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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/advice-for-a-new-staff-writer).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this Episode 368 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is out of town for the week, but he emailed and he is officially jealous that he’s missing out on this episode because today we’ll be talking about what it’s like to be a staff writer on a television program and offer some suggestions for getting that job and doing that job.

I’m so excited to introduce two writers who have first-hand experience on the topic. Alison McDonald is a Humanitas Prize winner, a Fulbright Scholar, Daytime Emmy and BAFTA award nominated TV writer and director whose credits include American Dad!, Nurse Jackie, and the remake of Roots, for which she received WGA and NAACP Image Award nomination. Alison wrote, directed, and executive produced An American Girl Story: Summer Camp, Friends for Life for Amazon. She’s currently a writer and co-EP on an upcoming Showtime legal thriller. Welcome Alison.

**Alison McDonald:** Thank you very much. I’m delighted to be here.

**John:** That was a great warm up. And you have a dog at your ankles. What other program is going to give you a dog–?

**Alison:** Again, like my bag is big enough to fit Lambert in. So, yes, hi listeners, I’m going to be absconding with John’s dog at the end of this.

**John:** And our second guest, well, if you Google Ryan Knighton it will Canadian Writer, which is true. Ryan was a guest on Episode 195 in which we talked about writing for Hollywood without living here. But for the last few months he has been living here, working as a consulting producer on In the Dark, a CW show about an irreverent blind woman who investigates her friend’s murder after the police dismiss her story. He is also adapting the novel Piece of Mind into a feature for Paramount with Daisy Ridley attached to star and J.J. Abrams producing. Ryan Knighton, welcome back.

**Ryan Knighton:** It’s nice to be back. And I’m hoping to take your dog with me, too.

**John:** All right, so it’s going to be a fight over my dog.

**Alison:** It’s going to be a tussle.

**Ryan:** Yeah. But I’ve got the blind guy advantage of like I’ll put Lambert to work.

**John:** Yeah. Lambert would be a terrible seeing-eye dog. Now Ryan I’ve known you for a long time but I’ve never asked you the question: you never had a support animal? You never had a seeing-eye dog?

**Ryan:** No, I never had a service dog.

**John:** OK. And why not?

**Ryan:** Well, a couple reasons. One is I have a French bulldog and I think she would be very jealous. People actually do sometimes—

**Alison:** The French are like that.

**Ryan:** Well people sometimes stop us when I have the dog and they’re like is that your seeing-eye dog, as it wraps itself around me. It is so not. But I don’t have one because I just sit so much and I just feel like having a large dog that needs to be worked all the time is just cruel to make it sit at my feet while I rewrite things that it’s not interested in.

**Alison:** Oh, that’s interesting. Like you don’t think the dog would pitch jokes for you?

**Ryan:** If it did I might get one.

**John:** Before we get to our main topic, we have a little bit of news. So, in front of Alison is a copy of the new Scriptnotes t-shirt. And so Ryan can’t see it, so Alison can you describe this t-shirt for our listeners?

**Alison:** Ryan, it’s very cool. It’s a black tee with stacked colored, I’m assuming like revision script pages, although I’m going to point out because everyone gives notes in this town. Progressive revisions aren’t accurate.

**John:** So tell me how you think they’re not accurate, because I thought we actually got them just right. So tell me.

**Alison:** Oh, doesn’t it go from white, to blue, to pink?

**John:** Yeah. Is it white, pink, blue in that one?

**Alison:** This looks magenta to me.

**John:** Oh! So really it’s not that they’re in the wrong order, it’s that they’re slightly the wrong shade.

**Ryan:** I just want to say I don’t know what magenta is.

**Alison:** You’re wearing a black and almost magenta checkered shirt.

**Ryan:** I didn’t even know that.

**Alison:** So there’s red, and there’s the spectrum of red, and magenta is closer to the pink end of the spectrum. So, Craig and John need to do a rewrite on these tees.

**John:** All right, we’ll be tweaking this. But this is the new Scriptnotes shirt. It’s called Colored Revisions.

**Alison:** Oh!

**John:** Yeah. That’s the idea behind the shirt.

**Alison:** It’s very clever.

**Ryan:** Your audience just listened to a person describe a color to me for the first time. I now have magenta in my head. I haven’t–

**Alison:** Really? That’s kind of cool for me.

**Ryan:** Alison just gave me magenta.

**Alison:** Wow. The only thing of service–

**John:** A moment that happened right here. So if you are interested in this t-shirt, we also have two other t-shirts back from the vault. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. There will also be a link in the show notes.

So, usually when t-shirts go up they’re only up for a short period of time. I think these are going to be up kind of recurring, but you should order them now so you can have them in time for the Austin Film Festival. I would like to see a lot of Colored Revision shirts out there in the audience while we’re at the Austin Film Festival. The other shirts we’ve got up there are a new Highland 2 shirt and a Karateka shirt which was something we did when we did the Karateka game years and years ago. And it’s cool and eight-bitty and pixely. So, check those out. Alison McDonald, thank you for describing the t-shirt. And we’ll make sure the colors are just right for you.

**Alison:** I’m sure it’s Craig’s fault.

**Ryan:** Well apparently if they don’t sell all the t-shirts Craig wears all the other ones that are left over all at once.

**Alison:** Oh, does he?

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Wears them around.

**Alison:** That’s got to be quite a sight.

**John:** I have some follow up too on previous Scriptnotes things which you guys can help me out on. So, we’ve been talking about sort of movies that are unavailable, movies you can’t find anywhere. And one of the issues being is that things have moved more towards digital, you know, you can buy a movie on iTunes, but a tweet that was sent my way this last week was from Anders G Da Silva. He writes, “Hey Apple, three movies I bought disappeared from iTunes library. Apple: Oh yes, those are not available anymore. Thank you for buying them. Here are two movie rentals on us. Me: Wait, what?”

And so the point is you can buy a movie on iTunes but then it’s just not there anymore because licensing stuff changed, and that is just nuts.

**Alison:** That gives me a panic attack. It really does. That’s sends me down an existential hole of what is real and what is not, what do we value. I still have tons of DVDs. Like I still buy them.

**John:** So Craig pointed out on Twitter this morning that technically even a DVD is kind of a license to watch a movie. It’s all kind of nuts. But if you physically have the DVD in your house you’re going to be able to watch that movie. And to have it just be removed from your digital account is just really frustrating.

**Ryan:** It’s weird how like they’ve actually redefined the word “buy.” Like to buy a movie it doesn’t mean what it used to mean.

**Alison:** It means nothing at all, Ryan.

**Ryan:** Yeah. I guess. Yeah.

**Alison:** I mean, had he not complained would they have refunded him his money?

**John:** That’s the thing. If he hadn’t noticed that the movies were gone would they have even done anything?

**Alison:** Apple, we’re directing this to you.

**John:** I also feel like this is the kind of thing which the WGA – no union is going to be able to address this. It feels like that’s government somewhere stepping in and they’re saying if you’re going to provide this kind of license for something you have to say that it’s really going to stick around.

**Ryan:** But we should also note that he bought a movie and then when it disappeared they gave him two rentals. As if that is an equivalent. Like I didn’t know two rentals was the same as ownership.

**Alison:** Nor did I. I don’t think anyone but Apple knew that. I think that’s highly contestable.

**John:** Last week we had Aline Brosh McKenna sitting in the chair that Alison is in right at this moment and she was talking through sort of her experience with sexual harassment. But we recorded that episode literally right before Les Moonves was ousted completely from CBS. So, all sorts of things have happened in the meantime with Les Moonves and other stories came out. But one of the most interesting ones I thought was yesterday, as we’re recording this, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason who did Designing Women and a lot of other TV shows wrote a piece for the Hollywood Reporter talking about how she never faced sexual harassment from him but she had an overall deal with CBS and got no shows on the air for years because he–

**Alison:** Seven years.

**John:** Seven years. He just basically stonewalled her. And was so nice to her face and undermining her constantly behind her back. How did you feel as you read that, Alison?

**Alison:** I’m going to be honest. It’s difficult to put into words just how enraged that made me. I can’t be as eloquent as Linda was in her piece. If you gave me the time to sit down and write out my feelings they would be less visceral. But the degree of deception in a way that it’s common in the culture of Hollywood to smile to someone’s face while you’re twisting the knife in their back, but this was lengthy, engineered deception and derailment of her. And not to be too alliterative. But, it’s really shocking how vicious it was. And how sustained it was. And he obviously engendered this culture at CBS that enabled this and encouraged this. And despite it being against his and the company’s best interests.

This woman had a proven track record and could have netted the company hundreds more millions of dollars in license fees and awards and yet it was more important to him to abuse her in this manner. So, again, it’s shocking that everyone below him went along with this.

**John:** Yeah, Ryan, that was a thing I didn’t really notice from the article is that for him to have done this everybody else had to know that this woman that we’ve had – this showrunner, this creator we have this giant deal with that we deliberately are never going to put her shows on the air. What was your reaction as you were reading through this? Did you feel that sense of rage and frustration? I started to wonder is anyone Les Moonves-ing me right now.

**Ryan:** It was all the talk in the writers’ room that morning. And there was such a palpable rage about it. And it was interesting because as you pointed out it wasn’t specifically about sexual harassment but about just the cult of power and personality and how it even exceeds economics, like you just pointed out. That’s what’s kind of shocking underneath it. It is a town that seems to love to cudgel you with economics as an argument for making something or not making something, but then to have the whim of personality and power above that have even more clout. It was truly astonishing. And it was like an amazing piece. The knife in that thing is so sharp. And if you haven’t read it I just encourage everybody to go read it, because it is quite the rallying cry I think.

**John:** So you were in a room to be able to talk about it and that’s an unusual experience for you because you’re mostly a feature writer. So right now you’re writing on this CW but this is the first time you’ve been writing on a show.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** And so I want to get into this and I want to sort of talk through the process of getting on a show and sort of what it’s like to be writing on a show versus writing features independently, because Alison you’ve written independently, too. So I want to compare and contrast those two and really dig into it, because I’ve had no experience writing on the staff of a show.

**Ryan:** Oh really?

**John:** I’m literally just going to ask you questions. And not knowing very much about what it was like I went out to Twitter and I had a bunch of people tweet in their questions for you guys about sort of what it’s like to be a TV staff writer.

**Ryan:** Oh cool.

**John:** So, Alison, it’s been a while since you’ve been a staff writer, but can you time travel back and talk us through getting that first job writing on television, and how you got the job and sort of what it’s like that first, those first few days, that first week getting settled.

**Alison:** Oh boy. It’s a triggering question. But I do – I want to preface what my response is by saying that if you polled a hundred different writers with this question you might get anywhere from 25 to 99 different responses. So, this was my experience.

I am somewhat unique in that I did not set out to have a career in television. I went to film school wanting to write and direct independent films. And then the bottom fell out of indie features. There just was not a career to be had in them. So it was both necessity and somewhat fortuitous that I fell into my first TV job. So that’s the preface.

I was newly out of film school and had worked as an intern at Jim Jarmusch’s office in New York. It was a wonderful experience. And I met a UPM, a unit production manager for anyone who doesn’t know, who is essentially in charge of finances for production. That’s true in TV and in film. And she left her job with Jim, the production ended, and she went to work on a feature and offered me a job as a PA, which is a step up from an intern because you actually get “paid,” although I came to find out that she was paying the male PA more than she was paying me.

**John:** Oh.

**Alison:** Yeah. Lots – have me back on, John. So at any rate, so I was working that job initially as a PA and was bumped up to production secretary at some point. And then our production offices moved to Kaufman Astoria, so all this was in New York.

And next door to us the Whoopi Goldberg sitcom was starting to set up their production. So this was before the writers were actually there. Most of the writers, I think perhaps all them except for the Turners, were Los Angeles based. So the room wasn’t up and running yet, but their UPM was setting up the offices and starting to hire local crew.

So I just walked down the hall one day, poked my head in his office, and said, hey, if you need a writer, you know, in that way that speaks of one’s naïveté but also you have to be ambitious and why not. And I had, again, just being out of film school I had written and directed two shorts that had gotten some attention on the festival circuit and also had some writing samples. So I was armed and prepared and that’s the best piece of advice that one can give anyone, because nothing else is in your control. And he explained to me the way writers’ rooms are staffed and how writers have long since been hired, the point of which the UPM is setting up an office, but he was very kind and said, “Leave me your card and I’ll let you know if any positions open up, specifically like a writer’s assistant.”

So I went back to my office and asked the other PA who was in the office at the time “What’s a writer’s assistant?” because obviously if you aren’t in this world and you aren’t introduced to the various levels of support staff that these shows have you have no idea. I mean, even if intuitively you know, OK, this is someone who assists the writers, in what way? And it affords one very close proximity to the process. And there’s no greater apprenticeship than that job. So at any rate, long story short, I was ultimately hired as the writer’s researcher for that show.

**John:** So not quite an assistant, but you’re in the mix.

**Alison:** Do you know what’s interesting about it, I don’t know that those jobs exist on most shows. Whoopi wanted someone who could keep an eye on topical subjects for the show to explore. And that’s what landed in my lap. So I was only too happy to do that. So I didn’t have the administrative tasks of a writer’s assistant, i.e. you’re being the court reporter and you’re typing down contemporaneously what everyone is saying, and then having to cull all of those notes at the end of the session. I was just working autonomously and, again, you try and observe what’s happening in this room around you, and I saw, OK, I’m not in the room with writers the way the writer’s assistants are, so I don’t have the proximity. But they can read my writing. So I was going through the newspapers on a daily basis and culling things that I thought might be topical, you know, appropriate for the show, but then also writing a paragraph, no longer than a paragraph, satirical take on what that particular story was.

**Ryan:** That’s a cool job.

**Alison:** You know, and it’s one that I was able to craft on my own. Nobody said this is what we’re expecting. It’s just give us some news stories. So the idea popped into my head to attack the task this way, which if you could look at through jaundiced eyes, so it feels like a menial task, you’re just cutting and pasting newspaper stories, but make it an opportunity. Do it with purpose. So, what came to pass is that more writers would approach me and say they thought today’s edition was really funny. I got other people – they were passing this around, so other people in the production would request me to put them on the distribution list. And eventually caught the attention of Whoopi’s producing partner who once the show got its back nine recommended me for a writer’s gig.

So I actually moved up the ladder faster than any of the other writer’s assistants.

**John:** So were you given one of the freelance gigs or what was it?

**Alison:** The way that happened is there are two options and they went with option A was to make me a staff writer as opposed to just paying me for a freelance script. So I was on staff. I did wind up getting a script. But it was more satisfying, because then I was in the room and I became a colleague. The funny coda to that story – and this is something you wouldn’t know if you were entrenched in the culture – is that in writers’ rooms typically the upper level writers tip their assistants. So the showrunner tips his or her assistant and then all of the writers combine, and it’s all based on seniority, so depending on how big a wig you are.

**John:** Tip? What do you mean?

**Alison:** So the way one would a server in a restaurant. Just a service tip, you know, because it’s Hollywood and everyone loves to give gifts. And these jobs don’t pay well, so let me state that. So, as part of the support staff I was tipped, and then suddenly I’m now in the room working with them and it’s like I hope you all don’t want your money back. I had bills to pay.

**John:** So you were in your early 20s or how old?

**Alison:** Yeah. And we’ll circle back around and Ryan can give his experience, but being fresh out of film school I was not prepared to read the room the way I was even a year later. It’s like, oh, this isn’t a free for all. This is actually a highly choreographed exercise in controlling chaos, to distill it into something that you can put on the air a week from now. So, again, coming from a classroom environment where there is a free exchange of ideas was both good preparation, because when you’re on a film set you learn the art and skill of collaborating, but also poor preparation into think that everyone on staff is encouraged to speak with equal volume.

**John:** Yeah. I want to get back to that because that’s a crucial thing I’ve always heard about TV writers’ rooms. So, your experience, while unique, was also kind of typical in that you got hired on as a very low level entry level job. You proved your merit. You proved that you were someone worth watching. And you got tapped on the shoulder to come into the room and become a staff writer.

Now, Ryan, your experience, you’re not a young woman in your 20s.

**Ryan:** I’m 85.

**John:** You’re 85 years old. And you’re a feature writer. But I would say actually a considerable number of feature writers are also writing TV now. So I think your experience is probably not going to be as atypical as a person who has mostly written features who after writing a bunch of features is now being brought into a room and having to adjust to that whole experience.

So, can you talk us through your early days, sort of entering into a writers’ rooms and sort of what your expectations were and what you were actually doing once you were there?

**Ryan:** Well, I mean, I came in as a bit of a spy. You know, I was actually in Portland doing a speaking gig and my agent called me and said that there was this show and the main character is a blind woman and Michael Showalter had shot the pilot and Corinne Kingsbury had written it and it was great and it was funny and it was very much my tone. Is it kind of too on the nose for me to want to do a show with a blind character?

And we hadn’t talked about me staffing on a show before. And the reason I did it in part was because I had a number of pilots in development elsewhere I thought I should really get inside a room and just be in one for a while and see how they really work and what works in them and what doesn’t. So I kind of came in both to roll up my sleeves but also very selfishly to spy.

And when I walked in the showrunner is John Collier and he had been on Bones, and Monk, and Simpsons. And the first thing he said to me in the kitchen is a lot of feature writers get really disoriented when they get into a room. It will rewire your brain. And after 15 weeks it’s completely true. Like it’s just a completely true statement.

And like Alison just said, I did not know that it was such a militarized think tank. That there is a real structure and it’s a deep structure. And from the outside you would think it’s an expression of status, or something very superficial like that, but it is a way of funneling the chaos of ideas towards moving forward. So, it’s not arbitrary. It’s not done out of a sense of pride like I have more experience than you, etc. etc. There really is a rationale underneath it, because you have too many people with too many great ideas and you have to somehow create a substratum to organize them.

So, I walked in and I knew enough to just listen, which is kind of the first job is doing a lot of listening, and as they say read the room. And being a blind guy I had the disadvantage of not being able to read the room, so I was just sort of listening to like just geographically in the room where the talking was coming from. And if you do that you can kind of get a sense of the way the room is organized. Like more comes from over here, less from over here. Right?

And it was really interesting for the first few weeks for me because I’d never been in such a boiler room sort of environment of pitching. I mean, I’ve pitched a ton of stuff over the years, be it features or radio or books, whatever. So pitching isn’t new to me, but pitching in the speed and in a constructive way in the chaos of other people also pitching, so you’re building on top of them, and also having to think like as fast as you need to. That was really disorienting.

But my favorite thing I discovered was I did not anticipate the level of memoir that goes into making a TV show. Like you get people in a room who ultimately at some point and at some level are drawing on their personal lives. And so you’re kind of in a collaborative memoir that is being repurposed as fiction. And so it’s pieces of people’s lives being stitched together into these Frankensteins. And I started as a writer doing memoir, like my first book was a memoir. So, after a couple weeks I found this really comfortable place where I’m like, oh, I remember what it was like doing this. You just tell people all you’ve ever done and that you think might be remotely interesting. And then somebody else puts a different head on it and somebody else puts wings on it and suddenly it flies and it’s not yours anymore.

So I found that whole experience really – like really interesting. And it requires a level of trust in the room, too, that you feel comfortable admitting things about yourselves because you don’t want to make characters that are saints as well, right?

**Alison:** That was so incredibly eloquent. That sounds like a place I want to be.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Alison:** I want to engage in that experiment.

**Ryan:** You should try it. It’s called TV.

**John:** Now, Alison, you have the benefit you’ve been on multiple shows. So you’ve seen the whole range of how a show can work and how it can function. Probably some that function really well and some that do not function well at all. But for a person who is a new staff writer, what’s some general advice you can offer in terms of listening and then eventually speaking and how do you find the place and the time to speak up and to actually contribute something versus reading the room that Ryan was describing?

**Alison:** I would say that the best fallback position if you’re brand new to the room is to listen. To listen with the intensity that you would speak in other instances. And you may not know initially because every room is different, the way the personality of every showrunner can’t be boiled down to any one predominant trait except megalomania. But it will service you well in every room in which you ever enter, because even as I’ve made my way up – even as I’ve clawed my way up to the top I have not had the security that a lot of different TV writers have where you’re on The Office for seven seasons, or you know anyone of those shows, or like Frasier. I worked with a writer who had been on both Cheers and Frasier.

**John:** Wow.

**Ryan:** Wow.

**Alison:** Right. So I can’t even imagine what kind of not just financial stability that gives you but also a level of comfort in knowing that your best ideas – your worst ideas rather won’t define you or limit you on a moment to moment or hour to hour or season to season basis. And that you have the freedom to make mistakes with impunity. That you just don’t have on a show that – you know, where you have to start over again every season.

But the ability to read the room and to be strategic about when you speak and what you say is crucial. And perhaps that serves you in every facet of show business and life. But a constant, and I’ve written on both comedies and dramas, and I would say that Ryan said this very, very succinctly. I won’t be as succinct because there are years of trauma attached to this advice.

**Ryan:** It’s my soft belly. It’s my soft belly that made me succinct.

**Alison:** You have no idea how much I envy your calm – none of this is triggering for you. But in a comedy room, for example, the pitching is fast and furious. And people are practically falling all over themselves to speak, but that doesn’t necessarily suggest aggression. It’s that, especially on a sitcom you just have to feed the beast of jokes, like there has to be a joke every two lines, every three or four lines. And so that kind of velocity certainly creates an environment that may feel like a mosh pit.

And on dramas there’s obviously a different, depending on the drama, like I’m on a legal thriller now, you may be pitching story arcs and it’s not that you don’t have to be able to pivot quickly, but pauses are encouraged. You know?

**John:** If there’s a silence that lasts 15 seconds that’s not the end of the world in a drama room. Whereas a comedy room that could feel different.

**Alison:** It’s almost death. It’s almost like unleashing a virus.

**John:** So I’m going to go to a question from Twitter. Michael Tull asked, “Which is better, to be able to come up with unique dialogue/stories on your own or to be able to go with the flow and have random bursts of input for other people’s ideas?”

So as a staff writer, which do you think serves you better? To be able to contribute in the room and to add on to things, or to be a person who can draft a whole idea and present it?

**Ryan:** You know, it’s interesting. From my observation anyway, I don’t know if that is – I don’t know if it’s an either/or question. In some ways one of the things that seems to make a room really work is the composition of the people in that room. So, you might have somebody who has a different skill set than somebody else. But there’s also this under sung value of a difference of personalities. There’s some people who are just great cheerleaders to keep things going forward when it feels pretty down. There’s some people that are just work horses, that just get up there and they hold the board together, and they’ve got the best handwriting in the world.

So, you know, it’s not like there’s a very narrow bandwidth of skill set you can specialize in. I think the strength is to know what you can contribute and to see its contribution to the whole in the way that people are kind of arranged around that table and what they bring. And I have different skill sets, I think. And in this particular room it took me a few weeks to kind of figure out, oh, this is probably the best thing I can bring to the table because I can’t bring everything I want to. You know, there’s just not room to try and do everything.

So, knowing what you can bring and how it would complement who is there is more I think valuable.

**John:** Alison, what’s your take on that?

**Alison:** I would concur 100%. And it changes from room to room. What the showrunner is doing at the outset of any room is assessing skill sets. She or he may have hired you thinking that your area of specialization was going to be X, but in this constellation of writers and experiences and levels you may be more useful doing Y. And the best example of this is comedy rooms, which they’ll often split into two. I once on a staff of 18 people. And they’ll often split into two for efficiency sake. You just can’t be in a room with 18 people pitching jokes. You really shouldn’t be in a room with 10 people pitching jokes. But one room will just be on story and the other room will just be the joke room, which I found to be no exit. Like I cannot stand it. Pitch one liners for six to eight hours every day.

**Ryan:** Comedy is such an unfunny business.

**Alison:** Oh god. Again, that’s another episode. But I was surprised, but depending on the room, depending on the show in question I was either in the joke room or in the story room. And it was just how that particular showrunner assessed my ability. And that goes back to the you need a full set of skills because any one of them may be called upon or required more in any particular room. And I think what most showrunners would probably say is that if you can get a couple of people who can give you really solid first drafts that’s invaluable. Because that’s where most of the time suck comes in having to rewrite. And the rewrite may not be because of anything you can necessarily control. Like you may get studio notes–

**John:** They blow up the episode.

**Alison:** Exactly. They blow up the script and suddenly it has to be rewritten in two days. That actually happened to me on my first Whoopi script. So somebody who can write quickly and write well quickly. You know, like in comedy rooms it’s almost like you can add the jokes later, you can add them on set, but structure you can’t piece together on a set. So, that skill set I think is certainly – help me out here, Ryan.

**John:** It’s important.

**Ryan:** It’s the thing.

**Alison:** That’s the brass ring. If you can do that. But again you may find that you’re better at doing that on a procedural than you are on a legal thriller. But I think to answer the person’s question, perhaps in a different way, is there’s no way to predict on a daily basis what you’re going to need to do in any given situation. So I think having an open mind and being courageous in that way, you know, if that doesn’t sound too precious.

**Ryan:** I could add, too, that part of it is, and I wasn’t really aware of this prior, and hadn’t really thought about it, was that as you go into production people start peeling away, right. So there might be a writer off on draft, there might be somebody out on outline, there’s somebody on set, there’s somebody in post. So the composition of the room isn’t stable either. It’s changing all the time.

So you might have had a particular role that you sort of fell into for a while, feeling it was your comfort zone, but as personalities in the room shift you might get called upon for other things that you didn’t do before.

I love it when people ask questions and you say the question is wrong. It’s the classic advice column move. But that’s just the nature of the beast I guess.

**John:** Let’s segue to a question from Victor Herman who is asking about that shift of the room. “Once an episode’s story is broken and a writer leaves the room for any number of days to write a script, what does it feel like to come back in the room now that the story has progressed without you? Are you vocal if there is something that’s happened that you don’t like?”

So, Alison, let’s pretend that you are off writing your script.

**Alison:** Right.

**John:** Now you come back in the room and they’re working on another episode. Things have changed. If you see something on the board or the episode is going in a way that you sense is going to be trouble do you speak up? How do you address that?

**Ryan:** You walk in the room and you’re like who is Victor? There’s these names on the board you don’t recognize.

**Alison:** Here’s a quick anecdote. I once was sent off on outline and got a call day two that the network had decided they didn’t want to kill off this character that I was killing off. Come back in the room. We have to rebreak the story.

**John:** Let’s clarify. So, to be off on outline means that you are writing the outline or you are writing the script?

**Alison:** It means that you’re writing the outline. Now, there are extraordinary circumstances where you’re writing both simultaneously. And that’s when, yes, the network has blown something up and you have to – there’s so many extraordinary circumstances that you talk to enough TV writers they’re like, oh yeah, that’s happened to me. Where just bureaucratically the network will demand an outline, even though the script has already been written. So you’re trying to distill a script into outline form. It’s ridiculous.

But I would say you always have to bear in mind the value of diplomacy. You’re off on script so you’re siloed and you’re focused on, you know, you have this myopic focus on the task at hand, these 28 to 55 pages, while the room is going on without you and they’re discovering other things about season arc and perhaps even series arc that you weren’t privy to. So they have information you don’t have. And you have information they don’t have because you’re discovering something about the character as you’re writing it. Jokes that weren’t pitched in the room or layers to the character that weren’t discussed in the room.

And depending on the room you may have a great deal of autonomy, or you may have very little. So I think if you come back into the room and something doesn’t jibe with you it’s just how do you go about farting in an enclosed space?

**Ryan:** That’s it. Next question.

**Alison:** I mean, depending on your dynamic with the showrunner it’s something you might want to have a sidebar on. And the showrunner can weigh in on I think that’s a valid concern, we’ll raise it in the room, or I hear what you’re saying but we’ve moved in this direction and I’ve called it. Like we’re heading on. And I’m sure that – this is something that does apply across all genres, across all rooms. You have to learn not to be precious of your writing. You won’t survive if you don’t.

And it’s actually a very good skill because even if you’re writing a play at some point someone is going to tell you that they can’t – this is impractical, we can’t get this set, or whatever it is and you have to adjust. But it’s constant adjustments in a writers’ room. So, if the showrunner has decided that they’re moving on from your idea, they’re moving on. And you need to let it go.

**John:** A question from Bob who asks, “How much is done or expected to be done at the office versus at home? So, are you working all the time? How long does it take to write an episode for a 30-minute show versus a 60-minute show?” Talk about the workload and how much of that work takes place over the course of ten to six or ten to whatever in the room versus not in the room. Ryan, what was your experience with work at the office versus work at home?

**Ryan:** I know it changes for every show, but you sort of get the schedule and the rhythm of the room pretty quick. And in our case we usually start at ten each morning. You know, your hope is to leave by 6:30 or seven. And often you don’t. Often you stay later. Just depending if the network blew something up or if you’ve fallen behind, whatever.

I would say the room can have a rhythm in the day where it’s like we’re all together at the beginning and sort of mapping out something large and then we might split into smaller rooms and somebody is doing episode eight and another one is doing episode nine. You’re running back and forth in between them because it’s a serialized show so you have to make sure everybody is speaking to each other and they’re not moving the story away from where it needs to be.

But workload wise, I mean the thing I found quite weird was how little I actually wrote for a long time. Like you’re really in a room talking a lot. And eventually you’ll go to outline. Eventually you’ll go to script. But that’s more the exception than the rule of your time. So, you’re in the room for the most part. You’re in there with people. It’s like you’re in the belly of the yellow submarine. And depending on your showrunner, when you go to outline or episode they may want you to stay around the office. And I can see advantages for that, especially if you’re doing a serialized show, because things might be changing and hot in the room and it might affect your episode so it’s good to be nearby so you can be pulled in, so you can integrate those changes.

You know, we might be on episode five and they’re shooting episode three and we need to do something in episode six that actually requires they change something back in episode three, so you might be tapping something that’s already almost going into production, just to make sure that something can be serviced further ahead in the story.

So, you know, it really depends on the show because in our case it’s sometimes helpful to be around the offices because it’s such a live worming show as far as the story and how it moves and shifts. But our showrunner has also been really great about if you want to write at home and you feel better and that’s good for your practice then go do it. And he’s cool with that. So we’ve been sort of given a lot of leeway that way.

I like staying in the office just because I kind of like to keep my finger on the pulse.

**Alison:** I would add only that having been a number of different shows and shows that are very room reliant and shows that aren’t, one of the disciplines that I didn’t value way back when but I certainly do now is the ability to write anywhere. Whether it’s actually on set, where you’re rewriting jokes on a sitcom, or if you have to quickly do triage on a script that the network has blown apart, and you’re shooting these scenes the next day, so you’re absolutely going to be writing in an office, or in a production vehicle.

The more you can test your ability to endure those extreme circumstances, the better off you’re going to be. Like how nice it is to sit home and write in your pajamas, all you screenwriters out there. John, I’m looking at you. For the most part you don’t have that option. I’m currently on a show where the showrunner will sometimes specify I’d like you to be around in the office should something change, or you know, it’s fine, go ahead and write at home. But I usually force myself to do half and half.

**John:** An important question from Gary Whitta who asks, “Sweats in the writers’ room? Acceptable?” So, it is different. As feature writers, I don’t have to get dressed. I can wear anything. But you are actually going into the presence of other people. So what are expectations for how you should dress in a room? Alison, in your experience what are the levels of dressed-up-ness in a writers’ room?

**Alison:** Comfort is key. I mean, I won’t be tongue and cheek with my response. Comfort is key. Because as Ryan said, depending on the room you may be there for eight to 14 hours. And I’ve seen it all in terms of attire. But writers on the whole, I think you’ll forgive me for generalizing, but are pretty casual folk. So, I worked with some dandies and that’s always a bit strange, but there is no code. I think that the strange thing about Hollywood, and surely you’ve found this even as a screenwriter, is writers tend to be the worst dressed. And agents the best. And then the network execs, you know, it’s like business casual for all of them. But agents definitely in pearls or suits and ties. But writers, yeah.

**John:** So Ryan Knighton, I see your dress code. It was already described as a red and black flannel. It’s the only time I think I’ve not seen you in a black t-shirt. That seems to be–

**Ryan:** That’s my uniform.

**John:** That is your uniform. So, can you offer any insights on the wardrobe of your–?

**Ryan:** Oh man, I’m a blind guy. I don’t know what they’re wearing in the room. I have no idea. They’re all naked for all I know. There are certain running jokes. And I’m sure he’ll be happy I say this. There’s an EP on our show who I just love. And he’s just a great veteran comedy writer. And he spent so many times eating lunch out of plastic takeout containers that he just refuses. So he has his plate and his fork and he does his dishes and he’s always dressed to the nines every day. And it’s just like he’s really committed to the idea. I’m here a lot. I’m just going to make it good. And apparently on a show he was on years ago people started people ribbing him about his fork and knife and his plate and all that kind of stuff. And eventually they noticed that he just kept adding to this. And so he brought a napkin. At a certain point he had a candle.

**Alison:** And a Ganymede to serve him.

**Ryan:** And I think that is just the best. And I think there’s something great about that variety in the room that everybody just sort of takes control of their own little micro environment of themselves.

**Alison:** I would say the one exception to the casual workwear code is on sitcoms where on show night if you’re always the person in a t-shirt and jeans you bring the sport coat. It’s a fun ritual, actually, because there’s an audience there and you’re filming a little half hour play so you dress up a little bit.

**John:** Brendon or Brian asks, “What’s for lunch? How early in the course of the day is the decision made about what the writing staff is going to eat for lunch?” And that is whole thing. And so even here, like Megan will run out and grab lunch for us sometimes. But it’s nothing like what the PA servicing a writers’ room is doing with like these giant lunch orders that are coming in. So talk to us about lunch. Ryan Knighton, this is your first time experience.

**Ryan:** I have so many thoughts about lunch. The thing about lunch, because I had heard about this before I came down, like it became sort of this weird cultural trope about the writers’ room and the lunch. And the thing I didn’t realize was it’s also because it’s like your own holiday moment in the day. It’s like the middle of the day. It’s the one moment where you sort of feel like you’ve stepped out of the room, even though you’re not in the room. So what you eat and sort of arranging that sacred time where you’re not on task is really important to people.

And in our case the menu goes out the night before. So we actually get it the night before.

**Alison:** That’s so smart.

**Ryan:** Which is great. Because it’s on the table. It doesn’t take up time in the morning. And it’s not a big to do. The only difficulty is deciding at 11 o’clock at night what you want tomorrow. But I can live with it.

**Alison:** I just want to say to anyone whose impulse might be, oh, I can’t believe these spoiled Hollywood writers are complaining about a free meal, it’s not a free meal people. Like they feed you so that they can keep you in house. It’s to keep you close by.

**Ryan:** How about we just work while we’re eating.

**Alison:** That’s most rooms. And what’s become quite standard now is there is a very hard rule about budgets. So try and be in Los Angeles or New York and find a lunch that you can get for like $11.25. Again, we’re not talking pampering and flying in sushi from Alaska or something like that. But I would also say that Ryan is right. There can be cultural wars over lunch.

**Ryan:** Oh yeah.

**Alison:** There can be holy wars waged over lunch. I worked with this one guy who was so obsessive and even if someone is trying to institute like a democratic process, like each person in the room gets to pick, like I’ve been that writer. I was a staff writer on a show and not knowing LA I just looked at the menu of some place and said this is fine. And everybody complained about the lunch, so of course you feel like you’ve got the scarlet letter A.

But I’ve also been in rooms where as Ryan just said the showrunner likes to work through lunch, which is torture. And it’s not just torture because you don’t get that decompression in the middle of the day. It’s because you have to watch other people eat. And then the room just smells. You know, the more rooms that you’re in the more contemporaneous mental notes that you take, like I will never do this when I run a room, I will never do this. You have to give people lunch and you have to enforce the no eating in the room edict because it needs to be a pure space in all senses of the word, except for the fact that we’re writing television. But yes.

**John:** Let’s talk about money and sort of the financial aspect of it all. Two questions that came in. Daft Kid wrote, “Is the pay enough to live off in LA?” And then Anthony Kupo asked, “Please give us a ballpark on salary.”

So, it’s always awkward to talk about money, but I texted a friend who is on a network one-hour and he polled staff writers on a network one-hour. And they said that after taxes and agent, but not counting a manager, it’s roughly $2,200 per week for a 20-week guarantee. And so for a 20-week guarantee that’s $44,000, which seems good, but is a challenging amount. If that’s the only money you’re making for a year in Los Angeles that’s a challenging amount.

So, when you got brought on to be a staff writer on Whoopi’s show, that was probably – you were just out of college. That was really good money for you.

**Alison:** Yeah. It was more than I could count. And by the way I just finished paying off my film school loans six weeks ago.

**John:** Congratulations. That’s nice.

**Ryan:** Wow. Yeah.

**Alison:** Maybe it’s been eight weeks. I can’t believe that I don’t have hash marks on my arm. The amount of time and just the amount of mental space of that debt took up. But it did feel like a lot of money in that very naïve sense, because you’re just used to seeing a negative balance. But, you are talking about living in New York or Los Angeles and if that is the one job you have, like 20 weeks you work out of a 52-week year, then that has to stretch quite a long time. And you have no idea of knowing whether you’ll work five months from then, one year from then, two years from then. So you have to learn to budget your money and live very modestly I would say.

**Ryan:** The rhetoric around it reminds me a lot about the way anybody talks about any kind of well-paying seasonal labor. Like you can be a rough neck on oil rigs and it’s a very similar kind of culture where it looks like you’re being paid just a ridiculous amount of money, but then when you think about 25% of it goes to your agent, manager, lawyer, a bunch goes to taxes, it only gets paid out over six months, and then you’ll find out six months later if you get to work again for another year, you have to sort of save with an anticipation of disaster all the time.

So it’s not even like you really can enjoy that feeling of security because on the other side of it is a big unknown question mark. And so everybody sort of squirrels away anticipating the worst, which it kind of creeps into your psyche.

**Alison:** Absolutely.

**John:** The example I gave was on a network show that is a 20-week show, but like so many shows these days are for streaming, they’re for cable, and there’s no guarantee you’re going to be that many weeks, you’re going to be at that rate. And one of the sort of WGA negotiations that has happened was about options and exclusivity. Basically when you finish a show how long can they hold onto you without paying you in case there’s another season of the show coming up? And so that is a huge factor in your ability to make a living as a TV writer.

And so what was great money for Alison coming out as a first time staff writer would be a challenging amount of money for somebody with a young family. It’s a lot.

**Alison:** It’s why I don’t have a family. [laughs] No, I mean, the truth is I have friends who have kids and when I say to them I was up until three or four finishing a script, you know, they look at me slack-jawed. And then I think of oh my god what if I had to feed a kid, too. What if I even had to walk a dog? So, perhaps the most useful piece of information to someone listening to this podcast, and god I wish podcasts existed when I was first starting out, is that if you’re uncomfortable with the notion of instability, and Ryan just spoke to this, this life isn’t for you.

It just – I mean, Linda’s story is a perfect example of that. Because you would think no one has greater stability than someone who has a $50 million deal, with this proven track record, who was in demand. But she was yoked so severely by Les Moonves. And that was an exclusive deal I have to assume. So obviously that’s an extreme example. She had been very well paid for a long time. She earned all of the money from her shows that had been on the air.

But television is predicated on failure, even more specifically than any other area of show business. Perhaps theater. But you just have to assume that you’re not going to work for a long time. And that’s not catastrophizing. That’s being a realist.

So, you have to be able to weather that storm emotionally, psychologically, and financially. And it never ends. You know, I’ve been doing this now almost 15 years. And when my room wraps in two months, less than two months, I don’t know what my next gig is going to be. So.

**John:** Crazy. Ryan Knighton, you’ve been doing this less than a year. On the whole how would you compare the experience of writing in TV versus writing in features? Did it make you want to do more TV or did it make you feel better about what you can do in features?

**Ryan:** It has really given me a taste for TV. I will say that. And I was joking in the room quite often that like there’s elements of working in TV that remind me of radio. And there’s elements of writing features that remind me of writing books. I mean, there’s that solitary isolated thing of novels and feature scripts. Whereas there’s such a much more social element in television and the process is incredibly social. It’s not just the nature of being in the room with the people, but the work gets done in a very socially collaborative way.

And it’s kind of refreshing to be yanked from my basement after ten years and be put in front of people–

**Alison:** What were you doing down there?

**Ryan:** You know, just like doing the laundry and just hoping there was another gig around the corner somewhere. So, you know, I think like a lot of people in the business right now because there’s such a seismic shift in what’s being made in terms of features and that there is so much more being made in terms of television, and streaming and cable, that everybody has got their eyes on both sides.

You know, so many companies that I met with in the past that used to be just features all have TV sides now. So, I’m looking at it more. And the thing that I find is that it just asks a different kind of brain around your writing. And there’s a lot of really interesting puzzles that I just never encountered before. Like I was saying to my assistant this morning that with features you start with a blank page and a concept and a pitch or a piece of IP and you just sort of sky’s the limit go for it. You know, what is your best version of what this story could be if it was up on a screen.

And there’s so many decisions that have already been made about television before you start writing. You know, you have certain actors for a certain number of episodes and so you got to plan out a season that makes somebody drop away for three times and make sure if you can at least have two of those episodes back to back so they don’t have to fly back and forth. And you’ve got four standing sets and you’ve got only four days on those and four days out for every episode. So you can write the most amazing episode of that show but it can be completely unproducible. And so you’re writing with all these interesting constraints already in place.

And that’s not a thing I’d had to do before. So, it’s a cool new puzzle in that respect. So I would say I’ve got a taste for it now.

**Alison:** That’s maybe the greatest gift that TV gives you is it forces this discipline that you never would have been able to describe had you not been in it. But I think having a producer’s brain is something that most writers don’t have to have or adapt to if you don’t write TV, precisely for what Ryan said.

But once you have it, I think it makes you a better writer. It certainly makes you a more efficient writer.

**John:** All right, let’s go onto our One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing is a TV show called Succession on HBO. And it’s a really good show and everyone talks about it as a really good show, but my experience getting into it was interesting because it’s a traditional show in that it’s once per week. And so it’s not a Netflix show which is all available at once. And I heard some good things and I heard some not good things about it. And so I sort of held off on watching it until like six or seven episodes in and everyone is like oh my god it’s amazing. And so now I’m watching it and catching up.

But it’s been such an interesting experience because I feel like Succession would have had a different placement in the world if it had all come out at once. And I think everyone had seen like, oh, it gets really good so therefore you should watch it. And yet in a weird way I think coming out week by week and then getting really, really good has sort of given it extra life. And you might have missed it if it was just like another really good show that’s stacked up waiting for you to watch.

So, Succession is a really good comedy-drama. It has a quality of Veep but it’s not Veep. And it takes a little while for it to find its tone and its footing, but I highly recommend Succession on HBO.

Ryan Knighton, what is your One Cool Thing?

**Ryan:** My One Cool Thing, so you know, since I’m working on this show and the main character is a blind woman and they brought me in for reasons related to that, amongst other things, one of the things that kept coming up was how technology has really changed the whole experience of being blind. And it actually throws a lot of really interesting wrenches in the storytelling that wouldn’t have existed ten years ago, five years ago even.

So, you know, I still have a stick, which is the best technology they came up with, which is kind of sad. But it’s very hard to improve on the stick. But there is something that has made a kind of run for the improvement on it. And it is an app that’s called Be My Eyes.

And Be My Eyes is run by – well the app basically is you can sign up, so anybody out there who is sighted can sign up to be a volunteer on this app. And it’s on a blind person’s iPhone. And it’s just a big button in the middle of the screen. And when you hit it it calls a random volunteer. And then it’s like FaceTime and they look through your phone for you and they can see things for you.

So, like if I’m standing at a street corner trying to find a crosswalk I can just Be My Eyes and John would pop on, or somebody in Tokyo, and they can look at the crosswalk for me and steer me.

**Alison:** Wow. You have to be a very trusting person.

**Ryan:** Yes.

**Alison:** And I’m not.

**Ryan:** You do. But it’s also fascinating because it’s become repurposed. Like apparently people with dyslexia have been using it. And all sorts of other circumstances. It’s sort of like a network of just volunteers who can FaceTime to help you with anything that could be solved by FaceTiming.

**Alison:** Wow.

**Ryan:** So, it’s kind of fascinating. But I don’t use it too much, because I like to have the material of being lost. It’s like it’s better stories if I get lost. But I put it out there because it’s a great thing to support by even volunteering for it.

**Alison:** That extraordinary.

**John:** Alison McDonald?

**Alison:** My One Cool Thing is a cool thing wrapped up in a piece of advice, and I hope that it’s one that hasn’t been mentioned on this podcast before, but if it has I think it’s still useful to hear again. And that is to take improvisation classes if you are interested in writing for TV. Is this a refrain oft repeated on this podcast?

**John:** It’s never been a One Cool Thing, so it’s good advice.

**Alison:** I had actually been writing in TV rooms for a while and started taking classes at UCB, at Upright Citizens Brigade. They’re actually matriculated “theater schools,” so you can take a number of different classes, in sketch and different aspects of improv and performance. But it teaches you the discipline of not just coming up with ideas and being able to dismiss them efficiently and not getting too attached to any one idea. But the discipline of collaboration.

And a lot of the same rules of etiquette apply in an improv troupe that do in a writers’ room, and UCB the philosophy is don’t be a dick. Like that’s first and foremost like the do no harm. First do no harm credo. And I wish more people adhered to that in TV rooms the way that they do at UCB.

But the second is that you are part of a multi-hydraed brain, and we spoke about this earlier in the podcast that there may be a unique skill set that you have that you contribute in this particular room that you wouldn’t in another room. And you have to be comfortable with that. But you also have to recognize when you’re getting in your own head too much.

And this is hard to just as human beings. You want to excel and you want to succeed and you know the high pressure stakes in a room. It’s not just the show must go on, we have to shoot this. It’s, you know, I want to have this job next season so I need to impress the showrunner. But if you’re so much in your head you’re not going to be able to be productive. And if you pitch a joke that dies in the room you cannot allow it to derail you.

So that’s what being in improvisation class can teach you. Just like get past that one bad joke, that one bad idea that didn’t fly. And there will be someone who comes around who either builds on it, like the yes-and philosophy of improv, or in the room, you know, you’re just going to move past. Like bad ideas are the ingredients of what ultimately becomes a good script.

So I think it teaches you dexterity. It teaches you to have a very healthy outlook on what the sausage-making process is.

**John:** Excellent. That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com.

That’s also where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions or the things I read from Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Are you guys on Twitter? Do you want to be singled out on Twitter?

**Ryan:** I’m just @ryanknighton.

**John:** @ryanknighton. And?

**Alison:** I’m @shegotproblems. [laughs]

**John:** It’s because you were asking all about how to use Twitter. So now you have more Twitter followers.

**Alison:** Yes. I’m following you, John. So you know you can follow a follow with a follow? I don’t know even how the lingo goes. I don’t know if I’ll follow Craig.

**John:** You should follow Craig.

**Alison:** He’s [unintelligible]less. Said with love.

**John:** You can find links to the stuff we talked about on the show today at johnaugust.com. So just search for this episode. You can find the whole podcast on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there you can leave us a comment. You can tell us how awesome Ryan Knighton and Alison McDonald are.

You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com. We get them up about four days after the episode airs. And you can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or as seasons at johnaugust.com/store.

Alison McDonald, Ryan Knighton, thank you so much for talking TV with me. This was great.

**Alison:** I’m delighted to have been here. Can I do a pass of the transcript? Can I clean up my dialogue?

**John:** 100%. Easily. The studio is going to blow it up anyway.

**Alison:** I’m just kidding. I really do adore Craig.

Links:

* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* Anders G Da Silva’s [tweet](https://twitter.com/drandersgs/status/1039270646243414016) about missing movies from his iTunes library
* [‘Designing Women’ Creator Goes Public With Les Moonves War: Not All Harassment Is Sexual](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/designing-women-creator-les-moonves-not-all-harassment-is-sexual-1142448), a guest column by Linda Bloodworth Thomason for the Hollywood Reporter
* [Succession](https://www.hbo.com/succession?pid=googleadwords_int&c=Google%7CSearch%7CMKL%7CIQ_ID_-VQ16-c&camp=Google%7CSearch%7CMKL%7CIQ_ID_-VQ16-c) on HBO
* [Be My Eyes](https://www.bemyeyes.com) app
* Improv classes for TV writers
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Ryan Knighton](https://twitter.com/ryanknighton) on Twitter
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* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
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You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_368.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is [sings] Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 366 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to be looking at how you end things, both in a narrative and in life. Specifically, what happens to your work after you die?

Hey, Craig, in general what happens after you die?

Craig: Nothing. So I asked my dad this question when I was very young and he gave me what I still consider to be the very best answer anyone has ever come up.

John: All right.

Craig: I said what happens after you die and he said, “It’s just like it was before you were born.” And that is the correct answer.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Nothing. You’re done.

John: Yep. You do live in people’s memories until they die.

Craig: Yeah. That’s meaningless. This is a meaningless ride. It’s a great ride. I love this ride so much. I’m so sad that it will end, but it doesn’t mean anything. Like no one goes on a roller coaster ride and says, “Now, when this ride is over do we live forever in a magical place in the sky?” No. No, no, it’s over. But you enjoyed it. Simple as that.

John: So today we will talk about what happens to your work after you die and the decisions you might want to make about your work for after you are no longer on this mortal coil. But first we have some news and some follow up.

So you and I are both on a different podcast. Sometimes we cheat on each other on other podcasts, but this time we went in together. We were sort of swingers. And we went on a different podcast. We went on Jordan, Jesse, Go! which came out last week. It was a fun time. Did you have a good time?

Craig: I did have a good time. It’s so funny because as you know – as everyone knows – I don’t listen to podcasts. So I’m never quite sure what to expect with any particular podcast and I always just assume that it’s going to be exactly like the one we do and it never is. First of all, everyone has much better equipment than we do. But I feel like we sound pretty good.

John: I think we sound pretty good, too. And also they had a good soundproof room, but they were banging their microphones constantly. Did that drive you a little nuts?

Craig: No, I didn’t mind that so much. I was just – mostly – our podcast is a little bit like us. You know, you and I, even though we seem very different, I don’t actually think we are that different. I think we’re both fairly rigid in our ways. And they were much more loosey-goosey improvisational fun. Like you got the feeling that if they wanted they could just spend an hour talking about anything at all and we’re not like that. We like routine. We’re set in our ways.

John: We have an outline. We have a structure. We get back to it. Theirs is just basically pancakes and sex toys. But it was a great conversation about pancakes and sex toys and mountain cabins.

Craig: Yeah. It was nice to take a little vacation from a structured podcast and actually just go bananas. It’s the morning zoo of podcasts. But in a good way. I like morning zoos. I’ve always liked them. I like a nice drive time banter.

John: Always good. But let’s get back to our structure. Dean wrote in to say, “You mentioned on the podcast that, ‘It would probably be quicker for you to write a half-hour than to pull together a pitch for it.’” I’m not sure which one of us said that, but I believe someone said that.

He continues, “I can guess as to how that might be the case, but explicitly what takes time in prepping a pitch? How much time would you spend on a pitch versus writing up a half hour of television comedy?”

So, you and I don’t write half hour comedies, but the overall idea that sometimes it’s just quicker to write it does feel kind of true. When I talk to people who write half hours, it’s really fast. They might spend a lot of time in the room figuring all the beats out–

Craig: Well, there you go.

John: But then when you actually write it it’s quick. Here’s what it was. I bet it was when I had Mindy Kaling on the show and she was talking about pitching a show versus writing a show. And sometimes you can just actually write the show more quickly than you can sort of pull together the full pitch.”

Craig: Look, the thing is if you put a stop watch to it, I doubt that that’s true. However, there is something called ease which is different than speed. Sometimes it’s easier to write the half hour, or write even an entire feature film than it is to pitch it. Because the problem — pitching requires you to know everything ahead of time so you already have to kind of write the movie anyway in your head, or a lot of it, or a lot of the show in your head.

And then be able to, oh, trippingly convey it to somebody in a non-audio visual form and just you talking, right? There’s no show. And that can be very strenuous and very nerve-racking. And you are incredibly aware that it is entirely based on the feeling in the room and whether or not you forget something or trip up or if you use words that are slightly ambiguous because, I mean, remember a script is already an audio-visual work that has been reduced or compressed into text only. Now you’re going to take sort of oral relaying of a text-only version of a thing that’s eventually going to be audio-visual. So at that point you think to yourself, ooh, you know what, the other problem with a pitch is they view it as an act of faith to buy a pitch. Why don’t I just not even go through all that mess? Why don’t I just write the damn thing?

And certainly if you’ve gone through the work that’s required to create and deliver a pitch, you’ve done the work that’s required to write the 30 pages or the 110 pages. So, in those cases the math might work out in your favor to just write it.

John: When David Iserson and Susanna Fogel were on the program they talked about how they ended up specking The Spy Who Dumped Me because it just felt better to write the whole thing and be able to deliver the whole thing versus going in and trying to pitch that idea around town. Sometimes writing is just a process of discovery. So sometimes you really won’t know what the movie is, what the show is, until you’ve written those characters. And so that’s a good example of why you might just want to write the half hour to see what it feels like.

There have been definitely times where I’ve gone in for a pitch and I’ve written scenes that would be in that final movie just to get a sense of the character’s voices, to get a sense of like what is this actually going to feel like.

So, that’s not blanket advice. I won’t say that you should always plan on writing that half hour. And ultimately if you write that half hour and you’re trying to sell that show you’re going to have to be able to pitch it further than that. You’re going to have to be able to describe this is where the show goes, this is how it grows. They’re going to need to sit across sit across from you and understand that like you are a person who can deliver this thing. But maybe writing that 30 pages will help you understand what the show is you want to make.

Craig: The other thing to consider is that when you’re pitching you are essentially in salesman mode which means that they’re in arms-crossed suspicious mode. When you have a script, then there’s an object to discuss. Work has been done. And so it’s a little realer. You know? I mean, people get burned by pitches all the time. I mean to say the pitch buyers get burned by pitches all the time. And they are well aware that sometimes writers need money. And they’re pitching something, they’re pitching their butts off for money, but then the money is just as the writing that you’re going to do is speculative, the money giving is speculative. We don’t know what we’re going to get. And they have been burned. So when you have actual writing I think it just changes the tenor of the conversation anyway in a much better way.

It’s not to say that you shouldn’t or can’t pitch, because I have. It’s just that, I don’t know, the gun is in your hand I think when the writing is there. And the gun is in their hand when you’re dancing for your supper.

John: Yeah. So Dean’s question about how much work are you doing before you go into a pitch, it varies wildly. And so the project I’m writing right now was a pitch. And so I went and I sold the pitch and I got hired to do it. And Megan, our producer, saw me sort of working through developing the pitch. And I think she was probably surprised at sort of like how little I had actually done. How little I had actually put down on paper. But I had done sort of the internal mental work of what is the conversation about this movie and I was able to describe the feelings and sort of what the overall goals of things were. And so if I didn’t have all the plot points really figured out, that really wasn’t the crucial thing for going in to pitch this movie.

It was basically like let me give you this take. Let me show you what this world will feel like. And that is ultimately what they were hiring me for for this movie.

Craig: Well, I will say though that Megan shouldn’t draw too much of an object lesson from that because you are in a different position. Over time the more you do it the less concerned and wary people are. They know that you deliver time and time again. They know you are a responsible professional. It’s a bit like actors when they start out they have to audition. They show up, read the lines in a scene, walk away, hope. And then later on the next step is I’ll come in and I’ll have a general discussion with you but I’m not going to actually audition by reading lines. We can just discuss the character. And then the third step is offer-only. And writers kind of follow those things, too. And we adjust it slightly as do actors depending on the part.

There are plenty of actors who, like for instance if you want to hire Jason Statham to be in your action movie, that’s offer-only. We know Jason Statham can do action. There’s no need to have Jason Statham come in to discuss the character with you. He can do it.

If, however, Jason Statham wants to spread his wings a little bit and maybe, I don’t know, Spielberg is making a movie and there’s this fascinating dramatic part and he wants to play a war surgeon, he might have to come in and meet. He might even want to read for it. You never know. And similarly with us. If there’s something that’s kind of – like if you want to write a Star Wars movie, my guess is you got to have a pretty lengthy conversation about what it is you want to do, especially if it’s their movie. And it doesn’t matter who you are. But if somebody is calling you up, John, and saying, “Listen, we have this movie. It’s going to be kind of, well, it’s family but family plus. So sort of elevated family entertainment.” You’re going to say, great, offer-only.

I mean, I’ll have a conversation with you if you want, but basically the point is if we’re having the conversation that means you want to hire me because you know I do this.

John: Absolutely. And when you and I are brought in to do weekly work, those are essentially offers only. Basically it’s just like, “Hey, we need help on this thing.” And if we go in it’s very clear we can do this job in front of us. But you doing Chernobyl, that is like Jason Statham doing a dramedy. That is not something that everyone would necessarily know is in your wheelhouse, so you do need to be able to describe your vision for what this is more fully.

Craig: Right. And that’s exactly what I did. So I went in with Carolyn Strauss to HBO and sat with [Carrie-Anne Follis] who is the head of their limited series department. And I pitched. And I pitched and I pitched. And I pitched how the series would work, who the characters were, the stories that would happen inside of it. I tried to keep it, you know, somewhat compressed. And it wasn’t kind of an overly rehearsed thing.

What helped there, in television there are so many different ways to stop people from working as they go through. All right, you’re going to write a bible and then you’re going to write an episode. And then we don’t have to do anything after that. And, of course, also in that field, too, is an understanding of and you’re not getting paid what you get paid to write movies. So that all made it kind of easy, but even so there was no question that when I went in there my track record, none of it mattered. None of it. Nor should it have.

John: I mean, your track record in terms of being able to like actually deliver something, like that you’re not going to run off and just disappear into the woods. You would actually give them something, but was it something that they actually wanted? They wouldn’t know that until they’re sitting across from you and ultimately until they’re reading the words.

Craig: Yeah. I think if my track record accomplished anything it was simply that I could get that meeting. That at the drop of a hat I can probably sit down with somebody who runs any division of anything anywhere and say, listen, I have something I want to tell you. But they’re under no obligation to buy anything. All the burden of proof is on me. If somebody wants to make an R-rated comedy where two adults are doing crazy things on the road I don’t really think I need to audition. I’m not going to. So there you go. You’re just going to have to pay me to do that. I’m not going to sit down and dance for that. That’s kind of offer-only. That’s sort of the way it works.

The only thing I think that you or I can count on track record-wise is that we can at least – you like, what’s the job, like have you written horror, like a Leigh Whannell kind of movie?

John: Yeah. I’ve written one of those and I did have to sort of like pitch more fully sort of what my take was on that because it was very off the rank and normal track for me.

Craig: Then you there you go. And so the good news is you can get that meeting no matter what.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: But then you got to work for it. So, it all depends. And obviously when you’re just starting out everybody is dancing for everything. First of all, you’ve got to convince people to even meet with you. And then you got to do a full dance. It’s pretty exhausting, but that’s what youth is for.

John: That is youth. All right, now further follow up, so on last week’s episode it came up that Craig really dislikes ventriloquism. No, no, no, I think you actually hate ventriloquism. You don’t understand ventriloquism. You find no artistic value in ventriloquism.

Craig: None.

John: And I think this is actually a call for a whole new segment on the Scriptnotes podcast so this is being inaugurated right here.

Craig: Oh, new segment.

John: New segment. Change Craig’s Mind.

Craig: Ah.

John: Yeah. So Craig has very strong opinions, but one of the things I like so much about Craig is that he also believes that other people can change their opinions about things they are obviously wrong about, such as vaccines. Like vaccines are good.

Craig: Right.

John: So, this will be an experiment to see whether we can change Craig’s mind and make him appreciate the artistic merits of ventriloquism. So, I welcome all your suggestions for things we can throw at Craig that will make him see that ventriloquism is a true art form. I’m going to start. I started by Googling. I started by Googling “best ventriloquist” and the first video that came up was by a performer named Nina Conti. It is I think terrific and Craig is watching it right now.

So I will describe for people, obviously there will be a link in the show notes, but here is a woman who brings a man up on stage. She affixes a mask to him that she can control the mouth of the mask. And she basically uses him as a ventriloquist dummy. He is helpless and has no control over what he says. Craig, what is your reaction to what Google has told us is best ventriloquist?

Craig: If this is the best ventriloquist ever I can think of no better defense for my position than ventriloquism is crap. Because she’s actually figured out a way to make ventriloquism even easier than it already essentially is. I mean, the hardest part it seems to me of being a ventriloquist is manipulating the multiple things on their stupid dummy. The stupid hands and that dumb face, the eyeballs and the mouth. What she’s done here is, and she seems like a very nice person, don’t get me wrong. A very nice Scottish lady. But what she’s done is she brings somebody out of the audience and puts a little mask on that covers his nose and mouth with her hideous dummy nose/mouth. And then she has that connected to a little thing in her hand that makes the mouth go up and down. That’s it. Now she’s got the hardest part down to just pushing a button repeatedly while she does the silly talking like this.

And he just stands there while people laugh at him. This is terrible. I think it is terrible. I understand why it’s vaguely funny. I do. But it’s just – this is sort of like I never understood Gallagher. Like why are people laughing when he hits the watermelon with the thing? I don’t know. And to me it’s all in the same world of Gallagher. I don’t get it.

John: All right. So a thing I’m surprised you’re not appreciating is the fact that she is talking constantly. So, her breath control is remarkable because it seems like she’s having a conversation with this other person, but she’s actually doing both sides of the conversation. How she’s breathing, how she’s making that all work, do you see the skill involved there?

Craig: No. Ella Fitzgerald had great breath control. Patti LuPone has great breath control. I mean, I can do this because I’m talking like myself and then I’m talking like this. But if I ask you a question, yes, well I just want to know how, how, I just want to, I’m thinking that, well why don’t you just spit it out already? Anyone can do this. Literally anyone. It’s not hard. Just take breaths. And then while the audience laughs you breathe. Because they’re laughing – and listen, I have been accused of making audiences laugh with garbage. So I sympathize on that level.

I’m just saying I don’t get it. I don’t get this. Why ventriloquism is funny. Or hard.

John: All right. So this example has not changed Craig’s mind.

Craig: No. Made it worse.

John: But I remain hopeful that there is something out there that will change Craig’s mind and make him appreciate the art form of ventriloquism.

Craig: I will say that it was refreshing to see a woman doing this as opposed to that weird Vegas-y, fake face, bad toupee type of dude.

John: OK.

Craig: You drive around Vegas, like impressions. I don’t understand impressions. Why is that cool? I don’t get it. It’s not that great.

John: Like Rich Little is not a person for you?

Craig: OK. You sound like those other people. But I could just – those other people are entertaining. That’s why you want to sound like them. But why don’t I just watch those other people. I get it. Anybody that does a Christopher Walken impression. Cool. You’ve made yourself like Christopher Walken. Which reminds me, I’m going to watch a Christopher Walken movie now. Impressions are also just like, meh, OK.

John: I remain hopeful that we will get you there at some point, Craig, and thank you for humoring me with the first installment of Change Craig’s Mind.

Craig: Oh, no problem. Yeah, I can’t wait for my mind to be changed. I like a good mind change. You know, my thing is all my opinions are strongly held but not firmly held.

John: Great. Good. All right. But let’s get to our feature topic, or one of our two feature topics. This is a Craig Mazin suggestion, so Craig start us off.

Craig: Well, you know, we’ve been doing all of our various segments, old and new lately, but my fondest kind of episode is the one where we talk about craft, probably mostly because I just want to put film schools out of business. So, it’s not with me as always any kind of pro-social thing. This is more vindictive.

It seemed to me that one of the things we hadn’t talked about over the course of our many, many, many episodes is the end. Not the end the way people normally talk about the end, when we say well how does the movie end. Usually people are talking about the climax and there’s all sorts of stuff to be said about the dramatic climax of a film and how it functions and why it is the way it is. But the real end of the movie comes after. The real end is the denouement, as the French call it, and this is the moment after the climax when things have settled down and there’s actually a ton of interesting things going on in there. It is the very last thing people see. And it’s an important thing.

I’ll tell you who understands the value of a good denouement. The people that test films. They’ll tell you if you have a comedy and you have one last terrific joke there it will send your scores up through the roof. If you have one last little bit of something between two characters that feels meaningful it will send your scores through the roof. The last thing we get is in a weird way the most important. So I wanted to talk through the denouement, why it is there, and what it’s supposed to be doing.

John: Great. So denouement is a French word. Denoue is to untie. To unknot something. And so it’s interesting that it’s to unknot something because we think about the tying everything up, but you also think about undoing all the tangles that your story has created. Sort of like straightening things out again so that you can leave the theater feeling the way we want you to feel.

So as we’re talking through, if we’re imagining the prototypical 120-page screenplay, these are the very last few pages, correct Craig?

Craig: Yeah. Absolutely. This is after the dust has settled. There’s going to be inevitably something, and we’ll talk through it. Like for instance sometimes it’s one single shot. Typically it’s its own scene. But there’s something to let you know this is the denouement.

And in that sense you – I guess the first thing we should do is draw a line between climax and denouement and say like, OK, what is the difference here. And the climax, I think we all get the general gist there. It’s action, choices, decision, conflict, sacrifice. And all of it is designed to achieve some sort of plot impact.

In the climax you save the victim or you defeat the villain. You’ve stopped the bomb. You win the – whatever it is that the plot is doing that’s what happens there. And the climax dramatically serves as a test of the protagonist. And the test is have you or have you not become version 2.0 of yourself. You started at version 1.0. We know some sort of change needed to happen to make you better, fix you, heal you, unknot you. Have you gotten there yet? This is your test.

And at the end of the climax we have evidence that the character has in fact transformed into character 2.0. The denouement, which occurs after this, to me is about proof that this is going to last. That this isn’t just a momentary thing but rather life has begun again. And this is the new person. This is the new reality.

John: Absolutely. So, in setting up your film you sort of establish a question for this principal character. Like will they be able to accomplish this thing. Will they be able to become the person who can meet this final challenge? In that climax they have met that final challenge. They have succeeded in that final challenge generally and we’ve come out of this. But was it just a one-time fluke thing or are they always going to be this way? Have they transformed into something that is a lasting transformation. And that is what you’re trying to do in these last scene or scenes is to show this is a thing that is really resolved for them.

Craig: Yeah. And that is why so many denouements will begin with six months later, one year later, because you want to know that, OK, if the denouement here is right, I used to crash weddings like a cad, but now I’m crashing my own friend’s wedding because I need to let this woman know that I really do love her and I’ve changed. And she says OK. We need six months later, one year later, to know, yep, they did change, they’re still together. They’re now crashing weddings together as a couple. So, they have this new reality, but it is lasting and their love is real. We need it, or else we’re left wondering, oh, hmm, all right, but did they make it or not?

Now that said, sometimes your denouement can happen in an instant and then the credits roll. And it’s enough because of the nature of the instant, particularly if it’s something that is a kind of very stark, very profound reward that has been withheld for most of the movie. Karate Kid maybe has the shortest denouement in history. Climax, Daniel wins the karate fight. Denouement, Mr. Miyagi smiles at him.

John: Yep.

Craig: That’s it. But that smile is a smile that he has not earned until that moment. And when he gets that smile you know that he’s good. This is good.

John: So as we’re talking I’m thinking back through some of my movies. In Go the denouement is they’ve gone back to the car at the end and Manny’s final question is, “So, what are we doing for New Years?” So it’s establishing that like they’ve been through all of this drama but they’re back on a normal track to keep doing sort of exactly what they’ve been doing before. That the journey of the movie has gotten them back to the place where they can take the same journey the next week, which is the point of the movie.

In Big Fish, certainly the climax is getting Edward to the river. There’s a moment post-climax where they’re at the funeral and see all the real versions of folks. But the actual denouement as we’re describing it right now is sort of that six months later, probably actually six years later, where the son who is now born and saying like did all that really happen and the father says, “Yep, every word.” So essentially we see the son buying into the father’s stories in the sense that there’s a legacy that will live on.

So, they’re very short scenes. They’re probably not the scenes you remember most in the movie, but they are important for sending you out of there thinking the characters are on a trajectory I want them to be on.

Craig: Yeah. The climax of Identify Thief is that Melissa McCarthy’s character gives herself up so that Jason Bateman’s character can be free of her and the identity theft and live with his life, which is a huge deal and that’s something she does that’s a self-sacrifice she does because of what he’s kind of helped her to see and that’s what he’s now learned from her. And the denouement which is important is to see, OK, it’s a year later and she’s in prison, which was really important to say, look, it’s real. Right? She went to prison. But what’s happening? Well, Jason and Amanda, who plays his wife, they’ve had their baby and everything is OK. He’s got a great new job. He’s doing fine. She’s been working hard in prison and studying so that she can get out and come work for him. And he then has something for her which is he’s found her real name, because she doesn’t know who she is. And he found her birth certificate and found her real name.

And so you get a kind of understanding that this relationship did not just stop right there. And it could have. She was a criminal. But it didn’t and that they’re going to go on and on. And then she punches a guard in the throat because the other thing about the denouement is typically it is a full circling of your movie and it is in the denouement that you have your best chance for any kind of fun or touching full circle moment. So in Identity Thief you have both. She at one point says she doesn’t know her real name. Here we find out her real name, which is Dawn Budgie, which is just the worse name ever. And the way she met him originally was by punching him in the throat and here’s she going to go ahead and punch a guard in the throat because you change but you don’t change completely because that feels gloppy, right?

But, both of those things are full circle moments. And in the denouement if you can find those, or if you’re wondering what to do in your denouement start thinking about that and looking for that little callback full circle moment. It is incredibly satisfying in that setting.

John: Yep. And a crucial point I think you’re making here is that the denouement is not about plot. It’s about story and theme, but it’s not about sort of the A plot of your movie. Your A plot is probably all done. It’s paying off things you set up between your characters. It’s really paying off relationships generally is how you are wrapping things up. It’s showing what has changed in the relationships between these characters and giving us a sense of what those relationships are going to be like going forward.

Craig: Oh, and that’s a great point, too. You’re absolutely right that it is showing what has changed and therefore it’s also showing what hasn’t changed, which can sometimes be just as important. So, for instance, if your theme is all you need is love, then it is important to show in the denouement that, OK, our protagonist has found love. She now has fulfilled that part of her life. But the other things that maybe she had been chasing aren’t there. So, if your problem is, OK, my character is Vanessa and Vanessa thinks that it’s more important to be successful than to be loved, which is an incredibly trite movie. I apologize to Vanessa.

At the end I don’t necessarily – if she’s found love I think maybe that’s good. I don’t need also then success. Because then I start to wonder, well, OK, what was the lesson here? Sometimes you just want to show nothing has changed except one thing. At the end of Shrek he still lives in a swamp and he is still an ogre, but he’s not alone. So one thing changes and the denouement is very good for almost using the scientific method to change one variable and leave the others constant.

John: Absolutely. So you’re saying that if you did try to change a bunch of variables, if the character ended up in a completely different place, in a whole new world than how they started, then we would still have a question about sort of like what is their life going to be like. We just don’t understand how they fit into all these things. But by changing the one thing we can carry our knowledge of sort of the rest of their life and see that and just make that one change going forward.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. It’s a chance for you to not have to worry about propelling anything forward, but rather letting people understand something is permanent. And permanent in a lovely way. Very often the denouement will dot-dot-dot off, the way that a lot of songs just fade out, right? Some songs have a big [Craig hums] and that’s your end, and you can do that. And some of them just fade out, which is also lovely. The end of Casablanca is a brilliant little fade out. You know, he says goodbye to Ilsa. She’s off on the plane. The plot of the Nazis is over. Everything is finished. And then, you know, two men just walk off and say, you know what, I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And therein is a dot-dot-dot. And they just walk off into the fog. A plane takes off. And you understand more adventures are ahead, but for now everything is OK.

John: Yeah. It’s nice when you get a sense that there will be further stories, we don’t necessarily need to see the sequel, but you get a sense of where they’re generally headed and that you don’t need to be worrying about them an hour later from now.

Here’s the counter example. Imagine you’re watching this film and you’re watching Casablanca and for some reason the last ten minutes get cut off, like the film breaks. That is incredibly jarring because you’ve not been safely placed back down.

There’s a social contract that happens when a person starts watching a movie. It’s like the writer and the filmmakers say if you give me about two hours of your time I will make it worth your while. And you trust me and I will take you to a place and I will deposit you back safely where you started. And if you are not putting people back safely where they started they’re not going to have a good reception, a good reaction. And that’s what you find when you do audience testing is so often what’s not working about the movie is that they didn’t feel like they got to the place where they expected to be delivered.

Craig: Yeah. And I suspect that people, well, reasonably invest an enormous amount of time, energy, and thought into building their climaxes. And then the denouement becomes an afterthought. And for me it is the actual ending. That’s actually the ending I back up from is the denouement.

John: Well, OK, let’s talk about that literally, because I literally do write those last few pages very early on in the process. I don’t know if you do that as well. But sometime after I’ve crossed the midpoint of a script I will generally jump forward and write the last ten pages. So some of that climax but really it’s that denouement. What are the final images of the movie? What are the final moments, the final words of a movie? Because if I know that, I know where I’m going, that second half of the script is much tighter and better and cleaner for where I’m headed towards.

Also, I like to write those last couple pages while I still have enthusiasm about the movie. So often you’ll read endings of scripts and you kind of feel like people were just rushing through the end. It’s like they were on a deadline and just plowed through those last pages and they spent so much time on their first act and spent so little time on those last ten pages which are sort of loose and sloppy because of when they were written.

Craig: That just infuriates me. The very thought of it. Because I obsess over those, the way I obsess over the first ten. And I don’t write out of order the way you do. But I think I plan very stringently in a way that you don’t. I try and write the movie before I write the movie essentially. And so I definitely know what those things are. And I don’t really have spikes or dips of excitement. I’m more of a kind of – you know, I think you write the way people probably think I write, and I write probably the way people think you write.

John: Probably so.

Craig: You know what I mean? I’m very robotic about it in a certain kind of procedural way, creatively obviously inside the robot management. I go all over the place and lop the heads off of giraffes and so forth. But I’m very kind of, you know, I’m a big planner.

John: I’m very instinctual and I will not know necessarily what the next scene is as I’m writing the current scene.

Craig: You know what? I think you and I just are so surprising to each other.

John: All right. So let’s wrap up this conversation of denouement because the denouements are about wrapping things up. So, the key takeaways we want people to get from a denouement is that it is a resolution of not plot but of theme, of relationship, of sort of the promise you’ve made to the audience about these principal characters and sort of what is going to happen going forward. What else do we want people to know?

Craig: I mean, that is essentially what they’re going to do. You’re going to show them that last bit whether you’ve done a good job or a poor job. When they see the last bit of the movie they will in their minds add on the following words: And thus it shall always be. And if you have done it well, and thus it shall always be, it’ll be really comforting and wonderful for them.

By the way, sometimes it’s not comforting. Sometimes it’s sad. You know, I mean, honestly the denouement of Chernobyl is quite sad and bittersweet. No shock there. Fiddler on the Roof has one of the best denouements of all time. Fiddler on the Roof opens with a guy playing this [hums] and it’s very jaunty and he’s on a roof and it’s silly. And Tevye is talking to the audience and saying, oh you know, our life is hard and tricky. And we’re like a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a simple little tune without breaking your neck.

At the end of the show, they have been driven from their town of Anatevka by pogroms and they’re trudging off to a new home. And the fiddler is the last person to go and he plays that same little tune, but it’s so sad this time. And the denouement is there to say and thus it shall always be, meaning we know based on the timeframe that what follows the people who leave Anatevka in whenever that takes place, let’s just call it 1910, is going to be worse. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better and thus it shall always be.

So, it doesn’t always have to be “and happily ever after.” Sometimes it can be and sadly ever after. But the point is it will be thus. And it shall thus always be. So, if you think about it that way the denouement becomes incredibly important because that’s where you’re sealing the fate of every single character in your film.

John: Yeah. Everyone is sort of going to be frozen in that little capsule that you created there and that can be placed up on the shelf. That is the resolution for this world that you’ve built to contain this story. So, that’s why it’s so crucial that it feel rewarding. So whether it was a happy ending or a sad ending that it feels like an ending.

Craig: Yeah.

John: All right. Let’s transition to our real endings, which is basically our short time on this earth and at some point we will not be on this earth, but some of our work will still be around. And so I think this was a question from Pam Stucky on Twitter. I couldn’t find the actual tweet that sort of led to it. So if it’s not Pam, if it was somebody else, I’m sorry. But someone asked a smart question about like, well, have you guys ever talked about what happens to our work after we die? Or how stuff gets inherited? And I don’t think we really have.

So I wanted to dig into this a little bit and talk about two things. What happens legally to our work? And what happens creatively? What are the creative choices we might make about how we want to see our work passed down in the future? So some of the stuff is really straightforward and some of the stuff is a bigger discussion.

But legally you own copyright to the things you write. And that copyright is a real thing. It is an asset that can be passed along to your heirs. And if you don’t lay it out in your wills and other documents to describe where you want that copyright asset to go to, it will get passed along just like your comic book collection or your couch. So, it’s worth thinking about who you would like to own the rights to – the copyright to the stuff you make.

Copyright is worth a lot potentially for certain properties because it’s reproduction rights, it’s the ability to make more copies of that thing, so for a book. It’s distribution rights, who can sell and distribute your work. Performance rights, which is incredibly important for playwrights in particular. And adaptation rights. So, for authors it’s the ability to take that book you’ve written and turn it into a movie or turn into a TV show, or to remake it.

So, these are crucial things for the original works that you are creating. But, of course, as screenwriters so much of what we’re actually doing as our job isn’t original works. They are works for hire.

Craig: Right. And interestingly the term length is much different for individuals or for people commissioning works for hire. So in general we’re talking about anything that’s made since 1978, if you – John, you’ve written Arlo Finch. You are the copyright holder of Arlo Finch. The copyright protection lasts you how long?

John: My life plus a certain number of years, 75 years?

Craig: 70, yes, correct.

John: 70 years.

Craig: So, as long as you live and then the day you die a clock starts ticking and there are 70 more years for your daughter to gather up those delicious Arlo Finch royalties. At which point after that theoretically it goes into public domain the way that say the works of Arthur Conan Doyle are in public domain. And anybody can do anything they want with Sherlock Holmes.

But if there is a work-for-hire and that covers every time say Warner Bros. employs you or me to write a screenplay, the length of term there is 95 years from the year of first publication, or 120 years from the year of its creation. Now you can say well life of the author plus 70 could be more than that, but you know, typically people aren’t getting copyright to important works when they’re 10. So right now as you and I both approach 50 and maybe we’ve got another let’s say 30 years in there, they’re starting to even up.

And that number is going to get longer and longer because every time Mickey Mouse almost becomes public domain they seem to get an extension.

John: Yep. And so this will not be the episode where we actually talk about copyright systems and the weird ways it has been perverted to benefit – to really do the opposite of what copyright was supposed to do which was to get ideas out there in the public. But you could say, well, it doesn’t matter the things that I’m writing for Warner Bros. because I will never control copyright, therefore my heirs will get nothing. That is not true.

Craig: That is not true.

John: So, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which was a movie I made for Warner Bros. that pays me residuals. Residuals are collected by the Writers Guild of America. And those residuals are based on every time they sell the movie through iTunes or license it to Netflix. I get checks. I get checks every quarter for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and it’s quite valuable. Those checks will keep coming after I die. And that is a very good thing. And those checks will keep coming as long as that movie is worth something and it is being licensed under copyright. So as long as Warner Bros. has copyright on the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie I’ve made, residuals will keep coming. And that is a good asset down the road.

Craig: Yeah. That’s basically the long and short of it right there. We do have a kind of perpetuous income source with the residuals. And that’s why we have residuals essentially to simulate royalties, to overcome the absurd fiction of the work-for-hire, which I guess is sometimes is not a fiction but a lot of times it is. So, yeah, that’s basically what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with 90 or 120 years following creation of or first publication, or first publication or creation of. That’s how long it lasts. So when we die it kind of doesn’t matter. The law doesn’t really care, in our case, because our death is not actually triggering any time constraint.

For you it will matter on Arlo Finch. Or interestingly for you and I have both written music for movies, so we’re in ASCAP and we get ASCAP royalties. Those I think will be tied to death and copyright and all that, the publishing.

John: They should be. Yeah. That’ll be interesting to see. And also it’s complicated because it’s comingled with people who did the music for it, so it’s me and Danny Elfman and I don’t really know how that all sorts out. I’ve choose not to worry about it. But, Craig, while I have you on this call I have a question about separated rights.

So, separated rights would also pass to an heir, correct?

Craig: I believe so. They pass to your estate.

John: Yes. So if you are a person who writes a work for which you receive separated rights, which is a complicated topic but essentially it’s the ability to derive money from sequels and other things based upon your original work that should pass along to your heirs. Sometimes there are even creative choices that come along with that. So that’s another useful thing.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, separated rights are at times tricky to invoke because the companies hate that they exist. But for instance if you write an original screenplay and sold the original screenplay you will maintain a separated right for dramatic exploitation under certain circumstances. In other words, you have the rights for a play to be done of the original script you wrote. And when you die that doesn’t go away. That stays with the family.

John: Yep. So quite famously J.F. Lawton who wrote Pretty Woman controlled the separated rights for Pretty Woman and did not want there to be a Broadway musical for a very, very long time. And could stop it. That separated rights is giving him that ability.

But let’s talk about sort of the creative aspect of this. Not the legal, but just sort of creatively what you might think about down the road. And so you may have specific intentions for how you want to see your work used in the future. A zillion years ago I worked on an adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time which was not the same thread of the current Wrinkle in Time. But Madeleine L’Engle had already passed away, but her estate had tremendous controls over what could be done with that property. So not just who could do it, but like specific things that had to be in the script or could not be in the script. They had creative controls. And that was given to her estate.

Edward Albee’s estate has sort of famously tangled with people who wanted to make casting changes to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

And I was talking to Andrew Lippa, my friend, about stuff he’s doing with the Dramatist Guild for playwrights and musical writers who want to be able to think about their works after they’ve passed away. And so there’s some things like basically a council of playwrights that will look at people’s intentions with plays at the time they were written and sort of how they should change down the road, so that after playwrights pass away there can be some consistency about sort of what kinds of things are done with a play. So it’s a fascinating topic creatively.

Craig: Again, for those of us in movies and television, not particularly applicable in that regard, other than the minor separated rights. But that ultimately comes down to your family or whomever you have assigned the executorship of your estate. Yeah, you know, I – it’s funny, I just don’t think much about this sort of thing. Probably because I don’t have any concern that I’m going to be watching either from heaven or from hell as people make bad decisions with the things I’ve done. I don’t think I’m going to be around.

John: A thing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently though, and it probably started with Morrissey and Morrissey being a crank on Twitter. And I loved Morrissey’s songs, but now it’s like I don’t want – ugh, Morrissey shut up. And it got me thinking about whether I want to put some system in place where I would deputize three people of different generations and if they agreed that I needed to retire or basically move out of public view that I would have to take their decision. Basically a council of advisors who would say, no John, you need to stop. Because you look at people who have decided to step away and like maybe that was a great choice that they stepped away.

So Robert Redford recently announced that he’s retiring from acting. He’s not retiring as a public person, but he’s retired from acting. Daniel Day Lewis did it. Gene Hackman did it. And maybe there could be good cause for someone to give advice to somebody about this is the time to stop. Craig, what do you think about that?

Craig: I don’t think – the problem is if you become a crank then you’ll just say I’m not listening to these people anymore. Look, everybody has a moment where they should probably put it down, but then some people don’t. Some people go all the way to the end and you’re thankful for it, you know.

Look, it’s a personal decision. Sometimes these actors announce that they’re retiring from acting and I just think or just maybe retire from acting and not announce it. You know, stop. Just stop. That’s all. You don’t have to do anything to retire. That’s the beauty of retiring. An announcement that I’m no longer going to be doing – oh, do you need one last round of attention here? I think it’s more interesting when you discover that like people go, by the way, did you know that Gene Hackman apparently retired? That’s the best way to do it I think.

So when I finally retire – no one will care anyway.

John: Craig, do you think you will retire?

Craig: I think I will be retired. In other words, I hope that when I look at my own work and my mind and I have an assessment that it is of diminishing value that that will come either simultaneous with or slightly ahead of everybody else’s similar determination. The bummer is when everybody else figures out that you’ve lost it before you do. You don’t want to be that pitcher who is still going out there and getting shelled and guys are like, dude, you can’t throw a 95 anymore. You’re barely touching 90 and your stuff is flat. Maybe it’s time to hang up the spikes. No, I got one more season in me.

I don’t want to be that guy. But, you know, I keep a fairly careful eye on myself and I have a tendency towards self-loathing anyway, so I think I’ll be OK. I think if anything I will constantly try to retire and if people don’t want me to, or they need me to do something they’ll say, “No, no, no, not yet,” and then I’ll feel bad and do it. That’ll be the ideal situation.

John: You and I both know writers who sort of functionally got retired and they basically kind of stopped working. Like people stopped hiring them. And it is sad when they want to keep working and no one is hiring them. Ageism is a real thing in Hollywood. And this is the kind of insight in which if I actually went to therapy I probably could have had ten years ago, but a thing the last few weeks I’ve realized is that I think part of the reason I keep pursuing new things or stuff that I kind of don’t know anything about, like writing a book, writing a musical, software stuff, is that it’s nice to be the new person in something. It’s nice to feel like I am actually a beginner. That I’m a younger person in that field rather than sort of like the person who has been a screenwriter for 25 years.

Craig: Yeah.

John: There’s something nice about that. So I don’t know that I will ever retire, but I can also envision some point where I’m basically not writing movies anymore because I’m just doing other stuff, where I haven’t been doing it for 25 years.

Craig: No question. I mean, it’s just like video games are very difficult in the beginning when you’re weak and you’re confused and you’re not quite sure how the controls work and they’re a little scary. And then there’s that wonderful process of slowly and steadily mastering what’s happening, until you get to a point where you’re so powerful it’s boring. And the more you do something, even if it’s not in terms of power it’s just in terms of mastery, it can get – like I don’t really want necessarily to write rated-R comedies anymore, because I feel like I’ve done it a lot. And I’m a little bit bored.

And it’s not even to say that I’ve done it well, or that I couldn’t do it better. But there’s been a lot of it. And there’s been a lot that people haven’t seen, also, where my name is not there, but there’s more work than people know. And so I agree with you that changing things up and trying new things is delightful. I’m 100% in that place with you.

I think sometimes with some of the people who get retired, forcibly retired, ageism, yes, I think truly is a thing. However, Ted Eliot did point out something many years ago that had the ring of strong truth to it, which was that there are people that kind of happen in Hollywood. They make a big splash with a thing. And it’s a shiny thing and people get excited and they begin hiring that person. And slowly but surely as they go from project to project to project the word spreads that maybe they’re actually just not that good. And that some of these people aren’t aging out, they’re just being found out.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And they just weren’t as good as people thought. And there’s been a bunch of those. Also some people behave poorly and they get retired out because all things being equal people would rather work with somebody that’s nice than not nice. Especially these days I think that’s more of a consideration than it used to be.

But, yeah, it’s a tough thing because the market is cruel, but not irrational necessarily. Racist though. It’s definitely racist. See that one there’s no question about.

John: Yeah, there’s a little of that. So a thing I found is at a certain point you become – when you first start in this business you are younger than the people hiring you, and then you end up becoming about the same age as the people hiring you, and then you become older than some of the people hiring you. And at a certain point it becomes challenging to take instructions from people who have less experience than you do. And that I think is probably true in all industries across the board. It is weird to be working for somebody younger than you. That is naturally a part of it.

But I think another thing that happens is that sometimes if this executive is used to working with young writers who will do 50,000 drafts and keep smiling and will try to incorporate all the bad ideas because they’re hungry and desperate for a job, the fact that the more experienced writer isn’t so hungry will change the nature of that relationship. You know, if a writer says, you know what, I’m not going to try to implement that ridiculous note that won’t conceivably work because it’s just a waste of everyone’s time.

That’s a thing that the older writer might say that the younger writer wouldn’t say and ultimately that older writer I think gets hired less and less.

Craig: Yeah, you know, I have found that there’s been a nice shift in a weird way. I was – I think it’s different for everybody. Honestly it’s just the way you carry yourself and how you are. I think some people as they get older they just don’t refresh their minds about the world around them and I try and do that as best I can.

Having children helps. You know, having a 17-year-old and a 13-year-old makes it so that I have a certain amount of awareness of what’s going on around me. Also there’s a little bit of a sweet spot which I think you and I are probably in right now. It’s as you’re approaching 50. My guess is it’s your 50s where you’re not too old, but you are old enough where it seems like you’re kind of the vet. Like you know, like you’re a reliable vet who is going to get the job done. Thank god you’re here. I want somebody slightly older than me who I feel like I can listen to. And you’re not too old so you’re not grandpa.

That’s a real thing. I think that you and I have the best possible insurance against ageism ever which is this show. Since by the time we’re in our 60s every single person running every studio I believe will have grown up listening to this podcast. Therefore we should be fine. You and I will be OK forever.

John: As long as the council that we’ve appointed to tell us that we need to stop doing the show doesn’t tell us we need to stop doing the show.

Craig: I’m already saying no to them. I defy them.

John: I refuse!

Craig: I refuse.

John: Let’s wrap this segment up with just a little bit of practical advice. If you are thinking about sort of who should control your work after you pass away, at a certain point you’re going to need to make a will. So every screenwriter at a certain point wakes up in panic and says like, oh crap, I have no will, I have no estate, I have nothing planned. You go to a lawyer and do it.

I think if you’re young and starting out without a lot of assets you can probably do one of those online things or get a book or do something that way and just write the will, do whatever you’re supposed to do in the State of California. File it wherever you’re supposed to file it so it’s found after your death. And make those choices about where those things are supposed to go.

If you are a person with some substantial assets you do need to go find a person who can figure out how you should structure all the stuff, because at a certain point you’re going to put stuff into a trust and there’s reasons why you do things the way you do them. But it’s worth everyone thinking about so you have some sense of where you would like your work to go.

Craig: 100%. I believe you and I use the same guy.

John: Yep. He’s the guy. All of our friends do use the same guy.

Craig: There you go. Boy, I hope that guy is good or else we’re all–

John: Just toast. It turns out he’s just awful and made fundamental misassumptions.

All right, let us go to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing are actually two awesome women who both write and perform. The first is my friend Erin Gibson. So Erin Gibson, she’s the host or cohost of Throwing Shade podcast which is fantastic. Co-creator, writer, and director of Gay of Thrones, which I’m sure you’ve watched. Jonathan Martin sort of recaps of Game of Thrones. They are fantastic.

But she has a book out which is also great. I went to the party. The book came out today but it’s already gotten great reviews. Called Feminasty: The Complicated Woman’s Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death. And it’s great. And Erin is fantastic. But she’s one of those people who – this is how I first met Erin Gibson.

She and Bryan Safi, who are cohosts on Throwing Shade, were both correspondents on this show called Infomania on the Current Network. And I stumbled across this show. I thought they were singularly fantastic. This is pre-Twitter I guess, so I emailed them and said like you guys are both fantastic and we ended up having coffee and they’ve been friends since then. So, Erin Gibson, a fantastic writer and performer.

The second one is Phoebe Waller-Bridge. And sometimes in life you find little individual things you like and then later on realize they were all the same thing. And that was Phoebe Waller-Bridge for me. So, she is the writer-creator of Killing Eve, which is remarkable. It’s so good. You should watch it. But before that she did Fleabag, which I hadn’t seen, but now I’m watching and it’s great. And she stars in and wrote that. And then she was also L3-37, the robot in Solo, which was one of my favorite things about that movie. And so she was all of these things and is all one person. And so I’m so happy that there’s a Phoebe Waller-Bridge out there. So, Erin Gibson, Phoebe Waller-Bridge are my two great One Cool Things.

Craig: Wow. That is pretty cool. I love it when that happens. And that is a bit of a sign from the universe that you should be friends with somebody, isn’t it?

John: Probably so. So, she should probably come on the show next time she’s in Los Angeles.

Craig: Yeah. Seems like that should happen.

Well, just like your two things, my third thing is also a video game DLC. What? OK. So, I’ve been playing The Witcher 3.

John: I don’t like The Witcher. So tell me why you love it.

Craig: Well, I don’t love it. I’ll be honest with you. I don’t love it. I like it. I did not like it to start with. It took a little bit of time to get into. And then once I got into it I was like, OK, OK, it’s pretty cool in that it’s massive. It’s sort of like do you like Skyrim? Well, what if it was Skyrim but not as good but bigger, like there was more stuff to do.

So many quests, you’ll never finish them. But, you know, not bad. Terrible video game sex in it. I don’t think I’ve seen good video game sex.

John: Terrible in what way?

Craig: The mouths don’t touch. And the hips are moving incorrectly, so it is a hideous simulacrum of sex. It’s just incredibly not arousing. The breasts do not move. They will show bare female breasts but they have no jiggle, so it’s like that’s not right. That’s really not right at all. Yeah, video game sex not sexy.

Also, this game, Witcher, from 2015 just absurdly sexist in a way that I think like I can only assume that the people over there in Poland at Project Red who are no doubt hard at work on Witcher 4 have noticed the world has changed. I hope they have. And maybe some of their women could have shirts that close. You know, that would be nice if all the buttons went up to the neck. Just a thought.

Yeah, anyway.

John: So, I mean, Witcher 3 is really, I mean, I played it back when I was in Paris. And it is beautiful. It really does look terrific and looks better than Skyrim kind of does. But you’re always playing the one guy and I felt like I was on rails the entire time. So I probably only played like two hours into it and just gave up.

Craig: The first two hours you are on rails. And when they take you off the rails, that’s the weird part, is that the first part of the game is absurdly railed and then once that’s over they’re like, no rails. Also, you have 4,000 quests to do. Good luck, bye. And then it really is fun. And never-ending. So you probably quit just a little too early. But I will say that in terms of the beauty aspect of it I got this DLC Blood and Wine where you go this new region which is essentially French wine countryside.

John: Nice.

Craig: And it is gorgeous. Oh, it’s so great to look at. I mean, the gameplay is the same damn thing, but it is beautiful. And you get your own vineyard estate to renovate. You have your own major domo who is very nice. You have nice chats with him.

You know, I’m not a big craft your own home guy, but when I did, like in Fallout 4 I’m like, OK, I better sort of spiff up my little homestead here you know. But the guess you can do is use terrible post-apocalyptic materials to build your weird creepy hut. Here you’re living in this gorgeous French, you know, countryside manor with fields and Bougainvillea and it’s quite lovely.

So, anyway, Witcher 3: Blood and Wine if you feel like escaping slightly to your French countryside estate while you are slaughtering Necrophages with your silver sword. There you go.

John: All right. And that is our show for this week. As always our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. And special thanks to Luke Davis for sending us that cool intro bit with Craig.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: If you have an outro or intro thing you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions and bits of follow up like we discussed today.

You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, anywhere where podcasts are found. Leave us a review. That’s always great. Links to stuff we talked about in today’s episode will be in the show notes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts. They go up about four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. We have nearly 3,000 of you premium subscribers. And so I think after we wrap here I’m going to talk to Craig about a special little thing I kind of want to do for those premium subscribers, because that’s pretty cool.

Craig: That’s amazing.

John: All right, Craig, thank you so much for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John. I will see you next week.

Links:

• You can listen to John & Craig on another podcast: Jordan, Jesse, Go!
• You can check out our episode with Mindy Kaling, or our episode with Susanna Fogel and David Iserson for some context in this week’s follow-up.
• John’s attempt at “Changing Craig’s Mind” about ventriloquism: Nina Conti
• Edward Albee’s estate has special rules about casting for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
• Erin Gibson: Throwing Shade podcast, Gay of Thrones, and her new book, Feminasty: The Complicated Woman’s Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death.
• Phoebe Waller-Bridge: Killing Eve, Fleabag, and she’s the robot, L3-37, in Solo
• The Witcher 3: Blood And Wine DLC
• The USB drives!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!). And thank you, Luke Davis, for Craig’s musical intro!

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/craig-hates-dummies).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 365 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be doing one of our favorite features, How Would This Be a Movie, with new stories looking at McDonald’s millions, a rest home for ventriloquist dummies, and the Tinder hunger games. Plus we’ll be answering listener questions and other bits of stuff that’s left over from Craig being gone for so long.

But, Craig, you’re back.

**Craig:** I’m back. Feels good to be back in here. We are on our one year of podcasts podcast, which is exciting. I have to say I’m not cut out to be a world traveler. I’m just going to put it out there. I have gone back and forth between Los Angeles and Eastern Europe, which is not an insignificant trip, about – I don’t know, back and forth seven, eight, nine times over the last four or five months. I don’t know how people that routinely do this do this.

**John:** I have a friend who has a business in Eastern Europe and he just goes back all the time. He just loves being on planes.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Doesn’t mind – he’s a citizen of the world. Doesn’t mind jetlag. And that’s just not me.

**Craig:** Yeah. The planes thing you can kind of make your peace with. The jetlag is just, blech. You don’t get used to it as much as you just no longer fear the unknown. Now you know exactly what to be concerned about. So I know now, OK, fly on Saturday, land on Sunday. Go to work on Monday. Monday will be surprisingly fine. Don’t be fooled. Tuesday you begin to feel a bit sick. Wednesday you want to die. And then Thursday you kind of get back to normal.

**John:** That’s often how it goes. Plus you’re working very long hours doing your show because you’re there on set.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s not natural light sometimes. It’s all crazy.

**Craig:** The last week of shooting we managed to fit in some splits, which is when you shoot half-day/half-night, and then full nights.

**John:** Oh, brutal.

**Craig:** Including an hour-long drive to and from location to our hotel in Latvia, so we managed to go over the border for that. But I have to say I’m thrilled. 90 days of shooting. An incredible cast. A wonderful crew. Best creative experience of my life. I surely hope that the show turns out as well as we all think it will. And it’s very exciting. Very meaningful and exciting for everybody involved. So, a lovely thing.

**John:** I’m so excited for you. Cannot wait to see it.

All right. We have so much follow up. So let’s get into our follow up. Two weeks ago you and I talked about the Department of Justice was looking into the Paramount Consent Decree, the decades-old ruling which said that studios could not own exhibitors and vice versa and set a whole bunch of special conditions on those relationships.

Jim in North Carolina wrote in to say, “The flaw in Craig’s support for studios owning theaters doesn’t scale downward. Many smaller communities don’t necessarily have multiple physical theaters. Concentrating ownership isn’t going to support rich ecosystem of films.”

Craig, what do you think of that?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know if that’s quite right. I mean, you are always going to have a place for independent cinema and theater houses that run non-studio films and non-studio fare, just as you always have. I mean, right now what we have are very large corporations that primarily show major motion picture releases from big studios, and then we have little ones that show other things. So that doesn’t change. Frankly, when he says – Jim says, “Many smaller communities don’t necessarily have multiple physical theaters,” what do they have? That’s what I would ask him.

If they have something like an AMC kind of chain, or a Regal, or one of these big ones, well then maybe the ownership changes, but the place itself doesn’t. Hopefully it gets better.

**John:** Well, but I do wonder in that situation, let’s say Disney buys AMC as a whole chain, so that theater now in his small town is owned by Disney. Is that going to limit his ability to see movies from Warners, to see movies from Paramount? There could be some concern there’s just actually some movies may not come to his town because Disney has that theater.

**Craig:** Well, what I would suggest is that if this ever does change, and the federal government allows studios to own theaters, it can only happen if there is some kind of regulation that requires the carrying of other people’s products, otherwise you are essentially engaging in bundling and monopolistic practices. So, I would think that it’s a bit of a – look, it could happen that we go from all of the regulation that we have to none. But that seems highly unlikely. I think what would happen is a relaxation but not a complete elimination. I can’t imagine a world where the government says we’re going to go from Disney not being able to own a single screen to Disney can own all the screens at once and only show Disney product. That just seems like a rather broad leap. So.

**John:** Another case came out of Texas this week, so I’ll put a link into this. Dominic Patten wrote it up for Deadline. So this was a case between AMC, the big theater company, and Viva, which was a smaller chain that showed Spanish language versions of big screen releases. And so this was a lawsuit, it was the next round in that lawsuit, between the two. Viva has now gone out of business, but the lawsuit continues.

And I thought it was really interesting. Basically Viva is arguing that there is a significant Spanish-speaking contingency that was not being served by AMC’s screens and that essentially AMC had a stranglehold on the market and was not allowing Viva to compete for the ability to show these movies. And so it’s the kind of thing that the government gets involved with, looking at is this a restraint of trade. Is this something that’s in violation of the consent decrees, I assume.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a really interesting situation. AMC is this big theater chain. And they said, look, we make these deals with studios where we show their movies and then they don’t show that movie maybe next door to us in our competitor. And then the studios say, yeah, this other exhibitor, Viva, they only show movies in Spanish, so that’s not really competition to you. That’s a different thing. And AMC said, no, no, no, it’s the same thing. We’re not showing any of your movies unless you agree to not show them over across the street at a Viva theater.

And their argument was, look, very few – I think they said 7% of the local population doesn’t speak any English at all. In other words, 7% only speak Spanish, therefore really only 7% is what Viva is claiming is the reason they should be showing these things. And the other 93% sitting in the crowd at Viva, so they would argue with bad statistics, could just as easily see the movie over there at AMC in English.

And the judge basically said, no, even if–

**John:** No!

**Craig:** No! Even if we suggest that the only people that go to see the films at Viva are the Spanish-speaking people, he said AMC does not explain why 7% of Houston’s population is not a sufficient submarket. I mean, Houston is a big city. 7% of Houston is a lot of people.

So this, frankly, this stinks. I think what AMC is doing here stinks. And we’ll see what happens. These things have a way of eventually settling out, but I don’t like it.

**John:** Yeah. As a person who was living in France for a year, when I would see US movies or British movies in France I could choose to see them version originale, which would be it’s all in English, I could a version originale sous-titre, which means subtitles, or version originale French basically. So basically I could see it dubbed, I could see it subtitled, or occasionally I’d see it without either the dubbing or subtitles.

Some movies you could see whenever you wanted to see, you could see it with subtitles on. But some movies, like especially Pixar movies or Disney movies, they were only in that first week and only in big markets could you see them not dubbed into French.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it became this complicated thing of like well we have to see Moana first weekend, or actually Vaiana there, because if we don’t see it that first weekend we won’t be able to see it in English. And so languages are a complicated thing. And to say that 7% of a market speaking that language isn’t significant is crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this is just overreaching greed.

**John:** So, in last week’s episode that you weren’t here for Kate Hagen came in and she was fantastic talking about video stores. A thing she brought up which I think got sort of a little bit lost in the edit is this idea that, as MoviePass seems to be going away, there’s this idea that arthouse theaters in a market could all ban together and essentially make an arthouse pass. And so with it you could see as many movies at these independent theaters as you wanted to over the course of a month. That seems like a great idea.

So, I would just – if someone is working on that for Los Angeles, please let us know because that seems like a terrific idea.

**Craig:** I mean, but is it a great idea for the exhibitors?

**John:** I think it’s a great idea for those one-screen houses, for them to get together and be able to make it all work. That would be great. Obviously there’s concerns about the degree to which independent businesses can work together to do stuff like that, but it does feel like it would be a win for people who want to go see these films.

**Craig:** I mean, one thing we know for sure is that we were right about MoviePass. Holy cajole is that thing just collapsing. It turns out that offering people something that costs X for X divided by five is not a good business model. Wow. Wow, did that blow up fast.

**John:** But, you know what? I want to thank all the VC money that went into making films cheaper for people who want to see movies for a year.

**Craig:** One year.

**John:** So, one year. But for one year they bought a bunch of people movie tickets.

**Craig:** That’s right. They subsidized the movie business for a year. It was amazing.

**John:** Thank you VC money. Keep doing it.

Second bit of follow up, just as my personal follow up, Highland 2.1 came out this week. It’s a pretty major update. One of the things we ended up doing in this most recent build is we have a bunch of international users and, you and I think of screenplays starting with INT and EXT and Cut to and we just have all of these English assumptions about how scripts should work, but those aren’t the natural assumptions.

So we’ve added the ability to customize all of those things for whatever language you want to do. You can set whatever you’d like for those things. And it seems to be very great and helpful. And it’s been really heartening to see like we have a lot more sort of Chinese users and Korean users than we had sort of expected. And they have special needs and the nice thing about being plain text is we can sort of meet those needs. So if you are a person writing in a language that is not English, I would say check it out because it is useful for those things.

**Craig:** Meanwhile Final Draft still does not have Unicode support. Amazing.

**John:** Yes. Yep. So, I mean, part of the reason why Chinese users write in to us, and thank god that Megan speaks Chinese and she can answer those support emails, is they’ve been – sometimes they’ve been desperate for a screenwriting app and because we support real Unicode and real sort of Chinese entry on stuff you can use it to write real screenplays in Chinese which is a difficult thing otherwise.

**Craig:** Indeed. Indeed. Fade In I know supports Unicode. I’m going to guess WriterDuet does because it’s–

**John:** It’s web-based.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, honestly there’s really no excuse for Final Draft at this point other than the fact that their empire is built on a crumbing foundation of nonsense.

**John:** Yeah. That tends to be a barrier.

**Craig:** You know what? New marketing slogan for them.

**John:** Crumbling foundation of nightmare. Can I use that as a blurb for selling?

**Craig:** Of course you can. You can do whatever you want, John. You know I can’t stop you.

**John:** Oh, the other one thing we added in this new version which I think people will find very helpful, because it’s a thing I needed for Arlo Finch is there will be times where you need to number stuff sequentially and stuff may move around but you need the numbers to keep updating to whatever it is, so like chapters it was for me and so I didn’t want to have to number the chapters and then go back through and renumber the chapters. So we added a variable called chapter, or series, or panel, or page, and you can put this in and then whatever the next number is it will just keep incrementing. And it’s incredibly useful for books, obviously, but especially people who are using Highland for graphic novels and comic books, because there you tend to say like this is the page, this is panel one, panel two, panel three. And to have those auto increment is useful. So, another reason to check it out if you have not checked it out.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** All right. We talked about the Editors Guild. So we got some feedback about the Editors Guild. We got a lot of great emails. I don’t know if we want to read through all of them, but I thought we might take a sampling of some of what people have wrote in about the Editors Guild. Do you want to start us off?

**Craig:** Sure. Ann writes in, “Thank you for the excellent discussion of the IA contract in Scriptnotes Episode 363, for which a link was posted on the 2018 IATSE contract forum on Facebook.” Ho-ho-ho. Interesting. “In response to your very astute comment, ‘There’s something rotten at the core of this union,’ I can explain. From its very beginning the real purpose of the IA has not been to represent the interests of its varied members, but instead to guarantee a docile below-the-line workforce to the employers. Please read Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930 to 1950, Moguls, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists by Gerald Horne.”

So we should probably throw a link to that up on here. Sounds like Ann’s got a pretty decent handle on the history here, which I admittedly don’t. She goes on to talk a little bit about something called the Industry Experience Roster. I had no idea this existed. Did you?

**John:** I didn’t.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s basically who you can hire.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s like a list of who you’re allowed to hire. This is a – this a roster that’s controlled by a nonprofit that is in turn controlled and funded by the companies, the AMPTP. And it’s a preferential hiring list. It came out of the Red Scare and the Hollywood Blacklist era and HUAC and all that nonsense. And it still exists. That’s insane. And, god, IA is – they got to clean up their house. Somebody has to start a little revolution over there I think.

**John:** Well, it might be Nicholas. So Nicholas writes in to say that he’s a member of the Art Directors Guild and “personally stand with the IA 700 and their refusal to support the new contract. I’m also appalled at Matt Loeb’s and the other BA’s responses to it. Craig is right that the IA is out of scale. That it can demand better. But that might require some initial sacrifice and few are up for it, least of all the leadership. Capitulation is easy, especially when it can be dressed up as winning.”

“So, Eugene Debs recognized the division of workers in the separate trade craft unions was a divide and conquer strategy and said as much in 1905.” So, again, it is old divisions and old systems in place that sort of keep people from getting to a better place.

**Craig:** It’s sort of fundamental to the purpose and function of the union, right? The whole idea is that you bring together people who individually do not have much bargaining power and you collectivize them in a way that they do. And it makes sense therefore that if you’re dealing with a bunch of unions that could move as one and coagulate all of their power into a larger fist then you should. And the tricky thing here is what it sounds like we’re hearing is that IATSE did that but kind of as part of a feint to almost take away that power from the unions that they were combining.

You know, the Writers Guild, we have our own little strange thing where we are oddly bifurcated into East and West. I don’t think I can find any reasonable person on either the East or West that isn’t a staff member of the Writers Guild of America East who says, “Yeah, this is a good arrangement. This makes sense.” It’s insane.

**John:** It is insane. Now, Craig, you may not have read the actual history of sort of why there are two unions. You’ve read that packet?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So there is an explanation for how it all happened.

**Craig:** There is.

**John:** And so TV was on one side of the coast. It’s the same kind of reasons that are stupid reasons for why we are not representing animation. We’re making assumptions that we were different kinds of writers and therefore didn’t need the same kind of protections. But we are separate unions. We get along very, very well. We have common interests. We do things together.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes. And sometimes we don’t. And the double nature of our administration is costly, it’s unnecessarily costly, and silly. And we would be better off if we just stopped and made one. Just as I think all of the unions of IA would be better off if they, I don’t know, looked out for each other and actually acted like a one total union instead of a bunch of unions that are literally being kept apart from each other by the people that run the union itself.

So, this is my once a year plea to get rid of the Writers Guild East and Writers Guild West and just make one Writers Guild. It’s absurd.

**John:** Yeah. And yet you know how incredibly difficult that would be.

**Craig:** It’s not that difficult. It’s not.

**John:** I think it’s more difficult. But we won’t solve that problem today.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Instead I think it’s time we break out our theme music because we’ve not heard it for so long.

I’m actually going to let Craig start with this because this is really a Craig announcement and I’m so excited to be able to share this with the world. Tell us about it, Craig.

**Craig:** Well, thank you. So you know I’ve been working as part of the credits committee, the screen credits committee for many, many, many, many years. We went through two elections, or I guess we call them referenda. Both of which were successful that made significant changes to the way we administer our credits. Now we have another one coming up and this one is a bit different. What we’ve done now is we’ve essentially rewritten the screen credits manual.

The screen credits manual rewrite has not changed any of our guidelines. It hasn’t changed the rules. Nothing is different in terms of how we administer and distribute credit. The reason we did this is because a lot of the policies that were in place weren’t necessarily listed in that manual and we wanted to list them. There were also some new things that had emerged that simply didn’t apply when the manual was first written, god knows how many years ago, that we wanted to add to acknowledge. And then we also wanted to make certain things more clear. Things for instance like the definition of story and the definition of screenplay and how you assign credit for one or the other. We know, just from practice, that a lot of writers don’t understand it. A lot of participating writers don’t get it. And even a lot of arbiters don’t quite get it.

So we’ve done a really careful job of expanding those areas to help both people that are heading into an arbitration as a writer or people who are heading into an arbitration as an arbiter understand best how they’re supposed to apply contributions to which credit.

So, again, I just want to repeat: this manual that everyone is going to vote on doesn’t change any rules. It doesn’t change any guidelines. It simply makes things more clear. And because one of the requirements of our union is that the membership vote on any change to the manual, even if it’s a punctuation pass, we do have to come to everybody for a vote.

Sometimes the danger of votes like this is that they’re so boring nobody shows up except the cranks, and then suddenly you lose. So, I’m going to be banging the drum to make sure that everybody does take the four seconds to vote online. That will be happening in October.

**John:** Yeah. I’m very excited. Everyone needs to read it. I’ve read the whole thing. It’s really good. It is just more clear. Craig, I can’t believe you got rid of the language about telegrams. I mean, if I can’t send a telegram then I just don’t know what I’m going to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there was a thing that said basically if you want to get the notice of tentative writing credits by fax or telegram you have to – this is what we’ve been dealing with. So, yeah, we did do a little bit of a cleanup on the telegram situation. There were a bunch of things like that. And, you know, took out some stuff that frankly was just confusing. I mean, there were some things that were kind of explanatory in the old manual that we know we’ve been wrestling with for years because the explanation actually made things less explained. So, stuff like that.

**John:** It’s also fair to say that this more closely resembles the structure of the TV credits manual?

**Craig:** I honestly don’t know. I have never read the TV credits manual.

**John:** So as it was presented to us at the board part of the logic behind it is that it more closely resembles the structure of what people do in the TV credits manual so that you can track through them the same way. Because as a person who has gone through many arbitrations and served as an arbiter many times I did find the credits manual confusing and sometimes redundant. I do think the new document is much better. So thank you for your work there.

**Craig:** My pleasure. I do know what you mean now. We did do some reordering of things. Again, the substance doesn’t necessarily get any closer to the substance of the TV credits, but the order in which we describe things and talk about things and the nomenclature we use for certain things we did conform so that it didn’t seem like they were two different documents entirely.

**John:** Very nice. My WGA news is nothing that you actually have to vote on but something you should go attend. So this past Saturday I attended the pilot version of the WGA sexual harassment seminar. It’s run by an outside consultant named Sunitha Menon. She is terrific. But the purpose of the seminar is to talk through what TV and film writers deal with both in terms of sexual harassment in their own workplace, but also what we’re writing as we’re writing for film and for TV. And so it’s sort of a broad discussion of those things, but also some really practical suggestions for what to do when you’re encountering sexual harassment, what to do when you’re a bystander for sexual harassment, and sort of how we can change the culture for writers and sort of beyond writing through awareness and really taking some concrete action.

I thought it was great. There are going to be nine of these presentations all throughout the city, so there will be a listing of when those are coming up. But I really strongly encourage you to go to them because I thought it was great. It’s an hour and a half. It’s fun. So please do go to attend those workshops.

**Craig:** Are they going to be videoed and perhaps representable to people who can’t make them?

**John:** There will be some version of that. They did film some of this. But I would say that watching it is good, being there is very helpful because some of what you’re trying to do there is actually have a discussion about what things you would do in a room in these situations, or encountering this thing how would you react. And there is a space for just real – like I asked a question in the room about a very specific and odd thing which had happened to me a couple of times and I just had no idea where I should report this. Like what do I do with this thing? This was a really uncomfortably sexually charged moment, but I’m the only person in it. And it wasn’t really directed at me. So it was great to be actually in that room to be able to ask her, but also just to get the feeling of the room about what is the right thing to do in those situations.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the reason I ask, I completely agree. It’s always best to be there in person. The reason I ask is that there’s always the danger that you get a self-selected crowd.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And the people that need to hear the message the most are the least likely to show up, but they might watch something. So it just occurred to me that, you know, I’m just always thinking like a Cassandra about the worst case scenario and then backing out from there. It’s my nature.

**John:** It’s your nature. And the thing I should also stress is that the WGA doing these workshops does not at all diminish the actual requirement for our employers to be the ones responsible for our protection in these situations. And so the WGA is not the employer. The WGA is just someone there standing on the writer’s behalf. So this is just hopefully giving people some guidance in terms of what their rights are and sort of what they should think about their responsibilities as they see these things happening around them.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get to our main feature topic, How Would This Be a Movie. There were so many great choices that were presented to us that I picked three of them, but there were – Megan had a list of like 12 more that were all really good. So, I’m going to pick these three. There’s a little bit of a recency bias. There are things that came across my feed more recently, but they’re all just terrific.

So this first one, here is the setup basically. It’s a Twitter thread I’m reading. A guy, BVD Hai, I don’t really know what his actual name is, he talks about this girl he was talking with on Tinder. They’re just chatting. They’re just texting back and forth. And she’s really busy now, but hey, later this week I’m going to – my friend is DJing this thing. Why don’t you meet up with me at the stage afterwards and we’ll go out? He’s like, great. So he shows up and there are a bunch of other guys at this stage. And it’s really unclear what’s going on. And luckily we have audio of it that we can play.

So he goes there and this is what he hears.

**Natasha:** Hi everyone. As you may or may not know, my name is Natasha. And I have everyone here today to be on a date with me. Dating apps are very difficult and I said maybe I can bring everyone here in person and see how that goes. So, do you have what it takes to win a date with me? So, we’re going to start the elimination. Half of you people here are in relationships, so those people should leave now. Anyone under 5’10”, please leave as well. No beer bellies. No long beards. No bald guys. No khakis. Or is any less than six inches. You know, you got to go. You got to go. Also, anyone named Jimmy. I don’t enjoy the name Jimmy.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** So, Craig, she does not enjoy the name Jimmy.

**Craig:** Mm, yeah.

**John:** This is a two-part How Would This Be a Movie, but let’s pause here and let’s say that this is the whole story. So let’s take Natasha as who she is and she’s done this thing where she’s getting all these people together and she’s going to pick them in person. What kind of movie is this? Where is a movie in this situation?

**Craig:** God. I mean, I presume that this is some sort of – I mean, she’s making a commentary right on the way men treat women, I guess. I don’t understand what’s happening, so I’m a little confused just in general. I mean, I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and say she’s not actually a total sociopath. There’s a reason for all this. There’s a point behind it.

Those tend to be terrible bases for movies, right? We want actually somebody to do something that is sincere, or if it’s insincere it’s on a bet or a dare and then it blows up in their face. I guess any time you’re talking about a date you immediately start thinking romantic comedy. So I suppose there is a version where somebody, a guy or a girl, does this and then realizes that actually there was somebody in the crowd that they kind of had a thing with. Like before they go on stage they have a weird moment with somebody where they’re like, oh wow, you’re actually amazing. Then they get up on stage and that person hates them and they have to go get them back. But I’m just already exhausted and annoyed. I don’t want to see it.

Did you ever see, was it called Dogfight? Do you remember that movie?

**John:** I never saw the movie, but I think I know the premise, which is basically guys pick the ugliest women to go out with. Is that the situation?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a bet. They make a bet. It was an early – River Phoenix and Lily Taylor, who is an amazing actor. And the idea is that there’s a party where a bunch of guys who are on leave from I guess the Korean War or something like that, or Vietnam War, they get into a bet of who can bring the ugliest girl to a party. And you just feel terrible. You feel terrible watching it.

And there is a comment about it, but the person that you immediately identify with and feel for and want to be victorious is Lily Taylor. And there is a certain casual dismissive kind of a bunch of idiot who are drinking go “Here’s an idea,” and then only do they realize – or at least one of them realizes it was a terrible and cruel idea. Here this is so – this is so 2018. It’s so synthetically viral. It’s so purposeful and calculated and cynical. And who am I supposed to identify with here, I don’t know.

**John:** All right. I want to make the case that there is a movie here, this clean version, this sort of first half of it. So, yes, you could have our heroine be the one who decided to actually do all these things and she goes through the arc and she actually ends up meeting the right guy, or the right guy was the guy who helped her put up this whole thing. I can also really envision the best friend character is the one who was actually messaging all these guys. Like my best friend is fantastic. You need to come meet her for this thing. Basically she’s pretending to be this one and look at all these men who could be right for you. And so somebody is trying to fix up her best friend or her sister. And this is what they’ve come to. And then if you’re those guys in the crowd, if you are interested, how do you start a real relationship when it’s begun under such horrible false pretenses.

There’s a Chris O’Donnell movie, I’m trying to remember the title, The Bachelor or something like that. It was a remake of an older film where there are like 100 women in wedding dresses–

**Craig:** Oh yeah, I remember the ad for it.

**John:** I don’t know the full premise for that. But living in a culture of The Bachelor/The Bachelorette, this does feel like a natural kind of thing you could see happen in the same way that we do these elaborate wedding proposals, it feels that sense of like it’s not real love unless it’s sort of this big, giant event love.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you might be onto something that maybe the person to follow is not the person who has come up with this thing or is on stage. There’s a tradition in mass market storytelling where you take a man, a boy, a man, whatever age he is, usually basically a boy in his head, and you propose that this man is an idiot and he is immature and stupid and cruel and thus behaves in a boorish, childish way until the right woman comes along, at which point he must redeem himself in her eyes in order to be an acceptable human being.

This is not a particularly good use of women as they tend to just be these weird angelic props for men-children to aspire to. But the one thing no one has ever had a problem with with those narratives is the premise, which is that men tend to be infantile idiots.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** We don’t necessarily have the same instinctive understanding of a female premise in that way. We don’t necessarily presume women are infantile idiots. It’s just part of our, again, this is the gendered culture we live in, right? We tend to view young women as somehow, I don’t know, more mature, just by dint of their gender. And there have been movies that have played around with that and confronted that. And I like those movies. Though you get trapped a little bit sometimes in a, oh how do I put it, it’s a trap of realism, right? Because you want to be able to challenge things, but you also want to make sure that as you’re challenging them you don’t leave the bounds of recognizability. Because, for instance, Trainwreck, the Amy Schumer movie, that lived – to me – that lived inside of the bounds of familiarity.

We all know women like that. And they do need to grow up and they do. Just like humans, right? Women are humans. This one, however, I don’t know if there is the familiarity there. So I would be concerned that an audience of women would be watching this going, “Nope, I don’t know her.” This is where we cue the Mariah gif. I don’t know her.

**John:** I think your point about our gendered expectations of what these kind of characters can do is so true and it reminds me of I saw Eighth Grade, the Bo Burnham movie, and a scene that made me so uncomfortable but as I was uncomfortable I also realized like, wait, I would not be uncomfortable if the teenage boy character was doing this. There is a sequence in which she’s sort of having her sexual awakening and she’s about to experiment with a piece of fruit. And her dad walks in. And it’s a great, really funny button on that scene. But the moments leading up to it were really uncomfortable and it’s because we’re uncomfortable with teenage girl sexuality being a joke.

We’re used to sort of like horny boys, but the idea of a 13-year-old girl being horny was just really uncomfortable to see. And that’s, again, just our gendered expectations of things.

**Craig:** Was the fruit an apple?

**John:** It was not an apple.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting. Was it a pear?

**John:** It was not a pear.

**Craig:** Not a pear. OK. I’ll keep thinking.

**John:** You’ll keep thinking of what fruit could possibly be involved. So, let’s get to the second part of the story which I think is actually genuinely fascinating and troubling in its own right. So, there’s two New York Post stories about the even that happened, but the third New York Post story reveals that the whole thing was a viral video set up by a guy named Rob Bliss. And so Rob Bliss explains sort of what the impetus was behind this and also how challenging it was. So let’s take a listen to a piece of audio. So this audio from Rob Bliss explaining the setup for all this.

**Rob Bliss:** So I’ve quickly realized holding conversations with all these guys just isn’t going to work. It’s too many of them. So I’ve developed a system. Step one, we message with a guy on Tinder and give him a Twilio phone number. Step two, this programmable phone number is routed through an online database. This central hub can send and receive texts and be logged into from anywhere in the world. Leading us to step three, farming out this texting operation to overseas workers. Over 50 fulltime workers help us to text with guys converting a Tinder match into a Tinder date. And if you were to call any of our numbers they forward to this phone with a voicemail of “Hi, this is Natasha. I’m not available at the moment.“

So I need a meeting location for Natasha and all these guys. That’s why I’ve created a fake EDM event, complete with stage, sound, and our friend, Nick AM. Guys will be told to stand next to the stage and after she says hi to her DJ friend, they’ll go off on their date. They’ll never expect a thing.

**John:** So we’ll post a link to the video that explains a little bit more, too. But essentially, this Rob Bliss, the whole thing was designed to be sort of a viral stunt. And so Natasha is not really Natasha. She’s not really the person texting them. Basically there’s a fake Tinder profile and when people are messaging him, messaging her, they’re actually messaging 50 fulltime employees around the globe who are carrying on these conversations and then finally inviting them to come to this event.

So, there really is no – while there was a person who showed up there, it’s all a creation. She’s not a real person in a meaningful way. These men have been interacting with strangers who are not the stranger they think they were interacting with.

**Craig:** What is the point of all this?

**John:** Well, he’s a viral marketing person. He wasn’t selling any specific thing, he was just selling an event, a thing.

**Craig:** OK, so hold on a second. Viral marketing means something is being marketed. There’s nothing marketed here. He’s just an attention whore.

**John:** Sure. Well, I think all viral marketing is attention whoredom.

**Craig:** Well, for a purpose.

**John:** He wasn’t selling any specific service. I think he’s basically promoting himself.

**Craig:** Wow. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him. I hate all of this. I don’t like what he did to that – I mean, does the woman that he employed to pose as this, she probably had no idea what was coming her way is my guess.

**John:** Yeah. So she was involved to some degree and she agreed to be this person here, so she knew some things about it, but she’s taking a lot of flak. And in the moment she’s taking a lot of flak. You can see even in this video that they’re cutting that these guys are really pissed and feel betrayed. There’s a reason why they have big body guards around her because they don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s so many ways this could have gone really, really south.

So this is where it becomes a Black Mirror episode where it’s like you think you’re talking to a real person, but there’s no real person there. And then you show up and it’s this weird Hunger Games situation where basically how desperate are you going to be to be on this. What happens if you show up at one of these things and you’re married? And like there’s now video of you showing up at this thing. It’s really interesting and disturbing. I think there’s a fascinating movie in that. Or there’s a fascinating idea in that of this event gone wrong and sort of what the ramifications of it are.

**Craig:** I would say all I’d be willing to take from this story is, if I’m writing a movie about something that takes place in New York, I include this character based on this guy to be the scum bucket that you laugh at because he’s so gross. Because this is just gross. This is like the most gross version. Blech. I hate it. I hate him. I hate him.

**John:** OK. So let me argue on his behalf. I’m just going to pretend to be him right now.

This is what you’re doing every day on Tinder. Every day on Tinder you are swiping on people and sorting them out in two buckets of yes or no. This is meant to demonstrate, it’s basically an art project to show this is what you’re really doing. These are the actual human beings who are getting discarded because of the systems that we’ve set up for dating.

**Craig:** Yeah. It fails on its face. The argument fails on its face. When you say no to somebody you say no. And when you say yes you say yes. Everybody understands the contract. I go on there, I show you my picture. You don’t it because I’m too fat, too bald, too short, whatever, OK, you say no. But if you say yes there’s also a contract there. Now I’m showing up and I have a feeling. You’ve created a feeling in a man or a woman that somebody is interested in them. That is a very powerful feeling. And then you say not really, I’m rejecting you. Also, I’m doing it simply to create a story that the media will look at so I get attention. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t even sell soap.

It does nothing except hurt you to make me feel good. Ergo, Rob Bliss is a dick.

**John:** All right. And so I think the interesting version of this is what if it is to sell soap. What if it is to sell that next movie? Because that’s coming. You know that’s coming.

**Craig:** It’s also bad. But this is like next level bad. This is pointless. This is like, “Well, it’s bad when people kill somebody because they get angry at them. That’s very bad. It’s worse when someone just randomly walks up to another person and calmly kills them because they enjoy killing people.” Ugh. I don’t like it. I don’t like it. What’s next? God. Something will make me happy now.

**John:** This will make you happy or creeped out. So this is about Vent Haven. It’s a retirement home for ventriloquist dummies. So this came from a Twitter thread by Monterey Jack. That’s a pretty great Twitter handle.

**Craig:** Great name.

**John:** So you definitely want to click through the links in the show notes for these because you will see all of these images of all these ventriloquist dummies that are all together like they’re in a grade school assembly staring directly at you with their dead lifeless eyes. And it’s just a real place. So here’s a situation where there’s not a lot of story threads. This is just a remarkable environment. And so looking through the behind the scenes, the abouts on this museum, you get some sense of what might be there. But I just thought it was a really interesting environment.

So the Vent Haven museum was founded by a Cincinnati native guy named William Shakespeare Berger who is known to his friends as WS. He was not a professional ventriloquist, he just really dug ventriloquist dummies. And so he purchased his first figure in 1910, and he just kept buying more and more ventriloquist dummies.

And so it became sort of a place where ventriloquists, or vents as they are known–

**Craig:** Vents. Ugh.

**John:** A lot of times they were, as ventriloquists died their dummies would go to this place and so it’s most of these ventriloquist dummies are the lifeless children of former ventriloquists who are now staring at you from here.

I think WS might be a fascinating character. He outlived his wife, his son, and grandson. Had no other heirs. So, fearing his collection would be divided and lost he set up this foundation to keep this open as a museum you can visit.

**Craig:** Thank god. Thank god. Thank god that organization is there so you can keep visiting what is as far as I can tell a house full of absolute crap. I don’t understand ventriloquism. Let me just – this is my – I get don’t get this. Ventriloquism has always been an art form that has completely failed to – I don’t even understand why anybody is interested in it. I can say, look, I don’t particularly love a certain kind of music but I could see where other people do. Why would anybody like ventriloquism? What is going on??

**John:** Oh, see that surprises me, Craig. Because ventriloquism is a kind of magic.

**Craig:** It’s not.

**John:** It is. It is.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It has many characteristics of magic. There’s a manipulation. There’s a slight of hand. The ability to make you believe that something has happening that’s not clearly happening. It’s anticipation–

**Craig:** Oh please. When I was a kid and people would say you can throw your voice. Remember on cartoons somebody could throw their voice and that meant that their voice would actually come out of a different part of the room. That to me was awesome. But that doesn’t actually exist. Ventriloquism is just I just talk like this and then I use a certain thing so instead of saying muh I say neh, so if I want to say like hey man how you doing, I go hey man, how you doing, and then that way – anyone can do it. Literally I think anyone could do it. Anyone. It’s not hard. And then you just do a funny voice. You do a funny voice and you have a little guy and he talks like this.

I’m serious. It should be banned. It should be banned. It’s a rip off. It’s all a rip off. I mean, I’ve seen these guys make all this money. Every time we go to Vegas you see these guys with their stupid puppets making money.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s actually quite a difficult skill and I’m going to stand up for ventriloquists here.

**Craig:** You do that. The vent community is coming for me.

**John:** I had a ventriloquist dummy.

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**John:** I had a Lester dummy.

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**John:** so I had Lester, the only notable African American ventriloquist dummy at the time. He was my little guy. So I really tried to learn how to do it, I just couldn’t do it. So if anyone could do it, I certainly couldn’t do it. He wasn’t a great puppet. He just had a string.

But I held onto him through high school, and so sat on the shelf and it was just terrifying the way all ventriloquist dummies are terrifying.

**Craig:** Terrifying. That’s the other thing is that they’re ugly. There’s like a ventriloquist dummy face, and if you look at this horrifying collection so many of them have it. This weird thing of arched, really high arched eyebrows, eye shadow for some reason on everybody, men, women, boys, girls, doesn’t matter. Weird pointy rosy cheekbones. And then a very long upper lip that doesn’t have a philtrum. So it’s one of the signs of fetal alcohol syndrome. I kid you not. Is to have no philtrum and a long upper lip. So they all have fetal alcohol syndrome. They’re terrifying. And then god forbid you have one of the black ones that was built, I don’t know, in like a time when Jim Crow was considered liberal. They’re so racist. There’s like – even like the ones that are about Irish people are racist. They’re all racist towards everyone. They’re terrible.

And the most you get out of them is a silly voice where somebody does bad jokes. So, anyway–

**John:** That’s a pretty good ventriloquist voice. So I will say you’re also not acknowledging that many of them are clown-based or clown-derived.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** And so it has the most terrifying aspects of clowns and zombies. Clowns and robots maybe. They’re like little robot clowns.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Who want to kill you.

**Craig:** Robot clowns. Look, the problem with making it a movie is naturally we want to make a horror movie out of these monstrosities but they’ve done it. Right? They’ve done the dummy horror movie. Great dummy horror movie with Anthony Hopkins. So, it feels a little cliché to make the dummy horror movie. Then you kind of start drifting towards Lars and the Real Girl, where you just want to tell a very sad story about a man who loved ventriloquism and ventriloquism dummies even though he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do the thing that I’m arguing literally anyone could do.

And so he begins to surround himself with these things and love them. I’m not suggesting anything untoward, but there is some sad Charlie Kaufman universe movie here that could be done.

**John:** Well, there’s also a version of Pinocchio. So look at Geppetto as a guy who creates a wooden boy who is very much like a ventriloquist dummy. And wishes for it to become real. So that is maybe the thing that can get to a non-creepy movie out of this is that you do bring these things to life, or there’s some reason why these things come to life and save the town or do something. That’s the start of a premise. It’s certainly not a whole movie. And really asks who are the characters. Is it a Toy Story situation where those are your characters and they have very specific roles and they can do specific things? Maybe.

And so what is it like to talk in their own voices? I put this on here as a disturbing image and sort of a movie world but I don’t think there’s a movie here right now.

**Craig:** Now. Another great Twilight Zone episode as well about this. I just find them horrifying and pointless. I don’t understand ventriloquism. I’m the worst possible person – no one should hire me to write this. That’s for sure. I dispute the premise of ventriloquism as a thing. People go and they sit in a crowd and listen to people tell horrendous jokes. And the problem with the dummies is they force you to make bad jokes. And they just watch somebody sit there and talk through a puppet in front of them. How is that a–?

**John:** I think it’s a skill. All right, let’s get to the motherlode of all this because when this first came across my Twitter feed I’m like, oh well, yes of course we’re going to save that for How Would This Be a Movie, but Craig is away in Eastern Europe so we’ll wait till it comes up. But then of course then it sells really quickly and then there’s a follow up on it. So this is the Moby Dick of How Would This Be a Movie. So, do you want to talk us through the premise?

**Craig:** Really simply there was this incredible article that came out in the Daily Beast about a true story and it’s one of those wonderful true stories that happened under our noses and we just didn’t notice. And there’s an amazing reason why.

But basically every year McDonald’s will run this Monopoly contest where you get these little Monopoly game pieces attached to your drink cups or your French fry packs. And my wife I can assure you has played this religiously and was really, really serious about it even though I’d make so much fun of her. And anyone who has played it even in a cursory fashion understands that the big prize comes if you get Boardwalk and Park Place. And you can get Park Place, but you just can’t get Boardwalk, right?

So there are just a few pieces that we understand are being printed that would give you the million dollar prize. That’s the big one. So the question is where is that one piece going to turn up? And what this story basically is about is a guy who was working at this tiny little company that was in charge of security for these pieces who was making I think $75,000 a year who just started pocketing them and then handing them out and then selling them and this turned into this massive conspiracy where literally for years no one could win unless this guy gave them the piece, one way or the other. The mob became involved at some point. And the FBI finally got wise and brought the whole thing down.

And the best part, I think, is that the day the trial began was 9/10/2001. So, the very next day that thing was completely wiped off the front page and no one really spoke about it until this incredible article came out, written by Jeff Maysh, who deserves all the money that has just been shoved in his pocket. Full disclosure. I made a bid for this myself–

**John:** Nice!

**Craig:** When this was – so I read this thing the day it came out and then I called up HBO and said, “OK, we’ve been looking for another thing, why don’t we do this? Why don’t we do a five-part on this sucker?” Because to me this thing was – what this is about is America. This is the most American story I can think of. It’s got McDonald’s. This company that sells you crap and you buy the crap, but there’s this little chance, the little piece of the American dream that as you go through your crap you have a little bit of a hope that you could become one of the rich people. Except you can’t. You can’t. The entire thing is rigged. You can never win. And yet you still try, and try, and try, and try, and try.

And I just loved how pathetic it all was. And how the people who won were so greedy and stupid. It’s the most wonderfully American story.

So, I called up CAA and I was like, “Hey, I don’t know what’s going on with this, but you know, HBO.” And they’re like, “Well, we should tell you Robert Downey, Jr. is trying to get it. And there’s 100 people that are trying to get it.” And I was like, “Oh, OK.” So, in my mind I went, nope, not going to get that. And then the next day it turned out that it went to the Good Will Hunting boys, to Affleck and Damon. And wonderful writers, Paul Wernick, and Rhett Reese doing the script. I love those guys.

**John:** This is I think the third project that some combination of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon has bought of our How Would This Be a Movie. So I know they bought the FIFA scandal, but I think there was one other one that they bought.

So, let’s talk a little bit. The article is great. And it’s certainly worth going through. And I think one of the things I responded to, which I’m sure would have been part of your pitch, is that it’s also just great that it was based around Monopoly because Monopoly is this game of rags to riches.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** This could be your chance for fortune. Of course, the history of Monopoly is exactly the opposite of that. It’s meant to be an anti-capitalism game. So, it’s crazy how it all fits together.

But, really want we want to talk about right now is the backstory on how the story got to be written. So Jeff Maysh is the guy who wrote the piece for the Daily Beast. But he had actually been contracted – the story had been brought to him by a person specifically looking for him to write the story that could be sold for a movie, which was a new thing to me. We’re used to these articles selling and they sell for up to $100,000 and someone goes off and tries to make a movie out of this. This was specifically written for the movie and it was brought to him by a producer whose job is taken upon himself to find these interesting things, hire writers to sort of go off, research them, and set them up in major publications. And that’s what he did. And that’s the reason why this really old story surfaced and sold.

So, so often on the podcast we talk about do you need to buy the article, do you need the life rights to these folks, what do you actually need? In this case I think what’s valuable about – and what’s maybe worth the $1 million is that Maysh did months and months of research to put all this stuff together. He not only broke the story in terms of the kind of three-act structure of it, but gave all the details that a person – you or I just going out to work on this as screenwriters would have had a hard time finding.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a brilliant idea. This speaks to one of the great benefits we all have now, and I’m now speaking to everybody that wants to be a professional screenwriter. You have the Internet. And I think so often people are terrified to put their work on the Internet because they think it’s going to be stolen. Put it on and stick your name on it. And there’s a billion places to publish these things. And you get attention and you get noticed. And nobody just rolls over you. They come to you. They want the article. It’s very common.

I personally don’t want it. And the truth is I don’t need it. In other words, if I wanted to race Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, I could. I don’t need Jeff Maysh’s article. I can do my own research. This is a matter of public record. And I could do my own McDonald’s story.

The problem is I just don’t want to race those guys. I don’t want to be in that situation. And I think frankly a lot of other places will say we don’t want to be in that situation either unless you have some way of really going fast and getting out there.

Also, I wouldn’t want to do that to Paul and Rhett because those guys are awesome dudes.

Now, it’s also fascinating to see what they come up with because just the fact that they want to do a movie whereas I was thinking about a series, because I was just thinking about more of a slow burn. You know, over the course of a few episodes kind of thing. It’ll be fascinating to see. But, yeah, put your stuff out there and you’d be amazed.

**John:** Yeah. So this was written as a long feature for the Daily Beast. You could also envision a version of this which was a podcast where he went off and interviewed all those folks and those things are now selling for good money, too, and those become the IP that becomes bigger properties down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When this gets made – I think there’s a good chance it’ll get made. We’ll have Rhett and Paul on to talk about the process and sort of what they found. I think there’s still going to be some significant obstacles ahead. So, the McDonald’s of it all is complicated. McDonald’s, if you’re portraying it on screen you can. It’s totally fair, just like you can make the Facebook movie, just like our friend John Lee Hancock made the story about early McDonald’s. But it’s complicated. And they are a giant corporation and there’s going to be some giant corporation concerns about how they’re portrayed in this whole situation.

There are other real people in there and some of those people if you’re just reporting on stuff that happened that is public record that’s great, but there’s going to be some people in there who are not going to be considered public figures and you’re going to have long conversations with legal teams about how much you can put them in there, how much they need to be fictionalized.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** What the boundaries are of what you can say about them.

**Craig:** Yep. There will be long conversations in that regard. But, on the other side of the balance sheet, Fox, and thereby extension Disney is backing Affleck and Damon and Wernick and Reese and they, too, are an incredibly large corporation with a lot of resources. So I think that they will have probably quite a bit of latitude, more than you would think.

Mostly because facts are facts. It’s a really hard thing for McDonald’s to sue over certain things when they’re facts. If they decide they want to create a potential storyline where somebody working for McDonald’s creates some sort of relationship with the Uncle Jerry, the guy that was handling these tickets, then yeah, that’s actionable. But I don’t think they would want to do that. I think they’re going to want to stick to the story as it is, because it’s good.

**John:** Yep. I agree. The story is good.

All right, so wrapping this segment up, please keep sending us the stories that you find in the news that you think might be a movie and we’ll talk about them on the air sometimes. Three of the ones we didn’t get to today but I thought were worth reading through. A New York Times story by Jacqueline Williams talks about a town of 11 where a mysterious disappearance turned neighbor against neighbor. Definitely worth reading.

This story, which was just heartbreaking and maddening. This is the story of a terrific clarinetist who turned down this great offer to study with this other clarinet master. It turned out his girlfriend had actually turned it down and had sort of basically broken into his email and done it. It will send Craig to 30 on the umbrage scale.

**Craig:** I’ve seen it. It’s so heartbreaking. Heartbreaking.

**John:** And lastly we’ll point you to a story about a US judge orders 30-year-old man to move out of his parents’ house. I don’t know that there’s actually a great story there, but as a premise I think is actually kind of fascinating in the sense of the kid who just won’t leave home so you end up having to sue him to get him to leave.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m already preparing those papers. My kids are teenagers, but I just want to be prepared.

**John:** Absolutely. You know, got to have them in there so you can deliver them. Is it like subpoenas or something where you have to have a person deliver it to them in person?

**Craig:** Oh, I’ll deliver it to them. That’s easy enough. Goes right under the door. Yep. There you go.

**John:** Our show ran long, so let’s try to do two questions so we get a little bit answered here.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** First question comes from Adam. He says, “Throughout the life of the podcast, most recently in Episode 363, Craig has joked about how he will never become a member of the Academy. Every time he does—“

**Craig:** Not a joke. That’s real.

**John:** “I wonder how does one become a member of the Academy? Are there certain criteria? Do you have to be nominated by a member or chosen by a panel?”

I can answer this question. The answer is both. And so you are nominated by members of that branch. So Craig will be nominated by members of the writers’ branch.

**Craig:** No I won’t.

**John:** And then a big committee comes together and looks through all those nominations. In some cases there’s cards that get filled out and recommendations. Other cases it’s just like a name on the list. That is a terrifically accomplished writer. It is crazy that that person is not a member of the Academy so we will invite them in.

I will predict on this podcast that within the next ten years Craig will be invited. Whether he’ll actually accept the invitation to the Academy. I predict he will [crosstalk].

**Craig:** I will accept the invitation. But I say that with full understanding that it’s never going to happen.

**John:** So this is the trajectory that I think is going to happen. I think Chernobyl is going to be fantastic.

**Craig:** I hope so.

**John:** And that will give you some credibility. Now, that’s not Academy stuff, that’s Emmy stuff. And so I don’t want to jinx it, but if Emmys love it that is great.

Off of that, one or two more things happen that are in feature land and that’s it. Because you have a tremendous number of credits and they are movies of – they are–

**Craig:** Oh, this is fun to listen to.

**John:** They are movies of professional merit. But they are not necessarily–

**Craig:** Academy movies. They’re not Academy movies.

**John:** They’re not Academy movies.

**Craig:** No, no they’re not. Well, you know my opinion. Only comedies should win Academy Awards. I still stand by this. Only comedies.

**John:** But when you have a movie that is critically acclaimed and does great they can say like, “Look at this great movie he wrote and all these other movies he wrote that show that he is an accomplished professional writer.” I think that will be the year that you get invited to the Academy.

**Craig:** Then finally I’ll feel whole as a human.

**John:** Absolutely. There’s really no validation unless there’s a committee and a procedure to validate you.

**Craig:** Exactly. Oh, now I feel good about myself. Well, we’ll see. We’ll see about that. I still maintain, Adam, it’s never going to happen.

We have a question from Victor from Maryland. He writes, “I’m an aspiring screenwriter and I was planning on getting my MFA as soon as I’m financially stable enough to avoid as many student loans as I can. I want to focus on screenwriting in my eventual career, but I wanted to get my MFA in Film rather than screenwriting because I would like some experience in every aspect of Filmmaking. I was wondering what you guys feel the value is of this course of action. What things of any could I learn from other aspects of filmmaking that could help me be a more successful screenwriter?”

John?

**John:** I can answer this. So I did not get my masters in screenwriting. I got it in producing at the Peter Stark Program which is sort of a broad MBA program in film. Victor, I think you’re making a good choice overall. If you’re going to get an MFA, I think it should be broader than just screenwriting. And so while I know folks who teach at MFA screenwriting programs, the folks I’ve talked to who’ve graduated from them over the last ten years, many of them have told me they don’t feel like it was the best use of their time and their money. Because, yeah, they got some scripts written but they didn’t learn a lot about the rest of the industry. They didn’t learn a lot about shooting stuff. They didn’t make contacts with other folks who are making movies. And I think that is going to be crucial for you if you’re going to be spending the tens of thousands of dollars it’s going to take to get an MFA.

So, if you’re going to go to graduate school for it, I would think beyond just screenwriting and think about sort of the nature of the business so that you get to know not just other screenwriters but directors and editors and really get a whole view of how movies and TV are made.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you could also just not do it, right? You’re not in a position financially to do it right now, as you say. You want to avoid student loans. I completely concur. You should avoid those strenuously. You should assiduously avoid those.

I don’t know if you need to do this. I think that there are all sorts of ways to get the experience that you’re looking for. There are individual classes that you can pick up that are much more cost-effective than entire graduate programs. I don’t know what’s going on, for instance, if you live near Baltimore, but I would imagine there’s probably some decent technical schools that teach simple things like editing, which is an incredibly important skill to have–

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** If you want to be anything. Understanding editing helps you write, helps you direct, helps you act.

Taking an acting class is a brilliant idea, because then you understand how the text actually converts into action and speech. And then reading. Just reading scripts that you like. Watching movies you like. Thinking about them. Listening to our podcast is certainly helpful.

I’m not sure you need the MFA. I got to say, if you are hell bent on it, don’t get it in Maryland. See if you can go to NYU or to USC or UCLA where you might get what I think is probably the lion share of the value of these programs which is connections to other people who are your cohort entering the business, or people that already work in the business. I just don’t know if you’re going to get any value beyond just, I don’t know, feeling like you’re purchasing certainty if you’re taking these classes in Baltimore.

**John:** Yep. I agree with you wholeheartedly.

All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is something I did for the first time about two weeks ago. I went to my first flat track roller derby meet/match/game/competition. It was great. And so I went in knowing very little about roller derby other than having seen the movie Whip It.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And this was like Whip It, but this is flat track so it’s not the bank tracks. You really can just see everything that’s happening. I loved it. I went with my daughter who is 13 and a friend, friend Nima who programs for us, and it was just great. And I just encourage people to go see it because it’s a very cool sport. You pick it up very quickly. Sort of like what the rules are. Everyone who is doing it, like it’s not a big cash money thing. So everyone who is doing that is doing it because they love it. It’s mostly a volunteer organization.

It’s really kid-friendly. So I just really loved it. I also loved that it was all kind of run by women. It was just a very great vibe. So October is the next one here in LA for Angel City Derby. But I just really dug it. So, check it out if it’s happening anywhere near you.

**Craig:** I think that my daughter would love that.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** She likes a good bruising, you know. I think she would dig it. I think she would dig it. I’m going to take her.

**John:** And what was great about it is the women who are doing it are so aggressive doing the thing and yet they’re so cooperative in all of the moments where they’re not slamming into each other. And so the sportswomanship you see there, you just don’t see in other sports. And it was great.

Because the team that I was seeing them compete against traveled from Denver. And like there’s no money to travel from Denver. They’re probably staying on other people’s couches. And they’re doing it because they love it and so it’s just a cool sport and a cool thing to witness. It made me feel better about America.

**Craig:** Anything that makes you feel better about America right now grab onto. Grab ahold of. Because, boy.

**John:** Boy.

**Craig:** Oof. Not pleasing these days. My One Cool Thing is a follow up game to a game that you originally had as your One Cool Thing, and then I had as my One Cool Thing, because I don’t listen to your One Cool Things as you know. Human Resource Machine. Remember that game?

**John:** It was fantastic. And so I’m going to click through this. I didn’t know there was a sequel. I’m so excited.

**Craig:** Sequel. It’s called 7 Billion Humans. So it just became available for release on Steam. OK, so there’s the angry part. Steam, what the–? Oh god, I hate Steam. Just let me download the freaking game onto my computer. Why do I have to? Anyway. Anyway, putting that aside, it appears to be essentially a proper sequel to Human Resource Machine, except instead of dealing with one little man that you’re moving around with things you have lots of little people that you’re doing lots of little things with, so they’re sort of stepping up the programming aspect of it.

But they make sure to tell you we’ll teach you everything and they will. So if you dig programming or you want to learn coding, simple coding, starting from scratch like how to just add two numbers together all the way up to figuring out, I don’t know, what the prime factors of any number is, this is a cool game. Well, the first one was cool. I presume this one will be cool. So, 7 Billion Humans.

**John:** 7 Billion Humans. All right, that’s our show for the week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. Edited by Matthew Chilelli, who is back from Japan. So, Matthew welcome back from Japan.

**Craig:** Oh great. Welcome back.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Timothy Vajda. 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 and follow up like what we did today.

For short questions though I’m on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Also now on Spotify. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. So if you want to read any of the articles we talked about that’s where you’ll find them.

You can find the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. We also sell seasons of 50 episodes at store.johnaugust.com.

Transcripts for this episode and all episodes go up about four days after the episode drops, so that’s basically the only way I can sort of Google to find things we talked about. So, transcripts are really helpful for our listeners and our readers. But mostly they’re there so I can Google and see what I said five years ago.

**Craig:** Ah, OK. Fair enough.

**John:** Very nice. Craig, thank you so much. It’s so good to have you back in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Good to be back, John. I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Thanks.

Links:

* [Studios Back In Antitrust Spotlight As AMC Chain Loses Key Court Ruling](https://deadline.com/2018/08/amc-entertainment-antitrust-lawsuit-disney-paramount-sony-universal-warner-bros-spanish-language-theater-1202449780/) by Dominic Patten for Deadline
* [Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists](https://www.amazon.com/Class-Struggle-Hollywood-1930-1950-Unionists/dp/0292731388) by Gerald Horne
* [@bvdhai’s Twitter thread about the mass Tinder date](https://mobile.twitter.com/bvdhai/status/1031327009564225536)
* [Woman dupes dozens of dudes into weirdest Tinder date ever](https://nypost.com/2018/08/20/woman-dupes-dozens-of-dudes-into-weirdest-tinder-date-ever/) and [Tinder hottie dupes dozens of dopes, but it’s all a marketing stunt](https://nypost.com/2018/08/20/mass-tinder-date-was-actually-a-marketing-stunt/) by Ruth Brown for the NY Post
* [‘Tinder Trap’ model claims she’s the victim after duping guys](https://nypost.com/2018/08/23/tinder-trap-model-claims-shes-the-victim-after-duping-guys/) by Tamar Lapin and Ruth Brown
* [Monterey Jack’s Twitter thread about Vent Haven](https://mobile.twitter.com/Chan315/status/1030007153451511812)
* Vent Haven’s [official website](https://www.venthaven.org/history)
* [How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions](https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-an-ex-cop-rigged-mcdonalds-monopoly-game-and-stole-millions) Jeff Maysh for the Daily Beast
* [Behind Hollywood’s A-List Bidding War for a McDonald’s Monopoly Article](http://www.vulture.com/2018/08/behind-hollywoods-mcdonalds-monopoly-article-bidding-war.html) by Chris Lee for Vulture
* [In a Town of 11 People, Mysterious Disappearance Turns Neighbor Against Neighbor](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/world/australia/larrimah-mystery.html) by Jacqueline Williams for the New York Times
* [McGill music student awarded $350,000 after girlfriend stalls career](https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/mcgill-music-student-awarded-350000-after-girlfriend-stalls-career) by René Bruemmer for the Montreal Gazette
* [US judge orders 30-year-old man to move out of his parents’ house](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-23/judge-orders-30-year-old-man-to-move-out-of-his-parents27-house/9790312)
* Flat track roller derby, like [Angel City Derby](http://angelcityderby.com)
* [7 Billion Humans](https://tomorrowcorporation.com/7billionhumans)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Timothy Vajda ([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_365.mp3).