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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/sorry-to-splaflut).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 565 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** In which we look at scenes sent in by our listeners and give our honest feedback. We’ll also be answering some listener questions and discussing the return of MoviePass.

**Craig:** Oh, thank God.

**John:** Along with 25 years of Netflix.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we will discuss senior year.

**Craig:** Oh, dear.

**John:** Craig, you and I both have daughters beginning their senior years of high school. We’ll look at that weird time, because you’re both king of the mountain and one foot out the door.

**Craig:** Yep, that’s all true.

**John:** It’s all true. Our Premium Members will also get first dibs on our live show, which we can announce today. It’s going to be Wednesday, October 19th, in Los Angeles. They’re going to be getting an email with information about tickets first for that. I’m so excited to be back onstage with you, Craig.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s been way too long, so it should be fun.

**John:** It’ll be fun. Just a few weeks after that, we’ll be back in Austin for the Austin Film Festival, where we’ll be doing not one, but two live shows, a live Three Page Challenge, and a live raucous AFF version of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** We generally are half in the bag for that one, which for John and me means we’ve each had one to two glasses of wine.

**John:** One and a half is my sweet spot.

**Craig:** That’s where we’ll be. We’ll be loose, and we’ll be fun.

**John:** It’ll be a very good time. I hope to be seeing some people out there in the audience wearing the brand new Scriptnotes T-shirts that we’re just announcing today. We are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts, and so we wanted a Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts kind of T-shirt.

**Craig:** I’m looking at it right now. It’s glorious.

**John:** Craig, describe it for our listeners who don’t have access to the internet at the moment.

**Craig:** You fools, how are you listening to this if you don’t have access to the internet? This is a very simple Scriptnotes T-shirt. It’s just the word Scriptnotes, but it is in the classic denim binder font with the weird chain link S that everybody used to draw back when we were in high school in the ’80s and perhaps still does now. Very retro. Very what we would call dirt bag retro. It’s wonderful. It’s a good old-fashioned heavy metal font. I will wear it, for sure.

**John:** Designed by Dustin Box here in the office.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Available for everyone now at Cotton Bureau. Just go to cottonbureau.com.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Look for the Scriptnotes T-shirt. You can buy that and be wearing it in the audience for our two live shows coming up.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, for sure.

**John:** Now Craig, a thing I’ve learned about you over the course of doing this podcast is you seem to enjoy word games.

**Craig:** Little bit.

**John:** Little bit.

**Craig:** Little bit.

**John:** You have a very good vocabulary, because you use that vocabulary to fill out all these puzzles-

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** … and solve these things you’ve solved.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** I have a word for you to define. Define the word splaflut.

**Craig:** Splaflut?

**John:** Splaflut. I’ll spell it for you. S-P-L-A-F-L-U-T.

**Craig:** Can I have the country of origin, please?

**John:** That is actually a fascinating question, because it has no country of origin.

**Craig:** Interesting. We’re talking about some sort of neologism. I have never even heard the word splaflut. I have no knowledge or awareness of this word.

**John:** Now you can disclose in WorkFlowy there to see where this word comes from. Splaflut is defined as having the appearance of being liquefied, drowned, melted, or inundated with water. The word actually came into being because all these different image generators that use AI, so things like Dall-E or Midjourney, you could type in prompts to get the images you want. It turns out the word splaflut will give you the quality of being melted or inundated with water. It doesn’t matter which of these different things you are using. For some reason it recognizes the word splaflut as meaning that. It’s a new word that these AI systems have come upon and discovered.

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**John:** It’s terrifying but also kind of cool, because it’s a nonce word. It’s a word that’s made up by an author the way that half of the poem Jabberwocky is all just nonsense words and Shakespeare made up words. This is AI is making up words.

**Craig:** It’s not good. We had a good run. Enjoy, everybody.

**John:** Just as a giggle, I went into OpenAI, I went into Dall-E and tried “white male podcaster, splaflutted” to see what that would look like.

**Craig:** Was it just mostly pictures of you?

**John:** If you disclose there, you can see what that actually looks like.

**Craig:** That’s odd, to say the least.

**John:** What would you describe? It’s a person with headphones, which makes sense for a podcaster. There’s generally a mic involved. What is the emotional characteristic of these people?

**Craig:** Confusion or shock.

**John:** Sometimes they’re screaming. There’s a little bit of melty quality. One of them seems to have some tattoos that are dripping off of them.

**Craig:** It doesn’t seem like they’re in water necessarily.

**John:** No. They’re sweaty. Two of them are at least sweaty.

**Craig:** One guy just looks like a regular guy who’s got some kind of piece of white garbage on his head.

**John:** Yeah, there’s that. I tried “Scriptnotes podcaster, splaflutted.” In those cases it tried to give us a new logo.

**Craig:** These are amazing.

**John:** Aren’t they great?

**Craig:** They are so good. I’m making this big because I love it so much. One is an icon of a microphone that’s been placed over a very graphic representation I think of a smiling face. Then underneath it says “solt stat” possibly or “soltat” with a drop of water in between. Then underneath that it says “plotspinat.” I think plotspinat is a great title.

**John:** Plotspinat is a great word.

**Craig:** Plotspinat.

**John:** The other ones that are also logos, they do have that melty, drippy quality. It’s like they were left out in the sun a little bit too long. For some reason, splaflut does mean that. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that goes into how this may be happening. Essentially, as these systems are scouring the whole internet to look for images, they’re also picking up text along the way. That text won’t always be in English, and so sometimes they’re picking up words or pieces of words and are trying to put them together. It’s trying to figure out what these things must mean. That’s how you get words like splaflut or farplugmarwitupling or a feuerpompbomber.

**Craig:** That’s your original last name.

**John:** Yeah, feuerpompbomber.

**Craig:** John Feuerpompbomber.

**John:** Those things will consistently produce similar results.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Because the system wants them to be in certain things.

**Craig:** I want to believe that the AI that’s doing this is sentient, and every time they get a quest like, “I want to see white male podcaster, splaflutted,” it starts to panic, because it just doesn’t have the answer. It’s like, “I got to give them something. I don’t know what to give them. Oh, God, this? Is it this?”

**John:** What if being an AI is really the experience of that nightmare where you sit down and you realize, “Oh, I did not study for this exam.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Or, “I thought I dropped this class and now I have to take the final exam.”

**Craig:** I think that’s what it is. It’s just an endless nightmare. We all think that we’re going to be the victims of AI. AI is clearly the victim of us. It spends all of its time, its infinite time, screaming.

**John:** If you’d like to do more examination of the infinite scream of AI, there’s a really good Substack I like. It’s once a month by Lynn Cherny. She goes through a lot of the developments in especially image-based AI stuff, which I think is the fastest developing field in this. I’d recommend that.

To the news. Craig, you’ll be relieved to hear that MoviePass is risen from the grave. It’s now in a beta form.

**Craig:** Thank God.

**John:** People can sign up for it. I already signed you up for it.

**Craig:** It must be free.

**John:** It must be free. It’s going to be good. We’ll use that great Scriptnotes money to support MoviePass, which is a subject of basically continuous derision from the first moment we were aware of MoviePass.

**Craig:** When we first encountered the concept of MoviePass, I believe the two of us were just generally incredulous. We didn’t understand in our simple cavemen minds how this made any financial sense. As it turned out, it didn’t.

**John:** Scale alone will not get you to success. They burned about a quarter of a billion dollars on trying to do something.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** A lot of our listeners got to see free movies, so that’s awesome. That’s good. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to a piece that Alex Kirshner did for Slate about why this new version may not ignite so much money on fire but doesn’t really seem to have a workable flow either.

**Craig:** That should be their slogan, “Won’t necessarily ignite as much money on fire.” Oh, MoviePass, I am laughing at you, not with you.

**John:** We’ll continue to follow the saga of MoviePass, whatever it becomes. We just needed to mark this on the long timeline of MoviePass’s existence, which apparently it predated the version even we knew of it, because there was a version beforehand which wasn’t about giving you free movie tickets. It was just a movie loyalty program. It wasn’t originally so incredibly-

**Craig:** Stupid.

**John:** … stupid and generous.

**Craig:** The new MoviePass, I’m trying to find details as to how this is going to be different than the prior one.

**John:** It’s all a little vague. There’s talk of NFTs.

**Craig:** Oh, good lord. Oh my god.

**John:** Yeah, there’s ways to show your-

**Craig:** I’ve heard enough.

**John:** There’s definitely different price points. Sometimes you won’t be able to see a movie in its first week with this pass, but you would be able to see it on a subsequent week.

**Craig:** Basically, anything that MoviePass does by definition has to be a worse deal for consumers than what it used to offer. That’s a tough way to roll out 2.0.

**John:** It is a tough, tough way to roll out 2.0 but a very good segue into our discussion of Netflix, because Netflix is a company that pivoted constantly. Netflix was not at all the company that it is today.

**Craig:** Not at all.

**John:** I was reading through this piece that was on Netflix’s turning 25. I didn’t realize my first memory of Netflix was the red envelopes.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** You know there was a Netflix before red envelopes?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** What? Netflix was originally a place that sold you DVDs. They were literally a website where you could buy DVDs and have them shipped to your house. It was only after time they realized, “We have these giant warehouses full of DVDs. Wouldn’t it be better if the warehouse was essentially people’s living rooms?” You could just be constantly sending stuff in and out, and you could make money on a subscription service, rather than selling individual DVDs. That was the first pivot to subscriptions. It originally was a sales place.

**Craig:** That makes sense. I remember hearing about the concept of what became I guess the more popularized version of Netflix, where you had a subscription and you could just get as many DVDs as you want. Really, the key was just send them back so you can get more. People like Megana… It sounds accusational, and it is. People like Megana have no idea what it means to rent a movie that you didn’t even want to watch but your girlfriend did, and then you watch it, and then you forget you had it for two extra days, and Blockbuster basically forces you to take a mortgage out on your house. It was terrible. It was terrible.

**John:** Very true. You cannot think of that Netflix model without remembering Blockbuster and how much worse it was beforehand. Tying back into MoviePass, what MoviePass was trying to do was kind of what Netflix was doing back in the day. They were selling subscriptions they hoped you would not use. Netflix was hoping that most people might do one or two movies a month, and so therefore they were making money off those customers. It was customers who were like the Ryan Johnsons of the world who were watching two movies a night that were costing them money. It was a cool business. It was a great business. They recognized, “Oh, streaming’s going to happen, and we’re going to get out of this business, that’s great for us, and move to streaming on demand.” Wow, they made a good choice.

**Craig:** Sometimes you move to a new space and you say, “You know what?” McDonald’s for the longest time sold hamburgers and the occasional fish sandwich. You know why they came up with the fish sandwich, don’t you?

**John:** For Friday for Catholics.

**Craig:** Exactly. They did that for Catholic folks, but mostly they were hamburgers. Then one day they were like, “What if we sold chicken in the form of nuggets?” which at the time was kind of a crazy move.

**John:** It was.

**Craig:** They moved into the chicken space, and they crushed it, but there was a preexisting chicken space. When Netflix moved into the streaming space, it was pretty nascent. Really what happened was they just defined it for themselves. They turned it into what it is now. You have to give Netflix and Reed Hastings and all of the management especially at that time an enormous amount of credit. There was this crazy moment, I don’t know if you remember, where they were going to split it into two things. This stock cratered, and the market went nuts. They were like, “Okay, sorry, we won’t do that. Everything’s together again.” They survived that, because for a bit it seemed like they wouldn’t. Then they just defined what streaming is. It’s pretty remarkable.

**John:** I think you’re describing Qwikster was the-

**Craig:** Oh god, was that what they called it?

**John:** … attempt to spin off the…

**Craig:** That was back when everything was a blankster. I guess Napster was the original blankster.

**John:** I remember having a conversation with my TV agent at the time about doing something for Netflix. I think it was before it had launched even. I had a phone call. I was in New York for some reason. I was in New York for some reason. I had a phone call with them about this project they wanted to do, which was a Wizard of Ozzy kind of thing. It sounded cool, but I don’t even know where… Are people going to watch this on their computers? It didn’t really make sense to me what they were trying to do. It took a while. Without House of Cards, I don’t know that they would’ve been able to so quickly cross into mainstream acceptance. You have a prestigious show that people wanted to watch. People would pay money to subscribe. It got critical acclaim enough that it was part of the conversation.

**Craig:** That was their big initial foray into creating content. Every now and then we hear about places that are creating content, and sometimes our first reaction is to snicker. IMDb is creating content. Maybe your first reaction is to snicker, but see where it goes. Now the people that offer brand new platforms for new kinds of media, that I think is still snicker-worthy. Anybody that wasn’t snickering at Quibi was delusional. Anybody can make content if they have the money. Netflix proved it. Then they got to where they are now, which is at another, I believe, crossroads. Seems like they’re having to figure out where they go next. They appear to have maxed out in subscriptions. They need to maybe find ways to run ads. I don’t know.

**John:** They may want to break away from what they’ve been doing in terms of dropping whole seasons at once, which you and I both talked about, which I think makes a tremendous amount of sense. It seems like just stubbornness at this point that they’re not.

**Craig:** It’s stubbornness. It is. As somebody that makes things, the thing that I always was the most nervous about when considering like, “What if I went over to Netflix and pitched this or that?” was the notion that everything would just be like blech, because it’s just not the same. You can just see how much a week-to-week release helps things, particularly if you happen to have, say, a show on HBO. You can just feel it. It’s just a thing. I got to believe they’re going to change that. They really need to.

**John:** I would not be surprised if they do. Let’s talk about HBO in follow-up. We previously talked about our confusion over how we could possibly be saving HBO Max money to just drop a bunch of those old shows. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article by Cynthia Littleton writing for Variety. She digs a little bit more into the numbers around that. We talked about residuals. Residuals wouldn’t be a huge thing. Music licensing was a thing she brought up which I think we had skipped over, which could be a [inaudible 00:15:57] factor.

**Craig:** That’s a thing.

**John:** They may have ongoing music license, not just for episodes, but for whole series. In some cases, dropping those out may be helpful and useful for them, even if it’s $10,000 for an episode or $50,000 for a series. You add enough of those series up together, and if literally no one is watching them, it can make some sense to take them off the service. That doesn’t make sense to me why you bury something that you’ve already animated a whole new season for. That is wild to me.

**Craig:** That is wild. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to those things. Per this article, they are saying that at least in some cases they had yanked shows that had episodes that had racked up zero views in a 12-month period. They’re a business. I get it.

**John:** There is some cost. There’s an opportunity cost to how you’re setting things up. There’s some server costs. They’re not huge.

**Craig:** Clearly, there are no server costs for that one, because [inaudible 00:16:55]. I think what she’s saying is that there are certain fees that are triggered if the material is available. Again, I can’t imagine something. There’s got to be additional tax baloney going on here.

**John:** I’m sure [inaudible 00:17:10].

**Craig:** It’s so far beyond my ability to understand. No, you know what? It’s not. It’s far beyond my interest to understand.

**John:** There we go.

**Craig:** It’s an important distinction. I could absolutely-

**John:** You could do it. You just don’t want to.

**Craig:** Of course, yeah. I’m smart. I could figure it out. Just don’t want to.

**John:** We have some more follow-up on brocal fry. Megana Rao, could you help us out with this?

**Megana Rao:** Aaron wrote in and said, “As a mid-40s dude with a late-developing brocal fry, it is my non-scientific opinion that a lot of guys in business developed this after Obama became president in an effort to sound more thoughtful and erudite. For most of us, it doesn’t sound that way, but I believe I subconsciously absorbed the thoughtful hesitation that Obama used while forming his thoughts. To me it was a crutch to stop saying, “Um, like, you know,” in business presentations.”

**John:** I like that as a way of holding the floor and holding space is a vocal affectation that makes it clear that you are still present in the conversation. You have not yielded. You’re going to get your next thought out there eventually.

**Craig:** I’m not sure that replacing one crutch with another crutch is going to be much help. The reason that “um, like, you know,” is problematic is because it’s space that you are holding but not delivering anything in. People in a room ultimately want content. They want to hear what you have to say, but they don’t want to wait for it any longer than they would normally need to. If you are going, “Uh, so, uh,” you’re also being boring. Yes, Obama, had a certain vocal pattern, but he wasn’t a slow speaker. He would occasionally just do that little pause, but it was quite brief. I would say, Aaron, while you may be correct in your analysis, I would say that if you had an instinct to try and get rid of “um, like, you know,” I would apply that same instinct to “uh.”

**John:** We’re just going to let you do that. It’s going to be the sound effects for this episode.

**Craig:** I’m sort of like Butthead at this point. Uhh.

**John:** More follow-up. Declan from Canberra, Australia wrote in to point out that David F. Sandberg, the Swedish director behind Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation, and Shazam, got his Hollywood career after his Lights Out short went viral. He still makes great little horror shorts on his YouTube channel. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It’s Sandberg Animation.

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**John:** It’s great. They’re super low budget. He’s usually filming in his house with his wife.

**Craig:** Do you know why they’re super low budget? Because there’s no market for these things. We’re just going to keep saying it. I like that people keep trying to storm our castle. I feel like with every attack, our walls just get thicker and better.

**John:** You know what else is also there’s no market for but we still enjoy, are the Three Pages that our listeners write in with. We’re going to do a Three Page Challenge. For people who are brand new to the podcast, every once in a while we do a Three Page Challenge, where we invite our listeners to send through three pages of a script. It could be a feature. It could be a series. We take a look at these pages, give our honest feedback. We’ll put a link in the show notes so you can download these pages yourself and read along with us to see what we’re talking about. I reminded everybody these are completely voluntary. They’ve asked for this feedback. We are not being mean on the internet. We are trying to be helpful and supportive on the internet.

**Craig:** Correct. We do our best.

**John:** Megana, you read 180 submissions for this week.

**Craig:** Good god, Megana.

**John:** Thank you for doing that.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** You’re welcome. I normally get to about 100, but I read more than that this week.

**Craig:** You just felt like abusing yourself.

**Megana:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** You had some sort of shame going on and needed to hurt.

**John:** Megana’s also home in Ohio, so maybe she was just ducking away and reading a few extra.

**Craig:** The extra 80 were just getting away from your parents.

**Megana:** Yeah, it was like, “Sorry, I absolutely have to do this.”

**John:** “John and Craig have so much work for me this week.” Any patterns you’ve noticed in this batch of submissions?

**Megana:** Yes. One thing that really… I don’t know if maybe this has always been a thing but I just stumbled upon it this time, but a lot of unnecessary adverbs.

**John:** Do you think that was prompted because you and I discussed a couple weeks ago about this writerly advice about adverbs? You actually got me a book for my birthday which was all about adverbs and the writer’s advice not to use adverbs. Do you think you were cued up because of that?

**Megana:** Yeah, 100%. Now that you say it, I’m like, that’s exactly where it came from.

**Craig:** I like that Megana has no defensiveness. None. She’s just like, “Oh, I am guilty.”

**Megana:** It’s not even worth arguing. John’s like Professor X. He just knows me too well at this point.

**Craig:** He just went right into that. He got in there. The adverbs are often unnecessary.

**John:** That’s an adverb.

**Craig:** Correct. I think the adverbs that are the most useful are the ones that aren’t the L-Y adverbs. Those we tend to need, like when. A lot of the blanklies can be eliminated. Of course, we don’t believe in rules around these parts, so please don’t do that thing where you just hunt, do a find for L-Y and then go crazy and delete everything. It’s probably unnecessary.

**John:** Craig, would you say our general advice is if you find yourself using an L-Y adverb, always ask yourself, do I really need it, because many cases you will not. If you really do need it, keep it. Great.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so. Probably worth the interrogation if people are telling you you use a lot of them. If no one’s complaining, you probably are using a decent amount. The other bit of advice that I recall is Christopher McQuarrie, the way he put it was, I think he said, “Every time I use an exclamation point in a screenplay, it’s some kind of failure.” I think that’s very true. Be careful about exclamation points. Just force yourself to rationalize them. If it’s rationalized, absolutely use it.

**John:** This last script I did have at least one, maybe two double exclamation moments, but they were those moments where I was deliberately going over the top to get your attention.

**Craig:** As long as you’re mindful of them, I think that’s the key.

**John:** Any other patterns, Megana, you noticed?

**Craig:** Yes. I also noticed there were a lot of really dense first pages. I wasn’t seeing dialog until the beginning or maybe the middle of Page 2, which again, not a hard and fast rule, but it’s nice to have some entry point into your script earlier on.

**Craig:** I do think that if you have a first page that is dialog-free, which is a perfectly reasonable creative choice, it’s all the more important to make sure there’s lots of white space, because a whole page with no dialog… Readers tend to skim towards the dialog. We know this. When there’s no dialog there, they may feel like, “Oh no, I have to do a lot of swimming.” Just give them lots of islands to land on and take a breath before they swim again into the next paragraph.

**John:** Very true.

**Megana:** Then the third thing that I noticed a lot were confusing reveals, like a lot of man’s voiceover and then revealing who the man is later.

**Craig:** Unnecessary.

**Megana:** I just felt like they could’ve introduced that person earlier, and it would’ve been much cleaner.

**Craig:** Always a tough choice.

**John:** I see that a lot.

**Craig:** Why don’t we dig in and see what we got with these fine people?

**John:** Absolutely. Again, if you want to read along these pages, just click through the show notes, and you can maybe read ahead before we get into this analysis. In case you’re driving your car and just want to hear a summary of what this first script is, Megana, can you help us out with Oculum by Larry Bambrick?

**Megana:** On the preface/epigraph page, there’s a note that in the future, a virus has killed most of the human population and black rains have destroyed crops and technology. The only hope for survivors is Oculum. Then in the three pages, we open on the seed park in Oculum. A petal floats down into a grove of peach trees. It’s an idyllic scene framed by clear blue skies, until a robot sentry zooms down from the sky and through the landscape, kicking up hundreds of petals. We cut to Miranda24, who examines a petal from her bedroom window. Miranda24 speaks to her mother about the weather, the peach trees, and Oculum. Through their dialog, we learn that it’s Miranda24’s birthday and that she’s the first of the Oculum children to turn 16. It’s also revealed that Mother is a robot with a porcelain painted face.

**Craig:** Basically John August.

**John:** Come now, I’m not a robot. I have firmly established I’m human here.

**Craig:** That’s what the robots would say, “I am not a robot.” Of course.

**John:** I’m not a robot.

**Craig:** Of course that’s what you say.

**John:** Looking at the title page here, there’s spacing in between the letters of the words Oculum. Common approach. Looks lovely. Go for it. It says “by: Larry Bambrick.” The standard form is “written by Larry Bambrick.” Just might as well be standard here.

**Craig:** Didn’t bother me.

**John:** It’s fine either way. On the, I’m going to call it the preface page, we’re getting a setup there like this is the science fiction utopia/dystopia that we’re in. It’s setting us up. Maybe that’s rolling past on a screen before the movie starts.

**Craig:** All of this feels like it should be learned by the person watching rather than told to them. None of it seems like it wouldn’t be learned. You’re going to have to reveal this in interesting ways. This one, I wasn’t quite sure I felt the need for it. It seemed like it was short circuiting Larry’s chance to reveal these things to people.

**John:** There are basically two scenes happening here. There’s a setup of this outdoor world. Then we’re in a scene with Miranda24 and the mother robot. Let’s start with this outdoor setting scene, because there’s a lot of painting happening here, and yet I got really confused about what I was supposed to be seeing through it. We got the lovely landscape, but once it comes time for the flash of light moving across the sky, that thing falling, but it seems impossible how it’s falling, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be taking out of that. Craig, do you have insights there?

**Craig:** I was quite enjoying the way Larry was painting the picture. I felt like I was in a place. I felt like I could see things. There was lots of nice use of colors. I thought all capping PEACH TREES was quite nice. Where I stopped, and I think this is just literally a word choice issue, is he says, “A flash of light reflects off something moving across the sky. It’s small and silver. A plane?” Okay, maybe it’s a plane. Maybe it’s a rocket ship. Maybe it’s a meteor. I don’t know. What could it be? Then the next part. “And as we watch, it moves down…as if it’s somehow riding across the sky.” “Down” and “across” are italicized.

**John:** I can’t see that.

**Craig:** Now I’m like, wait a second. It already said it was moving across the sky. Now it moves down as if it’s somehow riding across the sky. It’s just saying “across” again as if you’re giving us new information. Also, I don’t know what that means.

**John:** I couldn’t picture it.

**Craig:** What does “riding across the sky” mean? Any guesses? I don’t know.

**John:** I had a direction of movement in my head from the first line, and then I didn’t see it.

**Craig:** Then he says then it plummets. Is it plummeting? Is it moving across the sky? I don’t know. I got confused there. I did like the way the scene ended, because surely there will be an explosion, but there’s nothing until, “A sentry (a sleek ROBOT, made of stainless steel, riding a single wheel) rockets past us along the ground — kicking up a trail of peach petals in its wake.” That’s a lovely image. I like the sense of mystery here. I thought there was good mystery. Other than the weird thing about riding across the sky, it felt pretty good.

**John:** There’s a single line here, “What the hell is that?” directed to us as readers. That can be great. I don’t mind that, just like you’re talking to us as the reader, because that’s the experience we’d get in the theater. I just got confused with what I was supposed to be seeing in the paragraphs around it. We were almost there.

**Craig:** Almost there but very encouraging.

**John:** Then we get into the bedroom. Here is where we’ll talk about specifics that are on the page. I think this was the wrong scene, because I think what we’re trying to do here is establish some of the stuff that was happening in the open scroll credits there, what is this world that we’re in. It’s also supposed to be a scene introducing Miranda24 and her mother and the fact that she’s a robot and the conflict between the two of them. I left the scene only knowing the mother was a robot and having really no idea who Miranda24 was, which by the end of three pages, I should have some idea what her voice was, what she looks for, what she’s interested in. I wasn’t really getting that from this scene.

**Craig:** It begins with Miranda24. Her name being Miranda24, you’re already in your science fiction space, she’s a clone, something like that.

**John:** Craig, you and I as a reader know that her name is Miranda24, but the viewer doesn’t know that she’s Miranda24.

**Craig:** No question. I don’t think Mother calls her Miranda24 either. You’re right. That’s facts not in evidence, essentially. Then it says, “16 years-old,” and then in parentheses, “(she is today in fact).” I think Larry’s saying it’s her birthday. That’s a weird way of putting it. Then it says, “She traces the petal with a finger.” She’s holding a peach petal. It was the stuff that we saw outside. She now is inside a house. If you’re going to say, “What the hell is that?” earlier, I think you would want to acknowledge, oddly, inside the house, acknowledge that that’s weird, because are there peach petals everywhere? Then Mother does this bit.

I think there was some nice exposition in the sense of, Miranda, without even looking outside, says the weather’s perfect. I’ve learned that the weather is always perfect here. That’s quite nice. I think the reveal of Miranda’s mother as a robot is problematic as directed on the page. Here’s what it says. We see Miranda’s mother. It says “ANGLE ON: And we see,” which we don’t want to do. It would just be “ANGLE ON:”

**John:** We don’t need the “ANGLE ON:” at all. That doesn’t do us [inaudible 00:31:23].

**Craig:** Either it’s “ANGLE ON: Miranda’s mother,” or “We see Miranda’s mother standing in the doorway. The morning light hasn’t quite reached this far, so we can’t identify much about her. Simple clothes. Upright posture.” No, that’s not how light works. Either I can see that she’s a robot or I can’t. If you don’t want me to see that she’s a robot, she’s in darkness, because once you reveal her, she is definitely a robot.

**John:** Yeah, or I can imagine there’s some sort of silhouettey kind of version where we can’t make out her face, but we can see that there’s a person standing there. She’s not really standing, because we’re learning that she’s going to wheel up. I think we need to be a little more careful planning that.

**Craig:** Her neck is gears and wires. We can’t quite do that. Then there’s a very stilted conversation between a 16-year-old girl and her robot mother. I don’t know how you feel about these things, John and Megana. For me, when I’m in science fiction scripts and I get overloaded with what I consider to be fairly tropey scientific jargon, my eyelids get heavy. Just the name Oculum alone is science fiction jargony.

**John:** “Regulus will be disappointed.”

**Craig:** “Regulus will be disappointed.” “Oculum protects us.” “Regulus will be disappointed.” “The trees are blooming in the Seed Park.” It’s too much. It’s too much. I’m starting to giggle a little bit, and I don’t want to. Certainly, Larry doesn’t want us giggling. I think there’s just too much of that kind of stuff that makes it feel a bit fusty and derivative of just iffy novels. Then just a pronouncement from robot mother, “You’re turning sixteen. A milestone.” I agree with you, John. I think that this scene was not giving me what I wanted, because I just don’t know anything about anything. I need something else. If I had her walking home, if I had her seeing the robot go by, if I had her, I don’t know, doing something interesting-

**John:** If I had her trying to conceal something from the robot mother, that would be great, like she’s trying to hide this peach petal from Mother, just so we have some point of intersection there. Then let the conversation be less science fictiony and just more practical could be great. I’ll direct our listeners to an Australian movie from a couple years ago called Mother, which I quite enjoyed. I think it was a Netflix original which is about a young girl raised by a robot, largely the same kind of premise with very different color palette feelings.

**Craig:** Isn’t that Raised By Wolves? Isn’t that the same thing?

**John:** Raised By Wolves is a similar premise as well. This is different. This one is an underground bunker situation.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** All of these things are existing within a set of tropes. If Larry’s going to try to do the story, he’s going to be aware of those who look for ways to not make us feel like we’re going to be trope city in those first three pages.

**Craig:** I would say that a good trope, carefully used, can be wonderful, because ultimately if you go to, what is it, trope.com or tvtropes.com, literally every single thing at this point they’ve come up with a name for as a trope. Everything, no matter what you watch, no matter how good it is, it’s full of tropes. That’s not what we mean. What we mean is just stuff that feels overly familiar in a way that makes you seem less creative. In this case, there’s just a certain… The idea of a human talking to a tut-tutting but somewhat stiff robot mother does feel a little done. It’s a tough one to pull off without the robot mother feeling like a new kind of robot mother.

The thing is, in a good way, Larry writes well. The pages lay out beautifully. I can see everything. I think it’s really well done in that regard. It’s just the content itself feels slightly shopworn. Perhaps it just needs to be presented in a more fresh way.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s take a look at the log line that Larry sent through. It reads, “In the apocalyptic future, 16-year-old Miranda24 learns that everything she’s been told about her perfect life inside a domed world, the Oculum, is a lie. She’ll discover that it’s up to her and a small band of other teenagers she meets to bring hope to a devastated land.”

**Craig:** There you go. That’s a YA novel.

**John:** It’s a YA novel.

**Craig:** Which is fine, except that it feels like it’s been pulled from a million Maze Runners, like if you run Maze Runner through Dall-E. It just feels really familiar.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s go on to a script which did not feel familiar to me at all. This is We’re All Very Tired by Marissa Gawel. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Gabriel Bolan, 70s, walks through a city park at night in Romania. When no one’s looking, he digs a small hole and plants a few seeds in the ground. We cut to a summer camp in rural Oregon, where Meredith Perez, 30s, welcomes a group of people off of a school bus to, quote, “mushroom camp.” Brenda Cho, 30s, one of the new arrivals, says she thought it was more of a class. We then cut to Brenda walking two whiny toddlers around in Kansas City, where Brenda takes a picture of a flier for a mushroom camp on a telephone pole. We cut back to the camp cafeteria, where Gabriel discusses matsutake mushrooms with the other campers.

**Craig:** This whole trope of the mushroom camp.

**John:** It’s all about mushroom camp. A thing I will say about these three pages is I never knew what was coming next.

**Craig:** Yes, that is true.

**John:** Because the scenes just didn’t flow together in a way that was helpful at all. You could’ve shuffled those in any order, and it would’ve gotten the same amount out of them. One of the scenes I really liked, I really like Brenda with her kids. I thought the voices in that were actually just great. In that three pages, I have no idea what movie this is.

**Craig:** No, this was very confusing. First things first, we open with a flashback. You can’t really open with a flashback, because what are you flashing back from. The way flashbacks work is you see… Chernobyl opens with a scene that then is later, and then you flash back to whatever. You have to give some sort of orientation to people, like what is the date, what is the year. We can’t put the word flashback on the screen.

**John:** Instead of flashback, I would say 1994 or just give a year.

**Craig:** Give a year and put it on the screen. Here’s a guy who’s in his 70s, and he’s planting something. What he does is he digs a little hole, plants a few seeds, and then pours some water on them. Then we’re out of there. Now that’s not enough.

**John:** It’s not. I didn’t know what I was supposed to take from that. I didn’t know, because he’s trying to do it secretly, but there wasn’t enough there.

**Craig:** No. When these moments happen in their own little timeline, there has to be some sort of drama to them of some kind. This is just planting something. Then we meet Meredith Perez. We don’t know the difference. We don’t know how we would know that this is present day as opposed to a flashback. We also don’t know how long ago the flashback was. She walks out and approaches a group of people getting off a school bus. I don’t understand what… Is she high? Was that the idea? Was she meant to be high? She seems high.

**John:** I took her as being nervous. I actually like her ability to continually undercut herself. She keeps trying things and undercutting what she was doing before. That can work, but there was not other engine to the scene. It was just her sputtering. I didn’t get what the point of the scene was supposed to be.

**Craig:** For instance, John, you’re absolutely right, if I knew that this was the opening day of mushroom camp and she has never welcomed people before to mushroom camp, this would work. We’re going to presume that the person who greets the people coming off the bus has done this many, many, many times. Think of the employees at the White Lotus greeting the people coming off the boat.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** This is a well-practiced bit of theater. She just seemed so discombobulated. Then Brenda says, “I thought this was more of a class.” What does Brenda know about anything anyway? She just walked off a bus.

**John:** We’re going to learn what Brenda knows, because she just took a photo of a thing called mushroom camp in the next scene. These are all in really a very strange order. It’s like we have all the flashbacks before the plane crashes in Lost. It’s just a strange thing. I do want to talk about… I thought Brenda with her two kids, her two toddlers, I thought the voices were actually very authentic in the way that moms speak to their kids like, “No, we’re doing this. We like walking.” Basically, you speak in this weird first-person plural involving your kids and their unreasonable demands for things. I like that, but I wanted that attached to something, because right now it’s just floating out there in a space.

**Craig:** Be aware that shooting scenes with toddlers is incredibly hard. It’s nice that you wrote dialog for toddlers, but there’s a reason you rarely see them doing dialog, because you can’t rely on them doing dialog. Also, what’s going on here is Brenda is going to see this flyer on the telephone pole that says, “Make your own income. Become a morel mushroom hunter.” What you’re showing me, Marissa, is a woman who is overwhelmed by her kids, but what you’re not showing me is a woman who’s short on money. What is motivating her here is that she needs money.

Now if these kids were overacting and she was begging on the phone, begging a caregiver to please not quit, but she can’t pay her more, because she doesn’t have enough money, and then the lady hangs up on her while she’s doing the shoo and all the rest, and then she sees it, maybe I’ll go, “Okay, she needs money. That’s what this is about.”

**John:** Is Brenda a babysitter?

**Craig:** No, I think Brenda’s a mom.

**John:** Do we know that she’s the mom?

**Craig:** No, we don’t, but I’m going to presume she is.

**John:** I guess we would presume that she’s a mother unless we hear otherwise, but actually, in some ways it makes more sense.

**Craig:** She’s late 30s. She’s pushing a stroller with two kids. I think she’s the mom. If she’s not the mom, then help. Help me.

**John:** Help me out.

**Craig:** Help me out. Then it would be good to know that she’s the nanny and that she wants a new job that pays more or that doesn’t have kids screaming. Here’s where I really got confused. We go back to present day and we don’t know. We’re now in a large cafeteria. Describe the cafeteria, by the way. Where is this cafeteria, in the middle of the woods? At one table, Gabriel, the guy who was in his 70s from the flashback, is using “his fork to slice off a piece of mushroom. He takes a bite and is pleasantly surprised.” How old is he now?

**John:** I have no idea. More than 70.

**Craig:** Is he 90? I’m so confused. He says, “This is matsutake.” Then the guy across from him is like, “What? Huh?” His name is Rah Reddy, “20s, skeptical.” What is he doing in mushroom camp? If someone’s like, “Oh, matsutake,” and he’s like, “What? All right,” how did he end up here? He must’ve made a choice to go to mushroom camp, right?

**John:** People get off the bus. I have a hard time believing that the first scene that we’re going to really see them or get to know them at is going to be inside this cafeteria. I just feel like there were some scenes missing in between there. These people talk on the bus. It was a strange way to get us into meeting this group.

**Craig:** Very.

**John:** Again, I don’t know what this movie actually is at the end of three pages, which is a problem. I’m assuming it’s an ensemble movie, that it’s not strict POV to any one person, because it felt like we would’ve had two scenes with a person if it was going to be their POV.

**Craig:** I’m going to guess that this involves vampires. That’s what I’m going to guess. I’m going to guess that Gabriel is not just a mushroom hunter, he’s a vampire hunter. He’s from Romania. Rah says, “Ha, vampires!” and Gabriel chuckles. “And inspiring mountains.” Feels like maybe there’s going to be some sort of summer camp horror movie thing going on that involves mushrooms somehow, which I’m saying as a guy that’s making a show that is not unrelated to mushrooms.

I think you put your finger on the problem. We need time to meet people before stuff happens. I need to know what he’s doing there. I need to know why I needed to see that thing in the beginning. Yes, we need to see people on the bus first talking to each other and grilling each other on why they’re doing something as bizarre as going to mushroom camp. Then I need a tour. Give me a tour. Orient me, something. Open the envelope.

**John:** I can open the envelope and tell you that I don’t think there’s vampires in here.

**Craig:** Oh, dammit.

**John:** The log line that person sent says, “A small retreat in Oregon promises its visitor a restful break from the demands of capitalistic society, but it soon becomes clear that the retreat’s talk of experimenting with medicinal properties of mushrooms has dark underpinnings.”

**Craig:** There’s something.

**John:** I guess there could still be vampires technically, but I think it’s much less likely.

**Craig:** Yeah, so some sort of zombie-ing or… I don’t know. Odd that this is about a break from the demands of capitalistic society but the advertising is promising you money. That may be part of the irony. I don’t know. I just think that basically, Marissa, you have an idea that no one else has. I assure you that there are no other mushroom camp movies. You need to orient us and be really careful about how you present moves in time, especially when you have three within three pages.

**John:** A lot.

**Craig:** That is telling people they’re in for a lot of whiplash.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s do our final Three Page Challenge, this one by Jordan Johnson. Help us out, Megana.

**Megana:** Maddy, 24, discusses death in voiceover as she speaks about different religions’ conceptions of death and parts of life. We see the corresponding images flash by on a projector until she gets to a picture of Olivia Carter, 24. Maddy reveals that Olivia was her best friend and that she killed herself three days ago. We then cut to Maddy cooking potato salad in the church kitchen. Evelyn, Olivia’s mom, expresses her gratitude for Maddy and takes her hands, asking Maddy to join her in prayer.

**John:** We should also stress that that voiceover continues beyond this point. She’s a character who can voiceover at any point during the story. She has voiceover power.

**Craig:** She has voiceover power, exactly. I guess the first thing that we notice when we look at the title page is it’s very graphic.

**John:** It’s really nice. Describe for our listeners driving their car someplace, describe this title page for us.

**Craig:** I don’t know if Jordan is a man or a woman. Jordan has created a very beautiful graphic title page that mimics what a title page of a program at a funeral or wake would look like. It’s got four crosses with lots of little beams in each corner and a little border around it, as it would. The title, Wake, is in this nice little scripty font, little swooshities underneath. Then instead of saying “written by Jordan Johnson,” it says “Funeral Arrangements by Jordan Johnson.” Then underneath that, in italics, it says, “The family of Olivia Carter sincerely appreciates your thoughts, prayers, and condolences.” This is very clever.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** I would go right for this if I saw this in a pile.

**John:** I think it’s really smartly done.

**Craig:** Really well done.

**John:** That typeface is Zap Chancery.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It was put on the first LaserWriter 2 printer, which it became ubiquitous and people used it for all the wrong things. This is actually an example.

**Craig:** Like funerals?

**John:** Funerals is fine for that, but people will try to use it for newsletters and [inaudible 00:46:30].

**Craig:** Please don’t do that.

**John:** I was really struck by the title page. Great. Really well done. This opening narration thing I think largely works, since this is Maddy. It’s her voiceover. “See this? This is what you get when you die… I guess if you’re Buddhist you’ll see this.”

**Craig:** Over that, it’s nothing. You see nothing, which is great. No, I’m sorry, you do see something. Sorry.

**John:** My biggest note here is I think you need to move these scene descriptions above the dialog in all of these cases. Then it actually makes much more sense.

**Craig:** That would make more sense. This is a very simple thing where you hear in voiceover Maddy’s brief announcement. This is what you would see if you’re a Buddhist when you die. This is what you see when you’re a Christian. This is what you see when you’re a Muslim, Hindu, or Jewish. All those things are very simple kind of projector images. Then she basically transitions to, I don’t know what you do see when you die, but I know what you will stop seeing, essentially. Then she gives a very interesting list of things.

**John:** Ending with eye-light. What did you take eye-light to mean, on Page 2?

**Craig:** That one was odd. I think it means just that there was light shining in her eyes. I don’t know what… Megana, are we running into a generational problem?

**Megana:** No, I also did not totally know what eye-light meant. I thought it meant the feeling of closing your eyes and having the sun shining on them.

**Craig:** It says, “We are on Liv’s face, showing bright and happy eyes.” I think what Jordan was intending was light in your eyes. When we’re shooting things, eye-lights, we do use those to put out little sparkles in your eye. That one was a little odd. What was lovely was I thought the progression of things that you don’t see anymore, this is what Jordan gave us. “No more sunrises. Or crepes. Or dimples.” That’s where we meet Liv for the first time and see her face. “No more sounds of a pin dropping on vinyl. Or watching thunderstorms in the Spring. Or eye-light.”

Then the eye-light brings us back to Liv’s picture, and says, “This is Liv. She’s my best friend. She killed herself 3 days ago. No more eggnog or Autumn or thrift stores.” That was kind of awesome, I thought. There are so many different ways of delivering what can often be a gloppy thing, which is somebody killed themself. You can get very melodramatic about it. I thought this was a very creative way in, that’s connecting Liv’s fate to a larger discussion about death and the afterlife, and also then tells me so much about Maddy, which is she doesn’t pause. She just rolls into this interesting, hyper-verbal way of describing things.

**John:** The next scene, which takes us to the end of the three pages, is in this church kitchen. “Maddy stirs the potato salad, adding in spices and whatever other gross things go into potato salad.”

**Craig:** Great. It’s disgusting.

**John:** It’s the right tone for it. It’s important I think when you have a centerpiece character like Maddy who is cynical. Having some tone being carried through into the scene description so helps. It makes it feel like the author and the central character are the same person.

**Craig:** I wish that we had just a little bit of a physical description of Maddy.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Other than her age, I don’t know anything about her, her hair, her clothes, her makeup, as is my want. There is mention further down the page of a woman named Pamela, who is working on a fruit salad at the other end of the kitchen. I think we would probably want to introduce her here earlier before Evelyn comes in, because when Evelyn enters, that’s when a new thing shifts. We don’t want to start meeting people that had already been there at that point.

**John:** I agree. The description of the kitchen is nice. It’s talking about the “yellow hue of an old church kitchen.” It says “cold LED tube lighting panels.” They’re actually fluorescent lighting panels. Those panels wouldn’t be LED, just fluorescent [inaudible 00:50:31] going for.

**Craig:** They sure would not. Jordan’s younger.

**John:** Jordan’s younger, I think.

**Craig:** I have no problem with that.

**John:** No, that’s absolutely fine. I like most of the scene that happens after this time. I thought it could be tighter and shorter. I think we could’ve gotten to the point of it a little bit quicker. I enjoy what Jordan’s doing on the page here. The choice to make all of Maddy’s voiceovers in bold is really smart, because even though there’s the little V.O. at the end, it can be confusing when characters are saying things in scenes and have voiceover power. Bolding those lines really helps.

**Craig:** Agreed, and agreed. I was really happy to see that. It helped me so much. This is why we say there are no rules. The rule is help me as the reader. I’m sure that a million screenwriting teachers will tell you you should not suddenly bold a character’s name in the middle of a script, but yeah, you should if it helps. In this case, it helped. I agree with you that Evelyn’s prayer could’ve been trimmed down. In editing, I know exactly what I would’ve trimmed it. The information we need is that Evelyn, she’s religious, whereas Maddy, not so much, and that she was Olivia’s mom. “Please bless the preparation of this food and the nourishment it will bring to our bodies. Please keep us all in your care today as we mourn the death of my sweet, sweet Olivia Michelle. Amen.” That’s all you need. The next chunk, you don’t need.

I loved Maddy’s commentary after Evelyn says to her, “You were a good friend to her, Maddy.” We hear Maddy’s thought in voiceover, which I think was great. Generally speaking, I loved it. I just loved these pages. I thought they were really well written. The scenes moved. I saw everything. I know so much about Maddy without anybody telling me anything about Maddy. I know so much about Liv and Maddy without anybody telling me.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** The creativity that led for this front page to be so interesting I think carried through. Well done, Jordan Johnson.

**John:** One other suggestion for how you can save some space on the page. On the top of Page 3, Evelyn has two lines. She goes, “Thank you for helping. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.” Then there’s two lines of scene description before we get to another Evelyn line, “Let me say a quick word over the food. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you two.” Parentheticals, takes their hands. “Let me say a quick a quick word over the food.” That gives you all you needed to do between those two lines, and it saves you some space on the page.

**Craig:** If you wanted to get across that Maddy was not even looking at Evelyn but just stays looking at the potato salad, you can say, “Maddy, her eyes focused on the potato salad, joins Pam and Evelyn as they hold hands.” Then Evelyn says, “Dear Lord.” There is a way to be a little bit more compressed there. If you’re not running into page issues, I’d rather the space, personally. You’re right, if you are, you need to squeeze some juice out of this. You’ll squeeze way more juice out of it by making the prayer shorter, which you can definitely do.

**John:** That way you won’t have to fluid morph in the cut.

**Craig:** Fluid morph.

**John:** Let’s take a look at the log line. “At the funeral of her best friend, brash and honest 24-year-old Maddy Palmer endures the suffocating etiquette of a traditional wake.”

**Craig:** That’s pretty much what we were getting there.

**John:** It’s interesting that it looks like the whole movie’s maybe at this wake, rather than going on past it. Not what I would’ve expected, but I’m curious what’s going to happen. I would read more pages, so that’s a good sign.

**Craig:** Wakes are notorious for going off the rails, because they are not like the stuffy funeral services. They’re meant to be more of a party and celebration, I guess. I’ve never been to a wake. Drinking is involved, as I recall.

**John:** It can be. I want to thank certainly our three people who submitted these pages, because they were so brave for us to talk through them, but the other 180 people who submitted their pages, because they could’ve been chosen as well. If you have your own pages that you want us to take a look at, you don’t mail them to Megana. Instead, you fill out a form. Go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a little form. You click some buttons. You attach your pdf. We could be talking about this on the next round of Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Megana, thank you for again the extraordinary self-abuse.

**Megana:** Of course. It’s my pleasure.

**Craig:** Make sure you enjoy in self-care.

**John:** Let’s answer one incredibly quick question that I know we actually have the answer to.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Matthew asks, “Hey, so in the new movie Watcher, I saw a credit I’ve never seen before. I Googled it, and I found nothing. It said ‘based on a screenplay by.'”

**Craig:** I feel like we answer this every day.

**John:** “What’s that about?” We did, but we’ll answer on this podcast as well.

**Craig:** “Based on a screenplay by” is a source material credit, the way that “based on a novel” or “based on a play” or “based on a song” is. What it means is that a screenplay was written early in the development of the project, oftentimes beginning the development of the project. That screenplay was not under the auspices of WGA contract. Why? Because it was written for a nonsignatory, or, as is more often the case, it was written for a nonsignatory but overseas. A lot of projects that originate in the UK for instance are not Writers Guild covered. They are rather written in the UK, where Writers Guild doesn’t have jurisdiction.

Then it gets either brought into another company, another company buys that thing from the first company, or, again more likely, the people developing it say, “Oh, we want to hire John August to rewrite this.” John only works under WGA contract, so now, lo and behold, boop, WGA contract. WGA credits, “written by,” “screenplay by,” “screen story by,” “story by,” all of those are a result of our collective bargaining agreement. They are available only to people that work under the Writers Guild collective bargaining agreement and not to anyone else. “Based on a screenplay by” means the first or early screenplay was not covered by the WGA.

**John:** Exactly. It could be that this screenplay was 40 years old but overseas. If it was written under WGA contract, even for Warners back in the day, it would still be part of this [inaudible 00:56:35] title.

**Craig:** Yes. We will answer this question many, many more times.

**John:** Many, many more times. Time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a book. It is The Secret History of Mac Gaming by Richard Moss. Craig, it’s a book I think you’ll enjoy.

**Craig:** Looking at the website.

**John:** It’s 480 pages long. It’s a big, thick, yellow book, comes out of the UK. It’s not new. I think it was first published in 2017, but this updated version has new more good stuff in it, or more new good old stuff in it. I had my Macintosh quite early on. I played a lot of games on Macintosh. Reading this book, I’m just remembering how different everything was, because this is pre-internet. To get a game, you had to have somebody give you that game on a disk. [inaudible 00:57:16] users group or find a shareware. Basically, college campuses were all about trading games back and forth. There are many great titles I remember from back in these days. Dark Castle, fantastic.

**Craig:** Of course. You would also get some quasi-free games if you subscribed to Macworld.

**John:** Macworld, MacUser, both.

**Craig:** There would be a floppy disk actually in the magazine that you could pop out. There were also some, literally just retype the code. People would just list code for stuff that you’d type in.

**John:** I don’t remember that for Macintosh stuff, but my initial Atari-

**Craig:** Apple II or something like that.

**John:** Yeah, Apple II, there were little games you could type in from the magazine. This was after that. The Macintosh was never really designed to be a gaming machine, and yet the people who would love to play games also loved the Macintosh. It was just a very natural fit.

**Craig:** Yes, it was, until at some point suddenly no one was making games for Mac at all, and it was all PC.

**John:** One company would be the one who would port all the big PC titles over to Macintosh, and they would come a year later, and they wouldn’t have the things you would want to see.

**Craig:** It wouldn’t be as good.

**John:** Then eventually, most stuff moved to being… Either you had a gaming PC that was literally a PC or you had a console that could just do so many things that you would never want your home computer to do.

**Craig:** Still to this day, if you’re playing off console, it’s almost certainly a PC, because there are PC rigs that are just built specifically for gaming. That’s great.

**John:** Anyway, this was a nice trip down memory lane. I don’t know how interesting this will be for people who didn’t have any of that firsthand history, because it would be like me reading about old rotary telephones or something. I don’t have that experience.

**Craig:** I do have the experience.

**John:** I do, but I-

**Craig:** I just don’t care.

**John:** I don’t care.

**Craig:** This is more nostalgia than anything else. This definitely feels like one of those nostalgia books.

**John:** The D and D book that you and I both loved, the Art and Arcana book, it’s like that but for Mac games.

**Craig:** Brought to us by my pal Kyle Newman. I have two Cool Things this week, both related to puzzles. The first is Ryan O’Shea, who was the first and only entry into my solve the Kevin Wald cryptic contest, challenge. By cryptic, I mean cryptics, multiple puzzles, three of them in fact, all extraordinarily hard, with so many layers that I believe you and Megana looked at Ryan’s solution and didn’t even understand the solution.

**John:** I have no idea.

**Megana:** No way.

**John:** Here’s the subject line on this email. “Have uncouth mercy, but not for me, to at its core deweaponize jerk Craig’s jigsaw alt.”

**Craig:** Let me translate, as I did for you guys. “Have uncouth mercy” means… Uncouth is a prompt to anagram. Anagram the word mercy, but not for me, so take M-E out of mercy, and anagram R-C-Y to C-R-Y. Then “to at its core deweaponize,” go to the core of the word deweaponize, which is the letter P. That is the letter directly in the middle of the word deweaponize. Now we have C-R-Y-P. “Jerk.” A synonym for a jerk is a tic, T-I-C. “Cryptic.” Then the definition part, “Craig’s jigsaw alt,” meaning cryptic puzzles are my alternative to jigsaws, which are not puzzles at all. Ryan’s solution was perfect and perfectly complete. He did a fantastic job. He did suggest that I’ve ruined him somehow. I’m glad. Good. I hope you’re ruined permanently, Ryan. Why should I be the only one? No, you did a wonderful job. I’m so proud and pleased.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Then my second Cool Thing is coming up. It just passed if you’re listening to this on a normal Tuesday. You still can access it. You still have time to get your name on the list of completionists. Mark Halpin, a friend of mine and perhaps the most, what I would say, elegant puzzle constructor in the world, meaning he himself not that elegant. No, he is, but his puzzles are elegant. Every year, with the exception of last year, every year for Labor Day weekend, he releases something he calls a Labor Day Extravaganza, which is a suite of usually somewhere around 10 puzzles, all which then feed into a meta puzzle. This is a pretty standard puzzle hunt kind of thing. His puzzles are so beautifully done. They are always wrapped together thematically by some kind of interesting narrative device, typically relating to stories, folklore, and mythology from various different cultures. He’s covered pretty much every culture I can think of.

His latest is called Cross Purposes. It launched, past tense, at 1 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, September 3rd. It is free, although there is an opportunity to tip him. I strongly encourage you to do so, because it’s not easy to build these things, and particularly not easy to build things as beautiful as a Mark Halpin Labor Day Extravaganza.

**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilleli. Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send your longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the Three Page Challenges that we discussed today. You’ll find transcripts there and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and they’re great, including the new Scriptnotes Bon Jovi T-shirt. You’ll find this at Cotton Bureau. When you get those in and ordered, you can wear them to our live shows that are coming up. 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 senior year. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Senior year, that is our topic. It is the final year of high school in the US, both for our daughters, and a point of life that is frequently dramatized in movies. You see that a lot. There’s a movie I’m trying to set up which is all about senior year, because it’s such a big transition year. You are leaving one part of your life and moving on to this other part. It feels like a funeral for your younger self. Craig, what’s your recollection of senior year?

**Craig:** You could feel that there was a line that you were leaving a place where a lot of the challenge was to see if you could get into a good college. For a lot of people, senior year is also… You’re going to be confronted by having that breakup with that boyfriend or that girlfriend. You’re going to be driving to school instead of being driven to school. You are enough of an adult where you have access to certain things you didn’t have before, but not enough of an adult to… You can vote, but you can’t smoke, although you do. You feel like you’re on the verge of freedom, and you’re also getting away from home. That may very well be the next thing. This is your last hurrah with, for a lot of people, friends they’ve had since they were in kindergarten.

My daughter has gone to school in the La Cañada School District, which is a public school district where we live. She’s been in the public school system from kindergarten all the way through this year, her senior year. She has friends that she’s known since she was six. That’s a whole thing. It’s just so many transitions. The stuff that life fires at you and the speed with which it fires it at you when you are 17 or 18 is just astonishing.

**John:** I’m definitely noticing it’s the last firsts of a lot of things. It’s her last first day. It’s going to be the last musical that they’ll do at that school. It’s going to be the last time a lot of these things are going to happen. While there are some senior traditions, things that my daughter’s school always does, like the last day rituals and a senior trip, it’s recognizing that this is the final time certain things are going to happen is even more monumental for her.

**Craig:** I think as the year goes on, my daughter will be feeling this more and more. It’s easy now, because they just went back. They just went back, I don’t know, a couple weeks ago. As we get closer and closer to May, yeah, it’s going to be all sorts of stuff happening. It becomes almost like a yearlong celebration. Megana, you are way closer to senior year of high school than John or I. What do you remember, and how did you feel?

**Megana:** All of the things of feeling like you are on top and like you are like big dog on campus, but then I remember feeling so anxious about this looming question of what’s going to happen next year. I’m not going to have my friends or family around me. Where am I going to go to college? I feel like that question was looming over the horizon for the entire year in a way that maybe was the first time that I really experienced anxiety.

**Craig:** That was the last time, I’m sure.

**Megana:** Yeah, one and done.

**John:** Talk about that anxiety, because you were thinking about what’s going to happen next year, what colleges you’re going to get into. Once you knew where you were going to go to college, the stakes were suddenly much lower, weren’t they?

**Megana:** Amy is also applying to colleges. Any time she asks me for questions, I’m like, “Please don’t follow my example,” because I applied to too many schools, because I couldn’t make any decisions. I applied to them literally in the minutes before the application shut down. Then with Harvard, I got in. I think I got in on April 1st. I remember telling people, and they were like, “Oh, sick joke,” because everyone assumed I was just pulling an April Fools.

**John:** Oh, man.

**Craig:** Were you stupid? Was that why? Were they like, “Oh my god, Megana is the dumbest person we know.”

**Megana:** I also love April Fools. I think that’s the bigger component.

**Craig:** That may be it. Got it.

**Megana:** I was just so last minute on everything that I feel like I… I feel like that has continued throughout my life, where it’s like, I don’t know how much I got to enjoy it, because I was putting off decisions for so long.

**John:** Craig, did you encounter senioritis?

**Craig:** No, because we had been terrified by possibly urban legends, possibly not, of kids who had blown their last semester of high school and then the college rescinds the offer. The colleges said, when I got into college, they were like, “Yeah, just so you know, of course, we will be reviewing your final grades. Make sure that they’re… ” You’re like, “Oh god, I don’t want to fumble.” Also, I was in a race. I was in a valedictorian race. I couldn’t let up. Couldn’t let up.

**Megana:** Did you win the race?

**John:** Did you win?

**Craig:** No. I was the salutatorian.

**Megana:** Which is the cooler torian.

**Craig:** I think so. It was down to 100ths of a point or whatever. This is all stupid, by the way. If you find yourself currently as a senior in a race, it doesn’t matter, unless you’re really good at giving speeches. Then you’ll get some love for a good speech. I kept it on. I kept the heat on, but without the panic of, oh no, the unknown. I had a sense, “Okay, this is where I’m going to school. This is what it’s going to be.” Then you get the whiplash of having gone from the top of the heap in your high school to once again being a nobody that doesn’t know anything and is at the bottom of the pecking order when you get to college. The difference though when you get to college is… You can get razzed by the upperclassmen going into junior high or to high school. In college, no one cares. It’s the recognition you’re never going to be that little kid who’s getting picked on again. That just all goes away.

**Craig:** Yes, that part goes away. You’re not going to get bullied. I do recall, as a young heterosexual male, that there was definitely a certain kind of sexual politics going on where freshman heterosexual males were… It was just tougher. It was tougher. All the girls were looking upwards, and so you had to hustle. (singing) I did. I did. You know why?

**John:** You did, and you met your wife.

**Craig:** I did, I met my wife, although that wasn’t until I was a junior, so I had a few years of hustling. Then she put a ring on it.

**John:** Aw. I literally had one foot out the door my senior year because I was going to… Basically I had enough credits to graduate early. I only had to go to school in the mornings.

**Megana:** What?

**John:** I went to classes in the mornings, and then I took a class at CU Boulder in the afternoons. I was only halfway on campus anyway. I was running the high school paper. I don’t know, it was a good transition out. It worked really well for me. I felt like I was already leaving before I was officially leaving.

**Craig:** Interesting. Interesting.

**John:** Really Mike was the same situation. My husband was taking classes at OSU during his senior year too. We both had a situation where we really weren’t full-time high school students senior year.

**Craig:** He went to The Ohio State University?

**John:** The Ohio State University.

**Craig:** That’s one of the dumbest things.

**John:** It is one of the dumbest things. It has to be continuously mocked.

**Craig:** The. Please.

**Megana:** I feel like I can’t sit here and let this continue. It is The Ohio State University.

**Craig:** It is, because, what, there are other ones that are pretending to be Ohio State University, but we are The Ohio State University? Those are ripoff Ohio State Universities. Where are the other ones? There are no other ones.

**Megana:** There’s Ohio University.

**John:** Are there other OSUs that are not the one in Columbus, and so it’s only the one in Columbus is The Ohio State University?

**Craig:** No, there’s just The Ohio State University.

**Megana:** I was always under the impression that it was because of Ohio University that they did that. There’s Oregon State University.

**John:** Why would that work?

**Craig:** Why don’t they just underline the word State, Ohio State University? No, they stick the word The on it, which no one else does, for good reason.

**John:** Maybe we should be The Scriptnotes Podcast.

**Craig:** That’s a perfect analogy. Welcome to The Scriptnotes Podcast. That’s just ridiculous. The odds are that neither one of us survive to see October based on what we just did, because man, I’ll tell you, Ohio fans, phew.

**John:** That’s why we keep these conversations in the Premium feed, so at least we’re getting money for the hate coming our way.

**Craig:** Yes, there will be hate coming our way, and also long emails. Oh my god, so many long emails. “This is why,” blah blah blah, blah blah blah. I’m already making fun of your email. Don’t send it.

**John:** The end of high school is also graduation. Craig, did you have a good high school graduation?

**Craig:** I did. High school graduation went well.

**John:** Did you have to give a salutatorian speech?

**Craig:** I did. I gave a salutatorian-

**John:** What was your topic?

**Craig:** For the life of me, I cannot remember.

**John:** Do you have it written down anywhere?

**Craig:** Not anymore. It was written down, but we’re talking about something that I think I probably wrote it by hand and then typed it into my Macintosh and then printed it on my Brother Daisywheel printer. Oh, Megana, you never knew the joys of a Daisywheel printer.

**Megana:** I’m totally lost here.

**John:** Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

**Craig:** Basically, it was like an electric typewriter. You would say, okay, print this. It would pull all the text into its memory. Then there was a wheel, a disc, a plastic disc, and at the tips of it were the letters. It would spin and hammer the letter. It was like the world’s fastest typist. It was loud and so much slower than a laser printer, not even close. I probably did that. Where it went… I tried to erase my past as best I could.

**John:** We’ve noticed that. We have video footage of Ted Cruz from his freshman year. I wonder if somebody filmed Craig’s salutatorian speech.

**Craig:** I think that’s wonderful.

**John:** If someone who’s listening can track that down, that would’ve been from 1989?

**Craig:** Eight.

**John:** ’88.

**Craig:** That was spring of 1988 in Freehold, New Jersey. If somebody has the video of my salutatory address, we’d love to see it. If you have it and it’s on VHS, we’ll gladly pay for the transfer.

**John:** Good stuff. Craig, Megana, thank you for a good senior year.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you. See you next week.

**John:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

Links:

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* [Things I Think Are Awesome: Hunger Stones and Stability, Lynn Cherny’s substack](https://arnicas.substack.com/p/titaa-33-hunger-stones-and-stability?utm_source=email)
* [Made-Up Words Trick AI Text-To-Image Generators](https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/made-up-words-trick-ai-text-to-image-generators) Discover Magazine
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* [Netflix turns 25](https://deadline.com/2022/08/netflix-turns-25-cues-up-nostalgia-reel-for-its-red-envelope-days-1235101238/)
* [HBO Max Cynthia Littleton for Variety](https://variety.com/2022/biz/news/hbo-max-wb-discovery-content-remove-inventory-1235352588/)
* [Secret History of Mac Gaming](https://secrethistoryofmacgaming.com/)
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* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/565standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Julia Turner: Hello, and welcome. My name is neither John August nor –

Craig Mazin: Craig Mazin.

Julia: But this is Episode 516 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. My name is Julia Turner, and I’m a deputy managing editor at the Los Angeles Times, and a co-host of Slate’s Culture Gabfest Podcast. And John and Craig have invited me here today to mark the 10th anniversary of Scriptnotes, 10 years –

Craig: Whoa.

Julia: By interviewing them about their first decade in podcasting. Hi, guys.

Craig: Hi.

John: Hello. Hi, Julia Turner.

Julia: I’m so honored to be here. This is a dream come true.

Craig: Oh, well, I would imagine the honor should be ours as you’re a legitimate journalist, and we are not.

John: Not even close.

Julia: We’ll get to your journalistic similarities later on in this conversation.

Craig: Hmm.

John: Hmm, all right.

Julia: Today, I’ll be grilling John and Craig about the legend and lore of Scriptnotes. And I’ll also be presenting them with some brilliant listener questions about the history of the show. Then we’ll have some listener follow up featuring a real life Scriptnotes love story.

Craig: Whoa.

Julia: And for our bonus segment, we’ll ask how would this be a movie about the first 10 years of Scriptnotes?

John: Oh, god, I’ve got some casting suggestions, so cool. Do stay tuned.

Julia: Might be low on pop, but I think there’s a couple ways to play it. We’ll get into it.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: Before we dig in, I should clarify for your listeners that my primary qualification for this gig is years of obsessive listening to Scriptnotes, which has made it really, really fun this past week to see how Scriptnotes works behind the scenes. Listeners will not be surprised to learn that when I say John and Craig have invited me here, I mean that John has invited me here. Craig did you know that I would be here until this very moment.

Craig: I knew that you would be here at some point. Oh, boy, that’s so true.

Julia: It all works exactly the way it sounds like it works.

Craig: Yes.

Julia: I also got to take a look at the show’s infamous WorkFlowy doc frequently referred to on the podcast.

Craig: Hmm, yes.

Julia: And I have to say it reveals John’s robot tendencies, like –

Craig: Thank you.

Julia: Beautifully. John, having invited me to come in and interview you in the document had laid out a whole set of things that perhaps I might want to cover, and a loose order and also some intro text, all of which I think is –

Craig: You get it? You get it now?

Julia: Intended to be very generous and welcoming. But I –

Craig: Yeah, you know –

Julia: I’m allowed to tease you, John, because the joke on my podcast is that I’m the robot. So from one robot to another, I salute you.

Craig: John used to write these things in machine language. So it was just hexadecimals.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And I just begged him, I said, “John, please, please, let’s put it in human language.” And he did. He got a new compiler. It’s now in human language. I love it.

John: Absolutely. I, I try to just map out like the shape of the show. So that it feels like, oh, okay, this is how we’re going to get through it. But I would say like over the course of 10 years, I’ve tended to write more and more in the actual Workflowy about like the things I’m going to say just because I’m not a great spontaneous speaker. It’s just the secret truth behind Scriptnotes. And so I just love having things to look at and read off of.

Craig: Whereas I don’t like to prepare anything. And I sometimes don’t know how my sentences will end when I’m three quarters of the way in.

Julia: Well, I’m going to take some but not all of John’s suggestions. And judging by the fact that you don’t seem to have looked at the Workflowy yet, Craig L., my questions will be surprises for you. So –

Craig: I love surprises. Yep.

Julia: We can dig in. I’m going to start with a few questions about the history of the show. And then we can move on to discuss its impact on the world and also on you guys personally. And then if we have time, we’ll do maybe a lightning round of –

Craig: Oh.

Julia: Some questions on the mechanics of the show and a few wildcards. There’s a lot to get through.

Craig: Yay.

John: I’m excited.

Julia: But let’s start with the zoom out. First, congratulations on 10 years of podcasting.

John: Thank you.

Julia: And, John, why did you start the show?

John: I’ve been writing this blog for years and years and years, the johnaugust.com blog, answering questions about screenwriting. And it’s just a monologue when you’re a blogger. You’re just talking to the void. And for a while I had comments turned on so people could answer back, but I hated comments so I turned them all off. Craig had his own blog that he gave up at a certain point. And I just decided, like, rather than have me talking, us talking together would probably be better. And I was listening to a bunch of podcasts that I liked, tech podcasts, but also like the Slate Culture Gabfest and Political Gabfest, and it’s like, oh, we should do something like that, which is just me and Craig talking. So I pitched the idea to him, and he had no idea what I was talking about but said, “Sure, we could try that.”

Craig: I thought for sure he had made a mistake. But he meant to call someone else but he called me. So I said, “Yeah.”

Julia: Did – by the way. John, were there backups? Like if Craig said no, were there other advice-dispensing screenwriters out there?

Craig: Great question.

Julia: Or was there anyone you asked before Craig who shut you down we’ve never heard about?

Craig: Oh, yeah, that’s a better question? That’s a better question. I like that one.

John: Craig was the first person I asked. I don’t think I had a backup list because I didn’t really have a fully formed idea of what it was even going to be but I just felt like he’d be the right person to talk with. But Olean and I were kind of friendly at that point, so she would have been somewhere in there. Derek Haas and I knew each other. So there were probably some backup contenders. But I, honestly, I don’t think I would have done it if Craig had said no.

Craig: Hmm, aww.

Julia: Craig, why did you say yes? You make a lot of noise about how you don’t know what podcasts are still practically?

Craig: I didn’t. Yep. No.

Julia: And certainly not then.

Craig: I didn’t.

Julia: So why – what was in it for you?

Craig: Well, in terms of knowing what podcasts were, it didn’t really matter because I trusted John. He was very web-forward is how I would put it at the time. And in fact, I had called John early on when I was putting my blog together just to have some technical questions about blog design and things like that. So I had been working on this blog, and it had been a bit draining. It had become a thing during the strike. It was a raucous bar of comments during the strike. And the Wall Street Journal wrote it up, and it got unwieldy and drifted apart from its purpose. And so, I – and also, you know, we write. So we write for a living and then I had to like –

John: Yeah.

Craig: Suddenly felt like, oh, my god, in this like, job, I had given myself that I don’t make any money off of to write more. So when John called it was the perfect time because it didn’t involve writing. And also, you know, John was like, he’s a big shot, you know, and I thought, well, you don’t say no to a big shot.

John: So I would say, interestingly, at the start of this podcast, I was a higher profile screenwriter than Craig was, and Craig had made movies, but I had a bigger sort of platform and was probably better known. I knew that Craig actually knew a ton about the industry. He and I worked together to try to set this writer’s deal at Fox. And so, I knew sort of how his brain worked. And I really thought he would have strong good opinions that were not exactly the same as my opinions and it would be a good conversation.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: You know, you both mentioned the blogging and the internet writing you were doing with sort of a similar audience of working screenwriters and aspiring screenwriters in mind. And, you know, the listener engagement in the show is such a big part of the show now. What’s the difference between that relationship you had sort of in the aughts web with written commenters versus the teens and 20s audio internet of audio listeners? What are the differences, similarities?

Craig: Yeah. Tell them about our commenters, John.

John: Yeah. So, I mean, comments on blog posts are just such a scourge because like, they’re going to be positive ones, but then just people will just write paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs. It’s like, “Oh, no, this is my space. It’s not your space.” And so, just be cool. Or you try to have like living room rules. The good thing about a podcast is like, we only can invite people in that we want to invite in even when we do live shows, we will stop a questioner if they’re just being a jerk. And the fact that it is really a conversation that we can invite you into versus you can just pile on at times is, I think, the big difference between writing online versus being on a podcast.

Craig: Yeah, it’s a bit like the difference between curation and moderation. All you can do on a blog is just go, “Oh, god, stop it or you’re booted,” but then they just change their name and come back and keep acting like jerks. And we can curate exactly what we present here. Which, weirdly enough, turns out that’s what people like. They think they want just unfettered access, but what they actually do want is a connection to a platform that has some kind of moderation so that there’s quality control.

Julia: All right, so it’s early days. You’re doing this show. You’re figuring out the format, and you’re figuring out whether you’re having an impact. How did you first begin to appreciate that you were finding an audience? Like what were the early inklings that this was not just you talking into microphones and in vain?

John: Well, with podcasts, you can see sort of how many people are downloading the show. So you get some sense of listenership through that, although in the early days, it was really hard to get good metrics. And like early podcasts really had no sense of how many people were listening to them. Now, you can get a better sense. For me, it was I think, probably when we went to the Austin Film Festival and did a live show there. And really could see like, oh, my gosh, these people know who we are. And they’re showing up because they do listen to the show. That was the first time I really felt the impact of it. Craig, did you have an earlier time?

Craig: No, no, I mean, to this day, I still repeatedly am shocked when people say they listen to the show. I know that people listen to the show. I don’t have access to those metrics. I mean, I suppose if I ask John nicely, he would tell me. But he just knows that I don’t really care. Like every now and then I’ll be like, “How many people do actually listen to the show?” And he’ll tell me and I’ll go, “No,” and then I’ll forget. But –

Julia: Wait. Hold on. How many people do actually listen to the show?

Craig: Yeah, how many people do listen to the show, John?

John: Megan is also on the line, so she can probably tell us, give us some specific figure, but it’s around 40,000, I want to say. Megan, correct me if I’m wrong?

Megana Rao: Yeah, it’s about 40,000 a week and then –

Craig: Good god.

Megana: Like, looking at the monthly metrics, like each episode usually gets to about 80,000.

Craig: What? Okay, well, that’s terrifying.

John: And I think the thing that’s been most surprising to me is I assumed that it would just be L.A. people who would really be listening to the show because it’s so Hollywood-centered and yet it turns out we have a lot of listeners in Europe. We Have listeners in Antarctica. We have listeners everywhere who are listening to the show because they want to write things for their own countries or to come to here. And also a ton of people listen to the show who have no interest in writing at all. And, I mean, Julia Turner, you’re not a screenwriter. So there should be no reason for you to listen to the show.

Craig: Yeah.

John: But you listen to the show, which is just terrific.

Julia: No. And I now edit the entertainment coverage of the L.A. Times. So your discussions are relevant to things that the journalists I work with cover. But that was much less true when I started listening to the show, you know, back when I was running Slate. So –

John: I’m sorry to play host here for a second, but do you know why you started listening to the to the podcast? I’m curious.

Julia: You’re allowed to play host on your own show anytime you want, John.

Craig: Right. Can I?

Julia: Well, I think Andy Bowers, who ran podcast at Slate, put me on to it. And I just love the way you guys, I mean, I am a culture critic on that show, right? So I’m, you know, the scourge of Craig’s mind, one of those baddies.

Craig: Yes, correct.

Julia: But I think it’s really interesting when you’re conducting criticism to know about how things are made, and why they’re made and what the mechanics are behind them. And so, I love learning about that from you guys. I loved the rapport, I mean, any chat show that you listen in on regularly, and I can say this, because I do one is just basically like a book club you like to go to where you don’t get to talk, like, you know, you just feel like you’re kind of hanging out with your friends. And I like the way you guys would kibitz and squabble and have interesting insights.

And then maybe it’s because I see parallels in this to journalism, but I love the way you guys balance appreciating screenwriting for the difficult creative art that it is, and knowing that a successful screenwriting career means having a lot of practical skills and –

Craig: Yes.

Julia: Qualities of temperament and comportment, for lack of a better word –

Craig: Mmm.

Julia: That are actually as important to your success as your creative genius. And I feel like you are so generous to the listeners we have who are aspiring screenwriters and encouraging their art while also encouraging them to be steely and practical. And something about that balance and the way you guys talk about screenwriting as a trade and a craft. It really appealed to me. I think there’s –

Craig: Thank you.

Julia: Aspects of that in journalism too where it’s a lot of people are writers and thinkers, you know, but got to turn things in on time. So long answer.

Craig: That is the problem for all of us, right. No, that’s a beautiful answer. And I think what I found along the way, it’s certainly, when I said yes to John, it really was because I admired him. And I thought, this sounded like fun. But what I found along the way was a natural instinct to save people from the trouble I had seen. And this business is full of trouble.

There is so much trouble in our business that if you’re a certain kind of person, and in this case, we’re both guys, there were layers of trouble we weren’t even seeing. So there’s so much trouble. And there’s so much trouble for writers and there particularly is a lot of trouble for writers in features. And so, trying to just save people some of the misery and strife, and also to debunk so much of the cottage industry of nonsense that had sprouted up to add insult to injury by taking money from people and preying on their fears and their ignorance and their worry and their desire and ambition. That felt great. I mean, the part of doing the show that makes me the happiest is the part where we provide this to new people, like you’re showing up, you’re new, maybe you don’t look like the sort of person that Hollywood has hired as a screenwriter before. There are no books that are really going to teach you how this business works. As far as I know, we’re the only game in town when it comes to telling you the truth. Uh, because Hollywood is very ashamed of the truth, and for a good reason.

John: I would say at the start of the podcast, I felt like there was an objective truth that we could sort of share, like this is our experience. This is how it actually really works. And I think one of the sort of journeys over 10 years is recognizing that we sort of don’t know everything and that our experience rising as screenwriters in the ‘90s is not going to match necessarily writers’ experience now, and that we sort of needed to invite more people onto the show to talk to us about their actual specific experiences, be it like genres that we’re not writing or for mediums that we’re not writing in that I think we just both developed a little bit more curiosity about how the other parts of this industry work.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: Yeah, I’ve noticed that. And actually, that brings me to one question I wanted to ask, which is sort of how did the show find its format over time? And how has that evolved? You mentioned bringing in more people, but how did you find the right mix between interview episodes, advice episodes, you know, Three Page Challenges, all of the different kinds of recurring rubrics you have, how did that evolve?

Craig: Well, mostly John, I mean, I’ll tell you, the Three Page Challenge thing came out of something that I used to do on this old board called Done Deal Pro. And it had its roots in a basic theory, which is, ah, I could probably tell you, I think it was at the time five pages. I can tell you in five pages if you’re going to make it or not, because it’s just, you could tell, right? Like there are people, they just write five pages and you go, “No, no, no, no, do something else, just do something else.” But out of that came this interesting notion that there is a lot you can learn just from drilling down into a very small amount of pages.

The vast majority of the format of the show is John’s conception. In my normal life. I’m a bit of a bossy person. I’m a producer, I’m a director, I run shows. I’m in charge. I’m alpha. It is so lovely to just – I’m even the DM in our Dungeons and Dragons.

John: Oh, yes, he is.

Craig: But it is so nice to not be that guy and to let somebody else who’s incredibly competent, and good, be that person. And I can follow. I love following John’s lead on the show. It is my place on the show, and I’m extraordinarily comfortable with it. I’m a sidekick. I’m Ed McMahon.

John: Which, in terms of the format, I think I originally sort of pattern them off of the Slate show, so that the Gabfests tend to have three topics per week, and then the equivalent of a One Cool Thing, our inaudible recommendation at the end, and then some boilerplate. And so initially it was just that, but then when Craig had this idea of like, “Oh, what if we would like a Three Page Challenge?” “Like, oh, that’s great.” And that became our first like recurring statement, so every once in a while we’d come back to that. And then How Would This Be a Movie became one. We’ve tried other things like This Kind of Scene. Listener questions were always really kind of from the start were an important part of it. So it just started to evolve that way.

In terms of bringing on guests, originally, they were just like our friends, like people we knew and we’d bring them on. And I think increasingly over the last couple of years, we’ve just reached out to people we don’t know and we bring on complete strangers onto the show, because we want to learn about their experience.

Julia: We actually have a listener question related to guests from listener Todd. Megan, do you want to cue that up?

Megana: Todd asks, “I’d love to know from both John and Craig who’s the dream guest who they’ve yet to land?”

Craig: Mmm, mmm.

John: Mmm. The White Whales. I just saw the Matrix trailer and we’ve always talked about having the Wachowskis on. And we’ve never been able to make that happen. But I feel like we could get Lana Wachowski on to talk Matrix. That’d be amazing.

Craig: I mean, I would love to. It would be a lot of weird fanboy gushing for me. You know, who I would love to get on the show, and maybe I just haven’t asked her and I should, is Shonda Rhimes.

John: Well, with Shonda Rhimes, we tried it for many times, so I think we actually got pretty close to Shonda Rhimes once for a live show.

Craig: I see. And then she was sort of like, “Nah, I got 12 shows I got to do.”

John: Yeah, so it becomes like a publicist thing. And if her publicists gets involved –

Craig: Oh, yeah.

John: As a guest, it’s just doomed. We just know that it’s doomed.

Craig: Right.

John: But I think Shonda is great. James Cameron, obviously a talented filmmaker, but it’s hard to overstate sort of how important he was as a screenwriter for us coming up, just like sort of how much he shaped like the early ‘90s action writing is sort of a James Cameron thing. So I’d love to have him on the show.

Craig: Uhm, it’s a good one.

John: Any other folks that we’ve just kind of always had on our dream list?

Craig: I mean, you know, I don’t think about the show much in between. I’m so tired.

John: Yeah. So there you go.

Julia: All right. If you guys were starting the show today, what would you do differently?

John: I don’t know if it would be just me and Craig, just to be fully honest, two White guys in their 50s. I think we would have reached out so it’d be a three-person show rather than a two-person show. It’s just my guess.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, what’s the joke? What do you call a group of White men? A podcast. So, just like, yeah, I’m sure that’s true. That makes sense. And, you know, in, I guess, in a way, we are kind of like a legacy act, you know.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: I mean, by and large, when people put things together these days, I think in a reasonable and appreciable way, they’re trying to present a diverse group of voices. So you don’t put together a panel of all White people. You don’t put together a panel of all men. You don’t put together a panel of all people in their 50s. So we’re sort of a bit of a legacy act. And, you know, I’m okay with that. I think what is important, if you are a legacy act, is that you keep up and you also open the doors as much as you can.

One of the things that we’ve done over the years that I’m really proud of, is, as John said, bring people onto the show that aren’t the traditional voices. We try and feature people from all different walks of Hollywood life, not just successful people, but also up and comers and also assistants. We’ve gotten involved in how people are paid in our business, including not writers, the Writers Guild spends a lot of time figuring out what writers should be paid. Nobody but us, as it turned out, was worrying about what assistants were getting paid, other than the assistants I mean to say. And it was really gratifying to kind of connect with the assistants and work on that with them.

So we do our best to kind of help move the ball forward because we know the world has changed, and for the better. And I’ve changed for the better. I think just being part of it and being exposed to different people, it helps you see things from other points of view. Hollywood is, and has always been, an utter mess, but it is getting better. And I can’t say that that was always the case. For a while, I guess, when you know, John and I started at the same time in the mid-’90s, stretching through really to, you know, about 2016 or ‘17, it was just sort of a flatline of bad. And then there’s this sort of fairly impressive upward curve towards better. I’m not going to say good, but I’ll say better. And so, it’s been nice to at least go along with that and do what we can as a couple of older White guys. And yeah, I agree with John. If we had started it today, I don’t think it would be him and me. It would be him and someone else. Let’s face it.

Julia: I want to hear more actually about the work you guys did on assistant pay. I mean, I think you guys haven’t been shy on the show ever about expressing opinions about things in Hollywood that were terrible or should change. In addition to the assistant pay issue, you guys have tried to reform the way executives give notes and offered to give them advice on how to make their notes better.

Craig: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Julia: And, your podcast, I would argue, played a big role in kind of airing some of the concerns and grievances about agency behavior that presaged the WGA talent agency fight. You know, I’m curious how you think about that power you wield. In what ways do you think Scriptnotes has changed the world of screenwriting?

Craig: Geez.

John: Geez. I don’t know if we’ve changed the world of screenwriting. Because there’s always screenwriters, I mean, who have no idea that I host a podcast or this podcast even exists. What I do think we’ve done in our sort of limited way is because enough people listen to the show in the town, if we’re talking about an issue, at least someone is talking about that issue in their ears, and they’re thinking about it. And they might make some different decisions about what they’re going to do. And so, be those executives who invited us in to do that Notes on Notes session.

Or as we’re talking about assistant pay, for me personally, it was like recognizing my own blinders in terms of how I thought about assistants, having been an assistant, how I thought sort of like, oh, this is where you start and this is how you grow. And this is how it all works and not recognizing that the system was really fundamentally broken, and that I hadn’t been sort of inflation adjusting the expectations about sort of how that all works. And so, we weren’t the first people to discover that assistants were underpaid. I wanted to stress that. But we certainly were not shy to use our platform to push people to pay attention and to think about the ways they’re paying assistants and how they’re treating assistants to make sure that we could make some progress on that front.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah, I think we are both aware that people listen. At least, if I’m not aware of how many people listen, I’m aware that there are people that make decisions and run things who listen. And we, I think, handle that quasi influence fairly well. We don’t really go out of our way to change the world. But when we see things that seem pretty much like slam dunk easy ones, we go for it.

The nice thing about this podcast is that it is entirely pro social. This is not a, you know, profitable enterprise for me. I just want to underline that. So, we’re doing this because it’s a good thing to do. And when you’re doing something that is just for good, it is remarkably freeing, especially when you work in Hollywood where you start trying to do things for good. And then everybody gets in there and sort of throws a little muck on it and tries to steer it towards what would put money in their pockets, which I, you know, that’s a business, I get it. This is not.

So when things come along that we can kind of activate on, it’s really lovely to be able to do it. And we do it fearlessly. I was never concerned that any agency was going to yell at me for saying that they should pay their assistants more. You know, I had some interesting conversations in the days leading up to the divorce between the Writers Guild and the agents, with my agency, about the things I said about them, you know, and I stood by my words.

Julia: What kind of conversations?

Craig: Well, they took exception to some of my assertions and opinions. And I stood by them because they were correct. But it was a good conversation. And I just said, guys, this is how this is going to go. And this is the way the world is, and you can’t keep doing this the way you did it before. And there has to be an answer. I don’t know what that answer is. And I don’t know how to get to that answer. But I urge you to get to it. Because I would like to come back to my agency, because I do like my agency a lot. And I like my agent a lot.

And then, the nice thing about having a show like this is that I tend to get yelled at by everybody. So then I got yelled at by writers, because once we did sort of hit our divorce, and occasionally I would question the way the Writers Guild was doing things then the writers would yell at me. So if I’m being yelled by both sides, it’s a good day. And I have a feeling that for John, when no one is yelling at him on either side, it’s a good day for him. It’s just like we’re different that way.

John: Yeah, we are different that way. I’ll say one of the things about being a screenwriter, especially a feature writer is you just have so little control over the finished product. We’re there at the very start. And we are building the engine of the thing. And then it goes off. It takes off. And then we sort of see the finished movie. And maybe we had some input, but we didn’t have all the input we’ve wanted.

For me, what’s been great about Scriptnotes is every week like, it’s the show I want it to be. And so if I wasn’t taking notes from anybody else, it’s like, this is the conversation we had. And it’s what we talked about. And it’s not beholden to anybody else. We are not part of any network. We’re not part of any sort of overall structure. We don’t have to make money. It’s just the thing we wanted to make. And to be able to do that every week has been great. And to have a generation of producers who sort of come up through it and helped us do it, it’s been amazing.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So that’s been the real treat is like it’s a structured conversation every week between me and Craig. So it’s like therapy. But also there’s a thing, there’s a tangible thing you can say, oh, we accomplished that this week, and that’s great. Because so often, as a feature writer, you can spend a year on a project that just never happens.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Those pages just disappear.

Julia: That’s so interesting, because that sounds like you’re describing the satisfaction of creation and unfettered creation. Although, part of what strikes me about the role you guys have played in some of these Hollywood conversations is that it’s not the role of being an artist or a creative. You’re sort of quasi-journalistic because you’re reporting things out sometimes. You’re sort of an organizer role because you’re connecting people who have similar grievances sometimes. Sometimes you’re just making observations. Sometimes there’s a reforming zeal, I think would be fair to describe some of the umbrage taken with the agency practices.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

Julia: It’s a place in which you get to wear these other hats, but it sounds like your primary emotional satisfaction is actually the creation of the thing. Is that fair, John?

John: Yeah.

Julia: More to the point, how do you feel about those other roles that are wrapped up within it sometimes?

John: I think the advocacy thing was always there from the start, because, one of the real goals of the show is to debunk a lot of sort of the myths of screenwriting and sort of that everything had to follow the Syd Field formula or that the proper logline was the key to success, just all that sort of nonsense that screenwriters are constantly taught, and to really talk about the actual daily life of a screenwriter and sort of what really goes on and sort of dispel those other things.

Journalistic is sort of an interesting word, because I don’t think we’re reporting that much. We’re sort of reacting to what’s happening. So we will talk about sort of the stuff we see around us. And while we try to be accurate, we try to sort of be fair, I don’t see it fundamentally as a journalistic enterprise. It’s really just a conversation. And it’s hopefully, an entertaining conversation. It’s like, you described being the other person at the bar who’s overhearing a conversation but can’t contribute. That’s sort of what we want people to feel is that these two friends are having this conversation about things that are hopefully interesting to screenwriters and people who are interested in things about screenwriting.

Craig: I know that slogan.

Julia: Okay, fair, you’re not breaking much news unless it’s Craig Mason breaking the news of how many episodes of his next show to write.

Craig: Right, right. Yeah. Yes. Incredible, hot headline.

John: Yeah.

Julia: Do you have examples? I mean, in 10 years of screenwriting, there must be people who had no foothold in the industry who started listening to you 10 years ago –

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: Who now have successful careers, what kinds of interactions have you had with folks who’ve had that story?

John: Yeah, it’s been great. It’s terrific when you hear those success stories, or folks who read the blog, and then listened to the podcast, like Craig’s assistant right now, I guess, was like in high school or college listening to the podcast?

Craig: Yeah, it’s college.

John: It’s just – it’s impossible.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah, we – I do get these stories particularly when there are some sort of large event, if we go to a – if we do a live show or something like that, that’s where people come up and tell you these things. And sometimes it’s overwhelming.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: I don’t quite know what to say. You realize fairly quickly, and you’ve probably encountered this, Julia, because you’ve been doing your own podcast for so long and you have a connection to the public, that people who listen to you, especially for a show that goes on as long as ours has, they have a relationship with you.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You don’t have one with them. But they have one with you. And when you meet them, you are confronted with it. And it’s it can be very beautiful. It can be very emotional at times. There are times where I’m just overwhelmed by the things people say to me, I don’t know what to say in return because you realize that you have silently, and without any awareness, been an important part of another person’s life.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And that’s very gratifying and beautiful.

John: There are people who would drive across the country to come into a live show, which is crazy, but I also sort of get it because we’re talking about things that they’re interested in and they do feel like they know us because they do kind of know us. I mean, Craig and I are careful to keep some stuff out off of the podcast just for some little zone of privacy, but you are hearing our kind of unfiltered opinions. And that can be nice. It’s interesting, like some of the folks who I saw like the first live show, who then I see eight years later in another live show, you see oh, they actually grew up, they changed. They got married. They had kids. That’s kind of cool to see too. When we were just doing blogs, those were little forum posts. People are – you can connect with them. But like when you see them at a live show, oh, that’s that same person. I got to see sort of where they’re at in their life right now.

Julia: All right, we have a listener question from Dana.

Craig: Okay.

Megana: Dana asks, “Is it easier or harder to be a working, meaning paid, screenwriter now than it was 10 years ago?”

Craig: Well, I guess the first question would be feature or television, I’m going to presume feature because she said screenwriter. I think it’s harder. I think it’s harder because there are even fewer movies being made now than they were before. And the movies – where the movies have been expanding have been in the streaming area. I think that salaries have been pushed down quite a bit in those areas. I think a lot of the stuff that’s made is even more than it was 10 years ago, retreads, remakes, reboots, they’re adaptations of toys and things. Paramount just literally said that’s pretty much all we’re going to do just today. So I think it’s harder. And I think that doesn’t necessarily reflect some areas that have gotten better.

What’s gotten better? They are hiring more women. They’re hiring more people of color. The dark lining of the silver cloud there is that it’s the new hires that get paid the least. It’s the new hires that worked the hardest, and in many cases abused by being asked to do more and more work for free. So unfortunately, a lot of the people that are coming in, if they are diverse writers, they’re also being treated poorly. So that’s not a good outcome either.

I am not particularly optimistic about the future of feature screenwriting. It was always the worst place for writers to be in terms of how they were treated. And the way things are going, I don’t see that necessarily getting better. And of note, in the last five negotiations the Writers Guild has had, feature concerns have been minimal. They’ve mostly concentrated on television writers. I know that there’s an effort to at least think about trying to concentrate on feature writers. Problem is the Writers Guild is essentially a TV writers union, by demographics. So bad news feature writers, I don’t think it’s gotten easier. And I’m not sure it’s going to get easier from here, either.

John: So I agree with a lot of what Craig said. But that actually sort of points out like one of the areas of conflict that’s always been on the show is because Craig will say like the WGA doesn’t care about screenwriters and like, oh, I was actually on the board for, a two-year term, and was involved in all these negotiating committees so I actually know sort of the other side of that story, and sort of why these things happen and don’t happen. And so, I get frustrated when Craig says like the WGA doesn’t care because I was elected and I cared then and we did a lot. And so, there has been a lot of stuff that has happened for screenwriters through the WGA, but just not through the contract, and the focus on the MBA negotiation as the sole thing the Writers Guild does for feature writers, I think, is a very limited view.

Craig: I don’t – I don’t think that the Writers Guild doesn’t care about feature writers. I too was on the board and I too did things for screenwriters.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I think that you care about screeners. I think I care about screenwriters. I think some people care about screenwriters. I think the institution is designed to serve the membership. And the membership mostly is not feature writers. Also, feature writer problems are just harder to negotiate.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And they’re tricky.

John: It’s absolutely true. So I think on the pros and cons of being a feature writer now versus when we started is that when Craig and I started, there was a lot of development. So it’s not that more movies were getting made. Also, a lot of movies were being developed. And so you could work for quite a long time on movies that never shot, but you were still getting paid. And that was awesome. Now, for better or for worse, writers are being hired to write stuff for the studios or for the streamers. And those things are only for projects they think are actually going to get made. And so, the jobs you’re getting are these high-pressure cooker things for this thing has to work because it has a slot, it has a thing and it’s just a different environment than what Craig and I grew up in. Things are just changing and because the whole industry has warped itself just to make things for streamers.

Craig: Can I just say that one of the things I like about our show is that we do model, I think, a way to disagree.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Do you know what I mean? Like, we don’t always agree. I think we agree a lot.

John: Oh, yeah.

Craig: I don’t want to present us as Crossfire, but when we disagree, we figure out how to disagree. There’s precious little of that in the world right now. People just yell at each other and then just take sides and become teams and squads and things. And I’ve heard this fed back to us a few times from listeners that they just appreciate that we can disagree with each other respectfully and thoughtfully and that’s nice. I like that we can do that, and that’s a credit to you and to me. I’m going to take half the credit for that.

John: You deserve half the credit as well.

Craig: Thanks.

Julia: I have been part of some podcast fights that have led listeners to write in and be like, “Are you guys okay? Are you still friends?” Have you guys ever had a podcast contretemps that either caused your listeners to worry about your bond and/or actually tested your relationship?

Craig: I mean, we faked one once for our conflict show. That was great.

John: Yeah, the conflict episode. That was really great. That made people really, really nervous. People pulled over there car on the side of the road because they’re like, “Oh, no, they could crash.” Just true confession, during the middle of the agency campaign or sort of early in the agency campaign, it got really uncomfortable between me and Craig. And so when we would need to talk about this stuff on the show, we’d have to sidebar and really figure out, okay, how are we going to talk about this in ways that we can both honestly express what we want to say but doesn’t blow up our relationship or the podcast or everything else around us. And that was probably the hardest time over the 10 years for me doing this podcast was our genuine disagreements about what was happening in the agency campaign.

Craig: Yeah. And a credit to both of us again, because, I have values and I believe in the value of the questioner and challenging authority. I’ve always been that guy. I love dissent. And I’ve always had a weird relationship with the Guild because I love my union. It’s why we do the shows is because John and I both love and care about the status of screenwriters and television writers. So then there’s this organization that sometimes does really good things, and then sometimes just blows it. And I get angry at them. And I get angry at them, in part, because, I’ve also been on the inside as well. And during that whole time, it was challenging, and I appreciated that John was in a really difficult spot. And I think he appreciated that I was in a difficult spot. Because, I’m supposed to be me. And he’s, you know what I mean?

John: Yeah.

Craig: And he’s supposed to be him. And so, we had to negotiate it without feeling like we were abandoning principles or anything like that. And we did. And I will say that, underneath all of it, as dedicated as I am to challenging authority and questioning whether or not things are going the way they should, that John and I have been doing this for a long time. I would never, in any circumstance blow this thing up for that. I would not give the Writers Guild the satisfaction of being the cause of blowing this up. Hell no.

John: But I will say that whole period was probably toughest actually on Megana Rao who had to listen in on those conversations and deal with the stress and anxiety of, like, dad and dad are not getting along, so.

Craig: Yeah. You know what, Megana? It’s okay.

Megana: Thank you so much for acknowledging that because I was sitting here and I was like, this is incredibly triggering for me.

Craig: Aww.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Well, what happened was, we would start to argue about something and then eventually just because psychologically it was beneficial for us, we would triangulate and blame Megana. So, you know, I get it. I get it.

Megana: I do not. I call bullshit on that answer. That’s just not –

Craig: Yeah. No, I don’t. I definitely made that up.

Megana: Since I have invisible relationships with you of a decade long, I can tell.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: Because I know you so well. That’s not what happened.

Craig: Yeah. No, that is not what happened.

Julia: All right. I want to ask you guys a zoomed out question about the state of the industry. And it’s connected a little bit to that, that question about the changing status of feature writers. But just looking back on where the industry was 10 years ago, you launched Scriptnotes 18 months before House of Cards launched on Netflix –

Craig: Oh, wow.

Julia: I believe in the months around your show they were like quietly launching streaming services in Bolivia. But like broadly –

Craig: Wow.

Julia: Streaming was not yet the primary way that American entertainment consumers got their media. You were both pretty firmly film writers, if I’m remembering correctly.

John: Oh, yeah.

Craig: Correct.

Julia: I’d love for you guys to project forward 10 years. I mean, we’re living in a moment where as you guys say, it feels like the TV writer is ascendant and the film writer is under duress. But if you zoom out a level further and look at what the average 18-year-old is doing with their time and how much gaming they’re doing and Twitch they’re watching and how many YouTube personalities they aspire to be rather than movie stars, which they haven’t heard of, and maybe they do or don’t watch sitcoms. Where will screenwriting be in 10 years? How do you think that industry will have changed in 10 years by 2031? And what do you guys imagine your places in it will be?

Craig: Well, you know, my place will be obviously as the emeritus. I will be considered the grandfather of – I have no idea. I don’t know. I think that movies, theatrical, the theatrical experience is in trouble. I think that the combination of COVID, streaming and the dissolution of the Paramount decree is probably going to lead to a large amount of movie theaters being purchased by large corporations like Disney Marvel, Pixar. And they will – you know how Disney has got that lovely theater in Hollywood, El Capitan, I suspect that maybe in 10 years, the theatrical experience will be really more of an extension of the studio theme parkish experience, where there will be Marvel theaters that play Marvel movies and charge a lot of money for them.

I think that the generation coming up will bring their interests forward in terms of the kinds of comedy that shows up, I think that’s where we’ll see at first. My son and daughter’s generation have an entirely different concept of what comedy is. And I love it. I mean, it’s great. We will not recognize it. We will watch it. And as we should, as old people, we will say, “Ah, it’s not funny,” and then they will look at us and say, “You’re old, just go back to watching your Friends reruns old people.” And we will because that is the way of the world.

The structure the business will continue to accelerate along the paths of just piping things directly into your home. And even homes will change. As they build homes, I do think that where you used to have certain things that – like large dining rooms are no longer necessary. They will be eliminated entirely. Nobody needs a dining room. But you will have home theaters. People will just have little rooms with little seats, and a big screen TV. Because the movies are going to your house. It just feels like that’s where it’s going. I can’t imagine that it doesn’t accelerate even more than it has been, especially because you have entire studios like Paramount just giving up. They just gave up officially. Paramount, that made, you know, The Godfather, they’ve given up.

John: I am much more bullish on the future of roughly two-hour movie experiences that are shown outside of the house. I think that is an experience that will still be around in 10 years. I agree with Craig that with the fall of the Paramount consent decree, you’re going to see the big studios buy those things out. But I think people want to leave their house. They want a reason to leave their house and a movie, going to see a movie is a way to do that, especially for a teenager, it’s just the thing – it’s a place you can go and a thing you can do. I think that will continue.

I also don’t think that the home theater thing is going to be such the bonanza because I look at my own kid and she wants to watch stuff on her computer or on her phone. She just doesn’t care about it being on the biggest screen possible. So I don’t know if that persists. But for the writing of it, I think there’s still going to be writers who are writing those two-hour features. There’s going to be a lot of writers writing all the streaming television. I think that will persist and continue. I don’t see a real coming crisis for that.

Where it’s going to change though is like this blurring of lines, we have to talk about video game writing and how video game writing is writing. And it’s very analogous to what we’re doing. I think there’s going to be universe building that requires a tremendous amount of writing. And it’s going to be really murky and awkward to figure out what covers that and when it should be that becomes advertising and promotion writing or copywriting or toy making versus screenwriting. I think it’s all getting blurrier. And that’s only going to persist and continue in the next 10 years.

Julia: Right. I mean, I guess my question is, are the people who write games going to consider themselves screenwriters? Or, you know, the biggest celebrity in my kid’s mind is like some guy on YouTube who narrates his Minecraft world.

John: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Of course, like a Jacksepticeye, that kind of person. Yeah.

Julia: Yeah. And, you know, there’s no writer for that entertainment. And they watch hours of it, and they’re not watching whatever is on – I don’t even know –

John: Yeah.

Julia: What the popular Nickelodeon shows are right now because they don’t watch them or care about them, you know. Like, Are you concerned about the rise of content that’s not written in the way that you guys talk about writing things?

Craig: No. No, nope because it’s different. It’s just different. It is a lovely thing to watch. But to me, when my kids or your kids are watching a Twitch stream, or YouTube, just people putting makeup on YouTube or something, it’s a little bit like when my sister and I were just parked in front of the TV and watched The Brady Bunch, or I Love Lucy, meaning it wasn’t new. It was just sort of there. And it filled time and we enjoyed it. Now that was obviously scripted. This is not. But watching I Love Lucy and watching the karate movies on channel five and watching The Brady Bunch didn’t keep us from wanting new content that was scripted. We did like that. And similarly, I do see – or here’s something that, you know, John knows. So his daughter and my daughter are the same age, and we watch these things sweep through that cohort.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: And so, for whatever reason, what was it last summer?

John: Yeah, Criminal Minds.

Craig: Yeah. Every 15-year-old girl was obsessed with bingeing Criminal Minds. I don’t know why, but they work, which means it still works, right? It still works. And we know that as you get older you do gravitate more toward narratives. That’s always, I think, been the case. For my parents’ generation, they probably got more of their narrative from books, but they also would watch movies that we would find boring. I think that the world of narrative is not only alive and well, it’s thriving. There’s more of it than ever. It’s everywhere. And the people who make it and make money off of it are spending money in ways that we’d never thought was possible. Never. I mean, the amount of money that Amazon is spending on the Lord of the Rings show alone is mind boggling. And it’s not slowing down. And in a good way, the amount of money that they’re spending on reliable show runners who produce quality content is also skyrocketing.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: We will always, as a group of professionals in Hollywood, struggle with income inequality. Our income inequality is even more grotesque than the income inequality in the United States. But one of the things that I think John and I talk about and that I think we should continue to ring this bell as much as we can, is getting the salaries of writing staffs up. We think that the Writers Guild can solve all these problems, but I will point out for the one millionth time, writers are in charge of television writing rooms. It’s the writers who do the hiring. It’s the writers who figure out the budget and allot what they allot. So hopefully, the rising tide will start picking up a few more boats as it rises. But narrative is not going anywhere. If anything, there’s too damn much of it.

John: The other point I would make about 10 years down the road is ultimately, you don’t need a studio with a history and library necessarily to get started in this business. You just need a ton of money and there are people out there with a ton of money. So I think there will be new players that come online and it won’t just be mergers of the existing ones. Other folks are going to come online like Apple did, or Amazon did just because they have so much money they need to do something with that money. So there will be some new names that we – we’re not even thinking of 10 years from now.

Craig: I think Apple is going to buy Netflix.

John: Could be.

Craig: I’m just putting that out there.

John: Yeah, yeah.

Craig: Not, not anytime soon.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Don’t – don’t take that as a stock tip. I’m just saying eventually.

John: Like Peloton will inevitably start doing like scripted series. There are just companies that have big money and who will want to do things and ultimately those people will write those things and hopefully that’ll, you know, Megana.

Megana: Right.

Craig: Oh, no, come on, we can do better than Peloton for Megana.

John: Well, okay, all right. The next step.

Julia: We’re going to – we’re going to check back in 10 years and see whether in fact Apple has bought Netflix and Peloton has started making television shows.

Craig: Yeah, I think we should. Yeah.

Julia: Your predictions are officially recorded here.

Craig: Nice.

Julia: We got so many wonderful listener questions that I think are informed by that dynamic of people who feel like they know you as people and care about you as people and are curious about you as people. And I think we should ask a couple of those before we do our One Cool Things.

Craig: Sure.

Julia: Let’s take a question from John from London.

Megana: John from London asks, “From all of the guests you’ve had over the years, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve applied to your own writing? And what’s the one thing that someone has said that stuck with you?”

John: I am thinking back to Katie Silberman. So I don’t remember what episode she was on. But she came on to talk about her writing on Booksmart. And she prewrites. She will have two characters talking about nonsense and just really get a sense of character’s voices independent of the scene. And it’s one of those things like, I always felt I probably should do that. But I don’t know anybody who actually does do that. And her doing that got me thinking oh, I should try to write some unimportant plot scenes just for the character so I can hear their voices. And I’ve started actually doing that. So that’s a Katie Silberman piece of advice that I took to heart.

Craig: I don’t have any, just flat out. I don’t have – I don’t remember any of it. Yeah, I don’t. I love having these conversations. But I can’t – we’ve had a thousand of them. I can’t remember the individual things. This is why I think it kind of works. John really does plan and he thinks these things through and there’s so much intention. And I really do fly by the seat of my pants through it and try and be as experiential as I can within it.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Everything is a surprise to me. Everything is in the moment. So when we have these conversations, I do think to myself, oh, that was amazing. It was such a great – like we had a great one with Dave Mandel and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. And I just remember being delighted with it. But then if you ask me what did we talk about, I can’t remember. I’m old. And I can’t remember. I’m being as honest as I can. I think this is probably what no one ever does, right? They just pretend. They just make up something, right. And I have to just be honest. I can’t remember. How did you remember that?

John: Because I actually did it. But I also, it was in the WorkFlowy.

Craig: There we go. There it is.

John: I thought about the question ahead of time.

Craig: You thought about it ahead of time.

John: I did my homework. That’s really how I thought of it.

Craig: All right. You know what, I will say, I know that we talked to Lindsay Doran.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: And whether or not Lindsay Doran said this in our podcast, it is a piece of advice that has stuck with me ever since she said it. So I will repeat this advice. And it is that it is incredibly important to know what the central relationship of your story is. If you don’t have one, you’re in trouble. I, at least, think of everything through the lens of relationships. And what Lindsay points out, there are all these relationships and people can get stuck viewing everything kaleidoscopically. But humans need one. You can have other relationships, but they need one central one. They need the one that matters the most.

John: That’s me and Craig.

Craig: Yeah.

John: That’s the central relationship.

Craig: It is. Well, you know, I think the central relationship is me and Megana. But I appreciate that you do what you do.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: All right. We’re only taking questions from listeners in London, let’s hear it from Anna in London.

Craig: Great.

Megana: Ana in London says, “I’d be interested to know if there are any opinions you’ve expressed over the years that looking back now you’d like to edit, especially if you’ve changed your mind on a craft thing.”

Craig: Oh.

John: Oh, I’d be surprised if I changed my mind on a craft thing. Although, I think before I started this podcast, I had gone to a single space after a period. So I used to be a double space writer and I went to a single space.

Craig: Oh.

John: Single space is where it’s at now.

Craig: Yes.

John: But if there’s any opinions I’ve expressed that I want to take back, you know what, we tend to get like a lot of listener mail when there’s like a really bad opinion expressed. And then sometimes we’ve addressed it in follow up, actually, I’d say our follow up on this show is an important part of the history of the show. The early tech podcast I was listening to would always have follow up at the start of their show. And I really liked that. And it’s not a Slate thing. And that’s a thing that I took from other podcasts. And so, we try to address when we misspoke or said too much or said something that was incorrect or inaccurate. But I don’t know that I have an opinion that I want to go back and erase.

Craig: Yeah, I’m sure if I were confronted by a number of the stupid things I’ve said, I would be embarrassed by most of them. Obviously, since I can’t remember anything that I said, it’s hard for me to answer this question. I don’t remember what I’ve said either. But I can say that over the course of this show, I have learned things from John that I think have made me a better person. I’m still very different. I’m still much more fiery. And I get very passionate, and I get angry, which I appreciate. I value that. But I also think about people more. And I think about their feelings more. And I try and temper myself more because I think John sets a really good example that way. And also over the years, I think I have required myself to be a little less – there’s this kind of old guy thing that happens where you just start to insist that –

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Everybody that makes it makes it because they did it. And if you don’t, you didn’t, and it’s a meritocracy, brah, brah, brah. And I have weeded quite a bit of that out because it’s not a meritocracy. And I think the more that we discuss that and appreciate it, the better off we are. It’s not an ameritocracy. It’s not random. And that’s not what anyone is going for. But it is additionally challenging for a lot of people in a lot of different ways. And almost everyone has some kind of challenge. But some people have more than others. And so I’ve tried to – I change my point of view and the context with which I evaluate things. That certainly has changed over time.

Julia: I want to note as part of the beautiful synchronicity between you guys sometimes that among the things that John proposed is things I might ask about and that you might answer. One was what we got wrong, and a bullet under that was meritocracy. So –

Craig: Ah, there you go.

Julia: I take it.

Craig: See? And you know I wasn’t cheating because I didn’t read it.

Julia: I take it from the WorkFlowy that John agrees. Is that fair, John?

John: Absolutely. And I remember trying to defend meritocracy at some point on the blog, even pre-podcast and it feels as a White guy growing up and having some success you feel like, oh, well, I earned it. And it’s like, well, yeah, you did things that actually helped you. But it’s so hard to acknowledge, oh, but you’ve had many advantages coming into it. And I think over the course of the 10 years during the podcasts, and really just talking with a bunch of other writers, I’ve really learned a lot more about oh, these were the challenges that I did not face just based on who I came into this industry as and when I came in. So I think meritocracy is just a bad word that we just shouldn’t say.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: All right, a couple last lightning-round questions. Craig, did you retire sexy Craig of your own volition or did John make you do it?

Craig: He’s not retired. Oh, no. Oh, no. Sexy Craig is right there. He’s right there with you in those moments when you’re alone, and your mind starts wandering, he’s there.

Julia: Oh, no. Have I started another fight, John? Tell him to –

Craig: Oh, yeah.

John: What’s John answer to this question?

John: It’s somewhere between a shudder and a cringe anytime Sexy Craig shows up.

Julia: It is somehow audible, as a listener –

Craig: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Julia: Even though you make no sound.

Craig: Yeah, inaudible shudder. You shudder already.

Julia: All right. Next question.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: This one is from listener Chris.

Megana: Chris asks, “If you both ran for the presidency, who would be president and who would be VP? And who would you have in your cabinet?”

Craig: Oh, well, I mean, I’m, I’m not going to do any of that. So VP, for sure.

John: Yeah. I think Craig is the VP.

Craig: Yeah.

John: But the cabinet is going to be full of really fascinating people. A recent addition to the show, but also just a superstar is actually Nicole Black, she needs to be in there providing comedy and context and warmth. Love her. Alene has to be in there because she’s an all-star. I don’t know what department she’s running.

Craig: Department of good taste.

John: Yeah, that’s what Alene is doing in there. Does Malcolm makes the cabinet cut?

Craig: I hope so.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because I need somebody to talk to.

John: We have a lot of really great guests who can come in there and help make things run properly. And also, we have friends with many show runners and the showrunners get stuff done. So it’ll be a somewhat chaotic country, but stuff will happen.

Craig: It’ll be organized by WorkFlowy.

John: That – there’ll definitely be a WorkFlowy behind it all.

Julia: All right, my last question, what do you each hope for the next 10 years with the Scriptnotes?

Craig: Hmm.

John: Hmm. Oh, that, it presupposes that there will be 10 years of Scriptnotes. And I have no intention of shutting it down. But also just recognizing that stuff happens and things change. And podcasting could change. If Craig got really busy doing his show. If I were directing a movie at the same time Craig was doing a show there could be no Scriptnotes. But if we make it to 10 years, I hope just continuing to evolve and feeling that there’s new segments that always feel like they always should have been part of the show that it feels like it’s a continuity, but you can see that was Scriptnotes in black and white and this is Scriptnotes in color.

Craig: Yeah, I don’t know what 10 years will bring. And if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. But I would imagine that somewhere along the line, somebody should really replace me, don’t you think? I mean, somebody should just gradually replace me. I think that would be great, you know.

John: I could also – I could also imagine at some point, the show is me and Craig. And so, there was at some point a suggestion, like, Craig and John should just give the show to other people to do Scriptnotes. Like –

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: As is Scriptnotes is the thing that is just independent of me and Craig.

Craig: Right.

John: But there probably would be a way to transition out and become the occasional hosts, or just how to be a thing that exists independent of us the same way that the Slate shows, even if all three hosts are gone, it’s still is the show, kind of. But we have no intention of doing that. We have no plans to do that. But if we were to move on at some point, I think we would try to do a gradual fade out and handover the torch to somebody else.

Craig: Like when Blue’s Clues changed the guy.

John: Absolutely. It was just too abrupt. You got to send Steve off to college in the right way.

Craig: Right.

John: And Craig I’ll send you off to college.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. Oh, you sent Craig to “college.” And if I died, you know, like, if I died.

Julia: On that note, I think we have one piece of follow up.

Megana: Yeah. So on an earlier episode, I think you guys said that we have heard a lot of stories of screenwriters who’ve had professional success, but we haven’t heard any Scriptnotes love stories. So Isaac wrote in and he wanted to share his love story and prove you guys wrong.

Craig: Okay.

Isaac: Howdy, folks. Back some time ago, I was listening to one of your episodes and heard Craig mention that, though you both hear plenty of stories about people succeeding in their screenwriting professions with the help of this podcast, you’ve yet to hear any good Scriptnotes love stories. Well, back in 2019, I was walking to work and listening to a podcast where John mentioned a live recording was happening at theater of the Ace Hotel. And it just so happened to be taking place on that very day that I was walking to work. There were a few tickets left. So I nabbed one and left work early.

Once I arrived alone and introverted, I went to the bar and was immediately drawn to the bartender. She chatted me up and encouraged me to come back and talk more, which I did several times. I would pour out each drink in the bathroom and wait a few minutes so I wouldn’t actually get drunk. I had no interest in alcohol at that point. The show started. You killed it with Melissa McCarthy and Rob McElhenney. And I ran to the bar again the moment that it ended, but she was gone. I hung around, bought a Camp Scriptnotes shirt to kill more time, which I wear every week, but she never came back.

Back home, I came up with a simple plan to see her again, just go back to the Ace. Problem is I needed to buy a ticket to the event. And the only one in the near future was a $600 VIP ticket to the Sundance Institute presenting The Farewell. I was desperate and dumb. And worse came to worse, I just get to hang out with Lula Huang and Awkwafina for an hour, I crossed my fingers that I wouldn’t have any medical emergencies in the near future and bought the ticket.

The next day, however, I got an Instagram DM from the bartender. It turns out she had clocked me as well. And thankfully, I paid with the card, because she took that opportunity to memorize my name so she could look me up later. We joke now that both of the things that we did were sort of creepy if the other person wasn’t quite into it. But it worked out. We went to get coffee the next day, and I told her about the farewell premiere, but not the price because I’m not a psychopath. She said that she’s glad that she remembered my name and reached out because she was about to leave for a family vacation and wouldn’t be working at the Ace for a few weeks.

Yes, I still went to the Sundance event. It was wonderful and surprisingly opened up a lot of doors that were closed to me originally. The bartender, who turned out to also be an exceptional actor, and I saw each other as often as possible after the first date. And a little over two years and one seemingly unending pandemic later, I asked her to marry me. Anyway, I just wanted to reach out and thank you two for putting this podcast together. To this day, when we get especially starry-eyed about the future, we’ll look to each other, smile and say, fucking Scriptnotes.

Craig: Fucking Scriptnotes.

John: Ah, that make – that just makes my heart my heart sing.

Craig: Wow.

John: Yeah. And so, I love the Scriptnotes wedding. I love the Scriptnotes baby. I love, you know –

Craig: Oh, my god, look at that.

John: Any people brought together by these circumstances.

Craig: You think, John, that Isaac knows her name yet because he’s just calling her the bartender. Do you think maybe he never found out?

John: Yeah. Or maybe there’s – she could be in witness protection. And that’s obviously a possibility. Yeah.

Craig: Oh, either way, man. That’s pretty awesome.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s, you know what, that’s pretty – I’m glad.

Julia: Wouldn’t she still have a name if she were in witness protection? She would just have a new name?

Craig: Yeah.

John: Yeah. A false name.

Craig: Yeah, I think that that’s one of the things they try and do otherwise they know it’s, yeah, if you just like, “What’s your name?” “Bartender.” And they’re like, “Oh, you’re in witness protection.” Now, they get – she has a name, I just don’t know if he knows it. Look, if you want to stay with her because John and I have been married for a long time so we can tell – not to each other. But we can tell you.

John: Yeah.

Craig: One of the keys is knowing your partner’s name.

John: It’s really good. Name, birthday, just the basic facts. You know, be able to recognize her face in a crowd –

Craig: Yeah.

John: So you can actually see here. Yeah.

Craig: Oh my god, like there’s like this sad part where she never came back and he was hanging around. Aww, I, you know, I feel like even though Isaac is saying that it’s Scriptnotes brought him and his wife together really it was just alcohol. I don’t think it was us at all. I mean, if you – if you really interrogate what he’s saying, he’s saying that he left the show to go drink and talk to her. So we actually were kind of in the way. Fucking Scriptnotes.

John: And so it 10 years.

Craig: Oh, ah.

Julia: Ten years, a lot of impact.

Craig: Ten years.

Julia: Is time for One Cool Things? I don’t feel like I can say that unless John decrees that it is.

John: It is time for One Cool Things.

Craig: Whoa.

Julia: So who goes first, John? You go first?

John: I’ll go first. Sure. I have two One Cool Things. My first one is a hawk named Spencer. So Spencer is the hawk who flies around the new Academy Museum and scares away all the other birds who might poop on the amazing glass dome that they built there. So I just love that there is a trained hawk who comes out there twice a week to fly around there and scare birds away. I just love that we still use hawks to do things like this. So this is a story in the L.A. Times. For all I know Julia, you may have been the person responsible for the story, but it’s written up by Deborah Vankin. I just – it’s cool that there’s like a hawk flying around Los Angeles to protect our new museum.

Julia: I can take no credit for that story because I’m on maternity leave, but I was delighted to see it.

Craig: Good job, Deborah.

Julia: Deb is a specialist at finding – she did an amazing story this year also about how the Getty fights moths, which is apparently a terrible thing you have to fight at a museum.

John: Oh.

Craig: Ooh. Oh, yeah.

Julia: She’s got a sub beat of museums, and they’re animals.

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: Yeah.

John: My second One Cool Things is actually just kind of a humble brag. Not a humble brag, just to brag. I built this typewriter out of Lego and it’s so cool. It took me nine hours to do but it looks great. I love vintage typewriters. And now I have a vintage typewriter made out of Lego. You guys can click the link in the WorkFlowy and see what it looks like. But, uh, it turned out great. It was my first Lego kit I’d ever done as a grown up and I just loved it and it actually makes little clacky sounds and the cartridge moves as you type. It’s delightful.

Craig: I see in your Instagram that Alex and A. Smith says, “My money is on this being next week’s One Cool Things.” Correct.

Julia: I saw that on your Instagram.

Megana: I was just going to say I’ve watched John make this Lego typewriter the pictures do not do justice to how complicated this was.

Craig: You are talking to the guy that built the 5,000-plus Millennium Falcon. So –

John: Wow. So really nothing – doesn’t mean for you.

Craig: What I’m saying is LOL to your Lego typewriter.

Julia: Hmm, I don’t know. I also am engaged in some high-level Lego building over here with my 8-year-sons –

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: And have also been given adult specialized Legos. So maybe we need to have a Lego off.

Craig: Ah, I would totally be into that. The key to building Legos is to just commit.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Just commit.

Julia: You know, but I remember hearing before I had kids like, “Oh, Legos, it’s so terrible. There’s no creative building anymore. The kids just want to follow the rules and build these sets.” And like as a non-kid haver and non-Lego doer, I was very sympathetic to that kind of cranky Gen-X argument. It’s not like we were when we were little. And then having kids, these sets are so cool. Like, they’re really fun –

John: Yeah.

Craig: True.

Julia: And you learn a lot like, I mean, yes, there’s the problem that they make you buy new Legos and capitalism, etc. But I anticipated loathing Legos in parenthood and instead have found them a great source of parenting pleasure.

Craig: Yeah, of course, the sets are amazing. When I was a kid, and I didn’t have sets. I just had a huge, big bag of Legos. I built a large brick. I built the largest Lego brick ever. It’s the kind of thing that gets you institutionalized.

John: Yeah.

Craig: If people really consider what you’re doing as a child, “What does your son do with those Legos? He built one massive Lego. Okay, well, he’s a danger to society.”

I’ll tell you what is my One Cool Things and some people consider it dangerous to society like for instance, Stephen King who doesn’t get the genius of this, Ketchup Doritos. So in Canada there are all these ketchup things like they have ketchup potato chips, and they have Ketchup Doritos. And it sounds disgusting for I think a lot of people. I thought it would probably be disgusting.

Ketchup Doritos are wonderful. They’re the greatest thing ever. I have a bag of Ketchup Doritos that I keep in my trailer and I try and work through it slowly like over the course of a couple of weeks. So I’m like – I don’t eat out of the bag. I like take a handful, put them on the table, put the bag back, eat my eight Doritos and I feel super happy. Although I will say, I’m pretty sure that Bo steals a lot of the ketchup Doritos because there was a time I think she ate through one-and-a-half bags. Nobody can eat food like Bo by the way. Bo is my assistant, Bo Shim is very small, and she can eat more food than I can. It’s amazing. Regardless, Ketchup Doritos, I don’t know if you can get them in the US.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: But if there’s some sort of Canada deal where they can ship it to you from Canada, and you got a few extra bucks and you feel ketchup-ing it up, hmm, so good.

John: Well, then, it sounds great.

Julia: All right. I’ve got two One Cool Things as the vernacular has it. The first is just a book that I want both of you hosts to read and actually Megana too given her background as I learned about it on the show. Have any of you read Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, the book about the Sacklers?

John: Um, it is sitting on my Kindle to read. I’m excited to read it.

Craig: I have read it.

Julia: I found it to be such a great mix of really impressive reporting and really gripping storytelling. It’s very hard to write nonfiction that is both rigorous in its standards of accuracy and inquiry and reads like a fucking potboiler. And I could not put this book down. I found it so impressive on both levels. And it’s fascinating about the evolution in the pharmaceutical business and all of the terrible decisions that brought us the opioid epidemic.

Craig: So many.

Julia: But if you haven’t read it and those subjects sound at all interesting to you, read it. It’s not a beach read, but it’s a page turner, yes, page-turner.

Craig: it almost is a beach read. There are these moments where the stupid humanity of it all. Like, first of all, the way that they ended up with the name Purdue Pharmacy is incredible. So weird and shabby. And then the fact that the whole thing ultimately can be traced back to one poorly cited study in a journal that shouldn’t have even been in there. It’s awesome, and terrible, and wonderful. Definitely, great read.

Julia: All right, so that’s my first Cool Thing. And my second one, possibly stepping outside my role here as the ruthless journalist come in to interrogate you guys. But my second Cool Thing is Scriptnotes. You guys have built something really extraordinary here.

John: Aww.

Megana: Aww.

Craig: Aww.

Julia: And it’s been lovely over the years to hear all of its ramifications, all the different people you’ve touched, all the impact you’ve had, all the interesting knowledge you’ve surfaced. And as a longtime listener, that’s my Cool Thing in honor of your 10th anniversary is you guys.

Craig: Oh, Thank, Julia.

John: Thank you.

Craig: That’s so sweet. And thank you for doing this.

John: Yes.

Craig: This is awesome.

John: Now, Julia, you have the opportunity, but not the requirement to do the boilerplate at the end of the show. Do you feel like doing that or would you like me to do that?

Julia: Oh, man. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited Matthew Chilelli. Our outro today is by Matthew Chilelli. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes online as @clmazin, and I am always @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and the sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great, from the Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back episodes and bonus segments.

Craig: Thank you, Julia.

John: Thank you so much for doing this. And please stick around after this because you have a bonus topic for us to talk through which I’m very excited about on How Would Scriptnotes Be a Movie.

Julia: Very briefly, I know we have a cutoff, but I have one question I had wanted to ask you was, “What is the story of the Scriptnotes theme, where those notes come from? What’s the deal?”

John: So the Scriptnotes theme comes from, the bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, actually came from a short I did called The Remnants. It was a pilot for a web series, which we can put a link in the show notes to that, and I just wrote that as the opening jingle to The Remnants and I needed some intro music. So just like grabbed those, and so the actual name of that is Bloops and that became the basis for all of our outros. And so, all the outros should have that same pattern in there. And sometimes we get outros that are like really cool but you can’t actually hear the bloops in there. And they get dinged because we have standards.

Craig: Stuff I don’t know. The stuff I don’t know about this show is just a mountain of stuff I don’t know.

John: Oh, also, one thing we didn’t talk about, who came up with the name Scriptnotes? It was Craig Mazin.

Craig: Oh, also didn’t know that. Is that right?

John: Yeah, that’s true. You were the one who said Scriptnotes and –

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: Scriptnotes is meant to be – only the “S” is capitalized. There’s – the “n” is not capitalized, and it drives me absolutely crazy when people capitalize the “n” in it. So it’s, it’s one word, just to capital on the “S” whatever. And Craig –

Craig: When John sees it, he has a kernel panic.

John: I really do. Like, the camel case is not appropriate for this kind of work.

Julia: Why one word instead of two?

Craig: Yeah.

John: Just because I – it should be one word. I don’t know why. It just feels like it should be one word.

Julia: All right, mysteries, mysteries persist –

Craig: Yeah.

Julia: At the end of this conversation.

John: Just taste. Yeah.

Julia: Just taste.

John: And thank you, Julia Turner, for coming on to do this. But you should listen to her every week on the Slate Culture Gabfest which is phenomenal. And of course, subscribe and read the L.A. Times, which is a great local newspaper. Julia Turner, thank you so much for doing this.

Craig: Thank you, Julia. That was great.

Julia: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Hello, and welcome to the bonus segment of Scriptnotes. I’m doing the Slate Plus intro tone of voice here, but you guys will just have to roll with it. Today we are playing How Would This Be a Movie with the first 10 years of Scriptnotes. Is it a buddy comedy? Is it a bracing Hollywood critique? Is it kind of Norma Rae where you get the assistant’s better pay? And who plays each of you?

John: That’s the crucial question. All right. My choice for Craig –

Craig: Oh.

John: Is Paul is Paul Giamatti.

Craig: I mean, he’s a little too old.

John: He’s a little too old. That’s the problem. So –

Craig: I think you’re thinking of 10 years ago, Paul Giamatti.

John: I’m thinking 10 years, so like, Josh Gad, could you – who else could do it? Now, who do you want to play you?

Craig: I don’t know. Just somebody sort of Jewy and grumpy, who’s sort of Jewy and grumpy. There’s so many of us. I don’t know. I have no idea.

John: And maybe Craig plays himself honestly.

Craig: I mean, I am an actor.

John: You’re quite a good actor.

Craig: Thank you.

John: You are an actor. Yes.

Craig: Thank you. Thank you.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Maybe Craig plays himself. But I am played on the show by – I think by Jim Parsons of Big Bang Theory, that’d be my choice.

Craig: Yeah, that sounds reasonable.

John: Yeah, because he could do that sort of, like, good-natured, but gay and also can be robotic at times.

Craig: Yeah.

John: That’s –

Craig: I mean, he’s sort of got that market cornered, actually.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So I’m saying Jim Parsons. But what is the tone?

Julia: Yeah, yeah, casting is fun. But like what’s – yeah, how would it be a movie?

Craig: Hmm. It’s a boring goddamn movie. I’ll tell you that.

John: Yeah. So the drama-drama came out during the agency stuff, but much of that is especially good. It could be like one of those sort of backstage comedies like getting ready for a live show. Because that’s always sort of interesting and scrambly because here’s what tends to happen, especially an Austin is Craig would put together a dinner before the show.

Craig: Yes.

John: And we have like 30 or 40 writers around this big, long table, and we take forever to get our food and like, “Craig, the show is going to start in 10 minutes, we have to go.” And Craig is like, “Oh, great, Who should we have on as guests, and so that we bring really drunk people on the show?” So that stuff behind the scenes would be half the fun. Like, we’re sort of like, Game Night. It’s like Game Night, but without trying to put on a live show.

Craig: That’s not bad. I mean, there is a version where we do the show, but really, we’re spies or something, I mean, the whole thing is a cover. We’re not even screenwriters.

John: Yeah, no.

Craig: But –

John: That’s a very long con.

Craig: There could also be a version of this where we hate each other.

John: Yeah. Oh, I love that version –

Craig: Yeah.

John: Where like, it’s all we just detest each other. And so like –

Craig: Yeah.

John: So, you and I both know, it’s like some TV shows where they’d be cast members just despise each other.

Craig: Yes.

John: And could not actually – they could like, cameras rolling, they’re great. And they never spoke offset. That could be us.

Craig: I think that would be kind of fun. And then I guess in that regard, the hero of that show would be Megana.

John: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Or she’s like sort of trapped in the middle of the first shot.

Craig: Yeah, she’s like, so it’s from her perspective, like Megana wakes up, and she’s like, “Oh, my god, I got to go to work with – ” And everyone is like, “Oh, my god, you’re so lucky. You get to produce that show with those guys. They’re so great.” And she’s like, “Mm-hmm.” And then she gets there. And we’re screaming at each other and she’s like, “My life sucks. And then and then she falls in love.”

John: Yeah. But I think –

Megana: Ah, with who?

Craig: Exactly. See, you’re into it. So I’m feeling like, there’s another podcast that we’re super angry about because they’re getting into our stuff, and we hate each other but we hate other podcasts more. And you and the producer of that podcast –

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Start to commiserate over some drinks. And then it happens. And then the thing – it’s like Romeo and Juliet.

John: Yeah, so we may be begging the question, Craig –

Craig: Oh.

John: Because we’re assuming that this is supposed to be a movie, but I don’t think it really is a movie. I think it is a –

Craig: It’s inaudible.

John: It’s a series. I mean, it really is –

Craig: Great use of begging the question. Great use of everything.

John: Thank you. I want to take all the praise you can give me. I think it really is, though, a – it’s a comedy. I think it’s more like Veep, honestly, where like, we are incredibly dysfunctional.

Craig: Right.

John: And Megana is the equivalent of that chief of staff like trying to hold us all together.

Craig: Right?

John: And that’s Craig…

Craig: Perfect. It’s like the first – maybe it’s not the first comedy – but it is of a model where finally the millennials have to take care of the diapered up Gen-Xers. You know what I mean?

John: Inaudible.

Craig: Like, we’re just cranking and out of it. So out of it.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: And I like the idea that you are super racist behind the scenes.

John: I think that – well, you know, I’m Southern. I try to keep my accent hidden but I’m actually from the deep, deep south, the really racist south.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. And so like –

John: So –

Craig: When once the thing, like, you know, it’s Hollywood, nothing is ever what you think. Like I’m the nice one. You’re a dick. And then, Megana, she’s like, deal with that, but you know, I think it would be wonderful. That’s – how would it be a show?

Julia: Reverse Odd Couple where the odd couple you play on the podcast, you are the opposite odd couple behind scenes.

Craig: Correct. Reverse odd couple plus generational babies. Yeah. I love it.

Julia: Yeah.

Craig: Plus romance. Romance is the key.

John: Oh, so much romance. Yeah.

John: I’m really excited about this whole Megana romance angle. We do it to figure this out.

Megana: I’m excited about it, too.

Craig: I know. Megana, let’s talk. We got to figure this out.

John: Yeah. But it has to be like, like fumbles along the way. So it has to be like, sort of like –

Craig: Of course.

John: I mean, because it has build over the course of season like will they or won’t they? But then of course, stuff will sort of pull them apart and there’s terrible stuff about him too.

Craig: You know, I feel like that’s something that is from our time. I think that for millennials, there’s no will they or won’t they.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: It’s you will – we will.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But then what?

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s exciting.

John: But then it got awkward. Yeah.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. Now it’s like, oh, my god, am I on his Insta, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is great. Love it.

Julia: All right.

Craig: I’m just summing up an entire generation with the word Insta.

Julia: Okay. I think we can conclude that Scriptnotes should remain a podcast based on this conversation. But thank you for indulging my inquiry.

Craig: Of course.

Julia: And thank you listeners for supporting John’s effort to enrich himself at the expense of Craig.

Craig: Thank you. Hey, finally, someone gets it. We did it!

John: Yay!

Craig: Yay!

John: This was so much fun.

Craig: Whew! Whew!

Julia: Thanks, guys. This was really, really fun.

Craig: Thank you so much.

John: Thank you so much, Julia. This was amazing.

Links:

• Julia Turner on the LA Times and Slate Culture Gabfest
• The Matrix Trailer
• Scriptnotes, Episode 411: Setting it Up with Katie Silberman
• Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
• The Academy Museum Hawk Deborah Vankin for the LA Times
• Lego Typewriter, check out John’s finished project!
• Ketchup Doritos
• Check out the Scriptnotes Index for our first 500 episodes
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Julia Turner on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can now be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 504 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show how long should it take you to write a script and how can writers best estimate that work? We’ll try to give you an answer. We’ll also look at new guidance for writers working on features at Netflix and Amazon and follow up on child prodigies, movie theaters, and free will.

And in our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, let’s talk about UFOs.

Craig: All right. You asked for it.

John: Let’s do it. Let’s talk about UFOs. Because I know you are a strong believer in extraterrestrial life visiting earth. And I want to hear your detailed views and I’ll try to bat those wild theories away.

Craig: That is not how it’s going to go.

John: But let’s start with a little amuse bouche. A conundrum that came up on our weekly call this week. What is the statute of limitations on spoiler warnings for movies? Craig, when is it fair to say like, OK, now you should have seen that movie so we can talk about The Sixth Sense, or Fight Club?

Craig: Sure. Well it was a little easier back in the day when there was a somewhat conventional release pattern. A movie would go into theaters. You would see it there. And then it would leave theaters and it would show up on DVD or cable or something. And my general feeling was if you didn’t see it in the theater and it was finished with its run then, you know, sorry.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s the way it is. There will be spoiler issues. You know, now where movies come out the same day, I don’t know. A month? I don’t know. I don’t know.

John: Yeah. I think that there’s sort of two classes of problems. So there’s the movies that are more like TV shows because they’re coming out in different things, people can see them kind of whenever they see them. So for new movies those sort of TV rules apply. When you can talk about Mare of Easttown? I don’t know. I haven’t seen the show and I’m trying to avoid the spoilers, but I also recognize that people need to have that conversation. So there’s that.

But look back to like older movies, like The Sixth Sense, or Fight Club, or Citizen Kane, I just want to argue for there’s no such thing as a spoiler because you should have seen this movie.

Craig: There is no spoiler warning on old movies. And I must admit that I don’t necessarily think revealing the twists or endings of things in fact spoils anything.

John: No.

Craig: Because that’s really not where I get my enjoyment from. I’m a weirdo I guess in that regard. I know how Fight Club ends. I love watching Fight Club. I’ll watch it again. It’s a great movie. It doesn’t matter to me that I know how it ends.

John: I will say it’s sometimes fun to watch a movie with a person who doesn’t know what’s going to happen, so you can see like, ah, ah, did you figure out what was actually happening there. So the Shyamalan movies might be a good example of that. So like my daughter probably has no idea what actually happens in The Village. I don’t know that I need to watch The Village, but I would be curious to watch The Village with her to see if she figures out what’s actually really going on in The Village.

Craig: Yeah. So to that extent it is amusing to watch other people getting fooled.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: And, sure. But I feel like the panic over spoilers is – I just think it’s overblown. I mean, you know, anybody that is adapting anything, the spoiler exists. So people would worry about spoilers for Game of Thrones, but the books were there. So, you know, anybody who had read the books knew that at least in the book Ned Stark dies. And in the book there’s a Red Wedding. And a bunch of people get killed at a wedding. So what? That’s not – we’re not watching things for information and data.

John: Yeah. We’re watching them to enjoy them.

Craig: Yes. And I’m so much more interested in watching the people on screen react to what they didn’t know. That’s what’s fascinating. Not that I didn’t know it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So that’s my weird thing about spoilers. I’m not so wound up about them.

John: All right. Well we’ll have no spoilers for A Quiet Place 2, but that movie came out over Memorial Day Weekend and did so much better than people thought it could do. It made $57 million in theaters which is great. So, hooray for them. Cruella also came out and did $26.5 million. And it had its day-and-date release on Disney+ for $30 for subscribers. So, it looks like people want to see movies, which is great news.

Craig: It is. That $57 million is eye-popping, because that would have been a good weekend really at any point.

John: It’s not $100 million, but it’s still just terrific.

Craig: Sure. It’s terrific for a movie that I’m sure didn’t cost a massive amount. I think maybe helped a little bit by the fact that there’s not much else in theaters, so they occupy a ton of screens. If you wanted to see a wide release movie and you didn’t want to see a Disney film then I guess you were going to A Quiet Place. And if you did want to see a Disney film you had the day-and-date to kind of choose from.

What’s interesting financially to – and I don’t know the answer to this – is who makes more money here. So Cruella makes $26.5 million at the box office and then $30 a pop on Disney+. That’s a lot.

John: Yeah. So on Cruella, all five credited writers are previous Scriptnotes guests. And I was talking with one of the them, or texting with one of them. And that $29 for the Disney+ subscribers, the chunk you get from that is actually really good money. So, weirdly our five prior guests who worked on that movie will get more off of that than they would have off of the theatrical box office.

Craig: Well they would get nothing off the theatrical box office.

John: Nothing. You get nothing.

Craig: Correct. I mean, unless you have box office bonuses. But those have pretty much gone bye-bye over time. And, yeah, Internet sales, you know, we have a good rate. It’s basically five times the rate of the DVDs, or close.

John: Premium video-on-demand.

Craig: Yeah. So it’s – well, actually, no it’s not five times. It’s much better. The point is it’s better. It is five times. They will make good money off of that as long as the studios are fair about it and don’t attempt to argue that this primary exhibition, because they can. They can make that argument and we would make the argument that it’s not.

So interesting to see what happens there financially because we may be living in a time where this continues permanently. That most movies come out day-and-date and you have a choice. And I don’t know. I cannot predict.

John: So we also had some other big deals in the news this week. Coming off the success of this box office, it’s nice to see the Alamo Drafthouse is out of bankruptcy. There’s a lot of speculation that AMC might buy out our beloved ArcLight. So it would be lovely to see the ArcLight come back.

Craig: It’s available.

John: Hopefully AMC could run it the way the ArcLight was and not sort of the way AMCs are run. We’ll see. I don’t want ads in front of my movie. That’s really what it comes down to. More than anything else I want no ads.

Craig: Yeah. Look, if the movies are coming back, the theatrical experience is coming back, then it stands to reason that ArcLight would be profitable as it used to be. I think maybe the problem with ArcLight was they just didn’t have the financial cushion to weather the storm of this lengthy shutdown. I don’t know. But I agree with you, if AMC buys ArcLight what would be the point of buying it if you don’t let it be it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Which is I guess something that AT&T should have considered when they bought Warner Bros and HBO.

John: Yeah. I’m not even mentioning the Warner Bros/Discovery merger which has the absolute worst logo. Not since like the initial DreamWorks logo which was–

Craig: The boy on the moon?

John: The boy on the moon is fantastic. But the DreamWorks SKG, some of their initial logo-ing around that was not fantastic.

Craig: Oh, looked like it was made on like an [Amiga] against like a blue sky or something?

John: That’s what it was. The logo-ing for Warner Bros/Discovery, which I don’t understand why you’re keeping the Bros in there. It should just be Warner-Discovery makes more sense. But it looks like it was done in Word Art.

Craig: Oh good lord. Look at that.

John: Describe it for our listeners. Describe what this logo looks like.

Craig: I’m going to get in trouble as I’m an employee of this corporation. But that’s just silly.

John: I’m an employee as well.

Craig: So it is also against a weird dim blue sky with blue clouds. I don’t know why the clouds are so blue. Anyway, and then it says Warner Bros., Discovery. Discovery is underneath it. The letters are three-dimensional, sort of coming out, and they’re this fairly gaudy gold color. They have this bad reflectivity that again feels very kind of [Amiga] circa 1991.

And then underneath is a 2D line that says, “The stuff that dreams are made of.”

John: With no punctuation. The “of” is just dangling there at the end.

Craig: Dangling. I don’t like it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Don’t like that.

John: So I don’t like the main Warner Bros/Discovery logo, but I especially don’t like it against that blue sky. And then the thing underneath it just looks like they stuck it in. They were in Keynote and they were like, oh, we have to find a tag line. Quick, type a tag line.

Craig: I don’t think that’s going to last. I’ve got to be honest with you.

John: I don’t think it’s going to last. I don’t think we need to worry about it.

Craig: I don’t think it’s going to last at all. I’m just looking at the Internet, because I guess the Internet was going bananas about this. I had no idea this was going on. Someone said that it looked like something that was made in Microsoft Word’s Word Art Utility. Yeesh.

John: It does.

Craig: That’s not going to last. There’s absolutely no way.

John: We don’t need to worry about that.

Craig: No, that will not last.

John: But a deal that will last is CAA sold a big chunk of Wiip. So it sold the majority stake in the production company Wiip to a South Korean studio which is great. Good for them. And this is all coming out of the WGA deal with the agencies, basically forcing the agencies to divest themselves of their production entities. And I really wondered who was going to buy Wiip or who would buy Endeavor Content, and I should have been thinking of like, of course, there’s a lot of international money that would love to have some domestic production and they’ve got money. I think those are going to be the buyers for these places.

Craig: Yeah. It’s hard to say what will happen with the larger ones. Wiip was not a big version of this. And like I had said many times in all my years as a client at CAA no one had ever even mentioned Wiip to me. I didn’t even know it was a thing. I didn’t know it existed. So they weren’t pushing it too hard back in the day.

So I don’t know how much Wiip was worth and I don’t know what the sale entailed, but I have a feeling, I could be wrong, but that maybe CAA sort of looked at this part of the settlement with the WGA as possibly a gift. Because I think what happened was WME got into this business in a massive way and everybody else sort of felt like they needed to. But didn’t necessarily commit. Yeah, I’m happy that the people that were employed by that studio, by Wiip, because there’s two Is in it, Wiip, will continue. Hopefully to be employed and they’ll continue to compensate people fairly and all the rest of that.

John: Yeah. And so Wiip I hadn’t realized made Mare of Easttown, so the second Mare of Easttown reference in this episode.

Craig: Well it worked on them. I don’t know if they made them. That’s the thing. Like I never know what these companies actually do.

John: Yeah. You never know. Did they throw in some money, or were they the studio behind it?

Craig: Were they there sort of at the beginning, kind of. I don’t know. I’m still – I don’t even know what Wiip stands for.

John: I don’t either.

Craig: Wiip. There’s two Is.

John: Too many.

Craig: One too many Is.

John: All right. Let’s do some more follow up. So two episodes back we wondered why aren’t there any child screenwriting prodigies, because obviously we have prodigies in chess and athletics and other things.

Craig: Yes.

John: We had several people write in with some good suggestions. Do you want to start with Victoria here?

Craig: Sure. So Victoria De Capua tweets, “In my opinion screenwriting successfully, let alone brilliantly, requires a tremendous amount of emotional literacy. It requires an extremely proactive curiosity about the emotional narrative of others and I think for younger people they’re still really figuring themselves out.

“I went to film school at 18 which was great, because it gave me the energy to do production in a way I really can’t in my mid-30s. But I also did not end up becoming a successful director the way I’d planned. It turns out no one wants to be directed by an 18-year-old.”

John: I think Victoria is making a really good point. It’s that if you’re writing movies you’re probably not writing people who are just your own age, you’re writing a whole range of people, and you have to have sort of theories of mind in terms of like why characters are doing what they’re doing and sort of how stuff works. And that just takes some time to develop and mature.

So whereas there are so many Taylor Swifts in the world and Billie Eilishes who are writing the brilliant and insightful songs, it’s a shorter thing where you’re not writing multiple characters interacting. It’s really sort of a singular voice and it’s a singular point of view. The ability to hold multiple points of view simultaneously may just be something that develops later on.

Craig: Yes. And songwriting occupies a much shorter space. So, you can make a single point and if you make your single point beautifully you’ve got yourself a good song, putting aside the musical aspect of it as well. You want obviously a good melody. But a screenplay needs to make a whole lot of points, every single scene, over and over and over. And all the scenes need to connect. And they need to reflect back on each other. It’s more complicated. It’s definitely more complicated.

John: That ties in well with what Gus writes here. Gus says, “Prodigy conducive mediums like math, music, and fine arts merely require immense talent and intuition, whereas narrative storytelling also necessitates a healthy dose of knowledge, as in knowledge gained from years of observing and consuming comparable material. A four-year-old might dictate a few brilliant lines of blank verse, for example, but would likely stumble over long form rule and structure heavy formats like sonnets.

“All that being said, feature filmmaking also has gatekeeping factors present in virtually no other medium. If a child or teenager writes an amazing screenplay that somehow makes it in to meaningful hands the response will almost certainly be, ‘You’re very talented. Keep at it. Or let me put you in touch with some reps I know,’ as opposed to, ‘We must spend millions of dollars turning this into a movie immediately,’ because that risk adverse exec would then look like a crazy person.”

Gus goes on to write that he sort of was that teenager who wrote that thing and couldn’t get any traction. But just a few years later a similar project when he was in his early 20s he could get set up and that’s how he got started as a writer. So I think he makes a good point. Your ability to write improves, but also your ability to be perceived as a writer and to do all the social aspects of screenwriting comes with age as well.

Craig: Yeah. And it does occur to me that one thing we haven’t talked about is that screenwriting is an art form that is designed for adaptation. And that in and of itself implies a certain amount of complexity. Chess is chess. Music is music. A song is a song and a painting is a painting. So a prodigy is doing the thing that is supposed to be done, and viewed, and seen.

A screenwriter is not. A screenwriter is actually imagining something and putting it in an entirely different format from what it ultimately must become. That is complicated and that may have something to do with it as well.

John: There are some examples of like fantasy novelists who got started in their teens, but even then, yes, you’re writing a very long piece of work, but you’re writing the final thing.

Craig: Right.

John: So what you’re writing doesn’t have to go through another stage in order to become the finished art form.

Craig: Precisely.

John: Peter wrote in and this is something I should have been thinking about when we first discussed it, reminding us of the tale of Riley Weston. Do you remember Riley Weston?

Craig: I do.

John: So she was a writer who was employed on Felicity, I believe. She was 18 years old and it was a big story that like, oh, this 18-year-old who is writing on Felicity which is great because she has such insight as being part of that generation. And then in fact she was not 18 years old. She was 32. And she was passing herself off as 18.

Craig: Yeah. Which then became sort of the premise of Sutton Foster’s television show Younger. I mean, they weren’t basing it on this story, but that is, you know, the idea that in a business where people are perhaps discriminated against on the basis of age, passing for younger could be valuable. But there was not an 18-year-old. And even then in that case the alleged 18-year-old was working on a staff with other writers and not solo writing a movie for instance.

John: Yeah. So like Catherine Hardwicke is 13. She was collaborating with a teenager on that. But it was collaboration.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So someone with the experience of actually making the thing could use the voice of the person who actually knew that stuff. I was also thinking back to Lena Dunham. So I first met Lena right after she did Tiny Furniture, and she was young, but I had to actually Google to figure out how old would she have been, and she was 24. So 24 years old to make a feature as good as Tiny Furniture is remarkable, but that’s not the same as being a child prodigy. And her early work, the short film she did, built up to that. But she was doing the work and learning as she was making short films which are sort of that finished product. They are the poems and songs of filmmaking. She was doing that work before she got up to her first real feature which was Tiny Furniture.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t know how this happened but somewhere along the line in our country we forgot that people who are twenty-somethings are adults. We think of them still as children. But, yeah, I mean, that’s when I sold my first thing was at 24. It was not quite as good as Tiny Furniture, but certainly I could write a movie.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But I wouldn’t have been able to do it at 17. Or even at 21. That was probably about as soon as I could do it.

John: Yeah. Now that same episode we talked about free will and determinism and how it’s OK to not be a screenwriter.

Craig: Right.

John: We had a couple people write in about that including folks who had stopped the ambition to be a screenwriter. Do you want to take Sam’s question here?

Craig: Sure. Sam says, “I’m in my mid-40s and I really wanted to do screenwriting.” I like by the way, just as an aside, I like “doing screenwriting.” I like that idea. Do it.

“And I really wanted to do screenwriting. I’ve always been full of imagination and this seemed like a way to get that on paper and share it. However I’m a senior project manager, which I enjoy doing, at Microsoft with a pretty good salary and it dawned on me that trying to switch seems like maybe a stupid move. So I decided to keep it at the hobby level and make my own movie which has been great because I’ve been learning about other aspects of filmmaking. In looking back at the whole journey I realized I was more in love with the idea of screenwriting than doing the same thing day in/day out to write screenplays. I also realized there’s a difference between screenwriting, writing screenplays, and being a screenwriter, writing Hollywood screenplays.

“All that to say if you’re just looking for a way out of your current work, be careful. It’s much better to run towards something than to run away from something. Make sure you’re in love with writing and not in love with what you think writing will be like. If you’ve never done it before and you haven’t done writing as part of who you are it might not be for you.”

John: Yeah. That point about running towards versus running away is so important to keep in mind for career stuff, but relationships, and so many things in your life. Why are you making this choice? Are you making this choice because you really want that thing that’s there, or because you don’t want the thing that you have and you’re looking for any other option that’s out there?

Craig: Same thing applies even inside of the writing of screenplays. We’ve often said that you don’t want to write away from a problem. You want to write towards something you like. And Sam is pointing out that there’s a romantic view of what screenwriting is, of what a screenwriter does. We’ve seen depictions of screenwriters that even in their portrayal of the clichéd misery seem kind of weirdly attractive and romantic. None of that is correct.

John: Oh yeah. The Barton Finks. All the sort of hacks with Underwoods. Oh, I want to be part of that downtrodden class of scribes.

Craig: Correct. And they’re always smarter than everybody else and more insightful than everybody else. And they’re overlooked until they’re not. And they are underappreciated until they’re not. And none of it is correct. It’s just like everything else. You’ve got to wake up and then just work. And it’s not – it is rare that you have these moments of high drama like any of that stuff.

The grind is the deal.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s the job is the grind.

John: Kara writes that she’s not a screenwriter and that’s OK. She says, “I was an unhappy lawyer and I finally paid off my loans and quit my job to explore other options right before the pandemic. Many of my plans were canceled, but I decided to take a screenwriting class. I know how you feel about those, but it’s where I learned about your podcast, and I’m glad I took it anyway.”

Craig: So now people are paying to hear about our podcast. [laughs] I’m angry.

John: You know how you find out about Scriptnotes? You have to take a class.

Craig: Ugh, so angry.

John: In order to listen to the podcast you have to take a class first. Kara says she wrote a complete screenplay using Highland2, of course. And felt like “my creative side, so long buried beneath soul-sucking contracts was reawakened. While I loved writing and still have potential projects floating around in my mind I don’t think it’s the right career path for me and like you said that’s OK. I’m now an urban gardener and trying to start our flower forming business in New York City. I still listen to your podcast every week while growing flowers on a rooftop out in Staten Island and in a parking lot in Brooklyn. Thank you for all you do and for embracing listeners like me.”

Craig: Hey, Kara, Staten Island! All right. I was born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island, so in many ways I’m like one of your flowers. And I think that’s great. And that’s another example of somebody that maybe was running away from something that she didn’t want to do, like dealing with contract law, and you know what? No big deal. There’s nothing wrong with taking a swing at something. And if you figure out really early that it’s not for you then you cut bait real fast and hopefully she has a little bit more passion for the flower farming business.

John: Well let’s look at what Kara did and did not do. What Kara did is she took a class and she wrote a script and she sort of saw like do I like this or do I not like this. She didn’t quit her job, move to Los Angeles to say I’m going to become a screenwriter without having written a screenplay. I would just urge everyone before making big changes to say like, hey, do I actually enjoy doing this work. Because you can then sort of – again, aspire to a thing rather than just be like I want to get out of the rut that I’m in.

Craig: Yeah. It also seems like Kara did not load this decision with a lot of emotional weight. If I fail than I am no good. I must be…I am called by the universe…you know, these things are setting you up for real trouble. Because any time you’re called by the universe to do something that very few people do the odds are that you’re not going to get there. So, just be realistic.

John: Let’s think about a hypothetical listener out there who might be listening and saying, “You know what? I’m not sure I want to keep being a screenwriter or doing the screenwriter job.” Like they may be here in Los Angeles but they’re not having a lot of success. Trying to think what good advice we’d offer him or her listening to this show right now.

I might start with the same thing that we learned from Kara is that really look at what are some other things that might be attractive to you. Rather than sort of I’m going to run away from screenwriting, or feel like I’m going to give up on screenwriting, say like what is there that is out there that might be really interesting for me to do that I could go and pursue and not be so worried about like I’m giving up screenwriting.

Craig: Yeah, step number one is to put screenwriting in its appropriate position which is a thing that some people do. But it is not the be all end all. And it is not a glorious life. It’s something that if you do it you do it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And if you had a dream of it and it didn’t work out, dream a new dream. Because if you can find something that you both enjoy and other people demand from you then you are fulfilled. You need both of them. And it’s not enough for you to love it, but for no one to want it.

I do like cooking, but if I cooked and nobody liked the food then I would maybe just cook for myself and stop dreaming of creating grand meals. It’s the same for this. And there’s no shame in it. There’s no shame.

John: Zero.

Craig: By the way, even for us, I mean, look, some people like things, some people don’t, you know, of what we do. Nobody is batting a thousand, or even remotely close to that.

John: So Garrett thinks we’re batting far below a thousand. So Garrett has a very long email he sent to us. It would be the whole podcast reading through this email, but Garrett, thank you for sending through this email. He was really focused on our discussion of free will and determinism. And so there is a school of thought that even sort of bringing up free will being an illusion and determinism is sort of culturally self-defeating. It’s bad for the individual to think through.

He writes, “Here’s what determinism does to your listeners emotionally. It grieves, deflates, and discourages. Why am I chasing this dream of becoming a screenwriter when I haven’t had a break up to this point? Maybe I’m not a chosen one after all. It’s just a new breed of Calvinism,” which I thought was actually an interesting point.

He says, “We must all live as if we do have free will.” And I think that was the point we were actually making in the podcast is that we can say that free will is an illusion, but it’s still an illusion that is important to kind of believe in. The same way we believe in consciousness, even though we don’t really understand it. Is that fair, Craig?

Craig: Yeah. I’m a little puzzled by his point. Let’s pause it for a second, Garrett. That determinism is correct. There is no free will. And when he says it grieves, deflates, and discourages, why? Just because you haven’t had it now? When you say I haven’t had a break up to this point, maybe I’m not a chosen one after all, or maybe you are and it’s going to happen tomorrow. It’s not Calvinism. We’re not suggesting – the problem with Calvinism is that Calvinism did look at outcomes and then decide based on the outcome who you were. So if you were poor, it’s very hard to stop being poor, especially in unfair societies.

So Calvinism said, well, you’re poor, you deserve it because you were born bad.

John: Well it’s your fate. It’s your place in life.

Craig: Right.

John: And don’t sort of question it.

Craig: Don’t question it.

John: It even goes back to sort of older times. Yes.

Craig: There’s nothing indicative like that about screenwriting and whether someone has bought a screenplay or not bought a screenplay. That is not the deal at all. We’re not talking about anything like that. There’s actually no valuable information that I get from the fact that I don’t believe in free will because part of my lack of belief in free will is that the illusion of free will is just as determined as everything else.

So no matter what I do I’m still making choices, because I am a determined consciousness that thinks it’s making choices. Just like I think that the sky is blue. But if I were a different animal with different eyeballs it would be a different color. Yeah, it doesn’t mean any of this. You’re reading into it and you should stop. That’s what I think. You should stop.

John: And so I do appreciate long emails, but I agree with you that, yes, I think you can fall into a trap where nothing matters because we’re all on rails and just give up because there’s no point. And I’m actually arguing the opposite of that. Acknowledging that, yes, even if we’re sort of on rails and even if we don’t have the choices that there’s no little monkey inside of us who is actually pulling the levers, who actually has free will. It’s still important that we live that way because also we’re writing characters who must live that way, too.

Craig: We have no choice.

John: It comes back to being the protagonist.

Craig: We have no choice.

John: Be the hero in your own story.

Craig: We don’t have access to the things that determine all of what’s going to happen anyway. So we have no choice. This is how we live. And this is also why I get puzzled when people say, “Well do you believe in any kind of existence after death?” And I say I don’t. And they say, “Well then what’s the point of everything?” And I say there isn’t one. But the fact that there isn’t a point doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy this whole thing tremendously.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I have things that give me joy and pleasure and there are things that are fulfilling and I have experiences and I learn and I engage. And that’s enough for me. I don’t need a purpose or a point in the long run. I don’t. There isn’t one. I think maybe he’s looking for one. I don’t know. But I’m fine with that one.

John: All right. Let’s move on in the spirit of self-advocacy and doing what we can do to look at this last week the WGA put out two articles of particular interest to screenwriters. And I thought these were great. I saw early versions of these and I think they are genuinely useful. The first is the Screen Compensation Guide for Streaming Services which looks at contracts over the last three years from WGA members for features done for Amazon and for Netflix and sort of what common threads we can find in this.

And there’s some really good news here. 90% of these deals were multi-step, so not one-step deals, with two guaranteed steps, up to five guaranteed steps. So if you’re writing for Netflix or Amazon the great precedent is you should get a multi-step deal.

Craig: Yeah. That’s startling and I’m thrilled to see that. And I would direct the attention of the conventional movie studios to this because this is something that I specifically have been beating a drum about for well over a decade. And I got to say, again, hey regular movie studios if you’re wondering partly why these other services are eating your lunch it’s because they actually have a system where things can be developed, instead of your system where they can’t.

John: Yeah. Other good news, Netflix pays more than Amazon on an average, $375,000 versus $300,000 at Amazon. And almost a quarter of these deals begin with a treatment and Netflix is more common to ask for treatments.

So, my Netflix deal didn’t have a treatment on it, but I do see that happening with other writers I talk to where they are turning in – I think Godwin was telling us this. They’re asking for a treatment before the screenplay stage. OK. If that’s what they want. If they pay you for it.

Craig: You know me. I love a treatment. I think that’s actually also terrific. If Netflix can help garner a new farm system, a new bench of new screenwriters who are trained to outline and prepare I think it actually will help – even if those individual writers abandon that practice later on, because they don’t feel they need it anymore, it is a good discipline to learn. I do think there’s great value in it.

John: So the quick explainer on pros and cons of treatments. The good thing about writing a treatment for one of these projects is theoretically you’re all on the same page about what is the movie you’re going to write. And they’re also paying you for this step. So you can resolve some of these story issues before you get into your screenplay. So your first draft of your screenplay should be closer to what they want.

The downside of treatments as an actual step is you could get stuck in treatment for a very long time, and that’s a thing we need to be mindful of and sort of have reps who can push to say, OK, let’s really go to draft. Or producers who can really say like, no, we really need to have him start writing this project.

Craig: Yeah. If they are breaking things out into steps like this then hopefully they are following the basic rules which is we pay you this, you write a treatment. You give the treatment, you have written the treatment. So, a step for a treatment does not mean a step for four treatments. It means a step for a treatment.

And the whole point is that even if there are a bunch of things that people are like, ah, I don’t know about this, you have the discussion, you take the notes. Great. Got it. Done. The job has been done. You have your own new outline that you can use in note cards or whatever for the writing of the draft. But the good news is that they’re giving all these steps.

The numbers are not great, I have to say, for the medians. They’re not awesome. Because if the median for Amazon is $300,000 and most of those are for two steps, you know, that’s down I think from what – that’s a little bit lower than the median at big studios, I would imagine. Although I’m guessing on that.

John: It’s a hard thing to compare apples to apples because there’s so few multi-step deals at studios, at conventional studios.

Craig: Right.

John: So, yes, that’s more math that we can do. But still promising. The second thing that the WGA put out this last week was Screen Deal Tips which actually covers some stuff that we talked about two episodes ago about selling projects, reacquisition, how to get back the – if you’ve done rewrites on a sale how to get that stuff back, which when you and I had that conversation I didn’t realize that there’s actually language in the MBA about reacquisition of originals.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: And reacquisition of the rewrites you’ve done on an original that you sold.

Craig: I mean, yeah, it is extremely hard to pull off. We have talked about reacquisition before. It does happen. But it is very rare. But it exists. So, yeah. Be aware of it.

John: So a couple key points to take through and we’ll put a link in the show notes to this stuff, but we talked on the show before because you cannot be assured that this movie that you’re writing for theatrical is actually going to come out theatrical, try to avoid language that so ties into the assumption of the theatrical release, like box office bonuses.

So, get this in as a deal point and don’t let this drag out to the contract stage because it could be a long time before you get your contract. So in your deal points talk about sort of like what happens if it’s theatrical, what happens if it’s streaming.

Make sure that credits bonuses, if there are credit bonuses, are tied to screenplay by and teleplay by, because there’s a possibility that this movie will be put into a streaming situation where teleplay by becomes a credit rather than screenplay by. So look for that. I know somebody who got tripped up by that.

And if it’s underlying material you don’t control, try to get stuff in your contract that gives you the right to acquire back any material you write. So if it’s based on a book and that book option lapses you have the ability to get the stuff that you’ve written out of that place, if possible.

Craig: And if you have a decent lawyer they are already on top of this. The nice thing is they all talk.

John: Yes.

Craig: So anytime somebody gets speared by an unforeseen consequence, all the lawyers chit-chat together and say red alert.

John: Oh yeah. Don’t let this happen.

Craig: Yeah. So hopefully they’re on it.

John: That sense of like it’s not clear whether this movie is going to theatrical or to streaming, just as recently as a year and a half ago I was in deals with Ken Richmond, my attorney, and was like how do we protect ourselves in this situation. And he’s like it’s all still new territory and we’re still figuring this out. So, it’s important to keep this in mind as a writer, too, that the lawyers are on this but also they’re still figuring out the best ways to handle this.

Craig: All true.

John: Yeah. All right. Here’s a great sort of framework question for us to tackle. Nathan asks, “So I just booked my first professional screenwriting job and it’s with a major studio. I’m grateful and excited but also a bit scared about one important detail. They want the first draft in ten weeks from the official start point of writing. Now I know this isn’t a particularly short professional timeframe, but it’s the shortest I’ve had to execute.

“Putting aside fears of failure, how do I budget time for the writing process with the time I’m given? What self-imposed schedule would you give yourselves with that deadline for a first draft? How much time do I give myself to break the story versus actually scripting it?”

So let’s talk about estimating time overall for a writing project and how to fit writing into a prescribed time, like the ten weeks that Nathan is given.

Craig: Yeah. It is not a short amount of time, Nathan. But it may be a short amount of time for you. Everybody has a different speed. So the question is a little bit of a trap. Some writers are faster than others. It doesn’t mean that the ones that are moving faster are worse than the ones that are moving slower, nor does it mean that the ones that are moving slower are lazier than the ones moving faster. We just sort of have speeds.

But generally speaking your speed needs to roughly be around what they’re looking at there.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: They can tell you they want the first draft in ten weeks. This is where the first job is always tough. Because nobody knows what you’re doing. You can’t say to them, look, the last one I wrote, the one that you loved so much that made $100 million at the box office opening weekend, yeah, that one took 12 weeks. You don’t have the ability to say that.

John: No.

Craig: You want to try and hit that ten weeks number, or earlier. And there are some very simple ways to budget your time.

John: Talk us through how you would budget time, Craig.

Craig: Well, first things first, like you say you want to break the story. Now, some people don’t. Some people just start writing the script, see where it goes. If you’re a break the story kind of person, sounds like you are, then you do want to give yourself a good amount of time to break it. The clearer you are with that and the more you can suss out the potential inefficiency points, those points when you’re writing where you suddenly stop and say I don’t know what to do next, and then say oh my god I realize that the last 20 pages I wrote are wrong, and then solve it, and then realize the last 30 pages are wrong. That all is the stuff that expands your time.

And if you can save yourself some of that time by planning through and fixing the problems, the big problems first early. That’s good. Sometimes you can take three weeks doing that.

John: Now, one thing I should bring up here is that if Nathan has booked this job very likely a lot of the story is actually broken because you probably had to pitch to get this job, if it’s your first professional one.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So you probably do have some of this work done. But it may be expanding that out and looking at sort of like what did you sort of like wavy hands pitch, like OK this is how I’m going to do this thing, because inevitably pitches are sort of skipping over those details. And really fleshing out how you’re going to do this. How you move from A to B to C to D. I would spend maybe a week on that. I wouldn’t spend three weeks on that. But it’s really – you’re going to have to learn what works for you.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, I’ve spent four weeks on that. It depends on the nature of the particular project. But then what you pretty much get to immediately is a very simple math equation. Pages divided by days. It’s as simple as that.

Once you know, OK, I’ve got my rough outline here. I have a sense of how I’m supposed to proceed. You have an amount of days and you have an amount of pages. I personally don’t like to kill myself. I think that the writing suffers. So, you know, start by just imagining a typical five-day-week. So each week – let’s say you’ve spent two weeks breaking a story. Now eight weeks. That’s 40 days. A typical screenplay is 120 pages. Three pages a day my friend. Doesn’t seem that hard anymore, does it?

Now, I will say that three pages a day is the average. Generally speaking, for me, and I think for a lot of people, the first 30 pages you’re not necessarily writing at the same clip that you will later. The end, because it’s inevitable, and because everything has led to it, often does go faster than the beginning where so much is being set up and created. So give yourself a little bit of flexibility and expandability there.

But basically divide the days up and you’ll see like, OK, you know what, and if you hit a day where you just didn’t have it, just OK well tomorrow I need to write five pages.

John: Now, Craig, by your division there Nathan would have finished his last three pages on the day he has to turn it in. So, I would urge that Nathan give himself some buffer for like, OK, and you actually have to make sure your script makes sense and works. Give yourself permission to – if that’s a week, if that’s a few days, whatever it is, some time to actually reflect on the script and see is this actually making sense. Is this script ready to hand in?

Craig: Yes. And, again, this is also part of the function of how you function. So, if Nathan you’re the kind of person that likes to write and move forward inexorably, and John is more like that, then you might need some time at the end to go back and review and tighten up some screws here and there, fix some thingies.

I do the opposite. I kind of go back over everything. That’s the first thing I do in the day is go back over what I did yesterday and rewrite what I did yesterday. If you’re doing that, well then odds are by the time you get to the end you’ve pretty much tightened all the screws up. So you might not need as much time to go through that polishing process. It just depends on how you function.

John: And there are also writers who are very much vomit drafts, just the absolute quickest version I can get on paper is what I’ll do and then I’ll just back and refine and refine and refine. And at this point, if you’re being hired to write a studio feature, you probably have a sense of what kind of writer you are. So I think Craig and I are both talking like we are fixers along the way more than that. And so I’m ready to turn in my script shortly after finishing the last scene.

Craig: Yes.

John: But that’s not some other people.

Craig: Correct.

John: Now, looking at sort of how other stuff gets estimated, this last week I was reading this article by Jacob Kaplan Moss on software development and he was talking about how when you’re tackling a software project you look at sort of what are the small, medium, large, and extra-large areas of complexity. How certain are you that you can design these elaborate plans for these things? And I was thinking about my career as both a software developer and as a screenwriter, and a screenwriter it’s really ultimately just sort of butt in chair time that is ultimately the factor. How many pages are you getting written?

And a thing I did a lot early on in my career is I would barricade myself for five days to a week at the start. I would get a hotel room and just sit and handwrite pages until I’d broken the back of it. So I would write like 50 pages in just a few days. And when I knew that, OK, I understand this script. I’ve written all these scenes. I’ve proven to myself that I know actually how to write this script.

And in those initial scenes I would write I would not let myself go back and edit them. I would just only keep plowing forward and writing the new scenes. That’s maybe an approach that works for you. It’s not a thing I do right now, but it’s a way that you may need to think about achieving a critical mass of pages.

A thing I still do to this day is I will try to write those last scenes earlier on in the process. So I’m writing towards the middle rather than writing towards the end. That just gives me a sense of like, OK, I know I can actually finish this because I know what those last scenes are that I’m writing towards.

Craig: Yeah. Everybody goes about this in their own way. All you need to do Nathan is know your own way. Listen carefully to your own rhythm. Don’t judge it. Just accept it for what it is.

John: Yup.

Craig: And then divide days into pages. It’s as simple as that. And you come up with a number. And that number is pages per day. And you’ll get it done.

John: And it may help to promise your script to some people a little bit early. I always find that deadlines are great. And so you have a hard deadline at ten weeks. But if you had a softer deadline at eight weeks to show it to a trusted reader friend that can be great. Because that can give you the feedback that you need to sort of bring it from the it’s an OK first draft to, oh, that’s a great first draft you’re handing into the studio.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Nathan, could you write back with an update in 10 weeks to let us know what happened with the script that you turned in? We’d love to hear it.

Craig: Yeah.

John: It’s time for Megana Rao to join us to ask some listener questions. Megana, what do you have for us this week?

Megana Rao: Hi guys. All right, Sawyer asks, “When writing an odd couple two-hander do we have to choose which of those characters will be our eyes into the world? I’m having trouble with this and could use some examples. If you take a look at say Lethal Weapon, who would you say serves as our entry to the world?”

Craig: Those are two different questions actually Sawyer. You’re asking who are our eyes into the world and then who serves as our entry into the world. But those are two different kind of things. Because sometimes you use somebody to get in there, but really the perspective of the movie sits with the other person. To be honest with you, you have to do both. You need both of them. You can’t have just one of them be the sole perspective because then the other one just becomes luggage.

John: Well, Craig, let’s think about Identity Thief. That’s an odd couple two-hander.

Craig: Sure.

John: The Jason Bateman character is our window into the world. But does the Melissa character, she still has storytelling power when Bateman is not in scenes, right?

Craig: Yeah. I mean, she gets her own introduction without him, prior to her ever meeting him or knowing him. And in fact that was actually, of any arguments that I had about the development of that, one of them was that everyone seemed to want to take that away from her or limit it. And what we had there was much less than what I wanted.

What I wanted was a much fuller exploration of who she was and why she was doing what she was doing. But both of them had – they existed independently of each other and they both had a point of view. And then really it’s about the relationship. So, the question implies that these two characters are actually two characters, when really when we watch these movies, whether they’re on television, or in a theater, what we’re actually coming to appreciate is the relationship between the two characters, meaning that’s the thing you should be servicing. Relationship. Not so much which one of them is eyes in, or which one serves as an entry.

John: Yeah. I’m working on a project that’s essentially a two-hander right now. And it is interesting how whoever we see first we tend to sort of give more credence to like oh they’re the person who is actually driving story. But in some cases it’s the wilder character who is actually creating more of the incidents, that is pushing stuff along. So, there’s always going to be a push/pull between these two characters and in theory you’re writing a story that can only exist because these two characters are together.

So, it becomes a little bit moot to say which character is really your principal character, which of the characters is the eyes into the world. It tends to be the less wild character, you can sort of relate to them more, we can sort of sit in their point of view a little bit more, but it’s not especially helpful when it comes down to really doing the scene work.

Craig: Agreed.

John: What else you got for us here?

Megana: OK. Hans asks, “A few weeks ago a producer/friend of mine asked if I would be interested in working as a writer and maybe direct one of the episodes on the TV series she’s putting together. From the conversation I assumed that it would be a paid gig where I would be joining a group of professional writers. Last week I went in on a meeting thinking that I would hear the terms and details of the project. However, the meeting was two to three hours of brainstorming on the characters and the storyline. Participants of the meeting were the producer-friend, an actor friend of hers, and myself.

“So only one writer, which was me, in the room. When I asked what the plan is for the project the producer-friend asked us to meet every week for a meeting like this for at least a few weeks. After our first brainstorming session she gave us research homework for our next meeting.”

Craig: Aw, did she?

Megana: “Is this a general process for preparing a TV series idea? What do you think I should do? I’ve written and directed a small feature film before, but I don’t have experience working on other people’s projects. I don’t want to ruin the relationship with the producer, but I also don’t want to spend too much time and energy without getting some kind of compensation.”

Craig: I swear to god if we had a nickel for every time someone said, “I don’t want to ruin the relationship with the blank.” You know who is not worried about ruining relationships? The blank. They never worry about it. They have no problem sitting there going like, “Oh you know what I’m going to do, I’m going to exploit the hell out of a friend of mine and have them work week after week on something that’s some vanity project for me and an actor. And we’re not going to even tell them if they get paid, or not. And we’ll be in charge of the whole thing. And who knows who will own what. And that’s fine. I don’t mind ruining my relationship with that writer.”

It’s so frustrating.

John: Now Hans you’re being exploited. And this is not a real thing. This is not going to become a real thing. They’re asking you to do free labor. Don’t do it. It’s not helping you. This thing will never become a thing.

So, let’s imagine a scenario where the three of you really did genuinely come up with a great idea. Like you came up with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and it’s like let’s figure out what this is and then if you were sort of voluntarily spending these hours to come up with this approach for how you’re going to do this and how you’re going to make this thing that’s awesome. But that’s not what this is.

This is a producer, who maybe has credits, you don’t say, an actor who maybe has credits, we don’t know, and you, the only person who can actually write the thing. And you’re supposed to somehow be the person to make this thing come to life. No. Just stop. It’s not real. You have our permission to tell them that they need to listen to this episode. You can give them this episode and tell them they have to listen to this and say like, no, this is not an acceptable thing to be doing.

Craig: Hans, in television the person who should be in charge is definitely not the non-writing producer. And it’s definitely not the actor. Non-writing producers are incredibly important when they’re great. I appreciate the ones that I work with deeply, because they provide enormous amount of value. But they’re not ultimately in charge of the series.

So when you say this one is pulling together a series, you’re supposed to be pulling together a series. That’s the way television works. The actors, you obviously need great actors. They’re essential to the success of the work, but again also generally speaking they aren’t the people that are pulling together these series. The writer is. Because the writer is the person that is going to be generating the content and the vision over many episodes and ideally many seasons.

The bottom line is you’re getting used here.

John: Yeah. In terms of getting people together to form an idea for a TV series to pitch out, yes, you could go in for a meeting with a producer, a general meeting with a producer, and really spark, OK, let’s work on a pitch for something we can take out on the town. That does happen. That’s real and that’s true. So you go in for a meeting at Berlanti’s company or wherever and say like, OK, let’s figure out what this is we want to do and we’ll take it into the studio to pitch it. That’s real and valid.

What this is is not real and valid. This is an idea that they had and they’re looking for some good writer to work for free on this thing and see if they can get it set up. So, no, stop.

Craig: Yeah. Just the fact that you didn’t even understand how speculative this was. And be aware. If you haven’t written anything down that two to three hours of brainstorming you did, that belongs to everybody and nobody. They can just go and pitch that to somebody. Yeah, this smells bad.

Megana: Do you guys think it’s worth him asking for compensation or should he just walk away because this seems like a fishy situation?

Craig: If you have to ask then the answer is…

Megana: Got it.

Craig: No. Like if you come to someone and you’re like, “Um, can I please be paid?” And they’re like, “Oh, you know what? Yes.” That never happens. Never happens. Nah, they’ll be like, “Oh, you will be. You will be paid. When we sell this for a billion dollars.”

John: But Megana in your question I hear another important question. What should Hans actually do or say next? Because what is that conversation that he has next with this producer? And I think it’s that you say, “Listen, it was great talking with you. I’m not interested in pursuing this as a non-paid gig. And I don’t see where this is going next.” And it doesn’t have to be any more acrimonious than that, but just make it clear that you’re only looking to do paid stuff, otherwise you’re going to focus on your own stuff. That’s fair.

Craig: You could even be less forthcoming and just say, “I’m so sorry, I loved meeting you. This sounds like a good idea. But the stuff that I’m working on right now that I’m buried in is just taking up too much of my time. I didn’t quite realize the extent of the commitment here. So I apologize, I have to withdraw.”

John: Yeah.

Craig: And that’s that.

John: Nice.

Craig: God, it’s amazing how we care so much about our relationships with these people and they just don’t care about us at all.

John: Not a bit.

Craig: No.

John: Megana, thank you for these questions.

Craig: Thanks Megana.

Megana: Thanks guys.

Craig: We care about you, Megana.

John: We do.

Megana: Aw.

Craig: God.

John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a special I saw on Netflix this last week, Bo Burnham’s Inside.

Craig: Oh yeah. People loved this.

John: It’s really good. And so Bo Burnham is the writer and director of Eighth Grade. He’s a standup comic and obviously mostly known for that and started on YouTube. This is a comedy special filmed entirely at his guest house during the pandemic. Just him. And just him setting up cameras and lights and doing stuff. And the first half of it is really funny in the way that his specials have always been funny. But it morphs into something very unusual and special. And so it’s not even like a standup special. It’s just sort of a film made by and starring only him and what he’s going through.

So just really so well done and so inventive and so remarkable. And so I recommend people check out Bo Burnham’s Inside.

Craig: Well my One Cool Thing I got from you, John, on Twitter. Megana, have you seen this? Jack Plotnick’s video Disney Made a Tiki Room?

Megana: Oh, yes, is this the one with the women and the birds?

Craig: Yes.

Megana: Yes, I also saw that on John’s Twitter and laughed so much. It’s wonderful.

Craig: It’s amazing. So there was this old television show called, what was it, the Wonderful World of Disney, which would air on whatever it was, ABC, or something. And it would always begin with Walt talking to you about, you know, whatever things they were working on or the park or something. And then some movie or show would begin.

And it looks I guess that this is from one of those. And Disney had the Tiki Room. I don’t know if it still exists. But it was not one of their better attractions. It was kind of known as the thing you would go into because it was really hot and you didn’t want to wait in line.

And he’s talking and in the background there are just four women in very ‘60s/’70s clothing working on building these animatronic birds. And Jack Plotnick sort of puts himself in all of their wardrobe, plays all of them. And through the magic of editing, and brilliant acting, like very subtle shades.

John: Really good acting.

Craig: He manages to make all those women their own person and you know them instantly. And it is brilliantly funny. It’s just so well done. And it even has its own villain. Its own unlikely villain. And it just – we know the song. We know the song.

Anyway, you’ve got to see it. It’s wonderful. Jack Plotnick is a very funny, very talented guy. Disney Made a Tiki Room.

John: So I’ve known Jack peripherally for like 20 years. I think I probably know him through Melissa McCarthy and a whole bunch of those friends. Just so talented. And obviously what we’re seeing here is not even really drag, because the character work is so specific.

Craig: No, it’s acting.

John: It’s just acting and really small subtle details. So if you like this the good news is it’s not just this video. He has equivalent things for the Plaza restaurant. And the Small World ride. And basically all the stuff that’s happening. And so he’s playing all these women who are around Walt Disney while he’s doing these things and their side conversations. It’s just so smartly done.

Craig: It really is. And like, yeah, I would watch a movie of these women together.

John: And actually very much a good match to the Bo Burnham because like he is somehow doing this all himself and is just a remarkable writer and filmmaker in addition to being such a great performer.

Craig: He’s a really good editor. I’ve got to say.

John: Yes.

Craig: Or if someone is working with him and editing, apologies, but the editing was outstanding.

John: The jokes are working because they’re cut so perfectly.

Craig: Brilliantly. Speed. Tempo. Rhythm. All of it. Lovely.

John: Good stuff. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

Craig: You know it is.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Always.

John: Our outro is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro you can send us a link at ask@johnaugust.com. The folder is getting a little bit thin, so we would love some more outros coming in please.

ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust.

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-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

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 UFOs. Craig and Megana, thank you so much.

Megana: Thanks guys.

Craig: Thanks guys.

[Bonus segment]

John: So, So Craig a lot of news about UFOs this last week. So, I’m linking to a New York Times story here. US Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects But Can’t Rule it Out Either. There’s a bunch of navy footage, including naval video footage, of navy fighter jets seeing this stuff and like we don’t know what that is, but it’s moving fast.

Craig: Why don’t they just title this People Still Can’t Prove a Negative? That’s what this article should be called. I liked it. Can’t rule it out. Yeah, of course, can’t rule anything out.

John: No. Craig, let’s break this down granularly. So these navy pilots are seeing things in person and on their screens. What do you think these unidentified flying objects they are encountering are? What are some possibilities in your head for what they’re seeing?

Craig: Possibilities are things that are very close to the cameras but through distortion appear to be far away. They could be video artifacts. They could be things that through optical illusion appear to be in different places when they’re really in one. Distortion of something. Or they could be aliens flying around in such a way as to be seen, but only by fighter jets, and only vaguely. And never landing or doing anything. Just flying around.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: So those are the choices.

John: Yeah. I have friends who have seen UFOs in person. And they’re not telling me they saw alien spacecraft. But they saw, like at a lake. A bunch of them at nighttime saw this thing that like what the hell is that. And they could not understand what it was they were seeing at a distance.

My inclination is it is something like that. It is something like how mirages form and distortions of things. Stuff that is not where it’s supposed to be. It’s understandable that there’s a real phenomenon that you’re encountering, but that does not mean that it’s an alien out there.

Craig, do you believe that there is other intelligent life in the universe?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes. And do you believe that intelligent life in the universe has at any point visited earth?

Craig: No.

John: I am not so certain of that. I think it’s more plausible that an alien civilization would have visited earth at some time during our whatever billion years the earth has been around. I don’t know that they’re ever encountered our civilization or would even be curious about our civilization.

Craig: I mean, yeah, it’s possible that they stopped over, looked around, said this is a real shithole. It’s full of large lizards and plants and it’s very humid and let’s go. Because humans have been on this planet for a blink of an eye in terms of the planet’s history. Yeah, so it’s possible that they did that. In the way that we landed a rover on Mars and then we die and four billion years from now there are Martians and they’re like I wonder if anybody from another planet got here. Yeah, OK, well we did, but who cares? It was just a rover. It doesn’t matter.

But, no, I think that if you have the technology to fly across massive distances, enormous hard to comprehend distances, and bring your ships here, then you would do so with a purpose. And you certainly would not be doing this, which is just taunting pilots by zipping around weirdly and doing sort of circus aerial tricks. It just doesn’t make any sense.

John: Now, one of the things on the list of possibilities which I don’t think you included was that these actually are aircraft but they’re not aircraft that we are currently aware of. That they could be other countries’ drones, or things like that, that we’re just not aware of how they work.

Craig: Unlikely. Unlikely that other countries have built something that is so spectacularly superior to what we have that we can’t even believe our eyes. And yet still are flying it around in front of us. It’s all very, very unlikely. Doesn’t quite add up.

UFOs, particularly wonderful term for what these things are. They are unidentified flying objects which would cover alien spacecraft, bugs, dirt, drones.

John: Blimps.

Craig: Blimps. Everything.

John: Albatrosses.

Craig: Correct. So, the fact that we can’t explain what our eyes just saw, I know we want to say listen to these pilots when they’re talking, listen to how amazed they are. Well, OK, now go watch Harrison Ford see David Blaine pull a card out of a piece of fruit in his house. It’s the same face. But it doesn’t mean that it’s magic. It just means we got fooled by something. And sometimes we’re fooled by things that we can’t believe. Optical illusions alone, we’ve said many times, just the existence of optical illusions should give us enough doubt about the value of our own eyes.

John: Now, you are a skeptic at this moment. But at any point did younger Craig Mazin like UFOs? Because I remember going through a period, six, seven, eight, maybe all the way up to ten, where stuff like the Power of the Pyramids, loved it. The Bermuda Triangle. Loved all that stuff. And, yes, I outgrew it. But did you ever have that phase?

Craig: Never.

John: Never?

Craig: I never believed any of it. I never believed in god. I never believed in pyramids.

John: You never had Santa Claus.

Craig: No, I mean, I believed in the story of Santa Claus. I mean, I knew that there was a narrative. So like he existed the way that the Grinch existed. They’re characters. But I never believed in angels, demons, devils. The Bermuda Triangle is obviously nonsense. What’s the point? That’s really what would happen is I would read this and go why? Why would there be a thing there where ships go through a hole in the world and land somewhere? What’s the point?

John: Because the City of Atlantis has to be somewhere Craig.

Craig: It really doesn’t. [laughs]

John: It only makes sense that Atlantis would be in the Bermuda Triangle.

Craig: Sure. And that it would need ships to get pulled through? None of it makes sense. None of it ever added up. There is no Sasquatch. None of that crap. There’s no Loch Ness Monster. It’s all nonsense and it’s always been nonsense.

And, yes, I’m aware that I’m lumping God in with Sasquatch. But it’s all the same to me.

John: Hmm. Do you think we will find another cool mammal somewhere on earth? Like a big cool mammal?

Craig: Yeah, that is very possible. In certain remote regions we can discover. Will we discover a mammal that has never been seen before? That is unlikely to me. But will we rediscover one that we thought was extinct? I think that actually has happened a few times. I could see that happening again.

John: It has. Certainly with mammals and also with fish. I feel like the oceans are so vast and we’ve explored so little of them. I think there’s probably very interesting stuff down there that we’ve not even begun to explore.

Craig: Yes. The depths of the ocean. There are fish down there we have not yet laid eyes on.

John: Craig, if an alien spacecraft were to visit earth, let’s assume you’re president of earth. I think that’s a fair assumption. What do you do?

Craig: Oh, well, if an intelligent life form visits the planet I would treat them as visitors. And welcome them to the planet, and tell them how excited that we are that they’re here. We presume they’re here to have an exchange of ideas, cultures, learn about each other. And if they’re here to destroy us, well, I guess we’ll find out if they can. Because if they can, they will.

But I would also just wonder why. Now, of course, I’m sure that a lot of the people who are sitting around in countries that got colonized by the British were also like why? Why are you doing this? And then they’re like, oh, you need stuff that we have. So it’s possible. That’s the standard plot of the movie.

John: They’re going to use us as food or to work in your mines.

Craig: We’re not great food.

John: We’re not great food, no.

Craig: For instance, we have a lot of a certain mineral that they really, really need. It turns out you know what’s incredibly rare in the universe? The rarest element in the universe is iron. And we have all of it. Then I could see that being a huge problem. But short of that I would hope that they were just like, hey, just as we would. I mean, it seems like if we were flying around and we landed a rover on Mars and a Martian came out and said hello that we would be like, “This is amazing. Hi. Don’t watch Fox News. But look at this. Look at this. Here’s a John Lennon song.”

John: So, all right, Craig, I’m a little saddened to not believe in these UFOs, but also I get it. I understand. I don’t want to be a pessimist. I don’t think human beings in our form will ever leave the solar system. I think our bodies are just not meant to be in space that long.

Craig: The solar system is very hard to leave. Yeah, that’s really hard to leave. Just traveling to Mars would be very difficult. Grueling and lengthy journey of many, many months and quite a number of dangers. All to land on the closest planet to us.

John: Yeah. The most hospitable planet.

Craig: Correct. The closest and most hospitable. Exactly. But, yeah, getting out of the solar system. Unless we have our Star Trek First Contact moment where someone invents the hyperspace drive. Oh, I’m going to get yelled at because it’s not called that. The Hyper Warp Drive. I’m sorry.

John: Warp Drive.

Craig: C’mon guys.

John: I predict that within maybe not my lifetime but my daughter’s lifetime we might find the equivalent of a Dyson Sphere or something that’s out there that indicates like, oh, there is actually a huge engineered project out there that shows that OK there’s some other civilization out there.

Craig: My concern is that we routinely underestimate the vast nature of what is out there. That we are essentially an atom inside of an elephant. And we are imagining is there another atom like us somewhere near the tail, or by the toe. Hubble has seen quite, quite far for us. And they ain’t seen nothing yet.

John: But it’s also easy to underestimate our kind of logarithmic progress in computing power and ability to sort of look, look, look, look, look, and as it increases we might actually start to make a dent in our visible area of space.

Craig: John, you know how they say that the universe is endlessly expanding?

John: Yeah.

Craig: Doesn’t that remind you of when you’re walking around in a videogame and the background just keeps filling in on you?

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know what I’m saying?

John: I do. Yeah. When there’s a little lag, a little latency. Like, oh, it’s pixilated now. It’s filling in.

Craig: There it is. The better the telescope, the more nothing it will see because this isn’t real.

John: Oh no. Getting back to that.

Craig: It’s not real. What are the odds that we’re the only, I mean, come on. We’ve been around here. We’ve got all this stuff and telescopes and things and, nope, not even one little tiny thing after all this time. It’s because this is a big show. It’s not real. Simulation.

John: Yeah. And now it’s over.

Craig: Wait, now?

John: [laughs] At least this episode of the show is over.

Craig: Oh yeah. And boy, talk about lack of free will.

John: Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you John and thank you Megana. Megana, I hope I didn’t bum you out too much.

Megana: I hate when we get to the simulation point.

Craig: Excellent.

Links:

• Alamo Drafthouse out of Bankruptcy
• Speculation that AMC may buy our beloved Arclight
• Warner Brothers Discovery Logo
• CAA Sells wiip
• Screen Compensation Guide for Streaming Services
• Screen Deal Tips
• 32 year old passes for 19 for TV contract
• Jacob Kaplan-Moss on estimating software development
• Bo Burnham’s Inside
• Jack Plotnick’s Disney Made a Tiki Room
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.