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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: You’re listening to episode 660 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now one thing I love about our podcast is that we actively solicit suggestions on topics from our listeners. Today’s episode exists entirely because of one email we got. Craig, would you mind reading this email?

Craig: I would not. It says:

“Could you do an entire episode on why Moneyball works? A strange disease I have is watching the same movie over and over again when it affects me, and lately, it’s Moneyball. My older son has been doing this too lately, which I’m either proud of or worried about, and he was the one who landed on Moneyball, a movie I don’t even think I saw in theaters. I would very much welcome an expert understanding of why that movie, which contains so few of the traditional elements of a movie, a B-plot love story, for example, is so effective.” Side note, I challenge the premise.

John, I think we should do this.

John: I think we should. I think this is a great suggestion from any listener, but when it comes from an accomplished journalist, a best-selling novelist, she wrote Fleishman is in Trouble. She also wrote the acclaimed adaptation, the limited series adaptations of Fleishman is in Trouble, who we had her on the show to talk about that, and this summer’s new bestseller, Long Island Compromise. We had to get her on the show. Welcome back to the program, Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: It’s so great to be here. Thank you for having me again.

Craig: I love this. We have a genius on. This is great. I get to argue with her about Moneyball, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, and–

Taffy: Is it?

Craig: Extra thank you, Taffy, because we get to talk about baseball on a podcast where 50% of the people on this podcast don’t talk– They don’t even discriminate between various blank balls, basketball, football, baseball, it’s just sports ball to John, and I’m a baseball fanatic. I love Moneyball. I, too, have watched it over and over and over. I think it’s brilliant for so many reasons, and I do think it has all of the traditional elements of a movie, so, huh.

John: Wow.

Taffy: On the surface, the traditional–

Craig: We’ll get into it.

Taffy: Let’s go for it, let’s go for it.

Craig: We’ll discuss.

John: I agree with both of you. I think we’ll try to find the happy middle, the dialectic between these two polar opposites here. This joins your tradition of deep dives. We’ve done it on movies before, so we’ve talked about The Little Mermaid, we’ve talked about Frozen, we’ve talked about Die Hard.

Taffy: Clueless was one of my favorite deep dives.

John: Oh my God, Clueless, incredible. We’re going to do this. Also in our bonus segment for premium members, I would like to talk about money, because, Taffy, your book, Long Island Compromise, is about the intersection of trauma and money. Moneyball is literally about calculating how much a person is worth, so I thought we would dig into our feelings about money and value and how we value ourselves as writers. Money for our bonus segment, premium members.

Taffy: So good.

Craig: Amazing.

John: All right, Craig, you and I have a little bit of housekeeping to do before we can get on with Taffy here.

Craig: All right.

John: About two weeks from now, we are going to be in Austin for the Austin Film Festival. You and I are doing a live Scriptnotes show. I’m doing a 25th-anniversary screening of Go.

Craig: Oh, nice.

John: Yeah. I see that you are on at least one or two other panels. You’re doing the– I can’t believe they drafted you into doing the Pitch Finale. I don’t know how they–

Craig: You know what, I’m there. What else? It’s either I’m drinking while judging the Pitch Finale party, or I’m drinking and not judging the Pitch Finale party. I will say the thing about the– listen, I don’t care about pitches. I don’t think they make any sense. This is like, I don’t know why they keep picking me. They all know this. But it is fun because it’s in a bar, it’s packed, it’s kind of exciting. I feel like Simon Cowell, obviously that’s my part. I play Simon Cowell on the show, and we get to make somebody very, very happy, but the crowd is like really into it. That part I think is fun.

John: That part is fun. Drew will be there. Megana will be there. Craig, I don’t think that Megana’s going to come as well.

Craig: I am now levitating.

John: Chris who does our Inneresting Newsletter will be there as well. They’re there to help support Scriptnotes, but also because we’re launching the new version of Highland and so we’re going to throw a party for that. If you’re in Austin and whether you have your badge or don’t have your badge and you’d like to join us for this launch party for Highland, that’ll be on Thursday afternoon at some point. You need to click the link on the show notes and tell us that you want to come and then we’ll send you the details about that.

It should be a good fun time to see the new version of Highland that everybody else will be using. Let us get to the marquee topic here, Moneyball. We will talk about the development and probably at the end of this because there’s actually a really interesting development history that we can talk through. Let’s talk about the movie that we’re watching on the screen. It’s based on a book by Michael Lewis, screenplay by Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin.

Craig: Who?

John: Two hacks, they’ve never done anything else.

Craig: Can you imagine? That’s already screenwriting Voltron. That’s incredible.

Taffy: Right.

John: It is incredible. Story credit by Stan Chervin. Drew has found this undated 166-page draft. It has omitteds in it that makes it feel like it’s a production draft, but it’s not actually a very close representation of what we see on screen right now. Drew at some point made a hop in to tell us like, “This is a thing that was different in this draft as written versus the movie that we see.” Really for our purposes, we’re going to talk about the movie that we experienced.

If you were to download it as we’ve recently watched it, this is the movie we’re seeing. This is why it works on screen the way it works. Let’s get to the premise here because Taffy, you said that this quote contains so few of the traditional elements of the movie, like a B-plot love story, yet it’s so effective. What has been your experience and exposure to Moneyball and what prompted you to actually ask this question?

Taffy: Like I said in my email, my son has started watching Moneyball over and over. My son recites full scenes from Moneyball.

Craig: Yeah, he does.

Taffy: There are a couple of words that you could say that will trigger an entire scene. He is excellent at it. I’m not allowed to disseminate video of it, but I have video of it. In case you see me, I will show it to you.

Craig: Amazing.

John: I think you sent me a clip. We’re not going to post it–

Taffy: Did I?

John: Yes, I think you did.

Taffy: We started watching it a lot together. I have been a sports reporter, but before you get excited, Craig, I do not understand baseball on a level that I have had to, in ESPN Magazine stories, write, “please insert sports stuff here,” which is how it works sometimes if you’re bad. I think of baseball as the language Mandarin. You could learn it, but if you didn’t learn it before you were 11, you will never be fluent at it.

Craig: You might be onto something there because I certainly did learn it before I was 11.

Taffy: See. And by the way, I therefore think that there is something very, very– like I watch Moneyball over and over. I can now recite it. I still don’t know how baseball work. I think one of the successful things about it is that unlike the movie, also about a thing I don’t understand, Rounders? I don’t understand. When I watch Rounders, I don’t understand what I’m supposed to think based on the hand of cards that’s presented to me. I don’t feel that I am missing anything.

I feel like maybe these luminaries who wrote it may be learned about baseball, but understood more from my point of view than theirs, that you don’t need to know anything about baseball.

Craig: I agree with you. I’m running through my mental inventory of Moneyball and it teaches you the things you need to know along the way. You get a basic sense, okay, Billy Beane is the GM. That means he’s deciding who to trade, who to engage, but he doesn’t own the team. Then you have a bunch of scouts whose job, everybody played baseball and they’re old guys and they’re supposed to find you new talent. Then there’s this kid who’s helping him figure out with statistics, how do we solve this problem we have, which is that our team sucks.

One of my favorite quotes of any movie is Billy Beane, as played by Brad Pitt, defines the problem the Oakland A’s are having. You don’t need to know anything about baseball to understand this. “The problem we’re trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there’s 50 feet of crap and then there’s us. It’s an unfair game. If you try to think like the Yankees in here, you will lose to the Yankees out there.” Anyone can understand that. We are dealing with an underdog.

John: Let’s talk about digging into more of Taffy’s question. There are things that she is expecting to see in a movie like this that do not appear. Part of it, I think it’s also because the presentation of the movie is not what we might expect. It is shot almost like a documentary. It feels like a documentary at times. The camera’s very loose. There’s a lot of archival footage put in there. You feel like you’re watching things happen in front of the lens, but it’s not as presentational as we might expect from other movies.

Taffy: Can I just say also on that documentary note, we looked up all of the actors in this movie. Some of them are scouts and some of them are professional actors. The professional actors are not acting like professional actors.

Craig: They’re not.

Taffy: They’re acting like people who are in a documentary.

Craig: I’m so glad you said that.

Taffy: It’s amazing.

Craig: Because the person that I’m obsessed with the most, just on a tone point of view, is this actor named Ken Medlock who plays Grady. Grady is kind of the villain scout. He’s the guy who doesn’t want to hear about the idea– the basic premise of Moneyball is baseball’s been around for 100 years. It is imbued with tradition and old ways of thinking, the Oakland A’s are a poor team and they’re losing. This kid comes along from Yale and says, “There’s a better way of thinking about how to evaluate players.”

Grady represents the old guard who’s like, “You and Google boy– as he calls them– aren’t going to change baseball.” This guy, Ken Medlock, I was convinced was an actual baseball scout. He had baseball body, gym teacher face, and just the fluidity and realism of the way he portrayed that character. People don’t talk about a great character actor enough. Ken Medlock, you’re my one cool thing this week. I don’t care. Ken Medlock. So good.

Taffy: Is his name John Henry at the end who plays the owner of the Red Sox?

John: Arliss Howard plays him. Yes.

Taffy: Sorry, Arliss Howard plays John Henry.

Craig: The owner of the Boston Red Sox.

Taffy: The owner of the Boston Red Sox. He’s an actor, but he is acting like somebody I would have interviewed and is trying to figure out how to speak to somebody for the first time in front of a– it’s amazing.

Craig: It really is amazing.

Taffy: It’s like a third kind of movie, a thing that’s conveying itself as the thing we’re used to in a documentary from all these ESPN, 30 for 30 things, right?

Craig: Yes, this stiffness to it.

Taffy: So interesting.

Craig: Bennett Miller, who directed the film, also, a ton of credit there for just both the visual style and also keeping everything so wonderfully grittily grounded. You’re right, like an ESPN 30 for 30.

John: Well, let’s also talk about things you might expect to see in this movie. Let’s imagine that Michael Lewis’s book lands on your desk and like, okay, well, how do we adapt this book? How do we adapt this story? The very basics of the story is Billy Beane is the general manager of the Oakland A’s, has this team that is not winning, does not have the money to do what he needs to do. Ends up recruiting somebody on to help him figure out how to assemble a team in a much less expensive way that is the antithesis of how you’re supposed to be doing baseball.

We get this Michael Lewis book. The things we expect to see in a movie, like Taffy points out, is like, well, where is the B-story love interest? Where is the Brad Pitt love interest? You have Brad Pitt and he doesn’t kiss anybody in the whole movie. Now, Drew, the script that you gave us, there is a love interest in there. Talk to us about what’s different if we wanted to look at this script.

Drew: Yes, from the get-go, he has a girlfriend character who he’s bouncing things off of. A lot of those scenes get repurposed and given to Jonah Hill in the final thing. Yes, throughout, she pops up, they’ll have dinner and just little moments where he gets to talk to her and use her as a sounding board.

John: The movie is almost completely focused on his quest to make this team work under this new principle. Yet there are moments where we are able to hop off of this main ride and see some things who are not directly baseball. We have his daughter. We have Robin Wright who is his ex-wife. We had one scene with Robin Wright and Spike Jonze, who plays her husband, which is great fun.

Craig: Awesome.

John: They’re useful, but they’re not crucial. I think they’re just there to– well, let’s talk about why they’re there. Because almost this entire conversation is going to be about the main arc quest about this. Let’s talk about the little side quests we do with the daughter, with the ex-wife. Why they’re there and what function do they serve in this movie? Because you could have cut them out but they still feel crucial. Craig, I see you squinting like you couldn’t have cut them out.

Craig: I don’t think you should. There’s the right amount of them. To me, the story it’s a classic redemption tale. This character, Billy Beane, is a real person, obviously, was a first-round draft pick coming out of high school, I think, and was projected by scouts to be a star. And he was a complete flop. Ah-ha, scouts, flop, failure, and now he rolls himself into this front office gig, which is generally seen to be a bit like, “Well, you crapped out, so now this is what you can do instead.” His success and that’s what we’re invested in like, can he come back? Can he achieve?

Because in his mind, he’s a loser. His whole thing is, “I am a jinx and a loser. What I’m doing here, on the one hand, theoretically will work and it’s bold. On the other hand, simply because it’s me, it probably won’t work because I am a loser.” We need some stakes beyond whether or not the Oakland A’s succeed. We need to know that there are people at home that he is trying to also prove himself to, that he feels like a loser in context with. The most important one is his daughter.

It’s not like his daughter and his ex-wife are like, “If the Oakland A’s don’t win, then like we said, you’re a loser.” They do believe in him. That’s why it hurts more. He needs to show them, though. He needs to. Or else he goes home with his tail between his legs, again, a failure in the eyes of the people he wishes he could impress. The only people I think he’s trying to impress in this movie are his– really, the only person is his daughter, actually.

Taffy: I also think his daughter is there for a much more practical reason, which is that she is there to talk about his anxiety about being fired. Also, I want to say, I don’t know if this is even an okay thing to say. In a couple of those scenes, Brad Pitt is a different size and wearing a wig. It makes me wonder if he is returned–

John: These small things I never notice.

Taffy: -because there aren’t enough. I notice wigs all the time-

Craig: Oh, goodness.

Taffy: -but Brad Pitt, I was like, “What are those veins in his neck?” He’s bulking up for Troy 2 or whatever. He’s brought back in, and also, she’s a girl at a funny age where she could look like a child or a grown-up within a second.

I guess I think that a lot of this movie revolves around the idea that if you look at the movie in a certain way, Billy Beane is a villain who is just– he throws things. He is cruel to people underneath him. He’s a little bit abusive. He is doing something that actually puts a lot of people’s livelihoods in danger, but she is there to ask him, “Are you going to be fired?”

We have to see with him that the stakes are so, so high. He has another scene with Jonah Hill, with Peter Brand, where he says to Peter Brand, almost apropos of nothing like, “You went to Yale, this is your second job, you’re going to be fine. If I fail at this, I fail forever.” It’s like him against the world, but what is he doing? What about this world? I think the whole thing lands, and he’s saved by the one essential question of the movie, which is, what is the best way to love baseball? Is it to honor its traditions, or is it to innovate so that it becomes what it could be?

Craig: I love having this conversation. I’m fascinated, Taffy, by your view that there’s a slightly villainous aspect to him because I have a very different relationship with this character. My relationship with this character is– one of the reasons I love baseball is that it’s fairly scientific. I remember as a kid reading– I talked about it here on the show before, a book called the Microbe Hunters. There’s this old book written in the 1920s, but it basically catalogs seven or eight great scientists in history who tracked down the cause of disease and figured out a way to solve it.

Louis Pasteur, for instance. One of the things that keeps coming up over and over in these things is how much resistance each one of these people faced by the church, by commonly accepted… And the tension that I felt reading this was, there’s like this innate anger in watching somebody who is scientifically correct having to force their way past ignorance, doubt, fear, and superstition to prevail at great risk to themselves.

Watching this movie, that’s what I connect to. It’s like watching a story about Galileo or Copernicus trying to argue that, “No, the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth. The earth revolves around the sun, and I’m going to risk my life and limb to prove it because it’s correct.” I love that. I do. I love him for it, and I forgive him all of his tantrums and his stuff.

Taffy: I think that you’re right, and I think that that’s why it’s a great movie. I think his villainy is just viewed from all of these different parts. I do think he’s doing the work of innovators, and he’s very afraid. Also, there’s no winning for him. Even at the end when he wins, he didn’t win the last game of the season, so he gets to hate himself all over again. I think this is what I meant exactly when I said this doesn’t come along with the traditional, not just a love story. But with a certain kind of sympathy and a certain kind of like a dog, all of the things that you would have if we were showing you were such a great innovator but a really difficult personality.

It’s almost like it’s one of the freest movies I’ve ever seen because it just allows him to be in this story about this thing he was trying to do without– when I was learning how to write screenplays, I was told that if you have this difficult character, you should give him like a disability. The professor, I remember, always said, “Clubfoot.” I don’t know. That’s what he always said.

Craig: Worked for Shakespeare, I guess.

Taffy: Right. I felt like this was free from the constraints of that. That’s more what I mean when I say the protections around a traditional story are that he’s just allowed to do this. He’s allowed to fire people and send them home. He is allowed to have the hate of the people. Also Brad Pitt’s performance in this, his contempt for the people he’s talking to.

Craig: It’s so good.

Taffy: It’s so good.

Craig: “What is the problem? Enh. What is the problem? How can you solve it if you don’t know what it is?”

You’re absolutely right about everything you say. The counter really is just that there are elements that if– and I don’t know what the ordering was. I don’t know if Zaillian sat down and then Sorkin showed up, or Sorkin sat down and Zaillian showed up. It doesn’t matter if you have both those guys. The things that pop out when you look at the book and the story are, A, this guy was first-round draft pick and failed. That’s good character setup.

B, the Oakland A’s suffer this incredible challenge because they lose their star player. In general, they’re poor, and so the owners can never afford to keep the good players. They always leave for free agency. Then by applying this method, which no one believed in, the Oakland A’s go on to tie the record for most consecutive wins in a season by a team, and that is capped off by this insane game where they were up by an enormous amount.

It was in the bag, and then they almost blew it, and then the guy who wins it for them is the very guy that Billy Beane went out and pulled off the scrap heap even though he had unrepairable nerve damage and can’t throw, as Grady says. All of that stuff gives you really basic things. The only thing that would be missing there and then along it comes is what is the central relationship. Where is the love story?

The love story, to me, I would argue, is between Billy Beane and Peter Brand, that it’s Brad Pitt and it’s Jonah Hill. Because obviously it’s a buddy-buddy love story, but it is two guys who decide they’re going to go all in with each other and trust each other. The look when they pull off that trade for Rincón and Jonah Hill, the passion of it. You see these guys are in love with each other. They’re falling in love, and the whole thing will be on their shoulders.

To me, there are those romantic, basic storylines, and of course, the beautiful moment of Billy Beane to say, “Okay, we’re winning. I’ll show up at the 20th game. Oh God, I showed up and we immediately started to lose.” That’s the final climactic test of a character, all that stuff. I agree with you. There is all this beautiful freedom, and then you have all these great traditional elements that I think, had they not been there, this would have been a hard movie to write.

Taffy: Can I just say one more thing?

John: Please.

Taffy: I’m sorry. I agree with all that. The traditional stuff I was talking about was more like someone having sex with Brad Pitt.

Craig: Oh. Yeah, that’s pretty traditional.

Taffy: It makes me always think, by the way, which is why I love sports movies, that I really do believe you just have a freedom in these kinds of movies. I also want to say that I think that the love story– I love their relationship, but I think the love story is between Billy Beane and baseball. It is like-

Craig: Fair way to look at it.

Taffy: -it’s the only relationship that changes. He and Peter Brand are sort of like Butch and Sundance for the long haul. Billy goes from, is the best way to love baseball, to look at its statistics, or is it to just love it? He comes around to the best way I can love baseball is by trying to get to win this game. Anyway, you go on, sorry.

Craig: No, I think that’s a fair point. Look, what’s the line that people quote the most? “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” Baseball, which is, if you don’t love it the way I do, is one of the more boring sports to watch on television. Baseball, without question, empirically, factually, is the best sport to turn into a movie. There are so many great movies that have baseball at their center, and so few that have football or basketball. There are some, but you don’t have a field of dreams. You can just go down the list of incredible baseball movies and how much fun they are, all the way down to Bad News Bears. There’s no–

Taffy: What is it about baseball that does that?

Craig: Well, great question. Only a theory. Baseball is one of the few games where everything stops to let one person face off against one person, even though there’s a whole team. Baseball is the only sport that doesn’t have a clock. There’s no like– baseball is full of these traditions. It is pastoral. The fields are all different. There’s this sense that it was cobbled together out of America. I think most importantly, it’s the fact that there’s no clock.

The ability to stop and pause and feel anxiety is enormous. And only baseball has a home run. Everything else, a touchdown is how you score. You score touchdowns or you kick a field goal. In basketball, football in hoop. Hockey, puck in net. Soccer, put ball in goal. Baseball, you can run around the bases. You can steal home. Then there’s the home run, which is just everything stops. Everyone has a party. It’s just dramatic. Slow, but it’s wonderful. I love it.

Taffy: It also has a moment as opposed to moves. It has a moment.

Craig: Has a moment. When we get to the moment in this film where Scott Hatteberg gets to the plate and has a chance to win this game for them, it’s the same moment that you’ve seen in The Natural with Robert Redford. You see this over and over. Everything slows down. Time slows down. Bull Durham–

Taffy: Parenthood.

Craig: Every movie with baseball, there is a moment where everything gets slow and quiet. It’s just me and the hands squeezing on the bat. Everyone almost shoots it the same way and it works every frickin’ time. Because, you put it perfectly, baseball has space for moments and other sports don’t.

John: Yes, if you try to watch a football game or soccer game–

Craig: Match.

John: -you’re trying to follow the ball. You’re trying to follow, where’s the ball? Because that’s where the action is. Versus baseball, you’re looking at the people and what the people are doing. You can follow the action much more clearly and so can the camera, so can the audience, which is fantastic.

Let’s follow the ball in this story and take a look at how it unfolds on screen. We’re going to start with, the movie opens with Billy being listening to– not really listening to this disastrous game.

He’s frustrated. This is where we wonder if he’s a villain because he smashes the radio. He’s really upset. Then, seven minutes in, we get him explaining what the problem is and what he needs. This is a scene where he’s going to talk to the owner of the team. Let’s take a listen to this clip from seven minutes into Moneyball.

Billy: We’re not going to do better next year.

Steve: Why not?

Billy: Well, you know we’re being gutted. We’re losing Giambi, Damon, Isringhausen. Done deal. We’re in trouble.

Steve: You’ll find new guys. You found Jason, you found Damon.

Billy: I need more money, Steve.

Steve: Billy.

Billy: I need more money.

Steve: We don’t have any more money, Billy.

Billy: I can’t compete against $120 million with $38 million.

Steve: We’re not going to compete with these teams that have big budgets. We’re going to work within the constraints we have, and you’re going to get out and do the best job that you can recruiting new players. We’re not going to pay $17 million to players.

Billy: I’m not asking you for 10 or 20, 30 million dollars. I’m just asking for a bit of help. Just get me a little closer and I will get you that championship team. I mean, this is why I’m here. This is why you hired me. I got to ask you, what are we doing here-

Steve: Billy, I–

Billy: -if it’s not to win a championship?

Steve: I want to win just as much–

Billy: That’s my bar. My bar is here. My bar is to take this team to the championship.

Steve: Billy, we’re a small-market team, and you’re a small-market GM. I’m asking you to be okay not spending money that I don’t have. I’m asking you to take a deep breath, shake off the loss, get back in a room with your guys, and figure out how to find replacements for the guys we lost with the money that we do have.

Billy: I’m not leaving here. I can’t leave here with that.

Steve: What else can I help you with?

John: All right, such a great scene. You guys are talking about your experience with baseball and so you were making fun of me for sports ball and not knowing anything. Here’s what I will say. I had not seen this movie in the theaters, I don’t think. Until Taffy wrote in with the email, I was like, have I seen Moneyball? I watched Moneyball and it’s of course fantastic. What I found useful is I could see the analogies to the studio system that we’re used to working in this movie.

Billy Beane is the producer. He’s not the director. He’s not the coach. He’s not the one who’s directing all the action on the field. He’s the producer putting the whole thing together, but he’s not the studio head. Right now he’s talking to the studio boss saying like, “I need more money.” They’re like, “There’s no more money. You got to figure out with what you have.” He has to figure out like, “Okay, well, I don’t know how to do this. I’m explaining very clearly what I need, and I’m not getting what I need. What am I supposed to do?”

The scene we just played is essentially I want song. If this was Moana, this is How Far I’ll Go. This is I have this thing I need to do, and I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to need to find a way to win because I want this team to be a competitor at the highest level. I want to win.

Craig: You nailed it there, and I love your analogy of, because it’s dead right, this guy that he’s talking to is the studio chairman. He’s the producer. The director is the manager, and the actors are the players. He is saying, “You guys want me to, and I want to win.” He’s not even saying, “If I need more money to be able to do the job, you’re asking me to do so I can keep my job.” He’s saying, “I need more money so I can win.”

“I want to win,” and what this guy is telling him is,” I don’t have more money. You’re not getting more money.” I love just how stolid he is, “And hey, I’d love to win too, but also, it’s not actually that big of a–“ really, as long as our tickets sells and I profit, he’s not in it for the same reason Billy Beane is. That’s very, very clear. What a wonderful way of establishing where Billy is in the pecking order, what he wants, and what the problem is.

John: Yes, I agree with you, establishing what is the problem so that the hero can go about trying to solve the problem. So Billy Beane goes back to his scouts because he needs to find a replacement for the players that he’s lost. The scene in the movie is terrific with all these– a mix, I think, of real scouts and some actors in there playing scouts, and as we talked about, the documentary feel of this is fantastic.

Now, the script that Drew found actually has a scene that’s different that’s really, really good, and so I thought we might do a little play acting here, and let’s read through the scene that’s actually in the script for this thing. Craig, will you play Billy Beane?

Craig: Sure.

John: Taffy, can I have you play Grady? I’ll do Poat. I don’t know whoever Poat is. This, we are in the conference room with a team talking about how to put this together, and Billy Beane has lost his patience with his scouts.

Billy: What if we’ve been wrong this whole time about what ingredients manufacture a win? What if this whole time we thought it was the chicken that made the chicken soup taste good when really it was the onions that made the chicken soup taste good? Onions are a lot cheaper than chicken. You see what I’m saying?

Poat: I don’t have the first idea of what you’re saying.

Billy: We got to go start over. We got to go rethink this thing. We got to go look where others aren’t looking.

Grady: With all due respect, we’ve been doing this for a long time.

Billy: It doesn’t mean you’re doing it right. You watch nature docs? You know what happens to the runt of the litter? He dies. I’m open to any solution, as long as it’s not what the other guys are doing. Now, I’m going to Cleveland to poach an outfielder named Brandon Garcia.

John: All right, so this is a scene that’s not in the movie. At the end of this whole segment, we’re going to talk about sort of the development process of this, because this is a really weird situation. What I like about this is like, this is the feeling of the scene, but it’s not the actual words that are in the scene. You can see the scene like, oh, I get the shape of this. I get like what it is that he’s trying to do, but these words are not what we’re actually seeing on screen.

Craig: I think runt of the litter made it in, as I recall.

John: Yes.

Taffy: Runt of the litter did make it in, but it also feels like you’re doing a baseball movie and you’re writing it and you don’t know how much the person reading it knows about any of this. You just over-explain so that everyone’s on the same page and then you could take it out.

Craig: That’s a really good point. One of the things that they threaded beautifully on the page and then on the subsequent film is, they make sure that the way Billy is explaining things to these guys, and specifically the what is the problem scene, why I love that scene so much is, he’s explaining it to them, but not in a way that you would have to if you were with baseball people. He’s explaining a baseball thing to baseball people, but he explains it in a way where you go, ah, they haven’t considered doing it like this before and very specifically, he talks about how important it is to get on base.

What he says is, “I don’t care how people get on base,” because these guys do. All he care is how he gets on base. This is who we have to replace, Jason Giambi. This was his on-base percentage. We have to get three people who in the aggregate recreate Jason Giambi. That is a way of explaining things to baseball people where I go, oh, yes, whereas the chicken soup thing here feels a little bit like, oh, none of us know baseball, so let’s use a cooking analogy.

John: Yes. All right, so we zoom ahead and so he’s going to talk with the Cleveland Indians about doing a trade there. It’s in that room that he sees Jonah Hill’s character. He’s playing Peter Brand, who’s just a guy off in the background who would be a day player, except that Brad Pitt notices him and is like, “There’s something, people are listening to this kid for whatever reason.”

He goes and finds this kid in the bullpen and talks to him. There’s a scene which is like a first kind of an aggressive meet cute between them there. Then the real meat of the scene happens in a parking garage below. He’s just like, “Follow me down to the parking garage.” Let’s take a listen to that parking garage in which Peter Brand explains his theory of the case.

Peter: There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening. This leads people who run major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams. I apologize.

Billy: Go on.

Peter: Okay. People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. In order to buy wins, you need to buy runs. You’re trying to replace Johnny Damon. The Boston Red Sox see Johnny Damon and they see a star who’s worth $7.5 million a year. When I see Johnny Damon, what I see is an imperfect understanding of where runs come from. The guy’s got a great glove. He’s a decent leadoff hitter. He can steal bases, but is he worth the $7.5 million a year that the Boston Red Sox are paying him? No.

No. Baseball thinking is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions. If I say it to anybody, I’m ostracized. I’m a leper. That’s why I’m cagey about this with you. That’s why I respect you, Mr. Beane. If you want full disclosure, I think it’s a good thing that you got Damon off of your payroll. I think it opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities.

John: Wow. I pulled that clip this morning and so I was watching it as I was playing. Now that I just listened to the audio, you realize that music cue comes in at just that moment and says like, aha, this is where we’re getting a resonance between what he wants and what I want, that the light bulb is starting to glow there.

Craig: We also start to shift to footage of Johnny Damon and what he does. Johnny Damon, it always hurts me in my heart a little bit because the Yankees eventually make the same mistake the Red Sox do with Johnny Damon, no offense to Johnny Damon, but everything that this character is saying here is correct. The most important part of this is baseball thinking is medieval. It’s hard for us now, if you are a baseball fan, to process how medieval it was all just this short time ago.

Spoiler alert, not only do the Oakland A’s and Billy Beane adopt this way of thinking, everyone does, and not just a little, an enormous amount. It hits its crescendo with a guy named Theo Epstein who becomes a very young Billy Beane-ish general manager of the Boston Red Sox. Boston Red Sox don’t, they’re not able to get Billy Beane. They end up with Theo Epstein. Theo Epstein applies all these principles and breaks the curse. The Boston Red Sox finally win the World Series after a gazillion years.

Then what does Theo Epstein do? He leaves Boston Red Sox and goes to the Chicago Cubs, the only team with a longer curse, and they win the World Series using all of this. The problem baseball deals with now is that maybe they’ve gone a little too far with this. They have a billion statistics now. It has become insane. Just a short time ago, what they had was a bunch of scouts going, “He’s got a good baseball body. He’s got good hands.”

John: Yes, it was like phrenology. Yes, it felt medieval. Now, I’m not pushing back, but I’d say like, growing up, I always heard about baseball stat. People were always obsessed with stats.

Taffy: That’s what I was going to say, that you could look in The New York Times and–

Craig: Sure, there’s a box score.

Taffy: Yes, and see what happened at every point in the game. I also just want to say, my birthday is on October 26th. I can’t tell you how many game three, four, five, like surprise dinners I’ve had with boyfriends that forced me to watch one of these games. It feels like it’s all statistics and that’s what every– people make snow angels in statistics. It’s hard for me to understand why this was such a big deal.

Craig: Here’s what statistics used to be. I, of course, collected baseball cards like every little boy baseball fan. On the back of the cards, there were statistics. A hitter has a batting average. That’s how frequently they get a hit. They have home runs, hits, stolen bases, runs batted in. Those are your five statistics.

Here are what you have now just for hitting: You have batting average on balls in play. You have isolated power, late-inning pressure situation, on-base plus slugging. You have slugging percentage, which wasn’t a thing back then at all. Pitches per plate appearance, runs created, weighted runs above average. The most important one, wins above replacement. They figured out how many wins you create above the league average of who you are at your position. There are weighted runs created plus. There are maybe, and pitching– don’t get me started, there are about 40 statistics that they have now, including things I literally don’t know what they mean, like skill, interactive, earned run average. The spreadsheets that are happening right now with these players is insane. It’s insane.

John: Now Craig, what I would say though, is the success of this movie is that we don’t need to know about any of those statistics, because the only thing that Jonah Hill is introducing is that we need to actually figure out how much they are worth. Because we, as people, understand money. It’s like we don’t have the money to do this thing, so how much money is this person worth? I think one of the things when we’ll get into the bonus segment too, but like the movie talks a little bit about assigning a value to a person and reducing them down to just their statistics and not think about them as human beings.

Craig: As people.

John: Yes.

Craig: I will say like the one thing that they did brilliantly here was, and this was an early day’s thing for this sort of stuff, sabermetrics is ultimately what it was called, is on-base percentage. Like I said, it used to be, how many hits do you get? How many walks do you get? How many home runs do you hit? How many hits do you hit? What he’s saying here, what Peter Brand says in that speech we just heard is, I see an imperfect understanding of where runs come. Your goal should be to buy wins, and in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs. What he boils it down to is, to get runs, you need people on base.

They have to reach base. The imperfect understanding of baseball was walks. It’s mind-blowing to think that this was revolutionary, but the big revolution at the time was saying, a guy who reaches first base by hitting singles, and a guy who reaches first base by walking a lot, are the same guy. We’re paying the singles hitter an enormous amount more. They boiled it down to just that one concept. So why do you want Jason’s little brother, Jeremy Giambi, because he gets on base? Why do you want David Justice, an old guy whose best days are behind him, gets on base? Scott Hatteberg, gets on base.

Taffy: Am I correct to think though, in baseball, that it’s more interesting to watch someone run to the base than to walk to the base?

Craig: Of course.

Taffy: Is that what it is? It’s that like betting changed this? It’s that it didn’t matter anymore if it was entertaining, it mattered what you were betting on?

Craig: The ultimate entertainment, I think, is winning. What fans want is winning.

Taffy: I feel that way.

Craig: You, as a Yankee fan, if a pitcher wants to fall apart and walk eight guys in a row, which means a bunch of guys are going to score just by being walked in, awesome. Getting on base is not as exciting as getting a hit, no question. Winning is the most exciting thing. That’s what sells out a stadium and sells out your season tickets for the next season.

John: And in baseball and other sports, if there’s a thing that is happening that is not entertaining, they will change the rules to make the more entertaining thing happen. That’s happened in baseball in the last few years, right, Craig? Where they’ve changed some of the things to speed up the play and just make-

Craig: They have.

John: -it a more interesting game.

Craig: By the way, after a century of refusing to. I just want to say, baseball has been the most rules-change-resistant sport there is. Over the last 10 years, I think they have made a few, not dramatic, but a few good rules changes. For so long, they refused to change anything. Whereas basketball is like, you know what, they love the three-point line. They love it in colleges, screw it. Let’s do it. Let’s put it in.

John: Brilliant. All right, so let’s get back to the actual movie that we’re watching on screen.

Taffy: Especially since it’s so sad that I’m not going to remember anything you said, but I understood it in the moment. So sad.

John: Getting back to the movie that we’re watching on screen. Billy Beane is implementing these changes over the resistance of his scouts. He’s making trades and changes to the lineup that his head coach hates, that everyone says is not going to work. I think according to movie logic, it doesn’t work. Luckily, the true story is that it does not work at the start. They’re not winning games. Everyone is coming down on him like this is a stupid idea and he’s doomed for failure until it starts to work.

Taffy: And they have this moment where the two of them have to really recommit to each other. Billy and Peter have to decide like, “Do we really believe in this?” That’s a very touching moment to me. I think that so many of the things we’re talking about are aided by music and showing something on the screen that is illustrating the thing that they’re saying. In that moment where they recommit to each other about it is the moment that I understand really what I’m watching.

Craig: We have to personify the resistance. The resistance was personified by this scout Grady. Grady gets himself fired by putting his hand on Billy. His very baseball-y kind of thing. Then we have a new villain. The new villain is Art Howe, the manager. Played brilliantly as always by the late greats Philip Seymour Hoffman. The problem now is, okay, I’m the producer of the movie. I’ve come up with a plan that might make this movie good with the tiny amount of money we have. The director isn’t going along with the plan. And I can’t set the lineup directly.

What I can do as a general manager though is start to trade guys that I don’t want playing to make the manager have to play the people I do want playing. This is the great tension and in the best part of it all is that in the end, you see Art Howe– by the way, this isn’t really how it worked in real life. They did not fight like this. Art Howe makes the fateful, wonderful decision when everything is on the line. They’re trying to make baseball history to send Scott Hatteberg to the plate, which is his commitment to being honorable and pursuing of truth rather than baseball medieval thinking.

John: Now, so one of the things that the story does do, they establish that Billy Beane does not watch the games. He does not want to listen to the games. He doesn’t want to have any direct interaction with the players. He doesn’t travel with them. There are moments along the way that he is actually becoming more involved in the day-to-day. He’s in the locker room more and talking with them. A scene I think really embodies this is his conversation with David Justice, who they’ve now recruited on-

Craig: So good.

John: -to play for them. This is a senior player, and they’re having tension. This is all happening at a batting practice. Let’s take a listen to this scene.

Billy: Had a few thoughts.

David: Yeah?

Billy: Yeah.

David: Can you teach me some things?

Billy: Excuse me?

David: I’ve never seen a GM talk to players like that, man.

Billy: You’ve never seen a GM who was a player.

David: Huh.

Billy: We got a problem, David?

David: Nah, It’s okay. I know your routine. It’s patter, it’s for effect, but it’s for them. All right? This shit ain’t for me.

Billy: Oh, you’re special?

David: You’re paying me seven million bucks a year, man, so, yes, maybe I am a little bit.

Billy: No, man, I ain’t paying you seven. Yankees are paying half your salary. That’s what the New York Yankees think of you. They’re paying you $3.5 million to play against them.

David: Where are you going with this, Billy?

Billy: David, you’re 37. How about you and I be honest about what each of us want out of this? I want to milk the last ounce of baseball you got in you. And you want to stay in the show. Let’s do that. Now, I’m not paying you for the player you used to be. I’m paying you for the player you are right now. You’re smart. You get what we’re trying to do here. Make an example for the younger guys. Be a leader. Can you do that?

David: All right, I got you.

Billy: We’re cool?

David: We’re cool.

Taffy: Villainy. This is such a mean scene. This is so mean.

Craig: It’s so wonderful you think that.

Taffy: I feel like his arc is like, yes, he keeps a distance from his players. There’s this point where he’s trying to give them a pep talk and it’s like an eight-word disaster. “You don’t look like a winning team, but you are one, so play like one,” is what he says. In things like that, I feel like we are being set up storytelling-wise. By the way, patter is such a showbiz word. I do not believe at all-

John: Don’t believe it.

Taffy: -anyone here [unintelligible 00:50:00] yes. I think we’re being set up for a guy who is trying his hardest to keep his distance and can’t do it without getting a little bit messy. That’s what the three-part runner about cutting players is, when he’s trying to show art and he keeps cutting players.

Again, on my 30 millionth viewing, I started to think, that’s actually pretty terrible. You are firing people and ruining their lives because you’re having an argument with this guy. It’s the same thing as a guy who throws his chair across the room. It’s like a display of something that hasn’t aged very well.

Craig: I shockingly have an entirely opposite point of view about this.

Taffy: Good good good.

Craig: One of the things about sports, and when you listen to fans discussing sports, they’re brutal. The fans are the meanest ever. A little bit like the way the audience out there on Twitter is the meanest about, we never talk about each other’s shows or movies the way people online just go, garbage, blah. People are brutal. There are entire, still functioning, listen to AM radio stations that are nothing but call-in shows for 30 to 50-year-old, 60-year-old men to yell about players sucking. There is a brutal reality to sports, which is winning is winning. Every athlete gets into it to win. It is a binary function. There’s winning and losing.

Billy’s job is to make them win. He’s not cutting those players to win an argument. He’s cutting those players because that’s their best chance to win, and there’s somebody in the way of their best chance to win. That’s the thing about sports where it gets super focused. This scene, to me, is not villainy. This is actually kindness, because when you start to lose it as a man, where you’re like I had this physical capacity as a man, and there’s a reason the scene is set where it is. It’s in the stadium, in the back area of the stadium inside, and David Justice, who was an amazing player, is in the batting cage crushing these pitches coming out of the pitching, the little machine, right?

He’s putting on this display of masculine power, and Billy is like, you need to graduate because you’re 37. If you’re hanging on to what that was, it’s leaving you. I’m telling you have to redefine the value of your masculinity, and your masculinity’s value is no longer physical prowess, it’s wisdom.

Taffy: It’s we’re all told that we can’t always play the children’s show, right? Is that what it is, the children’s game? That’s what it’s called?

Craig: Yes.

Taffy: I feel that the movie agrees with me that it’s villainy, which is why he gets the soda in the end. I think that you’re right. I also think that when he restores the soda after David Justice is like, why am I paying for my own soda? It is an admission of villainy.

Craig: I don’t know if it’s an admission of maybe imperfection, but I want to point out how fantastic the beginning of this scene is. This is where there’s this formalized romantic way of portraying men talking to each other, and Mamet is the king of it, right? Sorkin and Zalian both excellent at it. The beginning of this: I got a few thoughts. Yeah? Yeah. Teach me some things? Excuse me? Never seen a GM talk to players like that, man. You never seen a GM who was a player. We got a problem, David? Now, there’s so much being said there in this blah way. You got a few thoughts? Get out of here. Yes. You have no validity with me. Teach me some things.

He’s just going basically, dude, you suck. You’re not a player. Then Mr. Sensitive/Villain goes, yes, I was. David Justice goes, not like me. Not even close. What are you doing down here, man? Then this thing about the money. I’m sorry, he’s right. The Yankees were paying $3.5 million dollars for David Justice to play against them. It’s hard truth and that’s why at the end, I think David Justice says we’re cool because he knows it’s true.

Taffy: Right, he can’t win.

John: My previous analogy, like this is actually a story about show business. You can map everything into the equivalent show business thing. I think about Amy Pascal running Sony Pictures while this is happening and she was the owner of everything and she had to make this decision. The three of us have all been the person in charge on set or we’ve had to make tough calls. I remember going to the first AD saying like, “I never want to see that extra again.” Just like, “Make them disappear.” That’s villainy but it’s also like this is standing in the way of what I need to do my job.

This conversation is really, it’s having the conversation with your lead actor, the top of the ticket. I need you to be a leader here. We had Ryan Reynolds on the show. We were talking about that, about when you’re number one on the call sheet, I need you to do a certain thing. Act like the number one on the ticket and be the example here. Having that honest conversation is just so crucial. I can’t imagine the back half of this movie working without this scene.

Taffy: I agree. I will say that the second AD having the conversation with the background person is the villainy. You were incredibly passive in that as you were supposed to be, right? You were supposed to not, you’re not supposed to fire them yourself. That’s the thing is that all the more so, this is him doing it in a way that we understand, but is brutal.

Craig: Yeah, and effective.

Taffy: Very effective. It pokes at every masculine little point. He just punctures everything.

Craig: But then builds them back. Yes, that’s the thing. I think the reason it works is he’s not saying you shouldn’t play or you should quit. What he’s saying is the implication of the movie was David Justice shows up and he’s just like, this team sucks. I’m just going to take my money, go out there, dog it, not try that hard, whatever. If the stuff works great, if it doesn’t, I don’t care, right?

Then he’s coming and saying, no, no. Actually, you do have a role here that could matter. It won’t be by occasionally hitting a home run. It’s going to be by teaching, mentoring, and leading by example. That’s your new value. You can feel in the scene– who’s the actor that played? He did such a good job.

Taffy: He did such a good job.

Craig: Playing David Justice. You can see him actually like, yes, actually, there is a competitive spirit in me that resented the fact that I have to give up and not care. Billy’s given him a reason to play.

Taffy: It’s so interesting because maybe the whole runner about cutting people is about how the most direct conversation is actually the kindest. That you don’t sit there and you don’t sit– maybe the movie is trying to explain that to you, this scene.

John: Yes. Brad Pitt’s character explains to Jonah Hill, this is how you cut a person. We actually see Jonah Hill having to do it and how to have the grown-up conversation about how to be the second AD who’s telling the extra that I don’t ever want to see on set that goodbye, you’re being paid for the day and see ya without a reason, why you were so annoying in that shot.

Craig: Or over apologizing or dragging it out or making it, there is– and Billy Bean’s character is brutally direct. You can also see from that very beginning scene that you cited, John, the problem that he has is also brutal. There’s no way to win if you pussyfoot around it. You have to just go straight at it. When you see the, my favorite scenes in the movie are the two scenes where he’s with the scouts because he’s so brutally direct. It’s wonderful. Watching again, that greatest character actor.

Taffy: My son Ezra is available to act that out for you right now.

Craig: Ezra may just do it all day long. One day I’ll be Billy, he’ll be Grady, then he’ll be– and then we can do the Fabio.

Taffy: Oh, he’ll do both sides.

John: Who’s Fabio?

Craig: He’s a shortstop.

Taffy: Who’s Fabio? I think he’s a shortstop.

Craig: He’s a shortstop. Yes, no, you got to go carry the one. There’s so many great little moments in there that are incredible. He walks a lot. Do I care if it’s a hit or a walk? Then he points, you do not. Do you want me to talk when I point at you, yes.

Taffy: When you point at him.

Craig: So many great things in those scenes.

Taffy: Yes, oh my God.

Craig: Anyway, this movie, and can we just talk for a second about the beautiful thing at the end? This is why I love baseball. They have this incredible moment where it does all work. Billy seemingly is able to overcome the curse of him even being near the team and they win and they win because of Scott Hatterberg and a home run. It’s tremendous, but they don’t win. They don’t, ultimately they don’t win the World Series. There’s this lovely, it’s a metaphor, Stone Hill over in the Plains-

Taffy: I know what it is.

Craig: -of this guy in their farm system who hits a ball and because he’s a big guy and he’s slow, he thinks it could be a double. He rounds first, gets scared that he’s going to get thrown out, tries to get back to first, falls. Then it turns out he hit a home run.

This is true. The Billy Bean didn’t think he did it and he did. He changed baseball permanently. By the way, the Oakland A’s winning 20 games in a row that season, that is insane. That is bigger than winning the World Series. It’s so special. The tragedy, of course, is that the Oakland A’s are no longer in existence as of right now.

Taffy: Last week.

Craig: That’s correct. The Oakland A’s played their last games as the Oakland A’s. The entire franchise is leaving Oakland and is being reconstituted as the Las Vegas Aces. This is not the first time this has happened in baseball. This has happened a lot in baseball and in all sports. There’s a reason that the basketball team in Utah is called the Utah Jazz. It’s because they used to be in New Orleans.

John: Because jazz is what I associate with Utah, yes.

Craig: Of course, the Los Angeles Lakers, because of all the lakes in Los Angeles.

Taffy: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Craig: Yes. These teams come from elsewhere and keep the names sometimes. In this case, they do not. The A’s became the Aces. It’s clever but it’s sad. The Oakland couldn’t survive. They just couldn’t survive. One of the reasons, ironically, they couldn’t survive is because everybody else picked up on it. The big market teams that do have a better fan base and do sell more tickets and can spend more money, they all follow the Billy Bean model. All of them.

John: Let’s now close up this discussion and talk about Brad Pitt’s character. Billy Bean and the decision he has to make at the end. The end of the movie finds him going to Boston. He’s talking with John Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox. It’s a really interesting scene. It’s raining. There are umbrellas. They’re in this semi-outdoor space. We’re going to hear some rain in the background here. This is that discussion and ultimately a job offer for Billy Bean.

John Henry: Steve told me he’s offering you a new contract.

Billy: Yes.

John Henry: Why did you return my call?

Billy: Because it’s the Red Sox. Because I believe science might offer an answer to the curse of the Bambino because I hear you hired Bill James.

John Henry: Yes. Why someone took so long to hire that guy is beyond me.

Billy: Baseball hates him.

John Henry: Baseball can hate him, you know. One of the great things about money is that it buys a lot of things. One of which is the luxury to disregard what baseball likes, doesn’t like, what baseball thinks, doesn’t think.

Billy: Sounds nice. Well. I was grateful for the call.

John Henry: You were grateful?

Billy: Yes.

John Henry: For 41 million, you built a playoff team. You lost Damon, Giambi, Isringhausen, Pena, and you won more games without them than you did with them. You won the exact same number of games that the Yankees won, but the Yankees spent 1.4 million per win, and you paid 260,000. I know you’re taking it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall, he always gets bloody. Always.

This is threatening, not just a way of doing business, but in their minds it’s threatening the game. Really what it’s threatening is their livelihood. It’s threatening their jobs. It’s threatening the way that they do things. Every time that happens, whether it’s a government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people who are holding the reins, they have their hands on the switch, they go bat shit crazy. Anybody who’s not tearing their team down right now and rebuilding it using your model, they’re dinosaurs. They’ll be sitting on their ass on the sofa in October watching the Boston Red Sox win the World Series.

John: There he slides a piece of paper across the table.
[movie scene playing]

Billy: What’s this?

John Henry: I want you to be my general manager. That’s my offer.

John: All right. What’s crucial to me about this scene is that he’s done it. He went out with this goal and someone is finally saying, yes, Copernicus, you were right. The solar system is the way that you described it, not the way that everyone always described it. It’s so nice to have an outside person come in and say, you did this.

It’s important for us to have the people who we’ve established in the movie, who he loves, who love him, provide that support, but to have an outside person that he’s always been pushing against come say, no, kid, you were right, is crucial.

Craig: Absolutely. Even more so, give our hero, I still think he’s a hero, give our hero a chance to do one last heroic thing which is to stay loyal to the sloppy mess that he helped improve. It’s like listen, I inherited a broken down trailer home and I worked really hard to make it look like a mansion. And I’m going to stay with it. And Even though I know I’m going to be losing to you probably, because now you now, Bill James was the guy that invented sabermetrics, which leads into the whole thing that Peter Brown was talking about. Now you got Bill James, now everything I know, I’m going to lose.

I’m going to lose over and over and over because now I’m not, because the trick is out, but I’m not leaving because I’m loyal. Literally, that’s exactly what happened. He stayed with the A’s and the Boston Red Sox won the World Series.

Taffy: I also think all sports movies have a stoic guy. In a romantic comedy, the equivalent would be a “you complete me” or a big sweeping kiss. In a sports movie, it’s the stoic guy cracking a smile. It’s Kurt Russell in the tunnel in Miracle. I think in this movie, I know, I know. You’re like, everything in your body just needs them to be happy for a minute.

Craig: For one moment.

Taffy: I think when he turns to Peter Brandt and says, “You’re a good egg.” That is our sweeping kiss. That is everything I need, which sets me up for that car scene that murders me dead every single time. I just need three notes from that song and I’ll need a minute. It’s really beautiful.

Craig: Yes. In the end, you have to boil all the sports away and get down to who am I as a person? What is my value? Have I performed up to the level of expectation that my loved ones should have of me? It doesn’t matter if their love was unconditional. It wasn’t to me. I needed to fulfill conditions for their love. Did I? The answer is yes, I did.

That’s why everyone who sees a movie like this can connect to it. Everyone. It doesn’t matter. This is where I do think this is different than Mamet when you talk about movies about men being all men-ish.

Mamet movies are brutal and Mamet stories are brutal and they’re wonderful and I love them. Glengarry Glen Ross I’ve gone all day about it. The sentiment of Sorkin and Zaillian, and they are sentimental to me, is why I love these movies. Love them. I get transported by them. They’re just wonderful.

Taffy: You didn’t have to learn about sports. I leave with as much knowledge as I came in with and it’s fine.

Craig: True. That’s absolutely true.

John: I want to go back to something you said quite early on about shame. We were talking about, and I think Craig, you also mentioned that Billy Beane is a character who was recruited and was going to be a superstar and was not. He feels shame. He feels this thing that was supposed to happen didn’t happen. It was his fault and he just did not live up to promised potential. The journey of the story is like how do you get past that shame? How do you get past the fact that you were seen as an underachiever, that you didn’t do this thing?

He’s actually able to finally do it. Having this outside force and everybody else say, yes, you did it. You changed baseball. You are worthy in baseball. For a movie that is so much about what is a person worth? What is a person in baseball worth? He’s proven his worth. That’s ultimately what he seems to be going for here. Like most movie protagonists, he couldn’t explain at the start of the movie what he actually needs inside. We as an audience see at the end like, oh, he got that missing piece that he was so hungry for the whole time through.

Taffy: That’s so interesting because the thing I always think with this is one of the plots is changing baseball, but it’s actually about a man processing his failures. If you look at the structure of it, it’s exactly at a third that you see the first flashback. The question is like, how long are you allowed to play? We’re all told we have to leave the children’s game and we don’t know when it is. The question that looms throughout this, is this when I’m leaving? Even as the GM, I’m playing the children’s game. Is this when I’m leaving? Is this when I’m leaving?

Craig: Wrapping this up, we talked a bit about how the screenplay that we have that we can look at is not a very good reflection of the actual movie that’s in front of us. Some of that is, I think, related to the development of the movie. Here’s what we know. This writer Stan Chervin pitches and sells the idea to Sony in 2004.

We’re going to talk about Amy Pascal. Amy Pascal was running Sony Pictures at that time. Brad Pitt was attached to a draft by Steve Zaillian in 2008. Chervin apparently wrote something, but Steve Zaillian came in and wrote a draft, and that is the draft that got Brad Pitt attached.

Steven Soderbergh attached himself to the project in February 2009. There’s a quote we have from him saying, “I think we have a way in making it visual and making it funny. I want it to be really funny and entertaining, and I want you to not realize how much information is being thrown at you because you’re having fun. We found a couple of ideas how to bust the form a bit in order for all that information to reach you in a way that’s a little oblique.” Former athletics players and manager Art Howe were set to play themselves. Dimitri Martin was cast as Paul DePodesta, who was the actual real person in real life who became later the Jonah Hill character.

The Jonah Hill character is not the person in the book. It’s a composite of other things and stuff put together. DePodesta ultimately asked, “Can you change the name of my character?” Because, it’s not me. The movie was given a green light with a $58 million budget.

Then five days before it was supposed to shoot in July 8th, 2009, Sony canceled it. They stopped production on it, and Soderbergh left. Bennett Miller was brought in December 2009, and Amy Pascal brought in Sorkin for a rewrite. We don’t know where stuff was at quite with this, and so we don’t know, I’ve never seen the Zaillian draft. I don’t know what stuff is what. I think we always can reach for and feel what feels like a Sorkin-y bit, but I’m not sure we really know.

My speculation is that there’s a draft, but the way scenes were actually shot, it feels like in going for that documentary feel, they probably did it a bunch, and they weren’t as text-obsessed as you would expect in a Sorkin movie.

Taffy: The thing I heard was that maybe the previous version was more literal documentary, real players, people looking at the camera and interspersed. I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s true, I don’t know that apocryphal, I just–

Craig: I think that’s what Soderbergh was going for, from what I understand.

Taffy: Yes, which is its own great way to go.

Craig: Could have been great, that’s the thing.

Taffy: You never know.

Craig: You could have three different versions of this movie that are all great. I am just thrilled that we got what we did get, which was very romantic, sentimental.

Taffy: It’s a very sentimental movie.

Craig: It’s very sentimental, it’s very dramatic at times. It clearly is, like the score is borrowing from those, the score for The Natural, like one of the great movie scores of all time. Ba-bam, ba-bam bum bum. It has that when Hattenberg hits the home run, that, whoa, that dramatic swell. I love the tone.

John: The movie was given a July 2010 start date, so about a year after it had been stopped, it got started again. Brad Pitt’s still attached, budget reduced to $47 million, and they went ahead. Amy Pascal coming in there and saying, “We got to go change some stuff, and you don’t have as much money,” feels very much like the owner of the ASA, no, this is how much money you have to do it, and figure out a way to do that.

Craig: What else can I help you with?

John: On the first Charlie’s Angels, I remember a meeting on a Friday afternoon going in, and Amy Pascal’s going through the script, and she’s like, and she just ripped out five pages and she’s like, “These are gone, figure it out. Basically, got to go save some money,” and that’s how we did it.

Craig: Figure it out is one of the great lines. Robert Weiss, who I worked with, he’s a producer, go all the way back to Kentucky Fried Movie and Naked Gun. He produced one of the great bad movies of all time called Nothing but Trouble, starring Chevy Chase.

Taffy: I love Nothing but Trouble.

Craig: Yes, it’s insane. It’s terrible, but it’s also so crazy that it’s worth watching. In the development of it Chevy Chase, the characters start in Manhattan and then they drive into Pennsylvania, and Chevy Chase, Bob Weiss was like, “We’ll do the New York stuff in Toronto. We can’t afford to shoot in New York.” Chevy Chase is like, “No way, no. If it’s New York, we’re shooting in New York. In fact, I’m going to call–“ the head of the studio was Mark Canton. “I’m calling Mark Canton right now.”

He picks up the phone, “Mark, Chevy Chase, I’m hearing that we can’t shoot this in New York. I demand we shoot in New York.” “Thanks.” Click. “We’re shooting in New York” and then he walks out, and then Bob Weiss picks up the phone and calls Mark Canton and goes, “Did you just tell Chevy Chase we’re shooting this in New York?” “Yes.” “Are we?” “No. Figure it out.” I always love figure it out is like-

Taffy: I love it.

Craig: -that’s amazing. Yes, no.

Taffy: Oh my gosh.

John: All right, that wraps up Moneyball.

Taffy: Thank you.

John: Quickly, let’s go through some one cool things. Taffy, do you have one cool thing you want to share with the audience?

Taffy: I do. I went to a Yeshiva high school, so I always feel that I am behind in my education.

Craig: My dad would teach, he worked at Grady High School in Brighton Beach, and then after that day was over, he would go to Mirror Yeshiva.

Taffy: That’s serious stuff. To teach what?

Craig: To teach the Yeshiva book, his history-

Taffy: How to read.

Craig: -because they had to pass the Regents exam.

Taffy: I know, it’s because of the Regents exam.

Craig: The Regents exam.

Taffy: Everything we know is because of the Regents exam.

Craig: The Regents exam. Everything is secular that you know.

Taffy: Right. I did not read great books but I read the Scarlet Letter four times.

Craig: Because you had to.

Taffy: That’s like cheating on your husband. Also because it was kosher. It punishes women for infidelity. It’s good, it’s good.

Craig: It’s good.

Taffy: I always feel that I am behind in my education, and I found this app recently called Imprint, and it is teaching me philosophy. It’s teaching me step-by-step. Also, I feel that I have several undiagnosed learning disabilities. It is teaching me exactly how I would like to be taught, short sentences and cartoons. I think that is my-

Craig: Imprint.

Taffy: It’s called Imprint. I think it’s like $25. It’s so good, and I am learning all about Stoicism. Right now learning about Stoicism. We’re moving on to Kant.

Craig: Oh, Immanuel Kant. Boy, you’re about to get into synthetic apriority and posteriority.

Taffy: Someone didn’t go to yeshiva.

Craig: Correct. Also, Kant, as it turns out was wrong. If you can avoid reading his massive super boring book, then you’re–

Taffy: I’m just going to see a cartoon about it. I think I win this.

Craig: The best way to learn Kant. The best way.

Taffy: All right.

Craig: Amazing.

John: I have two uncool things that are very closely related. These last two weeks I was traveling. I was first in London, then in Paris. I was in London in large part, to see ABBA Voyage, which is the ABBA show outside of London. It is incredible.

This is a sanctioned ABBA thing that uses, I thought it was holograms, but it turns out it’s not holograms. It is just done with really good visual effects and ILM and a real band that’s playing and just a purpose-built space. It was really incredible. The illusion that, I am somehow back in 1970 and I’m watching ABBA do these songs was great.

Really, I just thought ABBA Voyage was fantastic. If you like ABBA, even to some medium degree and you’re in London, see it, because I thought it was really good. Relatedly, weirdly, the apartment we were staying in, we got there and it had one of those narrow, stripped fireplaces that was lit when we went in. I’m like, this is really wasteful. Let me figure out how to turn this off. Then I realized, as I got very closer it’s like, oh, this is actually not a fire at all. This is some sort of virtual screen thing that’s incredibly compelling and looks like a fire.

It turns out it was actually the same basic technology as what I was seeing in ABBA Voyage in that there are foreground elements which are actually up above in the enclosure and there’s a split glass thing like how we do teleprompters that is making it look like it’s at the base and then there’s a video screen that’s really compelling. We ended up leaving it on the whole time, and I genuinely miss that fireplace in the apartment.

I was just astonished that both in the ABBA Voyage show and in this fireplace, synthetic things that felt so real and compelling are possible in 2024 through recording this. I applaud the technology behind them and encourage people to check out both of these things. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this Opti-V fireplace, which is the European version, but there’s many other ones out there.

Craig: The Dimplex Opti-V Duet. Well as promised, my one cool thing has to be Ken Medlock. I was looking Ken Medlock up as we were talking here because if you look at his resume, it’s classic character actor resume. He’s happily still alive. He’s 74 years old, but he hasn’t done much in movies since Moneyball. Really, it seems like he might be like possibly semi-retired because he really hasn’t done much since those years. Here’s something not surprising at all to find out. He played baseball. He played in minor leagues. He was a pitcher for the Decatur Commodores in the 1970s.

That’s a team that I don’t believe exists anymore. Then later worked as a coach for the St. Paul Saints. He was like most people that have ever had any experience in professional baseball, he never made it to the major leagues but he’s a player. You could just tell. That’s the thing. I’m so not surprised. I would have been so much more surprised if he had not played baseball just because he has that thing. He’s got baseball face, baseball voice, baseball– it’s hard to describe. Anyway, brilliant, absolutely brilliant job. I’m obsessed.

I think he’s only in three scenes. He’s in the two scenes with the scouts and then he’s in one scene where he confronts Brad Pitt. By the way, you’re going toe-to-toe with Brad Pitt and he just ate him up. He ate him up. Yes.

John: I want to congratulate Ken Medlock, Bennett Miller for directing him so well, but also let’s shout out the casting director who found him and found that this is the person who can do this role. Whenever we see those moments where that one actor was in one scene and killed it, that’s some great casting directing there probably.

Craig: Let’s find out who the casting director was, shall we? Casting director. Casting by Francine Maisler, who’s-

John: Oh, Francine Maisler–

Craig: -just a legend.

John: Indeed.

Craig: Legend.

Taffy: I’m sad that we didn’t get to talk about Brad Pitt’s stress eating in the movie.

John: Oh my God. The greatest.

Taffy: The Twinkie.

John: Constantly eating.

Taffy: Yes, the Twinkie that he jams angrily into his mouth. It’s not in the script.

Craig: It’s so great. I think it was a thing, he was like, I want my character to always be eating.

Taffy: Same.

Craig: It’s a real challenge when you’re directing because of continuity. It’s just the sandwich is too big, too small. You have to have a bucket. You have to spit the thing out or otherwise you’re going to be barfing after take seven. They committed and just pulled it off. It’s great stuff.

Taffy: Because he shoves everything in his mouth. There’s no continuity problem. You just need 30 Twinkies.

Craig: That’s true. That is also such a guy thing. Like oh, screw you food. I win.

Taffy: We do that. Just so you know we do that too.

Craig: We do it in front of everyone and you guys are like, there’s no one watching.

John: That is our discussion on Moneyball. Scriptedness is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew, thanks for all your research and help here. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on money. Taffy Brodesser-Akner, thank you so much for joining us.

Taffy: Thank you for having me. I just want to say thank you to my assistant Chris Logan, who is wearing a Mets jersey right now and is so excited about this. Don’t spit on him right now. He’s having the best day of his life.

Craig: It’s going to be over real soon. If they make it to the Yankees, if you’re so lucky to make it to the Yankees, we will destroy you.

Taffy: I still don’t know what that means, but thanks, everyone.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. We are here for the bonus segment. We’re going to talk about money. Listener note here: Craig had to disappear at a certain point. If he vanishes for a bit in this conversation, it’s because he had to give up the room that he was recording in. Taffy and I are going to be talking a little bit in the middle part without Craig there, but you’ll hear him at the end because of editing magic.

All right. Taffy Brodesser-Akner, I just finished reading your book, Long Island Compromise, last night. I was reading it on the flight on the way back, and then I stayed up and read the final chapters. Such an accomplishment. So well done.

Taffy: Thank you.

John: I want you to go out and read it. Taffy, your book is about the intersection of trauma and money. Do you feel any resonance between the things we were talking about in that and Moneyball?

Taffy: Yes. If we’re talking about worth, and thank you so much for saying such nice things about my book, which is about how money makes you crazy. I want to say that people ask me very often, what was making a television show like? I answer with actually what is a good answer to your question, which is this:

I work at the New York Times. I work at the New York Times Magazine. I’ve worked there for many years. Before that, I was a freelancer. I know how much you get paid and I know how hard things are. I think very often about this story I wrote about sexual harassment at Kay Jewelers. Remember every kiss begins with Kay?

Craig: Yeah, mall jewelers.

Taffy: Oh my God, terrible stuff. Two and a half years it took to write that story. Maybe 14 cities, thousands and thousands of New York Times dollars. It was dangerous. There were threats. There was crying. There was protection ordered for people. It was hard. It was scary. And it came out and the money I got paid for it was the same amount of money that I got paid per scale to write a six-page outline for an episode of a television show based on a novel I’d already written.

Craig: Voila.

Taffy: I couldn’t get over it. I would say, I’m writing paragraphs that are true, that are out there in the world and people took a risk in talking to me. I couldn’t get over it. I still can’t get over it because I think what does this mean?

Also, maybe we know what it means because we see how news is being treated. We see how entertainment is treated, although it’s starting to happen in entertainment too, this lessening. But it made me understand that it’s just crazy what we value in this system. To assign money as an assignation of what is valued, that way lies madness.

John: Yes. I’m thinking about the times often on this podcast, we talk about why are screenwriters paid the way that we’re paid, which is arguably too much. It’s interesting we’re talking about Moneyball because there are fewer professional screenwriters than there are professional baseball players. It is, in the end, a unique skill, a thing that we’re able to do and that gets us paid the way that we’re paid. And that I’ve also been in the same situation you’re fine. It’s like, I feel like I’ve been paid too much for the amount of work that I’m doing here or that I’ve had to play tricks on myself saying like, I just do not want to write this. If I actually break down the amount I’m being paid per page, I’m of course I’m going to write this. It’s crazy.

Taffy: Right.

Craig: What we get paid doesn’t necessarily make sense from day to day. The same talent that we have earns us X. Then two years later, for some reason, it earns us twice X. Then for two years later, it’s half X. There’s no real rhyme or reason when you focus on it. Overall, one of the things I’ve come to understand is, and it’s hard to process, no one would ever suggest that what we do is as valuable as, say, somebody that’s working on a vaccine.

John: Right.

Craig: Those people get paid less, probably, than the people working at the New York Times Magazine. Then there are people who get paid even less than that, who are doing other things that are just beautiful work. Then there are people who don’t get paid at all, the unpaid labor of the world, particularly among women. Then the question is, how do I morally reconcile all this? Kant will have some stuff to say about this as you go through your course. One of the things that I’ve come to just understand is that entertainment which we think of as frivolous, while it certainly doesn’t save anyone’s life, seems to be one of the reasons people like to live.

It’s one of the things we’re here for at all. If we took it all away, including watching sports or playing video games or movies or television or reading great fiction, then at that point, people may not care as much about having their lives saved. Because what’s the point? People’s value of entertainment is so profound — way more than I value it, by the way. I love the creation aspect of it but sometimes I do I can feel guilty about these things. The bottom line is, the demand for what we do, particularly if it works for people, is so high that this is how the market functions.

Taffy: Right. I don’t think I feel bad about it because now I’m both people. I’m making that for an outline. It’s just astounding to me. It makes sense to me that athletes and actors get paid an inordinate amount. They have at least the perception of an expiration date of their prime, whereas you and I can imagine that the older and older and older we get, eventually we’ll keep. You’re right. I don’t know. We may be dwindling already. I don’t know.

John: We also have an opportunity cost. Part of why I’m getting paid this thing is so that I’m not doing something else.

Taffy: I think these are all these questions about how we value a person. I think the answer is, I was always this person and then I got an amazing agent who suddenly had access to things like this. But I was always like this. If you go back to when I was being ridiculed at my first job at Soap Opera Weekly, I was writing the same things that I am now highly valued at the New York Times for writing. It makes no sense. What are we supposed to do with that?

Craig: Let’s go back to your book here. One of the characters in Long Island Compromise, Beamer, is a screenwriter. He’s a screenwriter who’s written with a writing partner. It’s really clear that Beamer’s not the talent there. Beamer has some soft skills but he’s not the writing superstar here.

Now that the partnership is broken up, he is questioning his own worth because he was getting paid good money to do this as a writing team. It’s a real question, can he do it himself? Is he worth anything by himself? He comes from a family where he didn’t necessarily need to make money. This was all a game for him to start with.

Taffy: Right. He, by the way, when you’re as wealthy as Beamer Fletcher is, the money isn’t meaningful. The question is when we meet him is my value dwindling? My agent hasn’t called me back in two days. That is what he knows. That is what I live in fear of, is I haven’t heard from you. Oh, it’s been Sunday, okay. You still love me, my agent? Thank you.

John: Our sense of self-worth is like a price tag on it. There’s the number of likes we get on a post. There’s the number of people who show up to a book signing. There’s all these little ways in which we determine our value based on outside forces coming in to tell us things. None of that actually reflects our own internal sense of valuation.

I think you’re going to be looking at in your Imprint app probably, is really where is the sense of self, the degree to which our self-perception is internally generated versus externally put upon us. That balance is tough. The dollar figure people are paying you is one of the ways in which you calculate your own self-worth.

Taffy: It’s one of the ways they calculate my self-worth. Can I ask you, what do you think? What do you think about all this? Your quote, it goes up and it goes up. Do you feel better about yourself? Or is there a point at which you’re like, I’ve made it. Is it success or is it money or is it money defined as success?

John: There was a point early in my career, like project after project, my quote was going up. I remember at one point, my agent, my lawyer, were pushing really hard on the studio to pay me more than this, or basically better, or John won’t do it. I was upset with them because I felt like they were pushing too hard. Basically, ah, I’m not worth that much, you’re asking for too much.

Then we moved into a period which was supposed to be technically post-quote, where they’re not supposed to be asking for quotes, but people still supply them. You’ll wait to get an offer. Then they’ll say like, “Oh, no, let me send you these last few things so you can say this is how much he’s actually worth.”

You can also as a writer, get to a place where your quote is so high they won’t even consider you for certain projects. That’s a situation that people will run into, where it’s like, I was at a lunch with a producer and she was talking about this project that they were looking to do. She said, “Oh, no, we’re looking for a younger writer for that.” I heard younger writers, like babies really, she meant a less expensive writer. I was 30 at that point. I was like, “How much younger do you want?” But they meant less expensive. There are certain things which you’re just not on the list for because they just know you’re too expensive.

Taffy: Which is where money backfires, because the more they’re spending also in this business, the closer they’re watching and the more their ability to make a decision is jostled by the immense amount of money. There’s a sweet spot, it seems, where you stay under the radar of anybody being up at night worried about the money that’s being spent.

John: Yeah, it’s crazy. Then I would say like over the course of my career, a lot of the places where you really feel your value because it’s just so direct is when you get paid on a weekly to come in and do on a project, it’s like my weekly quote got really high. It’s like, that was exciting, but also I felt like you’re on a tightrope. It’s like, Jesus, am I really worth this amount of money for this one week’s work? You quickly realize, yes, they want your writing, but they mostly need you to be able to survive in a room with some of these people because these are sometimes monstrous, sometimes just really talented, but also very demanding people.

And there’s very few people that, there’s a scarcity problem. There’s very few people they can put into that room who can survive in there and then also still deliver the project that comes out of there. That was really what I was going to be paid for was not necessarily the words I was writing, but the words I was able to say in those rooms.

Taffy: That’s so interesting. Also, that is the true opportunity cost because every time you’re doing one of those weeklies, you’re not doing something that is the product of your brain, the product of your creativity. It is maybe the least gratifying thing. What if the way you can define your self-worth in this business monetarily is the amount of money someone like John August is paid to fix your terrible screenplay? I would like to think that they don’t pay more than $150,000 a week to fix my crap. If they do, I quit because I should be doing something else.

John: I’ve actually heard that rationalization not applied to me directly, but someone saying, no, yes, they’re replacing you. They’re bringing on this big writer, but it means they really love the project because look how much they’re paying that person. Which is absurd, but also true because it means if they’re willing to spend six figures on something or seven figures on something, they really are planning to make it. So it’s good news that you’re being replaced by this big giant, expensive writer because it means they really want to make it a thing. It’s crazy.

Taffy: You go home that night and you share the same blanket that David Justice had to say, well, Billy Bean thinks I’m a good leader. That’s all you have to keep you warm that night. I guess I’ll be a good leader.

John: You’ll be a good leader. You are a fantastic guest on the program. Thank you again, Taffy for doing this.

Taffy: You guys are the best. I had such a good time.

Craig: Bye, guys. Thank you.

John: Bye. Thanks, Craig.

Links:

• Moneyball on IMDb
• Moneyball screenplay
• Taffy Brodesser-Akner
• Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
• Scriptnotes LIVE! at the Austin Film Festival
• Highland Pro Austin launch party – sign up here!
• ABBA Voyage
• Opti-V fireplace
• Ken Medlock
• Imprint App
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to Episode 659 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Often, in film and television, our protagonists are facing economic hardship. Today on the show, what if your hero’s problem is too much money? We’ll look at three stories in the news about excessive fame and fortune and ask, how would this be a movie? This week, we have a ringer to help us answer this question. Mari Heller is a writer and director whose credits include Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Her new film is Nightbitch, which just debuted at Toronto. Welcome back, Mari.

Mari Heller: Yay, thanks, John. I’m so glad to be here.

John: In addition to all of your writing and directing credits, you also played MacGruber’s mom. Craig would be really upset if we did not acknowledge that you are officially canonically MacGruber’s mom.

Mari: I was expecting you were going to say Queen’s Gambit, but I like that it went to MacGruber’s mom. I appreciate it.

John: Queen’s Gambit, sure, a meaningful, dramatic role, but come on.

Mari: The most important role of my lifetime. Not the mother to my own children, but the mother to MacGruber on the MacGruber TV show on Peacock.

John: Yes, everyone can see that there today. We’re going to talk through, probably not very much MacGruber, but we’re going to talk through Nightbitch. We’re going to talk through, how would these be movies? In a bonus segment for premium members, I would love to talk film festivals because I think maybe all of your movies have gone through film festivals. Is that right?

Mari: Yes, all of them have.

John: I want to talk about film festivals, both for when you’re trying to sell a movie originally, but when you’re also trying to launch a movie into the world and what writers and directors need to think about when their movies are playing at film festivals.

Mari: That’s a good topic. I like that.

John: Yes, great. I try.

Before we get to any of that, Drew, we have actual Scriptnotes news.

Drew Marquardt: That’s right, we do. You, Craig, and I will be headed to Austin for the Austin Film Festival at the end of October. We’re going to be really busy.

John: We are going to be so, so busy. Currently, on the books, we have four official events. We have a live Scriptnotes show and a separate three-page challenge. I’m going to be doing a panel on video games and graphic novels with Jordan Mechner. Plus, there’ll be a special 25th anniversary screening of Go with a Q&A afterwards led by Matt Selman of The Simpsons fame.

Drew: Oh, that sounds great.

John: Yes, I’m really excited for all of those. If you’re going to go to Austin and you already have your festival pass, you should be able to attend all of these for free just with your pass. There’s one more thing. We are planning an afternoon event in Austin, probably on Thursday the 24th, for the launch of the next version of Highland. This one is open to everybody, but we do need you to RSVP so we can figure out the logistics and how big a space we need and other stuff. So if you are interested in coming to that, Drew, how should they get on a list?

Drew: I will put a link in the show notes for the RSVP and you can just go through there.

John: Thank you, Drew. Now, let’s get on to the other news. We’ll start with this article by Matt Belloni and Puck about Hollywood’s 10% problem. He’s referring to a study that came out a couple of weeks ago that only one-tenth of the 500-plus movies that were either released or scheduled for release by the major studios and streamers between ’22 and 2026 actually came from an internal development slate.

The movies that development executives are theoretically working on at studios, very few of those actually are the movies that they’re releasing. Often, as screenwriters, we’re thinking like, “Oh, I’m going to go off with this open writing assignment that’s at a studio,” or they have this internal idea or they’re buying a spec script. And really, very few of those movies are actually getting made.

Mari: Yes.

John: It’s funny that Disney has not created an original live-action movie franchise since National Treasure 20 years ago, so two decades for that. It feels like so much of the theoretical work that we’re doing as writers does not ever actually make it to the big screen. Did this feel true to you, Mari?

Mari: Feels true to me in my limited experience. I’m sure it does for you too. When I was starting out and had first gotten an agent based on a spec script that I wrote with a writing partner, we were constantly going out for assignment jobs. We were constantly answering every call and getting– our first paid jobs were all things that never got made. I started to see a journey where I was an employed screenwriter with nothing ever getting made, where I wrote a made-for-TV movie for Disney for YA audience.

I wrote a number of pilots that sold for the networks when it was still more of the pilot game. I was like, “Okay, this is great. I’m getting health insurance and I’m making enough money to live.” But at some point, I want actors to say these words. The purpose of writing these scripts is that I want somebody to say them out loud and for it to get recorded and maybe even somebody sees it. I started to see a situation where development hell just becomes your experience of Hollywood. That’s all you get to do is just develop, develop, develop, but nothing actually gets made.

John: Absolutely. To slice apart these numbers a little bit more. Obviously, some open writing assignments are based on studio IP. That’s probably not quite what this is here, but that it’s sense of, “I have this original idea that I’m going to take out on the town and sell as a pitch or sell as a spec script.” Very few of those are getting made, at least at the majors. Now, this study omitted A24 and Neon. Some places are also making more originals. That also probably is undercounting genre movies that are getting made. There are horror things that are at certain price points.

Mari: Horror, it’s like the exception to every rule, right?

John: Yes.

Mari: In terms of theater audiences and how they get made and how much money they make.

John: Yes. You and I were both in the same situation where, listen, I was lucky to get some movies made, but I had a lot of movies that did not get made. I know so many writers who were in the guild for years and had no credits to show for all the hard work they’ve done. I think that partially pushes people towards television where at least like, “Hey, my name is on a screen at least. The work I’m doing is being said by actors,” like you’re saying, and it’s actually out there in the world.

The other part of this study, which I thought was interesting, is there’s charts. Listen, I don’t know that we can actually verify all the data that’s in there, but they talk about how many of these movies that are greenlit really came with so many elements attached. It was almost greenlit by the time the studio bought them. They had director attachments. They had progress to production built into the thing. The studio couldn’t help but make these movies. It wasn’t that the hard work of development executives brought this thing to fruition. That’s frustrating. It also feels like it was always true in this industry that most stuff has some other aspect to it. Increasingly, everything has to be completely safe before they’ll even consider greenlighting it.

Mari: Well, I think it’s a minor miracle when anything gets made. I think it takes so many things coming together at the right time and so many pieces have to line up. Sometimes having a lot of different attachments to something, I know I do that as a filmmaker, is I try to make sure that by the time I’m trying to get something greenlit, it’s an impossible thing to say no to because everything’s already moving.

The train is already going and all of these actors have slated this into their schedule or we got this tax incentive or whatever it may be. It’s putting enough pieces together so that you feel like you can push the thing over the finish line and actually get it shot because it’s just so easy for– particularly movies is what I know more, but it’s so easy for a movie to fall apart. There’s eight million ways that it can fall apart and there’s only one way it can get made.

John: Well, let’s jump ahead, though, and talk about Nightbitch because I want to talk about this as a movie and how this came to be because this is your fourth feature film as a director?

Mari: Yes.

John: Great. You’re a known quantity. Everyone knows you know what you’re doing here, but my understanding is like this wasn’t a thing where you went to them. Instead, they came to you. Is that accurate?

Mari: Sort of. This movie is based on an incredible novel called Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. It was her first novel, but it was a splashy-enough novel that it got on the radar of a lot of people. It was acquired by Annapurna, Sue Naegle, who was working at Annapurna at the time. Amy Adams and her company and Stacy O’Neil together both read the book and decided to option it.

John: That’s great.

Mari: So the book was optioned before I came on board, but it hadn’t even been published yet. It was one of those situations where it was an early manuscript and it had enough buzz to it that people started reading it. Amy Adams and Sue were the ones who said, “Let’s try and send this to Mari.” I hadn’t worked with Amy before, but she knew my work. She sent it to me.

Really, nothing had been done. All that had been done is it had been optioned. It was like, “Who knows if this is a movie? If anyone could make it into a movie, we think you could.” She sent me the book and I read it and came on board really early.

John: Let’s break down some of the parts of that because I think some people outside of the industry might not know who these players are and how they all fit together. Annapurna is an independent motion picture-producing entity and Sue Naegle was running it at that point. Sue Naegle was my former TV agent. Sue Naegle is fantastic. I love her to death. And it’s not surprising that they read this book when it was in manuscript because most books that sell in Hollywood sell very early on, way before they come out. Every Friday, I get this email that has summaries of all the different agencies that are covering all the different books like, “These are the books that people are talking about.”

Mari: There’s whole departments at the agencies, literary departments who cover all the books that are coming out, especially the ones that have a lot of buzz.

John: Beyond that, there are book scouts out of New York who are looking for those things. Individual producers might have their own book scouts who are hunting those things. They have bandits who try to find, “These are the areas of literature that we’re most focused on.”

Mari: Right.

John: When Yoder’s book came out and got the buzz and attention it did, it’s maybe not so surprising because the people who are the early barometers of what’s going to be cool had already read it and said, “This is going to be interesting.”

Mari: Right. I think what’s surprising about it is that it was her first novel. I think often, it’s a novel from a known entity that comes out that gets bought up quite so early. I think it was very exciting.

John: Amy Adams had read this book. Annapurna read this book. They decided together to work together to option this book. Then they need to find a filmmaker, a writer. Ideally, a writer-director. They came to you. What are those initial conversations like? Are you both feeling each other out in terms of like, “Is this a movie?” What are those conversations like?

Mari: My first initial conversations, and I can say this in this type of situation and podcast and I wouldn’t say it necessarily to everybody, but is I’m often looking for– I don’t want to get involved in projects that are so far along that I’m just being brought on as a director for hire. I really want to be able to make something my own. I want to be able to come with a vision and make something from the ground up. The fact that the first conversation I had with Amy after I read the book and I was totally moved by the book, I found it really impressive. It spoke to me in a really emotional way. I was postpartum. I was about six months postpartum on having my second kid. It was very personal in the moment that I read it.

John: What year would this have been? Is this 2020? When is this?

Mari: 2021. My daughter was born in 2020 and it was post-pandemic-ish, but still pandemic vibes around town. I was very isolated. I had moved out of the city. I was living in the woods, raising two kids. This book really spoke to me.

John: Actually, we know that you were isolated, living in the woods, because there was an episode we did of Scriptnotes where we asked a bunch of our previous guests, “Hey, during the pandemic, what the hell are you doing?” You were generous enough to tell us about moving out of the city and being in the woods and homeschooling your kids in New York with a group of other people. You’re just making it work.

Mari: You have such a good memory. Maybe you are a robot. You remember something from so many years ago on Scriptnotes. Yes, we were in a pod with another family. We were splitting up the homeschooling duties. We were each trying to get time for our creative work, which was so difficult at the time. That’s when this book got sent to me, not too long after that, once my daughter was born, and I was really home with her. Actually, Jorma was off prepping the MacGruber TV show.

He was away and I was home alone with two kids for the first time. The book, it spoke to me on an emotional level. Then when I spoke to Amy about it, it was great that she basically said to me, “I have no idea if this can be a movie or not and I don’t really know what it should be, but I would trust you to figure it out.” That was exactly what I needed to hear to also know, “Okay, this isn’t a train that’s already moving that already has everything figured out.” I get a lot of creative latitude to make my decisions.

John: Let’s talk about the decisions you’re making here because I haven’t read the book, so I’ve just seen your movie, which is fantastic, and everyone should see. Just so we don’t forget, when does it come out?

Mari: It doesn’t come out till December 6th. We’re doing the festival circuit right now. We just did TIFF. We’ll be at festivals all over, from the Hamptons to London to Middleburg and throughout the fall, and then it’ll come out in theaters on December 6th.

John: You said the book speaks to you, but what is your initial instinct about how to adapt this thing and to find your way into it?

Mari: It’s like a big internal monologue of somebody who is living as a newly stay-at-home mom and is isolated, has moved out of the city, is living in the suburbs with her son. Her husband travels for work a lot and she’s losing her mind. It wasn’t immediately clear how I would adapt it or what the form would be exactly, but I knew that the themes were something I had been wanting to explore for a while.

I’d been wanting to write a movie about motherhood and bodies and women’s aging bodies for a while. I had been toying with a number of ideas along those same themes. This just gave me enough excitement. I don’t know. I was so excited about what the book made me feel that I just was like, “I’ll figure it out.” I embarked on my adaptation without having a totally clear plan of how I was going to adapt it.

One of the first things that I realized was the central question of the book, or at least when I read the book, in my mind was, “Oh, God, have I made a horrible decision by becoming a mother? Did I screw my whole life up?” That felt like it was the central question that I was going to explore, and then that gave me some framework for what I wanted to focus on because the book has a lot more storylines and plot that happen where there’s a pyramid scheme with all the other mothers.

There’s a number of other storylines, but it became clear like, “No, this is a story about long-term relationships and parenthood and motherhood.” My central question that I want to be exploring and thinking about is, has this woman made a huge mistake by becoming a mother? Then really early on, that gave me the ending of the movie, which is not too much of a spoiler, but there’s a birth at the ending of the movie. I thought that’s the way to answer the central question is by seeing a birth. That’s something that wasn’t in the book.

John: The character’s journey gets her to a place where the idea of being a mother is not an affront to her. She comes to embrace both what she needs as a person and motherhood and able to find a unification of these two different sides of herself.

Mari: Exactly, a unification of the rage and all of the untethered parts of her that have felt like motherhood broke her apart and is able to bring them back together. If you think about that time in the world coming right out of the pandemic and I was pregnant during the pandemic and I remember I had one of my really good friends said to me, “Having a baby is the ultimate act of optimism,” and I thought, “God, that’s true.” I wasn’t feeling very optimistic about the world in that moment, and yet I was embarking on this journey of optimism by having another child. Yes, the end of the movie speaks to that choice and how you make that choice even when it doesn’t always feel like the clearest answer.

John: I want to go back to the question of, “Is this even a movie?” Because if you think about the internal monologue aspect of the book and you’re able to stage some of this as voiceover that’s directed to the audience, it could be a stage monologue. It could be what the Constitution means to me. It could be a thing where it’s ready to deliver to the audience, except that then you wouldn’t have the actual child in front of you.

I think one of the things I need to ask you a question about is, “How the hell did you get this performance out of the twins, I guess?” I’ve never seen young people on screen so much like such young people who have to actually do the thing you need them to do so that the scene could happen. As a writer who knew that they needed to direct this movie, I would never have put such young people in so many scenes, and you did. Talk to me about both the decision as a writer to, “I’m going to try this,” and as the director who actually had to pull this off. What was that process?

Mari: Well, first, I’ll say, thinking about whether this should just be a stage monologue or whether this was something that I wanted to be more of an experiential film where you get to put yourself in the shoes of a parent of a very young child and really feel what it feels like to be that person, I thought a lot about Diary and that this piece feels like a companion piece to The Diary of a Teenage Girl because it is a very subjective movie.

The attempt is to really place you squarely in the shoes of a person who’s in the middle of a major life transformation and she’s sleep-deprived. Every day feels like the same as the day before. Things are blending into each other. She doesn’t remember when she last changed her shirt or when she last took a shower or when she ate anything but Mac and cheese and fried hash browns.

That got exciting for me to think about creating a totally subjective world, where we’re trying to give an audience an experience of what it feels like because I realized, “Oh, friends of mine who haven’t had kids or family members who haven’t had kids, they have no idea how insane I felt and how this experience of being a first-time parent with a very little kid stuck at home, how much you do lose your mind.”

That became the fun thing about thinking about it as a film and why it is more than just a monologue. Then, yes, I have a big pet peeve about kids in movies who look like little Hollywood actor kids who don’t act like kids because I feel like it’s so deceiving. I don’t know about your kid, but my kids are wild. I had a little boy first. He always had so much energy.

He was up at 5:00 in the morning running crazy right away, even from the time he was really little. Just not a kid that you would have seen on screen. Not a kid who’s just quietly sitting in the corner while the grownups have conversations. Somebody who’s climbing on your head and it’s a very interactive physical life that I embarked on with him. So I really wanted to find kids who weren’t really actors and were really kids who would play.

John: Well, how old are these twins? Because when you say they’re not really actors, to what degree are they even aware of what they’re doing or they’re just having fun?

Mari: They were two when I cast them. They turned three on our camera test day. We found them through a twin forum on Facebook. We were out plastering with twin forums to find twins who could come. Then the way that I cast them was I just hung out for days at parks. I had twins come in batches basically to come and meet with me and I just played with them for hours on end until I found the twins who I felt really could play and pretend and were down to play these different games with me, and yet were also good listeners in their own way even if they had a lot of energy and wildness and spunk and humor, but also could listen and take direction and understand pretend.

These two boys, Arleigh and Emmett, they were just the perfect twins. I feel so lucky that I cast them because it could have gone really poorly. They gave one of the best toddler performances in a movie, as you said. They really are very realistic. We made the environment really fun for them, I think. They loved coming to set. They knew everybody’s names. They knew where to put the microphone. They got really into the mechanics of filmmaking. We let them check out the camera. We let them check out the props. They understood everything about what we were doing and what everyone’s job was. We made everything a game. So I think they had a really good time.

John: I’m doing this animated movie right now. One of the first conversations I had with the director was, “To what degree is this camera looking into a world versus the world that’s being projected onto the screen?” They’re really fundamentally different aspects. One of the things I think you do so nicely is that balance between the camera feels like it’s just documenting a thing that’s happening in front of you.

You feel like the kid is just actually a natural kid and Amy Adams is a good actor. She’s just rolling with it, which totally works. Also, the subjective reality is you’re pushing things at the screen that are not necessarily just the camera documenting a moment. When we’re in her point of view, it is a subjective experience. We’re shoving things at the audience rather than we’re supposed to believe that this is really what’s happening in front of the lens.

Mari: Right. It’s that tricky balance of having it feel not staged. You do want to feel like the kid is just a kid who’s acting like a kid. Between the editing and the framing and the ways in which there’s repetition, you realize it’s actually all very carefully planned. There was the trick of needing the kid to be able to say certain lines that scenes needed in order for the scene to actually progress the way I had written it.

There were certain scenes I wrote very much knowing we will improv whatever the kid ends up saying. They’re walking down the street hand-in-hand. “What do you want to talk about? That leaf up there or a truck rolling by or whatever it is? It doesn’t matter what you say. We’ll find something great in whatever your conversation is as long as it’s not about the cameraman.”

Then there were other scenes where I knew, “No, I need a really specific thing. I need you to ride on your mom’s back, tell her to play horsey with you, and then tell her that she’s got fuzzy hair coming out of her back.” We figured out games for how to do this. A lot of times, it was call and response. I would do a game of like, “Ready. Repeat after me. Say poo.” “Poo.” “Go.” “Go.” “Moo.” “Moo.” “Ruff.” “Ruff.” “Ah.” “Ah,” or get rhythmic games going, and then you say, “Mama fuzzy.” “Mama fuzzy.” “Louder. Mama fuzzy,” or whatever.

However it was, it was getting this to be something that was fun and playful for them, but sometimes it was trickier than others. I’d have a plan for how we were going to make something into a game for the kid. They would not be in the mood to do that thing that I was thinking of, or I’m thinking of this one scene where Amy thinks she’s lost her son at the playground. When she finds him, she runs for him. We had him sitting on this grass. I think this was day one or two, so he had just met Amy.

I had him sitting on the grass and I said, “Okay, and then she’s going to run up to you.” Well, he didn’t know as soon as I said action, she was going to be screaming, crying, running up to him. He turned around and saw this woman who he had just met really the day before screaming at him. He stood up and started running away, a very natural response. We realized, “Oh right, we need to figure out a way to make this game. Okay, you’re playing hide-and-go-seek. You count to 10. Even when she screams and runs for you, you can’t get up until you get to 10,” something like that.

John: In addition to all the challenges of these very young actors, you put a bunch of dogs in your movie. These are another classic rookie mistake, putting dogs in your movie. Dogs at this point, there are trainers. There’s ways to do it. How much of the dog action we’re seeing are, “This is what the lens saw,” versus you had to go in and post and move dogs around to make this all work?

Mari: Most of it is totally practical. There’s a tiny bit of adjustment in post when it comes to, “Oh, this one dog was misbehaving,” so we moved them over here or whatever. Actually, what we really did was we worked with really great trainers who spent a lot of time casting and training the dogs for the very specific behavior that we wanted in the movie. I wrote scenes and action for dogs having no real basis on how dogs behave.

Because the dogs are supposed to be a little bit magical and non-realistic in the movie, the things that I needed them to do were not necessarily things that dogs would do. Things like bowing to another dog. I had read things about wolves and how they’ll sometimes show their neck to another dog, so I would take things from research like that and put them into the script, but then we had to actually get dogs to do those things. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t work.

John: In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we had to train hundreds of squirrels to pick up nuts and shake them and then put them in the right places. Each time you see a squirrel, they’re trained for that one specific thing, and then you’ll never see that squirrel again. It’s all unique stuff.

Mari: We needed a squirrel to just run up a tree for this. I remember as I was going through my budget at one point, it was going to be $13,000 to train a squirrel. I was like, “But the squirrel doesn’t do something that a squirrel wouldn’t do. It just needs to run up a tree.” I was like, “No, we’re not doing this. I can’t pay $13,000 to train a squirrel.” We took that out of the budget and we just wandered around the park until we found a squirrel and filmed a squirrel.

John: I want to wrap up by talking about tone because you mentioned that the dogs were somewhat magical. One of the things that is so fascinating about your film but also unsettling is it always feels like it’s just about to tip into a different genre. Music-wise, we’re often getting close to horror moments at times. It feels like it’s a horror movie that doesn’t ever fully get to the horror thing.

Obviously, there’s a whole tradition of body horror that’s part of this. The experience of being a woman of that age and motherhood is a body horror story, and yet it’s also a comedy. There’s funny moments. There’s moments of marital strife that are appropriate in other movies. How did you think about the tonal shifts and how did you communicate them? Were there discussions both on the script stage and on the set about, “Where are we at here?”

Mari: Well, a lot of what I thought about was when reading the book, the mother does turn into a dog, but it’s not like The Fly or other transformation movies where that metamorphosis is painful or horrifying. If anything, it’s cathartic and euphoric. There was this whole element of body horror and the metaphor being as you enter into perimenopause and you go to look in the mirror and, “Oh, God, what’s that weird hair sprouting out here? What new wrinkles do I have?” and all the ways in which we look at our own bodies as we age and we think, “Who is that? I don’t even recognize myself,” taking that to a sort of extreme level.

That has a level of horror to it and just gore and grossness. We get some really great groans when we see this movie in big theaters as you can imagine. There’s some really nasty stuff. When it came to the actual transformation, it was really important that the transformation itself didn’t feel painful or horrible, but it felt euphoric. That was our guiding force. We did always want to be dancing on that edge.

I definitely think there’s a misconception if anybody goes into this movie thinking it’s a horror movie. I think it’s more of a psychological drama with a lot of comedy, more than anything in the horror realm. We played with horror tricks. We played with visual styles that tip their hat to the more horror genre, whether it’s like she’s walking down a hallway and we’re doing the push-pull visual styles or music as well. Ultimately, it’s really a story about motherhood and transformation. I don’t know. The things I got more interested in were less of the full horror parts of it and the more parts that made me laugh.

John: Well, let’s put Nightbitch to the side for a second because everyone will get a chance to see that and they should and think about some other movies down the road. Someone might be coming to you, Mari Heller, to say, “Hey, how about this article to adapt into your next thing?”

You have three choices here. We’re going to start with one that’s not even an article. This is the first time on Scriptnotes where we’re actually just going to a Threads post. Not even a Twitter post, a Threads post.

This is a post by Bo Predko. I have no idea who Bo Predko is, if it’s a real person or if it’s some other corporate entity. This is so short. We’ll actually just read this all aloud. Let me read the setup and then you can read the bullet points here.

All right, so it starts, “You’re 23 years old dating Leonardo DiCaprio in LA. Private parties, yachts, jets, signing NDAs every month. You’re 100% sure Leo loves you because he let you touch his Oscar. Let’s be real. You’ll be forgotten in two years. Here’s what to do when you’re dating a celebrity.” All right, help us out.

Mari: Number one, keep the contacts you make in a separate list. Number two, network like a shark at high-end parties. Number three, leverage the relationship to collaborate with luxury brands. Number four, save and invest the money from the lifestyle perks. Number five, eyes will be on you. Grow your social media following. Number six, read every paper you sign. Number seven, learn from Leo’s work ethic and use it to fuel your own goals. Number eight, stay out of unnecessary drama and keep things private.

John: All right. Mari, you and I both know famous people. This is not unfamiliar territory to us and it’s not unfamiliar as a setup for a movie in a way. We’ve seen other stories like a normie dating a celebrity and what that looks like and feels like, and yet I like that it’s an inversion of what we normally expect where the wide-eyed, young, doe-eyed girl falls in love with this guy and has her heart broken and learns a valuable lesson. Assuming that you know this going in and here’s how you’re going to plan for it.

Mari: Right, and not just plan for it, here’s how you’re going to abuse the system that would abuse you.

John: Yes, which I thought was exciting. Let’s think about this as, how would this be a movie? If this came towards you, what is your instinct? Where do you start? Are you thinking about who this young woman is? Are you thinking about the situation? What’s interesting about this to you?

Mari: I guess what’s interesting is the way that younger generations are approaching everything with a savviness that maybe I didn’t grow up with and playing the game. Everything about this scares me a little bit, to be honest. The idea of using a romantic relationship for your personal gain, it’s just so dirty and gross, but I also see the humor in it, especially using somebody like Leonardo DiCaprio because he so famously dates young women and drops them quickly.

I think in all of the comments below, so many people were commenting on how young this person would be, who he’s dating. It’s a funny subverting, I guess, a subversion of the expectation, like you’re saying, especially if it could be a misdirect, maybe. Maybe there’s a way that you start off really believing that this person is a bit of a dupe and that they’re in this situation having no idea what they’re doing. Then you start to realize, you could uncover it like The Usual Suspects or whatever and realize that they’ve been manipulating it the entire way.

John: Absolutely.

Mari: Everything’s been a plan.

John: There’s a Taylor Swift song, Mastermind, where she reveals like, “Oh no, you thought this was an accidental thing, but actually, I planned this whole thing the whole time through.” It also made me think about All About Eve because in that, you have the young assistant who, of course, takes over the role. What’s different is that in something like All About Eve, the assumption is like, “Oh, I want to be an actress. I want to be you. I have this other skill, which I’m going to be able to manifest by getting close to you.”

Here, and I think this is a generational difference that you’re pointing to, is that it’s not just about, “This is how I’m going to become the famous actor or whatever.” It’s like because we have this role of influencer and just like a person who’s able to monetize their fame, the goal is, “I need to become famous and get the brand deals, and that’s what I’m going to do. I want to become like Kylie Jenner. I don’t need to be Charlize Theron.”

Mari: Right. It could be fun if you did a movie like this that has the Being John Malkovich thing where the celebrity is in on it, in on the joke of it all, enough that they’re willing to use their own real name like if Leonardo DiCaprio would do this movie, let’s say it was a movie, as himself, right? It could be poking fun at his own celebrity and expectations of him as a celebrity. There could be something fun about that.

John: Well, if you think about Seth Rogen’s This Is the End, and you look at that as an example. They’re all playing themselves like highly characterized versions of themselves. There’s something really interesting and clever about that.

Let’s talk about the inversions of this because right now, this is a young woman dating Leonardo DiCaprio. What is the version of this where she’s famous and he’s the guy who gets swept up in there?

Mari: It’s not as fun.

John: It’s not as fun.

Mari: It’s just not as fun.

John: No.

Mari: It’s the person you always assume is going to be the victim, which in a scenario like this where the man has all the power and the age and all the influence and the fame and all the money and the woman is in the more subversive role and then she turns out to be the one who’s actually controlling everything, that could be really fun.

John: I guess because of the setup and because it’s supposed to be Leonardo DiCaprio and there’s this history of him dating for two years at most and then discarding, the idea that there’s an expiration date on the relationship is built in, but it doesn’t always happen that way. Matt Damon’s wife was a normie and I think that’s still going fine. There are famous people who marry normal people and it’s not always a Ben Affleck or a J.Lo.

Mari: I just love how comfortable you are with saying “normie.” That’s really making me laugh.

John: We know other people who aren’t Leonardo DiCaprio level but who work in the industry and who are comparatively famous, who are married to non-famous people. That can work. It’s just it has to be–

Mari: In fact, I think I see those relationships and I tend to believe in them the most, especially people who’ve been together since before they got anything. Often, if somebody has a really cool spouse, it can make me like them more.

John: 100%. Someone who does have a cool spouse, at least a very devoted spouse, is Palmer Luckey. This is an article by Jeremy Stern writing for Tablet Magazine. He’s talking about Palmer Luckey, who is an inventor, clearly brilliant, clearly some things about him that are challenging for people around him. He created Oculus Rift. He sold that to Facebook for $2.7 billion, then got fired by Mark Zuckerberg after he made this $10,000 donation to this pro-Trump troll group that was dedicated to “shitposting” in real life.

He tried to build this nonprofit that was about prisons. Ultimately, he founded Anduril Industries, this defense technology startup. It makes autonomous weapon systems. It’s now valued at $14 billion. It’s not just Mark Zuckerberg creating Facebook. There’s a two-step thing here. He’s able to rise and fall and rise again in ways that are really interesting. He’s married to or still with his high school sweetheart.

Mari: Except for they didn’t go to high school, they were both homeschooled.

John: Exactly right. The homeschool of it all feels relevant and appropriate. This comes in your direction. What parts of this are interesting to you? Where do you think a movie exists here? What are even the boundaries or the edges of the story you might want to tell on this?

Mari: Well, that’s the issue. The story is fascinating. Fascinating and overwhelming. I got tired just reading this story because there are so many twists and turns. I think the question comes down to, what type of story are we telling? What are we meant to feel about this person? Are they a hero in this story? Are they a tragic character? Are they somebody that we’re rooting for or are they somebody who we’re vilifying? Also, what are you saying? I couldn’t even feel through reading this article what the takeaway is.

What am I meant to feel about this person and what he’s done in the world? Yes, his brain is impressive. Yes, what he’s accomplished is impressive. I love somebody who’s been in this long relationship with somebody for so long through all these ups and downs. He has a thing in the article where he talks about how other people in the tech industry are all trying to keep all options open at the same time. He likes to pick a path and stick with it. There’s something about that ethos, which is really fascinating. But god, I would not know where to begin with this. What did you feel?

John: Listen, you could do the cradle to present day with him and rise up through the homeschool, but that’s going to be too much. It’s not going to be interesting. I think the instinct of, do a Social Network, where you’re focusing on one aspect of that person’s career and take that and you’re fictionalizing and fudging what you need to fudge to create the version of the character who makes sense for the course of your two-hour movie feels right, but it actually just misses so much.

Because if you’re talking about the sale of Oculus to Facebook, eh, that’s actually not– he’s getting fired is interesting. Maybe he’s getting fired from Facebook is the starting point and then having to build back up. It feels like that second founder story and the revenge story. Again, like you, I don’t know if he’s the hero of the story or if he’s an anti-hero that we’re following through the story. I don’t know where we want the audience to sit with our relationship with him.

Mari: No, and I don’t know what the ending is. I don’t know where you’re taking it to because Social Network, it’s all around the court case, right?

John: Yes.

Mari: What would be the framework that you were taking this person’s life through? It feels like the story is not over yet.

John: That’s really a part of the problem is that because of the court case, you could have a resolution of the court case. Even though Zuckerberg is still making a new story, it feels like that’s the resolution here. I don’t know what the resolution is at this point. We also need to talk about how challenging it is to make a movie about a living person. You’ve made two biopics.

Mari: Sort of three.

John: All right, so can you ever forgive me? Are those people alive at this point?

Mari: No, everybody’s dead.

John: Great, so that’s helpful for you.

Mari: Ooh. That’s the best-case scenario. I hate to say that.

John: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Fred Rogers was still alive as you were making this?

Mari: No, he passed away. His wife was still alive. A lot of the people who we were putting on screen were still alive, but he was not alive.

John: What’s the third biopic?

Mari: Well, it’s not exactly a biopic, but The Diary of a Teenage Girl is based on Phoebe, who wrote the book. It’s based on her real life and real people in her life, including her mom and her mom’s boyfriend. It wasn’t a biopic, but it was still based on people’s real lives. I actually cringe at the idea of calling any of the movies biopics because they aren’t cradle-to-grave stories and I don’t love biopics in general, but they are based on real people.

John: Yes. Where I come out with Palmer Luckey and Tell Me How You’re Feeling is that I think there’s so many things that are fascinating here, but I don’t think this article or any story about him specifically right now at this moment makes sense to do.

Mari: No.

John: If you could make this with his permission, I don’t see that working out very well. If you make this without his permission, he feels like a person who could be litigious and you could be in for some real situations there.

Mari: I could see like an organization on the right, somebody within the Trump world wanting to make a biopic of him as a hero for the right because the contribution he made was to a Trump troll account. Then eventually so many of the other people in the tech world ended up coming out for Trump and he feels like he was the one who started that. I don’t know. I wonder, it would almost be like a propaganda film.

John: Yes. I could also see if someone tried to do that, I could see him pushing it back against that too because I think he believes himself to be outside of those systems completely.

What I do think is maybe useful about this is to think about this as a kind of character and think about it as a template for sort of like an interesting character to build a new fictional character off of.

Mari: I think you’re right. He’s like an archetype that we don’t see very often and it makes you realize, my husband always says he finds it interesting when I adapt books because things don’t follow a certain way that they’re meant to go. Books take narrative in different directions or characters are more complex than they would be otherwise.

I think there’s something about him that’s sort of contradictory, like the fact that he is in this long-term marriage and has chosen to become a parent. It’s not what you would expect, but it gives you permission to look at a character and think, oh, you can make weird choices.

John: Yes. Agreed. I think he’s fascinating. I think people should read the article and think about him as a character, but I don’t feel like people are going to rush out and like, I want to make the Palmer Luckey movie. I just don’t see that working out well.

Mari: I can’t tell. Somebody might. It would not be me.

John: Look at Succession. You’re not going to make a movie or a series about the Murdochs, but what you can do is take some of the framework and some of the area around them and make a fictionalized story, and that may be the best approach here.

Mari: I miss Succession so much.

John: I miss it so much. It’s so good.

Mari: It’s so good.

John: It’s so good. All right, let’s wrap this up with sort of the opposite of Succession, which is How to Give Away a Fortune. This is by Joshua Jaffa writing for the New Yorker.

This is really fascinating. I’d sort of heard about little pieces of this before, but this is the first encapsulation where this is all together. It centers around Marlene Englehorn, who’s this Austrian heiress. Her family is incredibly wealthy because of a pharmaceutical fortune and her focus is like, I don’t believe I should have this fortune. I want to give away this fortune, but I want to give it away in a way that actually most benefits society.

And so to do this, I’m going to recruit a bunch of Austrians, 50 Austrians who are representative of our country and have them come together over the course of weekends to make decisions about how this $500 billion, this big chunk of money is going to be distributed to the world. I thought it was cool and ambitious and felt naive at times. There were lots of things that were interesting about it. I was trying to think like, could this be a movie? Would this be a movie? If this were a movie, who would you even center it on?

Obviously Marlene Englehorn is one choice, but the story actually puts a lot of its time in Emma, who’s this 80-year-old retiree who gets this letter recruiting her, which sort of feels like the Golden Ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, come to this thing and we’re going to do this thing. She doesn’t even believe it at first, but then she participates in it. Marielle, what’s your instinct here? Is there a movie here? If so, how would you start?

Mari: What I think is so interesting about it is it plays on something culturally that we as Americans, I think, feel is very foreign to us, which is this idea that we’re such a capitalist society. I didn’t even really realize how much that’s baked into our everyday life until I spent time in Berlin. I was talking to an American acquaintance who had moved to Berlin, and he was somebody I knew from my days of making theater, and he was working as a theater artist in Berlin.

He was saying, yeah, the thing about having a job here or about Berlin in general is nobody’s going to get very rich, but nobody’s going to be very poor. We’re all working and making a good living wage, and doctors and theater artists make somewhere around the same amount of money. We all have jobs, and we all have health care, and education is free, and the quality of life is really good, and nobody’s going to be too rich, but nobody’s going to be hurting too much, or not nobody, but in general, it’s just much more socialistic in that way. We’re operating from a very different perspective.

Then he pointed something out to me, which was he was like, have you noticed that when you talk to people here in Berlin, the first question is never, what do you do? It made me realize how much we’re focused on just wealth and career and what we do and how we make money and all of these things in our country. That I found it really liberating and beautiful to think about a society that was really thinking about wealth distribution in different ways. Berlin had capped rental increases at that point as a city because they just didn’t want housing to become unaffordable.

All of these things that the society in itself was supporting a more socialist view of the world, and somewhere it jived with me from an ethical point of view where I just thought, “God, we’re an unethical country.” That makes so much sense. Even just reading this, I felt the same feeling of like, “Could you do this? Could you change the whole way we perceive money and capitalism in such a jarring way?” There’s something fun about it.

John: There’s something fun about it. I like that. You could look at Marlene Englehorn as being sort of the antithesis of an Ayn Rand character, basically, not believing that any individual is worth more than society, therefore, she should not be worth more than everybody else around her. There’s something really noble about that. One thing that the article has to do a lot of work to explain is that, well, how did this family become so wealthy in a country that is not to have such great disparities? It’s because of sort of inherited wealth and sort of the way that inherited wealth becomes this perpetual cycle that’s very hard to break out of.

As a story purpose, I’m not sure who the antagonist is in a way, I’m not sure like what the–

Mari: I wonder if from a story point of view, if it’s the type of story that starts out with this great idea and great intentions, and then as soon as you get into the nitty gritty of it, things go really wrong and you can’t– she sort of, like you said, has a little bit of a naivete about what this would do for people’s lives that is probably coming from a privileged position where she actually really doesn’t understand what people who haven’t grown up how she did need or want, the sort of rich person, “I’m the hero of my own story” narrative vibe. Then maybe she could actually come to a point where she actually has to grow and change also in some other way, I don’t know.

John: Yes, we were talking about Succession before, it feels like she’s almost like the Siobhan’s character in Succession if she actually believed the things she sort of professed to believe in Succession, and then she sort of keeps getting pulled back in. The other thing that reminded me of was The Good Place and that it was a chance for have characters wrestling about like what is good and right in society, like how do we do this thing?

Because the probably most interesting parts of the story, which I think is probably a better documentary than a feature film, is about sort of like, well, how are we going to prioritize these choices that we’re making as a society and as a subset of society who gets to make some of these choices? It comes down to at the end, I’ll spoil a little bit, is that they have a slush fund at the end where they have like these stickers, they can just apply their stickers that are each worth like $50,000 to different projects and it’s like they’re putting my posters around.

Mari: Very Succession.

John: Yes, which is absurd, but also you get it. There’s a certain point you’re throwing money at things.

Mari: Yes, it does feel like it’s a fun way to explore some bigger ethical questions, and you would almost want like economists and ethicists to come in and weigh in on all of the like pitfalls that you couldn’t anticipate. If you were fictionalizing this and narrativizing it, like what’s the most extreme thing that could happen in this situation?

John: Let’s do a recap of our three How Would this Would Be a Movies.

I think the surprise for me is like the one that’s probably closest to a movie is the Thread thread of Dating a Celebrity because How To Give Away A Fortune is so interesting, but it’s probably a documentary, it’s probably not really suited for a two-hour theatrical experience. Palmer Luckey, I don’t think we want to tell his specific story over the course of this time. We’d like him as a template, but I could imagine several different kinds of movies that are based on essentially this list of advice for dating a celebrity.

Mari: Yes. When I first read it, I didn’t think it would be a movie, but as we talked about it, I got convinced.

John: As we drop this podcast, you and I both be racing to get our versions of this story down and get them sold off there.

Mari: I’m going to call Leonardo DiCaprio right now.

John: Right now. Appian Way, we’re going to get in there and make that movie.

Let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a blog post by Teresa Justino called, You Get To Be Fulfilled Now. She’s talking about how as writers, often we need day jobs to sort of get through and pay our bills and pay our rent. Often we think of those as survival jobs and she wants to recast those as what she calls thrival jobs, which are jobs you can thrive in even while you’re making a living to do your thing.

She says, “I love thrival because I believe it’s possible to find a job outside your chosen field that nonetheless contributes to your ultimate goals, supports you financially, and provides some sort of joy, fulfillment, and purpose. In other words, a job that allows you to thrive rather than just survive.” She talks about what that was like for her, but I think that’s a nice framework for us to be thinking about what we’re doing in terms of the work we do that is not the work we aspire to do. It applies to writers, directors, actors, everybody.

Mari: It reminds me of some advice you guys gave on the podcast a few weeks ago, I think, to somebody who was asking whether they should take a certain job within the industry even though they felt, I can’t remember what their hesitation was, and I loved that both of you were like, take the job, make the money, do the thing you need to do, and we need to all, not that you’re saying, “Oh, you just have to pay dues and we all have to pay dues,” but there is this sort of, I think, thing within Hollywood where people sort of believe somehow they’re just going to get handed their dream job out of the blue.

It just never has happened from what I can tell in the world. I agree, I feel like working in restaurants for 15 years and all of the different jobs I’ve done where I was a hard worker and I was good at multitasking and I learned lots of skills that helped me be a director and that everybody who I worked with recognized that I was a hard worker. There were times that I felt like that would be what I did for the rest of my life, and oh no, I want to do something else. But I was still going to give my all to jobs. I was still going to work hard and be the person I want to be in the world.

John: I think I always talk about with my early jobs, my sort of survivaly thrival jobs, is it was helpful for me to have a job that I didn’t hate, but I didn’t love, and that I could leave with enough brainpower left in me that I could still go home and write. That’s the balance, and there’s some, I do see sometimes people who will take a job that is so overwhelming that they don’t have anything left in the tank, and that’s not going to be the right choice. It made more sense to take a job, like waiting tables is physically exhausting, but it’s not using that same creative spark that you would otherwise be spending.

Mari: It’s true. My main thrival jobs of my life were all waiting tables and working as a camp counselor or for a daycare and taking care of children. That was much more exhausting on an emotional level than was waiting tables.

John: Yes, I can see it. What do you have to recommend for our listeners?

Mari: My one cool thing is a book that I just started reading that’s beautiful by my friend Priyanka Mattoo, and it’s called Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones. It’s a memoir, and it’s funny and relatable and just gorgeously written, and I recommend everybody reading it. She’s just a beautiful writer, and it’s a series of essays, and I think it will just warm your heart and make you feel less alone, which is what I think the goal of all art is.

John: Fantastic, Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones.

Mari: Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, which is also just such a great title, right?

John: I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

It’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware now. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become our premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on film festivals. Mari Heller, an absolute damn delight having you back on the show.

Mari: It’s so nice to be back, like coming home.

John: Check out Nightbitch, which is going to be coming out in December and many festivals before then, right?

Mari: Yes, please come and see it.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, we just mentioned film festivals. Let’s talk about film festivals. Nightbitch debuted at TIFF, but this was not your first experience at film festivals. Was the first time you were there with a movie, was that Diary of a Teenage Girl?

Mari: Yes, so Diary premiered at Sundance and that was a very specific and special experience because the movie had been supported by the Sundance Labs, a place you and I both know and love. Sundance had been, sort of my creative home in that way because I had developed both at the Writer’s Lab and the Director’s Lab. Then I got to premiere the movie at the Sundance Film Festival.

John: That’s amazing. So in that case, you want people to see your movie, but you want them to buy your movie, right? Because it hadn’t been sold yet?

Mari: Absolutely, it had not been sold yet.

John: There’s a lot of pressure there.

Mari: It sold at Sundance back when that still happened, which from what I can understand, movies don’t really sell at film festivals the way they used to.

Mari: Probably a topic for a bigger discussion, but like a lot of times, there’s been a lot of screenings ahead of time so people know what they’re going to buy or they premiere there and it’s weeks or months later that the actual sale happens.

Mari: That seems like it happens more often now, yes.

John: The case of, Diary of a Teenage Girl, there was that excitement of like, oh my gosh, there’s like two in the morning and the offers are going back and forth. That’s so cool and exciting.

Mari: That’s exactly what happened, which blew my mind that it played out in that way. What we did at the time was I took a lot of meetings before the movie premiered with a number of companies. I got to know the players and sort of people who were maybe going to be interested in the movie before they had seen the movie.

Then once the movie premiered, we were in that exact game of trying to sell the movie. Then three weeks later, I went to Berlinale with the movie to try to sell it to foreign markets. We had our foreign sales agent and I did a million meetings there and worked on basically selling off different territories to the movie too.

John: Good. I had two Sundance experiences. My first one was with Go and Go was a premiere at Sundance, but we already were sold. Columbia owned the movie everywhere in the world. This was just a happy premiere situation, like getting hype for the story and it was great. The second time was with The Nines and The Nines was not sold anywhere. We had that, the big screening, but really the purpose there was to find a buyer for the movie.

Like you, we had some conversations ahead of time. They hadn’t seen the movie, but they’d sort of knew who we were. We enlisted both a film sales agent and a film publicity agent who were there to make sure all the right people were coming to the screening. Of course, they don’t actually come to the screening because they’re getting busy with other stuff, so they have to come to a later screening or we’re burning a DVD for them so they can watch it in their hotel room. It’s so stressful to try to sell a movie at a film festival.

Mari: It is so stressful. At the time, I had just had a kid. He was five weeks old. I was at the film festival with a five week old baby and trying to understand the sort of ins and outs of selling this movie. UTA was representing the movie and having all of these meetings. It was, yes, it was very stressful and exciting. I’m glad I had that experience, but man, it was stressful. None of my other film festival experiences have been like that.

John: Let’s talk about the happier situation generally of a film festival where you are there to premiere your film, to debut it, to talk about it, but you don’t have to actually sell it. Something like A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood or Nightbitch, what do you go in with? Who has seen it before? Let’s talk about Nightbitch. Who had seen the movie before it debuted at TIFF? The programmers at TIFF, somebody had seen it, right?

Mari: Yes, so we had actually shown the movie to the programmers at TIFF the year before, before the strikes happened, because the plan was to premiere then. They were so passionate about loving the movie that they basically said, if you need to hold it for a year, we’ll hold a spot for you for next year, which was so kind and wonderful. So yes, programmers see the movie early. We had tested the movie. We had shown the movie to test audiences.

We had done some sort of tastemaker screen, or no, not tastemakers, not the right– toe-dip screenings, as they call them, where you sort of show them to journalists who will never cover the movie, but you get a sort of sense of how people might review the movie. We had done all of those preliminary screenings, and then, of course, I had shown the movie to everybody I had, no, in my house or living room or screening room or whatever, and done a million friends and family screenings. Because we weren’t selling the movie, the movie was already with Searchlight. It wasn’t the same situation where we needed to meet with people ahead of time in order to have them see the movie.

John: Let’s talk about the actual experience, then, of the premiere screenings. Was it at nighttime? Was it 7 PM, were you at one of the sort of marches?

Mari: It was 9.30 on Saturday night, which was a pretty key time, but late for me.

John: As a parent, yes.

Mari: Yes, I started that day at 8 AM doing my tech check of the DCP and checking all the theater stuff and showing up to make sure everything was going to sound and look great, and then I got into my glam, which is a wonderful thing, but, exhausting, too, and did pictures and press all day, and then the movie didn’t play until 9:30 at night.

It was really fun, though, because we were in a huge theater, this gorgeous theater that sat almost 2,000 people, and it felt like it was the hot ticket, Everybody wanted to see the movie, and I was getting calls and texts from everyone, “I can’t get into your movie, do you have any extra tickets, blah, blah, blah.” It just had this feeling, this energy, which I think that’s the best part about film festivals, is this energy of being together communally, watching movies, and people getting excited about something and hearing about something.

John: Because it’s in a big theater they’re not on their phone doing anything else, they’re actually just focused on the screen for once.

Mari: People are there because they love movies. People are geeking out over movies which is such a fun place to be, it’s always scary to show your movie to an audience no matter what but you feel like you’re watching with a ton of people who love movies and love watching movies and there’s just an energy that you can’t replicate. I remember Jorma talking about MacGruber premiered at South by Southwest and he was like, I’ll never have a better screening than that in my life. That was the most exciting, best audience reaction I could ever have.

John: Yes, Go’s premiere was also, it was at nighttime at Sundance. It was a great big party. My movie, The Nines, we had like the great big premiere, but like it went well, but like that’s by far the biggest house that’s ever going to see the movie. That probably is true for Nightbitch as well. You’re going to have a theatrical release, but this is the only one time you’re going to have that many people looking at their eyeballs directed towards your film at one place.

Mari: I sit in the audience and watch the movie at these film festivals because of that exact reason, because it’s so satisfying and fun to watch that many people watch your movie. I know a lot of filmmakers who can’t, who can’t sit there while it plays, and it just feels too much or actors who feel like it’s just too much to sit there while everybody watches the movie.

I think even when I was sitting there, this was only now two weekends ago, sitting there with the audience watching Nightbitch premiere, I was, as it was happening, doing that thing of being like, remember this, remember this feeling, remember that laugh, this feels so good, it’s never going to feel like this again.

John: It’s not your last festival, so let’s talk about that, because it’s not just, because this is really the start of awards season, and TIFF sort of kicks off awards season, part of the goal of doing this is to sort of get that first initial buzz started about sort of the things people might say like, “Oh, this should be on our list for picture, for screenplay, for Amy Adams, for other things.” All those things, those conversations are going to start happening, and you keep those conversations happening by going to different festivals. What does the runway look like ahead of you?

Mari: Yes, I’m so lucky that I can talk about this with as much experience as I’ve already had, because I had two years in a row, 2018 and 2019, where for Can you Ever Forgive Me, and A Beautiful Day, I did a very similar trajectory of film festival to film festival to film festival and press. An awards campaign, essentially. I am a little more prepared, I guess, this time around for all of that. I will be going to the London Film Festival, the Middleburg Film Festival, the Savannah Film Festival, the Chicago Film Festival, Hampton’s Film Festival.

I would be doing even more if my husband wasn’t off making a movie in Finland right now, and I wasn’t also solo parenting. I’m going to do as many as I can, and I have called on all the grandparents to help because it’s going to be quite a fall. Once you do the initial film festival, the rest of them don’t feel nearly as terrifying. They are a little bit more fun. You start to get your talking points down.

We all went to TIFF, the cast, me, the author of the book, the producers. Often what then ends up happening is we sort of split up and we each cover different territories when it comes to the film festivals. you become less– you’re more alone doing the next sections of it, so a few of us will go to London but I think like when I go I don’t know to Middleburg it may just be me I might be the only one really there representing the film, there to answer questions and do the press around it so it doesn’t have the same energy as the first time when everybody comes together and gets to celebrate.

John: The Nines went to Venice Film Festival it was like, “Oh what movies did at Venice?” I’m like, I saw nothing. I was there. That’s the other irony.

Mari: I saw nothing at Toronto either, no. I’ve never seen anything at a film festival when I’m there for a film. You’re working the whole time. Going to Sundance when I haven’t had a movie there is one of my favorite experiences because getting to see three movies a day or whatever you might be able to sneak your way into is such a cool experience. No, when you’re there with your own movie, you don’t see anything.

John: Yes, you’re in work mode. Mari, congratulations on the film you’ve made so far, on the festival so far, and all the festivals ahead.

Mari: Thank you.

John: Thank you for talking us through this.

Mari: My pleasure.

Links:

• Nightbitch | Official Trailer
• Marielle Heller
• Highland Pro Austin launch party – sign up here!
• MacGruber on Peacock
• Hollywood’s 10 Percent Problem by Matt Belloni at Puck
• Dating a Celebrity – Thread by bo.predko
• American Vulcan by Jeremy Stern for Tablet
• How to Give Away a Fortune by Joshua Yaffa for The New Yorker
• You Get to Be Fulfilled Now by Teresa Jusino
• Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones by Priyanka Mattoo
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

Craig Mazin: Hi. Today’s episode features an enormous amount of profane language, and not for any reason. I just felt like cursing. If you have kids in the car or anybody that doesn’t enjoy that sort of thing, earmuffs on.

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

Craig: [Underwater voice] Hello, and this is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 658 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we open our overflowing mailbag to tackle listener questions on collaboration, non-disclosure agreements, self-delusion, and when to switch jobs.

Craig: I like self-delusion.

John: Are you going to switch your job?

Craig: If I said yes, I would be engaging in some serious self-delusion.

John: Yes. Our bonus segment for premium members, which English words do we recognize but never actually use? We’ll discuss those words. We’re too chicken to try. I have a list of those.

Craig: Okay. That’s fun.

John: First, Craig, we have some actual news, a thing that has changed in the world. For as long as you have been a member of the WGA, you’ve been looking for your big green envelopes.

Craig: Oh my God. The WGA sent an update to us all. It was almost like, “Hey, we are now accepting your mobile phone number instead of your landline.” It was that overdue and out of date, but they are finally doing direct deposit of residuals into your bank account. Why it took them this long, I’m sure there’s a reason.

John: Yes. I can tell you some of the reasons why.

Craig: Yes. I’d love to know.

John: It was a subject of negotiation every time we went in with the studios.

Craig: Really?

John: Yeah. Because if you think about it, residual checks, they’re coming from the WGA, but they’re actually really coming from the individual studios. That relationship between the studios and the person being paid is complicated. Usually direct deposit is simple because you have direct deposit from just your one employer. Because they’re coming from all these different accounts, getting it all together to happen was an issue.

Craig: Just out of curiosity, because I don’t understand banking. I think everybody knows that about me. The WGA would collect the money and then it would conglomerate it into a paper check that came from the WGA to me. The companies weren’t paying me, right? The WGA was paying me.

John: The companies are ultimately paying you. There’s accounting that goes behind it too. It was more complicated than you would think.

Craig: It must have been.

John: Because obviously for 20 years we’ve been talking about this.

Craig: Right. It was crazy. The idea that paper checks were still– the cost of it all.

John: The cost of it all, yes.

Craig: Especially when you would get–

John: The checks would get lost.

Craig: Sometimes you get those weird residuals that are valued at less than the cost of the stamp.

John: It’s a good change. It just took a long time for it to happen. They’re rolling it out in phases, which makes sense.

Craig: Oh, you mean I’m one of the lucky ones that got it early?

John: Yes. Maybe I got it now, but my checks have been going to my business manager, so I’ve not actually seen the big green envelopes coming in.

Craig: Well, same. Nonetheless, I was happy for them. Business managers, particularly the large companies, the amount of those envelopes they have to process every week from writers and directors and actors, the opening of the things and the pens and the check and blah, blah, blah, so annoying. So, hooray. I’d love to really know–

John: What were the real obstacles, yes.

Craig: So strange, but thank God.

John: Thank God. We are a business that is being employed gig to gig, so all of our paychecks are coming through different services, but the same kind of payroll services that do things a lot. It makes sense that there should be some relationship electronically that they could figure out. So I’m not–

Craig: No, there is, obviously, because they did.

John: Yes. Making them partners.

Craig: It’s just whoever was responsible for this logjam, it is an interesting thing. Bureaucracies can harden themselves to things. When I was involved in the public schools in La Cuñada, here in California, which is a small school district, one of the first things that I encountered was that technologically, they weren’t just behind. They were so far behind, they were using software and a server that no one had really heard of or seen since the mid-‘90s. Basically, the guy who ran it was like– it was like when you’re trying to take your dog somewhere and they don’t want to go and they just plant their legs and you have to drag them. Eventually, he just got reassigned.

Somebody else came in and was like, “Oh my God. What?” But that was what they knew. The thought of a new system terrified everybody. They worried that the system will make them redundant. Sometimes there’s just this weird bureaucratic, what do you call it, cruft?

John: Cruft, yes.

Craig: Cruft.

John: That’s absolutely true. Sometimes it’s the gatekeeper, decision-makers, the doctors. Sometimes it’s the individual teachers who are so used to their one way of doing things, they don’t have the bandwidth to learn a new thing. Then other times, it’s just this acknowledgement that trying to change the system is going to be really difficult. My daughter’s at BU, and they changed the way this one financial thing works there. It’s just been absolute chaos to get bills paid.

Craig: That’s the thing that they all worry about. On the other hand, there are ways to transition to new technologies that are smooth, if they’re well thought through, well-planned. My goodness, the amount of meetings that must have occurred.

John: Oh, yeah.

Craig: It makes me shudder to think of having to sit through the quantity of meetings at the Writer’s Guild to transition to direct deposit. I don’t even want to think about it.

John: It’s going to be a lot. Well, as we talk about trying to transition people off of using Final Draft for everything, or the sense of colored pages, or the sense of locked pages, it’s tough because people are used to a thing.

Craig: Yes. And they’re afraid.

John: They’re afraid.

Craig: Oh, by the way, a little tip of the hat to our friends at Scriptation, because they sent me a free copy. Because I guess I mentioned on the show today, I was like, “I don’t have it.” Then they didn’t think like, “Oh, he can afford it.” They just sent me a free one. I would have also gone with if they had just been like, “Dude, buy a copy. Stupid.” They were very nice and they gave me one.

John: They gave me one too.

Craig: I downloaded it.

John: Nice. That’s the first step.

Craig: That’s the first step.

John: I agree, bit by bit. Back at Episode 654, we were talking about AI training. There was basically this service that was trying to hire WGA members to train on scripts.

Craig: Oh my God. Yes.

John: Peter wrote in and actually had his experience as a person who does this. Drew.

Drew Marquardt: Peter says, “I make between $20 and $30 an hour having conversations, editing text, and reviewing other workers’ conversations with AI chatbots. I work with General Models, LLMs designed to be personal assistants. I’m a 30-year-old actor, writer, and producer. To be clear, I’m not making it yet in the industry. I’m not yet in the Writer’s Guild. I audition for all kinds of projects and write all the time. I show up on my friends and colleagues’ sets to lend a hand when I can and will do whatever work I’m capable of.

There’s not as much of this happening right now and much less of it tied to a paycheck. I’d love to avoid this, but it pays my bills while I struggle to break into entertainment in a financially meaningful way. I set my own hours and my coworkers who are AI models are non-toxic, two things I highly value after working for years in the corporate service industry.

If I were a WGA writer, I would likely not volunteer to train a model specified to write, engineer, or filter scripts, even at $100 an hour. That said, as someone who’s been waiting for the chance to write and look at words all day and simultaneously make money, I’m extremely happy with this new position. I worry that I’m stealing from myself and my peers in the future, but the groceries I need to buy exist in the present.”

Craig: Well, that’s how they get you. Yes, you should be worried that you are stealing from yourself and everybody else in the future. Also, you should be worried about buying groceries, and this is how they get you. I think we were pretty clear when we discussed this last time that we certainly did not sit in moral judgment of somebody that needed to pay bills.

You need to pay bills. You need to pay bills. There are obviously other ways to pay bills. Everybody does have a choice. Peter has certain values. He doesn’t want to work in the corporate service industry. Do not blame him. He doesn’t want to deal with toxic coworkers. Don’t blame him. He’s training assistants, not AI writing.

From our point of view, okay. If I were an assistant out there, I would not like this at all.

John: Assistant is a pretty broad category. What Peter is doing is sort of making Siri better, like making those kinds of things. That’s also an assistant.

Craig: Yes, and hopefully that’s what it is. Then, okay, because I’m also a realist and I understand if Peter doesn’t do it, then Michelle will. Somebody’s going to do it. I understand this completely. I do think that we just have to be mindful that it’s not Peter’s fault. It’s the system and our business’s fault that it is driving people like Peter into the arms of the AI fuck masters.

John: I guess the language warning has to go on this.

Craig: Yes, I thought about it for a second. I was like, “It’s worth it.”

John: We had more follow-up from Kevin in San Francisco.

Drew: Kevin says, “Have you ever considered training an AI on the Scriptnotes transcripts? You could train an AI to create co-hosts that could fill in when one or both of you are too busy to record.”

John: Which one of us is going to be too busy to record, Craig? I wonder who would get filled in more often.

Craig: “It’s not my fault. I’m just trying to do my job.” Yes, we should totally do our job.

John: We totally have done that. You’ll remember this. Back in Episode 405, that was the one with Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone at the Ace Hotel, I had used a Markov chain generator, which is a very early rudimentary version of this thing, to create these synthetic statements of quotes from me and Craig, and we played a game called Bot or Not. We had to figure out, was that a real thing that we said or a robot?
Then in prepping for the script notes book, I had a resident genius named Yusefi train a version of ChatGPT-3, the older one, on the whole corpus of Scriptnotes to see if we could ask questions like, “Give me quotes from John and Craig talking about stakes.” We could search through the whole thing and then pull up the stuff because that’s useful. It’s not writing the stuff, but basically, can you gather up all the stuff–

Craig: Gather the things we’ve said.

John: We’ve said. It worked, but it was really kludgy, it was Python, it was really a brutal process. That was April 2023, and so just yesterday, I should say that nothing in the book is AI-generated at all, it’s 100%–

Craig: You’re goddamn right.

John: You’re goddamn right. It’s the stuff we said, edited by Drew and Chris and other folks who’ve just worked their asses off to do this, but yesterday, I went on perplexity.ai, which is one of the other big sort of LLM services, and I asked it to give me quotes from script notes in which John and Craig talk about stakes. That’s the only prompt I gave it, and holy shit, did it really come back with a lot. Craig, I’m going to show you the resulting page here.

Craig: I can get my glasses on for this.

John: All right.

Craig: It says, “In Episode 402 Scriptnotes titled How Do You Like Your stakes, John August and Craig Mazin delve into the concept of stakes in storytelling.” I have a problem with that first sentence, but that’s fine. “Here are some notable quotes from their discussion. John emphasizes the importance of understanding the stakes for each character. ‘When we talk about stakes, our key focus has to be our hero, our protagonist, and what are the stakes for that character?’” Okay, so it’s just– “But it’s important to remember that there should be stakes for most of these characters and they don’t have to be the same stakes.

Craig adds that different characters may have competing stakes. ‘For some characters in the show, the stakes are love. For other people, the stakes are I have to keep this government together, and If I fail, then there’s going to be chaos.’” Well, that one actually was sort of interesting because it introduced the idea of competing stakes based on what I said. That’s fairly impressive. Certainly, this looks like a book report from a very bland person.

John: I think what is remarkable, which is what we were trying to do when I had Nima train this himself, was it’s not hallucinating a bunch of stuff. It’s pulling quotes and you can actually click and see like, “Oh, that is where that this is from.” That is useful as a research tool, which I think is the kind of thing that I’m actually okay with. If it’s doing the job that a Google search would do, I’m much better with that than if it’s generating stuff.

Craig: I agree with you. Part of this is to not fall into the trap that a million math teachers fell into when we were growing up, which is to say calculators are cheating. No, they’re not. There’s really no benefit in knowing how to add three numbers together. There actually isn’t. If a calculator can do it, what’s the difference? If you want to be a mathematician, you have to understand the fundamentals behind that. I understand. Once you understand the fundamentals, what’s the point of requiring you to do it by hand? It’s stupid. It just comes down to [makes crazy sounds] I don’t think we should be that way with stuff like this.

If you say, “Listen, you have to go through by hand and pull all the things,” and it’s just drudge work, then yes, I’m fine with something that makes drudge work faster, sure. I would not be fine with saying, “Hey, ChatGPT-4…” is that what you use here?

John: This is actually perplexity.

Craig: Perplexity. “Hey Perplexity, go through all 600 and whatever episodes and write a book.” Nor, as the Australians say. Nor.

John: I agree. To your point about adding three numbers, there was a recent study, and I’ll try to find a link to it, that was talking about, I think it was college students who were encouraged to use AI to learn how to do certain things and basically studying how much did it help them when they were doing the thing right then, but how much did they actually retain in terms of their skills to actually do the thing? It helped them in the short term and it hurt them in the long term because they didn’t fundamentally learn how a thing worked. That’s the subtlety that I think we need to get past is that sometimes these AI systems are so good at doing certain tasks that we forget how to do them and we don’t understand the fundamental things behind this.

Drew, you have an example of this for Weekend Read, right? You were trying to– these duplicated lines that were showing up in a script that you were trying to clean up.

Drew: Yes, the OCR for a script had doubled every sentence, but it wasn’t perfect sentences. I tried to go to ChatGPT to have it make a Python code to just, or even a regular expressions thing to just take away that second sentence and it was nearly impossible.

John: The challenge is, Drew has the expertise to know how to ask ChatGPT to do a thing, but not really to understand how it’s doing the thing. It’s not a generalizable skill.

Craig: Yes, it seems to me that if you use these tools to take something you know how to do, but do it much, much faster, sure. That’s what– I can multiply any two numbers together. Doesn’t matter how big they are. Might take me a week if they’re really, really big. Calculator can do that instantly. So fine, do it instantly. I know how to do it.

John: Example of trying to use an LLM for a good purpose. This is when I tried this last week was, the prompt was, have a conversation with me in Spanish, correct me in English if I say anything wrong, and you can start your questioning with something about what I did today. It just becomes a back-and-forth conversation in Spanish. When I will freely make mistakes in front of this thing and will correct the mistakes, but then the conversation will continue. That was genuinely useful for me.

Craig: That’s actually a brilliant idea. That’s a really interesting way to learn a language. People generally say the best way to learn a language is just immerse yourself somewhere where you don’t know the language and you’re going to have to figure it out. If you talk to ChatGPT all day long and it’s speaking another language and it’s correcting you in that language, slowing down and repeating it, now that seems like a really good way of learning something. Did it insult you when you got things wrong?

John: I didn’t ask it to be snotty and insulting.

Craig: I would.

John: They’re very good at those tonal shifts, so I’m sure they could do that for you.

Craig: Did it ever sigh in exasperation? Like, “How many fucking times–“ there goes a language warning. “How many fucking times do I have to tell you? That’s a masculine word, not a feminine word. You goddamn moron.”

John: Yes. There’s a little of that.

Craig: That’s what I would set it to.

John: A little shame.

Craig: Because that’s how I learn best.

John: Absolutely. It’s well established that shame and abuse are really–

Craig: My love language.

John: We have more feedback on GitHub for screenplays. This is, again, I think that same episode we talked about how ideas of merging changes and like a bunch of whole established ways in coding, which you can– most people have been working on a code base and you can merge those changes. Someone with firsthand experience wrote in with their expertise.

Drew: “Tried and Failed writes, John and Craig are absolutely correct about Git being ineffective for script collaboration. I’m a software developer for a major innovative service vendor in the film industry. I was on a highly-skilled team that was instructed to build an internal screenplay-related tool with a Git backend and like a nice UI. We reluctantly built it and got it to production and the experience was awful for us and our poor users. The Git approach quickly descended into corner case hell.

Git works for code because the what and the why are explicitly expressed in code and comments with tightly bound atomic change sets. Screenplays are so different. They’re an incomplete product of sprawling intentions. A lot of what makes a screenplay effective happens off the page and the bones supporting that are rarely expressed atomically in text. I’ve used revision control for three decades and I assure you merging complex script changes was way more difficult than complex code changes.

As programmers, we dread huge unfocused pull requests, but with screenplay change sets, that’s the norm, not the exception. Revision control was the wrong approach.”

Craig: Yeah, seemed pretty clear to us. John, do you know what GitHub is called in the astral plane?

John: It’s something Githyanki?

Craig: It’s GithHub.

John: It’s GithHub, very nice, yes. Just for the D&D players out there.

Craig: Yes, GitHub is the wrong tool. Nothing wrong with that. It’s a great tool for collaborating on code, clearly. It’s very popular, but no. Screenwriting is not a matter of revision tracking. Revision tracking is secondary. Most of the revision tracking we do, we do even individually, just for ourselves. Then we show other people so that they can see what changed, not to make different changes. But when people are writing together, the changes should be happening together. When I was writing with Todd Phillips, we would sit side by side, computer in front of me. I would type because I type faster.

We would just talk through everything and just do it. That, to me, seems like still the best way, but there are solutions that aren’t so obsessed with revision tracking, but rather just we’re writing together. More like a shared Google Doc. Writer Duet sort of functions like this.

John: One of the points that he brings up here, which I think is really interesting, is that in code, you’re supposed to put in comments to sort of say like, “What’s actually happening here?” That would be a really great practice for writing in terms of like what is this scene? What has changed?

Craig: It’s so exhausting.

John: It’d be exhausting. One of the things we do in Highland is we have this thing called synopsis. Basically, we start a line with an equal sign. It doesn’t show up in the script, but it shows up in the actual editor. That is actually really useful for mapping out stuff. I wonder if it’d be a good practice to start just saying like, “This is what’s actually happening here. This is the intention, or this is why I changed this thing.” Because there’s an episode of a different podcast that’s coming out down the road, and a script that I’d written 20 years ago, they called to ask me about like, “Well, why is this thing this way?” I’m looking at the script, I have no idea.

I have no idea when this idea was introduced, but if it had some commenting in there, I could maybe figure it out.

Craig: I know that Final Draft and Fade In have a notes feature, which essentially, is the same thing. I never use it because, again, I just write for myself. Sometimes what I’ll do when I’m talking with people about– so I’ll sit with a director and we’ll go through the script, and we’ll have a discussion, and they may bring up a great point like, “Oh, you said this, but actually they don’t have the walkie-talkie right now.” I’ll just, I’ve set up a new revision level. I’ll just type my notes in bold, all caps. Then I go back, erase, and do the things that I want to change. That’s just for me.

John: I use synopses for the same thing, basically. I’m basically like bullet-pointing, like, “This is what’s going to happen here.”

Craig: Yeah, it’s a nice idea to think that we could go back and actually have a library of intentions, but writing’s hard enough. It’s just not– Also, I’m not sure to whom it would be super useful.

John: A thing we can already do is track changes, and so basically I’ll say compare this script to this script and see what changed, and with that sort of showing what changed, you can generally understand why, if you’re doing that close enough to the time that you actually did it. It’s like, “These are the reasons why I did that.” It would be a good practice to go in and, as you’re delivering a new script, just to spend the 10 minutes of like, “This is what actually happened in this draft.” Sometimes I can check the email that I sent with the draft and say like, “Here’s what’s new, here’s what’s different, and that’s a way to–” It doesn’t stick with the script.

Craig: It doesn’t. Season one, our script coordinator was very thorough about this. I think she would send a change log with every draft. Nobody read it. Nobody cared about it. They just looked for the asterisks, and then were like, “Okay, that’s the new stuff.” This season, I don’t think we did a change log. It just seems like nobody pays any attention to it.

John: In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, because there was no script coordinator. I was essentially the script coordinator. When I would send it through a color revisions, I would bullet point like, “These are the things that have changed.”

Craig: Oh, definitely. If it’s that kind of thing where I need people to know, but by the time we get into production, it’s all the product of meetings and things anyway, and generally no one cares. They are just, “Where’s my instruction set?” “Oh, I no longer have to do this with five people. I only have to do it with three people. Okay.” “We’re not shooting over there. We don’t have to build that anymore. Okay.” In development, it’s an easy thing to sort of say, “Hey, here’s what we’re doing. Here’s how it changed.”

John: Classically in TV, which is probably not your experience doing the show for HBO, but you would deliver an outline to the studio and then to the network, and they would give you notes back on this thing. In the follow-up phone calls and in the follow-up documents you’re sending through, you would make it clear like, “These are how we are addressing the notes that you sent through.” And that gives you some history on what’s actually happened here, but it’s not the same as what I think we’re asking for.

Craig: We do that with cuts. We’ll send a cut to the network and then HBO will have thoughts and then what I’ll do is I make what I call the little Christmas tree document. After absorbing them and looking through the material we have and also considering, do I agree? I will send back a response that’s basically, I just highlight their notes and I paint them either red or green. If I paint them red, I explain why I can’t or don’t want to do them. If I paint them green, I tell them how I either will be doing them or here’s the way we’re going to address this or we’re going to try at the very least. That stuff is all worth changelogging.

John: Well, we have a bunch of listener questions. It’s been a while since you and I’ve done this. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Yes, we’ll start with two questions on being torn between two jobs. SoVeryTired writes, “I’m a writer/director and VFX artist in LA. The lead actress from my last short has asked if I can help out with visual effects for a proof-of-concept pilot she wants to make. She’s made it clear this project already has a writer and director. She’s asked me to come on in a VFX artist capacity, which is my day job. My aspiration is to be a writer/director. My question is, how do you choose which projects to say yes to when you’re early in your career? I wouldn’t get paid much, if anything, for this. It’s definitely not about the money. I’ve asked to see an outline or script to see if it’s something I’m interested in.

Should I choose based on whether or not I’m interested in it or whether I think it has legs and might get picked up? I’m sure you’re going to say not to get involved if I don’t believe in the project, but nothing else I’ve made thus far has gotten me work. What if this project could be the one to get me noticed?”

Craig: What was the name of this person?

Drew: SoVeryTired.

John: SoVeryTired.

Craig: SoVeryTired, what you were sure of is incorrect. This sounds like you’re early in your career. Generally speaking, when it’s early in your career, I think the notion of opportunity cost is overemphasized. Your day is more elastic than you think. You have more time than you think. You have more energy than you think. Say yes, if you can. As long as it’s not clearly taking you away from something else.

It doesn’t sound like the conundrum is, “I am supposed to do this, which could help my career in terms of my creative output, but it’s not a lot of money. This over here is offering me a bunch of money for something that isn’t necessarily going to advance my career. What do I do? I’m torn between money or aspiration.” That’s not what’s happening here.

Nobody was healthy in the ‘90s, emotionally, and no one had any pride, because I did–

John: Or boundaries.

Craig: Or boundaries or anything. No one talked this way. No one. No one was like, “Oh, don’t do anything that your heart…” No, I did it. Nothing I did for 10 years had anything to do with what I wanted to do. I was just like, “Get me working. Get me knowing people. Get me experience. Have me prove to the people that do these things that I am reliable and talented.” Everyone’s path to that is different.

Your path to it was way different than mine. Your path was shorter. It was more efficient. I doubt there was much of a time where you were like, “Oh yes, I’m not going to do–“ you were 24 and you’re like, “I’m not doing that rewrite for this amount of money because it’s just not where my heart is, even though I have nothing else going on at the moment.” No, you just say yes.

John: I think saying yes is the right approach to most of these situations. I would say, you’re publicly saying yes, but internally, you should also be thinking about what is it I hope to get out of this experience? Do I want to meet some new people? Do I want to try this new visual effects tool that I’ve not gotten a chance to use? Do I want to get more stuff from my reel? SoVeryTired, you say that you are a writer/director, and VFX artist. If your goal is really to be a writer/director, do be mindful that you’re not only taking VFX jobs and never actually getting around to the thing that you actually want to do, which is writer/director.

There is a reality of people sometimes will distract themselves by taking a bunch of not-so-meaningful stuff because they know their main goal is hard. You’re young, you’re early in your career, do the things. If people are asking you to do a thing, say yes.

Craig: First of all, you’re not very tired. I’m sorry. You can’t be that tired yet. I’m very tired. I’m very tired. I just shot 12 hours a day for 7 months. I’m 53 years old. I’m very tired. You can’t be very– if you’re this tired already, bad news for you. Now, I’m making presumptions. Because even though it’s early in his career, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s early in his life. He could be 70 for all I know. Doesn’t matter. When you start, the one thing you really can’t afford to be is tired. This is when you’re supposed to have boundless energy. This is actually a pep talk.

I agree with John. If you go into this VFX thing, if it’s for a little bit of money or whatever, you’re hoping to get something out of it. Sometimes, you know what, you don’t know who you’re going to meet. That’s the crazy part. You don’t know who you’re going to meet on this gig. That person– how many stories are there of like two PAs meet, love each other creatively, write a script, become a thing? That happens.

John: Here’s what we’re not saying. We’re not saying you should do a thing that your spider sense says, “Don’t do.”

Craig: Of course.

John: If there’s people involved, you’re like, “I don’t think these are good people,” then that’s not worth your time.

Craig: Correct.

John: Don’t say yes to bad situations.

Craig: You want to basically say yes to things that you are actively interested in or things that don’t seem offensive and may therefore get you some additional experience. You want to be a writer/director? Well, bad news, hardest thing to be, rarest thing to be. We’ve talked a lot about shorts, which everyone seems to have and no one seems to watch, and the questionable value of those.

John: We have a question about that today.

Craig: Oh, well, you know what, maybe we’ll get to that question if I shut the fuck up. Once we do it, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: Once we do it, we do it. It’s been a long time. It’s been a long time since I cursed on this show.

John: On this show?

Craig: Yes. It’s pointless.

Drew: A second question here from Ben. Ben writes, “I’m an office coordinator in the facilities and real estate department for a major film studio. I took this job to make connections and hopefully get a job as a screenwriter. However, I find myself at an impasse today because of a few different factors. First, a lot of the connections and development that I’ve made were just laid off. Second, I just received an offer doing the same facilities job, but at a video game studio for double the pay. Finally, I recently got a publishing agent who also handles film and TV rights for my books, and I really enjoy writing novels now, not just screenplays.

If you were in my shoes, would you take the video game job and know that you’ll still be writing novels that have a slim chance of getting turned into movies anyway, or would you stay at the film studio and try to make more connections?

John: This one is so easy to me.

Craig: We’ve never had more of a slam dunk in our lives.

John: Take the video game job.

Craig: Oh my God.

John: You’re working in the facilities and real estate department for a major film studio. That’s nothing.

Craig: That’s like working in the facilities and office coordination area at Ralph’s or anywhere. It doesn’t matter. The fact that it’s at a studio is completely irrelevant.

John: If you worked at Universal Studios in the theme park side, you’re not any closer to the film and television business.

Craig: Correct. You’re just geographically close to the film business. Look, you made a mistake of perception. You thought, “Okay, if I work in the office and real estate section of a movie studio, I will be able to make connections to sell screenplays.” Never in a million years is that going to happen. You don’t come into contact with those people that’s not part of your job. However, it sounds like you’re very good at your job because this other company is offering you all this money to do it. Of course, also, you seem to like writing novels. Where are all your screenplays?

Your novels are doing well. They’re getting published. Maybe people are going to talk about adapting them. Great. Maybe you’ll be the person to try and adapt. Who knows? You are not at all in the right place to make “Connections.” Someone’s offering you double the money to do the same gig and you can still write novels on the side? This is like walking up to a 1 foot-high basketball hoop and dunking. John, dunking is the act of taking a basketball…

John: I know what dunking is.

Craig: Okay, just checking.

John: It sounds like this is your day job. Basically, they’re offering you a day job that pays twice as much because it seems like you really perceive yourself as a writer and possibly a novelist rather than a screenwriter. These are wonderful things. Many great novelists have come out of working day jobs their whole lives. It also sounds like this job is not taxing you mentally. It sounds like– I was an intern at Universal. There were three assistants above me and I was the intern below them. I had no responsibilities. I came home from work and I had not used my brain at all. I wrote my first screenplay those evenings.

Craig: Yes. When I was an intern at Fox Network, I was 20. My responsibility was to work for the assistant to the assistant to a guy. That meant xeroxing and covering phones for about 30 minutes where everyone was panicked I would screw it up. You’re absolutely right. When I got in my car, my brain emptied completely. I haven’t had that feeling since 1991.

John: It’s so nice.

Craig: It’s so nice to just know job ended. Go home. Think about not job at all because job done. Sounds like you got that nailed and you have time to write novels.

John: I bet because you’d be working at Starbucks and you’d have the same situation, you’d be exhausted because you would have been on your feet all day.

Craig: Exactly. Here you’re sitting in an office. You’re good at it. You answer some– you set up some people with some office space for– This one. Oh, one of the easiest ones we’ve ever had.

John: Love it. All right. Two questions here about career momentum.

Drew: Stu writes, “I was hired to write the pilot and Bible for two major sci-fi television franchises, each of which for various reasons never made it to production. I recently saw that the producers have now teamed up with a very well-known late-night talk show host to produce the series and they’re looking for a writer. Apparently I got fired without ever being informed I was fired, which sounds like Hollywood.”

John: I’ve been there.

Drew: “My frustration beyond the obvious is that I put a good four years of work into this project and I’m quite proud of it. Yet outside of a few offhand mentions buried deep in the internet, my contribution to the franchise seems to have been erased from our timeline. It seems childish to update my own IMDb page with the project in question. My question is less about what to do about this particular project and more what I should be doing to ensure that I can maintain industry visibility when I’m hired to write something that 9 times out of 10 will never make it out of development.”

Craig: Oh my God. What are we going to do with this generation?

John: First off, the easiest thing is you do not update your IMDb.

Craig: No.

John: No. No, absolutely not.

Craig: No.

John: Great. You were hired to write a pilot and Bible for two major TV franchises. I am assuming that got you reps. I don’t think this is going to be a situation like our mistakes on Hallmark movies. If these are major things, you have reps. They know the work you did. You got paid for them. They have those as samples that they can show around and give you additional work. Focus on what you’re doing next and you got to move past thinking about these two things that didn’t happen.

Craig: We have to talk about the value of recognizing and appreciating our failures. We fail all the time. In this case, a failure occurred. I’m not saying it was a failure of creativity. What you wrote might’ve been incredible, but here’s what happened. It wasn’t enough to get it made. Then the people that own the property had a conversation with some late-night talk show host who loves that property. No one has any interest in what you did. It doesn’t matter. They just hit reset and started over. You’re sitting here talking about all of those years and the pride and all the rest. You got paid. You took a job. You got paid. You took the money.

Welcome to being a professional in Hollywood. Put your pride away. Don’t go on IMDb with a, “Look at me thirsty, uncredited.” Every time anybody with an uncredited on their page, it’s a stain, as far as I’m concerned. All it says is maybe I did something, maybe I’m lying, or maybe I got fired. Either way, nothing good. What’s wrong with going, “Okay, lost. I lost that game.” Doesn’t make me a bad player. It just means you can’t win them all. I lost it. What industry visibility are you hoping to get from being a washout on a project? The only visibility you can get is a guy that got–

You weren’t even fired by the way. You weren’t fired. You were hired to do something. You did it. Job ended. That’s not even fired. It just means they didn’t want to keep going with you. That’s independent contracting.

Look, I know I have shame issues. I know that. I know that I’m not healthy, but it just seems like we have to get the pendulum swinging a little bit back towards, let’s not say shame. Let’s just say humility. This thing of, “Well, I worked on it, so therefore I deserve something from it.” You got something. Money, experience. Move on.

John: Now, down the road, if this project happens and it’s the same producers, you may still be in the chain of title for this thing. You may still end up with some credit on it.

Craig: Who knows.

John: Who know. You cannot be banking on that. You cannot be focused on that, because Craig and I both know too many writers who got so obsessed with this one thing that didn’t happen and it derailed their careers.

Craig: It’ll kill you. It’s a poison in your veins. To me, I am angry because I didn’t get to succeed on this. I’m not going to say I failed. I’m angry about this and I’m going to fight it in my heart and soul and also in the world somehow.

That’s one of the great poisons that can be in your blood in this business. The other one is envy. When you are watching other people and going, “Well, I should be where that lady is. It’s not fair that she’s there. I’m better than her.” None of that shit is going to help you ever. It’s only– not only to hurt you, it will keep you from succeeding all the time. There is nothing wrong.

By the way, Stu, the most Hollywood thing about you is that you worked on something that it didn’t work out. That’s the ultimate Hollywood professional thing. You don’t think that’s happened to me? You don’t think that’s happened to John? Not once, not twice, but maybe 10 times. It’s just what happens, man. You got to just– you got to let it go. Come on. Come on, Stu. Stu, be the guy that got that job. Don’t be the guy that lost that job.

John: Craig and I have both had conversations with– we’ve had folks on this podcast who were the subsequent writers on projects that we had initially done.

Craig: Yes, of course.

John: You roll with it.

Craig: Absolutely. Look, you and I have both sat in movie theaters, watching movies that are huge hits that our names aren’t on. We weren’t even sent a copy that we wrote a lot of. We took the money. It’s about not getting defined by these things and also not clinging to this one thing is like, “Look what I did.” Next. No one cares what you did four years ago.

John: Here’s the related thing, is I think we talk about writers whose career could derail because they get too obsessed about the thing that didn’t happen. There’s also writers who get too obsessed about the thing that did happen. The success that happened and like, well, that’s it for them. “I had this one success. I got this nomination on this movie was a hit,” and they’re not thinking about what comes after.

Craig: There is a well-known study. I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but that when directors in particular win an Oscar award, the time between that and their next movie is way larger than the time between whatever the median director is and their next feature. It’s because there’s this awards paralysis of, “I must now be precious.” Keep going, man. Just keep going, kids. None of it matters. Did you sell something today? Celebrate. Celebrate for three days if you want. When Monday comes around, get back to work. Do the next thing.

John: I was watching a movie this last week that I thought was fantastic. I was wondering like, “Where is this director’s next movie?” Because this is 10 years and the next movie has not happened. I emailed my manager who figured he’ll probably know this. I said, “What’s the deal? Did this person get secretly canceled? Is there a problem? I don’t understand.” It’s like, “Oh no, apparently he wants his next movie to be something he writes himself, and he’s just having a hard time writing that script.”

Ten years?

Craig: John, see, he wants something. What he wants has nothing to do with how he does his best work. What he wants has everything to do with his pride. “I don’t want to share it. I don’t want somebody else to get it. It’s me. I’m the man. Me. Me.” Well, you’re not. There’s nothing wrong with that either.

John: I do wonder whether there’s a sunk cost fallacy. It’s like, “Now, I’ve spent seven years working on this thing. Maybe I’ll spend another three years.” He should have directed three movies in that time.

Craig: Cut, bait, move on. You can’t. Maybe it’s an offshoot of follow your dreams, do your passion, all that crap, that then leads people who are underemployed and under-credited to behave as if they’re not.

I still struggle to say no to things because I’m panicked that it’ll all end. I have to, because I don’t have the time. That’s because I’m working. There’s no part of me ever that was like, “What? I’m above that.” The only time that I was like, I was very focused on, “I want to try and do something that’s different than the things I’m doing.” And that’s why I did Chernobyl. I did it. And I got to tell you, while I was doing that, I was writing other stuff. I was rewriting things left and right for money.

Because Chernobyl, the entire thing, paid me about what I would make in a week and a half on production rewrites on some very good movies and some spectacularly awful ones. That’s okay. I needed money to support my family while I did this. I never, ever just hit the brakes and was like, “I am now God’s little special, passionate dream child.” I’m in a mood today.

John: You are in a mood today.

Craig: You know what? There’s nothing wrong with that.

John: Let’s move on to Michael here.

Craig: Stu’s probably like, “What the fuck? Jesus, just say, just say no.”

Drew: Michael’s thinking about the next thing. Michael says, “My first short film was recently turned into a film that has won several prestigious awards in my home country. However, the biggest surprise is that it won Best International Short at an Oscar qualifying festival in the States, making it eligible for a 2025 nomination.”

Craig: Congrats.

Drew: “I understand that being long listed isn’t life changing. However, I don’t want whatever potential opportunities that might come from this to pass me by. I’m uncertain about my next steps. Should I continue to focus on developing another short film, or would it be more strategic to shift towards a feature script or TV series? If I’m lucky enough to be in a position where I’m speaking to anyone about potential future projects, I want to make sure I have something in the chamber.”

Craig: I feel like I’m dying.

John: Craig’s shaking his head. You go to that third paragraph and it’s like-

Craig: I feel like everyone’s turned into a fucking agent.

John: Here, I want to make sure we’re catching this. My first short film script was recently turned into a film. Michael is not the writer director, is the writer of the short film script. Michael, I’m so happy for you. I’m so happy the short turned out great. You as the writer will get a very small bump off of this. The writer directors and directors get bumps off of shorts. You will not. Anything you’re doing now to write other stuff that people can see is what you should be doing. Writing another short is not the best use of your time.

Craig: There is literally one way to convert this into value for you, Michael. That is to have whoever sends your script, your next script to someone, whether it’s you or a representative, they get to say in that little thing, “This script is from so-and-so whose movie that he wrote got this award, this award and was long listed, shortlisted or even won an Oscar.” That’s it. Period. The end. Meaning there is nothing to get from this. It happened. They need scripts. There has to be a script. Keep writing. Stop calculating so much. Everybody is just, “How do I convert this into max?” Because that’s the way everyone fucking talks now. It’s unreal. I see it.

You know there used to be, there was a bunch of fake gurus and you hated them? There’s too many now. There’s not enough hate in the world. Everyone now is obsessed with strategizing. I’m like, “You want to cut through all the strategizing? Write a good script. Then you don’t need strategy.” Guess what? My former writing assistant for season two of The Last of Us, I won’t say her name or anything about it identifying because I haven’t asked her for permission. I’ll simply say this. This is an unassuming human being who has the least amount of strategizing of anybody I know. She’s just a very simple, cool, down-to-earth person who’s a bit shy, a bit diffident, a bit nervous.

Well she wrote a script. And I don’t know who initially saw it or got it but there’s a full seven studio bidding war over this thing going on right now. The strategizing got no further than her calling me in a panic going, “I’m terrified and I feel like no one’s really on my side during this.” I was like, “Well, who are your representatives? Who’s your lawyer?” “I don’t have one.” “Got it, done. Now you have my lawyer. Now someone’s on your side. Go with God and congrats.” No planning, no conversions, just writing a script. Which, by the way, Michael, that’s how you got into this position in the first place. You wrote a script. Just keep going. Oh my God. It’s over. Let it go.

John: I do wonder if some of the strategizing that we’ve seen over this last, I’d say the last 10 years has been more of a focus on that. I think, I wonder if social media and the way that you get the instant gratification of like the likes and the re-shares is an acceleration. “This thing has happened, so therefore I have to capitalize on it.”

Craig: Oh yes. It’s poisonous. Everyone thinks that that’s getting you something. It’s getting you nothing. You are all just huffing air and pretending it’s special. It’s not. There’s nothing happening there that matters. As a writer, nothing. Your screenplays matter. The self-promotion, the strategizing, the, “Look at me,” all that stuff, if it makes you feel good, great. Hopefully you recognize that, but it doesn’t matter. The scripts, that’s it. Write something. Keep writing. Stop talking so much about it. Do it instead. I say that as somebody who’s on episode 609,000, but that’s only because you make me. I’m your indentured servant.

John: The last thing I’ll say to Michael is if you had a good experience with this director who did the short and you want to do other stuff, that might make sense. If they are getting some traction and you can be the person getting traction there with them, you can get in some meetings, fantastic. That’s a way that you could actually get out of this.

Craig: You can certainly, you can contact the producers of the film. You can contact maybe the studio that’s releasing it. It’s an easy one for at least for somebody to pick up the phone and go, “You wrote a thing that we made, of course.” Like I said, short of saying, “Hey, this is what I did, therefore, you might want to read the next thing–“

John: If you’re on anybody’s radars, if you’re on the radar of a Sundance Institute and it helps you get into the Sundance Labs, if that’s the thing you’re interested in, could be useful.

Craig: Apply.

John: Apply.

Craig: Anyone can apply.

John: Anyone can apply.

Craig: There’s no strategizing.

John: Two questions on IP stuff.

Drew: Wendy writes, “We’re starting to show our pitch deck around town to gain the interest of an actor. We have an NDA that everyone so far has agreed to sign.”

Craig: NDA, everyone knows that term.

Drew: “We have interest from a verbal pitch by a well-known actor, and his manager is telling us that they don’t sign NDAs. Is this common practice? When I worked as a producer at Imagineering at Disney, we wouldn’t let anyone in the door without signing an NDA. I feel the same way with this, but wanted to make sure that was correct.”

John: I think that anybody’s willing to sign an NDA for you is surprising. NDAs are not common for me as an individual to go out and do a thing. Disney is notorious. You’re not allowed to walk in that Disney Magic Hat building without signing an NDA.

Craig: That’s for them. We shouldn’t also know that abbreviation. We should be innocent of these things. It’s a nondisclosure agreement. Anybody that comes and auditions for us, visits our set, walks near our props, has to sign an NDA. If you’re talking with people about maybe working on something together, I’ve never asked. I personally, I’ve never asked anyone to sign an NDA in my life. It’s sending a little bit of an amateur vibe, I think, to say like, “This actor, we want to talk with you, but we don’t really trust you.”

John: I think it’s Silicon Valley NDAs are more common. When you’re going to pitch a concept of a–

Craig: Of course, because it’s financial, it’s about investing. This is about collaboration. Unless I’m misunderstanding.

John: No, it seems like it is. My answer to Wendy is I don’t think you should be stressed about it. Just don’t worry about it. They’re not going to sign an NDA. Then take that as–

Craig: I can see where like, if your whole career– Wendy worked in Imagineering?

John: Yes.

Craig: I get, your whole career you’ve been signing NDAs. People have been signing NDAs. Nobody can go to the bathroom without an NDA because, “Oh my God, no one can know about the Star Wars hotel or whatever.” But that’s that. You might think like, “That’s been my life. Therefore, it’s what we should do.” No, not in this circumstance. It doesn’t feel like it to me. Look, hopefully you have a lawyer who is working with you, but I’m not really sure what it is that they’re going to disclose anyway that’s so damaging.

John: Drew, let’s jump ahead to Brandon, who’s also sort of IP.

Drew: Brandon writes, “An artist friend and I were originally planning a comic book idea called Monster Agents. I handles all the writing, he worked on art concepts for the characters. But due to his schedule, a comic doesn’t seem likely. He gave me full support and permission to move on with adopting our comic idea into a children’s animation series. I began adapting my own comic scripts to a television pilot and it’s gotten some fantastic grades from some screenwriting feedback services, with many people believing this would work great as a television series for kids. I’ve started organizing a pitch deck and this leads to my question. In any of my pitch materials or on the front of my screenplay, do I say, adapted from the comic book concept?”

“The comic book never left basic storyboards, character concept drawings and scriptwriting phases. Also, it’s me adapting my own work from one medium to another, so would that be weird to mention? Should I just present it as purely an original television animation concept?”

John: So we actually have an answer here. Source material is defined in the WJ credits manual as, “material assigned to the writer that was previously published or exploited and upon which the writer’s work will be based.” This was not a comic book that was published out in the world. This is still an original idea.

Craig: It wasn’t even made. The answer to your question is no. That would be like saying, “Adapted from an idea that I had.” So not adapted. It’s new. It’s a new thing. The fact that you talked about it with people or even the fact that somebody illustrated images that you’re not currently using to promote it or anything like that, no.

John: The degree to which this was a collaboration between you and this artist friend, if you guys, this was your joint thing that you were doing together, I think it’s shitty to try to cut them out of this. You have to have a conversation with them to what degree are they a story collaborator on this?

Craig: It sounds like the other person was like, “Go do it. I drew some things, but we couldn’t turn it into a comic book.” If in the development of it, monsters started looking like the monsters that the artist drew, that would be a discussion to have, of course. But no, it’s an original work.

What was common, I don’t know if they’re still doing it, but in the 2000s and 2010s, it was common for people to nearly self-publish some sort of graphic novel to then go to studios and say, “I wrote a graphic novel, it’s IP, let’s set it up here and then I’ll adapt it into a screenplay.” That was somehow schmuckbait for dumb executives who couldn’t tell. Basically, they were just selling you a screenplay, but they just wrote it and put some pictures on it and published it at some baloney press. You could do that, but why?

John: There’s no advantage to it.

Craig: No, not anymore, I don’t think.

John: All right, let’s do our One Cool Things. I have two one cool things. First off is the new COVID vaccine, a booster shot that I got yesterday. I got it in my arm. Craig, you don’t need it because you just got it.

Craig: I just had nature’s COVID vaccine.

John: You just got the COVID vaccine. It’s out there, so everyone should get it. I always recommend the flu shots. From the very start of the program, I would recommend the flu shots. Now it’s the COVID booster.

Craig: I need to pick a week where I’m okay with being a little gross for a few days because I do need to get the shingles vaccine. Shingrix.

John: I got my shingles vaccine. It did, makes you feel bad. The second one hurts more than the first one.

Craig: Is it a series of two shots?

John: It’s two shots.

Craig: Hurts like your arm swells up kind of hurts?

John: No. They just feel bad. The shot hurts a little bit.

Craig: Your body reaction?

John: Yes.

Craig: Remember the first COVID vaccines, how much they hurt? The next day, your arm was like, ow.

John: My arm was a little bit sore.

Craig: Oh man, it really hurt. Then everyone was like, “That means it’s working.” I’m like, “I’m sure it is.”

John: My second one thing is a feature they’ve added onto threads, which I think is actually really smart. It’s called Hide for Everyone. Basically, if someone is replying to your post and is just being a jerk, and you tap Hide for Everyone, it just sends them into a void where they don’t know that you’ve hidden it from everybody else.

Craig: This feature is one of the most brilliant things. Back in the old days when I was on the writers’ BBS-type forums, there was a setting on this old, I think it was V Bulletin, I think it was called. There was a setting called Send to Coventry. It meant that person would not know that anyone couldn’t hear them. No one else would know that person was talking. They would just go on and on. No one knew. They didn’t know. It was wonderful because some people, oh my God. Send to Coventry, so that’s what they’ve done here, which is brilliant. Love it.

John: The other feature is you can, if you’re getting piled onto for a post you’ve made, you can disconnect that post from the feedback.

Craig: I see.

John: It just sort of takes you out of that.

Craig: To short circuit the viral kickback?

John: Yes.

Craig: You know what really does that? The best version of Hide for everyone.

John: Stay off social media?

Craig: Stay off social media. That’s what I’ve done. I have the ultimate Hide from Everybody. Disconnect. It doesn’t seem to have slowed me down, even though strategically I’m not leveraging my social media reach. Barf.

John: Barf.

Craig: Barf.

John: Craig, you got any one cool things for us?

Craig: It’s an old one cool thing, but it’s a renewed one cool thing because it’s just so goddamn cool. Obviously Baldur’s Gate 3 was my one cool thing when I first played it through. Now that we’ve wrapped, I’ve picked it back up to do a new playthrough, which is a little painful at first because you have to like learn a new character and you’re trying to break your old patterns and you want to experience different things.

John: You’re on rails for that first little section too. I find frustrating.

Craig: Ish. But that’s the thing. On this playthrough, as a totally different character, I’ve just made a point of like, “I’m going to slow down and look everywhere.” And the amount of shit that I had missed-

John: Totally.

Craig: -is insane. I’m not even talking about things that were like, “Well you made this choice. That gets cut off for you. I’m talking about-

John: A Little geographic exploration.

Craig: Correct. It’s bananas. Larian is just a little miracle. It was, it’s honestly like a little miracle. It’s hard to believe. The first playthrough, did you by any chance fight Raphael?

John: I did. Yes.

Craig: You did? That’s a, that’s a tough fight. That’s the toughest fight in the game.

John: It’s a really tough fight.

Craig: 666 hit points.

John: Of course the special song that plays.

Craig: The special song, which is catchy.

John: On your first playthrough, I bet you did not do the Githyanki crush.

Craig: I did.

John: You did?

Craig: I did. That’s the thing. On my first playthrough, I didn’t go to the house of hope. I didn’t do that. That entire thing I missed. I’m just saying like, “Wait, here’s a whole weird house with a thing in it that was in the corner of a map that I didn’t know was there.” There’s so much stuff. I thought I’d picked through all of it. In Laroque and the wizard in Baldur’s Gate, that tower has so much shit in it that I was not aware of. Now I am. God damn, that game is good. It’s so good. You know what? We should play D&D tonight.

John: I think we will. We should go to your house and play some D&D.

Craig: Huzzah.

John: What do we eat for D&D?

Craig: You know what? Whatever you want. You tell me and I’ll order it up.

John: I think some Burger Lounge could be good.

Craig: Burger Lounge? Done.

John: It’s been a minute.

Craig: It works every time.

John: That is it for Scriptnotes for today. It’s produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: What?

John: Edited by Matthew Cilelli.

Craig: Oh God.

John: Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com

That’a also where you find the transcripts, and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau, and hats. Hats are great. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on words we know, but never use.

Craig: Like GithHub.

John: Craig, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Alright, Craig. The motivation behind this segment was I recognized that there were words that I knew, but I was never actually using. I’d be nervous to type them, but I certainly wouldn’t say them in a conversation. It’s like, “Am I going to get it wrong?” For example, I got reticent wrong on the podcast and people called me out. I was like, “That’s right. It does not mean reluctant. I was using it as that.” Here’s a word that I’ve heard you use. This is the one.

Craig: Decrement?

John: Yes. I’ve heard you in the course of D&D say dee-crement rather than decrement.

Craig: Sometimes I’ll say dee-crement. I don’t know which is better, pronunciation wise.

John: Dee-crement matches up well with decrease and with the opposite of increment, but it does go down. Yes. Then I also listened to this past week, wrote in to say we should talk about bathos, and do you even know what bathos is?

Craig: I know that it’s not pathos.

John: Bathos is an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from sublime to the trivial or ridiculous. You might say, “His epic poem has passages of almost embarrassing bathos.”

Craig: It’s not going to come up often.

John: It’s not going to come up all that often.

Craig: No. It certainly is going to come up constantly in the staff meetings at the English department, classics departments at various colleges.

John: I thought we might take a look through some words that I will see used, and I’ve never been tempted to try to use.

Craig: Let’s play this game. I’m certain to fail.

John: Desultory.

Craig: Desultory?

John: Have you ever used it?

Craig: No.

John: Desultory is lacking a plan or purpose or enthusiasm. “A few people left dancing in a desultory fashion.”

Craig: Okay. A fancy way of saying random.

John: Yes, random.

Craig: Purposeless. Aimless. Unfocused.

John: Yes, I think the fact that we have really good alternative things for it is-

Craig: Don’t need it.

John: Induritize.

Craig: Induritize?

John: Yes, to harden the heart.

Craig: That’s just ridiculous.

John: We don’t need it.

Craig: Because we have inure. Inure to. Induritize. That almost feels like a mistake.

John: It does feel like a mistake. Not necessarily a word. Ebullient.

Craig: Ebullient means with bravado and confidence.

John: Confidence and joy and enthusiasm. I get the word. I’ve just never been tempted to use it.

Craig: Nah, it feels like you’re an asshole if you use that word.

John: Importune. To importune upon somebody.

Craig: To importune is to, is that to prevail upon them in an interrupting way, to force yourself upon someone?

John: Yes. Again, I’ve not needed it.

Craig: It’s not necessary.

John: Assent, so assent not to climb up, but to give one’s assent to a thing.

Craig: That’s to give your nod of approval. That I do use all the time.

John: Yes, with your assent. I use it as a matching to dissent, but it’s not a word I would reach for.

Craig: Do you give me your assent? What it’s been replaced with is consent. People are obsessed with consent.

John: Consent, but they’re not the same word.

Craig: They are not the same word.

John: Consent is agreeing to a thing.

Craig: A mutual agreement. Whereas assent is, and I think a lot of times when people say consent, they mean assent. Which is, “I assent to you doing this to me.” Consent is, “We both agree this will happen.”

John: Expatiate.

Craig: Oh boy. I guess it would mean to send somebody away from their country?

John: That sounds right. Expatriate is how I think it would be. If you think about it. Expatiate is to speak or write in detail about, expatiate upon.

Craig: Couldn’t have been wronger.

John: Again, a word that we’re not going to use.

Craig: Also, I said wronger.

John: Do you ever use mettle? Mettle, like prove you’re mettle?

Craig: Yes.

John: I don’t think I’ve ever used it.

Craig: Yes. To test someone’s mettle? Sure.

John: Rakish is a word I know. I never use it.

Craig: A rake, a rake is sort of a slightly caddish guy. A rakishness, rakish audacity is one of the things in D&D. Rakish. You’re a bit suave and cool and sassy.

John: Confidently careless and informal.

Craig: There you go.

John: Censorious.

Craig: Censorious, so that’s with a C?

John: Yes.

Craig: I assume that means in the matter of a censor, meaning prohibiting things.

John: Prohibiting, it’s actually criticizing.

Craig: Like censure?

John: Yes.

Craig: I see, interesting.

John: Insipid is a thing, I know it’s negative, but I’ve never actually had the opportunity to use it.

Craig: Stupid, banal, boring, witless.

John: Here’s a word, peruse, which does not mean what we think it means.

Craig: No, it does not.

John: It’s drifted and now it just means-

Craig: Peruse is in the category of decimate, and has become the opposite of what it means. Peruse means to study something very carefully, but everybody uses it to mean briefly scan for something. Where decimate means remove one-tenth of something and everyone thinks it means remove 90% of something.

John: Harsh. Laconic. Laconic is using words, using a lot of words or using very few words?

Craig: Very few.

John: Yes, and to me it feels like using a lot of words, therefore I’ve never reached for the word.

Craig: Laconic is a classic SAT word that gets grouped in with terse, brusque.

John: Perfidy.

Craig: Perfidy is lying, it’s being a liar.

John: Yes, have you ever used it?

Craig: I’ve used perfidious. Perfidy as a crime, rarely spoken of.

John: Supercilious.

Craig: Supercilious is a wonderful word that means snobby, basically. It comes from, it basically means raising your eyebrow. Super above cilia, the eyebrow.

John: Nice.

Craig: It literally comes from like, “I’m better than you.”

John: With your word game background, you’re probably encountering some of these words that you’re not even reading that often, but they exist.

Craig: They’re part of my life.

John: They’re part of your life but they’re not necessarily things that I would, even knowing what they mean, I would be not inclined to put them in my own writing.

Craig: Supercilious, if I used that word, I would be aware that I was almost self-defining as supercilious. It’s a word that means, like sesquipedalian means a lengthy word. You’re a dick if you say supercilious. You’re being supercilious. Nobody’s going to be like, “That common word.”

John: The challenge here is they’re not dead words. They’re words that people could use and people can understand, but they’re nearly dead words because you can’t count on a person understanding what your intention is behind them. While they could probably pick it out of context, it’s tough.

Craig: If you note, quite a few of these words are either Latin or Greek-rooted. We tend in English to move more towards the Germanic, our Germanic roots and our Scandinavian roots. There’s no way that the Romans or the Greeks didn’t come up with snobby. That’s going to have to be from the Vikings, right? Something like that. Supercilious, yes, very Latin.

John: As we talked about on the show before, English is unusual in that. We had a whole bunch of words and then the French came in and we took all of their words too. We have a bunch of redundant words that actually have the same origin.

Craig: That is correct. We have both small and petite.

John: Yes, which is fun. Royal and regal, which is good. There’s also the words that on podcasts I hear mispronounced and I’m always so surprised when it happens. This last week I heard re-present for represent. It wasn’t that they were re-presenting something that they presented before. They actually just said re-present.

Craig: Like he represents a version of, yes, that’s wrong. It’s just wrong.

John: It’s just wrong. I hear prefix.

Craig: No. Who says prefix? Prefix, like prix fixe menu?

John: Prefix menu. Tell me your objection.

Craig: I thought you meant prefix.

John: Not prefix. Not the thing that comes before a thing. Prix fixe like a fixed price menu. People will try to over-journalize the rules they think they know about French and so they’ll say, so they’ll say “pree fee,” or…

Craig: No. There’s a weird thing. You’re talking about prefix. Now, by the way, with that, I understand people can mispronounce French words. Especially with Xs.

John: Sometimes they’ll be so insistent that they’re doing it right.

Craig: There’s something that Melissa pointed out to me that I didn’t believe was true. Then the moment she said it, I encountered it many times. A little bit like when her cousin pointed out that a lot of people say hythe. I was like, “No, they don’t.” Then literally for the rest of my life, I’ve just been hearing hythe from people. I just, hythe from very educated people will say hythe. It’s mind-blowing. There are quite a few people who pronounce the word concierge, “conciere”. That’s insane. If it ended in a T? Sure. It doesn’t. It ends in a G. Do we say garage instead of “Gara,” instead of “Garage?” It doesn’t even follow internal rules. Outrageous.

John: Drew, you were pointing out at lunch yesterday that you had confusion about a small wiener dog.

Drew: Yeah, I thought that dachshunds and “dash-unds” were two different types of dogs until probably my late 20s.

Craig: What is it you thought? You saw the word dachshund. You thought it was pronounced “dash-unds”.

Drew: No, I heard the word dachshund. I was like, “That’s a type of dog.” Then I saw the word dachshund and was like, “That’s a wiener dog.”

John: He thought like the dog he was seeing would be, a dachshund would be like a D-O-X-I-N or something?

Drew: Probably D-O-X-E-N is what it was in my head, but that makes no sense.

Craig: It’s actually logical, but hund, hound, it’s all there.

Drew: I wasn’t that bad.

Craig: It was there for you. You just needed to reach a little harder.

John: Those are the words that are like, where once you understand. I think we were talking about lunch also, about like cupboard, like the word, it feels like there should be a word C-U-B-B-A-R-D.

Craig: It is odd that cupboard is pronounced cupboard. We have a few of those strange, very English abbreviated pronunciations like that. I don’t know why. It’s actually, cupboard is a really interesting one. It doesn’t make any sense. I remember as a kid thinking, “Why? Mother Hubbard, H-U-B-B-A-R-D, has nothing in her cupboard.”

John: Coxswain, like the person at the head of the boat. There are those things, which a lot of times place names will be the same situation where it’s like, “It’s spelled that way, but you don’t pronounce it anything like that.”

Craig: Other than spelling bee purposes, no one who hasn’t seen the word coxswain would ever spell it the way it’s spelled. It’s impossible.

John: C-O-X-S-W-A-I-N.

Craig: Correct.

John: That’s insane. It’s coxswain and then it’s coxswain and it’s one of those cupboard things.

John: It’s shortened down. I think the only takeaway I would say from this is that if you’re going to reach for one of those words, or if you have a character who’s reaching for one of those words, just understand that there’s the context around it. Understand that if the person uses one of these ambitious words, that tells you something about the character.

Craig: If you look at the text of the architects, two semi-monologues in the second Matrix movie, there are more high vocabulary words per minute than any other movie I’ve ever seen. Some of those words are incredible, like sedulous, but that was the point, was that he’s vastly smarter than you. Certainly than Neo.

I just like that Keanu Reeves’ character never was like, “Wait, what’s sedulous?” Which we made fun of in Scary Movie 4, because it was funny, but what is sedulous? Why would you let somebody say that in passing and not go, ”Sorry, roll back? What does that mean?” He was just like, “There’s been more of me.”

You don’t know what sedulous means, Neo.

John: I have no idea what sedulous means.

Craig: I still don’t know what sedulous means.

John: We have answers in our pockets. What does sedulous mean? “A person showing dedication, diligence.” “He washed himself with the most sedulous care.”

Craig: Sure. Careful would have been a perfectly good word.

John: Absolutely. That’s an example. It’s like, it’s not a needed word anymore.

Craig: No. I think that the Wachowskis certainly must have gone to a thesaurus and said like, “This guy is going to use these words as part of his character. We want people to be like, ‘What, huh?’” Otherwise they would have just said careful, or diligent even as a slightly more elevated word.

John: My guess is that the word makes persistent English a little bit because I suspect there is seduloso or some other Latinate language might still use it in a way that keeps it alive.

Craig: No one, I have never heard anyone in my life use the word sedulous. Except the architect in The Matrix. He is the only one, ergo. He did say ergo, which I love.

John: Very good. Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you.

Links:

• Move Over Green Envelopes, WGA Rolls Out Direct Deposits For Residuals by Peter White for Deadline
• WGA Screen Credits Manual
• CDC Recommends Updated 2024-2025 COVID-19 and Flu Vaccines for Fall/Winter Virus Season
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• Baldur’s Gate 3
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• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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