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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/point-of-view).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 358 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be looking at point of view in scripts and how the choice of which characters have storytelling power changes how we experience a movie. We’ll also take a stab at answering some listener questions.

**Craig:** That sounds like a pretty classic show. I don’t want to put pressure on us, but it sounds classic.

**John:** It sounds very classic. It’s another crafty episode. We’re going back-to-back crafty, but you know what? You got to do that sometimes.

**Craig:** Got to. Got to. And you know why? We got to put these film school teachers out of business.

**John:** That’s the goal.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Speaking of business, people have written in to say, “Hey, would it be possible to download back episodes rather than having to buy the USB drive?” And we said sure. So, I can report that as of today you can now download seasons of Scriptnotes. Basically 50 episode chunks of Scriptnotes, which is handy. Particularly international listeners would buy the USB drives and they’d have to pay like an import tax on it.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Which is crazy. That’s no good. So we’ve broken all the first seven seasons of Scriptnotes into 50-episode chunks. Seven seasons. That’s essentially a year per season. So 50 episodes, plus the bonus episodes that went with that year. And they are available now. So you can go to store.johnaugust.com and download them. They are $5 per block of 50. So, in some ways the $2 a month you can get through Scriptnotes.net is a better deal. But if you want to own a bunch of episodes that’s a way you can do it.

**Craig:** You know what? I think the point is we’re giving people choices. And in this way they can determine amongst themselves what’s the golden age of Scriptnotes. You know, like The Simpsons had a golden age.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. Lisa, I chew-chew-choose-you.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. I think our golden age is always right now, today.

**John:** This moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is it. We’re always in the golden age, John, because you and I push things forward steadily and inexorably toward perfection.

**John:** That is completely the goal. So let’s make this a perfect episode.

**Craig:** It’s already done. I mean, it is perfect.

**John:** Done. All right, let’s start with follow up. Because perfect episodes have follow up. Listeners wrote in–

**Craig:** That wasn’t that great. That was decent Segue Man. But I think you may have slightly pushed us down a little bit below perfect there.

**John:** All right. We’ll try to dig our way back out of this hole I’ve created. Listeners wrote in with their favorite examples of exposition based on last week’s episode about exposition.

**Craig:** Ah, OK.

**John:** Dylan wrote about The Matrix. “When Morpheus is explaining Neo’s potential powers and comparing it to the agent’s abilities in the street crowd simulation Neo says, ‘What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?’ And Morpheus brilliantly returns, ‘No, Neo, I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready you won’t have to.’ This is a very simple info dump of you will be able to control the code of the Matrix and get super powers, but it does more than simply state it. It sparks the viewer’s imagination about what Neo could do to fulfill that promise of power. It’s more than information. It’s an invitation to dream up what Neo will come to be able to do and wait in anticipation to see through it.”

Nice. That’s true.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. I loved Matrix. I love me some Matrix. And it is a tour de force of screenwriting. It is brilliantly efficient and compact even in its length. It feels to me like there’s five movies of stuff inside of The Matrix. I’m always amazed. When you think back to The Matrix you forget like, “Wait, oh my god, there was that whole thing in the beginning where he’s at a club dancing around.” And then, “Oh yeah, he’s in his office and he’s dodging those guys.” And then, “Oh yeah, there’s that bit where he’s in that room and he has no mouth.” And then, “Oh yeah, they have to get that bug out of his –“ that all happens before he even shows up in the stupid room to hear about the pills.

There’s just movies after movies after movies in one movie. I love The Matrix. It does it so well. And this is a great point by Dylan that exposition can be made fun if you essentially say I’m going to give you a bunch of information and then I’m going to give you mystery to follow. The screenwriter’s favorite friend, mystery.

**John:** Not confusion, but mystery.

**Craig:** But mystery. Exactly. So that you know that you’ve gotten some information. But you haven’t gotten it all. The boring, sad exposition tends to give you a feeling of completion. Oh, I’ve just learned everything. Bored.

**John:** Several other listeners wrote in to recommend the first Terminator, which I agree does just a fantastic job of exposition because it doesn’t tell you anything more than you need to know. It’s basically just the information that’s going to be relevant to this movie. Not a bit more than that.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, Jim Cameron is also master – master of that sort of thing. No question.

**John:** So Lars from Cologne wrote in, and I love it when people send in examples of things that actually have audio, so we’re going to be able to play this for you. He writes that, “Margin Call cleverly plays with the ‘explain it to me as if I was a five-year-old’ trope. One of the recurring jokes of the film is that the higher a person’s rank the less likely he is able to understand what is actually going on. The lead is repeatedly asked to explain in English what he discovered.” Let’s take a listen.

[Clip of Margin Call plays]

So Craig, talk to me about that scene in Margin Call. Why is that more helpful than just the guy giving information?

**Craig:** Well, you’ve got a challenge as a screenwriter. You have to be responsible to your story and to your characters, but you are also aware that there’s a room full of people. This was a problem that you could see, Adam McKay for instance, working over pretty successfully I think when he did The Big Short. The fact that you have characters who understand information doesn’t help the people in the audience that don’t. And so inevitably it is helpful to have a character on screen that can convincingly represent the audience or at least be consistent with the audience so that when they say just explain it to me like a lay person the expert has a chance to speak in a way that the audience can then understand. This is something that I had to deal with quite a bit with Chernobyl, obviously.

So, the trick then is to make sure that you have the right kind of character for that. Here it’s a little bit wobbly in the sense that it appears that this man runs a firm that is a financial firm but there’s a bit of a screenwriting trick here. It’s not necessarily the most elegant sleight of hand, where Jeremy Irons’ character says, “I assure you it wasn’t brains that got me here.” It’s clever. So, my character is that I’m kind of an alpha male that kind of bossed my way to the top, but maybe not the most believable thing in the world. Generally speaking if you run a financial company you don’t need to be spoken to like you’re a five-year-old or a golden retriever.

But that said, that’s what’s going on here. They’re trying to come up with a way to solve this problem that this screenwriter has.

**John:** Yeah, so if you take a look at the YouTube clip and don’t just listen to the audio, what becomes clear is that this is all happening in front of a room of other analysts. And so this guy is being put on the stand. So he, basically the stakes are will he be able to explain this thing in a way that Jeremy Irons’ character will accept. So there’s consequence and stakes and there’s a conflict happening there that wouldn’t naturally be there if it was just a straight information dump. So that’s one of the things I really liked about J.C. Chandor’s movie here is that it’s able to quickly explain some of the big things happening and let you see it from their point of view. And so as stuff is going south you understand enough about what the characters are facing that you can follow along on the trip. And so that’s a thing I really like about this movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also J.C. does a really good job of making the info dump subordinate to character feeling. And this is going to tie in nicely when we get around to point of view. You do get a sense that this is not simply a scene where people are going to talk about stuff that is technical. This is a scene about power and position and ambition and risk. So, that’s all good character stuff. And that’s why it’s an interesting scene as opposed to just blah-blah-blah.

**John:** Yep. Here’s our lesson about this financial instrument.

Well, let’s jump ahead. Let’s go to our big topic of point of view. So, this is a craft topic that I said we would talk about in some future episode. This is the episode we’re going to talk about it. So point of view I’m going to define as which characters in a story, movie story, a book, have the ability to drive scenes. Basically that they can be a scene by themselves and you will follow them. They can be a scene with strangers and you’ll still follow them. And in some stories it has a single POV. So only the hero can drive a scene.

Harry Potter is a classic example of, both in the books and in the movies, essentially, every scene has Harry Potter in the scene. And so you don’t get any information that Harry Potter doesn’t know. Other stories you could follow anybody in them. So classically an Altman film. Anybody who wanders through the frame, the camera could follow them and they could be in their own story.

Most films are going to have a mix of POV. You’re going to have obviously scenes driven by your hero, but perhaps you’re able to cut off to the villain and see the villain do stuff and see scenes that are just driven by the villain, or a supporting character, a love interest. So there are different choices. But the choices we make have to be deliberate. And they really help tell the audience how to watch your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I always thing about point of view as an answer to a question. With whom am I supposed to identify with in this scene? And by identify with I don’t necessarily mean I want to be like them, or they are like me, but rather I’m with them. Even if it’s a villain, sometimes I’m with the villain because the villain is considering the glorious possibility of so on and so forth, and I am with them and their ambition or their desire.

The big thing that I think a lot of early writers and frankly a lot of not early writers, a lot of practiced writers, make the mistake of doing is not choosing a point of view in their scene. To me, there is no possible way to create a successful scene if you do not know whose point of view you’re asking the audience to follow.

We are, I think, only capable of having one point of view in a scene. One. That means everything that transpires ultimately is about one person’s eyeballs, essentially. It doesn’t mean that we can’t have other people feeling things and wanting things and doing things, but it’s from one person’s perspective.

**John:** Yeah. So I think you make a distinction here which I think was important to call out is that we can talk about point of view for an entire work, so the course of an entire movie, the course of an entire, so this book has a certain character’s point of view. It’s told from a certain character’s point of view. But every scene is like a little movie and every scene is going to have a point of view as well.

And so you may have scenes in which two different characters, we’ve followed them separately and we’ve seen them have separate scenes they can do stuff, but once we’re in a scene with them together you’re going to have to tell us which character’s point of view this scene is from. And sometimes you see writers not making that choice. Or, the writer may have made that choice but as it was directed, as it was staged in front of you, it wasn’t actually done from that character’s point of view. And that is a real challenge.

And so that’s a thing, even up at this last Sundance Labs I saw, I’ll describe this project in broad terms because it’s not a movie that’s out there for people to see yet, but it was a story that follows two young boys who have an encounter when they’re kids. Then it jumps forward 30 years. You see these two people as adults. We follow one’s person story. And then we cut to the other person’s story. And we know because we’ve seen movies before that eventually they’re going to meet. And in fact they do meet. But the question is when they meet who is driving that scene. And interestingly as the story was structured as I was reading it, it had gone back to the first character before the two characters met. And so I was saying that I think it’s from this character’s point of view because he controlled the last scene. The last person we saw driving a scene is the person we’re going to assume is driving the next scene.

And so we talked about like, well, if we took out that scene it would shift and we would still be in the point of view of the second character. And that’s a crucial distinction. We know they’re going to meet, but literally who are we going to meet first? Who is driving the scene?

**Craig:** Yep. Absolutely. And it is an important distinction to understand that there is the macro and the micro. And honestly I find point of view to be the most useful thing to discuss when you are in the micro. Generally speaking the large questions are answered. Who is the star of the movie? Who is the protagonist? Who is the hero? And so on and so forth.

But then you have these little moments inside of movies where you have a real choice to make. And so, you know, Harry Potter is certainly, you’re right, it’s from the perspective and the point of view of Harry Potter. But then here and there you have these moments where things, like a scene where Ron Weasley is watching Harry and Hermione together and he gets jealous. That’s from Ron’s point of view.

A lot of times the audience will make certain assumptions based on the way the scene unfolds. And one of the simplest assumptions they make is “The first character I see is going to be the person through whose point of view I will be experiencing this scene.”

**John:** Absolutely. So in the case of Harry Potter, in most scenes we’re going to probably see Harry first and then we’re going to see the supporting characters. Granted, over the course of eight movies we’re going to be used to sort of seeing a different one of those characters first. But you’re not going to have any scenes that are just one character or the other character. There may be shots or little action sequences where we’re only following one, but in terms of bigger sequences Harry is going to be around for all of those things.

So, if you are figuring out how to tell one story point from the book, you have to figure a way to visualize this information and keep Harry still centerpiece to all this stuff. There’s a great example in Goblet of Fire where quite late in the story Harry is captured by Voldemort. And there’s sort of an information dump that Voldemort needs to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s an information dump that Voldemort doesn’t necessarily need to do for Harry Potter, but it’s very important for us as the audience to understand. And it’s important that Harry be part of that information dump because he is our way into this world.

**Craig:** Correct. And in the writing of that section in the book, and then by extension in the writing of the screenplay and the film that we saw, there is not just a metaphoric point of view but an actual point of view. An actual perspective. And this is a very useful thing to think about as well. When you’re writing these scenes if you decide that this – I always start by like, “OK, emotionally whose point of view should we be honoring here?” And then once I have that understanding then I start thinking about physical points of view, not just through eyesight but also through sound.

So, for instance, if you – a slight variation on the first character you see. You may see a character first and then we pull back to reveal that someone is watching them. Well clearly the point of view is with the watcher. You may be on a person’s face and you hear sounds and you know that they’re listening. But the actual physical point of view/point of sound is really important in scenes. It’s important because ultimately that is a huge part of how the director directs.

There’s no other way to make those scenes work unless you understand point of view because a lot of directing, just at least from the physical position, is angles. So the question is what are the angles? Where are we looking? Where does the camera go? Who is it looking at? And why?

**John:** Last week we talked about the scene from Aliens, and if people watched the scene you’ll see that even though Burke is doing most of the talking the scene is very clearly from Ripley’s point of view. She is the one watching and trying to process what he’s saying. And the camera work shows that. That it’s really favoring her and it’s favoring her reactions to his lines rather than him talking. So, it’s still her scene even though he’s the one providing the information and bringing what is new to the scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you can play games with point of view. You can make it seem like the point of view is one person’s and then it’s another. The great example of that is in the brilliant third act switcheroo in Silence of the Lambs where you think Starling’s point of view is one thing and it turns out it’s another and vice versa. There are scenes where two people have a long discussion and you’re not quite sure whose point of view it is. And then they get up and they leave and then we reveal that a person has been listening and they weren’t even in the scene but it was their point of view retrospectively.

Also point of view gives you an opportunity as a writer to shake things up. If you have a scene that maybe feels a little perfunctory or a little cliché but it fits nicely into your story and solves a lot of problems then maybe the answer for spice is point of view. How can you change that point of view? How can you make the point of view of that scene somebody that you wouldn’t expect? Suddenly the scene becomes so much more interesting and fresh.

Here’s a cliché scene. An 11-year-old kid is called in on the carpet by the principal. So it’s the principal yelling at the kid scene. Maybe it’s from the point of view of the principal’s secretary or assistant. Maybe it’s from the point of view of another kid who is waiting to go in next to be yelled at. You find fun, interesting ways to make these things happen.

Also, that scene, maybe the answer to that scene is, well, nine times out of ten it’s from the point of view of the kid because the kid is getting yelled at and we identify with the kid. What if it’s from the point of view of the principal? What if we’re identifying with the principal as they struggle to try and make this work? And then the kid leaves and we stay with the principal after.

And that’s what point of view and those decisions get you. It makes you think about what the beginning and the end of the scene will be and who your eyes should be on and who their eyes should be on. It’s an indispensable way of approaching scene work. And I think we honestly just saved a lot of people a lot of money for film school stuff.

**John:** So, let’s talk about the specific example you gave for a kid in the principal’s office and like what if it’s the secretary’s point of view or the principal’s point of view. Those are all really great, fascinating choices. And if it was the first scene of your story it would be really interesting and unexpected because like, “Oh, we expect it from the kid’s point of view and it’s actually from the principal’s point of view or the secretary’s.” But if it was the kid’s story, if it was about the 12-year-old boy, we sort of couldn’t stay with the principal’s point of view unless that principal is going to ultimately have storytelling power later in our movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, the moment you decide to stick around with a character who is not established to be a major character, who is not established to have a storytelling power, you’re suddenly elevating that person. You’re saying like, “Oh, this is a person that we now have an expectation that we’ll be able to come back to and see independent individual scenes.”

There’s maybe like five or ten seconds where you can hold on a character after the main character has left before that character goes like, “OK, there’s something bigger there. There’s some expectation you’re setting.”

Just yesterday I saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. And the movie is – this is not a movie review – the movie is nuts in a way that I had not anticipated. I really enjoyed it. Partly because it does really odd things. And one of the odd things it does is there’s a young girl character who is not really established. You don’t see her. But suddenly like 20 minutes into the movie we’re cutting to her and her POV and she’s driving scenes by herself. And it sort of threw me at first. It was like what is this movie. And then I remember that the Jurassic Park movies always sort of cut to minor characters. They were always elevating these minor people who can suddenly do things by themselves. And this movie takes that and runs with it very fully.

But it becomes interesting later on in the story where she and other characters meet and it does get a little bit murky for me kind of who was in control of the story at that point. Because it wasn’t clear whose POV we really were in in some of those scenes.

**Craig:** It’s a great point you’re making that point of view more than line count or screen time determines the importance and the salience of any particular role in a story. The more point of view you afford a character, the more important they are, the more elevated they are in the tale. And you’re right. You can actually have quite a few people doing this. But when they all get together then you do have a problem because, again, I’ll just say it’s my rule, we as human beings really can only have one point of view at one time. And maybe it’s just the narrative is reflecting the biological. We have one field of vision. We have one field of sound. We can’t see two things at once and we can’t hear two things at once. We hear a combination of things or we see a combination of things, but that’s it.

And it’s just our one view. So in those conglomeration scenes it’s really important that the screenwriter make sure to figure out who is the point of view person here because I need to make it really clear in that moment, or else the scene will feel very trifurcated, quadfurcated, and so on and so forth.

So, sometimes the best thing to do with those characters that you’ve given point of view to is before you get to that conglomeration scene kill them. Wayne Knight in the first Jurassic Park has wonderful point of view scenes and then he dies. Because who needs him later?

**John:** There’s, and this again I don’t think is a spoiler, that Henry Woo, the character played by B.D. Wong in the Jurassic Park movies, shows up in this movie again. And it was strange to me that he didn’t seem to have point of view. For a character who has been established through the whole franchise he’s not allowed to drive any scenes by himself. And it felt like he had sort of earned that. But also if you look at the course of the actual movie that we’re watching, he shows up kind of late. And so it might have felt strange to give him that power so late in the movie, to elevate to a place so late in the movie.

When you do shift POVs and we do unexpected things with POVs you do get a real jolt of energy. So I think back to Gone Girl. So, Gone Girl as a book, which I loved as a book and was dying to write the adaptation of that, is told – it’s alternating chapters between the husband and the wife. And for reasons I don’t want to spoil in the story that structure would not continue necessarily, but then when it does continue in ways you couldn’t imagine being possible in the movie it’s so thrilling that we’ve changed POV midway through the movie. And we’ve changed our sort of fundamental rules of how we watch the movie change halfway through. It was a great adaptation of a really great story that was told from a specific point of view and had to change its point of view in order to work as a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is thrilling. It’s exciting. It’s jarring. And when it’s done well it is as exhilarating as any car chase because you are creating a kind of emotional freefall in people. And one of the thrills we get I think from going to movies and watching television shows is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s point of view, somebody else that’s wildly different from us. Frankly that’s what we do as writers all day long, right? But when we receive it passively it can be – because it’s surprising, it’s awesome. And it can really wobble the ground beneath you for a bit in a fun way as long as it is done expertly and you feel like you’re caught. When it’s not, then it just feels clunky or confusing or you start to say to yourself I don’t really know what I’m supposed to feel here or why. These are the things that we want to try and avoid when we’re shifting points of view radically.

It also occurs to me that sometimes when we talk about stock characters or when we see a movie and we complain about a character that feels cliché that they aren’t really getting a proper point of view. Rather, they are only existing in someone else’s point of view and therefore they exist to serve a function. OK, so you’re going to be the judge in the trial. Well, you’re never going to get a point of view. You’re just there to go, “Overruled,” so that the prosecutor whose point of view we’re living in or the defendant whose point of view we’re living in can see it and hear it. And one way to avoid those kind of cliché stock characters is to consider that perhaps maybe they deserve some point of view.

But, then you got to make space.

**John:** Yeah. You got to make space and make sure that you’re not creating an expectation with the audience that your movie will not be able to match.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct. It’s tricky.

**John:** Let’s talk about general guidelines for when it makes sense to limit point of view and when it makes sense to broaden out point of view. So, some benefits to limiting POV is it does make your audience identify very closely with whoever that central character is. Generally if you’re limiting your point of view to one character like in a Harry Potter situation you’re going to identify very closely with Harry Potter because he’s in every scene so it’s driving everything. And particularly if you have a character whose experience may be different than sort of your audiences it can be great to limit POV because then you’re seeing everything through his or her eyes. And so if you have a tale of racism and you’re seeing it through this black character’s eyes, I think an audience might be able to understand and empathize with it in ways they wouldn’t see otherwise because we so closely identify with this central character. That’s a huge advantage to that.

It really focuses your storytelling because you’re only providing information that that character can actually get to. And so that’s helpful. So anything that the audience wants to know, the character needs to know, too. And so you’re following in his or her footsteps as they’re going out and trying to do these things. And so we identify very closely with characters if we limit the POV to those characters.

On the other hand, if you broaden POV suddenly your movie can feel much more expansive. Because suddenly you can cut to Egypt. You can cut to Morocco. You can see all these different parts of the world and so you establish new characters when you want to establish them. That’s hugely helpful, too. If you’re the kind of bigger, epic-scale story that makes sense. If you’re Game of Thrones, you don’t want to limit it to one character’s point of view, because you have to be able to jump around and have different characters be the hero of one story and the villain of another.

**Craig:** Perfect thing to mention, Game of Thrones, because when people talk about George R. R. Martin’s books they literally refer to point of view characters. So, generally speaking in his chapters there is a character that is sort of the point of view. And they get an inner life. They have an inner voice. And the events unfold through their eyes and their experience. And you’re absolutely right. Any kind of epic story demands it, I think.

And you should kind of know, I think, from the sort of story you’re telling whether or not you want to be expansive in your points of view or you want to be limited. But, some other things to think about beyond just scale is how much your character is meant to know. If there’s certain kinds of mystery or if there’s a certain sense of powerlessness, generally speaking it’s great to side your perspective with characters that have less power and less knowledge because then there’s more to learn. And there’s more to know. And that’s interesting. And it’s instantly sympathetic.

We don’t really want to share the POV of people that know a lot or are in control. We don’t need Morpheus’s POV really ever. We just don’t need it, except maybe for instance in the scene where he needs to break free from the agents and run and jump we are in his perspective because at that moment he is very powerless. He is weak. And he isn’t really sure he’s going to make it or not. There you go.

**John:** Yeah. A crucial example. So most of what we’ve been talking about has been sort of movie point of view and the things about which character the camera is on. Those are sort of movie conversations. But point of view is always a part of fiction. It’s always been one of the classic things we talked about. Going back to Pride and Prejudice. We are at Elizabeth Bennett’s point of view and not Darcy’s point of view. And we see the story through her eyes rather than his eyes.

Sometimes, just like in movies, it’s good to change point of view. It’s good to change point of view in books as well. So like the first Arlo Finch book is entirely from Arlo’s point of view. We only know information that Arlo knows. And if there’s information I had to get in there I had to have Arlo be present for that information to come out.

The second book for reasons that become clear when you actually read the second book, we do break POV at one point in the story. And my editor was really nervous about this, but then as we talked through it it actually makes sense that we break POV and suddenly the rules of sort of who we’re allowed to follow in the world shift a bit. But hopefully by that point you are comfortable enough with the characters that I’m breaking POV to that it makes sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t remember which Harry Potter book began with an entirely different POV of somebody coming home and finding Voldemort in his house or something. It fills the world out. And partly it also creates a complex reading experience because we are asked as readers to build little walls in our mind. Like, “OK, I just learned something and saw something but the character whose POV I’m going to be following for the rest of the book has not been there or seen that. I’m going to put a little wall between them. They don’t know that stuff.” And then ideally the story at the end will link it together and then they will learn it and in the learning of it we’ll learn something else and so on and so forth.

But it’s exciting. You just have to do it really deliberately. You can’t – that’s the thing, we always say everything is about being specific and being intentional. As long as you know what you’re doing and why it should work.

**John:** It should work. And exactly the scenario you described where a story starts with a different character’s POV before going back to the hero, that’s a very classic movie thing as well. So how many movies have you seen that start with some rando people you’re never going to see again? They’re establishing some nature of the world or some nature of the fundamental problem before we get to our main characters. That’s classic.

**Craig:** Yeah. Beginning of Scream for instance. We never see Drew Barrymore again, but it’s entirely from her point of view.

**John:** Absolutely. So it’s teaching us how to watch the movie. So, don’t feel like you’re breaking POV just to do that introduction to the world thing. That’s very classic. Or the tag at the end. That’s also well established.

**Craig:** Yep. I really do believe that honestly that’s worth one year of film school.

**John:** Done. Or at least one season of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** One $5 season of Scriptnotes. Agreed.

**John:** All right. Let’s try to answer some questions. And full disclosure, we’ve not read any of these questions. We did no prep work. So Megan has read these questions but–

**Craig:** I have news for you. Full disclosure. I have never read any of the questions. So, you will not notice any difference from me but John may seem very off his game. We’ll find out.

**John:** All right. We’re going to start with Preston in Salt Lake. Preston writes, “I am currently writing a script where the main character decides to change his name about a third of the way into the movie. This coincides with a huge decision to forego his family title and take a completely different path than he’s been presented with before. I want to call him by his new name after he makes the decision so it’s clear that he fundamentally sees himself as a different character, but I’m worried it will be jarring for the reader if I suddenly change the main character’s name on page 40. I definitely don’t want them to get confused and think I’m talking about a completely different person.

“So what do you think the best way is to alert the reader of the name change? Should I just write character X will now be referred to as character Y in bold? Should I warn the reader this character’s name will change when I first introduce them on page one of the script?”

Craig, what would you do in this situation?

**Craig:** We get this question all the time. People get so worried about this sort of thing. Well, first of all, it rarely works to be honest with you. It rarely works, but it can. And it’s the kind of thing that’s actually more of a problem in the read than it is in a watch if that makes sense. But, you definitely don’t want to start the movie off by saying someone’s name is going to change. No. Just go ahead and just say so-and-so will now be referred to as so-and-so and put that in bold is fine.

I also think it would be fair, at least a couple times, for one or another person to mistakenly refer to them by their old name and have them be corrected. It helps the reader. But, yeah, generally I’m not sure what else you can do other than in the moment make it quite clear this is what’s happened.

**John:** Yeah. I’m not a huge fan of changing a character’s name in terms of the title tag, so like the little – I guess they call it call character cue. It’s so weird that it’s a thing that exists in every screenplay you’ve ever read but the character’s name over the dialogue, is it character cue? Whatever you want to call that. I’m not a huge fan of changing that just because if you’re flipping back and forth in a script you can get confused about who you’re actually talking about. If they have a first name that’s not going to change, keep that. If there’s some way to keep them the same person. Because think about it like that little character cue is like the actor’s face. You’re seeing the actor’s face and they’re saying this thing. That’s the same person the whole time through. So, I wouldn’t go too nuts about changing that if you can help changing that. Let the story do it, but think about that little character cue as being the actor’s face. And the actor’s face as an audience we’re still going to know it’s the same person.

So, if we’re going to know it’s the same person I would try to keep the character cue the same.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you. If you can, to avoid it, it’s helpful. OK, so our next question is from Derek in LA. He writes, “I work in the script department of one of the studios in a job that involves not only processing screenplays for recent releases or titles still in development, but also occasionally converting a very old script into a digital file. We had one of these archive scripts this week that dated all the way back to 1935. And while I always expect some differences in formatting and terminology, this one had a term I’d never seen before and can’t seem to find anywhere else. The term is Jackman Shot. That’s Jackman Shot.

“From the context, it seems to refer to any composite shots used in a scene, for example footage of a plane superimposed over a map or miniature ships to create the background of a scene at a dock. But when I tried to find some definition or other use of the term I came up with nothing. As you might expect, it’s impossible to Google the phrase and find much of anything other than pictures of Hugh Jackman. When I asked around our office no one else here was familiar with the term either.”

So he’s turning to us. John, have you ever heard of the term Jackman Shot?

**John:** I have never heard of the term Jackman Shot. But I suspect what he’s describing it as is probably true. That it’s some sort of composite shot. It’s some sort of process shot. And it makes me think back to another James Cameron script. I think it was the script for Aliens where it says like in uppercase it’s like Panaglide through something. So like panaglide as a thing, which is a name for like a Steadicam kind of shot. And so Jackman Shot is probably the same kind of thing. Whatever the state of the art thing is they were doing at that time that the screenwriter put in there to describe this type of visual effect.

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe there was like a guy named Jackman that came up with that thing. You know, like that early composite shot. Or there was some machine they used called the Jackman that would make the composites. Beats me, man. Jackman Shot.

**John:** So I love special film terminology and I’ll always hear these great terms and then forget them because I don’t have the chance to use them in any meaningful way. So, some terms I will describe which I will not remember the actual name for because I’m not going to Google them while I’m saying them is so you know the shot, Craig, which is from the top of the actor’s head to a little bit above his kneecaps which should show the holster, like if he’s wearing a gun. What is the name of that?

**Craig:** Cowboy.

**John:** The Cowboy. The Cowboy Shot. What is the name of the kind of not really visual effects shot but where two actors are having a brawl and then they pass behind a window and you clearly swapped out stunt actors.

**Craig:** That’s a Texas Switch.

**John:** Texas Switch. See, they’re all Western kind of terms. I love these kind of special things. But you can also use them in your script without necessarily knowing – I wouldn’t necessarily call it out as a Texas Switch in a script if I were using it.

**Craig:** No, you just – that’s something that you just know. Yeah, because if you call it out as a Texas Switch what you’re saying is it’s fake. And you don’t want to do that in your script. You just want to be able to do that on the day on the set. Yeah, and similarly a Cowboy is something you only hear on set. And less and less. Two Teas is another one. I don’t know if you ever heard that one.

**John:** I don’t know Two Ts.

**Craig:** Two Ts is basically two breasts. Two breasts and up. So, it’s that shot that’s not quite a close-up but it’s not thigh high.

**John:** Like a medium essentially?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a medium. Haircut, you know. People don’t notice this. A lot of times when you’re looking at close-ups the frame gives the actor a haircut. There’s something about having a little bit of space above the hair that seems weird. You want to be close enough that you feel like if you start to give them a haircut then you feel like you’re intimately with them. It’s a strange thing. But I’m going to start walking around saying Jackman Shot. You know what, maybe we should Jackman this one.

**John:** I want to say back to the top of Derek’s question, so I think it’s great that he’s in the script processing department that’s actually processing these really old scripts because that is a real worry is that some of these things will kind of get lost to history because they only existed as printed things that can fall apart. So in processing them and getting them as digital files they can stick around forever which is a very good thing. So, I don’t know what you’re using to do it. If you’re using Highland to melt them that’s fantastic. But whatever you’re using to get them into a format that people can enjoy them in the future that is ideal.

**Craig:** Well done, Derek.

**John:** Jared writes, “My daughter just graduated from elementary school and received two academic achievement awards for the grade six education ceremony. One for French as a second language. The other for creative writing.” Congratulations Jared. “Her teacher described her saying I believe this student was born writing. She writes in her spare time. She writes in class. She writes at home. I know from listening to the Scriptnotes podcast that you excelled in writing from an early age.” Is that true for you, Craig? It was true for me. Was it true for you?

**Craig:** It is. Yes.

**John:** It’s true. “I was wondering if you might be able to suggest a bit of direction as she moves onto high school. I’d really like to help her foster her growth in this area before life bogs her down with stress and squelches that creative spark.”

Craig, what would you do to continue to stoke her love of writing?

**Craig:** Just let her know that you love that she loves writing. And there’s no reason that life should bog her down in stress and squelch her creative spark. The people that tend to bog teenagers down in stress and squelch their creative spark are adults who are demanding that those children be something the adults want them to be. It sounds like you’re the sort of dad that doesn’t do that. Sounds like you’re the sort of dad that wants her to be what she wants to be.

Now, fair warning here, Jared. You may be getting more excited about this than she is. Children, I can tell you from my experience, change dramatically as they go through puberty. Their interests change. Sometimes – and very frustrating for parents – sometimes they just lose interest in something they’re really good at.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it can make you panic a little bit. Don’t. Because they’ll either come back around to it or they won’t. The important thing is your job ultimately isn’t really to foster her growth. Your job is to support her as she reaches for things. It sounds like she’s fairly well self-directed in this regard. If she loves writing she will keep writing. And as long as you tell her that that’s a lovely and wonderful thing she’ll keep doing it to her heart’s content. And we’ll see how her heart develops. It’s as simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. I will say that sometimes there’s that fine line between supporting your child and then you’re expressing interest in what a kid likes and what a kid does can sort of backfire to a degree. Like as they hit puberty, like the fact that you like that they like this thing makes them not like the thing. There’s weird stuff that can happen.

So, I would just say be present for it. If there’s opportunities you see for her that she can do stuff, support those. As you go into junior high and to high school there are all sorts of opportunities to be in sports, or be in band, and be in all these other things. There are very few opportunities for like being in creative writing. But if there are like creative writing classes, clubs, whatever, stuff like that that she’s interested in, go for that. Go support that. Because that’s going to be helpful. But I would just say read whatever she wants you to read.

So my mom, to her credit, like I could write anything and my mom would happily stop whatever she was doing and read it and proofread it. And that’s good. Sometimes one of the most frustrating things about writing obviously is that you don’t know if it’s any good and you don’t know if it actually makes any sense. And so to be that set of eyes, to say like, “Oh yeah, this was good, I see what you were doing here, thank you for sharing it with me.” That can be a lot.

**Craig:** Yep. And avoid the temptation to become her instructor, her teacher, her coach. Don’t do that. If she’s really into it and wants to get some outside help or development then just say, great, let’s find you an interesting class to take or perhaps there’s somebody that actually does discuss creative writing one-on-one with kids. Probably not. That’s all good. Try and have other people do that. You just got to be aware of the syndrome John is discussing which is very real. At any point if she begins to suss out that you are deriving some sort of benefit from it it becomes tainted. So let it be her thing.

**John:** The other thing I would sort of caution you towards but also make sure you’re aware of is things like Wattpad or sort of the online communities where people write and people share their writing and get feedback on their writing and stuff like that, there can be good things to that. I mean, fan fiction really springs out of that. It can be a source of joy and positivity. But it can also be a source of great negativity. And so just the same way that you’d be mindful of any social media she might be starting or any other things in which strangers can be influencing her self-esteem I’d watch out for that as well. Because they’re so fragile at this point.

**Craig:** They are. And those things can be crab barrels where nobody wants to let anybody out of the barrel. I mean, I see it on the Reddit screenwriting thing. I’ll go on there and every now and again I’ll just see people giving each other advice and I just think why. Why are you asking these people for advice? And why are these people giving you advice? Because you’re all kind of in the same boat here. And I’m not sure there’s value there.

There’s a precious few amount of professional screenwriters that I look at and go you know what I would like their advice on this. It’s such a dangerous thing. And everybody wants to give advice because it makes them feel good. And sometimes they like to tear things down because it makes them feel good. So, another excellent point from John here. Just, you know, there’s something you could do. Maybe protect her from the angry world of online crabs.

**John:** Yeah. Crabs.

**Craig:** No one wants to get crabs.

**John:** Do you want to take this last question from Larry?

**Craig:** Yeah. Larry asks, “I’ve recently had an offer from an indie producer that liked one of my scripts. First-time director. Micro-budget. We haven’t gotten into brass tacks, but I have the feeling the offer to me will be something like, well, we can maybe give you some backend points if you hold our feet over the coals. And the size of the budget requires a number of script compromises. But, they want to shoot it so there’s that. The script itself has been pretty well-received by everyone that’s read it, including a reader for a decent sized indie studio, but no offers from anyone else.

“And personally I’d call it a good script not a great script. My question is how much value do I place on getting a script of mine shot? Do I throw caution to the winds? First-time director. No/little money for me. Shooting compromises and all. Or do I hold it back and wait for something better? I hate the idea of taking the wrong step forward but I also find I generally regret inaction more than action.” Oh, Larry does sound like a writer, doesn’t he, John?

**John:** He does sound like a writer. So, I would say, Larry, is this is a moment where you need to trust your Spidey sense. And your Spidey sense is “Will this person, this director in particular, make at least a good movie?” So you think great is fine. Let’s leave out great. Do you think this director has a vision for making this movie and having this movie turn out well? And really wants to make the movie for the right reasons which is to make a good film.

If not, then I don’t think it’s worth your time to have this movie be made if you don’t think this movie could be made at least to a good level. Because you might say even it’s not a lot of money, it’s going to be a tremendous amount of your time. It’s going to be your first thing produced. You want it to be a good experience even if it’s not a good amount of money. And if your Spidey sense is telling you that it’s not going to be a good experience I’d walk away.

If you really do spark to this director and think he or she has a real vision for doing your movie despite the low budget, then I’d say go for it. Craig, what’s your feeling?

**Craig:** I’m going to be a little more crazy than you. You know, because I don’t like to get too much more crazy than you. You’re my benchmark for crazy.

**John:** Benchmark of sanity, all right.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’re my benchmark for sanity. John is right. You have to kind of weigh your Spidey sense here, but maybe put your thumb a little bit on the scale toward doing it and here’s why. This isn’t, from the way you describe it, your life’s work. This is not the thing that you’ve pulled from your heart that represents who you are. It is not your magnum opus. It’s a script that you think is pretty good. It’s not a script that has lit the world on fire, but somebody wants to make it. And you haven’t had anything else made it seems like to me.

So, there is an enormous educational value to having any of your work produced. Not just because you see how your words and your scenarios translate into moving images and sound, but also you get an experience of what it means to have somebody else direct your work, produce your work, edit it, release it, all that stuff.

It doesn’t sound based on what you’re describing like this is going to be a high profile thing that will embarrass you until the end of time if it does kind of fall on its face, because it’s micro-budget and it’s indie. But you never know. Sometimes it’s catch a falling star kind of thing. It might work.

But more than anything I think it would be really educational. I think you would learn a lot. My guess is that the amount of money between not much and what you want isn’t a great gulf. And really the only financial value to these things are if they become one of those lottery ticket one-in-a-million things like My Big Fat Greek Wedding or something, so in that case backend points would be wonderful.

So, I would say if it feels bad, if it feels abusive, if it feels like they’re going to wreck things, don’t do it. If it feels like you’re not really sure then maybe err on the side of adventure.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s a good way to think about it. That’s probably a good split in terms of how much recklessness Larry should approach this with. And I’ll also remind you that just because it’s not the big breakout thing doesn’t mean it’s not useful. And so Quentin Tarantino had a movie before Reservoir Dogs. Doug Liman had a movie before Swingers. And we don’t think about those. We think about those other movies being their first movies, but they did other things before that. And so this could be that thing before that thing.

Or, it could be Reservoir Dogs. You don’t know. So, maybe be bold as long as you have some belief in these people.

**Craig:** Yeah. That makes sense.

**John:** Cool. All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things.

My One Cool Thing is Bubble. It is a podcast written and created by Jordan Morris. And so it is a scripted podcast. I’m generally not a big fan of fiction podcasts. I’ve just never really gotten them because sometimes they feel like radio plays. I’m just never quite sure where I’m supposed to sit in these things. I guess it’s sort of a question of POV. I’m not quite sure what these things are.

This one I just loved. And so Bubble tells a story, this kind of post-apocalyptic place. It’s this protected space. But there are monsters that run around. There’s a service you can hire to kill the monsters that sort of works like Uber or Lyft. It is really, really funny. And the feeling of the show, it has a bunch of actors who are all great and really, really funny. But it also has a narration that kind of feels like if you were at a script reading, a table-reading of your script. And the scene description was like really, really funny and sort of self-aware. And so the narrator for all that is fantastic, too.

So, I just really recommend it. There’s four episodes out right now. It’s delightful and it feels like kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a podcast. I just adored it. So I recommend Bubble.

**Craig:** Wow. Bubble by Jordan Morris. OK. I’ve got a fun game that I’ve been playing and it was sort of a surprise. It was like surprise game. Because the iPhone games or iOS games – I don’t talk about Android – they’ve kind of moved toward that console game structure where they have what they call AAA games, you know. It’s like The Room is a AAA game. It’s an indie game but everybody stops and goes oh The Room 3 is out, let’s buy it. As well you should.

Then there are a lot of like also-ran games that kind of live in that space. They oftentimes stink. You give them shots but a lot of times they’re just blah. And so, you know, bored, I found one. I was like, well, it’s probably not going to be great. And it’s kind of awesome. It’s called Alleys. It’s a game mechanic I haven’t quite seen before. You are exploring this abandoned city. Fair warning: the graphics are not up to The Room snuff. It’s not that level.

The way you move around is a bit clunky. The controls aren’t clunky. It’s tap. That’s it. But the actual animation of you moving through the space is a bit clunky. But the space is quite vast. And the mechanics are you’re basically finding three kinds of things. You’re finding keys. You’re finding check-in points. And then you’re finding resource cards. And you will run into obstacles that require either the right kind of resource card or a certain amount of keys which keys you burn. So they’re kind of like a – there’s two kinds of resources. There’s the kind that keeps building up and then the kind that you burn through. So keys when you use them they’re gone. So, OK, this door takes eight keys.

Then there are the check-in things where you need to have this many check-ins and that doesn’t go down, but the bar you have to jump in terms of number check-ins goes up. It’s really interesting. I like it. It’s kind of cool.

And there’s some interesting meta games clearly put in there that are kind of deeper involving some code language stuff I have to figure out. It’s kind of – it’s way more than I thought it would be. So it’s a big surprise. I mean, I’ve been playing it for a while and I don’t feel like I’m even halfway done. So, Alleys.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** On iOS.

**John:** Very nice. And that’s our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Davis. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. But we are always around to answer your questions on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We’re on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there you can leave us a review. That helps people find the show.

All the back episodes for the show are at Scriptnotes.net. You can subscribe there for $2 a month and get all those back episodes. But you can also now get the albums. So the individual seasons of Scriptnotes in 50-episode blocks are available at store.johnaugust.com.

We also have a few of the USB drives left that have the first 300 episodes of the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. Those go up about a week after the episode drops. And that is our show for this week. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. That was, in fact, perfection.

**John:** It was amazing.

**Craig:** See you next week.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are now available!
* [Margin Call](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmHl7hKlVj4) uses the ”plain English” trope a little differently.
* Justin Dise walks through the [basic shot types](https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/video/tips-and-solutions/filmmaking-101-camera-shot-types) in a blog post for B&H.
* [Bubble](http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/bubble), a podcast by Jordan Morris
* [Alleys](https://www.alleys.tw/), an immersive escape mobile game
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Luke Davis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_358.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/infinite-westworld).

**John August:** Today’s episode of Scriptnotes contains a surprising number of F-bombs. So, if you’re listening in the car with your kids, this is your strong language warning. Now this episode was recorded live last week at the ArcLight in Hollywood. It was a great venue for a live show and a surprisingly terrible one for recording sound. So between the wireless mics and a buzzy soundboard editor Matthew Chilelli had his work cut out for him. So we’ve done the best we could.

If anything, I think it’s a reminder of why it’s great to see these shows live in-person, so you can see and hear everything properly. We had listeners coming in from Texas, Chicago, and Sweden. I got to talk to a bunch of you after the show. That is awesome. And so we love to chat with our listeners live and in-person.

Our intro this week is by Jon Spurney and our outro is by Matthew Chilelli. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So we are here in Hollywood. We have a giant crowd here. Thank you all so much for coming out here. Hollywood is in Los Angeles, otherwise known as LA. It is the only city in the world that is known by the initials. Is that correct, Craig?

**Craig:** Not according to the kind folks on Twitter that angrily told us that DC also works.

**John:** DC. Who would have thought of DC? I actually created a television program that ran for four episodes called DC. And I didn’t think of that once.

**Craig:** Well, if it had gone for five episodes possibly.

**John:** Five episodes. If Dick Wolf had given me that fifth episode then it might have been the one. Craig, you are back from a city. You are back from Chernobyl.

**Craig:** I’m back from actual Chernobyl.

**John:** Actual Chernobyl. So, is it safe for me to be standing this close to you?

**Craig:** No. Nah, you’re okay. It’s totally safe…they’ve told me.

**John:** All right. So tell us about your experience being in actual Chernobyl because this has been a project you’ve been working on for so long. What was actual Chernobyl like?

**Craig:** It was kind of amazing. I mean, I’ve been working on this for four years and we’re shooting it right now, largely in Lithuania. A little bit in Ukraine. But I went with the second unit team to scout. So we went to actual Pripyat which is a little town right next to Chernobyl. I don’t know if you guys have ever seen any images of the ghost city next to Chernobyl. And then we went into the power plant itself. I had lunch in the Chernobyl cafeteria.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Not great. I should be honest, not great food. Also, you get what they give you. Still kind of Soviet there. It was remarkable to be somewhere that I felt like I’d been in my – you know, you guys are all writers, right? We have one. So great. I don’t know what the rest of you fucking people do. But things seem so real in your head when you’re doing them and then for you to go somewhere that matches up to that, it’s exactly the same. It’s so strange.

So, it was great. It was very surreal. But it was very safe. We were all taken care of. And, yeah, things are going well. I’m excited for people to see that show. But that’s not for a bit.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Still shooting.

**John:** But tonight we get to talk about the same kind of thing you went through where you’re creating a world in your head and you’re seeing the world come to life. You get to see this imaginary scenario that you’ve built come out in front of you and you have to figure out what are the things you want to see, what are the things that actually happen. We have four people here who I think are remarkably talented at talking about that thing. So let’s bring out our guests.

**Craig:** They may be remarkably talented at doing it. We’re about to find out if they’re good at talking about it. So let’s see.

**John:** I assumed perhaps too much.

**Craig:** Shall we?

**John:** Let’s bring out our guests. First, I want to welcome Lisa Joy who came into screenwriting after practicing law with her 2013 Black List script Reminiscence. That became one of the biggest sales of the year. She’s been staffed on Pushing Daisies, Burn Notice, and is currently set to write Battlestar Galactica for Universal Pictures.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** She created – Lisa Joy – it is a pleasure.

**Craig:** Welcome Lisa Joy. Welcome.

**John:** She created a show called Westworld with Jonah Nolan. Jonah’s credits include the story for Memento, screenplays for The Prestige, Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, and before Westworld he created the CBS series Person of Interest. Jonah Nolan, welcome to Scriptnotes. A pleasure.

**Craig:** Welcome Jonah. Welcome aboard. You’re doing great so far by the way guys. You’re doing great. Nailing it.

**John:** Nailing it.

**Craig:** But we have more.

**John:** We have more.

**Craig:** People. Because that’s not enough. We like to have the best of all worlds. We bring you the best of television and now we bring you the best of film. There’s a small film out you may have seen written by these two folks, Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus. Markus and McFeely. McFeely and Markus, if you would. They wrote three Captain America films, The First Avenger, The Winter Soldier, and Civil War, along with Thor: The Dark World, and this year’s very small failure, Avengers: Infinity War.

And also its untitled sequel: Infinity Plus One War.

**John:** More than Infinity.

**Craig:** Their other credits include The Chronicles of Narnia film franchise and ABC’s Agent Carter. Earlier this year they signed a new deal as Co-Presidents of Story for the Russo Brothers new venture. So welcome aboard McFeely and Markus and Markus and McFeely.

It’s an impressive group.

**John:** It’s a really good group.

**Craig:** All to save lives, by the way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re saving lives. Right?

**John:** We’re saving lives. We’re saving children’s lives. Hollywood Heart. We’re doing it.

So what I was so excited to have the four of you here to talk about to start with is world-building, because you guys all had to come out and figure out what is this universe we’re going to create. And so I want to start by talking – Lisa, I’ll start with you, because you’re next to me – about the literal geography of the place that you’re building. As you’re coming up with your plans for Westworld, you have Sweetwater the town, you have the ranch, you have the mesa. How early in the process were you figuring out literally where things are and how much to show our audience about how stuff is structured, like geographically structured in your world?

**Lisa Joy:** Well, we basically – Jonah and I before even shooting the pilot we sat in a room for about six months, because I think I was pregnant at the time probably, and we just papered it with all the deep mythology that we were talking through. And one of the things that we talked about was the geography of the place. We had this idea that the epicenter of it would be the most calm, idyllic place, Sweetwater. And that the further out you pressed from it, the more wild, dangerous, lascivious the park would become. So it basically created a soft border that kept pushing you back towards the center.

And then we sort of started charting and plotting out the different locations that we thought we would feature. We have weird maps that we drew in that endeavor. But, I mean, as it turns out, you really experience the park through the host perspective, so it’s a very slow unveiling of that. So you only kind of come to see shades of it through their lens. So, we could have slacked off a little bit because it took us a while to get to some of those places.

**John:** And Jonah how much mythology, I mean, how much geography – how big were your Tolkien maps of this? Because in the second season we learn like, “Oh, there’s Shogun World.” And there’s this whatever – I don’t even know if we know the title for the Indian kind of world of it all.

**Jonah Nolan:** The Raj.

**John:** And so there’s bigger spaces, but you guys probably had a sense of that right before – the six months leading up to it.

**Jonah:** Yeah, I’m big on geography. And I think actually we’d gone to see Sleep No More in New York a year before we started writing the pilot. And one of the things – I don’t know if anyone else here has experienced that. It’s a very, very cool sort of live action immersive experience in New York, sort of a mishmash of Shakespearean plays and you got to put on a mask and the audience kind of follows things around. But they laid out the geography beautifully in that experience because you start at the bar, always the most important part of any experience. I will be there in about 45 minutes.

And the geography is really simple. If you got lost, you go back to the bar. The bar was the center of it. So we thought, “Oh, that’s perfect.” And what we wanted with Westworld was we wanted an experience for the guest. We sort of designed the theme park first. How does the theme park work? Where would all the rides go? How would the corporate structure look like? But you also wanted an experience that required no owner’s manual, or no user manual rather. The experience, as Lisa was saying, reveals itself to you intuitively. So the geography was kind of all important.

And then we added five more parks all around, but didn’t tell anyone.

**Craig:** In terms of that concept of geography, geography can either be limiting in the sense that when they stand in front of that holographic dome image you get, OK, the park has an edge to it like all parks do. But we don’t necessarily know – you haven’t shown us all of the area. We don’t know scale necessarily. So we’re not sure how deep in.

But narratively speaking, too, you have a choice as people writing a series, you can say this narrative has an end point. We get to it and it’s over. Or, do you not see the borders of your own story? I’m kind of curious like how you guys conceive of the narrative? Is it ongoing and extensible endlessly? Or do you have a kind of end game in mind?

**Lisa:** Yeah, we have mapped out for the series kind of these tent pole moments I would say. You know, Westworld posits some kind of intellectual, philosophical questions. And we wanted to at least suggest some answers. And also in terms of our characters, we wanted to know where they would go and how we would keep renewing, and refreshing, and exploring different things.

So the really large sweep of their arcs we planned out in advance. But then as you’re writing, as you’re going into series and you’re writing the individual scripts, you know, the fun of it is when you find these opportunities to dance and linger and stay a moment with a character or a place, or you find some great chemistry between your actors and it opens up a whole new world for you. So there’s wiggle room in there.

**Jonah:** And I’ve done broadcast TV, and I’d very gotten very use to the sort of endless churn. I liken broadcast TV to getting a tie caught in a shredder. You’re just fucking all in. The prevailing rule of broadcast television for decades was once you’ve got that magic formula, that franchise of cast and characters and the story of the week, you just keep doing that. And I never had any interest in that whatsoever.

I think with Westworld much more explicitly we set out not using the rules of television, because TV has now expanded to fit so many different formats, it’s kind of the Wild West. We looked more at the rules for franchise filmmaking.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Jonah:** We’d say, “OK, you’ve got a consistent cast, you’ve got a larger story you’re telling, but you’re going to settle your obligations to the audience by the end of each season.”

**Craig:** And that’s fascinating because I feel like you guys – things are meeting. Because when I watch your movies I feel like now more than ever I’m seeing these enormous, very expensive, very elaborate, but really well-crafted episodes of this very big television series. It seems like there’s a series-if-ication of movies and there’s a movie-fi-cation of series. Do you feel that as you’re doing what you do?

**Stephen McFeely:** We do, but Kevin Feige would hate to hear you say that.

**Craig:** Well, that’s why I don’t work at Marvel. He’s not here I think.

**Stephen:** But it’s serialized storytelling. There’s no way around it. And I think that’s why people have embraced it because it treats the audience as if they’re in on something. I find – it’s a little funny that a lot of critics will go, “Ah, that’s too much for me to pay attention to. This movie is like…“ Well, your audience is clearly getting it.

**Christopher Markus:** Well, also it keeps it alive. It makes it not sequel after sequel. It makes it the next episode. So there’s a reason for it to exist outside of commerce.

**Stephen:** It rewards investment.

**Christopher:** Yeah. And I think with TV now there’s a reason to stop it outside of commerce. And people are paying attention. The narrative is done. Done. Let’s stop.

**Jonah:** That’s a good idea.

**John:** Lisa was talking about the moments that you discover where you get to linger, where you get to sort of hold onto a place. And what was so impressive about your film is there’s not a lot of time to sort of linger. You guys have to crank through a tremendous amount of stuff. And even the geography of your movie is really complicated. You’re creating brand new worlds that we’re seeing for the first time and you have basically very little time to establish anything about the world, but I guess the difference is we know those characters so we can see the world through those characters and that’s all that sort of matters. What was that – the new worlds we visit in your movie are extensive.

**Stephen:** Well, they’re actually not that extensive. We have very few choices in terms of what was still available to us, because we’re doing a movie with six MacGuffins, right? And five of them were established. So, we were going to visit places that if you were an audience member that already knew the movies you were expecting. So, the decisions we got to make were where was the soul stone, and where do you hold the third act. So basically we chose what combat and we made up a story about the soul stone and plucked a name of an old Marvel planet and put it there.

**Christopher:** And Thanos’s home town.

**Stephen:** Thanos’s home town. Sure.

**John:** But there are also environments–

**Craig:** Did you know that that was Thanos’s hometown, or did you just find out right now?

**Stephen:** We didn’t make it up. He’s from Titan, which is–

**Craig:** I just feel like he was maybe telling you. Covered meetings.

**Christopher:** You should come to more meetings.

**John:** I want to give you guys credit. There are moments – you can say like, oh, those places are already established in canon, but like we’re seeing them in your movie and the characters are suddenly there and we have to sort of like run with it. OK, we are at these [unintelligible] forages and like just roll with it. That’s brand new. We’re seeing this for the first time.

**Christopher:** Well, I think that’s the confidence that the franchise has built by this point is trust us, you’re going to be OK. This does make sense. We might be jerking you around a billion more miles than we usually do, but we know what we’re doing.

I do, however, miss those lingering moments and look forward to getting back to them.

**Stephen:** I mean, that was one of the things about that movie is that we had plenty of lingering moments in early drafts and it was a three-and-a-half hour movie and it turned out we needed something propulsive that only brought you in when a stone came up or a purple guy came to punch you in the face.

**Christopher:** Captain America’s dissolving relationship with his girlfriend was a great scene.

**John:** It was really good.

**Craig:** You can imagine it.

**Christopher:** Yeah, you can just see it.

**John:** But part of world-making is not just the literal worlds, it’s also setting the rules and the expectations for the audience. And so you guys in Westworld had to really clearly set rules for what the hosts are able to do and pushing past those rules. That’s the journey the hosts are on. But also rules for the universe and our expectations of like what’s happening outside this world. Because the first season we don’t get to travel outside this world to see what the rest of it is like. So, what were the rules you set originally for the hosts and for yourselves about how we’re going to venture into this world?

Was there a deliberate process of figuring out what it is that you wanted the audience to know were the rules of the world? Because in the second season Maeve is able to do things she couldn’t do the first season. So how do you set the rules for powers?

**Jonah:** It sort of came – the grounding in it for me was in working in the superhero film world for ten years with the only superhero who doesn’t actually have any super powers other than money and anger.

Male Voice: And rage [in a Batman voice].

**Jonah:** But the rules in those movies are all important. And we knew that the rules in Westworld were vitally important as well. Not that you want to belabor them for the audience, but I think – I know when I’m watching movies or TV I can feel sometimes when the writers haven’t put in the work. I don’t need to be told what the rules are necessarily, but I need to feel that the writers have spent six months sitting in a room, driving themselves nuts trying to figure out how it works.

2001 is a great example of that. You’ve got Arthur C. Clarke, you read the novelization of it. It’s like, “Oh shit, it all actually means something.” When you watch Kubrick’s film there’s very little exposition, but you feel there’s an underlying thought process that’s gone into – even the most sort of hallucinatory sequence at the end you can kind of feel that there’s a set of ideas that’s been woven into it.

So with Westworld from the very beginning we felt like we got – I mean, I literally we drew the map, maps, and then a corporate flow chart for how people work. And then we were like, “OK, we’ll set aside two days to figure out what consciousness is and then figure out the rules set for that.” Did not quite work out.

But, yeah, you’ve got to put in the leg work on that or the audience sniffs it out immediately. And that allows you to go to exciting places because if you know what their limitations are you can push through them.

**Craig:** I want to talk a little bit about the consciousness thing–

**Jonah:** Oh dear.

**Craig:** Because I got so excited–

**Jonah:** It was all going so well.

**Craig:** Here we go. You guys bring up this concept of the bicameral mind. I took a class with that guy in college.

**Jonah:** Julian Jaynes?

**Craig:** Julian Jaynes.

**Jonah:** Come on, really?

**Craig:** Julian Jaynes.

**Jonah:** Is he cool?

**Craig:** Well, he’s dead now. So no. But then, he was like a wise old owl. He was very cool. The book was incredibly influential on me. I bought it hook, line, and sinker, even though my other professors were like “This is bullshit. There’s no fucking evidence for that.” And it’s true. There is no fucking evidence for that.

But, it’s a fascinating theory and actually weirdly after I graduated I called him up one day, this is before he died luckily, and – because I had this idea that you know when we dream, I’m not high I swear to god. But if you are high this will make more sense.

So, we have dreams and in our dreams there are people that talk to us, and there are people that talk to each other, and we’re constantly surprised in our dreams. I mean, that’s why nightmares work. But that’s all from our own head. And it seems to me like we’re fragmenting our consciousness all the time in dreams. And I said isn’t that kind of evidence of – and he said, “No, I don’t think so.” And then that was the end of that, and then he died shortly thereafter. I may have killed him with that question.

But when I was watching this I couldn’t help but think how in a way your entire show, and specifically that point, is a great description of what it means to be a writer. Because you are fragmenting your mind into these interesting things. You’re hearing voices that are from you. And you’re also the god of creatures that you are responsible for that begin to in a strange way take on their own life. I can imagine only when drunk that this comes up all the time between the two of you.

**Lisa:** We weren’t oblivious to the sort of meta aspect of writing this, which is why we like to make fun of ourselves in it through the character Lee who is just such a high maintenance pain-in-the-ass. So, it was kind of, you know, our way of exorcising our demons through him. I don’t think we’re quite the pains-in-the-asses that Lee’s character is, but yeah, that’s what he’s there for.

**John:** Well, speaking of writers who are pains-in-the-asses, so you guys have a ton of characters that you have to manage in the course of your movie, some of which you’ve worked with before, some of which are brand new. You’re having to deal with machinery that’s been put in place largely through your movies but also through other movies, certainly through Black Panther you’re dealing with Wakanda which is a new thing for you to be touching. What is that like to be stewards of these characters, this story, to be controlling this universe but also know that it’s going on to another thing? What is your, as creators, what is your sense of responsibility to those characters and to those storylines?

**Stephen:** I mean, it’s make the best movie in front of you. Right? That’s always been Marvel’s watch word and it’s certainly ours. We’re selfish in that we’ll try to take everything for our movie and someone will have to pry things out of our hands and say, no, that’s somebody else’s. And I think we’re confident in our place enough now that we can ask for advice, help, and input. So we flew Taika Waititi in and said what the hell are you doing to Thor – we need to talk about this.

Because it was a radical re-toning of the character for the better clearly. But, you know, we didn’t know how far they were going to go with that. James Gunn is very specifically entwined with the Guardian, so we needed to talk to him. That kind of stuff happens all the time at Marvel. For all of its success it’s a very small shop, so that’s really easy to do.

**John:** So what is the conversation as you’re going in to work on this movie and the movie thereafter, you’re describing your overall plans for things and do you know – it feels like if you’re working on one of these movies you have to know not only what’s happening in your movie but what’s happening in the movie before you and happening in the movie afterwards. And that’s a complicated decision. It’s like if Lisa and Jonah were running your show, but somebody else was running another show that–

**Stephen:** Like if you had to know what was going on in Barry or something.

**John:** Exactly.

**Christopher:** And it’s particularly annoying because we were writing movies that we had to start making before they were making theirs, but theirs were going to come out first.

**Craig:** Oh.

**Christopher:** So we’d look like idiots because our movie didn’t mesh with theirs, even though they had to go after us. So there was a lot of, well, a lot of reading drafts and a lot of going just promise me you’ll leave him standing right here. I don’t care how he gets there, do whatever you want, just standing right there at the end of your movie and everything will be fine.

**Stephen:** It was also an opportunity, right? I mean, put yourself in our spot. Three years ago, we’re looking at a board that says Avengers 3, Ant-Man and Wasp, Captain Marvel, Avengers 4. You can either freak out by that or you can go, “Oh well, maybe we can use that to our advantage.” So the tags, spoiler alert, on our movie is a little teaser for Captain Marvel. Undoubtedly you’re going to figure out what that pager device is, right, and that’s a weaving. Ant-Man and Wasp will be the same thing, which means you’ve got to watch both those movies to get what’s going on in the next one.

**Christopher:** Well it’s also a selfish way of getting them to do a tiny bit of our work for us so that in the two movies – it wasn’t just a pause, the story was evolving as it went on.

**John:** Lisa and Jonah, a thing you and I have talked about is how important the “previously on” cuts are for a show. As someone is sitting down to watch an episode of your show, figuring out what it says on the “previously on” so you can set the right expectation about what’s going on there and remind people about what’s important. How early in the process do figure out what needs to be in that “previously on?” Is that a thing that’s happening in the writing stage or as you’re looking at the cut to see like you need to remind our audience that this is stuff that’s happening?

**Jonah:** I don’t think we get writing stage, although you start drawing up maybe a tiny list. One or two things. And then we do – I think unusually we cut our own. We cut our own in-house and we ship the cut to the network with a “previously on” on it. And then they recut it and they say – they have a traditional trailer vendor who makes – HBO puts a lot of money into their shows. And so in some cases you’ll have a really beautifully done piece. But we sort of hauled up the pieces we think are vital for understanding what’s coming.

**Craig:** And it seems like that’s something HBO has to do as one of the few places left that make you wait. Which, you know, as somebody that is doing something for HBO I personally like. I’m kind of old fashioned that way. I like the fact that I have to wait now a week, and a week, and a week to see your show. But it seems to me that the part that – well, at least from my point of view and I’m kind of curious what you guys think about this – and it sort of ties into the trailer—

**Christopher:** I would love for a “previously on”–

**John:** “Previously on” would save you so much time.

**Craig:** “Previously on” would be amazing for you guys. But it’s actually the coming up part at the end that I think is so important because when you’re binging you just go, great, I’ve finished, next, next, next. You can’t binge Westworld if you’re watching it during the season so it’s that little piece. How involved are you in that little hit of crack?

**Jonah:** We are sadly micromanaging lunatics and we’re involved in everything.

**Craig:** I love it.

**Jonah:** If there’s a fucking Westworld napkin under your beverage, we looked at the design.

**Craig:** Good.

**Jonah:** But the partnership at HBO is fantastically collaborative in that way. I’ve had it both ways, fighting tooth and nail to get your voice heard. With HBO it’s a seamless partnership on those pieces. You know, one of the reasons I got into movies is I love trailers. And that’s your little trailer at the end of every – you know, we had a lot of fun this year doing the trailers for our season. I shot the Super Bowl spot. I got to shoot that. And very hands on with all this material. It’s a lot of fun.

I’m also a big believer in – I think the binging thing is very cool, disrupt, etc., but there’s a lot of wisdom in the traditional broadcasting model. We come out for ten, I mean, in the movie business you would kill for ten consecutive weeks of watercooler conversation and articles. No matter how big your movie is, it’s kind of four weeks and it’s gone.

You know, if you get ten consecutive weeks it can be frustrating for some of the audience, but for everyone else it drives that conversation forward. And it gives you a chance to cut a little trailer for next week’s episode.

**Craig:** And there’s that beautiful anticipation that happens. You do feel as if the cliffhangers are cliffhangers. I have noticed that when I’m binging something the cliffhangers are – it’s just “Shut up, cliffhanger. Next episode. You know? I don’t believe in you.”

Which actually brings me to a question for you two, and it’s about death.

**Christopher:** Ah, death.

**Craig:** If you haven’t seen Avengers, fuck you. Come on. I mean, it’s the biggest movie in the world.

**Christopher:** It’s on in this building. Right now.

**John:** Literally walk across the hall.

**Craig:** In this structure, it’s on 20 screens. So, something happened I think, and I think it happened when Ned Stark’s head got chopped off. And in that moment, and it’s many years ago now, there was a kind of end of an era, in a weird way, where everyone always felt safe. The only time somebody would die is if, I don’t know, Jean Stapleton just didn’t want to do All in the Family anymore. And it was sort of like, well “OK, so you know she died.”

But when Ned Stark died I think it was kind of like a burning torch that said we are no longer going to let you be safe. And the ending of your movie is very television-like in that way I think. In that it sort of said you’re not safe anymore. Now I believe any of it. But I believe some of it. Like, I’m not sure. I feel like you guys are fucking with me, but I also feel like you’re not fucking with me, and I think that – so yeah, no.

**John:** They’re negging you is basically what they’re doing.

**Craig:** They are. Black Panther is not dead. That aside, money is money.

**Christopher:** Certainly dead at the moment.

**Craig:** But some of those people I think are dead. And I actually kind of love that. And I’m wondering if television was an influence on that in any way. The notion of lack of safety.

**Christopher:** I mean, yes, in that we’ve all gotten used to it between Game of Thrones and Walking Dead where death has become real. Has become a tool you can use. And I think when they chopped off Ned Stark’s head you went, “Oh, this is about the show. I’m watching a show. I’m not just watching these characters. Like this is a story they’re telling and they’ll kill people.”

And it made me take a wider view of the whole thing. And each time they lopped off the lead character’s head you go – people are thinking. Just like you said. They thought about this and they went, “They thought it through. We can do without that and move on.” It’s not just what are we going to make handsome man do next week.

**Stephen:** But that’s what movies had been for a long time, right? You got a handsome man and everybody went to go see handsome man. We’re going to see Handsome Man 2. We’re going to see Handsome Man 3.

**Craig:** Right. And handsome man could never, ever die.

**Stephen:** Oh my god no. Right.

**Craig:** He might get less handsome eventually.

**Stephen:** Eventually Handsome Man 4 will make less money and Handsome Man 5 won’t make any money. And then he’s done.

And Marvel understands, I feel like a huge shill here, but the success is ridiculous. They’re at 19 movies and god knows how many billions of dollars. So they understand that good storytelling needs endings. I mean, if you just keep giving them Handsome Man 6 you’re going to stop coming. And they also have this confidence that they know what they’re doing now and they’ve got a bench of 5,000 characters. So that you didn’t know you wanted Guardians of Galaxy. They got a ton of Guardians of the Galaxies. They’ll figure it out.

So, I mean, a part of it comes from this ridiculous confidence that they have now.

**Craig:** They really do. And I think it’s – you’d think that other people would learn the lesson. It’s remarkable how no one seemed to learn any lessons. They just learned – how did they not see it? You know what I mean?

**John:** I would also say that in defense of some of the other studios who are working with some of these characters–

**Craig:** Ugh. Talk about a shill.

**John:** So often these studios were like backed up against a wall. If we don’t make this movie within the next year we’re going to lose the rights to things. So they were making things for the wrong reason without a greater plan for how stuff was going to fit together.

**Craig:** That is true. But I do think that there’s a certain bravery that television just naturally has. Like you guys I feel on your show at any point you could kill anybody.

**Jonah:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For instance, Anthony Hopkins happened to make it through season one. But I didn’t know he was going to make it through season one, which is almost as good as him not making it through season one.

**Lisa:** Have you seen the finale, my friend?

**Jonah:** I hate to break your heart, but he didn’t make it through–

**Craig:** No, no, I’m saying, I’ve seen it. He didn’t. But I’m saying he didn’t know that he wasn’t. I thought maybe he would. But I wasn’t sure. And so that’s the best situation is I can’t predict. Television is very good at that. But Handsome Man 3 at a lot of places, I think, they’re petrified to kill Handsome Man because they think that’s why people are coming. And it’s interesting because I personally think that people generally now are coming for the promise of something that is unsafe narratively.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Lisa:** I think – I mean, just to interject, I think you’re right. And I think it’s so great. And as writers we always want to just go for it. And you need stakes. And one of the evolutions that’s happened in the superhero genre, and we deal with robots who are essentially superheroes, you know, is that after a while if they are just completely immune to death you start – it starts becoming really formulaic. And so you need to have stakes.

But just to give credit where credit is due, it’s also we all want stakes because we are adults and writers who are somewhat cynical and have been through and watched this and studied it for craft. A lot of these movies they attract children and families who haven’t gone through that whole experience yet. And so it really is still like a real risk to take in anything, in a feature or in TV, where you create these characters and you love these characters. As writers you love those characters. And to kill them is painful for you, too. You know, it’s not – you don’t do it blithely. Like, “Oh, I love this actor. I love this performance. And now that we have reached the pinnacle of our affinity for this character I’m going to lop off their head.” It’s tough.

**Craig:** I do like it though. It’s exciting.

**Lisa:** Yeah, I mean, it’s rewarding creatively. Because you get to write this swan song and everything. But there’s a lot that goes into that I think. It’s art but it’s also empathy for your audience. And it makes it tough to make the call.

**Christopher:** But also leaving them alive, when you have death leaving them alive has more weight now.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Christopher:** And now they’ve got mileage on them. You know, it used to be about they have to look just as pretty next season. They can’t age. Now, you know, every time Chris Evans comes up I think about, well, we put him through that and we put him through that, and we put him through that and he must be pretty unhappy by now.

**Craig:** Still incredibly good-looking.

**Christopher:** Yeah, he’s doing fine.

**Craig:** Yeah. All that trauma and just a brew grew.

**Christopher:** I don’t know.

**John:** So when we are talking about characters who live or characters who die, naturally spoilers come up. And you guys as people who are making these shows have to be mindful of you don’t want the world to know about what’s going to happen in your piece of product before they are actually watching the thing. So you guys have to be very mindful of how you’re going to protect those secrets.

So this last season on Westworld, between seasons you put out this special spoiler video that spoiled the whole second season as an acknowledgment of the strange relationship fans have with the thing that they love that they want to explore and investigate but also kind of end up destroying in the process of loving so much. Talk about the decision to do that. And also, you know, your relationship to fans and secrecy. Because you guys had the biggest script controls of anything I’ve ever seen. I remember talking with you guys about what you were doing even before the first season had shot about like how you guys locked down scripts. So, can you talk through us like secrecy and fan engagement?

**Jonah:** I just came up with It Runs in the Family. And Chris was psychopathic about script security before anyone gave a shit. I’d be like who’s trying to steal this script for painting houses and shit. I was like no one cares. But then eventually they kind of did. And I remember wandering around with a script for The Dark Knight on my laptop and thinking, “Fuck, like a state secret.”

And I had this insane 264-bit encryption thing, like a secret invisible drive. I’m like we’re doing all this shit ourselves from the beginning.

So we just came up with it that way. I don’t know any other way to do it. I mean, the way that the scripts for those movies work is the head of the studio goes to my brother’s house and reads it there. The script does not exist. Does not exist digitally ever outside of our little computer. And it’s on red paper for everyone else.

In TV it’s a little harder because you have bigger departments. You have – you’re moving faster. There’s a far greater volume of material. I mean, so many stories over the years in terms of every time you let your guard down, right. I’ve emailed one script my entire fucking career. One. And it’s online. And it was the original script for Interstellar. And everyone was like, “Ow.” And that wasn’t even a fucking draft. That was like a half draft somewhere very, very early, and I was in England and the producers were in LA and they were like “We need it now, now, now, now, now.” And I was like, it was literally like Christmas Eve or something. I was like, “Send.”

**Craig:** What a terrible feeling.

**Jonah:** That’s the one script that’s up. And it’s not a draft. It’s filled with mistakes.

**Craig:** Now there are reviews of your half draft.

**Jonah:** 100%. So I was like, well, that story comes up anytime anyone is like, “Just email it to me.” No.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** So, Chris and Stephen, I imagine you just print up copies and send them around.

**Christopher:** Yeah. We just hand them out.

**Stephen:** I took this out of my car today because I didn’t want to leave it in the parking lot.

**John:** So what is that you’re holding in your hand?

**Stephen:** Just a thumb drive that’s got stuff on it. All right? You know.

**John:** Just in case.

**Craig:** There’s so many more of us than there are of you. We could kill you right now. We want to know what it is.

**Stephen:** There’s nothing in my car.

**John:** So, I mean, obviously as much as you’re comfortable talking about it, like what is your process of making sure that the stuff that you’re writing is safe for you, but you obviously have to share it at a certain point. And is there a whole internal procedure for how that goes?

**Christopher:** There was. Sometimes it broke down. You know, sometimes you really would wind up going like “Just come here.” Were anyone to drop that thing, you know, at the waffle house, there’d be trouble.

**Stephen:** We’ll get the waffle house later.

**Christopher:** Once they were printing it and giving parts of it to different people, it got really sort of arcane and there were fake scripts and there were portions of scripts. And people didn’t know how things ended. So it was a very confused crew.

**John:** So when you say there are fake scripts, so these would be in the script there’d be scenes that you knew that you were never going to shoot.

**Christopher:** Or there’d be versions. So in the real version Thanos comes in, picks up an infinity stone, and in the script he’d come and pick up a donut.

**craig:**: That you thought that was going to work.

**Christopher:** You know, the equivalent to bats.

**Craig:** You thought that would throw these nerds off the trail?

**Christopher:** Exactly.

**John:** He’s Homer Simpson.

**Christopher:** They’re making a donut movie.

**Craig:** So Thanos is looking for the five donuts that power the universe. And no one is going to make the connection.

**Christopher:** There was at least one incident where the wrong version went to set deck, or something, and it wasn’t donut, it was the equivalent of a donut, but it was like where are the things. My script says donuts.

**Craig:** It was on the page and you said.

**Christopher:** It’s a fake one.

**Stephen:** You know the last thing you want to do when you’re trying to wrangle these things is write more—

**Christopher:** Oh my god, write extra.

**Craig:** Why don’t you hire one of these good people to do that? They could write fake scripts for you.

**John:** Absolutely.

Male Voice: Our assistant Joey eventually did it.

**Craig:** Oh, you gave it to Joey to do?

Male Voice: Yeah. Joey crushed it.

**Craig:** Yeah, Joey.

**Christopher:** He’s trustworthy.

**Craig:** Joey’s selling your shit right now on the Internet.

**Christopher:** Joey’s dead now.

Male Voice: Fucking Joey.

**John:** So, Lisa, as you’re going into your second season is there more – I mean, obviously you have a crew that you’re familiar with. There’s a little more comfort. Do you relax a little bit more going into it where you’re not so paranoid about every little thing? Or is just the same?

**Lisa:** I was like writers never relax. We’re always just neurotic messes. Actually that also pertains to security, so now, it’s the same level of paranoia.

**Craig:** I would think it should be higher, not to upset you, but when you’re making a show and no one has seen it yet and maybe there’s just an article that says Westworld, people are like, what, like “The Yul Brynner? OK.” Then maybe no one is trying to break into your shit. You know? And now they would be. So, think about that.

Tonight. When you’re trying to sleep.

**Lisa:** We could come up with a scheme where I’ll steal yours, you steal mine, and we sell them back to each other. There could be a real get rich thing here.

**John:** It’s like Ocean’s 4.

**Christopher:** I don’t have a problem with that.

**Craig:** Well how do I get into that? I want a taste.

Male Voice: You’re not required.

**Craig:** Shit.

**Christopher:** How does Chernobyl end? Oh shit.

**Craig:** That’s actually how it begins, to be honest with you. Well, I’m just giving something away, but I just thought like oh my god what torture if you were to watch a miniseries called Chernobyl and you had to wait five episodes for it to blow up. So, it blows up on page three.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Why wait?

**John:** Lisa and Jonah, you both also direct your show. And that has got to be an incredible – there’s a giant train moving and you’re stepping off the train to direct part of it and do the rest of it. So how is that possible? I mean, how does it not go off the rails when you are stepping outside of the writing and producing of the show to direct an episode? What was it like for you, Lisa?

**Lisa:** I mean, I delegated to Jonah. You know, everything from – it was actually a terrible time for me to direct, and if you think about it because I think I had just had a baby a couple weeks before I started prep.

**Craig:** What?

**Jonah:** Another baby.

**Lisa:** Yeah, a different baby.

**Jonah:** They just keep coming.

**Craig:** Different baby.

**Lisa:** It wasn’t like the longest gestation period, like a two season—

Male Voice: That would be one hell of a baby.

**Craig:** Wait, so you had a baby and then two weeks later—

**Lisa:** We have one per season just to really fuck ourselves.

**Craig:** Right. And then two weeks later you’re like, I know what I should do. The thing that kills people that haven’t just had a baby.

**Lisa:** Yeah. Yeah. And we were kind of still writing some of the scripts, so it was truly masochistic. And I actually was going to back out of it, but Jonah, you know, in a moment – actually in this moment in Hollywood it was especially lovely to have this level of support, not just from him, but from my whole crew, cast, from HBO. You know, I’m like, “OK, I’m going to get out of the hospital, I’m going to pump in the scout van. I’m going to write pages at 2am, and in the meantime I’m going to direct this episode. It’s going to be great guys. Don’t worry.”

And they didn’t. You know, and Jonah, there was one point where I was like am I mad because if I mess this up it’s going to be really bad. It’s going to be quite embarrassing. And he was like “You’re not going to mess it up.” And he pointed out that he was going to give me the same opportunity that I gave him for first season when he directed the pilot and the finale, which is I helped with the room, I helped with the kids. And he was like now I’ve got your back. And he did.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** You two! Wow.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** You guys never do anything like that.

**Christopher:** No, we never do that.

**John:** You guys don’t help each other out like that at all.

Male Voice: I did pump in the van though.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a huge fucking problem, and we’ve got to – we can’t even have a podcast anymore.

**Christopher:** We don’t use a van anymore.

**Craig:** That’s bad.

**John:** One of the things that I like and admire so much about writing teams and partners is that they get to know each other so well. And they can see the same problem and come up with the same solution. Sometimes you can separate them apart and either one of them can do the job.

**Craig:** Like the Newlywed Game.

**John:** Kind of like the Newlywed Game. They know each other so super well. And so I thought we might actually do a version of that.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** And see how well we know each other.

**Christopher:** Weirdest place you’ve ever made whoopee.

**Craig:** That would be in the van.

**Christopher:** In the van.

**John:** So here is what we’re going to do. I emailed each of you separately the start of a little scene or the moment from a scene and asked tell me what happens next. And so I emailed these to you separately and I asked you to sort of email back what you guys thought happened.

**Christopher:** We were supposed to email it back?

**John:** That’s OK. You can just read it. It’s fine. You didn’t actually follow the instructions. That’s fine. So let’s start there at the end of the list here. Here’s the prompt that I sent to Stephen and Christopher. This is somewhere in the middle of a script somewhere:

“Carson ducks for cover behind a parked car. Windows blow out, glass raining down. She’s got to get out of there, but where? Suddenly…”

That is the prompt I gave. Let us here how Stephen McFeely answered this call. No, no, you’re going to read it to us.

**Stephen:** But you said everyone else emailed it.

**Craig:** I don’t understand the rules of this game either.

**Christopher:** I don’t have mine.

**Stephen:** Then I got to take credit for this. This is a terrible thing, by the way. Every one of us thinks this is—

**Lisa:** We are so horrified by the stress–

**Craig:** He does this every year.

**John:** Absolutely. So, with that scene, I’m curious what your scene reads like.

**Christopher:** Oh dear.

Male Voice: Carson ducks for cover behind a car. Windows blow out, glass raining down. She’s got to get out of there. But where? Suddenly…something glints in the side mirror. She leans in, dumbfounded, staring at the reflection of something we don’t see. Over the gun fire we can just make out the sounds of Turkey in the Straw. You have got to be shitting me. She turns as Bethany approaches in the stolen ice cream truck, a string of Christmas lights dragging behind her.

**Christopher:** This is so much longer.

**John:** That was nice.

**Christopher:** You said two lines.

**Craig:** I feel like you were sabotaging yourself.

**John:** That was a good little moment. The Turkey in the Straw. Some good scene work there. I like that.

**Lisa:** They’re critiquing your writing. This is the most high stress thing ever.

Male Voice: He wrote Dark Knight. I had to do something.

**Lisa:** All right.

**Craig:** But you wrote Avengers: Infinity Box Office. I don’t understand.

**John:** Yeah, come on.

Male Voice: It writes itself.

**Craig:** It writes itself. You mean your partner. You described your partner as itself.

**Christopher:** I can’t wait for it to write itself next time.

**Craig:** He’s like I wish I had something to write itself for me.

**Christopher:** Because I’m going home.

**Craig:** All right, this is going well so far.

**John:** Christopher, do you have yours there, or do want to read off of mine?

**Christopher:** Please read it off of yours.

**John:** All right, I’ll read Christopher’s.

“Carson ducks for cover behind a parked car. Windows blow out. Glass raining down. She’s got to get out of there, but where? Suddenly…her phone rings. She answers. Carson: Hello. Hi Honey, it’s mom. Kind of a bad time, mom. I’m at work. Well, look then, call the guy and call me back. We never talk anymore. I miss you.”

**Craig:** Very sweet.

**John:** Sweet.

**Craig:** Very sweet.

**John:** They’re is the heart and the violence.

**Christopher:** Well, you know, I feel guilty about my mom.

**John:** In your actual writing life can you tell who writes what stuff? If you go back to something a year later, do you kind of remember “Oh yeah I did that, or he did that”?

**Christopher:** Some specific lines sometimes. But we’ve grounded down for so many mutual drafts that it’s hard to ID.

**John:** Are you guys both at the computer together or you’re writing separate things and pasting together?

**Christopher:** We’re writing separately, pasting together, then sitting down and rewriting this really shitty script written by this third guy.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** So much self-sabotage. You have the biggest movie in the world.

**Christopher:** What do you want me to take credit for it?

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** Yeah!

**Craig:** Yes! Because you did it. See, this is the problem with guys. Nothing ever is good enough.

**Christopher:** No.

**Craig:** Nothing. Nothing. What’s your dream? To write the biggest movie in the world.

**John:** Duh-duh-duh.

**Craig:** Yeah, doesn’t work.

**John:** All right, Lisa and Jonah, I sent you a different prompt. So this is the prompt that I sent you guys:

“Dave smiles at yoga mom. Just then the bottom of the wet grocery bag rips. He frantically tries to keep everything from spilling out, but one item escapes his grasp.”

Jonah Nolan do you want to take it first?

**Jonah:** This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I want you to know this.

**Lisa:** This is so bad.

**Jonah:** Not fun at all.

“Dave smiles at the yoga mom. Just then the bottom of the wet grocery bag rips. He frantically tries to keep everything from spilling out, but one item escapes his grasp. His spleen. He had taken out only the pieces of himself he thought he really didn’t need. Just enough to achieve that perfect Kundalini posture. But as he bent double trying to slide it back into the bag, hoping against hope that his homemade stitches wouldn’t give out he caught the glimmer of admiration in her eye. It had all been worth it.”

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Nice. That’s good. He did write Dark Knight.

**Lisa:** Oh man.

**Craig:** He did write Dark Knight.

**Christopher:** This is a very expensive little gag, John.

**John:** It is actually. I mean, how would you charge here? It’s a day rate here.

**Craig:** Millions and millions of dollars for that.

**John:** All right. Lisa Joy.

**Lisa:** Can I say it’s exactly the same? OK.

“Dave smiles at the yoga mom. Just then the bottom of the wet grocery bag rips. He frantically tries to keep everything from spilling out, but one item escapes his grasp. His precious corrective lenses. A complex prescription to treat not only his myopia and a light astigmatism, but also a recently diagnosed and pernicious case of hyper-masculopia, commonly known as the male gaze.

“Yoga mom bends her live form. Her breasts skimming the top of her low neck line. Her stomach taught. She gives him a come hither look as she hands him the specks, which he gracefully places on his nose. And is gob-smacked to see Yoga Mom suddenly transforms into Leslie from accounting. She balances a screaming toddler on her hip with the same ease she regularly balances the messy P&Ls of his company’s financing. He stammers, “Leslie, I almost didn’t recognize you.” She shrugs, “You’d be surprised how much that happens.” Then she turns and walks away, disappearing down the frozen food aisle without so much as an undulation of her hips.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah!

**Craig:** You definitely went over. You went over. But it was pretty good.

**Lisa:** I’m sorry. And I didn’t have the–

**Jonah:** Have you seen our show?

**John:** Both of you guys sort of wrote like a New Yorker little short story, like a one-pager New Yorker thing, which I think is kind of great.

**Lisa:** We normally tell ourselves when we’re carrying on too long, but we didn’t have each other to do that. So, you know, mortifying.

**Craig:** I loved all of it.

**John:** I loved every little bit of it. So, Craig and I are going to participate in this, too, because we’re not a writing team, but we’ve spent 352 episodes – we’re 352 episodes into this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the prompt I gave to the two of us is:

“Katherine awakens in a seedy motel room. Wood paneling. Stained carpet. Dead flies in the overhead light. She sits up in bed, putting her hand to her neck where she discovers…”

Do you want to do yours first?

**Craig:** Sure. Oh god, I got to read that whole thing again, don’t I? Shit.

“Katherine awakens in a seedy motel room. Wood paneling. Stained carpet. Dead flies in the overhead light. She sits up in bed, putting her hand to her neck where she discovers…a Post-It note starting to curl away from her skin. She pulls it free and stares at her boss’s handwriting through bleary eyes. Strike two. Ah, shit. Katherine staggers up on unsteady legs, walks to her cleaning cart, grabs some mini soaps and toilet cleaner, and gets back to work.”

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Poignant that is.

**Craig:** I’ve been writing dramas lately.

**John:** You have been, you. Katherine awakens in a seedy motel room. Wood paneling. Stained carpet. Dead flies in the overhead light. She sits up in bed, putting her hand to her neck where she discovers…a large bandage. She stumbles to the bathroom, squints in the harsh light, carefully peels back the bandage revealing a fresh tattoo. No. No. No, no, no. We reveal the tattoo. It’s Strawberry Shortcake. Not bad, really. Kind of cute. Fuck me. The camera reveals the rest of her tattoos. A flaming skull on her shoulder. A swastika along her bra strap. Finally a grinning Pepe the Frog along the small of her back.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Reversed a little.

**Craig:** Alt-right lady. Got Strawberry Shortcake. I feel like ours could be combined.

**John:** They’re really very close.

**Craig:** She also could be the maid.

**Christopher:** I’d like to say the email said specifically a line or two.

**John:** Yeah, I know.

**Christopher:** A line or two. I’m the only one who followed the rules.

**Craig:** I like to stay within the general boundary of–

**John:** You had a blank, you want to fill the blank.

**Craig:** You want to fill the blank. Hey, John, great game.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** Everyone loved it.

**John:** All right. Everyone out there–

**Craig:** Everyone out there.

**John:** Everyone here is like you’re making us do work. The last bit of work I want to make everyone do is a One Cool Thing which I was meant to remind you about in the green room. Did you guys remember it? You forgot. Jonah, did you remember? No one read the email. So I think instead of One Cool Things we should skip to–

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** The questions.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** So this is where Craig tells you what a question is.

**Craig:** Hi everyone. If you’ve been to one of our live shows before you’ve heard me say this. You get a chance to ask questions of us, any one of us here on stage, but we do have two rules.

One is your question must be a question. It can’t be a statement and then like “you know” at the end. Has to be an actual question.

Two, do not pitch anything, or even come close to pitching anything. Don’t be that guy. Don’t be that guy. And that’s it.

**John:** All right. And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to position John Gatins and Megan McDonnell, our–

**Craig:** You guys know John Gatins is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. I just want to be clear about this.

**John:** And Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell in this corner. If you have a question come to the end of the steps and they will offer you the microphone and you will ask a question.

**John Gatins:** And Craig, you said that I can beat people, right?

**John:** Yes. If you ask something that’s not a question–

**Craig:** If they violate my rules, hit them hard with the mic.

**John:** Go down and talk to John Gatins, sir.

**Audience Member:** OK, I have a world-building follow up question, for all of you. How much more than what you’re going to write on the page do you have to know about your world. Like ten times more? A hundred times more? How much more do you have to know to not have a total anxiety attack about what you’re offering the audience?

**Craig:** 53 times more.

**John:** There can be a paralysis where all you do is world build and you don’t actually write the real script. So, do you guys have any suggestions for where you stop?

**Christopher:** I don’t know, at the moment we’re having a problem of we’ve got way too much world. And the story is actually much simpler. And we’ve got so much iceberg under the water that it’s fucking up the simple story. So, it can really help having all of this knowledge. This is not Avengers 4. Which is already done.

**Craig:** And perfect.

**Christopher:** Having a ton can really help, but it can also kind of cripple you in that you feel obligated – you become confused as to how much of this shit the audience actually has to know. And you can overshare.

**Craig:** It’s also a little bit of a potential form of procrastinating. I know some writers love to use research – it’s just basically jerking off. I mean, that’s what it is. And at some point, right, it is important. But you know when the research that you’re doing is valuable, and if it’s pure fiction you know when the backstory thinking that you’re doing is valuable. But more often than not I think what happens is you may get to a point in your script where you realize, “Oh, the ice here is a little thin. Let me stop and think a little bit about what I need.“

I would kind of think about it as world-building on demand. Don’t get into the trap of world-building to avoid, you know, type, type, type. Whereas John Gatins calls it click, click, click.

**John:** One thing to add on world-building, so I’m doing the Arlo Finch books. And so there are three books in the series. And I got to a place in the second book and my editor is like, “Great, you need to stop world-building because there can be a situation where all you’re doing is building the world out bigger” and I’ve only got one more book. And I’m not going to be able to pay off all those things. And you’re setting an expectation for the audience if you show these things that they’re going to be meaningful. And I think you guys have similar things.

Like if you’re setting something up it feels like that’s a Chekhov’s gun on the wall. That gun is going to have to shoot. And there’s not going to be a space for that thing to shoot. And so the editing process of this has been, “OK, I need to make sure that I’m only building the stuff I can actually really use in the upcoming book because if it’s more than that it’s not just wasted time, it will diminish the actual read of the second and third books,” which I thought was a smart point.

**Lisa:** I totally agree. I have one little trick that I’ve been using lately, because we’ve been doing a lot of world-building for this and some of the feature work that I’m doing. And you really can get lost in the weeds. And it’s also fun. You’re imagining these wonderful places. But the thing that I’ve done to kind of get myself out of that and make sure it’s not a crutch, but I think it’s also just important for the story anyway is I’ll put it aside once I get really mired into it and say now approach this entire thing from just the character’s perspective.

Like look at what your protagonist and your villain is doing, because a lot of the time the thing that’s most relatable and most wonderful about a film I think is feeling really tied into that person, regardless of what world they’re in. And sometimes the most powerful moments I think are incredibly simple in that way. It could just be one person in a room staring at themselves in a mirror, but you understand what they’re thinking. And so that’s a little exercise I’ve been doing lately.

**Audience Member:** I’d like to ask a question about jeopardy. I wrote a screenplay. And one of the things that a couple readers didn’t like was, well, several things. But one of the things was that my protagonists were in Los Angeles and my antagonist was all the way across in New York. And they kept saying “He’s so far away. He’s so far away.” But my defense was he’s such a bastard and he’s very, very powerful.

My question is do you ever think about the different degrees of jeopardy? Do you ever think about as far as proximity to danger when you’re looking at a character and the situation they’re in? I’m not talking about immediacy. I’m talking about – in other words should I move him to like Covina or something?

**Craig:** Well, it’s certainly an evil place. You guys, sometimes your villains aren’t even on the planet.

Male Voice: Yeah, we certainly had a similar problem where Thanos had six things he had to do and he couldn’t be everywhere at once, even though he had the space stone. He could teleport everywhere.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was going to bring that up. But, OK.

Male Voice: Best we don’t dwell on that.

**Craig:** He had a rock that literally allowed him to break your movie, but go ahead.

Male Voice: Understood. But so in that case he had minions. And so we were able to have a few different scenes that were accomplishing the same thing. But I would also say that jeopardy doesn’t necessarily mean physical violence. It’s a super crutch of ours, but end of act two is always what’s the worst thing that could happen to our main character? And that does not have to be a punch in the face. That could be the loss of anything. That could be failure in any way. There’s lots of things that could be. And that could be a phone call.

And so I would just say that jeopardy is pandimensional.

**Christopher:** And also, I mean, distance can make people more frightening. There are a lot of people right now who are really terrifying who are just people, you know, and they’re in offices. They just happen to be in the right offices to scare us.

I mean, James Bond’s bad guys are inevitably guys he could just punch in the mouth and they’d fall over. They’re big fat guys, or, you know, titans of industry. It’s the power they wield from their chair. So I don’t know. Depends on the villain, but I don’t have a problem with them being across the country.

**John:** One thing I’d point out is in No Country for Old Man, Anton Chigurh from that movie is so terrifying in part because he’s headed towards you. And so you establish how scary he is, and he’s headed in your direction, and that is part of his threat is he’s coming towards you and you don’t know how the hero could possibly survive that threat. So not being right next door is fine. And most horror movies the villain is coming towards you and that is the thing.

But if people are consistently saying it feels just too distant and too remote, then you need to either bring him closer or proximity of emotion needs to be closer. Needs to feel like it’s a bigger threat to this person’s life.

**Craig:** Feeling is such a good way of thinking about these things, because you can get caught sometimes in the trap of trying to out-logic someone. They say “I don’t feel like your villain is close enough.”

“Well, I mean, there are scarier people that are even further away.” That’s a rational argument, but has nothing to do with how they feel. And ultimately we’re trying to make people feel things. So sometimes when someone says I feel like blank, blank, blank, I say OK, let’s talk about your feeling. You become a little bit like a therapist.

It helps if you have this kind of beard. This is very therapist-y. It’s amazing how often as writers we have to kind of, oh, I wish it weren’t so. It would be nice if everybody else had to be our therapist. But I feel like a lot of times we have to be therapists to the people that are reading to kind of help pull out of them what they’re saying. And then we can choose to agree or disagree, but then we’re agreeing or disagreeing about feelings which is different than agreeing or disagreeing about facts, which ultimately at some point fall apart because there are no robots that do that. And there is no Thanos in space. And so on and so forth.

**Craig:** Yes, I’m sorry. He’s not real.

**John:** Let’s go back over to Megan here.

**Audience Member:** This is specifically for Lisa and Jonah. I love the way you guys use music in Westworld. And I specifically love that this season, five episodes in, and there’s been so much hip hop. Very excited about that. But my question is first of all do we have any more hip hop to look forward to? And secondly how does influence your story or how do you choose the right music to use with the story that you’ve created?

**Jonah:** We have a psuedonoymous music supervisor on the show, which represents me. You know, one of the pent up frustrations for me, the wonderful experience of working with my brother for 15 years making movies was that he wasn’t a huge fan of using contemporary music, in the films or the trailers. You know, when you’re working with Hans Zimmer, you know, it’s an understandable impulse. You love the music that they crafted for each film.

And I kept trying to get him to do a Batman trailer with Paint it Black. I’m like “Just once. Let’s do it. People would lose their fucking minds.” And so then when we made the pilot for Westworld I was like I know which song I’m going to use. So this pent up 15 years of – because I love music. Lisa does as well, and Lisa picked the music for her episode which was magnificent. Boxy music and Rolling Stones. And there was this delightful idea very early on in the development of Westworld, we were looking for an icon for the show. Along the lines, if anyone here is a Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner fan?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Jonah:** So the penny-farthing bicycle, right? I don’t know what the fuck it means. I have no idea. There’s no penny-farthing bicycle in the show. I keep waiting for him to get on the penny-farthing bicycle and escape and he doesn’t. But we like the iconography of it.

And so we were casting around looking for an icon. And I’ve been a Vonnegut fan as a kid. And we just though every western town had a robot in it and it was the player piano. It was typically operated almost tragicomically because there’s no electricity in the Wild West. Most player pianos had a set foot pedals on the side and some poor asshole had to sit there pedaling the thing so it would play. We left that detail out.

I think originally you were introduced to Ford’s character in the pilot playing Deep Tracks. We just love this idea – I’ve worked now with Ramin Djawadi for, well, on and off – we collaborated at a distance, at a spooky distance, on Batman Begins, which I was a ghostwriter on and he was working with Hans Zimmer, kind of doing instrumentation. And then we started working together again 2011 on my first show. And we’ve worked together ever since. He’s one of the truly fucking gems. Like one of the greatest people in the world.

And so he loved this idea of “Let’s take contemporary music.” It was a way to fuck around with human programming. This is how payola works. Even if you don’t like a song, if I play it enough times it embeds. So we knew we could take popular music, which is why most of the songs are fairly well known, and we program the audience to make them feel something in it.

**Craig:** And you guys used, correct me if I’m wrong, Nirvana in your big sort of season trailer, right?

**Jonah:** We did.

**Craig:** Which was awesome. And part of the fun of watching your show is sometimes it’s pretty – like Paint It Black, something about the melody where it doesn’t matter how you play it. It’s Paint It Black.

**John:** And this last time you played it in Japanese instrumentation to remind us–

**Craig:** That’s the thing. But then there are some songs we’re like, “Wait, what the fuck is? And then like, oh, this is Black Hole Sun.” It took me like a minute or two, but this is Black Hole Sun. And I love that kind of–

**Jonah:** But you feel it moving around in your own programming.

**Craig:** It’s happening, you’re right, before you’re conscious of it it’s happening.

**Jonah:** The Wu-Tang one I think is our supreme fucking victory. Cleared that a year ago. I had a back and forth. I went to college with four roommates all from Brooklyn and Manhattan and I had to listen to the Wu-Tang Clan for five straight years.

**Craig:** Had to? Got to.

**Jonah:** Yeah. Got to.

**Craig:** I’m from Staten Island. I’m from Shaolin, my friend. That’s where the Wu-Tang – Brooklyn and Manhattan, psh.

**Jonah:** I was a grunge rock fan when I started. Everyone is like this show is set in the ‘90s. Clearly the fucking park is in the ‘90s. No, I just went to high school in the ‘90s. That’s where all the music comes from Wu-Tang, we cleared it a year before hand. Ramin did the instrumentation. And we had a choreographer. I’ve never been prouder. It was fucking glorious.

**John:** All right, question from John Gatins’ side.

**Audience Member:** Hi. This question is mainly for Westworld people.

**Craig:** They have names. We’ve said them over and over.

**John:** Lisa and Jonah.

**Jonah:** We’re OK. Westworld people works.

**Audience Member:** Of course, but it also kind of applies to the Marvel universe as well. And my question is about developing characters and creating characters and the process of making rules for these characters that are so close to human, like the hosts are, but they also have to have these elements of AI and robotic-ness to them. And how do the conversations when making rules for them and making these characters go when you’re trying to balance something that’s so close to the uncanny valley?

**Lisa:** You know, it was something we were very aware of, especially because in one of the drafts – we showed it to a producer who will remain nameless. And Delores gets attacked and murdered. And then they wipe her and put her underneath and they kind of repair and put her back out. And his note was, “Well why does it matter? Why do I care? Because she just forgets anyway.”

And I’m like that’s an argument for people who dose people with roofies. Like that’s really dark and terrible. Like it matters because it was evil and she suffered. And I don’t know that it matters if she remembers it or not.

**Craig:** I love that you were trying to explain that to a producer and they’re like “I don’t get it.”

**Lisa:** And I got really into this debate–

**Christopher:** Still not getting it.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, wait, the roofies is also bad?

**Lisa:** I was trying to – yeah, I was trying to liken the experience, and I really went deep into this debate with him, and I love the guy by the way. He’s a nice guy. It was just he could not get over this thing. But what I did realize then was if I’m having this debate it means that something has to change at least in the alchemy of when it goes to screen. Because god forbid people are having that debate. That’s not the feeling they should have from this. It’s not the feeling I intended as a writer, that we intended as writers. And honestly this is something that goes a little bit beyond script. It’s one of those places where direction, and Jonah directed it, and performance are incredibly, incredibly important.

And so the one thing we did in script to safeguard us on this count was we rooted our perspective as an audience with Delores’s perspective. She did not know she was a host. She did not know who among her were humans or hosts. And neither did we as the audience. So when it was revealed that her lover, the guy we thought was a guest was actually a host and the man in black was the villain, we too as the audience were meant to feel that betrayal. And it was supposed to bridge the empathy that we had with these hosts to make their pain more real and valid.

And then, of course, there’s the performance aspects of it and the direction, which it changes. It changes stuff, don’t you agree, to see it brought to life, where it’s no longer an intellectual debate about, “Oh, does it matter if she forgets?” because you see this heart-wrenching performance of a woman suffering. And you just think this kind of cruelty should not go on.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s amazing how acting eliminates 80% of the – it’s very frustrating as writers when we have to talk about those things, because what we want to say is a little bit like what you guys were saying. “Just trust us. We know what we’re doing. We’ve done it before. We’re not going to overwrite this. We need space for an actor to make it real and human.”

But you guys also, I think, very cleverly built in situations that allowed you to address the uncanny valley thing straight on and exploit it, particularly the interviews. I think the interview sequences are so important in the beginning because you realize how many levels there are. “Lose the accent. OK. Now also – no, stop with the emotion. Stop. Analysis. Why did you say that?” That’s brilliant and it allows the hosts to, A, be robots, and B, be very human actually in the strangest way. So you came up with I think a brilliant mechanism there to do that. So well done. Well done, you two.

**John:** Smart people. That wasn’t a question–

**Craig:** Those rules don’t apply to me. I can do whatever the fuck I want.

**John:** It is time for our actual last question, which I’m so sorry, over on Megan’s side.

**Audience Member:** This is for Christopher and Stephen. I just wanted to ask simply what was it like creating the character of Thanos on the page, because one of the things I really enjoyed about the film is that he had such an impersonal goal to balance the universe, yet you guys on the page made it very human and very emotionally resonant to us as an audience member. And having read Joseph Campbell, you can see that being paid homage to through the character of Thanos. Yet you guys seem like to really throw a monkey wrench into a lot of Campbell’s ideas. So I just wanted to ask what was it like crafting that character?

**Christopher:** It was a lot of fun. He was from very early on the protagonist, the main character of that movie. And that gave us the leeway to touch the emotions of a villain that you wouldn’t ordinarily go to. And he became more and more “human” the more we figured out the cost that he was going to have to pay to get what he needed. It’s not just he’s going to make the world pay. He’s going to pay a cost and it’s going to hurt. And that made him extremely compelling and lovable.

Male Voice: Sort of the secret writing trick we use is – I sort of alluded to it earlier, you know, what’s the end of act two? It’s the worst thing that could possibly happen. And I think a lot of people sort of just if you look at it casually think, oh, we lost Gamora at the end of act two and that’s terrible for our heroes. Not who it’s for. It’s terrible for him. And that idea when we hit upon that, that he would have to sacrifice the person he loved the most to get what he thinks he wants, everything sort of slid into place after that.

You knew what was coming. You knew he was going to collect six stones, or that’s at least what he was trying to do. But if there’s an emotional cost to collecting those things, if it’s not attached to Dr. Strange or isn’t sitting in Vision’s head, or isn’t an exchange required that you’re going to have sacrifice Gamora, then you’re just chopping. And we didn’t want to do that. We wanted it to cost.

**Craig:** It might as well be donuts at that point.

Male Voice: Exactly.

**John:** It could be donuts. That is our show for tonight. I want to thank Stephen and Christopher and Jonah and Lisa, our amazing guests. I want to thank our host, John Gatins, Denise Seider, Hollywood Heart. Thank you very much for having us here. They put together all this event.

**Craig:** Thank all these wonderful people.

**John:** We want to thank our fantastic audience.

**Craig:** You guys did a good thing tonight. You helped children. We think.

**John:** You would think.

**Craig:** We think.

**John:** We think there’s children involved in this. We need to thank Megan McDonnell, our producer. Yay, Megan McDonnell. And Matthew Chilelli who will edit this. And thank you to ArcLight for hosting us here. This was really fun.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**John:** This was nice. Thank you all for very much. Good night.

**Craig:** Thanks for coming out. Good night.

Links:

* Thanks to the ArcLight, [Hollywood HEART](http://www.hollywoodheart.org), and everyone who came out for this Live Show!
* [Lisa Joy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Joy) and [Jonah Nolan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Nolan) are on the second season of [Westworld](https://www.hbo.com/westworld) on HBO.
* [Stephen McFeely & Christopher Markus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Markus_and_Stephen_McFeely)’s [Avengers: Infinity War](http://marvel.com/avengers) is in theaters now.
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* Intro by Jon Spurney and [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilleli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_352.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/mostly-terrible-people).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 339 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program it’s one of our favorite features, How Would This Be a Movie, where we take complicated real life situations and boil them down to two hours of filmed big screen entertainment. The only way we know how to process life.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Can I just stop for a second and say Episode 339 – we almost have a year of podcasts.

**John:** Very true. You could listen to a podcast a day, which would be a way to spend your life. I don’t think it’s necessarily the best way to spend your life. But an hour with John and Craig every day. And actually if you counted all the bonus episodes I bet we’re super, super close to a full year.

**Craig:** We are. We’re probably super close. I’m just quickly doing the math in my head. This means we’ve been doing the podcast for roughly seven years, or 52 years.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s one of those, right?

**John:** One of those two. Math is hard for us. But it’s one of those two choices. It’s been a good, long time. But it’s a been a good, fun time. A few weeks ago we aired an old episode because you and I were both traveling and people said like, “Huh, the sound quality wasn’t so good.” And you know what? You’re right. The sound quality wasn’t so good. Expectations have increased.

**Craig:** Well, you know, technology and all the rest of it. We’ve gotten better at those little bits and bobs. But even so, I’ve got to say – you know what it is? I’ll tell you, John. You and I, we’re the marrying type. So, when we started this podcast it’s like we got married.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely true.

**Craig:** We don’t get – our heads don’t get turned.

**John:** Not a bit. So I’ll say that on an early episode I said like, “You and I, Craig, we’re not really friends. We’re not talking outside of this podcast.” And I could sense that you were really crushed by that. And, fair. And then I think we’ve become much better friends. We weren’t even playing D&D together when we started this podcast. That’s how long it’s been.

**Craig:** Which seems impossible. I’m crushed when anyone says that we’re – well, you know, we’re not really friends. And I think to myself, but why?

**John:** But why aren’t we friends?

**Craig:** I’m delightful. [laughs] I don’t understand what the problem is. No, I think we are friends. It’s true. I mean, it takes roughly 339 hour-long recorded conversations to really get to know you. But approximately one or two to get to know me.

**John:** And I always feel gross when I drop the word friend with somebody who is not really a friend. So I was on Chris Hardwick’s show a few weeks ago. It was a delightful conversation. You should listen to it because it was a really good time. And he’s on episode like 900 of his show.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** But when they first proposed this, I was like, “Oh yeah Chris and I have been friends for years.” And then I realized like are we actually friends? No, we’re people who know each other well and when we recognize each other we’ll say hi and catch up. But it’s not like we’re hanging out every weekend. And so it was weird that I would ascribe Chris Hardwick as being a friend and not you back then.

So, I apologize.

**Craig:** Yeah, well no apology necessary. I think the word friend has been absolutely shredded to bits by the modern age, and particularly Facebook, which as it turns out is not this vaguely annoying thing. It turns out to be a bit of a melanoma on the skin of society.

I used to think like, ugh, Facebook is just annoying because it has distorted what it means to be a friend or to have a friend. And everybody is now engaging in this strange narcissistic display. No, it turns out Facebook is much, much worse.

**John:** But, Craig, they’re going to fix it all because they’re tweaking the algorithms.

**Craig:** Oh yes. Of course.

**John:** So all those problems of the past, they’re going to go away.

**Craig:** Is there a more annoying Facebook post than the, “Dear friends, they’re fixing the algorithm. If you wish to keep hearing…” No. No. Don’t talk to me.

**John:** Do not do that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Facebook should only be about cute photos of babies and dogs. That’s all I want to see.

**Craig:** Pretty much. Anytime someone is like just respond so I know that you’re still listening to me. Mm-mm. Mm-mm.

**John:** Don’t do it. But on the topic of responding so that people know that you’re listening, Sundance Episodic Filmmakers Lab, which is actually like TV lab. We’ve talked about this before. It’s a really good program and they asked us to hype it up again so that they can get more great entries. The Episodic Story Lab is really, really great. And so it’s people who are doing television series, but also things that are kind of like television series. They put together showrunners and TV staff writers and people who are aiming for that kind of job together in a room up at the top of the mountains and they make great TV the same way they’ve been able to make great indie films.

So there’s going to be a link in the show notes to the application process for the Episodic Story Lab. Definitely consider if you’re considering writing TV. And if you are a writer headed towards this industry why aren’t you considering TV? So it feels like a good thing to consider applying for. I think the technical deadline for applying has passed, but they are still reading stuff realistically. So, get your stuff in there. Get into the Episodic Story Lab.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just a fine organization and we keep seeing great people graduating from that program and doing great, great things. So, seems like a no-brainer to me. Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to some follow up. Craig, will you take the first one here?

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ve got Steve in Los Angeles who writes in, “I’m a regular Scriptnotes listener and years ago I attended a Q&A with you at USC. Someone asked,” is he talking to both of us or just you?

**John:** I think it’s probably just me. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Just you. Because who is you? I mean, I’ve done Q&As at USC, but you’ve probably done more.

**John:** I’ve done more.

**Craig:** Your name is on a room there.

**John:** I got a name on a room.

**Craig:** Yep. “Someone asked you the proverbial question how do I break in as a writer.” That is not a proverbial question.

**John:** Yeah. What is a proverbial question? Let’s discuss proverbial questions. Is it an unanswerable fundamental question?

**Craig:** I don’t even know if there are proverbial questions as opposed to proverbial examples or the proverbial complaint or the proverbial – but a typical question, or the often asked question, but proverbial, I don’t know. Because proverbs aren’t in the form of questions.

**John:** No they’re not. They’re just sort of statements. [Unintelligible].

**Craig:** Yeah, I would say someone asked you the hackneyed question, “How do I break in as a writer? You answered that selling a spec screenplay is like winning the lottery. The best way to win is to buy as many tickets as possible. I took your advice to heart and my writing partner and I worked hard to stack the odds in our favor. There have been countless rejections over the years, but last week after writing 17 spec scripts we won.

“Our sci-fi spec, Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers, sold to Warner Bros. I wanted to reach out and say thank you. Your advice motivated me to keep buying lottery tickets.”

Wow.

**John:** Wow. Well congratulations, Steve, and to your writing partner. It’s awesome that you sold your spec. It’s awesome that you wrote 17 scripts. And I think it’s good for people to hear that it’s not about writing a script, or writing two scripts. It’s often about writing a whole bunch of scripts.

You know, Jonathan Stokes, who has become a friend, he is a middle grade fiction writer but he’s also a screenwriter. He works a lot in both. And it took him a long time to get his first purchase or his first spec sale, but then he ended up selling a bunch and he basically had this big old trunk full of scripts and he kind of sold them off one by one. So I’m curious whether that’s going to happen for Steve.

**Craig:** It’s a very common thing when people are interested in your work and hiring you for them to say what do you have in your drawer. So, Steve and his writing partner have another I guess 16 scripts in their drawer. But another thing to point out here, if we extend the analogy of the lottery ticket, unlike normal lottery tickets in which your odds remain the same, i.e. horrendous, in spec screenwriting with every script you write I think your odds get just a little bit better, because you theoretically at least are getting a little bit better each time.

**John:** Yeah. In the next episode of Launch, which I guess came out the same day as this episode of Scriptnotes, which is crazy, the final episode of Launch actually we talked to Tomi Adeyemi who has a book that comes out next week and her book is going to be huge. And sort of like Steve’s situation though, it wasn’t her first book. It wasn’t even really her second book. It was a bunch of stuff before this. And so she’ll seem like an overnight success, but there was a lot of work behind that overnight success-ness. So I would definitely tune in for her story in the next episode of Launch as well.

**Craig:** Yeah, there is the proverbial overnight success – proverbial used correctly there. And typically people will say, “Yes, my overnight success came over the course of 4,000 nights.” We just don’t see all that other stuff. What we see is the result. We see the outcome. So don’t get fooled by outcomes, folks.

Take a lot at the process. Steve has shun a light upon it.

**John:** Indeed. Winston in Los Angeles writes, “I recently wrote to you about my creative paralysis and I want to thank you for the advice you gave me on the podcast. It was affirming and encouraging. And now I’m happy to report that a production company has since agreed to produce my passion project. Of course, this is very exciting and I’m now in the process of attaching a showrunner before we take the project to the market. I’ll be having my first meeting with a potential showrunner very soon. And this writer on paper seems to be a great fit for me and my project.

“My question to you, John and Craig, is how should I approach and handle this meeting?”

So Winston is talking about a situation where he has written something and they’re going to partner him up with an experienced showrunner to go out to market. Like this is a person who would sort of godfather the project and sort of be the backstop to guarantee to the studio and to the network that this is really a show that can happen. And Winston who doesn’t have experience running a show will have somebody who does have experience running the show.

So, Craig, if you are meeting up with a potential creative partner for the first time what do you recommend you do?

**Craig:** Well this one is a tricky dance. I’ve never had this meeting, but I’ve definitely talked to people who have, from both sides. And so I think if you are aware of the potential pitfalls from both sides you’ll probably be well served.

So the showrunner is someone who has experience doing a lot of the things that Winston you may not have experience doing. Some of those are very managerial tasks. Managing human resources, as the corporates say. We are going to be hiring writers. We are going to be assigning writers things. We’re going to be figuring out our budgets. We’re going to be firing writers. We’re going to be hiring writing assistants. We’re going to be promoting writing assistants. We’re going to be dealing with notes from the studio. We’re going to be dealing with notes from the network. We have postproduction schedules to hit. We have staff to hire. We have staff to fire. We have crew to hire. Crew to fire.

We have directors to deal with. On and on and on. Oh, and let’s not forget the actors who occasionally will tromp into a trailer and complain about their characters or ask for more money or ask for more lines. All of this stuff is business-y stuff. So, I think Winston you should just be aware that when you’re speaking with the showrunner that there is a certain amount of experience they have that’s valuable to you, as opposed to going into that meeting and thinking, “So, nobody trust me because I’m new but they should trust me because I’m great. And so they’re just sticking somebody on here to be my babysitter.” That is not at all the case.

However, also then from the other side of things, for the showrunner, I think it’s important for a good showrunner to realize that somebody new to the business has created something that is unique and worthy of attention and thus has created a job for the showrunner.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And that’s really valuable. So, the more the two of you can learn to trust and love each other, and the more the two of you can recognize what the other brings to the relationship that is irreplaceable, the better off it will be. If you feel like the showrunner is dismissive or disinterested or imperious then I think it’s fair for you to say I don’t want them.

**John:** Yeah. You got to trust your gut instinct there. And if the first meeting does not go well, I doubt that the third meeting and the 17th meeting will go well. In many ways I would recommend that this not be a meeting. If there’s a way you can have this first encounter not be in someone’s office talking over stuff, I think you’re going to be better off. Because so much of this relationship is going to be kind of a relationship, a mutual trust in that we’re trying to make the same thing. So if you can find some neutral happy spot to have some coffee in and chat that could be great. Where it doesn’t feel like you’re in an office environment necessarily, where you can just talk about overall visions, overall strategies. Where challenges could come up. What some of the opportunities are. Talk about your vision for what is going to happen over the course of the season.

You know, you are the person who wrote this thing that got this all started. And they are going to be the person hopefully who is going to help you carry this all the way through to the end. So, if you can find a neutral place to talk through the story that way that will be great.

A dynamic I don’t think you want to see is where they are suddenly kind of in charge of everything and you are their employee. That’s not going to be healthy either. So, you got to find some place where there’s a good balance that you’re trying to work together to make something rather than you are working for them.

**Craig:** 100%. And it’s good to be able to point to examples of the kinds of working relationships you admire and desire so that there isn’t any of those weird fussy moments where – you know, I was just talking to somebody today, a journalist, and she’s doing an article about our casting director on Chernobyl who is also the casting director of Game of Thrones, Nina Gold, and the journalist asked me this interesting question about how it works with hierarchies where everyone is sort of together in a room. You’ve got your executive producers. You’ve got your director. You’ve got your casting directors. And there’s a difference of opinion. How does hierarchy come into play?

And I had never really thought about the question before, but it did seem to me that in cases where things are working well, like for instance on our show now happily, it doesn’t. That hierarchy is irrelevant. What matters is general trust and faith and another person’s instincts, respect for another person’s feelings and opinions. Respect and belief in your own feelings and opinions. And a general appreciation for passion. Both strong negative and strong positive. And then things get hashed out.

Rather than situations where rank suddenly becomes very important. I find those to be diminishing and dispiriting and I think sometimes what happens is showrunners can take over a show and then you realize, “Oh, they’re a general and I’m some sort of weird lieutenant colonel that no one is saluting or carrying about because they don’t have to because the showrunner is ranked higher.” That’s a bummer.

**John:** Yeah. You’re sort of the founder, but they’re the CEO who got installed above the founder. That sort of thing does happen. I haven’t had a lot of like long term creative partnerships, but the longest I’ve had has been with Andrew Lippa on Big Fish. And a thing that Andrew and I figured out very quickly is that we’re not always going to agree on everything. But publically, when we’re in front of other people, we are in 100% agreement. And we will never disagree with each other in front of other people. And that may be a dynamic you find with this showrunner is that you can close a door and work through all the stuff you need to work through, but when you’re in the room with a network, when you’re in the room with the studio you are one united front.

And if you’re not one united front, they will find ways to pit you against each other, not because they’re trying to bring the show down, but they’re just trying to get their views heard and understood. So, the degree to which you can talk about how to be united in your vision publically, even when you are still figuring out privately what that vision should be. That’s got to be a goal.

**Craig:** And I would even carry that through to writing rooms.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And to casts. Basically, you guys form your own little mafia and you don’t take sides against the family in public. Because you need to be a little mafia. You need to protect each other. Making television shows and movies is a process that is both necessary to make creative dreams realized and also it is a process that is corrosive to creative dreams. And the only thing that will protect you from the corrosive aspect is a mafia-like you and me. You and me, buddy, no matter what, back to back.

And if we have a fight, let’s fight behind closed doors. But when we come out, our ranks our closed. And it’s us against the world. And then everybody will follow along.

**John:** Yeah. That’s the goal.

All right, our last bit of follow up is a slightly different piece of follow up. So we’ve talked about MoviePass several times on the show. So MoviePass is a service. You subscribe for a monthly fee. I think it’s now $10 a month. And with that you can see unlimited movies basically. Or a movie a day.

We originally questioned well how is this possible. This is a way to lose a lot of money for a company called MoviePass.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then people wrote and said, “Oh, you know, I think there actually is maybe a viable business plan here.” And then when we were doing our live show in Hollywood, a guy came up afterwards named John who said, “Oh, you were talking about MoviePass. I’m a MoviePass user. I’ve seen a movie every day on MoviePass.” And like well that’s crazy and great. And would you please write in and tell us about your experience. So, he did. And so here is his testimony of his experience using MoviePass.

And I thought I would just play it in total because if we were to get him on the phone and talk to him about it he’d be answering exactly the same stuff. So, here is John Parker talking about his experience with MoviePass.

**John Parker:** Hey John and Crag. John Paul Parker here. I’m a MoviePass subscriber and I just want to let you know that the service is not a scam. It actually works as advertised. I received my MoviePass card on January 5, 2017. And since receiving my card I have seen a new film in the theater every day. I’ve literally not missed a single day at the theater since getting my card.

Living in Santa Monica there are major multiplex chains like AMC, and also smaller art house shops like the Laemmle Theaters all around me, so I have yet to run out of a new film to watch each day.

The greatest thing about MoviePass is not how many films you get to see, it’s how many really good smaller budget independent films you will see and support. Films like Maude, Tragedy Girls, Ingrid Goes West, Good Time, and Landline are all films I went into completely blind and absolutely loved them. If it wasn’t for this service it is very unlikely I would have dished out the cash to see these films in the theaters unless someone strongly recommended one of them to me.

While the service is not perfect due to its nearly impossible to reach customer service when there are issues, or the inability to get seats early, for what you’re paying for it’s really hard to complain. When I got my card in early 2017 the plan was $500 for the year. It’s now dropped down to $120 per year. Seeing the amount of movies that I have has added up to roughly $5,000 for this year. So I’m definitely getting my money’s worth.

Originally it seemed like MoviePass’s business model was to hope that people wouldn’t use the service as much as the monthly plan is actually worth. Kind of like a gym. But now that the price has dropped down to $10 a month my guess is that what they’re trying to do is just acquire enough customers so that they can use their members to leverage them against the studios and theaters.

The App Store says that they have over 500,000 downloadable users. If that number rises to say 5 million users and each one of their customers sees at least one film a month at an average of $10 a ticket, then you’re looking at $50 million of US box office sales a month that they control.

I hope this information helped you out. All the best to you.

**John:** John Parker that was amazing. Thank you very much for writing in with that. And I should say that Megan McDonnell, our producer, she also uses MoviePass and she’s had a pretty good experience with it. So, I guess I’m wrong. Or I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know how long MoviePass is going to last. I don’t know what it’s going to become. But for me to have dismissed it out of hand was incorrect I think.

**Craig:** Yeah. So certainly someone like John is rare. I don’t think a lot of people can – even have the time or the freedom – to see a movie a day like he does. But the deal, just to refresh my memory, is MoviePass is reimbursing the theater and therefore the studio for the cost of the ticket?

**John:** Essentially what happens is through the app you go in, you say I’m going to see this movie at this theater. And basically it’s GPS bound so that you’re literally at the theater. You’re clicking the button. It’s activating. It’s putting that money on your special MoviePass credit card. You’re using that MoviePass credit card to buy the ticket. So that is the transaction that’s happening.

So from the theater’s perspective, it’s essentially invisible.

**Craig:** It’s the same. It’s the same thing. Right. So, listen, we kind of went through this last time where it seemed like maybe what MoviePass was doing, and John is getting to this as well in his comment, they’re building a database of information and customers that could theoretically then be leveraged. Which is frightening, a little bit. I get frightened by – what’s the thing? If you’re not paying for something, then you are the product?

That worries me somewhat. But for now I guess, you know, go John Parker, go.

**John:** Yeah. I like that it has challenged himself to see a movie every day. He’s seeing a lot of movies he wouldn’t have otherwise seen. So that’s great and that’s fantastic.

I know there’s also been some challenges where certain theaters in Los Angeles and other markets are no longer on MoviePass and that was an unpleasant surprise to some folks. But I’m curious about new models. I would love for it to actually help the theatrical experience to get more people into theaters on a regular basis, because I think big screen entertainment is something worth fighting for.

So, I want it to help big screens and not hurt big screens. I’m not quite sure how it’s going to end up three or five years from now. But we’ll see. Because after all this podcast is going to go on for the next 20 years. So we’ll go through all of these cycles and see what it is. And we won’t believe what we were saying way back in 2018 about MoviePass.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, look at what we were saying in 2016 before things changed.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** Long sigh. Long sigh.

**John:** Imagine that different world we lived in way back when.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** All right. It’s time for one of our favorite features. This is How Would This Be a Movie. Listeners send in articles from the news on Twitter to us, @johnaugust and @clmazin. They say, “Hey, this is like a How Would This Be a Movie.” And usually they’re correct. And so I hit the little fave button. Or if I really like it I save it to my pin board and we gather them all up. And occasionally we go through and take a look at these stories and ask, well, how would they be a movie?

So, we have five different articles that were suggested in. Many of these were by multiple listeners. So we will tackle them and see which of these stories might really be well-suited for the big screen.

**Craig:** Right. Or maybe amend that slightly to big screen or Netflix screen, you know, like perhaps an Amazon movie or a Netflix movie, but a feature film.

**John:** A feature. And sometimes we should say we’ll go through a story and say, you know what, it’s really a TV idea. It’s really a TV series idea.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with television.

**Craig:** Not at all, says the guy who’s writing television right now. So, I agree.

**John:** We are not big screen chauvinists. We just know more about big screen stuff.

The first article is by Zeke Faux for Bloomberg, which is just what an amazing name.

**Craig:** Right? Like Zeke Faux? Faux. That can’t be real. That has to be faux. It’s just crazy. That’s crazy. I mean, it would be like meeting somebody whose last name was “False.”

**John:** Yes. The headline of the article is Millions Are Hounded For Debts They Don’t Owe. One Victim Fought Back With a Vengeance. One of our listeners said, “There’s an intriguing criminal network and a great, great persistent protagonist, but also a lot of dramatic action based around spreadsheets and phone calls. Shruggy face.”

I love shruggy guy built out of punctuation.

**Craig:** Shruggy guy is the best. You know who introduced me to shruggy guy?

**John:** Who?

**Craig:** Stuart Friedel.

**John:** That feels completely Stuart Friedel. Stuart Friedel, our former producer.

**Craig:** Yeah. He actually is the human shruggy face guy. Occasionally you can just imagine Stuart going, “What? What are you going to do?”

**John:** Our story follows Andrew Therrien. I guess I’m pronouncing his name right. He is a normal person with a normal job. Gets a phone call from a bill collector about a bill he does not owe. And a second phone call. And a threat to rape his wife. And other violence from these bill collectors. And most people would be frightened, annoyed. Andrew, it almost feels like one of those death wish things where you cross the wrong person.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And he goes on a mission to track down who this person was who is harassing him. But really what the whole industry was like of these people who are trying to collect debts, especially these really basically fake debts. And so this is a long dark slide I would say I would describe this article. Craig, did you feel a sense of a movie in here?

**Craig:** I did. I did. I don’t think it’s necessarily something that’s going to park in cinemas, as they say, but it could be an excellent feature on a Netflix or an Amazon or something like that. And here’s why. There is some general kind of interest in a new sort of villain and a new sort of scam. There’s a great tradition in movies of the little guy fighting back against a shadowy network of bad, bad people. I remember seeing that George C. Scott movie Hardcore, which was really gut-wrenching. But you could feel it. It was like there was a decent person trying to fight this thing that was so much bigger and just so much dirtier than he was. And how was he ever going to possibly win?

And so I like that. That’s good old traditional stuff. And there is an interesting onion-like method to this where you keep peeling layers and finding more and more stuff underneath. And finding people that are oddly sympathetic. And in fact in one point one of the middle men that was handling some of these fake phantom loans ends up killing himself because he’s so miserable about what’s happened and his life has fallen apart because of it.

But the reason that I think this actually could be really interesting to watch and unique is that there’s this fascinating notion of extreme people colliding. So you’ve got – and in the center of this onion there is a bad guy. The bad guy is named Joel Tucker, I believe. Joel Tucker kind of sits on top of this empire of awfulness. And he’s the one that has put all this in motion and he’s the one that has to be stopped.

And Joel Tucker, his scheme impacted millions of people. And if you impact millions of people the odds are you’re going to run into that one-in-a-million guy. And to me that’s sort of already the movie poster. You know? If you hurt a million people, you’re eventually going to hurt that one-in-a-million guy. And the one-in-a-million guy is our hero.

And our hero simply doesn’t care. It’s like, “Oh my god, I found the man who will not stop. His life is designed to find someone like me at any cost.” And he does. I love that.

**John:** In many cases that type of character is the villain. It is the unstoppable killer. It is the Terminator. It is the Freddy or the Jason who just keeps popping back up and is just relentless. And so it’s nice to see the relentless hero for a change, because looking through this guy’s basic makeup it’s not that he classically has the great story or the arc where he was this mild-mannered thing and then someone killed his wife. It’s not that.

It’s just like something was going to piss him off and this was the thing that pissed him off. And once he got pissed off you just don’t stop.

When I first started reading this I thought like, “Oh, there’s an interesting story to be made overall about this predatory bill collecting, about payday loans, about this whole industry that preys upon people who are just between checks on things.” And so you could do the Adam McKay version, The Big Short version, where you’re really looking at it as an overall industry. But in some ways I don’t think it’s as rewarding as the one that focuses on a single person.

We often cite Erin Brockovich as that story of the one person who stands up against a system. And this guy feels like that person standing up against the system.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a little bit like an Average Joe version of John Wick. Now, movies like John Wick are fun and they’re very similar to Taken and Taken is very similar to other movies before it where there is somebody who is an established dangerous person that other people in the world of danger know about and respect. And then somebody mistakenly comes along and screws with them. And then we just have the visceral fun of watching a guy on God mode, basically playing a videogame level, you know. I mean, Old Boy and all that stuff. It’s basically just videogames on God mode.

But this is different because nobody knows who this guy is. And, in fact, it’s almost like this man was waiting for this moment. That his life had been just about being on pause until such a moment that his super power could be required. And his super power is to never stop until he gets the right guy on the phone, and gets that right guy to admit what he’s done, and bring him to justice.

It is the strangest story. And it’s fascinating.

**John:** Well, because usually he would have some sort of structure backing him. So either he’s a journalist who is doing this for a newspaper article. Erin Brockovich, she is working for a law firm who is investigating this. But this was just – he was personally offended. And personally wronged. And that is what starts him on his quest, which is very relatable but also just unusual for this kind of story because he doesn’t have the backing of a greater thing behind him.

**Craig:** Right. That’s why I love it. In fact, there’s no evidence in his life as far as this article indicates that he would have even had the capacity for this. This man’s job – Andrew Therrien, his job was salesman for a promotions company. And then later in the article they talk about what he specifically did as salesman for a promotion company. He was promoting ice cream brands and hiring models for liquor store tastings. That is not a dangerous man. That’s also not a man who becomes obsessive about avenging this harassing phone call for $700.

Just to be clear, it started with a request for $700. And this guy went bananas. And I love that. I just think that’s so cool. And this is the kind of movie where if you got somebody like let’s say Leonardo DiCaprio to just become sort of bizarrely fascinated by this nut as I am, and he’s like a good nut, then you actually would get that in the movie theater. Because it’s like, “Oh my god, he will not stop. This is awesome.” I love that.

**John:** Here’s also why I think you might make the movie version of this is the situation he finds himself in general is relatable. So, I’m not behind on debts but maybe once a year I’ll get that call from a bill collector who is after somebody who used to work for me, or like they’re trying to collect the debt on the sister-in-law of someone who used to work for me. Basically they’re casting out the widest net possible to see if they can put pressure on somebody for some bogus debt. And it is horrible and I hate these people when they call and I let them know how much I hate them when they call.

And so we all have that experience either directly or by one step away and so I think we can relate emotionally to what that experience is like. It’s just like we are the people who wouldn’t snap, and he is the person who snaps.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, this guy bucks the trend. If the world feels like all of the chips are stacked against you, and here is a guy who just walks into a poker game with no chips. And just doesn’t stop until he wins. It’s fascinating. That part of it to me is remarkable. And I think it’s one great actor away from being a thing. But you need that great actor.

**John:** Well, and a script, too.

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

**John:** We always forget somebody has to write the script. Another potentially great role is in Worst Roommate Ever. Do you want to set us up for that?

**Craig:** Sure. Worst Roommate Ever. This has been going around and around. And I got sent this because a lot of people were like, “See, you didn’t have the worst roommate ever.” I don’t know. I think I still did. I think Ted Cruz was worse than this guy, even though this guy turns out to be a murderer. But in his own way, Ted, I believe – you can make an argument he’s complicit in murder. Side thing. We have to get to our – we owe people the – you know, every now and then we do the Scriptnotes side show. And I think gun control. We may need to do the gun control one. We had promised at some point.

**John:** I think we need to. I think we had promised that, so we should dig into that.

**Craig:** We’ll get to it. OK. So, this story is about a man who, again, a bit of a one-in-a-million kind of guy. And here’s what he would do. He would look for people who were advertising sublets, like I need somebody to help split the rent with me. I’ve got a spare room so you’ll pay a little rent and you can move in. And he would move in. And he was a 60ish kind of guy. And for a few months he would be just the best. He would be the best roommate. A gentleman. A kind man. He would pay on time. And then things would start to get bad.

And he would become sort of a nightmare tenant. And what he was doing as it turned out was trying to get people to sue him. This is where this one goes so weird. His whole thing was essentially to create conflict for conflict’s sake. He wasn’t really trying to steal people’s homes from them. He wasn’t trying to extort money from them really. He just liked getting into fights. A little bit like the Joker. Just chaos for chaos sake. So he’s like Roommate Joker.

But eventually it gets much, much worse. I mean, he clearly had serious mental problems and eventually he does end up killing his own brother and goes to prison. And when he is in prison he commits suicide. So he’s not around to torment people anymore. But it is a remarkable story of somebody that would go from rent share to rent share with only one motivation: to enter into a chaotic relationship.

**John:** The article we’re talking about is written by William Brennan. It is in New York Magazine. And what I found so fascinating about him as a villain, it reminded me a lot of the villain in Dirty John. So if you listened to that podcast or read the newspaper series, where superficially charming or charming enough, and sympathetic to the degree that he’d moved to town because of a sick family member and he needed to be closer to the hospital or he’d just been displaced by some natural storm. He showed up with a cat and a dog who he seemed to care for a lot.

So, you felt sympathy for him. And it’s a very classic technique where when you do a favor for somebody you feel extra indebted to them. And so he was doing a favor by moving into the apartment and helping to pay your rent. But, you know, in you doing a favor for him by taking him in you felt this bond. And then he clearly is – Craig, I mean, you’re the psychologist, but like a psychopath? Sociopath?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** To some basic degree he did not seem to – maybe he understood people’s misery and trauma but he liked to inflict it. He seemed to just really get off on just twisting the knife in there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And he went to law school and was apparently a brilliant law student. Failed the bar and never took it again. So, he had this legal background that he could use. But not necessarily use particularly well. He may have perceived himself as the victim in all of these stories. It’s not quite clear. But he’s not a person you should ever let into your home.

**Craig:** No. He’s not. And so there’s a – you probably saw that movie Pacific Heights. It’s a couple decades old now at least. Michael Keaton is essentially in a similar situation. A couple is looking to rent out some space in their home and Michael Keaton shows up and he seems perfect. And then he never wants to leave. And then he becomes a nightmare. And then it becomes a thriller and stabby and so forth.

The reason why I think this is not a movie is actually because the nature of this bad guy is puzzling. I don’t mind watching puzzling heroes because I’m meant to empathize with them, so I will learn about how they are and maybe even aspire to be a bit like them. But this guy’s problem is so strange. His reasons are so strange that they feel a bit arbitrary. And in real life that happens all the time and it’s a very, very scary thing. In movies, it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating if we feel that our villain is purely arbitrary.

And even in a movie like Dark Knight where we are meant to think, at least for a while, that the Joker is arbitrary and loves chaos, he has a point he’s trying to make about the nature of humanity to Batman. This guy has no point. He just likes getting into fights. And that strikes me as just a profound personality disorder. It is bizarre. And there is no explanation for it, nor do I find it particularly satisfying. I don’t want to hate him because I don’t understand him. I feel bad for everybody involved. And then he dies in the end and there’s no real sense of tragedy. The person that he kills, his own brother, there’s not much of a narrative story between those two either. I just don’t think this is a movie.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t think it’s necessarily a movie either. But I think it’s an interesting example of the Blank from Hell genre, which we went through a whole bunch of those. It’s the Nanny from Hell. It’s the Roommate from Hell. It is–

**Craig:** The Adopted Daughter from Hell.

**John:** The Assistant from Hell. That sense of like you’ve invited this person into your life and then this person becomes someone incredibly dangerous to you and to your sense of normalcy. And that happens in real life. We all have experiences where somebody who you thought would be cool ends up not being cool and being kind of a nightmare. And so to take it to the nth degree is really interesting.

But I think you hit a crucial distinction is that when a hero is complicated and it’s sometimes hard to understand exactly how their head is working we kind of lean into it because, all right, I’m going to try to sort this out. When a villain is doing that, particularly a villain who wouldn’t necessarily have full storytelling power, we’re like, yeah, I don’t get it. That doesn’t make sense to me.

Even movies that are, I think, have really great things to them can be frustrating because of that opacity. I really liked I, Tonya, but at the end of the day I have a hard time saying what I believe about Tonya Harding or Jeff Gillooly or actually a lot of the people involved in that story because I don’t think we can really even know. And I don’t think the filmmakers can definitively tell us what was going on inside their heads. And that is frustrating on a narrative level.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a difference between moral ambiguity and I’ll call it motivational ambiguity. I don’t mind wondering at the end of a film if someone is good or bad, because the truth is usually we are both. It’s a very human thing to be morally complicated. And those are interesting endings to movies when you are left discussing with your friends and loved ones afterward what do you think about that character and can you understand why they did what they did. I think we see the villain in Black Panther, Killmonger, is a great example of someone who is morally complicated. And at the end of the movie you can have great discussions about where he came from and why he did what he did.

But motivational ambiguity is frustrating. Why he did what he did, crystal clear. Whether it was wrong or not, that’s a different story. But actually motivated him, no question. He tells you. And when we don’t quite know why people are doing things from a simple motivational point of view it does get frustrating.

**John:** Yeah. So a writer who chose to adapt this story would have to make some fundamental choices like he’s doing this because of X. You’re going to have to pin something down which may not be really true or based on reality, but you’re going to have to give the audience some clear framework for why he’s doing this, or I think you’re going to end up with a very frustrating movie. Or more likely a movie that doesn’t get made because the notes are like, “I don’t get why he does this. It’s a pass from us.”

**Craig:** Yeah. And also pretty good litmus test for whether you should adapt something or not. If you have to invent the beating heart of the thing, what are you adapting it for? I mean, the whole point of these things is that you find something that gets you excited in it. That is inherent to it and honest to it. You can then, you know, paint outside the lines and invent, but there is a connection to something true. If the thing that you are ultimately connected to in a story like this is your invented reason for why this guy does stuff, then what do you need this for?

**John:** Yep. All right, let’s go to another story with a complicated hero, or villain. A character at the very center of the story who we’re not quite sure why she’s doing what she’s doing. So this story is Teen Girl Posed For 8 Years As Married Man To Write About Baseball And Harass Women. This story we’re reading is from Lindsey Adler who is writing for Deadspin.

So it tells the story of baseball fan turned writer Becca Schultz who for eight years was pretending to be a man writing about baseball. She started this persona when she was 13 years old and it was revealed much later that she was in fact a woman ,but she wasn’t just writing about baseball. She was harassing women online and doing some things which are kind of despicable. And it’s very hard to say exactly why.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, well, she tries to explain it. And the explanation starts, well, the way you would expect which is “I wanted to be a valid heard voice in a man’s world. And I was not a man, nor was I even an adult. And so I took upon the mantel of an adult man to be heard.” And that’s a fascinating thing and it’s an interesting commentary on our society.

It’s also – you could look at her performance as an adult man as a horrendous critique of adult men, because she went ahead and did the things that adult men so often do, which is harass women, make them feel bad, pressure them sexually, get them to do things they didn’t want to do sexually, berate them. Except as she says, you know, at some point it wasn’t intentional like an act. She says it slowly led her down a path to some things that she was very uncomfortable doing but didn’t even realize were happening. And then she was in too deep. And I think what ends up going on is people like this create relationships that matter to them.

Everybody, myself, everybody has had a relationship with somebody – even if it’s brief – on the Internet. It doesn’t have to be sexual. It could be a combative relationship. It could be anything. Where you realize I’m in a relationship with this person, for better or for worse. And it’s doing something for me, because I keep coming back to it. And it is a fascinating sort of example of how human relations can become quicksand when you remove accountability. But that in and of itself doesn’t feel like a particularly new or fresh observation to make cinematically.

**John:** Yeah. So at the heart of this is the concept of catfishing. And so this is catfishing where you’re not going into this proposing a relationship where you’re like presenting yourself in a relationship as a person you’re not. We’ve seen tons of stories of that. And I don’t know if there’s been a great movie version of that, or at least a great sort of big screen movie version of that. This one is weird because of the addition of baseball. And the sense that she was just a teenager when she was starting to do this.

But, I mean, teenager-hood is the time when you are trying on personalities anyway. So to try on an adult male personality online, and then carry it through to making up a fake wife and fake kids and then have these online relationships with these women who believe that you are a man – yeah, you can see sort of how it happens. I have a hard time understanding or envisioning how you would make this a movie in the sense of like whose perspective are we in.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because if we’re just seeing her go through all these steps it’s hard to really picture what are we seeing onscreen. This is the kind of thing where I feel like you need the internal voice of the main character who is doing this. And so it feels like a book rather than a movie. I just don’t know how you make sense of this character without having real introspection.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. I understand her. And it is a very juvenile kind of thing that she did. And it was a – I can empathize with the desire for intimacy, even when intimacy goes wrong and turns abusive. I understand essentially what was going on. It doesn’t puzzle me. I just don’t think that there’s anything larger to learn. So it doesn’t need to be represented as a movie, I don’t think. I hope she gets help.

**John:** Yeah. I hope she gets help, too. And I think if there’s a story to be told out of this, or something that’s not quite this story but this general area of a story, it feels to me like a book. It can weirdly be like a stage musical where you can have the ability to sing the song of who you are inside. Or do double casting where you are the same people. She is both herself and the person she is presenting herself. Those are compelling ways to do this. I just have a harder time seeing this as a piece of visual entertainment up on a screen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think actually a musical is a pretty good idea.

**John:** Yeah. I will always fall back on a musical. But yes.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, isn’t Dear Evan Hansen is kind of in this world, right, of a kid who tells a lie and can’t get out of it.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** So, yeah, anytime you are dealing with a very internal, complicated, ugly, greasy, yet beautiful and sad and lovely mush of human emotions, I hear a song.

**John:** I hear a song.

All right. Our next story is from The New Yorker. It is a piece by Rachel Aviv entitled What Does It Mean? “When Jahi McMath was declared brain-dead by the hospital, her family disagreed. Her case challenges the very nature of existence.”

So, Craig, you are our resident almost-doctor. What did you make of this story? And do you want to talk us through the framework here? So essentially a young woman goes in for a tonsillectomy. Something goes wrong. She ends up in a coma. And beyond a coma she ends up brain-dead. The family does not believe that. And essentially keeps her or her corpse, you’ve got to decide where you stand with whether she is alive or not, for years it seems now. And she’s still in this state in their apartment. And I guess it makes you question are they right, are they wrong. Who are the heroes and who are the villains in the story?

**Craig:** This is a classic bioethical conundrum tale here. This girl had – at least it’s suggested – may have had a physical condition where her corroded artery was really close to her pharynx and when that happens that can raise, as the article points out, potentially raise the risk of hemorrhaging. It does appear, in fact, that she was hemorrhaging. And ultimately that led to her heart stopping, a loss of oxygen to the brain. The heart eventually restarts but the brain appears to be dead.

So, you have these situations where Patti [sic] Schiavo was sort of the one everybody knew about. Someone whose brain shows no provable activity on an electroencephalograph. But the rest of the body can be kept alive with a ventilator and all the rest of that. And so the heart keeps beating and so on and so forth. And you’re on a feeding tube, etc.

So, what do we have here? And this is where it gets mushy because this article kind of paints everybody out weirdly to be a villain. That’s how I felt. Like the doctors all felt a little too callous about it and a little too dismissive and a little too, “Ugh, whatever, it’s a vegetable, she’s dead.” And there’s implications that race was a factor.

The family seems to be reading a bit much into some of the body movements that occur with their daughter. Which, you know, sometimes it could be a real thing. I mean, there’s locked-in syndrome and all the rest of it. But it still doesn’t look like she’s alive. I mean, they do bring a doctor in from Cuba who insists that she’s alive. But it’s a little upsetting. And there’s this other strange thing that’s happened. So they talk about the Jahi McMath shadow effect. A rise in the number of families, many of them ethnic or racial minorities, going to court to prevent hospitals from unplugging their loved ones from ventilators. The notion there being white doctors are telling us our kids are dead when they’re not really dead, because they’re racist and don’t care, or care less. And we’re going to fight back.

I don’t believe that that is the case. I don’t.

**John:** I don’t believe that is the case either. Here’s my real worry about this as a movie is I could see this being made as a movie and in the movie version of this the family are heroes and the doctors are bad guys and she clearly is still alive and this is Lorenzo’s Oil and she probably wakes up at the end. You bend it just enough to see like, “Look, they persevered. They believed when no one else believed and look at where we are right now.” And that version of the story doesn’t tell about all the loss and of the costs that happened because of the decision to keep believing that she’s alive when everyone says she’s dead. The costs to the rest of the family. The costs to the medical system. The costs to other people who didn’t get help because this money and time and resources were being spent on this situation.

So, I get so nervous about this because I can’t envision a movie version of this story that doesn’t have this family as the heroes in it.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re right. I mean, you don’t want to do a story where the point is these people are delusional and need to let their kid go. I mean, you could, and generally speaking the way you would do that is by having a disagreement between family members so it didn’t feel like there was some outsider coming in just yelling at them until they finally said, “Oh you’re right. What are we doing?” And then they bury their kid.

But this is not something that really is part of the common human experience.

**John:** Well, I say it is part of the common human experience in like that faith in miracles. That faith in like, no, no, we just have to keep believing longer and then we will – all our faith will pay off. I mean, that’s ultimately what this is is that if we believe hard enough and long enough we will be proven correct. And that is a common experience, whether it has to do with death or not death. And every one of us is also going to face end of life decisions. We’re going to face those choices of like do we start hospice or do we do some other great intervention on behalf of an elderly parent. Like we all do face this. This is just the more extreme version of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s tough when it’s a kid because the whole point of a child is that they’re supposed to live. You know, if there’s someone who is 85 and then the doctors are like “Brain-dead,” you’re like, “No, grandma is still alive.” Well, it’s grandma. What are you going to do? So, I understand the misery of it. And my heart goes out to anybody that has to suffer from this. But I think that we have yet to really come to grips with accepting the notion that we die and that people die. And there is also, look, if you believe religiously then you’re just going to keep these people alive because you believe in a soul and neuroscience doesn’t. Neuroscience believes in electricity.

**John:** Yeah. But you’re going to keep these people alive even though they’re being kept alive by artificial means that were not sort of part of your cultural tradition before this moment. So, that’s the weird thing, too. It’s only going to, in many ways these kind of decisions are only going to get harder as we get better and better at keeping more and more people, their bodies functioning even after what we had decided was death has occurred. That’s an interesting thing, too.

Also I should have said the other big cost of this is, of course, organ donation which is the one thing that can actually save people’s lives.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the part that’s so rough because it’s impossible to say how you would handle something like this, but I’d like to think the way I would handle it would be to let my loved one go and then save as many lives with their organs as I could. And certainly, oh my god, if it’s me – I mean, if I get a bad headache, go ahead and harvest my organs. [laughs]

**John:** There’s a story this past week, I’ll try to find a link to it, about the actor Jon-Erik Hexum. So he was–

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** He was a star who was on this show called Cover Up. He was like a big hunky model guy. And he was messing around with a prop gun and fired a blank that lodged a piece of paper into his head and he died. What I hadn’t heard about the rest of that story is like they donated all of his organs, because it was the perfect death because everything was in ideal condition. And so parts of him are still alive in so many different people, which I think is just an amazing legacy to carry on.

**Craig:** I knew him from Voyagers. He traveled through time. No question. That was a joke that did not work and he died. But, yeah, you save all these lives. And I think that’s wonderful. I would love to do that. But, you know, is this a movie? No.

**John:** No. It is not a movie. It is an interesting story to talk about at a dinner party when you want to depress some people, but it is not a movie. What will not depress them is our final opportunity. A Carnival Cruise Descends into Anarchy. There’s many stories about this one, but it’s Avi Selk writing for the Washington Post is the one we’ll link to.

Essentially on a Carnival Cruise ship, apparently one family that had like 12 or 24 people just created this tremendous chaos. And there’s video of just these brawls happening. Passengers were scared for their safety on the boat. They were like locking themselves through the cabin. We laugh because it’s absurd. I’m sure it was terrible for the people involved. I feel like there’s a movie space here, or at least there’s an episode of a TV show here, because that is sort of like one of my fears. Because it’s awful when you have people on a flight who are misbehaving. Like that’s terrible. But on a boat where you’re there for a week and these people are always around. It’s that sense of like a small village in the middle of the ocean. There’s something really interesting and fun to do there.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s some broad comedy to be done about a cruise. I mean, they’re Australians. They’re like a family of Bogans basically. That’s a word that we learned from Rebel. Yeah, there’s something. I mean, I don’t know. What bums me out is this is the one that probably most studio executives would be like, “Get me that Carnival Cruise thing. Get me the rights to that.” Because it just feels like, you know, it will be that movie. So I don’t even want to help them. I don’t want to help them.

**John:** It’s like Murder on the Orient Express but like funny and on a boat.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah. That’s what they’ll say.

**John:** And could we make it less snowy, and funnier, and could some people be in bikinis. And could we put Seth Rogan in it?

**Craig:** You’re helping them. Stop helping them.

**John:** That’s a movie.

**Craig:** Stop it.

**John:** [laughs] Yep.

**Craig:** No help.

**John:** All right. So, of the How Would This Be a Movies that we talked through, I think it’s clear that the debt collector one is probably the most compelling movie of this batch.

**Craig:** Yes. For me. But the most likely to be made is the Carnival Cruise descends into anarchy.

**John:** I think you’re probably right. Here’s what I’ll say. The Carnival Cruise, you do not have to buy the rights to that Carnival Cruise. There’s really nothing especially great or remarkable about the scenario there. The general sense of like what if you had Animal House but on a cruise ship. That’s a free idea. Free idea for anyone in Hollywood to run off with.

**Craig:** And begin…type…type…type.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. My first is Portal Bridge Connector. So, Craig, you’ve played Portal. You’ve played the amazing videogame Portal.

**Craig:** The cake is alive.

**John:** The cake is alive. The cake is delicious. Portal Bridge Connector combines all the fun of Portal along with the Bridge Connector games where you’re trying to move a vehicle from one side of the screen to the other side of the screen by building a physics enabled bridge. It’s really ingenious. I’m playing the version for the Mac and I’m sure there’s other versions, too. But it does all the fun stuff about bridge things with all the warped sense of humor of Portal. It’s very, very clever so I recommend you waste a lot of your time on Portal Bridge Connector.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** My second one is a great podcast by The Onion called A Very Fatal Murder. It is a parody of true crime podcasts. It is ingenious. It is so, so good. So I don’t want to say too much and spoil it for you, but the episodes are really short. So, download the whole season. You can burn through it in a little over an hour. But it just so nails all the tropes to the degree to which you won’t be able to listen to other true crime podcasts because you’ll recognize, oh yeah, that’s a trope. It’s just ingenious.

**Craig:** See, now I’ll listen. And you don’t have to worry about me not listening to other true crime podcasts, because that wasn’t going to happen anyway. But I do find that whole thing pretty up its own butt. And so I love the idea that they’re taking the piss, as the Brits say. Because it is all very kind of formalized.

You know, this is my problem with podcasts.

**John:** Now that you’ve listened to three podcasts–

**Craig:** These things keep popping up, even in the three I listen to. There’s like – have you ever seen the video that someone did about YouTube voice?

**John:** I haven’t seen that. I should find it.

**Craig:** So, YouTube voice is this thing. People who do YouTube videos where they’re talking about whatever the hell interests them, they all speak somewhat similarly. And they also edit their sentences so that there’s never any breaths. And in fact a lot of times purposefully clip off the ends of words. It’s so strange.

**John:** Yeah. That editing style is really annoying. It’s really clear when you see it.

**Craig:** There’s also podcast voice. And I don’t like it. [laughs] I don’t like podcast voice. And you know what? Neither one of us have podcast voice. Although I will say that in Launch you kind of have podcast voice. You have podcast voice in Launch.

**John:** I do have more podcast voice. And so in the later episodes where it is just more just chatting because I’m literally just in a hotel room and I’m exhausted, I’m a little less podcast voice-y later on. But finding my right voice was hard. And we threw out the entire first episode and rerecorded it because I was too podcast voice-y. It really felt weird and forced.

But it’s the difference between me spontaneously talking like I’m doing right now and reading off a script. And I have to read off a script because I have to be able to make these points and connect these dots in ways.

**Craig:** Well sure.

**John:** That I wouldn’t have to just speaking.

**Craig:** There’s this cadence that we are familiar with for instance on news broadcasts. The local reporter, “I’m standing here where just minutes ago,” and then in England it’s very much – there’s a wonderful, again, a person did a video where someone is just saying garbage but in the intonation of a British news reporter. And you realize how formalized that is. And it’s becoming formalized for podcasts, too. But you know who does a great job of not doing podcast voice, even though it’s an incredibly scripted show? Karina Longworth.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree. I would say part of it is that when you actually just talk to Karina in a normal setting that’s her real voice.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** But it fits really naturally. Her normal speaking voice is a little bit not like how other people would speak.

**Craig:** Her voice is authentic there. You don’t get a sense that she’s doing the podcast voice. Like for instance Leon Neyfakh, and I really, really enjoyed the Slow Burn podcast, so I hope he doesn’t take this as some sort of terrible insult, but he’s got massive podcast voice. And I actually want to say to him, you know what, you don’t need the podcast voice.

**John:** Well as the expert in podcasts, I feel like you should step in there. Having listened to so many podcasts, you are the person to–

**Craig:** I’ve listened to ones of them. Ones and ones of podcasts.

**John:** Tell us about your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Super-duper late to the party here, but I went on a binge and watched The Good Place. And I love that show so freaking much, written in part by my cousin, Megan Amram. So sorry that I’m so late to the show. But I hope you guys are watching it. If you’re not, watch it. There have been two seasons so far. Each season has I think ten episodes. So, very manageable. The cast is so, so good. I mean, the writing is amazing and the cast is great. Jameela Jamil – do you watch the show? Or have you watched the show?

**John:** So I’ve watched every episode and I watched the first season twice because I went back and watched it to sort of see what really happened. And I watched it with my daughter who is 12 and she loves it as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. Jessie, my 13-year-old, thrilled. Jameela Jamil may be the prettiest person in the world. Just like – I’m doing the thing where I’m fanning my face because she’s the hottest person alive. And hysterically funny on that show. William Jackson Harper plays Chidi and I want to be his friend so much because he’s basically like every nerd friend I ever had in college where we would sit and talk about Nietzsche and nonsense like that. And just loved it. And even like earlier in the episode I said Leap of Faith and in my mind I hear Chidi saying, “Well actually you know Kierkegaard, really it was better translated as a leap into faith.” It’s just so great.

Kristen Bell, the greatest, has always been the greatest. She’s first ballot Hall of Famer. And then Manny Jacinto is the latest in this wonderful television tradition of impossibly stupid people. I want to do a history of the impossibly stupid person on TV. You know, like Woody Harrelson on Cheers was one of the early ones I remember seeing. Like that’s not possible to be that stupid. And then Homer, of course, one of the great impossible. And then Manny Jacinto is even dumber than all of them.

And then lastly I just want to point out that on The Good Place they do diversity properly. You don’t get a sense that the show is diverse because a social justice warrior was whacking them on the knuckles with a ruler saying, “Come on. Fulfill the quotas.” It’s diverse because the show is about humans who are dying and going to the afterlife. And if you just go by the odds, I looked this up. If you by the odds, and you’re just going to randomly scoop up ten people that just died on our planet, the odds are that out of those ten people two of them will be Chinese. Not Asian. Chinese. Two of them. Two of them will be Indian. Two of them will be of predominately African descent. So we’re now up to six people. We’ve got two Chinese people, two Indian people, two people of predominately African descent.

There’s probably going to be one more non-Chinese, non-subcontinental Asian, so we’re talking about Indonesian or Filipino or Thai or Vietnamese, or Japanese, or Korean. So now that’s seven people.

We’ve got three people left. Divide them roughly up between Hispanic and non-Hispanic white people. That’s basically the world. If anything, they’re a little skimpy on the Chinese people. Other than that, they’re really good about being appropriately representational of the world.

And also there’s one person from America, which I loved. You know, it’s great. Because there’s not that many Americans.

**John:** You left off one person who is fantastic in the show who is Ted Danson who anchors it in way that is just so remarkable. And is clearly having a fantastic time doing it, but also has a weirdly difficult role that he just nails. It is just an incredibly ingenious show. Megan Amram’s puns are worth it. It’s the show where you actually do pause to look at all the signs that they’re constantly changing out. Drew Goddard directed the pilot and it’s hard to imagine that he had such a vision for what that show is going to be so early on. The writing across the board is fantastic. So, hooray.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s just so good and so smart. And it’s legitimately laugh out loud. I cannot wait for the next season.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. As always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions and follow up and feedback-y things.

If you have a short thing, on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. That’s where you can send us articles for us to consider for How Would This Be a Movie.

We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. Leave us a review while you’re there. That is lovely if you do that.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you’ll find transcripts for this and all the back episodes. You can find the most recent 20 episodes or so are on iTunes, but the whole back catalog is at Scriptnotes.net. It is $2 a month for all the back episodes. There’s also some USB drives with the first 300 episodes available at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, thanks for a fun exploration of How Would These Be Movies.

**Craig:** John, it was a great show. And 339, ooh, 340. We’re coming up on 340. So excited.

**John:** Oh, it’s going to be good. All right, have a great week.

**Craig:** See you next time.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Applications are being accepted for the [Sundance Episodic Lab](http://www.sundance.org/programs/episodic-storytelling#/)
* [Millions Are Hounded for Debt They Don’t Owe. One Victim Fought Back, With a Vengeance](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-06/millions-are-hounded-for-debt-they-don-t-owe-one-victim-fought-back-with-a-vengeance) by Zeke Faux for Bloomberg
* [Worst Roommate Ever](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/jamison-bachman-worst-roommate-ever.html) by William Brennan for New York Magazine
* [What Does It Mean to Die?](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/what-does-it-mean-to-die) by Rachel Aviv for the New Yorker. John also mentioned [this story](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5381943/How-actor-accidentally-shot-dead.html) about Jon-Erik Hexum by Gareth Davies for the Daily Mail.
* [Teen Girl Posed For 8 Years As Married Man To Write About Baseball And Harass Women](https://deadspin.com/teen-girl-posed-for-8-years-as-married-man-to-write-abo-1820305588?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark) by Lindsey Adler for Deadspin
* [A Carnival cruise in the South Pacific descended into violent anarchy](https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/02/17/a-10-day-carnival-cruise-in-the-south-pacific-descended-into-violent-anarchy/?__twitter_impression=true) by Avi Selk for The Washington Post
* [Bridge Constructor Portal](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bridge-constructor-portal/id1311353234?mt=8)
* [A Very Fatal Murder](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/a-very-fatal-murder/id1333714430?mt=2)
* [The Good Place](https://www.nbc.com/the-good-place?nbc=1) on NBC.
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_339.mp3).