Search Results for: hero main character protagonist

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/distracted-boyfriend-is-all-of-us).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 316 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie. This time we’ll be looking at stories from Arkansas, to Copenhagen, to WWII Paris. Trying to figure out which ones might lend themselves to the big screen treatment.

**Craig:** Excellent, but first, before we get to any of that, little business, John.

**John:** All right. Do the business.

**Craig:** The business of democracy, my friend. Right now elections are going on for the Writers Guild of America West and presumably the Writers Guild of America East. Although as you know, I think there should just be one Writers Guild of America.

**John:** But that’s not a thing you can vote on in this election.

**Craig:** It’s not. But what you can vote on are the officers and board of directors for the Writers Guild of America West, if you are a member of said union. And one of the people running is my co-host today and always, John August. I personally have voted for you, John.

**John:** Oh, thank you very much.

**Craig:** I’ve already voted. I voted for you. And I think everyone should vote for you, personally. There are a couple different ways to vote. We have electronic voting and we have regular old paper ballot voting. Paper ballots should have arrived in your mailbox by now. Generally speaking, those of us who live up closer to Pasadena get them later, you know, maybe a day later than everybody else. So, they should be in everybody’s mailbox by now. And also you can vote online, which is super convenient.

A brief reminder. For those of you who are strategy-minded about how to vote. We elect eight candidates to the board in any given cycle. I believe in this cycle one of the current board members is also running for an officer position, which means that the ninth vote getter would then also be taken in and appointed to fill her seat for the remainder of her term. You don’t have to vote for eight people. So there’s, again, for those of you who are strategy-minded, there’s something called bulleting your vote. And the idea is basically let’s say I really want John August to be on the board, which is true. One thing I could do is I could vote for eight people and include him among them. Makes sense.

I could also just vote for him. And what bulleting does is it strengthens your vote for whom you want, because you are not voting for somebody that he is also running against. So, the downside for bulleting your vote is that, well, you’re choosing fewer people and you’re gaming the system a little bit.

So, I tend to vote for about four or five candidates. That’s usually my move. I feel like, OK, I’m doing a pretty decent job here. I’m being democratic. But, I’m also giving a little extra **oomph** to the people I really like. So, we’ve discussed who we like, don’t we?

**John:** I think we have. So, there are people who are running who are from various backgrounds. We are electing probably nine people of the 12 candidates running. In general, in past years, we’ve said we want a mix of different voices and different backgrounds to make sure we have feature writers and TV writers represented. There are certainly plenty of TV writers already on the board and folks who are running who are TV writers as well.

So, a mix would be great.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure.

**John:** The other thing I’ll say is that you would have gotten a paper ballot in the mail by now, but you can also vote electronically. If you look through your spam filter, it sometimes gets caught in that, but it’s from Votenet.com is where the ballot for online voting would be found.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s exactly right. So please do vote, and vote for John August. He’s not allowed to say that, I don’t think. But I am allowed to say it over and over and over. Because I am protected.

**John:** All right. And voting concludes September 18, which is a Monday, but there’s no reason to wait till September 18.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You should vote now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Pause the podcast to vote now.

**Craig:** Just do it.

**John:** Do it. Other bit of news is my news. Big Fish in London is happening. And so it runs from November 1 through December 31. So, if you are in London or you will find yourself in London during that period, come see the show, because I think it will be really good. It’s a different version than we’ve done anywhere else. This version stars Kelsey Grammer. And there will be a link in the show notes to where you can buy tickets.

It’s selling really, really well, which is fantastic. So, if you’re thinking about getting tickets, maybe don’t think about it too long. Maybe just get some tickets because the page I’ll send you to shows the relative availability of different dates and many dates are not that available.

**Craig:** May I ask you a question, sir?

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** As an early viewer and fan of the first iteration, the Broadway iteration — well, not first iteration, but it’s the one that matters. In the version in London, does it include different or new songs?

**John:** It does include different and new songs. So, structurally it works a lot differently, but yes, it includes different songs, including a song that was in the Chicago version which was not in the Broadway version. It has one entirely new song. It has some songs that have been restructured. And actually I would say most songs have been restructured in some ways because things have moved because of the nature of what we’re doing in this version. And it’s spoiling nothing to say in this version the Edward character, who was played by Norbert Leo Butz fantastically on Broadway, that role is split between two people now, more like how the movie works.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So Kelsey Grammer is playing the real older Edward and a great actor named Jamie Muscato is playing the younger story version of Edward, more like the Ewan McGregor character. And so because of that, the songs work differently because different people are singing them. And it allows for some great possibilities.

**Craig:** That was the second question I was going to ask. And you have answered it in such a way as to satisfy my curiosity.

**John:** Fantastic. Let’s do some follow up. So, last week we talked about MoviePass and we were searching for explanations on how MoviePass actually works and we just couldn’t find them in time. But right after we recorded the episode I found out more information. So, I’m going to link to an article from Gizmodo by Rhett Jones that talks through more of the backstory behind. But a crucial thing which I did not understand as we recorded last week’s episode is that MoviePass actually functions as a MasterCard. And so the reason why they don’t have to have a specific relationship with a theater like AMC is it’s just a credit card. So you just buy it with that credit card and they can refund the whole amount to the user.

So, AMC still gets the full price that they paid on the credit card, but it’s the user who gets that money refunded to their account. So, that is how they get around having any specific relationship with an individual theater.

**Craig:** So, I go into AMC. A ticket costs let’s say $14. I hand them this card. They charge me $14. Then, because I have a $10 a month deal with the MoviePass people, MoviePass — and I’ve already spent my $10 — MoviePass just sends me back $14.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Then how does MoviePass make money? It seems like they’re losing money every time somebody goes to see a movie.

**John:** So that is more of what you can find out in this article. And other people who wrote in. So, specifically one of our listeners, Udhaya, wrote in saying, “There’s one reason the MoviePass idea might work. While it appears not to be a money-maker, the people funding this might work out some kind of special access leverage with buyers of the MoviePass which would allow them to target the market holders of the MoviePass by showing special products to them. Think about it. You have a millennial to Gen-X target audience who go to movies frequently.

“If these MoviePass guys could select custom products and services to them, it’s a fraction of their marketing budget to get out more MoviePass.”

So essentially she’s saying — I don’t know if Udhaya is a man or a woman — is saying that it’s the data that’s actually really helpful for MoviePass, because they get to target people who go to movies very frequently. And by collecting all this up, they can actually do something with it that might be useful.

So, and it turns out that the person who is now the CEO of MoviePass was a Netflix person, so it comes from that sort of data background. It made me a little more — a little bit less skeptical that there’s no way it could work.

**Craig:** I guess. I mean, I guess. Look, I don’t understand how they make money. $14 over and over and over — or $12, or $10 — whatever it is, if the average MoviePass person spends more than $10 in actual ticket prices per month, which I assume they do, and frankly the more they use it, the more expensive it becomes for the MoviePass people. That is the most extraordinary cost of data acquisition I can imagine. Especially because once you have their data, they’re just beating the crap out of you over and over, every time they go to see a movie.

So, I don’t know. I’m missing something clearly.

**John:** What I would say though is that same criticism could be leveled against the original Netflix model and the current Netflix model which is that the people who use it a lot are costing Netflix money. And so the people who were getting those discs, who are like watching one movie by mail every day, they were costing Netflix a lot of money. But it’s the people who, kind of like us, who would get the discs and sort of sit on them and not really get the maximum value out of it, those are the people they make money off of.

So I think they’re anticipating people will sign up for MoviePass, they’ll use it heavily for a while. It will taper down till they get back to sort of more normal movie-going habits. And it will sort itself out. I think that’s the hope.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll certainly find out.

**John:** We will certainly find out. So, it is filed away for a one-year follow up. We’ll see where MoviePass is one year from today.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our feature, How Would This Be a Movie. It’s a periodic look at stories in the news or stories we find other places and we examine them to look at how they could be adapted into movies. Usually we’re talking about big screen movies. Sometimes they’re more like made-for-cable movies. Occasionally we’ll decide that, oh, it’s actually more of a TV series idea, or it’s just a bad idea that should never have been put on the outline for us discuss.

But this week we’re going to actually try to do a bunch of them. Usually we do three. This time we might cram though as many as five. But we’ll be a little bit faster going through them and seeing what are the possibilities, what are the downfalls of this kind of movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the first one is something I put on the list. This is a New York Times story by Sabrina Tavernise. It is also a great episode of The Daily. So she came on to talk through it on the New York Times podcast The Daily. And the stories are very complementary. You know, her written version of the story versus the audio version of the story, they are structured differently, but they tell the same story, which is that one year ago 20-year-old Abraham Davis and some friends in Western Arkansas graffitied a mosque in their town with racial slurs and swastikas.

Abraham Davis was eventually caught because of radio surveillance on the mosque. So while in jail, he was unable to make bail. He wrote this letter apologizing to the leaders of the mosque, who then became kind of his allies. They tried to get his felony charge reduced to misdemeanor, not wanting his life ruined for this one stupid thing he did.

So ultimately the New York Times story sort of frames Davis as both a villain and a victim in this situation that’s really more about — as much about class as race and sort of the consequences of some really bad spontaneous decisions.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, what did you make of this story? As a story and as a potential movie?

**Craig:** Well, as a story it’s heartbreaking because you’re dealing with front line of failing America. There is a broken family with a deceased abusive father. And a mother who cannot make ends meet. They are living in poverty. And as is often the case, into that environment slips drinking and bad thinking. And blame. A search for blame.

And so on the one hand, this is a postmortem of let’s just call this almost a run of the mill kind of racist act. This isn’t the act of a coordinated group like those ding-a-lings in Charlottesville. This is more of the random guys get drunk on a Saturday night and go do something stupid. They act out. But they do so hatefully against the most vulnerable of people, namely outsiders. People that don’t fit into the status quo. And then we dissect why.

And underneath it we find that Abraham doesn’t really know why. And he comes off in his own way as sympathetic, because he feels terrible and he apologizes and he wants to make amends. And the people that he harmed, the members of this mosque, who seem like wonderful people, who have been trying very, very hard to live their lives in a place that is, well, inherently hostile to them, behave in, ironically enough, the most Christian way. And they forgive him and they try and help him.

All of that stuff feels very lovely. As a movie, the problem here is that this is too easy. There’s a wonderful moment in Mississippi Burning where Gene Hackman’s character is explaining how racism actually works to Willem Defoe’s character, because Willem Dafoe is a northern FBI guy. Gene Hackman is an FBI guy from the south.

And Gene Hackman’s own father, I believe, in the story does a terrible thing, a racist thing. And when Gene Hackman is done telling the story, the conclusion is he just couldn’t see — his father couldn’t see — that being poor was what was killing him. And that worked great as an object lesson inside of a movie that was about large historical events, people being murdered, and a courtroom drama. This does not have that, so it’s kind of operating on a simplistic Upworthy-like level.

**John:** Yeah. I can see that. And I think Upworthy is a good comparison to it, because I remember that site, and it would always have these sort of heartwarming stories of like, you know, you sort of won’t believe what happened next. And there’s a generosity of spirit that the leaders of the mosque show towards Abraham that is unexpected because it’s very easy to sympathize with their point of view is that they are sort of frightened to be in this town and suddenly have this spotlight on them because of this act that these guys took.

And the prosecutor in the small town decides to go after them for a felony, partly to make an example of them, to try to keep these things from happening again. And yet the leaders of the mosque really want to see this reduced down to a misdemeanor so this guy’s life isn’t destroyed.

I agree with you that I think what’s missing here is the bigger hook that sort of makes it a full story. This feels like a setup and right now it’s sort of like we’re kind of just floating in the second act. We don’t sort of see what his ultimate transformation is going to be. I’m assuming we’re looking at this from Abraham’s point of view, but we could look at it from other characters’ points of view. But what is the ultimate really outcome? What is the end of this journey? And I just feel like we’re still kind of in the middle of this journey right now.

The inciting incident was this decision to go graffiti this mosque. The surprise turn is that the mosque — not that it’s just that he’s caught, but that the mosque comes to his aid.

But we still don’t have anything to sort of push us towards that third act, much less a third act itself.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, it is a wonderful story in that it does exemplify what is the best I think of human behavior. But when you tell a story like this, you are immediately in danger. You’re on somewhat thin ice because partly the whole thing feels a little bit like an apologia for a racist. And even if he is not as much a racist as a misguided, poor, impressionable young person, I don’t think too many people are that interested in investing their empathy and sympathy in him, because on the other side you have these poor people that are doing everything right, following all the rules, putting up with every day racism, and then somebody comes along and puts swastikas, oddly enough, on their mosque. It’s not exactly the most historically enlightened racists.

And so really they’re the ones who deserve all the empathy. There is an interesting dramatic debate there between the prosecutor and then the victims, the actual victims, in the mosque. But overall it’s not a movie.

**John:** Yeah. You look at other stories of southern racism and sort of like discovery. You look at To Kill a Mockingbird, and in To Kill a Mockingbird, you know, Harper Lee has made some very specific choices about whose eyes we’re going to see all of this through. And by putting it in Scout Finch’s eyes, we see the whole story. It allows for a kind of simplicity to sort of really take in the whole thing at once, which would be very difficult if we were just seeing it from her father’s point of view, or from any of the sort of damaged parties’ point of view.

So, I don’t think we have a Scout Finch in this story yet. And maybe that is actually the way in is to focus on Abraham’s brother or some other character that lets us sort of take a wider point of view on what’s really going on here.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a character in here that appears briefly. And, of course, when we talk about these things we don’t mean to be insensitive. The whole point of this is to figure out how it’s a movie. This isn’t a character, it’s a human being, but, in the context of trying to figure out how it’s a movie, there is a character who is Abraham’s friend from high school who is Muslim. And his friend forgives him at the end, and that is certainly an interesting angle because, again, there is something a little sickly underneath all of this which is this weird desire to take the time to understand why this kid did this.

On the one hand, maybe that’s exactly what we need to do because that’s how we pull people away from this stuff. And on the other hand, is that the best use of our empathy right now? It’s a tough one?

**John:** So one last little bit that I want to make sure we didn’t elide from the story is the whole reason why Abraham Davis had to stay in jail is because he couldn’t make the bail. And so it does raise the real issue of sort of cash bail in the US legal system in that if he’d had any more money he wouldn’t have been in jail in the first place.

So, if you were to make this story or some version of this story, I think that’s an interesting detail to make sure you include in there. Because it speaks to the fundamental unfairness of the system as he’s seeing it.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just so people understand how poor Abraham and his family is, the bail was $1,580. And we presume that a bond would have cost a couple hundred bucks or something.

**John:** So in the audio version of the story you get into a little bit more of his family and his stepfather. And both of his parents are on disability. It’s really desperate times there. And so that I think is also part of the story if you’re trying to tell this story on some sort of screen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. Do you want to set up the next one?

**Craig:** Yeah. Sure. So the next one is sent to us — we were tipped off by Mark Harris. Mark Harris — he’s fancy.

**John:** Yeah. He’s a bona fide journalist there.

**Craig:** He’s a bona fide journalist. And husband of Tony Kushner. Is that right?

**John:** Yeah. That’s absolutely true.

**Craig:** Husband. Tony Kushner who I’m sure — by the way, Mark Harris is listening to this going, “Great, you know, I am my own person. You don’t have to mention the Tony Kushner thing. Do I always have to hear about the Tony Kushner thing?”

Yeah, you kind of do. He’s Tony Kushner. What are you going to do?

Anyway, fantastic story in the New York Times about a woman named Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens, who was a spy in WWII. And the article was spurred by her death at the age of 98. So Jeannie de Clarens was an amateur spy. She spoke fluent German, flawless German, no accent. And during the war, I believe after the Nazis had already occupied France, she became an interpreter in Paris for an association of French businessmen representing their interests as they negotiated with the German occupiers.

And while she was doing that she used all the things that were true about being a woman in the 1940s to get information out of the Germans. Essentially she played dumb. There’s a wonderful line. She said, when she was talking to these Germans, for instance when they spoke of this astounding new weapon that flew over vast distances she would say, “I kept saying what you are telling me cannot be true. I must have said that a hundred times.” And it totally worked.

So she heard all of this stuff and passed it along to the British. And then she was caught. She was actually caught a couple of times, different times, and ended up in a concentration camp. And would not talk about her experience in the concentration camp after. She did however meet her husband, who had also been imprisoned in Buchenwald and Auschwitz. And she didn’t speak much about her wartime exploits.

But it is a remarkable thing that these stories of heroism can just be invisible to us for so long. And then we uncover them, and we just marvel at how everyone, the most unexpected people, suddenly stepped up and put their own lives at risk to do what was right.

And I thought it was fantastic.

**John:** One of the things I liked about it was during the time where she was working, you know, translating for the Germans, she seemed to be complicit with them. She seemed to be sort of on their side. She was certainly helping them to be able to negotiate the occupation of France. And so anybody looking at her — a French person looking at her at the time would see her as an enemy, or see her as a collaborator with the Germans, not knowing that she’s actually working with the secret French intelligence network, the Druids, which is the best name ever.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** To provide information. And she’s providing incredibly detailed information, because she had a near photographic memory. So, she’s asking all these questions, but she’s ultimately convincing them to show her plans to, like, the VI and VIII rockets that could have leveled London. So ultimately it was the information that she passed along allowed for bombing raids that took out sort of key production factories along the way.

So, incredibly important intelligence she was providing, yet at the same time to anybody — any French person watching her would think that she was aiding the enemy, which is a crucial thing about spy life. You don’t know who you can trust and no one is trusting you, which is crucial and difficult.

There were also some really good cinematic moments. There was a moment where she’s just about to get out and she’s caught at the last minute. There were some good near escapes. And I could see it. There was a visual quality to it that I think is important.

**Craig:** And as a character she has all the things you want. Because she is not an ordinary person who just happens to overhear people and so in a sense becomes a hero by luck. She’s a genius. So as you already point out, she has a photographic memory. She performed, this is from the article, “brilliantly at the elite Sciences Po, graduating at the top of her class in 1939.”

This is a very, very smart woman. And yet what do they have her doing in the war? Well, translating for men. Right? And just being kind of secretarial in that regard. And she exploits that.

That is a huge Achilles heel. And in wartime when all of these men are doing everything they can at the highest, most cat and mouse levels, to steal information from each other, they’ve left this massive backdoor open because they don’t know that women are as smart, or smarter, than them.

So, she gathers, for instance, documents regarding the German rocket program into a report called the Wachtel Report. And when this report was looked at by intelligence — there’s an intelligence analyst in London named Reginald V. Jones, which is an incredibly British name. Reginald V. Jones. When Reginald V. Jones saw the Wachtel Report he called it a masterpiece in the history of intelligence gathering. And when he asked who sent the report he was told that the source as only known by the code name Amniarix and that she was one of the most remarkable young women of her generation.

And I think that that was absolutely true.

**John:** So let’s think about this as a movie. So one of the fundamental questions I come up to is what language do you shoot this in? You’re going to make this for an American audience, either French or German is going to be switched into English so that we don’t have to read subtitles the entire time. Would you agree?

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So, French becomes English and German stays German?

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** All right. And so we’re doing that and so all of the French people are going to be speaking English. I basically get that. Who is our prototype for Jeannie herself? Who do we see in that role? Because it seems like a star role.

**Craig:** For sure. So, she was born in 1919. This is taking place around 1943. So we’re talking about a 24-year-old woman. And she was beautiful. That was part of the deal was that she was kind of notoriously beautiful. So, you know, here we are looking for a beautiful woman in her mid-20s who we also believe is brilliant. There’s that thing behind the eyes that some men and some women have, and some men and some women do not.

**John:** Yeah. That actress can be found. I’m not actually so worried about that, thinking about that age range. I mean, as you get older we have this generation of remarkable talents, the Cate Blanchetts, the Nicole Kidmans. But I think we have a new batch of those who are in their 20s who could do that. A Daisy Ridley. There’s some great British or American actress who I think could do that role brilliantly.

**Craig:** No question. I think that there are quite a few. And the other — you would want, I think, the thing that this article does not give you really is that key relationship. A relationship will emerge eventually. She does meet this man and they get married. But that’s after.

**John:** That’s the end.

**Craig:** Right. So you need that key relationship in the middle. It doesn’t have to be romantic, but it has to be valuable.

**John:** So the obvious choice for that would be her key handler. Whoever with the Druids she’s dealing with that she has to pass along the information to. That feels like a natural choice. But it could also be the main sort of German person she’s talking to who, you know, to the degree to which he’s an enemy but she has to continually manipulate him. And like how much does he know/how much does he not know? That’s always a great tension where like you’re not sure whether he’s on to her or not on to her. That’s always delightful.

**Craig:** I agree. You’d want to personify the enemy in a villain. You want one guy that represents that real threat. But you also need that other relationship to have significance that is beyond the details of the story. Even if it is her handler, there has to be something there between them that’s greasy.

And, again, I don’t think it’s romance. I think it’s guilt. I think it’s honor. I think it’s a question of what to do and what to not do. Cowardice and courage. But it’s got to be sticky. It’s got to be greasy. There has to be conflict between them to make that relationship mean something and in all likelihood when she ends up marrying this other guy, that other person, whoever it is, man or woman, has to be gone. It does seem like the war has to take things from you that matter, you know? And that means people.

**John:** Yeah. It’s delightful if that handler is married. And so every time that he’s off meeting with her it sort of seems like they’re having an affair. So even if there’s not a sexual relationship, there should still be the threat of a relationship there. There’s the possibility there that can never be explored because of the nature of how things are set up. That’s great. That’s the human drama behind the sort of spy drama we’re seeing.

**Craig:** Yeah. You would need to put that together. But I think that there is a possibility here. I think that — I would say if I were at a movie studio I would not do this as a straight biopic. I would —

**John:** No, no.

**Craig:** I would want to use it as inspiration for a fictional narrative.

**John:** Oh, I might use the real story but knowing that you’re going to be inventing some things because there’s just not documentation of certain things. But I think you could use the real story but just not market it as a biopic. Just market it as a great spy thriller that happens to be based on true story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would go with inspired by. I would have some more license.

**John:** Sounds good. All right, our next one is a very different kind of thing. This is the Distracted Boyfriend meme. So, because we’re an audio podcast I will have to describe it, but once I describe it you’ll say like, oh, that thing I’ve been seeing all over Twitter and I’m really annoyed by.

So, the meme is an image. And the original image stars three people. There are two women and one young man. The young man is walking arm and arm with presumably his girlfriend, who looks over at him horrified because he’s looking back at an attractive woman who is slightly out of focus on the left side of the screen. So it has been dubbed the Distracted Boyfriend meme. And there are a bunch of articles I’ll put in the links of the show notes that talk about the meme and sort of where it came from and sort of how it was used.

Well, I should say that the original image is what I described. The meme became a thing once people started putting labels on the people, sort of identifying the people as ideas, or as types, or as goals. Basically you don’t want the thing that’s on your right arm. You want the thing that’s out of reach back over there. And so sometimes the faces get superimposed, but usually it’s labels.

And I think it was an effective meme that is now burning itself out quite quickly. But I put this on here because I’m curious what kinds of movies you could make out of this meme. So at first I was thinking this is straight ahead what happens when you are the stock photographer who has taken this shot in 2015 and now it has suddenly become a giant meme. Or you’re one of the actor/models in this thing who are suddenly identified with this worldwide phenomenon for something you did in an afternoon three years ago.

But there’s also I think the possibility of, like, what is it about the Distracted Boyfriend meme that feels kind of like all human drama? That you have the one thing, and you’re always looking for that next thing. I feel like so many of our stories that we try to tell on big screens, especially you know our two-hour sort of character dramas are about that guy or about one of those two women.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think there’s a movie, but I do think that there is a good lesson here for screenwriters. And if you were somehow doubting that a picture is worth a thousand words, this one has generated far more than a thousand. And it’s because it’s incredibly extensible. I mean, you look at this and there are a million possible different analogous things that you could put on it, and people are.

And it is because there is a relationship and a conflict. The key to the Distracted Boyfriend meme is the distracted boyfriend’s girlfriend. So the girl that the distracted boyfriend is looking at is unaware. She’s — they’re behind her and she’s walking away. So, to me it’s all about the girlfriend looking at him like, “Ehh, what are you doing?” And that relationship of you’re looking at her because you want something you don’t have, and I’m looking at you because I’ve just realized that you’re gross.

Because there’s this incredible realization on her face that I think is the birth of a revelation. That is a wonderful little bomb that you can set off to make an entire movie out of. But, yeah, no, it’s not an actual movie.

**John:** Yeah. It strikes me that we’ve probably made a hundred times movies from each of those characters’ points of view. So from the girl who has no sense that she is a wrecking ball as she’s walking down the street, where she has such an attraction that everything around her sort of crumbles and she’s blissfully unaware of it. That’s a delightful character sometimes to see.

We make a lot of movies about that guy, the cad. That guy who keeps screwing up but you still love him for some reason. But we’ve definitely made the girlfriend’s movie a bunch of times, who gets betrayed by the guy who thinks that she loves or thinks that she likes. And so sometimes that moment happens on page 10. Sometimes it happens on page 30. Sometimes it’s the strategy of a whole journey and discovery. Sometimes the movie is — realize she originally was the girl in soft focus at the left side of the screen and she’s become the girl on the right side of the screen.

So, those three characters are kind of — I think part of the reasons why this became such a good meme is those characters are really archetypal. It’s an experience we all have seen a hundred times and experienced in our own life.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But it’s not a movie in and of itself.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** It is worth clicking through — Martin Belam for The Guardian wrote up a piece about the original photographer. The picture was originally called “Disloyal Man Walking with his Girlfriend and Looking Amazed at Another Seductive Girl.”

**Craig:** That is accurate.

**John:** That’s fantastic. And so it was a stock photo image by a 45-year-old professional photographer, Antonio Guillem, from Barcelona. And he uses those same three models in a bunch of things, so it’s fun to see those same actors in just a bunch of different situations. So it’s fun to click through if you want to see more about that meme and its origins.

**Craig:** The craziest thing is these other things involving those stock photo actors and the craziest one is jealous girlfriend. There’s a sequence of four photos — jealous girlfriend and her husband — it doesn’t seem like the same guy — they’re happily looking at a pregnancy test. She’s pregnant. Then the next photo is she has a baby and she’s feeding it from a bottle. And then the next bottle is looking at a thermometer. The baby is not a baby anymore. She’s like two. And jealous girlfriend, now mother, is staring at a thermometer worried. The last photo is the jealous girlfriend sobbing as she stares at a toddler’s shoe. And it’s clear that the kid died. [laughs] It’s the craziest — I mean, actually this photographer has the ability to reduce narrative down in a way I’ve never experienced before.

I mean, it’s incredible.

**John:** Yep. The other four set of photos shows essentially the same — it’s a flipped version of the same couple looking at a girl who walks past. So, originally he sees the girl walking past, and then it’s like, oh hey, we know that girl. And so they’re friends. And then the two girls are having coffee. The guy is in the background. And then the two girls are kissing.

**Craig:** It’s getting better and better.

**John:** Yeah. So it can work many, many ways.

**Craig:** It can work many, many ways.

**John:** All right. Our next story comes from, there’s a bunch of different things I can send you to. I’ll link to a New York Post article about it. But ultimately a Daily Mail article which is sort of a more extensive follow up.

So what happens is Lisa Theris, she’s 25 years old, and she goes missing in the dense Alabama woods. Search parties with dogs go to look for her, but they never find her. Her family makes pleas for anyone with information.

Investigators then say that Lisa Theris was with two men who burglarized a hunting lodge in the woods. Eventually each man accuses the other one of killing her. Then a month later, almost 30 days later, Lisa Theris emerges from the woods, onto a highway, and is spotted by a motorist. She’s lost 50 pounds. She’s bedraggled. She says she was drinking water out of a brook and eating berries and mushrooms for all these weeks. She has bug bites and scratches. She looks horrible.

And originally the story is built like can you believe this woman somehow survived. It is a miracle. And then the story gets extra complicated. Do we want to jump to the spoiler right now, or do we want to talk about that initial part?

**Craig:** The spoiler is the only reason to do it, so we might as well talk about it, because otherwise it’s like whatever.

**John:** Right from the first time I saw this article and bookmarked it for like we’ve got to talk about this on a segment, there is something that doesn’t add up here. No young woman without any training is surviving for 30 days in the woods. And she wasn’t that far away from places either. So something else major was going on.

I initially suspected, OK, there’s some serious mental illness or something happening here. One of the initial stories said that she was legally blind. I didn’t see that in the follow up stories. But I thought like, you know what, there’s drugs here someplace. And it seems like there probably were some drugs here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Not just drugs. America’s favorite drug. Meth.

**John:** Meth.

**Craig:** Meth. I went into meth forest and I had meth mushrooms. So, Lisa Theris was hanging around with these two guys who were no good. She doesn’t seem to be any good either, to be honest with you. And when I say no good, I mean trouble.

They were talking about robbing a place. They were, it appears, to be completely out of their mind on meth. And she goes wandering off because she’s out of her mind on meth. Here’s the best part. The cops pick up these two guys. And they say what happened. And eventually they confess that they shot her in the head, which they believe they did because they were on meth.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** That’s where this story starts to go to the next level. I don’t think it’s a movie, but it could be an awesome episode of something. Or like even a plot device of something where two characters are absolutely convinced they’ve killed somebody and it turns out that, no, you were just on meth.

**John:** Yeah. So I really want Gillian Flynn to tackle this. Like Gillian Flynn who did Gone Girl. The same way that she was taking some real life events and sort of spinning them into her own fictional fantasy world for Gone Girl, I feel like this had the beginnings of an idea that needed to be further built out. And so you need some characters who actually had a little bit more agency here. Because one of the frustrations is like all three of the people involved here seem to just be idiots. And so you want somebody to be a little bit brighter and have a little bit more forethought.

But then it’s great when people do have some forethought and still get backed into a corner, which is what is so great about Gone Girl is that everyone ends up being sort of trapped by their own egos and their own devices. There’s something here that could be great, but it just needs a lot of extra stuff to sort of shape it and fill it out.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s kind of silly. Because in the end no one dies. No one is hurt. No one even gets burglarized. It’s just three knuckleheads losing their minds on meth. For those of you who might be thinking about trying meth, we don’t think you should. You shouldn’t do it.

**John:** I would think we can come down pretty strongly on that actually. Because we don’t want to tell you how to live your life, but I think we can say that meth is not good.

I don’t know a lot of tremendously successful people who are heavy meth users.

**Craig:** I actually don’t know any of them. We won’t tell you how to live your life, but we will tell you how not to not live your life. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] We can only offer, like, cautionary tales of things. And this would be a cautionary tale.

Ultimately what I think is appealing about this story is the sudden twists. So like a girl goes missing. That’s heartbreaking, but we’ve seen that before. Oh, these guys confess to killing her, but they don’t know where the body is. Oh, that’s a good twist. Oh, she stumbles out of the woods. Well that’s great. And so then like well what happens. And what we’re lacking right now is a “What happened?”

So we’re somewhere in the second act and there’s nothing — it’s not clear that there’s enough machinery built up to carry us through a second and a third act.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s go on to Copenhagen. Do you want to try to set this one up?

**Craig:** Copenhagen. Oh boy. This is a weird one. So, in Denmark they found a woman’s torso, without a head, arms, or legs. In the water. What happened here?

Well, [laughs] it’s just too weird to be true, but it’s true. A famous Danish inventor by the name of Peter Madsen had built a homemade submarine. And he took a journalist out on a little submarine ride because she was, I believe, writing a story about his submarine. Her name was Kim Wall. She ends up dead. Initially when she went missing he said that there had been an accident on board, which had caused her death, and that he had gone ahead and just buried her at sea.

And that already was not good. But when the body turned up missing a head and arms and legs, it does seem like maybe he didn’t just bury her at sea. That maybe she didn’t just have an accident. And so right now we’re kind of in the middle of this crazy case where this third rate Elon Musk has apparently pulled some Silence of the Lambs crap on his own submarine.

What? John, help.

**John:** So here’s what we have. We have a fantastic setting. It’s Denmark and it’s a homemade submarine. And you have this guy who aspires to be Elon Musk, or a Richard Branson. And he’s convinced this journalist, or maybe she sought out this interview, to go on this homemade submarine with him. And she’s an accomplished journalist herself. She’s Swedish. That’s all really interesting.

And then she dies. What’s tough, though, is to figure out where do you start the story. Do you start the story before this murder happens? Do you start the story with the body washing up? And who are the principal characters other than this guy? And are we following it all from his point of view? Because there’s definitely a dark, dark movie where you’re basically with him this entire time, sort of watching things go awry. But there’s also probably a Fargo-ish version where we have multiple point of views and particularly some law enforcement person who is pushing into the crazy here, to just help — he is thrown into this.

Again, we don’t have enough beats here yet. There’s not enough story here yet. So we have a really compelling world. A compelling central character. We’re not sure we’d follow him as a dark protagonist or as the Hannibal Lecter of the story. But we don’t have really an engine.

**Craig:** I agree. I think that there are quite a few, maybe one could argue too many at this point, television series that center around a single murder, an unexpected murder in a quiet place. A number of these series, in fact, are Danish and Swedish. And you could see this being episode one of an eight-episode series, trying to figure out how someone ended up armless and headless and legless after taking a submarine ride. So there’s certainly the potential for a good mystery here.

But I don’t think it’s at all a movie. It does sort of inspire, though, an idea for a movie.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** A serial killer on a submarine. Like a real submarine.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s like a locked-room mystery. So people just keep turning up dead on a submarine and you’re the guy in charge of figuring out who did it. That’s kind of cool.

**John:** Oh, OK, great. I was hearing that a completely different way. So you’re describing that it’s Murder on the Orient Express but you’re on a submarine?

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** But it keeps happening. Like Murder on the Orient Express, one person is murdered. So in this one — this is more like And Then There Were None on a submarine.

**John:** I originally thought you were describing a serial killer who like got into places on a submarine. Basically that’s why no one could ever detect him. Because he was coming in on a personal submarine.

**Craig:** That would be cool.

**John:** That would be kind of cool.

**Craig:** And weird.

**John:** And weird.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our final one. This is a much kind of looser idea for a story. I guarantee you there’s not a movie about specifically this, but I thought it was an interesting framework for sort of a thing that feels old fashioned yet still apparently exists.

So, this is a story in Fast Company written by John Paul Titlow. And he follows Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer who are starting an online business. And they’re able to do everything great. Things are set up and working well, but what they find, or at least what they suspect, is that sometimes their vendors or other people they’re dealing with are dismissing them, and they think it’s because they’re women.

So they create a fake male cofounder and start using his name on the emails going out. And they find a very different reaction when the email comes from a man’s name rather than a woman’s name. So it basically tracks what it’s like to create a fictitious guy in the company that’s actually run by two women.

**Craig:** I actually think that there is a movie in this.

**John:** Tell me about it.

**Craig:** Well, there is a long tradition in comedies, and I think it would be a comedy with an edge and purpose, of characters creating a lie, losing control of the lie, having to face the consequences of the lie. Usually the point of that is you shouldn’t have lied. And in this one the point can be, oh, you shouldn’t have had to have lied. And there is a possibility of two women creating this man and suddenly encountering all this success and having to farcically keep up the man and his presence and send him into meetings and all the rest of it. It’s a bit like Cyrano de Bergerac but for business. And instead of trying to win over the heart of a woman, you’re trying win over the heart of a VC guy. So you’re sending in some dopey guy who — essentially you hire a bro.

You hire a tech bro to be the face of your company and the entire thing is essentially a satire on sexist Silicon Valley. And then it all comes crumbling down. I think there’s potential for a funny movie there.

**John:** I agree. So, part of what they’re describing here is essentially the premise of Remington Steele. So that was a great detective drama that I loved, or detective comedy that I loved, in the ë80s, starring Stephanie Zimbalist and Pierce Brosnan.

And so Stephanie Zimbalist’s character was a private investigator and no one would take her seriously so she created Remington Steele who would be the man runs the agency, but he was always off on business. Pierce Brosnan shows up as somebody asking for Remington Steele, basically realizes that there’s no real person, and basically fills that spot. And so the tension is between them and this guy who shows up. So that’s certainly a possibility.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend also had a plot line where Rebecca had basically created a fake boyfriend based on this guy on Facebook. But that guy turned out to be her own stalker. And so he shows up and hilarity ensues.

So, there’s definitely a great tradition of that where you’ve started a lie and the lie just keeps spinning out of control. And you’ve lost the ability to sort of manipulate it, but that’s part of the fun of that.

So, I agree some person occupying the spot of that guy ultimately is what’s going to have to happen.

**Craig:** It does seem like that. Who, by the way, is in the great pantheon of culture — who is your favorite fake boyfriend?

**John:** Do I have a favorite fake boyfriend?

**Craig:** Because there is an answer.

**John:** What is the greatest fake boyfriend?

**Craig:** George Glass.

**John:** What is George Glass from? Is that from Not Another Teen Movie?

**Craig:** No. He is from The Brady Bunch.

**John:** Oh my god. The Brady Bunch. Of course.

**Craig:** Jan invented George Glass because Marcia was making fun of her for not having a boyfriend. George Glass.

**John:** George Glass is great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I think there could be some movie there and, again, the casting of these two women is so fundamental because their basic chemistry is going to have to be driving a lot of this. And then you add the third element of whoever this guy is who fills that spot. And some good stuff could happen. You could have the tension between the two women. You have the tension between the two women and this guy. The outsiders. It’s a good way of sort of framing the craziness of Silicon Valley or VC culture. So I can see all of that stuff happening.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think somebody should do this.

**John:** All right. Maybe someone will do this. So, I want to thank Andrew Ellard who pointed us towards this article. And we also had a bunch of readers who pointed us to other articles that we talked about today. Like nine people pointed me to the submarine thing, so thank you for that. Again, you guys continue to be the best people.

Craig, of all the movies we talked through today, you think this one could be a movie and probably the spy story could be a movie?

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s where I’m coming down, John.

**John:** All right. I think those are good choices. But I would say I wouldn’t be surprised if people keep digging around about the meth story and even this New York Times story, which got a lot of attention, there’s something appealing about the worlds in which they’re set. There’s just not enough story here quite yet for either of those other two stories.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. Craig, it is time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do. I do. Today’s One Cool Thing is something that was a cool thing in my life years ago and is about to become a slightly larger cool thing again. The Lego Company is putting out a new Millennium Falcon model. So, the last time, and this is the big one, right. So there was a big one back in the day that I built. It was 5,000 plus pieces. 5,195 pieces. And I built it, John. I built it. It was enormous. And it took me a long time as you can imagine.

**John:** Well, when you say a long time, it was weeks or days?

**Craig:** Weeks. Weeks.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it had to. 5,195 pieces is more than you think it is. It’s so many and a lot of them are tiny, tiny, and you’ve got to find — and the instruction booklet is like a phonebook. So, I built it. I built it. And then over time I actually gave it away to one of my son’s friends, so he has it now.

But they’re reissuing — not reissuing — they’ve created a new one. The new ultimate collector series Millennium Falcon. It’s going to have 7,541 pieces. And it looks so good. And I’m going to buy it. And I’m going to build it. Yeah. I’m going to do it, John.

**John:** So, where will you put the Millennium Falcon when you’re done with it?

**Craig:** That’s a great question. I’ve been thinking about that. I think I’m going to put it in my office. But I’ve got to find a real good spot for it. It’s heavy. I want to build it where I’m going to be, because transporting it is a huge pain in the ass.

**John:** Yeah. So and will you hang it some way, or will it be a pedestal? I suspect there will be a whole aftermarket for like custom pedestals for the Millennium Falcon.

**Craig:** I’m just going to put it on top of something. I’m not going to — hanging it would be very difficult. It is heavy. I can’t remember what the actual weight was of the first one. But it was probably 30 pounds, 40 pounds. I mean, it was really heavy.

And this one, one of the cool things about this one, just to get super dorky, is that they’re giving you a choice. As you build it, you can build it to be a replica of the original Millennium Falcon, or you can build it to include some little tweakies that have since come aboard the version that is in 7, 8, and 9.

**John:** Nice. Cool.

**Craig:** So I can build the Rian Falcon or the non-Rian Falcon.

**John:** That’s awesome. And so one kit will be able to build both, or you have to buy the special kit?

**Craig:** No, one kit will build both. There aren’t that many differences, so they’re able to do that.

**John:** Really nice. Cool. Maybe you could get Rian Johnson to sign your Millennium Falcon.

**Craig:** Ooh, I’m gonna. What a great idea.

**John:** I have good ideas every once and a while. My One Cool Thing is a website called the Living New Deal. And it’s basically a giant Google Map that shows little pins for all of the New Deal projects built across the United States. So, for people who don’t know US history, during the Great Depression there was an act called The New Deal which was to build a bunch of things across the country to basically put people back to work. So, there were major engineering projects, bridges, dams. But also a lot of artistic projects, so like a lot of artisans were put to work building murals and other sort of works around.

And you look at this map and it looks like some horrible outbreak has happened in the US, but it’s all like cool stuff that was built. So you can zoom in, or you can even type in your zip code and see what’s around you that was built as part of the New Deal. And I lost a lot of time just clicking through and seeing stuff because it’s really an impressive achievement of what an organized spending plan can do to create cool things in the world and keep people working.

So, particularly our national parks. That’s one of the great achievements of the New Deal was really building the infrastructure for our national parks system which is still amazing.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a great map. I know that some people feel like government doesn’t do anything, but when you look at this it is astonishing.

**John:** Yeah. And over a period of — the New Deal lasted eight years I would say, max. I don’t really know. I don’t know the outer boundaries of the New Deal.

**Craig:** Roughly. Yeah.

**John:** But it was making stuff. And it’s cool when people make stuff. And it’s cool that so much of that stuff is still around because you get to see it. And even in Los Angeles, you know, you kind of can’t go too far without encountering a grade school that has a mural from the New Deal, or our public libraries. So, check it out.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a time when this country actually functioned.

**John:** Remember that? All right, that is our show for this week. So, final reminders. You should vote in the WGA elections because it’s important to vote and set a course for the next two years of the WGA. And buy Big Fish tickets in London if you are going to be in London because it will be a fun show and I’d love to see you.

Our show is produced by Carlton Mittagakus. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Jonathan Mann.

**Craig:** Oh, I like Jonathan Mann.

**John:** And Craig will especially like this one, because Craig is all over this outro.

**Craig:** Well, you know. I’m pretty useful for outros.

**John:** If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send longer questions, but short questions are great on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. On Facebook, look for us at Scriptnotes Podcast. And look for us on Apple Podcasts to subscribe. While you’re there, leave us a review. That’s always helpful. Thank you for people who do that.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. Transcripts have been a little bit slower, so it’s about a week after the episode goes up that we have the full transcripts. But it’s nice. It’s searchable.

You can find the back episodes of this show at Scriptnotes.net or on the USB drive. Just go to store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, have a fun week.

**Craig:** You too. And I’ll see you soon.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Cast your ballot in the WGAw Officers and Board of Directors election](https://eballotuv.votenet.com/wgawest/login.cfm)
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.theotherpalace.co.uk/whats-on/big-fish-the-musical/booking) for this November and December’s London run of Big Fish: The Musical
* Gizmodo on [Why MoviePass’s Crazy Cheap Subscription Just Might Work](https://gizmodo.com/why-moviepasss-crazy-cheap-subscription-just-might-work-1798635276)
* Abraham Davis’s story on [The Daily](https://www.nytimes.com/podcasts/the-daily?mcubz=1) and in [The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/26/us/fort-smith-arkansas-mosque-vandalism-and-forgiveness.html?mcubz=1&_r=0)
* William Grimes on [Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/world/europe/jeannie-rousseau-de-clarens-dead-french-spy-in-world-war-ii.html?referer=https://t.co/79fyyCiWZo?amp=1)
* The Distracted Boyfriend Meme in [Wired](https://www.wired.com/story/distracted-boyfriend-meme-photographer-interview), [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/aug/30/the-team-that-made-the-distracted-boyfriend-meme-have-split-up), [Vox](https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/8/25/16200526/distracted-boyfriend-other-woman-stock-photo-meme), [Business Insider](http://www.businessinsider.com/distracted-boyfriend-meme-interview-with-couple-2017-8) and [the “movie trailer” from Vulture](http://www.vulture.com/2017/08/watch-the-trailer-for-distracted-boyfriend-meme-the-movie.html)
* The New York Post on [the woman lost in woods who survived on ‘berries and mushrooms’ for a month](http://nypost.com/2017/08/15/woman-lost-in-woods-survived-on-berries-and-mushrooms-for-a-month/amp/), and follow up from [The Sacramento Bee](http://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article168855082.html) and [The Daily Mail](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4810060/Cops-Woman-month-woods-high-meth.html)
* [Famed Inventor Says He Buried Reporter ‘At Sea’ After His Homemade Sub Sank](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/21/545029872/famed-inventor-says-he-buried-reporter-at-sea-after-his-homemade-sub-sank?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=npr&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews) on NPR
* Fast Company on [Witchsy’s two female founders and their fake male cofounder](https://www.fastcompany.com/40456604/these-women-entrepreneurs-created-a-fake-male-cofounder-to-dodge-startup-sexism)
* [The new 7,541-piece Lego Millennium Falcon is the biggest and most expensive set ever](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/31/16234244/lego-star-wars-millennium-falcon-set-7541-pieces-800-dollars)
* [The Living New Deal map](https://livingnewdeal.org/map/)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](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 Jonathan Mann ([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_316.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 314 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we’ll be taking a deep dive into 1992’s Unforgiven, looking at why Craig calls it a perfect film. Is that a fair assessment? Is it a perfect film?

Craig: Well, no one really knows what perfect is exactly. But for me, perfect.

John: Perfect. Is it perfect in the sense that if you had written it you would stop writing any other movies because you would know you would never top it?

Craig: Nah. I don’t think — if I ever do write the perfect thing, which you know is probably — we’re probably just months away from that, I’m sure, nah, I’d just keep writing anyway because I like it. I like writing. I would have no problem slowly falling off the mountain of my own success.

John: I understand that. I believe that Unforgiven is a terrific film. I do not think it is perfect, so as we get into our discussion I will point out some things which I found not so amazing about Unforgiven. But also reasons why I thought it is a fantastic film for anybody who loves movies to study because it does so many things so incredibly well.

Craig: Yeah. And that’s all reasonable. I mean, it’s a rare thing to be able to say, OK, well I just think this movie is perfect. And that’s always an individual relationship. All of our reactions are individual relationships that we have with these things. But there are so many concrete lessons for screenwriters that are contained within this script, which is wonderful. I can only imagine what it must have felt like to get this script and as the legend has it Clint Eastwood got it from David Webb Peoples when it was initially written I think in the early ’80s. And he read it and said, “OK, yup, I’m going to shoot this. Don’t write no more. This is good. I’m going to shoot it. And I’m going to be in it. But I’m not old enough yet, so I’m putting it in this drawer. And then when I’m old enough I’m going to make it.” And that’s exactly what he did. But the exhilaration of receiving a screenplay like this must have just been, well, something else.

John: So let’s do some setup on Unforgiven. So, the film came out in August 1992. So this is the 25th anniversary of Unforgiven. Craig, do you remember when you first saw it?

Craig: In August of 1992 in a movie theater.

John: I remember when I first watched Unforgiven, it was the summer of ’92, August, right when it came out. And I watched it with my friend Jason Hallett here in Boulder, Colorado. And I was just about to go off to film school for the first time. So I graduated from college, I was getting ready to pack up and move to Los Angeles. And it was one of the last movies I saw before I started film school and I think it had a big impact on me for just that reason. I knew I was heading into the industry that could make something like this movie.

Craig: Yeah. In August of 1992 I had just arrived in Los Angeles. I’m guessing I probably saw this movie with my then girlfriend and now wife. And we were probably at the Beverly Center, which wasn’t — you know, Beverly Center is this mall in Los Angeles. And they have a movie theater in there. I assume they still do. Haven’t been in a while. With lots of little tiny — there were like little mini theater rooms in there. So, it probably wasn’t the best way to see Unforgiven, but I do remember just being blown away by it from top to bottom.

It’s one of those movies where as you leave and you start thinking about it you realize, oh wait, everything I’m thinking about was amazing. And I didn’t even know at the time of that amazing scene that more amazing scenes were coming.

John: Agreed. This is the 25th anniversary of the film, so let’s go back and take a look at sort of what it was like to actually make the film. It had a budget of $14 million. It grossed $159 million in the US. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director for Clint Eastwood, Best Supporting Actor for Gene Hackman, Best Film Editing for Joel Cox, and the screenplay by David Webb Peoples was also nominated but it lost that year to The Crying Game, which was another terrific movie.

Craig: Yeah. The awards stuff is always dispiriting to me because I love The Crying Game and I love Unforgiven. It seems absurd to say that the screenplay for The Crying Game is better than the screenplay for Unforgiven is just stupid. It similarly be stupid to say the screenplay for Unforgiven was better than Crying Game. This is why I just don’t understand these sorts of things. They’re both brilliant.

But certainly if you do believe that the Academy Awards are a general echo of people’s appreciation for certain movies, no question everyone really loved this. So Clint Eastwood had at this point had kind of gone through this period which was a little bit of a — well, it wasn’t creatively his strongest period. I mean, he had come out of the great Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns. And then he had made the Dirty Harry movies which started in a kind of ’70s grindhouse spirit and then, well frankly started to devolve, I think, into just a broad vigilante fantasy world.

And then he had made — I mean I know people like Any Which Way but Loose, but it’s a movie about him and a monkey. It was starting to get a little silly. But here he comes along as a director and this movie going in I would imagine a lot of people, critics or audience goers might think, well, Clint Eastwood, he came out of westerns. He made The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and Fistful of Dollars, and The Outlaw Josey Wales. And that was a while ago.

But, you know, now he’s a little bit of goofy, and so is this going to be another devolution of a genre that he was once really good in? And imagine their surprise.

John: Yeah. It turned out to be a fantastic movie and it’s hard to imagine Clint Eastwood not in this role. But actually this was my first time reading David Webb Peoples’ script. So I should say that we’re going to be providing a link to a script that very accurately reflects the movie. So, the draft we’re going to be linking to is from April 23, 1984. Quite a bit before they shot the film. This is David Webb Peoples’ draft. It says “shooting draft.” Some stuff has changed from this draft to what you see on the screen, but it’s incredibly, incredibly close.

But if you look at the descriptions of the characters, William Munny’s character is meant to be in his 40s. Like it’s not meant to be that old. And so Clint Eastwood I think is actually older than that character is supposed to be, but his age works really well for sort of what’s happening on this character’s journey throughout this story. If you want to read the script, you’ll find a link in the show notes, but we also have it up in Weekend Read. So if you have Weekend Read it’s just in the Scriptnotes Extras folder.

If I refer to page numbers at any point, I’m referring to this draft, but most drafts you’re going to find online are going to have the same kinds of scenes. The page numbers may just be different.

Craig: Yeah. The age factor is an interesting one because you could argue that back in the time that the movie is set, 40 was already quite a bit older than 40 is now. But, yeah, it seems clear that Clint Eastwood understood, OK, this is a certain kind of age that I’m going to need here to make this work. And we’ll get into why in a bit. But I want to point out that your assessment of how close the film hues to the script is absolutely correct. It’s remarkably close. And, again, to reiterate, the script that we’re looking at here was written eight years before the movie came out. And in that eight years of time Clint Eastwood just waited. It is a remarkable act of confidence in a write and you can — this is what happens when you have a great script and everybody just is OK with that. And there isn’t this endless desire to just keep working on it because you can.

There are very, very few changes. There’s one tiny little change that I think is crucial and it’s two words that comes much, much later toward the end. But by and large, Eastwood shot the script. And the reason why I wanted to talk about this movie from a screenwriting point of view is because I can’t think of a better example of a screenplay that is about something. And I’m kind of curious, John, when you watch this movie and when you read this script what you kind of think it’s about.

John: I think the script takes our expectations of what a western is supposed to do and what the hero of a western is supposed to do and what the tropes of a western are supposed to do. It explores them and ultimately sort of rips them apart and sort of lays bare the pain and the suffering that’s underneath all of that and sort of tries to get back to the common humanity that underlies all the sort of mythic heroes that we have coming out of the western genre. I don’t you can make Unforgiven without a good knowledge of all of the westerns that came before it. And the audience’s expectations about what’s supposed to happen in a western.

It’s not sort of playing with the tropes as much as sort of just lighting them on fire and watching them burn away. Is that your experience of the film?

Craig: By and large it is. I think that there is certainly a deconstructive aspect to this. It is the deconstructed western. So the lawman is corrupt and the savage killer is our moral hero. And every story that we’re told seems to be false. But from a human point of view, I think the movie even getting past what it does to westerns, from a human point of view the movie I think speaks directly to the power of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. And how sooner or later those stories will crumble in the face of truth.

Some of the stories that we tell are worth telling. And some are just there to cover up some ugliness. But they all in the end crumble in the face of truth. And it is no small mistake that a key character in this movie is a writer. This writer, David Webb Peoples, is in many ways critiquing the power and the danger of writing itself.

John: All right. So let’s take a look at the characters and sort of the principal characters we are setting up here. Because one of the things I found fascinating as I went back and watched the movie this past week and read the screenplay was that it really doesn’t follow the very classic patterns of, OK, now we’re setting up this protagonist who is going to go on this specific journey. Yes, you have William Munny and he literally takes a journey and then comes back changed. But not changed in the ways you’d normally expect.

So let’s take a look at our principal characters and how they interact. So you have Clint Eastwood who is playing Bill Munny, William Munny. You have Gene Hackman as Little Bill Daggett. If you notice in the script, Eastwood’s character is always called Munny and Gene Hackman’s character is always called Little Bill. So even though they’re both Williams it is never confusing in the actual execution of the screenplay.

You have Morgan Freeman playing Ned Logan. If you look through the actual script there is no reference to Ned Logan’s race. It was just a choice to make Ned Logan be Morgan Freeman. And he’s fantastic. But watching the film I realize like, huh, it does seem curious that no one is addressing the fact that Morgan Freeman is black. It doesn’t matter really that it’s not addressed, it’s not acknowledged.

You have Richard Harris playing English Bob, a terrific character who comes in very late in the story. Is there for a while and rides right out of town. And I want to get into sort of why he’s important and why he’s included in the film, because some of the early reviews said like, “Oh, you could just cut English Bob out of the movie.”

Craig: No. No.

John: Which is crazy. The other two I say fundamental characters are Jaimz Woolvett plays The ‘Schofield Kid.’ He’s the kid who arrives with the offer like hey let’s go kill these two cowboys. Finally, you have Saul Rubinek as W.W. Beauchamp, who is the journalist/novelist/author who is originally following Richard Harris’s character, English Bob, and ultimately is trying to document the myth of the West. Would you say those are the principal characters we need to follow most closely?

Craig: Yeah. I think the only other one that is well worth mentioning is Frances Fisher’s character of Strawberry Alice, who is the head prostitute of a group of prostitutes that work in town. And she is the main driving force behind their call for vigilante justice.

John: Absolutely. So, she plays a very central role early on. If I have a frustration with the film, which I’ll talk about later on, she and the other prostitutes do sort of disappear in a way that gets to be a little bit frustrating. They are magically there when they’re helpful and disappear other times. But you’re absolutely right in that if you want to say the inciting incident of this film is the assault on Delilah and her being cut up and then Frances Fisher’s determination to raise a bounty to kill these two cowboys, which definitely seems like the inciting incident, then she is the driving force behind that. She is the engine of the film and her frustration that this horrible act is going unpunished is what is setting the wheels of this plot in motion.

Craig: Yeah. And as Peoples introduces these characters one by one — this is the beautiful intention of these characters — each one of them essentially is displaying on the one half who they are supposed to be and on the other half who they really are. Everyone seems to be essentially some compendium of a fake story they’re projecting to the rest of the world.

We know — and this is why Clint Eastwood really was the only person I think who could play this part — we know who Clint Eastwood is when he’s wearing western clothing and a hat and when he has a gun in his hand. We know that he is the most dangerous man in the west because we’ve seen all those movies. Sometimes casting does an enormous amount for you. And yet in the beginning of the film he is a broken down pig farmer who can’t really shoot straight. Can’t even get on a horse.

We have Gene Hackman, the sheriff, who is an upstanding lawman, building a house. But his house is crooked and you get a sense pretty quickly that so is he. That he is, in fact, sadistic and does not understand the purpose of the law at all.

You have Ned Logan, who seems to be a happily married man who has left a life of crime behind him. But at the first offer of a chance to go out and live that life again, he jumps at it. He jumps at it, leaving his wife behind without even a word.

John: What I will say is he jumps at it, but he — and I think this is actually underscored a little bit more in the script than in the film. Like a few lines got cut. He basically says he chose the life with the wife because he wanted comfort. Because he was tired of sleeping outdoors. He just wanted a roof over his head. There’s actually a bit that got cut out of the movie where he talks about a roof. And I think it was a little too on the nose compared to Little Bill and his inability to make a good roof.

But he wanted that comfort and that stability. But your earlier point in terms of like it seems like he has a good life with a woman and all this, but he is the one who is eager to find a prostitute. He is the one who is happily going upstairs at the billiards room because that really is more of what he’s into.

Craig: Correct. And this comes up over and over, multiple times. You have Richard Harris’s English Bob who is incredible, and you can’t cut him out of the movie. He’s crucial. He’s crucial first because of what he allows Little Bill to demonstrate to the audience, which is a sadism. But also Richard Harris is the ultimate self-aggrandized liar. You begin to understand that all these legends we hear from the west, and he is one of them — he’s essentially presented as Billy the Kid — is not. He is a fraud. He is a fraud and a drunk. The stories that he has told his slavishly-admiring writer are bunk. The man that he heroically killed in a bar he didn’t heroically kill. That man shot himself in his own foot and then his gun blew up in his hand. And English Bob was drunk and walked right over to him and just shot him like a coward.

Even Strawberry Alice. So, the movie begins with this terrifying incident. Well, it begins with us seeing Clint Eastwood briefly. But the movie-movie, the plot begins with a terrifying incident. In a whorehouse in this little town a cowboy, whose masculinity is questioned by a whore named Delilah, attacks her with a knife and starts cutting her face. It’s terrifying.

And Frances Fisher, who plays Strawberry Alice, the leader of the prostitutes, decides that they are all going to pool their money together to take revenge, because Little Bill, the sheriff, will not give them justice. He actually says I’m not going to even whip them. I’m just going to make them give ponies to the man who owns the establishment, a guy named Skinny. So, there is no justice here whatsoever and they’re going to seek vigilante justice.

But what’s fascinating even then is you have two cowboys in the beginning, one is murderous and sadistic and evil, and then his friend who is almost just a boy. And who is as terrified and shocked by what his friend has done as anyone else is. But he’s now lumped in. And when they come back with the horses, that one who is lumped in with — Strawberry Alice says we’re going to hire people to kill both of those guys. Well, that young one, he wants to give a horse to Delilah, and we can see she wants the horse. And Strawberry Alice won’t let him. Everybody essentially is a bundle of terrible contradictions.

David Webb Peoples won’t even give us two clear-cut villains. He’s going to say I’m going to give you one villain and one innocent man and they’re both going to be at the end of a barrel of a gun and you’re going to have to watch it.

John: Yeah. Looking at Strawberry Alice’s arc here, and I don’t think it fully completes. There could be a way in which you could imagine a character who has a beat in the third act where you see her make a choice that clearly differentiates a path she could have taken or a path she couldn’t have taken. But this moment that you’re singling out is really crucial because there’s this moment where she could have taken the horse and they could have called it done. If her best interest was really for Delilah, she probably would be done. But her interest is sort of agency. She wants to take power, take control of the situation. And that means killing these cowboys kind of no matter what.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, in that moment you understand perhaps her anger is not at all about Delilah. Her anger is about herself and her position and the way they’re being treated. “We’re not cattle,” she says. And so if it means that this poor kid who didn’t do anything has to die, so be it. And if it means that Delilah, the victim, the perfectly innocent victim here needs to be deprived of something, so be it. It’s not about her anymore. Nobody is really about what they say they’re about.

John: So, let’s talk about this opening sequence where we’re basically setting up our world before Bill Munny goes off on the trail. Before he goes off on this quest to kill the two cowboys. So, what I really appreciate this, you know, now watching it 25 years later and reading the script is how Peoples does a really great job with some very difficult things that he makes seem so simple. Which is basically setting up the overall engines of plot and sort of like this is what’s basically going to happen. He does a time jump that’s really natural and smooth where we see the initial incident. We see the cowboy is told to come back in a year with these horses. We set up Bill Munny. And then we come back a year later and they’ve come back with the horses. And it feels really natural.

I can imagine so many other movies which would really creak and strain under this jumping ahead a year, and yet it feels really simple and natural the way Peoples does it. Just like, you know, it’s a new season. They’re back with the horses. You get a sense that everything is going to take a while here just because the distances are so great. It was just — it really struck me as really good writing and execution to be able to pull off this time jump and make it feel so good.

Craig: Yeah. There is no wasted movement here. Everything that happens is gorgeously compact. And you can see that there is nothing that isn’t by careful design. The nature of the attack is horrific. And it is immediately followed by the introduction of Little Bill. And everything he does and says there tells you everything you need to know about him. It also creates a situation that is a time bomb, which is wonderful screenwriting. To have already, I believe she says — we know on page eight she’s gathering money. Page eight she is gathering money to hire vigilantes to come kill these men. A fuse has been lit. It’s already moving. On page eight.

And yet we’ve also had a tremendous amount of exposition. We’ve met a lot of characters. We don’t particularly feel like the movie is moving breathlessly. This is kind of amazing.

John: Let’s take a look at page three. Bottom of page three is where we first meet Little Bill Daggett. And so cleverly Peoples is setting him up before he walks into the whorehouse, the billiards hall, so that we know who he is independent of this moment. It’s a conversation with Clyde. Clyde is not important. But so we establish Little Bill’s physicality. And the initial dialogue is:

LITTLE BILL …wouldn’t let you settle it, huh?
CLYDE Hell, you know how Skinny is. Says he’s gonna shoot ’em…an I says, “Skinny, you can’t do that,” an’ he says, “Well, then get Little Bill down here an’ let’s settle this” an’ I says, “Bill’s sleepin’, Skinny,” an’…

So, in that little bit of dialogue we’ve established Little Bill’s name. We’ve established how important he is to the town. We don’t know necessarily he’s the sheriff quite yet, but we know that he is the guy you call when there’s a problem. And that Skinny, this guy who we just saw with a gun, is not going to do anything until Little Bill gets there. It’s such a crucial way of establishing the power and authority of a character before they’ve entered the scene.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, look at that last little bit is amazing. “An’ I says, ‘Bill’s sleepin’, Skinny.'” So, a guy comes to Clyde — this is Clyde, one of the lawmen in the town, and describes what has happened. Cowboys have come in. one of them has savagely cut up a woman. And Skinny is going to kill that man. And Clyde says you can’t do anything until we get Little Bill, but I don’t want to wake Little Bill up.

Well, that tells us so much about Little Bill and what happens when you do wake him up, because apparently waking him up is way worse than not telling him about all this stuff. And that is an enormous gift. Right in that little bit of dialogue we know that Little Bill already is probably bad.

John: Well we at least know you don’t want to cross him. You don’t want to wake him up. And what I think is so fascinating about the scene that follows is we see the two cowboys tied up and we establish now, OK, he must be the lawman, he must be the sheriff. And so he’s going to take care of this situation. And then within the course of the scene we realize like, oh no, no, he is the villain. He is a bad person. Is such a great revelation. Because basically all the men we see in the scene are bad people. They’re just different kinds of bad people. And the only people we can have sympathy for are the prostitutes who are upstairs who are being completely cut out of the situation.

So, it’s a great scene because we don’t know exactly where we stand with Little Bill at the start, but we see his actions tell us what we need to know about the character.

Craig: Yeah. And the nature of this scene is largely a little miniature trial. Which I thought was brilliant. Because he doesn’t come in there and start talking big and breaking hands and punching people in the face. He’ll do that later. This is actually an insight into how his mind intellectually works regarding the concept of justice. And he has an almost lawyerly negotiation with these men and with Skinny. Skinny literally pulls a contract out. He says, “This here’s a lawful contract… betwixt me an’ Delilah Fitzgerald, the cut-whore. Now I brung her clear from Boston, paid her expenses an’ all, an’ I got a contract which represents an investment of capital.”

Little Bill, and then in parenthesis, sympathetic to the argument, “Property.”

They are having a discussion of law. And when you get to the end of it you think, oh boy, the problem with this man isn’t that he is an emotional hot head, or a naturally violent person. Turns out he is. But right off the bat what Peoples wants you to know about this character is his intellectual concept of justice is completely corrupt.

John: Absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about this parenthetical which is “sympathetic to the argument.” And so every screenwriting guru will tell you like, oh, avoid your parentheticals. Here is a great and crucial parenthetical. Because without that parenthetical to properly phrase property, we could be reading that many different ways. We could say like, oh no, you’re a jerk to be saying that these are your property. Like it could spin you off in a different direction. But by making it clear like this is — that he’s going along with this argument, all his other lines thereafter are colored. It’s a small thing, but that parenthetical ends up becoming incredibly important for our understanding of the second half of the scene.

Craig: Yeah. It’s one of the reasons why I detest people that say don’t use these things. The reason that Peoples puts that in there, as you point it, is because it’s necessary. But more important I think to understand the writerly process is that David Webb Peoples understood it was necessary. That’s the part that a lot of writers miss. They will write these things and they will not have an innate accountability to the audience. Eventually this becomes second nature, I think, to a good writer. To know that this will be ambiguous unless I specify what I mean.

And when people say don’t use these things, they are not only saying something that is stupid, but they’re saying something that is dangerous, because it is literally cutting off a growth process toward being a better writer. This is part of good writing is clarifying ambiguity. And by doing it parenthetically, doing it in such a way that allows an actor to act something, which I think is wonderful.

John: This same scene, the same kind of scene took place later on in the story, you may not need that parenthetical because we would understand Little Bill well enough that it would be completely clear what the color was on that line. But because it’s his first scene, we need that to understand what’s happening.

Craig: Right.

John: The other thing I will point out just because there’s a zillion examples of really great dialogue throughout here, but just take a look at sort of how Peoples is setting up the dialect of people without killing us. And so it’s not every word is spelled out in a funny way, but the things that are interesting he’s choosing to call out. So the betwixt, the least ways, he’s using specific language for different characters so their voices sound different, but he’s not going nuts with the dialect. You don’t have to like stare at a sentence to try to figure out like, wait, what does that actually mean. You don’t have to sound it out. It’s clear what it is, but it’s also clear that it has a voice to it.

Craig: Yeah. He makes you feel like you’re in the place without feeling like you’re in a pretend version of that place. And he says here, you know, and in the hands of a bad writer this can start to choke the emotional payload from certain lines, but when you’re dealing with somebody like Peoples who is an expert, it somehow makes it better. Alice is reasonably upset because Little Bill isn’t even going to whip these guys, much less hang them, which is what she wants. He’s just finding them some ponies. And she’s protesting. And Little Bill says, “Ain’t you seen enough blood for one night? Hell, Alice, they ain’t loafers nor tramps nor bad men. They’re hard workin’ boys that was foolish. Why if they was given over to wickedness in a regular way…”

Hey Alice, they ain’t loafers, nor tramps, nor bad men. That’s a very archaic western construction. And somehow it makes the insanity of what he’s saying worse. I just love that language.

John: I also love that he’s calling Alice by name. So he does know who she is, knows exactly what she does here. And so he’s willing to speak to her, but he’s not willing to give her argument any weight whatsoever.

Craig: Exactly. Everybody is very familiar with each other. The town in another brilliant bit of sub-textual information that Peoples has delivered to us through this scene, we understand that this town is perfectly stable. That even when something like this happens, you cannot break the stability that Little Bill has placed over it. It is under control.

John: Absolutely. So I want to jump ahead to when The Kid comes to visit Munny to encourage him to come with him on this quest. There’s a moment which Peoples in the script describes the house. And I thought it was a terrific description and really indicative of what you can do with very few words to establish what a place is really like. So, this is on page 11.

INT. SOD HUT – DAY Munny selects a tin cup from a wash pan of dirty dishes. It is dark and cool inside his one room sod hut… and poor. The Kid checks one of the three chairs for stability before sitting down.

That’s the extent of it. I’m reading this after having watched the movie, so I’m not sure if that’s actually what was done in the movie. I’m not sure that the beat of checking the chairs actually happened, but it’s such a smart choice to be able to say this is what his place is like. He doesn’t have chairs that work properly. That he’s living in this little dirt hovel.

We’ve already seen him with the pigs, but to establish that the inside of his place is also so desperate is crucial. Because without the physical environment being right for us to be able to understand why Munny would go on this quest we’re not going to buy it. If things seemed OK, we’re never going to believe that he went on this quest to kill the two cowboys.

Craig: Yeah. It’s a terrific description. And it implies an instructive method for creating these places in a screenplay with just text in such a way that people feel like they’re there. I think sometimes writers create a place as if they were alone in a theater directing the creation of a set and then when it’s just the way they want it they call on the actors. But that’s actually not great. And it’s how you end up with actors moving around in sets that they’re disconnected from. Here is a situation where he builds the set with the actors in place. He’s tell us what the reaction and interplay between human and stuff is. And in doing so it now feels so much more vivid. I love that.

Very smart of you to call that out. And while we’re in this wretched hut, we’re meeting this new fascinating character. By the way, The Kid, he’s showing up here — Schofield Kid shows up on page nine. What a great name. We’ll get to that in a second. And we’ve met so many characters at this point. So many. Just to run it down we’ve met Alice, Silky, Delilah, Skinny, Little Bill, Clyde, the two cowboys. I’m missing a few other. I’m sure I’m missing more. And now we’re meeting more people. And it’s all working. It’s working gorgeously.

John: So we’ve met Munny. We’ve met Munny’s two kids. And now we’re meeting the Schofield Kid who is one of our last sort of new characters for a while. And but they’re all good. And this is classically a stranger comes to town. So we have established the normalcy of the house and now this new person is coming to town.

A thing which we skipped over in the very beginning is the script begins with that same crawl or that same sort of opening talking about William Munny’s wife. Weirdly the script does that over the attack on Delilah. And when you see the film, Eastwood does a bookend where it’s the same wide shot with the beautiful sunset. That’s where the crawl now reads, which makes a lot of sense. But the actual script started in a slightly different place.

So, and I think it was a good choice ultimately for the film because it let it be clear that the story is really about this man and not about this woman we’re about to see attacked.

Craig: It was a good choice. I think if they had let that voiceover or crawl play over the attack in the whorehouse, everything would have been robbed of value at that point. You would be reading while you’re supposed to be feeling. You’d be feeling while you’re supposed to be reading. You’d be talking about what guy that you can’t see. And you’re confused. There’s a hundred reasons why that change made absolute sense. But here we are with our main character, this guy that we’re told — and we are being told again by The Kid — is essentially the devil.

This kid shows up. He’s got this ridiculous name. He calls himself the Schofield Kid. So, again, we have a liar. Somebody who is selling his own legend. And this kid is acting tough. He’s so bad at acting tough it’s funny. We don’t buy it for a second. Nobody buys it, really. I don’t even think Clint Eastwood buys it.

John: Let’s pause there for a second. Because if I have an objection to the movie as I watched it this last time is I didn’t believe — I didn’t believe that anybody bought Schofield Kid from the start. And I didn’t believe that Eastwood would have gone along with him at all because he was so clearly out of his depth. I didn’t believe that anyone ever thought he’d killed a person. What’s your take?

Craig: I agree with you. I don’t think William Munny agrees to go along with this kid because he thinks that he’s got a partner that’s going to kill anyone. I think he agrees to go along with the kid because he needs money. He needs money and also underneath there is still that little itch of the adventure. This kid is related to a guy that used to work with William Munny.

And so all we’ve seen of William Munny is this broken down pig farmer who doesn’t look like much. And here’s what the kid says. Munny says, “You’re Pete Sothow’s nephew, huh? Hell, I thought maybe you was someone come to kill me…for somethin’ I done in the old days.” Notice not at all scared of the kid whatsoever. The Kid says, “I could of…easy.” Munny, “Yeah, I guess so.”

Kid says, “Like I was sayin’ you don’t look like no meaner than hell cold-blooded damn killer.”

And Munny says, “Maybe I ain’t.”

Now, let me pause for a second. Of everybody in this movie that is constantly selling their legend, William Munny does the opposite. He is the legend, and undersells it. He denies it over and over and over. So, the Kid says, “Well, Uncle Pete said you was the goddamndest meanest sonofabitch ever lived an’ if I ever wanted a partner for a killin’, you was the worst one. Meanin’ the best. On account of you’re cold as snow an’ don’t have no weak nerve nor fear.”

Now, who he’s describing here is a legendary killer and a very frightening man. And we don’t see that. We see an old broken down guy. He doesn’t even seem to be thrilled by this account. He seems sort of bummed out. And then, you know, then the Kid says, “I’m a damn killer myself, only I ain’t killed so many as you because of my youth. Schofield Kid, they call me.”

That’s ridiculous. And Munny goes, “Schofield? You from Schofield?” This is why William Munny is the only person who just cuts through truth. Like why the hell would you call yourself that?

And he goes, “On account of my Schofield model Smith and Wesson pistol.” That’s ridiculous.

So, anyway, the point being here’s somebody who is pitching the legend of you and you’re saying no. This is the only way that goes across. But in our minds, whether we realize it or not, here on page 11 David Webb Peoples, one of the most efficient screenwriters who ever walked the face of the earth, on page 11 he has essentially pulled a slingshot back. And the slingshot is this man is the devil. This man, William Munny, is the devil. And he’s going to hold that slingshot back the whole way through until…pretty cool.

John: Yeah. Another crucial moment that happens in this meeting with the Schofield Kid is the description of what they’re going after. So, going to kill a couple of no-good cowboys, what for, for cutting up a lady. They cut up her face and cut her eyes out, cut her ears off, and her tits, too.

So, it’s not enough that they cut up her face, like every time that her injuries are mentioned they keep getting added to which I think is just a brilliant choice. It’s like, you know, it has to be worse than what actually happened for it be worth going after these guys. So there’s a classic sort of like we have to save the princess thing, but because she’s a prostitute like well, you know, they did a terrible thing to her and it has to be a more terrible thing with each next person we meet to tell the story.

Craig: Yeah. Once again we live in a country of legends and lies. And nobody seems to have a handle on what’s real. Nobody. Which is awesome.

John: Yep. So this could be a 19-hour podcast as we go through scene-by-scene and talk about them being fantastic, but what’s another moment we should jump ahead to and really single out?

Craig: Well, there’s a few things we learn that we can sort of gloss over, but they support the points we’re already making here. We find out that the Schofield Kid is actually blind, or not completely blind, but can’t see very far. So there again is another possible just lie. And another indication that this kid is full of crap. But he also seems really angry, so something is going on there.

And Little Bill hearing about the vigilantes who are coming to town posts a big sign that says No Arms Allowed in Town. Here comes Richard Harris/English Bob, telling stories about how wonderful he is. And then Little Bill just beats the crap out of him. Savages him. And I’d like to jump ahead to the scene where he’s in the jailhouse and he’s got English Bob in a cell and he’s now coopted W.W. Beauchamp, the hagiographer, the mythologizer, I guess, and he’s now setting the record straight. And you see this writer pivoting from the guy who used to by my hero to my new hero because he has to aggrandize the west.

John: Absolutely. It’s an amazing scene which I had not recalled from my previous viewing of it. And I just didn’t know what was going to happen. It was a startling scene because I knew that Bill was capable of incredible violence. I knew that Beauchamp was an idiot, but also cocky. There were so many things that could happen that I was at the edge of my seat throughout the entire scene.

So, a really ingeniously done scene. Get us into it.

Craig: Sure. Some time has passed. They’ve cut away from the Little Bill story for a while. We’ve spent some time with our three heroes, Ned, William Munny, and the Kid. And now we’re back in jail. And it begins with Little Bill reading this book that W.W. Beauchamp has written about English Bob. And the book is called The Duke of Death. Little Bill keeps mispronouncing the word Duke as Duck. And he’s so amused by this, because he knows English Bob and we know he knows English Bob. The first time English Bob sees him he says, “Shit and scrambled eggs,” to himself. What a great phrase. Like, oh god, not this guy.

And Little Bill explains to Mr. Beauchamp that everything that he has been writing about the west is nonsense. He tells him the true story of what happened with English Bob. And the true story is the opposite of romantic. There’s nothing romantic about it. This dashing guy who is defending a woman’s honor is in fact completely drunk and acting like a jerk. The guy who is the villain is not a villain. He’s just unlucky. And we see W.W. Beauchamp’s — well we see the bubble being burst, right?

But what’s fascinating, and this is why I think this is David Webb Peoples’ critique of the danger of narrative, is that when the mythology is burst Beauchamp doesn’t just give up. He goes looking for a new one. And he begins to talk with Little Bill to try and get information. OK, tell me the real story. And what Little Bill does is he plays a game with Beauchamp ultimately which is I’m going to give you my gun because it’s hard to kill people. And you go ahead and you try and kill me. And he can’t. And Little Bill says, “Hard, ain’t it?”

And now we’re starting to see that everything that we thought about the way killing in the west worked just isn’t true.

John: Yeah. So this scene, basically page 64, there’s two scenes that are all taking place inside this jail. And the first is sort of setting up the mythology. The second is this test that Little Bill pulls on W.W. and on English Bob. And it’s really well done because as an audience member you don’t have any more information than English Bob or W.W. Like you don’t know if the gun is loaded. And you’re constantly thinking through like, OK, what are the options. You are game-theorying it of like, well, if I pull the trigger and it’s empty, then he’s going to kill me. But if I had it to English Bob…it really puts you in the place of this biographer in a way that’s fascinating and great.

And it’s such a great example of this is the kind of scene that would so often be on the chopping block in a normal development process. They’d say like, well, Munny is not in it. It doesn’t really affect the plot if the scene were to be taken out. It’s just an amazing scene. And so is it worth the time and the money and the screen time for this amazing scene? And the answer is absolutely yes. But it can be hard to convince people of that before you start shooting the movie.

Craig: Yeah. I think that the true value of the sequence is only felt a bit later. Because one thing that we learn from that scene is that in this world of liars and self-aggrandizers, Little Bill is actually the real deal. He is lying about who he is. He’s lying when he says I’m a lawman and I care about the law. Who he is in fact is a cruel sadistic man. But he is. You know that because he just proved it.

He proved it. He had no fear whatsoever. His hand was steady. He is not a liar like English Bob. He’s the real deal which is why Beauchamp then follows him to his house to hear more stories. But the reason this is so valuable is because it is setting up a confrontation that we know will be formidable. It’s going to be between two real people. And the next major sequence that happens in the movie is our heroes arrive in this town. Clint Eastwood’s character, Munny, is suffering from a terrible fever. He’s delirious. He has a gun on him. Little Bill comes into the bar and absolutely obliterates him. Beats him to a pulp, which is incredible.

Now there’s no question. The only question we have now is is William Munny the devil, or is he just a broken down guy? Because he sure seems like one.

John: Yeah. It’s a great choice to, like building that confrontation early, because classically you would hold off that confrontation for the third act. At the very end we’d have that moment, or there’d be some reason why the two heroes were separated. They have a class but they both go off. And to have our hero so profoundly defeated so early really by the weather, just by the environment to start with, and then by Little Bill is just terrific. We really have a question about like, oh, is this movie where the hero just dies off really and it becomes about Ned? It’s such a surprising turn.

And honestly the kind of turn that I can imagine so many A-list actors now would not let this scene happen. I can — you and I both know so many actors who would not put up with their characters being so squarely defeated this early in the story.

Craig: Right.

John: Like, no, it’s humiliating to me. It’s emasculating. Exactly what it should be. And it works so well here because it gives us a reason to really dig in and sort of explore this character more and be ready for that final conflict, that final comeuppance.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, being brought low is the best way to set up a triumph. You’re absolutely right.

John: But classically we also say like, oh, he’s beaten at the end of the second act and in the third act he rises, but this is still pretty early in the story. He’s just gotten to town and he’s been defeated. There’s still a lot of movie left here. And the worst of the worst, the low points, they’re still coming. And that’s what’s kind of great about how Unforgiven unspools. There’s still a lot more to go here. They still haven’t really started their mission of killing these cowboys. We’re not even there yet.

Craig: That’s right. And in this moment now where he has been beaten down and is sick, they get him away and he appears to be dying. He says so. He’s delirious. And he’s saying to Ned, “I seen the angel of death Ned, an’ I seen the river.” And he’s talking about these visions. And he’s saying I’m scared. And we’re like, god, he’s scared and he’s dying and he’s talking about his wife. And in the end of his vision, this is where you start to get a hint of what might be waiting. He says, he’s talking about the angel of death. “I’m scared, Ned. Ned, I’m gonna die. I seen her… I seen Claudia too…”

And Ned says, “Well, that’s good now, ain’t it, Bill? Seein’ Claudia an…?”

And he says, “She was all covered with worms. Oh, Ned, I’m scared of dyin’…”

And then he says, “Ned… don’t tell nobody… don’t tell the kids… don’t tell ’em none of… none of the things I done.”

He spoke earlier in a remorseful way about some of the things he did, which were horrifying, including shooting a man so that his teeth came out of the back of his head. But that’s on one level it’s a kind of a rational discussion of remorse. This is a feverish dying man expressing his greatest fear and his greatest wish which is that nobody know his story. And that, again, is just — we talk about thematic unity of a movie. Over and over and over, this is a movie about stories and truth. And Peoples never lets off that gas pedal on it. It’s just brilliant.

You know, when you ask the question, well, what am I supposed to be writing here, the theme will tell you.

Of course he comes out of this fever and what happens next is kind of remarkable. They go and they kill these two cowboys. The first one they kill is terrible because it is the opposite of everything we’ve ever seen in a western, where you show up, there’s either a standoff in the street or a big showdown outside of a saloon. It’s a non-descript valley. It is slow. It is drawn-out. The shooting is incompetent. And the man who is killed isn’t killed instantly. He’s hit once and lies there and they talk for a while, while he dies.

And it again is another reminder that the stories we tell are just junk. And the one person who isn’t surprised at all by how the truth unwinds is Bill Munny.

John: Absolutely. I want to talk about Little Bill and sort of the parallels between Munny and Little Bill. Because both of these men are trying to sort of move past what they were before and build a new life. And Little Bill has been more outwardly successful. He’s building this new house. He doesn’t have a family, he doesn’t have kids, but he has this new house he’s built for himself that’s completely crooked and the roof doesn’t work. But he is successful. He’s pulled himself out of this life of crime from before and is now the king of this little town.

Bill Munny is not successful. You know, he’s a pig farmer. He’s desperate. He’s sick. He is at his last ends. And that is the central conflict. You’ve created these two characters who come from a similar place who are inevitably going to have to come head to head with each other. And so this killing of the first cowboy is he’s essentially an innocent. He is a person who is collateral damage in this thing, in this bigger fight that’s going to have to happen. And we have to see it. And I agree with you. It’s the kind of death we don’t see in westerns because it’s a medium length death.

We’re used to the person who gets shot and immediately dies, who falls over and they’re dead. We’re used to the long drawn-out like there’s a bullet in my abdomen. It’s going to take a week to die and it’s going to be terrible. This is just a couple of agonizing minutes and it’s a cool death that we had not seen before.

Craig: That’s right. And when we come out of it, there’s more collateral damage, because the one person — two of the three could see this clearly. The Schofield Kid can’t. He’s too far away. But William Munny knows what he’s done and so does Ned. Ned was supposed to kill this guy but couldn’t. Lost his nerve. And as a result, having seen this, he says I can’t do this anymore. He just doesn’t want to do it. He has to leave.

And so we find out, OK, Ned is changed. That the truth here is he’s not that man anymore. But now the Kid is excited. He wants to be the next one to do the killing. And in fact he is. He’s the next one. The guy who does frankly deserve to die, the Kid shoots him. And in shooting him the Kid finds out that this is not at all who he is either.

John: A crucial moment that’s happened between these two killings though is that Ned has ridden off and he’s going to go back to his normal life. And in many movies he would either go off. In other movies we would see him being captured and that would be the central focus. Instead, like he’s just brought in to town like already having been captured. Even Ned’s death happens off screen, which is such a fascinating choice. Usually we would want to see the killing stroke that brought our guy to death. Not in this movie. This movie we are finding out with other people that Ned has died. And that is a great transformation. We are with Munny as he finds out that his friend is dead and we don’t have that information before him. That’s great. And that’s such a strong choice for this movie that is so smart about deciding what to show us and what to tell us about what’s happened.

Craig: That’s right. And it builds to one of the greatest scenes ever put on film. And it could only work if Peoples creates that flow of action the way he has. We know that Ned’s been caught. We see Little Bill torturing him, whipping him in a cell. We know he’s in trouble. We know that Munny and the Kid have just killed the second guy and now it’s just about getting their money. And so now we’re at a scene where he and the Kid are waiting on a hill under essentially the most perfect tree ever put on film for its purpose. And while we’re watching this rider, who is one of the prostitutes, slowly riding toward them with their money they have a discussion. And the Kid is essentially saying, despite his best attempts to convince himself, the way Peoples writes it is, “The Kid wipes whiskey from his chin. He has been working hard to make the hysteria he feels into a high… but it won’t quite come.”

And the Kid says, “That was…the first one.” He admits he’s never killed anyone before. And then he says, you know, I can’t do it — I can’t kill anybody else ever again. And one of the great lines ever, William Munny says, “It’s a hell of a thing, ain’t it, killin’ a man. You take everythin’ he’s got… an’ everythin’ he’s ever gonna have…” Which is profound, particularly within the context of a western, which is a genre in which people are constantly being killed. And in which we, the audience, are constantly cheering or meant to cheer. And suddenly here’s somebody who again refuses to go along with the legend. And he doesn’t have to because as it turns out he really is a terrible person.

When the prostitute shows up with the money she tells them that Ned has died. And she tells them that Little Bill killed him and made him say things. And while she’s talking, Munny starts to drink, which we know is the thing that he has not done because his wife cured him of that. But we also know that everything that he ever did that was terrible he did while he was drunk.

And this is what she says. This is just, ah, she said, “First Ned wouldn’t say nothin’… but Little Bill hurt him so bad he said who you was… He said how you was really William Munny,” I’m changing — the script is slightly different, “how you’re really William Munny out of Missouri… an’ Bill said “Same William Munny that dynamited the Rock Island and Pacific in ’69 killin’ women and children an’ all?” An’ Ned says you done a lot worse than that.”

Now, let me stop right there. She starts crying while she’s telling him this. And she’s not crying for Ned. She’s crying because she’s scared to death of the man she’s saying this to. She’s looking at him, understanding he is in fact the devil. And what happens next? The devil.

John: Yeah. So we’ve been promised the devil from the start of the film and the devil finally comes. And going back to the holding off the reveal that Ned is dead, you know, once we know Ned is captured our natural instinct is like, oh, well he’s going to have go save his friend. And so we always think that’s going to be a possibility. And so eventually we’re going to get there. And so we’re willing to put up with the Schofield Kid being all whiney about like, oh, it’s my first time ever killing a man because we know that, oh, he’s going to have to go out and save his friend. But then she comes and that’s taken away. That option is taken away. That pathway no longer exists.

And so the only things that are stopping him from becoming the devil are now here and that’s when he starts drinking.

Interestingly in the script, at least the script that I’m reading right now, does not show him drinking right then. But watching it in the movie, it’s such an incredibly strong moment because people are talking around him. He just takes the bottle and starts drinking. And you know —

Craig: You know.

John: Exactly what’s going to happen. And it’s fantastic.

Craig: Yes. So finally the slingshot is released. And now we cut to the town and it’s night and it’s rain and it’s thundering. Essentially it is now in fact a movie. It is a — so you wanted a western, we’ll give you a western. Here it is. Here comes the lone rider in on the horse. Here comes Clint Eastwood now.

You asked for it. You’ve been cheering for him. And now I’m going to frighten you to death with him. And I’m going to make you think about who it is exactly that you find so heroic. Because when he walks into the bar, he is, I mean, his face alone is terrifying. And he’s facing down this entire room full of men. He immediately kills Skinny. And then he points his gun at Little Bill and Little Bill says, “You be William Munny out of Missouri, killer of women and children.”

And in the script Munny says, “I have done that… killed women and children… I have killed most everything that walks or crawls an’ now I have come to kill you, Little Bill, for what you done to Ned.” And in the movie, what Clint Eastwood says before that is, “That’s right.” And it’s the scariest thing ever because this guy just says I guess you are and then rambles off this outrageous legend of a nightmarish person. And for the first time in this whole damn movie someone says, “That’s right. That’s me. And now I’ve come for you.” And it is terrifying. And in there you see Beauchamp leaning forward like, oh, this is it. This is the real thing.

John: So that last sequence, which would normally be like — it’s both kind of the orgy of violence that you expect to see in a western, but because of the setup and because this character is reluctant to do it, it plays so differently. It doesn’t have — I think Eastwood does a smart job of under-pedaling the fantasy of it. Because the whole movie has been set up so carefully. The script has set up so carefully to sort of puncture all of the excitement over this moment. So that it can both be a great guns a-blazing, but it’s not the end-all/be-all sort of like shoot them up amazing lucky shots coming through. It’s just what you want to see happen and you sort of know inevitably has to happen.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, essentially it’s real. You have one man who is a killer. And you have a bunch of guys who aren’t. And remember that scene that you’re right, dopier people would have said cut out, where Little Bill describes what it’s like. He said fast isn’t the thing. It’s keeping your cool. Well none of these guys can keep their cool. They are shooting not just wildly, but some of them are shooting straight up into the air. They’re terrified. They’ve never done this before. They’ve never killed anyone. We know they’re terrified even early on. They’re terrified to confront English Bob. Not Little Bill.

So William Munny starts shooting them. And he is moving slowly, just like Little Bill says a real killer does. He’s not fast. He is methodical and he keeps his cool. Everybody else is shooting wildly and quickly. And when it is over, a whole bunch of them are dead and the rest of them are leaving. Little Bill is on the floor, we think dead. And now Munny has an encounter with the second most important character in the movie, I’ll keep saying, W.W. Beauchamp.

And Beauchamp, the writer, who has gone from one person to another to another looking for the real legend has this discussion with him. He says, “You killed five men single-handed.” And Munny says, “Yeah.” And Beauchamp says, and god, it’s such a great bit of acting. Saul Rubinek, truly one of the great, great actors. Wipes his mouth, like he’s sweaty and he’s scared, but also excited. And he asks, “Who did you kill first?” That curiosity, that sociopathic curiosity of someone for whom reality is somehow subordinate to legend. He has to know. And Munny, the question to Munny is absurd. “Huh?”

And then Beauchamp, I love this, in parenthesis Peoples puts, “Reciting.” “Wh-wh-when confronted by superior numbers, the experienced gunfighter will fire on the best shots first.”

Munny goes, “Yeah?” I think in the movie he goes, “Is that right?” And then he starts going through all these questions. You killed him first. You killed Little Bill first, didn’t you?

And Munny says, “I was lucky in the order. I’ve always been lucky when it comes to killing folks.”

Beauchamp keeps going. Who is next? Was it Clyde or was it — ?

And Munny points his gun at him and says, “All I can tell you is who’s going to be last.” Which means essentially I don’t care about your storytelling. I don’t care about any of the lies or nonsense. I am the truth. Period. The end. And it trumps everything that you want to do here. Leave or die. And that, again, I think is Peoples great comment on what it means to mythologize things. That the truth has no time for the myth. But what happens after he kills, he finally kills Little Bill, a terrifying moment. Little Bill says, “I don’t deserve this, to die this way. I was building a house.” Lie.

Munny says, “Deserves got nothing to do with it.” Because this isn’t a story. Stories have morals and people deserve things and such. Not to this guy.

John: Yeah.

Craig: He kills him and when he comes outside he delivers this terrifying speech, terrifying, where he essentially in full flagrant Satan mode says, “I’m leaving and if anyone takes a shot at me I’m going to kill them, and I’m going to kill their family. I’m going to burn down their house.” And you believe it. You believe he will do these things. You understand who he is underneath.

And then I think cutting these other scenes and getting to that last bit really makes the last bit valuable. Because you understand from that last bit he returns back to the story that his wife told him that he needs to try and live. And he does. And you understand throughout the story that his intentions ultimately are to redeem himself. He’s trying. He’s the one person in the movie that’s actually legitimately good and honest to Delilah, the victim.

He’s the one person. He is trying to be good, but his nature is awful. And so the very end it says, his mother-in-law, “Some years later, Mrs. Ansonia Feathers made the arduous journey to Hodgeman County to visit the last resting place of her only daughter.” That was William Munny’s passed-on wife. “William Munny had long since sold the place and disappeared with the children… some said to San Francisco where it was rumored he prospered as a dry goods merchant under a different name.” And there’s nothing on the stone, meaning the gravestone of his dead wife. “And there was nothing on the stone to explain to Mrs. Feathers why her only daughter had married a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.”

Huh. What a way to end.

John: Yeah. It’s a great ending. So let’s look at how we actually resolve the film because this is a difference between the script and what we see on the film. So in the final film William Munny rides off. Then we come back to the farm and we basically come back to that same shot we saw at the start. So we do have the payoff, the celebration of sorts, that he does get to be back with his family. We’ve worried about his kids. His kids are OK. There’s a cross fade. And then we start our end crawl. So it’s literally a bookend to the story we’ve seen before and we find out he’s gone off to San Francisco to open a store.

The script has more. And there’s stuff there that I think if I were making this film I would say like, oh, well you’re going to absolutely need those moments because we want to see what happens with the kids. You’re going to want to see that everything resolved nicely, but I would be wrong. Because I think the film actually does a really good job at just sort of being done. Like once we’ve seen that violence and once we’ve seen that like, OK, once we know that he’s gotten back we don’t want to see those kids ever again.

And so the movie version we don’t spend time with those kids again. They have no more scenes. It’s just we’re into the next chapter.

So, that’s Unforgiven. And so I would encourage you to read the script in addition to watching the movie because you will see basically how good the script was before it became the movie, but also look for sort of what Peoples is doing on the page. You will notice a tremendous number of I-N-Gs. There are a lot of present progressive verbs being used where especially if we’re setting up the start of the scene, characters are in the middle of action. They’re in the middle of I-N-G’ing a lot of things. And it feels really nice and really natural.

The other thing you’ll notice, especially in the first half of the script, he is very kind of novel-ish about sort of his sentences. They sort of go on for a while. They’re not like tight and crisp a lot at the start. But they’re really good and they create a really nice feel. So look for the word choices he’s using but also the sentence length and sentence structures are really different and fascinating and I think work really well for the script.

They’re not often what we would point to in Three Page Challenges as like this is what you should do, but I can assure you that if we got these first three pages we would love them because they speak to a voice. They speak to a real understanding of what it’s like to read these pages and see the movie in your mind.

So, definitely do check them out. You’ll also notice that there’s some things that are in the script that are different that I actually really like a lot. So there’s a moment on page 53 where Schofield Kid, they’re talking about his being blind, and in the movie he throws a canteen on the ground and shoots it. And I didn’t know sort of how to take that as I watching this in the movie. In the script, there are these three turtles and he shoots them one-by-one. And it’s clear that he’s actually a really good shot, just at things that are close up.

And it’s a moment that I think plays better in the script than in the actual movie. It made me believe that Ned and Munny might think that the Schofield Kid could possibly kill somebody. That he actually has some kill. So it’s an interesting scene that didn’t make it into the script that way. I can understand why. It’s probably a little bit longer and a little bit — it’s just there’s a little shoe leather there that is not so great. But it was an interesting choice to let us understand like, oh, maybe the Kid is actually good at something. Because right now the Kid is sort of good at nothing.

Craig: Yeah. It could be that they were one a field and they didn’t have the stream and where would the turtles go. And then you got to get turtles. And you got to wrangle turtles. And you got to shoot turtles. And you got to rig fake turtles, because you can’t actually shoot turtles. Yeah, I understand it.

I also want to point out to folks that read the script here that David Webb Peoples apparently didn’t get the memo from all the brilliant script consultants and gurus out there who tell you to not put direction in your movies. He puts direction throughout. He slaters the script with direction. And I’m just picking one page at random, the very last page, here’s something in the middle. “VIEW ON MUNNY We are looking at him by now and there is nothing easy on his face, no big emotions, he is just looking at the grave.” We are looking at him. We. Oh my goodness.

John: We.

Craig: Oh my goodness. No. This must be why he didn’t win the Oscar, because probably the script for Crying Game didn’t have any We in it. Oh, god.

John: So Peoples scene direction of choice is View On, so it’s an intermediary slug line. It’s not a scene header. It’s all caps, single line. And he uses it a lot. And I know he uses it a lot because this afternoon I was going through the script to get it into Weekend Read and sometimes Weekend Read was thinking that those were character names rather than slug lines. So I had to sort of go through and correct them.

So, almost always he’s using View On for these different things. Totally great and valid choice because View On is basically calling out a shot without saying it’s a shot.

I think the trend now has been to leave out the View On and put the noun that’s there, so you wouldn’t say View On, you might say On Munny, or just say Munny does the next thing. But he’s good and he’s consistent and you never have confusion about what it is we’re supposed to be looking at. And that’s good screenwriting.

Craig: Yeah. It’s good screenwriting. And people also will say Angle On. It’s all fine. The point is you are directing, absolutely, don’t run away from this. You are directing a movie on the page. You’re directing it in a way that doesn’t get in the way of the experience of the movie, but rather makes the experience of the movie possible. And that’s exactly what happens here.

When he tells you we’re looking at something, there’s a reason. But therefore if there is a reason you must tell us. He does a fantastic job here. The script is well worth studying for its dialogue, for its structure, for its economy. It is just wonderful in that regard.

Most importantly, I think, the script is incredibly instructive on theme and character and how they intertwine and how all characters are like spokes, all leading to the hub of the wheel of the theme. And I just don’t know how to do it better than what he did here. It is just a spectacular, spectacular example of the best of what screenwriting can be.

John: So Craig, this is my true confession is when you proposed Unforgiven I said, “OK.” And then you went on Twitter and immediately said we were going to do Unforgiven, so I was sort of stuck with it. And I kind of resented it for a little bit because I — like, ugh, I’m going to have to watch this movie, I’m going to have to read this script. And I will say after watching the movie I’m like, yeah, you know what, it’s really good. And then after reading the script I’m like, you know what, it’s really good. But I think the testament to why these conversations can be good and productive is at the end of this hour I do genuinely like Unforgiven much more than when I started.

And I think the process of talking through the choices that Peoples made and that Clint Eastwood made in making this film really let me see some of the beauty in what was actually happening here. So this is not a movie that I started out loving. It’s not a genre that I started out loving. But I think you have sold me on why Unforgiven is one of the great scripts and one of the great movies that we should be paying attention to.

Craig: Victory. Well, I’ll tell you what. Thank you. I very much appreciate that. You get to pick the next one, which I presume is going to be Tuff Turf.

John: 100%. If it involves people posturing aggressively, then that’s my kind of movie. I’ve never seen Tuff Turf.

Craig: Tuff Turf is a movie from the ’80s I think, or early ’90s, starring James Spader. Sort of a teen romance. Derek Haas is obsessed with Tuff Turf. There’s a song in the middle of Tuff Turf — we’re not making fun of Tuff Turf, I swear to god. But whatever, look, you pick the next one. I’m in all the way. Let’s do it.

John: Excellent. So, that is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Carlton Mittagakus. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth.

If you have an outro, send it to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place to send longer questions, or questions that have audio files attached. We love those.

But on Twitter, ask us your short questions. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just look for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a review. That helps people find our show.

You can find the notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. While you’re there, go to johnaugust.com/guide to download the episode guide to all the previous episodes and that will include the previous deep dives we did on Little Mermaid. God, help me out, Craig. What were the other ones we did deep dives on?

Craig: We did Little Mermaid. Well we sort of did The Addams Family. We did Groundhog Day.

John: We did The Addams Family as sort of a general franchise.

Craig: We’re missing a big one. Oh, Raiders.

John: Raiders.

Craig: That was the biggest one of all.

John: That’s why we have a guide. So, you can find the guide for all those things back there. If you want to listen to those back episodes, they’re available on the USB drive. Store.johnaugust.com, or at Scriptnotes.net where you can get the entire back catalog for $2 a month.

Craig, thank you so much for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Cool. Bye.

Craig: Bye.

Links:

• Where to watch Unforgiven, and on IMDb and Wikipedia
• The Unforgiven script
• Weekend Read
• Past deep dives on The Addams Family, Ghost, Groundhog Day, Frozen, The Little Mermaid and Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Tuff Turf on Wikipedia
• The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!
• The USB drives!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/the-magic-word-is-in-this-episode).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 312 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be tackling listener questions and follow up on previous discussions. And, if we have time, we may dig into the Steven Soderbergh new venture where he’s back with a new movie and a whole new way to release movies.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Well, we’ll see if we do have time. We have a lot of questions. And I’m just going to be honest with you. I cheated. I looked ahead. Normally I don’t. Normally I just, you know me. I like to get hit in the face with these things fresh. But I cheated and I looked ahead. Really good questions today.

**John:** Really good questions. What I’m so excited about is we can finally talk about some things that you and I have both known about each other’s work that is now public knowledge. So, I want to start with congratulating you on your HBO series which is about Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. So this has been going on in my life for years. I don’t know, about three years or more now. And this was a project that I pitched a bit ago to HBO. It was the only place I went. I went with Carolyn Strauss, who is one of the executive producers of Game of Thrones. A fantastic person. And former guest of our podcast.

**John:** Very true.

**Craig:** And HBO said, yup, go ahead, write yourself a pilot there buddy. And I did that. And then we brought on another fantastic producer from the UK named — or as they say in England, called — Jane Featherstone, who executive produced Broadchurch among other excellent programs over there. And so we have our little team here. HBO went ahead and gave us the greenlight to make the series. We have a terrific director who is going to be doing all five episodes of this miniseries. There are five of them. I’m writing all the scripts. He’s going to direct all the episodes. His name is Johan Renck. Johan Renck, I don’t know if I mentioned him by name on the podcast, but remember back when I was extolling the virtues of Jack Thorne?

**John:** That’s right. The British writer whose work you loved so much.

**Craig:** Correct. So one of the things that he wrote that I loved so much was a miniseries in the UK called The Last Panthers. And that was directed entirely by Johan Renck. He also has directed Breaking Bad episodes and Walking Dead episodes. Terrific guy. Really, really good filmmaker, so we’re really excited about that. And Jared Harris has signed on to be our — we have basically three leads of the show. He has signed on to be the main — I don’t know, they’re all main because they’re leads, right? He’s signed on to be one of them, which is fantastic because he’s an amazing actor. Did you see The Crown?

**John:** I loved The Crown. And he was fantastic in it.

**Craig:** He was. He was so fantastic that when he died — spoiler alert, the king dies — I was like, oh, I guess I’ll keep watching. But I wish that mostly he was a ghost now and could walk around a lot and talk a lot more. Just make it about him. So, he was amazing in that and he’s always been great. And, of course, he is the son of the late, great Richard Harris, the original Dumbledore.

**John:** Yeah. So you have some quality people involved in your project. And when do you start shooting this thing?

**Craig:** We start shooting it next spring. We need a pretty long run up of prep, because there’s a lot of work to do. But also it’s just the way the calendar worked out. We’re going to be shooting this series in Lithuania and the explosion at Chernobyl took place toward the end of April, April 26, 1986. And the weather in Eastern Europe is sort of rough, rough, rough, rough, rough, hot, rough, rough, rough, rough, rough. So, we kind of need to get to that summertime weather that starts happening in April around there.

There’s a few colder scenes, but it’s really a weather thing. So, that’s when we’ll be starting. The other two leads, I think we are well on the way to casting those. Very exciting names, but I cannot say anything until it is all wrapped up and done.

**John:** And so, Craig, you’re going to be filming in Europe just like I was gone in Europe for the whole year. So you’re going to be there for months making the show and we’re going to have to do this thing with like a nine-hour time delay.

**Craig:** We’re going to have to do the dance again. But I’d like to point out that I have to be there. You whimsically chose to be there. So —

**John:** Yeah, I guess it’s a difference.

**Craig:** It’s a little bit of a difference. By the way, did you see that Jack Thorne has just been hired to rewrite the screenplay for Star Wars Episode VIIII, the one that’s coming after Rian Johnson’s Star Wars?

**John:** Holy Cow. So everything fits together. You’re basically the nexus of all things happening in Hollywood, or really worldwide at this point.

**Craig:** Well, don’t you think it’s a little odd that I just happened to make him my One Cool Thing, and I don’t know, three months later or less, fewer, someone goes, “Hey, you know who we should have to write the next Star Wars movie is Jack Thorne.” I’d like to think that Jack owes me quite a bit. Quite a bit. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. So it really wasn’t his talent that got you to notice —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, it was actually your singling him out that brought him to this acclaim.

**Craig:** Let me put a finer point on it. It was his talent that brought him to my notice. However, no one else appreciates talent. They simply appreciate my appreciation of talent. That’s what I’m saying.

**John:** Yeah I think in Aline Brosh McKenna’s script for Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep’s character makes a similar kind of observation. Like things are already out there, but it’s your shining a light on them that makes them valuable.

**Craig:** It’s my imprimatur. So, Jack, if you’re listening, half. I think that’s fair.

**John:** That’s totally fair. 100%.

**Craig:** Half. Yup. 50% of 100%.

**John:** 50% of 100% is what you’re asking for.

**Craig:** That’s correct. 100% of 50%. And there’s only a 20% chance of that. So, anyway, that is exciting and I’m glad I could finally tell people about it. And for anyone who is wondering, it is going to be historical drama, so it is a dramatization of what actually happened there. It’s not a documentary. It is an as true to history recounting of the events surrounding what led up to Chernobyl, the actual acts in and of itself, and then the terrible things that happened after.

It’s going to be a while before you get to see that on TV, but that’s what we’re heading into. And then you have this wonderful thing happening in London with a fantastic actor.

**John:** That’s right. So, for the last couple months we’ve been trying to put this together. Now we’re finally able to announce it. We are doing Big Fish in London. And so we’re doing a new version of Big Fish that is not what we did on Broadway. It’s not what we did in Boston. It is a third new version of Big Fish. Starting in November in London with Kelsey Grammer starring.

**Craig:** Fantastic. And now Kelsey Grammer is also starring in Billy Ray and Chris Keyser’s show The Last Tycoon. So, I guess Amazon shows they get hiatuses like everybody, so he’s doing this sort of in a hiatus. Is that the idea?

**John:** That’s the idea. So, I’ve talked to Billy and Chris about Kelsey, and they just could not be more enthusiastic about what a great person he is, but the way schedules worked out he’s able to do that, he’s able to do a movie. So, in his break he is doing our show and we are so excited to have him. So we start rehearsals in September. And first performances are in November. So I will be back and forth to London a lot. So, we get to do the time change dance as well.

**Craig:** Oh my god. The good news is that you’ll be back from London right around when I’m going to head out there to Lithuania. So the important thing is that we maintain half a planet between each other at all times.

**John:** 100%. So, in the show notes you’ll see links to the announcement of Craig’s new series, and also where you can buy tickets if you’re in London to see Big Fish with Kelsey Grammer.

**Craig:** And before people write in asking, no, I have not left movies for TV. This is the only TV thing I’ve ever done. And I’m writing movies. Movies are happening, folks. But, you know, figured why not. You know? You can’t do this story — you can’t do it in a movie. It’s too big.

**John:** All right. We’ve got some follow up from previous discussions. First off, Tim writes in with follow up on our discussion with Chris Keyser about the WGA deal. Tim writes, “You guys were talking about the possibility of moving to a weekly rate for screenwriters. We all realize this is tricky for the first draft, but maybe there’s a way to combine the two models. If studios are resistant to returning to two steps as a minimum, we should push for one step plus three weeks with some minimum per week fee. That way it helps solve the problem of producers demanding eight drafts before the studio even sees it. And it’s something the studios are familiar with, as in weeklies.

“Essentially two steps just means rewriting, so it might be worth it to try at least some sort of minimum weeklies after step one.”

Craig, what do you think of this idea?

**Craig:** Well, it certainly has its heart in the heart place, Tim. The idea of providing some sort of relief valve is exactly the kind of solution we need to find here. Now, we always have to run these things through the unintended consequences filter as well as the reality filter. So on the unintended consequences side, what we don’t want to do is get into a rut where people who are perhaps making a bit more than minimum, and that accounts for I think probably most screenwriters, would then just see that amount of this extra relief valve carved out of their quote so that it remains zero sum. And, in fact, nothing really changes.

The other issue is that we don’t also want to suggest that if you have one step and then a three-week, I guess it would be an optional relief valve, or maybe it would be a required relief valve, that the producers would then say, “I got a relief valve and weeks don’t matter. We can just do this now for three, four, or five months.” We know that that’s essentially what they want to do all the time. So, what we’re trying to figure out here really is how to get the producers out of the mindset that this is their one bite at the apple.

This would help, I think, screenwriters somewhat. I don’t know if it would address that core issue. On the reality side of things, there’s a problem here that would make it a tough hill to climb. And it’s this. Studios are very protective about what they call weeklies. In general, they have policies. They don’t hire people on weeklies for development. It is a disastrous precedent for them because all of the big shot writers make more per minute on a weekly than they do on any other kind of structured deal. So the studios limit weeklies essentially to projects that are in production that have been green lit. And those are production rewrites, production weeklies.

If something is in development, and that means to say it’s right on the edge of production where you’ll sometimes also see weeklies being given — they just want to call things polishes, or rewrites, drafts of some kind. They want to get away from that weekly because they find it horrifying and dangerous to spend that much money on something they don’t know if they’re going to make.

Now, what Tim is suggesting here isn’t that people get paid $250,000 for one of those weeks. He’s saying some minimum amount. And, sure, there is a minimum weekly. It’s very tiny, by the way. It’s about $5,800 or something. But, just violating the precedent of handing out weeklies in development will be a serious issue for them. So, couple of challenges here and I’m not sure it gets to the heart of the matter, but it’s well worth looking at as a possibility, even if it is an incremental one.

**John:** I agree it’s well worth looking at. I think what it does try to address is that sense of they keep you in this first draft forever so they can keep getting work out of you. And I think making it so that your deal said like you have a first draft and a guaranteed three weeks of rewriting, that makes it clear like we know that you’re going to be rewriting this draft and we’re going to pay you for rewriting that draft. That’s part of the process. And so studios can feel like, OK, I know I’m going to get this rewritten to my satisfaction because I have these extra three weeks tacked on.

I agree with you about the sense of weeklies as they are currently used in filmmaking are really expensive things that happen during production or right before production where expensive screenwriters are paid a lot of money to come in and fix problems in scripts. This is kind of a different thing. And it’s probably a little bit more like what happens in television right now where writers are kept on as things are going into production or like as the final episodes in a series are shot. So, there’s a precedent for it, but it’s not really a feature precedent right now. So it’s a different way of looking at stuff.

But I think it might be worthwhile, because I think it addresses something you brought up in your initial concern when we were talking with Chris was that that first draft experience is different and special. And to make that all on a time basis thing could be not great. But, the stuff that comes after that first draft, the tweaking, that really does feel kind of like weekly work and if we could get paid for that I think it could improve stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, what it comes down to really is when is that draft completed. And that is the crux of the problem. What we know is that we actually on our own can determine when a draft is delivered by delivering it. So, we’re dealing with a political and human problem here which is that, yes, individually any particular employee has the ability to draw a line in the sand. But our power generally is collective bargaining power. It’s not individual bargaining power. And individually writers are scared to do that when they’re being told that there will be repercussions.

So, we have to figure out how to get to the heart of that. And there are all sorts of solutions. Some try to be magic bullets and some try to be just slight improvements. At this point, we should be talking about all of them.

**John:** I agree. All right. Another bit of follow up. So, three episodes we talked about coincidence and we brought up the new Spider Man. Chris Ford writes in, “It was great to hear a plot point I worked on discussed on the show. I’m one of the writers of Spider Man: Homecoming and a long time listener of the show. I thought a lot about the super-link coincidence and how it could hopefully work. I think two factors helped us.

“We tried to make it absolutely as shocking as fun as possible so that as the audience settled into the idea, they were delighted with the comedy and the drama, and as a result they would accept it. But I think a deeper factor is that the surprise/coincidence like that is a genre element of Spider Man movies. There have been so many at this point that as we wrote it we were always playing against or playing with the genre of ëSpider Man movie,’ almost as clearly as if it was a Western and the audience was expecting a gun fight.”

**Craig:** Well, first of all, Chris, great to hear that you listen to the show and congratulations on the success of Spider Man: Homecoming. As John knows, I have not yet seen the film, but because of this letter I went and cheated and looked at the plot. Sorry about that. But, whatever, I’m a professional man. OK. It’s like two doctors talking to each other. Right? I think I’m allowed this one.

So, anyway, now I know what that coincidence is and I know how it works. And, yeah, it makes total sense. You know, one of the things that you can get out of a late movie coincidence is the coincidence is designed not to shock the audience, or make the movie any easier. The coincidence is designed to shock the hero. And make them realize that the way things were working isn’t in fact the way they’re working at all. And that’s fun for us to watch. We don’t mind that coincidence because it’s filtered through the characters scrambling to handle it. And it is fun.

So, that’s a kind of coincidence that I think you absolutely can get away with. And I think Chris is right that Spider Man movies generally speaking do have a lot of coincidence in them. The first Spider Man movie, the Tobey Maguire one, at least, I believe his best friend’s dad was Norman Osbourne, who became the Green Goblin, which is that’s an early baked in coincidence which is very soap operatic.

I mean, look, you want to talk about soap operatic coincidence, look at Star Wars. There’s a massive galaxy. How many planets are in a galaxy? I don’t know, a billion? Some crazy number. But everybody is basically related and two droids keep showing up everywhere. So, yeah, you know. It’s fine.

This coincidence is certainly less objectionable than any of those.

**John:** Agreed. Well, there’s always that sense, especially in Star Wars, like it’s a giant universe and a very small town. And everyone is always crossing paths with each other. And a listener named Elizabeth wrote in with another follow up about Spider Man. She says, “Number one, not only does it make the situation worse for our protagonist, it makes a dilemma. And that dilemma is deeply thematic. Peter Parker wants to be, is learning to be, and is learning to value being the friendly neighborhood Spider Man.”

They actually say that in the movie. “That means everyone cannot be and will not be anonymous strangers. In fact, it’s already been set up that the reason no one else has seized on this particular bad guy situation is because it is local. Perhaps this even makes the late-breaking coincidence not fully coincidental, or at least more likely.”

So, I think that’s a really good point. The coincidence and sort of the locality of it, like, oh, it’s in my own backyard aspect of it is really a fundamental part of this Spider Man. And so it makes more sense because thematically it all fits in all together.

**Craig:** Yeah. It certainly mitigates it. Certainly. I mean, if you’re telling a story where you have a working class hero facing off against a working class villain, it is not surprising that they are both living in the same working class neighborhood. So, yeah, that all feels perfectly legal to me. Chris, you have received the perfectly legal coincidence stamp from Scriptnotes. This is given out rarely. But, go ahead and put it on the cover of your magazine, Chris Ford Weekly. Seal of approval. It’s a ribbon. It’s a shiny ribbon. Silver. Silver?

**John:** Silver foil-ish. I mean, it’s not actual silver because actual silver would tarnish. But I think it’s definitely the kind of thing you’d want to keep up for a while. And then you’d be thinking about throwing it out, but then you feel really guilty throwing it out. Like it’s a gift you got that you never really kind of wanted. But now you have it. And so that to me is the Premiere Magazine Award that I have in my library. And it’s just this sort of square block of aluminum. So, I forget who the other director was. There was a director who got it the same year. And so Tom Cruise showed up to give it to the director. And they couldn’t find anybody notable to give it to me, so Rawson Thurber ended up giving me my Premiere Magazine award.

**Craig:** Aw. That’s so sweet.

**John:** It was so nice. And Rawson is awesome. But I have this thing, and I don’t really want this thing, but I cannot bring myself to throw it out.

**Craig:** Well, that’s hopefully how Chris feels about — I mean, that’s all we’ve ever asked from anyone who receives this, not that anyone has yet until now, but we just want it to be something that you want to throw out but feel a little weird about throwing out. Yes. A silver foil. That sounds good.

I was going to say we would use a silver-like foil because it’s just cheaper. But I think your tarnish reason also makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. So we want the gift to be made of 50% pride and 50% shame, kind of.

**Craig:** And then I get 50% of both of those. Because that’s what we’ve already established.

**John:** Shame or guilt. Either one works. It’s a fusion. We have a new question from Paul and he wrote in talking about coincidence as well. So let’s start with that. Let’s take a listen to Paul’s question.

Paul: Hi guys. My question is in regards to Episode 309’s discussion on coincidences. I’m currently working on a road trip style script where the main characters go on a journey and meet a selection of other characters along the way who are either a hurt or a hindrance or some sort of complication. Basically they all become relevant to the story, otherwise we wouldn’t meet them. So my question is how do we avoid making each one of these chance meetings feel like a coincidence?”

**John:** Craig, you’ve done a road trip movie. How do you make that not be a bunch of coincidences?

**Craig:** They’re not. By definition. You’re on a road trip. You’re going to run into people. Everybody understands that that’s the nature of a road trip. Coincidence is a problem when you’ve structured a story to be non-random. For instance, bank heist. That is a planned thing. People sit in a room. They talk to each other. They come up with a target. They come up with a plan. They execute the plan. If coincidences happen along the way that will be unsatisfying, because we know that they’ve planned so well.

When you’re on a road trip, you are saying we are embracing the unknown here. There will be things that happen. It is essentially episodic. The way you get out of it being episodic is for the people to meet random people along the way who then through their actions have some kind of thematic relevance and that is at the heart of every road trip movie. Even movies that you don’t think of as road trips, like the Wizard of Oz.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** It’s not coincidence that she meets the Scarecrow. It’s just something that happens. You tend to meet people along the way. And who do you keep talking to when you meet people along the way. You know, in Identity Thief, Jason Bateman meets the hotel clerk. He says three words to her and that’s the end of that because her character isn’t interesting or relevant. But then they meet other people who are and they become a huge part of the journey because the characters perceive something in them that is relevant.

So I don’t think that there is any issue whatsoever about coincidence there because that’s not what coincidence is.

**John:** I agree with you. So, the middle section of Go is a road trip, so the four guys are on a trip to Vegas. And what I think is crucial about it is the people they meet, they are meeting because they are taking actions that are bringing them to face these people. And that because of the things they’re doing, those people may be following up on them later on. And there’s repercussions and consequences of the things they’ve done earlier. But it’s not coincidence that they are in those places. They are deliberately going to those places. They’re meeting these people because they have chosen to enter these locations and that’s why it’s happening.

So, I can understand Paul’s worry because you know a lot of times it can just feel like a series of things, one after the other. That’s general plotting though. That’s trying to make sure that it feels like the characters are in charge of this road trip and that it’s not just a movie throwing a bunch of stuff at characters.

If a bunch of people walk through the door, that’s going to feel more coincidence. It’s going to feel more episodic. That’s the challenge you always have with movies that are sometimes set in one location. And it’s just a bunch of people walking through the door. Clerks could feel that way if it weren’t a great movie. And we’ve seen the bad version of Clerks a lot, where it’s just random wacky people just coming through the door.

**Craig:** Yeah. Then it’s a long sitcom. And sitcoms are amazing for 22 minutes on your television, but they don’t work on the big screen because you’re demanding something that’s a little more whole and completed. A narrative that moves in a circle and ends.

You’re absolutely right. If you’re going on a journey, theoretically you have some purpose for the journey. That’s what’s driving you through. It would be a coincidence if on your way you randomly ran into your own mom. That’s a weird coincidence. That’s bad. But, just meeting the people that you meet, and then choosing to continue to talk to them, that’s not coincidence at all.

**John:** No. The other situation which could occur, and this may be what Paul is bringing up, is you might have characters you meet and then you see them again later on and it feels really coincidental that they’re still on the same trajectory as you are. Yeah, be mindful of that. If there’s no reason why we would see that character again, you seem like you’re heading in different directions, there will need to be a cause and effect thing happening there for like why they’re suddenly on the same path.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So do work on that.

**Craig:** Yeah. For instance, in Identity Thief, they have a random encounter with Eric Stonestreet, the character that Eric Stonestreet plays. And that scene has relevance for Melissa McCarthy’s character and it makes her make a decision. And that impacts the course of her journey with Jason and her relationship with Jason and the choices she makes at the end. We see Eric Stonestreet one more time when bad guys are trying to find Melissa McCarthy and they basically put together clues that lead them to him. But that’s it. If he had shown up again randomly where they end up eventually it would have made no sense. It would have been a coincidence.

**John:** Absolutely. Do you want to take the next question?

**Craig:** Sure, Macaar writes, “I’ve just completed a first draft of a spec feature and I’m now preparing to write a second draft. I’ve never done a full on second draft before, so I’m not sure where to start, both logistically and artistically. Do I make a new document and start from page one, rewriting everything I’ve written before? Or I do just fine tune the material that I already have? What should be my main goals for the second draft? I’ve identified problems with the script, but I’m afraid that once I start rewriting the script I might lose sight of my original intention and the script will turn into something completely different from the story I wanted to tell. How does one maintain the integrity of their initial idea while working on a second draft? Are there any additional nuggets of wisdom you could give me before I embark on this journey?”

John, it’s nugget time.

**John:** It is nugget time. So rewriting is crucial and fundamental and the second draft is one of the hardest steps I find. Because often the second draft is where things kind of get worse, because you are trying to take this thing which was your initial idea and bend it into a new shape. And you’re reluctant to get rid of some things. You are still grappling with what you actually wrote versus what you meant to write. So, some general tips I can offer you is go in with a plan. And so I always approach a rewrite, a big rewrite after the first draft with this is what I’m trying to do. And I will type it up if I need to. Like these are the things I’m going to try to do. This is my intention with this draft. These are the characters I’m going to focus on. This is stuff I’m getting rid of.

If it’s a big rewrite, what I will tend to do is start with a new document and copy and paste in the scenes that are staying, even if I’m going to rewrite them, but if there’s stuff that’s going away all together, I won’t copy them into the new document. I will leave holes for where those are going and work on it that way. Very, very rarely I have I actually just like kind of started over where I have the script sitting off to the side and I’m typing a whole new script. That kind of rarely is necessary for me. But once or twice in my career I had to do that, where I’m really starting over from scratch.

What I would urge you not to do is just a Save As and it’s a new script and then you’re just sort of scrolling through it. Because I find you will just change the commas, and you won’t do the real hard work you need to do in really breaking apart the script and putting it back together properly.

**Craig:** That’s all excellent advice. Macaar, you’re asking great questions and they are reflective of a writer’s spirit. You’re panicking a little bit and you’re feeling a little overwhelmed. And that’s completely normal. John is absolutely right. The second draft is the danger zone. Which means, therefore, that you have permission to go backwards. That is not only normal, it’s probably more likely than not to occur.

With that said, when you ask do I rewrite everything I’ve written before, or just fine tune the material I already have, there is no answer we can give you. That is your answer to provide. Because you have to figure out what the purpose of the rewrite is. You’re saying what should be my main goals for the second draft. Your main goal is to have a script that is better. That is vague.

So, you can’t just start rewriting because you’re supposed to. Nobody would know what to do with that. Nor can you just start rewriting because a bunch of people told you things to do that you don’t believe in, or understand, or feel. Before you start to write your second draft you need to absorb what is actionable, what you agree with, what you don’t, challenge all of it until you feel it. In other words, don’t start writing your second draft until you know what to write. Then suddenly it’s not so scary, because now it’s not rewriting, or writing, or any of that stuff, and the mechanics of new files or old files, that will become apparent to you because you’ll know what to write, so you’ll follow the path of least resistance there. And you’ll start writing.

You are well within your bounds to be afraid that you will lose sight of things. And, again, you have permission. I am granting you permission. You have a silver foil seal of permission from Scriptnotes. We’ve got to open up a seal factory.

**John:** Totally. 100%. So they’ll be available on the store by the end of the week.

**Craig:** And we’ve got to make sure that people know like when we do open up the seal factory, we’ve got to be really clear about what kind of seals we’re talking about here.

**John:** When we break the seal on the seal factory we have to make sure that they — we could have Seal come for the ribbon cutting when we break the seal factory.

**Craig:** That’s not a bad idea. That’s not a bad idea. So, anyway, Macaar, all these questions are great, but I guess the biggest nugget I have for you is figure out what you want to write before you start. Vis-a-vis, the script you have and the script you want to have. Don’t start writing until you generally know, otherwise you will wander. Oh boy will you wander.

**John:** I agree. Our next question comes from Samantha in Brooklyn. She writes. “Simple question. Does the fact that I’m a transgender woman in my late 30s, by the way, hurt my chances of becoming a working screenwriter? Thanks for all your honest, sometimes difficult to hear advice. I feel you guys have given me a more realistic sense of what’s probable regarding breaking in. I look forward to your candid response.”

**Craig:** Well, Samantha, no doubt you did not choose to be transgender, but if you had you couldn’t have picked a better time as far as I’m concerned. In Hollywood there is an enormous awareness of transgender issues and I think there’s also for the first time in as long as I’ve been working here a legitimate acted upon desire to start varying the kinds of people that are hired to do work and that doesn’t just extend to gender, or to race, or to age, which were the prior categories and limited to those, but also gender identity and orientation as well.

And with that in mind, I would say that the fact that you’re transgender is not at all a hindrance, nor should I add is it a state that requires you to write transgender themed movies or movies that feature transgender characters. Write whatever the hell you want. If I were your agent, I would advertise to potential employers that you are transgender because you bring a perspective that is limited in this town and you bring it at a time when there is a great appetite for it. In particular, I think you would be a very attractive candidate for television rooms, because they have just more potential for diverse hiring since they have rooms of people, whereas movies just have one.

That said, if you want to write movies, you write movies. But, no, I don’t think it hurts your chances even in the slightest. John?

**John:** I wonder if we’re painting this as too rosy of a picture as like too white guys in Hollywood saying like —

**Craig:** You’re white. You’re white, dude. David Duke tells me I am not white. And I, as you know, I listen to David Duke.

**John:** As two cis white guys, I’m gay, you’re straight, so I would say being gay in my situation has not hindered me whatsoever in my thing, but that’s not the same experience as being transgender. So, I can’t pretend that I know what the obstacles could be. And so I would agree with Craig that this probably the best time that has ever happened for transgender writers who are trying to break into Hollywood, but I don’t know what some of the obstacles could be that I’m just not seeing. So, I just want to make sure that I’m acknowledging that we don’t know sort of everything that could possibly be out there.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** Oh, you do? Craig has magic knowledge.

**Craig:** I have a palantir.

**John:** Yes, he just peers into it.

**Craig:** Yes, I do. The great eye.

**John:** But, I will say please don’t use the possibility of obstacles ahead be any sort of deterrence from trying to do it. And I think that could be the biggest obstacle is your own worry that there are going to be walls put up in front of you. So, I would say go for it, do it.

You do bring up like you’re in your 30s, and in some ways I think that could be more of a factor than you being transgender, just because as we’ve talked about before a lot of sort of getting started in Hollywood is that sort of very beginning meetings and rooms and all the sort of grunt work of getting started. And it’s a little easier in your 20s than your 30s, but I don’t think it’s going to stop you.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree with you on that for sure. If you’re looking at three factors here that Samantha is describing, one is being transgender. One is being in her late 30s. And one is living in Brooklyn. Late 30s and living in Brooklyn probably have more of a negative impact on her prospects than being transgender.

And, you’re right, I’m guessing here. I just see an enormous amount of good will and open-mindedness right now in Hollywood and I’d like to think, perhaps I am being rosy, but I would like to think that being transgender would not negatively impact Samantha’s prospects.

Samantha, here’s another thing to consider, particularly if you write features. You can write a spec script and if it’s awesome it doesn’t really matter what name you are, what your gender status is. It doesn’t even matter if you’re a human as opposed to some kind of weird sentient rock. A great script is a rare thing. And people will want it. And unlike most gigs in the world where you first have to show yourself and then work to prove yourself, in this gig you can hand somebody paper anonymously, essentially, because they don’t know who you are, even if you give them your real name it’s anonymous to them. And you are judged by the work. You could leave a name off entirely. Put a pseudonym out. You could do whatever you want. But that’s the cool thing about it.

Then, you know, look, people then have to eventually meet you and at that point your identity collides with the reality of people’s opinions and observations, but I remain optimistic and also, according to David Duke, not white.

**John:** This past week I was talking with a young writer and she was describing the script she was writing and she was super bright. I was pretty confident that she is going to succeed in the business. And she said she was applying to some diverse writer programs, which I also encourage her to do. And we were talking about the things she was going to write next. And I strongly encouraged her to write something that had a central character that felt like her. Because there’s something wonderful when you sit down with a writer and you feel — you’ve read their voice and then you meet the person and you feel like, oh, that voice really connects well with this person. And I think that’s one of the things about Lena Dunham’s work that is great, because you meet her and you read her work. It’s like, oh, I can see the match up there. And so while I think it’s great to have a range of writing that shows your diverse sides, if Samantha is working on a new script, like a third script, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to have a character in there that feels like Samantha, because then when they’re sitting across from you to talk about this great script that they loved, they can sort of see you in that. And it feels like they kind of know you before they’ve called you in for a meeting.

**Craig:** Yeah. That can be very useful. It is a narrower target to hit for sure to be the kind of writer who says, “Don’t worry about me. Worry about what I write, because I can write anything. Or, I can write a wide variety of things that aren’t necessarily connected to me. I can be essentially that multi-tool weapon that studios are always looking for.” And that is a much narrower target to hit. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a tough one. But, if you can hit it, then you become a very — you know, like for instance, John Lee Hancock. It’s interesting. You look at John Lee Hancock’s work, when he directs, you see him in it. Right? John Lee is kind of that, he’s sort of laconic, Midwestern/Southern spirit of America kind of guy. You feel it. When he’s writing, he writes everything. Everything. So he is that multi-pronged weapon.

It depends on who you are as a writer. But, look, at that point you’ve got a high class problem there, kid.

**John:** Yeah. Like they only want you to be one thing, while if they want you be that one thing, that’s awesome for you.

**Craig:** Yep. As long as they’re paying you, you know.

**John:** So Mark wrote in with a question. Let’s take a listen.

Mark: My question has to do with screenplay competitions. I’ve placed in about a dozen competitions now with two different scripts, ranging from a first place finish in a fairly prestigious competition to quarter finalist placings in what you could call tier two or even tier three screenwriting competitions. My question is this: how much weight do these placings carry when I go to cold query my scripts later this year? Can I leverage these placings to help me get a foot in the door, or is the industry kind of wary and jaded when you bring up screenplay competitions? Also, would it be best to be more selective and only mention the more prestigious placings, or should I just go and list every single award I’ve gotten when I go to pitch and query?

**John:** Craig, what’s your advice for Mark about his screenplay competition awards?

**Craig:** Well, before I get into the advice, I have a question for you, John. And for all of our listeners at home. I say query. Mark says query. I hear that a lot. Which pronunciation do you use?

**John:** I say query like it’s the second half of inquiry.

**Craig:** Yeah. So do I. I wonder if it’s a regional thing. Anyway, Mark, I’ve procrastinated long enough. Here’s what I think. Most competitions, and when I say most I mean essentially all of them, are useless. They will not help discriminate you from other writers, nor will they make your screenplay inherently more attractive to anybody. By and large, people do not care. There are so many of these things. They are mostly designed to take your money. You yourself say that you’ve placed in, or even won, what did he say numerous of them? So, what does that tell you? The deal with screenplay competitions is the more you mention them, the more I think frankly amateurish you seem. Certainly saying that I finished in the quarter finals of the blah-blah-blah screenplay competition only makes you sound bad, as far as I’m concerned.

You know, if you say, look, this script has won first place in every single competition I’ve entered in. Here’s a list of 20 competitions it’s won first place in, then I would be like, well, maybe this is pretty good.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** You know, but that’s not the case. If you have performed very well in the Nicholl, I think that is well worth mentioning. If you win the Austin, that’s probably worth mentioning. But by and large, no. I think it’s far better to let the script speak for itself and not attempt to guild it with the dubious lily of screenplay competition laurels.

**John:** So, Craig and I don’t actually encounter query letters very often in our lives. And so we’re not people who would be seeing this letter that has all the awards attached to it. At some point we need to have a manager on who is like signing new clients to get a sense of whether that matters to him or to her. Because I don’t think it probably does matter. And I certainly wouldn’t list everything you’ve done. Like only hit the very, very highlights.

Like the same if you’re doing a resume, you don’t put everything on your resume, you just put the things that are applicable to the person you’re sending the resume to. And in this case, if there’s a recent award for a thing and it’s a really prestigious thing, highlight that. But otherwise I wouldn’t.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you got to remember, Mark, that you’re sending your letter to somebody that accepts them. Everybody else that’s sending a letter to them has also entered a dozen competitions, almost certainly. So, letter after letter they’re being told look how special I am. Meaning none of us are special. These competitions are meaningless. Everybody has been a semi-finalist in four of them at this point. So, you know, they’re not looking for people that can do decently well in Single A baseball. There’s only one league here. That’s it. Majors. That’s it. No Minors. So either you are killing it out there and just crushing your competition, and hearing their lamentations, or don’t talk about it.

**John:** Mm. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Do you want to take the next question here?

**Craig:** Timothy McGherry, that’s a great name. That’s a good song name.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Timothy McGherry writes, “A Reddit user posted the following question.” Hang on, John. Hang on. I want you to grip your seat tightly now, because here we go. “So I was talking to my buddies about that screenwriting thing and turns out one of them tried this a while before quitting. He wrote a script and sent it to a few contests but didn’t place. He then told us we shouldn’t bother anyway. There’s a conspiracy to keep us out. I mean, why do you think some writers get paid over a million dollars and more for a screenplay while so many others struggle and have lousy day jobs. Well, there is a secret password you have to write within a script…”

By the way, this isn’t me talking, this is still the question. “…there is a secret password you have to write within a script and it automatically gets in front of people. Only a few people know it. It’s handed down within families who are extremely connected. They’re all trained to look for that password. Readers. Contest judges. And so on. And if they find it, you sell your screenplay for a million dollars. Otherwise, you’re rejected. And no matter how much you try, if you don’t know that password you’ll never break in. Anyway, that’s what my buddy said, and he’s a screenwriter. He knows what he’s talking about. Might just be a theory though. So, what do you think?”

Uh, John, this is provocative because we have been sitting on this for how many years now?

**John:** Well, it’s been 311 episodes, so even before the podcast, because you and I learned the password quite early on.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course, because your father was very well connected. What was his occupation again?

**John:** He was an engineer. But he was the engineer who actually invented movies.

**Craig:** Ah. And my parents were public school teachers, but my great-great-grandfather I think came over on a boat next to the boat that had Carl Laemmle on it.

**John:** Yeah. That would be amazing that he was that old and movies have only been around for a hundred years. But that’s how the conspiracy works.

**Craig:** Well, that’s how — Jews are all born elderly. That’s just a fact. And also we’re not white, according to David Duke.

Look, Timothy, this is the dumbest shit I have ever heard in my life. And normally I’m amused by these things. But it’s actually fascinating because it’s so perfectly stupid. All right, let’s just run it down. Your buddy tried this screenwriting thing a little while before quitting. But later you appeal to authority and say, well, you know, he must know what he’s talking about, he’s a screenwriter. No he’s not.

**John:** He knows what he’s talking about because he’s a failed screenwriter. So, yes.

**Craig:** No, he’s just some guy. Now, let’s analyze this. Let’s play the what-if-it-were-true game, because it is kind of fascinating. Let’s put aside the stupidity of the families and the secret password. Let’s just say that there is some way that you can automatically get a million dollars for a screenplay. How do you think business works? Because, see, the Hollywood I know, they will pinch pennies into powder. The last thing in the world they will ever do is give anyone a damn break with money. They’re brutal about it. I’m not suggesting that there isn’t occasional nepotism. There is. Maybe two people being roughly equal for the same job that actually has no real qualifications other than access, like internship or assistant, or PA, you know, starter positions.

But things like buying a screenplay, let me tell you something. If they grind us on every penny, I’m pretty sure they’re going to grind you, too. They’re not just going to go, oh shit, he put the word BALONEY in and he spelled it BOLOGNA, oh man, he knew the password. All right. Write a check. Brenda? Brenda, go get business affairs. Yeah, we got a bologna script. Yeah, no, he spelled it right. Yeah, a million. A million. Write it to, shit, Timothy McGherry. Who does he know? [laughs]

Now I want it to be true.

**John:** Yeah. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if it were true? The fascinating thing though is how do the studios decide who gets to write the check to Tim McGherry? I’m sorry, Tim, we know it’s not you. You were just asking the question.

**Craig:** It’s not you. No, you don’t know the password. And it’s not really bologna.

**John:** Who gets to write the McGherry check to buy the bologna script for a million dollars? You know what? I bet the all meet at the secret room. They meet at the secret room and they figure out who is going to pay the million dollars so that they can buy the script. And then make the — it makes sense. I don’t know why I was thinking — I was just thinking aloud.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’ll tell you the part that actually is a little concerning to me and now I’m starting to think that maybe this isn’t true. I know obviously it is true. Of course there’s a secret password worth a million dollars. But I can’t get over this one little problem, John. He says there’s a secret password and they are all trained to look for it. Password readers: contest judges and so on.

**John:** Oh, yeah, so why aren’t they using it?

**Craig:** Thank you. If they all know the password, why aren’t they using it and getting a million dollars? So my theory is that there are other families that are just essentially through time are part of a secret order, like the Knights Templar, and they are just sworn to live a life of penury. I mean, they are contest judges. They don’t get paid that much. But that’s their lot in life. They get it. They’re like, look, my point is to live in poverty and then if I read the password, someone else gets a million dollars. Yeah. I’m not sure how else it would work.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, like there’s essentially two classes of people. Like there’s the class of people who are just the reader types, sort of like the paroles, and then there’s an upper class that actually get to sell the scripts for a million dollars. But they’re sort of probably just like trading scripts among themselves for a million dollars each because they already have all the money.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I don’t know. I just sort of feel like this Reddit user — it’s not stated, but I think they think that the word is a Jewish word. I just feel like there’s some sort of secret thing about like these are the people who control all the purse strings. There’s something hidden back there.

**Craig:** Yeah. This thing is definitely a one-nut-hair away from being some sort of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Yeah. Look, it would be nice if the world functioned this way. It would certainly explain failure, wouldn’t it? Because as Tim says his buddy mentioned why do some writers get paid over a million dollars and more for a screenplay while so many others struggle and have lousy day jobs.

One answer, far-fetched and absurd, is that it’s a very hard thing to do, even though it looks easy. And so very few people are worth a million dollars or more. And most people aren’t. And so must stay in their lousy day jobs. But I grant you that’s far-fetched. Far more likely that it’s just that a few people know the magic password. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This was real.

**John:** It was real. I also feel like this Reddit user needs to meet our previous questioner, Mark, who like won all those awards and is wondering should I say that on my awards. Because like he should have gotten all the million dollars already and yet he’s not. So something about the system is broken.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like he’s been passed through. So the scribes of the Order of Scriptus say the password obviously in his material because they read it and they gave him an award for it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So where’s the million dollars?

**John:** I don’t know. I think the million dollars is behind the gate in the library in Old Town. And so at some point you’ve got to pick the lock and get in there and get the secret book that has the password in it.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Well, that may be the missing piece of the puzzle here. It’s all sliding into place.

**John:** That’s what we try to do. We try to answer questions and really reveal the secret passwords behind the secrets of screenwriting.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you guys were listening to this in your car and you’re contemplating driving into an abutment, don’t. I understand the impulse. But don’t. Because this will pass. Don’t worry.

**John:** We have time for one more short question. So let’s do one short question. Alan from South Carolina writes in, “Not being in LA, would you advise getting an attorney that is closer to my location, or work with one that is in Los Angeles?”

**Craig:** I would recommend that you work with one that is in Los Angeles if you have access to one. All things being equal. The entertainment attorneys in Los Angeles have generally speaking far more experience handling the kinds of transactional agreements that we get into with studios, producers, executives, and so on. And they also almost certainly will have better relationships with agencies in terms of helping you maybe get an agent. Better relationships with the business affairs people.

You know, one thing that helps you negotiate a deal is knowing what other people like you have gotten for something similar. Well, they tend to know. And probably attorneys in South Carolina, simply by dint of not having as much exposure to our business, would not.

So, I would go with LA, all things being equal.

**John:** 100%. I think you want somebody who does this every day. And so you want an entertainment attorney. The entertainment attorneys you’re going to find are going to be in Los Angeles. Sometimes in New York, but really Los Angeles. That’s the one you want.

And don’t worry that you’re not sitting down face-to-face with this person. I almost never see my attorney. It’s all done by emails and phone calls. It’s absolutely fine. So, important to check references on an attorney, but it’s going to be fine. Pick an attorney who is in Los Angeles. You’re going to be much, much happier.

**Craig:** Agreed. And — and when you do find that person, give them the password.

**John:** Yeah, yeah, it’s crucial because otherwise they won’t be able to negotiate for the million dollars.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing, actually have two, but my first one is a follow up One Cool Thing. So, Brent Warkentine writes, “I started listening to your podcast about a year ago. Love the info so much that I shot a PSA based on John’s One Cool Thing in Episode 267, How to Tell a Mother Her Child is Dead. Thank you for bringing this op-ed to our attention.

So, Brent sent in a link to this PSA he shot and it is terrific. And so if you remember the One Cool Thing, it’s this article that describes how an emergency room doctor prepares for telling a mother that her child has died. And this guy, Brent, he shot a PSA that’s all based around it. Sort of uses the words from it. And it’s so well done. So, congratulations, Brent. I think it’s a really great use of this idea and it ends up becoming a very effective gun violence message to send out there. So, really well done.

**Craig:** What kind of name do you think Warkentine is?

**John:** I don’t know. It sounds like it could be Middle Earthian?

**Craig:** Right. It’s possible that he is a Halfling.

**John:** Hmm-mm.

**Craig:** Possible. I don’t know. There’s something vaguely Finnish about it to me. It’s probably not. Warkentine. That’s an interesting one.

**John:** You know who knows? Brent Warkentine knows where it comes from. So, Brent, write in and let us know where it comes from.

**Craig:** But please do include the password or it goes to spam.

**John:** It goes to spam. My second and new One Cool Thing is Mouth Time by Reductress. So, it’s a podcast that Craig will never listen to.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** But if he did listen to it he would love it. And so the folks at Reductress, and Craig, do you read Reductress? It’s sort of like The Onion for women’s stories.

**Craig:** Like Jezebel meets The Onion?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Got it. No, I don’t.

**John:** So good. But now you will. It’s so well done. So two of the editors, Nicole Silverberg and Rachel Wenitsky, they play these characters Quenn and Dikoda and they are talking through their days and sort of the things going on in their lives and it is so pitch perfect and wonderful. And like when I say pitch perfect, it is vocally fried pitch perfect.

And so the characters that they create, they’re kind of like Romy and Michelle from Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion, but they’re just great. And I just started listening to the podcast. I think it’s fantastic. So I would strongly encourage people to check it out. It is called Mouth Time with Reductress.

**Craig:** Quenn is hysterical. That name is brilliant. Quenn. Well, my One Cool Thing is for those of you who like me are avowed fans of The Room games. We are up to The Room 3. I believe Room 4 has been announced and I’m super-duper excited for that. But you know you’ve got to wait, because those games, they take a while to make. And, you know, it’s just one of those deals where at this point I mark my life in terms of time between Room games, and Bethesda games.

By the way, you realize do you know when Skyrim came out, John? Do you remember?

**John:** 2012?

**Craig:** Close. It was November 11, 2011. 11/11/11. It’s been freaking six years.

**John:** Yeah. And I’ve played the remastered version and it’s just still terrific.

**Craig:** It’s still so good. I can’t wait till they get going with Elder Scrolls 6. Anyway, while you’re waiting for The Room, there is, well, I don’t know how else to put it except there is a rip off. And generally speaking I’m not a huge fan of rip-offs. Rips-off? I’m not a huge fan of rips-off. But this is actually very well done. The knock on it is that is just straight up rip of The Room, down to the special lens that lets you see things. They add a couple of other little features, but it’s just Room-like in its sound, its design, its playability. The whole thing is just look at us, we’re The Room.

It’s called The House of Da Vinci. So, if you are a Room addict like me and you need a quick fix, something to bridge you over until you get to Room 4, you know what? House of Da Vinci, they’ve earned your four bucks. I hope they kick some of it back to I think it’s Fireproof games that makes The Room, because it really is just shameless. It’s just a shameless rip-off. But it’s very well done for shameless rip-offs.

**John:** Very nice. I shall check it out. That is our show for this week. So our show is produced by Carlton Mittagakus. 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 can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions, I’m on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts at Scriptnotes. And if you’re there, please leave us a rating or a review. That’s so lovely and it makes us happy when we read them. Craig doesn’t read them, but that’s fine.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That is also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up about three, or four, or five days after the episode airs. If you read them really carefully, you can find the secret password buried in them. But you have to read through every transcript —

**Craig:** Every single one.

**John:** There’s some algorithms and like you have to print them out and draw things between them. And if you have string and pushpins that will help you triangulate what the secret password is.

**Craig:** And you’re going to try it, so don’t bother. It’s not UMBRAGE. Duh. We’re not stupid, OK? Otherwise we would be out of cash.

That said, there is a secret password buried in there. You get a million bucks. Your movie gets made. You know, just like the way John and I did. That’s how we got started.

**John:** You know, that system that was doing all the sort of deep machine learning on scripts, like the one that we sort of savagely tore apart and Franklin ended up taking down off the Black List. I bet that one I’m sure figured out the secret password and that’s how they got their VC money.

**Craig:** Oh god. It’s all making sense. It’s all making sense. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. You can find that episode and all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. It is $1.99 a month. We also have a few more of the USB drives. They’re at store.johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** How much do I get from that?

**John:** You get nothing. Craig gets nothing from the John August Store. Not a bit.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Well. Hmm.

**John:** But, he got a million dollars because he knew the password, so it all worked out.

**Craig:** Boom!

**John:** Boom! See you next week.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [‘Chernobyl’ Miniseries Set By HBO & Sky](http://deadline.com/2017/07/hbo-sky-chernobyl-miniseries-starring-the-crown-jared-harris-tca-1202136735/)
* Carolyn Strauss on [Scriptnotes, 127](http://johnaugust.com/2014/women-and-pilots)
* [Big Fish The Musical starring Kelsey Grammer is on its way to London](https://www.theotherpalace.co.uk/whats-on/big-fish-the-musical)
* Scriptnotes, 310: [What’s in the WGA Deal](http://johnaugust.com/2017/whats-in-the-wga-deal)
* Scriptnotes, 309: [Logic and Gimmickry](http://johnaugust.com/2017/logic-and-gimmickry)
* A Reddit user asks: [Is there a secret password for success?](https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/6pu0px/is_there_a_secret_password_for_success/)
* [Every Three Hours](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X_XY-vWzKs&feature=youtu.be) on YouTube
* [Mouth Time with Reductress](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mouth-time-with-reductress/id1093619338?mt=2) on iTunes
* [The House of Da Vinci](http://www.thehouseofdavinci.com/)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](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_312.mp3).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hi, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 302 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we try to figure out how to adapt three stories in the news. Only this time we don’t want to just make a movie. We want to make our parents proud and enemies jealous by bringing home a shiny gold Oscar.

So, we’ll be aiming high with these adaptations.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Plus we’ll be answering–

**Craig:** I mean, I’m always looking for that Oscar. You know, I’ve come so close so many times.

**John:** Time and time again. So, this will be the one that finally does it for Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** After that we’ll be answering a listener question about why the hell the AMPTP can do what it does.

**Craig:** Well. Got a good answer for that. At least we have an answer.

**John:** There’s an answer. One of those rare things where’s actually just an answer.

**Craig:** Concrete answer.

**John:** We have some news and some follow up. So, the WGA deal was ratified by the membership. 99.2% of members approved the deal. That’s a good figure. Very close to 100%.

**Craig:** I want to meet, something like 18 people voted no, I think. I would love to meet them. Just kind of curious.

**John:** Yeah. So, we had promised that there will be an episode with Craig Keyser where we’ll talk through the deal and sort of everything in the landscape of the deal. And so we are still trying to schedule a time for that. So, there’s people traveling, but at some point we will him on to talk through what’s in that deal, what’s not in that deal, and sort of where things are in the process of us and the studios and film and television.

**Craig:** Yeah. And he is coming on. We’re just trying to figure this out between everyone’s vacation and all that.

**John:** Cool. Last month we actually crossed a milestone, but I didn’t notice it because I don’t often check the stats. But Scriptnotes crossed its 10 millionth download.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** In its lifetime, which is just such a huge number.

**Craig:** That’s kind of insane. So, you’re saying that the show has been downloaded ten million times?

**John:** Yes. And that’s only since we moved over to Libsyn. So the earliest 50 or so episodes or even more than that weren’t on Libsyn. So since the point where we’ve had good statistics, it’s been 10 million, which is great. So–

**Craig:** God. I’m losing so much money.

**John:** Well, and things that used to cost us money, like each download used to cost us a lot of money, which is part of why we moved over to Libsyn, and now we don’t have to pay for that. So, that’s great.

**Craig:** Oh, so wait, so if we don’t have to pay for that, then am I finally making money again?

**John:** I think you’re making as much money as anyone is making on this.

**Craig:** D’oh. That’s still zero.

**John:** Sorry. But thank you to all of the people who are our premium subscribers, because you guys are fantastic and you help pay for things like Matthew who edits the show, and Godwin who produces the show, and all the other stuff around it. So, thank you for that. And our transcripts, which are one of our biggest expenses.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is awesome. We do appreciate that very much. So, John, let me ask you this question then. Because I know downloads are a bit like hits in that they’re slightly misleading. How many people – is there a way to know how many people listen to this show?

**John:** That’s actually one of the interesting challenges of podcasting, because it’s kind of a black box. So, podcasting works under a system called RSS. Basically syndicated – it’s an XML file that gets passed around. But basically you’re tracking downloads, but you don’t know a lot more information about that other than just like the file was downloaded and sort of the general things you figure out, like where it was downloaded. But you can’t tell when it was played.

And so right now there’s a movement amongst some of the providers to be able to provide much more granular data so they can sell ads against it. Basically they just want to know where stuff is.

So like Spotify has some premium things where they can tell you exactly who listened and who skipped the commercials and that kind of stuff. Midroll bought Stitcher, or Stitcher bought Midroll. They combined. So there’s changes happening in the podcasting world. And including Apple itself. So we’re not supposed to call it the iTunes Store. You’re supposed to call it Apple Podcasts. So, we ask for people to leave a review on Apple Podcasts now. And there’s talk that there will be some new stuff happening probably around WWDC with how podcasts work for Apple as well.

**Craig:** Well, as long as I continue to get ripped off, I don’t care. I just like to know the tune to which I’m being ripped off.

**John:** You know what else you won’t be making money from is Cotton Bureau sent an email saying that they’re going to print more of our t-shirts. So they’re going to print more of the blue t-shirts. If you are a Scriptnotes listener who does not have one of the softest t-shirts ever made–

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re soft.

**John:** They’re so soft. The blue Scriptnotes t-shirts are back up for sale at Cotton Bureau. So just go to Cotton Bureau and get yourself one of those. They’ll be up until June 8. And that will be the last day you can order one of those.

**Craig:** Those are good shirts. You should get one.

**John:** They’re good shirts.

Some news from WGA. So I got this email and I emailed her to ask if it’s okay to share with other people and she said sure. So, they’re doing a first-time staff writer boot camp for all people who are new staff writers on TV shows. It’s a one-day boot camp, which sounds like a really good idea, sort of talking you through the crash course and how to be a staff writer. What it’s like being in the writers’ room. Best practices. It’s a good idea. So, Saturday June 17, at the WGA. If you are first-time staff writer on a TV show, you can write into tvdigital@wga.org with BOOT CAMP in the subject line. You need to include in the message what the show is and who your showrunner is. Because they really will be confirming that it’s a WGA show and that you are staffed on that show.

**Craig:** Great. That’s an excellent thing. And anyone who is starting out should be grasping for any bit of driftwood in the water that they find. This a particularly good bit of driftwood to cling onto. I suspect that the people that are going to be teaching it will have been there before.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Always a good service. I love that sort of educational effort from the WGA.

**John:** In the spirit of education and correction and making things correct in our podcast, last week I said the seed vault had flooded. It turns out the seed vault has not flooded and the seed vault is actually in much better shape than had previously been reported.

So, there’s been sort of a seepage, but the seeds themselves are fine.

**Craig:** Well it seems like if the seed vault is okay, we ought to get back to the busy work of destroying seeds left and right.

**John:** Absolutely. Because we got it back up there.

**Craig:** There’s nothing to worry about anymore. Let’s go burn some seeds.

**John:** [laughs] Or put them on delicious buns, because you never know what seeds – like poppy seeds are delicious. Let’s try all the seeds and see what you can make out of them. Or like a tahini. Grind up some seeds.

**Craig:** I don’t like tahini.

**John:** I love tahini. The little tahini made into a hummus? Come on, it’s the best.

**Craig:** See, hummus to me is hummus. That’s chickpeas. I’m down. I’m all over that.

**John:** But you can’t make hummus without tahini. Tahini is a crucial ingredient in hummus.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. But it’s like a little bit of it. It’s not all of it.

**John:** Yeah. I get it. Finally, last bit of follow up. It’s also a good segue. Another one of our How Would This Be a Movie is being made into a movie, or at least being optioned as a property. So Universal bought the rights to the New York Times column You May Want to Marry My Husband, written by the late author Amy Krouse Rosenthal. So it was a bidding war between Paramount, Sony, Netflix, Studio 8, and Universal. And so it was Mark Platt, a very seasoned producer at Universal, whose credits include Legally Blonde, and La La Land, and Craig has worked with him. So he is going to be a person shepherding this project into the world. So no writers announced yet, but it looks like there will be a movie version of that story at some point.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? I’m really interested to see how this all works out. You and I both saw the opportunities in that piece, but I think we also recognized that there were real challenges to it. I’m currently developing a movie with Mark. It’s a musical, so it’s totally off the beaten path of this. But he’s a very prolific producer and if anyone can get this one made, I think it would be him for sure.

What is remarkable is how many people went after it. Sometimes I think that there are ideas that are harder to turn into a movie than people realize. But they have a certain immediate grabbiness that makes everybody want them.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And then there’s that flip side movie where there’s nothing shiny or loud about something, but somebody just finds it in a pile and goes, “Oh my god, this is gold.” It’s interesting. I think this is one of those pieces that is going to be much harder to do than you might think. But that’s not to say that it cannot be done. It’s just going to require quite a bit of skill.

**John:** I agree with you. Let’s take a look at three new stories in the news and figure out which ones of those could become a movie. One of these I think has that shiny quality which everyone will chase. The other two maybe not so much, but I think there’s interesting movies to be made out of here.

The three articles we picked this week, the first one is written by Alec MacGillis, who is writing for ProPublica. Was also published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, so everybody read it. This is The Beleaguered Tenants of Kushnerville. So I’ll give you a little bit of a synopsis of this. The story follows these housing developments where there’s 20,000 people living in them in sort of the Baltimore area, but there’s other developments across mostly the eastern seaboard. They were generally owned and managed by different firms. But the firms fell on hard times and this one company started buying them up and started managing them.

And people who lived in these units would often get out of their lease. They’d go on and do different things. The reporter follows some of these people who were then sued by the people who bought out these different apartment complexes. And were sued sometimes for really small amounts of money, but they were just really dogged in sort of going after them.

The apartment complexes themselves, there’s in some cases black mold. There’s bad maintenance. There’s a lot of things you could consider being the bad landlord kind of story. The fascinating twist on this is that the bad landlord, the person behind JK2 trust is…

**Craig:** Jared Kushner. The presidential son-in-law and I believe current architect of a lasting peace in the Middle East.

**John:** Yes. So, a busy person. But this was sort of a fascinating escalation of sort of what could be a very normal sort of situation of class and race and real estate. But this sort of bumps it up a notch. So, Craig, what are you thinking of this as a movie and how would we even get into this as a movie? What kind of movie would you see making out of this story?

**Craig:** Well, we have some real opportunities. We have a wide variety of people, because these apartment complexes are enormous. And inevitably there are going to be some people who move out, do nothing wrong. I mean, there’s a number of instances cited here where people followed the rules but either the paperwork was lost, or a mistake was made when money was moved from one account to another. And then Jared Kushner’s company pursues these people doggedly and tenaciously and ultimately cruelly and unfairly to extract money from them, even going so far as to garnish their wages, which means that essentially a court gets between you and your paycheck, takes that amount of money out that you owe somebody, and then gives you the rest.

So you have lots of different kinds of tenants. That’s exciting. You have single moms. You have black tenants. You have white tenants. You have some tenants who are Trump supporters who then find out that it’s Jared Kushner that’s doing this to them. So good opportunity there.

But it seems to me that the only efficient way in is a way that gives you an efficient way out. That requires some kind of funneling through a character. And if ever a movie were asking for the Erin Brockovich treatment, or the A Civil Action treatment, it’s this one. Somebody has to get a case and then go about that case, even if they’re not a lawyer or a private detective. They’re just somebody who is going to help do one little thing and they start pulling on a thread that begins to unravel this thing and go all the way up to somebody in the White House.

However, because it’s somebody in the White House, we have to kind of either wait for a news resolution to this story, or fictionalize who is actually in charge.

**John:** Yeah. So I agree that there needs to be a center point of focus. With something like Erin Brockovich, it’s an outsider who comes in, because Erin Brockovich is not directly involved with the water stuff until she becomes involved with general case work. I think it’s more fascinating if it’s one of these – if you could sort of take one of the characters who is living at that complex. We have a lot of names of people and they’re all great, but I think it may be a new person that you’re creating who is living there, basically has all the paperwork. They just picked the wrong person and she’s the one who said like, “This is not fair. This is not right. I actually have the paperwork. You cannot do this to me.” And she just keeps challenging them and ultimately uncovers, oh, you know who actually owns this, it is the president’s son-in-law. That feels like the natural way up through that.

And it would be great to have somebody who is inside it so that it doesn’t just feel like this weird way of the outsider comes in and saves everybody. That, to me, feels like the frustrating thing.

The other movie that struck me as being a good way into look at this is The Big Short. Because The Big Short was able to take a bunch of different characters looking at the same situation and see it from their different points of view. And so there’s complicated finance things to explain which some complicated finance people could explain to us, but there’s also all the dealings on the ground and then there’s the dealings in the White House or sort of the bigger legislative issues happening.

**Craig:** It’s a little tough to apply that to this because it doesn’t – this story doesn’t quite have the global impact or the cliffhanger nature of that event. It doesn’t have a major market crash. It doesn’t have mad geniuses pushing their crazy theories against conventional wisdom to be proven wrong and then to be proven right. But, I like your idea of maybe having our savior come from within.

I do always think about relationships. What is the relationship we will care about in a movie like this? And there is something really interesting – the bit that sort of jumped at me was this one guy is a Trump voter and he’s complaining about the state of affairs in this apartment building and how he’s been screwed over and his apartment is neglected. And the company treats him unfairly and everybody unfairly. And he’s told that the landlord is Jared Kushner and he goes, “Oh. Really? Like they don’t have enough money?”

And it’s a fascinating moment. Fascinating in part because these buildings, specifically where these – the Baltimore buildings are in this interesting transitional Exurb – it’s not quite suburb, you know – where you have poor black people and poor white people. A lot of people getting Section 8, which is federal support for housing. And I can see a situation where one tenant starts a crusade and tries to find help among her fellow tenants to essentially fight back.

And she encounters this guy. And they are completely different on paper and yet also if you take away race and politics exactly the same on paper. They have the same class and they have the same place and they have the same power status. And there is a relationship between the two of them. It doesn’t have to be romantic, although why not. But a relationship where the two of them change and become something together.

There is something exciting about watching people without power not only fight the power, but stop fighting each other. I think that sometimes is the most uplifting part of this. So, I think I would probably come at it from there. All that said, probably this is not going to be turned into a movie.

**John:** I would never say never, because there’s certainly a smart way to do it and the right filmmaker could find a way to do it. There’s also potentially – there’s The Wire. There’s the series version of this which could be really fascinating, too. Where you basically are examining this community from different sides. And you’re sort of looking at it from different perspectives. But going back to what is that fundamental relationship is you’re hitting on a key thing, because whether there’s romantic conflict or just straight on conflict, you don’t just want your protagonist going up against this sort of faceless entity or Jared Kushner, who is not going to be a person you’re going to be able to see directly.

You need to have somebody who is right there in his or her life who most of the conversations are going to be going with. So, think of Taraji P. Henson in Hidden Figures. And so she’s clearly your central protagonist character, but she’s surrounded by people who are interesting who are challenging her in interesting ways. So they’re her friends, but there’s also Kevin Costner’s character. There’s the Sheldon character. There’s other people around her who can be foils for her for her next step. And that may be the kind of thing you need to be trying to build out early on in the story figuring out who is it that she’s not going to just talk to, but who is going to challenge her to make it to that next step.

Because it can’t just be like the next judge, the next thing. That’s not going to be interesting.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Erin Brockovich, you have her boss. And even though they’re on the same side, they have to be able to butt heads.

**Craig:** They have to be. And I think that this is a mistake that I encounter constantly in screenplays from new writers. They miss this big part where we really do experience narrative through the lens of relationships. It’s how we’re programmed as humans and it’s certainly how we’re programmed as movie goers and television watchers. We need it.

We don’t really feel – this is something that Lindsay Doran has talked about a number of times, including at Ted. The ends of movies are – what we feel at the end of a movie is not elation at something having had happened. We feel elation with a relationship experiencing joy in something having happened. And so it’s easy to just forget that part and write about somebody fighting the court. And that’s about justice. And that’s about what’s right and what’s wrong. These are moral things. You’d think they’d be enough. They are not. Even remotely enough.

**John:** It’s not emotionally satisfying. That’s why Star Wars doesn’t end with blowing up the Death Star. It ends with everyone being together and getting their medals. Which seems like, oh, you could just cut that scene. But, no, you can’t cut that scene because then it’s not Star Wars. You haven’t paid off the emotional arc of what those characters have gone through. And that’s the kind of thing you’d be finding for this movie is like what have the characters been able to achieve together and what does that look between those central characters at the end of this story? And that’s what you’re trying to build to.

**Craig:** Yeah. You get to this exciting courtroom conclusion and if it’s just legal fireworks, then it’s contextless. It doesn’t matter to us. It’s not within the confines of a relationship. Whereas when Luke blows up the Death Star, he’s doing it because he’s talking to his key relationship and he’s finally getting the lesson. When Tom Cruise lights up Jack Nicholson on the stand in A Few Good Men, we understand that that is the culmination of a character choice to finally stop playing it safe and be more like the man his dad was, which in turn is a response to the challenge he’s received from Demi Moore’s character. It’s all about the relationships. It’s not about the legal stuff. Otherwise, well, okay, yep, you got him there. You know? It’s just not as interesting.

**John:** That’s why this is a fascinating article because of the things it provokes, but you’re basically adding all new characters and all new character dynamics to tell this story. So someone comes to you with this, you can say like, okay, that’s a fascinating backdrop, but almost everything you’re going to be inventing wholesale to find a way to get at these things.

One of the most fascinating questions that the article asks and never really finds a great answer for is why is this firm so doggedly pursuing things that cannot really be profitable for them to pursue. They’ll go after these $5,000 bills and their legal fees are clearly much higher than that to go after them. And so one of the theories is that they do it just basically to intimidate everybody else who is currently in the building from trying to leave or from trying to raise any kind of a fuss because it will just get around that, no, no, they will sue you and they will never stop suing you.

I just finished rereading 1984 and there’s a long section at the end where Winston, your protagonist, is wondering like why are you doing this to me. You’ve already won. Why is it important to you that I completely surrender, because you could just kill me? And that’s actually the point of the end of 1984 is it has to sort of break you of that. And it seems like such a strange drive from the other side. And a movie could hopefully find a meaningful answer for that in the course of the story.

**Craig:** And this is where the story boils my blood, because it’s true. And because essentially this corporation is being punitive and bullying and somewhat sadistically so. And Jared Kushner should be held responsible. And I can only imagine, and this is where journalism can really work wonders, that these poor people – not figuratively poor, literally poor people – who cannot afford lawyers are about to get some. I can’t imagine there aren’t at least a few large firms who are looking at this going pro bono, let’s do this class action.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s just outrageous. And maybe then that could – that might give you the ending you want. But we have like kind of an interesting opposite sort of situation with this next story. And I assume that this is the one you were saying is flashy/blingy for studios. I can only imagine – I mean, this is My Family’s Slave, written by the late Alex Tizon, who is writing for The Atlantic. If this hasn’t been optioned already I would be shocked. Shall I give a little summary?

**John:** Absolutely. And if you’ve listened to any other cultural podcast for the last two weeks, you’ve heard this discussed, because it’s been the focus of a lot of conversation.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a fascinating one. So, Alex Tizon was a Filipino-American and when his parents come from the Philippines they brought along a woman names Lola who Alex’s grandfather had essentially given to his mother as a slave. It’s interesting how long it takes him in his life to realize that she’s a slave. She is always with them. She is their domestic. She is their cook and their nanny and their maid. She doesn’t get paid. She has a little space, but sometimes she just falls asleep in the corner with the laundry. Both of Alex’s parents are fairly abusive to her. The mother, in particular, has a very complicated relationship with her, in which she’s not only abusive but seemingly also jealous of the relationship that Lola has with the children, including Alex.

And eventually after Alex’s parents die, he takes Lola to come live with him, but of course not as a slave, just to give her a place to live and give her freedom and take care of her. And even so, she is not really able to do so and keeps sort of working because that’s the life she knows. And yet there’s this profound sadness with her. She never knows love. She never has sex. She never learns to drive. She never really lives independently whatsoever. And is permanently estranged from her family back home. And eventually she passes away and in a quite beautiful moment Alex brings her ashes back to her village where she is from and gives her back to her family.

But this story does not take place in the 1700s or 1800s. Quite obviously, it takes place in the ‘70s, and ‘80s, and ‘90s.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a fascinating story and unlike the first story which is all abstract, sort of like big picture things, this is nothing but characters. It’s all characters here. And so I think the reason why this is such catnip is because it’s a way of exploring our relationships with the people who work with us, work for us, and the sense of what is slavery. What does it mean to have somebody be working for you but not being paid? It’s all so relevant and the characters are so interesting and compelling.

The most fundamental question though is when do you start. When do you start telling this story? Because do you start telling the story when Lola is essentially given to the mother, so she’s 12 years old. Do you start the story then, back in the Philippines, and you sort of meet the crazy grandfather who is abusive, who beats Lola for something that the mother does? Or do you start it later on? Do you start it in the US with this kid who has this nanny he loves and eventually starts to realize, oh wait, she actually is not getting paid – this is sort of the family secret.

It’s a fundamentally different movie based on when you start it. Do you start it with Alex being in the story, or do you start it back in the Philippines and come to the US?

**Craig:** It’s a real challenge. This is the perfect example of a very shiny property that will pose an enormous amount of problems as you try and turn it into a movie. And, again, my question – it’s always my first question – what’s the relationship that we care about?

It seems here that the greatest potential of a lasting relationship that we can care about and find joy in is the relationship between Lola and Alex. She is his slave, too, even though he’s a child. And then later an adult. But she loves him clearly. And he loves her, clearly. And, in fact, a lot of the dissatisfaction and conflict he has with his own mother is because she mistreats Lola and because frankly he loves Lola more than he loves his own mother. There’s stuff there.

Now, this is a minefield because we have seen this movie before. We have seen the kind of movie where someone finally realizes that they have been taking advantage of and oppressing another person whom they love. And so they set them free, thus becoming the hero of the story when really they’re not. They’re just kind of correcting something that’s horribly wrong. And we’re meant to experience their kind of enlightenment as a positive, but ultimately for the slave there is really no happy ending.

So we’ve seen that. It’s a challenge to avoid that narrative here because there is no great change for Lola. There is really only the sadness of an unfulfilled broken life.

**John:** Yeah. One of the real challenges here, in the bad version of the story Lola is nothing but an object. She’s just something who is looked at but never sort of explored internally. And I think that is the real danger here is that you’re not getting inside what her drives are. Because they’re actually complicated. And Tizon does single out some moments where she kind of can’t leave, she doesn’t want to leave. She loves the kids. But she also wants to go back. She realizes that she has not ability to sort of function here and she’s scared what’s going to happen if she rocks the boat at all.

I wonder if the fundamental relationship is essentially a love triangle. It’s a love triangle between Alex, his mom, and Lola. And the very complicated thing between the three of them, because Alex loves his mom and he loves Lola, but it’s very hard to fit all that together. Like the mother is horrible to Lola and yet also needs Lola. And Lola needs to be needed. It’s messed up in really fascinating ways. To me, that feels like the crux of all this is the pull between these three people.

I mean, usually as an audience, we would probably sit with Alex because it’s the most comfortable place to come into the story. But I wouldn’t want to limit the POV to only Alex’s point of view because then I think we’re not going to really understand what the mother is going through and what Lola is going through.

Because if you look at the story from the mother’s point of view, she’s like look how hard I had it here. I came to the US. We had nothing. I worked three jobs. If I didn’t have this nanny, how would I do this? How would I provide for my family? She’s panicked at every moment. She wants the best for her kids. And Lola’s health and happiness can’t be anywhere on her priorities. I think it’s a fascinating story to look at where you have some sympathy for where the mother is.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then you don’t, because–

**John:** Then you don’t, yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, ultimately she didn’t have to be cruel. And the problem with the relationships there is that ultimately the stakes of those relationships which come down to “am I loved, who do I love, is it wrong to love you, is it wrong to not love you” all pare in comparison to the stakes of “I’m a slave.” It’s hard for me to–

**John:** Okay, and here’s the thing. You don’t want to slide into moral relativism or to – we could also post links to some good threads on people’s criticisms of the piece and support of the piece talking about sort of you don’t want to justify it based on like, oh, this is actually common in Filipino culture or like you’re misunderstanding what some of these things are. But I think there’s a universal aspect to this which I definitely felt where a person in Los Angeles who has a Latina nanny, like that is a complicated relationship. That person is being paid. But is that person living their best life? Are they living the dream that they had hoped to live? Well, they’re certainly in a better position than Lola, but it’s still complicated.

**Craig:** It is. Yes.

**John:** Here’s another complication. Imagine Lola was a relative. Imagine Lola was a niece or a spinster aunt who was basically in the same situation. Well, is that slavery? Well, technically I guess it sort of is. But that’s actually much more commonly accepted. Like a relative you are not paying. That’s sort of natural. It’s almost in a weird way that she was shanghaied into being part of this family with no choice of escaping.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there is a genre where people explore the nanny relationship. It goes way back. Mary Poppins was a nanny. And then in The Help you had a nanny. And in the modern phenomenon of the Latina nanny in Los Angeles and the Jamaican nanny in New York. But they’re paid. That is a job. And you can talk about the nuances of class and love and race, but at the very least there is a basic dignity that they are paid and they are free to leave.

This girl is not even sold. She’s just given. She’s just taken and given and separated from her family. Not allowed to go back. She’s never taught to read. They deprive her of an education. It is hard to look past the fact that she is essentially imprisoned and indentured and is owned. And has no free will. And that, to me, trumps all of the other possible concerns. And it’s very heartbreaking. The saddest thing in the world is an animal that is so used to being in a cage that when you open the cage door it doesn’t even understand that it can walk out.

And when you see that in a human being, and you see that, people have spent a long time in prison. Notoriously have really hard times when they leave because the freedom is overwhelming to them. Well, she’s never even – she can’t even have the freedom when she gets the freedom, because she has been essentially – she’s been broken. And it’s hard for me to look past any of that. It overwhelms everything.

This will require a very, very deft touch. And, I do think whoever writes this should be familiar with this culture, because I think nuance is going to be really important here. And this is a very interesting take on slavery. We have a lot of experience with culture investigating slavery in the United States. But we had a very specific slavery of African people. This is a different kind of slavery. And it’s a different kind of culture. It would take a deft hand and a very knowledgeable hand.

**John:** Agreed. I think one of the crucial choices to make sort of going back to, you know, when do you start the story. If you came into the story not knowing that she was essentially indentured at 12 years old things change a lot. If you believe that she actually came into this at 18 or at 20, that it was a choice, and like that things didn’t go well, it definitely shifts how you perceive this story. So, if you start the story when she’s 12, I’m going to have a very hard time ever becoming sympathetic to the mother.

Unless, and this is again very tricky, but the mother is a child as well. And if the mother as a child just cannot fundamentally understand that this girl is being forced here against her will, then maybe you’ve got something. But it’s really tough.

**Craig:** I mean, there is a version of this with a slightly amended ending where you don’t talk about the fact that this woman is a slave at the front. She is the beloved nanny. The son is older now. The mother dies. And the nanny doesn’t know what to do. And the son realizes that she’s not really leaving him. And he’s not sure what the deal is there. And he starts to try and give her some life that she didn’t have before because of the mother. And he decides, you know what, you’re pretty old. Let’s take you back to the Philippines. Why didn’t you ever go back?

And she makes excuses. They go back. And they have a journey to this very remote village where she’s from. And along the way the ultimate discovery is you weren’t my nanny. You were a slave. The truth emerges. And then in the end she does die.

There is a version there which is a version of discovery.

**John:** Honestly, from the article’s point of view, I found the trip back to the Philippines to be the least interesting part. When I reread it, I ended up just skimming them because that wasn’t–

**Craig:** She wasn’t there. That’s what I’m saying. If she were with him.

**John:** She was just a box of ashes.

**Craig:** Yeah. If she were with him, I think that could actually be sort of interesting because here’s somebody who is uncovering what he thinks is a trip where he’s going to uncover his “past” because he’s going back to the place where his people are from. But really the past he’s uncovering is his recent past. That’s interesting.

**John:** To me, the most fascinating and sort of cinematic moments for me though are when Alex is I think 12 or 14 and a friend is coming over. And the friend starts asking questions about who is this woman. And he gets caught in the lie where like, oh, she’s a relative. No, you said she was your grandmother. And basically like it’s almost like The Americans where you’re caught up in these lies and you can’t risk it being exposed because if it did get exposed, because Lola doesn’t have documentation, like the whole family could get shipped back to the Philippines. So that pressure on a 14-year-old kid who both loves his mother and loves Lola, that’s a really fascinating moment.

And in a certain way if you didn’t move forward in time but just let it be about that, that’s a really fascinating meaty bit of drama right there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is. I don’t know. It’s a tough one because we know. So we’re watching this and we feel bad. And then those people leave and we still feel bad. I’m looking for that engine to figure out how to make this story work. I mean, that’s why I’m going, “Is it a road trip?” I’m looking for something that is an engine here, because the other way to go is to go completely unconventional and do a magical realism take on this where we’re with Lola and she’s a slave and this is her life. But then she has this other life she leads in her head, which is the what-if. It’s really about what is the point you’re trying to make here and what is the thing you want to unlock for people. And the feeling you want to leave them with.

And you sort of make your decision there and work backwards, I guess.

**John:** Another choice you’re going to have to make early on is at what point are people going to start speaking English, because you feel like they’re not speaking English inside the house, but then that’s a lot of subtitles to read. So, figuring out how you’re going to make that split is really fascinating, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would think that you would stay pretty much in English. It’s accented English. I mean, you have a little help there in that the kids are American. So, even though they probably speak Tagalog, the parents and Lola will speak them in English, but then you can certainly hear – it would be interesting to hear the two of them fighting in Tagalog and not have subtitles and you just know it’s not good.

**John:** Yeah. All right, our last story is nothing like the other stuff, so it’s a completely different kind of story. This is The Mystery of the Wasting House-Cats. So this is a story in the New York Times by Emily Anthes and it tracks the outbreak of a really rare feline condition that they started noticing in the ‘70s which is hyperthyroidism. And basically cats don’t get hyperthyroidism where your – well, you should explain what it is because you’re the medical person. But essentially a gland in your brain pumps out way too much, is it insulin? What does it do?

**Craig:** Well, the thyroid pumps out growth hormone in part.

**John:** And so in humans when humans have hyperthyroidism they lose weight, they become incredibly hungry. It’s a thing you don’t see in cats. But then they started seeing it in the 1970s in cats. And so it starts to look at like, well, why would that happen. And scientists looked back at the previous autopsies of cats. It didn’t happen before then. So something new is happening, so they need to investigate why. And so it becomes a medical investigation story of like why are these cats getting it. What has changed? And the leading culprit is a flame-retardant which has been put into cushions for upholstery and other things. It’s meant to be there to protect us, but it’s getting into the cats and the cats are doing poorly for it.

And the real question is at what point does this become a human problem as well? Are these things we’re putting out there going to hurt us as well. So, it’s a detective story. It’s a little bit of an investigation. There’s a lot of cats, so you got to kind of like cats to like this movie.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But to me this struck me as it could be Erin Brockovich again where you’re going after the bad chemical makers. There’s something really interesting about this. It’s not Outbreak. It’s not one of those sort of disease movies. But there’s something fascinating about this. Craig, did you like anything of this?

**Craig:** No. By the way, I want to clarify it’s not really growth hormone. The answer is thyroids put out thyroid hormone, but I was like that’s not a really good answer. They’re mostly about controlling the metabolic rate. Which is why people who are hyperthyroidic, you know, get skinny and sometimes their eyes get a little buggy.

Yeah, the problem here is that the cats aren’t dying. So, when we see an epidemic where a lot of animals are suddenly dying like the collapse of the bee colonies, we’re like, “Oh no.” They’re not dying. There’s actually a pretty reasonable way to treat this. And it does seem like the cause here, the environmental cause, has been determined – PBDEs. And it’s not like the movie can really come up with a better solution than what we’ve already come up with which is to stop using those, because we have. So, those – I mean, they’re out there still because they’re sort of grandfathered into a lot of materials, but we don’t make them anymore.

And, first of all, cats will chew on things that humans don’t. So, we’re not necessarily chewing on our sofa cushions. It does not appear that there is a spike in hyperthyroidism among adults, or hypothyroidism for that matter among adults. So, it doesn’t really seem like there’s a problem for us, so mostly just seems like if you’re a super cat person, but no one is going to go to a theater and watch this. I can’t imagine.

**John:** There’s anecdotes in here that I really liked. In the 1950s in Minamata, Japan, all the cats seemed to go mad at once. And this seems kind of amazing. So they began to stagger, stumble, and convulse, limbs flailing in every direction. They hurled themselves at stone walls and drowned themselves in the sea. That’s cinematic. That’s crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Cool.

**John:** And so that’s terrifying. And then it started happening to the children. And, oh, that’s horrible. Now you’ve got a movie. At first you’ve got sort of like an “oh, that’s curious,” and once the kids start dying then you’ve got a real problem.

So it turned out to be that one of the local chemical plants was dumping stuff into the sea. The fish were eating the chemicals. The people were eating the fish. The cats were eating the fish. And that’s what happened. So, classically that’s a canary in the coal mine. That’s why often environmental impacts will be seen first in animals, and therefore you’re watching those to extrapolate out from there to other places.

And so in a movie where you saw cats or some other animals like suddenly perish, there will be that instinct of like, oh, isn’t that so interesting that that’s happening. But as an omen for things that are going to happen next, that can be a great way into the bigger problem that’s about to happen.

So, again, I’d love to pitch what the Oscar version of this is. And I’m now sort of regretting putting it on the outline, because I can’t see what that Oscar version is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But in terms of the horror movie start, that’s the great horror movie start. The cats acting insane is a great horror movie start because then the people start acting insane and you get a good foreshadowing of what’s to come. That’s always delightful.

**Craig:** Always delightful. Yeah. And we do see in movies like Contagion and the Hot Zone, and what was it, not Contact, but–

**John:** Outbreak.

**Craig:** Outbreak. There is almost always a scene where an animal goes bananas. And in the case of the one cited in this article is methyl, not ethyl, methyl mercury into the bay. Because the anti-vaccine people love to think that methyl mercury and ethyl mercury are the same thing. They’re not, dopes.

So, yeah, that’s super bad. And there are definitely things, I mean, we have at times realized that we are in trouble because of the way animals were acting. But, of course, animals aren’t people and they will do things that people don’t do, like eat feces. That’s one of the big ones. We generally don’t. [laughs]

**John:** But if you saw people doing that in a movie, you would know something is wrong.

**Craig:** Or something was right, like in Pink Flamingos, the great Divine rest in peace. So, yeah, I mean, maybe there’s a crazy black comedy to be done like this.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** There was a movie out of New Zealand I think where the sheep went nuts.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Like a horror movie. Which is kind of fun. You know. And so the idea of cats going crazy is kind of fun. So it’s a black comedy or sort of like a horror-comedy. But there’s no Oscar potential here for the cats. They’re just going to get better after some mild treatment. [laughs]

**John:** There will be a Pixar version of it where the cats notice the humans are going crazy, and the cats have to band together to save the humans. The humans are the canaries in the coal mine and the cats realize there’s a problem coming.

**Craig:** Right. Like the cats suddenly realize that Donald Trump is the President of the United States.

**John:** No, no, we’ve got to stop him.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not good. Something has gone terribly wrong here.

**John:** The new Cat Constitution. We could stop trying to save it. I regret putting it in here.

**Craig:** No, you should never regret. Never regret. Ever.

**John:** No regrets. That’s the thing I’ve learned about 2017 is no regrets ever.

**Craig:** No regrets.

**John:** Predictions. Will any of these things become movies?

**Craig:** Yes. I think My Family’s Slave is going to become something. It may be a Netflix kind of television-only piece. But if you attract the right filmmaker, the right actor, and you really kind of nail a specific and enlightening angle on a story to kind of honor what’s unique about it and not jam it into the same old story that we’ve seen where the slave owner is finally enlightened by the slave, then yeah, I think that one. Certainly someone is going to buy it, if they haven’t already. That’s unquestionable.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s a slam dunk. And I think Kushnerville, something like that could happen. I don’t know if it’s necessarily based around this article, but I think the idea of doing something about those housing projects is fascinating, but the hook of having Kushner be the guy behind it is also just great. So, I don’t know that it’s a big screen feature thing, but I could see a premium cable movie coming out of this. There’s something that it’s political, and targeted, and smart.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I could see something happening with that, but I don’t think there’s going to be a cat movie. At least not a cat movie based on this article.

**Craig:** [laughs] No, there is not going to be a cat movie. I think that there is a good story to be told. Someone should start working on this. Or, hey, just hire me. There’s a good story to be told about two people falling in love and one of them is – and it doesn’t matter which gender is which. It doesn’t even matter if they’re homosexual or heterosexual. All that matters is that one party is lower class and black, and one party is lower class and white. And you’re watching the two sides of that coin and the interesting thing that has happened in this country where they have been seemingly pitted against each other, coming together and actually falling in love I think would be spectacular. Because that’s the crazy thing.

I mean, I think we discussed that sketch on Saturday Night Live this year where Tom Hanks was on Black Jeopardy.

**John:** Oh yeah. Absolutely. That’s a great sketch.

**Craig:** And it kind of cuts right to it. Which is the experiences of our life are actually so much closer together than the experiences of say people like Jared Kushner, who don’t want to talk to either one of us, and don’t live like either one of us, and don’t respect either one of us. There’s something there. There’s a really good story to be told there. And this is an interesting – it’s certainly a way in. I don’t know if it’s the way in.

**John:** I agree.

All right, let’s get to our big feature question of the episode. This is from Nick in Los Angeles. And we have audio. So let’s take a listen.

Nick: This is a question that occurred to me during the last round of WGA negotiations with the AMPTP. And that is basically why is the AMPTP allowed to exist? Why are all the studios and networks allowed to get together and decide collectively what they’re willing to pay writers and directors and actors, even though they’re all separately owned companies, when that is not allowed to happen in other industries? Like, for example, Ford and GM and Chrysler can’t put all their CEOs in a room and say, “Okay, this is what we’re going to pay United Auto Workers Union next time there’s a negotiation. And if they want more than that, too bad. We’re all united on this.”

That’s an illegal trust and it can’t happen. So, I wonder why it’s allowed to happen in the case of the studios, even though it seems like it’s the same situation. They’re separately owned companies in the same industry that are basically colluding on what they’re going to offer their employees. So there must be a legal distinction there, but I don’t know what it is and I would like to understand. Thanks.

**Craig:** Well the AMPTP is considered a trade organization. And so this is a – it’s not just a phrase. It’s a term of law when it comes to collective bargaining. Specifically they are a multi-employer bargaining unit. And federal labor law, as has been interpreted by case law over time, because every part of the national labor relations act has been litigated up and down the line. The companies are allowed to form a multi-employer bargaining unit to negotiate with a common pool of employees. And it doesn’t always make sense, but a lot of times it does. For instance, in sports it makes complete sense.

So, if you’re Aaron Judge, you play for the Yankees. You are an employee of the Yankees. You’re not an employee of Major League Baseball. You’re an employee of the Yankees. But you are part of a bargaining unit, the Major League Baseball Player Association, that does not bargain with the Yankees. It bargains with the Major League baseball team’ multi-employer bargaining unit.

Similarly in Hollywood, we do the same thing. Nick says the CEOs of Ford, GM, and Chrysler can’t negotiate with the UAW as a group. I think they could, actually. They choose not to, and it makes sense in part because while the auto industry was once very, very centralized, it is no longer so. Hollywood is unique in this sense. It’s pretty centralized. There is this very specific walled-off pool of talent, just as there is in professional sports, which is the only real analogy I think to – or cognate to what we have.

Frankly, it probably wasn’t smart for the auto companies to not form a multi-employer bargaining unit way back at the height of the UAW’s power. But, yeah, long story short, they’re allowed to do it and they can do it. And for our situation here, it is not going to change any time soon.

**John:** It’s worth noting that I think nothing precludes – this is doing the 2007/2008 strike, there were discussion where the WGA was going to start negotiating with some of the members separately to do deals. And that’s a thing that could still happen. But I would like to remind Nick and other writers that it’s actually useful for the WGA to negotiate with all of the people at once, because if we had to make a separate deal with Paramount and a separate deal with Disney and a separate deal with Fox, it would be a mess. Because your terms would change based on who was employing you and that would be really bad really quickly.

Unlike the auto worker who is working for Ford and is working for Ford for 30 years, we are working for different people all the time. And it’s very useful to have common terms across all these different things. And so this is the fantasy of like, oh, we could pit them against each other. In real life, it would probably not work out very well for us.

**Craig:** Yeah. They don’t seem interested in being pitted against each other. They have chosen to band together in this multi-employer bargaining unit. And, look, it’s not just the big companies. The big companies are the ones that run the negotiations on behalf of the AMPTP. Well, I mean, the staff of the AMPTP runs the negotiations, but the big companies are the ones in the room with Carol Lombardini who is their chief negotiator.

But, the AMPTP is negotiating that deal on behalf of hundreds of companies. Every small company that wants to hire WGA writers has to become signatory to the contract. They essentially become members of the AMPTP. And it makes complete sense because why wouldn’t they? If they just agree to sign on board with the AMPTP, they get to have that contract. People who say, well why don’t we negotiate those people separately and get a better contract, the answer is because they don’t have to. Because they’ll just take that one. They can with the stroke of a pen. And so it goes.

**John:** There’s always going to be a discussion of like, oh, should we make a separate deal with Amazon or Netflix or some other brand new player who actually has a lot of money and is doing something different. That will always come up. I don’t know that it’s ever going to happen. But that does come up.

And the WGA does have different deals in certain cases because it’s a very different kind of company. So the WGA also negotiates on behalf of some TV news writers. It’s a completely different kind of thing. And those are done in a different way.

**Craig:** Yeah. And really specific, because for instance the WGA West represents news writers employed by KCBS. That’s it, as far as I know. Oh, and also 1010 WINS News Radio, I believe. So, they don’t even represent the whole business there, so that is an employer-specific negotiation.

Netflix and Amazon have agreed to just basically tack themselves onto the AMPTP. Smart business. I think they’re well aware that the only possible thing that could end up happening if they negotiate with us separately is them having to pay us more. Because we’re never going to take less than what the AMPTP gives us, so what’s the point? It just sort of resolves itself. That is kind of the deal and, yeah, it’s going to stay the deal.

**John:** It will stay the deal. It’s time for One Cool Things. Craig, what do you got?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a bit of a sad thing, but also a very lovely thing. My grandmother-in-law, my children’s great grandmother-in-law, my wife’s grandmother, Millie Hendrick, passed away this past weekend. She was 98 years old. She was a spectacular lady. It was fun to know her for as long as I did. She was born in 1918.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** You know, just imagine all the things you saw. Yeah, first six years, you don’t remember any of that. So let’s spot her at 1925 to make it a nice even number of when she starts realizing what’s going on. She’s there when the stock market crashes. She’s there during the depression. She’s there during WWII. She’s there during the Eisenhower era. She’s there during Korea. She’s there during Vietnam. She sees all of it. And then the computer comes.

Just think of the way the telephones changed. She was there when TV showed up. And there she was at the end just being her cool self. Fantastic lady. Lived a great life. Really active in the Peace Corps. And she loved bird-watching. My wife loves bird-watching. Bird-watching is one of those things where it’s like–

**John:** I just can’t.

**Craig:** What is that? [laughs] What possible joy are people – and yet they, oh my god, do bird watchers love bird watching.

**John:** I have to say, Craig, the way you feel about bird-watching is how I feel about most sports. I could totally understand some people find joy in this, but I just can’t find joy in this.

**Craig:** I mean, you can at least acknowledge that in sports there is an outcome. Right?

**John:** That’s true. There’s a mystery. Yes.

**Craig:** In bird-watching, they’re just watching birds. Anyway, she loved bird-watching. She was a terrific person and it was an honor to know her. And, you know, when someone dies at the age of 98, you can’t really be sad. I mean, you can be mournful.

**John:** Celebrate that they lived 98 years. That’s great.

**Craig:** What a run. What a run. So my One Cool Thing this week, Millie Hendrick.

**John:** Very nice. My One Cool Thing is a song and video called Dear Mr. Darcy. It is done Esther Longhurst and Jessica Messenger. It’s an open letter addressed to Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. It is just terrific. I just loved it. It reminded me of my favorite things about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Another Period, Hamilton. It was sort of like Empire with empire waist lines. It was delightfully perfectly done little short thing. So it’s just a little delicious treat to enjoy if you like Jane Austen things, which I suspect many people on this podcast do like.

So, I will use this as the outro for tonight’s episode so that people can enjoy a little bit of this song. And that’s our show for this week. So our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions like Nick’s today.

People ask us do you have a voicemail line for when people leave those messages like Nick’s. No, just attach you asking your question to the email and then we might use it. So, that’s a way to do it. You can just record it on your phone or however you want to do it.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts as Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a review, because that helps people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode, including links to all these articles we talked about, including additional things about My Family’s Slave, at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts in about four days.

And all the back episodes of the show are found at Scriptnotes.net. We have 300 episodes back there, plus bonus episodes with cool other people. So thanks.

**Craig:** Thanks John. See you next time.

**John:** Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Midnight Blue T-Shirt](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-midnight-blue)
* [The Seed Vault is Fine](http://www.popsci.com/seed-vault-flooding?src=SOC&dom=tw)
* [You May Want to Marry My Husband](http://variety.com/2017/film/news/universal-you-may-want-to-marry-my-husband-movie-1202429914/)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 293: [Underground Railroad of Love](http://johnaugust.com/2017/underground-railroad-of-love)
* [The Beleaguered Tenants of ‘Kushnerville’](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-beleaguered-tenants-of-kushnerville)
* [My Family’s Slave](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490/)
* [The Mystery of the Wasting House-Cats](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/magazine/the-mystery-of-the-wasting-house-cats.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&_r=0)
* [Dear Mr Darcy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekVdhO7P4Nw)
* [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 Esther Longhurst and Jessica Messenger ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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