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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 645 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. For showrunners, the first season of a television show is often a trial by fire as they figure out what show they’re actually making and how to do it. The second season can be both easier and more difficult, as showrunners have the benefit of experience but also the burden of expectation.

Today on the show, we have two showrunners who have just delivered the third seasons of their respective shows, which was an absolute cakewalk. Am I correct? There were no issues on either of your sides?

Jen Statsky: Not anything, yeah.

Meredith Scardino: Zero.

Jen: Really simple.

John: Great. Episode’s over. It’s done. Nothing to talk about.

Jen: Not much to talk about it.

Meredith: Credits.

John: Credits roll. Thank you for joining us on the show. Let me introduce you. Meredith Scardino is a writer and producer whose impressive listener credits include Saturday Night Live, The Colbert Report, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. She has four Emmys and a Peabody. She is now the creator and showrunner of (sings) Girls5eva. Bing!

Meredith: That was beautiful.

John: Thank you. I love myself a musical sting, a little introduction moment. It’s one of those few credits that you just don’t skip past, because you’ve got to embrace it while it’s there.

Meredith: It’s Jeff Richmond. He makes a good theme song.

John: After Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, we desperately needed another musical comedy to watch in the house, so we went back and re-watched Seasons 1 and 2 to get ready for Season 3. Man, I need songs. Even if they’re diegetic like they are in your show, I want characters to sing.

Meredith: It’s fun, and the cast is great at singing.

John: Yeah, which is nice. Sarah Bareilles, she’s a ringer. She’s actually genuine.

Meredith: She’s done this before.

John: Once or twice.

Meredith: A little bit.

John: But who knew she was funny? You knew she was funny.

Meredith: She’s hilarious. She’s absolutely hilarious, and so is Renee Elise Goldsberry from Hamilton fame, who no one quite knew she was absolutely hilarious, as she is, although I watched her in Co-op on Documentary Network.

John: Oh my god, so incredible.

Meredith: She was so committed to the bit.

John: Love it.

Meredith: You’re like, “Oh, that lady, committed.”

John: Alex Brightman is also in Co-op, and they’re just so fantastic in that.

Meredith: So fantastic. Then you got Paula Pell and Busy Philipps, who we knew were hilarious already, but you didn’t know they could sing.

John: All things you figured out. Jen Statsky is a writer and producer who has written for shows including Parks and Recreation, Broad City, and The Good Place. She’s the co-creator and showrunner of Hacks, for which she has won an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a Peabody Award. Welcome back, Jen.

Jen: Hi, thanks for having me. I’m sad you didn’t sing Hacks though. I was hoping.

John: Here’s the problem. It’s a really good show.

Jen: Not a musical show though.

John: No notes except you could add some songs. Would it hurt you to have a catchy song?

Jen: I do think that catchy songs would be helpful. I guess it’s not too late. Maybe next season it can be full musical.

John: That is a prediction that I might be willing to make. We’ll get to that in a second here.

Jen: Meredith, can you lend me your entire writing staff?

Meredith: Yeah, sure. Let’s do it.

John: A lot of the times on the show we have guests who have just finished their first season and they talk about what they’ve learned, and that’s great, but I really want to talk about what’s easier and what’s more difficult about being an established show and going into things where you know stuff.

But I also want to talk about this moment we’re in as an industry, especially for series, because both of your shows debuted at a different time, when there was this era of streaming abundance. I want to talk about what’s gained and what’s lost when streamers are cutting back so much right now.

We’ll also tackle questions from listeners about nonbinary characters, mentorship using the past tense, and finally, two years ago, I made a prediction about what would happen in the third season of Hacks, and I mailed it in a sealed envelope to Jen. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we will open that letter and see how right or wrong I was. She’s holding it up to the Zoom right now. I’m looking at it. I’m looking at my weird penmanship.

Jen: I’m so proud of myself that I didn’t open it. When did you send this?

John: Two years ago.

Jen: Two years ago.

John: There’s a postmark on it. Is there a date? Is it listed?

Jen: Oh yeah, June 2022. Wow. I was so terrified that if I opened it before everything was done for Season 3, you’d have a much better idea than we did, and then I would be like, “What do I do?”

John: There’s a Season 4 still, so if you’re searching for something, maybe it’s in there.

Jen: We’ll see.

John: I’m not actually 100 percent sure what I wrote, so it’ll be a surprise for both of us.

Jen: Great.

John: Only for Premium Members in the Bonus Segment.

You guys are on your third seasons, but to set the stage, can we go back in time and think about the shows you actually pitched originally when you were talking about doing these shows and figure out what that was, compared to what the show ended up becoming. Meredith, can we start with you? What was the pitch for Girls5eva?

Meredith: The pitch was a reunited girl group, one-hit wonder from the late ’90s, Y2K era reunites in the present after they get sampled by an up-and-coming rapper named Lil Stinker and tried to give it a go again. It follows four of the surviving members of Girls5eva. One sadly had swam off the edge of an infinity pool in the mid-aughts.

It follows being a woman in your 40s. There’s a lot of stuff about that. But it’s also a very big underdog story. It’s got a ton of comedy. It’s very hard jokes, fast-paced. We also look back at the past and do lots of flashbacks to their old, regrettable music, the way they got chewed up and spit out by that pop music machine that didn’t really value any of their voices. We just see the fun, ragtag comeback story of hilarious, very different women, who all internalized the pain of that big loss of the one-hit wonder going away in different ways. It’s a really fun show.

John: That very much describes the show that we end up seeing right now, but do you think that was actually all there in your original pitch? Was it a pitch, or had you written a script?

Meredith: It was both. I had written the pilot. Basically, I would go in to network streamers. I had a fake CD that I made, because I had an art background. I made a fake CD that was basically like, “This is what their… ” I made discount stickers, like it had been in the Sam Goody discount bin. I had the cover, and then on the back I had their track list, so it gave you an idea of what kind of group this was.

John: That’s incredible.

Meredith: I even sealed it with one of those plastic industrial sealer things on top, because I didn’t want anyone to open it, because I didn’t have a real CD in there and I didn’t have any music written. Again, just for weight, I put in DVDs from the Jack Lemmon collection that I had.

The pitch was very much similar to what the show became, and I think because I had the pilot. Basically, I’d do the whole pitch. I’d do the song and dance, 20-minute, like, “Here’s what it is. Here’s all the characters. Here’s where they go.” Then I’d leave behind the script. It was nice, because when you pitch something, it’s not always a complete descriptor of what you might end up writing. My producers and I made the decision to be like, the best way is just to be like, “Oh, do you like this thing that you’re reading?” That’s the best indicator of what the show is.

John: We can clarify, this is a situation where a leave-behind is completely appropriate, because you own and control everything here. You weren’t doing free work for them leaving this behind. This was, “I pitched you this. This is the evidence that I really can pull off this thing I just described to you.”

Meredith: Yeah, exactly.

John: Now, Jen, the initial pitches for Hacks, I think we talked about this when you were on the show before, but remind us, what was the process of pitching Hacks and getting it set up originally?

Jen: In 2015, my co-creators Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello and I had been talking about women of a certain generation of comedians and how they had never really gotten their due, especially in comparison to their male counterparts. And so we had this idea for a show that would be about the redemption of a comedian like that through the lens of her relationship with a younger comedy writer who had benefited from the ways in which this woman fought.

It was a long process to the pitch, because in 2015, Paul and Lucia were full time on Broad City and they were making a movie and I was full time on Good Place. It took us a while before we were ready to go out with the pitch. But that was to our advantage, I think, in many ways, because we kept working on it through those years. And by the time we got to go around town and pitch it, we had a very thorough, probably too thorough pitch, where we went through to the end of the series, to how it would end, which is still to this day what we plan on doing for the end of it. I did not have any cool leave-behinds. Maybe we would’ve gotten more yeses had I.

John: But you didn’t have a finished pilot? Did you have a script?

Jen: No, we actually hadn’t written a script. It was a pretty thorough 30, 35-minute pitch, but that was it. We didn’t have a script.

John: Wow.

Jen: We didn’t have talent attached. It was really just the idea and all the work we had done to build up the idea.

John: You said you had multiple seasons figured out for what the general arc was of the show. Now that you’re in Season 3 of it, how close are you to that plan?

Jen: We’re still very close. We’re still very close to the plan. Now, of course, obviously, there’s things within the season that happen, and your writers come in and they pitch things and you say, “Oh, that’s an amazing idea.” For example, we knew at the end of Season 1, it was in the pitch, this massive fight and that Deborah would slap her and what it would be. That was all thought out. But for example, Ava sending an email with dirt about Deborah that would then be this huge rift between them, that came in the writing of the show. There’s smaller story moves that of course have come up over the course of the years writing this show. But the major tent poles for what each season is and Deborah’s arc and Ava’s arc have remained from what we pitched.

John: Meredith, did you have multiple seasons figured out at the start?

Meredith: Yeah. I had basically eras of what I thought they would be doing, like chapters. Each season has adhered to that, where Season 1, it’s so much of the adrenaline of the reunion, trying to do everything the old way they used to, and then realizing, like, oh no, god, no, there’s a better way, and trying to just get it going again. Then Season 2 is very much about, okay, now they have an album they can make. What will they say once they have that moment to be in the studio as a group and they’re the actual songwriters? Then Season 3 felt like, okay, you gotta go promote that album and get on the road.

In their future, I would like to see them – they’ve been underdogs clawing for relevance for three seasons, and I would like to see what it looks like for them to have a little bit of success and how they navigate that.

John: Both of your shows are about women in entertainment who are grappling with their legacy, who were big stars and then they see their stars teetering, and so they’re trying to remain relevant or rebuild their careers without seeming desperate. They’re both shows about ambition, but they’re also insider shows. They’re shows about the entertainment business that look behind the curtain and inside. Classically, it’s a thing we do, but it’s also a thing we’re told, like, don’t pitch those shows, because no one wants to watch those shows, no one wants to make those shows. Did you find resistance to the fact that there were shows about the industry?

Meredith: I feel like people say that, but then there are so many shows that people – 30 Rock, even Entourage. There’s like a million shows about… I don’t know why people say that.

Jen: You do always hear that. You hear, “Don’t pitch an industry show. Don’t pitch inside baseball. No one wants it.” Then you turn on your TV and there are so many of them. So many of them have been acclaimed and awarded. I don’t know what it is. I guess no one wants to admit that they do make them.

But I will say, I don’t know how you feel, Meredith, but we pitched the show in 2019, which was during still the boom of streaming. When we pitched the show to Max, it wasn’t even Max at the time. It wasn’t even HBO Max. It was the Warner Media streamer that didn’t even have a name. They just knew that Warner Media was gonna do a streamer.

I think we very much benefited from pitching during a time when it was a seller’s market, and a good idea was a good idea. Credit to Suzanna Makkos, because she heard the pitch and she got it immediately and she made it happen. I don’t know that today, as we speak to you in 2024, I don’t know that Hacks gets bought or I don’t know that it gets made. Part of it I think would be reluctance to do a show about the industry. But I don’t think we faced it at the time. I don’t know. Did you, Meredith?

Meredith: No, I didn’t feel that coming off of anyone that we pitched to. But I also just think that in some ways the show is about the music business in some ways, of course. You get to make all those pop culture references that can be really fun to write, and all of those observations. But at its core, it’s about four women in their 40s trying to do something at the time when you’re normally retreating into the habits and ho-hum of life and you wonder if your greatest days are behind you. It’s about so much universal… I feel like Hacks is the same way. It’s not just about comedy.

Jen: No, it’s not just about… Yeah, you’re exactly right. The shows will work if they’re about universal, relatable things that any viewer, whether they’re in the industry or not, can connect with. Like you’re saying, women in their 40s and their friendship with each other, or in the case of Hacks, a very specific friendship and collaboration between two people and, honestly, just an older women in her 70s. We talk about it a lot. It’s about her quest for dignity. I think that is incredibly relatable to anyone watching of that age.

I think you’re right that what it is when they say don’t pitch an industry show, it’s kind of like don’t pitch an industry show that is about nothing else, that doesn’t have anything underneath it. As long as there’s something underneath it and you’re speaking to relatable universal themes that humans connect with, I think you can set a show anywhere.

John: Both of your shows are comedies, but they’re very different kinds of comedies. I want to talk about their relationships to jokes. Meredith, your show is in the tradition of 30 Rock or Kimmy Schmidt, where it’s a very joke-dense show, where there’s an expectation there’s a certain number of jokes per minute. People are being funny and they’re also not acknowledging that they’re being funny. It’s very much in that habit. Three seasons in, or more seasons when you think about Kimmy Schmidt too, is that just a natural form for you? Do you feel that in your bones?

Meredith: It is. First of all, I was attracted to it like a moth to a flame. But also, I think coming from late night, The Colbert Report, where you’re just taking in input from the news and churning out jokes and satire and character, like boom, boom, boom, boom, that muscle is the one muscle in my body that’s not atrophied. I’m very jacked in that capacity. Then going and working with Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, whose style I absolutely love from 30 Rock, and they came from SNL. I think there’s something a little bit coming from sketch and late night that imbues into the episodic execution.

At Kimmy Schmidt, we had that similar rhythm. It’s joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, but you also get to say all the things. I feel like there’s no shortage of the points we’re making about women feeling irrelevant or whatever we were trying to say. You can still say them even while the breakneck joke pace is breakneck.

John: Hacks is obviously about jokes also, because literally it’s two characters who are wrestling with coming up with material. There’s a comedy writer and a comedy legend. But what’s different about the jokes in Hacks is often they will say a joke and they will acknowledge that that was funny. Both parties that were around them will acknowledge that was funny. But they’re competing basically in comedy with each other. How early in the process of actually writing this did you figure out what that was gonna feel like and where the level was? Did you even know as you started filming how you were going to play that?

Jen: Yeah, I think from the get-go, we knew that we wanted this very specific tone that was a mix of comedy and drama. I’ve said this before, but for us, casting Jean Smart was – she embodies exactly that. She can do hard, funny comedy, but she can also be incredibly grounded and dramatic and heart-wrenching in that way. Once we got her, we said, “That’s our North Star. That is the tone of the show.” That’s what we were always going for.

You’re right that we have this cheat code of we want characters to be able to say jokes and be very funny, but it’s all within the grounded realm of you’re watching a show where characters are supposed to be funny and they know they’re funny and they know they’re making a joke. That was just the particular tone that we wanted to go for with this show.

John: Question for both of you. As you’re thinking about the outline stage or figuring out what is happening in the episode, you’re figuring out what the scenes are, how much does that need to be driven by, “Okay, this is the dramatic story points I need to get across,” or can this scene actually be funny?

Maybe start with you, Meredith. I’m thinking about, they’re on tour. You need to figure out what it is that’s happening in the show. Is it mostly about the emotional stakes that are progressing, or are you thinking, “Okay, these are gonna be good arenas that will allow me to make jokes.”

Meredith: What you want is to find the match where the emotional arc that you’re trying to sell for your character and their evolution over the course of the series is then told through a story that’s funny. That’s what I’m always looking for. Sometimes you’ll have an idea that’s just funny, but you’re like, “I don’t know where it lives.” Or this is popping into my head, but Wickie on the road getting tempted to cheat on her very stable, very nice boyfriend that she has back home, who’s a lunch lord, which is the masculine version of a lunch lady. You’re like, “Okay. What would be fun about… ” You’re trying to just find the match.

We ended up coming up with this idea of her having her idea of female arousal. She was talking about having a Home Alone doorknob for this guy Torque that she meets on the road. Then we wrote a song called Home Alone Doorknob. It is all coming from the fact that she’s being tempted on the road. It’s a real story about is she going to cheat, is she going to fall prey to her old ways of thinking about herself first and not thinking about another person. You’re telling that story in an absurd way, but it has a grounded core underneath it and some emotion. Renee Elise Goldsberry is incredible at walking that line, at making you feel for a character that’s talking about a Home Alone doorknob, being tempted to cheat. Yeah, but always looking for the match.

Jen: Yeah, it is very true. When I look back at scenes in Hacks, that always has to have an emotional reason to exist. For example, I can think of a scene from a Christmas episode we did this past season. I think this was my fault. I’ll take responsibility for this.

Hannah Einbinder’s character, Ava, grew up in a suburb of Boston, which is also where I grew up. And Irish step dancing is a huge phenomenon among Boston girls growing up. I went to many an Irish step competition, in the audience, not participating, which was actually weird. Why was I there? But at some point, I was like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Ava had Irish step danced? She should do that performance at the end of Deborah’s Christmas party.” We shot it. Hannah took days and days of Irish step lessons. She’s really good at it, because Hannah comes from a cheerleading, gymnastics background, so she’s very physically skilled. But also, it was really funny. But there was no emotional reason for it to exist in the episode. It didn’t come from, oh, and she needs the warm reception that the performance will get after a tough night or whatever. It wasn’t connected to anything. It was just purely me going, “That would be funny.”

We ultimately ended up cutting it. I think it’s a really good lesson exactly what Meredith is saying. The emotion and the story reason has to come first, or else you’re writing something different, which is like sketch comedy or something, which is great, but it’s not really the shows that either of us are making.

Meredith: You can always feel it too when you do a table read. When you have good story energy, you can just feel you’re locked in.

Jen: Yes, totally.

Meredith: You don’t feel any of the awkward tension that you might feel if you’re on a first date or if you’re talking to a new person or whatever that awkward thing is.

Jen: It just flows in a different way.

Meredith: It flows. Then when you do stop down for something that is comedy nerdery indulgence, that I love too – we all do it. We all pitch things that you want to just see on screen. But then they do stick out, and then you suddenly feel awkward. It’s not working. You’re like, “Oh, that just has to go. It’s just gotta go.”

Jen: Totally.

Meredith: Even though it’s funny. If you had the reason behind it, it might-

Jen: It might live.

Meredith: … be the greatest moment of the show.

John: This is three seasons in that you’re still encountering these situations. It feels like the first season you make the discoveries, things that work, things that don’t work, things that can fit inside one actor’s mouth. You learn things in that first season. But three seasons in, you’re still learning things about your show and what works. Going into this third season, what was the process of figuring out the shape of the season? What was the blue sky whiteboarding? How did you figure out the basic shape of what the episodes would be?

Meredith: At the end of Season 2, we bit off that Girls5eva, they pile into a van and they’re gonna go on tour. And they don’t have any idea of where they’re gonna go, except that they have a hit song in Fort Worth, Texas, because they wrote a pandering song about the city, because it was the biggest city in America that didn’t have a hit song about it.

Going into Season 3, there’s so many things to figure out, where you’re like, “Okay, we need to sell the road, but we also shoot in and around New York City, and we’re not gonna go on the road.” It was like, production-wise, how do you pull off the road without hitting it? We come up with ideas of what’s a home base they could go to. Hotel rooms. A hotel chain looks pretty much the same in every town you’re in. Does someone have reward points? Gloria did. That’s how we came up with the Marriott Divorced Dad Suitelets where they stay throughout the tour. You swap the art out. You swap the drop and whatever. That was good problem solving.

But then you’re also blue skying, like, “What would happen on the road? Dawn’s pregnant. What does it look like if she tries to get a prenatal checkup in the Ozarks? What does that look like?” You’re coming up with, what are some things that would happen that would challenge our characters, push our characters out of their comfort zone?

You’re also thinking, what is the end goal? We went into the season. I had done a lot of pre-work headed in and had the hotel and some rough ideas about, oh, maybe Wickie and Summer have never actually been alone together and they realize that in Season 3. Just a million different ideas. But then early in the blue sky, in the room, we figured out maybe Wickie bit off something massive to make this tour being a Taylor Swift-level tour, and so she books them at Radio City Music Hall, and they’re not that kind of act, and she books them on Thanksgiving. That gave us the engine, like, okay, how do you get to Radio City?

We had six episodes, so it was a short four hours of content to get them from Fort Worth to New York in six months and get a baby out. There was a little bit of math, but also just the fun of pulling off the plot of that, plus all the character development.

John: But also, in planning this to be a tour, you were blowing up your sets. Classically, in comedy, you always get to go back to your sets. Those things are established. You have to establish characters you go back to. You blew up all those things for this season, because you didn’t have those things. Her apartment is gone. A lot of the places we were expecting to see are gone.

Meredith: We did bring it back in Episode 6, because they return to New York. There was a return to some of those comfort sets that we had seen. But yeah, in some ways, the four of them together always feels like it’s somewhere. That always feels like the show to me. Whenever we get them together, no matter where they are, it feels familiar, whether it’s the Macaroni Rascals chain or the van or the hotel room or wherever it is.

John: Now, Jen, your tour was Season 2. We are leaving your sets behind and then hitting the road and going into a bus.

Jen: Same dumb problem of making the show really expensive.

John: Yeah, and the aesthetics are just different. You had to actually go places. We expect to see outdoor locations much more in your show.

Jen: Yeah, there’s a certain, I guess, tone and look that has been established with the show. Yeah, it was a lot of on-location shooting for Season 2, which was really, really challenging from a budget perspective. Also, just credit to Jean Smart. She’s 72 years old. It’s different driving to Universal to shoot on our stages than it is going to Tarzana at 5:00 in the morning.

Season 2, we knew going in it was gonna be on the road, and so those were our benchmarks. Much like Meredith is saying, the strength of a show when you have characters that are so good together, is as long as they’re together, you still feel like it’s the show. That’s how I feel about Hacks is that as long as Deborah and Ava are together, it is Hacks.

Then going into our third season, we had ended Season 2 on a pretty big cliffhanger, which was that Deborah and Ava had gone their separate ways. Deborah had fired her, benevolently, so that Ava could go pursue her own career. We had this huge question of how do we get them back together. That was really the first thing that we tackled when we came back to break Season 3.

Now, we knew that the arc of Season 3 and the thrust of it would be Deborah finding out that there was this late night position opening, and Deborah would say, “Okay, I want that chair. I’m going for it.” We always knew that that would be the thrust of the season. We specifically had to figure out how do Ava and Deborah get back together. But it ultimately felt very correct and satisfying to us that it would be only as Deborah goes after this biggest thing in her life, this biggest goal that’s she trying to achieve, she would need Ava’s help.

John: Now, can you talk about production in both of these situations? I’m trying to remember. Season 2 of Hacks, that was pre-COVID? I’m just trying to remember timelines of things.

Jen: Season 1 of Hacks was COVID, pre-vaccine. We were shooting, but I would get calls, the studio being like, “All the hospitals are full. Do you want to shoot today?” I was like, “This is up to me?” Then Season 2 was still COVID, but people were vaccinated, felt a little bit lower key. Season 3 I believe was the first time we got to shoot without masks, so kind of crazy to actually see people’s faces after three years of working with them.

John: But Season 3 also had dealt with the strikes probably. Were you able to shoot before or after the strikes or both?

Jen: We are so lucky that this show has been received the way it has been. But every season we’ve had some pretty significant production challenges. Season 3 was no different, in that a little less than halfway through shooting, we needed to shut down, because Jean Smart had a health issue and she needed to go have a procedure. We shut down for a few months so that Jean could go and take care of herself and get healthy, which of course was of the utmost importance. Then we came back for four shooting days, and then the strike was called. When I look at the calendar, we started shooting Season 3 in November 2022, and we wrapped in January 2024.

John: Wow.

Jen: Someone said to me recently, “It’s like you’re making Boyhood, the TV show.” It was taking so goddamn long. Yeah, very challenging, long Season 3 production.

John: Do you shoot episode by episode? Do you block shoot? What’s the plan?

Jen: We block shoot as much as we can. We try to get as many scripts done before we start the season as we can, so that we can be nimble and be efficient budget-wise, because if we tried to do it just episode by episode, it would be prohibitively expensive. We do block shoot. The first episode of Season 3 that was locked was Episode 8 of 9. The first shot of the season, this drone shot that comes into Caesars Palace in Vegas, that was the very last thing we shot.

John: Wow.

Jen: It’s very much boarded like a movie, in that you’re bouncing around.

John: Meredith, I noticed on Season 3, I believe it’s one director for the entire run?

Meredith: Yes, Kimmy Gatewood.

John: Has that always been the plan, or why was that choice made?

Meredith: The block shooting of the whole season was a budgetary decision. Kimmy was just also a perfect choice person who could bite that off. Obviously, it was confusing, with one scene that’s in Episode 1, you’re shooting one scene that’s in the finale, all on day one. We had done things like that in the past.

I remember being on set of the Kimmy Schmidt interactive special that had a million potential permutations and universes that you could end up going into and timelines and talking to the actors, like, “Okay, so this time you’re in the blue sweatshirt and the zombies came,” or whatever it is. That was fine.

The one benefit of block shooting is that you have to get all the scripts done ahead of time, which meant that I was free to be on set the whole time. I didn’t have to do that thing where you’re sprinting between trying to check out rehearsal and then you run upstairs and then you’re finishing a script and then you’re looking at an edit and then you’re working on an outline and then you’re pitching another thing. That was not part of this season. The scripts had to be done by this pre-production time. We did it. We prepped, and then we had a very dedicated strike of a shoot. We did the whole thing in six weeks.

John: Wow. Jen, you had a background in more traditional comedy. I’m thinking of The Good Place, or sorry, Parks and Recreation or Good Place, more episode by episode. Can you talk through pros and cons of traditional schedules versus block shooting?

Jen: I think what’s nice about the network formula, the way that Parks and Rec and Good Place were run, was that it honestly just allows you to do more episodes, because it’s this machine you have going. Parks and Rec was 22 episodes. There’s no way we could make 22 episodes of Hacks the way we do it, which is that Paul, Lucia, and I are in every step of the process. We are writing, and then we are on set every single day, and then we are editing. We all do every step of that process. That is just the way we want to do it, because we want to have all of our eyes on every single part of the process. Now, we’re allowed to do that and able to do that, because we do 8 to 10 episodes, but when you do 22, there’s just no way. There’s too much. There’s not enough months in the year to do it that way.

I think from my time on Parks and Rec and Good Place, it worked like a very well oiled machine, that Mike Schur would be in the writers’ room most of the time. Writers would be on set managing their episode and overseeing it. I think what was really nice about that model – and we’ve talked about this – is that it allows for more of a training ground. The writers are empowered. I certainly learned how to run a show by working on Mike’s shows and seeing how he did it, but also being given the power to be on set and having to take on that responsibility.

This has been well covered, but as we divorce the writing from the production from the editing, writers are given less of a chance to do that. There are certainly tremendous advantages to the older model that was tied to longer season orders in that it just makes better writers. Better writers come out of that process, because you become a producer and you become a showrunner that way.

John: Now, Meredith, Jen had a trio of people who were there to oversee stuff. On your shoots, were you the only writer around? Was there anybody else you can go to to help you out on that stuff?

Meredith: Yeah, this season we built into everyone’s contracts that they would come back for the week of their episode and be paid to be on set.

John: That’s great.

Meredith: That was important, for the exact reason that Jen’s talking about. You really learn by doing and being on the job and being empowered to make the decisions about a prop that’s not working or quickly doing a rewrite of a line that’s not working for an actor or whatever it is. You need that experience. That was very important to us.

Season 1 and 2, just because of the nature of the way the things worked, I was alone a lot on set and tired. But also, directors were very helpful. I had producers that would pop by if they were available, Robert or Tina. Jeff Richmond would be around too. Very incredibly helpful. Some writers would come by as well if they were available. By that point, our room was wrapped, so that was more like just to stop by and hang out, really. Not really on the clock. Also, during COVID, we weren’t allowed to have any visitors really.

Jen: That was for the majority of Hacks shooting it’s been COVID.

Meredith: That’s right.

Jen: Writers couldn’t come to set.

Meredith: That’s a good point. Maybe they didn’t come really Season 1 and 2, but yeah, Season 3. The new Writers Guild agreement, it has that thing in that where you have to have at least two people stay the entire course of shooting, I believe, right? Which I think is a great thing.

John: That was one of the things we heard from most going into the negotiation was it wasn’t just lower-level writers feeling like they weren’t getting experience. It was other showrunners who just felt completely abandoned and lost. They were having to carry the entire thing on their backs. It was incredibly difficult.

Jen: I give you so much credit, Meredith, because having three showrunners is incredibly helpful, and even then it’s really helpful. I’m like, “Oh, maybe we need a fourth showrunner,” sometimes. I give you so much credit, because doing it one person is really challenging.

Meredith: I lost a lot of stress weight.

Jen: That’s good.

Meredith: I was just trying to suck protein shakes. How many calories can you put in a shake?

Jen: Oh my god.

Meredith: So I can drink in as much as I can. It was still more exciting than not.

John: Season 3 is now behind you. Looking forward to a potential Season 4. When does the process start? As you’re working through Season 3, are you also thinking about, “These are the hooks we’re gonna establish for Season 4,” or are you mostly just focused on, “We gotta get Season 3 put to bed.”

Meredith: I think obviously the priority is getting Season 3 out. Then as we have in Seasons 1 and 2, we have a little bit of a tease of something to come. At the end of Season 3, you see the big time calling Wickie. It’s her old song from the early 2000s when she went solo, Yesternights.

John: Yesternights is such a great word.

Jen: So good.

Meredith: It is featured in the show The Crown, the finale of The Crown, so obviously, she’s gonna blow up and Kate Bush. That promises what could come. My phone is always just – if something occurs to me, I’ll just throw it in my notes app and revisit it later if there’s something real. But I try to always have rough designs, but not anything too prescriptive or rigid, because I feel like there’s always so many exciting surprises that come that you don’t want to be too locked into anything.

I remember in Season 2, we knew they were gonna do an album for a label. We made the label the Property Brothers label, because everybody’s branching out into so many passion projects that they have. They were on Property Records. We wrote that not knowing if we’d ever book the Property Brothers. I thought worst case, we could just get two brown-haired guys with beards. Maybe we’d get Vince Mulaney and Adam Scott to play them or something.

John: But of course they stepped up.

Meredith: But then we found out they stepped up, and they said they’d be happy to be in it. Then my favorite thing in the world happened. Drew Property, which I’m gonna say is his last name – it’s not, it’s Drew Scott – he sent us some assets to show off, “Hey, we can do all these different things.” One was a reel of voices that he did, animated voices. One was some music, because they’re very musical. Then one was this incredible reel of him doing stage combat in a backyard with guns and just attacking a stuntman and doing all this Jack Ryan stuff.

We saw that, and the writers and I were just like, “This is the greatest thing I have ever seen. How can we license this and put it on the show and use it in some way?” Then that’s what led to the big fight between Gloria and one of the Property Brothers that was I think a couple minutes, three minutes or something. We did not cut much of that out. We wanted it to be incredibly long.

Going into that season, could I have ever imagined that we would do something like that? No. I try to be loose with some of the things that we want to do, knowing that it could change.

John: Jen, we’ve established that you went into your pitch knowing all these seasons. As you’re looking at a fourth season, where are you at in your process? How do you get started?

Jen: Similar to Meredith, you set up these things at the end of Season 3 that you know you’re gonna follow through on. We knew at the end of 3, Deborah’s gonna get this show. That would be a major thing we’d be dealing with in Season 4 is Deborah having this show and getting that off the ground and how does that go, especially when she and Ava have a new dynamic to their relationship.

But it’s also very true what Meredith said. You do have to remember that the process is very much so alive, and so that even though we have figured out a lot of things and we have these benchmarks and tent poles for the entire structure of the series, there are surprises along the way, and there are things that are like, “That’s a better idea. That changes the path, but that’s a better idea.” You have to, I think, be really open to those.

I think that’s one of the reasons that I love being on set and why I can’t just go, “I wrote the script. Go execute it. I’ll do editing or whatever,” is because the process is so alive that you have to be paying attention to every part of it, because things come up while you’re shooting, while you’re witnessing the way the actors are delivering the lines, that you need to be on top of and change and be willing to change and be willing to adjust. We have these big story points that we are moving towards for Season 4, but of course, there’s always gonna be things that we adjust if it’s a better idea.

John: We have a few listener questions here. I’d love you guys’ opinions on what our listeners should do in these situations. Drew, help us out.

Drew Marquardt: Noah writes, “How should I describe nonbinary characters in action lines so as not to confuse my readers? For instance, how should I use they/them, or should I just use a character’s name instead of a pronoun?”

John: For context here, so thinking about inside a script, so it’s not how the characters around them are acknowledging, but what you’re reading on the page. What’s your instinct for that?

Jen: I guess my instinct would be, if it’s a scene that is solo with the character, you can use pronouns they/them. But yeah, if there’s maybe multiple people in a scene, I don’t use pronouns a lot in the action. Sometimes I’m trying to get the page count down, and I do. I’m almost always using their names, like, “Deborah moves to the other side of the room.” I’m just always using the character’s name anyway.

Meredith: So am I. I remember on Kimmy Schmidt, we were like, “Why did we name Jane Krakowski Jacqueline? It takes up so many characters whenever we’re describing her in an action line.”

Jen: I gotta say I love the name Ava. Ava, it has worked out.

Meredith: Ed would be great. I get why they made that show.

Jen: [Unintelligible 00:42:39] for the scripts.

John: My instinct would be, I understand the question. You’re trying to make sure the script feels inclusive. But if it’s important the character be nonbinary, great, call it out on the page if it’s gonna be acknowledged in the scene as well. But not to worry too much about it. You’re right to always be thinking about how do we not confuse the reader. Your answer in terms of just use the character’s name a lot is probably the better choice. On screen, we’re gonna be seeing that person’s face. The person’s name stands in for their face on the page. Drew, another question. How about this one from Tara?

Drew: Tara writes, “I recently won a competition for a yearlong mentorship from two major Hollywood screenwriters. I’d love some advice on how to make the most of it. For context, I’m on the East Coast and almost 48 years old and plan to do this for the rest of my life. I’m a no thanks to retirement, like Craig. I’ve written, produced, and directed three short films, and this is my first feature screenplay.”

Meredith: I think it’s great if you have a feature that you’re working on. What an amazing opportunity to have this amount of time to bounce things off of and get feedback from these mentors. The tangible stuff is always great. I think for me, when you’re mentoring someone, sometimes a lot of the questions are like, “How do get an agent?” Some of the things that have nothing to do with writing.

I think that the things that have the most to do with getting your screenplay in the best possible shape by the end of this mentorship and also, how do I navigate the business, asking questions like, “What would you do if you were me?” Those kind of things are always helpful. But I think, wow, what a great gift to have a project and two great people to be looking at it whenever you want them to.

Jen: I think that’s great advice, because of course you want to use these mentors to ask questions about the business if it feels important and relevant to you. But the business changes at breakneck speed, especially in today’s moment. But good story elements don’t change. I think like Meredith is saying, getting really specific of the script, like, “Oh, was this Act 2 break surprising to you? Did you see that?” Just really honing in on making that story and that script the best it can possibly be will be the most beneficial thing to you.

Meredith: Tina Fey always is a real big advocate of a table read, even if you don’t have production coming up. In this year, it might be worth putting together a little table read of your script when you feel like it’s in good shape and inviting these mentors or at least filming it so they can watch later. It’ll help you realize where your screenplay really needs work.

John: I’ve had a couple mentees over the years. Often, the best questions they can ask are “how” questions. We agree that this is a thing that needs to change. It’s a moment that’s not working right. But how do I get it there? How are the ways to make the scene work the way I want to do? Show some different examples.

When they come to me with questions about, “My manager wants to send it to this person,” when they come to me with a specific question about, “What should I do with this next situation?” that’s always much more helpful than, “How do I get an agent?” It’s specific advice for specific moments, or like, “This producer is taking too long to respond. Do I send this email?” Those are the quick answers I can give them. That may be something that Tara is able to use with these mentors. Last question here is from Stephen.

Drew: Stephen writes, “What’s your take about using adverbs in the past tense to convey emotion when writing action? For example, the slug line is, ‘Exterior restaurant parking lot, moments later.’ The action line is, ‘Exiting with Dre in tow, Sean checks his order. They screwed it up again.’ I want to make it known that this has happened before. I want to hammer home his frustration, but should I just find a better way to write it? Should it just be, ‘They screwed up his order,’ or am I over-thinking it?”

Meredith: Oh my god. I am so confused. Can you read it one more time so I can see what’s wrong with it?

John: It’s confusing. Here’s what it is. In the action lines, Sean is not saying they screwed up again, but there’s an uppercase line here, like, “They screwed it up again.” We’re reading this reaction that they screwed it up again.

Jen: It’s giving us the emotional feeling of, “Oh, god,” I see, I see, versus speaking to format of, why is it all of a sudden switching tense. I see.

Meredith: I think it’s fine.

Jen: I think it’s totally fine.

Meredith: It’s totally fine.

Jen: I sometimes put a smiley face in the action line. I’m really going wild and not sticking to format when I’m writing the script.

Meredith: Also, so many people don’t read the action lines. So many people read the dialog and skim them. I would always advocate just generally to keep those short. This is not the question, but don’t try to be too cute, put jokes in your action line, because that’s never gonna be on the page, something a little winky or whatever. Keep them real simple. If it makes sense as you’re reading it, even if grammatically it doesn’t agree with the tense you used earlier in the clause, I think that’s what you go with.

Jen: I think as long as the story keeps moving and it’s enjoyable to read, that’s all that matters, never a grammar shift or anything like that. As long as it’s keeping me engaged, that’s all I care about.

John: 100 percent. It is time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our listeners. Meredith, do you have something to recommend?

Meredith: I have a person to recommend.

John: I love that.

Meredith: It’s a person that Jen Statsky knows very well.

Jen: Oh, wow.

Meredith: Chris Fleming.

Jen: Yes. Oh my gosh.

Meredith: I love Chris Fleming. He’s a stand-up. So funny. Has a special. Also, I just saw him live in March at Town Hall. It was the happiest hour and a half ever. I love him. He’s so funny. I love how unpredictable he is. I’ve been in comedy a while, and you can start to get where a premise is going, even if the comedian’s incredible and has a cool execution. But I’m like, “I feel like I know where this is going.” But with Chris Fleming, you do not know where it’s going. It’s very surprising. He’s firing on all cylinders. If you see him come through your town, get a ticket.

John: Here’s a question for you, Meredith. Someone like Chris Fleming you see, like, man, this is a great comedic voice, do you think, “I want to just watch them,” or, “I want to hire them on as a writer for something.” Does that kick in?

Meredith: I want to know him. I want to go to coffee with him every morning. I want him to be in my life. I want him to be my domestic life partner. I would love to work with him. He’s great. But yes, I’m just also enjoying it. But yeah, of course.

Jen: I will say, Meredith, I’m so happy you brought up Chris. Same exact thing. You work in comedy a really long time, not to sound jaded, but it’s very rare that someone so organically surprises you and it feels like you’re seeing something new and fresh for the first time.

A friend of mine showed me Chris’s videos. I was like, “Oh my god, this is the funniest person I’ve seen in so long.” I told my manager, I said, “I will do anything to work with this person. He is so deeply funny.” Then I ended up producing his special for Peacock, which you can watch now. It’s on Peacock. I’m so happy that you shouted him out, because Chris Fleming is so deeply funny and talented and special.

John: Love it. Jen, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

Jen: I do have a One Cool Thing. We’re going on a stand-up comedy theme for this one. This one may sound like it’s connected to Hacks, and it is, but I gain nothing from promoting this. I have no financial stake in this. But Hannah Einbinder, who plays Ava, has her very first one-hour special coming out on Max on June 13. I have seen it. She is so phenomenal. If you’ve seen Hacks, great. If you haven’t, guess what? You can still watch this special and you will love it.

Hannah is – the same way with Chris – such a unique, special voice in comedy, doing something that I’ve truly never seen anyone do before on stage. Her tone and delivery is so specific to her. It’s unlike anyone else. She’s such a gifted also physical comedian. We do a little bit of that in Hacks, but the way she moves on stage and her physicality and her act-outs and voices, it is just so phenomenal.

Again, I financially do not benefit from this special. It’s actually bad for me if more people see her, because she’ll be unavailable to shoot the show Hacks. That’s how much I like this special and think Hannah needs to be seen as an incredible stand-up comedian. It’s called Everything Must Go. It’s Hannah Einbinder’s first special, on Max, June 13.

John: Excellent. I’m gonna break the pattern. I’m sorry. I don’t have a comedian recommendation. My recommendation is – the camera in your computer monitor is terrible. They are terrible. They’re not good. They’re not optimized for that. But the camera in your iPhone is fantastic. It would be so nice if you could just use your camera on your iPhone as your computer camera, which you can now. This thing called Continuity. If you’re on a Mac, it automatically already works. You can choose your iPhone. The problem is you need a place to actually put your iPhone. They have this thing now which is a little mount to the back of your monitor, where it just connects by MagSafe.

I’m right now using my iPhone camera. I’m gonna show the difference to you guys so you can see what the difference is. This is the built-in camera for my monitor.

Meredith: Oh, god! Hideous!

John: It’s hideous.

Meredith: It’s like a Bigfoot.

John: This is the iPhone version. It’s a better thing. We’re still stuck on Zoom for a lot of pitches and things, so if you are lamenting the terrible camera in your computer monitor, there’s a solution here. The one I have is from Belkin, but they don’t seem to make it anymore. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a thing that seems almost exactly the same. It just connects on the back. It’s lovely. It just makes things look better.

Meredith: That’s a hot tip.

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

You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hats and drinkware now. They’re all great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on opening up this envelope I sent more than two years ago about the future of Hacks. Meredith, Jen, an absolute pleasure talking with both of you. Congratulations on three seasons of incredible entertainment.

Jen: Thank you.

Meredith: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Jen: Thanks for having us.

[Bonus Segment]

John: The time has come, Jen Statsky.

Jen: Hold on.

John: I emailed you after you were on the show last time. I’d just watched and loved Season 2, and I had a prediction about what was gonna happen in Season 3. You said, “Write it down.”

Jen: I think I made a joke, because I was like, “Wow, wonder if it’s better than what I have planned. Write it down and send it to me, please.” Then you, in a great move, said, “I absolutely will. I’ll send it. I’ll write it down. I’ll send it and put it in a sealed envelope.” I have in my hand that very envelope, postmarked from June 2022. It has been burning a hole in my desk for almost two years. Let’s open it.

John: Let’s open it up.

Jen: Let’s see what you had to say.

Meredith: Should we do a little ASMR of the opening?

Jen: John, before I read this, do you remember what you wrote?

John: I have a general sense of what it was. I think that it was about the power dynamic shifting between the two of them, where eventually Ava would be the boss. I think Ava created a TV show is where I think it is.

Meredith: Good idea.

John: Let’s see what I actually wrote down.

Jen: We’re opening it now. Here’s what it says. “John August prediction for Hacks Season 3. Ava sells a TV comedy and Deborah is ultimately one of the leads. It puts them in an uncomfortable boss-employee relationship, since Deborah isn’t used to being subordinate and Ava is constantly being undermined and second-guessed.” Then there’s a heart, which is very cute. It says, parentheses, “The show within a show barely survives.” Very good pitch. Meredith, I don’t think you’ve seen the Hacks Season 3 finale. How could you?

Meredith: I have not seen the finale.

Jen: But there is a dynamic shift very close to what you’re guessing there, John, in the Hacks season finale. While Ava doesn’t sell a TV show the way you’re predicting, you are, in a good way, I think, getting at this dynamic shift in their interpersonal relationship.

John: What I was envisioning was that it was a scripted series. It was a scripted series more like a Hacks series gonna be reflecting their dynamic. But of course, Hannah would have created it, would actually be the showrunner behind it. The talk show thing is really interesting, because that star is still the star, in a way.

Jen: Is still the star, yes. It is Deborah’s white whale.

John: It [crosstalk 00:56:34].

Jen: It always felt like that would be the thing that Deborah would be going for, to get.

John: I’m glad I wasn’t completely wrong.

Meredith: I think you did a great job.

Jen: I think you did an amazing job, because even though the plot details are slightly off, the emotional details were right on, of a dynamic shift and the power flipping. I think don’t quit your day job.

Meredith: Jen, great job not losing the letter.

Jen: Not losing it. I know.

Meredith: Where did you keep it?

Jen: I kept it in my office, my desktop drawer, and I didn’t touch it.

Meredith: That’s great.

John: That’s nice. Meredith, on your show, the shifting power dynamics are present through the whole thing. I’m thinking about Wickie clearly is the biggest star and she’s not the songwriter and those ongoing dynamics. It sounds like your next season, God willing, is a lot about how they hold together in what’s gonna come next.

Meredith: It is always interesting to see. It’s interesting, I think, to see people change and go through an evolution. Sara Bareilles’s character, seeing her find her alpha side would be interesting, I think, to explore. Every episode, somebody’s more in charge than the other and telling somebody how to live.

John: In doing the Charlie’s Angels movies, I often use this metaphor of fighting the monster. For both the original and for the second Charlie’s Angels, every day on Charlie’s Angels was fighting the monster. You weren’t quite sure who the monster was going to be. Some days you were the monster. But every day everyone had to band together and fight the monster. That’s how we made those movies and why they were so incredibly painful and difficult and bruising to make. Those challenging dynamics.

Even doing the first movie, I already recognized that, oh no, I’m the problem here, and yet I’m just gonna own – I’m not gonna change. I’m gonna just let myself be the problem of the day, and then someone else will be the monster tomorrow that has to be fought. It’s tough.

An absolute pleasure talking with both of you. I will not write down a prediction for Season 4, but I predict it’ll be great.

Jen: Do you have anything you want Meredith and I to send you a prediction for?

Meredith: Do you want us to predict anything?

John: We’re on Episode 645. We just recorded Episode 645. Episode 700 will be our next big milestone. That’s more than a year away.

Meredith: We could pick the topic.

John: Pick the topic of Episode 700.

Jen: A retrospective on the career of Jen Statsky.

John: Absolutely.

Jen: Just kidding.

John: Absolutely. What happened?

Jen: If you want the show to end on 701.

Meredith: If you want it to be done at 700.

Jen: You want subscriptions to plummet.

John: Good stuff. Thank you both so, so much.

Jen: Thanks, John. Thanks, Meredith.

Meredith: Thank you so much.

Links:

• Meredith Scardino on Instagram
• Jen Statsky on Instagram
• Girls5eva on Netflix
• Hacks on Max
• Chris Fleming
• Chris Fleming: HELL on Peacock
• Hannah Einbinder: Everything Must Go on Max
• Stouchi iPhone Camera Mount
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Rodger Corser (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/the-power-of-the-cold-open).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 644 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we will sing the praises of the cold open. Those scenes that occur at the beginning of an episode, often before the opening titles. We’ll discuss how they work and how to make them work for you. We will also check out new requirements for loan-out corporations and answer listener questions on exposition, motivation, and agents. Finally, Craig and I have both discussed our love for the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her. Love that movie. It’s so good.

**Craig:** Love that movie.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, let’s talk about how OpenAI’s new chat capabilities might have us talking to human-like AIs and how we feel about that.

**Craig:** Okay. I don’t want to fall in love is all I’m saying.

**John:** It’s gonna be up to you whether you fall in love. First rule is never fall in love.

**Craig:** Oh, I see what’s coming next, and boy do I like what I’m looking at.

**John:** I’ll let you do the honors here. Tell us what we now have for our listeners.

**Craig:** We now have official Scriptnotes hats. These are baseball style hats. They’ve got the name Scriptnotes written across the front. But why I love it so is because the S that begins and the S that ends the name Scriptnotes is the legendary cool S.

**John:** The cool S. It’s the very cool PT folder kind of Scriptnotes S. We’ve had T-shirts of this logo for a while, but Dustin Box, our designer, said, “Hey, how about hats?” And I said, “Absolutely.”

**Craig:** I gotta get a hat.

**John:** You gotta get a hat. You and I are both gentlemen with not a lot of hair on top of our heads. Hats are very important for us. Gotta protect our bald pates.

**Craig:** Hats are not fashion for us. Hats are self-care. I gotta get one of these. I’m ordering one of these. Can I order one now? How do I do it?

**John:** You can order one now.

**Craig:** How do I get a hat?

**John:** The same place you get our shirts. They are available on Cotton Bureau.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Just let them know they are embroidered rather than being printed. I think they should be great.

**Craig:** John, you could also get glassware.

**John:** Yeah, we have drinkware there.

**Craig:** Scriptnotes themed glassware. I gotta tell you, I love this, because what is my cocktail of choice?

**John:** An old-fashioned.

**Craig:** And where does an old-fashioned belong?

**John:** In an old-fashioned tumbler, so a short, squat, cylindrical glass.

**Craig:** It is a rocks glass. I’m gonna get one. I love it. I’m gonna do some shopping today. I’m losing money.

**John:** Absolutely. Always been a money-losing podcast, and now Craig is personally losing some funds to the Scriptnotes branding.

**Craig:** It’s like you’re watching Scarface snorting his own coke right now.

**John:** I’m excited for these hats. I’ve not gotten my first Scriptnotes hat, but I’m excited to wear one, although I do recognize that sometimes I’ll be out in the wild, I’ll be wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt, and people will come up to me like, “Hey, John.” It’s like, “How did you recognize me?” Oh, because you think that’s probably John August and he’s actually wearing a Scriptnotes T-shirt.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. But you know what? Let’s face it. We’re not that famous. Every now and again, somebody goes… I could hardly say, “Oh god, I can’t even walk outside.” I can totally walk outside.

**John:** We can totally walk outside. We are not at the level of an actual actor. We’re not at Glen Powell level of celebrity.

**Craig:** I like that. Good choice.

**John:** Good choice. I will say I was wearing my Scriptnotes T-shirt this past week when I jumped out of an airplane for the first time.

**Craig:** Oh my god, you did what?

**John:** I went skydiving with my daughter. We went to a place in Oceanside. It’s a jump by the ocean kind of place. I was wearing my Scriptnotes shirt. I realized, oh, this is being filmed on the GoPro. Can I write this off? Basically, this is promotion for the Scriptnotes podcast. I decided no, I don’t think that’s ethically correct for me to do. But I did, I jumped out of a plane. It was actually fine and good. For me, it wasn’t personally terrifying. Aline was terrified on my behalf, but I was not terrified.

**Craig:** I am terrified. I will share with you Melissa Mazin’s philosophy, if I have not already on the program. It goes like this. If you do something like jump out of an airplane, go deep-sea diving, and you die, you deserve it. You deserve it. Now, I’m sure a lot of people listening who are avid skydivers are gonna feel very upset by that. I just want to remind them that’s what my wife says. That’s not me.

**John:** Blame it on Melissa there. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the video of me jumping out of a plane if people are curious to see me jumping out of a plane and want to see a Scriptnotes T-shirt in action.

I’ve done things like this. I’ve bungee jumped, which was much more terrifying, because – we can talk about agency here – bungee jumping, you actually have a lot of agency, because you are responsible for stepping off all by yourself. That is a hard thing to convince your body, which does not want to fall and die, that no, you have to go do this. That’s a tough thing to do. In the case of skydiving, I am strapped to the instructor, so I really have no agency. I’m gonna be out of this plane no matter what. I was like, “Might as well just go for it.”

**Craig:** That’s a huge distinction, because I did go rappelling once. Once. The moment where you sit back over air is basically like you just have to tell yourself to commit suicide. It’s the same feeling. It’s insane.

**John:** Craig, my palms are literally sweating just picturing that.

**Craig:** It’s horrible. Once you’ve done that, now you’re just going down the hill and it’s fine. But the moment where you just have to trust that this rope is going to hold you as you let yourself die… I could do that or I could do what I did yesterday, which is to solve the latest issue of Panda Magazine Puzzle Hunt with my friend Dave Shukan, in my seat, without falling off a hill.

**John:** They’re both thrilling. Only one will kill you potentially.

**Craig:** One is thrilling, and the other one is just sweaty and scary.

**John:** There’s a thing I’ve done which is similar to the skydiving. When we were living in France, we were in Chamonix, and we went paragliding, which is where you’re at the top of the mountain, and again, you are strapped to a person. The parachute is laid out on the snow behind you. You just start running forward and the parachute goes up. I guess it’s really a sail goes up. Then you jump off a cliff. But then you are literally just flying in the air. It’s 30 minutes. It’s incredibly relaxing and peaceful. You don’t have that sense of falling at any point.

I would say skydiving, the moments where you’re free-falling is incredibly loud in ways I hadn’t anticipated, and unpleasant. But then once the chute opens, it was just like paragliding again. I got to control the going to the left, going to the right. I was pulling on the ropes. I got to go through a hole in the clouds. That felt really cool.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** The answer is no from Craig.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I don’t think I’ll do it again. Just the hassle of getting down there and setting up… If I lived by an airstrip where I could just go on a random afternoon and just do it, I might. But it wasn’t that life-changing.

**Craig:** You didn’t get the bug for this?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** I’m not an adrenaline junkie, for sure. I was wearing my Scriptnotes T-shirt. I could’ve potentially taken a tax write-off, but that would’ve been a not necessarily kosher thing to do, because corporations are under a lot of scrutiny these days. This is our bit of news here.

You and I both have loan-out corporations – and we’ve talked about this before on the show – which is when somebody wants to hire us to do some writing work, they are not hiring us directly. They are hiring a corporation that we control, and that corporation then hires us to do the work. It’s an abstraction that is very, very common in the film and television industry.

**Craig:** I don’t know if this is referring to… John, have you done the annual report to the Secretary of State of California? Is that what this is referring to?

**John:** Yeah. It’s a new requirement. Traditionally, when you set up a loan-out corporation, your attorney fills out this paperwork and creates this corporation. Then once per year, you have to cement this on-paper annual meeting that describes what happened to the corporation. It’s just very perfunctory. What has changed is that starting in January 2024, most entities like corporations or LLCs, partnerships, have these new US federal disclosures-

**Craig:** Federal.

**John:** … because of the Corporate Transparency Act. It’s actually a big deal, because if you do not file these reports properly, there’s civil and even criminal penalties. It’s all in an effort to combat money laundering.

You and I and our individual corporations but also the Scriptnotes LLC now have to file this new paperwork. Our law firms who generally set up these things have said, “We’re not doing that anymore. This is beyond the scope of things that we are able to do for you.” Most folks listening to this podcast who have loan-out corporations are going to have to do something different this year, which probably means bringing on an outside firm and paying them 100 bucks, 200 bucks to file this new paperwork that has to be filed every year.

**Craig:** I will not be filing the paperwork personally. Here’s the order of business. Buy Scriptnotes old-fashioned rocks glass. Buy Scriptnotes hat. Talk to business managers and lawyers about who is gonna fill out my new report. Then I’ll have lunch.

**John:** That’s what it is. For most of us, it is an email. It’s a little annoying thing. But if you are a listener who ignores this, I would say maybe don’t ignore this, because it’s this year that you have to start doing it, and everyone’s gonna be scrambling to do it.

The kinds of things that have to go in this new report are principal place of business, if you’ve hired full-time US employees, and if you’re a beneficial owner of the company, which you and I would both be that for Scriptnotes, legal name. We have to file your primary residential address or if you got a new passport or driver’s license. Basically things that could look shady in the sense of money laundering, all that stuff has to be disclosed.

**Craig:** I can imagine you running through all these things as you were free-falling through the sky.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Thinking, “Should I write this? Probably not.” You know what? That means that this law is doing its job. It’s making very small business owners think twice, while massive corporations will simply assign a division of A-holes to get around all of this.

**John:** What’s actually interesting is these new regulations apply to companies with 20 or fewer employees. I think because that’s who tends to have the money laundering kind of problems.

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**John:** That is gonna affect almost all of us, because unless you’re Shonda or Greg Berlanti, you’re gonna have 20 or fewer employees as a loan-out corporation.

**Craig:** I can’t even imagine that Shonda or Greg have more than 20 employees, because most of the employees are being hired and employed by the studio or network, for writers, etc. It would come down to producing partners, assistants. Then I don’t hire, for instance, our landscape folks. The only people that are hired through my company really are me and my producing partner, and that’s it.

**John:** But how about your chauffeur and your assistant butler? Those are things that should go through your loan-out, because they’re helping you get your writing done.

**Craig:** My chauffeur and my assistant butler I got from overseas.

**John:** That’s nice. Like an au pair service.

**Craig:** It’s an au pair/indentured servitude.

**John:** It’s good, because you’re giving them an opportunity. You’re letting them move to the United States. You have a little space in the back of the guesthouse. It’s a cabinet basically they can sleep underneath.

**Craig:** It’s under the stairs. I call it a Harry Potter suite. It’s lovely.

**John:** It’s themed. I really like that. It makes it really feel [crosstalk 00:11:56].

**Craig:** I love they made Harry Potter sleep under the stairs. That’s fantastic.

**John:** In our house, there is actually a little room underneath our stairs. Is it the same in your place? Can you get into that space underneath your stairs?

**Craig:** I cannot.

**John:** You don’t know what’s hidden there, basically. It could be anything underneath there.

**Craig:** I think the stairs are solid.

**John:** That’s not true.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** The stairs going up to your second story, they’re not solid.

**Craig:** Of course they’re not solid. I don’t know exactly what is under there.

**John:** I think Kevin Williamson hid something there for you. Somewhere down the road, it’s gonna come out.

**Craig:** We do have a screening room in the basement, which is under the stairs. That goes down itself. Maybe there is a person still under the stairs that I’m not aware of. I gotta talk to Kevin.

**John:** If things go mysteriously missing, yeah.

**Craig:** Wait, if you buy-

**John:** They have to disclose that. It’s in the standard residential buying of a property.

**Craig:** But I purchased my home from one of the most famous horror writers to ever live. Surely he left behind some kind of nightmare. I gotta check in with him.

**John:** Actually, I am thinking about the geography of when you go down the steps into the basement where the screening room is, there is that little nook where the popcorn machine was originally at some point. That’s kind of underneath the stairs. That could be that space.

**Craig:** I think that is. What is currently there is the Chernobyl Mickey Mouse.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** By the way, we had the Chernobyl Mickey Mouse made in Europe. Folks made it there. I asked if I could have it at the end of the show, and everybody said sure. Shipping it to the United States was such a nightmare, because you had to declare it as a artwork. You had to pay customs. It had to have an assigned value. There needed to be so much paperwork filled out, I think in part because it also needed to be really carefully inspected, because it looked like the kind of thing you would fill with bags of cocaine.

**John:** It’s paper mâché, yeah.

**Craig:** It was so suspicious. I just kept going, “It’s from a show. I like it.” They were like, “Fill more papers out, please.”

**John:** Fortunately, there’s somebody on your payroll who just does that. It’s not the assistant butler. Who was it? Was it your vice accountant?

**Craig:** That was just my assistant Bo, who did a great job navigating the US customs people.

**John:** The thing about being an assistant is you never know what kind of weird stuff you have to figure out suddenly. Here’s a onetime only situation. Handle it.

**Craig:** Keeps you on your toes.

**John:** We have some follow-up. First off, Craig, you’ll be relieved to know there is a MoviePass movie now for you to watch.

**Craig:** There is a documentary on HBO that I will absolutely watch. It’s coming out a couple of weeks from now. It is a documentary about the rise and fall of MoviePass. But I think it should be subtitled “the thing that John and Craig predicted over and over and over.”

**John:** I’m a little upset that they did not interview you for this documentary, because come on. Who would be a better talking head than Craig Mazin on this?

**Craig:** I was really clear about it from the start.

**John:** You work for HBO, and you were available.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was. I don’t know. They seemed to concentrate, for some reason, on people that were actually involved. But I will say that the actual collapse of MoviePass, it was a moment that reminded me that the world still makes sense.

**John:** That there is gravity, yes.

**Craig:** Yes, because so many times, things happen, I’m like, “What the… ” That one at least, we were like, “Finally. Yes, there’s gravity. Exactly. Something that doesn’t make sense actually doesn’t make sense.” I’m gonna definitely give that one a watch. Of course, MoviePass, still out there. Zombie MoviePass trying to come back to life in some, I don’t know, new altered state. But the old MoviePass, oof.

**John:** Oof.

**Craig:** I watched the trailer for the documentary. It looks like not only did their business plan make absolutely no sense, but then they were also spending money like drunken sailors.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to this trailer. I want to say this trailer’s also the most HBO documentary trailer. It hits all the beats of an HBO documentary trailer. It feels exactly like what it should be.

**Craig:** They’re pretty good at what they do.

**John:** They know what they’re doing. We have talked about streaming ad breaks, so the idea that you write something and you produce a thing and it goes out there, and it might have act breaks already in there. But because of streaming, they make different choices about where those act breaks go. We asked for our listeners who had firsthand experience, who do this for a living, what the realities are on the ground. We had two folks write in. Drew, can you start us off with Lachlan?

**Drew Marquardt:** Lachlan in the UK writes, “I’ve been an editor for 12 years, and for much of that time I was working with one of the biggest broadcasters in the UK. Even if shows were delivered with specific ad break moments, often we would have to re-edit them to change where these ad breaks would happen. This is because we have a different amount of ad breaks in the UK than in other places like the US or Australia. Here, for a 30-minute slot we have one ad break, for a 60-minute slot we have two ad breaks, and so on. So often we would be joining up ad breaks, usually the old dip to black, and then the compliance team would dictate where the new ad breaks would happen.

“Unfortunately, these days, I believe they don’t use editors as much for this job, and the compliance team creates the ad breaks themselves. This means that even if you watch a show on VOD, it still has a title card that pops up every time the linear version would be going to a break, which gets very frustrating when trying to watch any HBO show in the UK. Sorry, Craig, this is the same with Chernobyl and The Last of Us.”

**John:** Again, what Lachlan is telling us is editing is a skill, and even editing like putting in the act breaks, getting out those fades to black is actually a skill. If you try to not use an actual editor to do it and it’s just some functionary who doesn’t have any experience with this, it’s gonna be unartful. It sounds like it’s unartful.

**Craig:** It is frustrating to hear that about the stuff that I’ve done. There are ways, of course, to find a spot and make a reasonable ad break in a show. But if the compliance team, which doesn’t care about any of that and is simply looking for, “Okay, at this point, at this point, at this point,” yeah, that is frustrating.

This is one of the bummers about working for a network that isn’t streaming only. That is that I have no control over how most people watch the shows I make for HBO, because most people are not watching it on HBO. Most people are watching it on the local service that HBO sells it to. For instance, in the UK, I believe that’s Sky. Sky just I guess just shoves stuff in. That’s a bummer.

You know what? I’m not gonna cry. People are watching it, and they can do the math. Listen. You know what a bigger problem is? The fact that people have motion smoothing on their TVs. That’s where I’m gonna cry. I can’t cry over this.

**John:** No. Zack wrote in with more information about streaming breaks. This is his experience doing a series where he had to put in the breaks. Let’s listen to Zack.

**Drew:** Zack writes, “Last year I edited a three-part series for Peacock. For every cut, we were asked to break up roughly 50-minute episodes into six acts, all with loose targets for duration. The execs noted that Act 1 should be longer than the subsequent acts, but overall there was a fair amount of flexibility. I found that mandatory act breaks impose some fun structural challenges on the team. We might send a viewer into a break with a question that we’d answer at the top of the next act or leave a loose end that we’d pay off in two acts down the road.

“We were forced to build well-defined phrases with sharp edges ending each act. Do writers think in terms of sharp edges the way that editors do? A sharp edge often means a clean break between scenes that shifts point of view, shifts a story from an A story to a B story, cleanses the palette, or maybe does all three. Too many sharp edges can leave you feeling a bit disjointed, while too few can make for a soupy edit. Often, the best sharp edges mark the end of the phrase or a movement. If you have a flowy, prelapsey series of scenes all following a single character, story, or theme, that sharp edge will be all the more noticeable when it shows up.”

**John:** What Zack is describing, I think he might’ve been cutting a reality show or a documentary show, because it sounds like it wasn’t something that was written for act breaks. There wasn’t a writer involved in determining where those things go in. They might be looking at, “Okay, given the footage we’ve got, what’s an interesting question to leave at the end of an act break? How do we get people to come back after the act break?” which is really the job that writers have traditionally done in traditional television, which is we think of act breaks as moments that have rising action, that end on a question mark, so that there’s a real intriguing moment to come back. That was very much the art of TV writing for 30, 40 years.

**Craig:** This is the way it should be done, because there are things that are not written with ad breaks in mind. I think that if you are writing a piece that is meant to be viewed all in one, you shouldn’t be worried about this other part. This other part is not your problem. But then if there are artful editors, like Zack, who can at least make it decent and reasonable when it is chopped up, fantastic. But we need those people. They can’t just be arbitrary.

**John:** I think AIs or just human eyes can actually figure out, “Okay, this is the end of one scene. This is the start of another scene. But is that the right place for an act break?”

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** It’s not necessarily the right choice. If you were to delay that 30 more seconds, it might be a more narratively useful place to put that break.

**Craig:** Also, it’s more valuable for the people advertising, because if it breaks at a dumb spot, that’s where people might just go, “Meh. Actually, meh.”

**John:** “I’m done.”

**Craig:** “I’m done. I’m not coming back.” Soap operas, that’s all they ever did was somebody would go, “You didn’t know? She’s alive.” Cut. Soap, soap, soap, soap, and then back.

**John:** We’ll talk about this more in the cold open section, but I’ve been working on this project that is a bunch of episodes. These are designed without traditional act breaks. But I also know that ultimately there will be act breaks going into this thing. While it’s not the top of my mind, I am thinking about, where would you slot in these ad breaks down the road? I feel pretty good about these episodes since there are natural places where you can put this thing in and it won’t disrupt the flow, and in some cases will give you that sense like, “Oh, I’m curious what’s going to happen next.”

Sometimes it’s just basic good writing. Scenes should end on a moment that has an energy going into that cut so you want to come and see what the next scene is. Most episodes of TV that are written without intentional act breaks should have that kind of momentum that you can get through it if there is an ad inserted there.

**Craig:** I agree. If, for instance, HBO said, “Hey, everybody is gonna watch your show on HBO in some streaming method. Some people, however, are paying less money and it will be an ad-supported experience. Where would you like to put these breaks?” I would take the hour or two with my editors to come up with those moments. The problem for me is that’s not what’s happening.

**John:** They don’t do that.

**Craig:** That’s what they did with Fallout. Even as I’m watching without ads-

**John:** It fades out.

**Craig:** … it fades out and then it comes back. But for me, it doesn’t matter. I could send it that way, and whatever the company is that shows it to people in, I don’t know, India, they have their own needs, and it won’t have anything to do with those things I put in, and so it’ll be even worse. I’m just gonna not think about it.

**John:** What I admire about Fallout, because they clearly anticipated people are gonna encounter these ad breaks and we’re gonna plan for them, it’s not just about fading to black. It’s also thinking about what is the music doing here, because that is what’s so awkward. If it’s just wedged in, music goes up to a moment and then it doesn’t pay off, or then you’re coming back from an ad break and suddenly we’re at this very high level, like, “Why is the music up here?”

**Craig:** Exactly. Because you will only watch Fallout on Amazon, no matter where you live, they have the luxury of dictating that. I thought that was smart.

**John:** Let’s move on to Andrew who wrote in about email anxiety. We had a previous listener who was so terrified and so nervous to send out an email because they wanted everything to be perfect and they got hung up on it. Andrew has a suggestion.

**Drew:** Andrew writes, “I was listening to your podcast where your listener Richard had anxiety about sending an email, and I had a suggestion. Recently, I was listening to Brian Grazer on someone’s podcast, and he had a strategy for getting the most positive response from emails. Apparently, what Grazer does is he watches the stock market and looks for when the studio he wants to work with has their stock go up. It’s on the day that their stock goes up that he sends emails to people he wants to finance his projects. Maybe this method would make Richard a little less anxious.”

**John:** First off, Andrew, I don’t think we said it was okay for you to listen to any other podcasts. You shouldn’t have been even listening to anything that Brian Grazer said, because you shouldn’t have been listening to any other podcasts. Scriptnotes will tell you everything you need to know about the film and television industry. That’s what we’re here for, not other people’s podcasts.

That stipulated, Craig, this is your strategy, I know, because you are tracking the stock market every day, and you’re only making the calls based on how well a certain company’s stock is doing.

**Craig:** No disrespect to Mr. Brian Grazer, but I don’t think this is gonna ever work. First of all, most of the people that we writers are sending emails to are not the owners of the company or people looking to exercise massive amounts of stock options. But even if they were, whatever the stock market happens to be doing that day can’t possibly be that meaningful to these people. Hopefully, the people that are at that level understand that any day’s movement, other than some insane delta, is not relevant to anything. This feels like a way to make yourself feel better about something. That feels like an attempt to calculate your way to success, which in this business is easier said than done.

**John:** I want to give full benefit of the doubt to Brian Grazer. Let’s imagine he’s talking to Bob Iger. If the Disney stock is just bouncing around its normal amount, I can’t imagine it’s gonna make any difference, because Bob Iger is smart enough to know the stocks can bounce around. Now, if the stock was suddenly down like 25 percent-

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** … then yes, it’s not the moment to try to sell your expensive thing there. I completely get that. But small normal things, no way.

**Craig:** Also, none of us are selling anything to Bob Iger. He’s 12 levels removed from that. It does not make sense. It’s adorable. It’s adorable.

**John:** Last bit of follow-up here. We’ve talked in the past about AI being used for coverage and that AI is really good at summarizing things, but we’re very suspicious about AI providing any kind of critical analysis of what material actually is or its worth or its merit. Greg in Illinois gave us his experience with The Film Fund.

**Drew:** Greg in Illinois writes, “I recently stumbled upon an interesting example of AI being used for feedback and coverage. The Film Fund is an organization that provides resources to filmmakers to produce short films. Their flagship program is a competition in which the filmmaker pays $35 to submit a one-sentence description of their film’s premise and how they would use the funds if they win. Winning films receive up to 10 grand. For an additional fee of $14, winners can opt for feedback on their one-sentence pitch.

“In a Reddit thread from last year, a couple of contestants complained that the feedback they received was worthless. The founder of The Film Fund replied, assuring them the situation would be much better in future contests, because they’re gonna use AI to generate feedback. These are his exact words. ‘Going forward, we’re implementing a different approach with our feedback service to ensure a consistent and high level of quality. We’ve trained a custom AI model explicitly on what our judges look for in entries and what makes a good pitch in the eyes of the judges. We’ve tested the output by this AI model thoroughly, and it greatly exceeds the feedback responses we were sending previously.’

“To his credit, he appears to be responsive and reasonably transparent. I don’t get the impression he’s trying to scam anyone. But it’s a bit surprising that he doesn’t perceive how this might undermine whatever credibility the contest has.”

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Here’s what I’m saying. Transparent doesn’t mean good. If someone says, “I am going to rob you,” that’s transparent. Doesn’t mean it’s good. This feels dumb. You’ve spent $49 on a thing that you shouldn’t have probably spent $49 on. This AI coverage, I will not believe that The Film Fund’s special training on what they’re looking for is worth $14 that you couldn’t get from a normal, free ChatGPT or whatever, which you shouldn’t be using anyway for feedback on your writing project.

**Craig:** I’ve never heard of The Film Fund, but I’m looking at their website. What I don’t see is that they are registered as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization, meaning they’re a business. I see no mention of being a charity of any kind. I could be wrong, but I don’t see any of it. I don’t know if they’re a for-profit company or not. But I will say if you have to pay money to submit a one-sentence description of your film’s premise, that’s ridiculous.

You’re paying $35 for somebody to read a sentence? And then for an additional fee of $14, which is a very odd number – it’s an even number, but it’s a curious number – they now will give you an AI feedback based on the input. The AI’s trained on what the judges did. The judges’ feedback is the very thing that they are also admitting was useless. This is ridiculous!

**John:** It is ridiculous.

**Craig:** It is ridiculous. It is absolutely ridiculous. Winning films receive up to $10,000. I don’t know how many they’ve made.

**John:** I’m looking at the examples and winners. They show how much prize money these different people get. They show the example pitch sentences here.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** We’ll look at their thing.

**Craig:** Look at this. Look at this. First of all, on their examples, no one has received $10,000. The most anyone has received to make a film is $6,000. Now, if I have, I don’t know, 15,000 people sending me 35 bucks and I hand out $6,000, okay. But then there are some people who, quote unquote, won a prize of $400.

**John:** Or a three-month subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.

**Craig:** What is this? What is this?

**John:** What is this?

**Craig:** What is this?

**John:** I think it was created just to annoy Craig.

**Craig:** It almost seems like it was. It literally seems like it was.

**John:** AI is being used to just create sites to annoy Craig. That would be a good use of AI is just to build websites that are specifically there to frustrate Craig.

**Craig:** This is really frustrating. I don’t know if it’s the deals that they make money from all the $35 and then they give some out. I guess I would have to look more about them to see. I love this. I hate these people so much. In their frequently asked questions, here’s a frequently asked question. “Do I need to give credit to The Film Fund?” The answer is, “Yes, and we’ll be honored.” How can you be honored by a credit that you are making mandatory? How is that an honor?

**John:** I initially thought this was something European or British, because there are, like The Irish Film Fund, these film funds that are actually national funds, where it’s a whole system by which they help support their local film communities. That’s a valid thing. But by calling yourself The Film Fund, it seems like it’s not even a competition; it’s just a thing.

**Craig:** It’s just a thing. They say, “Where does the money come from? It comes from filmmakers like you who have also submitted their sentence to The Film Fund.” They’re just making people pay to ask a question.

**John:** I do like on the fact, “Why are you doing this?” the answer is, “We know there’s a simpler way to fund films.” That’s a real answer.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** “Who are the judges? You can check them out here.” Let’s take a look through here.

**Craig:** Let’s see. No offense to any of these people. One of the judges is the founder and CEO of The Film Fund.

**John:** I’ll take a screenshot, just because this of course could change. But I do want to point out that at least on my thing, there’s an ad being served underneath one of these people’s photos that says, “Notice this site contains real police records, background reports.” An ad is breaking up this thing, making it look like this person is actually a felon, which is not accurate.

**Craig:** The folks here do not appear to be what you would imagine would be judging what films should be financed. I’m sure they’re all excellent people and valid in their own rights. But there’s a certain expectation of a kind of level of accomplishment for judges. What we see over and over in these kinds of things is that’s not what you get. This is a do not recommend for me.

**John:** I will say four of these people I’ve noticed are all from Lehigh University, which I don’t know of.

**Craig:** Oh, Lehigh University, it’s in Pennsylvania.

**John:** Which is the center of all film production.

**Craig:** That is very strange. We have college friends who sat around, and I’m not suggesting they were high or drinking, but they were sitting around going, “How do we make money?” This is operating like the lottery.

**John:** Here’s what I kind of respect. Over the years on Scriptnotes, we’ve criticized so many of these things that are like, “Send us your scripts and we will judge them.” Here they say, “How do we improve on this process? We don’t have to even read the script. We just have to read one sentence.”

**Craig:** “We read one sentence. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna charge people $35.” Usually, it’s $35 to send your finished film into our festival or send your finished script in. No, $35 to send your log line, and then an extra, if you want a little bonus action for our premium service, we’ll have ChatGPT barf some crap out about it, for free for us but $14 for you. Thumbs down. Do not like. This seems very silly. I’m sure they’re gonna yell at us now.

**John:** Yeah, which is fine, but Drew is ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** When they start these things, I’m sure everybody’s like, “At some point, John and Craig are just gonna swing a bat at us, because they don’t like these things.” It doesn’t mean we’re right. It’s just our opinion, man.

**John:** That’s all we can give. Hey, while we’re having a little bit of rants, I have a rant that I’ve just wanted to talk about for a while, and I think this is the moment to talk about it. Can we please stop sending Word documents around on emails? So often, I will get something that is a Word document that should’ve been a pdf. The problem if you send a Word document is like, okay, am I supposed to edit this? What do you want me to do? No, this is actually a press release, but you’re putting it in a Word document so that it looks terrible when I open it in QuickLook or Pages, because I don’t actually have Word installed on my computer. There’s no reason to send a Word document. Send a pdf or a link to a webpage. Do not send me a Word document. It’s so frustrating for me.

**Craig:** It is a rare thing for me to send a Word document. I only do it when I am essentially saying to somebody, “I’m sending this to you, and I’m specifically sending it as a Word document because I want you to have the ability to edit it if you’d like.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That is the only reason.

**John:** If it’s something you want me to be able to copy and paste out of it, you can do that from a pdf.

**Craig:** Absolutely. It’s literally only like, “Hey, I’ve written this. I’m thinking you’re gonna want to change a few sentences here and there. Do that, send it back to me.” For that, great. But otherwise-

**John:** But I’ll say a Google Doc could be better than that, because that way you can just send the link and they can edit that link.

**Craig:** You’re right. You’re right.

**John:** For WGA stuff, whenever we have to figure out what’s the press release we’re sending out, what’s the thing, we did it as Google docs, because that way we could actually all edit it and look at it. A little more sympathy for sometimes sending the Excel spreadsheet, because sometimes there is stuff they need to tweak and move around there. But also Google Sheets is available, and maybe try that instead.

**Craig:** Those of us who solve puzzles for a not-living use Google Sheets all the time. Incredibly useful.

**John:** So good. So useful. Let’s get to our marquee topic. This is the cold open. We’ve talked about the cold open several times on the program before. I know it’s a little bit of a repeat. But I was reminded of how important and how useful the cold open is because of this project I’ve been working on, because I’m getting the chance to write a bunch of cold opens, which is so wonderful and exciting.

I thought we might start by talking about what we’re talking about, because obviously, every episode of television is going to open with something. Sometimes that’s a teaser for what’s going to happen. Sometimes it’s continually the action from what happened in the previous episode. If it was a cliffhanger, it might go right back to this moment. But you also have the option in television to open with characters you’ve never seen before and just establish a brand new thread of something. It’s a great way to introduce a new character who’s going to be important to the series or at least important to that episode.

I just love a cold open. It’s just one of the most powerful things we have in episodic television. Sometimes people are not using the full power of the cold open. I want to just sing the praises of and talk through how it works, when to use it, why we love it so much.

**Craig:** You have a choice every single time. There is no such thing as an episode that can’t have one. The first decision you have to make is do I want to put one here or not.

They are enormously fun. They are fun for the audience. They work like appetizers. They are wonderfully free of rules. They are not bound into the normal narrative timeline, nor are they bound by the normal rules of who’s that and where am I and what’s going on. They can be mysteries. They can feature people that you never see again.

They’re often great ways to reveal information. You can have an episode where 20 minutes in, one character starts explaining something to another and you’re like, “Okay.” You could also just start the scene with one character explaining something to another and you don’t even know who they are or where they are. You’re leaning forward, and then you get to the end of it, and it’s a little short story that has a twist or something that makes you go, “Whoa.”

Then the show starts, and now you’re fully appetized and ready to go into the main storyline. The main storyline feels like an entrée has been served. Psychologically, I find it very comforting. I don’t do a cold open in every episode myself, but quite a few. Quite a few have them.

**John:** I think the quintessential cold open, the one we’ll put a link to in the show notes, is the introduction to Desmond’s character in Lost. Lost, I think it’s in Season 2, opens with this person we’ve never met before. We’re not even seeing his face. He’s waking up. He’s going through his daily routine. He’s inside someplace, but we’re not sure what it is. We would assume naturally as an audience that it is going to be one of the flashbacks that the show is known for, where you’re establishing who people were off the island. Ultimately, we’re gonna reveal that, oh, no, he’s actually down in this hatch that we’ve been working to figure out what’s inside there. It is a tremendous sequence, and it’s done so, so well and sets up this character that we’re now intrigued by and just really broadens the geography of what Lost could be about.

That’s I think what I love so much about a cold open is that you are creating these scenes that you could not put anywhere else in the episode. Almost by definition, if you’re starting in some brand new place, it would be very hard to slide this anywhere else in an episode. It basically has to start, and in many cases should start before the opening titles. You need all of the viewer’s attention. You need it to not be in the chain of events of the normal episode. Once you’ve started the normal sequence, it’s very hard to stop that and go to some place that’s completely different to establish a new person, a new place, a new way that the show’s going to work.

**Craig:** As you described that, something occurred to me that I don’t think has occurred to me before. That is that a cold open reveals a mystery to the audience with nobody in between. In the normal method of plotting in the main body of your story, when there are mysteries, they are discovered by and solved by and revealed to characters, but not in a cold open. In a cold open, it’s just you. That is a very exciting thing for the very reasons you said. It can’t really happen in the middle.

Once we are in the perspective of our main characters, we must stay there. We can certainly see some things they don’t see, but we can’t have scenes that are speaking directly to us. But you can absolutely have that at the beginning, before you begin the main storyline. That’s a great example where instead of somebody finding a tunnel, going through something, or opening the hatch itself and discovering this man, the show says now, this is just for you, directly for you only.

**John:** The point of view is the audience’s point of view rather than any of the one character’s points of view, which is great, so powerful. Honestly, some shows are built around this kind of idea. Law and Order almost always starts with the discovery of a crime by people we’ve not seen before.

**Craig:** Thunk thunk.

**John:** Thunk thunk. Poker Face, one of the things I love so much about that show is, generally we’re starting with a crime itself. It’s a question of when the hell is Natasha Lyonne gonna show up. You don’t know. She’s gonna come up sometime. Generally, we’re not starting with her.

**Craig:** She’s gonna be there when she gets there, and that’s no big deal.

**John:** She might be in the background of something or we see her arrive and we don’t know how are these two things gonna connect. That’s the joy of this. I love cold opens. Also, the sense that you cannot slide it anywhere else in time, this project we’re working on, has really made me appreciate, god, day and night is so tough, because there’s so many times where you would love to move this scene after that scene, and day and night is killing you, where this scene can’t happen before, because then you’re creating an extra day that is impossible. I’m sure you’ve encountered that in your writing as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s been more of an issue for me when I was writing movies than television, because you have a little bit more of a timeline flexibility there. But the day and night situation, especially as we enter this next storytelling phase of The Last of Us, is important, and so you do have to stay within the bounds of it. But that’s another reason why a cold open is so valuable.

**John:** Yeah. You’re not tethered to the timeline at all, which is so nice.

**Craig:** At all. Doesn’t even matter what year it is. You could be wherever. You could be in the future. You could be in the past. You could do whatever you want. That is freeing, and also, I think the audience appreciates it. They appreciate that they get spoken to directly without any rules whatsoever, before they settle into the traditional experience of the show.

**John:** Yeah, this cold open I just wrote covers a 14-year time span for a character we’ve never met before. It’s delightful to have the opportunity. We’re going from the past into a time beyond when the events of the series are happening. It’s delightful to give you a sense of like, oh, this is bigger than just this one moment in front of you. We’ll see if that makes it through the end, but that was the intention behind it.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Let’s answer some listener questions. I see the first one here is from Matt. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Matt writes, “As an Asian American actor, I’ve gone from being basically Johnny exposition guy in every television show and movie I was in, to now seeing true parts with complex, interesting characters being offered to me. One of the reasons I decided to start writing was because I was tired of being the furniture and wanted to be the interior designer. Since I keenly feel the plight of being the guy asked to give massive exposition dumps, what are some ways that writers can give the necessary exposition without relying on a single character for the purpose or at least make it interesting?”

**John:** What I love so much about Matt’s entry point here is that as an Asian American actor, he feels like he’s Johnny exposition guy. It never really occurred to me, but yeah, I could totally see that. I could completely imagine that the size that he’s getting for an episodic role, he’s just the guy who explains the thing and actually has no character beyond that. Hopefully, that’s changing. It sounds like it’s changing for Matt here in his experience.

We’ve talked on exposition a ton before. But Matt’s instinct here is that, like, god, it’s the worst when one character has to do all the heavy lifting. It’s so true.

**Craig:** Yes. For writers, we’ll do a very, very short sum-up. It is just as important to characterize the person receiving the information and to understand why they want the information and why they need the information and also how they feel about the information as the information is delivered. Relationship.

The scene where somebody is – we say an exposition dump. If it’s an exposition dump and that’s how you’re describing it, you’re doing it wrong. It is a conversation between two people who have a knowledge gap. The knowledge that is being imparted needs to impact the other person. The way it’s imparted needs to be crafted. It needs to feel like a little story. It needs to be interesting enough that people lean in, because when we say exposition dump, what we’re really saying is boring. But people can explain things in a way that is fascinating. You just have to write it well. So write well.

**John:** A recent conversation we had on this podcast, I think you were the one who was talking about how an explanation does happen in real life. People do explain things to each other in real life.

**Craig:** All the time.

**John:** Look for ways in which this would happen in real life, and that’s a way to hopefully keep that scene grounded and unapologetic about its need to get the information out there, because it’s being given from one character to another and not just to the audience.

**Craig:** Think of it as teaching. It’s not exposition. It’s teaching. You’re teaching somebody something. Teaching means that one character takes into account the other character’s education level, information level, what they deserve to know, what they ought to know, and then lays it out in a structured way so that they get it. That is as much fun to write as anything as far as I’m concerned.

But when we think of it as an exposition dump, what we’re really saying is, Character B needs to know and the audience needs to know a bunch of crap. Just have some guy say it. That’s not artful. That is not looking at it as an opportunity. That’s looking at it as a chore.

**John:** I would also say look for moments within those conversations where information is coming out, to have it not just be about that information, but there actually be some character not necessarily in conflict, but some challenge, some revelation that there’s something more there. A scene in which a character says, “Yeah, I knew that, because I’ve actually been following your career over these years.” That’s interesting. That makes us lean in and doesn’t just feel like, okay, now we’re being told this thing. Look for moments where there’s actually some interesting character moment happening there that’s not just about the text.

**Craig:** Yeah, agreed.

**John:** Another question here. It looks like Dean wants to ask us about titles.

**Drew:** Dean writes, “What makes a good title? Does it have to be unique more than it has to be relevant to the theme of the movie? Does a good title help get a script made, or is it just a good script that gets scripts made? Do writers even get the final say on titles, or is that all up to Brian in marketing? What are the best titles you’ve come across, and have you noticed any trends in titles?”

**Craig:** That’s a whole discussion.

**John:** That’s a whole episode. Titles are crucially important and yet the writer who has spent so much time thinking about the right title for their movie does not have the final say. The second Charlie’s Angels was Charlie’s Angels: Forever, it was Charlie’s Angels: Halo, and Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle came because the marketing person always wanted to do something called Full Throttle, and that became Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.

**Craig:** Full Throttle.

**John:** Full Throttle.

**Craig:** Full Throttle.

**John:** But yes, titles are important, because it is the first idea a person has about your script, about your movie is gonna be that title. So yeah, it does matter.

**Craig:** There was a trend – I don’t know if it’s still continued – where scripts that were going out, original screenplays, needed to have bizarro titles, long, bizarre, weird titles, because that was what was jumping out, because people were tired of the short, punchy title. But by the time things make it to a movie theater, they generally do have the short, punchy title. Yes, it is up to Brian in marketing.

A screenplay with a boring title I think is at a disadvantage. But if it’s what we’d call a good old-fashioned punchy title or a weirdo title or a title that is somewhat provocative, just to get them to get to Page 1, that’s really all it is, just literally to Page 1, and then off you go. Try to not have a title that feels like a rip-off of something else, just a blatant rip-off. By the time you get to the movie theater, the title itself is not up to you.

Famously, the movie I’m thinking of is title-cursed is Shawshank Redemption. It’s a wonderful film. It was released into theaters, and nobody went to it, because nobody knew what the word “Shawshank” or “redemption” meant, and certainly not the two words together. It just said nope, don’t come here. Then eventually, people found the movie and it is beloved. But it was a flop in the theaters, likely because of the title. But putting Shawshank Redemption on the cover of a screenplay that you’re trying to sell, no problem at all. None. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

**John:** Unforgiven was The Cut-Whore Killings.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** We’ve talked before on the podcast, I think, about there are rules about titles. The MPAA I believe is the one who has a title registry. If you have a movie that’s coming out with a title that is too much like another title, there can be a challenge. There can be a whole issue. Basically, so we don’t have two movies with the exact same title coming out at the same time.

My movie The Nines was coming out the same year as there was a movie Nine, and the Nine and a Half movie. We had registered our title first, and so we had to give permission for the other people to have their titles. It all worked out. But there is a reason why you don’t see too much of a log jam with the people with the same titles coming out the same year.

**Craig:** Yes. First movie I ever had out in theaters, the script was Space Cadet. Turned out Lucas had squatted on that one with the MPAA. I still haven’t seen his Space Cadet film, but we had to change our title. Did I ever tell you my crazy [bleeps] story about this?

**John:** I want to hear the [bleeps] story.

**Craig:** I’m telling everybody the [bleeps] story. I’m in a room with [bleeps]. Already interesting. He says, “Hey, I have registered a lot of titles with the MPAA. I tell my assistants, if you see some interesting words, I go and I register it, because it doesn’t cost that much.”

**John:** It’s domain squatting.

**Craig:** Literally. Then he goes, “Other people happen to need the title, they pay me.” He was literally domain squatting. He goes, “But some of these would be great movies, so I’m gonna give you some names.” He goes, “Oh, this is my favorite. This has to be a movie, so tell me if you want to write this.” By the way, by “this,” he means title, Body Bag. I’m like, A, in my brain, I don’t think that is a very good title, and B, no. But I was fascinated by the thought process of seeing the phrase “body bag,” picking up the phone, spending the whatever it cost, $5,000 or something, to register that title with the MPAA, even though you have nothing, and then asking writers to write a script for a title.

**John:** It’s not even IP. It’s awesome. I love it.

**Craig:** It’s nothing.

**John:** It actually reminds me of this past week. I was approached to do this movie. There’s a director who wants to do this movie. He basically has a story space. He has a cool deck of cool images. This is a filmmaker who could make something really cool. But there was actually no narrative to this. It was exciting, but also it made me really recognize how much we need constraints.

The fact there was basically no constraints other than it looks like this, it was tough to think about what is the story. What are constraints that are interesting to me? What are the things that I want to avoid about the kind of movie that would have this as a pitch deck? Once I got that narrowed down, then it could go like, oh, okay, this is probably what the movie actually wants to be or what’s interesting to me. But the lack of constraints, where it’s just, here’s an image or here is a title called Body Bag, it’s just too open.

**Craig:** There’s nothing there.

**John:** It’s harder because there’s nothing to push against. There’s no walls to it.

**Craig:** There’s nothing there.

**John:** Let’s get to a question from Spencer here. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Spencer writes, “My writing partner Parker and I just finished a new draft of a project that draws on our extremely unusual relationship. You see, I’m a wheelchair user, due to a form of muscular dystrophy. For years before we started writing together, Parker was my friend, roommate, and live-in caregiver. Our script is a crime genre buddy comedy that follows two people in a similar situation as they try to figure out the limits of their obligation to one another.

“Though one of the things I’m most proud of is the level of specificity we were able to bring to the story, I worry that readers and producers will find it too specific. We’ve felt this concern since the very beginning and have leaned heavily into genre conventions and broad-ish comedy, hoping to ease audiences into the often alien way of life that a disability entails. Do you have any strategies or recommendations for taking out a script that deals with such a particular context? And given the reports of the belt tightening across the industry, the representation boom seems over. Are we too late?”

**Craig:** Spencer, you’re asking a question that I think presumes more than exists, meaning I don’t think anybody is actually reading things through the lens of how specific is this or how authentic is this. I think they’re just reading through things to say, will an audience be entertained, moved, feel something, appreciate what we’re doing here? It sounds like you’ve tried to deliver entertainment, because you’re talking about leaning into genre conventions and delivering broad comedy.

I think the things that are unique to your voice and your writing partner’s voice are the things that are valuable in the script. Otherwise, anyone could do it. I don’t think there’s a specific strategy or recommendation here, other than to say when you submit the script, it’s important for people to know that you are in a wheelchair, because the concern will not be, uh-oh, somebody in a wheelchair wrote a story about somebody in a wheelchair. The concern will be, uh-oh, somebody not in a wheelchair wrote a story about somebody in a wheelchair.

The representation boom, I can’t speak to that, but the representation concern still certainly exists. I think people are looking for authentic voices when we’re talking about things like, for instance, living with disabilities.

**John:** I completely agree with Craig. Really what matters is what is the person’s reaction to this. Are they enjoying the script that they’re reading and can imagine a movie that an audience will enjoy reading? That’s all great. The specificity that you bring hopefully is just making the script better for its own sake.

I would consider including maybe not a preface page, but maybe a page at the end to say, “Oh, so you know, I actually am a wheelchair user. I’m not some sort of person pretending this experience.” That could be useful just for a person who reads the script without knowing who you actually are.

Obviously, we want your movie to get made. That’d be fantastic. But also, this thing will serve as a calling card for you. The fact that it reflects your own experience, when you come in to have that meeting or get on Zoom to have that meeting, it’s gonna be great that they actually have something to connect you with, like, “Oh, these guys wrote this funny script about the situation, and these are the guys.” That is useful to you when you have those general meetings and you start talking about writing stuff for other people. I think you made the right choices. I hope your script is good.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Let’s wrap it up there. We have a couple more questions we’ll save for a future episode. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Craig, I see you have a One Cool Thing listed here.

**Craig:** I do. John, are you a nail biter or a nail clipper?

**John:** I’m a nail clipper. I’ve never bit my nails.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. I have been biting my nails for so long, but I decided to stop. I stopped for I guess 2024. It was, by the way, not difficult. Not difficult. One of the things that has made it not difficult, one of the best gifts I ever got, from my intrepid assistant, Allie Chang, she gave me a pair of Suwada nail clippers. That’s Suwada, S-U-W-A-D-A. Do you have these, John?

**John:** I don’t believe I do, but now I’m looking them up to see what they are.

**Craig:** Oh, baby.

**John:** Oh, look at them. They look so different. They look more like pliers. Wow.

**Craig:** Exactly. They look like pliers or wire cutters. They’re made by a Japanese company called Suwada. They are so superior to the standard nail-clipping device that we can pick up anywhere, because they have so much better leverage, and the curved nature of the clipping edge itself just is so lovely and fits so right. They work like a dream. A standard nail clipper thing is, what, $8? This thing is $85. But if you’re gonna use it for the rest of your life, couldn’t recommend it more highly.

**John:** It also feels like a nice gift for a person who obviously does need a gift.

**Craig:** Yes, you can’t go wrong with this one. For somebody that was never a nail clipper, now I look forward to it. If I’m rubbing my thumb against my index finger and I feel a little like there’s too much nail there, I’m like, “Oh, I get home, I’m getting my Suwada nail clippers out. Kaching. Kaching.”

**John:** How much did you say nail clippers cost? I almost felt like there was a “how much could a banana cost” moment there, because I think cheap nail clippers are even cheaper than you think.

**Craig:** I was saying $8.

**John:** I think they’re like two bucks. They’re like two bucks.

**Craig:** Two bucks. You’re getting what you pay for with the two buck nail clipper. The handles are kind of this lovely texturized rubber or something like that. Also, it’s a particularly good gift, I think, for a dad, because just standard dads love tools. This is a tool. This isn’t a grooming device. It’s a tool.

**John:** It’s a meaningful tool.

**Craig:** It’s a butch-coded nail clipper.

**John:** That’s what we like. Absolutely. It also feels like for people who have their premium knives that they want to treasure and own, it’s the same kind of thing. Get the best tool for the job.

**Craig:** It’s a good tool.

**John:** I have two little One Cool Things. The first is an episode of Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a podcast that many people have probably heard of where they take an existing song, generally a pop song, and they interview the people who made it and go through the stems and figure out how the song came to be, and just interview things. It’s a short episode, like 15 minutes. It’s great. I’ve enjoyed listening to that podcast.

But one episode I want to point people to is Madonna’s episode on Hung Up, which is a great song. It’s the interview with Madonna, over 40 years we’ve known Madonna, the most direct and just work-focused I’ve ever heard. She’s so focused and smart on it. She’s not defensive. She’s not just doing any of the normal Madonna things you’d expect. Talking about how she and the producer came up with Hung Up and the different iterations they went through, what worked, what didn’t work, trying to get the sample from Abba and hand-writing a letter and going to meet with Abba individually. It just made me really, I don’t know, respect her as a songwriter and producer more than I ever had before. Song Exploder’s Hung Up on Madonna.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** My second One Cool Thing is The Ladder, which is a great new experience from the folks who made Lab Rat, the escape room that we love so much.

**Craig:** Hatch Escapes.

**John:** Hatch Escapes. Craig and I were both Kickstarter backers of this thing. We went and played it with a group of 8 people, 10 people last week. It was just terrifically well done. It is different than an escape room. It’s more of an experience. It’s 90 minutes long. It’s all the things you would expect in that escape room in terms of puzzles, but the goal is not to escape, but to do something different. It is replayable in ways that are really clever. I just think it’s a really great evolution of the form.

I want to commend Tommy Wallach and everybody else who put together The Ladder. If you’re in Los Angeles and you love escape rooms, you should book a time for The Ladder at Hatch Escapes. It’s just really, really well done.

**Craig:** I’m waiting to return to LA from production here. Once I do, The Ladder is high up on my list of things to get to.

**John:** It’s gonna be great.

**Craig:** I’m very excited for that.

**John:** Craig, you will see that you are actually a part of the experience itself. I don’t want to spoil any more than that. But you will see Craig Mazin as part of the experience if you go take your time through The Ladder.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Oh, boy.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

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

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Don’t know him.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson, in an homage to Severance, which actually feels very much like The Ladder. It all fits together nicely. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.

You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hats and hoodies. They’re all great. Oh, and drinkware now too. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau, so get your stuff there.

You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on the new [indiscernible 01:03:16] chatty voice features of OpenAI and what it means and how we feel about it. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Before we start, a little context. Craig and I recorded this segment about OpenAI before Scarlett Johansson called shenanigans on the voice that was being used. If you’re wondering why we’re not talking about that, it’s because it hadn’t come out yet.

Craig, recently, OpenAI had a demo for their new features in ChatGPT-4o, which is their omni-media thing, which does a lot of normal ChatGPT stuff but also could handle images and audio and speech all natively. It’s just much, much faster and can interact with you in a chat fashion more quickly and in ways that just feel novel and new.

I’m going to play one little clip. This is a guy named Rocky who is talking to ChatGPT on his phone. Over the course of it, he’s gonna put on a stupid hat. That’s the only thing you should know if you’re not watching this video.

**Rocky:** In a few minutes I’m gonna be interviewing at OpenAI. Have you heard of them?

**ChatGPT:** OpenAI? Huh? Sounds vaguely familiar. Kidding, of course. That’s incredible, Rocky. What kind of interview?

**Rocky:** It’s for a software engineering role, but I just need to know, do I look presentable, professional?

**ChatGPT:** Rocky, you definitely have the “I’ve been coding all night” look down, which could actually work in your favor. Maybe just run a hand through your hair or lean into the mad genius vibe. Your enthusiasm is what’s really gonna shine through.

**Rocky:** I don’t have a lot of time, so I’m just gonna throw this on. What do you think?

**ChatGPT:** Oh, Rocky, that’s quite a statement piece. I mean, you’ll definitely stand out. Though maybe not in the way you’re hoping for an interview.

**Rocky:** Okay. I got it, I got it.

**John:** Craig, what is your reaction to Rocky’s discussion with OpenAI?

**Craig:** The OpenAI personality I find toxically positive.

**John:** People describe it as like a kindergarten teacher.

**Craig:** Yes, like a bizarrely positive and a little bit condescending, slightly patronizing, like, “Oh, Rocky, you silly billy.” I didn’t believe any of it. I’m impressed. Certainly, it’s cool that an AI can look at an image, parse out what it’s seeing, have a general sense of category, and then make some sort of comment.

It’s sort of like, what do I care about a generic comment about my appearance? What possible valuable information can I get there? Generally speaking, we want information from people that we really care about or people that we believe have specific expertise, not from some vague amalgamation, because that’s what JCrew has on their rack. That’s what the amalgamation is. We don’t need that. I’m mostly just unnerved by the toxic positivity.

**John:** There’s a lot of things to unpack here. First off, of course, we’re playing a snippet of a demo, so this is an optimized version of what this is. From the longer live demo, you can clearly tune the personality of the chat bot. This was probably tuned to be incredibly positive and giggly and all that stuff and flirty in ways. You could turn that down. You can dial that pretty easily, apparently.

What is interesting is this is not a sentient system. This thing is not alive. This thing is not conscious. It’s not her. And yet the illusion of it is so clear to see, because it feels like that because it has the ability to have back and forth and actually really enter into a dialog, it crosses that uncanny valley and makes it feel like there’s really a person there, that there’s an intelligence there that is not actually there.

**Craig:** It certainly prompts the question of whether or not – not begs the question, but prompts the question.

**John:** Prompts the question. Invites the question.

**Craig:** Invites the question of whether or not the Turing test is the proper test. I think in Alan Turing’s day, it made absolute sense. But what we’re seeing now is that this person is a real person, is the illusion of being a real person, is not in and of itself indicative of intelligence, and in fact, creating the illusion of a real person talking to you is easier than we might’ve thought.

So much of it just comes down to how synthetic the voice is. Yeah, sure, she sounds real, and I think would pass the Turing test in the most rigid sort of way. But it’s unnerving. I find it unnerving.

**John:** We know that this is a demo of an AI speaking back to us, but I can just imagine a year from now, two years from now, there’d be a lot of situations where we just don’t know if we are talking to a real person or not talking to a real person. That feels like, I don’t know, a social boundary that we’re not really prepared for.

If I’m talking to customer service right now, I get a sense of when it’s a real person, when it’s not a real person. I won’t a year from now, two years from now. That is different. I will know that if I’m talking to an executive on Zoom, that’s a real person. But we may soon not really know if that’s an actual real person we’re speaking with. I don’t know, something makes me feel uncomfortable as a human not knowing that.

In situations where I do know that I’m talking to an AI, I think there could be useful things coming out of that. Siri is so frustrating and useless most of the time. Same with Alexa. But this seems like you could actually get meaningful information out of it. If I was in a situation where I needed to know something, I might just ask the question out loud rather than googling it, and that feels great.

**Craig:** It’s an extension of Siri, which nobody thinks of as being alive. It’s interesting, one of the things that AI seems to struggle with is the concept of being interrupted. Interruption is hard, and yet it is fundamental to the way humans talk to each other. We somehow managed to interrupt each other without destroying each other’s train of thought. We don’t keep talking. There’s an interesting back-and-forth rhythm that I think they have to figure out. Do you know the comedian Ron Funches?

**John:** I recognize that name, but I couldn’t think of what he’s known for.

**Craig:** He’s so funny. He’s so, so, so funny. He has this bit about filling out CAPTCHA things. What he says is, “Why do I always have to prove to a robot that I’m not a robot?” He’s like, “The thing is what the robot is asking me to do, to enter a random series of letters and numbers, is pretty much the kind of thing a robot should be able to be good at. It’s not even a good test. It’s really proving that I am a robot.” I just love that. I love that concept of what the robots think is indicative of humanity and then how they give it back to us.

Look. The AI thing at this point I’m just starting of think of as a meteor that might miss the planet or smash into it, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing.

**John:** There’s things we can do to mitigate certain harms, but there’s overall bigger things that are way outside of our pay scale and what we can control.

I want to go back to interruptability, because I think one of the things that made this demo impressive was there was better interruptability. It wasn’t perfect, but you could just talk over the AI, and it would still hear you when you’re talking over it. You didn’t have to wait for it to be done before you can say the next thing, which is useful and good.

But it’s also a great reminder of, when movie dialog feels artificial, it’s because you feel like people are not allowed to talk over each other, they’re not allowed to interrupt each other, they’re not allowed to interject before a sentence is finished, and in real life we’re doing that all the time.

**Craig:** Yes. Maybe what they’ll get better at is the idea of not stopping when somebody interrupts you, but continuing and then going, “Oh, exactly.” Hearing and talking at the same time is tricky. I feel like right now, AI either listens or talks. Certainly, Siri is horrible at that. Do you find yourself getting angry when you’re like, “Hey, lady, play me the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof,” and then there’s a long pause, and then she’s like, “Playing Hamilton, the 1983 free version.”

**John:** So incredibly frustrating.

**Craig:** I’m like, “What?”

**John:** Here is our daily struggle. While we’re making breakfast, we have Alexa Flash News. Flash News should play NPR’s brief little three-minute “here are the headlines” kind of thing. Maybe 70 percent of the time, that’s what happens, but another 30 percent of the time, anything else could happen. It could play Fox News. It could play on a different speaker in a different room. It’s so frustrating. It feels like I’m in some sort of experiment, where it’s like how much can we torment John before he’s had coffee.

**Craig:** Then you find yourself having this increasingly stern, escalating argument. “I said the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof.” “Now playing Annie.” I’m like, “I said… ” I’ll say, “No.” Now I realize it’s like I’m talking to my dog at this point. “No, Bonnie. No.”

**John:** Maybe what we need is we need the AI’s kindergarten teacher, like, “You did a good job. Oh, Rocky, I think that’s great that you were able to play that.”

**Craig:** I feel like this version would be like, “Sounds like you’re a little frustrated. I get it completely. Doing my best. Tell me one more time.”

**John:** That’s what we’re gonna hear.

**Craig:** Ah! Ugh! Eck!

**John:** Ah!

**Craig:** Ugh!

**John:** Ee! Also, now, imagine being a kid. You’re a two-year-old, a three-year-old who’s growing up in this world now. It’s just gonna be very different. The expectation that there’s a disembodied voice who should always be able to tell you things, to tell you a story, to do whatever, it’s just a very different experience.

**Craig:** Then our children will look at that generation like, “Oh my god. The worst.”

**John:** “So coddled.”

**Craig:** “The worst.” Instead of iPad kids, now they’re AI kids. Just sit the kid in front of the AI and let them talk to their imaginary friend. God. You know what? Generation X, John. We were the last ones out.

**John:** The last true generation.

**Craig:** Last true generation before all this crap. We’re the best. (sings) We’re the best around. Nothing’s ever gonna bring me down. I think I can get that out before the copyright kicks in.

**John:** Love it. Craig, thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Fantastic.

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

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

**Craig:** Could be lifesaving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah, a DCP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, my.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes?

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Great. Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Unquestionably.

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

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

**John:** Manhattan?

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Sure, yeah.

**John:** Midsommar.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** The Lost Boys.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Lost in Translation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Jumanji.

**Craig:** Unquestionably.

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

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

**John:** The Invention of Lying.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The first Thor.

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

**John:** It’s all a blur to me.

**Craig:** The South, somewhere.

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

**Craig:** Oh, absolutely.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Borat.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Sister Act.

**Craig:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Oh, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thank god.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** It is.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Great.

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

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

**John:** Yeah, that’s good stuff.

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

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

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

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** … Finrod the Fantastic.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** He is fantastic.

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

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

**John:** That’s good.

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

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

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

**John:** Correct.

**Craig:** Correct.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Love it.

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

**Craig:** Fantastic.

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

**Craig:** Fun.

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

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

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

[Bonus Segment]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Wow.

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

**John:** Late onset, yeah.

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

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

**John:** Mostly it’s insulin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** What was it?

**Craig:** Popcorn.

**John:** It melts into sugar.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** That’s true.

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

**John:** Alert, alert.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** A much smaller number.

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

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

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

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

**John:** That’s a problem.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thank you.

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

**Craig:** We sure will.

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

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Drew:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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