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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: All right. Okay. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 671 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it’s one of our favorite regular segments, How would this be a movie? Where we take a look at stories in the news and find their adaptable angles. We also have follow-up on AI, listener questions on partner credits, and in our bonus segment for premium members, let’s discuss Home Automation, Craig.

Craig: Oh.

John: Over this past year, we’ve added a few things to our house, and you just moved into a new house. I’m curious what your take is on home automation and what you’re doing and what you’re thinking about doing.

Craig: This is going to be very educational for me. I already can tell. I’m going to learn a lot, and this probably will end up costing me a bit of money.

John: Yes. A little bit.

Craig: What are you going to do?

John: First, I have a small rant.

Craig: Ooh.

John: Ooh. Craig is excited I have a rant.

Craig: Rubbing my hands together.

John: All right. This is a thing that happened twice. Because it happened twice, I know it’s actually a real thing. It’s not just like one person being weird.

Craig: Okay.

John: Okay. So I’m at the dentist, and I have a hygienist who’s really good. She’s a fast scraper. It’s not painful. Great. She chats a ton, but whatever. She’s not expecting me to answer back. It’s just a monologue-

Craig: You can’t.

John: -on her side. Good. Great. She says, “Your wife must be so proud of how good you are at cleaning your teeth.” It’s like–

Craig: It’s like [mumbles]

John: [mumbles] I’m like, okay, well, sometimes people don’t read me as gay, which is fine. I would otherwise correct her. Then I realized like, no, she also cleans Mike’s teeth, so she knows that he’s a man. Following this through, her belief is that the partner of a man is a wife, that you call that person a wife.

Craig: Oh, no.

John: Oh, no.

Craig: No.

John: It’s happened to other places too. It happened with other medical professionals.

Craig: Really?

John: It’s so strange. Here, I just want to state clearly so that everyone knows this, a male spouse is a husband.

Craig: Yeah. Is this one of these cases where someone feels so comfortable with the gay community that they’re like, “I’m going to use your words?”

John: No, no. No, no, no. It’s actually just a genuine, had never occurred to them before. It’s just like a misunderstanding of how English works.

Craig: In Los Angeles?

John: Yes. Isn’t that wild?

Craig: That is wild. Yes. Don’t do that.

John: There was no malice intended. It’s just strange though, right?

Craig: Wait. You said, by the by, spit, rinse. “Actually, I have a husband.”

John: Yes.

Craig: She said, “Oh, I know.”

John: No. She’s like, “Wait, you call him a husband?” I was like, “Well, yes.”

Craig: What did she think– You’re both wives in her mind?

John: I have no idea. I couldn’t get that far deep into her thought process, but essentially any person married to a man would be a wife.

Craig: Oh, honey. [laughs] That’s just wrong.

John: It’s wrong.

Craig: No, it’s just wrong. Wait, you said it’s happened twice.

John: It’s happened twice. It’s happened once and then it was another, this is a few years back, a different medical person.

Craig: Wait, so it’s only the medical people that are doing this.

John: I’m noticing among the medical staff.

Craig: All right. Let’s talk to our health professionals out there. What are you doing? Cut that out. That’s ridiculous.

John: I can understand people who are nervous about understanding pronouns or they’s, them’s. We’re in a place where it’s complicated. You can’t always be sure how a person wants to be addressed by themselves. But I think this is just a subtle matter of how English works is that a guy who’s married to a guy has a husband.

Craig: Yes. A married man is a husband.

John: Yes. Now you could say partner, spouse, other things like that.

Craig: Sure. I think I’ve done a little rant– Have I done a rant about partner?

John: Sure. Go for it.

Craig: I’ll do a little rant about partner. Very common in Europe. I’ve noticed in the UK, everybody refers to their spouse as partner and I’ve also been seeing it more common here and I think in part it’s because people are trying to be really inclusive and remove gendered partnering language. The problem is, partner-

John: Business partners.

Craig: -means two different things.

John: Writing partners.

Craig: When I meet somebody and they’re like, “Yes, I’ve been working on this show and I actually, I showed the script to my partner who was really thrilled,” and I’m like, ”Aah, is that–“

John: Part of the reason why we get to partner is also because it’s the unmarried person you live with who we, for all functional, is your spouse for everything else but law.

Craig: That’s the other thing.

John: I get that. Yet it’s a frustrating situation. It’s ambiguous in ways that it’s not useful.

Craig: It’s ambiguous in ways that are, that is not useful. I’m all for coming up with language that makes people comfortable.

John: Totally.

Craig: I think that’s great. I can see why there’s a need for a term that is different than husband or wife or spouse that covers somebody you’re not technically married to. Although my feeling is if you’re objected to technical marriage, go ahead and claim just virtual marriage and call them your spouse. That’s a perfectly great word.

John: Yes. Oy.

Craig: Oy.

John: Not solvable, but just, I wanted to put this out in the world for like the husband situation, the husband-wife situation, I think is at least standardized enough in American English. You shouldn’t need to worry about this.

Craig: That one, that lady invented a new problem. Now we’re about to get a bunch of emails about partner. I’ll take it. I’ll take it on the chin.

John: All right. Some more follow-up. Drew, start us off.

Drew Marquardt: Yes. We had been talking about Flightplan and how it came from The Lady Vanishes, which is a Hitchcock movie. Andrea Bartz wrote in and said, “As a thriller novelist in the throes of adapting my own novel, I had to point out that Hitchcock’s masterful The Lady Vanishes was an adaptation of Ethel Lina White’s criminally underrated 1936 novel, The Wheel Spins. Levels of genius all the way down.”

Craig: Ooh. I love that. Yes. Isn’t that interesting? Someone writes a book in 1936, you said. Then whoosh, you go 75 years into the future and there’s a movie about people on a plane. They had planes in 1936. I’m stretching a little bit. That speaks more to the immortality that you can achieve through art than just about anything I can think of. That’s really cool. Because someone’s going to take Flightplan 15 years from now and do it again. It’s never going to end.

John: The central sort of gaslighting, no, no, it never actually– that person was never there. You’re imagining this whole thing.

Craig: That’s good. It’s just good.

John: It’s good stuff. What is also apparently good was your Belfast accent, Dave in Belfast wrote in. Let’s listen to what he said.

Dave Marks: Hey John and Craig. Long time podcast listener and big fan. My name is Dave Marks or Dave Marks, as anyone outside of Belfast would pronounce it. Speaking to Craig’s Belfast impression from Say Nothing or say no’hin’ as we’d say with no T in it.

Do it nye, do was a bit more ooh and a bit less ooh. With do we just say do, not do. Little bit Americanised. The nye however was bang on point and that’s the bit most people get wrong. You just need to work on the old. How now brown cow becomes hye nye brown cow and that gets you all the way to Belfast.

Craig: Hye nye brown cow.

John: Great. A thumbs up from Dave in Belfast.

Craig: I am elated. Elated. It really is a fascinating accent. There are so many things that are so specific to the Northern Irish accent. Somebody, I’m sure, has a linguistic term for how this functions where accents are created in part by a political boundary because it really is a political boundary accent. The Dublin accent feels like an entirely different English from the Northern Irish Belfast accent. There are so many wonderful, wonderful things in that accent that just, I don’t know, make my heart sing. I’m glad that I got one and a half words right. [laughs]

John: Excellent. All right. We have some more follow-up on AI. In episode 669, we’re talking about they ate our words.

Drew: Benjamin writes, “Craig says he didn’t know if people were freaking out about Google linking when Google first started. They absolutely were. In fact, there were lawsuits over scraping and linking. The compromise that was eventually reached was that linking to something is acceptable because you are pointing to the source. Quoting or showing content on another site, however, had to undergo fair use scrutiny the same as if you were quoting in a book or magazine article.”

Craig: Okay. First of all, always comforting to know that we’ve always been freaking out. That’s a good reminder that every time some new technology comes along, we do tend to get a bit reactionary. It didn’t occur to me that the real issue wasn’t so much the pointing to things, and I agree with that, pointing to something doesn’t feel like you’re stealing it.

But the little tiny bits of summary that go along with the link, that’s a republishing and that’s an interesting fair use case, which, obviously Google prevailed. I think that’s reasonable, actually. That does feel like what fair use is about, a little snippet that is, meant to lead you to the intellectual property as opposed to replace it.

John: I think it’s also important to remember that we talked about this under the legal framework. What is legal, what is not legal versus what is ethical and versus what is not ethical.

Craig: Oh, right. Two different things.

John: I think we’re always looking for what are the laws, but what are the moral rules behind what you should be doing or publishing or claiming as your own. I see this on Instagram a lot where people will republish someone else’s thing without giving them credit or they will give them credit. It’s like they’re doing it for their own clout versus actually creating an original thought. To what degree is that just spreading culture?

Craig: It does feel like sharing culture has led to a lack of interest in attribution, whereas in academia and journalism, attribution is still considered an extraordinarily important thing. The levels of fact-checking that The New Yorker did on a piece, an interview with me, I mean really, why? It was down to like, you said you were at a cafe with this person, and we had to call and check and make sure that you were. Then everything is attributable and notable and checkable. Then in sharing culture, nothing is. It’s not even a question of people going, “Oh, I’m going to put this out there and pretend it’s mine.” They don’t even think about it.

John: No.

Craig: No one seems to care. That’s horrible, actually.

John: Yes. That’s always been that way. It’s like, I think the fact that we are now looking at digital things where you can try to do the forensics and track them back. We’ve had sharing culture for jokes for forever. We’ve had sharing culture for story ideas have always propagated throughout. The fact that, all of Shakespeare’s plays are directly inspired by things that came from before them. That’s always been a part of–

Craig: Yes, inspiration for sure. Jokes are a really interesting case because they are designed to be shared without attribution. It would be an interesting project to figure out who was the first person to come up with this joke that we’ve all heard 400,000 times. On the internet where things begin with a clear attribution, that’s a time-stamped attribution. Then what happens is, of course, people complain and say, “You stole my thing.” Then that becomes a thing. Then people share that and da, da, da, da, da.

John: It’s worth acknowledging that joke theft is a real thing. Among comedians, that’s a huge issue. The issue comes up of to what degree have you made something your own or are you ripping off this type of joke versus the actual wording of a joke?

Craig: Joke stealing in comedy is a fascinating topic. There have been a few notable cases where accusations were made. I won’t go so far as to say that proof was given in some sort of legal way, but there was a huge brouhaha over Carlos Mencia. There have been similar arguments made about Amy Schumer. Then people will show side-by-sides and things. Sometimes you look at these and you’re like, “Well, I can see how two people might come up with the same joke here.” Sometimes you look at it and go, “Oh, no, that’s like kinda word for word there.”

The world of stand-up comedians and that culture, that whole joke theft thing is fascinating. It is a major concern for them. They will talk amongst themselves. Comedians know, for instance, “Hey, if you see so-and-so at the club and you’re going up there before them, after them, it doesn’t matter, if they’re there, don’t do new material. Don’t do new material because they’ll be doing it next week and they’re more famous than you.”

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s scary.

John: More AI feedback here from Anna.

Drew: We got a lot of great AI feedback, so this one comes from Anna.

Craig: Is the feedback from AI?

Drew: Oh my God. no, I don’t think this one is, but other ones, you never know.

Craig: You don’t think?

Drew: You don’t think. Anna writes, “I just found out that a series of novels I co-wrote with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were part of 38,000 or so fiction books.”

Craig: Hold on.

John: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has written quite a few books.

Craig: Also this sounds like something AI would say.

[laughter]

Drew: True.

Craig: It really– “I’ve written 4,000 books with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.” That just feels like a learning language model. Just put some things together. Maybe it was like, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is tall and he got confused with height and amount of writing. Anyway, please–

Drew: It’s only a few novels out of 38,000, I guess.

Craig: Please, restart the question, but keep in mind my concern.

Drew: Just found out that a series of novels she co-wrote with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were part of 38,000 or so fiction books, both classic and contemporary, used to feed AI. “Apart from feeling thoroughly ripped off, I’m also bewildered. Our novels are historical fiction. They have fictional as well as historical characters. Queen Victoria comes to mind. There are half a dozen minor characters who do things they never did and say things they never said.

I do a gargantuan amount of research to portray an era, in this case, the 1870s accurately, but not to put too fine a point on it, I’m still making shit up. How would AI know this? In that great repository of info dumping, how will AI weed out the fake from the facts?”

Craig: It won’t.

John: It won’t. Anna, so I want to back up in here and say like, you’re feeling thoroughly ripped off and bewildered. Those are natural emotions. I totally get why you’re feeling that. Something that may be helpful for you to understand is that the LLMs, the models, they don’t care about the actual subject matter you’re giving them. What you’re giving them is a bunch of words in English that all fit together, that are complete whole thoughts.

They’re not looking for facts. They’re looking for long strings of words that all fit together and actually make sense together. That’s what your book provided. I don’t think you need to worry that some other piece of writing that’s generated by one of these things is going to involve these fake stuff that you made up in historical fiction. It’s unlikely to actually happen that way. Mostly what this is going to do is create a tool that is going to generate an email for somebody that’s a little bit better than it would have been otherwise.

Craig: Yes, that’s exactly right. I do think this is a common misconception that what AI is doing is taking chunks of stuff and regurgitating it as its own. If it were doing that, it wouldn’t be intelligent, artificially or otherwise. It’s just learning how our sentences are put together, how grammar functions and what words are related to other words and how closely.

So on the one hand, don’t worry that people will think that Queen Victoria, I don’t know, used an iPhone, whatever it was that happened in this book that was maybe anachronistic or just incorrect. Do worry that your work was sort of used for this.

This is where it gets interesting because AI isn’t taking intellectual property and using it as intellectual property. It’s almost like it’s taking a painting and just looking at how paintings are made. What do you do with that?

It feels to me like copyright law needs to be amended. Just side note here, because if we try and apply existing copyright law to this, I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere. It feels like copyright law needs to be amended to say that one of the rights that is inferred by copyright is the right for the material to be used as the basis for learning. That’s tricky because–

John: Human learning versus training on a model, it’s incredibly complicated.

Craig: It’s complicated.

John: Yes, there’s not a great easy way through this. Again, I understand what you’re feeling. Months ago, when we were looking at these examples of songs that were clearly, this is a Beach Boys song. Those examples were like, okay, well, you fed in all this stuff and it spit out something that looked exactly like the original. You can obviously tell what its references are. This is not going to happen based on your book being fed into this.

Craig: No. No, no.

Drew: More feedback here from Caleb. Caleb writes, “We’re at a new birth of artificial intelligence. It makes pretty things, but is it art? Why not?” He shares from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The Conundrum of the Workshops. “When the flush of a newborn son fell first on Eden’s green and gold, our father Adam sat under the tree and scratched with a stick in the mold. The first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart till the devil whispered behind the leaves, “it’s pretty, but is it art?”

John: I read that whole poem. Put a link to it and we’ll put a link in the show notes to it. It’s a really great Kipling poem. It’s so clever to bring in as like, at every point in the artistic process, I’m going to question whether it’s actually artistically worthy. The poem goes on to sort of great things are made, the towers of Babel is created and the devil is always whispering, “But is it really art?”

Craig: Yes, and I don’t know. The word art is a trap. I hear it all the time. I sometimes use it to describe what you and I do. Rarely, because it feels a bit goofy to me. I think the is it art, what is implied in the question is it art is is it valid?

Validity is seemingly something conferred upon art by not artists, by critics. I don’t care. I don’t care. That’s all they do all day. The devil is a critic. [laughs] The critic is whispering in the creator’s ear. Is it good? Is it art? Is it worthy? Is it valid? Basically, not today, satan.

One of the things that does give me pause to describe what I do as art is it sometimes feels almost that the lady is protesting a bit much. “My art, you assholes, who say it’s not art.” I would rather just call it a TV show or a movie and let it be what it is. If it were a painting, I’d call it a painting. If it were a statue, I’d call it a statue.

The fine arts, let’s say, for instance, painting, everybody agrees, “Oh, that’s art,” and we call it art. Just as how people seem to all agree that the best picture is a drama because that’s what’s best. It’s not, and other things are art. The word is loaded. Is what AI does art? The critics can all, “Let the devils discuss amongst themselves,” they say.

John: Meanwhile, just keep making things.

Craig: Meanwhile, just keep– thank you. Just make stuff. The word stuff, by the way, perfectly good.

John: Absolutely. Some of the stuff that’s being made increasingly are videos, and so months ago, we talked about Sora, which has now been released, so people can play around and make clips off of Sora. Google released this new product called VO2, which also looks really good. It can generate video clips that have– the physics in them looks much better. If you have a dog running down a beach, the VO1 looks really impressive. You realize that, you believe that dog is running down the beach.

People wrote in and said like, “Oh, what does this mean for us and for filmmaking?” At this point, not a lot. I think stitching these things together to create bigger projects hasn’t worked out so well. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this film festival that was debuting a bunch of short films made by filmmakers using these tools, and they’re terrible. They’re atrocious.

Craig: Much like most short film festivals. Everything in them was atrocious.

John: It was. But you can see the edges. You can see how hard they were trying to make some of this stuff work, trying to get people’s faces to look consistent, trying to get dialogue to sync and match. These are all tough things. It does a really good job at like, here’s three seconds of a person moving quietly through a space. Much harder for it to do real things.

Yet, I want us to always remember, this is the worst it’ll ever be. These tools will get better, year after year after year. Things will improve along the way, but just we all recognize there’s a big gap between where we are and where this becomes a profound danger.

I think my bigger concern is that well before these things are able to make an hour of television or a two-hour movie, they can create something that is interesting and compelling and different enough that it takes the attention of people who would otherwise see movies and television. If that were to happen at a big enough scale, that could have huge impacts on our industry. Basically a new form of entertainment comes out of this generation that just obviates the need for what we’re doing.

Craig: It doesn’t have to be better than us. It just has to be as good. If it is as good, we lose instantly because of volume. Because they can just create things at speed and volume and we can’t. Even if it’s almost as good, we lose. There is an article I will cite as my one cool thing that provides a glimmer of potential hope. It is a little bit of a pipe dream theory, but it is promising for those of us who are just hoping that AI can only go so far and that the singularity is perhaps unreachable.

Drew: Let’s wrap up here, I’ve got a question here from Michael. Michael writes, “You discussed what it means for AI to use our work, but not what it means for us to use AI. I wondered if you could share how you’re feeling about using it in your own work.”

John: Yes, so this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about for the last couple of weeks. We’re trying to draft up sort of like an official policy company-wide, but also thinking about sort of what I feel like personally. There’s a couple of different areas I sort of want to focus on. First off, would the use of AI be in some sort of public-facing role? Is this something that the world outside is going to see material that’s being generated by AI? Would it be text? Would it be images? That’s a no for me. Anything that’s representing our work or my work should not be generated by AI.

I ask, is this work that would normally be paid work, that we would pay somebody to do? That’s a huge red flag for me. Is this technology being used by the person whose job it is to make the thing? If it’s a coder doing coding, that feels different than having Drew be doing coding using one of these tools.

That’s what I’m thinking about company-wide, but then I think you have individual choices that might be different. As a writer, for me, I’m asking, am I using this the same way I would use Google? If I’m asking ChatGPT a question that I would normally ask Google for a question, that doesn’t feel that different to me. I don’t actually have big concerns with that.

An example I’ve cited is, I’m working on this graphic novel, and one of the characters in it is a philosopher. I was wondering, okay, well, what would this classical philosopher think about the situation they’re in, which they’re all hungry? It’s like, what do classical philosophers say about hunger? Not the state of famine, but the experience of being hungry.

That’s a really difficult thing to Google or to search for, but it’s actually like a really good question to ask a ChatGPT, because they can spit out answers that like, “Based on these things, this is what Socrates said about this, this is what Plato said about this,” and that was useful for me. I don’t feel bad about that, because it’s doing a thing that would be almost impossible for me to do otherwise.

Similarly, I’m reading Seneca’s tragedies, and I had ChatGPT open, I was just asking questions about like, “Wait, who is this character? What is this based on?” That was incredibly helpful. I don’t feel bad about using those ways. What I do feel bad about is any situation where the stuff that I’m doing, even internally, has an aspect of these tools being used. I think we talked about on the show is pitch decks. If there’s an image I need for a pitch deck, is it fair to generate that through one of these models versus pulling it out of some other movie still frame?

Craig: All of those objections, concerns, and allowances feel very on point to me. I don’t use ChatGPT at all. I don’t use AI at all. However, I don’t use it as I guess I would say, overtly. My suspicion is that a lot of the things I do, the underpinnings are already using AI. There’s that invisible AI I’m not aware of. The one area that I do think it’s interesting, and I would feel okay with is in temp work, not temp work like working as an assistant somewhere for a week. I mean to say in production, doing things that are placeholders until you can do the right thing. That’s interesting.

For instance, when we’re editing, I’m constantly throwing in little lines that I know I’m going to have the actors come and do later down the line with ADR. I’ll say, “Okay, I want this line where let’s say, Isabela Merced off camera says, “Wait, where are you going?” It’ll either be, if it’s a guy, any guy, it’s my voice. If it’s any woman, it’s usually our editor, Emily’s voice. But what ends up happening is you send this cut into the network and you know that they’re going to hear your voice 12 different times in 12 different places. Emily is not Isabela Merced and all of the women shouldn’t sound like Emily. Things like, okay, make this sound more like Isabella Merced for the purposes of this, knowing that then I’m going to have her come in and do this properly.

Just like have Emily do it and then just make the vocal quality sound a little bit more like somebody. I could see something like that being incredibly useful as long as, like you said, it never takes the place of the actual performer doing it. It’s just a placeholder to help you feel out if you’re doing it right.

In that regard, it’s not anything that I think is taking anyone’s job or taking away money. There are things that we do in post-production that I think probably are already using AI. Obviously, I don’t know what’s going on in some of the VFX places where they’re doing rotoscoping. My guess is AI is involved. Okay, someone is in front of a green screen, their hair is blowing around. Each one of those hairs has to be rotoscoped, against the background or comped somehow. I don’t know how they do it.

My guess is they’re using tools that are powered by AI and will be doing so more and more. I know that there are things like beauty fixes, so very common to– if there are some blemishes or things, back in the day, there used to be quite expensive retouching of things, because if an actor just has a honking pimple one day, it’s going to sort of grind your movie to a halt, especially since we don’t shoot things– So like oh, in the beginning of the movie, they had this huge pimple, then it went away, and then a year later-

John: It comes back.

Craig: -the pimple’s back in the same spot. AI can do those things very simply now. I think the people that are using these tools are using that. I, myself, I don’t use it to compose any writing. I recognize, however, that I’m close to 54 years old. I don’t think my experience and the way I conduct my career is probably going to be particularly relevant to somebody who’s 25 right now. I think they’re like, “That’s nice, grandpa. Here’s how we do it. Here’s how the kids do it.”

I don’t want to come off as a Luddite, I don’t want to come off as somebody who’s scolding. I guess all I can say is, it’s certainly not necessary to do good work. I can say that. Yes, ethically, I think we do have a responsibility to try and look out for each other as human beings and not replace each other as quickly as we can.

John: Yes, so examples of the visual effects you’re talking about or the beauty correction stuff, you’re describing the person whose job it is to do that thing, using these technologies as one of the tools in their toolkit to do that thing. That feels like much more defensible. It actually tracks with the recent negotiations and the recent IATSE deal is like, if those technologies are going to be used, they have to be used by the person who’s supposed to be doing them, which makes sense. You’re not trying to replace a person with those things.

Becomes a trickier line, though. I was thinking back at your example of like, okay, well, using AI to create a sound of life for placeholder lines in a movie. In the first Charlie’s Angels, there was a time where we didn’t have John Forsythe to do Charlie’s voice. We had a different actor who was doing that. We kept hiring him and bringing him in to record all these temp lines because he really did sound a lot like John Forsythe.

Ultimately, John Forsythe came in and did it. Realistically, now we could just do a digital John Forsythe for his voice for those placeholders. That’s one actor whose job, we wouldn’t have hired during that time in the meantime. Even though you’re just trying to do a placeholder, sometimes there is the economic cost to somebody.

Craig: Yes, one would hope that SAG continues to refine that language because I think they are probably in the front ranks of soldiers that are going to be fired at by this technology. That’s the scariest. I think writers and directors will be behind them still in danger, but the actors will go first. I think they know that. I think they’re terrified. I think reasonably so. I would be.

John: All right. Let’s get to our main topic, which is how would this be a movie? From the moment this first story started, it’s like, oh, this is going to be a discussion on this podcast.

Craig: How won’t this be a movie?

John: Because we know that our listeners sometimes tune into these episodes 5 years, 10 years after the fact, I need to actually explain this story which is happening so presently that everyone’s like, how can you need to describe this? On December 4th, 2024, Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare is shot on the sidewalk outside of a New York City hotel by a masked assailant. The attacker flees and a manhunt begins.

Now the initial speculation was that it was some sort of professional attack by a hitman, which turns out there are no such things as hitmen. Details emerged quickly that the attacker was staying at a hostel in New York City and that bullets found on the scene had the words deny, defend, and depose written upon them. Several photographs of the suspect show his time in New York City leading up to the shooting, including one of which one of these photos in which his face is visible.

Then on December 9th of this year, Luigi Mangione is arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Craig: Hold on. Say that sentence again because I think future people need to hear it carefully.

John: On December 9th, Luigi Mangione is arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Craig: Luigi Mangione is arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. That sounds like a ChatGPT sentence.

John: It does. It does. The whole thing has a sort of made-up fictional quality, which I think is what’s so compelling about it.

Craig: Yes. Yes.

John: A customer noticed him and believed he looked like the man in the photographs. As we record this, Mangione has pled not guilty to state and federal charges. This is the world of a movie about this event. You can come at it from any angle, but I think what’s so notable out of this to me is like from the start, from the moment you first heard about this, oh, whoever did this perceives themselves as being the central character in a movie story. It was one of those rare situations where it’s like, oh, we’re not forcing a narrative on this. This person is actually perceives themselves as having a role in a narrative.

Craig: Yes. Luigi Mangione is a evidently very smart young man from a privileged background who, as far as I gathered, has experienced both physical issues because he had back surgeries that didn’t seem to work very well and he was in pain, but also clearly was experiencing a mental health episode because he just dropped off the grid, disappeared, stopped talking to friends, stopped talking to his family, moved away to Australia, I think, for a while. Didn’t really tell anybody. And then started writing manifestos. Never a good sign. Essays are nice. Manifesto is not so great.

John: Let me push back a little bit. Any blog post is a manifesto. If after the fact, it looks like it came from a certain person.

Craig: Yes, I suppose a manifesto is an essay followed by a shooting. For sure. It’s fair. Okay, the shooting part is definitely the issue. Luigi Mangione does something that is both on the one hand, the worst crime you can commit, which is cold-blooded murder. On the other hand, becomes a folk hero because everyone hates the American healthcare system and he shot and murdered the CEO of the largest American healthcare corporation and there was this sudden sense of we got one of the fat cats.

That’s this deep class anger and resentment that had been built up over a large amount of time, which is completely unfair, by the way, to this one man and his family-

John: We’re going to talk about that.

Craig: -Brian Thompson. This is where our brains are weak and we can’t help ourselves. The most important factor to creating this as a big story the way it is that Luigi Mangione is very handsome.

John: He is.

Craig: Therein is the goof of it all. If this guy were ugly, no one, and I mean no one, would be on his side. No one. This is pretty privilege at its highest. If he were ugly, people would have been like, “Okay, yes, he was this crazy ugly guy who shot somebody and you shouldn’t do that.” Look, yes, our young colleague is suspicious.

Drew: No, I am. I think the act itself, because before we knew who he was before we even had the face of him, I think there was quite a lot of support for the act, at least online.

John: Let me take both sides here. I think when the act happened, there was a mystery of who this person was, but also there was immediately a sense of like, we are not in any danger. The normal American person is not in any danger, which is such a unique situation because usually there’s a manhunt because that person is a danger to society. This guy wasn’t.

We wanted this guy off the street because he had done this thing in a very public, big way and the police were embarrassed. There were lots of other factors there, but we never saw him as being a danger. He was just this mysterious man, but the slow trickle out of like, okay, here we can see a little bit more of his face because the mask is down a little lower. Oh, here he was flirting with the woman at the hostel.

Craig: That one picture changed everything.

John: Absolutely. Oh my God, he’s a smoke show and therefore the Timothee Chalamet and all the other stuff comes out. Absolutely.

Drew: But I think of the 24 hours before, I think the competency in a way was the most attractive thing.

Craig: Well, the idea, there are two possible ways of thinking about this. One way is there is a masked avenger out there who is fulfilling our need for street justice against evil corporate overlords.

John: It feels like a Robin Hood.

Craig: It feels like a Robin Hood, except instead of stealing money from the rich and giving it to the poor, he’s just murdering people on a sidewalk, which isn’t great. Then the picture came out and everything changed. Then it was like, “Oh my God, he’s hot. A hot guy is doing this.” Then when they caught him and they said his name was Luigi Mangione, everybody– it got even better because it was like, it felt like a meme name.

I saw a headline when they caught him and the headline, when they finally figured out, okay, who’s this person? They figured it out. The headline was, “It’s a me, Luigi,” which made me laugh. Then I thought, why am I laughing? A man was murdered on the sidewalk. Saturday Night Live did Weekend Update. Of course, they mentioned Luigi Mangione and many, many, and they were women, you could tell by the pitch of their voice, went, “Woo.” Colin Jost went, “Oh. Yes, okay. We’re wooing for justice, right?” Because he’s a murderer. How do we make this a movie?

John: How do we make this a movie? Because so really it’s, where do you choose to center the story? Obviously, it is a movie versus a series. I think there’s a good case for making it a series. I’m sure Ryan Murphy is going to be, those conversations are already happening to make the series.

Craig: I’m sure they’re on day 40 of shooting already.

John: Yes. The question is, you can easily imagine the narrative that’s all centered on him leading up to and after the shooting because it’s compelling. The planning, the escape, the being on the run, the camera, the surveillance state, all that stuff is really exciting. In that version, it’s really hard to center or anchor around this man who was killed and the actual, the crime itself in a way, because the crime itself becomes secondary to the cultural phenomenon.

Craig: I tend to think about these things as much as I can from the least privileged point of view and make that the interesting point of view. The least privileged point of view in this case would probably be Brian Thompson’s family, because listen, we can discuss whether or not it is fundamentally unethical to be the CEO of a health insurance corporation. However, that is our system.

The health insurance corporations exist. You could argue that it is unethical to not be the CEO of a health insurer. If you think you would be better at providing health to people than the alternative. If it’s me or that asshole, I guess I’d do better than that guy. That’s the system we have. He was murdered because somebody with mental health problems felt aggrieved by decisions that that guy probably had nothing to do with.

Now mine husband, my father, my brother is dead and everyone’s cheering. They’ve turned this kid who, by the way, looks terrified into a hero. He is not. Now it really becomes an exploration of how we distort truth to create narrative. The Luigi Mangione backlash will be coming soon. It’s going to come. It’s inevitable, because that’s how this pendulum swings.

I would make, probably, a movie about the way people lost their minds. I probably would also fold into it the other least privileged point of view, which is somebody caught up in the UnitedHealthcare System because there are poor people who are suffering because that insurance company is gross and they’re not murdering anyone. Who’s going to look after those people while we concentrate on the most powerful two people involved in the story, the man who ran a corporation and the person who was pulling the trigger of a gun?

John: We recorded this and Mangione has been arrested. He’s now being transferred back to New York City, but we don’t have information from his point of view. That’s all we know is like his note is his manifesto. We don’t have any greater insight and that’s going to completely transform everything once we have his current explanation of why he did what he did, how it all fits together and that’s going to really influence things.

So I do wonder about trying to map out the story now when you don’t, he’s still just a cipher. We still don’t have a way to handle him and you say like, “Well, he’s going through a mental health crisis.” Sure, that tracks with what I’ve seen, but until we actually see an interview with him, we can’t know what this is because he could also be incredibly savvy in ways that we’re not anticipating.

Craig: He was pretty savvy. He wasn’t savvy enough to not sit in a McDonald’s, which by the way, is a corporation with his manifesto in his bag and the murder weapon in his bag, duh. He was exhibiting what I would consider to be a high intelligence and also disordered thinking. Anyone that thinks that murdering somebody is the solution to their problems is exhibiting disordered thinking, I would argue.

He’s also a fan of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who in a very similar way was brilliant and targeted people that he felt were putting technology ahead of humanity. It wasn’t, again, “random”. Those of us who weren’t involved in research labs to, I don’t know, whatever, invent new plastics or Ted–

John: We were not going to get a bomb.

Craig: No, we weren’t getting mailed a bomb. Then there is that weird sense of, “Yes, someone’s doing something about it.” Americans love the story of a violent loner. Hollywood has been celebrating violent loners since film was invented. Probably not a good idea.

John: Getting back to where he fits in this overall cinematic universe, we have other examples like Bonnie and Clyde, the villains who were sticking it to the rich man, do become cultural heroes. That’s not a unique experience for us to be having with Mangione in this situation. I’m also struck by not that atypical. I think you could find a lot of people who meet the general characteristics of a Mangione, the kinds of podcasts he listened to, that self-improvement, that kind of stuff.

I think part of what’s so compelling to me about this story is that, well, what’s different about him versus the other thousand guys out there who fit in the same template?

Craig: Well, a circuit breaks and we don’t know which circuit and we don’t know why. I would say the great majority of people, if put in front of their enemy or the person that makes them the angriest and handed a gun, would not pull the trigger.

John: Yes, but that’s not what he did. It wasn’t that he was in a situation where he had the opportunity. He had to make a plan and systematically put the plan into place. I feel like we reward society for those individuals who can build companies, create great new things. He sort of has that founder’s mentality, but for–

Craig: He still had to pull the trigger.

John: Yes.

Craig: My argument is that’s where he steps away from the rest of us. Because the reason most people build businesses as opposed to murder, aside from the illegality, is because murder is not an option. I say this as an atheist. I feel like atheists get special points for saying this. I don’t not murder because I’m afraid of hell. I don’t not murder because I’m afraid of God’s punishment or disappointment. I don’t murder because my brain is organized in such a way as to find that horrifying. I could not do it.

I’m fascinated by portrayals of people who struggle to murder people. I do oftentimes think about how interesting it is when we watch movies where the tone is I can happily murder. The ’80s really went all in on that. The happy quipping murderer hero. That’s where this is scary.

John: The reason why I don’t want to drop this is that I feel like we feel like we’re in a time of increasingly violence as– political violence being a thing we see in the world and even in the US after the–

Craig: Attempted assassination on Donald Trump.

John: Absolutely. Also, I would say January 6th before that was the political violence we just aren’t used to. We used to have more of it. We used to have bombings and those kinds of things. I just feel like I can envision a character like Mangione who sees this as a killing baby Hitler situation where they feel themselves as like, “This is a chance for me to alter the future. Therefore, this is not just a murder, this is actually an act which will change society.”

Craig: Yes. That would be a thought of deep, deep delusion and also not particularly smart for a guy who is smart. Somebody else has to be the CEO now. It’s like that company isn’t going away. A little like Tim McVeigh drove a truck bomb up to the Murrah Federal Building and blew it up. Hundreds of people died, including children. That accomplished nothing. Nothing.

There is that sense of, “We’re going to start something. We’re going to kick off this big war that everyone’s ready to go fight.” No. Most people are not ready to go fight. I think social media has amplified some of the worst voices and made them feel more plentiful, I suspect, than they are. I’m just thinking about the Trump-Biden election. I think Trump got 68 million votes or something like that, or maybe tens of millions of people voted for him. 5,000 showed up that day. Very small number, happily.

My argument being most people are good, or if not good, terrified to commit violence. Luigi Mangione was not. That makes him terrifying to me. People that are celebrating him, I think, should not. That’s what’s terrifying to me is the idea that somebody can calmly walk up to somebody on a sidewalk and after all they’re planning, do it. That’s the scary thing.

John: Yes. All right. Let’s move on to our next story. This is an article by Paul DeBole written for Commonwealth Beacon in Massachusetts. It is, how do you license a fortune teller? In the state of Massachusetts, fortune tellers have to be licensed, which is great. You basically investigate what the licensing requirements are and what different cities in Massachusetts do for this.

How do you even define fortune-telling? Well, this is how it’s laid out in the law. “Fortune telling is the telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cartomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrying coins, sticks, dice, sand, coffee grounds, crystal gazing, or there’s such reading through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mind reading, telepathy or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article or substance, or by any similar such thing or act.”

I just respect them so much for like pulling out the thesaurus and figuring out what are the things– because they have to be careful like not to define probability or statistics or other things that are fortunes.

Craig: That’s an amazing list of things, although necromancy really shouldn’t be in. Necromancy? The raising and manipulation of the dead? Anyhoo, they could have just said bullshit. This is an interesting– I actually understand why they do this, because let’s say you decide reasonably, business licenses are for businesses, not for a bunch of bullshit. We’re not going to license bullshit, that’s ridiculous.

Now you got 20 bullshit shops in the rundown part of town, because weirdly, the people that peddle this crap, they can never seem to afford nice places. You’d think that they would, but it’s always crap. Anyhoo, they can’t leave that unregulated. I suspect that the licensing of these places, even though there’s this wonderful moment in the article where they ask like, “Why do you license these places?” The woman says, “To make sure that they’re good at it or something.” [chuckles] It’s really just to limit how many of them there could be, I suspect.

John: In certain cities, like there’s Amesbury City, lifted the cap on one license for the telling of fortunes for money per 50,000 residents. Basically, you’re trying to control a thing that’s out there and also to make sure that because they’re actual legitimate businesses, they’re collecting taxes and there’s not shady money laundering stuff. There’s reasons why you have to do it. Yet I just found it this delightful, and I think there’s some– it’s not probably the central focus of the movie, but I think there’s some delightful thing about either a family business, a family fortune telling business that loses their license or some legal drama, some sort of, My Cousin Vinny is like, you have to like defend this company.

Craig: You could also see a supernatural, comedy adventure like Men in Black where you meet a guy and his job is to check and grant/renew licenses for these people and they’re all real. He finds that one of the one thing is no necromancy. Everyone is, can’t do necromancy. Then he’s like, “Someone’s clearly doing necromancy here,” and follows it into some Ghostbusters-y sort of thing. It’s a great like beginning where you take a job and you’re like, “None of this is real.” Then it turns out some of it’s real. It is mind-blowing to me that people go to these things and believe any of it. It is mind-blowing. There’s so many of them. There’s so many.

John: Yes, I know really smart people who have gone to them and I found them useful and helpful and then also became sort of weirdly obsessed with the people who were giving them their fortunes, which makes sense, and get bilked for money.

Craig: Yes, they became weirdly obsessed with the charlatans that are con artists that–

John: Are very skilled at doing this thing.

Craig: Yes, digging their claws into you and extracting your dough. I’ve said this before. If I could do any of those things, I would be performing those things for free as a saint because that’s what I would be, a saint. I would be the most famous, most beloved person in the world if all I did was legitimately help people talk to the dead. The people that claim to be able to talk to the dead, they would prefer to be in a small shop in a strip mall next to a nail place, charging $25 a read. Interesting.

John: Lastly, we have an article by Susan Dominus for The New York Times Magazine. This is about an IVF mix-up, a shocking discovery and an unbearable choice. Here’s the brief version of this. We have a couple, Alexander and Daphna, who give birth to their second daughter, whom they name May. She’s a great, easy baby. The husband, other people start to say like, “This does not really look like it came from either one of us.”

Craig: This was a baby that was implanted in the mother via IVF.

John: Absolutely. They had the baby with IVF. They did a home genetics test and they found out neither of them is related to this baby. They have this moment of faulty decision.

Craig: It was sort of around three or four months.

John: Yes, so quite young. The question’s like, what do we do? Do we tell anyone? Do we go to the clinic? They end up hiring a surrogacy lawyer, went to the clinic, and it turned out that one of their initial suspicions was like, “Okay, this is not the right embryo that I gave birth to. What happened to our embryos? What happened there?” It turns out there was another baby born about the same time who was their embryo.

Craig: Living 10 minutes away.

John: Yes, which is crazy. They meet this other couple who are in fact– well, one’s Asian, one’s Latino. That’s why these babies don’t look anything alike. They make the decision like, “Well, we are going to swap the kids back, but what will that even look like? What is the process going to be? How do we do this?” In the background of all of this, there’s the lawsuit against the fertility company.

But the story really focuses on like, what do these families do? If there’s older kids, how does it all fit together? Craig, what did you take from this? Where do you think the interesting points are to hold on to if you’re trying to adapt this?

Craig: I thought maybe approach best straight forward. The part that was heart-wrenching and fascinating was what do you do when you’ve had a baby for four months and you find out that all of this love and attachment that has occurred shouldn’t have? You now are supposed to have that same love and attachment to a baby you don’t know. Now, I will tell you, if you have an asshole baby, this is a dream come true because some babies are assholes. I’m not going to lie. If you have a good one, I don’t know.

John: I got to babysit over this weekend, the best baby in the world.

Craig: Right, like an angel baby is amazing, right? Our first baby was not an angel. I would have been like, definitely? No, not definitely. That’s my kid. The question at the heart of it is, what defines parenthood? Let’s be even more specific. What defines motherhood? These women didn’t just receive a child from a surrogate mother. They carried these babies to term. These babies grew inside of them. They gave birth to these babies. They were nursing these babies. What is parenthood?

Now, the fascinating question to me is how this is approached differently by the father and the mother. You can see, even in the story, the fathers are like, “Oh, this is an easy one, switch them.” You didn’t grow it in you. You didn’t grow it inside of you. You’re not keeping it alive with your body, not only prenatally but postnatally. What is the nature even of love?

What’s beautiful about this story is that the two families decide to just sort of combine and let these kids grow up almost as sisters, even though there’s really no reason that they should, and the parents struggling. I think in a drama, you would want one of the parents to want to switch and one to not. You’d want to create some conflict, and you’d want to create a sense of that tearing apart. There’s some interesting ways to conclude it, but the issues at the heart of it, if we’re looking for, oh, what’s our central dramatic argument? The central dramatic argument is you do not have to be related to a baby to love it like it is your baby, and in fact, fiercely so.

John: Yes. To me, the most interesting moment was weirdly before the two couples match and where the first couple was like, “What do we do? We do nothing. Are we under any legal obligation to say anything?” Maybe not. I think there’s a moral obligation, probably, but there’s not a legal obligation, so they could have just said nothing, but then there would always be this time bomb out there, like at some point, this is going to come out, and at what point do we figure out that? I think that’s a really interesting. I would love to see that moment staged, and that this actually could be a play in a weird way for that reason. That discussion, that debate is really great.

Craig: This is a theme that goes all the way back to old stories and fairy tales, the idea that you have stolen a child from another mother because the other thing is they don’t know what the deal is with the other family.

John: Yes, at that point, they don’t know that they have their own kid that’s out there someplace, too.

Craig: Exactly. So A, they don’t know if their own kid exists, their biologically owned kid exists. B, they don’t know if the parents who are supposed to have had this embryo, they don’t know if those people have a different baby, another baby. Now you’re just quietly raising someone else’s baby. You know it’s not “yours”, but it kinda is. That’s the fascinating part.

Maybe the more interesting statement isn’t you can love a child as if it is your own, even if it is not biologically your own. Maybe the more interesting statement is you are capable of not loving a child that is your own biological child if you don’t know it, because one of the fascinating things is they each meet their other child and they’re like, “Yeah, nice baby, but who the F are you? I don’t know you.” That’s fascinating to me.

John: Yes. I have lots of good ways into this. This feels like it’s not a series. I think it has to be a short thing. Unless you were to actually do the blended family, but then it becomes– then it’s a comedy probably.

Craig: It’s just blah. We’re sisters, but we’re not. Our parents went to birth.

John: Yes. Having had our daughter through surrogacy and knowing that there are going to be other siblings out there because genetically there are going to be other siblings out there, yes, it’s what’s interesting and not so uncommon about this era that we live in. What’s interesting about this story to me is that it’s not classically like the two babies were switched out at the hospital and you’re just going to switch the babies back. There’s more complicated unknowns in there, too.

Craig: Just the fact that you are carrying a child within you all the way to term, it’s just an entirely different thing.

John: Craig, should we just be doing genetic tests at birth?

Craig: It did strike me that if I were running a fertility clinic and part of my job was implanting embryos, that, yes, at birth, immediately that day, make sure that we didn’t mess up. I don’t understand how that’s not just an immediate thing to do.

John: All right, let’s review our three movies here. There’s going to be multiple Luigi Mangione murder.

Craig: Multi-Mangione.

John: Multi-Mangione. I think there’ll be at least one feature film. There’s definitely going to be some sort of series, some sort of Ryan Murphy-ish series, probably several of them.

Craig: We’re going to hit peak Mangione in about two years.

John: Was there ever a Unabomber movie? I’m not sure I ever saw one.

Craig: I think there might have been some, yes, I bet you, Drew, if you Google up Unabomber movie, there’s going to be some miniseries or there has to have been some, right?

Drew: Yes. There’s one documentary, it seems like.

Craig: Oh, okay. Interesting. You know why? Wasn’t that handsome.

John: Was not handsome.

Craig: Was not handsome.

John: Lived alone in a cabin.

Craig: Lived alone in a cabin. Looked like a crazy old man.
John: Yes. No one liked that.

Craig: His sketch was handsome. In reality, not handsome. That’s why.

Drew: Oh, I lied. We had a Ted Kaczynski movie in 2021 with Sharlto Copley. Oh. I could see Sharlto Copley.

Craig: Okay. Sure. What was it called? Unabomber?

Drew: Ted K.

Craig: Ted K. Oh, boy.

John: Second story, licensing a fortune teller. There’s nothing in Debole’s story that you need to buy. There’s nothing there to buy. The idea of licensed fortune tellers, I think there’s a comedy there to be found.

Craig: Seems about right. I would agree.

John: The IVF story. I think there’s a made for lifetime movie. That’s pretty obvious. Whether there’s a bigger movie to be made out of this, possibly, maybe. What was the Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore movie, which was about the–

Drew: May December.

John: May December. Yes. May December was inspired by actual events. There’s definitely a big feature version you can make at some point, too. I can envision somebody doing this

Craig: Cool.

John: Let’s answer listener questions. Let’s start with Jane Doe here.

Drew: Jane Doe writes, “I’m writing a pilot with a buddy based on his memoir. Credits wise, I’m sure an ampersand makes sense as we’re absolutely writing this thing together. My question is about order of names. What exactly does it mean to order the writer’s names chronologically? Does that mean alphabetically? He’ll obviously have the based on the book by credit for himself. That’s not in dispute at all. Just curious if I’m right that it should be written by Jane Doe and John Everett, D first, E second, or if chronologically means something other than alphabetically. Also, does the fact that it’s Everett’s book affect the byline order for the script in any way?”

John: The chronologically comes if there’s multiple writers over multiple drafts and it’s separated in time, you list them chronologically. That makes sense for that. If it’s an ampersand, you’re considered one writer.

Craig: We don’t actually list them chronologically. Writers that are separated, not as teams, are actually listed in order of prominence of authorship.

John: Before it goes through arbitration.

Craig: Oh, before it goes through arbitration.

John: Basically on that top sheet, you should list.

Craig: Is that what she’s asking or is she asking about like the final credits?

Drew: I think final credits.

Craig: Yes. Final credits still doesn’t apply to her case because she’s a writing team. You can order your names in a writing team however you want.

John: Yes. You can argue about it, fight about it, but eventually, you’re going to have to put out a title page that has your names in one order, and that will be the order you have to go for.

Craig: Sometimes people will put their names in based on how the town refers to them. If the town calls you Smith and Jones, then you’ll probably say written by Smith & Jones.

John: Yes. I think Lord and Miller are always Lord and Miller, and I don’t know that that was chronologically, I don’t think.

Craig: Yes, because it sounds better than Miller and Lord. Yes. Lord and Miller. That’s the actual ordering within the ampersand doesn’t matter. Nobody cares. Doesn’t imply anything. It’s just sort of almost branding more than anything else, because the ampersand means writer.

John: We’re one.

Craig: We are one entity with multiple brains. No, the source material credit has nothing to do with that either. She should stop worrying about that.

John: Agreed. All right. It is time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a book called Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath. I brought this to D&D last week. It is this remarkable book about the history of role-playing games, starting with Dungeons and Dragons, which was the first in the ’70s, and continuing up through the 2020s. It’s really a remarkable excavation of a lot of games I’d never heard of so much, which I did know, and sort of how this whole system of role-playing games developed and grew.

Stu Horvath is publishing this through the MIT Press, but it’s all based on games that he collected over the years. They’re all from his own personal collection. His interviews with a lot of the folks who were behind them, sort of piecing together sort of what grew and what changed, how one game influenced the next game. If you love D&D and other role-playing games, you will love this book. If you don’t care about them, this won’t probably make you care about them. I found it to be just incredibly useful and just a delight to read.

My one observation about this kind of book is it’s the size of a monster manual or a player’s handbook. Its dimensions, but it’s also thicker and heavier. It’s a difficult book to read sitting on a couch. It’s actually not a comfortable book to hold. There’s a class of books that are like, this is a great book, but I need almost like a lectern to sit it on to read because it’s just too big to enjoy that way, but a small cost. Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground.

Craig: Fantastic. My one cool thing is this theory of quantum consciousness.

John: Tell me what this is.

Craig: Quantum consciousness, like almost every theory of consciousness, is completely unsupported by anything we would call evidence. Consciousness is the most– it’s like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. It’s so hard.

John: Consciousness is a feeling. Basically, we have the sense of what being conscious is like, but it’s actually hard to put that into concrete terms.

Craig: It is not only a phenomenon that is difficult for us to describe, we are also asking the phenomenon to describe the phenomenon, which already introduces a huge problem into the mix. We also know that it is pervasive across humans. It is, in fact, probably what defines us more than anything else, more than standing on 2 feet or having opposable thumbs. It is the fact that we are conscious, that we can metaphorize our existence, that we experience things moment to moment and can put them into words, what is going on.

There is this rise of a concept of quantum consciousness, which suggests that the old model of consciousness, which was whatever it is, it’s clearly the function of wiring neurons leading from one to the other. It’s like a huge circuit board, which then would imply AI, right? If it’s just a big circuit board, we can just build a big circuit board over here and it’ll do it.

This other theory is, no, that there are inside of cells in the brain, these microtubules, these very tiny protein things that are behaving in ways that show some sort of quantum mechanics at work, which I will be clear to say, I do not understand at all. All I know is this, quantum functioning has nothing to do with circuit board stuff. If they’re right, that human consciousness is the product of some sort of quantum state occurring rapidly and in this massively distributed manner, AI will never get there until we build quantum computing.

John: Which we got much closer to this last week, I’ll put it there.

Craig: Here’s the other fascinating thing is, at deeply frozen states and all the rest. One of the knocks on quantum consciousness and most scientists are like, “Screw you,” is that the brain is too warm and too wet, as they say. I have no idea. The mystery of consciousness is profound. I find that in and of itself fascinating, that we have no idea how it works. We can barely define it.

John: Yes, like art. It’s one of those tough things. You sort of know when you see it.

Craig: You know it when you feel it.

John: I understand why people are reaching for these things. They want to have a sense that what we do in our brains is different than everything else and that there must be some magic. There’s some homunculus in there who is the real us that is the thing. I think what we’re going to find is that consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon that happens when you have a certain amount of processing capability. It just erupts because also if you look at animals around us, primates, octopuses, and other creatures, it’s clear they can do some very sophisticated things that would, by any of our normal standards, involve consciousness. The things that ravens can do feel like they’re conscious.

Craig: That’s the interesting thing is we’re not sure because we don’t know because we can’t be in their heads. If there is a difference between intelligence and consciousness, it seems like there is. There have been arguments that consciousness is a function of language itself. That if you do not have language, you can’t be conscious because that’s what consciousness is.

Animals don’t have language. Everyone’s going to write in, “Dolphins can talk,” and blah, blah, blah. No. They don’t. They have communication. They don’t have language. I don’t care. I’d send whatever emails you want until a dolphin talks and says stuff. “Actually, there’s one dolphin.” I don’t care. They’re not talking. The end.

John: Yes. The situations where that boundary between what is animal communication versus animal language is interesting. The grey parrots who learn to speak and actually can do some sophisticated things in talking, it becomes a question of like, well, how much is that the training given them to a place? They can say novel things, but does that really mean that they’re conscious in ways that–

Craig: They’re combining sounds. Again, birds communicate through song, and whales communicate through song, and apes communicate through grunts and hand gestures, but none of them are currently writing a limerick. We are different. Now, you’re right, it may be that this is all just this desperate narcissism, neuro-narcissism, that no computer could do what we do. You’re probably right, because after all, we’re not real either. It’s just a question is, how sophisticated is the matrix that we’re inside of? Probably pretty sophisticated. Seems pretty sophisticated.

Drew: Why is language the benchmark for consciousness? I still don’t–

Craig: It may not be. It’s just a theory that consciousness is a function of the brain having an understanding of what the word I means, what the word you means, what tenses mean, am, were, going to be. Those concepts alone create a sense of consciousness, memory, planning ahead, experience right now, and then metaphor, which is a very complicated thing. It’s a very complicated way of thinking.

John: It’s a form of pattern matching, but is generalizable to ways that are so different.

Craig: Yes, and now I can explain something to you using metaphor, which even the word metaphor is a fascinating word. The vocabulary that we have, the thousands of words that we know, all of that stuff is perhaps what is leading to this mush in our heads. Moment to moment, if you try and define your own consciousness, you will fail.

John: The experiment we could never do, which would be telling, is if you could actually raise children in an environment with no language whatsoever and see what are they like, and do they have–

Craig: We’ve seen some of those cases. What happens is they start to create their own language. It seems like language is neurologically innate. Chomsky’s big theory, which seems true, is that grammar, the basic concepts of grammar, are true across all languages, that all languages ultimately do have subject, verb, object.

John: They could put them in different orders. They could have different rules for forming them, but that they all have that concept.

Craig: Yes, that all languages erupt out of the same neurological instruments. Yes, because why? Why would we need me, you, doing things? Somehow that’s how we organized it.

John: A sense of the future, a sense of the past, and we build, communicate those.

Craig: Then conditionals. Conditionals alone. Just the word “If.” That word is so powerful, and I’m not sure a lot of animals have if. If this, then this. If this, then this. If not this, you’ve lost my dogs. If, sit, then treat. I don’t even think they get that far. I think their brains are like, “Sit, treat.” Regardless, it’s not language.

John: All right. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli, outro is also by Matthew. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find them all at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links for things we talked about on today’s show in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for Craig and I to do this show every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on home automation. Craig, thanks for a fun and freewheeling episode.

Craig: Yeah, no, we won’t get any emails for this one.

John: Not a bit. Not a one.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Craig, let’s talk home automation and sort of what stuff in your house right now can you ask an assistant, digital assistant to do? What things happen automatically? What do you have working in your house right now?

Craig: Very, very little. I have my thermostats or Nest thermostats.

John: Do you use the app for it or just do you just turn it on and off?

Craig: I generally use the app, although from time to time, I’ll walk by, wave my hand in front of one of them and adjust it. I have reduced the amount of automation they have. The auto scheduling, I found to be brutal. I don’t think it’s very good at figuring out what I want. I found myself constantly being like, “No, Nest, I don’t want it to be 67 degrees. I would like it to be minimum 69, please.” It’s cold as shit in here. It’s like, “Oh, okay.” Then the next day, “You like 66?” I’m like, “No.”

I actually turned auto scheduling off. I do like the auto away, auto home. It knows, okay, if we’re out of the house, but then I worry about the dogs. I don’t want them to get too hot. I’ll probably turn that off too once it gets to the summer. Other than that, my lights are not all wired into a system. I don’t have Alexa. I don’t. You’d think I would. Tell me what to do.

John: In our house, Mike has rewired all our light switches to be programmable and sort of beyond the system. It’s actually really good. It’s actually really nice because I can ask to turn down the lights to 10%. I can turn the lights up. In my office, when it gets a little dark, I can tell it to turn on the lights. It’s really nice for it to do that. I can do the same with our Nest thermostat. I say like, I can ask like, “What is the temperature in the room?” Turn it up to 70 degrees if it’s too cold. That stuff has been really useful.

The other app that we tend to use a lot is as we leave the house, we can turn on the lights to sort of– it sort of randomly turns on different lights as we’re away. It makes it feel much more lived in, which is really, really good. Our locks are on the system, so we can have it lock the doors, unlock the doors. We get a notification if the gate has been opened or a door has been opened. We get a sense of like, “Oh, the housekeeper’s here.”

Craig: I do have that. I have the Lockly is my front door. My question for you is, do you put an Alexa? I assume that’s what you’re using.

John: Oh, in the house, yes.

Craig: Yes. Do you put one in every room so it can hear you everywhere you go?

John: Yes. There’s one in most rooms and you can sort of call out for it. We were always an Apple family. We were using the HomePods, because we rented an Airbnb that had Alexas and it was like so much better that we ended up switching everything off to that. It has been good. On my watch, I can open and close the gate. I can do that kind of stuff. When I’m calling out for someone to do something, it’s generally Alexa.

Craig: Nest is a Google product. Alexa is Amazon. They work together, I guess? They’re happy with each other?

John: The systems for communicating between each other have gotten better. They’re not nearly as good as you sort of would hope they would be, but they’ve gotten better.

Craig: They’re using some sort of protocol, like a standardized protocol. For your lights, what system did Mike put in?

John: I don’t really know.

Craig: Your wife.

John: What does my wife do, by the way?

Craig: What does your wife do?

John: I don’t know which light switches we ended up going with, but they’re all standardized now. My daughter hates them.

Craig: Oh, tell me why.

John: She’s been away at college when it changed. Now, a classical light switch is like the top turns it on, the bottom turns it off, unless it’s a three-way switch with somebody else and then it works the other way. Now the top always turns it on, the bottom always turns it off, but it doesn’t lock in the bottom place or the top place.

Craig: It’s a two-pole or a three-pole. This is another side, a good bonus episode is dealing with your children when they come home from college. Poor Jesse. Poor Jesse, please. I love her to death. We got a different house and she was upset. She was like, “I didn’t want to come home to some weird house, I wanted to come home to my house,” which I completely understood.

Then also I understand, let’s say we had stayed in that house, but only changed the light switches. It would still be somewhat traumatic because that’s where they grew up and they remember something. It’s also a little bit of a sign. I really do sympathize with our kids. They leave to go to college and they come back and they’re like, “Oh, the second I was gone, you started undoing things,” like as if to say, we could have done all this light switch work, but the kid was here. All right, you’ve got your lights automated, which is interesting to me.

John: Generally very useful. We’ll start to watch a movie. It’s like, “Oh, turn the lights down to 10%.”

Craig: That does sound great. Do the switches themselves have to be replaced, or is it some central thing somewhere that–

John: Replacing the switches. Basically, each individual switch knows where it is and what’s going on.

Craig: So many switches.

John: It’s a thing, electricians will come out and it’ll take a day to switch out all the switches.

Craig: They’ll do all the switches. Then you’ve got your switches. You’ve got your lights. I have Spotify, but I suppose if I had Alexa, it could tell Spotify to do that.

John: Yes, it plays then for sure.

Craig: Which would probably be better. I do worry about the Alexa. We had an Alexa briefly and it started to creep me out. Does it ever creep you out?

John: Not so much. We get frustrated with it. We will ask it for like, the daily news, like as we’re making breakfast and sometimes she won’t hear it right or the wrong one will answer or it’ll want to keep playing after we told her to stop. There’s those frustrations. No, on the whole, it’s been fine.

Craig: Do you yell at it?

John: Sometimes I lose my patience a little bit. The, “Damn it, Alexa,” is probably a thing it hears a lot.

Craig: Wow. Do you think Alexa eventually is going to sort of come out and do an article in Variety about you?

John: Absolutely. What an abusive employer.

Craig: Just toxic home environment.

John: Never asked about me.

Craig: Never, but also just yelled. Just a lot of yelling.

John: Wants to know like the air quality a lot for who knows why.

Craig: Also, here’s a transcript of everything they’ve said for the past five years. They do hear everything.

John: Apparently, how these systems were supposed to work is that only when they hear the trigger word, then they start paying attention to what comes after it. That’s how they’re supposed to work.

Craig: Supposed to.

John: Supposed to. It’s a thing I just had to learn to live with like that.

Craig: You sort of go for it. Last question about home automation. I’d love to hear from some of our listeners who are super gear heads who have like really wired their homes up because I feel like there’s some great total solution. This will do it all, because instead of this patchwork of products, maybe I’m wrong. Your Nest thermostats. Do you have the latest Nest thermostats?

John: We don’t. We have ones we’ve had for years and they’re fine.

Craig: I was looking at the latest ones. I can’t tell really what’s different about them other than that they look somewhat cooler. They also look slightly like HAL from 2001, which is unnerving.

John: It’s not the best. I’m curious to hear from our listeners because I also think there’s a sweet spot where it’s like the amount of home automation we have is like it’s useful but not a pain in the ass. I’m never against it. There’ve been other times along the way where we’ve tried to do things that were a little bit fancier and it’s like, “Oh, God.” In the old house, we had a home theater system where the projector would drop down from the ceiling and there was a screen that came down. It was always a nightmare. It was maybe a 20% chance it would work properly the first time, and you’re not helping yourself that way.

Craig: I’m open to it. I would love something that would be– the dream is something integrated where there’s one thing that is running the door, the lights, the thermostats. I’m not sure what else there, the gate.

John: Things like your sprinklers, things like that, yes.

Craig: Sprinklers.

John: The pool pump.

Craig: The sprinklers– and yes, sure. There is an app for the pool pump that I have and I just never look at it because to me, the pool pump belongs to the pool people that come and maintain it. The sprinklers belong to the gardeners who come and maintain that. Now, if I were working on that stuff myself, if I weren’t such a dandy lad, yes, I would want to have all of it integrated would be– that would be the dream.

John: Cool. Thanks, guys.

Links:

• The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White
• The Conundrum of the Workshops by Rudyard Kipling
• OpenAI’s controversial Sora is finally launching today. Will it truly disrupt Hollywood? by Wendy Lee for LA Times
• I Went to the Premiere of the First Commercially Streaming AI-Generated Movies by Jason Koehler
• A timeline of the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and search for his killer by Michael R. Sisal and Cedar Attanasio for Associated Press
• How do you license a fortune teller? by Paul Debole
• An I.V.F. Mix-Up, a Shocking Discovery and an Unbearable Choice by Susan Dominus for NYT Magazine
• Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath
• Your Consciousness Can Connect With the Whole Universe by Manasee Wagh for Popular Mechanics
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has even more swearing than usual, so if you’re in a car with your kids, this is a standard warning about that.

[applause]

Craig Mazin: Hi. Hello.

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is the holiday live show of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are–

Audience: Interesting to screenwriters.

Craig: Every time they do it, they get more and more bored.

John: Yes.

Craig: Interesting to screen–

John: I know. It feels like an obligation. It feels like a chore, but it’s never a chore.

Craig: It’s a little bit like Christmas.

John: Aww. Do you enjoy Christmas? Do you enjoy the holidays?

Craig: I actually love Christmas.

John: I know you like cooking. You like baking.

Craig: I do, but also, I love Christmas because when I was a kid I wasn’t allowed to have Christmas, because Jew.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That was a real thing when I was growing up. Yes, sure. I wanted a Christmas tree and I just thought, “Oh, we can at least get a Christmas tree.” No.

John: No Christmas tree?

Craig: No, because that meant you were “giving in.”

John: See, last night, I was over at Aline’s house, Aline Brosh McKenna from — you know, our Joan Rivers — and she was having a Christmas tree decorating party. It was really, really fun, so I thought maybe you got to have that joy, but no?

Craig: Does it look like I’ve ever had any joy? That’s not what happens, but I do, I love Christmas time. I love Christmas stuff. I love Christmas music. I love the time of year. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m like a little elf.

John: Yes, and you’ve got some red socks on. One thing I always love about this show is this show is a benefit for Hollywood HEART. Let’s remember what Hollywood HEART is. They are a great charity that provides summer camping experiences for kids who otherwise would not be able to go to summer camp. We want to support them every year, so this is a benefit for them. Thank you everybody who bought a ticket tonight. Thank you for great charity. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Thank you, Hollywood HEART for having us.

Craig: It’s great to do this each year, and we give how much? Half of the money to them?

John: We give every single penny out of tonight goes to them, plus we are chipping in on top of that, so we’re matching dollar for dollar. Everything raised here is going to Hollywood HEART. Sorry. Sorry, Craig.

Craig: Okay. Fine.

John: All right. You’re going to have to sell another show or something to make up for what we’re giving up tonight.

Craig: Fine.

John: Let’s talk about tonight. Tonight we have three very special guests. Oh, here’s the thing. The people who are listening to this at home who are clicking through their podcast player, they know who’s on the show, but you in the audience, I don’t think you do. Do you?

Audience: No.

John: Oh, this is pretty exciting.

Craig: Or, they’re like, they just get up and walk out.

John: Like, oh, my God, they’re storming the doors. First off, we have Jac Schaefer, creator of WandaVision and Agatha All Along. She is here to walk us down that Witches’ road. We’ll ask her all sorts of questions about how she put that show together and also why it kind of made me want to become a lesbian. There’s something about that show that just pulled me over in that strange direction.

Craig: How’s it going?

John: It’s going pretty well.

Craig: Great.

John: Looking at Aubrey Plaza and I’m like, yeah, I see that.

Craig: Same. Then we’ll sit down with Brian Jordan Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig of English Teacher. That’s right. To talk about their hit series and how to work with your bestie without killing each other, which I think you and I have done a really good job of.

John: I think we’ve done a pretty good job. We can always get some more help. We can always get some more hints from the experts there. And not intentionally, Craig, but somehow we booked the creators of the gayest shows of the season.

Craig: I’m going to give them a run for their money, I’ve got to be honest with you.

John: All right. Season two, right?

Craig: Yes.

John: All right, and Craig, you have a special game that we’re going to play.

Craig: Yes, we’re going to do a special little Christmas song game in the middle of the show. I’m very excited about it. It’s got a little twist.

John: Craig put it all in the workflow, but he’s like, “Don’t look at it,” so I didn’t look at it. It’s a surprise to me as well.

Craig: You will be a contestant.

John: I’ll be a contestant.

Craig: There will be two exciting guest contestants.

John: Yes. Who just found out they’re going to be a guest contestant. We’re so excited for that. We’re also going to have a raffle, which is raising more money for this incredible charity of Hollywood HEART. Now, there’s three things you can win in this raffle. One of them is a guaranteed audience question.

Craig: Otherwise known as a GAQ.

John: Yes. If you put your name in for the– I hear Megana’s voice laughing. I’m so excited.

Craig: She’s the only one that really loves me.

John: If you put in a thing for raffle, you could get a chance to ask a question of us and this amazing panel. So it’s time to be thinking about what question would you want to ask?

Craig: Yes. you certainly don’t want to flop on the Christmas show.

John: No, you better ask a good fucking question.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes.

Craig: Whoa.

John: Yes, I just swore. That’s how serious I am about this.

Craig: Oh, my.

John: I know, the vapors. We should not waste any more time. Let’s bring out Jac Schaefer, is a writer, director, and a showrunner who created two very witchy series. Jac Schaefer.

[applause]

[Music: The Ballad of the Witches’ Road]

Jac Shaeffer: Oh, I got a little lost on my witches’ road to the stage.

John: Yes, you got to go follow the arrows.

Jac: There were arrows, it couldn’t have been easier.

John: So we played you out to the Witches’ Road song. I want to start with that question. How early in the creation of Agatha All Along, which is so spectacular, but how early did that you know that okay, we need a song, and the song is not going to be theme music, but it’s actually be a fundamental part of the narrative of the series.

Jac: We always knew there would be music because it was so central to WandaVision. I had sort of a checklist for when we decided to do the Agatha show. Here are the things we need. We need another bop, or bops, plural. We need hair, makeup, wardrobe. We need opportunities to see her conning. We needed a meta piece. We needed to examine some form of tropes. The music piece sort of dovetailed with a larger mantra that I had, which is I wanted the show to be a spell. That was my sort of guiding light. As we sort of worked it in the room, I think it was probably three weeks in that it became that the song is the spell. It started as like, it’s the thing that opens the road. It’s the spell that opens the road. Then as we worked it more, it became it’s actually– I’m spoiling everything if you haven’t watched it.

John: I was just going to say that.

Jac: Sorry. Have you seen the show?

John: If you have not seen WandaVision, leave right now and go home and watch it, then listen to the episode afterwards.

Jac: Yes. It became it’s actually the con. It’s Agatha’s con. It’s the spell she is placing on the characters around her, on witches globally and, this was my big aspiration, on the audience. That it’s, she’s pulling one over on the audience with this centuries-long con that is the song.

Craig: In listening to you talk about it, it just sort of reinforces this question I’m dying to ask you. Because in your show and the way your narrative is structured, there seemingly is infinite possibilities. You could do almost anything. I love that you put these interesting restrictions on yourself. I’m really interested when you said work it, right? You guys can go down so many different witches’ roads. How do which ones feel consistent with some sort of, I don’t want to say rules, but a consistency when the nature of supernatural narrative is that you can kind of do whatever you want.

Jac: It takes so much discipline. And it’s something that I learned on WandaVision. Because Wanda’s power is that she can make anything happen, and that’s too much and too big. So in order for it to hold together and be satisfying for the audience, we have to put restrictions on that kind of in every way. One of the early discoveries on WandaVision was we knew we were going to do Wanda and Vision and sitcoms. It was actually Kevin Feige who early on helped us realize that we needed to limit the sitcoms we were doing. Because there’s workplace sitcoms. We were looking at Cheers. We were looking at Seinfeld. We were looking at Golden Girls. We were looking at all kinds of stuff, but it didn’t have any rigor. There wasn’t any reason.

John: Rigor. Great word.

Jac: Because it was like, what is Wanda after? Wanda is after the perfect nuclear family. That actually then pushed to the side All in the Family. It even pushed Roseanne to the side, because any sort of like larger social commentary or reflection, any political element, we were only entertaining aspirational family sitcoms. That was a revelation to me, what that did for us, because it meant that the themes were so supported and her journey was so supported. Then we applied that same ethos and that same sort of restriction in Agatha All Along. It was all about Agatha’s journey and supporting these characters and truly what is a witch? That’s what we came back to every time.

Craig: Got it.

John: That question of what is a witch is what you went into this writer’s room with. As you assembled your team, one thing I really like about how you set up Agatha All Along, is that it is sort of a heist. You’re putting together a team in order to perform a heist, which is to sort of get down this witches’ road. You were assembling a team of writers for this writer’s room. How much did you know on that first day? What could you tell them about, this is what the show is going to be about, let’s work a way to get there.

Jac: Yes. I like to have a very robust document going in that says, here’s what we have, here’s what we’re missing, here is what I desperately want to achieve. With the Agatha document, at the top, it said, “The show is a spell.” Then it was sort of explaining conceptually what I meant by that. For me, it was like The NeverEnding Story, it was The Usual Suspects. It was these pieces where at the end, there is a twist that feels right, but you realize you have been duped, and it’s expansive.

With The NeverEnding Story, it’s like, the whole thing unfolds and you realize you’ve been a part of it the whole time. That’s a children’s movie, but it turned my head around. It was an ecstatic feeling. That was the aspiration, is how do we pull the audience into our coven? One of the ways you do that is you hire the Lopez’s to write an earworm. The song really did cast a spell, and that is a trick of a lot of really talented people. The document is also very brass tacks of like, here are the characters we’re looking at, here is who– Like the Marvel rules to things, it’s like here’s who’s on deck for us. Should we partake? Here’s who we have to stay away from.

I was desperate to have them do a Fleetwood Mac style performance. I didn’t know how it fit. I didn’t know what it was, but I was like, I have this bee in my bonnet and it’s never going to go away. That ended up leading to, has everyone seen the live performance of Fleetwood Mac in their reunions?

Craig: Silver Springs.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: The greatest moment of all time.

Jac: The greatest moment of all time.

Craig: When she screams her anger in his face. Stevie Nicks is singing this song and she’s just singing it right into Lindsay Buckingham’s face.

Jac: Into his face.

Craig: Because it’s about him. I’ll follow you down and I’ll haunt you.

Jac: I will haunt you.

Craig: I will haunt you.

Jac: The sound of my voice will haunt you–

Craig: Forever. He’s like-

[laughter]

and she’s like, no, no, I’m going to say it again.

Jac: She’s like, “I am currently casting a hex on your face-

Craig: It’s incredible, you’ve got to google it.

Jac: -with my talent, with my anger.” I made the room watch it. I talked to the Lopezes about it. I was like, “This is what we’re doing because I believe I saw a witch.” Every time I watch that clip, I’m like, “That’s a fucking witch.”

Craig: She was known as the white witch. That’s what I think they called her, the white witch. Is that right?

Jac: She’s what– she is still on the planet. She’s somewhere.

John: Oh, no, she’s still here.

Jac: Praise Stevie, don’t come at me. That was in the document, was like a thing that I’m like, this is a dream. If we can integrate this in a way that makes sense, let’s do that. We didn’t know the Witches’ road, that was a missing piece. That’s something I call the container, like I need a container and–

Craig: Go into that a little more like as a practical tip.

Jac: I’m relatively new to television, I’m more of a feature person. What I find like enchanting about TV and also terrifying is that it can go in a million directions. How do you organize your episodes? What makes sense to me, and I also love non-linear storytelling, but like, what do you hang on to? The container for me is the thing that holds it all together. In WandaVision, the container is the hex. She created this hex. We made all the rules to the hex. We made sort of like all the sort of limitations of it and how it works and how she sort of has to understand it.

We had a vocabulary for what the different things were. We called them weirdnesses when something odd would happen. On the page, when we were in sitcom mode, the page would look normal. Then when we were stepping out, it would be italicized and have some bold in it. It needed to be organized in that way. That was my first time working with what I call the container.

Then for Agatha, I knew her character inside and out. I knew this was a story of a liar and that the point A to point B was, she’s a liar, we get to see her truth. I knew we were doing her and Billy and what that journey was and what it meant, but I didn’t know where were they going to be. How do we justify–

Craig: What are we supposed to write?

Jac: Yes. What’s the world and how do we make it big enough for the show, but contained enough where it doesn’t fly off into outer space? The road became that thing.

John: Now, one of the challenges you’re facing as you’re coming up on Agatha, which is after WandaVision, we sort of have an expectation of what Agatha All Along is going to be like.

Jac: Yes.

John: You know that each episode has to do certain things, but that the audience is going to have a discussion and an expectation of like, oh, this is this thing, this is this thing. How much, as you were putting together episodes, were you trying to anticipate this is what the internet is going to think is happening next and here’s how we honor that, stay ahead of that, use that to our advantage.

Jac: I don’t really think about it like the internet. I think about it– I’m constantly thinking about an audience’s experience, because what I want more than anything is I want that gasp. That like the moment where your brain starts to anticipate, “Oh my God, is that what’s happening?” That it is and you were right. Oh my God, and that thrill of that. Then, I also want everyone to laugh and it’s great when people cry and it’s great when people sing, but like that sort of thrill that makes you lean forward. What I wanted with this one, like it was so exciting when we hatched– Megan McDonnell is here, and she was one of the writers on episode four in WandaVision. Episode four where we stepped out of the sitcom.

One of the things that I loved about– I’m talking a lot about WandaVision because they’re–

Craig: You worked on it, that’s fine.

Jac: I did. I sort of diagnosed for myself that a sitcom lulls you, that you get into this place of comfort. I can count on one hand the times when a sitcom deviated and how distressing that was and how it made me– Like in Growing Pains when Carol Seaver’s boyfriend died, played by Matthew Perry. I was like, I’m going to throw up. This is not supposed to happen in this world. The idea that we could lull the audience three episodes of like, we’re moving through time and we’re going to episode style each time. Right? This feels good. This feels good.

Craig: Get people in a rut, get them leaning.

Jac: Yes. Then episode four would be like, just kidding. We’re back in the MCU with a different character. We’re like back in time. I wanted to do that again, but I was like, well, we can’t do it in episode four, so we did it in episode six. I tried to bundle it with the mystery of this team. This time when we get our step out bottle episode and we’re backfilling, we’re getting so much more information that the audience has been craving. It’s sort of– If that answers your question.

John: Absolutely. You’re really thinking about how do you make episode by episode so rewarding for the audience that they’re desperate to see the next episode. You and Craig both have the luxury or not like the way TV should be made, which is that week by week, there’s that weekly anticipation of the next episode. Now somebody can stream it all at once, but if they’re watching it in the real time, they’re part of a cultural moment, like trying to figure out what’s happening next.

Jac: Right. I love the theories. They make me really sick and keep me up at night, but like that audience engagement, it’s incredible.

Craig: Do you ever have that moment where you’re looking through some stuff and it’s–

Jac: It’s a better idea than I had?

Craig: No.

Jac: It happens a lot.

Craig: That’s actually never happened to me.

[laughter]

But people are trying to figure out like, this is what’s going to happen, this is what’s going to happen. The more sure they are, the wronger they are. Then one sort of random person says literally everything correct.

Jac: Tiny little voice.

Craig: They don’t even get told no, they’re just ignored.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: Yes, I’m like, you, a screenwriter.

Jac: I know. I wish I could think of an example of when that happened-

Craig: I want to rescue them, you know.

Jac: -a couple of time. I know. I want to be like, oh, I see you.

Craig: Yes, you got it.

Jac: You’re so smart.

Craig: There was like a guy that was like, here’s how I think every episode is going to start and finish in season one of The Last of Us. Nailed it. Nailed it. I was like, gah.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: Everyone’s like, shut up.

Jac: There’s this incredible TikToker and it’s terrible that I don’t know her name. If anyone knows who I’m talking about, please shout her name, she’s really great. She did a hilarious video. I can swear and say–

John: Yes, we understand.

Craig: You fucking can.

Jac: Great.

Craig: It’s fucking Christmas.

Jac: She did this hilarious fucking thing, where she was talking about like– She was like, “What kind of like cunty theater kid queen made The Witches’ Road? Like, ooh, the trial is we got to down a bottle of Merlot. We’ve got to like all like perform like Fleetwood Mac. We got to get together and be a band.” She was like, “Who’s the queen doing this?” And then it’s Billy Maximoff.

Craig: Yes.

Jac: Yes. I sent it to the room and I was like, “This is too delicious. I hope she feels rad when she realizes that she was right all along.”

Craig: That’s gorgeous.

John: Let’s talk about your room. Let’s talk about the room and who you assembled and why you pick the writers you pick. Obviously, you had that first session where they’re getting this document and your goals and plans for it. How do you like to run a room? What does a room look like to you?

Jac: I love assembling a room. I love running a room. I had no idea that this was– I wanted to direct and it turns out I wanted to be a showrunner. The working with a team of brains who are also awesome, fun, smart, funny, great people. It’s just the best. It’s so great. Don’t tell my children. I’m like the greatest joy of my life is working in a writers room. When I was doing WandaVision, I was terrified and I got some really good advice. One of them was my friend, Chris Addison, told me that it’s not my job to have the best idea in the room. It’s my job to be the keeper of the vision. I was like, I can totally do that.

I look for idea machines. I look for people who just think crazy thoughts, but I have of slots. On Agatha, first of all, there were some POVs that I needed to service that I could not do myself. That was crucial. I had chairs for those perspectives. That was going to be vital. Then there were people that I knew from WandaVision who were really suited to this spinoff show that was quite different from WandaVision. It had a different sensibility. It was about sort of bringing the people that I already knew who had the right dimensions to them.

When I look at a room, the first thing is that the people need to be kind and respectful. That’s always where I start, because I personally can’t work if there’s tension or disrespect or anything unpleasant like that, and it also has to be fun. When I read scripts, what I look for like specs and stuff is I look for audacious ideas. I don’t care if people can stick the landing. I don’t care if the end comes apart as long as you gave a shot. It’s really the like, what is the weirdest thing that someone tried really hard to have it hold water on the page?

Craig: Bravery.

Jac: Yes. I hired Giovanna Sarquis on Agatha because she had a character in her spec who was a mother and I believed the mother. Giovanna is a younger woman. She doesn’t have children. I was like, how did she write this middle-aged mom in a way that felt raw? It’s about that. It’s like once I have– Like I hired Jason Rostovsky and he is like a goth horror guy. I was like, I’ve nailed that piece. Then when I’m looking at the other chairs, like that’s covered, so what do I need over here? It’s a toolbox. It’s so fun.

John: Awesome.

Craig: Do we have time for one more question?

John: One more question.

Craig: One real fast one. Just talk a little bit about the challenges of protagonizing someone, because Agatha wasn’t the protagonist and now she’s sort of. Well clearly.

Jac: She’s a protagonist of her own story. That’s for sure.

John: Anti-hero.

Craig: How do you protagonize a character in such a way that doesn’t negate what came before, because side characters are fun and villains are fun and they’re not accountable the way that protagonists are?

Jac: First of all, thank you for not asking how do you make a character like Agatha likable?

Craig: Fuck that. It’s the worst note in history.

Jac: It’s the worst.

Craig: We’ve talked about that before.

Jac: Of course, as a writer you would never say that. Protagonize someone. It wasn’t hard because Kathryn had brought so much to the role of Agatha, so much more than was on the page for WandaVision. We were like, okay, she’s Mrs. Roper and she’s Rhoda and she’s all these other things. Kathryn can do that in her sleep. Then we wanted her to be this like scenery chewing centuries old witch. We’re like, Kathryn can do that as well. Kathryn brought all this texture about what she really wanted, what Agatha wanted. To protagonize, to use your awesome word, this character into her own show, it was following those threads.

Craig: It was already like raring to get out and do it.

Jac: Also, in film school, the like want versus need, I always had a hard time with that. But Agatha, it’s like so clear. She wants power, she needs community. End of story. That’s really what led to the thrust of the show or the kickoff, is like the most hated witch has to form a coven. You have the longest runway.

Craig: Great. Love that. Love that. All right. Interesting.

John: I think it’s time for your game, Craig. Talk us through what we want to do here.

Craig: Oh boy, here we go. Okay.

John: First off, we need to bring up two very special guests.

Craig: Yes, we got to get some guests going.

John: Holidays are a time for family. Let’s bring back some Scriptnotes family here. Two former producers of the Script Notes podcast, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. Can you guys come up?

Craig: Megan and Megana.

[applause]

Craig: Megana, is it true that you just flew back from India literally just to be in this game?

Megana Rao: I was in India.

Craig: Did you literally just got on a plane to be here.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: Thank you.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: For my game?

Megana: Yes.

Craig: Clearly not the case.

Megana: I am hours off of a plane. I also want to put that out there.

Craig: Excellent.

John: Absolutely. All right. Do you guys enjoy– These are Christmas songs we’re doing?

Craig: Yes.

John: Do you guys enjoy Christmas songs?

Craig: Oh, apparently not.

John: Megan MacDonnell, did you grow up with Christmas songs?

Megan MacDonnell: I love a Christmas song.

Jac: Megan MacDonnell is Christmas.

Craig: She’s Christmas.

Jac: Let’s be clear.

Craig: She’s Christmas.

Megana: Do we get to be on the same team?

John: You’re all on one team?

Craig: You can be on the team too.

John: All right.

Craig: Here, let’s switch seats.

Megana: Okay. Fantastic.

Craig: As you guys know, every now and again, John and I like to do a three-page challenge. Today, we’re going to be doing a little Christmas song game. Of course, because we’re writers, I like to concentrate on lyrics. We’re going to be doing a Christmas song three word challenge. Here’s how it goes. I have picked the strangest three words I could find in a Christmas song. They’re in a row, they’re not random. For instance if they were Deck the Halls, it might be “boughs of holly,” and then you go, oh it’s Deck the Halls. That’s it.

I’m just going to give you three words, you have to tell me the Christmas song. If you know it out there, don’t shout it out, just raise you hand.

Megana: Do we shout it out, or we have–?

Craig: You can confer, you can shout. You guys can shout. You guys can do anything you want. You can shout. You can confer. Let’s start with this one: Every mother’s child. Here we go.

Megan: Every mother’s child. Oh, that’s wrong.

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: This is awesome.

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: Does anyone out there know?

Megan: I’ll be home for Christmas? No that’s–

Craig: No.

Megan: No, I’m not saying. That wasn’t an official guess. That wasn’t an official guess.

Craig: Oh.

Megan: What about–

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: Someone’s ready to go in the front row it looks like.

Megana: Silent Night? Sorry, that was my answer.

Craig: No, this show is only like– It’s not five days long.

Megan: So we’re not qualified.

Jac: I can almost hear it.

Audience: The Christmas Song?

Craig: Yes. The Christmas song, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Every mother’s child is going to spy to see if reindeer really know how to fly.

John: All right.

Megana: Oh, wow.

Craig: All right. See. It’s hard.

John: It’s hard.

Megan: Stop with this game.

Craig: Ready? How about this one, you ding-dongs. I love this one, because this one really speaks to me. How you’ll hate.

John: How you’ll hate.

Craig: How you’ll hate.

Jac: Can we do Christmas movies?

Craig: No.

Jac: I don’t know, Wheelhouse.

Craig: I love saying no like Hannibal Lecter. No.

Megan: How you’ll hate to come in from the snow or something like that?

Craig: Yes, you’re very close. How you’ll hate going out in the storm–

John: Baby it’s cold outside.

Craig: Well, that’s part– No, it’s not. It’s, but if you really hold me tight, all the way home, you’ll be warm.

Audience: Let it Snow.

Craig: Yes. Are you from Australia? Oh, great. I thought I heard let it snorr.

John: Let is snow, all right.

Craig: It is. It was let it snow.

A platinum mine.

Megan: Santa Baby?

Craig: Yes. Santa Baby.

John: That’s a dime.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: You’re so good at this.

Megan: No I’m not, that’s my first win.

Craig: Okay, we’re cooking now. All right, this one is weird. I don’t know why this is in a Christmas song at all. This one speaks to you Jaq: Scary ghost stories.

Megan: [humming] Long ago.

John: Scary ghost stories.

Megana: Is that it?

Megan: Tales of the glories of Christmas. What is the song?

Craig: Yes. [humming]

John: It’s not my favorite things, it’s–

Craig: [humming]

Megan: It’s the most wonderful time–

Craig: Yes, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.

John: It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Craig: This turned into name that tune, but with so many notes.

The kids bunch.

John: The kids bunch?

Craig: The kids bunch.

John: The kids bunch uo, I assume. Is it a verb?

Megana: The kids would like to bunch up.

John: The kids bunch.

Craig: I like the analysis. Anyone?

Audience: Silver Bells.

Craig: Yes, it’s Silver bells.

Megan: Nice.

Craig: See the kids bunch. This is Santa’s big scene. I told the three words. This one you’ll get: The tree tops glisten.

John: [humming]

Craig: Oh, my God.

Megana: When the tree tops glisten.

Craig: You just said she was the– Yes.

John: Tree tops glisten.

Craig: Keep going. And children listen. To hear sleigh bells in the snow.

John: I’m dreaming of a White Christmas.

Craig: Yes, you are. White Christmas.

Jac: Apparently this is not how my brain works.

Craig: If you don’t get this one, I’m going to lose my mind.

Megana: Me neither.

Craig: Do you recall?

John: Frosty the snowman.

Jac: Rudolph the red nosed reindeer. I got it. I got one.

Craig: Yes. All right: Some pumpkin pie. It’s hard.

Megana: You got it. You got it.

Megan: I’m this close. It’s close. Nope.

Craig: Nope.

Megan: Is it rocking around…?

Craig: Yes it is. Rocking around the Christmas tree.

John: All right.

Craig: All right. Two more: You didn’t hear.

Jac: I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.

Craig: Oh, God. We’re going to turn to the audience?

Megan: What’s the lyric?

Craig: You didn’t hear.

John: You didn’t hear.

Craig: I case you didn’t hear.

Megan: Oh, by golly [crosstalk]

Craig: Yes, of a Holly Jolly Christmas.

Jac: These are all the same song. Right?

Craig: They are not. Last one. Then I’m going to ask a trivia question that connects them all. I know: a circus clown.

Megan: Yes, then we’ll pretend that he’s Parson Brown, it’s Frosted Snowman.

Craig: No. No. No.

Megan: Yes it is.

Craig: No, it’s not Parson brown…

Megan: We’ll pretend that he’s a circus clown.

Craig: Yes.

Megan: It’s not called Frosty the Snowman?

Craig: We’ll have lots of fun with Mister Snowman. Until the other kids come and knock him down. Does that sound like Frosty the Snowman to you? No.

John: Winter Wonderland.

Craig: Yes, you’re walking in a Winter Wonderland.

Megan: Wow, you’re so right. It wasn’t Snowman. Snowman is the clown.

Megana: So certain.

Megan: I was so certain.

Craig: No. All of these are linked by one commonality that isn’t that they’re about Christmas. I’m going to read the names again, see if you can tell. If you know in the audience raise your hand. You’re ready? Maybe they already know. The Christmas song, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Let It Snow, Santa Baby, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Silver Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, Holly Jolly Christmas, Walking in a Winter Wonderland.

John: They were all written for movies.

Craig: No.

John: All right.

Craig: That was a great guess. I’ll give you a hint. The answer begins with they were all written.

John: Same composer.

Craig: No.

Megana: Same year.

Craig: No. We have a guess.

Audience: They were all written by Jews.

Craig: Yes.

[applause]

They were all written by Jews. You’re welcome. Great job. Great job.

John: Well done.

Craig: Front row crushing it out here.

Jac: I feel like you deserve a prize.

Craig: Thanks for playing.

Megana: Because that was really good. You guys did great.

John: We did, yes.

Megan: Yes, yes.

John: Phenomenal.

Craig: You did great.

Megana: All contributed equally.

Craig: Yes.

John: Megana, Megan, Jac. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, guys. Thank you.

[applause]

I love how scared you were. They were all written by Jews. Because if you’re wrong, that’s, what?

John: What?

Craig: Jeez.

John: Oh, my God.

Craig: What the fuck, man. Who are we letting in?

John: I will say as a non-Jewish person, saying the word Jew just by itself is always still a little terrifying to me.

Craig: I’ll give you a pass.

John: All right. Let’s move on with our show. Our next guests have been working together as writers, directors, and actors for almost a decade, making dozens of shorts, web series, three feature films for YouTube. Now they are in one of my favorite shows of the whole year, English Teacher. Please welcome its creator, Brian Jordan Alvarez, and its co-writer and co-star, Stephanie Koenig.

[music]

Stephanie: Thanks for bringing the chairs and couches from my living room.

Brian: Thanks for bringing the chairs and couches in general. We didn’t want to have to bring these ourselves.

John: We try to keep our guests comfortable if possible. Could you hear backstage? Could you identify any of the lyrics in that song?

Stephanie: Yes.

Craig: All right.

Stephanie: What song? Wait, no. The Christmas songs?

Craig: The Christmas songs. Did you do it?

Brian: She was guessing them backstage. Yes.

Stephanie: I understand a couple.

John: You should have said you got them all. Yes. You had an opportunity.

Stephanie: No, I think I really only got one.

Craig: Oh.

Stephanie: I was singing it, and then I had to sing the whole thing to get to the refrain.

Craig: It’s hard because every Christmas song does have three weird fucking words in there, all just for no reason. Yes, and I went right for them.

Brian: Wait, what was the common thread between all of them?

Craig: They were all written by Jews.

Stephanie: Wow.

Craig: No, you didn’t believe me.

Brian: I don’t know whether– I don’t know how to react to this.

John: See, I didn’t either Brian.

Craig: Are you angry?

Brian: No, I just don’t want to have the– I don’t know if you’re kidding.

Craig: I’m not kidding.

Brian: Okay, you’re not kidding. Great.

Craig: I swear to God, I’m not kidding.

Brian: That’s very amazing.

Craig: They were all written by Jews.

Stephanie: Wow, that’s great.

Craig: Apparently John gets nervous when I say Jew.

John: No. When you say Jew, it’s great.

Craig: Oh.

John: It’s when I say it that I feel so bad.

Craig: Well, because you yell it.

[laughter]

Craig: Let’s talk about English Teacher for a moment.

John: Brian and Stephanie, so in this award season, we’re seeing a lot of co-stars who will come on and do interviews for things. They’re just the best of friends when they’re on camera and the cameras are rolling, and you’re always like, do they actually like each other whatsoever? Now, the two of you are genuinely friends in real life. Is that true? You guys have known each other for a minute.

Brian: A long time. 11 years going on 12, I think.

Stephanie: It’s 11 years now. That’s crazy. We hang out all the time.

Brian: We hang out all the time.

Craig: That’s not convincing. We hang out all the time. We’re best friends.

John: Because we hang out some, too-

Craig: We do.

John: -but we also work together, then we have to do stuff together. How do you guys manage a relationship of being friends, but also co-workers who are doing stuff together? Are there tensions? What are things you guys have learned over the years making so many things together about keeping your friendship, but also a professional relationship?

Brian: I don’t think it’s been very hard. We focus on, making sure the friendship is primary. I think that’s the only– If ever we need a reminder, it’s just like, well, the friendship is more important.

Stephanie: Correct.

Brian: The work is– It’s like a privilege.

Stephanie: It’s all the same. It feels all the same.

Brian: It’s all the same thing, yes.

Stephanie: Because when we first met, we met at a student short film.

Brian: Student film.

Stephanie: Student film, we were like the adults in a UC Santa Barbara.

Brian: Yes, we were like the sort of lame hired actors in a student film.

Stephanie: Yes, we really had not much happening.

Brian: We didn’t have anything going on.

Craig: It sounds great.

Brian: Her commercial agent was in the process of dropping her.

Stephanie: Just dropped me, yes.

Craig: Oh, God.

Stephanie: I think she had just sent the email out.

Brian: I don’t think I had representation at all.

Stephanie: I remember the first day on set, we were making jokes about getting dropped. What was the joke? It was something like–

Brian: You were doing the–

Stephanie: Listen, we think you’re great. If at any point you get funnier or you know, if you’re getting prettier, reach back out.

Brian: You were pretending that you were your agent talking to you and I was being you. You were saying, “We’re dropping you because we just have so many people who are better and better looking.”

Stephanie: Yes. You had said the only way we’re going to actually– Because you meet friends when you’re an adult. It’s like you have to really try.

Brian: You have to find an excuse to keep getting together.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. He was like, we should make something to keep hanging out.

Brian: Then we worked on a short that then we didn’t end up finishing.

Stephanie: Never went anywhere. We didn’t make–

Brian: Then we started making sketches. The first night I met her, I was like, so this is the funniest person in the known universe.

Stephanie: That’s what I thought about you.

Brian: Thank you.

John: Aaaw.

Brian: We’ve gotten less funny over time and we’re still supporting each other as–

Craig: On the slow–

Stephanie: I’m now the funniest person in Sherman Oaks.

Craig: Still, that’s legit.

Stephanie: It’s big. It’s big.

John: A thing we talk about on the podcast a lot is, we’ll have listeners write in saying, oh, what should I do? I need to break in. We tell people, make stuff. You guys just made stuff. You’ve made so many things.

Brian: I know.

John: If you look through, your YouTube, you guys have been working–

Craig: You made a song about sitting.

Brian: I know. I did. I’m doing it right now. Crushing it.

Stephanie: Oh, my God.

Craig: Crushing it.

Brian: This thing of telling people, just go out and make your own thing. I keep wondering if there’s ever going to be some new answer to how to break– Because that’s been the real answer for the last 15 years. I think we got lucky because– Maybe we weren’t even at the very beginning of this, but there was a time when you had to spend $100,000 to get a movie made yourself in 1990 or whatever. Then there was the time when you were like, people have these cameras that they thought were good digital cameras. I think they were Panasonics, because it’s big. They’d be like, oh, yes, we’re shooting an indie on this thing. I’d be like, that looks like shit. It looked like a handy cam, I was like, that’s not– I don’t know.

We ended up coming to, into being able to make stuff at a time when– Even very specifically camera-wise, we were shooting our sketches on the Blackmagic Pocket that had a really cinematic look. I had an eye for this stuff, but, the tech was just– It was also when YouTube was just a few years old. You could post something that really looked a bit like a movie on your YouTube channel and then that’s global for anybody who wants to watch it. I guess whenever you come up, you’re finding how to make it work. We would have done that in any era, I think. I think we were lucky in some ways.

Stephanie: What was great was your YouTube channel was sort of like a network of your stuff. I would put– Because I didn’t have a–

Brian: Yes, later when it started gaining steam.

Stephanie: Yes, later. It was just nice to go, okay, well, I’m going to make something for us and put it on your channel, and I know that there’s going to be an audience there.

Brian: Because you made this amazing movie, Spy Movie, that was us as spies, and it was a full feature and then we put it on the YouTube channel and people loved it.

John: That’s great. Talk to us about, the transition between you’re making stuff for yourself versus making stuff for other people, because you both as actors, went off and did other things. You managed to steal so many scenes on Will & Grace in ways that were just absolutely criminal.

Brian: I still have them in my house.

John: Yes, that’s great, you took the scenes with you.

Brian: I’m very grateful to Max Mutchnick and [crosstalk]

John: Stephanie, you were doing other stuff too, but was it hard to think about, okay, we also need to do some stuff together. How do you? As you’re going off and doing your own things and having your own successes, you still want to do stuff together. Is that hard to find those balance?

Brian: It’s so organic.

Stephanie: Yes. It’s just coming out of, how much fun it is to make stuff. Spy Movie was just like, oh, wouldn’t that be so funny if we were two dumb spies? Dumb.

Craig: In terms of that sense of this feels natural, I’m curious, when it comes to your show, were you guys just feeling like, hey, we’re adults now, and who are these children, and what are they about? Because what I find so fascinating about the show is that normally high school shows are about the kids, and this one is not. This is fascinating to me.

Brian: Right. We needed to be the leads. We needed the lead roles, yes.

Craig: That’s actually a great fucking answer. Ask a fancy question, you’re like, idiot, we need to be leads.

Brian: No, this show, maybe it’s more organic. I unfortunately don’t put a ton of analytical thought into most of the things I’m making before I make them. Then as they grow, they end up becoming smarter and deeper, maybe. Really, I was like, this felt like an environment that would make sense. It was also just, Paul Sims, who’s a genius and is TV royalty and has made so many amazing things. He essentially cold called me through my agent because he had seen my stuff online. He was like, “We need to make a TV show together. I did Atlanta with Donald Glover. I’m doing What We Do in the Shadows.” He’s done a million things, he’s amazing.

It was also a little bit fortunately in a moment, or I don’t know if it was fortunate, but it was in a moment when I had given up on making things in the system. I was really focused on acting. I was saying, look, I just came off Will & Grace. I’m doing this movie, Megan, coming up. At that time I had booked the role of Megan, then they changed the part to– I’m just kidding.

Megan, you guys know Megan?

Craig: That would have been better.

Brian: Paul was like, “We need to make a show.” I was like, “Oh, I don’t think I can. I’ve tried before. I don’t know how to get through that TV system.” He was like, “I’m going to show you. You’re coming out of retirement. We’re making a television show.” It was like this moment when someone comes down from heaven and is like, I believe in you. Then it’s literally like, oh my God, I got to go write something. Then I just was like, I don’t know, I’m like a teacher at a high school, and Stephanie’s there and we’re at lunch– Really, it was like that.

Craig: What did he show you in terms of– Well, okay, so you had some experiences as a writer, you mean, trying to work the system.

Brian: We’d had a few developments deals.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. It was like a lot of shows that we were both in. We were like trying to make a show specifically where we were always including each other.

Brian: Yes, able to do our thing.

Craig: Yes, you were getting frustrated as you went through.

Brian: I mean, they just didn’t end up getting made. It wasn’t any more frustrating than anything.

John: Talk to us about it. What did Paul Sims bring into the process that was new to you, that was different to you, that got it passing?

Brian: Every part of it was completely foreign to me. I was just like used to doing everything by myself and just with my friends. Any time there was any somebody being like, we think you should do this instead. I was like, this feels insane. Then like, Paul’s like, it’s okay, you’re going to survive, basically. It’s like, why don’t you just try doing it and maybe it’ll work. Then I would be like, all right. Then the show gets better. Then eventually you’re like, this show is way better than anything I could have made by myself. What the hell happened here?

I got lucky because it’s like, it’s not just anybody who’s giving you, it’s like Paul Sims, it’s like really intelligent people.

Stephanie: Jonathan Krisel.

Brian: Krisel, John Landgraf. These are the best of the best. They’re changing your show very gently. They’re still preserving the whole DNA, golden fiber at the center of your show. This is what people say to me when they see it now, having known my work for years, they go, “Oh my God, your voice survived. Your voice actually got on TV.” That is to their credit, because they know how to make it better and better, but to not break that spirit at the center of it. What I’m saying is like, some places would have made my show worse, but this show I look at it and I go, this is infinitely better than what I started with. It’s John Landgraf, Kate Lambert, Jonathan Frank, Paul Sims, Jonathan Krisel, even our line producer, Kate Dean, Dave King. There’s just high level help of people that have made 20 shows and they just know what’s good.

Especially Paul, I was with him the other day. I was just realizing, I was like, this guy can see story. I once heard of a DP who could just see light in a different way. He can just see what light is doing and Paul can just see story through everything.

Stephanie: Yes. This is like a separate thing, but to see Brian, because I had, worked with him so much on our little sets where we’re putting iPhones in our bras and strapping these bandages around our belly to record sound.

Brian: Yes, for lavalier mics, we would use iPhones with these bandages.

Stephanie: To save on not hiring any sound guy because we didn’t have any money.

Brian: Save the money we didn’t have.

Stephanie: Just like rigging the lights and bringing all the gear and setting up the camera, all that stuff. It was so cool to watch a hundred people do all of that especially on the stuff that Brian was directing, because he’s also showrunning as well. It wasn’t weird. It wasn’t like a different– It felt exactly the same, but he wasn’t having to carry anything.

Brian: Right. That was the thing about making stuff ourselves for so long. It’s hauling the equipment gear.

Craig: It’s the worst thing, and the food is a little better.

Stephanie: The food is great, yes. You don’t have to remember what and be like, I got to go feed them. I got to go feed everybody.

John: We talked about your voice surviving through the process. One of the things about the Evan character, which is so wonderful, is that we see him taking a stand and then realizing that his stand is sort of indefensible or he doesn’t actually– He wants to be the person who fully believes what he’s doing.

Brian: Are you just talking about a specific episode or in general?

John: The gun episode is one of the examples. Also, when a kid comes in and says– Comes out to you, it’s like, what should I do? It’s like, fuck you, yes, talk to someone your age, this is not my experience.

Craig: Go be gay out there. Everybody else is gay. Yes, it’s pretty awesome.

Brian: Thanks. I love that scene.

John: Talk to us about like, those moments and figuring them out on the page, figuring them out on the pitch to the page to how they go through, because it’s your voice. You have to say like, well, no, this will work in my voice. Talk to us about that.

Brian: We have a great writer’s room. It’s a really specific group, and it came together very slowly. I even remember saying to Paul, there are these two guys that write on Shadows and I keep seeing their tweets and it’s Zach Dunn and Jake Bender. Paul was like, “Oh, that’s funny. They were asking about if they would maybe be able to come write on English Teacher with you.” It just came together really organically over time. Essentially we have a great writer’s room and we build these stories that I love and that have this real funny bone. Then beyond that, with the execution, and this comes to Krisel, Jonathan Kreisel too, the execution is where it gets all that flavor, but it’s in the writing too.

I talk a lot about texture, what’s special, one thing that we’re good at is this texture of the show, the way people talk over each other and the way people are reacting to each other. I just think it’s all of that. It’s like we’re writing the best stories we can, but then when we’re on set, we’re trying to figure out right then how to make it funnier. We do it a lot of different ways. We trust our editors, Antonia de Barros and Mike Giambra. They love us sending as many options as we can.

So I’ll do a take where I’m going huge and I’ll do a take where I barely move my face and I’ll do a take that’s like somewhere in the middle. Then we’ll do a take that’s almost– I’ll tell them, okay, now say anything you want, do one that’s like– Doesn’t have to be all improv, but just anything you want to say, like we’ve got the camera on you, so just go for it. Then some that are perfectly descript.

Stephanie: To talk about that scene where the kid is asking for his advice on being gay and he thinks he wants to come out and stuff. I think he’s really good at this, which I’ve noticed in like our sketches.

Brian: Spelling everything correctly.

Stephanie: He knows how to use the apostrophes. There’s a lot of apostrophes in that monologue.

Brian: Unnecessary.

Stephanie: No, it’s like the surprising turns, the left turns that he takes really well in comedies and what makes us laugh so hard.

Brian: Yes, because that’s what we were doing in our sketches too, was sort of being like, you expect this joke and then boom, it does this other thing.

Stephanie: Yes, so I think that’s what the show does so well, is you’re like, you’re getting led into something and then it like takes a left turn.

Craig: I think to do that as well as you guys do, you do need to be in touch with the world around you in a very real way, because that can go on, right? The same concept could be incredibly not funny and sort of upsetting, and then in that case–

Brian: You know what I think the secret sauce is to that? To this exact thing you’re talking about?

Craig: Yes.

Brian: I think it’s the acting.

Craig: Oh.

John: Oh, yes.

Brian: Maybe I shouldn’t say that.

Craig: But you’re saying you’re a good actor.

Brian: Me and everybody else on the show. No, I mean, playing things hyper real.

Craig: Grounded.

Brian: It’s amazing writing, and then you have to have really good, not just good acting, like Oscar winning acting, just acting that knows how to make that joke ripe. I say this because I’m not talking about my own performance. I’m saying like, we really care about the acting on our show.

Craig: It’s serious business.

Brian: We talk about it and we direct it and we need the performances to be a certain way to sell that joke. That moment specifically, when the kid says, “I’m gay,” and then the camera spins around, “I’m like, what? Just go talk to somebody in the hall about this. I can’t help you with this.” Yes, it’s an acting thing and the kid performing it really real. There’s this character in this field trip episode, Sharon, like we call her like stone-faced mom, right?

John: Yes, incredible.

Stephanie: Yes, she was stone faced mom.

Brian: She’s obsessed with these games that these kids are playing. Her acting is so brilliant. We saw all these different tapes for it and everybody was being funny and playing the joke. Then we got her tape and she was playing it like it was like an Oscar movie. We’re like, this was the most serious thing that’s ever happened. She’s like, have you heard about these games that these kids are playing?

Stephanie: We were all like obsessed, obsessively watching the tape.

Brian: it’s only the final piece on an amazing joke, but it’s another critical piece and I think it’s something. Jonathan Krisel also really cares about acting. If you watch Baskets, the acting in that is just hyper natural.

John: Very much so.

Brian: What’s the name of the person who played the mom in the–

Craig: Oh, Louie Anderson.

Brian: Yes. It’s so natural and that’s what we’re going for. Even telling the editors–

Stephanie: It’s the editing, yes.

Brian: -leave the little things where people say things wrong-

Stephanie: The mistakes, yes.

Brian: -or stumble on their words and make people talk over each other.

Stephanie: Like in reality, yes.

Craig: Yes. It’s a testament to you guys how technically good you are. I know that you’re saying you sort of almost stumbled into this situation and somebody plucks you out from the things you do. You have to be very, very smart to come– It needs the smartest people. The attention to detail and how serious you have to be about being funny, it’s incredible and it really shows.

Stephanie: It is also just in the writer’s room. We are like dying laughing.

Brian: Dying laughing, yes.

Stephanie: It’s probably most writer’s rooms for comedies, it’s like the joke that keeps making us laugh will stick in the episode. We’re like, “God, that still makes us laugh so hard.”

John: Talk us through the process of getting a half-hour script out of this. In that writer’s room, you’re coming up with the outline, you’re coming up with the beat, so this is what’s basically going to happen, these are the scenes. One person goes off and writes and brings back a script and then you’re workshopping it or what happens?

Brian: Oh, we’re in the nitty-gritty.

John: Oh, yeah, this is the podcast where we talk about the nitty-gritty.

Stephanie: Scriptnotes.

Brian: Okay. Yes, do we tell you? Do we tell you our process? We’re beating out the story as a group and then generally we’re sending somebody off to outline, and the outline is an outline, but it’s relatively detailed and then somebody goes off to script.

John: Is the outline funny or is the outline just-?

Stephanie: Yes.

Brian: Ideally, yes. Like Stephanie’s outline was fucking funny. [crosstalk]

Stephanie: I thought my outline was so funny.

Brian: Yes. I would say the outline is not as funny as the final script.

John: I would hope. Yes.

Brian: The outline’s not full of dialogue and the dialogue is a large part of also what’s funny, so.

Stephanie: Very true.

Brian: Yes, each part being as funny as possible is certainly ideal.

Stephanie: What I loved so much was it felt so– I felt going off and writing Powderpuff, I was like so taken care of by the story because we had really broken it. We do that with each episode. We would like really all together like break the funniest thing in the scene.

Brian: Yes, I often think going off to script is one of the least labor intensive parts because the outline is so– then you’re just dancing on the outline, but yeah.

Stephanie: It’s like it feels all easy. Isn’t that?

John: Making a TV show is easy is what I’m taking from this. Yes, so easy. Everyone can do it. Why aren’t we all doing it?

Brian: Why aren’t you guys doing it?

John: [crosstalk] We? Come on.

Brian: We have all the best writers.

Stephanie: Actually, only easy because it’s like the funniest people in there.

Brian: Yes. Dave King, Zach Dunn, Jake Bender, Emmy Blotnick. Shanna. You guys know Jeremy and Rajat?

Audience Member: Yes.

Stephanie: So funny.

John: Some people do.

Brian: You got [unintelligible 00:52:50] heading the house.

Craig: These guys know literally everything, by the way.

John: They do. They answer the questions.

Craig: These guys know everything about everything. Geniuses.

John: They should be hosting a podcast.

Brian: Geniuses.

John: Congratulations on your show.

Brian: Thank you.

John: We cannot wait to see what you guys do next.

Brian: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Stephanie: Thank you for having us.

Craig: My pleasure. Thank you.

John: All right. This is the time of the podcast where we do one cool things. Things we want to recommend to our listeners at home, to our audience here tonight. Jac, start us off because you warned that you might have two one cool things.

Jac: Oh, I’ve been sweating this for the 24 hours that I knew we had to do this. I already feel like I’m failing. The thing I am recommending to everybody is the English Teacher. In lieu of that, because everybody here’s a fan, I really loved My Old Ass. I don’t know if anyone has seen that. I think that movie is spectacular. I think it’s a Thanksgiving movie. I think it’s about gratitude. I saw it over Thanksgiving. I did a lot of crying. Aubrey is fantastic in it. Then just to be weird, I’m also going to do a song that is an obsession of mine from Billy Joel’s lesser worshipped era, Downeaster ‘Alexa’. Does anybody know that song?

Craig: Of course. Of course.

Jac: It is a song that really inspires me to write because I feel it’s very atmospheric and it’s very rousing and it conjures a place and a person and it’s very salty. Yes, it’s an inspiring piece of pop music.

Craig: It is Billy Joel’s finest nautical theme song.

Jac: That is correct.

Craig: No question. No question.

Jac: A little weird fact for y’all.

Craig: Excellent. Fantastic.

John: Hey, Brian, do you have one cool thing to share with us?

Brian: I started watching the Netflix reality show about people over 50 dating each other called Later Daters.

John: That’s a very good title.

Brian: It was excellent. I recommend it. There’s one woman in it who’s a total star.

John: Excellent. Nice.

Stephanie: You love reality TV so much.

Craig: I don’t like that we’re in a category that’s called later.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s fucked up.

John: We’re married. We’re good.

Craig: I might be over 55– We’re married, but if we did date, it would be like we should make a reality show out of you.
[laughter]

Brian: That’s freaky.

John: Stephanie, what do you have to recommend?

Stephanie: Wait, can I do two too?

John: Of course, you can do two.

Stephanie: Okay. One’s a quick one. It’s like get yourself a sun lamp. It’s one of those lamps that kind of that same warm lighting that was glazed over you guys.

Brian: You mean like a full spectrum?

Stephanie: It’s a yellow– that. You can have that in your room. At night, you’re like, “Oh God.” It just takes you to a good place. Then real quick, I would say I suggest escape rooms for dating.

Brian: Yes.

John: Sure.

Stephanie: Just a couple– Take one other person that you’re dating to an escape room.

Brian: Especially if you’re over 50.

[laughter]

Craig: We got to book. Hell yes.

John: Stephanie, that is such a good idea. Tell us more because it feels like it reveals something about a person that we’d like–

Craig: Because we love escape rooms.

Stephanie: Do you?

John: We love it. We do escape rooms all the time.

Craig: Obsessed.

John: We’re going some escape rooms things after this.

Stephanie: Okay. Really?

John: Oh, yes. [crosstalk]

Stephanie: The reason I got the idea is because me and my husband will do that. It’s like, “Do you want to go out to dinner?” “No. We’re going to go to an escape room.”

Craig: How many have you guys done, you think?

Brian: 25?

Craig: Oh my God. 25?

Stephanie: 60.

Craig: 60?

John: I’m sure.

Craig: I don’t even think they have that many.

Brian: We’re in triple digits for sure.

Jac: Do you do it with strangers? That sounds weird.

Stephanie: No.

Craig: In the early days, you did.

Stephanie: If they’re open.

Craig: That was like an issue. In the early days, they were like, “We’ve got shove 12 people in.” No one does that anymore.
Stephanie: No.

Jac: You can do it just you and a date?

Stephanie: Yes. With a friend or someone you love or somebody you might love. It does tell a lot about a person.

Craig: Are they dumb, for instance?

Stephanie: That. That. If you’re a really competitive person, it’s like you may want another competitive person who’s like, “This is serious. I don’t want any hints,” and that’ll be for you. You could really suss somebody out if they’re really upset about you not getting something right. If there was a fight in the escape room, it’s like you’re done.

Craig: Wouldn’t the worst person be somebody that is just like, “Why does this even matter?”

Stephanie: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: Date over. Over.

Stephanie: Yes. I’d be like, “Get out. Let me finish it.”

Craig: Yes. Exactly. Go home. I need to escape.

Stephanie: I need to do Welcome To Jumanji alone.

John: That’s a good one.

Stephanie: That’s one of them.

Craig: That’s a good one. Amazing.

John: Craig, what you got?

Craig: My one cool thing, Thin Mint Bites. Have you had these?

John: No. Tell us.

Craig: Oh my God. Thin Mints.

John: Yes, it’s delicious.

Craig: Girl Scouts in combination with Satan. I always thought that the thing about Thin Mints that are so good is the crunchy bit, but there’s just not enough crunchy bit. Then these bastards came up with a way to turn it into this little tiny ball. It’s all crunch with just a little bit of the chocolate on the outside. You feel like, “Oh, I’m just eating one little bit.” Then it’s like bla, bla, bla. They’ve perfected something that I thought was perfect. Christmas time, guys. Thin Mint Bites.

John: Treat yourself.

Craig: Thin Mint Bites. Fantastic.

John: Excellent. My recommendation, one cool thing that’s also very good for Christmas time, it is a show, it’s like number two on Netflix. I’m not the first person to discover the show. It is A Man on the Inside. It is a show by Mike Schur, who’s been on the podcast. He did Parks and Rec, he did The Good Place. You’ll see our own Megan Amram on the show, in a small part.

The star is Ted Danson. He is a retired professor who’s being sent undercover into a retirement home. It is really light and it’s just delightful. Then because it’s so light, it’s like a sitcom, it’s able to hit some surprisingly serious themes of mortality and just losing your sense of autonomy. Really well done. I say Christmas time because it’s actually a show you can put on with your extended family who don’t like each other and you can all watch the same thing and no one will object to it. It’s nice to have TV that is just a common experience for everyone. A Man on the Inside on Netflix.

Craig: Amazing.

Stephanie: Great rec.

John: All right. It is time for our thank yous. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew Marquardt, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, Drew.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also wrote our music tonight. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at JohnAugust.com. That’s also where you find all the transcripts going back 12 years. We’ll have lots of links to things that we talked about tonight, including your shorts and all the other stuff that you guys have done. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They make great Christmas presents. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments. Thank you to all our premium members. Do we have any premium members in the house tonight?

Craig: Oh, amazing.

John: Oh, my God. Look at that, so good.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Premium members also get first notice about live events like we’re doing tonight. Thank you to Brian Jordan Alvarez, to Stephanie Koenig, to Jac Schaeffer.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Do you want to do stuff?

Craig: Sure. Thank you to Kasey Anderson and everyone at Hollywood HEART. Remember, you can learn more about their programs at HollywoodHEART.org. Also thank you to Dax Jordan and everyone in the booth. Thank you to Missy Steele, Mary Sadler, and everyone at Dynasty Typewriter. Thank you to all of you. It is so much fun to get to do this live. Thank you guys for showing up and making us feel welcome.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Appreciate it.

John: Have a great night.

Craig: Have a great night.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, it is time for our audience questions. If we can bring up the house lights a little bit, and if we can bring our producer, Drew Marquardt here.

Craig: Yay, Drew.

John: Sometimes, Craig, in the past, you’ve run into situations where people seem confused about the idea of a question, and you try to give them instructions, and yet still it doesn’t quite work.

Craig: It’s amazing. Every time there’s one.

John: I thought this time we might do some modeling of behavior. Drew, this is an actual question that came in to ask at JohnAugust.com, a legit question, but maybe you could be an audience member asking a question.

Drew Marquardt: Hi, guys. Big fan.

Craig: Get to the question.

Drew: A writer friend of mine recently asked me what I’ll be getting my reps for Christmas, and my answer was I didn’t know that was a thing. Is that a thing? If so, what should I get them?

Craig: That was in the form of a question. It was concise. Loved it.

John: Loved it. Let’s talk about getting your reps, your managers, your publicists, the folks who work for you on your behalf, getting them holiday presents. What do we think? Suggestions?

Craig: Their publicists are here, so they got to lie about that.

John: All right. Let’s think about other folks.

Craig: Like the agents.

John: The agents. Agents or agents assistants.

Craig: Agents assistants, yes.

John: All right. Talk to us about this, because back in the day, I used to know my agents assistants because I would talk to them on the phone all the time, and we don’t talk on the phone that much. I’m just emailing people now.

Craig: Right. Also, back in the day, we were probably sort of their age and we were all sweating it out. Now, it is a nice thing if you can remember and so just make the list of– and it’s a good old fashioned Amazon gift card or an Apple gift card or something like that, so that you don’t have to like use brain power and, “Oh, I wonder what John would like,” whatever. It’s a nice thing to do. The agents deserve nothing. Nothing. They get 10%. That’s enough. It’s enough.

John: Craig’s gift to a manager is not firing them.

Craig: What manager?

John: What manager? Jac, do you have any guidance? What do you think about gifts for your reps?

Jac: This is tricky. It’s making me real nervous. What I do think, like for up and coming writers, I would say you do not need to get anything of monetary value for your representation. I think that holiday gifting in the industry is something that happens when you cross that invisible line into some form of success. I started noticing I was getting gifts from people I wouldn’t have expected to get gifts from after WandaVision.

I am sort of just getting my gifting together because I feel like a puppy that’s learning from like the bigger dogs. I would say, early in your career, absolutely not. Later, you’re sort of indicated. I think the types of gifts that the people who are making money in the industry, it’s like I do think always, always acknowledging a person is the thing. Calling someone by name, wishing them well, sending them an email, giving some lip service to what they have done for you is you can never go wrong with that.

Craig: Great answer.

Brian: I keep it simple. I get each member of my team a brand new car.

John: Okay. Good. Do you let them pick the color?

Brian: No, I pick the color.

John: Drew, thank you for that question. That was a great question.

Craig: Thank you, Drew.

[applause]

John: All right. Now, if you are an audience member who would like to ask a question of us, of our panel up here, this is the time you can line up. Now, John, remember you can ask the first question if you choose to ask the question, but there’s no pressure.

Audience Member: All right. Just for the younger, like the up and coming, just breaking in and are about to spend 8 to 10 years grinding and probably overthinking as you are, like you’re in it though, but you’re at the very beginning. What is the advice? The one thing that sort of, and it’s usually I feel like something simple you would tell yourself.
Craig: What is the advice that we would give our younger selves?

John: Yes.

Brian: Do less, more often.

Craig: Oh. I like that.

Brian: I got that from somebody else, but I’ve been doing that my whole life. Do less, more often.

Stephanie: Like a brick a day is going to build a house?

Brian: Yes. You can build a house by putting one brick down a day.

Stephanie: I would add to that and say, whatever energy you’re putting into something, like energy in will match out. It might not be what you’re expecting, but it always– it’s like if you’re putting it in every day, something will happen.

Brian: Right. There’s no wasted energy. You could spend four years working on a project that doesn’t work out, but that energy will be the thing that made your next project work.

Craig: I like that. What about you? Do you have anything?

Jac: I would say the feeling that you get when you’re like at a bar telling a friend a story and you’re loving telling them the story and they’re loving hearing it and they’re hanging on your every word, channel that into your work.

Craig: Yes. Nice. Ooh.

Brian: Nobody’s ever hung on my every word.

Craig: Lots of snapping. Love that. John, you got any?

John: I do. I will say that too often you’re looking for who is the person who is a few steps ahead of me who could help me out. That’s the mistake. Look for people who are at your level who are trying to do the things you’re trying to do. Make friends with them. Help on their short films. They’ll help on your short films. Rise together with a group.

Jac: So good.

Craig: I love that. I’ll leave you with this very simple one. Do the work. Work. So much calculating, so much guessing, so much thinking, planning, wondering, blah-blah-blah. Do the work. Just do the work. That’ll get you there.

John: John, thank you for your question.

Audience: Good copy.

[applause]

John: Nicely done. Hello. What is your name and what is your question?

Brandt: Hello, my name is Brandt. My question is mainly for Craig, so ‘70s and ‘80s, Airplane, Naked Gun, huge movies, spoof movies. Then ‘90s, early 2000s, Scary Movie and Austin Powers. Today, from 2010s to today, there’s really no spoof movies around. I’m just questioning why you think that is.

Craig: An opportunity first to say rest in peace to Jim Abrahams, who is one of the three members of Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker, and a wonderful man. I think the reason is actually a lot to do with what you were talking about earlier with the way timing and technology works. Back then, a movie would come out and people would talk about it amongst themselves. No one would be talking to each other across the country or the world. Then somebody would say, “Here’s a funny version of that.”

Everything is parodied instantly and publicly, second by second. A parody or spoof is ancient by the time next week rolls around. There’s just no way. When Jerry and Jim and David made Airplane, they were spoofing a movie called Zero Hour that no one had seen from the 1950s. No one lets you do that anymore. No one’s interested in that. It turned into this weird pop culture machine. They are remaking Naked Gun and Seth MacFarlane making it with Liam Neeson, which that’s fucking exciting.

Brandt: Definitely.

Craig: I don’t know if you’ve seen his thing on Ricky Gervais’ Show where he’s, “Let’s do some improvisational comedy.” It’s fucking incredible.

Jac: Even as the Lego cop. He’s so funny.

Craig: Yes, that Lego cop. He’s just like that when he was like the deadpan– that’s my hope, but it’s unfortunately technology.

John: Stephanie, you were about to say something?

Stephanie: I made a spoof and you should watch it if you’re craving.

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: What’s the spoof?

Stephanie: It’s called A Spy Movie. You can watch it on YouTube.

Brandt: Yes. I definitely will.

Craig: How about that?

Stephanie: It works.

Brian: It works. It’s amazing.

Stephanie: It’s because it’s not specifically-

Brian: It’s not topical.

Stephanie: Yes. It’s not parodying– like it’s not doing the exact copy of the scene and remaking it. It’s actually just going–

Brian: The genre?

Stephanie: Yes. Yes, so you have to be less specific about it.

Craig: I think that’s exactly right.

John: Great. Brant, thank you so much.

Brandt: Awesome. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

Stephanie: I’m like shameless plug.

John: Hello. What is your name? What is your question?

Ken: Hi. My name is Ken. It’s for everyone on the panel. When you have a story idea, whether it’s for like an original feature or an episode of something or even just a scene, when you have that first spark, what do you immediately do to get that sort of seed to sprout to become something other than a passing notion? Then, by the same token, when you get further on in that idea and you hit what Aline Brosh McKenna calls the Rocky Shoals and you slow down. What do you do to remember what really sparked you about it in the first place?

John: For me, my first instinct is I do just write it down just so I don’t completely lose it, so I have like a stack of next cards and just like write down the idea so I don’t lose it. There’s something that resonates with me that’ll keep me thinking back about it. If it’s an idea that I do forget about next week, it was never that good of an idea. It’s the ones that keep demanding brain time like, “Oh, that’s a really good idea. I have to remember what that is.” I see some nodding.

Jac: Yes, I agree with that. For me, this is very specific to me, so this isn’t necessarily advice. I find that if I have something I’m excited about, if I tell someone about it, the magic goes away. The longer I keep something secret, the more I nurture it because I am thirsting for the day that I share it. The more sacred– and I can tell when something is very sacred because I have the discipline not to be like, “I had this really cool idea,” Even to my husband, like I just protect it, protect it, protect it.

For me, that works. That’s sort of like hoarding, “It’s my secret treasure,” spurs me on. Then later, when it gets bad, there are people in my life who they’re light helps me. Megan McDonald is one of them, like truly. There are personalities that if I talk to them about the thing, they have a natural energy that reminds me what I love and I can continue.

Stephanie: I follow that. The magic, it going away, is so huge.

Jac: Leaves the building, it’s so sad.

Stephanie: My husband gets so mad at me when I tell somebody an idea that I’ve had. He’s like, “It’s gone, girl. It’s gone.” It’s like 80% of the time I’m like, “Yes, I don’t like that idea anymore.”

John: Great. Thank you very much for your question.

Craig: Thank you.

Christy: Hi, I’m Christy and I’m an actor who’s dabbling in screenwriting. I was wondering if you had any specific, especially because we have some actresses who are like obviously doing more than dabbling.

Brian: What is that can in your hand?

Christy: Oh, it’s wine.

Brian: Oh, nice. You were kind of holding it out.

Jac: I thought you were filming us or something.

Craig: I thought it was a phone.

Christy: It was like a cheers, like top of the morning.

Craig: Okay, cheers. Yes.

Brian: Yes. I’ve been drinking. Yes. I love it. Do you remember your question?

Craig: You’re saying you’re an actor and–?

Brian: Some advice on being an actor and then transitioning to writing.

Stephanie: Yes. Okay. I strongly suggest it’s similar to what John was saying is like finding people that are in a similar position as you that make you laugh or you trust their creativity and you make stuff with them. I don’t know. I just think it’s easier with community as an actor when you’re specifically writing something for you to be into. You usually want to make it. You want to show that it’s just– and it was so helpful to– I swear to God, I would not be up here if I wasn’t also writing stuff for myself. The auditions, the endless auditions that people are like, “Next, next, next. They are not interested,” which is insane.

Brian: Because she’s so fucking good.

Stephanie: It’s just crazy to me. Yes, there’s been so many rejections. Actually, it was so nice. It was so nice. I remember like being like I would come home after like an audition or like a casting director being like– Oh, whatever. I’m not going to say anything. The rejection actually like fueled the writing. It was like you can do something, you can actively do something about it when you are inspired to write.

Brian: I support this. My only question is do you want to make things? Are you more like, “I should do that because people say I’ve got to break in that way.” I don’t know that I have an answer either way. I do think there’s a lot of pressure when you are an actor to figure out how to make something. I was always making things and so were you. We were making movies as kids, like on our handy cam. It’s also like an old muscle.

I don’t know. I would say you can you can also just be an actor and stay on the grind and you will get a part that will get you another part that will get you another. I many times was pursuing that trajectory and had some success that way, and also had more success also making things, so I don’t know. Do you have a natural instinct to write something and film something, or it’s more you’re doing it because people are telling you that that’s the only way to break in?

Christy: I have made things. I feel the same as you where it’s like I did it, it was so hard and I got it made and it got some recognition and people said it was good. Then it’s like, “I guess I’ll make another one.”

Craig: Welcome to writing. Yes, it never ends. “I guess I got to go make another one.” Here we go. That’s what it is. That’s the gig. It never ends. That’s how you know you’re a writer. When you go look– When you hit the end, you’re so proud of yourself for whatever. Give yourself a week… Fade in. Here we go again.

Christy: God damn it.

Craig: I know. I know.

John: Thanks so much.

Brian: Good question.

John: Hello. Can you tell us your name?

Katie: Hi, I’m Katie. In a previous episode, you guys mentioned that it can be helpful to let your representatives pigeonhole you in a genre as a writer so that they know where to put you. You guys have a myriad of different genres that you’ve written for. I’m curious how you navigate transitioning out of that once you have solidified your foundation.

John: Great. That’s a great question. I think what we said on the podcast before is like sometimes it’s useful for people to know what box to put you in just so they have some sense of how to send you out into the world. Yet it can be really frustrating. For a while before Go, I was only getting sent family movies. Things about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. With Go, I was able to say like, “No, I can really write a lot of other things.” Jac, I’m curious for you, as a feature writer, were you pigeonholed originally? Was there a thing that like, “Oh, we’d think about Jac for this, but not for other things.”?

Jac: Yes. I made a feature called Timer. Referring to the previous question.

Brian: I made a one called Oppenheimer so, people watched that too.

Jac: I wrote because I wanted to be a director. I’m not a good actor, so that really resonated with me, the like do you have the creator piece? Because I think that’s really what it is. I made it, this feature called Timer that’s about a device that counts down to the moment that you meet your soulmate. I was going for like an eternal sunshine, kind of a vibe. When people looked at it, all they saw was the rom-com. For a long time, I was the rom-com girl.

John: You’re also a woman. Could that be a part of it?

Jac: Yes.

John: Maybe.

Jac: It was a little bit of a part of it. It was really frustrating. Then I wrote– I was very angry. That’s another thing you said that I feel like when you write out of frustration, it can be really fantastic, like when you’re sick of something. I wrote the spec out of frustration and it was to sort of break out of the box. It got on the Black List. It’s called The Shower. It’s about a baby shower that gets interrupted by an apocalyptic alien invasion.

I was like I can do action. I had no idea how to do action, but I was like– so I sort of burst out of the box with a spec script. In fact, my agents didn’t get it. My manager, bless her, was like, “It’s time for you to leave,” so I left with like no career and a spec script that nobody got that was totally just all about vagina panic. It was me being like every horror movie is just a big, scary vagina and I need to address that in the script.

The script, then it got on the Black List, then I got representation. For my journey, I had to be like I’m going to write the thing. I didn’t feel like it was helpful at all to be in the rom-com box. I do think it is about what a kind of a creator you want to be. Do you want to be a writer for hire who can do any genre, any thing, like whatever? Then you need material that demonstrates that. If you want to have a singular voice, you got to write that singular voice. I think the real answer is what do you envision for yourself and write that.

John: We can stop there. That’s great.

Craig: Terrific.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

John: All right. Our last two questions of the night.

Thomas: Hi, I’m Thomas. This one’s aimed at Brian and Stephanie, but open to whoever.

Craig: I’ll take this.

Thomas: When you’re making your own stuff and you’re excited about it, how do you strike that balance of wanting to show your friends and your contacts and stuff, but also not wanting to seem annoying or needy?

Brian: Wanting to show your friends and your–?

Thomas: When you make something and you’re really excited about it and you want to send it to everyone, but you don’t want to annoy them.

Brian: Oh. That’s a great question.

Craig: Early on when you’re like, “Look, I made another short,” and everyone’s like, “We really don’t care.”

Brian: I have a gift where I’m not afraid to be annoying. My mom, when I was like five, she was like, “When you go to school, don’t care what people think of you.” Obviously, I care what people think of me. It’s also not just that I’m not afraid to be annoying. It’s that just being annoying– I had an older sister, so I just am kind of annoying. Then that’s like– it’s just not all the time, but it’s just a part of my personality where I’m like, even, I don’t know, it’s like part of something I’m comfortable within my relationships. I’m like, “Oh, I’m being a little annoying right now.” I can’t believe I’m saying this publicly. This is crazy.

Stephanie: It’s very endearing.

Craig: You brought your publicist. We will strike it from the record. “I’m annoying.”

Brian: Anyway, hopefully it’s endearing or something.

Stephanie: You’re saying don’t worry about it.

Brian: I’m just saying, yes, I would make something that I thought was funny. I would post it on YouTube, but I would also like send it around to people and be like, whatever. J. Crew is spamming me every day. I can spam my friends.

Craig: He’s got a point there.

Brian: You’re a business. You got to get your stuff out there. What I do say a bit more earnestly is, at first, if the stuff you’re making is good, which I’m sure it is. At first, maybe you’re sort of spamming people or you’re being annoying about sharing it. Eventually, people are sort of thanking you. “Oh my God. I love your stuff.” It’s almost like the same people that were ignoring it at first are like just complimenting it later. I don’t know. It’s like the– and the world will thank you for being willing to give it something that’s cool, that it didn’t have before. Then eventually you won’t be annoyingly spamming people on Facebook. You’ll be here talking about your TV show. That’s cool.

Craig: Yes. If it’s good, it’s not annoying.

Brian: Yes. Yes.

Stephanie: That’s great. That’s amazing.

Brian: It’s okay to be annoying, basically. I think.

Stephanie: Yes. What’s the point? You might–

Brian: Any business is annoying. It’s trying to–

Stephanie: Yes. No, but there’s also just no loss in spamming people your stuff that you made, and you made it. It’s like, “Watch it, damn it.”

Brian: Yes. Exactly.

Stephanie: Send it away.

Craig: I like this.

John: I will tell you that I feel your insecurity there because I’ll post one thing. I posted the one thing that’s all [unintelligible 01:20:16] and then I do it, but then I have friends who are 15 stories in a row for the next two weeks that are proposing another thing. It’s like, “I clicked through and it’s fine.” I’m not angry with them. I would say err on the side of showing too much because you don’t know who’s going to see it, and then when they’re going to see it. People are not going to get annoyed by you. They’re not going to unfollow you, it’s fine.

Craig: I wish that all our emails had the thing that the texts have that says, “Reply ‘stop’ to end,” so that I could respond to a friend with just the word stop.

Brian: But if you think about it, what you are trying to do is make something that the whole world sees. It’s like why would you be afraid of trying to get a bunch of people to see your thing. Isn’t that why you made it? Maybe it’s not why you made it, maybe it’s also you make it because it comes of you and is art and needs to exist, but it’s both, you want people to see it. Don’t be afraid of showing it to people.

Thomas: Thank you so much.

Brian: Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Our final question, and I don’t want to jinx you, but these have been the best questions we’ve had on a live show.

Craig: Oh, that is such a jinx. Oh my God. I would be drenched in sweat if I were you right now.

[laughter]

John: Let’s see if you can hold up to the standard here.

Ben: Oh, no.

John: Oh no. First off, what’s your name?

Ben: Hello, my name is Ben.

John: Hi, Ben.

Ben: I have a question about how writers’ rooms are scheduled and structured. I’m wondering-

Jac: I love this topic, so I’m already in on this question.

Ben: -Is it like a 9:00 to 5:00, a 10:00 to 6:00? Is it every Saturday and Sunday? I just have this irrational fear that if I get staffed, I’ll never see my wife again. I’m just curious how that works.

John: What a good question. Well done, Ben.

Jac: Such a good question. Such a good question.

Ben: Thank you.

John: What an audience. What an incredible audience.

[cheers]

Craig: I think we made it. I think we made it. This is a great audience.

John: Maybe the best audience we’ve ever had.

Craig: I think it might be.

John: It is a Christmas miracle. Jac Schaeffer, we’ve talked about writers rooms a lot.

Jac: We have. I love this question. I stumbled into TV with WandaVision because I was writing features at Marvel. When I got the job, I won the job, they were like, “How do you want to do this?” I was like, “How do I want to do this?” I asked all the smart people I knew who had TV experience and Micah Fitzerman-Blue said to me, “It is possible to have a civilized writers room that is 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, and that you get your work done. You have to be focused. You give them 15 minutes to shoot the shit in the morning. You are clear about what time your lunches are.” He broke it out for me.

My children were two and four. I was like, “This is going to blow up everything.” Also, I was doing TM at the time. I was like, “When does the TM happen?” Transcendental meditation, it’s 20 minutes, twice a day. I don’t do it anymore, which is maybe why WandaVision is probably the best thing I’ll ever make, because I was tapped into something. I’m a kind person and I’m a warm maternal person.

So I was warm, but I was real clear. I was like, “Go to the bathroom when you need to go to the bathroom.” Another thing I was told is let everyone know what the expectations are, and how they can reach you, when they can reach you, when you’re on the clock, when you’re not. I was told to give homework because I was like, “I don’t want to sit here,” like, “We’re not going to stare at each other until it gets funny or cool.” We end, everybody leaves.

I also had an hour-long commute. I was on the West side. We were at Marvel. It was, like, I’m still married and good job me. It’s because of what I did in this room. That’s not every showrunner, that’s not every show, but there are rooms out there that function in a way that support a life outside of the room and also support your creative mind outside the room.

Not everybody is fast in the room. Some of the greatest ideas on both my shows were born of homework, were born of people reflecting. Sometimes they would do it in pairs. They were allowed to stay as long as they wanted to stay. The childless people were there all the time. I promised them we wouldn’t have any overnight work sessions. We ended up doing that on WandaVision, and everyone loved it because it felt like we were kids in a candy store. This is the longest answer forever.

Brian: This is so good. Amazing. I’m learning.

Jac: I believe that we are currently in a moment where people can advocate for their personal lives and for their mental health, and I hope that we stay there. I think it’s about people in charge modelling that, and I think everyone has a right to that. You just have to do your job well. That’s the end of it.

Ben: That’s a big relief, thank you.

[applause]

Stephanie: Are there writers rooms Saturday, Sunday that you guys– Other than Saturday Night Live? That’s not even Saturday.

Jac: No.

Stephanie: I think Saturday and Sunday, you got-

Brian: I think the other thing is they vary wildly.

Jac: Production is totally different.

John: Production’s crazy.

Craig: You need to get a job on one of her shows. [crosstalk]

John: I was going to say.

Craig: You’ve got to get a job first.

Brian: We all want to work for Jac.

Craig: Step one, get a job.

Ben: It’s funny, you mentioned mental health. My wife is a therapist, which is why I’m asking this question for my own mental health. Thank you.

Craig: That’s great.

John: Great question.

Jac: Bless her.

Ben: Thank you.

Links:

• Hollywood HEART
• Jac Schaeffer
• Brian Jordan Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig
• Agatha All Along
• Fleetwood Mac – Silver Springs (Live)
• English Teacher
• A Spy Movie on YouTube
• Sitting
• My Old Ass
• The Downeaster “Alexa”
• The Later Daters on Netflix
• Sun lamps
• Thin Mint bites
• A Man on the Inside on Netflix
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.