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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 737 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is off directing this week, so in his place we have Phil Hay.

Phil Hay: Hello, John.

John: I’m so excited to have you back on the show.

Phil: I’m so happy to be here. It’s really nice.

John: It must be at least five times you’ve been on the show. We’ve–

Phil: I’ve got to be a five-timer at this point.

John: Oh, you would–

Phil: If not, maybe we can do like a quick fifth right after this.

John: 100%.

Phil: I need the jacket, is what I’m saying.

John: Yes, for sure. In my notes here I said designated hitter. Is that a thing? Does that actually apply to what you’re doing here?

Phil: First of all, thank you for speaking my language. I really appreciate that.

John: I’m trying to speak baseball.

Phil: I would say pinch hitter would be more the–

John: Pinch hitter?

Phil: Yes, pinch hitting for Craig. We’ve got a lefty on the mound. It’s time for me to shine.

[laughter]

John: Today on the show with a lefty on the mound, I want to talk about making movies inside the studio system and outside the studio system on the periphery because two of my favorite movies that you’ve done are movies that are made not in the let’s-sell-it-at-festival route, but with outside money in ways that we don’t talk about much on the show.

Phil: Yes, no, I’d be glad to talk about it.

John: We’ll also answer some listener questions about themes and productivity. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to go back to one of your earliest films, the iconic documentary The Dungeon Masters.

Phil: I was very happy to see that on the schedule.

John: We’ll dig into the history of that, which is a more classic indie film, and so the story behind that. It’s also a documentary. We don’t talk about documentaries very much, but we’d love to talk about Dungeons & Dragons.

Phil: This is a documentary that our Dungeons & Dragons game talks about almost every single week.

John: It is. It is a constant point of reference.

Phil: My proudest accomplishment.

John: First, we have some follow-up. Drew, help us out with some follow-up.

Drew: We were talking about focus groups a few episodes ago. Steven writes, “I was a film focus group moderator for 12 years, did over a thousand focus groups on first-run movies. In the last episode, Craig did a little recap of the horrible testing process. He specifically mentioned pacing and how no one ever says a movie is too fast. Not true.

Once we break the movie into places or parts that are too slow or fast, oftentimes, too fast will come up. What this means is there’s not enough information given to the audience at that time, and it seems as if the filmmakers have glazed over information needed to enjoy and understand the movie. This happens quite often. Also, I’ve never seen a movie get worse after testing. The scores always go up if the filmmakers are willing and able to follow the research notes. While the process is not a favorite of young directors, the good ones know that tests allow for a director to really satisfy an audience.”

John: All right. You and I have both been through a lot of audience testing, so let’s push back against Steven to the degree that’s pushing back. Have you ever gotten the notes too fast?

Phil: I have never once gotten the note too fast, but maybe that’s part of the kind of movies we make or how we do things. I don’t doubt him, but I think that generally, in all these binaries that we have in talking about movies and art, it’s leaning toward make it faster. The culture is leaning toward make it faster versus, I would say, slower or investing more time. As we both know from making movies, sometimes making the scene longer makes it play faster.

John: Yes, the ironic thing about sort of like if a thing’s not working, it feels too slow, but if it’s working, it’s perfect and delightful. My experience with testing has been largely positive. I really do love seeing a movie with an audience for a first time. We get the sense of like, did that work? You can feel when the audience is confused, when they’re right with you and such.

I haven’t found the actual notes back from the little forms they fill out to be especially useful. Focus groups, kind of marginally useful. I sit in the theater and listen to them, eavesdrop on them, but I have not ever taken anything from them that I felt like, “Oh, that’s an insight I couldn’t have gotten.” Have you?

Phil: Not really. I think that the thing that I gained the most from test screenings is just watching the movie with the audience. To me, my ideal version of that would be you watch the movie with the audience. I always leave that with a ton of things I would like to do to make the movie better.

The reason that it carries a lot of angst with it is that oftentimes, they’re good if the movie’s going well. If the movie is either not going well or if it’s the type of movie that is more than one thing, is difficult, has an ending that is not a positive ending, the fear, and what does come into practice sometimes, is people within that process, start using those comments as weapons against the filmmakers to say, “You’re wrong, I’m right.”

John: Absolutely. They have an opinion and they’re using the numbers off of the test screening to justify their opinions in terms of like, “We have to cut these things. Look at the data here.”

Phil: It’s incontrovertible because this person said that when you could point to someone saying positive version and frequently, that’s not the case.

John: If it were just the filmmakers who were in the test screening or benefiting from the process, I don’t think anyone would be afraid of it. It’s the fact that it is the studio and the financiers who are paying for this, they’re paying for the movie and they want to see that it’s working or it’s not working.

There are cases where I’ve had movies that have been on the bubble. We had a great test screening, and wow, we suddenly just have a lot more freedom to do what we needed to do. The early cut of it was like, we knew there were some real problems, but in showing it to an audience, we got this enthusiastic reaction, which freed up our budget to actually go and do the reshoots we needed to do.

Phil: It can be very helpful in those ways. It’s also the type of movie you’re making, right?

John: Yes.

Phil: Like when we were testing both the ride-along movies, those movies are the type of movie that tests really well if they’re done well. I think they were and they did and you’re gaining momentum from that. A lot of times, the testing, people don’t realize, even filmmakers, what is being evaluated is not how good the movie is, it’s how much the movie satisfied the expectations of the people watching it.

In a way, that’s the way the questions are asked too. Some of my favorite movies of all time have incredibly bleak, downer endings that I know tested in whatever the negative 30s, but they’re great movies. If you’re in a forum, we talk about studio versus independent films, if you’re in the studio, like it’s a commercial film, you do have to reckon with that stuff, and it becomes a very anxiety-ridden process.

John: We talk about the top two boxes, which are the very good and excellent scores that come out. You want those top two boxes to be a high a number as possible. Some people say like, “Oh, it’s the 90s in top two boxes, then you’re doing great.” It’s important to remember that was a snapshot of how people felt right as the lights were coming up. They may feel differently about it an hour, a day, a week later. Are they going to tell people like, “It was a tough one, but I’m still thinking about that movie”? That’s the kind of reaction that gives a movie real legs.

Phil: The ones that are really confounding, and I’ve been to some of them and involved in some of them, are where the movie plays incredibly in the theater. If it’s a comedy, you know when people are laughing. If it’s a horror movie, you know when they’re jumping and when they’re engaged. You can feel that energy. Then the test scores come back and it’s two completely different things.

John: Exactly.

Phil: I’ve yet to discern what that is. Part of me thinks there’s sometimes when you start asking people questions about specific things. They feel like they have to come up with an answer why it worked or it didn’t. Then you start analyzing in a way that’s not necessarily organic to the way you’re just experiencing it.

John: Yes, for sure. In every test screening, we have the system where there’s cameras that are actually filming the audience so you can see what jokes play and what things landed? I’ve been at those. I’ve never seen the footage that comes out of them. I don’t know if it’s real or helpful.

Phil: I’ve had that footage brandished at me before.

[laughter]

John: No one laughed, yes.

Phil: No. It’s funny, what you also realize is you see two different audiences and you see two completely different reactions. What’s fascinating is seeing what jokes play with one audience. You can have a screening where the– It’s a diagnostic tool, it’s not necessarily great because you have one screening where this one gag plays through the roof. The next screening, it’s just nothing.

It can be any number of things. It’s just who’s in that audience or it can be the volume in the theater, the dialogue isn’t loud enough, or all these different things. You do have to take some of that in the aggregate. If you do have a scene and the entire crowd is laughing and it’s visible to everyone, that can be helpful. I’ve had that work for me as well.

John: I don’t think this has happened on any of my movies, but I know of situations where they did sort of an A-B test. They had two theaters side by side that were showing slightly different cuts to see which one played better. I guess, it makes sense. I think you would feel in the room which one people were clicking on, but if the numbers are significantly different, there’s something about that change that is meaningful.

Phil: Again, that’s such an unideal thing for a filmmaker to go through because it’s how clearly they’re not equally excited about both cuts when that’s happening.

John: It is the director’s cut and the producer’s cut.

Phil: Right. Later when we talk about the various bands of studio to independent and in between, sometimes in an independent film you’re fighting for your director to get final cut as a producer. Some of that negotiation sometimes goes back to what all the tie-breakers are. The secret is if it ever comes into play, you’re screwed anyway. Like any of these tie-breakers. If a tie-breaker becomes necessary, we have a big problem, but you have to have something. Sometimes it will screen competing cuts and we create a structure around that. You really hope to never get to that point, but sometimes you do.

John: It does. We have more follow-up on audio questions. This is something that came up last week where some of our listeners were really displeased when we were playing the audio from people who wrote questions.

Drew: Who were asking questions.

John: Yes.

Drew: We had a handful of more folks this time. We only had a couple the last time. Most of them were just saying they also thought something was strange. I had one come in from Jared that I thought was nice. Jared says, “When I originally heard the audio questions, I thought they sounded robotic, but the idea of writing in to ask you to stop featuring them would not have crossed my mind. That’s ridiculously fuzzy. I like the audio, even if it’s from fellow screenwriting nerd robots. Keep them coming.”

John: All right, great. I think Tony actually may have hit on something that may be the issue here.

Drew: Yes. Tony says, “I also think what might be AI sounding is the crystal clear quality of the audio. I listen to many call-in type podcasts, and almost every call has that voicemail sound that your audio questions didn’t. Maybe iPhones just have come a long way, and that’s what voicemail sounds like now.

John: Yes, I think that’s probably partly it. Also, Matthew Chilelli, our editor, has incredibly high standards for audio, and so I do feel like he may be screening to make those things sound like they’re not coming out of an iPhone, and that may be the uncanny value– [crosstalk]

Drew: You got to stuff it up a little bit, and so–

John: If we go back to it, we’ll add some like traffic noise behind it-

Drew: Yes, exactly.

John: -to let you know that-

Phil: Sirens.

John: -someone’s yelling over construction equipment.

Drew: A guy selling newspapers in the ’30s. [laughs]

John: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Somewhat related to this, one of my big frustrations recently has been situations where in a program, there’ll be the sound of someone making a call or leaving a voicemail, but it doesn’t actually work that way, where the audio around it is just not actually how things work. Or whether you hear somebody, this happens in Duolingo specifically, where it’s like someone’s playing a voicemail, but you hear it ringing first. That doesn’t exist.

Phil: Yes, it is weird because it’s so boring. The reality of waiting, and also the thing of no one ever says goodbye off the phone. Everyone in every movie and television show is incredibly rude. They’re just like, yes–

John: Just stops talking.

Phil: Yes, or not even, yes. They just finish saying their line, and then the phone call’s over.

John: I do think it’ll be interesting as generations who are writing movies have never grown up with answering machines or that technology, and they’re trying to write period stuff that’s part of our era, just their assumptions about things. Because they’ll have seen stuff in movies, but that will be wrong too. The fact there was a physical machine.

Phil: There was an era. The machine era was like a gag, like a repeated gag that people would do, like–

John: Swingers had a great gag about-

Phil: The greatest. Maybe the greatest voice machine gag ever.

John: Voice machine. It was a pre-voicemail answering machine.

Phil: You remember the thing where somebody would introduce the character, and it’d be like, “Beep. Hey, it’s Toby. You know what to do.” You’re like, “Oh, great. Yes, I’ve been introduced to the character.” Not anymore.

John: Not anymore. All right. Phil Hay, you have made, with your partner, Matt Manfredi, made many studio features. We’ve also made features that are indies, but not kind of the, “Oh, let’s sell this at South by or Sundance.” They’re movies that are made with independent financing, that could have been made inside the studio system.

I want to talk about the split there. We’ve talked about this with you on Episode 244. We talked about The Invitation, which is fantastic. 377, we talked about Destroyer, which is a bigger film. The Invitation feels like you can imagine it playing at a festival, and so– [crosstalk]

Phil: That was the route for that one.

John: For that one? Okay.

Phil: Yes.

John: Whereas Destroyer, it’s a noir film set in Los Angeles with a recognizable star lead, and it could have been made for a studio, yet wasn’t. I’ve also talked with Keith Calder, Episode 343. We talked about indie producing overall. He’s a person who raises the money and does things outside of the system. I want to talk about the decision to do some things in the system, do some things outside of the system. Let’s start with The Invitation. You said it’s more of a classic model for it. Did you know from the very start this is how you were going to approach making the movie?

Phil: Yes, that one we did know from the beginning. In a way, it came about over the course of many, many years in a reaction to feeling like we not only wanted but needed for ourselves to make a movie that was ours, and that was not in the studio system, and that wasn’t beholden to all the stuff that is good and bad about that system. We wrote it very deliberately to be able to be made on a very small budget. In the end, it was $1 million flat, for that movie. We shot it in 24 days. All along the design for that, though it doesn’t fit into something like a classic festival movie. It’s not a straight drama. It’s a drama, thriller, horror, whatever else it is.

John: It anticipated the Blumhouse era, though, of a single location, terrible things happen in a single location, in a not quite real-time but almost real-time.

Phil: Yes, the thing that makes it necessarily independent was the subject matter and the tone, and also, the size of it being. That was our proposal to everyone. “Let us do this movie, and Karyn directing it, and let us be in charge of it.” When you do make a movie for $1 million, it’s the same as now, there’s these thresholds, where the level of you getting to do what you want to do decreases as you go up potentially. It really depends.

At that level, the deal that we said is like, “Karyn has final cut. This movie is what we want it to be. We’re going to cast whoever we want to.” We found the financiers who were willing to do that. Then did take that to South by Southwest where it premiered. It did sell there. In an interesting way, I think we’re going to talk about this a little bit later, the role of streamers now.

Then, we were able to sell to Drafthouse Films, which became Neon. It evolved into, with other things into that, for just theatrical and physical media. We sold it to Netflix for just streaming, which is not something they do anymore. They only did that up to a certain point. I think it was a real boon for a lot of independent films because you could sell it to the right distributor that could put it on as many screens as you can while knowing it wasn’t going to be a wide or even medium release. Then the Netflix deal could backstop everybody and make it work. That was the intention. Everything about it felt like an independent film. Destroyer–

John: Before we get to Destroyer, let’s talk through the pros and cons of doing something indie, because you were saying like, you have just much more freedom and autonomy. You have final cut. You have all these abilities. You can just say no to things you don’t want to do, but you’re also not an employee. Not being an employee means you don’t have the guaranteed money that you have to do. It’s all a risk, a bet on yourself because no one is paying you to write that draft. All of the work that you’re doing, you’re doing for yourself in the hopes that a thing will get made.

Phil: When the movie got made with a low-budget agreement, WJ, we deferred basically almost all of our screenwriting money. That’s it. You’re just investing in it yourself. It is really a labor of love. You’re doing it because you want and need that movie to be made. You’re doing it because you think that’s the best way to get people to see it.

John: Of my movies, The Nines is very much that model, where it’s just money we had ourselves. We went to Sundance, sold out of Sundance, sold foreign, sold domestic, got our token theatrical. That was always the plan for it. Go was an example of supposed to be all foreign-financed money in a very classic indie way that we would sell at a festival. We lost that money before production started, but Columbia Pictures came in and said, “We will be the bank, it’ll be our movie, but It was structured like an independent film. It already had a buyer at the end, so we didn’t go through the whole sales process on that.

Let’s talk through more, though, the pros and cons of you have this idea, a script you’ve written, pursuing it independently versus trying to sell it to somebody to make. What’s the calculus?

Phil: For us, it usually is, are we going to make this movie ourselves with Karyn Kusama, my wife, who’s the director? It really becomes a, is this something we’re going to take together and try to go all the way with? We have one right now that we’re planning to make independently, but it is not impossible for a studio. A studio maybe in another era would have made this movie, but now, the type of movie it is more likely to be made by either one of the mini-majors that we could talk about that have filled that gap a little bit, or made independently with independent money. For us, it’s like, what the thing is.

There are certain things that you can squint your eyes and see how a studio might see it, but if you have to work hard, I’m already worried. You want to make sure everybody makes the same thing. It’s almost dangerous to get someone excited about the potential of the thing versus the thing itself because you might not see it exactly the same way.

John: You can imagine a project which a studio might read the script and it’s like, “Yes, we’ll do that,” and so you get into development and you’re doing a draft, you’re doing another draft, and you realize, “They’re never going to make this movie.” You spend a lot of money and time wasted to getting it there and they now own the thing.

Phil: That’s the thing that’s really, you think you hit upon the thing too, is giving up your control and ownership over it at the last possible minute because if you do sell it to a studio, you get money and that’s great. If they make it, great, but if they don’t make it and they cannot make it for a million reasons, it’s almost impossible.

We had one recently where we miraculously got it out of turnaround from one studio into another studio. Then that entire leadership changed and we got it out of turnaround a second time, but by then, it was too expensive. We couldn’t make the movie. We had someone, an independent financier or a mini-manager ready to make the movie and you just can’t. That’s tragic when you’re–

John: Became expensive because of the money spent on development–? [crosstalk]

Phil: Because the money spent on script? The money spent on development, the interest on that money, the producer’s deal at that studio with their amortizing against it, all those fees, they just lumped that in there. If you can’t negotiate them off of it, then the movie’s dead. That’s something you have to think about, especially if it’s an original, do you want to risk putting all your eggs in that basket, unless you get the green light? You can obviously sell it to them if they’re saying, “We’re going to press Go if you sell it to us.”

With an independent film, there’s endless chances. You go down the line, financer after financer, there’s a million ways to do it. All of them are hard, but if you control it, like this movie I’m talking about now, the new movie we’ve just written, it’s me and Matt, it’s Karyn, and it’s Fred Berger, who’s our producer on Destroyer, and he’s our producer. That’s it. It’s an original, so there’s no rights to worry about. It’s just us.

I think that’s the safest place in a way because you have to be really careful about who you ask in and who you invite in because then they’re with you.

John: With The Invitation, it’s $1 million. You’re able to raise $1 million. No one had rights to this territory, that territory. Everyone was investing in the movie, hoping to make their money out of the movie when it’s sold to a distributor, correct?

Phil: Yes, that was the pure equity model.

John: Yes, that’s clean.

Phil: We did foreign sales later or maybe concurrently. Our producer, XYZ, was really great at foreign sales. I can’t remember exactly what the order was, but I think we had the equity money first, and then it was backstopped by some foreign sales. That was, again, just finding financiers who really wanted to make the movie and the price tag was low enough that they could literally write the check.

John: Let’s talk about the entities involved here. You say XYZ, there’s also Gamechanger, and Lege Artis.

Phil: Yes. Gamechanger was the primary financier, a fund that was specifically created to finance female-driven, female-directed films.

John: Great.

Phil: They had a mission. They were very serious and pure about it. They really liked what they saw with our movie. Then, they could put up three quarters of the money, and so we had to go get another quarter of the money. That was from a group of investors out of Canada called Lege Artis. That came together. Of course, there were lots of ups and downs and money flying from here to there. [chuckles]

John: Who connects you with those people? Is it your agents, Karyn’s agents? Who is the people who’s like, “Oh, you have this script, and so here are some people we can go to,” or are you just meeting people at festivals? How are you finding these folks?

Phil: The way that we did it and the way that a lot of people do it is, so every agency has an indie sales department. In our case, we’re at UTA, Karyn’s at WME at that time was at ICM. You just have to decide which is going to be the sales agent. Often, they team, but another secret about making independent movies is you have to leave one slot open for an actor because if you get a big star in your movie and they’re CAA, CAA is rightfully going to want to help control and package the movie.

We’ve had to have a noble back and forth with our various agents on who is going to handle the movie. We worked with a woman named Jessica Lacy, who was at ICM at the time, who put both Destroyer and The Invitation together. That’s just her job. She goes out and finds money for independent films. She was invested because she worked for Karyn’s agency. It was all part of a push to try to get this movie to happen. The sales agent at an agency is one very prime way. They’ll get involved at some point, no matter what.

There’s also a version where you don’t have them driving and you’ve got someone like XYZ or you’ve got someone like Rocket Science who is the foreign sales for Destroyer or FilmNation, very powerful, great entities who can say, “We’re going to build this on foreign sales. We’ll run it. We’ll go to Cannes market or we’ll go to any of the markets and try to start putting together based on your movie and your cast. We’ll put together the money that way.” They’re almost always working with a sales agent too. It’s foreign sales and a sales agent, and then your producer.

Fred, our producer is a real producer. He’s out there pulling stuff together. He’s on his own mission, monitoring and managing everything and has his own relationships with financiers and his own relationships with every agency in terms of that. That’s the answer is really the sales agent is the sales agent, producer, foreign sales is the [unintelligible 00:24:36]

John: Absolutely. It ends up being a lot of emails, a lot of calls, a lot of just figuring out who is doing what and what the next step in the process is. You’re all sort of chasing this dream of imagining making this movie. To what degree is this person attached? To what degree is it realistic? Is this timeline realistic? Is the money actually going to show up in the account when you need it to show up in time?

Phil: Yes, that is the question because so frequently, the money doesn’t show up in the account [chuckles] and you’re back scrambling again. Or you put together an entire cast and take it to sales and get the money, but by the time you can get the movie going, half the cast has to fall out because they’re doing something else. This is constant gears turning and trying to grab whatever the go thing is and get it far enough that when the inevitable stumble happens, they’re okay with the fact that it’s not that actor anymore. Now it’s this actor. That’s basically how that works.

The one thing I’d say that I took away, I’ve been doing some mentoring and so I’m talking to some younger filmmakers about this, is through all these meetings, the difference between someone who has the money and someone who can “get you the money” is the difference between night and day.

[laughter]

Phil: There’s so many people who will only out themselves in the meeting that they don’t have the money, but I can call this guy and this. You don’t need that person to call that person. You can call that person. The gold is the person who actually has the money.

Then the part 2 of this was to say, and this might be useful for listeners out there who are trying to put their own movies together, is always trust your first instinct about the people you’re sitting down with because that first meeting is the very best they are ever going to be with you. They want something.
They might stay that good and you might learn wonderful dimensions about them later, but on a basic sense, if you’re sitting in that meeting and you’re like, “I don’t think I’m aligned with this person, or I don’t think they get it, but they say they’ll write a check,” you have to acknowledge that because when the pressures of making the movie get together, that’s going to be your favorite meeting with them. It better start out pretty good.

John: There’s a feature I’m executive producing and I’m not heavily involved in the day-to-day of it at all, which is great and by design. Over the course of its development, there have been different actors in different roles. I was talking with another filmmaker and said like, “Oh, one of your actors is in this movie I’m executive producing.”

It’s like, “Oh, that’s so exciting.” It’s like, “What’s the thing?” I was like, “Blah-blah-blah. I don’t know that he’s doing that, but maybe he’s just doing something secret.” It was like, “Oh, no, he’s not in the movie at all.” I was like three or four months behind. It’s like, “Oh, it’s a completely different person.”

As I see the actual like, “Oh.”

Phil: It’s complete alternate universe you were talking about.

John: “That person’s not in the movie whatsoever.”

Phil: Yes. No, no, not at all.

John: You forget how many times along the way, like, this is the dream of things being put together and it wasn’t this way. My movie, The Nines, we had a completely different cast. As we were putting stuff together, but then schedules change. I can imagine that movie. I had a lovely meeting with Aaron Eckhart, but he’s not in the movie.

Phil: Right. The alternate universe version he is, I guess.

John: Yes. With The Invitation, you’re making a million-dollar movie, and there’s a template to that. We know what that looks like. 24 days is a reasonable amount of time. You’ve got one location. Destroyer is much more ambitious. For that, it feels like it could have been made as a theatrical feature. It’s unusual to have a woman starring in that role, Nicole Kidman. It’s her out of her normal lane. What was the process on that? Were you ever considering going into the studio, or you knew from the start that this would be some kind of indie?

Phil: I think when Matt and I first thought of the script, and again, like everything we do, it took eight years from inception to the movie coming out, and Invitation was the same thing. When we first thought of the script, I think we thought of it as something that we could do at a studio, that we wanted to maybe either write to try to sell to a studio or pitch to a studio. In a way, it’s like maybe a movie that Warner Brothers would have made in the 1970s or something, but maybe creeping up toward the present.

John: Yes, Jane Fonda would have starred in it. Yes.

Phil: Right, but we quickly realized, once Karyn knew she wanted to do it, and we started imagining what we were really chasing with it, we felt like it was much more at home. Again, we wanted to try to make it ourselves. The Invitation allowed us to have credibility to say like, “We want to do this again, and we want to do this movie.” The budget wasn’t massive. It was around $9 million, but it’s a lot bigger than The Invitation.

John: It’s a bigger risk and a bigger swing, though.

Phil: It’s a bigger risk, and that’s the thing, once you get to that point, people can start seeing how they might lose money. Fortunately, we made money for everybody with that movie.
The way that was built was, again, through Jessica Lacy, through all the people that were- through Rocket Science, through Fred, who came on to produce it, it was finding the perfect equity financer, again, to write the check on the trust that the type of movie it is with the director and with the script was going to pull people in. They got on board before Nicole Kidman, which is very, very rare when that happens now especially. It’s almost always cast– [crosstalk]

John: For a movie that’s almost entirely on her shoulders. She’s in nearly every frame.

Phil: Who knows, had it taken longer to find her, who knows what other things might have happened. To her eternal credit, Nicole is one of my favorite actors and people and is so wonderful. She just read it and wanted to do it, and she was in. It was not a lot of crap. It wasn’t a lot of waiting seven months to read it or whatever. That really made it go.

John: What were the differences in terms of, it’s one thing to reach out to people like, “Oh, for $50,000,” or whatever, but if you’re trying to get to $9 million, you have to have bigger swings and bigger people writing bigger checks. Was there a foreign presale? How are you getting up to $9 million? Was it just individual people writing bigger checks or was it pre-commitments to–?

Phil: I think we did well in presales, and we did, and then–

John: Let’s talk through presales. In presales, this is the script. This is the theoretical poster. You’re going to a market like Cannes and say like, “We’re making this Nicole Kidman thriller with this director.” Out of different markets, they’ll say, “I’ll buy that for X dollars”?

Phil: Yes. You’re going market by market. Like in Japan, you get a certain amount of money for that. Each market, each star is worth more in every market. Of course, as we know, that’s mostly just total voodoo.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Phil: Nobody has any idea. It means nothing, but they believe it. [chuckles] You’re going down the line. They present you with something, the ask and the take. The ask is what, in best scenario, they would get from, say, Australia, which you did really well because Nicole is an Australian and a massive star there. The take is like, “This’ll be okay. These are our bottom line. If we get the take from everybody, we’ll still be able to make the movie.”

John: What’s crucial to understand about this is that you could come to them with like, “I have this genre of movie and this star,” and they could do it, but they could also do it even without the project itself. They kind of know how much different people are worth in different packages. They could get a sense of what a package is worth.

Phil: In a feel of a type of movie.

John: Yes, they get a feel.

Phil: Sometimes they read the script. Sometimes it’s very intensive. Sometimes we’ve all seen endless deadline announcements of some package at Cannes that sold for all this money, and they just grabbed this star and they grabbed that star, and they have a title, and then they go, and then the movie never gets made, or maybe it gets turned into something else or whatever. In this case, we also had a unique thing where we were able to make the movie. We talked about, “Should we try to go get a distributor now?” Because we felt really strongly about the movie. We felt like it was turning out just the way we wanted it to.

John: An option you could have done is essentially, a negative pickup like we did with Go, where it’s like, “Okay, this movie is happening. Paramount, do you want to come in now and–?”

Phil: “Would you like to come in now, and you’ll be the distributor?” Now we have that backstop. Also, if you have a domestic distributor, your foreign sales go way up. That really helps them to know that because that’s advertising for them, too. We went back and forth about the pros and cons of that, like making the movie for a place, or making the movie ourselves and then trying to sell it. The plan always was make the movie, and then get into one of the festivals and sell it there.

Then at Cannes, at the market, when we were in the middle of cutting the movie, the idea came up, and I don’t know whose it was, to cut a reel. We cut a 15-minute reel, which is a mega trailer, but it was beautifully done. I was so proud of how they put it together. That really tells you the story of the movie if you are a distributor. They were like, “Look, we could either, we could have a distributor screening and screen the film later, or do the thing, we’ll premiere it Toronto, and we’ll try to sell it there, or let’s have this screening.”

We screened it for many, many distributors. I think a couple studios were there, too. Out of that, Annapurna just bought it lock, stock, and barrel. That was the ideal outcome for us because they were able to say, “We’re going to write a check that will make your investors fine. We believe in the movie, and we don’t want to wait until you screen at whatever festival.” We ended up premiering it at Telluride, which was incredible, and then screened it Toronto and London. Then it was better because we had a movie that we were just putting out, as opposed to trying to sell. That worked out great for us that they were willing to step up.

John: The festival is a launch pad, but it doesn’t have to do a sales job, which is great.

Phil: Totally. It’s a very different experience.

John: You mentioned Annapurna, which is no longer exists, if I recall?

Phil: They’re around. They’re making a comeback.

John: Fantastic. I want to talk about these mini-majors, because that’s an example of a place that can make and release its own movies, but it’s not one of the big studios. They could have developed the script themselves and got into it, but they also will buy a project along the way and do it. How do mini-majors complicate the question here? Because you have the Searchlights, the Focuses, the sub-labels of bigger companies, and you have these independent companies like Neons and Annapurna. How does that change the equation?

Phil: I think it seems like, and again, to use the movie that we’re working on now, it’s called Sorceress, that we’re in a hopeful way, it expands the possibilities for those things because A24 and Neon are acting more like traditional studios now, but in a really good–

John: They’re clear brands and–

Phil: Clear brands and clearly what they like and what they want to do and what they want to give their audience. I think it’s working out really well. The question that I have, I think they develop some within. I think that it’s possible to go to them with something and say, “Hey, let’s develop this movie together,” if you’re a filmmaker that they want to work with and you have the right idea. I think mostly it’s still buying a package, either buying script director, stars, plan, budget, and they’re like, “Okay, go, we’ll do it.”

Especially Neon is like a lot of acquisitions at festivals. It’s like the best movie at every festival is Neon grabs it, usually. You’ve seen the budgets that they’re comfortable with go like up to 20 or whatever million dollars, which is now something that Neon could not– Neon was one of the people interested in Destroyer, and we love them and they’re wonderful, but at that time, [crosstalk] they’re nowhere near the budget that they were able to spend on stuff.

John: Now you have A24 doing Marty Supreme for–

Phil: Yes, exactly. That’s going to be really interesting to see how that works because as they push out into the desire to make commercial movies, in my heart, I’ve always felt commercial movies are just good movies. We’ve been taught that commercial means bad or there’s one or the other. I’m like, “How about making a great movie, and then people show up and they see it and they talk about it?”

John: I do feel like the success of the box office this year will get people hopefully remembering like, “Oh, that’s right, we can make movies and make money,” which is great.

Phil: Yes, totally. Create something that people want to go see in a movie theater, which I think is important.

John: Let’s also talk about streamers because made for streaming, I think three years ago, we were like, “Ahh.” We were concerned about how much is made for streaming in terms of features. Now, you don’t hear about it as much, but both of these movies could have been made for streaming directly, and there’s a good case were made for those.

Phil: Yes. No, and I think a lot of movies that are on one end, a lot of super commercial movies, but then a lot of oddball, fascinating, director-driven, script-driven movies are made for streaming. For me, it’s always like the first thing is making the best movie, but there is something very real that we talk a lot about, about what happens to it in the culture? If you make it, if the tree falls and no one’s there.

I think the danger is how do you get people to pay attention and remember? We’re very lucky with movies like The Invitation and Destroyer that did not make a ton of money at the box office or anything, but they’ve been kept alive and thriving online and through getting reviews and through getting the traditional ways that people talk about movies and on Letterboxd and on all this stuff.

A lot of movies that are, I think, excellent movies come and go and it’s without a trace. It’s not even when a movie comes out in a theater and leaves in two weeks. It’s like, I’m in the business and I have never heard of a movie starring someone I think is incredible, directed by someone I think is incredible. That’s crazy.

John: We so often think about like, “Oh, you want to make sure your movie gets into a theater because of its exposure and people can see it on a big screen,” and that’s absolutely good and true. I’ll say my experience with The Nines is we never got the right streaming deal. The fact that it’s never been– It’s always been on iTunes, you would always buy it through Amazon. It’s always been a rental versus it just shows up on streaming. I’ve never gotten the right streaming place for it to be featured on.

Phil: That’s interesting.

John: It sucks. Frustrating.

Phil: Let me go to work for you, John.

John: Yes, absolutely. We’ll get somebody on board. To wrap up a few things in terms of the people involved, we talk about the agents who are representing the film for sales. We talk about the packaging and the fee. Let’s make sure we’re differentiating that kind of packaging from traditional TV packaging, which was the whole agency campaign.

Phil: Yes, totally different thing.

John: It’s a different thing. They are not taking an upfront fee, but they’re getting a percentage of whatever the sale is they’re able to make out of this.

Phil: They have a number, a percentage built into what’s called, which you know is called, The Waterfall, which maybe your listeners, some know and some don’t, which is this document that the money trickles through until a little desiccated little bit might fall into your little bird mouth at the end. It’s how everyone gets paid, and it’s administered and dropped through. They take their fee off of percentage of the sales that they make. It’s not a similar thing to what we were talking about there.

I’ll tell you as an anecdote, with The Invitation, which only cost $1 million to make and succeeded beyond our dreams in terms of what it accomplished and how many people know about it and everything. Just two months ago, we entered our profit stage.

John: Actual profitability.

Phil: Which is shocking and incredible.

John: Incredible. Nicely done.

Phil: It’s happened.

John: That’s awesome. Great. Let’s ask and answer some listener questions. What do you have for us, Drew?

Drew: Helen in Toronto writes, “I’m in post-production as a writer-producer of my first indie feature. This is my first project as a producer and sole writer. The script is political in nature and originally included talking heads and experimental moments. It hinted at a larger systemic failure surrounding our two protagonists. At this stage, some of the B-roll and interview-style material is being cut because it “isn’t working” in the edit, making the film feel smaller and more interior to me.

We lose characters, locations, and a sense of scale. I already had to rewrite the ending 13 days into shooting, and have also been asked to change the title. My question is, how much should I fight with my director and co-producers over cuts? What should I defend and how do I know when I’m blinded by my writer lens and should defer to the editor or director-producer perspective?”

John: What Helen’s describing is specific to her movie in terms of what’s getting cut, but really familiar to everything we’ve been through on our movies, where you have an intention as a writer and then in production and then going into post, it’s not the movie you had in your mind.

Phil: I feel for you because it’s something that a lot of us go through, that sense of it mutating before your eyes into something. It can be a very happy thing. It really does hinge on your relationship with the director and how you think they are accomplishing the goal. For us, it’s been very transformative to work with Karin. We were side-by-side, step of the way, and we mutated and evolved it together.

In this case, it sounds like you’re a little bit at aesthetic odds. I guess what I would say is the director really, for better or for worse, does have to be the last word. That’s the way it was meant to be. I guess the advice that I would give you is to fight for what you think is important for that relationship, because you’re going to have many of these along the way. You’re going to want to be able to work together. You’re going to want to maintain your credibility as not just a writer but a producer on this movie.

Our rule of thumb is always if we suggest something to the director and they say no, most of the time, we just move on. If it’s really, really important, we take the time to stop and explain one more time why we think it’s so important. If it’s a no again, it never is spoken again. It just never comes up because it will never change. If you can give yourself leeway to say, “Hey, can I explain to you why this is really important to me” in the most comprehensive manner you can, do that. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I think you have to move on from it at this point.

John: I would ask Helen, does it feel like the director actually has a vision and a plan, or is the director flailing and floundering? If it’s clear that they know what they want to do and they have a vision for how to do it, what Phil says is exactly right. You can speak your mind, but eventually, you’re going to have to back up and let them pull off its vision. If they’re flailing and don’t know what to do, that may be a situation where you’re going to have to insert yourself a little bit more directly into the editing room as the producer and say, “Let’s try this thing. Let’s go in this way.”

There have been some of the studio features I’ve worked on where I’ve had to just get in the editing room and just like, “Let me show you what this could actually look like and try it this way because there may be a way to do it.” In theory, Helen, you were there for a lot of these productions. You saw the stuff that was shot, and you have a sense of what footage actually exists. There may be a way to get something more like what you want happening, but it’s going to depend on the social skills of being able to read where this director is at and how much.

Phil: That’s a great point, John, that I would say is useful no matter where Helen is with her director is if you can offer an alternative and a solution and an idea and articulate some ideas that are different, versus articulating that you don’t think that works and it should be the way it was. It’s funny. It’s often the right argument. In human beings, it’s not a compelling argument to go back. You have to take that and go forward with that.

John: 100%. There’s also a bit of validation that needs to happen. You have to make sure that you make it clear that you hear and understand what’s not working about the old version, and also that the version you’re describing isn’t trying to recreate that. It’s trying to recreate the best of what was actually shot.

Phil: Sometimes speaking in values is really helpful, like the values of what you’re feeling is not there anymore. If it’s the value of, I want something bracing, I want something that really shakes the viewer, or I feel like we’re missing something that creates a sense this is happening in a wider world or any of that, then that starts to become a conversation that is more likely for you to win because we want you to win because you’re the one who wrote it.

John: Grant has written in asking about task lists.
Speaker 3: “In Episode 728, you mentioned you have a daily task list, John, that’s broken up into four quadrants, and you pointed to it as a key to achieving your daily goals. I’m always struggling with getting things done and breaking down tasks into achievable amounts. I’d love to hear more about your lists. Do you make them the day before? If you miss a task, does it carry over? Do you have repetitive elements accounted for on your list, like vitamin consumption? Basically, I’d just love to know more. If you care to share. Great.

John: I have mine right here. This is a blank one. Phil, you can describe this. Tell me what you’re seeing.

Phil: What level? Do you want me to go philosophical with it? Do you want me to analyze why you might have done this?

John: Maybe describe it physically, and then we can describe.

Phil: It’s just a piece of paper folded in quarters. Today is blank because it’s the place for the date. It’s got a lot of boxes and nice faint dotted lines, like a lined paper that you could write a task on. Then we got some PERMA stuff at the bottom. Rush Lambert’s teeth, journal, Duolingo, afternoon fiber, Anki. That’s what you got.

John: That’s what you got. It’s a sheet of 8.5 by 11 paper folded in quarters. It’s pre-printed, so I print it 10 at a time and just fold it up in quarters. Keep a little stack of them by our phone charger. First page says today is. I write the day of what it is. There’s an overflow inside. The back has 9:00 AM to 10:00 PM schedule. I rarely use that. Mostly, though, if I’m on a phone call and I need to take little notes from myself to remind me things to ask or just what happened in the call, I’ll jot those on the back.

Every day at breakfast, I fill this out. I say, “These are the things I want to get done today.” I will carry over tasks from the day before if they are still important. It’s just been great. There’s a blog post. I’ll put a link where I have a template there. People can look through a bit. I’ve done it since 2019, 2020. It’s really good. It’s my way of doing things. Only I put things on the list. No one else can touch the list. No one can go to it. I wouldn’t dare now. I wouldn’t dream of it now.

It’s my personal accountability. The other thing I’ve talked on the podcast, I have index cards everywhere in the house. If I need to write something down, a note to myself or a lot of dialogue, or a note for a scene, I write on an index card. Those index cards get tucked into the little pocket here. They all stay together until they’re handled or processed.

Phil: I’m experiencing this, John, like a beautiful alien being descended and taught me of a life I could never live, but I’d aspire to. Wouldn’t you rather just take a Sharpie and grab something and write, outline, and then stick it somewhere that you never found it again?

John: Absolutely a valid choice. I’ve sat next to Phil playing D&D. Phil will, in a notebook, hand-draw the cheat sheet guide for his character. He’ll do it every session, every single time. He doesn’t bring it back in every time. He’ll do it each time.

Phil: I love doing it each time because I actually enjoy it. I enjoy feeling the Sharpie. I do draw a little diagram, little stars and arrows, and things. Yes, I redo it every time, and I don’t know why.

John: Obviously, people could do that. You could have a list on your phone that you do it. I find having it on paper and the process of doing it every morning at breakfast to be really good in terms of just prioritizing and figuring out what the things are that need to get done. Another thing I think is crucial is don’t just write down things you have to do. Write down things you want to do, so things like watch the next episode of Widow’s Bay. It’s on the list, so I remember to actually do it because I want to do it. Otherwise, I’ll forget to do it.

Phil: That sounds great, John.

John: If it works for you, there’s a template you can download. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. Do we have a question about themes?

Drew: Joey in North Carolina says, “I’m in the middle of writing my first feature. It’s all outlined, and I have a pretty good idea of where it’s going. However, I keep coming up with interesting new themes to explore. At this point, I probably have six to eight themes woven into the script. Though these ideas all fit the story conceptually, I worry I may be trying to explore too many themes. I come up with a new idea, then stop myself, saying, “I can’t explore that because I already have enough themes. Is there a line I should avoid crossing when it comes to the number of themes in my screenplay, or am I just overthinking this?”

John: In the first sentence, I actually had my explanation. He’s in the middle of writing his first feature. In your first feature, you’re going to try to shove everything in there because you’re like, “Will I ever write another feature? I don’t know.” I’ll put everything I know about everything into this one feature. At least he’s aware that he’s doing it. That’s a good sign.

Phil: First of all, I’m glad he’s thinking about theme because I think weirdly thinking about theme, there’s some people who act like they’re too cool to do that. I know you do. I do all the time. I’m always thinking about it because theme to me is just what does it mean? What’s it about? Why would someone want to watch this? I’ve never thought about it in terms of number of themes. I guess what I would say is, hopefully, what you have are shades of one theme, are many shades of one theme.

John: If the theme is the central question, it’s parts of that question or aspects of it.

Phil: Totally. I think it’s always helpful. Part of the reason I was excited to answer this question is talking about theme, it’s always worth reiterating that so many times people mistake theme for what I’m telling the audience or what my lesson is or what my political stance is or anything. I think the most potent way to talk about theme is it’s a question that has more than one legitimate answer. Your movie is about digging into where you lie on that spectrum of those questions.

To me, if you’re thinking about it in terms of themes, having themes that are coherent and that are intriguing, another way to look at it is it gives your characters, there’s always something for them to talk about. Whether they’re talking about it directly or more likely indirectly, whatever that theme is, touches something that is either a strength or weakness of that person, and they want to express it in action or words.

John: It occurs to me, Phil, you and I, and three others I know, we’re never sitting around talking about theme. It’s not that thing that just comes up. It’s an inherent, intrinsic part of the specific story that we’re telling, but we’re never around lunch tables like, “Yes, I’m really struggling with the themes in this thing.

Phil: It’s right. It’s almost like it’s just the breathing of the script is the theme is almost why it exists to me.

John: Absolutely. It’s the question that you’re itching to explore and why you’re even doing it in the first place. I will say that if you’re doing a television series, yes, you might be exploring multiple themes. Each episode might be hitting one aspect harder than another thing. It makes sense that over the course of a series, you’re going to explore different themes. Even over the course of a season might have a thematic central premise that you’re digging into and diving into. For one feature, it’s a one-time journey of these characters going through with this thing. There’s probably a central theme that you’re exploring and aspects of it.

Phil: Maybe it’s helpful to say your theme should be big enough that it can incorporate a lot of these other– maybe I can’t tell because I don’t have it in front of me, but maybe what you’re talking about is six or eight big ideas, or maybe you’re talking about really six or eight themes. That would be a lot for a movie to handle. It’s really what you’re defining the theme as.

Again, to not think about it in the removed sense of I’m stating a theme, but think about it, how it makes your script breathe, how those questions motivate everything. Again, if it’s a question that is provocative, a lot of people say a theme is something that everyone agrees. It doesn’t do anything for you. You have to add to that. If I go back to our own stuff, like The Invitation, one of the themes of that movie that was provocative to us was, can one recover from grief?

Part of the movie is saying, “No, you can’t.” Part of the movie is saying, “Yes, you can,” and that’s the tension. How you do it is the text of the movie, how one can make that possible or not. You may have, ideally, a theme and then a bunch of interesting angles on that theme.

John: Joey, if you’re trying to figure out what is my main theme? Look at what is closest to your protagonist. What are they wrestling with the most? What is the thing that’s closest to them? That’s probably your theme. It doesn’t mean that your other characters can’t have interesting things they do. Everything doesn’t have to be directly on theme.

Phil: Yes, that’s a great point.

John: There are diversions and stuff, and no one has to show up dressed exactly to match those.

Phil: Every single cop in the station thinks the end justifies the means.

John: Absolutely. [crosstalk] Yes, absolutely. Every sequence probably needs to be on theme, not every scene. All right, and now it is time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a documentary that Pamela Ribbon, a frequent co-host of the show, is directing about one-act film, which is this annual Texas competition in high schools where each different high school has to put on a one-act play, but it all has to fit within an hour, including building the set and striking the set, and then going back to a black stage.

It is an ingenious competition that they’ve been doing for, I think, 100 years. It’s very longstanding. Pamela has put together a crew, and they filmed behind the scenes of this competition and followed the teams. It reminds me of Boys State. Have you seen Boys State?

Phil: Oh, yes.

John: In that same sense of rather than future politicians, these are theater kids competing at the highest levels, but with all the fun and drama of theater kids.

Phil: That’s awesome.

John: It is great. The movie is largely done, but she’s raising money for finishing funds. If you go to oneactfilm.com, you can see the trailer for it and chip in some dollars for finishing this because it’s going to be great. It is one of the funniest, most emotional. You see the trailer, and it’s like, “Oh, I get why that’s a movie.”

Phil: That sounds great. I’m in.

John: You’re in. All right. Phil, what do you have to share for us? What’s one cool thing?

Phil: I have the good fortune of having a college-age son who is a DJ on his college radio station, Michio at KOXY, Occidental College. He is always introducing me to incredible new music that I might not have found otherwise. I had an experience recently where I heard an album. He played one of the songs. We talked about it. I bought the vinyl at Barnes & Noble, which was fascinating because this is a very niche artist that I’m about to talk to you about that somehow, we were about to go to a movie, popped into Barnes & Noble. This record was there like a miracle.

John: Incredible.

Phil: Whoever is doing the buying at the Americana, kudos to you because it was among all the basic amazing records you’d imagine, and this. It’s a record by an artist called Petey USA. The album is called The Yips, which is a term from baseball about losing your ability to throw.

John: Petey USA

Phil: Petey. P-E-T-E-Y USA. I went home and put on the record. I had the experience that you every once in a while have, where you say, “This is one of my favorite records.”

John: Oh, it’s amazing.

Phil: I put it right on and played it again. I was like, “It’s still one of my favorite records.”

John: That’s incredible.

Phil: I highly recommend it. It’s not a baseball-themed record by any means. He loves baseball. That also touches my heart that he’s into it. Petey USA. His record is, I’m going to call it an instant classic, The Yips.

John: The Yips, a baseball term. Even I know that.

Phil: Exactly. John, there we go.

John: When we went to college, if we were DJing at the college station, our families would never hear this because it was only being broadcast at the college at two watts or whatever. You had to have a radio right next to the antenna to hear it. Now it streams, and so everyone can listen to it around the world. You get to listen to your son DJ all the time.

Phil: It’s pretty amazing because yes, it’s online, and you go, and lots of our friends listen, and his friends listen.

Drew: What hour block does he have?

Phil: He’s Fridays from 4:00 to 5:00, but it’s over for the year now because school’s done. Next fall, he’ll have a different slot, and I’ll come back on Scriptnotes to promote it.

John: I’d hype him up. My similar experience is with my daughter, who is studying film and TV at BU. One of her paid jobs is to film the athletic events that are there.

Phil: That’s a good job.

John: Back in our day, yes, maybe the football game would be taped or something, but now it’s all broadcast on ESPN+. She could text us five minutes men’s basketball, and we can see her directing games, or a lot of times she’s on the court holding a camera. That’s our daughter. Yes, that’s amazing. One nice thing about the internet is this stuff that was incredibly local and temporal, people can see everywhere.

Phil: Yes, it’s really cool.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Craig Good. If you want an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have t-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the famous documentary, The Dungeon Masters. Right on. Phil Hay, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Phil: Thank you, John. Literally anytime.

John: All right.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, so in addition to your work as a writer, you have a credit as executive producers?

Phil: Executive producers.

John: Executive producers of a film called The Dungeon Masters. Wikipedia describes it as thus, a 2008 documentary film about the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons and its significance in the life of three dungeon masters, Scott Corum, Richard Meeks, and Elizabeth Reesman. Let’s listen to a clip.

Elizabeth Reesman: My name’s Elizabeth Reesman.

Richard Meeks: Richard Meeks.

Scott Corum: My name is Scott Corum, and I play Dungeons and Dragons.

Speakers: Dungeons and Dragons.

Richard Meeks: Within my campaign, if I don’t kill you by midnight, I haven’t done my job.

Elizabeth Reesman: There’s a very big difference in the balance of power between males and females. His kind are not welcome. You’re an elf. Rights? Men don’t have rights. Most dragons can speak common.

Richard Meeks What’s that?

Elizabeth Reesman: It’s the common language which I’m speaking now.

Richard Meeks: I’m rolling 14 dice. Oh, Jesus, this is going to be sick.

Scott Corum: I’m a little sensitive to toxic mold.

Elizabeth Reesman: Relationships for me are interesting. The best way I can put it is that I am a drama attractor.

Speaker 6: Also, next month, there is going to be a lifestyle assessment survey. Expect about an hour and a half.

John: All right, so that’s a little taste from the trailer for the movie. What is this thing? Tell me why it exists and how you got involved.

Phil: This exists really from the Herculean efforts of Kevin McAllister, the director, who is an old good friend of ours and an amazing documentarian. I started talking about Dungeons and Dragons because, as we experienced together, it’s one of my favorite things. Kevin had never played and was not even super aware of it, but was immediately fascinated by everything about it.

Matt and I and our friend Kel, and our other producing partners decided to try to do this, which we’d never made a documentary before. It’s completely different than anything we’d done. It takes really long. The biggest difference, it depends on the type of documentary. This kind of documentary, you don’t know what the story is going to be when you start making it. You just have to figure it out. The important thing was finding the people. Kevin took a trip to Gen Con and interviewed a ton of people, all of whom were fascinating.

John: We should say Gen Con is the big D&D convention in Geneva, Wisconsin.

Phil: It’s the big gathering every year, and found all these amazing people. The one thing we had going into it, and Kevin says sometimes with the documentary, you don’t know what’s going to happen, but you know what is happening. That starts creating ideas. When we really knew it was going to be a movie, we realized we wanted to make a movie about how, talking about themes, I guess, if you’re a creative person in the United States of America and elsewhere, I’m sure, and you make money at it, you’re seen as a success, and you’ve done it.

It doesn’t matter what that thing is that you’ve done, or does matter, but you did it. If you are an incredible storyteller, a brilliant person telling stories to your friends, making joy for your community, and you don’t make money at it, you’re seen as nothing. We were like, “That’s really wrong.” The idea of Dungeons & Dragons and what we hope to show in this movie is that the amount of creativity can be a life.

Everyone in the movie, and sadly, we lost Scott Corum recently, but all of them have their whole lives, and then they’ve got D&D offers very different outlets for each of them, too, and that’s part of the fun of the movie. It was the desire to make a movie about creativity, but not in maybe the traditional way that we see artists’ dock of creativity.

John: What’s fascinating, watching it, because it’s 20 years back in time, is that Dungeons & Dragons has become much more popular, much more mainstream.

Phil: Whole different thing.

John: What we see in this film, it’s not live action role-playing, but they’re dressing up in costumes as they’re playing. It’s not what we normally think about it. It’s a more rough-and-tumble. I don’t know, theatricality, it’s just different.

Phil: I think part of that might be that Kevin, it’s a film, so he’s attracted to the people who did dress up more and do more.

John: For credit visual.

Phil: Also, Richard Meeks’s game is a very traditional, the glimpses we get of it, if extraordinarily brutal version of Dungeons & Dragons.

John: It’s actually that [unintelligible 01:05:07] of horror’s aspect of, and now, tear up your sheets and go home.

Phil: Tear up your sheets and go home. You’re all dead. You get the glimpse, the traditional round-the-table friend’s game. Elizabeth’s game, she dresses up. Scott’s game, I think in his game, sometimes they maybe dress, sometimes they don’t. They’re more traditional, too. We also have some LARPing. They all do a little bit of each of it. Yes, it’s a different time. When I knew we were going to talk about it, I was thinking that the evolutions of Dungeons & Dragons and the popular culture now.

Now, shockingly it’s a cool thing to do. It’s incredible to me because people who grew up in our era would be like, “If you played Dungeons & Dragons, you were part of the secret club, and you couldn’t let the jocks find out.” My friend, Chris, who I played D&D with, had a term that he’d call the shame of the game. He’s like, it’s the shame that you feel knowing you’re playing Dungeons & Dragons and they could find you at any time.

John: What’s fascinating about making a documentary and picking these three people to focus on is that you’re shining a spotlight on them and their lives. Of course, what’s fun and amusing about it is their normal lives versus what this is, and to what degree they are masters of the table when they’re DMing, they control the universe. In real life, they don’t control the universe.

Phil: Totally. That was something that I’m so glad Kevin was able to evoke so well. I know it was his intention, is to show that these are people who live very real American lives and have struggles and have triumphs and have this thing that gives them a community. Even though D&D is great. I think some people misinterpret a little bit. D&D is ridiculous. That’s what’s great about it.

John: It’s essentially improv.

Phil: It’s improv.

John: We say it’s a game, but it’s not a game you win. The terrible shooting at home implies that you’ve lost or you’ve failed, but it’s not really a winning or losing game. If you were to make a movie about ballroom dancing or something where you see their normal lives and their ballroom dancing, there’s a scoring to that. You can understand where people are at, but who’s ahead and who’s behind in Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t make sense.

Phil: The idea of being the dungeon master is one who is controlling the experience. You really are in control, and you have a lot of responsibilities, as we see in Richard’s group, which disintegrates because they disappoint him so greatly as a god. That’s part of it. Again, this is the creative outlet for some tremendously creative people who certainly aren’t offered that.

Scott wrote books and tried to get them out there, and did public television. He was constantly making things, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the people in the movie, I’d hope they could recognize that the D&D games that they ran might be the greatest act of creativity that they’ve had, and might have impacted people much more deeply than anything else.

John: It’s also the fact that it’s people trying to establish community who, in many cases, don’t have fantastic social skills otherwise. It’s a paradox of you’re playing a social game where you, in real life, are not necessarily so socially adept. That’s some of the comedy in there and the pathos in there.

Phil: I think it’s a haven for people who desire structure for social time, and it really is wonderful for that. I’ll also say the stereotype isn’t always true. We encounter so many D&D players who are robust, hard-living, crazy fun folk.

John: In our town, we have a bunch of very recognizable actors who are playing the game as well.

Phil: That’s true. Ringers.

John: Yes, it’s some ringers. I think what’s nice about it, and I’m so happy that it exists as a snapshot of a 2008 version of this, is because it’s so entirely true for what that is. If you look at it from a modern lens, it doesn’t match up to what it is now. D&D is weird because it attracts both theater kids and folks who love baseball stats.

Phil: Totally. There’s a number- crunching part of it that I’m really bad at, as you’ve witnessed in real life, John. Some people are into that. They’re really good at it, but other people, it’s like, “I want to play a weird character, and I want to roll these dice and roll these wonderful tetrahedrons that are–

John: There’s a collectible’s aspect. It touches on so many different areas of that.

Phil: Totally.

John: I went to the Ren Faire three weeks ago, and it’s not D&D, but there’s a lot of D&D-adjacent stuff there. They have dice. They have special gem dice, and there’s a lot of D&D stuff there, which makes sense.

Phil: It’s weirdly where you can see a nexus where there’s a door open for straight-up hippies, and a door open for metal kids, and a door open for prog rock dorks like me. The world of fantasy, I think it weirdly was like back in the ‘70s. Every band, like freaking Uriah Heep, was with the amazing dragon on the cover and everything. Then it got squashed a little, and now I think fantasy is coming back a little, and just an iconography. That’s cool that we’re in that zone.

John: The Dungeon Masters, you said that the invitation finally paid off. Do you know if The Dungeon Masters paid off?

Phil: I can’t imagine it paid off for the financier. Jeff Kusama-Hintewas the financier, who is a saint and a great producer. I don’t know, but perhaps I should do an audit.

John: Absolutely. Just dig in there and find out the hidden gold at the port of treasure.

Phil: We are owed $4.9 million personally. This is a miracle.

John: Thank you, Phil.

Phil: Thank you so much. It was fun.

Links:

• Phil Hay
• Scriptnotes Episode 244, Episode 377, and Episode 505
• The Dungeon Masters
• The Answering Machine Meltdown from Swingers
• John’s daily to-do template
• Pamela Ribon’s One Act documentary
• Petey USA’s The Yips
• KOXY College Radio
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Craig Good (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 698 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we discuss movies that never existed, from high-profile projects that got shelved at the last minute, to our own experiences with unmade projects. Then, it’s time for some listener questions covering multi-language dialogue and multi-part movies, among other things.

In our bonus segment for premium members, if no one paid us to write screenplays anymore, Craig, if they would never get made, would we continue to write them as a form?

Craig: Uh. [chuckles]

John: Yes, you have an hour to think about that.

Craig: I don’t know if I need an hour, but all right.

John: We’ll talk about the pros and cons of the screenplay format. It’s a literary thing independent of a way to make a movie. Craig, this last week, I ran the San Francisco Half Marathon.

Craig: Congrats.

John: Which was really fun. I’d done the second half of it six years ago. This week, I did the first half. As I was running it, I was thinking like, “I wonder if Craig knows these things.” How do they know when a racer crosses the finish line? How do they know the time of a racer?

Craig: If I had to guess, I don’t think it’s as fancy as like an RFID tag in a bib.

John: It is an RFID tag in a bib.

Craig: Oh, it is? It is as fancy as that.

John: The day before the race, you go and you pick up your bib, and that’s the thing you have paper-clipped onto your shirt, or we have little fancy magnets now because we’re fancy. On the back of that bib is an RFID tag, and so as you’re running the race, you’re constantly passing through gates that are tracking that you ran through. There’s an app that you install on your phone-

Craig: For friends and family to follow on.

John: -to find you, but also, it tells you in real time what your pace is.

Craig: Oh, so you actually carry a phone with you as you’re running?

John: I do carry a phone with me as I’m running.

Craig: Because that’s extra weight.

John: It’s extra weight, but it’s fine. Most people are, I think, are running with phones these days.

Craig: Running with phones, yes. It would be rough if you were tracking this, your loved one is in a marathon and they just stop.

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: They stop for a long time, then you hear sirens. It’s rough.

John: It’s not good.

Craig: No.

John: It’s helpful for your friends and family because that way, they can figure out where you are on the race, so they can come and cheer you on on a certain place.

Craig: Yes, that makes absolute sense. It’s a nicer scenario than the one I suggested.

John: The whole idea of RFID and tracking leads to a bigger question because earlier this summer, I was on a cruise in Alaska. On this boat, you wear this little medallion that has an RFID with you, and it’s super handy because, again, you pull up the app and it’s like, “I want a cup of coffee.” Wherever you are on the boat, [crosstalk] press one button, they find you, they bring you this stuff. It’s nice.

Craig: Oh, they’re bringing it to you?

John: They bring it to you, not to your cabin, just to you-

Craig: To you.

John: -directly, wherever you are.

Craig: Yes, right now, I guess our phones are that thing, but eventually, we’ll all be chipped at birth.

John: Both the race and the cruise ship were cases where that kind of constant surveillance I liked, but I don’t want to have it everywhere all the time. I don’t want to be forced into it.

Craig: No, I don’t want to have a situation where a corporation can track me wherever I go, although, currently, that is the situation I have. Let’s face it.

John: It is, yes.

Craig: They know everything. I was just thinking in my mind, if you did start to chip human beings at birth.

John: Yes, because you’re a parent who wants to know where your kid is.

Craig: Let’s say the state has decided. In our rougher scenario, every human shall be chipped. I’m trying to think biologically where to put this so that it won’t be dislodged by growth. I’m struggling. I think everything grows. Nothing is fully sized when you’re born, not even one little tiny thing.

John: Yes, your eyes are bigger, proportionally bigger, but the eyes are still going to continue to grow.

Craig: Everything grows, so I don’t know where to put it.

Drew Marquardt: With animals, they’d put it under the skin and it sits on top.

Craig: Animals grow, yes, and they don’t grow as much as we do. Humans are ridiculous. We’re born so stupidly small compared to–

John: Early because–

Craig: Early, because of our dumb heads.

John: Otherwise, we wouldn’t fit through the birth canal.

Craig: Yes, but I think you could put it under the skin, I suppose. I just wonder if it would get irritated, or it could move, it could shift.

John: Yes, you might swap that at a certain point.

Craig: Yes, maybe you do like a little baby tag. Then you do a kid tag. It’d be great. Kids would love it.

John: Oh, fantastic. Alrighty, the issue of tracking your kids and turning on Find My Friends and Find My is a thing. I remember talking with you at a certain point, and we realized that I think our daughters are at the same concert in Boston. You’re like, “Let me pull up,” and was like, “Oh yes, she’s there.” You did that. I didn’t do that because I sort of have an unspoken thing that I don’t find my friends when she’s not in Los Angeles.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. I never have to look at it, but when Jessie was in school in Boston, I never went to go look for her. I would look for Melissa, like, “Where’s my wife?” Always at the tennis. The tennis is where she is. It has a list. It’s like, “Melissa is 8 miles away. Jessica is 3,000-something miles away.” Then I’d be like, “Oh yes, look, there she is in Boston somewhere.”

John: I only share location with family. I don’t share with

Drew. That feels like–

Craig: I share my location with Drew, which is weird.

John: It’s just strange. Yes.

Craig: I just want him to know. No, just family. Just really, just actually, not even my full family, just Melissa and Jessica. You know what I don’t use enough? When you are meeting somebody somewhere in a large public place, you can share your location with them, which obviously Drew and his generation does constantly. I’m like, “Oh yes, I forgot.”

John: Yes. I will do that temporarily, but I don’t do it with friends. Drew, do you share your location with any friends?

Drew: I only do the temporary. Even me and my wife don’t share. We don’t have Find my Friends.

Craig: What? Oh wow.

John: Wow.

Drew: Pure trust.

Craig: It’s not about trust. It’s not like I think, “Oh, she’s going whoring again.” I–

John: To me, it’s always like, how close is Mike to being home?

Craig: Yes, exactly. If I’m going to order food, should I see if she’s going to be here or–?

Drew: I don’t know. It feels like a threshold that because I haven’t crossed it yet, I don’t want to cross it yet.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: You’re up to something.

Drew: [laughs]

John: It’s all– [crosstalk]

Craig: I am absolutely [unintelligible 00:06:01] Drew is up to something.

Drew: I’m whoring.

Craig: You’re whoring?

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I love whore as a verb–

John: He’s a secret assassin. He’s out there killing people.

Craig: Not anymore.

John: Not anymore. Some follow up. Hey, remember we wrote a book?

Craig: Oh my goodness. We wrote a book, and John, I have an author page-

John: On Amazon.

Craig: -on Amazon, which as you can imagine is populated with almost nothing. It’s got my picture.

John: Yes, got your picture. People have been sending Drew their pre-order receipts, which is great.

Craig: Amazing. How are we doing? Are we going to be doing a lot of signing?

Drew: We have about 150 so far.

Craig: Oh, that’s pretty good. Of just people that sent receipts?

Drew: Just people who sent receipts.

John: Oh. A reminder, if you pre-order the book from wherever you order it from, so not just Amazon, but any place– [crosstalk]

Craig: Sure, anywhere.

John: Send your little receipt through to Drew, ask@johnaugust.com, and we will send you something cool. We’re not quite sure what it’s going to be yet. It could be a bonus chapter. It could be some successful video report.

Craig: It could be a brand new car.

John: It could be something cool, but we’ll send that out well before the book comes out.

Craig: Do we have any sense, other than the receipts that you have received, does Amazon tell you how many people are buying it or–?

John: Pre-ordering it? I think Crown, our publisher in the US, has had this,-

Craig: Oh, they got– [crosstalk]

John: -and so at some point, they’ll tell us.

Craig: At some point they’ll give us the bad news.

John: They’ll say, “We’re really worried, John, Craig.”

Craig: [laughs]

John: No, I think they’re happy with almost anything.

Craig: Wow.

John: No, because here’s the thing, it’s–

Craig: That’s a low bar.

John: There are books that need to be giant hits out of the gate and needs to hit those lists. We are a catalog title, where there’s like, we’re evergreen.

Craig: We are not the latest Stephen King novel.

John: Yes. Questions that I got off of Reddit and other people asking, audio book. Yes, if you see, there’s a listing with a little button for audio book, there’s plans for an audio book. There’s nothing to announce yet, but there’s going to be an audio book. It’s not me and Craig talking.

Craig: Should we just get Ryan Reynolds to do it? [laughs] Just hold Ryan down and force him to do it at some point?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’ll be fun.

John: Yes, good.

Craig: Because occasionally, in the middle of an audio book, you get the sense that the person reading it is a hostage. [chuckles] They try and run, and there’s scuffle, and then they come back and resume reading.

John: For the podcast, they did lauch about the [unintelligible 00:08:02] books. The episode I did about the audiobook was actually really fascinating because I met the guy in LA, who actually recorded the book, and just his whole process was great and crazy.

Crown came to us and said like, “Hey, do you and Craig want to record the audiobook?” I’m like, “No. We record a podcast every week, and that’s plenty. No. No, thank you.

Craig: Yes, it’s too much reading.

John: It’ll be great to have a real professional do it.

Craig: Yes, terrific, so Ryan Reynolds?

John: Or somebody like Ryan Reynolds.

Craig: Yes, somebody bigger.

John: Yes.

Craig: Tom Hanks? [chuckles]

John: Yes. Crown said we should go for Tom Hanks.

Craig: Tom Hanks would be great.

John: Yes.

Craig: is he doing stuff? We’ll check into it.

John: I’ve heard that the Britney Spears biography that is read by Michelle Williams is incredible, so maybe Michelle Williams should be the choice.

Drew: That would be perfect.

Craig: That’s kind of amazing.

John: The person who I think is actually going to record it, is actually listening to the podcast right now, and he’s so upset that–

Craig: He’s like, “I’m an effin’ person.”

John: He’s an effin’ person in the world.

Craig: I’m an effin’ person.

John: Other questions were about the international versions, and so, there are no plans right now for a translation, probably because if you’re listening to this podcast, you speak English, you can probably read English. People ask about like, “Oh, I want to buy it in Europe. I want to buy it in Asia. Where do I get it from?” I asked, and the real answer is, wherever you get your English books is where you should go, so go to whatever bookstore or whatever online site is that you buy books in English, because they will have it. They’ll either get the US or the UK version. They’re both basically the same.

Craig: Yes, it’s an interesting question. I suppose that the marketplace will determine these things, if there’s a clamoring from a particular country. I’m looking at you, Brazil.

John: Yes, my agent was saying that there are cases, you’ll be in India, and you’ll see the US and the UK version side by side on a shelf. That’s just what happens.

Craig: Does just that color is spelled differently?

John: No. Honestly, the UK version is not changing our spelling.

Craig: What is the difference? Page size?

John: I think page size and slightly different pricing.

Craig: Oh.

John: Because of imports and–

Craig: What, tariffs?

John: Tariffs and things.

Craig: What? What? What?

John: What? What? What? Books are physical things that are printed in places. Other bits of follow up. My game Birdigo that I made with Corey Martin is out now on Steam. It’s a whopping $8.49.

Craig: Oh my God.

John: It’s a huge burden.

Craig: Ugh.

John: Ugh. We’ve gotten so many good reviews in the press,-

Craig: Great.

John: -and we’re currently 100% positive on Steam itself, which is great.

Craig: Only 100%?

John: Only 100%.

Craig: If I go in there just as a jerk, I can get it to 99%? [chuckles]

John: Weirdly, it would actually help us a little bit because how Steam ratings work is that it’s based on total number of reviews. We’re at the threshold where we’re listed as positive, but once we get to the next threshold of reviews, which is 50 or 100, then it becomes very positive.

Craig: I see.

John: Then it becomes overwhelmingly positive.

Craig: I see.

John: If you are a person like Craig who has played the game and enjoyed it and want to leave us a review, leave us a review because it actually does help.

Craig: That makes sense because if you put something on there, you could say, “Hey, I’m going to get 50 of my friends to do a review.” They need to know that it’s more than just the friends and family. I get that.

John: Yes, so that’s what–

Craig: That’s fantastic.

John: Yes, that’s good news.

Craig: Birdigo.

John: More follow up. Last week, we talked about Solar Storms as part of How Would This Be A Movie. Drew, what did we hear?

Drew: Multiple people wrote in that it sounded very much like the novel Aurora by a former Scriptnotes guest, David Koepp.

John: David Koepp, that hack.

Craig: Koepp, what can he do? By the way, David Koepp has quietly crushed the Summer Box office. Everyone was going on about Superman and Fantastic Four. Meanwhile, Jurassic, Jurassic-ness?

John: The Jurassic World Rebirth.

Craig: Jurassic World Rebirth has done better than both of those movies. It’s just massive.

John: Massive. Massive.

Craig: It’s like it’s grossed like almost $800 million globally. That’s David Koepp still doing it.

John: Also, Presence, a movie that Drew and I both saw, directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Drew: Black Bag too.

John: Yes, Black Bag also.

Drew: Black Bag is great.

John: Just killing it.

Craig: Just Koepp, just–

John: Keopp it in. Koepping it real.

Craig: You cannot beat David Koepp. Also, side note, and we’ve had him on this, one of the loveliest people. Just incredible guy. Love him.

John: Love it. I should not be surprised that he saw the scientific thing that exists in the world. It’s like, I should–

Craig: Of course he did.

John: I should write a book about this.

Craig: Yes, he’s sort of casually predicted that we would eventually get that and fumble it. Although, if you have a David Koepp novel, and it has not yet been turned into a movie, that is an indication that it should not be a movie because you know people must have tried.

John: Yes. What’s wrong with a book that it’s not–?

Craig: I think the book is probably great, it’s just that it’s not movie-ish.

John: Maybe.

Craig: How does that not happen?

John: He’s so angry now listening to this podcast.

Craig: I hope he is.

John: Yes. We were talking back in Episode 675 about lost genres or genres that people should see at least one example of a movie in. A bunch of people wrote in with recommendations for genres that people need to at least see one thing in. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Andrew writes, “Yakuza films, they are more often than not just as economical as noir films, but even more stylish, cynical, and tragic.” He recommends Pale Flower from 1964.

John: I’ve not seen any of these in the genre, and I think it’s a good recommendation.

Craig: Sure.

John: What else do we got?

Drew: John James recommends giallo, which is Italian horror.

Craig: Of course, yes, no.

Drew: Dario Argento’s Deep Red.

Craig: No.

Drew: No?

Craig: No. Not for me.

Drew: Not for you?

Craig: I’ve seen some of it. It’s not for me. It’s gross.

John: I’ve seen an Argento movie, and I do understand it as a genre. It’s just nothing for me. Either too, but it’s–

Craig: Right, other people, sure.

John: Should see it.

Craig: I think Suspiria-

John: Suspiria, yes.

Craig: -that’s the one to see, and then you would know.

Drew: I think nerds say that that’s not quite a giallo for some reason.

John: Oh.

Craig: No.

Drew: That would be my pick.

Craig: Nerds say that?

Drew: Yes.

Craig: I’m not going to listen. Let’s see if some of them write in. [chuckles]

John: What if we said like, David Koepp’s genre is dinosaurs, and then it’s just like, “Oh, but I also made Black Bag.” There’s no dinosaurs in Black Bag.

Craig: Black Bag’s not quite a dinosaur film. Then we’re like, “Yes, it is, nerds.”

Drew: [chuckles] Absolutely, and they just get angry.

John: Because this is about old spies and young spies.

Craig: Yes, it’s dinosaurs.

Drew: Dwayne writes, “Post-Michael Moore Americana documentaries, featuring cheeky editing, eccentric people, and small stories about the alluring weirdness of pre-9/11 Middle America. Documentaries like Hands on a Hard Body, or American Movie, or Wonderland.”

Craig: You know what? I’ve seen two of those movies. Yes, they were both interesting snapshots of a time.

John: Yes. Also like a style in editing. It’s good to point out what it is. It’s not that Michael Moore’s sort of like, “Here’s a broad statement about a thing.” It’s very specific on people and behaviors.

Craig: Hands on a Hard Body probably got 40% of its audience just from title confusion. Just brilliant.

John: Love it. So good.

Craig: Do you know what Hands on a Hard Body is though?

John: Absolutely, it says something about–

Craig: Oh, you might have seen even the show. They made a show.

John: Yes, they made a Broadway show of it.

Craig: Yes, I saw that show.

John: I never saw the show, but how are the songs? Were they–?” [crosstalk]

Craig: I remember there was one great one. I remember that. There was one really good, like eleven o’clock-ish kind of number.

John: How was the truck? Was the truck good?

Craig: The truck was great. They had it on a turntable, and the cast had to keep their hands on it. Although they were allowed to sort of like astral project forward to sing their solos and then move back to the truck.

John: Oh yes, that makes sense.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes. Did you ever see Waitress either on stage or-

Craig: No.

John: -the musical version? It’s one of the rare cases where they captured the Broadway version and really filmed it in a way that’s impressive. I’d recommend it for people who want to see it. Last one.

Drew: Last one is Aldo says, “If John likes Memories of a Murder, he’ll probably dig Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa in the Japanese horror genre.

John: I don’t know very much about Japanese horror, and that’s another good recommendation for me. If we could combine Yakuza horror,-

Craig: I’m sure that’s good.

John: -that’s has to have– Oh my God. As I said the sentence, like that one can happen.

Craig: Japanese horror is pretty cool. I had a pretty cool moment. Then Korea came along and just ate its lunch-

John: Yes, crazy.

Craig: -for East-Asian horror films. Kairo, aka Pulse is Japanese, they tried to– Well, they attempted to adapt it here in the US. Didn’t go well, but that movie has one of the scariest single scenes in it where basically, nothing happens. Totally worth it for that. Just the scene of a ghost walking down a hallway. It was very cool.

John: Love it.

Craig: If you know, you know.

John: Some more follow up. We had Scott Frank on and we’re talking about writing education.

Drew: Tim says, “I’m a high school film and TV teacher, and I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of teaching structure as a shortcut to storytelling, mostly because I don’t get much time with my hundred plus students before we need to move on to the rest of film and TV production. The conversation about craft versus voice really landed.

The Scott Frank school of screenwriting seems to emphasize practice as a path to discovering voice, which also helps to answer a question I’ve been wrestling with. Why teach students to write screenplays if AI can do it better than most of them? The answer is ChatGPT doesn’t have a unique voice, we do. This year, I hope to shift my focus to helping students find their voice and maybe a little less on the proper use of a parenthetical.”

Craig: Oh, wonderful. That sounds great. Because structure and all the rest of it, these parentheticals, margins, rules, format, all that stuff, you can pick that stuff up in three days if you feel like it. What you can’t pick up in three days is knowing what to write. I could certainly see a class where everybody has to write the same scene, and they have to rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it, until it’s something special. This is how you find your voice.

John: Love it.

Drew: More follow up, this one from Kate. “I’m a playwright and I teach theater at a small high school. I actually had to step into this job mid-year when the other teacher had to leave unexpectedly. I was so excited because in addition to my theater classes, I’d be teaching a screenwriting and playwriting course. The previous teacher had focused a lot on pitching outlines and working on index cards. Students wanted to talk about their ideas, but had trouble putting anything on the page.

I often got the feeling that students felt stuck or afraid when it was time to write their projects because they had an outline that they had to follow. Almost like they were afraid to write a scene because it may be wrong or different from their original outline. When you suggested writing short scenes with no pressure to be part of a larger script, I was practically fist pumping in my car. Yes, short exercises give young writers permission to experiment. Be messy, make mistakes. This is how we learned to write.”

Craig: Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Look, we may be changing things one teaching program at a time. Again, here’s your assignment, a scene. Write it, rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it. Have your classmates perform it. Rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it. If you could take a class where you end up with one great three-page scene, you’ve come so far, baby.

John: Absolutely. Because you would probably have started this class thinking, “I cannot do this thing. I have no idea what this looks like in my head,” but the ability to actually visualize, “Okay, this is what’s happening in the scene, that I can picture the whole thing. I can hear the whole thing. Now I’m going to capture it down on paper in a way that makes sense,” is so crucial.

A thing I did for myself when I was in high school, I think, is I had an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I had recorded on probably VHS. I just went and transcribed it, and then actually tried to write what the actual scene would look like on the page. That’s a good practice too, just like how do you– You see a thing, but what does it actually look like in words on paper?

Craig: Yes. The iteration, I think, is an incredibly important thing. I think that that’s not given enough attention. Being forced to rewrite the same thing over and over, it sounds bad, except you write a scene and then you share it. It is exposed. You learn how it’s landing. People give you feedback. Are we bored? Are we interested? Do we have questions? This doesn’t make sense. Or I’m just bored. What else could you do here? How could this be richer? What does the room smell like, look like? All those wonderful things we do. Then you rewrite, and you rewrite, and you rewrite. At some point, you’re going to find something.

John: Yes. As you talked about in the episode, acting classes are so helpful because that paradigm of just like, you have to be on your feet and doing a scene and you’re getting feedback on it. It’s just like, you just have to do it.

Craig: You have to do it.

John: You can’t talk about acting a lot.

Craig: Because you’re performing the scene, you are required to think about the things that happen in between your lines. Where were you the moment before? Massively important. How did that statement land with you? Are you lying? All these wonderful things need to be in the scene you write when people are learning how to write. If they’re concentrating on hitting the fricking midpoint, whatever the hell, they’re just not going to get it.

John: All right, let’s go to our main topic today, which is movies that never were. I’m not quite sure how this idea came to me. It could have been an article I read, but this week, I got thinking back about giant movies that never happened, things I sort of know about or I’ve heard about, but it never actually became movies that we saw in the theaters.

A lot of these are superhero movies. There was the Tim Burton version of Superman with Nicolas Cage.

Craig: Yes, I remember that.

John: McG Superman that had a script by JJ Abrams. Okay. James Cameron’s Spider-Man. I’d actually read that script a zillion years ago.

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: It was a, Spider-Man versus Electro. There was like a–

Craig: Oh, which they ended up doing anyway.

John: Yes. There was a Justice League that was supposed to be directed by George Miller.

Craig: Oh.

John: Yes. I think it was around the time of the earlier Record strike. Of course the Batgirl movie that was actually shot, but then it got shelved.

Craig: It got shelved.

John: Which is a really rare situation. Superhero movies are really common for this, but also Jodorowsky’s Dune is sort of legendary. There’s a documentary about that. Then Mouse Guard, which was the very expensive adaptation of a beloved children’s book or middle-grade book that Wes Ball I think was supposed to direct. They pulled at it the very last minute.

Craig: There are also these movies that I’m sure you either wrote on or somebody asked you to write on them that have been floating around seemingly forever.

John: Yes. Did you ever work on Bob: The Musical?

Craig: No, but I know that Alec Berg did.

John: Yes, I wrote on it. The amount of money spent on scripts for that movie, it’s got to be astronomical. Real composers did songs for it.

Craig: There are things like this.

John: Here’s the good scene of Bob: The Musical, a man who hates musicals wakes up and discovers he’s in a musical and has to get out of the musical. It’s a comedy in the world of a Liar Liar or those kinds of things.

Craig: Sure. Which it sounds like the premise of Schmigadoon!, which obviously came after the 800 years of development of Bob: The Musical. Yes, they’re just these movies. I remember in the ‘90s working on Stretch Armstrong. There are movies that they really wanted to make out of a toy or an object. Eight Ball’s been floating around for a while, the Magic Eight Ball. Then Monopoly. Monopoly–

John: Oh, yes. There have been so many versions of Monopoly.
Craig: I think they announced a new one recently. Every year, a new Monopoly is going to not happen.
[laughter]

Craig: It’s actually kind of amusing that that’s the property that people lose so much money on. [laughs]

John: Let’s just talk about the pure development projects. Because Monopoly, as far as I know, never went to pre-production, never spent that money. It was probably just on scripts.

Craig: Yes, endless development.

John: The endless development things, sometimes it’s all with one company. Therefore, it’s one property that has hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of script fees against it. Some cases, which I suspect is the Monopoly case, they didn’t set up this place or that place or this place or that place. Those all become new projects, essentially.

Craig: The rights lapse.

John: Therefore, the studio burned a certain amount of money on a script, but they can’t make the property anymore.

Craig: Clue they’ve been trying to redo again. Risk is one that was going around for a while. What are you supposed to do with that exactly?

John: No. Yes. There’s a version of that movie that could have been terrific, but we never saw it.

Craig: Board games are not a great idea to adapt. I understand why everybody went for them.

John: Yes, it’s a recognizable title.

Craig: Clue–

John: Clue is a better idea than most. It actually has characters.

Craig: The Clue that was made is a cult classic and I love it. It is probably the one that’s most– Because there’s a narrative to it. Someone killed somebody with a thing in a place. Monopoly, Risk, they’re just words we know.

John: Here we’re talking about the IP that is just like, is that even a really good idea for a movie? In other cases, like they are good ideas for movies that are based on a really good book.

Craig: They just don’t seem to be able to happen.

John: Absolutely. Let’s talk about the things that don’t happen and why-

Craig: Sure.

John: -they don’t happen. Sometimes there’s a piece of talent who was keyly involved in getting it set up and getting the momentum going on it. Like a Will Smith. I’ve been on a couple of really expensive projects with Will Smith that didn’t go forward. He loses interest or another thing comes up in front of it. When a director or a star has like 10 projects, nine of those aren’t happening generally. Sometimes you’re one of those things. People are gambling like this is going to be the one that they’ll say yes to.

Craig: Sometimes there’s projects where everybody, it feels like, is tight. The pressure to make it, the costs of the rights, some sort of window to get an actor or a director makes everybody tight. Everyone’s tense. Everything is overexamined, overthought, overanalyzed, and nothing can survive that generally. Nothing is natural about that process. Everything is hyper-coordinated, and you end up with a hyper-coordinated script, which nobody wants to make.

John: Some cases it’s not the script that was ultimately the problem though. It was that to actually make the movie, it just became impossibly expensive.

Craig: There is that BioShock.

John: Yes, so BioShock is a great, great property, but the world building in it is so expensive that it’s hard to justify making that as the movie. They’re trying to do it as a series now, we’ll see what that is, but those are real issues.

Craig: I think now in the era of these big streaming shows, it’s doable to do BioShock, for sure. I do remember being on the Universal lot. There was a building that used to be Ivan Reitman’s company, Montecito. It’s a big building, and they had all this great Ghostbusters stuff in there, and then–

John: Was that the big blue house or a different one?

Craig: No, it wasn’t big blue house. It was more like this squarish modernish building. It was pretty cool. It was near the big blue house. Then it got taken over by Gore Verbinski when they were well on their way to making that BioShock. I remember going in there, I think to meet with Gore, and there was a big daddy– I don’t know [unintelligible 00:26:23] Just this big oldie timey diver suit with a drill hand, full life size in the lobby. I’m like, “Oh, this is going to be awesome.”

John: Then, it didn’t happen.

Craig: Then, it didn’t happen.

John: Let’s talk about that because more than I think the money you’re spending on scripts, that kind of R&D where you’re actually starting to really go into prep, that’s where you’re spending some real money. There was a project I was on a few years ago that I finally asked, “What actually happened?” I realized and I was told, they spent tens of billions of dollars that I did not know they were spending on storyboards and everything else.

That momentum, it’s a weird thing. You think, “Oh, it’s a sunk cost policy, so therefore, they’ll make it because we have to keep going because we already spent all this money,” but at a certain point, they realized like, oh, no, no, that the movie itself is going to be too expensive to make and we have to stop.

Craig: One of the things that is true about Hollywood, and I’m not sure it’s quite as true in other industries, is that there’s much more turnover. Now, Hollywood has actually been a fairly stable place leadership-wise over the last few years. When you look at how long Donna Langley has been running Universal, Bob Iger came back to continue to run Disney.

Generally speaking, every three, four years, somebody got kicked out and a new person got put in, and that was the point where they would sit down, look at stuff and go, “This isn’t my Concorde fallacy.

John: No.

Craig: -this thing is absolutely turning around.” They would just drop the axe on those things knowing full well that they couldn’t be blamed for the money that was spent. They could only be rewarded for not spending more money. In that regard, Hollywood had these weird safeguards against the sunk cost fallacy.

John: I’m sure there is a corollary to the sunk cost fallacy where if someone just recognizes it doesn’t matter how much we’ve spent before. With the project I see right now, is there a way to go forward and have this make sense?

Craig: Yes, that’s the fallacy part, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: Somebody else comes in and goes, “Oh, I see we’ve all been engaging in the sunk cost fallacy on this. It’s over.” That’s a traumatic thing. When we talk about storyboards, and a large statue, and rooms of people that are trying to find locations. There’s a lot of jobs. A lot of those jobs at least used to be here too. Now, those too start to go away.

John: There’s other issues that come up. Once you think you’re making a movie, you’re starting to reserve a stage space, and so you’re like, “Oh my God, we need to shoot this in Australia. We need to shoot this in London. We need to scramble to get these things,” so you’re putting holds on things. I remember talking with a producer who coming out of the pandemic, it was like, “We have to reserve stage space, but I think we’re going to be okay to start shooting, but I’m not sure we’re going to be–“ Just having to make these calls, because it’s like, you can be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on a stage that you’ve rented that you can’t actually use.

Craig: Stage space is probably the largest pressure behind ratings for any network streamer to decide if they’re going to renew a show. They may be on the fence ratings-wise, but while they’re there, somebody from that show is going to say, “If you don’t renew us in the next week, we won’t have stages and we won’t be able to make the show.”

John: No.

Craig: “Are we going or are we not?” Stage space is the thing that makes some places– As attractive as the tax credits may be. For instance, in Australia, not a ton of stages.

John: No.

Craig: UK, amazing tax credits but not as many stages as you would think.

John: When I was shooting my one and only TV show up in Toronto, it was at a Canadian boom. There were so many things shooting in Canada, we couldn’t find stage spaces, so we ended up having to shoot like a warehouse.

Craig: Warehouses.

John: That was not really meant to be this. I’m sure you ran into similar situations like Calgary was not intended to have as much production as you were doing.

Craig: No, Calgary had one facility that was actually constructed to be stage space. The other large facility was two massive warehouses that they had retrofitted, but barely. In Vancouver there are both kinds, but there are a lot. Part of our thing, we’re going to be up there I think going side by side with Shogun this time, so Justin, and Rachel, and I are like, “Hey, are you using this person?” “Yes.” “Can I have that?” “No.” Where are your stages? Who’s your makeup person? It’s been a lot of that.

They have constructed more stage space there. When you look at other places the other issue is size of stages. Northern Ireland built quite a few stages during the Game of Thrones boom, but size like sometimes you need an enormous. Then there are the specialty stages, like at Warner Brothers, which has 20-something stages that are currently sitting mostly empty. Just tragedy. They have one, I think it’s stage 16, with the floor actually, you can remove the floor and it’s got a pit, which is very cool for all sorts of interesting things.

John: Let’s talk about this from a writer’s point of view and how this matters and what to think about with this. Some of the properties you mentioned early on, like the superhero movies or the things that are based on titles, the reason why a screenwriter might pursue them and take them is because they will pay you money to do the thing. It’s not like some wildfire. They’re actually going to pay you your quote to do a thing, and that can be great and that’s fantastic. I always go into those jobs knowing it’s like I might so naive to think like I’m the one person who’s going to crack the Monopoly movie that everyone else has been trying to do.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. I remember I think somebody had asked Ted Elliott around the time that the third Pirates movie came out, and they were saying, “How do you pick projects? Because people come to you and offer you things. What kind of movie do you want to write?” He said, “Movies that are getting made.” [chuckles] That was it.

John: That’s always been my answer about what genre- [crosstalk]

Craig: Genre is movies that are getting made. Yes, when you take one of those jobs, you have to know I am seventh in a line of 14.

John: You have to go in both hoping and expecting that it’s going to work, and then also, holding your heart a place that like, I understand why it could not work.

Craig: Yes, it’s a job. Yes. Everyone’s looking at it that way too. Sometimes the executives are like, “We don’t know why somebody made some deal with a wraith and we have to make this film or we’ll be cursed forever. We don’t want to, so we don’t really care.”

John: I want to distinguish between those two things. Listen, this is the luxury of where I’m at in my career, that I don’t pursue those things that I just don’t care about. Like Drew will say, like a lot of stuff comes my way, and it’s like, “No, that’s not for me.” I’ll often say like, “That’s not for me, but there’s a writer out there who will love that, and I’m so excited for them to do that adaptation of–

Craig: Monopoly.

John: Yes. There’s somebody who said that’s their favorite property at all time, but I try not to approach those jobs with such cynicism. For a weekly, if I’m just going on to fix a problem for a person–

Craig: Yes, I’ll do anything for a week.

John: Yes. Oh I know some of the movies you’ve worked on.

Craig: I’ve worked on just Extraordinary Girl. I’ll work on anything for a week. What do I care? You know what? I can’t make it worse.

John: No.

Craig: I try, I do my best, I make sure to listen to everybody, and I improve it. I really do.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: I do the job I’m paid to do. What I know is, and I’ve said this at times to them, I’m like, “I just want you to know I’m making this corpse okay for an open coffin funeral. That’s what I’m doing. Just so you guys know. This is not a patient I can cure, but you’ll be able to look at it.”
[laughter]

Craig: They’re like, “Great. We thank you. That’s what we were hoping for. We just want mom to be able to see her boy there in his little suit. Sometimes that even that’s hard.

John: Yes. Sometimes there’s just this fundamental problems.

Craig: Yes, but I’m always honest about it, but yes, for a week. To actually do a movie– When I started out, there are movies where I’m like, It’s job. A job’s a job.

John: A job’s a job.

Craig: I got to to it. I need money. You know what, I will learn along the way.

John: I did.

Craig: I did. I will also gain fans along the way. People that hire writers. Everybody calls everybody and asks. They all have their lists. Writers move up and down the list.

John: I was on Zoom this week with an executive who I’ve known and then talked about parties and had meetings with for 30 years. I’ve never worked with him or for him, but like, “Oh it’s great to catch up with you, Michael. I’ve not seen you.” I’ve not had a chance to do it, and it would be great to be able to do this project with him.” Going and knowing like it may not happen, and it’s okay also it doesn’t happen.

Craig: Sure, yes. There are some things you can just sort of smell the curse on them.

John: Yes, and I will run away from those. I’ve also learned, it’s like, “Oh, there’s this terrible person who’s attached to this intellectual property.” I will never touch it because that person, I cannot have in my life at all.

Craig: Correct. There are things where people start talking about them, and I think, “Oh, this is– Oh. Oh.”

John: Sure, yes.

Craig: “I wonder why this hasn’t–“

John: Absolutely. I remember loving that book and like, “Oh that guy.”

Craig: “Oh, this person’s involved.” Goodbye.

John: All right, let’s get to some listener questions. What do we got first, Drew?

Drew: Vanessa writes, “I’ve been listening to your podcast for a while now, and every time the intro comes around and the chime starts playing, I think I’ve heard that before. This email is asking if the chime is fully original or inspired by a movie or something like it.”

John: That is the “boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.” That is a thing I wrote originally for my short film, The Remnants. I thought I just needed a quick little intro that I sort of felt like The Office, but even quicker than that. I think it’s original, but you can actually find it in other things. Over the years, people have said like, “Oh, I found this theme from the ‘70s, which actually that has the same chord progressions.” It’s so simple that–

Craig: Yes, I know, it’s five notes. It’s five notes. Of course. It’s five notes that resolve. Yes, it will be in other things. It’s not like an identifiable jingle from any popular thing. Yes, but sure, you can find a five note progression before. There’s no new five note progression.

John: I will say, as we come up to episode 700, one of my favorite things about the show is that our incredible listeners starting with Matthew [unintelligible 00:37:03] who did so many of the incredible early intro, but just have taken those five notes and just done remarkable things with them. I’ll have a new one this week and every week. Please keep sending in your interpretations of the intro to make our outros.

Craig: Love it.

Drew: Larry writes, “”What’s the best way to watch a movie to put money back in the pockets of the people who made it? I half remember at one point that renting something out iTunes was better for y’all, but I feel like perhaps that’s out of date.”

Craig: No, that’s in date.

John: In date. We’re talking about the rental on iTunes or Amazon or wherever you rent those things. That rate is actually really good for us.

Craig: That is the best residual rate we have of anything. We got that all the way back in 2000. Yes, 2000, I’m pretty sure it was, or 2001. I think we got it mostly because the companies hadn’t really caught on yet. They were like, “What are you? Okay.” I remember the deal was that they refused to do sales. It was they were just like, “We’ll give you rentals. We’ll give you a great rate on rentals.”

John: If I’m this is a movie that I want to watch and I feel like I’m going to watch it once, I will rent it. If the movie is like, I think I may want to watch it again or if there’s something like an adaptation, I’ll buy it off of iTunes. Listen, there’s times where it’s like, “Oh, it’s got to go be streaming someplace,” and it’s like, “Sure, I’ll spend like two minutes to look see if it’s streaming someplace,” but just buy the movie or rent the movie because it’s just, I just have it.

Craig: I will say too that is very nice that he’s asking, but the truth is, the nicest way to watch anything, assuming you’re not pirating, is to watch it however you want. Rent, buy, stream, add support, doesn’t matter, just do it. Then, if you like it, tell other people to watch it too because the that’s the best residual rate we get is popularity. Spread the word, and that’s as best you can do, but you don’t need to be too concerned about the ethical viewing. [chuckles]

John: Yes, as long as you’re not pirating it, you’re making ethical choices. My movie The Nines, I think it’s it showed up on streaming every once in a while, but it’s basically always been a purchase or download, and so just like it’s cheap, it’s like $3.99 to rent the movie. Just watch the movie. It’s a good movie.

Craig: Just watch that.

John: Just watch the movie.

Craig: It’s all good.

Drew: Jeremy writes, “As a non-american, I’m horrified to watch what’s happening in your country, and my screenwriter brain was wondering how you would go about writing it in a humane, empathetic way. How do you write scripts in the era of neo-fascism that won’t dehumanize those who suffer most?”

Craig: I’m not sure I understand the question.

John: Yes, I think we may be some language barriers here, but I think I take this to mean like recognizing that your country’s is falling into fascism, how do you go approach writing movies, and does that change how we’re thinking about the stories we’re trying to tell and the choices we’re making?

Craig: if you’re writing a story that touches upon themes like that, then yes, you would want to touch on things, the part that I’m not quite getting is the, how do you be humane?

John: Humane. I think, from the context of the whole email, it’s something along the lines of like, if you’re writing about these big things, making sure that you’re thinking about the people who are affected by these big things.

Craig: Isn’t that what you would be writing about?

John: Here’s an example I can take from my own life. A project that we’ll see if I can end up getting it set up, but there’s a big military and international cooperation aspect of it, and it’s like, oh, it’s a different movie now than it would have been three or four years ago.

Craig: Sure.

John: Just because our allies are not our allies again. Europe isn’t necessarily on our side, and so those things change. You have to understand that, but in pitching it, it was actually nice to be able to say, “No, this is actually a moment where international cooperation becomes incredibly important, an outside threat unites us all together about a thing,” and that felt good and useful. In terms of, I’m not writing, I don’t have an extra appeal writing something dystopian and bleak, I think because I’m living in a bleak, dystopian moment, and I also know that I’m not going to get joy from writing that, but I also know that no one’s going to want to make that.

Craig: Right. I guess people have been writing about fascistic regimes, terroristic regimes, repressive regimes forever, whether they live in them or not. We are all, as artists, impacted by what’s going on around us. I don’t think it should be a challenge for anybody to write victims humanely.

I think sometimes there is an undertone of fear in some of the questions we get, and I don’t mean fear of fascistic regimes, although we should have that and quite a bit of it, fear that we’ll make a mistake in our writing. You use the phrase, make sure to, which is a very defensive position when you’re writing. I just want to make sure that I don’t blank, or I want to make sure I don’t blank. Make sure that you write something good, true and honest. If you do, some characters are going to be ugly, and I mean ugly on the inside, and like all of us, some victims will be imperfect. That’s part of what makes it true, interesting, and upsetting.

The weird attraction that Spielberg gave Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List, that strange hypnotic power he had, made that interesting more than just, there’s the dickhead Nazi. Because he understood that the truer that person gets, the scarier he gets. Yes, I wouldn’t worry so much. I would just write what’s true.

John: Absolutely, and I also need to recognize that your movie, when it happens, will resonate with the culture of the time that it comes out. The most recent Superman movie really resonates with this moment that we’re in terms of world crisis, and yet it was two years ago, three years ago, that it got put in motion. It wasn’t actually responding to the moment that we’re in, it’s just because of when it comes out, it resonates with the world that it’s actually in.

Craig: Yes, things take on stuff. I wasn’t thinking about, Donald Trump wasn’t the president when I started working on Chernobyl. Truth wasn’t necessarily under global attack at that moment. If you write about things that are evergreen concerns for humanity, and you write them truly, without fear of making a ‘mistake,’ then I think you’re off to a good start.

John: Let’s go to this question here from John about stamina.

Drew: “I’m quite fortunately a consistently working writer who has had a handful of produced credits, and I feel like I’m firmly in the prime of my career. I’m suddenly becoming very aware that my stamina as a writer is nowhere near where it used to be. I’m starting to have more anxiety over whether this means I’m losing my love for the job, or that sometime soon I won’t be able to do it at a high level anymore. Then I stress over the actual work itself. Do you have any tips for how to keep your energy for the job up when you know that you’ll never be the version of yourself that you were 10 or 20 years ago?”

John: Oh, for sure. Yes, I nod with all of this, and I do recognize it. I think, John, you already have the insight of that you’re just never the same person you were at 20 or at 30. Because on those, I could stay up to like four in the morning writing a thing, and my life was just different. It was before I had kids. We often talk about how kids are just career killers.

Craig: Vampires.

John: Vampires sucking away at your life and your time, and yet, I’m still productive. I still get a lot done. I think if you actually look at the output of work that I’m able to do now, it hasn’t really diminished much. I have found my habits changing, and I do write in shorter sprints and get stuff done, but stuff does still happen. You can both recognize that your stamina has changed and not panic that it makes it incapable for you to write stuff.

Craig: This is one of those areas where– first of all, John, I’ve felt all of those things that you’re feeling, and I feel all of them. The other day, I had lunch with Brian Johnson the other day, and we were both talking about how like, “Are we just slowing down?” It feels like we’re slowing down, but the work keeps coming, so the problem is feels like. It feels like it sometimes.

I think part of it is because, okay, John says he’s in the prime of his career. What that tells me is he’s done enough work now at a professional level, seen enough of it go in and out of the machinery to have improved. As you improve, it becomes harder to write because you can’t write garbage the way you used to. When you start out, you’re just wee, right? I’m awesome. Because you don’t know enough to know that you’re not. You’re freer. It’s a lovely feeling. Then later, after life has beaten that a lot of you, but also after you create a little bit more of a sense of inner scrutiny, then the crucible of your own judgment becomes much hotter.

Yes, then it is a little harder, and it can feel like you’re losing stamina, but you’re not. You’re just more exacting, so you know more. You have the burden of knowledge, John. Your anxiety is normal. Just make sure to not draw any conclusions from it. You’ve made a mistake of drawing a conclusion from it. You think because you’re anxious, you are in trouble. You are not, you’re just anxious.

One of the things I’ve really tried to accept as I’m getting older now is that part of why I do what I do is because my brain is attuned to scary things. Everybody that we write about, we’re usually writing about somebody that’s afraid of something. We have very fear-attuned minds. No surprise, I’m afraid all the time. I just have to accept that is part of the package of doing what we do. What you’re feeling right now is incredibly normal. It’s actually a fantastic sign that you are a good professional writer. If you felt as free now as you did when you started, oh boy, I don’t know what to say. Something’s wrong with you.

John: If you were a professional athlete, you would have the same kind of questions, like, I don’t have the same stamina as I did earlier in your career. It’s like, well, that’s true. That’s objectively true. You can actually measure those sort of things. What we would have is experience, technique and all the other things that make it worthwhile. Unlike a professional athlete, there is no forced retirement date. You’re never going to break your back and be unable to play again.

At a certain point, you may decide you don’t want to keep doing it, which is great, but that’s not what I’m hearing in this letter. I think I agree with Craig, it’s just anxiety and fear.
Craig: Yes, you’re not at the place yet where you actually are slowing down and preparing to stop. That will be a different feeling. I don’t think I’m at that place yet.

John: A friend of mine did retire and he actually is a writer friend who worked in TV for many, many years and it’s just like, “Yeah, I’m done.” I love it for him.

Craig: Listen, in the throes of certain phases of making a large TV show, I fantasize about just pulling the old ripcord, but I know that it’s not time yet. Really what I’m reacting to there is this is hard.

John: It’s hard.

Craig: When things are hard, there’s a little boy or girl in us that wants to quit. Then there’s our memory of our mom, dad, coach, older sibling, somebody saying, “You can want to quit, don’t yet, don’t.”

John: In the time of doing this podcast is when I started distance running. I will say that it’s been a useful metaphor for some of this stuff because it’s like, you just want to stop running. You just want to stop and just walk for a while. It’s like, no, but you actually, you really can just keep running and you just keep running.

Craig: You’ll be fine though, John. You’re in a good spot, actually, weirdly. It’s an encouraging question.

John: Let’s take two more questions, first from Kat here.

Drew: I wonder if you could settle a rumbling question for my university peers and I.

John: We can.

Craig: For my university peers and me.

John: Sure.

Craig: I’m just going to correct right away. For me, object of the preposition.

John: We understand that it’s standard to render non-English languages as English on the page with the indication in parentheses that it is in Mandarin or whatever the language is, potentially mentioning whether or not it should be subtitled. Then along came Celine Song, who, as you’re aware, used Korean text on the page in past lives, setting an industry precedent by writing bilingually with all Korean translated into English.

My tutor has said that for the purposes of the degree with Celine’s industry precedent, I can use Chinese in my script. I would very much like to use this. Characters speak in their native language unless noted otherwise. Where rendered in English, the dialogue will be subtitled. Where written in Mandarin or Taiwanese is the intention not to use subtitles.
My cohort feels this would be unacceptable. to the industry. I could be getting the characters to say all sorts of nasties, unbeknownst to the producers.

What are your thoughts on the wider industry acceptance of having small parts of the script unintelligible?

Craig: The answer is in the question. Celine, by the way, one of the best people. I like that when she did that, it became an industry precedent and therefore is now allowable at universities. That just tells me how broken the university instruction system is around screenwriting.

John: Because if there’s one movie from a filmmaker that was successful, now, I guess, sure.

Craig: What was the point of all of that dogmatic nonsense to begin with? The answer is do whatever you want. Clearly do whatever you want. She was nominated for an Oscar. Why is this person worried about what the university will think?

John: All choices you’re making have pros and cons. It’s the question of like, is it a problem that certain blocks of text in your script will not be intelligible to a person who only speaks English? It could be, but maybe it’s absolutely fine. You won’t know until you try it. Yes, if it makes sense for you, you should do it.

Craig: The whole point is to say to an English reader, you won’t understand this. Isn’t that the point?

John: Yes.

Craig: So, do it. The idea that you would be putting in stuff that so like, after the movie comes out, they’re like, oh my God, one of those characters said the Holocaust didn’t happen. That’s not a thing.

John: That’s not happening.

Craig: It’s not happening. That’s such a not worry. Who asked this question?

Drew: Kat.

Craig: Kat, listen, you write this however you want. If you are a good writer, Kat, who is going to succeed as a screenwriter, you are already beyond the concerns of this university. You have already escaped its surly bonds. If you’re not, you’re not, so it doesn’t matter. You write whatever you want.

John: Last question here from Henry.

Drew: A few big films recently are the first of a multi-part series, and while I’ve enjoyed watching them, I always leave the theater feeling that I’ve only seen half a movie. I think there’s something off with the structure here, where they’re basically making one really long film instead of discrete parts that can be watched on their own, because I don’t feel this way with, say, The Empire Strikes Back or The Fellowship of the Ring. Do John and Craig have any insight into what’s going on here?

Craig: Money.

[laughter]

I mean money’s going on. Harry Potter, the seventh book, was broken into two books, because it was very long, and I think they looked at it and they were like, okay, so on the one side, a very long movie. First of all, people don’t like to see very long movies, so we’re going to lose some people. Two, fewer showings per day on a blockbuster, we’re going to lose some money, or we split into two and we get two hit movies.

John: Let’s say, hypothetically, there was a screenwriter who was approached with the property of Wicked, and was just like, so Wicked, you could do it as one long movie.

Craig: Somebody smart.

John: Somebody smart would say like, no, and actually, let’s approach it from the start, saying like, what if at the act break, we actually split it into two movies? How do we make sure that the first movie is as rewarding and successful as possible, and the second movie is as rewarding and successful as possible? I think Wicked made completely the right choice.

Craig: Oh, I’m sure they did.

[laughter]

John: Now, Henry, I will say that there have been some movies recently where I did feel a little bit of that, what, because I wasn’t expecting it. That rug pull can be a thing. I felt a little bit on the last Spider-Verse movie, where it was like, oh, wow, I really thought we were going to resolve this, and we didn’t, it’s just a cliffhanger. Same thing happens in the 28 Years Later, where the movie resolves nicely, but then there’s a code that’s not a post-credit scene, that just basically sets up the whole next movie. I’m like, wait, what?

Craig: Right. Certain things have built-in dotted lines that you could see yourself folding or tearing the page. Wicked is obviously one of them. It has a huge intermission, and the last song before the intermission is Defying Gravity and as I recall, someone saying to the people there, “How in God’s name can you sit around after Defying Gravity?” Defying Gravity happens, roll credits, go home. There are certain circumstances where it makes absolute sense.

There are movies like Harry Potter, where you’re like, look, you’ve been on this ride for six movies. Let us give you a larger feast for seven and eight. Henry, I do know what you mean, and I think sometimes there’s been a little bit of indulgence. It’s that same indulgence I see in limited series sometimes, where it’s like, oh, this is a seven or eight episode limited series. It should have been a five episode limited series.

John: There’s some padding and some, oh, yes.

Craig: It’s just some sort of stretch and pull and froth, and yes, I can see that is sort of happening as movies try to accomplish some of the things that television series can accomplish. In television, we can just work with a bigger canvas, and movies want that, but I know what you mean, and I think we all smell it when it’s happening.

John: The Avengers finale, which was a split over two parts, I enjoyed the entire experience, but I really couldn’t tell you what happened in one part versus the other part. It’s just like, it was a big two-part thing.

Craig: Again, if you have successfully laid out another sequel, I don’t know how many movies we’re talking about at any given point in that one. I think it was four total, right? Then, okay, if you want the finale to be a big, big finish, sure. If you’re just starting and you’re like, hey, or if it’s part of a series, but it’s not really like, each one of the series is its own thing.

For instance, I don’t know how many James Bond movies we’re up to, but if the next James Bond movie, just being made by Denis Villeneuve, it’s going to be awesome. If the next James Bond movie did that, it wouldn’t necessarily be earned because James Bond isn’t like, okay, it’s one, two, three, done. Avengers, I got that. They want to do a big finish. [crosstalk] Yes, I’m cool with that.

John: I’m cool with that, too. It’s time for one cool things. My one cool thing is actually on the back of my phone right now, Craig, I’m going to show it to you.

Craig: Great.

John: It’s called the Mott Magnetic Wallet Stand.

Craig: This is very much in my interest.

John: It is a little thing that magnetically clips to the back of your phone, and it magnetically clips down, so you can have it be a stand vertically.

Craig: I didn’t think that was going to be what it was.

John: Or horizontally.

Craig: Okay, that is cool. For what that is, what I thought I was getting shown was one of those back of the phone wallet replacers.

John: It is awesome. In that little slot, you can put two cards.

Craig: Two cards?

John: Only two cards now. If you want more than that, you’d need a different thing.

Craig: This is very slim.

John: It’s slim, and I don’t use a case on my phone.

Craig: Really?

John: I’ve never used cases on my phone.

Craig: Interesting.

John: Not for a very long time. I also use it, just I loop a finger through it and just to help hold my phone, so that I’m not bending my pinky– I’m not holding the weight of it on my pinky.

Craig: What would you call the color of that, out of curiosity?

John: I would call it–

Craig: I have a color in mind, but I don’t know if I’m right.

John: Purple is probably the closest, but I think purple is a scrappier than that.

Craig: I’m going to say mauve.

John: Mauve, okay, yes.

Craig: But is that right?

John: That was my go, Mauve. Mauve, yes.

Drew: Mauve.

John: Yes, it’s a good color, I like it.

Craig: It’s like a grayish purple.

John: Yes, I like it. If you’re looking for something to help hold onto your iPhone, the Mott Magnetic Wallet Stand, it’s like $28.

Craig: That’s fantastic. Oh, 28, that’s not bad. Just a little bit more than that, and you can get the Scriptnotes book.

John: Yes, delivered to your home.

Craig: Really, if you had a choice, I would say Scriptnotes.

John: I haven’t put it out, but as soon as I put it, it’s also available as a e-book. People are like, oh.

Craig: Of course, and that’s even cheaper, I assume.

John: People ask about the paperback, and there’s not currently plans for a paperback. We’ll see.

Craig: If it does well, there will be a paperback.

John: Probably, but there’s also increasingly some books are just never going to paperback, because-

Craig: Because the e-book sort of takes that place.

John: It does, and it’s also, our D&D books are never paperbacks, because they would rip apart. For something that you’re referring to a lot, it could be useful.

Craig: Sure. I remember my Syd Field book was paperback, and I’m sure the many Save the Cats is paperbacks.

John: Yes, are paperbacks.

Craig: My one cool thing this week is a podcast that I appeared on as a guest. I don’t know if it’s– it must be out by now. The podcast is called Total Party Skill.

John: I’m guessing it’s a D&D podcast.

Craig: You know it, a little take on Total Party Kill, and it is a Dungeons & Dragons podcast that is, I wouldn’t say hosted the podcasters, are Gabe Greenspan, Dylan McCollum, and the delightfully named George Primavera. George Primavera, by the way, sounds like a bad character name, like– [chuckles]

John: Yes. Oh, 100%.

Craig: Yes, like Gene Parmesan from– [laughs] George Primavera, and all three of these guys were absolute gentlemen and scholars, all three deeply, deeply well-versed in Dungeons & Dragons as players and DMs. They’re just fun.

John: That’s great.

Craig: We had a fun–

John: You’re not playing the game, you’re just talking through stuff?

Craig: The topics, one topic was just, “Okay, it’s been a minute since we’ve got the 2024 rules. Now that we’ve had a chance to play with them for a while, what are the things that we really love? What are some of the pain points of things we don’t love?” We had a pretty good in-depth discussion of that.
Then they did a little fun draft where we were drafting classes.

John: Right.

Craig: The question was, you’re drafting classes to survive an apocalypse. Then, I think they’re a Patreon thing. One of their Patreon subscribers wrote in to say, “Oh, here’s a name of something. What would you home brew this thing to be? Item, spell, weapon, what would it be?” It was just a joy talking with those guys talking with those guys.

John: Love it. Sounds great.

Craig: Check it out, Total Party Skill, on wherever you get your podcasts.

John: I listen to so many podcasts, and deliberately have not added any D&D podcasts, because that’s just too much. I’m sure there’s so much good content that would just eat up more of my time.

Craig: You know I don’t listen to podcasts, but I actually will listen to this podcast.

John: That’s great.

Craig: Not the one I’m on, the other ones.

John: For Craig to start listening to a podcast is a pretty big deal.

Craig: It’s got to got to be about D&D, basically.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and edited by Matthew Ciarlelli. Outro this week is by Steve Piotrowski. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

You will find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this show each and every week, along with our videos and other things.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those backup episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on whether we would still write screenplays if we weren’t going to sell screenplays.

[laughs]

Thank you for pre-ordering the book. Pre-order those books and send those receipts to drewaskatjohnaugust.com, and we will send you something cool. Thanks, Craig. Thanks Drew.

Craig: Thank you.

[music]

John: This bonus topic came from a question. Drew, would you read us the question?

Drew: Your recent Scott Frank episode wrapped up with a bout of brutal honesty concerning the likelihood that any of us will have a career in screenwriting. I realized this was in an effort to encourage folks to be unique, advice I think I need myself, but I’d love to hear your perspectives on the idea of art for art’s sake. If, for whatever reason, nobody could ever pay you for a script again, would you still write them?

Craig: I wonder if Fraser– it feels like Fraser’s really asking this for themselves. Do I have permission to write screenplays if I’m not doing it professionally? The answer is, absolutely. I think for me, it’s a different question because I’ve written 4,000 scripts now and drafts and versions and things, and so, would I want to do it just for fun? No. I don’t think that’s a thing anymore. I would always want it to have a purpose just because I would.

If I hadn’t done so much screenwriting, I could see absolutely doing it for enjoyment.

John: I take this more as a question about the format of screenwriting as a worthwhile literary pursuit or a thing to spend your time on if it weren’t in the pursuit of actually making it into a movie or making it into a TV show. I agree with you. If I hadn’t done this job for so long, I could start writing screenplays.

I enjoy the form. I think it’s a great form, but it’s not a very shareable form. It’s not a form that other people are going to read and enjoy with you. I think having written books, and I have a graphic novel coming out next year, having written other things, I think there’s better stuff to write that for people out there in the world to read. You don’t have to write for other people to read stuff. You can just write for your own purposes and your own self.

Given what I like to do, I think I do like to write for other people to read it. I think books or stage musicals, or other things would be a better– it’s how I would spend my time.

Craig: One thing that this prompts is the idea that people pursue artistic expression for its own sake because it makes them feel good. It is part of our behavior as humans. We want to express ourselves creatively and artistically. I think it’s important that anyone give themselves permission to do so, as long as they acknowledge that they are not entitled to an audience.

If you want to write songs to make yourself happy, just don’t force your family to listen to 12 of them. You can play one maybe at Christmas, see how it goes. If you want to write a book or a poem or screenplay, great. Don’t make everyone read it. If people want to, great. I guess my point is, if you’re doing it for yourself, do it for yourself with no expectation because I think sometimes people say they’re doing it for themselves. What they really want is for everybody to tell them how great they are, and that’s a different thing.

John: It is. I feel like Fraser’s question is especially relevant in this era of increasingly powerful AIs that can generate things that look like the work that we’re doing, and just do it with seemingly effortlessly. Why even bother spending the emotional time and energy to write a thing when I can just generate a thing?

I still think there is meaning and value, and there’s discovery that happens when you’re actually trying to write a thing that is unique and wonderful. Those moments when I’ve written something, even if no one read it, I felt really good to have written it. Yes, fantastic, but I don’t necessarily need that to be a screenplay form. It could be something else.

Craig: It’s its own pleasure, right? If Fraser wants to write a screenplay because he enjoys writing screenplays and he’s able to accept that perhaps he may not write professionally, but that’s okay, he just likes writing, then that’s fantastic. There doesn’t need to be any reason to do that because there’s really no reason to do anything if we consider our mortality. What’s the point of anything? There is none. You die, so really, do you need to paint that painting? No.

We do it because it feels good. It helps us figure ourselves out and it might help us connect to one person. Beyond that, yes, just lower the requirements.

John: I always love the stories when they find some person who died and they find all this incredible writing or all these paintings that this person did. It’s like, oh my God, this person would have been a known artist, but they just chose not to do it or whatever circumstances, they didn’t. The work still is valuable and if they still enjoyed doing that thing, they did it for their own.

Craig: It’s not valuable for them anymore.

John: Intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. They did it because it was meaningful to them.

Craig: Absolutely, it felt good. Then there’s the counterpart to that, which is the Kafka situation where while Kafka’s alive, he goes, “You know what, I hate all of this, I’m burning most of it.” No, don’t, and he did. That can happen too.

John: It can.

Craig: I think, make a good point, there are authors that are discovered posthumously, there are artists that are discovered posthumously, but it just doesn’t matter, actually. If you’ve decided it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Certainly, I would say, give yourself permission for it to not matter.
I wish I liked writing screenplays enough to just wake up and go, “You know what I’m going to do today? I’m going to write some screenplay. Make myself feel good.”

John: Yes, that’s not me.

Craig: It’s not me. That’s the way I approach solving puzzles.

John: Playing D&D.

Craig: Playing D&D. Playing D&D, what’s the point of that?

John: No, it’s absolutely pointless.

Craig: Fellowship.

John: It is fellowship.

Craig: Fellowship, and it feels good. It’s fun, it’s interesting.

John: It’s problem solving.

Craig: It’s problem solving, but it’s creative. We get to–

John: Collaborative.

Craig: It’s collaborative, it’s creative. We get to express ourselves, does all these things. For its own sake, we are not critical role. Look, if we wanted to go, hey, some platformer, even if we went to the critical role people were like, hey, it’s me and John, and we’ve got Tom Morello and Dan Weiss and Chris Morgan, and all these cool da-da-da, Phil. Hey, we’re going to go ahead and just do it. Yes, they’d be like, yes, we’ll do it. You can make money off of it.

John: It would ruin it.

Craig: Of course, it would ruin it.

John: It would ruin it.

Craig: It would be horrible.

John: Also, the things we say around the table would get us canceled immediately.

Craig: I don’t think we would make it past a minute, but even if we could, the point is we’ve never even considered it because we don’t need it.

John: No.

Craig: Not because it’s that we don’t need money, it’s that we just don’t need to do it for a reason. It is ontological.

John: Also, we’re happily amateur D&D players.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Yes, and so I want to shout out to community theater because community theater is pointless, and also amazing and wonderful.

Craig: It is professionally pointless, but it fills people’s spirits and souls. And Waiting for Guffman, if that is not the most beautiful love letter to community theater, I don’t know what is.

John: Love it. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

Craig: Thanks.

Links:

• Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
• Birdigo on Steam
• Aurora by David Koepp
• Pale Flower
• Deep Red
• Suspiria
• Hands on a Hard Body
• American Movie
• Wonderland
• Hands on a Hardbody the musical
• Cure
• Pulse
• Moft magnetic wallet stand
• Total Party Skill podcast
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• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Steve Pietrowski (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 681 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what do you do when the answer isn’t yes or no, but an extended and interminable maybe? We’ll discuss strategies for coping and navigating periods of frustrating ambiguity as you’re trying to push projects forward.

Then it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at pages our listeners have sent in and offer our honest feedback. In our bonus segment for premium members, how to know when a movie or TV show has had reshoots or significant re-tinkering. Craig and I will spill the secrets that will help us notice that things have changed there.

Craig: Let’s ruin it for everyone.

John: Absolutely. That’s why I put it in the bonus segment. If you don’t want to be spoiled, you can just skip the bonus segment.

Craig: We’re going to spoil everything.

John: The tricks, the tips, the everything. First, we have some follow-up. Drew, help us out.

Drew Marquardt: Sure. Elizabeth writes, “Can you please ask Craig to stop joking that nobody in Post reads the script, supervisor’s notes? My notes are nearly always utilized by the editor and Post team, and the role of script supervisor has been dismissed, disrespected, and marginalized for far too long by directors and producers.”

Craig: Okay, Elizabeth, this feels like manufactured outrage. I’m literally expressing an opinion in support of script supervisors and the way that their work is overlooked, and your reaction is to say, “Stop dismissing us.” Here’s the reality. You’re not in the editing rooms. I am. I’m telling you, after 30 years, it is extraordinarily rare for the editors or the Post team to refer to the notes. Take my word for it. It’s extraordinarily rare. If you’re frustrated by that, imagine how frustrated I am about that.

I’m not saying it never happens. Clearly, you had a nice experience where it happened at some point, but Elizabeth, hear me out. I’m on your side. That’s why I’m saying this. I want editors, especially up-and-coming editors who listen to our show, to read the effing notes.

John: Yes. You have sung the praises of the script supervisor on The Last of Us so many times.

Craig: So many times.

John: Apparently, it’s fantastic, which is great.

Craig: Chris Roofs.

John: Great. I will say that even if those notes are not being used for the editorial process, I suspect there have been times where you needed to refer back to those notes because you’re doing inserts, pickup shots, you’re reshooting some things, you need to figure out like, what was it that we were doing here?

Craig: That’s a separate thing. In the crazy list of things that the script supervisor is responsible for, it’s the Swiss army knife of crew members. Keeping track of inserts that we owe is one of them. That is a separate list that is generated and shared with the post-production supervisor and the producer and the editors so that everybody’s on top of that. The ADs, most importantly, to make sure that they’re scheduled.

John: More follow-up. This one is from AI Guinea Pig.

Craig: Is this a real person or an AI guinea pig? This is a real person, okay.

John: This is a real person. Drew, it’s a long story, but I think it’s an interesting story because it feels like, oh, this is the bellwether of things that could come.

Craig: Oh, boy.

Drew: “In 2023, I had a script make the annual blacklist. The script led to the proverbial water bottle tour and eventually an option offer. The offer came from a producer with many produced credits on movies and shows over the last two decades. As my reps and I asked around, we also learned that he had a good reputation, both as a person and as someone with a knack for getting things done. What’s more, his pitch was compelling. He claimed to have access to financing, didn’t hurt that there was money on the table with the option agreement. I was going to become a paid screenwriter.

My lawyer negotiated the option agreement. I signed it. The check cleared and we were off. The producer and I had our kickoff call, and this is how he opened. ‘So, how much have you played around with AI?’

The producer, as it turns out, was intending to launch a new AI studio with my script as one of the headliners of its slate. After no mention of AI during our initial conversations or negotiations, I was now being told my project was going to be made using generative AI. What’s more, I came to realize that the producer’s so-called access to financing was not access to financing for traditional film production. It was for this technology specifically.

I tried to give the producer the benefit of the doubt. I expressed my many ethical and creative concerns around AI production. I asked if there was still a possibility of traditional production with a real live cast and a real live crew. The producer paid lip service to this idea, but once the announcement of the AI studio went public, it was clear to me that it was only ever that. I quickly got on the phone with my reps and my lawyer and asked out of the option agreement. I would gladly send the money back if it meant keeping my script and my soul intact. Surprisingly, the producer did not push back. It’s probably not a coincidence that the other movies in the announcement slate are all from unproduced screenwriters.

What’s the lesson? We now live in a world where we can’t take traditional paths to production for granted. We need to ask a prospective partner’s feelings about AI and even bar it contractually if we can. Yes, this producer kept their intentions hidden, but there was also nothing in their filmography or reputation that gave soulless AI tech bro vibes. Next time, I will definitely be asking.”

Craig: Wow.

John: Wow. A whole journey there. Usually, people are writing in for advice. In this case, the person is giving advice, but I thought it was good to keep all the context in there because this is a real thing that writers will be facing. You and I may not face it directly, but I think a lot of our listeners could be encountering this where, in a general case, you enter into an agreement thinking that you’re making one kind of movie, like a live-action movie with actors, but you find out, oh, it’s animation or it’s generative AI where there’s no people behind it.

Craig: I’m guessing this wasn’t a WGA agreement.

John: There’s nothing prohibiting that, no.

Craig: Oh, it’s just that it prohibits AI as literary material for the purposes of credit. The good news here is this was an option. Therefore, copyright had not yet been transferred, sold. There was no work-for-hire agreement in place. You didn’t even have to give the money back. You could just let the option lapse.

John: The producer could have exercised the option and he would have lost it.

Craig: They don’t have the money. I’m just going to say flat out, they don’t have it, but true. Hopefully, the money wasn’t a lot for the option. I guess it’s exciting when you get money for an option. It’s not so great when you have to give it back or you need to give it back. In this case, brilliant maneuver to get out of this mess.

Let’s talk a little bit, John, for a moment about, there’s a phrase that popped out here, and that is there was nothing in his résumé or past credits that would indicate AI tech bro. Probably there was. We need to think about producers in a different way than we think about writers and directors and actors. Because no matter what the quality is, if you get a writing credit, you wrote, directing, you directed, acting, you acted.

There are 12,000 flavors of producer. There are so many different kinds of producers, including producers that routinely do nothing that the producers themselves had to invent a fake guild, of which I am a member. I love that they call it a guild. It’s not.

John: It’s an association.

Craig: It’s a trade association to self-regulate which producers actually warrant the best picture award. One thing is to look at the credits. If, in movies, you see a lot of executive producer credits, well, that’s different than producer. In television, if you see a lot of producer credits as opposed to executive producers, the other way around, that’s also possibly a red flag that what this person is, and there’s no shame in it, is somebody that puts projects together but isn’t necessarily making them. And those people over time, like water, find the path of least resistance to escape and head towards money. In this case, it sounds like this guy thinks it’s AI.

John: It’s entirely possible that this producer who has a lot of credits rarely has that PGA after their name, which would indicate that they really did produce the movie. Let’s assume maybe for the sake of argument that they did produce those movies, and they’re at a place right now where they’re finding it very hard to make movies. Some tech people show up saying, “Hey, we have this generative AI technology to create the video basically on demand, and so we can film things without a studio, without people, without anything else.”

I could imagine them going to a person who has some respectable credits, who actually knows how to make some movies, and convincing him to do this. That’s also possible that it is a legit person who’s just at a certain point in their career realizing, “Okay, this is the thing I do next.”

Craig: That’s another tricky one. When you are coming up, and you’re trying to get your first thing out there, you sometimes meet people on your way up that are on their way down.

John: Very true.

Craig: Everybody’s in the middle of the ladder. Figuring out who’s on their way down can be very difficult to do, and producers are extraordinarily good at convincing you that they’re amazing. That’s part of their job. It’s part of their skillset.

In this case, what is so startling to me is that this producer thought they were going to get away with it by not saying anything until after the deal was signed. I’m going to go with idiot on that one. Great warning here. Let’s just get this out to all the lawyers around town. This should be standard now in option agreements that this material will not be used to assist in AI. It will not be a springboard for AI. There will be no AI development of this. I think that clause now needs to just be in there.

John: Let’s talk about the difference between generative AI as a technology versus animation or motion capture or other things which are different ways to do stuff. You had a good initial meeting with this producer and he was talking about a vision for the movie but apparently was describing a false vision for the movie or was being so vague about what it was he was trying to do that it’s frustrating.

Listen, would I fault Guinea Pig for making a deal with this producer that was going to try to use this AI thing? For a feature film, I think yes. I think that’s a bad look. If it was for a short film where they’re going to hire you on to do this little experiment, that’s a choice you make whether you’re going to do it or not do it.

Craig: It’s their original material. It just feels like if you’re going to go through the misery of creating something original, why then hand it off to robots to do what they do? The whole point is that you’re trying with your first thing to explain to everybody that you have value. If you immediately let them feed it into AI, you’re saying, “I don’t.” A very wise choice here. I think everybody should be looking out for this.

Also, I sure wish we could just say who these people were. We don’t happen to know who this producer is. This is the kind of person I’d love to bring on the show and just say, “Okay, let’s talk.” Not to beat them about the head and shoulders, but just to say what is going on here exactly and get under the hood of this.

John: I do wonder how this conversation will age 10 years from now. Because there’s the boundaries between what is using generative AI to do visual effects versus to film a thing and to replace the crew. Those are the first principles I think we keep coming back to, is that are you making this choice so you can avoid hiring the people whose job normally would be to do things? This does feel like that situation to me.

Craig: There are situations, I feel, where AI is replacing what I would call rote work. If the job is to take this peg and put it in this hole 4,000 times a day, well, automation has done that. That’s been around forever. That’s not AI. That’s just industrial automation. When the robots came, people in the auto industry were very concerned. Repetitive rote tasks are ultimately going to go to machinery. Words? No.

John: Words and the idea of putting together a crew to film something or a crew to animate a thing, to make those fundamental choices, that’s really what we’re pushing back against. You and I both discussed, if we are using AI tools to clean up audio in the way that we would normally have used other digital tools, I don’t see that as a crisis.

Craig: No, that is using a calculator instead of an abacus. I’m okay with that. I think with things like animation, it’s quite likely that we will progress to a place where an artist is creating the first frame of a two-second shot and the last frame, and then there is some interpolation, and then choices are made. Which one of these interpolations do I want? It will make things go faster. That’s sort of inevitable. But the key choices, I think, need to stay with us, or else we will end up with a whole lot of what the kids online call AI slop, which is a wonderful phrase.

John: I’ll try to find a link to this to talk about it. There’s a study that showed that you have people looking at a bunch of poems, and some of the poems are the actual real classic poems, and some are in the style of these things. People inevitably prefer things that are in the style of the things that are in AI. It’s just like taste is a weird thing. There’s a reason why people sometimes want the slop.

Craig: Oh, yes. Well, we know. We play D&D every week. As is tradition, I try as best I can to provide Cool Ranch Doritos at every session. When they came up with the Cool Ranch powder in the laboratory–

John: The geniuses.

Craig: Geniuses. That is synthetic, and that is short-circuiting a lot of work that our brain normally has to do to get that rewarded. When we were kids, you would get banana-flavored taffy. It’s an ester. It’s a chemical, and it certainly doesn’t taste like banana. It tastes like something else. It goes right into happy center in your brain way faster than a fricking banana would.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: AI is artificial flavoring, and it is chemicals. Yes, it can do those things. At some point, somebody does still have to make new stuff.

John: I continue to believe that as we move into this next decade, and more synthetic entertainment becomes online, I do think there will be a gravitation towards some live, in-person things, artistic plays that are staged in front of you. You feel like, “Oh, this is actually really happening. I’m not being fed a thing. This is a real moment.”

Craig: Absolutely, yes. Spontaneity and connection will not go away.

John: Agreed. All right, let’s get to our first topic today, which is something that I realized this past week was a thing I felt a lot at the start of my career. It never really went away. It just changed a little bit. I want to describe early in my career, and I’m sure you’ll recognize what this feels like.

I remember waiting for word back from an agent who was reading my script at CAA. I would come back from work every day and look at my answering machine, which was actually a physical box answering machine, to see if there was a blinking light, if there was a message from this producer, whether this agent at CAA had read it and hopefully liked it.

I’m waiting for like a month every day looking for that thing. There’s just a constant waiting. Early in my career as well, my scripts were being sent out and I was waiting to hear back from stuff.

Then this last month or two, and I’m being a little bit vague on some of these projects, but these are the kinds of things I was encountering, which was on one project waiting for the big boss to sign off on making my deal because it’s a lot of money. There’s a lot of speculation around town that this person may not be in that job anymore. Oh, well, does he actually have the power to sign off? Do you even want him to sign off? Do you want to wait for the next person? Because if he goes, then it becomes a project under the old regime.

Craig: Sure. I like the race between pay me and get fired, which will win– That’s exciting.

John: Another example of waiting is waiting for notes on a draft because the director is off busy shooting another movie. Waiting to take out a project because the rights holders have another franchise that they’re currently out shopping and they don’t want to confuse the market. Waiting for the company boss before taking out a different pitch because their attention is divided. I just want to talk about waiting. The frustration of a screenwriter is that you’re generating work, but you’re also waiting for results and for other people to do stuff.

Craig: It’s incredibly frustrating. Having now been on both sides of that ball, I can say that the waiting is worse. The making people wait is a constant churning guilt. But at some point, there is your limit for attention and your ability to focus on things because there’s a lot. The people who are making these decisions typically have too many decisions to make, too much stuff to read, and then the waiting happens.

Also, in our business, crises tend to occupy everyone’s time all the time. If you’re not a crisis, you just fall back to secondary position. We have to make peace with this horrible feeling, what Melissa calls sitting in your discomfort. We have to sit in our discomfort, which is awful. It is the most brutal indication that we are not in control of anything at all.

John: Let’s talk about control because I think one of the real gifts we have as writers is unlike actors and other people who make movies, we do have the agency to just go off and do other stuff. We’re not waiting for someone to give us permission to do our trade, a director needs to be hired on to do a thing. An actor needs to be hired on to perform in a role. We can just do new stuff. Obviously, the simplest advice is, well, go off and write the next thing and don’t spend too many brain cycles worrying about that other thing.

I don’t want to let us off completely there because I do think there is a responsibility for checking in and reminding people and finding ways to check in without being so annoying that they hate you. Most times, they won’t, but you are sometimes creating a bit of guilt so they actually do pay attention.

There’s a balance between how often you should do it and how often your reps should do it. I think one of the things I’ve learned over the years is how to stagger it so that the reps check one week and I check the next week.

Craig: Sure. Little pro tip for reps out there, and I’m sure they all do this. One of the things that happens with people whose attention is very divided is that they will swivel towards the potential for a loss as opposed to looking for the potential for a win. If a rep calls and says, “Hey, just reminding you. My client wrote this great script, you really should read it. That’s the potential for a win.” They’re like, “Oh, I’ll get to it.” “Hey, the script that we sent you, we would really like for you to be this person’s agent or this producer. Heads up, a couple other people now are on top of it and we’re getting a lot of incoming calls. Just doing you the courtesy of letting there’s heat now.” Oh, I might lose something? Oh, here we go.”

A little bit of a psychology there. It is much harder to do as the writer than it is, and this is why reps are useful. One of the reasons, I would say.

John: Agreed. Sometimes that ticking clock that you’re putting on there is John’s not going to be available anymore. Basically, you need him to do this next draft. We’re past the reading period and now it’s time to go on to the next thing. We should describe a reading period.

Craig: Sure.

John: In our episode where we talked about your contract, for each step in your deal, so writing a first draft, for example, there’s a certain number amount of time for you to deliver that first draft. You turn it in and then it starts a reading period. Reading period’s often four weeks. Could be longer, but it’s negotiated. It’s written down in your contract. They will ignore that. Expect that to be the minimum amount of time it will take them to read this and get you back to notes.

It’s useful that it’s in your contract because then if they come back to you after that time and say like, “Hey, we need to start this next thing.” They pass the reading period. You’ve got some negotiating room to say like, “He’s actually doing this next thing first because we missed this.” It’s also an invitation for your reps to call when that reading period is about to be over and say, “Hey, just so we know, this is the thing.” Occasionally, I’ve even been able to get people to commence me on the next step, even though they really haven’t given me notes because–

Craig: What happens is there’s a point where whatever the optional is for the next step, that number, that pre-negotiated number, only applies for a certain amount of time. If they missed that time, and this happened to me earlier in my career, where they blew past it, didn’t realize it, then they greenlit the movie. Then they said, “Okay, it’s time for you to do your optional polish.” We were like, “What optional polish?” Now it’s greenlit. We have a gun to your heads. I ended up getting paid more for that polish than I did for the first draft because they blew through it and they screwed up.

Patience is one of those things that is highly recommended, only because we aren’t in control and we don’t know where the ball is going to bounce. We think that we are responsible to force the issue. The answer, whether it’s I like this, I don’t like this, I want you to be my client, I want to make this or I don’t, is actually fairly unpredictable. The factors that lead to that decision are far beyond simply the writing.

If you wait three more days, something crazy can happen and now everybody wants to do it. You wait three more days, something horrible might happen and nobody wants to do it. Your specific movie about this one person and this one, “Tom Cruise just signed on to do the same story somewhere else, you’re done.” There’s no way of knowing. I think distressingly, Zen is called for here. Don’t be passive, don’t give up, but also be aware that whatever you do, maybe you can impart about 10% of spin on the ball and the rest of it is up to fate.

John: The other thing I want to make sure listeners hear out of this is sometimes that the waiting, the maybe, the we’ll see, is actually just a soft pass. No one wants to say no, and they can’t say yes. They say maybe, but really it’s no. Sometimes when you’re not hearing back from people, it really is that they passed, they’ve moved on, they’re not thinking about it anymore, but they just don’t actually want to officially say no.

That’s why I’m always so grateful when people are very upfront about like, “This is what’s happening. Sorry, this is where we’re at.” There’ve been times where I’ve vehemently disagreed on the decision but totally respected the person for actually having the courage to say, “No, this is where it’s at.”

Craig: Exactly. Maybe without conditions is no. If it’s maybe, the following three things need to happen, but if they do, then yes, and you understand those three things? Okay, let’s see if those three things happen. Now, sometimes because people don’t like saying no, they’ll say maybe these three things have to happen. One of them is Jesus needs to come back. Okay, if you create an impossible condition, then it’s no also.

John: We’re waiting to see what the market’s like in a month or two months. It’s a no. It could potentially come into a yes, but it’s not likely to be a yes. You really should not pin any hopes on that.

Craig: Typically, when we’re dealing with large companies, the amount of money that we’re talking about here is not enough to rattle a stock price, nor is it an amount that gets shaken loose by the market. They have it or they just don’t want it. Because if you said, “Okay, we can wait for the market. Just FYI, Spielberg wants to do it over there. Let me know how the market is by tomorrow morning. Otherwise, we’re going to Spielberg.” They’ll buy it before you hang up the phone. As we often said, almost everything but money is no. That’s how it goes.

John: Certainly, something you brought up early on is we recognize that sometimes we are that person who is being ambiguous or is in the maybe situation. That’s why I try to be that person who gives a clear, quick answer on things. If somebody sends me a thing for a possible adaptation or whatever, “Is this of interest to you?” I will try to take a look at it that day and I’ll try to get a no as quickly as possible if it probably is a no. On a call, I will pass on something. They sent it to me and five minutes later, I’m emailing back, “Not for me, thanks.”

There are situations where I need to stew and ruminate on things or it’s a big book to read and it’s like I’m interested and it takes a while. I just try to make it clear that this is how much time it’s going to take me to do it, this is why I’m thinking about doing it and not hold up the gears because I’ve recognized over the years, sometimes I’ve been that person, just ambiguously sitting out there.

Craig: We also have an advantage to decision making, which is that we are the people that make stuff. We’re not really operating according to heat or market interest or any of that stuff. We’re just going by instinct. One of the things that you do have to do is accept that you may not want to do something that literally everybody else does want to do. You need to be okay with that.

I’m just thinking of– there was a book that is not yet published, but it’s in galleys and went around. It was a proposal and I understood the story behind it. I read the proposal and I thought, “Yes, this will probably be quite good in adaptation. I don’t want to be the one to adapt it.” Now, I need to make my peace with that because I’m pretty sure in about three days, I’m going to read that somebody incredible is doing it, which is exactly what happened. I was okay with that because I made my peace with it. I think it’s harder for the other side because they panic. There have been situations where people call back and they’re like, “Wait, did I say no? I meant yes.” No backsies.

John: No backsies, yes.

Craig: No backses.

John: That FOMO, getting over that fear of missing out.

Craig: FOMO.

John: That’s really what it is. I’ve also been in that situation. When I feel it, something that’s helpful for me is to get right back and say, “This is going to be such a great movie. I cannot wait to watch it. I’m not the person to do this. I’m sure you’re talking to X, Y, and Z. They’re going to kill it.”

Craig: It’s a very reassuring way to say, “It’s no, but it’s obvious you guys aren’t going to be left here with an unsold item. It’s going to sell. It’s going to sell to somebody great. Good news. You don’t have to worry about me being the person,” and always thank you so much for consideration because it’s true. It’s very lovely to be considered for anything. On the other side of things, I think for those of us who are stuck in limbo, waiting for things, creating a little FOMO, probably better than being thirsty.

John: Absolutely. Let’s wrap up this topic. Just getting back to what Melissa said is that making peace with the uncertainty, with the discomfort. I think sometimes just like recognizing it, labeling it, naming it. This is an open loop that I have no control over. It’s there. I see it. Now, we’re moving on and we’re doing other things. It was in that weird storm of uncertainty that I ended up writing Go. It was actually a very productive period because I was just waiting on other stuff. It’s like, I had the agency to do it and so just take advantage of what you can do as a writer, which a lot of other folks can’t.

Craig: If you can forget that you’re waiting, you win.

John: All right. Let’s get to the Three Page Challenge. For folks who are new to the podcast, every once in a while, we put out a call to our premium subscribers saying, “Hey, send us the first three pages of your screenplay, of your pilot. We will take a look at this on the air.” We put out a URL. It’s johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. People fill out a little form. They say it’s okay for us to talk about this on the air. Everything we’re saying here is because people send us these things and ask for honest feedback. We are not being mean to anybody.

Craig: Have people been suggesting that we’re being mean?

John: I think some people get uncomfortable with our– This is like, “Oh, you’re ragging on them.”

Craig: They need to sit in their discomfort because we are actually so much nicer than what we have had to deal with.

John: The thing is, we’re actually saying stuff, whereas other people would just like, “Eh.”

Craig: If people are paying you, brutal.

John: Yes, that can be brutal.

Craig: Brutal.

John: Brutal. Now, Drew, help us out here because you put out the call for folks to send in these submissions. You sent out an email through the little system. Talk to us about what happened there.

Drew: Oh, yes. We got 250 submissions in less than 48 hours. It was amazing. It was really good work.

Craig: Sheesh.

Drew: My eyes are burning right now.

Craig: [laughs] You read all of them?

Drew: Basically, yes.

Craig: My God, 750 pages.

John: Now, so the filtering mechanism you’re using is we only want scripts that don’t have obvious typos that feels messy in a way that’s like, we’re going to have to talk about the mess on the page.

Drew: Typos are automatically out, and multiple submissions, I’ve caught those before too. I’ll start reading and be like, “Oh, this is the same thing. Okay, gone.”

John: Now, any other patterns you noticed in this tranche of scripts?

Drew: Yes. Actually, this one, I’ve been seeing several scripts where character age and gender are in message board formatting, if that’s the right way to put it.

John: Describe it.

Drew: F24, M30, or something like that, which is new. It sort of makes sense. [crosstalk]

John: As long as we understand what it is, as long as it didn’t stop me, I’d be fine with it. It also reminds me of an advice column like, “Me, female 35, and my partner, male 26 are doing a thing.” I get that.

Craig: F number, M number, sure.

John: Anything else you’ve noticed, Drew?

Drew: We had a few scripts with email and contact info directly under the author name. It was titled by this person, then it was sandwiched right up. I don’t know if people are doing that for the Three Page Challenge.

John: I feel like bottom left corner is a great place to put that. I like it better down there.

Craig: Sure.

John: It’s not the end of the world.

Craig: No. If I like the script, I don’t care where the email is.

John: All right. Let’s start off here with a sample called Scrambling by Tania Luna. Drew, if you could give us the synopsis for folks who are not reading along with us. If you are reading along with us, you might want to pause right now. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to the PDF. You can read the PDF and then hear what we said. For Drew, everybody else, give us the synopsis.

Drew: Veronica, 24, walks quickly through the financial district of New York City, staring at her GPS, totally lost. She asks a stranger for directions to Front Street, which all the pedestrians are happy to give her, but their directions become this confusing cacophony of words. We intercut this with moments from her childhood. Lost in her school hallways, she imagines rolling fog and shadows until a teacher finds her.

Back in present day, when Veronica ends up on Fulton Street rather than Front, she hails a cab, which takes her to her destination only a few seconds away. She enters the ONG building, where the guard asks her which suite number she’s going to, and she’s overwhelmed by the amount of words in front of her.

John: All right. Let’s start with the title page here. Scrambling is written in a jumble of fonts. I actually really like the look of it. It’s fun. Then it says written by, and then it says Lania Tuna, and then that’s stripped through, and it says Tania Luna underneath that. Fun. We’re giving a sense of what the underlying dilemma is here for this character. It’s all in Courier Prime, which is a delightful typeface. I’ve always noticed that. It all looks really good. We got the email address and the phone number in the bottom left corner. Nothing on the cover page that concerned me. I had more concerns as we started going into this. Craig, talk to us about what you’re seeing as you enter.

Craig: Let’s talk about some good things first. These pages look great.

John: They do.

Craig: The way things are spread out is the golden ideal of a blend of action and dialogue. There’s some nice white space throughout. It was very easy to read. I moved across it nicely. The sentences were all well put together. The first thing that jumped out was this description. They walk fast, but Veronica, all caps underlined. I’m fine with that. Sure, why not? Veronica, and then in parentheses, 24, mixed-race, is faster.

I’m not sure mixed race is enough because that’s a very generic way to describe somebody’s ethnicity. If you’re going to make a point that it’s mixed-race, shouldn’t we know what the mix is?

John: Yes. In the next paragraph, we’re hearing long, straight black hair, yellow backpack, bouncing as she walk, runs, but we’re not finding anything more about her. Giving us just age and–

Craig: Basically, it was like saying Veronica, 24, won’t tell you what she looks like, is faster. That’s what it felt like to me. Either don’t or do. The halfway seemed a bit odd.

Now, what happens here over these three pages appears to be the demonstration of somebody struggling with some kind of information-processing disability. The glimpse of her struggling with this as a kid was interesting, but possibly out of place in this frantic opening.

The biggest issue I have here, as far as these three-page challenges go, this is a fairly high-level one. That’s good news because I think that Tania Luna can write fairly well here, is that if you’re demonstrating that somebody has a specific processing disability, don’t show me them doing something that I think they would be able to do regardless. If you’re 23 years old and you know that you have some issues processing information, direction, street names, things like that, and you’re going for a job interview, you will prepare. You’re not going to be helpless. You’re not going to wake up that morning and go, “Oh, right, I forgot I have extreme dyslexia or extreme dysgraphia, or I cannot remember names or places, or I’m face-blind.”

You know these things. Would it not be more interesting to meet this person in a situation where they did feel self-assured because they had prepared, and then something happens that they weren’t expecting, and then we see the expression of this disability and what it means for this person.

John: Yes. I think my frustration with the three pages on the whole was that it was three pages of just getting somebody to an office in a way that didn’t feel like, I didn’t learn that much about Veronica over the course of these three pages. I didn’t know anything specific about what she was. I didn’t get a sense of what her issue was. It’s some sort of information processing issue that she was overwhelmed by this scenario, but I didn’t know much specific about her, and that started with not getting a clear visual of her at the start.

I want to talk about just the very first lines here. With the New York City Financial District, skyscrapers jetted out of concrete like shiny Lego towers made by a kid without much of an imagination. I don’t see that specifically.

Craig: It’s also unnecessary because we know–

John: We know what skyscrapers are.

Craig: Yes, we know what New York looks like.

John: Cabs honk as they whiz by, a few meter trees, leaves yellow, dot the sidewalk. Not helping me get so much. Here’s my concern, tourists. So many tourists wander with the locals, business suits, business shoes, business expressions. I don’t associate a lot of tourists with the Financial District, so I think highlighting that there are people in business suits doing Wall Street work and that Veronica is maybe not part of that is actually more useful to us than the confusing thing of the tourists in there because I don’t understand who Veronica is in relationship to people she’s walking around. The GPS on her phone, the GPS just feels– it makes me think, “Oh, are we in the ‘90s?”

Craig: Right. It’s an incredibly ambiguous concept. It’s a technology that underpins all the other things we have.

John: We refer to it as a separate thing anymore.

Craig: Is she using Google Maps? Is she using Waze? Is she using Apple Maps? GPS is like a Garmin device.

John: Absolutely. Call up the map on her phone, which is fine. Beyond that, I mostly get it. Cutting back to the elementary school was probably not the right choice for cutting back and forth in these first pages leads me to think that we’re going to do this all the time in the movie, and that’s not, my friend. I get a little bit nervous about jumping back to the grade school so much at the start.

Craig: If you do jump back to the grade school, I need to know that it’s her memory. Otherwise, it’s the movie doing it, in which case I’m just frustrated. I feel, in this case, like the movie just said, “Oh, now, here’s her as a kid,” not okay, on her face, panicked, sweaty. There’s this memory of her being panicked and sweaty in a hallway. You’re absolutely right, where we place her in the beginning, none of those things are in service of her character. They don’t create specific obstacles. It isn’t a question that we almost missed her because she wasn’t interesting, but then we realized that’s part of the issue. It wasn’t that she was moving faster than everybody or getting jostled. Why the street? Why the here? What’s going on? Why not just, boom, panicked, running?

John: I want to get back to the thing you said early on. I said a person with this situation, this information processing disorder, would have a strategy going into it. They’d have a plan for coping ahead. That might actually be a more interesting thing. If we’re going to cut away from the moments, it might be more interesting to see what her plan was for that day, and then watch it fall apart.

Craig: Yes, exactly. You sit there and you make a plan. If I’m watching a 23-year-old young woman at night in her apartment practicing the map, practicing the movements, I would be so curious as to why. Then when I see her the next day moving, and I’m like, “Oh, okay, so she has some issue. That’s why she prepared this.” Then, “Oh, Con Ed has closed the street off. You can’t go that way. Oh, no.” Then I’m connected to her panic because I’m experiencing it. I’m part of it because I’ve been prepared for it.

One thing to consider, and I don’t know if Tania has this processing disorder or not, but one thing I would suggest, Tania, is to think, okay, sometimes reality gets in the way of what we think would be dramatic. Don’t worry. Better to be realistic. Then say, well, then what are the pettier, the smaller, the more mundane obstacles that will be unique to this situation?

John: As you were talking, I was thinking about, let’s say she’s coming from uptown to the Financial District. She gets on a train and she assumes it’s local and it’s going to stop, but it turns out to be an express, and so she goes three stops too far. We’ve all been in a situation where we’re like, wait, you just saw the stop go past you. We can handle that. We have an expectation of how we can handle that, but if we then cut back to her planning for how many stops it’s going to be, and you realize like, “Oh, this is a much bigger deal to her than it would be to me,” we’re leaning in, we’re curious.

Craig: Yes. If we replace this character with a blind character, we would not accept an opening where this blind character is moving through the New York streets with their cane, completely unaware of where they are. You would prepare, but we would be very invested if, for instance, like what you just said happened, and you realize, “Oh, my preparation is useless now. Now what do I do?” That creates connection with the character. What we don’t have here is a rooting interest because we’re just watching. We’re not invested.

John: Agreed.

Craig: I will say the ability to put sentences together, to lay things out in a convincing way, read, it was smooth as silk, so it’s all promising.

John: Absolutely. We’re sure pitching a better version of what’s already been solved.

Craig: Which we usually don’t have the opportunity to do, so that’s a good sign.

John: It is, agreed. Drew, our writer also sent through the logline to explain what’s happening in the full script. Tell us what else is happening in Scrambling.

Drew: The logline is, a dyslexic woman with a wild imagination accidentally lands a high-stakes job and must scramble to prove she belongs in a cutthroat corporate world that wasn’t built for her to succeed.

Craig: Yes.

John: That’s right. It’s working girl. Great, love it.

Craig: Sure.

John: Let’s move on to our next script by Leah Newsome. This is Lump. Drew, help us out.

Drew: A desert town in the year 2140. Very pregnant Ingrid, early 30s, is being given a cervical exam by a doula in an old dingy motor home. The doula is feeling for something. She finds it, says no, and ends the exam. Ingrid hangs her head. On her way out, the doula encourages Ingrid to go to a hospital across the border as they’re cleaner. Ingrid is reluctant. Driving home, odd beeps and screeching comes over the radio. Ingrid accidentally swerves into oncoming traffic but avoids a crash. At home, Ingrid makes tea but panics when she drops some of the water on the floor. Sean enters, informing her that the water filter was jammed, and fence was cut.

John: All right, and so on the title page here it says, “Inspired by the mythical epic The King of Tars.” I’ve never heard of The King of Tars.

Craig: I’ve never heard of The King of Tars

John: I believe it exists.

Craig: It has to.

John: It makes me curious.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes, and I also like that you’re saying the medieval epic because it’s like, nothing about this feels medieval. Great.

Craig: Yes, that’s inspiring.

John: Yes, if you’re just making it up just to pique our curiosity.

Craig: Brilliant.

John: Brilliant.

Craig: Actually, a genius movie.

John: Well played. All right, let me start us off here. We are starting off in this doula’s motorhome. I like the visuals that we’ve got here. I like sort of how we’re being set up. The super title over it says The Excised Lands 2140. I bristled a little bit at The Excised Lands. It just gave me that sort of fantasy sci-fi thing.

Craig: Slightly fanfic-ish name.

John: Yes, fanfic-ish. Yes, it does feel a little bit like that. This is a small thing. In the Courier Typeface, you use dash, dash. There’s no such thing as like a long em dash. Whatever Leah’s doing here to create those em dashes, those long dashes in the first paragraph and second paragraph, just a little bit weird. Just it bumped for me. I noticed it. Not a big thing.

What is a little bit bigger of a thing for me is fourth paragraph. She leans over Ingrid’s legs, finding the right angle. The last person who’s named was Ingrid. I didn’t realize it was the doula immediately. Just say doula. Just keep it. It’s that read to make sure that everything is unambiguous the first time you take a look at it. I was a little bit frustrated by the end of this first scene. Doula says, “Sorry.” I wanted more. I felt you were being ambiguous for no purpose. The doula would have said more there.

Craig: Yes, this is the reaction. The doula is doing a vaginal examination to check what? Dilation possibly to see if it’s time for the baby to be born. It’s a cervical exam. Cervical exam would imply, yes, that it is. We’re checking dilation, right? Then the doula feels for something difficult to find. The cervix is not difficult to find. Now I’m like, “Okay, well, what is difficult?”

John: Is something else happening in there?

Craig: Something else happening. Okay. We are in the future. Are we hoping for a two-headed baby? I don’t know. All I know is that the doula says, “No,” which is very casual. No, sorry. Ingrid drops her head onto the table defeated. It’s a bit like, I didn’t get the job. Not my baby’s dead. If your baby isn’t ready to be born, then that would be a different response. I had no idea what I was meant to feel there.

John: Yes. Here’s why it matters because we’ve established she’s very pregnant. We say that she’s very pregnant. We’re just seeing this exam or calling a cervical exam. Then the idea that she’s going to cross the border to do a doula makes me wonder, and not in the right way, is to wonder what’s going to happen next. I feel like if she’s close enough that she’s there for this exam, that the baby’s just about to come.

Craig: Let’s talk a little bit about the post-apocalypse, if I may.

John: Do you have any experience about that?

Craig: When you begin, it’s important to introduce changes slowly. The things that are contrasted to our life are important, but you don’t want to just pile on 12 of them at once.

John: No.

Craig: Because now nobody knows really what the rules are. Nobody knows quite what the connection is to the past. There’s so much going on here in this first scene that I don’t– They don’t have stirrups. She’s got to hold her own legs back. It’s in a motor home, but they do have rubber gloves or latex gloves. Then there’s an oil drum fire pit, which I have to say, I have a rule on The Last of Us.

John: No oil drum fire pits.

Craig: No oil drum fire pits. It is the most possible cliche thing to do in the apocalypse.

John: Where do we think– Was it Mad Max where we first established the post-apocalyptic oil drum fire pit?

Craig: I don’t know.

John: Because they used to actually exist. In the Great Depression, that was actually a way that people kept warm.

Craig: From oil drums? It was a metal thing.

John: It was a metal– [crosstalk]

Craig: When do you find– Oil drums exist. You’ll see oil drums in the second season of The Last of Us, but not for braziers. Isn’t it rare to just see oil drums with the top lopped off that you can fill with garbage and light on fire, and they’re always on the street corner? I think it’s because it’s just they’re easy to source for productions. They’re at a height that makes it interesting. Otherwise, people have to sit. I don’t know. Anyway, but here’s what I really don’t understand. There’s an oil drum fire pit and it’s 100 degrees out.

John: Yes.

Craig: What? What?

John: Yes. What is that? They’re playing a card game near the fire.

Craig: Why would they be near the fire sweating through their clothes when it’s 100 degrees? Now, that may be explained also, but then I want the script to tell me that’s weird. At least to acknowledge to me, I’m supposed to note that that’s strange. One thing I do think that would help this is if we took the excise land 2140, moved it down a bit.

John: I was about to say the same thing. If that’s, as she’s getting back to her truck and everything else, that’s when we’re saying that, great. Because then also it makes that first scene clean. It can be about the duelist medical examination. We’ll notice like, okay, is this just a– what’s happening here?

Craig: Generally, you want to put that title over the widest possible shot.

John: Agreed.

Craig: Where you get the full scope of the world and you go, “Oh yes,” that’s not just that I’m in this horrible junkyard or a terrible mobile park. Look at the horizon, look at the sun, look at the sky, look at whatever.

John: I want to make a proposal for the second scene. In the second scene, we’re outside the motor home and Ingrid is walking to her truck. She gets in her truck. I would propose that we start the scene a little bit later on, because right now we have an action line. Ingrid pulls her keys out of her pocket. That’s not an interesting line to give to itself. If she were to get into the truck at that point and the rest of the conversation is there, then we can end on the finally get the car to start the engine rumble into life. I would say just get us into that car sooner. It’s probably going to be your friend.

Craig: This is also a place where knowing where people are and how motion is functioning will help. Why is the doula following her? I didn’t even know the doula was following me until she started talking. Is she trying to keep up with Ingrid? Is she worried about Ingrid? What she’s saying here, I can’t tell what the intention is. Is she worried for Ingrid’s life? Is she just being just a know-it-all? I can’t tell because I don’t know how she’s moving with her.

John: Yes. If that first line from the doula is like, listen, you could probably make it in time if you left now. If she was following her and like that’s the first line, in the sense that she’s restating a thing she said before.

Craig: Also it says exterior doula’s motorhome day. The motorhome door slams behind Ingrid and the doula. That’s it.

John: Who slammed it?

Craig: Then they don’t seem to be walking. They’re just standing there. Is the truck right next to the motorhome? Where is everything? This is the classic Lindsey Durant question. Where are they standing? Are they moving? Where is the truck? Where are the women relative to the motorhome?

John: My instinct is they should be in motion as the scene starts.

Craig: It feels like they should be in motion because I would understand that the doula is worried about her. For the doula to be worried about her, I need to go back to the prior scene where Ingrid drops her head onto the table, defeated, then starts to get up. The doula goes, “Wait, wait, wait.” Cut to, boom. “Hold on, hold on.” Just because I don’t know why this next bit is happening. Just thinking about how people actually function. They don’t just do nothing and then suddenly appear together outside of the door. Find the intention.

John: Yes, agreed. As we get into Ingrid’s truck, she’s driving back. I was confused by the radio voice because the radio voice to me feels like, at first I thought, is it a dispatcher? No, it’s just convenient radio-

Craig: It’s the news.

John: -telling up the news.

Craig: It’s the news. I really struggle with this. Three arrested west of the former municipality of Phoenix.

John: Oh, come on.

Craig: If it is 2140, you’re not calling it the– That’s like us referring to New York as the former New Amsterdam today. We don’t do that, right? You could call it west of Phoenix territory or west of– Fallout would call it New Phoenix. That’s what they do. New Vegas. Why is there just this casual– If you have this casual news update, I feel like there’s way more civilization going on than we thought there would be.

John: With this last line, suspects were found with stolen rations on their persons. That feels police-y. That feels like police dispatcher. Finding the right level for that is interesting.

It sounds like, Leah, we’re really harping on a lot of stuff. I want to love this. I actually like the space of it. I love a pregnant woman in this space and trying to make a decision about what to do next. We’re about to get to Sean, who’s apparently the father of the kid. We’re about to meet him. That scene is better. We don’t know who Sean is. He’s not given any other uppercase name. I’m curious to keep reading based on what you’ve done so far.

Craig: Yes. I love a scene that begins with a cervical exam. If you start with a cervical exam, hats off, good for you. Audacious, bold. There is a lot of clunky, cliche, sci-fi stuff going on here that you have to be better than because you just don’t want to end up in a Wattpad world with this stuff, right?

Last thing is to just think about where everybody is, give the audience a chance to visualize things. It means say less and make the things you say matter more. We are interior cat house evening. What does the exterior look like? Where is it? I don’t know.

John: I don’t know what interior cat house means.

Craig: I don’t know either. Cat house could be whore house.

John: Yes.

Craig: Then it says her house. I don’t know what’s going on. Then, listen, Sean is saying a bunch of things that I suspect are intentionally confusing. The filter, what is it? The fence, don’t know. Something with the water. Not sure. All fine.

John: All fine. He’s entering in as if he’s just continuing a previous conversation, which makes sense for people who know each other well.

Craig: She knows something from the doula. She hasn’t told him. Am I looking at her face? Is she contemplating telling him? Is she worried about telling him?

John: I don’t know what she knows.

Craig: I don’t know either. All I know is that she doesn’t seem to be concerned about it here anymore either. I think all this is to say to Leah, “If there’s one word I could give you, Leah, as advice for this, it is to focus. Focus in on what you want me to see. Focus in on why it matters. Focus in on, visually, on your frame, the movement, all of it.”

John: Yes, watch the scenes.

Craig: Watch the scenes. These feel written. They don’t feel watched.

John: All right, Drew, can you help us out? What is the log line? What else is going to be happening in Lump?

Drew: Over a century into the water crisis, a couple moves to the former state of Arizona where they’re pulled into a violent and mystical cult of doulas following the birth of their Lumpchild.

Craig: Okay. My interest is piqued. I’ve never considered that there would be a cult of violent doulas. That’s hysterical. I don’t know what a Lumpchild is. Cool. A lot of questions.

John: A lot of questions. I would say I’m intrigued because the fact that the doulas are an important part of the whole story, I wasn’t getting that out of them.

Craig: Not at all.

John: I’m surprised that thing we saw in the first frame is actually a crucial part of the whole rest.

Craig: Because they showed us doula.

John: Doula, yes.

Craig: Not doulas.

John: There were other dusty old women out there, but–

Craig: They were playing cards by a fire in 100-degree heat. The thing that I think is missing from that log line that I’d love to hear is some brief reference to why doulas matter at all in this new world, or at least more than they did now, or why they would conglomerate into a violent cult in a world with terrible infertility problems. Yes. In a world where no new babies have been born. In a world where only 1 out of 1,000 children survive. Something to create relevance so that it’s not just– Because you could take the word doulas out and replace it with janitors, bubblegum manufacturers, girl scouts.

John: It doesn’t matter. The thing I was missing in that log line is Ingrid must make a choice. Basically, what is the decision that this central character has to make? Yes.

All right, let’s get to our third and final three-page challenge. This is The Dread Pirate Roberts, written by J. Bryan Dick. Drew, help us out.

Drew: “We’re dropped from space down towards earth, specifically the Carolina coast, and into the middle of a 17th-century naval battle between two ships, the Revenge, which is filled with pirates, and the Queen’s Pride, which is a Navy ship. The captain of the Queen’s Pride believes they’re winning, sends his steward, Wesley, 18, to go get his victory snuff. As he does, the Revenge turns and rams the Queen’s Pride, and pirates storm the ship. Too scared to do it himself, the captain gives Wesley a dagger to cut them free from the pirates’ grappling hooks. Wesley is quickly stopped by a pirate named Scars, who encourages him to jump into the ocean like the rest of the Navy sailors.

Wesley pretends to run away but grabs a rope and slingshots back and knocks out Scars to cut the rope. Soon, a pirate in all black soars over them all, swinging up to the crow’s nest triumphantly, and a knife is put to Wesley’s neck.”

John: Now, for listeners who are saying, “Hey, that sounds familiar,” we should say that underneath the title on the title page, it says, a pilot for the lost adventures of the black-masked scallywags from The Princess Bride, William Goldman’s timeless tale of true love. This is literally fan fiction.

Craig: Yes, and that’s fine.

John: Fine.

Craig: Are you allowed to sell this? No, not without permission. Are you allowed to write it as a sample? 100%. Absolutely, nothing wrong with that.

John: I actually applaud this choice, because if I needed to read a sample, and I sort of know what the source material is, can this guy write in this kind of a style? Can it? Sure, and I think, actually, J. Bryan Dick did a nice job here. I enjoyed reading these pages.

Craig: Yes, the challenge with this is the bar gets higher.

John: It does.

Craig: Because everybody’s aware that you’re cheating. You’re not creating new characters. You’re not creating a new world. You’re not creating a tone. You’re building off of something. Therefore, a little more expectation, because you haven’t had to cook at all yourself. In addition, when it’s something that’s derived from a beloved movie, like The Princess Bride, that, basically, everyone has seen in our business multiple times, you need to also nail it. It’s not enough to be good. It felt good, but I wasn’t delighted. It just sort of was a pretty typical naval battle.

Listen, you’re trying to write like William Goldman. What a target that you put on your back. It’s confident. It’s crackling. There was one moment where I thought, “Oh, there’s a missed opportunity, where the captain gets scared and sends Wesley.” That felt like it could have been a little bit more of a Goldmanesque turn from overconfident bravery to, oh, you there. I have a thought. It just felt so quick as to be almost arbitrary. Yes. It’s a naval battle. I will say, I appreciated that J. Bryan didn’t bury us in action description. The boats collide and side by side. Got it. Okay. I can do that math.

John: Absolutely. We were focused on characters during it, which was crucial. I did feel there was a missed opportunity with the captain who’s just captain. Give that captain a name that crackles. His first line is only okay. The first line is, these pickeroons will be food for the sea. Reload. Make this pass our last. There’s a better version of that first line. I like pickeroons, but like these pickeroons will feed the sea, man. Something about that could feel fun. Let us also know that this is a bit of a comedy, because I didn’t feel like we were quite getting to the joke. Even though the captain is not going to be a crucial character, he’s the first person who speaks, and that becomes important.

Craig: Yes. That’s the issue is everything has to be as good as The Princess Bride.

John: Reading this made me think back to Mindy Kaling when she was on the show. We were talking about when she’s staffing for shows, she gets frustrated by reading original pilots, and she’s like, “I really miss the day when you would read, specs of existing shows, because then you can see like, can this person write in somebody else’s voice?” That’s obviously what she needs to know. It’s this, can this person do somebody else’s thing?

I think what’s nice about this is, as a sample would be like, “Oh, this person is adaptable and can answer, can get a thing, which is really useful.” In a weird way, I suspect that this pilot script, which you can’t shoot. If it’s all at this quality and beyond this quality, will be useful because it shows the ability to match a style that’s not their own.

Craig: This would obviously hinge on the relationship between Wesley and the Dread Pirate Roberts. The promise of that story is enough to keep me going. One thing that’s important tonally is that The Princess Bride was framed as a tale where a grandfather is reading from a novel to his grandson. I think that that is baked in to the world of The Princess Bride. Even if you just want to start inside of it, which I think is reasonable, here’s what you can’t do.

On page three, Scars says, “What’ll it be, boy?” With that, young Wesley charges to the side of the ship. Scars reacts. That was too easy. Young Wesley doesn’t go overboard. He launches himself into a taut rope and slingshots back at Scars. Scars says, “Oh, shi–.” We don’t curse in The Princess Bride. Ever. That’s not a thing. We don’t do that. Understanding tone is massively important.

John: Absolutely. That oh, sh, could be a reaction from Scars. You can put that in italics after that. We wouldn’t say it.

Craig: We just wouldn’t. We would not say that.

John: We would not say that. That idea of do you, will J. Bryan Dick adopt that framing that this is a tale being told within this? Maybe. I can imagine at a certain point, I think something just stops. It’s like, but what happened next? Sure. Absolutely.

Craig: Yes. Promise of fun. Zippy pages to read. Not a ton of what I would call fresh invention here. Enough to make me wonder like, okay. I will say like the great idea here is to meet the Dread Pirate Roberts. Because we never met him. Yes. We met Wesley. He was not the first Dread Pirate Roberts. [crosstalk]

John: That’s fine. What’s also helpful about this is like, if you had to pick between 10 things to read and you saw this one, it’s like, oh, I know what this is going to be. There’s something comfortable about that.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Drew, help us out. What else? The long line for the rest of this pilot.

Drew: Set in the Princess Bride world, the Dread Pirate Roberts TV series, follows the adventures of each person who donned the black mask to sail the high seas and command the Revenge.

John: Oh, well, that’s an interesting idea that it’s not just Wesley. It could also be like the history of.

Craig: Then why are we starting with Wesley?

John: What, that he was the last one?

Craig: Then we go backwards?

John: Maybe there’s a whole cadre of other folks who are still around and a lot.

Craig: I don’t want to watch that. I’ll tell you why. Because television shows, unless they are anthology shows like Black Mirror, where everything is a different story. It’s about connecting with the characters and relationships. I want to watch the Dread Pirate Roberts tutor this young lad, to whom he says at the end of every day, “Well done, probably kill you in the morning,” and then doesn’t. I want to see that father-son relationship happen. I don’t want to just keep meeting new Dread Pirate Robertses.

John: Yes, I do. I guess the version of this I want is basically Hacks, but it’s pirates.

Craig: Sure. Did you see Our Flag Means Death?

John: I did not get into Our Flag Means Death. But it’s in that same space, for sure.

Craig: It is in that same space, although definitely a different tone. What I loved is you got to meet this ship full of wackos and got under the hood of those wackos. It was appreciated if I kept going to different ships and different people.

John: I doubt that’s really what’s happening here. This reminds me of, because I was just editing the chapter on what kind of story this is. Basically, we’re talking through in this strip dance book chapter, I have this idea. Is it a movie idea? Is it a TV idea? There is a movie idea for the Dread Pirate Roberts, where it’s all contained within one thing. The TV show version of this is fun in the same way that Cheers is fun. Is that like you are following a group of people and sort of the adventures of the week.

Craig: They don’t change.

John: Exactly. They don’t change.

Craig: That’s the key. Every week we meet a new bartender in Cheers. That part, I do think it would be a wonderful, I presume that this would be a movie.

John: It feels like it should be a movie. Let’s talk about just the final, could you actually make this thing? You could if this were terrific. I don’t know who owns the rights. Is it Castle Rock? Who would own this?

Craig: Yes. It’s Castle Rock, but you would probably need– yes, you wouldn’t need permission from William Goldman. Unless you were, no, you might-

John: Because of the underlying book.

Craig: Because of the underlying book.

John: Yes. I suspect in buying the rights to the book.

Craig: They probably bought it all out in perpetuity across the universe for all time. Yes, you’re probably right. Then it would be Castle Rock. Not impossible, but you’d have to know there would be a tremendous outcry.

John: There would be. The standards would have to be really high.

Craig: This is meant for, hey, I’m a good writer. Not, hey, make this show.

John: Yes. I think it’s a good writing sample. We want to thank everybody who submitted, all 250 of you who submitted, especially these three writers for letting us talk about their work on the air. Drew, thank you again for burning your eyes out to read through all of 250 of these.

Craig: I don’t know how you did that.

John: It is time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a show that’s actually in the same space. It’s a specific episode of a TV series called The Goes Wrong Show.

Craig, you may have seen on Broadway, there’s a show, The Play That Goes Wrong. There’s also a TV series, which the premise is that it’s a theater troupe that puts on a show for television each week. A director explains what the goal was and also tells what challenges they felt they encountered that week. Never mind, it’s going to go fine for this live TV thing. Of course, things go wrong at the premise.

The episode, if people are, if that’s at all appealing to you, the episode I recommend to folks is one called 90 Degrees. It’s a Tennessee Williams type play. The premise of the episode is that the set designers mistook 90 Degrees as instructions for how one set was supposed to be built.

Craig: Everything is turned.

John: Everything is turned. It’s turned 90 degrees. The cameras also turn 90 degrees for it. You have characters who are trying to sit around this table and they’re falling down, and gravity just works against them. It’s incredibly dumb, but also just delightful.

Craig: I love dumb.

John: It’s a thing you could also watch with your kids because it’s absurd and it’s completely safe.

Craig: Where would I find that?

John: I think we found it on Amazon Prime. I would just google and see what servers you can find it on.

Craig: Sure.

John: All right. What do you got for us?

Craig: My one cool thing is someone I met in Austin. We were down there for South by Southwest and myself and Neil Druckmann and the many of the cast of The Last of Us got to meet Cookie Monster.

John: Oh my God. Cookie Monster’s the best.

Craig: And Elmo. No offense to Elmo. Elmo’s great. Cookie Monster has been there, John, for our entire lives. It was so strange to meet a puppet as a 53-year-old and feel like you might cry because it’s like when you smell something from your childhood, it’s just this instant thing of getting back. Now, one thing I noticed about Cookie Monster that I did not expect is he’s enormous. Those puppets are huge. They’re so much bigger than you think they are. They’re so big.

It was pretty, it reminded me of how powerful Sesame Street is as a cultural institution. To the extent that these kinds of cultural institutions are being assaulted and undermined, it’s so distressing because it is just an absolute positive thing that has lasted. Every generation of children that comes along magically loves Cookie Monster. The color of the blue, just his blue made me so happy. I just want to thank Sesame Street and Cookie Monster for welcoming us into their studio. I still don’t know why, but they did. [laughter]

John: Craig, tell me, so I’ve never interacted with Muppets. Was it hard to maintain eye contact with the puppet and ignore the puppeteer?

Craig: No, because the puppeteer gets very low. There’s a camera that’s filming things and the puppeteer gets very low. In fact, there’s quite a bit of scrambling right before they roll, which is like, lower, no, see you, lower. That’s why the puppet is so big. Because it actually has to fill a lot of space below frame to make sure that the puppeteer is not in the frame.

John: That’s great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our host for this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You will find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this show each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record on the secret things we noticed that let us know that something has been re-shot. Craig, thanks for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, you are watching a movie, you’re watching a TV show, and your little radar is like, okay, there’s a recut here, something’s changed, something went off. What are some things that are tipping you off that things changed here?

Craig: The biggest indication is there is a rather long and explainy bit of dialogue that is not on camera. Someone is, the person who’s not on camera that’s talking to the person who is on camera says a long thing that explains a thing that they wouldn’t have normally said or needed to explain because he would have seen it, which is probably covering for the fact that that thing was essential to know for the plot, but the scene just wasn’t working and so they cut it.

John: Absolutely. We’ve both been in situations where in post, you are adding ADR lines, looping lines to take care of a little bridge or situation. ADR is used to fix little technical mistakes but also can be used to correct some narrative issues because a scene got dropped out because a scene where that information used to happen is no longer there. Watching the current season of Severance, and we’re recording this before the final episode, and I don’t really know any of the backstory on Severance, what happened this season.

Watching it, I did notice a few moments in these last few episodes where like, okay, something shifted here. One of those things, situations was a crucial word or term was used and we were not on the characters while they were saying it or we suddenly cut incredibly wide when a character says a certain phrase. It led me to believe like, okay, something shifted here. There was also a situation where one character had a confrontation, drove away to leave the show and then comes back and then leaves the show again. My suspicion is that the episode in which those were happening got shifted later on in the season and we were moving stuff around to accommodate that change.

Craig: That could absolutely be true. The interesting thing about the streaming world now is that episodes have variable lengths. It’s not necessarily the case that if you see a very short episode or a very long episode that things, may have, but sometimes when an episode is very short, it’s because there were some scenes, it’s rare to plan for an episode to be say 35 minutes if you’re an hour-long show. There may have been some things that got cut.

The other thing, let’s talk about an additive thing that is an indication. When a sequence occurs that is very self-contained and exciting, actiony, scary, sexy, one of these big, loud, noisy scenes that didn’t really feel like it needed to be there, didn’t change anything, suddenly sort of happened, didn’t impact stuff. That is oftentimes the result of a studio network going, this thing needs to be louder, sexier. I need a car chase, and so they just make one happen and shove it in. If you ever feel like something got shoved in, it’s probably because it got shoved in.

John: A thing I will notice is that you have key characters having a scene on a set with nobody else around them. It feels like a reshoot. It feels like we haven’t established anybody else in the world who could be in this thing, but we need to have this moment happen. Therefore, we’re putting them in this set. One of the recent Marvel movies, I did notice there were some sequences were like, “Wait, why are we here? What is this place that we’re in?” It’s a place that was not established. It’s a place that serves no other function, and yet we’re in this place for this one scene to happen. To me, it felt like six months later, they brought everybody back and shot this one thing.

Craig: If you see something like that that isn’t really set up and isn’t used again, either it was created for that, or there were five scenes in that thing. All of them except one guy. That’s another good point. Sometimes that can be an indication.

You’re right to suggest that sometimes it’s those scenes between two characters sitting somewhere that are additional photography, but sometimes those are the best scenes. Very famously, we had David Benioff and Dan Weiss on our show, and they talked about how in the first season of Game of Thrones, they just missed the target on how long the episode should be and needed to go back and put stuff in.

They were out of money, so they did the cheapest thing, which was write conversations between two people in a room that already exists, and lo and behold, those are some of the best scenes in season one because they’re good writers. They did a great job of creating scenes where you, what happened inside of there wasn’t just plot or filler, it helped inform the conflict and the character.

John: Yes, one of the issues with the way we make TV shows now, especially for series on streaming, is that we’ll often block shoot things. We could block shoot the entire eight episodes or 10 episodes of the season, but more likely we’re doing things in chunks and stuff moves around. I’ve talked with show owners who they need to do reshoots, and suddenly they have like four directors who are like all shooting the same week in the same space to do stuff. It gets to be really, really complicated. It’s not surprising that you didn’t go in intending the scene to work that way.

Clearly, that was what you could do with the situation you had. You have a character giving a piece of information that’s like, is not the most organic way to do a thing, but it’s who you had available at the moment to make this bridge fit.

Craig: Yes, there are all sorts of things that can go wrong. You either are on a show where you have the resources to accommodate those things. It was raining that day and we needed it to be sunny. We’re going to wait for it to be sunny and do it again. It was raining that day, we needed it to be sunny. They’re going to be in the rain, and we’re not going to really talk about it. The fact that the scene before and the scene after are on the same day are sunny, just going to happen. Things like that do happen. It is remarkable what people notice and don’t notice.

One of the things about all of these strange bumpy moments is that we’re very well attuned to them, but they wouldn’t happen so frequently if they didn’t work. They actually get away with it all the time.

John: The other thing I’ll notice about, something has changed here. A scene got dropped, something got wedged in there, endless days or nights, or it goes day to night, day to night in a way that’s not really possible. These two things could not be happening simultaneously, and that’s just a thing. No, the writers aren’t idiots. It’s just that something changed and something shifted, and this is sort of what we can do. This is where we’re at.

Craig: Yes, if something occurs that is jolting in a superficial way, it’s probably because there was something in between that got lost. If you have characters who are getting to know each other at work, and then the next scene is it’s the evening, and they’re at some sort of very swanky party, and the woman is dressed in this like rotten ballgown. The guy’s in a tux, and you’re like, where did you come from? Why is this totally occurring now in this way?

Something got lost here, and one thing that we always have to watch out for when we’re doing all of our work is that if the people who are paying for it are losing faith in it, or their faith is wobbly, they will generally resort to faster. Go faster. You don’t need that. It’s slowing us down, and they have such a lower sensitivity to things not making sense than we do. We’ll say, well, that literally will not make sense now. If we take that out, this will not make sense, and they don’t care a lot, and that’s a fight you have to have.

John: Because they are familiar with the bad version, and it’s like, let’s get rid of the bad stuff, and if we get rid of the bad stuff, it’s all really good. It’s like, no, it may just not make any sense.

Craig: In their defense, I have watched things before that I’ve enjoyed, where at some point I went, I don’t know, I don’t understand that. Anyway, okay, still, what happens next? You can get past some of those things.

Now, what’s interesting is when you have a show that is built heavily on intentional mystery/confusion puzzle boxing, like Severance, it can actually be very hard to tell. Did this happen because you’re screwing with my head? Did this happen because something went a bit awry in production? It’s hard to tell. I give Severance the benefit of the doubt that everything is intentional. There is that illusion of intentionality that no matter what we see on screen, it was exactly the way they wanted us to see it.

It could be, well, maybe that was a stylistic choice to have them say that line over this big, huge wide shot. It’s hard to tell sometimes, but it’s cumulative. You get one of those, okay, you let it go. Two, eh, you start getting four or five of those things, the boat’s going to sink.

John: Yes. Over the summer, I helped out on a show that was doing reshoots, and you’re trying to be surgical, and you’re trying to not break any of the good stuff, but there have been times where it’s like, okay, that’s actually a pretty good scene, but it just doesn’t make sense with where we are right now, and we’re going to have to take all that information and put it into a new scene where it actually is where things fit better, and that’s, the frustration is that sometimes you have to lose good stuff in order to make everything else fit together right.

Craig: I’m going to give you, I rarely do this, but I will give you a specific example from my own career. I worked on the second Snow White and the Huntsman movie, and what had happened was they had a script, well, I’d actually worked on a script, I think, and that had gotten the thing to a green light, and then someone came on to make the movie, and they rewrote the script completely, and got all the way, I think, to they were like a week away from shooting, and the studio said, “Wait, hold on, we don’t like this.”

They then came back to me and said, “You’ve got about two weeks, and here’s the deal. These sets have been built, and these people have been cast, and this stuff is occurring because we’ve already spent the money on the visual effects development, so that’s not changing, but we need to make this all make sense, and so then it became an exercise in, right: I’m going to get some blue index cards that are stuff I can’t change, and now I have all these white index cards, and I have to figure out how to lead into those blue cards and out of those blue cards and into the next blue cards in a way that is at least coherent, and then provides hopefully what the actors are looking for, the studio’s looking for, there’s a new filmmaker on board, what is that filmmaker looking for, and that was very difficult, and in the end, you don’t get a prize for solving the math problem. Basically, people didn’t like it very much because it was, you could tell, it was like something had gone wrong here.

John: Absolutely, so what you’re describing is very analogous to what I was describing in the sense of things hadn’t been shot, but they might as well have been shot because you were locked into certain sets, I was locked into certain scenes, which that already exists, we’re never giving that actor back, so we got to go get me into it now in a way and put that in a place where it actually makes sense.

Craig: It doesn’t matter how much you protest, it doesn’t matter how much you say, if you would just not have to have this in that, and they’re like, yes, but we do, so that’s what’s happening, and also, you can’t write anything that would require a new set build. We don’t have the money or the time. Those kinds of math problems are sometimes how movies happen.

John: Absolutely, and sometimes creative constraints can lead to great solutions, but in two weeks, they’re not going to likely get you the best solution.

Craig: Everybody’s thinking maybe this will be, because it’s happened, maybe this will be that chaotic thing that comes together and is brilliant, because it’s happened. Usually, the best you can hope for is coherent.

John: Let’s wrap this up by saying, these are things that we’re noticing when we’re watching other people’s projects, but there’s so many things we’re not noticing at all. The patches were so well done that even we couldn’t see it. It was like the hardwood floors, they somehow matched everything together. It’s like, wow, you did a great job, because I did not know there was that issue there at all.

Craig: Listen, the first episode of The Last of Us was the first two episodes of The Last of Us that were combined together with some stuff removed and some stuff that I redid, and just a lot of interesting, careful weaving to make it as seamless as– and to make it seem inevitable, like it was meant to be that way. Tricky.

John: Tricky, yes. When it works, it works.

Craig: When it works, it works. That’s great. Thank you.

Links:

• Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections! SCRAMBLING by Tania Luna, LUMP by Leah Newsom, and THE DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS by J. Bryan Dick
• The King of Tars
• Sesame Street
• The Goes Wrong Show on Prime
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• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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