so weird.

**Lorene:** It’s so weird. They got me a big cake on my birthday on Hustlers. It was shaped like a giant peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Humiliating. 41. So, yeah. Those are silly rituals, too.

**John:** Kevin, any rituals for you?

**Kevin:** I have relatively severe OCD that I could give you lots of rituals that utterly a waste of time and worthless and I wouldn’t recommend at all. But the notion that I have to keep in mind a lot is when there’s a lot of pressure, when you can’t think of an idea, when there’s a story problem and it gets very frustrating and I’ve pulled all of my hair out already, but you’re realizing no, no, this is a good thing. I remember being an intern and being jealous of anybody there that was employed. Anybody there that had a job. And I would hear them complain. And there was always stuff to complain about. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with complaining.

But I remember being like if I was there I wouldn’t be complaining. So, wherever I am now if I start complaining or start getting – it’s not even about complaining. It’s about just getting agitated. You realize, no, this is – exactly what Lorene said – that we get to do this and we’re very, very lucky.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** That’s a great final answer right there. Thank you.

**John:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Thank you to our incredible guests: [Kevin Feige](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0270559/), [Lorene Scafaria](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1032521/), and [Shoshannah Stern](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0998074/), for joining us! And thanks to Robbie Sutton and Elizabeth Green for interpreting the show.
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 44: Endings for Beginnings](https://johnaugust.com/2012/endings-for-beginners)
* [Twitter Block Chain Extension](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-block-chain/dkkfampndkdnjffkleokegfnibnnjfah?hl=en)
* [AI Dungeon](https://www.aidungeon.io/)
* [Bathtubs Over Broadway Soundtrack](https://www.bathtubsoverbroadway.com/)
* [FDA Approves Transparent Surgical Masks](https://www.theclearmask.com/product)
* [Dolly Parton’s America Podcast](https://www.npr.org/podcasts/765024913/dolly-parton-s-america)
* [Kevin Feige](https://twitter.com/kevfeige) on Twitter
* [Lorene Scafaria](https://twitter.com/LoreneScafaria) on Twitter
* [Shoshannah Stern](https://twitter.com/Shoshannah7) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) and Intro by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_431.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here.](https://johnaugust.com/2019/assistants-arent-paid-nearly-enough)

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig, Craig, fo-feg, fonana-fana fo-bleg – I don’t even know how that works – Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 422 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. And Hollywood assistants.

Last we asked for listeners to tell us how much assistants in this town are getting paid and the impact of those wages. And oh boy.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Oh yeah. It’s the most mail we’ve ever received on a topic. More than 50 of you wrote in. So we’re going to assess where we’re at with assistant pay. And the challenges ahead. So buckle up.

**Craig:** Let me tell you. There is umbrage coming the likes of which few have ever seen. Few have ever seen. You are about to take a raft ride down umbrage river my friends.

**John:** We’ll also be looking at videogame writing.

**Craig:** More umbrage.

**John:** Spec features. And thesauri. Craig, are you ready?

**Craig:** Nah, I love thesauri. I can’t be mad at you, thesaurus.

**John:** Let’s start with some follow up though. Craig, will you help us out with Heidi who wrote in about things to watch out for?

**Craig:** Sure. Heidi wrote, “It’s not as horrifying as sexual abuse, but I think and hope we will talk about the long hours that writers, especially comedy writers, are required to be in TV writer’s rooms. It’s commonly known that on certain shows writers have sleeping bags in their offices. They’re in the room till early morning, get a couple of hours of sleep, then buy new clothes to change into at the studio store. Even without technically sleeping over, comedy writers are sometimes expected to work until after midnight for days at a time.” Yikes. I have heard these stories.

**John:** Yes. And it was a thing I associate more with previous generations but I think it still happens now. I think it’s very much show by show. And one of the first questions you ask when you talk to a TV writer is what is the room like. And is it a room that is crazy or is it a room that actually has reasonable hours? And you kind of don’t know until you’ve talked to people who have been in that room.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like you, I had heard this mostly as a story of in the past when you were in a world of 14 sitcoms, each of which were churning out 22 episodes that people would go through these processes. I think if it’s happening now it’s because the show is poorly run. I don’t know what else to say. There is no intrinsic value in running a show like that. If you’ve fallen that far behind it’s because the show is being poorly run.

Now, there are certain times I know when showrunners – I did a panel at the WGA with Rob McElhenney who is the showrunner and star of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. And he says sometimes you’re hoping that a staff writer’s draft is going to get you in the ballpark. And every now and then it just doesn’t. And you’re behind. But to have an entire room of people there all night until early morning routinely is madness. And also frankly if you’ve got your staff there overnight why are you sending them to buy new clothing at the studio store? Shouldn’t you be as the showrunner be, I don’t know, supplying them with amenities? Find a hotel room somewhere for them to shower? It just seems crazy. I don’t understand this.

**John:** Yeah. The other big challenge with this, in addition to being unhealthy, it makes it impossible for some writers to work on a show like that. So people with kids. It makes it impossible to have a sustainable life when you’re doing those things.

Now, we’re talking about writers here, but of course there’s an industry-wide problem with long hours. And so we’ll put links in the show notes to other articles that talked about the long hours worked on set and how dangerous that can be for cast and crew. So KJ Apa obviously of Riverdale was an example of that.

Industry-wide we need to look at the unsustainably long hours and look for what the solutions are. One example is French hours that sort of make it so you’re only working a certain number of hours per day. You might work through lunch but you’re actually getting home at a reasonable time. We need to be thinking smarter and more sustainably about how we’re making our film and television.

**Craig:** Well, here’s a shocking bit of information for people. They’re always surprised when I say this. There is no, as far as I know, there is no real hard limit that anyone recognizes for working. So when you’re in production I’ve worked 21-hour days. And no one should be allowed to work 21-hour days. It doesn’t matter whether they’re paying people or not. It shouldn’t be allowed. It’s dangerous. It’s just dangerous. We need to have some kind of legislation that caps the amount of days.

Now, what is the cost to doing that? Money. Money. So, this is the theme for today. And now let me begin my anger at our oh-so-progressive business, which is populated almost entirely by Democrats, you know, people that vote the Democratic Party. People who believe in progressive policies and social policies and people who profess to be as woke as woked can be. And yet when it comes to this stuff, hypocrisy. Hypocrisy. So this is going to come up over and over and over. And easy calls to just say it doesn’t matter if working people to the bone for 21 hours straight puts more money in your pocket. Don’t do it. It’s wrong, with a capital W.

**John:** I also think there’s an overlap between Hollywood hours and startup culture hours. Because every film and television project kind of starts as a startup. It’s this new idea you’re struggling to work hard to make this thing come to life. And there’s the excitement and the joy, but recognizing how unhealthy that is in the long term is something we all have to keep in mind as we work on these projects that we hopefully love. So, yes.

And that could be the mantle that we’re taking up. It could be the charge that we’re leading, but apparently it’s not the charge that we’re going to be leading this year on Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** No, no. We have more important fish to fry. We have one more important fish to fry.

**John:** But, Craig, I want you to stretch before you get into full umbrage. So this I think is a good warm up umbrage here.

**Craig:** OK, cool.

**John:** Martin from Detroit writes, “My question is more of a concern. It’s regarding your segment How Would This Be a Movie. Have you ever—“

**Craig:** Hold on. I just want to interrupt. So this is already bad. Because do you know what a concerned troll is, John?

**John:** I know what a concerned troll is. This is actually definitional concerned troll which is why I left it in the outline.

**Craig:** Wonderful. Go on my friend from Detroit.

**John:** “Have you guys ever thought about all the screenwriters out there who may be affected by this segment. I mean, I know you guys don’t personally care about ideas being ‘discovered or stolen’ as I’m sure you get offered high profile assignments from existing IP all the time. But so many of us don’t. We have to search and find our own IP and it tears us apart after we spend so much time in research and development of the idea to only realize that a ‘bigger fish’ is also making the same project.

“It’s happened to almost all of us and it sucks every time. I think with all the great stuff that you guys do for screenwriters this segment of how could this be a movie is a detriment to working screenwriters. Sure, it helps all the studios and bigwigs to go out and grab one of your proposed ideas, but it does nothing for us. Each time you do one of these segments I feel like Obi-Wan when Alderaan was destroyed. I grow faint and need to sit down as I feel other screenwriters’ pain across the world.”

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** “All the while praying that you don’t mention any of my ideas that I have spent months, even years, researching and prepping. I thought this was a podcast for screenwriters, not for bank-rolled producers. I know you guys love the segment and think it’s fun, but well, just think about it. Signed, Concerned Screenwriter.”

**Craig:** Hmm. Let me think about it. Let me think about it. Well, I guess Martin what I would say is that you use a lot of words incorrectly. There’s so many fundamental flaws with what you’re saying here. For starters, I don’t know what you’re calling IP. I have no idea what you mean by that. Do you mean a book, a novel? Do you mean something that actually is intellectual property, because that’s what I and P stand for? If that’s what you mean then I don’t know what you’re talking about because we can all talk about it all day long. I can tell you all about the new Joe Hill book. Doesn’t matter. I don’t have the rights to it. Do you have the rights to it, Martin? If you do, it doesn’t matter what John and I do, because you have the rights.

But I don’t think that’s what you mean. When you say IP, I think what you just mean is topic. I think that’s what you’re saying. And Martin I have terrible, terrible news for you. When John and I do that segment we’re reading about topics that are in the newspaper. And they’re on the Internets, which means everybody already knows. It’s out there.

Now here’s another thing you need to know, Martin. You can’t own any of that. And you’re a fool to think that if John and I merely refrain from talking about it on our one podcast that no one else in Hollywood has noticed. Let me explain how it works, Martin. Every single thing we’ve ever seen has also been dumped into a hopper in front of an assistant – and we’ll get to them shortly – who have to go through all of this. These are all compiled and submitted every day, minute by minute, second by second. You have found nothing – you hear me? – that they don’t know about.

The only thing you can do if you’re talking about stuff that isn’t actually IP but just topic is to find something that they know about but don’t care about because they don’t see in it what you see in it. Which, by the way, would define say me and Chernobyl. It’s not like people didn’t know about Chernobyl. They just didn’t, I don’t know, they just didn’t care that much. I did. There you go. That’s how it works, Martin.

We don’t do this show for bank-rolled producers. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Nor do I think anyone is growing faint and screaming out in pain as we blow up Alderaan on a week-by-week basis. I don’t know what to tell you, Martin. I disagree with everything you’ve said here completely. But maybe nothing more than the way you’ve phrased this all as a concern.

Thank you for your concern.

**John:** I think the most crucial word that Martin is missing is How. And the idea of the topic is How Would This Be a Movie. So it’s not saying like there’s an idea out here and we’re going to make this into a movie. It’s really talking through what are the opportunities and challenges of this idea in turning it into a movie. And what are the many different avenues you could take?

Because you and I often don’t agree on sort of what the way into a story is. And that is the job of a screenwriter is to figure out given this idea, given this notion, how are you going to approach it. Who are the characters? How do you think about this idea as a screenwriter? That’s really the purpose. So, while we might brag about how many of the things we picked ended up becoming movies, it’s just because those are ideas that could become movies. We really are focused on the how. Like what are the actual mechanics, the characters, the storyline, the tone. What is it suited for? That is the purpose of the exercise. And that is what screenwriters do every single day.

**Craig:** Yeah. Martin, why don’t you just write something that other people can’t write?

**John:** Do that.

**Craig:** There’s a thought. Just do that.

**John:** Good. All right. Craig, are you properly stretched?

**Craig:** Dude, I woke up stretched for this. I don’t need stretching for this.

**John:** We’ve got another question. Matt writes about narrative games. “I’m a writer/narrative designer in the videogame industry who has worked at many well-known story-driven studios throughout the years. I heard a rumor about the WGA awards dropping the videogame writing category for 2020. My question is simply what gives?”

Craig, what gives?

**Craig:** Well, the guild has done it again. Well done Writers Guild. So here’s how this goes. The Writers Guild in the mid-2000s decided in its wisdom that one of the ways it could maybe help organize videogame writing would be to include videogame writing as a category in its awards. So they were going to use awards as sort of bait. And the way you could qualify for those awards ultimately became signing onto a kind of a Writers Guild – it’s not even like a real – it’s like a side agreement. It’s not like a full agreement. And so they did this for a while. And what happened was – big shock – big videogame companies did not – they did not unionize. Their members did not vote to join the Writers Guild. But we still hand out the awards.

And so then the Writers Guild said, oh, we have a great idea. Let’s just stop giving the awards. Because I can only presume the Writers Guild trophy costs thousands of dollars to forge in the fires of Mt. Doom. And we have to save that money. So now they’ve just given a huge middle finger to the videogame writing industry.

And here’s my problem. We have the worst of both worlds now. The writers that appreciated recognition for their writing are angry because all they see from their side is, oh, I guess we’re not writers in the eyes of the Writers Guild anymore. And on the Writers Guild side they’ve gotten nothing from this, except bad press. And again whatever they saved from the forging of the trophies in the fires of Mt. Doom.

I personally believe that videogame writing is essential. I think that a lot of videogames are vastly bigger than the movies and television shows that we write. I would love to see certain videogame shops unionize for the Writers Guild. We haven’t actually done the work to do it. All we’ve done is offer awards. Waited for something to flop out of the skies in our laps. It didn’t happen and now we’re taking our ball and going home.

It was a bad strategy. I don’t understand it. I don’t know why they did it this way. This was something that I was urging Patric Verrone to do, oh god, all the way back in 2006, starting with Bethesda. I thought that was a good place to start. But I can think of a number of companies where switching them to a proper Writers Guild agreement and getting them into the fold would be amazing for us. And we just haven’t done it. We don’t have the right inroads to that business. We’re not talking to the right people. It’s not a priority.

We have other priorities right now apparently, which I also don’t agree with. So, this is angering to me. And on behalf of all of my brethren and sister-en in the videogame business, all I can say is yeah this is a screw job. I hate it.

**John:** All right. Counter point. First let me validate the things you said that I think are absolutely true. Which is that videogame writing is truly writing and it is writing that is analogous to what screenwriters do. If you look through some of these narrative games they’re literally written in screenplay format, especially for cut scenes. It is very much the same kind of writing. And so the same way that I wish we had the foresight back in the ‘30s to cover animation writing, we should be looking at how we cover videogame writing. So you were right back then when you talked to Patric Verrone about wanting to make sure that videogame writing got covered. You’re still right now to say that videogame should be covered.

Craig, how often do you go to the Writers Guild Awards?

**Craig:** Well, John, as you know until recently I was not a heavily nominated writer. But I have gone to the Writers Guild Awards most recently to support our mutual friend John Gatins who was nominated for an award for his fine screenplay for Flight.

**John:** Very good. At those awards you took careful note of all the awards given out and at no point did you say, huh, that is funny that they are giving out an award to an area of business that they do not even represent writers in that field?

**Craig:** I’ve got to be honest with you. I didn’t pay heavy attention to that. I was having a good time. I was drinking a little. You know, sometimes you have a – and for me you know what that means. It means I had a full two glasses of wine.

**John:** Yes. Because 1.5 we have stipulated is enough for a podcast, but two is too much.

**Craig:** Right. Two is a party. But, no, it didn’t bother me.

**John:** All right. So I was not part of this decision to remove this category from the awards this year. There have been other awards that we decided to over the years award or not award based on sort of what seems to make sense. And giving out awards is a continuously flexible thing. I would not be surprised if the videogame award comes back in the future.

The challenge is that often the number of eligible entries for something will be like two. And so when you’re giving an award and there are only two possible things you can give it to it becomes a little less meaningful of an award. And so I think that all factored into the decision not to award the videogame category this year.

I do hear your frustration that this was not messaged properly and that you saw this as a rebuke of videogame writing, which I think you and I both agree is cinematic writing.

**Craig:** I’m just waiting for when the Writers Guild does message something properly. It’s been a while. It’s been a while. Just sort of set your watch to this. I don’t understand why they do these things.

**John:** So Craig here’s my frustration. Here’s my genuine frustration with your approach here is that I honestly could have flipped a coin and it could have – if they had awarded this award I could have imagined or some other screenwriting-ish kind of award but for an area that we don’t cover, I could imagine you saying, “What a stupid choice for the WGA to be offering an award for a category of writing that they don’t even cover.”

So, something like Best Writing for Reality Competition Shows. And that’s my frustration. I do think that you perceive anything the Writers Guild does as a stupid bad choice when sometimes it’s just a choice.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t think that’s true. The Writers Guild does make some stupid, bad choices from time to time. No question about that. If the Writers Guild had made a awarding reality shows awards, like Writers Guild Awards while they were trying to pull them into the fold, which they did for a while. I mean, they were trying to organize reality writing for a while. I think that would have made sense. I would have understood that.

The problem with giving people awards is once you start giving them to stop giving them is a bit of a slap in the face. I don’t think I would have had a problem with that. I don’t have a problem with everything the Writers Guild does. I have a problem with almost every kind of way the Writers Guild handles messaging about touchy things. Particularly in the last six months where it just seems to be one blunder after another. I don’t know who is in charge of that. It’s not the individual writers on the board. They don’t write press releases. But somebody is bungling this over and over and over. And, so no, I don’t think it’s fair to say that I just decide a la Republican Senators and anything that comes out of a Democrat’s mouth is bad.

No, I’m thinking critically about this. I assure you. I feel like they just – I can’t remember the last time they said something and I went, “Well done.” I really can’t. I’m an annoyed member of my union. What can I say?

**John:** All right. Let’s move on to a topic where I think we will find much more agreement. This is the issue of assistant pay. So to remind everybody, in a previous episode we asked – this was in relation to the #MeToo movement – what issue do you think we’re not paying enough attention to now that in a few years we’ll look back and say, oh my god, how did we not focus on this thing as being a huge problem? And someone wrote in to say I think you should be paying much closer attention to how little assistants in Hollywood are being paid and how that is a huge barrier to increasing representation, diversity, and just sustainability within this business.

So we in the last episode asked, hey, if you are somebody who has experience as an assistant in Hollywood tell us about your experience. Tell us what you’re making if you feel like telling us that. And what needs to change. By far it was the most email we ever got in on a topic. And the person who had to read all those emails is our producer, Megana Rao. So Megana Rao, welcome to the podcast.

**Megana Rao:** Hi guys.

**Craig:** Hi Megana.

**Megana:** Hi Craig.

**John:** So, we got a zillion emails that came in. So if we’re going to quote anybody from these emails we should stipulate that all the names have been changed. We’ve removed anything that can individually identify a person. And I should also say that some people were concerned that even by saying that “some assistants are getting paid as low as X dollar figure” that we could actually force wages down. And we’ll get to why that can be a problem is that even people who were able to unionize it sometimes had a negative effect on how much they were actually bringing home each week.

So this is complicated. And so this is not going to be the episode where we fix all these problems. This is going to be an episode where we describe the nature of these problems and invite discussion on how to improve things for everybody.

But I thought we might start with some context because a lot of the assistants who wrote in were writing in about television. And Craig has made a television show. He won an Emmy for it. But it was not a traditional television show. And so I wanted a better sense of what traditional TV assistants were like. So I emailed Aline. She wrote:

“On a show there’s typically a writer’s production assistant who gets lunch and runs errands.” So a writer’s production assistant. “Then there’s the EP assistant who works for the showrunner,” so who works for Aline. “Then a writer’s assistant who is in the room and works with all the writers, but especially the showrunner. There’s also a script coordinator who handles the mechanics of getting a script properly distributed.” So she’s describing four people.

And she says that some shows combine these roles in various ways but that’s how Crazy Ex-Girlfriend did it. So, we’re looking a showrunner’s assistant, a writers’ room assistant, a writers’ room PA, and a script coordinator. And the script coordinator is the one that classically has been a union job. Megana, can you tell us about Lance?

**Megana:** Lance says, “I’m a script coordinator on a network show. The IATSE union minimum for a script coordinator is $16.63 per hour. That means that even with overtime and a 60-hour week guarantee I make about $44,000 a year after taxes. And that’s if I work all 52 weeks out of the year, which as anyone who works in TV can tell you basically never happens. $44,000 a year is pathetic for any full-time worker trying to pay their rent is Los Angeles. But it’s downright laughable considering what a script coordinator is responsible for.

“We manage and distribute the scripts, act as the liaison between the writers’ room and the other departments of the show and process the guild union paperwork to ensure that writers are properly credited and paid.”

**John:** So Craig, working full-time 60 hours a week bringing home $44,000 a year.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s bullshit. That’s just absolute bullshit. And we haven’t even gotten to – and we will – get to what we’ll call the assistant-assistants, right, like the classic assistants. Now we’re talking about somebody that’s actually doing a job that has even more responsibility or authority than a number of assistants.

What’s happening here essentially is theft. OK? It’s theft. Because any normal business – any normal industry that was relying on somebody to do the things that Lance is describing here would have to pay them more than that. More importantly, the way they’re doing this, and this is a theme that’s going to come up over and over, is essentially relying on the fact that they can get rid of Lance. And somebody else will be there. They’ll shove them in. They’ll train them and make them do it. And then they’ll get rid of them.

It comes down to just a callous disregard for people. They don’t care. They don’t care about Lance when he’s not there, or she’s not there. They don’t care what’s going on in the morning and what’s going on in the evening. They don’t care if they’re trying to start a family. They don’t care if they have bills or medical problems. They don’t care at all. They just want what they want. And if you can’t give them what they want then they get rid of you. And I will say it again. In our business it is disgusting to think that this is how companies treat our lowest paid people.

Think of this. Lance, Script Coordinator, is sitting there on a network show where I presume at some point or another there was a storyline about how hard it was to work in today’s economy, or get laid off, or be underpaid or overworked. And Lance is there with his 60-hour work week getting paid $16.63 an hour. Working for a company where no doubt the CEO has tens, 20s, 30s, and 40s of millions of dollars or more. It’s sick. It’s a sick business. This is honestly a sickness.

And you and I, John, we’re going to change this. I swear to god. As god is my witness. The god that I do not believe in. We are going to change this. I swear. I swear it.

**John:** All right. Let’s set the table a little bit more. So we talked about assistants in television. So there’s four different kinds of roles you might look for there. We also heard from agency assistants. We heard some real horror stories from agency assistants.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Evelyn wrote that she currently makes $16 an hour working at a talent agency which she is told among the higher numbers. Man, we got some horror stories there.

We heard from studio assistants. We also heard from temps, which I found was fascinating. Megana, can you tell us about Miguel?

**Megana:** Yeah, so Miguel says, “To preface I’m currently working as a temp going between HBO Max, Skydance, and Disney+. And temping pays more than any assistant job I’ve seen or had. I’m currently covering for another temp that has been on the same desk for eight months and we both make $20 an hour. When you factor in the temp company my employers end up paying $30 an hour and $45 an hour when it hits overtime. I’m constantly asking how companies can pay $30 an hour for a temp for eight months, yet I’ve never made more than $17 an hour as a full-time assistant for four years. I’m pretty sure I get paid more than the person I’m covering for, even without the premium the temp company takes which is 33%.

“Short term, it’s actually better for me to stay a temp right now than to work full-time.”

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

**John:** That illustrates the hypocrisy that’s happening here. Because if a company can pay $30 or $45 an hour for a person in that job they can pay the actual person that money. They’re paying for the convenience of having a temp that they can just not think about or worry about. But it’s crazy.

**Craig:** See, OK, so what they’re doing is they’re saying if we hire somebody permanently we take on certain burdens. We have all this payroll tax we have to pay. We have to pay for some fringes like healthcare, which we don’t want to pay for. But even worse, we’re stuck with them. Because it’s hard to fire people unfairly. And I know the laws are so awful. You can’t just fire people willy-nilly because you don’t like their face. Or maybe, oh my god, what if a woman gets pregnant. Dun-dun. What do we do then?

You know what the best thing to do would be? Let’s not hire anybody ever. Let’s just use temps. Let’s just rent human beings. And maybe it comes out to be a little bit more, but that’s OK because we have the convenience of just getting rid of them whenever we want. And that is essentially the Uber-ification of the assistant business.

If you go back to Evelyn, our agency assistant who wrote in, what she is saying is essentially she comes home with roughly $480 a week. That’s about $1,900 a month. That’s including overtime. OK. That’s the difference, right? So, they’re “stuck” with Evelyn because they’re employing her in a traditional normal way that it’s supposed to work in America. And they’re giving her what amounts to about $22,000 a year.

When I moved here in 1992 my first job paid me $20,000 a year. OK, she’s talking about take home. Fine. It’s roughly then, you know what, it’s the equivalent. $20,000 a year, it was barely survivable. It’s even less survivable now. And it’s unconscionable. And more to the point, and this is what blows my mind, these people – Miguel, Evelyn, everyone writing in – these people are at the heart of this enormous pillar of our economy, of our American economy. Our entertainment industry is enormous and it is one of the few exporting industries we have. And all of these people know everyone’s phone number, address, credit card number, Social Security number, the gate code to the house, the alarm code to the alarm. They know everything. They see financial statements. They handle scripts that are confidential. There are a thousand Evelyns out there who are being terribly underpaid and all of them can destroy every secret we have in Hollywood.

So is this how we’re going to run our business? To save those dollars because we can while CEOs. And even forget CEOs. Even just like the senior vice president of something is making so much money. No. You can’t do it. I’m not saying that you have to pay Evelyn $300,000. But I think $20 an hour is a pretty reasonable place to start, don’t you?

**John:** I do. So, Evelyn actually wrote more about this, so let’s go on to – she talked about the expenses of living in Los Angeles and how she’s being paid the same amount as she would have in 1993.

**Megana:** So Evelyn says, “I’ve had this conversation with our head of HR,” and Evelyn also works at one of the big four agencies. She says, “I’ve specifically asked how companies can justify paying assistants this low. And the response was not the greatest. I mentioned that agency assistants made the same amount of money in 1993 that we make now in 2019. The response was that our working conditions have improved since then. And they were salaried and abused working 16-hour days. We are hourly now.”

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**Megana:** “The amount of money however still comes out to the same and in addition the response was the value of the dollar is much different. In 1993 everything was cheaper. Cars. Gas. Apartments. Bills. Food.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Megana:** “My apartment would have been a third of the price 25 years ago.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Did they say it’s better now because they’re not abused? Is that what they said?

**Megana:** I think that was the point. But this was the real kicker. This HR person responded to her, “Low wages should push people to work harder, to get more experience in order to make the next step and make more money.”

**Craig:** OK. Now we get to the heart of the stupidity and the greed. Which is this ugly puritanism. You’re being paid less, they say, because it’s good for you. Let me tell you dear friends at home that nobody succeeds simply because they were being underpaid. There is not one person that is powerful and rich today that is powerful and rich because they were super freaking angry at their low pay when they started. Nobody works at McDonald’s says, “Oh my god, this sucks so much. I have to be the CEO of a company.”

People who are going to be successful are successful because they want to be successful. They have a drive and ambition and a talent and a work ethic. And sometimes they just have dumb luck. But one thing I know for sure is getting underpaid doesn’t make you want to be successful more. What it does is sap your energy, demotivate you, make you believe you’re working in an unfair system, because you are, and it makes you resentful. It is bad for your health. It’s bad for your family. It’s bad for your relationships.

And that person who said that is just wrong. I want to believe that they weren’t actually saying something they believed but rather they were lying. Because I feel better about them. I’d rather that they be an evil greedy liar than someone so stupid as the think that paying people less than what they deserve is good for them.

**John:** The other challenge here is that if you were making that same money working at In-and-Out you walk away from In-and-Out and you have no other expenses or needs related to that In-and-Out career. But the career that Evelyn wants is very different. So she goes through her budget and sort of like how she breaks out her expenses. She says she has $208 left at the end of the month. “But as an assistant I should also be going to comedy show, script reading, networking events that may cost money, so there’s another $20 gone each time.” So the networking expenses. The clothes expenses. Or a car.

Christian writes in about how important it is to have a car as a writer’s production assistant.

**Megana:** Yes. Christian says, “I want to point out the fact that it’s nearly impossible to do a writer’s production assistant job, keep in mind it’s supposed to be entry level, or any other assistant job with elements of personal duties without a car. And that the wages we make god knows none of us can afford car payments. So that’s just another way our wages, combined with the requirements of the jobs, ‘Must have car,’ has been listed on so many job descriptions I’ve seen. It keeps those who come from underprivileged backgrounds from breaking in.”

**Craig:** I’m going to lose my mind. So these folks like Christian are writer’s production assistants. That means they’re working for a show. Right?

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Give them a car. It’s a TV show. It has a budget in the millions. In the millions. Go out, buy an $8,000 used piece of crap and there. Now you have a show car. It’s disgusting. I just don’t understand. Like come on. Why would you do this to them? Why would you do this? Some people, if you’re not going to pay them a proper salary then you can’t also penalize them for other things that you need from them. It’s all backwards. And it’s disgusting. The only way – I really believe this – the only way we’re going to fix this is by continuing to talk about this and shaming somebody interesting doing the right thing and going, “You know what? I don’t know what we were thinking here. Duh. Let’s just get a car so the writer’s production assistant has a car that they can use during the day that we pay the insurance for and we put gas in and we wash.”

Oh my god. I’m going to lose my crap.

**John:** So a car is obviously a huge expense, but rent is a huge expense, too. And so we had people who wrote in sort of what rent is like. But, Megana you recently moved to Los Angeles. Los Angeles is not an inexpensive city to live in. So, what was your experience like trying to find a place to live? And how do you find a place to live in Los Angeles as an assistant?

**Megana:** Woof. OK. So I joined a few Facebook groups and reached out to a bunch of friends. I ended up finding my current apartment through Craig’s assistant, Bo. But every time I was looking for an apartment and I would find something sort of reasonable maybe around the $1,000 range it was always a shared—

**John:** So $1,000 that you’re sharing?

**Megana:** Yes. $1,000 and it was like $1,000 would be my monthly rent. It was always a shared bedroom or like a hostel sort of situation where I would be like in a bunk bed. Or just probably an hour commute to get to the office. So, it was rough.

**John:** Well, also, you’re single. You’re in your 20s. I think there’s an expectation that you can get by with a little bit less for that now.

**Megana:** Definitely.

**John:** But like if you had a kid. If you had other expenses it makes it impossible to be an assistant if your rent is going to be that high for you. It rules out a huge number of people who could be working in that job because they simply couldn’t afford to work in that job.

**Megana:** Totally. Or finding roommates who would be OK with me coming in with a family or a partner just adds a totally extra layer of difficulty.

**Craig:** I mean, not to mention a lot of people in this position have student debt that they have to pay off. It just blows my mind. The reality is such that where we’re going is the only people who can do these jobs in Hollywood are people that have independent sources of money. They come from money. That’s who we’re going to get. We’re going to get people with money already. Well I don’t want those people. There’s nothing wrong with them, but I wasn’t one of them. And I think it’s best if we open the door wide for all sorts of people. That’s kind of the point. And, again, liberal progressive Hollywood, these cities are attractive places to live and to work. So the rents are going to go up and up and up.

And if you as a boss don’t understand what these numbers are and you still think it’s OK to pay your assistant $15 an hour and not help them out in any other way and force them to work ridiculous hours, you’re a dick. You’re a dick.

And you’re company is a dick. And I’ll say UTA, ICM, CAA, WME, if this is what you’re doing you’re dicks. And Universal and Sony and Disney and Warner Bros and Lions Gate and Fox, dicks. There. I’ll light my whole career on fire. I don’t care. It’s wrong. They have to stop this. It’s just wrong.

**John:** To that point let’s hear from Kyle. So Kyle is working at a management company.

**Megana:** So Kyle says, “While working for a miniature golf course in 2015 I was making $14 an hour. That is in 2015 dollars. So I assume the pay rate there is even higher today. I now make $15 an hour at my current job as an assistant to a talent manager. That is after renegotiating it up after a year of working here. I had asked for more money when it came time to evaluate my performance, but my boss found that he could not afford to pay the extra $5 a day I had asked for.”

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**Megana:** “This is while I have to listen to him making deals for his clients for hundreds of thousands of dollars from their jobs. Jobs that I submit them for. Jobs that I work 45 hours a week on making sure that they are happy and satisfied with. I currently have to share a bedroom in a house with six people because I do not make enough money to have my own room.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s going to be a war.

**John:** A revolution of some kind.

**Craig:** You can’t keep this going. This is disgusting. It has to stop. And what we’re doing is creating an entire generation in this business that is disgusted by this business. And who looks at their own bosses as gross hypocrites, which they are. Which they are. Not that, you know, when you and I started John I’m sure we both looked around and saw a lot of disgusting crap, too. This has been going on for a long time. But I feel like the economic portion of this has gotten ridiculously bad. There is no excuse for it. None. It’s not like we’re in lean times economically in Hollywood. We are not. The compensation packages are outrageous.

How do these people look these 25 year olds in the eye and say, “I need you to take my Tesla to the car wash, take my Armani to the dry cleaners, take my $5,000 designer dog to the vet. I need you to then drop my kid off at her $50,000 preschool. And then I need you to come back and do all the work I demand that you do and here’s $15 an hour. Enjoy the taxes on top of that. And, no, I can’t afford to give you an extra $5 a day.”

**John:** No, Craig, you and I think back to when we had those entry level jobs. Because you were saying you started – you were working for nearly nothing. It was a marketing company. I was a reader, not getting paid very much at all. And I think the reason why I was OK doing it is because obviously I always had my parents I could fall back on, but I also had a sense that this was only going to be for a year or two. That there was clearly a path up. There was a way to sort of move forward. And as I would talk to folks who worked as like a PA, like a writers’ room PA, there was a path. There was a ladder to move forward and to move up.

And one of the things we heard consistently in these emails is that I think a lot of times employers believe that ladder is still there, that there’s still a clear trajectory, and that trajectory doesn’t exist anymore. And one of the reasons it doesn’t exist is the systemic changes in the business, specifically short seasons and small rooms.

If we can jump down, take a look at what Barry writes about how short seasons and long breaks affect how he can move up in the business.

**Megana:** So Barry says, “I currently work on a successful TV show. I worked for five months on the first season. Then we took nine months off. Then I worked for five months on the second season. Then we took an entire year off before the third season started. It should be pretty clear why the folks who make the least amount of money and have the fewest contacts and don’t have agents or managers repping them for other jobs are going to be hit the hardest in this scenario where the new world order is that the majority of jobs only last a couple of months.

“This is a huge difference even from when I started in the industry, where getting a job on a hit show would at least mean that you had a few years of steady work before you had to start looking again.”

**John:** So what he’s describing is traditionally if Barry had been employed on an old fashioned TV show that had 22 episodes a season he would have been employed basically the whole year. And he would have had a whole year to prove how good he is at his job and attract the attention of the showrunner and might get a script in the second year. There would be a way to sort of move forward and move up.

But if it’s just, OK, we’re going to write a bunch of scripts and then we’re going to go off eventually and shoot the show and then we’re going to take these giant times off, Barry is hopping from show to show to show to show. And can never get to prove his worth to the people who are supposed to be there noticing how good he is and sort of give him that next step. And so this system that we set up makes it so hard to do what was pretty easy for me and Craig and other folks who came into the industry 20 years ago.

And I think so many employers still think we’re in that system of 20 years ago.

**Craig:** Well yeah. I mean, look. What a great deal for them. They can run these shows this way and then they can hire people for a ridiculously small amount of money. They don’t even have to pay for their cars or pay for their gas or any of that stuff. They can work them to the bone when they need them. Kick them out the door when they don’t. And when they finally show up and say I’m sorry I can’t afford to live this way they go, “Fine, bye. We’ll just get the next person that is excited to do this and they’ll do it.”

There is this feeling see that if they pay you more, like what you’re worth, that you will be demotivated. I really believe that like a lot of these people believe this stupid notion. You know, when I started and I was paid my $20,000 a year my share of rent was $700. And that $700 was for my own – I had own little bedroom that I could close the door to. And it wasn’t in a great neighborhood, but it wasn’t, you know, in a bombed-out zone or anything.

And $20,000 with $700 a month rent was doable. It wasn’t great but it was doable. I could handle my expenses.

Now, that place, which was not exactly Fox or Warner Bros or anything, still had an opportunity for me to prove myself and soon enough I was making $28,000 a year. In other words, there was a sense that there was growth. I think a lot of these places go, “Why would we offer you growth? We don’t care about you. We just want you to do this job. If you don’t want to do it, go away. We’re a McDonald’s now. There’s no growth at McDonald’s. Just come here. Do the job. If you don’t like it, F-off. We’ll get another sucker. There’s like people knocking on our door.”

Just because a lot of people want these jobs doesn’t mean you can get away with paying people little for them. There’s going to be a riot. And again I will just say to them, I will say to all of you that are underpaying these people, you are playing with fire. They have your emails. They have your information. Wizen up. If you don’t want to do the right thing because you’re a good person, do the right thing because you’re a prudent person.

**John:** Yeah. We heard many stories about folks feeling that supply and demand made it impossible to negotiate on their own behalf. And one writer wrote in and she said that – she was working on a show and the studio was trying to basically pay her less than she’d been paid on her previous job. And it wasn’t until friend of the show Aline Brosh McKenna stepped in and said, “No, you have to pay her this amount.” She was able to keep her very low hourly salary.

The other thing which I was not as aware of until we got all of these emails is the idea of 60-hour work weeks. And so we were just talking about how people work too long. But for many of the assistants who were writing in they are working under the assumption – they’re hoping to get a 60-hour week. Because they’re paid at a certain rate and they go into overtime after 40 hours. And without that guaranteed overtime there’s no way for their life to be sustainable.

But sometimes that can backfire. We had situations where time sheets were doctored to hide overtime or basically there were blanket statements that you cannot possibly do overtime. So weekend reading, well that does not count as part of your work.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this is an area where they can screw around all they want, right? And there’s not much you can do to prevent people from wriggling around rules. But what you can do is prevent them from just generally not paying you enough, right? We know – this is a little bit like with screenwriters and producers and free passes. It’s hard to stop bad people from getting what they want if they want to wriggle around rules and spin on technicalities. But what you can’t do is fudge an overall number.

So, in reality no matter how these companies are managing these hours with their employees, they know what they’re paying them. They know. They know exactly what the average salary is for every single person in that position. In every single position. They have the data. Easy enough to run. That includes how they actually effectively spend for overtime or for not overtime. Take that number and make it bigger. It’s as simple as that. Because what they’re doing is wrong. We have a moral requirement as far as I’m concerned as people who are well-off in this business – you and me – to speak out on behalf of those who are not. Because we’re not seeing – I don’t think – anything remotely close to fair treatment. And it makes me feel gross. And I and you can’t solve this problem. Not with our own pocketbooks. But every single company can.

So the real question is how much would it cost. How much would it cost a company like say WME to guarantee that every single one of their assistants is making $20 an hour and that’s across the same amount of hours they were working before. The same amount of paid hours. I don’t know what it would cost them. Maybe it would cost them like, I don’t know, $20 million. They have it. That’s not a problem. I know exactly what they have. I saw their stupid IPO. I saw the stupid amount of money that the guys in charge make.

And I also know that they’re also happy to host big fundraisers when Elizabeth Warren comes to town. Well, I guess not her. She doesn’t take their money. Pete Buttigieg? I don’t know. But when people come to town to talk about the death of the American dream and income inequality these mega millionaires show up and applaud. And I’m telling you that they know where to go because their assistant reminded them. And the assistant handled the RSVP. And they’re not paying the assistant enough. So, why don’t you take a good long look in the mirror if you’re paying your assistant less than that amount?

Right now take a good long look in the mirror, dickhead, and then pay them more.

**John:** So, I don’t want to stop at the assumption that $20 an hour would actually solve anything. I don’t want to anchor that as the set point, because I think it’s really dangerous when we put a number out there and say, oh, as long as we hit that then all the problems are solved.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s a place to start.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about solutions overall and the range of things that are going to need to happen for this problem to be improved. So increasing pay to some number would be a start. Just the way there’s a movement towards a national minimum wage. Some sort of realistic minimum for Los Angeles that factors in how expensive it is to live in Los Angeles. And the requirements for putting on these people in terms of how they have to dress, especially if you’re at an agency. You know, that you’re supposed to have a car if that’s a requirement. If those things, even if it’s just like kit rentals or something that sort of really reflects the true cost of trying to do this job.

**Craig:** Kit rentals? So if people don’t know what kit rental is, if you’re working as like the key grip on a movie you may charge them a kit rental which is there’s equipment that needs to be used on the movie that you own and you rent to the production. It’s one of the ways that a lot of people make money. Sometimes they’ll call it as a box rental for computers. If you need somebody to use their own computer you pay them a box rental. You’re renting their computer from them while they work for you.

I think it’s a brilliant idea, John, to say that there should be kit rental for clothing. If you require a certain kind of clothing level at your company you should put in an amount that is essentially compensation for the clothing that that person has to purchase. Of course.

**John:** Yeah. Unions. So classically when workers are not able to demand the things individually unions are a way to gather up all those workers and demand more things. And so some of the people who wrote in are members of IATSE. So IATSE is International Alliance of – oh, god, I’m going to mess up what it actually stands up for.

**Craig:** Television and Stage Employees.

**John:** Employees? Great. IATSE is a giant umbrella union that covers lots of different things. So some of the folks who wrote in are members of IATSE, which originally represented script coordinators and also represents some writer’s assistants on certain projects. It doesn’t sound like it’s been a blanket wonderful solution. Some people talked about how it actually forced their wages down because the overtime things that kicked in.

IATSE is not a great union. It’s kind of not. But the idea of union representation is not the wrong one in the sense that it hopefully can raise the floor for everybody. It’s just it’s not going to sort of solve the problem I think by itself.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not sure that the union is going to be the answer here. The union meaning it would – because it’s not going to be the Writers Guild. It’s not going to be the Directors Guild. It’s not going to be SAG. It’s not going to be a creative guild. It would be some kind of service union kind of thing. And it would be a long and expensive war. And it could make things possibly worse. But it could make things amazing. I mean, in its best incarnation it would solve the problem completely. But you will get there faster, I think, if you use shame and start calling out places.

But I guess also my favorite is reverse shame. What I would love as a result of this, honestly, is for a major company – meaning a big agency, a major agency, like one of the big four agencies, or one of the major studios, or one of the major networks – to stand up and say, “We’re actually going to do this. We are going to improve across the board all assistant pay. And we’re not going to do it with games to take it away on the other side. We’re legitimately going to put more money in the pockets of our assistants.” Because once one place starts it will spread. That’s what it will take. It will take one brave company to look their stupid shareholders in the eye and say stop being greedy for five seconds and realize this is good for us. We can’t push everything in a race to the bottom. That is not the answer.

**John:** Agreed. So in addition to the companies actually stepping up and taking more responsibility for this, I’ve really been heartened to see how many assistants have gathered together and started to share their own information about how much they’re making. So, in the process of putting this episode together we got a look at a lot of this secret spreadsheets that have been passed around where assistants are talking about how much they’re actually earning which gives people a sense of what the ranges are or sort of you can actually get this much at a certain place and can help these assistants make better choices about where they’re working and sort of what is reasonable to ask for and how hard to push.

One of the things that was really helpful to see from the emails that we got in was some guidance for showrunners. And Boris I thought actually had a really great point which I’d never considered. So Megana can you tell us what Boris wrote about assistant’s scripts?

**Megana:** So Boris says, “Read your assistant’s scripts before you hire them so that you know what kind of writer they are. And if there’s something about them or their writing that will make it impossible for them to advance on your show I think a lot of showrunners in this industry don’t want to be the bad guy. So they avoid these kind of tough conversations with their assistants. But they are so necessary to have. Most assistants want to move up. And if we’re working sometimes up to 90 hours per week on your show everyone has to be on the same page about what the payoff for that work could be. Because I can tell you from experience it is really hard to hear from a boss who you have spent years working for that they never had any intention to promote you, or do much of anything to help you professionally. And their assumption was that you just figure out your career on your own somewhere else.”

**John:** Yeah. So that relationship between showrunners and assistants is crucial. I mean, that showrunner is trusting that assistant with so much information about not just their lives but their vision for the show. And what Boris is asking for is to just be a little bit more honest at the front about what you potentially actually see in this person.

And I think there’s actually potential for showrunners to make a big difference here. I can imagine some showrunners really stepping up and saying, “Hey, look, let’s go through all of our budgets and really take a look at how much our assistants are getting paid. And how we can prioritize paying them a true living wage so that person can make a living doing this job.” They can still have the same aspirations of moving up through, but it’s not going to be survival until they can actually get a staff writing job or a script on a show.

**Craig:** And you know where that money can come from, right?

**John:** It’s going to come from the massive overall deals they’ve signed with streamers?

**Craig:** Voila. And even if you’re not at a massive overall deal that you signed with a streamer, even if you just have your one show on basic cable and you’re the showrunner, you got enough. Take care of your people. They’re your people. They work for you. OK? And if you want to go fight the fight with the studio and say, “Hey, you guys got to give me more money to pay my assistants,” and you want to argue with them that they shouldn’t take that money out of your salary, do it. I don’t care. Have that argument. Or, just give them money. Either way, don’t stop until your people are taken care of. If your people under you are not making a reasonable amount of money and you need to ask them if they are. You really do.

Have the conversation. And find out how they’re doing. I guarantee you that if you’re a halfway decent person and you have that discussion with them and you hear about what their deal is you’re going to hear something that makes you go, “I think I might need to vomit now. I think I screwed up. And I think I need to take care of you better.” And then do it. Figure out how to do it and then do it. It’s how it starts. It’s got to start somewhere, right?

**John:** Be the change you’re seeking in the world.

**Craig:** Well, also seek the change. Because, look, a lot of people, they’re busy and they have their lives. And the assistant comes along as somebody to say, “I’m here to help you.” And that’s incredibly wonderful. And if you haven’t had an assistant and suddenly you do and they’re taking care of things for you, you feel like wow. And it’s easy to take that person for granted. Do not. Listen to them.

Because a lot of times they’re terrified of you, whether you know it or not. The way I was terrified of every boss I ever had when I was 22.

**John:** So let’s talk about the way forward for assistants and also for our discussion of this topic on the podcast. So we read aloud some bits from this, but truly there is a book of stuff that people wrote in. So we’re going to look for some way to form a document that can actually be downloaded or looked at on the site to get more of these anecdotes in there, because we really just scratched the surface of what people wrote in.

Keep writing in as more stuff comes up. As you get ideas listening to this. Or reading other stuff about how to fix this and sort of the parts of this conversation that we’re probably missing. Because there is a lot to talk about here clearly. Off-mic Craig and I will be doing work talking with folks as well about how to fix this situation. So, I just want to thank everyone who did write in.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** Even if we didn’t read any of your stuff, it helped inform all this discussion and will help us moving forward.

**Craig:** I want to be your Che Guevara. [laughs] Seriously. I do. I’m so angry. I’m so angry about this. It’s just not fair.

**John:** And Megana thank you for all the hard reading you did this week.

**Megana:** Of course. And thank you to everyone who wrote in. I read all of them and it was tough.

**Craig:** I bet. I bet.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to some simpler questions. Craig, Rob asks, “My agent tells me that no one is spending on feature development. So the only solution is to spec. I have concepts in light treatment form about five pages, but it seems crazy to invest months of work taking them further without clear interest. To me if there’s enough interest for me to write it there should be enough interest for someone to pay to develop it. I get why companies want things to be a certain way, but surely this can’t be the only way?”

Craig, what’s your feeling in terms of writing out that spec versus essentially I think Rob is talking about pitching the thing for someone to develop?

**Craig:** Sure. Well, Rob, first of all you have to understand that what your agent is saying is that no one that talks to him is spending on feature development. Meaning no one that’s willing to take his call or her call. OK? So, your agent sucks. Because of course they have feature development money. They have entire funds that are there for nothing but feature development. They do take pitches. They do develop things.

Now, if you are new and you don’t have much of a track record, taking a pitch from you is a high risk endeavor for them because they just don’t know what they’re going to get. If you have original concepts in light treatment form then putting aside your agent’s utter failure, it probably is in your economic interest to write it if you can. It doesn’t matter what the interest is. You make interest with the writing. No one is going to say, “We can’t wait to see your script about blankety-blank.” If they are, well, it costs them that much breath to say it but little else. It doesn’t mean anything.

**John:** Yeah. So some context on this question which I realized as I pasted it in. Rob is British, so he has a British agent, which is why he still has an agent at this moment. I agree that there is feature development that is happening off of pitches. Pitches do sell. Katie Silberman was on the show talking about the pitch that she sold recently.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And she did another one after that. So, it does still happen. It happens with people that they’re excited to work with. And so if you happen to be a person they’re excited to work with that can happen for you.

I think the crucial thing to be thinking about is in this period of time where you have these five pages of ideas, you’ve got to be writing. You have to always be writing. And so you need to pick one of those ideas Rob. The one that you’re most excited to see as a movie. And write that script. Because if you stop writing scripts because you’re not sure that they’re going to sell that’s not being a writer. That’s not moving your career forward. You always need to be writing something. And if they’re not paying you to write it, then you’re going to need to write it yourself.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, when you say, “To me if there’s enough interest for me to write it that should be enough interest to pay to develop it.” It will be once they know that you can write to their satisfaction. It will be. I guarantee you. But until that point it’s not. And therefore you should write it and, I mean, hopefully you know this, Rob. The amount of money they’ll pay you to develop something is vastly less than the amount of money they’ll pay for the actual script of that thing, if they don’t own it. So, if they love what you write they will pay a lot for it. If they love what you might be able to write they’ll pay a little for it.

So the question for you is do you know what that is. How much effort would it take to write it? And then bet on yourself. There is a certain entrepreneurial aspect to this job. There’s no way around it.

**John:** The other thing I want to challenge is no one spends on feature development. Well, Rob, why does it need to be feature development? Because you know where they do spend money in development? Is in television. All television is is development. And so it’s coming in with an idea, a writer they’re excited about, and then paying that writer to write the script and decide if they want to shoot a pilot. It’s the way television has always worked. It’s the way it works in streamers right now.

So, take a look at some of those ideas and ask yourself does this have to be a feature idea, or could this be a television idea? Could this be an idea for a streamer? Because that may be the way that you get paid to write that thing you really want to write.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Jack asks, “Just wanted to ask if you could recommend a good thesaurus website. I get stuck on emotional descriptions sometimes and find myself frequenting the Internet for synonyms and the like.” Craig, do you have a favorite synonym site?

**Craig:** You know, I bounce around all sorts of them. Merriam-Webster, m-w.com – maybe just mw.com now – is quite good. But I bop around all over the place. It’s not like there’s one great one or anything. The nice thing is they’re all freely available to you. So, no need to rank them. Just type in a word and then type synonym and then see what pops up.

**John:** That’s always a good way to do it. When I’m in the middle of a sentence in Highland and I just need to find an alternate word because I’m repeating a word, I’ll right click on a work and pop up the thesaurus that’s there. So that’s Apple’s built-in thesaurus, which is pretty good. So for finding that matching word that can swap in.

For more in depth searches it’s probably been a One Cool Thing before. But Rhyme Zone is a really amazing website that I mostly go to when I’m doing song lyrics and need to find what could possibly rhyme with this word. It’s great for that. But its thesaurus ability is also really smart.

It was developed in a really strange way in that rather than sort of relying on experts to find synonyms, it’s just going through and figuring out with all the text in the Internet trying to figure out what words match up to each other. And so it’s really a weird way to get to thesaurus, but I find it works really, really well. It finds words that sort of cluster in meaning that aren’t necessarily direct synonyms which could sometimes be more useful. So, Rhyme Zone is the place to go.

**Craig:** That’s a good one. And another one, if you ever find yourself suffering from tip of the tongue syndrome, where you are trying to remember what a word is. Like weirdly yesterday I just needed the word digression. And it was one of those weird mental blocks where I’m like what is the word again? You know, the word that’s like D-something and it means wandering off from your conversational topic. I’m just having one of those gear locks.

So there’s a terrific website that a lot of puzzle solvers will use called onelook.com. And it’s got all sorts of wonderful uses, but one of my favorites is it can search for words based on criteria you enter including wild cards and question marks. An asterisk means any number of letters could go here. A question mark means any letter could go here.

And so you can say for instance, D and then asterisk. That means it’s going to return every single word that’s D and then some amount of letters after, which obviously that would be too many. But if you hit colon, then you can type in a word that you’re saying limits this search by definition. So I can say D-asterisk-colon “conversation.” And then it will just find all the D-words that are vaguely related to the concept of conversation. And, voila, there’s digression.

So, very, very useful website for me.

**John:** And I just looked it up. One Look is by the same people who make Rhyme Zone.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** So it’s all fitting together here nicely.

**Craig:** Gorgeous.

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Untitled Goose Game.

**Craig:** This is everywhere.

**John:** From Panic. Oh, it’s so good. I’m just so delighted. So, now I think I’ve talked about it on the show before, is like I refuse to install games on my computer because then I’ll be playing games on my computer rather than doing work on my computer. And so this game is available for Mac, PC, or Switch. So I bought myself a Nintendo Switch just so I could play Untitled Goose Game. And it was worth the purchase. So I’m greatly enjoying it.

In this game you play a goose who is trying to do things and just annoy people. And you just feel like a small child who is an annoying brat and it’s just a delightfully fun little game.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s basically the story of my life, man. It’s how I move through the world. It’s Untitled Craig Game. It’s me. I’m just wandering around honking at people.

**John:** You are that goose. You are honking at the world.

**Craig:** Honking at the world. Certainly honked at them in this episode.

My One Cool Thing is a repeat but it’s the second year, so it’s all new. This is Queer Qrosswords. So this is a pack of 32 crosswords. They are all LGBTQ+ themed. They are all by LGBTQ+ constructors. They did it last year. They’ve done it again. It’s out today as of this recording. We are recording on National Coming Out Day, October 11.

**John:** Happy National Coming Out Day, Craig.

**Craig:** Happy National Coming Out Day to you, John. And last year they raised nearly $25,000 for LGBTQ+ charities. So here’s how this works. They don’t take money from you. Rather, you prove that you have donated at least $10 or more to one of eight suggested charities, all the ones you might imagine are on there. You send in your proof of your fresh new charitable contribution, and they send you a packet of 32 crosswords. And the constructors are terrific. A lot of the constructors are people whose names if you are a crossword puzzle solver like myself you have seen time and time again in the New York Times. There’s also my most preferred escape room cohorts Trip Payne. And then most importantly, most importantly, my – you know I’m absolutely obsessed with the puzzles of Mark Halpin. I talk about them all the time. He, I think, is the best cryptic crossword puzzle constructor in the universe. And he had an amazing one last year. And he has, of course, another one in this packet. His crossword alone is worth a $10 or more contribution to an LGBTQ+ charity.

So, Queer Qrosswords. We’ll put a link in the show notes. But that’s Queer and then Qrosswords. They cutely spell Qrosswords.

**John:** Very nice. And that’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Thank you, Megana. It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Naomi Randall. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. But for short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

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

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net, or you can download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, thank you for all the umbrage.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And Viva la revolución.

**John:** All right. See you.

Links:

* [Hollywood’s Grueling Hours & Drowsy-Driving Problem: Crew Members Speak Out Despite Threat To Careers](https://deadline.com/2018/02/hollywood-safety-drowsy-driving-long-work-hours-crew-1202275319/)
* [WGA Will No Longer Award Video Game Writing](https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/03/wga-will-no-longer-award-video-game-writing)
* [John’s Post on Assistant Pay](https://johnaugust.com/2019/hollywood-assistants-have-always-been-underpaid-but-this-is-different)
* [Untitled Goose Game](https://goose.game)
* [Queer Qrosswords](http://queerqrosswords.com)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Naomi Randall ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_422_assistant_pay.mp3)