Search Results for: characters

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/basic-instincts).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has a little bit of swearing. I use the F-word, and I use it in a non-PG13-safe way. If you have a kid listening to this show, and you don’t want them to hear the F-word, just a heads up.

**Craig Mazin:** But they should hear it.

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 611 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, why are characters doing what they’re doing? We often talk about motivation in terms of high-level wants like love and pride and jealousy, but what about those base animalistic desires? We’ll look at how those inform characters both on the scene and story level. Then that movie you loved, that TV show you devoured, that book that changed your life, will you be able to find it next year?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** We’ll discuss the impermanence of media in the age of digitization and how to think about it as consumers and creators, Craig. Also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, Craig, do you want to talk about swimming?

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I have this weird relationship with swimming, because it’s one of those few things where humans are born able to swim, but then they forget to swim. Then if you aren’t taught how to swim-

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** … you just have this whole weird relationship with swimming. I want to talk about swimming.

**Craig:** I have a different swimming experience than you, I think.

**John:** Great. I’m excited.

**Craig:** We’ll find out.

**John:** Cool. We always push listener questions to the end of the episode, and I feel like they’re rushed, so I thought we would start with some listener questions this week, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** Thank god. I know you’ve been clamoring for this for years.

**Craig:** I honestly love listener questions, because it matches my lack of preparation perfectly. It’s the perfect thing for an improv artist.

**John:** You are an improv artist. That’s what we learned.

**Craig:** I’m an artist.

**John:** You are an artist. Drew, start us off. What questions do you have for us?

**Drew Marquardt:** The first one comes from Wren. They write, “How close is writing for movies and TV to writing for comics? The way I do it and have seen it done resembles scripts for animated series quite a bit, but I also don’t know how close those are to live action. Have either of you ever been curious or even dabbled in comics?”

**John:** Craig, have you written any stuff for comics or for graphic novels?

**Craig:** No, sir.

**John:** I’m doing one right now. I was familiar with the form beforehand, but this is my first time actually writing in it. There’s not one standardized format the same way there is for screenplays. All screenplays look kind of the same. Different writers and different studios will do things a little bit different for how they format stuff. A lot of it’s done in Word, but sometimes people are using screenwriting software. I’m using Highland for it.

What I’m doing looks like a screenplay except that panels I’m putting in brackets. You can see the screen description for that panel is in a bracket, and then there’s dialogue that goes with it as part of that. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s been a bit more of an adjustment than I expected it to be. You have to be thinking more visually than what I would do in a screenplay, because I’m really thinking about how is this flowing across the page, what is the bottom of the page, now I’m turning to the next page. Not every writer is doing that, but that’s worked really well for me and the artists I’m working with.

**Craig:** I think maybe the only script I’ve ever seen for a comic or graphic novel is, I’ve read some of Neil Gaiman’s original writing material that was then used for Sandman, which is a glorious piece of art. I mean, god, if people have not read the Sandman series, all of it, they really need to. It’s just remarkable.

**John:** Last year or the year before, I read Sandman. I got the giant hardback book. It’s terrific.

**Craig:** It’s incredible and kind of mind-bending. Neil has promised to come on the show. We keep missing him as he’s out here or he’s over there. We have to figure it out, because he’s just a giant. It was fascinating to read.

It reminded me more than anything of the writing I did way, way back in the very beginning of my career, when I was working in advertising, because in ad copy, at least back then, it was a two-column thing. On one side, there was the things that the person would say, and on the other side was what you would see. You were learning how to write audio and visual side by side, in a column, which is fascinating. In a way, it makes more sense. I think we’ve talked about this on another episode before. It allows you to match the words with the visuals in parallel, as opposed to in sequence, which is what we do.

I don’t know if you’ve run into this, John. When you’re writing a screenplay, there’s a bit of action that really needs to come after the dialogue to have the punch you want. However, once you read it, you understand it’s supposed to have happened during what the person said. You have a choice. You can either put it before or you can put it after. Neither is correct. That’s an interesting aspect of that format that I really like. I’ve never done it. Wren, dive in and tell us how it goes.

**John:** Yeah. I would say most of the graphic novel stuff I’ve read has been more towards a screenplay format recently. I looked at some DC books. It looks more like a screenplay, although sometimes dialogue isn’t centered the way we do it in screenplays. But it feels kind of like that. There’s a wide range of way to do it.

I think it makes sense that it is kind of like what we are used to with scripts, because it is just about, here’s the visuals, here’s the dialogue that’s happening. You can emphasize sound effects the same way you want to do it. But you have many of the same limitations that you’re not able to… You’re generally not describing what things feel like or smell like or anything else. You’re not doing other book kind of stuff in a graphic novel. Cool. What else do we have for a question?

**Drew:** Ian writes, “What’s your take on the use of photo-real de-aging and how it will or will not influence what is written? Do you think audiences will learn to accept de-aged actors such that there will be studio push for scripts that feature performances from actors who are beyond their prime or even deceased? If so, as writers, would you approach a script differently if you knew that the film or series was going to feature a 30-year-old Steve McQueen or Sidney Poitier? Or you can fill in the blank. At what point do writers have to consider the technical capabilities of the medium or the audience’s ability to believe what they are seeing? Or are all of these issues an answer to why it will never become widely used in cinema?”

**Craig:** Currently, de-aging is weird. We’re definitely in the uncanny valley zone. It’s not necessarily because the visual effects work itself isn’t perfect. I think it is a little bit more just going, “That’s not how that person looks.”

We actually did an experiment on de-aging Pedro Pascal, because in the first 20 minutes of the first episode of The Last of Us, he’s supposed to be in his 30s, and then we jump ahead and he’s in his 50s. Pedro’s in his 40s. As it turned out, with a little bit of makeup on either end, we were able to make it look like he was 20 years apart. I can’t even imagine how much money we saved on that in terms of aging. It’s much easier, obviously, to age somebody with practical makeup.

The de-aging itself was impressive, but the fact that I said impressive kind of gives away the problem. It needs to be unnoticeable, in a sense. We may get there.

What strikes me is that people still psychologically value authenticity, and so anybody can have a really close reproduction of the Mona Lisa hanging in their home. Brushstroke for brushstroke, there are people out there who are making these beautiful replicas of the Mona Lisa. Sometimes forgers make such close copies that experts really struggle to tell the difference, and yet everyone is obsessed with knowing if it’s real or not, because we value it. We just do.

So we could keep certain people alive. I think everybody will just value it accordingly, which is to say it’s copy. There’s just something in our minds. We are aware that copies are less then. When it comes to performances and human beings, especially when we’re being asked to care and feel, authenticity does seem to matter. But who knows? Once the robots take over, who gives a shit?

**John:** Craig, you talked about authenticity. And I think that’s a nuance I want to dig into here, because it’s one thing if you have a 30-year-old Sidney Poitier suddenly showing up in your movie. That’s inauthentic. We know that Sidney Poitier was not there at all. But if you were de-aging Joel for 20 minutes in your show, that’s not really inauthentic, because you could’ve done it with makeup or someone else.

I think audiences aren’t going to necessarily feel different about like, that person was never even there versus, okay, we used some fakery on this, because makeup and other things could be used for that fakery. Yes, we will get to the point where we’re not going to see it, just the same way that most visual effects you see in movies you don’t realize are visual effects, because it’s just gotten so good. We’re going to stop noticing it, and we’ll only know that like, oh, Ryan Reynolds was 20 years old there and is now 40 years old. Something must’ve been done. You’re not going to see the seams, the way the uncanny valley problem that we’ve had up to this point.

The Indiana Jones movie, the last one, the visual effects on de-aging him were really good. I didn’t necessarily love that sequence, but I wasn’t taken out of it really by his face. That was the best version of that I’ve ever seen.

**Craig:** Yeah. What you’re getting at is that there is an inability for us to make the relative distinction. If you show me the real person and then you show me that person very old or very young or whatever, then I know, okay, it’s movie magic, but it’s fine. They’re really there. I think it’s the really there part.

One thing that’s interesting about makeup is the person is still there. When we de-age with VFX, we’re not sure the person is still there. That could be a different person, actually.

**John:** Yeah. It could be a face replacement, really.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. You start to lose the connection to the person. That gets tricky. That’s where I start to wonder how this will all go. But again, who knows? By the way, people may be listening to this podcast for the next million years, because Craig bot and John bot just keep going.

**John:** We do.

**Craig:** Oh, wait, did you just give it away?

**John:** Oh, sorry, yes. It’s already out there.

**Craig:** You mean they do. You gave it away. People have just been listening to ChatGPT for the last 12 years. That could happen. Everybody passes the Turing test all the time, all day long. Nobody knows who’s real. Nobody knows who’s not real. And so at that point, authenticity and reality and the concepts of those things completely dissipate and become irrelevant. But until such a time, I do think that when we start to wonder if the person that we care about is there, then we start to distance ourselves from the work.

**John:** Absolutely. We’re recording this in 2023, so we should say this is a live issue in the SAG-AFTRA Strike right now is the concern over use of an actor’s likeness, and so use beyond the grave and also how you’re using them in the course of a film or TV show. De-aging is part of that. So we’ll see. What else do we have for questions?

**Craig:** Christian writes, “If many viewers are watching with captions on, as a recent New York Times article claims, then what does that mean for screenwriting? Reading is a somewhat different experience than listening. It makes sense to me that a writer would approach something meant to be read differently than something meant to be only heard out loud. Should we lean into the fact that viewers are reading lines and not just listening?”

**John:** My instinct is no. I think it’s good to be aware that people are recently turning on the subtitles for stuff. There may be some reasons in specifically what you’re writing that you might want to call that out, like, “In the subtitles, people will see that they’re actually saying this,” or like, “Don’t subtitle this.” There may be specific reasons why you want to do that. No, I don’t see myself changing my writing at all based on the fact that some people are going to be watching this with subtitles on. Craig?

**Craig:** No. No. Subtitles are after the fact. It’s not our problem. I really don’t care. What I’m doing is making this for people to watch and listen. However, if they are deaf and need to read the subtitles, if they don’t speak English and need to read subtitles, fine.

**John:** Great. Love it.

**Craig:** Because look, when I watch a movie with subtitles, the reading happens without my conscious awareness. It just happens. It all goes away. The reason that people are doing this is because they’re able to do some other things while they’re watching it. My sense is, if they really, really care about something, they’ll probably focus on it. We should not anticipate that. That is a path to weirdness. Real weirdness. Just ignore it. Let it happen.

**John:** In our household, we are not default subtitles on, but for certain things, like my daughter loves to watch Love Island UK, and we have to turn it on, because it otherwise doesn’t make sense. There have been moments in theaters in the last year or two where it has felt like, oh, I wish I could turn the subtitles on, because the way this is mixed, the way the accents are hitting me, I’m having a hard time following every word of this, which is the nice thing about subtitles.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting, this whole thing about mixing and dialogue, because it’s been a topic of great conversation over the last few years.

A little inside story about weirdo Craig. The guys who did the sound mixing for Chernobyl deservedly won Emmys. Excellent team. The first time they played back the first episode, I left. I said, “Thank you. I need some air.” Then I walked out, and I walked for 40 minutes in London, lost myself somewhere. But really what I wanted to do was walk in front of a bus, because it sounded completely wrong.

I went back, and I said, “Okay, I’ve taken my walk. I feel better. Let’s talk about what’s going on here, because everything sounds very, very weird to me.” What they explained was that they had made a choice, which they were happy to unmake, that was based in part on feedback from the BBC. Not that we made Chernobyl for the BBC, but everything in the UK, a lot of it is driven by the BBC, because the BBC is this huge broadcaster, and they kind of set a lot of standards.

What happened was, elderly people, who comprise a great percentage of BBC watchers, had been complaining constantly that the dialogue just wasn’t loud enough. What the BBC started asking for was louder dialogue that was more centered in the speakers. Now, what that meant for me was everybody sounded too loud and also in the middle of the room, even though they were on two different sides of the room, which sent me into a full spin-out. Now, the guys worked all night. I came back the next day. Mwah, perfect. And so it went from there.

I was interested in that conversation, because on the other side, in the US, there’s been a proliferation of sound effects that are so loud and so obscuring that dialogue gets muddled into nothing. And it is hard to hear dialogue, because people just aren’t taking the time that’s required to really mix things beautifully. Dialogue is in and of itself the most important sound, I think, that’s coming out of your speakers.

Also, a lot of mixers don’t take the time, like the wonderful folks that mixed The Last of Us, to play things back through a regular TV. So most people don’t have a 5.1 or 7.1 system. They’ve got left, center, right, or sometimes just left and right. And what will it sound like there?

So mixing things to sound good across all those things is really difficult, and I hear shows that fail at it all the time. We’ve seen movies that failed at it, where I’m like, what happened here? Did no one care? I think maybe nobody cared.

**John:** I think they had other priorities. A thing I’ve noticed in sound mixes is that the people who are in the room know what’s being said, and so therefore they stop listening for whether it’s actually understandable. If you’re the director, you know exactly what’s happening, so you know what they’re saying, and so you don’t need to listen for it. A stranger would not know that. Just like it’s great to have fresh eyes, it’s great to have fresh ears on something. And you were fresh ears in that sound mix.

Now, here’s a question for you. It’s something that may already exist in the world. I’m just not aware of it. I’m thinking back to when I ride on the Peloton, one of the choices I can make is I can adjust the sound for more music or more trainer. I can adjust the mix between the trainer and the music, which makes sense, because they’re micced separately. To what degree can we do that now with 5.1 mixing? Is dialogue on its own track in a way that a TV setting could be adjusted to say, like, emphasize dialogue?

**Craig:** No, nor should it be, because down that road is a nightmare. It’s a little bit like giving people control over, I don’t know, the focus. It’s an artistic choice of how we mix things. Hopefully, people are paying attention, as they should.

I am particularly obsessed with mixing. What we can do is emphasize certain frequencies. Things are mixed together. You have all these channels. Obviously, when you’re doing a mix, you have your dialogue channels, your sound effects, your music, and then the music is broken out into stems. But then things get mixed down into sub-mixes and then eventually into one big mix, which then goes out, and here’s what it is.

In most AV receivers, which are the things that are processing your audio for a nicer television system at home, there are some audio settings that emphasize certain frequencies. So the human voice exists in a particular range. Male voices are here. Female voices are here. And then music, you have, everyone’s familiar with bass and treble, but the EQ, roughly. There are certain instruments that are very human voice-like. It’s the saxophone or the oboe or something. Then on the high end you’ve got your crash cymbals, and on the low end you’ve got your bass. And you can emphasize certain things slightly.

But the thing that I am hoping for, that we eventually get… And this is one of the areas where Chris… When Chris McQuarrie and I agree violently on something-

**John:** Dangerous.

**Craig:** … then it’s a thing. One of the things we agree violently on, and I know our friend Rian Johnson is a similar acolyte of this religion, is turning off the goddamn motion smoothing on your TV.

**John:** Oh, of course, yes.

**Craig:** What we’re hoping for is that eventually we can code into our content certain settings that are required, that if you want to watch this movie, it’s going to tell your TV to turn off the goddamn motion smoothing. Or I guess we did a language warning. Turn off the fucking motion smoothing, for the love of god. Similarly, it would be nice if it could also send an EQ and say, “This is how we think your EQ should be for listening to this based on what array of speakers you have.”

And if we could do that, and there could be a system that essentially responds to that, which is, by the way, not hard to do. I don’t think it’s a hard thing to do in an engineering sense. It really just comes down to somebody making something where they say, “Hey, when you turn this auto setting on, you’re giving the content control over your thing.” Oh, man. Yes, please, please. And by the way, motion smoothing is so fucking stupid to begin with.

**John:** How about you’re watching soccer? That’s I think the best case I’ve seen for motion smoothing. It actually does look like you’re looking through a window at it. It’s better for some sports.

**Craig:** Great. Then make that-

**John:** Listen to me.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** Backing sports here. It should be a sports setting.

**Craig:** It should be an option, like, “Oh, I want to turn this on for sports,” not like, everything looks like Days of Our Lives now. Congrats.

**John:** Yeah, it’s crazy.

**Craig:** I mean, what? And by the way, here’s what blows my fucking mind, now that we’ve got the language warning. No one gives a shit. That’s the thing. I don’t understand. People literally don’t even notice.

**John:** Younger people especially don’t notice it at all. It’s something about our eyes and our brains that we notice it more than other people do. It’s true.

**Craig:** But they go to movies. They see movies. They also watch things on their iPad, which doesn’t have motion smoothing. So they know what it’s supposed to look like. Then they put it on TV, it looks like Days of Our Lives. By the way, Days of Our Lives is fine. It’s just Days of Our Lives is supposed to look like Days of Our Lives. Everything gets turned into, oh, congrats, everything is now in focus. Congrats. Everything is sharp and weird-looking. And they just don’t give a shit.

**John:** Yeah. It’s crazy. So getting back to closed captioning, I want to think about this from an accessibility standpoint. You could say closed captioning is the accessibility standard, because the dialogue is there for you, but that doesn’t help all people who might need to have help with the dialogue.

The podcast app we use to listen to stuff is Overcast. One of the things that Marco Arment built into that is voice boost, which basically scans the podcast ahead and basically emphasizes the voices, makes the voices sound a little bit nicer. And it does genuinely work. I do wonder whether that is going to be the solution down the road is some sort of algorithm or honestly an AI that looks for and listens for the voices and moves them more front and center for people who genuinely need that to happen. That feels like a technology that if it’s not out there today, will be out there in months, because that’s a very doable thing.

**Craig:** Look who’s supporting AI now, you scab. Scab!

**John:** Scab.

**Craig:** Scab! I agree with you.

**John:** It’s an AI over any kind of algorithmic things.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Really, what you were talking about was those frequencies, but basically, the same way that we can take a song and strip out the music and just hear the clean vocals using these systems, they can do that for dialogue.

**Craig:** That makes total sense. I think maybe the medium that is leading the way on accessibility is video games. So video games have started to build in an enormous amount of accessibility features. The Last of Us Part II was the first game where I saw a full array of these things for both sound and visuals, including people who are colorblind, people who have focus issues. They gave you so many different options. That is different to me.

Look, if you have a disability and you cannot experience this content the way a author had hoped, you’re not able to do it, then providing some alternative that, again, the creator has authorized, makes sense to me, whereas giving everybody the ability to just turn up dials left and right because they feel like it doesn’t.

**John:** That’s how you wind up with motion smoothing on all the TVs.

**Craig:** Yep. You know that when Rian is in a Best Buy or something, he’ll just start turning them off on the TVs that are on? I think that’s amazing.

**John:** That’s the first thing I do whenever I go to visit a relative’s house for a holiday is I’ll turn it off without telling them.

**Craig:** They’ll never know.

**John:** They’ll never know.

**Craig:** They’ll never know. You know what? You did what we Jews like to call a mitzvah, John. That’s a mitzvah.

**John:** I knew the mitzvah word. It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** You know that word.

**John:** Let’s leave this high technology behind and go back to some primal instincts here. We often talk about character motivation, what characters want, what characters need. We talk about how want versus need is sort of a trap sometimes. I really want to focus now on not the higher-level things about love and community and support of your trusting spouse, but instead the four Fs, so feeding, fighting, fleeing, and fucking, which are the base level things that all creatures do. It’s how creatures survive. It goes back to Richard Dawkins and the Selfish Gene, that idea that genes want to propagate, and they propagate by staying alive and creating a new generation.

That is also true for our characters. It may not be the top-level thing we think about them, but sometimes it’s good to remind ourselves that these characters we’re making are human beings, and humans are animals, and animals do things for reasons that are kind of hardwired into their brains. I thought we might take a few minutes to talk about that and how it could apply to the stories we’re telling.

**Craig:** When I was studying this in college, the text referred to the four Fs: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating, which we all thought was so funny. This is all very hypothalamic. Your hypothalamus, this is what it does.

I love this topic, because I think we probably begin our careers as writers and our paths as artists aiming ourselves towards complication, because what we’ve been told or what we think we’ve been told is that better art, let’s say, is about the more complicated, subtle aspects of human behavior, not the obvious, dumb things. In fact, there are no complicated aspects. There are simply complicated expressions of these things.

But what we do absolutely comes down to these four Fs. That is it. There actually is not much else, except I would add in that fucking would cover pleasure in general, because it’s inextricably linked to a larger reward system. So I would call it feeding, fighting, fleeing, fucking, and feeling good. I’ll make it the five Fs.

**John:** Five Fs, coined by Craig Mazin on-

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** … this episode of Scriptnotes, 611.

**Craig:** Thank you very much.

**John:** I’ve been on a safari. One of the best things about a safari is you’re in the jeep for hours, and you’re just basically looking at the four Fs. All the creatures that you’re seeing, they’re just doing that. They’re trying to get some food. They are battling each other. They are getting away from each other. It’s a bunch of gazelles who are trying to flee. Or they’re having sex. There’s these two lions just mating and mating and mating. It’s Game of Thrones is what you’re experiencing.

**Craig:** Look, kids.

**John:** It’s a terrific… Highly recommend it for anybody who wants to go see it. It’s also good to remember that’s also us. That’s also what we’re doing. We just have more layers over it. I was going to say this is the lizard brain. And as I looked up lizard brain, apparently that’s gone out of fashion. It’s a myth that we have a lizard brain that has layers built on top of it. That’s not really true. It goes back to the core things that drive all creatures, certainly all vertebrates. We’re trying to do things to propagate our genes to get us to the next generation.

**Craig:** Yeah. When we’re writing, I think it’s a really good idea to start there. A lot of times, what we’ll say is, okay, what does this character want? If you don’t understand what people in general want, you’re going to end up with a character that wants something that is so intellectual that no one gives a shit.

I see this all the time where people will say, “What this character wants is,” and then they will explain something. I’m like, that’s an interesting concept, but it’s not how human beings actually work. Again, we’ll complicate our behavior. We also lie to ourselves. We delude ourselves. And that’s interesting.

But you peel the layers away, all these Fs lead to another F, which is fear. Fear is really something that is used in response to these. We’re afraid to starve. We’re afraid to be killed. We’re afraid we will get stuck somewhere, fail. There’s another F. I’m up to six Fs now, seven Fs. All of that stuff is what underpins everything else.

It’s a really good exercise to ask yourself, if you’re struggling with a character that people just aren’t relating to, does this character actually want something that people generally want when you really get down to it, or have I created some foofidy, artistic, overcomplicated, intellectual simulacrum of a human being?

**John:** Let’s talk about the expressions of these different Fs. Start with the expressions of feeding and what feeding might actually look like in terms of a human character in your story. Feeding, like literally they could eat, but also, any time they’re trying to hoard or they’re trying to store up or save things, that’s all about feeding. It’s the fear of hunger down the road. Greed is essentially a feeding expression. It’s the desire to accumulate, to have those things. With control of the food, with control of the money, you have power, you have status. These are all tied up together.

**Craig:** Yeah. The economy, as complicated as it is, comes down to food in the end. Everything comes down to can we eat or not, or else we’re dead. Vampire stories, which most people think are about fucking, and to some extent are, I think are also about feeding.

**John:** Of course they are.

**Craig:** It’s a great way to analogize hunger.

**John:** They have a very specific hunger that has incredibly strict requirements on it. It’s difficult life to be a vampire, because they’re always driven by the need to feed.

**Craig:** The Hunger is a great movie. It is a really interesting way to tell a story of something we all experience. If we just make a movie about somebody who’s really hungry, their stomach is growling, and they need a sandwich, who gives a shit? They’re hungry and they need blood. Okay, now you’ve complicated the expression of a basic thing. Every movie or story that’s about addiction is about feeding. That is all addiction is. It is the same loop in the brain. I need to put substance in to keep going.

Always interesting to take a simple thing and then analogize it outwards in a different way, so that you can show something that’s fun, that is also relatable, because none of us are vampires, and yet we love watching vampires do shit, because in fact, they’re incredibly relatable. They’re just hungry and horny. Let’s get into the Hs.

**John:** We’ll get the whole alphabet in there.

**Craig:** The Xs are going to be tough.

**John:** Likewise, fleeing. Obviously, we think about fleeing as it relates to a slasher movie, where you’re running from the killer. But realistically, our characters are often running from something, running from a danger that they may not even be able to say is the danger they’re running from. Characters are always running from something, some version of something that scares them, something about themselves, something about their situation. Characters are running.

Think about on a primal level what happens when you are fleeing. What is that elevated heart rate? What does that adrenaline feel like? What is it like to maintain that state? If you look at an antelope fleeing a predator, they go into panic mode. But they also get out of the panic mode when it stops, because they have to just do all the other Fs. For our human characters, sometimes they’re always running. They’re always running from something. That’s an interesting dynamic to start a character or to find a character at in the middle of the story.

**Craig:** When you think about heist movies or any movie where you’re supposed to root for the criminal, feeding is a part of it, because they want something. They need money so that they can feed themselves, metaphorically. But fleeing becomes a fun part of it. How do I get away with this? Getting away with murder is exciting.

When we watch movies where James Bond has a mission, half of the mission is get inside somewhere and get a thing. The other half is, and get out. That’s fun to watch. That’s where a lot of tension comes from. Fleeing is suspenseful. We all know that terror of being caught, and so it is relatable.

**John:** We think about fighting in terms of action movies, but even a movie like Erin Brockovich, she’s fighting against these corporations. What is the nature of that fighting? How is that fighting like the primal version of fighting? I think it actually does tie in, because fighting is often about status, maintaining your control over your situation, driving off enemies so that you can maintain your terrain. There’s lots of reasons why animals fight. I think the same reasons apply to humans, why they’re fighting. We’re not fighting with our claws and our jaws. But we’re still using the tools we have at our disposal to drive off others. That’s still fighting.

**Craig:** If you want to watch feeding, fighting, and fleeing all at the highest level, no fucking as far as I can tell, in a movie where no one does anything other than talk, watch Glengarry Glen Ross. It is incredible. There is a scene at the end between Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey where Jack Lemmon goes from fighting to realizing he’s been caught and then begins fleeing. It is the most squirmy, uncomfortable, sad thing possible. Jack Lemmon does such a beautiful job of expressing what Dave Mamet did such a beautiful job writing, which is a man desperate to avoid the jaws that are squeezing down on his head, and there’s nothing he can… He keeps trying. For actors, that’s a wonderful thing to give them.

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** Tactics, strategies. Everything comes out of what you want. I need to not die here. I need to get away. What do I say? What do I do? How does it work? He tries to bribe his way out. He tries to smooth talk his way out. He tries to lie his way out. And eventually, he tries to beg his way out. And none of it works. And it’s remarkable to watch.

**John:** I’m glad you brought up actors, because of course they are the other ones who are always thinking about motivation. The classic director advice is, don’t direct with adjectives, direct with verbs. Directing with these four F verbs is actually really useful. Think about, “Fight back against that. Run away from him metaphorically.” Those are things an actor can play. An actor can’t play, “Be joyful.” That’s not a thing. The fucking, like, “Take pleasure in this. Really have fun. Enjoy this moment.” That’s a thing an actor can do. Looking at the primal, playable emotions underneath that is good advice for actors and writers and directors.

**Craig:** Actors are a lot like us as writers. Obviously, I am an actor, John. You know that.

**John:** I know that’s been well established.

**Craig:** Pretty impressive actor. A lot of times, they need to figure out how to get what you want in their own way or reorient their mind so that it makes sense to them, so that they can do it. Even if you do give them certain verbs, it may not necessarily connect to one of their instincts that are all connected to the Fs until they can make it connect to their instincts. You can see them searching or hunting. Sometimes the back and forth is about that. It’s about them finally going, “Okay. Wait. I know how to do this as me.”

Similarly, we’ve been in situations where someone said, “I understand why you did this, but what I think it should be is this.” You think to yourself, “Okay, I understand that, but how do I do that as a writer? How do I do that in a way that isn’t just giving you what you just asked for in the dumbest, most surface sense, but actually getting inside of it and making it good and making it something that I believe in and actually want to be there?”

That’s something where, I don’t know how many Ps we’ll need to use for directing, but patience certainly is one of them. I think it’s important for directors to be patient with actors, especially when actors are struggling with what to say. Sometimes you’ll say, “Hey, look, I would like you to do this,” and they’re struggling. You can think to yourself, “Oh, no, I’ve given a bad direction,” or you can just feel bad. Don’t. Just wait. Just be patient. Give them time. They just heard it. Give them time to process. Be patient. Then lo and behold, they generally will get there. You just don’t have to push. I’m going to keep doing Ps. I’m on the P theme now.

**John:** It’s tough. As I was pasting this together, I was also looking up the prey drive, which is another P there. The prey drive is really fascinating. The stages of the prey drive, and we think about it with dogs, but other animals do it too: searching, stalking, chasing, biting to grab, and biting to kill.

Most of the dog behaviors we see, like dogs love to play fetch or dogs are good guard dogs or they love to do a certain kind of thing, it’s because we’ve emphasized and trained them on one part of the prey drive and discouraged other parts of the prey drive. Our herding animals, we emphasize their stalking, but we take away their desire to bite and kill things. I think it’s fascinating to think back to how does that apply to humans.

When I look at the prey drive, it also feels like dating. It feels like how we can think about relationships and how we get to… Men especially tend to think about how to go out and date. A man at a bar with his buddies is very much like that dog and his prey drive.

**Craig:** The cops and robbers genre is a wonderful combination of feeding and fleeing and then this notion of prey, which is a different kind of feeding. Hunting people down. Very excited when we watch our heroes. You ever seen the movie Commando?

**John:** I have seen Commando, yeah. I loved it.

**Craig:** Schwarzenegger movie. It’s a pretty standard concept from the ‘80s. Arnold Schwarzenegger is an impossibly jacked human being who lives in a weird mountain shack with his daughter. There is no mother, because who needs them? It’s the ‘80s. Bad guys come and steal his daughter. He goes into his shed, where he has all of his hidden armaments, as one does, and he begins to hunt them all down and kill them one by one. Oh my god, so much fun, because we like watching predators do what they do when we’re rooting for them. It’s exciting. It’s exciting because it’s empowering. \

Superhero movies where they’re hunting down the bad guys, those scenes where they finally master their powers and kick ass, those are prey scenes, where we are enjoying rooting for a killer to kill. It satisfies us, because it satisfies the part of us that wants to be a predator. It makes us feel powerful and safe to be the predator.

**John:** Craig, do you think any of your puzzling comes… Or solving. I’m sorry if I’m using the wrong term.

**Craig:** Solving.

**John:** Does it apply to prey drive? Is the desire to solve a problem and to look for an answer and come to the answer, do you think that ties into the desire to hunt?

**Craig:** I don’t think so. There is a survival aspect to it, I think. It’s definitely triggering some weird pleasure circuit to make sense of things. The interesting thing about solving puzzles is I think it’s so separate from the base purpose of what drives it that it almost doesn’t matter. It’s a little bit like what we do. We are compelled to write stories. That compulsion is certainly related to one of these Fs or multiples of these Fs, because it is so disconnected from its base purpose that it’s hard to distinguish where it came from at all.

**John:** It’s abstractions on top of abstractions.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. It’s something that you can only do when you feel safe because you aren’t worried about that first or second level of the four Fs. You’re now on the 10th level above it. As you said, abstractions of abstractions.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s move on to our next and final topic, impermanence. On this show before, we’ve talked about how once upon a time it felt like there were video tapes and you go to the video store and find a thing and now it’s hard to find certain movies.

On Episode 364, we had Kate Hagen on. We were talking about how Netflix killed the video store and this assumption that you’d be able to find things forever, because of first Netflix on DVD, then Netflix as a streaming service. Oh, we’ll always be able to get those things, and now it turns out that’s not true. Things are actually harder to find than ever in some cases. I was talking about this with Drew yesterday. Drew, do you even remember or did you ever experience Netflix as a DVD delivery service?

**Drew:** Only vaguely. In high school, I remember some people were getting Netflix DVDs in the mail.

**John:** Already, that generation doesn’t have that assumption of like, oh, that movie’s always going to be there, sitting on a shelf somewhere for me to watch it. It’s also important to remember we’ve always lost things. We’ve always lost media. We’ve always lost culture. Euripides, ancient Greek playwright, probably wrote 80 to 90 plays, but we only have 18 of them. We only know the four most famous Greek playwrights. The rest of them are lost to history.

I thought we’d check in in 2023 on what we’re holding onto, what we’re losing, how we’re doing in terms of the sense of the stuff that we make and our ability to find it 5 years from now or 10 years from now.

**Craig:** The phenomenon of disappearing stuff actively is relatively new. We used to lose things passively. There are great concerns in the film community that old movies are disappearing simply because the prints have become lost to time or damaged beyond repair. The negatives can’t be found.

There was a fire, I think at Paramount, in a film vault, and a whole bunch of movies that were just never copied were gone permanently. The film preservation concept has gathered a lot of interest. That’s a way to actively prevent a passive disappearance.

We also lost things passively through disinterest. There were shows that were on TV. Nobody cared about them. They were canceled after four episodes. Nobody bothered to make a videotape release or anything like that, and no one’s complaining about it anyway.

**John:** My TV show, DC, I think four episodes may have aired. I can’t find them anywhere. I don’t know if they exist anywhere for anybody to watch. We’ve accepted that.

**Craig:** People I guess aren’t clamoring for it. This concept of actively removing things now and throwing them down the black hole is fairly new. Started with the takeover of Warner Bros by Discovery, it seems. And now everyone’s doing it. Everyone’s getting into it.

What I think is going to happen in reaction is, as things now are streamed or released, people on their own are going to go about the business of preserving them. We will see far more bootlegged things made available. If corporations are going to disappear stuff off of their channel, people are going to reappear it now, because the costs of doing so are essentially $0 in terms of technological costs. There’s maybe some legal exposure you’d have to worry about, although honestly, kind of a hard time arguing in court that you have damaged me by showing a thing that I removed from my service, thereby claiming as a loss.

**John:** Yeah, I see that. David Streitfeld has this piece in the New York Times about Internet Archive, which is doing a similar kind of thing with books. Books you could not find anywhere, they were putting online. Then all the publishers sued them and won and got that whole service taken down. That’s the challenge is that we as a culture both want to protect creators and we want to ensure access to things. And those are contradictory goals at times.

**Craig:** Yes. If a publisher just stopped publishing a book, but the book’s existed out there, and then someone said, “I’m going to put this on Internet Archive, because there are not that many copies of this thing,” okay, I get it. You could say, “Look, people could buy that book. They could buy it for lots of money. They’re not. Screw you.”

If a company says, “I’m the only place you can get this thing. I am actively making it disappear,” the analogy would be, I’m a book publisher, I’ve pressed a button, every one of those books had a self-destruct in it. It is now blank paper. Harder to argue that people are harming you by reintroducing something that you have tried to make go away. But it’s sort of an academic discussion, because it’s going to happen regardless.

One of I guess the side effects of this current disappearing is that there’s going to be a lot more individual acts of preservation. These days, you can go and find some random, weird thing from your childhood on YouTube. I think there’s going to be a whole lot more of that. Note, YouTube is Google. Sorry, Alphabet. And Google does not have a streaming service like Amazon or Apple. Google’s not interested in that.

**John:** YouTube’s streaming service is YouTube.

**Craig:** It’s just YouTube.

**John:** You could pay for it, but yeah.

**Craig:** You’re just paying to get rid of ads. They don’t make the content. They used to try.

**John:** They tried. It didn’t work.

**Craig:** They tried. It just didn’t work. What Google is interested in is the opposite. What Google is interested in is content being everywhere, and basically they just suck it up and then spew it out across everything and eliminate themselves from any sort of exposure for that. You’re going to start seeing these things popping up all over the place. Even if there is a copyright take down, then it’ll just show up on a gabillion other torrent sites or whatever. Nothing, I think, soon enough will be disappearable. The only things that can be truly disappeared are things that never came out in the first place, like for instance the-

**John:** Batwoman movie.

**Craig:** … Batwoman movie. Even then, I gotta be honest, somebody’s going to leak that out someday.

**John:** Someone’s going to see it.

**Craig:** It’s inevitable.

**John:** Deadpool was a similar situation. They had a VFX thing, and they nixed the project. Somehow, that snuck out there.

**Craig:** I can’t imagine how.

**John:** How that happened.

**Craig:** Who could’ve done that?

**John:** Now it’s a franchise.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I want to go back to the film vault and the fire in the film vault problem, because I want to talk about two different needs for this preservation. There’s the preservation of at least one copy so that scholars can look at the thing and so that there’s an ability to go back to that source to actually see where the thing was. That’s very, very hard to argue against, that we need to have one master copy of a thing so we can look at what was and just for culture and for everything else that we have one copy saved there.

Anybody at any point can watch things at any time was never a guarantee. It’s something we took for granted as streaming came up, but that was never always really the case. I want to make sure we’re distinguishing between the two of those.

Even on Broadway, any show that opens on Broadway, they do go in and they film one version of it, so they can keep it in the master vault. The public can’t see that, but that way, other directors can go in and see what was this performance like. Scholars can go in and see that. I want to make sure we’re doing something like that for all of the film and TV that we’re making, just so that there’s at least a record, we just don’t fully lose something forever.

**Craig:** The companies will probably not be reliable for this. It is incredible to me how they still haven’t learned the lessons of all this. It also betrays a certain lack of respect for the material they make, but people are filling it in.

Also, AI, again, is going to help, because restoration of things, particularly stuff that was not made digitally but on film, is going to be improved dramatically over time, using AI, because it can go frame by frame to remove noise, scratches, artifacts, and try and get things back to what they used to be.

My feeling is that what has happened over the last really year or two is I think hopefully a strange kind of inoculation, and that everybody’s gone, “Oh, I didn’t know they could do that. Let us now react accordingly.”

**John:** Some of these shows disappearing was a business decision made by tax incentives and other things too. What I do take some solace in is these companies are not in the business of losing money, and so if they can make money off that show, they’ll find another place to put that show and have it make money. That’s what they used to do with things before.

If something disappears off a streaming service, but then it moves to a fast service, I don’t know that that’s a loss. I think that actually is maybe the right place for that show to exist, and those creators can get paid in that new venue.

I hope that is the transition that we see is that some of these things which are no longer on Netflix are now available someplace else. Grace and Frankie is apparently still on Netflix, but it’s also available on E right now. Great. You can watch it in two different places. That’s how things used to be, and it’s how things I think should be.

**Craig:** There’s two kinds of things that have happened. There are things where they’ve said to themselves, “Okay, just running this on our service isn’t making us any money at all. It’s not driving subscriptions, nor is it retaining subscriptions, and there are costs associated with keeping it on. So we’re going to go ahead and put it on a different channel and make some money off of it.”

Then there are things that just weren’t being watched at all, by anyone. That stuff, unless someone’s grabbed a copy of it, either it’s gone or it one day will be bundled into some sort of thing they could try and make 10 cents off of, but unlikely.

**John:** That’s also always happened. For most of broadcast history, the shows that never made it, you couldn’t see anywhere. There’s shows with tremendous actors in them who ran 13 episodes that you can’t find anywhere, or you’ll find them maybe on YouTube, and maybe that’s the right place for it.

**Craig:** Exactly. Jim Carrey’s first thing was, was it called the Duck Factory, I think? It was a sitcom about a guy working in a animation studio. You can’t watch that on Netflix as far as I know. But I think it might be on YouTube. There may be a episode. I don’t know.

**John:** Again, I want to make sure that the person who’s writing the Jim Carrey biography can find that episode, just because that’s a part of the whole story. That’s a part of culture.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Wahoo.

**John:** Craig, do yours first, because I’m excited about your One Cool Thing as well.

**Craig:** Obviously, my One Cool Thing is Baldur’s Gate 3. Baldur’s Gate 3 is-

**John:** The two things Craig loves.

**Craig:** D and D and video games smashed together. Baldur’s Gate is a role-playing video game that functions not like D and D, functions exactly like D and D. You are playing D and D. All of the classes, sub-classes, spells, but also, more importantly, all of the rules. There are few things that they had to change slightly because of the nature of video games, and I think they did it brilliantly.

For instance, when you’re playing regular D and D, your characters can take a long rest. That basically resets them. They get all their health back. They get all their spells back. They get everything. It’s like starting fresh. When you’re playing D and D, the rules basically are you can long rest once every 24 hours, basically, which keeps your characters from long resting every 2 minutes. In video games, you can’t really track time like that. So what they do instead is they use a resource system, where long resting uses up resources, and you have to keep finding resources to pay for a long rest.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** That was very smart. It’s beautiful.

**John:** Craig, what are you playing this on?

**Craig:** I’m playing it on, of all things, people are going to start screaming at me. I’m playing it on a Steam Deck. There’s something about just… Is it the most brilliant visual way to play it? No. But I don’t have a PC. It’s much easier. It’s portable. I can play it anywhere. I can play it on a plane. I can play it in a hotel. I can play it wherever I want. It actually plays quite well. It will burn through the Steam Deck’s battery in about an hour and a half. That’s the most. The heat that’s pouring out of the top of it could melt an icicle. But it plays really smoothly. Once you get a hold of the simple radial menus and stuff like that, combat function’s great. More importantly, the story is really good.

The concept of the story is you’ve been captured. This is where a lot of people are just turning off the episode. I’ll be real brief. You’ve been captured by the Illithid, mind flayers. Mind flayers will put this little thing in your brain to turn you into their slave and eventually turn you into an Illithid. You’ve gotten one implanted in your brain, but it somehow got interrupted. So you have certain Illithid powers and properties. You have been marked as a member of some weird cult that involves the absolute and true souls, so they kind of think you’re one of them, but you’re not one of them. You gotta get this thing out of your head before you turn into an Illithid. You have some fellow travelers in your party who also have these things in their head.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** It’s just been a joy. What it captures more than anything is just D and D-ness, entering some weird, decrepit chapel and finding a secret door that leads into a room where some weird cultish stuff was happening and digging into a mystery, all those little side quests and main quests and encounters and things like surprise. Just in general, the characters do what they’re supposed to do. Duergar, they larch. They got it right. What can I say? They got it right. It’s like playing D and D in your hands, and you can play D and D whenever you want, because it’s right there. Baldur’s Gate 3. They nailed it. What can I say? Absolutely nailed it.

**John:** I pre-bought it for PlayStation 5, so next week I’ll start it.

**Craig:** I’m really curious to see how it plays on the PS5.

**John:** Yeah, I am too.

**Craig:** You’re going to love it.

**John:** I’m going to love it. I have two One Cool Things. First is the word jamoke. This last week, I heard somebody say it, and I thought, wait, is that racist? Then our friend Chris Miller had a tweet this last week that said, “Calling people jamokes, like look at those two jamokes over there, is the most fun thing to call people that sounds like its origins are racist, but surprisingly and thankfully it’s not.” I looked it up, and it’s not. It’s just a word that kind of came into being. Jaboni, jamboni, jabroni, there’s lots of things that are like that. But it just spontaneously happened.

**Craig:** Jabronis. Jabroni.

**John:** Jabroni.

**Craig:** Jabroni feels like a very Philadelphia… My Philly friends have always said jabroni. I like the fact that we’re totally cool with calling somebody an asshole as long as we’re not being racist.

**John:** Totally. 100%.

**Craig:** It’s fine, guys. It’s totally cool. We’re just saying they are the human epitome of an anus.

**John:** I don’t know that I’m going to be using jamokes a lot, but I like that it’s out there as an option. If I needed to use it in a script and it felt right, I would do it, because it’s a word that exists in the world.

My other Cool Thing is something I just didn’t know existed until now. Hydrostatic life vests. These are life vests you wear over your clothing. They’re flat. If you fall into the water, they automatically inflate. They have a CO2 cartridge that automatically inflates if you fall into the water. They’re set up in a way that just getting sprayed with water, it isn’t going to happen, but you could be knocked off and knocked out, knocked off a boat, and you’d land in the water, and this will inflate, bring you up, and turn you to the right side. It’s just a really smart invention that I didn’t know existed until now.

**Craig:** They should put those on planes, because I’m so tired of using the inflatable tube.

**John:** How many plane crashes do I have to go through until they actually improve these? I wonder how many people have used the life vests in planes in the history of aviation.

**Craig:** Oh, it can’t be that many.

**John:** There’s the miracle on the Potomac.

**Craig:** The Hudson. The Hudson River crash, I assume some people put the life jackets on.

**John:** I said Potomac. It’s Hudson. You’re right.

**Craig:** The miracle on the Potomac was a miracle. There was a plane crash. Very few people survived. I don’t think they had life jackets on, because it was so sudden. The miracle part was that some people… People have studied this in psychology. There was a man who was driving over the bridge, sees this plane crash into the Potomac. It was cold as hell. People were going to freeze to death. He got out and just jumped in the water and saved somebody.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** For years, psychologists have been asking the question, but why? Literally, what is going on with us where some of us will just put our own lives in danger to save another person we do not know and have no connection to whatsoever?

**John:** That doesn’t tie into our four Fs, honestly.

**Craig:** It is a whole other topic of altruism and how it might function in a way that does tie in.

**John:** I guess you’re propagating your species. There’s a kin selection kind of thing.

**Craig:** I think it’s more about we’re programmed to be pro-social because it’s self-protective, but sometimes that leads us to do things in an abstracted way that make no sense. Very few people have had a chance to put the life vests on and pull the cord. Please, outside of the plane is the most important.

**John:** Outside the plane. Come on. We all know.

**Craig:** Everybody knows.

**John:** It’s going to be a mess if you do it inside the plane.

**Craig:** Listen, the one thing you gotta do when the plane’s going down, keep your head about you. Read that card as the plane is going down. Read the card to remind yourself where are the emergency exits.

**John:** This is a small rant, but I feel like we’ve gone too far on the clever videos to explain how to use all the stuff in a plane, like the clever onboard things. It’s just gone too far.

**Craig:** It’s annoying.

**John:** I’m ready for the boring, basic ones, because we are spending clearly millions of dollars to make these things, and I don’t care.

**Craig:** What if we just made one that said, “When mask falls, put on kid, then yourself. Here is life jacket. Do this. Don’t do that. Here are exits. Goodbye. Here’s where the seatbelt is.”

**John:** We’ve gotta have choreography. We’ve gotta have koala bears. We’ve gotta have everything.

**Craig:** Exactly. We have to have celebrities coming on. The first time I saw the British Airways one, I was like, “This is delightful.” The 4 millionth time, I’m like, “I hate all of you.”

**John:** My god.

**Craig:** All of you. I will destroy your careers.

**John:** And you have, quietly.

**Craig:** Yes. The last one that remains is Sir Ian McKellen, but I’ll get him too.

**John:** They’ll all go down.

**Craig:** They’ll all go down.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Whoop whoop.

**John:** Outro this week is by Bob Tibbing. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We’re a little thin on the outros, so please send those in. 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 weekly newsletter called Inneresting. There’s lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and sweatshirts that are 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 swimming. The other thing you need to know if your plane crashes is how to swim. Craig and Drew, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, when did you learn how to swim?

**Craig:** I was very young. I was five.

**John:** I was younger. I was three.

**Craig:** Oh my god. I don’t even remember things from when I was three. It’s possible that I learned to swim when I was three, and I’ve just forgotten.

**John:** Where did you learn to swim?

**Craig:** My dad got a job over the summer working at a sleep-away camp in upstate New York, Camp Algonquin.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** If anyone has gone to Camp Algonquin in upstate New York, it’s near Argyle or Saratoga Springs, go ahead and write in and tell me your memories. I was there, I believe it was 1976. Camp Algonquin closed I think in the ‘80s. Then because it had closed, it was used as the setting for the horror movie Sleepaway Camp, which is considered a cult classic, in no small part because of the shocking ending. There was a lake there. I think it was called Mirror Lake. They had a little dock that pinned in some of the lake, so it wasn’t like you were going out in the open lake. That’s where I learned to swim. My dad took me out there.

**John:** In a lake?

**Craig:** In a lake. Again, I just want to be clear, they didn’t throw me in the open lake. This was a little, boarded-off area of the lake. It was a lake. I was in a cold fricking lake in upstate New York.

**John:** I learned in a heated pool-

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**John:** … in Boulder, Colorado with my mom. It was called Gym and Swim. There was little, not really gymnastics, but just this little balance stuff for half an hour, and then there’s a half an hour in the pool. I was with my mom. I learned how to swim and basically learned how to not drown. You don’t learn how to swim very, very well. I went through YMCA swimming lessons and made my way up to baby shark or whatever. I pretty much stayed at that level. I can swim competently, but I’m very much a swimming pool swimmer. I’m not a very good ocean swimmer. I’m not going to drown, but I’m not going to win any races swimming.

**Craig:** I just looked it up. It’s Summit Lake.

**John:** Summit Lake.

**Craig:** Summit Lake. That’s where I learned how to swim, Summit Lake.

**John:** My point about swimming though is that if you’ve seen the videos, babies when they’re first born can totally swim, because they’ve been in water this whole time. It’s actually cool seeing newborns swim, because they actually are really good at it. At a certain point, they stop being able to instinctively swim, and they get afraid of the water and you have to get them back past that thing.

If you look at kids who are raised in boat culture and water culture, they’re really good swimmers, because they’re just always in the water. It’s so interesting that humans who don’t start swimming as children really have a hard time learning how to swim. It’s not one of those skills that immediately you get back.

**Craig:** I love swimming. I swam a lot. The one thing that I always noticed about myself, and this is true for some people, is I don’t float as easily as other people. Some people are slightly denser than water or about as dense. Most people are not, and so they float very easily. I am not an easy floater. It doesn’t take much to keep me floating. I always noticed that. I always wondered, huh, is something wrong with me? But no. Some people are just slightly denser than water.

**John:** I’m a very good floater on my back. I’ve always been a very good floater on my back. I can do the head up and Jesus sort of position. I can do all the survival kind of floating. I got my swimming merit badge. I can do all that stuff. But never got great at swimming to the point where like, oh, this is what I want to do for exercise for life. It’s more just I splash around and have fun, but I’m not great at it.

Some things that have helped me a lot though is, I always got frustrated by ears getting filled with water, and so I got really good earplugs. I’ll put a link in the show notes to those earplugs. Listen, it’s a hassle because you can’t hear people anymore, but it makes diving and everything else so much more pleasant, because you’re not dealing with getting water out of your ears half an hour later.

**Craig:** I not only didn’t mind water in my ears, I loved getting the water out later, because it was so warm. You would just hop on one foot with your head tilted, and then suddenly it would go puh, and then this wonderful warm water would come out of your ear. You’d be like, “Ah, this is a wonderful relief.”

**John:** It was always great when it happened, but it sometimes would get stuck behind stuff. Then I would have a day of water in my ear, which is never good.

**Craig:** Oh, god. That never happened to me. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, god.

**John:** That’s why I wear the earplugs.

**Craig:** When you were learning to swim, did you learn multiple strokes or just freestyle or…

**John:** Definitely learned freestyle, which at that point was called Australian crawl. They used to call that Australian crawl.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** I really loved backstroke. I loved elementary backstroke, where your two arms are going at the same time. I was always a really good backstroke swimmer. Of course, then you’re always worried you’re going to bang your head into the far side of the pool. I’m good on sidestroke, but only with my left shoulder up. If you dropped me in the water right now, I’d probably default to a sidestroke.

**Craig:** In that regard, you are like many older ladies.

**John:** I am an older lady, yeah.

**Craig:** That is such a classic older lady move.

**John:** What’s yours?

**Craig:** I was a big fan of the breaststroke myself. Freestyle was sort of like the dessert, because for a while there, I was going to the Y and actually in this swimming… I don’t know what you’d call it. It was like a club. It wasn’t competitive or anything. We had to just do like a thousand laps. You’d have to go through all of them. Freestyle was the dessert swim, because it was so simple to do.

Backstroke I didn’t mind, although I definitely didn’t enjoy the whole, am I going to smash my… It was my hand I was more worried about than my head. You’re going to smash your hand before anything else. Breaststroke, I don’t know, there was just something about it that, I don’t know, just worked for me. I was very fast with that one. I was quicker with that than I think any other stroke.

**John:** While we were living in Paris, my daughter competed on the swim team there. She’s a confident swimmer but was never a great swimmer. It was so interesting watching her versus actual kids who were really good at it. It’s just a whole different skill and scale, because it’s not like running. That gets faster. Swimmers, they get lapper. If you’re a good swimmer, it’s just such a difference between an ordinary swimmer.

**Craig:** Definitely. Did you see the video of, I don’t know if you would call her the poor woman or the wonderful woman from, I can’t remember what country it was. I believe it’s an African country. There was an Olympic level sprint. They sent her out there. She was not a competitive runner at all. It was startling, because for the first time in my life, I realized just how fast Olympic runners are, because it was like watching somebody moving in slow motion while these other people just went zoom, except you realize when you’re watching her run, you’re like, “That’s how I would run.”

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** That’s what a normal human looks like. Swimmers, it’s hard to tell, when they’re all moving at the same speed, just how fast they’re going. I think they should do this for all Olympic sports. Put one regular person in a race just so everyone can see, holy shit, how fast these people are at what they do.

**John:** Drew, before we leave, what’s your swimming experience?

**Drew:** I learned at a Y. I did swim team when I was a kid and then I stopped. Now as an adult, it’s interesting how much currents freak me out. If I’m in the ocean or a river, one of the four Fs pop up at me and I start getting anxiety in the water, which is really strange. It’s a new one.

When I was growing up too, I had trouble diving off the starting block to do these races, so the swim instructors would duct tape my legs together, and I would just plop off, and then they’d have to rescue me from the bottom of the pool basically, because I couldn’t…

**Craig:** I had to do stuff like that for studying to be a lifeguard. Oh my god, the worst is when they would throw you in a pool with all of your clothes on. Did you ever do that one?

**John:** Oh yeah, take them off, inflate your jeans.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh my god, the worst. You’d take off your clothes, get your shoes off, get your socks off, get your shirt off, get everything off, get your pants off, then come back up, tie the legs of your jeans together, empty them of water, blow air into your jeans and then wrap them around your neck and make a… You did the same.

**John:** I did the same thing.

**Craig:** Has anyone ever saved their life using the jean trick? Somebody write in, please, and tell me that you’re alive because of that.

**John:** I want to hear that.

**Craig:** Because it just feels like, how often does that come up?

**John:** Not very often. It didn’t save anybody on the Potomac, so it’s not going to save me.

**Craig:** In the Potomac, I think the-

**John:** The crashing was part of it.

**Craig:** The hypothermia was a real big issue there. It turns out water is really cold.

**John:** Things we learn. Craig, Drew, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Drew:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/technology/personaltech/subtitles-streaming-shows-speech-enhancers.html) by Brian X. Chen for the New York Times
* [No, You Do Not Have a Lizard Brain Inside Your Human Brain](https://mindmatters.ai/2021/03/no-you-do-not-have-a-lizard-brain-inside-your-human-brain/) from Mind Matters
* [Prey Drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_drive)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 364 – Netflix Killed the Video Store](https://johnaugust.com/2018/netflix-killed-the-video-store)
* [The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/business/media/internet-archive-emergency-lending-library.html) by David Streitfeld for the New York Times
* [Baldur’s Gate 3](https://baldursgate3.game/)
* [Tweet by Chris Miller](https://twitter.com/chrizmillr/status/1696276296337342585?s=46&t=xGDWKvLrNvj-hJqhgtqqlA)
* [Hydrostatic Life Vests](https://mustangsurvival.com/products/elite-28-inflatable-pfd-auto-hydrostatic-md5183)
* [British Airways safety video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCoQwZ9BQ9Q)
* [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/)
* [Writer Emergency Pack XL](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/writer-emergency-pack-xl)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Bob Tipping ([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/611standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 610 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what is it even about? We are discussing the premise, the very foundation of story, upon which we construct our takes. We also have a ton of follow-up on AI and language, listener questions, and more. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, it’s back to school season. We’ll reminisce about pencils and notebooks and what we do and don’t miss about being in school.

**Craig:** Oh my god, that’s like, we’ll reminisce about penny candy.

**John:** Ah, indeed. I love it.

**Craig:** Pencils and notebooks, what?

**John:** A preview for our listeners, I have such distinct olfactory memories, actually, of back to school season, like the smell of glue and paste and when you open up a new thing of Mead paper and the notebooks. I love it all.

**Craig:** Listen, it’s going to be a Gen X fest.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** We’re gonna talk you through all the pink erasers and-

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** … the little plasticky zip-loc pencil holders that would go on your three-ring binder. Oh, we got it all, my friends.

**John:** Yeah, plus the new jeans that are really too stiff when you’re first trying to break them in.

**Craig:** New jeans. Hey, guess what? Jeans used to be made out of the same stuff they use to cover old boats.

**John:** Now they use them to make the new WGA T-shirts.

**Craig:** That’s right, exactly. They use that now to punish us, in our hair shirts. Yes, all true, all true.

**John:** It’ll be fun. We’ll start with some actual news. In the headlines this week, there was a ruling saying that AI-created art is not copyrightable. This was a bid. Stephen Thaler is an artist, a person who made something or had his machine make something. He wanted to register it for copyright. The copyright office said, “Nope.” The judge in the case said, “Yeah, the copyright did the wrong thing. That is a no from me, dog. You cannot say that is a thing that you created that is going to be subject to copyright.”

It is interesting. There’s been a lot of little moments that have come along this way. I’ve testified on the WGA’s behalf in terms of our perspective on copyright and AI. It’s going to be an interesting area to follow over the next couple years about whether things that are made by AIs can be copyrighted and in what circumstances.

**Craig:** I think Stephen Thaler, I believe he owns some sort of AI business. I don’t think he’s an artist in and of himself. I could be wrong. Maybe he considers himself one. To me, this was a slam dunk. There is no reason to imagine that AI would have copyright production, any more than there’s a reason to think that AI would have freedom of speech protection. AI is not a person.

If there’s one thing we know, that I think we can all agree on when it comes to the Constitution – and copyright is enshrined in the United States Constitution – it is that the people who wrote it were writing it about people and did not imagine, predict that there would be artificial intelligence. There wasn’t even a cognate for it.

Sometimes people point out that the Second Amendment was written at a time when guns needed to be loaded slowly with a rod and powder and that the founding fathers did not foresee assault weapons. True, but there were guns. At least we know, okay, so there was a gun. Guns have gotten crazy. All right, we can discuss. There were no computers, no calculators. There wasn’t even an adding machine. There was nothing. Copyright is for people.

I did read the decision. Sometimes you read these things, and you can just tell that the judge is like, “Oh, come on. Really? No.” It was very much a no. I foresee that that will continue. I cannot imagine that this would survive in challenges. I don’t care who’s on the Supreme Court. I really don’t. Unless the Supreme Court is entirely made up of people that own AI businesses, I just don’t see how anybody could ever argue that AI-created stuff qualifies for copyright.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to the pdf of the decision, which is great. People should read through it. The article I’ll also link to talks about some of the other challenges to copyright that have come up over the years. Of course, you and I, Craig, we both work for corporations, and corporations are retaining the copyright on the things we do, because we are doing work for hire. I think that was part of Stephen Thaler’s argument here is that the machine was essentially work for hire and the same kind of principle should apply here.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** What I argued in front of the U.S. Copyright Office is that copyright was initially intended to protect… There was always a human author. It was always about the authorship. While the final copyright might transfer to somebody else or transfer to a corporation, it was originally intended to protect that author and that author’s expression and to foster more expression from authors. That is not a thing that a machine knows or wants to do.

**Craig:** No. Work for hire was about commissioning work. You could commission it from people. Again, there was no understanding or conception or ability to foresee that you could commission work from something that wasn’t alive.

For instance, nobody would’ve argued that if somebody had, I don’t know, a loom that could operate itself, that that would be creating works of art. Player pianos, interestingly, created all sorts of issues around copyright. That led to a whole understanding of mechanical copies and things like that and how mechanical copying was in and of itself a derivative of copyright.

We do not commission work. I think work for hire and the commissioning actually started in, I don’t know, prerevolutionary time with silversmiths, people like Paul Revere, I suppose.

**John:** It’s all Paul Revere’s fault.

**Craig:** They would come up with a design and say, “Listen, you work in my factory. I do all the silver stuff. Come up with a design of something. I’ll make a bunch of buckles. I’m going to own the buckle copyright if you want to work here.” That became the way that functioned.

You cannot commission something that is not alive, because you can’t pay it. It’s not a thing. So work for hire requires payment. It requires employment. You cannot employ something that isn’t alive. That’s not what employment is. Employment is paying a human for a thing.

**John:** The use of technology has also come up in copyright over the years. As photography came to be, they had to decide, a photograph taken by a camera, is that copyrightable, and is it to the person who took the photo, and if it’s to the person who took the photo, does it apply to the monkey who takes a photo. There famously was a monkey who took a selfie. Who owns the copyright to that selfie?

**Craig:** What courts have found is that humans causing something to be created is an essential part of copyright. If a camera falls off the back of a truck and the take a picture button gets hit, and it takes a picture, welcome to public domain. No one caused it to be created.

Animals cannot cause something to be created in an intentional sense, or at least in the sense that we say is necessary for copyright. No, selfies by animals, pictures by animals, paintings by elephants, none of it can be considered copyrightable, nor can a human say, “I am causing an animal to create something. Therefore, I should have the copyright on this.”

**John:** Where I think the decisions will ultimately come down, and it’s trying to draw that line of, when a human being uses AI programs to create a work of art, or to create anything that would normally be subject to copyright, where is that line, where it’s like, okay, that human gets the copyright claim. Caselaw will figure that out.

**Craig:** That’s a real thing. That’s happening now, and to the extent that there are elements in there that you can say are unique. This is the key. People need to look at some of the language underpinning all of this, but the most important word is “unique.” Unique work expressed in fixed form. Unique is key.

If people are using AI to make something, but the AI elements that they’re employing are not unique, it’s gonna be very hard for them to qualify for things, because other people can… It’s just basically, you’re remixing chunks of stuff that somebody else has created.

**John:** While all culture is remixing, how you’re doing it and the things you’re using to do it with does matter.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. You can remix to the extent that, okay, I’m gonna write a song that’s gonna hint at a little phrase that was in this piece of music and maybe do a variation of something else, and it’s unique.

What you can’t do on your own, just because, is do Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys, and then not have to deal with the fact that you’re using copyrighted works that you are remixing. That is gonna be a mess, because AI itself can’t really exist without the input of stuff that somebody made.

**John:** Craig, on this listening session, I gave my little testimony, but then I also got to listen in as other people gave theirs. This was an interesting thought experiment, which is gonna not even be a thought experiment soon. This will come up, and it’ll become an issue.

Let’s take a game like Red Dead Redemption. You would agree that the company that makes Red Dead Redemption can copyright the material that’s in Red Dead Redemption. Someone wrote all the stuff that’s in there. There’s an ability to protect that material, correct?

**Craig:** Yes. Rockstar commissioned a lot of people on a work-for-hire basis. Rockstar owns the copyright to Red Dead Redemption. Correct.

**John:** Imagine a future version of Red Dead Redemption where the dialogue and situations that occur within Red Dead Redemption are not the product of people writing things, but instead of AI generating, in real time, within the game itself, those scenarios, the dialogue, what’s happening, creating characterizations. Would that material be copyrightable by Rockstar Games?

**Craig:** It would, because Rockstar is creating a derivative work of their own copyrighted material.

**John:** Okay. Defensible, but also challenging to protect in certain ways. If it wasn’t IP that was clearly already owned, then you can imagine scenarios in which there is, inside a computer game, new material being created, and a real question, a live question, of whether that material created by AI is protectable.

**Craig:** They would have to be able to show that their AI… Let’s just call it a black box. You put stuff into the black box. Stuff comes out of the black box. They would have to show that they only exclusively fed the black box stuff that they had 100% intellectual property control over. At that point, I don’t see how you can argue that the black box somehow undoes that.

Now, if they say, we’re gonna put in all of our stuff, plus we’re also gonna feed the black box 30 Westerns, now you got a problem. Then I think they can’t. That’s where it gets interesting. I think it’s actually, weirdly, not that complicated, as long as you understand how copyright works and what you can and can’t do and what it means to own something. Either you do or you don’t. If you don’t, you can’t half-own it. You own it or you don’t.

**John:** Other news this last week, Disney is releasing on Blu-ray Disc… Blu-ray Discs still exist, apparently.

**Craig:** Yes, they do.

**John:** Mandalorian, Loki, WandaVision, and some other titles. Just notable because you don’t hear about Blu-ray or DVD releases that often. There’s always that concern of shows will disappear off their services, and then no one will ever be able to find it. This is a counterexample, where these things are so popular that Disney recognizes, people will pay us money for these things that have special features on them, and they believe they can make a buck on it. What’s your reaction to some stuff coming out on disc?

**Craig:** Just last week I received my 4K and Blu-ray copies of The Last of Us on DVD.

**John:** Fantastic. Talk to us about that and also what is the sales pitch for a consumer. Why would a person want that, versus watching it on HBO Max?

**Craig:** Quality. It just simply comes down to playback quality. It doesn’t matter how fast your internet connection is. Let’s say it’s maximum speed. It still doesn’t matter, because in order to put the signal out in an efficient way across the world, every streaming service has to compress the image, and the sound to some extent, much less. Really, the image has to be compressed in such a way that it’s deliverable.

When you are getting 4K in particular, but also Blu-rays, it’s just higher resolution than what you’re getting over a streaming service. 4K would be the maximum resolution. In fact, technically, we didn’t even shoot the season in 4K. We were going to shoot the next season in true 4K. Then we went through an HDR process, and it gets up-ressed, and magically, I don’t know, something happens.

**John:** Probably AI.

**Craig:** It’s probably AI.

**John:** It genuinely is probably AI. It’s pattern matching to figure out what the missing pixels would be.

**Craig:** I have no idea. It’s probably more algorithmic than AI. The bottom line is, there’s no reason to buy any of these things unless you really want to see it at its best, which of course, as a cinephile, I do, for certain things.

Also, as our screens get bigger at home, the flaws of streaming will become more and more evident. You would think that as time goes on, speeds would get faster and faster, and therefore the ability to send something through at full resolution would be closer and closer. But the problem is because everything is now going through the same pipe. They have to feed that pipe across the world to billions of people. It’s gonna be a while, I think, before we have that kind of infrastructure. Owning these things on DVD at full resolution is as close as you can get to permanency, as long as they keep manufacturing the equipment to play them back.

**John:** That’s gonna be the question. We do have a Blu-ray player, but we got it specifically because Stuart Friedel, formerly Scriptnotes podcast producer, has purchased, for my daughter, a Blu-ray copy of Freaks and Geeks, because she’d never seen Freaks and Geeks. He got her a Blu-ray copy, and we realized we don’t have a Blu-ray player. We got a Blu-ray player so she could watch Freaks and Geeks. I think she watched an episode.

**Craig:** Stuart got you a gift that ended up costing you a lot of money.

**John:** It did. It did. It cost us a lot. This news that these titles are coming out on disc, I’m excited for those creators and showrunners and everyone who worked on them, because they know there’s some permanent copy of this, which years from now you can look back at, which is fantastic. Reflecting on my own experience, it’s been two or three years since I’ve played anything off of a disc. It’s just the reality. I don’t know what your experience has been.

**Craig:** Similar. I think that where home video on DVD, VHS, used to be this enormous market, at this point, it’s more akin to the way laser discs used to be, something that people who really care about image quality purchase. It’s more of a niche marketplace. It is a little bit of a prestigious kind of, “Look, you can even own it for yourself at full la da da da.” That’s terrific, but as you note, this is not something that they do for everything.

Luckily, I’ve had it for Chernobyl and for The Last of Us, because when I was writing movies, there’s DVDs for all of those things, because there was DVDs for everything then. So far, I haven’t written anything that could theoretically be disappeared off the planet, or as the kids would say, yeeted, or you know what? I don’t even think they say that anymore. I bet yeeted is 10 years old now.

**John:** Yeah, it’s moved on. It’s a historical term.

**Craig:** Yeeted got yeeted.

**John:** If you’re listening to this podcast 10 years from now, and we say yeeted, and you don’t know what we’re talking about, or you do know it, and Craig was wrong, and it did come back, please write-

**Craig:** It’s going to come back.

**John:** … to future producer, Adam Middlemarch, and tell Adam what happened.

**Craig:** Now we have to comb the hospital records for an Adam Middlemarch being born.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Find him and just be like, “You have been chosen. It is your fate.”

**John:** “You have been chosen.”

**Craig:** “You will fulfill your destiny.”

**John:** We have some follow-up. Drew, talk us through. This first one, I’ll tell, his name is Adam Lisagor, because it’s hard to guess how you would pronounce that name. He’s a very smart writer, actor, producer, director person and a friend of mine. He wrote back about our conversation on large language models in 607.

**Drew Marquardt:** Adam Lisagor writes, “To Craig’s question of why we don’t like hearing our names over and over again, prefer using pronoun variables for comfort, my best guess is it’s a mix of two things. First, it’s a conservation of energy. Naming something with specificity requires effort, and naming something with generality requires less effort. We’d prefer to just not have to think so hard.

“Second, conservation of cortisol and our limbic system’s threat detection, because usually, hearing your name is a signal that something needs your attention immediately, can induce panic, like a new email alert tone. When there’s context, your name can be a really nice sound. When there’s less context, it causes stress. That’s my best guess.

“But I’ve been thinking a lot about why we would choose to use so many permutations of words to convey an idea instead of always trying to stick to the same words as the path of least resistance and best communication. I guess the best answer is that’s what makes us human. We derive so much joy from infinitely combining and recombining the elements to new and surprising outcomes, even at the expense of efficiency, even when it causes miscommunication. I guess that’s why writers write. When you find exactly the right new permutation of words, the link you can create with the receiver is that much more powerful. I’m not high right now.”

**John:** Two basic points here. The first is his pronouns argument, is that we use pronouns not just for simplicity, but also because it’s just more comfortable, because you’re not calling the person out every time by name. You don’t ring the bell as hard when you use the pronoun. Is that striking you as all accurate?

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t buy the conservation of energy theory. When we talk about where we live, we don’t say, “I live in town,” although I suppose I say, “I live in the city.” There’s things that we refer to specifically all the time.

I do think that there’s something to the notion that your name is an attention grabber. Attention, what we know, if you keep ringing a bell over and over and over, it just starts to disappear. Our brains can’t handle repetitive alerts like that. Yes, that makes sense. It takes a little bit of the edge off of that. I agree. I don’t think he’s high right now. He might be high right now.

**John:** As he wrote this email, he probably wasn’t high. His second point is about basically, our language could be simpler. We could choose to speak in simpler words. We’ve definitely seen examples of cases where you’re limited now to 115 words you have to communicate. You can get it done.

There’s a game we played in the office a few weeks ago called Poetry for Neanderthals, where you can only use single-syllable words. It’s difficult, but it’s very doable to get your point across. The ability to mix things up and really surprise yourself and everyone else around you by how you’re stringing words together is what makes language delightful.

**Craig:** Agreed. I like your observation there, not-high-at-the-time Adam Lisagor.

**John:** We have some more follow-up on Esperanto.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** I love Esperanto.

**Craig:** We can’t kill this topic any more than we can kill the fake language Esperanto. It just keeps coming back.

**Drew:** You’re going to get a couple knocks on this one, Craig.

**Craig:** Of course I will.

**Drew:** Mark F writes, “One point that pricked up my ears was Craig’s reference to Esperanto being an aspiration of recent vintage. I just happened to be reading about Esperanto in the wonderful book, Humanly Possible, a historical overview of humanism by Sarah Bakewell. She includes a chapter on Ludwik Zamenhof, who originated Esperanto in the 1870s, with the ambition of making a universal language that would break down barriers and help promote a more humanistic civilization across cultures.

“An incredible part of the story is that Zamenhof developed the language as a teenager, but before he was able to work on introducing it to society, his father locked away all his language notebooks, to force the young man to focus his energies on studying to become a doctor. He was sent to Russia to study medicine, but when he returned, he discovered his father had actually burned the notebooks, at which point he started over and rebuilt the language from memory. Amazing.”

**Craig:** I’m really on board with his dad. I think Ludwik Zamenhof’s dad was spot-on.

**John:** Craig, this is the first time I knew that Zamenhof had worked on this as a teenager. That teenager idealism does still ring through in the language, in Esperanto. I’ve of course picked it up a couple times. It’s on my Duolingo little things I can study. It is clever in many ways. It’s so ambitiously unambitious in a way. It’s almost an example of how few words do you need, because it has a limited vocabulary by default, but it’s logical in ways that are all really appealing. No one is ever going to speak it in a meaningful way, because it’s just-

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** There’s not gonna be any native speakers of it, and so therefore, it’s never going to catch on. I still find it delightful.

**Craig:** Regardless of when Esperanto was originally conceived and then burnt and then reconceived, culturally it did seem like it had a moment in the ’50s and ’60s and then rapidly went away. I’m sure there were lots of moments along the way, between 1870 and when it finally… Although again, it will never end. Esperanto is the Ayn Rand of languages. It’s just one of these things where it’s like, guys, it doesn’t work. Let it go. They won’t go.

**John:** Like communism. There’s never been a true communist country.

**Craig:** Exactly, nor will there be. There’s a reason for that. Now all the Marxists are gonna write in. Guys, it’s not gonna happen. Let it go.

**John:** But maybe like Marxism, you can say, what is it that’s fascinating about this idea, and how can you apply it to actual, real places where real people are living? Here’s my generous take on it. Looking at Esperanto and while it did work, it probably got a lot of people curious about how languages actually really do work.

That probably could’ve started a whole generation of folks who were more curious to learn about the actual languages that people out there in the world are speaking, and the quest for what is the universal grammar that’s underneath all these languages, like what is it about our brains that is causing us to create the same patterns again and again and again, and why languages broadly work in very similar ways, when we can imagine that they could work, that they just don’t work.

**Craig:** That is remarkably generous.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** I don’t think Esperanto did a goddamn thing.

**John:** People with the little green stars, Esperanto speakers.

**Craig:** Esperanto speakers, yes, they can all talk to each other at the world’s most boring conference.

**John:** We will have universal translators very soon. Arguably, we have them right now in that-

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s called English.

**John:** Also, what’s on our phones right now, those translate features are really good.

**Craig:** They’re really good. They are really good.

**John:** It’ll become less important. Our last bit of follow-up here is about lingua franca, and it really pertains to this.

**Drew:** Chris writes, “As a fellow language nerd, I enjoyed Episode 607, but I have to correct Craig’s assertion that the term lingua franca derives from the fact that French was once the common language for international communication. In fact, lingua franca was spoken throughout the Mediterranean, where Europeans came into contact with people from the Middle East and Africa, for whom Franks was a general term for Europeans. Lingua franca was the language of the Franks.

“Scholars argue quite a bit about whether lingua franca really qualified as its own language or was more of a pidgin dialect, but in any case, the languages to which it was the closest were Italian dialects, not French. Some version of lingua franca was still spoken in North Africa into the 19th century, but a Frenchman would not have understood it.”

**Craig:** That is fascinating. I did not know that. Lingua franca is a combination of Italian and French and other stuff, but yeah, I guess more akin to Italian than… It’s its own language. It was the Esperanto of its time, except that it emerged, I presume naturally, as, Chris says, a pidgin dialect as opposed to-

**John:** Yeah, which is when you have people who can’t speak the same language have to figure out how to get along, you get a pidgin. Then if their kids speak that as a creole, which is a more formalized version, a new language is formed.

I want to defend you here, Craig, because you were talking about lingua franca in the way that we typically use it, rather than the historical terms, because we now talk about lingua franca as being the actual default or the bridge language in a place. English is a lingua franca for a lot of places, where it’s just like, the British language is the common language that people speak. If we throw in that Wikipedia link there.

**Craig:** Again, you’re being very kind. I think I just screwed up, because I’m pretty sure that, it sounds like, I can’t remember exactly, but I probably said something like, “Lingua franca, which comes from French, because that was the language of diplomacy,” which it was. I’m sure I referenced the Olympics and the fact that they constantly would repeat everything in French in the Olympics for some reason. It made sense in my brain, but I was wrong.

This is the kind of thing that… I have to say, some people don’t like people like Chris at parties. “Well, actually… ” But I do. By the way, I also appreciate that Chris did not use the word “actually,” even though I’m sure Chris really wanted to. Thank you, Chris.

**John:** He said “in fact,” which is the gentleman’s “actually.”

**Craig:** Could be a she

**John:** Absolutely. 100% true. I don’t know why I jumped to that conclusion.

**Craig:** Because you are a-

**John:** I’m a monster.

**Craig:** You’re a monster. You’re a cancelable monster. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate the correction. You are completely correct. I was entirely wrong. Now I know something that I can bother other people about.

**John:** I love it. Hey, Craig, let’s talk about the premise. Our marquee topic here in the weekly Inneresting newsletter, which is sort of the print version of Scriptnotes, Chris Csont had picked an old blog post I did back in 2016, where I was responding to something that Michael Tabb had written for Script Magazine.

In that, Tabb was talking about how a premise is the core belief system of a script and the lifeblood of a story. I was arguing, “What you’re talking about seems great. I really wouldn’t call that the premise. Greek scholars might call that the premise, but I would really say that is the thesis, that is the dramatic question.”

I wanted to talk with you, Craig, about what we mean by the premise, what we mean by a thesis, and really what we mean when someone says, “What is your movie about? What is your story about?” Because that about is really two very different things. It can be about what is the TV Guide’s synopsis, it can be talking about that log line, or it could be like, what is it emotionally about for the characters within, what is it about for the writer, what is the purpose behind the work. Sometimes when we have challenges talking with people about their work, I think sometimes we’re really not understanding what we mean by “about” when we ask, “What is this about?”

**Craig:** This is a great question. I tend to answer as follows when people say, “What’s your show about? What’s your movie about?” I’ll say, “What it’s about is blah blah blah, but what it’s really about is blah blah blah.”

What it’s really about, that’s the theme, that’s the central dramatic question, whatever vocabulary you want for that. What is it about to me is the plot premise, what’s happening, literally what’s the basic, simple thing of what’s happening in your show. What it’s about, it’s about the nuclear disaster that happened. It’s about a guy that has to take a girl who might have the cure for worldwide plague from point A to point B. It is the hardware premise, because that is the very first thing that will hit people’s eyes and ears when you put a trailer out, for instance, or a teaser.

**John:** That sort of log line description, for The Martian, is an astronaut stranded on Mars has to find a way home. That is a good example of, it’s explaining what the problem is and what the quest of the movie is. It feels like, oh, how would you do that? That’s intriguing. It feels like there’s a question mark to that.

Sometimes we’re talking about the story area. What is your movie about? It’s about Hawaiian indigenous rights. Great. Or it’s about fatherhood, which is a broad, general theme, but fatherhood is not a central dramatic question. It’s not a thing you’re necessarily grappling with.

**Craig:** I try and avoid topics as a premise, because a topic just is a topic. Okay, it’s about indigenous rights in Polynesia. Okay, that’s a topic. That can be a term paper. It could be a nonfiction book. But what is the premise of the movie or show?

**John:** If it’s about a tribal leader leading a revolution against some other people for indigenous rights in this one Polynesian island, that is specific.

**Craig:** A premise has occurred. We need to know what some big, huge thing is happening. Typically, it’s the big, huge thing that happens very early on that is the thing. Most people, by the way, out there in the world, the vast majority of the audience, will never get past that “what’s it about” when they’re telling other people what it’s about.

When we’re talking about this with potential people, to buy it, act in it, direct it, write it, whatever it is that we’re trying to get somebody to do when we’re communicating this within our industry, it’s very important to know the both what it’s about, because if it’s super high-concept, people may get very excited, like, “Whoa, these three guys get together to fight an outbreak of ghosts in Manhattan? Very high concept. I can see how that movie… It’s a comedy. Okay, got it.”

Then what’s it about-about? Then maybe in a circumstance like this, there’s very, very little. It’s about somebody going from being cynical to a believer. That’s cool. But there are other situations where, what’s it about, it’s about one baseball game of no importance, that happened in 1976, between two teams that weren’t even in contention, for a pennant. But what it’s really about is da da da da. Then you’re like, “Oh, this is fascinating.” We need to know both. It’s very important.

**John:** Not only do you need to be able to communicate both, you need to really deeply understand both. I was on a phone call yesterday with a young writer, talking about her project. Her two abouts didn’t really match up, because she could tell me both abouts. I just didn’t think they were fundamentally compatible. That’s really the heart of our conversation.

She was doing a period musical about a young woman trying to get over a breakup and move on. Okay, I see that as a plot premise, I guess, and her inner emotion. But what it’s really about is this writer’s own feelings of exile after being forced to leave the country.

I said, “Okay, I get those two things separately. I don’t see how you’re drawing the connections there. Okay, that feeling of exile and loneliness, sure, but I don’t see how those two things are going to tie together with everything else you’re describing here. I think maybe you’re going to have to honestly change one of your abouts, to get something that’s actually going to be writeable. I think the reason why you’re struggling is you’re trying to write two different incompatible movies. I think that’s why you’re finding it so difficult to have scenes that actually resonate and have a story that feels that it gets you to a meaningful conclusion.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s so important. There’s only one reason for the plot premise to exist, and that is to ultimately convey, in some form or shape, the “what it’s really about” premise. But there’s only one reason for the “what it’s really about” premise to exist, and that is to live inside of the “what happens” premise. They are connected, inherently.

Typically, we will think of a plot premise first. But the very next job should be, “Okay, but what would that serve? What could I learn or note or be fascinated by, even if it’s incredibly simple? What sort of thing would make this interesting once I have absorbed the reality of what it is?”

The opposite is also true. If we’re like, “You know what? I really… ” A lot of people start things with their own experiences. “I had an experience where I’ve lost somebody, and I experienced grief, and I want to write a story about grief.” Okay. “But also, one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was skeet shooting. I want to write about grief, set against the world of skeet shooting.”

Your common love of things is not enough. They are not purposefully reflecting each other. They are simply living side by side. One has to purposely reflect the other. They must serve each other. It must make sense. Otherwise, like you said, you’re just going to have one thing floating on top of another, and nobody wants that.

**John:** If you have that inner premise and no external premise, the inner premise could be a great poem. You can just have free-floating feelings and analysis of questions. It could be an essay. But it’s not going to have characters and a story that can actually get you to a place, because that’s the social contract you’re making with an audience is that, if you’ve given your attention, I will tell a story that will be meaningful, and it will take you on a journey.

There’s not gonna be a journey if it’s just, “This is what I think about a thing.” If you just have a central dramatic question or this feeling you want to explore, that’s not gonna be a movie. That’s not gonna be a story. That’s just a thing. Maybe it’s a song. But that’s all you got.

**Craig:** Yeah, precisely. We sometimes get a little reductive about this stuff. That’s why I don’t like the whole pitch contest thing, even though I’ve judged them. It boils things down to only thinking about these premises like polishing these premises to sharp edges and points when they don’t need to be. They don’t even need to be interesting. The premise can be utterly boring if the “what it’s really about” is fascinating, and vice versa.

God knows how many times I’ve said it. We talked about it at length in the How to Write a Movie episode of our podcast. The “what it’s really about” of Finding Nemo is so banal and so dumb fortune cookie, it’s almost giggleable. But it’s what’s perfect about it, is that you sometimes want to take something that’s so simple and obvious and then explain it through the most remarkable premise, plot premise, so that you finally get it.

It’s weird. Sometimes the simplest things just fly right over our heads, because they’re so cliché, they don’t even sink into our skin. We need to be reminded through fascinating plots and vice versa. Sometimes the simplest plot is what you need to absorb something that’s very complicated.

**John:** Absolutely. I can think of many films I love, including many great indie films, where you look at the description, you’re like, “That’s not enough for a movie.” You Can Count On Me, it’s a woman’s sort of shiftless brother moves home. It’s like, is that it? There’s not a lot of plot, story to it. It’s terrific, because it’s actually exploring the rarely asked questions about how adult siblings get along and what the nature of that relationship can and should be. Both are good things. I’m saying, don’t freak out if they’re not equal weight for you. But they have to serve each other, no matter what.

There’s a project I’m hoping, whenever the Strike is resolved, to take out. I am genuinely very, very excited about the movie poster premise of it all and what you’re gonna see in the trailer, but even more excited about the “what it’s actually really about” of it all. Those two things I think are gonna marry really well together. I’d say I’m excited by the flashy, what’s in the trailer of it all, but I’m really excited to write the deeply what it’s about, if I get a chance to do so.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** We’ll hope.

**Craig:** That’s true. We have to hope. I don’t want to just go presume that it’s gonna be fantastic. I agree with you. First of all, we have to… You said, “Whenever the Strike ends.” If the Strike. Let’s just say if.

**John:** Oh, come now.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** Craig, no.

**Craig:** Craig, no. Craig. Craig.

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** Craig. No, I believe it’ll end.

**John:** It’ll end.

**Craig:** Everything ends, John.

**John:** Everything ends.

**Craig:** Everything ends.

**John:** The heat death of the universe.

**Craig:** That’s right, John. One day the Sun will devour us.

**John:** Memento mori. Remember that you will die.

**Craig:** Craig.

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** Craig, no!

**John:** Memento mori!

**Craig:** Craig, no! We should do some listener questions. We’ve probably built up quite a few.

**John:** We have. Drew, start us off.

**Drew:** Our first one comes from Johan on Twitter. He writes, “Hey, John and Craig. Is the whole starting a script with FADE IN actually just a myth? I think I see it in like 5% of the American scripts I’ve read through the years. Seems like a huge waste of space. Cheers.”

**Craig:** “A huge waste of space.”

**John:** Craig, do you write FADE IN?

**Craig:** No, but does it really seem like “a huge waste of space?” It’s one line. Who cares?

**John:** It is one line, but also, it’s the first line. If your first line is a useless line, I’d say get rid of it.

**Craig:** Look, I don’t use it. I think it is superfluous. Also, not every film fades in.

**John:** No, it doesn’t.

**Craig:** Often, you just start with a boop, where you just pop in. You don’t need to start a script with anything there than INTERIOR, EXTERIOR, blah-dah-dee blah, or even not.

**John:** Or not that.

**Craig:** You could start with just we hear a bunch of sounds or whatever.

**John:** Or just an image, because it’s not even clear where you are.

**Craig:** Exactly. That said, it is not “a huge waste of space.” It is precisely line. You can absorb it.

**John:** Absolutely. Now we’re gonna get all the people who are so angry at us. It’s like the CUT TOs and the we hears and the we sees.

**Craig:** I like that. Do it.

**John:** Do it. Write in.

**Craig:** Let them fight.

**John:** Waste our time. Waste Drew’s time, because he won’t put it in the outline for us.

**Craig:** It seems like a huge waste of time. What’s next?

**Drew:** Patrick writes, “Apart from supplying the budget, what services do the studios actually provide during the production of a movie? If you got the money elsewhere, as per your billionaire episode, would you still need to work with the studios? Equipment, studio space, crews, cast, post facilities, marketing companies, etc, are all available elsewhere, right? Are studios just glorified banks? Is it all about the distribution?”

**John:** Aha.

**Craig:** Cutting right to it.

**John:** He’s challenging the fundamental premise of the studios.

**Craig:** I think he’s confirming the fundamental premise of the studios.

**John:** Craig, you can talk us through. Also, Drew just graduated from the Stark Program, so he’ll have a perspective on what studios do. Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** I think Patrick’s put his finger on exactly why we do use them. Studios are, in fact, a combination of a distribution facility, a bank, and an advertising agency. That is what they are. The rest is what we do. But what they do is they pay for it, they advertise it, and then they put it out. That’s it. That’s what they do.

**John:** It’s easy to confuse the fact that they have physical lots where you can shoot films, and they obviously have some equipment there, and they have facilities there for doing post. But of course, Craig and I will both tell you that so often, a show that is for CBS will actually shoot on, like, Universal stages, because that’s what was available. It’s not like they’re always shooting their own things on their own lots. They do that wherever they could do it.

There are, of course, lots of movies that were made completely outside of the system. There are independent films and other things that are sold after they are produced, to a company that distributes them. But it’s that distribution function and marketing function that’s really, I think, the heart of why there still is a modern American studio system.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are stages everywhere.

**John:** Everywhere.

**Craig:** There are post facilities everywhere. Sometimes when things are independently financed, you take away the bank aspect of the studio, but you’re still maintaining the marketing, the advertising aspect, and the distribution aspect, which is why independent films are constantly looking to get distribution from studios. That’s sort of how it goes.

**John:** We talked about Legendary Pictures. Legendary, it’s kind of a studio. They definitely have money. They do their own development of stuff. They can put stuff in production. They have money to put stuff in production, but they’re not a distribution company. I’m sure they have a lot of sway in the marketing, but they don’t have unilateral control over the marketing of things.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** They partner up with other companies for distribution. Drew, any insights that you have from having just completed the Stark Program and knowing… You’ve had a studio management course recently.

**Drew:** You guys have nailed it. I think marketing and distribution is obviously so key. I think it seems so easy for indie producers or indie filmmakers or people outside the studio system, that we would be able to jump in, and the idea of, oh, you can get some money together and make a movie. But without that distribution… Marketing costs, I think it’s a million dollars per 100 screens, just to try and get you to the place where you’re gonna break even on that money.

Then I think for people, for writers and for artists, it becomes an institutional check too. You can try and make a career outside of it, but I’m not sure. I think you need to have that to have a certain longevity.

**John:** Maybe so. One point I want to make about distribution is you need an ongoing distribution program. Basically, you can’t just spin up in a distribution company once, to distribute one movie, and then wind it all back down.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** You need to have ongoing people who do that, not just so you have the expertise to do it, but also, to collect the money that you made in those theaters, you have to have another movie coming out, so you can say, “Hey, deadbeat exhibitor, before we give you this next movie, you gotta pay us what you owe us.” That historically has been an incredibly important part of why studios who have spun up and done one or two or three years of movies have failed, because they couldn’t get the money back in, because they didn’t have the ongoing pipeline of product.

**Craig:** Money goes out instantly, comes back slowly. You also need a library to keep you afloat. You need to have the ability to absorb that slow return. Also, when it comes to distribution, there is a leverage when you’re dealing with…

Let’s just deal with theaters, which are having a nice little bounce-back. Hooray. There’s a limited amount of theaters. Do you want Batman? Yeah, you do want Batman if you’re a theater owner. I need you to also take this thing. You get to where, as if you just have this thing, and they’re like, “We don’t want to show that.” I don’t have a Batman to make you show it.

You’re absolutely right. There is a reason why the only new studios that are appearing are from companies that are already enormous. Really, Netflix was kind of the only one to emerge without having been a legacy studio or a preexisting massive entity, like Apple or Amazon. But even then, Netflix has absorbed an insane amount of venture capital. It is a massive endeavor to start one of these things from scratch. The war field is littered with the bodies of companies that tried and failed.

**John:** We’re phrasing everything in terms of movies, but the same thing happens in TV. If a studio has a TV show that they’ve made, that they want to then sell around the world, they need to have a team that sells that show around the world and collects the money from around the world.

If they have Designing Women, and they want to sell it to Portugal, and some Portuguese company wants to air it, they have to make that contract, enforce that contract, collect the money. That’s just a lot of overhead. You can’t expect one individual to do that. It just takes a lot of people and bodies to do it.

**Craig:** It takes a lot of people, which is why you can’t really create one of these things as a single-use entity, because the amount of people required, lawyers, financiers, to keep the pipeline functioning, it just is not warranted by a single-use entity.

The HBO is an interesting case, because they have certain, unlike Netflix or Amazon or Apple, which is just one worldwide, or Disney Plus, for instance. Everybody just logs on to the one thing. HBO still has linear. They have Max. They have Max LatAm. They have Max Nordic. There’s some local versions of it around the world.

Then for most places internationally, they’re making good old-fashioned distribution deals. For instance, in the United Kingdom, HBO material, through a deal that the studio made with Sky, is shown on Sky in the UK. In Canada, it’s shown on an outlet called Crave. Every single one of those deals has to be negotiated and forced, managed, renewed, evaluated. John, the amount of PowerPoints, we can’t imagine. We can’t imagine.

**John:** Obviously, Craig doesn’t have to worry about each of those individual deals. Craig might be asked to go to travel to some place to hype up the show as it’s being released in Canada, but he’s not responsible for negotiating the Canadian deal.

**Craig:** I don’t have to do any of that.

**John:** He doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to.

**Craig:** Thank god, because I would be like, “I’d love for Canadians to see it, but guys, how about just free? It’s free.”

**John:** It’s free. It’s free. I remember Rachel Bloom came to Paris while I was living in Paris, because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend had just started airing on its new network, and they wanted her to go there and promote it. She’s like, “I’ll go there and promote it.” We hung out. We drank some wine. It was nice.

I don’t want to get off this topic though without saying that just because it’s hard to build up an entire studio distribution marketing arm doesn’t mean that it’s hard for any given billionaire to make the production part of it. The production part of it’s actually the easier part. You make a thing, and you sell it to a distributor who does all the rest of that. We would love more people to do that, to do what Legendary does, to do what other companies have done to create that, because that’s awesome.

**Craig:** There is a lot of money in the world. There are only a few studios that are capable of marketing and distributing a film. Yes, lots of money. Now, traditionally, investing in movies and television has been a great way to lose a billion dollars.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like opening a vineyard. It’s like, oh, it’s a great way to make a little money off of a lot of money.

**Craig:** You know how to make a million dollars in the wine business? Start with a billion dollars. It’s definitely a thing. But it has always been, I think for a certain segment of independent financiers, a labor of love. Patron of the arts is a thing. Nobody who supports the production of Broadway shows, for instance, nobody goes into that thinking, “I’m gonna make a gazillion dollars.”

**John:** “I’m gonna be rich.”

**Craig:** No. You are doing it because you love it. Now, you may still be a hard-charging guy who’s probably corrupt, because Broadway accounting makes Hollywood accounting look absolutely spotless. Nonetheless, the point is, you can make a whole lot more money just handing it to a hedge fund and just sitting back.

There is still a value to the Medici-style patron of the arts. Those people exist. Those entities exist. Every now and then, a very wealthy scion will go into that business. The Ellisons, for instance, both Ellison siblings have done so.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And have led to the creation of some fantastic stuff.

**John:** Absolutely. You look at the success of A24, and as horribly toxic as they were, The Weinstein Company at its peak recognized the ability to make and market a certain kind of movie and distribute a certain kind of movie that did really well for them and did well for the industry, at least in terms of the quality of material they were able to put out there and some of the artists they were able to introduce. I don’t want to say it’s impossible to do it, but it’s not possible to compete on the big studio level with just a billion dollars.

**Craig:** No, it is very difficult. It may be the case that the lesson of the Weinsteins is that it’s only possible to be successful in going to war against those big studios if you are an absolute shameless son of a bitch. But who knows?

**John:** Who knows?

**Craig:** Look. A24, there are companies that do quite well.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I don’t mean to take things away. A24 really is the new Miramax. They really are. They seem to be doing it quite well.

**John:** Fantastic. Let’s try one more quick question here.

**Craig:** CR asks, “I want to ask if having log lines or summaries of some of my original unsold scripts posted to a personal website with a prompt saying, ‘If you’d like to read this, please contact me at whatever email for the full script,’ is remotely a good idea. I’m friends with several amateur artists trying to break into their respective industries. One does a web comic posted to her personal website. She was telling me to start finding ways to give myself an internet footprint, so if someone wants to find me, there’s something to find. She recommended a website.

“The only problem is, what do I put on this website if I have nothing sold? I can’t just put up random pieces of writing like an artist might post sketches. I thought about putting final versions of original scripts I have up, but I’m not sure if I’m comfortable just having my unsold scripts there for the taking.”

**John:** My first instinct is, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. I just don’t think that’s actually gonna be successful for you. I’m curious what our listeners think, because we obviously have 10 years of aspiring screenwriters who have listened to this podcast. I’m curious whether any of them have done anything like this and found it to be successful in terms of getting people to read it.

My other instinct is, let people read your writing, but maybe just put up the first 10 pages so they can see, and if they want to read more, they can read more. Craig, what’s your instinct?

**Craig:** I don’t understand why you can’t put up random pieces of writing, like an artist might post sketches. Throw a couple of scenes on. Throw one scene on. Throw one scene on with a storyboard. Maybe your friend who does a web comic can… Throw her a couple of bucks and have her do a little… Why not? I don’t understand why. Nobody wants to read a whole script anyway. Everyone hates reading scripts.

Also, you say, “I’m not sure if I’m comfortable just having my unsold scripts there for the taking.” What are you afraid of? You have the copyright on them. They’re there. You’ve published them on the web. Register them with the United States Copyright Office for whatever it is, 100 bucks, and then put them there. Why worry? Dude, no one’s stealing your script, man.

**John:** No one’s stealing your script.

**Craig:** No one’s stealing it.

**John:** If it’s on the web, an AI will scrape it. They’ve already scraped it. But you know what? They’re gonna scrape everything anyway. We can’t stop it.

**Craig:** You should be so lucky, because then you can point back and say, “This was copyrighted.” Now the people that scraped it and folded it into whatever have to pay you a lot. No, I think there is no problem whatsoever. Think about this. Photographers do it all the time.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Photographers take a picture. It is their copyright. They put it on the internet. Anyone can take it, copy it, and stick it somewhere. People don’t stick it in anything that’s actually legit and moneymaking, because they’re gonna get sued, and it’s gonna cost them money. They’ll throw it all over a bunch of crap that isn’t gonna make money, but also, they’re not pretending that they took the picture. I just don’t think this is a problem.

I think, I have always said this, the paranoia that people are gonna steal your unsold script is not warranted. You should be far more concerned about the odds, the minuscule chance that somebody who can make a difference in your life is also gonna find it and also gonna read it and also gonna like it. That tiny, little lottery victory is worth the chance that some dingdong somewhere is gonna take your pages and put them into his unsold script. It’s not a problem.

**John:** It doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** It doesn’t happen. Even if it did, you would have recourse. I just wouldn’t worry about it.

**John:** Agreed. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a holdover from our live show. We were gonna do One Cool Things. We ran long, and it was messy and chaotic.

**Craig:** Just say Natasha Lyonne. My belovedly messy and chaotic Natasha Lyonne.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is an article by Danielle Campoamor in Marie Claire. Headline is, We Need to See More Parents Having Abortions in Film and Television. The point is that if you look at, in film and TV, whenever you do see a character having an abortion, it is a young, unmarried white girl. That’s not actually the majority of abortions in America. It’s actually people who already have children are the ones who are getting the most abortions in the US. So rarely do we see that portrayed on screen. Literally, in 2020, of characters who had abortions on film, 73% were white, and one third were teenagers, and not a single one of them was a parent.

It’s just arguing for, we need to have representation of what reality is, because people see themselves in that and see the choices they need to make reflected in those characters. That gets people thinking about abortion in a different way, because I think our image of what it is is just that unmarried teen mom, and that’s just not the reality. It’s actually people who already have multiple kids and are deciding whether to have another child.

**Craig:** I completely sympathize with this. I think it’s important to get that message out. I’m not sure drama is necessarily the best way to do it. The problem is a little bit like showing… I bet you if we cataloged the portrayals of leukemia on film, you would also see a predominance of children and teenagers, maybe kids, or rather, young adults in their 20s. What you wouldn’t see are a lot of people in their 70s or 80s or something like that, because nobody cares, because it’s not dramatic.

The problem is the reality of abortion is it’s not dramatic. This is just the stark reality. It’s not dramatic. People who are in committed relationships, with three kids, and a woman gets pregnant, and they decide rationally, oh yeah, no, actually, this was not a pregnancy we wanted. She goes to a clinic. She goes to a gynecologist. There is an abortion. It’s done. Move on. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it’s fun. But it’s not dramatic.

That’s specifically the point I think that Danielle’s making is that what we tend to concentrate on is the overdramatic abortion scenario, a 13-year-old white girl, because white girls. Oh, god, white girl. That’s what we concentrate on. Therein lies the problem, is that we are dramatists.

We’ve talked about medical shows and legal shows. They’re soaking in this problem. They’re just not building medical shows around the mundane medical needs of people, nor are they building legal shows around the vast predominance of legal cases, which are boring and result in settlements between people in quiet rooms.

I understand. I think it’s a fair critique. I think the critique needs to be acknowledged. I think it is important. For instance, what I would argue is that at the end of an episode or a movie about or that contains such an abortion storyline, it would be important to actually put this information up on screen. That’s more, I think, actionable than just forcing non-dramatic situations into a product that is supposed to be entertaining and dramatic. It’s a tricky thing to do, but that’s where I would go with it myself. I’m sure no one will have any thoughts or comments about this.

But as somebody that actively and aggressively supports reproductive rights and access to reproductive rights in this country, I just want to make sure that we don’t end up getting stuck on too much of a hook as dramatists, to portray situations that are inherently not dramatic.

**John:** The article itself actually points out Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as an exception to the rule, because on that show, Rachel and Aline had a character who was a mom of two kids, who had an abortion. It wasn’t a big deal. I think it was such a smart choice to have the character who was facing this decision not be Rachel Bloom’s character, but her friend, who is a central character, but is not the unwed young mother. I think there are definitely ways to do it.

I guess, Craig, I would just challenge that it’s not necessarily that we need to wedge this into more things. I’ve not even seen a movie that it happens in, or it even be the central thing in a movie. I’ve never seen it come up as an issue in this stuff. It feels like it could. There’s gonna be interesting ways to do it, and unexpected ways. We have such a stereotype of who a character is who has an abortion. It’s great to always challenge those stereotypes.

**Craig:** I completely agree with that. Listen, I guess in a way, I’m almost being more aggressive about it, by saying that we should just put facts on screen, white letters on black, and just say, “What you’ve just seen is a dramatization, or is drama. Understand, however, this is the reality,” da da da da da da da da da, to aggressively deromanticize and dedramatize the truth of how abortions occur, not only in our country but around the world, and have always done.

But I agree with you. I’m not suggesting that it’s not possible to do. Of course it is. Nor is there a way to do it in a way where there is no burden of drama on it. Really, what I’m saying is I don’t want to unfairly judge works of art that do portray-

**John:** I get that.

**Craig:** … the most dramatic form of abortion, particularly because I suspect in most of those dramatizations, the characters do end up either having an abortion or relaying a positive perspective of that essential reproductive right. Could be wrong about that.

**John:** I think what we’re both saying is we don’t need fewer portrayals of abortion. We want more portrayals of abortion, and among those, maybe a broader range of experiences.

**Craig:** With an acknowledgement of the truth, because I think what Danielle’s writing about is incredibly important. People don’t understand how this actually functions. We are typically, in this country, always afraid of the wrong thing.

My One Cool Thing is just as much of a hot topic. It is not. We gotta take a break from some of the serious stuff and talk about things that are even more serious, like Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, boys.

**John:** It’s Dungeons and Dragons adjacent. You don’t actually have to play D and D to play this game.

**Craig:** You don’t. This is sort of exciting. Again, not for everybody, but for boys and girls who are dorks like us, and who do like role-playing games. There is a new board game out. This is not a typical role-playing game of the sort you might see on Critical Role or the kind that John and I play on a weekly basis, sometimes on a biweekly basis. This is a board game version of Dungeons and Dragons that is playable in one shot, I think they estimate over the course of two hours, which is not wildly nuts. It’s like a nice, long Monopoly game. It’s called Dungeons and Dragons: Trials of Tempus.

This is an officially licensed product, so it gets to use all of the characters, classes, spells, and so forths from Dungeons and Dragons. It was created by two friends of mine, along with a fellow I don’t know, Adam Carasso, and then my friends, Thor Knai and Kyle Newman. It’s excellent if you enjoy nerdery like we do.

What’s really interesting about it is you get to do something that we generally don’t get to do when we’re playing D and D, which is fight against each other. You get divided into two parties. The two parties are rivals in an heroic adventure. Normally, when I’m DMing, technically I suppose it’s like the DM versus the players, but I think that makes you a bad DM. I think it’s the DM with the players. The point is we’re all gonna get through this and have a great time and go through highs and lows and all the rest. This is more of a traditional “our team wins.”

It’s got all sorts of D and D-ish things about it. I know the overlap between D and D players and board game players is almost 100%, so I think you might like it. Check it out, Dungeons and Dragons: Trials of Tempus, freshly out, available online and all sorts of places, including Schmamazon.

**John:** I checked this out when I was at your house this last time. It is beautifully put together. It’s in a very heavy box. It’s full of figurines and cards and things and all the accoutrement that you love in a board game. I’m excited to play it with you.

**Craig:** (Speaks French.)

**John:** (Speaks French.) That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Craig, we gotta talk merch.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** We have T-shirts, and they’re great. They’re at Cotton Bureau, including the new Scriptnotes University T-shirt and sweatshirt.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Craig, have you even seen this?

**Craig:** No, but I want a Scriptnotes University… Is there a hoodie?

**John:** Of course there’s a hoodie, but also just a normal sweatshirt, a collared sweatshirt.

**Craig:** I never wear those.

**John:** I’m gonna paste a link in the Workflowy here so you can see it.

**Craig:** What I need is a hoodie.

**John:** There’s hoodies.

**Craig:** I’m getting one.

**John:** Our hoodies are good.

**Craig:** You know Cotton Bureau, by the way, used to make the blank T-shirt in the Stuart tri-blend?

**John:** They don’t do it anymore?

**Craig:** They don’t do it anymore. They stopped.

**John:** Oh, wow.

**Craig:** It’s such a shame. I’m checking out… I love the look of it. Oh, but this doesn’t show me… Oh, it doesn’t have a hoodie. Oh yeah, it does.

**John:** It does have a hoodie, yes.

**Craig:** But it’s not a zip hoodie.

**John:** Oh, you want a zip hoodie.

**Craig:** Yeah, I want a zip-

**John:** We’ll figure it out.

**Craig:** John.

**John:** We’ll figure it out.

**Craig:** John.

**John:** The problem is the zipper would go through the logo itself. That’s the problem with a zip hoodie.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true. Ugh.

**John:** It has a pullover crew neck. The pullover crew neck is what you would think about for a sweatshirt.

**Craig:** What about doing a zip one where you take the Scriptnotes University and just make it a bit smaller and put it on one side? I don’t want to screw up our merchandise methods. I’m just saying. A tank top? Wow. Who’s walking around in the Scriptnotes University tank top? That’s cool. Aw, there’s a onesie. Aw.

**John:** There’s a onesie. See?

**Craig:** Aw, so cute.

**John:** Make them for everybody. This was inspired by a Scriptnotes listener who wrote in. She wants to remain anonymous. She said, “I really feel like I learned more from Scriptnotes University than I did from actual film school. I really want a Scriptnotes University T-shirt, sweatshirt.” We’re now making this for her and for everybody else. If you zoom in, you’ll see that the little logo at the center has a typewriter. It’s surrounded by brads. It says “scriptum notas” and “ira and ratio,” which is umbrage and reason.

**Craig:** I love it. I love it.

**John:** Established 2011.

**Craig:** Established 2011, Scriptnotes University is objectively superior to every film school in the world and costs far less. I’m just saying it. I don’t care. I’m saying it now constantly. It’s just a fact. I know you guys went to Stark and everything. I’m just saying it. It’s a fact. We’re just better.

**John:** Speaking of college, any listeners who are college students, reminder that you can get Highland 2 for free for the student license. You just write in. There’s a link in the show notes. Also, just go to Quote-Unquote Apps. If you have a student ID, if you have a student dot-edu address, you get it for free. Why would you not want to do that?

We also have the new XL version of Writer Emergency Pack in the store at writeremergency.com. 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 Craig and I are about to record about going back to school.

**Craig:** Back to school.

**John:** Craig and Drew, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Drew:** Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Oh, Craig. Megana was back from her trip, and she texted you and me, saying, “Oh, I was at Target, and I saw that it’s now spooky season, because they have Halloween stuff out.”

**Craig:** Freaking August.

**John:** Megana, it’s not spooky season yet-

**Craig:** it’s not.

**John:** … because it’s still back to school season. Back-to-school season is the best time of year. I loved back-to-school season. I didn’t like necessarily going back to school, but I loved school supplies. I loved stocking up for the new year.

**Craig:** Always fun, yes. Fresh, new stuff. Crisp, new stuff. I was the sort of kid that would just ruin his notebook or binder over the course of the first two months. To have a fresh, new binder, a new notebook, with that weird marble cover that makes no sense, all of that stuff was wonderful, and getting my new pencils, and pens, which we weren’t really allowed to use, until we were in, what, 7th grade or something?

**John:** For a while, we were allowed to use the erasable pens, which-

**Craig:** Those stank.

**John:** I’m sure they still exist, but no one uses erasable pens anymore.

**Craig:** What was it called, Paper Mate?

**John:** Paper Mate.

**Craig:** Paper Mate. Those stank. Poor lefties were just erasing their little-

**John:** That smear.

**Craig:** It was just so sad. Those stank. Protractor.

**John:** Oh yeah, compass.

**Craig:** Compass, all that great stuff. That weird eraser, that big, chunky, pink, trapezoidal, or parallelogrammatic.

**John:** I want to know, how did that form come to be, because where it’s slanted, it’s-

**Craig:** It’s a parallelogram.

**John:** It’s a parallelogram. That’s what it is.

**Craig:** It’s a parallelogram.

**John:** On the side. It’s a parallelogram extended as a solid.

**Craig:** What was it? Was it a Pearl? Was that what it’s called, Pearl Eraser?

**John:** Yeah, Pearl Eraser. Yeah, Pearl Eraser. A very distinct smell.

**Craig:** So distinct.

**John:** You’re not rubbing through the paper, but you can smell that burning rubber to it.

**Craig:** You know what? It’s by the Paper Mate company, and it’s called the Pink Pearl Eraser. It is one of those products still available, of course, that seemingly will never change. The script on it that says Pink Pearl and all that, it just will never change.

**John:** Why would you change it? It’s already perfect.

**Craig:** It’s kind of perfect. It does have that weird smell. Occasionally, it would crack.

**John:** Yeah, because it would dry out over the course of the year too. It was much better when it’s fresh out of the package.

**Craig:** Everything is.

**John:** A few months in, it’s pretty bad.

**Craig:** Everything is better. Also, we did have new clothes, which in my case meant going to Sears and buying-

**John:** Sears or JC Penney’s.

**Craig:** Yeah. On Staten Island, you would go to Sears, and you would have to buy all of your winter clothes, because that’s when they were available, because for some reason, they would only have winter clothes in the summer and summer clothes in the winter, which made me crazy. We were all in the same lower middle class economic stratum. We would get to school, and everybody’s wearing the exact same coat, this weird polyester thing with fake fur and a bright orange inside. Did you have that one?

**John:** I didn’t have that one, but I know exactly what you’re talking about. I also had this maroon color coat that was my coat for a couple years.

**Craig:** There was that. There were your jeans, your new sneakers. Everything was fresh, fresh, fresh.

**John:** You did not have hand-me-downs, because you were the oldest.

**Craig:** I was the oldest, yes.

**John:** I got a lot of hand-me-downs.

**Craig:** My younger sibling was a girl, my sister. She wasn’t really getting my stuff. That’s probably why our stuff was so shitty, because you could only use it once. It was all really cheap. I had a lot of Wrangler shirts. You know those Western style button-downs?

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** You’d get a haircut. Your hair’s all combed. You had to look super clean and neat on day one. This ended on day one. Day two, you could be an absolute rolling, lice-filled wreck. But day one, spotless.

**John:** Now, did you have school photos on day one, or was it in that first week? When were your school photos taken?

**Craig:** That’s a really interesting question. I can’t remember. Maybe it was in the first couple of weeks.

**John:** I think it was the first school week. I do remember, because there was another day where you had to actually look pretty good and bring a comb, or they’d give you one of the incredibly sharp, painful, disposable combs to run through your hair. Every year, I would have to get my photos retaken, because I just could not smile properly.

**Craig:** Was there some… Emotionally damaged or-

**John:** I would make the wrong choice in that last millisecond before the shutter went off.

**Craig:** Was it the kind of thing where you would smile and everybody would be terrified, like look evil?

**John:** No. I would just be looking away or something. I would get nervous by the eye contact.

**Craig:** I do remember, it was always like every year, you would just be in the same arrangement. I was generally taller, and so I would be in the back, next to my tall friend. Man, every now and then, somebody will send me something like, “Oh my god, look. Your former classmate, who’s on Facebook, put this thing up from 3rd grade.” They’ll copy and send me the photo, because I’m not on Facebook. I’m just like, “What am I wearing? What is this weird, horrible, nylon disco outfit that my parents have put me in?” It was just nightmarish.

**John:** I think it’s more fun to look at what the teachers were wearing, because the teachers were actually indicative of what adults were wearing at the time. Like, oh my god, how was that comfortable? That looks like polyester death.

**Craig:** Everyone was wearing some sort of plastic clothing.

**John:** Not a tri-blend. No. It was actually just all plastic.

**Craig:** A uni-blend of some sort of cancer fiber that we were all breathing in. You know what? It was also a lovely time, because I’m sure it was like this for you, for us in New York, the weather was getting cooler. Finally, summer was ending. Fall was sweeping in. Fall in New York is lovely. There’s also all the fun fall stuff. It’s not spooky season. I just want to be clear. It was just more like apple cider and whatever. I don’t know. Leaves.

**John:** I remember we would get the Ditto machined copy of like, this is what you need to bring for your school supplies. I just loved that, checking off the things. You had to bring a box of Kleenex, because somebody, mostly me, I would go through all the Kleenex is the classroom, because my nose was always runny.

**Craig:** You were the snot kid.

**John:** I was snot kid, because I had terrible allergies in a time before people understood what allergies were, apparently.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Now, I take medicines for them, but at that time I didn’t have them.

**Craig:** There was always a kid with snot. I guess it was you.

**John:** It was me.

**Craig:** Then we would also have to bring a shoebox, which all the girls or resourceful boys or non-resourceful boys’ mothers would cover in wallpaper or newspaper or something to make it look pretty. That was our school supply box. We would have our Elmer’s glue and our safety scissor and whatever else was on that Ditto sheet, which I’m sure, Drew, you are absolutely falling asleep here, but let me just wake you up for a second and explain.

We did not get emails listing what we required. No. A teacher hand-wrote a list of things on this toxic piece of disgusting purple paper, that was then stuck to a large roller, coated in even more disgusting purple fluid. Then they would roll it with their hands. As they would roll it, it would stick onto another piece of paper, send that piece of paper off, pull in another piece of paper, and thus, like a small Gutenberg printing press, made of purple death. Each one of those things stank, and yet we all loved the smell of it.

**John:** You did, because you’d get a fresh Ditto machine, you’d just stick it up to your-

**Craig:** Everyone.

**John:** Stick the paper up and inhale it, yeah.

**Craig:** Everyone was snorting whatever was in that. I don’t even want to know what was in it. We were absolutely huffing paint, in the classroom, by the way. The teacher would be like, “Go ahead, kids. Snort it up.” Then we would go to work. That’s what we would get. What a time. What a time to be alive.

**John:** My olfactory memories of that age are so distinct, because I also remember when you have heads down for Thumbs Up, Seven Up on a rainy day, I remember what the desk would smell like. It would smell like this weird cleaner, whatever they used to clean the desks. I have that memory firmly in my head.

**Craig:** Same. It’s funny, you went to school halfway across the country from me, and our desks smelled exactly the same.

**John:** Absolutely. It was not quite urine, but it’s almost that. It was an ammonia-ish kind of thing to it.

**Craig:** It was ammonia. It was this weird, rank ammonia smell. It’s a disgusting smell. The desktop was some horrible, again, plasticky, lacquery thing.

**John:** It looked like wood, but it was not wood.

**Craig:** It also had a little bit of a sour milk smell to it. It just was disgusting.

**John:** Craig, did you have a number line taped to the top of your desk?

**Craig:** Of course we did. Of course. We all had a number line when we were learning addition and subtraction. Also, lining up in size order. Drew, did you ever have to line up in size order?

**Drew:** Yeah. I was always at the front because I was tiny.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw, little Drew.

**Craig:** Aw, little Drew. Oh my god, he was in the front.

**John:** We were almost always in alphabetical order, especially if we were going to lunch, because we had to go through the lunch line. If you were buying lunch, they would check your name off on the little logbook.

**Craig:** I see. That actually makes sense. Lining up in size order seems unnecessarily cruel to everyone on either extreme of the line. Even if you weren’t on the extreme of the line, if you put two boys, if they happen to be next to each other in the size-order line, there would almost certainly be a shoving fight over who was taller. Just pointless. Why? What is this size order thing? Who came up with that? What does it even matter what the order is? What does it matter?

**John:** They want to make sure Drew gets his milk first.

**Craig:** Because he needed it. They’re like, “There’s only one thing that’s gonna make this kid grow: warm, under-refrigerated milk.”

**John:** In a cardboard container.

**Craig:** That has the picture of a lost child on it.

**John:** Indeed. Drew, what are we forgetting about back-to-school?

**Drew:** Oh, my god.

**Craig:** He’s like, “You guys are from a different time.”

**Drew:** No, the smell is real, but I can never delineate where the smell is cleaning product and what is just the smell of children.

**John:** That’s true.

**Drew:** Maybe that sounds strange, but-

**Craig:** It really does sound strange.

**Drew:** It does.

**Craig:** That’s really upsetting.

**Drew:** Should probably walk that back, but yeah.

**Craig:** I just like the idea of a small Drew just walking around, just sniffing.

**John:** Sniffing.

**Craig:** Everyone’s like, “Oh my god, what is with that kid? Oh, leave him alone. He’s small.” They didn’t know what the Ditto fluid was. Ditto fluid.

**Drew:** I wonder when they retired the Ditto machines, because I definitely went to a school that did not have up-to-date equipment by any stretch of the imagination, and we didn’t have one, which makes me feel like they must’ve-

**John:** At your point, it was all photocopies, right?

**Drew:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here’s a website that says mimeographs, that was the technical name, “The classroom chore that smelled so good.” I’m just looking to see if they actually identify what was in there. The duplicator fluid was methanol and isopropanol, so basically-

**John:** Alcohols.

**Craig:** … alcohol, but non-drinkable alcohol, the kind of alcohol that makes you blind. That’s what we were snorting. Hooray.

**Drew:** In my generation, we had the markers that ended up, I think had to be the same stuff that kids would just stick straight in their nostril.

**John:** Craig, you and I didn’t really have markers as much, because even Sharpies were late in my career. We had some marker things, but it wasn’t a default thing. I didn’t go to school with Crayola markers at the start. Did you?

**Craig:** They were much later on. We typically went to school with a box of Crayola crayons. The classic was the 64… I have one. I bought one of them just off of eBay for two bucks. I loved it. It was a proper 1970s era 64 Crayola crayons with the crayon sharpener in the back, which didn’t-

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** … sharpen shit.

**John:** No, but you didn’t really need to. Of course, the pink color was labeled Flesh, because that was the default white.

**Craig:** Yes, Flesh was that, yes, was a slightly whitey peach-ish. I don’t even think Flesh was my color of flesh. It was really for John and Melissa.

**John:** Basically, yeah. It’s a difference between my very tanned legs and my very pale ankles. It’s the pale ankle color.

**Craig:** It’s the pale ankle color, yeah. Flesh, it was like, oh, you’re very light. That is back when things weren’t quite the way they are. There was also Indian Red. That was a color, Indian Red. They’re not red, and they’re also not Indians, but okay, Crayola. That’s how we grew up. We had the Crayola thing and, oh yeah, man, the tape. Magic Tape was a huge deal.

**John:** Oh, Magic Tape, a huge innovation.

**Craig:** Yes. Before Magic Tape, Drew, regular Scotch Tape was shiny as hell.

**John:** Yeah, it was shiny and gross.

**Craig:** You’d put it on something, and it would just reflect like a mirror. Then somebody over there came up with this matte finish, called it Magic Tape. It was invisible. Everybody lost their crap.

**John:** Those 3M scientists, we don’t talk enough about the innovations they had. Magic Tape. Then they had the Post-It notes.

**Craig:** Oh my god, absolutely. They’re geniuses over there, absolute wizards.

**John:** Oh, question for both of you. Were you required to… You got your textbooks, or your math book or your science book.

**Craig:** Cover it?

**John:** Did you have to put a cover on them?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Was it like part of your task is, okay, now you have to put on this cover?

**Craig:** Book covers, yes.

**John:** Loved them.

**Craig:** Which I bet you made your own book covers.

**John:** Yeah, out of paper bags, for sure.

**Craig:** I knew you would. I knew it. Now, you’ve seen me attempt to do crafts, so you know that I could not. My mom would have to do it. Then eventually, I got my sister to start doing it. If it ripped in class, you would get in trouble. I don’t know why. I would ask one of the kids sitting next to me. I’m like, “Can you fix my da da?” Then they would, because everybody just understood I was helpless.

**John:** They would rip off a piece of their shiny tape and fix your book cover.

**Craig:** Yes, just so shiny. So shiny. Inside the textbook, sometimes it would be like “this book is the property of” and then there’d be one kid after another, and it’s stamped. What was that about? Who needs to know?

**John:** I loved that.

**Craig:** Yeah, like, “Oh my god.”

**John:** They had the history. “Did you know that some of these kids are dead by now, and they owned this book.”

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** They got sent off to war.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Some of these people who were reading this book had been sent off to Vietnam, and I’m reading this book.

**Craig:** I’m reading this book on vocabulary, and the last kid who had it died in Inchon. It’s all very grim. I gotta say, man, every generation has its ups and downs and things, but you know what? Generation X, we’re pretty great.

**John:** We’re pretty great.

**Craig:** Does anyone hate us? I don’t think anyone hates us.

**John:** No, because we’re a small generation too.

**Craig:** We’re small. We’re kind of like, “Whatever, man.” We were still there when computers came around. We reminisce, but not like, “And our way was better.” We’re usually reminiscing in a way of like, “God, that sucked.” We like everybody except the Boomers. Nobody likes the Boomers. Let’s face it.

**John:** We grew up mostly with a fear of nuclear war.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re terrified. We’re all right.

**John:** We’re all right.

**Craig:** Last question for you, Drew, on back-to-school week. Are there people that don’t like Generation X, or is there a generation that you think is opposed-

**Drew:** To Gen X?

**Craig:** … naturally to Generation X?

**Drew:** I don’t think so. I think you guys are truly safe, because my generation looked up to you. I’m firmly Millennial. We looked up to you. You were creating all the content when we were growing up. I think Gen Z likes you much more than us, because we’re very cringey to Gen Z, because we’re very cringey in general.

**Craig:** Yeah, you guys are special. You know what? It’s not your fault. Your echo Boomers. You’re the children of Boomers. You are trying to outrun a legacy in your blood, and you’re doing all right.

**Drew:** We can’t escape it though.

**Craig:** It’s tough. It’s a tough one. That was amazing. I wish it were back-to-school week every week.

**John:** I love it. Drew and Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Drew:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, Judge Says in Ruling That Could Give Hollywood Studios Pause](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-works-not-copyrightable-studios-1235570316/) by Winston Cho for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Thaler v. Perlmutter](https://www.scribd.com/document/665871482/Thaler-v-Perlmutter#)
* [The Mandalorian, Loki, And WandaVision Are Getting Limited Edition 4K And Blu-Ray Releases](https://www.slashfilm.com/1371265/mandalorian-loki-wandavision-getting-limited-edition-4k-blu-ray-releases/) by Ryan Scott for Slash Film
* [Lingua franca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca)
* [Where Story Begins – Premise](https://scriptmag.com/features/script-notes-where-story-begins-premise) by Michael Tabb for Script Magazine
* [The premise, or what’s the point?](https://johnaugust.com/2016/the-premise-or-whats-the-point) by John August
* [We Need to See More Parents Having Abortions in Film and Television](https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a35802152/parents-having-abortions-on-tv-films/) by Danielle Campoamor for Marie Claire
* [Dungeons & Dragons: Trials of Tempus](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/385546/dungeons-dragons-trials-tempus)
* [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/)
* [Writer Emergency Pack XL](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/writer-emergency-pack-xl)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Pineless ([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/610standard.mp3).