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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/unbelievably-agentic).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 627 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome back the OG Scriptnotes guest host, writer, director, showrunner, producer, Aline Brosh McKenna. Welcome back, Aline.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** I’m so excited to be here. There are so many people I need to thank. Oh, wait. That’s not the right place to do it.

**John:** You have to comment on how surprisingly heavy the award is.

**Aline:** Oh, it’s so heavy. I’m going to put it down. I’m just going to put it down.

**John:** You put it down and then pull out your notes of people you need to thank.

**Aline:** It’s going to mess up the line of my dress.

**John:** Yeah, 100%. Today, I would like to talk about agency in the sense of characters and what characters are doing in our stories, but also in real-life people, about making choices about what they want to do next. Then you’ve seen in the Workflowy, we have another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we discuss stories in the news and thing about how we would adapt that into quality filmed entertainment. Aline, have you stretched? Are you ready for this?

**Aline:** I’m really ready. I’m ready for a word I’ve never heard before.

**John:** Yes, which is… How are you going to pronounce it?

**Aline:** Agentic?

**John:** Yeah, agentic. It’s a word I saw a ton that week, and so I thought we’d talk about that. It’s agency as applied to real people, kind of. It’s a word.

**Aline:** I plan to use and misuse this word liberally.

**John:** Yes. At the end of the day, it’s how you use catchphrases to fill things in. Do you remember “at the end of the day”? Do you remember when you first heard that? Because it was during our careers that that became a thing.

**Aline:** “At the end of the day” is an industry term?

**John:** I think it’s an industry term.

**Aline:** Interesting. There’s so many circling backs and touching of bases. I feel like the lingo and the jargon has gotten so much worse as the business has gotten more corporatized, because you used to go to meetings, and there could be a guy smoking a doobie, with his feet up on the couch, just talking about whatever and maybe telling you about his marriage. And now when you go in, everyone is so official. They have all of these bits of jargon that clearly came from a retreat. We once sat down with someone who, I was asking him about what they were looking for, and he said, “Regionality is something that we take into consideration when we look at our buckets.”

**John:** Oh, buckets is a thing, yeah.

**Aline:** Buckets.

**John:** Buckets is a big thing too.

**Aline:** Buckets is a big thing.

**John:** We’ll get into all of those choices that we make. Coming out of COVID, a lot of times where you’re meeting with executives, you’re still meeting with them on Zoom. The small talk is also different on Zoom, because there’s less of that getting in a room and getting comfortable. You’re still asking about what people did over the weekend or where they are, but you’re also in their homes, which is a different thing too.

**Aline:** It’s really weird. I try not to scan the background too extensively. At the beginning of the pandemic, how many bedrooms did you see?

**John:** So many.

**Aline:** So many. I was like, guys, just turn it around. Sit on the bed would be my thought, so I’m not looking at the bed. I saw a lot of beds, basements, guestrooms, pets.

**John:** Vacation homes.

**Aline:** Vacation homes, yeah.

**John:** A lot of people who moved to Colorado, never moved back, all those. In our bonus segment for premium members, Aline and I are going to talk about the experience of being empty nesters, because we have both sent our kids off to college, and so what we’re looking forward to, how we’re adjusting, how many more dogs we’re going to get, the process of becoming empty nesters.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**John:** Now, Aline, we’re recording this on the day that Oscar nominations are due. Have you submitted your Oscar nominations already?

**Aline:** I have. I have, indeed.

**John:** For folks who are not voting in this, I thought we might just talk through what the process is, because it’s not what you would think. It’s no longer a form. It’s a website you go to. You and I are both members of the writers’ branch. Tell us about what you went through as you picked your entries.

**Aline:** It’s interesting. You vote for your branch and Best Picture. Then in the second round, you vote for everything. When you’re nominated, it really is your peers, because it’s your branch that’s choosing. I’ve heard people advocate for the technique of really listing all five or six. I think it’s five. But then some people will say that if you really love a movie and you think it doesn’t have a lot of chances of being nominated, that you just vote for one.

**John:** I would say that having filled it out earlier this afternoon, because you’re ranking them, I think that there’s much less of a problem with filling out the rest of the card. I don’t think it’s going to be as big of an issue. Fill out the rest of the card.

**Aline:** This was an extraordinarily good year.

**John:** I want to say the same thing too.

**Aline:** So many good movies. I don’t know what is the trend that resulted in this, but sometimes the awards movies can have a spinachy, homework vibe to them, and I felt like this year there were so many that were wildly enjoyable, like Holdovers and Poor Things, that were just packed with entertainment and fun. We stayed home over the break, and I really enjoyed watching all the movies that were out.

**John:** Yeah, I did too. There have been years where I feel like I’m scrounging to get those last, the fourth and fifth filled in there. No, I had multiple choices I could’ve put in as other really good movies to nominate. I’m really curious. By the time this episode comes out, people will have seen what the nominees are. There’s really good movies out there. I would just encourage people, if there’s movies that are nominated that you haven’t heard of yet, they really are good, and they really are worth seeking out.

**Aline:** I always vote for a straight-up comedy-

**John:** Same.

**Aline:** … because it’s such an under-represented genre, and as discussed many times on this show, it’s just as hard, if not harder, to write. I always find a couple of straight-up comedies that I like and throw them in there.

**John:** Comedies and also animation for me. It’s making sure that we’re recognizing the writing that goes into animation, because a lot of times, those animated films aren’t written under Guild contracts, so they’re not eligible for WGA awards, but they are eligible for other Oscars and stuff.

**Aline:** We are righting wrongs with our votes. We are really-

**John:** That’s what we’re doing.

**Aline:** … administering justice.

**John:** Another thing that happened this past week is I got an announcement for Final Draft 13. I make Highland, so of course, I don’t really use Final Draft. But you write in Final Draft, don’t you?

**Aline:** I do. I tried another program, but the people that I collaborate with revolted. It was like everybody had to get it or nobody. Nobody wanted to change. It’s the devil you know. I don’t know that I’m super up on every update. I got to say, I don’t know that I update until it becomes impossible-

**John:** Exactly.

**Aline:** … not to update. My general feeling about updates – and I’m not alone here – is I approach them with dread, as I almost always find it’s a worsening. Like this new iPhone update, where to get a GIF going, you got to go through several… I’m tapping a lot of stuff to get to my kittens with a ball of yarn.

**John:** Give Aline her kittens.

**Aline:** That’s right. I’m wondering, what does Final Draft have at this… The way I use it is so simple that-

**John:** You’re using it probably the same way you’ve used it for the last 15 years. You have a very set workflow way to do it. To the degree I sympathize with Final Draft is they are selling a product where they sell it once and then they have to convince you to keep buying the new version of it, so they have to keep adding new features to it. But the features, to my eyes, are not particularly rewarding. I would be curious if listeners write in and say, “Oh, I actually do use these new features.” Tell us about it. There are these ribbons and these cards and all these other things. Aline, you’re a person who uses this every day, but I suspect you’re not touching any of those things.

**Aline:** Ribbons, I don’t know what that is. Cards are those slug lines or slugs?

**John:** No. They actually look like little index cards. It takes your whole script and it breaks it down into little index cards.

**Aline:** Oh, right. Here’s the thing. I’ll mess that up. Whatever that is, I will change it to a point where I will then have to text my son and ask him how to undo things. You want a simple… Unless it could do stuff like tell you to get up and go for a walk or make your lunch for you, which would be amazing, because just the constant drumbeat of what’s your lunch… If Final Draft could assemble a turkey sandwich on focaccia, that is a-

**John:** Game changer.

**Aline:** … update I would pay for.

**John:** Absolutely. So many of the features that apps and Final Draft and other ones add, they feel like productive procrastination. It’s like, oh, it’s a different way to look at your thing, or it’s, oh, I’m filling out all this stuff. I’m just here to tell you that you and me and no other professional writers we know of really use all those things.

**Aline:** Are you still doing longhand?

**John:** I still write longhand for scenes, starting out, yeah.

**Aline:** You do? I know other people who do that. That’s so interesting. It’s the same if you’re doing it with a rock and a chisel. You just got to get stuff on paper, although I don’t mind things that get you in the mood. As you and I have discussed, the project of writing is a lot like getting into cold water, where you’re splashing little bits of it on your arm to acclimate yourself. What’s interesting to me is some people really, really use those features to really, really outline. For me – and I think you and I are the same – it will kind of kill my fun. I think it’s probably better for people who really love to have it all completely worked out.

**John:** Writing is one of those weird things where it’s the overall imagination to figure out what the shape of the story is, but it’s also what is literally at the cursor, what is the next letter in this word, what is the next word in this sentence. It’s that kind of work. I don’t see these tools helping you very much in doing that real, actual, granular writing work.

**Aline:** You can spend a lot of time without pages.

**John:** I guess my sympathy for Final Draft and these apps is that they’re not making any money unless they can convince you, Aline Brosh McKenna, to spend another $199 or whatever the upgrade fee is for Final Draft to buy it again. That’s a tough thing for them.

**Aline:** Don’t they do that by making the old versions unusable?

**John:** Eventually, they’ll stop updating them, so they won’t work with the new versions of Mac OS. Then you have folks who don’t upgrade their machines for forever. That’s also a challenge. It’s bad.

The main topic I wanted to get into today is actually kind of related, because it’s about taking control of your circumstances. We’ve talked before about main character energy. I think you actually had some follow-up conversations about main character energy, what protagonists in general want and what they’re doing. But usually, when you hear about agency, it’s usually about lacking agency. Aline, when someone says, “This character lacks agency,” or, “We need to see more agency out of this character,” what do they mean? What is the note behind that note?

**Aline:** An expression that I like is pulling levers, because I think that’s a very nice visual, where sometimes you’ll have a character who’s not affecting the outcome of the story enough, and so they’re serving more spice or frosting, as opposed to being the main course or being something which really moves the story forward.

Unfortunately, this happens a lot with female characters, especially in big, bombastic genre movies. You’ll sometimes find the woman who is the, quote unquote, scientist. All she does is sort of spit out a bunch of lingo. The poor lady was trying to memorize in her chair. But that’s not actually pulling the levers in the story. It’s really important.

It doesn’t mean you have to do it all the same way. Some characters can be moving a story forward by being absent or being passive in some way, although that’s probably higher degree of difficulty. But making sure that your characters are involved in every turn, so that the turns don’t happen without them, and if there is a coincidence or if there is a dropping into their lap of something, that it’s justified by what you set up before.

I don’t mind a happenstance. A lot of times when you tell your friend a great story, it’s like, “And then I turned the corner in Cost Plus and there was John August looking for a throw pillow.” Sometimes coincidences are fine, but if you find that your character is not the one controlling the puppet strings, then it’s something to look at. I’m really an advocate of making writers’ lives easier. The more active your character is in pushing things forward, the easier it’ll be.

**John:** Yeah. I think when I hear that note about, oh, it feels like the character lacks agency, it seems like they’re reacting rather than acting. They’re responding to things that other people are doing, rather than doing the things themselves. They feel like they’re corks floating along in the water and just being moved by the waves. We want to see them having the ability to make choices, and actually making those choices. We’re going to talk about the term “agentic” in just a second. Agency, I think to me, is the ability to make choices, and agentic is making those choices. You’re actually seeing the characters take that initiative, take those actions and do those things.

Before we dive into it, I do wonder whether our notions of agency tend to be a little bit gendered and culturally loaded. We have a sense of agency as the hero with the sword who runs and does the thing, whereas having agency in a story may look different for a female character in another cultural situation.

**Aline:** I think good storytelling requires protagonists who you’re engaged with, and you’re engaged with their decision tree. What’s interesting to me is sometimes we rename these things as main character energy or agentic or whatever. They’re all kind of the same thing. It goes back to our Final Draft discussion. These are elemental. You’re making bread; you need flour, water. There’s a few things you need. I think giving it another name… I’m looking forward to the first time I’m in a meeting and someone says “agentic.”

**John:** It’s going to happen.

**Aline:** I will text you instantly. I think that the reason that people will grab at certain bits of jargon like that is that you can have a shared conversation about what’s important in storytelling. The thing about main character energy is just our idea of what a main character is or does.

In Poor Things, for instance, she’s got diminished capabilities in certain ways, but she’s, I’m going to say, wildly agentic. She’s constantly going, “Oh, I want to go over there,” and it’s very disruptive to everyone around her, making big choices and big swings.

I think that’s part of what makes, to me, a story entertaining. I tend to be less entertained by movies where people are being buoyed by fate. But that’s a genre also. That’s a certain type of storytelling too. It just feels very different from what I do. I really like things that grab you with putting you on a story towrope right away.

**John:** Absolutely. This term “agentic,” I found it in a bunch of… I fell down a rabbit hole looking at these blog posts which were using this term and linking to each other talking about the term. It relates to grind and hustle culture and that sense of doing all the things to put yourself ahead and put yourself first, about taking risks professionally and socially. It also ties into that sense of seeing yourself as the protagonists in this story and not being afraid to take up space and demand attention.

**Aline:** Now, you’re talking about stories or life?

**John:** Both. As I was reading these blog posts, I was seeing people writing about themselves as characters, basically taking a look outside themselves and saying, “What should this person, who is me, do in this situation in order to achieve those goals?” Just like heroes have their “I want” songs. They’re basically giving themselves permission to sing their “I want” songs and actually pursue those things and not stop earlier in the process, not settle for mediocre or okay, but push themselves. I guess mostly, I want to talk for a little bit about real-life people, because I think our listeners are also heroes in their own stories. There’s pros and cons to acting more agentic themselves.

**Aline:** That’s where I think you do get into different sort of people feeling entitled to be more agentic than others. Something I think I’m quite annoying about when I work with women is reminding them that they just asked for permission to do something or they just apologized before they did something or they just apologized before they pitched something.

I’ll often find that men will use humor to cover very aggressive behavior. They’ll say, “I fired that agent.” They did something very aggressive, and they’re proud of it, and they think it’s funny. With women, not always, but it can be a very tortured path just toward saying what you want and going to get it. Obviously, it’s because there are social repercussions to that. It can be not a cute look.

I think you’ll find that women put a lot more exclamation points in their emails. I’m not the first person to say that. We were talking the other day about the devastatingness of when you’re texting someone and then they throw in an “xo.” I don’t know what that means to men, but for women that means I’m done now talking to you. This conversation is done. It’s an “xo.” It’s a firm hug and a kiss of farewell.

**John:** As you’re saying this, I’m thinking back to our text conversations, and how do you and I decide when that thread is done. It can be tough to know asynchronously. I don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what I’m doing, whether we have the moments to really engage in that. Finding a nice way to close a text conversation can be challenging. But I agree with you that it is often, there’s a gender and a power level aspect of that. You just don’t know, not even permission, but you don’t even know how it’s going to be received if you clearly state what it is you would like.

**Aline:** You have to be, I don’t know if aggressive is the right word, but you have to be forthright to get anything. You wouldn’t go up to the counter of In-N-Out and be like, “I was thinking, I don’t have to have it. It would be nice. I don’t totally have to have it. I could have something else. I do have a car, so I could go somewhere else, but it would be nice to have a burger. I would love cheese on that. If you don’t have cheese, we don’t need to do… ” That is something that women are taught, not directly take a class in that, but we’re definitely taught to lubricate our asks.

I do think that I modeled myself in certain respects on my father, my brother, and my mom is French. She does not need to lubricate her asks, for sure. I think I modeled myself on a lot more forthrightness. The combination of French and Israeli is two of the most forthright folks. But I do find that women, I’m often saying to them, you don’t need to ask for permission to specifically take up space.

**John:** A classic tenet of this, being agentic, is asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Basically, assume a yes, and also don’t be afraid of hearing no. If you hear no, welcome the rejections, basically. One of the guys here talks about having a Google Doc basically, like, “Here’s all the people who’ve said no to me,” and here’s the rejections you’ve gotten, and taking those as a mark of like, then you actually asked. You actually did. You went up, put yourself out there to ask those questions.

**Aline:** There’s something I’m fascinated with, which is, I think, a spin on agentic, which is I know several people – and they’re men – who are powerful by virtue of not engaging, so they won’t answer the text or they won’t answer the email or they’ll let it slide. I think one time somebody said to me, “Aline, you don’t have to hit every tennis ball back over the net. You’re making yourself very tired doing that.”

I do think if you’re following up with everything, if you’re answering every email, there is a low status to that in a funny way. If you’re just saying, “No, I don’t want to do that,” or, “I’m not interested in that,” I feel like you can be too forthright and add an extra level of communication. I’ve been working on letting things slide a little bit more and not responding to absolutely everything and being a little less scrupulous about that. I think there’s a funny way where that is agentic in a way.

**John:** It is.

**Aline:** You don’t have to. I shared an office with a male writer who was really helpful with me. One time I called somebody, and I thought maybe I hadn’t said the right thing. Then I was like, “I’m going to call him back and say, ‘I didn’t mean this, but I could mean that. I’m sorry I said this, but really,'” da da da blah and da da da. He was like, “Just stop. There’s a lot of power in just stopping.” It’s interesting. I think it’s more about knowing what your goal is and what the steps are to get it, as opposed to resolving to just talk all the time.

**John:** Let’s talk about strategy here. You and I both have assistants. Part of the reason why we’re not responding to every email is because we have assistants who filter stuff down to us. As something becomes important, Drew will tell me, “Oh, this is a thing we actually need to pay attention to.” But I’m not worried about every bit of schedule and the 19 times to reset a meeting. The time when Drew was off on his honeymoon, and I suddenly had to do a bunch of that stuff, I was like, “Oh, wow, this is actually really annoying.” I’m glad to have Drew there.

What I do see some of these people who are pitching agentic talking about is, really think about how to be a good assistant to yourself. If you had a great assistant, what would that assistant be doing for you? How would they be filtering stuff down? Amy, my daughter, was just home over the Christmas holiday, and she needed to call and cancel this appointment she had, and she’s like, “Daddy, can you just do it?”

**Aline:** Yeah, it stresses her out.

**John:** It stresses her out. She doesn’t want to do that. She’s like, “It’s weird. I could totally do it for a friend, but I can’t do it for myself.” That’s I think the skill you have to learn is just pretend you are your own assistant and just do the thing.

**Aline:** Man, my assistant, the wonderful Kari O’Hara, happens to be here with me, sitting next to Drew. Big plug for Kari. What’s up? High five. One thing I do is, when I tell assistants that I may not be flowery in my responses, because I do think they’re accustomed to women who are like… If she’s saying, “Do you want to do coffee or lunch?” I think they’re accustomed to women saying, “Oh, thank you so much for asking. Coffee would be great,” blah blah blah. Sometimes I’ll just text back, “No lunch?” or, “Lunch?” or, “No coffee?” One time we ordered lunch in the writers’ room and someone’s lunch was missing. I was in the middle of running the room and talking, so the only words I managed to squeak out were, “Phoebe no lunch.” Then we called the group text Phoebe No Lunch.

One of the things is to try not to lard up all your communications with… Again, I’m back to lubricant. I don’t know what’s happening this morning. Just to be able to find people that you can communicate with directly and simply and that they don’t need everything to be sprayed with cologne before they receive it. I think for women, that’s…

As you get older as a woman and you start to drift towards battleax, which is a wonderful place that I hope to be eventually, where you feel like after a certain age… This is where women, I think, beat men. A really old woman. My mom’s 93. She can say and do whatever she wants. She can ask however she wants. We’re all drifting past that, whereas I think men are going to fall into cranky old man waving a cane.

But I think one of the things about growing up as a lady is learning to get what you want and using softer tactics if you need to, but then also finding people to work with who are comfortable with your directness, so that you’re not always apologizing to the furniture.

**John:** Absolutely. I cherry-picked a bunch of little strategies, different blog posts I’ve listed here. Evie Cottrell has a bunch of them. We’ll put a link in the show notes to them. One of them is, put a big premium on doing something now rather than later, so don’t leave enough time for motivation to fade, which seems like smart advice for writers, but also for anybody who just needs to get some stuff done. My One Cool Thing actually has a little bit more about that. That sense of, “Oh, there’s going to be a better place or time. I’m not ready for it yet.” Waiting is generally not helpful for almost anybody.

**Aline:** My husband has a thing, and I’m sure he got it from a business book or something. But there’s a principle called now, soon, later. It’s things you need to do right away, things you can do soon, and things you can do later. It sounds so simple. But sometimes, breaking that into like, “Hey, if I want to make a hair appointment for Thursday, I got to do that now. Then I need to call the upholsterer. I could do that later.” Just really breaking those down in your brain.

I do think there’s a value sometimes in taking a second and making sure. I’m the king of the random text, of the random reach-out. If anything, I’ve tried to take a breath before I do that and make sure it’s an important communication, especially if I’m reaching out to someone really busy. Then my other thing is, I really used to send people a lot of TikToks, and I’ve lately decided that I’m just sending them homework, unless I write below it. Can’t send a naked TikTok anymore. You have to say, “John, I’m sending you this because it’s about the word agentic.” Don’t just send me a cold TikTok.

**John:** Context.

**Aline:** I’m the worst offender with those, but I’ve just realized that you’re going to… If you’re going to send me a reel, which is obviously a TikTok that was from four weeks ago, you got to tell me why you’re sending it to me.

**John:** That’s fair, because you’ve been on the receiving end of those reels/TikToks. You got pulled out of whatever thought train you were in, because Aline’s texting me, there must be something important. And no. It’s a very cute chihuahua, but it’s not relevant.

Reaching out to people is actually part of the set of advice, which is figuring out what you need and figuring out who can help you get it and then asking for it. Those are things that are challenging to do, that you feel like there’s power imbalances. These agentic people will tell you, just get over your fear of doing that, because you can get no answer, you can get a no, but you’re actually not going to be burning things as much as you suspect you will.

**Aline:** I would say, because we’re almost all communicating now electronically – a lot of people are still in letter-writing age – I think it’s okay to send an email that goes, “Hey John, so-and-so is in town and wants to know if you want to have dinner,” bloop. People still send things with lots and lots of words in it. I always think of Craig’s thing of like, the return key is your friend. Also, I think because of texts, when people get to emails, they really roll out the folderol.

**John:** Short emails are fine. Love them.

**Aline:** Delightful.

**John:** Delightful.

**Aline:** Don’t need a greeting.

**John:** “Hey.”

**Aline:** “Yo.”

**John:** Cut the first two paragraphs. Go right into the heart of it. As I said before about thriving on rejection, so writing down those rejections. Apply for jobs you don’t think you’ll get, because at least you’ll actually have experience of what it is like to interview for those places. Rejections are evidence that you’re actually exploring and trying things.

We’ve talked a lot on the show about luck. The way this blog post was phrasing it was to, “increase your surface area for serendipity,” which is putting more places out there where people can find you and recognize, like, “Oh, that’s a good idea. This is a smart writer.” We talk about how you’ve written that script that’s fantastic. No one is going to read that script unless you put that out there in the world for people to read. The same applies for any other profession you’re doing. If you’re a coder, an artist, whatever, you have to put stuff out there so people can see, and see, oh, this is a person who knows what they’re doing.

**Aline:** For certain. You have to eat some embarrassment. My older son is in the workplace. I think sending a cold email or a cold call or reaching out to someone you don’t know that well, that might be a help. I think that’s really hard when you’re young, because it feels like you don’t have the portfolio. You’re not standing in the right shoes. I remember that being the hardest thing. When you get more experienced and people are like, “I know who John August is, so if he’s emailing me about this thing… ” You’re going to be treated with certain respect. It’s eating the embarrassment of someone going, “Who is this?” or, “Don’t send this to me.”

One time early on in my career, really early on, my agent was someone that I had been friends with, and I didn’t really understand the lines between friend and work friend. Those can be hard to figure out. I had found a piece of material that I thought was really interesting, and I called him on the weekend. Again, it was someone that I was friends with, so I thought that was okay. I called him on the weekend, and I said, “Hey, I have this idea. What do you think?” He was really angry. He was really angry. He said, “How dare you call me on the weekend when I’m home with my family and talk to me about work?”

You know when something embarrassing happens, your body floods with adrenaline, your brain starts printing Polaroids? I can remember where I was sitting in my kitchen, at the table that I had bought at the flea market, the Pasadena City College Flea Market, and painted myself. I can remember where I was sitting. I was so deeply humiliated that I had disrupted him and that I didn’t know what rule.

What I did and what I do a lot with uncomfortable work things is I convert it into something funny. I tend to save those things up as little stories to then tell other people. That is the way that I pop the pimple on my embarrassment.

You’re going to do that when you’re young. You’re going to go somewhere. That’s why every time, when you’re a young person, it’s like, “We’re going to be networking,” then you just have a clenching of the sphincter, because it just sounds like it’s going to be awful. You will have awful interactions, but you might meet your best friend after something where you tried to pitch yourself to someone.

I had, when I was young, a couple things where someone thought I was someone else. I just recently told her this story. I once met with a producer. We were walking in, and the executive said, “Are you ready for this meeting?” The gentleman said, “I’m always ready for a meeting with my favorite writer, Jenny Bicks.” Then we all stood there, frozen. Then the poor executive had to say, “This is actually not Jenny Bicks.” I then had to have a meeting with someone who very clearly didn’t really know who I was, probably hadn’t read my stuff. Again, got to eat embarrassment and just go. It’s like, “You know what? This is still an opportunity. This is still a great producer. Maybe something will come from it.” My second meeting with that gentleman, by the way, he was wearing a wet bathing suit. Continue.

**John:** Oh, good lord. Talk about lines being transgressed. He felt no shame.

**Aline:** None.

**John:** You felt shame about your moment there. Going back to your story of you called the executive on the weekend and realized, oh, I crossed a boundary there that I shouldn’t have crossed, yes, you hold onto those moments, not because you want to fixate and ruminate them, because as a writer, you actually can use them. While it did not directly lead to any scene in Devil Wears Prada-

**Aline:** Yeah, of course.

**John:** … that experience is something that carries through to her character.

**Aline:** Prada was so resonant for me, because I had completely failed as a magazine writer. I remember calling New York Woman with my then-partner. I was trying to leave a message, a query message, but it kept beeping and beeping and cutting us off. It was like, “Hi, we’re so-and-so and so-and-so, and we’re really excited to write for New York Woman, because we think,” beep.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Aline:** It’s like, do you call back? Do you call back? And if you call back, are you starting from scratch? What do you do? Are you starting from scratch, or are you saying, “Sorry, I think I got cut off. I’m Aline, and I wanted to,” and then I got cut off again.

**John:** You’re in the swinger state at this point.

**Aline:** I then wanted to abandon ship, but I thought that’s worse.

**John:** She changed her name so they could never track her down again.

**Aline:** This editor from New York Woman, wherever you are, I’m really sorry for the six half-tries that I left on your machine. But again, trying to laugh about the rejections. I think even if you’re taking a more serious tact to it, yeah, it’s at bats, man. The best baseball player… What’s a great baseball average? 380. Oh, wow, John’s even worse than I am. You guys? What’s good? Oh, wow. We’re in a show biz room. There’s not a person in here.

**John:** As established in last episode, baseball is not my thing. I will guess basketball.

**Aline:** I think high 300s is a good baseball, which is you failed over 70% of the time.

**John:** We’ll wrap up this topic with-

**Aline:** 60%. Keep going.

**John:** Wrap up on a… I love a good metaphor. This was called the moat of low status. Cate Hall has a blog post about it. She says when learning a new skillset, it requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time in which you are actually bad at a thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people. It’s a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side, but also because it gives anybody who can cross it a real advantage. Sometimes, these really awkward moments, it’s recognizing, this is the moat, I’m in the moat. It’s going to suck, and you’re going to be floundering and half drowning. When you get to the other side, you’re like, oh, you actually did cross over. In some ways, I feel like we always talk about the wall around Hollywood or breaking in, but really it’s swimming across that moat is really I think a better way of thinking about what it’s like to enter into this industry.

**Aline:** That’s where relationships really are helpful. When you and I met, I think I was pregnant or I just had a baby. It was 20 years ago. You are definitely ahead of me in terms of getting rewrites and talking to people about those things. I can remember conversations. That was not that long before the strike. I can remember I was having conversations where I would say to you, “How do you do this?” or, “How do you initiate that?” I do that for people too. I always encourage them to call me, because sometimes it’s learning how to make that approach or how to dig yourself out of whatever hole. That’s why I think it’s still important to live here, honestly, more than anything else, is just not to meet…

Young people often think they’re here to meet the important folks. You’re not. You’re there to meet your peers, Drew and Kari sitting on a couch later when we ask them for jobs. It’s important to create those things, so that you can call people who are on and about your level. A step below, a step above are the most helpful people, because they’ll also remember what that was like, getting an agent, taking meetings with agents, what was a good meeting, what wasn’t, is this person good or not. To me, the little floats across the moat are these relationships. I treasure those peer relationships that I had when I was a young person so much.

**John:** It’s also important to remember that we swam across the moat in a different era, and the moat has changed. That’s why it’s important to have people who are in the same struggle that you’re in.

**Aline:** That’s right. What I do now when young people come to town, they want to talk to me, is I get the assistants together in my office and their friends to talk to them, because if you want to know how to break in in 1991, I can really help you if you got a time travel machine, but it’s so, so different now. It’s much more useful for young people to find other young people than to talk to me, because I just have different moats. The moats never end. I think it’s also important to say that the moats never end.

I was talking to someone who has a movie in contention in the awards season. What always happens is it coalesces around a couple things. It’s like the Oppenheimer bulldozer is coming, and so for other movies, even though they’re in this amazing conversation and they’re doing panels and events, walking through those things knowing you’re not going to win anything is dispiriting. I was trying to say to this person, “You’re doing great,” but they were feeling bad. They were feeling like they were in a moat, because they were now going to go to 20 events where they were going to watch the same people win over and over. Not all moats are the same, but we all have them.

**John:** Let’s go on to our other marquee topic, How Would This Be a Movie, one of our favorite things we’ve added over the years. This first article comes from Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris writing for Slate. It’s called Never Use Alone. It’s about Jessie Blanchard. She’s an operator and education director for Never Use Alone. It’s this hotline designed to reduce the risk of overdose for drug users who are alone. Basically, you call this hotline when you’re about to use drugs, heroin or whatever. She stays on the line with you. Before you actually use, she’s like, “Unlock the door. Tell me where your address is.” Then if she hears you overdosing, she will call for emergency services.

The story follows one specific call with Kimber King, who’s recently out of rehab, and highlighting post-rehab life there, and also gets in a bit of Blanchard’s personal journey there into harm reduction. Aline, what did you make of this article? Is there a movie there? Is there a character there? What do you think is the story here?

**Aline:** I don’t know if that’s a whole thing, but it’s a really good kick-off, I thought, for a thriller or a murder mystery or something. Again, I don’t want to minimize the important life-or-death work that these folks are doing. It’s a great idea. I’m really always in favor of things that treat people as they are and not as we hope they should be. But I do think it’s because it’s over the phone, because there’s someone silently listening, it almost made me think of Blow Out, the De Palma movie with Travolta on the bridge. It seems like you could stumble into some sort of mystery, criminal conspiracy by listening through on the phone. I don’t know if it’s about drugs and people who traffic drugs.

PJ Vogt has a new podcast. Have you listened to Search Engine? He has an episode about why fentanyl is in everything. It seems like it could be a good jumping-off point for a story about that world of drugs and availability, but also could kick you into maybe a genre piece that had a mystery or a thriller.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s always that issue of, if it’s a two-hour movie, it’s a one-time story, there has to be something remarkable about this out of all the things. This is the happenstance that kicks into this specific story, that’s not a thing that happens all the time. I think she’s potentially a really interesting character, because her background is a nurse, her own family lost to addiction, and trying to walk this line of wanting to help people, but realizing that in helping people, she may be prolonging their addiction. That is really interesting. But I agree that there has to be some inciting incidence beyond just what’s usual.

**Aline:** For sure. The other thing is it could be someone’s job inside of a thing, where let’s say you have an emergency response team and they do suicide intervention, if you wanted to do something with several people. It could be a job that someone has, because there’s this aspect of silent witness and overhearing. Those are good Hitchcocky-feeling things.

**John:** Another possibility would be to actually just do the origin story of how she came to do this, so it’s the first time she’s doing this thing. Basically, after a loss in the family, she’s doing this for the first time, because she doesn’t want this thing to happen.

**Aline:** It’s going to have to go somewhere.

**John:** It has to go someplace.

**Aline:** It would have to go somewhere.

**John:** It has to be. Who are the obstacles? Who are the people who are telling her no? What is she overcoming? What is the journey that she’s going through?

**Aline:** She somehow gets connected to her cheating ex-husband and doesn’t call 911 when she should.

**John:** Maybe.

**Aline:** That’s not this exact woman, but that could be a different character.

**John:** Second up, we have an article by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo for the LA Times. This one is looking at cases of silicosis, which is an incurable lung disease that’s happening among California workers, particularly those who are cutting and polishing engineered stone, silicon kitchen countertops. It’s affecting workers at much younger ages. People in their 20s and 30s are getting a fatal, incurable lung condition. The story follows particularly Leobardo Segura Meza, a 27-year-old father diagnosed with silicosis. This is a California story for this one, mostly Los Angeles County, and the questions of what controls or safeties things we’re going to put here.

**Aline:** Man, that was distressing.

**John:** Yeah, it was distressing. My first thought is it’s an Erin Brockovichy thing. Whenever bad things are happening to people and no one’s paying attention, that it’s an Erin Brockovichy kind of story, where you have somebody coming in to recognize the situation and fight for them and to help them. That’s one option. But I’m also wondering if there’s a way to have the people that are being affected be more the drivers of the story.

**Aline:** It’s so funny, I had the exact same thought, which is those “someone from the outside is the savior” stories apart from occasionally feeling inauthentic, I think have been done so much. Could it be a story about people who have to organize, who have never organized before? I was really distressed to hear that there are interventions with water and other equipment that they could use to make it better, but they won’t.

I don’t know that this one jumped out at me as anything other than a background piece. It feels like there’s a lot of businesses which can be shady, based on how they’re implemented, not inherently shady, but how they’re implemented. To me, this just made me think of how really venally consumerist and bottom-line-based our economy has become, that the idea that you would protect workers and that you would have those things in place to protect them is just not a first thought. I just think we’ve gotten increasingly like, if you make a buck, then that’s all that matters. Getting the water probably costs money, and getting the right equipment probably costs money.

I would see it more as like, if you were doing a movie like The Big Short or something, and one of the businesses that you stumble across is someone who’s just rampantly killing people when he could be doing something else. But it didn’t jump out at me as its own piece.

**John:** I didn’t get the sense that the countertop manufacturers were… They could be negligent, but they weren’t evil. Sometimes it was just the ignorance, that they didn’t know what was happening there, and sometimes it was people who were just not trained to do this thing or that weren’t aware of what the actual problems and dangers are, because apparently, it’s different than cutting other stone. If you’re cutting granite, you’re not going to have the same issues as you are these special things.

**Aline:** Yeah, it’s those composites. A friend of mine’s mother called her and said, “I’m thinking of having my counters replaced, because we have this stuff that’s harmful.” We were saying, “It’s already in there.”

**John:** It’s the cut.

**Aline:** When you cut it up to get it out, you might be creating the very thing that you’re protesting.

**John:** It’s not a problem existing there in a space. Like you, I’m not sure there’s a full movie here. It felt like this is the context background for a Law and Order episode. It’s a thing that’s happening, and we’re meeting a bunch of people because of that situation, but it doesn’t feel like it’s necessarily driving the whole thing.

The other way you could get into this is that it’s a story about this family, and the patriarch of the family, the young father of the family is going to be dying at a young age because of this thing. That’s an interesting story that I haven’t seen before.

**Aline:** He learns how to represent himself as a lawyer, and he takes the case.

**John:** Even if the court case is in foreground or the sense of what is it like to be a young father who knows he’s going to die of an incurable thing, like an old man’s disease, that could be an interesting story, whether he’s the central character or he’s the father of the protagonist.

**Aline:** One of the things that’s happened – this happens also when people send me books – is that Hollywood swings back and forth between doing things that require special handling in the sausage factory. It has swung back and forth many times since you and I have been doing this. TV and movies like to take turns doing this. In the word of Super Mario Bros being the most successful movie, I don’t know that this is commercial. Again, that’s why I tend towards genrefying these, because if there’s a murder or an extortion or a way to make it Night Agent, because otherwise, we’re not really engaging with how commercial things are. But right now, there’s such an emphasis on things that are super commercial. I look back on things like Erin Brockovich, just wondering who would make that.

**John:** I still think you can make Erin Brockovich, but it has to be a more seasoned movie.

**Aline:** With a big star.

**John:** With a big star. You wouldn’t put it out in the summer. You’d put it out in December, to get a bunch of awards. That would be driving it.

This might be more commercial. This is called Loyalty Testers. It is Gina Cherelus writing for the New York Times. It looks at this service called Loyalty Test, where they hire these, quote unquote, “Testers” to flirt with people’s partners online and assess their loyalty. It tracks Caden Redmond, who’s a college student who charges $100 per test, which involves starting a conversation on TikTok or Instagram and gauging their response to those romantic advances and then reporting back to the person who hired them whether they got something out of it. There’s people who do it freelance, but this service has recruited a bunch of Testers and about 1,000 customers, and they’re going on through it. Aline, this feels like it’s in a relationship space. I can see a rom-com version of this. What are your instincts with Loyalty Testers?

**Aline:** There’s always some rom-com version of this floating around, whether you go on dates and you try and do this. Now, it’s sort of catfishingy online things. This is a TikTok genre. There’s a couple people who do this on TikTok, and they’ll show you the texts. It has an unpleasantness to it that I think as a romantic comedy, I think if it was sharper, more edgy, more like Bottoms or something, where it was a little bit more irreverent and anarchic, because you’re dealing with shitty behavior from both the person who’s fishing and the person who’s been fished, although I don’t know that this always means that people want to cheat or if people are excited to have been flirted with. It is kind of shocking in those TikToks how fast particularly men go to, “Yeah, I’m going to be in Phoenix next week, so what are you doing? I’d love to get a drink.” I don’t know. It depressed me.

**John:** I wonder if it’s the jumping-off place. You have a person who is a Tester, who has become so jaded and cynical about love, and they’re the person who has to be finally won over that there are actually goodhearted people that cannot be tempted or pulled away. That’s probably the best way in there. There’s a non-rom-com version of this as well, of course, which is that you think you’re doing one thing, but it actually spirals way out of control, and someone’s life is put in danger because of this flirting.

**Aline:** Or it’s Bill Clinton, or somebody says, “I want you to test this person,” but what you don’t realize is it’s Putin. I guess you could play with that a little bit. No Hard Feelings, which I really enjoy, had an aspect of somebody’s hired to do… Somebody’s hired to do a something is a genre on its own. I wrote one of those. That’s Three to Tango. Someone hires someone to do a something, and it leads to unintended consequences is a genre of which I thought Bottoms did a fun job of. It turned into about four different movies along the way. I thought that that contributed to the fun, anarchic spirit of it, that they have a very tiny germ of an idea, and then it leads them hither and thither. If you’re going to do something with a satirical edge in the way that this has a satirical edge… Pain Hustlers is the movie I think of recently. It’s scammy people. Then it feels like it’s got a satiric aspect to it.

**John:** Don’t sleep on No Hard Feelings. If you’ve missed it in theaters, it’s worth a watch. It’s really well done.

**Aline:** The funniest scene of the year.

**John:** The fight on the beach?

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. I love it. It’s so good. Next up, we have Zachary Crockett writing for The Hustle. This is about a man who won the lottery 14 times. Stefan Mandel, who is a Romanian mathematician, exploited loopholes in various lotto systems to buy every possible combination. If you have to guess six numbers, there’s only a certain number of variations, and you can actually just buy them all up. The formula basically works out. If it’s worth it, if it’s three times the amount of money you’re going to spend, you should absolutely do it, because it can pay off. The challenge, of course, is that logistically, it’s absolutely a nightmare to buy all those tickets. But you can do it. He won the Virginia Lottery and some other ones, got quite rich off the Virginia Lottery. Ultimately, the story continues, went through bankruptcy. There were lawsuits and other things. He’s now living a quiet life in Vanuatu. A lottery movie, is there a thing to do here?

**Aline:** The one thing that jumped out at me was, you know when you’re watching a heist and they’re putting together a group of guys? It felt like one of the group of guys has retired to Vanuatu, and this is his claim to fame, and so they’re putting together… They need someone who crunches the numbers, and it’s this guy. I would pitch the guy from this season of Fargo who plays the hitman. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.

**John:** I haven’t seen it.

**Aline:** I will find out what the name of that actor is. But someone really enigmatic and interesting, with a foreign accent, who made a killing doing something abstrusely mathy like this, and then retired to an island, but they have to bring him back for this heist on a casino. That’s what I pictured. That’s not a whole movie, but it’s a really fun backstory for somebody.

**John:** It’s good you bring up heists, because this thing has a heist feeling, because they’re not breaking the law, but logistically, it’s just so challenging to do what they’re doing. They have to convince so many people. The social engineering of it all was a huge factor as well. There’s just mechanics of doing this thing, but there needs to be a larger purpose. That’s why I think you going to they’re pulling somebody in to do this one extra job makes more sense, because if it’s just like, “We want to make a bunch of money,” nobody cares. That’s not actual real stakes. You have to do it for… There’s something that he’s actually really going for here. Originally, he’s doing it so he can escape from Romania. That feels a very great purpose.

**Aline:** Did you see BlackBerry?

**John:** I loved BlackBerry, yeah.

**Aline:** It kills. What I loved about it is everyone is there for a different reason. Glenn’s character really does not care about what they’re doing or why.

**John:** He just wants a hockey team.

**Aline:** He just wants a hockey team. What I loved about that character piece was that he was such a jerk, but then he was so good at being the exact guy they needed in that exact moment, and then somehow it’s a version of the Peter principle. It itched some part of his brain which caused him to completely take his eye off the ball and just grind on the hockey thing, which was so funny. That single-mindedness, the character who’s single-minded to the point of being socially inept, it feels like one of these. I bet Noah Hawley could do something with… I could see a season of Fargo where they do something like this.

**John:** Glenn’s character in BlackBerry is agentic.

**Aline:** He’s the most agentic.

**John:** Yes, absolutely.

**Aline:** He and Emma Stone in Poor Things, quite agentic. I would say that Barbie’s pretty agentic.

**John:** Barbie’s agentic too, yeah. None of them are afraid to make fools of themselves. They’re happy to pick up the phone to get an answer. They know what they don’t know, and they’re not letting that get in their way. Let’s look back through these things and see which of these might actually be movies. Also, we should talk about which of these things do we need to get those specific rights, or is it just the general story space. Never Use Alone, is there anything here?

**Aline:** I don’t know how widespread that is. If it’s just this one lady, then it’s different from if that’s been adopted as a widespread practice. There are many movies about suicide hotlines, and this is a zhuzh on this. It’s very topical, and it’s a thing people are interested in. What do you think?

**John:** I think it’s an interesting space. I could see the indie film version. I could see the Sundance movie that’s in this space.

**Aline:** You would then get her life rights?

**John:** Maybe, because then it’s nice to be able to have her as a person, as not just a resource, but also as part of the, you want to say market of the movie.

**Aline:** The narrative around a movie. That’s a really good point, John, in that for the smaller movies, the narrative around the movies is sometimes just as important.

**John:** I think that could be helpful. Her goals, in terms of keeping people from dying alone of overdoses, would be served by this movie existing.

**Aline:** That too.

**John:** Countertop cancer? We don’t think there’s a movie here.

**Aline:** No, not really. It seems like it’s an element of something.

**John:** Absolutely. The article’s interesting. You don’t need to buy that article. I think it’s a backdrop for something, but there’s nothing here specifically you want to hold on to. The Loyalty Testers?

**Aline:** It’s been around for a long time. Those ideas of “I test your spouse’s fidelity” twas ever thus. Just finding a new spin on it, I-

**John:** I feel like there’s probably a Cary Grant movie.

**Aline:** Here’s the issue though. Some of the funniest things that happen in your life now happen with your hand out, and you looking like you’re telling people a hilarious story. The visual is you lying in bed just looking at your phone. We have so many virtual interactions now, and this type of thing is quite a virtual experience.

Romantic comedies are one of the genres where using electronics… I’m not sure, but I feel like one of the reasons Holdovers was set in 1971 was so that… It’s an awfully short movie if someone can just call an Uber. I think sometimes technology can make these things a little dry. There’s literally not much to look at.

I would rather do a movie about somebody who hires themselves out to go to Rome and find out if the King of Denmark will cheat on the Queen before they get… The Queen of Denmark hires you to go and flirt with him and see if he will… That idea of testing fidelity is a better, almost Shakespearean idea than the specifics of how you’re doing it now.

**John:** I think if you are going to try to do something like this, you have to look at Zola or other movies that are-

**Aline:** Oh, god, I love Zola. Yes, you’re right.

**John:** Really good at-

**Aline:** Great.

**John:** … finding ways to manifest what that online conversation looks like.

**Aline:** Great call. Great call. They did that really well there. But the other thing is people get in trouble a lot with Instagram messages. People are messaging people they’re not supposed to on Instagram after a stranger reaches out to them. It just goes to show that human desire for connection or lust or whatever it is really overrides the logic button.

**John:** I have friends who are absolute strangers who met on Instagram and are dating for years.

**Aline:** Through the DMs.

**John:** Through the DMs.

**Aline:** Slid into the-

**John:** Slid in the DMs.

**Aline:** I don’t like the expression “slid into the DMs.”

**John:** It does feel filthy.

**Aline:** Back to our lubricant conversation.

**John:** Finally, the lottery winner. Is there a lottery winner movie?

**Aline:** Not per se, I don’t think.

**John:** Yeah. I like your notion of taking a piece of that, an idea of that character and bringing it into something else. I think if you’re going to do the story, I think you’re going to probably want something to back this up on. If there’s really good original reporting on this stuff and somebody who has the real scoop on all this stuff, great, but I’m not sure that you necessarily need it. Obviously, if Craig were here, he would say, if it’s all true facts, nobody owns history.

**Aline:** If it’s reported, for sure, if that’s been reported. That’s different from whether you’re going to do a first-person story about what it feels like to live in Romania and how you find these things, as opposed to using that and that math and those statistical things for a different character.

**John:** Do any of these movies get made?

**Aline:** I don’t see you following up on this batch, but really interesting to think about. One of the reasons I really like that you do this is because people struggle to find ideas. I remember one of my early writing teachers was like, “Take the New York Times and put it in front of you, and there’s 100 movies in there.” That really is true. I think what’s harder to do, and which you do your whole career, is figure out why does this speak to me, and what do I really want to talk about here.

It’s interesting how much an idea or a book or something will resonate with you, and you don’t really know why. An example is my most memed of movies, We Bought A Zoo. I really wanted to write that. I really resonated to it. I really had to have it. I really had a clear vision of it. It wasn’t until well into writing it that I realized my dad, who’s an Israeli guy, an engineer, we moved to a house in New Jersey that had nine horses and a bunch of ducks and chickens, and so here’s this guy who’s an engineer and really just works with his brain all of a sudden having to muck out stalls. But I didn’t even think of that when I grabbed that story.

Similarly, sometimes people submit me things, and they’re perfectly great, but they don’t light up the little light board in the brain that you need to follow your interest through the project.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Aline, what do you have for us this week?

**Aline:** Sometimes I just do really not useful ditties, but this time… I have a thing that many, many women have, called melasma, which is when… Look at John’s [crosstalk 00:56:54]. You get discolorations on your face. They’re hormonal. I used to have it really bad after I had babies. It’s just subject to hormones. Your face will have these brown patches. They’re usually on your cheeks or over your lip. They’re also enhanced by sun.

I’ve tried to treat it for a really long time. I’ve done lasers and various creams. Then I was influenced by Instagram. Was it Instagram or TikTok? One of those. But there’s a company called Musely, M-U-S-E-L-Y. You get on the website, and you describe what your skin looks like, and then you send them a picture, and you show them where it is on your face. They concoct a thing for you that has bleaching agents and tretinoins and different things. I’m sure that none of what I said was right, but something like that. They put a cocktail of skin stuff. First, they send you a peel, depending on what you need. They sent me this thing called the Spot Peel. You walk around for 12 hours with what looks like toothpaste on your face. Then you wash that off, and then you follow it up with a cream. I was highly skeptical, but it really worked.

**John:** That’s good.

**Aline:** My right side of my face is really almost totally cleared up. My left side, which is the driving side, which is where the sun damage always is, still has a patch here. You know what? They have really good customer service. It comes right away. They tell you when it’s coming. They make the refill process really good. Sometimes people have a good idea for a business, but the interface is not… I’m not breaking any news here, but the interface is not good. The interface of Musely is really good. You get communications from them, and they explain to you why they’re sending you this thing. The instructions are good. Is it a scam? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it except that it worked for me.

**John:** Good. You had a good customer experience there.

**Aline:** I had a good customer experience and good results.

**John:** Love it. My One Cool Thing is a blog post by Adam Mastroianni called “So you wanna de-bog yourself.” It kind of ties into some of the things we talked about in terms of being agentic. He’s talking about those situations where you just feel like you’re stuck in a bog, and you just never can get out. You’re just trapped in the mud. I always love a good metaphor for things. He has a lot of really good metaphors for the stories you tell yourself about why you can’t get out or the frustrations you feel. Gutterballing, which is basically you’re moving the right direction, but you’re already in the gutter.

**Aline:** I thought that was really funny.

**John:** No matter what you do, you’re still not going to strike. Waiting for the jackpot, when someone says, “Here’s a solution.” It’s like, yes, but that doesn’t solve all of my problems. It’s not magical. The mediocrity trap, stroking the problem. Some really good-

**Aline:** Stroking the problem felt NSFW [unintelligible 00:59:37].

**John:** It does. It does. That’s basically where you’re acknowledging the problem and you’re talking about the problem and you’re poring into the problem without actually trying to solve the problem.

**Aline:** John, I’m going to pitch an alt to agentic.

**John:** Please.

**Aline:** Pageantic. I’m just going to act like I’m in a beauty pageant all the time.

**John:** You’re going to do that elbow, elbow, wave, wave?

**Aline:** The elbow, elbow, wave, wave. I’m going to divide every meeting into a swimsuit, interview, talent. Pageantic.

**John:** Pageantic.

**Aline:** What do you guys think of pageantic? They love it. No, I’m just telling you.

**John:** Applause all around.

**Aline:** It’s just a different way of doing-

**John:** Pageantic.

**Aline:** Big hair and a sash.

**John:** 2024, my word is pageantic. 100%.

**Aline:** I would love John coming in with a sash, just a sash that says Mr. Hancock Park.

**John:** One of your One Cool Things originally was a sling for your iPhone. If that was a sash rather than a sling, two things killed at once.

**Aline:** Can you still believe they didn’t send me one free bandolier?

**John:** Come on.

**Aline:** Come on, guys.

**John:** You started that whole trend. We all know it started here.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**John:** I love it all. The last bit of this blog post I thought was really smart was the difference between diploma problems and toothbrushing problems.

**Aline:** Oh god, yes.

**John:** A diploma is something you get once, and then you’re done. A toothbrushing is basically, you got to do it every day. Some people confuse the two things.

**Aline:** I hate that. I hate the eating and the sleeping and the thing that you have to do all… Especially, you know what’s the worst is working out. Let me just work out for an entire day once a month, instead of the… It’s the constant drumbeat. Anything that’s a constant drumbeat. I’m not a routinized person. My husband really is, and I’m really not. The constant drumbeat of the feeding the dog, the brushing the teeth, things that have to be done every day, don’t like it.

**John:** You have three dogs now. Are you brushing your dogs’ teeth?

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** Yes, of course. That was a 100% honest yes. Everyone will know that she of course-

**Aline:** Everyone who knows me knows that Jimmy the dog, you can’t even put a leash on him, so the idea that you’re brushing his teeth… I’ve got one of those little adorable snarl balls, a little chihuahua. There’s many popular ones on TikTok. He’s just basically a little dust of snarl most of the time, interrupted with some kisses and cuddles.

We put some stuff in their water, and then we have a treat that we give them, but I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a good… Then every once in a while, we have a lady come over and wrestle them to the ground. Swear to god, because I don’t want to anesthetize them, because I know someone whose dog died being anesthetized for dental. I would really feel bad. We found somebody who will just wrestle your dog to the ground with a bunch of towels and non-consensually brush their teeth.

**John:** Lambert luckily is a very happy tooth-brusher. You just open up his mouth and just go to it.

**Aline:** That’s a really August thing to be, like a very, “Yeah, I got to do this. It needs to get done.” I’m still laughing about the day that Mike broke all his habits, because he had like 60 things, where he was on Duolingo and his running app. He had like 50 things where he was competing for these fake electronic rings of success. I feel like having a dog that… Your dog probably has an app where after you brush its teeth, it logs it.

**John:** It doesn’t yet. I’ve definitely wanted to get those little buttons that dogs can push.

**Aline:** “Toothbrush.”

**John:** “Toothbrush.” But then I feel like-

**Aline:** “Toothbrush.”

**John:** … they’re just training me to do stuff, so no. “Treat. Treat. Play.”

**Aline:** “Get another dog.”

**John:** No. No more dogs. That’s our show for this week.

**Aline:** Woohoo!

**John:** Very exciting. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Aline:** Yay!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Larry Douziech.

**Aline:** Woohoo.

**John:** If you have an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Inneresting exists because of Aline Brosh McKenna making fun of how I don’t put the T in “interesting.”

**Aline:** Me, make fun of someone? I would never.

**John:** Never, ever. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. Aline keeps pitching-

**Aline:** Guys, I want to make a workout set. If we make a Scriptnotes workout set, it doesn’t even need to be a Lycra one. It can be a T-shirt and leggings. Something for the ladies. Something specifically for the ladies.

**John:** The legs is basically an overlooked thing. The challenge is Cotton Bureau doesn’t make sweatpants or leggings. We’re looking for a vendor. We have pretty high standards.

**Aline:** I know. Your stuff is good. I know. I looked into it, and I couldn’t find anything, but I feel like a viewer will have-

**John:** Maybe our incredible listeners-

**Aline:** Also, I’d wear a Scriptnotes onesie.

**John:** Sure, 100%. Love it. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like me and Aline talking about being empty nesters. Aline, it’s never an empty nest when you’re here with me.

**Aline:** Aw.

**John:** Aw. It’s just so nice chatting with you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** This is our bonus segment for our premium members. We love our premium members. Aline, you’re a premium member.

**Aline:** I am. Of course I’m a premium member. I love having all the episodes at my fingertips. I recommend them to people frequently.

**John:** Thank you very much. I just put my daughter on a plane back to school. She was here on Christmas break. I’m once again an empty nester. You’ve had this experience for a little bit longer. How are you feeling about your life without children in your house?

**Aline:** It’s been a really interesting transition. My first guy left, and then I had another kid at home. They’re three years apart. When Charlie went to college, Leo was 15, 16, so we still had a lot to do with college and a ton of friends. Then during the pandemic, I was incarcerated with them, which was wonderful and every parent’s dream, despite the horribleness of it. But you’re raising them to send them into the world, to be independent, happy people. That’s what you’re doing. I comfort myself with that. But man, I really miss them. We really miss them. This weekend, Will wanted to go see Beekeeper, which I’m obviously not the biggest audience for.

**John:** You’re not a Jason Statham completist?

**Aline:** He’s a Statham completist, as are my kids. He really turned to me and said, “Man, I wish Charlie could go see Beekeeper with me this weekend.” Then Leo, my younger son, is a Scrabble player. When he’s home, we play Scrabble every day. Do I want them to be at home with their mother playing Scrabble and going to Beekeeper? No. They need to be out in the world.

When Leo left, he went to college in September, and two months later I was shooting a movie. I was so busy during that time that I actually felt relief, because I would’ve been letting him down. I wouldn’t have been very available, so I’m glad it didn’t happen in his senior year.

Then when that wore off, we’ve had to become more entertaining to each other. When you notice that’s happening, you start to look at your partner and say, “We should make a list of shows and things.” Will’s gotten really into cooking, and so that’s been really nice. There’s a freedom there to be able to go and pop off and do whatever you want and go take a trip. I try and value that.

There’s this oft cited statistic that you see your kids for 18 years, and then the rest of your life you’ll see them for a year cumulatively. That’s a scary thing. But we talk to them all the time. The really lucky thing for our generation is texting, because nobody really wants to call their parents. I remember really avoiding that myself, just because it’s a big energy shift to be on the phone with your parents. But texting, the ability to send the TikTok or send the funny article or fam chat. Our text thread was ablaze with what happened with Sweet Lady Jane. It’s fun to have those conversations keep going as a whole family or individually. You learn to have the relationship evolve in the next phase.

That said, I have many sad moments. I remember once, one of our mutual friends said that somebody was complaining about taking their kid to a birthday party in kindergarten, and she said, “I would run someone over with my car to be at a kindergarten birthday party with my son just one more time.”

There’s definitely a lot of things that I miss, but I try and think like, they’re where they should be. You don’t want them to be dependent on you. You want them to be independent in the world. But John, they’ll never really appreciate how much you love them until they have their own kids. I didn’t appreciate how much my parents loved me until I had my own kids. It’s their job to live in a blissful feeling that you’re there for them but you don’t have excessive needs.

**John:** I’m going to stop you there, because there are so many things stacked up for me to respond to. For listeners outside of Los Angeles, or listeners in Los Angeles who aren’t aware of it, Sweet Lady Jane is a fantastic bakery you always got your fancy cakes from. It was default, like, “Oh, we need a fancy cake. We’ll get one from Sweet Lady Jane.” They spontaneously closed. It looked like they were going to expand, and they suddenly closed. I don’t think we know why they closed.

**Aline:** It turns out they were being sued for wage exploitation.

**John:** That’s not good. That’s a How Would This Be a Movie, Sweet Lady Jane, the secret story of Sweet Lady Jane. Your earlier point about you’re trying to raise them to be successful adults, Mike will often say, “You’re not trying to raise a child. You’re trying to raise an adult.” The fact that they’re off in college now, doing their own thing, it’s like you successfully raised an adult. Congratulations. They’re out there.

But it also just means that all the time that you spent hands-on parenting them is now free, and you have to figure out other ways to do that. A productive way to do that is to really think about, what is it that you used to do as a couple or you’d want to do as a couple that you couldn’t before. I mentioned on the podcast last time, Mike and I have our 24 for ’24, 24 things we want to get done in 2024, which means seeing the shows and committing to game nights and bar trivia and just making sure we’re getting out there doing the stuff that we’re supposed to be doing. You’re heading to New York to see four shows.

**Aline:** Yes, I’m seeing a bunch of plays.

**John:** That’s a thing you do.

**Aline:** It was a spur of the moment thing. Charlie’s actually going to come down from Boston and meet me for a couple of those. Also, I think they don’t owe you. They didn’t ask to be born. They don’t owe you. I think people get into a thing of… It’s so funny, because moms will say to me, “How often does your son call you?” I call them. They’re incoming. They’re in the incoming. When I’m elderly, I’ll be in the incoming. But right now, they’re building their lives, so I don’t wait for them to reach out to me. I reach out to them. I try not to guilt them.

Also, I’m always marketing Will and I. “We got sushi. We can pay for sushi. We might be able to take you skiing.” We try and make it appealing and attractive and interesting to spend time with your parents, as opposed to it feeling like homework and obligation. I always said when they were little, you’re not there to be their friend, but when they’re out of the house, you are.

There’s this study that shows the only thing you can really control about kids is how much they like you. If Amy’s coming home to fun game nights and dinners and, in my case, a dog and a half – as soon as anyone leaves, I get another dog and a half – it sounds fun, as opposed to coming home to people who are staring at you and trying to suck your blood, trying to vampire your life.

**John:** What was interesting over this Christmas break was recognizing and figuring out the boundaries between, okay, you’re a college student doing college student things, but you’re also under our roof now, and what that balance is and what is a fair expectation of you being home.

**Aline:** That means we have dinner with the dads, and then we take the car, and we’re out until 1:00 seeing our other friends. That’s what that means.

**John:** That is what it means. Are we going to bed not knowing where they are, which in college-

**Aline:** You don’t know where she is.

**John:** In college, you don’t know.

**Aline:** I know. I know. Isn’t that a funny thing?

**John:** It’s a strange thing. I definitely appreciated that growing up with my mom. I was like, “It’s so frustrating that you have these concerns when I’m thousands of miles away.”

**Aline:** My god, in college, your poor mother had to call you on a phone that was like beep, boop, beep, boop, ring, ring, ring. When would she get you? She was not sending you a little text that said, “Hey, our neighbors got divorced.” We’re lucky because we can communicate with them.

**John:** We are both very lucky. Aline, I’m always lucky to have you come back on the podcast.

**Aline:** Yay!

**John:** Thank you.

**Aline:** Woohoo!

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [How to be More Agentic](https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/how-to-be-more-agentic) by Cate Hall
* [What’s Stopping You?](https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/44-agency) by Neel Nanda
* [Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Tnpp3cyEHMGthjGAf/seven-ways-to-become-unstoppably-agentic) by Evie Cottrell
* [“Agency” needs nuance](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/acyfmFTN3cNgwnYw6/agency-needs-nuance) by Evie Cottrell
* [The Woman on the Line](https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/09/overdose-drugs-fentanyl-opioid-never-use-alone.html) by Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris for Slate
* [California workers who cut countertops are dying of an incurable disease](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-24/silicosis-countertop-workers-engineered-stone) by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo for the LA Times
* [Would Your Partner Cheat? These ‘Testers’ Will Give You an Answer](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/style/loyalty-test-infidelity-cheating.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) by Gina Cherelus for the New York Times
* [The man who won the lottery 14 times](https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times/) by Zachary Crockett for The Hustle
* [Musely](https://www.musely.com/)
* [So you wanna de-bog yourself](https://www.experimental-history.com/p/so-you-wanna-de-bog-yourself?publication_id=656797&post_id=140270094&isFreemail=true&r=3dw6x) by Adam Mastroianni
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aline_Brosh_McKenna)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Larry Douziech ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/627standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 598 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now Craig, off and on this program, we make fun of screenwriting competitions, but I’m wondering if maybe we’re wrong, because today on the show, we welcome the winner of the 1989 Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Award.

This is a writer who’s gone on to a prolific career in film and in television, including his work on The X-Files and creating the legendary series Breaking Bad and co-creating its sister series, Better Call Saul. I think we were wrong about screenwriting competitions, because welcome Vince Gilligan.

Vince Gilligan: I love that. Thank you, John. Thank you, Craig. Yes, you were completely wrong about that.

Craig: I don’t know, I guess we have to look back at the Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Award and really run through the other winners. Something’s telling me that maybe they just got lucky, blind squirrel and all that.

John: Correlation but not causation.

Craig: I will say that in 1989 they nailed it, because as I have often said on this podcast and in other places, Vince Gilligan is pretty much the best that’s ever been, the best that’s ever done this job of writing television. It’s great to know you, but it’s also great to have you on our show to talk, because people need to know what’s going on inside your noggin. It’s a pretty special place.

Vince: Oh, man. Jesus, I’m glad this is not on video, because I’m just glowing bright red now. That was very, very kind. I will say, I’m sure you guys have said you shouldn’t pay to enter screenwriting contests, and I agree with that wholeheartedly.

Craig: Excellent.

Vince: The Virginia screenwriting competition was free to enter.

John: That’s what we like.

Craig: Music to my ears.

John: Vince, I think I’ve shaken your hand once at the Austin Film Festival. I don’t know if you remember the only time I think we’ve ever had a long conversation was back in spring of 2007, because I was coming on to work on a project, a feature that you were leaving. You very graciously talked me through what you’d done on the script and where the bodies were buried. It was incredibly helpful for me as I was coming onto that project.

You said you couldn’t do any more work on the project, because you were going to go off and direct this pilot you’d written about this chemistry teacher who starts making drugs. I just wanted to know, whatever happened to that?

Vince: I’m so glad you brought that up, John, because I have to tell you, you were such a stand-up guy. I’m embarrassed to tell this story, but I’m going to tell it anyway, even though it does not make me look great.

You came in after me. I had just taken that script as far as I knew how to do, so many, many drafts. What was so wonderful about the way you handled that is that you called me out of the blue. This was probably before we shook hands in Austin.

John: Definitely.

Vince: You called me up, and you introduced yourself. You were very kind and very professional and just wanted to say, “I’m coming in behind you here on this thing.” This is the part I’m embarrassed about. I didn’t do that for the originating writer of that project.

When you called me, I thought, “This is such a cool thing this guy’s doing, this guy I don’t know.” Then I thought, “I never did that for the last guy.” It’s not like I thought about it and said no. It’s just I never even thought about it. It was very thoughtless of me. Then you came in behind me, and you were a real class act the way you handled that.

John: Thank you. We were moving into an Airbnb in Hawaii. I was there for a wedding. It was great to actually hear all the work that you had done. There were so many incredibly talented, powerful people on the project. It was so helpful for you to be there talking me through where the landmines were. Thank you again for that.

Vince: You’re very welcome. The pleasure is mine.

John: Craig, you are making TV shows, and so I thought maybe you could lead our discussion into the television of this all. I’m really curious to know from Vince about working your way up in TV staff and writing a TV show. What are you going to ask him about?

Craig: Everything, but I think mostly I really want to dig into what makes him special. He’s going to get all glowy and blushy, and that’s fine. I want to get into some of the things that make him who he is, because there aren’t a lot of writers who are consistently excellent, and Vince is. That’s where I’m going to dig in.

John: Great. I was thinking for our bonus segment for premium members, Vince, you had done a remake of Kolchak, The Night Stalker, and I was thinking, what other shows would the three of us want to remake or reboot, because it feels like there’s so many great old shows. Are there any things out there that we’d love to see brought up to a 2023-2024 season? Maybe in our bonus segment for premium members, we can talk about that at the end of the show.

Cool. Craig, we have a bit of follow-up. In our last episode, we were talking about the old prospector archetype.

Craig: Just so you catch up on this, Vince, if we say the old gold prospector, what do you imagine in your mind?

Vince: If people didn’t come up to me about once every two weeks or so and say, “I saw you on that episode of Community,” I wouldn’t know what the hell you were talking about just now.

John: Wait, did you play a gold prospector on Community?

Craig: I haven’t seen this.

Vince: There was an episode of Community where they had a VHS. You remember these things? They found an old VHS game.

John: I remember this.

Vince: I was the guy on the VHS prospector.

Craig: I love this.

Vince: I think I was a gold prospector. I was a Wild West guy.

Craig: Perfect.

Vince: I meant what I said a minute ago. I got all these kids coming up to me lately saying, “Oh man, I loved you in Community.” I’m like, “Okay, great.”

Craig: What a strange confluence of things, because weirdly, last week, we were just talking about just the concept of the old gold prospector. I had remarked that there’s this consistent thing where if you think about the old gold prospector, you think about this kooky guy with a white beard doing a weird jig and dancing around about his gold.

Vince: That’s me.

Craig: You’ve already done this. You’ve actually been this guy.

John: This feels like a glitch in the matrix that you just happen to be the person who played that.

Craig: This is so weird. We were just trying to figure out, as we often do, why, where does this come from. There has to be some kind of origination of this, like the Wilhelm scream of gold prospectors. It looks like-

John: We got an answer here.

Craig: Our listeners have given us an answer.

John: Drew, do you want to read us… Apparently, a bunch of people wrote in, but this guy was first?

****Drew:**** Yeah, we had a lot of people write in. Duncan Brantley was the first one, who said, “In Episode 597 you were wondering about the origin of the old-timey gold miner’s happy dance when he strikes the mother lode. One source is definitely Walter Huston’s amazing boot-stomping jig in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

John: We’ll put a link to this YouTube video. Vince, were you aware of that? Did you know that that was where this all started?

Vince: I certainly have seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and love it. I don’t know. I wouldn’t say with authority that that’s where it came from. The fellow who wrote in might well be right, yeah.

John: It’s a film directed by John Huston, but that’s Walter Huston, his father, playing the old prospector. It looks like the original thing. You can imagine that performance, and you get the animated version of it, and it gets more and more cartoony in our memory. That was probably where it all started.

Craig: He slaps his knee as he does the dance. Everything seems to have flown from there. It seems like my old buddy Ash Brannon has written in.

John: Drew, tell us what Ash Brannon said.

Drew: Ash says, “I can fill you in on the prospector character in Toy Story 2, as I was on the film as the co-director, story co-creator, and character designer. When Pete Docter, Jeff Pidgeon, and I started breaking the story in a big empty room, we were given a premise, Woody is stolen by a toy collector, but not much beyond that. My first question was, what would make Woody valuable to a toy collector? That led us to concocting the Howdy Doody style series circa 1950s.

“Running with the Western theme, we built a tropey cast around Sheriff Woody, and a prospector sidekick just felt right. Jessie started as a talking cactus, by the way, more proof that bad ideas can lead to good ones. Character-wise, Jessie and Bullseye are very much like their TV counterparts, but with the prospector we deliberately went 180 degrees from the TV series bumbling idiot. Being the lead antagonist, he needed to be smart and manipulative, so we found this perfect opportunity to create a sophisticated intellectual who’s forever trapped in the body of a bumbling idiot.”

John: Aha. Once again, we have the greatest listeners on earth, because not only did they give us the oor [ph] text for the prospector, we actually have a writer-director from Toy Story 2 there to answer our questions.

Craig: That makes total sense that Kelsey Grammer would be forced to act like this goofy idiot. Then it’s a little bit like Alan Rickman in-

Vince: Galaxy Quest.

Craig: Yeah, exactly, in Galaxy Quest, this guy that’s used to performing Shakespeare on stage in England being forced to wear this crap and say these dumb lines like, “By Grabthar’s hammer.” Yet as I’ve often pointed out, I don’t think anything has made me cry harder in a science-fiction movie than Alan Rickman saying to a dying alien, “By Grabthar’s hammer, I will avenge thee.”

Vince: Great moment.

John: So good. Vince Gilligan, how can we best fast-forward from you winning the Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Competition to being the television titan that you are today? What are some of those early steps? This is Virginia. Obviously, you’re there for school. When did you come to Los Angeles? When did you start coming to your work in film and television? What was that transition for you?

Vince: It was basically win the contest and then have an interstitial title that says, “And then a bunch of lucky stuff happened.” There was an awful lot of good luck involved. Before that, there was five years or thereabouts of me living in my home state of Virginia.

This was after winning that contest, 1989. Winning that contest put me in touch with Mark Johnson, who I’ve been working with really ever since, for the last, gosh, what is it now, 35 years, 36 years, whatever it is. Mark Johnson, he was a producer on the movie Rain Man, which had won the Oscar just months before I met him, when he shook my hand as one of the judges of the screenwriting contest in 1989. He contacted me after the contest and said, “Do you have any other scripts?” I sent him what I had. I had a couple other movie scripts I had written in the meantime.

Always good advice, which I’m sure you guys have given many times before, is don’t just write that one script and then rest on your laurels. Write that one and put it aside and then start writing a second one. Back then I had that kind of self-starting self-discipline. I don’t really possess that anymore, but I had it then, and so I had a couple of other scripts to show Mark Johnson after he had expressed interest in my first one.

Then basically five years of living in Virginia, trying to be a movie writer and trying to do it from a distance. John, my hat is off to you, because I was not cut out for the movie business. It’s a tough business. The emotional rollercoaster you’re on as a movie writer, at least in my experience.

If TV hadn’t come along to save me in about 1994, I know you guys wouldn’t be interviewing me now. I’m not sure where I’d be. I’d be writing for the PennySaver or something. Nothing wrong with that, by the way, for folks who do that. I don’t know what I’d be doing, but I wouldn’t be-

Craig: I don’t think there’s a lot of editorial work at the PennySaver.

Vince: I would’ve changed that.

Craig: Exactly.

John: [Crosstalk 00:12:24].

Craig: This one PennySaver is full of fantastic writing. Maybe it is that your mind is more creatively speaking, that you feel like you’re more suited for television, or is it just that the business of features was enough to grind you down, whereas the business of television fits your speed a little bit better?

Vince: I think writing is writing. I think there’s wonderful movie scripts being written, wonderful TV scripts being written, and then everything along the spectrum all the way to bad. I think writing is writing. In TV, the writer is the boss. In movies, they are the polar opposite of the boss. That’s the problem. Unless you get to a point you’re like a John August where people pay attention to you as a movie writer in the various meetings that you go to around Los Angeles, New York, and whatnot.

The experience I had, if someone had designed some sort of fiendish mental torture, they couldn’t have done a better job than the process of you write a script, whoever you’re in that particular meeting says, “Oh my god. We love it. We love it. Oh, we love it. Sit and wait by your phone. Be around tomorrow. Do not leave the house.” This is back in the day before cellphones. I can’t tell you how many times I was told by various producers, by various studio executives, “Wait by your phone, because we’re going to be calling you tomorrow with further instructions. This is a go project.” Then you literally cut to the phone has cobwebs on it. It hasn’t rang. It was torture.

The movie business was torture. The TV business can absolutely… Every business has its torturous moments. In the TV business, until somebody fucks it up… Can I curse on this, by the way?

Craig: You can.

John: You absolutely can. You’re required to.

Craig: You fucking can.

Vince: Until we take what works about the TV business and take all the wrong lessons from the movie business… I say this as a member of the Directors Guild as well, but there is a push currently to make… I don’t even know if this comes from the DGA as much as it’s coming from executives at various streamers and various studios and whatnot, networks. “The writers are okay, but directors, now that’s who you want running a TV show.” Then you cut to some superstar director directing the first 48 minutes of a TV show and then shuffling off to Buffalo. Then who’s running it after that? It’s the writer. It’s the showrunner, who is another way of saying the head writer, and his or her staff of wonderful other writers. There seems to be a push now to change that. If that happens, then you’re going to have a TV business that’s more like what’s happening in the movie business.

Craig: I won’t stick around for that business if that happens, as a refugee from features to television. You mentioned directors. I don’t know how many episodes of television you’ve made. You probably have lost count yourself. Across all those, but particularly across the ones where you’ve been the showrunner, you’ve worked with a lot of directors. I’m curious, from your point of view, what do you think makes a good episodic TV director versus a not so good one. Maybe think about that from the point of view of both the quality of the work they do but also the experience of working with them.

Vince: Great question. I think there’s a lot of overlap about what makes a great TV director versus what makes a great movie director. I think like writing is writing, directing is directing. I hope everything I just said a minute ago does not denigrate the process of directing for TV. It’s a crucial job. Directors, especially the great ones, and I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of great ones, the value they add to the process is immeasurable.

I think a great director, and I’ll say this movie or TV, a great director looks at the script, looks at the story, and says, “This is the story we’re telling.” Then they look to do everything in their power, with every decision they make, with the wardrobe, the props, the locations, certainly the casting. They’re looking at telling one story that everyone agrees is the story. It’s really the same skill set in either version. Television directors typically have to listen to the input of the writer, of the showrunner, more than they do in movies. I can’t tell you how many times I was not even allowed to be on the set.

Craig: I was going to say, that’s quite an understatement.

Vince: I think a smart director, whether they have to, quote unquote, have to listen or not, I think a smart director, just like a smart anybody in these mediums, listens to these people around them. By the way, this absolutely goes for showrunners too, writer-showrunners in TV. If you stop listening to your directors, conversely, if you stop listening to the people around you, you’re just bound to fail. Both these mediums are the ultimate in collaborative mediums, movies and TV.

You get this vibe that movies are not so collaborative, that it’s all about the directors and their vision. Anyone who forgets that either one of these lines of endeavor is a collaborative medium forgets it at their own peril. You have to surround yourself with smart people. You don’t have to do anything, but I think you’re foolish to not surround yourself with smart people and then not listen to them. That’s just the height of arrogance and egotism and ultimately self-destructiveness.

John: Craig, you’ve had your own experiences with The Last of Us, the first time you were working with a series of different directors. Did you learn a lot?

Craig: I did. It’s interesting. For Chernobyl we had one director, a director that worked on Breaking Bad, in fact, Johan Renck, who directed a couple great episodes of Breaking Bad. I had a fantastic relationship with Johan. It was easy to learn one person’s rhythm and language and their quirks, because it’s an interesting relationship.

I try to be the kind of person that I always wished the feature directors I worked with had been, which is to say yes, I do get the final vote, yes, I am in charge, however let’s work to agree, and let’s treat each other with as much respect as possible and let’s let everybody else know around us that we are both integral and just as important as each other, which really doesn’t happen much in features.

Vince: It does not.

Craig: Working with multiple directors, it’s a little bit like new actors coming in. You just have to get very flexible very quickly, because everyone’s different. You have to learn their rhythms and their quirks afresh. Hopefully, they understand that they are stepping into rushing water, because there’s been a lot of stuff that’s happened before they showed up, and there’s going to be a lot of stuff that happens after they leave.

The other thing that I think is important hopefully to find with directors is directors that understand that ultimately you as the showrunner are going to be responsible for the edit. I don’t know about how you go about these things, Vince, but there are times where you just feel like you need something. You have to almost negotiate a little bit with your own directors to make sure you get the things that you think you’ll need, even if ultimately it turns out you didn’t need it.

Vince: You described it very well just now, Craig. The buck stops with you as a showrunner just like the buck stops with the director on a movie set. Wherever the buck stops, it is good advice to that person, to that decider, listen to people around you. Ultimately, yeah, you gotta make a decision, but be as collaborative as you can be.

Communication is nine tenths of it, I feel like. If you need certain things in the finished footage, you need to communicate that. The time to do that is in pre-production. Pre-production is ultimately probably more important than production. You would have these epic tone meetings. I guess you do them in movies too.

Craig: Not really. I wish we would.

John: We really don’t. It’d be better if we did.

Vince: You’re right. You’re right.

Craig: It’s a shame.

Vince: I was trying to be magnanimous toward the movie business.

Craig: Don’t be.

Vince: I think directors certainly could do them in movies. In just focusing on television, the tone meeting is where the writer of the episode, and usually the showrunner as well, and sometimes that’s the same person, very often the producers will sit with the director for hours. We’ve had tone meetings that have gone 9, 10 hours. We’ll break them up. Sometimes we’ll break them up over two days or whatever. We’re not trying to numb everybody’s butts into submission by sitting there talking for nine hours or whatnot.

We’re basically going through the script from Page 1 to where it says the end. We’re going through and talking through. This is after the bulk of the pre-production is figured out, after the locations have been picked, the guest actors have been cast, all that kind of thing. It’s the final opportunity for the director and the writer/showrunner to get on the same page.

It works best when it flows both ways. If it’s just the showrunner dictating to the director, “This is what I want. I don’t want any Dutch angles. I want this. I want that. I want a 70-foot Technocrane,” you can do it that way if you want, but it works best when it goes both ways, when the director asks the showrunner just as many questions.

You want someone who’s a collaborative artist, just as you and your best version of yourself want to be a collaborative artist, but you also want someone who has a point of view. The best directors are not the ones who just roll over and say, “Tell me how to do it, boss.” The best directors are going to give you things you’ve never even conceived of. The best directors I’ve worked with and the ones I work with over and over again don’t just roll over and say, “Tell me what to do.” They say, “Here’s what I’m thinking here.”

We had a wonderful director on Better Call Saul, Larysa Kondracki. We always have these big teasers. There was a teaser in an episode she directed. We had a scene at the US-Mexican border. At this moment I’m drawing a blank what happens in the damn scene, but I know it was epic. We had it in our heads, it’s going to be dozens of shots and dozens of setups. She said, “I want to do this whole thing as a oner.”

Craig: I remember this. I remember this one.

Vince: She explained it to us way in advance. She said, “When I read this, I pictured it as one shot.” I remember hearing this and thinking, “That’s nuts. You can’t do this as one shot.” Damned if she didn’t. She talked us into it. It wasn’t that hard for her to talk us into it, because she basically pitched it to us. “Picture this. You’re here, and you’re on this thing. You go up the row of vehicles,” and blah blah blah.

It was just brilliant the way she did it. That was not the intention of the folks in the writers’ room when we came up with it. We just figured standard. It was great. It was much more memorable than it would’ve been the way we had in mind. That’s what you’re looking for.

She communicated that to us as soon as she had the idea, basically. She talked us into it, which as I say, was not hard, because it was so cool. Then every department worked with that image, with that idea in mind, worked through the process of making it, because we had to build a US-Mexican border at Double Eagle Airport just to the west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Everything then going forward in the pre-production was designed to make it work as well as possible for that oner. That to me is when it’s working best. It starts with communication, clearly.

Craig: One of the things that you’re digging into here is how much planning is involved in things. Just taking a step back from production and just going back to the act of creation and planning out the stories that you want to tell, one of the hallmarks I think of what you do is this constant balance between surprise and planning.

The example that I want to use is the floating teddy bear in the pool, the opening episode in Season 2 of Breaking Bad. There is something that is so weird about it and surprising and confusing, and yet when all is said and done and you arrive at the end of that season, you understand exactly what’s going on. It all has led to this inevitable concept that is harrowing and way more upsetting than you ever thought it was going to be.

I’m just curious, as you go about thinking about story and how to divide story up across episodes and fill out a season, how do you find the weirdness and then balance it across the structure of things? That was so weird, and yet also so structured.

Vince: I wish I had an answer that always applied, but it really is a case-by-case thing. The storytelling I think is best is organic storytelling, which is where you start with a character. The character revealing themself to you, the writer, precipitates the plot. That’s to me organic, starting with character, working out from that.

Sometimes you’re just restless in the writers’ room, and you get real inorganic from time to time. That is probably a good example of inorganic storytelling where, to the best of my recollection… I’m not being coy or vague as to who said what. Honestly, I forget who said what, which I think the writers’ room is chugging along best when you forget who gets credit for what idea. I think in that case, my vague memory of it now all these years later is I was just thinking, “This is a visual medium,” and I’m always saying that, “I want something really cool to look at here, opening up this season.” Season 2 I think is what it was.

I don’t know who came up with it. It’s a group effort as always, but just, “I want something weird and random.” That was as inorganic as it gets, because it was the idea of the pool in Walter White’s backyard, which by the way, this is, again, such a collaborative medium.

The only time I ever worked on that show by myself was coming up with the pilot. When I was coming up with the pilot, and that’s for my money the least successful episode, my least favorite episode, the one I basically came up with on my own.

Craig: We might have to quibble a little bit there with you on that one. Possibly the greatest pilot of all time, but okay, go ahead.

Vince: I love all the subsequent episodes so much more, and I think in part because I wasn’t alone in the wilderness anymore. I’m getting in the weeds here. Let me try to keep on subject.

The pool in the backyard of Walter White’s house, I don’t think it was important to me. I don’t even think I thought he would necessarily have a pool. I probably thought he wouldn’t have a pool, because the guy’s hurting for money. It seems like a status symbol to have a pool.

This house that we picked, you wind up driving around in a van with all these folks, and you see this house, and you say, “I think this is the house. Something about this feels right. Oh, it’s got a pool in the backyard. For a guy who’s hurting for money, that seems… What the hell? Let’s go with the pool.” Then the pool became a touchstone for this guy. Now we have Season 1, and he’s sitting by the pool from the pilot on. The pool feels important on some weird, symbolic level, although I can’t explain what this symbolism adds up to.

Then we’re sitting around in the writers’ room in the early days of Season 2, and it’s, “What if something’s floating in the pool? What would it be? I don’t know, what if it’s a teddy bear? How did that teddy bear get there? Who the fuck knows?”

Craig: That’s interesting, because I was going to ask what comes first. Spoiler alert, by the time you get to the end of the season, someone has died from drugs. That person’s father works as an air traffic controller. The air traffic controller is distracted and distraught and makes an error that leads to a plane crash.

Vince: Exactly.

Craig: The plane crash results in debris being scattered over Albuquerque, including this scorched teddy bear that belonged obviously to some now-dead child, that lands in Walter White’s pool. The question was, what comes first, the bear or the crash? It sounds like the bear comes first. Then you go, “How did that get there?” That leads you to the airplane. Wow.

Vince: I think so, to the best of my memory. I do not recommend. Listen, by the way. If it takes standing on your head until the blood rushes to your head and you pass out, if that’s what it takes to get to where you ultimately want to be, so be it. Short of doing yourself physical harm or certainly anyone else, whatever it takes is whatever it takes.

The best kind of storytelling, to repeat the thought, is from character outward. Every now and then you cheat. Every now and then you get bored. You try to jumpstart the process. I think in that case, it was from some crazy image outward.

It’s a little bit of schmuck bait I guess you could say. We’re trying to mystify the audience at the beginning of Season 2. There’s a burnt teddy bear floating in this pool. Its plastic eyeballs come out in a skimmer. There must’ve been violence done at the Walter White house. There must’ve been a shoot-out. Except we’re looking at the house, and it doesn’t seem like there’s any signs of an explosion or a fire at the house.

Craig: People gather some of it with an evidence bag, which makes you-

Vince: Exactly.

Craig: … think even further there was some sort of crime.

Vince: Exactly. Exactly. Even in that, we were careful not to schmuck bait it too much. We showed the house right from the opening images. You see the house. The windows are still intact. The house is not burned down, that kind of thing. You see a body bag. It’s a partially full body bag, which I guess is the way it would be after a plane blew up mid-air. It’s just little pieces of people. Then you work outward. We thought, “We’re going to make the audience think there was some terrible violence here,” but then the idea of a plane crash came fairly quickly.

The one thing that was crucial was, it can’t be just some random happenstance thing. It has to be because Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, put the wheels into motion that led to debris raining down on his house. The one thing we knew for sure we were dead set on is it can’t just be a random thing. It has to relate back to Walter White’s actions. His actions have to have these terrible karmic effects upon the world. He has that kind of power over this particular fictional universe, whether he knows it or not. It’s not even a sure thing that he understood that he was responsible. He wouldn’t take responsibility in any way. He’s not that kind of guy.

Craig: He would figure out how to avoid moral responsibility.

Vince: Exactly.

John: Vince, I hear you talking about the origin of this idea, this image. You’re using we the whole time through. This is all a thing that’s coming out of the writers’ room as you’re trying to put together Season 2. You don’t even quite know whose idea it was to come up with the teddy bear, but it was not just one brain. It’s a bunch of brains working together and working in sync.

How did you assemble your writers’ room? How did you pick the writers you wanted to be in that room with you? How did you manage that? That’s such a different skill than being a writer working alone is figuring out how to harness the power of a bunch of writers. You obviously had staffed on X-Files coming up, but what was it like to be the showrunner with a bunch of writers working for you?

Vince: I didn’t think I’d like it. I could spend a whole podcast talking about how lucky I was to be on The X-Files, what it taught me, what working for Chris Carter and those other writers taught me, because I had never been in a room before with other writers. Having said that, X-Files was so episodic that we writers worked in a collaborative way, helping each other out, but it was an informal way. We didn’t really have a writers’ room per se on The X-Files.

John: Because it doesn’t build from episode to episode.

Vince: Exactly. Exactly.

Craig: It’s not serialized.

Vince: Exactly. When it’s a serialized show and you have a writers’ room, at least the way we’ve been doing it for 15 years, it has to be all hands on deck, plugging away. On The X-Files, I’d be in my office working on an episode about thus and so, and Frank Spotnitz would be in his office and doing another episode. John Shiban would be in another office banging away on yet again another episode. We were helpful to each other as far as banging ideas off each other, but it was a different kind of beast.

Before that even, before I had that experience, I was just working by myself. I didn’t know I’d like it working in a writers’ room. I didn’t know that I’d fit in well. I thought there’s a real chance I might be a real square peg in a round hole there. I might not fit in. I might hate it. Secretly, I want to do it all myself, because I’ve got that vanity of wanting to write it all myself. I thought I would feel that way. A writers’ room is a great adventure.

How did I get the writers for Breaking Bad? Ironically, I had the priceless help of a non-writer, my producer, Melissa Bernstein, who is a genius producer and a really excellent director as well at this point. When Breaking Bad was starting off, she and I both were starting off. She was the assistant to Mark Johnson. She was basically sitting on his desk, as we say in Hollywood. She was the one sitting on the desk outside his office and answering his phones.

When Breaking Bad started, Mark said, “You’re going to need a day-to-day producer. How about Melissa?” Just smart as a whip, but had never done that job before. Grew into it beautifully. Now she’s off running I think House of the Dragon in London as we record this. They’re lucky to have her.

John: Melissa’s fantastic. She was involved with Arlo Finch. She’s great.

Vince: She is fantastic. How I found the writers, she found them for me. This was back in the days before everything was set digitally and read on an iPad. I saw it in her office. She had a seven-foot-tall pile of printed paper scripts. She read through them all and winnowed them down to a pile that was, I don’t know, maybe less than a foot tall. Then I read those. Every writer I hired for that first season was in that pile, including Peter Gould, who wound up running-

Craig: Better Call Saul.

Vince: Yeah, co-creating Better Call Saul with me and then running it, running it brilliantly. I didn’t know him from Adam before I read his script in that short pile of scripts that Melissa had winnowed down. That’s how I came to find these folks. They just turned out to be a murderous row of writers in that first season and beyond.

Listen, again, to reiterate, once you get this job, do it any damn way you please. Just try to be kind to people. You’re not curing cancer. It’s just a TV show. There’s no excuse to be nasty to people.

If you get this job and you can write every episode by yourself, more power to you, but the way it works best for me is being in a room, getting everyone emotionally invested in the story at hand and the characters at hand and the story you’re telling, and then not keeping score as to who said what, really.

There’s that old expression, I didn’t make it up, but to paraphrase it, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re not keeping score, when you’re not accounting for who said what. I really hew to that. Every now and then I remember who said what in the room, when it was some highlight moment that made us all erupt into laughter or whatever.

As an example, we had an episode where we’ve got the actor Danny Trejo plays a character who gets his head chopped off with a machete. We came up with this moment where, “What happened to this guy?”

Craig: So great.

Vince: This guy’s severed head is on a giant desert tortoise. They painted on the tortoise “Hola DEA.” We came up with that. That was a group effort. We came up with that. I was so tickled by that image and so excited about putting it into an episode of Breaking Bad that I basically said, “We should just call it a day right there. We should take an early lunch, because I think we’ve done all the work we need to do for the day.”

George Mastras, one of our wonderful writers, the show, he had been quiet. He had been pitching in on this thing, but he was quiet for a minute. He said, “Yeah, but then what happens?” I said, “What do you mean? You got a head on a tortoise. What else do you need?” He says, “I think the head should blow up.” Everyone said, “What?” I said, “George, man, let’s take the win here. That’s like gilding the lily.”

John: Hat on a hat.

Vince: A hat on a hat. God, we love that expression. We use that one all the time.

Craig: It wasn’t.

Vince: It wasn’t. Literally, I kind of scoffed and said, “George, we don’t need to do that. We don’t need that.” He shrugged and said, “Seems like it’s… ” I thought about it, and I said, “Oh shit, you’re right.” That’s how the scene ends. It would’ve been an okay scene, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as, I love the expression Kubrick used, non-submergible. It would not have been a true non-submergible scene if the head hadn’t blown up. That was George.

You’re working together in this room. What I’m trying to achieve is have one brain almost instead of six or seven or eight brains. It’s worked well for us. Again, like I say, do it any way you want when it’s your show.

John: I don’t have a good sense of both of these shows. Are the writers figuring out the season. How many scripts are you ahead before we start production. Are those writers still around as you’re in production?

Vince: You were as ahead as many as you could possibly be. We had all kinds of different experiences. We had experiences where we were only maybe four or five ahead. Was it the final season of Better Call Saul or the one before it? It’s amazing what I can’t remember. We’ve had experiences toward the end of the run of Better Call Saul where we had every episode broken. Oh, man, is that the dream. That is the dream.

People say, “That’s not every episode written.” The writing is the easy part. The breaking is the hard part. You put that many people in a room together for 9, 10 hours a day for 5 days a week, months on end, and having the whole thing figured out with index cards on a corkboard. That’s the hard part.

The theory that we apply to it is, once that episode is broken, in other words, once every story is hammered out and put on these index cards, then any one of us, whoever’s responsible for that episode, or if they drop dead that week, anyone else could just jump write in and write it themselves. Everybody knows that everybody had an equal hand in coming up with it. One writer writes the draft and gets credit for it, and that’s not nothing. That’s important. There’s invention to be had writing the draft.

You have as many ahead as you can possibly have, because then selfishly, as the showrunner, or as the co-showrunner in the case of Better Call Saul, then I get a chance to actually be on the set. Maybe I get a chance to direct more.

If you’re working one episode ahead, which is basically what we did on the first season of Breaking Bad, then you just feel like you just barely got your nose in the water, feel like you’re about to drown any second. You can’t really do all the other parts of the job that are the more fun things, the location scouting, picking props, picking costumes, blah blah blah. You just don’t have time for it all in that version.

Craig: One thing that occurs to me as I hear you talk about your room and the way, it makes sense, you’re trying to create this joint brain that all thinks aligned, the joint brain is, however, aligning itself ultimately to your brain if you are running the show. If I were in a room for one of your shows, I would certainly be desperate to make you happy.

I guess my question is, and this is going to be a hard one for you, because you are, and I’m sure people are picking up on this, just inherently decent and humble person, but what do you think is different about the way you think and work compared maybe to other people that work in television? Because you do seem to have this ability to come up with work that just people are obsessed with and I think is obviously quality work. What’s going on? Have you thought about what separates you or what makes you different? Because I think a lot of people listening would be inspired to perhaps be more like you if they knew exactly what it meant to be like you.

Vince: That’s very flattering. It probably tends to come across as somewhat falsely modest at some of these kind of situations, but it really is the truth. Also, you’re only a genius for as long as you’re a genius. Breaking Bad was lightning in a bottle. Better Call Saul, lightning strike twice for us. Then we were so lucky that it’s hit twice. This next thing I’m working on, it’s just as likely, if not more likely, that everyone will say, “Ugh.”

Craig: Listen. God knows I can identify with that. It does seem like lightning doesn’t really strike twice just randomly. There are things that you stress or that you emphasize, things that you go for, things that you try and do that set your shows apart. By the way, your shows are also traditional in that they are commercially interrupted, whereas all the highfalutin streaming shows aren’t. You’re still writing in this, what I would call the commercially interrupted format.

Vince: You’re right.

Craig: You are doing it at a level that I think puts so much of the so-called PTV streaming to shame. I guess I’ll rephrase to let you off the self-praise hook. What advice would you give to a creator who’s about to run a show? This is purely creative advice, not functional, not procedural, just creatively, advice on how to make something great as opposed to just good.

Vince: Starting with what you just said about commercially interrupted, it’s interesting. Before the strike started and we were in a writers’ room, we’re working on a new project for Apple. The sky’s the limit basically. This is the first time I’ve non-commercially-supported project.

When we created Breaking Bad, we created squarely for AFC. Then luckily, Netflix came along and was a wonderful second broadcaster or medium or whatever the proper terminology is. X-Files before that, these are created for ad-supported television, so we did what we had to do. Now I’ve really fallen in love with that art form.

Even now in this Apple show where we could do it however we choose to do it, we are still queueing to this teaser and four-act structure. We’re still using the same structure on this new show as we were using 30 years ago on The X-Files. What was created years before I ever got in the business, what was created out of necessity for an ad-supported business, I think actually has benefits, even now that we don’t have to hew to it.

I think there’s benefits. They are storytelling and structural benefits when you’re thinking in terms of, “We got a teaser, and then we’re going to do some sort of title sequence. Then we have Act 1. By the dramatic necessities of storytelling, this act has to end with some reason to keep watching.” I think that works whether you have commercials or not.

If you’re building toward these mini climaxes, and I like that, four mini climaxes, well, three and then one big climax at the end of the hour that makes you want to tune in next week, or in the case of streaming, not interrupt the thing when it immediately starts playing the next episode, I think there’s real benefit to that. I certainly didn’t invent that. It was thrust upon us on X-Files. I love it. I continue with it. I think that helps focus my thinking as a storyteller. There’s that.

These are just thoughts. Again, the beauty of this job is you can do it any damn way you want. I would say to folks getting that wonderful opportunity to do this, don’t necessarily throw away all the old ways of doing things, because there was good reasons for them sometimes. Hire the smartest people, both in front of and behind the camera, and then listen to them. Try to set your ego aside. It’s not false modesty or real modesty or whatever. It’s just plain old meat and potatoes kind of common sense.

We get so much credit for this job. Showrunners get so much credit. It’s turned into this sexy job. God knows how that happened. You’re never going to starve for credit. You’re going to get plenty if your show is doing well. When you don’t try to hog it all, the people who work with you are happier, and they give you even more of what you want from them, which is to say their best work. There are so many benefits.

My business manager always says he’s talking about money, not about credit. He always says the expression, “Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.” Try not to hog the spotlight too much, because you’re going to get pats on the head and pats on the back you don’t even deserve in the first place.

What happened with Breaking Bad and what I’m trying to do with this new thing is look around and see what everyone else is doing and try to zig a little bit if everyone else is zagging.

Craig: There you go. There you go. I’ve been waiting.

Vince: That’s to me, using Breaking Bad as an example. I looked around. I love television. I watch a lot of old TV and new stuff. I love the medium, period. I was looking around in the early 2000s, the mid-2000s, and I said, “What is everyone doing now?”

All the shows had a somewhat similar look to them in that everyone was framing for head and shoulders mostly. Every now and then you’d see a cowboy or from the waist up or from the thighs up, or every now and then you’d show somewhat full body, but the framing was tight in the early and mid-2000s.

Just looking around and observing what was going on, what everyone else was doing, what didn’t make sense to me then was that the framing wasn’t changing, even though we had the advent of big-screen TVs. We were going for more squarish, 3-by-4 tube TVs that were maybe maxed out at 34, 36, 32 inches probably. Suddenly there’s these plasma TVs and then later LCD and LED flat screens that were 16 by 9. If you had the money back then, you could have a giant screen that’s taking up most of your living room, and yet still people are framing super tight on people’s faces. What’s the point? You got this new tool now.

That was part of what I was looking for. That’s not story so much. That’s more from a directorial point of view. You look around at stuff like that, what are people doing. If you start with that, that can hold you instead.

Craig: That’s excellent advice. You’ve just put something in my brain that I had never considered, which is that the rise of so-called peak TV or the golden age of television that we’re living in corresponds very closely to the introduction of the 16-by-9 television format, that the format itself had led to a certain kind of constriction of TV, both visual and storytelling-wise. That’s fascinating. It never occurred to me. I’m sure a thousand people are going to write in now saying, “Hey, idiot, there have already been a hundred articles about that.”

John: Or if they’re not, they’re writing an article right now.

Craig: They’re writing right now. Some listicle is being generated as we speak. That’s a great observation. I think going the other way, as you said, zigging when people are zagging, it doesn’t necessarily lead you to an original idea or thought. What it does is set you up to look for one that you are not copying, you’re not sitting in the same groove as everyone else.

It’s hard sometimes because the television movie business is designed to urge you to copy, because that’s what makes people who don’t write things safe. It makes them feel safe, at least. Probably actually puts them in great danger. For us, I think making a virtue of doing something different, that’s excellent advice.

John: Agreed.

Vince: Thank you. I hope it is, but I don’t know how practical it is, ultimately, because the two scariest letters in the world right now, in this business at least, are AI, but a close second is IP.

Craig: I hear you.

Vince: The folks listening, I think it’s good advice. I don’t know if it’s good advice. I think it’s just good practice to try to do something original, try to come up with your best version of something that no one’s ever done before. Good luck with that.

I do believe there’s only so many stories in the world. That doesn’t keep me up at night, because I think there’s only a finite number of human emotions, so therefore there’s only a finite number of stories.

If you can do everything you can to make your work as original as possible, good on you, more power to you. Just know that you’re going to be swimming against the current when it comes to most of the decision makers in this business, both in TV and movies. They want IP. They want intellectual property. They want existing stories.

Craig: Even inside those, Vince, I think that there’s an opportunity. We’ve been talking about the Dungeons and Dragons movie, which is a delight. That’s the most IP IP-ish-ness that you can get, or the Lego movies.

Vince: True.

Craig: Best example that there are ways inside of IP to do the different thing, to do something that people aren’t expecting even inside of that.

Vince: Absolutely.

Craig: You are right, there are only so many stories. There are only so many human emotions. There’s only 12 keys on the piano keyboard really. There’s only six strings on a guitar, and people keep coming up with new songs. I don’t know how.

Vince: If we lived in a world that’s completely flipped on its head and no one wanted something from some other existing property turned into a TV show, for instance, we wouldn’t have The Last of Us. Thank god we have The Last of Us.

Craig: Thank god.

Vince: No, seriously. What a brilliant show.

Craig: Thank you.

Vince: You know what it is? It’s just about absolutism. It’s just as bad, like I say, if we lived in bizarro Hollywood where they said, “No. If it’s been done before, you can’t. God knows you can’t have another Star Wars. God forbid, because it’s already been done. We need nothing but originality,” that really would be bizarro Hollywood.

Craig: That would be a very strange Hollywood. You’re right. I think going too far in either direction is a mess. Hollywood’s always looked to books before there were… We’ll be discussing this on our bonus segment. Movies look to television. Television looks to movies. Everybody’s looking at each other. Now they’re looking at toys and video game narratives.

Ultimately, I think if you come at these things creatively, as if it’s original, you come at it with all the care that you would for something that is your own, which basically means instead of somebody calling you up and saying, “Hey, we got this thing. You want to do it?” and then you’re already probably in a rough spot, if you can find something and then take it somewhere and go, “I love this thing. I want to make a thing into a thing,” probably you’re off on a better foot there.

Vince: Absolutely. God, if you don’t have enthusiasm for… It’s so easy to fall prey to this. I wanted to have this job back before I even knew what the name of this job was. I wanted to have it so badly, I would’ve probably chopped off a pinky finger or something to get it.

At a certain point, it’s like, what are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to be a showrunner, or do you have a story to tell? It’s so seductive to do this. “Here, do this show. Go off and run this show.” When it’s that kind of scenario, when someone suggests, “Hey, why don’t you do this,” there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s perfectly a moral, valid thing to do.

If you have to manufacture, if you have to find the enthusiasm for something because you want the job, versus just coming off the street if you can manage to get through the door and say, “I don’t even know what you call that job, but I got this story I want to tell,” that’s a naïve way of looking at it, because it doesn’t really work like that, but I wish it did.

Craig: Same.

Vince: That’s the way I wish it worked always.

Craig: Fantastic. I wish I could talk to Vince all day. I really do.

Vince: Great for my ego.

Craig: Is no one else telling you this stuff? Is it just us?

Vince: My wife, Holly, is very careful to not let me-

Craig: Good.

Vince: … get too big for my britches as we say.

Craig: Our spouses do the same for us, no question.

Vince: They’re doing us all a great favor.

John: Our spouses too, for sure.

Craig: Indeed, indeed.

John: We wrap up every episode with our One Cool Things. I think we warned you about this. Something you would like to recommend to the audience. Do you have something you want to pass along?

Vince: I got a twofer. I’ll make it quick.

Craig: Great.

Vince: A TV show-

John: Please.

Vince: … that I’d be amazed if anyone listening to this has heard of. I may be wrong. I have a TV show I love so much right now. It’s called Dracula’s Kung-Fu Theatre. This is on a channel called Retro.

Craig: There’s a channel called Retro?

Vince: There’s a channel called Retro TV. It’s out of Chattanooga, Tennessee. I think you can find their live feed on the internet. Other than that, it’s over the air or nothing.

John: Wow.

Vince: I use an over-the-air antenna I bought at Walmart. I watch a lot of over-the-air television.

Craig: God. Wow.

Vince: Retro TV is one thing I get if I adjust the antenna just right and the wind’s not blowing too hard.

Craig: Wow.

Vince: It’s a show these three or four guys do I think out of Chattanooga. Basically it’s Dracula, the vampire king. You turn on the episode every week, and he is in his castle in Transylvania, and he is sharing his bitching collection of VHS kung-fu movies with you, one movie a week.

Craig: Oh my god.

Vince: He’s got a werewolf in a cage. The werewolf hands him the tape of the week, and he puts the tape into a VHS tape player that’s sat on a cart with a tube TV. He does the intro every week. He tells you about that week’s kung-fu movie, some movie from the ’70s.

Craig: Oh my gosh.

Vince: Then literally, they cut to the tube TV, which plays the movie for two hours.

Craig: Oh, that’s awesome.

Vince: I love the show so damn much.

John: Amazing.

Vince: I can’t even tell you. I would recommend. I bought a T-shirt from them and everything. I’ve got a Dracula’s Kung-Fu Theatre T-shirt. I love these guys. They make this show for 29 cents.

Craig: Wow.

Vince: It doesn’t matter they have no money to spend. It is so fun, and it is so charming, and it is so witty, a lot of the banter. He’s just this really funny version of Dracula, and he loves kung-fu movies. That’s my first recommendation.

Craig: That’s awesome.

Vince: Then Alien Tape. Alien Tape. Probably no one listening to this watches over-the-air commercials anymore. Everyone is too smart. Everyone’s way smarter than me. They’re not sitting through the commercials. I watch a lot of over-the-air TV, and therefore I have to sit through the commercials, just like we did 40 years ago.

There’s this commercial for something called Alien Tape. I’m thinking this is bullshit. It’s this clear tape that’s made out of silicone. You can stick a brick to a wall with it. I buy some of this stuff, because I’m in CVS in LA, and they’ve got an aisle of as seen on TV. I see this stuff. I’m thinking, “Oh, brother.” I wind up buying it, because what the hell? This shit is for real. This stuff, I stuck up my over-the-air antenna on the wall with it, but at a certain point I had to move it. I could not get this thing loose. It is so strong.

Craig: Wow.

Vince: I finally pried it loose, and I thought, “Oh, man, I’ve messed up the paint on my bedroom wall here.” It came off completely clean. You can run it under running water and clean it up and reuse that same piece of tape. I love this stuff.

Craig: Wow.

Vince: It is awesome.

Craig: I’m going to get some of this.

John: Fantastic.

Vince: I’m big into adhesives. I love adhesives of all kinds. They’re really cool.

Craig: I would have never predicted.

John: This is content you can’t get on any other podcast. How many interviews have you done? No one’s ever gotten your love of adhesives out of you.

Craig: He doesn’t love them. He’s big into them.

Vince: I’m big into them.

Craig: He’s big into the entire adhesives product category.

John: Yeah, big into it.

Craig: Wow.

John: I love it.

Craig: My One Cool Thing today is… Oh, jeez, I hate to recommend anything on Twitter, because Elon just keeps getting dumber and dumber. There is an account, @todayyearsold, which comes from the old memey comment, “I was today years old when I found out.” Today Years Old is dedicated to doing nothing but just running videos of things that you should’ve known that you don’t know.

For instance, yesterday some guy’s like, “Did you know that you can use the back of a claw hammer to set a nail, and that’s your first stroke in is backwards with the nail? You don’t have to hold the nail and hit it and avoid hitting your thumbs. You just wedge it in there and go whack and then you turn your hammer around and finish the job.” I was like, “Oh my god.”

There are so many little things like that, all these little life hacks. Inevitably, they always come along with somebody who’s just utterly shocked and indeed was today years old when they found so, so @todayyearsold.

Vince: That’s a good one.

John: I love that. My One Cool Thing is a video I watched this past week. It is a robot puppet who’s singing A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton. You may remember back, Vanessa Carlton’s song A Thousand Miles. You may also remember the video, because in the video for it, she’s at a piano, but the piano’s being driven all over the city. She’s basically, a hidden seat belt, she’s on this piano just being moved all over the city.

This guy created a robot puppet to do the exact same video, basically. You’d think it would just be a parody of it, but it’s actually brilliant and charming. It’s a puppet version of Vanessa Carlton singing A Thousand Miles. It’s on one of those little robot drone cars. It’s just incredibly charming. If you’re having any darkness in your day, watch this video, and it will brighten it up.

Craig: What are the odds that any of us are having darkness in our days? No dark days. What for?

John: No, there’s no dark days.

Craig: How? Why?

John: Never. Never. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Matt Davis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. It’s been so nice to see them out on the picket line. Craig, I don’t know if you’ve seen them out on the picket line, but it’s nice. The blue WGA T-shirts, they’re fine, but you can’t wear them five days in a row. Wear your Scriptnotes shirt.

Craig: I’m wearing mine right now, actually, my blue strike shirt. Strike shirt!

John: Strike shirt. It’s not as comfortable as the Cotton Bureau shirts. I think we [crosstalk 01:05:18].

Craig: Nothing is as comfortable. I gotta tell you, I don’t know, Vince, if you like an undershirt or just a nice T-shirt.

John: We have good ones.

Craig: You gotta go to this place, Cotton Bureau.

Vince: I don’t like wearing clothes in general, but if I have to, I will, yeah.

Craig: I’m with you, man. I’m with you.

John: He’s a nudist who’s into adhesives.

Craig: Oh, man. That’s such a painful combination. I don’t like wearing clothes either, but I have to. Mostly, I go by how annoying they are to wear. Cotton Bureau, you can get yourself… Just go for the, what is it, the tri-blend I think they call it.

John: Yeah, it’s the Stuart special.

Craig: They blended together cotton with two other things that probably cause cancer, but you know what? It’s soft.

John: So soft.

Craig: It’s so soft. They don’t cause cancer. It’s very, very soft. I only wear those. That is now all I wear. Just got a whole bunch of gray Cotton Bureau undershirts, and that’s all I wear.

Vince: I am writing this down, Cotton Bureau.

John: Cottonbureau.com.

Craig: Cotton Bureau and tri-blend or something like that.

John: That’s what you want.

Craig: So soft.

John: You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record with Vince Gilligan, talking about TV shows we’d like to remake. Vince Gilligan, an absolute pleasure talking with you. I can’t believe it took 597 episodes for us to do this. Let’s do it again.

Vince: I would love doing it. You guys are really smart and a lot of fun to talk to. I had a great time. Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Bonus segment. Looking through your credits, I noticed Kolchak, the Night Stalker, which is a remake of an earlier TV series. It got me thinking, what other old series would we like to remake if the opportunity came about? I’ll start. I’ve always had a soft spot for Hart to Hart. Do you guys remember Hart to Hart?

Vince: Yeah.

Craig: Of course. Of course I do.

John: Oh my god, I loved it. Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers. When they met it was murder. It’s this millionaire, they’d probably be billionaires, married couple, who their friends just keep getting murdered, and they just solve the murders, just because they’re bored. It’s not even their job to solve the murders. They just happen to be around, and they solve the murders. I loved it. I feel like it could be a fun show to do.

Vince: That’s a great show. That in and of itself I’m assuming was a riff on the Thin Man series of movies. Have you guys ever seen Jon Hamm and Adam Scott do the reboot of the Hart to Hart title sequence and Simon and Simon?

Craig: No, I haven’t seen that.

Vince: It’s great.

John: It’s really worth seeing.

Vince: It is.

John: Adam Scott has a series with John Hamm where it’s like the greatest remake ever made or the greatest film ever made. They basically will painstakingly recreate moments. One of the things is the Hart to Hart opening sequence.

Craig: That’s hysterical. Do you think these days it’s a little strange to think of Robert Wagner as a character who is constantly around people being murdered, because he was famously around when his wife, Natalie Wood, died.

John: Died in an accident.

Craig: Eh…

John: I don’t know. I do wonder how you’d do it now. I guess inspired by, we haven’t talked about Rian Johnson at all this episode, which is strange, but Rian Johnson’s-

Craig: That’s right.

John: His series with Natasha Lyonne, Poker Face, takes what we love so much about Columbo and finds a way to do it in modern times. I wonder what the 2023 update of Hart to Hart would be. I feel like it could be done. We still got rich people. We still have rich beautiful people.

Vince: That’s true.

Craig: Always.

Vince: We absolutely do.

Craig: Always.

John: Craig, any thoughts for a show you’d like to do if you reached back into the vault?

Craig: Sure. It’s famously impossible to do. I know this because I know the gentleman who made it. It was essentially impossible for them to keep up. The television show Police Squad, which was done by Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker. It was the forerunner of the Naked Gun movies.

It is incredible. It is one of my favorite childhood memories, because my father and I both were just howling at this thing, watching the television set, our square, tiny tube television set and just the two of us just absolutely rolling on the floor. It really defines so much of what I think of as funny.

Even though a lot of the references inside of it are rather old-fashioned, those guys have always loved to make fun of the old, old fashion, and really it was keying off of Dragnet, I suppose, in its style, more than anything else, which was before my time, I absolutely adored it.

It to this day features the single best joke I have ever heard in my life. This guy finds a man in his study who’s not supposed to be there. He says, “Who are you, and how did you get in here?” The man says, “I’m a locksmith, and I’m a locksmith.” That is the single greatest joke ever on television.

Vince: That is so smart.

Craig: It’s just so perfect. It’s full of stuff like that, absolutely full of things like that, visual jokes, weird verbal jokes. I don’t even know where you… They must be available somewhere to stream. Ultimately, David Zucker told me it was important to keep it up. You couldn’t write a show where there was a joke every 10 seconds and do it every week, week after week after week. It’s just not possible, but man, I wish it were.

Vince: Oh, man.

John: Craig, did we ever talk about Angie Tribeca? Because that’s probably the closest there’s been to a remake of it.

Craig: Yes, and that is in the style. Listen. It’s hard to hit. I should know because I’ve tried it. It’s hard to hit the heights of what those guys were able to do. It has been tried before. Maybe it was just a product of its time. Since then we’re so soaked in parody and satire everywhere we look that it’s just hard to make it seem fresh week after week. It’s really an alternate universe where it just never stopped. It just was never canceled-

John: Was always there.

Craig: … immediately, the way Police Squad was.

Vince: God, it was such a good show, Police Squad. I guess it started, as you said, with Airplane. It was so smart of those guys to hire Leslie Nielsen and Peter Graves and Lloyd Bridges. Those guys, kudos to them for getting it back when they were making Airplane, because none of those three guys were known for comedy at all.

Craig: No. In fact, I remember David telling me that when they said, “We want Leslie Nielsen to play the doctor,” they were like, “Leslie Nielsen? Leslie Nielsen’s the guy you go to when everyone else has said no. He’s not funny.” They were like, “No no no, you don’t understand. That’s the point.” In a weird way, it’s the opposite of what you do, because you take guys like Bryan Cranston and Bob Odenkirk and Lavell Crawford and you put them into dramatic roles. The ZAZ guys were like, “Let’s go find guys that are known for being stiffs and make a virtue out of it.” It was so much fun.

Vince: They were so much ballsier than we are. It’s easy to say, “Gee, if someone could be funny, they could play it straight.”

Craig: I’m with you on that one.

Vince: The way they did it, those guys were brilliant, Peter Graves. Oh, and Robert Stack is in there.

Craig: Robert Stack.

Vince: It’s one thing for the ZAZ guys to come up with that. My hat will eternally be off to them. Those old-school guys like Leslie Nielsen, who had a certain image that they might feel like they needed to protect, that was really ballsy of them-

Craig: It was.

Vince: … and just really great.

Craig: It was. They just went with it.

Vince: It was great. Remember the side gag in… The one I always remember in Police Squad, there was one guy in the squad, in the bull pen, who was so tall, you never saw his face. I guess they literally got a guy who was over seven feet tall. You only saw him from the shoulders down.

Craig: So great.

Vince: He’s always got a file folder in his hand. He comes up, walks past Leslie Nielsen. Leslie Nielsen says, “Hey, Bill,” or whatever his name was, “You got something on the side of your mouth.” The guy reaches up, and he says, “No, other side.” Half a banana falls down.

Craig: Yeah, just drops down. It’s so great. Oh, god. Anything in that room where they’re like, “Let me show you the… “ The guy who would show them the lab stuff, because it was always like the tall guy would go by, and then the scientist would be like, “Here, let me show you something in my microscope.” Leslie Nielsen would bend down and say, “I don’t see anything.” “Use your open eye, Frank.”

Vince: I love that stuff.

Craig: It’s just so great.

Vince: I love it. It’s so good. Oh, man.

John: Vince, how about you? Any shows you’d want to get a shot at remaking?

Vince: Oh, man, it’s a toughie, because I love old TV. I was just thinking of how much I just was such a fan of WKRP in Cincinnati growing up. Then the trouble is so much of a show like that is chemistry of those original actors, so seeing it rebooted with different actors, I don’t know, that would be tricky.

A show that pops in mind… I only recently became aware of this, and thanks to my friend Gordon Smith. This is a guy who started off as my assistant on Breaking Bad, and he is now an executive producer. He was an executive producer of Better Call Saul. He’s an executive producer on this new thing I’m working on. He’s an Emmy-nominated writer. He’s this really smart, really tuned-in guy.

I thought I was the Western guy in our writers’ room. He told me about a show called The Westerner, which probably some people listening in have heard of it. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t heard of it. It was a one-season show. It lasted 13 episodes, half a season back in the old days. It was a show created by Sam Peckinpah.

John: Oh, wow.

Vince: It aired in 1961. It starred Brian Keith, who was a really underrated actor, really wonderful actor. He was the dad on Family Affair. After that, he was on Hardcastle and McCormick and stuff like that. Really, really talented, talented actor.

He stars in this show called The Westerner. He is a cowboy who roams around the West, basically looking to support himself. He’s a saddle tramp. He wanders around with his dog. His dog’s name is Brown. It was the same dog who played Old Yeller in that famous movie. He basically wanders around the West looking for a job. He is really not that heroic. He’ll run from a fight sometimes. He can be greedy. He can be kind of venal.

It really was ahead of its time. It was really smart. It was the same time that Gunsmoke and The Rifleman and Bonanza were on the air. Actually, I love those shows, but the morality of those shows felt dictated by Colgate-Palmolive or whoever or Philip Morris or whoever the sponsors were. This thing was so far ahead of its time, it got canceled after half a season. It wouldn’t shock now like it did then. A show like that, that’d be interesting to see that rebooted.

John: Nice.

Craig: I’m just looking at this. It says one of the issues was that it was programed against ratings powerhouse The Flintstones.

John: Oh my god.

Vince: The Flintstones killed it. I think it would’ve been canceled no matter what, because he is shockingly unheroic at times, and in a way that it’s like a breath of fresh air. I could watch The Rifleman all day. I love The Rifleman. It was a great show. You watch three or four episodes of The Rifleman, and Lucas McCain is always doing the right thing, and then you see an episode of this and it’s like a breath of fresh air. It’s like, this is more like a real human being and not a superhero.

John: Great. Some good ideas for shows that we will never realistically remake. I’d be remiss if I didn’t end the segment by getting back to, Aline Brosh McKenna and I have always promised that we were going to someday remake… It’s Episode 100 I think, we decided we were going to do a remake of The Winds of War, the Herman Wouk mini series. At some point, that time will come. It’s going to happen.

Vince: Nice.

Craig: One day. One day.

Vince: You know he only died a year or two ago, Herman Wouk?

Craig: What? Really?

Vince: Am I right about this? Herman Wouk also wrote The Caine Mutiny, right?

John: He did, yeah.

Craig: I believe so. Yeah, you’re right, he died four years ago.

Vince: Four years ago.

John: Four years ago. He was 103 years old. Wow. That’s a long life.

Craig: He was 103. You know what? I got no chance. I got no chance. I’m not getting there. No way.

John: I could live a good, long time.

Craig: You think so?

John: I think I’ll keep going. I’ll keep going. My family lives a good long time.

Vince: Good for you.

Craig: I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to play what you just said at your funeral.

John: Oh my god, that’s really cruel. You’re assuming I’m going to die before you?

Craig: That’s what I’m saying. I’m just saying, you’ve opened up the universe to strike you down.

John: That’s true, I did.

Craig: To strike you down.

John: I walked into that. It’s true.

Craig: By the way, how weird would that be if I did play that at your funeral? People are like, “Why would you play that?” I’m like, “I’m just saying he was wrong.”

John: “Because I promised I would. I’m a man of my word.”

Craig: Listen, I promised I would. You know what? You know who would’ve loved it? Not John.

John: Vince Gilligan would’ve, because Vince Gilligan was on the episode.

Craig: That’s right.

John: That notable episode where John foretold his death.

Craig: Vince Gilligan, also alive.

Vince: For the time being anyway.

Craig: Oh, man.

John: It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thanks, Vince.

Vince: Pleasure talking to you guys. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

Links:

• Vince Gilligan on IMDb
• Vince Gilligan plays a prospector on Community (S5 E9)
• Walter Houston’s dance in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
• Dracula’s Kung-Fu Theatre
• Alien Tape
• Today Years Old on Twitter
• Robot Puppet Sings “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton by Ben Howard on YouTube
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Matt Davis (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](https://johnaugust.com/2022/marveling-with-michael-waldron).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 555 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, I’m talking with the Emmy Award-winning writer behind Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the Emmy Award-winning writer of Marvel’s Loki series, who happened to be the very same person. Welcome to the show, Michael Waldron.

**Michael Waldron:** Thanks for having me. Five hundred and how many?

**John:** Five hundred and fifty-five episodes.

**Michael:** Wow.

**John:** That’s a lot.

**Michael:** You brought me on for this milestone episode. Thank you so much.

**John:** This is the milestone, yes. Chris McCoy we always bring on every 200 episodes, to celebrate our bicentennial or whatever. You’re every whatever 555 is. That’s what you are.

**Michael:** I’ll see you the 1,010th episode.

**John:** That’s when we’ll bring you back on. By that point, we’ll have even more to talk about, but what I want to talk with you about today is the mushy boundaries between TV and movies and the role of writer and this weird transition and convergence that we’re facing. We’ll also have some listener questions that I think you’re especially well suited to answer. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk with you about Atlanta, because you’re from Atlanta. You live in Atlanta now while you’re shooting some stuff. It feels like all of Hollywood will eventually live in Atlanta. I’m hoping that maybe you can give our listeners your writer’s guide to Atlanta.

**Michael:** Cool, sounds great.

**John:** Let’s get into it. I’m just for the first time meeting you on this Zoom. I really have no idea about your backstory and how you became a writer. What is the quick Michael Waldron origin story?

**Michael:** Yes, I’m from Atlanta. I went to University of Georgia. I guess I graduated from college in 2010, which was a time that… It was before the whole movie industry had moved out here. It felt like being a screenwriter was an impossible thing to do. I had not grown up really writing scripts or anything. I just loved movies. I was going to go to law school, and at the last second was like, “I don’t want to be a lawyer. I just like watching Jeff Winger on Community. I like lawyers in movies and on TV.” I bailed on that, and I went out to California, which is the first time I’d even been. I’d never even seen the Pacific Ocean until I got out there.

I went to Pepperdine. They have a screenwriting MFA program, which was great for me. I fell under the tutelage of some really amazing mentors, a guy named Chris Chluess, who was the showrunner of Night Court for a long time, Emmy-winning writer and just a genius, and Sheryl Anderson, who’s the creator/showrunner, Sweet Magnolias on Netflix. I had some great professors. Before, I just knew how to write some jokes and some funny, stupid stuff. They really taught me how to write scripts. From there, I was fortunate enough to land an internship on the first season of Rick and Morty. That was really, really lucky. I was a huge fan of Dan Harmon, because I love Community, even when I was back in Georgia.

**John:** Before we get on there, I want to talk to you about film school here, because we get a lot of questions about like, “Oh, should I go to film school?” It sounds like for you, you were growing up in Atlanta, you were going to school in Atlanta, you were interested in film, so you just applied to film school and had no other plan or exposure to the film industry, other than like this is how you were going to get started, right?

**Michael:** Yeah. To me, it was the way I could wrap my head around getting out to LA, because I had no connections, knew nobody in the industry, had no way of getting a job. I was like, “I’ll just go into debt. I’ll just take on a lot of student loan debt.”

**John:** I want to get more, because we don’t have a lot of guests who actually went through film school. I went through film school for grad school. You show up. Is it a two-year program or a three-year program?

**Michael:** It’s a two-year program. I think you could take your time. I did it in two years because I wanted to get out and start working. The cool thing about Pepperdine was it was very practical. It was based on just writing pilots, specs. Each semester, you were creating an original piece of work. I had that very difficult process demystified for me very early on, where I was like, “Okay, I know how to write a pilot and create a world.”

Chris Chluess, my professor, did a great thing, where at the end of the semester, I took a half-hour comedy pilot writing class with him, where at the end you had to come in and pitch the show to him and an agent that he brought in. Only at the end did we learn that the agent was actually a real estate agent who was a neighbor of his in the Palisades. It was an incredible simulation of the pressure that I would go on to feel later in my career in some rooms where there’s some real skin in the game. I benefited from a couple of really fantastic professors.

**John:** You have good professors, but you obviously did something right while you were in that program. Imagine you’re a listener listening to this right now who is in a film program, is in a screenwriting program. What are things you could do in a screenwriting class to get the most out of it? What are the practical steps a student could take if you’re in one of those classes right now, to really dig the most out?

**Michael:** It’s the time. You’re paying a lot of money to be focused on writing. Now is the time. When I went there, I was still a lazy undergrad college kid. I had to shift out of that mentality and start learning how to be a professional writer, treat deadlines like real deadlines.

The other thing that was actually really helpful for me was the process of reading classmates’ stuff and giving notes on that, because that’s what you’re doing as a writer, especially in a writers’ room, all the time, is you’re reading stuff, you’re pitching, you’re giving feedback.

I was there with Eric Martin, a guy who became a close friend of mine and wrote on Loki with me, went on to work with me on Loki. He and I, we just said we’re going to treat each class like a writers’ room, and every script is a professional script that we want to try and get made with our feedback and everything. I think you just take it seriously. It really is one of those things that you get out of it what you put into it.

**John:** Yeah, because it’s not like going through a law program or a medical program where there’s clearly like, these are the things you’re going to learn, and you’re going to be tested on these things. It’s not that, because you could probably graduate that program and not really have learned a lot or not really have grown that much, correct?

**Michael:** A thousand percent. Also, your degree-

**John:** Has anyone ever asked for your degree?

**Michael:** Nobody cares. It’s worthless. You’re only there to learn, to make connections, and to hopefully come out of there with original material. That’s the other thing, samples that you can show to potential collaborators, people that are going to help you on your way up in the industry. I wrote the first draft of Heels, my show on Starz, in a class at Pepperdine. It was very, very helpful for me, because I was just finishing stuff.

**John:** Now, the other thing you got out of this program, apparently, was connections that got you an internship. You got an internship with Dan Harmon’s company. That was set up through the school?

**Michael:** It was set up through a buddy of mine who was a classmate, who was working on the first season of Rick and Morty. I had a chance to go on and be an intern on the first season, which was a blast.

**John:** We had Drew Goddard on the show, we’ve had Damon Lindelof on the show, who both said that working on a first season of the show was incredibly hard or being on the ground in a first season of the show was hard because everything was chaos and was constantly falling apart. Sometimes, because of the chaos, you could really learn a lot and you could see how it’s all being put together and be useful. Were you able to be helpful on that first season?

**Michael:** I think so. I think I totally benefited from the fact that it was a first season show. Nobody knew what it was going to be, at a little fledgling animation studio that Dan had just started with a couple of friends. I came in as the intern. The thing that I did is I made sure everybody knew from the beginning that I wanted to be a writer. That was who I was. Any time there was a hole that could be plugged with an intern who knew how to write, I was the first one to raise my hand.

The other thing that I did while I was there, weirdly, was I started a softball team, I guess as a stealth way to get to know Dan and Dino Stamatopoulos, one of the other owners. They played on the team. I was the coach. It worked out for me, because I went from being the intern to the coach. In that sense, I became a friend and a peer. That friendship led to my first real job as a writer’s PA on Season 5 of Community.

**John:** You talk about being an intern and offering to write anything they needed to have written. What are some examples of things you would’ve written as an intern on that show?

**Michael:** It wasn’t even necessarily Rick and Morty specific. It was just as simple as somebody’s got to make a sign to wash your hands or to wash the dishes in the kitchen. It’s like, that’s a chance to be creative. At some point, one of these great writers that’s working here you hope is going to see this stuff and say, “This is actually funny. Who’s doing this stuff?” You’re just trying to put yourself out there. Then writing coverage and just treating everything, every assignment like your life depends on it from a writing standpoint, because as far as I was concerned, it did.

**John:** You’re working there. You’re writing there on small things. When are you letting them or asking them to read the stuff you’ve been writing for Pepperdine? When are you asking if someone’s willing to read your samples?

**Michael:** A long time, if ever. I don’t know if I ever did. That was another great piece of advice I got from my mentor, Chris Chluess. He said, “Think of it. You’re sitting at a card table. You only get to cash in those chips, your equity with these guys, one time. You have to be really, really shrewd with where you asked for something, essentially.” It’s a political game. In fact, I think earlier in your career… Obviously, it’s harder now because not everything’s in person. You’re almost, I found, better off selling people on your personality as a colleague and as a collaborator, and then let them be blown away down the line when you’re actually a really good writer. I can’t remember how long it took for me to ask Dan to read something. It was years and years down from our relationship.

**John:** You’re starting off in Rick and Morty land. Then you’re going over to Community. You said you’re a writers’ room assistant?

**Michael:** I was the writer’s PA.

**John:** What was your job like doing that?

**Michael:** It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare.

**John:** Were you getting the lunch order?

**Michael:** Oh my god, the lunch, the dinner, the snack, the coffees, the midnight stack. It really was a blast, but that was a grind. I don’t know, there were like 13 writers that season. It was Season 5 of a network show, 13 or 14 writers. They had assistants. Each coffee order was a double decker, two boxes. I just remember trudging across Paramount with all that. I was getting lunches, getting meals and everything, but I asked Dan if when I wasn’t doing that, if I could sit in the writers’ room and just listen and learn. He was great, and he let me. Then I got to know all the other great writers there and suddenly had a whole new network of great mentors, which included Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who’d written all the Spider-Man movies. I would show up early to sit in Erik Sommers’s office and just ask him, “What does a manager do vs an agent? What does your attorney… ” I really benefited from there just being so many good folks who wanted to help me learn.

After a certain amount of time, I had I guess earned enough trust to open my mouth and start pitching bad jokes. I got to feel that feeling of, oh, I just pitched a joke that crashed and burned. It was no good. Then I got to feel the feeling of, the world didn’t end. Nobody cares, because everybody’s pitching stuff all day, and a lot of it dies. Then the next thing you know, you pitch something that makes it into the show, and you can tell your wife, “Hey, look, I wrote that joke.” I think that was 2014. We worked from June until January. It was crazy. The hours were insane. In a lot of ways, I feel like I learned everything there.

**John:** Now, there was an amazing chance to learn things there. We’ve been talking with support staff over the last couple years about those jobs and how underpaid they are and how hard it is for some people to make a living or even keep a roof over their head doing those jobs. Was that your experience? Was the pay low, the hours long? How were you surviving during that time?

**Michael:** You’re certainly not handsomely paid. On that show, we worked such insane hours that I was actually making a decent amount from overtime. I got some checks that I was like, “Holy crap.” I was lucky in that sense. The food budget was so astronomical. I was in charge of the food. There was always an extra pizza or a tray of sushi coming home with me. I figured out how to scrounge my way through life. Of course, it’s a grind. Everybody, all the support staff is working just as hard as the writers and as everybody else. We’ve got to take better care of those folks, because you can’t do the job without them.

**John:** Now, what is your transition from you’re sort of in the room on Community, you’re now a repped writer who’s making things? What was that transition? 2014 or so when you’re in this writers’ room. When do you start getting some stuff that is Michael Waldron as a writer in himself?

**Michael:** That was on the end of Community. I got an email from a guy on the support staff, another assistant, who said that a young agent was looking to discover talent on the support staff, which I know now, an absolute lie. I said, “Wow, this is my big shot.” I sent this supposed young agent the pilot for Heels. They responded. This guy named Harry turned out to just be the assistant to a manager, who was a guy my age, but wanted to meet me.

Long story short, the guy’s my manager until today. We met. We went to The Den in West Hollywood or something. I had my first experience of, oh wow, here’s a guy who feels like a real gatekeeper talking to me about an original script I wrote, giving me feedback but also talking like he wants to be an advocate for me, and he was. I did some revisions on that script based on his feedback and some other folks he introduced me to.

That kicked off I guess that first general meeting tour. You’re meeting the people your age. Everybody’s climbing the ladder at the same pace. You’re meeting young creative executives or assistants and people that are looking to be somebody who discovered someone. Through that, I guess I legitimized the project enough, and there was enough interest in it, that my manager’s company LBI actually took me on as a client. They called me in to their big office, and I sat on the giant table for network. I was like, “Oh my god.” It was like, “We want to rep you.” That felt like wow, I did it. Then of course, you didn’t do it. You didn’t do anything.

Shortly after that, I met a guy who was working at Paramount television who would go on to become one of my best friends. He really championed the show over there. In about 2015, 2016, Paramount Television optioned Heels. It was funny how it happened. He called me and he was like, “Yeah, we want to have a general with you. Some of my bosses read it.” Then on the way over, called me and was like, “No, this is a pitch. We’re really interested.”

**John:** Oh my god.

**Michael:** It’s like, I don’t know what happens in this show. This is a sample. There was a lot of tap dancing and making it up as I went, but they got it. I got really lucky to just get into development on something original of my own very young. I was just learning and getting to go through that process. You learn so, so much.

**John:** If we were to watch the pilot of Heels today, the series that exists, and the sample that you wrote in film school, how close are they?

**Michael:** The one that I wrote in film school was markedly worse. I actually can look and realize that my writing took a genuine professional leap after going through Community, working on Community, and then suddenly finding myself in real professional situations where the stakes are higher. That actually made me raise my game. It’s not just a homework assignment anymore. You realize that this is something I’m trying to get on television and change my life. I have to put everything I have into this. It’s a hell of a lot better.

**John:** At this stage, you’re working on Heels. It’s great to have development. This is actually getting money coming in the door, which is fantastic and probably much needed. Were you thinking, okay, now I should try to staff on TV, now I should try to write a feature? What were the other things you were thinking about doing? Obviously, it’s never just one job. You need to keep it going.

**Michael:** Money coming in the door was insane. I thought about staffing. I guess in my mind, I was like, “I’m a showrunner. I’m a creator. I’m a showrunner. I’m going to get this show made.” So naïve. So stupid. I was like 26. That was I was determined to do. I had the good fortune of I was continuing to work with Dan in a more producorial, executive context. I had some other money coming in the door. I was helping Dan develop some stuff as a producer, which I only knew anything about that because I was just going through it on my own on the other side. I hadn’t written a feature.

**John:** That’s crazy you had not written a feature, throughout the whole time in film school that you never finished one feature.

**Michael:** I thought I was going to be a comedy writer. I was mostly focused on that. Then I fell in love with the one-hour world. Like I said, I got lucky, and then Heels caught fire. People really responded to it. It always felt like it had so much momentum. I was like, “I don’t want to step away from this thing. I want to always be able to run it.” Now, I remember I applied for the WGA Showrunner Training Program. In my interview, they were like, “Why are you applying for… Why don’t you go get a staff job? What are you doing?” I was like, “I don’t know, I’m a writer.”

**John:** I had the experience where I had a very hot script go that was getting a lot of attention. I was able to sell a TV show and make a TV show, a one-hour TV show for the WB. I was a showrunner who had no business being a showrunner. I think the WGA folks would’ve looked at me as well and said, “Why the hell are you doing… You should not be doing this.” I wish someone had pulled me aside to tell me that.

**Michael:** I needed it, yeah, jeez, because eventually, I would get into that position a year later and have no clue what I was doing.

**John:** It was just rough. Jump us forward a little bit in time to… Was Heels the first thing of yours that was wholly yours that got made?

**Michael:** No, the first thing that was wholly mine that got made was Loki.

**John:** Did Loki come out before Heels?

**Michael:** Yeah, Loki came out last June, and Heels came out in August. Long story short, what happened was Heels went to a mini room that I ran, as an idiot, but had a great writing staff. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know how to lead a writing staff. I had some great collaborators and ended up writing a great season. We just couldn’t cast it, couldn’t cast the show. Starz put it on a shelf. I was like, “That’s it for me. I’m moving home. That’s end. That’s the end of my meteoric rise.” I licked my wounds, wrote a feature, just to do it, and then went off and actually got that staffing experience on Rick and Morty.

I was a writer and producer on Season 4 of Rick and Morty, went back and got to feel like what it was like on the other side of the whiteboard, which was very helpful, to be a showrunner, to know what your writers are feeling like and their anxieties as they’re pitching and coming in every day. Then right toward the end of Season 4, that feature that I’d written made its way over to Marvel. It was a time travel action comedy that just happened to be the perfect sample for the Loki show they were developing. That’s how I got in the game on that project.

**John:** Great. Now, before we get into Loki here, I do want to talk about the mini room you did for Heels. How many writers did you have in that room? You said you did it wrong. Tell us some lessons you learned in doing it wrong.

**Michael:** There was six of us, I believe. I didn’t know how to synthesize all of my writers’ tremendous ideas while still making it be my vision. That was just a hard thing of how do I take what your room is wanting it to be and reconcile that with what I want it to be. Every day I walked away being like, “Am I making the show I even want to make?” Then I wasn’t really giving them great instructions for the first half of the room. It took a while for me to realize that at least my best approach to a writers’ room is if you’re the showrunner, if it’s your thing, then your writers’ room is an extension of your vision, the voices in your head.

The best thing I think you can do as a showrunner is just listen, is to throw something out there, an idea that you’re interested in pursuing, part of your vision, and then let your writers take it somewhere really, because that’s what you’ll be doing at home in your head anyways. Here you have the benefit of great professionals who can do it out loud. It just took me a while to realize that that was the way to do it as opposed to I was a guy who was used to just sitting at home on my couch writing and doing it all on my own. That’s what I had to learn is you don’t have to do it all on your own.

**John:** Now, when Heels finally did shoot, were they using the scripts that you had come out of from that room, or did you have to go back and take everything out of that?

**Michael:** It was a combination. The first half of the season was pretty much locked and loaded. We needed to do big revisions on the back half. They brought in Mike O’Malley, the great writer and actor who had created Survivor’s Remorse for Starz, brought in him as showrunner. It was crazy, because it really did feel like I was giving my baby to someone. When they wanted to revive it in 2019, I was off doing Loki, and so there was no way I could do it. I had to give Mike the keys to this car that was very personal to me. Really, I owe Heels everything. I owe it my life, those characters and that world. He was just so gracious and generous and made the show better every step of the way. That in itself was a great learning experience of the ultimate collaboration, giving something so personal to someone else.

**John:** Let’s jump ahead to Loki here. I want to talk through the process from, okay, Michael, you got the job to now the cameras are rolling and we’re starting to shoot this show. What time frame was that? What were the steps along the way? They’re meeting with you. You’re pitching how you would do it. You get the job. What is your first step? Are you making documents just by yourself? Are you immediately going into a room situation? What is the process like for this Marvel series?

**Michael:** It was really the dawn of the Marvel series. Loki was the third or fourth one to go. It was at first very solitary. It felt almost like I guess developing a feature. Then it was just meeting with our executive team and pitching on… The core idea they had was, here’s Loki, and it’s Loki and the TVA. The pitch that I developed was where does it go from there. It’s Loki hunting a variant of himself across time.

Once I got the job, first off there was a process of mourning leaving Rick and Morty, where I’d been for nine months and created a lot of great friendships and was very comfortable. There was a real comfort level there. I was going into a situation of total unknown. It was hiring a staff and launching a room. This time around, I knew what I was doing.

On the first day of the Heels writers’ room, the only person I actually knew what to tell to do was the writers’ PA. I was like, “Here’s how the lunch order should go,” because that was the job I had had. On the first day in the Loki writers’ room, I knew I have a vision for how I want this story to go, and I want us to all get there together.

**John:** Is everybody looking at the same document? Are you talking at them for an hour about the big, broad strokes vision? What are those initial conversations?

**Michael:** There was a core document that I… They read my pitch that I gave to Kevin Feige that got me the job. It was pretty thorough. Here are the six episodes. Honestly, they’re generally what the episodes ended up being. Episode 3 is Loki and Sylvie are crossing a moon together. Then you want to hear, okay, my brilliant writers, what do you think the best version of a Loki show can be? They know the general framework and where I and Marvel would like to take it.

In the case of that show, our first job was let’s figure out the emotional story of this thing. Let’s figure out what each of the six episodes is. We can say Episode 2 is the zodiac episode. Episode 3 is Before Sunrise. We know what each episode is. Then we had to take about two weeks and just do time travel, which was its own… That was a new experience of really doing a sci-fi camp together, of a lot of us drawing lines, squiggly lines on the whiteboard, and just trying to create a shared institutional language of what is time travel in this show, what is a time law, how can it be broken, because we had to all be on the same page. By the end, it felt like we’d been in the writers’ room for 60 weeks, not 3 or 4.

**John:** That first writers’ room was how many weeks long?

**Michael:** Twenty, and that was it.

**John:** Was it enough?

**Michael:** It was enough to get solid first drafts of everything. The one tricky part of it is I hadn’t written the pilot. That’s the one atypical part of the process there was I hadn’t written the pilot as the writers’ room launched. It was about 9 or 10 weeks in, it became really important for me to get a decent version of the pilot written so that we could establish the tone of the show. Otherwise, it becomes really hard to write a writer’s draft if you don’t really know what the tone of the show is going to be.

**John:** For sure. During this 20 weeks, you guys are breaking these 6 episodes. Were there story areas? Were there outlines? What are the actual written documents that are coming out of this process, before there are scripts?

**Michael:** Everything starts with me with a story circle, which comes from the Dan Harmon camp.

**John:** Very familiar, yes.

**Michael:** From the Dan Harmon camp. That was how we broke our stories, which probably drove everybody else crazy, because I think everybody else prefers to do note cards. Even I am like, note cards are probably more efficient. It was outlines. It was let’s get a beat sheet that we feel good about and then let’s send a writer off to write an outline. That outline goes up the flagpole. Once that’s approved, we’ll write a draft.

**John:** A beat sheet is one to two pages. An outline is longer. Are those the right lengths?

**Michael:** Yeah, I think our outlines were, I don’t know, never more than 10 pages. Again, that’s probably a function of my own personal style. I am a bad planner. I like to discover it on the page. I’m more apt to send someone off to outline or to script with a little less figured out and leave some room for discovery, which is exactly what happened in Loki Episode 102 a lot. So much of the great stuff with Loki and Mobius in that episode was Elissa Karasik, our writer. I just trusted her to go off and say, “Go figure some of this stuff out,” and she did. It was all great. I was glad that we didn’t waste time in the room trying to figure out all the details when you can just rely on your writers to do that.

**John:** Is the first time the studio is seeing the specifics of what happens, are they seeing [inaudible 00:33:17] or they’re seeing the outline?

**Michael:** In the Loki process, we actually had our executives, our producers in the room with us. It was atypical but really fantastic.

**John:** Were they listening or contributing?

**Michael:** Contributing. It was great. It was like having other writers, other producers, somebody there who, A, is incredibly steeped in the Marvel lore, what’s come before. They also know what’s coming next. The most important role that is Stephen Broussard and Kevin Wright, they’re producers, but they’re also filmmakers. They may as well have been writers on our team for all the great ideas they had. Some of the most valuable things they did was know the stuff that Kevin Feige and the higher-ups were not going to respond to. Instead of spending five days in the room chasing a storyline that’s just going to end up being an absolute non-starter, you’ve got somebody to say, “No, don’t go there. I don’t think anybody’s going to really respond to that.” As a showrunner, or as somebody running a room, that is invaluable to not have to burn that time.

**John:** Jac Schaeffer was on the show, and she was talking about how on the first day of her writers’ room, she had up on all the walls all this imagery about what she wanted the show to look like and feel like, because she was in a physical room. You were in a physical room your whole time too, because this is all pre-pandemic.

**Michael:** Yes, I was in a physical room. The first time I walked by Jac’s room and saw it, absolutely, I was like, “I got to quit.” I was like, “This is a nightmare. I’m bad at my job,” because we shared a wall. They were the room right next to us. You look in there, and I was like, “Oh my god, it’s so organized.” By the way, her writer’s assistant was a guy named Clay Lapari, who was the writer’s assistant on Community with me a hundred years ago. It all comes back around. I came in, I was like, “We got to print some pictures out.” We did. I felt better once we had that stuff up there.

**John:** Earlier you referenced on Heels this other guy, Mike O’Malley, was coming in to be a showrunner on that show, and yet you’re listed as head writer on Loki. What is the distinction? Is there a meaningful distinction? Job-wise, what he was doing versus what you’re doing, are they similar?

**Michael:** The Marvel shows don’t have a showrunner. I guess the best way I know to put it is it’s you and the director, whoever the producing director is, you’re passing a baton over to them and working in tandem together, whereas if you’re Mike O’Malley, the showrunner, he’s the final say over the head of directors on set, through the edit, through everything.

The Marvel process is I guess a much more collaborative one, where at least in TV I’m not necessarily the final say. I was like, “There’s definitely an opportunity to have my ego bruised by this.” You realize, “I’m not the showrunner of this.” Then quickly it’s like, “I just want the show to be great.” When we hired Kate, her and I were so instantly on the same page creatively, and her level of ambition with the show matched mine. It was like, “This is going to be good. This is going to work.”

**John:** This is Kate Herron, the director?

**Michael:** Yes.

**John:** At what point in the process did she come on board and did you start having these conversations? Was the room finished? Was the room still going?

**Michael:** Yeah, maybe, I don’t know, a month or two prior. She came in at a great time in the process where we had our first drafts. I was making my way through my revisions on everything. She represented just creative, fresh eyes. I’m like, “Hey, we’ve all gone insane this summer making this crazy time travel show. Does this make any sense to you as a normal person?” Also, a practical filmmaker’s perspective. We’ve got a trained heist sequence. I could sit with Kate so I’m not wasting a week writing an action sequence that is simply un-renderable on screen.

**John:** I want to get to some listener questions, but I don’t want to skip all over Doctor Strange and your involvement on Doctor Strange. I’ve done a zillion features. This was your first feature to do. How did you take your experiences on these TV shows and apply it here? Did they apply? What did it feel like to be a writer on a feature?

**Michael:** Weirdly, it felt like TV. Sometimes it felt like showrunning. That’s just a testament to how collaborative Sam Raimi is and that he empowered me so much. He and I had a really special kinship together, forged by the fact that we were coming up with a movie over the course of 2020 when the world was ending around us. I was not on set of Loki. I was getting ready to fly to Atlanta to be on set. I got a call that said, “We need you more right now on Doctor Strange.”

**John:** Doctor Strange was shooting in London?

**Michael:** Shooting in London. Then COVID hit, and it became the last two and a half years of my life. I was on set every day of Doctor Strange. I was there for six months last year locked down in London. When I think about Doctor Strange, really I think about it as much of a filmmaking experience as a writing one. I was writing, but it was also just so much working with our actors and working alongside and learning from Sam about directing and everything he does. When I think about Doctor Strange, I just think about being cold on set in London.

**John:** A lot of being on set is just being cold or hot or being in the sun when you don’t want to be in the sun.

**Michael:** Exactly.

**John:** Or cursing the sun for coming up when you’re supposed to be shooting nights and you run out of night.

**Michael:** Precisely. It was an absolute adventure that didn’t… Probably 2020 and 2021 for a lot of people doesn’t quite feel real, but yet again was an amazing experience, where I just got to learn so much.

**John:** Great. We have some listener questions. This first one I see is actually about film school. It feels like exactly what we should have you talk to us about. Megana, what’s the first question here?

**Megana Rao:** Live and Die By Approval from Columbus, Ohio wrote in, “I was recently accepted to USC School of Cinematic Arts. As a country bumpkin from the shire of Ohio in the twilight of his 20s, this is an honor and huge dream come true. Recently, we had a meeting about financial aid options. The thing I most anticipated hearing about were merit-based scholarships. Turns out they emailed everyone who had received a scholarship earlier that day, and I received no such email. It’s funny, despite having gotten into one of the most competitive film schools in the world, I already feel like I’m not enough. If this class is a group of people who they view as having a unique voice among thousands of other voices, I somehow feel like I’m already on the low end of this elite totem pole.

“I guess I’m asking for any words of advice you may have on handling rejection or I’m not enough self-judgments. It’s one thing to battle those voices in your personal life. In dating, for instance, sometimes people just don’t fit. It’s another thing entirely when there’s something as measurable as money at stake to validate your insecurities.”

**John:** To summarize, Live and Die has gotten into a great film school but feels bad because they didn’t get a merit-based scholarship. They feel like they’re coming in at the bottom of this class or not at the top of this class.

**Michael:** As somebody who got rejected from USC’s screenwriting program, I would say congratulations. Also, your ability to focus on defeat, even in the glow of victory, means you’ll probably be a very successful writer, because that is a quality we all share.

If I’m reading between the lines of that, I know what it’s like to feel like a country bumpkin wanting to go out to Hollywood and make it. I’d say first off, that is a voice that needs to be… Shit, I’ve made a career out of it. Hollywood needs country bumpkins too. It is an honor to get in, and Hollywood does need your voice, clearly, or you wouldn’t have gotten accepted. I think rejection that is tied to finances is a bummer. That’s just your first lesson in film school, because that is going to be your whole career is rejection tied to finances. Steel yourself now.

**John:** I would say, Live and Die, that you’re having a feeling, and feelings don’t come from logic. Sometimes we try to use logic to justify the feelings that we’re having. If we actually check the facts, you got into one of the best film schools in the country, if not the best film school. This obsession with a merit-based scholarship is like… What are they actually measuring? Do you even know how many people are getting them, why people get them? Do the people who get them succeed more often than the people who don’t?

I think just hearing Michael on this podcast today, he was talking about how you get value out of film school. It’s actually by showing up and just doing the work all the time and try to do your very best in it. So often, I think as writers, we were probably really good at being in school and were probably really good at getting grades and everyone commending for our writing. Suddenly, when you get into a place where you’re not necessarily the best, you panic that you’re the worst. That’s just not true. You could come in there with a head of steam and actually get amazing stuff done while you’re in film school. I understand your feelings, but you got to push them aside and be excited to be at USC. Megana, do we have another question?

**Megana:** Yes. Cherry asks, “After years of struggling to break in, I’ve signed my first contract to write a feature, and it will qualify me for the WGA. I’m thrilled to finally be in the game, but now the real work begins. My primary focus is nailing it with this project. My question is, what should I be doing to prepare myself for the next step?

“I have new spec scripts that will be ready to share soon. I’ve had a couple meetings with managers and an offer of representation. I have a light relationship with some producers, agents, and development execs who have read my work. How do I go about getting the next job or getting my new material in front of the right people? It seems like the next step would be to sign with a manager, but I’m not sure how to navigate that. What am I looking for in a manager? More importantly, what am I looking to avoid in a manager? If I didn’t work with a manager at this stage, what would an alternative game plan be?”

**John:** Michael, you’ve had a manager all this time. Talk to us about managers.

**Michael:** My relationship with my two managers has been one of the most important parts of my career, as has my relationship with my agents. I’ve had the same team my whole career, which is atypical. My answer to that is it’s all personality base. I am teamed with people that I click with on a personal level whose values align with mine. It’s not based on agency or management company clout. Wherever you’re going to seek representation, I wouldn’t even say tell yourself you need a manager vs an agent. You need somebody that you connect with and that can be an advocate for you. That’s the most important thing.

Then as far as what is that next thing, it’s doing a great job on the project you just landed, which is amazing. Congratulations. That is the most important thing. That’s what will get you the next jobs is kicking ass on the thing you just got hired on. Really, don’t think too much beyond that other than maybe know what is the one thing that I have behind this that I believe in the most that I would show someone when that next opportunity comes calling.

**John:** You’re going to probably end up signing with some manager, Cherry, who is going to take you on the water bottle tour of Los Angeles that Michael was describing earlier where they just sit you in a bunch of rooms and you talk with people. That’s good. That’s a natural function. Whether it’s this person who’s already introduced themselves to you and wants to represent you… Maybe it’s them.

A really good place to check on that is the other producers you have light relationships with. Ask them. Say, “Hey, this person offered to represent me. What do you think of this person? Is this a good match?” If not, they might suggest a better person or a different person you could meet with. All of my previous assistants have gone on to have writing careers, and most of them had managers. In every case, they would come to me like, “I think this person is great, but I get a weird feeling.” If you get a weird feeling, that’s not the right person. You should not sign with a manager or a representative or a lawyer who you dread taking their phone calls or dread getting their emails. It has to be somebody you’re excited to be on the phone with, because otherwise it’s just not going to work.

**Michael:** Hundred percent agree with that.

**John:** Megana, do you have another question for us?

**Megana:** Yes. Moomin asks, “In the conception phase before any word of the screenplay is put to paper, what tools or methods do you both use to keep everything organized? Where do you compile all your thoughts, ideas, and bits and pieces?”

**John:** What are you doing for that stuff, Michael?

**Michael:** Not being as efficient as I should. A lot of my writing is done walking my dog, going for walks in the woods, or driving around. Then as far as recording it, it’s usually going onto my iPad and doing story circles and stuff.

**John:** Are you doing story circles just with a pen and drawing?

**Michael:** Yeah, just to get it down. In the inception phase, that’s what I’m doing. I spend a lot of time just daydreaming. I don’t necessarily need to write it all down, because I feel like anything that I don’t remember probably wasn’t that good of an idea to begin with. It’s the stuff that I can’t let go of, finally I know it’s time to put this down. Then when I’m actually writing a script, my process becomes really inefficient, because the way I’ll write a scene is I’ll just retype it over and over and over again, making little, minute changes here and there, because I just need to… It’s how I play the scene out in my head is typing it out.

**John:** I loop scenes just in my head first. I have the blocking for everybody and the rough dialog. I will do a scribble version, which I’m just like, the quickest version on paper I can possibly get down so I don’t forget it. Then I’ll start tackling the scene. I’ll know that sometimes in this loose version, some stuff’s just not making sense. I’ll work on that when I get to the real final version. That scribbling process isn’t part of my overall note taking or overall recordkeeping.

I think more what Moomin’s asking for is those general ideas that come to you, you don’t want to lose. I’ll have index cards everywhere. I’ll just scribble it down on an index card. Then I just try to process those once a day. I just put them in. Now we’re using Notion, but we used to use other tools for that, just so they are someplace. I don’t look back to that that often, but sometimes I do need to find that thing, or if at least it’s in the same document, I can say, oh, all of these ideas go together, and they fit in a meaningful way. If I don’t write something down, I’m going to have to keep spending brain cycles to remember it, because it’ll go away. I want to use those brain cycles to do new stuff, rather than just remembering stuff.

**Michael:** That’s how I end up looking back in my Notes app. I’m like, “2016 Moby Dick in space?”

**John:** Fantastic.

**Michael:** What an idea.

**John:** It’s come time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our listeners. Michael, do you have something to recommend to the folks listening to this podcast?

**Michael:** Yes. A cool thing that I’m going to recommend is giving blood, which is a cause that has become near and dear to my heart. One of my best friends, a writer and actor named Breck Denny, who was a member of the Groundlings, he passed away earlier this year. He was a beneficiary of a lot of blood donations. They were trying to save him. Cycled through an outrageous amount of blood in the hospital. What I learned on the other end of that process is just how bad of a blood shortage there is in the country right now and how far a single blood donation can go. We’re at a historic shortage of blood in the country.

My buddy, he was one of the first people to get COVID back in 2020. After that, he started giving blood religiously, so they could test blood, and was actually part of vaccine trials and everything. He was just a great guy. As a way to honor him, we created a blood drive called Blood for Breck. You can find it in my Instagram bio. I think it’s on my Twitter. You can go there and pledge to give blood.

Really, giving blood, it’s an awesome thing that you go, you do it for 30 minutes, you get to take a picture. It just makes such a difference. It really does save lives. I don’t know. I feel like in a day and age where we spend a lot of time being like, “How can I help?” and it’s like, if I just do an online challenge and donate money, where does that money go? What is this? A bag of your blood is going to go into somebody’s body that’s fighting for their life. It’s just not a thing I ever really thought about until this touched our world, and so now it’s something I’m passionate about.

**John:** That’s great. Back in college I donated blood and loved donating blood. As of right now, we’re recording this in Pride month of 2022, gay men still can’t donate blood in the US, which is crazy. There’s lots of work being done to try to fix that problem. If you can donate blood, donating blood is a great idea. We’ll put a link in the show notes to your blood donation charity and some other blood donation drives out there across the country.

**Michael:** Great.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is this essay I read this week by Elizabeth Williamson in Slate. It was an excerpt from her book about Sandy Hook. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this. I’ve always been fascinated by conspiracy theorists and people who believe in impossible things. The people who believe school shootings didn’t happen are just this weird, special breed. This is what the article’s really getting into. This one talks about this Tulsa grandmother who goes by the handle gr8mom and really dives into why is she going after parents of Sandy Hook families and continues to believe that all these school shootings are nonsense, and digs into it.

It describes a dark triad of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, which is basically you really fundamentally cannot convince them that this is not the way it is. There’s no reasoning with them. They literally just cannot be swayed from the path that they think they’re on. If you point out any inconsistency in their logic, they will “what about” to get to another thing.

It wasn’t a hopeful article to be reading, but I think it actually helped me understand more like, oh, they’re actually just psychopaths, really, some of the people who are believing the wildest of these things. As opposed to other people who get sucked into it and they can be talked out of it, there are some people who are just never going to be talked out of this, and maybe we shouldn’t try.

**Michael:** You found some depression I hadn’t even thought about in a while. That’s great.

**John:** Absolute pleasure to have you on the show this week. That’s our program. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ryan Gerberding. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Michael, are you on Twitter? That’s where I reached out to you the first time.

**Michael:** Yes, @michaelwaldron and on Instagram @fakemichaelwaldron.

**John:** Love it. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We have one Loki-inspired T-shirt, which you should check out. Our 10th anniversary T-shirt is Loki-inspired. Our designer Dustin Box did a great job making it feel both like Scriptnotes and like Loki.

You can find the show notes to this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. You can sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record about Atlanta. In the meantime, Michael Waldron, thank you so much for coming on Scriptnotes and sharing your history here.

**Michael:** Thanks for having me. It was an honor. I’ll see you after another 555 episodes.

**John:** It’s going to be great. We’ll be living in the future.

**Michael:** Yes, exactly.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** We’re back, and we’re here with Michael Waldron, who is not only a film writer and a TV writer, he is a person who came from Atlanta, who now works in Atlanta. We will all inevitably now work in Atlanta, it seems. Can you give us some tips for… Let’s say I’m a Los Angeles person who is moving to Atlanta for work, to work on a thing. Where should I live in Atlanta? What should I do in Atlanta? Give me an overview of life in Atlanta for a writer.

**Michael:** Right now I think the heat index is 106 degrees, so don’t come. That’s my biggest advice.

**John:** We won’t. Okay, done, won’t come.

**Michael:** It’s great here. It’s been amazing to watch the city become more progressive and grow up as the years have passed. As far as living, the places that you’re going to feel the most like LA, like what you’re used to probably, it’s Inman Park is what you always hear, down south side of the city. Inman Park, Grant Park, Old Fourth Ward.

**John:** What are the Los Angeles equivalents of any of these neighborhoods? What’s the Silver Lake?

**Michael:** Inman Park is like the Silver Lake. It’s like one big Silver Lake. There’s a bunch of different areas around there. That’s probably the place to look at if you’re moving that’ll feel like LA. It’s very walkable. Atlanta’s great. There’s a thing called the BeltLine. It’s a sidewalk. It’s a sidewalk that stretches throughout the entire city. You can walk or bike across the whole city. There’s great restaurants and breweries and all sorts of stuff all around it. Inman Park or anywhere right around there, that’s going to be your best bet.

**John:** If I’m moving to Inman Park, but I’m working on a Marvel property, a Marvel project, how long is my commute to get from where I’m living to-

**Michael:** Marvel, we shoot all our stuff down at… It’s called Trilith Studios now, which is the old Pinewood, which is in Fayetteville, which is… I don’t know, it’s about a half hour with traffic and stuff. If you’re from LA, you’re not going to be daunted by any of the travel times out here, unless there’s a wreck on 85. Then you’ll be like, “What on earth?”

**John:** Like, what choices have you made?

**Michael:** You can get screwed, but it’s nothing. The traffic here, it’s as congested as LA, but somehow you’re always still going 80. It’s like Nascar. Get ready. It’s an intense vehicular experience.

**John:** Now, when I’ve been shooting things in Vancouver or Toronto, one of the things we have to watch for is any line that a local player has to say that has a U sound in it, so no “abouts” and that sort of problem. There are certain lines we’re going to write around certain things. Is there any local casting things you should be aware of if you’re filming something in Atlanta that is not supposed to be in Atlanta?

**Michael:** I’m always delighted with the local casting around here. It’s some real talented folks. What wouldn’t you want? I don’t know, if you can write stuff with Southern accents, you’re going to have an easier time. That’s for sure.

**John:** Now, something like Loki, which obviously had a tremendous amount of set work, you had some real practical exteriors as well in that show, because the main… Or at least the places that weren’t sound stages, like that TVA building. Was that a real building?

**Michael:** The shot of the archives with the elevators coming down, yeah, that’s an old hotel in Atlanta. Everything else was, generally in the TVA, that was a practical set that we built down there at Trilith. That was Kasra Farahani, our brilliant production designer.

**John:** Are people who have to come into Atlanta and leave from Atlanta, are there now direct flights? Are there enough direct flights that you can always get back and forth reliably or are you flying two places now?

**Michael:** It’s so easy out of LA. There’s probably eight or nine flights out of the day. Atlanta, it’s the Delta hub. The airport is massive. You’ll never want to go back to LAX after you’ve been to the Atlanta Airport. Before COVID, they’d added direct Burbank to Atlanta flights, which were really nice, but they were always on planes that felt like they were from the ‘60s. You’d get excited, and you’d take them, and then it was a real like, “I don’t know about this.” You’re normally on a nice airbus if you’re flying Delta to and from LA. It’s pretty easy travel-wise.

**John:** Now today, a lot of productions have moved to Atlanta, obviously. How much post-production on these shows is happening in Atlanta versus other places in the world? Is any writing happening in Atlanta? I feel like maybe Walking Dead maybe did writing in Atlanta. Do you see either writing or more post happening there?

**Michael:** I don’t know. I’m certain there’s got to be post going on here. Maybe, sure, Adult Swim does some of their stuff. None of my shows have posted here. That’s all still LA. Writing-wise, still LA, but maybe in the future. I think that if you were doing something that was very specifically Southern, maybe it would be helpful to immerse yourself in the fast food and the fried catfish and stuff for a couple weeks.

**John:** You as a student who was going to high school and then college in Atlanta, there would’ve been opportunities for you now to be working on sets and doing PA kind of stuff…

**Michael:** Totally.

**John:** …that there wouldn’t have been before.

**Michael:** I was an extra. They were shooting a Revenge of the Nerds reboot that got killed. I got to be an extra in it. I was like, “The movies came to Atlanta. I can’t believe it.” Now it’s everywhere. I think, yeah, if you’re a kid now who loves show business, you can just get out there and do anything, put honey buns in a basket somewhere as a PA, and you’re going to meet people who can help you get that next job.

**John:** This is not a specific Atlanta question, but what’s your instinct on writers’ rooms going back to in person versus staying virtual? What’s the split going to be? Is it mostly going to be in person? Is it mostly going to be virtual?

**Michael:** I guess it’ll be dictated by showrunners. Generally, I think people prefer to work in person. You just get better work. I think about so many of our great ideas come from just the moment, the times after lunch when you’re screwing around. It’s like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Loki went to Walmart?” and suddenly-

**John:** Then he’s at Walmart, yeah.

**Michael:** That’s not how that came about, by the way. That was just an example. I think it’ll go back to in person, but probably not the five days out of the week grind. Like in anything in show business, there can be a lot of wasted time in a writers’ room. Hopefully, if we go back to in person, we retain the efficiencies that we’ve picked up from doing it on Zoom.

Links:

* [Michael Waldron](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5642271/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/michaelwaldron?lang=en) and on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/fakemichaelwaldron/?hl=en)
* Donate blood with the Red Cross [#BloodforBreck](https://sleevesup.redcrossblood.org/campaign/blood-for-breck-the-breck-denny-memorial-blood-drive/)
* [“Prove to the World You’ve Lost Your Son”](https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/06/shooting-school-texas-uvalde-sandy-hook-conspiracy.html) by Elizabeth Williamson for Slate from [Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1524746576/?tag=slatmaga-20)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Ryan Gerberding ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/555standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/20-questions-with-craig).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 544 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Last week, Megana and I answered 20 listener questions without Craig. This week he’s doing the same without me, because I am not here. This introduction is prerecorded and the show is completely in the hands of Craig and producer Megana Rao, so God help us all. I now turn over hosting duties to them.

**Craig:** Hosting duties belong to us. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Megana and I will finally have a chance to discuss millennial stuff. Megana, welcome to our show.

**Megana Rao:** Thank you, Craig. Thank you for having me.

**Craig:** We both feel a little bit naughty right now. I think that would be fair to say, right?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You mentioned that we felt a little bit like perhaps when the teacher leaves the classroom and we’re put in charge of the class but we’re not really in charge of the class, or like if our dad owned a store and he left and we had to work the cash register.

**Megana:** It’s like, what amount of freedom do I have but I still care about the store?

**Craig:** Because you’re the good kid, and I’m the kid that clearly doesn’t care. If something goes wrong, ultimately you’ll be held responsible, not only by our parent, but by your own overactive conscience. You also love me, so you’re really torn here. You’re in a tough spot. All we can do is talk about keyboards. Logitech K860 does have Bluetooth, Megana. Are you aware of this?

**Megana:** Yes.

**Craig:** We’re getting into follow-up here. This is what John would normally structure for us. I’m going to read this. Joseph wrote in regarding the keyboard discussion. He went through the same journey that I did, from Microsoft Sculpt to Logitech K860. He knows that he’s never been tempted by John’s crazy, inverted thing, and neither has anyone else.

**Megana:** Have you ever tried using it?

**Craig:** Yeah, I did. I think at his house I sat down and did it for a minute and went, “Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope.”

**Megana:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Joseph was saying while the Logitech does work with Logitech dongles, it also works with regular Bluetooth. What? What? I’m going to have to try that shortly. That’s exciting. I’m into that. Oh my god. Then apparently you and John took a typing test.

**Megana:** In Episode 543 that John and I recorded, we followed up on the touch typing conversation you guys had, because I was feeling very insecure that I didn’t know what touch typing was, and that maybe I didn’t know how to type properly, but turns out I do.

**Craig:** Oh, Megana.

**Megana:** I took a typing test.

**Craig:** This is so good.

**Megana:** I got 81 words per minute and 100% accuracy.

**Craig:** I think anyone over 70 I think is starting to get into really good territory. Once you hit 100, you’re getting into zip zip, and then anything over that, you’re talking about professional stenographers and so forth. 81 words a minute is terrific. It’s terrific.

**Megana:** Thank you. Thank you. John got a 62 on his stand-up keyboard.

**Craig:** Which means probably on a regular keyboard he would be 4,000 words a minute.

**Megana:** Exactly, in the hundreds for sure.

**Craig:** It sounds like I’m going to have to take this one. Once we finish recording here, I’ll sit down and bang this out and report back dutifully.

**Megana:** Perfect.

**Craig:** How I do. Megana, for the love of God, just honestly. Apparently, there’s a bonus question here.

**Megana:** Yes. Today we’re going to get into 20 questions that listeners have wrote in for you.

**Craig:** Oh, my. Oh, my.

**Megana:** There was one question that came in through Twitter that asked, “Did Megana take Craig’s advice to watch Barton Fink?” As follow-up, we’re going to answer that here. I have watched Barton Fink now. I really enjoyed it. I understand why you recommended it to me.

**Craig:** I’m glad that you liked it. Obviously, a lot of Barton Fink is somewhat obtuse by design, but it’s an incredible view of the screenwriter, both as victim and also as wretch. Dig in a little bit. Tell me what struck you about it. I’m curious.

**Megana:** First of all, absolutely unexpected turn of events in it. Brilliantly executed and very satisfying by the end. As I was watching it, I was like, “Where could this possibly go?” I’m not sure that I had any of my questions really answered, but I felt very pleased by the end.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**Megana:** Barton Fink as a character was so painful to watch, perhaps because of some self-loathing, him talking over John Goodman’s character about how much he wants to be the voice of the common man and never lets him speak.

**Craig:** The common man. “You don’t listen!”

**Megana:** When he’s talking about how much he envies John Goodman because he leads the life of the mind, oh god, it was –

**Craig:** “I’ll show you the life of the mind.” One of the things about Barton Fink that I love so much is that in addition to the kind of baked-in inauthenticity of the writer, I guess the Coen brothers turning the lens back on themselves in a fascinating way. It also is a pretty disturbing examination of writer’s block and the weird, creepy decay that can happen in your own brain where things are just melting inside your mind. The entire hotel that they’re staying in begins to melt.

**Megana:** The wallpaper.

**Craig:** The wallpaper. The paste that comes out the wallpaper is the same as this infectious ooze coming out of Madman Mundt’s ear. It’s all this creepy connection. I have all these deep theories about Barton Fink and what I think about it.

I was lucky enough to work on a movie that John Goodman was in. He is lovely, such a sweet guy, very quiet. I wouldn’t say shy. Maybe a little bit. A little bit shy in his own way. I walked over to him at one point when he was alone, and I said, “This is a wonderful moment for me because I’m such a fan and also I get to ask you about Barton Fink, because I have all these theories. I would just be fascinated to know what you thought.” He said, “I have no idea what it means.” He said, “Those guys are geniuses. My job, as far as I could tell, was to make sure that I knew my lines on the day. On the day, I really worked hard to make sure I knew my lines and was able to say them the way they wrote them. I have no idea what it means.” I was like, “That is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” In my life. We did talk about the scene where he’s running down the hallway and how they did the fire, so it was fun. Anyway, point is, John Goodman doesn’t know what it means, so I think you’re allowed to think it means whatever you want it to be. I’m glad you liked it, at the very least.

**Megana:** I did like it. I love the Hollywood of it. I love the head of the studio. It was so fun. It’s like, yes, I know that Michael Lerner’s character flipped so quickly, but what a joy to be on that ride while you are.

**Craig:** I’ve been there. As awful as they were and continue to be, there’s something of the Weinsteins in there. When they wanted to charm you, boy did they go all the way. Everybody comes here and imagines a moment where somebody who runs a studio, who’s famous and powerful, tells you to your face that you’re a genius. When it happens, it flips switches in you you didn’t realize you had. Then later, boy when you fall down or when they throw you down, boy does it hurt. When I watch that, I’m like, oh man, I know exactly how that feels. I’ve been in that meeting. I’ve been in both of those meetings. The berating of the underling is something incredibly familiar to me as well.

**Megana:** Oof, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, oof.

**Megana:** We need an episode that’s a guide of how to deal with that narcissistic charm, because it is…

**Craig:** Oh boy. Yeah. We do. There’ll be a lot of therapy in that episode. A lot, because ultimately, you can’t do anything about them. You can’t. All you can do is identify the breaks in your own system that they are sneaking through.

**Megana:** Correct.

**Craig:** In this way, they illuminate for you. They give you a little bit of a gift. They shine a light on things that need to be fixed. You just need to know when it’s happening.

**Megana:** It’s like a pressure test of…

**Craig:** It’s a pressure test, because they are there to find their way in through the breaks and gaps and lean on the parts of you that hate yourself and need approval. They find them. They’re so good at finding them. You don’t realize it’s happening until it’s too late. Each time it happens you get a little bit smarter, you get a little bit better.

**Megana:** Are you ready to get into the 20 questions?

**Craig:** Yeah. The deal is I got to answer all 20 of these, right?

**Megana:** Oh gosh, I haven’t thought of what the alternative would be.

**Craig:** I’m going to do it. You know what? I’m going to do it.

**Megana:** You’re going to do it.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. We’re going to do it.

**Megana:** Our first question came from Julien, who asked, “My script’s been professionally read a couple of times and is heavily based on true events. However, the notes say I should weave real moments throughout the script, which I already did, a lot. How do I notate reality? Is it kosher to have an explanation page at the end, or footnotes?”

**Craig:** What Julien’s saying is that people don’t seem to be recognizing the real moments throughout his script, which I think is not going to be helped by an explanation page or perhaps Julien saying, “No, but I did.” The whole thing with notes is they’re just being the audience. If people in the audience don’t get that you are being real, it doesn’t matter if you’re being real. You actually have to be aware how that’s coming across.

What I would say probably is, “Okay, thank you for that note. Here are a number of real moments. Did they feel real? Did you think they weren’t real? That’s something that we can address or talk about, where are we losing a sense of authenticity.” It could be possible that they just don’t know at all. If you put it in the form of a question, you’ll be better off. If you say, “Dear idiots, here are 12 places I put true events,” you’re probably not going to last. If you say, “Okay, that’s really valuable. Here are 12 places where there were real events, but it seems like it’s not coming across as real events, so let’s have that discussion and figure out maybe how we could do better at that together,” because they may go, “Oh, good lord, we didn’t know. Okay, thank you.”

I’m not sure what the story is. Sometimes when real stories have very wild elements, you have to be aware of that and figure out how to ground them so that people actually believe it could possibly be true. Sounds like you just need to have another conversation with people. When it’s been professionally read, I’m just wondering who are these professionals, what does that mean, and can you get some follow-up from them.

**Megana:** With Chernobyl, you had a podcast where you did notate reality. You were talking about the events that were real. Most of them were the decisions that you made behind that. I guess I’m curious, is that something that you wanted to do so that people would buy into the show more?

**Craig:** No, the opposite. I wanted to make sure people knew what we had made up. I remember having this discussion with HBO, because at first they were like, “A podcast? Why? What are you talking about?” They thought I meant a marketing thing. I was like, “This has nothing to do with marketing,” because of course nobody was going to watch Chernobyl or listen to the podcast. I really was like, “This is just because we live in a time when everyone scrutinizes everything. I know they’re going to be scrutinizing this show. If we put stuff out there and don’t acknowledge that we’ve made certain changes to history, people are going to point their fingers back at us and say, ‘You guys made a show about lies and you lied,'” which would be true. If you can be transparent about where you had to dramatize or adjust to fit years of reality into five hours, then it’s much harder for people to point fingers at you, which is why I insisted that each episode of the podcast appear literally 12 seconds after each episode initially aired, so there was no gap. It was like, there you go, no waiting.

There were a lot of moments when I was writing Chernobyl where I was concerned that people just would think, “That’s not real. You just made that up,” because people made crazy decisions that were hard to understand. It was important to me that I present them in a way where the audience could at least say, “Okay, I kind of understand.”

There’s a moment in the first episode where Dyatlov is thinking, and then he’s just like, “The tank. That tank. It’s big enough to have caused this explosion,” because he’s come up with a theory of why it exploded. It felt like I needed a moment where I saw him convincing himself, because otherwise I would be wondering, why would a person just leap to that conclusion and then never question it in any way. There’s moments like that to just help people understand the reality of the human foibles behind the bad decisions.

**Megana:** That’s so interesting. I’m watching The Dropout that’s about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. I find myself asking, because there’s a lot of really specific beautiful details that are in there, and I’m constantly asking was that real, where did that come from. I just don’t know if that’s a helpful question for me to be asking as an audience member.

**Craig:** Probably not. I think if you’re watching a documentary, it’s always a good thing to ask, what is the perspective involved here, is there an agenda, because editing is a wonderful, powerful thing. Documentaries are questionable, should be questioned, should be interrogated and held to task if they distort. Drama is drama. The point of drama, even when it’s based on reality, is not to journal, but rather to instruct in some manner of humanity. Dramatic instruction. What are we going to learn from the character? What are we going to learn about human behavior and nature? It is not there to be a full book report on a nonfiction event. Some events I think it’s best to be as accurate as you can be. I tried to be with Chernobyl, because I thought actually the beauty was in the specifics, and in a way in the journalism of it.

There’s been a terrific documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, so probably not much of a need to be perfectly documentarian again with the drama. Can you do the voice, by the way? Can you do the voice? Can you do it?

**Megana:** We’re hoping to change the world.

**Craig:** That’s great. That was great. Wow. Someone said once that–

**Megana:** There you go, that’s it.

**Craig:** That Elizabeth Holmes’s voice was just the voice that women do when they’re doing an impression of a dumb man.

**Megana:** You know what? That does feel right, because as I accessed it, I was like, this feels familiar, this feels like a pathway that I’ve used before.

**Craig:** Maybe it was Aline who said that. I can’t remember who said it. Maybe it was Aline. I just thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Anyway, great job. That character should come back, like Sexy Craig, every now and again. Theranos Megana.

**Megana:** That’s really helpful advice just for writers, dramatizing real events, that you’re not writing a documentary.

**Craig:** You’re not doing a book report. You get to decide how close or how far you want to be.

**Megana:** Next question. Andreas writes, “I wanted to ask how you approach writing jobs where you’re brought in quite late and asked to make the dialog funnier, touch up specific storylines, scenes, characters, or make cultural references more specific, etc. How do you curb your writerly instincts that you yourself would tell the story in an entirely different way and just focus on the job at hand? How much feedback on the overall story is expected of you?”

**Craig:** That’s a great question. So far I have not been called in for cultural references, weirdly. They made a whole movie about Staten Island, never called me. I was shocked. I do get called in from time to time, quite late, later than you would ever imagine, to make dialog funnier or touch up specific storylines, scenes, or characters. Yes, this happens all the time. It takes a certain kind of writer to do it. Not everybody can do that, because you are in a very different mode. You’re in a problem solving mode.

You need to understand production. I think that’s really important, because that’s what you’re writing for at that point, production, almost always. That means you need to understand scheduling, you need to understand who the actors are. Oftentimes you’re being put on the phone with them, because they’re upset about things. I can’t tell you how many times I have sat and been a therapist for famous people because they’re unhappy with the script. Partly, I have to just listen and hear what they need and then come back to everybody else and say, “Look, whether you agree or not, this is what they need. They can’t do it unless they get what they need. I’m going to give them what they need, but I now have to do it in a way that also gives you what you need,” because what they need is more action, or this scene needs to be better.

Sometimes what I suggest is that they have put their fingers on the exact right problem, all of their solutions are wrong. We should not do any of those things. I’m not going to do the seven things you asked me to do. I’m going to do these four things I think you ought to do instead. Oftentimes, and I’m not patting myself on the back as much as just pointing out that I have a job to do and they have their job to do, I’m right, because that’s my job. That’s what I do. Their job is different. In a good way, they’re trying. They’re trying to say, look, we know what a problem is and we have a suggestion of how to fix it, but they are not going to think of the things outside the box. Sometimes, you have to just go outside of what exists and say what we need is actually an entirely different scene in a different spot that is going to solve these 12 problems in one fell swoop.

You have to be a problem solver. You need a lot of experience. It takes time. Nobody who is a fairly new writer to business is going to be pulled in for stuff like that or relied on in that kind of way because they just haven’t done it enough. It’s very specific work. Very specific work.

**Megana:** Getting back to our screenwriting RPG framework, that seems like a very specific instance where you need a lot of wisdom and confidence.

**Craig:** Yeah, you need a tremendous amount of wisdom there, because there’s no way to survive that whole thing. Everyone is upset. When you walk into those situations, there’s tension. Everyone’s scared. They’re scared not only because they’re in a scary situation. They’re also scared of you, because they don’t know what you’re going to do. Everyone is quietly lobbying you to not mess everything up, meaning we’re going to call you in here and we’re going to tell you that we have some problems. Please do not tell us that we have 29 problems. Please do not tell us that we actually have six other problems that we don’t think are problems. Please don’t make our director leave. Please don’t make our actors angry. Please don’t make us upset.

You just have to listen really carefully and then understand that what everyone wants, what they’re dreaming of is that you’re going to sit down and go, “I have the solution. The solution will not upturn the apple card. It’s going to answer everyone’s questions. It’s not going to upset anyone. It’s not going to set you back in a huge way. We’re not going to tear all the stuff down. we’re just going to do this fairly easy series of things, and it will be much, much better.” That’s what they want and that’s in fact exactly what you have to deliver. It has to be effective. Not easy, but they do pay you a lot, so there’s that. Best money in Hollywood. Weekly production rewrites.

**Megana:** Speaking of money, I think this is going to be a question you’ll like, Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School wrote in and said, “I’m 23 and wrote my first screenplay in 2020 and got good scores on the Blacklist and met a director hoping to make it. He’s been taking the script around trying to get us a deal. He’s had it read by Paramount, HBO, etc. The most exciting news he told me was that Paramount liked it so much that they recommended it to their team.

“With my very first script already having made it as far as it has, it’s given me a lot more confidence in my ability to turn this passion into something real. Now, the problem is, I haven’t written a second script. I have the idea. I’ve slowly been mapping it out, but working part-time and going to school full-time has left me with virtually zero space to fit in my just-for-fun hobby. Obviously, I can’t quit working, but at this point it’s starting to feel like school not only isn’t benefiting me anymore, but that it’s actually holding me back from jump-starting my career. On the other hand, I’m four years into it, and I would only have about two terms left to finish my degree. It feels like either option I choose results in a waste of my time, either finish the degree and waste the next year of my life getting something that I don’t think will help me instead of actually writing, or I drop out and have the last four years of my effort and money be for nothing.”

**Craig:** Sunken costs fallacy here, writ large. It comes down to this. We struggle with the notion that we’ve wasted time and money. We struggle with it so much that we insist on finishing something that is a waste of time and money, which means spending some more time and money. What will that degree get you? I don’t know. As far as I can tell, nothing. We were on set just yesterday and I turned to Bo and I said, “Did you learn any of this at NYU, any of this?” She said no in such a hard way. It was the hardest no I’ve ever heard.

**Megana:** I don’t know that Bo has any soft no’s though.

**Craig:** This was one of the harder… It was like a no and not even close. It was sort of like she went to school and she was supposed to study how to make television and movies, and then when she arrived in Hollywood and saw how we made television and movies, it seemed like what she had really been studying was veterinary medicine and they just called it television and film studies because it had nothing to do with what we do. Nothing.

If Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School is 23, he’s already young, he’s getting some interest, he’s just starting. 23 is a fantastic age to be starting, because you have lots of energy. You have lots of enthusiasm. Everything is still exciting. You have lots of scripts ahead of you. You don’t theoretically have a family. As John and I pointed out, children are not zapping your life away. You can really make inroads.

As he points out, he’s just languishing in this school to get a piece of paper that no one will ever ask for. Ever. The only paper anyone’s ever going to ask to see is a script, if that’s what he wants to do. Furthermore, the degree will not get him anything anywhere else. In fact, all it’ll get him, and I think this is something else Bo and I were talking about, is that he will qualify to teach at film schools. That’s what those degrees give you, as far as I can tell.

He can finish it another time. It’s not like they go, “All that time is gone.” You can always come back and finish, I think. Take a year off. Take two years off. You don’t have to decide right now whether or not you’re going to flush the prior four years. Take a couple years off. Work on your career. If it happens, don’t go back. If it doesn’t happen, and you want to go back and complete it to get the paper and do something else, do it. Seems to me like you don’t have to make this choice right now. You can punt. I would punt. I would take the two years. I would take some time off, write some scripts, get some work, and see how this actually functions instead of whatever film school is teaching you.

**Megana:** I do agree with a lot of that, but I just worry that that piece of paper would get him a foot in the door or some entry level jobs and it would help him as his resume is being screened through a job at a big agency or something, that he has a completed degree. Not that I agree with that, but I wonder if that would help him to have that.

**Craig:** I don’t know where he’s going to film school. If he’s not going to NYU or USC, I’m not sure what networking there is available. Film schools are barfing out humans at a remarkable rate every year. They’re not all getting jobs because they went to a film school. What if he just went to a temp agency and got placed and started working at a company somewhere? Paramount’s looking for people to be assistants. You don’t need to have a film school degree to get those jobs, do you?

**Megana:** I think that you might. That’s what I’m worried about is I feel like even those jobs are so competitive. I’m very bad at rationalizing with the sunk cost fallacy, so I know this is a weak point of mine. He’s so close.

**Craig:** I think we’re getting to the real of it. I can hear your parents talking through you.

**Megana:** It’s like just do the two more terms and then do whatever you want. Become the doctor and then become a writer.

**Craig:** Become the doctor and then become the writer. This is your parents, and by the way, a useful voice to have. The internalized parental voices are important to an extent. We don’t want to nourish them too much. If we don’t have them at all, then we theoretically might head down sociopath lane. Don’t you agree, or perhaps I shouldn’t lead the question, do you agree that he can take a break, see how it goes, and then come back?

**Megana:** Yes, I do think that he can take a break. I am a huge advocate for taking time off before or during while you’re getting higher education, because it is such a privilege to be able to take classes and to spend time learning. I think you want to set yourself up in a way that you are getting the most from that experience that you can.

**Craig:** I think it’s a privilege to not go to film school. Anyway. Sounds like at least we agree on this. You can take some time, punt on the decision, see what happens. If it doesn’t work out, then you got an option to finish it and do what Megana’s parents would want you to do.

**Megana:** Correct. I hope Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School writes back and lets us know what he does do.

**Craig:** Yes, please. Yes, please do, Please.

**Megana:** No Context asks, “What tools do you use to keep track of notes and ideas that happen when you’re not at your desk, visual or analog?”

**Craig:** Here’s where John and I probably diverge. I have no doubt that John has an entire team of people working on a perfected software application to do precisely this. In the meantime he has six or seven different integrated processes.

Here’s what I do. I email myself. That’s it. It’s pathetic. On a given day of writing, I will typically think about what I’m writing that day in the morning, walk around, take a long shower, whatever it is, and then I know what it is. I don’t need to write it down. It’s in my head. It’s the scene of the day. I can do it. Sometimes when I’m thinking ahead about things that are coming or moments, as I walk around I will stop and go, “Okay, there’s actually a specific way I just said that line of dialog in my head that I want to make sure for this flow of lines that this leads to this leads to this interesting twist of line. I’m going to just quickly tap this out to an email to myself,” and I send it and then I have it and then I refer to it. That is as analog as digital gets, I suspect.

**Megana:** John’s answer was actually surprisingly more analog. He just uses index cards.

**Craig:** What?

**Megana:** He has stacks of index cards around the house.

**Craig:** What? When you say index cards, you mean individual miniature iPads of his own manufacture that are in the shape of an index card, that synchronize to some Cloud-based–

**Megana:** No, I mean paper and pens, pens with ink. I don’t know. Who’s the robot here?

**Craig:** Megana, I feel like I’m going to cry. Oh my god, never meet your heroes. Never meet your heroes. Oh, man. Wow. You rocked my world there.

**Megana:** Paul asks, “Will Zoom pitches still play a big role in post-pandemic life or will this all go back to in the room?”

**Craig:** Zoom pitches are here to stay. It’s not that we will eschew the room completely, as we did when we were in lockdown. Of course there will be in-room meetings. Inevitably, the Zoom pitch is here to stay because people’s schedules are tight, because they are all over the place. They’re traveling all the time. They’re in different spots, because of convenience, because a lot of people now have home offices that are just as comfortable and obviously more convenient than the at-office offices. While I don’t think the room is gone, the Zoom room I do believe is here to stay. What do you think?

**Megana:** It makes so many of the logistics of my life easier that I imagine that that’s probably true for everyone.

**Craig:** Certainly if you’re the kind of person who is going to a meeting as opposed to a person who’s receiving a meeting, way easier to do Zoom. When I started working on The Last of Us with Neil Druckmann, we had a series of early story sessions. Because he was still hard at work on The Last of Us 2, I would go to the Naughty Dog offices in Santa Monica. Driving to Santa Monica for me is–

**Megana:** From Pasadena?

**Craig:** That’s right. Essentially I said, “I can meet you roughly between 11:30 and then I’m leaving by 2. That’s it. I’m going to be nowhere near the edges of the day.” We would never do that now. We talk to each other all the time. I’m in Canada right now. He’s in Santa Monica. By the way, not that much further than Pasadena. It may actually be faster, because I could fly and land at LAX and get to Santa Monica faster.

**Megana:** 100%.

**Craig:** We Zoom all the time, and we will continue to, and we’ve all become incredibly used to it. If one thing the pandemic achieved, other than a horrifying death toll, is it normalized video conferencing, which prior to the pandemic, people forget, everyone was like, “Eh.” Even Google couldn’t get us to do it. We were like, “Eh. FaceTime, ew.” Then suddenly–

**Megana:** Google had Google Meet, but yes.

**Craig:** They had it, but nobody liked it.

**Megana:** Yes, but coming from working at Google, I used it all the time.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course. That’s like, “Coming from a cattle prod factory, I did occasionally use a cattle prod. I didn’t like the feeling of being cattle prodded.” It was not and continues to be not a good solution. Google does a lot of things brilliantly well. Google’s social, what was it called, Google Circles or something?

**Megana:** Oh gosh. Google Plus.

**Craig:** Google Plus. Google Minus.

**Megana:** That was tough. Speaking of The Last of Us, Matt asks, “When you have a project to write where you’re the main stakeholder, do you subconsciously change your style? John and Craig talked before about Ryan Johnson’s scripts being for himself to direct, so he can do what he likes with regard to the rules. Basically I’m wondering if Craig has so much to write for The Last of Us in such a short amount of time that he’s going gonzo freestyle.”

**Craig:** Oh no, I don’t have a gonzo freestyle. Hopefully, people don’t think that I wrote all The Last of Us in a short time. The Last of Us, which is entirely written and we just have a little bit more to shoot, was written over the course of essentially two years. I’m a very deliberate writer. For the scripts that I was writing while we were still in production early on, because the production of this is rather lengthy, they were so well outlined and thought through. I mean thoroughly outlined. I’m not praising myself. The writing of the script was not ever going to be anything approaching gonzo freestyle. I don’t know how to write gonzo freestyle. The only things I write gonzo freestyle are birthday cards. Even those sometimes I deliberate.

The fact that I am over-empowered and have too much authority has not made me any less fastidious or nervous, because ultimately, you can say you’re the main stakeholder, you’re in charge, you’re the boss, the audience is waiting. If there’s one thing that people who wrote comedy features know, it’s that they’re out there with their knives and you are going to have to face the music sooner or later, so do what you can to get it right and never just think, “Oh, I’m in charge. I can do whatever I want.” You’re not in charge. The audience is in charge.

**Megana:** There are so many other departments that you have to communicate with. It’s not just about shorthand between you and the director.

**Craig:** Oh, certainly. In this case it’s me and the directors, because we have quite a few, because there are 10 episodes. You’re putting your finger on something huge. Every department has 4,000 questions. You are accountable to them as well. The one thing I can never do is say to our special effects team or our costume team, “Oh, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I don’t know.” Ever. I am not allowed to say that. I have to know. I can’t make it up in the moment either. I have to pre-know what I mean and what I want, because they will say… Look, in good ways, they want to make sure that I’m getting what I want. They will say, “Here’s what we’re planning for this.” Sometimes I go, “Oh my god, nailed it, perfect.” Sometimes I say, “180 from what I want. That’s okay. I see why you did that. Here’s what I want instead.” What I can’t do is go, “Oh. Huh. Maybe.” They’re like, “What would you want different?” “Hm. Oh, I don’t know. Do other things and let me see them,” which maybe other people get away with, but we have too much to do.

I am accountable to everybody that’s working around me. They need fast answers because we’re on a schedule over here. This train don’t stop. I am accountable to HBO. I am accountable to my creative partners, my other producers. I’m accountable to my actors, because on the day, if they go, “What does this mean?” and I go, “I don’t know,” that’s not good.

Then ultimately, I’m accountable to the audience, which is why editors are a good early punch in the face. Editors represent the audience. They advocate for the audience. They don’t know how hard it was to write that line or how hard it was to get that day shooting. They don’t know about the weather. They don’t know if the actor is cranky. They don’t care. They just look at the footage and they’re like, “This is bad, so I think I’ll do this instead.” They don’t care. That’s actually quite refreshing, because once shooting is over, you get to shake it off like a wet dog, take a breath, and then say, all of the creation, the raw creation, is completed. This is what we have. Now, let us begin the final act of creation, which is narrowed into this world of finite possibilities, as opposed to that world of infinite possibilities. No gonzo freestyle for me. Sorry, Matt, or you’re welcome, Matt, if you’re not a gonzo freestyle guy.

**Megana:** Sort of a follow-up question to that, because how you got to where you are now, Cat asks, “How did you find your voice and what are some steps to produce your own if you’re having a hard time finding it?”

**Craig:** I have no idea. There you go. I have to gonzo freestyle that one. I don’t know. Someone, maybe it was Scott Frank, he said he doesn’t like to delve too deep into the how did you get your voice question out of terrible fear that it will make him self-conscious about something he didn’t realize was just his voice. It’s a little bit like if somebody ever says back to you, they’re like, “Oh my god, you have this interesting vocal affectation that you say this thing all the time.” You’ll suddenly realize that you say it all the time and you’ll say it less.

Neil Druckmann, the other day, not the other day, it was a couple months ago, I asked him a question and he went, “Correct.” He went, “By the way, that’s what you say all the time. You know that?” I said, “What?” He goes, “Yeah. Instead of saying yes, you go, ‘Correct,’ just like that. ‘Correct.'” He’s like, “Correct.” I’m like, “Oh.” Then I was like, “I don’t know if I do that.” Then seven minutes later I heard myself do it and I went, “Oh, no.” Now I don’t do it as much because he ruined it.

I don’t want to stare too much at this other than to say I don’t know, but that is a metaphor. Don’t get too tripped up, because I think maybe voice is just a small word for confidence in your own mind’s organization of words, thoughts, and feelings. You have a point of view. You have thoughts. You have a way of saying things. Whether you realize it or not, you have your own quirky bits. If you become confident that your quirky bits and your way of presenting things are interesting to other people and you continue to invest in that, other people might point at it and say that’s your voice. Thinking about what your voice is and trying to find it is counterproductive, because that’s calculated and it will never work. You want other people to tell you afterwards about it. What’s your voice?

**Megana:** That’s really helpful. If you define it too much, then you also somehow limit yourself and limit the potential of what it could be.

**Craig:** You can’t hear it. You can’t hear your own voice the way other people do. Even the sound of your own voice physically sounds different. Really what you’re saying is how did you find the way to do things that create the following impression in other people and how can I do that. I don’t know. Megana, you have a voice. You have a very specific way of thinking and talking and presenting things. If I heard 12 people and all the voices physically were turned into the same pitch, I think I could still pick you out.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** Because it’s about your mind.

**Megana:** Friendship.

**Craig:** It’s about the way your mind works. Friendship. Is that a millennial thing to just go, “Friendship.”

**Megana:** No, that’s just me.

**Craig:** That’s just you. See, you have a voice. You have a voice.

**Megana:** Oh gosh. We can’t talk about it too much, because then it’ll go away.

**Craig:** I know. I’m ruining it. I’m ruining it. Next question.

**Megana:** We’re going to do some quick ones. Christopher asks, “What’s the best way to format a quick flash of memory three seconds long or a quick image? Do you simply write it in description or add a CUT TO?”

**Craig:** Oh, easy. I usually will just, in an action line, all caps, say FLASH TO: colon and then return and then write the little bit that I’m flashing to or even keep it on the same line with the colon. I might put the stuff that I’m flashing to in Italics. I may say FLASH BACK TO: or MEMORY FLASH: or something like that. I don’t add CUT TO’s. I just write it into description and then flow. Basically, I’m just including it the way you would experience it watching the movie.

**Megana:** Another craft question. Brilland asks, “Purposeful pauses, beats. When should silence carry a scene?”

**Craig:** Constantly. Constantly. Here’s a quirk of mine. Okay, Cat, I’ll give you a little piece of the voice. I know, because I feel myself doing it and I don’t care, I write the following thing, I don’t know, at least 12 times a script: “They sit quietly, then,” or, “There’s a moment, then.” I’m writing that all the time, because I believe that people pause. There are moments when people stop because they don’t know what to say. The importance of those moments is that they inform how the next line must be, because when you break a silence, you break it in a certain way. You don’t break it without deliberation. What you say next has been considered, because that’s what was happening in the wait. Somebody didn’t want to say something, made a choice to say it, thought about how to say it, and then they said it. I think this is incredibly valuable, because most of the time when we’re talking it’s extemporaneous, it’s flowing, it is impulsive. We make mistakes. It’s clumsy. It’s not well thought of.

I like movies where people speak brilliantly and quickly, like Sorkin or Tarantino, but it is mannered. It is not meant to be a reflection of how humans actually speak with each other. They don’t do it that way. That is more of a stylized presentation of reality, which is wonderful. Those guys are excellent at it. It’s not my jam. I’m not excellent at that. I like clumsiness. I guess I just dig a little bit more in drama work into the authenticity of how people speak to each other. Pauses are a huge part of it. Do not be afraid of silence. Embrace the silence, for in the silence is great opportunity. Just like we just had.

**Megana:** I was trying to hold for silence for a bit, but I am conscious of your time.

**Craig:** We did it. We did it.

**Megana:** Hannah from Minneapolis asks, “How important do you think reading classics/popular literature is for both improving your writing and for social capital and respect within the TV/film writing industry? Do other writers expect that of you?”

**Craig:** This is such a good question, Hannah. When I first started, I would go on these meetings, and for whatever reason, I don’t know what it was at the time, but in 1994 when I was having these meetings initially with producers and so forth, and I was working in comedy, they would reference the Peter Sellers film The Party all the time. They would talk about The Party. I had never seen The Party. I had seen The Pink Panther. That was when I was a kid, because my dad made me. I hadn’t seen The Party. I would just go, “Oh yeah,” because they would never say, “Have you ever seen The Party?” They would be like, “It’s like The Party. If we can aim for The Party but do this or this or this.” I’m like, “Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that’s great.”

The funny thing is, in 1994 watching a movie that was slightly obscure was actually hard to do. You had to find it somewhere and rent it. I was just like, “I got to go and rent The Party at some point.” I finally did and I watched it and I was like, no offense to Party fans, like, “Wah? Wah?” I guess when I was done, I thought like, oh, I think what they mean is cheap. I think they mean a comedy that’s mostly in one building that there’s a party in. That’s the whole movie. I don’t know.

Anyway, it is a little important. Try and keep up as best you can. At some point, it will be impossible, and that’s okay, because you’ll be old, Hannah. When you’re old, nobody expects you to know anything other than old stuff. They think it’s adorable when you know new stuff. When you are young, yeah, you do need to be plugged into what’s going around. You should be, because that’s the time of your life when you would be. It is helpful to know what the hell is out there, and look, too much for everybody to watch. Do you feel a pressure, Megana, to keep up?

**Megana:** I do feel a pressure. It’s also a desire. I want to see what’s out there and what’s going on. I love television and film, so that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. Her question asks, “Reading classic/popular literature, how important is it for improving your writing and for social capital?” I think that a lot of the writers that I talk to, I’m not talking to them about classic literature. I think that’s something that they probably have read. A lot of my writer friends have lots of references, whether that’s a very random nonfiction interest that they have or a specific genre of television shows that they watch or types of books that they like.

**Craig:** By the way, you don’t have to be. You could also be just really into what you’re into, and people know that one of your quirks/voice is that you don’t know what the hell is on TV right now, but you are a master of 1960s action films, and that’s okay, as long as there’s apparently some interest.

What will happen, Hannah, is if you start doing well in this business, then the reference that you’re most familiar with, the TV show or the film that you’re most familiar with is the one you’re making. Then that’s the only one in the world. There’s only one television show I really care about right now, and that’s The Last of Us. That’s all I work on. That’s all I think about. That’s my job. The fact that I haven’t seen 12 other things that have come out in the last month, no problem, because no one needs me to. They just need me to make the thing that they want me to make, and hopefully they’re happy with it. Then in the in-betweens I catch up a little bit, as best I can with some things, but the truth is, I feel like it’s more important when you’re in your early stage, your young years in the business.

**Megana:** I agree with that. I also think agents and producers tend to be really plugged in. It’s incredibly important for them, with good reason.

**Craig:** That’s their deal is they need to know everybody and everything, because that’s their trade. They’re not sitting down and writing stuff. They’re watching and reading, watching, reading, watching, reading. They have to know everything. I could certainly see where your fancy boss mentioned something and you haven’t heard of it, then they’ll throw a stapler at your head.

**Megana:** The classic Hollywood punishment.

**Craig:** Classic.

**Megana:** Anders asks, “What are some important questions to ask oneself during the pre-writing phase?”

**Craig:** What is this about? What is the point? Why would anyone care? Would anyone want to watch this? Why would they want to watch this? If I create it in such a way that they feel compelled to watch it, why will they keep watching it? How will they feel at the end? What is the purpose and point of all of this? Then get into the rest of the stuff. I think that people forget to ask that first. Why? Why should this exist? There’s a lot of television. There are a lot of movies. There are a lot of books. There are a lot of songs. Why should this one exist and why would people care? It’s not about being cruel to yourself. It’s just about, again, respecting your ultimate boss, the audience.

**Megana:** I guess going back to what Hannah’s question, what you were saying about that, is that it is important to be plugged in culturally so that your writing is responding to the moment.

**Craig:** Yes, and not only to the moment as you see it, but the audience consists of people much younger than you, when you are old. When you’re young, it doesn’t, unless you’re writing for children’s television. If you’re in your 20s and your 30s, you’re probably writing comfortably for people in their 20s and 30s, and that’s no problem. Most stuff is aimed in that, whatever, 18 to 45. That’s the big classic TV demo. If you’re in your 30s, yeah, of course you’re writing for people between the ages of 18 and 45. You are between the ages of 18 and 45.

As you get older, you may forget or discount what 20-year-olds might be interested in, and you will certainly, certainly, you will overestimate how important things that are important to you are to others. In Hollywood right now, I’m sure there are people that are trying to remake things that people really enjoyed in the ’80s, but no one in their 20s cares because the ’80s is 5,000 years ago to them. When I started out early on, so again, let’s go back to 1994, and Disney was attempting to do a film adaptation of My Favorite Martian. Have you ever heard of My Favorite Martian?

**Megana:** I have.

**Craig:** What is your awareness of it?

**Megana:** I think it’s a show.

**Craig:** Go on.

**Megana:** Was it on Nick At Nite or Turner Classic Media?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll get you off the hook. They did make a movie. They did it. They made a movie. I did not write it. They made it in 1999. The movie My Favorite Martian was based on a television show that aired on CBS from September 29th, 1963 to May 1st, 1966. Now you can imagine that I, who had been born in 1971, and who felt that things from the early ’60s were essentially from the Stone Age, how I felt hearing that Disney wanted to make a live-action movie of this that no one would care about, because they were overestimating how beloved the things that were beloved to them were, because the people who made it were children who watched that show and loved it. Right now there are things that children are watching and loving that eventually they’re going to want to make a movie of and people are going to be like, eh, because we don’t care. We just don’t care.

Part of this whole thing is just making sure that… Just ask yourself, okay, what would people not like me think? What would people who are not my race, my gender, my age, my orientation, what would people not like me think of this? Are they going to roll their eyes hard? Because man, in 1999 when they put My Favorite Martian out, I’m sure a lot of people went, “Okay, whatever,” but they did it to themselves. Everyone’s going to do it online right now and in your face and they’re going to make fun of you. Just interrogate yourself before you start writing.

**Megana:** Fair. Leah asks, “Do you have tips on simplifying a complex world for an audience? Any other exemplary scenes like Minority Report’s PreCrime Unit or Chernobyl’s courtroom reactor explanation?”

**Craig:** Thank you for putting me in there with Scott Frank’s excellent script. The tips are that you need to be a teacher. Again, you’re thinking about other people. You don’t want to bore people. No one likes homework. No one likes sitting in a classroom. Whatever it is about your complex world that thrills you, that makes you passionate, that excites you, hold onto those bits and relay those bits and build your case carefully and always with an eye at keeping them interested. Take breaks.

You notice the courtroom, one of the reasons I structured that the way it was was, A, I just didn’t want to do the usual, okay, episode 1 is a sunny day and then it ends with something exploding. The other reason was because I knew that when it was time to walk people through what happened and solve the mystery, that I wanted to give them breaks. Otherwise, it would’ve just been awful. You may enjoy those scenes as they exist, but if it was just 40 minutes straight of that stuff, you would pass out, because you just can’t. You’re stuck in a room for too long. Give them breaks. Structure it. Make it interesting. Teach them carefully and use what makes you excited as a signifier for where you ought to put your sign posts along the way.

**Megana:** Super helpful. We’re going to do another little lightning round. Adrian asks, “In what part of writing the script do you think about music? Not like the movie Yesterday where the plot revolves around the music. I’m particularly curious about music rights you don’t own.”

**Craig:** I don’t think about it much, only when I think to myself, oh, a song would really add something here, hearing vocals and pulling people out of the reality for a bit and hearing something. Then I think about it. Then I do a little research. I also remind myself, I don’t need to solve that now unless I’m literally seeing somebody singing it on screen. Yes, I think if you’re making Baby Driver and you’re Edgar Wright, it’s incredibly important to think about that. That would be more like the movie Yesterday. The plot revolves around it, but also I think somebody like Edgar also really does key in how he writes and creates scenes to pre-imagine songs that have to go there and function like that. I don’t, for what I do. I would say just listen to yourself and ask that question. Don’t get too bogged down in it if it’s not crucial to what you’re doing.

**Megana:** David asks, “Should the writer acknowledge in a note that they are aware that something a character says is insensitive or ignorant if that detail will be confronted later in the series?”

**Craig:** Oh wow, that’s a really interesting thought. It’s a pretty rare circumstance, I would imagine, where you’re writing something that’s going to be in a series. Maybe if it’s a pilot, then yes. I think if it’s a pilot, so that script exists on its own, and if somebody says something like that, I think it’s fair to acknowledge on page 38 someone says something that is insensitive and ignorant and upsetting, it will be confronted later in the series, to let people know you are aware of that, so you don’t just get this note back like, “What’s wrong with you? Do you not live in the world right now? Do you not see how people are functioning?” Yeah, that’s perfectly reasonable to do.

If you are in a flow of a season, that means the show’s already running. There’s probably a room or at least there’s a showrunner or other people, so people will be able to just pick up the phone and discuss it. When I say pick up the phone, I mean text each other. I guess if you were doing a pilot where that would be coming back around, and you don’t have the opportunity to address it right then and there, it’s not a bad idea. Not a bad idea at all.

**Megana:** I wasn’t expecting you to say that.

**Craig:** Oh, what’d you think I was going to say? “No! Wrong!”

**Megana:** No, just to have good faith that it would be resolved or addressed later.

**Craig:** I don’t have that faith. I got to be honest. People surprise me all the time. They really do. They surprise me, because when you’re like, “Do you not know how that’s going to… You don’t get how that’s going to come off, really? You’re not on Twitter? You don’t read?” Let’s put it this way. If I saw that in a pilot script, I would not go, “I hate that.” I would think that’s reasonable, you’re taking care of me.

I wouldn’t spell it out, other than to say there is a moment. You don’t even have to say on what page, because they might flip right to that page. You might just say there is a moment in the script where someone says something that is insensitive and ignorant, it will be confronted later in the series. Perfectly fine. Smart.

**Megana:** Cool. Tom in LA asks, “I have a script that’s been optioned and reoptioned, two times, different 18-month options. During that time I was paid to do a rewrite. Then another writer was brought on to do a pass. The option has just lapsed, and I was wondering what happens now. My agent says that it’s not as simple as just getting my original script back, since the production company did spend money on development. I’ve had many producers hit me up for the rights, but my agent said any new producer might have to repay the original producer. My hope is to get rid of all the changes and start with a script that I originally had.”

**Craig:** Here’s what I think is happening. Tom writes a screenplay. It is optioned and reoptioned. It is not purchased outright. The rights to the screenplay belong to Tom. The producers have paid him some money to have the exclusive right to develop that at this point, meaning he can’t sell it to someone else. They then pay him to do a rewrite. Kind of curious why they didn’t just buy the script at this point, but okay. They pay him to do a rewrite. Now what that means is that’s a work for hire. The rewrite is something they do own.

Now, at this point I’m very confused, because I as Tom’s agent never would’ve allowed this. The reason why is, they’ve created… I don’t know how this works. In their agreement, they must have created them in such a way where they own this, regardless of whether or not they own the underlying rights, because he’s granted them the… I don’t understand how this functions, because essentially, they’re… If they don’t have the ability to properly own that rewrite, which they would, as work for hire, because he says it’s WGA, once the option lapses, that rewrite doesn’t have any value to them at all. Meanwhile, Tom’s problem is, if he goes to sell the script that has reverted [unclear 00:57:50] the original script to somebody else, he obviously can’t sell those rewrites, because somebody else owns the rewrites. What his agent is pointing out is, anybody else buying this thing knows that the other company’s out there with the rewrites. Any rewrites they ask for, if they come even close to what was in the rewrites the other company owns, they’re going to have to buy those out from the other company or they’re going to get sued.

This is a mess. I don’t see why this went down this way. I would say you can say your hope is to get rid of all the changes, Tom, but the problem is, other people might ask for the same damn changes. Now what do you do? Do you write them? Do you say, “Oh, I can’t do that. I can’t do that change because I did it once before for someone else, or I can do it, but I can’t do it the way I would normally do it.” It’s a mess. If this is going to go somewhere else, I suspect your agent’s right about this, new producer would just have to repay the original producer and then some to buy out those things. Why was this done this way? I don’t know.

If you’re going to option something, you’re holding back the big, valuable thing, which is copyright. If they want you to do a rewrite, don’t sell it. You do the rewrite and it’s for you. You’re doing it for you. It’s your rewrite too. You own that also. It’s like I own a house, but I’m going to let you come and own the first floor. I will own the foundation and the second floor. What am I supposed to do with the foundation and the second floor, without the first floor? It doesn’t function. Confused about how this went down. Would not recommend that method. Yes, I think your agent is right that it is not as simple as just getting the original script back.

**Megana:** Oh man, that’s so tricky. Poor Tom probably hasn’t been paid. Two times 18-month options for three years on this?

**Craig:** He got paid to do a rewrite, so he was paid. That’s the problem. In a way, you just have to understand, if you’re going to sell it, sell it. There’s nothing wrong with selling. That’s what we do. We’re professional writers. Brush off anyone that calls you a sellout, because that’s a feature, not a bug. You’re a professional. You get paid. If you’re going to sell out, sell out. Don’t rent out and sell out at the same time. You’re going to do worse than you would’ve otherwise. Otherwise, you took a little bit of short-term money and you, I think, muddied the water on something that could’ve been more valuable if it had been kept intact.

**Megana:** Got it. I guess I feel for Tom, because I can understand how in his position he would want to get paid, but your advice is…

**Craig:** Absolutely, without question. This is why I’m just wondering where his agent was on this one, because I would just say, look, if you guys want to develop this, let’s do it right. Now, if they were like, “No, we just want to pay WGA minimum for a rewrite, I smell a rat. They’re making a very low commitment for something that’s valuable and disruptive to the chain of title and I would just advise my client to say, no, hold out, let’s sell this. If they have a plan for how they want to develop it, convince a studio that they have a plan, and then have the studio buy the script and finance the development of this property. That’s the way we do it, or in the network or the television production company. I agree with you. I commiserate with Tom completely.

**Megana:** Richard asks about another project that hasn’t gone as well as he’d hoped. He says, “I’ve recently finished my first film, a short on a very low budget, and it stinks. I tried so hard, put everything into it, but it’s rubbish. I’m not too disappointed, as it’s my first attempt and I only had 10,000 to work with. It made me wonder what it’s like to make a flop when the budget is 10 million as opposed to 10,000. More specifically, when do you know it’s going to tank? Audience viewings, opening weekends, or way before? Secondly, how do industry people dress it up? Are they honest and admit that it’s a turkey or do they wrap it up in ‘maybe it will have a second life on DVD’ sort of rhetoric? Thirdly, what’s the follow-up for the writer specifically? Do you lose work? Do people start answering your calls? Is there resentment from the people who took a chance on you, or is it understood that some films just sink without a trace?”

**Craig:** Oh, man. Richard, I’m sorry. For what it’s wroth, we’ve all been there, except for Lord and Miller. I don’t know, Chris and Phil have never tasted the… No, I take it back. They have. They have. Every time I say this to them, they’re like, “Ah, [unclear 01:02:36].” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, right.” You got fired before any… Okay, you were fired, but you didn’t have a bomb under your name, see, so your track record is 100%. I still hold them up as the rarest of rare unicorns.

For the rest of us humans, it happens. It often happens early on. It is devastating. It is particularly devastating the first time, Richard. Yes, it’s your first attempt. Yes, you only had $10,000 to work with. This was going to be a small thing. I’m sure you also were thinking to yourself as you were making it, people have done things with $10,000 before and made big, wonderful things. You know it. This one hurts. It hurts more than it will ever hurt again, because you have nothing else to compare it to. You are currently oh for one. Oh for one is rough. When you have one victory under your belt, it buys you at least a certain amount of emotional ability to withstand another flop or two, because you feel like, okay, I’m not just Ed Wood, but most normal people are walking around nervous that they’re Ed Wood as they’re trying to do something good. Feel your feelings.

I’ll tell you that the difference when the budget… Budget’s irrelevant, to me. I think for producers and network and studio people, that’s a huge part of it. They don’t care. Oh, whatever. They’re looking at budget cheats and they’re looking at what they’re accountable for. As an artist, humiliation is humiliation, and failure is failure, no matter what the budget is. Sometimes the only factor is how much you cared. If you care a lot about the thing that cost $10,000 and you cared sort of a little about the thing that cost 10 million, the $10,000 failure will hurt more.

When do you know it’s going to tank? Audience viewings are definitely a big indication. There’s no question about that. A bad opening weekend, unless you are one of the .01% of movies that somehow just keep on trucking and build and build and build, that’s a pretty good indication. The first time you watch it, you may think it’s… If you just watch it and you go, “That’s just absolutely unsalvagable,” then it’s unsalvagable.

How do industry people dress it up? There’s a certain layer of people in our business that are paid to lie and will do so. The way they dress it up is just by announcing that everything’s fine and it’s great. They use that to get their next thing. I think the non-creators, the business folks, when they sense a flop is coming, they just work hard to make sure that they’re protected and already have the next thing working, so that they can’t be fired and ended permanently. For the rest of us, not so easy.

What is the fallout for the writer specifically? Depends. If you have created a television show, you are the showrunner and it fails spectacularly, that is on you. I do think there’s going to be a bit of a work your way back in process. If you are a writer in feature films, generally speaking you are not going to be blamed. People will blame the director. It is the only upside to a system where the writer is demeaned and deprived of any positive credit whatsoever. It’s that when there is a disaster, they just blame the director. Is there resentment from people who take a chance on you? Only if you fought them tooth and nail every step of the way and told them they were idiots and insisted on things and wouldn’t change things and then it failed and then, yes, they will absolutely resent you.

Do you lose work? Not if you already had work ahead of time. Always keep the treadmill going. Do people stop answering your calls? No. It doesn’t really function that way. People weirdly love to talk to you when something has just failed. It makes them feel better about themselves. Is it understood that some films just sink without a trace? Yes. Sinking without a trace, vastly preferable to being noticed while you sink. Lots of boats sank, but everyone remembers the Titanic. Be one of the boats that quietly sank that no one talks about.

**Megana:** Gosh. John is so good at segues. I’m really appreciating that skill level now.

**Craig:** You’re missing segue man.

**Megana:** I’m missing segue man.

**Craig:** That’s an interesting point. The thing that you just said has nothing to do with the next question. So-and-so asks…

**Megana:** Speaking of films…

**Craig:** Segue lady.

**Megana:** Ryan asks, “Screenplay examples for instructions come in waves. Tootsie, Star Wars, Casablanca. Which scripts from the last 20 years do you think should get taught in film programs?”

**Craig:** Oh my god. Of the last how many years?

**Megana:** 20 years, so 2002.

**Craig:** I’m the worst person to ask this question of, because I don’t know. Taught in schools?

**Megana:** Taught in film programs, your favorite institutions.

**Craig:** None of them. None of them, because it doesn’t matter what they teach you. There are things that are instructed to me that don’t mean anything to anyone else. There are things that other people seize on that just blow their minds and make them be in love again with movies. The answer is what blows your mind. The premise is flawed. Indeed, it is the premise upon which these programs are constructed, which is to say there are objectively valuable, wonderful films that if you study and dissect all the way down to the atomic level, you too will be able to create. You will not. The people who created them created them. You’re going to create what you create. There’s no Codex.

What are the movies that film schools obsess over? We all know that they have an unhealthy obsession with 1970s and particularly with Spielberg and Scorsese and Coppola, but also then they like to go to the Italians of the earlier years, ’60s and ’50s, Sica and Fellini, and they should. They’re wonderful movies. Also, what are we looking at there? Those guys all sound alike. They all look alike. A lot of the movies come from certain schools of thought and ways of being. All those men came out of the years they were born, in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s. Now when we talk about the movies that come out now, all those people were born in certain years and they did certain things and it doesn’t matter. You just like what you like. If you don’t like The Godfather and you don’t like Reservoir Dogs and you don’t like Casino and you don’t like The Bicycle Thief, that’s okay. You don’t like them. That’s fine.

What do you like? Why love it? Some of these movies, you watch them and something sings in you, starts singing. Listen to the thing that starts singing in you. In the end, these schools and all of the thousands of para-academic discussions that happen around films, on Reddit and everywhere else, are just people being critics, not in a boo I hate it or yay love it way, but rather in an analysis way. People are critiquing films. They’re analyzing films. They’re discussing them. They’re breaking them down. What they’re not doing is creating anything. They’re just contributing to the howling tornado of film opinion. In that howling tornado, there are about three or four people I’ve ever listened to where I thought, oh, I’d like to listen to them more talk about movies. I’d like to listen to them more talk about television. My answer is, the ones that make you sing. Those are the ones.

I don’t care what they choose to teach in film school, at all. In fact, I almost feel like don’t watch those movies. Go find other ones, because all you’ll end up doing is you’re in a camp where they’re all teaching you how to play Kumbaya. Then you leave and you start writing Kumbaya-like songs. Just go listen to your own music. Do your own thing. Do I sound like a hippie or do I sound like… I don’t know.

**Megana:** It also relates to the thing you were saying about My Favorite Martian. If you were going to an institution where someone was teaching you something, they’re teaching you the things that were important or meaningful to them, but those references have changed because you are a different age than them. You are a different person than them. I feel like there’s a lot of parallels to what you were saying earlier on that too.

**Craig:** I just feel like I’m on an island sometimes. I feel like I’m alone.

**Megana:** I guess you are your own sort of little cult leader, like, “Do what makes your heart sing.” I don’t know what you would call your acolytes, your followers, the Mazinites?

**Craig:** I wouldn’t have any. I would say that that’s already disqualifying. You fail to be a Mazinite if you’re following me.

**Megana:** That wouldn’t stop them.

**Craig:** Really what I’m saying is be your own cult leader and make sure that your cult is a cult of one person, which is you, and show us something new, or just show us something you. Why do we care what six grouches in a conference room that smells like bad coffee think we should watch? Bicycle Thieves, by the way, not The Bicycle Thief. I’m an idiot.

**Megana:** We’re almost done with the 20 questions. We have one more.

**Craig:** Great.

**Megana:** Spencer asks, “I’ve heard from a few different sources that one learns more from writing a large number of scripts and focusing on quantity over perfecting a single project over the course of several drafts. However, no one talks about the point at which one should put that script down, after just one draft, after two or three. While I feel comfortable putting a script down when I feel like it’s good, what is the point at which the learning stops and I should start a new project?”

**Craig:** Wouldn’t it be nice, Spencer, if there were a graph, we could just go, draft amount quality increase, chart it, hit the sweet spot, and stop there? I don’t know if one learns more from writing a large number of scripts and focusing on quantity. Focusing on quantity is a weird way to start. Over-perfecting a single project over the course of several drafts, here’s the uncomfortable truth. If you want to be a professional writer and continue to work and have a lengthy career, you need to both focus on quality and perfecting a project over the course of several drafts, and quantity. You have to do it a lot.

I think sometimes when it’s early, you think, is it better to write eight different scripts or is it better to write eight different drafts. The answer is, write 400 drafts. That’s the answer. You can say that those 400 drafts are over three movies or they’re over 58 movies. Doesn’t matter. You just have to write way more than you think. Way more. If you’re worried now about whether you should be doing two or three drafts a script or should you be doing five drafts a script, those numbers are not different. They’re the same number, as far as I’m concerned. Quantity of scripts will create a lot of pdfs. Nobody cares. You want to talk about a quantity of scripts, the collective screenwriting humanity has written a massive quantity of scripts. You are competing against the rest of the world. You’re not going to hit their output, which is four million bad scripts a day. I would try and write one good one. How about that? You know what? There we go, Spencer. Just start and say you are allowed to write and focus on quantity when you’ve written one good one.

Now when people say you learn more from writing a large number of scripts and focusing on quantity, I have no idea how that functions. It could be that if you write lots and people give you lots and lots of feedback and each one gets better, then yes. I wouldn’t call that quantity as much as evolution and improvement. At some point you need to be able to write good enough to be a professional screenwriter.

Is it better to perfect one pitch or learn five pitches? Doesn’t matter, if you’re never going to be a Major League Baseball pitcher. Probably a false dichotomy. Most of these questions I just end up disputing the premise and then saying a lot of things that must cause tremendous discomfort in people, because what I do is I sow uncertainty. I sow uncertainty because indeed it is uncertain.

**Megana:** We all have to be more comfortable with it. I think you’re doing us a service, all of us Mazinites.

**Craig:** Dammit. I don’t want anyone in this church. Get out. That’s how all my sermons begin, with, “Get out.” All right, well, if you’re not going to get out…

**Megana:** You can’t help but speak in slogans. Like you said, what did you say, be you, be…

**Craig:** See how bad that slogan was?

**Megana:** No, you had a really good rhyme. I wish I could rewind this and go back.

**Craig:** You’ll be able to later. I have perhaps the trappings of a cult leader, without any of the ambition.

**Megana:** What is the line?

**Craig:** They always say you want to elect someone who does not want to be president. That’s the person you want to elect as president. I do not want to be a cult leader.

**Megana:** It will inevitably happen precisely because you don’t want to be a cult leader.

**Craig:** I can’t wait to just disappoint people on a weekly basis as I refuse for us all to live in one compound, and I insist that we do not randomly murder people to make a point.

**Megana:** The cult is wondering, Craig, what is your One Cool Thing for this week?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing for this week, so everyone is caught up in Wordle, of course, Wordle Qordle Septidurdle Schmurdle Fertile Framle Lamle. That’s exciting. As somebody who is an avid solver and loves puzzles of all kinds, I love it when everybody nerds out over puzzles. I wasn’t surprised to see the New York Times, of course, bought them, and we discussed this before. I wanted to call out a little bit of old-school New York Times variety, since people are interested now in what I would call a variety puzzle. It’s not a crossword, for instance. The New York Times also features variety puzzles. If you have a subscription to their puzzle service, which is not too expensive, and I think much worth it, they have the typical things like Sudoku and so forth. They have, every Sunday, in addition to the Sunday Times crossword puzzle, there is a variety puzzle.

There’s a kind of puzzle called Split Decisions, where there’s pathways of letters that then split and then resume. There might be three letters in a row, and then it splits, and on either side there’s two letters, and then it resumes with another four letters. There are words where the only difference between them are those two letters in the middle. As you fill them through and they cross each other, you’re able to fill the whole grid. It’s fun. I think one of the more venerable forms is the acrostic. Have you ever done an acrostic, Megana?

**Megana:** I’m Googling it now. Is this just a crossword puzzle?

**Craig:** It is not at all. An acrostic is, in its traditional form, is a quote, some sort of pithy quote. Maybe it’s 20 words long. It is presented to you in grid format, just straight across, white squares, black squares separating the words. Then you are given a list of clues below. They’re not for the words in the quote. They’re their own things. As you fill those in, under each letter is a number. All of the letters in the quote have a number. You’re answering one kind of clue and then assigning those letters to various spots in the quote above. As you begin to fill in the quote above, you can start figuring out some of the clues below. As you figure out the clues below, you can figure out the quotes above. It is a really interesting way of doing things.

There is a lovely reveal at the end, because you get a really interesting answer and all of the letters, the first letters of these things will ultimately also spell out the name of the author and the book or source from which the quote comes. It’s all very clever. It’s well done. You can do it online, which is the best way to do it. When you do it on paper, it is tedious. “Okay, so this letter goes to, oh, here. This one goes to this.” Online it’s super easy to do.

I believe they’re a husband and wife team, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, have been doing the New York Times acrostic for as long as I can remember. Every two weeks, without fail, they deliver. It’s wonderful. It’s like a mystery. It resolves itself a little bit like a mystery. It’s fun to watch it all come together. If you love puzzles and you do have a New York Times crossword puzzle subscription, definitely on every other Sunday online check out under variety puzzles right there the acrostic by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon.

**Megana:** Very cool.

**Craig:** How about you?

**Megana:** My One Cool Thing for this week is a podcast called Not Past It. It’s produced by Gimlet and hosted by Simone Polanen, who is one of my dear college friends. That’s why it’s also not weird if I say that if honey could speak, it would sound like Simone.

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**Megana:** She has a lovely speaking voice. She’s very smart and very talented. The premise of the podcast is each week they look at something that happened that week in history and provide more cultural context and history around it. She has a lovely episode called The Last Queen of Hawaii. Spoiler alert, the US government does not look good in this story.

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**Megana:** Yeah, I know, shocking.

**Craig:** We’re the greatest country on Earth.

**Megana:** I know. She has another episode called World’s Most Famous Virgins. It’s spectacular. In 30 minutes she goes from the Virgin Mary to the Jonas Brothers and George Bush purity politics.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**Megana:** Lots of fun episodes. Really bold swings. Give it a listen. It’s called Not Past It.

**Craig:** I love that you’ve referenced in the notes here Mary’s immaculate conception. Even Catholics a lot of times will mistakenly believe that the concept of the immaculate conception refers to the conception of Jesus, but it does not. It refers to the conception of Mary herself.

**Megana:** This is so fascinating to me. The biological mechanisms that they traced sin with are so interesting. Something she talks about is how I guess the Catholic Church determined that original sin from them taking this bite of the forbidden apple was then solidified or manifested in Adam’s sperm, so all of us who are the product of sexual relations are burdened with–

**Craig:** We’re tainted.

**Megana:** We’re tainted. We’re tainted.

**Craig:** We’re tainted. Something had to break that line, and they had to break it when Mary was born.

**Megana:** Mary could not have been a product of sin because then she wouldn’t have been pure, but then what about Mary’s mom?

**Craig:** Mary’s mom was sinful and that’s the miracle is that somehow Mary was born without sin. You could say, hey, Catholic Church, if you can just stop it wherever you want, just stop with Jesus, or what about Mary’s grandma, whatever, the rest? That’s when you realize that all of modern religion in this fashion is as if 8,000 years from now people discovered this ancient record called The Simpsons, believed it was true, and then built an entire series of laws and moral determinations around it. There was no Garden of Eden. It’s so stupid, but it’s very organized.

**Megana:** It’s the power of storytelling, Craig.

**Craig:** I know, cult. It is a cult. That’s what it is, just all cults.

**Megana:** That’s our episode for this week.

**Craig:** Who’s Scriptnotes produced by?

**Megana:** Megana Rao.

**Craig:** What? Who’s it edited by?

**Megana:** Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Our outro is by whom?

**Megana:** Let’s just go ahead and say Matthew Chilelli. We haven’t picked one out yet.

**Craig:** If you at home have an outro, to whom or to where should you send a link?

**Megana:** To ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Oh. That must also be a place where they can send longer questions, but for shorter questions on Twitter–

**Megana:** Where are you at, Craig?

**Craig:** I am @clmazin and John is @johnaugust. We must have T-shirts. They’re surely great. They’re from Cotton Bureau. Megana, where can we find the show notes for this episode and all episodes?

**Megana:** At johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

**Craig:** That’s all great and fine, but what if I want to sign up to become a Premium Member? Where do I go?

**Megana:** You can sign up at scriptnotes.net, which is also where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record.

**Craig:** Right now. Megana, that was a joy. Honestly, if people at home aren’t clamoring for you and I to do this every day, there’s something wrong with them.

**Megana:** You guys can request more content with hashtag #craigana.

**Craig:** Yes! Hashtag #craigana. Thank you, Megana. That was fantastic.

**Megana:** That was fun. Thanks for a fun episode, Craig.

[Bonus Segment]

**Craig:** What should we talk about today on our Bonus Segment for these fine folk?

**Megana:** I think that it’s time for us to face on issues of millennials.

**Craig:** It’s happened. I’ve been clamoring for this for a while as well. Megana is a millennial extraordinaire. Unlike a lot of my grouchy generational cohort, I love millennials. I think they’re great. Millennials are better at a lot of things than we were. Also, millennials, as they get into their dotered ages, the dotage, as they arrive at dotage, meaning they’re in their 30s and 40s, they’re going to be running this business. I’m going to need a job. I need millennials to take care of me. I think it’s time for us to dig in a little bit more into this generation that a lot has been said about, but probably quite a few misconceptions have been formed about, and who are indeed going to be shortly assuming the mantle of being in charge of this whole place. Megana, it hasn’t happened yet. Millennials have not yet taken over Hollywood, but surely it’s coming.

**Megana:** I think I would argue that it is happening. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a millennial, Greta Gerwig, Michaela Coel, Chloe Zhao. I think that there are a lot of millennials who are doing exciting things in Hollywood right now.

**Craig:** There are a lot of exciting millennial artists. The question is, where are the millennials who are in charge? I think about Hollywood, and Hollywood has always been very good at exploiting the young. They practically invented the art of it. When it comes to running things, I do remember when I started out, most of the people that were running things were white men who were seemingly between 50 and 60. Right now the people that seem to be running things seem to largely be white men and women between 50 and 60. Is that always going to be the thing? Are millennials going to get there a little faster? It certainly seems like the one thing that your generation is not patient about is changing stuff.

**Megana:** Are you saying in terms of studio heads and executive leadership?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m saying why haven’t you stormed the Bastille yet and taken over? In I think it was the ’80s, CAA was swarmed from a bunch of, they called them the Young Turks, but I think they were all in their 30s. They were the millennials of their time and broke away from the old, frumpy agencies and began their own thing. It seems like that some sort of millennial revolution is going to happen sooner or later. There are some things that are built in to the way life functions right now that might make it a little bit more difficult for them than it was say for Baby Boomers in the ’80s, specifically the fact that our world is falling apart, slightly.

**Megana:** I don’t know. I wonder if there’s some economic reasons why it would be tougher for millennials and the industry to assume that sort of risk.

**Craig:** Oh, really? You seem to be suggesting that perhaps there have been some sort of multi-year pandemic and shutdown and that housing costs were at an all-time high and that the entertainment industry itself had undergone some sort of minor upheaval, like the disappearance of the theatrical film business. Things are changing too damn fast. It’s hard to get a hold on it.

**Megana:** Also, things aren’t changing fast enough. As we’ve talked about with the Pay Up Hollywood stuff, the cost of living in LA is increasing very quickly, but other things like wages are not matching that.

**Craig:** Millennials found themselves trapped in between two things. The business is transforming, but on the other side all this other stuff isn’t transforming, but just continuing, including, I think probably, as much as Hollywood likes to pat itself on the back, diversity at the higher levels of things probably is not where it ought to be. I think we can say for sure. I don’t know, from my point of view, as Oldie Olderson, to seem rather hopeful, I will say from my longer point of view, things are definitely better now in lots of ways than they were back then. Shall I count the ways or will it be depressing?

**Megana:** No, I’d like to hear it.

**Craig:** For one, the consciousness around diversity didn’t exist. I’m not going to say that it’s higher now. It literally did not exist at all. No one talked about it. If you were to say something like, “Oh, that’s weird, everyone in this room is a man,” then somebody would be like, “Whatever. Shut up.” No one would care. Much less, “There’s no one in here who is a person of color.” No one cared about anything. It just was not a topic at all. That has changed dramatically, and certainly for the better. The ability to make yourself known to the world was a zero back then.

Now everyone has a megaphone to the planet. What we do with the megaphone, certainly there are toxic impacts. Everyone does have a megaphone to the planet. The amount of material that’s made now is I believe larger than it was then. We can say, “Hold on, they made lots and lots of movies back then.” Yeah, true, but there were essentially three networks, and now there are streamers that put out so much context. Netflix alone I think makes more stuff in a year than everybody combined made in 1994. There is more stuff, but I suspect that you’re going to tell me, there are some areas where things are worse or have not improved at all.

**Megana:** I think with more content and the more shows that we’re getting from streamers and places like Netflix, we’re also seeing shorter season orders and smaller rooms, and so whereas on a network show in the ’90s you would have, what, a 22-episode season?

**Craig:** Yeah, or 26 episodes, something like that, something nuts.

**Megana:** If you were a staff writer on that show, there’d be so many opportunities for you to write an episode or go to set, because there’s just more material to be written and to be worked on. Now it seems like you have to elbow your way in to get one out of six or eight episodes on a streamer.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. That’s a great point. The streaming business has introduced a slight McDonaldsization to how we employ people. The people who are always going to get squeezed by that are the people who are on the younger end of things. In your cohort, is there any sense that at least you’re no longer the rookies, that it’s Generation Z are in the rookie zone, and you guys have a little bit of seasoning, picking up a little bit of authority as you progress through this business?

**Megana:** Gosh, I don’t know, it’s hard because right now the mood feels so like we’re all sort of coming out of this sluggish, depressive few years. I talked to so many millennials who have been assistants for sometimes over 10 years and I don’t think that that’s something that older generations necessarily dealt with. I would imagine that it’s more like welcome to the bottom.

**Craig:** Oh, my. Welcome to the bottom, that’s a decent title for… That’s depressing.

**Megana:** Not for all millennials. I don’t know whether that’s because the idea of pursuing film and television as a career has become more popular, so the people who are pursuing this, the pool has expanded. I don’t know, I’m curious what you think about that.

**Craig:** Everyone talks about everything more, so yes, it’s possible that everybody wants to do this. I think there is more of a sense that everybody can do anything they want, because access in a way became both worse and better at the same time. I guess when everybody has a megaphone, nobody’s listening to anyone, so there is that problem. I’m part of the weirdest generation, Generation X. We don’t know what the hell we are. We never considered ourself really generational. Nobody likes Baby Boomers. I think we can all agree on that. They’re the worst. Even they agree. They know. They know they’re the worst. I don’t think we ever thought of ourselves as a cohort in a really weird way. I just didn’t. Is there a sense among millennials and/or Generation Z that Generation X is the problem, that we’re the ones that are blocking the path up or creating that kind of permanent bottom?

**Megana:** No. I think we should just continue to blame everything on the Boomers.

**Craig:** Great. Thank God.

**Megana:** Do you think it’s Generation X that is the problem? I don’t think it is. Generation X, let’s define terms, that’s 45 to 55?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s about right. Let’s see, Generation X is born between 1965 and 1980, so I’m a younger Generation X kind of person. It seem like actually you can go even up to 62 kind of thing. Oh no, 1965 is just 57. Then 1980 is young. Now we’re talking about 42. 42 to 57. Let’s just call it 40s and 50s. That seems reasonable. The 40s and 50s people, we are mostly in charge of this business. There are definitely some Baby Boomers sitting on boards and thing, but not too many that are still in charge, I think. It seems like we’re the ones that are in charge. I don’t know, I hope that we would be doing better than our Boomer people before us.

For a generation that has been labeled as soft and afraid and fragile, it’s endured quite a bit. I don’t see that as a reality. I worry about this permanent bottom thing. That’s bad news. There’s something that happened, I noticed, in the feature business, where studios empowered producers, and producers became incredibly abusive of screenwriters, and it got to the point where essentially we were running out of screenwriters, because everyone just left. Nobody wanted to do it. Either they never got a chance to get good because they were replaced constantly and treated like widgets, or they fled to television. We were running out of feature writers.

Towards the end of my feature career, because I started really concentrating on TV, I was getting a stupid amount of calls for work, to the point where I’m like, “I am not this good. I don’t deserve this number of phone calls. No one’s left. This means no one’s left.” When I say no one’s left, no one’s left who has 20 years of experience. No one was allowed to become experienced. Everybody who wasn’t allowed to become experienced was punished for their inexperience, and so all that was left were the few people from my generation that had been allowed to become experienced, who essentially had been allowed to fail, because they kept making movies. They were doing things. We were taught.

There’s no system for teaching. I’m worried that the same thing is happening everywhere, that no one is allowed to learn and be taught, and so we run out of people to come and refresh the troops, to be the new A-list people of tomorrow. For all the lip service that we pay to bringing new kinds of people in, it doesn’t matter if we don’t teach and nourish the next group. This is nerve-wracking to me. Actually, I’m shooketh, as millennials say. I’m shooketh.

**Megana:** I have a question for you, because I think feature films are interesting, because I had a friend who also pointed out that a part of this problem with trying to have a career as a feature writer as a younger person is that the mid-range studio films don’t really exist anymore.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Megana:** It’s very hard, and reflective of what we’re seeing is that it’s almost impossible to go from being someone who’s making these low-budget indies to then being granted the reins to a major studio tent pole. To your point about teaching, who taught you? What was your process like? Do you think that it was the opportunity to make some of those mid-tier movies?

**Craig:** Yes, which is all I made for a while, because the movies that I made, generally speaking, cost between $18 million and $50 million. That was the meat and potatoes of our business, movies that weren’t tent poles, that weren’t massive budget items, that were producable and shootable and makable and releasable. If they failed, they failed. If they hit, they really hit. That was great. Everybody loved that. That was where you learned. There was a lot of it. Then there were rewrites and there’d be other rewrites, but you learned, because there was stuff to move around in between. Then it all just went away. Who do people hire? When they don’t have a lot of stuff to make, they hire the most experienced, quote unquote, best writers they can find who are available, because there’s not that much stuff. Then what happens? Those people age up.

As we get older, we start to lose touch. Our goodness becomes more narrowed to certain areas and we are less good in other areas. Comedy, notably. I’m not being ageist. I’m just being factual, that people who are in their 60s cannot possibly be plugged into what is culturally relevant to people in their 20s in the way the people in their 20s are. Just factually impossible. There was nobody then left to turn to, because so few people had been trained, because there was nothing to train them with.

It was like if you get rid of the Minor Leagues in baseball and you just go, look, everybody has to just come from high school and then we’re going to throw you into the Major Leagues and you’re good or you’re not good. No one’s trained. You just keep going, okay, well let’s just trade for the people who have been trained in the Minor Leagues when they existed. Then those people all get old and then what do you do?

I’m worried that the same thing is happening in television because of the way, like you say, the shorter season orders, the mini rooms, how fast things go. People don’t get trained. They cannot grow up with this system. They start carping at each other and blaming each other for things, because when there’s scarce resources, people start to hurt each other in their attempt to get those scarce resources. It’s a mess. Basically, what I’m saying is I’m worried about your generation, especially when I’m saying, okay, people have been an assistant for 10 years. Some people want to be assistants. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you don’t, and you’re on your 10th year, that’s problematic.

**Megana:** Last question for you, I see the benefits of what you’re saying and how it would grow the next generation of writers, creators, directors, executives, people to move up into leadership roles. Do you think that there are business benefits towards doing that, because I don’t think that it would necessarily change unless there was an economic impact that studios would also see.

**Craig:** A massive benefit for studios. It’s research and development. Other industries understand this inherently, but in Hollywood, everyone is so focused on what you just did and are you making money right now that they don’t have time to think about sowing a field for the future. As far as they’re concerned, they’re going to get fired soon anyway also. What are they doing? Growing the next generation of brilliant writers to benefit the person that knocked them off the perch? This is the issue. I’ve said as much to people who run studios, that ultimately somebody is going to be left without a chair in the musical chairs game, and they’re not going to have people who are any good to write these things, because they’re not being trained properly at all and they don’t care. They don’t care, because that’s going to be somebody else’s problem.

If I were the chairman of one of these corporations, not just the person running the studio, chairman of one of these corporations, the answer is pretty simple. Look, there’s certainly plenty of good in what they call their training programs, which are almost exclusively focused at increasing diversity in the hiring pool. Those are fine, but they’re not the same thing as getting hired and working. The experience of being hired and working in the real situation, not a simulation, but the real deal, live fire on the battlefield, there’s nothing like it. That’s how you learn. That and that alone is really how you learn. They are not going to get, they meaning the businesses, are not going to get the people they need at the level they want unless they start increasing those opportunities and that means paying people and keeping them on longer so that they can live and afford a home and can have a family and learn and get better. We had this for, I don’t know, 100 years, and then we just suddenly went, meh.

**Megana:** That’s really helpful. I’m also interested to hear what other people have to say and would love for people to write in with their experiences.

**Craig:** Yes, and as always, tell me I’m wrong. I would love to be wrong about this, but I’m worried.

**Megana:** Unshake Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. I want to be an optimist. I do. I think every pessimist wants to be an optimist. This is not a rosy picture. The fact that my generation’s cranky about your generation isn’t going to help. Tell me I’m wrong or tell me I’m not even right enough. That’s my other favorite kind, like, “You weren’t angry enough.” Sorry.

**Megana:** As always, do what makes your heart sing.

**Craig:** Do what makes your heart sing.

Links:

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* [Take this typing test -](https://www.typingtest.com/test.html?minutes=2&textfile=benchmark.txt) Craig got a 110 wpm!
* [Barton Fink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barton_Fink)
* [Chernobyl](https://www.hbo.com/chernobyl), [Chernobyl Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chernobyl-podcast/id1459712981) and [The Dropout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dropout)
* [60 Seconds With Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/crosswords/who-made-my-puzzle-cox-rathvon.html) and puzzle [here](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/27/acrostic)
* [Not Past It](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/not-past-it) Podcast
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/544standard.mp3).