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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/18606).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi folks. This episode does contain some strong language so put in those ear buds, put in those headphones. Keep those children safe.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 445 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today it’s our very first ever live video Scriptnotes. We have some number of people watching us live on YouTube, each of them wondering, wait, is that what Craig and John actually look like?

**Craig:** No. This is not what we look like.

**John:** No. So we do live shows fairly often, a couple times a year. We do one in Austin generally. We do a holiday show. This is a special occasion so we’re doing one live streaming on the Internet. People aren’t really here to see us. They’re here to see our two very special guests who we’re going to bring out in a moment. We’re also today going to have a game segment. We’re going to have audience questions. So it will be like our normal live show, except I won’t have had 1.5 glasses of wine which is the amount of wine I need basically to do a live show.

**Craig:** And that’s a bummer because you will be 1.5 times less entertaining. I’m just going to be honest.

**John:** Yes. So, this is 10am. We’re recording this on a Saturday in Los Angeles. But people around the world are watching this which is so exciting. So, as we’re talking right now I now see that there are, let’s see, how many people are watching this? 654 people–

**Craig:** We’re on our way to 14,000 which is my – that’s my target, 14,000. Yeah. Seems reasonable. A small arena. That’s how I work.

**John:** So this is free for the world. This is not a fundraiser for anything. This is just a morale raiser. But for Premium subscribers, Craig you don’t know that we’re going to do this. We’re going to do a postmortem after the show, maybe tomorrow we’ll record this, to figure out what we learned and what went well and what went wrong in the process.

**Craig:** Great. I’m sure that under what went wrong I will feature heavily.

**John:** [laughs] It is a weird moment in which we’re all now just broadcasters. Somehow we’re supposed to be doing television, just everyone.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it turns out that broadcasting is not the rare talent that we were all told it was.

**John:** Mm-mm. Anybody can do it in their basement.

**Craig:** Yeah. People would say you’re no brain surgeon or radio broadcaster. Well, we’re all–

**John:** We’re all broadcasters now.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re all broadcasters now. It’s not hard. It’s not hard.

**John:** All right. Let us welcome our two very, very special guests. First off can I welcome Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She is an Emmy, Golden Globe-winning writer, and actor, whose credits include Killing Eve and Fleabag. She’s joining us from London. Phoebe Bridge, please turn on your camera and join us on Scriptnotes.

**Phoebe Waller-Bridge:** Hey.

**John:** Phoebe!

**Craig:** There she is.

**Phoebe:** We did it!

**John:** We did it.

**Craig:** She looks just like she does on TV. It’s amazing.

**John:** It’s incredible. Actors are wonderful, beautiful people.

**Phoebe:** I know.

**John:** Phoebe it is so wonderful to have you here. Thank you so much. It’s a fantasy to have you on the show at all, but to have you all the way from London is a special, special treat.

**Phoebe:** Thanks for having me.

**John:** Our second guest, Ryan Reynolds is an actor, writer, producer, gin magnate, and somehow a wireless provider. He’s known for such films as Deadpool and The Nines. Ryan Reynolds—

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Ryan Reynolds:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Hey!

**John:** Ryan Reynolds!

**Ryan:** You forgot some of my awards like MTV Movie Award Best Kiss nominee 1998.

**Craig:** Good year.

**Ryan:** Very good year.

**Craig:** Who won? Who could have possibly beaten you?

**Ryan:** I think Tobey Maguire. Pretty sure it was Tobey Maguire. Hi everybody.

**John:** Ooh.

**Ryan:** This is very exciting.

**John:** It’s nice to have everyone here together, around the world, to talk and do things. And we’re all looking directly at our camera lenses which is something which is a question I want to start off asking the two of you about, because last week on the show we were talking about Clueless. We did a deep dive on Clueless which is one of my favorite movies of all time. And we were talking about how important Cher’s narration was in Clueless because she is talking directly to us as an audience about her experiences and we would not understand the movie without that.

But the two of you are known for looking directly at the lens and talking to the audience and having a relationship with the audience as characters which is so different from most movies. So let’s start with you, Phoebe. As a writer and as a performer how do you make that decision to suddenly start talking directly to the people watching and what’s the decision process in terms of when is the right time to break that seal?

**Phoebe:** Well Fleabag started as a play and it was a one-woman play. So that was all directed to the audience anyway. And I always felt like I wanted the audiences’ experience to be that they feel like they know someone really intimately and then they get sort of betrayed by her halfway through. So it starts off as a sort of mini sort of standup act. And then you realize halfway through that actually there’s sort of more going on. And that by the time you like her and she’s made you laugh she then divulges things to you that you feel uncomfortable about but you feel complicit in that moment. And so bringing that into the TV show sort of felt like a no-brainer.

But then what was hard was that when I was doing the play I was the only person there. It was a lonely experience. And also I was in total – the character in that was completely in control of the narrative. Whereas suddenly in the TV show there’s actual real life things happening around that are also truthful. So I had to kind of shift it so she wasn’t just the only person describing the world. You could see the world. So then it had to become about her – about having fun with it a bit more. So she would tell you someone was going to behave in a certain way and then they don’t. And then she’s actually a bit knocked by that. So lots of little sort of games and stuff that we were playing throughout it.

But overall for me in the TV show it was to create a relationship between Fleabag and the camera that actually changed and evolved itself. So, at the beginning she’s sort of like, “Come in. This is going to be fun, and sexy, and cool, and I’m in total control.” And then by the end of the first season the camera won’t leave when she wants it to. So she’s like, “Oh, fuck, I should never have done that. I should never have let you in.” So sort of made it a central relationship.

**Craig:** Is there any parallel to your actual life now that the camera will not leave you alone? Oh, fuck, why did I do that?

**Phoebe:** I mean, yeah. It cuts quite close to the bone there, Craig.

**Craig:** Good. That’s my job here is to upset. Ryan, say something that I can then make you feel bad about.

**Ryan:** Oh, please, there’s ideas, a whole list alphabetical and chronological that you could probably make me feel bad about.

**John:** But Ryan I was going to say as long as I’ve known you you’ve been trying to make the Deadpool movie. So you were always obsessed with this character and this character in the comic books did break that fourth wall and seemed to be aware that he was in a comic book. But at what stage did it become clear that, oh, in playing this role I will be directly addressing the audience? There’s going to be a relationship between me and the audience that’s different than sort of a normal hero.

**Ryan:** On Deadpool in particular he has a very intimate relationship with the audience. I mean, even by virtue of the fact that Deadpool exists is exclusively because of the Internet and the audience that made it happen after the test footage leaked that we’d made years before. They were the ones that sort of generated the energy that convinced the studio to say, yes, we’ll make this film.

So, it sort of started off that way and I love it. I love how intimate – there’s an intimate relationship there. Deadpool is constantly acknowledging and playing with the cultural landscape. And I think in doing that there’s a bit of a nod-nod-wink-wink with the audience. So, it’s always been – it’s just something to be judicious about with us. I find that less is more with it. I mean, by the second movie I think we’d done it about half as much as the first one. But I do love it. I do love a good fourth-wall break.

**Craig:** There’s something about that connection that both of you guys do that I find fascinating in its relationship to comedy particular. Because I do love comedy, you’re both hysterical. Fleabag is wonderfully funny. Deadpool is wonderfully funny. But you are also talking to the man that was crying on a plane at the end of Deadpool 2. Crying. Like a lot. [laughs] And I was crying a lot because I cared.

**Ryan:** The efficacy of alcohol is much more severe on an airplane.

**Craig:** I wasn’t even drinking. I was not drinking. It was just that because you loved her and you got to say goodbye. Anyway, the point is when you are having these conversations with people it seems to me that you are also getting at something that is true underneath comedy in general which is that funny characters at their best are funny because we understand also that they are sad. That in some way there is something profoundly sad about everyone that is being really, really funny.

And I’m curious what you think about that in terms of how you create your particular characters that you’re so well known for and why people connect to them so well, especially when they’re kind of one-on-one.

**Ryan:** Hopefully this will be pithy, but I do think that the key difference is one is obnoxious and then funny to me is usually steeped or filtered through some kind of prism of pain or you’ve earned it in some way, otherwise you’re just spouting obnoxious jokes. So, that’s always the trick. I know certainly for Deadpool it was always a trick to weight the B side of everything or the A side depending on how it’s constructed but with some pathos or some kind of pain. And it’s also what I find most challenging about writing on Deadpool is that we really have to take everything away from this guy in order for him to exist, otherwise he would just be too much. So you have to – for both of those movies – we have to strip everything that he holds dear away in order to create this real estate in which we can sort of create a bit of a playground. So making that guy the underdog by virtue of his face, he’s all sort of scarred up. He looks sort of hideous under the mask. All those kinds of things. Those are all, I think, those are all the key ingredients to allowing this guy to sort of spread his wings and fly and be as funny as possible.

So, that’s the sort of unsexy work that goes into it. But I do think, I just don’t want to forget this, I think the most beautiful use of a fourth wall breakup I’ve ever seen is Phoebe’s in the last season of Fleabag. That goodbye was, uh, it just – it pulled every vital source of oxygen out of my body. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

**Craig:** It’s also, I mean, let’s just buff her up a little bit more here. The moment where Andrew Scott notices the camera was one of the first acts of actual cinematic invention I think I’ve seen ever. Because I think by the time like I came along in 1971 they’d invented everything. We had flashbacks and montages. People had broken the fourth. But that was astonishing. It was so astonishing – it was a brand new way to tell people in an audience she’s in love with him and he’s special and he deserves it because he’s on that – what a brilliant…what a brilliant thing to do.

Why are you so smart? There’s your question.

**Phoebe:** Um…well. I’m going to put it down to, do you ever – I don’t know if you guys have this, but you know sometimes when you slightly dissociate yourself from ideas that you have? Because that one I do – I remember having that idea really early on before I’d even come up with the character of the priest. Thinking, fuck, that is smart. And it happens but it’s like outside of you, so like all the painful stuff happens like when you’re actually trying to make something work or fit together, but there are moments – and literally I was thinking – it was less of “fuck this is smart,” more like “that will be cool.” And it just affected me in a way.

And I thought but what would that mean for her? Because I think like Ryan was saying you’re constantly trying to find a way to throw rocks at your characters and like especially if they’re funny. Because being funny takes a confidence. And also to be able to be relentlessly funny takes an awful lot of effort. And I think if you meet people in real life who are just like constantly on, you know, you think the [unintelligible] so hard underneath and you think why are you working so hard?

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**Phoebe:** And what are you hiding?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Phoebe:** What happens when you stop? And in some ways that was what the idea when Fleabag began anyway was that she was just the first five minutes of this, like when I first started writing the play was just joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. And I was getting exhausted. And I was like she is clearly miserable. And then it was finding out what that was.

But I also think there’s g really heroic about people who try and be funny. Because you can die multiple times in a moment and there’s a real risk in it. And so people being really funny in a really heartbreaking situation can feel both heroic or can feel kind of cowardly at the same time. And I think that’s a really fun thing to be able to play with in a moment. And also the moments that the character isn’t funny, or doesn’t crack a joke and actually lets you in a little bit, is a really powerful tool to have.

**Craig:** Right.

**Phoebe:** But I think, yeah, I have to believe that the funniest people in the world are in deep, deep pain. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yes.

**Phoebe:** Like you say, otherwise it is just endlessly – they just get boring after a while.

**John:** So a question for both Phoebe and Ryan, as you’re doing asides to the camera, as you’re having this direct relationship with the audience, as the writer and as the actor who are you seeing there as the audience? Are you really playing it to the camera operator right behind that? Or are you trying to picture the viewer at home? Who is the person you’re having a relationship with when you’re doing these asides?

**Ryan:** I mean, I typically just right down the barrel. I’m also not, you know, I don’t come from any particular – as you may or not know – school of acting. So I don’t have – person, tennis ball, whatever. [laughs] You know, I can do it. So I don’t need to have that extra feedback in order to kind of pull off the two camera look. It dos help if I enjoy the A-camera operator in the moment because, you know, I feel like you’re sort of delivering it right to him, or her. But that’s, yeah, no, it’s just right down the barrel.

If the camera is too close, though, you can get a little cross-eyed. And I’m naturally cross-eyed, so it’s already an uphill battle.

**John:** Phoebe who is the audience as you’re doing your things?

**Phoebe:** Just the audience. I think I’m the same. I didn’t think of anything too romantic to think about because I don’t know how I’d act that actually, how I’m going to act continuously that there’s another mysterious person that I’m thinking of and trying to communicate that to the audience would feel like a complicated message to get over which is why I think.

So, yeah, I just imagined an audience. And also I felt like the part of it that Fleabag was just desperately trying to keep their attention. So every time looking at the camera was stay with me, I’m here. And then when it changed it would be like, oh, don’t look at me. So sometimes it was a happy welcoming thing, and sometimes it would feel like, you know, an evil eye.

But, yeah, the relationship with my DP who was the camera operator as well was really important, especially when he was like, “Put your face down. You look gross.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Phoebe:** It’s like, “Head up. Head up.” But I really loved in Deadpool 1 as well that really little moment when you just pushed the camera aside and you just give us that little break. And you go, “I don’t think you guys want to see that.” And the fact that he has care for us in it really – because there’s so much bravado and then he’s actually like, “Oh, actually give yourself a break.” I really loved that bit.

**Craig:** Fleabag and the Deadpool movies both have this meta awareness which does not undermine the reality of what they’re doing at all. It kind of oddly enhances it. It’s a common thing I think for people to think when they’re writing something that if you start to break the fourth wall what you’re doing is blowing apart the reality of the situation therefore people will not care about the characters.

So, I’m kind of curious as you guys went through this process, and Ryan I know you were writing on Deadpool 2, as you were writing was this a concern that maybe by doing this too much or in the wrong places that you would undermine what was real and what people would care about, or did you have an innate sense that if it was done in certain ways and certain times it would actually make us connect more to the fake reality of the world you were building?

**Ryan:** I think it’s both. I think it’s a cheat, for me at least. I’m not going to speak for Phoebe or anyone else. But for me it’s a bit of a cheat, you know. I think you want to be very judicious with it and you want to make sure that you’re not overdoing it obviously. But there’s a whole sequence. I remember, I don’t know about you guys, but I find I can spend two days – first off, let me just say this is the perfect [unintelligible] – I hate writing. I just hate it. It’s the worst thing ever.

**Craig:** No, that’s accurate.

**Ryan:** I find that I can get fixated on two lines for like four straight days. I can just be hammering away, fixated on these two when I should just be moving on. And then other days I can put out 20, 30 pages. But I remember there was this one scene in Deadpool which is like a 15-page scene which is already a bit of a no-no in a film—

**Craig:** Slightly.

**Ryan:** Yeah. But it’s a scene where Deadpool has lost the lower half of his body and he has these little child legs growing back. And I loved writing it because as long as you can go in the scene without revealing these child legs to me was very funny. And then we get into some kind of weird cinematic trope where I break the fourth wall and I – oh, we’re talking about time travel that was it, which is also another just horrendous thing to write.

And I remember breaking the fourth wall and saying, “That’s just lazy writing.” So, you know, really that’s a complete cheat because that was lazy writing and we’re forgiven for it to a certain degree by acknowledging that it’s lazy writing. And then kind of carrying on.

But I tend to use it initially as a crutch a lot. And it’s rarely written into the screenplays. I mean, Deadpool we almost never wrote it in. And then Deadpool 2 I think it was written in at one point during an extraordinarily belabored death sequence at the end of the movie. I just did a couple in the script. I wrote, you know, “straight to camera.” But other than that we didn’t, you know.

**Phoebe:** You had decided to do it before filming though? But it wasn’t in the script?

**Ryan:** Oh yes. Oh, 100%. Yes. Breaking the fourth wall. That’s actually not an invention of ours. That’s from the comic books. He’s constantly talking to the reader in the comics. But we did this elaborate death sequence at the end of Deadpool 2 and I was just doing everything – at one point I even did somebody’s award speech from the Golden Globes straight to camera. It was another person’s. Absolutely kitchen sink type stuff.

**Phoebe:** Oh, I can see just that moment right now.

**Ryan:** Right. Just on and on and on and on. But it was, yeah, I do love it. I mean, I do really love that sort of after a while it creates a bit of a trust I think there. And just as long as you don’t overdo it.

**Craig:** You planned for it to happen but you did not plan ahead in terms of actually writing what it was that you were going to say or even when it was going to happen.

**Ryan:** No.

**Craig:** Whereas Phoebe, I’m just going to go out on a limb here and think that you planned it all pretty carefully because you were coming from the stage where obviously you had to perform every night in the same way.

**Phoebe:** Yeah, yeah. And I crumble under the pressure to be able to be spontaneous with the straight to camera. I would lean on the script. In terms of how many times I spoke to the camera that was really scripted. But there were looks that weren’t scripted. I went with abandon with that when we were shooting. And then we just took them all out.

**Craig:** Not all.

**Phoebe:** I was like being all creative. And there’s a cut of the first episode of the second series when I just wanted to see what it looked like when there was just no looks to camera or no talking to camera at all. And my poor editor Gary was sort of like, “Are we really going to do this?” And just to see how it sits without it so you can feel the impact of it again. And we just scripted so far back, because I think it can get irritating because there’s a self-awareness about it and somebody being consistently self-aware all the time is a bit like the same thing as someone making jokes the whole time. But it’s almost like commenting on what’s happening. And so I did put it back quite a lot.

But, god, I really went for it in a few scenes and it’s a shame. It’s a shame.

**Ryan:** You would side eye the camera, though, which was just one of my favorite things that you would do. In an emotional moment there would just be this little side eye glance to the camera. Oh, it was such a great use of it.

**Craig:** I do them sometimes. I try and do them. Like in my house sometimes if something happens—

**Ryan:** Always.

**Craig:** And I screw up. There’s one thing that I always do from the Howard Stern movie Private Parts where he’s gotten his first job at a radio station and he pours Dr. Pepper on a record and he goes [laughs like Howard] and I’ll do that any time I drop something. And now if I screw something up or somebody says something ridiculous I’ll just sometimes look over. I’ll look over to a Fleabag camera and just go…

**Phoebe:** Oh good. Good.

**Craig:** You’ve ruined me.

**John:** Nice. Well, let’s talk about self-awareness because both of you are writing things in which you are going to star. And you’re going to be the principal person we’re going to see on screen. And it must change your relationship to the material and to all your collaborators. So you are the person, you’re the face of this thing, but you have directors, you have producers, you have other actors in the thing. How do you balance, and especially both in production, but when you get to post, how do you balance your relationship as the person who created this thing with the person who is the centerpiece star of it? How do you take in outside feedback to make sure you’re doing the right things? You are the center of this whole project. How do you make sure that it actually makes sense? Who do you turn to and how do you have those conversations?

Ryan, I’ll start with you. Who do you enlist in your circle of trust because the camera is aimed at you and you’re talking directly to the camera, how do you know when you’ve gone too far? How do you know when to rein it back in?

**Ryan:** First off, fuck everyone else’s opinion.

**Craig:** There we go. There it is. I knew it. I knew it.

**Ryan:** Secondly, no. I am so self-loathing. You know, look, this panel of people right here have forgotten more about screenwriting on this call than I’ll ever know.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Ryan:** I’ll start with that. But I’ll say this, though. I am so self-loathing that there is no part of me that is really precious about more me in anything. I do struggle, you know, this film I did this year called Free Guy, which is one of my favorite things that I’ve ever been a part of, I struggled writing other people in it. Not myself so much, but I did struggle making sure that their voices felt three-dimensional and important. It’s easy to give other people jokes. But, yeah, in the post-production process sitting in there I had no problem. My biggest problem is pulling out too much stuff. You know, I’ll start to – I’ll pull stuff out and the editor or in this case Shawn Levy who I was working with, the director and producer, he would say that you’re taking out exposition at this point. You’re taking out important information that we need to know. Just because you don’t want yourself…

So, yeah, that’s never been a huge problem of mine. But then there’s also – the flip side is I can get a little crazy about certain jokes or beats or things that are for whatever reason super important to me. But, you know, I take feedback in a test audience the same way anyone else takes feedback in a test audience. I can walk away and if there’s a resounding no to something then it’s got to go.

**Craig:** Phoebe, self-loathing also?

**Phoebe:** Yeah, huge amounts of self-loathing. All the way through every part of the process. I lean really heavily on my director, Harry Bradbeer, and my producer, Tony Robbins. Because they are really brutally honest. No matter how much that hurts it’s so valuable. But also there’s sometimes when I, from a performance point of view, I feel there’s so much going on. Sometimes I just wouldn’t know. And feeling like you’re in it when you’re also running it and that kind of stuff is a luxury. I don’t feel very in it all the time as an actor. I don’t actually know if I’ve felt like that to be honest. It’s so bad.

But so I would – I’d just be like is it funny, is it sad? Basically is like the question that would be thrown across the set. Sad enough? And Harry would be like, “Sadder.”

So, I really rely on them. And then I suppose, I can’t remember what the other thing I was going to say. What was the other thing that Ryan said?

**Ryan:** I don’t know. No idea.

**Craig:** He’s not good at writing. And…

**Ryan:** And now, yeah.

**Phoebe:** Oh yeah, he’s a terrible actor. He’s terrible at writing. Really bad at producing.

**Ryan:** I’m OK at some stuff. I’m OK – I can drink like a fish. Yeah.

**John:** Ryan, I think we can help you out because from the very start of Scriptnotes we’ve been trying to offer sort of useful advice. And to steer people away from bad advice that they often get as screenwriters. Because new screenwriters are sort of inundated – they read the books. They go online. They look through all these guides to teaching you how to be a better screenwriter, how to even get started as a screenwriter. So I thought we might play a game the four of us together to figure out sort of like how to sort through the good advice and the bad advice.

So what I did last night is I went online and I Googled “screenwriting mistakes” and I pulled some of the advice I found online about screenwriting mistakes. And I’m going to invite on a contestant to play this game with us.

**Craig:** Hey Paige.

**Paige Feldman:** Hi.

**Phoebe:** Hi Paige!

**John:** Paige, can you introduce yourself?

**Paige:** Hi, I am Paige Feldman. I’m a writer and director. I’m living in Los Angeles. I just signed my first feature deal like on Monday.

**Phoebe:** Yay.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** How about that? We have really – I mean, our listeners are quality.

**John:** Yes.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, Paige, this is going to be a game segment. So what I’ve done is I’ve pulled this advice from the Internet but it also introduced some things I just made up myself. And so your job is going to be to figure out what was real bad advice and what is fake bad advice. And so as a new screenwriter this is important stuff for you to figure out.

Now, I should ask you have you ever played on a game show before?

**Paige:** Yes. I was a contestant on Jeopardy! in the teen tournament when I was 16.

**Craig:** Wait, hold on. Hold on.

**Phoebe:** What?

**Craig:** Where have you been all my life?

**Ryan:** Yeah buddy. Let’s walk that back a second.

**John:** Paige, you have to tell us about this teen tournament. So, how did you do? What were the questions that got you? Tell us.

**Paige:** So, I lost in the first round. Lost on Final Jeopardy!

**John:** What was the answer, what was the question? Let’s see if we can get it. Craig will probably get it. We’ll see.

**Craig:** I’ll try. I’ll try.

**Paige:** In 1859 this man said to Horace Greeley, “I have 15 wives. I know no one who has more.”

**Craig:** Ooh, that was 18-what?

**Paige:** I think it was ’59. I mean, it was in 2001 that I was on the show so this is—

**Phoebe:** Have you got people in your head for the other years, Craig?

**John:** I was going to guess Brigham Young, but I’m not sure.

**Craig:** I was going to guess Joseph Smith, but I don’t think we’re right.

**Ryan:** I was gonna go Joseph Smith.

**Craig:** [laughs] That was the fakest – I was Brigham Smitherson.

**John:** Paige, what is the answer?

**Paige:** It was Brigham Young.

**Craig:** Oh, you got it. Great. You picked the right Mormon.

**Phoebe:** Oh my god.

**Ryan:** John August!

**Paige:** You could have won the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament, John.

**Ryan:** Wow.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Who did you pick out of curiosity, Paige?

**Paige:** I had absolutely no idea because I didn’t know who Horace Greeley was when I was 16. So, I just—

**Ryan:** For shame!

**Paige:** I just chose the only person I knew who had a lot of wives which was Henry VIII, even though I knew he only had six. And I enjoyed myself on the show until I got eliminated and then I got to watch all of my friends do fantastically. So.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I hope that they all paid for it somehow.

**John:** Let’s hope you can do better on this one. I think you probably will do better on this one.

**Craig:** High stakes.

**John:** All right. So let’s start with some really basics. We’ll have Craig start with a first bit of advice. So this will be A, B, and C. Craig, you start.

**Craig:** Basics of formatting. Is it, A, only use Fade in and Fade out at the beginning and of your script?

**John:** Or is it B?

**Phoebe:** Dissolve to is the proper transition to use within the script if needed.

**John:** Or is it C?

**Ryan:** Make sure to underline jokes in your script so that even idiot actors can understand them. Save italics for dramatic moments like when Deadpool remembers his hot dead wife.

**Craig:** I love that moment.

**John:** So, Paige, which is the fake answer there?

**Paige:** I am going to guess it’s C unless Ryan was adlibbing the idiot actors part.

**John:** C is the correct one.

**Phoebe:** She’s good, guys. She’s good.

**John:** She’s good. She’s good.

**Craig:** She’s on it.

**John:** A pro.

**Craig:** She’s on it. We’re going to have to step this up.

**John:** Question two, let’s talk about technique on the page. Phoebe, why don’t you start us off? Is it A…

**Phoebe:** When you’re writing scene description it’s OK to use “we see” as a way to communicate an image or action every now and then.

**John:** Ah, the controversial “we see.” All right, Ryan, B?

**Ryan:** Slug lines should not contain dates or times.

**John:** No dates or times in slug lines. Or is it C, Craig?

**Craig:** Every screenwriter worth his or her salt uses Final Draft.

**John:** Paige, what do you say, A, B, or C?

**Paige:** This one is a little bit tougher but I’m going to guess it’s A because there’s so much like “no one should ever use we see” happening which is silly.

**John:** The correct answer was C. I made it up just so Craig would have to say to use Final Draft.

**Craig:** I’m so angry. I’m so angry for so many reasons. One, Paige, I thought you knew me. You don’t.

**Ryan:** Craig, are you like John where you just charcoal sketch your scripts?

**Craig:** No, no, John goes from legal pads to his own proprietary software. And then at some point I think he ultimately does the formatting within one of his many multiprocessors. Whereas I use a lovely program called Fade In Pro. But I do not like Final Draft. I’m on record.

**Paige:** I just switched to Fade In.

**Craig:** Oh, good for you. Well done. And John has Highland.

**John:** Mostly Craig I wanted you saying that on the air so that they can snip that out and use it.

**Craig:** I know exactly why and I’m not upset, but a little bit.

**John:** Question three. Talk about nuance and detail. Ryan, can you start us off?

**Ryan:** In screenplays detail is poison. Film is a collaborative art form. The director, cinematographer, set designer, makeup artist supervisor, special effects supervisor and so many others will decide the details. Now, your job is to convey the broad stroke image as quickly as possible so the reader can visualize it quickly and move on to the next image they’re supposed to be seeing.

**John:** Or is it B?

**Phoebe:** Whatever you do don’t have your protagonist look to the camera and deliver a devastating line. [laughs]

**John:** Or is it C?

**Craig:** If you character isn’t listening to music and you simply included the song as something to be played over the scene that is not your job.

**John:** Paige, tell us. A, B, or C?

**Paige:** While I would assume that B would be given as advice of someone who wanted to, I’m thinking that it’s probably a little too specific to Phoebe, so I’m going to guess B.

**John:** You are correct. Correct.

**Craig:** So just to be clear, the other ones they’re real things that you’ve read?

**John:** They’re real things. So in the show notes I’ll provide the links to where I took these all from. These are actual articles online. So things about “detail is poison,” that came from an online thing.

**Craig:** Well, we’re going to ruin that person’s day, month, year, life.

**John:** All right. Question four. Structure. Oh, structure is a big bugaboo. People have a hard time with structure. Whole books are written about structure. Phoebe, can you start us off with answer A?

**Phoebe:** A, in a properly structured movie the story consists of six basic stages which are defined by five key turning points in the plot. Not only are these turning points always the same, they always occupy the same positions in the story.

**John:** Ooh, or is it B?

**Ryan:** At the exact midpoint of your screenplay your hero must fully commit to her goal.

**John:** Or is it C?

**Craig:** Do not indicate where to place the title of the film or where to roll the credits. These notations are superfluous in a speculative script. Such matters are usually decided by the director.

**John:** Paige, tough one here. A, B, or C?

**Paige:** I feel like I’ve heard all of these. I am going to guess – I’m going to go with B.

**John:** It’s a trick question. They were all actual things I pulled out.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** So-called experts said all of these things.

**Phoebe:** So my first instinct was correct.

**John:** Your first instinct was correct. We’re going to give you the chime. All right, final question. These are takeaway lessons we can sort of get out of what we’ve learned. Craig, start us off. A?

**Craig:** For a character to be engaging, even likeable, they have to be deeply flawed.

**John:** All right. Or is it B?

**Ryan:** Physical descriptions including race, height, clothing, etc. matter far less than most writers think. Leave the costuming up to the costume designer.

**John:** Or is it C?

**Phoebe:** You may think that there are rules for how a screenplay is supposed to work, but in fact there are merely conventions. And while it’s important you understand the conventions you should use them as a foundation upon which to build your own work, rather than a straightjacket to constrain you because after all isn’t that the point of art?

**John:** Paige, what’s the answer?

**Paige:** I mean, this is about the bad screenwriting advice and C was very good screenwriting advice, so let’s go with C.

**John:** C is correct. Paige, you have won the game. I’m not sure what you won. You got a chance to hang out with us on the Zoom.

**Paige:** That is winning.

**John:** Thank you so much. Good luck with your screenplay. Sorry about Teen Jeopardy! but I hope this made up for it.

**Paige:** Absolutely. It’s better than Teen Jeopardy! Thank you guys so much.

**Ryan:** Well done, Paige.

**Phoebe:** Nice to meet you, Paige.

**John:** Thanks Paige.

**Paige:** Nice to meet you.

**Phoebe:** Killed it.

**John:** Bye.

**Ryan:** Bye-bye.

**Craig:** You know, better than Teen Jeopardy! was all I ever wanted.

**John:** Yeah. It is.

**Ryan:** John, Brigham Young, like just pulling that out.

**John:** That’s Colorado. Growing up in Colorado. So Horace Greeley, there’s Greeley, Colorado is named for Horace Greeley, so I had a sense of the time and place of it all. It’s just sometimes you’re born lucky.

**Phoebe:** Very good.

**John:** I have a specific question for Phoebe and Ryan, because you are the two people who actually have done this. Hosting Saturday Night Live, you both hosted. When you get to the end credit things how do you know which person to hug first? I always stay for the end credits because I want to see the hugs. How do you know which person to hug first? And does one of the cast members come up to your first? Usually it’s the musical guest you sort of huge first. But tell us what is the decision process on who to hug first at the end of Saturday Night Live?

**Ryan:** I aim for hierarchy. I just go for the most powerful person on the stage first. And then work my way down to the audience.

**Craig:** Right. And then through the audience in hierarchy as well?

Ryan. Yes. 100. And then to my family. Through that hierarchy as well. By the end I’m just hugging sperm.

**Phoebe:** I actually got stuck in a non-hug world of pain at the end of mine. Because I was sandwiched between Taylor Swift and Matthew Broderick. And I’d already hugged Taylor earlier. And I’d never even met Matthew. So suddenly when they were like now is the time to fucking touch them I was like, well I turned to Taylor and was like well we’ve done this so I should probably go and do it. It all happened in like split seconds. I should probably go to Matthew and I gave her a look, as she was coming in. So I like—

**John:** Oh no.

**Phoebe:** [Unintelligible] Taylor, turned to Matthew who was already on his way back, had to like claw him back. And then he kind of already gone. Then I turned around and Taylor said to me, “I’ll hug you.” And then we hugged. And then someone actually sent me a gif of the whole thing.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s wonderful. None of us will be watching that right after this. In fact I may–

**John:** We’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** I may leave for a moment to watch it. I mean, I need to see it now.

**John:** All right, we have 1,277 people watching the show right now live.

**Craig:** 13,000 fewer than I thought, but OK, go.

**John:** Some of those people have written in with questions already. Megana Rao our producer she’s going to read some of the questions that people have joined us with. Megana, welcome.

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

**John:** Megana start us off with a question from our listeners/viewers.

**Megana:** OK. We’ve gotten in so many questions. So the first one is from Brady. And he says, “Aside from Beyoncé who inspires us all what’s the most obscure place you’ve pulled creative inspiration from for your projects?” Brady also says, “PS, I love you all.”

**John:** Aw, Brady. We love you, too. Obscure place of inspiration, where you get stuff from?

**Phoebe:** I accidentally, I was a little bit stuck and I just try and pick up like random things when I’m a bit stuck and just have a read, sometimes like three sentences can just get your head out of something. And I picked up a book called Vagina by Wolf that was on the side, it was my friend’s book, and I’d seen it hanging around and I wanted to read it for ages. But I literally opened it at one chapter and I read like five sentences of it and it gave me the idea of the godmother orgasming when she paints, which then rolled into [unintelligible]. This beautiful chapter about how orgasms can connect to your creativity. And so it really helped. So I just dove straight into a vagina.

**Ryan:** Wow.

**Craig:** I’ve done that, but it hasn’t – I mean, I haven’t gotten any great work out of it. Got to be honest with you. It’s distracting frankly.

**Phoebe:** Uh…

**Ryan:** I usually – I’ll dip into music. I find anthemic synth rock, Phil Collins. I don’t know why. That will just pull me right out of whatever kind of funk I’m in. Yeah, Enya. Stuff you wouldn’t expect. Weird sort of not – unexpected kind of stuff that’s melodic and synthy and, I don’t know. For some reason it shakes me out.

**John:** Cool. Megana, another question.

**Megana:** OK, this one is for Ryan but I guess you can all speak to it. It came in from another Ryan and he says, “After being in a one-room film like Buried how did that change your relationship with locations in any given–?”

**John:** Yeah. Buried. I enjoyed your film Buried. So in the film Buried you are in a coffin for basically the entire film. How did it change your feeling about sets?

**Ryan:** Well, the funny thing about Buried was it was shot in Barcelona. It takes place in a coffin. And I was like can’t we just shoot this in my fucking living room? Why are we going to Barcelona?

I don’t know if it changed my relationship to sets but it certainly was a lesson in that, because you do think, OK, this thing is a single location, it’s a claustrophobic movie, isolationist kind of film. But actually there were 17 coffins that we shot in. Each one had a different sort of purpose. So it really did require a tremendous amount of engineering and crew and space and that sort of thing.

But, yeah, locations are – my mentality they’re kind of irrelevant. I don’t really think about it like that necessarily. But, yeah, I do remember that. That was a lot of travel for one coffin.

**John:** Phoebe for Fleabag did you write to specific locations? Do you know like this is the coffee shop I want to be using? Do you have places in mind as you’re writing or is that just normal location scouting after you had scripts?

**Phoebe:** Well, a mixture of both I think. There were one or two places I felt I would write to and I felt really connected to. Like there’s a scene in a Quaker Hall in season two and actually Andrew Scott who plays the priest in it and taken – when I was first pitching the idea to him for the show we met up in Soho and we were talking about religion and all sorts of stuff for hours. And then he at the end of it said I want to show you something. And he took me into that Quaker Hall.

And we sat and spoke in there. There was no one else in there. We weren’t breaking the rules. But then I really desperately wanted that location for the real thing, because it was gorgeous, but also it was in the center of London. This felt really good. And also it had that history between us. And we couldn’t get it. And so we got another place somewhere else. And at the last minute that one fell through and the one we loved became available. And so we got to film in there in the end. And it is really joyful I think when you find yourself in locations that you’ve written to. But it’s rare I think that everything falls into place that you can.

**John:** Megana, another question.

**Megana:** OK, awesome. So Eleanor asks, “As a writer are you ever insecure about using autobiographical elements in your work?” With a follow up from Andy who says, “When you incorporate something that’s vulnerable are you ever surprised when people praise you for that instead of judging you?”

**John:** Great. So incorporating autobiographical elements and sort of the vulnerability that happens with that. I mean, Ryan, you and I can speak to the movie we did, The Nines. That middle character that you play, you play three characters, the middle character is sort of me. And so one of the initial conversations we had to have was sort of like you’re free to take anything you want to take from me. My mannerisms. My whatever. And it was really great and weird to sort of see it being mirrored back. But it worked well together. So, you’re incorporating stuff from the real world.

If it’s a moment that I’m sharing with another writer I will sometimes ask like are you going to use that thing that just happened between us because I want to – I don’t want to take it if you’re going to take it. Phoebe or Ryan, do you encounter that, stuff in your real life that’s maybe becoming part of stuff you’re writing where you have to feel some protective bubble around certain things?

**Phoebe:** Ryan? [laughs]

**Ryan:** I was so excited to hear what you were going to say.

**Craig:** I mean, I was on the edge of my seat.

**Ryan:** Well, I mean, I don’t know about protective. Sometimes something – if something completely wild happens and you have some sort of expectation that we come 90 degrees to and we’re all sort of freaking out about this funny thing that just happened. And I’m amongst a group of people that may or may not be writing screenplays, I might sort of do the same thing John is doing where I might say can I use this because it’s fantastic. I think I could do it justice.

And certainly I don’t write anything autobiographical other than it’s about myself. And I did enjoy playing John with John five feet away from me every scrutinizing moment in his home lo those many years ago. But, no, I look at it more like influence. When I was younger I was in a writer’s circle online. This is about 15 years ago and there was heavyweight writers on this thing. I mean, all over the place. But you could sort of lurk as well. And I was always too nervous to jump in this circle and, you know, write stuff. But I certainly learned so much from the voices. There were so many distinctive voices in these writer’s room. And while trying never to steal from any of them, I did sort of learn about sensibilities and how they can just so be so completely polarized. So, yeah.

**Craig:** Phoebe, do you ever wrestle with the fact that a lot of people think you are Fleabag and Fleabag is you?

**Phoebe:** Yes. But it’s not so much of a wrestle. I just sort of realize that – because it’s not autobiographical but it’s really, really personal. So I think – and I think that question is beautiful about do you feel like people actually reach out a bit, they don’t judge you. They actually are so relieved when they feel that something is honest and truthful. And I think when I was writing stuff before – Fleabag was the moment where I just thought oh fuck it, I’m just going to write this. And I think when you have that feeling sometimes that’s when you kind of – I don’t know if you guys have had that – but when you just go off.

And when I first started writing the series I was writing what I thought a TV show version of Fleabag should be. And I was writing that and I was getting really angry. No one told me to write it like that. No one said it. It was just a part of my brain that said this is what people are going to want. And then I was angrily writing that and I got so angry writing it that I started writing what turned out to be the TV series as like rebelling against myself for writing the sitcom version. And I was like I hate that they’re making me do this. And I’m like this is what I’m really going to do. And then I sent that one off with a real like Fuck You to my producers. And they read it and they were like OK. And then I was like and this is what I really want to make. And they were like, “Well good, because that is so much better. Why are you wasting your time doing that?”

And so it was quite confusing at the beginning trying to write something that sounds and feels like something people would like. But then there’s always an emptiness about that. And then the moment you start writing something that feels really personal and you get a little bit nervous writing it. Or I remember in season two of Fleabag when I was writing the speech. She does the speech like two-thirds of the way through when she’s saying “I just want someone to tell me what to do.” And she just does this whole list of “I just want someone to tell me what to wear, what to eat” and it felt a little bit dangerous writing that as a central female character just going like, “Just tell me what to do.”

And I was writing it going like, oh god, I’m going to get bashed for this. How dare I say that that’s what a woman or anybody secretly wants underneath it all, let alone a kind of heroine of the story? And that was one of the speeches that people have been so responsive to. And that’s a really comforting feeling.

**Craig:** I think the audience is very good at detecting something that is true, as opposed to something that is designed to seem true.

**Phoebe:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And so their willingness to forgive things, because we are complicated people. There’s a subtlety there that they just got. I got it when I saw it. I just thought that, oh, this actually – I understood why it was a dangerous thing for her to be saying AKA you to be saying. And I also understood therefore that it was a different thing than you are weak and I do want to be dominated or told what to do. It was really more of this – it was an instinct we all have that is different from our – it’s complicated. I got the complexity. It worked. It worked beautifully. Well done. Good job, Phoebe.

**Phoebe:** Thank you. But it’s funny because when you do something like that you just don’t care how you get judged because you feel like it’s truthful. And then I was just like that is true. And I’m going to stand by that character in that moment.

**Craig:** It usually works.

**Phoebe:** Whereas when you’re being false it’s far more scary. They’re going to find out. They’re going to find out. And they always do. They always do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Craig, do you want to start us off with a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Yes I do. And, look, we’ve done a great job I think of keeping this a light, lovely podcast. We’re not getting all down. But even in the best of times I have some anxiety problems. Just vague medicated anxiety problems. And so I’ve tried all sorts of the cool mediation apps and the things like that. But the thing that generally works the best for me is just good old breathing. Just simple deep breathing does miracles.

But then I start getting in my own Jewie way, I start freaking out that I’m breathing wrong which is the most Jewish thing I can think of. Like am I breathing right? Did I count enough? So I’m trying to remember this. And a couple of years ago and this just got recirculated around a guy named Nathan Pyle made some little animation, some little web animations to help you breathe rhythmically in a nice deep breathing way. And they work so beautifully. And they’re very simple. It’s just like a ball rolls down a little hill. And up the hill. And you can sort of breathe along with them. And they’re wonderful.

And for whatever reason these days I’ve felt the need to do quite a bit more of that. So, if you’re prone to anxiety and you’re prone to those moments where you’re feeling a bit jelly-legged or butterflies in the stomach or just afraid and you feel like a nice little deep breathing session would help will include a link to those because I find it a wonderful tool.

**John:** Excellent. Now, Craig, on a previous show you had talked about Horse Paste which is a version of Codenames that’s online. Megana and the rest of the office we were trying to play that yesterday and it was down. So instead we went – maybe it’s back up now, but instead we played Drawful 2 which is on Jackbox.tv which was actually tremendously fun.

So, it’s a thing that’s probably most designed for playing on AppleTV with people in a room together and you’re drawing on your phone. But it actually works really well over Zoom. And so you can share one person’s screen and then everybody else is drawing on their phones. And so it’s a way to have a party game when you cannot physically be together. So, Jackbox.tv. It’s a game called Drawful 2 if you’re looking for something to play with your family, no matter where your family is, or your friends.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Something out there in the world. Ryan Reynolds, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Ryan:** I have one particular podcast that I’ve been going back to since Christmas. John, I think I sent it to you. It’s Anthropocene Reviewed. It’s John Green, novelist/screenwriter. He has this great podcast. It’s once a month. It’s called The Anthropocene Reviewed. I think it’s the last Thursday of every month. But there’s one particular episode that I revisited right now in these times that we’re living in, like you guys, we’re all needing to take some deep breaths. But it’s basically about Auld Lang Syne, the history of Auld Lang Syne, the song. Auld Lang Syne and where it comes from and its use, because it does actually have a use. And it’s heartbreaking. And it’s so beautiful and it’s one of the most beautiful 22 minutes of podcast I think I’ve ever heard in my life. And I think it’s really resonant for right now. So I keep going back to that.

It’s the podcast from I think this last December. John Green. The Anthropocene Reviewed. I highly, highly recommend it.

**John:** Yeah. I listened to that in a train in Japan on your recommendation. It really is a terrific episode.

**Ryan:** Yeah. Beautiful.

**John:** Phoebe, do you have something to recommend for us?

**Phoebe:** I do. It’s a TV show. So it’s not quirky, but I feel so passionate about this TV show that I just have to say. And I don’t know if it’s actually out there. I think it’s being remade. It’s a BBC show called This Country. Do you guys know of it?

**Craig:** This Country?

**Phoebe:** This Country. And it’s a brother and sister, Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper wrote it together. And it’s based on their experiences growing up in the Cotswolds.

**Craig:** Oh, I’ve seen much of this. It’s excellent.

**Phoebe:** It is so good. And it gets right under your skin. And it is so funny and so witty. And it’s a kind of documentary style but their performances are so, so detailed and so extraordinary. And I was grief-stricken when it ended. And they’re not going to make another one. They’ve made three series. But I think Paul Feig is remaking it in America. But catch theirs before because it has so much heart. It is so funny. And it is a really accurate depiction I think of the Cotswolds life for teenagers.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if it’s watchable here unless you’re—

**Phoebe:** Well find a way.

**Ryan:** In that case just go with CSI: Miami.

**Craig:** It’s a similar show.

**John:** One or the other.

**Craig:** If you use a VPN and you can fake where then I think you can probably watch the BBC.

**Phoebe:** Maybe you can buy it on iTunes? I don’t know. Maybe there’s–

**Craig:** It’s possibly purchased. Obviously you’d want to ideally purchase it if you can. It’s extraordinary. And it’s one of those shows where I started to feel like I was starting to learn a little bit about Britain. I was starting to learn a little bit about people.

**Phoebe:** Yeah. And it’s not a side of it you see very often.

**Craig:** No. No it’s not. And it was fantastic.

**Phoebe:** What do you feel like you learned from it?

**Craig:** Well there is actually this fascinating connection, because now I’ve spent a bunch of time in the UK, and I’ve started to become closer to this fascinating connection between people in Britain and people in the United States. I mean, growing up I used to think that British people were, you know, quite British and quite posh and everything was wonderful. And then we were just a bunch of rooting, tooting Yosemite Sams just shooting in the air.

And as it turns out I guess there’s a huge swath of rural America that matches up quite nicely in a weird way with Northern England and some parts of Southern England. And it’s just the accents are wildly different. Wildly. But the general deal is not wildly different. And I was shocked at why I was shocked. Because it’s where everybody came from.

**Phoebe:** Of course. Of course. It’s the same everywhere.

**Craig:** It’s literally the same. And we did spend, you know, for Chernobyl we had, I don’t know, probably of our cast I think 90% was UK and of that 90% probably 50% were Northern England. And, I mean, and this isn’t to say that I didn’t love everybody from London, but the folks from Northern England are awesome, and Scotland are awesome. I mean, it was just – I had the best time. They just felt like home in a weird way. They felt American and so I love that show because there was a weird camaraderie in the clumsiness and the brokenness but beauty of our people together. I thought it was great.

**Phoebe:** Aw, that’s lovely.

**John:** That is our show. So, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, who I get to see. Hi, thanks Megana.

**Phoebe:** Thanks Megana.

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Special thanks this week to Nima Yousefi and Dustin Box for helping us out. Our outro is by John Spurney. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Phoebe, you’re not on Twitter. You’re so smart.

**Craig:** So smart.

**Phoebe:** So scared. So scared.

**Craig:** And then tell us what dummies thing is. What is it? @Vancity?

**Ryan:** @VancityReynolds.

**John:** Excellent.

**Ryan:** Ryan Reynolds was taken.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**Ryan:** True story.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments including the postmortem on this episode.

**Craig:** All that money. Oh, so much money coming into John.

**Phoebe:** Still on air. Still on air.

**John:** Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Ryan Reynolds. Thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**John:** Thank you so much for being our very first ever video guests. This was remarkable. Thank you so, so much. Thank you to everybody who watched. I’m supposed to tell you because we’re on YouTube that you have to push that like button and subscribe.

**Craig:** Smash that like button. Smash it.

**John:** I don’t care.

**Ryan:** Smash button. Yeah.

**John:** I don’t care. Don’t subscribe if you don’t want to subscribe. But thank you both very, very much for being on the show. It really means a lot that you came on board.

**Ryan Reynolds:** Thank you guys.

**Craig:** Thanks guys. You’re the best.

**Phoebe:** Thanks so much.

**Craig:** Have a great one.

**Ryan:** Lovely. It was a pleasure.

**John:** Bye guys.

**Phoebe:** Bye.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. It is 25 hours later. Craig how was that live show for you?

**Craig:** Well, I mean I thought it was deeply enjoyable. First of all, it worked, so thank you because you did everything. You and Megana and your crew put the whole thing together. I thought it worked kind of flawlessly, from my point of view at least, because we could see them. There were a couple of moments where there was a little bit of video lag, but honestly in today’s day and age for there to be not a ton of that is lovely. And we were able to have a great conversation. It seemed like a lot of people watched it.

**John:** So we had a bunch of viewers. We had simultaneously like while we were recording it the peak number of viewers was 1,315. Overall, so we’re recording this on Sunday, there were 10,559 views to the video so far.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So a normal episode of Scriptnotes gets about 40,000 or more people listening to it over the course of the week. So it was good to have for our first ever video thing it felt really good that we got that many people watching. And the report back from the folks who I had moderating the comments was that everyone was lovely and positive and they didn’t need to ban anybody or put anybody on time out. Everyone was great in the comments section.

**Craig:** [laughs] What a weird thing. That our expectation is that adults will behave like little nursery school kids and need time outs. But unfortunately that’s kind of the way the world works.

**John:** So I want to talk a little bit about the technical side of this for folks who might want to try to do something like this at home. The four of us and our guests were speaking in Zoom. And so Zoom is a privacy and security for nightmare for a lot of reasons, but it also works really well. And so the fact that Phoebe was all the way in London and our latency was not bad at all that’s credit to Zoom. So despite all the scary things you read about Zoom are probably true, but they actually do work really well.

So we were all talking in Zoom and then if you use the Zoom webinar feature which is about $40 a month you can pipe that through to YouTube Live. And so that was my choice to not have our normal viewers watching us in Zoom which was possible. I pushed it all to YouTube Live just because that way no one can Zoom bomb us because we were safely behind a wall. That was the instinct behind that.

It went OK. I would say that Megana and I and you actually at one point were in little test screens where we were seeing to make sure that it all worked right and every time we did that it started a new YouTube Live session. And so people would join us and then finally when we actually got the real thing going it could happen.

But I wanted there to be an ability to sort of pause the YouTube streaming so that we could actually talk to Ryan and Phoebe before we went on camera and there really wasn’t a good way to do that.

**Craig:** Well, it still worked.

**John:** It worked.

**Craig:** And I thought you did a great job.

**John:** Aw, thank you. Thank you. And I thought it was a good conversation and they were just lovely, smart people. They had never met before and they felt like, you know, they should have met.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I can’t be the only who was just watching them and listening to them talk and thinking, yeah, I could see these two guys in a movie doing something together.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Yeah. It feels like a decent team up.

**John:** I don’t remember if Ryan was texting me this or tweeting me, but back when he had watched Fleabag he was like, “Oh my god, I hope she will put me into a movie or a TV show at some point.” He was so impressed by her way back when in the day. And she’s just great. It was lovely to have them together.

I don’t think Scriptnotes is overall going to pivot to video. I don’t think we’re going to be a regular television show.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** But how are you feeling about doing more of these?

**Craig:** I’m fine with it. I mean, I don’t get nervous about any of this stuff. I don’t mind it. As long as there’s no expectation of people getting all dressed up and things. But there seems to be a fairly robust environment of podcasts that are now also video casts where it’s like there’s a camera stuck in a recording booth so you’re looking at a guy talking into a microphone.

Personally, look, I find the whole thing bizarre in the sense that any – I’m excited that people listen to our podcast. As you know, I’m endlessly amused and shocked that anyone listens at all. And then the thought that people would watch something also seems kind of crazy. If they want to, I guess. Yeah.

Look, I’m a bigger fan of our actual live shows because there are people there and you can feel a room and warmth and an audience. It’s a very experience. So I’m on the ends of the spectrum. I like a nice quiet just you and me. We’re out on our couples date alone. No one can bother us. Or, we’re at a big party.

**John:** Yeah. I will say that when you and I are just recording the show by ourselves there will be times where we’ll get into tangents or we’ll get on a thing. It’s like, you know what, let’s cut all of that out and pretend we never had that conversation. And in a live show or live stream we really can’t do that. I was mindful that I had to watch myself a little bit more because everyone was listening to us live as it was happening. So there’s something comforting about when it’s just us on tape because you and I both have the ability to cut anything out.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. I mean, I’m so generally oblivious. I mean, it’s a rare thing for me to go, oh god, why did I? Oh no, I shouldn’t have said that. And I do every now and again and I say, “Hey John, can we cut that out?” But every now and then it would occur to me that we were live, but you know the nice thing is when you’re doing this with two very accomplished actors they’re so calm, even if they tell you later that they were not calm at all, but at least in the moment they appear so calm that you can’t help but mirror their general demeanor.

**John:** Now we may want to talk about this in the real episode that we’ll record for this next week, but we’re recording this on Sunday where all of Twitter is abuzz about the New York Times Maldives story. So we should maybe have a quick moment because this was actually part of my morning was this conversation about like, oh, is this going to be a movie? And of course it’s going to be a movie.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I mean, writes itself basically. Actually the problem is it’s so obviously a movie that you almost don’t even want to see it because you’ve seen it. Like I’ve seen it in my head. But then again, if somebody does a really good version of a great formula picture then it can be wonderful. I mean, I’ve already put my own little spin on it which is that a couple gets married. It’s not like an arranged marriage or anything, but there was pressure from everybody because they were perfect for each other and they kind of bought into it and they got married. And they both realized individually and separately like minutes after they said “I do” that this was a huge mistake. But the honeymoon is already booked and so they decide I’m going to tell my partner on the honeymoon that this was a mistake and it has to end. And they’re both thinking it. And then they get there and then they both say it to each other and they’re both hurt. And then seconds later they’re told they cannot leave.

**John:** Absolutely. So that’s easy good approach. I’m not dying to see that movie honestly.

**Craig:** I don’t want to see any of them. [laughs]

**John:** I was texting with Ryan this morning about this saying like, hey, this could be a movie. And he was like, yeah, my executive assistant just sent this to me. And he’s like do you want to do it, we could do it together. And I’m like give me a second for my morning coffee to wear off and then I’ll get back to you. And I ultimately – I “passed” on it, not that it was ever offered to me, but to me it was like there are – I can think of 20 writers who could do a great version of this story, or at least could do this movie. And if 20 other writers could do this and do a bang up job on it like there’s no reason for me to be chasing this movie.

What I do think is interesting about a possibility for this is in some ways it feels like a play. Because it is contained.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** It’s within a single space. Except that it’s the Maldives so you don’t want it on a stage. You actually want it beautiful shot everywhere. You want it to feel like you’re on location or some sort of Lucas Film Mandalorian where you create the Maldives through the magic of video screens. So, it wants to be a movie just because it’s going to be gorgeous and beautiful, but it is essentially a chamber drama or chamber comedy between these people.

Something that people have been bringing up on Twitter which I think is a good point is that it can feel like Beauty and the Beast where everyone else who works at that resort are kind of like–

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** These animated things. And that is potentially really problematic.

**Craig:** Hugely.

**John:** To not have their perspective on what’s actually going on there.

**Craig:** Hugely.

**John:** I think the opportunity would be to do sort of a Wes Anderson kind of thing. They’re trying to keep this couple here because they actually – as long as this couple is here they don’t have to go through quarantine. There’s like a whole process. So they’ll do whatever they can to sort of keep this couple together.

**Craig:** I like that. That’s fun. So, then it’s really like the company said, OK, well, we’re going to fire you as soon as the last guest is removed. But if there is a single guest there, of course, you have to stay because that’s our policy. And so they cannot let those – and those people really want to leave but they can’t let them leave. The problem is then the quarantine aspect gets a little mushy.

**John:** It does. So, there’s problems. I think the other opportunity in terms of that central couple is that the way you can chart an entire marriage in this very hot box environment is potentially great. All the progress when you can’t actually leave this person sort of what happens. It can be a microcosm of a marriage within this small period of time.

But someone else can write it. I’m not going to write it.

**Craig:** I agree. And sometimes I think when everybody looks at something and goes, oh my god, that is so a movie. What they’re really saying is oh my god that reminds me of a lot of movies I’ve seen.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** What was the movie that Dana Fox worked on? Couples Retreat.

**John:** Couples Retreat. Yeah. The one where she’s in a resort in the Maldives and she’s just crying and trying to figure out a way to print pages.

**Craig:** It was actually Bora Bora in French Polynesia. And that’s a movie is Dana Fox writing that movie in Bora Bora. But that movie is very much couples in paradise except that it’s contrasted with the trouble inside their relationship and all that. So, you know, makes sense. Yeah, I can see – there’s all sorts of–

**John:** Couples Retreat meets Contagion is basically the pitch on that.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And this is almost now we’re starting to put our finger on what the problem with Hollywood is is that that requires zero effort. So there’s an entire merchant class of producers who do nothing but sort of just go, neh, heh, and then someone else goes, meh, and then they have to go find writers. It’s like it’s not necessarily a thing. It’s just because it sounds like stuff you’ve already seen. But that’s kind of a blemish isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, isn’t that partly why you just don’t want to do it? Because it just feels like what new thing can you say with that kind of high concept? Yeah.

**John:** There’s a couple projects that I’m writing right now and what I will say about them is that they are things for which I am incredibly passionate about doing and I feel like, yeah, I’m the right person to do it. So that’s why ultimately I was like you know what let one of the other 20 writers who would be great at this pursue this project and I’m going to try to chase less in this next decade.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know what I’m perfect for.

**John:** You’re perfect for The Last of Us.

**Craig:** You know what? I do love it. I love it. God, I love it. And weirdly also a pandemic just happened.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is the strangest of things. Yeah.

**John:** Craig, one last question for you. What is happening in Russia and are they just completely concealing the actual numbers? Is it actually just horrible there and we’re just not hearing about it?

**Craig:** Well, you won’t until you will. But certainly in the initial days of sort of Russian reporting on COVID if you looked at the maps of the world and you start to see where the cases were every now and then on the map there would be this little white spot on their color chart. And that indicated there was no COVID there whatsoever. And Russia was this enormous white spot. See, there was no COVID there according to them. In fact, there was. Of course there was.

What was happening was they were simply failing to classify it. Not failing, deciding, determining under pressure to not classify pneumonia cases as COVID. That is akin to just sort of saying, oh yeah, there’s been a lot of pneumonia, like weird cystic pneumonia and it’s not because of AIDS. It’s just pneumonia. But it is because of AIDS. Because we know that. So, that’s what they were doing.

And then they’ve stopped because it got out of control. So there is sort of – suddenly Putin starts doing things. I think because he started to realize how bad this could be.

It is remarkable that the same delusion has landed on the doorstep of very similarly minded political people. And it’s not about – I wouldn’t say that it’s about being strong men per se. But there is this group of political leaders that are men who feel like they don’t need to take no guff from the experts. And that it’s the damned expert elites who are ruining everything and just good old fashioned common sense like back in the old days, John Wayne types, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So Trump, Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, and of course the uber Vlad Putin, all of them have the same responses which is, oh, boloney. I’m not crying over some flu. That’s what the French do. Well, the French didn’t really do it well enough either. Well, now they’re crying. So he’s finally now, or at least over the last two days, he started to shut down Russian businesses and places where people can gather and so on and so forth.

They are not in good shape. They’re in bad shape. This is not an economically healthy country. Their “democracy” is incredibly fragile. They have had a number of political convulsions that Putin has successfully knocked back. But it’s things like these that cause real problems.

I don’t know how bad it’s going to get over there. Obviously I never wish ill will on anyone. Certainly no one wants to see a bad leader suffer by his citizens dying. But I do suspect that it’s going to be quite bad over there.

**John:** Well, it strikes me that looking back to the Chernobyl age, you know, at least then there was a central planning sort of authority. It felt like they bungled, they lied, they did bad stuff, but they actually could sort of muster their forces and do massive things. I don’t know that Russia today can do that. So, that is the challenge. You have all the problems with none of the actual solutions.

**Craig:** Well, there was a strange kind of spirit in the Soviet Union. They were obviously more than happy to deny reality and to make decisions that cost lives and to lie to the rest of the world. But once they understood the enormity of something they were capable of reaching back into this interesting collective Soviet spirit of fighting. So World War II the Soviets I think something like 40 million–

**John:** The meat grinder of, yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, 40 million casualties, military and civilian combined from World War II. That’s a five-year, six-year stretch. That’s insane. We don’t understand what that means here. We have no sense of it. They do. And that was after World War I and the Revolution. So, they have a certain kind of spirit.

Over here what we’ve done is fragmented ourselves into 50 fiefdoms. We have a central leader that doesn’t lead. And our John Wayne go-it-on-your-own spirit is currently being tested in the sorest way by a little clump of RNA surrounded by a lipid layer.

**John:** Yeah. It is not a great time.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. But to bring us back to a happier note, thinking back, the postmortem on our show, and the possibility of a Maldives movie, I do think Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge writing and starring in that couples movie could be ideal. I could picture them together. They are beautiful. They are funny. That is the movie we need right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I’ll watch anything with those two. I think that would be awesome.

**John:** Craig will watch a livestream of a podcast with them in it. That’s how much he enjoys the two of them.

**Craig:** I watched it as we were doing it. First of all, you’ve been friends with Ryan forever. And that was my first time meeting him. And he really, like I said on the show, his reputation is just sterling. I mean, it’s a rare thing when you hear somebody just say, oh yeah. And it’s not that every Canadian has that reputation, by the way. Don’t get fooled. There are some bad Canadians out there. Not many. There are some.

But he’s just terrific.

**John:** So I’ll put this in the real follow up show notes, but for folks who might be curious about it Ryan texted me afterwards to say that he kept meaning to talk about the original fourth wall-breaking movie. It was Mary MacLane’s 1918 silent film Men Who Have Made Love to Me. And so if you look up the Wikipedia entry it’s actually fascinating. So it’s a lost film. There’s no prints of it left. So there’s only reports about what actually happens in the film. But it is a silent film where the writer-director star, this woman who actually kind of looks a lot like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, does turn to camera and speak directly to camera and acknowledge sort of what’s happening.

So that was sort of the first – apparently the first time in cinematic history where that fourth wall was broken.

**Craig:** Men Who Have Made Love to Me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So she would turn to the camera and then–

**John:** And then title card.

**Craig:** Title card.

**John:** So, I mean, she’s a pioneer.

**Craig:** I love it. I love it. Well, I mean, first of all like what a cool proto feminist thing that in 1918–

**John:** What a great title.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s like I’ve had sex. [laughs] I like it.

**John:** All right. Craig, thank you for a fun show and we’ll do one of these again sometime.

**Craig:** Awesome John. Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

 

Links:

* [Watch the episode here – Scriptnotes Live: Episode 445](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRV5O0ZSNc0)
* [Deadpool](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1431045/) and [Deadpool 2](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5463162/)
* [Fleabag](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B01KW5IIJM/ref=atv_dp_season_select_s1) and the [play](https://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/news/phoebe-waller-bridges-fleabag-play-to-stream-_90860.html) to release soon!
* Huge thank you to [Phoebe Waller Bridge](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3564817/) and [Ryan Reynolds](https://twitter.com/VancityReynolds)!
* [Breathing Cartoons](https://twitter.com/nathanwpyle/status/1139676955316559872) by Nathan Pyle
* [Anthropocene Reviewed: Auld Lang Syne](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anthropocene-reviewed/episodes/anthropocene-reviewed-auld-lang-syne)
* [This Country](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6583806/), now on [Hulu in the US](https://www.hulu.com/series/f3e3f7ed-134f-411d-9dc8-e8048b2d6b7e)
* [Free Guy](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6264654/)
* [Drawful on Jackbox Games](https://www.jackboxgames.com/drawful/)
* Bonus How Would This Be A Movie, [Couple Stranded in Maldives](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/style/coronavirus-honeymoon-stranded.html)
* [Men Who Have Made Love to Me](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Who_Have_Made_Love_to_Me)
* Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium [here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jon Spurney ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/445standardv3.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/beyond-bars).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 440 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast I’ll be talking with a panel of experts about the criminal justice system and incarceration, looking at what TV and movies get right and get wrong and how to do better. It’s a great discussion we held this week in cooperation with Hollywood Health and Society. If you’d like to watch this panel rather than listen to it there is a link in the show notes to the video.

Craig, it was good, it was fun. I missed you but there was so much to talk about that an extra person up there probably would have been a challenge.

**Craig:** Sometimes I feel like it’s important to have these moments where you get to do your thing, or I get to do my thing. It keeps it fresh. I’m not saying that we’re swingers or anything. I don’t think – that’s not our lifestyle.

**John:** It isn’t.

**Craig:** No. We don’t have an open relationship, but you know how married couples talk about a hall pass?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I feel like we actually give each other hall passes every now and again. It’s like instead of the fake ones that you know will just get you in permanent trouble.

**John:** Absolutely. Like my husband for many years, he would go on one vacation by himself each year which I think is just great. So, it’s a chance to sort of like what is interesting in the world that is not just a shared couple thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It lets you be yourself. I’m glad that I could let you be yourself.

**John:** Now Craig, what has been your experience with the criminal justice system or writing about the criminal justice system? Because I’m thinking back through your credits and I don’t perceive you writing a bunch about lawyers and jails and prisons. But have you done that?

**Craig:** Only in the most bizarre and non-realistic way for the third Hangover film.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which features Thai law enforcement as well as Mexican law enforcement and I don’t think any of it was accurate in the slightest. So mostly I watch law enforcement. I don’t think I’ll ever be one of those people that writes a big jury trial movie or anything like that.

**John:** Yeah. Like you, I mostly have my experience of criminal justice system watching it on TV. Yes, I’ve been on juries, but most of what I perceive is the things I see on television. And those things are not particularly accurate, so it was a great chance to talk with the folks who do this for a living about what is actual and accurate and real and sort of how to think about it more smartly. And how to really include characters and stories that aren’t being told on the screen. So, enjoy this panel discussion. Craig and I will be back at the end of this for our credits. And if you’re a Premium member stick around because Craig and I are going to talk about the coronavirus. And Dr. Craig–

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** He will have it all covered and handled for you.

**Craig:** I’ve got it all.

**John:** All right. Enjoy.

Hello and good evening. It is so nice to be here with you all in this nice little intimate room. Tonight we are going to be talking about the criminal justice system. We’re going to be talking about the myths and realities of what the criminal justice entails. And we’re really going to be talking about biases. And so I want to start by talking about my own biases. I’m coming at this as a screenwriter. And so I’m looking at some of these issues from the perspective of what a writer, a filmmaker, someone in the medium might want to learn about when it comes to criminal justice, and so how we tell the stories accurately, how we tell them better, how we avoid some of the tropes and how we just do a better job writing about the criminal justice system.

But I’m also coming at this as a citizen and as a person who votes and as a person who picks people who make policies that really impact how we think about criminal justice. So, I really have two hats on my head, on my very bald head, as I look at these issues. And so I’m so lucky to have an amazing panel here and I’m going to ask maybe some really naïve questions, but I think questions that so often are not asked as we think about what criminal justice entails.

So, I’m going to start with you Aly. So Aly Tamboura is a manager in the criminal justice reform program at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative where he brings firsthand experience after spending a decade of his life incarcerated. Tamboura partners with formerly incarcerated leaders who are accelerating reforms, giving those who are closest to the problems a voice in reimagining a better criminal justice system. Welcome Aly.

**Aly Tamboura:** Thank you.

**John:** So a couple months ago I did a panel here for Hollywood Health and Society where we were talking about addiction and mental health and one of the things I really wanted to start with is that there are a whole bunch of terms we use related to addiction and mental health that are just inherently negative. That start from a judgmental basis. Like alcoholic or addict. And so when you start using those words you’re automatically coming in at a deficit.

And there’s words like that in relation to criminal justice as well, so before we start talking about anything else can you talk us through some of the words and some of the terms that we may be using that are really not helpful at all. And so can we start using some better words as we start this conversation. What are some words that you hear or terms that you hear that maybe we could just take off the table from the start?

**Aly:** I was going to say all of them.

**John:** All of them. All right.

**Aly:** so, I mean, when you think of things like ex-convict, prisoner, felon, ex-felon, parolee, those are all pejorative words meant to marginalize people. Right? I remember having this big argument when I first came home with my parole officer. You know, he’s calling me a parole and this and that. I said I’m not. And he’s like, yeah you are. I’m like I am not the worst mistake I ever made in my life and I will never, ever, ever accept anybody telling me that I’m the worst mistake I ever made in my life. Right? And I challenge the audience out here. Imagine the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life. And imagine if someone called you that for the rest of your life, in employment, in housing, in access to healthcare, everything. You walk in the door and that’s what they call you. And that’s what it feels like when I hear this language.

**John:** So, you started to explain why it’s a negative, but also what are words that we can use that are neutral, at least neutral, that actually acknowledge that you are a person and not the worst thing you’ve ever done.

**Aly:** Right, so instead of calling people prisoners or inmates, call them incarcerated people. I think if you keep the word people–

**John:** People or individuals.

**Aly:** Or individuals.

**John:** Acknowledging that they are human beings.

**Aly:** In this context, right, it not only helps the individual who may have transgressed on one of our social norms, but it also helps society as a whole to be able to accept those people back in our society.

**John:** You spent a decade of your life in prison.

**Aly:** 12 years, four months, 21 days.

**John:** All right. And so can you talk us through the reality of going from your normal life into a life as a person who is incarcerated. Talk to me about the degree to which you lose your individuality. Are there aspects of that process? Because I’ve seen this in movies before. I’ve seen a person enter prison. What aspects of that are accurate that I’ve seen in movies and TV shows? What aspects of that are not accurate in your experience?

**Aly:** Almost every aspect is not accurate. And I have to tell you when I – I never thought for a minute in my life that I’d end up incarcerated. But I had – all of my knowledge was from media on what prison, jail, the court system was like. And I’m going to say it starts in court. The idea that you have any control. You hire an attorney or one is appointed for you. They take your name. They give you a case number. You become a case number. And you become a spectator. Right? Very rarely and most of the times most people don’t get up and testify in their defense. So you’re just a spectator in this process.

And then once you get to prison then you really start getting stripped of your identity. You get a prison number. And that becomes who you are for the time of your incarceration. They take your clothing from you and mark you as a prisoner. You no longer can do the normal things that you did in life, like cook for yourself, or wash your clothes, or decide when you want to take a shower. So, you really start losing – you lose your individuality but you also lose your purpose, right.

You know, most people in here have a purpose. Get up, go to work, take care of your kids, take care of your family, go to school, whatever it is. In prison your purpose soon, like actually not – the day you arrive becomes survival. How am I going to make it through this? How am I going to make it back to my family? Then you add on top of that this just crushing oppression and isolation. You’re just ripped completely away from your social network and very, very small channels of communication. It’s why I love my job because we’re content on changing the system.

**John:** So we can all talk about the same terms, can you explain the difference between jail and prison, or sort of what kinds of incarceration are out there?

**Aly:** Sure. So jail in most jurisdictions means that you are a ward of the county. You are – it’s usually lower level offenses, so misdemeanors and some felonies that they call wobblers. Usually couldn’t spend more than a year in jail. In some jurisdictions that’s changed now though. And then if you have a sentence that’s more than a year then you become a state prisoner and you’re a ward of the state. If you’re in jail you get probation after jail. If you go to prison you get parole.

**John:** Thank you. Next I want to talk to Lovisa Stannow. She’s the executive director at Just Detention International. She’s also a trained rape crisis counselor and has written extensively about prisoner rape, including a series of high profile articles in the New York Review of Books. Previously Lovisa served as the executive director of the Pacific Institute for Women’s Health and the West Coast director of Doctors Without Borders. Welcome Lovisa.

**Lovisa Stannow:** Thank you.

**John:** So your organization works with jails and prisons in the US but also internationally. So I would love to get some perspective on what do you see internationally that’s the same or different than US prison and can you broaden this out to a global perspective here.

**Lovisa:** Absolutely. Thank you. So you’re right. A lot of my work is in the United States, but I also am spending quite a bit of time inside South African prisons and also doing work in places like Mexico and the Philippines, but also Canada and Europe. And there are prisons in the world that are logistically speaking a lot worse than US prisons in the sense that I have been inside facilities where half of the people don’t have beds, where they sleep on the floor. I have been inside facilities where the government agency that incarcerates people doesn’t supply food. So you rely completely on your family on the outside.

There are also prisons in for example Canada or parts of Northern Europe that are relatively healthy institutions in the sense that there’s much more of a focus on helping people heal from whatever trauma brought them to the prison in the first place. And that are really committed to making sure people never come back. And the US ends up somewhere in the middle there, but what’s important is that we should not think that we’re doing well here. And I think a lot of Americans believe that relatively speaking our prisons are OK and that’s just not the case.

You know, we incarcerate more people than anybody else in the world, both in terms of relative numbers and relatively speaking. And we keep people in prison for such a long time. People spend decades inside. They lose touch with their families. They are dehumanized at every turn, like we just heard. And in addition US prisons are suffering from an epidemic of rape and sexual abuse. So every single year in US detention 200,000 people are sexually abused. So that’s not the number of incidents. Most of these people are assaulted more than once. And that’s not good enough.

So, I think there are reasons for us to be ashamed and alarmed about our prisons.

**John:** Now we see portrayals in media of prison violence and sexual violence. Is it realistic or is it reinforcing that we see these portrayals? To what degree are the expectations being set by the media that we’re seeing? What are you seeing in terms of sexual violence in prisons?

**Lovisa:** The narratives that we see in most movies and television shows that touch on sexual abuse in prison are really misguided and dangerous and frankly inaccurate. Both in the way prisoners themselves, incarcerated people, are described and portrayed, but also the way the institutions themselves are shown.

So prisoners tend to be portrayed as somehow one-dimensional, casually cruel, less than human beings. And that’s so far from the truth. And the actual institutions are often portrayed as these inherently violent places where there’s no way we can keep people safe. And that’s also not true. And these false narratives have real life consequences. Because it means that we start to believe that prisoners are disposable. That it’s OK to ignore people who are incarcerated. That it’s OK to hate people who are incarcerated.

**John:** Zach I’m going to ask you the next question because you actually are making a show that is about an incarcerated person. Zach Calig is a writer-producer for the new ABC legal drama For Life, loosely based on the true story of Isaac Wright, Jr., it tells the story of a man who was wrongfully imprisoned but while incarcerated became a licensed attorney and helped overturn the wrongful convictions of 20 of his fellow inmates. Zach, welcome.

**Zach Calig:** Thank you.

**John:** Zach, now, I was reading up about the show and I was struck by this quote from Isaac Wright, Jr. who sort of inspired the show. “I think one of the things happens in the criminal justice system is that the prosecutor is able to control the narrative from the very, very beginning. The moment an arrest is made they put out a press release to the media and the media follows that narrative. They control the destiny of the person they’re going to be prosecuting.”

So you as writing on this show, you got to sort of set your own narrative for what this story was going to be about and what it was going to be like. What were your challenges and what did you see as the opportunities for setting the narrative for this person’s life?

**Zach:** Well, one of the opportunities that we were able to exploit was giving every single person that was incarcerated a full backstory. We were able to talk about their relationships, their loves, their children, their hopes and dreams and really humanize every single person, whether they were – I don’t want to say the word villain, but whether they were an antagonist to our main character, actually both in prison and even the prosecutors. We tried not to have full heroes or antagonists.

But we don’t have any control over how a prosecutor will present the case and probably will continue to be the same on their end, but we can on our end start to peel back the curtain and understand that it’s not black and white. That at least in Aaron’s case there was an eye witness line up that he will prove to be tainted. And so one of the reasons he was able to do this, like for example you’re called into an eye witness lineup and there’s me and four other people. You don’t recognize anyone. Two weeks later they say John we want you to come back in and you see me and four new people. And now suddenly I look familiar. And in that case Aaron, our protagonist who was based on Isaac’s life, is able to attack that and kind of set a precedent for his own case and free him.

Also, able to look at other issues in terms of like paid criminal informants and in one case of someone who is giving information to a DA in order to get a get-out-of-jail free card for himself. So, with humanizing everyone who is incarcerated on our show, whether they deserved to be in their prison or not, and peeling back the curtain on the prosecutor, we’re trying to paint a picture that there’s more than what meets the eye.

**John:** Well it sounds like, and we’ve all seen police lineups in TV shows. As long as I can remember I’ve seen that scene. But I’ve never seen it from that perspective. So you’re actually just taking a look at the same moments we would have seen in other shows but from a different perspective, from really looking at sort of what’s going on behind the scenes. There was a second one and so therefore that’s why that character is familiar again. So you’re questioning sort of how it actually really works. And was that research or how did you get to that?

**Zach:** Research. Well, I want to say in dramatizing how loaded some of these portrayals can be. But, yeah, that was research. We had an incredible staff. We had a writer who was a former CO. We had two attorneys, one of whom was a public defender and opened up three non-profits in criminal justice. We had a lot of writers, myself included, who had friends and family incarcerated. So everyone was able to bring these perspectives to the table to really put a vivid portrayal on a side of prison that we hadn’t seen. I am personally guilty of watching Oz when I was a teenager and enjoying it at the time, but I also understand that that’s problematic because it’s one side of prison. But it I would say by and large dehumanizes most of the people who are on the show.

**John:** No one comes off well on Oz. There are no heroes in Oz. Let’s get to Dan Birman. So Dan Birman is an award-winning producer and director. He’s spent six years producing and directing the documentary Me Facing Life, Cyntoia’s story, which follows 16-year-old Cyntoia Brown who received a life sentence for murder in Tennessee. He’s currently producing the second installment of Cyntoia’s story exploring juvenile justice issues and her fight for freedom, slated for release this spring on Netflix. So Dan, while Zach was talking about taking a real life person’s story as a jumping off place, you are talking about a real person who you met early on in this process. Can you catch us up to speed on like how you first got to know Cyntoia Brown? How you first got involved with this story? And what the change has been over the course of these years you’ve seen? How both she has changed but really it feels like some of our assumptions about criminal justice have changed over the course of the time you’ve been making this documentary.

**Dan Birman:** So about 2004 I decided to take on the task of understanding how juveniles can become violent. And so it was my job as a documentarian to figure out how to tell that story. We don’t get to write out the narrative. We actually have to go find it and bring it in. So I did a lot of research and found myself in Davidson County, the seat where Nashville is located. Gained the access to the juvenile justice system, to the public defender’s office, and over the course of a year between 2003 and 2004 somewhere in there Cyntoia Brown was arrested and I got a call from the public defender’s office saying I think we have a story for you. That’s after gaining a lot of access and trust.

And I found myself on a plane within three hours with a little camera in my hand. The next morning I was in Nashville at 6:30 in the morning and by 7:30 I was staring in the face of a young girl, 16 years old, who looked like anybody’s little girl, only knowing that she had done something pretty horrible. And so what I started doing is recording interviews with Cyntoia Brown and we had an agreement back in 2004 that nobody on earth is going to allow me to do the story I wanted to do over time, so I was just going to have to follow this story on my own.

And I decided to do that, as long as she agreed not to lie to me or send me down, manipulate my storytelling process that I would stay with this story as long as I needed to that. And that has been 16 years.

**John:** So over those 16 years in the little trailer we just saw we talk about how she was initially described as being a prostitute and now she’s described as a victim of sexual abuse. That does feel like a change that’s happened over the course of this time.

**Dan:** That’s an insightful – you’re going down an insightful path. Because first of all there are a lot of assumptions that go on in this system. And I started out as a – I’m a filmmaker. I’m a documentary producer. So, what I know about justice systems you could put on the head of a pin and still have room for an entire bowling alley. But what I went in with were my own assumptions. I started this story, to be quite frank with you, a very close personal friend of mine lost his mother because her granddaughter murdered her for drug money. And so I thought well that’s messed up. So, what do we do about that?

So my assumptions when I got the call, I said tell me Cyntoia. 16-year-old girl in the middle of prostitution, on drugs. Got picked up by a 43-year-old man who picked her up for sex. Things went from bad to worse and she murdered him. And so I thought to myself, and as I was flying to Nashville I thought Birman what the hell are you doing? I mean, this is stuff we read in the newspaper every day. Why are you going down this path?

And all of a sudden I found myself asking what the hell kind of question is that. She’s a 16-year-old girl. So at that time Cyntoia Brown was eviscerated by media. She was painted as someone who committed murder, a really bad thing to an upstanding citizen of the community, and whatever. So my initial assessment centered on the crime. And centered on a whole lot of factors that are our prejudices.

But what I found over time is it ain’t that simple. What took me seven years to put out the first film was to really peel back the layers of humanity in a human story, because Cyntoia Brown is a human. And the world that grew up in had a lot to do to shape her. Yes, she made a really bad decision on August 6, 2004. Really bad decision. But if we are busy not couching what people do with at least trying to shoot for some level of understanding, some level of perspective, then we’re missing it.

And the reason I think our film has been so successful and now we’ve got this new film that’s coming out, it’s a redo, it’s not an update, it’s a redo, is because I think we bothered to take a hard, hard, hard look at the humanity.

**John:** So in the Cyntoia Brown story it’s a murder that gets her caught up into the system, but that’s probably not – that’s not the reason why most people end up in the criminal justice system. Can we talk about the start of the process, like what it is that gets people involved in the criminal justice system and gets them into a situation where they may be incarcerated? What are the common reasons for which a person is arrested and how do arrests then lead to sort of the incarcerations that we’re seeing? Aly, what are you seeing as what are the common factors that are getting people into our jails and our prisons?

**Aly:** I don’t think that there’s any like we can just say these are the five factors because every person is different. You know, in my case lack of emotional intelligence, lack of impulse control, being raised in a hyper masculine environment. But there are – I think a big chunk we can codify and that’s lack of opportunity. When people are thriving in the world they’re not going to go out and commit a crime. You know?

And so I think if we have opportunity for that segment of society then we would be able to deal with the people who really need the help.

**John:** And what are the specific things that people tend to be arrested for? Because we know about like there’s the issue of like nonviolent drug offenses that are getting people into the system. But what are the things that you see in your time in jail and in prison that you saw as being reasons why people are caught up in this net? What are the specific incidents that tend to get people–?

**Aly:** A vast majority of the people are for drug sales or violence surrounding drug sales, or drug use. Then there’s a segment of people who have mental health issues and as a society we don’t know what to do with those people anymore. So, we send them to prison and jail. And then you have the people, the category that I put myself in, who were in a bad situation, emotionally-charged situation, and made a poor choice in that situation.

And I want to challenge you a little bit. I don’t think Cyntoia murdered her victim. I think she killed him, definitely. But the definition of murder, that premeditation, right – this little girl was being trafficked and made a poor decision but I don’t think – and I’m speculating – but I just don’t believe in my heart that she got up that morning and said, “I’m going to go kill someone in a hotel.” Right?

**Dan:** That’s correct.

**Aly:** And to me that’s the definition of murder.

**Dan:** That’s correct. She didn’t get up that morning and decide to go murder somebody, to kill somebody. I use the word murder for a very dramatic reason. And the reason I use the word murder is because that is a label that is put on someone who does kill somebody. She was convicted of murder. She went to prison. She became incarcerated for having convicted first degree murder. So I use the word for a little bit of dramatic effect.

It’s not perhaps the best word because I think we showed that there’s a much deeper story and as in fact Cyntoia Brown is walking, is a free person, today. Today. Because somebody stopped and bothered to look at a young woman in 360 degrees. But I want to just add one more thing to your question. In the year that Cyntoia was arrested 2.2 million children – children – were arrested for violent crime that year. That year. A third of them were girls. 98% of the girls who were arrested that year according to the Department of Justice, the data that I found, were also victims of sexual and physical abuse.

I think you can maybe – there are ways to categorize what are the crimes of the day but I think what we’re really looking at are the situations of the day. And I think what we miss as writers, as filmmakers, I’m a documentarian so I have to go for facts anyway, but is be able to find perspective because it’s not as sexy to find perspective.

**John:** So you’re saying that the – we might notice the arrest but the actual incidents that were leading up to that arrest happened way before that. And we’re outside of the control of—

**Dan:** It’s big. It’s way the hell big. And I will tell you that there were no lawyers who were ready to put in six years of their time to go find the birth mother, the adoptive mother, the maternal grandmother, and to understand their stories that led to three generations of violence that resulted in Cyntoia Brown. I don’t think the system knows how to do that.

**John:** Let’s talk about the process from the moment that a person is arrested and sort of portrayals we see in the media we tend to see it from the prosecutor’s point of view. We tend to see like, well, we’re trying to figure out who committed this crime. We found a person. This is the person who committed the crime and we’re going to convict this person and then credits roll and the thing is over. What are we missing from the other side of the story? What side are we not seeing? And Zach maybe you can speak to that just a little bit. What side are we not seeing of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of criminal justice systems?

**Zach:** Well, for the people that matter, the jury, they’re not seeing the human element. They’re not seeing the circumstances in which some of these crimes were committed. And they’re not seeing what goes on in the police department. They’re basically only seeing what the prosecutor wants them, especially if someone can’t afford a good attorney.

And the quality of attorney that one has kind of determines the narrative that’s going to be put out there. And when you said we don’t see other narratives, they just maybe think of Harvey Weinstein. Well, we see his narrative because he can afford the best attorney money can buy, and most people cannot.

**John:** Aly, when you see people who are caught up at the start of the criminal justice system, you see people who are arrested, do you have any sense of like what the percentage of people who are arrested or go to trial are going to be convicted? I’m guessing it’s quite high.

**Aly:** Yes. So, in America, and this is just a shocking statistic, if a prosecutor charges you with a felony you have a 97% chance of being found guilty, whether you’re innocent of the crime or not. And I want to highlight something about the prosecutor narrative. Prosecutors have a very, very, very difficult job. And I argue that they’re also system-impacted. They see the worst of humanity every day. They work in an antiquated system, with very, very little to no technology. They read a police report and literally in a manner of minutes, most times less than an hour, make a charging decision that is going to affect the offender, affect the victim, affect the community, affect tax payers. And, yeah, I’m proud to say one of the things that we are doing at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is working with prosecutors, helping them use data and technology and get better at making more informed decisions that have better outcomes for everybody.

**John:** So when a person is arrested you would like the prosecutor to say not only how good of a case can I make but I really first ask is this person the actual person who committed the crime. Is this person the guilty person? And what is actually the appropriate response for what’s happened there. Those are two things or what else am I missing?

**Aly:** Well, I think, I mean, it’s more nuanced than that. But I think one of the things is we have this adversarial system, right? What a police officer writes in a police report is held as gospel. And once a person goes in you really, really have very, very little control of, like Zach said, unless you can hire an expensive attorney you are literally a spectator.

And it’s even worse if you can’t afford bail. Because you can’t even assist your attorney in your defense because you’re in jail.

**John:** Talk to us about bail. Because that’s a system that I don’t really understand. And how does bail come about? What is the decision about who gets bail, who does not get bail? And what is a person expected to be able to put up for bail, because I know bail bondsmen and all sorts of stuff. I’m sure it’s different state by state. But what are some useful things that writers and filmmakers can understand about how bail works if a person is arrested?

**Aly:** So, supposedly you’re innocent until proven guilty and bail is a way to get people to show up to court. So if you have some skin in the game, right, if you’re accused of a crime and there is a bail scheduled for offenses in every jurisdiction or every geography they say, OK, you stole a car, your bail is $50,000. Usually people don’t have $50,000 so what they do is they pay a bail bondsman 10%. The bail bondsman—

**John:** So they would have to pay $5,000 and the bail bondsman would basically do an insurance policy on them.

**Aly:** Exactly. And that’s funny because the insurance industry underwrites most of the bail bondsman and they take that 5% as a fee, or 10%. It really depends on the bail bondsman. But anywhere from 5% to 10%.

**John:** It’s basically a tax on that person for having been arrested.

**Aly:** Right. And so what happens is if you’re wealthy you can post the whole bail and after you get out of trial you get your money back, or you can leverage your real estate. But if you’re poor you’re stuck in jail. And you’re stuck in jail, this is pre-trial, you’re not proven guilty. So you’re already incarcerated and the issue with that is people that are poor you lose your job, you lose your house. It’s just a cascade that goes downhill.

And then it also forces you into a lot of times prosecutors if you’re sitting in jail four, five, six, seven, eight days they’ll come up and say, oh well, take a plea deal, I’ll let you out today. And people plea out sometimes think [they knew].

**John:** Now, Lovisa, if a person is sitting in jail during this time they’re unable to make bail, what are the range of things they could see in jail? Because I’m guessing that jail is not a place that anyone ever wants to be. But in your experience dealing with jails because I know you were consulting with like Aspen jail, but also there’s I’m sure worse jails than the Aspen jail. What does one encounter in jails?

**Lovisa:** Well, one of the biggest jails in the world is just minutes away from here which is the Men’s Central Jail, Downtown Los Angeles. And jails tend to be pretty terrible places. Partly because people are supposed to be there for only short periods of time, either waiting trial or as Aly already said spending maybe up to a year if they get a short sentence. And that means that there’s even less programming. There’s even less attention being paid to why people ended up there in the first place. There are so few services in a jail to actually help all these women who arrive because they have endured horrible trauma previously in life, or men who have endured trauma.

So, jails tend to be really chaotic places. And violent places. Both in terms of physical violence in general, but also sexual abuse.

**John:** So obviously we’re focused on the media narratives here, but let’s just a step at the process here. What are some things that could be done to fix this part of the early process? So from arrest to trial, what things would you here on the stage like to see done? So I hear things about cash bail reform or the end of cash bail. Can someone explain what that actually means because I don’t want to explain it wrong?

**Zach:** One of the writers on our show created a nonprofit, one of the attorneys, called the Bail Project. And the idea behind bail was that if someone who has gone through a trial has skin in the game than they will post a bond and be able to return to collect that money. And what this organization did is it paid bail for people who cannot afford it, predominately people in lower income communities, and they found that 96% of their clients came back. And it kind of blew away the notion that people need skin in the game to even consider coming back to their trial. And now they’re in 20 cities across America and that’s one of the things that they’re pushing for and collecting the data to kind of dispel this myth that we have.

**John:** Dan, Cyntoia was a teenager, so what did you see in terms of a teenager entering the jail system? What do we do with juveniles who are caught up in that system? What are the right choices? Putting you on the spot to fix juvenile detention.

**Dan:** I think the hard work of understanding of what a juvenile’s process should be centers on a lot of factors. One is where did they come from. What situations are they in? But you know the system is not designed, it’s not intended to understand the circumstances. It’s not intended at all.

Look, I think in television and film it’s easy to vilify everybody. It’s easy to vilify the prosecutor. It’s easy to vilify the cops. It’s easy to vilify everybody associated with the system. But everybody comes at this with pieces of information, pieces of destiny, what they’re supposed to do. And I think that for the – I’ll never forget that the sheriff of Davidson County asked to take a look at the fine cut of our first documentary before we released it. And he said, “Oh my god, we missed this one.” And I said, you know, I’m not sure you could have seen it.

I mean, these are people who are overworked, overwhelmed by a lot – a lot – a lot of people coming into their system. And Cyntoia Brown was just one of them, one of many that day. How do you stop and go take a look at what their environment was like?

**John:** But I would challenge that as storytellers we have the opportunity to put – to make a character out of one of those prosecutors and let that person realize that there’s actually more to the story. And actually let that person be a heroic person, to actually step beyond their job to actually realize what’s going on there and how to sort of best—

**Dan:** I got to tell you, these are great characters. I mean, Jeff Burks, who was the prosecutor in Cyntoia’s case, was a hardworking guy, a thinking guy. He’s also an animated guy. And he’s a guy who has got a great theatrical presence. For anybody who is writing a story, if you were to watch Jeff Burks in action you’d go, oh my god, I want to write about that guy. And if you look at each of the people involved, the police officers, the detectives involved, they all have that presence. Again, the hard work for us as the filmmakers, as the writers, as the producers, you know, for me the documentary guy, is to take a much harder look, a much closer look at what makes those characters tick.

That’s the fun stuff. Because you could take it from the surface, we’ll see a prosecutor who is doing his job. But if we dig a little deeper we’ll find something more.

**John:** This person we’re talking about is now incarcerated. This person is going into a prison situation. Can we talk about the depictions of entering prison versus what reality is? Because I feel like I’ve seen the scene where the character goes to prison a zillion times. And I don’t know how much of any of that is accurate. Aly, can you talk us through some of the things you see in media about entering prison and what myths you’d like to see dispelled?

**Aly:** You know, you always see the guy walking – or gal – walking with—

**John:** The folded clothes?

**Aly:** The folded clothes. You got your sheet. Your towel. And your socks and underwear. And then there’s a bunch of people catcalling. And I’m just like, oh no, oh god, this is just not how it works. In reality how it works, I mean, it’s a very, very spirt-breaking process. You’re taken from the county jail to what they call a reception center.

**John:** Which is not the prison itself or sort of outside?

**Aly:** So they are prisons. I think in California we have four reception centers. So depending on what geography—

**John:** It sounds so nice.

**Aly:** Well, no, they send you there and you’re put directly in isolation. So, there is no contact with family members. I spent 101 days in isolation in a prison called [Delano]. I had no paper, no pen, no pencil, no phone calls.

**John:** And is the stated purpose behind this for safety and protection?

**Aly:** No. It’s an assessment time. So, you get medically screened. You get screened for education. Then you go in and you go to an actual hearing and they decide your custody level. Then you get shipped to one of California’s 36 prisons, the main prisons. And then in California you have Death Row, which is the highest custody level. And then it goes level four down to level one. And the way – usually you can earn your way down, so the idea is by the time you’re getting ready to go home you’re in a minimum security facility.

Some people depending on their score never reach like a Corcoran Level IV or like Pelican Bay. And there’s a total different type of violence that happens there. It’s very extreme. But it’s not the whistling catcalls that you see in movies, on cinema.

**John:** Lovisa, this last week a big Hollywood person, Harvey Weinstein, got sentenced to prison. We were talking beforehand that you were expecting there to be a whole bunch of like Harvey Weinstein rape jokes and they did not come. Is that progress? Is that good news that it wasn’t the first thing Twitter jokesters went to?

**Lovisa:** I hope it’s progress. I hope we won’t find that there is a bunch of jokes happening tomorrow about Harvey Weinstein. But one of the things that really filled me with dread was once the conviction hit the news we learned that his lawyer had said he “took it like a man.” And I just thought, oh no, now we’re going to get all the jokes. All the don’t drop the soap jokes.

But to my great surprise it didn’t really happen. There were some sort of minor tweets that were just tasteless, but there was also some strong pushback from higher profile media folks. And I’d like to hope that that means we’ve turned some kind of corner, because I think that the sort of flippant treatment of rape in detention is really one of the – it’s a really dangerous trope. And it’s one of the biggest problems with Hollywood’s approach to criminal justice.

**John:** You talk about detention and detention, you know, in the US I think we think about criminal justice as keeping those people outside of society. And other countries may think about it more as rehabilitation and pushing people, you know, getting people the skills they need so they can function back in society. Can you talk us through some of the different approaches that other countries, or sort of more positive approaches other countries might take to this person who was convicted of a crime and is now incarcerated? What are some things that we might see that are different in other countries?

**Lovisa:** In healthier prisons those who are incarcerated are allowed to live somewhat normal lives. They get to still have some control over their lives. Whether it’s just that they’re allowed to wash their own clothes or cook their own food, which doesn’t necessarily seem like a privilege to those of us on the outside, but that’s hugely important to actually – especially for people who arrive with profound trauma in their past, who may never have lived a mainstream life. They have a chance to learn basic skills that are essential upon release.

And so those are really important basic, basic programs that we are typically lacking in the US.

**John:** Zach on your show your central character gets his law degree while incarcerated?

**Zach:** In our show he gets his law degree while in custody. It made it simple for the audience to understand that he’s an attorney. In reality he got his law degree after, but he did everything that we’re portraying as a paralegal in prison.

**John:** I would say as a screenwriter that he was able to build a sense of purpose and autonomy for himself in doing the work for other people who were incarcerated. And the education that he’s getting, the education he’s able to get is what allows him to feel like not just a number, but actually a person with value. Was that a goal of the show?

**Zach:** It’s interesting you say that because he’s actually not this altruistic do-gooder at the top. He’s really taking cases at the beginning of the season specifically to knock down the pillars of his own case and get himself a new trial. Obviously because it’s Hollywood and it’s television we may see this character evolve and start to do something for someone else without personal benefit. But we also go in – I mean, he starts out an attorney in the pilot, but we do have a flashback episode so we can understand how he got to where he is and we see him arriving in prison. We skipped through a lot of the areas where he’s not interacting with other people. But we see him kind of acclimate to this culture and decide to find purpose in the law. And at first, yes, it’s a selfish-driven purpose, but it does give him purpose. And ultimately he’ll find value in helping other people.

**John:** And Dan I haven’t seen your movie yet, but I want to know to what degree—

**Dan:** April 30.

**John:** April 30. To what degree is Cyntoia able to grow into being a woman over the course of her time in prison?

**Dan:** Watching Cyntoia over the 15 years that I watched her I was amazed. Here is a young woman who walked in with a whole lot of issues going on for her. She’s staring at a life in prison that she might not walk out of. And yet she bothers to take advantage of everything that the prison has to offer in this case and she got an education, one course at a time. She graduated while in prison with an Associate’s Degree. Then she worked her way toward a Bachelor’s Degree. She worked on a whole mechanism for helping kids keep them from going down the same path that she went and helped them out of trouble. When they see themselves getting into trouble before they get into trouble.

So, you know, I’m watching her grow up through this entire time so the transition for her walking out of incarceration and back into a life means the continuation of a process that she’s been doing. It’s not an on/off switch. She’s not all of a sudden a new person. She’s a developing person.

And even, you know, stop and think about it, too, and I think something that we had to wrap our heads around is that even the Supreme Court recognizes that kids who are incarcerated are starting out with [squirrely] brain syndrome and at some point they grow up and mature and they become something different. They evolve.

**John:** Now, part of – ideally the end of an incarceration comes at parole or there’s some sort of hearing, there’s an assessment. I’ve seen, again, I’ve seen that scene in movies and I don’t know if anything I’ve seen in movies is accurate. Aly, can you talk us through what the end of incarceration looks like and what a parole hearing, or how that actually happens in real life?

**Aly:** It really depends on your sentence. So there’s two different types of sentences in California. And actually across, more than two. Because you can get the death penalty. But the basic two are determinate and indeterminate sentences. So in indeterminate, for instance, if you’re sentenced in California to 25 years to life, after the 25 years you go in front of a parole board and they assess your behavior in prison, your growth, your ability to articulate how you were able to commit a crime. And they make a decision and you’re either released or you go back to prison and they give you some recommendations and you come back later.

Then there’s determinate sentences. Determinate sentences you’re just sentenced to five years. And when you’re done you get out and you’re on parole for usually three years.

**John:** And so in a determinate sentence could you be released earlier on good behavior? Could there be other circumstances which get you out in less time than that?

**Aly:** So in California there’s three tiers of credits that you can earn. So most everybody can get out a little bit early. If you’re a violent offender you’re going to do 85% of your law under the truth and sentencing law. If you’re a drug offender you do about 50% of your time. If you’re a very, very low level offender you can actually get out in a third of your time and those are the men and women that you see that are out fighting fires in California. They earn a lot more credits.

**John:** How do we feel about that? I don’t know how to feel about that. That actually was a topic we brought up on Scriptnotes was about these people who are fighting fires on California’s behalf. And you can see that as an inspiring story of these people who are getting a chance to sort of do stuff, but you can also see it as they are kind of incarcerated labor and it’s very dangerous. So, I don’t know how to feel about that all.

**Aly:** Slavery is still legal in prison. The 13th amendment abolished slavery everywhere but in prison. I mean, I worked for $0.09 an hour when I was in prison. I think there’s a way to do it right. I just think we’re doing it wrong right now. I think – I actually went to Norway and Finland and one of the people in our delegation was an assemblyman here in California. And I talked to him about these men and women are going out there, risking their lives for I think they get a dollar a day and I think it’s $5 a day if they’re fighting a fire. And then to come home to have fines and fees, right? What do you mean? I just risked my life, saved millions, and maybe billions of dollars of property and I still owe $20,000 for my fines and fees. So I think that should be eliminated.

I think that they should be compensated decently. And third I think they should be eligible to work as firefighters post incarceration.

**Lovisa:** Can I add something there?

**John:** Please.

**Lovisa:** Is that there are other prison jobs that are quite invisible to the outside world. And that I think most Americans are completely unaware that for example there are major sweatshops inside prisons. There are – when you buy your next t-shirt that says Made in the USA, chances are it was actually made in a prison and then it was sent out to some other place that just applied the logo. There are government agencies that use prisoners to answer their phones. So next time you throw a fit because someone can’t help you, you might be talking to a prisoner who has no power and who is making I think now it’s probably $0.11 an hour. So it’s just important to have an awareness of that.

**John:** And what are ways people who are incarcerated at this moment could get some skills for work, for instance I really want to transition to what is life like after prison. And so how do you find a person who has been incarcerated who is then out in the world, what are the good outcomes? What are the success stories? What are paths that could sort of get somebody to not be caught back up in the system again?

**Aly:** You know, there’s 70 to 100 million people in the United States who have a criminal conviction. So there’s a lot of success stories out there. We just don’t highlight them. We always go to the parolee that did something wrong. But I think—

**John:** And terms like ex-convict doesn’t help.

**Aly:** It doesn’t help. Could you imagine if I went and applied for my job and I said, hey, I’m an ex-convict, want to hire me? Right? It just doesn’t work. But getting back to your question, I believe that our elected and our carceral system has a duty to make sure people leaving the system don’t go back and revictimize communities. And until—

**John:** So it’s a duty both to the person who is leaving the system so they’re actually ready to function, but also to society.

**Aly:** Right. I mean, and I believe in personal responsibility and taking advantage, like you were saying Cyntoia taking advantage of all the educational opportunities. But if you don’t have those educational opportunities and you’re locked up in a concrete steel box for decades and then they push you out – in California they give you $200 – with no skills, very low education, what are you going to do?

And so I think there’s a lot of programs. I learned to write computer code. And I can tell you I wouldn’t have the job today. I don’t write code anymore, but I learned how to write computer code. There was a program called The Last Mile. I get to fund them now which is awesome. Right? And it’s this sort of crazy turn of events. They’re in six states and 13 prisons. And so when I came home I had these skills, these marketable skills. Like software engineers are in high demand. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a floor of an engineering group, but people with red hair and tattoos on their faces. They don’t care. If you can write the code – if you can build it they’ll hire you.

And so I think really starting to think about what – and skills that pay a living wage. What the carceral – public/private partnerships in the carceral setting can do to offer opportunities to our folks when they’re coming home.

**John:** Dan, we’re going to lose you in a couple minutes because I know you have to catch a flight, but I want to talk about sort of Cyntoia Brown- and a little spoiler – like post-prison. We will watch your movie so we will see what happened. But did she feel like she was ready for life outside of this? Because she had spent half of her life—

**Dan:** Well, she spent 15 years incarcerated. And as I said she did take advantage of programs and people who were in contact with her to help her just kind of readjust her thinking and her approach and who she was. And to rethink who she was. I don’t know how somebody, I don’t know where that turn happens because I’m neither a psychologist nor have I lived with incarceration. But I can tell you what I observed. And what I observed was a young woman going through stages. Denial at first, I’m going to walk out of here. When I first interviewed her she was sure that within a few weeks this was all just going to be done and she was going to walk out of the jail and back into her life. She was sure of that. And then there was a point in which, oh my god, the likelihood is that I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison. And that is my destiny.

And there was a bit of a resignation. But then when she actually went from jail to the Tennessee Prison for Women and she started working on things, by having at least a program. And I’m not going to sit here and say that Tennessee Prison for Women is the most progressive prison in the world. It is not for a whole lot of reasons. But they are also taking progressive steps to allow an education program. That’s big. So for her whether she was going to walk out or not, she at least had some hope. There was something called hope in there. So even if there’s a little flicker of that, she gets to develop as a person while she’s going through the maturation process. And through an education process. And it kind of works out so that when she walks out she has written a book. She started writing that before she got out. She’s giving talks. She’s helping legislators. Tennessee is taking some very progressive steps which is amazing to see. They’re learning from it, too.

**John:** Great. Well it sounds like what you’re describing is we think about the criminal justice system as sort of extinguishing hope and you’re stressing that we have to make sure that we are igniting hope in people who are incarcerated. That society wants them back and that there is going to be a place for them and that they are meaningful and valuable people.

**Dan:** I suspect there’s a place called balance where we might see situations treated differently so that hope becomes the goal as opposed to punishment as the goal. Look, people do bad things. There’s no question about it. I’m sure that for Johnny Allen, his family was certainly not very sympathetic to whatever Cyntoia Brown went through. She couldn’t turn that around. It was impossible for her to turn that situation around. However, do we throw away a person, do we throw away a human, without at least considering alternatives? And I have a flight to catch.

**John:** We’re going to open it up to questions. Dan, thank you very much.

**Dan:** Thanks.

**John:** All right. We have time for some questions now. So we have people with microphones. And so raise your hand and we will get somebody with a microphone to you so you can ask your question of the panel.

**Female Audience Member:** Hi, my name is Angelica. I’m from the south, so I’ve been deep, deep in the south and seen some of the horrendous conditions that have been in the prisons, like Parchman in Mississippi. If you haven’t heard of what’s happening there you should look it up. So I have kind of two questions for Aly and Lovisa. I wanted to know have you all explored any alternatives to justice like restorative justice or prison abolition. What do those concepts look like for you and how they work in the real world? And for Zach, mass incarceration has a lot of racial and socioeconomic disparities, and how have you approached those in writing, producing, research on the show?

**John:** Angelica, you have totally a job as a moderator. Those were great questions. So I want to start with alternatives to traditional criminal justice. Aly, do you want to start?

**Aly:** So, in my personal capacity, absolutely right. I try to bring those voices into our foundation. But our foundation, like we can only do so much. So right now we’re really focused on two areas. And that’s the funnel of people coming in to the criminal justice system. So really transforming the way we prosecute this country, so we’re putting people in prison for less time and having alternatives to prison. Because prosecutors really right now only have one lever and that’s like incarceration with fines and fees.

And then than the tail end is really expanding opportunities to formerly incarcerated people. Really making sure they have the opportunities in their life to thrive post-incarceration.

**John:** Lovisa, do you have any thoughts on alternatives to prisons or things you’ve seen that we should be considering?

**Lovisa:** I think it’s pretty clear that we are incarcerating people at a crazy level in this country. And that it’s not a fair system at all. One of the questions you asked early on John was what are some of things that make people end up in prison. And of course the answer to that is quite complicated, because it depends on what you look like and who you are. Because the kinds of things that if we all committed the same crime in this room we would be – some would be much more likely to be arrested than others and convicted and get very long sentences and be denied parole. There’s just incredible racism and classism in the system.

So, if we started addressing those really fundamental issues then I think our incarceration rates would become a little bit more normal as they relate to the world, because incarcerate six, seven times more people than Canada. Why?

**John:** And Zach, let’s talk about the racial component of disparities in criminal justice and sort of in the show how do you address and how do you look at that?

**Zach:** You absolutely have to address it doing any sort of show in prison now. The last I read the statistic being that African Americans make up 13% of the US population but nearly a third of inmates in prison. And Latinos under 15% but almost a quarter of inmates in prison. And so we’re very conscious of that. We don’t shy away from it. But we don’t try to lean in too hard to recreate that narrative, if you know what I mean. We also had a very diverse room of storytellers to make sure we did include everyone’s perspectives and that was very important to us.

And in terms of looking at mass incarceration I think one of the things that our show does very well is it looks at the collateral damage as well. And it’s not a show just about Aaron behind bars in [Bellmore], it’s a show about Aaron Wallace and his family and what it did to his daughter who was raised without a father at home. And what it did to his wife and their relationship. And what it does to the families of not just Aaron but all these secondary characters in our show, too. And that’s in my opinion the beauty of our show and the comment that that makes on mass incarceration.

**John:** Yes?

**Female Audience Member:** I’m currently doing work in bail reform in California, working in partnership with the LA Superior Court, and LA County Probation. And with the SB-10 and bail reform in California, you know that the process under SB-10 would require the use of risk assessment tools as an alternative to having cash as a way for a person to be released. And I just wanted to know what the thoughts are on the use of risk assessment tools in determining whether or not a person should be released.

**John:** And just, because I don’t know, SB-10 is a state law—

**Aly:** It’s a bail reform law that’s trying to essentially eliminate cash bail. There are some places that have done it way better than California. There’s a lot of issues with SB-10 and to answer your question we’re a tech-based philanthropy so we build tools for nonprofits. So that’s how I came into this work, as a software engineer. There are some really, really tough things that we have to consider when we start using technology to determine the destiny of people’s lives.

And so we don’t take that lightly. I think – there’s no like one answer for that. A lot of the risk assessment tools or the data that they put in them are already biased. So, you can create something that has the bias that’s in the data. So, it’s a tough thing that smarter people than me are working on.

**John:** Another question.

**Male Audience Member:** Hi, so another group that’s often treated in dramatizations of anything that has to do with prison reform and in a sort of caricature way are the guards. And I’m wondering if you could talk for a second about the psychology of and experience of and bureaucracy of the guards?

**John:** I can talk about sort of the stereotypes I see of guards. And then I would love to hear some reality checking on this. Is that I always see the burly, under-educated, hot-headed prison guard who is abusive and sort of a know-nothing. And I’ve rarely seen a positive portrayal of a guard in prison. What are some realities? I’m sure there’s a whole range of sort of what these people are like, what people who do that job are like. What are things that we’re missing? What are stories that we’re not seeing about people who are guards in prisons?

**Aly:** I think the portrayal of guards, you know, there are those type of people. But there’s also some very, very empathetic – I’m reluctant to tell this story, but you know I had the flu before I came home and I really thought I was going to die. You know, you go through the stages where you think you’re going to die, then you want to die, right, as an adult with the flu. And this prison guard bought medicine from Walgreens or something out there and risked his job and brought it in and gave it to me. And so, you know, I think they’re human beings just like anybody else. They get a bit jaded and get calloused from being in a job. But like I have a great relationship with the California Department of Corrections.

And I don’t have Stockholm Syndrome. I think if we’re going to improve the system we need to improve their lives also. And get some trauma-informed care for them also.

**John:** Lovisa, I’m guessing training is an important thing for prison guards?

**Lovisa:** Yeah, and I just want to agree with what you were saying which is that there’s a full spectrum of people in the corrections profession. And some are definitely drawn to prison jobs because they like hard power. And for example when you talk about sexual abuse in detention, half of all sexual abuse in detention – you wouldn’t know this through Hollywood – but is actually perpetrated by prison officials. And half is among incarcerated people. So there definitely are guards who are in the job for all the wrong reasons.

But also many who come to the profession because they care and they want to make things better. They don’t always succeed because these are really toxic environments. And some people also get destroyed in these jobs. And it’s something that we see very clearly that former corrections officials upon retirement, they tend to retire early, and they usually have very poor outcomes in retirement.

**John:** Zach, as you were looking at prison guards in your show what were some of the expectations and how did you try to push against them?

**Zach:** So it’s interesting. We originally characterized one prison guard and he was kind of like this tough, burly – I mean, if you watch the pilot you can tell he’s an emotionally abusive guard. And one of the things we were able to do in the season is dive into this person’s depression. And I won’t give anything away but we do look at his home life. And we do look at the trauma that he has suffered from spending so long here. And this is a person who actually went into the profession because his father was in the profession, and that’s very common as well.

And I will say, funny enough, we had a wall in the writers room of all of our guards, because we would just script like guard number two, guard number three, and then we started over the season to like ascribe character traits of these guards. And then we would find situations where certain guards could display moments of kindness and allow Aaron to hug his daughter while he showed up early to court and his daughter wanted to watch him. Or allow Aaron to touch his father when his father came to visit him for his character and fitness hearing. And they’re not supposed to do that, but sometimes we characterized them in really small moments that humanized them. And it would be nice to get into the guards more in future seasons.

**John:** So you’re recognizing them as individuals and not just one monolithic force that everyone who wears that uniform is the same.

**Zach:** Is not monolithic. And we’ll differentiate them and figure out who is going to do what and who has what characteristics.

**John:** Great. A question was right over here. Hi.

**Female Audience Member:** We’ve talked a lot about humanizing them when they’re in prison, but I’d like to know what your experiences are as far as humanizing them before they enter the prison system. And I know that that’s very, very complex what leads these people to prison, but there’s so many traumas, so many experiences like Cyntoia Brown was sexually assaulted. They never questioned her psychological state of mind. The fact that she herself was a victim before she committed the act that she committed. And I don’t know if you guys have exposure to organizations that are working on that, but sort of what the preventative measures are, if any at all, within the community, within societies to prevent them from even being convicted at all. That’s my question. I know it’s a little complicated.

**John:** Aly, you started talking about this and we sort of moved on early in the process, but you were saying it does start well before any interaction with law enforcement. That there’s something that has happened here.

**Aly:** I think as a society we really have to start looking at the history of racism and the use of the carceral system as a social control mechanism. But I really think like I said in the beginning that if we offer more opportunities to people they’re not going to end up in our prison jails. And then I’ll answer your question. There are some organizations like Debug who is doing participatory defense, where your family and everybody gets involved in your defense. There’s an organization called Root and Rebound who is growing into – I think they’re like in seven or eight states now. So there are organizations that are trying to help people on the front end to really, really have a robust defense that brings in some of these things, so the judges and the DAs can hear them.

But one of the problems is that our criminal legal system is not built to allow that information to come in. A lot of the times they’ll just say it’s irrelevant, it doesn’t have anything to do with what happened with the crime, therefore depending on the judge they’re not going to let that kind of data come in.

**Lovisa:** Can I add something? I think trauma is a bit of a blind spot in society generally. And especially inside prisons. That if you look at the pathways of women entering prison it’s not just juveniles, but adult women as well, or the vast majority, maybe 90% of women in prison are sexual abuse survivors from prior to their detention. So these are extreme numbers. And their trauma has tended to be ignored before they were detained and then it continues to be ignored inside because trauma doesn’t count as a mental illness. It’s not something that there are services for in detention. So people are then sitting in detention for years or decades with this untreated trauma. And then they’re released. And they may be getting some help to find a job, or find somewhere to live, but if they still get no support to deal with their trauma they won’t succeed.

**Male Audience Member:** One of the things I feel like in this conversation that we miss is the economic incentive to incarcerate. And so the economic incentive to incarcerate and the incarceration test system is literally designed to prioritize the incarceration of black and brown folks. And so like the residual spillover of that, you know, infects our systems. So, kind of going to the question earlier about guards, I used to be a prison guard for almost four or five years. With those who are incarcerated as well as those who are the jailers, most of those folks are coming from communities that are decimated by poverty. And so you have the incarcerated who more often than not, especially with the majority of people who are incarcerated being locked up for drug crimes, which has its own rich history on why that happens, are in there because they didn’t have the resources to be able to survive and thrive.

Then you have folks who are looking for employment in order to survive in their communities and they’re taking on jobs with little to no post high school education to go in and work in these systems. So, one of the things I’m really curious about your thoughts on is how do we talk about the intersection of race and how it functions with economic incentives to incarcerate black and brown folks in this country?

**Aly:** You know, there’s this wonderful woman, her name is Bianca [Tyler], she puts out this report every year about the prison industrial complex and who is profiteering off of it and how that keeps driving incarceration. We have private prisons who lobby for tough on crime laws. We have guard unions who lobby for tough on crime laws. So, there’s a lot of work to be done in this area. I’m fortunate that I work with a lot of really, really smart people. And there’s other foundations and lots of nonprofits that are chipping away on all of these little aspects.

But it’s going to take – it took us 400 years to get here. It’s going to take us some time to get back. But really recognizing the racial part of it is part of it. And coming to Jesus. Like, you know, we built this system that is biased and we need to deconstruct it.

**John:** A question, are you a writer?

**Zach:** Lee was a writer on our show, I just might say.

**John:** Because I was going to say like well it sounds like you should write about that. Because I think – here’s what I’m hearing and what you’re saying. You’re talking about the intersection of the people who are on either side of those bars have similar stories and that is fascinating and the degree to which this whole system – everyone is caught up in the same system. That is a really great, strong narrative cinematic element. So, I would just encourage you to write on that.

I want to make sure that as part of this panel, and this will also go out on Scriptnotes, is that we as storytellers are not complicit in sort of perpetuating these myths and that we do rise to the challenge of actually talking about these things honestly and making sure we’re exploring what’s really going on. So, thank you for sharing that.

In that spirit, I don’t think we have any time for more questions, but I did want one last little segment here which is a thing I did for the addiction and mental health panel which is called Please Stop. Which is the things people up here see on a repeated basis in film and television and media that is just wrong or not helpful when it comes to criminal justice. Lovisa, I know you had some recommendations for Please Stop. So what are some things you hope to never see again onscreen?

**Lovisa:** I would hope to never see a “don’t drop the soap” joke again, ever. And also to never see one of these flippant taunts in police shows where cops who are portrayed as the good guys are telling the bad guys essentially do what we want because otherwise you will go to prison and get raped, but they say it differently.

**John:** Yes. Zach, what would you like to stop?

**Zach:** Stop creating as a writer’s perspective one-note characters where people are entirely good or entirely evil. And Lee was mentioning the prosecutors, we talked about the prosecutors before, we go to great lengths to characterize the people who put Aaron away and they legitimately believe that he is guilty. They legitimately believe they’re doing the right thing. They may have cut some corners we’ll come to learn through the season. One of them may know, one of them may not. And they’ll have some in-fighting with each other. But both of these people are men who believe they were doing the right thing.

And I think if one were to characterize him as a Klansman it would not do justice to the system and it would not be accurate to the reason why he gets a report on his desk and says, you know what, this is a good case, I’m going to put this person away.

**John:** If that person were thoroughly evil and a villain then we wouldn’t see any of ourselves in him and we wouldn’t recognize our own complicity in those types of decisions.

**Zach:** And we wouldn’t know how we can improve the system and do it differently.

**John:** Aly? What things don’t you want to see out there?

**Aly:** You know, I was at LAX when I was coming here and I saw this kid throw himself on the floor and just do this tantrum. And his mother gave him what he wanted. And I said, damn, that’s a learning experience for me. So for me, even up on this stage, I heard like Zach saying [inmate], it just kills me to hear people categorized by these words that we use. And so if you as writers can start using people, like instead of calling someone a felon you can say a person convicted of a felony. Right? Because if we keep the word person in there, right, employers and people out in the community, when we come home we have a chance if they see us as humans.

**John:** And I’m actually going to break the rules and give sort of a One Cool Thing instead. Because it actually ties in very well to this. It’s a great charity called Manifest Works. It’s an organization that is right here in Los Angeles and it pairs formerly incarcerated people and gets them trained for jobs in the industry for film and television which is exactly sort of what we need to do. So Manifest Works and we’ll have a link to that in the show notes for this episode.

I want to thank our amazing panelist. I want to thank Hollywood Health and Society for putting this together. Thank you all very, very much.

And that’s our show. So as always Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Seth Podowitz. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the link to the video for this panel. You’ll find transcripts there. They go up about a week after the episode airs. You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you can get all the back episodes and bonus segments like our upcoming discussion on coronavirus. Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, so how freaked out should I be about coronavirus? Now, to stipulate we are recording this on Thursday morning, so who knows what the world is like on Tuesday as this episode drops.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, it could all be over by then. Look, I think everybody should be concerned about it. We are definitely experiencing a panic right now in no small part because the disease vector started in China. China is not an open nation. They are not known for freedom of speech or press. The government has done a very Chernobyl-esque job of saying things out loud that they prefer to be true instead of were true. No one quite knows. Even the statistics we’re getting now are confusing. Based on some reports it’s already starting to kind of Peter out slightly. But we also know that it is vectoring its way across the Middle East and Europe and the rest of Asia. And we do have our first case of what they would call community infection here in the United States in Northern California, meaning somebody that isn’t here on our soil because they traveled here with the virus or somebody with the virus traveled here and gave it to them. It’s just here.

So, how freaked out should we be? Hmm, we should be concerned.

**John:** Yeah. We should be concerned. So right from the debut of this disease it’s been interesting to see how movies and television have influenced our perception of it. Because you know when the outbreak first began we heard people going back to Contagion, the Steven Soderbergh movie about Gwyneth Paltrow just destroying the world. And Chernobyl in terms of the degree to which information was being controlled or the government sort of misleading us about what was actually really going on.

So, obviously as storytellers we can look at all these things from the perspective of the movies we’ve seen before, the TV shows we’ve seen before. But it’s also important to look back at history and so if this ends up being a very bad flu, well, a very bad flu is a big deal. And so I don’t want to sort of minimize what a bad flu would look like. But there’s also the range up to it’s probably not going to be Contagion. And I don’t think we as Americans particularly have a good sense of what the possibilities are for a disease coming across the states.

**Craig:** Well, one of the things that generally protects us from a fictionalized virus that wipes the planet out is that viruses exist for the same reason we exist, which is to make more of us. And viruses cannot make more of themselves if they kill their hosts too quickly. Or kill too many of their hosts. They actually need you to be alive. The problem of course is that they’re use of you is to spread more of themselves. So viruses are little bits of RNA, little single strand bits, and they get inside your cells and then take your cells over and have the cell become a little virus factory and then your cell pops open. And this is the part that’s the problem. Lots of cells are being popped open so essentially the virus is starting to kill you a little bit.

If it goes too fast and does too much or the area where it acts is so sensitive that even small damage can kill you, then the virus has a problem. We have seen worse viruses – and I’m not doing the [Vira] thing, I can’t – we’ve seen worse viruses in terms of fatality rates. Assuming that the fatality rates we’re hearing about are correct, SARS was a deadlier virus.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Than coronavirus. As is MERS. So is that good news? Not really. Because SARS and MERS kind of burnt themselves out. This one has the potential, well, let’s put it this way. We’re all going to get it. I do believe that. So, coronavirus, and people may think this is a new virus like it’s the Ebola virus, the common cold is a coronavirus. It’s just this is a twist on it. And it’s a really nasty cold. And right now it seems like, first of all, it doesn’t seem to be infecting children very much which is interesting.

**John:** Yeah. Some of the speculation is that because kids get coronaviruses all the time, they’re constantly dealing with that stuff. Their immune system is just better able to handle it and sort of shrug it off.

**Craig:** Yes. So here in the United States where we’re constantly wiping our children’s environment down with Purell we are doing them a disservice. It does appear that the 2% mortality rate is a factor of age. So, older people are dying. People who are immunocompromised are dying. People who have congestive heart disease or pulmonary issues definitely are at risk because ultimately coronavirus seems to be killing you by giving you a pretty advanced pneumonic state. And your lungs are filling with fluid and can’t get enough oxygen to your blood.

One thing that people have pointed out is that women are dying at a slightly lower rate than men, and this is from China, if the statistics are accurate. And one of the reasons they think that may be is because about 50% of men in at least Wuhan, in that area, smoke. So, smoking clearly once again not compatible with good health. But if you look at the numbers of people that are perhaps under the age of 80 and not smoking and generally healthy my guess is that they’re quite low.

But what it means is that it’s coming here. And people are going to die. And our system is going to be severely taxed and our global economic system has already been seriously impacted because we all decided in our lust for lower prices and cheaper goods that China should be the factory of the world. And the factory currently is sick.

**John:** Yeah. Now let’s talk about the practical effects in terms of daily life in our industry. So, I’ve already started to notice that there’s some hands that are not being shook. There are some more elbow bumps happening. I don’t know if it’s necessary or helpful, I’m not seeing masks come out. The general consensus seems to be that the masks should be saved for people who are actually in medical fields who are encountering a bunch of people. That normal people shouldn’t be wearing the masks.

But it is a change and I do – you and I for example, we’re thinking about doing a European Scriptnotes visit. And it’s great to make those plans, but I think I’m making all those plans with the back of my mind saying like, huh, I wonder if that’s actually a thing that’s going to be continuing, or going to be possible when that date comes. And so it is an interesting thing to be thinking about in terms of the projects that I’m handing in, movies that could go into production, knowing that everything could be effective.

Our friend Chris McQuarrie, his next Mission: Impossible movie they’re supposed to have a big Venice shoot. Well, Venice has coronavirus and they’ve decided to pull back from shooting in Venice because of those concerns. So it is going to impact production. It’s going to impact some of the daily functioning of Hollywood, even if it doesn’t become the Steven Soderbergh level of disease.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it’s going to impact everybody. It’s hard to say if more people are going to die from the coronavirus or specifically COVID-19 which is the disease cause by this strand of coronavirus. It’s hard to tell if more people are going to die from COVID-19 or from the economic fallout of COVID-19. Because when economies start to topple people die. So, this is all connected. We forget sometimes. Sometimes we think the economy is just a ticker. Or a statistic about gross national blah-blah-blah. Really what it comes down to is food, medicine, money. The ability to work and pay for things.

So, it’s going to get bad. But we don’t know really at this point what we’re looking at. We can say this with surety. The individual that our federal government has put in charge of leading the effort against coronavirus is not qualified even in the remotest, slightest way.

**John:** No. No. There is almost no person I would feel less comforted is doing this thing. I guess there are probably some MAGA professional wrestlers who I feel would do less of a good job, in the sense of having no understanding of how bureaucracy works. But, no, you do want somebody there who actually believes in science. It feels like a bare minimum.

**Craig:** I mean, I could imagine if they put someone named Karen O’Virus in charge or something like that, but beyond that I can’t imagine anybody less qualified. The good news is those people who are put in charge of these things don’t do anything anyway. We do have the CDC, one of my favorite governmental programs. The CDC I suspect as endlessly not as fully funded as they should be is behind the eight-ball on this. They’ve been behind the eight-ball on a lot of these things because that’s how disease works. And they struggle at times to get the message out. But they’re trying.

I will say to people listening to this, don’t go and try and buy face masks. First of all you can’t. I guess there’s been a run on them which is ridiculous. But we do need those for health professionals. And it’s not going to save you from anything. It really isn’t. Just walking around with a face mask on is not going to save you because that’s not how you’re going to get it. You’re not going to get it walking around. Unless someone literally sneezes directly into your face. Wash your hands.

But eventually you’re going to pick it up. Unless you’re one of those people who can actually say I’ve never had a cold, and I don’t believe you, this one is out there. And unless it does a much, much better job of killing than it seems to be doing, it’s – so there are lots and lots of coronaviruses. Most of them affect animals but not people. Every now and then one of them has a little change in it and kind of jumps the barrier.

**John:** Makes the jump.

**Craig:** And this one made the jump. And that’s going to keep happening. That will never stop happening. And I have no doubt that sooner or later, hopefully sooner, there will be some sort of retroviral drug to help reduce the impact of coronavirus or COVID-19, the way we have Tamiflu which does an excellent job with flu, I can say personally.

But we’re in for trouble. It’s not going to be fun. And people are going to get sick.

**John:** Yeah, so going into this, anticipating that this will get rough and bumpy is probably the best preparation you can do, more so than stockpiling food or trying to get a mask is to recognize that we’re going to be in for some bumpy territory and just be emotionally prepared for that. And also to be thinking about what your life would be like if you did need to stay home for a time, or your kid needed to stay home, or your elderly parent needed help. Just thinking through those scenarios, not panicking yourself, just being ready for them I think will be the guidance we can offer somebody.

**Craig:** And, you know, just don’t do anything that you think would be wildly risky. You know, like bringing in chunks of pangolin from China, which honestly if this really did start with pangolin I’m going to lose my goddamn mind. This is a perfectly innocent, beautiful little creature that for whatever many people in china – and anytime you say many people in China you’re talking about so many people – believe has some sort of medicinal qualities, which it doesn’t, and so they keep hunting them almost to extinction and then selling them in these open air markets and…. [sighs]

I swear.

**John:** Craig, should I get some crystals? Will crystals help?

**Craig:** Yes. If you do need to finally end it and you have a sharp crystal.

**John:** That would be the choice.

**Craig:** Yes. Beyond that, no. I’m so sorry.

**John:** I’m hoping we can revisit this segment a year from now and say like you know what our advice was reasonable but actually it did not turn out to be as bad. And there is that possibility. It’s also possible that it’s much worse than we’re saying. But again, it’s only Thursday.

**Craig:** Yes. And we haven’t had a big worldwide pandemic that really killed millions and millions and millions of people since HIV, which is still pandemic but under control. And prior to that I think it was polio.

**John:** Spanish flu. Oh, polio.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, Spanish flu before that. But it’s been a while. We’re due. These things happen every 30 years or so, kind of like clockwork. And this is the one. So, but this is a different one.

By the way, most people apparently who get COVID-19, it’s very mild. Some people are infected by a coronavirus and experience no symptoms. So, this is a bit of an odd one. We’re not quite sure what’s going on.

**John:** Craig, thank you for making me feel much more nervous.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’ve done it again.

**John:** All right, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

 

Links:

* [Beyond Bars: Changing the Narrative on Criminal Justice](https://hollywoodhealthandsociety.org/events/beyond-bars-changing-narrative-criminal-justice)
* [Watch the full panel here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twVS-IJRKR8)
* [Aly Tamboura](https://chanzuckerberg.com/story/alys-criminal-justice-reform-perspective/) from the [Chan Zuckerberg Initiative](https://chanzuckerberg.com/)
* [Lovisa Stannow](https://justdetention.org/people/lovisa-stannow/) executive director at [Just Detention International](https://justdetention.org/)
* [Zach Calig](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3016924/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0) writer on [For Life](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10327830/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1)
* [Dan Birman](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2270576/) documentary producer, watch [Me Facing Life](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflix-acquires-criminal-justice-doc-cyntoia-brown-1221992) on [Netflix](https://media.netflix.com/en/press-releases/untitled-cyntoia-brown-documentary-from-director-daniel-h-birman-lands-at-netflix) April 30th!
* [What Happens After You’re Released from Prison?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TtZMhHCuBE)
* Scriptnotes, [Episode 324](https://johnaugust.com/2017/all-of-it-needs-to-stop) How Would This Be a Movie? [On the Line: The Female Inmates Who Battle California’s Deadly Wildfires by Matt Toder for NBC News.](https://www.nbcnews.com/video/california-on-fire-these-female-inmates-are-fighting-the-blazes-1068589123744)
* [Coronavirus Updates](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/world/coronavirus-news.html)
* Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium [here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Seth Podowitz ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/440standard.mp3).