Search Results for: characters

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/framing-the-story).

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

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

**John:** And this Episode 511 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’re looking not just at the story but the story around the story, how framing effects the perception of a movie, and the choices writers have to make. We’ll also look at vaccine mandates for production and answer listener questions about cheesy writing, zombies, and diversity fellowships. And in our bonus segment for premium members we’ll discuss the Black Widow lawsuit and what it means for backend bonuses.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Craig, it’s August. It’s finally my month. I’ve been waiting all year for this month and it’s my month. A month named after me.

**Craig:** A month named after you. A month that I think everybody generally agrees is sweltering and miserable.

**John:** It can be sweltering and miserable. It could also be delightful. It is a month full of stone fruit. And this trip on the east coast has made me remember how much I really do appreciate stone fruit, especially nectarines, which I think are overlooked because they’re just ready to eat. You don’t have to peel them. You don’t have to do anything. You just bit into them and then you throw away the pit. They are delicious.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, a peach is the ultimate. You don’t like peaches?

**John:** Peaches are great for – I like peaches, too. But peaches, like you can not peel them, but I just don’t like the fuzzy texture if you are eating a peach peel. Do you like the fuzziness?

**Craig:** Who peels peaches?

**John:** I know a lot of people who peel peaches.

**Craig:** Really? Megana?

**Megana Rao:** I’ve never heard of that. And I feel strange about it.

**Craig:** I think he made it up. John just made it up. Maybe people shave their peaches. I mean, I like the fuzzy part. I think it’s nice. It’s sort of a nice warm reminder.

**John:** It’s extra fiber.

**Craig:** It’s extra fiber. Do you know, John, there’s a wonderful puzzle word. Puzzle words are words that most people don’t know but they happen to be useful for crosswords and things like that. A puzzle word, it’s the botany word for stone fruit.

**John:** Oh what is that?

**Craig:** A drupe.

**John:** Droop?

**Craig:** Drupe. Drupe.

**John:** Ah. Drupe.

**Craig:** A drupe.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So cherries, nectarines, peaches, etc. Drupes.

**John:** Oh, yeah, I don’t think of cherries as being stone fruits, but of course they are stone fruit.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** All this season. So this is basically the summer of stone fruit. It’s a Hot Vax Summer and it’s stone fruit season.

**Craig:** The two of us talking about this, it’s a bit like the ladies on NPR, the Saturday Night Live sketch.

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. Schweddy Balls.

**Craig:** Shweddy Balls. Mm, good things. Mm, love stone fruit. Mm.

**John:** Craig, we have some follow up. I’m wondering if you could David from Iceland.

**Craig:** Sure. He writes, “The Icelandic sagas, which are often considered some of the earliest novels, are usually full of explicit foreshadowing in the form of dreams, dreams that women usually interpret correctly as terrible events that the men who are fated to live those events dismiss either blithely or in desperate denial of destiny. This literary device hangs a sense of dread over the proceedings from the outset while also giving these stories of damp farmers murdering each other a mythic, heightened quality. That is one sense in which ‘spoiling’ the broad strokes of a narrative at the beginning can enhance the story. It frames it, letting the story comment on itself as a story turning happenstance into destiny.”

**John:** I’m really glad that David wrote in with this reminder, because I really do like that kind of foreshadowing – that foretelling and sort of the sage foretelling of like doom is about to happen. And we see that in a lot of movies. We see that in any story that begins with like “let me tell you how I died.” It’s told by a narrator who is no longer living. Sunset Boulevard. American Beauty. Casino to some degree. I love that as a quality, basically when you know that the narration is not happening in the same time period as the movie itself. Therefore there’s an aspect of foreshadowing just by the fact that this narrator is talking to you.

**Craig:** Absolutely Correct. And I should add that somewhat happily we’ve got our second puzzle word here coming up, the Icelandic saga. The term for Icelandic saga, the Norse term is Edda, which we love to see in puzzles.

There’s another kind of foreshadowing of this sort that I really enjoy which is the I guess we call it ironic foreshadow, where somebody says this is how it’s going to end, and you think, OK. And it does end that way but in a way you didn’t expect. One of my favorite examples is an episode called X-Files called Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose. And the story involves – Peter Boyle plays a psychic of a sort. He only has one psychic ability and that is that when he meets somebody he sees how they are going to die. And leading aside all the other bits and parts of the story, and spoiler alert – it’s what, 20 years old now – Scully says, “Well have you seen your own death?” And he says, “Yes.”

And he’s lying in a bed and she’s sitting sort of on a chair near the bed. And he says, “Actually when I die we are going to be together in bed.” And she’s like, “Hmm, really? Really Peter Boyle?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I don’t mean any offense, but we’ll be in bed and you’re going to be holding my hand and you’re looking at my face and there are tears streaming down my face.” And she’s a bit skeptical because she’s a skeptic.

And later in the episode, or at the end of the episode, it is revealed that he has committed suicide. And he is in a bed and he’s got that plastic bag over his head, that method of going, with pills and such. And she sits down next to him and she holds his hand and they close in on the bag over his face and the moisture from his breath has turned to little rivulets of water that are kind of rolling down the inside of the plastic as if tears were streaming down his face.

So they told you how it would end, but you really did not know how it would end. And I thought it’s just one of those moments in television storytelling where I just thought that was just so smart.

**John:** Yeah. It’s really smart. And it’s a very classic technique. It’s a new show, but it’s a classic technique, that inescapable fate.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** No matter what you try to do you are cursed to live in this. And useful for storytelling because by setting out that sort of expectation or the characters pushing against those expectations you’re really establishing a through line for the audience. The audience is looking for ways it’s going to cue back to what that original statement was.

**Craig:** Yes. You know, there’s a whole other podcast that we could do just about these old stories. You know, like every culture has this epic tale that they go through. All of them. The Edda and Mahabharata and Gilgamesh and there’s so many and I don’t enough, but I think there’s a podcast where you just do the stories. You just read the stories and you kind of – Song of Roland is considered the first – Chanson de Roland – is the first “novel” in western literature. And it’s like Rocky. It’s like reading Rocky basically.

**John:** You know, Craig, I honestly think like maybe we could come up with a way in which all stories are essentially the same story and that really create a theory for like how all movie stories should work the same way. It could be stages of like heroes get a call to adventure. I know we could do this.

**Craig:** Can we make designs?

**John:** Designs or pivot off like Joseph Campbell. I really think we could sell books on it. I think we could do a lot here.

**Craig:** It doesn’t work if we don’t have a design. It needs to be not a triangle, they’ve already stolen the snail shape.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve got to have a shape.

**Craig:** 20-sided die. Of course.

**John:** Oh my gosh. Do like a [Hedron] theory of storytelling. It would have to have like 20 plot points and each plot point has to connect, but it has to be at opposite faces that add up to 21, right? Is that how 20-sided dies work?

**Craig:** It’s an Icosagon, by the way. Dodecahedron is a 12-sided die.

**John:** Oh, you’re absolutely right.

**Craig:** The barbarians’ best friend is the dodecahedron.

**John:** It is. I know. I’m so embarrassed.

**Craig:** You know, I think the icosagon, I think probably it is that they – well, except, yeah, they would have to add up to 21, right? So nine would be across from 12. 11 is across from 10. Yeah, that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. We solved storytelling and math in just one podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. Wow.

**John:** So good. So good.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Let’s get to our first topic today and this is coming off of two things that people have written in about. We’ll start with [Olafemme] who wrote in to say, “With Simone Biles’ withdrawal from her Olympic events the Twitterverse has been revisiting a moment from the 1996 Olympics which was Kerry Strug’s historic vault on an injured ankle. It earned the US the gold in the event. I’m old enough to remember the imagery of Strug successfully completing the vault, saluting the judges, then instantly collapsing to her knees in pain, having to be carried off the mat by her team. It was an unforgettable moment of Olympic history and an inspirational story of triumph in the face of adversity.”

Craig, you remember this moment?

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** This was a big photographic moment.

**Craig:** It was almost like it was scripted.

**John:** Yes. It was a very narrative moment. It felt like, oh, this is the end of the story. Well, it’s not quite the very end, because there would also be then a celebration after. But this was the final sort of moment of victory here.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then we’re going to get to see her hugging her coach and he’s proud of her. But Olafemme reminds us that “in recent years numerous pieces of information have come to light that have completely changed the context of this story. In particular the facts that her trainer had miscalculated and the US would have won the gold even without Strug performing the vault. And that the very people helping her off the mat, Bela Karolyi and Larry Nassar, were abusive psychologically, physically, and in the last case sexually.

“What seemed like a story about victory has been revealed in truth to be one about the toxic pursuit of victory. How it can be so toxic that we overlook and justify traumatic abuses. I don’t mean to make light of real world tragedy, but I’m fascinated by how a powerful story can be turned on its head this way.”

I like what Olafemme is reminding us that we could tell the story of Kerri Strug and it would be a certain story if we leave out certain facts. But now with the new framing it’s a very different moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. Our narrative maturity has accelerated, just as a culture. We used to have very, very simple narratives. Morality plays, Aesop’s fables, and the aforementioned Edda, and Mahabharata, and all of that other stuff. And what’s happened over time is – especially the last 30 years, there’s so much culture. So many stories are being told that we’ve gotten wise to all the tricks. Everyone has pretty good story horse sense.

My daughter, your daughter, have watched enough television at this point to probably be able to predict halfway through a typical average episode of ‘90s TV how it’s going to turn out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So over the last 30 years there’s been an acceleration of the subversion of narrative, or an interest in exploring hyper-reality. To insist that our narratives cover a lot of uncomfortable things. What we want, of course, is a very simple story on some level. We need Kerri Strug to make that vault in order to win the gold. She is deeply hurt but she makes one last vault, sacrificing herself, her body. And performs it brilliantly. And we win and she’s carried off by the men who inspired her to do so. And then now all these years later we’re a bit more grown up and what we want is the truth. And the truth does not diminish what Kerri Strug did. Nor by the way does the truth of what Kerri Strug did have anything to do with what Simone Biles did.

So, what I like about the way things are going now is that we are apparently grown up enough to face facts and in doing so we don’t lose heroes. Simone Biles remains a hero as does Kerri Strug. We just see the picture fully for what it is and we don’t sacrifice facts at the altar of simple narrative.

**John:** Now way back in the Austin Film Festival a couple of years ago we talked about the Zola Twitter thread. I’ve seen the movie. I don’t think you’ve seen the movie yet, Craig.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But one of the interesting choices that the filmmakers make is it’s largely framed around Zola’s tweets to the degree that which when a line of dialogue is actually from a tweet there’s a little Twitter sound to show that it’s from that tweet. But there’s a moment in the movie, and this is not a spoiler, where it reframes everything from the other girl’s point of view and you see like, oh, there’s a completely different context behind what could actually be happening in these moments which I think is interesting.

Now those are choices that the filmmakers are making. And so the same way we could have made a certain Kerri Strug movie in 1996 and a different Kerri Strug movie in 2021, I’m really more curious about how the outside events really change the perception of a given piece of art. And so let’s not talk about changing the story, but the world around the story changes it, even if it’s the same piece of art.

So not the piece of art, but the frame around it. So with visual arts it’s literally the gilded frame you’re putting around it changes how we see the work itself. Because that’s the thing we sort of have less control over as artists, and we as writers, but we have to sort of be aware of it. Because if we are making a Naked Gun movie that has OJ Simpson in it we have no control over the fact that OJ Simpson was going to be the person he became.

**Craig:** Right. We just have to keep up. I feel like that’s the important thing. We have to keep up. We can’t go back in time and change the things we’ve done, or made. We have to keep up with culture. We certainly can go back and reevaluate. Here’s a moment where I didn’t even realize that Larry Nassar was one of the people helping Kerri Strug off the mat. That’s just so upsetting. It’s important to go back and look at those things and acknowledge them.

However I think our primary task as artists is to keep up with culture as best we can while we are creating it. And learn. And adapt. It’s crucial.

**John:** Yeah. And I think part of that awareness is recognizing that generally we’re looking at things from a North American cultural point of view. And that framing might be vastly different in other parts of the world. We’ve talked about how some of our movies see big changes overseas, especially in China. Some of it is political pressure, but some of it is also just cultural understanding. Things that would work a certain way here just don’t come across the same way overseas.

**Craig:** Yeah. Every culture is at a different place in their narrative growing process, and I don’t even mean to imply that more complicated narrative is inherently better. The French, I think, have always felt that their narrative sense was better than ours, because it was more complicated, more subtle, more French cinema. I don’t that’s true. I don’t think it means it’s better. But if you like that sort of thing then it’s wonderful. The important thing is that the French were making films for the French for their taste. French comedies, on the other hand, are so – generally speaking – I’m going to generalize here are really broad.

So, famously the French loved Jerry Lewis. So even within narratives there’s certain kinds where there’s what we’ll call a grown up, or very mature, complicated point of view on narrative. And then in other genres there’s a bit of a younger point of view. In other parts of the world there’s an appreciation for some of our simpler movies that we make because people are still kind of catching up to all the movies that there are. Not everybody has access to all of the stuff that we’ve had access to. So it is different all across the world and it is different because people are seeing things through their own filters.

One thing though that I try and keep in mind as an active participant in Hollywood is that despite all of the differences that exist across the globe in terms of culture and the way people create and process narrative Hollywood still does kind of change things. People literally learn to speak English from the things we make and do. They are watching very, very carefully. So, it is important for us, particularly for us, to keep up.

**John:** I think I’ve mentioned on the podcast before one of my favorite movies of all time is the Talented Mr. Ripley. I think it is just phenomenal.

**Craig:** Amazing. Love it.

**John:** But on this trip it was the first time I saw Purple Noon, which is the French adaptation, the much earlier French adaptation of the same source material.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Vastly different. And absolutely worth watching for just all the places where one movie goes right and one movie goes left. But one of the things that you can make this movie, when Minghella is making Talented Mr. Ripley in – I’m looking up the year – in 1999 versus the original film is that the subtext of sort of why Ripley is doing the things he’s doing and his attraction to Dickie Greenleaf can be more overt. So it’s not just he wants Dickie Greenleaf’s life, but he wants Dickie Greenleaf. And the sexuality is possible just because of the years that had passed between it. And it’s interesting how filmmakers have to be aware of the context in which they make their pieces. Minghella could just make a different movie than he could have made 30 years earlier in France.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I love those strange evolutions. I think it’s great. There’s a movie out right now, The Green Knight, which is – I haven’t seen it, I’ve just been reading discussion of it so far, but I’d like to catch it in a theater here in Canada. And it is a retelling of an incredibly old and super simple story of Gawain and the Green Knight and, you know, he comes – it’s like Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable with a bit of magic in it. It’s a fable.

And by all accounts the story that is being told in this new version is quite mature. And somewhat profound. So I love that sort of thing. I think it’s great.

**John:** Now the other prompt for this framing discussion was Stillwater. So Tom McCarthy’s new movie, Stillwater, it tells the story of Bill Baker who is an Oklahoma oil rigger played by Matt Damon, also from Talented Mr. Ripley, and this character travels to Marseilles to visit his daughter Allison. She is a one-time exchange student who is now serving a nine-year prison sentence for killing her lover. If that last part sounds familiar that’s because it’s reminiscent of the situation of Amanda Knox who found herself arrested and later acquitted of a murder in Italy in 2007.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the challenge here is in interviews McCarthy says the story is completely fictionalized because “there’s no similarity in our stories beyond an American student in jail.” And on Twitter and on Medium Amanda Knox herself, who is now a journalist, says kind of, well, “Bullshit.” And it raises the issue that we’ve been discussing a lot on the show recently is sort of who owns a story. And to what degree do we take things from real life in sort of How Would This Be a Movie segments and fictionalize them. And there’s legal implications. There’s moral and ethical implications. And real narrative implications.

And so even if McCarthy and team feel that they are fictionalizing the story every article written about it says Amanda Knox “is perceived as being the Amanda Knox story.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** How are you feeling about this situation?

**Craig:** Let’s talk about just the easy part first, which is the legal part. The deal here is it doesn’t sound like anything illegal is occurring. Even if you were to tell the Amanda Knox story specifically in your own way, if you were basing it on existing news articles and reporting and interviews, public interviews that Amanda Knox herself did, you can do that. And you can even cast an actor and make her look like Amanda Knox. You can put a bunch of makeup on and such. That’s entirely legal.

What you can’t do is defame people, at least in the US you can’t defame living people. So, what you can’t do is imply, for instance, that Amanda Knox is in fact a murderer. Because by all accounts and from everything I’ve read it seems quite clear she was not. And certainly at the very least she was acquitted. That is different than the moral standing question.

So, I think this kind of working out the way it should. I believe that if you’re going to make a movie that is inspired by someone’s life, and in particular inspired by a very traumatic thing they went through, then it’s sensible to talk to them. And it is sensible to listen and to communicate in some way. It doesn’t always work out. Sometimes you talk to people, you communicate with them, and then they stop. Sometimes they stop communicating back. Sometimes they claim you never communicated with them at all. It’s an interesting that can occur. But you do your best to try.

You have to know that the balance is that that person has the exact same pulpit you do. And they can go and say I don’t like this and here’s why. And in this case that’s what Amanda Knox has done. And it sort of works out the way it does and some people get upset, some people don’t, but everybody gets their day in public court, especially now because everybody has a pulpit.

I do think it’s important for us to at least try if we’re really going to be kind of expanding and going in a different direction in particular than what somebody actually lived, in this case sounds like they did, it just seems like maybe you should talk to that person or make enough changes that there isn’t really a concern about it.

**John:** Yeah. The issue of like they have access to the same pulpit, yes I think Twitter makes some of these things more possible, but the power differential between a giant movie starring Matt Damon and Amanda Knox is significant. In her own essay she cites for so long we were calling it the Monica Lewinsky affair when we really we should call it the Clinton affair. Basically the power differential between who Monica Lewinsky was and the forces against her was so vast that we needed to really think about how we were framing that.

Also Amanda Knox, she is a journalist who can speak up and defend herself, not everyone could do that. And so I’m trying to think of some guidelines we could offer filmmakers to think about when you’re using a person who exists in real life, someone who is going to be perceived as being the character in your story, how do we treat that person the respect? It’s also – you missed out on this conversation, but when we were talking about Cat Person a few weeks back, which was that short story that was–

**Craig:** Yes, I remember.

**John:** And then there was a discourse because it really came out that like, OK, it wasn’t about the own writer’s life, but it’s about this other woman’s life and she could speak up and say like, “Hey, this was actually my life, and it feels really strange.” Ownership of that becomes complicated.

**Craig:** Well, I am going to stick up for the writers of the world here in the sense that we do need to be free to create art. Sometimes art is inspired by life. There are hard rules in place to protect people from being damaged legally. When we say damaged legally it’s not like there’s some number that you hit on a meter and suddenly the legal thing goes up. Those laws are there to reflect our moral stances and our moral points of view. We can always, of course, adjust those laws through legislature and so forth. But I do think that artists need to be free to work.

If we are going to say that people who might be unintended victims or collateral damage of artworks, if that is the rule that we use to not write the work of art we have just eliminated most great works of art, at least when it comes to novels in particular. It’s a really sticky area.

**John:** It is. But Craig I think you laid out some of the remedies earlier which is that you might look for like what are the things that are absolutely to identify those people and what are the things you could change so that it’s not so clearly one person. So that was the issue with Cat Person is that the original writer could have changed some small details that would have made it more clear, it would have helped distinguish this fictionalized relationship from the real relationship that happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. But maybe it wouldn’t have been as good.

**John:** Maybe? Maybe.

**Craig:** You know, the thing is I was not aware that that story was based on a real person. If the real person hadn’t said this was based on a real person then would I have even known that it was based on a real person? I don’t know.

You know, I’m a little bit more – certainly you’re intention is never to hurt anybody. But if a woman is in an abusive relationship with a man, he abuses her, and he torments her, and then she writes a roman a clef, right, she writes a novel that’s basically inspired by the things that she experienced with that person, she’s supposed to respect him too? Does she have to change things so that we don’t know it’s him? I think there’s the legal line and that’s the line. And the rest you have to kind of just feel. I understand why Amanda Knox is upset. The people I think she should be most upset with are all of the lazy journalists who just keep going, “Look, it’s Amanda Knox,” because that is kind of easy.

But I’m not sure there’s a remedy here beyond just saying hey everybody just to be clear if you think that that movie that is sort of like my life is actually like my life it is not at all like my life, at all. But I don’t think there’s any stricter kind of remedy than that.

**John:** So we talk a lot about our How Would This Be a Movie and to what degree we would need to get life rights from a person or just use publically available facts to do something. Obviously one of the reasons why you sometimes want life rights is because it’s going to be very difficult to do this work without access to information they have. Or to protect yourself from defamation lawsuits, libel lawsuits that could come up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there’s reasons why you may want to protect yourself. Even if you think you are in the clear you may still want those life rights because it’s better not to have that lawsuit and have something hanging over you. And to have that person be publically on the side of the film rather than against the film. Those can be very useful things independent of kind of the moral and ethical issues.

**Craig:** Almost no one is going to go get life rights for a fictionalized version of something. They will get life rights if they are telling the so-and-so story. They’re using your actual name. But if we’re into the roman a clef world where we are drawing from reality but changing some names and doing a parallel fictionalized version of it it would probably not be advisable to go get the life rights. You are essentially opening yourself up to even more trouble I think. Because at that point you’re saying, “Oh yeah, this is definitely you.”

Whereas right now Tom McCarthy and the studio can say, “No, I mean, it’s not her. We’re not telling the Amanda Knox story.”

**John:** Yeah. So Craig on Saturday I got to go see Mike Birbiglia’s new comedy show.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** It was delightful. So Mike Birbiglia, a frequent guest on the show, friend of the podcast. And it was my first time having to show proof of vaccination to get into a venue to see his show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I was just absolutely delighted to show my vaccination card and to be in a space full of vaccinated people. I still wore my mask and I was one of the few people wearing my mask. I kind of felt like more people should have been wearing their masks. Still, I was delighted to be using my vaccination card and be in a space to see Mike do his new show, which is going to be obviously a stage adaptation and is going to be just terrific.

But I wanted to talk about required vaccinations because it’s not just comedy venues like this. It’s actually a big thing in the industry as of the last two weeks. More and more places are requiring crews to be vaccinated. So Netflix led the way. They were the first major Hollywood studio to do it. It’s basically everyone in Zone A has to have proof of vaccination for their productions. Craig, can you talk to me about what Zone A means?

**Craig:** Zone A, which is my zone on my show, is the zone where you are working with actors. You were working in general proximity to actors. And the reason that is its own zone is because the actors are required at various points throughout the day to have their masks off. They have to act without masks. So all of the people around them need to be masked and tested and evaluated regularly. I myself am tested three times a week. And so far I’ve aced every test.

**John:** Yes. So you are vaccinated but you are also tested.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Because even though the vaccination will protect you from serious disease you could theoretically get a breakthrough infection and I know folks who have gotten breakthrough infections.

**Craig:** Yes, absolutely. Happily what we’re seeing with breakthrough infections is for the most part it is a mild illness, almost no hospitalizations, and almost no death, thank god. There’s a little bit concern about some of the long haul Covid symptoms showing up in some of those folks, so vaccinations are not a magic shield against being ill. But we’ve always been ill. I mean, we’ve been sick our whole lives with flus and colds. I mean, every year we would get a cold until the last two years, rather nice.

So we’re used to being sick. We’re just not used to having to go into the hospital, get intubated, and die.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s what the vaccines have accomplished. I’m thrilled that they are starting to require these vaccinations for people working in Zone A. Along with those new rules, the unions also agreed to loosen some things up. For union productions if you are fully vaccinated you don’t necessarily have to wear the mask all the time, I think, or when you’re outside I believe you don’t have to wear the mask.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they’re starting to loosen things up. Unfortunately up here in Canada we don’t get the full benefit of those easing of restrictions because quite a few people here in Canada are vaccinated with Astra-Zeneca which the US has not approved. So it’s sort of like it doesn’t count for those rules which is annoying. Because I just read, by the way, I mean the whole thing about Astra-Zeneca was the danger of blood clots, and they’ve just come out with a study no more danger of blood clots with Astra-Zeneca than with nothing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we’ll see what happens next.

**John:** So as we’re recording this Disney was requiring all salaried and non-union hourly employees in the US to be vaccinated, which is great. And so you have to do it within 60 days. And all new folks have to be vaccinated it looks like before they even start.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I’m sure other studios will have the same thing. Google and other places are laying that in. As you said the unions are saying yes it’s OK to mandate vaccines. They have stipulations about who can have access to the vaccine information, but great, that’s good.

For writers we’re in sort of a unique place because you as a writer, and many showrunners, need to be in Zone A because they have to be on set around the actors, but if you’re a writer in a writer’s room, eh, do we need writer’s rooms to be in person right now? WGA came out and said if you are going to have an in-person writing room basically your employer is responsible for protecting your safety. They strongly recommend everyone be vaccinated and that you still need to give the option/accommodation for writers who don’t want to be in-person for services in a writer’s room. And that just makes sense because we are lucky that we don’t have to be in-person to do a lot of our jobs unless it’s something involving the set.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t use a writer’s room, but if I did I would imagine I would love to have it back in person just because there is a certain interpersonal magic that occurs and the ease and speed of communication that Zoom can disrupt. But if it were my room I would say you’re not getting in this room if you’re not fully vaccinated and also you have to wear a mask.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If everybody is fully vaccinated and wearing a mask then I’m more than happy to sit in a room with all those folks. That would be no problem for me.

**John:** So for personally and for sort of my own small business we are back in person sometimes. We’re outside as much as we can be. We’re all vaccinated. We’re trying to be safe and smart. On this trip Mike and I have been the two guys with masks in places where a lot of other people weren’t wearing masks, but it just felt like I don’t want to be indoors places without a mask if I don’t need to be indoors without a mask, especially because we’ve had other friends on this trip who have gotten breakthrough Covid-19 infections. That’s just the reality that we’re living in.

Coming back to the city after being on Fire Island we went and got PCR tests, which you can get at any Walgreens. So the drive-through PCR test. But we also got the cheap do-it-yourself kits, the BinaxNOW kits, which are actually surprisingly easy to use and are useful in the sense of something that was promised kind of very early in the pandemic, the test that is not perfectly accurate but shows are you infectious right now, and they’re really good for that, so I would recommend those for folks. And they’re behind the counter at the pharmacy. And they’re cheap.

**Craig:** Yeah. So just a couple years after anyone who wants a test can get them and they’re beautiful tests.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So one of the things I’ve read about the Delta variant, which makes it interesting, and I think is part of what’s happening here is that the Delta variant seems to work primarily through the nose as opposed to the lungs. It really wants to get inside your nose. That’s where it does its business. And the nose is in a fully vaccinated person the least vaccinated part of you. There’s just not a lot of blood flow in there, which is weird for anyone who has ever gotten a nosebleed, but it just doesn’t have the same kind of constant flow around.

So when you do get fully vaccinated all those wonderful immune cells are living in the rest of your body, but not so much in the nose, and that’s where Delta is going in and doing a number. Now, eventually what happens is it crawls down your throat and into your lungs at which point the vaccine says, ah-ha, I’ve got this, and then it wins. Which is why you can get sick with Delta but not fatally so, which is good news. But that’s what’s going on.

**John:** I’ve just decided I’m treating myself as my own Zone A. I’m going to be careful about myself and I’m going to protect myself, because I am my own actor. I’ve got to protect the production and the production is me.

**Craig:** Yeah. I worry about this all the time. You know, we have hundreds of people working on this show, maybe a thousand, more.

**John:** And you and I both know so many shows that have had to start up and shut down and start up and shut down. And you don’t want that.

**Craig:** No. Yeah, we have not had to shut down, which is wonderful, and I’m hoping we don’t. We have a lot of people. So, of course, I think about it all the time. I worry about it all the time. But what I am pretty happy about is that we’re vaccinated. I think basically everybody – I believe everybody in Zone A is vaccinated. And so if something should happen, shutting down is never the thing that should freak you out the most. What should freak you out the most is people getting really sick.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And to that extent I’m way less nervous about life than I was a year ago, that’s for sure. So thank you science.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I will say that before we started our trip was the first time I got a Covid exposure notification and it’s basically we went to go see a movie in a theater in Koreatown and the next day got a notification that someone had tested positive for Covid-19. It’s like, OK, well we’re all vaccinated. 100% of the people in the theater were wearing masks. And we were spaced out widely. I’m not worried and nobody got sick.

But the advice for what you’re supposed to do next reminded me of the signs you see in restaurants about Covid safety but they’re like six months out of date. I hate the ones that are all about it’s really important to wash your hands and that stuff. I’m like, yeah, washing your hands is important, but by far the most important thing is to be vaccinated and to wear a mask. And the instructions I got from this exposure notification were sort of the same. They were kind of vague about isolation, but didn’t sort of say the actual things we know you really should do. So, frustrating. Like getting tested.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. Well, our government is struggling.

**John:** It does struggle at times. But we never struggle with listener questions because we get the best ones.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** And so Megana Rao, if you could come on and share some questions from our listeners with us.

**Megana Rao:** All right. Dan from Baltimore asks, “I found myself watching a clip from a movie about a particular turtleneck-wearing technology figure and someone in the comments said, ‘This part is so cheesy.’ While I agreed with them it was hard for me to put my finger on exactly what made it cheesy. Was it the acting? The writing? Or was it that the moment itself was unearned? I’ve searched the podcast and maybe I’m using the wrong term, but have you guys ever talked about cheese and how to avoid it?”

**John:** You know, I don’t know if we’ve really used the word cheese much on this podcast.

**Craig:** I don’t think we have.

**John:** But I mean I get it. I know what Dan is describing. And those moments that set up this wincing feeling like, oh, that is so cheesy. And it sort of feels like fake earnest. It feels forced. And so let’s talk about some of the reasons why those things feel forced. And sometimes it is the writing. But sometimes I think it really is the acting and the staging that is what’s making a moment that doesn’t have to feel cheesy feel cheesy. So Craig what’s your instinct on where cheese comes from?

**Craig:** I think cheesiness happens when the people who are performing or the scene, whatever, any of the things that you’re witnessing feel unaware of the complexities of life. So, you see this a lot on sitcoms for children, although you used to see it a lot on sitcoms for adults, where you’re like, OK, well in real life nothing like that happens like that. That’s insane. It’s like somebody walks into a wall and goes, “D’oh, my head,” and someone else is like, “Oh man, you’re so clumsy.” And they’re like, “I know.” That’s so divorced from the reality of what’s true.

It’s a little bit like what we were talking about earlier, the complexity of narrative, and the maturity of narrative. Cheesiness is the least mature narrative. It’s narrative that is just unaware. A little bit like a hyper formalized and hyper imagined human behavior.

**John:** Yeah. You’re describing something that feels unnatural. And so it can feel unnatural because it’s just written unnatural, like characters are doing things that they just wouldn’t do, but sometimes the [unnaturality] feels like the motion-smoothing that’s being left on a hotel room TV, which I encountered way too much on this trip. It just feels weird and gross and sometimes it’s because of the staging, because it’s just forced camera movements that don’t make sense, or eye lines that don’t match. It just feels like, oh, this is just not good. We’re staying way too wide for no good reason.

We have a sense of what it is and I think there’s a vicious circle where the kinds of camera work and staging that we see in children’s sitcoms, which is cheesy material, whenever we see that kind of staging in things that aren’t written cheesy it feel cheesy because we’re associated the cheese with it. So you sort of have that sprinkling of parmesan over anything if it’s used in that same kind of blocking and staging and shot selection. It’s strange.

Also, the difference between camp and cheesy.

**Craig:** Oh sure.

**John:** Because camp kind of knows that it’s cheesy and it’s leaning into the cheese and sort of celebrating the cheesiness of it, which can be great and delightful.

**Craig:** Something about cheesiness is connected to indicating. The cheesy material is always over-explaining what it’s about and how somebody feels. Somebody puts their hand out and gestures to a thing and says, “What is this?” It’s so weird.

My sister and I loved Brady Bunch but we knew how cheesy it was. So part of our enjoyment of The Brady Bunch was giggling about how those parents just seemed like they were on drugs because if we had done any of the things those kids did, you know, we would have been screamed at. Any of that stuff.

**John:** I guess you really are describing the awareness or unawareness of cheesiness is camp versus cheese. And that’s why The Brady Bunch movies are terrific because they are fully aware. They’re doing the same tropes but they’re fully aware that they’re doing the tropes and that’s what makes them work.

**Craig:** Yes, the movie is aware. And the characters who are the Bradys are not, which is wonderful. I love those movies. The second one is really good. Both of those movies are great. I love them.

**John:** Love them to death. Megana, what else you got for us?

**Megana:** OK, Lydia asks, “I’m writing a script right now that has an extensive discussion about zombies and the plan for surviving the apocalypse when it comes, because, well, it is. My characters are discussing the different types of zombies in the existing film universe and how each are better or worse in relation to their ability to survive. I want to call them out specifically. I was going to say Cillian Murphy/Brad Pitt zombies or Romero Slow Pokes. That’s OK right? How far can I go in referencing or quoting without infringement?”

**John:** My instinct is that I’m nervous for your scene. I’m nervous for your scene because I feel like characters discussing things in other movies is not generally going to work out great, but there’s exceptions. I think Kevin Smith’s Clerks does a really good job of that. But, Craig, I have no issues with referencing Romero zombies versus 28 Days Later zombies. I think that’s all fine. You’re not infringing on somebody to say – you can talk about those things without using those things in a copyright sense.

**Craig:** You can talk about anything you want. People in movies are allowed to have seen movies. Somebody can sit down in a movie and explain the entire plot of Ghostbusters 2 if they want. That’s perfectly fine. So, there’s no problem here with that. If that’s what you want to do you can do it.

**John:** Craig, I want to see the movie where someone just explains the plot of Ghostbusters, because that could be phenomenal.

**Craig:** It would be really funny.

**John:** I can imagine a version of that that’s absolutely great. And at some point you would cross some line where it’s like, wait, are you actually just – is there enough of a narrative adaptation to it? But it’s still great.

**Craig:** Are you just reading the script for Ghostbusters?

**John:** The same way that that Gone with the Wind parody was considered not to be enough of a parody to be its own, to not be copyright infringement.

**Craig:** Ah, yes.

**John:** There’s some line you’re going to cross, but if it’s characters in a scene doing it you’re not going to cross that line.

**Craig:** You can reference every zombie that’s ever been made. You can reference the people who were in it. You can reference the people who created it. No problem.

**John:** Craig, I think we’re at a fascinating moment right now with also the superhero genre and basically we have the DC Universe, we have the Marvel Universe, but then we have both Amazon’s The Boys and Invincible which are really closely quoting sort of those characters. There’s sort of one-for-one parity between the characters in the DC universe and the characters in these other universes. And it’s just gotten to be sort of weird.

I mean, I don’t think there’s going to be any lawsuits, but it’s strange that we have these ideas of like well what if Superman was evil in both of these shows.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s too much. I feel like this is – we’ve gone through these. We’ve talked about this before. There was a time when everything that was on a screen was a western. And there was a time when everything that was on a screen was a car chase movie, or an action movie. And let’s see where this all goes. But Marvel in particular is experiencing so much success that everybody else now – I think people tried to chase them and then most people said, “Well, this is all based on characters, other than Warner Bros. and DC none of us have characters that people know, so yeah, let’s just start inventing characters and commenting.”

And to that extent if they’re good shows, great, fantastic. All for it. But, yeah, we’re getting into levels now.

**John:** Levels over levels.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Megana, let’s try one last question.

**Megana:** Great. Kevin asks, “My partner applied for a diversity fellowship and admitted to me that he submitted a script we co-wrote together as one of his two samples, but with just his name on it since I don’t meet the qualifications for diversity that the fellowship asks for. That’s wrong, right? I’m not sure what my next step should be or if I should just let it go.”

**John:** Oh Kevin. Kevin.

**Craig:** Now, wait, is Kevin’s partner a life partner or writing partner? Probably writing partner is what we’re thinking here.

**John:** I’m assuming just writing partner.

**Craig:** OK, it’s just writing partner.

**Megana:** It’s writing partner.

**Craig:** Man, if it had been actual cohabitation romance partner.

**John:** My wife. Yeah.

**Craig:** Ooh, damn. That would have been rough. But it’s still rough.

**John:** To stipulate it’s wrong to change the title page to take your cowriter off. That’s just wrong. That’s absolutely wrong. That’s actually–

**Craig:** It’s wrong and–

**John:** Legally…yeah. There’s liability. I don’t want to say – it’s not like criminal, but…

**Craig:** No. But you have considered – what you have done is committed a tort as the law [unintelligible]. That is a civil wrong. You have violated another person’s right in their own shared copyright of that material. You cannot do that. It is wrong. And, yeah, you’re absolutely legally liable. And even worse if Kevin wants to he can just drop the dime on you to the diversity program and they’re going to be like, “Oh yeah, no, you’re out,” because it’s dishonest. And it’s also not fair to everybody else applying for that diversity fellowship.

Everyone is supposed to be applying representing their own work. So, Kevin, your partner has done a very wrong thing and they should undo it.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s imagine that the question came not from Kevin but from Kevin’s writing partner saying like I did this thing, what should I do. I think the choice is to own up to it, to say, “Hey, I sent this in, my name on it, but it’s actually me and my partner. I need to resubmit the script.” You need to apologize the hell out to Kevin.

There are going to be situations where you’ve co-written a script and one of you is eligible for a thing and the other one isn’t. Ask. There’s going to be some frequently asked questions about like how you submit this, because there’s going to be a way to do this. Most likely the best choice for this, and this happens also with representation, is you need to have something that you wrote by yourself and something you wrote with a partner. That’s representative of your work. But just taking the other person’s name off of it is not cool or kosher. And that just cannot be done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Generally when you use the phrase “he admitted to me” then you know that he did something wrong. Like John says if he had asked that’s entirely different. You’re allowed to ask permission. And if you grant that permission, fine, that’s up to you. And it’s entirely your prerogative. But, no, what he did was wrong. And as far as what your next step should be, I’d get a different writing partner. I mean, I don’t trust this dude at all.

**John:** Uh-uh.

**Craig:** And I’ve got to be honest with you. Kevin, there’s so many untrustworthy people in this business. So many liars that the thought of self-inflicting one of them upon your person and your soul is no good.

**John:** You need to trust your writing partner. You just do.

**Craig:** You have to.

**John:** Not only are you sharing a mind space with them, but you are making business decisions together.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Your lives are going to be entangled. Don’t do this.

**Craig:** What does Oprah say? When somebody shows you who they are believe them. Is that Oprah?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I choose to believe it’s Oprah.

**John:** I’m sure she said it, even if she didn’t say it originally.

**Craig:** In Oprah we trust.

**Megana:** Can I ask you a question? Because Craig said something like if you ask their permission and they give it to you. Can you give your permission to have your credit revoked?

**Craig:** Absolutely. So this is not a Writers Guild awarded credited. This is your work. And you have control over how your work is reproduced, assigned. And so, yes, they would have to ask permission. There would have to be something written. You would have to sign it. And it basically says in this limited circumstance you are allowed to present this work without my name. But you’d have to really limit that and make sure it’s defined carefully. But that’s one of the rights of copyright is that you can waive it or reassign it, which is what happens when you sell a script to a studio. You reassign it.

**John:** That’s true. I think there could still be a moral/ethical issue between you and the contest, or the fellowship you’re trying to enter into.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** I think there’s an issue there for misrepresenting that this is your own work.

**Craig:** I think that in the case of Kevin and his untrustworthy writing partner if the writing partner had said, “Can I do this,” and Kevin said, “Mm, OK, fine, let’s have a lawyer draw up a little thing, we sign it.” And then the partner does it. The partner is still committing the crime. The partner is misrepresenting something to this program. Kevin has merely created a condition that allows the partner to do the wrong thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is Judge Mazin. Slam.

**John:** Chun-chun.

**Craig:** Tunk-tunk.

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a place I’ve visited today which is Little Island in NYC. It is a new floating park. I guess it’s not actually floating. It is built on piers. It is on the west side. I just thought it was delightful.

**Craig:** Oh, look at this thing.

**John:** I’d read stories about it and it was sort of controversial as it was being planned and people were opposed to it. And Barry Diller provided a lot of money for it, which I don’t really love billionaires, but if you’re going to be a billionaire and you want to build something build a public park that people can go and enjoy and is free for the world. And I really dug it. It’s super pretty and it’s just like this little space you could wander around. They have an amphitheater for concerts and outdoor shows. And I just like when there’s – it reminds me of the High Line.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s just an outdoor place of joy. And so I would recommend anybody who is visiting NYC or living here to check it out when you get a chance. It’s limited entry, or it’s like timed entry during the weeks. It’s going to keep changing. But if you get there early you can just wander in and it’s just really nicely done.

**Craig:** It looks beautiful and I’m all in favor of this. We stopped building stuff at some point. All we decided we were going to ever build again were shopping malls and square office park buildings. So New York, all these wonderful buildings there, the whole skyline with the exception – one notable exception as the result of terrorism – it’s essentially kind of unchanged. Like all the great buildings are still there. But where’s the new Chrysler Building? Where’s the new World Trade Center? Where are all these wonderful things?

And so the High Line was an example of something new in New York that felt wonderful and so is this. If they’re going to build things then build these. This is cool. Yeah, I mean, look, Barry Diller is probably not a great guy. [laughs] I mean, based on what I’ve read. But that Little Island looks beautiful.

**John:** It does. And the photos that you’ll see in the New York Times piece that we’ll link to is with it empty. But it’s actually when it’s full of people, and it’s not crowded, but when it’s full of people, people just love it. And it feels imagineered in the sense that like all the slopes are designed so that an older person could get up them. You can sort of explore. There’s little bell things that kids can play with. So everyone who was there was just really digging it. And so just well done everybody for building this thing.

**Craig:** I’m sure folks from the wide open spaces in the US like Wyoming are looking at this going, “What?” [laughs] “You spent a quarter of a billion dollars for what? 2.4 acres?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s New York for you. I love it. Love it.

**John:** What have you got?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing, you know I love an escape room, John.

**John:** Oh you do.

**Craig:** The escape rooms are open here in Calgary. And I had the pleasure of visiting twice doing two rooms at Escape Ops here in Calgary. And what I love about Escape Ops, they have four rooms. I’ve done two of them so far. There are two remaining. It is run by Dan and Emily who I don’t know if they’re husband and wife but they’re partners. And they’re also partners. And they love what they do. And they make some terrific escape rooms there. And it just occurred to me that in so many circumstances you need passion and skill. If you find people with passion and skill it is the greatest thing.

If you’ve got passion without skill it’s just sort of noise. And if you have skill without passion it’s boring. But when you have passion and skill like they do you come up with really great things because you care. Because you want them to be wonderful.

So, if you do like escape rooms and you live in here in the Greater Calgary Area go visit Escape Ops and tell them Craig sent you.

**John:** I love that we’re providing highly localized opportunities of places to visit only if you are in the places that you are.

**Craig:** Correct. Well, I mean, about the same amount of people live in New York City and Calgary I think. It’s roughly the same. [laughs]

**John:** They really are. They’re really two capitols of the world.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Caden Brown. If you have outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. Go to Cotton Bureau. You’ll find them, including the new 10th Anniversary t-shirt.

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 Black Widow. Craig, it’s nice to have you back.

**Craig:** Great to be back, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** And we’re back. So, Craig, this past week Scarlett Johansson or I don’t think she actually sued them this week but basically news broke that Scarlett Johansson is suing Disney over Black Widow saying that the decision to release it through streaming and theatrically cost her millions of dollars that she would have been paid in box office bonuses. This is the first of these lawsuits that I’ve seen publically, but a lot of actors and directors were complaining when Warners was doing similar things. How are you feeling about this and the situation we find ourselves in?

**Craig:** Well, we can talk about the prospects of this case and we can also just talk about the politics of it which may be more interesting. Legally the prospects seem super questionable to me. As always, I am not a lawyer. What do I know? Except that they did release it theatrically. Unless there was something in the contract that said we have to release it theatrically on this many screens and we cannot release it day-and-date in any other way, I’m not sure what she can do other than say this sucks and you guys are jerks for doing it to me.

Or, you guys suck because you haven’t compensated me the way that for instance Warner Bros. eventually compensated their major talent when they decided to put everything out on HBO Max.

So, is she going to win? At this point, like if Disney showed up and murdered your family I’m not sure you’d win either. I would not want to go up against that crew of lawyers. But this is possibly the beginning of the end of something and the first shot of a war that is about to start.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s what makes it most interesting to me. It doesn’t honestly matter that much to me whether she wins or loses. I mean, I don’t think this lawsuit will be especially important, but I think it does signal a split between these two things. Because we have this time before which was like, oh crap, there’s a pandemic, we have to release stuff on streaming. OK, we’re going to compensate these big movie stars to do this.

In this case they didn’t compensate her for doing this, which was a choice. They could have just chosen to give her some extra money or sort of make good on that. It seems like they didn’t do that. I sort of wonder why they didn’t do that.

**Craig:** Well, they might have.

**John:** They might have.

**Craig:** They might have. It may have just not been what she wanted. Right? So then it becomes a negotiation. We don’t know. I don’t know the details behind the scenes here.

**John:** But so we should back up and say it’s not just big actors and big directors, you and I have box office bonuses built into our contracts. And so for movies that are in production right now, but also moves we’ve had before. If Aladdin had gone to streaming rather than gone to theatrical I would have lost, you know–

**Craig:** A lot.

**John:** A lot of money. Major, major money. And I would have been pissed, understandably. And I think in some ways even a little bit more pissed in – if it was just the pandemic and there really wasn’t a choice and they had to release it on streaming I sort of get it. But here they had a choice that they could have just gone full theatrical and there might have been more money to have made. We won’t know.

**Craig:** That’s the part I disagree with. I don’t think Disney is ever going to do anything that they know is going to cost them money. I think they–

**John:** But their calculation is different. Because they make money if people see it in the theater, but they also make money if people sign up for Disney+ and keep their Disney+ subscription.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And they’re trying to serve two masters there. And we as folks who get box office bonuses are only getting money if it’s successful at the box office.

**Craig:** 100%. I just think that if Disney thought that they would make more money ultimately for themselves, regardless of what they were going to dole out, by a longer and exclusive theatrical window they would have done it. It is possible that they are also pricing in the long term plan to put everything on Disney+ and just stop putting movies in theaters. I don’t know.

What I do know is that we are living in the echo time. And when Covid happened it impacted a whole ton of contracts that had no concept of what Covid was and didn’t care. So, now we all know. And contracts will look different. That’s for sure.

**John:** Oh, for sure. I mean, I guess we’re probably living in a force majeure world for a bit, where they can sort of say this is an act of god, we can’t do normal things. And now that this is more normal, we’re not as pandemic, but it’s also not – nothing is unprecedented at this point. We sort of know how to do stuff and we have a sense of what the shape of the universe is like. Yes, our contracts will be different. And I think they will be different in ways that will tend to favor the studios.

**Craig:** Yeah. Of course. [laughs]

**John:** Let me make a more obvious point. [laughs] I’m not nervous for Disney succeeding here.

**Craig:** No. They’re going to be just fine. This is really fascinating because I’m still confused. So much of this subscription based stuff is really hard to tie the income to individual works. They have their baloney theories of how they can figure that out. But Netflix won’t even tell us how many people really watch something. And when they do tell us how they define who watched something, you know, you want to shoot milk out of your nose. It’s the biggest joke in the world.

So if somebody watches something for 20 seconds they watched it? That’s crazy. So, everything is wonky. Nothing is connected to anything real. I have no – it’s just a black box. Nobody knows what’s happening inside of there. And if there were ever a time when the three guilds needed to come together and figure something out here and unify on an issue it was this. That said, they won’t. 100% they will not.

**John:** [laughs] Oh my gosh. I love how definitive you are on that.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** I will, god, I don’t know. Are we betting on this? I think – so here’s where I think we agree. I think you and I both agree that if the guilds don’t figure this out it is an existential threat to the nature of residuals and sort of meaningful backend compensation. And not only do the guilds understand this, but I also think the agencies understand this as well. So I think there are a lot of people who have clear vision of how important this is. And what we’re really debating is whether that clear vision will get them to actually take an action that will benefit all of them.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t count on the agencies. The agencies make all their money from probably 10% of their clients.

**John:** Like a Scarlett Johansson.

**Craig:** Correct. But in the case of Scarlett Johansson my guess is that if they were negotiating a new deal for Scarlett Johansson they would know to not build it around box office bonuses. Meaning that there’s a lot of ways to skin the cat when it’s an individual negotiation with a studio. The issue for guilds is they’re there to protect everybody, so there’s this baseline thing.

And in a way the studios love that because they don’t want individuals negotiating too much of this backend stuff. They want to be able to say, well, when it comes to residuals that’s what it is for everybody. What I think will happen is probably there will be some labor action and then the DGA will make a deal. [laughs] That’s just sort of how it goes around here.

**John:** Well so here’s the point of commonality between all these different parties is the desire to break that black box and actually have some insight into what’s actually happening there. And some of that insight is already happening because Nielsen actually kind of does know who is watching what. So I think the desire to keep all that data secret, it’s just not going to be secret for forever.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s what we really need is some sort of robust third party verification of who is watching what and how long they’re watching it for. And it’s tricky because they’ve got to figure out what watching something means. It used to be very simple. The TV was on for that thing and you watched it. And then it was gone.

**John:** Or you sold that DVD and that DVD was sold and that became residuals. And it is tougher in this age, I get it, with streaming. But we can figure this out because we figured stuff out before.

**Craig:** I mean, there’ve been things where I’ve started it watching it and stopped and then like seven months later I’m like, oh, look at that, and I finished it.

**John:** Does that count as one view or not?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I don’t know.

**John:** But we have computers who can count that stuff. And they’re really good at counting stuff.

**Craig:** The computers will save us, said the computer.

**John:** Ha-ha. So I think our summary of Scarlett Johansson lawsuit is I don’t think it will probably amount to anything, but I think it is an important step along the way of this discussion about how we move from how we were counting things to how we will count things in the future.

**Craig:** I agree. I think it will be settled, as these things almost always are, and that settlement will be yet another black box by design. But we are going to have to figure this out and one thing I think we have to be really careful about at this point is no longer fighting blood wars over dying models. We have to figure out – knowing what to fight for is just as important as a willingness to fight. And right now that’s the trick of it. I don’t envy anybody planning strategy for these next negotiations.

**John:** Agreed. Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Kerri Strug Shouldn’t Have Been Forced to Do That Vault](https://slate.com/culture/2021/07/kerri-strug-simone-biles-vault-atlanta-legacy-injuries.html)
* Amanda Knox’s [twitter thread](https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status/1420871392266911746?s=21) and [Medium article](https://amandamarieknox.medium.com/who-owns-my-name-93561f83e502)
* [Mandatory Vaccinations On Productions An Option Under Return-To-Work Protocols](https://deadline.com/2021/07/mandatory-covid-19-vaccinations-now-an-option-on-film-tv-productions-1234796313/)
* [Disney to Mandate COVID-19 Vaccinations for All U.S. Staffers](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/disney-requiring-all-employees-be-vaccinated-1234990995/)
* [Netflix To Require Covid Vaccinations For Actors & Other “Zone A” Personnel On Its U.S. Productions](https://deadline.com/2021/07/netflix-to-require-covid-vaccinations-for-all-actors-on-us-productions-1234801577/)
* [Little Island](https://littleisland.org/visit-us/) by [Barry Diller](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/arts/little-island-barry-diller.html)
* [Scarlett Johansson’s ‘Black Widow’ Lawsuit Is Game-Changing, But May Be Legally Weak](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/scarlett-johanssons-black-widow-lawsuit-1234990644/) by Eriq Gardner
* [Scarlett Johansson Sues Disney Over ‘Black Widow’ Streaming Release](https://www.wsj.com/articles/scarlett-johansson-sues-disney-over-black-widow-streaming-release-11627579278?mod=e2tw) on WSJ
* [Escape Ops on Calgary](https://escapeops.ca/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Caden Brown ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and 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/511standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/378-the-worst-of-the-worst).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode originally aired in December 2018. In it Craig and I talk about the Worst of the Worst, which we define as that need to make things not just a little uncomfortable for your heroes, but downright awful. We talk about stakes, consequences, and transformation. Mostly, this feels like a feature idea rather than a TV idea, but with the rise of short series I think you’re going to see more and more of these decisions happening on the small screen as well.

Craig and I were not prescient. We’re just feature guys in an industry that was quickly moving towards streaming. So, enjoy this episode. If you’re a premium member stick around after the credits where I’ll be talking with producer Megana Rao about what she’s been learning listening through all the back archives and what she’s seeing out there in the real world as she’s trying to be a writer getting staffed.

Enjoy.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 378 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to dash hopes, ruin friendships, and destroy things we love most.

**Craig:** Oh, thank god.

**John:** As we talk about why bad things need to happen to characters we love. Plus, we’ll be answering questions about WGA signatories and old TV scripts.

**Craig:** Well that sounds fun.

**John:** Yeah, Craig, it’s nice to have you back.

**Craig:** It’s good to be back. I’m so sorry I missed – since I’ve been working and traveling, you’re working and traveling, and then I had some needle shoved into my spine last week.

**John:** Oh, no, not good. Don’t do that.

**Craig:** It wasn’t an accident. It was on purpose. There was a medical professional doing it.

**John:** All the kids are doing it.

**Craig:** All the kids are doing it.

**John:** Yeah, just inject – first it was Juuls, and then they’re injecting things into their spines.

**Craig:** Exactly. So that was why. Initially it was supposed to happen first thing in the morning and our podcast interview with Phil and Matt was going to be in the afternoon, and then they had an adjustment. So when I got out of that thing I was about two hours away from doing the podcast and just feeling really weird and oogie. So, yeah, but I’m back. I’m back.

**John:** He’s back. He’s no longer oogie. He’s full of boogie. And you can see Craig in person on December 12th which is tomorrow as this episode comes out. We are doing our live show in Hollywood. Our guests are fantastic. Zoanne Clack of Grey’s Anatomy, Pamela Ribon of Ralph Breaks the Internet. Cherry Chevapravatdumrong of Family Guy and The Orville, plus Phil Lord and Chris Miller of Lego Movie and the new Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse. So we are hyping this show, but for all I know we’re sold out and it’s just–

**Craig:** We should be based on that list of people. By the way, Zoanne Clack I think is a medical doctor.

**John:** She’s a medical doctor. So if Craig has an emergency, she’s the person.

**Craig:** We’ll be talking about my spine on that show. But this is an amazing lineup of people. Totally – everybody from different places – well, we do have three representatives of animation come to think of it. All right. All right. Lord and Miller, I mean, boom, Pam Ribon has got this huge movie out. Everybody is famous. And you know what? Why would anyone not want to go to this show? Plus, me and you.

**John:** Well that’s us. I mean, that’s the other celebrities in this whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Sometimes we like try to land a big name and then it’s like, you know what, let us be the big names sometimes.

**Craig:** We’re the big name.

**John:** Zoanne Clack, yes, she’s a medical doctor, but what I really want to talk to her about on the show is how she’s transitioned from being a doctor to writing a show about doctors. Because we get so many questions from listeners about like “I am a police detective, but I want to write detective stories.” And that’s an interesting, fascinating transition. She has done it, so she will be able to tell us what that life is like.

**Craig:** Maybe she can also chat a little bit about our episode where we went through all the mistakes that, like the fake medicine on TV. I wonder if she’s ever – well, you know what, let’s save the Zoanne questions for when we’re with Zoanne.

**John:** Absolutely. We also have another live show to announce. I’m very excited to announce that we are doing a screening of Princess Bride and an episode afterwards in which we’ll be talking about the movie we just saw. So, William Goldman passed away this past month. We are going to be doing a series of screenings for the WGA. This is going to be at the WGA Theater on January 27th. So, Craig and I will watch the movie then discuss the movie afterwards with the audience. And so this is I think going to be open up to everyone. So once there are tickets there will be a link in the show notes for that. I’m very excited to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Me too. It’s one of my favorite movies and William Goldman was a giant. So it’ll be nice. It’ll be nice to do that in his memory.

**John:** Absolutely. And so this will be kind of a trial run also because I’d like to do more of these on the whole. So if this goes well there’s some movies down the road I want to do a deep dive on. We’ll screen them and then do a deep dive. So we’ll let this be a test run.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**John:** Brilliant. We have some follow up. First is from Partis about the Start Button. Craig, do you want to take this?

**Craig:** Sure. OK, so Pardis writes, “The problem with the system you outlined on the podcast where the WGA can be the bad guy if you ask them to, calling the studio on your behalf to enforce the terms of your writing agreement is that the studio knows the WGA is only calling because you, the writer, have asked them to. And since writers are more dispensable than directors, yes, you can get labeled as a diva or as a problem child or as more trouble than you’re worth and lose out on future writing assignments as a result. So, what’s the solution?”

Pardis says, “A system whereby the WGA is alerted to commencement on a feature automatically. And a system whereby the WGA checks on progress for all feature products automatically without asking the writer first. That way the studio can’t blame any specific writer for asking the guild to be the bad guy. There’s just automatic oversight across the board. But, how can we put this system into place if the guild isn’t already alerted to commencement automatically?

“Option number 1: Negotiate a meaningful financial penalty into the next contract for studios that fail to file their paperwork for new project with an X number of days of the agreement being signed. That money can go toward covering the guild’s increased oversight and enforcement costs.

“Option number 2: Create a small financial penalty for writers who fail to alert the WGA that they’ve started work on a new project. Option 2, because then the studio can’t get mad at writers for alerting the WGA about new projects because writers have no choice but to inform the WGA directly less the writers be penalized themselves.”

**John:** All right, so let’s take a look at Pardis’ suggestions here and sort of how Pardis is laying out the situation. So, I think what Pardis is suggesting overall have some merit to it. You want the WGA to be the bad guy. You want the WGA to step up and do this work on behalf of writers. And if it feels like the WGA is only calling the studio or only getting involved because the writer complained I can understand that hesitation.

That said, the goal is for this to feel like it is just automatic. It’s like changing the way we’re just doing this on a regular basis. And so that even without a financial penalty for failing to hit the Start Button and report a new project, that it will become a matter of course for writers to do this. And the WGA has increased already the number of enforcement people there are to do that work. And so they are going to be checking up on people anyway. And so regardless of hitting the Start Button or not hitting the Start Button, there’s a lot more outreach to say like, hey, what are you working on, how is this going, and are you being paid on time? Is anything going on? And that is one of the overall goals and functions of the WGA is to make sure that our members are being paid and are treated appropriately.

**Craig:** These ideas, all ideas really, have been discussed ad nauseam since I have been involved in WGA stuff, which is, you know, over 14 years ago or something. But I would say that Pardis you’re not the first person to suggest that we should maybe start penalizing writers. But good luck. It’s not a great idea, honestly, to essentially crack down on writers to solve the problem that is created by studios. We already have enough problems. You’re dealing with writers that are already being abused and now they have to send money to the guild because they’ve been abused? It’s not great.

Can you get a meaningful financial penalty for studios that fail to file their paperwork? No. Probably not. And again when things start is kind of fuzzy. So, the Start Button actually is the best idea I’ve seen to date. And I think it will bear fruit. So I would say, Pardis, patience.

**John:** Related aspect here is that when you are hitting a Start Button or even now if you’re not hitting the Start Button, you are supposed to upload your contracts. And so I have been uploading my contracts. Everyone is supposed to upload their contracts that show all the steps of your deal. When the WGA has this information they can be checking on it independently so they don’t need to necessarily wait for you to say that there’s a problem. They can say like, hey, according to what we have this is what’s happening on this project – is this accurate? And you need to answer that honestly. And so that is a way in which the WGA can become involved, even if you are not reaching out to them to say help me here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Hopefully this works the way we would want it to in an ideal situation where the guild is helping you without feeling like they’re bonking you on the head. And in getting in your work process. So, let’s see how it goes.

**John:** Second bit of follow up, a previous One Cool Thing was the show Please Like Me. And last night I was out and randomly bumped into Josh Thomas the creator and star of Please Like Me. And so I want to talk a little bit about sort of what to do when you meet somebody who you’ve only seen their work in person. Because it can be sometimes kind of awkward. So what I did is I said, “Oh hey, you don’t know me, but I thought your show was fantastic and you do great work.” I asked him if he moved to Los Angeles fulltime and is writing here and he is. And then I left him be and let him sort of go on and be about his night.

So maybe we’ll get him on the show at some point and he can talk about what he’s doing here. But as a person who gets approached like Josh Thomas gets approached in that situation I want to talk about sort of best practices when you’re going up to talk to someone whose work you admire, but it’s in a social situation. Because, Craig, you must encounter this, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s not on a daily basis by any stretch of the imagination, but it does happen. And mostly people seem to do it well. You know, I haven’t had any weird encounters. Any actor that’s on television has astronomically more of these encounters than you or I. And my guess is just that numbers wise they’re going to run into some odd ducks, probably at least once a day.

**John:** Yeah. So I would just say I would encourage – if there’s a person who is doing great work and you want to say like, oh, I really like the thing you’re doing. It’s good to say that, because sometimes it’s just good to hear that you’re making stuff that the world appreciates. But I would say if you’re going to make that approach plan for an out that’s going to get you out of that conversation within 30 seconds to a minute, because they were going about their life before you interrupted them. And so you want to be able to say what you need to say and then like let them go off and do their thing. If they want to keep engaged, they can engage. But make sure you’re giving them the release to get out of the conversation.

**Craig:** And take a look at their face before you walk up to them, because listen, everybody is a person. Everybody is going through stuff. Sometimes we’re in a nice happy mood, sometimes we’re in a neutral state of mind. Sometimes we’re concerned, we’re running late, we’re sad, we’re nervous. And then we don’t want anyone talking to us. Anyone, by the way. Much less people that we don’t know. So, just take a look. I know it’s hard because – and again, this isn’t something that I think anyone has towards somebody like me – but when people see a movie star in their minds they think you know what it doesn’t matter how they’re feeling and it doesn’t matter what’s going on. This is my moment to shake Tom Cruise’s hand and I’m doing it. Because the rest of my life I shook Tom Cruise’s hand, right? I had that moment. And he’ll get over it and he will. He will. But, you know, it’s not that big – who cares? I guess that’s my whole thing is like who cares.

**John:** My ground zero for getting recognized, well of course Austin Film Festival I get recognized a lot there, which is – I sort of go there knowing that’s going to happen. The lobby of the ArcLight I get spotted a lot. And sometimes at the Grove. And there was one time I was walking through the lobby of the ArcLight and this guy goes, “Wait, you’re that writer guy. You’re good.” I’m like, OK. I guess I’m good. Thank you, random stranger. That’s nice.

**Craig:** You’re that writer guy. Well, that’s pretty much right. This is one of the nice things about living in La Cañada is that nobody cares. Nobody cares. They don’t care.

**John:** Let’s get to our marquee topic which is bad things and bad things happening to the characters that you love. This came up for me this morning because I was working through the third book of Arlo Finch and I was looking at my outline and just looking at how many bad things happen, which is just a tremendous number. I think partly because it is the third and final book, so if something could happen this is the last place where it could happen. But also the character has grown to a place where he can handle some things that he couldn’t otherwise handle. So, there’s a lot of serious stuff that happens in the third book.

But I want to talk about it because I think there’s this instinct to sort of protect our heroes, protect our characters, and it’s hard to sort of get us over the hump of like, no, no, no, you have to – not just allow bad things to happen but make bad things happen to your heroes in order to generate story. And this is really very much probably more a feature conversation than a television conversation because in ongoing series there will be conflict within an episode, but you won’t destroy everything in their life every week. But in features that’s a really important part.

**Craig:** It’s a huge part. And, yes, you’re right. In television you need to make sure that people come back the next week in roughly the same shape you found them. So there will be little mini ups and downs. But in movies we feel narratively like we have to see people torn apart. And this goes all the way back to the bible.

**John:** Oh, the bible.

**Craig:** The story of Job.

**John:** Tell me the story of Job.

**Craig:** I will. And I should mention I don’t believe in anything in the bible. However, the bible is evidence of something. And it is evidence I think of deep seeded instinctive narrative patterns in the human mind. They are expressions of these things that are in us. They are not always sensible or logical, but they are there. So, that’s how I’m going to take a look at the story of Job. It’s a very simple story. Job is a very pious guy. He believes in God. He’s just super godly. And God therefore rewards him with a fortune and health and, I don’t know, bountiful crops, or I don’t know, whatever God would give people. And God is hanging out one day with Satan, as he used to do, and Satan says, “You know, Job only loves you because you reward him.” And this is a general moral conundrum that has been dissected over time. You watch The Good Place, right?

**John:** Oh yeah. It’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Of course, so they refer to this as moral dessert. The idea that you behave well so that you get your reward from whatever metaphysical/supernatural deity you believe in. And God says, “No, no, no, no, no. Job loves me because he’s a good guy. And I’ll prove it. I will remove my protection from him and you go ahead and do whatever you want to him. And you’ll see. He’ll stand by me.” And so that’s what happens. God removes his protection and Satan begins to torment Job – torment him – torment his health, and ruin his crops, and scatter his children. It’s just awful. Like every bad thing you could do to somebody he does to Job. And Job just stands by God.

And in the end, you’re the winner Job, and God rerewards him and gives him even more crops and frankincense or whatever they had back then.

So, why am I bringing up the story of Job? Because there’s a moral inherent to it that I think is why we need, narratively, to torture our characters. And the idea is that our goodliness or our growth or whatever you want to call the evolution of our selves, the betterment of our selves, it doesn’t count to other people unless it is perceived to come at terrible cost.

Now, is that actually true? I don’t think so. I think it’s perfectly possible to become a better person without suffering. But when it comes to narrative it seems like we need it or we don’t believe the change.

**John:** Yeah. We didn’t see the work. We didn’t see the struggle. We didn’t see sort of the cost and it doesn’t feel like it was merited.

**Craig:** Exactly. So what we like to see is somebody that has experienced a trauma and they’re going to get over the trauma but only by facing it in the most hard and difficult way. They are going to repair a relationship with somebody by that person leaving them. They’re going to appreciate what they have because they lose it all. So, every character starts with this flaw and then we as the writers we torment them and force them to confront it through a series of increasingly difficult trials the way that Satan did to Job. And through that there is this falling apart. Break you down to lift you up. And we call this the low point.

The low point in a movie is the low point because the writer has tortured the hero to the point where they give up. They finally give up. That’s what you have to do is – you’ve lost your, whatever your ego is, and your hubris, and you give up and from that you will rise back. But those moments are so notable. And one of my favorite versions of that is the Team America puke scene which is just perfect. It’s perfect.

**John:** Let’s play a clip from the Team America puke scene.

[Clip plays]

So this scene classically is a character who has lost everything and then sort of loses more and in this case is literally vomiting up the last they have left. But let’s talk about some of those things that a character can lose and list off some of those classic things you’ll see characters losing here.

Some bad things might be to take away their home. So you might literally burn it down, or you might cast them out of society. You might take away their support system, so taking away their friends, their family, the institutions, the organizations that they’re a part of. You might have the rest of the world see them as the villain. And so you have a hero who is being perceived as the villain which is horrible. Incarcerate them. I have a note here sort of incarceration, also the weird case of Paul Manafort at this moment. So as we’re recording this, this is a guy who is going to probably be in jail for the rest of his life and he’s acting really strangely which leads me to believe that there’s something else he could lose, which is always fascinating to speculate on that. There’s something worse than being in prison for all this time and so he’s acting on behalf of that. So figuring out what that is.

You can kill a character. You can lop off a limb. You can force them to act against their own beliefs, so classically they have the daughter kidnapped and so therefore they have to do things that they can’t believe. You can sew tension and conflict between their allies. You can destroy the item they love most, so it’s like he finally gets that car he’s been hoping for his all his life and you destroy that thing.

So, those losses are bad things you’re doing to your character and they’re pretty crucial. If you don’t do some of those kinds of things over the course of your movie it’s probably not a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, what you’re doing is burning away what needs to be burned away. And it’s unpleasant. And we need it to be unpleasant. We need to see this character suffer. What is it, hamartia I think is the Greek word for suffering. And then catharsis is essentially vomiting. Which is one of the reasons why I like that scene so much because they just did it.

Humiliation is something that we see all the time. The writer creates circumstances in which the hero is humiliated. Where they lose all sense of self-worth and pride. We can kill or harm the people they love the most. We can make them feel terribly guilty and confront them with the consequences of what they’ve done. It’s good because it’s tortuous.

There’s that scene, people of our age always remember this moment in the second Superman movie from the late ‘70s/early ‘80s where Superman willingly gives up his power so that he can marry Lois Lane. And he gets beaten up by some guy in a bar. And it’s crushing. It’s crushing because you see someone brought low. I remember seeing that scene in the theater and feeling terrible inside. And it was the same feeling I had when I watched the animated The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe when all the evil Snow Queen and her minions shave the mane off of Aslan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Take his hair away and reduce him to just this pathetic wretch. And, yeah, it’s – you need it. You need it or else when they come back you don’t feel anything.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about the timing of when these bad things happen, because there’s a couple different moments over the course of a movie where you see these things happening classically. So, the first is the inciting incident or whatever you want to call that moment early in the story that sort of kicks this story into gear. And so, you know, in the first 10 to 15 minutes of a story where a change has happened. This is the village is raided and the hero’s parents are killed. This is a big change has happened that is starting this story with this character.

Often the end of act one. So you’ve arrived at a new place. We’re not in Kansas anymore. The hero’s house has burnt down. We’re entering a new world. There’s a big change and the hero has lost something. They may be excited about what they’re headed towards, but there is a loss. They’ve crossed into a place where they can’t get back to where they were before.

There’s a lot of times, moments in the second act that are going to be losses, where allies turn on them, where new obstacles arise. There’s a plan that fails, seeing things that were important to the character that we were hoping for for the character don’t come true. And then classically the biggest of these losses, which is probably the vomit scene from Team America, is the end of act two, sort of the worst of the worst, which is you’ve gotten to this point and you’ve lost everything. It should generally be the character’s lowest point, or at least the lowest point in this character and how they’ve evolved over the course of the story. That thing that looked like it was potentially in their reach has been taken away from them. And that’s classically the end of the second act.

**Craig:** It’s the end because there’s nothing left to lose. You, the writer, have beaten it all out of them. They have no pride left. They have no resources. Or whatever it is. You’ve removed the stuff that they were relying on. Their crutches are all gone.

It’s important to note that when you visit these bad things on your character you must do so sadistically. It’s not enough to just have some bad things happen. You have to do them in a way that is deeply ironic and miserable. Especially miserable. Because then oddly the more exquisite the torture the more we feel positively when they overcome it.

So, the example I always think about is Marlin at the beginning of Finding Nemo. He’s a happy fish and he’s there with his wife and their hundreds of little babies. And they’ve found a place to live. And then his wife is eaten and all of the babies are eaten except for one. And that is very bad. But then Pixar understood it’s not bad enough. They have to make that little one disabled. They have to give him a bad fin so that he will need even more protection. And then that’s not enough. He is the one that goes missing. And so you have to go get him. And that’s not enough. In the end you have to let him go into more danger to save a friend. And then that’s not enough. You have to feel like he died there. And in that moment where Marlin thinks that Nemo is dead, he flashes back to holding him as a little egg and if you’re human you cry. Because the torture has been so exquisite. And therefore the relief and joy is beautiful and our appreciation for how far Marlin has come as a character is real.

They earned it. Did I ever tell the story of Jose Fernandez, the pitcher?

**John:** No. Tell me.

**Craig:** So this sort of goes to what I think of as the essential ingredient of character torture is irony. It’s not enough to just sort of make bad things happen. You have to do it in a way that feels ironic, as if the world had conspired against them.

So, it’s a guy named Jose Fernandez. Like a lot of baseball players he came from Cuba. So he had to escape from Cuba and he escaped on a small boat with – it was one of these crowded boats full of refugees and at some point on the voyage the boat gets tossed and turned and someone says, “Someone has gone overboard,” and without even thinking Jose Fernandez just jumps into the ocean to save whoever that person is. And he does. He grabs them. He brings them back on board. He pulls them up. They live. And it turns out that the person he saved was his own mother. He didn’t even know it.

He arrives in the United States and he becomes a baseball player. Not just a baseball player. He is an amazing pitcher. He plays for the Marlins. He is fantastic. He is going to earn many, many hundreds of millions of dollars. So, just the kind of dream come true for somebody that had to escape Cuba on a small boat and rescue his mother from drowning.

Unfortunately, two years ago he died. He died in an accident. And if I told you that he died in a car accident you would think that’s bad. But he didn’t die in a car accident. He died in a boating accident.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** And that is ironic in a terrible way. It implies that the universe was doing something. It had its thumbs on the scale so to speak. It is tortuous to think of. And when we write our terrible tortures for our characters I think it’s important for us to think of that. Because – and it’s a sad thing of course – but the worse it is and the more ironic it is the better the ending feels.

**John:** Yeah. Well let’s talk about sort of how those bad things come into the story. Because I can think of three main ways you see those bad things happening. The first is an external event. So that’s the earthquake. That’s the world war. In Finding Nemo that is the – is it a shark who eats the fish originally?

**Craig:** No, he gets grabbed by some fishermen who are looking to capture fish to sell, like for aquariums.

**John:** No, but at the very start of the movie where–

**Craig:** Oh yeah, it’s like a barracuda or something like that.

**John:** So that’s really an external threat because that – so barracuda is not the primary villain of the story. I don’t remember Finding Nemo that well. That barracuda itself never comes back.

**Craig:** Correct. It was just nature.

**John:** It’s nature actually. So some external force that you cannot actually defeat comes back. But sometimes it is the villain itself who is the character who arrives who is the one who is causing the suffering. So, every James Bond movie. Many fairy tales. Die Hard is an example. So, there’s a personified threat. A villain who is doing the thing that is causing the suffering. That is beginning the suffering.

But in some of my favorite movies it is the hero themselves that is doing the action that is causing the problem. So if you look at Inside Out or Ralph Breaks the Internet or Toy Story, it is the hero who is causing the problem. The hero who is ultimately responsible for the suffering that the characters are going through. And that’s often great writing. Because it gets back to the idea of like what is the character’s flaw and something about that character’s flaw is causing the suffering. And we see them having to address that flaw in order to stop the suffering.

**Craig:** No question. It’s very common with Pixar movies. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of a Pixar movie where the bad stuff is majority villain driven other than Bug’s Life, where Kevin Spacey, a real life villain, portrayed a villainous grasshopper. But typically in Pixar films – and sort of I guess in The Incredibles, but yeah, mostly they bring it upon themselves because it is more interesting.

**John:** I mean, in The Incredibles movies there’s sort of an attenuated thing where it’s like it’s because of past actions, it’s a boomerang effect that sort of comes back in, but it’s not a thing we saw them do at the start of the movie. It’s not generally responsible for most of the suffering.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But movies are about consequences and if characters are allowed to freely make choices and then have to suffer the consequences of those choices, that is good and appropriate and compelling storytelling, especially for a feature which is something that is designed to happen just once.

So, a television show theoretically should be able to repeat itself ad nauseam. A feature is sort of a one-time journey for a character. And so that one-time journey is going to about big steps and big swings and big failures when they happen.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** So some takeaway on this idea of bad things happening to your characters. I would say really as you’re breaking a story you have to be thinking about what are the biggest worst things that could happen. And when I say the biggest worst things that are in the universe of your story. So, obviously you can’t stick a tornado in space. But within the context of your movie what are those and what are the character effects for it?

I think so often when we get notes about like well the stakes feel light here, sometimes the proposed solution is to make it be – it’s the end of the world. Like if we don’t do this then everyone else around us dies. I think that sometimes that’s mistaking the bigger scale for more personal consequences for the things that the characters are going through. So, making sure that it feels like a punishment very specifically tailored to this character that you’ve created.

**Craig:** Exactly. And you don’t have to – you don’t have to substitute volume of badness for quality of badness. In the beginning of John Wick the bad guys basically kill his dog. Which in and of itself would be like OK that’s bad, except it was the last gift he received from his deceased wife. That’s all it takes. I’m good.

And, you know, it doesn’t have to be this massive visitation of problems. Sometimes it’s just the cruelty of it really. Little bits of cruelty.

**John:** The Wizard of Oz, she’s trying to take Toto away at the start. That horrible woman is trying to bicycle away with Toto. That’s horrible. And that’s absolutely the right scale of problem for that movie so before the tornado comes that is what we’re experiencing. We can see it from Dorothy’s eyes like this is one of the worst things she can imagine ever happening.

**Craig:** A lot of times I do think about The Wizard of Oz when people start harping on stakes in meetings. Because I’m like what are the stakes exactly? What are the stakes?

**John:** There aren’t stakes in a classic way. It’s not like the Lollipop Guild was being horribly oppressed. It’s not like there was – she ended up changing the world but kind of by accident.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess the stakes were that she would get killed or something. I don’t know. But yeah, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes it’s really more about how closely we empathize with the character and the stakes are whatever is stakey to them. It’s about what makes them feel. And if you make me feel what they’re feeling, those are stakes. That counts.

**John:** Absolutely. In a previous discussion we talked about want and want versus need, which I think is a false dichotomy. But when characters express their wants they have a positive vision of the future. So they can imagine a future and in that future their life is better because they have this thing that they want. And that’s a positive vision. Fear is a negative vision of the future. And so they are afraid. They’ve seen the future and in the future their life is worse because this thing has happened or has been taken away from them.

That’s really what we’re talking about with these things we’re trying to – these horrors we’re trying to visit upon our characters is that those things that they feared or those things they didn’t even think they had to fear, those are happening to them now in this story and they have to figure out how to deal with it.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to some listener questions. First off is James in Napier, New Zealand. I assume it’s Napier, but maybe it’s pronounced a different way. It feels like one of those words where it could be Napier, or Napier.

**Craig:** I think it’s probably Napier.

**John:** Napier. James writes, “How in god’s name do you make sure a TV script is the right length? There’s a lot of flexibility in how feature film scripts can run. I know the one-minute per page rule is a rough guide when you’re writing. TV and radio are much more time-constrained so how do you make sure the script is exactly the right length to start with? And how do you keep it that way during production?”

Craig, you just went through TV.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re doing this right now. Don’t panic over here, James. It’s no big deal. Generally speaking, you know, we’ve got this rough 30-page/60-page guideline for half an hour or an hour. But the truth of the matter is it’s all guess work. The pages don’t really conform clearly to one-minute per page. Things are going to get cut. Some things are going to be expanded.

The good news is that we don’t really live in the world where the vast majority of television is constrained by rigid time formats. Everything is far more loosey-goosey now which is nice. If you’re writing for network television, different story. But with that point I would say, again, don’t panic. You can edit. And you can speed things up or slow them down editorially. So just generally, you know, get roughly in that zone and that’s what it will be.

And, you know, my experience at least with Chernobyl so far is that the scripts – at least for the first four episodes – are around 59 to 63 pages and they’re all timing out to be about an hour.

**John:** It does work that way. I was talking with Rob Thomas, the creator of Veronica Mars and iZombie and other shows and Rob hates the one-page-per-minute rule because he feels that sometimes networks try to value it too much. And so the way he writes it doesn’t really match up that well. He believes that you could probably actually do a word count that would more accurately reflect how long something really will take to fill.

I don’t know if that’s true, but I think it’s an interesting experiment. The truth though is that once you start making a show, so iZombie or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or any of Derek’s Chicago shows, they know. Ultimately they get a sense of like, OK, our scripts need to be about this length because this is what the episodes cut out to be. And even then there will be episodes that are running long for a while and they have to find way to get two minutes out of it. And when we had the Game of Thrones creators on, Benioff and Weiss, they were talking about how in the first season their episodes were too short. They didn’t understand sort of how long stuff was going to play. And so they needed to add additional scenes to sort of fill them out because they just didn’t have a sense of how long an episode was going to be based on the script page.

**Craig:** Exactly. All right. Joe has a question. He writes, “I am a WGA member. I have an offer on the table from a reputable Middle Eastern production company looking to produce a more Western style show. The offer is about 15% less than WGA minimums. They won’t go any higher because they say lower budgets and the Arabic-speaking portion of the MENA territory,” Middle East, I don’t know, “simply doesn’t support it. I asked the WGA and they said flatly I cannot work for any company who is not a WGA signatory.

“I asked my reps and was told the WGA does not have jurisdiction here and becoming a signatory should not be what stands in the way of signing this deal. To be honest, the WGA response rubbed me the wrong way because it felt like they were using me to gain signatories when they didn’t have anything to lose and I did. A job.

“That said, I owe a lot to the WGA. I’m eking out a meager living as a writer and I recognize the WGA is part of that. But I don’t have so much work that I can just turn stuff down willy-nilly. So, does the WGA actually have jurisdiction here?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** I think there’s probably some situation in which you can be hired by a foreign company as a WGA member and they don’t have to pay you minimums. But this is probably not one of those situations. I know there’s international working rules, essentially one of the things the WGA needs to make sure never happens is that international companies sort of come in and sort of scoop up American writers to really write American things but try to pay them less than that. So I think that is why the WGA’s response is that.

But, Craig, you know more about the rules. Tell me.

**Craig:** Well, I have an understanding here, but it will be interesting. I would love to get the WGA’s official position on this. My understanding is that the WGA here is correct. The issue is that Joe is here and the WGA’s jurisdiction covers the United States. It is chartered by the Department of Labor. So, if you are a member of the WGA and you are writing something here in the United States it has to be for a WGA signatory. You cannot go lower than that. Period. The end. Assuming that there is an applicable collective bargaining agreement which obviously there is here.

So, no, you can’t do that. Listen, Sony, right, owns Columbia. We call them Sony now. Well obviously Sony is a Japanese company. So why wouldn’t Sony just start saying everybody who works for Columbia Pictures, we’re actually employing you under the Japanese branch of Sony, so you don’t have to do WGA. No. That doesn’t work that way. At all.

**John:** So I suspect that where we could get to with Joe is if this company was willing to fly you over to the Middle East and put you up there and you were doing your writing services there–

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** They could pay you less than that and that would not be a great situation for you. So not only are you giving up 15% of this money, which by the way 15% of scale is not a ton of money. I just feel like they could find that money for you. But, you are giving up your credit protections. You are giving up kind of all the stuff. Health and pension. You’re giving up much more than you sort of think to take that job. So that is why we have protections like this so that you cannot be undercut by a foreign thing.

So could this company form a WGA signatory? Yes they could. It would be great if they did.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think the WGA, by the way, Joe is using you to get this company to sign up as a signatory. I don’t think they care about this company. I think they care about everybody else that’s in the WGA and the value of our minimums not being degraded. So, what I would say here is you can say to them, listen, this isn’t me asking you for anything. I’m not allowed to do this. And, by the way, company, if you come here to the United States you can’t get anybody in the WGA to do this. None of us will be able to do this. You’re going to have get a non-WGA writer.

So, you know, which generally speaking won’t probably be as good. So, that’s where they’re at, Joe.

**John:** All right. Kofi from Woodbridge, New Jersey writes, “My question pertains to the release of completed scripts after a television show has aired or a movie has been released to the public. Who decides whether or not the completed script will ever be released? I’d love to read the script for every episode of my favorite shows, but usually only the scripts for the pilot and episodes selected for awards are available. Movie scripts can be hit or miss, too. Why isn’t every script made available to be read for educational purposes?”

**Craig:** Well, there are certain circumstances where the writers actually have the publication rights over screenplays. If you have separated rights in feature films that means you have a Story By or Written By credit then I believe you have the right to publish your screenplay.

But, look, by and large they don’t do it because it takes time and it costs some amount of money and it takes some tiny bit of effort and they’re just not willing. It’s no one’s job. It’s a massive company and they can look around and who wants to be the person responsible for scanning and posting 4,000 screenplays. Nobody wants to do it. And there isn’t really a huge clamoring for it, which, you know, is a bit of a bummer. That said, there are plenty of kind of underground swap meets for these things online. I’ve seen them around.

So, yeah, it would be nice. But it comes down to sheer laziness and lack of interest, I think.

**John:** So, the situation is actually a lot different than it was 25 years ago when Craig and I were starting. I remember when I arrived at USC for film school they had a script library. You could go down and could check out two scripts from this library and they were literally printed bound scripts. Not even brads in them, but these special posts that sort of like are sturdier than brads. You could check them out and read them and take them back in. And it was a great experience for me to read all of these scripts from classic movies I loved but also things that had never been produced and it was a really good experience.

So, I think reading scripts is fantastic. But, now there’s the Internet and now there are PDFs of screenplays. And so while Kofi can’t find all the screenplays he wants to read, he can find a ton of them. I mean, even just in Weekend Read we have hundreds of scripts. Things that are going for awards, those are posted online and those things are easy to find. It’s harder to find the scripts for movies that are not sort of award contenders. But, you can kind of find them.

But Kofi’s more interesting point is he wants to read the episodic scripts. Those are harder to find. You tend to find pilots or just those marquee episodes of things. And it’s great to read the normal episodes. That’s one of those things where it actually is much easier to do if you are in this town. Because then you just have networks and assistants at places who can get you copies of scripts. They’re not really under lock and key. They don’t have a lot of value in and of themselves. You can’t do anything with the scripts and so no one is trying to sort of keep them from you. But what Craig said is like it’s no one’s job to publish them or post them. That’s why they don’t happen.

**Craig:** That’s why they don’t happen. Well, keep looking. And by the way, Kofi, spent a lot of time in the mall over there in Woodbridge myself, so just waving hi to you back there in the old country.

And we’ve got one more question here from Cory right here in LA who writes, “I’ve got an award-winning short film and I just hired a screenwriter to adapt it into a feature. Though I’ve come up with much of the story, he will be hitting the keys to bring the story and script together. I am a one-man production band with a small production company. I’d like to make sure that I am setting both he and I up for success.” That should be him and I. Setting both him and me. Yeah. Because, right. Anyway.

“I’d like to make sure that I’m setting both him and me up for success and possible WGA membership or eligible points toward. First, should or must I make my company a WGA signatory? Second, since I or rather my company is self-financing his writing of the screenplay do I need to adhere to WGA payment standards to allow him eligibility? Finally, if I’m the creator of the original work and I’ve come up and will be credited with Story By is there an opportunity for me to earn WGA points or is that just for the screenwriter?”

Oh, excellent list of membership questions there, John. What do you think?

**John:** Absolutely. So, I don’t have all the answers but I will tell you that you’re not the first person to encounter this and I think the WGA has done a much better job over the last ten years dealing with these kinds of situations. I think Howard Rodman deserves a lot of the credit for that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you’re describing is probably a low budget independent film. And if you go to the WGA website there are resources there to talk you through what happens with low budget independent films. Classically these were done outside of WGA jurisdiction. But recognizing that some of the best work was happening there and this was obviously writer’s first work they set up these low budget agreements so that you can do this kind of stuff. That you don’t have to pay people the full amounts for writing services and other things but still allows for things like credit protections. It allows for other parts of what you get with a WGA package for these productions.

So, I suspect you will click through on the site, we’ll put a link in the show notes, and see what you need to do and how you sort of put the script into a place where it’s eligible for these low budget agreements. And I don’t think you will have to become a full signatory. I think there’s just ways you can sort of use an associate membership to get you started here. So, it’s good you’re doing it. It’s good you’re thinking about this now. But just read the stuff and then make the thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Definitely you want to take a look at that low budget independent film agreement. To become a full-fledged WGA signatory there are quite a few hoops to jump through. I mean, it’s not trial by fire or anything, but for instance you need to show that you have enough financial resources to be able to cover your residuals obligations. So in this case because it’s just you and this is just one independent film I think that’s the way to go. Take a look at it.

In terms of credit, the original work will be considered source material. It was written outside of the WGA so it will be based on a short film by blah-blah-blah. If you want proper WGA story credit, on the title page of the screenplay it would need to say Screenplay by Jim, Story by Jim and Corey. And that, of course, requires Jim to agree. The truth is the story in the original film is essentially akin to the story in a novel. The novelist doesn’t automatically get WGA credit for the movie of it. They have to actually do some work. So in this case what you would need to do to warrant Story by credit or Shared Story by credit is to work up a written story for the new movie that you’re talking about, either on your own or with the screenwriter that you’re hiring, and then that is now part of this chain of title of the work that’s leading up to this film that would be covered by the independent film low budget agreement.

Hopefully that makes sense.

**John:** I think it makes sense.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing feels like a Craig One Cool Thing, but it’s the story in the New York Times by Moises Velasquez-Manoff and it’s about how emergency rooms and other medical professionals are starting to examine ketamine as a suicide prevention or a suicide drug for dealing with people who show up suicidal and it seems like it is potentially a quick life-saving drug to be using for people with severe suicide ideation.

So, it’s a really nicely written up story about the potential of a drug which we only think of in sort of bad context possibly having some really good uses.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a fascinating article. Totally my kind of thing. Ketamine is one of these drugs that’s been around for a long time and it’s kind of one of those – I think the World Health Organization has their list of essential medicines, like if you were building your doomsday locker of medicines you’d want ketamine in there. It is a sedative. It is kind of a tranquilizer sort of thing. It can be used anesthetically, you know.

And what they found, and I didn’t realize this, but in this article they are saying that very small doses of ketamine can almost stop suicidal ideation in its tracks. So you have somebody coming in who is in severe distress who was just taken by the cops off of the side of a bridge and brought to the emergency room and you give them this tiny injection of ketamine and suddenly they don’t have that anymore. They don’t want to jump.

And, now, that doesn’t last obviously, right? So then there’s work to be done after that. But what they’re pointing out is that suicidal ideation, kind of underlying depression, to reverse that pharmacologically with say serotonin reuptake inhibitors takes weeks. Maybe months. Same thing with talk therapy. But if you need to make sure that someone doesn’t hurt themselves over the two, three, four weeks, this may be a viable deal.

Now, part of the issue is that it can be used recreationally and if there’s a certain dosage you start to have hallucinations and, you know, psychoactive effects. So, that’s why I think in general people are a little, you know, but we have to kind of get over some of this stuff. You know?

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Doctors in the emergency rooms are pretty good at figuring out who is there because they’re actually suicidal and who is pretending to be because they feel like getting a ketamine dose.

**John:** You look at sort of this work, you look at work on LSD, you look at work on ecstasy, these are clearly drugs that should be studied for what they can do in a clinical setting and sort of what good can come out of them. But instead they sort of become demonized because of dangerous uses of them recreationally.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we wouldn’t use them recreationally if they didn’t work on some level. So, yeah, obviously how much we use and all the rest. So, anyway, that was really promising. So you did that and I went the other direction. I went all the way over into computer world. So I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption 2, of course, and I want to call out the people that worked on the environment because it’s so good. It’s the best environment experience I’ve ever had playing a videogame.

There was a moment where – it’s not just the detail of the appearance of things, which is quite extraordinary. But it’s the way it interacts sort of synergistically. Just sort of trotting along on my horse and I’m going through sort of a path with some trees on either side and the wind kind of blows and leaves rustle off the trees and kind of swirl in the air around me and then fall to the ground. And I’m like, what? This is getting good.

The wind people talked to the tree people. And then the tree people decided, you know what, some leaves come off when wind blows but not a lot of them, not all of them, and how do they come off? And what happens when they go? And it’s perfect. It’s really amazing how well they did with those little things. And you and I know because we work in movies and television how much work goes into making something look effortless.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** God only knows how many hours were spent trying to make the wind make the leaves go just right. It’s really well done. So, tip of the hat. My One Cool Thing this week the people that did the environment in Red Dead 2.

**John:** Very nice. Those leaf physicists, they did God’s work there.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael O’Konis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

But short questions are great on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

You can find the links in the show notes for the things we talked about, so that’s at johnaugust.com. Just follow through to the links there. Or if you’re listening to this on most of the players swipe and you will see a list of links there.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. While you’re there, leave us a review. Those are lovely. We need to read some of those reviews aloud so we’ll try to remember to do that.

Transcripts go up within the week and so you can find transcripts for all the episodes back to the first episode. You can find the audio for all our episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

**John:** Craig, I will see you tomorrow for the live show.

**Craig:** See you tomorrow for the live show, John.

**John:** Bye.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. And it is now time for our bonus segment. So bonus segments are just for you premium members who are paying us $4.99 a month. That $4.99 a month pays for a lot of things, including the salary of our producer Megana Rao who is now sitting across from me and smiling.

Megana Rao: Thank you, Premium members.

**John:** You picked this episode for our rebroadcast today. What made this stand out for you?

**Megana:** So this is a craft episode that I really like and I think it’s something that I personally struggle with is, you know, making things difficult for your characters because I think at the point that I am on a project that I’m working on it’s like, oh, I really like these characters and then making them go through conflict is something that I viscerally feel as I’m writing it. And so it’s something that I feel like I, like a lot of writers, need to push myself because that’s what makes good storytelling.

**John:** Yeah. So not only do you produce the show every week, but you actually go back and listen to earlier episodes. How much of the back catalog have you gotten through at this point?

**Megana:** I think I’ve gotten through a decent amount.

**John:** All right. A decent amount being 10%?

**Megana:** Oh, gosh, there’s a lot of episodes. No, I think over 30%.

**John:** OK, that’s really good. But of course there are premium members who have listened to every single episode and are like how could she possible produce without listening to every episode. We had Zoanne Clack on the show and she produces Grey’s Anatomy. And she was saying when they hire on a staff writer they expect them to have watched every episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

**Megana:** Well, I was really ambitious when I first started. And every time I’m like, yeah, I’m going to do it and I get through – like I’ve done the first 15 episodes of every season stack for sure.

**John:** So, what kinds of things are you learning from the show that are applying to what you’re doing now as an aspiring writer? And what stuff do you still feel like you’re still missing? What kind of advice have you not gotten on Scriptnotes that we need to make sure we start hitting?

**Megana:** So I think the craft stuff is – and as we’re working on the Scriptnotes book I’m just like, wow, what an incredible trove of information. And I should really listen to it more. But, I mean, I do read it and listen to it a lot. But I think something that I’ve been wondering and have been wanting to get your take on is when you are having a meeting in the industry what does success look like, because we work in the entertainment industry so people are very charming and great to talk to. And so it’s kind of confusing afterwards to measure how well it went or how I should be thinking about it.

**John:** Because right now you’re at a phase that I remember very distinctly when I was first starting, because you’re going to a lot of general meetings and a lot of sit-downs and hey-how-are-yous and you’re doing the water bottle tour of Los Angeles [unintelligible]. I guess actually you’re not going into people’s offices. You’re meeting for coffees? How are you doing these general meetings?

**Megana:** Some are for coffees, but I think because of the pandemic mostly Zooms.

**John:** Mostly Zooms. So a thing my first agent did which I think was a smart choice, he just sent me out on like – he just shotgunned me out into meetings. I took way too many meetings. And you just get better at taking meetings. And so it sounds like your meetings are going well, but you’re having a hard time figuring out what’s the next step, or how to go from like oh that was nice in the room but will I ever work with this person again.

**Megana:** Right. And the thing that I am sort of looking to decode is you know when you go on a date and you’re like waiting to hear what the last thing the person says, because it’s different if they’re saying, “Hey, it was really nice to meet you, or I had a really good time,” versus, “Can I get your number? I’d love to see you again.” And so what does that look like in the entertainment industry or after a general meeting?

**John:** So as you wrap up a general there will be that sense of like it was really nice to meet you, just a very classic thing, like we should look for things to do together. Great. That’s sort of the generic version. And it’s not a brush off. It’s just there’s not a specific next step they’re looking to take. If they really were intrigued by you and sort of like, “Oh, I really want to talk to you more about this specific thing,” they’ll bring up that specific thing.

**Megana:** OK.

**John:** Or if there’s something that you mentioned in the meeting and you were like, “Oh, we both really want to do something that’s based on Norse mythology.” And they’re like, “Oh, let me send you this stuff and we can keep up that conversation.” And so sometimes those will happen at the end of the general, or sort of a first meeting. Other times they won’t. You have to be comfortable with sometimes meetings are just meh.

Like when I went over to Verve. You were there for that. And I went out on a bunch of general meetings and a lot of them were just kind of, “So, we now know each other.” If something down the road comes up they actually feel like they could come out to me for a project. And a lot of what you’re doing now is sort of that.

**Megana:** So I guess also as a writer what responsibility do I have to follow up?

**John:** I think your responsibility to follow up with the good ones. The ones you actually think like oh I would like to work with this person, yeah, it’s good to reach out. And so that’s a case where it’s like, hey, can I have your email. Or you can get the email from the agents to say like, hey, I really enjoyed meeting with you about this. I wanted to talk to you about these specific things. Or this is a thing I’ve been working on that I’d love to talk with you more about.

To me, and people can disagree, I don’t think you owe a thank you note to a general meeting, or that kind of stuff. It’s just like if there was chemistry there was chemistry on both sides and it sort of is like dating. You don’t have to send a thank you for dinner at the end of it.

**Megana:** OK. That makes sense.

**John:** Now something you were talking about at lunch was when you have a meeting with somebody and they’ve read something of yours and they start giving you notes on it. And that’s a weird situation. Can you describe in a general sense what it was like?

**Megana:** I feel like in a lot of meetings there’s questions and constructive feedback or nice – I’m trying to avoid the word saying compliments – but, yeah, it’s nice that they’ll compliment my work. But then a couple of times they will have specific notes or want to do a follow up call with notes. And the notes are great, but I’m confused about whether I should act on them and what that means. Because we don’t have a clear plan forward.

**John:** And that sort of gets back into the dating. Are we actually trying to start a relationship here, or are you just sort of like giving me constructive feedback because you think it could actually think this thing and help me as a writer. And that’s a case where your reps, your agents, or your managers can sort of help suss out is this a person we really think could do this project, because if so then maybe it’s worth really investing the time with them and sort of working through that.

If not, then it’s just great to get their feedback. And if you’re getting consistent feedback about these things you could consider making those changes. But the stuff you have out there right now in the world is something that could get made but it’s really there as a writing sample for you to get hired for other jobs. So it should not be the primary focus is to be rewriting that stuff you’ve already been writing.

**Megana:** Totally.

**John:** An experience I definitely had in those early meetings is they’ll pull out a box of like these are all the things I’m working on. And have they sort of presented that list of the things that they are working on?

**Megana:** Yeah. And I’m always like – I mean, people are just so good at pitching their projects. It’s like the most fun part of the meeting to just listen to all of these great stories.

**John:** Sometimes they’re saying, “OK, we’d like to consider you for this thing,” but other times you get a sense of the kinds of things they’re looking for. Really getting the sense of like what things are going to spark for you that are really priorities for them and how you can sort of like keep that conversation going about like oh this is a thing we want to see happen together.

You’ll also be in some meetings where you’re just like this is not a fit. And the meeting should just end. Just like a bad date.

**Megana:** Yeah. Yeah. Well, thankfully they’ve all been really good so far and the people that I’ve met have been lovely.

**John:** Cool. Thank you, Megana, for producing this show every week. And thank you to our premium members for supporting the podcast.

**Megana:** Thank you guys. Thanks John.

Links:

* The Team America: World Police [puke scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKqGXeX9LhQ), with some bad language
* The opening of [Finding Nemo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG3L98NFyro)
* Aslan’s sacrifice in [The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ6VAGyhWXM)
* [Can We Stop Suicides?](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/opinion/sunday/suicide-ketamine-depression.html) by Moises Velasquez-Manoff for the New York Times
* The environment in [Red Dead Redemption 2](https://www.rockstargames.com/reddeadredemption2/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael O’Konis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli). And special thanks to Megan McDonnell, the original producer of this episode!

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/378rebroadcaststandard.mp3).