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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-wizard-of-splash).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 612 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, if the hero of your story is a fish out of water, it really matters what that water is. We’ll look at the importance of starting context for your character’s journey and definitively break down all films into just two categories. We’ll also looking at Rotten Tomatoes, gibberish, vanishing movies, and in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, Craig, we have a new suggestion from you.

**Craig:** Yes. Today on our Bonus Segment, we’re gonna be talking about diabetes, both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Lots to discuss. Worth the five bucks, I should say.

**John:** Yes, because you’ll get news and insight.

**Craig:** Could be lifesaving.

**John:** It could be lifesaving, generally could be, but only for the people who can pay $5.

**Craig:** Correct. Everyone else dies.

**John:** Dies. We have some follow-up, speaking of things that are no longer on this earth. Drew, help us out.

**Drew Marquardt:** Ghosted by the Studios writes, “While I’m so happy for Craig and those Disney Plus show creators to be able to have a physical copy of their work, I’m sad not to be in their company. A film that I wrote and deeply love, and for which I earned my first Writers Guild award nomination for, was unceremoniously disappeared from a streaming site a few months ago with no warning, leaving me with no record of the movie I wrote. I was gutted. I still am. Since then, I’ve been trying to get a DVD copy or even a digital link so I can have the movie in my library to show my kids when they’re old enough, but unfortunately, my contract was for a feature film, as the film was originally slated to go to theaters before COVID sent it to streaming instead. Because of that, I was only entitled to a DVD if a DVD was produced. But since the movie was an original film for the streaming site, there was never a DVD made. This has all left me wondering if there’s any possibility the Guild could ever create a new contract stipulation, that for films that go directly to streaming, the screenwriter is entitled to a digital copy of the movie at the least.

“There seems to be nothing I can do about it now, but perhaps we could save future screenwriters from the pain of losing something that means so much to them by adding new creative rights language to keep up with the times. Do you think that’s possible?”

**John:** I feel really bad for Ghosted here. On the question whether that’s a Guild thing that could happen, it’s not inconceivable. It’s nothing that’s gonna be happening in this time. What you’re talking about with if the film has a DVD, you get a copy of the DVD, that was in your individual contract. When Craig and I did the episode where we talked through your individual contract, that’s one of the clauses that’s really standard to be in there. Maybe we can break our advice down in a couple categories. What should Ghosted do right now, and then, Craig, what should we be thinking about so future people don’t get in Ghosted’s situation?

**Craig:** Certainly quite a bit of empathy here, Ghosted, although I’m gonna give you a little ray of hope. It hasn’t been disintegrated. It’s just been removed from streaming now. That doesn’t mean it won’t come back. The odds are, at some point all this stuff will somehow come back. They generally like to make money off of these things.

Right now you can try, as you said, to get a copy. It’s gonna be difficult, because A, we’re on strike, and the companies have even less instinct to help us than they normally would. Also, it’s Disney, and good luck navigating that whole situation. They also have this bizarre thing where they don’t want to give you a digital copy of something for fear that it will lead to piracy of the thing that they don’t even give you an option to see legally. It’s gonna be a bit of an uphill battle there.

I think going ahead, this is really a cri de coeur for agencies and lawyers, maybe even more importantly, lawyers to just put these clauses into contracts that guarantees a digital or physical copy for everything that you do if something is produced. That just seems like a good idea to start doing. If companies are reluctant or resistant, then it ultimately comes down to more successful writers, very successful writers, I should say, I don’t know how successful Ghosted is, who can get whatever they want, to begin kicking that door open. This feels like it’s going to become a boilerplate clause soon enough. The lawyers are all aware of what’s going on.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll start with the second part, going ahead, how do we get this solved. Ghosted, you as a screenwriter really want a copy of that movie. You know who else does? The director. Directors will fight for it in their contracts. Whether DGA makes it an issue, who knows. But once that veil is breached, then I think we can see, okay, you have a right to a digital copy or a physical copy of whatever work that you’ve done.

I would say that is actually a thing that Ghosted can pursue right now. I don’t know what your relationship is like with the director or the producer or the editor. I would reach out to the director and say, “Hey, do you have a copy of this somewhere?” because they probably do. They probably copied it off the AVOD at some point and they have some version of it somewhere. Just get that, stick it on a drive somewhere, just so you have some backup. The editor might also have that kind of thing. You don’t have to say to anybody that you have it. Just so you know from your personal security. Your kids will be able to see this thing you did.

Craig is right. These companies are not in the business of not making money. If they can money off this movie you wrote, they’ll put it on some other service, some other site. They’ll find a way to sell it, because it’s not making them any money right now, and they like to make money off of it. That’s going to help. It’ll be on iTunes or Amazon or some other place to rent or buy, because they want to make money. It’s really frustrating for you right now that this movie that was just 2020 is not available to see anywhere in the world.

**Craig:** That’s good advice, to reach out to the director. I guarantee you the director has a non-finished version at the very least, maybe the final director’s cut or something like that. It’s not gonna be perfect. The sound is all gonna be temp and rough and unmixed. The director may be reluctant to share this with you because it will be watermarked to them. If it does get out there, then they’re in trouble. It just is an exercise in trust and comes down to your relationship with that person.

The editor almost certainly no longer has access to the files. All that stuff gets locked up, because when we edit now, by and large the media does not rest on the editor’s computer the way it used to. The editor used to have a bunch of hard drives sitting there at the table with all the media. The way we’re accessing those now is everything is located in some, I think for The Last of Us it was all in some server farmed and downtown LA. The nice part is you could edit the show anywhere you were, but you, unsurprisingly, do not have physical access to the media. It’s now under lockdown.

**John:** I would say one situation in which they may have made a physical copy it or they may have put it on a hard drive is, did you have a test screening? If you had a test screening, that was probably something that was carried to that theater.

**Craig:** Yeah, a DCP.

**John:** There may be some version of it that’s out there someplace. Worth asking. By the way, if you’re having this conversation with the editor, with the director, they have the same concerns you do, and so maybe together you can, once the Strike’s over, lobby hard to get that copy of it.

We had Patrick Somerville on the podcast a while back. He did the show Station 11, which I loved so much. He was really concerned that at some point the show that he’d done for HBO Max would disappear. He was able to finally get a DVD copy of it, just so he could have it on his shelf someplace. What you’re fearing and feeling is felt across the industry.

**Craig:** Everyone’s wrestling with this right now. Nobody until really a year ago had contemplated that things would just disappear. We’re all still scratching our heads, because very few of us are tax attorneys, to even figure out why they’re doing this, but they’re doing it. Greater minds than ours are currently tackling this problem. Let us hope that they solve it.

**John:** It looks like we have another bit of follow-up here. This is from an academic perspective.

**Drew:** This is from David. He writes, “I’m an academic librarian at a university, and I occasionally get requests from instructors who want to show a video, often a documentary, in class. There’s a classroom exemption in copyright law which allows performance or display of any material in an in-person classroom setting for educational persons without violating copyright. So if the library or the instructor has a DVD or Blu-ray of the material, there’s no problem showing it in class. Unfortunately, it’s increasingly the case that the video the instructor wants to show is only available from a streaming service, usually Netflix. All the standard streamers have licensing terms that don’t allow public display, which is defined to include classrooms. And of course none of the streamers offer institutional subscriptions, since they want individual students to subscribe. In these cases, I have to inform the instructor that there’s no legal way to show the video in class. They wouldn’t be violating copyright law, but they would be breaching the terms of their license. Of course, many instructors don’t bother asking and just show the video using their personal Netflix account, ignoring the licensing terms. But it’s really maddening that streamers provide no legal means to show their videos in class. I’m happy when they’re made available on Blu-ray, since that provides a way to legally use them in a classroom.”

He also writes that Netflix does have a program where they allow the showing of some of their documentaries for educational purposes, with very strict limits. However, he’s yet to have an instructor request a video that was on that list.

**Craig:** A lot of people don’t understand that when they are watching a streaming service, they click accept terms at some point, without reading the terms, of course, and those licensing terms are like a private contract between you and Netflix. You are agreeing that you are paying this money for a specific set of rights to view their streaming work. That can supersede copyright law, because it is essentially more binding. It’s an additional thing that you’re agreeing to.

In this instance, David, I would fully flout the law and dare Netflix to hunt you down and sue you for having somebody show a documentary in a classroom. They’re not going to do it. They don’t have the time. They don’t have the care. It would be terrible publicity. I think the terms there are designed to protect Netflix from one person using an account to roll a movie of theirs in a bar and charge people to come and watch it. It’s not about a classroom. I wouldn’t worry about this. But you’re right. This is indeed technically the case.

**John:** I think classrooms and copyright are a really interesting intersection, because there have obviously been issues where instructors will want a chapter from a book and they’ll have it photocopied out and that will become a copyright violation. There’ll be whole issues with that. They’ve been dealing with that for a while.

I think, Craig, your advice is the right one here. Just turn the blind eye and do it in this situation, because they’re never going to come after you. You do need to be mindful of certain places might, but the big ones are not gonna risk the publicity of that kind of fight.

**Craig:** Look, if you have to know that one of your student’s moms is an IP lawyer at Netflix, then maybe not. But other than that, go for it. This feels about as victimless a crime as it gets. Netflix, their licensing terms, although they do supersede fair use doctrine, the spirit of fair use is being violated there. This feels a little bit like civil disobedience to me in a nice way, even though it’s not like they’re a government or anything.

**John:** I wouldn’t be surprised to see some case law in this area in years to come, because we have those exemptions and copyright for a reason. The fact that it’s a slightly different medium shouldn’t really impact that.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t hold your breath on that, only because Netflix’s point is, we’re not requiring you to watch our stuff. You’re agreeing to it. We’re putting some conditions here. If you don’t like them, then don’t pay us money, and don’t watch it. It’s legal. It’s just lame.

**John:** It’s lame. Finally, our most important bit of follow-up, back in Episode 610 in our Bonus topic, we talked about going back to school and lining up to go from room to room in size order. We have an answer for why we did that.

**Drew:** Ian says, “Size order is for the teacher’s benefit to aid with inventory and roll call. When everyone’s in a single line, the teacher can stand at the front and see the faces of every student and ensure, in theory, that each student can see the teacher. The line of height becomes ingrained so any gap is easily identifiable by sight, and also no need to memorize names.”

**Craig:** I reject this explanation as thoroughly and vigorously as any explanation can be rejected. Look. First of all, we know, because we all lined up in size order, that there are going to be at least three to four kids in 5th grade who are almost exactly the same height. It’s not like every kid is three inches… The one in front is two feet, and the one in back is seven foot nine? That just doesn’t work that way.

Second of all, gaps? The notion that this lineup is that orderly… It’s not the military. We’re talking about nine-year-olds who are nuts. They’re all wiggling around and hunching and standing up and jumping. The boys are punching each other for no apparent reason.

If you can’t memorize their names, particularly when you are an elementary school teacher, which is where the lineup is happening, and you are responsible for the same group all day long, five days a week, then something’s wrong with you. Plus, they slap name-tags on you for the first three weeks. There’s not gonna be a gap. The only noticeable gap would occur if, again, you had some extremes of height.

Here’s my explanation. Size order is because they just want you to get in a damn line, and it gives you a reason to get in a line. More importantly, this is why it happens. Ian, I want you to listen carefully, because my explanation is one million times better than yours. Making kids line up in size order eliminates this thing that happens, primarily with boys, where they want to be in front of each other, that somehow being earlier in line is better, so they give you an ordering to follow so that you stop fighting about nonsense.

**John:** I like that as a theory. Another theory I’ll float is that kids want to be the tallest, and so they think the tallest should be in first, in front. Instead, this makes the smallest kid the leader of the line. That feels good, helping the underdog.

When I think about lining up in size order, I cannot help but think about the Von Trapp children in Sound of Music and the whistle. They’re lining up in line. Then you really could see a gap. Then you have a very limited set of children, so you’re going to notice when someone’s missing there.

**Craig:** Yes, perhaps Hans or-

**John:** Here’s my other question. Possibly, they want to make sure that kids are learning the importance of a sorting algorithm. Are you doing a bubble sort? What is the proper way of, am I taller than this person next to me? How are they determining where they should be in that line?

**Craig:** Is it a first-in-first-out stack? Are you popping? Absolutely. You may be on to something, that this is really about training the next generation of database management.

**John:** We would love to hear from actual grade school teachers to see, A, are you ever lining up by height? In my class it was always by last name, because we were mostly going down to the cafeteria and had to sign in for school lunch. If you are lining up by height, why are you doing? I want actual teachers with on-the-ground experience.

**Craig:** Actual teachers, on-the-ground experience. I will continue to reject… I don’t care if the entire National Education Association issues a press release.

**John:** Randi Weingarten is going to come here and she’s going to talk to us about it.

**Craig:** If Randi Weingarten comes and says, “No no no, really is so that you can see all the faces of each student,” I’m gonna reject it. I’m gonna punt that into the sun a thousand times.

**John:** It’s come time for our marquee topic. This all stems from a dream I had while I was traveling.

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**John:** In this dream, I was talking with a writer about their script. Rachel Bloom was sitting next to me for some reason. She was not really an active part of the dream, but it felt like an important detail that Rachel was sitting next to me.

I was talking to this writer. I said, “You have your character going on a journey that takes them to a new world. It’s new for them, and it’s new for us. We’re learning about that new world with them. It’s like The Wizard of Oz. It’s kind of hard for that to be funny, because your hero is reacting in ways that are completely what we’d expect, because it’s new and bizarre to them. Compare that to Splash. There you have an outsider coming to a world that the audience fully understands, and the comedy is that this hero doesn’t understand this world, and that tension is part of what makes it funny.”

My thesis coming out of this dream is that not all movies are fish out of water stories, but all fish out of water stories can be sorted into either The Wizard of Oz or Splash. Craig?

**Craig:** Yes?

**John:** Do you believe this premise?

**Craig:** I would argue with your dream premise that it’s hard to be funny when you are going into a new world.

**John:** Harder. I think there’s moments of comedy that you’re missing because it’s a new world.

**Craig:** It’s different comedy, but yes, either the fish is going on land or the human is going in water.

**John:** The land being, we’re used to land as humans.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Great. Okay.

**Craig:** Either somebody that doesn’t belong in the world we know comes into it or somebody leaves the world we know and goes into one we don’t.

**John:** What I’ll call The Wizard of Oz stories, the hero comes from the mundane world, Kansas, to a new world. Dorothy arrives in Oz. It’s literally in color. She has to learn about all the rules of the world. The audience is on the same page. We are not ahead of the hero at all about this world. We have to learn how it works with the hero. Classic template.

Splash movies are basically the hero comes from a strange world to a very mundane world. In Splash, she’s a mermaid who comes to New York. They don’t know how to behave, but the audience does know how to behave. That’s the comedy. These are usually comedies, Splash setups. It comes from that tension between what the hero is doing, not understanding the rules of the world.

**Craig:** Very often, when we’re talking about a movie where somebody leaves a world we don’t know to enter our world, the hero is not that person. The hero is a person in the real world who is trying to help the new arrival acclimate.

**John:** Classically, the Tom Hanks character you would say is the hero of Splash.

**Craig:** Unquestionably.

**John:** He is trying to help Daryl Hannah’s character adapt to this situation she finds herself in.

**Craig:** Do you remember her name?

**John:** Manhattan?

**Craig:** No, not Manhattan. Madison.

**John:** Madison, of course. That was probably the introduction of Madison as a name that actual children were named.

**Craig:** Madison, after Splash came out, took over two things at the same time, as I recall. One, little girls everywhere being born named Madison, and also a wave of porn stars named Madison. This is a really strange juxtaposition of things. Yes, Madison, she got the name because of Madison Avenue. They just picked something, because they were trying to give her a name and they looked up and they were on Madison Avenue. Ganz and Mandel were responsible for naming god knows how many millions of people and at least a couple of hundred porn stars.

**John:** Let me list some movies that I would say are Wizard of Oz template movies. If you disagree with any of these, we can discuss them. The Matrix.

**Craig:** Sure, yeah.

**John:** Midsommar.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** [Unintelligible 00:20:53] basically goes to Sweden. Back to the Future.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** The Lost Boys.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Lost in Translation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Jumanji.

**Craig:** Unquestionably.

**John:** Yeah, a hundred percent. Vengeance, B.J. Novak’s Vengeance, which we haven’t discussed on the show, but it’s really, really good. I went to see B.J. Novak’s Vengeance. He is a New York podcaster who goes to rural Texas.

**Craig:** The one that I keep thinking of is, I don’t know why, the Ricky Gervais movie where he goes where no one lies.

**John:** The Invention of Lying.

**Craig:** Invention of Lying. Just very typical comedy of somebody… Or Galaxy Quest is another really good example. Even though they were on a show that was like the Oz that they go to, when they actually go into space, they are completely lost and adrift and trying to figure out the rules and it’s funny.

**John:** Let’s talk through some Splash movies. I would say Barbie is a Splash movie. Her Barbie world is really strange. She comes to our normal world. The Little Mermaid is of course a Splash movie. She’s literally a mermaid. School of Rock, he is not used to this-

**Craig:** Yeah, the world of regular people.

**John:** Yeah, so he’s breaking all the rules, intentionally or not. Thor.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The first Thor.

**Craig:** The first Thor, yeah.

**John:** First Thor. Pretty Woman.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Interestingly, we don’t know the high fashion snottiness so much, but we’re ahead of Julia Roberts’s character in it, so I would call it a Splash movie. Legally Blonde. When you go back and look at Legally Blonde, she’s actually very confident from the start, but she doesn’t want to fit in and play by the rules and still doesn’t have an understanding of the rules of the world she’s moved into.

**Craig:** That one’s trickier, because she doesn’t come from a strange place, and where she goes is actually arcane and not well known by regular people. I would actually argue that that is a Wizard movie.

**John:** We’ll call that a Wizard movie. My Cousin Vinny?

**Craig:** Again, I think if you were going to put Vengeance in the Wizard section, you should probably put My Cousin Vinny in there too. I’m saying this as somebody from New York. I’m way more in my own water in New York than I would be, say, where he ends up. Where were they in My Cousin Vinny?

**John:** It’s all a blur to me.

**Craig:** The South, somewhere.

**John:** Coming to America is a Splash movie.

**Craig:** Oh, absolutely.

**John:** Hundred percent. E.T., to a degree we want to call it a fish out of water movie at all. I debated putting it on the list. E.T. doesn’t understand the world around him, but he’s not really the hero of the movie.

**Craig:** I think that works. It’s a little bit not in terms of the actual movie, but the concept. Do you remember that movie Encino Man where they thaw out-

**John:** Oh, yeah, of course. There’s a fish out of water.

**Craig:** That’s a Splashy movie where it’s sort of like, “Okay, welcome to our world. This is a fork.” The second Terminator movie, by the way, Terminator 2, it’s very much like that, like, “Welcome. We have to teach you how to smile now. We have to teach you how to say hello and how to not kill people.”

**John:** Borat.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Sister Act.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Let’s debate this, because I have questions about which thing it falls into. Going into the Catholic nunnery, I guess she’s learning the rules along with us. What do you think?

**Craig:** She is, I think, a Vegas showgirl or lounge act who’s on the run from the Mob. We understand that world of just, I’m a singer and I work in Vegas. She goes into a very strange world, the world of nuns. To me, that’s more of a-

**John:** That’s more of a Wizard situation.

**Craig:** That feels like a Wizard situation, yes.

**John:** Enchanted is a hundred percent Splash movie.

**Craig:** Oh, the ultimate, except for Splash.

**John:** Miss Congeniality. She understands the world of being a FBI agent and then is forced to enter the world of pageants, which is a bizarre choice. I feel like we as an audience are ahead of her, because we understand how these things work. I could see debate though.

**Craig:** I might want to be put that in the other category, because again, if we think about what we identify with, and if that’s the defining issue, I feel more on solid ground with an FBI agent doing FBI stuff and then has to enter a place she does not belong and is a fish out of water. I think I would put that over in the wizard category.

**John:** This is a movie that I couldn’t put into one good category, because I knew I wanted to discuss and debate with you, is Spy with Melissa McCarthy. This I think is very much the same as Miss Congeniality. Melissa McCarthy’s character here actually does know what she’s doing. She is trained in this to some large degree, but she’s not used to being a field agent. It does mine on her being a fish out of water. It feels like a ‘tweener to me. It’s not one or the other.

**Craig:** It may not be a fish out of water movie at all. Spy conceptually reminds me a lot of Spies Like Us. Do you remember that movie?

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** What it really is is screw-ups. It’s a screw-up who eventually does a good job. A screw-up with their heart in the right place, that feels like its own genre, so I probably wouldn’t put it in the fish out of water category.

**John:** I think part of what I’m grappling with here is that when we as an audience are familiar with a genre in ways that the characters don’t necessarily seem to be. It feels a little strange. I’m also thinking about The Spy Who Dumped Me, which is more classically a Wizard film. They start in a very normal world and enter into this high-stakes spy world, and yet we as an audience are a little ahead of our characters, just because we seem to understand the genre in ways that they are not understanding it.

**Craig:** One of the things that we have to watch out for with comedy, and this is why I’m glad we’re having this discussion, because there’s some practical considerations here. This is not just an intellectual exercise. If the movie is saying, look, we’ve put this person in a crazy world, and they don’t understand what’s going on, and we’re meant to identify with that character, and we do understand what’s going on because we’ve seen movies, then the comedy can be negatively impacted.

We don’t like it when characters appear to be unaware of the things we are aware of, especially when it comes to how movies function. If somebody gets thrown into a James bond kind of situation and has no idea what the hell is going on and is constantly confused, at some point the audience will say, “Haven’t you seen any James Bond movie?” At some point, you’re going to want to say, “This is like a James Bond movie.” You’re not gonna want to say that exactly. We do want our characters to at least have the same knowledge we do. If they don’t, then you’re dealing a little bit with…

Often, actually, I would argue, a lot of Splash movies where the main character is not the weirdo that’s arriving, those movies are Jesus stories. It’s a strange thing to say that Splash is a Christ tale, but it kind of is. An innocent comes from far beyond, teaches us a bunch of lessons, including quite a few about sacrifice and truth, and changes us for the better. Certainly E.T. might as well have come down on a cross, for God’s sake.

**John:** While we’re talking about Christ movies, let’s talk about Dune. I’m gonna compare Dune versus John Carter of Mars. Dune is a double strange world situation. You have a lead character who’s coming from a really strange world to another really strange world and having to adapt to life in really strange worlds. It is Wizard and Splash at the same time. I think it works really well, but that’s really challenging, because comparing his wet world to his dry world and what is important, we as an audience never have a solid base, like this is what normal is.

John Carter of Mars is a similar situation where he ends up in this fantastical world, but he already is from a fantastical world. I think those are challenging situations to start your story in.

**Craig:** Incredibly so. Because the Writers Guild has changed their rules and I can now talk about, because whatever it is, the participating writer credit or whatever, you are defining exactly what I did on the first Dune movie. My job was to try as best as I could to create a sense of a normal place early in the movie, so that when Duke Leto Jr, Paul Atreides, travels to Dune, we feel that sense that somebody that we know who’s from a place we understand has gone to a new place with new rules, and there’s gonna be a struggle to adapt.

It’s hard but incredibly necessary to ground the audience and the character in the familiar. If the familiar is not familiar to us, then we need to get across that it is very familiar to the characters, that they have mastered the world they live in, they are comfortable with it, they are respected in it, everything is very clear to them about who they are and what they’re meant to be, even if they are emotionally struggling with that. But it’s essential. It means you have to take some time.

You and I have discussed at length how really in the 2000s this thing happened in Hollywood where first acts were suddenly under stress and nobody wanted them. Everybody just wanted to get to the thing, get them to Dune. There’s been a proper and good course correction, particularly in movies, I think, where people understand in fact, first acts are not only necessary to tell your story, but audiences enjoy them.

**John:** There was a concern, like, oh, the story’s not started if we’re still in the first act. It’s like, no, the story has started. This is an important part of the story. It doesn’t mean that the characters should be standing still. It’s that we are getting to know and love our characters and seeing what they want, what they need, what their crisis is. Before everything gets upended, we understand who these characters are.

Yes, I think in the 2000s, there was a real push to, gotta get there faster, we gotta cut 5 pages here or 10 pages, and movies suffered for it. I think it’s good that we seem to be acknowledging more how important that is. I wonder if that’s the sort of movies that’s done it or just people recognizing how good premium cable and streaming shows have been at giving us space and permission to actually tell the story properly has got us thinking about that for features as well.

**Craig:** I will very strongly support the notion that it’s been the, I don’t know what you’d call it, short-form television series thing that emerged that proved that audiences enjoyed that first act. The legendary misfire and brilliant correction by Benioff and Weiss of the first couple of episodes of Game of Thrones was entirely about creating that setup and giving things a chance to breathe and be clear.

If there’s been a correction, there’s probably also been an overcorrection. I think certain series perhaps take a little bit too long. They feel like they wander around a little bit, and perhaps they’re slightly indulgent. You have to hit a target that feels correct. Everybody’s sense of internal rhythm and pace is a bit different.

I completely agree with you that movie executives and producers, it’s not even that they learned lessons from those things, like they were told, “Hey, look, people like this.” They watched them, and they enjoyed them, and they started to examine their own need for that stuff. When they would say, “It’s taking too long for the movie to start,” you’re like, “No no no, listen to the word you just said, start. It needs to start. The start is the start.” It’s like, “It’s taking too long for my appetizer to be dessert.” Correct, because it’s not. It’s your appetizer.

**John:** Wrapping this topic up, I think I’ll go back to what I was saying to this writer in the dream is that these fundamental premise decisions really do matter. Sometimes if you’re looking at what’s not working, what were you attempting to do, and how were you trying to introduce this fish out of water character into the world? Were you trying to do a double strange world thing, which is really difficult?

If you’re looking at a comedy, recognize that it’s hard to do certain kinds of comedy when the world is strange than when the world is familiar to the audience. Vice versa, there’s reasons why traveling to a new world, it’s exciting for the audience to learn along with your hero, but you gotta make sure that you’re balanced there, that the hero’s not ahead of the audience, and the audience is not too far ahead of the hero.

**Craig:** The last bit of advice I would give on this is that, in the same way I often say that there’s not really character, there’s just relationship, and that’s what defines character, if you feel like maybe you do have a double strange world, ask yourself, “Okay, but what is the relationship between those two worlds?” Because if the relationship is interesting, then you will be able to accept it, because you understand what to point at and why it’s relevant. Did you see that old movie… It’s old not to us really, but to people that aren’t ancient like we are. Moscow on the Hudson, Robin Williams.

**John:** Oh yeah. That’s Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines?

**Craig:** Nope. That was Moscow Nights or White Nights.

**John:** Moscow Nights. I don’t remember Moscow on the Hudson.

**Craig:** Was it White Nights? I can’t remember what that was called. Moscow on the Hudson was, Robin Williams plays a musician in a orchestra, like Moscow Symphony, and they travel to the United States to do a special performance, and he defects and has to now live as an immigrant from a very strange place in Harlem. You had a double strange world, because you had both the Soviet Union and all of its weirdness and then you had Harlem in whatever it was, the ’80s or ’90s New York, which very few people had a relationship with. Most people understand to just be like, “Oh, Harlem, ah.”

**John:** You’re saying that Harlem in the ’80s felt exotic to most moviegoers.

**Craig:** Yes. It felt exotic, and it was portrayed as exotic. The relationship between those two things was important, that it was… What they kept pulling out was, on the one hand you have freedom, you’re not being followed by secret police, there are resources; on the other hand, there’s a complete lack of structure, and possibilities are endless and so therefore scary, and there is a weird safety in being a prisoner, and then there’s fear and danger in being outside and at the whims and mercies of the world around you. Really, what it came down to was East versus West.

I guess Dune is like wet, dry. There’s a reason that Frank Herbert made Caladan, the home planet of the Atreides, an ocean planet, a wet place, obviously, because it was important to contrast it with Dune, which is a desert planet. If Caladan had been a swamp planet or like America, like it’s wet, it’s dry, it’s both, then when he got to Dune, he’d be like, “Oh yeah, this is like East Caladan, that’s a bit dry.” You need to create this contrast.

Then the double world thing really does become about opposition as opposed to you’re blowing it, because in certain stories, you want E.T. to arrive at the most mundane possible place on Earth there is. You don’t want him going somewhere weird. We don’t know where he’s from, so where he needs to arrive is Suburb with a capital S.

**John:** For sure. Second topic, Craig, I know from the start of the podcast, one of the things you’ve liked more than anything else has been reviews of movies and TV.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Viewers, critics, you live for them. This was an interesting piece this last week in Vulture by Lane Brown on The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes. It’s really just taking a deep dive into Rotten Tomatoes, which is of course the site that gives a tomatoes score for how critics feel about any given film or television show, above 60 percent is considered fresh, below 60 percent is considered rotten, and how gamified it has become, how arbitrary and meaningless and yet stupidly important it has become for films. Craig, what was your takeaway from this article?

**Craig:** It was an excellent analysis of why something that is this statistically clunky is statistically clunky. Even well-run studies by companies that are experts in data collection, bias reduction, anti-skewing, and error analysis will be subject to certain inherent biases and flaws. Rotten Tomatoes is a goof when it comes to this stuff.

Let’s just start with this. Unlike Metacritic, for instance, which attempts at least to weight reviews by saying, “Okay, this one was a 100 to us. This one was a 5. This one was an 80. Here’s your average,” Rotten Tomatoes is binary. Good or bad.

I don’t know about you, but I have seen, like in the little blurbs, a fresh tomato where it says, “The movie is barely worth seeing, but it has some moments of interest.” You’re like, “Wait, why is that good?” Then some that are bad, where it’s like, “It’s not maybe what people were expecting, but there’s something wonderful about blah-dah-dee blah.” You’re like, “I think you just miscategorized this.”

More importantly, good or bad is not a… This is the great crime of Siskel and Ebert, may they both rest in peace, is they binary-ized something that should be the opposite of that. If there’s one thing we shouldn’t be saying is good or bad. It’s art. Discussing the nuances, how we felt about it, what worked and didn’t for us, these things require subtlety. Somehow we’ve become reliant on this review slurry, as I call it, that accounts for zero subtlety, no shades, just black or white.

**John:** You and I have both had issues with film criticism over the years, but what I will say about when an established film critic is looking at a movie, there is subtlety. There is a look at what’s working, what’s not working, where does this fit into the artist’s overall oeuvre. There’s a reason why you read the whole thing, because you’re hopefully learning something and appreciating the film in a different way. But then when you reduce that to was that a yes or a no, it does become what you’re saying is a slurry.

This article goes into one of the ways this can be gamified is by either recruiting more people to review the movie, and so there’s a company that will just do that, will pay the reviewers to write a review of the movie, or really planning for when the embargoes lift so that the initial wave of reviews that come out will be positive. Quantumania, the Ant-Man movie, looked like it benefited from that, because the initial reviews that dropped were very positive. Rotten Tomatoes score fell over time because more negative reviews came out. The opposite was the Indiana Jones movie, where the initial reviews were negative coming out of the film festival but rose after a time, just because there were more data points. It points to just why the formula is so bad and so stupid.

**Craig:** In statistics, the smaller your sample size is, relative to the population you are ultimately trying to represent, the more error you’re going to have. That’s accounted for, because they will say here’s what we found and here is what the error is, with an expected plus or minus blah. Now, Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t do that. Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t say, “Okay, we’ve got five reviews in. The movie is 100 percent fresh.” What’s gonna happen is people run online and go, “It’s 100 percent fresh.” It’s 100 percent fresh with a plus or minus of 70 percent at that point. It just doesn’t mean anything. Now, when you get to 200 or 300 reviews and you’re in the 90s, then okay, it’s probably plus or minus 3. Even then, how much love was that?

**John:** Was it a situation like a Barbie, where people were literally talking about how good it was, or was it just like, oh, it was better than you’d like, or it wasn’t bad.

**Craig:** Yes, or what about situations where the people that love it love it, and the people who give it a bad review just are mildly bad. You point out something correct, which is that reviewers who are trying to do their job well will often engage in quite in-depth analysis. Regardless of the relative merits of it, they’re trying, and it’s there. None of it matters to Rotten Tomatoes. They don’t give a damn.

**John:** No. Craig, this is giving me flashbacks to Ain’t It Cool News. Our younger listeners will have no idea what this website was.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** What color would you even call it? It was an orangey brown.

**Craig:** It was a diarrhea-ish kind of brownish.

**John:** Run by a man named Harry Knowles out of Texas. The reviews there would be rapturous or scathing and actually mattered for a brief moment. For anything that relied on fanboy culture, it was incredibly important to get that review, and the gamification of that was terrifying.

I will say I still click through Rotten Tomatoes. One of the reasons I do it is, it’s actually a very handy aggregator of all the reviews, so I can see, oh, what did Dana Stevens think. I can click through and see what she thought and then see what other reviewers thought of the same thing and quickly get to all those things. That I think is its useful purpose. Its useful purpose is not calculating the pros and cons.

**Craig:** It certainly is a decent place for that. They carve out top reviewers. I’m not sure how they quality certain reviewers as top reviewers. It also helps a little bit if you’re looking through, and you see a vicious pan, but it’s from some ridiculous website no one’s ever heard of. Then you can put it in the box. It’s the other thing that Rotten Tomatoes does is makes an equivalency where there ought not be one. The other thing it’s fun for is clicking on Armond White and just reading his reviews, just to see how awesome it is to be an anti person.

**John:** Having said all this, I would say of course I should be looking at Metacritic instead, which at least one of the things that I do like about Metacritic when I do go through to visit, you can see the people who loved it, the little blurb will show why they loved it. People who didn’t like it, it’ll show why they didn’t like it. That actually is a useful scale, which you do not get out of the rotten tomato/fresh tomato blurbs on Rotten Tomatoes’ site.

We have no insight here. I will say that for filmmakers, unfortunately, in 2023 as we’re recording this, it still does matter. Your studio is going to think about it. You’d have to be aware of that. They may have a strategy for how they’re going to deal with it. I would just urge folks who are not making movies but enjoying movies to take it with the giant grain of salt it deserves.

**Craig:** I don’t know if you’ve been on Metacritic lately. They finally, after it seems like decades, update their look.

**John:** I’m looking at it now for the first time.

**Craig:** Look, it’s still not what I would call great, but at least it doesn’t look like it was made in 1998 anymore. The concept of Metacritic is a superior concept to Rotten Tomatoes. The layout is nowhere near as good. It’s just a lot busier. They feature user reviews to a very large extent, whereas Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t bother with that.

User reviews are a place where, notoriously on Metacritic, and particularly with video games, you’ll get a lot of review bombing. There’s some review bombing as well on Rotten Tomatoes. There’s really no way around the review bombing, except to just say, okay, we’re not gonna bother with user reviews anymore.

For some reason, cultural, I don’t know what it is, Metacritic still has a near cultural monopoly on video game reviews. Video games are just as big, if not a larger segment of the entertainment business than anything else. I’m not sure why that’s the case, but I’m glad, because I think that the Metacritic method is at least marginally more valid.

**John:** I would agree. Drew, I think we have time for a listener question. What do you have for us?

**Drew:** John in London writes, “I’m writing a short animation from an animal’s perspective. No human dialogue is understood throughout it. Just a tone of voice to pick up the intention. Same between the animals. The final product will be a gibberish, made-up language. However, I feel it would be useful for the reader to somehow indicate towards or even write the dialogue to better understand what will eventually be translated through cadence on screen. How would you recommend I approach this? Should I write the dialog out with a disclaimer at the front saying this will not be understood, or should I not write any dialog and find a way of describing how they feel in the action? I’ve done the latter so far, and it makes the script a bit laborious and novelish to read. I could describe how something is said in a dialogue column to easily convey to the reader that dialogue is being spoken, or is that too silly? Or anything I haven’t mentioned? Would love to hear how you’d approach this.”

**John:** I’ve actually faced this situation. Frankenweenie, of course, has large segments where it’s just the dog and there’s no dialogue around him, so you have to make sure you understand what the dog is reacting to. It’s great to write a character who doesn’t speak.

In another project I was working on, there is language being spoken that the central character doesn’t understand. I did go through both strategies, where on one I would, in italics, explain what the conversation was about. I ultimately did go and write the dialogue and put it in little braces to make it clear you’re never actually to understand, this is not gonna be a subtitle, but just so we can get a sense of what the intention is behind those words, because it does matter. Craig, what’s your instinct?

**Craig:** The movie that comes to mind, any of the movies with the Minions. They speak in gibberish, but obviously they’re trying to get ideas and thoughts across. My instinct here would be to give those characters names, create a little bit of gibberish, particularly if it’s specific gibberish. The Minions love saying banana. In parentheses, say what it is. It’s easy when you start to just say, they only speak in gibberish, but it’s clear from how they’re saying it how they feel. Then it would say Minion Number 3, in parentheses, “That’s hysterical,” and then have him say, “Banana, banana,” whatever they say, rah rah rah. It is gonna be easier to read that way-

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** … than putting everything in action. People will just not read it.

**John:** We have among our listenership, I am 100 percent certain, some folks who have worked on the Minions movies. Can you write in and tell us what you do on the Minions movies and whether there’s dialogue on the page there? I kind of feel like there is.

Also, on the plane recently, I watched one of the Minions movies I hadn’t seen. They’re just speaking Italian. You really can understand. I can look away from the screen and understand a lot of what they were saying at a certain point. I don’t know if it’s all Minions or later Minions movies. I’m picking up a lot of their words. I’m curious what the choices were about the Minion language. I’m sure I could Google that. If you worked on a movie, I would love to hear what you actually did and thought about for that.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Craig, you were talking about Metacritic, and this is obviously gonna be on Metacritic. Talk us through it.

**Craig:** I haven’t even played it yet. I’ve just been watching. Because I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and I need to finish Baldur’s Gate 3 before I go on to the next insane experience, I’ve got Starfield waiting in the wings. I’ve just seen some brief things as they roll through on Twitter, like, oh, here’s a clip of somebody spawning a thousand potatoes, but also here’s a clip of somebody doing cool stuff, and people talking about the game. It sure does look like Elder Scrolls in space, and I am there for that.

**John:** Yeah, that’s good stuff.

**Craig:** It’s inevitable once I finish my assault on the, and then I will just put spoiler alert, retracted, and one day we’ll discuss who the big bad is in Baldur’s Gate, then yeah, it’s gonna be time for Starfield. It looks awesome.

**John:** I started Baldur’s Gate this week. It really is just delightfully done. I’m playing it on PS5, which is a pretty good version of how I think you could best do it. Obviously, there’s things that on a PC would be a little bit more nimble, but I think that’s a good version of it. Craig, I meant to ask you, for the character you created for Baldur’s Gate, were you adapting a character you played before on your real game or did you just make a brand new person?

**Craig:** I adapted a character that I play in the game that I play in. He’s a rogue named-

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** … Finrod the Fantastic.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** He is fantastic.

**John:** I adapted Eldenere, who was my very handsome sorcerer from the game we played together. It’s fun to see that.

**Craig:** Eldenere is gonna have a great time sleeping with everyone. I have so far only slept with one person. She’s a Githyanki.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** The sex was pretty weird and aggressive. I told this to Melissa, and I have to say, it seemed like she was jealous. I think she was saying, “That’s weird. That’s creepy.” I’m like, “No, no, it’s awesome.” I think she’s jealous. I think she’s jealous of my Githyanki girlfriend. She doesn’t know what the Gith look like. If she did-

**John:** I’m gonna text her a photo, like, “This is who’s Craig been sleeping with.” Then she’ll get over it.

**Craig:** She’ll get over it. She’ll be like, “Okay, if that’s what you want, pal, fine. I’m better looking than that thing.” Correct.

**John:** Correct.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I spent the last week in New York City, which I loved. I got to catch up with some friends, see some shows. It’s been too long since I’ve been to New York. One of the things I really like about New York in recent years, which I have not talked about on the air, is that the buses are just so much better than they used to be. We take the bus to get around a lot. Obviously, yes, there’s a subway. You can get places with the subway. If you need to get across town or you’re just in a weird route, it is always worth pulling up Apple Maps or Google Maps and going to transit and see could a bus take you there, because it probably could. The buses in New York, they’re new, they’re modern, they’re super clean, they come really often.

Because all transit there is using Omni, which is where you can just tap your phone or your watch against it, it’s just so handy and so easy to get there. You’re never worrying about change or having enough credits on your Metro card.

**Craig:** That was the misery of taking the bus when I was kid growing up in New York was exact change. If you were a student, you got a bus pas. The problem is you would lose your bus pass inevitably, because you were 11. Then you’re sitting there going kaching, kaching, kaching, kaching, kaching. It’s like, “I’m one cent short.” “Tough. Get off the bus.” “But you took my other 49 cents.” “Get off the bus.” The buses were not clean.

**John:** The buses are bright and clean and beautiful.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** I just loved it. It just makes so much more sense than trying to take a taxi or take an Uber any place. Just hop on a bus. My friend Amy always said she would recommend the bus 15 years ago. I’m like, “The buses look really sketch.” They’ve really improved them a lot.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** We have a fantastic outro this week by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau, including the new Scriptnotes University T-shirt and sweatshirt. They’re great. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on diabetes. Craig, it’s so good talking with you.

**Craig:** It’s so good talking with you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, you have the floor. Tell us about diabetes.

**Craig:** First of all, let’s talk about what diabetes is. Diabetes is a disease where your body is no longer removing glucose, sugar, the basic energy molecule, from your blood. The way our bodies normally function, we eat food. The food is transformed into various substances, but glucose is the one that we use for immediate energy. We have insulin, which is created by cells in the isles of Langerhans. Islets? Islets of Langerhans, which are wonderfully named cells in the pancreas. Insulin is a hormone that goes ahead and helps the body take the glucose out of the bloodstream and into cells where it can be converted into energy.

There are two kinds of diabetes. In diabetes, people can’t do this very well or they can’t do it at all. There is type 1 diabetes. This is the kind that we find in children.

**John:** I have a nephew who has type 1 diabetes.

**Craig:** Type 1 diabetes. In type 1 diabetes, it’s an autoimmune disorder. The body’s immune system attacks the insulin-creating cells in the pancreas, destroys them, and the type 1 diabetic needs to take insulin through injection, or there are pumps, in order to get glucose out of the blood, or they’ll die. There’s all sorts of problems that hyperglycemia can lead to, but it becomes incredibly difficult when you have zero insulin. Like I said, it’s what we see in kids, and happily it gets diagnosed. It is very manageable, more manageable now than ever, because we have science. We have continuous glucose monitors that monitor the glucose in your blood. We have insulin pumps that pump the insulin into your body.

Then there’s the far more common type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes occurs almost always in adults, although unfortunately there are a lot of teenagers and young adults that are getting type 2 diabetes. That is generally the product of diet and lifestyle. The body gets too much glucose hammered at it all the time through eating and sedentary lifestyle. What happens is the insulin-making cells get tired. They start to wear out. They’re just getting tapped on too much. The cells that receive insulin, which tells it, hey, pull the glucose out of the blood, they become insulin-resistant because they’re getting tapped on too much. The body gets less and less efficient at processing glucose. The glucose in the blood goes up. This leads to a lot of other health problems, heart issues, glaucoma, neurological problems, numbness and tingling in the extremities. In extreme cases, you end it with amputations. It’s not good.

I was diagnosed with diabetes a few months ago. I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, of course, because I’m an adult, which is normal. That’s what they do.

**John:** Tell me about this diagnosis. Were they based on a blood test? Were they looking at the glucose in your blood? They were looking at the amount of insulin? What is the testing?

**Craig:** They start very strictly with glucose in your blood. When you get a standard blood test, you have to fast for it, typically, and it’s because they want to know what your fasting glucose is. When you wake up in the morning, they measure glucose. They use different units on either side of the pond. Here in the U.S., the numbers of the units are such that they want to see, when you wake up in the morning and you’ve been fasting, 99 or less. If it’s between 100 and 125, they call prediabetes, so you’re starting to have a problem. 125 and up, welcome to diabetes.

They said, “Okay, it’s early. It’s 130 or whatever, but it’s diabetes. We’re gonna try and put you on these diabetic medications,” and dah dah dah, which I did not tolerate very well. There’s Metformin. I did a dance, and it was terrible. I was just nauseated and all sorts of GI issues.

A few months go by, and I had a chance to… I won’t say who it is, because I don’t want people to bother them, but there’s a pretty famous screenwriter that I met, who said, “My wife is the leading diabetes doctor in California.” Sometimes people say those things and you’re like, “Eh, is she?” Actually, in this case, she really is. I was like, “I feel bad. I’m not a special case. I don’t think I need all of this special attention.” He was like, “Just talk to her. She’ll talk to you.” So I did.

She asked me this question that I was not expecting. She said, “Do you know what kind of diabetes you have?” I was like, “I assume type 2, because I’m an adult.” She went, “If that were the case, I probably wouldn’t be asking the question.” She did additional tests. The additional tests are generally for antibodies, although while they’re also testing for antibodies, they’re also looking at your actual insulin levels. There is a particular antibody that’s a primary indicator of type 1 diabetes. Mine was through the roof.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** There are varying names for these things. One of these things you’ll see is sometimes you’ll see it called type 1.5 diabetes. It’s not really between type 1 and type 2. It’s just because you’re an adult. Or they’ll say LADA, late acquired diabetes, dah dah.

**John:** Late onset, yeah.

**Craig:** She’s like, “None of those things are a thing.” She’s like, “There are two diabetes, type 1 and type 2. You, my friend, have type 1.” What are the pluses and minuses of type 1 diabetes? Not too many pluses. If there’s any plus, it’s that your lifestyle did not lead to this point. That’s also the biggest downside, because you can’t change anything. There’s no great eating and thing that’s gonna turn any of this around or really reduce it. In fact, no matter what I do, as somebody with type 1 diabetes that is expressed later in life, I will proceed inexorably toward zero insulin. It might take 5 years, it might take 10, but it’s gonna happen, at which point I will be required to take insulin.

The other not great news about type 1 diabetes is that it doesn’t get treated the same. Most of the treatments that we have are for type 2 diabetes, because the vast majority of people with diabetes have type 2 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is not really. There’s a few things, but mostly-

**John:** Mostly it’s insulin.

**Craig:** You basically try and not eat things that spike your glucose and then eventually take insulin. That’s why I wanted to talk about this, because for all my prattling about how I’m a doctor, I’m just not licensed, I did not know that adult type 1 diabetes was even a thing.

I’m saying this because I suspect we have at least a number of listeners who have been diagnosed with diabetes who I hope will ask to be tested for the antibodies for type 1 diabetes, because if you don’t know, what happens is you continue to take medicine for type 2 diabetes. A lot of those medicines have annoying side effects. They kind of don’t work. You feel bad and frustrated, and you get worse and worse. People will tell you you’re just not doing these things that you need to do to make it less worse and worse, when in fact there is nothing you can do. It’s better to know exactly what you have and be completely on top of it from the start.

In my case, what’s nice is, super early, my body is still making insulin, although less than you do and not quite as effective, because it’s less. I wear a continuous glucose monitor, which is a miracle of science. It’s a little thing that you just go boink. You don’t even feel it. It sticks on your back of your arm, lasts for two weeks, feeds you a constant glucose number to your phone, which is great, so you could see I’m in the green, I’m fine. The app is linked up with my doctor. Every week, she can just review the tracings, review the charts, and in a glance go, “Okay, here’s where you are.”

This is important. If you have been diagnosed with diabetes and you have not been tested for these antibodies for type 1 diabetes, I strongly recommend that you do get tested. If you’re a borderline case, maybe they’re like, “Okay, it’s really mostly just type 2.” But if you’re a stark case, like I was. I think it was, I don’t know, 80 times what it should’ve been. Then you get to know exactly what you have. I’m spreading the word.

**John:** Craig, I’m sorry that you’ve got this diagnosis, but I’m also relieved that you have an answer and that you were able to take initiative and figure out what it was that was actually causing it, and so you weren’t sticking on drugs that weren’t working for you.

I remember reading this last week, a relatively small study, but it was showing that some of these drugs that have been introduced, that are effective against type 2 diabetes, are actually remarkably effective, which is great for folks who have type 2. But that’s not gonna help you. For you to be able to get the answer about why they weren’t working for you is fantastic. I’ve noticed you eating healthier over the last couple months. This is obviously part of the reason why you were doing so.

I have another friend who is pretty much in your situation, where he’s a little heavier, and he assumed that he had type 2 diabetes. It wasn’t until he actually fully got tested where it was like, “Oh no, no, you actually have type 1 diabetes.” He’s using insulin. It’s going great. The good thing about being an adult who’s responsible is you can do it. You know how to do it. The technology is better than ever.

**Craig:** The technology is better than ever. It does get a little confusing when people have a number of the comorbidities for type 2, if they are obese, if they have metabolic syndrome. Then it’s understandable, I think, why there’s a misdiagnosis there, although honestly, almost everybody over the age of 40 who gets diagnosed with diabetes, there’s just an assumption by I would imagine 98 percent of primary care physicians that they have type 2 diabetes. You’re absolutely right. If you can jump on it early, there is no reason why you should have any less life expectancy than anybody else. It’s entirely about the early and careful and expert management of this.

You’re right. It’s funny. The eating choices I make are entirely about converts quickly to glucose, so glycemic index. That does overlap with healthier eating. Generally, what it means is low carb, and specifically avoiding high-glycemic carbs, potatoes. You know what I had once that sent my blood sugar so high so fast, the thing that did it the most?

**John:** What was it?

**Craig:** Popcorn.

**John:** It melts into sugar.

**Craig:** Popcorn is just starch. That’s what it is. It’s just a kernel of corn that the starch exploded outwards from heat. All that white of what popcorn is is starch. Corn syrup, as we know, is just… That starch gets converted to glucose instantaneously and in massive quantities, at least in me. I avoid those things, like I said, potatoes and white rice and white bread.

**John:** Craig, you love an old-fashioned, so what is your-

**Craig:** Here’s an interesting thing.

**John:** How are you handling an old-fashioned?

**Craig:** This is why I love the continuous glucose monitor, and not only because I don’t have to constantly stick a needle in my finger and squeeze blood out. I am a constantly running experiment. I’m not a big drinker. I’m a pretty moderate drinker. I’ll have a drink, maybe two on a fun night. Alcohol doesn’t really cause much of a problem. Interestingly, sugar itself doesn’t generally do it. I will get a higher spike from eating French fries than I would from having a dessert, because when you’re eating something sweet, you can’t eat that much of it.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** You can eat a lot of carbs, which turns into 12 desserts in your body. You just don’t realize it. This is all gross simplification. I have learned what does cause trouble and what doesn’t. This morning I got a loaf of bread from the Levain Bakery in our neighborhood. It was a whole grain bread. Whole grains generally I do okay with. Not this one. Jeez, Louise. I was looking at the thing. My phone goes bleep bleep bleep. That’s like, uh-oh, you’re heading toward some trouble.

**John:** Alert, alert.

**Craig:** I was like, “Hm.” There’s really nothing you can do at that point except lodge it. Happily, it came back down pretty rapidly. I was like, “Okay, can’t eat that.” Apples, no problem. Asian pear, skyrocketed. I’m constantly running experiments on myself and learning information. I don’t get paid by Big Pharma. For those of you with conspiracy hats, calm down.

I use this thing called the FreeStyle Libre 3. That is just incredible, the information it gives you in real time. It really is maybe behind by 5 or 10 minutes, I think, because it’s sampling your interstitial fluid as opposed to your blood directly. It’s phenomenally useful. It’s so weird to look at a chart on your phone that connects in the most clear way what happens when you eat and what happens in your body, because otherwise it’s like a dream. I eat food. Then I move around. My day goes on. You just forget. You don’t realize that there’s this thing happening in you. It’s remarkable to watch.

**John:** As we do the next 10 years of the podcast, we’ll be looking forward to your updates on where stuff goes, because it does feel like, like you said, there’s not other great treatment options right now. It does feel like there’s so many opportunities for them to figure out new stuff to do. Since diabetes is about your body is no longer producing insulin, there may be ways to regenerate the things that create insulin. There may be ways to embed stuff better. I think there’s going to be some real innovation here.

**Craig:** That is possible. The challenge, autoimmune disorders are always difficult. They have come so far in other areas. My oldest kid has Crohn’s, and she takes Skyrizi, which is one of these complicated biologic medicines. They’ve done remarkable work in that area. It’s really been revolutionary. When you combine all the people that have ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s, there’s a lot of them. There are tens of millions of Americans, I don’t know, maybe there’s 40 million Americans who have type 2 diabetes. How many people have type 1? That’s the question, because obviously drug companies go where the fire is, because that’s also where the money is. Statistics.

Center for Disease Control, the CDC, in 2018, so this is five years old, but it’s probably pretty close, 21 million adults had type 2 diabetes. 1.3 million had type 1.

**John:** A much smaller number.

**Craig:** It’s so much smaller. When you have 20 times the amount with type 2, it’s not surprising that everybody’s chasing that. Also, type 2 diabetes is an easier thing to tackle.

**John:** Craig, part of the reason why you wanted to talk about this topic is that your argument is that some of those people in that 21 million probably actually do have type 1 diabetes and they have not been tested properly for it.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s the other issue is how many people have been misdiagnosed. The more I read, the more you see, even if it’s not a ton, it’s a non-zero number. That’s frightening for people that have that. I don’t know what our average age is for our listenership, although as we keep going, it probably keeps going up. Probably got more people coming in than people leaving.

But there’s gotta be at least a few people in here listening who may be wondering, “Wait a second. I wonder if I should get this checked out.” There are, I think, three antibodies, but the big one is something called GAD65, which is an antibody to glutamic acid decarboxylase. I think the normal amount that they allow is between 0 and 5 units, and I had 175.

**John:** That’s a problem.

**Craig:** That’s not good. There’s that. That’s not going anywhere. That just is what it is.

**John:** Again, we are not a medical show, but this last week I was talking with a writer who is phenomenal. She had initially talked to me on the picket line, but I followed up in email with her. She had a situation where for two years, she just could not get healthy, and she was having all these issues and couldn’t figure out what was going on. She listened to the Sarah Polley episode where Sarah Polley was talking about her post-concussion syndrome and the doctor that got her through that. My friend, this writer, was like, “Wow, that’s what’s happening to me.” She went to a doctor, went through a program, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and is now recovered. Hopefully, there’s people out there who have a similar situation, where they will hear you talking about this misdiagnosis and realize, oh, okay, this is something I need to take control of.

**Craig:** I hope so. I would even suggest to any adults who have been told, “Hey, you’re prediabetic,” or just any adults over the age of 45, I don’t know, just middle age, ask your doctors just to test for these antibodies anyway, even if your blood sugar is normal, because the antibodies are gonna be there before the disease is expressed. The earlier you know, the better off you get.

**John:** Craig, I wish you great health.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** We will follow up on this over the years to come.

**Craig:** We sure will.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Drew:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.vulture.com/article/rotten-tomatoes-movie-rating.html) by Lane Brown for Vulture
* Read the [Frankenweenie script here](https://johnaugust.com/library#frankenweenie) and on [Weekend Read 2](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weekend-read-2/id1534798355)
* [Starfield](https://bethesda.net/en/game/starfield)
* [Manhattan Bus Map](https://new.mta.info/map/5391) by [MTA](https://new.mta.info/)
* [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/)
* [Writer Emergency Pack XL](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/writer-emergency-pack-xl)
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* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and is edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/612standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/storytelling-and-the-strike).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 614 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This week, the WGA ratified a new contract with the studios, marking the conclusion of the 148-day strike, but that’s not the end of the story, nor does it really give a sense of how this all began. Today on the show, I will welcome the co-chair and chief orator of the WGA Negotiating Committee, Chris Keyser, to help us understand the storytelling behind the strike. Chris Keyser, welcome back to Scriptnotes.

**Chris Keyser:** It’s good to see you again, John. It’s been a couple of days since I was locked in a room with you for five months.

**John:** We were locked in rooms for a very, very long time. I know we are all kind of sick of talking about negotiations, but I promise this one is going to be different, because it’s going to be crafty. It’s going to be much more like… Greta Gerwig was sitting in your seat a few years back, and we were talking through Little Women. We were going through pages of the script, like, “Why did you make this choice? Why this word, not that word?” We’re going to do the same with you here, because we’re going to look at three of your speeches as a framework for talking about the overall narrative and storytelling that was so crucial for this whole campaign, for figuring this out.

**Chris:** A speech and two sequels.

**John:** A speech and two sequels, yes. You became not notorious but beloved, I’ll say, for long speeches. People loved your long speeches. We’ll talk through those speeches.

**Chris:** Is “long” the operative word in all that?

**John:** No. Inspiring, meaningful, scene-setting speeches. I think actually there’s a lot to learn here just in terms of how we tell stories, because in these speeches, we see that you had to establish a premise, identify themes and characters, structure a timeline, and it weirdly is a lot like what we do in our day jobs. One of the members of the Negotiating Committee said it was like being in the best writers’ room that just went on for forever.

**Chris:** It’s true. It’s true. Although we don’t start by saying it’s a story, in the end we have to tell a story to the members, and they have to believe the story and want to be a part of it.

**John:** Yes, and so we have to tell a story that feels true to them, and we have to be honest and truthful with them at every moment. Yet we’re still always trying to make sure that we’re framing it in ways that they can relate to, that they can identify with.

**Chris:** Exactly.

**John:** We’re going to talk about all that, and in a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about debate, because you were president of the Harvard University Debate Council.

**Chris:** You remember.

**John:** I remember way back then. You’ve stayed active in debate. I just don’t know debate at all. You’ve coached debate.

**Chris:** I have. We can talk about it, yes. I’m happy to talk about that.

**John:** Also, we’ve got a clip of you as a 23-year-old.

**Chris:** I’m less happy about that.

**John:** It’s amazing. You’re killing it on the debate stage. It’s strange to see, because it’s both you sound like a 23-year-old and you sound exactly like Chris Keyser, which is a great combination. You’re going to want to be a Premium Member to hear that Bonus Segment.

Last time you were here, Chris Keyser, I think we were sitting in this room, and we were talking through the agency campaign, which was a whole thing and a challenge. Before we got into what happened in this campaign, this negotiation, could you set the table a little bit for where we were at around 2019, where the Guild was at, what we saw as the big, broad issues going into 2020 and then into 2023?

**Chris:** Sure. I might even go further back than that-

**John:** Please.

**Chris:** … if that’s okay. I remember.

**John:** Please.

**Chris:** David Goodman will remember this too, because I bring it up a lot, that he and I had a breakfast while I was president of the Guild at some point. I don’t even know what year it was. I finished my term in 2015. He said to me, “Nothing’s going to happen unless you come up with an agenda for how we’re going to move things forward.” I don’t mean it was just mine alone. But that began a conversation, and he was part of it, and obviously a central part of it, and others were too, and so was David Young and everyone on staff at the Guild.

We began to identify some issues that we were seeing on the horizon that we need to deal with over the next decade or so. They included, and you know because you were a part of this, one, dealing with how we’re paid, the idea that drafts, which were the old measure of payment, the unit of pay, were no longer sufficient either for screenwriters or for television writers, whose work was getting longer and longer. So we talked about that. We talked about our relationship with our agents and the extent to which our agents were representing us as true fiduciaries. We talked a lot about the three guilds and the need for a kind of unified bargaining strategy. Those were the among the highlights of that. The conversation began in earnest. A good first step in all of that was probably 2017 when we took on span, in addition to trying to save our health care plan.

**John:** Span, for folks who are new to this, is the idea that a certain amount of pay in television gives you a certain number of weeks of that writer’s time, but you can’t drag people out forever on that.

**Chris:** Exactly, exactly. Essentially, when you sign a contract, you need to know what the term of the contract is. It doesn’t mean very much to say, “Look how much I’m paid. I just didn’t realize it was for the next 25 years.” That was all part of a conversation that we’d been having also, because we’d talked about free rewrites for screenwriters. The Committee on the Professional Status of Writers had made the rounds amongst all the studios for years and years and years talking about all of that. It was part of the same question, which is you get you a payment, you think it’s for a period of time, and then you end up working some multiple of that, and it’s no longer a viable career. It began there in 2017.

2017 was also important, I think, because it was the beginning of us testing the relationship between leadership and the membership. Maybe testing is the wrong word, but solidifying it, beginning to use our power again. Broadly speaking – and I’m not the best expert at this, other people will do better – the strike of 2007 and 2008 came after nearly two decades of Guild fear of using its own power after the strike of 1988.

Patrick and John Bauman and all of those and David Young, who reestablished the Guild as a kind of fighting force, took on the issue of jurisdiction of the internet, at some cost, because the Guild was not unified at that point. They had to build it from scratch. That strike obviously succeeded in achieving its principal goal but also revealed some of those ongoing divisions in the Guild. In 2017 we took a strike authorization vote. It was the first time the membership had voted not to strike but to give the Negotiating Committee the power to call a strike if needed to at contract deadline.

That was an important process. We didn’t end up going on strike, but it tested the waters in some sense. That led us to begin to talk about the agency campaign. It’s the way in which the agents and minimums in the MBA are, as David Young has said, just two sides of the same coin, how we get paid. The agency campaign was maybe the most important thing the Guild has done.

**John:** It was one of the strangest things the Guild has done, because it’s not going up against our traditional adversary. It’s not going up against the studios the way you do every three years. This was attempting to forge a new relationship with the agencies, who are in theory our allies, but oftentimes were working at cross-purposes to us.

**Chris:** That’s right. That was not an easy thing to do. It was different from a strike, because writers did not lose work in the course of doing it, but it went on for a very long time, and it tested the Guild’s resolve. The Guild held together through all of that, thanks in large part to everybody who was on that Negotiating Committee. David Goodman was remarkable in that struggle.

We ended up obviously resetting the relationship between writers and their agents and limiting the extent to which they could function not as our fiduciaries but as independent parties to our contracts, who would be paid directly by the studios or, alternatively, establish their own studios. They were both our employers and our representatives at the same time.

**John:** But that campaign also, I think, established a different connection between writers and the Guild, and the sense that the writers should’ve felt like they were in charge of the Guild and they could act together as part of the Guild to make changes that they wanted to see happen.

Going into that, we had the captain system, which we built up out of the remnants of 2007, 2008. But it was the first time really in practice we had to see people following leadership but also leading and self-organizing to do things. I remember the events like Latinx writers nights to talk about staffing and how to figure out new, alternative systems for that. Just the entrepreneurial nature of our membership was so apparent that they actually could take on that role and weren’t afraid.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s exactly right. The other thing that the agency campaign proved was precisely how democratic the Writers Guild was. Without going back and reliving that or identifying who was on what side of the conversation, there were some number of people, showrunners and others, who wish we hadn’t done what we were doing during the agency campaign and made that relatively clear.

Probably if that had happened two decades earlier, that might have fundamentally divided the Guild and undermined the campaign itself. But what became clear during the agency campaign is that every individual member of the Guild has one vote in the decision about what the Guild does. That became critically important. I don’t want to suggest that we had a major fracture. It was overwhelmingly supported. But there were meaningful members of the Guild, people who had-

**John:** Famously, we had people running for office during the course of the agency campaign, who were down on the agency campaign.

**Chris:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** And so that we could have tension within the Guild and still be resilient and still get through it was crucial.

**Chris:** Yeah. Not to say it’s like 1864, but David Goodman, like Abraham Lincoln before him, was forced to run for office in the middle of a war.

**John:** Now, actually in the middle of the agency campaign, we had 2020, which was supposed to be a negotiation. Streaming was going to be one of the central issues on that. I was on the Negotiating Committee for that. This felt like the time where we’re going to actually really deal with streaming. We went in there with a plan. We had member meetings. Then we had a pandemic, and all the leverage we possibly would have just disappeared, because we couldn’t mount a strike threat in the middle of the pandemic. It was so strange. Everything was strange about 2020. But to go into this and have the air just go out of the balloon was really frustrating.

**Chris:** Yeah. It’s weird how history is defined by climate and disease so often. The pandemic marginally helped the agency campaign and undermined the MBA negotiations. I don’t want to say it exactly that way. Actually, the committee did a very good job. Not only did we use our leverage the way we could at that point, but we won some things we didn’t think we were going to win. You were centrally part of paid family leave, which was a meaningful achievement. A huge, meaningful achievement. And to do that in the middle of a period when no one was in a position to exercise the leverage we normally do was pretty remarkable.

But we had known, I would say we knew in 2017, looking forward, that there were issues that we hadn’t dealt or were just beginning to see on the horizon that at some point would come to a head. And the question was, would 2020 be the moment in which that happened, when the Guild suddenly had to deal with the changes that were being brought about by the shift to the streaming model. Not being able to do it in 2020 delayed for an additional three years the ability to face all of that stuff. That’s really difficult in an MBA perspective, because one of the things that we talk about a lot with the members is the AMPTP tends to see things as solidified inside the contract.

If you wait too long to make a change, they say, “We have a mature contract on that provision, and you’ve been okay with it for a number of cycles. We’re not really inclined to do anything about that.” That’s what we faced in 2023, a long list of things, and longer than I think we knew in 2020, or at least problems that had become exacerbated in the intervening three years that had to be addressed.

**John:** Let’s talk about that list-making, because the process for figuring out what we’re going to negotiate in this MBA, obviously there were conversations ahead of time, but it started with a member survey. We surveyed the entire membership to see where they’re at, what are the things they’re facing. There’s quantity of information on that, but there’s also just a lot of anecdotal data and a lot of just people’s stories. It became clear, I think from that, that there was a big list of things.

I guess the question I want to get to is, how early on did you have a sense this was going to be a kitchen sink negotiation, where it felt like there was a whole bunch of stuff that all had to be addressed in this one thing, where there wasn’t a thing we could point to that’s like, let’s save the health plan, let’s save pensions, let’s deal with that. When was it clear to you that like, oh crap, it’s a big list here?

**Chris:** I think it was pretty early. I don’t know for you, but we were paying enough attention in the three years intervening, although I didn’t have any sense that I was going to be playing the role I had, because I had been tracking it somewhat and was in touch with Guild leadership and all the way through. I knew that list was getting longer and complicated.

I’ll tell you one thing that relates to this. In 2017, the staff of the Guild, because they had also done research then – there were surveys done then – came to a meeting with the co-chairs of the Negotiating Committee and said, “Here’s what we think should be on the table in 2017.” I remember having a pretty vigorous conversation, where there was a lot of push back from me and Billy and Chip, Billy Ray and Chip Johannessen, and said, “That’s too much.” I don’t know what that story is. It might actually be worth… I’m sorry for-

**John:** Oh, go for it.

**Chris:** … being parenthetical about this. It’s important to know that when we talk about this as a story, it’s more documentary than a piece of fiction. I know it’s not fiction. The story doesn’t come first. The facts on the ground come first. You can’t make that stuff up. What the Guild fights for is what the membership says it needs. I don’t want to make it feel as if story matters more than the reality of being a writer.

It’s also true, as you suggested, that it’s very difficult to have a negotiation where there are many, many things on the table, both because that’s a more difficult, complex story to tell, but also because it’s more difficult to defend a negotiation itself, where the tendency is for the other side to say, “What do I need to give you before you get so close to that point at which the membership is no longer willing to fight for everything that you have to start dropping stuff?” We can talk about that more. But it’s a risky way of going into a negotiation. Maybe risky is not the way to put it. Ellen would tell me that’s the wrong word. But I see it that way as a non-pro.

In 2017 we said, “We have to begin to couch this in a way that we cover as much as we possibly can, we don’t ignore any of the central issues, but that people understand fundamentally what we’re fighting for.” This was, by the way, before the health care stuff came up in 2017, for those who don’t remember, because that was a rollback on the table.

**John:** That’s right. That’s right.

**Chris:** They gave us the story that we didn’t have. Yes, I think it was pretty clear well before this negotiation that there was no way to boil this down to one or two things.

**John:** Let’s talk about the first framing of all this. The first time I heard it framed was in what you call the Member Rap, which was the presentation that you give to membership, saying this is what this is going to be about. I know you had to pitch it. You gave a version to the board. You read it to the Negotiating Committee. We all had notes. I feel so bad for how many notes you got, both in the room and emailed afterwards.

**Chris:** That was the largest writers’ room I’ve ever been in. Everyone felt free to.

**John:** Of course. You’re always surrounded by the best writers who have the strongest opinions in the world, and yet you got to a really good place. I thought we might spend a few minutes looking through this rap. It’s 20 double-spaced pages. The version I see says 22.0. Is that the 22nd draft?

**Chris:** The 22nd draft, yes.

**John:** 22nd draft.

**Chris:** Yeah. I should say, John, remember also, we had a month or more of meetings before that where we began to talk about which issue should be included and also making some really important decisions that held all the way through. For example, the question of whether minimum room size should be based on episodes or on show budget was a big conversation that we had.

**John:** I do forget that there was the long list, and we were scratching things out from that early stage. It was more detailed than what the Pattern of Demands is, but it was also allowing for some flexibility. Staff would weigh in on things. There were some wild ideas that were shot down. We were also really searching for how do we unify, bring this all together, what is the story we’re telling membership out of this. You were responsible for writing out the story.

Let me hand this over to you. This is something you’ve read 20,000 times, I’m sure. I thought we might start with, this is on the bottom of Page 1, you kind of establish the premise. Would you mind reading that aloud to us, that part?

**Chris:** This feels a little bit like I’m in a courtroom. They say, “Do you want to read out loud what you said? Do you stand by that?” I said, “Driven in large part by the shift to the streaming model, writing is being devalued in every sector of the business: in features, with its insufficient streaming residuals and continued reliance on free work – in comedy variety, whose writers were being unprotected by Guild standards on streaming platforms – in episodic television, where short orders, endless production calendars, the decoupling of writing from production, and the related rise of the mini room are an existential threat to writer compensation and power.”

**John:** That feels to me like a premise. In that paragraph, you’re really talking through this is the problem that we’re facing. This is the central thing that we have to look at. It sounds obvious, but without that, I don’t know what this whole campaign is about.

**Chris:** It’s always important, I think, in these kinds of negotiations, to tie what’s happening to some meaningful kind of sea change in the business. In 2007-’08, it’s obviously the hint that the internet is going to take over and our stuff is going to migrate to that, to an online platform. Here it was what came out of the shift to the streaming model. People understand that. They realize it’s the “why now”-

**John:** Exactly.

**Chris:** … of this conversation.

**John:** In a pitch, you have to sell why do we make this movie now, why do we make this series right now, why is this important right now. This is the “why now” of this. This is the premise.

**Chris:** The other important thing that is more apparent to me now than before is that premise that we stuck with all the way through, of no writer left behind, of every single sector of the business being attended to, dovetailed really nicely with – we were talking about it – the increasing democratization of the Guild. This strike relied in large part on the energy and dynamism of younger members. If we had decided, and we were never going to, that this was going to be an agenda that mostly took care of showrunner problems, for example, that wouldn’t have flown. We wouldn’t have been able to get away with that. What we ended up with was broad, near universal solidarity for an agenda that, as we said here, within the first minute and a half of the very first member message, said this is for everybody.

**John:** Let’s talk about who this everybody are, because next up, you have a premise, but it’s not a story until there are characters. On the next page, you get to the characters. I highlighted a few of them there, if you’d mind reading those.

**Chris:** “Our survey tells a story – your story. Almost 7,000 of you responded. You wrote to us in detail, with anger and sometimes with anguish and fear. Here’s who we heard from:

“The screenwriter who’s on a one-step deal, who’s been writing for months while their delivery money is held hostage to the next free rewrite, whose residuals on streaming are capped at the movie-of-the-week rate, even with its A-list stars and theatrical budget.

“The staff writer who’s kept at the same level on short orders, year after year.

“The lower-level writer who’s going from 10-week job to 12-week job to 20-week job. Who sometimes can’t even get those jobs because mini rooms with their small staffs and uniform salaries, tend to favor higher-level writers. Who gets a script – maybe.”

**John:** In that same segment, you’re talking through comedy variety writers and mid-level writers and showrunners and making clear this is about everybody. In doing that, you are letting people say, “Oh, he mentioned me, because that’s what I am,” but also, you can imagine yourself in those other people’s position, which ended up being crucial for solidarity to make sure that we all felt like we were fighting for each other.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s right. The interesting thing about this is, though the membership, I’ll say first of all, understood it intuitively, because it did come from that, the full understanding of it in some ways didn’t come until people were in these meetings and then on the picket line where they began to meet each other. It was a little bit like those stories of… We’re not really like this. We’re not provincial and living in our own little wards, but it’s like you got called up to war and you met all these people from all across the country whom you had never met before. You went places you never knew existed in some ways. You learned stuff that you wouldn’t have learned had you not been drafted into a conflict.

**John:** I remember on the picket line talking with Jeopardy writers or folks who do Hallmark movies. It’s such a different structure of work than I’m used to, but it’s also covered by the same Guild and they have the same issues. Because I knew that those Jeopardy writers are under the same kind of provisions, Appendix A, as comedy variety writers, I understood what the kind of things were that they were facing, which was crucial.

**Chris:** The companies, I think, were often – I don’t know if they are anymore, maybe not – under the misconceptions that these agendas are imposed by leadership on the membership. That is not at all what happened. It comes up from the membership, and the leadership just echoes that.

Then I think the truth of this in any one of these longer struggles is that, just as in writing, you can’t make up stakes. You can put all kinds of flowery language around something, but either the stakes are there or not. The reason why this ended up actually holding people together was because they felt it deeply.

**John:** You want to move ahead?

**Chris:** Sure.

**John:** You literally state the theme. It’s Page 4 there.

**Chris:** Yes. “7,000 individual stories – your own private economies. With one repeated theme: the business is broken. Writing is broken.”

**John:** You literally state the theme. That’s a thing we came back to again and again is that the companies have broken this model that was so successful for them for so many years, and we need to fix it. We need to put in place practices that actually fix and correct the mistakes that they made, not to go back to an old system, but to make this current system workable, livable, survivable.

**Chris:** I don’t know we knew that. The thing is, you’re just guessing at… I don’t mean we’re guessing at the problem or the solutions. It’s like having a test screening, these early member meetings, to see whether it works or not, is this a four-quadrant negotiating agenda.

**John:** Let’s talk about the revisions and the rewrites, because I don’t remember clearly your first passes. What was different and what changed in that rewrite process, getting notes back from the board, from Negotiating Committee, from early people listening to the drafts of this?

**Chris:** That’s also a little distant in my memory, because there are so many drafts. First of all, it was a honing of the way we talked about the issues. I needed, and we always need, the first time through – and I remember this in every single one of these negotiations I’ve been part of – to have people hear it and say, “Am I understanding immediately what you’re talking about?”

Remember, these meetings, you’re sitting in the audience. You have some slides up of what the proposals are, but there’s a lot of information passing through your ear canal very quickly. It’s not easy to keep track of that stuff. It’s really important. It’s mostly not visual. One thing that goes on is people saying, “I’m getting this like this. It’s crystal clear.” The second thing is, to be honest, different constituencies in the board and NegComm saying, “This doesn’t entirely address what I need, and can you make sure that it does?” There was a lot of that.

Then the third thing is just there’s a lot of good language that comes out of a 40-person writers’ room. I found it, and I think that staff and anyone did, very useful to hear even the casual comments that people made in conversation. We would just jot things down and say, “That’s a beautiful way of putting that.” I remember, because I actually referred to it at one point, Mike Schur said, “The minimum size for a writers’ room in the MBA is zero.” We’re going to use that forever.

**John:** Absolutely. I do remember some NegComm meetings where someone would say something, like, “Yep, we’re pulling that in.” Let’s talk about some of the very specific and, in some cases, very strong language you’re using in that. “Cold calculation.” “Unconscionable practice.” “Systematic elimination.” “Held hostage.” “Spent money like maniacs.” You’re not afraid to paint the other side as being ruthless, which I think is important here. It’s not personifying them individually. You’re not trying to go after the CEOs. You’re saying these companies are acting in ways that are not necessarily evil, but not rational, not forgivable.

**Chris:** That’s right. First of all is you say ad hominem attacks ever, because eventually you have to negotiate with those people, also because it really is about companies at this point, not at all about CEOs, who probably have no idea exactly what’s going on at this point in the conversation.

It is an interesting thing that one of the things you deal with, with a membership that’s very attuned to obviously its own issues but also fairness – because writers really care not just to get the most of what they deserve but to make sure what they’re asking for is fair and that we’re characterizing things honestly, which I think is probably not necessarily the case in every single negotiation for every single Guild or union – but there isn’t a requirement early, particularly if you think that this could be a conflict negotiation – and we knew from the very beginning that there was certainly a possibility of that – to rev the membership up enough to have them ready to… Negotiation really isn’t a war – really, when we said that later, we meant it – but certainly a battle. To rev them up for battle, to take it out of the realm of, these are reasonable conversations with people who would deal with you reasonably, and remind them the fact is, left alone individually, they’re really being taken advantage of in the most obscene ways.

That will change over the course of the next… This is in February, March, so the next seven months, as we begin the strike and then move toward trying to settle it, the rhetoric will change, because, and David Young always used to say, first you have to make war, and then you have to make peace. Both of those things, you have to do them equivalently well.

**John:** In your recollection, did you have to tone anything down? Because I know that it is always a concern about overshooting or going too far. Do you remember softening any lines in this speech as you went along?

**Chris:** I don’t remember specifically, but I know all the way through, yes. There’s no question that sometimes you write these things, and you begin to rev yourself up, and it feels good looking at your computer. You need somebody to say, “This may be more than we need to say.” Staff was great about that. Ellen Stutzman, Rebecca Kessinger, in addition to all the members of the NegComm who read this in the leadership, and David Goodman in particular, they were all very good about it. But yes, periodically, you had to pull back on it.

**John:** Now, reading through here, I was also struck by the number of times you were heading off counterarguments, and so examples being, “You are going to hear relentless rumors of the demise of the streaming business. They will be used as a weapon against you – against all of us.” “You’re living in the past, the companies will say, This is the new business model. It’s not a business model. It’s bad faith.” “Some will say the companies want us to strike. That they want an excuse to shut down production. As if anyone’s stopping them from doing that now.” “You’ll be punished, some will say. We’re being punished now. This is what punishment looks like.” Many cases in here, you’re having to anticipate the argument and shut it down before it can be made.

**Chris:** It’s very, very deliberate, obviously, over and over again. First of all, it is sort of a debate tactic to preempt arguments. But even more important not to think of it that way, and you probably experience this with members, is one thing that we heard from them over and over again is, “Oh, you could see it coming. You told us what was going to happen, and then it happened.”

That was important for two reasons. One, obviously, it inoculates people against the shocks that necessarily will occur over the course of some number of months. A good example of one of the largest was, “The DGA is going to make a deal at some point. You need to know that. You need to know that we’re going to stay on strike, that they’re not going to solve any of our problems. We need to tell you that up front, so in that moment there’s no fracture.”

**John:** There’s no other Guild in no other hall that’s going to make our deal.

**Chris:** That’s right. Exactly, exactly. The other thing is, you begin to get a deep well of trust with a group of people who hear you saying this is what’s going to happen tomorrow, and then it happens tomorrow. We say, “Look, they’re going to make a deal. They’re going to make us an offer, and it’s going to be a bad offer. Then they’re going to tell you this about your leadership.” All of those things end up happening.

The thing is the AMPTP in some ways were undermined in this cycle, because it really did play the same playbook over and over again. They were undermined, one, because it didn’t work, because the world had changed then, but also because they were running the same offensive or defensive plays that we had seen over and over again. We knew where we could do the shift.

**John:** It’s interesting you use the word playbook, because we’ve used it a lot in the last couple of months, but it doesn’t appear in these early speeches. It’s a thing that came up later on. It’s such a useful way of describing their standard procedure, which is so ineffectual, which is crucial.

**Chris:** Here, for example, in this speech, really what we’re doing is saying, let us articulate for you what you have not been able to put together entirely, because you are still living in your own, as we say, private economy, what’s going on across the whole biz, where you fit into the way writing in general is being undermined and how we’re going to solve that. Though we talk about some of the companies’ arguments here, we don’t talk yet about negotiating very much.

**John:** We do say that we will be heading into negotiations. On Page 24, if you want to jump ahead to there, you introduce the notion of we may need to go on strike, which was I know a debate, like how much do we talk about the possibility that we’re going to head out on strike. Let’s listen to how you actually introduce it.

**Chris:** “But if the companies are unreasonable in response, it may require us to demonstrate our resolve – and we will come back to you for a strike authorization vote. We will still work to make a deal. That is always our goal. But if the companies’ answer is still no, then to get what we deserve, what we need to survive, may require a strike.”

“A strike is a brutal thing and it’s not always a fair thing. It’s okay to be afraid of it. Like a war – it takes its toll on all of us – but it also punishes some of us more than others. And yet, here is a simple truth, it is our willingness to strike, and nothing else, that gave us our health and pension funds, our minimums, and our jurisdiction over the internet.”

**John:** Here you’re just getting people ready for the notion that we may need to go on strike, especially a membership who most of them were not part of the 2007-2008 strike, so they don’t have a recollection of it.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s right. Two things are true about this. One, and it’s sometimes hard to remember when you’re on the Negotiating Committee, is that we’ve been talking about this amongst ourselves for months and months and months, preparing, I guess inoculating yourself against all of those things, but internalizing what might happen in the future. Members are dealing with this for the first time. They’re coming to a meeting not quite knowing particularly here what they’re going to hear.

It’s really important to give them the time to process. Here we’re in – I can’t remember what the date of this is – sometime in February, but we’re going to go into negotiation in March. So we’re only two months away from a contract deadline. They need time. You can’t come back to somebody a couple of days before a contract deadline with a strike authorization vote and say, listen, we’ve never mentioned the possibility that what you could be doing could send you out on strike. That would be too much of a shock to the system. We needed to begin to put into play the possibility. Trust us, we’ll try to avoid it, but remember that this is always an option and something we might actually need to do. That I think was a place, if you remember, John, where we had lots of conversations about quite how far to go.

**John:** Of course.

**Chris:** There were people who were very nervous about that and saying, “You’re going too far. May be going too far to say a strike is a scary thing and it hurts some people.” We, broadly speaking, had the philosophy, talk about the fear. It’s like raising kids. The best thing to do is talk about everything. Don’t let anything fester inside unspoken.

**John:** Now, we’re looking at this as a printed document, but of course this was a performance. You were reading this aloud. How much did that influence both your writing process and the shape of it itself? Because it’s not meant to be a pdf that someone’s reading. It’s meant to be someone’s watching you actually say it. A related question is, stuff got applause in here, and how much did you need to anticipate where the crowd was at during the speech?

**Chris:** First, I wrote it as a speech. I wrote it according to the rhythms of how I speak. Sometimes I’d get notes, and I’d have to say to people, “Listen, I know. Just trust me. It’s not a document you’re reading. It’s a document you’re hearing, so I’ve got to do it that way.” This is the least speech-like of all of them though in some ways, because it had a very long section of proposals, which are really-

**John:** Slides, yeah.

**Chris:** … just a slide deck. But everything else is like that, and it’s written intentionally that way, with repetitive clauses and builds and things like that. You can’t know until you get there what the audience is going to do. I actually have some memory of not being flustered but thinking, “Okay, where do I need to stop? How far should I go? When do I pick up again?” All of that. I’m sure David would tell you the same thing, and Ellen as well, who sometimes when she read through the list of proposals would get a standing ovation. Certainly at the end, you get a standing ovation between every one. You learn a little bit the way the audience is going to react to it, and then you adjust. All of these things we did only a couple of times each. We didn’t go on the road with any of them and really learn.

**John:** Never see how they played in Wichita.

**Chris:** Exactly.

**John:** Let’s talk about the audiences, because the audience who is hearing this speech are all WGA members. They’re all sophisticated. They can handle complicated language. They can handle these things. They know most of the esoteric terms that you’re talking about. You may need to explain a few things, but they get the whole scope of this.

One of the things that became really clear as we got into negotiations and I would hear from people who were outside of the business or who were producers of stuff, they had never heard of this speech, and so they didn’t have the framing of all this. We talk about inoculation, but it’s also education. It’s really making sure everyone’s on the same page. Our membership was really good at being on the same page. The rest of the town didn’t have any of that information and was just perplexed by what we were doing.

**Chris:** Actually, I was going to think about something before we get to that. Remember also, we actually did a couple of other small test runs of this. We got some writers and just did it in front of them and got some notes on these things, so that the first time we did it was not in front of, I don’t know, 800 people.

**John:** First, we had the captains’ meeting.

**Chris:** That’s right.

**John:** You read it at the captains’ meeting. There was also a showrunners’ meeting. It wasn’t in front of giant hotel ballrooms. It was smaller groups first.

**Chris:** One of the things that I experienced in this, and I think David Goodman would say the same thing, is we always went into those early meetings thinking, “You don’t know how this is going to play.” Writers adopted it almost immediately and universally. You could tell me better than me, because I’m too in the middle. Was there a sense that the town truly didn’t understand this and thought there’s no way this was going to happen?

**John:** Yeah, they truly didn’t. I remember a phone call with a producer on one of the projects who said, “Oh, yeah, I know you guys might be on strike, might call for a vote, but you wouldn’t actually be on strike until September 1st.” I’m like, “I have no idea where you’re getting that information, but I guarantee you that’s not correct.” There were other just really fundamental things about what it is you’re actually going for. They clearly didn’t understand it.

**Chris:** I don’t know if you were going to bring this up or not, but very early on in the process, I think probably even in the early member meetings with this message, even though it was broadly very well received, was this repeated question: what’s the bumper sticker?

**John:** I wanted to get to that.

**Chris:** Oh, sorry.

**John:** There was no great slogan. The closest you got to it, which you did repeat three times in this, was “Put money back in writers’ pockets and power back in writers’ hands.”

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s right. That’s what we came up with in this one. I think some other version of it was, if somebody asks you what it’s about, it’s compensation, compensation, compensation. And yet, that didn’t really end up being the way we talked about this, although fundamentally, obviously, it is about compensation and power. No one asked us again after the first month, what’s the slogan?

**John:** We never had a bumper sticker. We never had the thing to put on a T-shirt. It wasn’t that. It was about this. Once we were on strike, we were on strike, and that was the message is that we were on strike.

But before we got out on strike, we had to have a strike authorization vote. That’s the next speech. Talking through this, this was the SAV. We had a couple of these meetings. They were mostly in hotel ballrooms. The audience for this was probably different. We obviously had a ton of captains there, because captains will come to everything. We had skeptics. We had nervous people, because the people who were fully on board, I don’t know that they necessarily needed to come to this.

**Chris:** That’s right. It’s generally true in the Guild that some percent of people who trust and are fine don’t show up to the meetings, so the meetings may encourage a broader range of points of view. I had to admit, this SAV again went very well, even in the room, as I remember, although it triggers a different kind of question, like, “Tell me you’re not going to stay on strike over this or that,” kind of thing.

**John:** Absolutely. Cleverly, you’re trying to hold off on some of those issues, and you’re trying to hold member questions back about what would a strike be like or what the logistics of a strike would be. You’re just talking about trying to balance the hope and fear going into this moment, talking about why the strike authorization vote is important for leverage in the Negotiating Committee, so we can try to get the best deal possible without a strike, and yet at the same time say, “We’re asking you to trust us that we will make the best deal possible, but if we need to go on strike, we will go on strike, even though it’s a difficult thing to do.”

**Chris:** Yeah. I don’t know whether your listeners need even more of an explanation. By the time the SAV, the strike authorization vote meetings and the strike authorization vote happen, we’ve been in negotiations for some number of weeks. They haven’t gone particularly well. The companies are not really engaging us in a meaningful way. They’re engaging us in the way they would do during a normal negotiation, which is to say, “We can give you some version of Pattern, some increasing minimums, and a few sweeteners.” The message to the membership needs to be that, but also to talk about how a strike authorization vote will put us back into the negotiating room for about two more weeks or so before the deadline, and how that member power is going to give us what we want.

It’s an interesting conversation, because in some sense, you want to say to people, “Look, a really high strike authorization vote number gives us the kind of leverage to do the work that might avoid a strike. But you can’t vote for it thinking that’s what you’re doing. You have to know that it’s real, and if we don’t get there, then a strike is what may come next.”

**John:** Going back to 2017, a lot of the messaging was maybe not intentional, but a lot of the messaging you heard is like, “Vote for the SAV because then there won’t be a strike.” That was a message that got out there. This time we were definitely trying to push back against that. Don’t just say yes because you’re trying to avoid a strike. Know that a strike is possible.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s right. It was an adjustment based on what we learned from 2017, where we probably went too far in that direction. It was effective, and it got us some of what we needed. The issues were important but not quite as existential that we describe these. I can’t say that we knew absolutely whether we were going to strike or not.

**John:** We had a rollback on the table too, and everyone wanted that rollback gone.

**Chris:** That’s right. Once that came off, of course things changed substantially. We made adjustments in that, because as I said, writers are very attuned to the truth of an argument that you’re making. It used to drive David Young crazy. He appreciated it, but it’s the only Guild that says, “I don’t deserve that, so don’t ask for that.”

**John:** Thinking back to this moment in the strike authorization vote, we did tell members that the AMPTP didn’t have crazy rollbacks. We were very honest with them. The AMPTP was polite and patronizing, but not outrageous. We worked really, really, really hard to get out giant SAV vote. Then it turned out every other unit after us could get a giant SAV vote just because, just because that was a thing that happened.

**Chris:** It drove us crazy. I went, “You can do this without being really neurotic?”

**John:** Absolutely. Without calling each individual member, it’s actually possible to get a giant number? It’s great that they did.

**Chris:** Writers are writers.

**John:** Writers are writers.

**Chris:** The other thing I was going to say is – and you know this because we’ve been in a lot of negotiations – you really don’t know until the last few days whether you’re in an actual negotiation or not. Even as we went back in with the companies, and they were being very, very difficult, there was always a possibility that at some point a week before or five days before, something would kick in, and instead of the posturing and this is all you were going to get or some stuff around the edges, we would begin to have a real negotiation. It never happened, but you don’t know that. I don’t know for you. For me, it was probably only three or four days before that I began to think, oh, they’re never coming around.

**John:** No, they’re just toying with us. I do remember you saying in the room that we have to prepare that they’re going to come to us with a deal that’s going to make it really tough for us to say yes or no, then we’ll have to debate that. That never happened. They didn’t come to us with anything even remotely close to that.

**Chris:** That’s right, because it turned out, going back to the same thing, their playbook was their playbook. You have to assume that in some ways the AMPTP was perfectly okay with us going out on strike, because they assumed that their strategy is to push us to the side right now because we were going first, get to the DGA, make a deal there, make a deal with SAG, come back to us, and say, “Now you’re alone. You’ve got this big, overreaching agenda,” as they might put it. “We’ll do a little bit here and there, and then you’ll settle pretty quickly.” That obviously did not happen, which was their fundamental mistake in all of this. I think we realized at some point, oh, this is not a real negotiation that’s going on up until then.

**John:** We did go out on strike. Not a shock there. The next speech we’ll look at is from the Shrine Auditorium. The premise in your first speech was on Page 1. The premise in this speech I think actually comes quite a bit later on. It’s on Page 9 here. Do you want to read through this section?

**Chris:** Sure. “But now as we move to close the deal with the companies, we must speak in the language of power. Power is the only thing that moves them. Our employers give up nothing in negotiations out of fairness or compassion. They say yes only when they are made to understand the cost of saying no. They say yes only when they are made to understand the cost of saying no.”

**John:** Great. An example of repetition there, to make sure people actually heard the point.

**Chris:** Exactly. Pretty obvious [crosstalk 44:00].

**John:** But talking about this is going to be a power negotiation, that we basically have to show our power, so the power in the SAV but ultimately then the power in the strike, and that this wasn’t about what is right and what is fair and what is honest and what is true. This is about our power versus their power.

**Chris:** It’s important education for new people on the Negotiating Committee as well, which is to realize that for writers the story has to begin with a truthful recitation of the problems in the industry and what we need to survive. Truth doesn’t end up mattering very much in all of this. In fact, David Goodman made the joke in the later meetings that at some point one CEO said to me, “Stop with the speeches. I don’t want to hear anymore why it’s true.” That’s really the case. We had to say that to the members. We had to say to the members, “Look, at this point you and we know that we’re right in asking for these things, but that doesn’t matter anymore. We need your vote now, because all they’re going to respond to is the risk of a strike and what that means to them. That’s our power. Our power is the only thing that’s going to move them closer to their bottom line.”

**John:** Now, ultimately, we do go out on strike. I think the counterargument to that is that truth doesn’t matter to the companies, but truth matters tremendously to our membership and our transparency.

One of the great things we did, which I don’t think was all that well planned in advance, was when we went on strike we put out this two-pager that listed this is what we are asking for, this is what their counter is. That did so much work for us in terms of letting our membership know this is why we’re out on strike, these are the issues. What do you know about the two-pager? Because I perceive the two-pager as something that Sean on staff generated for our own internal purposes. When did it become an external document? What was the decision to make that a public document?

**Chris:** I think the staff had it pretty clear in their head that they were going to do that as we got to the last-

**John:** Day or two.

**Chris:** … day or two or so. Remember again, it’s a very complicated negotiation. It’s much more complex in some ways than some others. You can’t just say, “We didn’t get jurisdiction of the internet yet, so we’re still on strike.” You had to make clear exactly what we were asking for. The favor the companies did was the opposite of what you were talking about your fear would be, what happens if they get awfully close to what somebody will say is good enough. They were so far away-

**John:** Exactly.

**Chris:** … from what anyone would say was even plausible that this very clear recitation of how far they were away from any kind of reasonable deal really gave us a lot of power moving into the strike. It’s one of the most important days of the entire process from February to the middle of September is the release of that document. I don’t even remember it being a debate. It just seemed like it was a given.

**John:** The other thing I think was so powerful about the two-pager is it mirrors your initial speech in terms of we heard from the screenwriter, we heard from the middle-level writer, we heard from the lower-level writer, we heard from the showrunner, and each of those people could see themselves reflected in the things we were asking for and were not receiving and could also remember, “Oh, that’s right, that’s what the comedy variety proposal is. That’s what the issue is here.”

Of course, the issue that we… This may be a good time to talk about it. Going into this negotiation, the AI stuff was just a tiny little footnote at the end. I remember in those initial meetings with the Negotiating Committee, we have all these other things, and then there’s also AI. Like, “Really? Are we going to talk about AI?” I would explain why I thought it was important, but it didn’t seem that important. Then it became much more important really during the time we were in negotiation. Then we went out on strike, we could say to the members that they did not even want to talk to us about AI, and that that signaled that they were looking to do things with AI, and that became a real centerpiece flashpoint. It became one of the most important things we were fighting for in this.

**Chris:** It reminded me of a few things. First, let’s put AI aside for one sec. I just wanted to talk about one thing. It’s interesting. One thing that the two-page document pointed out though is exactly how complicated this negotiation is, and in some ways how even really attentive members don’t necessarily understand things intuitively, immediately.

It’s a conversation that I had with Ellen and that we had to have with members repeatedly afterward, because the two-pager included, for example, our opening proposals on minimum room size. Tell me if we did not spend the next two months explaining to our own members this was just an opening proposal, it was not the number we expected to end up at. We understood there would be a negotiation. You get caught in those things because our sense of negotiation has not been internalized by every single member. There was that. That was a little bit of a pressure that got put on us by the two-pager. It was way outweighed by the honesty of it, but we had to go back and explain all of that.

AI turned out to be a gift in some ways, because I think we were somewhat focused on it. They made us afraid of it in ways that we hadn’t been before. It required us to dive into it. I know we had a working group, or that the board had a working group. You had been working on it all the way through. But we didn’t quite know all the implications of what it would be. What it ended up doing though during the strike was it made the story even stronger, because it dovetailed with other things we were saying about the drive toward efficiency and productivity and how that would eventually undermine writer employment, how they could replace original creativity or well-distributed creativity amongst a reasonable number of writers with very few writers and a machine.

All of a sudden, all of these things we were arguing about – this may be a part of the bumper sticker – began to feel like, in ways that we didn’t really understand at the beginning, were coalescing into a single, larger argument that the membership really understood.

Look, we didn’t overhype AI. We didn’t try to turn it into more of a nightmare than it was. But the membership and the rest of the world began to fear it really intuitively. It also linked us to labor across America, because everyone’s worried about the idea that they don’t matter anymore and that they can be replaced by a machine. Maybe not everybody, although maybe everybody should. It was a fascinating moment and a huge mistake on the companies’ part.

**John:** They’ve largely acknowledged that, I think, because if they’d dealt with it early on or at least not ignored us completely, it wouldn’t become a flashpoint for the DGA even. The DGA, who didn’t seem to have an interest in it at all, suddenly had to have an interest, and then they had to get an AI proposal on there. They got really insufficient language, which angered us, angered our membership and riled us up and created even more attention on the issue. It was foolish.

**Chris:** In the months that we had to think about it, with your work and the work of the staff and everything, resulted in a much more sophisticated, I think, AI …

**John:** A hundred percent.

**Chris:** … standard proposals than we had at the very beginning.

**John:** We didn’t have anything on consent, basically that they had to tell you if they were handing you stuff generated by AI. Those were not part of our initial proposals there. Those were not any crucial gains.

**Chris:** Look, it was certainly an education for me, I think also an education for our members, thinking, for example, about training AI, to distinguish between uses of AI, those parties, Open AI, Google, Microsoft, who don’t own our copyrights and whose use of our material will be an issue both for us and for the companies who do own it. But in our relationship with the companies who do own the copyright over our material, it’s much more complex, because they have certain rights, and we have certain contractual rights, and the balance of those things is going to have to be worked out. But I didn’t understand that going in.

**John:** We are now out on strike. We have this big meeting at the Shrine Auditorium. That’s where I think we really established some individual characters in the strike, which I wouldn’t have anticipated. Obviously, Ellen became a superstar, and people just loved her sense of humor and her deadpan affect. You and David Goodman, you were familiar to people in the old history. People knew you guys. Lindsay Dougherty suddenly came out of nowhere. I’m thinking, she’s not even in our Guild, and then she became a superstar.

Then Carol Lombardini. The speech at the Shrine is the first time you mentioned Carol Lombardini by name. It’s in reference to things she said in the room, basically making sure that our membership understands that they were hearing us but also ignoring us at the same time. That was crucial. You said before we don’t do ad hominem attacks, but you do mention Carol Lombardini by name. What was your thinking about that?

**Chris:** John, I think it was around the time we began to understand what was going on here, which was that there was probably a split inside the room we had hinted at between the legacy companies and the streaming companies based on their varying business models, and that one of the factors impeding the legacy companies, for example, from coming to terms with what was happening was the way the AMPTP functioned. It became very useful to have a villain in the story.

It was good to have the villain be the AMPTP, because I think we knew – I say we knew and it all turned out this way – but in fact we had some experience and did know that this would get solved eventually when CEOs from the companies would engage in the process. It was a thing we had tried to have happen from very early on. They were resistant to it. We can talk about that if you want. It was a way of saying we’re not going to identify those people who will eventually be, I don’t want to call them the heroes, but will be our partners eventually, to spare them from that, and yet still identify, for the membership, the antagonists.

**John:** I think it’s good to stress that on our side, we did nothing to try to vilify David Zaslav, but just a series of things happened with David Zaslav, that he became a public figure for other stuff he was doing, but that wasn’t our doing.

**Chris:** It wasn’t. I don’t even think it was beneficial to us, to be honest with you, because he wasn’t the villain in this story. I don’t want to identify anybody. But we needed him to be part of the solution, and so hyper-identifying him with what was looked on as some flubs didn’t really advance our narrative particularly well.

**John:** Now, the narrative at this point is much less about… You had speeches along the way. Occasionally, a video would come. A new Chris Keyser video would drop. Everyone would stop what they’re doing and watch the Chris Keyser video. But the messaging and the narrative at this point was much less about you and what you were saying, as consistent communication from the Guild to members, from the Guild to press, just telling the story consistently and honestly and openly, and with good framing, to everyone to make sure we are all on the same page about what was happening there.

Let’s talk about message discipline. One of the things that people may not understand is that as board and Negotiating Committee members, we get some talking points, usually from Rebecca, about like, this is what we want to say about these things, and we can say those things.

If there’s a member email, we can generally say what’s in the member email, but we shouldn’t go much beyond that. We have discretion about what things we can say to individual members, but not say to groups, or certainly not to say to the media. That was so useful on our side, both for us individually as NegComm members, but I also think for members. They knew what we could talk about, what we couldn’t talk about with the negotiations. We could listen and pass that word up, but it felt like it was a good way of keeping this all together, keeping the story one story.

**Chris:** I think that’s true. It’s true, and yet there were risks inherent in making that work. The reason why it did was not something that we might have, I don’t know about predicted, but we couldn’t have counted on. There were two sides of that. The first was, I’d say it was a pretty remarkable Negotiating Committee and board and council. They were very, very good at telling the story and making it a story, not just a series of talking points. Broadly speaking, we really fanned out across the city or cities and told that story over and over again, and told it with very great discipline and some power.

Then, because I think the story we were telling was true, the members, who were much more important than had ever been true before, even in the agency campaign, as advocates and storytellers as well, also repeated that story, sometimes in ways that were very funny but always on point. You just didn’t get those people who were going off on tangents and misidentifying what our key proposals were, whatever it was. We couldn’t have known that until it happened. But it turned out that we had 11,000 members on point.

**John:** Yes, and it was really impressive to see. I’d also say that a lot of the discussions that happened in 2007-08 on the Deadline Hollywood comments section, instead, those member conversations were happening in smaller forums. We weren’t as public, which I think was really, really helpful. If there was misinformation or issues coming up that way, we could talk to those members individually. We could address those things. But there weren’t big public fights happening, which I think was great.

**Chris:** Yeah. Members really did also internalize the idea that union conversations have to be internal conversations. You can disagree, push back, ask questions, but that ought to be inside the union, because otherwise it can be very dangerous. Obviously, we had the advantage of a much more favorable press.

**John:** We really did. What theory do you have for that?

**Chris:** One thing is the journalists know what we know. They’re also members or want to be members of unions. They have seen this in their own lives, the way in which their working conditions have been degraded over time. I think there was some sense of that amongst the reporters. Not everybody. Not every reporter was that great. We still had some who seemed to take the companies’ side no matter what. By and large, again, there was a sympathy and empathy for writers that I don’t think we had before. I don’t know if you have other theories as well.

**John:** Certainly on the AI issues, because I did a lot of the AI press, they would stop recording and say, “I totally get this, because that’s exactly what’s happening in my industry.” They’re afraid of AI, because they’re just as vulnerable as we are, if not more vulnerable.

**Chris:** Right, and then probably the fact that this caught on more broadly amongst the public and other labor unions. We always tell our members very early on, the only people who need to hold together are writers themselves. Don’t worry about public opinion. Don’t worry about any of that other stuff. If we’re strong together, we can win. Turns out the truth is broad-based public support and, even more important maybe, real support amongst guilds and unions, particularly those in our own industry, were critical to the success of this. But once that builds, once that’s the story out there, I think it also engenders more support. It’s very difficult to push against that quite as hard and just take the company line.

I think there was, broadly speaking, just a general acknowledgement, except on the part of some people. The companies were just wrong about this stuff. I don’t mean wrong on every single point, but I mean broadly speaking, they had broken the business. Something had to be done. It wasn’t going to undermine their business model in order to do that. They all had to work through their problems. They can’t work through their problems by leaving their workers behind. That’s not a path forward. People got that in a way then.

Remember also, by the way, without going on, in 2007 and ’08, we’re talking about the internet. It’s a thing that hasn’t quite happened yet, and a lot of people don’t want have happen.

**John:** Exactly. The internet was our AI.

**Chris:** Right, but we were trying to control it and use it as if it were something good. Writers were thinking, “Oh my god, I don’t want to write in seven-minute segments or whatever on the internet.”

**John:** Webisodes. All webisodes. We also have to consider that the companies had their own narrative. They had to have their own internal narrative about what was going on, how long this was going to last, that the writers’ demands were unreasonable, that these things were close. And they didn’t have the message discipline to keep it together. They didn’t all have one story.

As little things would come out, it became clear they were just denying reality. It was frustrating to watch at times, because little bits would come out. I remember being in the room with the AMPTP one day, and we were getting these texts saying, “I hear there’s a deal. I hear that you’re already signed and you’re about to announce it.” We were nowhere close. This was in August when nothing was happening. It was clear that either that’s the story they were telling internally, and that it had leaked out, or they were trying to sell the story. But it never worked. They just kept tripping over themselves whenever they were trying to sell a story to the broader public.

**Chris:** That’s right, yeah. First of all, nowhere was that more apparent than in the fateful day when somebody anonymously decided to tell the press that they were trying to starve us, in fact. We took strength from all of that, because they misperceived how things would play. I’m not quite sure why they made those mistakes over and over. I think in some ways there was competitive PR going on, that different companies were trying to position themselves, and that led to mistakes being made. I don’t know whether it was ever being run through some central communications department there or not, but they seemed to do that over and over again. I have a feeling sometimes some of these companies had to tell stories to their own employees.

**John:** I think so too.

**Chris:** Yeah, that were not necessarily what was going on in the room.

**John:** No. It’s tough. Let’s think about the narrative going forward, because while we’ve just had the ratification vote, so that chapter is done, the story continues, because looking back to 2007-2008, the story of what happened in that strike kept changing and evolving. You heard a narrative like, oh, we lost things in 2007-08 or DGA won the internet in 2007-2008.

I want to think about the narrative going forward and some things we’re going to probably start hearing over the next couple months, couple years about stuff. The New York Times’ The Daily Podcast was talking about the wrap-up of the strike. And they said, oh, don’t be surprised if streamers start raising their prices, because they’ll have to pay for these writers. Price increases are your fault, Chris Keyser.

**Chris:** Yeah, exactly. One of the things that became true in the negotiations is that the CEO said to us, “This has nothing to do with our bottom line.” We made that argument to them. I know television very well. You could talk about features. But these adjustments in the writers’ budget are just internal conversations about how to reallocate inside a budget that used to much more highly favor writers and has ceased to do so. This is not going to raise their costs. Even some of the proposals, by the way, like what they call success-based residuals, are so small in comparison to what’s really going on.

We had lots of conversations with CEOs or other people in the business, who would just repeat to us, “You know, these companies have enormous problems. They have cost problems. They’ve thrown all this money out. They’ve chased the Netflix model of unlimited spending with no requirement of any kind of revenue on the other side. They’ve got too many upfront costs, and they’ve eliminated backend, and it’s all become disastrous. There’s no relationship between pay and results.”

We kept saying, “We get it. You’re going to have to take care of all of those things.” That’s what’s actually driving the changes in the business. This is not about that. This is just about the fact that when you hire us, and you only hire us when you want to spend the money, you have to pay us fairly.” This is at minimums also. This is not over scale. This is not what the highest paid screenwriter gets for a movie. This is really what the entry-level screenwriter and television writer and Appendix A writer can expect in a contract. It has nothing to do with the overall macro changes in the industry.

**John:** The price of Netflix or Disney Plus will go up. It has nothing to do with this contract or SAG-AFTRA’s contract. It’s all about how much money they think they can charge consumers for this and how much money they want to make. That’s what it’s all about.

**Chris:** That’s right. Look. They’ve got a problem in streaming obviously in particular, because they decoupled what they spent from what they got back. At some point, my guess is, and you can talk about this – I’m sure you have – that streaming is going to resemble some hybrid between broadcast and basic cable of subscribers and advertising and resale to secondary markets. That’s going to be a balance that the more successful company’s going to make work. It’ll take them some number of years to do that. But that’s going to be okay. We’re going to suffer in the meantime.

**John:** It’s going to be okay. Fewer shows will be made. Fewer writers are going to be employed. Both entirely possible.

**Chris:** I think very possible, because that peak TV era of anything goes is probably over. But people were talking about that well before. If you go back to the very first speech I made, I talk a lot about all the things the companies are saying before we go out on strike, about how the business is changing and they can’t spend the money and they’re not making money anymore. This is all over the place well before the strike happens. Decisions about what the proper number of shows is or writers being hired because of that, that’s all built in to the system.

**John:** It’s correlation versus causation. Yes, these things are happening at the same time, and they have the same underlying causes, but we didn’t cause this.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s exactly right. Look, it’s going to be complicated. Individual writers are not going to know going forward exactly what the cause is of any given period of difficulty. I think there will be even people in our guild who will say, this happened to me because of the strike. I can’t say it’s not true for anybody. I don’t know what specific effect that will be. But broadly speaking, as with the recession of 2007-08, corresponding to that strike, unfortunately, the ups and downs of the business, the inherent uncertainties exist outside of remarkable but not business-plan-changing gains that the writers have made.

**John:** I think coming out of this strike period, we’re not going to have that intense focus and member-driven messaging about what things are. We’re not going to have that instinct to push back against, “This is the narrative that they’re trying to sell you.” Some of that stuff is just going to come up. You’re going to hear these stories and these accusations that, oh, this is going to make it harder for new writers to break in or that more production is going to go overseas. These things can be true, but they’re actually not caused by what we just did and the gains that we made.

**Chris:** Exactly right. There are some risks with that. Look, I think there are some really excellent agents who are engaging with the guilds more directly and who will take on all of the challenges, and the less good ones will repeat the message that exonerates them and the whole business from it and say, “You’re not being hired because of this and that.” We become an easy scapegoat in all of that, and we’ll have to deal with all of it.

**John:** Yeah, we will. We have two listener questions that I thought might be appropriate here. Drew, hop in here.

**Drew Marquardt:** Allen writes, “I was curious if the new WGA agreement has any impact on foreign levies payments. I saw a lot of material about an increase in foreign residuals but wasn’t sure if that included the levies as well. I’m a non-WGA writer, but I’ve received foreign levies for several years now and wasn’t sure if those amounts would increase with the new agreement or if it was a completely separate thing.”

**Chris:** I am really the wrong person to be asking this question. As I understand it, and John, you may know it better, foreign levies are based under European law. That essentially has something to do with distributing some piece of the value of selling tapes and DVDs because they might’ve been used to copy your programs. That will have nothing to do with-

**John:** It’s not part of this contract at all. Foreign levies will continue the same way that they always have. The Guild receives money on behalf of writers and other artists that get sent from Europe. The Guild is not the main collector of that. It’s not part of this contract.

**Drew:** The next one comes from An Anonymous Young Writer. They write, “With the strike over and the writers returning back to work, how is our relationship with the studios that we spent the last couple of months outside their buildings striking? I feel like there were some jabs back and forth, with us chanting, ‘Pay your writers,’ and waving our taunting signs, while they were okay with waiting months to give us a fair deal, and even Universal cutting their trees to make it harder for us to strike. How are we supposed to work together again, knowing that we just endured the last couple months fighting against them?”

**Chris:** Here’s what I hope and what I think is going to be true. I think that the creative executives with whom we work day to day understand the business, understand what we were fighting for. They may have supported us, more or less, to some degree. None of them I think should or do feel as if they were the target of this conversation. I think we tried to make that clear in our messaging all the way through, that they would be our partners again.

You can’t say never. You can’t say nobody is going to get pissed off about it. But I think broadly speaking, and John, you can speak to this as well as I can, the creative relationship between writers and their executives is going to go back to where it was before. If anything, we just miss each other and can’t wait to get back to work.

**John:** Absolutely. In the spirit of getting back to work, a thing that I keep trying to stress is that all of the energy, enthusiasm, and drive we showed on the picket lines these last five months needs to be channeled back into the thing we’re actually really, really good at, which is we are the best film and television writers in the world.

As we get back to work, what I’d love to see is, in a couple years down the road, looking back at this period, why did film and television get so good in 2024 and 2025. It’s because we had all these writers kept from doing a thing that they are so amazing at for five months, and came back with this incredible burst of passion and enthusiasm and wrote the best things that have ever been written. I think that’s going to get you past these weird feelings about the studio executives. We’re going to write these amazing things, and they’re going to pay for them, and we are going to make great TV and film.

**Chris:** I think that’s right. I also say, by the way, it’s a very writer thing to get worried about how people feel about us and think that somehow if we ask for something, we’re going to get punished for it. But the CEOs with whom we negotiated ended this on a note of respect. I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish, but phone calls that said, “Listen, you guys fought hard for a thing you needed, and you got a deal, and that’s good. And we know that the thing is broken, and we should have conversations about how it broke and what needs to happen.” I don’t mean just the business itself, but I mean the system of negotiating new deals. I think all the way up to the top there is, I hope, some level of mutual respect back and forth.

**John:** That would be great. Wrapping this up, so talking about the narrative of the strike, the storytelling of the strike, what things did you learn as one of the showrunners of this crazy writers’ room?

**Chris:** Look, I think as is true with history in general, you have to do the best you can, and you have to be lucky in some ways. We got lucky.

**John:** We got very lucky.

**Chris:** We got very lucky in a lot of ways. A lot of things came together in the way we needed them to come together. It’s an odd thing to say, because we got so unlucky for the years before in the business. It’s not a lucky place to be right now. But the membership, its youth, its facility on social media, the mistakes the companies made, the extent to which they made it very clear in the way they communicated with us, the fact that the staff was so good at ascertaining exactly what was in the members’ hearts, in their 7,000-response survey, really set us up well. And I think we executed it nicely.

I do think that we learned a lot from 2007 through 2017, in the agency campaign to now. But some of it just has to break in your favor. We take good lessons from it and realize we’re just going to have to get lucky again the next time we do it.

Here’s a thing that we did know though, which is that writers are committed to each other. They are brave. They do understand. They are willing to stay together. I think the relationship between writers and their guild is different from what it was before this strike and will help us going forward. Success breeds success, and we need to use that. I guess that’s one thing I learned is you got to keep that going, keep that momentum. We’re not going to fight the next fight immediately, but we need to talk to each other constantly, all through the next two and a half years, to whatever happens. What about you?

**John:** I think it’s a good lesson in what is possible. I remember there were times throughout this campaign I would feel frustrated or just I couldn’t see what was going to happen next. I remember you saying at some point that you yourself did not know how this is going to end, that all you could know is the principles of what it is you were going for and to try to keep moving forward on those principles.

The fact that we ended up at this place where we really did get the things we needed to get was just a good lesson in being ready for hard things, embracing some of the uncertainty, and also just counting on each other. I think I felt it in the room with the Negotiating Committee, but I also felt it on the picket line. I felt it in the big rooms. Even in the most difficult member conversations, when I’d have phone calls with people who were kind of flipping out, if I could get back to the place of what it is that we’re going for here, what it is that we need to achieve, that does a lot of the work.

**Chris:** Yeah.

**John:** We have a tradition on Scriptnotes where we do a One Cool Thing, something we want to share with our audience. My One Cool Thing this week is called One Revolution Per Minute. It’s this animated short film by Erik Wernquist, which is set in a space station that has artificial gravity, because it’s revolving. It’s revolving around a central axis, so a very classic way to create artificial gravity in science fiction movies. It’s gorgeously animated. But what it’s mostly showing is that in order to create even .5g gravity, you have to be spinning really fast, and it’s actually really uncomfortable. This thing has big windows, so you can always see the thing you’re looking at. It’s like, oh, it’s too fast. It’s really uncomfortable.

**Chris:** You really feel like you’re inside of it, essentially?

**John:** Yeah, but it’s also gorgeous. Just watch it, because it’s a gorgeous video and really shows what a space station could feel like. You really wouldn’t build it this way, but it’s just very impressive. Take a look at it. It’s called One Revolution Per Minute. We’ll have a link in the show notes. What do you got for us, Chris?

**Chris:** It really shows how you’re looking forward and I’m looking backward. You’re fun, and I’m less fun. I have to admit that I’ve been so burdened by this thing, and not in a terrible way. I have a one-track mind. I re-watched yesterday one of my favorite movies, my favorite documentary, which is Barbara Kopple’s American Dream. If you haven’t seen that, you have to go watch American Dream, which is about a strike at a Hormel meatpacking plant, and it is devastating.

**John:** I know of the movie, but now I need to see it.

**Chris:** I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s all labor all the time. I’m going to stop. If you had asked me two days from now, maybe it would be something else, but that’s where we are.

**John:** I did an AI panel yesterday. It was a good panel for the FTC. I was happy to do it. But also I’m happy not to do those for a little bit. I think it’s going to be fine. I’m happy to go back to-

**Chris:** Dear FTC, not home right now. Call somebody else.

**John:** Absolutely. There’s so many talented people on the Guild who can do those panels. I don’t need to be the person doing them now.

**Chris:** It was one of the wonderful things, wasn’t it? All these people we met on the Negotiating Committee, incredible people who are going to take over and do the work.

**John:** When I look at the folks who have won on the board or won on the council, they’re so smart and they’re so great. Go, go, lead the way.

**Chris:** One of the things that happens when the Guild is successful at fulfilling writers’ needs is that people say, “I want to be a part of that. Why would I not want to be a part of that?” You get really great people, because you have to love writers after all of this.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on debate. Chris Keyser, thank you so much for coming on this show again to talk through this whole crazy thing we did.

**Chris:** You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here. This may be the last time I get to talk about it for a little while.

**John:** You won’t miss it.

**Chris:** No. I will be okay moving on.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Chris Keyser, can you talk to us about debate? To set this whole thing up, I have to play this clip that’s going to embarrass you. This is a clip from, I think it’s 1984. You were dressed in a tuxedo. You had a bow tie. Let’s listen to it.

**Chris [in old clip]:** There’s much that is lousy on both sides. The world is a lousy place. It’s also a crazy place. I’m 23 years old and no less than any one of you who has antipathy for the United States. I’m sick of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. Still, it seems to me that we do ourselves no good to deny what is good in a system which is not all good, to deny what is good in a system which can correct itself, and that is the United States. I think one political analyst in the United States put it best when he said, “Critics say that America is a lie because it does not reach its ideals. America is not a lie; it’s a disappointment. But it’s a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” I beg to oppose.

**John:** Chris, you got huge applause there, rapturous applause. This looks like it’s off of PBS. Was this the highlight of your debating career? Talk to us about debate and your experience with debate.

**Chris:** My experience with it. Yeah, that probably was my highlight of my debating career. I wasn’t a really good debater most of the way through. I debated in high school and then in college, but not for very long in college. I used to do a kind of debate called policy debate, which is very fast speaking and like speed chess or something like that, which was great and one of the formative things of my youth. My friends, my decision to go law school, the way I thought about the world was all, I think in some ways dictated by the fact that I was part of the debate world. I loved all of that, but I ended up not caring very much about the competition in some ways. I moved into more public debating, which this is an example of it at the Oxford Union. By the way, Boris Johnson was there-

**John:** Wow.

**Chris:** … and Andrew Sullivan. I debated against William Hague. They were all in this path, I guess, not all them, the Eaton through Oxford to leading their country down the terrible path. It’s a straight line in the UK. That’s broadly speaking. I don’t mean it that way necessarily, although there are a lot of examples of it.

Anyway, that was really fun to do. It was just a way of seeing the world and talking about important things. I did a couple of these at Oxford that PBS broadcast. That was sort of fun. Then I put debate away for a really long, long time.

Debate more importantly became a part of my life again because my son started debating when he was in fifth grade, in elementary school. I guess like the dad who gets pulled into being the first base coach, because his kid says, “My dad played baseball once,” I ended up being a debate coach for about 10 years or so, but mostly for young kids, for elementary school kids and then for middle school kids, just because I really believed in the way in which debate gave kids a sense of their own selves and their own voice and ability to understand the other side of the question, to listen well. There were so many things. I can’t think of any activity outside the curriculum in a school that’s better for, broadly speaking, developing an analytical and compassionate mind than debate, so I’ve believed in it for a long time.

**John:** That’s great. I confessed to I think it was Rachel on picket line at Paramount that I get very intimidated by your ability to spontaneously speak so eloquently. She’s like, “You know he was a national debate champion.” I’m like, “I did not know he was a national debate champion.”

**Chris:** Do you know why you didn’t know that?

**John:** Because you don’t talk about it?

**Chris:** Because I wasn’t the national debate champion.

**John:** You debated on an international stage, as we just heard.

**Chris:** I did, periodically. I think it’s probably a 10,000 hours thing, whether that’s true or not. It’s just a skill you end up developing.

**John:** Here I was. You’re a professional athlete. I was saying, “Why can I not play basketball as well as Chris Keyser can?” It’s like, oh, because that’s something he does.

**Chris:** That’s like Scotty Pippen saying, “Why can’t I play basketball like Michael Jordan?” You do fine. You’re okay. I don’t mean to say I’m like Michael Jordan. That sounded obnoxious. I was trying to compliment you, not myself. Very careful of these things.

**John:** Roll back the tape here and see what you actually said. Talk to me about how you teach a fifth grader debate or a high schooler debate. What is the fundamental structure that you’re learning as you’re learning to debate? Is it about how to put together an argument and supporting arguments? Is it about the literal performance aspect of it? What are the things that are crucial for debaters to learn?

**Chris:** All of that stuff. Those topics are often announced in advance. It depends on the format of debate. There are a lot of different ones. I did policy. There’s Lincoln-Douglas. I coached in middle school parliamentary debate. The first part of it is research. It’d be a little bit like paralleling our negotiations. It’s the months we spent trying to figure out what our position was going to be and what the world suggests and understanding it from both sides, knowing what somebody else might say, and generating arguments that may work and understanding the power of arguments and how to answer them. Then it’s about being in a debate round itself and under the pressure of having to listen and take notes and understand what the other side is saying and respond immediately.

I’m just picking a few things out, because it’s too long of a conversation, but there are lessons that I think you learn in debate if you do well, one of which is don’t shy away from the places where you’re vulnerable. Lean into where you’re vulnerable. You can’t be silent on that stuff. All the stuff that we are talking about in this labor action, about preempting other arguments, understanding where our weaknesses are, trying to figure out what the other side might say, that all is well practiced in debate.

There are some kinds of debate where performance matters a lot, where eloquence matters. But there are some forms of debate where it doesn’t at all. It’s just about the very quick application of arguments and being able to cover all of them and understand all the nuances. I did different kinds of debate, and it gave me different skills. Some of them are about picking up on that stuff and generating arguments and answering arguments. Some of them are about convincing other people. I went to law school afterward. People who know me probably make fun of me about this, but I end up then thinking about writing scripts as making emotional arguments.

**John:** I want to tie that in. To what degree is screenwriting in general related to debate? How useful is that as a skill? Obviously, you’re anticipating there’s a dialogue between two people, that the people are going to come into a scene or a moment with opposing opinions, and then one person’s going to win the other one over, or at least reach an understanding. How does it apply?

**Chris:** I don’t think of it quite that way. I think running a show has something to do with organizational principles and beating out series and the structure that’s required in a screenplay or a television script are all related to that. In some sense, not to overstate it, it’s all like debate.

It’s got that element of poetry in the sense that you’ve got to be as efficient as you possibly can. Debate is all about time limitations and getting as much in as you possibly can do. You need to know in some ways the precise, right number of words and exact words to use in the moment. I don’t think of it that way. Getting to the heart of something I think is much more what I say it applies, is to think not that you have to approach it in the obvious way. You don’t want to write the scene that everyone expects. No one’s looking to me for advice on how to write right now. But I think that’s it. In debate, arguments have inherent power. They have weight. You have to know what that weight is. The same thing is true, in some ways, in writing. It’s like, where’s the weight?

**John:** I was a journalism major and essentially was advertising. It is that ruthless efficiency, like how do you get this down to an idea that people can grasp so clearly? Style and presentation, all that stuff matters a lot, but if you don’t have that central core idea, the whole thing doesn’t land. It doesn’t work. People respond to that core idea more than anything else.

**Chris:** Right. But for me, I continued to do it more because I thought for kids that the ability to think clearly and to appreciate both sides of an argument, to listen really well and to feel confident in your own point of view matters. That’s why I think I probably focus more on debaters who are entering into adolescence and right at the cusp of that, because that’s when that becomes particularly important.

**John:** How objective is the judging, scoring of debate?

**Chris:** It’s subjective.

**John:** It’s subjective.

**Chris:** Subjective. That’s, by the way, the other thing that’s really good about debate. You lose a lot. You lose sometimes for reasons that are not fair, and you have to deal with all of it. John Meany is the head of the middle school public debate program that I worked under. He always said, “Human communication is imprecise and fallible, and you have to learn to live with that.” You have to learn to live with taking your audience as you find them and convincing them of what they can understand when. By the way, it goes back again to what you and I and everyone else did in this strike, is that you can believe whatever you want, but unless the people to whom you are speaking perceive that, it doesn’t really matter.

**John:** It matters much less what you say versus what they’re hearing, what they’re actually taking in. If you’re not getting through to them, it doesn’t count.

**Chris:** Right. Academic debate is fairer than politics, where no one listens to anybody, it doesn’t really matter, and no one changes their mind from where they started. But it’s full of uncertainty.

**John:** Excellent.

**Chris:** That’s the way it is. Anyway, I love doing that, and I haven’t done it for a little while, because I got pulled back.

**John:** You’ve been busy doing things.

**Chris:** I’ve been a little bit busy. It was really great. It was a great way to do something with my son. We had lots of kids of that generation.

**John:** Chris, thank you.

Links:

* [Chris Keyser’s speech to members at the start of negotiations](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Member-Rap-22.0.pdf)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 389 – The Future of the Industry](https://johnaugust.com/2019/the-future-of-the-industry)
* [One Revolution Per Minute](https://erikwernquist.com/one-revolution-per-minute) by Erik Wernquist
* [American Dream](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099028/) on IMDb
* Christopher Keyser on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0450899/?ref_=tt_ov_wr)
* [Chris Keyser at The Oxford Union Society vs. The Harvard Debate Council, 1982](https://youtu.be/mS2Zi6u95pg?si=L_R7ZdlXIH_dih_3&t=2283)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

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